This is extremely depressing to me. I've greatly enjoyed the fact that my 500mhz powerbook that i bought about a year ago is still the fastest clock speed you can buy in a macintosh. None of that silly next door neighbor buying the newest faster chip every two weeks for me. Way to make your computers appear to become obsolete a little less quicky apple!
Maybe with all the negative press that intel has been getting over it's P4, with the empty clock speed, at least a little more consumer awareness about the fact that clockspeed is just one of many numbers determining computer speed. Apple certainly is in a sucky spot with this whole motorola thing. I wonder if/when the computer world is going to end up more like the car world, where most any machine you buy will have plenty of power/speed, and other things can become a deciding factor in purchases. Apple would certainly like it that way.
I agree with your opinion on computer education to a degree, but I think it's important to understand where to draw a line. You said you believe that the secondary education system children are taught to use a computer, not understand it. I don't see a problem in that neccessarily. For 98% of the jobs that that child may hold in his/her future, it will only be important to know how to use the computer, an indepth understanding shouldn't be necessary. It's the same way with cars. When you go in for a driver's license exam, they don't expect you to be able to diagram how your automatic transmission works, they just want you to be able to put it in drive to go forwards, and reverse to go back. The average person has better things to do then understand how their car works as a machine, the mechanical workings are best left to a mechanic.
Now computers are a slightly different deal due to their relative lack of development. The personal computer is a relatively new thing compared to automobiles, and they still require much more constant maintanance than your average car. But hopefully that will change.
I understand computers because I took an interest in how they work. I learned how to cope with their problems because it was a challenge that I sometimes enjoyed, and was always willing to deal with in order to have a working machine. Not everyone shares this enthusiasm for all things electronic. My mom for example gets rather upset when I try to explain to her how the computer works. She just wants to know what to click on. She's a real estate appraiser who likes to communicate with friends via email. Where her work software keeps its config files doesn't matter to her, she doesn't want to know which mail server she's sending out all those chain letter emails through.
While frustrating for those of us that get stuck taking care of the comptuer problems of people like her, it's just the way things are. The best option in my opinion is to improve computers and software to the point where someone just pointing and clicking can't hurt anything, things won't go wrong, and until then, try to get stuck doing tech support for someone besides your mom, so you can charge them money.
I certainly agree that there can't be any real 'average'/. reader just chosen. Being picked by the maintainers of the site means you may fit what/. wants to present as the average consumer of their site. I think what we have here is a person that fits a lot of the 'stereotypes' that the rest of the world gives to geeks, and this interview was probably meant to be some sort of platform for a geek to step up and say I'm not that stereotype.
To be perfectly honest, this interview seems to almost have reinforced that stereotype. No offense to Clinton, beacuse I am friends with plenty of people like him, and find them to be some of the most decent and intelligent and interesting people i know. If you look at his answers, the most indepth response is, by far, the question having to do with his MentalUNIX distro. Some of the other questions, questions involving defining points in everyone's life, relationships/school/jobs, are just sort of brushed over and only half answered. I honestly hope that Clinton was just being lazy, and if he really wanted to, could easily write at least as much about his thoughts on girls or school or whatever than he did on a computer project.
I dunno, although as I said earlier, I find the concept of an average/. reader to be kind of silly, if someone put a gun to my head and asked me for to describe one, this kid would've matched pretty close to what I'd say. Not sure if that's good or bad.
Another result of the increase of size,scale, and popularity of some community websites is the amount of problem causers that take interest. In a community of fifty to one hundred people, one or two morons trolling is easy enough to ignore. Hundreds or even thousands of people with nothing better to do than make things difficult for the community are much harder to ignore, even if the community grows to over one hundred thousand. Smaller groups/boards/channels/whatever really have an advantage in this sense, they're easier to administer, have fewer problems, etc...
The government obviously sees this as a matter of national security, and sees the satellite photographs as a military asset. The government in and of itself doesn't design and manufacture F-18's, but they do have a say over what countries they can be sold to. And I think that makes sense. Not to mention that the development of a lot of this stuff is funded by tax dollars from the government.
So, the first mass produced computer that you can have a conversation with, and we're already referring to it with the prefix omni? Why don't we just shackle our hands and start heading down into the caves the computers will have us mining once they take over... Maybe it isn't that bad. The article said that they originally wanted to call it HAL, but it didn't end up that way. Could the name it responds to be changeable?
Honestly, how could they not see that the UCITA is not in the best interests of the people? If they need our thoughts on it all to understand that, then this country is in far worse trouble than I thought. That being said, it is important that people share their thoughts with them, if not to help them see the truth, but instead to tell them that we see the truth, and that we aren't about to take it quietly.
Well, architecture, at least good architecture, is about more than just details, and is about designing something to serve a purpose. I definately realize that gameplay is the most important, and while I don't study gameplay much in schoolwork, it is just another particularity in designing spaces for a game. Architecture is about designing spaces, and whether those spaces are really built, are run in a 3D engine, or just drawn on paper, there are many qualities about them that can make them impressive/comfortable/scary/any other adjective you can think of... architecture is about more than pretty walls. All you need to make pretty walls is a drawing program and some free time. The understanding of spaces, hierarchy, organization, and all of that that comes with a decent architectural education could apply very well to level design in my opinion.
I did a little paper on hagfish back in highschool, and they're really rather interesting animals, if not a little ugly. They've got multiple hearts that all beat in seperate rhythm, they've got the whole slime thing and the ability to tie themselves in a knot to remove the slime, and to escape from and confuse predators. They can change their gender from season to season to suit the conditions. Despite a relatively low birth rate, they exist in significant numbers, so they must be doing a good job at keeping themselves alive. All in all a pretty efficient species. Fossil records show that they've existed in pretty much their present form for quite some time, so they can't be too dumb for tying themselves in knots.
As an architecture major, I've wondered how the understanding of space and structure and all of that that i've been learning would translate to level design for games. I just haven't had the time to sit down and play with an editor long enough to actually make something. I remember reading that Bungie hired licencensed architects to do a lot of the level design for Oni, and that it was actually done in autocad. As far as I know, oni still hasn't been released, but I'm interested in seeing how that all turned out.
I can't help but see video games as a sort of step up from the TV trained people have become common place, at least in the US. Sure, you can still be a couch potato if you're playing video games, but at least you're doing something that tends to require a bit more brainpower than just watching a screen flickering at the command of someone miles away that you've never met.
I won't argue that all or even most video games are all that educational, but you can't really argue that for most television either. At least video game playing forces you to make decisions more often than every halfhour when all the shows end and you have to find something else to watch.
And while they're not an ideal subsitute for going out and meeting people. Online games can provide a sort of social experience for people who would otherwise sit in front of the television and probably start talking to the remote.
the problem with biometric data is that it's not terribly secret. If you used your retinal scan to validate something online, then wherever you validated with would have to have a record of it, and what's to stop someone with the record of it from sending it off as theres. Your DNA is unique, but it wouldn't be difficult at all for someone to get a sample of it, and pretending to be you. I may not be able to make my body match your biometric qualities, but I doubt it'd be too difficult to go in somewhere between the biometric entries, and the computer comparing it with its records.
On a side note, how much could Mitnick really be informed on all of this? Why do people care about his opinions on anything? Am I going to see a story about what kind of chaloupa he things taco bell should offer next? Nothing against the guy himself, but let it go...
The computer lab at my school must be a terribly harsh enviroment for computers, because you can always count on the lab machines not working. The poor computers cry out in misery to me. I can't go there anymore...it's depressing...
I don't have any links or information about it, but I remember hearing a story about a guy who tried to patent the wheelbarrow. It supposedly happened in the 70's, and was not taken very seriously. I may be just a dumb story, I don't even remember who I heard it from, but it amused me, and you reminded me of it.
What I found most interesting about the article was where it talked about some companies encouraging personal accounts to avoid liability when harassment or whatnot occurs over company email accounts. It seems to me that if a company is monitoring and filtering emails and messages to the point where they can tell if it's private or company related, then they can tell if it's harassment or inappropriate, and could possibly be held liable for letting such material through, even if it was a personal issue done on a personal account. Someone could argue that they felt harassed by an email I sent from work, and even though I sent it through a hotmail account, my company shouldn't have let that sort of stuff happen at the office. It's sorta like why a lot of message boards like/. aren't edited by the owners. Once you try and take responsibility for even a small portion of them, you become potentially liable for everything that passes through. If I was running a company, I'd be a little afraid at the responsibility that you may place upon yourself by monitoring your employees communications so closely.
Of course, encrypting everything would be an excellent start at a solution.
100 doesn't seem like all that much when you look at the time span that the shuttle program has been working over, but when you take into account the cost of the STS program, especially with NASA's budget, and also a couple years off after the whole Challenger thing, 100 flights is fairly impressive. And speaking of the Challenger, while that was obviously a catastrophic event, in space flight, a 99% return rate for spacecraft is very admirable. I think it's fairly safe to say that the shuttles have been a technical and scientific success, even if their PR value isn't all that great anymore. Go Nasa.
It certainly would be a nice thing to save, but seeing as how "we came in peace for all mankind", making a US National Historic site seems a little silly. And what's the point anyways, I don't think schools are going to start making field trips there any time soon. Does it need to be protected that badly? Are the oil companies thinking of drilling for crude there or something?
I don't think there are many countries out there with the technology to actually go mess with the site, and those that can probably won't, cause that'd just be an asshole thing to do. Meteors and whatnot may not be so selective when deciding where to slam material in to the moon's surface, but I don't think they recoginze US historical site boundries anyways.
Nice thought, good to recognize a significant step in human history, but at least make it a global thing. Maybe some sort of new thing, like a Humanity Historical Treasure (I think that sounds sufficiently corny to work),
I think the best part about finding actual life somewhere else would just be the excitement that it would cause among the world, which would result in increased funding towards space programs. Back in the day, the space race was the hotbed of an incredible amount of scientfic advancement. Now the scientific advancement moves just as quickly, but it's run by big corporations, many of which are more interested in profit than science just for the sake of knowledge and the benifit of humanity. The discovery of life on another planet could bring the energy of people, not just corporations into the research area.
I'm not sure if this is making sense or not, but I just think I'd feel better if I saw a lot more signicant science and spinoffs coming from an organization like NASA, which, despite the governmental ties and politics involved, is still funded by and working for the people; as opposed to companies looking at scientific advance as a way to take more money from the people.
They gotta see an easy way to make money in it. All you hear now is how much the latest probe or rocket to fail cost the tax payers. And it always sounds like a lot of money lost, but when you compare it to the obscene budget surplus the US is talking about lately, or the insane amounts of money spent in the space race (wasted then too, I'd love to see figures on just how many rockets and such they had blow up back then).
The countries with the finacial ability to attempt a major space project are all too busy trying to make more money that they won't have time to spend. I'm not sure if there's enough sense of national pride, or a spirit of adventure and the unknown to kind of unite the populace, at least in the US.
It most likely is illegal to mess with your opponents signal. And even if it isn't, it sorta goes against the spirit of the whole thing, which is all about watching robots kick the crap out of each other, not staring at a bunch of ECM devices fighting it out. That'd be interesting to a handful of geeks out there maybe, but wouldn't make for very good TV.
I hope that computer they're predicting is running an OS a little less frustrating than most of what you find nowadays, cause that thing really looks like it'd be easy to toss out a window.
Having not played UT for more than maybe 3 minutes, I'll have to take your word for that, but I know at least in Counter-Strike, which basis itself on realism, it's usually quite easy to tell when someone's cheating. Especially a see through walls cheat, cause as you're flying around as a ghost (spectator) after dying, it's not hard to notice someone shooting up from the basement and picking people off on the roof with 2 supposedly solid floors between them.
I'm just plain curious as to why the cheating is such a big thing. In a game like half-life, particularly Counter-strike, you can pretty easily tell when someone's cheating, and noone is impressed.
That having been said, I'd like to hear from some of the cheaters (and I know there are lots of you out there;) exactly what cheating in those games does for you. My guess is it's sorta like those people on irc who are so obiviously bored that they go from channel to channel flooding and insulting just to see how many channels they can get banned from. Is there really nothing better for you to do than ruin other people's fun?
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This is extremely depressing to me. I've greatly enjoyed the fact that my 500mhz powerbook that i bought about a year ago is still the fastest clock speed you can buy in a macintosh. None of that silly next door neighbor buying the newest faster chip every two weeks for me. Way to make your computers appear to become obsolete a little less quicky apple!
Maybe with all the negative press that intel has been getting over it's P4, with the empty clock speed, at least a little more consumer awareness about the fact that clockspeed is just one of many numbers determining computer speed. Apple certainly is in a sucky spot with this whole motorola thing. I wonder if/when the computer world is going to end up more like the car world, where most any machine you buy will have plenty of power/speed, and other things can become a deciding factor in purchases. Apple would certainly like it that way.
I agree with your opinion on computer education to a degree, but I think it's important to understand where to draw a line. You said you believe that the secondary education system children are taught to use a computer, not understand it. I don't see a problem in that neccessarily. For 98% of the jobs that that child may hold in his/her future, it will only be important to know how to use the computer, an indepth understanding shouldn't be necessary. It's the same way with cars. When you go in for a driver's license exam, they don't expect you to be able to diagram how your automatic transmission works, they just want you to be able to put it in drive to go forwards, and reverse to go back. The average person has better things to do then understand how their car works as a machine, the mechanical workings are best left to a mechanic.
Now computers are a slightly different deal due to their relative lack of development. The personal computer is a relatively new thing compared to automobiles, and they still require much more constant maintanance than your average car. But hopefully that will change.
I understand computers because I took an interest in how they work. I learned how to cope with their problems because it was a challenge that I sometimes enjoyed, and was always willing to deal with in order to have a working machine. Not everyone shares this enthusiasm for all things electronic. My mom for example gets rather upset when I try to explain to her how the computer works. She just wants to know what to click on. She's a real estate appraiser who likes to communicate with friends via email. Where her work software keeps its config files doesn't matter to her, she doesn't want to know which mail server she's sending out all those chain letter emails through.
While frustrating for those of us that get stuck taking care of the comptuer problems of people like her, it's just the way things are. The best option in my opinion is to improve computers and software to the point where someone just pointing and clicking can't hurt anything, things won't go wrong, and until then, try to get stuck doing tech support for someone besides your mom, so you can charge them money.
I certainly agree that there can't be any real 'average' /. reader just chosen. Being picked by the maintainers of the site means you may fit what /. wants to present as the average consumer of their site. I think what we have here is a person that fits a lot of the 'stereotypes' that the rest of the world gives to geeks, and this interview was probably meant to be some sort of platform for a geek to step up and say I'm not that stereotype.
/. reader to be kind of silly, if someone put a gun to my head and asked me for to describe one, this kid would've matched pretty close to what I'd say. Not sure if that's good or bad.
To be perfectly honest, this interview seems to almost have reinforced that stereotype. No offense to Clinton, beacuse I am friends with plenty of people like him, and find them to be some of the most decent and intelligent and interesting people i know. If you look at his answers, the most indepth response is, by far, the question having to do with his MentalUNIX distro. Some of the other questions, questions involving defining points in everyone's life, relationships/school/jobs, are just sort of brushed over and only half answered. I honestly hope that Clinton was just being lazy, and if he really wanted to, could easily write at least as much about his thoughts on girls or school or whatever than he did on a computer project.
I dunno, although as I said earlier, I find the concept of an average
Another result of the increase of size,scale, and popularity of some community websites is the amount of problem causers that take interest. In a community of fifty to one hundred people, one or two morons trolling is easy enough to ignore. Hundreds or even thousands of people with nothing better to do than make things difficult for the community are much harder to ignore, even if the community grows to over one hundred thousand. Smaller groups/boards/channels/whatever really have an advantage in this sense, they're easier to administer, have fewer problems, etc...
The government obviously sees this as a matter of national security, and sees the satellite photographs as a military asset. The government in and of itself doesn't design and manufacture F-18's, but they do have a say over what countries they can be sold to. And I think that makes sense. Not to mention that the development of a lot of this stuff is funded by tax dollars from the government.
So, the first mass produced computer that you can have a conversation with, and we're already referring to it with the prefix omni? Why don't we just shackle our hands and start heading down into the caves the computers will have us mining once they take over... Maybe it isn't that bad. The article said that they originally wanted to call it HAL, but it didn't end up that way. Could the name it responds to be changeable?
Honestly, how could they not see that the UCITA is not in the best interests of the people? If they need our thoughts on it all to understand that, then this country is in far worse trouble than I thought. That being said, it is important that people share their thoughts with them, if not to help them see the truth, but instead to tell them that we see the truth, and that we aren't about to take it quietly.
Well, architecture, at least good architecture, is about more than just details, and is about designing something to serve a purpose. I definately realize that gameplay is the most important, and while I don't study gameplay much in schoolwork, it is just another particularity in designing spaces for a game. Architecture is about designing spaces, and whether those spaces are really built, are run in a 3D engine, or just drawn on paper, there are many qualities about them that can make them impressive/comfortable/scary/any other adjective you can think of... architecture is about more than pretty walls. All you need to make pretty walls is a drawing program and some free time. The understanding of spaces, hierarchy, organization, and all of that that comes with a decent architectural education could apply very well to level design in my opinion.
I did a little paper on hagfish back in highschool, and they're really rather interesting animals, if not a little ugly. They've got multiple hearts that all beat in seperate rhythm, they've got the whole slime thing and the ability to tie themselves in a knot to remove the slime, and to escape from and confuse predators. They can change their gender from season to season to suit the conditions. Despite a relatively low birth rate, they exist in significant numbers, so they must be doing a good job at keeping themselves alive. All in all a pretty efficient species. Fossil records show that they've existed in pretty much their present form for quite some time, so they can't be too dumb for tying themselves in knots.
As an architecture major, I've wondered how the understanding of space and structure and all of that that i've been learning would translate to level design for games. I just haven't had the time to sit down and play with an editor long enough to actually make something. I remember reading that Bungie hired licencensed architects to do a lot of the level design for Oni, and that it was actually done in autocad. As far as I know, oni still hasn't been released, but I'm interested in seeing how that all turned out.
I won't argue that all or even most video games are all that educational, but you can't really argue that for most television either. At least video game playing forces you to make decisions more often than every halfhour when all the shows end and you have to find something else to watch.
And while they're not an ideal subsitute for going out and meeting people. Online games can provide a sort of social experience for people who would otherwise sit in front of the television and probably start talking to the remote.
On a side note, how much could Mitnick really be informed on all of this? Why do people care about his opinions on anything? Am I going to see a story about what kind of chaloupa he things taco bell should offer next? Nothing against the guy himself, but let it go...
The computer lab at my school must be a terribly harsh enviroment for computers, because you can always count on the lab machines not working. The poor computers cry out in misery to me. I can't go there anymore...it's depressing...
I don't have any links or information about it, but I remember hearing a story about a guy who tried to patent the wheelbarrow. It supposedly happened in the 70's, and was not taken very seriously. I may be just a dumb story, I don't even remember who I heard it from, but it amused me, and you reminded me of it.
Sure the bosses don't know how to set up the listening apps, but what happens when they tell the LAN admins to do it for them?
Of course, encrypting everything would be an excellent start at a solution.
100 doesn't seem like all that much when you look at the time span that the shuttle program has been working over, but when you take into account the cost of the STS program, especially with NASA's budget, and also a couple years off after the whole Challenger thing, 100 flights is fairly impressive. And speaking of the Challenger, while that was obviously a catastrophic event, in space flight, a 99% return rate for spacecraft is very admirable. I think it's fairly safe to say that the shuttles have been a technical and scientific success, even if their PR value isn't all that great anymore. Go Nasa.
I don't think there are many countries out there with the technology to actually go mess with the site, and those that can probably won't, cause that'd just be an asshole thing to do. Meteors and whatnot may not be so selective when deciding where to slam material in to the moon's surface, but I don't think they recoginze US historical site boundries anyways.
Nice thought, good to recognize a significant step in human history, but at least make it a global thing. Maybe some sort of new thing, like a Humanity Historical Treasure (I think that sounds sufficiently corny to work),
I'm not sure if this is making sense or not, but I just think I'd feel better if I saw a lot more signicant science and spinoffs coming from an organization like NASA, which, despite the governmental ties and politics involved, is still funded by and working for the people; as opposed to companies looking at scientific advance as a way to take more money from the people.
The countries with the finacial ability to attempt a major space project are all too busy trying to make more money that they won't have time to spend. I'm not sure if there's enough sense of national pride, or a spirit of adventure and the unknown to kind of unite the populace, at least in the US.
It most likely is illegal to mess with your opponents signal. And even if it isn't, it sorta goes against the spirit of the whole thing, which is all about watching robots kick the crap out of each other, not staring at a bunch of ECM devices fighting it out. That'd be interesting to a handful of geeks out there maybe, but wouldn't make for very good TV.
I hope that computer they're predicting is running an OS a little less frustrating than most of what you find nowadays, cause that thing really looks like it'd be easy to toss out a window.
Having not played UT for more than maybe 3 minutes, I'll have to take your word for that, but I know at least in Counter-Strike, which basis itself on realism, it's usually quite easy to tell when someone's cheating. Especially a see through walls cheat, cause as you're flying around as a ghost (spectator) after dying, it's not hard to notice someone shooting up from the basement and picking people off on the roof with 2 supposedly solid floors between them.
That having been said, I'd like to hear from some of the cheaters (and I know there are lots of you out there ;) exactly what cheating in those games does for you. My guess is it's sorta like those people on irc who are so obiviously bored that they go from channel to channel flooding and insulting just to see how many channels they can get banned from. Is there really nothing better for you to do than ruin other people's fun?