Re: [fonc] [info] [racket] OPERATING SYSTEM ON A FPGA (fwd)
Josh, if you did take the time to put together a collection of links, it might be helpful to my imaginary historian. Hosting an independent archive to supplement the newsgroup backlog would be more helpful -- what will become of ultratechnology.com, for example, now that Jeff Fox is gone? Most helpful would be spending several months tracking down the old-timers and interviewing them in person. I didn't have in mind technical lore as such: I agree that most of that stuff is more-or-less obvious in context, and more-or-less irrelevant out of context. There's more to history than tech trivia. I'm much more curious about the culture itself, and I see little point in trying to separate language from culture. Who used Forth, for what, and when? How many Forth users were there, and where? Where did that extreme-YAGNI aesthetic come from, besides Chuck Moore's personal style? What did Forth users agree and disagree on? Where does the language survive today (besides Open Firmware and some old spacecraft)? Why did C eventually become dominant? Was there ever any hope for Forth as a mainstream language? -- Max On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 5:19 AM, Josh Grams j...@qualdan.com wrote: If anyone here is actually serious about the history of computing, they might consider writing a book about the culture of Forth. Seems to me there's some valuable material there which is gradually passing out of living memory. I would like to read such book. There are bits and pieces out there; Chuck Moore has written a couple of things and Jeff Fox has a bunch of essays. And the old Forth Dimensions newsletters are fun reading. Mostly it's a culture of YAGNI taken to extremes, on the assumption that it's cheap to extend the functionality when you find you actually need it. And a culture of distrusting academic work and complex compilers and having the programmer make as many decisions as possible. I've been interested in Forth for about 10 years; I came to computing via Basic and then x86 assembly language, and when I was 16 (1996) I started asking myself what was the simplest compiler I could build that would get me significantly more power than assembly language and came up with something remarkably similar to Forth (it was a pleasant surprise discovering the actual Forth language 5 years later). So I tend to think that most of the stuff is obvious if you're coming from that direction, and I haven't come up against any code or prose from the Forth folks that makes me feel differently. There *is* several decades of people working on it, so there are a bunch of interesting tricks. And of course YMMV. I could come up with a bunch of links if anyone is interested... ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] [info] [racket] OPERATING SYSTEM ON A FPGA (fwd)
I don't know Hugh, but he appears to be a machinist who never outgrew his typically American blue-collar knee-jerk homophobia, which in turn alienated him further from the small handful of his Forth-using peers. His casually hateful comment on comp.lang.forth, to which Josh links, is much more poignant in light of this blog post, one of Jeff Fox's last: http://www.ultratechnology.com/blog.htm#111910 It's not clear to me what's on topic on this list anymore, or who's still reading. But those of us who are foolhardy enough to maintain an emotional or intellectual investment in fundamentally different ways of thinking about and practicing computing might want to reflect for a while on what Jeff had to say there. We're a minority culture, folks. At best. More realistically, we represent a few distinct minority cultures and a big handful of unaffiliated eccentric individuals. We're not going to change the world any time soon. A more realistic goal would be survival in the current regime. This is a very serious problem which has been, and continues to be, faced by every distinct minority group in the history of civilization. Some manage to adapt and find relatively safe niches where they can preserve a few of their vital traditions. Most are crushed into oblivion. If anyone here is actually serious about the history of computing, they might consider writing a book about the culture of Forth. Seems to me there's some valuable material there which is gradually passing out of living memory. -- Max On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 5:20 AM, Josh Grams j...@qualdan.com wrote: On 2012-12-07 08:37AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: Forwarded message From Hugh Aguilar hughaguila...@yahoo.com Re: OPERATING SYSTEM ON A FPGA I don't understand what you want to get out of reposting this here? ISTM that the thread on racket-users covers things pretty well... I think Hugh has a point that Racket would not be suitable for development on small microcontrollers. I don't do embedded at all, but I get the impression that it's generally very static, with most data structures pre-allocated, or taken from a fixed-size pre-allocated pool. It's difficult for me to see how a dynamic language like Racket would fit that niche. But I don't know much about it. There may be a way to allow that kind of low-level control over memory usage. In general Hugh seems to be a bigot with questionable technical skills; e.g. Straight Forth is straight as in no homosexuals allowed... https://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.forth/msg/bb9040268348ec02?dmode=sourceoutput=gplainnoredirect --Josh ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Halide: Decoupling algorithm from scheduling for image processing
In another domain entirely, some more expressiveness gains: http://www.cs.stonybrook.edu/~liu/papers/DistPL-OOPSLA12.pdf Performance numbers not quite as awesome as Halide, but impressive nonetheless. -- Max On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 2:18 AM, Marcel Weiher marcel.wei...@gmail.comwrote: Looks like an interesting approach: http://people.csail.mit.edu/jrk/halide12/ The presentation was impressive, especially for a performance + expressiveness geek like myself. Marcel ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA
But, that's exactly the cause for concern! Aside from the fact of Smalltalk's obsolescence (which isn't really the point), the Squeak plugin could never be approved by a 'responsible' sysadmin, *because it can run arbitrary user code*! Squeak's not in the app store for exactly that reason. You'll notice how crippled the allowed 'programming apps' are. This is simple strong-arm bully tactics on the part of Apple; technical problems solved by heavy-handed legal means. Make no mistake, the iPad is the anti-Dynabook. -- Max On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 9:28 AM, Mack m...@mackenzieresearch.com wrote: For better or worse, both Apple and Microsoft (via Windows 8) are attempting to rectify this via the Terms and Conditions route. It's been announced that both Windows 8 and OSX Mountain Lion will require applications to be installed via download thru their respective App Stores in order to obtain certification required for the OS to allow them access to features (like an installed camera, or the network) that are outside the default application sandbox. The acceptance of the App Store model for the iPhone/iPad has persuaded them that this will be (commercially) viable as a model for general public distribution of trustable software. In that world, the Squeak plugin could be certified as safe to download in a way that System Admins might believe. On Feb 29, 2012, at 3:09 PM, Alan Kay wrote: Windows (especially) is so porous that SysAdmins (especially in school districts) will not allow teachers to download .exe files. This wipes out the Squeak plugin that provides all the functionality. But there is still the browser and Javascript. But Javascript isn't fast enough to do the particle system. But why can't we just download the particle system and run it in a safe address space? The browser people don't yet understand that this is what they should have allowed in the first place. So right now there is only one route for this (and a few years ago there were none) -- and that is Native Client on Google Chrome. But Google Chrome is only 13% penetrated, and the other browser fiefdoms don't like NaCl. Google Chrome is an .exe file so teachers can't download it (and if they could, they could download the Etoys plugin). ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Martin Baldan martino...@gmail.com wrote: - Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally benign and affordable. That seems a pretty strong claim. How do you back it up? Low cost and environmental impact are supposed to be some of the strong points of ebooks. Glad you asked! That was a pretty drastic simplification, and I'm conflating 'software' with 'hardware' too. Without wasting too much time, hopefully, here's what I had in mind. I live in a city with some amount of printing industry, still. In the past, much more. Anyway, small presses have been part of civic life for centuries now, and the old-fashioned presses didn't require much in the way of imports, paper mills aside. I used to live in a smaller town with a mid-sized paper mill, too. No idea if they're still in business, but I've made my own paper, and it's not that hard to do well in small batches. My point is just that print technology (specifically the letterpress) can be easily found in the real world which is local, nontoxic, and sustainable (in the sense of only needing routine maintenance to last indefinitely) in a way that I find hard to imagine of modern electronics, at least at this point in time. Have you looked into the environmental cost of manufacturing and disposing of all our fragile, toxic gadgets which last two years or less? It's horrifying. I can only conceive of paper books having a lower TCO than ebooks if people usually spent all day reading the same book again and again for several years. Well, I had my own book collection in mind, which is well under 100 volumes, almost all mathematics, and I expect will last me for a few more decades anyway. More ephemeral books I'm happy to get out of the libraries, or 'rent' from the local used bookstores. Quality before quantity is a major part of the POV I'm trying to get across. YMMV if you prefer lots of cheap, fast-decaying information, which I am fully aware is the trend these days. -- Max ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
Here's a study which is a little more careful. Basically, it comes down to how many e-books your expect to read over the life of your device. Baseline for an iPad (considering only carbon emissions from manufacturing) is about 100 books. http://www.greenpressinitiative.org/documents/ebooks.pdf -- Max On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 11:34 AM, Max Orhai max.or...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Martin Baldan martino...@gmail.comwrote: - Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally benign and affordable. That seems a pretty strong claim. How do you back it up? Low cost and environmental impact are supposed to be some of the strong points of ebooks. Glad you asked! That was a pretty drastic simplification, and I'm conflating 'software' with 'hardware' too. Without wasting too much time, hopefully, here's what I had in mind. I live in a city with some amount of printing industry, still. In the past, much more. Anyway, small presses have been part of civic life for centuries now, and the old-fashioned presses didn't require much in the way of imports, paper mills aside. I used to live in a smaller town with a mid-sized paper mill, too. No idea if they're still in business, but I've made my own paper, and it's not that hard to do well in small batches. My point is just that print technology (specifically the letterpress) can be easily found in the real world which is local, nontoxic, and sustainable (in the sense of only needing routine maintenance to last indefinitely) in a way that I find hard to imagine of modern electronics, at least at this point in time. Have you looked into the environmental cost of manufacturing and disposing of all our fragile, toxic gadgets which last two years or less? It's horrifying. I can only conceive of paper books having a lower TCO than ebooks if people usually spent all day reading the same book again and again for several years. Well, I had my own book collection in mind, which is well under 100 volumes, almost all mathematics, and I expect will last me for a few more decades anyway. More ephemeral books I'm happy to get out of the libraries, or 'rent' from the local used bookstores. Quality before quantity is a major part of the POV I'm trying to get across. YMMV if you prefer lots of cheap, fast-decaying information, which I am fully aware is the trend these days. -- Max ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
Yeah, true enough, the conventional paper and ink industries are pretty nasty. But, search for nontoxic printing or nontoxic ink or environmentally safe paper, and you get real-world products which just cost marginally more than their poisonous counterparts. Try searching for nontoxic computer by comparison. There aren't any major electronics manufacturers where you live because they're all located in places with even more lax environmental regulations. As to the cost of distributing brand-new paper books, I notice that e-books are consistently priced at about ten percent less than the hardcover paper versions, by which I infer that either e-books are much more profitable for the publishing companies, print distribution doesn't cost more than ten percent of the cover price, or some combination of these two factors. According to the Author's Guild website, publishers currently pay about 25% of receipts in royalties for e-book sales, versus a long-standing 50% for paper books... they're optimistic about the long run, though. I do read a lot of ephemeral documents on my computer. Web pages, pdfs, email, and the like. I don't miss the magazines and newspapers that the web has replaced for me, and I think that's a pretty clear win in terms of environmental impact, since I need the computer anyway. Maybe if the Kindle or iPad was a real, fully-capable, user-programmable computer I might consider using one instead of a laptop. Trying to use a device which is crippled by design just makes me angry, though. Again, not a technical issue at all, but rather a social / economic / ethical one. I guess there are some REPL / IDE apps for Android devices, and the OS can be rooted if the manufactured hasn't locked the bootloader. Google's keeping the sources available, which is laudable. So, if there's a tablet in my future, it will probably be running Android or webOS... or maybe, someday, a descendent of Frank. I can wait. -- Max On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 4:56 PM, Martin Baldan martino...@gmail.com wrote: Indeed, now that you mention it, there's a paper factory not too far from where I live...well, far enough, fortunately. By night, with its huge vapor clouds and red lights, it looks like the gates of hell. And you know what, it smells accordingly, tens of miles around. On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 11:12 PM, Mack m...@mackenzieresearch.com wrote: Just a reminder that paper-making is one of the more toxic industries in this country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_pollution Paper itself may be simple and eco-friendly, but the commercial process to produce it is rife with chorine, dioxin, etc. not to mention heavy thermal pollution of water sources. So there are definitely arguments on both sides of the ledger wrt eBooks. -- Mack On Mar 8, 2012, at 1:54 PM, BGB wrote: On 3/8/2012 12:34 PM, Max Orhai wrote: On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Martin Baldan martino...@gmail.com wrote: - Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally benign and affordable. That seems a pretty strong claim. How do you back it up? Low cost and environmental impact are supposed to be some of the strong points of ebooks. Glad you asked! That was a pretty drastic simplification, and I'm conflating 'software' with 'hardware' too. Without wasting too much time, hopefully, here's what I had in mind. I live in a city with some amount of printing industry, still. In the past, much more. Anyway, small presses have been part of civic life for centuries now, and the old-fashioned presses didn't require much in the way of imports, paper mills aside. I used to live in a smaller town with a mid-sized paper mill, too. No idea if they're still in business, but I've made my own paper, and it's not that hard to do well in small batches. My point is just that print technology (specifically the letterpress) can be easily found in the real world which is local, nontoxic, and sustainable (in the sense of only needing routine maintenance to last indefinitely) in a way that I find hard to imagine of modern electronics, at least at this point in time. Have you looked into the environmental cost of manufacturing and disposing of all our fragile, toxic gadgets which last two years or less? It's horrifying. I would guess, apart from macro-scale parts/materials reuse (from electronics and similar), one could maybe: grind them into dust and extract reusable materials via means of mechanical separation (magnetism, density, ..., which could likely separate out most bulk glass/plastic/metals/silicon/... which could then be refined and reused); maybe feed whatever is left over into a plasma arc, and maybe use either magnetic fields or a centrifuge to separate various raw elements (dunno if this could be made practical), or maybe dissolve it with strong acids and use chemical means to extract elements (could also be expensive
Re: [fonc] Sorting the WWW mess
Nelson's still kicking, you know: see http://gzigzag.sourceforge.net/ for some recent spin-offs. -- Max On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 2:56 PM, Casey Ransberger casey.obrie...@gmail.comwrote: On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 7:04 AM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: Hi Loup snip However, Ted Nelson said a lot in each of the last 5 decades about what kinds of linking do the most good. (Chase down what he has to say about why one-way links are not what should be done.) He advocated from the beginning that the provenance of links must be preserved (which also means that you cannot copy what is being pointed to without also copying its provenance). This allows a much better way to deal with all manner of usage, embeddings, etc. -- including both fair use and also various forms of micropayments and subscriptions. If only we could find a way to finally deal with all that intertwingularity! One way to handle this requirement is via protection mechanisms that real objects can supply. Cheers, Alan -- *From:* Loup Vaillant l...@loup-vaillant.fr *To:* fonc@vpri.org *Sent:* Thursday, March 1, 2012 6:36 AM *Subject:* Re: [fonc] Sorting the WWW mess Martin Baldan wrote: That said, I don't see why you have an issue with search engines and search services. Even on your own machine, searching files with complex properties is far from trivial. When outside, untrusted sources are involved, you need someone to tell you what is relevant, what is not, who is lying, and so on. Google got to dominate that niche for the right reasons, namely, being much better than the competition. I wasn't clear. Actually, I didn't want to state my opinion. I can't find the message, but I (incorrectly?) remembered Alan saying that one-way links basically created the need for big search engines. As I couldn't imagine an architecture that could do away with centralized search engines, I wanted to ask about it. That said, I do have issues with Big Data search engines: they are centralized. That alone gives them more power than I'd like them to have. If we could remove the centralization while keeping the good stuff (namely, finding things), that would be really cool. Loup. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc -- Casey Ransberger ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA
It's entirely beside the point, but there is another workaround route to fast parallel code in the (Firefox) browser, called River Trail: https://github.com/RiverTrail/RiverTrail Quoting the project wiki: In a world where the web browser is the user’s window into computing, browser applications must leverage all available computing resources to provide the best possible user experience. Today web applications do not take full advantage of parallel client hardware due to the lack of appropriate programming models. River Trail puts the parallel compute power of client’s hardware into the hands of the web developer while staying within the safe and secure boundaries of the familiar JavaScript programming paradigm. As to the real point, which is why these fundamental research results about the 'right way' to do secure distributed systems has been systematically ignored for 40 years or so, let me gently suggest that there are political and sociological issues at stake here, as well as the technical and psychological issues already being discussed. -- Max On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 3:09 PM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: Hi Duncan The short answers to these questions have already been given a few times on this list. But let me try another direction to approach this. The first thing to notice about the overlapping windows interface personal computer experience is that it is logically independent of the code/processes running underneath. This means (a) you don't have to have a single religion down below (b) the different kinds of things that might be running can be protected from each other using the address space mechanisms of the CPU(s), and (c) you can think about allowing outsiders to do pretty much what they want to create a really scalable really expandable WWW. If you are going to put a browser app on an OS, then the browser has to be a mini-OS, not an app. But standard apps are a bad idea (we thought we'd gotten rid of them in the 70s) because what you really want to do is to integrate functionality visually and operationally using the overlapping windows interface, which can safely get images from the processes and composite them on the screen. (Everything is now kind of super-desktop-publishing.) An app is now just a kind of integration. But the route that was actually taken with the WWW and the browser was in the face of what was already being done. Hypercard existed, and showed what a WYSIWYG authoring system for end-users could do. This was ignored. Postscript existed, and showed that a small interpreter could be moved easily from machine to machine while retaining meaning. This was ignored. And so forth. 19 years later we see various attempts at inventing things that were already around when the WWW was tacked together. But the thing that is amazing to me is that in spite of the almost universal deployment of it, it still can't do what you can do on any of the machines it runs on. And there have been very few complaints about this from the mostly naive end-users (and what seem to be mostly naive computer folks who deal with it). Some of the blame should go to Apple and MS for not making real OSs for personal computers -- or better, going the distance to make something better than the old OS model. In either case both companies blew doing basic protections between processes. On the other hand, the WWW and first browsers were originally done on workstations that had stronger systems underneath -- so why were they so blind? As an aside I should mention that there have been a number of attempts to do something about OS bloat. Unix was always too little too late but its one outstanding feature early on was its tiny kernel with a design that wanted everything else to be done in user-mode-code. Many good things could have come from the later programmers of this system realizing that being careful about dependencies is a top priority. (And you especially do not want to have your dependencies handled by a central monolith, etc.) So, this gradually turned into an awful mess. But Linus went back to square one and redefined a tiny kernel again -- the realization here is that you do have to arbitrate basic resources of memory and process management, but you should allow everyone else to make the systems they need. This really can work well if processes can be small and interprocess communication fast (not the way Intel and Motorola saw it ...). And I've also mentioned Popek's LOCUS system as a nice model for migrating processes over a network. It was Unix only, but there was nothing about his design that required this. Cutting to the chase with a current day example. We made Etoys 15 years ago so children could learn about math, science, systems, etc. It has a particle system that allows many interesting things to be explored. Windows (especially) is so porous that SysAdmins (especially in school districts) will not allow
[fonc] Fwd: [AGERE! at SPLASH] Talks by Mark Miller
Some on this list with interests in security may enjoy these, too... Related: - The AGERE! (Actors and Agents Reloaded) workshop webpage: http://www.alice.unibo.it/xwiki/bin/view/AGERE/ - AmbientTalk (actor language for mobile devices): http://soft.vub.ac.be/amop/ -- Max -- Forwarded message -- From: Tom Van Cutsem tomvc...@gmail.com Date: Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 12:37 PM Subject: [AGERE! at SPLASH] Talks by Mark Miller To: agere-at-spl...@googlegroups.com Dear all, During the panel session, Mark Miller showed some slides from a talk he gave at our university (University of Brussels, Belgium) a couple of weeks ago. At the workshop, I promised to forward links to the videos of the full talks when they would become available. See the abstract and links below. How does this relate to actors? Mark talks about capability-based security, which meshes really well with object-oriented, and - in the distributed case - with actor-based programming. Don't worry if you are not an expert on security: Mark explains the issues in a very clear and understandable way. Thanks again to the organizers for a successful AGERE! workshop. Kind regards, Tom Van Cutsem Talk 1/2: Secure Distributed Programming with Object-capabilities in JavaScript Until now, browser-based security has been hell. The object-capability (ocap) model provides a simple and expressive alternative. Google's Caja project uses the latest JavaScript standard, EcmaScript 5, to support fine-grained safe mobile code, solving the secure mashup problem. Dr. SES -- Distributed Resilient Secure EcmaScript -- extends the ocap model cryptographically over the network, enabling RESTful composition of mutually suspicious web services. We show how to apply the expressiveness of object programming to the expression of security patterns, solving security problems normally thought to be difficult with simple elegant programs. Slides: http://soft.vub.ac.be/events/mobicrant_talks/talk1_ocaps_js.pdf Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9hHHvhZ_HY Talk 2/2: Bringing Object-orientation to Security Programming Just as we should not expect our base programming language to provide all the data types we need, so we should not expect our security foundation to provide all the abstractions we need to express security policy. The answer to both is the same: We need foundations that provide simple abstraction mechanisms, which we use to build an open ended set of abstractions, which we then use to express policy. We show how to use EcmaScript 5 to enforce the security latent in object-oriented abstraction mechanisms: encapsulation, message-passing, polymorphism, and interposition. With these secured, we show how to build abstractions for confinement, rights amplification, transitive wrapping and revocation, and smart contracts. Slides: http://soft.vub.ac.be/events/mobicrant_talks/talk2_OO_security.pdf Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBqeDYETXME -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups AGERE! at SPLASH group. To post to this group, send email to agere-at-spl...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to agere-at-splash+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/agere-at-splash?hl=en. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] making matter come alive
I'm a big fan of Rosen's, and I think he was on to some important stuff, but his book is not exactly a model of clarity in mathematical exposition. It's readable enough, but the strokes are pretty broad. He also comes across as somewhat jaded; I don't think his work was very well received for most of his career. The serious student should have a look at A. H. Louie's More than Life Itself, which is essentially about the same material, but considerably more rigorous. -- Max On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 5:29 AM, Peter C. Marks peter.c.ma...@gmail.comwrote: If I might add: The important point about Robert Rosen's work is that his emphasis is not on structures at all. Instead, he develops his ideas based on the relationships between biological components. Hence, the term relational biology. Moreover, he begins to show (in his book Life Itself) how biological systems can be modeled with the use of Category Theory (it's all about the arrows/morphisms). Peter On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 2:03 PM, Max OrHai max.or...@gmail.com wrote: I've encountered this wet a-life research program before. There's a biologist at my school who's doing similar stuff... see http://web.pdx.edu/~niles/Lehman_Lab_at_PSU/Research.html I think your analogy is quite understated, Subbu. There are an awful lot more than 2^(2^10) permutations of elements involved, for starters. (Have you heard of Tom Ray's Tierra project?) But, if I read you right, I totally agree that Cronin is being unwarrantedly optimistic. There's more to life than just evolution; metabolism and homeostasis come to mind. In a way, biology is in a similar situation to computer science in that we have a big collection of facts, a handful of vague heuristics, and relatively weak real theoretical grounding. I would encourage those with an interest in this stuff to read Robert Rosen, and also perhaps Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. While somewhat heterodox, they're the best I've found in the subject of theoretical biology so far. Any others? -- Max 2011/9/20 K. K. Subramaniam kksubbu...@gmail.com On Tuesday 20 Sep 2011 9:25:11 AM Shawn Morel wrote: only slightly off topic. The questions posed seem really applicable when pointed at boot-strapping truly complex software: http://www.ted.com/talks/lee_cronin_making_matter_come_alive.html The software equivalent of this experiment would be create random mutations of a 1MB array to see if it becomes a useful program ;-). Subbu ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] making matter come alive
I've encountered this wet a-life research program before. There's a biologist at my school who's doing similar stuff... see http://web.pdx.edu/~niles/Lehman_Lab_at_PSU/Research.html I think your analogy is quite understated, Subbu. There are an awful lot more than 2^(2^10) permutations of elements involved, for starters. (Have you heard of Tom Ray's Tierra project?) But, if I read you right, I totally agree that Cronin is being unwarrantedly optimistic. There's more to life than just evolution; metabolism and homeostasis come to mind. In a way, biology is in a similar situation to computer science in that we have a big collection of facts, a handful of vague heuristics, and relatively weak real theoretical grounding. I would encourage those with an interest in this stuff to read Robert Rosen, and also perhaps Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. While somewhat heterodox, they're the best I've found in the subject of theoretical biology so far. Any others? -- Max 2011/9/20 K. K. Subramaniam kksubbu...@gmail.com On Tuesday 20 Sep 2011 9:25:11 AM Shawn Morel wrote: only slightly off topic. The questions posed seem really applicable when pointed at boot-strapping truly complex software: http://www.ted.com/talks/lee_cronin_making_matter_come_alive.html The software equivalent of this experiment would be create random mutations of a 1MB array to see if it becomes a useful program ;-). Subbu ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] making matter come alive
random expression trees mutating. OK, so less Ray's Tierra then Koza's Genetic Programming? Still too much structure baked in, I'd say. All the GP stuff I've ever seen has been more about selection than natural evolution; the modularity, replication and selection is provided for free by the environment. Thanks for the author reccomendations! I haven't head of Ganti (or Kampis or Fontana) before, and I share your discomfort with philosophizing. I do have a fond spot for Kauffman, though... -- Max ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Good books on control theory?
My thinking out loud response would be that classical control theory may not be very well suited to CS-type problems, which often can't even be approximated by linear systems. Cybernetic feedback control, a la Weiner, is IIRC mostly about systems with a few continuous variables, while our problems more often involve large numbers of discrete variables. But, there's certainly quite a bit more to control theory than I'm aware of. Wolfram MathWorld recommends Zabczyk: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0817636455 There are plenty of other, smaller, less comprehensive intro texts out there too... sorry I can't recommend one first-hand. -- Max On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 1:49 PM, John Zabroski johnzabro...@gmail.comwrote: Folks, Lately I've been learning about control theory from research papers. I started off with the classical Witsenhausen counterexample paper, and have been reading a lot of papers about just that counterexample. I'm really interested in control theory problems that overlap with information theory, which is just the sort of problem Witsenhausen focused upon. I'm also wondering if any computer scientists have applied control theory to any computational problems. I'm a little stunned that I can't find anything relating things like the Actor Model to ideas from control theory. Just thinking out loud, but also welcoming suggestions! Cheers, Z-Bo ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Eternal computing
Thanks for the link! RDP looks quite interesting, and I'm looking forward to further developments. Some of the space-time leakage problems of the early FRP models have been addressed with Nillson and Hudak's Arrows-based Yampa system; could you use any of this in your Haskell RDP implementation? Apropos of reactive programming and formal methods for ubiquitous systems, some may be interested in the late Robin Milner's work on what he called the Bigraphical model, which also adresses many of these issues, providing a mathematical foundation for an entirely different (and much more scalable) mode of information processing from the Von Neumann machine which (IMHO) is one of our most fundamental unquestioned assumptions... http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rm135/ -- Max On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 9:30 AM, David Barbour dmbarb...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 3:13 AM, Chris Warburton chriswa...@googlemail.com wrote: On Wed, 2011-06-29 at 11:40 -0700, Alan Kay wrote: The only human artifact that is remotely like this is the Internet, which has been able to grow and replace most parts large and small without having to ever be stopped. At the network level we have the Internet, as an 'Intergalactic Network', but it is never interacted with directly. Instead it has become, in the developed world at least, a ubiquitous communication medium *for our devices*. At the software level we have, for example, Smalltalk. As has been mentioned many times before, this is essentially its own network of pluggable computers (objects). The internet is made up of active objects with a high level of concurrency. If you're searching for analogous software models, don't look to Smalltalk with its passive objects and control flow. Multi agent systems are a better comparison. We want resilient, scalable, open applications. Consistency, security, graceful degradation, and behavior during and after partial failures (disruption, partitioning, node failure, buggy software components) will be major concerns. Our models for communication, concurrency control, identification and linking of dependencies, system discovery, and configuration management are all impacted. To be 'eternal', we need runtime upgrade - the ability to upgrade and modify software components without restarting the whole system. We desire 'live programming' - ability to upgrade and modify a component without disrupting active users. If a developer must know the entire history of an eternal program in order to understand its current behavior, that would be a serious obstacle to long term development. So, after upgrade, the modified system should quickly reach a state as though it were always using the new code. This has a profound impact on the use of 'state', and suggests favoring a reactive programming model that can easily propagate a change. Our data models will change over time... but the data models of our dependencies will change at their own pace. This suggests that we need effective adapters between data models, such that we can transparently replace a model with a 'view' of it. I think the distinction between model and view breaks down very quickly. I've been developing requirements, desiderata, and programming models for open distributed systems programming since 2003, with an emphasis on real-time systems. The resilience and upgrade requirements for open distributed systems naturally imply eternal computing. In April 2010, I finally came up with a model I find extremely promising (though I've only run it through pseudocode tests). I call it 'Reactive Demand Programming'. I started to blog the subject in May 2011 [1]. These are the ideal wearable computer, as they are perfectly acceptable standalone machines wherever we are, but when we sit at a desk they merge with our office computer seamlessly so that we don't have to care about eg. sync issues. I'm also interested in 'pervasive' computing, augmented reality. For example, consider the ability to take a picture of a printer then drag and drop a symbol for a document onto it. This would require we identify the printer by some combination of its image and other indicators for our location. You might check out a language called 'Ambient Talk', designed to support mobile computing and interaction with the environment. Unfortunately, Ambient Talk is not designed for security My favored model for 'discovery' of the environment and dependencies involves a network of fine-grained, composable, RDP registries (i.e. a network of micro-databases). Each can be administered separately, adjusting the filters and such, and there are separate publish and query capabilities. The registries are stateless (in RDP, I can replace most state with 'continuous publish', and simply make disruption equivalent to revocation). Different registries can represent 'ambient' vs. 'machine local' vs. 'global' resources (and, appropriately,
Re: [fonc] Eternal computing
A couple more references in this vein: Robert Rosen's work in theoretical biology predates the autopoiesis theory of Maturana and Varela by a couple decades, and is somewhat more general and mathematically rigorous. He's not as well-known, but his book *Life Itself* is well worth reading, although one of his major points is that the essential character of living systems is *not* computable. More immediately on topic, I've just read a particularly thoughtful essay from Richard Gabriel, titled Conscientious Computing, which directly addresses these issues of scalability and adaptability in pervasive software systems. Some here may find it interesting. http://dreamsongs.com/Files/ConscientiousSoftwareCC.pdf -- Max On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 2:03 PM, Wesley Smith wesley.h...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: Thanks for the references to The Chemoton Theory -- I hadn't seen this before. But I didn't understand your reference to Bergson -- wasn't he an adherent of the Elan Vital as a necessary part of what is life? and that also drove evolution in particular directions. you're welcome. The interesting part of about Chemoton Theory is that the first papers were written contemporaneously with Eigen's RNA world theory and Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis ideas. The Bergson reference was cryptic. Sorry about that! He did write about Élan Vital, but in my understanding it doesn't represent a transcendental category but is rather a name for a self-referential process by which objects/virtualities/... differentiate. The clearest exposition I've found on this is the last chapter of Deleuze's Bergsonism. The aspect of Bersgon that I was thinking about though was the concept of duration, particularly that of the cerebral interval (the time between a received movement and an executed movement), which generates perception. Yet perception is both matter (made of up of neurons, cells, chemical networks, sensors, ...) and the perception of matter. It's a self-loop of something perceiving itself. We see the same kind of self-loop pattern in von Foerster's Cybernetics of Epistemology and Notes on an Epistemology of Living Things where computation is understood as com + putare or thinking together. Where Bersgon was talking about human perception, I think his ideas can be taken all the way down to the basic (theoretical) units of life that Ganti describes in Chemoton Theory where instead of a cerebral interval, there's a metabolic interval. The metabolic interval is the time of adjustment and reaction to environmental conditions (the cell shrinks, grows, chemicals flows with varying degrees and directions) that is a direct result of the structure of an auto-catalytic loop. By virtue of this self-loop, novel conditions develop through differentiating patterns of chemical flow that hook on to the metabolism, over time developing into more and more complex structures with new hierarchical levels. I should point out that I'm not saying this is how life happened, but rather that I believe it's a compelling way to approach conceptualizing about how computational systems could be cast in a biological perspective. I tend to think of computation as mathematics + duration and biology as chemistry + duration. Computational systems does not have to mimic in a literal way what biology does, which is what I see most systems doing. wes ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: Age and Language (was Re: [fonc] Alternative Web programming models?)
with the limitations of Smalltalk. It's interesting that the debate about O/R mapping is still stuck in the same place it was in 1990. After all these years I still think it would be easier to implement relational semantics on top of this sort of environment than vice-versa, but last time I checked Oracle and Microsoft weren't taking my calls. This paper is kind of old, but it describes the implementation of a DBMS inspired by the description of Smalltalk in the famous 1981 issue of Byte magazine. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=602300 Making smalltalk a database system To overcome limitations in the modeling power of existing database systems and provide a better tool for database application programming, Servio Logic Corporation is developing a computer system to support a set-theoretic data model in an object-oriented programming environment We recount the problems with existing models and database systems We then show how features of Smalltalk, such such as operational semantics, its type hierarchy, entity identity and the merging of programming and data language, solve many of those problems Nest we consider what Smalltalk lacks as a database system secondary storage management, a declarative semantics, concurrency, past states To address these shortcomings, we needed a formal data model We introduce the GemStone data model, and show how it helps to define path expressions, a declarative semantics and object history in the OPAL language We summarize similar approaches, and give a brief overview of the GemStone system implementation Cheers, Steve On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 11:38 AM, Max OrHai max.or...@gmail.com wrote: There are certainly practical differences between conventional relational databases and hierarchical filesystems, without having to get into implementation details. I'm sure at least a few people on this list are familiar with the BeOS filesystem, which acted much more like a relational DBMS than most filesystems do... over a decade later, we've now got hacked-on DBMS-like functionality in the form of (e.g.) Spotlight, but most users are stuck with the little walled-off databases presented by their media library and email application software. Once again, it's not a technical issue so much as a matter of perspective. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/03/29/windows_on_a_database_sliced/ -- Max On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 11:31 PM, BGB cr88...@gmail.com wrote: On 6/20/2011 9:19 PM, Julian Leviston wrote: Hi... (see below)... On 21/06/2011, at 3:42 AM, BGB wrote: On 6/20/2011 3:22 AM, Julian Leviston wrote: On 20/06/2011, at 8:06 PM, BGB wrote: hmm... S-Expression database?... sort of like a hybrid between a database and a persistent store. or such... I'd like to know if you think there's a difference between a filesystem and a database... conceptually... or such... interesting thought... Note that I asked if you think there's a difference not how they differ. I'd be surprised if there were any people on this list who didn't know how they differed. I don't consider there to be much of a difference between the two, conceptually - they are both concerned with the retrieval and storage of data (I'm using the term 'data' here to mean any form of raw information at all, useful or otherwise, including programs). (I got sidetracked and forgot to answer earlier...). but, well, I consider them as different, as they serve different roles... filesystems serve a very narrowly defined role, so possible variation is limited before one risks compromising compatibility with existing software (both WRT removing features, or adding too many fundamentally new ones). compromising this compatibility would also severely compromise the general usability of the system. however, one could argue that filesystems are probably a fairly narrowly defined subset of databases, so in this sense there is overlap. for example, humans are mammals, but not all mammals are humans (tigers aren't hosting TV shows, there are no cities of bears, elephants aren't doing construction work, ...). so, it seems a similar level of difference... ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: Age and Language (was Re: [fonc] Alternative Web programming models?)
I wish that emacs / vi, GBD, and the Unix shell had anything close to the n00b mode provided by Squeak in terms of inline documentation, tool tips, menus etc.. But, yeah, Squeak has serious problems, and you're absolutely right that it's too hard to tinker with the core of it, just like every other computing system on the planet. When you hack your kernel, should you be free enough to do so, you *expect* to break everything... don't you? You'll notice we've been discussing things like Worlds, which might be one way to address this particular issue. Pioneering isn't for everyone, but the conventional roads don't lead where I want to go. My daily software environment has been over-engineered to solve too many problems I don't have. I'd like to be able to shed some of the excess complexity of a conventional OS while retaining the media capabilities and increasing the overall expressive power. I don't mind giving up the comfort of familiar habits, and I don't give a whit about delivering a product to anyone. That's why I read this list. -- Max On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 8:21 PM, Julian Leviston jul...@leviston.netwrote: On 23/06/2011, at 12:35 PM, Max OrHai wrote: People who want a small language should be prepared to be somewhat idiosyncratic, if they want to express big or complex programs. I mean 'language' here not just in terms of a programming language definition but rather to mean all constructs (or, more fundamentally, concepts and conventions) which are shared, which belong in some sense to a culture rather than an individual. If they don't enlarge the language (usually via some library) they enlarge their personal idiom instead, which may not be as portable. Progress depends on the ability of individuals to nonetheless communicate these new ideas 'uphill' so to speak, but more immediately on the ability to make them, so as to make them better. Some leverage here may be available through improvements in the notion of expressivity itself. There is a wonderfully large number of experiments being done in dynamic language design these days, from Ruby to REBOL... If more of them would take what I'd say is the major lesson of Smalltalk and become fully integrated personal computing environments, rather than living off the previous generation's operating systems, perhaps they might be able to move some of the uncomfortable fixed points of usability and complexity, as well as gain more user-programmers altogether. I think FONC is, at least, a pointer in the right direction; a reminder that there's plenty of room out there beyond the familiar. So, by that reasoning, GNU SmallTalk doesn't exhibit what you'd express as being the major lesson from SmallTalk? Interestingly, one of the most irritating things for me was the User Interface when I first came to Squeak, having programmed in GemStone SmallTalk for a number of years (which we were programming via snippets plugged into HTML, and sometimes via GemStone/J, on a mac natively, not inside a SmallTalk environment at all). At that point I had experience in AmigaDOS, MacOS (pre X), Windows 95, NT and GEOS (commodore 64 based GUI) would you believe... Squeak was supremely irritating for two reasons: Firstly, the UI was completely different without having any easy way to say hey, I'm a n00b, turn on n00b mode so I can learn this thing, and second it seemed far too easy to make irreparable damage, or even lose what I was doing... (probably due to point 1). So I'd be very much against your build the whole world so you can express the language philosophy. Potentially, though, I'd say having the idea of a SmallTalk-like image loaded into a fully graphical interface AS AN OPTION is awesome... I'd love to have a visual debugger for my Ruby code the likes of the SmallTalk ones... (to a degree, MagLev kind of allows this as a possibility). My issue seems to be that if you change the language at a base level while in one of those environments, you kind of break everything... don't you? They don't really lead to experimentation very well. Julian. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: Age and Language (was Re: [fonc] Alternative Web programming models?)
There are certainly practical differences between conventional relational databases and hierarchical filesystems, without having to get into implementation details. I'm sure at least a few people on this list are familiar with the BeOS filesystem, which acted much more like a relational DBMS than most filesystems do... over a decade later, we've now got hacked-on DBMS-like functionality in the form of (e.g.) Spotlight, but most users are stuck with the little walled-off databases presented by their media library and email application software. Once again, it's not a technical issue so much as a matter of perspective. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/03/29/windows_on_a_database_sliced/ -- Max On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 11:31 PM, BGB cr88...@gmail.com wrote: On 6/20/2011 9:19 PM, Julian Leviston wrote: Hi... (see below)... On 21/06/2011, at 3:42 AM, BGB wrote: On 6/20/2011 3:22 AM, Julian Leviston wrote: On 20/06/2011, at 8:06 PM, BGB wrote: hmm... S-Expression database?... sort of like a hybrid between a database and a persistent store. or such... I'd like to know if you think there's a difference between a filesystem and a database... conceptually... or such... interesting thought... Note that I asked if you think there's a difference not how they differ. I'd be surprised if there were any people on this list who didn't know how they differed. I don't consider there to be much of a difference between the two, conceptually - they are both concerned with the retrieval and storage of data (I'm using the term 'data' here to mean any form of raw information at all, useful or otherwise, including programs). (I got sidetracked and forgot to answer earlier...). but, well, I consider them as different, as they serve different roles... filesystems serve a very narrowly defined role, so possible variation is limited before one risks compromising compatibility with existing software (both WRT removing features, or adding too many fundamentally new ones). compromising this compatibility would also severely compromise the general usability of the system. however, one could argue that filesystems are probably a fairly narrowly defined subset of databases, so in this sense there is overlap. for example, humans are mammals, but not all mammals are humans (tigers aren't hosting TV shows, there are no cities of bears, elephants aren't doing construction work, ...). so, it seems a similar level of difference... __**_ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/**listinfo/fonchttp://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Coding at the Speed of Touch
Prograph, much like Self, looks to be another tragic visual programming language story (and the moving obituary for the lead developer on the Andescotia Marten website doesn't help!) As far as I'm aware, the visual dataflow language that gets the most actual use nowadays (albeit in a narrow niche market) is Pure Data. It's an open source project and seems fairly healthy. See http://puredata.info for details. Pd and its commercial cousin, Max/MSP, may be responsible for the common perception I've encountered that visual languages are for artists/musicians/hobbyists, not real programmers... but at least they've survived! And, come to think of it, they've brought the creative discipline and joy of programming to many who would never care to get past the ugly syntax and absurdly convoluted workflow of conventional languages. May we all live long enough to see better days. -- Max On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 2:21 PM, Ryan Davis ryand-f...@zenspider.comwrote: On Jun 13, 2011, at 22:03 , David Barbour wrote: I think some recent work by Sean McDirmid may be of interest to the FoNC audience. Coding at the Speed of Touch http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4257 This paper describes a programming language with a tile-based development environment designed for use in tablets. The 'type system', such as it exists, involves constraints on which tiles can peacefully coexist, and is used to achieve intelligent suggestions. The language itself is prototype-based and describes 'continuous' behaviors suitable for animating characters in a simulation or game. There's a lot of interesting variety for everyone. This reminds me of (and makes me miss) Prograph. I LOVED that language, esp the visual modularity and the object system. And it could be so much more now since the visual dataflow programming implied automatic parallelization. http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrographLanguage for some visual idea: http://andescotia.com/products/marten/ also some pictures on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Consolidation and collaboration
Thank Ward Cunningham, nearly fifteen years ago, long before the appearance of Jimmy Wales and his ilk. Of course, the idea of a Pattern Language is due to Christopher Alexander, in the seventies. And as for where he got it... http://www.patternlanguage.com/leveltwo/patternsframe.htm?/leveltwo/../history/ajustsostory6.htm -- max (BTW, the Pattern Language books are much better looking than the website... but also not cheap.) On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 11:14 AM, Casey Ransberger casey.obrie...@gmail.com wrote: +1 For an example of how wonderful and also not-Wikipedia this can be, check out: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PortlandPatternRepository If you haven't seen this yet, it's the best wiki ever, a sprawling hyperlinked conversation that covers just about every concept in programming, with lots of opinion and historical tidbits (i.e., it's not an encyclopedia at all and isn't trying to be) and a focus on people, places, and patterns. On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 7:30 AM, Carl Gundel ca...@psychesystems.comwrote: Why not use a wiki to collaborate and organize thoughts and information?* *** ** ** -Carl ** ** *From:* fonc-boun...@vpri.org [mailto:fonc-boun...@vpri.org] *On Behalf Of *CHM de Beer *Sent:* Wednesday, June 15, 2011 10:21 AM *To:* fonc@vpri.org *Subject:* [fonc] Consolidation and collaboration ** ** Hello fonc members, Over the past year I have greatly enjoyed, and benefited from, threads on this mailing list, written by individuals with far greater understanding and insight than I will ever master. The diversity, and somewhat seasonal traffic, does make me wonder if we are maximising the impact of our efforts. Would there be value in a platform for us to; capture all the ideas and initiatives, distil them into groups, reduce them to a handful concepts to explore, and finally focus all our efforts on. Obviously that means I may have to relinquish a pet project, but I am surprisingly comfortable with it, if substantial progress on fundamentals of new computing results. Consider the typical mail from Dr. Kay. He would comment: Back in 196x, we considered *this*, but elected to go with *that*, because of *some reason*, or we did *this*, going forward you should consider *something else*. In my imagination I can see as many opinions as there were people in the room. Yet the language suggest the initiatives were reduced to a handful, and then pursued with vigour. Just think of what we can do by following the same pattern, and we have the added benefit of doing it as a virtual, distributed team. Significant action is needed, because I fear the odds are stacked against us. Invention receives no attention, and innovation (even when incorrectly understood) receives lip service in the press, but no current-day vehicle exists to to nurture it. The only hope I have, is that a number of talented individuals pool their energy and collaborate towards fundamentally changing computing. I am willing to start a database of ideas and initiatives if there are at least a few in the fonc group that agree in principle. Regards, Marius -- mobile: +1 604 369 1854 skype: chmdebeer twitter: twitter.com/chmdebeer ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc -- Casey Ransberger ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Alternative Web programming models?
On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 11:09 AM, BGB cr88...@gmail.com wrote: snip ... there is not a whole lot that seems in common between a browser and an OS. yes, there is Chrome OS, but I sort of suspect this will (probably) fall on its face (vs... say... installing real Linux on the netbooks...). BGB, you're being waay too literal-minded! This thread was (I thought) about architecture, rather than implementation details of current technologies. Chrome OS is a case in point, and FWIW, I expect it to succeed, maybe even beyond Android, because it's been carefully built to give a seamless, painless end-user experience. That's what most people want. Almost everyone who casually uses a computer day-to-day doesn't give a damn about how powerful or configurable it is. They just want it to work, get out of their way, and not irritate them unnecessarily. Increasingly, most people spend most of their computer time in a browser anyway. For quite a few, that is (or easily could be) *all* of their time. Chrome OS just trims away several layers of what these users would consider pointless complexity. As others here have mentioned, the Web has *already* become the de-facto universal communications medium. The interesting question to me is, how do we help ordinary people (like, you know, children) *use* this powerful new medium to learn, experiment, express and communicate powerful ideas? As far as this question is concerned Chrome OS and the Lively Kernel bring us back up to almost the level of Smalltalk (plus or minus some semantic noise from Javascript, but hey). Surely we can do better... -- Max ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Re: Electrical Actors?
You might get a kick out of this toy model I made to demonstrate how a mesh (or cloud) of minimal hardware actors can work together to compute. It's the latest in a series of explorations of the particle / field concept... http://cs.pdx.edu/~orhai/mesh-sort I think there's a lot that can be done with fine-grained homogeneous self-contained hardware in quantity, and I may get around to building a poor man's Connection Machine out of a bucketful of microcontrollers one of these days. The AVR is quite a capable machine for $5 apiece! -- Max On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 6:44 PM, David Pennell pennell.da...@gmail.comwrote: Note that you can create new HW in a cloud environment. On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 8:13 PM, Casey Ransberger casey.obrie...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you for your reply, comments inline. On Jun 5, 2011, at 4:25 PM, Dale Schumacher dale.schumac...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Casey Ransberger casey.obrie...@gmail.com wrote: Has anyone taken the actor model down to the metal? If someone has, I would sure like to hear about it! There was the Apiary machine, but I don't think that was ever physically built, only simulated. Googling... (snip) The SEND and BECOME primitives seem fairly straight-forward to translate to hardware. It is the CREATE primitive that I struggle with. Since we can't actually create new hardware elements (snip) Oh, yeah. That makes sense. Maybe there would be some way to activate latent nodes of processing power, injecting them with their initial behavior as a way of breathing life into them. I really like this idea. It could be just a matter of allocating new actors the way we allocate memory. Each hardware node could have a capacity of available actors who only need a script to become alive. This is not far off from what I was already daydreaming about. When I started I thought those guys looked like a kind of regular object animator that would light up when something was bound. I'd likely have to cache the ones that didn't fit on the chip somewhere. Maybe to deal with concurrency I should really start thinking of them as actor animators. I'm sure there's a way to pull this off. Even if it's by having a lot of FPGAs on the logic board so that I can compensate for reconfiguration latency by switching between them, but I don't think that idea fits any goal around a parsimonious architecture, which is one thing that I'm after. The synchronization problems I'd expect also seem awful, unless someone out there has thought a bunch about doing a low-level TeaTime (or what have you.) So I'm really hoping I can find a general thing that I can just place many identical copies of in the die or whatever it is we use now... ahem. I am such a noob! And then just swap them out to main memory or a local cache when I run out. I would love to explore this idea further and hear how you would consider approaching the problem. I will definitely CC you if I think I've gotten somewhere with it. Feel free to send me a note if you have any big aha-moments, because I have a tiny slab of time to run at that fence before I'm going to have to get back to work, and any/all help that I can get will be much appreciated. If I made it, I'd likely build a couple of boxes and try to pass them off as art (like what one buys for the wall,) but my plan is to make everything you need (IP cores appears to be the term of industry) to do it yourself available under the MIT license if and when I've made some actual progress. I reckon I have a better shot at getting to actually use it if I just give it away! ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Alto-2?
This sounds like a really cool project, and I hope you report to the list as you make progress. Have you looked at Jecel Assumpcao's SiliconSqueak? An awful lot can be done on the cheap with modern FPGAs, so long as you don't stray *too* far from the conventional CPU design space... (For an example of what I mean by too far, check out http://cellmatrix.com or http://greenarraychips.com). I really wish more people designed *whole* systems, both hardware and software, these days. -- Max On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 2:44 PM, Casey Ransberger casey.obrie...@gmail.comwrote: Hello all, I've found myself with the first sizable chunk of free time I've had in years. I've been having so much fun! But I must admit, after a bunch of hustle-your-butt software work, the software part isn't completely satisfying me. I miss taking apart computers. It's wonderful that they've gotten so small, but it comes at a price, I think. No one's really figured out a way to make something that small which leaves room for serviceability. When I was a kid, I learned _so much_ with the case open. Somewhere I read about an XO installation where they found a little girl who'd set up an assembly line and was doing her own repairs on other kids laptops. No one asked her to, she just decided to do it. It really warmed my heart:) and I couldn't help feeling some nostalgia, because I was *totally* that kid. And when you add free time to life long love, well, hah! I'm gonna build a computer this year. I was thinking it would be fun to throw out the Intel architecture and look at alternatives. I know nothing of silicon, not really, and so I'm liable to grab parts off of the shelf, though that visual-6502 simulator I found on the web has me tempted all the same. For a CPU, I thought it might be interesting, and temporarily future-proof, to go with something ARM. I know people have had the Squeak VM running on ARM chips, which is sort of my only req'ment anymore, outside of the web browser which lets me live in the modern world. But then I stopped. What about Frank? I have a feeling Frank should work anywhere, but since I've only seen things Ian is doing, I thought I'd stop to ask. If I wanted to be able to run VPRI's bits (if and) when they become generally available, is there a particular chip architecture I should go with? Okay that's the first question. The other question is, was there anything in particular about the Alto that folks on this list miss? Would the Alto make an interesting case study for me to explore, or have modern computers imitated it to the point where it isn't the thing to examine? I'm picking my way through the wikipedia article, but it occurs to me that not having used the thing, it might be hard for the details on the wiki to jump out at me in any sort of aha moment. Not sure that the tech is at the point where I can hope to construct something Dynabook-shaped, but I know that I can make one improvement to the interim desktop design just by using a flat panel that will swivel into a portrait orientation:) ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] The best TED talks you've seen?
Ok, Ok, me too. Thanks for the prompt, Z-Bo. How about these classics: http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html ...and of course http://www.ted.com/talks/neil_gershenfeld_on_fab_labs.html (My favorite part is at 4:30 elapsed where he says computer science is one of the worst things to ever happen to either computers or to science) Another more recent favorite, less obviously computer-related: http://www.ted.com/talks/gero_miesenboeck.html (some great theatre there!) ...see http://www.kurzweilai.net/fruit-fly-nervous-systemhttp://www.kurzweilai.net/fruit-fly-nervous-system-provides-new-solution-to-fundamental-computer-network-problem?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletterutm_campaign=d5f5bc2866-UA-946742-1utm_medium=email for a connection. My two cents: if we really want technology that behave at all like living things, we'd better be prepared to put aside our convenient contrivances for a moment and actually observe some natural systems. -- Max On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 2:16 PM, John Nilsson j...@milsson.nu wrote: On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 5:34 AM, John Zabroski johnzabro...@gmail.com wrote: That makes me wonder if the group here on the FONC mailing list can suggest their favorite TED videos. There are simply too many for all of us to watch them all (my guess), but if we all contributed here and there, we might come up with a sizeable list of educational and entertaining, thought-provoking stuff. Ok, I'll bite =D Some of my favorites http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows.html http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html BR, John ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] (no subject)
Would he be kind enough to post it somewhere the rest of us can use it? -- Max On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 3:38 PM, Sachin Desai smde...@pacbell.net wrote: Thanks Dan, Ted Kaehler was kind enough to send me a plugin which works with the image. -- Sachin On Nov 19, 2010, at 2:03 PM, Dan Amelang daniel.amel...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Sachin, I don't think the plugin is available right now. Bert is the author if you want to bug him about it. Dan On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 9:40 PM, Sachin Desai smde...@pacbell.net wrote: Hello, I was using the Text Field Spec for Lobjects and updating the image, I ran across a missing plugin for GeziraBindings which led me to Gezira. Is the plugin available somewhere for Mac OSX, failing that, is the source available so that a plugin could be built for the VM. Thanks. -- Sachin ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Growing Objects?
Also, some interesting research along these lines by Stephanie Forrest of the University of New Mexico: http://genprog.adaptive.cs.unm.edu/ -- Max On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Murat Girgin gir...@gmail.com wrote: Cunningham's Extreme Genetic Programming might be of interest: http://www.neocoretechs.com/. Murat On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 1:33 AM, John Nilsson j...@milsson.nu wrote: On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 3:20 AM, Casey Ransberger casey.obrie...@gmail.com wrote: I wonder: what if all we did was write the tests? What if we threw some kind of genetic algorithm or neural network at the task of making the tests pass? I've been having a similar thought for a while now, but its not really the test as such, it is more the declarative nature of the test. How would the programming model look like if the system was derived from formalized requirements (tests)? How would the system be derived (genetic algorithm)? My thinking is more focused on the programming model and how to divide the artifact development between the correct people than actual algorithms for auomatic derivation. F.ex. architectures could be expressed as libraries, a constraint solver or genetic algorithm can be fed the high level requirements and mine the architecture libraries to generate a basic architecture. The generated architecture concepts can then be referenced in new requirements to derive functions. Now the trick is, i believe, in stratifying the requirements when formalizing them. Low-level requirements is often dependent on solutions picked from high-level requirements. I.e. the color of the navigation menu should be red is not at the same level as the system presents a webshop. Still the dependency between the requirements is interesting to focus on. Would one revisit the choice of webshop maybe there is no navigation menu that can be red. I anticipate that the problem in developming and maintaining such a system is to keep referential integrity between requirements. Navigating Java in a modern IDE f.ex. makes it easy to find all references of an identifier which is vital when assessing the imact of a change. In a similar style high level requirements that affect lower level requirements must be easy to trace. To achieve such a system I have been thinking of implementing a meta language system in which languages can be declared, mixed and anlyzed together. By declaring transformations between langaugas the system would allow derived concepts in one language to depend on declared expressions in another language and assert referential integrity. BR, John ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] goals
I think Ryan has best articulated what it's all about for me anyway: regaining control of our technology. Simplicity and clarity are, to some extent, their own imperative. That's nothing new: Occam's Razor has long been the dominant aesthetic in mathematics and the natural sciences at least. In a world such as ours where all human endeavors are increasingly influenced (often unintentionally) by technological concerns, I feel it as a moral imperative as well. A computer is a necessary tool for engaging with the modern world of human knowledge and culture. A truly personal computer should be fully understandable and extensible, inside and out, by its individual users, without the users having to devote a disproportionate amount of effort to this understanding. If these users thereby become more productive, that's great too, but I don't think that's the major goal. -- Max On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 3:35 AM, Ryan Mitchley r...@peralex.com wrote: I would imagine that the goals align with the task of augmenting human intellect, to borrow Engelbart's phrase. The STEPS project, in particular, seems concerned with compact representations that approach the entropies of the systems being simulated. Computing, to me, anyway, is very closely linked to simulation. A compact representation is (hopefully) easier understand, thus making it suitable for educational purposes. However, it should also be more computationally efficient, as well as enabling greater productivity. I think it's also about regaining control of our technology. A modern computer system is composed of layer upon layer of ad hoc mechanics, short on architecture and long on details. There are few people who have a truly good understanding of the complete system from firmware to UI, including all the details in between, and it's not because the details are fundamentally complex - they simply involve huge amounts of rote learning. Something like Linux has grown somewhat organically, without any of the robustness that organic growth might imply. Given concerns about security and privacy - not to mention demonstrable correctness of operation - an easily decomposable, understandable system is hugely desirable. There should be bonus side effects, such as running well on lightweight mobile devices. I hope to see computing systems becoming vehicles for training intelligent agents that assist human endeavours - by automating menial tasks, freeing humans to concentrate on more interesting problems, while also leveraging the abilities that are trivial for computers, but hard for humans (large scale data processing, correlation and statistical analysis, particle simulation, etc.). I also hope to see more of the abilities that have traditionally been described as A.I. entering mainstream computation (goal-seeking behaviour, probabilistic reasoning). Disclaimer: http://www.peralex.com/disclaimer.html ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
[fonc] Other interesting projects?
Hello all. I'm an undergraduate student (formerly CS, now math) and I've been reading this list since the beginning of the STEPS project: this is one of the most promising things I'm aware of going on in computing right now. (I'm a big fan of Haskell's rising popularity, although it's more of a case of gradual improvement, building on the traditions of Lisp and ML etc..) Still, I'm puzzled how I've never seen anyone here mention the other famously compact, dynamic, self-contained system: Forth. There's been a recent resurgence of interest in stack languages, mostly around Slava Pestov's Factor (http://factorcode.org), which seems to me to share many themes with the STEPS/FoNC work, although it's certainly more pragmatic in orientation and less earth-shaking. Does anyone here have any experience with Forth or Factor that they'd care to comment on? Here's a Google Tech Talks video of Pestov introducing Factor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_0QlhYlS8g - Max OrHai ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Other interesting projects?
Thanks for asking. I don't really have much first hand experience here (which is why I asked in the first place), and that phrase doesn't immediately ring a bell. Factor has reflection, continuations, optional typing, and meta-programming features. It supports functional, OO, and dataflow programming; it can do concurrency in a few different ways, it has excellent support for lazy lists and PEGs, and yes it even has named variables if one really wants them. The full image (including IDE and some quite featureful libraries like a relational DB, XML parser, and http server/client) is about 30K lines of code I believe, and unlike Squeak it's quite easy to trim it down for release as a standalone application if so desired. I don't use it everyday, but I haven't yet found anything enormously problematic about it. I'd be happy to admit that my perspective is probably narrower than it could be, though: I'll defer to the more experienced. - Max On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 5:03 PM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: Hi Max, Well, what properties do you think might be enormously problematic with stack languages ? Cheers, Alan -- *From:* Max OrHai max.or...@gmail.com *To:* Fundamentals of New Computing fonc@vpri.org *Sent:* Sat, May 8, 2010 4:49:14 PM *Subject:* [fonc] Other interesting projects? Hello all. I'm an undergraduate student (formerly CS, now math) and I've been reading this list since the beginning of the STEPS project: this is one of the most promising things I'm aware of going on in computing right now. (I'm a big fan of Haskell's rising popularity, although it's more of a case of gradual improvement, building on the traditions of Lisp and ML etc..) Still, I'm puzzled how I've never seen anyone here mention the other famously compact, dynamic, self-contained system: Forth. There's been a recent resurgence of interest in stack languages, mostly around Slava Pestov's Factor (http://factorcode.org), which seems to me to share many themes with the STEPS/FoNC work, although it's certainly more pragmatic in orientation and less earth-shaking. Does anyone here have any experience with Forth or Factor that they'd care to comment on? Here's a Google Tech Talks video of Pestov introducing Factor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_0QlhYlS8g - Max OrHai ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
