This isn't what I intended on posting next, but I'm just going to jot down some ideas in between programming, because it's just so cool.
Everything has to be flawless because then the code can be reused and actually readily available. If a program can do what it's name says it should be able to do, you'd think anyone can use it, right? Since they -
Damnit. Roomate walked in with his program and now I lost my train of thought.
To me, sharing really is the way to go. Humans know how to do it, let's do it more often. That's what Open Source software accomplishes. Anyone can go ahead and use it, it's free.
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software with its source code made available and licensed with an open-source license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change and distribute the software for free to anyone and for any purpose. Open-source software is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open-source software is the most prominent example of open-source development and often compared to (technically defined) user-generated content or (legally defined) open-content movements.
A report by the Standish Group (from 2008) states that adoption of open-source software models has resulted in savings of about $60 billion per year to consumers
For more information, click here.
Crazy, right? People working collaboratively even though they don't know each other nor directly benefit by helping? What has this world COME to?
It's called making a better future. Research. Development. Technology. That's where it's at people, not making a quick buck. In the long run, being personally prosperous is so selfish. Create and make things because they help people become happier. Not only does it help others, it also helps yourself since you invented the damn thing. So now you're happier because you have this thing that helps with a stress of yours, of saves you time in your day, so that you can now develop more things faster. Does that sound like exponential growth - or rather, Moore's Law to you?
Right now, we need to work on transfer speeds, and the rate of finding data. Solid State Drives (SSDs) are the future, people. If we can get SSDs cheap, we can transfer information at faster speeds. Add into the mix efficient Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and we have ourselves picking up the slack on the processing power for transferring data. Now start thinking about the speed of light. Kinda really fast, right? Yeah, now put that speed into a goddamn cable. We call that Fiber Optics.
Why haven't we combined all of this yet?
(Hint, it's green, has a unique scent to it, and is all over the news.)
You guessed it, MONEY!
All of that stuff costs a lot of it! And guess what? In our society we've made the saying "Money makes the world go 'round" absolutely true. Good ol' society. Letting certain people have what they want just because they decided money was a good thing. I'm not arguing that it's bad, but dealing with money could be thought of differently, and if people took a different attitude towards money, maybe then we could collaborate and come together for science.
Food for thought:
Now apply all of this to organic materials. This is known as Organic Computing.
I should make this into a TED talk, or something of the sort. If anyone honestly agrees with me, post here.
