If only it were socially acceptible for parents to actually take some time out of their busy schedules of driving their SUVs around and watching their own television to actually, I dunno, parent their kids sometime.
Then these lists would be ignorable, because parents could see for themselves which shows their kids are watching on TV, how much homework their kids are doing, and what kinds of games are ok and not-ok for the kids to play.
Supervision of children used to be a pretty big deal, and you could get charged with neglect for not doing it, so how are all these Soccer Moms getting away with completely ignoring the content they buy for their kids until its too late?
Should responsible people really take all this crap from a demographic known for recording South Park (which is on at midnight in most areas) so their 12 year old can watch it?
Isn't Doug Lenat's Eurisko program the one who figured out the 3d lithography process many, many years ago? I guess he didn't license out the patent very nicely, because we're only NOW hearing about high-density three dimensional RAM chips.
Oh well, a number of science fictiony people have been talking about this technology for quite some time, and dreaming up amusing applications for it in fields like processing, mass storage, I/O, etc. The idea of a cherry-sized chip with the computing capacity of a human brain is pretty common in those old books.
Of course, three or four layers of memory is a big step from thirty or forty thousand layers of processor.
This tower is going to be 10km tall with a 20km footprint. It will need to be enclosed for thermal convection to be most efficient, too. So, my big question is: what are they doing with the huge surface area?
A decent sized apartment would take up a 10x10x10 metre cube. If this tower were built in a place other than Australia, with a decently cold climate and still a lot of sun, it would be possible (and perhaps even cost-effective) to house a few million people in this solar-heated supertower.
If architects were especially creative they could add areas for businesses and recreation, including fully-enclosed, solar-heated parks along the surface, too, to provide comfortable habitation for the millions living inside, while providing fresh air, entertainment, possibly even food production without its inhabitants ever needing to step outside.
Unfortunately, after 9/11 I don't think people would flock very quickly to live in such a huge high-rise.
How strong would a cone-shaped building be after a plane flew through one of its walls?
If only the governments of the world didn't have such a stringent, screwy obsession with "cyber crime legislation." Rather than whining and lobbying to our jurisdictional nannies to do something about spam, the more clueful private citizens could harass, berate and take action against spammers better, using less white-hat tactics than are required right now.
When we were growing up, absolutely no good ever came from telling your mom to beat up the bully's mom, so why are we telling our governments to beat up spammers and soft-line governments all the time?
What we need are PCs that come with a single, directing processor on the mainboard and a bunch of PCI slots for daughtercard machines, running an OS geared towards clustering and paralell processing. They'd be able to get a lot more oomph than the current-generation single processor machines, and a non-von-neumann architecture, with multiple processing points might finally get people out of the WIMP interface paradigm.
These Linux-running blade machines seem to be a good first step on this evolutionary path.
Its about time Apple put a flat panel on their mac. Now it'll look even more badass through the transparent top, and maybe there'll be room for expansion slots. In any case, the flat panel will make it much easier to lug around without having to change the overall form factor.
Now all they need to do is make the thing as cheap as the original imac and we're cooking.
While suffering from overheating and architecture flaws as old as the 1970s, the x86 might last into the 2010's or 2020's, but it requires more and more expensive processes, innovations in the constructions of transistors and other envelope-pushing procedures. Meanwhile other architectures are enjoying higher instructions-per-clock, far less power consumption and heat production, and greater vectorization.
By the 50's, the x86 by Intel/AMD/whoever else will be a memory. The "other" major platform seems to have less of a problem with switching to new architectures every few years, whenever it becomes practical. Will Wintel users be lucky enough to have "Moore-Compliant" emulation of the Pentium-XIXX and the next CPU they're forced into?
If only so many wars were fought so civily, with publication of papers, logic and reason taking the forefront over all that gun-use and wasted effort trying to convince people with a big stick.
Of course, on the other hand, there's always fighting wars with lawyers and tax-men. That qualifies as throwing papers and logic and math around, almost. Pseudo-logic and semi-science works great when you're dealing with human judges rather than mathematics.
When people start saying that the computer industry will be going nowhere for the next few years, it means something totally new and world-altering is about to happen.
Before the microprocessor, the world was under the impression nothing would change until mainframes got a LOT bigger, made of fewer discrete components. Before handhelds, people thought laptops were going nowhere. Before the Internet people thought BBSes were going nowhere.
Before Linux started picking up, people thought the only thing that could run on PCs was Windows and DOS. Little did they know!:)
So, something big is gonna happen in the computer industry soon. Sweet:)
We'll probably only ever get to see the one Pluto Probe get launched in the next 20 years, which is a shame, because redundancy is the best way to reduce cost/benefit ratios in a NASA mission.
The odds for a long duration mission like this to the far reaches of our solar system are pretty slim, and once you make one Pluto Probe it is a lot cheaper to make *many* Pluto Probes.
What do you think the odds are there will be even a Pluto II?
> Personally, I'd rather we stopped even pretending to disapprove of drug use,
> and say that you can do anything you like to yourself before or during the
> competition, but you'll compete in issue equipment, or naked. Hey, it was good
> enough for the Greeks.;-)
Yeah. ALL the athletes who enter into the Olympics and other big competitions have decided to give up on a "normal" lifestyle. From a very young age they train, train, train and train and do very little else. They either do it out of their own free will, or ignore free will long enough to win big.
Super-elite drugged up, surgically enhanced, genetically modified or engineered athletes would be the next logical step, where people are either born for the express purpose of providing us with amusement, or forced by their families or governments from a very young age to do the same. What exactly is the big problem with letting people decide for themselves to get totally messed up on steroids, let alone genetic modification?
I'd have more confidence in Final Fantasy style human models being used in movies alongside human actors if they didn't move and look like CG models.
Fure, they put trackers on human actors for the people in FF, but they didn't walk or move exactly right. There were just too few imperfections for them to be real people. Hell, they walked like robots.
Until it is easy to mistake a real human and a CG person, they'll only be really good for having around other cartoon characters.
It might, however, be a good idea to use CG people in pornography. Snuff flicks, kiddie porn, etc DO have a fairly big market, and the main objection to them (aside from the obvious thoughtcrime problems) is the exploitation, torture and probable death of the victim.
If you can get CG people to act like they're in real pain (and liking it) they'd be useful in all sorts of kink, custom-built fanasies, etc. You wouldn't have to worry about the privacy problem associated with going to the pr0n store either.
In general, porn applications would probably be the only place they're handy right now.
On the one hand, I can see Redhat getting into problems with people all over for un-leveling the playing field, breaking a gentleman's agreement with CERT, etc.
On the other, this could easily and very vocally show RedHat, true or not, to be a good OS if you want to avoid security vulnerabilities. FUD victims could be saying to themselves, "These other guys sit on their hands for over a week?? I'm going to go with redhat!"
Microsoft social engineers news stories like this all the time. Single examples that Lemmings treat as a global sample of productivity, security, programmers' skill, or whatever other wonderful thing the company wants to tote.
What would it take to make a 32 bit DR-DOS distribution which could be stuck in a dos emulator like DOSEMU? If we could set that up, then who needs to dual-boot into Windows? Just run Windows on top of Linux whenever you want to use whatever applications.
Of course, we'd need to set up an emulation layer that Windows 95 sits on top of.
The c2.com wiki started in the mid 90s, and has only managed to expand and proliferate, and to improve in popularity. It makes for a much better interaction platform than, say, a message board, because the importnat and interesting information is always under judgement. People are editing and creating based on other peoples ideas, and not just responding to other peoples' posts, so you don't have to scroll through nearly as many pages.
Nevertheless, the wiki at http://www.c2.com is dedicated to Design Patterns, a general enough audience, and after so many years it is still growing. Last time I checked there were about 18000 pages, all made by outsiders, and almost all well written and quite interesting.
The best way to have your community thrive is to have it as open as possible. IRC is so successful and well-used because anyone can become powerful in their own little corner of the system. While nobody likes the people who go out of their way to stir things up on online communities, their existence does tend to lead to others following after them and tidying their mess up. In the end, there is more traffic, and your site becomes more popular, until there are enough signal producers to make the noise producers ignorable.
So far the only major, high-speed chipmakers who seem to have a problem with power consumption and heat generation are the Intel and AMD family of processors.
Rather than develop completely new technology that will raise the price of their chips higher, why doesn't Intel take a year off and totally revamp their architecture so it isn't so much of a space heater? Sure, the general public will be shocked and appalled when they can actually touch their 5ghz Intel Pentium-IX, but I'm sure they'll get over the noisey fan-belt the AMD version needs.
What's stopping us from making a big generator out of a microturbine like this? Put a LOT of them side by side and you can get a lot more power per square metre of hydroelectric dam.
You get the added bonus of your turbines not eating fish, too. All you need to do is cheapen these tiny generators down below the price of a big turbine per unit volume.
Greenies keep saying that the environment is changing too quickly for animals to adapt to it, and they're going extinct as a result. Whether this is true or false, why do they keep trying to fund preservation programs like this one, restoring dead species to the Earth.
I thought biodiversity was one of the things they like to promote. Why don't we spend a few decades splicing together some new animal species, more keenly adapted to the world as it is now. Frogs that love smog, for example, or insects with two heads. Anything the learning-disabled kids of the world can invent.
If we create as many animal species per day as we lose, then in a few hundred years things will be back to "normal," the ecosystem won't be quite so "damaged," and everyone will be happy.
Of course, by that point, greenies will most certainly find something else to complain about. Maybe earthshine makes the moon bleach faster. Who knows?
It would be much cooler to take other peoples' brain activity when dreaming, amplify it, and reproduce it in other people by affixing electrodes to their skulls.
Sure, you wouldn't have the same dreams, but you'd be damn sure having a sex dream if you ordered a sex dream pattern, or a nightmare if you ordered a nightmare pattern. That'd be pretty nifty, and it seems pretty plausible given modern technology.
Now, if they could tap into our visual centres a bit easier, we'd be able to get product placement, or even our favorite shows in our sleep. Television takes up four hours from our day, so putting TV into the 8 hours when we're drooling vegetables already might be a better alternative, for advertisers and TV stations alike.
In fact, when we're asleep odds are we won't be flipping channels, and ratings will be much easier to grab.
While the two-faced US Government, first bombing the Red Cross for *suspected* pilfering of food to Taliban members is funny, that's only because they then threw food around at random throughout the country at the same time, in far smaller quantities, which could more easily be accidentally stumbled upon by Taliban forces. Some aid packages were, of course, also dropped in well-known minefields. What a knee-slapper, imagining all those starving people waving back to the relief jets with their stumps!
What *isn't* funny, however, is how we in the West and other Allied Countries(tm)(r) are on the side of the bad guys in this conflict. The US has cut out an entire country's Internet access because of *suspected* terrorist conntections. A country which they have bombed over and over again during the recent civil war. Now they have taken care of any free exchange of ideas and news from one private citizen to another, if not locally than internationally, where it counts.
The acts of terrorism by the United States will have just as much a positive effect on their victims as Bin Laden's attacks and threatened attacks have had on our own.
Someday soon I hope at least a few Allied Countries (hopefully even Canada, cuz I live here) take a step back and realize that the United States has only as much Big Swinging Dick power as we allow them to have, and take a more neutral, peacemaking stance in this conflict.
Wait a minute, isn't there already an organization dedicated to providing such a Global perspective? The United Notions or something... eh, I must be mistaken.
I've found thousands of really detailed, useful pages about software engineering, design and manufacture at the Portland Pattern Repository. Why are they trying to make yet another big repository with a structure that doesn't neccesarily scale as well as a wiki?
To see the PPR, surf to http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki
If only NASA would act as a testbed facility, getting through the FAA red-tape with homebrew rockets instead of laughing at them and generally ignoring the X-prize type competitions.
Then I'd be a lot less worried about these amateurs strapping bombs to their behinds and vying for orbit. After a few failed launches, new laws will be implemented world-wide "for our protection" that prevent anyone but registered governmental space agencies from launching manned missions, and commercial spaceflight will be relegated to satellites and probes forever.
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If only it were socially acceptible for parents to actually take some time out of their busy schedules of driving their SUVs around and watching their own television to actually, I dunno, parent their kids sometime.
Then these lists would be ignorable, because parents could see for themselves which shows their kids are watching on TV, how much homework their kids are doing, and what kinds of games are ok and not-ok for the kids to play.
Supervision of children used to be a pretty big deal, and you could get charged with neglect for not doing it, so how are all these Soccer Moms getting away with completely ignoring the content they buy for their kids until its too late?
Should responsible people really take all this crap from a demographic known for recording South Park (which is on at midnight in most areas) so their 12 year old can watch it?
Isn't Doug Lenat's Eurisko program the one who figured out the 3d lithography process many, many years ago? I guess he didn't license out the patent very nicely, because we're only NOW hearing about high-density three dimensional RAM chips.
Oh well, a number of science fictiony people have been talking about this technology for quite some time, and dreaming up amusing applications for it in fields like processing, mass storage, I/O, etc. The idea of a cherry-sized chip with the computing capacity of a human brain is pretty common in those old books.
Of course, three or four layers of memory is a big step from thirty or forty thousand layers of processor.
This tower is going to be 10km tall with a 20km footprint. It will need to be enclosed for thermal convection to be most efficient, too. So, my big question is: what are they doing with the huge surface area?
A decent sized apartment would take up a 10x10x10 metre cube. If this tower were built in a place other than Australia, with a decently cold climate and still a lot of sun, it would be possible (and perhaps even cost-effective) to house a few million people in this solar-heated supertower.
If architects were especially creative they could add areas for businesses and recreation, including fully-enclosed, solar-heated parks along the surface, too, to provide comfortable habitation for the millions living inside, while providing fresh air, entertainment, possibly even food production without its inhabitants ever needing to step outside.
Unfortunately, after 9/11 I don't think people would flock very quickly to live in such a huge high-rise.
How strong would a cone-shaped building be after a plane flew through one of its walls?
If only the governments of the world didn't have such a stringent, screwy obsession with "cyber crime legislation." Rather than whining and lobbying to our jurisdictional nannies to do something about spam, the more clueful private citizens could harass, berate and take action against spammers better, using less white-hat tactics than are required right now.
When we were growing up, absolutely no good ever came from telling your mom to beat up the bully's mom, so why are we telling our governments to beat up spammers and soft-line governments all the time?
What we need are PCs that come with a single, directing processor on the mainboard and a bunch of PCI slots for daughtercard machines, running an OS geared towards clustering and paralell processing. They'd be able to get a lot more oomph than the current-generation single processor machines, and a non-von-neumann architecture, with multiple processing points might finally get people out of the WIMP interface paradigm.
These Linux-running blade machines seem to be a good first step on this evolutionary path.
Its about time Apple put a flat panel on their mac. Now it'll look even more badass through the transparent top, and maybe there'll be room for expansion slots. In any case, the flat panel will make it much easier to lug around without having to change the overall form factor.
Now all they need to do is make the thing as cheap as the original imac and we're cooking.
While suffering from overheating and architecture flaws as old as the 1970s, the x86 might last into the 2010's or 2020's, but it requires more and more expensive processes, innovations in the constructions of transistors and other envelope-pushing procedures. Meanwhile other architectures are enjoying higher instructions-per-clock, far less power consumption and heat production, and greater vectorization.
By the 50's, the x86 by Intel/AMD/whoever else will be a memory. The "other" major platform seems to have less of a problem with switching to new architectures every few years, whenever it becomes practical. Will Wintel users be lucky enough to have "Moore-Compliant" emulation of the Pentium-XIXX and the next CPU they're forced into?
If only so many wars were fought so civily, with publication of papers, logic and reason taking the forefront over all that gun-use and wasted effort trying to convince people with a big stick.
Of course, on the other hand, there's always fighting wars with lawyers and tax-men. That qualifies as throwing papers and logic and math around, almost. Pseudo-logic and semi-science works great when you're dealing with human judges rather than mathematics.
When people start saying that the computer industry will be going nowhere for the next few years, it means something totally new and world-altering is about to happen.
:)
:)
Before the microprocessor, the world was under the impression nothing would change until mainframes got a LOT bigger, made of fewer discrete components. Before handhelds, people thought laptops were going nowhere. Before the Internet people thought BBSes were going nowhere.
Before Linux started picking up, people thought the only thing that could run on PCs was Windows and DOS. Little did they know!
So, something big is gonna happen in the computer industry soon. Sweet
Ok, so what was Apple's crime again? They are a pretty successful company, so there has to be something :)
Didn't Apple PAY xerox large sums of money to get that tour of PARC?
Microsoft was the one who decided to grab the ideas for free.
We'll probably only ever get to see the one Pluto Probe get launched in the next 20 years, which is a shame, because redundancy is the best way to reduce cost/benefit ratios in a NASA mission.
The odds for a long duration mission like this to the far reaches of our solar system are pretty slim, and once you make one Pluto Probe it is a lot cheaper to make *many* Pluto Probes.
What do you think the odds are there will be even a Pluto II?
I think "Universities" like these are a great idea. Finally, a place to teach people the hard way not to be stupid!
Its like those Smart Pills you find on the ground in the woods. You know, the ones which turn out to be rabbit poop?
> Personally, I'd rather we stopped even pretending to disapprove of drug use, ;-)
> and say that you can do anything you like to yourself before or during the
> competition, but you'll compete in issue equipment, or naked. Hey, it was good
> enough for the Greeks.
Yeah. ALL the athletes who enter into the Olympics and other big competitions have decided to give up on a "normal" lifestyle. From a very young age they train, train, train and train and do very little else. They either do it out of their own free will, or ignore free will long enough to win big.
Super-elite drugged up, surgically enhanced, genetically modified or engineered athletes would be the next logical step, where people are either born for the express purpose of providing us with amusement, or forced by their families or governments from a very young age to do the same. What exactly is the big problem with letting people decide for themselves to get totally messed up on steroids, let alone genetic modification?
I'd have more confidence in Final Fantasy style human models being used in movies alongside human actors if they didn't move and look like CG models.
Fure, they put trackers on human actors for the people in FF, but they didn't walk or move exactly right. There were just too few imperfections for them to be real people. Hell, they walked like robots.
Until it is easy to mistake a real human and a CG person, they'll only be really good for having around other cartoon characters.
It might, however, be a good idea to use CG people in pornography. Snuff flicks, kiddie porn, etc DO have a fairly big market, and the main objection to them (aside from the obvious thoughtcrime problems) is the exploitation, torture and probable death of the victim.
If you can get CG people to act like they're in real pain (and liking it) they'd be useful in all sorts of kink, custom-built fanasies, etc. You wouldn't have to worry about the privacy problem associated with going to the pr0n store either.
In general, porn applications would probably be the only place they're handy right now.
On the one hand, I can see Redhat getting into problems with people all over for un-leveling the playing field, breaking a gentleman's agreement with CERT, etc.
On the other, this could easily and very vocally show RedHat, true or not, to be a good OS if you want to avoid security vulnerabilities. FUD victims could be saying to themselves, "These other guys sit on their hands for over a week?? I'm going to go with redhat!"
Microsoft social engineers news stories like this all the time. Single examples that Lemmings treat as a global sample of productivity, security, programmers' skill, or whatever other wonderful thing the company wants to tote.
What would it take to make a 32 bit DR-DOS distribution which could be stuck in a dos emulator like DOSEMU? If we could set that up, then who needs to dual-boot into Windows? Just run Windows on top of Linux whenever you want to use whatever applications.
Of course, we'd need to set up an emulation layer that Windows 95 sits on top of.
The c2.com wiki started in the mid 90s, and has only managed to expand and proliferate, and to improve in popularity. It makes for a much better interaction platform than, say, a message board, because the importnat and interesting information is always under judgement. People are editing and creating based on other peoples ideas, and not just responding to other peoples' posts, so you don't have to scroll through nearly as many pages.
Nevertheless, the wiki at http://www.c2.com is dedicated to Design Patterns, a general enough audience, and after so many years it is still growing. Last time I checked there were about 18000 pages, all made by outsiders, and almost all well written and quite interesting.
The best way to have your community thrive is to have it as open as possible. IRC is so successful and well-used because anyone can become powerful in their own little corner of the system. While nobody likes the people who go out of their way to stir things up on online communities, their existence does tend to lead to others following after them and tidying their mess up. In the end, there is more traffic, and your site becomes more popular, until there are enough signal producers to make the noise producers ignorable.
So far the only major, high-speed chipmakers who seem to have a problem with power consumption and heat generation are the Intel and AMD family of processors.
Rather than develop completely new technology that will raise the price of their chips higher, why doesn't Intel take a year off and totally revamp their architecture so it isn't so much of a space heater? Sure, the general public will be shocked and appalled when they can actually touch their 5ghz Intel Pentium-IX, but I'm sure they'll get over the noisey fan-belt the AMD version needs.
What's stopping us from making a big generator out of a microturbine like this? Put a LOT of them side by side and you can get a lot more power per square metre of hydroelectric dam.
You get the added bonus of your turbines not eating fish, too. All you need to do is cheapen these tiny generators down below the price of a big turbine per unit volume.
Greenies keep saying that the environment is changing too quickly for animals to adapt to it, and they're going extinct as a result. Whether this is true or false, why do they keep trying to fund preservation programs like this one, restoring dead species to the Earth.
I thought biodiversity was one of the things they like to promote. Why don't we spend a few decades splicing together some new animal species, more keenly adapted to the world as it is now. Frogs that love smog, for example, or insects with two heads. Anything the learning-disabled kids of the world can invent.
If we create as many animal species per day as we lose, then in a few hundred years things will be back to "normal," the ecosystem won't be quite so "damaged," and everyone will be happy.
Of course, by that point, greenies will most certainly find something else to complain about. Maybe earthshine makes the moon bleach faster. Who knows?
It would be much cooler to take other peoples' brain activity when dreaming, amplify it, and reproduce it in other people by affixing electrodes to their skulls.
Sure, you wouldn't have the same dreams, but you'd be damn sure having a sex dream if you ordered a sex dream pattern, or a nightmare if you ordered a nightmare pattern. That'd be pretty nifty, and it seems pretty plausible given modern technology.
Now, if they could tap into our visual centres a bit easier, we'd be able to get product placement, or even our favorite shows in our sleep. Television takes up four hours from our day, so putting TV into the 8 hours when we're drooling vegetables already might be a better alternative, for advertisers and TV stations alike.
In fact, when we're asleep odds are we won't be flipping channels, and ratings will be much easier to grab.
While the two-faced US Government, first bombing the Red Cross for *suspected* pilfering of food to Taliban members is funny, that's only because they then threw food around at random throughout the country at the same time, in far smaller quantities, which could more easily be accidentally stumbled upon by Taliban forces. Some aid packages were, of course, also dropped in well-known minefields. What a knee-slapper, imagining all those starving people waving back to the relief jets with their stumps!
What *isn't* funny, however, is how we in the West and other Allied Countries(tm)(r) are on the side of the bad guys in this conflict. The US has cut out an entire country's Internet access because of *suspected* terrorist conntections. A country which they have bombed over and over again during the recent civil war. Now they have taken care of any free exchange of ideas and news from one private citizen to another, if not locally than internationally, where it counts.
The acts of terrorism by the United States will have just as much a positive effect on their victims as Bin Laden's attacks and threatened attacks have had on our own.
Someday soon I hope at least a few Allied Countries (hopefully even Canada, cuz I live here) take a step back and realize that the United States has only as much Big Swinging Dick power as we allow them to have, and take a more neutral, peacemaking stance in this conflict.
Wait a minute, isn't there already an organization dedicated to providing such a Global perspective? The United Notions or something... eh, I must be mistaken.
I've found thousands of really detailed, useful pages about software engineering, design and manufacture at the Portland Pattern Repository. Why are they trying to make yet another big repository with a structure that doesn't neccesarily scale as well as a wiki?
To see the PPR, surf to http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki
If only NASA would act as a testbed facility, getting through the FAA red-tape with homebrew rockets instead of laughing at them and generally ignoring the X-prize type competitions.
Then I'd be a lot less worried about these amateurs strapping bombs to their behinds and vying for orbit. After a few failed launches, new laws will be implemented world-wide "for our protection" that prevent anyone but registered governmental space agencies from launching manned missions, and commercial spaceflight will be relegated to satellites and probes forever.