Re: Here's your empty coke bottle...
I remember reading an SF stgory from the 60s, by either Fred Ohl or Cyril Kornbluth about a consumer society that did exactly this.
54 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Dec 2013
Neat idea but I see trouble ahead if it gets deployed to places where managers just love a quick fix .... "Can't you just reshape that for now ?" . getting those last few apps that hold up the completion, patched to the new schema and thru QA ,,, "sorry no budget for that" or "We don't have time for that now" . Not sure where that ends, but it won't be very manageable. That's not a criticism of the tool to be sure and used carefully looks like a winner.
There are ways to do decentralised blockchain without burning the planet, and there are successful projects that have used this scheme.
If you don't believe me, go look at https://hedera.com/
I take the point that ransomware depends upon bitcoin style blockchain, but that doesn't mean you must throw out blockchain entirely. A method of payment is not the cause of a crime, any more than iphone secure messaging is the cause of terrorism. There's a case to be made for money transfer without government supervision, or excessive fees from the transferring entity. Just look at what the big transfer agencies extract from the third world, in fees and exchange rates.
I learnt ALGOL 60 on a Elliot 503 in Oz in the 60s , and moved on from there to a long career of systems programming in ALGOL variants on the Burroughs machines, then Unisys A series. The OS is still written in ALGOL variant, all the compilers are ALGOL programs , including the ALGOL compiler.
And the I/O conundrum was solved handily by Knuth, who wrote an I/O library (largely in ALGOL) quite early on.
ALGOL lives still, though is a rare skill these days
There are other AI natural language processing approaches that are not based on machine learning type pattern matching. I am much taken with
http://www.cortical.io/
It's still arguable if the program understands anything. But the deeper we dig into "intelligence" the more that seems to be so for human, IMO.
<quote>you can't really expect an OS deliver drivers for each and every device ever produced. Especially complex ones like scanners or printers which may have very specific functions.</quote>
I suspect more and more people do really expect just that. I certainly do. And especially for complex ones (i.e expensive ones) like scanners or printers with very specific functions. An OS choice doesn't give the manufacturer a licence to determine what hardware you should choose. The ever onward strategy of the OS companies is a business choice, they want to generate more revenue. It's worked well for them; I see no problem with requiring some of that revenue to be dedicated to maintaining functionality.
Keeping security patches entirely separate from feature patches might be a good start.
It's the "Danger:savage primitive lifeforms in stellar system" beacon, placed, as per convention, on the poles of rotation of the largest planet in the stellar system.
Generally when the life forms figure out how to turn it off, they are advanced enough to not want to argue with the lifeforms that turned it on a long time ago.
When I had a student job building radio Telescopes for the Physic Department of the University of Tasmania in the 60s, I remember being told about whistler research and listening to sounds just like this, particularly the second recording. I don't think it is a new research topic, although the satellites weren't available then...
So the Trump administration leaks a possible new security protocol and what happens? It dominates the news and deflects attention from other newsworthy issues, such as Trumps FBI director and his NSA head dissing him in a public, televised forum. And revealing he may have had links to Russia during his campaign and that he was lying wrt being wiretapped by Obama. And his candidate for the supremes is in front of the Senate committee just now.
I commend the description of the "goat and the cow" in https://extranewsfeed.com/when-villains-arent-super-f5646d81db6#.zdmm06qtq
To anyone who has endured as an employee of a large corporation, it's obvious why El Reg is blacklisted, at some point a senior manager took offence at something on the website and The Register was a added to the "Do not revive" list. That worthy has probably moved on, been disgraced or died, but the listing remains. Large corporations are not flexible in this matter. Executive dignity must be preserved at all costs, even at the risk of being pompous.
.... change shape and colour every new software release
.... have controls that were invisible unless you swiped left (with 2 or 3 fingers) on the steering wheel (or left , or something)
... not have a speedometer as it would clutter the user interface
.... an entertainment centre that only played music available on iTunes
... have a unique charging plug
The flying wing thing cruising at 90,000 feet is way cool. But the laser connection from the ground station to the plane would seem to be dodgier. I can't imagine that airline pilots will be too keen on them; they will need significant power to be detectable at 90K - more I suspect than the lasers that pen laser waving idiots around airports are using. And then there's the weather ...
MacOS, the original on from the 80s, was implemented largely in Pascal, and the reference docs were all in Pascal form. The best IDE and compiler I ever worked on , Think Pascal, was a brilliant piece of UI work, unmatched in IDEs to this day I think.
Apple then discovered C and seemed to think it was superior, but I didn't see much evidence of that at the time.