langreiter.com plain, simple: 2006-04-18

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2006-04-18

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 6793 days AGO

Peter C. Patton: "When Herb Sullivan first told me about the software implementation of his CHoPP technology, I reminded him of a termite colony. The mystery of a termite colony arises from the number of bits of information required to describe the architecture of a termite mound, a six-foot high structure commonly seen on the African savanna. The information required to design the architecture of the mound surpasses the number of neurons in a given termite's brain; no individual termite's brain is large enough to store the entire design. So where does the colony store it? Herb's response was that, of course, the architecture is not stored explicitly, each termite knows only its preprogrammed function and they all work together in a non-preemptive multi-tasking environment, each to do their own thing, which in sum is the thing of the colony. He then replied that ants do the same sorts of things as termites but do it in the daylight and are beautiful and shiny black or red creatures, rather than ugly and pasty white or semi-transparent, so he would rather call the technology ants."

Sounds like, er, Termite.

2006-04-18-ants

"Welcome to the Sun Secure Global Desktop demonstration server ... well, it was the demonstration server until it got mentioned on Slashdot - now it's only demonstrating how we didn't size it with this sort of load in mind."

2006-04-18-slashSize