Cordwainer Smith's short story Nancy is about exactly this topic- if a crewman gets too whacky Out There he can push a button.
He is told beforehand that pushing the button will wash out his career but he can do it. Our hero's fellow crewman and pet die, and he gets wonky, so he pushes the button. His perfect woman appears and keeps him happy throughout the voyage. She is of course an entity built from his mind that helps him function at a minimal level.
Once he makes it back Nancy disappears (since she's part of the ship's safety equipment, never to run again. He is not only ruined for space, but for being involved with anyone else, because he's already experienced the Perfect Companion and is left with the feeling that she could pop up at any time.
The reason Open Source has not won through is twofold- large companies who could trivially pay 2-3 programmer's out of pocket change see Open Source as a huge liability (sued for misbehaving code, not getting 24x7 support because it's one guy who just went squirrel hunting or security risk), and programmers don't do it because momma Microsoft/IBM/whatever isn't there with a secure paycheck.
This cycle feeds on itself, as a major issue for corporations is not having a steady stream of Open Source programmers familiar with the major packages to support to be available and drive down costs, and programmers don't get into it due to the cash flow problem.
This kind of thinking is backwards- the risk is NOT having the source so you can bring in whatever programmer to fix or modify a problem. Black box solutions is giving the store to the vendor and increases costs, because now you have to pay for the original programmer AND his bosses AND the profit margin for the company, and if you don't your captured system will not be running long.
The lawsuit risk should be minimized (you had the source code, you had the chance to totally vet the code before running it), but that will depend on whether common sense or industry shills will win out.
For a tenth of what they pay the vendors corporate America can have all the customized secure programming they want without being held up by the vendors, and still have plenty for the programmers. This fact alone will drive Open Source into the mainstream.
As for the programmers, it's simply a matter of letting their programs go and creating a demand for their customization and service. It won't be everyone's cup of tea as the paychecks will not be regular and creativity/vision does not necessarily go along with programming skills.
At our site we have HP-UX, OpenVMS, AIX, Solaris, and probably one or two I don't know about that our Midrange Systems people manage. There are three of them to service 15 or so major 24x7 medical-related systems. They can do it because they are darn good, we tend to dump the apps support on the apps vendor by contract, and the management doesn't interfere or hobble them with various insanities. Of the three the good admin one is most important, although having good management probably helps retain the good techs.
They say they like AIX best due to the ease of admin.
In 1996 Paul Krugman, MIT economics professor and wirter of the Dismal Scientist column in Slate, wrote this column about a look back at what happened to content providers from 2096. Krugman's overriding point is that in a digital environment content ends up being free, and people that actually make tangible non-digital things (blue-collar-type jobs) will get the benefits of the future.
His model for music in a post-Napster environment is that music is delivered free to promote attendance at live concerts.
I particularly enjoyed the part where he predicts the demise of economists' perk jobs and he's writing part-time from a vet clinic.
I weep not for the end of Madonna and her ilk's excess. It's far more important what happens to the average plumber then it does for these pampered poodles.
There are 5 Los Angeles-class boats that are getting SDS refits, and the new Virginia class will ALL have SDS capability. So pretty soon an enemy will never be sure when Uncle Sam's SEALs may show up on their doorstep.
This website should show you that Jimmy is probably pretty happy with getting a sub named after him.
Each part of the navy thinks it's the most important. They refer to themselves as communities (so the carriers are the Naval Aviation community, the anything but carriers crowd is the Surface Warfare community, etc.). Some naval catalogs list carriers as the premier warships, others submarines, and a case can be made for either.
I'm not sure why Jimmy got a sub named after him, much less the biggest and baddest sub. For instance the Carl Vinson was named after the senator that got the Two Oceans Navy Act passed before WWII that got the Navy on an industrial roll before Pearl Harbor. Ronald Reagan is obvious due to the 80's buildup. But Jimmy just drew down the fleet. The submariners must be desperate for attention.
Here is a link describing wht the Jimmy Carter is getting- basically a bigger SEAL delivery system, probably with the ability to drop a carried bathysphere or other goodies.
The Jimmy Carter is too high value a ship to just keep out on fiber patrol- independent of her spec-ops function she can pretty much conventionally destroy most navies by herself thanks to that 50-weapon loadout, being quieter running at speed then the Los Angeles subs at dock, and that wide-aperture sonar. So making her a $3 billion dollar satellite feed doesn't make sense.
Therefore they must be planning to hook into the fiber-optic network, and spool off their own fiber line to a discrete uplink several hundred miles away. The upgrade must be to allow for all that equipment.
1) It is a militarly dominant position. Once you get a solar-powered mass driver that can chunk rocks, you have an infinite supply of ICBM-level attacks that can be fired night and day.
2) The cheap grav gradient off the lunar surface means that materials from the moon are cheaper then earth-based solutions. So if we do get zero-g industrial or medical processes going the effective way to build them will be from the moon.
3) The asteroids are a gold-mine waiting to happen. Our havy metal material costs would plummet with a stream of asteroids pouring in.
4) And of course, the real snswer is we can't possibly imagine what we will do with it. For instance the American West was thought of as a great desert, and Alaska as a useless chunk of ice. Seems we've done okay with it, but only with technology and needs for materials we had no inkling about when America bought them.
We don't know what space will bring, and it presently looks like a desert, but whatever it gives us it will be our future (along with the oceans).
That's all well and good for a controllable environment such as an MS-Office suite derived office. Problem in our environment is that there are many specialized processes that require workstation installs. Yeah you can do the Citrix thing as noted ad nauseum, but for corporations at a certain level it's easier to bite the bullet, negotiate a lower per-seat price, and not undo a whole sick, sad infrastructure.
The risk comes in when you have an NT-derivative mission-critical server down, the vendor is pointing to Microsoft and Microsoft is pointing to the vendor, you need it fixed, and Microsoft finds out your happy butt has been on slashdot talking about how your company dumped a million dollars worth of Microsoft license. Think your server is going to get any priority whatsoever?
I expect that like Linux at ISPs this is sneaking up on everyone, but may be difficult to find companies publicly willing to risk Microsoft wrath by being open about it.
Going wireless is a godsend for me. My Kyocera Smartphone allows me to sign onto the mainframe anywhere as a terminal, and I have been reasonably satisfied with the text-only Eudora browser and Blazer or Vagabond for pictures (although no darn online comics, proxy rendder servers screw them up).
Yeah the juice gets sucked out, but 5-7 hours on a phone beats hell out of 4-6 from a laptop, plus I don't have to leave the game to fix an easy problem at work.
Since I've been toting this around at work, most of my coworkers have been motivated to check into webphones. I don't know about the particular combination asked about in this article, but the demand for webphones will go through the roof.
Hey, maybe the webphone will finally be the NC (Network Computer) Ellison, IBM and the rest have been lusting for. What Palm desperately needs is a fully-rendering browser without the proxy and tieins to other Palm apps. If AOL was smart they would be all over this, but hey this leaves an arena open for a smart developer that ties in the browser with a PDA suite.
Consider that 90% of the bulletpoint features are not used by the average user, there is a lot of room for small apps that make the webphone the laptop.
Hitler is pure evil not for what his hardships led him to, but for his deeds. Launching a war with at least 60 million plus deaths counts as evil to me.
He didn't wnat to fight America not because he was an enlightened soul but for two reasons- one he thought we were a soft people and so easy to defeat at will. He had other fish to fry.
The other reason was that the man literally did not understand nautical warfare and amphibious movement. He only followed Doenitz and went for wonder weapons like the bomber project AFTER being forcibly shown by 1943 that long-range bombers and cross-Atlantic troop movements were defeating him.
Now as far as Today Europe Tomorrow the World, sure he was an opportunist and given no opposition would have taken it all. I'm not suggesting he would have stopped of his own accord. But taking the whole thing was not in any of his plans.
That's like saying 8 of the last 10 wars involved Christians. Islam is a huge religion on par with Christianity, so if people are involved, one or the other belief systems will likely be involved. Throw in Communism, Tribalism, animism or Capitalism as a belief system and that should cover everyone.
Now you're just wrong there. Yes Hitler wanted to cow Britain, conquer Europe and turn Russia into a lebensraum charnel house, but he did not want to conquer the British Empire or fight America. In fact Hitler had very little grasp of nautical affairs, although he did ultimately trust Doenitz more then any other military leader and sacrificed an entire army to protect the U-boat pens for three extra months.
It's not that simple. Hitler absolutely foreswore deployment of chemical or biological weapons, yet he seemed to do alright in the killing department, and might even have 'won' if he stopped short of attacking Russia.
Truman, the man who dropped the bomb, did not drop them on Korea or China when we had near absolute superiority.
I agree, bioweapons and nanowars are a whole level of extermination above nukes, but just because this terrible technology exists doesn't mean it will be used. Humanity has proven to be more intelligent then that so far (or lucky).
However, just because the terrible stuff is not used does not mean warfare is over, just that it gets ritualized at a realpolitik level.
Au contrare my anonymous one. Code clean-up tools assume a nice stable one-type of envirionment. My point is that contract law has to act like Java and be portable in different environments but the compilers (jursidictional law) may not be written to the standard.
I am also making the subpoint that coding and legalese are complex tools for a reason, and both are mystifying to the masses. In fact the average person has a better shot at legal then C.
Contracts and other legalese are a highly specialized form of syntax with very precise meanings. The license/contract writer has to consider all possible contexts and jurisdictions the EULAwhatever will be used in.
To put it in programming terms, the contract 'program' has to be able to compile and run successfully in 50 different Unices and possibly other national legalOS, be federal standard compliant, and stand up to peer review and active hacking attacks in situations the 'programmer' never considered but has to account for.
Now wouldn't YOU end up with spaghetti code under those circumstances?
Two thoughts- on the various controlled leader messages, the best of the various novels and stories has to be Interface by Neal Stephenson writing under alias Stephen Bury. Best he's done yet, mostly because it has an actual ending instead of a fadeout.
Second cyberpunk thought is that William Gibson's slamhounds cannot be far behind. For those not familiar, a slamhound is essentially a guided dog-bomb that gets your scent and runs you down, then explodes.
I bought a 27" TV and what was an outrageously costly $400 VCR in order to capture and enjoy Max. I'm all set to go when I sit down to watch and record, but when I turned on the channel Max wasn't there. He had been replaced- by Mr. Belvedere! Ohhh the pain, the bitter irony, the hole in my wallet!
I will enjoy watching Max on the same TV and VCR which has outlasted 90% of my friend's electronics. It will be bittersweet venegance for the pain inflicted upon me.
Slashdot Mirror
I posted this little nugget about an expensive DB access. Probably not tops but up there.
Cordwainer Smith's short story Nancy is about exactly this topic- if a crewman gets too whacky Out There he can push a button.
He is told beforehand that pushing the button will wash out his career but he can do it. Our hero's fellow crewman and pet die, and he gets wonky, so he pushes the button. His perfect woman appears and keeps him happy throughout the voyage. She is of course an entity built from his mind that helps him function at a minimal level.
Once he makes it back Nancy disappears (since she's part of the ship's safety equipment, never to run again. He is not only ruined for space, but for being involved with anyone else, because he's already experienced the Perfect Companion and is left with the feeling that she could pop up at any time.
The reason Open Source has not won through is twofold- large companies who could trivially pay 2-3 programmer's out of pocket change see Open Source as a huge liability (sued for misbehaving code, not getting 24x7 support because it's one guy who just went squirrel hunting or security risk), and programmers don't do it because momma Microsoft/IBM/whatever isn't there with a secure paycheck.
This cycle feeds on itself, as a major issue for corporations is not having a steady stream of Open Source programmers familiar with the major packages to support to be available and drive down costs, and programmers don't get into it due to the cash flow problem.
This kind of thinking is backwards- the risk is NOT having the source so you can bring in whatever programmer to fix or modify a problem. Black box solutions is giving the store to the vendor and increases costs, because now you have to pay for the original programmer AND his bosses AND the profit margin for the company, and if you don't your captured system will not be running long.
The lawsuit risk should be minimized (you had the source code, you had the chance to totally vet the code before running it), but that will depend on whether common sense or industry shills will win out.
For a tenth of what they pay the vendors corporate America can have all the customized secure programming they want without being held up by the vendors, and still have plenty for the programmers. This fact alone will drive Open Source into the mainstream.
As for the programmers, it's simply a matter of letting their programs go and creating a demand for their customization and service. It won't be everyone's cup of tea as the paychecks will not be regular and creativity/vision does not necessarily go along with programming skills.
At our site we have HP-UX, OpenVMS, AIX, Solaris, and probably one or two I don't know about that our Midrange Systems people manage. There are three of them to service 15 or so major 24x7 medical-related systems. They can do it because they are darn good, we tend to dump the apps support on the apps vendor by contract, and the management doesn't interfere or hobble them with various insanities. Of the three the good admin one is most important, although having good management probably helps retain the good techs.
They say they like AIX best due to the ease of admin.
In 1996 Paul Krugman, MIT economics professor and wirter of the Dismal Scientist column in Slate, wrote this column about a look back at what happened to content providers from 2096. Krugman's overriding point is that in a digital environment content ends up being free, and people that actually make tangible non-digital things (blue-collar-type jobs) will get the benefits of the future.
His model for music in a post-Napster environment is that music is delivered free to promote attendance at live concerts.
I particularly enjoyed the part where he predicts the demise of economists' perk jobs and he's writing part-time from a vet clinic.
I weep not for the end of Madonna and her ilk's excess. It's far more important what happens to the average plumber then it does for these pampered poodles.
IBM manuals are all PDF and online. I tote around a CD that has everything I want on it.
There are 5 Los Angeles-class boats that are getting SDS refits, and the new Virginia class will ALL have SDS capability. So pretty soon an enemy will never be sure when Uncle Sam's SEALs may show up on their doorstep.
This website should show you that Jimmy is probably pretty happy with getting a sub named after him.
Each part of the navy thinks it's the most important. They refer to themselves as communities (so the carriers are the Naval Aviation community, the anything but carriers crowd is the Surface Warfare community, etc.). Some naval catalogs list carriers as the premier warships, others submarines, and a case can be made for either.
I'm not sure why Jimmy got a sub named after him, much less the biggest and baddest sub. For instance the Carl Vinson was named after the senator that got the Two Oceans Navy Act passed before WWII that got the Navy on an industrial roll before Pearl Harbor. Ronald Reagan is obvious due to the 80's buildup. But Jimmy just drew down the fleet. The submariners must be desperate for attention.
Here is a link describing wht the Jimmy Carter is getting- basically a bigger SEAL delivery system, probably with the ability to drop a carried bathysphere or other goodies.
The Jimmy Carter is too high value a ship to just keep out on fiber patrol- independent of her spec-ops function she can pretty much conventionally destroy most navies by herself thanks to that 50-weapon loadout, being quieter running at speed then the Los Angeles subs at dock, and that wide-aperture sonar. So making her a $3 billion dollar satellite feed doesn't make sense.
Therefore they must be planning to hook into the fiber-optic network, and spool off their own fiber line to a discrete uplink several hundred miles away. The upgrade must be to allow for all that equipment.
There is plenty of why for a moon base.
1) It is a militarly dominant position. Once you get a solar-powered mass driver that can chunk rocks, you have an infinite supply of ICBM-level attacks that can be fired night and day.
2) The cheap grav gradient off the lunar surface means that materials from the moon are cheaper then earth-based solutions. So if we do get zero-g industrial or medical processes going the effective way to build them will be from the moon.
3) The asteroids are a gold-mine waiting to happen. Our havy metal material costs would plummet with a stream of asteroids pouring in.
4) And of course, the real snswer is we can't possibly imagine what we will do with it. For instance the American West was thought of as a great desert, and Alaska as a useless chunk of ice. Seems we've done okay with it, but only with technology and needs for materials we had no inkling about when America bought them.
We don't know what space will bring, and it presently looks like a desert, but whatever it gives us it will be our future (along with the oceans).
That's all well and good for a controllable environment such as an MS-Office suite derived office. Problem in our environment is that there are many specialized processes that require workstation installs. Yeah you can do the Citrix thing as noted ad nauseum, but for corporations at a certain level it's easier to bite the bullet, negotiate a lower per-seat price, and not undo a whole sick, sad infrastructure.
The risk comes in when you have an NT-derivative mission-critical server down, the vendor is pointing to Microsoft and Microsoft is pointing to the vendor, you need it fixed, and Microsoft finds out your happy butt has been on slashdot talking about how your company dumped a million dollars worth of Microsoft license. Think your server is going to get any priority whatsoever?
I expect that like Linux at ISPs this is sneaking up on everyone, but may be difficult to find companies publicly willing to risk Microsoft wrath by being open about it.
Going wireless is a godsend for me. My Kyocera Smartphone allows me to sign onto the mainframe anywhere as a terminal, and I have been reasonably satisfied with the text-only Eudora browser and Blazer or Vagabond for pictures (although no darn online comics, proxy rendder servers screw them up).
Yeah the juice gets sucked out, but 5-7 hours on a phone beats hell out of 4-6 from a laptop, plus I don't have to leave the game to fix an easy problem at work.
Since I've been toting this around at work, most of my coworkers have been motivated to check into webphones. I don't know about the particular combination asked about in this article, but the demand for webphones will go through the roof.
Hey, maybe the webphone will finally be the NC (Network Computer) Ellison, IBM and the rest have been lusting for.
What Palm desperately needs is a fully-rendering browser without the proxy and tieins to other Palm apps. If AOL was smart they would be all over this, but hey this leaves an arena open for a smart developer that ties in the browser with a PDA suite.
Consider that 90% of the bulletpoint features are not used by the average user, there is a lot of room for small apps that make the webphone the laptop.
Hitler is pure evil not for what his hardships led him to, but for his deeds. Launching a war with at least 60 million plus deaths counts as evil to me.
He didn't wnat to fight America not because he was an enlightened soul but for two reasons- one he thought we were a soft people and so easy to defeat at will. He had other fish to fry.
The other reason was that the man literally did not understand nautical warfare and amphibious movement. He only followed Doenitz and went for wonder weapons like the bomber project AFTER being forcibly shown by 1943 that long-range bombers and cross-Atlantic troop movements were defeating him.
Now as far as Today Europe Tomorrow the World, sure he was an opportunist and given no opposition would have taken it all. I'm not suggesting he would have stopped of his own accord. But taking the whole thing was not in any of his plans.
That's like saying 8 of the last 10 wars involved Christians. Islam is a huge religion on par with Christianity, so if people are involved, one or the other belief systems will likely be involved. Throw in Communism, Tribalism, animism or Capitalism as a belief system and that should cover everyone.
Now you're just wrong there. Yes Hitler wanted to cow Britain, conquer Europe and turn Russia into a lebensraum charnel house, but he did not want to conquer the British Empire or fight America. In fact Hitler had very little grasp of nautical affairs, although he did ultimately trust Doenitz more then any other military leader and sacrificed an entire army to protect the U-boat pens for three extra months.
It's not that simple. Hitler absolutely foreswore deployment of chemical or biological weapons, yet he seemed to do alright in the killing department, and might even have 'won' if he stopped short of attacking Russia.
Truman, the man who dropped the bomb, did not drop them on Korea or China when we had near absolute superiority.
I agree, bioweapons and nanowars are a whole level of extermination above nukes, but just because this terrible technology exists doesn't mean it will be used. Humanity has proven to be more intelligent then that so far (or lucky).
However, just because the terrible stuff is not used does not mean warfare is over, just that it gets ritualized at a realpolitik level.
This is THE battle analysis tool. Trevor Dupuy was the master of prediction. Note the $93,000 price tag.
Remember, this is a tool for the operational level. The article is discussing macrosocietal conflict.
Here is a less obtuse and more practical summation of an 80s book that somehow got short shrift. How To Stop A War is more usable then that article.
Au contrare my anonymous one. Code clean-up tools assume a nice stable one-type of envirionment. My point is that contract law has to act like Java and be portable in different environments but the compilers (jursidictional law) may not be written to the standard.
I am also making the subpoint that coding and legalese are complex tools for a reason, and both are mystifying to the masses. In fact the average person has a better shot at legal then C.
Contracts and other legalese are a highly specialized form of syntax with very precise meanings. The license/contract writer has to consider all possible contexts and jurisdictions the EULAwhatever will be used in.
To put it in programming terms, the contract 'program' has to be able to compile and run successfully in 50 different Unices and possibly other national legalOS, be federal standard compliant, and stand up to peer review and active hacking attacks in situations the 'programmer' never considered but has to account for.
Now wouldn't YOU end up with spaghetti code under those circumstances?
Two thoughts- on the various controlled leader messages, the best of the various novels and stories has to be Interface by Neal Stephenson writing under alias Stephen Bury. Best he's done yet, mostly because it has an actual ending instead of a fadeout.
Second cyberpunk thought is that William Gibson's slamhounds cannot be far behind. For those not familiar, a slamhound is essentially a guided dog-bomb that gets your scent and runs you down, then explodes.
I bought a 27" TV and what was an outrageously costly $400 VCR in order to capture and enjoy Max. I'm all set to go when I sit down to watch and record, but when I turned on the channel Max wasn't there. He had been replaced- by Mr. Belvedere! Ohhh the pain, the bitter irony, the hole in my wallet!
I will enjoy watching Max on the same TV and VCR which has outlasted 90% of my friend's electronics. It will be bittersweet venegance for the pain inflicted upon me.