I used to think Esther Dyson was a smart woman... and I still think so, but one person's brains aren't enough... meritocracy still depends on who's doing the defining of "merit." There's at least a perception of her trying to run things... and ever since I wasn't in the "in crowd" in grade school, I've hated cliques.
Ever programmed with a dual-head display? Code editor/IDE up on one, references on the other, execution on one, debugger on the other... I miss those projects....
And the market for this will be HUGE. Once people realize what they've been settling for, how will we be able to take pride in our little.22 dot pitch 1600x1280s? Even the Trinitron doesn't come close. Price'll be a pain, but there are enough different high-fidelity applications for this kind of display (how many will Lucas order to edit SWIII on?). Not just CGI, or IBM's favorite market, CAD - artists, architects, medical folk (like the article mentioned), the defense simulation folks (I know some tank simulators that could use this upgrade).
Of course, I'll have to sell stock to be able to afford one.:-( It still doesn't qualify as my dream workstation, but it's an improvement. (remember Stellar Cartography from Star Trek:Generations? Now THAT's a workstation!)
Yeah, but don't forget our color-blind brethren. I have a buddy who was on a review board for a product that used color-coded borders to indicate state of a document - informal, draft, released, revised, etc. Unfortunately, they all used about the same luminance - his red/green colorblind eyes couldn't tell that there was a difference.
Then there are the all-the-way blind. I wonder how/. translates onto a Braille keyboard?
Is there really such a thing? Sure, there are the instructions hardwired into the chips - but all applications programming is done at the x86 instruction set level. Transmeta's interpretation technology is another of the things that, IMHO, makes them dangerous to Intel, Motorola, et. al. They can write translators for ARM, PowerPC, 68000, etc. instruction families and hide their internal implementations inside the translators - so they aren't crippled in the future by "gotchas" in their processor architecture (see the x86 family). Hopefully, there won't really be a "native" mode - but maybe they'll come out with a "reference" architecture that's optimized for their translation technology.
Now - for my wish list, I want a translator that will eat Java bytecode. The Crusoe family could be THE Java deployment platform, esp. for portable devices.
Yeah, but Evercrack, um, Everquest, is IMPOSSIBLE to play and view an on-line manual (unless you have 2 computers handy).
I mislike the trend toward building a game, THEN documenting it in a separate, $15-$25 book sold on the shelves alongside the game. If I'm going to pay $45 for a game that I'll have to pay another monthly fee to keep playing, they can damn well include a manual with enough info in it that I don't NEED their supplemental tome to be a good player.
There are other issues in space... accurate pointing, attitude control, vibration damping, power management, orbit maintenance and management of thruster fuel, thermal loads (absolute and differential)... whereas on Earth, you have a stable base (outside the occasional earthquake), accurate pointing is a well-developed technology, you can plug into the power grid, you orbit geosynchronously at a (hopefully;-) stable altitude, you can control the temperature of the mirror (although you're stuck with the quality and temp of the air outside your dome).
Huge telescopes COULD be assembled in space - even better, multiple large telescopes could be used cooperatively, or in very long baseline interferometry. The technology's chancier, the price tag is an order of magnitude higher, and then you have to have gen-u-ine Rocket Scientists get the thing(s) into orbit, and assembled - then there's the continuing Ground Control cost, and piles of money for the occasional servicing mission (if you want a long, reliable life).
Thirty years from now, yeah, we can do this stuff in orbit. For now, let's prove the adaptive optics, control technologies, and other basic principles here on the planet, where we can get to it to fix it when it breaks.
Radio pays. Commercial (and "public") stations pay good, hard $US (in the US) to play the music they play. Just ask a program director - they'll tell ya.
The BIG difference is, they worked out the pay-for-play equation around the time they went on the air (IANA historian, but that's what I've been told). There are a couple of big groups (I think BMI, or is it ASCAP?) who collect the money, based on logs the stations keep (some only have to log twice a year, others more often). "Free" over-the-air radio (and TV, too) content is still paid for.
Look at the problem those college admins had - do they turn off whole classes of service, or do they use these utilities (being generated through open market forces, wink wink) to profile traffic and allocate bandwidth to different services?
Ok, so your pr0n and mp3s are going to take longer to download - those aren't the Official Reasons the schools hooked up to the Net in the first place. An awful lot of people don't seem to realize they don't really have a "right" to internet connection through their Institute of Higher Learning - and would you rather have them ration bandwidth, or cut the wire and say, "Do without"?
Given the Gov's current emphasis on using contractors and commercial services to do their work, we better get used to this kind of thing. It's called "outsourcing" - just wait until it's the NSA that's doing it (or the FBI, or the IRS, etc., etc., etc.).
Slashdot's running behind - I heard this one on NPR last night driving home.
And yeah, it is a crappy precedent - I'm starting to believe we need judges who specialize as much as the various law firms do. No way they can all be up on every little kind of law - why not set up individual judges in the different Circuits who handle different "kinds" of cases?
Here I was, wondering if I was just wierd, and there's the explanation - I'm not a programmer, I'm a software engineer!
I've written software in assembler, C, C++, Ada (83 and 95), Basic, FORTRAN, and Java... I've used UML, OMT, Booch, and functional decomposition... I've written 50-line programs, 15,000 line programs, and 25,000 lines of code in various modules and libraries that went into dozens of programs... designed, developed, documented, tested, and integrated... and all along, I've been torn between programming and software engineering.
So - let me try to sum some of this up - programming is cranking out a solution to a single problem in the most efficient method. Software engineering is developing part of the solution to a complex problem in a manner that: - others can understand - is documented - is tested - uses some common design, implementation, and testing methodology and procedures (maybe even - that dreaded phrase - Software Process!)
Guess I can have Software Engineer on my business card, then. IMHO, in the Great Scheme of Things, we need both - I just wish they wouldn't get into screaming matches so often.
Re:x86 is popular to hate, but not that bad really
on
Is The x86 Obsolete?
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· Score: 1
So it's really a matter of the compiler technology, isn't it?
As long as you're not hand-coding assembler, the compiler is what's picking the instructions that will be used. Why don't the compiler vendors and the processor companies work more closely so we can eliminate some of these 'dead' instructions in future systems?
Not that it matters - as the Ars article points out, the new systems really translate and emulate the ISA, and turn those instructions into things their internals can process. Now, when folks complain about Java bytecodes, I can rebut with the fact that their "native" code isn't really running on the raw hardware - it's emulated, too.
Back in Days of Yore, the Science Fiction Writers of America (now the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc.) were getting victimized by publishers, movie producers, etc. - so they came up with their Model Contract. Can't remember who was the first to sign a contract using it (something in me wants to say Harlan Ellison - NEVER get Harlan pissed at you). Since then, it's become the de-facto standard for writers in several genres, and has versions for various types of publication (all available at the SFWA web site. They also have a Position Paper on electonic rights - something folks should pay some attention to, since these guys have been doing this a while (not to mention (1) they dreamed a lot of this up (2) they have Harlan Ellison:-).
A brouhaha occurred a couple of months ago when Verant, publishers of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) Everquest, added terms to their license agreement which would let them monitor other processes running on your computer, and scan for certain files, reporting the results back to Verant (and Sony, who runs their network).
The avowed purpose was to detect people using monitor and probe programs to cheat while playing the game, but the firestorm of criticism and controversy it set off led to the removal of the offending language.
I don't have the language (or even good references - it's been a couple of months, they've expired off the web sites) here at work, but this has to be held up as a pretty poor attempt at a license agreement. It basically allowed them to install, on my computer, at their convenience, a program which would monitor the processes I ran, and the data on my hard drive, and report back to them. If they'd actually done it - I'da quit.
As more of the economy moves to the Internet, governments are starting to count beans - and notice that some are missing. I doubt the EU's proposal will fly - any one government or set of governments will have a heck of a time enforcing something like this outside their own borders. However, this kind of thing will give impetus to tax efforts in other countries. My bet is on some international, probably UN-sponsored group being chartered to figure out a way to tax online transactions within the year.
Of course, I think this particular approach is technically ignorant, and politically naive - but that may be intentional. It's just an opening salvo - the battle hasn't even begun.
Jon, you wrote a lot of stuff there, but I wonder what grade your 10th grade English teacher would give it. If she knew nothing about gaming, or SF, or geeks, or corporate culture, you'd be in good shape - but we/.'ers do. You took one work of fantasy gaming, polarized it through the lenses of your favorite topics, and generated a diatribe against the evils of Corporation. Not that some of your points aren't valid - they're opinion, with the intrinsic value of anyone else's. Your opinions are usually given some added weight because they're assumed to be informed opinions - but you lost some of that credibility, in my eyes at least, by the way you stretched this one piece to fit your thesis.
After all, there are thousands of fictional works about dystopian societies, hundreds where they're corporately ruled, and gaming ALWAYS wants to set you up in an "interesting" environment. It wouldn't be a good roleplaying game setting if the characters lived in central Kansas and their main concerns were which crops to plant that season and what to do about those pesky crows. IMHO, you'd have been a lot better off broadening your references, instead of concentrating on one, arguably derivative, RPG setting.
One item in particular bugged me - the following: The heretic today is marginalized without any bloodshed. He doesn't even take the risks the Shadowrunner takes. His teacher and peers make him a joke in the classroom, and ignore or isolate him. His career is either destroyed outright, as it being fired or demoted.
This IS the era of the Internet, Jon. Any loon with the cash for domain registration can air their crackpot beliefs to the universe. Anyone who can make it to the public library can participate in chats, mail lists, and forums like this one. Heretics abound today, Jon - indeed, I'd argue that they're proliferating at unprecedented levels. From the WTO/World Bank protestors in their ununified hordes, to the UFO conspiracy theorists, to the various religious extremes, heretics are finding like-minded folk and carving their own niches - cobbling together their own soapboxes and shouting to the world.
But then, that's just my opinion... worth about the same as belly-button lint... everyone has their own supply.
Ahh - physicist approximations - I remember those (grin).
Yeah, if you look at the difference between the particle and ray density Out There during one of these storms, and compare with Down Here, it's pretty well filtered - the magnetic field, and the atmosphere, do a good job.
So you would prefer an operating system that (1) denies they have security problems (old Digital VMS party line) (2) makes you pay for the patch for their security hole (old IBM party line) (3) is so screwed up, they can't patch their security holes (Micro$oft today).
The thing that makes the security folk I know bang their heads against their cheap metal furniture is vendors with security problems who either refuse to acknowledge them or wait "until the next full release" to patch them. They can almost sympathize with soom poor community-college admin trying to keep an NT shop running so he doesn't have the time, awareness, or maybe even the ability to fix his security holes - but the folks who ship broken stuff, that earns ire.
Thanks for the news, Sendmail. And thanks for pathing it so soon, Linux Community. Now - don't let it happen again!:-)
If the Van Allen belts shielded us 100%, there wouldn't be any auroras to be seen, would there? The magnetic field of the planet causes "holes" in the belts approaching the poles.
So, your dose will be higher if you're in Nome or Thule tonight, but folks down in Brasilia shouldn't let this get to them (although folks down in Rio have the South Atlantic Anamoly to worry about).
Slashdot Mirror
($10 psuedo-bucks for the person who IDs the story and author)
I used to think Esther Dyson was a smart woman... and I still think so, but one person's brains aren't enough... meritocracy still depends on who's doing the defining of "merit." There's at least a perception of her trying to run things... and ever since I wasn't in the "in crowd" in grade school, I've hated cliques.
Ever programmed with a dual-head display? Code editor/IDE up on one, references on the other, execution on one, debugger on the other... I miss those projects....
And the market for this will be HUGE. Once people realize what they've been settling for, how will we be able to take pride in our little .22 dot pitch 1600x1280s? Even the Trinitron doesn't come close. Price'll be a pain, but there are enough different high-fidelity applications for this kind of display (how many will Lucas order to edit SWIII on?). Not just CGI, or IBM's favorite market, CAD - artists, architects, medical folk (like the article mentioned), the defense simulation folks (I know some tank simulators that could use this upgrade).
Of course, I'll have to sell stock to be able to afford one. :-( It still doesn't qualify as my dream workstation, but it's an improvement. (remember Stellar Cartography from Star Trek:Generations? Now THAT's a workstation!)
Then there are the all-the-way blind. I wonder how /. translates onto a Braille keyboard?
Now - for my wish list, I want a translator that will eat Java bytecode. The Crusoe family could be THE Java deployment platform, esp. for portable devices.
Ahh, grasshopper - as the great Heinlein wrote, an honest politician is one who stays bought.
(fake Asian guru tag off)
Now, exactly how many of those politicians are going to stay bought, hmmmm?
Only if YOU want to innovate, too....
I mislike the trend toward building a game, THEN documenting it in a separate, $15-$25 book sold on the shelves alongside the game. If I'm going to pay $45 for a game that I'll have to pay another monthly fee to keep playing, they can damn well include a manual with enough info in it that I don't NEED their supplemental tome to be a good player.
Oh, my... was that a rant? (grin)
Huge telescopes COULD be assembled in space - even better, multiple large telescopes could be used cooperatively, or in very long baseline interferometry. The technology's chancier, the price tag is an order of magnitude higher, and then you have to have gen-u-ine Rocket Scientists get the thing(s) into orbit, and assembled - then there's the continuing Ground Control cost, and piles of money for the occasional servicing mission (if you want a long, reliable life).
Thirty years from now, yeah, we can do this stuff in orbit. For now, let's prove the adaptive optics, control technologies, and other basic principles here on the planet, where we can get to it to fix it when it breaks.
The BIG difference is, they worked out the pay-for-play equation around the time they went on the air (IANA historian, but that's what I've been told). There are a couple of big groups (I think BMI, or is it ASCAP?) who collect the money, based on logs the stations keep (some only have to log twice a year, others more often). "Free" over-the-air radio (and TV, too) content is still paid for.
Ok, so your pr0n and mp3s are going to take longer to download - those aren't the Official Reasons the schools hooked up to the Net in the first place. An awful lot of people don't seem to realize they don't really have a "right" to internet connection through their Institute of Higher Learning - and would you rather have them ration bandwidth, or cut the wire and say, "Do without"?
"Komrades, the Microsoft Missile Defense System is about to become operational!"
"Fine, fine... schedule our attack for the beta test period for version 3.1...."
If you can afford connection fees, ISP charges, etc. to keep a site on-line, why aren't you paying the bill for the domain name?
And yeah, it is a crappy precedent - I'm starting to believe we need judges who specialize as much as the various law firms do. No way they can all be up on every little kind of law - why not set up individual judges in the different Circuits who handle different "kinds" of cases?
I've written software in assembler, C, C++, Ada (83 and 95), Basic, FORTRAN, and Java... I've used UML, OMT, Booch, and functional decomposition... I've written 50-line programs, 15,000 line programs, and 25,000 lines of code in various modules and libraries that went into dozens of programs... designed, developed, documented, tested, and integrated... and all along, I've been torn between programming and software engineering.
So - let me try to sum some of this up - programming is cranking out a solution to a single problem in the most efficient method. Software engineering is developing part of the solution to a complex problem in a manner that:
- others can understand
- is documented
- is tested
- uses some common design, implementation, and testing methodology and procedures (maybe even - that dreaded phrase - Software Process!)
Guess I can have Software Engineer on my business card, then. IMHO, in the Great Scheme of Things, we need both - I just wish they wouldn't get into screaming matches so often.
As long as you're not hand-coding assembler, the compiler is what's picking the instructions that will be used. Why don't the compiler vendors and the processor companies work more closely so we can eliminate some of these 'dead' instructions in future systems?
Not that it matters - as the Ars article points out, the new systems really translate and emulate the ISA, and turn those instructions into things their internals can process. Now, when folks complain about Java bytecodes, I can rebut with the fact that their "native" code isn't really running on the raw hardware - it's emulated, too.
Back in Days of Yore, the Science Fiction Writers of America (now the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc.) were getting victimized by publishers, movie producers, etc. - so they came up with their Model Contract. Can't remember who was the first to sign a contract using it (something in me wants to say Harlan Ellison - NEVER get Harlan pissed at you). Since then, it's become the de-facto standard for writers in several genres, and has versions for various types of publication (all available at the SFWA web site. They also have a Position Paper on electonic rights - something folks should pay some attention to, since these guys have been doing this a while (not to mention (1) they dreamed a lot of this up (2) they have Harlan Ellison :-).
The avowed purpose was to detect people using monitor and probe programs to cheat while playing the game, but the firestorm of criticism and controversy it set off led to the removal of the offending language.
I don't have the language (or even good references - it's been a couple of months, they've expired off the web sites) here at work, but this has to be held up as a pretty poor attempt at a license agreement. It basically allowed them to install, on my computer, at their convenience, a program which would monitor the processes I ran, and the data on my hard drive, and report back to them. If they'd actually done it - I'da quit.
Of course, I think this particular approach is technically ignorant, and politically naive - but that may be intentional. It's just an opening salvo - the battle hasn't even begun.
After all, there are thousands of fictional works about dystopian societies, hundreds where they're corporately ruled, and gaming ALWAYS wants to set you up in an "interesting" environment. It wouldn't be a good roleplaying game setting if the characters lived in central Kansas and their main concerns were which crops to plant that season and what to do about those pesky crows. IMHO, you'd have been a lot better off broadening your references, instead of concentrating on one, arguably derivative, RPG setting.
One item in particular bugged me - the following:
The heretic today is marginalized without any bloodshed. He doesn't even take the risks the Shadowrunner takes. His teacher and peers make him a joke in the classroom, and ignore or isolate him. His career is either destroyed outright, as it being fired or demoted.
This IS the era of the Internet, Jon. Any loon with the cash for domain registration can air their crackpot beliefs to the universe. Anyone who can make it to the public library can participate in chats, mail lists, and forums like this one. Heretics abound today, Jon - indeed, I'd argue that they're proliferating at unprecedented levels. From the WTO/World Bank protestors in their ununified hordes, to the UFO conspiracy theorists, to the various religious extremes, heretics are finding like-minded folk and carving their own niches - cobbling together their own soapboxes and shouting to the world.
But then, that's just my opinion... worth about the same as belly-button lint... everyone has their own supply.
Yeah, if you look at the difference between the particle and ray density Out There during one of these storms, and compare with Down Here, it's pretty well filtered - the magnetic field, and the atmosphere, do a good job.
And we do get these neat-o light shows....
Why are they coming out with a new, "luggable" version of the venerable PS1, when the marketing blitz is going to be on for the PS2?
Has Sony given up on the hand-held market? Will my nieces and nephews be condemned to GameBoy Hell forever (or at least for this product cycle)?
Inquiring minds, and all that....
The thing that makes the security folk I know bang their heads against their cheap metal furniture is vendors with security problems who either refuse to acknowledge them or wait "until the next full release" to patch them. They can almost sympathize with soom poor community-college admin trying to keep an NT shop running so he doesn't have the time, awareness, or maybe even the ability to fix his security holes - but the folks who ship broken stuff, that earns ire.
Thanks for the news, Sendmail. And thanks for pathing it so soon, Linux Community. Now - don't let it happen again! :-)
If the Van Allen belts shielded us 100%, there wouldn't be any auroras to be seen, would there? The magnetic field of the planet causes "holes" in the belts approaching the poles.
So, your dose will be higher if you're in Nome or Thule tonight, but folks down in Brasilia shouldn't let this get to them (although folks down in Rio have the South Atlantic Anamoly to worry about).