Optical Computing versus Quantum Wires
on
Quantum Wires
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Seems like from one direction optical computing is advancing, from another we're working towards room-temperature superconductors.
So what's the future look like? Quantum processors with superconducting and optical connections? I wonder how these various technologies will actually be deployed?
There are a lot of people who currently think you can free-fall from outer space back into the atmosphere as long as you have a pressure suit and a chute. Man, that has to be one heck of a ride!
Maybe instead of this continual battle with Linux and drivers (which I don't see getting better anytime soon) somebody should engage in a mass-reverse-enginnering of the Windows Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). Add your *nix hooks on top of that, and then if it works with windows it ought to work under Linux.
I know the devil is in the details, and this would not be an easy project, but has anyone thought of that?
Seems to me the way to do it is to have one team code a large project, and the other teams try to maintain it. Most of programming is maintenance, not development. Solving problems creatively is fun, but is that the real work of programmers? I thought we were supposed to make solutions happen for people.
Hey -- I love Google. Use it every day, and I think they're doing some really neat stuff.
But this was an hour-long commercial for Google - -to me it looked designed to recruit from college campuses. While I think it's great that Google does this (it sure sounds like a great way to get cheap qualified labor) is it really new or interesting? Or even geeky?
So we have redundant clustering, LISP-like patterns, and issues of dealing with BIG stuff.
Hasn't the industry already done all of this, like dozens of times? You can't tell me VISA international doesn't handle this size data, or that General Motors doesn't have some of the same scaling issues. I read somewhere that Wal-Mart has one of the biggest computer systems in the world.
To me the signal-to-noise ratio was out of whack to make it worth an hour of my time. Just my opinion folks.
Which would be exactly how you would control it. You anticipated my reply
I'm not saying _thought_ control, although that's where the flip side of this is heading. I'm simply saying if you can get stimulus out, you can certainly put it back in. And probably with the same equipment.
Hey. Being able to change channels on the TV without having to actually use my finger to push the little remote button would be great. But I'm not so happy about having the remote push my buttons, if you know what I mean.
With NASA trying to do too mnay things with too little money, I'd like to get in on the action as well.
- $10 for first person to discover tenth planet - $15.75 for invention of anti-gravity device. Must include batteries - $17.50 for first person to deliver truckload of gold bullion to my house - $37.50 for proof of alien life
I've got the money right here (pats wallet). Let's all not rush. Stand in line, please.
From the site promoter side, rigging search engines is a no-win proposition. SEs become more junk, people go places they don't want to be, etc. So the only solution, imo, is to create valuable content -- but to create that content elsewhere, on trusted sites. Then link from there into your site.
From the searcher's side, they are already going to trusted sites with material that they are interested in (such as slashdot). My point was having this "content-based referral" seems like the only way for the two to hook up reliably. The whole concept of search words is just too easy to mess around with, especially when you're dealing with the entire web.
Does anybody know if there is a open-source Windows PBX program?
The one bad part is the 30-40 bucks BV and others charge you with for what seems basically a large internet directory service, right? I mean, if I have the PBX and am willing to share my land line, all I want to know is a list of other people who will do the same. So it seems to me the only real expense should be the cost of the land line (if you want to share). In a world with long-range WiFi and mesh networking, perhaps even this cost goes away. Perhaps I missed something.
Really neat stuff! I wonder if the standards support both video and audio conferencing?
How can you possibly control the actions of billions of people? It just seems all so silly and 20th-century.
With the net on everything from watches to cell phones and jackets, and the myriad of procols available (especially with tunneling) it just seems like closing the door after the horses got out.
I have a new website. I've also been paying for marketing.
I found I got almost as much traffic this month when I put my website in my slashdot profile! Way to go Slashdot!
For all of the trickery and such, I think that promoting your site or idea is just going to boil down to old-fashioned guerilla marketing. Once the search engines become polluted, people are going to start looking for valuable _content_, and then from there going to a site to purcahse things. It's basically what Google is supposed to do -- use web pages as a "virtual" referral tool. Only this has the benefit of not being amenable to spamming.
Whether bloggers are journalists. It's obvious to most all who think about it that they are. The question is whether journalists should conceal sources that are doing criminal things.
There is no special elite class of people called journalists. If there were, we'd really be in trouble. Everybody's got a point of view and a story to tell. That's the beauty of free speech. My CNN is your Fox News. Your local weekly rag is my neighborhood newsletter. My esteemed orator is your empty-headed shyster.
But using free speech to cover up somebody leaking information to hurt a company is wrong, blogger or no. The judge made the right call.
This wasn't another one of those posts where you had to read some long article and make comments. This is one of those "Do you like ice cream?" questions.
Go for the business degree, kid. Whatever you do in this world, there will always be a business manager over you (or working for you)
I, for one, have been waiting for the Write-Once, Read Never drives.
Let's face it: half the stuff on your drive you're never going to use again anyway. Might as well save it on a data hair so it will not be there when you don't need it.
And these things will be easy to design to follow moore's law. Every 18 months, just put a new label on the package.
So there. I wonder if I get any bonus honesty karma points.
As to your comments (and not the article), sounds like hyperbolic bullshit to me. The network is the computer, the code is the design, my grandma is a trolley, etc.
Code is what comes out of a coder. That's it. may have nothing to do with design. Could be a thousand monkeys typing on a thousand typewriters. Yes. Since there is code there is an implied design, but since you've defined design as everything, then everything must be part of design. Ergo, you have a circular argument. Either there is more depth to it or not. From the other posts, didn't look like it, so I didn't waste my time. Thanks for the comments.
Perhaps slashdot should have a special section for newbies who don't want to do the hard work of creating software and would rather just hack.
Yes, staring at the ceiling can be just as good as playing with UML. But your job is to communicate -- to the team, to the customer, to the poor maintenance programmer -- just what the heck you are trying to accomplish in your code. The "being the smart kid" should be the easy part. The "getting clarity and agreement on scope and solution space" is what they are paying you for.
I've found that it is very hard to communicate to the customer the contents of a switch statmenet using polymorphism. Hence the reasons for layers of abstraction. Model, design, plan at just enough detail that you can communicate and agree on a strategy with all the stakeholders. Then go play with the bits and bytes.
If the nature of the problem is that there is too much to do and not enough time to do it, it would seem that the answer would be personalized content selection, not mass produced. We already see this in "clanning" -- groups of like minded people getting together to share knowledge they deem important. I would think this pattern would grow, until we are all employed in some fashion recommending and filtering information for our fellow humans.
Since this has great value to the individual, it will be reompensed. "Light" services such as slashdot already are competing with "heavy" services such as professional organizations with paid membership and private chat areas. The competition will be for the best ideas, best filtering, best commentary, best presentation, etc.
This is the act of humans relating to one another, which I do not see being automated any time in the near future. (cyborg implants, anyone?) Creating an intelligent agent to predict what I might like is not the same as expereiencing a play or a movie and personally recommending it to me. RottenTomatoes is always going to beat Tivo -- it has much greater inter-personal value.
If you view this species as some sort of consumption machine then I would agree with you. But I don't see us that way. We're much more social and desiring to work together. Fulfilling those needs cannot be automated. To do so would take out the very nature of the value to be provided.
You sound like the guy who said "640K! Who would need any more memory than that?"
Or the other one "The nuclear bomb will never work, and I speak as an expert on explosives"
I would suggest that the arguments you make against a knowledge economy are in fact supportive of one. If you define the question as "how many reruns of Gilligan's Island do we need?" then obviously the answer is 17. But the bigger question "Now that we have so many creative avenues and materials, how do we sort out what is good from what is not" -- that, my friend, is a creative, knowledge-worker-type question.
As the abstraction level raises, workers must ride the wave. Nobody works at hand-writing general ledgers anymore, but the accounting industry is far from kaput. Yes in the future one person may design 1000 or 10,000 cars and robots may build them, but there will be many more products than there are now that involve design. How many do we need? I don't know. I was happy with just 12 reruns of Gilligan.
Main Entry: enterprise Pronunciation: 'en-t&(r)-"prIz Function: noun Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French, from Old French entreprendre to undertake, from entre- inter- + prendre to take -- more at PRIZE 1 : a project or undertaking that is especially difficult, complicated, or risky 2 : readiness to engage in daring action : INITIATIVE 3 a : a unit of economic organization or activity; especially : a business organization b : a systematic purposeful activity
The public school system is trying to be everything for everybody and has wound up being nothing for nobody. (I love the irony of that last sentence!)
It's not jsut broken -- it is based on a paradigm that is obsolete. No amount of "fixing" is going to work. We must rethink the entire enterprise.
If we continue to manufacture passive students ready for 19th century factory work and then complain about all the factory jobs going overseas, well we got what we asked for -- an outdated workforce.
The new age will be creativity and knowledge-based, and will require students to work in knowledge areas as adeptly as master bricklayers build stone walls.
The Titanic is going down -- we had better stop re-arranging the deck chairs and start building a new boat.
I would suppose that the best minds of Gallieo's day disagreed with him as well. Simply reviewing something and scrutinizing it does not imply that it is any way validated -- it simply may mean that all of the reviewers share the same bad assumption. In fact, that would seem to be the likely case, instead of the other way around.
Should I have knowledge of every detailed area of science in order to form an opinion that science, in general, follows a herd mentality? Why would this require detailed knowledge of climate modeling? And if I had such knowledge, would you not simply point out further levels of detail that perhaps have less bona fides?
I get the feeling you understand full well what I am saying. Let me restate: there are various levels of knowing something. At those various levels there can be radical changes in one's model of reality. Science tends towards gradual changes in reality perception. Therefore, it is the norm rather than the exception that the "common sense" of science is dramatically wrong -- especially in those areas with less than a couple hundred years of study. That's my thesis.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like from one direction optical computing is advancing, from another we're working towards room-temperature superconductors.
So what's the future look like? Quantum processors with superconducting and optical connections? I wonder how these various technologies will actually be deployed?
There are a lot of people who currently think you can free-fall from outer space back into the atmosphere as long as you have a pressure suit and a chute. Man, that has to be one heck of a ride!
Maybe instead of this continual battle with Linux and drivers (which I don't see getting better anytime soon) somebody should engage in a mass-reverse-enginnering of the Windows Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). Add your *nix hooks on top of that, and then if it works with windows it ought to work under Linux. I know the devil is in the details, and this would not be an easy project, but has anyone thought of that?
Seems to me the way to do it is to have one team code a large project, and the other teams try to maintain it. Most of programming is maintenance, not development. Solving problems creatively is fun, but is that the real work of programmers? I thought we were supposed to make solutions happen for people.
Hey -- I love Google. Use it every day, and I think they're doing some really neat stuff. But this was an hour-long commercial for Google - -to me it looked designed to recruit from college campuses. While I think it's great that Google does this (it sure sounds like a great way to get cheap qualified labor) is it really new or interesting? Or even geeky? So we have redundant clustering, LISP-like patterns, and issues of dealing with BIG stuff. Hasn't the industry already done all of this, like dozens of times? You can't tell me VISA international doesn't handle this size data, or that General Motors doesn't have some of the same scaling issues. I read somewhere that Wal-Mart has one of the biggest computer systems in the world. To me the signal-to-noise ratio was out of whack to make it worth an hour of my time. Just my opinion folks.
Which would be exactly how you would control it. You anticipated my reply I'm not saying _thought_ control, although that's where the flip side of this is heading. I'm simply saying if you can get stimulus out, you can certainly put it back in. And probably with the same equipment. Hey. Being able to change channels on the TV without having to actually use my finger to push the little remote button would be great. But I'm not so happy about having the remote push my buttons, if you know what I mean.
How long is it going to be until somebody makes this work in reverse, ie, controlling the brain from a computer chip?
With NASA trying to do too mnay things with too little money, I'd like to get in on the action as well.
- $10 for first person to discover tenth planet
- $15.75 for invention of anti-gravity device. Must include batteries
- $17.50 for first person to deliver truckload of gold bullion to my house
- $37.50 for proof of alien life
I've got the money right here (pats wallet). Let's all not rush. Stand in line, please.
I think we agree.
From the site promoter side, rigging search engines is a no-win proposition. SEs become more junk, people go places they don't want to be, etc. So the only solution, imo, is to create valuable content -- but to create that content elsewhere, on trusted sites. Then link from there into your site.
From the searcher's side, they are already going to trusted sites with material that they are interested in (such as slashdot). My point was having this "content-based referral" seems like the only way for the two to hook up reliably. The whole concept of search words is just too easy to mess around with, especially when you're dealing with the entire web.
Perhaps since WiFi.
Does anybody know if there is a open-source Windows PBX program?
The one bad part is the 30-40 bucks BV and others charge you with for what seems basically a large internet directory service, right? I mean, if I have the PBX and am willing to share my land line, all I want to know is a list of other people who will do the same. So it seems to me the only real expense should be the cost of the land line (if you want to share). In a world with long-range WiFi and mesh networking, perhaps even this cost goes away. Perhaps I missed something.
Really neat stuff! I wonder if the standards support both video and audio conferencing?
How can you possibly control the actions of billions of people? It just seems all so silly and 20th-century.
With the net on everything from watches to cell phones and jackets, and the myriad of procols available (especially with tunneling) it just seems like closing the door after the horses got out.
I have a new website. I've also been paying for marketing.
I found I got almost as much traffic this month when I put my website in my slashdot profile! Way to go Slashdot!
For all of the trickery and such, I think that promoting your site or idea is just going to boil down to old-fashioned guerilla marketing. Once the search engines become polluted, people are going to start looking for valuable _content_, and then from there going to a site to purcahse things. It's basically what Google is supposed to do -- use web pages as a "virtual" referral tool. Only this has the benefit of not being amenable to spamming.
Whether bloggers are journalists. It's obvious to most all who think about it that they are. The question is whether journalists should conceal sources that are doing criminal things.
There is no special elite class of people called journalists. If there were, we'd really be in trouble. Everybody's got a point of view and a story to tell. That's the beauty of free speech. My CNN is your Fox News. Your local weekly rag is my neighborhood newsletter. My esteemed orator is your empty-headed shyster.
But using free speech to cover up somebody leaking information to hurt a company is wrong, blogger or no. The judge made the right call.
I lived and worked there for a year and had four years of French. I should know better! Apologies.
I checked by Googling tuke -- up popped some images of people with and without hats, so I thought - -gee! That must be it. Looks like I mis-googled.
And apologies to the other 14 Canadians. I hope I didn't hurt any of their feelings either.
Time to make a tinfoil tuke.
This wasn't another one of those posts where you had to read some long article and make comments. This is one of those "Do you like ice cream?" questions.
Go for the business degree, kid. Whatever you do in this world, there will always be a business manager over you (or working for you)
And yes, I do like ice cream.
I, for one, have been waiting for the Write-Once, Read Never drives.
Let's face it: half the stuff on your drive you're never going to use again anyway. Might as well save it on a data hair so it will not be there when you don't need it.
And these things will be easy to design to follow moore's law. Every 18 months, just put a new label on the package.
I've been doing my own double-slit experiment, with web pages.
On one side of my screen is slashdot. On the other is the Devil Chicks From The Fourth Dimension web site.
Devil chicks, physics, devil chicks, physics
I was commenting on the other posts.
I admit it! I didn't RTFA!
So there. I wonder if I get any bonus honesty karma points.
As to your comments (and not the article), sounds like hyperbolic bullshit to me. The network is the computer, the code is the design, my grandma is a trolley, etc.
Code is what comes out of a coder. That's it. may have nothing to do with design. Could be a thousand monkeys typing on a thousand typewriters. Yes. Since there is code there is an implied design, but since you've defined design as everything, then everything must be part of design. Ergo, you have a circular argument. Either there is more depth to it or not. From the other posts, didn't look like it, so I didn't waste my time. Thanks for the comments.
Perhaps slashdot should have a special section for newbies who don't want to do the hard work of creating software and would rather just hack.
Yes, staring at the ceiling can be just as good as playing with UML. But your job is to communicate -- to the team, to the customer, to the poor maintenance programmer -- just what the heck you are trying to accomplish in your code. The "being the smart kid" should be the easy part. The "getting clarity and agreement on scope and solution space" is what they are paying you for.
I've found that it is very hard to communicate to the customer the contents of a switch statmenet using polymorphism. Hence the reasons for layers of abstraction. Model, design, plan at just enough detail that you can communicate and agree on a strategy with all the stakeholders. Then go play with the bits and bytes.
If the nature of the problem is that there is too much to do and not enough time to do it, it would seem that the answer would be personalized content selection, not mass produced. We already see this in "clanning" -- groups of like minded people getting together to share knowledge they deem important. I would think this pattern would grow, until we are all employed in some fashion recommending and filtering information for our fellow humans.
Since this has great value to the individual, it will be reompensed. "Light" services such as slashdot already are competing with "heavy" services such as professional organizations with paid membership and private chat areas. The competition will be for the best ideas, best filtering, best commentary, best presentation, etc.
This is the act of humans relating to one another, which I do not see being automated any time in the near future. (cyborg implants, anyone?) Creating an intelligent agent to predict what I might like is not the same as expereiencing a play or a movie and personally recommending it to me. RottenTomatoes is always going to beat Tivo -- it has much greater inter-personal value.
If you view this species as some sort of consumption machine then I would agree with you. But I don't see us that way. We're much more social and desiring to work together. Fulfilling those needs cannot be automated. To do so would take out the very nature of the value to be provided.
You sound like the guy who said "640K! Who would need any more memory than that?"
Or the other one "The nuclear bomb will never work, and I speak as an expert on explosives"
I would suggest that the arguments you make against a knowledge economy are in fact supportive of one. If you define the question as "how many reruns of Gilligan's Island do we need?" then obviously the answer is 17. But the bigger question "Now that we have so many creative avenues and materials, how do we sort out what is good from what is not" -- that, my friend, is a creative, knowledge-worker-type question.
As the abstraction level raises, workers must ride the wave. Nobody works at hand-writing general ledgers anymore, but the accounting industry is far from kaput. Yes in the future one person may design 1000 or 10,000 cars and robots may build them, but there will be many more products than there are now that involve design. How many do we need? I don't know. I was happy with just 12 reruns of Gilligan.
FYI
Main Entry: enterprise
Pronunciation: 'en-t&(r)-"prIz
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French, from Old French entreprendre to undertake, from entre- inter- + prendre to take -- more at PRIZE
1 : a project or undertaking that is especially difficult, complicated, or risky
2 : readiness to engage in daring action : INITIATIVE
3 a : a unit of economic organization or activity; especially : a business organization b : a systematic purposeful activity
Gates is right-on.
The public school system is trying to be everything for everybody and has wound up being nothing for nobody. (I love the irony of that last sentence!)
It's not jsut broken -- it is based on a paradigm that is obsolete. No amount of "fixing" is going to work. We must rethink the entire enterprise.
If we continue to manufacture passive students ready for 19th century factory work and then complain about all the factory jobs going overseas, well we got what we asked for -- an outdated workforce.
The new age will be creativity and knowledge-based, and will require students to work in knowledge areas as adeptly as master bricklayers build stone walls.
The Titanic is going down -- we had better stop re-arranging the deck chairs and start building a new boat.
Geesh!
I would suppose that the best minds of Gallieo's day disagreed with him as well. Simply reviewing something and scrutinizing it does not imply that it is any way validated -- it simply may mean that all of the reviewers share the same bad assumption. In fact, that would seem to be the likely case, instead of the other way around.
Should I have knowledge of every detailed area of science in order to form an opinion that science, in general, follows a herd mentality? Why would this require detailed knowledge of climate modeling? And if I had such knowledge, would you not simply point out further levels of detail that perhaps have less bona fides?
I get the feeling you understand full well what I am saying. Let me restate: there are various levels of knowing something. At those various levels there can be radical changes in one's model of reality. Science tends towards gradual changes in reality perception. Therefore, it is the norm rather than the exception that the "common sense" of science is dramatically wrong -- especially in those areas with less than a couple hundred years of study. That's my thesis.