please go to a computer store and browse. Laptops are very personal machines and pointing device preference and the feel of the keyboard beneath your fingers as well as general layout of special buttons and the brightness and clarity of the screens are something you need to get a feel for first-hand
I definitely agree with this. Notebooks are literally closer to the user than desktop machines and it's impossible to get the "right" notebook simply based on performance specs. You really need to play around with a few brands/models to get a feel for what you like. Also a high performance machine is useless if you really have a hard time with a trackpad (I personally do) or if it's too bulky to tag along with you everywhere you go (if you really need portability).
I recently bought a notebook that uses an 800 mhz Crusoe processor, and realistically speaking it's slower than the equivalent intel p-whatever. It also only holds up to 256 megs of RAM, and doesn't have 3D graphics hardware.
But portability, battery life, a trackpoint (I like my hands in a fairly constant position), and a good screen are really important to me. I couldn't care less about performance as long as it's fast enough to write documents, do light coding, browse, and email/IM. I added the 802.11b option and the machine's perfect for running all over town with.
First off, great article. Well written and even understandable for someone non-technical (we should all take note).
I do question some of his statements, however, particularly about human creativity:
Now it seems we face a curious Malthusian catastrophe of the information economy: The products of human creativity grow only arithmetically, whereas the capacity to store and distribute them increases geometrically. The human imagination can't keep up.
Or maybe it's only my imagination that can't keep up.
I'd say that the bolded part above is very likely. He states that he individually can't think of what to do with 120 TB, but collectively I'm confident we'll find a use for it. I've read through a dozen posts already where we've come up with some suggestions for use. Not to be critical or anything, but the surface has barely been scratched. It's not going to be all about data warehouses, streamable content, and how many dvd movies we can rip. Tell the whole world that 120 TB is available for storage, and a variety of uses will come up.
I'm pretty convinced that the actual consumer use of 120 TB will be for something that, if suggested now, we'll all laugh at and ask why the hell we'd want to pursue such an insane idea. For instance, the article mentioned mounting tiny cameras on eyeglasses to document one's whole life. The article also mentions home digital media hubs. Both are probably uses, but I actually think they are rather conservative ideas in the grand scheme of things. A successful idea now to think of an interesting and probably use of that much space in the future is more likely to come out of the mouth of some random guy while intermittently taking puffs out of a giant bong than any mature, prominent engineer.
Then again, some founders of successful companies were allegedly (I don't have any factual evidence) pretty fond of the herb.
Has anyone else read this and felt extreme sympathy for the 17 year old kid who tried to build a breeder reactor? The guy had endless amounts of curiousity and intelligence and his story ends rather dissapointingly.
I apologize for giving anything away from the above article, but I don't understand why he wasn't recruited into some of the nation's top research labs doing positive things for society. Hell, I'd put him in a research lab with gobs of funding doing whatever the hell he wants....
I know these devices can be shut down, but that requires "proper" drivers and such. I'm still working with some hardware vendors (not by choice) that can't even get their PERIPHERAL working properly
This is the exact reason that I feel a bit jealous when I see my friends using Macs. They've really integrated the hardware and software nicely so that things just work. Meanwhile my windows machine starts fucking up, so I try to shutdown...it hangs, so I hit the power button, nothing happens, and I resort to unplugging the power and shudder to think of what side effects I've caused.
But, your analogy to the TV is a bit of a misnomer. A TV turns on so quickly because it's ALWAYS on. The insides are always kept "warm," which is why you don't have to wait for your TV to turn on like in the old days.
Yeah I realized this right as I posted...TVs nowadays usually have that standby feature. But then again old TVs didn't take that long to power up, although the colors usually wouldn't look right for a minute or so.
Getting computers to the point where they have a reliable standby does require some good hardware integration.
All my computers are on constantly, and the monitors switch off after 10 minutes idle or whatever. People (very non-technical) that come in and use my computers equate the monitor being off to the computer being off, so they just hit the flashing monitor power button since there's nothing else to press (I have flatscreens and my machines are safely hidden away under my desk) and it suddenly turns "on". This seems to be a decent interaction in my opinion.
Empathy would require the animal to have emotions, I did not know that cats and dogs were capable of such things, please point out some specific studies. Since you will be probably be unable to cite any relevent studies let me continue;
Damn...I wish I could have interrupted you. Not only are animals emotional, but they share some pretty common lower level traits with humans, as do many other animlas. After all, emotion is a very physical reaction. Someone that actually remembers freshman intro to psych can probably go into more detail on the actual part of the brain that controls emotion.
And if you really want to prove that animals have emotions in a literally hands-on way, try punching a dog (preferably a doberman) in the nose REALLY hard a few times. Squeeze your fist really tight and clock him. Yeah...he'll probably try to bite your hand off, if not tear your neck open. Why? Because he feels the human equivalent of anger. We just can't call it anger, because anger is a human concept.
Most higher level animals have emotions, but since they are anatomically (and neurologically) different they have different types of emotions. We share some pretty basic feelings, such as fear, loss, delight, and anger. As humans we're blessed with extended thought that other animals don't have, although sometimes I do talk with my roommate's dog about how shitty life is and how she has it so easy.
You mean like a power button that turns the power on, and then off again ?
I know it sounds silly, but this really is an issue. The general public wants to be able to use a computer like they do any other appliance. The power button is a simple thing, but across different computers the physical power button maps to different behavior. For instance, on notebooks, will it shutdown, hibernate, or go on standby?
In XP on my desktop, when I hit "Turn off Computer" (under Start, I might add) it asks me if I want to standby, turn off, or restart. But I just told the computer I wanted it to turn off. It was a lot simpler on older machines where if I hit the switch it would cut the power and I'd be done (with a defragmented hard drive).
Pretty much general users want to be able to use the computer like a TV: sit down, press a button, and have things immediately available. When the user's done, hit the button again and walk away. Not everyone leaves their computer on 24/7.
I don't have an X-Box, and I probably won't buy one for a while since my roommates have every other console system out.
I have a friend who works in the gaming industry who bitches and moans about how development for PS2 is difficult while XBox is a breeze. Given a choice he said he'd rather program the XBox all day rather than touch a PS2. But...PS2 has the biggest market. This guy is no MS fan either. He just wants to get his job done and the game designer team's creative concepts implemented.
I have always seen a video game console's success based on the availability of good games. The fact that XBox is easier to program makes me think that they will get more game development teams moving, meaning (hopefully) a grip of innovative new games. This doesn't look good for PS2 at all.
Oh, and I'm a big fan of the PS2, but realistically I don't see the XBox fading out.
I recv'd my PS2 during the downturn. I also heard on TV that consumer electronics was one of the few areas that was not hard hit by the downturn. That included the PS2 and XBox.
This makes a lot of sense. I read some article saying (forgot where...don't have a link) that video games and similar products didn't suffer much from the downturn in the economy. In terms of entertainment value, video games are extremely cheap for the amount of time you get out of it. A family can opt not to take their $5000 vacation to Disneyworld this year, and instead shell out $500 for a video game console plus a few games.
For a different perspective, try asking non-technical people in the professional world what they generally think of software developers and admins. Techies as we know them haven't been around as long as laywers, but they (lol...I mean we) have a pretty bad reputation for being extremely arrogant, non-social, stubborn, and unsympathizing.
Now obviously this is just a stereotype, just as the devil lawyer is a stereotype as well.
Not sure if anyone else raised this possibility, but you can scale down the color depth and resolution of all the textures (since the display is NTSC anyway).
One simple and well-known algorithm to implement this solution is a token-bucket. (More information from Cisco's web site) [cisco.com] The basic idea is that you have a bucket that collects token at some rate. This rate corresponds to the peak rate of transfer. The bucket also has a maximum capacity which corresponds to the size of the 'burst' you'll allow. When a packet arrives and the bucket is non-empty, the packet is forwarded and one token is removed from the bucket. When the bucket is empty the packet is queued or dropped.
You'd better not be unemployed...this suggestion is so sound for business AND technical reasons.
I would hope that Time Warner and other ISP/cable companies would at least consider this as a viable alternative.
...and capable of solving in one second what a human being with a calculator would need 10 million years to figure out.
Obviously within a limited problem scope that the machine would be good at. I just wish they were a bit more explicit about this so that non-techies won't tell me how they're worried that machines will be watching them and manipulating them ala-HAL all of a sudden.
Then again why would a non-techie even browse to that page anyway? Never mind.
Starcraft ran under WINE too...those of us with Linux could play as well.
Ahh...right. forgot about that. I wish my roommates running linux had figured that out back in the day. they kept having to reboot to 98 just to play SC.
Software doesn't evolve by chance, folks, it is DESIGNED by its CREATORS
I'm not sure whether this was supposed to be funny or whether other readers are interpreting it as funny. There have also been a few stabs at the parallels with life (evolution vs creation, etc). Hrm...whatever. From the article: "The gap between biological evolution and artificial systems evolution is just too enormous to expect to link the two,"
In all seriousness, I've seen so many project managers use evolution (not the theory explained in the article, however) as some sort of methodology for their projects and I have not seen any of those projects truely succeed. The idea that you throw something, anything, out there, find out what's good/bad with it, then re-iterate the design and development based on findings is such a random and expensive process. I've seen so many programmers put in half-assed functionality, especially on front-end code, just so that they'll let testers and "usability" experts fix the problem and fix it in the next release. This is like throwing a chunk of randomly chipped wood out and hoping that others can tell you how to sand it down to something usable.
Cooper makes this analogy in "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" (link here) and bashes project teams that take on this sort of process of evolution. He poses a process of almost completely up-front design by building to a theoretical user persona and culling out complexity by ditching features that will never be used by this persona.
Now Cooper's views don't necessarily contradict Lehman's (at least from what I've seen in the article). In fact at a glance they seem to blend in nicely.
From the article, again: Figure out how to control the various feedback loops -- i.e. market demand, internal debugging and individual developer whim -- and you can stave off crippling over-complexity for longer periods of time
It's clear that he means that we, as programmers, should be willing to throw away a shitload of code. I agree with this. I think there's a huge belief in re-use (I tend to it myself) among programmers for both practical and personal (pride...having spent weeks on certain code) reasons. But there are so many cases where the re-use of a small feature among others in bloated code can really complicate and bog down the overall code-base, or where the functionality of certain re-used code doesn't really fit, but so much investment has been made that it might as well be re-used.
Developers really do need to listen to the feedback provided by the marketplace and other forces. I'm not certain if the unified theory is so unified, but it's a valid perspective and blends in with other published sentiments on software development methodology.
Then they switched over to NT because the gamers angered people.
I don't remember the switch to NT stopping us from playing Starcraft. I believe a few guys in Morewood (or was it shlag) set up a windows share with a hacked version of starcraft. Drag and drop to the desktop, then run.
how is that possible?
Check out http://www.uniax.com/. They use Flash for nav so I can't give a direct link, but click on "how it works" and then check out either the FAQ or the OLED section. It's pretty cool...
...where I can use the trackpoint on my thinkpad. Most mouse-based (FPS, RTS) games totally blow when using the trackpoint (nipple) control on some notebook computers.
Oh yeah and this thing works pretty well with 802.11 ad-hoc networking. I'm going to start walking into starbucks and assaulting people with the obvious lucent card sticking out of their notebook.
This is all very late in the article comments but I thought I'd respond since you made some valid comments. I like discussion.
Yes, you can call him elitist, but your opinion hardly matters, you are a common oaf trapsing through the fields of the lords, you and your massive swarm of idiots trampling the grounds, turning what was once a beautifully cultivated garden into a mudpit reminescent of Woodstock 99.
Very colorful, especially the oaf part.
I do believe that you're assuming a tad too much about me, but I won't go into where you're wrong. After all, if we really wanted to get to know each other, it would be better to just meet up at a neighborhood pub over a beer or intoxicant of your choice.
To respond to an earlier statement, I did indeed experience the online community that he talks about. I have yet to find a "community site" that even begins to approximate the thrill of being online in a BBS. There definitely was a holistic, living, place back then. There was a higher signal to noise ratio, since I tended to get exactly what I wanted, and I definitely spent a greater percentage of my disposable time (is that even a term?) online, somewhat productively.
So basically I agree with the sentiment that both you and the original poster expressed. I just disagree with the elitist attitude. First of all, if they don't understand proper etiquette it's hardly their fault. As you mentioned there's no one to teach them this. They don't give a shit about how much bandwidth they use putting up retarded gifs and pictures of their ass on web pages because they don't know any better. I certainly didn't know any better (except the ass part) until I learned. And AOL doesn't exactly require members to undergo training before use, nor will it ever.
You posed that I might lack good taste. In many avenues I do lack good taste simply because I haven't discovered any better. While I try to improve on my ignorance in dimensions I'm not familiar with, I really appreciate it when someone comes along and SUGGESTS something better, especially if he doesn't initially alienate me by saying I'm completely wrong.
I know this is going to sound cheesy and naive, but at the heart of it I just want people like you and the orginal poster to take what we appreciated back then and somehow get it moving again today. People that you think are stupid don't need any self-degradation by being called stupid...they just need a few pointers.
Missing the nestalgia of calling bbs, I have recently been telneting to them again. Its great, you feel the community is smaller, you share files, you ask questions and share info.
I miss the BBS community as well, and I have yet to see it replicated through a web interface. I remember first using the web and thinking about how lonely it was compared to logging into a BBS and getting hailed by online friends. I guess instant messaging has added a bit, but there's less sense of visiting a location and hanging out.
I've been seeing a lot of picture + profile + messageboards + instant messaging sites out there recently, mostly centered around a common interest or theme. They have a ways to go though. The p2p-BBS idea is a good one...I'd like to see someone push this out one day, or find a team and implement it myself.
You know, hyrdra made a pretty valid response to you. You really are being a tad elitist. It seems that you're disgruntled that the Internet isn't conforming to the "intents" that you wish it to be.
information one distributed should be, for the most part, relevant, interesting to others, or important.
Who decides this? And with the huge online population, HOW do you make every bit of content interesting or important? I would argue that everything published on the web is important to someone, just not necessarily important to you or me. The recent proliferation of weblogs is one example, since they're really only interesting to the individual (and the odd reader) in terms of having an ongoing online identity and a channel for expression.
True, there is a lot of shit out there. 90% of the web is irrelevant or important to any single individual. But the high-note about this is that the remaining 10% is likely to be increasingly rich and interesting. I know that my narrow non-technical interests are being represented better and better every day.
And I resent you scoffing at geocities pages. Most of the pages on their are crap, but who cares? In 1995 I was one of those idiot high school students with bad spelling and a bad html tag reference. I had a web page up on free hosting and it was useless -- 1 LONG page of drivel complete with animated gifs and huge fonts all about how special my little world was. Useless to everyone, but it pushed me on a fun road for the last 7 years. Last year I filed for two patents in document knowledge extraction and data visualizations, both focused on navigating rich data through a web browser. I had fun coding up a shitty html page about me, and I eventually had fun coding other things.
The web has become less special and exclusive, and I'm glad. I want everyone to have a presence online, because this only makes the better content providers want to have better content to differentiate from the crowd.
So I think MIT was the pioneer in this movies+wireless industry.
I doubt this, since CMU deployed the first collegiate wireless network, and has had a tradition of showing $1 in both the main theatre and one of the bigger lecture halls since the fifties.
And believe me when I say that wireless + theater isn't a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I definitely agree with this. Notebooks are literally closer to the user than desktop machines and it's impossible to get the "right" notebook simply based on performance specs. You really need to play around with a few brands/models to get a feel for what you like. Also a high performance machine is useless if you really have a hard time with a trackpad (I personally do) or if it's too bulky to tag along with you everywhere you go (if you really need portability).
I recently bought a notebook that uses an 800 mhz Crusoe processor, and realistically speaking it's slower than the equivalent intel p-whatever. It also only holds up to 256 megs of RAM, and doesn't have 3D graphics hardware.
But portability, battery life, a trackpoint (I like my hands in a fairly constant position), and a good screen are really important to me. I couldn't care less about performance as long as it's fast enough to write documents, do light coding, browse, and email/IM. I added the 802.11b option and the machine's perfect for running all over town with.
He's worried about debris orbiting around the Earth, when his proposal involves potentially tearing up the moon's surface.
Still...the idea has some merit, just seems a bit crazy.
I do question some of his statements, however, particularly about human creativity:
Now it seems we face a curious Malthusian catastrophe of the information economy: The products of human creativity grow only arithmetically, whereas the capacity to store and distribute them increases geometrically. The human imagination can't keep up.
Or maybe it's only my imagination that can't keep up.
I'd say that the bolded part above is very likely. He states that he individually can't think of what to do with 120 TB, but collectively I'm confident we'll find a use for it. I've read through a dozen posts already where we've come up with some suggestions for use. Not to be critical or anything, but the surface has barely been scratched. It's not going to be all about data warehouses, streamable content, and how many dvd movies we can rip. Tell the whole world that 120 TB is available for storage, and a variety of uses will come up.
I'm pretty convinced that the actual consumer use of 120 TB will be for something that, if suggested now, we'll all laugh at and ask why the hell we'd want to pursue such an insane idea. For instance, the article mentioned mounting tiny cameras on eyeglasses to document one's whole life. The article also mentions home digital media hubs. Both are probably uses, but I actually think they are rather conservative ideas in the grand scheme of things. A successful idea now to think of an interesting and probably use of that much space in the future is more likely to come out of the mouth of some random guy while intermittently taking puffs out of a giant bong than any mature, prominent engineer.
Then again, some founders of successful companies were allegedly (I don't have any factual evidence) pretty fond of the herb.
I apologize for giving anything away from the above article, but I don't understand why he wasn't recruited into some of the nation's top research labs doing positive things for society. Hell, I'd put him in a research lab with gobs of funding doing whatever the hell he wants....
Intelligence is a terrible thing to waste.
This is the exact reason that I feel a bit jealous when I see my friends using Macs. They've really integrated the hardware and software nicely so that things just work. Meanwhile my windows machine starts fucking up, so I try to shutdown...it hangs, so I hit the power button, nothing happens, and I resort to unplugging the power and shudder to think of what side effects I've caused.
But, your analogy to the TV is a bit of a misnomer. A TV turns on so quickly because it's ALWAYS on. The insides are always kept "warm," which is why you don't have to wait for your TV to turn on like in the old days.
Yeah I realized this right as I posted...TVs nowadays usually have that standby feature. But then again old TVs didn't take that long to power up, although the colors usually wouldn't look right for a minute or so.
Getting computers to the point where they have a reliable standby does require some good hardware integration.
All my computers are on constantly, and the monitors switch off after 10 minutes idle or whatever. People (very non-technical) that come in and use my computers equate the monitor being off to the computer being off, so they just hit the flashing monitor power button since there's nothing else to press (I have flatscreens and my machines are safely hidden away under my desk) and it suddenly turns "on". This seems to be a decent interaction in my opinion.
Damn...I wish I could have interrupted you. Not only are animals emotional, but they share some pretty common lower level traits with humans, as do many other animlas. After all, emotion is a very physical reaction. Someone that actually remembers freshman intro to psych can probably go into more detail on the actual part of the brain that controls emotion.
Here:
http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/tierphys/Startle/start le_emotion_e.htm
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.lubi nski.html
Buy a book (excerpt)
And if you really want to prove that animals have emotions in a literally hands-on way, try punching a dog (preferably a doberman) in the nose REALLY hard a few times. Squeeze your fist really tight and clock him. Yeah...he'll probably try to bite your hand off, if not tear your neck open. Why? Because he feels the human equivalent of anger. We just can't call it anger, because anger is a human concept.
Most higher level animals have emotions, but since they are anatomically (and neurologically) different they have different types of emotions. We share some pretty basic feelings, such as fear, loss, delight, and anger. As humans we're blessed with extended thought that other animals don't have, although sometimes I do talk with my roommate's dog about how shitty life is and how she has it so easy.
I know it sounds silly, but this really is an issue. The general public wants to be able to use a computer like they do any other appliance. The power button is a simple thing, but across different computers the physical power button maps to different behavior. For instance, on notebooks, will it shutdown, hibernate, or go on standby?
In XP on my desktop, when I hit "Turn off Computer" (under Start, I might add) it asks me if I want to standby, turn off, or restart. But I just told the computer I wanted it to turn off. It was a lot simpler on older machines where if I hit the switch it would cut the power and I'd be done (with a defragmented hard drive).
Pretty much general users want to be able to use the computer like a TV: sit down, press a button, and have things immediately available. When the user's done, hit the button again and walk away. Not everyone leaves their computer on 24/7.
I have a friend who works in the gaming industry who bitches and moans about how development for PS2 is difficult while XBox is a breeze. Given a choice he said he'd rather program the XBox all day rather than touch a PS2. But...PS2 has the biggest market. This guy is no MS fan either. He just wants to get his job done and the game designer team's creative concepts implemented.
I have always seen a video game console's success based on the availability of good games. The fact that XBox is easier to program makes me think that they will get more game development teams moving, meaning (hopefully) a grip of innovative new games. This doesn't look good for PS2 at all.
Oh, and I'm a big fan of the PS2, but realistically I don't see the XBox fading out.
This makes a lot of sense. I read some article saying (forgot where...don't have a link) that video games and similar products didn't suffer much from the downturn in the economy. In terms of entertainment value, video games are extremely cheap for the amount of time you get out of it. A family can opt not to take their $5000 vacation to Disneyworld this year, and instead shell out $500 for a video game console plus a few games.
For a different perspective, try asking non-technical people in the professional world what they generally think of software developers and admins. Techies as we know them haven't been around as long as laywers, but they (lol...I mean we) have a pretty bad reputation for being extremely arrogant, non-social, stubborn, and unsympathizing.
Now obviously this is just a stereotype, just as the devil lawyer is a stereotype as well.
Not sure if anyone else raised this possibility, but you can scale down the color depth and resolution of all the textures (since the display is NTSC anyway).
You'd better not be unemployed...this suggestion is so sound for business AND technical reasons.
I would hope that Time Warner and other ISP/cable companies would at least consider this as a viable alternative.
Obviously within a limited problem scope that the machine would be good at. I just wish they were a bit more explicit about this so that non-techies won't tell me how they're worried that machines will be watching them and manipulating them ala-HAL all of a sudden.
Then again why would a non-techie even browse to that page anyway? Never mind.
Ahh...right. forgot about that. I wish my roommates running linux had figured that out back in the day. they kept having to reboot to 98 just to play SC.
I'm not sure whether this was supposed to be funny or whether other readers are interpreting it as funny. There have also been a few stabs at the parallels with life (evolution vs creation, etc). Hrm...whatever. From the article: "The gap between biological evolution and artificial systems evolution is just too enormous to expect to link the two,"
In all seriousness, I've seen so many project managers use evolution (not the theory explained in the article, however) as some sort of methodology for their projects and I have not seen any of those projects truely succeed. The idea that you throw something, anything, out there, find out what's good/bad with it, then re-iterate the design and development based on findings is such a random and expensive process. I've seen so many programmers put in half-assed functionality, especially on front-end code, just so that they'll let testers and "usability" experts fix the problem and fix it in the next release. This is like throwing a chunk of randomly chipped wood out and hoping that others can tell you how to sand it down to something usable.
Cooper makes this analogy in "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" (link here) and bashes project teams that take on this sort of process of evolution. He poses a process of almost completely up-front design by building to a theoretical user persona and culling out complexity by ditching features that will never be used by this persona.
Now Cooper's views don't necessarily contradict Lehman's (at least from what I've seen in the article). In fact at a glance they seem to blend in nicely.
From the article, again: Figure out how to control the various feedback loops -- i.e. market demand, internal debugging and individual developer whim -- and you can stave off crippling over-complexity for longer periods of time
It's clear that he means that we, as programmers, should be willing to throw away a shitload of code. I agree with this. I think there's a huge belief in re-use (I tend to it myself) among programmers for both practical and personal (pride...having spent weeks on certain code) reasons. But there are so many cases where the re-use of a small feature among others in bloated code can really complicate and bog down the overall code-base, or where the functionality of certain re-used code doesn't really fit, but so much investment has been made that it might as well be re-used.
Developers really do need to listen to the feedback provided by the marketplace and other forces. I'm not certain if the unified theory is so unified, but it's a valid perspective and blends in with other published sentiments on software development methodology.
'nuff rambling...
Somehow the last two words form a concept that at least from observation, doesn't really exist.
Then again I'm only 2 years out in the "commercial world"...what do I know?
Flash has its uses, but it totally breaks the web paradigm.
I don't remember the switch to NT stopping us from playing Starcraft. I believe a few guys in Morewood (or was it shlag) set up a windows share with a hacked version of starcraft. Drag and drop to the desktop, then run.
Or did I miss something in your post?
how is that possible? Check out http://www.uniax.com/. They use Flash for nav so I can't give a direct link, but click on "how it works" and then check out either the FAQ or the OLED section. It's pretty cool...
Also check out this site for more info on OLEDs.
Karma whore I am...
Oh yeah and this thing works pretty well with 802.11 ad-hoc networking. I'm going to start walking into starbucks and assaulting people with the obvious lucent card sticking out of their notebook.
Yes, you can call him elitist, but your opinion hardly matters, you are a common oaf trapsing through the fields of the lords, you and your massive swarm of idiots trampling the grounds, turning what was once a beautifully cultivated garden into a mudpit reminescent of Woodstock 99.
Very colorful, especially the oaf part.
I do believe that you're assuming a tad too much about me, but I won't go into where you're wrong. After all, if we really wanted to get to know each other, it would be better to just meet up at a neighborhood pub over a beer or intoxicant of your choice.
To respond to an earlier statement, I did indeed experience the online community that he talks about. I have yet to find a "community site" that even begins to approximate the thrill of being online in a BBS. There definitely was a holistic, living, place back then. There was a higher signal to noise ratio, since I tended to get exactly what I wanted, and I definitely spent a greater percentage of my disposable time (is that even a term?) online, somewhat productively.
So basically I agree with the sentiment that both you and the original poster expressed. I just disagree with the elitist attitude. First of all, if they don't understand proper etiquette it's hardly their fault. As you mentioned there's no one to teach them this. They don't give a shit about how much bandwidth they use putting up retarded gifs and pictures of their ass on web pages because they don't know any better. I certainly didn't know any better (except the ass part) until I learned. And AOL doesn't exactly require members to undergo training before use, nor will it ever.
You posed that I might lack good taste. In many avenues I do lack good taste simply because I haven't discovered any better. While I try to improve on my ignorance in dimensions I'm not familiar with, I really appreciate it when someone comes along and SUGGESTS something better, especially if he doesn't initially alienate me by saying I'm completely wrong.
I know this is going to sound cheesy and naive, but at the heart of it I just want people like you and the orginal poster to take what we appreciated back then and somehow get it moving again today. People that you think are stupid don't need any self-degradation by being called stupid...they just need a few pointers.
Later...
I miss the BBS community as well, and I have yet to see it replicated through a web interface. I remember first using the web and thinking about how lonely it was compared to logging into a BBS and getting hailed by online friends. I guess instant messaging has added a bit, but there's less sense of visiting a location and hanging out.
I've been seeing a lot of picture + profile + messageboards + instant messaging sites out there recently, mostly centered around a common interest or theme. They have a ways to go though. The p2p-BBS idea is a good one...I'd like to see someone push this out one day, or find a team and implement it myself.
information one distributed should be, for the most part, relevant, interesting to others, or important.
Who decides this? And with the huge online population, HOW do you make every bit of content interesting or important? I would argue that everything published on the web is important to someone, just not necessarily important to you or me. The recent proliferation of weblogs is one example, since they're really only interesting to the individual (and the odd reader) in terms of having an ongoing online identity and a channel for expression.
True, there is a lot of shit out there. 90% of the web is irrelevant or important to any single individual. But the high-note about this is that the remaining 10% is likely to be increasingly rich and interesting. I know that my narrow non-technical interests are being represented better and better every day.
And I resent you scoffing at geocities pages. Most of the pages on their are crap, but who cares? In 1995 I was one of those idiot high school students with bad spelling and a bad html tag reference. I had a web page up on free hosting and it was useless -- 1 LONG page of drivel complete with animated gifs and huge fonts all about how special my little world was. Useless to everyone, but it pushed me on a fun road for the last 7 years. Last year I filed for two patents in document knowledge extraction and data visualizations, both focused on navigating rich data through a web browser. I had fun coding up a shitty html page about me, and I eventually had fun coding other things.
The web has become less special and exclusive, and I'm glad. I want everyone to have a presence online, because this only makes the better content providers want to have better content to differentiate from the crowd.
I doubt this, since CMU deployed the first collegiate wireless network, and has had a tradition of showing $1 in both the main theatre and one of the bigger lecture halls since the fifties.
And believe me when I say that wireless + theater isn't a good thing.