Perhaps this is/.'s way of trying to make sure we don't disable Idle from showing up on the front page.
Actually, I think this might be targeted at people who feel Slashdot no longer occupies a legit place between hardcore tech sites and fluffy news aggregation sites (Digg?).
By moving the interesting but tabloidesque stories to Idle the rest of the site can get more tech without depriving readers of their light coffee break reading.
Like it or not, this story is something that readers are likely to see in the weird news section of the nightly tabloid news shows.
Now if this article was a summary of what other robot building geeks should learn from the efforts of the individual profiled in this story.. then it would not belong in Idle. Either way, Idle does not seem to be the total failure that many readers claim it is.
Wait a minute... Checking listings on those websites is a great recommendation, but as someone who has tried to donate like this to another type of underfunded public organization let me say donor beware!
Even if you are able to make the donation legally, and politically (ie: another cash-strapped dept doesn't complain about fairness of who gets the benefit from your donation etc.), it is difficult to cut the cord after the donation.
Whatever you are donating needs to be recognized by whatever type of group maintains infrastructure for the organization.
While providing computers to help educate is definitely the greater gift in terms of changing the learning environment for every child, it might be wiser to spend time individually helping to educate the children(after school program?).
My original post does not say that games cannot be patented, only that there are special laws about 'game rules.' The game itself is a combination of elements that can include programming code (copyright issues), physical or electronic representations of board for play (clearly patentable if the board is a material item), maybe a couple other elements, and the game rules.
The game rules are the wildcard under current law. If someone can implement your ruleset without infringing on the other protected elements of your game there is nothing you can do, IIRC.
If it is popular then it will get knocked off on other platforms - or maybe even on your chosen platform.
The only way to make money then would be a lawsuit against the purveyors of said knock-off. Seeing as game rules have special designation under the law you would need to sue like the Scrabble folk did, focus on the actual board design etc.. and then you will just look like a prick to all the people who discovered 'your' game through the knock off you have now hounded in court.
Make a couple variations on game-play, open source the code, have a contest for free (donated?) stuff awarded to the best alternative implementation of game rules etc.., and then get an online game consortium to give you an interview based not on a CV, but the conversation their reps had with you at the game expo where you were hobnobbing with your new open source gaming friends.
Don't advertise on other game designer's comment threads without consent - hopefully you knew that already.
Have fun most of all, though, cause your idea is probably not going anywhere - most don't and it usually isn't cause they are bad ideas. Implementation is everything.
Strict constitutionalists would tell you so, or at least they tell me so. The nature, qty, and method of procuring the federal funding that flies around these days has made the D.C. delegations much more powerful than their state level counterparts.
Anyhow, I usually hear the Civil War cited as the tipping point between state/federal power with feds going unchallenged for supremacy since I have been alive to witness.
I use my first name and my initial, as well as my email, that way you can still reference it when applying for a job (whereas you'd look like an idiot claiming that you did excellent coding work but never gave a real name or used your regular email)
Hmmm..
Some people (especially younger coders) seem to see the open source community as a place to exercise weaker skills and get feedback from the often impolite, but usually honest maintainers of open source projects. A lot of these people utilize a core skill set at work during the day and choose to spend their spare time in areas of the field that are less familiar, and therefore more ripe for error.
In that case the data trail attached to whatever you post under will include all sorts of content that you might never want to be associated with a professional capacity... The danger being that struggles chronicled online from your Open Source adventures are indicative of the fact that you like to try new things and add skills, but will be mistaken as something else by prospective employers.
Generally speaking, keep anything that could result in a flamewar or a security breach under a different name.
Hell, this slashdot account is actually a troll account, I am just not usually in a blatantly trollish mood in my old age;)
My original account's karma died quite a while ago, but you wouldn't know it from my current karma.
Wait, the summary says she does not like sciences, she is just good at them.
I am familiar with groupthink around here, but the mods that are dropping my comment from +whatever to oblivion are living in a dream world.
Snaring a technically gifted person that would otherwise shun the field altogether, and getting a technically apt mind involved in research support (ie:creating/molding public awareness through marketing) would be a high5 score for most research groups.
I think maybe some people are unaware that marketing != sales. Marketing and sales are both highly evolved arts, but at the highest levels I have observed marketing = mystical kung-fu vs sales' MMA approach.
Another way to think about it... a good sales person plays to the customer's pragmatic desires, a good marketing person finds ways to entice a customer's vision.
Check out marketing positions for the types of companies in the fields you have probably already identified as good prospects.
Public speaking, preparing/delivering glossy presentations, personal interactions with all sorts of people made possible by the ability to discuss product applications or service capabilities in finite technical detail. International travel on the company dime.
After all, if she is not designing or using the product she will only need a level of technical knowledge that is 'easy' for a person like her to grasp and the ability to have an intelligent conversation.
I have a cousin who does something along these lines. She parlayed her technical skills into a non-technical marketing position with sweet benefits and travel to sweet locales.
If she is interested in this field buy her Mitnick's books and make sure she is aware that social engineering is not just a code word for lying. And make sure she understands that marketing and sales are not the same thing! There are guerrilla marketing books that might catch her interest too, though i can't recall titles atm.
The boot time may not be 20 seconds on our machines, but the guy who wrote it might be running old hardware or a bloated box.
Anyhow, here is a real world example of the perception problem from a small office I support with a custom app.
I got OpenOffice accepted at an office with old Dell p4s - don't recall the speed of the processors - and I'm a software guy anyhow, so I didn't make much point of checking before installing OpenOffice on the machines. I do recall that there was plenty of ram for XP machines under their use scenario.
The customer had upgraded to Office 2007, but was having massive problems including unexplained resource locks that would take down machines and lose all unsaved data (this was a number of patches ago, so the MS product may have improved stability since this happened).
Open Office worked fine for everything they needed, but the boot time was at least three times that of the MS offering on those specific machines. Luckily, the controller wanted stability first - but her employees still grouse about her being a cheapskate. Even after using OO for a while they think of it as second tier and the only specific complaint they can back this attitude up with is that OO is slow.
I know their usage pattern and the only slow thing is the suite's boot time, and only then when compared to the older version of Office they were all used to using. So transitioning the customer to OpenOffice was actually harmful to the suite's reputation among the rank and file, and this issue comes up when the controller has to give out bad reviews to employees. Apparently some have cited having to use shitty software as a reason they cannot perform their duties well.
Now any manager in their right mind would think that those employees need to get new jobs, but MS penetration of the market has made it difficult to find rank and file that view OSS as anything other than a 'cheap' alternative, and small companies are not usually willing to part with long time employees over software issues.
"Oh noes! it takes 20 seconds to boot!"// as if those nerds have anything better to do with their precious time
The problem is not the nerd's time, but the perception of the MS users to whom said nerds show the suite. Startup time for OpenOffice programs directly conflicts with the assertion that wins OSS converts, that OSS software will better utilize existing hardware.
Probably a cultural difference, but the American Hippies I have met live in forests in places like Arcata, CA. They are often naked in 'public' ie:the forest.
Some of them use cell phones, but many shun them for radiation concerns, and all of them I know well enough to judge would think regulating standard pornography is insane.
That being said many of them are leery of technology in general because they see it as a symptom of our cultural debasement... said debasement being why they are in forests in the first place.
I often get flak from Hippies for being a programmer not because programming is wrong, but because they don't like 'corporations,' whatever that means, and they think programmers only program for corporations (I am self employed and serve very small niche markets). Open Source can change this attitude, but naked people in forests don't have much to offer the Open Source movement at the current time, so it will have to be gradual.
For the record, I knew one hippie with a custom solar set up on her van. She powered an ancient 286 with a photovoltaic cell/battery setup. I hope she was using Linux. The one time I hung out with her she was beating on a drum around a campfire without any clothes on.
Anyhow, sorry for what is happening in your country. If you are ever in America and looking to meet some Hippies you can visit Black's Beach near San Diego on the full moon. I have not been in the area for a while, but there used to be mad hordes of naked Hippies that congregated there for a monthly drum circle on the night of the full moon.
P.S. Beware of Hippie chicks, yo. Feeding hungry Hippie chicks garners good favor with the Gods of the road, but don't let them follow you home unless you already have beads and tassles hanging from everything you own.
Forgive the bad form of replying to my own comment, but I left out the essential part of my position.
My anecdotal evidence suggests that for a large swath of humanity there is always 'someone' who is given validity through popularity. The poster who started this sub-thread basically identified the method through which my grandmother was convinced to forgo medical treatment for CANCER. Why? Because her someone spoke to her in the method she required.
Gladwell examined the way ideas work, recognized an age old mechanism powerful enough that it can be used to lead one tribe to exterminate another or emancipate enslaved people, and chose to use it to make himself the man for a while.
People are mimics. IIRC there are dating books based on this concept. Psyops is an entire field based on this concept dedicated to changing the models a populace mimics incrementally.
Gladwell is given people an accessible model to mimic to begin a new discussion. Are there limitations to his methodology? Yes. But he did not design the framework, he is only using it.
Not only is he using it.. he is explaining it to you as he does it. That is what it all boils down to, his entire body of work. The art of making snap decisions = listening to your inner mimic which can hone in on successful or self destructive models with stunning precision. Anyone who understands this can establish themselves as a (often negative) model for others.. whether that is the abusive spouse who goes unreported by an 'understanding' partner or the hostage taker who rocks an innocent person's world with sudden violence and then finds the person defending them to the authorities. Or a priest who tells an old woman that dying of treatable cancer is gods will. In each example the 'victim' cedes power the power to the dominant individual.
Get kittens. Watch them learn. If an idea is the currency in our dawning age, Gladwell is royalty.
OK, so the criticism of Gladwell then boils down to something like this:
A guy who claims to know something about ideas has chosen the most enduring and successful method for propogating ideas known to man.
I don't want to come off as brutish, but some branches of my family have been ensnared in occasionally unhealthy religious practices that made no rational sense, so I have thought about mind control in depth. Gladwell is using an extremely well documented aspect of human nature to spread his ideas. The documentation of the technique he is using is called History - AKA a chronicle of ideas that caught fire long enough or brightly enough to be remembered - something this dude claims to know something about.
Humans like to be spoken to in the manner that Gladwell is speaking and he will continue to be massively popular until a fresher face comes along and does the exact same thing in a slightly different manner. The parent to my original reply should be +5 Insightful in my opinion, even though I think more nuance was required in the original post.
Before someone mods you troll I would like to point out that this is exactly the stimulus that 'people of faith' the world over seek every time they enter a place of worship.
Gladwell is utilizing a proven tool (rehashing the familiar) to get people thinking...
Not sure about the offtopic mod on the parent comment. I have heard the same thing... that the RIAA legal war is not sustainable because the settlements don't cover the cost of waging the war.
If this is the case, they are fighting to make a point, not a profit - a tactical subtlety that is critical to understanding how to fight back.
Slashdot Mirror
So is Zombo just an advert for the other site mentioned in the page source, or is my browser setup blocking their movie from playing fully?
Perhaps this is /.'s way of trying to make sure we don't disable Idle from showing up on the front page.
Actually, I think this might be targeted at people who feel Slashdot no longer occupies a legit place between hardcore tech sites and fluffy news aggregation sites (Digg?).
By moving the interesting but tabloidesque stories to Idle the rest of the site can get more tech without depriving readers of their light coffee break reading.
Like it or not, this story is something that readers are likely to see in the weird news section of the nightly tabloid news shows.
Now if this article was a summary of what other robot building geeks should learn from the efforts of the individual profiled in this story.. then it would not belong in Idle. Either way, Idle does not seem to be the total failure that many readers claim it is.
Wait a minute...
Checking listings on those websites is a great recommendation, but as someone who has tried to donate like this to another type of underfunded public organization let me say donor beware!
Even if you are able to make the donation legally, and politically (ie: another cash-strapped dept doesn't complain about fairness of who gets the benefit from your donation etc.), it is difficult to cut the cord after the donation.
Whatever you are donating needs to be recognized by whatever type of group maintains infrastructure for the organization.
While providing computers to help educate is definitely the greater gift in terms of changing the learning environment for every child, it might be wiser to spend time individually helping to educate the children(after school program?).
My original post does not say that games cannot be patented, only that there are special laws about 'game rules.' The game itself is a combination of elements that can include programming code (copyright issues), physical or electronic representations of board for play (clearly patentable if the board is a material item), maybe a couple other elements, and the game rules.
The game rules are the wildcard under current law. If someone can implement your ruleset without infringing on the other protected elements of your game there is nothing you can do, IIRC.
On the open source note...
If it is popular then it will get knocked off on other platforms - or maybe even on your chosen platform.
The only way to make money then would be a lawsuit against the purveyors of said knock-off. Seeing as game rules have special designation under the law you would need to sue like the Scrabble folk did, focus on the actual board design etc.. and then you will just look like a prick to all the people who discovered 'your' game through the knock off you have now hounded in court.
Make a couple variations on game-play, open source the code, have a contest for free (donated?) stuff awarded to the best alternative implementation of game rules etc.., and then get an online game consortium to give you an interview based not on a CV, but the conversation their reps had with you at the game expo where you were hobnobbing with your new open source gaming friends.
Don't advertise on other game designer's comment threads without consent - hopefully you knew that already.
Have fun most of all, though, cause your idea is probably not going anywhere - most don't and it usually isn't cause they are bad ideas. Implementation is everything.
This is a documented but rare symptom of conjoined twin myselxia.
There are some documentary snippets on YouTube for those interested in further research.
With maximized windows, 100% of the desktop is in use by the application I'm using.
I'm not sure about the GP, but the problem with dedicating 100% to one window is that I am never 100% doing one thing.
Sounds like you know more about this tech than I do by a good sight, so tell me this...
Is this another entry in the framework theory of everything arms race we have going, or just a logical development based on developer feedback?
"Aren't Governers > Senators?"
Strict constitutionalists would tell you so, or at least they tell me so. The nature, qty, and method of procuring the federal funding that flies around these days has made the D.C. delegations much more powerful than their state level counterparts.
Anyhow, I usually hear the Civil War cited as the tipping point between state/federal power with feds going unchallenged for supremacy since I have been alive to witness.
Sandboxes for legacy apps will remind consumers that they didn't want to upgrade in the first place.
I use my first name and my initial, as well as my email, that way you can still reference it when applying for a job (whereas you'd look like an idiot claiming that you did excellent coding work but never gave a real name or used your regular email)
Hmmm..
Some people (especially younger coders) seem to see the open source community as a place to exercise weaker skills and get feedback from the often impolite, but usually honest maintainers of open source projects. A lot of these people utilize a core skill set at work during the day and choose to spend their spare time in areas of the field that are less familiar, and therefore more ripe for error.
In that case the data trail attached to whatever you post under will include all sorts of content that you might never want to be associated with a professional capacity... The danger being that struggles chronicled online from your Open Source adventures are indicative of the fact that you like to try new things and add skills, but will be mistaken as something else by prospective employers.
Generally speaking, keep anything that could result in a flamewar or a security breach under a different name.
Hell, this slashdot account is actually a troll account, I am just not usually in a blatantly trollish mood in my old age ;)
My original account's karma died quite a while ago, but you wouldn't know it from my current karma.
I believe so, and the person that matters (the controller) is convinced that the OO solution is appropriate - so I don't have any fires to put out.
Are other people getting better performance on boot than I am describing in production environments.
I had come to the conclusion that slow boots were a fact of life with OO.
Wait, the summary says she does not like sciences, she is just good at them.
I am familiar with groupthink around here, but the mods that are dropping my comment from +whatever to oblivion are living in a dream world.
Snaring a technically gifted person that would otherwise shun the field altogether, and getting a technically apt mind involved in research support (ie:creating/molding public awareness through marketing) would be a high5 score for most research groups.
I think maybe some people are unaware that marketing != sales. Marketing and sales are both highly evolved arts, but at the highest levels I have observed marketing = mystical kung-fu vs sales' MMA approach.
Another way to think about it... a good sales person plays to the customer's pragmatic desires, a good marketing person finds ways to entice a customer's vision.
Check out marketing positions for the types of companies in the fields you have probably already identified as good prospects.
Public speaking, preparing/delivering glossy presentations, personal interactions with all sorts of people made possible by the ability to discuss product applications or service capabilities in finite technical detail. International travel on the company dime.
After all, if she is not designing or using the product she will only need a level of technical knowledge that is 'easy' for a person like her to grasp and the ability to have an intelligent conversation.
I have a cousin who does something along these lines. She parlayed her technical skills into a non-technical marketing position with sweet benefits and travel to sweet locales.
If she is interested in this field buy her Mitnick's books and make sure she is aware that social engineering is not just a code word for lying. And make sure she understands that marketing and sales are not the same thing! There are guerrilla marketing books that might catch her interest too, though i can't recall titles atm.
The boot time may not be 20 seconds on our machines, but the guy who wrote it might be running old hardware or a bloated box.
Anyhow, here is a real world example of the perception problem from a small office I support with a custom app.
I got OpenOffice accepted at an office with old Dell p4s - don't recall the speed of the processors - and I'm a software guy anyhow, so I didn't make much point of checking before installing OpenOffice on the machines. I do recall that there was plenty of ram for XP machines under their use scenario.
The customer had upgraded to Office 2007, but was having massive problems including unexplained resource locks that would take down machines and lose all unsaved data (this was a number of patches ago, so the MS product may have improved stability since this happened).
Open Office worked fine for everything they needed, but the boot time was at least three times that of the MS offering on those specific machines. Luckily, the controller wanted stability first - but her employees still grouse about her being a cheapskate. Even after using OO for a while they think of it as second tier and the only specific complaint they can back this attitude up with is that OO is slow.
I know their usage pattern and the only slow thing is the suite's boot time, and only then when compared to the older version of Office they were all used to using. So transitioning the customer to OpenOffice was actually harmful to the suite's reputation among the rank and file, and this issue comes up when the controller has to give out bad reviews to employees. Apparently some have cited having to use shitty software as a reason they cannot perform their duties well.
Now any manager in their right mind would think that those employees need to get new jobs, but MS penetration of the market has made it difficult to find rank and file that view OSS as anything other than a 'cheap' alternative, and small companies are not usually willing to part with long time employees over software issues.
"Oh noes! it takes 20 seconds to boot!" // as if those nerds have anything better to do with their precious time
The problem is not the nerd's time, but the perception of the MS users to whom said nerds show the suite. Startup time for OpenOffice programs directly conflicts with the assertion that wins OSS converts, that OSS software will better utilize existing hardware.
Yikes, sorry for the extra tag, long Saturday.
The hippies are winning :)
Probably a cultural difference, but the American Hippies I have met live in forests in places like Arcata, CA. They are often naked in 'public' ie:the forest.
Some of them use cell phones, but many shun them for radiation concerns, and all of them I know well enough to judge would think regulating standard pornography is insane.
That being said many of them are leery of technology in general because they see it as a symptom of our cultural debasement... said debasement being why they are in forests in the first place.
I often get flak from Hippies for being a programmer not because programming is wrong, but because they don't like 'corporations,' whatever that means, and they think programmers only program for corporations (I am self employed and serve very small niche markets). Open Source can change this attitude, but naked people in forests don't have much to offer the Open Source movement at the current time, so it will have to be gradual.
For the record, I knew one hippie with a custom solar set up on her van. She powered an ancient 286 with a photovoltaic cell/battery setup. I hope she was using Linux. The one time I hung out with her she was beating on a drum around a campfire without any clothes on.
Anyhow, sorry for what is happening in your country. If you are ever in America and looking to meet some Hippies you can visit Black's Beach near San Diego on the full moon. I have not been in the area for a while, but there used to be mad hordes of naked Hippies that congregated there for a monthly drum circle on the night of the full moon.
P.S. Beware of Hippie chicks, yo. Feeding hungry Hippie chicks garners good favor with the Gods of the road, but don't let them follow you home unless you already have beads and tassles hanging from everything you own.
First the security tools, now this... I used to want to emigrate to Germany.
Instead of having national moments of silence to commemorate calamity after the fact, how about we do it before, like now.
Forgive the bad form of replying to my own comment, but I left out the essential part of my position.
My anecdotal evidence suggests that for a large swath of humanity there is always 'someone' who is given validity through popularity. The poster who started this sub-thread basically identified the method through which my grandmother was convinced to forgo medical treatment for CANCER. Why? Because her someone spoke to her in the method she required.
Gladwell examined the way ideas work, recognized an age old mechanism powerful enough that it can be used to lead one tribe to exterminate another or emancipate enslaved people, and chose to use it to make himself the man for a while.
People are mimics. IIRC there are dating books based on this concept. Psyops is an entire field based on this concept dedicated to changing the models a populace mimics incrementally.
Gladwell is given people an accessible model to mimic to begin a new discussion. Are there limitations to his methodology? Yes. But he did not design the framework, he is only using it.
Not only is he using it.. he is explaining it to you as he does it. That is what it all boils down to, his entire body of work. The art of making snap decisions = listening to your inner mimic which can hone in on successful or self destructive models with stunning precision. Anyone who understands this can establish themselves as a (often negative) model for others.. whether that is the abusive spouse who goes unreported by an 'understanding' partner or the hostage taker who rocks an innocent person's world with sudden violence and then finds the person defending them to the authorities. Or a priest who tells an old woman that dying of treatable cancer is gods will. In each example the 'victim' cedes power the power to the dominant individual.
Get kittens. Watch them learn. If an idea is the currency in our dawning age, Gladwell is royalty.
OK, so the criticism of Gladwell then boils down to something like this:
A guy who claims to know something about ideas has chosen the most enduring and successful method for propogating ideas known to man.
I don't want to come off as brutish, but some branches of my family have been ensnared in occasionally unhealthy religious practices that made no rational sense, so I have thought about mind control in depth. Gladwell is using an extremely well documented aspect of human nature to spread his ideas. The documentation of the technique he is using is called History - AKA a chronicle of ideas that caught fire long enough or brightly enough to be remembered - something this dude claims to know something about.
Humans like to be spoken to in the manner that Gladwell is speaking and he will continue to be massively popular until a fresher face comes along and does the exact same thing in a slightly different manner. The parent to my original reply should be +5 Insightful in my opinion, even though I think more nuance was required in the original post.
Before someone mods you troll I would like to point out that this is exactly the stimulus that 'people of faith' the world over seek every time they enter a place of worship.
Gladwell is utilizing a proven tool (rehashing the familiar) to get people thinking...
I did not read this article, but another profile on Gladwell and this book. The winning talent actually seems to be a lack of interest in yourself.
Not sure about the offtopic mod on the parent comment. I have heard the same thing... that the RIAA legal war is not sustainable because the settlements don't cover the cost of waging the war.
If this is the case, they are fighting to make a point, not a profit - a tactical subtlety that is critical to understanding how to fight back.
The second vermont republic is another option. 05401 in the house.