Category: Computers

Take a cheap WiFi router and add some mesh networking software, and before you know it he Telcos are obsolete. Read Cringely’s theory about how it will unfold:

A disruptive technology is any new gizmo that puts an end to the good life for technologies that preceded it. Personal computers were disruptive, toppling mainframes from their throne. Yes, mainframe computers are still being sold, but IBM today sells about $4 billion worth of them per year compared to more than three times that amount a decade ago. Take inflation into account, and mainframe sales look even worse. Cellular telephones are a disruptive technology, putting a serious hurt on the 125 year-old hard-wired phone system. For the first time in telephone history, the U.S. is each year using fewer telephone numbers than it did the year before as people scrap their fixed phones for mobile ones and give up their fax lines in favor of Internet file attachments. Ah yes, the Internet is itself a disruptive technology, and where we’ll see the WRT54G and its brethren shortly begin to have startling impact.

RTWT for the theory, which sounds crazy, but who really knows?

James Lovelock points out that any rational response to the threat of global warming has to embrace nuclear power:

Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media. These fears are unjustified, and nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources. We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all pervasive carcinogen, oxygen. If we fail to concentrate our minds on the real danger, which is global warming, we may die even sooner, as did more than 20,000 unfortunates from overheating in Europe last summer.

So who’s really to blame for the low priority we’ve placed on nukes here in the US, the filthy corporations or the scruffy hippies? I think we all know the answer to that.

Via Dan Gillmor.

From the WordPress Development Blog:

I am very proud to announce the immediate availability of the much-anticipated 1.2 “Mingus” release of WordPress. You can download it through the usual methods, though it usually takes a few hours for the SourceForge mirrors to catch up with everything. There are so many new features it’s almost too much for this post, but I’ll squeeze them in. You can view the full changelog on the wiki.

There you are – real progress.

Kathy Kinsley offers up a useful hack.

Alan Kellog isn’t too impressed with WordPress:

I say the Hell with it. The documentation is written by people with something close to Aspergers Syndrome, with no consideration for people who have no background in coding, scripting, or any of that shit.

I didn’t find it especially difficult myself – the basic stuff installed and imported MT in less time than it took to transfer the MT export file over, so to each his own.

This blog runs WordPress:

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful.

A little rough around the edges, but it’s good enough. The main things I like about WordPress are performance and ease of management. In WP, you don’t have to compile pages into psuedo-static HTML, and it seems to grab stuff from MySQL faster than MT. The user interface stuff is a little rougher, but it’s probably not all that hard to hack, given that it’s all php and stuff.

Very nice software, I give it three out of four stars.

I’m playing around with a GPL package called “zFeeder”, which does RSS aggregation and formatting in Javascript – it’s on the left-hand side. Functionally, it’s similar to the Robopundit tool I had on this blog a couple of years ago before RSS was all the rage and stuff. The old Robo was a major kludge, relying on a program running on a personal server and a service on a community college server in W. Va. that’s now been discontinued. the zFeeder thing is php that refreshes in real-time.

It has some quirks I don’t much care for, but I’m still learning how to use it and stuff. The installation was a snap, just one line in the MT template after the files were uploaded to the host of my choice. Someday all Blogware will have this function built-in, but for now we have php.

It’s cool enough.

Businesses are hiring as job growth booms:

“The longest jobless recovery during the postwar period is over,” said Sung Won Sohn, chief economic officer of Wells Fargo Economics. “Businesses have regained confidence in the sustainability of this economic expansion and have started to hire people in earnest.”

Hallelujah.

From Sanskrit as an Object Oriented Language:

Lakshmi Thathachar’s view of Sanskrit’s nature may be paraphrased as follows: All modern languages have etymological roots in classical languages. And some say all Indo-European languages are rooted in Sanskrit, but let us not get lost in that debate. Words in Sanskrit are instances of pre-defined classes, a concept that drives object oriented programming [OOP] today. For example, in English ‘cow’ is a just a sound assigned to mean a particular animal. But if you drill down the word ‘gau’ –Sanskrit for ‘cow’– you will arrive at a broad class ‘gam’ which means ‘to move. From these derive ‘gamanam’, ‘gatih’ etc which are variations of ‘movement’. All words have this OOP approach, except that defined classes in Sanskrit are so exhaustive that they cover the material and abstract –indeed cosmic– experiences known to man. So in Sanskrit the connection is more than etymological.

It was Panini who formalised Sanskrit’s grammar and usage about 2500 years ago. No new ‘classes’ have needed to be added to it since then. “Panini should be thought of as the forerunner of the modern formal language theory used to specify computer languages,” say J J O’Connor and E F Robertson.

BTW, that clown Chomsky stole his structural linguistics from Panini, and never gave him credit. Anyway, it’s an interesting article so RTWT.

Despite my best efforts to kill it, the Lessig-land blog lumbers on, and with a guest blogger no less.