I don't want to be too off-topic or political here, so if I am, I apologize, but I have a few honest & serious questions.
Most people I know agree that copyright is messed up, and this proposal just makes the situation even more complicated.
From TFA: "rights have to be of limited duration". So, why is it that as a nation, we have not had any noticeable impact on the situation in our country? Do we really want to have copyright limited to a fixed duration again? Do we really want to have more freedom in obtaining, sharing, distributing content and ideas? Then why isn't that happening on a larger scale?
Things such as the GPL, Creative Commons type of licensing, etc. seem like a step in the right direction, but clearly even they have limitations. Why can't the public seem to get amendments that seem to work more in its favor (instead of in the favor of organizations, companies, etc.) on the table and then signed into law? Reasons other than capitalism, I mean...
I may have worded it incorrectly - my point is not so much about what this debate is about, rather, what the debate SHOULD be about. Basic internetworking is not much different from a public utility (and it should not be seen as different). Network providers should be happy with the fees they currently receive to compensate them for basic internetworking services from any customer, large or small, directly or indirectly connected. The issue should not be the interconnections between organizations - without them why would we even bother calling it the Internet?
The next issue, and the more important one, is what flows over these networks and how. That is where QoS comes in because this is where the ISPs and telcos will make their money - stealing it away from cable broadcasters, satellite services, and who knows what else by providing a network which will function for IPTV, VoIP, any streaming content, faster data transfer, etc. The basic level of service (let's just call it "best effort" data service) must survive and must be protected.
Basically, it seems that ISPs, telcos, etc. should be (and probably are) saying "Ok, the base interconnections between our organizations are considered to be costs of doing business... they benefit us and the general public. Now, how do we make money off premium services based on the specific content in question, without disrupting the basic function of this global network?".
I have been following this whole discussion, and I want to clear something up for everyone. Network engineers, this one is for you...
General uninformed public, meet Quality of Service (QOS). Simply stated, the concept roughly is:
To allow for differentiated levels of service (ex. best effort, guaranteed delivery, etc.) based upon the content of packets and type of transmission
Telcos, ISPs, etc. should not.. and I repeat.. NOT!!! be able to discriminate against different users of their bandwidth, lines, etc. However, they SHOULD be able to discriminate against different kinds of packets, because different kinds of packets (packets carrying video, packets carrying VOIP data) can vary greatly in size and can greatly impact performance.
The Internet as you know it today is considered to be "best effort" delivery. That means that there is no guarantee that a packet will make it from point A to point B. It's insane not to allow ISPs and telcos not to add a premium that guarantees that. HOWEVER, they also need to have laws passed that force them to also maintain their best effort level of service for the base level of Internet services. It's like telling FedEx that they can't charge you more for air shipping than ground shipping!
If we don't agree with the arguments for QoS, then let's just not implement it! Sheesh!
I was interested that you posted about the healthcare industry, because I work in it today, and also went to a university which has done quite a bit of research into the area of health & bio informatics. From the research, it is clear that the semantic web and healthcare are actually a great match for each other, particularly when it comes to things like concepts & ontologies (for example, check out MeSH if you haven't seen it before).
Another example of how semantics make sense for healthcare is in identifying how to properly code a particular diagnosis or procedure. For example, if I know that going to visit your doctor in the office is a procedure represented by the number 99213, I need to be able to figure that out when I send in my medical bill. Here's a hierarchy that might help in this scenario:
General Example: Where->Who->How->What Specific Example: In a doctor's office->by a doctor->in person examination->99213
However, good will only come of this if semantic technologies ever make the leap from research to practice for ordinary healthcare professionals.
As for EDI, it is a crime that such poor standards exist today (the HIPAA X12 transaction set springs to mind), and that a technology like XML markup exists, but is not the basis of our standards. XML has a lot of overhead over say, your fixed width files, but it sure makes parsing this data and finding columns and fields a lot easier!
Have you ever seen Rebol? Check out http://www.rebol.com/. I messed with it a bit in the past, and it kind of comes close to what you are talking about, although it has a very different programming syntax!
I just hope the Wii controller comes with some sort of superglue to glue it to your hand, because I don't know about you, but IANAFP (I am not a football player), and can't guarantee I won't fling the darn thing across the room while pump-faking my hail mary pass!;)
I am not the person who made the comment, but I THINK what they were trying to do was comment on the relationship between Zend (the private company that supports PHP) and Sun that has been growing for several years. Zend recently released a PHP to Java bridge, and there have been folks who have said that PHP presents a lower barrier to entry, extremely large developer base and easier syntax than JSP. As far as I am concerned, JSP, ASP, PHP, etc.. are just tools.. pick the right one for your environment.
I think, perhaps, the comment may have been referring to a better integration of PHP with Java-supporting web servers, such as Apache Tomcat or JBoss, in addition to increased PHP and JVM integration. Since PHP is so widely supported as a web-scripting language, and Java is so well supported as middleware, server-side software, etc.. well I think you get the idea.
..that there are at least 3, and many, many more well qualified and enthusiastic folks on Slashdot who would be able to do these jobs, who will probably read this post. Hey, you guys, submit your resumes! Maybe even post them here!
BTW, I do not work for Apple. In fact, I hardly use a Mac. That does not mean I don't like them!;)
I don't agree with you about GUI components - I don't think they're so significant that it would be worth the enormous work it would take to make it happen. Most applications are better served by being web-based anyway. The only things you should need to do on your desktop are terminal; browser (which is actually just a different type of terminal); hardware-intensive apps (image editors, games, etc). Everything else is better served by being simple and server-side (with all the advantages that allows - ccentralised backups, redundancy options, straightforward remote access, etc, etc).
Of course, I see your point. I'm curious, what is your opinion on the "thin-client" approach that many companies have tried, a la Citrix, VNC, network-based X desktop, RDP, terminal services, etc? I have often thought that serving up an actual screen scraped image of an application running on a server platform would be a much better method of distributing fully featured web applications.
I suppose what I have considered many times is a remote desktop kind of philosophy (somehow, simpler and lower level than those mentioned earlier), where the GUI rendering framework itself is actually hosted on the server, and the fully rendered page is just passed through as an image or much more simplistic display/markup, which can also be compressed. It's not a revolutionary idea by itself, but perhaps a refactoring of an older idea with a slight twist.
I thought that was what all the GUI libraries that come with your OS were meant for! GUI libraries pre-date the Internet. I think that today, they're mostly there for legacy purposes. From a developer's perspective, a single code base that runs everywhere is much more appealing.
While I will agree that SOME GUI libraries predate the net.. I feel like many GUI libraries had so much of the functionality that we are trying to emulate now with AJAX in the browser, that it's kind of silly that we can't use native OS components. For example, have you ever tried to code an extremely flexible data grid control in the browser (not using any plugins)? I mean, a control that somewhat mimics MS Excel or OpenOffice Calc functionality? Yes, we can approximate that today with tables, or, if you're feeling lucky, with divs, and use lots of nice Ajax functionality to load data, make it seem more dynamic, etc. However, MS has had a GUI data grid that handles 99% of this easily in normal fat client apps. Cross platform widget frameworks like WxWidgets, Qt, Gtk, etc all have much more dynamic control sets. And in the end, web browsers end up rendering their input boxes, buttons, etc. using these widget frameworks or GUI libraries.
I admit I may sound a bit redundant considering the W3C is, in THEORY, interested in building such a framework. I only think they have been considering this kind of in-depth application framework for a very short time, and sometimes, I admit, I get tired of waiting around when good solutions could already exist. I'd like to see the OS and major tech companies get behind the push and this time understand why open standards/open source are important to innovation, and don't necessarily hinder competition. Yes, I know, radical thinking..
Perhaps the W3C should peruse what desktop/GUI application developers have used for controls for years, and use that as a starting point (of course, innovation helps too!). I truly wonder if Tim Berners-Lee had what the Internet is today in mind when he started it so long ago.
You know, this comment is not just funny, I find it rather ironic. Why do we try and force a "real application" through a web browser? The way we are treating browsers these days, it seems like they are less about information presentation/sharing and more about actual application-type functionality. I thought that was what all the GUI libraries that come with your OS were meant for!
Rather than taking an incremental approach and altering the core purpose of "web browsing", why don't we get all of the major technology companies that exist today to agree to support ONE standard for the remote binding of locally displayed user interface components. That way, every company can make their own components and their own code, but everybody knows a standard way to bind network-based logic to an interface. I'm pretty sure this is what Bill Gates was after when he envisioned.NET, what Sun hoped Java would be, what Macromedia hoped Flash would be. It's clear that no plugin, no single method is dominant. All we have is a [slowly] improving mess of HTML, CSS and Javascript. AJAX makes a difference, but only so far as it accomplishes the goal of ONE standard for fat-client, desktop application type functionality.
Seriously, are all the big players so greedy that they can't ALL band together, for the good of humanity and advancement of technology, to agree on ONE standard? ONLY ONE? Take some time, flesh out a good model, agree to standardize, build new products, free and proprietary, and let's make the shift to these well-defined products.
I guess I'm biased... I've been developing web applications for years, and I recently was speaking with a long-time desktop GUI developer. This developer hasn't suffered nearly as many of the injustices that we web developers have, trying to shoehorn something into a "web browser". Of course, his application doesn't work on every OS and every type of system (terrible in and of itself), but hey, if we had ONE standard for UI binding to network-enabled logic (web-services, remote components, anything at all), maybe it could.
I saw and touched it at the Creative booth at CES 2006. IMHO, it's just another Fatal1ty gimmick, mostly useless bells and whistles. The one touch sensitivity feature was kind of interesting, but seeing as how I only ever adjust the sensitivity ONCE in most games and don't change it much, it is not that practical. The weights might be handy if multiple people game on the same PC, but when I played with it I didn't find a reason to change the weight in the middle of my Quake 4 gaming, for example. I didn't seem to notice the extra accuracy too much. I did feel that the mouse was a little bit small though, somehow didn't have a place to really rest the hand comfortably.
Extended trinary signal apparatus includes window comparator logic having first and second inputs for first and second trinary input signals, wherein each the trinary input signal can be a high, low or mid state, and an output for outputting signals dependent on the states of the first and second trinary input signals. A switch, which is connected to one of the first and second inputs, can be selectively activated in one phase to set the one of the first and second inputs to a state other than the mid state and can be inactive in another phase. Control logic is responsive to output signals from the window comparator output during the one and the other phase to provide extended trinary decoding of the trinary input signals. In this manner ninth and tenth input combinations can be identified by detecting whether two inputs which show a mid state are electrically connected to each other or not, this being achieved by selectively pulling one of the inputs to a predetermined state and determining whether the other input follows or not. Trinary encoding can thus be extended to provide ten, rather than the conventional nine states from two inputs."
Ok, so the way I see it, we have invented a lot of ways to increase our MIPS and our processing power.. something along the lines of this->
1) Single CPU 2) Multiple CPU 3) Multiple Machines in a grid with single CPUs 4) Multiple Machines in a grid with multiple CPUs 5) Multiple grids with many machines 6) Multiple cores in a single CPU 7) Multiple cores in multiple CPUs 7) Multiple cores in multiple CPUs in a grid 8)..what next?
We also went from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit to now 64-bit and beyond. 64-bit words.. nice! Of course, more parallelism means more threads for more simultaneous processes, and 64-bit means twice as much "word" space than 32-bit, but what next?
It's truly mind boggling, and it's a great time to be in IS/IT!
What I want to know is, how much further? How can we increase the multiples more? For example, what happened to quantum processing and multiple states for a bit instead of 0 and 1? When can I count my bits 0, 1 and.5? Any supercomputer geeks care to postulate?
I second the Polycom - I have actually used one for a presentation that was given to a large number of people. We had three Polycom devices, one standalone at our site, one standalone at the remote site, and one in an office nearby connected to a PC. The voice/video performance was pretty decent over a T1.
Another cool addition to that setup was a digital projector. We displayed the video at our site using the digital projector, which made the folks life-size... it felt like they were in the room!
Now I can pay to get first post (yeah, I know, I didn't make it.. but maybe I would have if you had to pay $20 bucks to do it)! I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a first post today! *grin*
Interesting though.. is the Internet really "free" or is it really all valuable property that translates to something physical in the real world? Do communities on the Internet somehow "own" the virtual land, or do they have to pay for it? Somewhere out there these are real bits on a real hard drive that cost someone money to supply!
It also brings to mind questions like why do people pay for virtual objects from massively multiplayer online games? Or.. why do we still pay to watch commercials on cable TV (or ahem... obtain our media from other sources)? Where is the value!? Where is the worth!?
One thing is clear - there is a new economy at work here. Maybe it is Peter Drucker's "knowledge" economy, or maybe folks are starting to realize that with money can come actual quality. To be fair, let's not forget that with money (and I suppose even without it) comes control, power struggle, and who knows what else..
I think they mean vole as in the animal vole - a vole is kind of like a small rat. Here's something from Wordnet: "any of various small mouselike rodents of the family Cricetidae (especially of genus Microtus) having a stout short-tailed body and inconspicuous ears and inhabiting fields or meadows" (from Wordnet)
Kind of a slick way to call them a rat, if I do say so myself!
Regardless, I definitely agree with everyone - I would LOVE, SUPPORT and CONTRIBUTE to a 100% open source "generic" database interface. I think it would be a huge hit with open source advocates and corporations because that way, end users could have any easy way to interface with open source databases!
This is known as Pareto's Principal, a common concept studied in project management. It is also referred to as the 80/20 rule, and was meant to be applied to more than just project management.
From what I understand, people don't actually take the time to measure the actual performance of their projects, review the results, and learn for the future. That may be why rules like the "80/20" rule often seem mythical - they are untested until you yourself actually implement them.
Slashdot Mirror
..isn't competition grand! Look at the innovation these two companies are making at a breakneck pace! Woohoo!
Hmm let me see here.. what could be considered prior art?
Maybe Pablo Picasso's Guernica??!?! Man, that Picaso was waaaay ahead of his time!
*watches out for rotten tomatoes*
SixD
I don't want to be too off-topic or political here, so if I am, I apologize, but I have a few honest & serious questions.
Most people I know agree that copyright is messed up, and this proposal just makes the situation even more complicated.
From TFA: "rights have to be of limited duration". So, why is it that as a nation, we have not had any noticeable impact on the situation in our country? Do we really want to have copyright limited to a fixed duration again? Do we really want to have more freedom in obtaining, sharing, distributing content and ideas? Then why isn't that happening on a larger scale?
Things such as the GPL, Creative Commons type of licensing, etc. seem like a step in the right direction, but clearly even they have limitations. Why can't the public seem to get amendments that seem to work more in its favor (instead of in the favor of organizations, companies, etc.) on the table and then signed into law? Reasons other than capitalism, I mean...
SixD
I may have worded it incorrectly - my point is not so much about what this debate is about, rather, what the debate SHOULD be about. Basic internetworking is not much different from a public utility (and it should not be seen as different). Network providers should be happy with the fees they currently receive to compensate them for basic internetworking services from any customer, large or small, directly or indirectly connected. The issue should not be the interconnections between organizations - without them why would we even bother calling it the Internet?
The next issue, and the more important one, is what flows over these networks and how. That is where QoS comes in because this is where the ISPs and telcos will make their money - stealing it away from cable broadcasters, satellite services, and who knows what else by providing a network which will function for IPTV, VoIP, any streaming content, faster data transfer, etc. The basic level of service (let's just call it "best effort" data service) must survive and must be protected.
Basically, it seems that ISPs, telcos, etc. should be (and probably are) saying "Ok, the base interconnections between our organizations are considered to be costs of doing business... they benefit us and the general public. Now, how do we make money off premium services based on the specific content in question, without disrupting the basic function of this global network?".
SixD
I have been following this whole discussion, and I want to clear something up for everyone. Network engineers, this one is for you...
General uninformed public, meet Quality of Service (QOS). Simply stated, the concept roughly is:
To allow for differentiated levels of service (ex. best effort, guaranteed delivery, etc.) based upon the content of packets and type of transmissionTelcos, ISPs, etc. should not.. and I repeat.. NOT!!! be able to discriminate against different users of their bandwidth, lines, etc. However, they SHOULD be able to discriminate against different kinds of packets, because different kinds of packets (packets carrying video, packets carrying VOIP data) can vary greatly in size and can greatly impact performance.
The Internet as you know it today is considered to be "best effort" delivery. That means that there is no guarantee that a packet will make it from point A to point B. It's insane not to allow ISPs and telcos not to add a premium that guarantees that. HOWEVER, they also need to have laws passed that force them to also maintain their best effort level of service for the base level of Internet services. It's like telling FedEx that they can't charge you more for air shipping than ground shipping!
If we don't agree with the arguments for QoS, then let's just not implement it! Sheesh!
SixD
Here's a proposal for an EV infrastructure - http://www.acpropulsion.com/Veh_Grid_Power/Veh_gri d_power.htm
Not sure if it works in fast charge/discharge cycles though.
SixD
P.S. I am in no way associated with the company linked above.
I was interested that you posted about the healthcare industry, because I work in it today, and also went to a university which has done quite a bit of research into the area of health & bio informatics. From the research, it is clear that the semantic web and healthcare are actually a great match for each other, particularly when it comes to things like concepts & ontologies (for example, check out MeSH if you haven't seen it before).
Another example of how semantics make sense for healthcare is in identifying how to properly code a particular diagnosis or procedure. For example, if I know that going to visit your doctor in the office is a procedure represented by the number 99213, I need to be able to figure that out when I send in my medical bill. Here's a hierarchy that might help in this scenario:
General Example: Where->Who->How->What
Specific Example: In a doctor's office->by a doctor->in person examination->99213
However, good will only come of this if semantic technologies ever make the leap from research to practice for ordinary healthcare professionals.
As for EDI, it is a crime that such poor standards exist today (the HIPAA X12 transaction set springs to mind), and that a technology like XML markup exists, but is not the basis of our standards. XML has a lot of overhead over say, your fixed width files, but it sure makes parsing this data and finding columns and fields a lot easier!
SixD
Have you ever seen Rebol? Check out http://www.rebol.com/. I messed with it a bit in the past, and it kind of comes close to what you are talking about, although it has a very different programming syntax!
SixD
I just hope the Wii controller comes with some sort of superglue to glue it to your hand, because I don't know about you, but IANAFP (I am not a football player), and can't guarantee I won't fling the darn thing across the room while pump-faking my hail mary pass! ;)
SixD
I am not the person who made the comment, but I THINK what they were trying to do was comment on the relationship between Zend (the private company that supports PHP) and Sun that has been growing for several years. Zend recently released a PHP to Java bridge, and there have been folks who have said that PHP presents a lower barrier to entry, extremely large developer base and easier syntax than JSP. As far as I am concerned, JSP, ASP, PHP, etc.. are just tools.. pick the right one for your environment.
I think, perhaps, the comment may have been referring to a better integration of PHP with Java-supporting web servers, such as Apache Tomcat or JBoss, in addition to increased PHP and JVM integration. Since PHP is so widely supported as a web-scripting language, and Java is so well supported as middleware, server-side software, etc.. well I think you get the idea.
Just my 2c.
..that there are at least 3, and many, many more well qualified and enthusiastic folks on Slashdot who would be able to do these jobs, who will probably read this post. Hey, you guys, submit your resumes! Maybe even post them here!
;)
BTW, I do not work for Apple. In fact, I hardly use a Mac. That does not mean I don't like them!
SixD
I don't agree with you about GUI components - I don't think they're so significant that it would be worth the enormous work it would take to make it happen. Most applications are better served by being web-based anyway. The only things you should need to do on your desktop are terminal; browser (which is actually just a different type of terminal); hardware-intensive apps (image editors, games, etc). Everything else is better served by being simple and server-side (with all the advantages that allows - ccentralised backups, redundancy options, straightforward remote access, etc, etc).
Of course, I see your point. I'm curious, what is your opinion on the "thin-client" approach that many companies have tried, a la Citrix, VNC, network-based X desktop, RDP, terminal services, etc? I have often thought that serving up an actual screen scraped image of an application running on a server platform would be a much better method of distributing fully featured web applications.
I suppose what I have considered many times is a remote desktop kind of philosophy (somehow, simpler and lower level than those mentioned earlier), where the GUI rendering framework itself is actually hosted on the server, and the fully rendered page is just passed through as an image or much more simplistic display/markup, which can also be compressed. It's not a revolutionary idea by itself, but perhaps a refactoring of an older idea with a slight twist.
Thanks for your comments fellow Slashdotters!
SixD
I thought that was what all the GUI libraries that come with your OS were meant for!
GUI libraries pre-date the Internet. I think that today, they're mostly there for legacy purposes. From a developer's perspective, a single code base that runs everywhere is much more appealing.
While I will agree that SOME GUI libraries predate the net.. I feel like many GUI libraries had so much of the functionality that we are trying to emulate now with AJAX in the browser, that it's kind of silly that we can't use native OS components. For example, have you ever tried to code an extremely flexible data grid control in the browser (not using any plugins)? I mean, a control that somewhat mimics MS Excel or OpenOffice Calc functionality? Yes, we can approximate that today with tables, or, if you're feeling lucky, with divs, and use lots of nice Ajax functionality to load data, make it seem more dynamic, etc. However, MS has had a GUI data grid that handles 99% of this easily in normal fat client apps. Cross platform widget frameworks like WxWidgets, Qt, Gtk, etc all have much more dynamic control sets. And in the end, web browsers end up rendering their input boxes, buttons, etc. using these widget frameworks or GUI libraries.
I admit I may sound a bit redundant considering the W3C is, in THEORY, interested in building such a framework. I only think they have been considering this kind of in-depth application framework for a very short time, and sometimes, I admit, I get tired of waiting around when good solutions could already exist. I'd like to see the OS and major tech companies get behind the push and this time understand why open standards/open source are important to innovation, and don't necessarily hinder competition. Yes, I know, radical thinking..
Perhaps the W3C should peruse what desktop/GUI application developers have used for controls for years, and use that as a starting point (of course, innovation helps too!). I truly wonder if Tim Berners-Lee had what the Internet is today in mind when he started it so long ago.
SixD
You know, this comment is not just funny, I find it rather ironic. Why do we try and force a "real application" through a web browser? The way we are treating browsers these days, it seems like they are less about information presentation/sharing and more about actual application-type functionality. I thought that was what all the GUI libraries that come with your OS were meant for!
.NET, what Sun hoped Java would be, what Macromedia hoped Flash would be. It's clear that no plugin, no single method is dominant. All we have is a [slowly] improving mess of HTML, CSS and Javascript. AJAX makes a difference, but only so far as it accomplishes the goal of ONE standard for fat-client, desktop application type functionality.
Rather than taking an incremental approach and altering the core purpose of "web browsing", why don't we get all of the major technology companies that exist today to agree to support ONE standard for the remote binding of locally displayed user interface components. That way, every company can make their own components and their own code, but everybody knows a standard way to bind network-based logic to an interface. I'm pretty sure this is what Bill Gates was after when he envisioned
Seriously, are all the big players so greedy that they can't ALL band together, for the good of humanity and advancement of technology, to agree on ONE standard? ONLY ONE? Take some time, flesh out a good model, agree to standardize, build new products, free and proprietary, and let's make the shift to these well-defined products.
I guess I'm biased... I've been developing web applications for years, and I recently was speaking with a long-time desktop GUI developer. This developer hasn't suffered nearly as many of the injustices that we web developers have, trying to shoehorn something into a "web browser". Of course, his application doesn't work on every OS and every type of system (terrible in and of itself), but hey, if we had ONE standard for UI binding to network-enabled logic (web-services, remote components, anything at all), maybe it could.
SixD
*sarcasm* Wow... a fancy mouse! *sarcasm*
e gory=1&subcategory=208&product=14000) sound system in the same booth was very powerful, and I could feel the chaingun rounds pummeling my chest!
I saw and touched it at the Creative booth at CES 2006. IMHO, it's just another Fatal1ty gimmick, mostly useless bells and whistles. The one touch sensitivity feature was kind of interesting, but seeing as how I only ever adjust the sensitivity ONCE in most games and don't change it much, it is not that practical. The weights might be handy if multiple people game on the same PC, but when I played with it I didn't find a reason to change the weight in the middle of my Quake 4 gaming, for example. I didn't seem to notice the extra accuracy too much. I did feel that the mouse was a little bit small though, somehow didn't have a place to really rest the hand comfortably.
A little off-topic, but the Creative X-Fi (http://www.creative.com/products/product.asp?cat
-6d
I always wondered how /dev/null worked. Now I get it. It's a black hole.. nothing escapes it, no naughty data files, not even light!
Come to think about it, in databases, nulls usually give me my fair share of headaches. Finally, another good use of the null beast!
6d
Here's one possible example (from a patent):
T O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1=trinary.TTL.&OS=TTL/ trinary&RS=TTL/trinary
"Trinary signal apparatus and method
Extended trinary signal apparatus includes window comparator logic having first and second inputs for first and second trinary input signals, wherein each the trinary input signal can be a high, low or mid state, and an output for outputting signals dependent on the states of the first and second trinary input signals. A switch, which is connected to one of the first and second inputs, can be selectively activated in one phase to set the one of the first and second inputs to a state other than the mid state and can be inactive in another phase. Control logic is responsive to output signals from the window comparator output during the one and the other phase to provide extended trinary decoding of the trinary input signals. In this manner ninth and tenth input combinations can be identified by detecting whether two inputs which show a mid state are electrically connected to each other or not, this being achieved by selectively pulling one of the inputs to a predetermined state and determining whether the other input follows or not. Trinary encoding can thus be extended to provide ten, rather than the conventional nine states from two inputs."
From http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
Ok, so the way I see it, we have invented a lot of ways to increase our MIPS and our processing power.. something along the lines of this->
..what next?
.5? Any supercomputer geeks care to postulate?
1) Single CPU
2) Multiple CPU
3) Multiple Machines in a grid with single CPUs
4) Multiple Machines in a grid with multiple CPUs
5) Multiple grids with many machines
6) Multiple cores in a single CPU
7) Multiple cores in multiple CPUs
7) Multiple cores in multiple CPUs in a grid
8)
We also went from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit to now 64-bit and beyond. 64-bit words.. nice! Of course, more parallelism means more threads for more simultaneous processes, and 64-bit means twice as much "word" space than 32-bit, but what next?
It's truly mind boggling, and it's a great time to be in IS/IT!
What I want to know is, how much further? How can we increase the multiples more? For example, what happened to quantum processing and multiple states for a bit instead of 0 and 1? When can I count my bits 0, 1 and
I second the Polycom - I have actually used one for a presentation that was given to a large number of people. We had three Polycom devices, one standalone at our site, one standalone at the remote site, and one in an office nearby connected to a PC. The voice/video performance was pretty decent over a T1.
Another cool addition to that setup was a digital projector. We displayed the video at our site using the digital projector, which made the folks life-size... it felt like they were in the room!
Have fun!
-6d
I hate having to get donut dust out from in between the keys!
-6d
Now I can pay to get first post (yeah, I know, I didn't make it.. but maybe I would have if you had to pay $20 bucks to do it)! I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a first post today! *grin*
Interesting though.. is the Internet really "free" or is it really all valuable property that translates to something physical in the real world? Do communities on the Internet somehow "own" the virtual land, or do they have to pay for it? Somewhere out there these are real bits on a real hard drive that cost someone money to supply!
It also brings to mind questions like why do people pay for virtual objects from massively multiplayer online games? Or.. why do we still pay to watch commercials on cable TV (or ahem... obtain our media from other sources)? Where is the value!? Where is the worth!?
One thing is clear - there is a new economy at work here. Maybe it is Peter Drucker's "knowledge" economy, or maybe folks are starting to realize that with money can come actual quality. To be fair, let's not forget that with money (and I suppose even without it) comes control, power struggle, and who knows what else..
It will be interesting to see all this play out!
-6d
I think they mean vole as in the animal vole - a vole is kind of like a small rat. Here's something from Wordnet:
"any of various small mouselike rodents of the family Cricetidae (especially of genus Microtus) having a stout short-tailed body and inconspicuous ears and inhabiting fields or meadows" (from Wordnet)
Kind of a slick way to call them a rat, if I do say so myself!
On a side note, using M$ Access as a front-end to MySQL has been possible for quite a while using MySQL's MyODBC connector. It might not give you all the features of MySQL, but it works fairly well for simple stuff. Just try googling "Access & MySQL" http://www.google.com/search?q=using+ms+access+wit h+mysql&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie =utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:e n-US:official.
Regardless, I definitely agree with everyone - I would LOVE, SUPPORT and CONTRIBUTE to a 100% open source "generic" database interface. I think it would be a huge hit with open source advocates and corporations because that way, end users could have any easy way to interface with open source databases!
-6d
Did they forget to mention this book was published on October 7, 2003? Hmm - I smell an advert!!! -6d
This is known as Pareto's Principal, a common concept studied in project management. It is also referred to as the 80/20 rule, and was meant to be applied to more than just project management.
a /Pareto081202.htm.
However, applied to project management, the 80/20 rule states that 20% of the work will actually take 80% of the time/resources necessary. For more, check http://management.about.com/cs/generalmanagement/
From what I understand, people don't actually take the time to measure the actual performance of their projects, review the results, and learn for the future. That may be why rules like the "80/20" rule often seem mythical - they are untested until you yourself actually implement them.
My 2 cents..
-6d