Are other civilizations, on other planets around other stars, in any danger from us? Do their transmissions, when we eventually find them, make us wish to rise up and destroy them? Actually we are much worse than any alien destroyers. We would bring them Coca-cola and McDonalds.
Wouldn't it be worse to meet a benevolent race that wanted to "enlighten" us poor barbarians and in the process strip us of our own cultural identities? Better to remain hidden until we develop enough technologies to meet them on equal ground.
I hope there isn't any other intelligent life in the universe because some of the crap we spew into interstellar space is just _embarassing_. Take that METI signal for one. It reads like a MySpace page. Yeesh. If there is intelligent life out there somewhere I hope it's far enough away that we can spread to other star systems first and grow up a bit first before we meet them.
Are these nanobots going to have a Posix environment or are we to use something like a Java ME... Java Nano Edition? Are they going to have an x86 compatible machine code language? The article is so light on details. No processor specs, not even a mention of what version of networking these things support. How am I supposed to build a Beowolf cluster of these?
For the record, I have always hated Star Wars and never understood why people felt that they had to defend it. There was some real story potential there right up until the last movie but the chance to do some real story telling was utterly squandered. Hell, even Star Trek V had a better story line and that was a pretty terrible Trek.
Should live in a card board box and never read books that way Star Wars will seem more entertaining? I have a kid who watches Pokemon movies and most of the Pokemon movies are better SciFi than Star Wars. The Pokemon story arc between La-Tay-os and La-Tay-as has deeper emotional complexity compared to virtually everything in Star Wars.
... horribly, horribly... implausible. Vader is Luke's daddy? Okay, fine, I'll buy it... stretching a bit there. Yoda is a super powered oven mitt that trains warriors as a hobby... whatever. Leah is his sister... wait... huh? Straw. Camel. Back. Snap.
And I always hoped that the "Clone Wars" meant that the Obi Wan we knew from "New Hope" was a clone of the original... or that he was the original and Vader had been going around killing every Obi Wan he found. I had hoped that Jedi were super rare so that when someone actually became a Jedi they cloned the heck out of him so that there would be lots of copies. Vader would some how become miffed at this saying it was a perversion of the true Jedi religion and start slaying the cloned Jedi in a religious pogrom that would end in his becoming the very evil he sought to purge the galaxy of. I would have loved to see five Obi Wan at various ages doing battle with one suped up Vader.
So when Episode I came out and we heard something about the Queen of Naboo being surrounded by clones of herself I had hoped we would see something about clones that didn't suck eggs.
No dice. The story line is merely full of things that are cool by accident. There was no story telling genius... just accidental genius. You've heard people say: "I'd rather be lucky than good any day." Well, that applies to Lucas. Lucky. Not good. Story is just a prop for visual effects to sell merchandise.
If you read the page that you linked you might notice what it says:
International Atomic Time (TAI, from the French name Temps Atomique International) is a high-precision atomic time standard that tracks proper time on Earth's geoid. It is the principal realisation of Terrestrial Time, Which is very nearly but not quite what I was getting at.
So imagine a system that works like GPS but the "stars" in this GPS system are in a solar "stationary" orbit. Your super precise time piece can compute your time by observing your location on the globe and where that location on the globe is relative to the sun. In other words you would SPS (Solar Positioning System) your location in the solar system and from that compute the time.
Don't rely on lookup tables to tell you where the Earth is... look at where the Earth actually is.
You reuse the same image when the clock strikes the same time to remind you the recurrence. This reuse effect cannot be achieved if you replace a 12-hour clock with a digital clock showing the Unix time. Nobody is going to remember a 10 digit long number all the times. Wow. Did I say that? I thought I said we should guess at where the sun was in the sky based on the number of clock ticks since epoch time. That means that you could calculate where the hands of the clock should be based on the unix time stamp. The position of the hands represents the position of the sun in the sky. You would then have a device that would move some physical hands into the right position based on the unix time stamp... or draw some... or show 6am at the right time.
If I said we should all just use unix time from now on I was wrong. I'm sorry. I don't think that's a good idea. I think it would be a good idea to get a better idea of our planet's orbital mechanics rather than have leap seconds and such. You wouldn't shrink or grow a tick... instead just accept that the planet doesn't work like a watch. Instead the position of the sun in the sky which is what most of us refer to as a "day" would be guessed at using a computation which wasn't at all thought of as "real time" just a fuzzy time for use by humans.
In other words, a calendar is an orbital/rotational model for the planet in a lookup table to guess for me where the sun is in the sky relative to me right now. Which is not really anything to do with time really and everything to do with where I am on the planet. Time and space are not separate, hence the problem. Hence leap seconds, days, years, time zone drift, etc. The whole problem stems from a broken notion of time.
The rule for computer programs is to do all calculations in computer time and only use human time for display. It's funny. I've been repeating that for ten years but nobody ever listens. They always use local time for everything and then run around like chickens with no heads when problems happen and blame congress/government/everyone for their trouble. I've also notice that people in EST think it is just fine to tell people in Colorado: "Report everything in EST."
Weird. I genuinely thought nobody ever thought of this.
It has always seemed to me that there should be computer epoch time and then you should have a conversion from that epoch into a time that make sense for the user. So, computer time units could be fixed to the vibrations of your favorite atom and human time could be fixed to the orbit and spin of your favorite planet. And all systems would do a conversion between the time systems at display. Different systems could do different conversions. Applications programmers could remain oblivious to the conversions if all time was stored in a universal fixed format independent of any particular planet, orbit, or galaxy.
Basically, you compute what time of day it is based on your clock ticks and the orbit and spin of your planet. You don't need to model the entire orbital mechanics of your planet... if you think about it that's what all "time of day" systems do now... highly simplified models of the Earth in space. We know that the earth will be inside the zone of space we call "November" and we know it will be turned to the position we call 6am UTC when the clock ticks out this number or any number in this modulo. As we become more demanding of time and more exacting of the position of the planet in space we need to make more sophisticated orbital models... or allow for heuristic adjustments to existing look up table based models.
Time as in time-space has nothing to do with any of this and it is passage of time in space that a computer should be worried about keeping inside itself... not where the sun is. If you want "where is the sun?" you should be use a conversion or algorithm to calculate "where is the sun?" and the "time" inside the computer should be seen as the number of clock cycles that computer has experienced. Using clock ticks alone, your computer can probably do a fair job at guessing at where the sun is... but that's not what computer time is about.
Of course, these ideas neglect relativity. Eventually we'll have to deal with relativity and clock ticks. I suppose you would have to decide on an a set of arbitrary points in the cosmos and call their inertial frame of references "fixed" which you would use to compute temporal differentials via a kind of relativistic triangulation... say clocks in three star systems that transmit their time beats out to the universe and based on the time you read from each at your point in space you can triangulate your position and time-shift due to relativistic effects. But I think I may be getting a few centuries ahead of myself.
And, it doesn't matter what I think anyway. It's not like anybody in a position to influence these decisions and ideas reads Slashdot. If you started now you could probably get all the digital clocks in the world to work on these principles in about a hundred years.
If you have ever read Microsoft's EULA for their development tools (C#/VB/.NET/etc.) Microsoft states that their products should *NOT* be used in mission critical systems.
Anything with non-monotonic timing should be avoided in any system that has sub second timing issues. Such as system might be a robot that drives a car. That means that windows derived products should never be used in real time sensitive systems. Microsoft knows this and doesn't pretend otherwise. Microsoft products are simply unusable for many embedded applications.
I'm not just saying this to bash Microsoft, it's a known issue with windows based systems. They simply aren't suitable in places where sub-second timing is important. Take a look at this post if you don't believe me:
https://lists.ntp.org/pipermail/hackers/2007-May/002888.html
The salient point from the post is:
The system time on windows takes rather big steps (typically 100Hz, but
1000Hz and 64Hz are also not impossible, it just varies from system to
system). That much variability will kill you in a fighter jet or missile. In time as systems become faster and faster the chaotic variability of the windows systems becomes less and less important since the variable length actions take shorter and shorter amounts of time to resolve. In time maybe the non-monotonic timing in Windows will become less important to real time systems programmers but I find that hard to believe.
... I really don't see any innovation here. Isn't this what youtube already does? I mean, I basically post everything I've ever seen and heard to youtube already. Backing up my brain would just be redundant.
most predators are hardwired to chase things that run, because that's a good indication of edibility...If it doesn't run, there may be something going on there, something that it may not be in your best interest to find out about the hard way.
And, that's why in survival training the tell you not to run from a bear. If the bear sees you run you trigger the predator response. So instead you talk to the bear and back away the way you came. Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards so you probably won't get mistaken for food. The result is a bear that is some what confused as to how it should react... so you just might get away.
So I wonder if our brave mousy friends get treated with equal confusion by cats.
It makes you wonder if we are all teletype operators. In the distant past there used to be a profession all about just operating teletype machines.
In the really distant past (like ancient Egypt past) reading and writing with a pen all day was high tech and you could make a living on just being able to write. They called it a scribe. Today that's just not a viable way to make a living.
So maybe many of the jobs professional IT geeks work at now are going the way of the scribe and the teletype operator. Maybe that's a good thing. Today there are still people who make a living from writing. So maybe there will still be people who make a living from technology. But the living you make from writing today is very different from the living you made from writing for the Pharaoh. The IT of tomorrow will probably be likewise different.
I think that the IT industry is having issues in this arena because the skill set required to perform the job is so specialized that programmers who get promoted to managers never bother to acquire "managerial" skill sets (or they just don't put any value in managerial skill sets) and people who do have managerial skill sets are so wildly incompetent in IT that you would not dream of hiring them to manage coders or SAs.
I think you are on to something. The problem partially stems from IT being a very young component in business. Consider that Accounting has been around for hundreds of years... there is an established relationship between various types of businesses and accounting professionals. Yet IT has only been around for a few decades. I don't think businesses nor the profession itself knows how to deal with the problems of succession and management of talent.
The most "fun" work environment for the worker is one of unstructured cooperation where there are no rules. This is not the ideal since that freedom can potentially lead to disaster in the wrong coworker's hands. Eventually management will get paranoid about waste.
The most "profitable" work environment is where nothing goes to waste and every key stroke leads to profit. This is not the ideal since that efficiency means a loss of adaptability and a high burn out rate for employees. It turns out that the highly profitable environment can only exist in sprints.
There should be a sustainable happy medium that works well as a company grows. I don't know what that is yet. I haven't seen it in my work history.
...I think they are just a myth. I've never actually gotten a rebate. I fill out the forms, send them off, and never hear about them again. I'm fairly certain SOP is dump rebates in a dumpster or mine the addresses for spamming purposes. I fill out rebate cards and get spam but never money... what's up with that?
My girlfriend's flatmate says to me, looking at a Linux mag I am reading:
"Ah, I don't use an operating system, I'm a Mac boy. But I heard Linux is good."
That is the funniest one-liner I've read in years!
Now, if we could get enough functionality through a browser or thin client that the punchline read like:
Ah, I don't use an operating system, I just use the internet.
That's when things will start to change.
What kind of stupid metaphor is that? Red shift means that they are moving away from the observer fast, blue shift means that they are moving towards the observer fast. I'm pretty certain this was done deliberately. Imagine you are the observer and you are chasing after the star. If the star is blue shifting you are catching it... if they are red shifting they are leaving you behind. Do you want to get left behind? Do you want to blue shift? No, you want to be the one whom everyone else sees as red-shifting. You want to be the winners of the race. Buy Sun! Rah rah, red shift!
Slashdot Mirror
I keep trying to view the demos and I keep going around and around with these install screens. Does anyone know where I can download the RPMs?
Wouldn't it be worse to meet a benevolent race that wanted to "enlighten" us poor barbarians and in the process strip us of our own cultural identities? Better to remain hidden until we develop enough technologies to meet them on equal ground.
I hope there isn't any other intelligent life in the universe because some of the crap we spew into interstellar space is just _embarassing_. Take that METI signal for one. It reads like a MySpace page. Yeesh. If there is intelligent life out there somewhere I hope it's far enough away that we can spread to other star systems first and grow up a bit first before we meet them.
Are these nanobots going to have a Posix environment or are we to use something like a Java ME ... Java Nano Edition? Are they going to have an x86 compatible machine code language? The article is so light on details. No processor specs, not even a mention of what version of networking these things support. How am I supposed to build a Beowolf cluster of these?
It's only mostly deadly... mostly deadly means partially harmless!
For the record, I have always hated Star Wars and never understood why people felt that they had to defend it. There was some real story potential there right up until the last movie but the chance to do some real story telling was utterly squandered. Hell, even Star Trek V had a better story line and that was a pretty terrible Trek. Should live in a card board box and never read books that way Star Wars will seem more entertaining? I have a kid who watches Pokemon movies and most of the Pokemon movies are better SciFi than Star Wars. The Pokemon story arc between La-Tay-os and La-Tay-as has deeper emotional complexity compared to virtually everything in Star Wars.
... horribly, horribly... implausible. Vader is Luke's daddy? Okay, fine, I'll buy it... stretching a bit there. Yoda is a super powered oven mitt that trains warriors as a hobby... whatever. Leah is his sister... wait... huh? Straw. Camel. Back. Snap.
And I always hoped that the "Clone Wars" meant that the Obi Wan we knew from "New Hope" was a clone of the original... or that he was the original and Vader had been going around killing every Obi Wan he found. I had hoped that Jedi were super rare so that when someone actually became a Jedi they cloned the heck out of him so that there would be lots of copies. Vader would some how become miffed at this saying it was a perversion of the true Jedi religion and start slaying the cloned Jedi in a religious pogrom that would end in his becoming the very evil he sought to purge the galaxy of. I would have loved to see five Obi Wan at various ages doing battle with one suped up Vader.
So when Episode I came out and we heard something about the Queen of Naboo being surrounded by clones of herself I had hoped we would see something about clones that didn't suck eggs.
No dice. The story line is merely full of things that are cool by accident. There was no story telling genius... just accidental genius. You've heard people say: "I'd rather be lucky than good any day." Well, that applies to Lucas. Lucky. Not good. Story is just a prop for visual effects to sell merchandise.
So imagine a system that works like GPS but the "stars" in this GPS system are in a solar "stationary" orbit. Your super precise time piece can compute your time by observing your location on the globe and where that location on the globe is relative to the sun. In other words you would SPS (Solar Positioning System) your location in the solar system and from that compute the time.
Don't rely on lookup tables to tell you where the Earth is... look at where the Earth actually is.
If I said we should all just use unix time from now on I was wrong. I'm sorry. I don't think that's a good idea. I think it would be a good idea to get a better idea of our planet's orbital mechanics rather than have leap seconds and such. You wouldn't shrink or grow a tick... instead just accept that the planet doesn't work like a watch. Instead the position of the sun in the sky which is what most of us refer to as a "day" would be guessed at using a computation which wasn't at all thought of as "real time" just a fuzzy time for use by humans.
In other words, a calendar is an orbital/rotational model for the planet in a lookup table to guess for me where the sun is in the sky relative to me right now. Which is not really anything to do with time really and everything to do with where I am on the planet. Time and space are not separate, hence the problem. Hence leap seconds, days, years, time zone drift, etc. The whole problem stems from a broken notion of time.
Weird. I genuinely thought nobody ever thought of this.
It has always seemed to me that there should be computer epoch time and then you should have a conversion from that epoch into a time that make sense for the user. So, computer time units could be fixed to the vibrations of your favorite atom and human time could be fixed to the orbit and spin of your favorite planet. And all systems would do a conversion between the time systems at display. Different systems could do different conversions. Applications programmers could remain oblivious to the conversions if all time was stored in a universal fixed format independent of any particular planet, orbit, or galaxy.
Basically, you compute what time of day it is based on your clock ticks and the orbit and spin of your planet. You don't need to model the entire orbital mechanics of your planet... if you think about it that's what all "time of day" systems do now... highly simplified models of the Earth in space. We know that the earth will be inside the zone of space we call "November" and we know it will be turned to the position we call 6am UTC when the clock ticks out this number or any number in this modulo. As we become more demanding of time and more exacting of the position of the planet in space we need to make more sophisticated orbital models... or allow for heuristic adjustments to existing look up table based models.
Time as in time-space has nothing to do with any of this and it is passage of time in space that a computer should be worried about keeping inside itself... not where the sun is. If you want "where is the sun?" you should be use a conversion or algorithm to calculate "where is the sun?" and the "time" inside the computer should be seen as the number of clock cycles that computer has experienced. Using clock ticks alone, your computer can probably do a fair job at guessing at where the sun is... but that's not what computer time is about.
Of course, these ideas neglect relativity. Eventually we'll have to deal with relativity and clock ticks. I suppose you would have to decide on an a set of arbitrary points in the cosmos and call their inertial frame of references "fixed" which you would use to compute temporal differentials via a kind of relativistic triangulation... say clocks in three star systems that transmit their time beats out to the universe and based on the time you read from each at your point in space you can triangulate your position and time-shift due to relativistic effects. But I think I may be getting a few centuries ahead of myself.
And, it doesn't matter what I think anyway. It's not like anybody in a position to influence these decisions and ideas reads Slashdot. If you started now you could probably get all the digital clocks in the world to work on these principles in about a hundred years.
Anything with non-monotonic timing should be avoided in any system that has sub second timing issues. Such as system might be a robot that drives a car. That means that windows derived products should never be used in real time sensitive systems. Microsoft knows this and doesn't pretend otherwise. Microsoft products are simply unusable for many embedded applications.
I'm not just saying this to bash Microsoft, it's a known issue with windows based systems. They simply aren't suitable in places where sub-second timing is important. Take a look at this post if you don't believe me: https://lists.ntp.org/pipermail/hackers/2007-May/002888.html The salient point from the post is: The system time on windows takes rather big steps (typically 100Hz, but 1000Hz and 64Hz are also not impossible, it just varies from system to system). That much variability will kill you in a fighter jet or missile. In time as systems become faster and faster the chaotic variability of the windows systems becomes less and less important since the variable length actions take shorter and shorter amounts of time to resolve. In time maybe the non-monotonic timing in Windows will become less important to real time systems programmers but I find that hard to believe.... I really don't see any innovation here. Isn't this what youtube already does? I mean, I basically post everything I've ever seen and heard to youtube already. Backing up my brain would just be redundant.
And, that's why in survival training the tell you not to run from a bear. If the bear sees you run you trigger the predator response. So instead you talk to the bear and back away the way you came. Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards so you probably won't get mistaken for food. The result is a bear that is some what confused as to how it should react... so you just might get away.
So I wonder if our brave mousy friends get treated with equal confusion by cats.
It makes you wonder if we are all teletype operators. In the distant past there used to be a profession all about just operating teletype machines.
In the really distant past (like ancient Egypt past) reading and writing with a pen all day was high tech and you could make a living on just being able to write. They called it a scribe. Today that's just not a viable way to make a living.
So maybe many of the jobs professional IT geeks work at now are going the way of the scribe and the teletype operator. Maybe that's a good thing. Today there are still people who make a living from writing. So maybe there will still be people who make a living from technology. But the living you make from writing today is very different from the living you made from writing for the Pharaoh. The IT of tomorrow will probably be likewise different.
I think you are on to something. The problem partially stems from IT being a very young component in business. Consider that Accounting has been around for hundreds of years... there is an established relationship between various types of businesses and accounting professionals. Yet IT has only been around for a few decades. I don't think businesses nor the profession itself knows how to deal with the problems of succession and management of talent.
The most "fun" work environment for the worker is one of unstructured cooperation where there are no rules. This is not the ideal since that freedom can potentially lead to disaster in the wrong coworker's hands. Eventually management will get paranoid about waste.
The most "profitable" work environment is where nothing goes to waste and every key stroke leads to profit. This is not the ideal since that efficiency means a loss of adaptability and a high burn out rate for employees. It turns out that the highly profitable environment can only exist in sprints.
There should be a sustainable happy medium that works well as a company grows. I don't know what that is yet. I haven't seen it in my work history.
...I think they are just a myth. I've never actually gotten a rebate. I fill out the forms, send them off, and never hear about them again. I'm fairly certain SOP is dump rebates in a dumpster or mine the addresses for spamming purposes. I fill out rebate cards and get spam but never money... what's up with that?
I'm pretty sure that this has been ten years away for the last twenty years. Every few years a new headline saying it's only ten years away...
That is the funniest one-liner I've read in years!
Now, if we could get enough functionality through a browser or thin client that the punchline read like:
Ah, I don't use an operating system, I just use the internet. That's when things will start to change.Really, I just needed some additional reason to buy it... games... something... I mean it's not like it's expensive or anything.