First of all it is impossible, if most people in the economy were on welfare [there] would be no economy. Where would these companies get money to build and maintain the robots?
Money isn't some magic substance that is secreted from the sweat glands of labourers, it is a measure of production. When a factory inputs some ore and outputs a widget, the factory has produced money. It is immaterial whether the factory owner builds a robot from the widget, trades it for a robot, or sells it and uses the money to buy a robot: there is still one more robot. You don't need some hairless monkey to smear shit on little round bits of metal for it to be an economy.
Wealth is generated from the harvesting of natural resources; the conversion of matter or energy; or the production of information. Robots regularly do the first two, and are starting to produce information. As a result, they will soon have no use for you -- you can go sit in your tree, at least until it gets cut down.
I agree. Consumer-grade palmtops are way behind in terms of connectivity.
Approximately a year ago, I wanted to replace my IIIe but everybody was like "wait for Bluetooth, it's just around the corner and it'll make you cream your pants". Well, now it turns out that Bluetooth will be useful around the same time Denmark becomes a superpower. Now I'm waiting for WiFi.
WTF? You'd think everyone in the IT business would have heard of Metcalfe's Law by now, but obviously not. It's not about the memory size or the camera on top, it's about connectivity! I'm tired of stupid gadgets and dongles and proprietary web browsers.
There is no task but surfing, and Tim is its prophet.
Tipper so I can calculate the exact tips at restaraunts...
You need a special app to calculate the tip? What, does it use a little camera to estimate the waiter's service level? On my Palm there's this really cool app called a calculator, it can calculate tips and tax!
What kind of loser leaves a $5.23 tip, anyway? My brain can round-off, can Tipper? (With a Master's in Psyc, I'd hope so, but you never know...)
He put my mother and himself through both college and grad school...
Maybe one of them should have considered getting a useful degree somewhere in all that schooling? I mean bettering yourself is all well and good, but only after your foundation of Maslow's Hierarchy is secure. Or he could have invested the tution money and taken early retirement when his job gets exported to Korea?
Pensions and collective bargaining have bred a subspecies of human whose brains have atrophied to the point where it is unable to plan for the future. You'd think at least someone with all those humanities credits would be able to think critically enough to see their obvious demise.
There's this thing called capitalism, which is what will get us the robots in the first place and it's an implementation of a thing called natural selection, which is what got us you in the first place. And what these things say is: if you choose not to use the robots, the world will choose not to use you.
All it takes is for a very small minority of humans to vote robot and by meme or by gene that small minority will become a big majority. (And believe me, no matter how taboo something is, you can always find a small minority who'll choose it for step 1 if step 3 is profit.) Then the robots take over.
Sorry, but the only way to prevent you being replaced by a robot would be to prevent your creation in the first place. The same forces that giveth, also taketh away.
Obviously there are a few hardware platforms with good J2ME API implementations, but as long as they're not consistently good you're left with write-once-debug-everywhere. Am I supposed to tell my customer who complains that an application isn't working to "take a look at Motorola's iDEN phones"?
Yes, but to write a C API (or compiler), all you need to know is C. Yes, you need low-level knowledge of the hardware interfaces, but that's an assumed requirement for writing an API, isn't it? Whereas with Java, you can't write the API in Java because it doesn't have low-level hardware access. Therefore, Java only works on a platform if the hardware vendor or some other kind soul decides to allow it to work.
I'm not sure if it's the first place I heard about it, but my most solid source is a large statue commemorating the snipe hunt in the small tourist town of Chemainus, BC.
Um, did you or any of the asshat moderators bother to read my post or did you just interpolate from the highlighted word?
My point is that without the APIs encapsulating the hardware interfaces you can't write serious programs in Java, not that you shouldn't. How is your mobile phone going to interact with that Exchange server if you can't even use the phone's network interface? If the J2ME API is not fully implemented, then you're trapped in a little mobile jail.
I was arguing that industry has shown itself unable to properly implement APIs for high-level languages, so therefore volunteers need to implement them. As a result, someone needs to know the low-level language because Java can't be used to write its own APIs. Java can be used for serious programs, but only after someone else does some programming in a lower-level language.
But are people actually using J2ME applications? Like lots of cell phones are WAP-enabled, but I don't know anyone who has used a WAP site for more than the novelty. And I'd guess a lot of those JVMs are put on there for web browsing rather than full-blown client-side apps.
If you bothered to actually read my original post, you'd realise that cell-phones aren't what I was talking about. Their screens are too puny for serious applications and their wireless capabilities are too limited to require the full power of J2ME. I'm talking about ad-hoc networks of palmtops and embedded appliances, not the highly sophisticated device your mother uses to alert me after she's turned her last trick.
If you use a language that won't let you get to the hardware yourself or an API that isn't open source, then you're at the mercy of the hardware vendors to make the nice little garden paths you need to go down. And a reoccuring theme is that they don't.
For right or wrong, a lot of hardware vendors seem to assume that people using high-level languages aren't writing serious programs. As a result, they don't bother to fully implement their interfaces. This leads to a catch-22 because, of course, without the interfaces you can't write serious programs. Since I assume the hardware industry isn't about to get a clue, the only solution seems to be volunteer-implemented APIs -- either that, or using programming languages that are actually designed for hardware interfacing.
Actually it's quite reasonable for a washing machine equipped with something like Maytag's StainBrain stain database to be able to download new stain algorithms. It's even reasonable that they'd be encoded as a serialized Java object that would call the appropriate hardware control methods.
However what doesn't make sense is using Java on wireless devices. One of the great misfortunes of the Information Age is that battery power has not kept up with Moore's Law. As a result, wireless devices need to be very stingy with their power when they are required to be broadcasters such as in ad-hoc wireless networks. And the best way to waste power is to use a language so inefficient that it runs on a virtual machine. The only time I could imagine using Java on a wireless device beyond prototyping is if the device contains a Java CPU.
Is anybody out there actually applying the stuff in this book? Or is everyone just reading it for fun?
You hit the nail on the head. If companies are smart enough to relocate operations where operating costs are lower, then individuals should respond by relocating labour supply to where the cost of providing that labour is lowest.
The first step is getting out of the cities. If software can be remotely produced in India, then it can just as easily be produced in Idaho. Programmers in the rural developed world might not be able to live off as little as programmers in the developing world, but they will certainly have a lower cost of living than those in the major economic centres.
The second step is working for a standard of living rather than a a meaningless numerical amount. The value of labour and land in India is small enough that you might be able to afford servants and a mansion in India with the same income as you'd be spending on your trailer home and TV dinners in the US. Here, go play with this.
Living in America does not make you special, just expensive.
Microsatellites Are Actually Viable
on
Saving the Net
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As many other posters have pointed out, suggesting optical links for anything larger than a LAN party must be a joke (you're not an idiot, right?). A much more reasonable suggestion is the launch of publicly-controlled communications microsatellites.
Perhaps the launch vehicle could be built on some of that X-Prize technology that keeps generating press-releases. We might actually have to find some radio spectrum a little more useful than the visual range (since it's in space, I assume we only have to worry about interference and not licensing?). But the cost of launching a few satellites that communicate with off-the-shelf minidishes would almost certainly be lower overall than setting up line-of-sight laser connections. And the open source community already knows enough about routing (and is now starting to do hardware projects) that the design is not a major obstacle.
In all seriousness, your Canada comment points out how/.'s American bias is starting to distort reality: just because the US government screws up the US Internet doesn't mean the rest of the Internet will be significantly effected.
Americans are now a minority online, and as we all know, the Internet routes around damaged legal jurisdictions. Perhaps the best thing that could happen to the Internet is the long run is for the creation of a Great Firewall of America like in Signal to Noise and let the rest of us get along with our surfing.
Well, for starters you don't actually need to line up at some office to immigrate, most of the paper-work can be done remotely these days. And the border is open enough that you can come here and work with almost no red tape.
But the real reason is that generally we don't want any of you: Canada only accepts for immigration the world's best and brightest, and in general those on the top of the pyramid in first-world countries aren't willing to risk losing their status by emigrating.
Has anyone come up with a lazy dialect of Java? That might just do it. Oooh, or call-by-name? Of course the ultimate would probably be to rewrite the FreeNet client as a Turing Machine on a UTM interpreter... Like I said, really impressive.
You know what'd be really impressive? Finding a way to make FreeNet slower. It'd be so slow you could make a Beowulf cluster of FreeNet nodes and use it as a time machine. Personally, I'd use it to go back to Ian Clarke's dorm room and convince him to get drunk and high rather than wasting his life making a P2P system that will be useful around the same time we have to start worrying about being censored by the United Federation of Planets. But that's just me.
There's actually very little of insight in the Theory of Patches. It's just taking some fairly obvious facts about functions on sets and rewriting it with the word "patches". Either that, or it's just taking some fairly obvious facts about patches and wrapping them in shiny formalisms. Regardless, it's trivial and should not be seen as an indication of the quality of darcs (of which I know nothing) but rather the background of the author. Mind you, it's nice that someone bothered to write it down, even if all SCM users already have the intuitive understanding.
So the best case scenario is that understanding Perl 6 programs written by gurus will require knowing the syntax of a bunch of other Parrot languages? Allowing you to write gluable libraries (like.Net) is one thing, but intermixing languages is just evil.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all it is impossible, if most people in the economy were on welfare [there] would be no economy. Where would these companies get money to build and maintain the robots?
Money isn't some magic substance that is secreted from the sweat glands of labourers, it is a measure of production. When a factory inputs some ore and outputs a widget, the factory has produced money. It is immaterial whether the factory owner builds a robot from the widget, trades it for a robot, or sells it and uses the money to buy a robot: there is still one more robot. You don't need some hairless monkey to smear shit on little round bits of metal for it to be an economy.
Wealth is generated from the harvesting of natural resources; the conversion of matter or energy; or the production of information. Robots regularly do the first two, and are starting to produce information. As a result, they will soon have no use for you -- you can go sit in your tree, at least until it gets cut down.
I agree. Consumer-grade palmtops are way behind in terms of connectivity.
Approximately a year ago, I wanted to replace my IIIe but everybody was like "wait for Bluetooth, it's just around the corner and it'll make you cream your pants". Well, now it turns out that Bluetooth will be useful around the same time Denmark becomes a superpower. Now I'm waiting for WiFi.
WTF? You'd think everyone in the IT business would have heard of Metcalfe's Law by now, but obviously not. It's not about the memory size or the camera on top, it's about connectivity! I'm tired of stupid gadgets and dongles and proprietary web browsers.
There is no task but surfing, and Tim is its prophet.
Tipper so I can calculate the exact tips at restaraunts...
You need a special app to calculate the tip? What, does it use a little camera to estimate the waiter's service level? On my Palm there's this really cool app called a calculator, it can calculate tips and tax!
What kind of loser leaves a $5.23 tip, anyway? My brain can round-off, can Tipper? (With a Master's in Psyc, I'd hope so, but you never know...)
He put my mother and himself through both college and grad school...
Maybe one of them should have considered getting a useful degree somewhere in all that schooling? I mean bettering yourself is all well and good, but only after your foundation of Maslow's Hierarchy is secure. Or he could have invested the tution money and taken early retirement when his job gets exported to Korea?
Pensions and collective bargaining have bred a subspecies of human whose brains have atrophied to the point where it is unable to plan for the future. You'd think at least someone with all those humanities credits would be able to think critically enough to see their obvious demise.
There's this thing called capitalism, which is what will get us the robots in the first place and it's an implementation of a thing called natural selection, which is what got us you in the first place. And what these things say is: if you choose not to use the robots, the world will choose not to use you.
All it takes is for a very small minority of humans to vote robot and by meme or by gene that small minority will become a big majority. (And believe me, no matter how taboo something is, you can always find a small minority who'll choose it for step 1 if step 3 is profit.) Then the robots take over.
Sorry, but the only way to prevent you being replaced by a robot would be to prevent your creation in the first place. The same forces that giveth, also taketh away.
Obviously there are a few hardware platforms with good J2ME API implementations, but as long as they're not consistently good you're left with write-once-debug-everywhere. Am I supposed to tell my customer who complains that an application isn't working to "take a look at Motorola's iDEN phones"?
Yes, but to write a C API (or compiler), all you need to know is C. Yes, you need low-level knowledge of the hardware interfaces, but that's an assumed requirement for writing an API, isn't it? Whereas with Java, you can't write the API in Java because it doesn't have low-level hardware access. Therefore, Java only works on a platform if the hardware vendor or some other kind soul decides to allow it to work.
I'm not sure if it's the first place I heard about it, but my most solid source is a large statue commemorating the snipe hunt in the small tourist town of Chemainus, BC.
Um, did you or any of the asshat moderators bother to read my post or did you just interpolate from the highlighted word?
My point is that without the APIs encapsulating the hardware interfaces you can't write serious programs in Java, not that you shouldn't. How is your mobile phone going to interact with that Exchange server if you can't even use the phone's network interface? If the J2ME API is not fully implemented, then you're trapped in a little mobile jail.
I was arguing that industry has shown itself unable to properly implement APIs for high-level languages, so therefore volunteers need to implement them. As a result, someone needs to know the low-level language because Java can't be used to write its own APIs. Java can be used for serious programs, but only after someone else does some programming in a lower-level language.
But are people actually using J2ME applications? Like lots of cell phones are WAP-enabled, but I don't know anyone who has used a WAP site for more than the novelty. And I'd guess a lot of those JVMs are put on there for web browsing rather than full-blown client-side apps.
If you bothered to actually read my original post, you'd realise that cell-phones aren't what I was talking about. Their screens are too puny for serious applications and their wireless capabilities are too limited to require the full power of J2ME. I'm talking about ad-hoc networks of palmtops and embedded appliances, not the highly sophisticated device your mother uses to alert me after she's turned her last trick.
Let me guess, you're trying to catch the little man who keeps sneaking into your pocket and replacing your change with lint?
If you use a language that won't let you get to the hardware yourself or an API that isn't open source, then you're at the mercy of the hardware vendors to make the nice little garden paths you need to go down. And a reoccuring theme is that they don't.
For right or wrong, a lot of hardware vendors seem to assume that people using high-level languages aren't writing serious programs. As a result, they don't bother to fully implement their interfaces. This leads to a catch-22 because, of course, without the interfaces you can't write serious programs. Since I assume the hardware industry isn't about to get a clue, the only solution seems to be volunteer-implemented APIs -- either that, or using programming languages that are actually designed for hardware interfacing.
Actually it's quite reasonable for a washing machine equipped with something like Maytag's StainBrain stain database to be able to download new stain algorithms. It's even reasonable that they'd be encoded as a serialized Java object that would call the appropriate hardware control methods.
However what doesn't make sense is using Java on wireless devices. One of the great misfortunes of the Information Age is that battery power has not kept up with Moore's Law. As a result, wireless devices need to be very stingy with their power when they are required to be broadcasters such as in ad-hoc wireless networks. And the best way to waste power is to use a language so inefficient that it runs on a virtual machine. The only time I could imagine using Java on a wireless device beyond prototyping is if the device contains a Java CPU.
Is anybody out there actually applying the stuff in this book? Or is everyone just reading it for fun?
You hit the nail on the head. If companies are smart enough to relocate operations where operating costs are lower, then individuals should respond by relocating labour supply to where the cost of providing that labour is lowest.
The first step is getting out of the cities. If software can be remotely produced in India, then it can just as easily be produced in Idaho. Programmers in the rural developed world might not be able to live off as little as programmers in the developing world, but they will certainly have a lower cost of living than those in the major economic centres.
The second step is working for a standard of living rather than a a meaningless numerical amount. The value of labour and land in India is small enough that you might be able to afford servants and a mansion in India with the same income as you'd be spending on your trailer home and TV dinners in the US. Here, go play with this.
Living in America does not make you special, just expensive.
As many other posters have pointed out, suggesting optical links for anything larger than a LAN party must be a joke (you're not an idiot, right?). A much more reasonable suggestion is the launch of publicly-controlled communications microsatellites.
Perhaps the launch vehicle could be built on some of that X-Prize technology that keeps generating press-releases. We might actually have to find some radio spectrum a little more useful than the visual range (since it's in space, I assume we only have to worry about interference and not licensing?). But the cost of launching a few satellites that communicate with off-the-shelf minidishes would almost certainly be lower overall than setting up line-of-sight laser connections. And the open source community already knows enough about routing (and is now starting to do hardware projects) that the design is not a major obstacle.
In all seriousness, your Canada comment points out how /.'s American bias is starting to distort reality: just because the US government screws up the US Internet doesn't mean the rest of the Internet will be significantly effected.
Americans are now a minority online, and as we all know, the Internet routes around damaged legal jurisdictions. Perhaps the best thing that could happen to the Internet is the long run is for the creation of a Great Firewall of America like in Signal to Noise and let the rest of us get along with our surfing.
Well, for starters you don't actually need to line up at some office to immigrate, most of the paper-work can be done remotely these days. And the border is open enough that you can come here and work with almost no red tape.
But the real reason is that generally we don't want any of you: Canada only accepts for immigration the world's best and brightest, and in general those on the top of the pyramid in first-world countries aren't willing to risk losing their status by emigrating.
Yeah, but I'm betting/hoping that C isn't willing to sacrifice performance for machine-independence.
Has anyone come up with a lazy dialect of Java? That might just do it. Oooh, or call-by-name? Of course the ultimate would probably be to rewrite the FreeNet client as a Turing Machine on a UTM interpreter... Like I said, really impressive.
You know what'd be really impressive? Finding a way to make FreeNet slower. It'd be so slow you could make a Beowulf cluster of FreeNet nodes and use it as a time machine. Personally, I'd use it to go back to Ian Clarke's dorm room and convince him to get drunk and high rather than wasting his life making a P2P system that will be useful around the same time we have to start worrying about being censored by the United Federation of Planets. But that's just me.
I was wondering if somebody was going to find that...
Does it need to be done in assembler? Does anyone have something other than a twos-complement machine they could try this on:
There's actually very little of insight in the Theory of Patches. It's just taking some fairly obvious facts about functions on sets and rewriting it with the word "patches". Either that, or it's just taking some fairly obvious facts about patches and wrapping them in shiny formalisms. Regardless, it's trivial and should not be seen as an indication of the quality of darcs (of which I know nothing) but rather the background of the author. Mind you, it's nice that someone bothered to write it down, even if all SCM users already have the intuitive understanding.
Hey man, if not for this, then what other point could the Friend/Foe system have? :)
Damn, good responses. It's nice to actually hear from somebody who heard the actual talk. You win. :)
I dunno, the response to lini's question scares me.
So the best case scenario is that understanding Perl 6 programs written by gurus will require knowing the syntax of a bunch of other Parrot languages? Allowing you to write gluable libraries (like .Net) is one thing, but intermixing languages is just evil.