Uses in the War on Drugs
on
Digital Nose
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· Score: 2
This could be used to step up enforcement of drug laws. Imagine police with hand-held devices that can detect traces of cocaine, marijuana, &c. When these devices find a trace, they can at the touch of a button call a base and get a (digitally signed, automated) search warrant, within seconds.
A few decades in the future, there may even be clouds of near-ubiquitous drug-sniffer robots, each the size of a grain of pollen. These would be able to notify the police whenever and wherever drugs were detected.
Might not be healthy, having clouds of machinery floating in the air we breathe, but it's For Our Own Good.
If you have, say, a few hundred CDs (and I know people who have thousands), and you suddenly feel like hearing a track from one of them, chances are you may not have it on hand. However, if you have said CDs at home, you have a licence to use them, and this provides an alternate means.
In future, such licence registries could be used for other things. Say, a favourite CD of yours is destroyed; if you have legal proof that you own a licence to play it, you may be able to get a new copy for the cost of the media.
(Granted, that could be open to abuse, unless CDs are serialised or somesuch. Though the potential is there.)
I've seen it spelled "idoru" and "aidoru" by various people other than Gibson. Anyway, if you say "idol", it means something entirely different, losing a level of nuance.
If you're going to make the interface look like a human (which is an impressive trick, given both the visual qualities of the human form and the repertoire of nonverbal signals available to humans), you may as well make it look like an attractive, aesthetically pleasing human.
Of course, they could have made it androgynous (sort of like Desire in the Sandman comics), but then it'd be harder to suspend disbelief about it being a human being. How many genderless people do you meet every day?
And a lot of techno-fetishists like looking at pictures of attractive women. It's almost as visually appealing as looking at real attractive women, though does not necessitate leaving one's terminal and finding some.
Now there's an idea worthy of a huge IPO: a real virtual girlfriend service.
Think about it: you sign up to a site, and get a "relationship" with an idoru; for the sake of example, let's say her name is Traci. For the subscription fee, she (actually, a random natural-language generator running off a knowledge base crosslinked to your relationship account) will send you email, telling you about her virtual life, asking about yours, and remembering enough to give the illusion of continuity. Once a year, she'll have a "birthday" (randomly chosen), at which you can buy her virtual presents (by credit card). Also add to this other relationship surrogate activities/expenditures.
Something like this would probably really sell in Japan (and may in fact exist there). Then again, there they have parks where you can pay for the privilege of raking leaves, for that real close-to-nature experience denied to city-dwelling salarymen.
GNUnanova will probably come with appearance themes. The most popular will look like a composite of Queen Amidala and one of the absurdly-endowed women from Heavy Metal comics, and there'll be a wide range of BAB3Z, ranging from Pamela Anderson knockoffs to Jenni-alikes for the downloading.
Max Headroom was actually a guy in a rubber suit, designed to look like a computer-rendered surface. The only computer graphics in the shot were the rotating cubelike background.
Apparently the British version of MacOS differed from the US one in a few things, such as "Trash" being labelled "Wastebasket", as well as text in menus and dialogs. Nothing that some hacker with a copy of ResEdit couldn't put right.
Commonwealth English appears to be in decline, and has been for decades. Though at least now, with the Net (a bidirectional medium, unlike Hollywood and MTV), it goes both ways. The new international English won't be just American-minus-obscure-regionalisms, but will contain pithy Commonwealthisms. For example, how many Americans have you seen using the adjective/adverb "bloody" lately?
And the hardcore Americophobes can use RiscOS; which is so British it even comes in a Welsh version.
Bowix is actually a rebranded version of BeOS, with icons and the look and feel redesigned by David Bowie, and sounds taken from his back-catalogue. It ships with an exclusive interactive CD containing concert footage and unreleased songs.
In religious areas, programmers will likely highly analyse it, and either: reject all religion in disgust (atheism), decide that with a lack of data, no decision can be made on the whole issue (agnostism), or opt for a non-mainstream religion (paganism, for example.) Some will stay Christian, but if you ask them why, they will generally have a quite well-thought out reason.
The Christian geeks I know of tend to also be theology geeks, who rather than accept a prepackaged Christianity, delve into all manner of arcane theological arguments.
This could be a universal phenomenon concerning religious geeks tending to be more into the arcana and metaphysics of their religions. I've encountered a number of Jewish programmers who were really into the Cabbala, for example.
It's a reference to pulp-erotica novelist turned sex-cult messiah P. Ron Huddard. In his heyday, he was so successful, the term "pronography" was coined after him, and only mutated into "pornography" after the phonographic industry filed mass lawsuits against dictionary publishers, on the grounds that the term produced defamatory search-engine results.
And then there's the correlation between hackers and adherents of fringe subcultures and interests. The Church of the SubGenius draws a sizeable percentage of its base from computer people (this is evident in SubGenius references in things such as Slackware). Quite a few computer people are into psychoceramics, following crackpots and lunatics and collecting fringe theories and beliefs. (This also ties into the affinity for unconventional thinking.) Askew visionaries, from Ed Wood to Harry Stephen Keeler get a lot of their fan base from computer "geeks". And need I say anything about Kibo, arguably the first genuine Internet personality?
Programming isn't like flying a plane. When flying a plane, you have to intuitively know the correct response at any one moment, to be able to handle the situation as it arises; being able to think nonlinearly, to make logical leaps and come up with novel solutions isn't very important. However, if you approach programming from the same point of view, your code is going to be very ordinary and mediocre. To be a good programmer involves the ability to think nonlinearly and creatively.
Actually, Linux is more of a monolithic SVR4 clone, with bits of BSD thrown in where it makes sense to do so. Or that's what it has historically been, anyway.
The problem with the NT kernel is that Microsoft tend to put unnecessary (and potentially compromising) things in kernel space (or its equivalent) to get better benchmarks. As of NT4, it's not a microkernel; you can't separate the Windows layer from the kernel (as you could have originally; I believe someone made a UNIX layer for it). And if you move the mouse, CPU utilisation goes up to 100%.
Ah yes, I remember... the reference to British heroic myth is quite apt.
Which reminds me: I heard that the Archimedes and RiscPC are massively popular in Wales, mostly because it is the only system that is fully localised into the Welsh language (mostly a matter of national pride).
MacOS may have a nice UI (for things that are best done with a mouse, at least), but the rotten guts of MacOS are another matter.
In the past, Apple have not had incentive to invest in the relatively unsexy area of operating system internals. After all, their competition was Microsoft, who despite having memory protection in their OSes, manage to put in enough bugs to not be too reliable.
The advent of Linux as a well-known OS will raise the bar, making it harder to get away with mediocre OSes, and forcing Apple (and Microsoft) to invest more in making their systems work reliably.
Did the first Archimedes actually have RiscOS, or some earlier system? I recall that their architecture was bootstrapped from the BBC Micro and Electron, and attempted to build an Amiga killer on top of it.
(The BBC was a very impressively designed system; from what I could recall, you could execute arbitrary system calls by outputting characters to the console, which beat the pants off ANSI art. And the BASIC interpreter was light years ahead of anything Microsoft had at the time. The Archimedes continued that tradition of impressiveness; apparently it was so fast that the entire UI system was written in interpreted BASIC, as was a 3D game that shipped with it. When I was in my teens, I really wanted an Archimedes.)
Anyway, from what I remember, RiscOS showed up a few years after the Archimedes made its debut (circa 1987), as a second-generation OS for it.
Many years ago, there was an incident in Melbourne, Australia, in which a teenager eliminated himself from the gene pool in a similar fashion. He was a member of a graffiti gang, who snuck into train yards to do aerosol art/vandalise trains; on the side, they would do all sorts of other train-related tricks, such as lever open the doors of moving trains and climb onto the roof.
Now this guy, apparently having smoked a little too much dope, decided that it would be really cool to go surfing in the City Loop (the underground section of the Melbourne train system, running under the city centre). He did not count on the height of the tunnel abruptly decreasing ahead of him. He hit a wall of concrete face first at something like 60km/h. Apparently he died some hours later in hospital.
There were memorial aerosol-art murals to him all over the Melbourne train system for several years. Guess they didn't have Darwin Awards back then...
Linux in itself is not particularly technically innovative. it is based on a classic monolithic kernel design like traditional unices, and modelled on SysV (and to a lesser extent BSD). This is opposed to systems such as the HURD, which is considerably more novel, and countless weird concept OSes that never get a large installed base because few people are willing to get their heads around an alien paradigm.
More novel is the open-source concept and the distributed ("bazaar") development model, though again, that derives from the GNU project, and the hacker culture in general.
Linux in itself is not particularly technically innovative. it is based on a classic monolithic kernel design like traditional unices, and modelled on SysV (and to a lesser extent BSD). This is opposed to systems such as the HURD, which is considerably more novel, and countless weird concept OSes that never get a large installed base because few people are willing to get their heads around an alien paradigm.
More novel is the open-source concept and the distributed ("bazaar") development model, though again, that derives from the GNU project, and the hacker culture in general.
I don't mean to belittle Miguel's (indeed impressive) achievements. However, can we really consider something like GNOME to be a great innovation in this day? GUI systems have been around since Xerox PARC's Alto, and desktop environments with common UI tools and guidelines have many precedents (Macintosh, NeXT, OS/2, Windows). Compound document architectures aren't new either (Wang devised one which MS copied for OLE), and object-oriented application kits date back to Smalltalk.
Is GNOME really a profound innovation, or merely a case of good engineering using already established techniques to fill a niche?
I don't know about anybody else, but I'd much rather have a monochrome screen with a higher resolution (the 240x320 of WinCE devices would be good) than a new, improved 160x160 screen with full colour.
160x160 is prohibitively small; there is only so much information you can show on such a screen. Increase the resolution, and the amount you can see at once increases. You might even be able to see a whole datebook page without scrolling, or more than a short paragraph of text. And once wireless networking arrives (which it will), a bigger screen would be better for accessing web pages over WAP.
In contrast, colour would be merely a superficial gimmick. Though maybe Palm's marketing department has taken over and the new Palms are being optimised to be primarily executive status symbols with usability taking second place.
Maybe "Bob" was right after all. What could be more prophetic of the coming Tribulation of a post-X-Day World Without Slack than the rise of a master race of TV celebrities, and their dominion over the wretched remnants of un-Ruptured Pink humanity.
From what I've heard, Times Square is one of the major wacko magnets, with terrorists, religious fanatics and miscellaneous lunatics falling over themselves to be the first to detonate something there come midnight 1/1/2000. After all, think of the publicity; and if you were a terrorist, would you want some rival group to get all the glory?
One guy (supposedly linked to Bin Laden, the current arch-villain) was already arrested smuggling explosives into the US. Chances are he wasn't the only one with that particular idea.
Of course, security will be pretty tight there. Whether it's tight enough to stop a fanatic bent on martyrdom is another matter. In any case, under Times Square would not be my first choice of a safe place for a survival bunker.
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This could be used to step up enforcement of drug laws. Imagine police with hand-held devices that can detect traces of cocaine, marijuana, &c. When these devices find a trace, they can at the touch of a button call a base and get a (digitally signed, automated) search warrant, within seconds.
A few decades in the future, there may even be clouds of near-ubiquitous drug-sniffer robots, each the size of a grain of pollen. These would be able to notify the police whenever and wherever drugs were detected.
Might not be healthy, having clouds of machinery floating in the air we breathe, but it's For Our Own Good.
If you have, say, a few hundred CDs (and I know people who have thousands), and you suddenly feel like hearing a track from one of them, chances are you may not have it on hand. However, if you have said CDs at home, you have a licence to use them, and this provides an alternate means.
In future, such licence registries could be used for other things. Say, a favourite CD of yours is destroyed; if you have legal proof that you own a licence to play it, you may be able to get a new copy for the cost of the media.
(Granted, that could be open to abuse, unless CDs are serialised or somesuch. Though the potential is there.)
I've seen it spelled "idoru" and "aidoru" by various people other than Gibson. Anyway, if you say "idol", it means something entirely different, losing a level of nuance.
:-)
If you're going to make the interface look like a human (which is an impressive trick, given both the visual qualities of the human form and the repertoire of nonverbal signals available to humans), you may as well make it look like an attractive, aesthetically pleasing human.
Of course, they could have made it androgynous (sort of like Desire in the Sandman comics), but then it'd be harder to suspend disbelief about it being a human being. How many genderless people do you meet every day?
And a lot of techno-fetishists like looking at pictures of attractive women. It's almost as visually appealing as looking at real attractive women, though does not necessitate leaving one's terminal and finding some.
Now there's an idea worthy of a huge IPO: a real virtual girlfriend service.
Think about it: you sign up to a site, and get a "relationship" with an idoru; for the sake of example, let's say her name is Traci. For the subscription fee, she (actually, a random natural-language generator running off a knowledge base crosslinked to your relationship account) will send you email, telling you about her virtual life, asking about yours, and remembering enough to give the illusion of continuity. Once a year, she'll have a "birthday" (randomly chosen), at which you can buy her virtual presents (by credit card). Also add to this other relationship surrogate activities/expenditures.
Something like this would probably really sell in Japan (and may in fact exist there). Then again, there they have parks where you can pay for the privilege of raking leaves, for that real close-to-nature experience denied to city-dwelling salarymen.
GNUnanova will probably come with appearance themes. The most popular will look like a composite of Queen Amidala and one of the absurdly-endowed women from Heavy Metal comics, and there'll be a wide range of BAB3Z, ranging from Pamela Anderson knockoffs to Jenni-alikes for the downloading.
Max Headroom was actually a guy in a rubber suit, designed to look like a computer-rendered surface. The only computer graphics in the shot were the rotating cubelike background.
Apparently the British version of MacOS differed from the US one in a few things, such as "Trash" being labelled "Wastebasket", as well as text in menus and dialogs. Nothing that some hacker with a copy of ResEdit couldn't put right.
Commonwealth English appears to be in decline, and has been for decades. Though at least now, with the Net (a bidirectional medium, unlike Hollywood and MTV), it goes both ways. The new international English won't be just American-minus-obscure-regionalisms, but will contain pithy Commonwealthisms. For example, how many Americans have you seen using the adjective/adverb "bloody" lately?
And the hardcore Americophobes can use RiscOS; which is so British it even comes in a Welsh version.
Bowix is actually a rebranded version of BeOS, with icons and the look and feel redesigned by David Bowie, and sounds taken from his back-catalogue. It ships with an exclusive interactive CD containing concert footage and unreleased songs.
In religious areas, programmers will likely highly analyse it, and either: reject all
religion in disgust (atheism), decide that with a lack of data, no decision can be made
on the whole issue (agnostism), or opt for a non-mainstream religion (paganism, for
example.) Some will stay Christian, but if you ask them why, they will generally have
a quite well-thought out reason.
The Christian geeks I know of tend to also be theology geeks, who rather than accept a prepackaged Christianity, delve into all manner of arcane theological arguments.
This could be a universal phenomenon concerning religious geeks tending to be more into the arcana and metaphysics of their religions. I've encountered a number of Jewish programmers who were really into the Cabbala, for example.
It's a reference to pulp-erotica novelist turned sex-cult messiah P. Ron Huddard. In his heyday, he was so successful, the term "pronography" was coined after him, and only mutated into "pornography" after the phonographic industry filed mass lawsuits against dictionary publishers, on the grounds that the term produced defamatory search-engine results.
And then there's the correlation between hackers and adherents of fringe subcultures and interests. The Church of the SubGenius draws a sizeable percentage of its base from computer people (this is evident in SubGenius references in things such as Slackware).
Quite a few computer people are into psychoceramics, following crackpots and lunatics and collecting fringe theories and beliefs. (This also ties into the affinity for unconventional thinking.) Askew visionaries, from Ed Wood to Harry Stephen Keeler get a lot of their fan base from computer "geeks". And need I say anything about Kibo, arguably the first genuine Internet personality?
Programming isn't like flying a plane. When flying a plane, you have to intuitively know the correct response at any one moment, to be able to handle the situation as it arises; being able to think nonlinearly, to make logical leaps and come up with novel solutions isn't very important. However, if you approach programming from the same point of view, your code is going to be very ordinary and mediocre. To be a good programmer involves the ability to think nonlinearly and creatively.
Actually, Linux is more of a monolithic SVR4 clone, with bits of BSD thrown in where it makes sense to do so. Or that's what it has historically been, anyway.
The problem with the NT kernel is that Microsoft tend to put unnecessary (and potentially compromising) things in kernel space (or its equivalent) to get better benchmarks. As of NT4, it's not a microkernel; you can't separate the Windows layer from the kernel (as you could have originally; I believe someone made a UNIX layer for it). And if you move the mouse, CPU utilisation goes up to 100%.
Ah yes, I remember... the reference to British heroic myth is quite apt.
Which reminds me: I heard that the Archimedes and RiscPC are massively popular in Wales, mostly because it is the only system that is fully localised into the Welsh language (mostly a matter of national pride).
MacOS may have a nice UI (for things that are best done with a mouse, at least), but the rotten guts of MacOS are another matter.
In the past, Apple have not had incentive to invest in the relatively unsexy area of operating system internals. After all, their competition was Microsoft, who despite having memory protection in their OSes, manage to put in enough bugs to not be too reliable.
The advent of Linux as a well-known OS will raise the bar, making it harder to get away with mediocre OSes, and forcing Apple (and Microsoft) to invest more in making their systems work reliably.
Did the first Archimedes actually have RiscOS, or some earlier system? I recall that their architecture was bootstrapped from the BBC Micro and Electron, and attempted to build an Amiga killer on top of it.
(The BBC was a very impressively designed system; from what I could recall, you could execute arbitrary system calls by outputting characters to the console, which beat the pants off ANSI art. And the BASIC interpreter was light years ahead of anything Microsoft had at the time. The Archimedes continued that tradition of impressiveness; apparently it was so fast that the entire UI system was written in interpreted BASIC, as was a 3D game that shipped with it. When I was in my teens, I really wanted an Archimedes.)
Anyway, from what I remember, RiscOS showed up a few years after the Archimedes made its debut (circa 1987), as a second-generation OS for it.
Many years ago, there was an incident in Melbourne, Australia, in which a teenager eliminated himself from the gene pool in a similar fashion. He was a member of a graffiti gang, who snuck into train yards to do aerosol art/vandalise trains; on the side, they would do all sorts of other train-related tricks, such as lever open the doors of moving trains and climb onto the roof.
Now this guy, apparently having smoked a little too much dope, decided that it would be really cool to go surfing in the City Loop (the underground section of the Melbourne train system, running under the city centre). He did not count on the height of the tunnel abruptly decreasing ahead of him. He hit a wall of concrete face first at something like 60km/h. Apparently he died some hours later in hospital.
There were memorial aerosol-art murals to him all over the Melbourne train system for several years. Guess they didn't have Darwin Awards back then...
Linux in itself is not particularly technically innovative. it is based on a classic monolithic kernel design like traditional unices, and modelled on SysV (and to a lesser extent BSD). This is opposed to systems such as the HURD, which is considerably more novel, and countless weird concept OSes that never get a large installed base because few people are willing to get their heads around an alien paradigm.
More novel is the open-source concept and the distributed ("bazaar") development model, though again, that derives from the GNU project, and the hacker culture in general.
Linux in itself is not particularly technically innovative. it is based on a classic monolithic kernel design like traditional unices, and modelled on SysV (and to a lesser extent BSD). This is opposed to systems such as the HURD, which is considerably more novel, and countless weird concept OSes that never get a large installed base because few people are willing to get their heads around an alien paradigm.
More novel is the open-source concept and the distributed ("bazaar") development model, though again, that derives from the GNU project, and the hacker culture in general.
I don't mean to belittle Miguel's (indeed impressive) achievements. However, can we really consider something like GNOME to be a great innovation in this day? GUI systems have been around since Xerox PARC's Alto, and desktop environments with common UI tools and guidelines have many precedents (Macintosh, NeXT, OS/2, Windows). Compound document architectures aren't new either (Wang devised one which MS copied for OLE), and object-oriented application kits date back to Smalltalk.
Is GNOME really a profound innovation, or merely a case of good engineering using already established techniques to fill a niche?
I don't know about anybody else, but I'd much rather have a monochrome screen with a higher resolution (the 240x320 of WinCE devices would be good) than a new, improved 160x160 screen with full colour.
160x160 is prohibitively small; there is only so much information you can show on such a screen. Increase the resolution, and the amount you can see at once increases. You might even be able to see a whole datebook page without scrolling, or more than a short paragraph of text. And once wireless networking arrives (which it will), a bigger screen would be better for accessing web pages over WAP.
In contrast, colour would be merely a superficial gimmick. Though maybe Palm's marketing department has taken over and the new Palms are being optimised to be primarily executive status symbols with usability taking second place.
Maybe "Bob" was right after all. What could be more prophetic of the coming Tribulation of a post-X-Day World Without Slack than the rise of a master race of TV celebrities, and their dominion over the wretched remnants of un-Ruptured Pink humanity.
From what I've heard, Times Square is one of the major wacko magnets, with terrorists, religious fanatics and miscellaneous lunatics falling over themselves to be the first to detonate something there come midnight 1/1/2000. After all, think of the publicity; and if you were a terrorist, would you want some rival group to get all the glory?
One guy (supposedly linked to Bin Laden, the current arch-villain) was already arrested smuggling explosives into the US. Chances are he wasn't the only one with that particular idea.
Of course, security will be pretty tight there. Whether it's tight enough to stop a fanatic bent on martyrdom is another matter. In any case, under Times Square would not be my first choice of a safe place for a survival bunker.