Reminds me of the old days when the US and USSR smashed up little third world countries as part of their "cold war". Today, IBM is the US and Microsoft is the USSR, Linus is Korea and SCO is East Yemen.
It's clearly a battle between IBM and Microsoft, over the value of the Linux brand. SCO is being used as a vehicle to try to weaken this brand. We are unlikely to see IBM or Microsoft get involved directly, but there will be an escalation of this. It will not end with SCO's demise, if that happens soon.
Unlikely that this will do anything except increase their margins. Established players do not generally like to change the rules of their markets. So, this is like saying "Sprint move from copper to fibre". Yeah,... international calls going to be any cheaper? Forget it.
Somewhere out there, someone is building systems that _will_ have a significant impact on telephony. Find these guys - that will be news.
The fact appears to be that for most people, most of the time, "survival" basically consists of competing with other people, and this often includes killing them, either directly through violence and war, or (much more significantly) through competition for food, water, space, and energy.
If that does not ruin your day, consider that this is the way of all life as we know it: competition inside a species generally being much more aggressive than competition between species.
It is very unlikely that we will have stopped this by the time the comet passes. Whatever our ecology, we will be fighting each other tooth and nail to be the ones getting to most out of it.
On the positive side: evolution is basically the reproduction of those genes that stay at the top of the heap. From the genes' point of view, it all makes perfect sense.
You cannot innovate and standardize at the same time. But there is no conflict between the two processes unless you are stupid enough to try to apply them at the wrong time.
Innovation is exploration, discovering the best solution to specific problems through the various techniques we use: scattershot, imagination, design, etc. This is largely an individual enterprise - innovation by committee is a joke.
Standardization happens later on the curve when the best innovations have been tested in real life (though with a limited audience). Then, a skilled committe will merge several innovations into a standard, and define a basis for dividing-up large problems.
Standards are interfaces between groups working on different aspects of a problem. Innovation allows one to understand what these aspects might be, and later to repeat the same process on smaller problems.
Using the "divide and rule" metaphor, standards are the "divide" and innovation is the "rule". Only it's rule and divide and rule and divide and rule ad infinitum. You really should not try to divide and rule at the same time.
I'm serious: there is a new cult in Microsoft, lead by an ex-C# guru who is trying to convert the whole company to Java and J2EE. Apparently the company has had a collective angst attack due to the sheer luxury of having more money than the fifty poorest nations on Earth put together.
Part of this new messianic cult involves giving away all your riches, which is why Ballmer sold his stock, and why Microsoft is trying to give away its software to all and sundry.
Alternatively, they are just trying to make more money as always. Does the phrase: "drug pusher" make any sense here?
It is popular, but I believe it is stuck in its 'second generation P2P' model, namely closed-source, Windows-only, spyware advertising, worm-heaven.
All products go through a life-cycle from pioneer, early-adopter, maturity, late-adopter. Kazaa is already in its late-adopter phase.
Question: what are the early-adopter P2P products today? These will be the market leaders tomorrow, and they will be: open source, portable, secure against worms and attacks, silent.
Read between the lines. The only reason that Munich went with Linux/OSS is because IBM is backing it. If Microsoft were offering a 90% discount to try to keep their hooks in place, how much do you think IBM was offering to install _their_ hooks instead?
It is a little naive to assume that a city government (or any large group) would switch to Linux simply because it is "better" or "cheaper". There is only one rule to understand politics and business: follow the money. In this case, and I believe it's the same in many "switches" to Linux, we are seeing Linux/OSS used as a trojan horse by interests that just happen to be competing with Microsoft.
Personally I admire IBM for having seen in 1999 that Linux aand OSS was their best weapon against their biggest enemy, namely Microsoft. Remember, this is the company that thought OS/2 would beat Windows... It has taken them four years, but now it is starting to pay off.
Expect IBM to downsize their Linux/OSS sales pitch once they have the formula working.
This says a lot about our modern society. The original Matrix was a very good movie that played the "things are not what they seem" angle beautifully. The second Matrix film was a series of plastic action sequences designed for or taken from the video game, linked by a bizarre and fragmented plot, and populated with characters who acted like cardboard and sounded like cliches of themselves.
How either of these two films can become the basis for a pseudo-religious metaphor is beyond me. Surely there is more substance in movies like "28 Days Later", or even "City of God". (Like: life sucks, get used to it.)
Stelios has actually a very sound business model behind easyCinema, as he has used in easyjet, and the other easy companies.
The principle is that capital should always be working, even if at a loss. A cinema seat (like a plane seat) that is left unsold represents a complete loss. A seat sold cheap represents less of a loss. So, by adjusting prices dynamically to suit demand, using the Internet to calculate demand exactly, and by reducing staff costs, the average seat price drops. It's very simple.
Before you start saying "it's illegal to sell at a loss in order to capture a market", it's worth comparing an empty seat (loss) and a cheap seat (smaller loss).
Also for US readers, it's worth knowing that in Europe, prices are generally high (around 8 Euro) and fairly inflexible. So while cinemas are always packed on Friday and Saturday night, they are generally empty on week nights. Stelios' business model is to get bums on seats all week long, so using his capital better, and allowing the weekend prices to drop too. It is true that this will wreck the existing cinema industry, since the difference for a family of 4 is significant: today, perhaps Euro 60 including popcorn and drinks. At easyCinema, around Euro 20.
Stelios is a business hacker: find the inefficiencies in the system and exploit them. You really have to admire him.
No doubt the annoucement of F# will cause a new round of discussion of the relative merits of different programming languages. Yes, it may address certain problems in a better way than the alternatives. No, it's not new, just a small improvement on existing concepts.
But most of all, what does the discussion of one more language bring us? Agreed, languages get better, safer, more powerful, more abstracted. But the rate of change is so slow that it hardly seems worthwhile. Abstraction does not require syntax, after all, only the mental ability to form and use the right kinds of models. Someone who says "you cannot do such-and-such in language X" is simply someone who has not been able to see how.
My point is this: at certain levels, the choice of language is close to irrelevant, and new languages do not define progress of any kind. In contrast, new languages encourage the "throw it all away" mentality that plagues our business. You simply cannot develop a craft into a process if you have to reinvent your world every three or four years.
Programming languages are not and will never be magical solutions to the problems of writing good, large applications.
Excessive relevance is not a good thing in software. Good models of abstraction come from stepping back from the detail and looking at much larger pictures. Can you imagine a workflow model that allows people in five companies to collaborate on a project? Does the implementation of this depend on the language you use? Of course not. Can you invent an abstraction language that will support the model? Yes, and XML is a good place to start. Is this kind of thing worth doing? Yes, now you are starting to build abstractions that work ten, a hundred times better than conventional programming methods.
You're obviously speaking from the US, where SMS is a non-product. Sending a 140-byte message should not take 15 minutes unless someone has specifically set the priority to amazingly low.
Sometimes the obvious is anything but. A nice website means nothing more than a nice budget for graphics design. Think about the companies you do business with, and I'll bet that the majority of the money you spend goes to people you have either bought from before, or have heard about from someone else.
I was specifically not thinking about web sites that sell articles, because these are not the ones where content management is an issue. Catalogues are not content. The other counter example is that of web sites that distribute technical information - and clearly the web is great for this. Sure.
But "content management"? I'm somewhat cynical. And judging from the content management tools I've seen (large, expensive, apparently useless), they do not address a real problem at all, but are a fad.
Has anyone proven that a well-managed web site actually generates business? I know it sounds obvious, but I don't believe it is. Most business comes from who you know, not what you say, with the exception of large companies selling to the public market. Web sites filled with content, and the tools to manage this content, are possibly (I'm just suggesting this possibility) largely irrelevant.
Fundamentally, managing a web site is going into the publishing business. Not something you should do unless you actually have something to say, and people interested in hearing it.
SMS is strictly speaking a 'store and forward' protocol, but then this is how (e.g.) ICQ works as well. SMS is close to instant: around 1-2 seconds in most cases and only rarely slower than that.
Yeah, say it, brother. SMS is IM. Only the markets in the US price SMS above voice traffic (there is a rational explanation for this but it involves large amounts of mind-altering substances). In Europe (and Asia and probably most places outside North America) this discussion is long over: over 70% of the population (here in Belgium) has a mobile phone and they can all IM each other using SMS.
From the company they used to be in the 1980s. They have a sense of humour. Not only do they still make "dinosaur" machines, they make them big and mean and frankly, after Jurassic Park, it's not a bad branding move. T-Rex is, after all, the meanest of them all.
This discussion has been interesting, since I spent many years working on mainframes: MVS, TSO, VM/CMS, et al. But to really feel the mainframe "experience", you had to work on a Siemens BS2000, built by Fujitsu, running a poor imitation of TSO/CICS/DB2.
We wrote a *lot* of Cobol code, not applications, but tools: editors, code generators, reporting tools, virtual i/o layers, the works. When we got our software to run on a PC (MS-DOS 3.2 with Realia Cobol), I knew the mainframe was dead.
IBM tried hard to reproduce the mainframe experience on their AS/400 machines, but it was never really the same again. Our team got used to response times measured in seconds rather than minutes. We started to hack Rexx and JCL to get interactive compiles, rather than the normal batch queues. We began mucking with the holy 3270 terminals and get them to show colours.
However, there is wisdom in the mainframe model, often forgotten under the layers of crud that we were forced to wade through. Simple transaction processing systems can be incredibly efficient. Forget J2EE and.NET - these are the bastard children of a stoned generation. Look at a transaction processing system like CICS and you will see a model that is brutally efficient.
And which can be quite easily implemented on any modern PC. Been there, done that, and it works real nice.
Like secure, anonymous, spam-free newsgroups
on
P2P Meets Push
·
· Score: 1
This might just work. My intravenous connection to alt.b.e.p.b has had to be shut down due to the weight of spam.
Five seconds for the lawsuits to hit
on
P2P Meets Push
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Pushing files, huh? It's as bad as pushing drugs. Into jail, my little hacker-bee.
The US is much more robust than you might believe. The current swing is an opportunistic gambit that has worked so far only because the American people have been solidified by the Sept.11 attacks. This cannot last. The US is too diverse, holds too many contradictory interests, and is simply too mature a society to actually swallow a coup d'etat. Not because the clique that currently holds power would be afraid to try (I believe they are trying and will continue to) but because they are not the only group with ambition, and as soon as other groups see the opportunity, they will counter attack, and we will be back to the "normal" state of politics - total and utter confusion.
Which is of course why the Bush clique puts so much emphasis on the terrorist threat - not to win votes, not to boost public opinion, not to justify harsh measures, but simply and purely to make it impossible for competing power cliques to make their move.
Patience, however. It will take some time. People always seek a strong leader in times of crisis, but it is a weak and exhausted country that allows such leaders to stay once the crisis is past. The US is not exactly a weak or exhausted country.
A quick pedal through history shows that the state will always try to accumulate power over its citizens. One of the strengths of the US constitution is the way it divides power between the different branches of the state. The goals then were to handicap any individual or group from seeking absolute power.
One has to assume that any politician is always seeking as much power as possible. It is not even a criticism - political systems specifically select those individuals who want power and are good at accumulating and trading it.
It's always cute to see how people are surprised when their "democratically elected leaders" turn out to have just the same tendencies as self-elected tyrants and dictators.
I believe the current tendency towards a centralization of power in the US is a self-defeating gambit, pushed by Ashcroft, but against the deeply ingrained beliefs of the political wing that put him into power, which has always distrusted big government. The attempts to turn "terrorism" into citizen control is a bit sad, really, since the minority views of the right-wing consituents in the US depend for their very existence on a open-minded and liberal democracy. Today, a register of information on everyone. Tomorrow, a national policy on morals. The next day: revolt from the conservative right-wing and fragmentation of the Republican party.
The point of democracy is not to elect the best leaders - this is a laugh - but to allow every policy, no matter how "vital to the State's interests" to be debated. Eventually such instruments will become the subject of discussion (allow 5 years for the Sept.11 trauma to wear off), and someone, somewhere, will be elected on the basis of protection of privacy. At which point we will see a swing back to smaller government and dissolution of the more blatant links between business and power.
Firstly, it should come out at night, and be silent. Since my house has all wooden floors, and no carpets, there are probably alternatives to suction motors that would be quieter and allow the thing to do a large house without recharging. Static electricity? Sticky rollers? Tiny little antennae that literally pick up each piece of dust?
Secondly, it should digest and live off the dust, which is mainly human skin, so rich in protein. I'm thinking a small bacterial engine that can turn dust into glucose, and pass that onto a glucose fuel cell of some kind.
Thirdly, should be really cheap. I don't want to have to take out my credit card each time I step on the cleaner by mistake. I'm thinking that the ideal model would actually be organic, which makes sense, given the bacterial engine, and so it could actually breed. Hey, why not?
Forthly, I want a powerful AI engine that can avoid stairs and feet, and will search for dust where it's most prevelant, namely in corners and in those hard-to-reach areas.
Fifthly, why not make it able to walk up walls... perhaps using those little sticky feet that pickup the dust so well.
Lastly, since the model is small, it should package its collected dust (after bacterial digestion) into easy-to-sweep nodules. This will eliminate any need for dust bags, discharging stations, etc.
Reviewing my design against the available models, I think the most practical solution would be to use standard breeding techniques combined with genetic engineering to create a species of super cockroaches that live off dust. There may be a small market acceptance problem, but I believe this can be overcome by finding a new name and a cute logo... how about "RoboRoach"?
One of the signs that a product has become a commodity is the use of a brandname as a generic description. Calling all modern, stable, portable, everything-is-a-file, my-great-grandfather-ran-on-32k-words-on-a-PDP-11 operating systems "UNIX" is technically inaccurate but culturally accurate.
Having been doing both software and art (painting, drawing, photography) for over 20 years, I agree with Graham only in a few aspects.
Software is obviously not a single subject: it is like language, and can be applied in many different ways.
Let me take a simple example. There are two main ways that people look at the world of problems: they search for the commonality, or they search for the particularity. Now, I would argue that good software is built by finding the common patterns and solving those, but that is just the way I make software. Other people I've worked with do the opposite: they focus on hundreds or thousands of individual cases. Clearly we have different types of mind - what I consider mindless and irrelevant detail is to my colleagues the only part worth solving.
Painters, artists obviously work the same way. So do writers, archietcts, and all creative people, including scientists. There are hacker chemists, and there are the synthesizing chemists.
Personally, I find that the best art comes from using standard patterns in new way: for instance, good photgraphy relies on excellent understanding of light and subject, but every image must be unique. The best science takes the other extreme: determined effort to find the core patterns and understand those. Ten experiments that are each unique are worthless. Ten experiments that give the same results each time are perfect.
Two more dimensions to this, in my experience. First, men and women tend to different approaches when it comes to creating and problem solving. More men like to hack, not because we're taught that but because our brains work that way. Second, with age our minds also seem to change: older brains can understand a depth of asbtraction that escapes younger minds. Software is all about abstraction, unlike science or art, but very much like language. Young geniuses may be able to hold thousands of details in their heads, but they cannot (generally) use them to build large-scale abstractions that work well. Again, the same for writers.
No accident that some of the best programmers ever are also linguists and writers.
Didn't Microsoft release a "Windows for Robots" OS some time ago? I seem to remember that no-one would buy robots based on RoboWin because they only ran for three hours before needing a recharge. So Microsoft had to build their own Robots and sell them to people who never actually used them but thought they were cool 'coz they could read Excel documents. And then Sony brought out their range of household robots running on PalmOS, which was cool because the robots could recognize script and you could give them to your mother to use an she'd never call for help. But IIRC the final straw was that virus that infected every WinBot and turned it into a homicidal home-recipe machine, producing endless and ultimately fatal lunches of Belgian Waffles with corn syrup.
Uh... I'm sorry. I must stop with the blue pills. Does any company on earth (except MS and Nokia and Palm) bring out a new device that does _not_ run Linux?
People keep bringing trucks and cars into this. If Ford brought out a truck that cost 30% of other models, and made their profits on the fuel, they would sell every truck they could produce. And then they would have to spend significant effort trying to stop people using 'black market' fuel.
The printers are cheap, cheap beyond belief if you compare to the cost of printing only a decade ago, and everyone and their grandmother wants to print. If I had invented the inkjet, I'd very sincerely deserve to get rich from it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's clearly a battle between IBM and Microsoft, over the value of the Linux brand. SCO is being used as a vehicle to try to weaken this brand. We are unlikely to see IBM or Microsoft get involved directly, but there will be an escalation of this. It will not end with SCO's demise, if that happens soon.
Somewhere out there, someone is building systems that _will_ have a significant impact on telephony. Find these guys - that will be news.
If that does not ruin your day, consider that this is the way of all life as we know it: competition inside a species generally being much more aggressive than competition between species.
It is very unlikely that we will have stopped this by the time the comet passes. Whatever our ecology, we will be fighting each other tooth and nail to be the ones getting to most out of it.
On the positive side: evolution is basically the reproduction of those genes that stay at the top of the heap. From the genes' point of view, it all makes perfect sense.
Innovation is exploration, discovering the best solution to specific problems through the various techniques we use: scattershot, imagination, design, etc. This is largely an individual enterprise - innovation by committee is a joke.
Standardization happens later on the curve when the best innovations have been tested in real life (though with a limited audience). Then, a skilled committe will merge several innovations into a standard, and define a basis for dividing-up large problems.
Standards are interfaces between groups working on different aspects of a problem. Innovation allows one to understand what these aspects might be, and later to repeat the same process on smaller problems.
Using the "divide and rule" metaphor, standards are the "divide" and innovation is the "rule". Only it's rule and divide and rule and divide and rule ad infinitum. You really should not try to divide and rule at the same time.
Part of this new messianic cult involves giving away all your riches, which is why Ballmer sold his stock, and why Microsoft is trying to give away its software to all and sundry.
Alternatively, they are just trying to make more money as always. Does the phrase: "drug pusher" make any sense here?
All products go through a life-cycle from pioneer, early-adopter, maturity, late-adopter. Kazaa is already in its late-adopter phase.
Question: what are the early-adopter P2P products today? These will be the market leaders tomorrow, and they will be: open source, portable, secure against worms and attacks, silent.
It is a little naive to assume that a city government (or any large group) would switch to Linux simply because it is "better" or "cheaper". There is only one rule to understand politics and business: follow the money. In this case, and I believe it's the same in many "switches" to Linux, we are seeing Linux/OSS used as a trojan horse by interests that just happen to be competing with Microsoft.
Personally I admire IBM for having seen in 1999 that Linux aand OSS was their best weapon against their biggest enemy, namely Microsoft. Remember, this is the company that thought OS/2 would beat Windows... It has taken them four years, but now it is starting to pay off.
Expect IBM to downsize their Linux/OSS sales pitch once they have the formula working.
How either of these two films can become the basis for a pseudo-religious metaphor is beyond me. Surely there is more substance in movies like "28 Days Later", or even "City of God". (Like: life sucks, get used to it.)
The principle is that capital should always be working, even if at a loss. A cinema seat (like a plane seat) that is left unsold represents a complete loss. A seat sold cheap represents less of a loss. So, by adjusting prices dynamically to suit demand, using the Internet to calculate demand exactly, and by reducing staff costs, the average seat price drops. It's very simple.
Before you start saying "it's illegal to sell at a loss in order to capture a market", it's worth comparing an empty seat (loss) and a cheap seat (smaller loss).
Also for US readers, it's worth knowing that in Europe, prices are generally high (around 8 Euro) and fairly inflexible. So while cinemas are always packed on Friday and Saturday night, they are generally empty on week nights. Stelios' business model is to get bums on seats all week long, so using his capital better, and allowing the weekend prices to drop too. It is true that this will wreck the existing cinema industry, since the difference for a family of 4 is significant: today, perhaps Euro 60 including popcorn and drinks. At easyCinema, around Euro 20.
Stelios is a business hacker: find the inefficiencies in the system and exploit them. You really have to admire him.
But most of all, what does the discussion of one more language bring us? Agreed, languages get better, safer, more powerful, more abstracted. But the rate of change is so slow that it hardly seems worthwhile. Abstraction does not require syntax, after all, only the mental ability to form and use the right kinds of models. Someone who says "you cannot do such-and-such in language X" is simply someone who has not been able to see how.
My point is this: at certain levels, the choice of language is close to irrelevant, and new languages do not define progress of any kind. In contrast, new languages encourage the "throw it all away" mentality that plagues our business. You simply cannot develop a craft into a process if you have to reinvent your world every three or four years.
Programming languages are not and will never be magical solutions to the problems of writing good, large applications.
Excessive relevance is not a good thing in software. Good models of abstraction come from stepping back from the detail and looking at much larger pictures. Can you imagine a workflow model that allows people in five companies to collaborate on a project? Does the implementation of this depend on the language you use? Of course not. Can you invent an abstraction language that will support the model? Yes, and XML is a good place to start. Is this kind of thing worth doing? Yes, now you are starting to build abstractions that work ten, a hundred times better than conventional programming methods.
You're obviously speaking from the US, where SMS is a non-product. Sending a 140-byte message should not take 15 minutes unless someone has specifically set the priority to amazingly low.
I was specifically not thinking about web sites that sell articles, because these are not the ones where content management is an issue. Catalogues are not content. The other counter example is that of web sites that distribute technical information - and clearly the web is great for this. Sure.
But "content management"? I'm somewhat cynical. And judging from the content management tools I've seen (large, expensive, apparently useless), they do not address a real problem at all, but are a fad.
Fundamentally, managing a web site is going into the publishing business. Not something you should do unless you actually have something to say, and people interested in hearing it.
SMS is strictly speaking a 'store and forward' protocol, but then this is how (e.g.) ICQ works as well. SMS is close to instant: around 1-2 seconds in most cases and only rarely slower than that.
Yeah, say it, brother. SMS is IM. Only the markets in the US price SMS above voice traffic (there is a rational explanation for this but it involves large amounts of mind-altering substances). In Europe (and Asia and probably most places outside North America) this discussion is long over: over 70% of the population (here in Belgium) has a mobile phone and they can all IM each other using SMS.
This discussion has been interesting, since I spent many years working on mainframes: MVS, TSO, VM/CMS, et al. But to really feel the mainframe "experience", you had to work on a Siemens BS2000, built by Fujitsu, running a poor imitation of TSO/CICS/DB2.
We wrote a *lot* of Cobol code, not applications, but tools: editors, code generators, reporting tools, virtual i/o layers, the works. When we got our software to run on a PC (MS-DOS 3.2 with Realia Cobol), I knew the mainframe was dead.
IBM tried hard to reproduce the mainframe experience on their AS/400 machines, but it was never really the same again. Our team got used to response times measured in seconds rather than minutes. We started to hack Rexx and JCL to get interactive compiles, rather than the normal batch queues. We began mucking with the holy 3270 terminals and get them to show colours.
However, there is wisdom in the mainframe model, often forgotten under the layers of crud that we were forced to wade through. Simple transaction processing systems can be incredibly efficient. Forget J2EE and .NET - these are the bastard children of a stoned generation. Look at a transaction processing system like CICS and you will see a model that is brutally efficient.
And which can be quite easily implemented on any modern PC. Been there, done that, and it works real nice.
This might just work. My intravenous connection to alt.b.e.p.b has had to be shut down due to the weight of spam.
Pushing files, huh? It's as bad as pushing drugs. Into jail, my little hacker-bee.
Which is of course why the Bush clique puts so much emphasis on the terrorist threat - not to win votes, not to boost public opinion, not to justify harsh measures, but simply and purely to make it impossible for competing power cliques to make their move.
Patience, however. It will take some time. People always seek a strong leader in times of crisis, but it is a weak and exhausted country that allows such leaders to stay once the crisis is past. The US is not exactly a weak or exhausted country.
One has to assume that any politician is always seeking as much power as possible. It is not even a criticism - political systems specifically select those individuals who want power and are good at accumulating and trading it.
It's always cute to see how people are surprised when their "democratically elected leaders" turn out to have just the same tendencies as self-elected tyrants and dictators.
I believe the current tendency towards a centralization of power in the US is a self-defeating gambit, pushed by Ashcroft, but against the deeply ingrained beliefs of the political wing that put him into power, which has always distrusted big government. The attempts to turn "terrorism" into citizen control is a bit sad, really, since the minority views of the right-wing consituents in the US depend for their very existence on a open-minded and liberal democracy. Today, a register of information on everyone. Tomorrow, a national policy on morals. The next day: revolt from the conservative right-wing and fragmentation of the Republican party.
The point of democracy is not to elect the best leaders - this is a laugh - but to allow every policy, no matter how "vital to the State's interests" to be debated. Eventually such instruments will become the subject of discussion (allow 5 years for the Sept.11 trauma to wear off), and someone, somewhere, will be elected on the basis of protection of privacy. At which point we will see a swing back to smaller government and dissolution of the more blatant links between business and power.
Secondly, it should digest and live off the dust, which is mainly human skin, so rich in protein. I'm thinking a small bacterial engine that can turn dust into glucose, and pass that onto a glucose fuel cell of some kind.
Thirdly, should be really cheap. I don't want to have to take out my credit card each time I step on the cleaner by mistake. I'm thinking that the ideal model would actually be organic, which makes sense, given the bacterial engine, and so it could actually breed. Hey, why not?
Forthly, I want a powerful AI engine that can avoid stairs and feet, and will search for dust where it's most prevelant, namely in corners and in those hard-to-reach areas.
Fifthly, why not make it able to walk up walls... perhaps using those little sticky feet that pickup the dust so well.
Lastly, since the model is small, it should package its collected dust (after bacterial digestion) into easy-to-sweep nodules. This will eliminate any need for dust bags, discharging stations, etc.
Reviewing my design against the available models, I think the most practical solution would be to use standard breeding techniques combined with genetic engineering to create a species of super cockroaches that live off dust. There may be a small market acceptance problem, but I believe this can be overcome by finding a new name and a cute logo... how about "RoboRoach"?
One of the signs that a product has become a commodity is the use of a brandname as a generic description. Calling all modern, stable, portable, everything-is-a-file, my-great-grandfather-ran-on-32k-words-on-a-PDP-11 operating systems "UNIX" is technically inaccurate but culturally accurate.
Software is obviously not a single subject: it is like language, and can be applied in many different ways.
Let me take a simple example. There are two main ways that people look at the world of problems: they search for the commonality, or they search for the particularity. Now, I would argue that good software is built by finding the common patterns and solving those, but that is just the way I make software. Other people I've worked with do the opposite: they focus on hundreds or thousands of individual cases. Clearly we have different types of mind - what I consider mindless and irrelevant detail is to my colleagues the only part worth solving.
Painters, artists obviously work the same way. So do writers, archietcts, and all creative people, including scientists. There are hacker chemists, and there are the synthesizing chemists.
Personally, I find that the best art comes from using standard patterns in new way: for instance, good photgraphy relies on excellent understanding of light and subject, but every image must be unique. The best science takes the other extreme: determined effort to find the core patterns and understand those. Ten experiments that are each unique are worthless. Ten experiments that give the same results each time are perfect.
Two more dimensions to this, in my experience. First, men and women tend to different approaches when it comes to creating and problem solving. More men like to hack, not because we're taught that but because our brains work that way. Second, with age our minds also seem to change: older brains can understand a depth of asbtraction that escapes younger minds. Software is all about abstraction, unlike science or art, but very much like language. Young geniuses may be able to hold thousands of details in their heads, but they cannot (generally) use them to build large-scale abstractions that work well. Again, the same for writers.
No accident that some of the best programmers ever are also linguists and writers.
Uh... I'm sorry. I must stop with the blue pills. Does any company on earth (except MS and Nokia and Palm) bring out a new device that does _not_ run Linux?
The printers are cheap, cheap beyond belief if you compare to the cost of printing only a decade ago, and everyone and their grandmother wants to print. If I had invented the inkjet, I'd very sincerely deserve to get rich from it.