I read A Fire Upon the Deep about a month ago. The setting was excellent, with AI Gods who are as much above us as we are above cockroaches. Looking for other material with this setting led me to Orion's Arm. Orion's Arm shares the ideas of the Singularity like A Fire Upon the Deep and has a 10000 year time-line with no humanoid aliens and as realistic as possible physics.
but I am not sure how glass ceiling can be broken...
Lobby the technical college's. I'm currently an IT student and all we are taught is Microsoft products. We did one course in one semester on Linux, and it basically amounted to installing Red Hat 7.1 and playing with some basic scripting. That's it. We didn't learn anything about how to configure a Linux machine as a router, how to use BIND, how to install and configure SAMBA, or really anything besides a shallow impression of Linux. Linux needs to be taught in detail in the colleges, then when we get out into the workforce we'll be familiar enough with it to actually design solutions based on Linux instead of Windows.
The point I'm making is that if you've only been taught Windows then you don't know how to approach a problem using Linux. Every student who only learns Windows in school is a fractional loss for Linux reaching critical mass.
We've only had the Internet since 1969 and the World Wide Web since 1993. Together, they are still fledgling technologies.
Imagine what the Internet could be used for in the future. The Semantic Web or something like it is set to revolutionalize the Internet of the future. Imagine being able to organise and sort information based on the qualaties - instead of quantaties - of the information (See Microsoft's qualatative search). The position the Internet is in today is that most of the information contained in it is quantative in nature, it is stored in a manner that reflects machine organization of information. Qualative information on the other hand is much more useful for performing searches and organizing information, it allows the retrieval of information to be based on attributes rather than specific-word-matches. Going back to the Microsoft search link, using qualatative information as the criteria of the search you could search for a base attribute of "cars" and refine the search using arbitrary attributes such as "sleek form", and "red". In this example, a web page that held information about "Ferrari's" would be included in the "car's" search results even if it did not explicitly contain the word "car" as part of it's web page text - in the semantic web XML markup, "car" would be one of it's attributes.
He does have a major strategic point about Linux: Sure it's a great operating system, but it is not (at this point) network aware.
The definition of network aware to me means having built in services that interconnect the operating system with the Internet. And not simple services such as a web server, I mean service suites of things such as a instant messenging, a collaborative calender (e.g. Lotus Notes), and other as yet undreamed of services that improve or redefine work and information flows between people.
Please someone confirm for me, IIRC doesn't the DMCA allow reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability? If so, wouldn't OpenOffice et al be allowed to reverse engineer the DRM format and support it within OpenOffice without running afowl of the DMCA?
If you want to read some of those old magazines online, go here. They have all the Antic issues online plus a whole lot more of the other computer magazines of the time.
Imagine if by some fluke that SCO does get to charge for the use of Linux. Would SCO therefore have to split up the profits and distribute them to the other kernal developers?
It would seem to me that if SCO only has 80 lines of the millions of lines in the kernal source code that they would not be making very much off of charging for Linux after they paid royalties to the people who did the lion's share of the work.
What the next generation of P2P needs is the ability for it's users to be anonymous. This could be acomplished by routing all P2P packets through at least one third party node. The third party node is the only node that knows the IP addresses of the two sides and it does not keep any logs. In addition, why not encrypt all network traffic as well.
Of course as soon as a viable solution exists that makes people anonymous on the internet, no doubt the congress-critters will pass legislation to make it illegal.
Ok, I googled it and here's a result: QWERTY Speed
To quote: Thus, the QWERTY layout effectively reduced the speed at which human users could type, thereby preventing their jamming the mechanism too often
He's referring to the keyboard layout. The QWERTY layout is actually designed to slow down typing. This is because if you typed too fast on an old mechanical typewriter you would jam up the keys.
Microsoft software usually doesn't start to be good/stable until version 3.0. They may not be giving Java a run for it's money now but how about 5 years from now when C# has the same number of API's as Java?
Does this mean that it's legal to download copyrighted mp3's in Canada because the artist's are getting paid?
And if it's not legal, why the tax?;)
Yeah I know I'm dreamin' but just thought I'd point out the one-sided logic of the record companies.
This could lead to life-saving medical procedures once further research is in. Imagine uses for this 'womb' where fetus' are not grown but instead it is used to grow organs for transplantation. A few of your own cells can be used for the procedure giving you an organ that is genetically identical and therefore will not be rejected by your body.
Slashdot Mirror
I read A Fire Upon the Deep about a month ago. The setting was excellent, with AI Gods who are as much above us as we are above cockroaches. Looking for other material with this setting led me to Orion's Arm. Orion's Arm shares the ideas of the Singularity like A Fire Upon the Deep and has a 10000 year time-line with no humanoid aliens and as realistic as possible physics.
but I am not sure how glass ceiling can be broken...
Lobby the technical college's. I'm currently an IT student and all we are taught is Microsoft products. We did one course in one semester on Linux, and it basically amounted to installing Red Hat 7.1 and playing with some basic scripting. That's it. We didn't learn anything about how to configure a Linux machine as a router, how to use BIND, how to install and configure SAMBA, or really anything besides a shallow impression of Linux. Linux needs to be taught in detail in the colleges, then when we get out into the workforce we'll be familiar enough with it to actually design solutions based on Linux instead of Windows.
The point I'm making is that if you've only been taught Windows then you don't know how to approach a problem using Linux. Every student who only learns Windows in school is a fractional loss for Linux reaching critical mass.
We've only had the Internet since 1969 and the World Wide Web since 1993. Together, they are still fledgling technologies.
Imagine what the Internet could be used for in the future. The Semantic Web or something like it is set to revolutionalize the Internet of the future. Imagine being able to organise and sort information based on the qualaties - instead of quantaties - of the information (See Microsoft's qualatative search). The position the Internet is in today is that most of the information contained in it is quantative in nature, it is stored in a manner that reflects machine organization of information. Qualative information on the other hand is much more useful for performing searches and organizing information, it allows the retrieval of information to be based on attributes rather than specific-word-matches. Going back to the Microsoft search link, using qualatative information as the criteria of the search you could search for a base attribute of "cars" and refine the search using arbitrary attributes such as "sleek form", and "red". In this example, a web page that held information about "Ferrari's" would be included in the "car's" search results even if it did not explicitly contain the word "car" as part of it's web page text - in the semantic web XML markup, "car" would be one of it's attributes.
He does have a major strategic point about Linux: Sure it's a great operating system, but it is not (at this point) network aware.
The definition of network aware to me means having built in services that interconnect the operating system with the Internet. And not simple services such as a web server, I mean service suites of things such as a instant messenging, a collaborative calender (e.g. Lotus Notes), and other as yet undreamed of services that improve or redefine work and information flows between people.
Please someone confirm for me, IIRC doesn't the DMCA allow reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability? If so, wouldn't OpenOffice et al be allowed to reverse engineer the DRM format and support it within OpenOffice without running afowl of the DMCA?
If you want to read some of those old magazines online, go here. They have all the Antic issues online plus a whole lot more of the other computer magazines of the time.
When I first read its name, I thought it was Canadian. :)
Imagine if by some fluke that SCO does get to charge for the use of Linux. Would SCO therefore have to split up the profits and distribute them to the other kernal developers?
It would seem to me that if SCO only has 80 lines of the millions of lines in the kernal source code that they would not be making very much off of charging for Linux after they paid royalties to the people who did the lion's share of the work.
What the next generation of P2P needs is the ability for it's users to be anonymous. This could be acomplished by routing all P2P packets through at least one third party node. The third party node is the only node that knows the IP addresses of the two sides and it does not keep any logs. In addition, why not encrypt all network traffic as well.
Of course as soon as a viable solution exists that makes people anonymous on the internet, no doubt the congress-critters will pass legislation to make it illegal.
Having no bias is a myth. Even selecting what get's reported is bias - is this important enough?
important to who?
...implemented in python...
Is there anyway to get the sourcecode for those of us that are interested?
In this scenario I wonder if they could be charged with destroying evidence?? =)
Ok, I googled it and here's a result:
QWERTY Speed
To quote:
Thus, the QWERTY layout effectively reduced the speed at which human users could type, thereby preventing their jamming the mechanism too often
The QWERTY layout was designed to keep the keys from sticking, thereby increasing speed.
Um. That's what I said only reversed in logic.
He's referring to the keyboard layout. The QWERTY layout is actually designed to slow down typing. This is because if you typed too fast on an old mechanical typewriter you would jam up the keys.
If research is truly dangerous then classify it. But not to research it only leaves you behind when other nations research it.
since when I need to free up two slots to add a graphics card? :)
Remember Voodoo 2 SLI? Two cards there
CNN has one here.
Microsoft software usually doesn't start to be good/stable until version 3.0. They may not be giving Java a run for it's money now but how about 5 years from now when C# has the same number of API's as Java?
Setup time, head seeks and rotational delay don't apply to this device - it's solid state meaning it's made up of RAM chips.
Does this mean that it's legal to download copyrighted mp3's in Canada because the artist's are getting paid? ;)
And if it's not legal, why the tax?
Yeah I know I'm dreamin' but just thought I'd point out the one-sided logic of the record companies.
This could lead to life-saving medical procedures once further research is in. Imagine uses for this 'womb' where fetus' are not grown but instead it is used to grow organs for transplantation. A few of your own cells can be used for the procedure giving you an organ that is genetically identical and therefore will not be rejected by your body.
The device itself and another story for the article.
Yeah but they had to try... It would have been 100% more profits if they had won.
Doesn't HP have to release their source code to comply with the GPL?