drallison

Yum! The patent and intellectual property rights issues show how problematic and ineffectual our current laws are. Anyone have any thoughts as to how to equitably restructure our concepts and rights about intellectual property.

I have not read the book, but I did look at the TOC. It seems remarkably trival and not very useful. I am a great believer in teaching algorithms and algorithmic thinking to everyone, but this book seems too simple-minded.

Rather than teaching coding, you might try to teach algorithmic concepts. For example, iteration, abstraction, sorting, comparison, search, recursion, partitions, and so forth. These are tools which can be used without recourse to a computer to solve problems.

David Quammen's book Spillover is informative about the role of animal infections and the pandemic.

An email exchange with one of the 8086 architects informs me that no version of the 8086 design had base and bound hardware. Vivid and detailed as my recollection is, I appear to be remembering something that never happened.

I believe the 8086, as originally designed and implemented, had a segmented address space with base and bounds registers in the style of the CDC 6600. This rudimentary but effective memory management approach was scrapped by Intel to make the 8086 part commensurate with the stepper reticle and semiconductor process of the time.

Duskin died a while ago, but his clothing (and that of Marsha Fox) was truly revolutionary.

I certainly respond to the wabi-sabi aesthetic and philosophy for physical objects. How it applies to computer software and systems is not obvious in part because we have not evolved good visualization and aesthetics for complex multi-layered concurrent systems held together by wishful thinking.

Kudos and thanks to Dom Hodgson.

Leap seconds are a bad idea and should be abandoned. Computing the time between events by subtraction should work. And while we are at it, dropping time zones and daylight saving time would also make sense.

Paul Allen's Living Computer Museum in Seattle had a wide range of vintage computers. Since his death, the museum has been closed. Last I checked, the fate of the collection is up in the air. They had a number of working older machines and had a staff capable of working on restoring them and keeping them running. It would be wonderful to get it reanimated. Best contact I have would be Aaron Alcorn at Vulcan (Paul Allen's venture firm).

Bruce Damer's Digibarn Computer Museum in Scotts Valley CA has been looking for someone to take over its collection since Bruce has redirected his personal research effort into AI from digital computer history.

Of course there is also the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

Wikipedia has a list of computer museums.

The Compuseum in Philadelphia is the latest new museum. (https://thecompuseum.org). It is the brainchild of James Scherrer who has done an amazing job collecting resources and support. Philadelphia is the original home of ENIAC (John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, Jr.).

And a word of caution. Real vintage machines are made from parts no longer manufactured, consume large amounts of power, are often water cooled, and need a large amount of physical space. They date from a time when the resource (compute cycles, storage) was so precious that having a staff of hardware engineers to keep the hardware working could be justified. On the software side, most systems were unique, non-standard, and supported by a team of five or more systems programmers. Economics forced a "small is beautiful" style on everything: those gifted programmers who could solve big problems with small speedy programs were in great demand.

Dynamic models are useful ways to explore complex systems. For example:

Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies S Motesharrei, J Rivas, E Kalnay Ecological Economics 101, 90--102

Modeling Sustainability: Population, Inequality, Consumption, and Bidirectional Coupling of the Earth and Human Systems S Motesharrei, J Rivas, E Kalnay, GR Asrar, AJ Busalacchi, RF Cahalan, ... National Science Review 3 (4), 470--494

Check out Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. He looks at a large number of historical complex societies that collapsed and suggests that they collapsed when the cost of the complexity exceeded its utility. A very appealing concept. His arguments about why our society is not at risk were not convincing.

Well said. It may be that we should do nothing and accept our fate. In the geological frame of reference we are just an instant from extinction.

Heathkits were great. I assembled a number of them for my stepfather and for myself. My favorite was the multi-band short wave radio receiver which I used to listen to sputnik.

A neighbor enlisted by stepfather's aid in troubleshooting a color TV kit he had assembled. I remember the workmanship was picture perfect, matching the photos in the assembly manual exactly. But turning on the power did nothing. A bit of investigation turned up the reason. The entire kit had been constructed using Liquid Solder, construction adhesive most often used to bond metal and other strong materials such as concrete--and a non-conductor of electicity..

The Java language is proprietary to Oracle. Oracle lost their lawsuit with Google with the SCOTUS finding that Google's use of some declarative code was "fair use". Oracle's license requirements and its litigious history is enough for me to not want to use Java in a product setting.

I personally find the Java language cumbersome and the type system constraining. These days my preferred languages are Python, Go, and C. In my experience, Java is not a good choice for exploratory programming where adapting old code to new use takes significant repurposing effort.

The policies and paywalls of Elsevier and many other commercial scientific journals do impede the progress of science. One way to improve things over current practice would be for authors to only cite works published in open access journals.

Another collection of wisdom, this time from David Farber. https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/icon/oddsends/farber.htm

These days, Dave is in Japan. Co-Director, Cyber Civilization Research Center and Distinguished Professor, Keio University Tokyo Japan ------------------------------------------ ip: ip Permalink: https://ip.topicbox.com/groups/ip/T5d02d25c6d0cdd1c-Mccf10bb... Delivery options: https://ip.topicbox.com/groups/ip/subscription

The SCOTUS decision on API Fair Use is the correct one. Students of intellectual property law and computer programs will find the briefing for the Supreme Court fascinating. I find it hard to see how the Circuit Panel that overturned the original pro-Google decision to Oracle's favor in the light of the arguments and evidence provided. The briefing for the Cert, particularly the amici, is worth reading. Oracle tried to move the argument into the public square by encouraging "experts" to write damning op-ed articles for news outlets and for the semi-technical press about the evils that Google did. Often their articles misplayed a shallow understanding of the issues and history of the Oracle/Google dispute.

The SCOTUS decision cuts through the cruft and reaches the right finding in this case. It shows that the Supremes can can pay attention and do the right thing.

It is sad to see Larry McMurtry has passed on. He was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford 1960-1961 along with my friend, Peter Beagle.

My personal favorite of Larry's books is "Leaving Cheyenne", which plays out three intertwined lives in West Texas during the brief interlude we call the "wild West". While "Lonesome Dove"is an epic novel, "Leaving Cheyenne" is an intense record of love and commitment set against the evolving West Texas backdrop. It is among the few novels I have read more than once.

This puts everything in context.... Visualization is a powerful tool.

The link goes off to another paper on another topic.

Entirely appropriate paean to female power and mystery for International Women's Day. Fascinating.

The headline claiming "limited negative impact" does not refer to fact but to the opinion of library staff based upon complaints. The pricing of Elsevier journals and their access limitation policies keep recent research out of the hands of scholars and researchers--information which helps drive future research. Many authors choose to use Open Access journals with very different access policies.

Refrigerant leaks are common and very significant sources of greenhouse gases. Common refrigerants are thousands of times more efficient than CO2.

Influential and educational. The paper is worth reading and understanding. Bootstrapping a system is within the abilities of beginning programmers. The wikipedia article provide a brief introduction to the world of Meta II.

The desire for "Write Once Run Anywhere (WORA)" probably came from Smalltalk (Kaye, Goldberg, Ingalls) and was adopted by Java. Both Java and Javascript were influenced by the Smalltalk language and system.

Wikipedia attributes the phrase to SUN Microsystems and Java but, with weasel words admits that the same idea was baked into UCSD Pascal.

Futurists prefer "forecasting" rather than "prediction" since the future is constructed from the past (that is, data) and not from the examination of pigeon entrails, tea leaves, or flakey models with deus ex machina solutions.

David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming would be a good choice. It's a snapshot of forecast reality, not near-future sci fi, and scary.

https://smile.amazon.com/Uninhabitable-Earth-Life-After-Warm...

Also worthwhile, David Pogue's How to Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos. Similar to the Wallace-Wells book, but from a different perspective.

https://smile.amazon.com/How-Prepare-Climate-Change-Practica...

Cormack McCarthy's The Road is a disturbing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive when life on earth dies off from the bottom up. It is set a bit further in the future than the others, at a point where the die off of humans is happening. Collapse and death is mostly low tech.

https://smile.amazon.com/Road-Cormac-McCarthy/dp/0307387895/...

It does seem like we are living in a utopian sci fi novel these days (pandemic aside). We have ignored the warnings of pending collapse until there is no longer time to correct course or even adapt. So it's likely we wail be living in environmental chaos for the next 20 years and then slip into extinction over the next 10 as we experience first hand the last great die-off.

Please point out the irony. If this op-ed were published in the Rupert Murdoch's NY Post or read on Fox News, it might be ironic, but in the NY Times by Shoshana Zuboff, it is serious analysis. If you find it interesting, read her book.

For those who do not remember 11th grade English:

   If something is ironic it's unexpected, often in an amusing way. If you're the world chess champion, it would be pretty ironic if you lost a match to someone who just learned to play yesterday. Ironic is the adjective for the noun irony. In contemporary speech, when we call something ironic, we often mean sarcastic.  [From www.vocabulary.com]

He is wrong. 20 Mb/s is barely adequate. Pai's opinion may be informed by requirements that telcos and others provide "high speed internet" and they can only provide 3 Mb/s without making a considerable investment.

Raw speed is not the only issue. When I was living in "semi-rural" Montana, the constraint on performance had to do with the number of sessions. When the DSLAM ran out of session slots, a session was simply dropped in favor of the most recent one. Movie night became a nightmare of disjointed video fragments and irritating reconnects for everyone.