While I share your view that taking peoples chices away from them is always a bad thing, I don't see that as what Katz is advocating. What he is advocating is a self imposed, benificial filter. He has made the assumption that at some future time, continous technological saturation and advancement will drive us insane, and is simply proposing a mechanism to slow the progress to a human-managable pace!
And he's not saying you need to be forced to let some machine play God for you. Katz is saying 'hey! lets invent an AI tool that lets US play our own god without ever having the associated cerebral workload!'
And why should we? I know I'd be better off if I never had to hear about the New/Whiz 2.0 digital spatial Quisenart, or her companion appliances, the Hygromatic ToastMaster 4.2 or the New/Shazam electromagnetic back-hair shaver. Not only wouldn't I even think of purchasing them in real life, I really don't need some snazzy jingle cluttering my brain. I'd rather have seen/heard the advertisment for VA, or no advertisment at all.
We still use for our VERY critical inhouse legal databases. It has yet to let us down, really, but it is a total bear to deal with if you started in any newer *nix.
Most people find it funny that I still have a Xenix box, (quad full height 320M HD) on my desk.
Assume that this so-called 'autism' exists, and it is at least partially genetic. In today's society, those that posess it are at an advantage. Now remember back to elementary evolutionary science; those members of a species with even a slight advantage will tend to outnumber those without over time. If society as we know it continues indefinitly, geekdom will expand until those without the trait of mild autism are the minority. At that point, we (the geeks) will have a great laugh when the tables reverse and we discover 'Neandertalism', and ostracize the 'over-emotional', 'low-IQ' throwbacks to the 19th century over it.
As complicated as it looks, these puppies (and their older models) are user upgradable. Granted, you have to order the new chip from Kryo, but thats excusable. All it amounts to is clamping down the compressor (some of them came with autoclamping connectors) and unscrewing the super cooled chip. Go ahead and buy the overclocked 800. When the 800 comes out, Kryo will have it overclocked to 1.1G, and they'll be more than happy to sell it to you sans compressor/case.
Court documents != contracts. Besides, if I were to lose my original copy of my divorce settlement, I can walk into the county clerks office and get for a certified copy for four bucks. Originals are not that important!
One of the people I work with, a woman in her late forties, has the horrible habit of tying up the printer first thing every morning. (So badly, in fact, we ended up installing a personal printer for her.) On the way past her desk recently, I asked her what was so darn important it had to be printed every morning. 'Oh, I print my email.' was her response. I asked why. 'Well, if the message was kind of important, I file it. If it has something in it I have to do later, I fold it up and stick it to my calander with a push-pin. If its something I want my secretary to handle, I'll stick it in her 'in-basket'.' My jaw dropped. I told her 'You know, you can forward the relevant messages to your secretary, put the 'important' ones in their own mailbox, and drag the time-sensitive ones right into your scheduler! I'd bet it would take you a lot less time, and it would certainly kill fewer trees!' She looked at me with an evil glare. 'Listen, hon. I've had my system for mail for almost twenty years, and I'm not going to change it just because it doesn't come pre-printed anymore.'
Technology has already replaced the written contract. Almost all contracts include a 'photocopy' clause, which basically says that for all legal matters requiring the original signed contract, a photocopy/scan/faxsimile will be judged original. At my company, as soon as the contract is signed it is sent to be scanned, indexed and added to the database of thousands of others. The original is destroyed, no longer being needed.
This sounds more like a e-commerce marketing ploy than an evil plot to spy on us. IBM is simply marketing for the same audience that buys into 'Blue'; AOLusers. They're selling it to the uninformed. For the rest of us, the chip is useless. It may provide some limited form of encryption, (read small key) but which of us would actually trust it over GPG? Watermarking? Not as reliable as a Verisign registered key, I'm sure. Plus, we can be sure that the possible 'Big Brother' applications of it will only be included in MS products, so we're all safe! Right?
I have to forgive poor Georgie that one. He spent quite a few years fighting 'the Red Menace' at the CIA , and I gather bought into the anti-communist/athiest propaganda a bit. Granted, it was a dumb thing to say, but as an athiest, I would forgive it sooner than if he had say, puked on my new carpeting, or spent the weekend flipping me the bird, or fathering some blithering fool govenor.
> It seems that, in our society, it is okay to be > anything but Christian.
That about sums it up. Every night on the news, you see some murderous fanatic claiming he did it because it was the 'christian' thing to do, or some self-proclaimed paragon of christianity preaching against the Constitution, athiests, television, . The actions of these high profile screwballs stick everyone else with a label. If you don't like the label, get rid of the screwballs.
Unfortunatly, with a nuclear device you have power to spare. The explosive power of even a smallish device quickly makes the argument of efficiency moot. Even if 90% of the energy from the explosion was wasted, you still have a HUGE amount going into the water. Assuming 90% loss, a 1M nuke would look like 100,000 tons of conventional explosive with 0% loss. That is far more explosive than could ever be practically placed.
As for the 'wall of water' I mentioned; it was an actual test performed in the early days after WWII. They anchored a few captured Japanese ships and a pair of stipped Allied destroyers off Bikini Atoll, loaded with domestic animals as test subjects. The plane dropping the A-bomb missed its target by a huge margin, and only one of the ships was sunk because of the wave. (Another sank days later because of damage incurred).
Looks like I'm going to make some money. They're taking a US firearms sales increase at 200-1 odds. US firearms sales are already up a few percentage points over last year. Even if December sales are relativly static, I'm sure the last rush of nuts will pull up December sales. And at those odds, it's better than the RH IPO.
This is not really news. In the 1950's, the US tested both submerged A-bombs and surface detonated H-bombs for efficacy against ships and submarines. If a small A-bomb detonated on the oceans surface can produce a thirty foot wall of water five miles from zero, imagine the devastating effect of a H-bomb several powers of magnitude larger. Thankfully, the experiments in New Zealand appear to have been conducted with conventional munition, and were just a 'proof-of-concept'.
Just an observation: The world would be much safer if all nuclear weapons were required to run Win 95. If they even make it off the pad, they'll bluescreen before the target.
> He also criticized the Nokia 9000 as not a > convenient PDA and not a convenient cell-phone > either..
Perhaps the Nokia 9K is just Transmeta's choice for the corporate cellphone, and it pisses him off. I constantly complain that my PDA is too huge; Does that mean my company is going to be making smaller PDA's? Nope. Mabye he was just using it as a fairly recent example to further his point on purpose built devices!
Quit jumping to conclusions! Transmeta is not the CIA! You don't have to read between the lines constantly. As Freud is oft quoted, 'Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.'
Frankly, I was disappointed as soon as I saw the introduction. I suppose the parallel to the O'Reilly book fooled me, but the title was way too ambitious. Still, a fine read for those new(er) to *nix. I'm mailing out the link to a few of the guys here and reading it will be enforced. We had a 'cat stuff >/dev/fd0' debacle last week, resulting in a half a dozen calls to me asking to retrieve their file so they could open it up in Word.
Not only does Intel get to stay out of the DOJ antitrust warpath, we, the 'consumer' get better, cheaper chips! I think it was a serious, almost Microsoftian mistake on Intels part to junk the s7 processor scheme.(We'll make them pay for the CPU AND the MB chipset!) While they were bust pushing overpriced PII chips and Slot1 MBs, AMD has been silently stealing away market share with the K6 I/II/III, and then using that share to undercut Intel further.
In addition, I can see them hurting Intel with the incredible Athlon. Even if Intel can get stable, faster PIIIs to market, AMD will have the capacity to one up them monthly in both performance and clock speed for years!
(Forgive my toadiness. I have owned far more AMD-based machines in the last few years than Intel, and they ALWAYS give me more zip for less cash)
I imagine some sort of contextual cache mechanism would work. If your last three queries were for information on Des Moines, Iowa, the 'Guide' could pull down likely targets for the next search. If you had just requested the Linux-Networking howto, it could pull down copies of (or links to) the Ethernet and Hardware howtos. As for the British accent, that would be kind of easy. I've done speech synth on boxen with far less power than is required to churn out MP3 files like some of them are doing. Festival runs quite nicely on a DX 75, while real time mp3s usually require at least a P90. (Yes, I'm dated.)
I can see a myriad of used for the Guide, if they implement it something like the literary equivalent. Imagine losing a fan belt out on US-71, and not knowing how to put it back on.. Not only will the Guide keep you from panicking, it could potentially tell you which service stations you could call, as well as how to put the belt back on yourself. You're having trouble finding your destination? Grab a map off of the Guide; it's easier than finding the Interstellar Spaceway. Can't get the firewall to cooperate? Pull the specs from the Guide, and then use it to SSH onto the box. Have a german engineer you need to communicate with? The Guide includes an electronic Babelfish. In a meeting and you NEED the 'netcat' manpage? Don't panic, the Guide has it! Some hints on beating a Sun boot PROM into submission? Hit the Guide first. Wake up on a strange spacecraft with a towel in your hand? Is the Tlaziam empire tightening her grip on the Acensus Cluster? Well, those may not be covered in the Guide, but I'm sure you see the point..
I'm sorry, but I can see absoulutly no reason that NCR can claim 'irreperable harm', nor even 'harm'! NCR, a largish manufacturer of cash registers, ATMs and the like, and Netscape, a web browser/portal, have virtually no business overlap! Has NCR lost sales of their ATMs because Navigator uses the same data cache mechanism? No. Has NCR lost POS customers because Netscape incorporates a low-level feature that they have a bogus patent on? Nope. Is Netscape a threat to their dying PC division because of patent infringement? Not likely. I think it a little more likely that NCR has an outstanding patent infringement claim with a company in direct competition, and that they are using this attack on Netscape as some sort of sick leverage. 'Golly, they can hit up a BIG company like AOL! We'd better cave!' Pshaw. I hope this goes to court and NCR gets crushed.
Corel has opened up a big can of hurt with this one, if they try to push their terms over the GPL. Fortunatly, I think this is just a case of the legal department getting jumpy over what it views as a potential loss. There is probably a small chunk of Corel-owned code in the distro, and the overzealous legal dept doesn't want anyone crying 'liable' when it breaks. But even if this is just some lawyer's itchy faxing finger, Corel needs at least some verbal abuse over it. (I wouldn't mind paddling the moron directly responsible). However, I'd hold off on the 'NO ONE SCREWS WITH THE GPL AND GETS AWAY WITH IT!' attitude until I hear from Corel.
But is the large planet in a close orbit the Universal norm? We don't know. Here's what we do know from simulation:
1. Planets are an unusual thing. Normally, the matter that constitutes them is eaten up in the early days of the system when it falls into the star due to an unstable (or non-existant) orbit.
2. Multiple planets are even more unusual. If they aren't eaten up by the star, at some point their orbits intersect. In universal time, collisions are frequent.
An argument can also be made about small planets, and 'rocky' planets both being unlikely.
Honestly. Go down to the local pawn shop and buy a few autorange Polaroid cameras (They made a few models. They're the only ones that take AA batteries.) The acoustic rangefinders return a voltage corresponding to the distance (exponential curve, I think.)
Sonar-equipped Mindstorms controlled by my Palm V.. Damn, and I just bought a pair of Polaroid cameras for their acoustic rangefinders. Muhaha. I just love the escalation of technology! Now I need some of those compact gas-turbines, and an iPic. Why? World domination! I'll sit outside the MS campus while the Mindstorms droid does a seek-and-destroy on ol' Billy.. And the integrated iPicBeowulf will allow the rest of the world to watch!
One side of me says: More dart guns, more high power hardware to drool over, more freebies (I WANT A SuSe shirt, damn it. That lizard is cool) and scantily clad she/he-geeks.
On the other hand, a lecture on 'Linux in the enterprise' might be nice, or even one covering 'Linux in embedded and RT microcontrollers'
We might get the vendors(Compaq/Alpha, VA, etc) to give specific attention to enterprise-wide Linux-only solutions. Most *nix guys aren't good salesmen, so when they go back to the office and propose 'Linux' to the PHB, a little constructive prep won't hurt.
Oh, yeah. Did I mention that I want a LOT of freebies?
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While I share your view that taking peoples chices away from them is always a bad thing, I don't see that as what Katz is advocating. What he is advocating is a self imposed, benificial filter. He has made the assumption that at some future time, continous technological saturation and advancement will drive us insane, and is simply proposing a mechanism to slow the progress to a human-managable pace!
And he's not saying you need to be forced to let some machine play God for you. Katz is saying 'hey! lets invent an AI tool that lets US play our own god without ever having the associated cerebral workload!'
And why should we? I know I'd be better off if I never had to hear about the New/Whiz 2.0 digital spatial Quisenart, or her companion appliances, the Hygromatic ToastMaster 4.2 or the New/Shazam electromagnetic back-hair shaver. Not only wouldn't I even think of purchasing them in real life, I really don't need some snazzy jingle cluttering my brain. I'd rather have seen/heard the advertisment for VA, or no advertisment at all.
We still use for our VERY critical inhouse legal databases. It has yet to let us down, really, but it is a total bear to deal with if you started in any newer *nix.
Most people find it funny that I still have a Xenix box, (quad full height 320M HD) on my desk.
Assume that this so-called 'autism' exists, and it is at least partially genetic. In today's society, those that posess it are at an advantage. Now remember back to elementary evolutionary science; those members of a species with even a slight advantage will tend to outnumber those without over time. If society as we know it continues indefinitly, geekdom will expand until those without the trait of mild autism are the minority. At that point, we (the geeks) will have a great laugh when the tables reverse and we discover 'Neandertalism', and ostracize the 'over-emotional', 'low-IQ' throwbacks to the 19th century over it.
Odd.. I don't seem to remember any problems with my OC'd 386 and my 48 mhz cordless phone.. ;-)
As complicated as it looks, these puppies (and their older models) are user upgradable. Granted, you have to order the new chip from Kryo, but thats excusable. All it amounts to is clamping down the compressor (some of them came with autoclamping connectors) and unscrewing the super cooled chip. Go ahead and buy the overclocked 800. When the 800 comes out, Kryo will have it overclocked to 1.1G, and they'll be more than happy to sell it to you sans compressor/case.
Court documents != contracts. Besides, if I were to lose my original copy of my divorce settlement, I can walk into the county clerks office and get for a certified copy for four bucks. Originals are not that important!
One of the people I work with, a woman in her late forties, has the horrible habit of tying up the printer first thing every morning. (So badly, in fact, we ended up installing a personal printer for her.) On the way past her desk recently, I asked her what was so darn important it had to be printed every morning. 'Oh, I print my email.' was her response. I asked why. 'Well, if the message was kind of important, I file it. If it has something in it I have to do later, I fold it up and stick it to my calander with a push-pin. If its something I want my secretary to handle, I'll stick it in her 'in-basket'.' My jaw dropped. I told her 'You know, you can forward the relevant messages to your secretary, put the 'important' ones in their own mailbox, and drag the time-sensitive ones right into your scheduler! I'd bet it would take you a lot less time, and it would certainly kill fewer trees!' She looked at me with an evil glare. 'Listen, hon. I've had my system for mail for almost twenty years, and I'm not going to change it just because it doesn't come pre-printed anymore.'
Technology has already replaced the written contract. Almost all contracts include a 'photocopy' clause, which basically says that for all legal matters requiring the original signed contract, a photocopy/scan/faxsimile will be judged original. At my company, as soon as the contract is signed it is sent to be scanned, indexed and added to the database of thousands of others. The original is destroyed, no longer being needed.
This sounds more like a e-commerce marketing ploy than an evil plot to spy on us. IBM is simply marketing for the same audience that buys into 'Blue'; AOLusers. They're selling it to the uninformed. For the rest of us, the chip is useless. It may provide some limited form of encryption, (read small key) but which of us would actually trust it over GPG? Watermarking? Not as reliable as a Verisign registered key, I'm sure.
Plus, we can be sure that the possible 'Big Brother' applications of it will only be included in MS products, so we're all safe! Right?
I have to forgive poor Georgie that one. He spent quite a few years fighting 'the Red Menace' at the CIA , and I gather bought into the anti-communist/athiest propaganda a bit. Granted, it was a dumb thing to say, but as an athiest, I would forgive it sooner than if he had say, puked on my new carpeting, or spent the weekend flipping me the bird, or fathering some blithering fool govenor.
> It seems that, in our society, it is okay to be
> anything but Christian.
That about sums it up. Every night on the news, you see some murderous fanatic claiming he did it because it was the 'christian' thing to do, or some self-proclaimed paragon of christianity preaching against the Constitution, athiests, television, . The actions of these high profile screwballs stick everyone else with a label. If you don't like the label, get rid of the screwballs.
Unfortunatly, with a nuclear device you have power to spare. The explosive power of even a smallish device quickly makes the argument of efficiency moot. Even if 90% of the energy from the explosion was wasted, you still have a HUGE amount going into the water. Assuming 90% loss, a 1M nuke would look like 100,000 tons of conventional explosive with 0% loss. That is far more explosive than could ever be practically placed.
As for the 'wall of water' I mentioned; it was an actual test performed in the early days after WWII. They anchored a few captured Japanese ships and a pair of stipped Allied destroyers off Bikini Atoll, loaded with domestic animals as test subjects. The plane dropping the A-bomb missed its target by a huge margin, and only one of the ships was sunk because of the wave. (Another sank days later because of damage incurred).
Looks like I'm going to make some money. They're taking a US firearms sales increase at 200-1 odds. US firearms sales are already up a few percentage points over last year. Even if December sales are relativly static, I'm sure the last rush of nuts will pull up December sales.
And at those odds, it's better than the RH IPO.
This is not really news. In the 1950's, the US tested both submerged A-bombs and surface detonated H-bombs for efficacy against ships and submarines. If a small A-bomb detonated on the oceans surface can produce a thirty foot wall of water five miles from zero, imagine the devastating effect of a H-bomb several powers of magnitude larger. Thankfully, the experiments in New Zealand appear to have been conducted with conventional munition, and were just a 'proof-of-concept'.
Just an observation: The world would be much safer if all nuclear weapons were required to run Win 95. If they even make it off the pad, they'll bluescreen before the target.
> He also criticized the Nokia 9000 as not a
> convenient PDA and not a convenient cell-phone
> either..
Perhaps the Nokia 9K is just Transmeta's choice for the corporate cellphone, and it pisses him off. I constantly complain that my PDA is too huge; Does that mean my company is going to be making smaller PDA's? Nope. Mabye he was just using it as a fairly recent example to further his point on purpose built devices!
Quit jumping to conclusions! Transmeta is not the CIA! You don't have to read between the lines constantly. As Freud is oft quoted, 'Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.'
Frankly, I was disappointed as soon as I saw the introduction. I suppose the parallel to the O'Reilly book fooled me, but the title was way too ambitious. Still, a fine read for those new(er) to *nix. I'm mailing out the link to a few of the guys here and reading it will be enforced. We had a 'cat stuff > /dev/fd0' debacle last week, resulting in a half a dozen calls to me asking to retrieve their file so they could open it up in Word.
Not only does Intel get to stay out of the DOJ antitrust warpath, we, the 'consumer' get better, cheaper chips! I think it was a serious, almost Microsoftian mistake on Intels part to junk the s7 processor scheme.(We'll make them pay for the CPU AND the MB chipset!) While they were bust pushing overpriced PII chips and Slot1 MBs, AMD has been silently stealing away market share with the K6 I/II/III, and then using that share to undercut Intel further.
In addition, I can see them hurting Intel with the incredible Athlon. Even if Intel can get stable, faster PIIIs to market, AMD will have the capacity to one up them monthly in both performance and clock speed for years!
(Forgive my toadiness. I have owned far more AMD-based machines in the last few years than Intel, and they ALWAYS give me more zip for less cash)
I imagine some sort of contextual cache mechanism would work. If your last three queries were for information on Des Moines, Iowa, the 'Guide' could pull down likely targets for the next search. If you had just requested the Linux-Networking howto, it could pull down copies of (or links to) the Ethernet and Hardware howtos. As for the British accent, that would be kind of easy. I've done speech synth on boxen with far less power than is required to churn out MP3 files like some of them are doing. Festival runs quite nicely on a DX 75, while real time mp3s usually require at least a P90. (Yes, I'm dated.)
I can see a myriad of used for the Guide, if they implement it something like the literary equivalent. Imagine losing a fan belt out on US-71, and not knowing how to put it back on.. Not only will the Guide keep you from panicking, it could potentially tell you which service stations you could call, as well as how to put the belt back on yourself. You're having trouble finding your destination? Grab a map off of the Guide; it's easier than finding the Interstellar Spaceway. Can't get the firewall to cooperate? Pull the specs from the Guide, and then use it to SSH onto the box. Have a german engineer you need to communicate with? The Guide includes an electronic Babelfish. In a meeting and you NEED the 'netcat' manpage? Don't panic, the Guide has it! Some hints on beating a Sun boot PROM into submission? Hit the Guide first. Wake up on a strange spacecraft with a towel in your hand? Is the Tlaziam empire tightening her grip on the Acensus Cluster? Well, those may not be covered in the Guide, but I'm sure you see the point..
I'm sorry, but I can see absoulutly no reason that NCR can claim 'irreperable harm', nor even 'harm'! NCR, a largish manufacturer of cash registers, ATMs and the like, and Netscape, a web browser/portal, have virtually no business overlap!
Has NCR lost sales of their ATMs because Navigator uses the same data cache mechanism? No.
Has NCR lost POS customers because Netscape incorporates a low-level feature that they have a bogus patent on? Nope.
Is Netscape a threat to their dying PC division because of patent infringement? Not likely.
I think it a little more likely that NCR has an outstanding patent infringement claim with a company in direct competition, and that they are using this attack on Netscape as some sort of sick leverage.
'Golly, they can hit up a BIG company like AOL! We'd better cave!' Pshaw. I hope this goes to court and NCR gets crushed.
Corel has opened up a big can of hurt with this one, if they try to push their terms over the GPL. Fortunatly, I think this is just a case of the legal department getting jumpy over what it views as a potential loss. There is probably a small chunk of Corel-owned code in the distro, and the overzealous legal dept doesn't want anyone crying 'liable' when it breaks.
But even if this is just some lawyer's itchy faxing finger, Corel needs at least some verbal abuse over it. (I wouldn't mind paddling the moron directly responsible). However, I'd hold off on the 'NO ONE SCREWS WITH THE GPL AND GETS AWAY WITH IT!' attitude until I hear from Corel.
But is the large planet in a close orbit the Universal norm? We don't know. Here's what we do know from simulation:
1. Planets are an unusual thing. Normally, the matter that constitutes them is eaten up in the early days of the system when it falls into the star due to an unstable (or non-existant) orbit.
2. Multiple planets are even more unusual. If they aren't eaten up by the star, at some point their orbits intersect. In universal time, collisions are frequent.
An argument can also be made about small planets, and 'rocky' planets both being unlikely.
Honestly. Go down to the local pawn shop and buy a few autorange Polaroid cameras (They made a few models. They're the only ones that take AA batteries.) The acoustic rangefinders return a voltage corresponding to the distance (exponential curve, I think.)
Sonar-equipped Mindstorms controlled by my Palm V.. Damn, and I just bought a pair of Polaroid cameras for their acoustic rangefinders. Muhaha. I just love the escalation of technology! Now I need some of those compact gas-turbines, and an iPic.
Why? World domination! I'll sit outside the MS campus while the Mindstorms droid does a seek-and-destroy on ol' Billy.. And the integrated iPicBeowulf will allow the rest of the world to watch!
One side of me says: More dart guns, more high power hardware to drool over, more freebies (I WANT A SuSe shirt, damn it. That lizard is cool) and scantily clad she/he-geeks.
On the other hand, a lecture on 'Linux in the enterprise' might be nice, or even one covering 'Linux in embedded and RT microcontrollers'
We might get the vendors(Compaq/Alpha, VA, etc) to give specific attention to enterprise-wide Linux-only solutions. Most *nix guys aren't good salesmen, so when they go back to the office and propose 'Linux' to the PHB, a little constructive prep won't hurt.
Oh, yeah. Did I mention that I want a LOT of freebies?