From the DailyTech, comes a story about an astronaut blunder on the ISS:
A NASA astronaut accidentally lost her toolbag while conducting a spacewalk
Astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper suffered an astronaut blunder after she mistakenly let go of her tool bag in space after a grease gun inside of her backpack-sized bag exploded.
"Uh, we have a lost tool," Stefanyshyn-Piper said as she watched the bag float away.
It seems that the grease gun began to leak inside of the bag, which inadvertently lubricated everything inside the bag. The bag floated away as she tried to manage the mess, but the lack of gravity proved too much.
This is why you don't let woman near tools, cars or International Space Stations.
Microsoft's greatest weakness will make itself increasingly felt as the software world moves to cloud computing and the SaaS (Software as a Service) model. The weakness? Microsoft is stuck using Microsoft Windows Server for its cloud computing servers, while its competitors use Linux.
There is simply no way Microsoft can maintain its integrity (by continuing to use its own OS on its servers) and be able to compete on a level playing field with firms using open source OS's on their server farms.
Wikipedia currently uses Linux for its 500 servers. Google uses Linux for all of its servers. Digg uses Linux for all of its servers. Open source, particularly Linux, is the market choice for running large server farms. This has come to be because Linux is more stable than Windows Server, on account of having millions of coders editing and contributing to its source code, whereas Microsoft's closed source approach limits the number of eyeballs that can edit and improve its software, and ensures that it can never be as robust as Linux.
Microsoft earns billions of dollars every year on sales of Windows Server and SQL Server, so it will resist doing any thing that could jeopardize the market share of these products, and therefore it will almost certainly sacrifice the efficiency advantage that adopting Linux for its server farms would give its SaaS initiatives, in order to support its own server OS.
This means that while Microsoft continues amassing billions of dollars via its established product lines, it will be hampered in its efforts to expand into the fastest growing sector of the software market: SaaS.
There has been much attention given to Intel's recent statement that computers' reasoning ability may exceed humans' in 40 years:
The firm predicts in just over 40 years machines may have the reasoning power of humans, though stopped short of saying they will become our masters and we will be forced to do their bidding.
"The industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago," said Justin Rattner, CTO of Intel said.
"There is speculation that we may be approaching an inflection point where the rate of technology advancements is accelerating at an exponential rate, and machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason, in the not so distant future." source
But the most profound part of Intel's statement has been overlooked, and that is the tacit speculation of an impeding Singularity. From the last paragraph: "there is speculation that we may be approaching an inflection point where the rate of technology advancements is accelerating at an exponential rate"
The Singularity is a hypothetical event where the rate of technological progress accelerates to the extant where it can no longer be defined, similar to the mathematical singularity that results from dividing 1 by 0.
Leading AI theorist Ray Kurzweil has spoken and written much about this theoretical event:
The Singularity is in some ways more like a religious subject, rather than a technological subject as it has enormous implications for the fate of man, the universe, mortality, and consciousness, by predicting that absolutism, infinite creation and infinite consciousness is our destiny. This kind of world view is something we are accustomed to hearing only from the religious perspective.
For the world's largest semiconductor company to speculate that it could occur, suggests we live in a much more interesting and dynamic world than those who understand the world through the prism of science and observable reality, versus faith and religion, are accustomed to believing in.
