Many creative people are resistant to new technology. However, creative people are also usually the first adopters of new technology. Consider Mark Twain with the typewriter, or Douglas Adams with the Mac. Yes, many artists refuse to accept digital photography as art. But it isn't Joe Sixpack who is buying $40,000 high-resolution digital cameras--artists are doing that.
It's all fine and dandy to say that, with Moore's law obviating the need to be careful.
That is, up until the point when you have to write some code for a Palm device, or a cell phone, or even a wristwatch. Then all of the old virtues become relevant again.
I spent 13 years at the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute, an interdisciplinary research institute whose job it was to figure such things out. Amongst other goodies, we had the first CM-2 (a SIMD box with 65536 processors) with floating point chips, at the time the fastest machine in the world. We also had a homegrown machine for quantum chromadynamics. And a cluster with 150+ nodes, and some shared memory machines, yada yada yada. Lots of stuff.
So, from my experience:
It's a little bit tricky to do. Sometimes you find an algorithm that someone abandoned fifty years ago that turns out to map better onto the hardware. However, it isn't all that tricky to do, and there are plenty of algorithms and libraries to make the job easier.
But it still doesn't happen anyway, because even a small amount of work is more than no work at all. And besides, what people want to do is run their old dusty decks but just have them run faster. And in the mean time, Intel has just come out with a faster scalar processor, so why bother?
The only thing I can see coming out of this is if, say, NVidia makes a faster graphics card based on it.
As far as I can tell, the only thing that John Varley has written in years has been Red Thunder, which is very much a traditional, almost Tom Sawyer romp.
Event: Somebody actually does something realted to some Apple product. Slashdot reaction: Unless it comes in GCC today and fixes me a martini and picks my nose and sings the Hallelujah chorus and comes with a big check, what damn good is it, anyway?
Event: Somebody at Microsoft says that they might do something in a couple of years if they feel like it. Slashdot reaction: Hah! Luser! See, Microsoft already did it.
Event: Somebody decides that it might be possible to do something cool if they could only get cheap enough buckytubes to wire the brains of ants to the FPU in Python emulated in Perl emulated in ELisp. And it will run on Linux. Except nobody is going to do it, really, but it would be cool. Slashdot reaction: Linux is ready for the desktop! Linux is ready for the desktop!
You're right, but you'll get attacked by a lot of morons.
Only it is't really a "shockwave;" it's more of a shock front.
I'd be well please if one of these "no air, no shock" morons were to set off a stick of dynamite inside a bell jar. Do they really think a tympanic membrane inside the bell jar wouldn't register a signal? Hell, they could even make a really big bell jar and stand inside it. Either way it would solve the problem.
Since there's not much to be done about it anyway, have a good long laugh about how a technique used as a bludgeon by megacorporations can come back and bite them.
Phil Dick may or may not have been bitter, but this quote does not reflect it. He did not look down on trash. One of his other quotes was that, "It may seem that I trust nothing, but it's just that what I trust is so small." Furthermore, he was steeped in California culture. He once wrote Lem, "You have to understand, trash is all that we have here." His relationship to trash reflected more of what might be called a Buddha nature than bitterness.
Another clue: confusing a light sail with a radiometer (which is, in fact, a heat engine and works because it's not run in a complete vacuum). The guy knows nothing.
Incidentally, when I was back in school, I got to see a film of an experimental verification of light sails. A small mirror was suspended on a hair in a fairly hard vaccum. Then a bright light was flashed off and on until the mirror started swinging. The effect was so small, and the time of the experiment was so large, that any thermal equilibrium would have long been achieved. The only problem is that the effect was so incredibly small, that I wonder if it's practical actually to make one. The need to have high enough strength and low enough mass to get anything useful out of it seems some pretty severe engineering requirements.
I used to dream about having OR and NOT gates. I used to have to build circuits using neon bulbs as negative resistance elements, using resistors and diodes unsoldered from old television sets found on the street powered by wall current filtered using 40 microfarad capacitors salvaged from one-tube kiddie record players.
(The strange thing is that this was actually true for me. There are an amazing number of things you can do with neon bulbs. You can even use them as input devices--biased with DC between the points of hysteresis, if you touch them, the hand capacitance is enough to make them go on. My 7th grade science fair project on basic computer circuits had a 6-bit binary adder made entirely using neon bulb logic.)
When this came out, people bitched that that it was only the RIAA. Now, what is it, a few weeks later and they're going after independent labels, but they're only going after the larger ones, so people are bitching about that. A few weeks from now, and when they do go after the smaller labels, people are probably going to bitch about how they haven't fellated every bass player who is living in his parent's garage.
The practice originally started in retail stores with cash registers. Clerks tended to ignore the new-fangled machines for purchases in whole numbers, so the numbers were changed to persuade the clerks to use the cash register to get the penny change. It didn't become popular in other forms of retail, such as catalog purchases, until about 50 years later.
This was pointed out by Bill Bryson in one of his books; I think it was Made in America.
Slashdot Mirror
The Forbes philosophy is that anyone with a nice Armani suit should have the right to steal whatever they like, just because.
Many creative people are resistant to new technology. However, creative people are also usually the first adopters of new technology. Consider Mark Twain with the typewriter, or Douglas Adams with the Mac. Yes, many artists refuse to accept digital photography as art. But it isn't Joe Sixpack who is buying $40,000 high-resolution digital cameras--artists are doing that.
It's all fine and dandy to say that, with Moore's law obviating the need to be careful.
That is, up until the point when you have to write some code for a Palm device, or a cell phone, or even a wristwatch. Then all of the old virtues become relevant again.
I spent 13 years at the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute, an interdisciplinary research institute whose job it was to figure such things out. Amongst other goodies, we had the first CM-2 (a SIMD box with 65536 processors) with floating point chips, at the time the fastest machine in the world. We also had a homegrown machine for quantum chromadynamics. And a cluster with 150+ nodes, and some shared memory machines, yada yada yada. Lots of stuff.
So, from my experience:
It's a little bit tricky to do. Sometimes you find an algorithm that someone abandoned fifty years ago that turns out to map better onto the hardware. However, it isn't all that tricky to do, and there are plenty of algorithms and libraries to make the job easier.
But it still doesn't happen anyway, because even a small amount of work is more than no work at all. And besides, what people want to do is run their old dusty decks but just have them run faster. And in the mean time, Intel has just come out with a faster scalar processor, so why bother?
The only thing I can see coming out of this is if, say, NVidia makes a faster graphics card based on it.
MR was enough for projectile vomiting.
As far as I can tell, the only thing that John Varley has written in years has been Red Thunder, which is very much a traditional, almost Tom Sawyer romp.
Event: Somebody actually does something realted to some Apple product.
Slashdot reaction: Unless it comes in GCC today and fixes me a martini and picks my nose and sings the Hallelujah chorus and comes with a big check, what damn good is it, anyway?
Event: Somebody at Microsoft says that they might do something in a couple of years if they feel like it.
Slashdot reaction: Hah! Luser! See, Microsoft already did it.
Event: Somebody decides that it might be possible to do something cool if they could only get cheap enough buckytubes to wire the brains of ants to the FPU in Python emulated in Perl emulated in ELisp. And it will run on Linux. Except nobody is going to do it, really, but it would be cool.
Slashdot reaction: Linux is ready for the desktop! Linux is ready for the desktop!
It's for exactly the same reason you choose the phrase "spittle-fringed invective": because you think it's a clever putdown.
And similarly with my response.
You're right, but you'll get attacked by a lot of morons.
Only it is't really a "shockwave;" it's more of a shock front.
I'd be well please if one of these "no air, no shock" morons were to set off a stick of dynamite inside a bell jar. Do they really think a tympanic membrane inside the bell jar wouldn't register a signal? Hell, they could even make a really big bell jar and stand inside it. Either way it would solve the problem.
Microsoft is responsible for half of the crashes, and the rest of the software industry is responsible for the other half.
I was hoping not every country had people dumb enough to believe in polygraphs and other "lie detectors."
Since there's not much to be done about it anyway, have a good long laugh about how a technique used as a bludgeon by megacorporations can come back and bite them.
Phil Dick may or may not have been bitter, but this quote does not reflect it. He did not look down on trash. One of his other quotes was that, "It may seem that I trust nothing, but it's just that what I trust is so small." Furthermore, he was steeped in California culture. He once wrote Lem, "You have to understand, trash is all that we have here." His relationship to trash reflected more of what might be called a Buddha nature than bitterness.
Another clue: confusing a light sail with a radiometer (which is, in fact, a heat engine and works because it's not run in a complete vacuum). The guy knows nothing.
Incidentally, when I was back in school, I got to see a film of an experimental verification of light sails. A small mirror was suspended on a hair in a fairly hard vaccum. Then a bright light was flashed off and on until the mirror started swinging. The effect was so small, and the time of the experiment was so large, that any thermal equilibrium would have long been achieved. The only problem is that the effect was so incredibly small, that I wonder if it's practical actually to make one. The need to have high enough strength and low enough mass to get anything useful out of it seems some pretty severe engineering requirements.
If you play nice with the Mafia, they'll let you do what you want and even help you.
Wow, that's 13974 in decimal!
I used to dream about having OR and NOT gates. I used to have to build circuits using neon bulbs as negative resistance elements, using resistors and diodes unsoldered from old television sets found on the street powered by wall current filtered using 40 microfarad capacitors salvaged from one-tube kiddie record players.
(The strange thing is that this was actually true for me. There are an amazing number of things you can do with neon bulbs. You can even use them as input devices--biased with DC between the points of hysteresis, if you touch them, the hand capacitance is enough to make them go on. My 7th grade science fair project on basic computer circuits had a 6-bit binary adder made entirely using neon bulb logic.)
When this came out, people bitched that that it was only the RIAA. Now, what is it, a few weeks later and they're going after independent labels, but they're only going after the larger ones, so people are bitching about that. A few weeks from now, and when they do go after the smaller labels, people are probably going to bitch about how they haven't fellated every bass player who is living in his parent's garage.
I heard the BBC production last weekend.
Actually, the Gollum was nowhere near as good as the voice in the movie.
Jimmy Carter signed the bill.
Or maybe not.
In other news, more people die in hospitals than at McDonalds, so if you get appendicitis, you should go to McDonalds.
Not only that, but he fucked it up in ways that Slashdotters pointed out.
It's going to be a while before I believe anything he says.
The practice originally started in retail stores with cash registers. Clerks tended to ignore the new-fangled machines for purchases in whole numbers, so the numbers were changed to persuade the clerks to use the cash register to get the penny change. It didn't become popular in other forms of retail, such as catalog purchases, until about 50 years later.
This was pointed out by Bill Bryson in one of his books; I think it was Made in America.
So, she just fits in the floppy drive, then?