Exploring my ignorance: the systems of uploaded people
Joseph Nebus
machines unassisted by humans on the scene brought to my mind stories
of uploaded people. As far as my very limited experience remembers
I've only encountered stories about uploaded/virtually-created people
whose software runs on a single server or else on quite compatible
servers.
And yet the experience of the computer industry suggests to me
that by the time it's possible to have an uploaded community there will
be several operating standards similar enough that folks will naively
think there's some way to have mutual contacts. Possibly this will be
aided by auxiliary programs (pets?) which struggle mightily to keep the
uploadeds' local standards of reality from collapsing entirely into
gibberish.
I don't remember that story, but someone's got to have written
it, and if so, who? It could be a _Romeo and Juliet_ for the asp.net
versus php divide.
--
Joseph Nebus
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William December Starr
nebusj-@-rpi-.edu (Joseph Nebus) said:
> And yet the experience of the computer industry suggests to me
> that by the time it's possible to have an uploaded community there
> will be several operating standards similar enough that folks will
> naively think there's some way to have mutual contacts. Possibly
> this will be aided by auxiliary programs (pets?) which struggle
> mightily to keep the uploadeds' local standards of reality from
> collapsing entirely into gibberish.
>
> I don't remember that story, but someone's got to have written it,
> and if so, who? It could be a _Romeo and Juliet_ for the asp.net
> versus php divide.
What's an asp.net? What's a php?
-- wds
David DeLaney
Well, because I'm rereading it, John C. Wright's Golden Transcendence trilogy
contains uploaded, vastened, transcended, etc., intelligences of a great many
kinds (though we see many of them only in passing, really), running on all
sorts of hardware, ranging from chemical-interaction pathways between sea
life of various sorts to sheets of neutronium with oddly encoded data to
super-cold substrates out past the orbit of Uranus. Translation routines are
needed in several cases just to get the intelligences to be ABLE to talk to
one another, and I'm assuming more are needed internally for some of them.
But it also extends this to the -people- involved; there's at least three
very different kinds of _mental_ architecture running around - Warlocks,
Invariants, and Cerebellines - who find it difficult to understand each
other's ways of thinking, reasoning-or-the-analogue-thereof processes, etc.
- and they get to use translation software as well. (I don't recall any plot
points where the translation software _itself_ surpasses the limits and
becomes self-aware.) This must also have some consequences for the various
mass-mind conglomerates around, who logically have to have ways to deal with
having humans of different underlying mental structure as some of their
presumably-interacting components...
Dave "between books 2 & 3 right now; Phaethon has gotten the support of
Daphne & Atkins in person, and many others in the background, and the Ship
is about to Sail" DeLaney
--
\/David DeLaney posting from d...@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.
Robert Carnegie
Linus Torvalds?
An "I'm a PC" falls in love with an "I'm a Mac"...
There seem to be a lot more "I'm a PCs"...
But it's more likely to be Linux Gnome vs. KDE.
I think _Accelerando_ does feature interacting computer characters
whose "physics model", if taken strictly, is not compatible with the
other character's survival. As would be a Phoenix in flames and a
snowman, which I don't think is in the book. But the software adjusts
so that you don't get hurt... except emotionally. (I don't know if
they can fix that with software.)
In a Doctor Who Victorian(?) story called "Ghost Light" there were a
mother and daughter(?) who talked about people "going to Java", but it
turned out they were (under mind control) killing them.
Joseph Nebus
They're ways of making web pages, particularly when you want to
have the page actually be some stuff that's in a database, like articles
from a blog or newspaper or whatnot, plus some fixed stuff like headers
and navigation bars and advertisement boxes and the like.
They do about the same kinds of things, although since asp.net
comes from Microsoft it will not surprise you to know it does some things
really easily and yet by construction will not produce a functional web
page that satisfies the specifications for valid HTML. Meanwhile since
php comes from Linux-dipped programmer types it will not surprise you to
know the name is actually a recursive acronym of the kind that produces a
dull pain in the teeth in place of humor.
--
Joseph Nebus
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Mike Schilling
> They do about the same kinds of things, although since asp.net
> comes from Microsoft it will not surprise you to know it does some
> things really easily and yet by construction will not produce a
> functional web page that satisfies the specifications for valid
> HTML.
I use the lowest-level parts of ASP.NET to build web services, but
never go near the upper layers. What does it get wrong about HTML?
Joseph Nebus
Oh, it's a little nagging thing. When it's used to produce
web pages that take the input of a form into a fresh page, which it is
rather good at, ASP.NET stores information about the page it came from
in a little tag given the id name '__VIEWSTATE', which doesn't appear
when the page renders but can be used by the server to gather data.
The catch is, HTML rules about id names include that they may
not start with the underscore character '_' (more specifically, they
must start with a letter, but can include underscores after the first
character position), and therefore the pages fail by default. It's a
trivial failure and I can't imagine any web browser having trouble
rendering the page on that ground, but, you know how it is.
(And I overstated in saying that ASP.NET couldn't make a valid
HTML page --- if there's not this form-submision stuff and therefore
no use for __VIEWSTATE there's no harm --- but it's close enough.)
--
Joseph Nebus
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