MySpace, LiveJournal,... They are the Internet equivalent of the mega shopping mall. They represent convenience but convenience comes at the price of freedom. Have you ever tried protesting outside a shop in a mall? You can't. The mall is private land and you will get removed by security. Similarly with LiveJournal and the other "communities" based on a centralised website, they are private space and the owner can boot you out on a whim.
Why not stick with the public spaces on the Internet? If you need a chat room: use an email list, Usenet or run an IRC server. If you want to share your photos: put them on your web server. If you want a pretty home page with lots of "friends" put a home page on your web server with a guest book. These are the online equivalent of the local shopping strip. It's a public place and no-one can force you to bend to their whim. The public spaces of the net are better than web2.0. They are just as customisable, do the job as well or better and you don't have to take it on trust that your freedom will be respected.
In fact I will go further and say that machine code is an even better first language under some circumstances. Advantages of machine code over assembly are: a) No need to learn how to drive an assembler b) The symmetry of the instruction set and the underlying machine is more apparent.
Maybe there is a call for a "kid's CPU", implemented in an FPGA? A minimal CPU with a very simple instruction set that can be mastered by a child. Make it a complete CPU though, so in time the child can graduate from machine code to assembly to a Linux based development environment.
You joke about assembly, but there is a serious school of thought that says assembly is a great first language. Take an 8 bit microprocessor (eg. 6502) with 20 or so instructions (plus addressing modes). The system is so simple that a child can learn it inside out. All they need to know is the fetch and execute loop, input, output, CPU and memory and what each of the 20 instructions and a few addressing modes do. Watching a computer count from 1 to 10 under your control for the first time is just as exciting as watching a sprite bounce across the screen.
Every website has a finite time in the sun, and RupertSpace is no exception. There
will even be a day (soon?) when people say "Now what was that website called, TheirSpace or something?"
Who remembers AltaVista? It was as big as Google and RupertSpace in its day. Everyone thought it was the ultimate answer and unassailable when it "indexed the whole Internet". As altavista faded so will RupertSpace (and even Google eventually) and their restrictions on users will be irrelevant.
Except the Encyclopedia of Life will be a catalogue, not an identification key.
A catalogue simply records that a species exists and is usually organised by scientific name. You can't find something unless you know its full name, or are prepared to flick through and compare your find with 1.8 million entries.
An identification key on the other hand is organised to answer the question "What is that?", a bit like trying to guess what animal someone is thinking of by asking them questions. A key allows you to specify an increasing list of characteristics and answers with a decreasing list of possible species. Here's an example key for a small number of bugs.
It's interesting to read this FAQ from the Encyclopedia of Life:
6. What about Wikipedia?
Wikipedia inspired us. Wikipedia accumulated about 1.5 million entries in English in its first four years. That gave us confidence that our tasks are manageable with current technology and social behaviour, although the expert community in a lot of the subjects for pages in Encyclopedia of Life may be only a handful of people. Wikipedia has also created some species pages, as have other groups. Encyclopedia of Life will, we hope, unite all such efforts and increase their value. The Wikimedia Foundation is a member of the Encyclopedia's Institutional Council.
They don't mention WikiSpecies directly, but would have to be aware of it with the Wikimedia Foundation on board. It will be interesting to see what license will the EoL be using and will it be WikiSpecies (GNUFDL) compatible? Hopefully the Wikimedia Foundation will give some good advice.
Given that a stated aim of the EoL is to get lots of people involved and be a cooperative effort, a copyleft license might promote cooperation. Perhaps it would be worth a few Slashdotters politelycontacting the EoL and suggesting that copyleft would be a good thing for the EoL?
Remember that the term of copyright was only extended in the US. In China the protection term is still life+50years for personally owned works or 50 years since publication for companies. The film is public domain in China. (Incidentally a film published in 1937 is also public domain in Australia.)
That's overstating the facts. Each week there are a couple of slots set aside for religious education in public schools. Each religion is responsible for providing its own teachers for that time. Children attend the class of choice, and have the freedom to do a non-religious activity during that time. It's a good system. Freedom of religion includes the freedom to be religious as well as the freedom not to participate in religion.
That's the beauty of free software. If MySQL goes bad the codebase will be forked and another project will rise to take its place. It will be interesting to see what the MySQL prospectus will have to say to investors about this risk.
Good luck to MySQL. I hope they make a go of it, get rich, and don't shoot themselves in the foot by causing a code fork.
A number of my friends with children are looking to get out of the drudgery of abandoning their families for 60% of their waking hours.
These are the people working a 55 hour week in a "9 to 5" job, with an hour of commuting each way. They are typically engineers or other professionals working in jobs where technology companies demand that the product be in the market yesterday. Their (ex) colleagues have been "downsized" and the company is too tight to employ replacements or there just aren't the qualified people out there. Consequently they are each doing one and a half jobs. Flexible hours policy is "We don't mind what hours you work as long as the job gets done", which translates to "55 hours".
These friends are figuring out that they are missing out on being part of their family growing up while earning 2-3 time the average wage. Often they are concluding that they are better to move to a part time job, earn a little above an average wage and be part of the family growing up. If the change requires a change of employer or profession then they are prepared to do it. When pushed the better employers realise that they are better to have a part time expert than no expert.
I used to work with someone who previously worked in AWA, the manufacturer of such traffic light controllers. He was in the group that designed traffic light controllers. Eventually they modernised these controllers. How? By building an integrated circuit version of the PDP and running the unmodified software on it!
True. My bad. I was forgetting that the filter in front of the mixer isn't so much to eliminate images due to negative frequencies (when using a complex mixer with I and Q components) as to suppress out-of-band signals that might cause overloading, the non-linearity resulting in yet more images. Make the mixer linear enough and you can mix straight down then filter and sample.
It's not strictly true that you need to have bandpass filters to transmit information. There are other ways to select individual users without frequency division multiplexing. For example:
Do it in the time domain (ultra wideband) using narrow pulses. Each user transmits at a different time.
Use a spreading sequence to spread the signal so it takes up the entire band, with no need for a narrow filter (CDMA). Each user has a different sequence.
Use multiple antennas to do space encoding. Users are separated in space, not frequency.
The gotcha is that you need some way of sampling the band. One way is to to use a bandpass filter, mixer and slow sampler. Another is to directly sample (using RTDs???) or in the case of UWB just detect pulses. Bandpass filters are the conventional way of doing it, but not the only way.
I've never been able to figure out where they keep all their people. They claim to have hundreds of technical employees. The people I know say they work in Balmain. I gather they are spread across multiple terrace houses (the dominant type of building in the area), yet that seems like an awful lot of people to cram in and terrace houses hardly seem suited to housing labs. Maybe they have a significant lab elsewhere, or contract such work out? Anyone know?
I think it is serious. The principals used to work for Canon and used to design the chips which take care of the imaging parts of their laser printers. My understanding is that until now they mainly do the ideas, then license the patents.
They are located in the inner city suburb of Sydney in Australia. They are also secret to the point of seeming to be paranoid. I know lots of people who have interviewed with them and some employees. You have to sign an NDA just to get an interview with them. A shame really. As the article said, they do high tech stuff, but are so secretive there is little contribution to or cross pollination with the rest of Australia's high tech sector.
As far as I can tell they do a fair bit of MEMS stuff. A lot of the people they employ are integrated circuit designers. I don't think they are much into Free Software philosophy.
Historically they are Information Theory topics. Only recently, when we figured out how to build them, did they become engineering topics.
Information theorists are typically drawn from the ranks of mathematics, engineering and computer science so the positioning between computer science and mathematics is expected. The close link to control theory is also expected.
As others have pointed out the chart deals with academic papers, so it is telling you how the theory of each area is related. Building MIMO chips for mass production isn't in the domain covered by the chart, but if you want to understand the theoretical basis of the algorithms that such a chip implements you will need to know about Mathematics and Computer Science (and have a smattering of the other stuff linked to on the chart).
What's wrong with the existing open source series from Dell, provided there is a genuine reduction in price for the absence of MS software?
If Dell is hesitant about offering Linux what the Free Software community forming a third party company and approaching Dell with a proposal that Dell simply contract the entire Linux support operation out to them?
In other words: Code is Law. Whoever controls the code controls what happens, no matter what happens. It's the moderm version of "possession is nine points of the law".
RMS figured it out in 1883, Lessig figured it out in 2000, Jobs figured it out in 2001 (probably read Lessig), the music industry figured it out two minutes ago.
Slashdot Mirror
MySpace, LiveJournal, ... They are the Internet equivalent of the mega shopping mall. They represent convenience but convenience comes at the price of freedom. Have you ever tried protesting outside a shop in a mall? You can't. The mall is private land and you will get removed by security. Similarly with LiveJournal and the other "communities" based on a centralised website, they are private space and the owner can boot you out on a whim.
Why not stick with the public spaces on the Internet? If you need a chat room: use an email list, Usenet or run an IRC server. If you want to share your photos: put them on your web server. If you want a pretty home page with lots of "friends" put a home page on your web server with a guest book. These are the online equivalent of the local shopping strip. It's a public place and no-one can force you to bend to their whim. The public spaces of the net are better than web2.0. They are just as customisable, do the job as well or better and you don't have to take it on trust that your freedom will be respected.
In fact I will go further and say that machine code is an even better first language under some circumstances. Advantages of machine code over assembly are: a) No need to learn how to drive an assembler b) The symmetry of the instruction set and the underlying machine is more apparent.
Maybe there is a call for a "kid's CPU", implemented in an FPGA? A minimal CPU with a very simple instruction set that can be mastered by a child. Make it a complete CPU though, so in time the child can graduate from machine code to assembly to a Linux based development environment.
You joke about assembly, but there is a serious school of thought that says assembly is a great first language. Take an 8 bit microprocessor (eg. 6502) with 20 or so instructions (plus addressing modes). The system is so simple that a child can learn it inside out. All they need to know is the fetch and execute loop, input, output, CPU and memory and what each of the 20 instructions and a few addressing modes do. Watching a computer count from 1 to 10 under your control for the first time is just as exciting as watching a sprite bounce across the screen.
Why bother? Just use another website.
Every website has a finite time in the sun, and RupertSpace is no exception. There will even be a day (soon?) when people say "Now what was that website called, TheirSpace or something?"
Who remembers AltaVista? It was as big as Google and RupertSpace in its day. Everyone thought it was the ultimate answer and unassailable when it "indexed the whole Internet". As altavista faded so will RupertSpace (and even Google eventually) and their restrictions on users will be irrelevant.
Except the Encyclopedia of Life will be a catalogue, not an identification key.
A catalogue simply records that a species exists and is usually organised by scientific name. You can't find something unless you know its full name, or are prepared to flick through and compare your find with 1.8 million entries.
An identification key on the other hand is organised to answer the question "What is that?", a bit like trying to guess what animal someone is thinking of by asking them questions. A key allows you to specify an increasing list of characteristics and answers with a decreasing list of possible species. Here's an example key for a small number of bugs.
It's interesting to read this FAQ from the Encyclopedia of Life:
They don't mention WikiSpecies directly, but would have to be aware of it with the Wikimedia Foundation on board. It will be interesting to see what license will the EoL be using and will it be WikiSpecies (GNUFDL) compatible? Hopefully the Wikimedia Foundation will give some good advice.
Given that a stated aim of the EoL is to get lots of people involved and be a cooperative effort, a copyleft license might promote cooperation. Perhaps it would be worth a few Slashdotters politely contacting the EoL and suggesting that copyleft would be a good thing for the EoL?
Remember that the term of copyright was only extended in the US. In China the protection term is still life+50years for personally owned works or 50 years since publication for companies. The film is public domain in China. (Incidentally a film published in 1937 is also public domain in Australia.)
Hmmm. Looks like the little box on the equator that reverses the spin on the electrons broke down again.
That's overstating the facts. Each week there are a couple of slots set aside for religious education in public schools. Each religion is responsible for providing its own teachers for that time. Children attend the class of choice, and have the freedom to do a non-religious activity during that time. It's a good system. Freedom of religion includes the freedom to be religious as well as the freedom not to participate in religion.
That's the beauty of free software. If MySQL goes bad the codebase will be forked and another project will rise to take its place. It will be interesting to see what the MySQL prospectus will have to say to investors about this risk.
Good luck to MySQL. I hope they make a go of it, get rich, and don't shoot themselves in the foot by causing a code fork.
the energy used to run the servers to render a virtual tree is about equivalent to burning a real tree?
A number of my friends with children are looking to get out of the drudgery of abandoning their families for 60% of their waking hours.
These are the people working a 55 hour week in a "9 to 5" job, with an hour of commuting each way. They are typically engineers or other professionals working in jobs where technology companies demand that the product be in the market yesterday. Their (ex) colleagues have been "downsized" and the company is too tight to employ replacements or there just aren't the qualified people out there. Consequently they are each doing one and a half jobs. Flexible hours policy is "We don't mind what hours you work as long as the job gets done", which translates to "55 hours".
These friends are figuring out that they are missing out on being part of their family growing up while earning 2-3 time the average wage. Often they are concluding that they are better to move to a part time job, earn a little above an average wage and be part of the family growing up. If the change requires a change of employer or profession then they are prepared to do it. When pushed the better employers realise that they are better to have a part time expert than no expert.
How long before, like the flaming mouse, one of these knocks a candle over or runs into a fireplace, and burns a house down?
I used to work with someone who previously worked in AWA, the manufacturer of such traffic light controllers. He was in the group that designed traffic light controllers. Eventually they modernised these controllers. How? By building an integrated circuit version of the PDP and running the unmodified software on it!
True. My bad. I was forgetting that the filter in front of the mixer isn't so much to eliminate images due to negative frequencies (when using a complex mixer with I and Q components) as to suppress out-of-band signals that might cause overloading, the non-linearity resulting in yet more images. Make the mixer linear enough and you can mix straight down then filter and sample.
It's not strictly true that you need to have bandpass filters to transmit information. There are other ways to select individual users without frequency division multiplexing. For example:
The gotcha is that you need some way of sampling the band. One way is to to use a bandpass filter, mixer and slow sampler. Another is to directly sample (using RTDs???) or in the case of UWB just detect pulses. Bandpass filters are the conventional way of doing it, but not the only way.
Their building on google maps
I've never been able to figure out where they keep all their people. They claim to have hundreds of technical employees. The people I know say they work in Balmain. I gather they are spread across multiple terrace houses (the dominant type of building in the area), yet that seems like an awful lot of people to cram in and terrace houses hardly seem suited to housing labs. Maybe they have a significant lab elsewhere, or contract such work out? Anyone know?
I think it is serious. The principals used to work for Canon and used to design the chips which take care of the imaging parts of their laser printers. My understanding is that until now they mainly do the ideas, then license the patents.
Here's an article about Silverbrook.
They are located in the inner city suburb of Sydney in Australia. They are also secret to the point of seeming to be paranoid. I know lots of people who have interviewed with them and some employees. You have to sign an NDA just to get an interview with them. A shame really. As the article said, they do high tech stuff, but are so secretive there is little contribution to or cross pollination with the rest of Australia's high tech sector.
As far as I can tell they do a fair bit of MEMS stuff. A lot of the people they employ are integrated circuit designers. I don't think they are much into Free Software philosophy.
Historically they are Information Theory topics. Only recently, when we figured out how to build them, did they become engineering topics.
Information theorists are typically drawn from the ranks of mathematics, engineering and computer science so the positioning between computer science and mathematics is expected. The close link to control theory is also expected.
As others have pointed out the chart deals with academic papers, so it is telling you how the theory of each area is related. Building MIMO chips for mass production isn't in the domain covered by the chart, but if you want to understand the theoretical basis of the algorithms that such a chip implements you will need to know about Mathematics and Computer Science (and have a smattering of the other stuff linked to on the chart).
What's wrong with the existing open source series from Dell, provided there is a genuine reduction in price for the absence of MS software?
If Dell is hesitant about offering Linux what the Free Software community forming a third party company and approaching Dell with a proposal that Dell simply contract the entire Linux support operation out to them?
In other words: Code is Law. Whoever controls the code controls what happens, no matter what happens. It's the moderm version of "possession is nine points of the law".
RMS figured it out in 1883, Lessig figured it out in 2000, Jobs figured it out in 2001 (probably read Lessig), the music industry figured it out two minutes ago.
The problem isn't that it is "proprietary". The problem is that they don't own it.
Femtoseconds are not complete BS, you insensitive clod!
;-)
Pick the Knuth: both have a round face, thin hair and no teeth!
image 1
image 2
Thanks for the link. Very interesting!