Thanks and no thanks for this heinous crime of wasting readers' time with timecube. I ran across this blathering page years ago on a different server and it was repellent at a fraction of the current size. Now, quickly scanning the interminable page for anything redeeming due to your recommendation I feel like half my neurons are fried! (Only the cruelty cubicle photo saved the day). Feels much like an sf novel (Timelike Infinity I believe) which had an extraterrestrial intelligence test that destroyed the minds of Earth's best.. it took a mediocre mind to beat it.
Is there a measurement for the collective amount of processing power or time alive on this planet which gets wasted/wellspent/fed to a given slashdot piece? Ouch.
I visited the Japan webserver for the Internet World Expo at Keio University outside Tokyo once, this was maybe three years ago. It was possibly the first time such a piece of iron was used as web server and it hauled ass. (Don't remember the stats though).
It was an SP2 (I think they had two towers actually) with storage on Auspex I believe. It was the apparently the only server that had the capacity to be backup web server for the Atlanta Olympics, also SP2 I think. I remember at the time checking out how a similar machine was being used for 3d graphics in Hawaii at the supercomputer center there to see if we could do realtime rendering for the expo.. but like lots of great things (like the phone monopoly providing 45Mbps lines all over the place for free over the year) much of what could have been done got wasted feeding rapacious ad agencies. I remember Dai Nippon tried to make money off their position of being the coordinator chosen by the government, to sell *web site space* to clients. Don't know where the disks were but probably in the same room now that I think about it. Hauled ass though!
Now if only that thing had been running a couple dozen kilolinuxes (klix? kl? KL!) we'd have taken over the country..
Been dying to have it back as I listen to screeching, popping, clucking mp3 in realplayer for linux. It's worth trying to locate a cd copy and trying it.
Today's Be Developer newsletter says that large performance enhancements for SIMD capabilities like that in the Pentium III, other new Pentium II scalar performance enhancement, and a total rewrite of the geometry pipeline to support hardware OpenGL acceleration multiple textures (with new OS interface layer), and multiple graphics devices, did not make the FreeBe release.
Will they provide a patch for BeOS the file that is BeOS in a file?..
You ever wonder how to make a Windows 98 app run faster? I found out in a "this is too dumb to work, so let's try it" experiment. No fancy mods or wires needed. Just twirl your mouse around over the Window in question. Gee, Windows is interactive! OUCH! Thank you Mr. Gates.
Being a Mac person at heart though now mostly Linux (strengthened by someone wiping my hard disk) I have to say I keep thinking about the BeOS which, while you can't do everything like Linux (because someone has worked on the problem somewhere), what it does it does awesomely well. Kicking and screaming at Mr. Gate$ on a seven month implementation Quicktime 4 for Windows as a porting layer (probably first to do it) for a huge layout application in the beginning of last year, I really don't like Windows that's for sure, though I've developed some expertise in it. Sure, now this Quark/Illustrator predecessor can play Quicktime movies if you want it to, and it was interesting using the half of the MacOS that got ported to x86 to run Quicktime. I was even able to port resource files as-is for the most part. But everything still looks like shit on Windows (well at least not so jaggy with Quicktime though). And you can't trust its event handling for shit, which I found out when implementing Mac Toolbox based dragging etc. Compare that to "everything works though it usually looks weak" on Linux, and "everything looks great and you get synergies from the OS" on BeOS. Don't know enough about OS X client to say but Be feels most powerful using it, as in horsepower under the hood.
I met Gassee once briefly at a press conference in Japan a couple years ago I told him I wanted to do a media art installation on the BeOS (and did once) but every time I want to get back to it, there isn't as much need. Thought it would be good for quick prototyping of apps but hell flat storyboards go a long way, you can surf web pages with a more ubiquitous interface, and there are only about a zillion ways to script this sort of thing in linux.
What I could never figure out for years and always wondered why, is why Be didn't just release a while back an x86 ram-resident kernel for free that would let people run apps written for BeOS on Windows. It would totally extend the reach of developers and give Be a market. Otherwise the idea of coexistence with Windows is total crap. One manufacturer in Japan (Fujitsu) sold a Be/Win double boot machine once. Who cares if it can only do one processor, that would be the gateway to the Windows market where people only need the faster chips for games and that's not what BeOS is yet about. If you want two processors run Windows in VMWare on BeOS..
Be is right to be worried about Apple hardware, heck even users get burned, repeatedly, like I have been.. and I've been an Apple owner since the II (Integer Basic). They certainly should be able to make an Altivec version, for the G4 machines that are out there now, but they will never get information from Apple about hardware. Apple owes them nothing and is plenty capable of making sure BeOS doesn't run on Apple hardware in the future if they want.
Originally I remember in PR2/R3 days that Be couldn't get documentation on Motorola's supervisor mode which was needed to make BeOS run like BeOS. When the company newsletter talks constantly about the microseconds advantage of one type of semaphore over the other, and gives you real world demonstration of how to own the scheduler in realtime, you have to love it. So BeOS has always been for me like a cheapo Silicon Graphics Machine. It was insanely great and I always got a big smile when I booted up (faster on a Mac 9600MP two years ago than my SuSE on Inspiron 7.5K 40MHz Pentium III laptop does ordinarily now.. with less screen artifacts).
I looked for other domain names that might indicate Be was planning on opening more but didn't find any in a cursory search.. if they would open more of the OS, so that it would actually begin to work with Linux, Be would become *dangerous*.
So I put the Be CVS client onto my Linux laptop last night and wouldn't mind running the OS on this or one of my other older linux macines.. but the real question is why doesn't Be just make a small free modular distro for x86 that you can put onto millions of CDs in popular magazines, or download in minutes from CNet and friends. The kernel is small and was getting smaller aparently for the appliance market, end users could plug and play modules to enable other services or hardware support. It would be cool, like Linux in a 100 mb zip distribution but this would be mere megabytes. Maybe some of those enablers would find their way back into Linux. It would run Be programs reasonably well inside windows. (I do not know if there are major problems with this, but missing the extra CPU for one thing is only a problem for people with two CPUs and irrelevant IMHO). Be would suddenly look as though they had opened the floodgates of Unix inside windows and you could imagine running Windows and Linux apps side by side (though that might just suck if Windows is still really in charge, see the first paragraph.. maybe you could let people run it badly like this but offer to let Windows boot up after Be's kernel so that Windows isn't really in charge). Maybe it could be a GUI shell inside of which Linux code (hell the whole KDE or Gnome environment might fit why not?) could run, maybe superficially prettified. Be could start providing APIs for its widgets and compete with Troll QT and Eazel, they could use the exact same API and totally stomp all .
While it feels like Be will pick up more momentum relatively speaking, and I would seriously consider putting another hard drive into my Inspiron for BeOS to keep perspective on Linux and would like to buy a CD from them again (hell I want them to succeed!) I just don't see the killer strategy yet. Maybe more newbies will consider installing BeOS than Linux on their Windows box but not a guarantee. You need to have some way for Be to get into Windows desktops or they will always be a hobbyist OS. Seems to me Be has squandered the head start they had, and is not taking a big enough step now.
At the moment I don't see the current free BeOS being a huge threat to Apple. If anything I'd say the ex-Apple people at Eazel and the new Linux kernel are big threats to Be. As Linux GUIs get (even just a little) better and realtime slicing in major apps gets (just a little better) there will be a little less edge for Be. These advances will still not approach Be, but just get a little closer. Be will still be far better unless you maybe install the SGI/SuSE journaling file system, someone reinvents some of Be's search capability for Linux, and Linux gets a bit more preemtive so Netscape doesn't hang your computer. Or if Eazel expands, a gnome company hires some great designers, or Apple gets stupid and opens Aqua without lawsuit threats.
Be should realize their current booming announcement is not nearly enough to get the kind of volume of product out there in the time frame they need. Be has already relinquished their software site to someone else (huh?) and if they don't have something to base cashflow on they are finished. They should get more revenue from CD sales, sure. But if they want to coexist with Windows or make a serious play for spreading at a more accelerated rate they need to either make a much more Windows friendly gateway (ram-resident kernel, no need to partition, and Be programs running on Windows as far as the user knows) and/or seriously open up a lot more interface, and put some weight behind getting it used. Obviously Be programs will work better on the BeOS, but there is little percentage in being a prima donna about not letting its apps run unmodified on the windows desktop at all.
Their liscense for the tracker and deskbar *are* insanely great (so what if they got slashdotted last night midway through getting my opentracker CVS client updated). It makes LGPL look wimpy.. its free!..They should have made a request at least to register apps using that code to leave their URL on a Be homepage for advertising, or offer to sell them in a BeDepot kind of store. But insanely great is the right direction and that's why Apple has come back.
Thank you very much for this info. Too bad, Cameraworld's out of stock (!) but you can order at list price from Sima.
My mother just produced a video on Valentines (she's an expert on the history of them) and guess what, VHS with Macrovision. Apparently it is to be shown by the Ephemera Society of Great Britain but they had trouble copying to PAL, maybe they don't have as much experience with Macrovision there. Sure it's best if she has a DV or Beta tape but either a corrector like Sima's (available in England?) or maybe the TV video out fix mentioned earlier would do the trick for now. The studio that made the original tape is charging an arm and a leg for making PAL tapes and only in bulk.
When I was working on a digital video (Quicktime) project I heard it was cheaper to convert to the format native to your company (somebody wanted us to make a PAL output box since conversion is apparently very expensive since you have to rent a big deck). Anybody know a good shop in London, or New York, that can do this kind of easy job with high quality, quickly, at a reasonable (low budget) price? Maybe printing a DVD too? We're getting a bunch of hits at the site I made for her (telebody.com/valentines). Thanks again.
"In recent years he has worked chiefly on imparting to machines the human capacity for commonsense reasoning."
You might want to take a look at this page, at the MIT Media Lab. Some articles he has written on this subject are there, he concludes in "Will Robots Inherit the Earth" that the robots will be our children. From a conversation we had in Japan once I think he has a totally different take on robots/AI - one with a sense of humor, delight, and a sense of the faults of these children he builds - and emailed him to see if he would talk to Joy.
Can't say that I don't agree with what Joy says about nano and gene warfare and knowlege-enabled destruction.. though this doesn't mean there is no viable strategy to approach the topic. A lack of action at all will simply give more time for marginal actors to reach critical levels of knowlege and impose their own architecture. Perhaps his paralysis is due more to confronting the difficulty of weeding out the possibility of catastrophic synergies in Jini code (after all it's supposed to lend itself to synergies to some extent).. as if a sentient computer was able to hack together all of the Jini-enabled devices in the world, or if somehow they reached a critical mass as in older science fiction. Seems like Microsoft would be more dangerous since they've already done much of that in a banal human kind of way. Perhaps Joy sees himself as wielding dangerous power by fiddling with pervasive systems.. really pervasive that is.
I am no expert on any of the three dangers Joy confronts, but if you start thinking how you could protect people against dangerous mites, it seems on the face of it that either a compartmentalized environment (lots of secure sandboxes for well behaved physical programs) or a phage-filled environment (agents ready to themselves multiply like an amoeboid macrophage on a hair trigger and overwhelm an attacker) are some possibilities. For example one might imagine some way (they already exist really) to reliably tile space at high resolution and apply an addressing system keyed to electromagnetic broadcasts, much as PHS cell phones in Japan can find their geographic location.
Of course there are no wires and gates in 3d space, unless they are everywhere. You'd have to be some kind of idiot to want to have running nanotech outside of a sealed factory.. Some kind of agent probably will be omnipresent to guard against rogue mites or badly formed good ones and enforce the architecture. But all of these potential strategies come out of networking stuff Joy's been thinking about.. probably my own weakness in not having other models myself. Maybe in addition to information science and network space strategies there are different ones from the military, for example giving yourself a booster shot as the troops did in the Gulf War against chemical weapons. unfortunately, they got sick. Another model is the ocean, where coral polyps disgorge tons of embryos. Here things get more dispersed and potentially harmless the smaller and less mass they require. The only other model I can see is the Slashdot/Capitalist/Communist/Jihad Model for World Domination, that is, coopt everyone so there are no individuals who do not think too differently from you.
That said, if most of the nano and gene genre, plus AI, is based on software and communications techniques derivative from what we know about already, we are in trouble. Java was Joy's best shot at secure communication and even he is pretty adamant about Java not being designed for nuclear power plants and other dangerous things.. if Jini and sandboxes can be compromised or rendered impotent by soft that plays by different rules, you definitely do not want to bet your life on it. So I could see where he might be prone to the morose.
I think the first out were amazing ideas on how to get Hi-Vision (HDTV) sets into the market. But you also get a lot of just digital NTSC with top trimmed off for wide tube. In train stations in Tokyo you sometimes see *real* fish tanks with information/advertising display in ordinary ntsc behind it so you have to watch tv if you want to look at the fish. Some let you navigate.. personally I'd rather just see the live fish.
I'm involved in a project to distribute music over fiber or isdn to kiosks where they are written on minidisc. It is Linux based with a (don't ask why, it just is) lisp-based custom VRML browser, and is in operation. We developed a faster MD writer and liscensed it back to Sony. For the U.S. I wanted to get a CD version (2 yrs ago) but MD was done first. MD is actually a very good medium, there is even another gadget probably not yet in the U.S. a boombox with LAN connection so you can edit your MD title data on your computer easily. I believe there is a computer peripheral.. MD Data format. My guess is Sony is pushing their own secure music initiative standard with DVD instead now. Coolest gadget I've seen so far are the magnesium versions of Sony products (MD player, camera, etc). You should be able to order these things from web shops in Japan though you might need someone who can read kanji characters.
I did some research on rural communications for Cambodia since I have been helping my partner who has built a hospital, free newspaper with two printing presses donated by Heidelberg, Future Light orphanage (with one of the best Internet computer labs in the country), and now schools ($10,000 each with your name on it, matched by World Bank), for charity there. This was supported by King Sihanouk. It seemed that security and technological needs pointed to satellite, so we had inmarsat et al give presentations. But Thailand has a phone system set up in the sky based on satellite already (no Cambodia doesn't want to be dependent.. duh). Why not turn over some of these satellites to countries that don't have any telephone switching (or lines for that matter) and a phone could mean a lot for a single village? How much would it cost to contract commercially with someone to keep one of the satellites in orbit and operational. Use Iridium handsets in the third world and UNHCR camps. Unfortunately at the end of last year heard from Nicholas Negroponte, who is on the board of Iridium, as saying that they "weren't good for data" in response to my asking about how to put Internet into Cambodia using them. He did buy a school though. And Kyocera already had an Iridium data service on their home page.. Ouch. If anyone at Iridium or MIT reads this please email, I will pursue this from my end as well. Seems to make more money for Iridium than the red ink it will cost to manage the satellites' death cruise. Cambodia hospital and mines effort (with the Princess Diana fund): telebody.com/sihanouk/, telebody.com/diana/ this thread is old now so please continue via email. mattr@telebody.com.
Installed in a snap and worked fine once I remembered where the hardware volume control was on my I7.5K.
But having developed for Quicktime 4 I've been hoping Apple will trounce with their own release, like, *today*. Quicktime plays.ram fine plus real streaming media, and in the Windows trojan horse implementation includes most of the rest of the a/v universe plus half the MacOS' toolbox.. it's an edifice. And the libraries let you do serious programming. Always thought of it as the real thing but this Realplayer seems to work well on.ram files anyway.
Hope it is just Apple polishing up the BSD libraries.. and it all fits into the Game Plan for World Domination (tm) but idiotically it seems that you would have to install VMware (which is great in itself) to view the ouput of your Apple Darwin open source streaming server from the same machine. Repeat mantra: Let them find the bugs so we don't have to..
Unfortunately I have not read Bill Joy's article but two cents anyway. Current technology is plenty enough to wreck the planet, but the spread of network technology and open source thinking means a sea change in the landscape and nearing of the horizon on this one. Just ask the people at VA Linux.
Following this message are a list of two related books and link to a little site I built in 1996 on the Aum cult which got an award from England's Web Magazine.
I have agreed since probably before the Gulf War with some of what Bill Joy says but with a corollary and obligation to continue.
Clearly technically enhanced substances, for lack of a better term, have great potential for good or harm, whether they are based on one or a combination of nanotechnology, genetic engineering, microscale and chip manufacturing, or even just very large clumps of engineered matter whether nuclear or just hanging above our heads at escape velocity.
As matter inevitably grows more digitally addressable, the power of the individual will be magnified much as it now is by the Internet, although at a more irresistibly charged metric. An overwhelming momentum for empowerment will develop along a vector pointing towards cataclysmic power unleashable by a widespread desktop-sized apparatus.. and soon thereafter by the very tiny indeed. We will catch software viruses and our need to be always online will take on a new meaning.
In the short term, we may come to wish we only had to worry about missing plutonium when destruction can be unleashed from seemingly innocent delivery mechanisms, perhaps a body, a toothbrush, or a seed. Even now, biological warfare is too easy for the determined. But in the not so distant future there will be just too many dual-use technologies, and too many ways for knowledge about how things really work to get out.
Four years ago in Tokyo people I knew were peripherally affected by a sarin gas strike on a Tokyo subway I use often. It and subsequent events were collaborations by the direct perpetrators (Aum Shinrikyo, which built up a cadre of trained professionals), and the mass media. They stored their data on CD-ROM and did things that were both silly and scary at the same time.. like burning the bodies of victims in homemade ultrapowerful microwave ovens. They were researching powerful laser and other weapons technologies. They shot the chief of police near his home. The cult still exists and has members. They are still pasty-faced and have dead eyes from the LSD-powered indoctrination they had. Children were raised in this group and are fighting for their right to an education. This case was handled terribly by the authorities but another recent one was quickly smashed. There actually are a large number of large, powerful, internationally capable religious and quasi-religious organizations in Japan alone.
I have often struggled personally with the immense sorrow and graphic portrayal of war presented in non-U.S. media and yet, at the same time found a potential justification: it is to be hoped that the most dangerous "rogues" are somehow destroyed or coopted before the general level of purchasable or open source technology empowers people with intense hatred of open societies. Not because they will individually push a button, but because someone who believes in them will eventually get empowered too.
While distrusting the motivations of those who seek and hold real power, the realization that we are living on borrowed time, in that it may become impossible for the democratic powers to stay far enough ahead to learn of such dangers for their own safety, does not justify to me, either morally or strategically, the arrest of basic freedoms.
But it does seem necessary to hope that military operations against such opponents are well-crafted, and effective. Likewise it seems that promotion of positive values which seem to be shared by people in open source and other contemporary movements informed by a sense of the millenium, must be spread as quickly and widely as possible -- before this carrier wave is loaded with physically real munitions.
Obviously there are two solutions. One is for the people who do the spying to successfully subvert all open technologies.. or possibly a large group of advanced researchers might opt to watch over each other. This path does not seem a good bet to succeed in the face of such a supernova of change, one which washes over us, and through the entire human population on the planet.
The other solution is for the rest of us to ensure that all empowered individuals have a stake in the existence of our community, that there is no outside. Destruction of the intellect is neither a worthy or valid strategy. Thanks to Joy and many others, we have a better chance at being able to decide our own future. As for mankind's unleashing the ultimate power when quantum reality is far better understood, I figure it's fifty-fifty.. and take the optimistic side. It makes far more sense to believe that we are at a cusp in time now and that the decisions we make will - in many different dimensions - shape our future.
"Media Tero" -- http://telebody.com/mattr/tero/
Some related reading: Beggars and Choosers (Nancy Kress), Islands in the Net (Bruce Sterling).
Hi from Tokyo. I don't have a PS2 yet since I would rather be developing for it then playing it right now. Working on that.. they sold almost a million units in the first 3 days but some of the chips are out of stock and apparently will take 2 weeks for some people who ordered to get theirs. Development system is Linux apparently. It has PCI Type 3, ilink and optical output, and USB according to http://www.scei.co.jp/ps2/ and Sony rates it at 66 million polygons/sec and 6.2 Gflops ("for soft-looking smoke and realistic hair rendered strand by strand").. Hmm I better pick one of these up! Display using special process chip called Graphics Synthesizer, a 147.456 MHz "ultra-parallel display writing circuitry" for TV, S-Video, and future DigitalTV. Emotion Engine is one big LSI chip (0.18micron,128bit) at 294.912 MHz which they say is fastest 128bit CPU as of January, only 32MB main memory (increases by 25% with memory card), 4MB VRAM (?), 48+ simultaneous sound cannels, 2MB sound memory (!). Surely would be a love hate relationship unless repackaged on a PCI card.. Oh and the MagicGate encryption is called Encryption/Authorization capability ("security for the network era"..) Wonder if tha means there's a harware serial number.. guess that is inevitable. <P> All I really want are the big chips. <P> PocketStation is a 3000 yen peripheral (http://st1.yahoo.co.jp/nojima/pocketstation.html where you can buy it for 2700 yen, or http://www.scei.co.jp/news/pocket/menu.html and links in that directory) which zdnet Japan calls a PDA. Looks like a play on the Dreamcast Visual Memory game saving thing, comes in white and skeleton (or "crystal" as Sony calls it). According to ZDnet Japan You can store 15 memory blocks on it, each of which can be a PocketStation program, so you can play games on it. It was supposed to come out 12/23 but ended up being a month late, production projected at 1 million units a month. It has a 32 bit cpu and talks they say (!). Monochrome display, docks with old PS, you can download soft from CD or.. I found one page where you can download (http://www3.freeweb.ne.jp/misc/q-_-p/html/pks.htm l..note smiley in url and see menu.html for other stuff) a zip archive of a game written in assembler.. for ARM. Now I don't have a PS, so I probably shouldn't buy the PocketStation.. better get a dev unit somehow!
Yes another Evangelion fan. Have the two movies been released in the U.S. ? Some excellent computer graphics and risk taking in the film versions.. had a special meaning for lots of psychologically scarred Japanese youths. Female characters are interesting too.
Is there a way to view this page without crashing your computer?
You probably know about this book but for those who haven't been into sci-fi for a long time, check out Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, which features something called Ice-Nine..
I'd guess this is probably the classic story, mixes self-assembly _and_ crystallization and I'd better not tell you any more or I'll give it away. Checking the name of the book I found a relevant url.. http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/Issues/Sciobs96/Sciob s96-09Ice.html
The name of this substance somehow strikes the soul harder than something called "gray goo" for me anyway.. which sounds so silly maybe it should be renamed. Gray Nemesis? Another oldie.. this on what happens when the goo gets smart: Greg Bear, Blood Music.
Also another good book if you like nano and society. Beggars and Choosers, by Nancy Kress. A good read.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks and no thanks for this heinous crime of wasting readers' time with timecube. I ran across this blathering page years ago on a different server and it was repellent at a fraction of the current size. Now, quickly scanning the interminable page for anything redeeming due to your recommendation I feel like half my neurons are fried! (Only the cruelty cubicle photo saved the day). Feels much like an sf novel (Timelike Infinity I believe) which had an extraterrestrial intelligence test that destroyed the minds of Earth's best.. it took a mediocre mind to beat it.
Is there a measurement for the collective amount of processing power or time alive on this planet which gets wasted/wellspent/fed to a given slashdot piece? Ouch.
I visited the Japan webserver for the Internet World Expo at Keio University outside Tokyo once, this was maybe three years ago. It was possibly the first time such a piece of iron was used as web server and it hauled ass. (Don't remember the stats though).
It was an SP2 (I think they had two towers actually) with storage on Auspex I believe. It was the apparently the only server that had the capacity to be backup web server for the Atlanta Olympics, also SP2 I think. I remember at the time checking out how a similar machine was being used for 3d graphics in Hawaii at the supercomputer center there to see if we could do realtime rendering for the expo.. but like lots of great things (like the phone monopoly providing 45Mbps lines all over the place for free over the year) much of what could have been done got wasted feeding rapacious ad agencies. I remember Dai Nippon tried to make money off their position of being the coordinator chosen by the government, to sell *web site space* to clients. Don't know where the disks were but probably in the same room now that I think about it. Hauled ass though!
Now if only that thing had been running a couple dozen kilolinuxes (klix? kl? KL!) we'd have taken over the country..
Be SMP tech has hauled ass for years.
Been dying to have it back as I listen to screeching, popping, clucking mp3 in realplayer for linux. It's worth trying to locate a cd copy and trying it.
Apparently there was a backhoe incident at Be so they couldn't get the software out at first. Not a major blow since I took it for slashdotting :)
Gassee sez in the dev letter today that an mp3 encoder is included in freebee.. though it seems the mp3 player from real isn't.
Today's Be Developer newsletter says that large performance enhancements for SIMD capabilities like that in the Pentium III, other new Pentium II scalar performance enhancement, and a total rewrite of the geometry pipeline to support hardware OpenGL acceleration multiple textures (with new OS interface layer), and multiple graphics devices, did not make the FreeBe release.
Will they provide a patch for BeOS the file that is BeOS in a file?..
You ever wonder how to make a Windows 98 app run faster? I found out in a "this is too dumb to work, so let's try it" experiment. No fancy mods or wires needed. Just twirl your mouse around over the Window in question. Gee, Windows is interactive! OUCH! Thank you Mr. Gates.
..They should have made a request at least to register apps using that code to leave their URL on a Be homepage for advertising, or offer to sell them in a BeDepot kind of store. But insanely great is the right direction and that's why Apple has come back.
Being a Mac person at heart though now mostly Linux (strengthened by someone wiping my hard disk) I have to say I keep thinking about the BeOS which, while you can't do everything like Linux (because someone has worked on the problem somewhere), what it does it does awesomely well. Kicking and screaming at Mr. Gate$ on a seven month implementation Quicktime 4 for Windows as a porting layer (probably first to do it) for a huge layout application in the beginning of last year, I really don't like Windows that's for sure, though I've developed some expertise in it. Sure, now this Quark/Illustrator predecessor can play Quicktime movies if you want it to, and it was interesting using the half of the MacOS that got ported to x86 to run Quicktime. I was even able to port resource files as-is for the most part. But everything still looks like shit on Windows (well at least not so jaggy with Quicktime though). And you can't trust its event handling for shit, which I found out when implementing Mac Toolbox based dragging etc. Compare that to "everything works though it usually looks weak" on Linux, and "everything looks great and you get synergies from the OS" on BeOS. Don't know enough about OS X client to say but Be feels most powerful using it, as in horsepower under the hood.
I met Gassee once briefly at a press conference in Japan a couple years ago I told him I wanted to do a media art installation on the BeOS (and did once) but every time I want to get back to it, there isn't as much need. Thought it would be good for quick prototyping of apps but hell flat storyboards go a long way, you can surf web pages with a more ubiquitous interface, and there are only about a zillion ways to script this sort of thing in linux.
What I could never figure out for years and always wondered why, is why Be didn't just release a while back an x86 ram-resident kernel for free that would let people run apps written for BeOS on Windows. It would totally extend the reach of developers and give Be a market. Otherwise the idea of coexistence with Windows is total crap. One manufacturer in Japan (Fujitsu) sold a Be/Win double boot machine once. Who cares if it can only do one processor, that would be the gateway to the Windows market where people only need the faster chips for games and that's not what BeOS is yet about. If you want two processors run Windows in VMWare on BeOS..
Be is right to be worried about Apple hardware, heck even users get burned, repeatedly, like I have been.. and I've been an Apple owner since the II (Integer Basic). They certainly should be able to make an Altivec version, for the G4 machines that are out there now, but they will never get information from Apple about hardware. Apple owes them nothing and is plenty capable of making sure BeOS doesn't run on Apple hardware in the future if they want.
Originally I remember in PR2/R3 days that Be couldn't get documentation on Motorola's supervisor mode which was needed to make BeOS run like BeOS. When the company newsletter talks constantly about the microseconds advantage of one type of semaphore over the other, and gives you real world demonstration of how to own the scheduler in realtime, you have to love it. So BeOS has always been for me like a cheapo Silicon Graphics Machine. It was insanely great and I always got a big smile when I booted up (faster on a Mac 9600MP two years ago than my SuSE on Inspiron 7.5K 40MHz Pentium III laptop does ordinarily now.. with less screen artifacts).
I looked for other domain names that might indicate Be was planning on opening more but didn't find any in a cursory search.. if they would open more of the OS, so that it would actually begin to work with Linux, Be would become *dangerous*.
So I put the Be CVS client onto my Linux laptop last night and wouldn't mind running the OS on this or one of my other older linux macines.. but the real question is why doesn't Be just make a small free modular distro for x86 that you can put onto millions of CDs in popular magazines, or download in minutes from CNet and friends. The kernel is small and was getting smaller aparently for the appliance market, end users could plug and play modules to enable other services or hardware support. It would be cool, like Linux in a 100 mb zip distribution but this would be mere megabytes. Maybe some of those enablers would find their way back into Linux. It would run Be programs reasonably well inside windows. (I do not know if there are major problems with this, but missing the extra CPU for one thing is only a problem for people with two CPUs and irrelevant IMHO). Be would suddenly look as though they had opened the floodgates of Unix inside windows and you could imagine running Windows and Linux apps side by side (though that might just suck if Windows is still really in charge, see the first paragraph.. maybe you could let people run it badly like this but offer to let Windows boot up after Be's kernel so that Windows isn't really in charge). Maybe it could be a GUI shell inside of which Linux code (hell the whole KDE or Gnome environment might fit why not?) could run, maybe superficially prettified. Be could start providing APIs for its widgets and compete with Troll QT and Eazel, they could use the exact same API and totally stomp all .
While it feels like Be will pick up more momentum relatively speaking, and I would seriously consider putting another hard drive into my Inspiron for BeOS to keep perspective on Linux and would like to buy a CD from them again (hell I want them to succeed!) I just don't see the killer strategy yet. Maybe more newbies will consider installing BeOS than Linux on their Windows box but not a guarantee. You need to have some way for Be to get into Windows desktops or they will always be a hobbyist OS. Seems to me Be has squandered the head start they had, and is not taking a big enough step now.
At the moment I don't see the current free BeOS being a huge threat to Apple. If anything I'd say the ex-Apple people at Eazel and the new Linux kernel are big threats to Be. As Linux GUIs get (even just a little) better and realtime slicing in major apps gets (just a little better) there will be a little less edge for Be. These advances will still not approach Be, but just get a little closer. Be will still be far better unless you maybe install the SGI/SuSE journaling file system, someone reinvents some of Be's search capability for Linux, and Linux gets a bit more preemtive so Netscape doesn't hang your computer. Or if Eazel expands, a gnome company hires some great designers, or Apple gets stupid and opens Aqua without lawsuit threats.
Be should realize their current booming announcement is not nearly enough to get the kind of volume of product out there in the time frame they need. Be has already relinquished their software site to someone else (huh?) and if they don't have something to base cashflow on they are finished. They should get more revenue from CD sales, sure. But if they want to coexist with Windows or make a serious play for spreading at a more accelerated rate they need to either make a much more Windows friendly gateway (ram-resident kernel, no need to partition, and Be programs running on Windows as far as the user knows) and/or seriously open up a lot more interface, and put some weight behind getting it used. Obviously Be programs will work better on the BeOS, but there is little percentage in being a prima donna about not letting its apps run unmodified on the windows desktop at all.
Their liscense for the tracker and deskbar *are* insanely great (so what if they got slashdotted last night midway through getting my opentracker CVS client updated). It makes LGPL look wimpy.. its free!
Looking for more of that.
Thank you very much for this info. Too bad, Cameraworld's out of stock (!) but you can order at list price from Sima.
My mother just produced a video on Valentines (she's an expert on the history of them) and guess what, VHS with Macrovision. Apparently it is to be shown by the Ephemera Society of Great Britain but they had trouble copying to PAL, maybe they don't have as much experience with Macrovision there. Sure it's best if she has a DV or Beta tape but either a corrector like Sima's (available in England?) or maybe the TV video out fix mentioned earlier would do the trick for now. The studio that made the original tape is charging an arm and a leg for making PAL tapes and only in bulk.
When I was working on a digital video (Quicktime) project I heard it was cheaper to convert to the format native to your company (somebody wanted us to make a PAL output box since conversion is apparently very expensive since you have to rent a big deck). Anybody know a good shop in London, or New York, that can do this kind of easy job with high quality, quickly, at a reasonable (low budget) price? Maybe printing a DVD too? We're getting a bunch of hits at the site I made for her (telebody.com/valentines). Thanks again.
You might want to take a look at this page, at the MIT Media Lab. Some articles he has written on this subject are there, he concludes in "Will Robots Inherit the Earth" that the robots will be our children. From a conversation we had in Japan once I think he has a totally different take on robots/AI - one with a sense of humor, delight, and a sense of the faults of these children he builds - and emailed him to see if he would talk to Joy.
Can't say that I don't agree with what Joy says about nano and gene warfare and knowlege-enabled destruction.. though this doesn't mean there is no viable strategy to approach the topic. A lack of action at all will simply give more time for marginal actors to reach critical levels of knowlege and impose their own architecture. Perhaps his paralysis is due more to confronting the difficulty of weeding out the possibility of catastrophic synergies in Jini code (after all it's supposed to lend itself to synergies to some extent).. as if a sentient computer was able to hack together all of the Jini-enabled devices in the world, or if somehow they reached a critical mass as in older science fiction. Seems like Microsoft would be more dangerous since they've already done much of that in a banal human kind of way. Perhaps Joy sees himself as wielding dangerous power by fiddling with pervasive systems.. really pervasive that is.
I am no expert on any of the three dangers Joy confronts, but if you start thinking how you could protect people against dangerous mites, it seems on the face of it that either a compartmentalized environment (lots of secure sandboxes for well behaved physical programs) or a phage-filled environment (agents ready to themselves multiply like an amoeboid macrophage on a hair trigger and overwhelm an attacker) are some possibilities. For example one might imagine some way (they already exist really) to reliably tile space at high resolution and apply an addressing system keyed to electromagnetic broadcasts, much as PHS cell phones in Japan can find their geographic location.
Of course there are no wires and gates in 3d space, unless they are everywhere. You'd have to be some kind of idiot to want to have running nanotech outside of a sealed factory.. Some kind of agent probably will be omnipresent to guard against rogue mites or badly formed good ones and enforce the architecture. But all of these potential strategies come out of networking stuff Joy's been thinking about.. probably my own weakness in not having other models myself. Maybe in addition to information science and network space strategies there are different ones from the military, for example giving yourself a booster shot as the troops did in the Gulf War against chemical weapons. unfortunately, they got sick. Another model is the ocean, where coral polyps disgorge tons of embryos. Here things get more dispersed and potentially harmless the smaller and less mass they require. The only other model I can see is the Slashdot/Capitalist/Communist/Jihad Model for World Domination, that is, coopt everyone so there are no individuals who do not think too differently from you.
That said, if most of the nano and gene genre, plus AI, is based on software and communications techniques derivative from what we know about already, we are in trouble. Java was Joy's best shot at secure communication and even he is pretty adamant about Java not being designed for nuclear power plants and other dangerous things.. if Jini and sandboxes can be compromised or rendered impotent by soft that plays by different rules, you definitely do not want to bet your life on it. So I could see where he might be prone to the morose.
Now would be a good time to read Minsky.
I think the first out were amazing ideas on how to get Hi-Vision (HDTV) sets into the market. But you also get a lot of just digital NTSC with top trimmed off for wide tube. In train stations in Tokyo you sometimes see *real* fish tanks with information/advertising display in ordinary ntsc behind it so you have to watch tv if you want to look at the fish. Some let you navigate.. personally I'd rather just see the live fish.
I'm involved in a project to distribute music over fiber or isdn to kiosks where they are written on minidisc. It is Linux based with a (don't ask why, it just is) lisp-based custom VRML browser, and is in operation.
We developed a faster MD writer and liscensed it back to Sony. For the U.S. I wanted to get a CD version (2 yrs ago) but MD was done first. MD is actually a very good medium, there is even another gadget probably not yet in the U.S. a boombox with LAN connection so you can edit your MD title data on your computer easily. I believe there is a computer peripheral.. MD Data format. My guess is Sony is pushing their own secure music initiative standard with DVD instead now.
Coolest gadget I've seen so far are the magnesium versions of Sony products (MD player, camera, etc). You should be able to order these things from web shops in Japan though you might need someone who can read kanji characters.
I did some research on rural communications for Cambodia since I have been helping my partner who has built a hospital, free newspaper with two printing presses donated by Heidelberg, Future Light orphanage (with one of the best Internet computer labs in the country), and now schools ($10,000 each with your name on it, matched by World Bank), for charity there. This was supported by King Sihanouk. It seemed that security and technological needs pointed to satellite, so we had inmarsat et al give presentations. But Thailand has a phone system set up in the sky based on satellite already (no Cambodia doesn't want to be dependent.. duh). Why not turn over some of these satellites to countries that don't have any telephone switching (or lines for that matter) and a phone could mean a lot for a single village? How much would it cost to contract commercially with someone to keep one of the satellites in orbit and operational. Use Iridium handsets in the third world and UNHCR camps. Unfortunately at the end of last year heard from Nicholas Negroponte, who is on the board of Iridium, as saying that they "weren't good for data" in response to my asking about how to put Internet into Cambodia using them. He did buy a school though. And Kyocera already had an Iridium data service on their home page.. Ouch. If anyone at Iridium or MIT reads this please email, I will pursue this from my end as well. Seems to make more money for Iridium than the red ink it will cost to manage the satellites' death cruise. Cambodia hospital and mines effort (with the Princess Diana fund): telebody.com/sihanouk/, telebody.com/diana/ this thread is old now so please continue via email. mattr@telebody.com.
Installed in a snap and worked fine once I remembered where the hardware volume control was on my I7.5K.
.ram fine plus real streaming media, and in the Windows trojan horse implementation includes most of the rest of the a/v universe plus half the MacOS' toolbox.. it's an edifice. And the libraries let you do serious programming. Always thought of it as the real thing but this Realplayer seems to work well on .ram files anyway.
But having developed for Quicktime 4 I've been hoping Apple will trounce with their own release, like, *today*. Quicktime plays
Hope it is just Apple polishing up the BSD libraries.. and it all fits into the Game Plan for World Domination (tm) but idiotically it seems that you would have to install VMware (which is great in itself) to view the ouput of your Apple Darwin open source streaming server from the same machine. Repeat mantra: Let them find the bugs so we don't have to..
Unfortunately I have not read Bill Joy's article but two cents anyway. Current technology is plenty enough to wreck the planet, but the spread of network technology and open source thinking means a sea change in the landscape and nearing of the horizon on this one. Just ask the people at VA Linux.
Following this message are a list of two related books and link to a little site I built in 1996 on the Aum cult which got an award from England's Web Magazine.
I have agreed since probably before the Gulf War with some of what Bill Joy says but with a corollary and obligation to continue.
Clearly technically enhanced substances, for lack of a better term, have great potential for good or harm, whether they are based on one or a combination of nanotechnology, genetic engineering, microscale and chip manufacturing, or even just very large clumps of engineered matter whether nuclear or just hanging above our heads at escape velocity.
As matter inevitably grows more digitally addressable, the power of the individual will be magnified much as it now is by the Internet, although at a more irresistibly charged metric. An overwhelming momentum for empowerment will develop along a vector pointing towards cataclysmic power unleashable by a widespread desktop-sized apparatus.. and soon thereafter by the very tiny indeed. We will catch software viruses and our need to be always online will take on a new meaning.
In the short term, we may come to wish we only had to worry about missing plutonium when destruction can be unleashed from seemingly innocent delivery mechanisms, perhaps a body, a toothbrush, or a seed. Even now, biological warfare is too easy for the determined. But in the not so distant future there will be just too many dual-use technologies, and too many ways for knowledge about how things really work to get out.
Four years ago in Tokyo people I knew were peripherally affected by a sarin gas strike on a Tokyo subway I use often. It and subsequent events were collaborations by the direct perpetrators (Aum Shinrikyo, which built up a cadre of trained professionals), and the mass media. They stored their data on CD-ROM and did things that were both silly and scary at the same time.. like burning the bodies of victims in homemade ultrapowerful microwave ovens. They were researching powerful laser and other weapons technologies. They shot the chief of police near his home. The cult still exists and has members. They are still pasty-faced and have dead eyes from the LSD-powered indoctrination they had. Children were raised in this group and are fighting for their right to an education. This case was handled terribly by the authorities but another recent one was quickly smashed. There actually are a large number of large, powerful, internationally capable religious and quasi-religious organizations in Japan alone.
I have often struggled personally with the immense sorrow and graphic portrayal of war presented in non-U.S. media and yet, at the same time found a potential justification: it is to be hoped that the most dangerous "rogues" are somehow destroyed or coopted before the general level of purchasable or open source technology empowers people with intense hatred of open societies. Not because they will individually push a button, but because someone who believes in them will eventually get empowered too.
While distrusting the motivations of those who seek and hold real power, the realization that we are living on borrowed time, in that it may become impossible for the democratic powers to stay far enough ahead to learn of such dangers for their own safety, does not justify to me, either morally or strategically, the arrest of basic freedoms.
But it does seem necessary to hope that military operations against such opponents are well-crafted, and effective. Likewise it seems that promotion of positive values which seem to be shared by people in open source and other contemporary movements informed by a sense of the millenium, must be spread as quickly and widely as possible -- before this carrier wave is loaded with physically real munitions.
Obviously there are two solutions. One is for the people who do the spying to successfully subvert all open technologies.. or possibly a large group of advanced researchers might opt to watch over each other. This path does not seem a good bet to succeed in the face of such a supernova of change, one which washes over us, and through the entire human population on the planet.
The other solution is for the rest of us to ensure that all empowered individuals have a stake in the existence of our community, that there is no outside. Destruction of the intellect is neither a worthy or valid strategy. Thanks to Joy and many others, we have a better chance at being able to decide our own future. As for mankind's unleashing the ultimate power when quantum reality is far better understood, I figure it's fifty-fifty.. and take the optimistic side. It makes far more sense to believe that we are at a cusp in time now and that the decisions we make will - in many different dimensions - shape our future.
"Media Tero" -- http://telebody.com/mattr/tero/
Some related reading: Beggars and Choosers (Nancy Kress), Islands in the Net (Bruce Sterling).
Hi from Tokyo. I don't have a PS2 yet since I would rather be developing for it then playing it right now. Working on that.. they sold almost a million units in the first 3 days but some of the chips are out of stock and apparently will take 2 weeks for some people who ordered to get theirs. Development system is Linux apparently. It has PCI Type 3, ilink and optical output, and USB according to http://www.scei.co.jp/ps2/ and Sony rates it at 66 million polygons/sec and 6.2 Gflops ("for soft-looking smoke and realistic hair rendered strand by strand").. Hmm I better pick one of these up! Display using special process chip called Graphics Synthesizer, a 147.456 MHz "ultra-parallel display writing circuitry" for TV, S-Video, and future DigitalTV. Emotion Engine is one big LSI chip (0.18micron,128bit) at 294.912 MHz which they say is fastest 128bit CPU as of January, only 32MB main memory (increases by 25% with memory card), 4MB VRAM (?), 48+ simultaneous sound cannels, 2MB sound memory (!). Surely would be a love hate relationship unless repackaged on a PCI card.. Oh and the MagicGate encryption is called Encryption/Authorization capability ("security for the network era"..) Wonder if tha means there's a harware serial number.. guess that is inevitable.m l ..note smiley in url and see menu.html for other stuff) a zip archive of a game written in assembler.. for ARM. Now I don't have a PS, so I probably shouldn't buy the PocketStation.. better get a dev unit somehow!
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All I really want are the big chips.
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PocketStation is a 3000 yen peripheral (http://st1.yahoo.co.jp/nojima/pocketstation.html where you can buy it for 2700 yen, or http://www.scei.co.jp/news/pocket/menu.html and links in that directory) which zdnet Japan calls a PDA. Looks like a play on the Dreamcast Visual Memory game saving thing, comes in white and skeleton (or "crystal" as Sony calls it). According to ZDnet Japan You can store 15 memory blocks on it, each of which can be a PocketStation program, so you can play games on it. It was supposed to come out 12/23 but ended up being a month late, production projected at 1 million units a month. It has a 32 bit cpu and talks they say (!). Monochrome display, docks with old PS, you can download soft from CD or.. I found one page where you can download (http://www3.freeweb.ne.jp/misc/q-_-p/html/pks.ht
YAHHH!
Yes another Evangelion fan. Have the two movies been released in the U.S. ? Some excellent computer graphics and risk taking in the film versions.. had a special meaning for lots of psychologically scarred Japanese youths. Female characters are interesting too.
Is there a way to view this page without crashing your computer?
P.S. Otherspace is at www.otherspace.de
Two friends have worked in this area for some years now, Bob O'Kane and Ulrike Gabriel of Otherspace, an Art & Technology Duo (Ulrike originally from Germany, Bob was in Buffalo for a while and is the tech side.. skills ranging from analog circuitry to SGI Onyx programming). You may find them by searching for Terrain project, one old page is at > t0 (http://web.t0.or.at/t0/terrain/page001.htm)</a>. In the versions I have tried in Tokyo, two participants sit about 8m apart separated by a 3m diameter low round platform on which a fleet of light styrofoam/solarpanel/sensor covered mini robots twirl about. The table is lit from above by a giant bank of bright halogens, and from below relatively dim panels from which reectangular portions of the platform seem to randomly change in intensity. The robots move faster depending on the amount of current in the halogens, and the light from below changes their behavior. In some versions the intensity of emotion in the participants (measured by headbands linked to transceivers) is measured, and like amounts would produce a synergistic effect in the robots. A later version worked more on similarities in emotion. When I say emotion it obviously is not a chemical sensor, it works more on the ration of beta and delta waves if I remember correctly. It was very difficult at first to use and when I tried it the lights went bang! on and off which startled everyone. Apparently they had precalibrated the system for Japanese minds. An interview with Bob by Volker Grassmuck (who was also in Tokyo and is now in Berlin) is available at <a href="http://www.ntticc.or.jp/pub/ic_mag/ic014/vol ker/volker_e.html">http://www.ntticc.or. jp/pub/ic_mag/ic014/volker/volker_e.html</a>.
You probably know about this book but for those who haven't been into sci-fi for a long time, check out Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, which features something called Ice-Nine..
b s96-09Ice.html
I'd guess this is probably the classic story, mixes self-assembly _and_ crystallization and I'd better not tell you any more or I'll give it away.
Checking the name of the book I found a relevant url.. http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/Issues/Sciobs96/Scio
The name of this substance somehow strikes the soul harder than something called "gray goo" for me anyway.. which sounds so silly maybe it should be renamed. Gray Nemesis? Another oldie.. this on what happens when the goo gets smart: Greg Bear, Blood Music.
Also another good book if you like nano and society. Beggars and Choosers, by Nancy Kress. A good read.
Matt