I just want to comment on how AI proponents have fulfilled their promises... oh...just a minute... I seem to have left my car hovering over the pad, oh, it's ok, it's gone off to recharge itself and have the antigrav adjusted.
As I was saying about AI...oh, my Barbie XXX has just come in to bring me a drink, of course my Barbie has limited AI but is saturated with artificial sex hormones to pander to my every whim... but not now Barbie, daddy's busy...
Now about the promise fulfilled by AI proponents... oh damn look at the time...If I'm going to make the lightspeed shuttle to Mars I pretty much have to teleport out now, we're going white water rafting in the Valles Marineris.
"A port of Windows XP was developed for an earlier version of Xen, but is not available for release due to licence restrictions."
MS was involved in the development of Xen as were other industry heavyweights. As usual MicroSoft decided to take its toy Virtual PC home and play with itself.
Perhaps OS will win out because by way of an evolutionary analogy OS relies on a sort of sexual cross pollinization to evolve; whereas corporations are like giant eunuchs that only feed the growth of others when they are cannabilized by their own kind.
Try a template, for example, in Canada, the Business Develpment Bank provides templates for starting mid sized businesses.
If you're on foreign turf and don't know your way around then go with what generally works for others. There are usually government agencies that provide templates.
If you're developing a budget then remember to develop it with an eye to your banker. A fubar budget cobbled together by a non accountant is not going to please your banker, your tax accountant, the tax dept...etc.
It may well be the Monty Python skit of the funniest joke ever told being lobbed into the warring enemy's camp stirred the imagination of Rooster Teeth Productions to bring us "Red vs. Blue".
For a westerner, I consider myself widely read in the works of Zen. The intent of my studies was to permit the emptiness of mind that is central to Zen practices.
My reading and practices have lead me to try many meditation methods and, after some years, I've managed to achieve the silencing of my mind. Silencing one's stream of consciousness must be only the beginning of what the advanced practioners of Zen and other eastern belief systems hint at, because, even though I can silence my mind, I most certainly have not achieved any great mystical insights. Unless what I started out with ( mmm chick on chick action... boobies!!!) is the ticket to satori.
Regardless of the scant returns I've experienced from quelling my inner monologue, I think it is a very strong attribute to have on hand to play in social situations, and, now, in situations wherein there's a possibility of being mind probed. With the quieting of the stream of consciousness comes a placidity, or, maybe the placidity allows the quietude.
For what it's worth, what I discovered is that the secret of Zen is that there is no secret. It's a state one may simply fall into, and it's more achievable by release than by concentrated effort.
Events that pose immenent death, for me, seem to happen outside of time and the actions taken to escape death are so focused on the components of the situation that all else is voided.
For example, just out of highschool I took a summer job as a hooker (insert jokes here). I was a hooker on a log salvage operation in the mountains on the west coast, (Canada). As a hooker my job was to catch a hook (thus hooker) on the end of a long steel cable and attach it to thickly braided nylon cord, braided at the end of the cord into an eye, wrapped around a section of log to be salvaged. (The fun part of the job was ridding the hook from one salvage site to another... I would wrap my legs around the hook on the end of the cable and the chopper pilot would fly me from one mountain side to another. Very illegal, but oh what a rush.) At one site the chopper came in and titled away to "throw" the hook at me. The idea was that the chopper tilted away from me, guiding the cable hook to me; I would catch the hook in one hand, with the eye of the nylon cord in my other hand, snap the hook into the eye of the cord and the chopper would take off, still tilted away from the mountain side, taking the log section away to a dump. It called for speed, concentration and preparation. The nylon cord had to be looped just so on the log section, so that it wouldn't tangle. On one occassion the chopper came in, tilted, and feed me the hook. I snapped the hook to the cord and threw my hands back signaling the chopper to fly off. What I hadn't seen was that someone had made the cord too long and had left it looped on the ground. My right foot was in the loop. The chopper took off at about 50 Km, the loop began to close. Between the chopper going away at 50 Km and the log section weighing in at 450 Kg my chances of survival were negligible. Even if I had just lost my leg the nearest hospital was an hour plus away by chopper.
Time went away (I've no other way to describe it). There was just the loop snaking up my leg. My mind was crystallized, there was no thought, no mundane awareness. Awareness of my body was gone.
I did a perfect back flip, pulling my body up and away from the closing loop, landing on my shoulders, then tumbling back upright. The chopper took off cleaning jerking the log section away. I'd taken a few tumbling classes in jr high, but wasn't anywhere near the training necessary to what I'd done. The sense of purity and oneness such situations bring is highly addictive.
Under pressure some crack, others look to the alpha members of the group to OK their actions. Some exit time and do what needs to be done. For the latter group no software is going to keep up.
In the alternative, I watched a documentary on Vietnam, wherein a US officer said the lesson that stayed with him was never to send a man, where a bomb or a bullet can go. I think the effort is to follow the 5Ps (proper preparation prevents poor performance) and, as much as possible, plan for events such that protocol substitutes for heroics, and, in this guise software can reinforce protocol.
I read Pynchon's book,Gravity's Rainbow, in highschool, and, while I was impressed by his genius, I just didn't like his style. Because of my experience with Gravity's Rainbow I've, unfortunately, not read Entropy. Accordingly I can't directly respond to your point.
Admittedly, themes run through great works, and, you're quite right about Aesop's Fables and the passion plays. I would add that the works of the Troubadours and Trouvères also have much to do with the making of The Western Canon.
My point takes more from an essay by James Joyce wherein he makes the point that all drama (fiction) invites catharsis. Catharsis, requires both recognition and resolution. From resolution I imply conflict and, in conflict, judgement, i.e. moral judgement.
Technology comes about when we extract information and abstract the information into mathematical expressions. Fiction requires we embed and entangle our selfs sympathetically into a story, as such it encourages "the right side of the brain" responses which feed moral choice.
Fiction from the deepest past to the present has always had a moral message. It could be said the purpose of fiction is to preach.
What is the moral being propagated in this work? None? Is it just a wapper for tech knowledge? Then why read it? Most geeks just want the facts. As the reviewer points out/. ers do well at calling bs. Why read poorly crafted fiction when the tech details are readily at hand?
Looking at the original South Sea Bubble it's fair to say what predominantly characterizes investment bubbles is unwarranted, great expectations. The expectations are unwarranted in that they can't be adequately quantified and, thus, rigorously examined.
The Dot Com bubble exhibited the same feeding frenzy behaviour. No one really knew the potential of the web, but every wanted in, and, the more the better. The collapse of the Dot Com bubble reflected, not only unwarranted investment behaviour, but the fact that the web couldn't deliver in a timely fashion, not too mention the bloated, vapour ware companies backed by wildly speculative VCs.
What we may now have is a Google Bubble. While investors may not be ready to reinflate the Dot Com Bubble and speculate wildly on the web as a whole, they might be ready to invest wildly in a darling of the web like the, do no evil, just too cool, Google company.
Me I'm gonna stick with Double Bubble and good 'ol Pud.
"Why is it that virtually everything I read on slashdot, I've already seen on the AP/Reuters wire stories from my paper?"
The short answer is you've got too much time on your hands.
I put in 12/14 hour days, too often 7 days a week. I'm a quick study and an experienced researcher, but, even with those skills I only manage to stay abreast with news out of/. and the Reg. I read the headlines from a few feeds, but have to steal the time to read the full articles.
You and the others who jump on/. for lagging behind your reading must do not much else but casually surf the web satisfying your whimsy. Alot of us can only find the time to choose one or two sites to keep us informed. Contrary to the/. critics/. does a fine job of keeping me informed about "stuff that matters."
"Fortunately I don't think it has anything to do with the rest of us though."
Taking your comment from the specific to the general, it's interesting that the American biologist E. O. Wilson has noted, in a different article I can't now locate, that China is the test case for humanity. His argument is that if China, with it's huge population, can find ways to provide for it's citizens, without destroying their ecology, then it's likely we, as a species will be able to overcome our current problems.
While civil liberties are an important facet of China's development, its fast degrading eco-structure is a more telling and scary indicator.
Back in Feb of this year Bill Gates touted Building Software That Is Interoperable By Design. Other readings of mine suggest Microsoft is responding to the pressure from past customers, such as government bodies, who have since switched to Linux, by offering interoperability as the buzzword du jour.
Microsoft isn't willing to open up its source but by flying the flag of interoperability it's suggesting FOSS people can "seamlessly" move data across platforms.
Recently I've been doing alot of reading about The Xen virtual machine monitor and The Xen virtual machine monitor, interestinly MS is/was involved in both projects. There's never any doubt in my mind that the wet dream of every large corporation is to own everyone from the cradle to the grave. I've no doubt MS will never give up the idea of owning the web, and, further that interoperability is just another way to say "come into my web said the spider to the fly."
Behind it all, I suspect, is a gameplan that has MS software as a utility piped into thin clients in each and every household and business.
"I'm all for Harry Potter protecting his rights; but it seems we keep getting closer and closer to the world described in Stallman's visionary The Right To Read article."
Just a little nit to pick but... uhm you see Harry Potter is a fictional character. J. Rawlings in the author of the Harry Potter books and she is protecting her rights. Now as to Richard Stallman being real or a work of visionary fiction, well, that is a moot point.
Read the anniversary copy of Neuromancer wherein, now that my memory has had time to kick in, he relates that he typed on a Hermes 3000, although, for some reason, I recall it as a 2000 model. I'm going on recall from the intro to the anniversary edition I read some years ago. He speaks of being approached by a publisher to work up some, or one, short story into a novel form. He replies that it "behooves him to give it the old college try...", which he notes some years later was a sophomoric reply. I'm recounting gossip passed around in a book store but from all accounts it was accurate, but, again it's gossip. I am sure about the account in the anniversary edition.
I live in Vancouver, where Gibson lives, and I lived in his neighbourhood for a long time. Gibson frequented the same scifi/fantasy bookstore as I and many others did. The kids in the store use to laugh at how little Gibson knew about computers, (In the early 90's he didn't know what a "drive" was). If you read the anniversary edition of Neuromancer you'll find an intro by Gibson where he states the make and model of the typewritter he used to write his first cyberspace novels.
from wikipedia:
"Mathematical rigour is often cited as a kind of gold standard for mathematical proof. It has a history, being traced back to Greek mathematics, where it is said to have been invented. Complete rigour, it is often said, became available in mathematics at the start of the twentieth century. This relies on the axiomatic method, and the subsequent development of pure mathematics under the axiomatic umbrella. With the aid of computers, it is possible to check proofs mechanically; throwing the possible flaws back onto machine errors that are considered unlikely events. Indeed, mathematical rigour may be defined as amenability to algorithmic checking of correctness. Formal rigour is the introduction of high degrees of completeness by means of a formal language. Most mathematical arguments are presented as prototypes of formally rigorous proofs, on the grounds that too much formality may in fact obscure what is being said."
from wikipedia:
"In computing terms, robustness is reliability or being available seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Robustness is an important characterists of the internet because network design is a key factor in the availability of data." This also can translate into portability.
Elegance
from wikipedia:
"The proof of a mathematical theorem is considered elegant if it is surprisingly simple yet effective and constructive; similarly, a computer program or algorithm is elegant if it uses a small amount of intuitive code to great effect."
Euclidean Geometry was long thought to demonstrate all three qualities. If one wants to attribute art to elegance then programming can be said to be art.
A book I picked up in a used bookstore spoke to the supposed knowledge of 20th century alchemists. The Morning of the Magicians is a fun read dealing to a large extent with Black Magic as practised in the Third Reich.
Slashdot Mirror
As I was saying about AI...oh, my Barbie XXX has just come in to bring me a drink, of course my Barbie has limited AI but is saturated with artificial sex hormones to pander to my every whim... but not now Barbie, daddy's busy...
Now about the promise fulfilled by AI proponents... oh damn look at the time...If I'm going to make the lightspeed shuttle to Mars I pretty much have to teleport out now, we're going white water rafting in the Valles Marineris.
Anyway good job on the AI.
"A port of Windows XP was developed for an earlier version of Xen, but is not available for release due to licence restrictions."
MS was involved in the development of Xen as were other industry heavyweights. As usual MicroSoft decided to take its toy Virtual PC home and play with itself.
Perhaps OS will win out because by way of an evolutionary analogy OS relies on a sort of sexual cross pollinization to evolve; whereas corporations are like giant eunuchs that only feed the growth of others when they are cannabilized by their own kind.
just a thought
If you're on foreign turf and don't know your way around then go with what generally works for others. There are usually government agencies that provide templates.
If you're developing a budget then remember to develop it with an eye to your banker. A fubar budget cobbled together by a non accountant is not going to please your banker, your tax accountant, the tax dept...etc.
It may well be the Monty Python skit of the funniest joke ever told being lobbed into the warring enemy's camp stirred the imagination of Rooster Teeth Productions to bring us "Red vs. Blue".
My reading and practices have lead me to try many meditation methods and, after some years, I've managed to achieve the silencing of my mind. Silencing one's stream of consciousness must be only the beginning of what the advanced practioners of Zen and other eastern belief systems hint at, because, even though I can silence my mind, I most certainly have not achieved any great mystical insights. Unless what I started out with ( mmm chick on chick action... boobies!!!) is the ticket to satori.
Regardless of the scant returns I've experienced from quelling my inner monologue, I think it is a very strong attribute to have on hand to play in social situations, and, now, in situations wherein there's a possibility of being mind probed. With the quieting of the stream of consciousness comes a placidity, or, maybe the placidity allows the quietude.
For what it's worth, what I discovered is that the secret of Zen is that there is no secret. It's a state one may simply fall into, and it's more achievable by release than by concentrated effort.
it's not nice to rip off a quote from the reg and not attribute it. it's biting the hand of the hand that bites the hand that feeds it.
For example, just out of highschool I took a summer job as a hooker (insert jokes here). I was a hooker on a log salvage operation in the mountains on the west coast, (Canada). As a hooker my job was to catch a hook (thus hooker) on the end of a long steel cable and attach it to thickly braided nylon cord, braided at the end of the cord into an eye, wrapped around a section of log to be salvaged. (The fun part of the job was ridding the hook from one salvage site to another... I would wrap my legs around the hook on the end of the cable and the chopper pilot would fly me from one mountain side to another. Very illegal, but oh what a rush.) At one site the chopper came in and titled away to "throw" the hook at me. The idea was that the chopper tilted away from me, guiding the cable hook to me; I would catch the hook in one hand, with the eye of the nylon cord in my other hand, snap the hook into the eye of the cord and the chopper would take off, still tilted away from the mountain side, taking the log section away to a dump. It called for speed, concentration and preparation. The nylon cord had to be looped just so on the log section, so that it wouldn't tangle. On one occassion the chopper came in, tilted, and feed me the hook. I snapped the hook to the cord and threw my hands back signaling the chopper to fly off. What I hadn't seen was that someone had made the cord too long and had left it looped on the ground. My right foot was in the loop. The chopper took off at about 50 Km, the loop began to close. Between the chopper going away at 50 Km and the log section weighing in at 450 Kg my chances of survival were negligible. Even if I had just lost my leg the nearest hospital was an hour plus away by chopper.
Time went away (I've no other way to describe it). There was just the loop snaking up my leg. My mind was crystallized, there was no thought, no mundane awareness. Awareness of my body was gone.
I did a perfect back flip, pulling my body up and away from the closing loop, landing on my shoulders, then tumbling back upright. The chopper took off cleaning jerking the log section away. I'd taken a few tumbling classes in jr high, but wasn't anywhere near the training necessary to what I'd done. The sense of purity and oneness such situations bring is highly addictive.
Under pressure some crack, others look to the alpha members of the group to OK their actions. Some exit time and do what needs to be done. For the latter group no software is going to keep up.
In the alternative, I watched a documentary on Vietnam, wherein a US officer said the lesson that stayed with him was never to send a man, where a bomb or a bullet can go. I think the effort is to follow the 5Ps (proper preparation prevents poor performance) and, as much as possible, plan for events such that protocol substitutes for heroics, and, in this guise software can reinforce protocol.
Book him, Dano.
Admittedly, themes run through great works, and, you're quite right about Aesop's Fables and the passion plays. I would add that the works of the Troubadours and Trouvères also have much to do with the making of The Western Canon.
My point takes more from an essay by James Joyce wherein he makes the point that all drama (fiction) invites catharsis. Catharsis, requires both recognition and resolution. From resolution I imply conflict and, in conflict, judgement, i.e. moral judgement.
Technology comes about when we extract information and abstract the information into mathematical expressions. Fiction requires we embed and entangle our selfs sympathetically into a story, as such it encourages "the right side of the brain" responses which feed moral choice.
cheers.
not nearly as boring as bad fiction
What is the moral being propagated in this work? None? Is it just a wapper for tech knowledge? Then why read it? Most geeks just want the facts. As the reviewer points out /. ers do well at calling bs. Why read poorly crafted fiction when the tech details are readily at hand?
Johnny Long did a mini guide to hacking google.
The Dot Com bubble exhibited the same feeding frenzy behaviour. No one really knew the potential of the web, but every wanted in, and, the more the better. The collapse of the Dot Com bubble reflected, not only unwarranted investment behaviour, but the fact that the web couldn't deliver in a timely fashion, not too mention the bloated, vapour ware companies backed by wildly speculative VCs.
What we may now have is a Google Bubble. While investors may not be ready to reinflate the Dot Com Bubble and speculate wildly on the web as a whole, they might be ready to invest wildly in a darling of the web like the, do no evil, just too cool, Google company.
Me I'm gonna stick with Double Bubble and good 'ol Pud.
They have set us up the bomb all your base are belong to us
The short answer is you've got too much time on your hands.
I put in 12/14 hour days, too often 7 days a week. I'm a quick study and an experienced researcher, but, even with those skills I only manage to stay abreast with news out of /. and the Reg. I read the headlines from a few feeds, but have to steal the time to read the full articles.
You and the others who jump on /. for lagging behind your reading must do not much else but casually surf the web satisfying your whimsy. Alot of us can only find the time to choose one or two sites to keep us informed. Contrary to the /. critics /. does a fine job of keeping me informed about "stuff that matters."
cheers
Taking your comment from the specific to the general, it's interesting that the American biologist E. O. Wilson has noted, in a different article I can't now locate, that China is the test case for humanity. His argument is that if China, with it's huge population, can find ways to provide for it's citizens, without destroying their ecology, then it's likely we, as a species will be able to overcome our current problems.
While civil liberties are an important facet of China's development, its fast degrading eco-structure is a more telling and scary indicator.
Sorry! The second link goes to The Xenoserver project.
Microsoft isn't willing to open up its source but by flying the flag of interoperability it's suggesting FOSS people can "seamlessly" move data across platforms.
Recently I've been doing alot of reading about The Xen virtual machine monitor and The Xen virtual machine monitor, interestinly MS is/was involved in both projects. There's never any doubt in my mind that the wet dream of every large corporation is to own everyone from the cradle to the grave. I've no doubt MS will never give up the idea of owning the web, and, further that interoperability is just another way to say "come into my web said the spider to the fly."
Behind it all, I suspect, is a gameplan that has MS software as a utility piped into thin clients in each and every household and business.
Just a little nit to pick but... uhm you see Harry Potter is a fictional character. J. Rawlings in the author of the Harry Potter books and she is protecting her rights. Now as to Richard Stallman being real or a work of visionary fiction, well, that is a moot point.
Laptop, Cell phone, PDA, iPod... now you're telling me I need jewlery scavanged from old hardware? I don't think so ;)
cheers
I live in Vancouver, where Gibson lives, and I lived in his neighbourhood for a long time. Gibson frequented the same scifi/fantasy bookstore as I and many others did. The kids in the store use to laugh at how little Gibson knew about computers, (In the early 90's he didn't know what a "drive" was). If you read the anniversary edition of Neuromancer you'll find an intro by Gibson where he states the make and model of the typewritter he used to write his first cyberspace novels.
from wikipedia:
"Mathematical rigour is often cited as a kind of gold standard for mathematical proof. It has a history, being traced back to Greek mathematics, where it is said to have been invented. Complete rigour, it is often said, became available in mathematics at the start of the twentieth century. This relies on the axiomatic method, and the subsequent development of pure mathematics under the axiomatic umbrella. With the aid of computers, it is possible to check proofs mechanically; throwing the possible flaws back onto machine errors that are considered unlikely events. Indeed, mathematical rigour may be defined as amenability to algorithmic checking of correctness. Formal rigour is the introduction of high degrees of completeness by means of a formal language. Most mathematical arguments are presented as prototypes of formally rigorous proofs, on the grounds that too much formality may in fact obscure what is being said."
Robustness
from wikipedia:
"In computing terms, robustness is reliability or being available seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Robustness is an important characterists of the internet because network design is a key factor in the availability of data."
This also can translate into portability.
Elegance
from wikipedia:
"The proof of a mathematical theorem is considered elegant if it is surprisingly simple yet effective and constructive; similarly, a computer program or algorithm is elegant if it uses a small amount of intuitive code to great effect."
Euclidean Geometry was long thought to demonstrate all three qualities. If one wants to attribute art to elegance then programming can be said to be art.
A book I picked up in a used bookstore spoke to the supposed knowledge of 20th century alchemists. The Morning of the Magicians is a fun read dealing to a large extent with Black Magic as practised in the Third Reich.
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/57 05.html
http://www.thezodiac.com/alchemy.htm