I recently blogged about Slaves of technology, where I mentioned that over-dependency on technology might create problems.
Here's what I found today regarding responsibilities of humans in technological evolution. This is an audio excerpt from Ray Kurzweil's interview in Accelerating Change 2005.
| Your Brain's Pattern |
 You have a dreamy mind, full of fancy and fantasy. You have the ability to stay forever entertained with your thoughts. People may say you're hard to read, but that's because you're so internally focused. But when you do share what you're thinking, people are impressed with your imagination. |
Pardon me for the title. I am not on either side of the balance. Let the law decide who is right and who is wrong. But this one really seems interesting.
This is a continuation of the blog Patents – A boon or a bane, that I wrote recently. And this time it is to do with Copyrights. Without delaying any further let me tell you what I am talking about.
I am talking about the Google Print lawsuit and all the hoopla around it. Google wants to digitize all the books in 3 major libraries of the world and many publishers don't want that to happen.
The ones on Google's side say it helps people in easily searching for collections. You can search for each and every word in each and every page of each and every book that the library has. Seems great for a techie, but the ones against Google say, “It is against the law. Google cannot copyright anything without the prior permission of the publishers. If Google can do it to books, it can then do it to movies, audio and whatever it wants!”
And there is another take of the whole story. What is Google trying to do? Is it trying to grab the data (may be personal) of each and every person? (That is what sounds like the – Aim of Google). How will you feel if someone owns all your data? Is Google a silent killer? (At present it does not seem like one and this seems like a merciless extension of the Google story).
Let's wait and watch.
Recently someone claimed that XML is something that they have patented [News story]. A similar thing happened with JPEG patent [News story].
And then a survey was conducted by AAAS on A Descriptive Analysis of a Pilot Survey on the Effects of Patenting on Science. This survey has reported that 28% of the respondents have abandoned their research projects because of complex licensing negotiations. (How sad!)
There are 2 groups of people: one who support patents and ones who don't. The ones who support patents say that it is good and patents in fact are responsible for innovation to happen. The reasons they give are:
* Patents mean that you disclose something safely and the government grants you exclusive rights over your idea, which means that either another company will have to pay you for the use of your idea or they cannot use it.
* Patents result in people thinking in different ways than one, so that results in innovation.
Both seem to be good observations. But the ones who don't support patents say that, it is in fact hindering innovation. Patents are being misused, especially in the software world [A software patent debate in Wikipedia]. Many basic things, some very obvious things are patented and being misused. For example, extending software functionality has been patented in various forms (although extending something to provide extended/enhanced functionality seems obvious).
My personal take on the issue is that patents in their present form clearly hinder innovation. Keeping the business interests of companies in view, patent procedure should be modified so that misuse does not occur. Or else, there will be people who patent just about anything and everything that they can.
I had recently written about someone who had patented the method of swinging a swing.
While this is not just one of them, there is a very interesting blog entry here, which describes how a person patented a wheel to emphasize the flaws in the patenting system.
Let me end by telling you another shocker: 1/5 of All Human Genes Have Been Patented. So, you have in your body genes that are owned as patents by someone else! 🙂
There was a time when there was no electricity. And then came this wonder. Today we take it for granted, although there are occasions when we need to go without power. It is a really dreaded feeling.
Now we are talking of cyborgs and things like pervasive computing (which means you don't even know you are using it). There are these wonders called Digital Homes, where it is possible that doors will not have knobs. Everything is controlled using biometric recognition or may be directly controlled by the brain!
In fact, if you read Ray Kurzweil's articles, you will go a step further into this. Kurzweil talks of virtual worlds and singularity.
All these sound really great! But is this over-reliance of man on computers/technology? Is there a limit to comfort? Can we live without these once it is available?
The more you rely on technology, the more riskier it gets, the more vulnerable we are to attacks. Consider world without paper money for example. There's just e-cash. Sounds great?
Now consider that the bank where you store your money has a really great virus attack and everything goes down in a moment. What happens? What if the home with no door knobs experiences some failure and you are not able to open the door? This might sound silly (perhaps for lack of a better example), but the problems are quite clear.
This does not in any way mean that reliance on technology is bad. After all that is how man progresses. Technology is a tool. It facilitates something that is otherwise tough or impossible to do. But over-reliance is bad. But what exactly is over-reliance?
Well, it is really tough to draw the line. It becomes an ethical discussion if we proceed on this. But this point is worth considering.
Suppose you have read Kurzweil's articles, try answering this question: “If you are given the freedom to live till eternity, what will you do?” Something that you should really consider!
Take it, you also take it… give it to your friends, give it to your relatives… give it to your pets… give it to everyone. The resource which was so scarce just some time back, will be considered to be so abundant in the near future.
Well, I am not an expert in IPv6 or networking, but here goes:
Consider this article on IPv6: The Next Generation Internet Protocol. The author says:
To accommodate almost unlimited growth, and a variety of addressing formats, IPv6 addresses are 128 bits in length. This address space is probably sufficient to uniquely address every molecule in the solar system! (For a full description read the article).
Well, this is not surprising.
This would mean that every folder could have its own IP address, because the number of molecules required to store the fact that a folder exists is much more than 1. You might ask me, “Are you crazy? Why should every folder have its own IP address”, but mind you, if it is there, people will use it.
Enter nanotechnology, and we move beyond molecules and enter into the world of electrons. What happens next. It is already told that in nanotechnology you are able to control the motion of electrons to make computations. So now, is it possible to really give every folder its own IP address?
Perhaps not. The reason is that the number of logical states is infinite. A folder does not have any physical existence. Just because it is static now, does not mean that it will be so even in the future. Folders could be dynamic. No data will ever exist statically and that is where we are heading.
What am I trying to prove? Well, the point that IP addresses are 128 bits and that every molecule can have its own IP and its comparisons with Avogadro's number seems foolish. True, IPv6 solves the problem that IPv4 brought with it and that should be the end of the discussion. You can never say it is exhaustive (can you?). IP addresses are used to uniquely identify hosts. Wikipedia says, “A host is any machine connected to a computer network, a node that has a hostname.” That need not be the case. We could have logical entities connecting to the network (take folders themselves as examples). What then?
It occurred to me when Gmail used it. Many other sites/products/services were using this same concept, albeit with different names.
I am talking about the concept of tagging (or labeling). There is a very interesting study on tagging here.
It made me wonder, why at all have folders? Why not have just tags? How about a world without folders?
Well, if you think I am fantasizing then you should look at evidence that people are moving in this direction.
* The much hyped Reiser4 filesystem supports Semantic filesystems.
* WinFS supposedly has this.
* MAC OS's Spotlight search is a work-around to this.
2 years down the line, you might see that “Folders are history”! But the question is what will replace them? Is it tags? Well, in its present form, tags are not quite a replacement to folders. While tags have several advantages like automatic rule application, there are some disadvantages of tagging compared to folders. One that I can describe right-off is “Context awareness”.
Suppose I tag a file by name “Project” does it mean it is MY project, or does it mean SOMEONE ELSE'S project or does it mean PROJECT RESOURCES? In folders, it is possible to give a context to the data, while tags in their present form, will not help us here.
A good solution is to have the best of both worlds. The concept of tag clusters would probably be what would actually replace folders. It is not yet unclear how tag clusters would look, so it would be early to comment on it, but you can expect something soon!
This is just humor (no real facts down here… Or is there?!):
I remember having read that Windows XP was rewritten from scratch. But the day I found out that it was not possible to create a folder by name “con” in Windows XP I started experimenting.
It is not possible to create this folder in either FAT or an NTFS partition. This clearly indicates that the problem lies not in Windows kernel as such, but in the filesystem (considering that filesystem is separate from the kernel in a microkernel approach). And since NTFS is adopted in Windows XP and FAT was there earlier, NTFS was not a complete rewrite.
Me and
Now comes the question, is Windows XP a real rewrite? I don't think so. Microsoft is known for showing off things which others would have created ages ago. The recent show PDC'05 is an evidence of this. The speaker was demonstrating the new browser IE 7 and said, “And look what we have here : Tabs!!!”
This made me think:
Is it true that Windows XP hangs less than Windows 98? If so, how did Microsoft do this?
This is how they did it:
Windows 98 kernel:
…
…
…
explorer();
…
…
…
Windows XP kernel:
while(1)
{
if(!stable(explorer))
{
kill(explorer);
explorer();
}
}
And lo!!! Windows XP does not hang!!!
Yeah, it's true! Google Earth now shows Bangalore satellite images.
Without any more words, let's get to business (I didn't want to mark the images):
Golden Towers – The place where I work currently:
(Landmark: Just in front of the X shaped building is a L building, which is Golden Enclave. To the right is Golden Tower. It is a small building. To the front is empty space, which is the parking space.)
Embassy Golf Links:
(Landmark: To the front of EGL is the Golf course, and to the right bottom is the airport runway. The IBM EGL buildings are to the left of the Golf course, to the left top of the picture.)
Embassy Golf Links – IBM:
(Landmark: This clearly shows the IBM EGL buildings.)
How about some other places in Bangalore?
Majestic:
(Description: The railway station to the left and the U shaped bus stand. Looks majestic. )
Chinnaswami stadium:
(Description: Needs none.)
Airport:
(Description: The runway looks good, but the airport is spoiling the city. Too much of pollution. 🙁 )
Experiment with Google Earth Now!!!
I had heard that the Orkut server is bad.
But I didn't know it could be so deadly.
Orkut sent me a friend request approval mail atleast 20 times (as of writing this blog entry)! 🙁 Server spamming eh?! And there comes another…