The reason the ending - which I agree gets drawn out too long - is there is because the story seems to forget all about morality about 3/4 or the way through, and becomes interested only in bringing some sort of conclusion to David's life.
The story neatly lets all of humanity off the hook by fast forwarding through all the real moral issues involved. We would have had a MUCH stronger story here if the emphasis at the end was on what it means for science to get so ahead of itself. Where's the public outcry against the mass-manufacturing of loving mecha's? Where's the debate on if it it ok to have even one loving mecha?
Instead we're focused on a boy stick in a while true do loop. If only the last 1/3 was as focused on morality as the first 1/3, then we'd have a true masterpiece on our hands.
You'll probably get a resonable idea at this page:
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html.
Also, try a lookup for a bloom filter, which google uses, I think. Most search engines work by inverting the index, and then merging the lists. Taking the intersection of all the keywords gives ou the membership, then you apply ranking to the membership. Pretty simple concept. I don't know of any search engines that use a trie, or use any form of stemming.
Seems to me that if Napster could argue that any type of file could be exchanged over the internet, not just music, then Napster would be no less a target for the RIAA then WorldCom or AT&T for providing bandwidth services.
Napster should flood their service with copies of DeCSS the dramatic MP3 reading and call it a code exchange system that accidentally let users share music.
I just pulled down activeperl's release (for unix no less) which contained a SOAP implementation.
So one could argue that since it ships with a (decent) version of perl, it is in there. COM+ is an awefully platform dependent technology, no? I think that's what modules are for.
This should be interesting to watch develop. Since this one is going to be design by open source, I wonder if they'll ever be able to release an upgrade.
It seems that the past has shown that language by committee ends up over-burdoning the language. Are they're any previous examples of language design by committee that worked? It seems that all of the successes programming languages have made have been because of one or two evil geniuses who were able to see a project to completion, design to code.
I wonder if it's just revisionist history, but weren't c, c++, python, perl, and tcl all works of very small teams (excluding the standardization committees).
This should prove to be a great example for university programming language courses.
Has anyone heard any news of products using MD as the storage medium?
I've been thinking about getting a sharp 722 MD player, but no one even allows you to digitally transmit audio to MD, everything goes through a converter when they're compressed on input.
It would be really nice to buy $2 md discs (at 140 megs each) and use that for mp3.
It would be much nicer than CDR or even those players using Clik drives IMHO.
Faster, a tremendously good book by James Gleick covers just this topic. There's two really good chapters in the book where he discusses how technology has changed what we do with our time and how we spend it.
One fascinating bit of info was that Americans have the same amount of leisure time now as they did 20 years ago, only we block it up now into little time segments (usually a half hour here or there) which creates the illusion of having no free time.
A half hour here a half hour there and soon you're talking about real time.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason the ending - which I agree gets drawn out too long - is there is because the story seems to forget all about morality about 3/4 or the way through, and becomes interested only in bringing some sort of conclusion to David's life.
The story neatly lets all of humanity off the hook by fast forwarding through all the real moral issues involved. We would have had a MUCH stronger story here if the emphasis at the end was on what it means for science to get so ahead of itself. Where's the public outcry against the mass-manufacturing of loving mecha's? Where's the debate on if it it ok to have even one loving mecha?
Instead we're focused on a boy stick in a while true do loop. If only the last 1/3 was as focused on morality as the first 1/3, then we'd have a true masterpiece on our hands.
You'll probably get a resonable idea at this page:
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html.
Also, try a lookup for a bloom filter, which google uses, I think. Most search engines work by inverting the index, and then merging the lists. Taking the intersection of all the keywords gives ou the membership, then you apply ranking to the membership. Pretty simple concept. I don't know of any search engines that use a trie, or use any form of stemming.
-js
Seems to me that if Napster could argue that any type of file could be exchanged over the internet, not just music, then Napster would be no less a target for the RIAA then WorldCom or AT&T for providing bandwidth services.
Napster should flood their service with copies of DeCSS the dramatic MP3 reading and call it a code exchange system that accidentally let users share music.
I just pulled down activeperl's release (for unix no less) which contained a SOAP implementation.
So one could argue that since it ships with a (decent) version of perl, it is in there. COM+ is an awefully platform dependent technology, no? I think that's what modules are for.
-js
This should be interesting to watch develop. Since this one is going to be design by open source, I wonder if they'll ever be able to release an upgrade.
It seems that the past has shown that language by committee ends up over-burdoning the language. Are they're any previous examples of language design by committee that worked? It seems that all of the successes programming languages have made have been because of one or two evil geniuses who were able to see a project to completion, design to code.
I wonder if it's just revisionist history, but weren't c, c++, python, perl, and tcl all works of very small teams (excluding the standardization committees).
This should prove to be a great example for university programming language courses.
-js
Has anyone heard any news of products using MD as the storage medium?
I've been thinking about getting a sharp 722 MD player, but no one even allows you to digitally transmit audio to MD, everything goes through a converter when they're compressed on input.
It would be really nice to buy $2 md discs (at 140 megs each) and use that for mp3.
It would be much nicer than CDR or even those players using Clik drives IMHO.
-js
Faster, a tremendously good book by James Gleick covers just this topic. There's two really good chapters in the book where he discusses how technology has changed what we do with our time and how we spend it.
One fascinating bit of info was that Americans have the same amount of leisure time now as they did 20 years ago, only we block it up now into little time segments (usually a half hour here or there) which creates the illusion of having no free time.
A half hour here a half hour there and soon you're talking about real time.
"I suggest we make a new name "The Wired Effect" for overloading websites linked to by /. "
Yes, the Wired Effect is:
Worthless Information Repackaged Every Day
syndome....
Thanks wired, for telling us the samething slashdot does, but with little added insight!