Y'all should go read the original material by Woese (& Goldenfeld) before making asinie statements about science you clearly don't understand. Though, a large part of that is because Dyson's explanations of the stuff really aren't that good; or more accurately, they aren't very deep, and these are complex issues that require a deep reading to understand. The couple paragraphs Dyson presents are a reasonably good summary, but if you're not inclined to take what he says at face value there's no depth there to convince you.
The "New Biology" article by Woese is brilliant and a much, much better exploration of the nature of evolution and the origins of life.
The political economy of the process of IP legislation and internationalization is critical to consider in this context. The construction of these policies have to do with the narrow self-interest of corporate actors and how they are able to sell their case to political policymakers. For example, the conversion of IP law from an abstract problem to a trade issue addressable through the United States Trade Representative office has allowed the US to pursue the IP agenda of large corporate actors outside the bounds of IP-related treaties.
Or even better, just buy a new usb2.0 enclosure designed for a 2.5" laptop drive. I recently got one from cyberguys.com for $19.95 and it's powered off the USB port and everything. Works like a charm with that spare 40G drive I had lying around.
Yes, there is an extention that does this, I use it all the time. It's called SessionSaver. For some reason it's hard to track down the version that works with firefox 1.0, but I've gotten it from:
http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopic =166
I would suggest the following: an OO programming languange shouldn't be taught as a learning language at all. What CS students need to learn in their intro class is how languanges and computers and programming languages work, not OO design methodology. Java is just too far removed from the concepts of "hardware" and a real "compiler" to teach anything useful about how computers work, and C and C++ are too complex to teach anything truly useful about programming languages.
Instead, I would suggest using something like Scheme or LISP as a teaching languange. My first college programming class was in Scheme, and while I had no great love for the language while taking the course, it taught me much more useful things about programming then Java ever could have. The concept of a stack is very important in scheme; this relates directly to the way an OS works with memory. Scheme is also something that people are not too likely to come into the class with any experience with, so all the students are on a level playing field; you don't have anyone thinking they really know what they're doing in C and therefore ignoring all the instruction and useful conceptual information...
CS students need to learn good OO design, but that should be saved for their second programming class, IMHO. What they need to learn in the first one is how programming languages work, so that they have a good foundation to work from later. Scheme may not be a marketable job skill, but learning how to program in that kind of language will give someone a much stronger base to build skills in C/C++/Java/whatever on later.
That's funny, I don't even feel at home in an office with fewer then 2 old-skool 7200 RPM Barracuda hard drives in external enclosures whining away like jet engines... that plus the Atlas 10K and 4 fans in my case makes for a nice, relaxing hum:)
Re:I like this quote from the FAQ...
on
Shared Source?
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· Score: 2
My favorite quote was this, from the front page of the Shared Source website:
Over the past 25 years, few people outside of the development community talked about source code and even fewer had access.
Never mind that closed source is actually a relatively new thing...programmers started out by giving away source, because the hardware to run it on was what was important... As I recall, IBM used to more or less give away the source to OS/360 because what the customer was really paying for was the big iron to run it on. Ah, great MS FUD...defend your own business model by claiming it has a long, distinguished history, and make it sound as though these "open source" lunatics are some kind of crazy group of upstart hippies. Never mind the actual truth of the history of computer programming...
I think the problem is not so much that there's no innovation going on, but that scientific fields are becoming so specialized that an outside observer can't TELL there's any innovation going on... These days, everyone's area of knowlege has to be pretty narrow in order to be knowlegeable enough to do any cutting-edge research, with the end result being that fields of research are generally pretty isolated.
Also, it generally takes a lot of very expensive equipment to do cutting-edge research nowadays, which tends to restrict the field to academia and large corporations -- not that innovative ideas can't come out of either of these two areas, but they can be restrictive working environments for people wanting to research crazy, unprecedented ideas...
Actually, cars aren't equipped with this because they don't explode...seriously...despite what you see in movies and on TV, it's virtually impossible to get a car to blow up.
A property is something that can be bought, sold, traded, transferred; that's why we, civilization, created the cash
economy. A "work of art" is fundamentally no different that anything else created by any individual. The chair a
woodworker crafts in his workshop is no different than a book created by an artist (that one is infinitely reproducable
at economies of scale is immaterial). Would you lay the same claim that the chair too belongs to the public? If so, I
hope you have a DVD player in your possesion because I sure would like one and would love to exercise my
public-ownership claim to it (as a work of art created by the Sony Corp.).
This is certainly true. However, I think the important thing at this point in public discourse is to find a reasonable middle ground between the view that "the public owns everything" and "the public owns nothing"... While several provisions of the DMCA are patently absurd, and the >95 yr. extention to copyright law is downright criminal (a crime against humanity and the common good, and I'm not exaggerating or bullshitting with that statement), the statement that artists don't own their own work is equally criminal. As Ellison points out, artists need to make money so that they can eat and support their families, just as someone who produces more tangible goods does. However, changing copyright law so that the artist (or his/her publishing company) will still have exclusive ownership of the work 50+ years after death is also ridiculous and a huge injustice. Hopefully these sort of discussions on/. contribute usefully to that public discourse, and don't just get lost under the mountains of publicity and FUD put out by corporate entities like the RIAA intent on preserving evil laws for the sake of their own profits.
Ringworld would be cool... However, I think that Varley's Gaia series (Titan, Wizard, and Demon) would be even more interesting, while being set in an equally visually impressive environment. If you haven't read those three books, by the way, they're highly recommended...
I think Moore's Law is only supposed to apply to transistor count in semiconductor logic; since this is a totally different technology, I'm not sure that it even applies.
Now we just have to get the price down...
Superconductors and 5K cooling systems are both insanely expensive. However, if I can get one of these today, I'd be willing to install the cryogenics facility in my house. That 750Ghz system would be a nice litte boost up from my P133:)
Re:But the net IS creating a new geography
on
The New Geography
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· Score: 1
Funny that the world is already like that, and has been for a long time. In fact, your statement should be generalized as follows:
The continuing run of technological development is continuing towards two types of major associations in the world:
"Developed" countries
"Developing" countries
This has been the case ever since the start of the European colonial era. The problem is not tied to the "Information Age", but to the fact that one group of people (for example, the United States, the world's only remaining great hegemonic power) is not going to go into a foreign land for the great, selfless purpose of helping that land's people up to the same level of prosperity as themselves. Sure, individual Americans will do things like that, but not in great enough numbers for it to really matter, and there is no public will for this sort of great humanitarian project. This is true because it opens up the possibility of the people you helped becoming your equals, or maybe exceeding you in terms of economic and technological achievement. The people who have the power want to look good (see america's "policeman of the world" attitude and the old british imperial attitude that they were out "educating the savages" by taking over large chunks of the world), but don't want to actually make competition for themselves.
So, to fix this, you need to find a solution for this problem in human nature...not blame it on the New Scary Sociological Trend of the Day the You Don't Actually Understand (in this case, the Internet), as the author of this book seems to want to do. That, or destroy human civilization, so that the survivors are all on equal terms;)
I wish I had some cash...
on
ICANN Meetings
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· Score: 1
...so I could fly out to CA right now to attend this meeting.
In all seriousness, this is a great opportunity...I urge anyone who can attend to do so. The ICANN has way to much power with too little non-giant-corporate influence as it stands for this meeting, and any sort of public effort to protest and maybe force them to NOT fuck over most everyone on the TLD issue would be great.
Intels chips use 1-4 watts in full energy save mode. The Crusoe Gets between 0.789 and 2 watts in its energy save mode.
Yes -- but you're not running in full energy saving mode much of the time, especially if using an OS like windows that doesn't do very smart things for power consumption. In non-power-save mode, the Intel chips burn a lot more power and get a lot hotter then the transmeta chips in a similar mode of operation, largely because the transmeta chips can scale their clock frequency to application demands, while the Intel chips have relatively simplistic power management capabilities. I've read that Intel has improved their CPUs power management capabilities, but they are still nowhere near as advanced as Transmeta's AFAIK.
Well, you would think that...but actually, the chip DOES consume a great deal of the power in a machine like a laptop, which is the market that the transmeta chips are aimed at. When running full-bore, a pentium III or an Athlon will draw 40-60 watts of power...that's a LOT, especially when you're talking about drawing it from a laptop battery pack.
Well, ASCI white was custom built, but out of standard IBM hardware -- mostly RS/6000 POWER3 SMP High Nodes and the SP Switch2, which is some pretty damn impressive hardware, especially when you consider that they're now making this stuff for mass consumption. if you can pay for it, that is.
Well, not all ATI stuff blows... Specifically, the new Raedon card kicks a lot of ass. ATI has had some problems in the past, but they seem to be getting their shit together pretty well now.
The point is that skins shouldn't be made THE DEFAULT. Not that they shouldn't be put in, or that the capability shouldn't exist, or whatever...just that making a skinned UI the default (as in NS6) is going to be confusing for a lot of people, probably even most people.
Lucent can make money by a) writing some damn Linux drivers and b) making hardware that works on ALL platforms. The person you're responding to didn't whine and bitch about having to pay for software. NO... it's about being able to use the hardware that you get from the store on your platform of choice. Linux is not some obscure OS anymore.
A point that many people seem to miss is that no company has an OBLIGATION to release stuff for linux. this attitude is absurd. no one has any such obligation...if it's not worth a company's time and resources to make linux stuff, they're not going to. companies are economic entities, and if they're not making money (or at least moving a lot of money around), they're not viable. I'm an avid linux user, but I don't expect any corporation to release linux drivers/devices because I think they have some sort of obligation to the linux community to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Y'all should go read the original material by Woese (& Goldenfeld) before making asinie statements about science you clearly don't understand. Though, a large part of that is because Dyson's explanations of the stuff really aren't that good; or more accurately, they aren't very deep, and these are complex issues that require a deep reading to understand. The couple paragraphs Dyson presents are a reasonably good summary, but if you're not inclined to take what he says at face value there's no depth there to convince you.
The "New Biology" article by Woese is brilliant and a much, much better exploration of the nature of evolution and the origins of life.
If you are interested, look at this book: Private Power, Public Law: The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights, Susan Sell
It's a great in-depth analysis of this topic and very enlightening for anyone who thinks this debate is somehow easy to understand.
Or even better, just buy a new usb2.0 enclosure designed for a 2.5" laptop drive. I recently got one from cyberguys.com for $19.95 and it's powered off the USB port and everything. Works like a charm with that spare 40G drive I had lying around.
Yes, there is an extention that does this, I use it all the time. It's called SessionSaver. For some reason it's hard to track down the version that works with firefox 1.0, but I've gotten it from:c =166
http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopi
The link to OpenIPO is broken. It should be:
http://www.openipo.com/
Thanks Alton! I'm a big fan of your show, and the interview was fun to read. Also, I think you should really have a go at that Iron Chef thing ;-)
I would suggest the following: an OO programming languange shouldn't be taught as a learning language at all. What CS students need to learn in their intro class is how languanges and computers and programming languages work, not OO design methodology. Java is just too far removed from the concepts of "hardware" and a real "compiler" to teach anything useful about how computers work, and C and C++ are too complex to teach anything truly useful about programming languages.
Instead, I would suggest using something like Scheme or LISP as a teaching languange. My first college programming class was in Scheme, and while I had no great love for the language while taking the course, it taught me much more useful things about programming then Java ever could have. The concept of a stack is very important in scheme; this relates directly to the way an OS works with memory. Scheme is also something that people are not too likely to come into the class with any experience with, so all the students are on a level playing field; you don't have anyone thinking they really know what they're doing in C and therefore ignoring all the instruction and useful conceptual information...
CS students need to learn good OO design, but that should be saved for their second programming class, IMHO. What they need to learn in the first one is how programming languages work, so that they have a good foundation to work from later. Scheme may not be a marketable job skill, but learning how to program in that kind of language will give someone a much stronger base to build skills in C/C++/Java/whatever on later.
That's funny, I don't even feel at home in an office with fewer then 2 old-skool 7200 RPM Barracuda hard drives in external enclosures whining away like jet engines... that plus the Atlas 10K and 4 fans in my case makes for a nice, relaxing hum :)
My favorite quote was this, from the front page of the Shared Source website:
Over the past 25 years, few people outside of the development community talked about source code and even fewer had access.
Never mind that closed source is actually a relatively new thing...programmers started out by giving away source, because the hardware to run it on was what was important... As I recall, IBM used to more or less give away the source to OS/360 because what the customer was really paying for was the big iron to run it on. Ah, great MS FUD...defend your own business model by claiming it has a long, distinguished history, and make it sound as though these "open source" lunatics are some kind of crazy group of upstart hippies. Never mind the actual truth of the history of computer programming...
You could make it safe, though...of course, this would raise the cost:
Build it on a telecomm-industry type passive PCI backplane -- 10 PCI slots, 1 CPU slot -- that sort of thing.
Use redundant power supplies.
And use RAID 5 for your storage.
run all your a/v wiring into a closet with a rack with this beast in it, and control it from your living room with a wireless keyboard and mouse...
I think the problem is not so much that there's no innovation going on, but that scientific fields are becoming so specialized that an outside observer can't TELL there's any innovation going on... These days, everyone's area of knowlege has to be pretty narrow in order to be knowlegeable enough to do any cutting-edge research, with the end result being that fields of research are generally pretty isolated.
Also, it generally takes a lot of very expensive equipment to do cutting-edge research nowadays, which tends to restrict the field to academia and large corporations -- not that innovative ideas can't come out of either of these two areas, but they can be restrictive working environments for people wanting to research crazy, unprecedented ideas...
Actually, cars aren't equipped with this because they don't explode...seriously...despite what you see in movies and on TV, it's virtually impossible to get a car to blow up.
A property is something that can be bought, sold, traded, transferred; that's why we, civilization, created the cash economy. A "work of art" is fundamentally no different that anything else created by any individual. The chair a woodworker crafts in his workshop is no different than a book created by an artist (that one is infinitely reproducable at economies of scale is immaterial). Would you lay the same claim that the chair too belongs to the public? If so, I hope you have a DVD player in your possesion because I sure would like one and would love to exercise my public-ownership claim to it (as a work of art created by the Sony Corp.).
/. contribute usefully to that public discourse, and don't just get lost under the mountains of publicity and FUD put out by corporate entities like the RIAA intent on preserving evil laws for the sake of their own profits.
This is certainly true. However, I think the important thing at this point in public discourse is to find a reasonable middle ground between the view that "the public owns everything" and "the public owns nothing"... While several provisions of the DMCA are patently absurd, and the >95 yr. extention to copyright law is downright criminal (a crime against humanity and the common good, and I'm not exaggerating or bullshitting with that statement), the statement that artists don't own their own work is equally criminal. As Ellison points out, artists need to make money so that they can eat and support their families, just as someone who produces more tangible goods does. However, changing copyright law so that the artist (or his/her publishing company) will still have exclusive ownership of the work 50+ years after death is also ridiculous and a huge injustice. Hopefully these sort of discussions on
Ringworld would be cool... However, I think that Varley's Gaia series (Titan, Wizard, and Demon) would be even more interesting, while being set in an equally visually impressive environment. If you haven't read those three books, by the way, they're highly recommended...
I think Moore's Law is only supposed to apply to transistor count in semiconductor logic; since this is a totally different technology, I'm not sure that it even applies.
Now we just have to get the price down... Superconductors and 5K cooling systems are both insanely expensive. However, if I can get one of these today, I'd be willing to install the cryogenics facility in my house. That 750Ghz system would be a nice litte boost up from my P133 :)
The continuing run of technological development is continuing towards two types of major associations in the world:
- "Developed" countries
- "Developing" countries
This has been the case ever since the start of the European colonial era. The problem is not tied to the "Information Age", but to the fact that one group of people (for example, the United States, the world's only remaining great hegemonic power) is not going to go into a foreign land for the great, selfless purpose of helping that land's people up to the same level of prosperity as themselves. Sure, individual Americans will do things like that, but not in great enough numbers for it to really matter, and there is no public will for this sort of great humanitarian project. This is true because it opens up the possibility of the people you helped becoming your equals, or maybe exceeding you in terms of economic and technological achievement. The people who have the power want to look good (see america's "policeman of the world" attitude and the old british imperial attitude that they were out "educating the savages" by taking over large chunks of the world), but don't want to actually make competition for themselves.So, to fix this, you need to find a solution for this problem in human nature...not blame it on the New Scary Sociological Trend of the Day the You Don't Actually Understand (in this case, the Internet), as the author of this book seems to want to do. That, or destroy human civilization, so that the survivors are all on equal terms
...so I could fly out to CA right now to attend this meeting.
In all seriousness, this is a great opportunity...I urge anyone who can attend to do so. The ICANN has way to much power with too little non-giant-corporate influence as it stands for this meeting, and any sort of public effort to protest and maybe force them to NOT fuck over most everyone on the TLD issue would be great.
In this vein, see:
This article by Bill Joy. Very interesting, and sobering article.
Intels chips use 1-4 watts in full energy save mode. The Crusoe Gets between 0.789 and 2 watts in its energy save mode.
Yes -- but you're not running in full energy saving mode much of the time, especially if using an OS like windows that doesn't do very smart things for power consumption. In non-power-save mode, the Intel chips burn a lot more power and get a lot hotter then the transmeta chips in a similar mode of operation, largely because the transmeta chips can scale their clock frequency to application demands, while the Intel chips have relatively simplistic power management capabilities. I've read that Intel has improved their CPUs power management capabilities, but they are still nowhere near as advanced as Transmeta's AFAIK.
Well, you would think that...but actually, the chip DOES consume a great deal of the power in a machine like a laptop, which is the market that the transmeta chips are aimed at. When running full-bore, a pentium III or an Athlon will draw 40-60 watts of power...that's a LOT, especially when you're talking about drawing it from a laptop battery pack.
Well, ASCI white was custom built, but out of standard IBM hardware -- mostly RS/6000 POWER3 SMP High Nodes and the SP Switch2, which is some pretty damn impressive hardware, especially when you consider that they're now making this stuff for mass consumption. if you can pay for it, that is.
Well, not all ATI stuff blows... Specifically, the new Raedon card kicks a lot of ass. ATI has had some problems in the past, but they seem to be getting their shit together pretty well now.
The point is that skins shouldn't be made THE DEFAULT. Not that they shouldn't be put in, or that the capability shouldn't exist, or whatever...just that making a skinned UI the default (as in NS6) is going to be confusing for a lot of people, probably even most people.
A point that many people seem to miss is that no company has an OBLIGATION to release stuff for linux. this attitude is absurd. no one has any such obligation...if it's not worth a company's time and resources to make linux stuff, they're not going to. companies are economic entities, and if they're not making money (or at least moving a lot of money around), they're not viable. I'm an avid linux user, but I don't expect any corporation to release linux drivers/devices because I think they have some sort of obligation to the linux community to do so.