Book Reviews


[Day Permalink] Thursday, October 24, 2002

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Jon's Radio writes: "My weekly column. For seven weeks now, I've been writing a weekly column on strategic software development issues. It's currently being delivered primarily as an email newsletter, but the columns are now also posted online. I'll blurb them here going forward, and will also collect them in my InfoWorld category. It has its own RSS feed for those interested in tracking my magazine work (columns plus other articles) not published in full here in this weblog. Note that there is also an InfoWorld columnists feed."


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Supercomputers for science: "Since Neurome Inc. was formed two years ago, its appetite for powerful computers and more data storage space has grown so rapidly that it now uses up 100 gigabytes a week." [Google Technology News]


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Doug Engelbart on improving collective IQ: "[Engelbart] argues that our criteria for investment in innovation are, in fact, short-sighted and focused on the wrong things. He proposes, instead, investment in an improvement infrastructure that can result in sustained, radical innovation capable of changing computing and expanding the kinds of problems that we can address through computing." [Seb's Open Research]


[Item Permalink] What is a Universal Rule? -- Comment()
I started to wonder what the phrase 'universal rule' means in everyday use. For me the phrase is familiar from mathematics and computer science, but the other meanings are not so familiar. Thus I made a Google search of the Usenet newsgroups, and found quite a few nice examples. The following are taken out of context. Finding the original sources (and meaning) is left as an exercise for the reader.

Universal rule of life;

"When a passenger of foot heave in sight,
tootle the horn. Trumpet him melodiously
at first, but if he still obstacles your
passage, tootle him with vigor."
  -From a brochure at a Tokyo car rental firm

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Universal Rule of Pinball:

As I understand it, the way it works is if you don't hit anything but the middle, the ball comes back, since it thinks that the launcher just shot the ball back into the hole.

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There are a few universal rules which have been around for a long time, things like "Don't spit into the wind!" and "Don't draw on the Lone Ranger!".

Here's a new one: Don't let your wife count your Viagra tablets!

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"Last applied takes precedence" is not a universal rule; in fact, it's not even a rule at all--the rule is "apply existing effects in the order played", which usually works out to "last applied takes precedence" but doesn't always. And "apply in the order played" is not a universal rule; there are cases where more specific rules apply.

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Universal rules are identifiable when *all* human cultures have always adopted the same rule, although even then, cultural mores may influence how that universal rule is interpreted. For instance the universal rule against theft is dependent on the cultural definition of property, and the universal rule against causing needless harm is dependent on cultural definitions of what is "needless", and (though to a lesser extent) even what is "harmful".

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And worse yet, the more prestigious the publication, the more insipid the poetry. Perhaps it's in keeping with the universal rule: 95% of everything is nonsense.

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"Now that we've mapped the human genome, it has been proven that the universal rule is 95% of everything is nonsense...including this advert."

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One universal rule applies everywhere: the entering traffic should try to match the speed of the traffic stream into which it is attempting to merge.

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Friesen implies that there exists some general rule in the history of science that every theory held as true which is later falsified is always subsumed as a special case in some more general theory which replaces it. While this does occur sometimes it is hardly a general or universal rule in the history of science.

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You are presuming to apply a 'universal rule' which is NOT universal. The 'universal rule' you presume is that 'we all agree we shouldn't kill others.' But in the face of individual self-defense, we realize that rule is NOT 'universally accepted.' I certainly DO NOT want it to be a 'universal rule' that we should not kill others, if I see myself threatened with annihilation by another entity.


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Tiger Launch 1.0 Released: "Ranchero Software has released Tiger Launch 1.0, an open source application launcher for Mac OS X. TigerLaunch is an easy-to-use and easy-to-configure application launcher for OS X.It displays an Apps menu at the top of your screen listing all your applications in alphabetical order[~]no matter what folder they appear in. You can easily configure it to exclude applications you rarely or never launch." [MacMegasite]