I was referring to the demo, which is seven-segment. The actual watch is 15 pixels per digit, but the point is that the watch is displaying the arabic numerals "0" and "1". My point is that I only need one pixel per bit.
Not strictly on topic, but having stumbled across this oeuvre in my parent's bottomless pit of a library a couple of months ago, and since then, having badgered all my friends (well, the litarate ones) about them _having_ to read this great book, I'm "jumping with glee" (as it were) to see this actilce on/. and add my two cents:
this is what SF is about, or rather, for.
It paints a vivid picture of a world none of us will ever see in the flesh (well... maybe if you have your head frozen... but I digress) which is fascinating, i.e. "a real trip, man", but also tells us much about the world we can/do experience in the flesh. In times to come, books such as these will not be sidelined into "science fiction", but rather will be up there with the rest of literature, albeit of a perhaps more consciousness-expanding type (maybe when spaceships become commonplace). It tells of things which could not fit into a non-science fiction piece - or at least, give a new and vastly different perspective on the state of being human.
Heh. Where was I? Oh yeah - I liked it and recommend it.
Errr... no time-zones. Midnight = 000.beat only in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. Farked-up, eh? But it does mean that 123.beat for you = 123.beat for me too, regardless of where we are.
(Still think 1024 would have been better, though. I mean, 1000 = 23 x 53, and I've only got two hands (for the fives), whereas 1024 = 210, and I have exactly 10 fingers. Woo)
Well they got this one wrong. Seven-segment displays for binary numbers? So they might be taking the piss with that, but they could at least offer up a true binary watch at the same time.
All it would need is 17 binary indicators, or three seven-segment display units (which would leave 4 bits over, for... oh, a game, perhaps?)
Swatch did ".beat"-time, but the maximum would be ".otherBeat" with 1024 beats per day (... new idea? GPL it. This post counts as prior art:)
Apart from incidentals (such as Jules Verne's pretty good estimate of the escape velocity of earth's gravitational field - about 11 kps) which I put off as coincidents, I see SF-RL links in two categories:
SF -> RL:
naming, e.g. "cyberspace", "robots", "cyborgs", "beaming", etc. etc.
RL -> SF:
(and this is one of the aspects of SF which facinates me) interpretations of the world. For example: Douglas Adams' Hitch-Hiker trilogy (heh...) contains todays lay-man's interpretations of modern physics, as concerns faster-than-light travel, time travel, computing, and so on. In general: An SF author is called upon to paint a picture of a world which is different from the one which is accepted in the author's day - and the interesting thing is to see just where the author's imagination doesn't flex, especially in "older" SF. This touches not only on science, but also on sociology, psychology etc. For instance: some 50s 60s SF is good solid stuff, but all spaceship's crew are scrubbed clean & in white uniforms, like they just came off an super-modern ocean-going ship, and the society is, by today's standards, sexist & racist to a hairraising degree.
BTW: don't miss out on all the SF which is too litarary to be classified as SF, such as Hesse's "Das Glasperlenspiel", or Michel Houellebecq's "Les Particules Elementaires".
I agree, especially about the missing 95% (Not Quite Peanuts TM) - OTOH, balancing rocket of that size on a pillar of fire for more than a kilometer is quite a feat in itself. The first time I saw this guy's site, I thought he was a complete piss-artist... but maybe he can make it after all.
[...] this right is enshrined in the First Amendment: with connotations not just of "earliest" but also "primary" [...]
I put more emphasis on "Amendment", and not so much on "First". Amendments have been de facto repealed in the past... but everyone's too scared to update the constitution (as done in other countries) to put free speech into the law proper, because the special interests would be writing it, and not the "people". Scary. Whatever.
First this that occurred to me was not astronomical numbers, but ones like these: the human brain. Assuming that a true AI will have approximately the same complexity, petabytes may just not cover it, quite.
a group of the original submitters (who never signed the CRC "boilerplate") were to sue CRC for copyright infringement?
It might nullify the contract between Weisstein & CRC, and lead to the demise of the book, but with an adequate number of mirrors - I think the wold is ready for the if-you-want-a-hardcopy-then-download-it-and-print- it book.
hm... I've been working with the triangle "Cost", "Schedule" and "Quality". "Quality" in this case includes "quantity" in your sense, but considering feature creep, I think making it a seperate corner point makes sense... thanks Lars!
(maybe I should just read a book about project management, rather than going by the seat of my 501's:)
aye, there's the rub. Getting the client to understand what the hell the specification means is the hard bit. Most of the time, you spend half the specification strech explaining the client's requirements back to them, because they don't even know precisely what they want/need. I.e.: translating "fuzzy logic" into "hard logic".
I think that Eric Raymond is setting up a bit of a straw man here. This can be exemplified best by peeking at the analogous discussions about Napster et al. What the FSF is advocating, as far as I understand, is the philosophy (or rather, tagline) of "information wants to be free". That is, conventional contracts can be entered, but as soon as the information is out there, it will be nearly impossible to police it, and ensure that it stays within the select circle of those-who-bought-it. If someone outside the circle is found possessing a copy, and using it, they cannot be dragged to court - only the person who leaked it outside the select circle is liable, and they will be almost impossible to identify. This is very similar to the MP3 discussions, and also opens a new can of worms: underage persons cannot enter legally binding contracts. So it you want to remove the "blanket" protection for information (i.e., software, music, literature, etc.) the way it is in place now, to protect the information contractually, you'd have to have every buyer, worldwide, enter a valid, binding contract in which they promise not to pass it on. Kids and teenagers would no longer be allowed to purchace muzak or gamez without becoming instant automatic leaks outside the select circle. Kind of messes it up for an industry which has best success rate telling people what is cool when the people are teens, doesn't it?
In short: the spirit of what the FSF is standing for is not a mandate of the types of contracts which can and cannot be made, but merely the concept of what constitutes a crime. The way it is now: you see something, chances are you'll get your pants sued off it you use it. What they want: it's there, you can use it. If you can sell something and ensure that your rights are policed, bully to you - but chances are it'll end up in the public domain without you being able to identify a culprit. There is simply no blanket protection anymore enabling you to go after every Joe Average with whom you never entered any contract in the first place. I.e. (provocativly) only innovations will be worth anything anymore...
Salmon Rushdie. He wrote a book he knew would be illegal in Afghanistan (or wherever). At least they had the courtesy to come and get him. Or at least try to. But - He had it coming.
Oh, so it was the almighty space aliens. Of course - it could have been. It could have been natural erosion. A late group of neanderthals, who mysteriously died out right after completion. Egyptian jet air planes. Instant rock: just add water. Antigrav units, imported from Atlantis. Sublimated cloud formations. (Hey - you come up with some, it's you who's claiming they are all on par with "a bunch of slaves".) And considering that all of the above, and a whole lot more are all possible, we'd better follow up on them, all at once. No sense in concentrating on what makes some kind of sense, given current knowledge, oh no. The world's a mad house. Computers were a coincidence. Science is bunk./. is insane... well, I might agree to the last one.
On the other hand, if you discard Occam's razor, you end up in loo-loo land. If you apply the razor, and it gives you a conclusion which turns out to be false, in most cases it's because your data was a) corrupt, or b) not precise enough.
I agree, in principle. For musicians, this might work - apart from the fact that most median-sized (in the marketplace) bands don't make a heck of a lot of money off concerts, if any. And as for the music, and the works of other artists, I can't even think of an "obvious" way for them to make money other than selling faxsimilies of their work, tuppence a pop. How would a very popular author such as Stephen King ever be able to become marginally wealthy, if it were not for the fact that it is illegal to copy and sell, or give away his work?
Maybe the question is about the legitimacy of "pop stars" in any genre making potentially boatloads of money (although most don't, of course). However, this is an idea which is strongly ingrained in modern society. The fully libertarian stance would be to say "you can sell what you produce - each item exactly once. Anything else is obviously a scam."
What I'm saying is this: I don't know. Requiring artists to pass the hat to get by would be demeaning, copyright is, form certain perspectives, unethical, but redefining copyable artistic output as "essetially worthless" to anyone but the first buyer undermines current values to a radical degree.
hm... depends how you count. You can extract the individual applets, and use them "standalone", I guess, and they do do some nifty (i.e., actually useful) stuff. But all in all, no. Just expressing my aggreviation here, at a working solution being shot down because the big boys won't talk. Right now platform and browser independence is strong for Domino web apps; post-ME however, I doubt that either will be upheld to any extent. Of course - rereading your post - everything can be done in HTML, and I'm with you on that one: 99% of the time it isn't, it should be. Developing for clients, however, I am confronted with kings who desire bells and whistles, and the less hassle I have candying up the frontend, the more time I have to make a satisfyingly robust backend. </stream of consciousness>
I agree with your post: candy is way overemphasised nowadays. My comment: If you have to have candy, Java is (will have been) a sensible way to do it.
Inter-/intranet solutions in Lotus Domino/Notes (can, and often do) make heavy use of Java, IMHO in a very elegant way - views, outlines, actions bars, and especially rich-text editing (like an RTF editor, in a Java applet, just there to use). I shudder to think of the investment which will be necessary to change all the intranet applications for my clients to use non-Java solutions. But then, I'm sure people are sprinting around at Iris/IBM to find a way... sometimes it's nice developing in a very rich RAD environment - some annoyances are just SEPs.
Matching single events to historical developments:
The fusion breakthrough takes place... fossil fuels become prohibitively expensive... cars run on hydrogen... the first models are no further advanced than the Model T, for the respective era (i.e., simply "modern")... hydrogen is not "nice" to handle... so when I hear the first "boom" of Joe Yuppie's Hydro-Beamer flattening a block, I'll know that it's happened, that mankind has entered a new era.
(In memory of Deeper Blue - I was there when it became clear that Gary didn't stand a chance - I was pretty darn impressed)
(me2): the sexy thing about this is that Mr. Man was able to expend 1.5 trillion calculations on this high-tech thumb-twiddle with nary a thought. So this would be step 4 in science: employing the technology - the technology being the boxen & SW.
Slashdot Mirror
... right here
(jes' trollin')
I was referring to the demo, which is seven-segment. The actual watch is 15 pixels per digit, but the point is that the watch is displaying the arabic numerals "0" and "1". My point is that I only need one pixel per bit.
Not strictly on topic, but having stumbled across this oeuvre in my parent's bottomless pit of a library a couple of months ago, and since then, having badgered all my friends (well, the litarate ones) about them _having_ to read this great book, I'm "jumping with glee" (as it were) to see this actilce on /. and add my two cents:
... maybe if you have your head frozen ... but I digress) which is fascinating, i.e. "a real trip, man", but also tells us much about the world we can/do experience in the flesh. In times to come, books such as these will not be sidelined into "science fiction", but rather will be up there with the rest of literature, albeit of a perhaps more consciousness-expanding type (maybe when spaceships become commonplace). It tells of things which could not fit into a non-science fiction piece - or at least, give a new and vastly different perspective on the state of being human.
this is what SF is about, or rather, for.
It paints a vivid picture of a world none of us will ever see in the flesh (well
Heh. Where was I? Oh yeah - I liked it and recommend it.
Errr ... no time-zones. Midnight = 000.beat only in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. Farked-up, eh? But it does mean that 123.beat for you = 123.beat for me too, regardless of where we are.
(Still think 1024 would have been better, though. I mean, 1000 = 23 x 53, and I've only got two hands (for the fives), whereas 1024 = 210, and I have exactly 10 fingers. Woo)
(Disclaimer: The following is IMHO)
... oh, a game, perhaps?)
... new idea? GPL it. This post counts as prior art :)
...
Well they got this one wrong. Seven-segment displays for binary numbers? So they might be taking the piss with that, but they could at least offer up a true binary watch at the same time.
All it would need is 17 binary indicators, or three seven-segment display units (which would leave 4 bits over, for
Swatch did ".beat"-time, but the maximum would be ".otherBeat" with 1024 beats per day (
Gah. If you want something done properly
Apart from incidentals (such as Jules Verne's pretty good estimate of the escape velocity of earth's gravitational field - about 11 kps) which I put off as coincidents, I see SF-RL links in two categories:
SF -> RL:
naming, e.g. "cyberspace", "robots", "cyborgs", "beaming", etc. etc.
RL -> SF:
(and this is one of the aspects of SF which facinates me) interpretations of the world. For example: Douglas Adams' Hitch-Hiker trilogy (heh...) contains todays lay-man's interpretations of modern physics, as concerns faster-than-light travel, time travel, computing, and so on. In general: An SF author is called upon to paint a picture of a world which is different from the one which is accepted in the author's day - and the interesting thing is to see just where the author's imagination doesn't flex, especially in "older" SF. This touches not only on science, but also on sociology, psychology etc. For instance: some 50s 60s SF is good solid stuff, but all spaceship's crew are scrubbed clean & in white uniforms, like they just came off an super-modern ocean-going ship, and the society is, by today's standards, sexist & racist to a hairraising degree.
BTW: don't miss out on all the SF which is too litarary to be classified as SF, such as Hesse's "Das Glasperlenspiel", or Michel Houellebecq's "Les Particules Elementaires".
I agree, especially about the missing 95% (Not Quite Peanuts TM) - OTOH, balancing rocket of that size on a pillar of fire for more than a kilometer is quite a feat in itself. The first time I saw this guy's site, I thought he was a complete piss-artist ... but maybe he can make it after all.
... sure wish him the best of luck
Point taken. IANAL. I was thinking of the paring of amendments 18 & 21.
Free speech might well go into Article 1, Section 9 ("Limits on Legislative Power") of the constitution.
[...] this right is enshrined in the First Amendment: with connotations not just of "earliest" but also "primary" [...]
... but everyone's too scared to update the constitution (as done in other countries) to put free speech into the law proper, because the special interests would be writing it, and not the "people".
I put more emphasis on "Amendment", and not so much on "First". Amendments have been de facto repealed in the past
Scary. Whatever.
...wander the way of the PFY, before you venture upon the path of the BOFH.
First this that occurred to me was not astronomical numbers, but ones like these: the human brain. Assuming that a true AI will have approximately the same complexity, petabytes may just not cover it, quite.
a group of the original submitters (who never signed the CRC "boilerplate") were to sue CRC for copyright infringement?- it book.
It might nullify the contract between Weisstein & CRC, and lead to the demise of the book, but with an adequate number of mirrors - I think the wold is ready for the if-you-want-a-hardcopy-then-download-it-and-print
heh... ask her/him how long it will take to document it:)
hm... I've been working with the triangle "Cost", "Schedule" and "Quality". "Quality" in this case includes "quantity" in your sense, but considering feature creep, I think making it a seperate corner point makes sense... thanks Lars! :)
(maybe I should just read a book about project management, rather than going by the seat of my 501's
[...] even though he doesn't understand them[...]
aye, there's the rub. Getting the client to understand what the hell the specification means is the hard bit. Most of the time, you spend half the specification strech explaining the client's requirements back to them, because they don't even know precisely what they want/need. I.e.: translating "fuzzy logic" into "hard logic".
Getting a nuke on board even a small plane would not be too much effort, if you have the nuke in the first place. Scary.
I think that Eric Raymond is setting up a bit of a straw man here. This can be exemplified best by peeking at the analogous discussions about Napster et al.
What the FSF is advocating, as far as I understand, is the philosophy (or rather, tagline) of "information wants to be free". That is, conventional contracts can be entered, but as soon as the information is out there, it will be nearly impossible to police it, and ensure that it stays within the select circle of those-who-bought-it. If someone outside the circle is found possessing a copy, and using it, they cannot be dragged to court - only the person who leaked it outside the select circle is liable, and they will be almost impossible to identify. This is very similar to the MP3 discussions, and also opens a new can of worms: underage persons cannot enter legally binding contracts. So it you want to remove the "blanket" protection for information (i.e., software, music, literature, etc.) the way it is in place now, to protect the information contractually, you'd have to have every buyer, worldwide, enter a valid, binding contract in which they promise not to pass it on. Kids and teenagers would no longer be allowed to purchace muzak or gamez without becoming instant automatic leaks outside the select circle. Kind of messes it up for an industry which has best success rate telling people what is cool when the people are teens, doesn't it?
In short: the spirit of what the FSF is standing for is not a mandate of the types of contracts which can and cannot be made, but merely the concept of what constitutes a crime. The way it is now: you see something, chances are you'll get your pants sued off it you use it. What they want: it's there, you can use it. If you can sell something and ensure that your rights are policed, bully to you - but chances are it'll end up in the public domain without you being able to identify a culprit. There is simply no blanket protection anymore enabling you to go after every Joe Average with whom you never entered any contract in the first place.
I.e. (provocativly) only innovations will be worth anything anymore...
Salmon Rushdie. He wrote a book he knew would be illegal in Afghanistan (or wherever). At least they had the courtesy to come and get him. Or at least try to. But - He had it coming.
Oh, so it was the almighty space aliens. Of course - it could have been. It could have been natural erosion. A late group of neanderthals, who mysteriously died out right after completion. Egyptian jet air planes. Instant rock: just add water. Antigrav units, imported from Atlantis. Sublimated cloud formations. (Hey - you come up with some, it's you who's claiming they are all on par with "a bunch of slaves".) /. is insane ... well, I might agree to the last one.
And considering that all of the above, and a whole lot more are all possible, we'd better follow up on them, all at once. No sense in concentrating on what makes some kind of sense, given current knowledge, oh no. The world's a mad house. Computers were a coincidence. Science is bunk.
And, by the way log in. It ain't that hard.
On the other hand, if you discard Occam's razor, you end up in loo-loo land. If you apply the razor, and it gives you a conclusion which turns out to be false, in most cases it's because your data was a) corrupt, or b) not precise enough.
Space aliens, Almighty space aliens. All of it.
eg. give away music, sell concert tickets
I agree, in principle. For musicians, this might work - apart from the fact that most median-sized (in the marketplace) bands don't make a heck of a lot of money off concerts, if any. And as for the music, and the works of other artists, I can't even think of an "obvious" way for them to make money other than selling faxsimilies of their work, tuppence a pop. How would a very popular author such as Stephen King ever be able to become marginally wealthy, if it were not for the fact that it is illegal to copy and sell, or give away his work?
Maybe the question is about the legitimacy of "pop stars" in any genre making potentially boatloads of money (although most don't, of course). However, this is an idea which is strongly ingrained in modern society. The fully libertarian stance would be to say "you can sell what you produce - each item exactly once. Anything else is obviously a scam."
What I'm saying is this: I don't know. Requiring artists to pass the hat to get by would be demeaning, copyright is, form certain perspectives, unethical, but redefining copyable artistic output as "essetially worthless" to anyone but the first buyer undermines current values to a radical degree.
Anyone else have any ideas?
hm... depends how you count. You can extract the individual applets, and use them "standalone", I guess, and they do do some nifty (i.e., actually useful) stuff.
But all in all, no.
Just expressing my aggreviation here, at a working solution being shot down because the big boys won't talk. Right now platform and browser independence is strong for Domino web apps; post-ME however, I doubt that either will be upheld to any extent.
Of course - rereading your post - everything can be done in HTML, and I'm with you on that one: 99% of the time it isn't, it should be. Developing for clients, however, I am confronted with kings who desire bells and whistles, and the less hassle I have candying up the frontend, the more time I have to make a satisfyingly robust backend.
</stream of consciousness>
I agree with your post: candy is way overemphasised nowadays.
My comment: If you have to have candy, Java is (will have been) a sensible way to do it.
Inter-/intranet solutions in Lotus Domino/Notes (can, and often do) make heavy use of Java, IMHO in a very elegant way - views, outlines, actions bars, and especially rich-text editing (like an RTF editor, in a Java applet, just there to use). I shudder to think of the investment which will be necessary to change all the intranet applications for my clients to use non-Java solutions. ... sometimes it's nice developing in a very rich RAD environment - some annoyances are just SEPs.
But then, I'm sure people are sprinting around at Iris/IBM to find a way
(yes, I love TLAs)
Matching single events to historical developments:
... fossil fuels become prohibitively expensive ... cars run on hydrogen ... the first models are no further advanced than the Model T, for the respective era (i.e., simply "modern") ... hydrogen is not "nice" to handle ... so when I hear the first "boom" of Joe Yuppie's Hydro-Beamer flattening a block, I'll know that it's happened, that mankind has entered a new era.
The fusion breakthrough takes place
(In memory of Deeper Blue - I was there when it became clear that Gary didn't stand a chance - I was pretty darn impressed)
</perspective>
(me2): the sexy thing about this is that Mr. Man was able to expend 1.5 trillion calculations on this high-tech thumb-twiddle with nary a thought. So this would be step 4 in science: employing the technology - the technology being the boxen & SW.