The latest mural in Łódź: "TIGER" in a "technological" environment, the EC1 building or a code referring to a programming language... Author: Adam Wirski, known as 'Kruk'.

The concept is to refer to the activity of the SESTO company, on whose building it is located - i.e. the production of electronic components for railway substations, as well as other electronic systems used in industry. Łódź, Poland

Laws of Physics

Laws of Nature

Laws of Common Sense

Laws of Man

Laws of Musk

Lords of COBOL

Laws of God

Laws of Beans and Beer

 

"Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country." – Charles E. Weller

 

Media:

* Wikipedia: Filler text

* Stu Phillips and Glen A. Larson: Battlestar Galactica Theme (1978)

* Prometheus of Videos: Empire Strikes Back: Intro to Imperial Fleet & Executor / Arrival At Hoth (1980)

 

Tualatin Fred Meyer, 11:26 PM.

 

See also: January 20, 2025, 4:16 PM (2024)

Ab abstractum, ad infinitum...

 

Two iPads eying each other.

 

I rarely publish self-portraits like this mainly because, as I have four arms, they usually elicit some sort of comment from folk, and that makes me feel self-conscious.

 

This is for the Flickr Friday theme this week of Recursion which I found intriguing. Recursion is a concept that reminds me of the happy days when I used to learn new programming languages by writing programs to play board games like Reversi (Othello).

 

Recursion in that context is one program routine calling a nested copy of itself repeatedly, and it was useful to analyse board scores several moves in advance to work out which initial move was most powerful. As you can imagine I sold the rights to that idea to DeepMind and retired on the proceeds some while ago…

 

The approach I have used here of using two devices with front-facing cameras to provide the visual recursion is hardly a novel idea, I am sure, but I’d not done it before and wanted to try it out as a proof of concept. Previously I’d just used a single device and a mirror.

 

To be honest, it was a real fiddle to get even half right - point it in the right direction with the right position and right height and tilt, and plonk the screen to focus and then trigger the shutter... Great fun was had!

 

And with this still shot you rather miss out on the real fun which was watching a change in the initial image percolating down the stack of frames, at about four or five frames a second.

 

It’s also interesting to see how the saturation increases in successive iterations - so much for the iPad’s colour veracity then!

 

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image! Happy Flickr Friday :)

 

[Edit: If you have not played with this kind of thing before you may find this visually confusing, so I thought I would add some explanation.

 

There are two identical iPads involved here, one with a green cover (you can see that at the top), and one with a black cover, though it’s folded back so you only see the hinge at the bottom.

 

Both iPads have their cameras switched on to use the front-facing camera on the device - the selfie one. Both display a live view on their screens of what their camera is seeing.

The green iPad is lying on my dining table (brown cover) facing up to the ceiling.

 

I am holding the black iPad upside down (facing the green iPad) about 12 or 15 inches above the green. I’m taking the picture we see here with the black, suspended, iPad.The picture shows the green iPad and its screen.

 

But the green iPad screen is showing what it is seeing, which is the black iPad with my finger on the shutter button. It is also showing what the black iPad is showing on its display - which is this image. And so we have the first degree of recursion - I am taking an image of the image I am taking… And this image of the image I am taking shows the image of the image I am taking as well (via the green and black iPads again) and so the recursion continues and disappears into itself in the distance.

 

Technical note: You can do this with a single device and a mirror but you run into a problem. The camera on these devices is not in the centre of the screen but set in the edge of the device outside the display area. To get the image of table (green) iPad in the frame I needed to tilt the suspended iPad to one side.

 

This creates a perspective distortion in the image - I fixed this with a perspective correction while processing the main image, but you can see it still in the images within images. If you use a mirror then the perspective distortion gets worse with each iteration.

 

But what I did here was to use two devices both with similar offset cameras. Placing one camera at one side and the other camera at the other (the green camera is on the right and the black camera was on the left) means that the two perspective distortions work against each other (negative feedback) so the image is much more centralised.

 

I didn’t realise this when I started - it was a happy accident! My main problem was convincing the suspended black iPad to orient the display so that the shutter button wasn’t on the same side as the camera so I didn’t obscure the camera with my finger... sigh.

 

I hope these notes help you if you try it yourself - do have a go: it’s fun.]

 

via "a meditation on biological modelling"

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jZsEUMeU94

The Macro Mondays theme for this week is "Stitch". Photo of a LabVIEW Logo hat patch. LabVIEW is a graphical programming language created by National Instruments

[Eng. /Esp.]

 

Transputers T800C mounted on IMS 404 boards, linked on an IMS B012

 

Transputer processors were designed and manufactured by Inmos Ltd., UK from the late '80s to the early 90's, to directly support the Occam programming language, based on C.A.R. Hoare's CSP formalism, providing massive parallelism. Scalar performance increase had staggered, an massive parallelism was the Promises Land (rings a bell guys?), with a wide range of many different parallel programming paradigms. Imnos was not able to catch up with the technology roadmap, delivering the last transputer model (T9000, codenamed H1) at a lousy 100 MHz wereas TI DSPs were alredy running at 300 MHz, which lead to the end of the last great British and European computing project, under my point of view. The transputers shown in the picture are part of the set I installed and configured to implement as a proof of concept the theory I introduced in my PhD. However, working with them meant to program my own tools for loading and debugging programs, and whenever I managed to shone my tools, new commercial tools were available, until eventually the entire European Transputer project crumbled. Fortunately, my theoretical work was sound enough and I could happily wrap up, defend and get my PhD. That was 23 years ago... passed in a wink!

 

Los transputers fueron procesadores diseñados y fabricados por Inmos Ltd. UK entre finales de los '80 y principios de los '90, para soportar directamente el lenguaje de programación Occam, basado en el formalismo CSP de C.A.R. Hoare, permitiendo paralelismo masivo. El incremento del rendimiento escalar parecía detenido y la programación paralela era la Tierra Prometida (¿No os suena esto?), con una enorme variedad de paradigmas de programación paralela. Imos fue incapaz de seguir la oportunidad tecnológica, entregando el último modelo de transputer (T9000, código de desarrollo H1) a unos tristes 100 MHz, mientras que los DSPs de Texas Instruments salían a 300 MHz, lo que condujo al fracaso del último gran proyecto Británico y Europeo de computación, bajo mi punto de vista. Los transputers de la fotografía forman parte del conjunto que monté y configuré para implementar una prueba de concepto del desarrollo teórico de mi tesis doctoral. Sin embargo, trabajar con ellos significaba hacerme mis propias herramientas, y para cuando conseguía tenerlas afinadas, siempre aparecían nuevas herramientas comerciales, hasta que todo el proyecto europeo en torno a los transputers se hundió. Afortunadamente la parte teórica de mi trabajo era lo suficientemente sólida, y pude finalmente acabar, defender y obtener mi doctorado. Eso fue hace ya 23 años... que han pasado en un abrir y cerrar de ojos!

Todays Macro Monday theme is "In Between" and I thought about the gaps at the back of a fountain pen nib.

 

I'm pretty computer literate, I can hack my way through all sorts of programming languages and tend to learn software applications fairly painlessly, but I still have a bit of an obsession in writing in fountain pen.

 

I find it steadies my thought process down and gives me thinking time. I even take great care in finding specific inks to write in.

 

Ranging from British Racing Green when I want to be patriotic through to my everyday ink that I have imported from Japan just because it writes smoothly and I love the colour.

 

I also think my pens will make a nice gift for my children when I'm too old to use them. They're my everyday pens so they've seen their share of action but I think if you have something beautifully made then it's to be used not stored and hidden away.

probably the double entendre of the title isn't obvious for non-informatics, so i will try to give some hints: ;)

  

"life cycle" is a meta-concept in the computer sciences

 

"java" doesn't mean only coffee or an isle, but it's also the name of a program language

 

there is this phrase: "A programmer is a device for turning coffee into software" by Unknown(?)

(it's an assimilation of the original citation "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems" by Paul Erdos)

 

'the life cycle of java' On Black: small and large

(best Explore @102)

Cuthbert was a big fan of the Korn shell. These days he uses bash.

 

We're Here: Shells

 

The Kornshell: Command and Programming Language

by Morris I. Bolsky and David G. Korn

 

This incredible glass structure sits in front of what was The Sundowner Motel in Albuquerque. The Sundowner was built in 1960 during the heart of Route 66 tourism.

 

This glass structure casts amazing coloured shadows on the ground. I'd love it in my yard.

 

This motel was where Bill Gates and Paul Allen lived when they wrote a version of the programming language BASIC for the Altair 8800 computer in 1975. Their company Albuquerque based MITS later moved off to Seattle as they were unable to get funding from banks here in Albuquerque. The rest, as they say, is history.

 

The Sundowner Motel is now an apartment complex.

Logo of Scala programming language in origami. Folded from a single 2:1 rectangle of Kami.

A view down the side of one of the open atriums within Bell Works in Holmdel, NJ. Bell Works is the two million-square-foot building formerly known as "Bell Labs," where Bell employees did foundational research that led to discoveries and advancements in transistors, lasers, the Unix operating system, the C programming language, and CCD technologies. Several noble prizes were awarded to the teams who worked here back in the day.

 

Today, Bell Works is a re-imagined workspace, nicknamed the "Metroburb", featuring floors of private offices that overlook a giant atrium area full of specialty shops, restaurants, a basketball court, both Dental and Medical offices, an indoor virtual driving range, art gallery space, escape rooms, the Axelrod Performing Arts Academy, and the Holmdel branch of the Monmouth County Public Library. They are open to the public from 6:00 AM to Midnight each day, and it's a great place to walk some laps in bad weather in a safe, secure environment.

 

Panasonic Lumix ZS100 compact digital camera, 9mm (25mm equiv on 35mm), F7, ISO 320, 1/80th second.

In the distant future of year 2020 corporations rule supreme. Largest and most sinister of them all is the Empire Corp. A band of underground hackers and freedom fighters is fighting to bring down the world order and restore liberty to the people. Among them:

Lola - a girl from a wealthy family who managed to steal source code of the BLACK_STAR_ICE - the most deadly piece of software ever created

CY3ER - a hacker fluent in over six hundreds of programming languages

Bernard - a legendary hacker of old, a co-author of FORCE operating system

Luc - a street racer with big dreams

Hanzo & Chuck - pair of street samurais/mercs, veterans of Corporate Wars working for cartels

This is my second approach to designing a Scala logo. With different colors, it could also be interpreted as Ericsson logo.

 

The difference to Scala Logo I is that this model is folded from a long and thin strip (it needs to be longer than about 12:1) rather than from half a square. This model is of the “simple but difficult to fold” variety: the construction is almost trivial (just folding the strip into the right shape — the logo it represents is just a winding band as well), but since there are no reference points, getting it right took me several attempts.

The 17th century French polymath, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), is famous for several reasons. Taught by his father, he was a child prodigy who excelled in mathematics and the science of his day.

 

Amazingly enough, whilst still in his teens, he developed ideas about calculating machines and over three years produced 50 prototypes. He is rightly considered one of the fathers of mechanical calculators and his findings contributed eventually to the rise of modern computers. In fact one of the early computer programming languages was named after him: Pascal.

 

His major scientific discoveries, however, related to chemistry, particularly the study of fluids and the clarification of theories about gases under pressure and the vacuum. I can recall first learning about him in high school Chemistry - a Pascal is now a unit of pressure.

 

His major contributions to mathematics began when he was just 16, both in geometry and probability theory. In fact this latter theory led him to his primary reason for choosing to believe in God (though let me add, this is NOT why he believed in God - more of that in the next picture).

 

Pascal's Wager is another term that has entered our lexicon. In it Pascal argues that one must stake one's own life on the outcome of a coin toss.

 

Suppose the following (and I'll use terms current with the theology of his age):

 

You believe in God AND

{God exists} = Eternal Happiness or Heaven

{God does not exist} = Nothing

 

You do not believe in God AND

{God exists} = Eternal Damnation or Hell

{God does not exist} = Nothing

 

Now leaving aside the debate about Hell (in which most people in Pascal's age believed), you can see the conclusion. By staking your life on the fact that God exists you cannot lose the bet. And more than this, you have lived a virtuous life (supposing that you are true to the principles of your faith).

 

But this rational argument is not why Blaise Pascal believed in God. He also said, "The heart has its reasons which reason cannot tell." So to the next picture...

 

This model represents the logo of KotlinConf, a conference dedicated to Kotlin programming language.

 

While the logo as pictured on their homepage certainly has an origami-like appearance, I don’t know if it is based on an actual origami model or only made to look like one. Nonetheless, I was able to devise a way of folding exactly the same shape from a single square of paper (duo colored: blue on one side and orange on the other) without any cutting or glue. It was a fun challenge.

"Treinta y tres, tres tes"

 

"BINGO!!!!"

 

A quadtych to all of you :D

 

Today, studying Programming Languages (Lisp( :D ), Prolog( :@ ) and relative things( :AbsoluteShit: )...)

 

I hope I'll survive to tomorrow :D

 

PS: I know there are some cuts of color and things, but this was the intention, not to create a master master piece... ^^

I like playin round with colour schemes.

My favourites so far: The lime and white ones.

I'm going to build some of them for sure.

 

Things you shouldn't do while you are supposed to learn C programming language:

*) Try different colour schemes using a digital model of your MOC

*) Create a collage and publish it on flickr

Read the article on opensource.com

Education Reform: Insert your favorite “Wrath of Khan” joke blog title here

Design without debt: Five tools for designers on a budget

Scratch, a programming language for kids

 

Created by Jessica Duensing for opensource.com

Cobol was one of the first high-level programming languages. Condemned to disappear many years ago, it is still more current than ever. In the USA there is an urgent search by programmers in this language to keep alive the millionaire applications developed in this language, which is not resigned to death.

I love it, it was one of the most powerful and beautiful languages that I knew in my computer profession.

My son has become fascinated with bitcoins, and so I had to get him a tangible one for Xmas. The public key is imprinted visibly on the tamper-evident holographic film, and the private key lies underneath. (Casascius)

 

I too was fascinated by digital cash back in college, and more specifically by the asymmetric mathematical transforms underlying public-key crypto and digital blind signatures.

 

I remembered a technical paper I wrote, but could not find it. A desktop search revealed an essay that I completely forgot, something that I had recovered from my archives of floppy discs (while I still could).

 

It is an article I wrote for the school newspaper in 1994. Ironically, Microsoft Word could not open this ancient Microsoft Word file format, but the free text editors could.

 

What a fun time capsule, below, with some choice naivetés…

 

I am trying to reconstruct what I was thinking. I was arguing that a bulletproof framework for digital cash (and what better testing ground) could be used to secure a digital container for executable code on a rental basis. So the expression of an idea — the specific code, or runtime service — is locked in a secure container. The idea would be to prevent copying instead of punishing after the fact.

 

Micro-currency and micro-code seem like similar exercises in regulating the single use of an issued number.

 

Now that the Bitcoin experiment is underway, do you know of anyone writing about it as an alternative framework for intellectual property (from digital art to code to governance tokens)?

  

IP and Digital Cash

@NORMAL:

Digital Cash and the “Intellectual Property” Oxymoron

By Steve Jurvetson

 

Many of us will soon be working in the information services or technology industries which are currently tangled in a bramble patch of intellectual property law. As the law struggles to find coherency and an internally-consistent logic for intellectual property (IP) protection, digital encryption technologies may provide a better solution — from the perspective of reducing litigation, exploiting the inherent benefits of an information-based business model, and preserving a free economy of ideas.

Bullet-proof digital cash technology, which is now emerging, can provide a protected “cryptographic container” for intellectual expressions, thereby preserving traditional notions of intellectual property that protect specific instantiations of an idea rather than the idea itself. For example, it seems reasonable that Intuit should be able to protect against the widespread duplication of their Quicken software (the expression of an idea), but they should not be able to patent the underlying idea of single-entry bookkeeping. There are strong economic incentives for digital cash to develop and for those techniques to be adapted for IP protection — to create a protected container or expression of an idea. The rapid march of information technology has strained the evolution of IP law, but rather than patching the law, information technology itself may provide a more coherent solution.

 

Information Wants To Be Free

Currently, IP law is enigmatic because it is expanding to a domain for which it was not initially intended. In developing the U.S. Constitution, Thomas Jefferson argued that ideas should freely transverse the globe, and that ideas were fundamentally different from material goods. He concluded that “Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.” The issues surrounding IP come into sharp focus as we shift to being more of an information-based economy.

The use of e-mail and local TV footage helps disseminate information around the globe and can be a force for democracy — as seen in the TV footage from Chechen, the use of modems in Prague during the Velvet Revolution, and the e-mail and TV from Tianammen Square. Even Gorbachev used a video camera to show what was happening after he was kidnapped. What appears to be an inherent force for democracy runs into problems when it becomes the subject of property.

As higher-level programming languages become more like natural languages, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish the idea from the code. Language precedes thought, as Jean-Louis Gassée is fond of saying, and our language is the framework for the formulation and expression of our ideas. Restricting software will increasingly be indistinguishable from restricting freedom of speech.

An economy of ideas and human attention depends on the continuous and free exchange of ideas. Because of the associative nature of memory processes, no idea is detached from others. This begs the question, is intellectual property an oxymoron?

 

Intellectual Property Law is a Patch

John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder (with Mitch Kapor) of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that “Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted or expanded to contain digitized expression... Faith in law will not be an effective strategy for high-tech companies. Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology. Technology advances in lunging jerks. Real-world conditions will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will lag further behind, more profoundly confused. This mismatch may prove impossible to overcome.”

From its origins in the Industrial Revolution where the invention of tools took on a new importance, patent and copyright law has protected the physical conveyance of an idea, and not the idea itself. The physical expression is like a container for an idea. But with the emerging information superhighway, the “container” is becoming more ethereal, and it is disappearing altogether. Whether it’s e-mail today, or the future goods of the Information Age, the “expressions” of ideas will be voltage conditions darting around the net, very much like thoughts. The fleeting copy of an image in RAM is not very different that the fleeting image on the retina.

The digitization of all forms of information — from books to songs to images to multimedia — detaches information from the physical plane where IP law has always found definition and precedent. Patents cannot be granted for abstract ideas or algorithms, yet courts have recently upheld the patentability of software as long as it is operating a physical machine or causing a physical result. Copyright law is even more of a patch. The U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 requires that works be fixed in a durable medium, and where an idea and its expression are inseparable, the merger doctrine dictates that the expression cannot be copyrighted. E-mail is not currently copyrightable because it is not a reduction to tangible form. So of course, there is a proposal to amend these copyright provisions. In recent rulings, Lotus won its case that Borland’s Quattro Pro spreadsheet copied elements of Lotus 123’s look and feel, yet Apple lost a similar case versus Microsoft and HP. As Professor Bagley points out in her new text, “It is difficult to reconcile under the total concept and feel test the results in the Apple and Lotus cases.” Given the inconsistencies and economic significance of these issues, it is no surprise that swarms of lawyers are studying to practice in the IP arena.

Back in the early days of Microsoft, Bill Gates wrote an inflammatory “Open Letter to Hobbyists” in which he alleged that “most of you steal your software ... and should be kicked out of any club meeting you show up at.” He presented the economic argument that piracy prevents proper profit streams and “prevents good software from being written.” Now we have Windows.

But seriously, if we continue to believe that the value of information is based on scarcity, as it is with physical objects, we will continue to patch laws that are contrary to the nature of information, which in many cases increases in value with distribution. Small, fast moving companies (like Netscape and Id) protect their ideas by getting to the marketplace quicker than their larger competitors who base their protection on fear and litigation.

The patent office is woefully understaffed and unable to judge the nuances of software. Comptons was initially granted a patent that covered virtually all multimedia technology. When they tried to collect royalties, Microsoft pushed the Patent Office to overturn the patent. In 1992, Software Advertising Corp received a patent for “displaying and integrating commercial advertisements with computer software.” That’s like patenting the concept of a radio commercial. In 1993, a DEC engineer received a patent on just two lines of machine code commonly used in object-oriented programming. CompuServe announced this month that they plan to collect royalties on the widely used GIF file format for images.

The Patent Office has issued well over 12,000 software patents, and a programmer can unknowingly be in violation of any them. Microsoft had to pay $120MM to STAC in February 1994 for violating their patent on data compression. The penalties can be costly, but so can a patent search. Many of the software patents don’t have the words “computer,” “software,” “program,” or “algorithm” in their abstracts. “Software patents turn every decision you make while writing a program into a legal risk,” says Richard Stallman, founder of the League for Programming Freedom. “They make writing a large program like crossing a minefield. Each step has a small chance of stepping on a patent and blowing you up.” The very notion of seventeen years of patent protection in the fast moving software industry seems absurd. MS-DOS did not exist seventeen years ago.

IP law faces the additional wrinkle of jurisdictional issues. Where has an Internet crime taken place? In the country or state in which the computer server resides? Many nations do not have the same intellectual property laws as the U.S. Even within the U.S., the law can be tough to enforce; for example, a group of music publishers sued CompuServe for the digital distribution of copyrighted music. A complication is that CompuServe has no knowledge of the activity since it occurs in the flood of bits transferring between its subscribers

The tension seen in making digital copies revolves around the issue of property. But unlike the theft of material goods, copying does not deprive the owner of their possessions. With digital piracy, it is less a clear ethical issue of theft, and more an abstract notion that you are undermining the business model of an artist or software developer. The distinction between ethics and laws often revolves around their enforceability. Before copy machines, it was hard to make a book, and so it was obvious and visible if someone was copying your work. In the digital age, copying is lightning fast and difficult to detect. Given ethical ambiguity, convenience, and anonymity, it is no wonder we see a cultural shift with regard to digital ethics.

 

Piracy, Plagiarism and Pilfering

We copy music. We are seldom diligent with our footnotes. We wonder where we’ve seen Strat-man’s PIE and the four slices before. We forward e-mail that may contain text from a copyrighted news publication. The SCBA estimates that 51% of satellite dishes have illegal descramblers. John Perry Barlow estimates that 90% of personal hard drives have some pirated software on them.

Or as last month’s Red Herring editorial points out, “this atmosphere of electronic piracy seems to have in turn spawned a freer attitude than ever toward good old-fashioned plagiarism.” Articles from major publications and WSJ columns appear and circulate widely on the Internet. Computer Pictures magazine replicated a complete article on multimedia databases from New Media magazine, and then publicly apologized.

Music and voice samples are an increasingly common art form, from 2 Live Crew to Negativland to local bands like Voice Farm and Consolidated. Peter Gabriel embraces the shift to repositioned content; “Traditionally, the artist has been the final arbiter of his work. He delivered it and it stood on its own. In the interactive world, artists will also be the suppliers of information and collage material, which people can either accept as is, or manipulate to create their own art. It’s part of the shift from skill-based work to decision-making and editing work.”

But many traditionalists resist the change. Museums are hesitant to embrace digital art because it is impossible to distinguish the original from a copy; according to a curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, “The art world is scared to death of this stuff.” The Digital Audio Tape debate also illustrated the paranoia; the music industry first insisted that these DAT recorders had to purposely introduce static into the digital copies they made, and then they settled for an embedded code that limited the number of successive copies that could be made from the a master source.

For a healthier reaction, look at the phenomenally successful business models of Mosaic/Netscape and Id Software, the twisted creator of Doom. Just as McAfee built a business on shareware, Netscape and Id encourage widespread free distribution of their product. But once you want support from Netscape, or the higher levels of the Doom game, then you have to pay. For industries with strong demand-side economies of scale, such as Netscape web browsers or Safe-TCL intelligent agents, the creators have exploited the economies of information distribution. Software products are especially susceptible to increasing returns with scale, as are networking products and most of the information technology industries.

Yet, the Software Publishers Association reports that 1993 worldwide losses to piracy of business application software totaled $7.45 billion. They also estimated that 89% of software units in Korea were counterfeit. And China has 29 factories, some state-owned, that press 75 million pirated CDs per year, largely for export. GATT will impose the U.S. notions of intellectual property on a world that sees the issue very differently.

Clearly there are strong economic incentives to protect intellectual property, and reasonable arguments can be made for software patents and digital copyright, but the complexities of legal enforcement will be outrun and potentially obviated by the relatively rapid developments of another technology, digital cash and cryptography.

 

Digital Cash and the IP Lock

Digital cash is in some ways an extreme example of digital “property” -- since it cannot be copied, it is possessed by one entity at a time, and it is static and non-perishable. If the techniques for protecting against pilferage and piracy work in the domain of cash, then they can be used to “protect” other properties by being embedded in them. If I wanted to copy-protect an “original” work of digital art, digital cash techniques can be used as the “container” to protect intellectual property in the old style. A bullet-proof digital cash scheme would inevitably be adapted by those who stand to gain from the current system. Such as Bill Gates.

Several companies are developing technologies for electronic commerce. On January 12, several High-Tech Club members attended the Cybermania conference on electronic commerce with the CEOs of Intuit, CyberCash, Enter TV and The Lightspan Partnership. According to Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit, the motivations for digital cash are anonymity and efficient small-transaction Internet commerce. Anonymity preserves our privacy in the age of increasingly intrusive “database marketing” based on credit card purchase patterns and other personal information. Of course, it also has tax-evasion implications. For Internet commerce, cash is more efficient and easier to use than a credit card for small transactions.

“A lot of people will spend nickels on the Internet,” says Dan Lynch of CyberCash. Banks will soon exchange your current cash for cyber-tokens, or a “bag of bits” which you can spend freely on the Internet. A competitor based in the Netherlands called DigiCash has a Web page with numerous articles on electronic money and fully functional demo of their technology. You can get some free cash from them and spend it at some of their allied vendors.

Digital cash is a compelling technology. Wired magazine calls it the “killer application for electronic networks which will change the global economy.” Handling and fraud costs for the paper money system are growing as digital color copiers and ATMs proliferate. Donald Gleason, President of the Smart Card Enterprise unit of Electronic Payment Services argues that “Cash is a nightmare. It costs money handlers in the U.S. alone approximately $60 billion a year to move the stuff... Bills and coinage will increasingly be replaced by some sort of electronic equivalent.” Even a Citibank VP, Sholom Rosen, agrees that “There are going to be winners and losers, but everybody is going to play.”

The digital cash schemes use a blind digital signature and a central repository to protect against piracy and privacy violations. On the privacy issue, the techniques used have been mathematically proven to be protected against privacy violations. The bank cannot trace how the cash is being used or who is using it. Embedded in these schemes are powerful digital cryptography techniques which have recently been spread in the commercial domain (RSA Data Security is a leader in this field and will be speaking to the High Tech Club on January 19).

To protect against piracy requires some extra work. As soon as I have a digital $5 bill on my Mac hard drive, I will want to make a copy, and I can. (Many companies have busted their picks trying to copy protect files from hackers. It will never work.). The difference is that I can only spend the $5 bill once. The copy is worthless. This is possible because every bill has a unique encrypted identifier. In spending the bill, my computer checks with the centralized repository which verifies that my particular $5 bill is still unspent. Once I spend it, it cannot be spent again. As with many electronic transactions today, the safety of the system depends on the integrity of a centralized computer, or what Dan Lynch calls “the big database in the sky.”

One of the most important limitations of the digital cash techniques is that they are tethered to a transaction between at least three parties — a buyer, seller and central repository. So, to use such a scheme to protect intellectual property, would require networked computers and “live” files that have to dial up and check in with the repository to be operational. There are many compelling applications for this, including voter registration, voting tabulation, and the registration of digital artwork originals.

When I asked Dan Lynch about the use of his technology for intellectual property protection, he agreed that the bits that now represent a $5 bill could be used for any number of things, from medical records to photographs. A digital photograph could hide a digital signature in its low-order bits, and it would be imperceptible to the user. But those bits could be used with a registry of proper image owners, and could be used to prove misappropriation or sampling of the image by others.

Technology author Steven Levy has been researching cryptography for Wired magazine, and he responded to my e-mail questions with the reply “You are on the right track in thinking that crypto can preserve IP. I know of several attempts to forward plans to do so.” Digital cash may provide a “crypto-container” to preserve traditional notions of intellectual property.

The transaction tether limits the short-term applicability of these schemes for software copy protection. They won’t work on an isolated computer. This certainly would slow its adoption for mobile computers since the wireless networking infrastructure is so nascent. But with Windows ’95 bundling network connectivity, soon most computers will be network-ready — at least for the Microsoft network. And now that Bill Gates is acquiring Intuit, instead of dollar bills, we will have Bill dollars.

The transaction tether is also a logistical headache with current slow networks, which may hinder its adoption for mass-market applications. For example, if someone forwards a copyrighted e-mail, the recipient may have to have their computer do the repository check before they could see the text of the e-mail. E-mail is slow enough today, but in the near future, these techniques of verifying IP permissions and paying appropriate royalties in digital cash could be background processes on a preemptive multitasking computer (Windows ’95 or Mac OS System 8). The digital cash schemes are consistent with other trends in software distribution and development — specifically software rental and object-oriented “applets” with nested royalty payments. They are also consistent with the document-centric vision of Open Doc and OLE.

The user of the future would start working on their stationary. When it’s clear they are doing some text entry, the word processor would be downloaded and rented for its current usage. Digital pennies would trickle back to the people who wrote or inspired the various portions of the core program. As you use other software applets, such as a spell-checker, it would be downloaded as needed. By renting applets, or potentially finer-grained software objects, the licensing royalties would be automatically tabulated and exchanged, and software piracy would require heroic efforts. Intellectual property would become precisely that — property in a market economy, under lock by its “creator,” and Bill Gates’ 1975 lament over software piracy may now be addressed 20 years later.

 

--------end of paper-----------

 

2013 & 2021 update: On further reflection, I was focused on executable code (where the runtime requires a cloud connect to authenticate, given the third party element of Digicash. (The blockchain fixed this). Verification has been a pain, but perhaps it's seamless in a web-services future. Cloud apps and digital cash depend on it, so why not the code itself.

 

It could verify the official owner of any unique bundle of pixels, in the sense that you can "own" a sufficiently large number, but not the essence of a work of art or derivative works (what we call NFTs today). Frankly, I'm not sure about non-interactive content in general, like pure video playback. "Fixing" software IP alone would be a big enough accomplishment.

Kotlin is a programming language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) which is gaining in popularity. Having used it for some time, I'm quite happy about the results and I held a Kotlin birds-of-a-feather session at the recent Devoxx.PL conference in Kraków, Poland.

 

Since the logo is quite simple and based on geometric shapes representing just the letter K, I couldn't resist trying to design it in origami. Lacking duo paper with the right colors, I used a three--layer sandwich paper (Tant-tissue-Unryu).

In computer science, polymorphism is a programming language feature that allows values of different data types to be handled using a uniform interface. The concept of parametric polymorphism applies to both data types and functions. A function that can evaluate to or be applied to values of different types is known as a polymorphic function. A data type that can appear to be of a generalized type (e.g., a list with elements of arbitrary type) is designated polymorphic data type like the generalized type from which such specializations are made.

 

Source :Wikipedia

  

XML geek tatoo !!!!

Donald Knuth, 1974 @ CHM

 

In this portrait of the artist as a young man, bit by bit he realizes that he is a prisoner, yet keeps a hand in both camps.

 

From comment stream below: I think art is the emergent beauty of computational complexity. We use a process of simple steps to create a pattern or resonant homology to the computational complexity of nature.

 

Natural beauty, whether fractal or evolved, it the product of iteration. We immediately recognize such constructs as complex and rich (a intricate shell, a landscape). A blank canvas in a gallery or a silent symphony is not art. The art there is at a higher level of abstraction, art in the process itself. The only reason people pay any attention at all to such things is that they represent a symbolic hack to the institution of art, a banner that we've been punked.

I took this photo to document the setup that I was using while I was working on my senior project in college. It was a little table-top particle physics project, using a detector (just off camera to the right) not built by me. I set up the data acquisition chain in the lab and wrote some software to run it. (Side note: that was implemented in LabView, which I haven’t used since. LabView is an interesting concept that lets you write software graphically, instead of in a traditional programming language. I remember waking up that semester in the middle of trippy dreams involving that programming language.)

 

Most of the electronics boards here were, I think, basically spare parts that my advisor (the late Prof Ulrich Becker) had brought back from CERN. I think some of it was stuff that had gone bad and thus been tossed. He would take the boards to his lab bench and figure out which solder joint had failed or whatever and fix it. (It may have also just been surplus.)

 

(For the curious, the bottom rack is a CAMAC crate and the rack above it is a NIM crate.)

 

The most interesting artifact here is the module on the very top, which isn’t connected to anything in this photo but worked just fine and was used for manual testing. It was a simple pulse counter, old enough that the display used Nixie tubes ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXBK__h6MY0 ). Unfortunately I do not have a picture of it powered on. Those Nixie tubes were so cool. The hand lettering in orange paint says “KF GRP”. This was a reference to the Kendall-Friedman Group. Henry Kendall and Jerry Friedman were the MIT part of the MIT-SLAC deep inelastic scattering experiments that discovered the quark structure of the proton in the late 60s and early 70s. Kendall, Friedman, and Richard Taylor won the Nobel Prize for this in 1990. So I always assumed that this was surplus left over from that era, although that is an assumption.

 

Henry Kendall assisted as an instructor for a small lab component of a class I had as a freshman in the fall of 1998. (Physics majors don’t take a “real” lab class until junior year, but this was some very light introduction to the lab environment that was folded into another class.) I distinctly remember him gently scolding me for showing too many significant digits in my numerical results. It’s a lesson I never forgot! Only a month or two later, he tragically died in a diving accident in Florida. I saw Friedman give a lecture at MIT at some point. I don’t recall if I ever encountered Taylor when I was at SLAC.

 

This lab was in Building 44 — the MIT Cyclotron building, which has since been demolished. I must have an old film picture of the cyclotron somewhere. I should see if I can find one. (The cyclotron dated to about 1940 but I believe the building was newer [ physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.3058412 ].)

 

This is the first computer that I owned. I make that distinction because I worked with business computers for many years prior to buying my own. Mouse over the image for notes.

I bought this computer for $400. in 1980. That was the bare bones computer, 4k of memory with a "Non-extended BASIC" operating system. "Extended BASIC" was a more extensive set of commands which was at an additional cost. This was a ROM, Read Only Memory, based operating system. A TV set was used as the monitor. This photo was taken in 1983. By that time, the system had been upgraded to at least 32K, maybe 64K of memory. It had Extended Basic and several peripherals, printer, modem etc. The system eventually grew to an OS-9 by Microware system with a 40 MB hard drive. I built an interface to connect a WD1002 disk controller to the computer.

My floppy disk drive can be seen to the far right of the computer. Radio Shack catalog page featuring that drive:

www.flickr.com/photos/jmschneid/15906212516/

To the right of the TV is an Anderson Jacobson A 242 Acoustic Coupler

www.flickr.com/photos/jmschneid/15932286552

To the left of the TV is an NCR 260 thermal printer. It was previously an I/O writer on an NCR Criterion Mainframe computer. As an I/O writer it sat into a hole in the console table, that's why there is no cabinet for the printer.

Radio Shack catalog page featuring the computer:

www.flickr.com/photos/jmschneid/15906212516/

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9

A bit of retro tech for you here from 1987. I found a boxed Interface card for the IBM PC, used with 'LEGO TC Logo', a technic control program using the Logo programming language, and LEGO's actual first foray into programming. Slap this baby in the expansion slot of your IBM PC (another variant was made for the Apple II) and load the software, and you could create primitive commands for your technic motors connected to a control deck.

The Atari 400 and Atari 800 were released in 1979. The 800 was the higher-end model and the one I grew up with.

 

I spent many afternoons and weekends with this machine, typing in BASIC programs from magazines and playing games. BASIC was the first programming language I learned, and I learned it on this machine.

 

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"

20 GOTO 10

Writing a book here: open.spotify.com/show/3mMrq70ofFvPputOjQIiGU?si=kwclM6f8Q...

 

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#visionary #illustration #2danimation #digitalpainting #conceptart #characterdesign #visualdevelopment #conceptdesign #characterartist #photoshop #environmentdesign #story #storytelling #movie #gaming #industry #Photo #Photography #work #talk #3d #cg #blender #brechtcorbeel #psyberspace #psyberverse #Xrystal #Aescermonium #rapthraeXeum #Xomplex #Xaethreal #Xrapthreum

  

Siri-Stroustrup Software Engineer-cat sez:

 

"Eurekat! I has just invented a new programming language called CAT++

It has classes and objects and also has Inheritance Polymorphism that allows it to create default objects such as Meeces, Fishes and Birdies - Yum Yum!

Wait a minute though - does that mean that I could actually belong to a parent class called Mousie that forces me to inherit the same member functions as a mousie has? HIIIIILPPPPPPP............!

Genealogy tree of programming languages

An Instantiation is a concept in Object Oriented Programming (OOP) - You can create an object with a set of properties that are defined by a Class in a program. When you create a member of a class, it is the instantiation (i.e. realization or creation) of a specific object of that class.

 

Object (computer science)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In computer science, an object is a location in memory having a value and possibly referenced by an identifier. An object can be a variable, a data structure, or a function. In the class-based object-oriented programming paradigm, "object" refers to a particular instance of a class where the object can be a combination of variables, functions, and data structures. In relational database management, an object can be a table or column, or an association between data and a database entity (such as relating a person's age to a specific person).[1]

 

Contents [hide]

1 Object-based languages

2 Object-oriented programming

3 Specialized objects

4 Distributed objects

5 Objects and the Semantic Web

6 See also

7 References

8 External links

Object-based languages[edit]

Main article: Object-based language

An important distinction in programming languages is the difference between an object-oriented language and an object-based language. A language is usually considered object-based if it includes the basic capabilities for an object: identity, properties, and attributes. A language is considered object-oriented if it is object-based and also has the capability of polymorphism and inheritance. Polymorphism refers to the ability to overload the name of a function with multiple behaviors based on which object(s) are passed to it. Conventional message passing discriminates only on the first object and considers that to be "sending a message" to that object. However, some OOP languages such as Flavors and the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) enable discriminating on more than the first parameter of the function.[2] Inheritance is the ability to subclass an object class, to create a new class that is a subclass of an existing one and inherits all the data constraints and behaviors of its parents but also changes one or more of them.[3][4]

 

Object-oriented programming[edit]

Main article: Object-oriented programming

Object-Oriented programming is an approach to designing modular reusable software systems. The object-oriented approach is fundamentally a modelling approach.[5] The object-oriented approach is an evolution of good design practices that go back to the very beginning of computer programming. Object-orientation is simply the logical extension of older techniques such as structured programming and abstract data types. An object is an abstract data type with the addition of polymorphism and inheritance.

 

Rather than structure programs as code and data an object-oriented system integrates the two using the concept of an "object". An object has state (data) and behavior (code). Objects can correspond to things found in the real world. So for example, a graphics program will have objects such as circle, square, menu. An online shopping system will have objects such as shopping cart, customer, product,. The shopping system will support behaviors such as place order, make payment, and offer discount. The objects are designed as class hierarchies. So for example with the shopping system there might be high level classes such as electronics product, kitchen product, and book. There may be further refinements for example under electronic products: CD Player, DVD player, etc. These classes and subclasses correspond to sets and subsets in mathematical logic.[6][7]

 

Specialized objects[edit]

An important concept for objects is the design pattern. A design pattern provides a reusable template to address a common problem. The following object descriptions are examples of some of the most common design patterns for objects.[8]

 

Function object: an object with a single method (in C++, this method would be the function operator, "operator()") that acts much like a function (like a C/C++ pointer to a function).

Immutable object: an object set up with a fixed state at creation time and which does not change afterward.

First-class object: an object that can be used without restriction.

Container: an object that can contain other objects.

Factory object: an object whose purpose is to create other objects.

Metaobject: an object from which other objects can be created (Compare with class, which is not necessarily an object)

Prototype: a specialized metaobject from which other objects can be created by copying

God object: an object that knows too much or does too much. The God object is an example of an anti-pattern.

Singleton object: An object that is the only instance of its class during the lifetime of the program.

Filter object

Distributed objects[edit]

Main article: Distributed object

The object-oriented approach is not just a programming model. It can be used equally well as an interface definition language for distributed systems. The objects in a distributed computing model tend to be larger grained, longer lasting, and more service-oriented than programming objects.

 

A standard method to package distributed objects is via an Interface Definition Language (IDL). An IDL shields the client of all of the details of the distributed server object. Details such as which computer the object resides on, what programming language it uses, what operating system, and other platform specific issues. The IDL is also usually part of a distributed environment that provides services such as transactions and persistence to all objects in a uniform manner. Two of the most popular standards for distributed objects are the Object Management Group's CORBA standard and Microsoft's DCOM.[9]

 

In addition to distributed objects, a number of other extensions to the basic concept of an object have been proposed to enable distributed computing:

 

Protocol objects are components of a protocol stack that enclose network communication within an object-oriented interface.

Replicated objects are groups of distributed objects (called replicas) that run a distributed multi-party protocol to achieve high consistency between their internal states, and that respond to requests in a coordinated way. Examples include fault-tolerant CORBA objects.

Live distributed objects (or simply live objects)[10] generalize the replicated object concept to groups of replicas that might internally use any distributed protocol, perhaps resulting in only a weak consistency between their local states.

Some of these extensions, such as distributed objects and protocol objects, are domain-specific terms for special types of "ordinary" objects used in a certain context (such as remote invocation or protocol composition). Others, such as replicated objects and live distributed objects, are more non-standard, in that they abandon the usual case that an object resides in a single location at a time, and apply the concept to groups of entities (replicas) that might span across multiple locations, might have only weakly consistent state, and whose membership might dynamically change.

 

Objects and the Semantic Web[edit]

The Semantic Web is essentially a distributed objects framework. Two key technologies in the Semantic Web are the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF provides the capability to define basic objects—names, properties, attributes, relations—that are accessible via the Internet. OWL adds a richer object model, based on set theory, that provides additional modeling capabilities such as multiple inheritance.

 

OWL objects are not like standard large grained distributed objects accessed via an Interface Definition Language. Such an approach would not be appropriate for the Internet because the Internet is constantly evolving and standardization on one set of interfaces is difficult to achieve. OWL objects tend to be similar to the kind of objects used to define application domain models in programming languages such as Java and C++.

 

However, there are important distinctions between OWL objects and traditional object-oriented programming objects. Where as traditional objects get compiled into static hierarchies usually with single inheritance, OWL objects are dynamic. An OWL object can change its structure at run time and can become an instance of new or different classes.

 

Another critical difference is the way the model treats information that is currently not in the system. Programming objects and most database systems use the "closed-world assumption". If a fact is not known to the system that fact is assumed to be false. Semantic Web objects use the open world assumption, a statement is only considered false if there is actual relevant information that it is false, otherwise it is assumed to be unknown, neither true nor false.

 

OWL objects are actually most like objects in artificial intelligence frame languages such as KL-ONE and Loom.

 

The following table contrasts traditional objects from Object-Oriented programming languages such as Java or C++ with Semantic Web Objects:[11][12]

 

OOP ObjectsSemantic Web Objects

Classes are regarded as types for instances.Classes are regarded as sets of individuals.

Instances can not change their type at runtime.Class membership may change at runtime.

The list of classes is fully known at compile-time and cannot change after that.Classes can be created and changed at runtime.

Compilers are used at build-time. Compile-time errors indicate problems.Reasoners can be used for classification and consistency checking at runtime or build-time.

Classes encode much of their meaning and behavior through imperative functions and methods.Classes make their meaning explicit in terms of OWL statements. No imperative code can be attached.

Instances are anonymous insofar that they cannot easily be addressed from outside of an executing program.All named RDF and OWL resources have a unique URI under which they can be referenced.

Closed world: If there is not enough information to prove a statement true, then it is assumed to be false.Open world: If there is not enough information to prove a statement true, then it may be true or false.[13]

 

using processing programming language

Eric is an iOS Software Engineer in San Francisco. After being acquired by Capital One, he likes to spend his days at work hanging out with Samuel L. Jackson and asking everyone "What's in your wallet?". Lately his main focus has been with Swift and gaining a deeper knowledge of programming languages at the core.

Outside iOS, his interests are tinkering with hardware (Raspberry Pi and Arduino), gaming, exploring San Francisco, and regretting endless Netflix marathons. You can find Eric on Twitter or his personal site.

Not the programming language !!

No, no the programming language but the roller coaster in Efteling... soaring just above us while we were having a waffle...

Title: In October 1979, eleven students, mainly newly arrived Vietnamese refugees enrolled in a special language course at Fanshawe College, toured various schools and public functions in St. Thomas. Here, Alderman Peter Laing greeted the group on Talbot Street across from city hall. Currently, the Hamad family, refugees from Syria, have been settling into their new life in St. Thomas since February 17th. The family is being privately sponsored by First United Church.

 

Creator(s): St. Thomas Times-Journal

 

Bygone Days Publication Date: March 1, 2016

 

Original Publication Date: October 19, 1979

 

Reference No.: C9 Sh4 B6 F9 4

 

Credit: Elgin County Archives, St. Thomas Times-Journal fonds

 

A blockchain, originally block chain, is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography. Each block typically contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp and transaction data. By design, a blockchain is inherently resistant to modification of the data. It is "an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way". For use as a distributed ledger, a blockchain is typically managed by a peer-to-peer network collectively adhering to a protocol for validating new blocks. Once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks, which requires collusion of the network majority. Blockchains are secure by design and are an example of a distributed computing system with high Byzantine fault tolerance. Decentralized consensus has therefore been achieved with a blockchain. This makes blockchains potentially suitable for the recording of events, medical records, and other records management activities, such as identity management,transaction processing, documenting provenance, food traceability or voting. Blockchain was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 for use in the cryptocurrency bitcoin, as its public transaction ledger.The first work on a cryptographically secured chain of blocks was described in 1991 by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta.In 1992, Bayer, Haber and Stornetta incorporated Merkle trees to the design, which improved its efficiency by allowing several documents to be collected into one block.In 2002, David Mazières and Dennis Shasha proposed a network file system with decentralized trust: writers to the file system trust one another but not the network in between; they achieve file system integrity by writing signed commits to a shared, append-only signature chain that captures the root of the file system (which in turn is a Merkle Tree). This system can be viewed as a proto-blockchain in which all authorized clients can always write, whereas, in modern blockchains, a client who solves a cryptographic puzzle can write one block.[citation needed] In 2005, Nick Szabo proposed a blockchain-like system for decentralized property titles and his bit gold payment system that utilised chained proof-of-work and timestamping. However, Szabo's method of double-spending protection was vulnerable to Sybil attacks. The first blockchain was conceptualised by a person (or group of people) known as Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. It was implemented the following year by Nakamoto as a core component of the cryptocurrency bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for all transactions on the network.Through the use of a blockchain, bitcoin became the first digital currency to solve the double spending problem without requiring a trusted authority and has been the inspiration for many additional applications. In August 2014, the bitcoin blockchain file size, containing records of all transactions that have occurred on the network, reached 20GB (gigabytes). In January 2015, the size had grown to almost 30GB, and from January 2016 to January 2017, the bitcoin blockchain grew from 50GB to 100GB in size.The words block and chain were used separately in Satoshi Nakamoto's original paper, but were eventually popularized as a single word, blockchain, by 2016. The term blockchain 2.0 refers to new applications of the distributed blockchain database, first emerging in 2014. The Economist described one implementation of this second-generation programmable blockchain as coming with "a programming language that allows users to write more sophisticated smart contracts, thus creating invoices that pay themselves when a shipment arrives or share certificates which automatically send their owners dividends if profits reach a certain level". Blockchain 2.0 technologies go beyond transactions and enable "exchange of value without powerful intermediaries acting as arbiters of money and information". They are expected to enable excluded people to enter the global economy, protect the privacy of participants, allow people to "monetize their own information", and provide the capability to ensure creators are compensated for their intellectual property. Second-generation blockchain technology makes it possible to store an individual's "persistent digital ID and persona" and are providing an avenue to help solve the problem of social inequality by "potentially changing the way wealth is distributed".:14–15 As of 2016, blockchain 2.0 implementations continue to require an off-chain oracle to access any "external data or events based on time or market conditions [that need] to interact with the blockchain". In 2016, the central securities depository of the Russian Federation (NSD) announced a pilot project, based on the Nxt blockchain 2.0 platform, that would explore the use of blockchain-based automated voting systems. IBM opened a blockchain innovation research center in Singapore in July 2016. A working group for the World Economic Forum met in November 2016 to discuss the development of governance models related to blockchain.[28] According to Accenture, an application of the diffusion of innovations theory suggests that blockchains attained a 13.5% adoption rate within financial services in 2016, therefore reaching the early adopters phase. Industry trade groups joined to create the Global Blockchain Forum in 2016, an initiative of the Chamber of Digital Commerce. A blockchain is a decentralized, distributed and public digital ledger that is used to record transactions across many computers so that the record cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks and the collusion of the network. This allows the participants to verify and audit transactions inexpensively. A blockchain database is managed autonomously using a peer-to-peer network and a distributed timestamping server. They are authenticated by mass collaboration powered by collective self-interests.The result is a robust workflow where participants' uncertainty regarding data security is marginal. The use of a blockchain removes the characteristic of infinite reproducibility from a digital asset. It confirms that each unit of value was transferred only once, solving the long-standing problem of double spending. Blockchains have been described as a value-exchange protocol. This blockchain-based exchange of value can be completed more quickly, more safely and more cheaply than with traditional systems. A blockchain can assign title rights because it provides a record that compels offer and acceptance.

 

Blocks

Blocks hold batches of valid transactions that are hashed and encoded into a Merkle tree. Each block includes the cryptographic hash of the prior block in the blockchain, linking the two. The linked blocks form a chain.This iterative process confirms the integrity of the previous block, all the way back to the original genesis block.

 

Sometimes separate blocks can be produced concurrently, creating a temporary fork. In addition to a secure hash-based history, any blockchain has a specified algorithm for scoring different versions of the history so that one with a higher value can be selected over others. Blocks not selected for inclusion in the chain are called orphan blocks. Peers supporting the database have different versions of the history from time to time. They only keep the highest-scoring version of the database known to them. Whenever a peer receives a higher-scoring version (usually the old version with a single new block added) they extend or overwrite their own database and retransmit the improvement to their peers. There is never an absolute guarantee that any particular entry will remain in the best version of the history forever. Because blockchains are typically built to add the score of new blocks onto old blocks and because there are incentives to work only on extending with new blocks rather than overwriting old blocks, the probability of an entry becoming superseded goes down exponentially as more blocks are built on top of it, eventually becoming very low. For example, in a blockchain using the proof-of-work system, the chain with the most cumulative proof-of-work is always considered the valid one by the network. There are a number of methods that can be used to demonstrate a sufficient level of computation. Within a blockchain the computation is carried out redundantly rather than in the traditional segregated and parallel manner.

 

The block time is the average time it takes for the network to generate one extra block in the blockchain. Some blockchains create a new block as frequently as every five seconds. By the time of block completion, the included data becomes verifiable. In cryptocurrency, this is practically when the money transaction takes place, so a shorter block time means faster transactions. The block time for Ethereum is set to between 14 and 15 seconds, while for bitcoin it is 10 minutes.Express. Why is Ripple XRP falling today? Why is it crashing in value?Ripple price: Why is Ripple XRP falling today? Why is it… 'Ripple is first in line' - CEO reveals next cryptocurrency to catch up with bitcoin

'Ripple is first in line' - CEO reveals next cryptocurrency to…

Ripple price news: Why is XRP falling so fast? What's happening to Ripple?Ripple price news: Why is XRP falling so fast? What's happening… Bitcoin price BOOST: Big investors are FINALLY realising Bitcoin is GAME-CHANGING Bitcoin price WARNING: CEO says cryptocurrency has 'NOTHING to do with the real economy' BITCOIN has come under fire from the CEO of Euronext as the financial expert claimed the cryptocurrency "has nothing to do with the real economy".

Bitcoin price suffered a massive plunge as the cryptocurrency reached the value of $9,114.56, according to Coindesk at 10:37 pm on February. As the crypto-craze started to die down, Euronext CEO Stéphane Boujnah claims bitcoin cannot even be classified as a cryptocurrency. Speaking on Bloomberg, Mr Boujnah said Euronext will never open a bitcoin market. He said: "We will not create a bitcoin market because the mandate of Euronext is to power Pan-European capital markets to finance the real economy and bitcoin has nothing to do with the real economy. "Bitcoin has a lot to do with bitcoin. And we believe bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency.

"Bitcoin is at best a crypto asset. All currencies are assets but not all assets are currencies. "Clearly, bitcoin today is just like a piece of art, or just like a diamond, just like a Pokemon card.

"It can be anything to capture value but today people buy it because it goes up and because it’s not as serious and transparent as a lot of assets. "So great, good luck. Like any emerging assets, it’s very fancy, which is great, but this is not our mandate. "Our mandate is to be the place regulated, transparent, open, reliable. It’s not our mandate to be part of this new game in town." Despite the rollercoaster few months suffered by the crypto mania, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies such as Ripple and ethereum still benefit from a "growing" appreciation among institutional investors, according to Dr Garrick Hileman, from the Cambridge University Centre for Alternative Finance.In an exclusive interview with Express.co.uk, Dr Hileman said: "Any breakthrough technology, and bitcoin and blockchain, are certainly breakthrough technologies, hype often outpaces the reality. “In terms of both of how mature the technology is, the rates of adoption. “We’ve seen this before with bitcoin and we’ve seen the price shoot up first in late 2013 when it first entered the mainstream public consciousness. “The price subsequently crashed 85 percent as security at a major exchange broke down and bitcoin’s were stolen. “So we’ve seen this kind of story repeat where bitcoin rises, gets hyped and then there’s a crash.” This section is transcluded from Fork (blockchain). A hard fork occurs when a blockchain splits into two incompatible separate chains. This is a consequence of the use of two incompatible sets of rules trying to govern the system. For example, Ethereum has hard-forked to "make whole" the investors in The DAO, which had been hacked by exploiting a vulnerability in its code. In 2014 the Nxt community was asked to consider a hard fork that would have led to a rollback of the blockchain records to mitigate the effects of a theft of 50 million NXT from a major cryptocurrency exchange. The hard fork proposal was rejected, and some of the funds were recovered after negotiations and ransom payment.

Decentralization

By storing data across its network, the blockchain eliminates the risks that come with data being held centrally. The decentralized blockchain may use ad-hoc message passing and distributed networking. Its network lacks centralized points of vulnerability that computer crackers can exploit; likewise, it has no central point of failure. Blockchain security methods include the use of public-key cryptography. A public key (a long, random-looking string of numbers) is an address on the blockchain. Value tokens sent across the network are recorded as belonging to that address. A private key is like a password that gives its owner access to their digital assets or the means to otherwise interact with the various capabilities that blockchains now support. Data stored on the blockchain is generally considered incorruptible. This is where blockchain has its advantage. While centralized data is more controllable, information and data manipulation are common. By decentralizing it, blockchain makes data transparent to everyone involved. Every node in a decentralized system has a copy of the blockchain. Data quality is maintained by massive database replication[9] and computational trust. No centralized "official" copy exists and no user is "trusted" more than any other. Transactions are broadcast to the network using software. Messages are delivered on a best-effort basis. Mining nodes validate transactions, add them to the block they are building, and then broadcast the completed block to other nodes. Blockchains use various time-stamping schemes, such as proof-of-work, to serialize changes. Alternate consensus methods include proof-of-stake. Growth of a decentralized blockchain is accompanied by the risk of node centralization because the computer resources required to process larger amounts of data become more expensive.

 

Openness

Open blockchains are more user-friendly than some traditional ownership records, which, while open to the public, still require physical access to view. Because all early blockchains were permissionless, controversy has arisen over the blockchain definition. An issue in this ongoing debate is whether a private system with verifiers tasked and authorized (permissioned) by a central authority should be considered a blockchain. Proponents of permissioned or private chains argue that the term "blockchain" may be applied to any data structure that batches data into time-stamped blocks. These blockchains serve as a distributed version of multiversion concurrency control (MVCC) in databases. Just as MVCC prevents two transactions from concurrently modifying a single object in a database, blockchains prevent two transactions from spending the same single output in a blockchain.[24]:30–31 Opponents say that permissioned systems resemble traditional corporate databases, not supporting decentralized data verification, and that such systems are not hardened against operator tampering and revision. Nikolai Hampton of Computerworld said that "many in-house blockchain solutions will be nothing more than cumbersome databases."Business analysts Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott define blockchain as a distributed ledger or database open to anyone.

 

Permissionless

The great advantage to an open, permissionless, or public, blockchain network is that guarding against bad actors is not required and no access control is needed.This means that applications can be added to the network without the approval or trust of others, using the blockchain as a transport layer.

 

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies currently secure their blockchain by requiring new entries including a proof of work. To prolong the blockchain, bitcoin uses Hashcash puzzles developed by Adam Back in the 1990s.

 

Financial companies have not prioritised decentralized blockchains. In 2016, venture capital investment for blockchain related projects was weakening in the USA but increasing in China. Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies use open (public) blockchains. As of January 2018, bitcoin has the highest market capitalization.

 

Permissioned (private) blockchain

 

Permissioned blockchains use an access control layer to govern who has access to the network. In contrast to public blockchain networks, validators on private blockchain networks are vetted by the network owner. They do not rely on anonymous nodes to validate transactions nor do they benefit from the network effect. Permissioned blockchains can also go by the name of 'consortium' or 'hybrid' blockchains.

 

The New York Times noted in both 2016 and 2017 that many corporations are using blockchain networks "with private blockchains, independent of the public system."

 

Disadvantages

Nikolai Hampton pointed out in Computerworld that "There is also no need for a "51 percent" attack on a private blockchain, as the private blockchain (most likely) already controls 100 percent of all block creation resources. If you could attack or damage the blockchain creation tools on a private corporate server, you could effectively control 100 percent of their network and alter transactions however you wished." This has a set of particularly profound adverse implications during a financial crisis or debt crisis like the financial crisis of 2007–08, where politically powerful actors may make decisions that favor some groups at the expense of others.[citation needed] and "the bitcoin blockchain is protected by the massive group mining effort. It's unlikely that any private blockchain will try to protect records using gigawatts of computing power — it's time consuming and expensive."He also said, "Within a private blockchain there is also no 'race'; there's no incentive to use more power or discover blocks faster than competitors. This means that many in-house blockchain solutions will be nothing more than cumbersome databases."

 

Uses

Blockchain technology can be integrated into multiple areas. The primary use of blockchains today is as a distributed ledger for cryptocurrencies, most notably bitcoin.While a few central banks, in countries such as China, United States, Sweden, Singapore, South Africa and England are studying issuance of a Central Bank Issued Cryptocurrency (CICC), none have done so thus far.

 

General potentials

Blockchain technology has a large potential to transform business operating models in the long term. Blockchain distributed ledger technology is more a foundational technology—with the potential to create new foundations for global economic and social systems—than a disruptive technology, which typically "attack a traditional business model with a lower-cost solution and overtake incumbent firms quickly".Even so, there are a few operational products maturing from proof of concept by late 2016.The use of blockchains promises to bring significant efficiencies to global supply chains, financial transactions, asset ledgers and decentralized social networking.

 

As of 2016, some observers remain skeptical. Steve Wilson, of Constellation Research, believes the technology has been hyped with unrealistic claims.To mitigate risk businesses are reluctant to place blockchain at the core of the business structure.

 

This means specific blockchain applications may be a disruptive innovation, because substantially lower-cost solutions can be instantiated, which can disrupt existing business models. Blockchain protocols facilitate businesses to use new methods of processing digital transactions.[68] Examples include a payment system and digital currency, facilitating crowdsales, or implementing prediction markets and generic governance tools.

 

Blockchains alleviate the need for a trust service provider and are predicted to result in less capital being tied up in disputes. Blockchains have the potential to reduce systemic risk and financial fraud. They automate processes that were previously time-consuming and done manually, such as the incorporation of businesses.In theory, it would be possible to collect taxes, conduct conveyancing and provide risk management with blockchains.

 

As a distributed ledger, blockchain reduces the costs involved in verifying transactions, and by removing the need for trusted "third-parties" such as banks to complete transactions, the technology also lowers the cost of networking, therefore allowing several applications.

 

Starting with a strong focus on financial applications, blockchain technology is extending to activities including decentralized applications and collaborative organizations that eliminate a middleman.

 

Land registration

"Land is a financial source, if people can prove they own it, they can borrow against it."

Emmanuel Noah, CEO of Ghanian startup BenBen, New York Observer

Frameworks and trials such as the one at the Sweden Land Registry aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of the blockchain at speeding land sale deals.The Republic of Georgia is piloting a blockchain-based property registry.The Ethical and Fair Creators Association uses blockchain to help startups protect their authentic ideas.

 

The Government of India is fighting land fraud with the help of a blockchain.

 

In October 2017, one of the first international property transactions was completed successfully using a blockchain-based smart contract.

 

In the first half of 2018, an experiment will be conducted on the use of blocking technology to monitor the reliability of the Unified State Real Estate Register (USRER) data in the territory of Moscow.

 

The Big Four

Each of the Big Four accounting firms is testing blockchain technologies in various formats. Ernst & Young has provided cryptocurrency wallets to all (Swiss) employees,has installed a bitcoin ATM in their office in Switzerland, and accepts bitcoin as payment for all its consulting services. Marcel Stalder, CEO of Ernst & Young Switzerland, stated, "We don't only want to talk about digitalization, but also actively drive this process together with our employees and our clients. It is important to us that everybody gets on board and prepares themselves for the revolution set to take place in the business world through blockchains, [to] smart contracts and digital currencies."PwC, Deloitte, and KPMG have taken a different path from Ernst & Young and are all testing private blockchains.

 

Smart contracts

Blockchain-based smart contracts are contracts that can be partially or fully executed or enforced without human interaction.One of the main objectives of a smart contract is automated escrow. The IMF believes blockchains could reduce moral hazards and optimize the use of contracts in general.Due to the lack of widespread use their legal status is unclear.

 

Some blockchain implementations could enable the coding of contracts that will execute when specified conditions are met. A blockchain smart contract would be enabled by extensible programming instructions that define and execute an agreement.For example, Ethereum Solidity is an open-source blockchain project that was built specifically to realize this possibility by implementing a Turing-complete programming language capability to implement such contracts.

 

Nonprofit organizations

Level One Project from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation aims to use blockchain technology to help the two billion people worldwide who lack bank accounts.

Building Blocks project from the U.N.'s World Food Programme (WFP) aims to make WFP's growing cash-based transfer operations faster, cheaper, and more secure. Building Blocks commenced field pilots in Pakistan in January 2017 that will continue throughout spring.

Decentralized networks

The Backfeed project develops a distributed governance system for blockchain-based applications allowing for the collaborative creation and distribution of value in spontaneously emerging networks of peers.[88][89]

The Alexandria project is a blockchain-based Decentralized Library.

Tezos is a blockchain project that governs itself by voting of its token holders. Bitcoin blockchain performs as a cryptocurrency and payment system. Ethereum blockchain added smart contract system on top of a blockchain. Tezos blockchain will add an autonomy system – a decentralized code Development function on top of both bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains.

Governments and national currencies

The director of the Office of IT Schedule Contract Operations at the US General Services Administration, Mr. Jose Arrieta, disclosed at the 20 Sep ACT-IAC (American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council) Forum that its organization is using blockchain distributed ledger technology to speed up the FASt Lane process for IT Schedule 70 contracts through automation. Two companies, United Solutions (prime contractor) and Sapient Consulting (subcontractor) are developing for FASt Lane a prototype to automate and shorten the time required to perform the contract review process.

The Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee, a subcommittee of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, is working on finding practical ways Blockchain could be implemented in its duties.[1]

Companies have supposedly been suggesting blockchain-based currency solutions in the following two countries:

 

e-Dinar, Tunisia's national currency, was the first state currency using blockchain technology.

eCFA is Senegal's blockchain-based national digital currency.

Some countries, especially Australia, are providing keynote participation in identify the various technical issues associated with developing, governing and using blockchains:

 

In April 2016 Standards Australia submitted a New Field of Technical Activity (NFTA) proposal on behalf of Australia for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to consider developing standards to support blockchain technology. The proposal for an NFTA to the ISO was intended to establish a new ISO technical committee for blockchain. The new committee would be responsible for supporting innovation and competition by covering blockchain standards topics including interoperability, terminology, privacy, security and auditing.[99] There have been several media releases[100] supporting blockchain integration to Australian businesses.

Banks

Don Tapscott conducted a two-year research project exploring how blockchain technology can securely move and store host "money, titles, deeds, music, art, scientific discoveries, intellectual property, and even votes".. Furthermore, major portions of the financial industry are implementing distributed ledgers for use in banking, and according to a September 2016 IBM study, this is occurring faster than expected.

 

Banks are interested in this technology because it has potential to speed up back office settlement systems.

 

Banks such as UBS are opening new research labs dedicated to blockchain technology in order to explore how blockchain can be used in financial services to increase efficiency and reduce costs.

 

Russia has officially completed its first government-level blockchain implementation. The state-run bank Sberbank announced 20 December 2017 that it is partnering with Russia's Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) to implement document transfer and storage via blockchain.

 

Deloitte and ConsenSys announced plans in 2016 to create a digital bank called Project ConsenSys.

 

R3 connects 42 banks to distributed ledgers built by Ethereum, Chain.com, Intel, IBM and Monax.

 

A Swiss industry consortium, including Swisscom, the Zurich Cantonal Bank and the Swiss stock exchange, is prototyping over-the-counter asset trading on a blockchain-based Ethereum technology.

 

Other financial companies.

The credit and debits payments company MasterCard has added three blockchain-based APIs for programmers to use in developing both person-to-person (P2P) and business-to-business (B2B) payment systems.

 

CLS Group is using blockchain technology to expand the number of currency trade deals it can settle.

 

VISA payment systems, Mastercard,Unionpay and SWIFT have announced the development and plans for using blockchain technology.

 

Prime Shipping Foundation is using blockchain technology to address issues related to the payments in the shipping industry.

 

Other uses

Blockchain technology can be used to create a permanent, public, transparent ledger system for compiling data on sales, storing rights data by authenticating copyright registration,[116] and tracking digital use and payments to content creators, such as musicians. In 2017, IBM partnered with ASCAP and PRS for Music to adopt blockchain technology in music distribution.Imogen Heap's Mycelia service, which allows managers to use a blockchain for tracking high-value parts moving through a supply chain, was launched as a concept in July 2016. Everledger is one of the inaugural clients of IBM's blockchain-based tracking service.

 

Kodak announced plans in 2018 to launch a digital token system for photograph copyright recording.

 

Another example where smart contracts are used is in the music industry. Every time a dj mix is played, the smart contracts attached to the dj mix pays the artists almost instantly.

 

An application has been suggested for securing the spectrum sharing for wireless networks.

 

New distribution methods are available for the insurance industry such as peer-to-peer insurance, parametric insurance and microinsurance following the adoption of blockchain.The sharing economy and IoT are also set to benefit from blockchains because they involve many collaborating peers.Online voting is another application of the blockchain. Blockchains are being used to develop information systems for medical records, which increases interoperability. In theory, legacy disparate systems can be completely replaced by blockchains.Blockchains are being developed for data storage, publishing texts and identifying the origin of digital art. Blockchains facilitate users could take ownership of game assets (digital assets),an example of this is Cryptokitties.

 

Notable non-cryptocurrency designs include:

 

Steemit – a blogging/social networking website and a cryptocurrency

Hyperledger – a cross-industry collaborative effort from the Linux Foundation to support blockchain-based distributed ledgers, with projects under this initiative including Hyperledger Burrow (by Monax) and Hyperledger Fabric (spearheaded by IBM)

Counterparty – an open source financial platform for creating peer-to-peer financial applications on the bitcoin blockchain

Quorum – a permissionable private blockchain by JPMorgan Chase with private storage, used for contract applications

Bitnation – a decentralized borderless "voluntary nation" establishing a jurisdiction of contracts and rules, based on Ethereum

Factom, a distributed registry

Tezos, decentralized voting.

Microsoft Visual Studio is making the Ethereum Solidity language available to application developers.

 

IBM offers a cloud blockchain service based on the open source Hyperledger Fabric project

 

Oracle Cloud offers Blockchain Cloud Service based on Hyperledger Fabric. Oracle has joined the Hyperledger consortium.

 

In August 2016, a research team at the Technical University of Munich published a research document about how blockchains may disrupt industries. They analyzed the venture funding that went into blockchain ventures. Their research shows that $1.55 billion went into startups with an industry focus on finance and insurance, information and communication, and professional services. High startup density was found in the USA, UK and Canada.

 

ABN Amro announced a project in real estate to facilitate the sharing and recording of real estate transactions, and a second project in partnership with the Port of Rotterdam to develop logistics tools.

 

Academic research

 

Blockchain panel discussion at the first IEEE Computer Society TechIgnite conference

In October 2014, the MIT Bitcoin Club, with funding from MIT alumni, provided undergraduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology access to $100 of bitcoin. The adoption rates, as studied by Catalini and Tucker (2016), revealed that when people who typically adopt technologies early are given delayed access, they tend to reject the technology.

 

Journals

 

In September 2015, the first peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology research, Ledger, was announced. The inaugural issue was published in December 2016. The journal covers aspects of mathematics, computer science, engineering, law, economics and philosophy that relate to cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. There are also research platforms like Strategic coin that offer research for the blockchain and crypto space.

 

The journal encourages authors to digitally sign a file hash of submitted papers, which will then be timestamped into the bitcoin blockchain. Authors are also asked to include a personal bitcoin address in the first page of their papers.

 

Predictions

A World Economic Forum report from September 2015 predicted that by 2025 ten percent of global GDP would be stored on blockchains technology.

 

In early 2017, Harvard Business School professors Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani said the blockchain is not a disruptive technology that undercuts the cost of an existing business model, but is a foundational technology that "has the potential to create new foundations for our economic and social systems". They further predicted that, while foundational innovations can have enormous impact, "It will take decades for blockchain to seep into our economic and social infrastructure."

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain

Also known as "pulling," the Czochralski process is also used to grow single silicon crystals that are cut and used as silicon wafers (which seemed appropriate, given this is meant as a gift to a creator of a programming language). This is a more time-consuming, expensive process than the verneuil (flame fusion) process commonly used to create lab-created gem rough, is of higher quality, and allows for larger finished stones.

 

The gem was cut from red corundum (which is what a ruby is -- any other color of corundum is a sapphire).

Happy Day of the Programmer (the 256th day of the year).

 

This is the book I associate most with my becoming a programmer.

Image source:

www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/928762

www.flickr.com/photos/editor/2590568234

 

Read the article on opensource.com

Can programming language names be trademarks?

 

Created by Meredith Atwater for opensource.com

There is no predefined agenda; instead attendees collaboratively create one during the first evening of the event.

 

Right now, I am listening to a discussion of entropy and the mathematics of time by Lee Smolin, Jaron Lanier and Neal Stephenson…

 

So many cool but concurrent sessions… I’m open to your votes on which ones to attend…

 

Saturday, August 4th

 

09:30

1.The Next Big Programming Language

2.Open Science 2.0

3.Digital Data Libraries

4.Citizen Science - Where Next?

5.Future of Healthcare

6.Visual Garage - We'll Fix Your Graphs and Visuals

7.Quantum Computing - What, Why, How

8.Synthesizing Life

 

10:30

1.Efficient Inverse Control: Through the Users Not the Resources

2.Clinical Problems in Neuroscience / Towards Practical Cognitive Augmentation / Towards Practical Cognitive Augmentataion

3.How to Build Intelligent Machines

4.Why aren't there more Scientists on the Covers of Magazines

5.Future of Human Space Flight and Ocean Exploration

6.Science and Art

7.3D Video Applications: How to Publish Science in Video

8.The Nature of Time and Mathematics

9.Alternate terms of Science Education

10.Future History of Biology

11.Human Cell and Regeneration Map or is it worth building a cellular resolution database for the whole human body?

 

11:30

1.3D Printing / Robot Printing / Food Printing / Printer Printing

2.Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Teach Evolution

3.Sequencing the Genome: Implications, Ethics, Goals

4.Are Patents Preventing Innovation?

5.Tricoder is Finally Here

6.Ethical Implications of the Information Society

7.Reversible Computation and Its Connections to Quantum Interpretations

8.Mapping Science and Other Big Networks

9.A Magician Looks at the Irrational and Pseudo-Science

10.Listening to the World: Voices from the Blue Deep

 

14:00

1.Collecting More Data Faster Can Make an Organization Dumber

2.Skepticism and Critical Thinking in an Age of Marvels

3.Computable Data/Mathematics

4.$100 Laptop Demo

5.Where Are the Aliens?

6.The Selfish Scientist

7.Evolutionary Robotics

8.Buildings, Energy Use and Behavior Change - Can the Built Environment be an Interface?

9.Why a Mouse?: Multi-touch, Physical and Social Interfaces for Manipulating Data

10.Scientific Communication in 2030

11.Universe or Multiverse?

12.Reuse of Sewage to Grow Food and Provide Sanitation

13.Is Collaborative Policy Making Possible? (think wikipedia, government simulation games)

14.Viral Chatter

 

15:00

1.Freebase Demo

2.Biodiversity on the Web: Science Publishing

3.Prioritizing the World's Problems

4.Display of Greater than 2D Data or Lots of 2D Data All at Once

5.E-Science Beyond Infrastructure

6.Implantable Devices and Microchips for Healthcare / Diver Assistance Devices

7.Using Evolution for Design and Discovery

8.Stem Cells (a.k.a. How to Get Scientists to Care about Web 2.0

9.Machine Reading & Understanding Science

10.Science & Fundamentalism

11.Biological Data & Research / Open Source Biomedical Research for Neglected Diseases

12.My Daughter's DNA: Hacking Your Genome / Towards a Data Wiki

13.Network-Centric Biomedicine

14.Squishy Magnets, Talking Paper and Disapearing Ink: How can inventables.com open its doors to kids for free.

 

16:00

1.Give us your Data! Google's effort to archive and distribute the world's scientifcic datasets.

2.Personal Impact Factor: Measuring Scientific Contributions Outside the Literature

3.Kids, Science, Math & Rational Thought

4.Micro-UAVs

5.Machine Learning in the Natural Sciences

6.Hunch Engines

 

17:00

1.Data Mining the Sky

2.All-Fluidic Computing

3.Science vs. Capitalism: Utopian Effots in the Overshoot Century

4.Dinosaurs and Ancient Sarahans

5.The Paperless Home

6.Provenance Analytics: Illuminating Science Trails and the Future of Scientific Publications

 

20:00

1.Piracy, Murder and a Media Revolution

2.Engineering Living Instruments

3.Nanohype: The volumnious vacuous vapid world where only size matters.

 

Sunday, August 5th

 

09:30

1.Golem: Data Mining for Materials (and Non-Programmers): sketching information systems Andrew Walkingshaw / Searching the Edges of the Web

2.Novel Biofuels

3.Genome Voyeurism – Let's poke through Jim Watson's genome

4.Would You Upload?

5.Reforming Patent Systems

6.How to Celebrate Darwin in 2009

7.Innovation is Not Pointless...But It's So 20th Century

 

10:30

1.Large Scale Molecular Simulation

2.Tree of Life: Fractal Data Problem

3.Planetary Defense Against Asteroids

4.The Automation of Science and the Technological Singularity

 

11:30

1.Science on the Stage

2.Human Microbiome

3.Out Future Lies in Space

4.Climate Crisis vs. Environmental Justice

Back to school. After all these years, now I really want to learn the C programming language. A good book, new powerful hardware, and we can start.

I use Atmel Studio 7.0, the STK600 programmer tool, PicoScope 2205, Logicport analyser with 32 channels @ 500MHz, and the low cost MikroElecronika Xmega board with a lot of I/O's. The chip used is the ATXmega128A1U. I've 2 boards now, one for tests and one for a future application. I've to read over the 1500 pages of information and data sheets. The first program run now with just 8 leds. Next step is the LCD display with 4x20 chars.

I am now 73 years old but this is a real challenge!

Freshly compiled OTHELLO.C

 

­Once upon a time in prehistoric days of personal computing, Robert Halstead of MIT wrote a game of Othello in C programming language. In late 1978, Leor Zolman really wanted to play that game on his micro but couldn't, he had to write a C compiler first. The compiler he wrote became known as BDS C -- one of the most widely known and influential C compilers of the 8-bit era.

 

In the fall of 2007 I really wanted to run a few old games and demos for an awesome but mostly forgotten computer called Vector-06C and, disappointed by the state of existing software emulators, created my own hardware implementation. Reverse engineered without a complete circuit diagram, with scarce documentation, tested by software written for the original computer it has fancy graphics and it plays music. But I find its role as a historical link the most fascinating.

 

Recreated in 2008 for want of a demo, using a compiler written in 1979 for want of an Othello game, running the game from mid-70's on a 21st century FPGA, here it is. Looking not very impressive but with a kind heart, this is an entirely free and open source project. It utilizes approximately 30% of EP2C20 FPGA on Altera DE1 development board, fully recreating a 8080-based computer that was popular in the former Soviet Union in late 80's to mid-90's. It's worth noting that unlike many other Soviet-era designs this computer was truly original, borrowing very little from any other computer of the time.

 

Other projects created for, or ported to the DE1 kit include at least a couple of ZX Spectrum clones, FPGApple: an Apple ][ recreation, Minimig: the Amiga clone, One-Chip MSX, and new projects keep emerging.

 

vector06cc project URL: code.google.com/p/vector06cc/

I took this photo because I knew I was about to spend a whole semester teaching the statistical programming language R. This random bit of graffiti seemed to be "calling me out" or something.

Writing a book here: open.spotify.com/show/3mMrq70ofFvPputOjQIiGU?si=kwclM6f8Q...

 

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Programming language share of sell through, per Neilsen Bookscan, from January 2003 through mid-June 2005.