There's a wonderful novel by Rudy Rucker called Wetware that is based on just this topic. A phenomenon called chipmold fries all integrated circuits. Since so many common household gadgets already contain them, many of them stop working. Some people's cars also stop (this is set a little further in the future). The inhabitants of the novel come up with a way to infect plastic with a type of mold that can be tweaked and programmed, coming up with integrated circuit replacements that look a little bit like daubs of Silly Putty. Eventually, whole autonomous, intelligent beings grow out of the smart-mold silly putty, who are all a bit like Plastic Man. It's a great, funny, intelligent book, much better than my description here. You can visit Rucker's homepage at http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/ He's a computer science professor at San Jose State, and has some cool cellular automata and little online games & stuff on his site, as well as links to his books.
Maybe they will bring back Computer Shopper
on
CNET Buys Ziff-Davis
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I hope that they bring back Computer Shopper. This phone-book sized tome composed almost entirely of ads (and some totally worthless reviews which I ignored) was actually very valuable -- and there really *isn't* anything on the Net that really replicates its breadth and depth. When you do product searches on any site, now all you get are the big suppliers, not the multitudes of small distributors specializing in one type of item (who, btw, often have better prices & service). How are you supposed to find them now? CS was convenient.
Raster image processing.... The term "to rip" comes from Raster Image Processing, and it's the main way that stuff from your screen becomes ink on paper from your printer. PostScript software is often referred to by people who make printer software as a "PostScript rip" or "ripper." People used to know it was an acronym because in the beginning they used all caps -- RIP. Over time, "ripping" became a verb, and now "rip" has become a general term for moving and distributing data; taking a CD and making an MP3 file is often called "ripping" even though there are no raster images involved. Unfortunately, rip is associated with the colloquialism "rip off."
Agreed. I've been using Applix Office at home, and I like it a lot. But moving files from home to work, where they have Windows, is tough.
Actually, it's toughest in the other direction (work to home) because I have to remember to save files in earlier file formats; as usual, I am the weakest link in this chain. What I would really love is one of those programs that seem to grow up around the Mac ecosphere to translate PC files into other files -- even just to plain ol' text would be good if it would help me read it.
Actually, I have one funny story. Every year I make over 500 holiday cookies in 6 varieties. I was putting together a spreadsheet to calculate the total amounts of each ingredient I needed so that I could do all the shopping at once (when you make this many cookies, efficiency is critical if you want to keep your day job). But my printer was out of ink, so I sneakernetted the file over to another (Windows) machine to print it out. I was able to open the file, but all the numbers in the cells were read in a new format -- scientific notation. I was tickled! I got to shop in scientific notation! (I'm going to publish it on my holiday cookies portion of my website, too).
That said, one major flaw for me is the non-portability of spreadsheets with certain types of formulas in them between Applix's spreadsheet program and Excel.
If you haven't seen it earlier, you may want to check out the work of Maja Mataric, whose "nerd herd" of autonomous robots build up a sort of team/cooperative behavior by sending signals to one another; in an experiment, they collectively try to herd six hockey pucks toward two goals in the most efficient way by understanding which members of the herd are closest to the pucks. You can check it out at http://www-robotics.usc.edu/~maja/home.html.
Thomas Frank and his cohorts at The Baffler have some great and funny essays on the relationship between "hip" and how it gets degraded by mass adoption (they call it GAPpification). It's interesting that this happens so frequently not just in the area of music and clothes but in technology, too. A lot of The Baffler's content has been anthologized in the book Commodify Your Dissent, available from all the usual places.
After a few months of dual boot I zotzed my Windows partition; and to a large extent I am Jane Average user. There are a few things I miss but it's not really about having Quicken or some other productivity app. Things like having common cut and paste buffers would help. I've tried some solutions to this, but they're not ones Joe Average could really attempt.
Agreed. I was hired by a bunch of (non MS) sw giants to look at the potential for these "thin clients" -- and they're just going nowhere. That's not to say that someone won't "crack the code" for a consumer device. Look at how many unsuccessful handhelds there were before the Pilot.
Well, I hope that things will work out the way you suggest -- that nice guys will win out over not so nice ones in an open-source environment. But I think that the Darwinism example is probably not a good support for such an argument, since evolution in the wild usually favors the more aggressive opponent. To use a somewhat similar metaphor, "bad money drives out good."
However, it may be that evolution isn't really a very good metaphor for the open-source development community, since it would imply that there are no social rules, and clearly there are lots of social rules in the open source community about what is acceptable and what is not that aren't just based on utility (which is all evolution cares about) but based on values.
I actually think a more appropriate metaphor would be a small society with "normative values" -- things that everyone accepts as ok or not ok. Clearly, we have a case here where the normative values haven't been established.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a wonderful novel by Rudy Rucker called Wetware that is based on just this topic. A phenomenon called chipmold fries all integrated circuits. Since so many common household gadgets already contain them, many of them stop working. Some people's cars also stop (this is set a little further in the future). The inhabitants of the novel come up with a way to infect plastic with a type of mold that can be tweaked and programmed, coming up with integrated circuit replacements that look a little bit like daubs of Silly Putty. Eventually, whole autonomous, intelligent beings grow out of the smart-mold silly putty, who are all a bit like Plastic Man. It's a great, funny, intelligent book, much better than my description here. You can visit Rucker's homepage at http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/ He's a computer science professor at San Jose State, and has some cool cellular automata and little online games & stuff on his site, as well as links to his books.
I hope that they bring back Computer Shopper. This phone-book sized tome composed almost entirely of ads (and some totally worthless reviews which I ignored) was actually very valuable -- and there really *isn't* anything on the Net that really replicates its breadth and depth. When you do product searches on any site, now all you get are the big suppliers, not the multitudes of small distributors specializing in one type of item (who, btw, often have better prices & service). How are you supposed to find them now? CS was convenient.
Raster image processing....
The term "to rip" comes from Raster Image Processing, and it's the main way that stuff from your screen becomes ink on paper from your printer. PostScript software is often referred to by people who make printer software as a "PostScript rip" or "ripper." People used to know it was an acronym because in the beginning they used all caps -- RIP. Over time, "ripping" became a verb, and now "rip" has become a general term for moving and distributing data; taking a CD and making an MP3 file is often called "ripping" even though there are no raster images involved. Unfortunately, rip is associated with the colloquialism "rip off."
Agreed.
I've been using Applix Office at home, and I like it a lot. But moving files from home to work, where they have Windows, is tough.
Actually, it's toughest in the other direction (work to home) because I have to remember to save files in earlier file formats; as usual, I am the weakest link in this chain. What I would really love is one of those programs that seem to grow up around the Mac ecosphere to translate PC files into other files -- even just to plain ol' text would be good if it would help me read it.
Actually, I have one funny story. Every year I make over 500 holiday cookies in 6 varieties. I was putting together a spreadsheet to calculate the total amounts of each ingredient I needed so that I could do all the shopping at once (when you make this many cookies, efficiency is critical if you want to keep your day job). But my printer was out of ink, so I sneakernetted the file over to another (Windows) machine to print it out. I was able to open the file, but all the numbers in the cells were read in a new format -- scientific notation. I was tickled! I got to shop in scientific notation! (I'm going to publish it on my holiday cookies portion of my website, too).
That said, one major flaw for me is the non-portability of spreadsheets with certain types of formulas in them between Applix's spreadsheet program and Excel.
lwilliams
If you haven't seen it earlier, you may want to check out the work of Maja Mataric, whose "nerd herd" of autonomous robots build up a sort of team/cooperative behavior by sending signals to one another; in an experiment, they collectively try to herd six hockey pucks toward two goals in the most efficient way by understanding which members of the herd are closest to the pucks. You can check it out at http://www-robotics.usc.edu/~maja/home.html.
Sun recently acquired Forte, a development tools vendor who had been moving towards the greener pastures of middleware/integration software.
Also, does anyone really believe this NC stuff? I've done the math on a market model; I can't get it to add up.
Thomas Frank and his cohorts at The Baffler have some great and funny essays on the relationship between "hip" and how it gets degraded by mass adoption (they call it GAPpification). It's interesting that this happens so frequently not just in the area of music and clothes but in technology, too. A lot of The Baffler's content has been anthologized in the book Commodify Your Dissent, available from all the usual places.
After a few months of dual boot I zotzed my Windows partition; and to a large extent I am Jane Average user. There are a few things I miss but it's not really about having Quicken or some other productivity app. Things like having common cut and paste buffers would help. I've tried some solutions to this, but they're not ones Joe Average could really attempt.
Agreed. I was hired by a bunch of (non MS) sw giants to look at the potential for these "thin clients" -- and they're just going nowhere. That's not to say that someone won't "crack the code" for a consumer device. Look at how many unsuccessful handhelds there were before the Pilot.
Well, I hope that things will work out the way you suggest -- that nice guys will win out over not so nice ones in an open-source environment. But I think that the Darwinism example is probably not a good support for such an argument, since evolution in the wild usually favors the more aggressive opponent. To use a somewhat similar metaphor, "bad money drives out good."
However, it may be that evolution isn't really a very good metaphor for the open-source development community, since it would imply that there are no social rules, and clearly there are lots of social rules in the open source community about what is acceptable and what is not that aren't just based on utility (which is all evolution cares about) but based on values.
I actually think a more appropriate metaphor would be a small society with "normative values" -- things that everyone accepts as ok or not ok. Clearly, we have a case here where the normative values haven't been established.