"So, in a fair world, Nakamura would have been compensated much better than he has been. The rest of the researchers on his team should've been, too."
This I see as a general problem of shareholder-owned companies. The people running the company have no vested interest in being "fair" - or at least none that goes beyond retaining their current employees - they simply need to maximise profits for their shareholders. There might well have been individuals in management voicing the opinion that "Mr. Blue LED" should be (much) more genrously compensated - but I find it obvious that these voices lost out. They simply stick to the existing contract.
One thing to consider is that companies regularly fund "speculative" research, and maybe hover around the break-even line in the results - this is accepted as common practice, and good for researchers. In this particular case, however, I believe that the value of the company was increased by around an order of magnitude due to sensei Nakamuras research. This type of invention is rare... and it usually ends up in a bum job for the inventor financially (Im thinking of the inventor of the Tamagotchi, for instance, who received a bonus in the same range as this case).
At least their legacy will make them, what, a little bit immortal, in the human reference of all things? Faint comfort - but I, for one, always think of Mr. Nakamura every time I see, a white LED flashlight, a full-colour large LED screen, or any mention of new high-density optical media. Thank-you sensei.
I recall reading something very similar in I believe Scientific American (which is not searchable, unfortunately), oh, ages ago. Used to identify ICBMs / warheads / other missiles during arms reduction discussions between the US & Russia (might even have been so far back as to make that USSR). Basically a splash of epoxy with sparkles mixed in on some disasterously-expensive-to-replace part of the device, snap a photograph and/or hologram, and the device is reliably tagged.
So it's become cheaper, cheap enough even for everyday use. However, the possible uses I can see are rather limited: local authentication, and pretty much nothing else. It's good for credit cards, but only if the card is physically read by the entity requestion authentication, and only if that entity is online (or has a local database of the speckle pattern of all cards worldwide, plus a magically updated revocation list). For any non-local authentication it doesn't seem much good... unless of course Fritz [Hollings] gets his palladium-plated way and we at some point do get tamperproof, "trusted" hardware (... to play around with - I'm looking forward to that).
So... it raises the price of duplicating a unique physical dongle.
But it definitely has nothing to do with crypto (i.e. encryption)... what was the author of this/. article taking? I want some.
Why does this company need to get approval of the US Gov?
My thoughts exactly.
I presume it's just a publicity gag. Considering that a) the moon is legally (AFAIK), as well as de-facto international, and b) they'll be neither launching from the US, nor flying through US airspace, I guess they just went up to various government organisations (NASA, EPA, federal reserve, you name it) and asked for a signed chitty saying that it was okey-dokey for them to be flying to to moon.
Not that this didn't generate any revenue for the goverment ("Permission to fly to the moon... hmmm... lemme seee... that'll be $50k to search for the corresponding form. Unreturnable if it turns out there ain't one." - but I figure it was worth it just because it looks good on their front page.
... 'course, this is not entirely on-topic, but: I have this lovely old wardrobe, that looks as if it were completely solid. Thing is, it's actually held together by just four screws. Two for the top, two for the bottom, and the sides are sort of wedged in. You take out the screws, lift the top, and the sides fall out on you. Of course, it's a bugger to put together, balancing two side pieces, three back pieces, and two doors on the base, and trying to get the top on properly... (still, I claim it to be a prime example of latter-day elegance of design markedly absent in Ikea)
More on topic: the ultimate wet-dream would be bits and pieces that could mind link with you. Imagine: you pick up a screw, and hear a happy voice in your head going "I am a screw!" - then it emotes a smiley at you... ugh. (Then you emote back: "okaaay... but are you a *good* screw?")
Even better would be self-assembly (okay, okay, I'm veering of topic again)... but by the time the tech has gotten that far, I expect the standard message on wake-up to be "hummmmmmm... your apartment is too small for me to fit in. The restocking fee is $$ . . " (yadda yadda). Or perhaps, if you get past the startup: "okey-dokey, I'm all assembled. But hey, I *so* don't match your dresser..."
Hmmm back to the case in point: No, don't do it. It's just one less chance for a tech-geek of having even a snowball's chance in a really hot place of having any reason at all for getting laid. </rampant sexism> [ducks]
So I'll get shot down in flames for the quote in the subject line... but I believe there is indeed a quite historical aspect to this story:
Most/.ers will have read some SF (that *Speculative*, godamit:) tome on the subject of the Valhalla machine (or whatever you want to call it): the end of the age of scarcity, thanks to "universal replicators".
The "IP" version of this is the "celestial jukebox"... which Napster would have become, but for the stumbling blocks.
I can imagine business / law majors a couple of decades down the line pointing out to us, back here in the time well, just where we went wrong & what we *should* have done - how it could have worked.
Music & films nowadays *can* be replicated & distributed for nothing more than the very cheap transmission & storage costs - thing is of course, they *aren't*.
I am very aware of all the linkage - artists & crew having to feed families & suchlike - but nonetheless, humanity almost had it, but somehow couldn't quite manage to organise things in such a way as to enjoy the fruits of the labour of previous generations & share the luxury of entertainment & education all round the globe.
Grand-style napsterisation of anything & everything digitizable *will* come... and Shawn Fanning's legacy may be just that: the word. Hopefully it won't acquire any more negative connotations than it already, illegitimately, has.
----
"and they say that I'm a dreamer / but I'm not the only one"
Goatse.cx [harvard.edu] is A-OK by Chinese authorities, but google isn't? Wow... now that's what I call a strange can of worms.
Ah, but the goat-man *has* to be visible, as a prime example of western decadence. Currently the average Chinese-off-the-streets thinks *all* westerners look like that... from that, uh, particular angle. I can imagine the Chinese equivalents to rednecks going around making jokes: "Nope... still too small for my dick. Open wider, Yankee."
After reading the story, and the comments here, one point remains: the protagonist, whose name I've already forgotten, emphasises how easy the body is to hack. Then he goes on about "Seratonin Levels" et cetera.
Seratonin. Aha.
What the fuck ever. My point is that the function of the body is not described by an amalgam of what is currently known. It may be possible to compile a list of what the human body is capable of, i.e., what the extremes are, and perhaps some information on the interconnectedness of it all - and I like the point made in the story that the excercise does not burn fat, but puts the body into a state where it is prepared to burn fat (although there's no reason it ought not do it any other time (apart from the obvious: if it did it willy-nilly, you would die)) - together with a small portion of the low-level goings-on, such as Seratonin, Vitamins, DNA, what-have-you, but information on the great slab of middleware is kind of flaky. Does anybody know, on a molacular level, what message I would have to send my body for it to commence burning fat? I don't think anybody knows.
Hard ess eff ought at least to be marginaly credible.
[...] with a cheap notebook at least you can [...] do some programming [...]
Yes, as could can with NewtonOS. It's mentioned somewhere inthe article: The Newton is a self-sufficient device, in addition to giving the possibility of syncing up with pretty much anything binary. Many of the Apps on NewtonOS are written in the native language (or so I am told) rather than externally compiled. Plus: the laptop has several big big disadvantages compared to say an emate: - screen backlight required. A Newton is fine with sufficient ambient light, reducing power consumption. - hard disk a must. A Newton gets by fine with no moving parts: robuster, less power consumption. It can do that by being essentially bloat-free. - fragile. The emate was designed to be used, and could sensibly be used, by professionals as well as kindergarten-age kids, without great risk of breaking. A laptop is someting I would not hand to a six-year-old and expect to get back in one piece.
No, nobody can. I wish I'd grabbed one while they were still up for grabs. Back when the Newton was dropped, I figured "hey - someone's going to make a replacement. I mean... the concept is so neat, the usefulness so obvious...". Boo-yah. Years down the line - there's nothing like it in the marketplace, your device is still unsurpassed. There is not one OS I can think of that adheres to the "KISS" principle (erm, that's "Keep It Simple, Stupid", for the acronym-disadvantaged). The magical thing about the Newton / emate is exactly the lack of processing power: and it performs just fine. What kind of hardware is required to run even a "slimmed-down" version of OS-X? What exactly is anyone doing with a computer that absolutely requires it to have a 1600 x 1400 screen in 65 million eye-watering colours displaying semi-transparent windows powered by an appreciable part of a gigaflop? (OK, that was rhetorical - CAD, gaming etc. But *not* just for reading, taking notes, browsing, emailing, messaging or even number-crunching, word processing form-filling and the other 95% of work performed with a computer.) (Anyway - "whaa - I wanna Newton" is about all I have to say.)
In the Mac people I've known, a lot of them tend to have much less full of the anti-social nerd in them than do the Windows and Linux communities.
I concur - a "typical" mac user (if there be such a thing) uses the mac as a tool for certain jobs, often unrelated to computing, whereas a "typical" win / *nux user is far more concentrated on the tech: computing for the sake of computing (this is the group I belong to, BTW).
However, I do have an additional point: these "sub-cultures" are not distinct. The biggest thing that comes to mind is OS-X: based on BSD, in turn made by some of the geekiest geeks out there (i.e., my hat goes off to them). So: Apple's OS is based on the fruits of the work of people who use computers for the sake of computers, and probably wouldn't touch OS-X with a bargepole.
Not good, not bad - but kind of neat.
PS: I dropped Newton when Apple dropped it. If I use something, I like to have the feeling it will still be around in a couple of years. And apple not licensing Newton tech so at least someone else could keep this fantastic machine alive is one of my main gripes with Apple / Steve Jobs / market economy / the concept of "intellectual property" / the universe. But I digress... right back onto the topic, it seems:)
Just to point out: "having parctical application" and "changing the world" are not exactly the same thing. If something has a practical application, it is a thought based upon which a device can be built: both human knowledge and the ability to change their environment have been enhanced. Books, on the other hand, can have an appreciable impact on society, historical import even. If that were not so, we would be no more than, uh, borgs perhaps? OK, so maybe it's just me whom the "no practical application" doesn't bother... I am aware of the (strong) possibility of future application, and the worth as a contribution to human knowledge - but it still doesn't compare to other realms of venture. That is to say, *any* venture can benefit humanity - art, literature, phuque knows, creative landscaping. Except for maybe the debate on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. That's pure bull;)
my 2 cents: not all studies are equal. Well, that much is obvious. But depending on how you cut the cake, you get some glaring differences. In my opinion, doctors and engineers are the two groups that require the most simple knowledge to be able to work at all, comparing all studies. That is to say, if you don't teach an electrical engineer adequately what phaenomena he/she might come across say at high frequencies, they won't be unable to design a light switch that didn't cause Bob-from-accounting's PDA to burp three rooms down the hall. Or in abstract, and as has been said further up in the thread: there is no time for any other shit. We live in what is touted to be the age of reason - scientific knowledge has exploded, and it is a reasonably oredered structure. An engineer in this age needs to know what an engineer did a hundred years ago, plus about 50 times as much in addition (same goes for doctors, but I'm more of an engineer... anyone else want to speak for them?). The same goes, of course, for all studies, but with the difference that engineers in particular cannot allow themselves too much specialisation. I would claim that even physicists and mathematicians, more so studies of literature, philosophy, even law can afford far greater specialisation without becoming completely useless. The amount of knowledge humanity has amassed (in spite of such things as the loss of the library in Alexandria... papyrus... who uses papyrus for data storage... pffft) is, of course, awe-inspiring, and that across the board.. my claim is merely that engineers need a greater-than-average slice of the whole cake to be able to opeate at all.
Renaissance people are great - we had a calculus prof who also gave a course "Introduction to Ulysses"... maybe this uni will work out, if they can attract the right students... but all in all, the world doesn't exactly abound with across-the-board genius. All they can do is make it a little bit easier on the multi-talented. You can do "holistic" studies at virtually any uni these days - you won't be able to stop those who are prone to successfully study a mix of all sorts of stuff from doing so - but for the rest of us, four years of pure engineering is intense enough as it is - add anything else, something else drops out of the pipe the other end.
But now, having read right - I actually find the granter's sin more forgivable. He simply screwed up.
But the grantee is "trying it on for size". They *may* know full well they're shovelling it with both hands, and that they're out to, in the worst case, screw money out of people whose work they originally profited from / ripped off.
As for the patenting process - this particular one may be a rather blatant mistake. Maybe: a) make it easier to revoke patents based on prior art: it shouldn't cost the earth. b) get PO employees to read/.:)
Now about that goatman idea... you haven't filed a patent yet... ?
I dig the tech... but from preceding comments I believe that a somewhat false impression has been made on a few people: There is indeed this fantastic engine which can reasonably efficiently propel you around the globe at speeds exceeding that of sound by a factor greater than the number of finger most people have on one hand - but: it has to be accelerated to more than twice the speed of the fastest jet aircraft built to date for it even to ignite.
I once had this motorbike I always had to push start. It was quite annoying.
I would guess that these people are focussed on what they do. They don't ask the question "is what we are doing similar to something someone else has done before, or perhaps even pretty much identical", instead they're saying "what we're doing is better than sliced bread. We are the definition of bleeding edge. What do we have to do to patent this stuff? I wanna buy an island.".
I would also guess that even their hard core hacks would share this delusion - when asked by the money guys whether what they were doing was patentable, they would go "Sure. Of course. I mean, there's some older stuff out there, but it's kiddie play in comparison. For all intents and purposes, we invented this."
OK - I'm just giving them the benefit of doubt. Delusional with a side order of intentionally selectively blind and a sprinkling of dismissive - not *necessarily* unethical. Just probably.
... I shall mention etoy, since I remember them to be at least one of the first to manipulate search engine rankings in an amusing manner. Does anyone else remember the "hijackings" they did? You entered a conventional search term, e.g. "cooking chicken", and the n-th link of the results, if you clicked on it, took to to a big ol' page saying "YOU HAVE BEEN HIJACKED" yadda yadda. Entertaining, albeit politically incorrect, especially nowadays.
The neat thing was that they had their rankings down to a fine art - they could say "we want our page to be no. 2 on yahoo, no. 5 on altavista, and no. 1 on webcrawler"... any hey presto, it was. Neat. The engine guys hated them, of course... as did etoys.com - the altercation etoy.com had with *them* is probably where most people know them from.
There's an article on wired, but I haven't been able to come up with anything on their internet hijacks.
Oh well. I'm feeling old in Internet years right now.
I see three main areas of use for computers nowadays: a) old-style number crunching: weather, nuclear warheads and whatnot b) work: shuffling documents around, making the odd powerPoint presentation c) play: from iTunes to pac-man
Most/.-ers use their comps for all three. However Number crunching -- considering that today's desktop is probably more powerful than a comp used for global weather forecast as of ten years ago, there's not much of this going on. Or if there is, 90% of the cycles are probably going into a pretty GUI with translucent whatsits. Work -- companies are flexible towards legal mandates. There is no specific desire for a general-purpose comp in most work places - it just has to do what it is supposed to, and there has to be a vendor to blame when it doesn't. Play -- this is where the general population is. Stuff like iTunes is really nice and easy to use, as are xboxes / PSs etc. right out of the box. Very few people look even at all the configuration possibilities, much less anything that has a hex number in it somewhere.
So actually very few "play around" with this stuff. This goes from replacing the sound card & feeling like a 1337 h4X0r about it, to cracking the encryption of the xbox bootup sequence (which I *do* consider to be pretty 1337). And these things are done for the same reason as mountain climbing: because they can be done, and it's fun. So it doesn't get the chicks & studs juiced up, because a byte is something *they* take out of a burger, but it does pass time (and/or get you a degree).
Now to my point: this isn't about the digital hub, but I see the issue as a broader one: it's about the demise of the general-purpose computer. So-called general-purpose comps nowadays are pretty closed-system anyway. How many have any clue what the schematics of their 3/5/7/~ layer moBo looks like? How many have actually de- and/or re-soldered an SMD? You're getting everything from some shop or other. The best you can do is to hack a board with a DSP / Z80 / HC11 whatever for some arcane highly specialised use. And the shops that build even those things are highly specialised in turn. The general-purpose comp of today is already an illusion. Even overclocking is just setting some jumpers and tweaking the BIOS - it's all within the parameters set by the manufacturers. The jobs computers are used for is cut out already. To recap:
- Crunching: use big iron. Not affected by CBDTPA / BPDG/etc. - Office: don't care. Would use an "xbox office edition" if it increased productivity. Would even welcome P2P-inhibiting features - Play: a large majority neither care, nor are capable of grasping the issues anyway
Which means that the 1337 are left with closed-shop systems which are likely about to become just a little more closed-shop. OGG will die, and no-one (who matters) will care.
If you read this and are thinking to yourself "but I want my general-purpose computer" (with only a smidgen of "this guy's full of shit" and "his rhetoric stinks" - both of which I am aware of and take pride in, not necessarily respectively;) - ask yourself what exactly for. The most positive answer I can think of "I don't know - yet" (to which Hollywood's response will be "great, we're going to tell you"). Any other answer will evoke a response from Hollywood of either "you can still do that" or "that's exactly what we want to stop, because it is / is going to be illegal.". No big deal either way.
And this branch of the thread is dragged, kicking and screaming, back on-topic.
Unintentional side-effect:)
Okay... I never had a notebook. I still have a couple of loose leafs with sprites for the C-64 though... from the time before a) sprite-editors, and b) my trusty 1541 5 1/4' disk drive. I remember once not taking part in a contest, where the task was to write a useful program in C-64 BASIC in thirteen instructions or less (or some such inanity). I had a killer submission - a sort of 'roids game - which was so good I spent the whole time playing it instead of submitting it. Well, that's my excuse anyway. I'm sure I still have a disk somewhere, with half an inch of dust on it.
Um... so that was a "me2", without the benefit of having read the article even, because it was/.-ed.
[...] slashdot should automatically pull a copy of the page/story and put it somewhere in a temporary cache [...] PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS! IT IS VERY ANNOYING, ALMOST AS ANNOYING AS WHEN SOMEONE TYPES IN ALL CAPS
(re. the slashcode)
Hmph. I am kept from submitting comments like this by cringing at the thought of someone replying "It's open source. Dude - go ahead. Don't let *us* stop you." - and I can't type when I cringe. Seriously though - I have more ideas than I have 1337 5ki11z, and I don't think that those with the skills have fewer ideas than myself.
Plus - hey... wouldn't this lead to/. being/.-ed?:)
Hi Ilan Volow - An excellent article - many thanks. (Q7, circular popups, I have never had the pleasure of using, but they sound like a mix between pointing and gestures - neat)
concerning mice: using a mouse is terribly inefficient. The only thing it has going for it is that it is universal. I can use it to point (badly), draw (badly), write (very badly) - just about anything in 2-D.
However, when I watch myself aim for instance for that 5mm x 20mm area in most apps that says "File", I realise that fast as it is, it actually represents an effort - it requires appreciable hand-eye coordination. This is not really a problem (at least not for me), but it is an unnecessary annoyance - it should be effortless. It's also the reason I learn about 20+ keyboard shortcuts as soon as possible for every app I know I'm going to be using 2+ times a week. I always Alt-Tab through my apps on Windows, and if I want to see the running apps, I unhide the autohidden startbar with the Windows key, rather than the mouse. My favourite apps are the ones where I don't have the touch the mouse at all. Although there are some exceptions: mouse gestures in Opera are great, mainly because they require hardly any hand-eye coordination - the pointer just has to be somewhere in the window I want to do something with. Same with wheeled mice - successful, because it requires far less effort putting the pointer somewhere in a windows and "wheeling" up/down, rather than aiming for the proper section of a 5 mm scrollbar.
Having said all that - this is just one element of modern GUIs, notably interesting because it's both so successful and so bad.
I was expecting all sorts of bits coming together in this article, such as image/video processing, adding several images together, object recognition, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle as applied to video images (if it's blurred, you probably can't recognise what it is - but then, it's probably moving fast, so precise identicication takes a lower precedence than getting out of the way), attempts to put all gathered data into perspective, i.e., making a "map" of the outside world, and so on.
What do I get? Hey! I remember thses things from the eighties. You got a little bug with a couple of light sensors underneath, plus a red pen. You also got a thrashing when you covered the most available big flat white surface, which was the kitchen table, with roads (a.k.a. "scribbling").
OK, so they've gotten faster, but it looks like any car you upgrade with this tech will race down the centre marker of any highway you let it loose on... which might actually be an improvement on some people's driving, come to think of it.
As chance wants it, I came across Charlie's writing just a couple of weeks ago - and concur with all the positive comments. He also has a unreleased novel called Scratch Monkey on his website (right at the bottom), for which you need to request the "keys" before being able to access it.
Scratch Monkey is definitely worth reading.
PS: hi Charlie! This article is the equivalent of being on the cover of the Rolling Stone, yea?
Slashdot Mirror
"So, in a fair world, Nakamura would have been compensated much better than he has been. The rest of the researchers on his team should've been, too."
... and it usually ends up in a bum job for the inventor financially (Im thinking of the inventor of the Tamagotchi, for instance, who received a bonus in the same range as this case).
This I see as a general problem of shareholder-owned companies. The people running the company have no vested interest in being "fair" - or at least none that goes beyond retaining their current employees - they simply need to maximise profits for their shareholders. There might well have been individuals in management voicing the opinion that "Mr. Blue LED" should be (much) more genrously compensated - but I find it obvious that these voices lost out. They simply stick to the existing contract.
One thing to consider is that companies regularly fund "speculative" research, and maybe hover around the break-even line in the results - this is accepted as common practice, and good for researchers. In this particular case, however, I believe that the value of the company was increased by around an order of magnitude due to sensei Nakamuras research. This type of invention is rare
At least their legacy will make them, what, a little bit immortal, in the human reference of all things? Faint comfort - but I, for one, always think of Mr. Nakamura every time I see, a white LED flashlight, a full-colour large LED screen, or any mention of new high-density optical media. Thank-you sensei.
I recall reading something very similar in I believe Scientific American (which is not searchable, unfortunately), oh, ages ago. Used to identify ICBMs / warheads / other missiles during arms reduction discussions between the US & Russia (might even have been so far back as to make that USSR). Basically a splash of epoxy with sparkles mixed in on some disasterously-expensive-to-replace part of the device, snap a photograph and/or hologram, and the device is reliably tagged.
... unless of course Fritz [Hollings] gets his palladium-plated way and we at some point do get tamperproof, "trusted" hardware (... to play around with - I'm looking forward to that).
... it raises the price of duplicating a unique physical dongle.
... what was the author of this /. article taking? I want some.
So it's become cheaper, cheap enough even for everyday use. However, the possible uses I can see are rather limited: local authentication, and pretty much nothing else.
It's good for credit cards, but only if the card is physically read by the entity requestion authentication, and only if that entity is online (or has a local database of the speckle pattern of all cards worldwide, plus a magically updated revocation list).
For any non-local authentication it doesn't seem much good
So
But it definitely has nothing to do with crypto (i.e. encryption)
Why does this company need to get approval of the US Gov?
... hmmm ... lemme seee ... that'll be $50k to search for the corresponding form. Unreturnable if it turns out there ain't one." - but I figure it was worth it just because it looks good on their front page.
My thoughts exactly.
I presume it's just a publicity gag. Considering that a) the moon is legally (AFAIK), as well as de-facto international, and b) they'll be neither launching from the US, nor flying through US airspace, I guess they just went up to various government organisations (NASA, EPA, federal reserve, you name it) and asked for a signed chitty saying that it was okey-dokey for them to be flying to to moon.
Not that this didn't generate any revenue for the goverment ("Permission to fly to the moon
... 'course, this is not entirely on-topic, but: I have this lovely old wardrobe, that looks as if it were completely solid. Thing is, it's actually held together by just four screws. Two for the top, two for the bottom, and the sides are sort of wedged in. You take out the screws, lift the top, and the sides fall out on you. ... (still, I claim it to be a prime example of latter-day elegance of design markedly absent in Ikea)
... ugh. (Then you emote back: "okaaay ... but are you a *good* screw?")
... but by the time the tech has gotten that far, I expect the standard message on wake-up to be "hummmmmmm ... your apartment is too small for me to fit in. The restocking fee is $$ . . " (yadda yadda). Or perhaps, if you get past the startup: "okey-dokey, I'm all assembled. But hey, I *so* don't match your dresser ..."
Of course, it's a bugger to put together, balancing two side pieces, three back pieces, and two doors on the base, and trying to get the top on properly
More on topic: the ultimate wet-dream would be bits and pieces that could mind link with you. Imagine: you pick up a screw, and hear a happy voice in your head going "I am a screw!" - then it emotes a smiley at you
Even better would be self-assembly (okay, okay, I'm veering of topic again)
Hmmm back to the case in point: No, don't do it. It's just one less chance for a tech-geek of having even a snowball's chance in a really hot place of having any reason at all for getting laid.
</rampant sexism> [ducks]
So I'll get shot down in flames for the quote in the subject line ... but I believe there is indeed a quite historical aspect to this story:
/.ers will have read some SF (that *Speculative*, godamit :) tome on the subject of the Valhalla machine (or whatever you want to call it): the end of the age of scarcity, thanks to "universal replicators".
... which Napster would have become, but for the stumbling blocks.
... and Shawn Fanning's legacy may be just that: the word.
Most
The "IP" version of this is the "celestial jukebox"
I can imagine business / law majors a couple of decades down the line pointing out to us, back here in the time well, just where we went wrong & what we *should* have done - how it could have worked.
Music & films nowadays *can* be replicated & distributed for nothing more than the very cheap transmission & storage costs - thing is of course, they *aren't*.
I am very aware of all the linkage - artists & crew having to feed families & suchlike - but nonetheless, humanity almost had it, but somehow couldn't quite manage to organise things in such a way as to enjoy the fruits of the labour of previous generations & share the luxury of entertainment & education all round the globe.
Grand-style napsterisation of anything & everything digitizable *will* come
Hopefully it won't acquire any more negative connotations than it already, illegitimately, has.
----
"and they say that I'm a dreamer / but I'm not the only one"
Goatse.cx [harvard.edu] is A-OK by Chinese authorities, but google isn't?
... from that, uh, particular angle. ... still too small for my dick. Open wider, Yankee."
Wow... now that's what I call a strange can of worms.
Ah, but the goat-man *has* to be visible, as a prime example of western decadence.
Currently the average Chinese-off-the-streets thinks *all* westerners look like that
I can imagine the Chinese equivalents to rednecks going around making jokes: "Nope
After reading the story, and the comments here, one point remains: the protagonist, whose name I've already forgotten, emphasises how easy the body is to hack. Then he goes on about "Seratonin Levels" et cetera.
Seratonin. Aha.
What the fuck ever. My point is that the function of the body is not described by an amalgam of what is currently known. It may be possible to compile a list of what the human body is capable of, i.e., what the extremes are, and perhaps some information on the interconnectedness of it all - and I like the point made in the story that the excercise does not burn fat, but puts the body into a state where it is prepared to burn fat (although there's no reason it ought not do it any other time (apart from the obvious: if it did it willy-nilly, you would die)) - together with a small portion of the low-level goings-on, such as Seratonin, Vitamins, DNA, what-have-you, but information on the great slab of middleware is kind of flaky. Does anybody know, on a molacular level, what message I would have to send my body for it to commence burning fat? I don't think anybody knows.
Hard ess eff ought at least to be marginaly credible.
[...] with a cheap notebook at least you can [...] do some programming [...]
:)
Yes, as could can with NewtonOS. It's mentioned somewhere inthe article: The Newton is a self-sufficient device, in addition to giving the possibility of syncing up with pretty much anything binary. Many of the Apps on NewtonOS are written in the native language (or so I am told) rather than externally compiled.
Plus: the laptop has several big big disadvantages compared to say an emate:
- screen backlight required. A Newton is fine with sufficient ambient light, reducing power consumption.
- hard disk a must. A Newton gets by fine with no moving parts: robuster, less power consumption. It can do that by being essentially bloat-free.
- fragile. The emate was designed to be used, and could sensibly be used, by professionals as well as kindergarten-age kids, without great risk of breaking. A laptop is someting I would not hand to a six-year-old and expect to get back in one piece.
... and so on
No, nobody can. I wish I'd grabbed one while they were still up for grabs. Back when the Newton was dropped, I figured "hey - someone's going to make a replacement. I mean ... the concept is so neat, the usefulness so obvious ...".
Boo-yah. Years down the line - there's nothing like it in the marketplace, your device is still unsurpassed. There is not one OS I can think of that adheres to the "KISS" principle (erm, that's "Keep It Simple, Stupid", for the acronym-disadvantaged). The magical thing about the Newton / emate is exactly the lack of processing power: and it performs just fine. What kind of hardware is required to run even a "slimmed-down" version of OS-X? What exactly is anyone doing with a computer that absolutely requires it to have a 1600 x 1400 screen in 65 million eye-watering colours displaying semi-transparent windows powered by an appreciable part of a gigaflop? (OK, that was rhetorical - CAD, gaming etc. But *not* just for reading, taking notes, browsing, emailing, messaging or even number-crunching, word processing form-filling and the other 95% of work performed with a computer.)
(Anyway - "whaa - I wanna Newton" is about all I have to say.)
In the Mac people I've known, a lot of them tend to have much less full of the anti-social nerd in them than do the Windows and Linux communities.
... right back onto the topic, it seems :)
I concur - a "typical" mac user (if there be such a thing) uses the mac as a tool for certain jobs, often unrelated to computing, whereas a "typical" win / *nux user is far more concentrated on the tech: computing for the sake of computing (this is the group I belong to, BTW).
However, I do have an additional point: these "sub-cultures" are not distinct. The biggest thing that comes to mind is OS-X: based on BSD, in turn made by some of the geekiest geeks out there (i.e., my hat goes off to them). So: Apple's OS is based on the fruits of the work of people who use computers for the sake of computers, and probably wouldn't touch OS-X with a bargepole.
Not good, not bad - but kind of neat.
PS: I dropped Newton when Apple dropped it. If I use something, I like to have the feeling it will still be around in a couple of years. And apple not licensing Newton tech so at least someone else could keep this fantastic machine alive is one of my main gripes with Apple / Steve Jobs / market economy / the concept of "intellectual property" / the universe. But I digress
Just to point out: "having parctical application" and "changing the world" are not exactly the same thing. If something has a practical application, it is a thought based upon which a device can be built: both human knowledge and the ability to change their environment have been enhanced. Books, on the other hand, can have an appreciable impact on society, historical import even. If that were not so, we would be no more than, uh, borgs perhaps? ... I am aware of the (strong) possibility of future application, and the worth as a contribution to human knowledge - but it still doesn't compare to other realms of venture. That is to say, *any* venture can benefit humanity - art, literature, phuque knows, creative landscaping. Except for maybe the debate on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. That's pure bull ;)
OK, so maybe it's just me whom the "no practical application" doesn't bother
my 2 cents: not all studies are equal. Well, that much is obvious. But depending on how you cut the cake, you get some glaring differences. ... anyone else want to speak for them?). The same goes, of course, for all studies, but with the difference that engineers in particular cannot allow themselves too much specialisation. I would claim that even physicists and mathematicians, more so studies of literature, philosophy, even law can afford far greater specialisation without becoming completely useless. ... papyrus ... who uses papyrus for data storage ... pffft) is, of course, awe-inspiring, and that across the board .. my claim is merely that engineers need a greater-than-average slice of the whole cake to be able to opeate at all.
... maybe this uni will work out, if they can attract the right students ... but all in all, the world doesn't exactly abound with across-the-board genius. All they can do is make it a little bit easier on the multi-talented. You can do "holistic" studies at virtually any uni these days - you won't be able to stop those who are prone to successfully study a mix of all sorts of stuff from doing so - but for the rest of us, four years of pure engineering is intense enough as it is - add anything else, something else drops out of the pipe the other end.
In my opinion, doctors and engineers are the two groups that require the most simple knowledge to be able to work at all, comparing all studies. That is to say, if you don't teach an electrical engineer adequately what phaenomena he/she might come across say at high frequencies, they won't be unable to design a light switch that didn't cause Bob-from-accounting's PDA to burp three rooms down the hall.
Or in abstract, and as has been said further up in the thread: there is no time for any other shit. We live in what is touted to be the age of reason - scientific knowledge has exploded, and it is a reasonably oredered structure.
An engineer in this age needs to know what an engineer did a hundred years ago, plus about 50 times as much in addition (same goes for doctors, but I'm more of an engineer
The amount of knowledge humanity has amassed (in spite of such things as the loss of the library in Alexandria
Renaissance people are great - we had a calculus prof who also gave a course "Introduction to Ulysses"
Right - wasn't reading properly, was I?
/. :)
... you haven't filed a patent yet ... ?
But now, having read right - I actually find the granter's sin more forgivable. He simply screwed up.
But the grantee is "trying it on for size". They *may* know full well they're shovelling it with both hands, and that they're out to, in the worst case, screw money out of people whose work they originally profited from / ripped off.
As for the patenting process - this particular one may be a rather blatant mistake. Maybe:
a) make it easier to revoke patents based on prior art: it shouldn't cost the earth.
b) get PO employees to read
Now about that goatman idea
I dig the tech ... but from preceding comments I believe that a somewhat false impression has been made on a few people: There is indeed this fantastic engine which can reasonably efficiently propel you around the globe at speeds exceeding that of sound by a factor greater than the number of finger most people have on one hand - but: it has to be accelerated to more than twice the speed of the fastest jet aircraft built to date for it even to ignite.
I once had this motorbike I always had to push start. It was quite annoying.
I would guess that these people are focussed on what they do. They don't ask the question "is what we are doing similar to something someone else has done before, or perhaps even pretty much identical", instead they're saying "what we're doing is better than sliced bread. We are the definition of bleeding edge. What do we have to do to patent this stuff? I wanna buy an island.".
I would also guess that even their hard core hacks would share this delusion - when asked by the money guys whether what they were doing was patentable, they would go "Sure. Of course. I mean, there's some older stuff out there, but it's kiddie play in comparison. For all intents and purposes, we invented this."
OK - I'm just giving them the benefit of doubt. Delusional with a side order of intentionally selectively blind and a sprinkling of dismissive - not *necessarily* unethical. Just probably.
... I shall mention etoy, since I remember them to be at least one of the first to manipulate search engine rankings in an amusing manner. Does anyone else remember the "hijackings" they did? You entered a conventional search term, e.g. "cooking chicken", and the n-th link of the results, if you clicked on it, took to to a big ol' page saying "YOU HAVE BEEN HIJACKED" yadda yadda. Entertaining, albeit politically incorrect, especially nowadays.
... any hey presto, it was. Neat. The engine guys hated them, of course ... as did etoys.com - the altercation etoy.com had with *them* is probably where most people know them from.
The neat thing was that they had their rankings down to a fine art - they could say "we want our page to be no. 2 on yahoo, no. 5 on altavista, and no. 1 on webcrawler"
There's an article on wired, but I haven't been able to come up with anything on their internet hijacks.
Oh well. I'm feeling old in Internet years right now.
I see three main areas of use for computers nowadays:
/.-ers use their comps for all three. However
/etc.
;) - ask yourself what exactly for.
a) old-style number crunching: weather, nuclear warheads and whatnot
b) work: shuffling documents around, making the odd powerPoint presentation
c) play: from iTunes to pac-man
Most
Number crunching -- considering that today's desktop is probably more powerful than a comp used for global weather forecast as of ten years ago, there's not much of this going on. Or if there is, 90% of the cycles are probably going into a pretty GUI with translucent whatsits.
Work -- companies are flexible towards legal mandates. There is no specific desire for a general-purpose comp in most work places - it just has to do what it is supposed to, and there has to be a vendor to blame when it doesn't.
Play -- this is where the general population is. Stuff like iTunes is really nice and easy to use, as are xboxes / PSs etc. right out of the box. Very few people look even at all the configuration possibilities, much less anything that has a hex number in it somewhere.
So actually very few "play around" with this stuff. This goes from replacing the sound card & feeling like a 1337 h4X0r about it, to cracking the encryption of the xbox bootup sequence (which I *do* consider to be pretty 1337). And these things are done for the same reason as mountain climbing: because they can be done, and it's fun. So it doesn't get the chicks & studs juiced up, because a byte is something *they* take out of a burger, but it does pass time (and/or get you a degree).
Now to my point: this isn't about the digital hub, but I see the issue as a broader one: it's about the demise of the general-purpose computer. So-called general-purpose comps nowadays are pretty closed-system anyway. How many have any clue what the schematics of their 3/5/7/~ layer moBo looks like? How many have actually de- and/or re-soldered an SMD? You're getting everything from some shop or other. The best you can do is to hack a board with a DSP / Z80 / HC11 whatever for some arcane highly specialised use. And the shops that build even those things are highly specialised in turn. The general-purpose comp of today is already an illusion. Even overclocking is just setting some jumpers and tweaking the BIOS - it's all within the parameters set by the manufacturers. The jobs computers are used for is cut out already. To recap:
- Crunching: use big iron. Not affected by CBDTPA / BPDG
- Office: don't care. Would use an "xbox office edition" if it increased productivity. Would even welcome P2P-inhibiting features
- Play: a large majority neither care, nor are capable of grasping the issues anyway
Which means that the 1337 are left with closed-shop systems which are likely about to become just a little more closed-shop. OGG will die, and no-one (who matters) will care.
If you read this and are thinking to yourself "but I want my general-purpose computer" (with only a smidgen of "this guy's full of shit" and "his rhetoric stinks" - both of which I am aware of and take pride in, not necessarily respectively
The most positive answer I can think of "I don't know - yet" (to which Hollywood's response will be "great, we're going to tell you").
Any other answer will evoke a response from Hollywood of either "you can still do that" or "that's exactly what we want to stop, because it is / is going to be illegal.". No big deal either way.
signed,
- the Devil's advocate
And this branch of the thread is dragged, kicking and screaming, back on-topic.
:)
... I never had a notebook. I still have a couple of loose leafs with sprites for the C-64 though ... from the time before a) sprite-editors, and b) my trusty 1541 5 1/4' disk drive.
... so that was a "me2", without the benefit of having read the article even, because it was /.-ed.
Unintentional side-effect
Okay
I remember once not taking part in a contest, where the task was to write a useful program in C-64 BASIC in thirteen instructions or less (or some such inanity). I had a killer submission - a sort of 'roids game - which was so good I spent the whole time playing it instead of submitting it. Well, that's my excuse anyway. I'm sure I still have a disk somewhere, with half an inch of dust on it.
Um
[...] slashdot should automatically pull a copy of the page/story and put it somewhere in a temporary cache [...]
... wouldn't this lead to /. being /.-ed? :)
PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS! IT IS VERY ANNOYING, ALMOST AS ANNOYING AS WHEN SOMEONE TYPES IN ALL CAPS
(re. the slashcode)
Hmph. I am kept from submitting comments like this by cringing at the thought of someone replying "It's open source. Dude - go ahead. Don't let *us* stop you." - and I can't type when I cringe.
Seriously though - I have more ideas than I have 1337 5ki11z, and I don't think that those with the skills have fewer ideas than myself.
Plus - hey
Hi Ilan Volow - An excellent article - many thanks. (Q7, circular popups, I have never had the pleasure of using, but they sound like a mix between pointing and gestures - neat)
concerning mice: using a mouse is terribly inefficient. The only thing it has going for it is that it is universal. I can use it to point (badly), draw (badly), write (very badly) - just about anything in 2-D.
However, when I watch myself aim for instance for that 5mm x 20mm area in most apps that says "File", I realise that fast as it is, it actually represents an effort - it requires appreciable hand-eye coordination. This is not really a problem (at least not for me), but it is an unnecessary annoyance - it should be effortless. It's also the reason I learn about 20+ keyboard shortcuts as soon as possible for every app I know I'm going to be using 2+ times a week. I always Alt-Tab through my apps on Windows, and if I want to see the running apps, I unhide the autohidden startbar with the Windows key, rather than the mouse.
My favourite apps are the ones where I don't have the touch the mouse at all. Although there are some exceptions: mouse gestures in Opera are great, mainly because they require hardly any hand-eye coordination - the pointer just has to be somewhere in the window I want to do something with. Same with wheeled mice - successful, because it requires far less effort putting the pointer somewhere in a windows and "wheeling" up/down, rather than aiming for the proper section of a 5 mm scrollbar.
Having said all that - this is just one element of modern GUIs, notably interesting because it's both so successful and so bad.
I was expecting all sorts of bits coming together in this article, such as image/video processing, adding several images together, object recognition, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle as applied to video images (if it's blurred, you probably can't recognise what it is - but then, it's probably moving fast, so precise identicication takes a lower precedence than getting out of the way), attempts to put all gathered data into perspective, i.e., making a "map" of the outside world, and so on.
... which might actually be an improvement on some people's driving, come to think of it.
What do I get? Hey! I remember thses things from the eighties. You got a little bug with a couple of light sensors underneath, plus a red pen. You also got a thrashing when you covered the most available big flat white surface, which was the kitchen table, with roads (a.k.a. "scribbling").
OK, so they've gotten faster, but it looks like any car you upgrade with this tech will race down the centre marker of any highway you let it loose on
... why, that's almost sixteen and a half kilofurlongs per fortnight!
this is another social "scene" I can help define by not being part of it.
As chance wants it, I came across Charlie's writing just a couple of weeks ago - and concur with all the positive comments. He also has a unreleased novel called Scratch Monkey on his website (right at the bottom), for which you need to request the "keys" before being able to access it.
Scratch Monkey is definitely worth reading.
PS: hi Charlie! This article is the equivalent of being on the cover of the Rolling Stone, yea?