Not necessary. The number Pi already contains all the works of Shakespeare, along with all other works. It's an infinite, non-repeating series of digits. If you interpret it as an MPEG stream, it even contains all movies ever made and ever to be made! So leave those monkeys alone.
IMHO, the article is right in that Web 2.0 is not the Next Big Thing (NBT). But in fact, I think we all have been to the tender beginnings of the NBT: Second Life (or WoW if you prefer, don't even start to tell me why SL sucks and WoW doesn't.)
People just *want* to be walking around a virtual world with landmarks, and with avatars that help them put a "face" to person. And everything's there: User generated content, silly advertising, annoying spam, even goatse if you're looking for it. It really has all the ingredients.
What is missing? Simple: An open protocol a la http. Granted, the protocol would probably be much more complicated (or "richer" as they now call it). But it needs an open protocol to enable the IT community to write and run their own servers and connect them to the SL grid. It needs feature negotiation. ("Hi, I'm server X, my avatars can fly, can yours?" - "Yup, but my inventory is limited to 256 items. What about yours?") It needs security for identity management, optional payment systems, and for confidential member-only areas. But these are solvable issues, as http has proven.
The question only is: Will the Lindens do it or will someone else come and do it. There's even a business opportunity: Obviously, people wouldn't want their avatars hijacked or otherwise abused. So the Lindens could sell certifications for "well behaved" server implementations rather than selling servers or charging for content uploads. Of course, they could remain an active player and continue to do the latter two things and many more as well.
The thing is, if they don't do it, somebody will. And with the ever increasing capabilities of modern VR engines and end user technology, it's just inevitable.
It would be interesting to read the actual study. The actual claims quoted in the article seem to be misleading:
"In the market place, hydrogen would have to compete with its own source of energy, i.e. with ("green") electricity from the grid" Not really. In fact, it would nicely complement green energy. In particular, solar energy is normally DC, so the wasteful DC/AC, then AC/DC conversion could be skipped for hydrolysis.
"production of hydrogen depends on the availability of [...] water, [which is] increasingly rare" Well, it is fresh water that is increasingly rare, and water in the right place, i.e. in large cities. Water as such is far from rare. In fact, the oceans are full of it.
"We have to solve an energy problem not an energy carrier problem." As witnessed by the recent large blackout in Europe, we have as much an energy carrier problem as an energy problem. All that nice, green wind energy from the North Sea could suddenly not be transported off to other places in Europe when a major power line was switched off. Thus the blackout. It is quite costly and difficult to transport electrical power, and even more problematic to store it!
"Separating hydrogen from water by electrolysis requires massive amounts of electrical energy and substantial amounts of water." Well, one could argue that storing energy in batteries and taking it our of them is quite wasteful as well, as witnessed by every notebook user after a couple of months. Also, AC/DC conversion as needed by battery chargers is wasteful. Every touched one of those converters you plug in every day? Guess where the heat comes from...
"advanced batteries have a cycle efficiency of above 80%" Is that after purchase, or after a few months? Wish I had one of those in my notebook.
"We now have to focus our research on electricity storage" Electricity storage is ultimately based on chemical processes. What the article says is, other processes are more efficient than hydrogen-based ones. This might be right today, or it might not, see above. If it's true in the future, noone can tell.
All this is probably not even taking into account the energy required to build "advanced batteries" and to get rid of them again.
So the next step would be self-organizing networks of microscopic, autonomous, solar-powered network routers. And with them, a new toxic waste problem with all those routers slowly becoming obsolete, eroding, and lying around. Just like one of my favorit Sci-Fi authors, Vernor Vinge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge) described in "Fast Times at Fairmont High". With an interesting solution, too.
I wonder: Shouldn't the headline read "Remains of First American Slaves Found"? Or are we talking about the first slaves in America that were of African origin rather from some other place?
Java is uncool and pretty unproductive because it is not extensible. There is no way to implement something as simple as the 1.5 "foreach" construct without resorting to code generation or a syntax change.
Look at the abundance of code generators for Java. Look at all those tools for metaprogramming. People even came up with MDA as a bug fix for Java's lack of extensibility. And don't even start to tell me about Java's pathetic reflection features.
Not having an extensible language was probably a conscious decision, trading it for security. I wonder, though, if secure metaprogramming is unthinkable...
(And, by the way, I am aware that there are even less productive programming languages.)
Re:All domains resolve! To Spammers!
on
.biz Open For Biz
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· Score: 0
And it's probably the same guys that kept spamming me with announcements for their new TLD for months now.
Even regular civilian planes don't need that much in-flight operation on transatlantic routes. Is it a coincidence that this record was published right after the spy plane incident in China? Might the U.S. be showing off to the Chinese, essentially saying: See, you won't have any hostages next time?
But of course, Modula was influenced by Pascal which has designed by Niclaus Wirth. He is said to have worked on the same floor as the Smalltalk people at PARC at one time. It's a small world.
Of course, public forums may also be read by a former employer. And of course they can take actions as they like when they read things they don't like. Why shouldn't they?
On the other hand, I can see why this company's stock probably went down, when they spend their shareholders' money on tracking down former employees on public forums and newsgroups...
It looks only at people who are already diagnosed with brain tumors, and not those [...]whose tumors go undiagnosed.
It might be hard to get a statistically significant number of people with undiagnosed brain tumors for a study...
Slashdot Mirror
... they only had stone soup.
Not necessary. The number Pi already contains all the works of Shakespeare, along with all other works. It's an infinite, non-repeating series of digits. If you interpret it as an MPEG stream, it even contains all movies ever made and ever to be made! So leave those monkeys alone.
IMHO, the article is right in that Web 2.0 is not the Next Big Thing (NBT). But in fact, I think we all have been to the tender beginnings of the NBT: Second Life (or WoW if you prefer, don't even start to tell me why SL sucks and WoW doesn't.)
People just *want* to be walking around a virtual world with landmarks, and with avatars that help them put a "face" to person. And everything's there: User generated content, silly advertising, annoying spam, even goatse if you're looking for it. It really has all the ingredients.
What is missing? Simple: An open protocol a la http. Granted, the protocol would probably be much more complicated (or "richer" as they now call it). But it needs an open protocol to enable the IT community to write and run their own servers and connect them to the SL grid. It needs feature negotiation. ("Hi, I'm server X, my avatars can fly, can yours?" - "Yup, but my inventory is limited to 256 items. What about yours?") It needs security for identity management, optional payment systems, and for confidential member-only areas. But these are solvable issues, as http has proven.
The question only is: Will the Lindens do it or will someone else come and do it. There's even a business opportunity: Obviously, people wouldn't want their avatars hijacked or otherwise abused. So the Lindens could sell certifications for "well behaved" server implementations rather than selling servers or charging for content uploads. Of course, they could remain an active player and continue to do the latter two things and many more as well.
The thing is, if they don't do it, somebody will. And with the ever increasing capabilities of modern VR engines and end user technology, it's just inevitable.
See e.g. Scientific American, March 2006: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colI D=1&articleID=000B73EB-3380-13F6-B38083414B7F0000
Well, it doesn't do grpahics, but I'd suggest the Curta. This device certainly has the coolest (= geekiest) UI.
It would be interesting to read the actual study. The actual claims quoted in the article seem to be misleading:
So the next step would be self-organizing networks of microscopic, autonomous, solar-powered network routers. And with them, a new toxic waste problem with all those routers slowly becoming obsolete, eroding, and lying around. Just like one of my favorit Sci-Fi authors, Vernor Vinge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge) described in "Fast Times at Fairmont High". With an interesting solution, too.
I wonder: Shouldn't the headline read "Remains of First American Slaves Found"? Or are we talking about the first slaves in America that were of African origin rather from some other place?
"I've learned to use my other brain ... but there are lots of people who will never master that trick"
That whole post is of course a flame bait. No real person would show their arrogance so blatantly. Hah.
I bet you already considered answering to this. Oops, now _I_ did. Maybe I should try to learn using my other brain. Where the heck did I put it?
Java is uncool and pretty unproductive because it is not extensible. There is no way to implement something as simple as the 1.5 "foreach" construct without resorting to code generation or a syntax change.
Look at the abundance of code generators for Java. Look at all those tools for metaprogramming. People even came up with MDA as a bug fix for Java's lack of extensibility. And don't even start to tell me about Java's pathetic reflection features.
Not having an extensible language was probably a conscious decision, trading it for security. I wonder, though, if secure metaprogramming is unthinkable...
(And, by the way, I am aware that there are even less productive programming languages.)
And it's probably the same guys that kept spamming me with announcements for their new TLD for months now.
I DON'T WANT TO BUY A BIZ DOMAIN!
May they got it now...
Even regular civilian planes don't need that much in-flight operation on transatlantic routes. Is it a coincidence that this record was published right after the spy plane incident in China? Might the U.S. be showing off to the Chinese, essentially saying: See, you won't have any hostages next time?
But of course, Modula was influenced by Pascal which has designed by Niclaus Wirth. He is said to have worked on the same floor as the Smalltalk people at PARC at one time. It's a small world.
Of course, public forums may also be read by a former employer. And of course they can take actions as they like when they read things they don't like. Why shouldn't they?
On the other hand, I can see why this company's stock probably went down, when they spend their shareholders' money on tracking down former employees on public forums and newsgroups...
It looks only at people who are already diagnosed with brain tumors, and not those [...]whose tumors go undiagnosed. It might be hard to get a statistically significant number of people with undiagnosed brain tumors for a study...