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On a similar note, I wish more teachers, students and educators had adopted Hypercard and kept it alive! Poor documentation is a huge problem in both education and mainstream/alternative software. Greater usage and skills in Hypercard could have sustained educational computing through many of the dark years.

Unfortunately, history has shown that educational computing has been widely abused in the 90s and 2000s. Instead of using simple, inexpensive software to advance teaching, cheap PCs with poor software have been unloaded on hapless schools - costing a lot of money, and confounding teachers who haven't been provided with adequate training, or decent software tools. It was a crazy bonanza of spending on inappropriate technology when schools were encouraged to "adopt" IT and computing. But now the spending-spree is over, with schools and government having to live with their poor decisions, while not being able to afford replacements. If only some sensible decisions had been made a decade ago, we might not have to live with this crap today!

I can't read TFA, it appears WIRED is slashdotted:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,67190, 00.html#
So I see your mirror site:
( http://www.networkmirror.com/ )
and go to the Appropriate Link:
http://www.networkmirror.com/CC_qTtXVggGorP95/www. wired.com/news/technology/0%2C1282%2C67190%2C00.ht ml%23.html
but that doesn't have any mirrored content.

Speaking of "Easter eggs" and the recent holiday, I can only imagine these photographs (since I can't actually see TFP's), perhaps one from the mideast with a big crowd throwing rocks at three guys hanging on crosses...

True. On the other hand, people who have non-mainstream tastes do represent a significant portion of the market. The sooner that television-style content finds a way to address niche tastes, the happier I'll be...

We released a video we made for Portland band The Decemberists to bittorrent on purpose. We've had much greater impact from that than the few times MTV2 aired it.

Wired article details how and why.

For everyone concerned some four weeks later it's been an enormous success.

As I often mention, a solution that everybody seems to be ignoring is putting up a new telescope, the Hubble Origins Probe. This new telescope would be more capable than the original Hubble and cost less than a robotic repair mission. For whatever reason, this possibility is almost never mentioned, although it's IMHO the best option by far.

Obligatory blurb:

Astronomy Magazine reports that an international team of astronomers has proposed an alternative to sending a robotic or human repair mission to the ailing Hubble Space Telescope. Their proposal is to build a new Hubble Origins Probe, reusing the Hubble design but using lighter and more cost-effective technologies. The probe would include instruments currently waiting to be installed on Hubble, as well as a Japanese-built imager which 'will allow scientists to map the heavens more than 20 times faster than even a refurbished Hubble Space Telescope could.' It would take an estimated 65 months and under $1 billion to build, less than the estimated cost of a service mission.

seriously, does no one else but me remember SASH? (which spawned SASH-XB)

http://sash.alphaworks.ibm.com/
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,37969, 00.html
http://www.sashxb.org/

people playing pity violins for konfabulator can go fuck themselves.

-z

I bet their internal board meetings are a riot.

Actually the pity and irony is: they're more likely two distinct, separate, exclusive board meetings. One for hardware, one for music label. (and technically a third for movie studio / multimedia label.) Note: I am not speaking from experience, merely word of mouth feedback. IANASE (I am not a Sony Employee.)

Sony, the electronics manufacturer, has its own agenda. Sony Music (now officially Sony-BMG Music) has an obvious other agenda. This gets worse too, because the Japanese company doing all the real innovation in design of electronics products, etc. has next to no contact with the US / North American one. Some products trickle down, yes, but not nearly as many of the 'cool' ones they put out in Japan.

Wired had a fantastic article almost two years ago now called The Civil War Inside Sony. Definitely worth a read.

One should not confuse the two (electronics manufacturer and music label.) Just because you see the "Sony" brand on an mp3 player doesn't mean at ALL that Sony Music had anything to do with it.

If the company was really smart they would co-brand Sony electronics products with Sony music artists. That's the biggest no brainer ever and they have yet to do anything like this. (Not that I would buy a "Jennifer Lopez MP3 player" but I'm sure somebody would.)

ad

It is ironic that a company which ostensibly should be better at reconciling the competing interests of hardware developers and music distributors is still stumbling with this stuff.

Suprisingly it's not a lot different than human intelligence

And you get a Godwin award, of course.

Ack...damn HTML. The full post was:
Bastarding a research network? I disagree. All they were doing was ... uhh, stress testing the network by sending random bits of data that just happened to look like movies and porn when viewed with a media player.

On a more serious note, while the file swapping was illegal, it did help network engineers figure out how to prepare for the future when everyone has the same bandwidth to their homes as university dorms. When people can send a full CD of data in < 2 minutes (it choked on the 100mbit link to my computer), the modern movie industry will have to adapt just like the modern music industry has with iTunes. This gets worse for the *AA when everyone has a terabyte hard drive and can just ask friends to IM the files rather than search on a P2P network. Legal action just pushes the crimes further underground like banning alcohol with the Prohibition.

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Wired article as proof

Bastarding a research network? I disagree. All they were doing was ... uhh, stress testing the network by sending random bits of data that just happened to look like movies and porn when viewed with a media player.

On a more serious note, while the file swapping was illegal, it did help network engineers figure out how to prepare for the future when everyone has the same bandwidth to their homes as university dorms. When people can send a full CD of data in
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In case you missed it, VeriSign sold Network Solutions October 16, 2003

The funny part is the ROI on this deal: they bought NetSol in 2000 for $21 billion in stock, then sold it in 2003 for $100 million in stock and debt.

So a better option to Nuclear might be those Solar Stack Power Generators. as seen in wired.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66694, 00.html/

After all its a big funnel to at least the mid-atmosphere, and it produces power that could be used to make the ozone.

And MIT did it to Harvard first. (#7) They weren't even original in their choice of schools.

Sadly, though, that was just a copy of a previous MIT hack. (#7 on that list, it just gets overshadowed by its more-famous balloon twin.)

And then MIT will loose to the high school kids from Phoenix.

Following is a modified version of a submission from last month, relevant to this discussion. I believe Edwards' group is planning on competing in the competition. Hopefully congress will lift the $250K prize restriction, allowing NASA to award larger prizes and truly stimulate research in this area:

MSNBC, Space.com, and Wired report that NASA, in collaboration with the non-profit Spaceward Foundation, has announced its first two Centennial Challenges. The Centennial Challenges, inspired by the Ansari X Prize and DARPA Grand Challenge, are prize contests seeking to stimulate private industry development of technologies relevant to space exploration. One contest is the Tether Challenge, for building the sort of super-strong tether needed to make a space elevator feasible. The other is the Beam Power Challenge, for creating a wirelessly-powered ribbon-climbing robot capable of lifting as large a payload as possible within a limited timeframe. The initial set of challenges in 2005 will award $50K to the winners of each contest. A second set of challenges in 2006 will award first, second, and third place prizes worth $100K, $40K, and $10K. It's hoped that these contests will further space elevator technology and help eliminate the 'giggle factor' surrounding them. Additional contests will be announced in the coming weeks, although Congress currently restricts NASA from awarding prizes of more than $250K; the agency is lobbying to try to get this limit raised to $40 million for future prizes.

overall population density of about 113 persons per sq. km

The population of Portugal is ageing, with nearly 3.5 million people over the age of 50 in 2003

almost half of the population is economically active

Brazil has a [portuguese speaking] population of approximately 151 million

I think this is leaps and bounds better than lame half-assed attempt by Google, especially considering that Brain Boost works with ALL questions, doesn't require ANY HUMAN input and is completely and totally AUTONOMOUS.

Google sucks, Brain Boost rules! I want a direct interface to Brain Boost, like this guy. :)

The article says "Hard Drive(s): This is an easy one. Buy the biggest 7200 rpm IDE drive that you can afford." which is a bad choice. While it is good to have a fast main hard drive, it might be better to invest in a nice tower case and cram it with multiple slower hard drives in a RAID 5 configuration. Since a terrabyte (5x250GB in RAID 5) is only around $500, it might be worth it to have a central media server. This lets you rip your DVDs and CDs for easy access. These hard drives don't have to be fast since you won't normally be writing a live stream to them but just using them as a slow storage. The 7200 HD would contain the OS and enough temp space to capture and play live video without a problem.

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Wired article as proof

Fortunately the debate is already underway. I'm sure many of us recall Bill Joy's piece in Wired a few years back:

http://wired-vig.wired.com//wired/archive/8.04/joy _pr.html "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us"

In short, Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, suggests that as technological systems grow increasingly complex humanity will loose its ability to control the systems it depends on.

Sci-fi authors' take on this is either grey-goo or terminator -- apocalyptic visions.

Reality will probably be much less exciting, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned.

Wolfe's opinion is a sterling example of how nanotech -- and not nanotech itself but even the idea of nanotech has potential to strip away human control.

He says that we should abandon our traditions of public discourse because public discourse will get in the way of economic and scientific "progress."

But isn't thought and discussion, even if it is sometimes hyperbolic or overly concerned, an essentially human activity that we should preserve, even if the cost involves moving slowly with technological advances?

Additionally, shouldn't we scrutinize the end results of this kind of progress? As with stem cell and other biotech research, nanotech promises to be hugely expensive, concentrate intelectual capital in the hands of a few major players, and in return give us more viable human beings with more stuff to consume.

No thank you.

Other "hacks" include ... playing multiplayer games with only one copy of the game.
That hack involves creating the WiFi game (I've done this with Tony Hawk) on one PSP, moving the UMD into another PSP, having that other person join that WiFi game, switching the UMD back to the original PSP as the original player starts the session (it asks you if you want to quit when you take out the UMD) and then the second player starts the session. It's not as good of a trick as the DS's single game/ multiplayer setup, but it gets the job done if you want to spend the time.

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Looks like Wired almost copied this article here: http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,67151,00.ht ml?tw=wn_tophead_8

The major issue with nanotech in the next few decades won't be a grey goo problem or any other sci-fi apocalypse. The biggest problem will be the toxic garbage mentioned in the article. Self replicating nanobots are still in the distant (20+ years) future but the problem with nanoparticles exists now. Some of the artifical dust being created by the nanotech manufacturing processes is small enough to pass through the various safeguards that organisms have evolved to protect against the environment. Very few things in nature are self contained objects on a nanometer scale so organisms never had a chance to evolve protection against the things we are creating. There is a valid risk of a problem similar to asbestos related cancers and DDT if nanotech becomes widespread before the proper safeguards are in place. I fully support nanotech and do believe the grey goo fears are overstated, but toxic dust is something that people should figure out how to deal with before it becomes dangerous.

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From what it shows here there may not be many Japanese around to fly to the Moon... Oh, I keep forgetting, they will be the first to implant their 125 year old brains into robotic bodies...

I will be honest - yes. I disagree. The fact is people have not stopped downloading music. As a matter of a fact, shortly after killing Napster, the number of people downloading and sharing eclipsed Napster's all time high (from a 2001 Wired article)

It's not closing Napster which helped the record industry (which many independent agencies determined HELPED the record industry sales) but about providing viable alternatives. Why is P2P slowing? Because of iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster 2.0, etc. etc.

I don't want to start a language flamewar, but I just finished reading a slashdot article comparing Ruby on Rails to Java + Spring/Hibernate and was wondering if anyone with experience in both would like to recast this book into that context.

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Funny, the only place I could see it there was in that little "slashdot mysterious future" thingy on the right. Meaning it is basically taken right from slashdot. Might as well complain that I saw it here first (you know, the articls /. linked to...)

Thanks. :) I went out and tracked down some linkage on this:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vision_pr .html

It's a really fun read.

They were stimulating nerves in the eye with tiny electrodes, although they had to ask the patient where in his field of vision he saw the phosphene as they stimulated him. From this they created a "mapping" of sorts.

This sort of research was frowned upon on the US, and so it had to be carried out overseas. Check out the article -- more info than the linked BBC one.

This was attempted: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,34691,00 .html

It was too hard for the average user. Perhaps if Apple built it into the iPod and integrated it with the scroll wheel it would reach critical mass.

On second thought, just get a Lovegety

Here's another article on the same subject. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/brain.htm l

Mac Boxes Make Nice Couches

(Note: this link works correctly as the one above didn't work correctly for me... regards NoKarma)

Check out Wilco to see how it is done. Check out Fiona Apple to see how it is done to you.

Check out Wilco to see how it is done. Check out Fiona Apple to see how it is done to you.

Back on target, I don't like the trend even thought this is for a good cause. Product placement in books and comics may be a bad thing.

Ignore the previous post. I clicked on the wrong button.

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Wired article as proof

You're thinking of Linux on the T-mobile Sidekick

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Wired article as proof

You're thinking of Linux on the T-mobile Sidekick

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There is still very little known information about the cool hardware features like the touchpad, WiFi, etc. While they (the hacker community in general) have figured out how to tweak things like model data in Metroid Prime, they still haven't figured out how to get the WiFi to work fully. Based on what is currently known the DS doesn't support IPv4 or any public protocols on a higher layer than OSI Layer 2. This means it might still be a while before someone gets a working web browser or telnet client on the DS. However, given the amount of hacks available for the GBA, I'm confident that they'll figure out all the cool tricks pretty soon. Then I won't have to worry about buying a PDA and I'll have an excude for having "using" my DS during work.

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I can't believe people think this is an April Fool's story. They even have a picture on their site to prove that their story is true. We must rise up against our British Overlords who wish to control our information and tax our tea. Please, think of the children!

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How the hell is that insightful? I would hope that slashdotters have enough common sense to be able to figure out a real story from a joke one. (Yes, I'm a rabid optimist. Why do you ask?) Even if the blurb is confusing due to the nature of the strange stories that are sometimes posted, it should become obvious once you actually click the link whether the story is serious or not. Then again, maybe that's too much to hope for.

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You hit the nail on the head there. Sony's decision to offer the top 500 shows that they really don't understand what makes ITMS so successful at all.

If there are any Sony folks reading, you should click through and read the following articles immediately:

• The Long Tail
• Millions of Markets of Dozens

Here's the key grafs from the 2nd piece (by Joe Kraus, founder of Excite and now chief of JotSpot):

Let's look at the Amazon example. This graph shows that Amazon sells roughly 2.3M books and that the average Barnes and Noble retail store stocks 139,000 books. So, Amazon stocks roughly 2.2M more books that Barnes and Noble.

No surprise here. That's the benefit of an online storefront. Massive inventories housed in ultra-low-rent areas that are fronted electronically.

The astonishing figure is the percent of sales that comes from the "long tail" of books (books that Amazon carries but that Barnes and Noble doesn't).

57%.

57% of Amazon's sales come from books you can't even buy at a Barnes and Noble...

Yep, just like I would imagine a good chunk of ITMS sales come from singles you can't find at your local Sam Goody -- and Kraus cites in the same article that "every iTunes song has been purchased at least once", which would seem to bear that out when you figure that ITMS has an inventory of over a million songs. That's a heck of a long tail business.

If Sony had a brain they'd be figuring out how to use the PSP as a platform to revitalize their back catalog -- all those movies they've got sitting around that aren't Top 500 material, but which have a few fans here and there. If they can get the distribution system efficient enough the profits would probably be considerable.

Have you heard about The Long Tail? It's a great article on just how catering to the obscure/cult/indie/less popular tastes is not just a good idea for the improvement of our collective culture, but can also actually be profitable. Still, you won't see any of these megacorps thinking too clearly on the issue for some time yet.

Your finger already controls your thoughts. Just touching the tip of it starts off a flurry of activity in your parietal lobes.

Mods forgive me, but those two sentences made me think of something wayyyy south of the brain. But it's almost on-topic...

Wired Story

Wired seemed to stress the opinion of other scientists in the same field, that this research was 'premature' and disaster could bring public outrage and set back (American) research a good ten years.

The thing is, Matt Nagle was a willing volunteer; he's an adult who can comprehend the risks involved in this procedure, and if he's injured, one can't say that it's unexpected. If this niche industry is destroyed when somebody is hurt and this whole chance for mobility gets tossed back like U.S. stem cell research has been, I hope they can find other places to continue this technology -- and that the U.S. government doesn't hold them back.

Matt and the other four volunteers are pioneers, so to say; they want to help further this research and get back some, if not all, of the mobility they had.

Hats off to 'em.

is that they require a surgical procedure which makes it risky at the moment and hard to reverse. While it's good for disabled patients (until we can biologically fix neural damage) it's still not the magic neural link that some geeks want it to be. The more interesting research with alternative interfaces comes from tech like subvocalization and other virtual input that NASA is working on. This includes movement recognition where sensors on the surface of the skin (no surgery required) can pick up subtle gestures that would be invsible to others. That would allow you to work your wearable computer without anyone noticing since all of your motions would be subtle.

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I had thought this was alarmist, that the information would be a set of MD5s or in the case of client-side data, public-key encrypted, but that turns out to not be the case. It's all naked data.

Actually, the term has been co-pted by anyone working on such a scale, much to the behest of Eric Drexler, the scientist who originally coined the term to describe extremely tiny machines.

'Nano' Suddenly a Gigantic Label

I believe he is using a new word, instead of nanotechnology, to describe his vision - but I can't seem to find it anywhere.