Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the "brains" of robots. In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World's Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaid*large, clumsy, slow- moving but capable of general picking-up, arranging, cleaning and manipulation of various appliances. It will undoubtedly amuse the fairgoers to scatter debris over the floor in order to see the robot lumberingly remove it and classify it into "throw away" and "set aside." (Robots for gardening work will also have made their appearance.)
General Electric at the 2014 World's Fair will be showing 3-D movies of its "Robot of the Future," neat and streamlined, its cleaning appliances built in and performing all tasks briskly. (There will be a three-hour wait in line to see the film, for some things never change.)
It's really fun (and sometimes sigh-inducing) to see where he was accurate and where he wasn't. And, of course, the whole notion that we'd have a world's fair is among the inaccurate predictions.
The first thing this will be used for is going to be porn, not Shakespeare.
Hey, it's not "either-or".
HAMLET to OPHELIA: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
OPHELIA: No, my lord.
HAMLET: I mean, my head upon your lap?
OPHELIA: Ay, my lord.
HAMLET: Do you think I meant CoUNTry matters?
OPHELIA: I think nothing, my lord.
HAMLET: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.
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If we theorize some more and discover that yes, it's possible for us to 'crack' part of the universe hard enough to push it out of the metastable state....
There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. (L. Cohen)
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I bet when all the kids were super-excited about programming on the i386 with its "OMG VIRTUAL MEMORY!!!" the older guys who had worked on mainframes just rolled their eyes.
You talking about the same old grey beards that gasped when the kids opened the cover on a server and added their own memory, network adaptors, backplanes, disk drives, etc without having to call IBM out to do it?
Yeah, and then rolled their eyes again because the kids didn't know about change control, didn't notify the users about the outage, didn't verify that their backups were good (if they even had backups), and lost 6 months worth of corporate data as a result.
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However, not to be a denier just a questioner, how can we tell if this is just part of the statistical variations to be expected over time rather than an actual real trend?
A part of the answer to your question can be found here: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html . To get the full impact you need to watch the whole thing right to the very end, 3:15.
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Global atmospheric CO2 levels are highly cyclic, and have been above the current level many many times before
Not according to this: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html. (You need to watch all 3 minutes of it to get the point. It's rather dramatic.)
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The data exists to serve the needs of the business and programmers/developers work to serve those needs.
+1. Every developer should be made to write 100 times on the whiteboard: "The data belongs to the enterprise, not to the application."
Data architecture is a discipline in itself, not something a developer does off the side of his/her desk.
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Washington has begun to cross the Rubicon.
I thought Washington crossed the Delaware. When was he in Italy? Now I'm all confused.
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Quantity is no substitute for quality, but its the only one we've got.
