>>Howabout OSes that dont crash? How about hardware that won't lock up your computer
One of the key laws of nature is : Shit Happens.
This is as true for code in your PC as it is for crawlies in nature.
We want to fool ourselves that the PC is a clean and closed environment which we have full control of but it just isn't true. That storage device that was there a picosecond ago may have just failed or been removed, the network connection may have just been severed, another program may be running amok and draining system resources just as another needs it.
Nature mostly gets around unexpected problems, we need OS's and languages that can do the same.
Your goal of OS's that don't crash and hardware that doesn't "lock up" arn't incompatible with that.
Contracting in the UK is dead, and it won't come back. Tony, Gordy and their chums have seen to that
I never understood the thinking behind the IR35 tax laws which basically destroyed the tax benefits of being an independant consultant.
The Govt. clearly thought that they'd close a few tax loopholes and make a bit more cash out of a small percentage of the population who could easily be portrayed as "having it too good for too long".
It must have been obvious to anyone with half a clue that contractors were an entrepreneureal, highly skilled, educated and above all mobile section of the workforce. Why they thought we'd stay and take it is anyones guess.
I work in the US now and I have heard of others relocating to Holland and Germany. Vote with your feet.
Would the last consultant leaving the UK please turn out the light.
For the most part this tactical information is given context through GPS.
Assuming some nation is capable of incapacitating the GPS satellites (or enough of them to make readings innacurate) and the US method of war will quickly bog-down.
Without GPS you can't fire a single Cruise Missile.
Without GPS you'll find it hard to find your bombing targets / intercept enemy fighters.
Take GPS from the picture and US-style "warfare" is a very different proposition. Not nearly so clinical, much messier (read : vietnam levels of "collateral damage")
Would you even consider the average wealthy Chinese citizen with online access truly 'on the Internet'?
What typical elitist crap.
This is just another way of saying You may have the same advantages and access as me but you will neve truly be one of us. Why? Because they won't share your English-speaking, Amero-centric, left-of-center, hamburger & apple pie world-view? Give me a break.
This is exactly the attitude that the Aristocracy take with the Nouveau Riche once the lower classes start to gain money and power in any society : "You can dress like us, haunt the same places as us, own the things we do, talk like us but you will never be us"
We are the Tech-savvy aristocracy of the 00's, we must accept that we represent a tiny, tiny proportion of world-society and that our place in the Internet world order will become increasingly eroded and yes, irrelevant, as the masses pile in. If you thought AOL's introduction of the hoi-polloi to the internet changed the internet forever you ain't seen nothing yet.
Get over it. There'll still be places like/. where we can gather to whine about it.
I like to think of myself as a creative type too. If you're like me you probably think of youself as a creator rather than a consumer. So these "gaming binges" are embarrassing to you but after a while you snap out of it and go back to the writing.
I think of these phases as cathartic, a way to focus singlemindedly on consumption rather than creation for a short while. After all, a change is as good as a rest.
but until it is smart enough to home in on its base station and recharge itself when its batteries are running low, it's hard to consider AIBO ready for prime time.
Oh yeah, when AIBO can do that it will be so much more Useful.
I don't want to see adverts for tampons or other such things which a) mean nothing to me, and b) shouldn't be aired publicly anyway.
You have clearly never watched an ad for a feminine hygene product or for toilet-paper for that matter.
If you had, you would know that they are so obtuse as to be confusing. You really wouldn't know what they were advertising if it weren't for repeated use of the name.
I completely fail to see why adverts like this shouldn't be aired. Perhaps because it reminds you of one of the messier aspects of the human condition? Get a grip man.
In the race to put everything into writing, we forget that the best solution is not always the most technologically advanced. I mean, we've abandoned barter for letters of credit and there is even writing on the walls of toilets in Xanchu. Dear Lord, what will they be writing on next?
Word-of-mouth is close to the ideal form for people to digest information from. You can take a story anywhere and it never wears out and it doesn't rely on all the equipment that writing does. Hell, with the clay shortage in Cresus at the moment, you'll be lucky to find a peice of tablet to write on!:)
And more to the point, people feel comfortable with the oral-tradition. They know where they stand. In Mesopotamia, where there is a very healthy streak of techno-skepticism amongst the general public, the story is what they want, not the latest fancy writing from MIT that promises to "revolutionize" the way information is disseminated. And the storytellers and bards knowhere where they stand when they tell a story - who gets paid and so on.
No, the oral-tradition is here to stay for a long time. As for yet, I have seen nothing that has any compelling reasons to change. Don't let a techno-fetishing blind you to the obvious solution to such a non-problem.
In the UK they are now introducing digital speed camera's. Instead of a single camera mounted where everyone sees and slows for it (before speeding up again 10 meters down the road) the system employs two cameras set an arbitrary distance apart. The time it takes to travel between camera A and camera B is what decides whether you get a ticket.
The problem is that in the few areas where this has been trialed the vast proportion of drivers are being tagged as speeding - so many that on those stretches of road they set the speeding threshold higher because of the impracticalities of fining everyone.
The authorities are worried : they know that any system which routinely penalises the masses is going to be very unpopular. Anything which brings this many people to book is going to be seen (as it already is) as a back-door tax on driving and since the UK already has the worst public transportation system in Europe, the most expensive cars, the most expensive petrol and for all I know the most expensive insurance the nation is very close to the edge.
So unless they want rioting in the streets it is very unlikely that the UK authorities will introduce a system which penalises a high proportion of the population.
What is needed is more carrot and less stick. Speeding must be made socially unacceptable just as drink-driving has become - taxing us off the roads won't work.
Actually, I think a 10 year stall in Moore's law could be good for the industry as a whole.
The vast majority of software is very inefficiently written, making poor use of the processors we have. Given a 10 year lull in processor speed hikes we would be forced to explore the potential of what we have and squeeze out every last drop of performance we could find.
It would be extremely painful but leave us (as an industry) in better shape to exploit future breakthroughs in processor speed.
..that actively discourages advertising of their product.
That's what mass broadcasting of music by radio stations (web or traditional) is : Advertising.
We've all been out and purchased tracks that we heard on the radio : radio promotes music.
Do billboard companies pay their advertisers to put up their billboards? No, its the other way around. So why should radio stations pay to advertise the products of record companies while charging "advertisers" premium-rates for product advertising space?
Your point is well argued but you miss my meaning of HerdThink.
As you point out many individual/. posters have reasonable opinions on copyright and paying for material but as a crowd/.ers promote a different view.
This is not unlike the (mis)quote "An individual person is smart but people are dumb."
I generally surf/. at a threshold of 3 or 4 (nested). At that level you are seeing what the community as a whole thinks is worth promoting...the HerdThink. Most of what I see there, related to digital assets, is rhetotic about how media companies deserve to be ripped off because they have been ripping everyone else off for so long : ergo, piracy is in some way part of a great moral crusade.
The truth is, if you have 40GB of MP3's you don't have the original media for, chances are you haven't sent the artists a dime in compensation. You wanted, so you took. Whining about how the industry is ripping of consumers and artists is just a blind.
"People would pay in a fair system" is something I have heard here on/. Oh yeah? How many unregistered copies of WinZip are there out there?
While I see what the previous poster is saying and agree with the points made perhaps I can risk pointing out that as life in the western world (and slowly elsewhere) becomes increasingly digital there isn't going to be much that isn't stored in digital form.
The HerdThink at/. appears to be :
"If information is stored in electronic form, it should be free. If it isn't it wants to be. If it wants to be, we should make it happen."
I'm sure I'm not the first to point out that in a digital economy that doesn't exclude very much.
The corporate world is understandably having a tough time facing a future where all digital assets are distributed freely to whoever wants them.
I see plenty of direct-action "break the codes and set them free" type talk on/., talk about fighting for the digital future and our rights. Wholly absent from the debate seems to be a coherent vision of what the future should be, how corporations can survive in the digital age and still make money from their efforts. Maybe we don't think they SHOULD be allowed to make money, or only a certain amount but we should at least come out and say that.
As far as I can tell from reading/. the moral framework we seem to be trying to work toward is "whatever suits me".
That is no framework for a moral society, digital or otherwise.
I remember when Gauntlet first arrived in the UK (the early 80's). I loved that game, we all did. The graphics were amazing, the gameplay astounding. I can still do the voices:
Don't shoot food!
Wizard is about to die!
That summer we were united in two things : Our pubescent desire for a girl who spelled her name "Nikki" and Gauntlet.
A few months ago I loaded up Gauntlet in MAME. Though the graphics were terrible the gameplay was still there. What I really missed were the other players screaming "Over here! Arrggh! Death!"
I learned several lessons from this.
First, nostalgia warps the past.
Second, I should have concentrated on Gauntlet since I never got anywhere with Nikki.
Third, playability is king.
And finally, the best, most memorable games are those you play with friends...which is exactly what I was trying to explain to Nikki all those years ago.
My wife and I are currently thinking of a sojourn in the US for a couple of years (we live in the UK now).
I already have a job offer with a US company (software).
My question is : Can the wife of a H1-B visa holder work or would she have to apply for her own visa? She's a Biochemist so she shouldn't find it too hard to find a job : But could she take one?
Since we're only planning to stay a couple of years the time limit is no problem.
What we need is not less flame but better quality in the flame we have!
Lets face it, you can never find the right insult when you really need it.
To that end, I predict the rise of MailRazor 1.0, an add-on that monitors your email messages and offers suggestions to make your point with razor-sharp wit instead of blunt profanities.
I see at least three modes:
New York Cabbie : Largely intelligible mixture of pidgin english and native tongues. Amazing passion, high insult-density but requires target to also be a New York Cabbie for full impact.
Irish Fishwife : Clever but empassioned diatribe amusing for bystanders but guaranteed to belittle its target. Insults related to inadequate sexual performance or virility a speciality.
British Gentleman : Bone-dry, passionless wit delivered like an epee wound to the heart. Savage minimalism.
While I have no problem with your belief I can't help but note that religion is constantly losing ground to science.
The bastions of religion are all in areas which are unknown or "unknowable". As science begins to peer into these subjects religious dogma is shown to be innacurate or downright wrong.
Do religions or their champions collapse? No. They simply retreat back into less-explored regions.
>> The face that life on Earth arose so quickly after it's formation - about 500 million years later - is a sure sign of the Lord's hand at work.
Is it? We just don't know - and unless YOU are God you don't either.
My point isn't whether your statement is true or false. My point is that if science gets closer to the truth of this you will cede this ground and move onto some other "sure sign".
Fortunately for me I work at home, so I can avoid most distractions, but it usually takes me at least a day to recover from a day in the real office.
I work from home also and I too have experienced this.
I haven't worked in an office for 4 years now and when I do go to the head office I simply can't believe the amount of wandering in the hallways, telephone calls, "door hovering" and other timewasting that goes on.
I can get more done in a couple of hours of silent time in the mornings than they get achieved in a couple of days.
If any managers are listening : Set your programmers free. Sure, they might take 2 hours a day off to go walk the dog, shop, relax etc but they will be so productive in the hours they do work that you'll actually get a big productivity boost!*
I got dragged along to this one. Two women met in the foyer while I was waiting in line for popcorn.
Said one : "What you seeing?" the other replied : "The beach. A couple of hours of staring at DiCaprio's gorgeous body."
That about summed it up for me going in.
But actually I was pleasantly suprised.
Yes its Lord of the flies, yes its been "Americanized" to make it palatable to the US market. It isn't great, but it was better than what I was expecting and I'm willing to bet it wasn't that poor woman in the foyer was expecting either.
New Scientist published it. To my mind that means it must have passed at least a cursory level of criticism by someone with a grasp of this kind of advanced physics.
This proves nothing of course. Maybe NS editors were having a bad/lazy day. My hope is that NS doesn't just publish any rubbish they get offered. Perhaps they should cite who the referees for the piece are and seek a "sidebar" opinion from an expert in the field.
( BTW, you never see on a job app that a degree from specific colleges is required. Just a degree.....snip... So how much value does the degree really have? Think about it. )
While I agree with your observations broadly speaking degrees are not interchangable.
Don't get to thinking that the world views a degree from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale or any of the great European Universities as having the same value as a degree from home-town community college.
If you're going to do a degree get into the institution with the best reputation you can.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Howabout OSes that dont crash? How about hardware that won't lock up your computer
One of the key laws of nature is : Shit Happens.
This is as true for code in your PC as it is for crawlies in nature.
We want to fool ourselves that the PC is a clean and closed environment which we have full control of but it just isn't true. That storage device that was there a picosecond ago may have just failed or been removed, the network connection may have just been severed, another program may be running amok and draining system resources just as another needs it.
Nature mostly gets around unexpected problems, we need OS's and languages that can do the same.
Your goal of OS's that don't crash and hardware that doesn't "lock up" arn't incompatible with that.
Contracting in the UK is dead, and it won't come back. Tony, Gordy and their chums have seen to that
I never understood the thinking behind the IR35 tax laws which basically destroyed the tax benefits of being an independant consultant.
The Govt. clearly thought that they'd close a few tax loopholes and make a bit more cash out of a small percentage of the population who could easily be portrayed as "having it too good for too long".
It must have been obvious to anyone with half a clue that contractors were an entrepreneureal, highly skilled, educated and above all mobile section of the workforce. Why they thought we'd stay and take it is anyones guess.
I work in the US now and I have heard of others relocating to Holland and Germany. Vote with your feet.
Would the last consultant leaving the UK please turn out the light.
Assuming some nation is capable of incapacitating the GPS satellites (or enough of them to make readings innacurate) and the US method of war will quickly bog-down.
Without GPS you can't fire a single Cruise Missile.
Without GPS you'll find it hard to find your bombing targets / intercept enemy fighters.
Take GPS from the picture and US-style "warfare" is a very different proposition. Not nearly so clinical, much messier (read : vietnam levels of "collateral damage")
Would you even consider the average wealthy Chinese citizen with online access truly 'on the Internet'?
What typical elitist crap.
This is just another way of saying You may have the same advantages and access as me but you will neve truly be one of us. Why? Because they won't share your English-speaking, Amero-centric, left-of-center, hamburger & apple pie world-view? Give me a break.
This is exactly the attitude that the Aristocracy take with the Nouveau Riche once the lower classes start to gain money and power in any society : "You can dress like us, haunt the same places as us, own the things we do, talk like us but you will never be us"
We are the Tech-savvy aristocracy of the 00's, we must accept that we represent a tiny, tiny proportion of world-society and that our place in the Internet world order will become increasingly eroded and yes, irrelevant, as the masses pile in. If you thought AOL's introduction of the hoi-polloi to the internet changed the internet forever you ain't seen nothing yet.
Get over it. There'll still be places like /. where we can gather to whine about it.
This happens to you because you are a writer.
I like to think of myself as a creative type too. If you're like me you probably think of youself as a creator rather than a consumer. So these "gaming binges" are embarrassing to you but after a while you snap out of it and go back to the writing.
I think of these phases as cathartic, a way to focus singlemindedly on consumption rather than creation for a short while. After all, a change is as good as a rest.
Don't be so hard on youself.
Having recently read Dune it was all I could do to stop myself screaming at the screen.
This wasn't just a few nips and tucks for the film version it was butchery. From the top of my head :
I think I'll stick to the books thanks all the same.
Oh yeah, when AIBO can do that it will be so much more Useful.
Actually, Interbase can do "hot" backups and has support for replication.
People really ought to look more closely at Interbase. It just works.
I don't want to see adverts for tampons or other such things which a) mean nothing to me, and b) shouldn't be aired publicly anyway.
You have clearly never watched an ad for a feminine hygene product or for toilet-paper for that matter.
If you had, you would know that they are so obtuse as to be confusing. You really wouldn't know what they were advertising if it weren't for repeated use of the name.
I completely fail to see why adverts like this shouldn't be aired. Perhaps because it reminds you of one of the messier aspects of the human condition? Get a grip man.
In the race to put everything into writing, we forget that the best solution is not always the most technologically advanced. I mean, we've abandoned barter for letters of credit and there is even writing on the walls of toilets in Xanchu. Dear Lord, what will they be writing on next?
Word-of-mouth is close to the ideal form for people to digest information from. You can take a story anywhere and it never wears out and it doesn't rely on all the equipment that writing does. Hell, with the clay shortage in Cresus at the moment, you'll be lucky to find a peice of tablet to write on! :)
And more to the point, people feel comfortable with the oral-tradition. They know where they stand. In Mesopotamia, where there is a very healthy streak of techno-skepticism amongst the general public, the story is what they want, not the latest fancy writing from MIT that promises to "revolutionize" the way information is disseminated. And the storytellers and bards knowhere where they stand when they tell a story - who gets paid and so on.
No, the oral-tradition is here to stay for a long time. As for yet, I have seen nothing that has any compelling reasons to change. Don't let a techno-fetishing blind you to the obvious solution to such a non-problem.
Errm, isn't that the link that is cited in the writeup above?
That would make it Redundant - how did this get a score of 4?
Slashdot moderator : "OOh a link! That must be useful, better mod it up."
Wake up people!
In the UK they are now introducing digital speed camera's. Instead of a single camera mounted where everyone sees and slows for it (before speeding up again 10 meters down the road) the system employs two cameras set an arbitrary distance apart. The time it takes to travel between camera A and camera B is what decides whether you get a ticket.
The problem is that in the few areas where this has been trialed the vast proportion of drivers are being tagged as speeding - so many that on those stretches of road they set the speeding threshold higher because of the impracticalities of fining everyone.
The authorities are worried : they know that any system which routinely penalises the masses is going to be very unpopular. Anything which brings this many people to book is going to be seen (as it already is) as a back-door tax on driving and since the UK already has the worst public transportation system in Europe, the most expensive cars, the most expensive petrol and for all I know the most expensive insurance the nation is very close to the edge.
So unless they want rioting in the streets it is very unlikely that the UK authorities will introduce a system which penalises a high proportion of the population.
What is needed is more carrot and less stick. Speeding must be made socially unacceptable just as drink-driving has become - taxing us off the roads won't work.
Actually, I think a 10 year stall in Moore's law could be good for the industry as a whole.
The vast majority of software is very inefficiently written, making poor use of the processors we have. Given a 10 year lull in processor speed hikes we would be forced to explore the potential of what we have and squeeze out every last drop of performance we could find.
It would be extremely painful but leave us (as an industry) in better shape to exploit future breakthroughs in processor speed.
..that actively discourages advertising of their product.
That's what mass broadcasting of music by radio stations (web or traditional) is : Advertising.
We've all been out and purchased tracks that we heard on the radio : radio promotes music.
Do billboard companies pay their advertisers to put up their billboards? No, its the other way around. So why should radio stations pay to advertise the products of record companies while charging "advertisers" premium-rates for product advertising space?
I tell ya, it's a weird world we live in.
I see at least one poster who has lost the plot and started off on a ramble about how great Chili!Soft are. This ain't them.
Your point is well argued but you miss my meaning of HerdThink.
As you point out many individual /. posters have reasonable opinions on copyright and paying for material but as a crowd /.ers promote a different view.
This is not unlike the (mis)quote "An individual person is smart but people are dumb."
I generally surf /. at a threshold of 3 or 4 (nested). At that level you are seeing what the community as a whole thinks is worth promoting...the HerdThink. Most of what I see there, related to digital assets, is rhetotic about how media companies deserve to be ripped off because they have been ripping everyone else off for so long : ergo, piracy is in some way part of a great moral crusade.
The truth is, if you have 40GB of MP3's you don't have the original media for, chances are you haven't sent the artists a dime in compensation. You wanted, so you took. Whining about how the industry is ripping of consumers and artists is just a blind.
"People would pay in a fair system" is something I have heard here on /. Oh yeah? How many unregistered copies of WinZip are there out there?
SparkyUK
While I see what the previous poster is saying and agree with the points made perhaps I can risk pointing out that as life in the western world (and slowly elsewhere) becomes increasingly digital there isn't going to be much that isn't stored in digital form.
The HerdThink at /. appears to be :
"If information is stored in electronic form, it should be free. If it isn't it wants to be. If it wants to be, we should make it happen."
I'm sure I'm not the first to point out that in a digital economy that doesn't exclude very much.
The corporate world is understandably having a tough time facing a future where all digital assets are distributed freely to whoever wants them.
I see plenty of direct-action "break the codes and set them free" type talk on /., talk about fighting for the digital future and our rights. Wholly absent from the debate seems to be a coherent vision of what the future should be, how corporations can survive in the digital age and still make money from their efforts. Maybe we don't think they SHOULD be allowed to make money, or only a certain amount but we should at least come out and say that.
As far as I can tell from reading /. the moral framework we seem to be trying to work toward is "whatever suits me".
That is no framework for a moral society, digital or otherwise.
- SparkyUK.
Count to ten..then flame away if you must.
I remember when Gauntlet first arrived in the UK (the early 80's). I loved that game, we all did. The graphics were amazing, the gameplay astounding. I can still do the voices :
Don't shoot food!
Wizard is about to die!
That summer we were united in two things : Our pubescent desire for a girl who spelled her name "Nikki" and Gauntlet.
A few months ago I loaded up Gauntlet in MAME. Though the graphics were terrible the gameplay was still there. What I really missed were the other players screaming "Over here! Arrggh! Death!"
I learned several lessons from this.
First, nostalgia warps the past.
Second, I should have concentrated on Gauntlet since I never got anywhere with Nikki.
Third, playability is king.
And finally, the best, most memorable games are those you play with friends...which is exactly what I was trying to explain to Nikki all those years ago.
- SparkyUK.
My wife and I are currently thinking of a sojourn in the US for a couple of years (we live in the UK now).
I already have a job offer with a US company (software).
My question is : Can the wife of a H1-B visa holder work or would she have to apply for her own visa? She's a Biochemist so she shouldn't find it too hard to find a job : But could she take one?
Since we're only planning to stay a couple of years the time limit is no problem.
What we need is not less flame but better quality in the flame we have!
Lets face it, you can never find the right insult when you really need it.
To that end, I predict the rise of MailRazor 1.0, an add-on that monitors your email messages and offers suggestions to make your point with razor-sharp wit instead of blunt profanities.
I see at least three modes :
While I have no problem with your belief I can't help but note that religion is constantly losing ground to science.
The bastions of religion are all in areas which are unknown or "unknowable". As science begins to peer into these subjects religious dogma is shown to be innacurate or downright wrong.
Do religions or their champions collapse? No. They simply retreat back into less-explored regions.
>> The face that life on Earth arose so quickly after it's formation - about 500 million years later - is a sure sign of the Lord's hand at work.
Is it? We just don't know - and unless YOU are God you don't either.
My point isn't whether your statement is true or false. My point is that if science gets closer to the truth of this you will cede this ground and move onto some other "sure sign".
Fortunately for me I work at home, so I can avoid most distractions, but it usually takes me at least a day to recover from a day in the real office.
I work from home also and I too have experienced this.
I haven't worked in an office for 4 years now and when I do go to the head office I simply can't believe the amount of wandering in the hallways, telephone calls, "door hovering" and other timewasting that goes on.
I can get more done in a couple of hours of silent time in the mornings than they get achieved in a couple of days.
If any managers are listening : Set your programmers free. Sure, they might take 2 hours a day off to go walk the dog, shop, relax etc but they will be so productive in the hours they do work that you'll actually get a big productivity boost!*
* My experience. Your milage may vary.
I got dragged along to this one. Two women met in the foyer while I was waiting in line for popcorn.
Said one : "What you seeing?" the other replied : "The beach. A couple of hours of staring at DiCaprio's gorgeous body."
That about summed it up for me going in.
But actually I was pleasantly suprised.
Yes its Lord of the flies, yes its been "Americanized" to make it palatable to the US market. It isn't great, but it was better than what I was expecting and I'm willing to bet it wasn't that poor woman in the foyer was expecting either.
New Scientist published it. To my mind that means it must have passed at least a cursory level of criticism by someone with a grasp of this kind of advanced physics.
This proves nothing of course. Maybe NS editors were having a bad/lazy day. My hope is that NS doesn't just publish any rubbish they get offered. Perhaps they should cite who the referees for the piece are and seek a "sidebar" opinion from an expert in the field.
( ....snip... So how much value does the degree really have? Think about it.
BTW, you never see on a job app that a degree from specific colleges is required. Just a degree.
)
While I agree with your observations broadly speaking degrees are not interchangable.
Don't get to thinking that the world views a degree from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale or any of the great European Universities as having the same value as a degree from home-town community college.
If you're going to do a degree get into the institution with the best reputation you can.