Slashdot Mirror

If someone could either correct me or find the article I remember reading it in, but didn't Golden Tee become the #1 arcade game of all time (in units sold) like last year?

This article brings up only 50,000 units sold.

Sounds like you might be talking about Community Memory. Now, for some shameless whoring:

• Remembering Community Memory The Berkeley beginnings of online community
• Community Memory

Steven Levy's Hackers has a chapter about the Community Memory project.

There was Lee Lee Felsenstein's Community Memory project to do an electronic bulletin board system throughout the Bay area, run by a group called "Loving Grace Cybernetics" Probably what you're thinking about.

I think cory doctorow best explains why this doesn't work in Metacrap.

My bible for this argument is basicly here: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia

People are lazy, People are stupid and the system is not scalable to larger enterprises without problems.

People being lazy is possibly the greatest problem: Very few people are going to sit down and add descriptions to all their photographs, documents and video footage. Currently Metadata is common in Music only. I don't claim to know why this is, but my best guess is it's probably because it is not a visual file and there's no way of previewing it without watching. (As opposed to seeing a thumbnail of a document/movie/picture.) If the system is incomplete and any single file doesn't have metadata added, the system is effectively useless because as with anything which is unreliable, it will fall into disuse and there will be less incentive to add metadata to files, so less people use the feature due to decreased reliability and the sitation continues to snowball.

People not knowing everything about their content is also a problem. Meta data can only identify what we know as it is added by humans. If i was confronted by Java Source Code for a program, I wouldn't be able to read it and I would not know what to describe it as.

A Meta data based system also scales up badly to network/internet size solutions. Not only is the first problem amplified the larger the system is (more people being lazy, also less confidence that everyone will do their bit in adding metadata) but an inherent problem is that in a webwide Meta data system, people have hidden agendas, and they lie. The largest web-scale meta data implemantation we have at the moment is META tags in web page markup. I don't think I need to explain why these are often ridiculed - people lie. META tags are often abused by sites to get more hits: adding Britney Spears, XXX, pr0n etc will boost a page's rank. (This is often misguided, as more hits may occur, they they will not be relevant and leave the site straight away, however this is besides the point - they still input incorrect metadata into the system.) The problem has got to the stage where Google really doesn't pay all that much attention to META tags in comparison to the page's actual content and a monitoring of it's popularity with visitors searching for a certain subject.

This last point might not be a problem with Spotlight currently, as a systemwide index it's not affected by it - however on an enterprise level there are instances where it could be a problem even over a LAN or WAN and afterall, the Internet is just computers connected together so this metadata is really useless on a larger scale in the same way that METAtags are now almost redundant in HTML, or or the RIAA has been able to spoof meta data on P2P networks to fool fileswappers.

Don't tell me - he slipped in the shower?

The policy on The Well, an online conferencing system that's been around since 1984, established a policy to address this issue long ago:

You own your own words.

That is, you retain complete ownership of -- and therefore responsibility and liability for -- whatever you write. This relieves The Well of any liability for the actions/writings of their posters, and the posters can rest assured that neither The Well nor any other user will turn around and sell their writings to someone else without permission. This policy, referred to by Well members with the acronym YOYOW, has been in place and has worked fairly well for the last 20 or so years.

YOYOW: Ask for it by name :-).

Schwab

For the last thousand years mankind has torn down forrests, polluted the environment, brought disease and predators to foreign lands.

Neal Stephenson works for Blue Origin as a consultant. Reference here.

"The Internet reacts to censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore (frequently misattributed to Howard Rheingold)

Rusty Schweickart is the only independent involved in the venture. A quick google query brought me to his homepage, where there are some very nifty links to space stuff.

Astronauts make good sources for space-related links!

Rusty Schweickart is the only independent involved in the venture. A quick google query brought me to his homepage, where there are some very nifty links to space stuff.

Astronauts make good sources for space-related links!

Rusty Schweickart is the only independent involved in the venture. A quick google query brought me to his homepage, where there are some very nifty a href="http://www.well.com/user/rs/links.h

Rusty Schweickart is the only independent involved in the venture. A quick google query brought me to his homepage, where there are some very nifty links to space stuff.

Astronauts make good sources for space-related links!

Rusty Schweickart is the only independent involved in the venture. A quick google query brought me to his homepage, where there are some very nifty links to space stuff.

Astronauts make good sources for space-related links!

Rusty Schweickart is the only independent involved in the venture. A quick google query brought me to his homepage, where there are some very nifty a href="http://www.well.com/user/rs/links.h

Rusty Schweickart is the only independent involved in the venture. A quick google query brought me to his homepage, where there are some very nifty links to space stuff.

Astronauts make good sources for space-related links!

Rusty Schweickart is the only independent involved in the venture. A quick google query brought me to his homepage, where there are some very nifty links to space stuff.

Astronauts make good sources for space-related links!

Rusty Schweickart is the only independent involved in the venture. A quick google query brought me to his homepage, where there are some very nifty a href="http://www.well.com/user/rs/links.h

Rusty Schweickart is the only independent involved in the venture. A quick google query brought me to his homepage, where there are some very nifty links to space stuff.

Astronauts make good sources for space-related links!

Rusty Schweickart is the only independent involved in the venture. A quick google query brought me to his homepage, where there are some very nifty links to space stuff.

Astronauts make good sources for space-related links!

Rusty Schweickart is the only independent involved in the venture. A quick google query brought me to his homepage, where there are some very nifty a href="http://www.well.com/user/rs/links.h

Rusty Schweickart is the only independent involved in the venture. A quick google query brought me to his homepage, where there are some very nifty links to space stuff.

Astronauts make good sources for space-related links!

Rusty Schweickart is the only independent involved in the venture. A quick google query brought me to his homepage, where there are some very nifty links to space stuff.

Astronauts make good sources for space-related links!

Rusty Schweickart is the only independent involved in the venture. A quick google query brought me to his homepage, where there are some very nifty a href="http://www.well.com/user/rs/links.h

Does it strike you as odd that these people are putting millions of dollars into the most advanced visualization system currently known to man, and the best they can come up with is essentially a three-monitor spread? I realize that they are using a bunch of projectors to produce a complex image, but shouldn't we be reaching toward something more out of the ordinary, like our sci-fi writers have already visualized? When William Gibson wrote about virtual reality, Jaron Lanier and his contemporaries said, "That's a neat idea. We can do that." So, what's up here?

D'OH! You must have posted this while I was writing my explanation of Set. My family loves this game. I think it's harder than it sounds because it overflows the average person's "Seven, Plus or Minus Two" buffer.

Hey, everyone: Take a look at his web page. You'll find the answers to 50% of the questions here. (90% if you don't count the "why are your endings so abrupt" questions)

Let's try to keep Neal's answers to /. from being, "See FAQ"

You might be particularly interested in this link, at the very top of the page:

my relationship to Blue Origin LLC

Hey, everyone: Take a look at his web page. You'll find the answers to 50% of the questions here. (90% if you don't count the "why are your endings so abrupt" questions)

Let's try to keep Neal's answers to /. from being, "See FAQ"

You might be particularly interested in this link, at the very top of the page:

my relationship to Blue Origin LLC

>Neal, in Cryptonomicon why did you call Windows and MacOS by
> their true names but used the fictitious name 'Finux' to refer
>to what is obviously 'Linux?' Does this mean that you hate Linux?

Since Finux was the principal operating system used by the characters in the book, I needed some creative leeway to have the fictitious operating system as used by the characters be different in minor ways from the real operating system called Linux. Otherwise I would receive many complaints from Linux users pointing out errors in my depiction of Linux. This is why Batman works in Gotham City, instead of New York--by putting him in Gotham City, the creators afforded themselves the creative license to put buildings in different places, etc.

There already is a data haven, on Sealand. It's even mentioned on Neal's own site. :)

From Neal's web page:

>Neal, in Cryptonomicon why did you call Windows and MacOS by > their true names but used the fictitious name 'Finux' to refer >to what is obviously 'Linux?' Does this mean that you hate Linux?

Since Finux was the principal operating system used by the characters in the book, I needed some creative leeway to have the fictitious operating system as used by the characters be different in minor ways from the real operating system called Linux. Otherwise I would receive many complaints from Linux users pointing out errors in my depiction of Linux. This is why Batman works in Gotham City, instead of New York--by putting him in Gotham City, the creators afforded themselves the creative license to put buildings in different places, etc.

We can't stop people from having kids. We can try and conserve natural resources, but eventually the number of people will be more than the planet can support.

Over-population is not quite the problem you think it is. In the United States, pop growth has slowed to a crawl, and most of our growth is due to immigration.

Developed countries the world over have slow (and declining) birthrates. Heck, Italy is trying to encourage their population to reproduce - they are suffering from net population decrease!

World population, based on current trends, is due to stabilize around 2075 at around 9 million people.

There are a number of reasons for this. Affluent people tend to have fewer kids, merely because they are a hassle. In the more impoverished nations, existing infrastructure is failing to provide for current needs, let alone future growth. For example, one of the largest mass poisonings ever in human history is taking place in Asia because of arsenic-laced drinking water.

<RANT>

What truly amazes me is the sheer number of people who don't google whatever they're talking about before they say it. The volume of uninformed, stupid comments on the Internet that can be corrected with 10 minutes of googling and quick research is mind-boggling.

People with access to this kind of information should not be making the stupid comments they are. That they do, anyway, and don't get flogged on the streets is a mere testament to the fact that humanity does not yet value intelligence and critical thinking over stupidity.

I daresay we are entering a new era of humanity - the era of the informed but ignorant idiot. The information is there - cheap, easily available. Tools that our ancestors would have killed for - and we use it to pass along mundane drivel because "we feel" or "we think" rather than actually use that tool to anywhere near its true potential.

Sad. TV is used for network television and advertising, instead of mass education and information. News shows on TV are remarkably shallow and uninformative. The best bet are the "nature" shows, which are nice but curiously designed towards complacency.

We are in the middle of a mass extinction event brought about, no doubt, by people who chcose not to be informed, and make decisions based on ego and inadequate information.

We need to pay attention, people!

</RANT

The article failed to mention flying cars, another no-duh prediction that seemed completely obvious, and won't happen either.

A short while ago, Cory Doctorow published an piece entitled Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia, which mentioned two very good reasons why the semantic web won't take off the same way that these articles predict: schemas aren't neutral, and there's more than one way to describe something. These are basic problems that have been hounding AI research for years, dictionary & encyclopedia publishers for centuries, and all other academics for millenia, and they aren't going to go away.

The central problem with universal metadata is that it requires informed work on the part of data creators, and it's a major pain in the ass. The OED took almost a century to create, and the first few decades were essentially wasted figuring out that dilletantes were not adequately capable of properly cataloging use of language. Even with a profit motive, good metadata is a bitch (see EBay comment in the article above).

It's like the senator's (I forget who) comment about pornography: "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." Often, we don't know what it is we're looking for exactly, and we don't know how to describe what we've got so other people can find it except in very narrow terms. I have a few creative projects which I've released under the creative commons license and dutifully marked up with cc's provided RDF information, but all that code just says what the license is, not what the project is like in a way that's as meaningful as, for example, a music recommendation from a friend who knows your tastes. The porn industry (as usual, on the bleeding edge of information and communications technology) deals with this to some degree by having a very narrow semantic universe to describe: Search Extreme is a stupendously complete metadata set, but even it contains only a few kinds of information.

I was going to write something like Metacrap, but now I don't have to.

• Metacrap
• Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview

"Good topic for a Psych Major to do a thesis on, but that's about it."

The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information

by George A. Miller

originally published in The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97

http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html

The image shown would "vibrate", it moved wonky, but there definitely was depth to the image. You could record the image, and play it back, and it was still there - a form of 3D that required no changes in broadcast or recording equipment, no glasses needed to view, and no special viewing system to watch - in short, it allowed 3D to be created by anyone, to be viewed by anyone (as long as they had one working eyeball!), on any standard video equipment. I have never seen this technology demonstrated anywhere else, nor did the company which presented its work (along with video clips that were fun to watch) go on to produce these boxes for sale - the technology and the company just seemed to "vanish" (is it any wonder?).

The closest I have been able to find about how this technology works can be seen here. Please note that the site has "not safe for work" imagery on it...

This site's images, along with another poster's (below) comments about "temporal 3D" via running two movies out of sync, basically gives me a clue as to what they were originally doing:

I believe (now) that the box was somehow delaying the signal, every other frame, then interpolating those frames in/among the regular video frames and sending them down the wire. This isn't a very good explanation - basically, they were doing a combination of the temporal viewing with the "flicker GIF" of two stereo views (but without stereo, just time between the two frames) to generate the image. At the time, it must have been really expensive (for the RAM to buffer the image, etc) - although I wonder if they could have been de-interlacing frames and sending/reconstituting the frames by double-lacing the de-interlaced frames to make up the lost pixels, then showing each one (because each field of the frame would be out of sync by 1/15 second - maybe enough time to do the temporal 3D? - and it wouldn't require more than simple electronics rather than RAM buffering).

Aside from the flicker 3D images on the web (ie, those two different angle 3D animated GIF's like I noted above) - does anybody else remember seeing that episode of "That's Incredible", or anything else about the device? The episode was on in the mid-1980's or so...

• People lie
• People are lazy
• People are stupid
• Mission: Impossible -- know thyself ("People are lousy observers of their own behaviors. Entire religions are formed with the goal of helping people understand themselves better; therapists rake in billions working for this very end.")
• Schemas aren't neutral
• Metrics influence results
• There's more than one way to describe something

;)

Most people can hold three or four things in their minds at once when given a quick glimpse of an image such as a collection of coloured dots, ...

Did it not also depend on what kind of (was it) chunks you store (if this is at all what is stored in should it perhaps be ultra-) STM ?

Where it "started":

The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information
by George A. Miller
originally published in The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97


CC.

He explicitly writes"

I do not accept any responsibilities there that would conflict with my work as an author or that would exceed the limits of my competence

Visa International (formerly Bank of America) did.

And this Liberty Alliance would do well to understand the experience of Interbank/Master{card|charge}. Properly implemented open systems can explode on the scene when conditions are right...in both finance and networking.

The BankAmericard now is back as...get this...a Mastercard!

Some posters perceive a climate of hostility on Slashdot to certain ideas, particularly pro-Microsoft and pro-government-regulation ones.

Although these ideas may attract a disproportionate share of hostile reaction, the very fact that they generate so much reaction indicates that people are interested enough in the ideas to debate them. It suggests that a large number users are looking for an argument.

Passionate intensity is no measure of truth and is often a mask for uncertainty. However, it can be a measure of the importance of an idea or proposition. It indicates that something important may be at stake.

The benefit for more dispassionate readers is that they often learn more when conflicting ideas are forcefully presented than when everyone takes a measured approach.

I agree to an extent, which is why I mentioned rendered Jue from Final Flight Of The Osiris in the Animatrix (probably the best 3D rendered person I've seen yet, better than Dawn, IMO). As with most things 3D a lot depends on the artists... so I'm guessing a decent 3D scanner and a willing model will make this attainable to the average porn overlord (when 3D scanner prices drop a bit more). I was aware that it has been around for a long time, and quite possibly stereo 3D doesn't work for most people, but I think it makes an interesting feature for a site. Eitherway, interactivity is a must.

Of course, a dedicated fan might do a Cat Bus conversion on his car!

Cory Doctorow has a great analysis of why most metadata schemes become less and less useful. This is also where he described the ebay "Plam Pilot" phenomenon that the NYT picked up on a little while back.

I don't see how adding 'metadata' is going to help. If people are unwilling to give their files meaningful filenames or organize them in directories, then how can they be expected to provide properly describe their data?

An interesting article that addresses this and several other points is here.

Been playing AA since it first came out, and when there was no servers for the first 3 days, major slashdotting on the game servers. It has come along way, many military departments, and outfits added. The gfx are decent, the levels are nice and designed like real life landscapes. The game has a good sense of game play, attack/defend, or rescue/defend hostage/aid workers.. Nothing really overtly political in the game, other than the enemy looks like the region you are in, which make sense, Russia, Africa, etc.

But if you reference this game and Iraq, Iraq is a Police Action. Different styles of combat, this game doesnt show whats its like to patrol borders, do house to house searches, or night incursions into an enemy city. Maybe they need to add those scenarios.
-
Just, kicking back listening to Country Joe and the Fish...

You must have a shorter attention span than George Bush! That web page (Mass Extinction Underway)is not just ONE article-- it has HUNDREDS of links to studies and articles from countless sources including Science Magazine, Scientific American, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, the IUCN, Smithsonian, National Geographic, BBC, CNN, New York Times, etc., etc.

The author of the above post has shown zero scientific credentials. The author of the above post has referred to zero peer reviewed studies. The author of the above post has not once considered the posibility of the other side's views, let alone the ramifications.

I am not a climatologist. You are not a climatologist. The vast majority of the people engaging in this debate are not climatologists. Who am I supposed to trust? This is a big, big deal. Global warming or no global warming, we're in the middle of one of the biggest mass extinctions in Earth's history and people are still bickering about politics. Why isn't this front page news? Why aren't we fighting tooth and nail to try and save our planet, our resources and ultimately our way of life?

- There's nothing to gain from going to Mars
This argument pretty much is true. We really should settle the gobi desert before we settle mars.

here.

I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert.

The 'decrease in biodiversity' has been going on for as long as man has walked on two feet.

Not at the current rate, it hasn't. You offer some anecdotal evidence about horses being wiped out in North America by Native Americans (which I don't find inconceivable), but this has scant relevance to the present debate. What has far more relevance is the mounting evidence that Earth may be experiencing one of the largest mass extinctions of all time. This has not been going on since Man first walked on two feet.

A thread of anti-modernism runs deep within many intellectual circles

Judging from the quality of your rhetoric, I'm amazed at your familiarity with these "intellectual circles".

I am not a climatologist. You are not a climatologist. The vast majority of the people engaging in this debate are not climatologists. Who am I supposed to trust? This is a big, big deal. Global warming or no global warming, we're in the middle of one of the biggest mass extinctions in Earth's history and people are still bickering about politics. Why isn't this front page news? Why aren't we fighting tooth and nail to try and save our planet, our resources and ultimately our way of life?

Bruce is in the midst of a two week discussion about the state of the world hosted by the WELL. You can post a comment or ask a question directly to the topic if you're a WELL member; if not, you can send a comment or question to inkwell-hosts at well.com, and they'll post it for you.

"Probably the single thing I do personally that reduces the crude havoc on the Internet is avoiding the Windows OS. Use a Mac, for heaven's sake. Stop adding to the pollution of viruses, and stop offering slave machines that spew spam for others."
- Bruce Sterling

Source: 2004 Bruce Sterling State of the World Address

There is also Bruce's yearly visit to the Well's Inkwell.vue: The 2004 Bruce Sterling State of the World Address.

And, don't forget Bruce's new weblog at Wired: Beyond the Beyond.

I think as the web matures, these so called 'rules' will be rewritten. No hysterical 'end of rules' proclamations need be sounded.

The 3 click rule made more sense during the bubble when there was a glut of sites for every category. Or when there really wasn't a definitive site for any one purpose. When a person knows there are a multitude of sites they can look at, they are reluctant to go too deep on any one site. I can recall using 3-5 search engines every time I was looking for something. I would look at the first result page and then try another engine. Now I only hit Google, but I'll look as deep as I need to.

The 7+/-2 rule is based on a cognitive psychological idea first put forth in an article by George A. Miller, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information. In it he argues that the average person can really only hold about 5-9 things in immediate memory at one time.
I don't believe that is an internet design 'rule' that should be ignored, too many choices in one space will overwhelm your average users.

Gongrijp knows what he's talking about. He was one of the founders of Hacktic magazine, a "magazine for techno-anarchists" that was published from 1989 till 1994. Hacktic publications included schematics for pay television descramblers, detailed expositions of operating system vulnerabilities, articles on "social engineering" (I think they might even have coined the phrase), and numerous topics on hacking the phone company ("phreaking") and war dialing.

These guys have also organized some huge hacker conferences such as Hacking at the End of the Universe in 1993 and Hacking In Progress in 1997 (I was there in '97). Later Hacktic professionalized and they became the first ISP in the Netherlands. Still later that turned into XS4ALL, probably the best ISP in the Netherlands.

Through everything, Gongrijp ("Public Enemy #1") was a driving force. If he says the phone is secure, then that's a pretty damn strong endorsement.