For the real story, read Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" (full text online at www.foresight.org somewhere) and for a genuine technical treatise try "Nanosystems" by the same author. Diamond Age is a sci-fi novel, and while it might awaken you to the possibilities, you're far better off with scientific fact.
Btw, build a nanocomputer with the same architecture as a conventional one and you're no less prone to bugs and viruses - but the HP team has also designed the Teramac, a new architecture designed to "route around" failures.
256K isn't much these days, and I'm concerned that letting BT keep its info monopoly by pushing DSL will hold up cable rollout. It's difficult enough already to fit fibre into Britain's ancient infrastructure; I hope this doesn't deter the glass guys even more.
Journalists in China have a problem Western ones don't: they have to search hard to find things to write about, since many, many subjects will annoy someone in authority somewhere. You'll see lots of articles in mainland Chinese papers that aren't really news - archaeology is popular I think. This piece is another.
Bashing the West is also pretty safe ground, and that's why this article was written. Remember that the impression it'll create in China is somewhat different to the impression it creates on/.; this article will be seen as just another example of Western arrogance and illogicality, probably just what its writer intended.
It's a good job most people don't read the official press any more and get their content smuggled in from Hongkong.
It's a good thing this came along or we risked falling off the Moore curve.. even so, even these holes aren't small enough for proper x-ray lithography, so it looks like we're still stuck with that five-atom width absolute limit of traditional litho if technology takes this route.
The question is, though: is squeezing every last breath out of trad litho the way to go? A couple of hexagons on the wall of a bucky tube can form a complete logic gate; molecular nanotech will soon build single-molecule transistors (check out J Ellenbogen's work at MITRE.org) and Ned Seeman at NYU is folding DNA into massively parallel computing devices. These bottom-up routes are to traditional scrapin' and shinin' lithography as Linux is to Windows 3.1. Maybe we don't need new ten-billion dollar fabs; maybe we just need some fresh ideas.
Would different cup sizes be regarded as forks in the code base, since they're not "user independent"? Would geeks get offended when women said the contents of these bras are proprietary? These are important issues. Perhaps the D cup distro would be from "Slackwear", Red Hat would become "Red Strap", FreeBSD would become "Three BreaSteD"...
Let's hope we can get some real samples (or at least spectroscoped/gas chrom'd images) back to Earth. If complex carbon compounds are found onboard the comet, it could confirm several theories about how life developed.
India, Australia, Japan, and pretty much the whole of Asia (excepting, I think, China) drives on the left. I think worldwide more people drive on the left than on the right...
Quote from the article: "These men are not the beer guzzling, belching variety..." just shows how one-sided the sexism debate really is. I mean, what if I described the women here in Paris as "not the unmade-up, straggly-haired, visible-panty line variety?"
I'm a very new Linux user, and here's something to think about:
If Windows users cross the floor to this "OpenLinux", they'll get something that looks exactly like where they've just come from. If it looks no different, it'll create the impression that it acts no different. And those new users will wonder what all the fuss is about, since much Linux functionality will be "hidden" behind the Windows-like UI.
I may be wrong; I haven't used OpenLinux. And if my struggles with RedHat are any indication, a familiar GUI may make the learning curve less steep. But the next great idea won't come from copying kludged old GUIs; there's an opportunity here for UI designers to do something really different. Linux is different, and should be trumpeted as such, not apologised for.
What about a UI based on the web metaphor instead of the desktop metaphor, for example? Where your disk is just a faster, closer bit of the Internet? I'd want one. And for all I know, stuff like this has already been created by someone. (I'm NOT talking about MS's "active desktop" here. I think only about six people in the world actually use it.)
I want people to use (and contribute back to) Linux because it offers a fresh, powerful way to do stuff. Not because it looks just like what's gone before.
Yes, I know how OSS works - I'm trying to illustrate that know-nothing men in suits can damage pretty much ANYTHING if they put their minds to it. What if a "freedom tax" forced Linux users to pay a penalty for using it? What if Gnome got classed as a public utility and was "for its own good" taken into the hands of a government committee? (If anyone's wondering, each of these things has happened to real products in the past.)
My only message was that governments (and other coercive monopolies) generally do a lot more harm than good. If you look to them for help today, don't be surprised when they start taking away your freedoms tomorrow.
I'm as happy as most Slashdotters at the thought that Microsoft might get slapped on the wrist, but contain your enthusiasm, guys - years down the road, you could be next.
Imagine it's 2008 and everyone uses Linux, which is free (as in beer). Imagine some entrepreneur raising a case that this "predatory pricing" prevents him developing a new OS and narrows consumer choice. Some bureaucrat might just go for it... and once again we'd have know-nothing governmental noses in our world.
I'm no coder, just an end-user who's switching to Linux because I finally got tired of the proprietary brittleness of Microsoft's stuff. (With a lot of pain, of course, but with gain too.) Government action against Microsoft isn't the answer to anything. The answer is to LET the Microsofts make their billions - let them become fat, stodgy and arrogant. Because this sows the seeds of their own destruction. Resulting in their ideal target buyers, guys like me, becoming dissatisfied and escaping when smarter, more creative people build something like Linux. And the Microsofts start to die.
In a webbed world, top-down government is unnecessary, and relying on it to "solve" our problems just perpetuates this outmoded system known as politics. Let's hope it's not many more years before the mass of people realise this, and strip back governments worldwide into the minimal scraps of social plumbing they should be.
No - CDMA is low power and up spectrum, which doesn't work well in water. Local companies run cables up to land or even further in, and then mount base stations around them to feed in.
Couple of weeks ago in NY I saw a presentation by David Small (http://www.davidsmall.com) who built an 8000x6000 display as part of his PhD.
His point? As with bandwidth, a bigger screen allows you to do not just more stuff, but qualitatively different stuff. Like look at the thumbnail structure of Shakespeare's plays and pick out structural details (length of last lines? Size of scenes?) large and small.
This screen is a step towards that increasing of visual bandwidth that took my breath away. Can't wait for the day I can create web pages the way I write ads - pasting big sheets to a wall and writing in foot-tall letters everyone, just everyone, can comment on.
I know a lot of optics guys, and here are some observations that passed muster with them:
YES, they're laying it underwater because a) it's cheaper and b) needs fewer bribes than doing it overland;
NO, they won't be running cables to every hut. The game plan is probably to make the ring a backbone linked to by 2MB wireless CDMA, doing an end-run around State telcos. (The end of government gets little closer. Great!)
YES, cost is a huge issue - but not because of immature tech; it's purely due to bureacracy and bribes. Making phone calls in Africa is pricier than in Japan, despite the fact parts of Africa (Egypt, for example) are massively wired and handle a large chunk of Europe's traffic.)
By the way, that FLAG project was obsolete even when the Wired article was written - as is Iridium up above. Think WDM and CDMA, not grateless and TDMA.
A basic principle of Drexlerian nanotech is that bottom-up is better than top-down. This nanotrain is a huge achievement, but ultimately it's quite simple - just a few moving parts. And once you've built something simple but foolproof, you can build something a bit more complex on top.... and test it to foolproofness again... and then... it's essentially how life developed, except evolution is somewhat more random.
There's a parallel here with software, of course - open source stuff "grows" bottom-up from hundreds of coders solving real problems, whereas Windows trickled top-down into a thousand pools of problems. For me, this is a more fundamental difference between OSS and CSS than the few coders/many coders difference. If we're to build the incredibly complex machines nanotech will make possible, we have to go the bottom-up route - no question.
I think they mean "horizon" rather than "event horizon" - once something moves over an event horizon you can't get it back again... (this has particular significance for me, a Windows user who's just started his move away from the dark side and is struggling to get out of the FUD gravity field...)
But anyway, I think this UI model solves several problems with onscreen real estate, especially if it'll work with the eyepiece screens being developed at MIT and elsewhere. A big problem with "spacial" UIs is that of the user getting "lost in space" - and this is reduced if there's something solid to use as a reference point, like the horizon bar. Good luck to them.
My $0.02: like other top-down control methods, controlling the right to influence others (which is really what tampering with free speech is all about) is best left to the people themselves. Yes, anonymous posters can spread scandalous, libellious drivel - but who listens to them? A few people perhaps, but not many.
Rumours tend to die fast without someone to take responsibility for them, even on the Net. I find unnamed flameboys odious, as do most people who never post anonymously - but I don't worry about them, and I wouldn't interrupt their right to do it. As their method of posting suggests, anonymous posters are literally nobodies, with reputations to match. So let's stop talking about top-down regulations - the bottom-up ones we've grown on the Net are far better.
Nobody has a use for five cellphones (I'm not counting creative Slashdotters here) - but what if every cornflake packet suddenly became a "buyer" of a tiny cellphone letting breakfasting kids talk to a comments site? And what if every piece of paper had a few gigs of memory sandwiched at its core? Ubiquity of chips and communications will let us build fundamentally different kinds of applications. I for one can't wait.
Evolution doesn't try to perfect nature - it's blind, just surviving individuals tending to propagate more of the genes that resulted in survivability traits. There's no reason life should have provided such a mechanism - evolution "wants" to propagate only genes, not animals.
Don't forget that Dolly's short telomeres were completely expected, which is a good sign - it's further proof that telomeres are intimately related to aging. Given the exponential rise in genetic knowledge, anyone under 30 today can reasonably expect to live forever, reset to the 'default' physical age of 25, even if they've aged beyond that in the meantime. Of course, since dying itself is simply an evolved cellular-level defence against cancer, let's hope cancer is solved along the way.... (and before anyone answers the obvious point raised here, remember that evolution favours individual genes, not individual animals.)
Slashdot Mirror
For the real story, read Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" (full text online at www.foresight.org somewhere) and for a genuine technical treatise try "Nanosystems" by the same author. Diamond Age is a sci-fi novel, and while it might awaken you to the possibilities, you're far better off with scientific fact.
Btw, build a nanocomputer with the same architecture as a conventional one and you're no less prone to bugs and viruses - but the HP team has also designed the Teramac, a new architecture designed to "route around" failures.
Not sure what the EU has to do with this. Can you explain?
You're the first AC whose comment I've read for over a year, so congratulations!
"Since when did I"... well, I've lived in the Chinese world most of my working life, and only returned to Europe this year.
Second, I can't speak for the US Media - I'm not American.
256K isn't much these days, and I'm concerned that letting BT keep its info monopoly by pushing DSL will hold up cable rollout. It's difficult enough already to fit fibre into Britain's ancient infrastructure; I hope this doesn't deter the glass guys even more.
Journalists in China have a problem Western ones don't: they have to search hard to find things to write about, since many, many subjects will annoy someone in authority somewhere. You'll see lots of articles in mainland Chinese papers that aren't really news - archaeology is popular I think. This piece is another.
/.; this article will be seen as just another example of Western arrogance and illogicality, probably just what its writer intended.
Bashing the West is also pretty safe ground, and that's why this article was written. Remember that the impression it'll create in China is somewhat different to the impression it creates on
It's a good job most people don't read the official press any more and get their content smuggled in from Hongkong.
Check the story about IPv6 further up home... maybe they've run out of old addresses and have to reuse numbers!
It's a good thing this came along or we risked falling off the Moore curve.. even so, even these holes aren't small enough for proper x-ray lithography, so it looks like we're still stuck with that five-atom width absolute limit of traditional litho if technology takes this route.
The question is, though: is squeezing every last breath out of trad litho the way to go? A couple of hexagons on the wall of a bucky tube can form a complete logic gate; molecular nanotech will soon build single-molecule transistors (check out J Ellenbogen's work at MITRE.org) and Ned Seeman at NYU is folding DNA into massively parallel computing devices. These bottom-up routes are to traditional scrapin' and shinin' lithography as Linux is to Windows 3.1. Maybe we don't need new ten-billion dollar fabs; maybe we just need some fresh ideas.
Would different cup sizes be regarded as forks in the code base, since they're not "user independent"? Would geeks get offended when women said the contents of these bras are proprietary? These are important issues. Perhaps the D cup distro would be from "Slackwear", Red Hat would become "Red Strap", FreeBSD would become "Three BreaSteD"...
It's STILL Facetious Friday here in Paris.
....than the fact that the moment this thing gets onto the market, one of you lot will put Linux on it. (Who said Linux doesn't offer good support?!)
Sorry, it's Facetious Friday here in Paris.
Let's hope we can get some real samples (or at least spectroscoped/gas chrom'd images) back to Earth. If complex carbon compounds are found onboard the comet, it could confirm several theories about how life developed.
India, Australia, Japan, and pretty much the whole of Asia (excepting, I think, China) drives on the left. I think worldwide more people drive on the left than on the right...
Quote from the article: "These men are not the beer guzzling, belching variety..." just shows how one-sided the sexism debate really is. I mean, what if I described the women here in Paris as "not the unmade-up, straggly-haired, visible-panty line variety?"
I'm a very new Linux user, and here's something to think about:
If Windows users cross the floor to this "OpenLinux", they'll get something that looks exactly like where they've just come from. If it looks no different, it'll create the impression that it acts no different. And those new users will wonder what all the fuss is about, since much Linux functionality will be "hidden" behind the Windows-like UI.
I may be wrong; I haven't used OpenLinux. And if my struggles with RedHat are any indication, a familiar GUI may make the learning curve less steep. But the next great idea won't come from copying kludged old GUIs; there's an opportunity here for UI designers to do something really different. Linux is different, and should be trumpeted as such, not apologised for.
What about a UI based on the web metaphor instead of the desktop metaphor, for example? Where your disk is just a faster, closer bit of the Internet? I'd want one. And for all I know, stuff like this has already been created by someone. (I'm NOT talking about MS's "active desktop" here. I think only about six people in the world actually use it.)
I want people to use (and contribute back to) Linux because it offers a fresh, powerful way to do stuff. Not because it looks just like what's gone before.
Let's all hope you're right.... I sure do!
Yes, I know how OSS works - I'm trying to illustrate that know-nothing men in suits can damage pretty much ANYTHING if they put their minds to it. What if a "freedom tax" forced Linux users to pay a penalty for using it? What if Gnome got classed as a public utility and was "for its own good" taken into the hands of a government committee? (If anyone's wondering, each of these things has happened to real products in the past.)
My only message was that governments (and other coercive monopolies) generally do a lot more harm than good. If you look to them for help today, don't be surprised when they start taking away your freedoms tomorrow.
I'm as happy as most Slashdotters at the thought that Microsoft might get slapped on the wrist, but contain your enthusiasm, guys - years down the road, you could be next.
Imagine it's 2008 and everyone uses Linux, which is free (as in beer). Imagine some entrepreneur raising a case that this "predatory pricing" prevents him developing a new OS and narrows consumer choice. Some bureaucrat might just go for it... and once again we'd have know-nothing governmental noses in our world.
I'm no coder, just an end-user who's switching to Linux because I finally got tired of the proprietary brittleness of Microsoft's stuff. (With a lot of pain, of course, but with gain too.) Government action against Microsoft isn't the answer to anything. The answer is to LET the Microsofts make their billions - let them become fat, stodgy and arrogant. Because this sows the seeds of their own destruction. Resulting in their ideal target buyers, guys like me, becoming dissatisfied and escaping when smarter, more creative people build something like Linux. And the Microsofts start to die.
In a webbed world, top-down government is unnecessary, and relying on it to "solve" our problems just perpetuates this outmoded system known as politics. Let's hope it's not many more years before the mass of people realise this, and strip back governments worldwide into the minimal scraps of social plumbing they should be.
No - CDMA is low power and up spectrum, which doesn't work well in water. Local companies run cables up to land or even further in, and then mount base stations around them to feed in.
Couple of weeks ago in NY I saw a presentation by David Small (http://www.davidsmall.com) who built an 8000x6000 display as part of his PhD.
His point? As with bandwidth, a bigger screen allows you to do not just more stuff, but qualitatively different stuff. Like look at the thumbnail structure of Shakespeare's plays and pick out structural details (length of last lines? Size of scenes?) large and small.
This screen is a step towards that increasing of visual bandwidth that took my breath away. Can't wait for the day I can create web pages the way I write ads - pasting big sheets to a wall and writing in foot-tall letters everyone, just everyone, can comment on.
I know a lot of optics guys, and here are some observations that passed muster with them:
YES, they're laying it underwater because a) it's cheaper and b) needs fewer bribes than doing it overland;
NO, they won't be running cables to every hut. The game plan is probably to make the ring a backbone linked to by 2MB wireless CDMA, doing an end-run around State telcos. (The end of government gets little closer. Great!)
YES, cost is a huge issue - but not because of immature tech; it's purely due to bureacracy and bribes. Making phone calls in Africa is pricier than in Japan, despite the fact parts of Africa (Egypt, for example) are massively wired and handle a large chunk of Europe's traffic.)
By the way, that FLAG project was obsolete even when the Wired article was written - as is Iridium up above. Think WDM and CDMA, not grateless and TDMA.
Bring on the ring!
A basic principle of Drexlerian nanotech is that bottom-up is better than top-down. This nanotrain is a huge achievement, but ultimately it's quite simple - just a few moving parts. And once you've built something simple but foolproof, you can build something a bit more complex on top.... and test it to foolproofness again... and then... it's essentially how life developed, except evolution is somewhat more random.
There's a parallel here with software, of course - open source stuff "grows" bottom-up from hundreds of coders solving real problems, whereas Windows trickled top-down into a thousand pools of problems. For me, this is a more fundamental difference between OSS and CSS than the few coders/many coders difference. If we're to build the incredibly complex machines nanotech will make possible, we have to go the bottom-up route - no question.
I think they mean "horizon" rather than "event horizon" - once something moves over an event horizon you can't get it back again... (this has particular significance for me, a Windows user who's just started his move away from the dark side and is struggling to get out of the FUD gravity field...)
But anyway, I think this UI model solves several problems with onscreen real estate, especially if it'll work with the eyepiece screens being developed at MIT and elsewhere. A big problem with "spacial" UIs is that of the user getting "lost in space" - and this is reduced if there's something solid to use as a reference point, like the horizon bar. Good luck to them.
My $0.02: like other top-down control methods, controlling the right to influence others (which is really what tampering with free speech is all about) is best left to the people themselves. Yes, anonymous posters can spread scandalous, libellious drivel - but who listens to them? A few people perhaps, but not many.
Rumours tend to die fast without someone to take responsibility for them, even on the Net. I find unnamed flameboys odious, as do most people who never post anonymously - but I don't worry about them, and I wouldn't interrupt their right to do it. As their method of posting suggests, anonymous posters are literally nobodies, with reputations to match. So let's stop talking about top-down regulations - the bottom-up ones we've grown on the Net are far better.
Nobody has a use for five cellphones (I'm not counting creative Slashdotters here) - but what if every cornflake packet suddenly became a "buyer" of a tiny cellphone letting breakfasting kids talk to a comments site? And what if every piece of paper had a few gigs of memory sandwiched at its core? Ubiquity of chips and communications will let us build fundamentally different kinds of applications. I for one can't wait.
Evolution doesn't try to perfect nature - it's blind, just surviving individuals tending to propagate more of the genes that resulted in survivability traits. There's no reason life should have provided such a mechanism - evolution "wants" to propagate only genes, not animals.
Don't forget that Dolly's short telomeres were completely expected, which is a good sign - it's further proof that telomeres are intimately related to aging. Given the exponential rise in genetic knowledge, anyone under 30 today can reasonably expect to live forever, reset to the 'default' physical age of 25, even if they've aged beyond that in the meantime.
Of course, since dying itself is simply an evolved cellular-level defence against cancer, let's hope cancer is solved along the way.... (and before anyone answers the obvious point raised here, remember that evolution favours individual genes, not individual animals.)