In one article he describes or hints at: barcodes, hyptertext, magnetic hard disks, optical storage, desktop interfaces, the familiar navigation thumbnails/process for navigating items. And one thing we still don't quite have: easily constructable hypertext links within the work environment between text image etc from the desktop.
And did I also see in there... yeah. A suggestion for neural implants or interfaces !
A very prescient work. Now I know why he is considered so highly by Arthur C. Clarke.
Shows perhaps the greatest value of futurists: Pre-empting the patent lawyers.
Um er yeah. Well the point is that at that time it had just been revealed that ice age conditions could return in decades rather than millenia. And that the SO2 in the atmosphere would add to cloud cover increasing the Earth's albedo. We are after all overdue for the next ice age... it will come eventually about that there isn't much doubt.
As for Global Warming. Yes the Earth has warmed up in the last 200 years... not much debate about that. The last bit of hope the renegades had was the results of NASA satellite temperature measurements which showed no such gain in the temperature of the troposphere. Then it was discovered that no-one had factored in the decay in the satellite's orbit over the decades of observation.... final result: there is indeed warming.
Actually, I never took much stock in the standard measurements... really fiddly working out statistics of sea based or land based temperature measurements for over a century. However, some bright spark realised that if you sunk a bore through the permafrost in tundra areas then you would get a clear signal of temperature effects resulting from past changes because of the slow pace of heat diffusion through icy ground. And bingo... there is a heat pulse from last century slowly advancing downwards.
Is it the Sun. Well it could be. Seems a bit of a coincidence we get warming just when we expect it though. I do recall some comments in the journals that the temperature change measured in ice cores or somewhere was the largest since the holocene but I can't remember where. Anyway what's the mystery here... increase greenhouse gas... planet gets warmer... well duh! Why is this so difficult ?
Didn't think much of anime myself until I saw Neon Genesis. Wow. Like reading a deep novel. My kids and I taped the series (the dubbed one) and watched each episode about 10 times (no joke). Always see something new in it.
Unfortunately, Neon Genesis Evangelion is now the standard I judge all anime by. I was hoping Lain would be in that ballpark. Someday a new NGE will come along... I hope. I usually don't last much past the first episode unless there is some substance in the series.
Have to agree with you on this. Although I like GTK+/Gnome and like the look of KDE/Qt... the reason I got disgusted with Win32 was the unnecessary complexity. It seemed looking at windows that the window manager merely needed to be a thin graphical interface to independent components. Sadly, that is not where Linux desktops are going lately.
Of course, there's no reason why someone can't grab the code from GTK+ and do some re-engineering and make their own window manager based on this. Maybe this is why Sawmill is so lightweight... Not a heavy investment in Window Manager internal code.
And as you say it would be nice to take some of the natural architecture of Linux/Unix and turn it to our advantage i.e. use of file/devices instead of arcane API calls.
I don't know. It seems like the U.S. government bodies just can't wait to supply countries like China with the technology to suppress democratic movements. First in a country noted for free speech they try to narc the internet protocols, or introduce snooper technology. I can just see third world countries taking notes on "How to find all those dissidents". Australia seems bent on similar ideas. But the government here is a bunch of complete losers and dolts. They fucking wouldn't know what the internet is anyway... just follow the latest braindead pseudo-current affairs program on channel 7 or whatever.
Anyway I digress. The point is that all of these proposals are think tank exercises, at the very least for prototypes of suppression that will be taken up by other countries.
When the power of home PCs becames sufficient to run decent operating systems : e.g. Linux. Then the range of possible researchers would expand dramatically. All those CompSci graduates could then go home at night and work on some good idea, bring in a few friends etc. Add the Internet and the whole process accelerates dramatically. If you can also make some money out of it then you could start a company and implement the research as a product.
In this scenario, many research centers would find themselves less productive. Mainly because they now have so much competition. There are plenty of smart programmers who don't work at research centers, but who with little trouble can get a linux system (or even a Windows one I guess) to work on. And all you need to publish is a web page and a mention on Slashdot or a spot on Sourceforge.
I have not noticed such discrimination myself. I am in my late 40s. I was a C++ programmer, then Java and now back to C++. For the first time in 2 years now I am not doing web stuff.
That said I have noticed one thing. Most programmers very soon get tired of programming, why I don't is a question I can't answer. But I have often seen programmers burn out, or just decide sysadmin or business analyst etc is better than what they are doing. Once you're out of the coding loop you tend to stay out.
I have never had trouble at my age switching jobs, it has been in fact ridiculously easy. My bet is that in 10 years you'll think coding is the last thing you'll want to be doing.
But me I just drool at the thought of learning more Python and using GTK+, and hoping MFC dies an ugly death.
When I first heard of XML it seemed obvious that it would make an ideal medium for an RPC mechanism that could be platform neutral.
In my opinion this is a "good idea", never mind for the moment that M$ will obviously put their own spin on it. Maybe they will try to steal the lead in integrating XML so that as we saw in a recently referenced news item ("Did Microsoft try to kill Unix?" or somesuch) they can take control of the enterprise by controlling the communications medium. The big thing is that this should improve interoperability and if the Open Source movement gets on board with XML support then MS will have the shock of their lives if , for example, Linux XML support and use overtakes MS.
This is just some undisciplined rambling of course, the issue howeve requires some careful thought... this is a warning shot everyone.
I think I would take issue about "neatly stacked circular orbits" being rare. We must remember that because Marcy and Butler's technique uses Doppler changes in the star's spectrum then it will preferentially pick up strange solar systems especially ones with large planets in very eccentric orbits. There are a LOT of stars within 100 light years, we should not be surprised if we find some very odd things with this technique. Still it does put to rest the argument that solar systems are rare, it also sugests that more "ordinary" systems are likely.
I wonder if there is any chance of refining the technique to pick up our kind of solar system ? Failing that then we'll just have to wait for the deployment of the space borne multiple mirror projects in development at the moment...
Apart from the obvious threats to innovation, fair pricing etc that a monopoly like MS represents there is also a threat by monopolies to democracies.
Last time I looked MS's market capitalization was a shade under HALF A TRILLION dollars. Yep trillion! That much money means _awesome_ influence not just on markets but on governments. I actually think in this MS has been pretty good that they haven't blatantly bought out the entire US administration. Mind you it would only be a matter of time before they tried it... and by then they would be even more powerful.
It seems to me that there will always be companies that grow too big and become a threat to the society that supports them. Breaking them up is the only thing to do. It wont hurt MS either, as I recall when the US steel monopoly was broken up earlier in the century Rockefeller made MORE money as a result but had LESS power. I wonder if that is the real Gates take on this, that for a guy who has always been in control and been the boss this would be a dramatic loss of control and power.
As I see it the situation is actually worse for Microsoft than it first appears. MS has said that W2K is not like NT to the extent that there will need to be considerable retraining of staff, i.e. developers and administrators. That means a lot of extra cost.
Since many e-commerce sites are relatively small there will be little attraction to pay all this extra for retraining, re-development and new licences. Why move from NT at all in that case. Why not then just wait a while while, regear and transfer to something most of your developers probably already know about --- Linux/FreeBSD.
I don't think this licensing scheme is going to seriously harm MS by itself, but I bet a lot of corporates are doing some serious thinking about their server directions when this issue is combined with the retraining requirements.
Am I the only one to have followed the link at the bottom of that report to a response by a "Linux zealot" ?
The guy actually knew the reporter (who re-hashed the Gartner Report stuff) and reports on her attitude "its just an operating system" with what he regards as the true distinguishing feature, about why Linux would still be preferred even if a good percentage of the Microsoft "myths" piece were true (which I don't believe).
Essentially, Free software (as in Open of course) and ability to extend and have open standards and interoperability. Worth more than some small temporary (and perhaps imagined) difference in performance.
Although we already have a lot of animals that need help now it certainly wouldn't hurt to bring back a member of the megafauna. There aren't very many large land mammals left. Funny that most of them went extinct as homo sapiens experienced its first interglacial ? I think it is a reasonable possibility that humans had some hand in the original extinction of the mammoth, bringing them back could then be considered retroactive rescue attempt.
Besides nothing much lives in the tundra areas even now. I'm sure the native people of those areas wouldn't mind the extra tourism.
The reality is however, that even considering the rapid freezing there is bound to be considerable genetic damage.
In fact isn't this the same institute which had members sign a statement supporting Microsoft's position anti-trust position ? Then Microsoft paid for national advertising of that statement.
It also seems to me that there is way too much mulling over whether an experiment was done correctly 50 years ago rather than suggesting new fair experiments to answer this question. These institutes are usually loaded with cash (since they often have indecently close links with big business), surely they could fund their own experiments if this is such an "ideal" test case.
IF there are no other explanations, like the contribution from heat emissions etc, then perhaps we are seeing an effect from some locally trapped dark matter in the solar system. Like a minor version of the concentration within the galactic halo. Not enough to be noticable calculating planetary orbits, but with a decades long radial trajectory (well more radial than planets) there would be a detectable cumulative effect.
XML is probably best applied where there is some variable structure data in some kind of nested format. For an excellent example of this just look at the un gzipped spreadsheet files from gnumeric which are XML. However, configuration data often doesn't require quite such a level of nesting and although XML solves object oriented data etc very neatly it seems overkill for configuration issues. A lot of configuration data is quite happy with the old "keyword=value" format.
If we ever wanted to implement a Registry for Linux (shudder!) then XML would be a good way, though why you'd want to do it is another matter:) .
As a data interchange format it seems to me ideal, as long as the tags are understood at both ends... but that's going to an issue anyway no matter what the format.
For a single user machine the root and user's password need not be different... just the username, so the root and user password could be the same and root access is kept separate but accessible.
For a start what can you say about an article that actually quotes the Mindcraft report ?
Secondly while slamming Java it shows graphs showing the number of Java apps doubling each year and the number of Java programmers increasing at an even greater rate.
Then the article uses Microsoft comments as the core of its article with a trailing comment by RedHat. This article is total crap.
Linux wont die because people find it fun. That's it. If some other OS comes along that is more fun then maybe a big slice of linux programmers will go over , but even then not all. I don't see a new OS like Linux coming along in the next 5 years... but then 5 years is a long time. What we can say is that it wont come from Microsoft.
As for Microsoft. The pace of technological change in Linux is much faster than that of Windows, it wont be very long before Linux overtakes Windows in many areas we traditionally think of as being MS "strong" points e.g. look and feel.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow a really interesting article by Bush.
... yeah. A suggestion for neural implants or interfaces !
In one article he describes or hints at: barcodes, hyptertext, magnetic hard disks, optical storage, desktop interfaces, the familiar navigation thumbnails/process for navigating items. And one thing we still don't quite have: easily constructable hypertext links within the work environment between text image etc from the desktop.
And did I also see in there
A very prescient work. Now I know why he is considered so highly by Arthur C. Clarke.
Shows perhaps the greatest value of futurists: Pre-empting the patent lawyers.
Pete
Um er yeah. Well the point is that at that time it had just been revealed that ice age conditions could return in decades rather than millenia. And that the SO2 in the atmosphere would add to cloud cover increasing the Earth's albedo. We are after all overdue for the next ice age ... it will come eventually about that there isn't much doubt.
... not much debate about that. The last bit of hope the renegades had was the results of NASA satellite temperature measurements which showed no such gain in the temperature of the troposphere. Then it was discovered that no-one had factored in the decay in the satellite's orbit over the decades of observation.... final result: there is indeed warming.
... really fiddly working out statistics of sea based or land based temperature measurements for over a century. However, some bright spark realised that if you sunk a bore through the permafrost in tundra areas then you would get a clear signal of temperature effects resulting from past changes because of the slow pace of heat diffusion through icy ground. And bingo ... there is a heat pulse from last century slowly advancing downwards.
... increase greenhouse gas ... planet gets warmer ... well duh! Why is this so difficult ?
As for Global Warming. Yes the Earth has warmed up in the last 200 years
Actually, I never took much stock in the standard measurements
Is it the Sun. Well it could be. Seems a bit of a coincidence we get warming just when we expect it though. I do recall some comments in the journals that the temperature change measured in ice cores or somewhere was the largest since the holocene but I can't remember where. Anyway what's the mystery here
Peter
Didn't think much of anime myself until I saw Neon Genesis. Wow. Like reading a deep novel. My kids and I taped the series (the dubbed one) and watched each episode about 10 times (no joke). Always see something new in it.
... I hope. I usually don't last much past the first episode unless there is some substance in the series.
Unfortunately, Neon Genesis Evangelion is now the standard I judge all anime by. I was hoping Lain would be in that ballpark. Someday a new NGE will come along
Peter
Have to agree with you on this. Although I like GTK+/Gnome and like the look of KDE/Qt ... the reason I got disgusted with Win32 was the unnecessary complexity. It seemed looking at windows that the window manager merely needed to be a thin graphical interface to independent components. Sadly, that is not where Linux desktops are going lately.
... Not a heavy investment in Window Manager internal code.
Of course, there's no reason why someone can't grab the code from GTK+ and do some re-engineering and make their own window manager based on this. Maybe this is why Sawmill is so lightweight
And as you say it would be nice to take some of the natural architecture of Linux/Unix and turn it to our advantage i.e. use of file/devices instead of arcane API calls.
Peter
I don't know. It seems like the U.S. government bodies just can't wait to supply countries like China with the technology to suppress democratic movements. First in a country noted for free speech they try to narc the internet protocols, or introduce snooper technology. I can just see third world countries taking notes on "How to find all those dissidents". ... just follow the latest braindead pseudo-current affairs program on channel 7 or whatever.
Australia seems bent on similar ideas. But the government here is a bunch of complete losers and dolts. They fucking wouldn't know what the internet is anyway
Anyway I digress. The point is that all of these proposals are think tank exercises, at the very least for prototypes of suppression that will be taken up by other countries.
When the power of home PCs becames sufficient to run decent operating systems : e.g. Linux. Then the range of possible researchers would expand dramatically. All those CompSci graduates could then go home at night and work on some good idea, bring in a few friends etc. Add the Internet and the whole process accelerates dramatically. If you can also make some money out of it then you could start a company and implement the research as a product.
In this scenario, many research centers would find themselves less productive. Mainly because they now have so much competition. There are plenty of smart programmers who don't work at research centers, but who with little trouble can get a linux system (or even a Windows one I guess) to work on. And all you need to publish is a web page and a mention on Slashdot or a spot on Sourceforge.
Peter
I have not noticed such discrimination myself. I am in my late 40s. I was a C++ programmer, then Java and now back to C++. For the first time in 2 years now I am not doing web stuff.
That said I have noticed one thing. Most programmers very soon get tired of programming, why I don't is a question I can't answer. But I have often seen programmers burn out, or just decide sysadmin or business analyst etc is better than what they are doing. Once you're out of the coding loop you tend to stay out.
I have never had trouble at my age switching jobs, it has been in fact ridiculously easy. My bet is that in 10 years you'll think coding is the last thing you'll want to be doing.
But me I just drool at the thought of learning more Python and using GTK+, and hoping MFC dies an ugly death.
Pete
When I first heard of XML it seemed obvious that it would make an ideal medium for an RPC mechanism that could be platform neutral.
... this is a warning shot everyone.
In my opinion this is a "good idea", never mind for the moment that M$ will obviously put their own spin on it. Maybe they will try to steal the lead in integrating XML so that as we saw in a recently referenced news item ("Did Microsoft try to kill Unix?" or somesuch) they can take control of the enterprise by controlling the communications medium. The big thing is that this should improve interoperability and if the Open Source movement gets on board with XML support then MS will have the shock of their lives if , for example, Linux XML support and use overtakes MS.
This is just some undisciplined rambling of course, the issue howeve requires some careful thought
I think I would take issue about "neatly stacked circular orbits" being rare. We must remember that because Marcy and Butler's technique uses Doppler changes in the star's spectrum then it will preferentially pick up strange solar systems especially ones with large planets in very eccentric orbits. There are a LOT of stars within 100 light years, we should not be surprised if we find some very odd things with this technique. Still it does put to rest the argument that solar systems are rare, it also sugests that more "ordinary" systems are likely.
I wonder if there is any chance of refining the technique to pick up our kind of solar system ? Failing that then we'll just have to wait for the deployment of the space borne multiple mirror projects in development at the moment...
Apart from the obvious threats to innovation, fair pricing etc that a monopoly like MS represents there is also a threat by monopolies to democracies.
... and by then they would be even more powerful.
Last time I looked MS's market capitalization was a shade under HALF A TRILLION dollars. Yep trillion! That much money means _awesome_ influence not just on markets but on governments. I actually think in this MS has been pretty good that they haven't blatantly bought out the entire US administration. Mind you it would only be a matter of time before they tried it
It seems to me that there will always be companies that grow too big and become a threat to the society that supports them. Breaking them up is the only thing to do. It wont hurt MS either, as I recall when the US steel monopoly was broken up earlier in the century Rockefeller made MORE money as a result but had LESS power. I wonder if that is the real Gates take on this, that for a guy who has always been in control and been the boss this would be a dramatic loss of control and power.
As I see it the situation is actually worse for Microsoft than it first appears. MS has said that W2K is not like NT to the extent that there will need to be considerable retraining of staff, i.e. developers and administrators. That means a lot of extra cost.
Since many e-commerce sites are relatively small there will be little attraction to pay all this extra for retraining, re-development and new licences. Why move from NT at all in that case. Why not then just wait a while while, regear and transfer to something most of your developers probably already know about --- Linux/FreeBSD.
I don't think this licensing scheme is going to seriously harm MS by itself, but I bet a lot of corporates are doing some serious thinking about their server directions when this issue is combined with the retraining requirements.
Just my 2 cents anyway.
Am I the only one to have followed the link at the bottom of that report to a response by a "Linux zealot" ?
The guy actually knew the reporter (who re-hashed the Gartner Report stuff) and reports on her attitude "its just an operating system" with what he regards as the true distinguishing feature, about why Linux would still be preferred even if a good percentage of the Microsoft "myths" piece were true (which I don't believe).
Essentially, Free software (as in Open of course) and ability to extend and have open standards and interoperability. Worth more than some small temporary (and perhaps imagined) difference in performance.
Peter
Although we already have a lot of animals that need help now it certainly wouldn't hurt to bring back a member of the megafauna. There aren't very many large land mammals left. Funny that most of them went extinct as homo sapiens experienced its first interglacial ? I think it is a reasonable possibility that humans had some hand in the original extinction of the mammoth, bringing them back could then be considered retroactive rescue attempt.
Besides nothing much lives in the tundra areas even now. I'm sure the native people of those areas wouldn't mind the extra tourism.
The reality is however, that even considering the rapid freezing there is bound to be considerable genetic damage.
In fact isn't this the same institute which had members sign a statement supporting Microsoft's position anti-trust position ? Then Microsoft paid for national advertising of that statement.
It also seems to me that there is way too much mulling over whether an experiment was done correctly 50 years ago rather than suggesting new fair experiments to answer this question. These institutes are usually loaded with cash (since they often have indecently close links with big business), surely they could fund their own experiments if this is such an "ideal" test case.
IF there are no other explanations, like the contribution from heat emissions etc, then perhaps we are seeing an effect from some locally trapped dark matter in the solar system. Like a minor version of the concentration within the galactic halo. Not enough to be noticable calculating planetary orbits, but with a decades long radial trajectory (well more radial than planets) there would be a detectable cumulative effect.
Just my 2 cents.
Notice that it is 125 words in one sentence!
... supports the thesis that it is the output of some scripting.
I wonder if anyone tried to actually read this on one lungful of air
XML is probably best applied where there is some variable structure data in some kind of nested format. For an excellent example of this just look at the un gzipped spreadsheet files from gnumeric which are XML. However, configuration data often doesn't require quite such a level of nesting and although XML solves object oriented data etc very neatly it seems overkill for configuration issues. A lot of configuration data is quite happy with the old "keyword=value" format.
:) .
... but that's going to an issue anyway no matter what the format.
If we ever wanted to implement a Registry for Linux (shudder!) then XML would be a good way, though why you'd want to do it is another matter
As a data interchange format it seems to me ideal, as long as the tags are understood at both ends
For a single user machine the root and user's password need not be different ... just the username, so the root and user password could be the same and root access is kept separate but accessible.
For a start what can you say about an article that actually quotes the Mindcraft report ?
... but then 5 years is a long time. What we can say is that it wont come from Microsoft.
Secondly while slamming Java it shows graphs showing the number of Java apps doubling each year and the number of Java programmers increasing at an even greater rate.
Then the article uses Microsoft comments as the core of its article with a trailing comment by RedHat. This article is total crap.
Linux wont die because people find it fun. That's it. If some other OS comes along that is more fun then maybe a big slice of linux programmers will go over , but even then not all. I don't see a new OS like Linux coming along in the next 5 years
As for Microsoft. The pace of technological change in Linux is much faster than that of Windows, it wont be very long before Linux overtakes Windows in many areas we traditionally think of as being MS "strong" points e.g. look and feel.
Just my thoughts anyway.
Peter