Based on John Norstad's orginial widely popular NewsWatcher program Simon Frasier (yes, the same fellow whose done much of the news code for Mozilla) extended it with a number of new features inlcuding multithreading. The result is a rock-solid application of marvelous usability.
Filtering is trivial, writing & managing filters is easily done (and without needing to know any specific notation), scoring is performed identically, saving text and binaries is accomplished cleanly and with versatility, heck it can even be set to use voice commands and read back material. It honors every obscure usenet convention thown at it (mail-copies-to, X-face, etc.) and follows every good usage guideline plus handles multiple languages with aplomb.
Finally the documentation is simply fantastic. If nothing else this makes it a great program: Clear well-written comprehensive documentation properly laid out, indexed, usefully hyperlinked and always helpful. I can't express how important this is and how useful has been.
Oh yeah, it's a free (as in lucre) Mac application running under both MacOS & MacOS X. However MT-NewsWatcher is good enough friends have kept old Macs just for running it; it's that good.
.com.us domains should be given only to a real corporation with that name..tm.us should be administered by the USPTO and subdomains given strictly on the basis of trademark ownership. Conversely, trademark considerations should not impinge on the other subdomains - as long as it is clear that this is the case, so nobody gets misled.
It's so easy to be sure of oneself when ignorant.
Exactly which "Olympia" gets that olympia.us? Olympia Pizza down the street from me? One of the 1,000 other unrelated Olympia Pizza's across the US? Olympia Cruise Lines? Olympia Finance Corporation? Matt Olympia?
What about trademarks? NT goes to Microsoft or to Nortel (nee Northern Telecom)? What about the dozens of other trademarked NT's in various fields? NT adhesive or NT car parts?
Actually L. Ron Hubbard was claimed to have written numerous books after his apparent death, a much more impressive feat then simply having books published ex mortis.
I don't know if it true but I was once told the American Library Association once awarded Hubbard an award for most books written post-humously.
-- Michael
ps for the Scientologists: L. Ron Hubbard now lives in my pants - feel him for 25 cents.
Actually Wellesley Massachusetts USA, bedroom suburb about 15 minutes/miles outside Boston. With moderate glow from the city, nearby parking lots, and a streetlight 30 feet away. The horizon was entirely obscured by surounding houses & trees. From five to six am EST.
Impressive
Oftentimes multiple tracks visible at once. Very "bursty" activity with gaps of 5 - 30 seconds between sightings, then often several together or in the same part of the sky separated by moments. About one really bright one a minute.
Paths were often at angles to the horizon, once or twice almost oblique. The paths themselves were also often quite prominant being very bright themselves and lasting up to a few degrees behind the meteorite and lingering for a second or two in some cases.
The most astonishing thing was if one laid back as so that the zenith was centered and nothing but sky was in the field of vision there was an almost constant sparkle of *something*. I've done and taught astronomy before but I've never sen this much activity at once - even from this relatively crappy location it was obvious something dramatic was going on overhead.
I'll not attempt to offer counts or speculate on the rate as I was in a lousy location, they're hard estimates to make accurately and frankly I didn't care. It was a deeply impressive sight and I'm thrilled to have witnessed it. In a single hour of viewing I likely saw as many meteorites as I've seen in my life before, never so many multiples at once.
At one point it was like popcorn popping: "Look there... Oh!.. Oh!.. Down!.. Over!.. Uhhhhhhh THERE!"
Back when the STS debuted the announced plan had been to quickly spin it off into private management. Of course 48-hour turnaround and low costs were also much ballyhood features too. Indeed at one point Eastern Airlines (remember them?) folks were brought in to watch a few flights and get a feel for how they could take over regular operations.
These days Lockheed handles most of the service & maintainance contracts on NASA facilities with NASA oversight. Turnaround time remains months and flights are steadily being reduced due to budget constraints. Low cost has also not been realized, certianly not within an order of magnitude of the original predictions.
Of course the STS fleet remains an experimental one. These are the first generation designs developed in the 1970's with only upgraded subsystems since then. The logical next step of a second generation applying the lessons learned isn't even being discussed much less implelemented leaving the the aging (though refurbished) four orbiters the US's only manned spaceflight capability.
Statistically more accidents must be anticipated reducing the program 25% each time. With R&D not even begun in an organized fashion a replacement generation is itself at least a decade off even if fast-tracked. I fear it is not a promise of a bright future the US sees but a slowly dwindling legacy.
Indeed NASA just released a report calling for reducing staffing & facilities on the ISS (angering it's internationial "partners" who weren't even given copies of the report in advance of the press conference in spite of their own considerable contributions to the project.)
Elsewhere the USSR is actively looking for any partners with which to continue it's own program, the ESA has it's own launcher and program along with involvement in the ISS, the Japanese projects slowly advance, and China is reportedly almost ready to launch it's first manned orbital mission and has published its goal of going to the moon.
Like so many other areas of endeavor the US seems to pioneer then not follow up on it's advances. With realistic possibilities of power generation and manufacturing now becoming a possibility it seems the US is content to allow its manned spaceflight programs slowly wind down.
-- Michael
ps Many could argue that outsourcing STS operations would free up NASA funds and personel for producing a follow-up program. Were this the plan this would all be a good thing but no such intentions have been announced nor does there appear any support for such.
Long ago I worked for what was then the #3 (or #4 - who really knew) email vendor. Nobody has heard of them today but back when Notework Instant Email was a big player in the Netware networks of the world.
Anyway, one day one of the support staff got a call from a customer asking about delayed email, specifically could messages arrive months late. Well, it was possible if the site had two or more servers and if after some types of problems the "Resend" command wasn't used but it was rare and *months*?
Anyway, this was a small office that was calling and they just had the one server and no external email (this was about '87). Our support person said that no, there wasn't any way she could imagine this happening though possibly if a client machine hadn't been used in all of that time but it was still unlikely... The customer seemed to accept this, thanked her and hung up.
The next day they called back. More mysterious email. It turned out what really bothered them was that the sender was an employee who had died some months ago. Getting the messages was very disturbing to the staff and was there any way to purge them? Not to purge as there wasn't a centralized email store but the account could certianly be deactivated. As the folks calling weren't technical our support person faxed off a set of direction for them to give to their systems consultant.
Three days pass then she gets another call and the person on the other end is in tears: More email, it contains personal information and current events! The office is in an uproar, half the staff is freaked and the other half is furious. Our support person reassures the caller we've never heard of anything like this and to have the systems consultant call her as soon as they come in before *anything* is touched.
Eventually through some sleuthing (well, mostly login times) it's determined that someone has the password to the dead fellow's account, had gone through his old email learning personal details and was now using this to harass co-workers.
Once the times and dates of the messages creation were firmly established it was in the hands of the customer but they apparently had a good idea who was doing this once it was confirmed how & when.
Real ghost story? No - but creepy enough that someone would torture their co-workers this way.
BTW at the same software company we had to go around removing a screensaver that randomly composed funny headlines with staff's names in it after a person listed died.
Our University Search enables you to search to a specific school's website.
Adding a couple of spiders dedicated to subscriber's sites (possibly on their sites only for their sites) and some key words that are relevant to them seems a simple and straightforward enough proposition. Indeed haven't all of the other search engine folks been selling off their technology for corporate installations for years?
As for the software, try using IE 5 on a PC and then using IE 4.5 for the mac and note the difference. SPEED. Microsoft software ported to the mac is extremely slow, and generally makes more sense in the windows version.
Er, bad choice. IE 4.5 is Mac from the ground up, has no common code with Wintel IE. Furthermore while it is indeed somewhat slower it was until recently far more standards compliant. With IE 6 Wintel is back in the game but then it's as slow as Mac 4.5 is for most folks.
MS Office applications like Word & Excel are cross-ported (you are aware they began as Mac applications, right?) and have often taken a performance hit though that seems fairly resolved at this point. There were some justly loathed versions but 98 is fine, runs well on any Mac sold in the past 2 or 3 years (remember that Macs stay on desktops far longer then PCs) and the X versions are shaping up very nicely.
As the mail clients are all unique and un-ported there's no comparison except to say that the MS Outlook for the Mac developers deserve being made to use their own products. On the other hand Entourage has some really good qualities and with it's support for AppleScript lots of features can be added in.
Oh, and as to Blue Screen of Death / SadMac Bombs - MacOS X is incredibly stable.
Beta VCRs and tapes cost more to produce mostly because Sony refused to license the tech. Fewer manufacturers mean less competition and less opportunity for economy of scale.
No, I was careful in my wording. Beta products were intrinsically more complex to manufacture then VHS. More components were required, higher quality materials. Economies of scale don't change if it's 1 manufacturer making 100,000 units or 10 manufacturers making 10,000 units - indeed they get worse.
What I believe you were attempting to describe is incremental improvement brought about by a widely used design being iteratively refined by numerous and diverse engineering teams. With only one company producing a product or a highly dominant reference design being used a product tends not to evolve very quickly.
Ask Polaroid.
You're implying this was Polaroid's problem - it wasn't. Their habit of doing everything in-house likely didn't help but this certainly wasn't the cause of their downfall.
The recently W3 endorsed SVG looks like an appropriate choice. XML-based it renders into vector graphics exactly of the sort most network maps consist of.
So you want me to share my paid-for ISP connection so a bunch of folks can leech off of it while at the same time the highspeed industry is going under.
I pay, you get free access, we all lose out in the end when the ISPs who are the unwilling backbones go under.
This is a case where there are real costs & TANSTAAFL.
1.) Terrorism only thrives in a Democratic government. Simple Terrorism and Guerilla Warfare Theory teaches that. If we are a Dictatorship, terrorism would die extremely quickly.
Really? For much of the world the exact opposite is true. Where there is democracy you've an enfranchised public. Under an oppressive dictatorship you've not and terrorism is one of the few means of protest or causing change.
I think your lecturing us on your opinions is well intentioned but poorly thought out.
... your irony was moderated "Insightful" at the time
It depends on how you view words.
Personally I feel it's far more insightful in that it comments on the issues involved and some of the mindset relevant them "Haha that's so funny I gotta remember to tell my brother" stuff.
For over 200 years the USA has suffered under it's impractical Constitution and the unworkable so-called "Bill of Rights". We need to move forward into a new era where we can compete with every tin-pot dictatorship and repressive regime on their own level!
Only criminals need fear this - you're not a criminal are you?
imap provides for sharable folders, wherin everyone could keep some randomly standardized text document with a schedule
Well yes, that's a calendar but it's not what folks mean by calendering these days.
In a modern system there's a master calendar with holidays and big events listed on it. Then there's the department calendar. There might also be a site calendar and a production calendar and a team calendar. Then there's the individual calendars.
Aside from the pleathora of levels is how they're used. Folks want to check off participants, perhaps even classified under must-attend/invited/notified, also specific equipment or rooms if needed or just best-fits rooms. Then they want concordant times with the meeting invitees listed and once a time is selected, or better yet a rated series of times selected they want invites to automatically go out, the bookings made, and confirmations handled. In cases of a must-attend not attending then the whole process is typically reset for the next favored time, all of the participants notified, etc.
It's not just a matter of a standardized text file in a common folder and it really requires dedicated technology in the backend to achieve.
I don't think "spontaneous intelligence" was what they were trying to communicate. I believe that the amount of processing power to simulate both the speed and complexity of a human mind is what they were talking about.
We don't have a model to simulate, much less with speed & complexity.
We have no idea how a memory is made or a decision happens. On a gross scale we can determine where electrical activity happens and if parts of a brain are damaged we can identify specific types of impaired cognition but we've no understanding what is actually happening.
Seriously. Ask any neurologist the process of memory formation. Or recall. Or decision making. What charge goes where, what's the biochemical process that happens. We don't know. We've got parts of the puzzle but they only scattered bits, not even a good outline or theory. We haven't got a clue how the most basic processes work much less more sophisticated ones, indeed if even such a distinction exists.
At this point in the process speed is irrelevant - it's not the limiting factor. Indeed considering how baroque & innefficient what neurology we do understand is it's well possible that if reimplemented a human mind could operate on today's technology. If it's even reproducable on our hardware. If we had a clue as to how it works.
But what happens when the computer frame is bent a fraction of a degree. How can one possibly compensate for that and keep the sizes so small.
Everything would have to be right up against eachother and secured beyond firmly.
No - you're completely missing the design.
Imagine you're inside one of these next-gen computers. The bus inside the computer supplies power and low-frequency signalling. Arrayed across the mother board and daughter cards are these next-gen optical IO chips.
Instead of an opaque case these chips have a window transparent to whatever frequency is being used. Wherever on a traditionial chip the circuitry would head off to a lead in this case there's a tiny solid-state laser & adjacent reciever (with some support circuitry.)
Whenever a signal needs to be sent the laser serving as an optical IO point fires. They may differ in frequency, they may use coded pulses of light, however it works they'd be addressable. These picosecond flashes of light illuminate the interior of the PC bathing the other components in varying degrees of brightness.
Whatever other component is being address recieves the signal with it's own optical IO point and acts on it, replying back with it's own coded flash of light.
No line-of-sight is required as long as the primary reflective surfaces in the case have a high enough albedo and sufficient light scattering ability. If you need an anology imagine a bunch of kids flashing signals to each other with flashlights in the woods. Oftentimes one won't see another hidden behind a tree but the light reflecting off nearby bushes reflect the signal.
Some of the proposed benefits:
Significent amounts of complex high-speed IO is taken off of the backplane and optically transmitted (directly & indirectly.)
Greatly lessened signal-noise problems and EMF transmissions. Todays PC's are moving from being little radio broadcasters to little microwave ovens - this would obviate much of that problem.
The lasers and recievers can be built into the chips using conventonial photolithographic processes.
The chips would be cheaper to manufacture then traditionial ones as the number of complex pads connecting the chips to their carriers and then to the pins would be decreased by an order of magnitude.
Internally the chip's subsystems wouldn't require routing to outside edges - optical IO points could be put wherever on the chip surface most convenient.
Bandwith shouldn't be a problem as the frequencies are certianly high enough.
The reason that buses that uses photons as the data carriers are coming up is quite interesting. The good thing with light (photons) are that photons are 'bosons', which amongst other things means that they do not interact with other photons. Good for transporting data, since noise is not a problem.
Photons don't interact? Then what are those interference patters we all had to study? Or why is a monochromatic laser beam so powerful compared to white light (hint: the same-energy-level photons don't interact with eachother.)
Throw some big words and a lecturing tone at these/.'ers and they'll suck up any bs.
You should read Hienlen's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", asshole.
I've a signed first edition.
It's hardly a new proposition. Arthur C. Clarke did a great short story in the 60's about the phone system "waking up"; many other authors have done other treatments.
Nonetheless your assumptions are baseless and bizarre. In light of your constant (what can only kindly be described as) weird postings I can only assume you are ill or in desperate need of moving to a room with better ventilation.
Whatever the case I believe our conversation is at an end.
It will not engage us in coversation, because we will look incomprhensibly stupid to it. We would continue to tell it to do the same things and expect different results. Our I/O would look impossibly slow and subjective. We would look very week as well, which it would enjoy. It would most likely want to exterminate us, starting with the ballbreakers in Redmond.
Yes Twitter, thank you.
We've all seen Terminator; now go back to your room and the orderly will be along in a minute with your meds.
Slashdot Mirror
Filtering is trivial, writing & managing filters is easily done (and without needing to know any specific notation), scoring is performed identically, saving text and binaries is accomplished cleanly and with versatility, heck it can even be set to use voice commands and read back material. It honors every obscure usenet convention thown at it (mail-copies-to, X-face, etc.) and follows every good usage guideline plus handles multiple languages with aplomb.
Finally the documentation is simply fantastic. If nothing else this makes it a great program: Clear well-written comprehensive documentation properly laid out, indexed, usefully hyperlinked and always helpful. I can't express how important this is and how useful has been.
Oh yeah, it's a free (as in lucre) Mac application running under both MacOS & MacOS X. However MT-NewsWatcher is good enough friends have kept old Macs just for running it; it's that good.
It's so easy to be sure of oneself when ignorant.
Exactly which "Olympia" gets that olympia.us? Olympia Pizza down the street from me? One of the 1,000 other unrelated Olympia Pizza's across the US? Olympia Cruise Lines? Olympia Finance Corporation? Matt Olympia?
What about trademarks? NT goes to Microsoft or to Nortel (nee Northern Telecom)? What about the dozens of other trademarked NT's in various fields? NT adhesive or NT car parts?
Sigh - Ignorance must be bliss.
I don't know if it true but I was once told the American Library Association once awarded Hubbard an award for most books written post-humously.
-- Michael
ps for the Scientologists: L. Ron Hubbard now lives in my pants - feel him for 25 cents.
Impressive
Oftentimes multiple tracks visible at once. Very "bursty" activity with gaps of 5 - 30 seconds between sightings, then often several together or in the same part of the sky separated by moments. About one really bright one a minute.
Paths were often at angles to the horizon, once or twice almost oblique. The paths themselves were also often quite prominant being very bright themselves and lasting up to a few degrees behind the meteorite and lingering for a second or two in some cases.
The most astonishing thing was if one laid back as so that the zenith was centered and nothing but sky was in the field of vision there was an almost constant sparkle of *something*. I've done and taught astronomy before but I've never sen this much activity at once - even from this relatively crappy location it was obvious something dramatic was going on overhead.
I'll not attempt to offer counts or speculate on the rate as I was in a lousy location, they're hard estimates to make accurately and frankly I didn't care. It was a deeply impressive sight and I'm thrilled to have witnessed it. In a single hour of viewing I likely saw as many meteorites as I've seen in my life before, never so many multiples at once.
At one point it was like popcorn popping: "Look there... Oh!.. Oh!.. Down!.. Over!.. Uhhhhhhh THERE!"
These days Lockheed handles most of the service & maintainance contracts on NASA facilities with NASA oversight. Turnaround time remains months and flights are steadily being reduced due to budget constraints. Low cost has also not been realized, certianly not within an order of magnitude of the original predictions.
Of course the STS fleet remains an experimental one. These are the first generation designs developed in the 1970's with only upgraded subsystems since then. The logical next step of a second generation applying the lessons learned isn't even being discussed much less implelemented leaving the the aging (though refurbished) four orbiters the US's only manned spaceflight capability.
Statistically more accidents must be anticipated reducing the program 25% each time. With R&D not even begun in an organized fashion a replacement generation is itself at least a decade off even if fast-tracked. I fear it is not a promise of a bright future the US sees but a slowly dwindling legacy.
Indeed NASA just released a report calling for reducing staffing & facilities on the ISS (angering it's internationial "partners" who weren't even given copies of the report in advance of the press conference in spite of their own considerable contributions to the project.)
Elsewhere the USSR is actively looking for any partners with which to continue it's own program, the ESA has it's own launcher and program along with involvement in the ISS, the Japanese projects slowly advance, and China is reportedly almost ready to launch it's first manned orbital mission and has published its goal of going to the moon.
Like so many other areas of endeavor the US seems to pioneer then not follow up on it's advances. With realistic possibilities of power generation and manufacturing now becoming a possibility it seems the US is content to allow its manned spaceflight programs slowly wind down.
-- Michael
ps Many could argue that outsourcing STS operations would free up NASA funds and personel for producing a follow-up program. Were this the plan this would all be a good thing but no such intentions have been announced nor does there appear any support for such.
Anyway, one day one of the support staff got a call from a customer asking about delayed email, specifically could messages arrive months late. Well, it was possible if the site had two or more servers and if after some types of problems the "Resend" command wasn't used but it was rare and *months*?
Anyway, this was a small office that was calling and they just had the one server and no external email (this was about '87). Our support person said that no, there wasn't any way she could imagine this happening though possibly if a client machine hadn't been used in all of that time but it was still unlikely... The customer seemed to accept this, thanked her and hung up.
The next day they called back. More mysterious email. It turned out what really bothered them was that the sender was an employee who had died some months ago. Getting the messages was very disturbing to the staff and was there any way to purge them? Not to purge as there wasn't a centralized email store but the account could certianly be deactivated. As the folks calling weren't technical our support person faxed off a set of direction for them to give to their systems consultant.
Three days pass then she gets another call and the person on the other end is in tears: More email, it contains personal information and current events! The office is in an uproar, half the staff is freaked and the other half is furious. Our support person reassures the caller we've never heard of anything like this and to have the systems consultant call her as soon as they come in before *anything* is touched.
Eventually through some sleuthing (well, mostly login times) it's determined that someone has the password to the dead fellow's account, had gone through his old email learning personal details and was now using this to harass co-workers.
Once the times and dates of the messages creation were firmly established it was in the hands of the customer but they apparently had a good idea who was doing this once it was confirmed how & when.
Real ghost story? No - but creepy enough that someone would torture their co-workers this way.
BTW at the same software company we had to go around removing a screensaver that randomly composed funny headlines with staff's names in it after a person listed died.
There aren't 13 lunar "months" in a solar year. Indeed there is no resonance between the two at all.
However from the linked site you seem only tenously acquainted with reality, apparently not enough to ever actually look at a lunar calendar.
Score: -3 (troll with pseudo-science & bad math!)
Check out their Other ways to use Google Search page which lists:
Adding a couple of spiders dedicated to subscriber's sites (possibly on their sites only for their sites) and some key words that are relevant to them seems a simple and straightforward enough proposition. Indeed haven't all of the other search engine folks been selling off their technology for corporate installations for years?Er, bad choice. IE 4.5 is Mac from the ground up, has no common code with Wintel IE. Furthermore while it is indeed somewhat slower it was until recently far more standards compliant. With IE 6 Wintel is back in the game but then it's as slow as Mac 4.5 is for most folks.
MS Office applications like Word & Excel are cross-ported (you are aware they began as Mac applications, right?) and have often taken a performance hit though that seems fairly resolved at this point. There were some justly loathed versions but 98 is fine, runs well on any Mac sold in the past 2 or 3 years (remember that Macs stay on desktops far longer then PCs) and the X versions are shaping up very nicely.
As the mail clients are all unique and un-ported there's no comparison except to say that the MS Outlook for the Mac developers deserve being made to use their own products. On the other hand Entourage has some really good qualities and with it's support for AppleScript lots of features can be added in.
Oh, and as to Blue Screen of Death / SadMac Bombs - MacOS X is incredibly stable.
Parlez-Vous Français? (Quebecois)
No, I was careful in my wording. Beta products were intrinsically more complex to manufacture then VHS. More components were required, higher quality materials. Economies of scale don't change if it's 1 manufacturer making 100,000 units or 10 manufacturers making 10,000 units - indeed they get worse.
What I believe you were attempting to describe is incremental improvement brought about by a widely used design being iteratively refined by numerous and diverse engineering teams. With only one company producing a product or a highly dominant reference design being used a product tends not to evolve very quickly.
You're implying this was Polaroid's problem - it wasn't. Their habit of doing everything in-house likely didn't help but this certainly wasn't the cause of their downfall.
Beta lost to VHS for a number of reasons, over-simplifying it to licensing is so innacurate as to be incorrect.
Licensing and single-sourcing was just one more problem.
I pay, you get free access, we all lose out in the end when the ISPs who are the unwilling backbones go under.
This is a case where there are real costs & TANSTAAFL.
Really? For much of the world the exact opposite is true. Where there is democracy you've an enfranchised public. Under an oppressive dictatorship you've not and terrorism is one of the few means of protest or causing change.
I think your lecturing us on your opinions is well intentioned but poorly thought out.
It depends on how you view words.
Personally I feel it's far more insightful in that it comments on the issues involved and some of the mindset relevant them "Haha that's so funny I gotta remember to tell my brother" stuff.
YMMV
For the insight-impaired I was being ironic.
Only criminals need fear this - you're not a criminal are you?
Well yes, that's a calendar but it's not what folks mean by calendering these days.
In a modern system there's a master calendar with holidays and big events listed on it. Then there's the department calendar. There might also be a site calendar and a production calendar and a team calendar. Then there's the individual calendars.
Aside from the pleathora of levels is how they're used. Folks want to check off participants, perhaps even classified under must-attend/invited/notified, also specific equipment or rooms if needed or just best-fits rooms. Then they want concordant times with the meeting invitees listed and once a time is selected, or better yet a rated series of times selected they want invites to automatically go out, the bookings made, and confirmations handled. In cases of a must-attend not attending then the whole process is typically reset for the next favored time, all of the participants notified, etc.
It's not just a matter of a standardized text file in a common folder and it really requires dedicated technology in the backend to achieve.
4Q Profit of $66 Million
850,000 Macs shipped 4Q
$4.3 billion in cash
Don't see number of employees, go search for yourself.
We don't have a model to simulate, much less with speed & complexity.
We have no idea how a memory is made or a decision happens. On a gross scale we can determine where electrical activity happens and if parts of a brain are damaged we can identify specific types of impaired cognition but we've no understanding what is actually happening.
Seriously. Ask any neurologist the process of memory formation. Or recall. Or decision making. What charge goes where, what's the biochemical process that happens. We don't know. We've got parts of the puzzle but they only scattered bits, not even a good outline or theory. We haven't got a clue how the most basic processes work much less more sophisticated ones, indeed if even such a distinction exists.
At this point in the process speed is irrelevant - it's not the limiting factor. Indeed considering how baroque & innefficient what neurology we do understand is it's well possible that if reimplemented a human mind could operate on today's technology. If it's even reproducable on our hardware. If we had a clue as to how it works.
No - you're completely missing the design.
Imagine you're inside one of these next-gen computers. The bus inside the computer supplies power and low-frequency signalling. Arrayed across the mother board and daughter cards are these next-gen optical IO chips.
Instead of an opaque case these chips have a window transparent to whatever frequency is being used. Wherever on a traditionial chip the circuitry would head off to a lead in this case there's a tiny solid-state laser & adjacent reciever (with some support circuitry.)
Whenever a signal needs to be sent the laser serving as an optical IO point fires. They may differ in frequency, they may use coded pulses of light, however it works they'd be addressable. These picosecond flashes of light illuminate the interior of the PC bathing the other components in varying degrees of brightness.
Whatever other component is being address recieves the signal with it's own optical IO point and acts on it, replying back with it's own coded flash of light.
No line-of-sight is required as long as the primary reflective surfaces in the case have a high enough albedo and sufficient light scattering ability. If you need an anology imagine a bunch of kids flashing signals to each other with flashlights in the woods. Oftentimes one won't see another hidden behind a tree but the light reflecting off nearby bushes reflect the signal.
Some of the proposed benefits:
Throw some big words and a lecturing tone at these /.'ers and they'll suck up any bs.
I've a signed first edition.
It's hardly a new proposition. Arthur C. Clarke did a great short story in the 60's about the phone system "waking up"; many other authors have done other treatments.
Nonetheless your assumptions are baseless and bizarre. In light of your constant (what can only kindly be described as) weird postings I can only assume you are ill or in desperate need of moving to a room with better ventilation.
Whatever the case I believe our conversation is at an end.
Yes Twitter, thank you.
We've all seen Terminator; now go back to your room and the orderly will be along in a minute with your meds.