I remember having to make our own abacus in kindergarden with bits of bomb fragments left from the war, we walked 60 miles to the outhouse before breakfast, paid the teacher to beat us to death in cold blood and when we got home we had to work 15 hrs straight in a coal mine to earn the lump of frozen lard we'd give to our parents so we were skinny enough for 29 of us all to sleep in one bed on a rubbish tip! And only then were we allow to watch a light bulb being turned on in the master's house on top of the hill overlooking the dump.
> People who believe in anything that isn't objectively verifiable, do not believe because of logic.
Though that doesn't necessarily make what they believe untrue, just unverifiable.
For instance can you prove that you love your wife, that you are happy, that you aren't thinking of changing jobs, that you are an optimist? You can only provide circumstantial evidence at best, but no absolute, verifiable proof af any of these or a myriad other things you assume to be true in your life.
How true is the love that you feel for your wife or child? It's not provable in an absolute or computational manner - does that really matter? You believe it anyway.
Someone's bound to say you can measure love with enough electrodes on someone's head. Fine. Then there's even more subtle things beliefs like the sanctity of human life. Personally I don't need evidence to believe these things.
It's important to determine why someone makes spelling, grammer and syntax errors. Indeed, their very choice of words and sentence construction (even if correct English) tells us a lot.
People make errors for many reasons, including:
1. They are in a rush and content is more important than correctness. 2. They do it on purpose in rebellion against perceived authoritarian figures (from their childhood etc). 3. They want to make a specific point or joke (eg referencing "pr0n"). 4. They don't know any better. 5. They didn't notice the mistakes (for some reason at that time) though normally they would. 6. They don't really care about producing correct written English.
I'm sure there are other reasons. Without a doubt I'm sure most readers make value judgements regarding the writer based on their sentence structure, choice of words, punctuation etc.
I'm equally sure many readers of Slashdot feel they shouldn't be judged on their writing style. However, the truth in the world is the "face" you present to people really is all they have to go on to determine in some way what the writer is like as a person.
In a scientific journal one does not try to read between the lines (usually) to determine what sort of person the writer is like (unlike there is something unusual about the text).
On Slashdot, many of the posts are opinion related. Many are also purely about technical issues, though most, even if by relation to other posts, hold valuable content regarding the writer. For example, earlier posts regarding the 128k Apple Mac were gleefully given by people who used them. Readers would immediately think about how old that person was and that changes how we process the rest of a post - even if the content is technical. Or a technical point refuting an earlier technical point, depending on it's conciseness and thoroughness might cause the reader to decide the latter writer knew what he was talking about and is more experienced and is to be respected. If the second post has poor grammer and spelling errors then we might tend to question their authority in this area.
This is just human nature.
There are always times we wish we'd written things differently before hittimg "Submit". Likewise the world is full of so many different people it's hard to determine how you will be interpreted some times. However, it's a good general rule of thumb to assume you will be judged on how you write, just as you're likely to be judged in real life on how you dress, walk, speak, groom etc. It'd be nice at times if life wasn't like that but it is.
My own personal pet peeve is when people add "already" at the end of a sentence. This is a recent US trend that was spread largely by the scriptwriters of "Friends". In most cases it adds no extra meaning or content. It does however identify the writer as a fan of "Friends" or perhaps easily influenced by recent cultural trends. But then, that's my personal judgement and shouldn't influence what you write! Of course, I'm sure people reading this post will put make all sorts of value judgements about me - but then, that'll just prove my point:-)
I'm curious how many books of the paper variety you (or rather the publisher told you) sold and how many on PayPalDownload? (I realise they're quite different books, still you seem to have a pretty clear view now of which you'd prefer)
The reason I ask is I have a nearly complete novel, a number of short stories and some scripts that I've become somewhat despondent over due to the uphill climb to traditional publishers. Your experiences seem to reinforce my perception (despite your having some cache to your name to help promotion) so I looked at some online publishers who wanted money (usually hundreds of dollars) and that just didn't feel right either. I'd left it for a year or so now untill reading your comments and wonder if it's worth putting time into these projects again.
It's good to see you've achieved some successes that are each stepping stones to the next adventure (whatever that is!)
I wish you well - there's just *got* to be a place for an articulate actor/artist who's self effacing manner yet technical savvy certainly endears you to the Slashdot, in not a wider, crowd.
I agree with other posters that it's largely about the example you set and keeping a balance.
I have 4 kids 13, 12, 10 and 9. The eldest (boy) hates sport and spends a lot of time on the computer and vaguely hopes to write computer games when he grows up. So I educate him on how to program. Now he knows what programming's about he wants to be a graphic artist (for games, of course). It's early days yet.
Daughter at 12 loves the Sims2 but loves playing outside and animals. She chats to her school friends online and hates RPG or FPSs.
10 yo boy is brilliant at getting through RPGs with minimal time (somehow only doing 1/5th of the things you're meant to do - game designers have to cater for little kids who are impatient I guess), he loves Warcraft but loses ever time when playing online. Thankfully he plays three different sports. He'll probably be the lead singer in a band or a soccer player!
10yo is the smartest of the lot by far and really doesn't like computers at all. He builds electronic kits (which we do together) and he reads and makes cubby houses in the back yard.
They're all different and all see me working on the computer from time to time and realise it's just another profession.
So if you're a new dad don't sweat too much because there's time to sort it out a little later - as long as you have a good relationship with your kids. Show by example that when you're needed away from the computer that you can walk away and attend to whatever (wife, kids etc). Also, just because you like computers doesn't mean they will and there's nothing wrong with that.
The only tech thing I insist on is my kids have a good general knowledge. They know in general how a computer or tv or radio or mobile phone works, they can spot spam email, they know locations of 20 or more major countries on a map of the world, know how to behave in a resturant, they know how to modify their behaviour if required when relating to other people, they know why fast food isn't generally good for you, what the stockmarket is and (broadly) how it works, how to calculate change exactly in the shop and question if it's wrong and that school stops after university (if they want to) but they have to start earning something to pay board when they finish high school.
These are the general knowledge ground rules children need to survive (in my opinion - they may beg to differ I'm sure once they're older!). I'm a strong believer in teaching them enough so they can make their own educated guesses about the things they'll face in life ie they need to know *how* to think, not *what* to think.
Above all is a need to be able to relate well with other people. Repeated studies show that ability to relate to others and handle your own feelings (emotional intelligence) is a far greater predictor of future success in life than general IQ type intelligence (or education).
Also(!) remember that by the time your kids are 8 or so then their internal thinking and personality, morals, ethics etc are pretty much set for life. From then on the child you knew is subsumed by the growing adult intellect which will forever by tainted/guided by that underlying child. It is very much worth getting it right in the early years because it is so hard (and painful) to make changes later in life (even as a teenager) though not impossible.
Actually I recall a guy from NASA giving a talk back in the 80s here in town. He was looking at the next generation after the shuttle. The calculations show a vertical (rocket powered) landing is less fuel expensive than the cost of adding wings that are needed for a horizontal landing. I recall following the DC-X development (early 90s?) which was also designed based on this efficiency based calculation. I'm not sure if this was part of Carmack's reasoning too (www.armadilloaerospace.com) as he's planning on using a parachute IIRC.
Or the other opposite: those who are scared to succeed. For some people that means too much in their lives will change and brings too many unknowns and they'd rather not have all that fuss.
I'll bet you anything you like that at least three people will follow up this post to confirm that they're installing Gentoo on an old 486DX/33 and that they're expecting it to finish compiling and be able to start up X in just another week or two...
Yup! I had an old FreeBSD 1.0 box (396SX/16 from about '90 I think, with 8MB RAM and 40MB disk) that used to have a linux 0.99r16 kernel on it and I'm rebuilding it to use as the house squid cache. It'd be cool to use one of those SIMM mounted embedded systems but this'll do the job. I hook 30metres of network cable to the shed out the back as the computer is so darn noisy it keeps the family awake at night. I did this at my last house and the cat loves it to sleep on in winter...
> Personally, I'm in favor of an olympic standard mayonaise...
But then, who really wants to level the playing field when being eaten by a crocodile? Garnishing is always tricky when you want to be eaten by a wild animal. Personally I find dressing like a penguin and dashing about the place making squarking noises always catches their attention.
This reminds me of the scientists in early 1900s who said it was impossible to get a rocket out of earth's gravity well, or Bill Gates saying no-one would ever need more than 640k of RAM, or the guy who said the markt for computers in the US was 4 and hence wasn't worth pursuing.
How much would you like to bet that in 50 yrs the majority of computer interfaces wont be 3D? Take a moment to think about the fact that 50 years ago there were no computer and black and white TV was just emerging. Now try to extrapolate that rate of change into the future remember that the rate of change is increasing.
I'm sure there'll be 2D displays of all sorts. I'm also sure things like retinal laser displays mounted on unobtrusive headgear will much more common. I've used one (at HITL at U of Washington) and it was the crispest, clearest image I've every seen (and I worked for SGI for several years so I know what a decent image looks like).
I agree VR's time hasn't come yet - but saying it won't ever happen is just plain shortsighted.
I've used a augmented reality headgear that showed a CT scanner cross section superimposed over a real person so I could see inside them. AR views of ultrasound data of foeteses are *much* clearer and easier to interpret (and hence not make mistakes in diagnosis) than normal ultrasound. Seeing that ultrasound compisited into a 3D model and AR projected onto the mother is truly awesome.
I've used good HMD (not the virtual boy with plastic lenses where the spherical aberration caused people under 12 to have stereopscopic vision problems for up to 30 minutes after use - the main reason it was pulled just before going to market) with low latency (10ms) high res displays.
Yes you get disoriented if you run around too much - better to stay in a chair - like driving, you get used to it.
Yes it is a *much* better and more natural way to play Quake.
Yes is still costs a lot and yes it's much better than it was 10 years ago.
Personally in 50 years I expect mobile phones, computers, PDAs etc will all be intergrated (with whoever knows what else) and will project over my vision either as a transparent display or I can flip the glasses down to block out extraneous vision.
The only thing you'll have to get used to is if this happens in 10 or 15 year rather than 50...
There's some formula here on Convenience inversely proportion to Security - but you need to find "reasonable" values for C and S. For many ppl this guys security is too inconvenient to bother with.
Also, as pointed out elsewhere, this guy seems to have a disproportionate sense of self importance. Sure it's fine to go to *some* lengths to stop a hacker (eg a firewall) rather than leave your home network wide open (assuming permenant Net connection).
At home I also try to have some security with 4 primary aged kids who download all sorts of crap off the Net. I have 3 XP boxes and one Linux box and make all family members have their own logins and passwords as we had so many fights when people look at other files and stuff like that.
The big problem I have is probably 80% of games the kids want to run only work if run as Administrator!! Many times I've tried changing permissions on files (usually games save data under/programfiles rather than in the user's own area) but this usually doesn't work. So when the kids want to play a game I have to log them in as administrator and then every few weeks I find someones done something like copied all of/programfiles to their desktop or moved all the mp3s we have to their own folder (or worse still, taken just some mp3s from the common directory we put them in).
But it's not just games. I have a friend with a multimedia company and most of the highend apps his people use also require to be run as Administrator, so you get employees screwing up their machine configs all the time.
It'll be a while before developers and users understand they can't expect to just sit down on a PC and do anything (beyond what they're meant to be doing).
I have taught the kids to use logins and save downloaded stuff to their own area. I can't teach the app/game developers this.
I never have this problem with Linux (despite some of unix's security shortcomings) but then the kids rarely use it as it doesn't have any games they want and the free office stuff isn't what they're used to using - basically it's only good for surfing the Net - so it's a last option if all other machines are in use [sigh]
All very true - but - please don't invite me to your place for dinner!!!!
Explains everything about our brains???
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Mapping the Mind
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· Score: 1
Oh come on now - it takes a fraction of a second to realise how little we know about people. It's a little like saying you know everything about computers because you have pulled one apart and worked out what all the components do and worked out how Windows pop up and the mouse can click on things on the screen and then This happens, or This.
This book doesn't touch anything about what motivates people to excel or how to overcome feelings of inadequacy or why they don't get on well with their siblings or why they can't keep a relationship together or why they sabotage their own success or why they try to keep up with the Joneses when they know the Joneses are unhappy or why they feel hollow in their successful job/family or why they have trouble talking to their kids etc etc etc.
Then there's the fact that most people in the world believe in something metaphysical (god, whatever) and most modern science (including the writer of this book it seems, and the reviewer) believes that those people are self delusional or just plain simpletons.
It reminds me of scienists at the end of the 18th century proclaiming man was on the verge of knowing everything there was to know about the universe, or those in the early 19th century who proved mathematically that rockets would not work and you could never escape Earth's gravity.
I hate to categorise but it seems the author and reviewer fall firmly into this genre of thinking. I guess one has to consider though that to both these people the contents of the books *are* complete and that's a wonderful thing to them to see their whole known world defined so nicely. The fact that most people see them as standing in a little world neatly cordoned off from most other people's reality is irrelevant to them as they do not see the rest of the world and trying to explain to them that it exists is a pointless exercise. Just like the patients in the book who refuse to acknowledge their own illness, trying to show a rational and intelligent person the narrowness of their thinking is pointless. I hat e to say it, but first off they have to "want" to see if there's anything beyond the walls they have defined around themselves.
I remember reading a review of a Compaq credit card size data storage device (no PDAs back then) that you tilted to scroll text. It only had two buttons I think. Anyone remember more details of this? I remember reading a review in a magazine (probably Byte).
You might look in to some test implementations that compiled Renderman into Pixel Shader language so it was implemented in hardware. There were problems (only 32bits fixed point I think). It was a few years back in a SIGGRAPH paper. Maybe the compilers have improved now to be useful. All renderers for 3D progs (softimage, maya, lightwave, 3dsmax etc) can work over a network. Most companies I've worked with on this have things set up to render overnight the latest version of the scenes being worked on. Many seem to be moving to linux for the workstations as it's good at most of the popular 3d tools (except Max I think) and is so much easier to control for batch processing, scripting etc. Look at BMRT for a start if you don't like your renderer.
Also, it's a mistake to assume a equal probability of matches with subsequent dates. Generally(!) people learn as they go on and even after 5 relationships your average person would have a much better idea of what they like and what they don't like and will tend to go out with people who are closer to their ideal than they would have earlier on. It becomes an optimisation problem rather than pure probability. There'd need to be some factors taken into account however like as you have more relationships that fail you might tend to be less likely to go out at all (too jaded) or too picky because you know just what you like. Or some people would purposely go out with someone who was different to the last person, on the assumption that if the last one didn't work then anything similar wouldn't work either.
Then there's also the problem that once you start to determine what a match actually is and closeness of matching then you bring up the issue of relativity and perception. For example a relationship that failed may have been very close to a match but the perception (ie what they thought they were after or would like) was invalid. Likewise some people would never go out with "that type of person" but might end up doing so and finding a match, much to their surprise, so selection criteria is an issue.
There's another factor also of time and that some people churn through one partner a month and others take years or decades or a lifetime to realise they're not with the right one and then (as mentioned earlier) they just can be bothered changing or chnage their perception and staywith what they've got. Some epople's perception/view changes over time anyway and they wake up one day and realise they're not in love and that's it and can't explain why.
Now role all this into one equation/theory and I suspect it'd be so darn complicated people will just go back to random bonking or "rules of thumb" (cough cough) which, at the end of the day, come down to a mixture of genetics and upbringing.
One final point is the "why" factor in searching for a match. (The why *after* a mtach is often different, again due to changed perspective or insight). Is the person searching because they want to leave home, want a mother figure, want children, want to control someone, want a house cleaner, want to be controlled, don't want to be alone etc etc. All these factors change the probabilities beyond simplistic calculations it seems this book covers.
Mind you for a humorous book it gets you thinking a bit:-)
Angel investors offer 100k to maybe 1m (it used to be 100-300k but times change). A friend and I had an idea for which we wrote the prototype over several years in our own time. It was good enough to get angel investing. We looked at several sources but chose a quasi-govt body in the end (this was '99). They were genuinely helpful. The next step is to get some big or strategic sales (ie to big name customers) then on the strength of that initial business, project outrageous numbers and get VC backing (to the tune of 1-5m usually).
We talked to many VCs but were happy with none or the deals they offered (basically they say "if it's so good and you need the money then give us at least 50%"). We pursued a much bigger funding deal (about $16m) but that fell through after about a year of negotiations.
Today I'm back into a 9-5 job but a lot wiser. The software still belongs to my friend and I and no-one has come out with a similar product.
A close friend also went down the same path but got 1m VC money, followed by a further 5m. Control of the conpmany went to the VCs. After 2 years the original two dvelopers had 8% each and one had been fired and the other hanging on by the skin of his teeth in a sidelined job at 100k salary whilst the VC appointed managers were on 160+100k annual bonuses+options. Too many pigs in the trough and the company died 2 1/2 yrs after starting.
Only about 5% of companies that get angel funding get VC backing. Only about 10% of VC backed company reach 5yrs age. Very very seldom there's a Cisco or such like that returns enormous rewards (though the founders were kicked out of that too in the end).
I wonder sometimes if we'd taken the VC money if I'd be happier. I'd've had to move cities and in all probability would have a huge salary for a few years (based on statistics of past VC backed companies). Instead I learnt a lot and still own the sw/idea and still have the opportunity to do something with it. Someone else might come up with the same idea and maybe I don't have the spare time now to devote to it like I did in the mid-late 90s so it'll never get off the ground again.
Tough decisions ahead for all developers of ideas trying to get them off the ground...
Use value investing, not day trading. Value investing is what Warren Buffet uses (or used to untill he had so much money he had to change his tactics). As I live in Australia I'm only investing on the Australian stock market so I read books that focus on this market which is a bit different to the US, though the same general rules apply.
Buffet uses techniques developed by Benjamin Graham. Graham wrote a book called the Intelligent Investor. This book is a bit old now but has been rewritten and copied and dumbed down many many times so any books you see that talk of the Intelligent Investor or Graham or Buffet or Value Investing are worth flipping through before you choose which to buy. Choose a practical book, because the theory is either superficially simple (all you need in the first place) or very complicated.
Value Investing is basically this: examine everything about a company *except* the share price - look at past profit, debt to equity and price to earnings ratios, dividends, growth, number of shares issued, cash etc atc and from this work out what the share price should be. If the calculated value is lower than the actual share price it might be a good buy. You can automate this process from publically available data going back a few years on each company. I use Excel (which can be made to download web data on timed imtervals too which is nice to auto update graphs etc) though a die hard friend does it all in Perl! You may get 50-200 companies. Now look at cuttofs for P/E, company value and hone it down some more. Then look at the market they're in, who's in charge, read the last few financial reports (qrtly, yrly) and any other news, lool at their web site, competitors etc. Finally choose maybe 10 or 12. Chances are half will do well, some will drift and some will go down (but usually not badly). Check back every week or so to see how it's going. Buffet has managed 22% annual return after tax for 30 yrs using this general method. Some people I know get 60%, some 20%. Either way I just reinvest every cent (ie just keep the shares, selling only when the number start to level off). Sometimes there's a real gem (one I chose in March this year has already gone up 220%!) and sometimes real bears. Overall, with the money spread over many different companies and industries this is a fairly safe and sure method. These big, well run copanies generally don't change fast, so you can spot a dog before it burns you too much. On the flip side you don't get meteoric rises usually. What you do get is much better than the Dow Jones though. Stick in a spreadsheet 20% annual gain over 10yrs then add in extra each year that you save from your day job, plus margin lending (ie borrowing up to perhaps 50% of the value in your stock to buy further stocks which gives a modest 33% debt) and you may be looking very good in the longer term.
This isn't a get rich quick scheme, it's slow plodding and a bit boring - none of the flashy day trading excitement (or stress!). I tried that and lost quite a bit and made not as much. I had good tutors who do it for a living but day trading was too intrusive into my daily work - I might be at a meeting or have a deadline on a report I had to write or was at the dentist or something and hence miss a falling price. Too stressfull! I want to get rich, not old before my time!
oh, another good place for info is Buffet's BerkshireHathaway web site where his letter to shareholders from previous years provides some informative insight into his thinking. You can do your own thing but it costs nothing to learn from someone who's done extremely well at what you want to do (every if it's just for a hobby).
The Motely Fool has some good info. It's popular enough that so many people will follow it's advice that that will start to impact share prices. The best way to invest is to do your own thing, not what everyone else is doing. Sure, others are out there doing value investing and similar calculations to you. You'd be surprised how many aren't.
I trade shares for hobby and at the current rate that hobby will pay enough for me to quit by high paying day job (senior computer systems engineer in a defense company) in 3-5 years (I've been doing it for 2 years). This takes aabout an hour a week (value investing, not day trading).
I also went back to study phsychology and ended up as a qualified counsellor where a see a couple of clients a week to help keep me in touch with real humans. I also do some tutoring work for counselling students (which is all weekend and evenings). This takes a few hours a week plus 8-16 hours when I'm tutoring.
I write written scripts (have done two cartoon episodes for The Toons: Where are they now?) and am working on a self help book and a novel. Not to make money but because I like writing. This is usually only a 1-2 hrs a week (averaged over a year)
Because my day job in IT is so senior I don't get to do interesting technical/creative stuff I do little PC setup jobs for friends and write php/mysql apps for friends businesses (currently doing a 1.5TB image management and workflow system). This is about 10hrs a week at the moment.
I'm also developing some self help workshops which I hope to start running early next year. This takes 2-3 hrs a week (at the moment).
This is on top of my 50hr a week job, a wife and 4 children. I do as much extra stuff as I can after everyone else is in bed (eg 10pm onwards) and sleep about 5 hrs a night (with the occassional 10hr night to catch up).
The idea is to develop paying work that has a very high hourly rate so I can work less hours. The share trading is best, earning several hundred dollars an hour and in future for the same effort this will increase as profits are simpy reinvested and not consumed. Secondly the counselling is experience towards doing the workshops, where you can charge 30 ppl $200 for a weekend workshop (16hrs) to give a similar hourly rate (minus overheads and prep time).
Currently all this augments my income by about 30% (up from 10% last year) so I'm on track to retire within 5 years.
I also used to play in a band (did 3 albums) which was an aweful lot of fun but an aweful waste of time. Once kids came along that something had to give!
The best way to relax is playing with the kids, programming and writing (for me at least).
I still toss around ideas of high tech startups (I had one in the late 90s with angel funding but we never got to the big venture capital stage) but nothing is as assured as 1) value investing with shares, and 2) a 9-5 job.
If money and creating spare time weren't a concern I would probably just counsel people and write, but I wouldn't make a good living out of it (well, I might but it's unlikely - I'm not abuot to plan on an improbably income stream when I have a mortgage and kids!).
The real browser lineage - get it right guys!
on
Netscape Reborn?
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· Score: 1
You forget those before netscape:
In the beginning CERN begat the www in about 1991 with a text browser called "www", based on a proposal by Tim Berners Lee which was a bit of Xanadu and a bit of gopher (which was a bit like veronica and wais).
Marc Andreeson led a team that wrote Mosaic, the first GUI version of the client, funded by NCSA in 1993. (I remember using version 1.0 on a Sun early in 1994 and also getting email from Andreeson in response to some queries I had.)
In March 1994 Marc and Jim Clark (former founder of SGI) formed what was later called Netscape.
A long time ago (early 80s) I worked in a lab that used scintillation counters to measure biological activity (Background: you'd put a radioactively labelled (eg with tritium or C14)reagent in with the other cocktail for a test you're conducting in a little test tube. After say 5 mins you'd stop the reaction (say with perchloric acid), syphon off the top layer and put it into scintillation liquid (not sure what it was, but largely based on toluene) and put the vials into the scintillation counter which would have hundreds of little tubes in a conveyor belt and one by one drop the tubes deep inside the lead shielding to measure flashes of light as the isotopes decayed, hence telling you v accurately how much of the original substance under test had bound to the labelled reagent).
Anyway, every few days the counter would go completely stupid, and every few weeks copletely bananas (a technical term). It turned out the major machine crashes coincided with all scintillation counters in the building going crazy at the same time. We had over a dozen of these machines (all different brands) and they had about 6inches of lead around the detectors, so that was quite some energetic particles we were getting. The all the manufacturers' reps said there was little we could do to fix this, unless we wanted to be underground.
Talking to a friend at the local uni cosmic ray observatory (500+ scintillation counters spread over about a square kilometer), he said the more energetic showers were smaller in radius as the particles have less time to spread out from the initiating collision of a cosmic particle with the upper atmosphere. Usually they spread out to 50 to a few hundred metres across, with a massive cascade of all sorts of particle by the time it reaches ground level.
Interestingly, the initial byproducts of cosmic ray collisions have a v short life which means they should decay before reaching sea level. However as they travel close to the speed of light the depth of the atmosphere is foreshortened (Lorenzian contraction) to only a few hundred metres deep - a simple proof of relativity in action (or likewise, time is going slower for the cosmic particles).
It has been said that cosmic rays are the largest contributor to genetic mutations, beyond background radiation levels due to radioactive isotopes occuring naturally in the ground. Similarly, work place studies show airline hostesses/stewards have the far largest dosage of radiation of any occupation as they spend so much time above the bulk of the atmosphere. (Pilots spend less time in the air due to safety/fatigue regulations).
I also recall reading that it's extremely difficult to work out where cosmic rays originate as they are usually charged particles that follow curved paths through space due to the small but significant magnetic fields of stars and the galaxy itself. Due to timing of shows hitting detectors we can easily measure the angle a particle was going when it hit the atmosphere, but the particle took a very convoluted path prior to that, so finding a close source (100ly) is significant.
About 20 yrs ago I did some caving out on the Nullabor Plain (Australia). In a cave called Mullamullang we went about 4 miles horizontally (only a few 100 feet down) and at the end dome there's a species of spider there that has no eyes or pigmentation. This is the only place in the world this species has been found, probably having been sucked in (there's a v v strong diurnal wind that blows through the cave entrance, changing direction every 10hrs (that's right, ten hrs, not 12). The whole trip took 16 hrs. Read more about the spider here
We have started rolling out this across our project (300+ PC running Win2k and WinXP, about 20 Suns and 10 SGIs) and it's the best we could do. We weren't able to get our VAXes (yes, two of them!) to join in but besides that the rollout is going fine and no significant glitches (despite getting out SUN NIS+ password credentials out of sync when upgrading from Solaris 8 to Solaris 9 because Solaris 8 didn't care if local and remote credntials got out of sync!). (You can't use Win Servers as an LDAP server because it's non-standard, but will accept a unix based LDAP server for authentication.)
This patents covers some excellent points not covered elsewhere so completely. Sure it's full of holes, but if you read the full patent you see that besides making a grab for some future fame by piggypacking on the hard fundamental work of other (to implement such a system), there are some very sound points made.
I don't know enough about the ICOT mentioned (which I believe is the Japanese govt project that was massively funded back in the 80s to develop AI using inference engines - a "different kind" of approach than neural networks to acheiving AI - at least at the time). It did make me pause to think what did come of all those 100s of millions of 80s dollars spent (they built several machines, I last recall hearing of the second generation machine and had assumed it all went quiet due to inactivity - maybe I'm wrong).
Certainly using a patent to establish the considerable effort isn't right but then possibly none of the established AI journals would publish the work.
It begs the question though of do you want a robot (assuming it can think) to act in an immoral way? If not then why wouldn't it? I do't think Asimov's law cover this. Of course humans have free will and many do act immorally - is that what we want? Don't we as parents spend years and years instilling into our children "sound" moral values? Elsewhere someone says a sufficiently intelligent robot would act morally anyway. Would it? Why? Very intelligent people don't always. And why don't they? Many would say it's because "their parents didn't bring them up right". So a robot doesn't have parents. So where does it learn these moral codes from then?
I was curious to also see archetypal traits of heroism, wisdom etc listed. One seeming glaring omission in my opinion is humour and the archetypal trait of the joker, someone who can make jokes, laugh at themselves etc. This is of a sophistication combining attributes such as self deprecation along with the ability to recognise the need for the injection of levity (for many reasons).
I'm sure others can validly read the full work of the patent and realise other shortcomings - however I would not be too arrogant to dismiss this initial stab at what will one day be, I am sure, a very important arena.
Slashdot Mirror
8088 was it?? Luxury!!!!...
I remember having to make our own abacus in kindergarden with bits of bomb fragments left from the war, we walked 60 miles to the outhouse before breakfast, paid the teacher to beat us to death in cold blood and when we got home we had to work 15 hrs straight in a coal mine to earn the lump of frozen lard we'd give to our parents so we were skinny enough for 29 of us all to sleep in one bed on a rubbish tip! And only then were we allow to watch a light bulb being turned on in the master's house on top of the hill overlooking the dump.
> People who believe in anything that isn't objectively verifiable, do not believe because of logic.
Though that doesn't necessarily make what they believe untrue, just unverifiable.
For instance can you prove that you love your wife, that you are happy, that you aren't thinking of changing jobs, that you are an optimist? You can only provide circumstantial evidence at best, but no absolute, verifiable proof af any of these or a myriad other things you assume to be true in your life.
How true is the love that you feel for your wife or child? It's not provable in an absolute or computational manner - does that really matter? You believe it anyway.
Someone's bound to say you can measure love with enough electrodes on someone's head. Fine. Then there's even more subtle things beliefs like the sanctity of human life. Personally I don't need evidence to believe these things.
It's important to determine why someone makes spelling, grammer and syntax errors. Indeed, their very choice of words and sentence construction (even if correct English) tells us a lot.
:-)
People make errors for many reasons, including:
1. They are in a rush and content is more important than correctness.
2. They do it on purpose in rebellion against perceived authoritarian figures (from their childhood etc).
3. They want to make a specific point or joke (eg referencing "pr0n").
4. They don't know any better.
5. They didn't notice the mistakes (for some reason at that time) though normally they would.
6. They don't really care about producing correct written English.
I'm sure there are other reasons. Without a doubt I'm sure most readers make value judgements regarding the writer based on their sentence structure, choice of words, punctuation etc.
I'm equally sure many readers of Slashdot feel they shouldn't be judged on their writing style. However, the truth in the world is the "face" you present to people really is all they have to go on to determine in some way what the writer is like as a person.
In a scientific journal one does not try to read between the lines (usually) to determine what sort of person the writer is like (unlike there is something unusual about the text).
On Slashdot, many of the posts are opinion related. Many are also purely about technical issues, though most, even if by relation to other posts, hold valuable content regarding the writer. For example, earlier posts regarding the 128k Apple Mac were gleefully given by people who used them. Readers would immediately think about how old that person was and that changes how we process the rest of a post - even if the content is technical. Or a technical point refuting an earlier technical point, depending on it's conciseness and thoroughness might cause the reader to decide the latter writer knew what he was talking about and is more experienced and is to be respected. If the second post has poor grammer and spelling errors then we might tend to question their authority in this area.
This is just human nature.
There are always times we wish we'd written things differently before hittimg "Submit". Likewise the world is full of so many different people it's hard to determine how you will be interpreted some times. However, it's a good general rule of thumb to assume you will be judged on how you write, just as you're likely to be judged in real life on how you dress, walk, speak, groom etc. It'd be nice at times if life wasn't like that but it is.
My own personal pet peeve is when people add "already" at the end of a sentence. This is a recent US trend that was spread largely by the scriptwriters of "Friends". In most cases it adds no extra meaning or content. It does however identify the writer as a fan of "Friends" or perhaps easily influenced by recent cultural trends. But then, that's my personal judgement and shouldn't influence what you write! Of course, I'm sure people reading this post will put make all sorts of value judgements about me - but then, that'll just prove my point
I'm curious how many books of the paper variety you (or rather the publisher told you) sold and how many on PayPalDownload? (I realise they're quite different books, still you seem to have a pretty clear view now of which you'd prefer)
The reason I ask is I have a nearly complete novel, a number of short stories and some scripts that I've become somewhat despondent over due to the uphill climb to traditional publishers. Your experiences seem to reinforce my perception (despite your having some cache to your name to help promotion) so I looked at some online publishers who wanted money (usually hundreds of dollars) and that just didn't feel right either. I'd left it for a year or so now untill reading your comments and wonder if it's worth putting time into these projects again.
It's good to see you've achieved some successes that are each stepping stones to the next adventure (whatever that is!)
I wish you well - there's just *got* to be a place for an articulate actor/artist who's self effacing manner yet technical savvy certainly endears you to the Slashdot, in not a wider, crowd.
I agree with other posters that it's largely about the example you set and keeping a balance.
I have 4 kids 13, 12, 10 and 9. The eldest (boy) hates sport and spends a lot of time on the computer and vaguely hopes to write computer games when he grows up. So I educate him on how to program. Now he knows what programming's about he wants to be a graphic artist (for games, of course). It's early days yet.
Daughter at 12 loves the Sims2 but loves playing outside and animals. She chats to her school friends online and hates RPG or FPSs.
10 yo boy is brilliant at getting through RPGs with minimal time (somehow only doing 1/5th of the things you're meant to do - game designers have to cater for little kids who are impatient I guess), he loves Warcraft but loses ever time when playing online. Thankfully he plays three different sports. He'll probably be the lead singer in a band or a soccer player!
10yo is the smartest of the lot by far and really doesn't like computers at all. He builds electronic kits (which we do together) and he reads and makes cubby houses in the back yard.
They're all different and all see me working on the computer from time to time and realise it's just another profession.
So if you're a new dad don't sweat too much because there's time to sort it out a little later - as long as you have a good relationship with your kids. Show by example that when you're needed away from the computer that you can walk away and attend to whatever (wife, kids etc). Also, just because you like computers doesn't mean they will and there's nothing wrong with that.
The only tech thing I insist on is my kids have a good general knowledge. They know in general how a computer or tv or radio or mobile phone works, they can spot spam email, they know locations of 20 or more major countries on a map of the world, know how to behave in a resturant, they know how to modify their behaviour if required when relating to other people, they know why fast food isn't generally good for you, what the stockmarket is and (broadly) how it works, how to calculate change exactly in the shop and question if it's wrong and that school stops after university (if they want to) but they have to start earning something to pay board when they finish high school.
These are the general knowledge ground rules children need to survive (in my opinion - they may beg to differ I'm sure once they're older!). I'm a strong believer in teaching them enough so they can make their own educated guesses about the things they'll face in life ie they need to know *how* to think, not *what* to think.
Above all is a need to be able to relate well with other people. Repeated studies show that ability to relate to others and handle your own feelings (emotional intelligence) is a far greater predictor of future success in life than general IQ type intelligence (or education).
Also(!) remember that by the time your kids are 8 or so then their internal thinking and personality, morals, ethics etc are pretty much set for life. From then on the child you knew is subsumed by the growing adult intellect which will forever by tainted/guided by that underlying child. It is very much worth getting it right in the early years because it is so hard (and painful) to make changes later in life (even as a teenager) though not impossible.
Actually I recall a guy from NASA giving a talk back in the 80s here in town. He was looking at the next generation after the shuttle. The calculations show a vertical (rocket powered) landing is less fuel expensive than the cost of adding wings that are needed for a horizontal landing. I recall following the DC-X development (early 90s?) which was also designed based on this efficiency based calculation. I'm not sure if this was part of Carmack's reasoning too (www.armadilloaerospace.com) as he's planning on using a parachute IIRC.
Or the other opposite: those who are scared to succeed. For some people that means too much in their lives will change and brings too many unknowns and they'd rather not have all that fuss.
Click on the link to get the software and it comes up:
IBM TIVOLI DIRECTORY SERVER MGD PR FOR LINUX ON Z LIC+SW MAINT 12 MO (D54J6LL) 22,330.00 (tax ex) 24,563.00 (tax inc)
Doesn't sound free...
I'll bet you anything you like that at least three people will follow up this post to confirm that they're installing Gentoo on an old 486DX/33 and that they're expecting it to finish compiling and be able to start up X in just another week or two...
Yup! I had an old FreeBSD 1.0 box (396SX/16 from about '90 I think, with 8MB RAM and 40MB disk) that used to have a linux 0.99r16 kernel on it and I'm rebuilding it to use as the house squid cache. It'd be cool to use one of those SIMM mounted embedded systems but this'll do the job. I hook 30metres of network cable to the shed out the back as the computer is so darn noisy it keeps the family awake at night. I did this at my last house and the cat loves it to sleep on in winter...
> Personally, I'm in favor of an olympic standard mayonaise...
But then, who really wants to level the playing field when being eaten by a crocodile? Garnishing is always tricky when you want to be eaten by a wild animal. Personally I find dressing like a penguin and dashing about the place making squarking noises always catches their attention.
This reminds me of the scientists in early 1900s who said it was impossible to get a rocket out of earth's gravity well, or Bill Gates saying no-one would ever need more than 640k of RAM, or the guy who said the markt for computers in the US was 4 and hence wasn't worth pursuing.
How much would you like to bet that in 50 yrs the majority of computer interfaces wont be 3D? Take a moment to think about the fact that 50 years ago there were no computer and black and white TV was just emerging. Now try to extrapolate that rate of change into the future remember that the rate of change is increasing.
I'm sure there'll be 2D displays of all sorts. I'm also sure things like retinal laser displays mounted on unobtrusive headgear will much more common. I've used one (at HITL at U of Washington) and it was the crispest, clearest image I've every seen (and I worked for SGI for several years so I know what a decent image looks like).
I agree VR's time hasn't come yet - but saying it won't ever happen is just plain shortsighted.
I've used a augmented reality headgear that showed a CT scanner cross section superimposed over a real person so I could see inside them. AR views of ultrasound data of foeteses are *much* clearer and easier to interpret (and hence not make mistakes in diagnosis) than normal ultrasound. Seeing that ultrasound compisited into a 3D model and AR projected onto the mother is truly awesome.
I've used good HMD (not the virtual boy with plastic lenses where the spherical aberration caused people under 12 to have stereopscopic vision problems for up to 30 minutes after use - the main reason it was pulled just before going to market) with low latency (10ms) high res displays.
Yes you get disoriented if you run around too much - better to stay in a chair - like driving, you get used to it.
Yes it is a *much* better and more natural way to play Quake.
Yes is still costs a lot and yes it's much better than it was 10 years ago.
Personally in 50 years I expect mobile phones, computers, PDAs etc will all be intergrated (with whoever knows what else) and will project over my vision either as a transparent display or I can flip the glasses down to block out extraneous vision.
The only thing you'll have to get used to is if this happens in 10 or 15 year rather than 50...
There's some formula here on Convenience inversely proportion to Security - but you need to find "reasonable" values for C and S. For many ppl this guys security is too inconvenient to bother with.
/programfiles rather than in the user's own area) but this usually doesn't work. So when the kids want to play a game I have to log them in as administrator and then every few weeks I find someones done something like copied all of /programfiles to their desktop or moved all the mp3s we have to their own folder (or worse still, taken just some mp3s from the common directory we put them in).
Also, as pointed out elsewhere, this guy seems to have a disproportionate sense of self importance. Sure it's fine to go to *some* lengths to stop a hacker (eg a firewall) rather than leave your home network wide open (assuming permenant Net connection).
At home I also try to have some security with 4 primary aged kids who download all sorts of crap off the Net. I have 3 XP boxes and one Linux box and make all family members have their own logins and passwords as we had so many fights when people look at other files and stuff like that.
The big problem I have is probably 80% of games the kids want to run only work if run as Administrator!! Many times I've tried changing permissions on files (usually games save data under
But it's not just games. I have a friend with a multimedia company and most of the highend apps his people use also require to be run as Administrator, so you get employees screwing up their machine configs all the time.
It'll be a while before developers and users understand they can't expect to just sit down on a PC and do anything (beyond what they're meant to be doing).
I have taught the kids to use logins and save downloaded stuff to their own area. I can't teach the app/game developers this.
I never have this problem with Linux (despite some of unix's security shortcomings) but then the kids rarely use it as it doesn't have any games they want and the free office stuff isn't what they're used to using - basically it's only good for surfing the Net - so it's a last option if all other machines are in use [sigh]
All very true - but - please don't invite me to your place for dinner!!!!
Oh come on now - it takes a fraction of a second to realise how little we know about people. It's a little like saying you know everything about computers because you have pulled one apart and worked out what all the components do and worked out how Windows pop up and the mouse can click on things on the screen and then This happens, or This.
This book doesn't touch anything about what motivates people to excel or how to overcome feelings of inadequacy or why they don't get on well with their siblings or why they can't keep a relationship together or why they sabotage their own success or why they try to keep up with the Joneses when they know the Joneses are unhappy or why they feel hollow in their successful job/family or why they have trouble talking to their kids etc etc etc.
Then there's the fact that most people in the world believe in something metaphysical (god, whatever) and most modern science (including the writer of this book it seems, and the reviewer) believes that those people are self delusional or just plain simpletons.
It reminds me of scienists at the end of the 18th century proclaiming man was on the verge of knowing everything there was to know about the universe, or those in the early 19th century who proved mathematically that rockets would not work and you could never escape Earth's gravity.
I hate to categorise but it seems the author and reviewer fall firmly into this genre of thinking. I guess one has to consider though that to both these people the contents of the books *are* complete and that's a wonderful thing to them to see their whole known world defined so nicely. The fact that most people see them as standing in a little world neatly cordoned off from most other people's reality is irrelevant to them as they do not see the rest of the world and trying to explain to them that it exists is a pointless exercise. Just like the patients in the book who refuse to acknowledge their own illness, trying to show a rational and intelligent person the narrowness of their thinking is pointless. I hat e to say it, but first off they have to "want" to see if there's anything beyond the walls they have defined around themselves.
I remember reading a review of a Compaq credit card size data storage device (no PDAs back then) that you tilted to scroll text. It only had two buttons I think. Anyone remember more details of this? I remember reading a review in a magazine (probably Byte).
You might look in to some test implementations that compiled Renderman into Pixel Shader language so it was implemented in hardware. There were problems (only 32bits fixed point I think). It was a few years back in a SIGGRAPH paper. Maybe the compilers have improved now to be useful. All renderers for 3D progs (softimage, maya, lightwave, 3dsmax etc) can work over a network. Most companies I've worked with on this have things set up to render overnight the latest version of the scenes being worked on. Many seem to be moving to linux for the workstations as it's good at most of the popular 3d tools (except Max I think) and is so much easier to control for batch processing, scripting etc. Look at BMRT for a start if you don't like your renderer.
Also, it's a mistake to assume a equal probability of matches with subsequent dates. Generally(!) people learn as they go on and even after 5 relationships your average person would have a much better idea of what they like and what they don't like and will tend to go out with people who are closer to their ideal than they would have earlier on. It becomes an optimisation problem rather than pure probability. There'd need to be some factors taken into account however like as you have more relationships that fail you might tend to be less likely to go out at all (too jaded) or too picky because you know just what you like. Or some people would purposely go out with someone who was different to the last person, on the assumption that if the last one didn't work then anything similar wouldn't work either.
:-)
Then there's also the problem that once you start to determine what a match actually is and closeness of matching then you bring up the issue of relativity and perception. For example a relationship that failed may have been very close to a match but the perception (ie what they thought they were after or would like) was invalid. Likewise some people would never go out with "that type of person" but might end up doing so and finding a match, much to their surprise, so selection criteria is an issue.
There's another factor also of time and that some people churn through one partner a month and others take years or decades or a lifetime to realise they're not with the right one and then (as mentioned earlier) they just can be bothered changing or chnage their perception and staywith what they've got. Some epople's perception/view changes over time anyway and they wake up one day and realise they're not in love and that's it and can't explain why.
Now role all this into one equation/theory and I suspect it'd be so darn complicated people will just go back to random bonking or "rules of thumb" (cough cough) which, at the end of the day, come down to a mixture of genetics and upbringing.
One final point is the "why" factor in searching for a match. (The why *after* a mtach is often different, again due to changed perspective or insight). Is the person searching because they want to leave home, want a mother figure, want children, want to control someone, want a house cleaner, want to be controlled, don't want to be alone etc etc. All these factors change the probabilities beyond simplistic calculations it seems this book covers.
Mind you for a humorous book it gets you thinking a bit
Angel investors offer 100k to maybe 1m (it used to be 100-300k but times change). A friend and I had an idea for which we wrote the prototype over several years in our own time. It was good enough to get angel investing. We looked at several sources but chose a quasi-govt body in the end (this was '99). They were genuinely helpful. The next step is to get some big or strategic sales (ie to big name customers) then on the strength of that initial business, project outrageous numbers and get VC backing (to the tune of 1-5m usually).
We talked to many VCs but were happy with none or the deals they offered (basically they say "if it's so good and you need the money then give us at least 50%"). We pursued a much bigger funding deal (about $16m) but that fell through after about a year of negotiations.
Today I'm back into a 9-5 job but a lot wiser. The software still belongs to my friend and I and no-one has come out with a similar product.
A close friend also went down the same path but got 1m VC money, followed by a further 5m. Control of the conpmany went to the VCs. After 2 years the original two dvelopers had 8% each and one had been fired and the other hanging on by the skin of his teeth in a sidelined job at 100k salary whilst the VC appointed managers were on 160+100k annual bonuses+options. Too many pigs in the trough and the company died 2 1/2 yrs after starting.
Only about 5% of companies that get angel funding get VC backing. Only about 10% of VC backed company reach 5yrs age. Very very seldom there's a Cisco or such like that returns enormous rewards (though the founders were kicked out of that too in the end).
I wonder sometimes if we'd taken the VC money if I'd be happier. I'd've had to move cities and in all probability would have a huge salary for a few years (based on statistics of past VC backed companies). Instead I learnt a lot and still own the sw/idea and still have the opportunity to do something with it. Someone else might come up with the same idea and maybe I don't have the spare time now to devote to it like I did in the mid-late 90s so it'll never get off the ground again.
Tough decisions ahead for all developers of ideas trying to get them off the ground...
Use value investing, not day trading. Value investing is what Warren Buffet uses (or used to untill he had so much money he had to change his tactics). As I live in Australia I'm only investing on the Australian stock market so I read books that focus on this market which is a bit different to the US, though the same general rules apply.
Buffet uses techniques developed by Benjamin Graham. Graham wrote a book called the Intelligent Investor. This book is a bit old now but has been rewritten and copied and dumbed down many many times so any books you see that talk of the Intelligent Investor or Graham or Buffet or Value Investing are worth flipping through before you choose which to buy. Choose a practical book, because the theory is either superficially simple (all you need in the first place) or very complicated.
Value Investing is basically this: examine everything about a company *except* the share price - look at past profit, debt to equity and price to earnings ratios, dividends, growth, number of shares issued, cash etc atc and from this work out what the share price should be. If the calculated value is lower than the actual share price it might be a good buy. You can automate this process from publically available data going back a few years on each company. I use Excel (which can be made to download web data on timed imtervals too which is nice to auto update graphs etc) though a die hard friend does it all in Perl! You may get 50-200 companies. Now look at cuttofs for P/E, company value and hone it down some more. Then look at the market they're in, who's in charge, read the last few financial reports (qrtly, yrly) and any other news, lool at their web site, competitors etc. Finally choose maybe 10 or 12. Chances are half will do well, some will drift and some will go down (but usually not badly). Check back every week or so to see how it's going. Buffet has managed 22% annual return after tax for 30 yrs using this general method. Some people I know get 60%, some 20%. Either way I just reinvest every cent (ie just keep the shares, selling only when the number start to level off). Sometimes there's a real gem (one I chose in March this year has already gone up 220%!) and sometimes real bears. Overall, with the money spread over many different companies and industries this is a fairly safe and sure method. These big, well run copanies generally don't change fast, so you can spot a dog before it burns you too much. On the flip side you don't get meteoric rises usually. What you do get is much better than the Dow Jones though. Stick in a spreadsheet 20% annual gain over 10yrs then add in extra each year that you save from your day job, plus margin lending (ie borrowing up to perhaps 50% of the value in your stock to buy further stocks which gives a modest 33% debt) and you may be looking very good in the longer term.
This isn't a get rich quick scheme, it's slow plodding and a bit boring - none of the flashy day trading excitement (or stress!). I tried that and lost quite a bit and made not as much. I had good tutors who do it for a living but day trading was too intrusive into my daily work - I might be at a meeting or have a deadline on a report I had to write or was at the dentist or something and hence miss a falling price. Too stressfull! I want to get rich, not old before my time!
oh, another good place for info is Buffet's BerkshireHathaway web site where his letter to shareholders from previous years provides some informative insight into his thinking. You can do your own thing but it costs nothing to learn from someone who's done extremely well at what you want to do (every if it's just for a hobby).
The Motely Fool has some good info. It's popular enough that so many people will follow it's advice that that will start to impact share prices. The best way to invest is to do your own thing, not what everyone else is doing. Sure, others are out there doing value investing and similar calculations to you. You'd be surprised how many aren't.
Possibly (and I'll f
I trade shares for hobby and at the current rate that hobby will pay enough for me to quit by high paying day job (senior computer systems engineer in a defense company) in 3-5 years (I've been doing it for 2 years). This takes aabout an hour a week (value investing, not day trading).
I also went back to study phsychology and ended up as a qualified counsellor where a see a couple of clients a week to help keep me in touch with real humans. I also do some tutoring work for counselling students (which is all weekend and evenings). This takes a few hours a week plus 8-16 hours when I'm tutoring.
I write written scripts (have done two cartoon episodes for The Toons: Where are they now?) and am working on a self help book and a novel. Not to make money but because I like writing. This is usually only a 1-2 hrs a week (averaged over a year)
Because my day job in IT is so senior I don't get to do interesting technical/creative stuff I do little PC setup jobs for friends and write php/mysql apps for friends businesses (currently doing a 1.5TB image management and workflow system). This is about 10hrs a week at the moment.
I'm also developing some self help workshops which I hope to start running early next year. This takes 2-3 hrs a week (at the moment).
This is on top of my 50hr a week job, a wife and 4 children. I do as much extra stuff as I can after everyone else is in bed (eg 10pm onwards) and sleep about 5 hrs a night (with the occassional 10hr night to catch up).
The idea is to develop paying work that has a very high hourly rate so I can work less hours. The share trading is best, earning several hundred dollars an hour and in future for the same effort this will increase as profits are simpy reinvested and not consumed. Secondly the counselling is experience towards doing the workshops, where you can charge 30 ppl $200 for a weekend workshop (16hrs) to give a similar hourly rate (minus overheads and prep time).
Currently all this augments my income by about 30% (up from 10% last year) so I'm on track to retire within 5 years.
I also used to play in a band (did 3 albums) which was an aweful lot of fun but an aweful waste of time. Once kids came along that something had to give!
The best way to relax is playing with the kids, programming and writing (for me at least).
I still toss around ideas of high tech startups (I had one in the late 90s with angel funding but we never got to the big venture capital stage) but nothing is as assured as 1) value investing with shares, and 2) a 9-5 job.
If money and creating spare time weren't a concern I would probably just counsel people and write, but I wouldn't make a good living out of it (well, I might but it's unlikely - I'm not abuot to plan on an improbably income stream when I have a mortgage and kids!).
You forget those before netscape:
In the beginning CERN begat the www in about 1991 with a text browser called "www", based on a proposal by Tim Berners Lee which was a bit of Xanadu and a bit of gopher (which was a bit like veronica and wais).
Marc Andreeson led a team that wrote Mosaic, the first GUI version of the client, funded by NCSA in 1993. (I remember using version 1.0 on a Sun early in 1994 and also getting email from Andreeson in response to some queries I had.)
In March 1994 Marc and Jim Clark (former founder of SGI) formed what was later called Netscape.
A long time ago (early 80s) I worked in a lab that used scintillation counters to measure biological activity (Background: you'd put a radioactively labelled (eg with tritium or C14)reagent in with the other cocktail for a test you're conducting in a little test tube. After say 5 mins you'd stop the reaction (say with perchloric acid), syphon off the top layer and put it into scintillation liquid (not sure what it was, but largely based on toluene) and put the vials into the scintillation counter which would have hundreds of little tubes in a conveyor belt and one by one drop the tubes deep inside the lead shielding to measure flashes of light as the isotopes decayed, hence telling you v accurately how much of the original substance under test had bound to the labelled reagent).
Anyway, every few days the counter would go completely stupid, and every few weeks copletely bananas (a technical term). It turned out the major machine crashes coincided with all scintillation counters in the building going crazy at the same time. We had over a dozen of these machines (all different brands) and they had about 6inches of lead around the detectors, so that was quite some energetic particles we were getting. The all the manufacturers' reps said there was little we could do to fix this, unless we wanted to be underground.
Talking to a friend at the local uni cosmic ray observatory (500+ scintillation counters spread over about a square kilometer), he said the more energetic showers were smaller in radius as the particles have less time to spread out from the initiating collision of a cosmic particle with the upper atmosphere. Usually they spread out to 50 to a few hundred metres across, with a massive cascade of all sorts of particle by the time it reaches ground level.
Interestingly, the initial byproducts of cosmic ray collisions have a v short life which means they should decay before reaching sea level. However as they travel close to the speed of light the depth of the atmosphere is foreshortened (Lorenzian contraction) to only a few hundred metres deep - a simple proof of relativity in action (or likewise, time is going slower for the cosmic particles).
It has been said that cosmic rays are the largest contributor to genetic mutations, beyond background radiation levels due to radioactive isotopes occuring naturally in the ground. Similarly, work place studies show airline hostesses/stewards have the far largest dosage of radiation of any occupation as they spend so much time above the bulk of the atmosphere. (Pilots spend less time in the air due to safety/fatigue regulations).
I also recall reading that it's extremely difficult to work out where cosmic rays originate as they are usually charged particles that follow curved paths through space due to the small but significant magnetic fields of stars and the galaxy itself. Due to timing of shows hitting detectors we can easily measure the angle a particle was going when it hit the atmosphere, but the particle took a very convoluted path prior to that, so finding a close source (100ly) is significant.
About 20 yrs ago I did some caving out on the Nullabor Plain (Australia). In a cave called Mullamullang we went about 4 miles horizontally (only a few 100 feet down) and at the end dome there's a species of spider there that has no eyes or pigmentation. This is the only place in the world this species has been found, probably having been sucked in (there's a v v strong diurnal wind that blows through the cave entrance, changing direction every 10hrs (that's right, ten hrs, not 12). The whole trip took 16 hrs. Read more about the spider here
We have started rolling out this across our project (300+ PC running Win2k and WinXP, about 20 Suns and 10 SGIs) and it's the best we could do. We weren't able to get our VAXes (yes, two of them!) to join in but besides that the rollout is going fine and no significant glitches (despite getting out SUN NIS+ password credentials out of sync when upgrading from Solaris 8 to Solaris 9 because Solaris 8 didn't care if local and remote credntials got out of sync!). (You can't use Win Servers as an LDAP server because it's non-standard, but will accept a unix based LDAP server for authentication.)
This patents covers some excellent points not covered elsewhere so completely. Sure it's full of holes, but if you read the full patent you see that besides making a grab for some future fame by piggypacking on the hard fundamental work of other (to implement such a system), there are some very sound points made.
I don't know enough about the ICOT mentioned (which I believe is the Japanese govt project that was massively funded back in the 80s to develop AI using inference engines - a "different kind" of approach than neural networks to acheiving AI - at least at the time). It did make me pause to think what did come of all those 100s of millions of 80s dollars spent (they built several machines, I last recall hearing of the second generation machine and had assumed it all went quiet due to inactivity - maybe I'm wrong).
Certainly using a patent to establish the considerable effort isn't right but then possibly none of the established AI journals would publish the work.
It begs the question though of do you want a robot (assuming it can think) to act in an immoral way? If not then why wouldn't it? I do't think Asimov's law cover this. Of course humans have free will and many do act immorally - is that what we want? Don't we as parents spend years and years instilling into our children "sound" moral values? Elsewhere someone says a sufficiently intelligent robot would act morally anyway. Would it? Why? Very intelligent people don't always. And why don't they? Many would say it's because "their parents didn't bring them up right". So a robot doesn't have parents. So where does it learn these moral codes from then?
I was curious to also see archetypal traits of heroism, wisdom etc listed. One seeming glaring omission in my opinion is humour and the archetypal trait of the joker, someone who can make jokes, laugh at themselves etc. This is of a sophistication combining attributes such as self deprecation along with the ability to recognise the need for the injection of levity (for many reasons).
I'm sure others can validly read the full work of the patent and realise other shortcomings - however I would not be too arrogant to dismiss this initial stab at what will one day be, I am sure, a very important arena.