What was the purpose of the first computer? How does that measure up against the uses we have found for computers?
We are each here because of a highly improbable chain of events and free to decide (within limits) how much chance we might give our particular chain of contributing to an even more interesting future.
You can only really judge purpose retrospectively. Before that it is just intentions and we know what happens to the best of intentions. It also helps to be optimistic enough to recognise both that the future is still being worked out and that what you do could make some difference.
As of 2007, highly functional autonomous humans are the only known actors with a capacity for reflection which can be used to anticipate future purposes at a level which might have significant consequence. All the other beauty we find in this world has flown blind.
Looking to the mythical past for some purpose is but a mostly subconscious tactic of control freaks.
The future is only a losing game if you've already lost it.
I suspect you'll find that if the Mac demographic skews older and more affluent now, it is because Mac users skewed older and more affluent then.
We didn't have to waste half our lives making our computers do what we wanted them to do and could just get on with what we wanted to do with them.
(I was trained in what has become IT by IBM starting in 1965, have used Macs almost exclusively since 1984, and chosen to pursue mostly non-financial rewards, so I won't be getting my 24 inch iMac until after Easter, though I will be getting a MacBook as soon as they get around to shipping to Australian dealers.)
We are also the demographic that has no intention of giving up dominating the world.
Before the end of the 1940s CSIRO's predecessor developed and test ran the world's "fifth electronic stored program computer", later known as CSIRAC. In 1954 widely venerated Prime Minister Robert Menzies decided that CSIRO should drop research on computers in favour of cloud seeding. (The back stories would fill a book without getting to Pig Iron Bob presenting my undergraduate degree.)
Then in the early 1980s microprocessor technology faciliated the emergence of a promising embryonic computer hardware industry, but quiz king turned science minister Barry Jones announced that we had already missed the boat, and corporate misdeals soon mopped up the few threatening survivors. (I prepared supplements covering 40+ local maunfacturers for Australian Micro Computerworld in each of its two years of publication, 1983-84, before it was swept away by the PCWorld/Macworld tidal waves, having put on a government-supported professional development conference for those manufacturers in 1983.)
I'm surprised nobody yet seems to have cropped down to that heavily tracked part of the image and made it more widely available. Guess it comes with the problems of working with even an 11.7Mb JPEG in an image editor unless you have a machine up to the task, which I won't till well into 2007.
Reminds me about our local TV news showing the recent orbiter pic of Victoria Crater and zooming in until a black dot appeared near the rim, while totally omitting to mention that the black dot was a rover (Opportunity).
Yes he can be a difficult old coot, but trying to help where I can has also provided a few lessons about what to be aware of when its my turn to face the same descendant-free zone, two of which are relevant here:
1. At the top of the food chain, the doctors need to spend less time treating the information on their (admittedly low tech) clipboards and more time taking a broader interest in the totality of the patient's condition. Any dividend from IT there is going to be negative in terms of health outcomes for however many years it takes to start getting some real AI into the loop.
2. Computers and the net had been my friend's lifeline for years before the two he has now mostly spent in hospital, but it is currently beyond the wit of the system to recognise the mental health benefits that could be provided to even a portion of geriatric patients by encouraging them to (continue to) communicate via the net while physically restricted from other activities. They provide it in kids' ward, but it is beyond their imaginations that it might be even more important to the elderly where the dividend from increased IT could be huge.
In both cases it was their initiative. The first time I was teaching a youngster to snorkel and this dark shape sped past, so I rushed him out of the water, then saw that it was dolphins and got him back in just as quickly. There were eight in total, four pairs of what I can only presume were mother and half grown juvenile and they stayed with us for as long as the youngster could survive the cold water, seeming just as interested in us as we were in them.
The second time I was on a boat with a diving party aiming to repeat what had been my most memorable dive ever the day before and the dolphins arrived before we were quite ready to hit the water but that certainly got us moving and we enjoyed a few minutes interacting before they went on their way and we resumed our dive plan. I wrote a personal note about the first day which just concluded: "And the next day we dived there with dolphins." That clearly seemed to say all that needed to be said at the time but, nearly 20 years on, it might have been good to have written more at the time. Any more now I would be making up.
I am reminded of the counter argument which noted that the enlarged part observed in Einstein's brain was due to the extra glia cells needed to support the higher activity of the same number of neurons.
I've also dived with many varieties of fish, but our interaction with dolphins off Tiputa Pass and Trousers Point (you can find both easily on Google) was qualitatively different from any with fish.
It basically sounds like Japanese propaganda to me. Might be time to make that donation to Sea Shepherd.
There is no serious possibility of any ongoing gene transfer between Tasmania and mainland Australia or anywhere else between the flooding of the Bass Strait land bridge after the ice age and the first visits of European sailors. As much as I enjoy the waters of Bass Strait, they were simply not crossable by humans with the technology available in that region.
Further reflection on Olsen's above mentioned secondary claim suggest that his model might be unreasonably assuming symmetrical inheritance flow between low contact regions. In reality, visiting/stranded males will have been responsible for almost all of the flow at the lowest contact levels, so the direction of movement will be highly asymmetric. Therefore it remains most unlikely that the broader human population of 1400 AD had ancestors who had lived in South America or Australia since the ice age, even though the reverse is undoubtedly true. So the secondary claim might work for -20K but it remains fanciful for -7K.
Furthermore, Olson and his colleagues have found that if you go back a little farther -- about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago -- everybody living today has exactly the same set of ancestors. In other words, every person who was alive at that time is either an ancestor to all 6 billion people living today, or their line died out and they have no remaining descendants.
... is the secondary claim which the 10+K separation of Tasmanians and continued existence of a small pool of their mixed descendants invalidates.
While there are other clues that any notion of extended periods of genetic isolation of Australia in recent millenia is misguided, the dingo argument puts that to rest. By the time of the British invasion, dingos had spread through out mainland Australia, but not Tasmania, which does at least provide an exception to Olsen's supplementary claim.
I'd go a bit further in support of Olson's findings being able to coexist with m-Eve, y-Adam and the Toba bottleneck, but with the disclaimer that the planet is big enough and complex enough for outliers that his model misses.
In particular we know that the Tasmanians were truly isolated for more than 10K years and that while the pure line did not survive the British invasion, there are descendents of Tasmanians from -10K alive today, yet very clearly not everybody is descended from those Tasmanians, so Olson's supplementary claim that there is a single set of everybody's ancestors who were alive around -7K falls over.
I'd expect Tasmania is not even a unique exception, but others might be a lot harder to prove. Those outliers apart, the rest makes broad sense and the relative mobility of genes, might help resolve a few other misconceptions about recent human evolution, especially the post-modern selection pressures favouring poverty and stupidity.
At 2% and falling of the affluent world market, we are used to having our patience tried by new kids on the technology block, but after reading the iTWire report from Stuart Corner, who has been around the local industry as long as I have, it suddenly makes a lot less sense. Best to just quote Stuart quoting Lars Rasmussen, head of engineering for Google Australia:
The company's R&D in Australia started in late 2004 when Google acquired Where 2 Technologies, a mapping company founded by Rasmussen, his brother and two Australian friends.
"We formed about half of the team that put out Google Maps about a year ago and once we had done that we started lobbying to have a fully-fledged engineering centre in Sydney, Rasmussen said.
"The Sydney engineers still form a very significant part of the team that is working on Google Maps and I think that fact is going to make Google Australia an extremely attractive place for the top programmers and computer scientists to seek employment.(")
So Google acquires an Australian outfit with mapping expertise so they can put their technology into Google Maps, and nearly a year after Maps was launched the maps view of Australia contains nothing more than a monochrome continent dotted with unlikely bodies of water. No roads, no cities, a status which only our indigenous community are entitled to dream about.
Yes, I do have a prototype application using the Maps API which has had to rely on satelite/aerial images to place pins and, no, this isn't a job application, at least not unless they have a need for some very part time context analysis.
Sure, some older songs are probably not worth as much and some newer songs might be worth more
For at least some of us, that is arse-about. My over-filled circuits have great trouble resonating with almost anything first recorded after the '70s, which I'm equally happy to attribute to capacity constraints as to the idea that almost all the best corners of music parameter space were already occupied making it much harder to come up with anything new and good.
The wash up is that even heavy discounting of current music would not get me to buy it, even when I'm still silly enough to pay $A14.99 yesterday for effectively one track that is unlikely to make it to iTMS any time soon and which, at over eight minutes, would almost certainly finish up marked as "buy whole album" if it did.
We were Adobe's Australian representatives and an Apple VAR for a while early on and I spent enough time at Adobe that I even had a temporary desk there at one point. The working relationship between Apple and Adobe at the time was as close as it gets.
The only other licensee that was talked about from the beginning was Linotype and, from memory, relatively obscure companies like DataProducts and QMS were next to market with PostScript printers. That is all a while before Adobe acquired PhotoShop. When we took them on, their only distribution product was typeface (font) packs, but internally developed Illustrator was on the horizon.
Apple sold their 20% a few years down the track quite publicly. That may have had something to do with Apple and M$ getting together on TrueType to undercut PostScript in certain sectors, but I wasn't as closely involved by then.
But scientists are human and, unfortunately, cosmology and particle physics have proved particularly attractive to those who in another age would have wanted to start their own religions.
Just like so many things in the world we find ourselves in, Occam's Razor is both used and abused.
According to Kohler's Wikipedia stub he has been at it for 35 years. He is ubiquitos here, turning up in the middle of our TV news with some of other spin graph to punctuate the too familar droning to the day's 'numbers'.
He is trying to become his own industry, in pale imitation of the likes of Crikey who have actually been prepared to do the hard yards and enjoyed some deserved success. But I've yet to hear Kohler say anything perceptive. Certainly this piece lacks any suggestion of coherence.
And I say that as somebody with a reasonably strong math backgound.
What we are really saying is that we have been able to assign a bunch of attributes to some things which are at the lower limit for infered observation because ultimately all relevant observation is mediated by photons and they have their well known limits.
From another perspective, we really haven't much of a clue about what a quark or an electron is, especially after you think about the fact that for some important purposes, the 'hole' left where an electron is 'missing' behaves almost indistinguishably from an electron (save for the charge reversal).
So just how are we supposed to tell the difference between three kinds of neutrino which oscillate amongst themselves and one kind which oscillates between states where it can interact with electrons, muons or taus? Even the idea that they interact so rarely because they have such a small 'cross section' might be hard to distinguish from the idea that they undergo a long oscilation cycle through some state space that is impenetrable to photons, and that it is only at specific moments of that cycle that they can interact with ordinary matter at all.
Particle physicists and cosmologists still don't seem to be able to get over their fetish for "too easy" answers.
Religion trying to engorge itself by encouraging somebody who has declared their own susceptibility to addictibe behaviour to substitute their old prop for a new one that is even more parasitic.
This guy already knows he is gay. Anti-sex/homphobic Christianity is the last thing likely to constructively fill the gaps he needs to fill to reduce the temptations to addiction.
Just a *hug* would be a much better starting point.
As much as I would be happier to just ignore it, there is something about the increasing Longhorn hysteria that is reminiscent of the depths Apple slid into in the mid-90s.
There were a succession of enticing technology demos promoted as seeds of totally new architectures, more than a couple of which almost survived deployment then in the process of their ultimate abandonment burnt many fans.
But the ask was always too big, just the same as it has always been with every other monolithic attempt at software over engineering.
The one thing we can count on from Microsoft is that they will eventually bring out something which they will tell us is Longhorn. They are too political to contemplate honest abandonment. But all they will ever deliver will be cherry picked features grafted onto their already long suffering underlying architcture.
The thing that makes this even wierder is that the betas of XP made it actually look like they might have been getting somewhere, but this time around even the betas are apparently off putting.
I'm relying here on reports from otherwise bright people who actually try to use the stuff, as the weekend provided almost the only excuse I've had to curse M$ software to its face in years. Normally I can just stick with the line which has done almost everything I've asked of it since 1984, but now I guess I might have to revert to evangelising with that client before I'm forced to walk away.
But I have to admit the vast self-promotional preambles attached to much of the otherwise often interesting stuff Edge puts out can be off-putting. I'm used to them and still needed a double take before I spotted the change of context. It just didn't sound like something Kelly would throw in, even if Brand's observation was perfectly relevant.
However, you and others really should try to get over your obsession with Wolfram's supposed lack of citations. Yes it does seem he missed a bit of what was going on in parallel during the decade plus he was buried in his own research, but the end product was a book, not an academic paper, and its copious notes do provide valuable coverage of the history prior to the early '90s.
Wolfram's earlier systematic research on the classification of one dimensional cellular automata was seminal to the field, turning it from something only seen as fit for mathematical recreations columns in the early '80s to one of the pillars of the rise of complex systems research in the late '80s. (I was an interested participant in both phases.)
Slashdot Mirror
What was the purpose of the first computer? How does that measure up against the uses we have found for computers?
We are each here because of a highly improbable chain of events and free to decide (within limits) how much chance we might give our particular chain of contributing to an even more interesting future.
You can only really judge purpose retrospectively. Before that it is just intentions and we know what happens to the best of intentions. It also helps to be optimistic enough to recognise both that the future is still being worked out and that what you do could make some difference.
As of 2007, highly functional autonomous humans are the only known actors with a capacity for reflection which can be used to anticipate future purposes at a level which might have significant consequence. All the other beauty we find in this world has flown blind.
Looking to the mythical past for some purpose is but a mostly subconscious tactic of control freaks.
The future is only a losing game if you've already lost it.
(I was trained in what has become IT by IBM starting in 1965, have used Macs almost exclusively since 1984, and chosen to pursue mostly non-financial rewards, so I won't be getting my 24 inch iMac until after Easter, though I will be getting a MacBook as soon as they get around to shipping to Australian dealers.)
We are also the demographic that has no intention of giving up dominating the world.
Before the end of the 1940s CSIRO's predecessor developed and test ran the world's "fifth electronic stored program computer", later known as CSIRAC. In 1954 widely venerated Prime Minister Robert Menzies decided that CSIRO should drop research on computers in favour of cloud seeding. (The back stories would fill a book without getting to Pig Iron Bob presenting my undergraduate degree.)
Then in the early 1980s microprocessor technology faciliated the emergence of a promising embryonic computer hardware industry, but quiz king turned science minister Barry Jones announced that we had already missed the boat, and corporate misdeals soon mopped up the few threatening survivors. (I prepared supplements covering 40+ local maunfacturers for Australian Micro Computerworld in each of its two years of publication, 1983-84, before it was swept away by the PCWorld/Macworld tidal waves, having put on a government-supported professional development conference for those manufacturers in 1983.)
That's all folks!
I'm surprised nobody yet seems to have cropped down to that heavily tracked part of the image and made it more widely available. Guess it comes with the problems of working with even an 11.7Mb JPEG in an image editor unless you have a machine up to the task, which I won't till well into 2007.
Reminds me about our local TV news showing the recent orbiter pic of Victoria Crater and zooming in until a black dot appeared near the rim, while totally omitting to mention that the black dot was a rover (Opportunity).
Way back in 2001, the year everyone seems to have selective amnesia about.
The Man Who Sued God
Yes he can be a difficult old coot, but trying to help where I can has also provided a few lessons about what to be aware of when its my turn to face the same descendant-free zone, two of which are relevant here:
1. At the top of the food chain, the doctors need to spend less time treating the information on their (admittedly low tech) clipboards and more time taking a broader interest in the totality of the patient's condition. Any dividend from IT there is going to be negative in terms of health outcomes for however many years it takes to start getting some real AI into the loop.
2. Computers and the net had been my friend's lifeline for years before the two he has now mostly spent in hospital, but it is currently beyond the wit of the system to recognise the mental health benefits that could be provided to even a portion of geriatric patients by encouraging them to (continue to) communicate via the net while physically restricted from other activities. They provide it in kids' ward, but it is beyond their imaginations that it might be even more important to the elderly where the dividend from increased IT could be huge.
In both cases it was their initiative. The first time I was teaching a youngster to snorkel and this dark shape sped past, so I rushed him out of the water, then saw that it was dolphins and got him back in just as quickly. There were eight in total, four pairs of what I can only presume were mother and half grown juvenile and they stayed with us for as long as the youngster could survive the cold water, seeming just as interested in us as we were in them.
The second time I was on a boat with a diving party aiming to repeat what had been my most memorable dive ever the day before and the dolphins arrived before we were quite ready to hit the water but that certainly got us moving and we enjoyed a few minutes interacting before they went on their way and we resumed our dive plan. I wrote a personal note about the first day which just concluded: "And the next day we dived there with dolphins." That clearly seemed to say all that needed to be said at the time but, nearly 20 years on, it might have been good to have written more at the time. Any more now I would be making up.
I am reminded of the counter argument which noted that the enlarged part observed in Einstein's brain was due to the extra glia cells needed to support the higher activity of the same number of neurons.
I've also dived with many varieties of fish, but our interaction with dolphins off Tiputa Pass and Trousers Point (you can find both easily on Google) was qualitatively different from any with fish.
It basically sounds like Japanese propaganda to me. Might be time to make that donation to Sea Shepherd.
There is no serious possibility of any ongoing gene transfer between Tasmania and mainland Australia or anywhere else between the flooding of the Bass Strait land bridge after the ice age and the first visits of European sailors. As much as I enjoy the waters of Bass Strait, they were simply not crossable by humans with the technology available in that region.
Further reflection on Olsen's above mentioned secondary claim suggest that his model might be unreasonably assuming symmetrical inheritance flow between low contact regions. In reality, visiting/stranded males will have been responsible for almost all of the flow at the lowest contact levels, so the direction of movement will be highly asymmetric. Therefore it remains most unlikely that the broader human population of 1400 AD had ancestors who had lived in South America or Australia since the ice age, even though the reverse is undoubtedly true. So the secondary claim might work for -20K but it remains fanciful for -7K.
... is the secondary claim which the 10+K separation of Tasmanians and continued existence of a small pool of their mixed descendants invalidates.
While there are other clues that any notion of extended periods of genetic isolation of Australia in recent millenia is misguided, the dingo argument puts that to rest. By the time of the British invasion, dingos had spread through out mainland Australia, but not Tasmania, which does at least provide an exception to Olsen's supplementary claim.
I'd go a bit further in support of Olson's findings being able to coexist with m-Eve, y-Adam and the Toba bottleneck, but with the disclaimer that the planet is big enough and complex enough for outliers that his model misses.
In particular we know that the Tasmanians were truly isolated for more than 10K years and that while the pure line did not survive the British invasion, there are descendents of Tasmanians from -10K alive today, yet very clearly not everybody is descended from those Tasmanians, so Olson's supplementary claim that there is a single set of everybody's ancestors who were alive around -7K falls over.
I'd expect Tasmania is not even a unique exception, but others might be a lot harder to prove. Those outliers apart, the rest makes broad sense and the relative mobility of genes, might help resolve a few other misconceptions about recent human evolution, especially the post-modern selection pressures favouring poverty and stupidity.
Once they get their targeting more precise Revenge of the Minkes might revisit Hiroshima.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports and my old bookmarks quickly confirmed that street maps for Australian cities are finally on the map.
I'm guessing I might now have to upgrade my prototype application to use version 2 of the Maps API to get the street maps to show there.
Yes, I do have a prototype application using the Maps API which has had to rely on satelite/aerial images to place pins and, no, this isn't a job application, at least not unless they have a need for some very part time context analysis.
They will post a link to a generalist source misreporting a journal article about the universe repeating itself every trillion years.
And some older posters will point out that it is a dupe.
The wash up is that even heavy discounting of current music would not get me to buy it, even when I'm still silly enough to pay $A14.99 yesterday for effectively one track that is unlikely to make it to iTMS any time soon and which, at over eight minutes, would almost certainly finish up marked as "buy whole album" if it did.
We were Adobe's Australian representatives and an Apple VAR for a while early on and I spent enough time at Adobe that I even had a temporary desk there at one point. The working relationship between Apple and Adobe at the time was as close as it gets.
The only other licensee that was talked about from the beginning was Linotype and, from memory, relatively obscure companies like DataProducts and QMS were next to market with PostScript printers. That is all a while before Adobe acquired PhotoShop. When we took them on, their only distribution product was typeface (font) packs, but internally developed Illustrator was on the horizon.
Apple sold their 20% a few years down the track quite publicly. That may have had something to do with Apple and M$ getting together on TrueType to undercut PostScript in certain sectors, but I wasn't as closely involved by then.
But scientists are human and, unfortunately, cosmology and particle physics have proved particularly attractive to those who in another age would have wanted to start their own religions.
Just like so many things in the world we find ourselves in, Occam's Razor is both used and abused.
According to Kohler's Wikipedia stub he has been at it for 35 years. He is ubiquitos here, turning up in the middle of our TV news with some of other spin graph to punctuate the too familar droning to the day's 'numbers'.
He is trying to become his own industry, in pale imitation of the likes of Crikey who have actually been prepared to do the hard yards and enjoyed some deserved success. But I've yet to hear Kohler say anything perceptive. Certainly this piece lacks any suggestion of coherence.
And I say that as somebody with a reasonably strong math backgound.
What we are really saying is that we have been able to assign a bunch of attributes to some things which are at the lower limit for infered observation because ultimately all relevant observation is mediated by photons and they have their well known limits.
From another perspective, we really haven't much of a clue about what a quark or an electron is, especially after you think about the fact that for some important purposes, the 'hole' left where an electron is 'missing' behaves almost indistinguishably from an electron (save for the charge reversal).
So just how are we supposed to tell the difference between three kinds of neutrino which oscillate amongst themselves and one kind which oscillates between states where it can interact with electrons, muons or taus? Even the idea that they interact so rarely because they have such a small 'cross section' might be hard to distinguish from the idea that they undergo a long oscilation cycle through some state space that is impenetrable to photons, and that it is only at specific moments of that cycle that they can interact with ordinary matter at all.
Particle physicists and cosmologists still don't seem to be able to get over their fetish for "too easy" answers.
Religion trying to engorge itself by encouraging somebody who has declared their own susceptibility to addictibe behaviour to substitute their old prop for a new one that is even more parasitic.
This guy already knows he is gay. Anti-sex/homphobic Christianity is the last thing likely to constructively fill the gaps he needs to fill to reduce the temptations to addiction.
Just a *hug* would be a much better starting point.
The thing that makes this even wierder is that the betas of XP made it actually look like they might have been getting somewhere, but this time around even the betas are apparently off putting.
I'm relying here on reports from otherwise bright people who actually try to use the stuff, as the weekend provided almost the only excuse I've had to curse M$ software to its face in years. Normally I can just stick with the line which has done almost everything I've asked of it since 1984, but now I guess I might have to revert to evangelising with that client before I'm forced to walk away.
But I have to admit the vast self-promotional preambles attached to much of the otherwise often interesting stuff Edge puts out can be off-putting. I'm used to them and still needed a double take before I spotted the change of context. It just didn't sound like something Kelly would throw in, even if Brand's observation was perfectly relevant.
However, you and others really should try to get over your obsession with Wolfram's supposed lack of citations. Yes it does seem he missed a bit of what was going on in parallel during the decade plus he was buried in his own research, but the end product was a book, not an academic paper, and its copious notes do provide valuable coverage of the history prior to the early '90s.
Wolfram's earlier systematic research on the classification of one dimensional cellular automata was seminal to the field, turning it from something only seen as fit for mathematical recreations columns in the early '80s to one of the pillars of the rise of complex systems research in the late '80s. (I was an interested participant in both phases.)