Of course, if they sequence the genome, they may in the future be able to create a much safer, if rather boring, version of Jurassic Park, where we can all "see this astonishing 20th-century fruit(/herb) restored to to life in it's natural environment!!"
Many in Hollywood have railed against the machines, saying they could cut into TV advertising revenues if fewer people watch the commercials that underwrite broadcasters' business.
(Story continues after advertisement)
Actually I just went back to see what the advert was for, having forgotten, and it turns out to say "Your memory may not be optimized!". I'm just going to go and lie down, before my irony lobes over-heat.
Pedantic, I know, but FTP != web. HTTP == web.
I know a lot of people don't grasp the difference between the internet and the world-wide-web, but you'd have thought someone writing web content might have got it right.
Also, ethernet != internet (the program manager for the project got that one wrong).
If the number of claims filed would result in refunds of less than $5.00 per claimant, there will be no cash distribution to individual consumers
If you read on, you see the that in this situation, they give money (not product) to some not-for-profit which does work beneficial to the settlement group.
I wonder how they choose the benificiary. How about the EFF? BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!
The article was absolutely brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that it made me wonder why the music industry is being so reactionary about all of this when many print publishers are doing their best to embrace the new technology.
The difference, I think, lies in O'Reilly's description of the mathematical necessity for go-betweens to facilitate interaction between millions of buyers and sellers. If that really was the basis of the recording industry, then everything else he said would immediately apply and we could justly accuse the recording companies of a deplorable lack of vision. However, in the case of the music industry, I don't think that is the whole story.
When I buy a book, I either go to Amazon and look at the customer reviews (for technical books) or wander into a shop and look around until I see something interesting (for novels). My decision is therefore based either on my own, (relatively un-manipulated) opinions, or those of other consumers. Despite the existence of poster and tv adverts for books, the role of a book seller is therefore primarily to present me with a wide selection of books and let me make my own decision.
The music industry is in a very different position. Through radio and TV, people are continually hearing music which is currently available. Liking a piece of music is an odd psychological phenomenon which depends heavily on repetition of the tune and perceptions of what your peer-group likes. Since the music industry has a lot of control over what you and your friends hear day in, day out, they have a remarkable amount of control over what you like, and therefore what you will buy.
The truth of this can easily be seen by the fact that it is possible for the music industry to make vast wads of cash out of such utter crap as Will Young covering Light My Fire (and, oh, I still tremble with rage at thought of that sacrilege) and the Cheeky Girls rambling on about their bums.
That level of control over the minds of customers far outstrips anything the print publishers can exert. It's a license to print money, and I believe the recording industry is scared of losing it. A well implemented peer-to-peer service in which it is possible not only to download music you know you want, but to be exposed to new music in a way the music industry cannot control could be their worst nightmare.
I don't want the music industry to disappear and, as the article pointed out, it never will. I just want it to be reduced from its current role as the definer of popular culture to to its proper place as a facilitator of popular culture. If that can happen, one way or another, we will all be better off
Rendezvous With Rama was one of the best SF novels I have ever read, but the series went the same way as 2001.
Arthur C. Clarke started off writing the ultimate in mystery sci-fi, then it seems that he found God, and developed a fetish for offering his own wishy-washy explanations for all of his most delicious mysteries.
So the purpose of all creation is to worship God and the monoliths can be defeated by a computer virus, Independence Day style?!?!?!? Geeks all over the world must have been tearing their hair out. The Phantom Menace (Jar-Jar Binks and all) pales in comparison to these crimes.
After Rama Revealed was published, Arthur C. Clarke's should have been banned from writing for the rest of his life, to prevent him from further defacing the cultural icons he himself created.
5. Mystery. Can't write an epic tale without it. There are few things more stimulating to the imagination than a hint at something so vast you can't even begin to comprehend it. The obvious example is 2001 (and the rubbishness of 3001, in which the monoliths are fully explained and therefore reduced from modern legend to mawkish crap - and don't get me started on the steenking pile of mushy, bible-bashing horseshit that is Rama Revealed).
6. Understanding of science. Not in the sense of knowing a lot about cosmology or sociology (God knows there have been some rubbish novels written by people who knew their science), but in the sense of knowing the "feel" of the stuff. Every time I read an Iain M. Banks novel what strikes me is how convincingly he puts across a sense of the sheer scale of the technology involved, whilst hardly giving any information about how it works, and yet without ever losing the sense that what he is writing about is nothing more than highly advanced technology.
Regardless of how well you design your network, it is possible for it to go down or experience brief glitches, as you yourself pointed out. If the network does go down and you are in the middle of a delicate procedure, it is essential the surgeon knows about it as quickly as possible, and not just from an image freezing or something. Imagine what can go wrong during 0.5 of a second in which a surgeon has hold of some delicate piece of tissue and thinks the reason it isn't moving is because he isn't applying enough pressure, when in fact the image has momentarily frozen because of a brief network glitch. Having a pet geek monitoring the network and yelling if something goes wrong isn't good enough to deal with such short-term matters.
The point is it sounds like a good idea for the surgeon to know how the network is responding RIGHT NOW!! It's not a question of whether the network has gone down, but whether the image on the screen is an accurate representation of what is going on at this precise instant
I'm not talking from any knowledge telesurgery, but I can't think of any faster way for a surgeon to be alerted of network problems. The pings could be sent out constantly at a high rate (without even waiting for each to come back before sending the next), and their results converted to a sound which the surgeons hears continuously. If there was a sudden drop in responsiveness or if the connection is lost, the surgeon may even know quickly enough to respond instinctively.
Sometimes very simple ideas turn out to be highly effective and lasting. Think about the dead man's handle on trains, for example. And sometimes the more complicated ones cost lives, like the Airbus computers. (and yes I know the Airbus problems were technically pilot error, but the point still stands - it's good for the person in control of a potentially dangerous situation to get accurate feedback in the simplest and most robust way possible)
>> The point is that what the surgeon needs to know about the network (or in the analogy, her hands), is *why* it disappears, and under what circumstances
Nonsense! If for some reason, during an operation the network goes down, what the surgeon needs to know, and know bloody quickly, is THAT it has gone down, so he can do whatever he has been trained to do to minimise the danger of the situation. As to WHY it went down, there's plenty of time for thinking about that once the patient is safe
I don't think the poster quite got the article. Regardless of whether this can be implemented in software or would require new hardware (don't know myself) this is a novel idea.
When you ping a machine from the command line, you get a list of ping times, which scroll by at a rate of about 2 per second or so. This doesn't show you the truly short-term behaviour of the connection. If I have understood correctly (and with the science writer "guitar string" crap removed), the idea here is to ping continually whilst playing a sound whose period (1/frequency) is the same as the ping time.
This has two advantages I can think of. The first and most important is that the ear is much better at picking up on a change in frequency than the eye is at picking out a couple of unusually high or low numbers in a scrolling list. This means that you can carry out a much larger number of "useful" pings (ie. ones whose results can be understood and used by an operator) per second. The second is that most networking applications (including telesurgery) don't make any use of sound, so the output of the pings is made continuously available to the user in a way that doesn't interfere with the task he/she is carrying out.
I don't know a thing about telesurgery, but if the very short term behaviour of the connection is important, this sounds like an ingenious way of keeping the user continuously updated.
Slashdot Mirror
The Church of Scientology plans to disconnect 6 billion brains.
Of course, if they sequence the genome, they may in the future be able to create a much safer, if rather boring, version of Jurassic Park, where we can all "see this astonishing 20th-century fruit(/herb) restored to to life in it's natural environment!!"
Many in Hollywood have railed against the machines, saying they could cut into TV advertising revenues if fewer people watch the commercials that underwrite broadcasters' business.
(Story continues after advertisement)
Actually I just went back to see what the advert was for, having forgotten, and it turns out to say "Your memory may not be optimized!". I'm just going to go and lie down, before my irony lobes over-heat.
Pedantic, I know, but FTP != web. HTTP == web. I know a lot of people don't grasp the difference between the internet and the world-wide-web, but you'd have thought someone writing web content might have got it right.
Also, ethernet != internet (the program manager for the project got that one wrong).
From the article:
If the number of claims filed would result in refunds of less than $5.00 per claimant, there will be no cash distribution to individual consumers
If you read on, you see the that in this situation, they give money (not product) to some not-for-profit which does work beneficial to the settlement group.
I wonder how they choose the benificiary. How about the EFF? BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!
The article was absolutely brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that it made me wonder why the music industry is being so reactionary about all of this when many print publishers are doing their best to embrace the new technology.
The difference, I think, lies in O'Reilly's description of the mathematical necessity for go-betweens to facilitate interaction between millions of buyers and sellers. If that really was the basis of the recording industry, then everything else he said would immediately apply and we could justly accuse the recording companies of a deplorable lack of vision. However, in the case of the music industry, I don't think that is the whole story.
When I buy a book, I either go to Amazon and look at the customer reviews (for technical books) or wander into a shop and look around until I see something interesting (for novels). My decision is therefore based either on my own, (relatively un-manipulated) opinions, or those of other consumers. Despite the existence of poster and tv adverts for books, the role of a book seller is therefore primarily to present me with a wide selection of books and let me make my own decision.
The music industry is in a very different position. Through radio and TV, people are continually hearing music which is currently available. Liking a piece of music is an odd psychological phenomenon which depends heavily on repetition of the tune and perceptions of what your peer-group likes. Since the music industry has a lot of control over what you and your friends hear day in, day out, they have a remarkable amount of control over what you like, and therefore what you will buy.
The truth of this can easily be seen by the fact that it is possible for the music industry to make vast wads of cash out of such utter crap as Will Young covering Light My Fire (and, oh, I still tremble with rage at thought of that sacrilege) and the Cheeky Girls rambling on about their bums.
That level of control over the minds of customers far outstrips anything the print publishers can exert. It's a license to print money, and I believe the recording industry is scared of losing it. A well implemented peer-to-peer service in which it is possible not only to download music you know you want, but to be exposed to new music in a way the music industry cannot control could be their worst nightmare.
I don't want the music industry to disappear and, as the article pointed out, it never will. I just want it to be reduced from its current role as the definer of popular culture to to its proper place as a facilitator of popular culture. If that can happen, one way or another, we will all be better off
SPOILER WARNING
Rendezvous With Rama was one of the best SF novels I have ever read, but the series went the same way as 2001.
Arthur C. Clarke started off writing the ultimate in mystery sci-fi, then it seems that he found God, and developed a fetish for offering his own wishy-washy explanations for all of his most delicious mysteries.
So the purpose of all creation is to worship God and the monoliths can be defeated by a computer virus, Independence Day style?!?!?!? Geeks all over the world must have been tearing their hair out. The Phantom Menace (Jar-Jar Binks and all) pales in comparison to these crimes.
After Rama Revealed was published, Arthur C. Clarke's should have been banned from writing for the rest of his life, to prevent him from further defacing the cultural icons he himself created.
I'd also add:
5. Mystery. Can't write an epic tale without it. There are few things more stimulating to the imagination than a hint at something so vast you can't even begin to comprehend it. The obvious example is 2001 (and the rubbishness of 3001, in which the monoliths are fully explained and therefore reduced from modern legend to mawkish crap - and don't get me started on the steenking pile of mushy, bible-bashing horseshit that is Rama Revealed).
6. Understanding of science. Not in the sense of knowing a lot about cosmology or sociology (God knows there have been some rubbish novels written by people who knew their science), but in the sense of knowing the "feel" of the stuff. Every time I read an Iain M. Banks novel what strikes me is how convincingly he puts across a sense of the sheer scale of the technology involved, whilst hardly giving any information about how it works, and yet without ever losing the sense that what he is writing about is nothing more than highly advanced technology.
Regardless of how well you design your network, it is possible for it to go down or experience brief glitches, as you yourself pointed out. If the network does go down and you are in the middle of a delicate procedure, it is essential the surgeon knows about it as quickly as possible, and not just from an image freezing or something. Imagine what can go wrong during 0.5 of a second in which a surgeon has hold of some delicate piece of tissue and thinks the reason it isn't moving is because he isn't applying enough pressure, when in fact the image has momentarily frozen because of a brief network glitch. Having a pet geek monitoring the network and yelling if something goes wrong isn't good enough to deal with such short-term matters.
The point is it sounds like a good idea for the surgeon to know how the network is responding RIGHT NOW!! It's not a question of whether the network has gone down, but whether the image on the screen is an accurate representation of what is going on at this precise instant
I'm not talking from any knowledge telesurgery, but I can't think of any faster way for a surgeon to be alerted of network problems. The pings could be sent out constantly at a high rate (without even waiting for each to come back before sending the next), and their results converted to a sound which the surgeons hears continuously. If there was a sudden drop in responsiveness or if the connection is lost, the surgeon may even know quickly enough to respond instinctively.
Sometimes very simple ideas turn out to be highly effective and lasting. Think about the dead man's handle on trains, for example. And sometimes the more complicated ones cost lives, like the Airbus computers. (and yes I know the Airbus problems were technically pilot error, but the point still stands - it's good for the person in control of a potentially dangerous situation to get accurate feedback in the simplest and most robust way possible)
>> The point is that what the surgeon needs to know about the network (or in the analogy, her hands), is *why* it disappears, and under what circumstances
Nonsense! If for some reason, during an operation the network goes down, what the surgeon needs to know, and know bloody quickly, is THAT it has gone down, so he can do whatever he has been trained to do to minimise the danger of the situation. As to WHY it went down, there's plenty of time for thinking about that once the patient is safe
I don't think the poster quite got the article. Regardless of whether this can be implemented in software or would require new hardware (don't know myself) this is a novel idea.
When you ping a machine from the command line, you get a list of ping times, which scroll by at a rate of about 2 per second or so. This doesn't show you the truly short-term behaviour of the connection. If I have understood correctly (and with the science writer "guitar string" crap removed), the idea here is to ping continually whilst playing a sound whose period (1/frequency) is the same as the ping time.
This has two advantages I can think of. The first and most important is that the ear is much better at picking up on a change in frequency than the eye is at picking out a couple of unusually high or low numbers in a scrolling list. This means that you can carry out a much larger number of "useful" pings (ie. ones whose results can be understood and used by an operator) per second. The second is that most networking applications (including telesurgery) don't make any use of sound, so the output of the pings is made continuously available to the user in a way that doesn't interfere with the task he/she is carrying out.
I don't know a thing about telesurgery, but if the very short term behaviour of the connection is important, this sounds like an ingenious way of keeping the user continuously updated.