Working in Singapore a year ago I noticed that there were a lot of Lamborghinis around. Its a bit silly because their highest speed limit is 80km/h and the island isn't big enough to get the thing to top speed anyway.
Apparently the thing to do is wake up at 4 AM, cross the causeway into Malaysia and point the car at Kuala Lumpur. Two hours later you are having breakfast in KL. The drive back would be after the traffic cops have woken up for the day so you take a bit longer for that leg, and carry some cash
TFA waffles on about how Bugatti had to work on the structure to make it survive at 250 miles per hour, but honestly, speeds like that are just routine for twin engined aeroplanes. They need to be engineered to do that too but it isn't really a big deal.
Amateurs have built cars which go close to the sound barrier. Cars were going as fast as this 50 years ago. Sure, road vehicles get stressed a bit more than aircraft, but any sail plane comes with a 20G crash cage made out of normal aluminium. And they cost, what? 100 grand?
When Gibson drew a line under the Neuromancer story arc there was a perception that it had turned into distant future fantasy. So Virtual Light started with something grounded in the present day, not as way out. But the last couple of years, with hacking, spam, botnets and P2P being so important, and universal networking through mobile 3G networks, I have started to think we are closer to the world of Neuromancer than we thought.
Artificial Intelligence is an important hacking tool now. It hasn't taken off, but Marie-France Tessier could be developing something right now in Morocco. I have the feeling we are only a single breakthrough away. But the breakthrough will be more of an integration thing than a software development thing. The tools are there now. Making them understand each other will be a challenge.
Ah, insightful... its good to know that neither you nor anyone moding your comments have any clue about network engineering.
Seriously. I work in a place which really does need a good hard wired LAN. It is over-engineered to hell by our IT contractor, mainly to help justify their existence. They use juniper firewalls in place of commodity switches for some reason.
But most IT consumers don't do the software engineering we do. They move a few word documents around, exchange some emails. Google do email for domains for free now. They do word processing for free as well. Facebook does groupware better than lotus notes ever did.
In house information services is going to collapse. Nobody needs desktop support for Android.
I just don't see the fully wireless office coming any time soon.
Not for big places but say you run a travel agency, or a little import operation. Many of your people need email but they can do that on their phones now. Maybe your receptionist has one of those netbooks you can buy from the phone company with 3G built in. If you don't need to transfer mass quantities of data, 3G might be enough.
In years past we had an nntp server on the LAN at work for internal forums. Now that I can get to outside forums I just don't bother. For the younger generation its just going to seem natural to do normal business on facebook.
Have to say I am sceptical of that. I spent a week in Changi Village (one of the localities in the article you linked to) a year ago. I didn't detect any wifi at all. I paid $12 SG per hour for wired internet, charged to work of course. In fact the only free wifi I know of in the region is in KL airport. But it is oversubscribed and very slow.
... until WiFi access is as ubiquitous as mobile-network access and people pay for usage much the same as for mobile phones.
Its a bit of a moot point because protocols change all the time and will no doubt converge in the medium term. If you pay a telco for a data service it won't really matter if the service is wifi or 3G in the future.
My prediction for the next five years or so is that some businesses will stop wiring their offices for data at all. They will use the 3G cellular network with VPNs for secure communication.
My mother used to teach children who are both deaf and blind. They used taxies quite a bit to move children between home and school. One day the taxi driver got the destination totally wrong. The child knew straight away they were going the wrong way and tried to tell the driver but unfortunately the driver assumed he knew better and kept going.
Without sight and hearing you still have a lot of input from your senses. Your skin can detect photons (nice and warm sitting here in the sun) and vibration (haptic feedback, etc). One trick my mother used with her students was to press an inflated balloon to the child's skin, then to expose it to sound. The balloon makes it easier to couple the sound source to the skin. That way you can use sign language to help the child understand the sounds and vibrations they experience.
And for those in countries where it matters, this article mentions that it should also be available in right-hand drive.
Where it matters? Do some countries have laws dictating that sort of thing? AFAIK, that sort of thing of more de facto than de jure. I, personally, would love to have a right-hand drive car here in the US. Because otherwise when you park on the street the most-used seat/door is exposed to traffic.
Its strictly illegal in Australia to drive a car with the driver on the left. There are a few minor exceptions:
Imported classic cars. Say you have a Ford Mustang which you imported. You only want to drive it on Sundays and with the car club. You can get a permit for that
Test cars, usually imported by Ford or GM. Sometimes new models can be seen driving around with the driver on the left
Street cleaners and garbage trucks. These drivers need good visibility on the left. Many of them have dual control.
In all but the first case they have to display a prominent sign saying LEFT HAND DRIVE.
Its different in Europe. People drive around all the time in the wrong sort of car which (frankly) gives me the creeping horrors. In 1975 my family drove around Europe in a English camper van. Several times my Dad started driving on the left purely by reflex. I would find it hard enough to adapt in a left drive car. But at least then having the controls reversed would give me a continuous reminder of what side of the road I was supposed to be on.
Along most typical highways there are electricity transmission lines. You could build a standard box which attaches to the transmission line. It contains a data interface which can be used for billing. It would be a bit like a USB interface where the consumer has to negotiate with a server to get the full power supply switched on.
If EVs become common you could attach one of these to a power pylon every kilometre or so. Anybody who needs to stop and charge could do so.
People like you who do drive four hours at a time will probably be the last to get electric cars. But the normal suburban commuter which spends an hour and a bit going to work and back can just be plugged in at night like a phone. That accounts for 95% of cars out there. Your example is not typical.
I think it was Seymour Cray who made a boat every year and finished by chopping the boat up and having a barbecue. If I could somehow dispose of the megabytes of legacy code I have to deal with at work, moving forward would be a lot easier. So maybe GPLing code is Carmack's way of saying its done. Now forget about it and move on.
My wife went to Hong Kong with our son and her parents right at the start of the swine flu panic. She got her sister to write her a prescription for tamiflu and they took it with them on their trip along with face masks which (looking at the pictures they brought back) they wore a lot of the time.
Personally if I had to wear a mask to go to another country I just wouldn't go, but maybe thats just me. The tamiflu was useless as well. My wife's sister, who is a doctor, says when you go to the hospital don't touch the buttons and hand rails in the lift, because sick people use the lift. Doctors take the stairs.
Unless some of my very basic assumptions are wrong, this sort of cements the "active water cycle", doesn't it? I'm fairly certain that the Martian atmosphere won't tolerate something like methane snow, so what's left?
Well its a simple water cycle. It sublimates and then it solidifies. There is no direct evidence of a liquid phase yet. That would have to be underground.
DEC (now Oracle) RDB is an SQL database. A pretty nice one, actually.
Yes but it had its own query language, complete with a precompiler for C so you could embed queries directly into your code. I believe SQL was an option back when DEC owned it as well.
Our own nervous system works as a pretty good associative database, though (in my case at least) it seems to be designed to associate places with objects, ie, it is intended to answer the question "what happened the last time I was here?". So as we develop new applications we tend to develop spatial or geographical models for our data.
The genetic data you describe is not too different from other things we all have to deal with. Trace or log data. Video streams. Sequences of real time events from practically anything. All of these things consist of partly structured streams from which we need to extract meaning. And yes, for all these things storage in a relational database doesn't add any value.
My guess would be that because SQL is a Structured Query Language it is best used for handling structured data. If you have serial, unstructured data you have to invent your own format for it to use inside the database, and then the query language isn't helping you.
P-III at 16Hz? (The H in Hz is a capital) Was that on the toys packaging, or what? Furthermore, its "I need" instead of "I needs".
Its a CD my son turned up with. Its got some crap game on it. The system requirements are printed on the CD and they really do say 16hz. Just some stupid translation problem. Last night we watched a DVD of Zorro which my wife had picked up from somewhere. Soundtrack in mandarin, english subtitles derived from the soundtrack. Hilarious.
Slashdot Mirror
But I'm not a yank. Thats why.
More likely to be the other way around I think.
Working in Singapore a year ago I noticed that there were a lot of Lamborghinis around. Its a bit silly because their highest speed limit is 80km/h and the island isn't big enough to get the thing to top speed anyway.
Apparently the thing to do is wake up at 4 AM, cross the causeway into Malaysia and point the car at Kuala Lumpur. Two hours later you are having breakfast in KL. The drive back would be after the traffic cops have woken up for the day so you take a bit longer for that leg, and carry some cash
TFA waffles on about how Bugatti had to work on the structure to make it survive at 250 miles per hour, but honestly, speeds like that are just routine for twin engined aeroplanes. They need to be engineered to do that too but it isn't really a big deal.
Amateurs have built cars which go close to the sound barrier. Cars were going as fast as this 50 years ago. Sure, road vehicles get stressed a bit more than aircraft, but any sail plane comes with a 20G crash cage made out of normal aluminium. And they cost, what? 100 grand?
When Gibson drew a line under the Neuromancer story arc there was a perception that it had turned into distant future fantasy. So Virtual Light started with something grounded in the present day, not as way out. But the last couple of years, with hacking, spam, botnets and P2P being so important, and universal networking through mobile 3G networks, I have started to think we are closer to the world of Neuromancer than we thought.
Artificial Intelligence is an important hacking tool now. It hasn't taken off, but Marie-France Tessier could be developing something right now in Morocco. I have the feeling we are only a single breakthrough away. But the breakthrough will be more of an integration thing than a software development thing. The tools are there now. Making them understand each other will be a challenge.
Ah, insightful ... its good to know that neither you nor anyone moding your comments have any clue about network engineering.
Seriously. I work in a place which really does need a good hard wired LAN. It is over-engineered to hell by our IT contractor, mainly to help justify their existence. They use juniper firewalls in place of commodity switches for some reason.
But most IT consumers don't do the software engineering we do. They move a few word documents around, exchange some emails. Google do email for domains for free now. They do word processing for free as well. Facebook does groupware better than lotus notes ever did.
In house information services is going to collapse. Nobody needs desktop support for Android.
I just don't see the fully wireless office coming any time soon.
Not for big places but say you run a travel agency, or a little import operation. Many of your people need email but they can do that on their phones now. Maybe your receptionist has one of those netbooks you can buy from the phone company with 3G built in. If you don't need to transfer mass quantities of data, 3G might be enough.
In years past we had an nntp server on the LAN at work for internal forums. Now that I can get to outside forums I just don't bother. For the younger generation its just going to seem natural to do normal business on facebook.
Have to say I am sceptical of that. I spent a week in Changi Village (one of the localities in the article you linked to) a year ago. I didn't detect any wifi at all. I paid $12 SG per hour for wired internet, charged to work of course. In fact the only free wifi I know of in the region is in KL airport. But it is oversubscribed and very slow.
... until WiFi access is as ubiquitous as mobile-network access and people pay for usage much the same as for mobile phones.
Its a bit of a moot point because protocols change all the time and will no doubt converge in the medium term. If you pay a telco for a data service it won't really matter if the service is wifi or 3G in the future.
My prediction for the next five years or so is that some businesses will stop wiring their offices for data at all. They will use the 3G cellular network with VPNs for secure communication.
My mother used to teach children who are both deaf and blind. They used taxies quite a bit to move children between home and school. One day the taxi driver got the destination totally wrong. The child knew straight away they were going the wrong way and tried to tell the driver but unfortunately the driver assumed he knew better and kept going.
Without sight and hearing you still have a lot of input from your senses. Your skin can detect photons (nice and warm sitting here in the sun) and vibration (haptic feedback, etc). One trick my mother used with her students was to press an inflated balloon to the child's skin, then to expose it to sound. The balloon makes it easier to couple the sound source to the skin. That way you can use sign language to help the child understand the sounds and vibrations they experience.
And for those in countries where it matters, this article mentions that it should also be available in right-hand drive.
Where it matters? Do some countries have laws dictating that sort of thing? AFAIK, that sort of thing of more de facto than de jure. I, personally, would love to have a right-hand drive car here in the US. Because otherwise when you park on the street the most-used seat/door is exposed to traffic.
Its strictly illegal in Australia to drive a car with the driver on the left. There are a few minor exceptions:
In all but the first case they have to display a prominent sign saying LEFT HAND DRIVE.
Its different in Europe. People drive around all the time in the wrong sort of car which (frankly) gives me the creeping horrors. In 1975 my family drove around Europe in a English camper van. Several times my Dad started driving on the left purely by reflex. I would find it hard enough to adapt in a left drive car. But at least then having the controls reversed would give me a continuous reminder of what side of the road I was supposed to be on.
Along most typical highways there are electricity transmission lines. You could build a standard box which attaches to the transmission line. It contains a data interface which can be used for billing. It would be a bit like a USB interface where the consumer has to negotiate with a server to get the full power supply switched on.
If EVs become common you could attach one of these to a power pylon every kilometre or so. Anybody who needs to stop and charge could do so.
People like you who do drive four hours at a time will probably be the last to get electric cars. But the normal suburban commuter which spends an hour and a bit going to work and back can just be plugged in at night like a phone. That accounts for 95% of cars out there. Your example is not typical.
I think it was Seymour Cray who made a boat every year and finished by chopping the boat up and having a barbecue. If I could somehow dispose of the megabytes of legacy code I have to deal with at work, moving forward would be a lot easier. So maybe GPLing code is Carmack's way of saying its done. Now forget about it and move on.
My wife went to Hong Kong with our son and her parents right at the start of the swine flu panic. She got her sister to write her a prescription for tamiflu and they took it with them on their trip along with face masks which (looking at the pictures they brought back) they wore a lot of the time.
Personally if I had to wear a mask to go to another country I just wouldn't go, but maybe thats just me. The tamiflu was useless as well. My wife's sister, who is a doctor, says when you go to the hospital don't touch the buttons and hand rails in the lift, because sick people use the lift. Doctors take the stairs.
Unless some of my very basic assumptions are wrong, this sort of cements the "active water cycle", doesn't it? I'm fairly certain that the Martian atmosphere won't tolerate something like methane snow, so what's left?
Well its a simple water cycle. It sublimates and then it solidifies. There is no direct evidence of a liquid phase yet. That would have to be underground.
DEC (now Oracle) RDB is an SQL database. A pretty nice one, actually.
Yes but it had its own query language, complete with a precompiler for C so you could embed queries directly into your code. I believe SQL was an option back when DEC owned it as well.
So we keep out eyes open for funny-once jokes?
Our own nervous system works as a pretty good associative database, though (in my case at least) it seems to be designed to associate places with objects, ie, it is intended to answer the question "what happened the last time I was here?". So as we develop new applications we tend to develop spatial or geographical models for our data.
The genetic data you describe is not too different from other things we all have to deal with. Trace or log data. Video streams. Sequences of real time events from practically anything. All of these things consist of partly structured streams from which we need to extract meaning. And yes, for all these things storage in a relational database doesn't add any value.
This is one of the main objectives of ReiserFS, to make such things easy, a project which unfortunately has run into some difficulty of late.
I wonder if I could sneak Hans an eeepc inside a birthday cake...
It would be interesting to hear why this is.
My guess would be that because SQL is a Structured Query Language it is best used for handling structured data. If you have serial, unstructured data you have to invent your own format for it to use inside the database, and then the query language isn't helping you.
I thought DEC RDB was a pretty good query language. I never got into SQL as a result. I am glad people are thinking about alternatives.
P-III at 16Hz? (The H in Hz is a capital) Was that on the toys packaging, or what? Furthermore, its "I need" instead of "I needs".
Its a CD my son turned up with. Its got some crap game on it. The system requirements are printed on the CD and they really do say 16hz. Just some stupid translation problem. Last night we watched a DVD of Zorro which my wife had picked up from somewhere. Soundtrack in mandarin, english subtitles derived from the soundtrack. Hilarious.
Yes, there is a typo in my sig. Fixed. Thanks.
Does masturbation count?
Yes
Oh thank god.
But what if you injure yourself? How would you call for help if you have wrecked the phone?