I really don't understand how people can have become so blaze so quickly about such wonders, both of nature and technology.
Sure there will be more to come, but that image alone is the best "WOW" I've had in a while, at least in the intellectually satisfying but not invented here category.
Thanks for posting it, and to the poster of the clickable link for lazy people like me.
Just to keep this slightly on topic I should mention that I have had little symapthy for Sun since they rolled over on NeWS and killed our fledgling development business by taking 14 months to pay an invoice, but that was all before the end of the cold-war of which you speak:
Just curious...was the outcome of the cold-war unsatisfactory in your opinion?
I'm not trying to speak for the parent, but rather for my elderly mother whose opinion I heard at some length this week.
She has every right to an informed opinion, having at one point chosen to live in what was still then East Germany for several years.
She makes a convincing case that it was Russia that won that part of WWII which paused in 1945, but that Korea, Vietnam and other skirmishes were in reality just WWII continuing. It was certainly the Russians who took the losses and the Russians who first pushed Germany and Japan back into and beyond their historic borders, but the Americans, who had kept themselves safe from early losses while playing both sides, eventually jumped in on the coat tails of the gallant and then still significant British Empire who had only just managed to hold off prosepctive invasions of Britain and Australia. So it was the Americans who were able to finally deter the Russians from completely driving the fascists from Europe and East Asia, as they would have otherwise done within months, and American capitalism which was ultimately shown to be at war with Russian socialism.
My own opinions have become rather jaundiced and impractical, but I am starting to think we might all be better off with one bottom-up political party than continuing to pretend there are useful differences between twin top down parties, not that bottom up has been tried much outside Switzerland. And if the real dividend of the cold war was to make shopping the most desirable human activity, then it may really not have been worth winning.
Why, exactly, would a perceived inferiority of iTunes and QuickTime on Windows make you hesitant to switch from Windows?
I can only guess that the parent poster is a developer and concerned that if they develop something that works well on OS X it won't port nicely to their perceived main target market.
Personally I expect only a Mac user would be likely to notice the difference.
I try to tell non-IT clients who need/want to present an image of quality through their own product/service offerings that switching their inhouse computing to Mac is a good starting point for promoting a quality mindset internally. But that doesn't help those who have bought the lie that cheaper means more profit.
As always, a more comprehensive presentation is on my TODO list.
We are still far from "the end of physics"
on
The Fabric of the Cosmos
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The most eloquent of the group promoting loop quantum gravity as an alternative to string theory, Lee Smolin, makes what I believe to be a significant point that string theories, like quantum theory but unlike general relativity, are background dependent, that is they just assume the existence of spacetime rather than establish it.
Yet there is something about all current approaches that smacks of epicycles. Great scientific theories have an elegance which appears to be missing from current attempts to bridge the gap between the micro and macro domains. Theory needs that kind of elegance and the wider comprehensibility which comes with it to be accessible to real critique.
If those who have not shared a lifetime of indoctrination are unable to play in the sand pit, the "experts" can get away with ever more circular cases of theoretical blinkers and instrumental blindness which only ever return the answers they are looking for, as well as all the funding advantages that come from having sidelined the nay sayers.
One side of me wants to suggest that our current infatuation with anything to do with information really might produce A New Kind of Science which breaks down a few barriers, but the only honest position is that the jury is still out on that one too.
Some of my own work hints that computer models of seemingly irreversible systems readily generate local time reversibility and that starting inflation may be a lot easier than stopping it, but leaves some other fundamental phenomena needing to be explained within the same frrame of reference. I mainly try such experiments to get a better feel for the state of play and right now my best estimate is that the next real revolution in physics might still be a generation away, but that one is coming.
Just six weeks ago I posted about countable and uncountable infinities in my/. journal, as much for future reference as because of anything in particular at the time.
I guess that future has now arrived.
Skipping past the fluff, my central point was that understanding the difference between countable and uncountable infinities is often really useful, but that even esteemed mathematicians often miss that point.
It really doesn't sound from this review that either the author or the reviewer really get that point either.
It's intriguing how the social significance of assembler programming has drifted over the decades.
When I met my first computer, an IBM 1440, Assembler was the only thing they taught us and we developed some very useful application software to run within its 12,000 characters of decimally addressed magnetic core memory.
Even through the transition to System/360, assembler was it, though there was Fortran on the 7044 at uni and PL/1 was coming as a promised advance on both Fortran and Cobol which others had started to use but our place did not touch.
Then Ed Dijkstra came to town and I was an immediate convert. Nowadays we would call in "professional development". But still we programmed in assembler, and I could not see any reason that my assembler code would not benefit from following the principles of structured programming.
Years later, a job interview became quite confused when the interviewer did not understand that assembler programming and systems programming had not always been synonymous and that there were application programmers who had also used assembler, especially back when any of the functionality we might now expect to find in an operating system was basically hard wired.
Now, I do know that "structured programming" is not strictly synonymous with "object oriented" but they are also the major then and now approached to encapsulation, which remains a good thing. I also know that Parrot is "byte code" rather than a true assembler language, and don't expect any of this will convince me to take Parrot up in preference to the real thing (Perl of course) at this late stage of my programming life.
Astronomical events happen on astronomical timescales, so if you accept the argument that even one dinosaur killer asteroid managed to get its orbit disrupted sufficiently to head our way, then there would most likely have been a few more disrupted by whatever caused that disruption, and/or by consequent events.
Now you put a large enough asteroid in an earth intersecting orbit, and ask yourself just how long it will take to either collide, or have its orbit further disrupted by a sufficiently near miss, and, I suspect, estimates of the order of hundreds of thousands of years would not be unreasonable. There is a lot of space out there.
(I still like the notion that there might have been a brief flourishing of technological dinosaur society which decided that the best way to benefit from the resources in the asteroid belt was to move some nearer to earth, but can't seriously imagine that there would be no other surviving evidence of such a society.)
One more reason to go back to the moon permanantly is so we can do a proper age census of significant craters where the archive isn't subject to plate tectonics.
Apparently just 75,000 years ago Lake Toba was the site of the biggest eruption in the last 2 million years. This site even provides a comparison to Yellowstone.
This eruption may not have caused more than local and marginal extinctions, but it certainly seems to have had a significant impact on the early expansion of homo sapiens sapiens who within 10,000 years had made it across a significant stretch of open sea to reach Australia. And that, of course, produced many extinctions.
Ok, the last place we are going to think about seeing something similar is deep underground in limestone caves, but, for what it's worth, we do have one well known example or spherical minerals being formed abiogenically in about the right size range.
Don't yet have a hypothesis as to how such things might find themselves scattered in a rock matrix.
I'm old enough and been around long enough that Episode 2 has quickly become and will most likely stay my favourite, because the brooding late adolescent Anakin is a character I have met over and over again in real life, and is portrayed convincingly enough within the terms of the overall generally fun scenario.
I have to wonder whether much of the reaction against both 1 and 2 here is because their portrayal of Anakin brings out emotional baggage that many younger Slashdotters have not yet managed to resolve.
NeWS is about the only thing that would get me to post this late in the life of a story, and with mod points to burn.
My then company, PICA Pty Ltd, worked with both Sun and Adobe on the respective fronts way back then. Sun encouraged us to devote our own resources to a Macintosh port of NeWS by contracting us to develop NeWS demonstration applications, some of which got a guernsey in Gosling, Rosenthal and Arden's NeWS Book.
We were a recognised early player in the PostScript game because I landed the job of doing a technical review of one of the first two Apple LaserWriters to reach Australia for Australian Macworld. That led to PICA becoming the local distributor for Adobe and other early desktop publishing products, and to me contributing the final chapter to Roth, ed's Real World PostScript.
In what may seem like several cases of deja vu, Michelle Arden was very keen to help us try to convince Adobe to open up control of the PostScript standard, yet within a couple of years Sun, having made themselves quite unpopular through the success of NFS, were then rolled by the rest of the Unix community who insisted on adopting X as the blessed window system ahead of the much superior NeWS.
Despite strong support from our main contact person, the inability to focus by Sun's Sydney office brought our efforts to a premature end, on one hand because they had initially tried to motivate us by suggesting we were in competition in the porting project with Keith Henson's Grasshopper Group. Then when I finally met Keith we became instant friends. Meanwhile Sun Australia also managed to hold up payment for our contracted work for 14 months.
Bottom line is that Sun's efforts with NeWS were in spite of Adobe. The significantly later Display PostScript did not borrow directly from NeWS in any way. If Sun ever gain a clue as to why they are being overrun by history, despite making a technical contribution over the years that has been disproportionate to their financial strength, one thing they could start with even at this late stage would be releasing NeWS to the public domain.
I have an aging friend who really might benefit from access to medical knowledge. He uses the net a lot, but almost entirely as a social network so he can worry about other people's problems.
Then, rather than watch TV, he has a radio scanner which he uses to listen in on police channels. So in this mostly peaceful city of over 3 million, it isn't surprising that every few days he hears something in some distant burb which scares him personally, proving that he too "can't handle too much information".
If more people really understood statistics there would be a lot less room for lies.
I had a bit to do with Wolfram in the late 1980s and have been actively following the NKS project. The essay currently on my discoloured home page is my relatively recent take on the subjects raised in your post, which is almost too good for a/. post.
The 2% I partly disagree with is that Wolfram is saying something important that Dawkins (and other politically correct authoritarians) would have us ignore in that the mechansisms for producing variation are at least as important as the mechanisms for selection in the grand sweep of evolutionary history, and that I'd rather call Stephen "different" than "weird".
It's most likely a dealing with a branch office of a branch office problem. Swinburne is in Melbourne, Australia, while Apple Australian's main office is in Sydney.
Over the years Apple Australia has managed to hire a few people technically competent to think outside the square, but more often, after such people have moved on to bigger challenges, they are left with a team which operates almost entirely on received wisdom.
Who wants to read about the plan for some that's in the middle of development?
When I can escape the clutches of IT I enjoy looking through housing estates that are under construction while the water supply, drains, sewers, electric supply, gas, telecommunications, roads, footpaths, etc. are being installed. Likewise for friends' new houses and renovations and public buildings when I can wangle access.
Following the Perl 6 development process is a lot like that. You gain some appreciation of how all those indispensible but ultimately hidden services were actually put into place. Then maybe you will be able to use them with a bit more insight and respect.
Of my several trips from Oz to North America, many of the best memories are of visiting with friends "from the industry", around half in the Bay area.
I'd better not start name dropping or I might never stop, but at least for my last visit in relatively early days of the commercial Internet, a couple of those were to people I only knew from the Net.
If there is a next time I will have no hope of getting around to all the Net friends I would like to visit.
Any time I receive an Excel spreadsheet I open it in RagTime which can equally export its spreadsheet components so they can be opened in Excel by clients.
RagTime isn't only a spreadsheet, but its spreadsheet components allow me to do more than I could ever imagine trying to do in Excel. It is also a layout package and thus provides a one stop tool for data intensive publishing such as price lists and the sports results systems I cut my teeth on.
RagTime was originally developed for the Mac only but the developers got badly burnt after investing heavily in a new version which made ground breaking use of Apple's soon to be abandoned OpenDoc component technology for which it was particularly well suited.
Understandably they were then a bit tardy getting an OS X version out, but that version is now at.4 release so it is most likely very stable. However I'm still waiting for a response from their nominated Australian distributors so I can acquire my own copy. Meanwhile I've been surviving on the free (for non commercial use) RagTime Solo which was their final version for OS 9.
... at its most fundamental level, as does Lee Smolin coming from a totally different perspective.
Wolfram's point with cellular automata is that they are much easier on human perception than networks are, and that they are both examples of a class of simple mechanisms that all do the same kind of interesting things.
Nah, I'm not suggesting Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science qualifies as science fiction, but rather noting the counterbalance provided by Greg Egan's Permutation City which I read as light relief while slowly working through NKS's copious notes... all this is quest of some ideas for pushing the envelope with cellular automata development... an area I keep returning to.
Egan posits the discovery of a cellular automata implementation, from which emerges, given limitless hardware, not just an analogue of biology but ultimately a (very) alien form of intelligence. There's not much in Egan's writings which could be seriously tackled during my life time. He presses fast forward way to hard for that. But at least he provides a gentler reminder than Wolfram that we have barely started exploring the possibilities.
I live and love IT, but really, it seemed near half the list was some or other minor step in the march of IT towards world domination, with some side bets on medicine, motor cars and financial instruments.
From memory, food got three mentions (frozen, micorwaved and fast/franchised) and construction two (tract housing and Gyprock).
What about glass skinned skyscrapers? If you used the approach they used to IT, I'm sure there could be several more discrete innovations which have made our modern CBDs possible.
But beyond that, and even more essentially American (at least before the rise of China in the last decade) is the interconnected web of manufacturing industry where things like JIT and TQM, of even, in its day, the humble fax, have made a huge difference.
I dunno what I can do but chuckle when a publication like Forbes starts to see the whole world as an IT application. WIRED I can imagine.
Richard, it is unfortunate your most informative post doesn't seam to have been widely noticed before this thread had slid into quiessence the way of most all Slashdot stories.
Slashdot isn't much of a place for reasoned debate, let alone conclusive debate, but it is just about the best place on the Internet to get the temperature of knowledgable people's feelings, so the most useful thing you could do is listen to what some of us have been saying with passion: E.164 (telephone) numbers provide a much less satisfactory human interface than does the DNS.
I write this sharing a flat with a colleague who is in the middle of half a year coding a voice over IP system, having myself posted above about Telstra's historic blindness to these issues, which I've been following closely for more than 20 years, and having gone looking for your "article on ENUM in Communications Convergence" only to find the article credited to "Geoff Huston, Telstra".
While Geoff has certainly proved to be politically adroit, he has never demonstrated that he has a clue as to what actually goes on in the real world where the real actions of real people ultimately determine the fate of everybody's best intentions.
I also know from first hand experience how easy it can be to get caught up with what you are sure is a great answer to the point where you can no longer ask yourself whether you are actually addressing a valid question. I think we could all happily name more than one arm of W3C, by way of familiar example, which has run off with the best of intentions in a direction the world will never follow.
So do what you must to facilitate the graceful deprecation of E.164 numbers as the IP network takes over the routing of more and more voice traffic, but please spare us the embarrassment of any more suggestions that humans might ever willingly use 8-10 digit strings in place of familiar user names and domain names.
At it's heart this is a product of the Telstra cultural malignancy whereby they actually believe that eight plus digit numbers define the pinnacle of usability.
I really should write a book on the sad quarter century of Telstra struggling and failing to turn online information into an income stream without ever coming to terms with the fundamental dynamics of the information age, so I shouldn't try to squeeze too many details into a SlashDot post before I run the facts past a libel lawyer.
As Australia's public telecomms carrier, Telstra's world view continues to blinker policy debate, even more so since our reactionary federal governement installed the even more reactionary Senator Richard Alston on top of the information and communications policy bureacracy, basically as an offshoot of his dabblings with the arts.
How amusing that Telstra has been thrown a lifeline by the rise of mobile (cellular) phone usage. They still don't have a clue that the biggest plus for mobile phones is that they enable you to stop addressing people by their numbers.
But it's still far and away the best place to live, even if the numbers don't always add up.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't understand how people can have become so blaze so quickly about such wonders, both of nature and technology.
Sure there will be more to come, but that image alone is the best "WOW" I've had in a while, at least in the intellectually satisfying but not invented here category.
Thanks for posting it, and to the poster of the clickable link for lazy people like me.
She has every right to an informed opinion, having at one point chosen to live in what was still then East Germany for several years.
She makes a convincing case that it was Russia that won that part of WWII which paused in 1945, but that Korea, Vietnam and other skirmishes were in reality just WWII continuing. It was certainly the Russians who took the losses and the Russians who first pushed Germany and Japan back into and beyond their historic borders, but the Americans, who had kept themselves safe from early losses while playing both sides, eventually jumped in on the coat tails of the gallant and then still significant British Empire who had only just managed to hold off prosepctive invasions of Britain and Australia. So it was the Americans who were able to finally deter the Russians from completely driving the fascists from Europe and East Asia, as they would have otherwise done within months, and American capitalism which was ultimately shown to be at war with Russian socialism.
My own opinions have become rather jaundiced and impractical, but I am starting to think we might all be better off with one bottom-up political party than continuing to pretend there are useful differences between twin top down parties, not that bottom up has been tried much outside Switzerland. And if the real dividend of the cold war was to make shopping the most desirable human activity, then it may really not have been worth winning.
Personally I expect only a Mac user would be likely to notice the difference.
I try to tell non-IT clients who need/want to present an image of quality through their own product/service offerings that switching their inhouse computing to Mac is a good starting point for promoting a quality mindset internally. But that doesn't help those who have bought the lie that cheaper means more profit.
Probably the most useful recent summary is: Irreversibility precedes reversibility.
As always, a more comprehensive presentation is on my TODO list.
The most eloquent of the group promoting loop quantum gravity as an alternative to string theory, Lee Smolin, makes what I believe to be a significant point that string theories, like quantum theory but unlike general relativity, are background dependent, that is they just assume the existence of spacetime rather than establish it.
Yet there is something about all current approaches that smacks of epicycles. Great scientific theories have an elegance which appears to be missing from current attempts to bridge the gap between the micro and macro domains. Theory needs that kind of elegance and the wider comprehensibility which comes with it to be accessible to real critique.
If those who have not shared a lifetime of indoctrination are unable to play in the sand pit, the "experts" can get away with ever more circular cases of theoretical blinkers and instrumental blindness which only ever return the answers they are looking for, as well as all the funding advantages that come from having sidelined the nay sayers.
One side of me wants to suggest that our current infatuation with anything to do with information really might produce A New Kind of Science which breaks down a few barriers, but the only honest position is that the jury is still out on that one too.
Some of my own work hints that computer models of seemingly irreversible systems readily generate local time reversibility and that starting inflation may be a lot easier than stopping it, but leaves some other fundamental phenomena needing to be explained within the same frrame of reference. I mainly try such experiments to get a better feel for the state of play and right now my best estimate is that the next real revolution in physics might still be a generation away, but that one is coming.
Just six weeks ago I posted about countable and uncountable infinities in my /. journal, as much for future reference as because of anything in particular at the time.
I guess that future has now arrived.
Skipping past the fluff, my central point was that understanding the difference between countable and uncountable infinities is often really useful, but that even esteemed mathematicians often miss that point.
It really doesn't sound from this review that either the author or the reviewer really get that point either.
It's intriguing how the social significance of assembler programming has drifted over the decades.
When I met my first computer, an IBM 1440, Assembler was the only thing they taught us and we developed some very useful application software to run within its 12,000 characters of decimally addressed magnetic core memory.
Even through the transition to System/360, assembler was it, though there was Fortran on the 7044 at uni and PL/1 was coming as a promised advance on both Fortran and Cobol which others had started to use but our place did not touch.
Then Ed Dijkstra came to town and I was an immediate convert. Nowadays we would call in "professional development". But still we programmed in assembler, and I could not see any reason that my assembler code would not benefit from following the principles of structured programming.
Years later, a job interview became quite confused when the interviewer did not understand that assembler programming and systems programming had not always been synonymous and that there were application programmers who had also used assembler, especially back when any of the functionality we might now expect to find in an operating system was basically hard wired.
Now, I do know that "structured programming" is not strictly synonymous with "object oriented" but they are also the major then and now approached to encapsulation, which remains a good thing. I also know that Parrot is "byte code" rather than a true assembler language, and don't expect any of this will convince me to take Parrot up in preference to the real thing (Perl of course) at this late stage of my programming life.
Astronomical events happen on astronomical timescales, so if you accept the argument that even one dinosaur killer asteroid managed to get its orbit disrupted sufficiently to head our way, then there would most likely have been a few more disrupted by whatever caused that disruption, and/or by consequent events.
Now you put a large enough asteroid in an earth intersecting orbit, and ask yourself just how long it will take to either collide, or have its orbit further disrupted by a sufficiently near miss, and, I suspect, estimates of the order of hundreds of thousands of years would not be unreasonable. There is a lot of space out there.
(I still like the notion that there might have been a brief flourishing of technological dinosaur society which decided that the best way to benefit from the resources in the asteroid belt was to move some nearer to earth, but can't seriously imagine that there would be no other surviving evidence of such a society.)
One more reason to go back to the moon permanantly is so we can do a proper age census of significant craters where the archive isn't subject to plate tectonics.
Apparently just 75,000 years ago Lake Toba was the site of the biggest eruption in the last 2 million years. This site even provides a comparison to Yellowstone.
This eruption may not have caused more than local and marginal extinctions, but it certainly seems to have had a significant impact on the early expansion of homo sapiens sapiens who within 10,000 years had made it across a significant stretch of open sea to reach Australia. And that, of course, produced many extinctions.
Ok, the last place we are going to think about seeing something similar is deep underground in limestone caves, but, for what it's worth, we do have one well known example or spherical minerals being formed abiogenically in about the right size range.
Don't yet have a hypothesis as to how such things might find themselves scattered in a rock matrix.
I'm old enough and been around long enough that Episode 2 has quickly become and will most likely stay my favourite, because the brooding late adolescent Anakin is a character I have met over and over again in real life, and is portrayed convincingly enough within the terms of the overall generally fun scenario.
I have to wonder whether much of the reaction against both 1 and 2 here is because their portrayal of Anakin brings out emotional baggage that many younger Slashdotters have not yet managed to resolve.
NeWS is about the only thing that would get me to post this late in the life of a story, and with mod points to burn.
.
.
My then company, PICA Pty Ltd, worked with both Sun and Adobe on the respective fronts way back then. Sun encouraged us to devote our own resources to a Macintosh port of NeWS by contracting us to develop NeWS demonstration applications, some of which got a guernsey in Gosling, Rosenthal and Arden's NeWS Book
We were a recognised early player in the PostScript game because I landed the job of doing a technical review of one of the first two Apple LaserWriters to reach Australia for Australian Macworld. That led to PICA becoming the local distributor for Adobe and other early desktop publishing products, and to me contributing the final chapter to Roth, ed's Real World PostScript
In what may seem like several cases of deja vu, Michelle Arden was very keen to help us try to convince Adobe to open up control of the PostScript standard, yet within a couple of years Sun, having made themselves quite unpopular through the success of NFS, were then rolled by the rest of the Unix community who insisted on adopting X as the blessed window system ahead of the much superior NeWS.
Despite strong support from our main contact person, the inability to focus by Sun's Sydney office brought our efforts to a premature end, on one hand because they had initially tried to motivate us by suggesting we were in competition in the porting project with Keith Henson's Grasshopper Group. Then when I finally met Keith we became instant friends. Meanwhile Sun Australia also managed to hold up payment for our contracted work for 14 months.
Bottom line is that Sun's efforts with NeWS were in spite of Adobe. The significantly later Display PostScript did not borrow directly from NeWS in any way. If Sun ever gain a clue as to why they are being overrun by history, despite making a technical contribution over the years that has been disproportionate to their financial strength, one thing they could start with even at this late stage would be releasing NeWS to the public domain.
I have an aging friend who really might benefit from access to medical knowledge. He uses the net a lot, but almost entirely as a social network so he can worry about other people's problems.
Then, rather than watch TV, he has a radio scanner which he uses to listen in on police channels. So in this mostly peaceful city of over 3 million, it isn't surprising that every few days he hears something in some distant burb which scares him personally, proving that he too "can't handle too much information".
If more people really understood statistics there would be a lot less room for lies.
I had a bit to do with Wolfram in the late 1980s and have been actively following the NKS project. The essay currently on my discoloured home page is my relatively recent take on the subjects raised in your post, which is almost too good for a /. post.
The 2% I partly disagree with is that Wolfram is saying something important that Dawkins (and other politically correct authoritarians) would have us ignore in that the mechansisms for producing variation are at least as important as the mechanisms for selection in the grand sweep of evolutionary history, and that I'd rather call Stephen "different" than "weird".
More strictly
Life emulates Rule 22
Rule 22 emulates Rule 90
Rule 90 emulates Rule 90 recursively
But you really did not want to know that.
It's most likely a dealing with a branch office of a branch office problem. Swinburne is in Melbourne, Australia, while Apple Australian's main office is in Sydney.
Over the years Apple Australia has managed to hire a few people technically competent to think outside the square, but more often, after such people have moved on to bigger challenges, they are left with a team which operates almost entirely on received wisdom.
Following the Perl 6 development process is a lot like that. You gain some appreciation of how all those indispensible but ultimately hidden services were actually put into place. Then maybe you will be able to use them with a bit more insight and respect.
Of my several trips from Oz to North America, many of the best memories are of visiting with friends "from the industry", around half in the Bay area.
I'd better not start name dropping or I might never stop, but at least for my last visit in relatively early days of the commercial Internet, a couple of those were to people I only knew from the Net.
If there is a next time I will have no hope of getting around to all the Net friends I would like to visit.
Any time I receive an Excel spreadsheet I open it in RagTime which can equally export its spreadsheet components so they can be opened in Excel by clients.
.4 release so it is most likely very stable. However I'm still waiting for a response from their nominated Australian distributors so I can acquire my own copy. Meanwhile I've been surviving on the free (for non commercial use) RagTime Solo which was their final version for OS 9.
RagTime isn't only a spreadsheet, but its spreadsheet components allow me to do more than I could ever imagine trying to do in Excel. It is also a layout package and thus provides a one stop tool for data intensive publishing such as price lists and the sports results systems I cut my teeth on.
RagTime was originally developed for the Mac only but the developers got badly burnt after investing heavily in a new version which made ground breaking use of Apple's soon to be abandoned OpenDoc component technology for which it was particularly well suited.
Understandably they were then a bit tardy getting an OS X version out, but that version is now at
... at its most fundamental level, as does Lee Smolin coming from a totally different perspective.
Wolfram's point with cellular automata is that they are much easier on human perception than networks are, and that they are both examples of a class of simple mechanisms that all do the same kind of interesting things.
Nah, I'm not suggesting Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science qualifies as science fiction, but rather noting the counterbalance provided by Greg Egan's Permutation City which I read as light relief while slowly working through NKS's copious notes ... all this is quest of some ideas for pushing the envelope with cellular automata development ... an area I keep returning to.
Egan posits the discovery of a cellular automata implementation, from which emerges, given limitless hardware, not just an analogue of biology but ultimately a (very) alien form of intelligence. There's not much in Egan's writings which could be seriously tackled during my life time. He presses fast forward way to hard for that. But at least he provides a gentler reminder than Wolfram that we have barely started exploring the possibilities.
I live and love IT, but really, it seemed near half the list was some or other minor step in the march of IT towards world domination, with some side bets on medicine, motor cars and financial instruments.
From memory, food got three mentions (frozen, micorwaved and fast/franchised) and construction two (tract housing and Gyprock).
What about glass skinned skyscrapers? If you used the approach they used to IT, I'm sure there could be several more discrete innovations which have made our modern CBDs possible.
But beyond that, and even more essentially American (at least before the rise of China in the last decade) is the interconnected web of manufacturing industry where things like JIT and TQM, of even, in its day, the humble fax, have made a huge difference.
I dunno what I can do but chuckle when a publication like Forbes starts to see the whole world as an IT application. WIRED I can imagine.
I reckon that is very much on topic.
But you might need to be an Australian and a Stones fan to understand why.
Time to go help ensure the party in power federally don't sneak back into our state.
s/illegal/unauthorised/g
Richard, it is unfortunate your most informative post doesn't seam to have been widely noticed before this thread had slid into quiessence the way of most all Slashdot stories.
Slashdot isn't much of a place for reasoned debate, let alone conclusive debate, but it is just about the best place on the Internet to get the temperature of knowledgable people's feelings, so the most useful thing you could do is listen to what some of us have been saying with passion: E.164 (telephone) numbers provide a much less satisfactory human interface than does the DNS.
I write this sharing a flat with a colleague who is in the middle of half a year coding a voice over IP system, having myself posted above about Telstra's historic blindness to these issues, which I've been following closely for more than 20 years, and having gone looking for your "article on ENUM in Communications Convergence" only to find the article credited to "Geoff Huston, Telstra".
While Geoff has certainly proved to be politically adroit, he has never demonstrated that he has a clue as to what actually goes on in the real world where the real actions of real people ultimately determine the fate of everybody's best intentions.
I also know from first hand experience how easy it can be to get caught up with what you are sure is a great answer to the point where you can no longer ask yourself whether you are actually addressing a valid question. I think we could all happily name more than one arm of W3C, by way of familiar example, which has run off with the best of intentions in a direction the world will never follow.
So do what you must to facilitate the graceful deprecation of E.164 numbers as the IP network takes over the routing of more and more voice traffic, but please spare us the embarrassment of any more suggestions that humans might ever willingly use 8-10 digit strings in place of familiar user names and domain names.
At it's heart this is a product of the Telstra cultural malignancy whereby they actually believe that eight plus digit numbers define the pinnacle of usability.
I really should write a book on the sad quarter century of Telstra struggling and failing to turn online information into an income stream without ever coming to terms with the fundamental dynamics of the information age, so I shouldn't try to squeeze too many details into a SlashDot post before I run the facts past a libel lawyer.
As Australia's public telecomms carrier, Telstra's world view continues to blinker policy debate, even more so since our reactionary federal governement installed the even more reactionary Senator Richard Alston on top of the information and communications policy bureacracy, basically as an offshoot of his dabblings with the arts.
How amusing that Telstra has been thrown a lifeline by the rise of mobile (cellular) phone usage. They still don't have a clue that the biggest plus for mobile phones is that they enable you to stop addressing people by their numbers.
But it's still far and away the best place to live, even if the numbers don't always add up.