Yeah, it would have been nice if the article actually told us what happened.
It must have simply been a consultation, albeit by unusual and way-cool means. I'm sure that the local medical team did the surgery, and the remote team gave advice as needed on very specialized issues peculiar to joint surgery. But the article doesn't actually *say* so. Maybe news writers need a satellite link to someone who knows how to tell a story.:-(
Anyway, given the quality of the link, I hope that the use of teleoperators would not even be considered unless the condition were an immediate threat to life. (See Clarke's "A Meeting with Medusa" for a really good story which shows some of the problems with teleoperation.)
I was reminded of the story about the DEC support center guy who got a call via satellite from the crew of a battle tank in the middle of maneuvers, wanting help getting their ruggedized MicroVAX back in operation.
Certainly we ought to look first to the traditions of the physical world when figuring out how or whether to regulate behavior on the 'net. If someone sneaks into my computer without my consent, he's trespassing, and if he had reason to believe that he was unwelcome then it's illegal entry; if he had to defeat my access controls, he's breaking and entering; if he takes something then he's a thief; if he intentionally breaks something, he's a vandal; and if he alters records, he's a forger. And he should go to jail. Physically. I am astonished at the number of people who have failed to understand this simple idea.
As usual, my initial reaction to this is, "how do I turn that off?" I've had enough of The Amazing Mutating Menus already, thank you. No other machine requires me to relearn its user interface every time I turn it on, so why would anyone think it's desirable for a computer to do this?
Fortunately as long as I have a choice of OSes I don't really have to worry.
Probably it's because so many "tech designers" were never taught a sustainable design process; they just worked out their own methods by trial and (all too often) error. See Gall's _Systemantics_ for characterization of the typical result. There's a pervasive attitude that nothing useful can be learned from those who have gone before, and that's simply wrong (as is understood in nearly every other discipline).
Some surprising things to keep in mind:
o Large systems are *qualitatively* different from small systems.
o The result of design is not code; it is documentation. The code should implement what the documentation describes.
o Code says nothing about what the design was *intended* to do; it only describes what the end product actually does. Code is necessary but not sufficient for understanding a product.
o Users will find novel uses for your code, so it's best to actually talk to some of them before getting serious about any design decisions -- in fact, even before deciding to do the project.
VMSmail's storage format is instructive. Each message is represented by a single record in an indexed file. A short message body is simply tucked into the record along with the headers and other metadata. Long bodies (more than around 2kb IIRC) are stored as individual files and their header records point to the files by name.
Of course you all realized at once that the main file can get out of sync. with the directory which holds the external bodies. It does, sometimes, and fixing it up can be a pain. Any storage method which partitions a single message among multiple files is going to have similar problems. But it works pretty well, and it shouldn't be too hard to write a tool to groom the message store in case of inconsistency. It's worth study.
It was a natural choice on VMS, which has really good multi-indexed file support in the base package. It works well with text messages, which often do fall within the size limit for avoiding external storage of the message body. Today it suffers the same problem that mbox does -- people use email differently now.
"A criminal could use the data to... open bank... accounts in the victim's name."
Really? So, if I could find the account with my name on it, I could close it out and take the cash? Sounds like an item for News of the Weird's Least Competent Criminals category.:-)
This is exactly the kind of model needed for online distribution of music. Build it into my ISP monthly bill and I'll gladly pay up to $5.00 per onth to legally download/upload all the music I want. Send that money to the artists who deserve it and I will be completely happy with the arrangement.
Only if I can opt out and keep my $5/month, in exchange for being blocked from all of the music sites that I don't use anyway, and would not even if I were paying for it.
If they rewrite a story I've already read, I wouldn't know it because I don't read it again. If it has the same title, it's the same story. If you wanna change the story, please change the title or add "(revised)" or something.
In fact, the thing that really bugs me about CNN.Com is that they also change the title without changing the story. Several times a week I see a fresh title, plow through several screens, and then realize, "hey, I already read this." Close tab, start reading next story.
Old or poorly-made fluorescents do put out a lot of EM noise, but most of the power is at 120Hz or low harmonics. I suppose someone builds a FSM capable of detecting the tiny amount of power they radiate at 2.4gHz but I'll bet it's rare and mighty expensive.
Even if you dump the ballast for a "high frequency exciter", the fundamental frequency is just beyond the *audible* range and the harmonics taper off pretty quickly. They should tend to be better-built, too, which ought to reduce the harmonics -- after all, the purpose here is to use more of the power to make light and waste less.
"If so much bandwidth can be given away to subsidize Kazaa, et al., then perhaps I2 could be opened up to private ISPs which could take over some of the costs that various governments are already paying."
Ugh, then we'd just have to go build Internet3 to escape the garbage again.
Maybe if we did a better job of teaching, more students would figure out that there are things you can do with a computer which are *way* more interesting than those silly games, or using a $2500 machine to emulate a $69 CD player.
If only someone could explain to me *why* we should want 3d UIs for general use. We have enough clutter and irrelevant detail in two dimensions. I've been computing for a quarter of a century and I am still more productive with a 1d UI (a commandline) than with any of its modern rivals.
Let me know when the neurocouplers are ready, so I can try out a 0d UI. It sounds wonderful.
Clarke wrote a number of books which discuss aspects of living with electronic machinery. _Imperial Earth_ (I think that's the one) included PDAs and pervasive IR networking long before anyone seriously considered building such stuff. (Not to mention a planetary public data network used routinely by billions. Can you say, "Internet"?)
Re:Doesn't the earth receive more? beware!
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Lunar Power
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· Score: 1
"If either drifted at all and this beam no longer hit the target on the moon, it would cease sending power."
So where does the power go then? "Massive explosion wrecks moon power system. Film at 11 if our batteries hold out."
Beamed power has its own problems
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Lunar Power
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· Score: 0
See Asimov's story "Reason" for why you might want to think twice about aiming terawatt microwave beams at an inhabited planet.
Also, you only *think* we don't have to worry about ecological concerns. (A) You're dumping terawatts of heat into Earth's biosphere. Anybody wanna debate Global Warming? (B) Someone's sure to object to spoiling the view with planetoid-sized industrial works. (C) There are people who worry about the effects of tiny electric fields from nearby power lines. What will they think of being at the business end of a power beam?
Am I the only one old enough to remember the one wherein Tom built active noise cancellers to defeat some bad guy who was using deafening sound as a weapon?
(Now that I think of it, the active-camouflage suits that MIT is working on are a variation of Tom's submarine that made itself invisible to sonar by cancelling the echo and copying the pulse through to the other side of the boat. Pretty soon there won't be any fiction left!)
Anyone who utters the phrase "user-friendly" ought to be required to define the word "user". Most of the stuff I've dealt with which was called "user-friendly" was actively hostile to the kind of user who's been herding computers for a quarter of a century and expects them to just do as they're told with no back-talk. I'm always asking vendors to make their software less user-friendly and more usable.
Let's hope that this doesn't lead Debian in the wrong direction.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to see a (fictional) pure gift economy in action, read Hogan's _Voyage from Yesteryear_. Chiron sounds like a nice place....
See! Didn't I say that we'd be glad some day that we learned to make fusion bombs? We've got 16-17 years to give this rock a better (for us) orbit.
Now where did I put my Tom Corbett books?
Yeah, it would have been nice if the article actually told us what happened.
:-(
It must have simply been a consultation, albeit by unusual and way-cool means. I'm sure that the local medical team did the surgery, and the remote team gave advice as needed on very specialized issues peculiar to joint surgery. But the article doesn't actually *say* so. Maybe news writers need a satellite link to someone who knows how to tell a story.
Anyway, given the quality of the link, I hope that the use of teleoperators would not even be considered unless the condition were an immediate threat to life. (See Clarke's "A Meeting with Medusa" for a really good story which shows some of the problems with teleoperation.)
I was reminded of the story about the DEC support center guy who got a call via satellite from the crew of a battle tank in the middle of maneuvers, wanting help getting their ruggedized MicroVAX back in operation.
I'm still waiting for someone to explain why I should want this .Net stuff at all.
...define and use a standard interface. Tight integration is the enemy of both competition and creativity. Don't let them lock *your* ideas out!
Now my cellphone can have an annoying "personality" just like the Gadgetmobile. I can hardly wait.
Thinking fondly of days of yore, when telephones had only two controls and no display, and worked just fine, thankyouverymuch.
Certainly we ought to look first to the traditions of the physical world when figuring out how or whether to regulate behavior on the 'net. If someone sneaks into my computer without my consent, he's trespassing, and if he had reason to believe that he was unwelcome then it's illegal entry; if he had to defeat my access controls, he's breaking and entering; if he takes something then he's a thief; if he intentionally breaks something, he's a vandal; and if he alters records, he's a forger. And he should go to jail. Physically. I am astonished at the number of people who have failed to understand this simple idea.
As usual, my initial reaction to this is, "how do I turn that off?" I've had enough of The Amazing Mutating Menus already, thank you. No other machine requires me to relearn its user interface every time I turn it on, so why would anyone think it's desirable for a computer to do this?
Fortunately as long as I have a choice of OSes I don't really have to worry.
Probably it's because so many "tech designers" were never taught a sustainable design process; they just worked out their own methods by trial and (all too often) error. See Gall's _Systemantics_ for characterization of the typical result. There's a pervasive attitude that nothing useful can be learned from those who have gone before, and that's simply wrong (as is understood in nearly every other discipline).
Some surprising things to keep in mind:
o Large systems are *qualitatively* different from small systems.
o The result of design is not code; it is documentation. The code should implement what the documentation describes.
o Code says nothing about what the design was *intended* to do; it only describes what the end product actually does. Code is necessary but not sufficient for understanding a product.
o Users will find novel uses for your code, so it's best to actually talk to some of them before getting serious about any design decisions -- in fact, even before deciding to do the project.
VMSmail's storage format is instructive. Each message is represented by a single record in an indexed file. A short message body is simply tucked into the record along with the headers and other metadata. Long bodies (more than around 2kb IIRC) are stored as individual files and their header records point to the files by name.
Of course you all realized at once that the main file can get out of sync. with the directory which holds the external bodies. It does, sometimes, and fixing it up can be a pain. Any storage method which partitions a single message among multiple files is going to have similar problems. But it works pretty well, and it shouldn't be too hard to write a tool to groom the message store in case of inconsistency. It's worth study.
It was a natural choice on VMS, which has really good multi-indexed file support in the base package. It works well with text messages, which often do fall within the size limit for avoiding external storage of the message body. Today it suffers the same problem that mbox does -- people use email differently now.
"A criminal could use the data to ... open bank ... accounts in the victim's name."
:-)
Really? So, if I could find the account with my name on it, I could close it out and take the cash? Sounds like an item for News of the Weird's Least Competent Criminals category.
Only if I can opt out and keep my $5/month, in exchange for being blocked from all of the music sites that I don't use anyway, and would not even if I were paying for it.
If they rewrite a story I've already read, I wouldn't know it because I don't read it again. If it has the same title, it's the same story. If you wanna change the story, please change the title or add "(revised)" or something.
In fact, the thing that really bugs me about CNN.Com is that they also change the title without changing the story. Several times a week I see a fresh title, plow through several screens, and then realize, "hey, I already read this." Close tab, start reading next story.
Old or poorly-made fluorescents do put out a lot of EM noise, but most of the power is at 120Hz or low harmonics. I suppose someone builds a FSM capable of detecting the tiny amount of power they radiate at 2.4gHz but I'll bet it's rare and mighty expensive.
Even if you dump the ballast for a "high frequency exciter", the fundamental frequency is just beyond the *audible* range and the harmonics taper off pretty quickly. They should tend to be better-built, too, which ought to reduce the harmonics -- after all, the purpose here is to use more of the power to make light and waste less.
.as techies find other jobs and quit in droves.
"If so much bandwidth can be given away to subsidize Kazaa, et al., then perhaps I2 could be opened up to private ISPs which could take over some of the costs that various governments are already paying."
Ugh, then we'd just have to go build Internet3 to escape the garbage again.
Maybe if we did a better job of teaching, more students would figure out that there are things you can do with a computer which are *way* more interesting than those silly games, or using a $2500 machine to emulate a $69 CD player.
If only someone could explain to me *why* we should want 3d UIs for general use. We have enough clutter and irrelevant detail in two dimensions. I've been computing for a quarter of a century and I am still more productive with a 1d UI (a commandline) than with any of its modern rivals.
Let me know when the neurocouplers are ready, so I can try out a 0d UI. It sounds wonderful.
"where is the mind located?"
Mu. Where is the value of money located? Which component of a painting contains the beauty?
Clarke wrote a number of books which discuss aspects of living with electronic machinery. _Imperial Earth_ (I think that's the one) included PDAs and pervasive IR networking long before anyone seriously considered building such stuff. (Not to mention a planetary public data network used routinely by billions. Can you say, "Internet"?)
"If either drifted at all and this beam no longer hit the target on the moon, it would cease sending power."
So where does the power go then? "Massive explosion wrecks moon power system. Film at 11 if our batteries hold out."
See Asimov's story "Reason" for why you might want to think twice about aiming terawatt microwave beams at an inhabited planet.
Also, you only *think* we don't have to worry about ecological concerns. (A) You're dumping terawatts of heat into Earth's biosphere. Anybody wanna debate Global Warming? (B) Someone's sure to object to spoiling the view with planetoid-sized industrial works. (C) There are people who worry about the effects of tiny electric fields from nearby power lines. What will they think of being at the business end of a power beam?
And I have a Maxtor that was actually made by IBM, according to the sticker.
Am I the only one old enough to remember the one wherein Tom built active noise cancellers to defeat some bad guy who was using deafening sound as a weapon?
(Now that I think of it, the active-camouflage suits that MIT is working on are a variation of Tom's submarine that made itself invisible to sonar by cancelling the echo and copying the pulse through to the other side of the boat. Pretty soon there won't be any fiction left!)
Anyone who utters the phrase "user-friendly" ought to be required to define the word "user". Most of the stuff I've dealt with which was called "user-friendly" was actively hostile to the kind of user who's been herding computers for a quarter of a century and expects them to just do as they're told with no back-talk. I'm always asking vendors to make their software less user-friendly and more usable.
Let's hope that this doesn't lead Debian in the wrong direction.