Methinks you slightly misinterpret the intended meaning. Innovation still exists - but if the "hot topics" at a university are basic problems of computer science, that have been studied and dissected for decades... well, I'm not going to expect the invention of the microchip.
Was ENIAC an innovation? Sure! So was Babbage's machine, and the vacuumn tube, and the transistor, and the IC, and the 8088. Is it innovation to add on-chip L2 chache? No - it's refinement of existing principles and concepts.
As for the value of a solution to Travelling Salesman - why, yes, that would be nice. Given the fact that these are classical examples of non-polynomial solution sets, I'd be more inclined to predict a solution from the mathematicians of the world (Slashdot, May 25, Mathematical Problems For The New Age, Is P=NP?)
Innovation means more than Micro$oft's tagline. It's something NEW, for which uses have to be invented (see the computer), or a completely new way to do something (see the integrated circuit). What's innovative software? Like p0rn, I'll know it when I see it.
In other words, cars are not being developed to manuever in three independant dimensions. The engine of a car (cpu of a computer) is continually being refined. The console and driving instruments (UI of an OS) are continually being refined. The fact that the car travels on land is not being altered (the fact that an OS coordinates the hardware) is not being changed.
ACTUALLY - there are people out there working on alternatives to our current 2-dimensional automobiles. Check out the Solotrek and the Moller M400 velocitor - a couple of my favorite, root-for-the-underdog, hope-they-make-it concepts.
The Sony Studios flacks were talking about satellite distribution a few months ago (wish I could find the reference quickly - 3 searches failes already:-( ) - on opening day, a geosync satellite link would start beaming down the movie, and each theatre would have some kind of crypto key to let them play it X times.
As others have pointed out, this is going to make piracy a real concern. Today you have projectionists in NYC theatres with handheld camcorders taping movies for sale on the streets - these folks will just do backups to new $250 hard drives, take it home and let the PIV work on cracking the encryption (or even worse, steal the theatre's key), and start burning videotapes/DVDs/etc. IF the movie folks do it smartly, they'll be able to trace the pirates back to the source theatres through something embedded in the digital streams, and sock it to the folks who let the movie "walk out the back door."
Won't help with the piracy on that particular film, but if that results in that particular theatre losing the right to show movies... they're out of business, aren't they?
You're actually the first being in this forum to comment on that particular tag line. Congrats!
In RL, I'm a carnivore - just can't stand most vegetation. However, through years of study and research, I have come to one inescapable conclusion - God put cows on Earth to make grass fit for humans to eat. Deer, too. And sheep - with the added bonus of wool, too....
wonders how many veggie-Nazis are going to take these remarks at face value and start flaming...
So - your professors are still researching Dining Philosophers and Traveling Salesmen - and you detect innovation?
I was frustrated during my college career, because I sensed that there was so much more out there than I was being exposed to - then I hit the real world, and found I was right.
Of course, your mileage will vary. Some schools are/were/will be hotbeds of innovation - Berkeley, back when BSD was being evolved - but what's new out of the UCal system? AT&T innovated - they built Multics, which caused such an internal backlash that UNIX appeared. Now, they concentrate on building business and let other corporations (like Lucent and Telcordia, the companies that used to be Bell Labs) do the innovating for them at the technical level.
Is innovation dead? Oh, heck no. However, I do believe that our universities tend to fight against it, more than lead toward it. Very few seem to have leadership with the foresight to not focus their research on the current hot topics, or the classics of yesteryear. (Dining Philosophers? Yeesh.) It's far easier to get and retain tenure through making incremental improvements in existing technologies than by trying to come up with something completely new, which noone will understand until you can show them a demo with flashing lights and sound effects.
Of course, this is all my opinion - and worth less than the electrons that represent it on your screen.:-)
According to Cisco's press release they're using Qwest's fiber backbone and a bunch of Cisco routers and VPN products, with a whole bunch of other industry-buzzword products involved in the projection:
"Once the TITAN A.E. file reaches the Atlanta theater, it will be stored on a QuVIS Inc. server and projected using a Barco/Texas Instruments DLP Cinema digital projector. Sigma Designs Group has built a state-of-the-art Tørus Compound Curve Screen and Eastern AcousticWorks has provided a customized digital audio sound system for the event."
Groovy, eh?
Star Blazers, aka Space Battleship Yamato
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 1
THE original blow-up-the-universe sci-fi anime. Often imitated, never duplicated - personally, I want to write the computer game:-).
The English dubbed version is called Star Blazers - Japanese with subtitles is Space Battleship (or Cruiser) Yamato - different titled depending on the importer that year. Evil aliens attack Earth, our Space Navy is destroyed - our last hope is a mighty battleship, constructed from the hulk of the WWII Battleship Yamato, equipped with the alien Wave Motion Gun.
I'm not incredibly familiar with the ins-and-outs of the GPL - I've read it, but IANAL. Let me posit a hypothesis and check the reactives:
What if I take a Linux kernel, and somebody else's COTS product, and perform my own black-magic-and-voodoo manipulations to make them do something neat - what code do I have to release? Just the Linux kernel base? My own mods built on top of it? For the purposes of the posit, let's assume there's no way I'm going to get to the somebody else's source code... what is my exact obligation to release?
You oughta see the look on the Security guy's face when he's standing there, chatting, on one of his visits to the working class... scanning that long shelf of Nutshell books... "Java in a Nutshell"... "Java Enterprise in a Nutshell"... half a dozen X books... "Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell.":-)
Actually, individual translations are, indeed, copyrighted. Check inside the front cover of yours.
Granted, the original King James version is public domain now... but anyone who's walked through a religious bookstore will observe the proliferation of versions of the Bible, with annotations, study guides, etc.
Any misuse of the Bible then becomes an offense punishable by law. Anyone who purposely twists the meaning of Scripture to fit their own evil purposes can be sued or sent to prison. All that this requires is for a nationwide alliance of ministers and preachers to take up the cause, which I do not think is so unreasonable.
Actually, the much-quoted-in-this-forum doctrine of "fair use" allows for quotation of nice chunks of Biblical versage - and since it's usually preceeded by a blurb giving chapter and verse (e.g. "John 3:16"), attribution is taken care of, in most folks' eyes.
As for the "nationwide alliance of ministers and preachers" - which nation do you live in? Here in the US of A, we can't even get our various brands of Protestant Christianity to stop fighting amongst themselves on interpretations of this same book, and you want them to ally to fight copyright violations?
And sometimes it doesn't make a lick of sense but that's because they are reacting with their hearts, which is why protests with youth in them are usually motivated and fiery.
Not sure it's their hearts doing the motivating... I'd vote for a set of organs a couple of feet lower.... My Spousal Overunit, a former 9th grade teacher, says she'd've liked most of her former students if their hormones would've stopped hammering them back and forth long enough to have a coherent conversation.
You ever seen the AARP (American Association of Retired People) screaming chants in the streets?
You ever seen the Congress muck about with Social Security, Medicare, etc.? These folks don't HAVE to march in the streets - they have $$$, and write letters to their congresscritters and their newspapers, and write checks to opposing candidates. America (and Europe, and Japan) is an aging society - the kids may be the loud ones, but it's their grandparents who're accumulating the clout.
In the event of system lockup, the hardware can clear the memory and write the OUM backup back into RAM. Voila! You're back where you started (more or less).
Voila! You're back, 0.5 seconds before you crashed, with an identical stream of code and data coming... so you crash again!
Your blue screen of death just flickers REAL FAST. See loop, infinite.
Now, if there were some smarts that could trap and diagnose the cause of the crash, reload the memory, fix the problem, and THEN restart things... you'd have something.
Hmmm... sounds like something the High Availability folks could look at....
after all, a lack of cryptography on the part of the Germans and Japanese in WWII did severely compromise their respective war efforts.
Don't say it like that - say that our ability to read their crypto gave the Allies advantages and may have swung the tide of the war.
The Japanese and German codes were stong, powerful things for the day - Enigma and its brethren were mean and nasty. If we hadn't managed to capture the Enigma devices, we would have had a harder time decrypting messages as they changed keys.
One of the big differences these days is the public availability of the source of the crypto systems. The algorithms and source code implementations for DES and PGP and ECC are out there for public review and hole-poking, while the WWII systems largely relied on hiding the algorithm to maintain security. A very different situation from today's.
Ok, so they're carving the headstone for OS/2 - but they'll still offer "special-bid, fee-based" support. How many folks think this OS is never going to go away?
There are still folks out there running DOS 3, not to mention the Cult of the Amiga and the Trash-80 and the Timex-Sinclair. How do you put a stake through the heart of these beasts? (esp. one that Big Blue sold to banks, governments, etc).
"IBM wants its customers to deploy ebusiness technology applications concurrently with existing OS/2 applications until platform neutrality has been achieved, and then change the operating system," said the spokesman (quoted from the article)
Wonder if the folks who thought then that they couldn't get fired for buying IBM are sweating, or if they're not getting fired for buying Micro$oft now?
Heh - we don't ALL use 'em. I, too, am an SAIC software person, and my previous assignment was on a 15-person development - I was brought in as a lead developer, in part to provide experience with SW process as this project tried to work its way up to SEI Level 3. Didn't make it (gov't and the prime got the program canceled - LONG story), but the value of the processes we used was established in the minds of everyone involved.
Our Telcordia subsidiary (formerly BellCore, half of what was once AT&T Bell Labs) is one of those Level 5 organizations - we're all learning from them.
That's the point of SEI Level 5 - "Continuous Process Improvement."
I've worked on programs assessed at Levels 3 and 4, and supposedly the folks I work with now are Level 5 (I know they made 4, but I'm not sure the certification for 5 is finished). I grind my teeth sometimes at the layers of process we have to wade through to get things done - but every six months or so, they make changes to (hopefully) make it better.
The SEI's not just working with software - they're developing models for System Engineering and Integrated Product Development, as well as Personal and Team software process models for small and independent-minded folk. Your tax dollars at work!
Well... let's enumerate just a couple of these good ideas that SF writers have come up with, and not seen a penny for:
The Clarke Orbit, invented by Arthur C. Clarke back in his military servitude, IIRC - also known as geosync. Can you say Comsats, boys and girls? Is Hughes or Intelsat paying to use these orbits? (Note - a couple of years back, TRW PATENTED one of the proposed Medium Earth Orbit comsat constellations and orbits - and you thought software patents were bad!)
The waterbed, by Robert A. Heinlein - has his estate seen a penny from Water Bedroom Land?
There are plenty more. Remember, there are quite a few actual scientists writing science fiction. Shouldn't they get some credit for writing down something so far ahead of its time that everyone considers it "sci-fi?"
Encyclopedia Astronautica has to be my favorite spacey site. He's managed to get a lot of the Russian historical documents pulled together, and tells coherent stories.
The saga of the N1 (Russia's attempt at a Moon booster) is great - lots of little engines, makes big BOOM!
Slashdot Mirror
Methinks you slightly misinterpret the intended meaning. Innovation still exists - but if the "hot topics" at a university are basic problems of computer science, that have been studied and dissected for decades... well, I'm not going to expect the invention of the microchip.
Was ENIAC an innovation? Sure! So was Babbage's machine, and the vacuumn tube, and the transistor, and the IC, and the 8088. Is it innovation to add on-chip L2 chache? No - it's refinement of existing principles and concepts.
As for the value of a solution to Travelling Salesman - why, yes, that would be nice. Given the fact that these are classical examples of non-polynomial solution sets, I'd be more inclined to predict a solution from the mathematicians of the world (Slashdot, May 25, Mathematical Problems For The New Age, Is P=NP?)
Innovation means more than Micro$oft's tagline. It's something NEW, for which uses have to be invented (see the computer), or a completely new way to do something (see the integrated circuit). What's innovative software? Like p0rn, I'll know it when I see it.
In other words, cars are not being developed to manuever in three independant dimensions. The engine of a car (cpu of a computer) is continually being refined. The console and driving instruments (UI of an OS) are continually being refined. The fact that the car travels on land is not being altered (the fact that an OS coordinates the hardware) is not being changed.
ACTUALLY - there are people out there working on alternatives to our current 2-dimensional automobiles. Check out the Solotrek and the Moller M400 velocitor - a couple of my favorite, root-for-the-underdog, hope-they-make-it concepts.
Now THAT's innovation.
As others have pointed out, this is going to make piracy a real concern. Today you have projectionists in NYC theatres with handheld camcorders taping movies for sale on the streets - these folks will just do backups to new $250 hard drives, take it home and let the PIV work on cracking the encryption (or even worse, steal the theatre's key), and start burning videotapes/DVDs/etc. IF the movie folks do it smartly, they'll be able to trace the pirates back to the source theatres through something embedded in the digital streams, and sock it to the folks who let the movie "walk out the back door."
Won't help with the piracy on that particular film, but if that results in that particular theatre losing the right to show movies... they're out of business, aren't they?
In RL, I'm a carnivore - just can't stand most vegetation. However, through years of study and research, I have come to one inescapable conclusion - God put cows on Earth to make grass fit for humans to eat. Deer, too. And sheep - with the added bonus of wool, too....
wonders how many veggie-Nazis are going to take these remarks at face value and start flaming...
I was frustrated during my college career, because I sensed that there was so much more out there than I was being exposed to - then I hit the real world, and found I was right.
Of course, your mileage will vary. Some schools are/were/will be hotbeds of innovation - Berkeley, back when BSD was being evolved - but what's new out of the UCal system? AT&T innovated - they built Multics, which caused such an internal backlash that UNIX appeared. Now, they concentrate on building business and let other corporations (like Lucent and Telcordia, the companies that used to be Bell Labs) do the innovating for them at the technical level.
Is innovation dead? Oh, heck no. However, I do believe that our universities tend to fight against it, more than lead toward it. Very few seem to have leadership with the foresight to not focus their research on the current hot topics, or the classics of yesteryear. (Dining Philosophers? Yeesh.) It's far easier to get and retain tenure through making incremental improvements in existing technologies than by trying to come up with something completely new, which noone will understand until you can show them a demo with flashing lights and sound effects.
Of course, this is all my opinion - and worth less than the electrons that represent it on your screen. :-)
"Once the TITAN A.E. file reaches the Atlanta theater, it will be stored on a QuVIS Inc. server and projected using a Barco/Texas Instruments DLP Cinema digital projector. Sigma Designs Group has built a state-of-the-art Tørus Compound Curve Screen and Eastern AcousticWorks has provided a customized digital audio sound system for the event."
Groovy, eh?
The English dubbed version is called Star Blazers - Japanese with subtitles is Space Battleship (or Cruiser) Yamato - different titled depending on the importer that year. Evil aliens attack Earth, our Space Navy is destroyed - our last hope is a mighty battleship, constructed from the hulk of the WWII Battleship Yamato, equipped with the alien Wave Motion Gun.
Even had a cool theme song. Check it out.
Not a surprise - would YOU want your first rough are-you-sure-we-can-do-this cut at the code exposed for the universe to dissect? I think NOT...
At least they give a date... if they were a game company (or M$), I wouldn't expect anything from them until sometime in 2002....
What if I take a Linux kernel, and somebody else's COTS product, and perform my own black-magic-and-voodoo manipulations to make them do something neat - what code do I have to release? Just the Linux kernel base? My own mods built on top of it? For the purposes of the posit, let's assume there's no way I'm going to get to the somebody else's source code... what is my exact obligation to release?
(waits for his ignorance to get stamped out...)
When I typed on it, I'd get about 2.5 words before I jammed the keys - he could do 50 wpm. I understand the reason behind the QWERTY keyboard.
Haven't seen such a good double-take in weeks.
Actually, individual translations are, indeed, copyrighted. Check inside the front cover of yours.
Granted, the original King James version is public domain now... but anyone who's walked through a religious bookstore will observe the proliferation of versions of the Bible, with annotations, study guides, etc.
Any misuse of the Bible then becomes an offense punishable by law. Anyone who purposely twists the meaning of Scripture to fit their own evil purposes can be sued or sent to prison. All that this requires is for a nationwide alliance of ministers and preachers to take up the cause, which I do not think is so unreasonable.
Actually, the much-quoted-in-this-forum doctrine of "fair use" allows for quotation of nice chunks of Biblical versage - and since it's usually preceeded by a blurb giving chapter and verse (e.g. "John 3:16"), attribution is taken care of, in most folks' eyes.
As for the "nationwide alliance of ministers and preachers" - which nation do you live in? Here in the US of A, we can't even get our various brands of Protestant Christianity to stop fighting amongst themselves on interpretations of this same book, and you want them to ally to fight copyright violations?
Not sure it's their hearts doing the motivating... I'd vote for a set of organs a couple of feet lower.... My Spousal Overunit, a former 9th grade teacher, says she'd've liked most of her former students if their hormones would've stopped hammering them back and forth long enough to have a coherent conversation.
You ever seen the AARP (American Association of Retired People) screaming chants in the streets?
You ever seen the Congress muck about with Social Security, Medicare, etc.? These folks don't HAVE to march in the streets - they have $$$, and write letters to their congresscritters and their newspapers, and write checks to opposing candidates. America (and Europe, and Japan) is an aging society - the kids may be the loud ones, but it's their grandparents who're accumulating the clout.
Voila! You're back, 0.5 seconds before you crashed, with an identical stream of code and data coming... so you crash again!
Your blue screen of death just flickers REAL FAST. See loop, infinite.
Now, if there were some smarts that could trap and diagnose the cause of the crash, reload the memory, fix the problem, and THEN restart things... you'd have something.
Hmmm... sounds like something the High Availability folks could look at....
Don't say it like that - say that our ability to read their crypto gave the Allies advantages and may have swung the tide of the war.
The Japanese and German codes were stong, powerful things for the day - Enigma and its brethren were mean and nasty. If we hadn't managed to capture the Enigma devices, we would have had a harder time decrypting messages as they changed keys.
One of the big differences these days is the public availability of the source of the crypto systems. The algorithms and source code implementations for DES and PGP and ECC are out there for public review and hole-poking, while the WWII systems largely relied on hiding the algorithm to maintain security. A very different situation from today's.
There are still folks out there running DOS 3, not to mention the Cult of the Amiga and the Trash-80 and the Timex-Sinclair. How do you put a stake through the heart of these beasts? (esp. one that Big Blue sold to banks, governments, etc).
"IBM wants its customers to deploy ebusiness technology applications concurrently with existing OS/2 applications until platform neutrality has been achieved, and then change the operating system," said the spokesman (quoted from the article)
Wonder if the folks who thought then that they couldn't get fired for buying IBM are sweating, or if they're not getting fired for buying Micro$oft now?
Our Telcordia subsidiary (formerly BellCore, half of what was once AT&T Bell Labs) is one of those Level 5 organizations - we're all learning from them.
I've worked on programs assessed at Levels 3 and 4, and supposedly the folks I work with now are Level 5 (I know they made 4, but I'm not sure the certification for 5 is finished). I grind my teeth sometimes at the layers of process we have to wade through to get things done - but every six months or so, they make changes to (hopefully) make it better.
The SEI's not just working with software - they're developing models for System Engineering and Integrated Product Development, as well as Personal and Team software process models for small and independent-minded folk. Your tax dollars at work!
The Clarke Orbit, invented by Arthur C. Clarke back in his military servitude, IIRC - also known as geosync. Can you say Comsats, boys and girls? Is Hughes or Intelsat paying to use these orbits? (Note - a couple of years back, TRW PATENTED one of the proposed Medium Earth Orbit comsat constellations and orbits - and you thought software patents were bad!)
The waterbed, by Robert A. Heinlein - has his estate seen a penny from Water Bedroom Land?
There are plenty more. Remember, there are quite a few actual scientists writing science fiction. Shouldn't they get some credit for writing down something so far ahead of its time that everyone considers it "sci-fi?"
The saga of the N1 (Russia's attempt at a Moon booster) is great - lots of little engines, makes big BOOM!