The Body is the Convergence. You have 5 main input devices (and two lesser ones). What you can perceive is limited by these input devices. Digital tools enhance what you can perceive. Can one digital tool make all possible enhancements?
No.
This may not seem obvious because most of the "innovation" in the digital tool market has been Microsoft Innovation (tm) and not Real Innovation (no trademark; no patent - it expired soon after we started using Stone Tools).
Can you feel someone behind you? Like I mean feel their presence? There is a "Digital Tool" that gives you this perception (those who tried it out felt "naked" once they had to take it off again). Can you see in pitch blackness? Can you communicate with someone far away? Can you communicate with someone right next to you who doesn't know any language you do? Can you find some information stored on an aluminum plate in Moscow? Can you find some information someone told you yesterday, but you forgot?
Understand the domain, then re-ask the question: can one device do all these things? How? Do you want it to?
Vodaphone merged with AirTouch. Then Vodaphone set up a joint venture with Bell Atlantic - Verizone. Vodaphone gave the baby Bell a majority position, but it still has a huge chunk (something like 40%).
Vodaphone then merged with Mannessman. Not only did they not bite the dust, BUT at one point they were worth more than Microsoft. Currently, if you include their percentage stake in Verizone, they are the world's largest wireless firm.
All this means one thing: you're wrong-o, friend:)
Ha! Even the American cellphone firm you mention isn't a proper American. It's half US (The Bell part) and half European - AirTouch is owned by Vodaphone, a British wireless company.
Again the same problem. You need prior knowledge of what are the concepts involved in the semantics of natural language. In simpler terms, what are you supposed to tag, and what is your tagset? And what if many relevant factors in actual language use simply can't be captured in corpora? ("corpora" == databases of naturally occurring speech or writing.)
Yes, I agree that current SNLP methods are semantically weak - that's one of the things I'm working on. And I agree that you need good apriori information.
But my key point is that NLP is turning from a _philosophical_ airy-fairy field into a _science_. And that's the first step to having some real breakthroughs.
Now, I should qualify what I'm saying with a few things: the NLP systems that have worked in the past work in small domains with limited vocabulary. This will still be the case. However, we now have the tools to begin scaling up.
I think another breakthrough in NLP will be a reduced emphasis on a "whole-language" theory of semantics, and a more (pragmatic) emphasis on a domain-by-domain approach.
It will take a long time for a computer to pass anything resembling a Turing test, but long before that, you'll be able to use voice (along with other input devices) to control your computer in many specific applications. And honestly, I think right now the limitation in starting to get applications that scale more is the small number of researchers and programmers who are well-versed in NLP rather than the technology itself.
Like a system, and langauge can be as secure or insecure as you can make it. One can write an extremely tight program in C++ while writing one in Perl or Java that leaves gaping security holes open.
This statement troubles me. C/C++ addict who have little exposure to other languages have little knowledge of what they're missing.
_Many_ (if not most?) security attacks involve buffer overflows. You have to _work_ and _think_ to free yourself of buffer overflows in C/C++. In other languages, this protection comes for free.
Yes, it's possible to make a secure program in C/C++. But it's just a hell of a lot easier in bounds-checking languages.
I've been working in "computational linguistics" for the last two years.
I guess there were a few things you didn't study:)
The past 10 years or so a new field - statistical natural language processing (SNLP) has shown a _lot_ of promise.
Right now, if you throw a SNLP system a bunch of parsetrees, it's able to induce a grammar - even in sufficiently complicated languages. (For simple languages, you can even induce a reasonable grammar just by giving syntactically correct string. Impressive!)
The next stage after inducing syntax from training examples with tagged syntax is to induce semantics from training examples with tagges semantics.
Yes, this is still a research topic, but it is by _no_ means pointless. One day computers will be able to do anything humans can, and more.
Is it just me, or do a lot of post seem (-1, Redundant) to you?
In fact, you could automate a moderator for this story.
IF "ya I'll just patent xxx and sue everyone" THEN +1, insightful IF "but this isn't a patent - it's a trademark. Give them some credit" THEN +1, informative IF "but NeXT had a cube in the late 80's. Apple bought NeXT" THEN +1, informative IF "but trademarks cover names, not designs" THEN +1, insightful IF "but trademarks are only if consumers may be confused - and Cobalt and Apple are targetting different markets" +1, informative
A number of things 1. I *wish* mods would read other posts first. Bring out interesting viewpoints that are being ignored.
2. Don't always be so hostile to trademark laws. If they didn't exist, there would be nothing from stopping MS from releasing a product called "MS Linux" and spending billions on advertising it when the Halloween Document was just a document and not a call-to-arms.
Cobalt is a *small* company, and it's good that there is some way of preventing a multibillion dollar multinational (where is Katz when you need him?) from stomping all over the little guy - Cobalt in this case.
Part of their marketing campaign - the way you recognize them - was their name and the unique shape of their boxes. All the millions they spent on building that name could be lost because Steve Jobs was having a bad hair day.
Side Effect's Houdini is SHIPPING for Linux. Each package has it's own strengths and weaknesses. A|W is particularily strong in modelling; Houdini's strengths include a powerful scripting language and the drag'n'drop "visual procedural interface" (really COOL if you ever get a chance to use it). And of course the most important strength is Linux support today (and not just the renderer).
To all the people who complain about open source/free software by pointing at Mozilla, here is something to point back.
It's a fork but not a fork (uses the same code base) and solves problems people have (big web browsers, ugly Netcenter skin on Mozilla:). And if this were a commercial product, it just wouldn't happen.
A lot of posters here make references to CHI (Computer-Human Interface) research groups at various universities. This just skims the surface. (Do a google search for "computer human interface" or "human computer interface" and follow any of the many links you'll find).
Is GUI innovation dead? Well, one of the things CHI people are working on are ways to improve GUI design. However, as is sadly too common, there is a huge barrier between what academics find and what is adopted in industry.
Remember: although Apple did do a *lot* of original work with GUIs, the core ideas came from academia (Even the Xerox PARC team were former students of Doug Englebart, the Stanford researcher who laid the important groundwork).
But where are the bold, new, designs? Why do all the improvemnts still look like dialog boxes and buttons?
Well, there may be hugely innovative stuff yet to be done - but the field is old by computer science standards. Most of the major ideas of how to get humans with keyboards and mice to interact with computers have already been done.
So does this mean *all* UI innovation is done? Nope. The old hardware assumptions - the human had a keyboard and mouse, the computer had a video display (and maybe a sound system) - will be overturned.
You will be able to use your eyes and hands to let the computer know what you want. Or, if that isn't accurate enough, you can still use the mouse. You can speak when that's more efficient, or type if typing would be faster (For things like "(" or "{" or "["). If your finger and eyes aren't accurate enough to point, go ahead and use the mouse.
All of these new ways of interacting with computers will lead to new ways of presenting data, and new ways of allowing users to modify data. The innovation won't be in GUIs alone, but a combination of GUIs with newer input/output devices.
Don't ask about innovation in GUI design, ask about innovation in human-computer interfaces overall.
A Robot Car. A perfect digital map. A network flow optimization algorithm that gets you to where you want to go, taking into account current and historical traffic patterns.
Yup, some people are able to do already in their heads but read on:
No traffic lights, no stop signs, no speed limits. Your car will be able to avoid other traffic without these things designed to make driving safe for imperfect human drivers.
Except during rush hour in the biggest most congested cities, most roads are >50% unused. Huh? you say... traffic is everywhere? No, most places, people tend to leave at least 1 car length, and cars tend to travel in "packs" because some slow clod won't let others pass.
None of that. Cars are *right* upto one another. Nearly no space. They already have this in a special highway in San Diego. And no attitutes, no slow people to block your way... everyone is going really really fast.
And that's not it. Stick in an entertainment center, a reclining chair... man you're set. Get a good book, maybe pop a movie into the DVD drive. And since speed limits are a thing of the past, you'll get there in 3 hours going at 200km/h. And it'll be safer.
I think I caught the first booboo he made. Photons *do* have a rest mass of zero. But uh, they tend to travel at the speed of light relative to all frames of reference (or so I hear:). Because of some relativistic quirks, this gives them a slight mass.
Godel's argument is that any logical system is either inconsistant or incomplete. Humans, however, are not logical beasts, but rather emotional beasts. Our reasoning is both inconsistant *and* incomplete but sometimes we manage to eek out some logical statements (that's why math geeks are a *rarity* in society).
There are two ways in which an AI machine can be built. Either symbolically (with an understanding of intelligence) or through simulation (by simulating human neurons, but possibly no understanding of what's going on). Probably there will be some kind of a mix of the two.
The biggest problem that AI faces isn't any kind of philosophical barrier, but rather SPEED. There are a lot of NP-complete and NP-hard problems in AI, some of which don't have good approximation algorithms. Take simulation, as an example, modern neural net simulations (I'm not taking cheezy backprop nets, but rather cool biologically-inspired stuff) have only been able to simulation a small fraction of the neurons and a small fraction of the interconnects in the human mind.
What happens when we're able to simulate *all* the neurons in a human mind in real time? It's just a matter of getting the structure right, and letting it learn like a small child. There will be nothing in the human mind that isn't in this "Turing Machine" (except possibly some Chaotic effects... the precision of TMs may be more limited) . And that says nothing at all of symbol methods, which will also benefit from increases in processor speed.
It'll be a "virtuous cycle". Once processor speeds are good enough, AI techniques will be adopted by the private sector, who will be able to *sell* systems and spend many billions of dollars on development. Sad but true, I think the first AI systems will be privately owned.
Damn damn damn I hate how stupid these analysis are sometimes. "Cisco's operating system will be the platform of the future"....NO! The network will be the platform of the future. Cisco has NO O/S ambitions, and I wish those analysits would understand that.
IOS is an embedded operating system designed to run routers and little else. You can't run Apache on it. You can't run MS Office on it. You can't run thin clients on it. That's not the point. The point is to run a router. Cisco is a hardware company, not a software firm. If you don't know IOS is there, it's doing it's job.
Preamble: In the olden days, software came with manuals, and the software designers expected you to read at least a bit of the manuals before attempting to use the software. These days, (enlightened) developers design software to be used without manuals - in fact it is common for even commerical software to ship with nothing in the way of usable print documentation. The difference is usually made up in online documentation. Whether that's good or bad is another issue - but it does bring me to my question:
As online documentation becomes more and more important, searching online documentation becomes one of the most important functions a program can offer. In the Windows world, this started as nothing more than a grep through the documentation files. Recently, however, as things such as information retreival (IR) and natural language queries (NLQ) become hot research topics (in part due to searching the WWW), Microsoft has been at the forefront of making these technologies work. Say what you want about the Office Assistant, with each new release, it's able to better understand questions you ask it. My question is: is there any effort to bring IR or NLQ technologies to the Open Source world? Has anyone been talking to researchers at universities if they would be willing to release their source for inclusion into an Open Source project?
Another poster hinted at this, but I feel like the authors walked into a slaughterhouse and can't smell the stink. Besides stature in the community, there is another benefit to Open Source programming - it's fun. It is widely beleived that most "new" economic theories will come from the crossover of economics to psyhchology, so the authors would be wise to consult (the now-popularized) psych. concept of "flow" and how this relates to Open Source programming.
as far as my understanding goes, iridium was actually a more *expensive* than many local exchanges. In poorer countries with telephone monopolies, Iridium was waaaay to expensive for the local population to afford. In countries where lots of people actually could afford Iridium, cheaper alternatives existed - namely cell and PCS phones.
Iridium went under the old-fasioned way: it ran out of money because not enough people bought it's product.
You're forgetting that as you speed up, time slows down. Let's say (woo-hoo) someone invents a teleporter device, and a "human" can be transported over some kind of signal.
Now, if send the human to the sun over this signal at the speed of light - it will appear to take 8 minutes for us, but for the teleported human, it will have appeared to take no time at all.
If we send the human to the sun at 2x the speed of light through some kind of tachyeon signal, it will appear to take 4 minutes to us, but from the point of view of the person transported, time will have regressed 4 minutes. (OR something like that)... from what i remember from high school physics.
Maybe I'm getting my history a bit screwed, but Sun, over the years, has released the source for a number of different products. Maybe the liscenses weren't Open Source (tm) Approved, but this was quite some time ago - in the pre-Java days when Sun wasn't the Microsoft-on-Unix company it seems to have turned into.
Again, my history might be a bit screwed: I'm not sure of the liscence for NFS 1.0, Tcl/Tk-guy might have started that project before joining Sun and the Open Windows/olvwm/XView source I think was released after it lost out to Motif... but I don't think it's accurate to say this is a first for Sun.
but MusixTEX and lilypond don't count for me 'cause it doesn't have a GUI:) PS I am one of those people who use lyx rather than LaTEX b/c I don't want to learn yet another language (as if it wasn't enough to know C/C++, Java, 4 different kinds assembly, Prolog, LISP, ML, Haskell, 2 different shells, make scripts, 2 different text-file regex matching languages including one (Perl) that's Turing-complete, plus languages for config files (yup! they are formal languages, too!) like/etc/passwd, init, Xinit, Xresources).... damn Unix needs to come a loooong way until it's easy-to-use....
From the GNOME and KDE homepages, I managed to find sequencer apps... actually from what I saw they were hoping to be whole "music suites." (I think the KDE one was hoping to be a re-write of Cubasis). Of course, like productivity software, the Windows/Mac versions have in some times a decades long development head start, and this shows (although it seems some OSS projects seems to catch up very quickly).
Sound librarians are far behind... there is a port of CSOUND to Linux (the top patch synthesizer), but this only synthesizes patches, I don't think it has a wave editor, nor do I think it can download patches from a keyboard.
Music notation software is even further behind. The Rosegarden project (now part of Gnome) had a notation part, but the whole thing is being rewritten from sratch for GNOME (hmpf - it needed to be rewritten, I understand, but what ever happened to platform idependence?)
Hope this helps, it was a while ago that I looked, so sorry for the lack of URLs... but maybe there's enough here that you can do a search.
You say nature, I say nurture, let's call the...
on
Genome
·
· Score: 2
...whole thing off.
In a new book Judith Harris, "The Nurture Assumption," a third, and perhaps more important alternative is looked into: the idea that a child's peer group has lasting impact on his/her development.
On another note, I don't like the tone of, "we have to start asking these questions." The usual result is that somebody (a mandarin or politician) asks the question, gets it answered by a lobby group, and the answer gets shoved down the throats of an unsuspecting public.
I - as someone who tends toward libertarianism - beleives that people will eventually find the right choice (perhaps after some wrong turns), but the choice they will find on such moral matters are often better than any answers from any political body.
To take the China example - even if boys were favoured every time, after a few years, the scarcity of females would probably make people value female children a lot more... and maybe there would be a natural decline in population first, but in the end, culture will adapt to the situation.
Nuclear-powered toothbrushes (removes plaque... and everything else).
Nuclear-powered cigarette lighters (I don't understand this one - you'd probably get cancer anyway!)
Nuclear-powered cell phones (ditto)
Nuclear-powered laptops (Uranium is just a tad too heavy... but the battery life is good).
Nuclear-powered Minivans (you could just *laugh* at all the people paying $1.50/gallon)
Nuclear-powered Linux installer (if you screw up, not only does it trash your Windows partition, it trashes your house... but don't worry Corel is working on a user friendly front-end for it: Selecting this option will destroy your neighbourhood ).
Slashdot Mirror
The Body is the Convergence. You have 5 main input devices (and two lesser ones). What you can perceive is limited by these input devices. Digital tools enhance what you can perceive. Can one digital tool make all possible enhancements?
No.
This may not seem obvious because most of the "innovation" in the digital tool market has been Microsoft Innovation (tm) and not Real Innovation (no trademark; no patent - it expired soon after we started using Stone Tools).
Can you feel someone behind you? Like I mean feel their presence? There is a "Digital Tool" that gives you this perception (those who tried it out felt "naked" once they had to take it off again). Can you see in pitch blackness? Can you communicate with someone far away? Can you communicate with someone right next to you who doesn't know any language you do? Can you find some information stored on an aluminum plate in Moscow? Can you find some information someone told you yesterday, but you forgot?
Understand the domain, then re-ask the question: can one device do all these things? How? Do you want it to?
Vodaphone merged with AirTouch. Then Vodaphone set up a joint venture with Bell Atlantic - Verizone. Vodaphone gave the baby Bell a majority position, but it still has a huge chunk (something like 40%).
:)
Vodaphone then merged with Mannessman. Not only did they not bite the dust, BUT at one point they were worth more than Microsoft. Currently, if you include their percentage stake in Verizone, they are the world's largest wireless firm.
All this means one thing: you're wrong-o, friend
Ha! Even the American cellphone firm you mention isn't a proper American. It's half US (The Bell part) and half European - AirTouch is owned by Vodaphone, a British wireless company.
Again the same problem. You need prior
knowledge of what are the concepts involved
in the semantics of natural language. In
simpler terms, what are you supposed to tag,
and what is your tagset? And what if many
relevant factors in actual language use
simply can't be captured in corpora?
("corpora" == databases of naturally occurring
speech or writing.)
Yes, I agree that current SNLP methods are semantically weak - that's one of the things I'm working on. And I agree that you need good apriori information.
But my key point is that NLP is turning from a _philosophical_ airy-fairy field into a _science_. And that's the first step to having some real breakthroughs.
Now, I should qualify what I'm saying with a few things: the NLP systems that have worked in the past work in small domains with limited vocabulary. This will still be the case. However, we now have the tools to begin scaling up.
I think another breakthrough in NLP will be a reduced emphasis on a "whole-language" theory of semantics, and a more (pragmatic) emphasis on a domain-by-domain approach.
It will take a long time for a computer to pass anything resembling a Turing test, but long before that, you'll be able to use voice (along with other input devices) to control your computer in many specific applications. And honestly, I think right now the limitation in starting to get applications that scale more is the small number of researchers and programmers who are well-versed in NLP rather than the technology itself.
Like a system, and langauge can be as secure or insecure as you can make it. One can write an extremely tight program in C++ while writing one in Perl or Java that leaves gaping security holes open.
This statement troubles me. C/C++ addict who have little exposure to other languages have little knowledge of what they're missing.
_Many_ (if not most?) security attacks involve buffer overflows. You have to _work_ and _think_ to free yourself of buffer overflows in C/C++. In other languages, this protection comes for free.
Yes, it's possible to make a secure program in C/C++. But it's just a hell of a lot easier in bounds-checking languages.
So there.
I've been working in "computational linguistics" for the last two years.
:)
I guess there were a few things you didn't study
The past 10 years or so a new field - statistical natural language processing (SNLP) has shown a _lot_ of promise.
Right now, if you throw a SNLP system a bunch of parsetrees, it's able to induce a grammar - even in sufficiently complicated languages. (For simple languages, you can even induce a reasonable grammar just by giving syntactically correct string. Impressive!)
The next stage after inducing syntax from training examples with tagged syntax is to induce semantics from training examples with tagges semantics.
Yes, this is still a research topic, but it is by _no_ means pointless. One day computers will be able to do anything humans can, and more.
Is it just me, or do a lot of post seem (-1, Redundant) to you?
In fact, you could automate a moderator for this story.
IF "ya I'll just patent xxx and sue everyone" THEN +1, insightful
IF "but this isn't a patent - it's a trademark. Give them some credit" THEN +1, informative
IF "but NeXT had a cube in the late 80's. Apple bought NeXT" THEN +1, informative
IF "but trademarks cover names, not designs" THEN +1, insightful
IF "but trademarks are only if consumers may be confused - and Cobalt and Apple are targetting different markets" +1, informative
A number of things
1. I *wish* mods would read other posts first. Bring out interesting viewpoints that are being ignored.
2. Don't always be so hostile to trademark laws. If they didn't exist, there would be nothing from stopping MS from releasing a product called "MS Linux" and spending billions on advertising it when the Halloween Document was just a document and not a call-to-arms.
Cobalt is a *small* company, and it's good that there is some way of preventing a multibillion dollar multinational (where is Katz when you need him?) from stomping all over the little guy - Cobalt in this case.
Part of their marketing campaign - the way you recognize them - was their name and the unique shape of their boxes. All the millions they spent on building that name could be lost because Steve Jobs was having a bad hair day.
Side Effect's Houdini is SHIPPING for Linux. Each package has it's own strengths and weaknesses. A|W is particularily strong in modelling; Houdini's strengths include a powerful scripting language and the drag'n'drop "visual procedural interface" (really COOL if you ever get a chance to use it). And of course the most important strength is Linux support today (and not just the renderer).
To all the people who complain about open source/free software by pointing at Mozilla, here is something to point back.
:). And if this were a commercial product, it just wouldn't happen.
It's a fork but not a fork (uses the same code base) and solves problems people have (big web browsers, ugly Netcenter skin on Mozilla
A lot of posters here make references to CHI (Computer-Human Interface) research groups at various universities. This just skims the surface. (Do a google search for "computer human interface" or "human computer interface" and follow any of the many links you'll find).
Is GUI innovation dead? Well, one of the things CHI people are working on are ways to improve GUI design. However, as is sadly too common, there is a huge barrier between what academics find and what is adopted in industry.
Remember: although Apple did do a *lot* of original work with GUIs, the core ideas came from academia (Even the Xerox PARC team were former students of Doug Englebart, the Stanford researcher who laid the important groundwork).
But where are the bold, new, designs? Why do all the improvemnts still look like dialog boxes and buttons?
Well, there may be hugely innovative stuff yet to be done - but the field is old by computer science standards. Most of the major ideas of how to get humans with keyboards and mice to interact with computers have already been done.
So does this mean *all* UI innovation is done? Nope. The old hardware assumptions - the human had a keyboard and mouse, the computer had a video display (and maybe a sound system) - will be overturned.
You will be able to use your eyes and hands to let the computer know what you want. Or, if that isn't accurate enough, you can still use the mouse. You can speak when that's more efficient, or type if typing would be faster (For things like "(" or "{" or "["). If your finger and eyes aren't accurate enough to point, go ahead and use the mouse.
All of these new ways of interacting with computers will lead to new ways of presenting data, and new ways of allowing users to modify data. The innovation won't be in GUIs alone, but a combination of GUIs with newer input/output devices.
Don't ask about innovation in GUI design, ask about innovation in human-computer interfaces overall.
Image a cluster of th... er, nevermind.
A Robot Car. A perfect digital map. A network flow optimization algorithm that gets you to where you want to go, taking into account current and historical traffic patterns.
Yup, some people are able to do already in their heads but read on:
No traffic lights, no stop signs, no speed limits. Your car will be able to avoid other traffic without these things designed to make driving safe for imperfect human drivers.
Except during rush hour in the biggest most congested cities, most roads are >50% unused. Huh? you say... traffic is everywhere? No, most places, people tend to leave at least 1 car length, and cars tend to travel in "packs" because some slow clod won't let others pass.
None of that. Cars are *right* upto one another. Nearly no space. They already have this in a special highway in San Diego. And no attitutes, no slow people to block your way... everyone is going really really fast.
And that's not it. Stick in an entertainment center, a reclining chair... man you're set. Get a good book, maybe pop a movie into the DVD drive.
And since speed limits are a thing of the past, you'll get there in 3 hours going at 200km/h. And it'll be safer.
Thanks for the clarification... it's been a while since I've done any physics, and I guess I'm rustier than I thought :)
I think I caught the first booboo he made. Photons *do* have a rest mass of zero. But uh, they tend to travel at the speed of light relative to all frames of reference (or so I hear :). Because of some relativistic quirks, this gives them a slight mass.
Godel's argument is that any logical system is either inconsistant or incomplete. Humans, however, are not logical beasts, but rather emotional beasts. Our reasoning is both inconsistant *and* incomplete but sometimes we manage to eek out some logical statements (that's why math geeks are a *rarity* in society).
There are two ways in which an AI machine can be built. Either symbolically (with an understanding of intelligence) or through simulation (by simulating human neurons, but possibly no understanding of what's going on). Probably there will be some kind of a mix of the two.
The biggest problem that AI faces isn't any kind of philosophical barrier, but rather SPEED. There are a lot of NP-complete and NP-hard problems in AI, some of which don't have good approximation algorithms. Take simulation, as an example, modern neural net simulations (I'm not taking cheezy backprop nets, but rather cool biologically-inspired stuff) have only been able to simulation a small fraction of the neurons and a small fraction of the interconnects in the human mind.
What happens when we're able to simulate *all* the neurons in a human mind in real time? It's just a matter of getting the structure right, and letting it learn like a small child. There will be nothing in the human mind that isn't in this "Turing Machine" (except possibly some Chaotic effects... the precision of TMs may be more limited) . And that says nothing at all of symbol methods, which will also benefit from increases in processor speed.
It'll be a "virtuous cycle". Once processor speeds are good enough, AI techniques will be adopted by the private sector, who will be able to *sell* systems and spend many billions of dollars on development. Sad but true, I think the first AI systems will be privately owned.
Damn damn damn I hate how stupid these analysis are sometimes. "Cisco's operating system will be the platform of the future"....NO! The network will be the platform of the future. Cisco has NO O/S ambitions, and I wish those analysits would understand that.
IOS is an embedded operating system designed to run routers and little else. You can't run Apache on it. You can't run MS Office on it. You can't run thin clients on it. That's not the point. The point is to run a router. Cisco is a hardware company, not a software firm. If you don't know IOS is there, it's doing it's job.
Preamble: In the olden days, software came with manuals, and the software designers expected you to read at least a bit of the manuals before attempting to use the software. These days, (enlightened) developers design software to be used without manuals - in fact it is common for even commerical software to ship with nothing in the way of usable print documentation. The difference is usually made up in online documentation. Whether that's good or bad is another issue - but it does bring me to my question:
As online documentation becomes more and more important, searching online documentation becomes one of the most important functions a program can offer. In the Windows world, this started as nothing more than a grep through the documentation files. Recently, however, as things such as information retreival (IR) and natural language queries (NLQ) become hot research topics (in part due to searching the WWW), Microsoft has been at the forefront of making these technologies work. Say what you want about the Office Assistant, with each new release, it's able to better understand questions you ask it. My question is: is there any effort to bring IR or NLQ technologies to the Open Source world? Has anyone been talking to researchers at universities if they would be willing to release their source for inclusion into an Open Source project?
Another poster hinted at this, but I feel like the authors walked into a slaughterhouse and can't smell the stink. Besides stature in the community, there is another benefit to Open Source programming - it's fun. It is widely beleived that most "new" economic theories will come from the crossover of economics to psyhchology, so the authors would be wise to consult (the now-popularized) psych. concept of "flow" and how this relates to Open Source programming.
as far as my understanding goes, iridium was actually a more *expensive* than many local exchanges. In poorer countries with telephone monopolies, Iridium was waaaay to expensive for the local population to afford. In countries where lots of people actually could afford Iridium, cheaper alternatives existed - namely cell and PCS phones.
Iridium went under the old-fasioned way: it ran out of money because not enough people bought it's product.
You're forgetting that as you speed up, time slows down. Let's say (woo-hoo) someone invents a teleporter device, and a "human" can be transported over some kind of signal.
Now, if send the human to the sun over this signal at the speed of light - it will appear to take 8 minutes for us, but for the teleported human, it will have appeared to take no time at all.
If we send the human to the sun at 2x the speed of light through some kind of tachyeon signal, it will appear to take 4 minutes to us, but from the point of view of the person transported, time will have regressed 4 minutes. (OR something like that)... from what i remember from high school physics.
Maybe I'm getting my history a bit screwed, but Sun, over the years, has released the source for a number of different products. Maybe the liscenses weren't Open Source (tm) Approved, but this was quite some time ago - in the pre-Java days when Sun wasn't the Microsoft-on-Unix company it seems to have turned into.
Again, my history might be a bit screwed: I'm not sure of the liscence for NFS 1.0, Tcl/Tk-guy might have started that project before joining Sun and the Open Windows/olvwm/XView source I think was released after it lost out to Motif... but I don't think it's accurate to say this is a first for Sun.
but MusixTEX and lilypond don't count for me 'cause it doesn't have a GUI :) PS I am one of those people who use lyx rather than LaTEX b/c I don't want to learn yet another language (as if it wasn't enough to know C/C++, Java, 4 different kinds assembly, Prolog, LISP, ML, Haskell, 2 different shells, make scripts, 2 different text-file regex matching languages including one (Perl) that's Turing-complete, plus languages for config files (yup! they are formal languages, too!) like /etc/passwd, init, Xinit, Xresources).... damn Unix needs to come a loooong way until it's easy-to-use....
From the GNOME and KDE homepages, I managed to find sequencer apps... actually from what I saw they were hoping to be whole "music suites." (I think the KDE one was hoping to be a re-write of Cubasis). Of course, like productivity software, the Windows/Mac versions have in some times a decades long development head start, and this shows (although it seems some OSS projects seems to catch up very quickly).
Sound librarians are far behind... there is a port of CSOUND to Linux (the top patch synthesizer), but this only synthesizes patches, I don't think it has a wave editor, nor do I think it can download patches from a keyboard.
Music notation software is even further behind. The Rosegarden project (now part of Gnome) had a notation part, but the whole thing is being rewritten from sratch for GNOME (hmpf - it needed to be rewritten, I understand, but what ever happened to platform idependence?)
Hope this helps, it was a while ago that I looked, so sorry for the lack of URLs... but maybe there's enough here that you can do a search.
...whole thing off.
In a new book Judith Harris, "The Nurture Assumption," a third, and perhaps more important alternative is looked into: the idea that a child's peer group has lasting impact on his/her development.
On another note, I don't like the tone of, "we have to start asking these questions." The usual result is that somebody (a mandarin or politician) asks the question, gets it answered by a lobby group, and the answer gets shoved down the throats of an unsuspecting public.
I - as someone who tends toward libertarianism - beleives that people will eventually find the right choice (perhaps after some wrong turns), but the choice they will find on such moral matters are often better than any answers from any political body.
To take the China example - even if boys were favoured every time, after a few years, the scarcity of females would probably make people value female children a lot more... and maybe there would be a natural decline in population first, but in the end, culture will adapt to the situation.
Nuclear-powered toothbrushes (removes plaque... and everything else).
Nuclear-powered cigarette lighters (I don't understand this one - you'd probably get cancer anyway!)
Nuclear-powered cell phones (ditto)
Nuclear-powered laptops (Uranium is just a tad too heavy... but the battery life is good).
Nuclear-powered Minivans (you could just *laugh* at all the people paying $1.50/gallon)
Nuclear-powered Linux installer (if you screw up, not only does it trash your Windows partition, it trashes your house... but don't worry Corel is working on a user friendly front-end for it: Selecting this option will destroy your neighbourhood ).