I think if you start to break the problem up into to more manageable parts it starts to become realistic (I know, I know, forest for the trees and all that). One of your points was about universities, but we have already started to build portable and distributed systems of information management (open source search engines like Lucene, or presentation/collaboration systems Media Wiki). So the fact that a university has complex administration and takes up a lot of space on Earth doesn't mean it has to on Mars. We are approaching a point where it might be possible to export and backup all of humanity's knowledge in a device as small as a laptop. Imagine what it could do for the world if while pursuing this larger goal we gained the ability to put a university into the hands of someone with access sun light.
As for the ability to fix or replicate that laptop on Mars, that is a valid point but not necessarily a deal breaker in building a sustainable outpost. Mr. Aldrin is advocating that we start to think bigger, and I think his aspirations for humanity are in line with a more prosperous and exciting future that befits everyone.
Is there an emoticon for standing up and applauding a well written and totally spot on comment? You sir deserve it. The really sad thing is that people who understand and value natural resources don't need to be told why it is important to use less, and recycle. For us, even if global warming was completely out of our hands we would still strive to live less resource demanding lives. The people who actually need to be scared by global warming (or resource depletion) are the same people who take aim at the messenger without out acknowledging the message. It's really frightening how much we will have to lose before some people see what they have thrown away.
The web servers you linked to all require an intervening computer to actual connect them to a network (the first one seems to be WAMP on a USB drive, as it requires a copy of Windows to run). They are "web servers" in the same way that Apache is a "web server". This device is totally self contained, requiring only power and a Ethernet cable. And damn impressive. It might be clearer to refer to this as a really small "web serving computer", the Sun article would still take the cake as the smallest web server in my book, but then this one wins because of it's ease of implementation. As a side scary note, image a tiny bit more power and a second Ethernet jack on this thing. Yo cold set it up to sit as a proxy for a real production web server adding a few lines of malicious JavaScript to any outgoing HTML page. A device that small, with that purpose, would likely go undetected by most competent server administrators. Kinda makes those keyboard loggers seem tame. -Jason
At Radio Mixtape we let people create personal play lists out of promotional material and then share those play lists freely. And so far it has turned out that music labels are receptive. Our user base has grown to over 2,000 mixtapers already, and we have streamed music over 30,000 times now. It couldn't be easier, we even have the ability to swap mixtapes from a cell phone. 2007 really is shaping up to be the year of the end of DRM!
-Jason
I think Barbra Baxter is trying to play on peoples fears in a kick back for campaign contributions. Goes to show the culture of corruption is in both major parties.
Well I think she's going to need all the campaign contributions she can get because at least for now, Barbra Boxer is the democratic senator of California.:P
-Jason
Over at Radio Mixtape you can already share music for free (as non DRMed MP3 files), we even have a lot of bands that you already know (thanks to a deal with Sub Pop), and we are growing every day. In a few weeks we are going to announce a new service called mixbox.mobi where you can swap mix tapes from your cell phone, so you have music swapping, from a device that the hot girl is likly to actually have.
-Jason
You know if you like the music sharing, but hate the DRM, there are other solutions. Check out Radio Mixtape. You can create play lists from full length MP3 audio files that artists designate (we even have Sub Pop's promotional catalog, something the Zune claims to come pre-loaded with). Mix tapes can be embedded in MySpace profiles as Flash Widgets, or Blogs as JavaScript widgets. Everything is free and information about downloads and sharing are provided back to the artist directly (and all "buy album" links are in direct control of the artists, some link to Amazon, some to thier own label others even to iTunes). It's free for artists and free for fans, and it works on absolutely every portable audio player. You don't need to sell your sole to Microsoft just to share good music.
-Jason
Radio Mixtape uses a Flash 6 applet that pulls down a XML document parses it and displays it information. I'd call that XML support, now if you meant XSLT or XPath support I might agree with you, anyone have experience with that one? -Jason
At Radio Mixtape (disclaimer, this is one of my sites), we use both technologies. Our site is accessible in most modern browsers (even cell phones) for browsing, downloading, and sharing so a reliance on Ajax and Flash is out of the question. However for building a mixtape (why our site is useful to most of our users) we use a flash applet(is that the right word) to display the selected tracks (it's really cool, the tracks are drawn on a cassette jacket in a handwriting font) by an XML feed. This gives us font embedding, guaranteed placement, total control over the look and feel and even back button support. However when you want to reorder the tracks you selected you are taken to a page that uses a simple drag and drop Javascript library and makes XMLHTTPRequest calles to save the changes in track order every time you drop a song in a new position. For sites like Radio Mixtape is has to be a balance, not everything looks good or works right in JavaScript+CSS+HTML, and Flash can actually be overkill for simple things.
-Jason
Short answer: No. Long answer: No, you idiot. Can't you see the difference between a large pool of water and a small crystal of silicon, or whatever? Honestly, Slashdot seems to be full of scientifically illiterate morons at the moment.
Good thing rational, intelligent adults who are capable of civil discourse are not in short supply! To address the difference you noted about a large pool of water and a small crystal of silicon (or whatever), isn't it possible to consider displacing atoms by the calculated application of converging waves of energy? Feel free of course to dismiss this question if I am violating some fundamental law of physics. Though if it is ridiculus, I would at least be interested in learning why.
-Jason
These scientists can apply an amazingly controlled level of force to a specific point on a 2-D surface across something a unpredictable as the surface of water. Imagine bringing this down to nanotechnology level, could the same principles allow someone to sculpt an object out of individual atoms from the center out? -Jason
Radio Mix Tape is a new service that lets people make mix tapes, and swap them. Entirely out of the kind of free tracks that bands put on their website. And its starting to gain support from artists. Big ones too. On yeah and we now have fancy Blog Widgets (checkout this blog here
-Jason
P.S. Yes I own it, I made it, but we have a team working hard on our 1.0 version and I am extremely proud of it.
Just two. As founder / CTO of my company I do all the interactive server side programming and I have a brilliantly talented designer create the CSS files and do layout. But it's really a full company approach. While we are a web services company we are far from a "dot com", most of our sales are though direct conversations and conventions. Our website is like a quick brochure to send to prospective clients and a great place to keep our current clients informed about our development. Because we see our website as a communication method, our sales department has continuous input (they after all will be sending it out to prospective clients often in advance of actually meeting them, so they need to know what it says and I value their input on how it was received). And even though the website pales in comparison to our deployed apps (which contain over 60,000 lines of code now and over 400 "web pages", compared to the 15 pages that make up our "site") we all agree that web pages are like business cards (appearance matters). So budgeting for our website is hard to separate, it fills a necessary role in our business and therefore everyone (currently only 6 people) has a role in maintaining it.
Maybe that is what you need to convey to that middle manager, that your company's website is a sales tool, not an expense. -Jason
Oh yeah? I owned a TurboExpress, damn that thing was expensive, but a brilliant system. And in what was perhaps the the single most retarded moment of my life, I sold it to a friend to buy an Atari Jaguar back when they where only launched in San Francisco and New York. I know, I'm not that bright. -Jason
On one hand I totally agree with you. I started 4 years ago (while a student at a Community College) to build a student service portal for my school. Knowing that I would need to balance limited funds with high production quality, I selected Java, Tomcat and MySQL (with a "back of my mind" emphasis on someday working on Oracle and SQL Server). Now that was a full production environment with no upfront costs (except the time investment needed to learn how to full utilize the software). Now 4 years later I have my own company, I market elements of my student portal for for as much as $20K. But there is an obvious limit to how far I can take this code-base. As solid and dependable as it is, the kinds of clients I am talking to now are interested in a greater support network underneath it. They want to see a company with more employees than just me, and they want to be able to know that some technician can assist them within 24 hours (hard to do when I'm on the road presenting, a Blackberry only goes so far). The fact is the number of concurrent clients that I can handle time wise produces less than I need to handle them (resource wise), and to price my software higher only produces fewer sales. The solution, raise money, and build the support base needed to sell my software closer to it's full market value. Along with my family's financial support and some great mentoring from my business partner, I built a collection of products for around $40,000 (along with a bunch of temp jobs and programming contracts to help pay rent). That would not have been possible if it weren't for the free software movement, and the amazing amount of documentation found on the web, but to market this software as anything other than the "budget solution" we need marketing capitol. Social Network business models can change this arrangement for some markets, but most traditional businesses still require investment. -Jason
Ok this is going to sound like I'm somehow connected to Etsy, but just in case anyone decides to trust me that I'm not, I have to say having just spent the last 30 minutes gawking at some of the coolest Flash UI I have ever seen these guys (or gals, I haven't figured out yet) have one hell of a web site. I really think they are on a strong track to getting bought out by a Yahoo or even Ebay (for just there brilliant way of browsing user contributed content and favorites) I don't think they would be in Google's radar (just considering their aversion to Flash) but who knows. Is anyone else doing this kind of stuff in any other internet space? I don't know what their long term plans are but they are doing everything right in getting noticed. And I'm saying this as the CEO of my own web company (who is thankfully not in their industry, other wise I would be quite intimidated) -Jason
If we don't have email for this role, then we need something similar to replace it.
What about things like MySpace? Is that's the core of the issue, that valuable and sensitive information comes of the same channel as the ten funniest pictures of cats falling. If someone thinks that a serious offer to change ones PayPal password would arrive over MySpace as a last resort then that fool and their money really should be separated.
-Jason
I was amazed to hear that there is an Applet API for DOM interaction. Is there any work to make this cross browser compatible? I develop web applications for Higher Ed and I am constantly battling the limitations of ADA compliance in making fun interactive web pages. I can see how something like this could make an excellent "Web 2.0" ish version that didn't rely on redoing every page in Java Script (thus creating a nightmare of code to support) It seems like you could build some extremely powerful web apps that went far beyond the capabilities of Java Script and used better persistence patterns and stood a much better chance of being cross browser compatible. This is defiantly worth investigating. -Jason
Slashdot Mirror
I think if you start to break the problem up into to more manageable parts it starts to become realistic (I know, I know, forest for the trees and all that). One of your points was about universities, but we have already started to build portable and distributed systems of information management (open source search engines like Lucene, or presentation/collaboration systems Media Wiki). So the fact that a university has complex administration and takes up a lot of space on Earth doesn't mean it has to on Mars. We are approaching a point where it might be possible to export and backup all of humanity's knowledge in a device as small as a laptop. Imagine what it could do for the world if while pursuing this larger goal we gained the ability to put a university into the hands of someone with access sun light. As for the ability to fix or replicate that laptop on Mars, that is a valid point but not necessarily a deal breaker in building a sustainable outpost. Mr. Aldrin is advocating that we start to think bigger, and I think his aspirations for humanity are in line with a more prosperous and exciting future that befits everyone.
It warms my heart to see Nina Totenberg come up in conversation : )
[Yes, this means you, Microsoft. I designed my enterprise accounting system to run on Bob and I've been hearing about it ever since...]
Brilliant! Why can't I mod this up as hilarious while still granting props for the insightful first part.
Is there an emoticon for standing up and applauding a well written and totally spot on comment? You sir deserve it. The really sad thing is that people who understand and value natural resources don't need to be told why it is important to use less, and recycle. For us, even if global warming was completely out of our hands we would still strive to live less resource demanding lives. The people who actually need to be scared by global warming (or resource depletion) are the same people who take aim at the messenger without out acknowledging the message. It's really frightening how much we will have to lose before some people see what they have thrown away.
The web servers you linked to all require an intervening computer to actual connect them to a network (the first one seems to be WAMP on a USB drive, as it requires a copy of Windows to run). They are "web servers" in the same way that Apache is a "web server". This device is totally self contained, requiring only power and a Ethernet cable. And damn impressive. It might be clearer to refer to this as a really small "web serving computer", the Sun article would still take the cake as the smallest web server in my book, but then this one wins because of it's ease of implementation. As a side scary note, image a tiny bit more power and a second Ethernet jack on this thing. Yo cold set it up to sit as a proxy for a real production web server adding a few lines of malicious JavaScript to any outgoing HTML page. A device that small, with that purpose, would likely go undetected by most competent server administrators. Kinda makes those keyboard loggers seem tame.
-Jason
I tried an OS based on a microkernel and I observed that it was slow, hard to program, and not in use commercially first hand.
Have fun with that one guys!
NO.
:P
The first answer will be 42.
That, it turns out wasn't the hard part, it's figuring out the query!
-Jason
At Radio Mixtape we let people create personal play lists out of promotional material and then share those play lists freely. And so far it has turned out that music labels are receptive. Our user base has grown to over 2,000 mixtapers already, and we have streamed music over 30,000 times now. It couldn't be easier, we even have the ability to swap mixtapes from a cell phone. 2007 really is shaping up to be the year of the end of DRM! -Jason
I think Barbra Baxter is trying to play on peoples fears in a kick back for campaign contributions. Goes to show the culture of corruption is in both major parties. :P
Well I think she's going to need all the campaign contributions she can get because at least for now, Barbra Boxer is the democratic senator of California.
-Jason
Over at Radio Mixtape you can already share music for free (as non DRMed MP3 files), we even have a lot of bands that you already know (thanks to a deal with Sub Pop), and we are growing every day. In a few weeks we are going to announce a new service called mixbox.mobi where you can swap mix tapes from your cell phone, so you have music swapping, from a device that the hot girl is likly to actually have. -Jason
You know if you like the music sharing, but hate the DRM, there are other solutions. Check out Radio Mixtape. You can create play lists from full length MP3 audio files that artists designate (we even have Sub Pop's promotional catalog, something the Zune claims to come pre-loaded with). Mix tapes can be embedded in MySpace profiles as Flash Widgets, or Blogs as JavaScript widgets. Everything is free and information about downloads and sharing are provided back to the artist directly (and all "buy album" links are in direct control of the artists, some link to Amazon, some to thier own label others even to iTunes). It's free for artists and free for fans, and it works on absolutely every portable audio player. You don't need to sell your sole to Microsoft just to share good music. -Jason
Radio Mixtape uses a Flash 6 applet that pulls down a XML document parses it and displays it information. I'd call that XML support, now if you meant XSLT or XPath support I might agree with you, anyone have experience with that one?
-Jason
At Radio Mixtape (disclaimer, this is one of my sites), we use both technologies. Our site is accessible in most modern browsers (even cell phones) for browsing, downloading, and sharing so a reliance on Ajax and Flash is out of the question. However for building a mixtape (why our site is useful to most of our users) we use a flash applet(is that the right word) to display the selected tracks (it's really cool, the tracks are drawn on a cassette jacket in a handwriting font) by an XML feed. This gives us font embedding, guaranteed placement, total control over the look and feel and even back button support. However when you want to reorder the tracks you selected you are taken to a page that uses a simple drag and drop Javascript library and makes XMLHTTPRequest calles to save the changes in track order every time you drop a song in a new position. For sites like Radio Mixtape is has to be a balance, not everything looks good or works right in JavaScript+CSS+HTML, and Flash can actually be overkill for simple things. -Jason
Short answer: No. Long answer: No, you idiot. Can't you see the difference between a large pool of water and a small crystal of silicon, or whatever? Honestly, Slashdot seems to be full of scientifically illiterate morons at the moment.
Good thing rational, intelligent adults who are capable of civil discourse are not in short supply! To address the difference you noted about a large pool of water and a small crystal of silicon (or whatever), isn't it possible to consider displacing atoms by the calculated application of converging waves of energy? Feel free of course to dismiss this question if I am violating some fundamental law of physics. Though if it is ridiculus, I would at least be interested in learning why. -Jason
These scientists can apply an amazingly controlled level of force to a specific point on a 2-D surface across something a unpredictable as the surface of water. Imagine bringing this down to nanotechnology level, could the same principles allow someone to sculpt an object out of individual atoms from the center out?
-Jason
Take THAT Moore's Law! Right now I bet Gordon's mind is being blown!
-Jason
Radio Mix Tape is a new service that lets people make mix tapes, and swap them. Entirely out of the kind of free tracks that bands put on their website. And its starting to gain support from artists. Big ones too. On yeah and we now have fancy Blog Widgets (checkout this blog here
-Jason
P.S. Yes I own it, I made it, but we have a team working hard on our 1.0 version and I am extremely proud of it.
I, for one, welcome our new Chinese Google Overlords
New?
-Jason
Just two. As founder / CTO of my company I do all the interactive server side programming and I have a brilliantly talented designer create the CSS files and do layout. But it's really a full company approach. While we are a web services company we are far from a "dot com", most of our sales are though direct conversations and conventions. Our website is like a quick brochure to send to prospective clients and a great place to keep our current clients informed about our development. Because we see our website as a communication method, our sales department has continuous input (they after all will be sending it out to prospective clients often in advance of actually meeting them, so they need to know what it says and I value their input on how it was received). And even though the website pales in comparison to our deployed apps (which contain over 60,000 lines of code now and over 400 "web pages", compared to the 15 pages that make up our "site") we all agree that web pages are like business cards (appearance matters). So budgeting for our website is hard to separate, it fills a necessary role in our business and therefore everyone (currently only 6 people) has a role in maintaining it.
Maybe that is what you need to convey to that middle manager, that your company's website is a sales tool, not an expense.
-Jason
www.bluejaycs.com
Oh yeah? I owned a TurboExpress, damn that thing was expensive, but a brilliant system. And in what was perhaps the the single most retarded moment of my life, I sold it to a friend to buy an Atari Jaguar back when they where only launched in San Francisco and New York. I know, I'm not that bright.
-Jason
On one hand I totally agree with you. I started 4 years ago (while a student at a Community College) to build a student service portal for my school. Knowing that I would need to balance limited funds with high production quality, I selected Java, Tomcat and MySQL (with a "back of my mind" emphasis on someday working on Oracle and SQL Server). Now that was a full production environment with no upfront costs (except the time investment needed to learn how to full utilize the software). Now 4 years later I have my own company, I market elements of my student portal for for as much as $20K.
But there is an obvious limit to how far I can take this code-base. As solid and dependable as it is, the kinds of clients I am talking to now are interested in a greater support network underneath it. They want to see a company with more employees than just me, and they want to be able to know that some technician can assist them within 24 hours (hard to do when I'm on the road presenting, a Blackberry only goes so far). The fact is the number of concurrent clients that I can handle time wise produces less than I need to handle them (resource wise), and to price my software higher only produces fewer sales. The solution, raise money, and build the support base needed to sell my software closer to it's full market value.
Along with my family's financial support and some great mentoring from my business partner, I built a collection of products for around $40,000 (along with a bunch of temp jobs and programming contracts to help pay rent). That would not have been possible if it weren't for the free software movement, and the amazing amount of documentation found on the web, but to market this software as anything other than the "budget solution" we need marketing capitol.
Social Network business models can change this arrangement for some markets, but most traditional businesses still require investment.
-Jason
Ok this is going to sound like I'm somehow connected to Etsy, but just in case anyone decides to trust me that I'm not, I have to say having just spent the last 30 minutes gawking at some of the coolest Flash UI I have ever seen these guys (or gals, I haven't figured out yet) have one hell of a web site. I really think they are on a strong track to getting bought out by a Yahoo or even Ebay (for just there brilliant way of browsing user contributed content and favorites) I don't think they would be in Google's radar (just considering their aversion to Flash) but who knows. Is anyone else doing this kind of stuff in any other internet space? I don't know what their long term plans are but they are doing everything right in getting noticed. And I'm saying this as the CEO of my own web company (who is thankfully not in their industry, other wise I would be quite intimidated)
-Jason
That's no moon.. It's a...
:P
Oh wait a minute, yes that is a moon, my bad.
-Jason
If we don't have email for this role, then we need something similar to replace it. What about things like MySpace? Is that's the core of the issue, that valuable and sensitive information comes of the same channel as the ten funniest pictures of cats falling. If someone thinks that a serious offer to change ones PayPal password would arrive over MySpace as a last resort then that fool and their money really should be separated. -Jason
I was amazed to hear that there is an Applet API for DOM interaction. Is there any work to make this cross browser compatible? I develop web applications for Higher Ed and I am constantly battling the limitations of ADA compliance in making fun interactive web pages. I can see how something like this could make an excellent "Web 2.0" ish version that didn't rely on redoing every page in Java Script (thus creating a nightmare of code to support) It seems like you could build some extremely powerful web apps that went far beyond the capabilities of Java Script and used better persistence patterns and stood a much better chance of being cross browser compatible. This is defiantly worth investigating.
-Jason