Actually, there are many reasons such places stay poor. A good education is useless if you can't apply those skills anywhere because there is no industry at home and you can't communicate with anyone where there is. An entrepenurial drive is useless if warmongering kleptocrats steal almost anything you make and destroy the rest. Your education won't get you far if the Big Man has decided destroy the country's agricultural infrastructure and you're spending your days foraging in the bush for food.
There are many reasons places are poor, but bad government is often a better indicator than average education level of the populace. One of the most valuable contributions that the $100 laptop could make is private communication and connection to sources in the outside world that will demonstrate that things don't have to be the way they are in your country. At least we can work for that outcome, though I realize that there are cases (*cough* Kansas *cough*) where it doesn't seem to have taken hold.
Like many visionaries, he's bound by the vision he had in the 1980s. (other visionaries have their own decades). Expectations of usability, and manner of interaction, have changed since then, but since RMS has found a system that worked for him then, and continues to work for him now, making it pretty and easy just isn't on his agenda. Thankfully others, having different visions, are working on the "computers for people, not for other computers" side of the problem. Those range from the obvious (GNOME/KDE/OpenStep) to the less so (OpenCroquet). He may sound extreme, but it's better than the days of the $1000 compiler or code it in assembly choice, and he should get credit for those days being mostly behind us. (and if you remember, MASM wasn't cheap either)
I suspect that if his original vision had been realized, you wouldn't be running GNU/Linux or GNU/Hurd, but rather GNU/Emacs for your OS, editor, mail program, web-browser, recipe file, etc. The dominant scripting language would be Lisp, all running snazzy tty graphics.
Give the man a few cheers, at least. He provided the early tools, and gathered disciples who extended those tools to an entire userspace. They gathered disciples, and implemented a pretty good user environment, to the point where large corporations were willing to spend real money on open code. He's living his ideal, and everyone else gets to live in a pragmatic lesser ideal, but at least they're reminded that there is somewhere further they could go.
I agree with him about the (*&#$# Word files, btw. I can't get my local environment to send me text, RTF, or even PDF. Everything is accursed Word, Excel or Powerpoint, in email. It's an institutional virus, and I think they need a good dose of Richard.
Be careful about joking about this. Companies could make that a condition for employment: "Sysadmins who consume caffeinated beverages will accept the implantation of a second bladder, and agree to take only one (but a suitably extended) bathroom break every 24 Hours".
You combine this with the pill that makes it so you don't have to sleep, and some photosynthetic capabiilty tuned to fluorescent lights, and you have the Ultimate Admin!
That's partly because what we tend to think of as Supercomputer-class problems are floating point based, and partly because with modern machines the integer unit is already screamingly fast, so it's not much of an issue. More subtly, while searching algorithms can be parcelled out in a loosely-parallel (or embarrassingly parallel) manner (i.e. if you have 100 processors, break your database into 100 subsets, and search each subset on its own processor), most of the floating-point heavy algorithms are also tightly coupled, and rely upon efficient inter-processor communication, good cache latency, and generally are overall more sensitve to machine design.
This is why your have theoretical peak performance, and then production codes that only reach a fraction of it.
If you're interested in some of the issues in bioinformatics searching, there are worse places to start than the page at Washington University, St. Louis, http://blast.wustl.edu/blast/TO-FLY.html/
I tend to care about screenshots mainly with graphical programs. Therefore, I look at the rendering capabilities (is it nicely shaded, or banded?), the layout (clean and unobtrusive, or a thousand cryptograms spread over the screen), and the quality of the icons (minimal care in drawing, or third-grade art project). I have to really need the functionality the app is offering if the interface looks like the controls of a 747 as reinterpreted by Sumerians.
This won't tell you how well the app really works, but it gives you some idea of the nature of the effort. It can indicate whether the team implementing the program has a coherent vision, or whether the project has attracted enough talent so that someone who can draw icons has come on board. It can also give a hint at a glance of whether the app can be convinced to perform the visualization I need.
Having said this, I tend to end up using programs such as GNUPlot, Octave, or Molden, which fail at least one of the tests above, but are highly functional. They, of course, also have a decade or more of development behind them, which is also critical information, but which doesn't show up in the screenshots.
Finally, may I recommend one of the best indictments of everyone having to have a screenshot of their project. The screenshots for GNU Fortran 95 at http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?gro up_id=5179/. For examples of good screenshots, then http://www.uku.fi/~thassine/ghemical/, which shows not only the basic modeling and interface, but also shows the ability to have custom spotlights and renderings.
If you accept a Forbes article from 1999 or so, the culture of modern Microsoft is mostly Balmer's creation. Bill may have had the vision, but it's Balmer's Napoleon complex (if you believe Forbes, literal Napoleon complex) that enable Microsoft to become the behemoth it is.
Once Balmer was on board, Allen might not have been able to do much to influence Microsoft's culture.
I remember his editorial in the New York Times when the second-generation iMac (the iMuffin or iLamp) was released. He castigated Apple for not being as forward thinking with their desktop as his Vision of time-centered piles of data.
It's an interesting idea, but I'd like to work with it in practice for a few weeks first. Something better than the current heap-sort has got to be out there, as the folders and file-cabinet metaphor doesn't work all that well in the real world either.
The Guy you're thinking of is Yale CS prof. David Gelernter. I believe that his startup went casters up. Not enough people saw what this could do for them, so it's back to the shelf until more receptive times.
PPC Macs run OS-X, OS9, and often, OS-6 software from 1991, which is motorola 68K code, and therefore emulated twice. Intel Macs will run OS-X PPC programs, so once again, generation - 1. Give the community a year, and you will probably find some interest in a PPC emulator allowing OS-9, 8.6, or some other favored PPC version being offered by third-parties or the emulator community for those Macs. (as an aside, I find it humorous that it's probably easier for me to run OS-360 code than PPC/OS9 at the moment, but that's depends on which is more fun to reimplement)
XP runs most programs from the NT days, and periodically older this and thats, with varying degrees of success. Still, as people I know at IBM would put it, "sometimes you have to drag the customer, kicking and screaming, into the future."
Unfortunately for Microsoft's OS team, the customer is the Office team. Given the 40% of Microsoft's income they provide, they can kick and scream quite effectively.
If it were tasteful, productivity enhancing eyecandy, then yes. Otherwise, drop back and punt.
On a Linux desktop, i was always very much in favor of WindowMaker, as it had just enough chrome to be attractive, but then got out of the way.
Since what we're really talking about here is WindowsTNG (or whatever Vista will be when it ships), then I would say, "NO!" to more eyecandy. I would only think they neede to do more if the first step is they fire whoever the designer in charge currently is, and subcontract the design to the Gnomes at IKEA.
Just think; a Windows Desktop in tasteful, understated, blond wood veneer.
Anecdotally, I ran across an old Trek episode a while back (the one with Kodos), and to bring up the voice-print files Spock is shuffling a handful of what appear to be 720K floppies. So, in the 1960s they could imagine transluminal transportation, extracting useful energy from fusion or matter/antimatter annihilation, and world peace, but they thought computers would be stuck with a storage medium that could only hold one voice-print per 3-4" square cartridge, that would be transported by SneakerNet. This is similar to RAH's stories from the 1950s where it was accepted that navigators in space would have memorized enormous logarithmic tables.
Here we are in 2006, and we're puttering in LEO, but our computers are large, fast, and well-connected enough to archive all of mankind's knowledge, simulate sub-molecular processes with usable accuracy, and monitor every communication going in and out of a 300 million person country. Makes you wonder what we're overlooking that's in development, but just under the radar.
You would be right, except that _60 Minutes_ interview is ephemera, while a report on climate-change, rewritten to not offend members of the petrochemical lobby, will be posted on a public website and referenced for years. This is similar to NIH, which had a website on birth-control edited to abstinence only, and of course the recent Big Bang flap, where a political flunky wanted a public essay rewritten to cast doubt on modern cosmology. Being able to speak is of no use if nobody hears it, or if they hear it in passing, but then can only find documents that say the opposite. Being discouraged from speaking because presenting reproducible results which disagree with predetermined conceits will result in loss of employment is being supressed, though in a softer manner than that used in Iran.
Nobody is arguing that NASA scientists are being rounded up, or threatened at night by Men in Black, but their work is being systematically supressed or altered beyond recognition by an ideologically driven administration which has nothing but contempt for the rational thought-processes of the enlightenment. They have publicly derided their opponents as being members of the "Reality-based Community", and openly stated that they believe that they make their own Reality.
This administration is arrogating powers to the executive branch in a manner not seen since the Nixon administration, without pursuing the middle-of-the-road policies of Richard Nixon. You may approve of the war in Iraq, support the tax cuts, or be a fan of whatever other administration policy you choose, but don't be blind that there are side-effects, and those need to be kept in mind.
It's improving, but the honor of "Most Secure Microsoft OS Yet" is like "Tallest Building in Topeka". Is it an honor, yes. Is it an honor that matters,....
Well, I'll be. From the descriptions of the IBMers I know, I had thought it was another iteration of VM/XA or MVS, though if I read that page, it gives the impression that it runs as a service under Z/OS. Nice to see that you guys have finally admitted that the subdirectory has a place along side the minidisk. (I kid, I kid. I ran on a 3090/VF a number of years ago, and allocating minidisks for scratch was the hardest part of the transition to the machine)
Not to pick, but being Unix-centric is not necessary. IBM's biggest systems run variations of the (old,proven,legacy,venerable) Z/OS http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/zos/, and their iSeries (formerly AS/400) run i5/OS, http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/soft ware/os/i5os.html/ the successor to OS/400, neither of which is remotely unix-ish. I'll admit that they can run Unix, that the RS/6000s under AIX or Linux/PPC are unicies, or that at least virtual machines running under the primary OS can run Unix, but Unix-compatibility per-se isn't what Microsoft needs to compete against IBM.
What they need to compete is the high level of handholding, the extensive uptimes, and the absolute reliability and throughput of those IBM OSes. Microsoft will probably make inroads into the small-business market, and the edges of the corporation, but it's going to take more than just new software to displace IBM from the truly big-iron apps. Personally, I think that Sun, HP, and RedHat should be more concerned, as this will threaten the midrange server market.
Yes, but that's interesting enough in its own right. RAH and Haldeman gave us the image of the future soldier in his heavily computerized powered armor, but the soldier was still human. Later Haldeman (Forever Peace), changed that to a remote-controlled humanoid form. It's interesting to see that this might be the future; the humans (war-fighters in current parlance) will be isolated from the combat, and we'll fight via Waldos, whether these robo-cars or predators, or sharks with transmitters in their heads.
It's an interesting progression. We won't give up on war, but we will go to great lengths to make ourselves less personally involved. It will be interesting to see what happens when AIs improve, and the devices do become more autonomous. "I'm sorry Dave, but he really does need to be shot."
Hate to reply to myself, but I was at a talk a year or so ago, and the biophysicists were saying they'd need an exoflop computer to simulate the large and small subunits working in concert. Time to spend more time foraging PNAS, I guess.
Bigger problems, and bigger computers to solve them on. This is certainly a fun example, and aesthetically pleasing as well.
Unfortunately, we're still a few generations of supercomputer off from being able to simulate ribosomes (at which point most of the cellular machinery will be suitable for in-silicio biochemical investigation), but this is an excellent step along the way. It's also a good to showcase Schulten's group's work on efficient parallelization of complex simulations. He's had to solve a lot of algorithmic issues in order to be able to run that simulation, so this is not just an example of "wait for a bigger computer". If you check out their web-page http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/, you'll find discussions of the underlying technology, which has required collaboration between biophysicists and computer science. My hat is off to them, especially as they not only achieved the proof of concept (we can simulate a small virus), but also gained biochemical insights (we didn't know they collapsed without the genetic payload). Bully for the Biophysicists!
Note: I don't work for them, but I admire the scale of simulations they do, and their willingness to make available to the community the tools they use.
You're witnessing the power of Marketing. IBM called their Intel/DOS system a PC, and therefore all of its descendants are as well. Apple Computer, Inc, etc, have appropriated common words, and your average owner forgets to put the (TM) after their name. "Well Bob, I bought one of them (tm) new Apple Computer Inc(tm) PC(tm) Thingies to steal movies with".
They've missed the true meaning of PC, which is "Personal Computer". Once, due to circumstances not entirely beyond my control, I was the sole User/Root on an Origin 2000. Except that it was headless (had to use a real DEC VT220 to access it), it was an absolutely marvelous PC. At the time, the only improvement would have been if it had been an Onyx, with the cinema display.
Because our role in extinction is closer to "Asteroid Impact" than "Sorry dude, you got out-competed". Being as we drove much of the North-American ice-age macrofauna into extinction, followed by the Auroch (17th century), Dodo (ibid), Passenger Pigeon (19th), almost got the Bison, Cod, and Whales, and are now probably going to finish off our genetic cousins, the Bonobo, for lunch, it would behove us to not casually slaughter something that has survived 11 million years mostly by our absence.
We are the most effective predator ever, with the capability of destruction on a scale unachievable by all but the most extreme natural disastors. That's why we have to make a conscious effort to leave things be, and let nature take their course, rather than our current system "whoops, it doesn't do well in suburbia, guess it just deserves to go."
It has, and the Laotians seem to think it's delicious. It's only caught the attention of Western Biologists recently. Laos has always been remote to the west, then you add in the unpleasantness of the 60s and 70s, and the problems to get funding for fauna inventories of faraway places, and you begin to get the picture.
Meanwhil the Laotians are saying, "how inefficient of you Americans, having separate Rat and Squirrel species, rather than one integrated Rat-Squirrel, to take care of your rodentia needs."
True, but only if we're discussing "technical polish" (i.e. show-stopping bugs, major visual glitches), versus "Debian Polish" (If it isn't perfect in the eyes of the last Vax user, we aren't releasing it). So far, they've got the clean and easy to use down pat, so they should take some extra care to make sure that's being maintained.
No, for cute I expect them to bred up to the size of Beagles. Of course, at that point I've recreated the woodchuck, so I'd be better off trying to domesticate an existing rodent, rather than getting one custom designed.
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Actually, there are many reasons such places stay poor. A good education is useless if you can't apply those skills anywhere because there is no industry at home and you can't communicate with anyone where there is. An entrepenurial drive is useless if warmongering kleptocrats steal almost anything you make and destroy the rest. Your education won't get you far if the Big Man has decided destroy the country's agricultural infrastructure and you're spending your days foraging in the bush for food.
There are many reasons places are poor, but bad government is often a better indicator than average education level of the populace. One of the most valuable contributions that the $100 laptop could make is private communication and connection to sources in the outside world that will demonstrate that things don't have to be the way they are in your country. At least we can work for that outcome, though I realize that there are cases (*cough* Kansas *cough*) where it doesn't seem to have taken hold.
Like many visionaries, he's bound by the vision he had in the 1980s. (other visionaries have their own decades). Expectations of usability, and manner of interaction, have changed since then, but since RMS has found a system that worked for him then, and continues to work for him now, making it pretty and easy just isn't on his agenda. Thankfully others, having different visions, are working on the "computers for people, not for other computers" side of the problem. Those range from the obvious (GNOME/KDE/OpenStep) to the less so (OpenCroquet). He may sound extreme, but it's better than the days of the $1000 compiler or code it in assembly choice, and he should get credit for those days being mostly behind us. (and if you remember, MASM wasn't cheap either)
I suspect that if his original vision had been realized, you wouldn't be running GNU/Linux or GNU/Hurd, but rather GNU/Emacs for your OS, editor, mail program, web-browser, recipe file, etc. The dominant scripting language would be Lisp, all running snazzy tty graphics.
Give the man a few cheers, at least. He provided the early tools, and gathered disciples who extended those tools to an entire userspace. They gathered disciples, and implemented a pretty good user environment, to the point where large corporations were willing to spend real money on open code. He's living his ideal, and everyone else gets to live in a pragmatic lesser ideal, but at least they're reminded that there is somewhere further they could go.
I agree with him about the (*&#$# Word files, btw. I can't get my local environment to send me text, RTF, or even PDF. Everything is accursed Word, Excel or Powerpoint, in email. It's an institutional virus, and I think they need a good dose of Richard.
Be careful about joking about this. Companies could make that a condition for employment: "Sysadmins who consume caffeinated beverages will accept the implantation of a second bladder, and agree to take only one (but a suitably extended) bathroom break every 24 Hours".
You combine this with the pill that makes it so you don't have to sleep, and some photosynthetic capabiilty tuned to fluorescent lights, and you have the Ultimate Admin!
That's partly because what we tend to think of as Supercomputer-class problems are floating point based, and partly because with modern machines the integer unit is already screamingly fast, so it's not much of an issue. More subtly, while searching algorithms can be parcelled out in a loosely-parallel (or embarrassingly parallel) manner (i.e. if you have 100 processors, break your database into 100 subsets, and search each subset on its own processor), most of the floating-point heavy algorithms are also tightly coupled, and rely upon efficient inter-processor communication, good cache latency, and generally are overall more sensitve to machine design.
This is why your have theoretical peak performance, and then production codes that only reach a fraction of it.
If you're interested in some of the issues in bioinformatics searching, there are worse places to start than the page at Washington University, St. Louis, http://blast.wustl.edu/blast/TO-FLY.html/
That's the scoring system. If you do a good job, your 'fro grows out. If you do a bad job, you get a genuine ThomasKinkaide(tm) Mustache instead.
I tend to care about screenshots mainly with graphical programs. Therefore, I look at the rendering capabilities (is it nicely shaded, or banded?), the layout (clean and unobtrusive, or a thousand cryptograms spread over the screen), and the quality of the icons (minimal care in drawing, or third-grade art project). I have to really need the functionality the app is offering if the interface looks like the controls of a 747 as reinterpreted by Sumerians.
o up_id=5179/. For examples of good screenshots, then http://www.uku.fi/~thassine/ghemical/, which shows not only the basic modeling and interface, but also shows the ability to have custom spotlights and renderings.
This won't tell you how well the app really works, but it gives you some idea of the nature of the effort. It can indicate whether the team implementing the program has a coherent vision, or whether the project has attracted enough talent so that someone who can draw icons has come on board. It can also give a hint at a glance of whether the app can be convinced to perform the visualization I need.
Having said this, I tend to end up using programs such as GNUPlot, Octave, or Molden, which fail at least one of the tests above, but are highly functional. They, of course, also have a decade or more of development behind them, which is also critical information, but which doesn't show up in the screenshots.
Finally, may I recommend one of the best indictments of everyone having to have a screenshot of their project. The screenshots for GNU Fortran 95 at http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?gr
If you accept a Forbes article from 1999 or so, the culture of modern Microsoft is mostly Balmer's creation. Bill may have had the vision, but it's Balmer's Napoleon complex (if you believe Forbes, literal Napoleon complex) that enable Microsoft to become the behemoth it is.
Once Balmer was on board, Allen might not have been able to do much to influence Microsoft's culture.
I remember his editorial in the New York Times when the second-generation iMac (the iMuffin or iLamp) was released. He castigated Apple for not being as forward thinking with their desktop as his Vision of time-centered piles of data.
It's an interesting idea, but I'd like to work with it in practice for a few weeks first. Something better than the current heap-sort has got to be out there, as the folders and file-cabinet metaphor doesn't work all that well in the real world either.
The Guy you're thinking of is Yale CS prof. David Gelernter. I believe that his startup went casters up. Not enough people saw what this could do for them, so it's back to the shelf until more receptive times.
PPC Macs run OS-X, OS9, and often, OS-6 software from 1991, which is motorola 68K code, and therefore emulated twice. Intel Macs will run OS-X PPC programs, so once again, generation - 1. Give the community a year, and you will probably find some interest in a PPC emulator allowing OS-9, 8.6, or some other favored PPC version being offered by third-parties or the emulator community for those Macs. (as an aside, I find it humorous that it's probably easier for me to run OS-360 code than PPC/OS9 at the moment, but that's depends on which is more fun to reimplement)
XP runs most programs from the NT days, and periodically older this and thats, with varying degrees of success. Still, as people I know at IBM would put it, "sometimes you have to drag the customer, kicking and screaming, into the future."
Unfortunately for Microsoft's OS team, the customer is the Office team. Given the 40% of Microsoft's income they provide, they can kick and scream quite effectively.
If it were tasteful, productivity enhancing eyecandy, then yes. Otherwise, drop back and punt.
On a Linux desktop, i was always very much in favor of WindowMaker, as it had just enough chrome to be attractive, but then got out of the way.
Since what we're really talking about here is WindowsTNG (or whatever Vista will be when it ships), then I would say, "NO!" to more eyecandy. I would only think they neede to do more if the first step is they fire whoever the designer in charge currently is, and subcontract the design to the Gnomes at IKEA.
Just think; a Windows Desktop in tasteful, understated, blond wood veneer.
Anecdotally, I ran across an old Trek episode a while back (the one with Kodos), and to bring up the voice-print files Spock is shuffling a handful of what appear to be 720K floppies. So, in the 1960s they could imagine transluminal transportation, extracting useful energy from fusion or matter/antimatter annihilation, and world peace, but they thought computers would be stuck with a storage medium that could only hold one voice-print per 3-4" square cartridge, that would be transported by SneakerNet. This is similar to RAH's stories from the 1950s where it was accepted that navigators in space would have memorized enormous logarithmic tables.
Here we are in 2006, and we're puttering in LEO, but our computers are large, fast, and well-connected enough to archive all of mankind's knowledge, simulate sub-molecular processes with usable accuracy, and monitor every communication going in and out of a 300 million person country. Makes you wonder what we're overlooking that's in development, but just under the radar.
You would be right, except that _60 Minutes_ interview is ephemera, while a report on climate-change, rewritten to not offend members of the petrochemical lobby, will be posted on a public website and referenced for years. This is similar to NIH, which had a website on birth-control edited to abstinence only, and of course the recent Big Bang flap, where a political flunky wanted a public essay rewritten to cast doubt on modern cosmology. Being able to speak is of no use if nobody hears it, or if they hear it in passing, but then can only find documents that say the opposite. Being discouraged from speaking because presenting reproducible results which disagree with predetermined conceits will result in loss of employment is being supressed, though in a softer manner than that used in Iran.
Nobody is arguing that NASA scientists are being rounded up, or threatened at night by Men in Black, but their work is being systematically supressed or altered beyond recognition by an ideologically driven administration which has nothing but contempt for the rational thought-processes of the enlightenment. They have publicly derided their opponents as being members of the "Reality-based Community", and openly stated that they believe that they make their own Reality.
This administration is arrogating powers to the executive branch in a manner not seen since the Nixon administration, without pursuing the middle-of-the-road policies of Richard Nixon. You may approve of the war in Iraq, support the tax cuts, or be a fan of whatever other administration policy you choose, but don't be blind that there are side-effects, and those need to be kept in mind.
It's improving, but the honor of "Most Secure Microsoft OS Yet" is like "Tallest Building in Topeka". Is it an honor, yes. Is it an honor that matters, ....
Well, I'll be. From the descriptions of the IBMers I know, I had thought it was another iteration of VM/XA or MVS, though if I read that page, it gives the impression that it runs as a service under Z/OS. Nice to see that you guys have finally admitted that the subdirectory has a place along side the minidisk. (I kid, I kid. I ran on a 3090/VF a number of years ago, and allocating minidisks for scratch was the hardest part of the transition to the machine)
Not to pick, but being Unix-centric is not necessary. IBM's biggest systems run variations of the (old,proven,legacy,venerable) Z/OS http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/zos/ , and their iSeries (formerly AS/400) run i5/OS, http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/soft ware/os/i5os.html/ the successor to OS/400, neither of which is remotely unix-ish. I'll admit that they can run Unix, that the RS/6000s under AIX or Linux/PPC are unicies, or that at least virtual machines running under the primary OS can run Unix, but Unix-compatibility per-se isn't what Microsoft needs to compete against IBM.
What they need to compete is the high level of handholding, the extensive uptimes, and the absolute reliability and throughput of those IBM OSes. Microsoft will probably make inroads into the small-business market, and the edges of the corporation, but it's going to take more than just new software to displace IBM from the truly big-iron apps. Personally, I think that Sun, HP, and RedHat should be more concerned, as this will threaten the midrange server market.
>> Next up, "Rudy Guiliani orders torture of Al-Queda suspect at Gitmo"
Yeah, well, he probably had a squeegee, and you know that Rudy just *Hates* that.
Yes, but that's interesting enough in its own right. RAH and Haldeman gave us the image of the future soldier in his heavily computerized powered armor, but the soldier was still human. Later Haldeman (Forever Peace), changed that to a remote-controlled humanoid form. It's interesting to see that this might be the future; the humans (war-fighters in current parlance) will be isolated from the combat, and we'll fight via Waldos, whether these robo-cars or predators, or sharks with transmitters in their heads.
It's an interesting progression. We won't give up on war, but we will go to great lengths to make ourselves less personally involved. It will be interesting to see what happens when AIs improve, and the devices do become more autonomous. "I'm sorry Dave, but he really does need to be shot."
Hate to reply to myself, but I was at a talk a year or so ago, and the biophysicists were saying they'd need an exoflop computer to simulate the large and small subunits working in concert. Time to spend more time foraging PNAS, I guess.
Bigger problems, and bigger computers to solve them on. This is certainly a fun example, and aesthetically pleasing as well.
Unfortunately, we're still a few generations of supercomputer off from being able to simulate ribosomes (at which point most of the cellular machinery will be suitable for in-silicio biochemical investigation), but this is an excellent step along the way. It's also a good to showcase Schulten's group's work on efficient parallelization of complex simulations. He's had to solve a lot of algorithmic issues in order to be able to run that simulation, so this is not just an example of "wait for a bigger computer". If you check out their web-page http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/, you'll find discussions of the underlying technology, which has required collaboration between biophysicists and computer science. My hat is off to them, especially as they not only achieved the proof of concept (we can simulate a small virus), but also gained biochemical insights (we didn't know they collapsed without the genetic payload). Bully for the Biophysicists!
Note: I don't work for them, but I admire the scale of simulations they do, and their willingness to make available to the community the tools they use.
You're witnessing the power of Marketing. IBM called their Intel/DOS system a PC, and therefore all of its descendants are as well. Apple Computer, Inc, etc, have appropriated common words, and your average owner forgets to put the (TM) after their name. "Well Bob, I bought one of them (tm) new Apple Computer Inc(tm) PC(tm) Thingies to steal movies with".
They've missed the true meaning of PC, which is "Personal Computer". Once, due to circumstances not entirely beyond my control, I was the sole User/Root on an Origin 2000. Except that it was headless (had to use a real DEC VT220 to access it), it was an absolutely marvelous PC. At the time, the only improvement would have been if it had been an Onyx, with the cinema display.
Because our role in extinction is closer to "Asteroid Impact" than "Sorry dude, you got out-competed". Being as we drove much of the North-American ice-age macrofauna into extinction, followed by the Auroch (17th century), Dodo (ibid), Passenger Pigeon (19th), almost got the Bison, Cod, and Whales, and are now probably going to finish off our genetic cousins, the Bonobo, for lunch, it would behove us to not casually slaughter something that has survived 11 million years mostly by our absence.
We are the most effective predator ever, with the capability of destruction on a scale unachievable by all but the most extreme natural disastors. That's why we have to make a conscious effort to leave things be, and let nature take their course, rather than our current system "whoops, it doesn't do well in suburbia, guess it just deserves to go."
It has, and the Laotians seem to think it's delicious. It's only caught the attention of Western Biologists recently. Laos has always been remote to the west, then you add in the unpleasantness of the 60s and 70s, and the problems to get funding for fauna inventories of faraway places, and you begin to get the picture.
Meanwhil the Laotians are saying, "how inefficient of you Americans, having separate Rat and Squirrel species, rather than one integrated Rat-Squirrel, to take care of your rodentia needs."
True, but only if we're discussing "technical polish" (i.e. show-stopping bugs, major visual glitches), versus "Debian Polish" (If it isn't perfect in the eyes of the last Vax user, we aren't releasing it). So far, they've got the clean and easy to use down pat, so they should take some extra care to make sure that's being maintained.
No, for cute I expect them to bred up to the size of Beagles. Of course, at that point I've recreated the woodchuck, so I'd be better off trying to domesticate an existing rodent, rather than getting one custom designed.