Until at least the mid-1960's, this kind of communcation system was even endemic in British neighborhoods -- using not cell-phones, of course, but actual telephones! When we, in the U.S., wanted to speak immediately with my grandmother (in her own wholly-owned home) we called the neighbor down the street, whose name and number we had been provided for that purpose.
Those U.S. folk who assume Internet access is for individuals, and is therefore not economically attractive enough for third-world communities, do not understand how extremely individualistic the U.S. is. The more normal social group (whether extended families/clan or tribe, or non-kinship groups living together in small geographical area) finds great value in this kind of knowledge utility/store/communication utility!
In fact, India in particular is very active in promoting Internet use. The pattern of Internet usage generally seems to be following the earlier pattern of television usage: it is considered an extremely valuable community asset (tv was used for information and education generally, also for specific issues such as public health and birth control training/development).
You aren't sure, you say, about whether having a driver's license is a threat to your privacy. You don't say, but must note, that license plate numbers on your car may also be problematic, now that satellite tracking is available....
Here are a couple facts to throw into your thinking this through:
Here in NYC (prime "police city" within the police state of the USA), when the new "metro card" was made available presumably to benefit consumers (with ease of use) and the transportation system (reduced cost), the facility to track each user's movement was built into the system. Way back when some of us learned that, a phone hackers' group immediately instituted a "recycling" basket for the used cards. (Make your trip, then exchange your metro-card for another's spent card.) Recently, the first case involving the "criminal justice" system's use of the tracking potential was reported in the mainstream media. (It was used to crack an alibi.) The tone of the report clearly questioned whether New Yorkers want their movements tracked in this way. I think our distaste for this is near-instinctive.
Some states have automated tracking the speed of cars issued passes on throughway/freeway-type highways. Speeding traffic tickets are sent to cars where the passes indicate the time was insufficient for the milage, given the legal speed limit. How do you feel about that?
I realized we don't live in the age of competition when I founded my first company. It was really obvious -- I was attempting to fill a whole in the existing business landscape, after all.
If you really understood that "publishing predictions such as this fellow just made actually produce the result.." you (and the poor fools you teach) would no longer be putting practically all your eggs in the basket called "the market." You see, the economy is doing fine, but the capitalization schema currently in use in that economy are doomed... precisely because the market is going up because it is going up, then going down because it is going down. I'm not going to explain it again... if you want an explanation, simply read a little engineering. Specifically, read about positive feedback loops, then think about their relevance to the technological changes still taking over the classical "market" (bonds, stocks, options, whatever).
There is no adjustment that economists need to make to figure out the difference between today and the early period of industrialization.
Uh, huh -- so of course if you had a great idea for some new product you would be out there trying to raise all the capital to create all the pieces yourself, right? Then you'd hire the cheapest possible workers to asssemble the whole thing (on an assembly line) yourself -- and market to the whole world instead of any niche market... You wouldn't be at all interested in trying to create standards, or find out what economic "ecosystem" you fit... Yeah, right.
Try reading Moore's "The Death of Competition." He may not have the whole picture, but he's got more on the ball than you do!
Thought you might like to see an unabashed example of the way these people think:
IN THE KNOWLEDGE CENTER Personalization in Europe by Jennifer Schu -------------------------------------------------- -------- Europeans are slowly looking to personalization despite cultural and legal challenges. Although not as popular as in the US, personalization is making headway in Europe. http://www.intra ware.com/research/itkc/2000/feb/euro_personal.html
I have predicted, several times, to several persons, and even written a paper (part of a business plan) about how in the future, economists will finally discover the concept of limits (well-known to other mathematicians) because of the Internet, particularly that most popular part of it known as the Web. This guy is correct about the overvaluation, but I doubt he understands exactly which kinds of business models will work. After all, he thought Amazon.Com would someday return a profit sufficient to pay off that enormous capitalization, proving he doesn't even understand the way the 'Net transforms ordinary retailing!
Btw, in a second (smaller) paper, I have described how publishing predictions such as this fellow just made actually produce the result... The entire capitalization machine (based on shares, stocks, etc.) has, via changing technology (and its increasing ubiquity!), become a mechanism with ever-decreasing periodicity and ever-increasingly efficient positive feedback loops (in the engineering sense).
Capitalism is a very specific system (using money to make money) arising from the historically brief age of industrialization... Further, we now live in the age of cooperation and specialization, not competition. Economists who can make this adjustment to a new paradigm are, of course, few and far between! They think the entire world has always run the way it ran for just the past few centuries, and have invested an enormous amount of learning time, professional experience, and ego in it.
I assume your question is rhetorical -- you must know the reason nothing comes bundled with IJB or other privacy-protective software or hardware... But for anyone who doesn't integrate so-called "real world" (i.e., business/commerce) facts into their technical understanding:
Why plain folks aren't given privacy-protection options:
Those who make decisions about bundling are marketing types.
Marketing types don't want anyone preventing advertising from reaching them online.
In addition, interlocking directorates and the interconnectedness of the few top-level people (in this still-hierarchical structure we live in) usually implies at least some of the folks whose companies want to send you cookies also control or partly own the companies selling the hardware (and bundling the software).
Actually, once you are able to read the article (I got through to the site and read it a few minutes ago -- 4:45pm EST Friday), you will see this has nothing to do with other theories at all. It is a completely original speculation about how, taking an arbitrary matrix of scalars (with some constraints, such that each is close to zero) and performing (iterated?) matrix manipulations, one arrives at a MATHEMATICALLY-GENERATED structure with properties that bear a remarkable resemblance to what we think of as the universe.
Btw, the concept these mathematicians have labelled "gebit" (sp?) has already been around for years in the MDS (multi-dimensional scaling) work of Dr. Joseph Woelfel... who uses it in the mathematically/statistically more demanding world of the "soft" sciences! It has applications in marketing, persuasion, etc. Back in long-gone days at MSU, I was a graduate student working with Joe's Galileo (MDS) program. Aside from his professorship (SUNY, I think -- Rochester), he has an informative Web site for his consulting work, in case anyone is interested... I *think* it's http://www.terranova.com.
Many companies are looking into basic (really basic!) research now for better keyboards, though few (if any) are offering a great product. I don't suffer RSI, but for other reasons (wearable computing!) I am very interested in the report that vertical keyboarding (a al accordians) creates far less stress in the wrists.
If a vertical, double-sided, very lightweight keyboard (hanging around the neck, perhaps) became available, would your friend be able to use one?
Btw, it's interesting that pianists never seem to suffer RSI, isn't it? I suspect many who develop carpal tunnel syndrome hit the keys too hard -- sometimes because the keyboards are too stiff!
Newspaper columns are much too small for optimal reading! As I said, good lines (best fitting the eye's abilities) are 45-60 characters, or 6-8 words, across. Furthermore, unless you are talking about reading an open spread (of tabloid or anything else), how do you know a tabloid is wider than a monitor?
Of course, when I lay out a Web page, unless there is particular reason to do something different, I use a single, reduced-width column. I am always infuriated by Web pages laid out like newspapers or magazines, where I'm supposed to scroll down to read a column of text, then scroll back up to continue the story!
If you will reread the original inquiry, you will notice that this chemist is NOT a frequent user of Mathematica and therefore probably forgets how to use it (between rare occasions).
It may be easier to use paper and pencil than to:
Find the manual
Read the manual
Work out how to apply the identified syntax/operators to the problem!
You are correct -- for typeset pages -- that it is good to have about 45-60 characters or 6-8 words across a line for optimal readability. Once we are online, however, all (most) bets are off! We cannot read online at all as well as we can read text in books. But it would certainly help is so-called Web designers spent a little time thinking about the aspect ratio of a screen (wide) vs. a book/magazine/newspaper (long), and skipped the endless scroll-to-read-then-scroll-back-up columns!
I don't think it will be necessary to penalize Amazon beyond the penalties imposed by their own "business plan." Whatever it is. After all, Amazon.Com is just a retailer, and no retailer can succeed in the long run online without taking on one of two characteristics (neither of which is possible for Amazon.Com as a profit-making entity).
Of course, those angry at patenting "1-Click Shopping" appear to have forgotten that Microsoft started threatening to sue persons and companies that used the word "Bookshelf" years ago. Remember? And we all know what happened to MS. (Ooops, I forgot my timeline... that hasn't happened yet -- rewind!)
Okay, I have to admit I gave up on the NYTimes the first time I attended an event (an anti-V-war march in Washington) and then saw the incredibly-biased-posing-as-objective coverage of that event. Now, that was back around 1970.
Around 1993, however, I began happily to read New York Newsday. Coverage of local issues -- complete with an overt point of view and references to other related (sometimes behind the scenes) events -- was excellent. I often read this paper cover to cover.
Now, Newsday started out in Long Island, and I think there's a Queens version, too, and those are both still going strong -- but the NYC (Manhattan) edition was killed. Deliberately. By its publisher, who could (according to chat on the Charlie Rose Show the night it was declared murdered) have started to see profits (!) within another year or two.
The writing was great, coverage was great, I even kinda went along with the editorial slant (which wasn't pseudo-objective, thank heaven). So they killed it.
There are no good papers in NYC. If there are no good papers left here, why should I expect to see any good papers anywhere else? The "alternative" trash papers are available here for free, but again, the good writers (with a point of view, reporting and extrapolating from events) have disappeared and what's left is junk, self-absorbed filler around which to arrange "related" advertising.
My "regular" sources of news include the Web (BBC, PPS and these also on radio sometimes), Science News,/., "In These Times" (terrible technical/science coverage, but okay on keeping me current with the old-fashioned "Left"), but I can't imagine anyone in this country ever making a newspaper work again. It takes a lot of money, and that means taking a risk, and no rich person wants to do that. Nor do rich folks have any interest, generally, in reporting on real issues and thereby threatening the status quo.
One relevant statistic is that the percentage of girls qualifying for and accepting positions at the special NYC high schools (those with a focus on science) is declining, and has been for years. The high point was decades ago now, and the current ratio is about 37% girls (although the ratio of girls in the general school population is the usual 50% or slightly more). When asked why they won't attend these schools, girls often cite the isolation they expect to face.
Not coincidentally, statistics were most promising when the "women's liberation" movement was powerful, and began to plunge again in the late 70's. (These days, most girls or women preface any statement asserting their equality with "I'm not a feminist, but...")
I wanted to study the effects of two kinds of intervention on this situation:
identify (female) students who could pass the qualifying exams, and give them a chance (i.e., a safe place) to study together after-school [passive intervention] for a couple terms prior to the test, and
add a group mentor [active intervention] to see what effect a role model might have.
But it seems I'd have to be doing some kind of "official" school research to pull this off, and since I'm not actively seeking a degree in education (and refuse to pay for any more formal education, anyway!), it ain't gonna happen. Unless some woman out there sees this and tries it? (-8
Btw, it is also still true that teachers (men and women both) call more often on boys for answers, spend more time looking at boys and speaking with them, and generally still ignore girls. (This research was reported in Science News a year or so ago.) No wonder some think girls' gangs are actually a sign of progress!
Speaking as a woman, I have to disagree strongly with your statement. Every time I ever took an "aptitude" test, the results always strongly indicated I should become a mechanic. In fact, the first time my father invited me to look over a piece of machinery with him (a failing odometer), I spotted the problem before him -- and he's a pretty good engineer. I am also a serious chess player (well, I do it for fun, but I'm serious about it!), and poker player, and adore almost all game-playing, especially RPG.
Of course, I hardly ever get to play such games. In case you don't realize it, male chess players don't wish to play females: if they lose, they're embarrassed, and there's no upside to winning. And, although I'm a good programmer, I'm hardly ever seriously considered for hard-tech positions. In fact, when I showed (male) presenters at conventions my Web site some years back, their constant reaction seemed to be "gosh, you must have worked so hard to learn how to do this really hard thing." (Yeah, I read one book for a couple hours, then wrote a program to translate my WP output to HTML, and wrote a set of macros to write future files for the site on-the-fly. Real hard work.)
I believe I've previously noted in this forum that when I applied for a Web-content-creator job advertised as immediately available, the idiot interviewing me not only didn't know that PhotoShop does compression (which he called "optimization") but even after he stole the background graphic I used PhotoShop to create (or fix, rather) on one site I showed him, he wasn't interested in hiring me.
Women don't take CS courses for the same reason they don't take science courses and labs -- the boys crowd them out, and they are treated like freaks. I was never allowed to actually perform lab experiments in chemistry or physics, and was extremely frustrated with noting down the way-off measurements that resulted when the boys took charge. (They always agreed to fake the numbers so the experiments came out according to the book, which is actually why I finally dropped my hard-science major my first term in college. I don't know why I thought college would be any better than high school... just once I would have liked to run an experiment doing all the measurements and procedures myself, instead of just taking notes, to see how it "really" came out!)
Of course, if we are impervious to ridicule or social ostracism (like me), more severe sanctions are sometimes employed. When I was taking CS courses way back in my college years ('69+), us girls submitted our punched decks for the overnight turnaround (yeah, we got a big 1 run/day for our debugging!)... The boys, however, quickly discovered that if they hung around the computer building late at night (around midnight), they could get multiple runs, and really quick turnaround. (They did not share this information with those of the opposite gender -- I learned their trick when I asked friends how they had managed to get enough runs to make their code work.) If I went out at night, I ran a serious risk of being raped (I almost was, twice, when I went out as late as 10pm).
I was in my mid-20's before I made my peace with being female. One reason I'm such a good poker player is that I am a balanced person: sure, I can calculate odds on the fly, but I'm also great at dissembling (poker face+) and reading others' body language and vocal tension. I'm a pretty good programmer despite being unemployable as a coder, but that's a low-level occupation, anyway; much better for me to review specs (or write them) and help programmers achieve consistent, intuitive interfaces -- or teach users how to make a system do what they need it to do (the techies typically want to teach users how to do the neatest features, which isn't at all the same thing!).
I'm about to look for a job. I know it will be hard because I'm female (with white hair, no less). But I know eventually I'll find something, because I'm better than about 95% of the other candidates. Eventually I'll find someone who'll judge me based on what I have done and can do, rather than my appearance. And I also know (based on my consulting experience) that the company that employs me -- or at least those who work closely with me -- will be greatly impressed by my skills, very steep learning curve, flexibility, and broad & deep technical understanding.
As to living on an emotional plane, it's been my experience that it is men who think with their... well, their hormones, let's say. Women are much cooler in business, except for those who manipulate men (in the usual way). Sheer projection!
Sometime in the past few months, I was looking up Linux in one of the main search engines, and found reference to a site which specifically offered project management facilities for open-source projects. I'm sorry I didn't save the reference, but I was very impressed with the facilities at a quick glance. Some coder out there might want to replicate my search and publicise the site (I don't do code these days -- or at least, not very much!)
Another (economic) explanation is more likely
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I suspect that the growing proportion of "seniors" on the 'Net is actually accounted for by the fact that they have the financial resources to get online, rather than the extra time. A very large proportion of (American) youngsters live in poverty, remember?
In addition, many older persons are allowed access (free) to colleges and senior centers, where courses or speakers "hold their hands" as they take their tentative first steps online. I'm not aware of any comparable programs for over-school-age, under-retirement-age folks, at any cost.
Just-graduated young adults probably connect at work, but are typically saddled with huge debt (for college graduates, student loans and student credit cards) or other restrictions (must have car! must buy engagement ring!) and can't afford a home PC. (Or at least, they think they can't, which comes to the same thing.)
One of the reasons Linux (and anything else) has such a large window of opportunity is that even though MS claims to focus on corporate users (and they do, they do!), even so-called wealthy and powerful corporations can't force MS to clean up its act. Those who realize there are bugs, and call attention to them, are brushed off just like the lowliest home users.
I've already written somewhere (probably here at/.) how Toshiba couldn't get MS to fix a utility program it had custom-written, back in the early- to mid-80's. It doesn't help that those who understand just what the major problems are with MS products are the techies segregated in low-ranking IT positions, of course. Just try explaining to some high-level IT or managerial personnel why idiosyncratic, hidden, embedded formatting is not a good idea. I can do it, but it takes several minutes, and most of them forget all about it in a few seconds.
Finally, even when IT personnel review networks/packages/OS's for installation in a corporate environment, they tend to read the blurb on the package (or the brochures) -- meaning, usually, just the features list. Then, it's usually a shock to discover half the features aren't implemented, or are misleadingly worded. One example: a bank for which I was consulting switched from Freelance to Powerpoint for presentations....
They believed the two packages were equivalent, despite the facts:
Freelance creates true standalone presentations (for those with a DOS prompt), Powerpoint didn't... it needed a Windows helper.
Freelance really was integrated with a word processor, spreadsheet, etc. That meant you could work on the presentation in the WP package, look at the slides by importing that WP file into Freelance. Apparently, when MS sais Powerpoint was "integrated," they meant nothing more than that similar commands and menus were used across their WP, presentation, and spreadsheet packages!
I personally spent about 3 hours reading manuals, calling tech support, and experimenting (searching for work-arounds) before concluding that Powerpoint really was not "integrated" with any form of WP file... work for which my client was charged rather a large sum of money... also, of course, they had to pay for my time cutting and pasting the text I'd already prepared using the MS WP (as requested) into Powerpoint.
If I am reading the signs correctly, wearable computers (modular, replacing cell-phone AND PDA AND laptop) will be big very soon... and the Transmeta processor will be VERY big in wearables (-8.
Thanks for the interpretation! I had missed that one.... 8-)
Seriously, though, couldn't some bright young (i.e., quick) company put together a splendid batch of wearable computers with the upcoming Transmeta 5400, Linux OS, and custom apps specifically tailored for group-ware-type tasks? After all, a Navy ship seems like a good place to assume wireless computing can be used for effective communication/collaboration (as on the spaceship Enterprise!)....
What I loved, and still use, is ECCO (PRO). A 32-bit version for W'95 was created and released... I have it... but then, of course, MS launched their "free" "Outlook" or whatever it was, and it was "game over" for Ecco (by Netmanage).
I use Ecco, however, without taking advantage of its "group-ware" features, since others I work with don't have it. Had great reviews, though... I've also used the previously-Lotus now-IBM package (Organizer?), and didn't appreciate it at all. It's too clumsy, not customizable for effective individual use, not very intuitive.
All these packages are actually forms of databases, anyway; groupware is database-with-networking features.
Btw, I guess if/. moves up to the new XHTML standard, we'll all have to use <p> and <p/> for our comments longer than one paragraph?
Slashdot Mirror
Until at least the mid-1960's, this kind of communcation system was even endemic in British neighborhoods -- using not cell-phones, of course, but actual telephones! When we, in the U.S., wanted to speak immediately with my grandmother (in her own wholly-owned home) we called the neighbor down the street, whose name and number we had been provided for that purpose.
Those U.S. folk who assume Internet access is for individuals, and is therefore not economically attractive enough for third-world communities, do not understand how extremely individualistic the U.S. is. The more normal social group (whether extended families/clan or tribe, or non-kinship groups living together in small geographical area) finds great value in this kind of knowledge utility/store/communication utility!
In fact, India in particular is very active in promoting Internet use. The pattern of Internet usage generally seems to be following the earlier pattern of television usage: it is considered an extremely valuable community asset (tv was used for information and education generally, also for specific issues such as public health and birth control training/development).
You aren't sure, you say, about whether having a driver's license is a threat to your privacy. You don't say, but must note, that license plate numbers on your car may also be problematic, now that satellite tracking is available....
- Here are a couple facts to throw into your thinking this through:
- Here in NYC (prime "police city" within the police state of the USA), when the new "metro card" was made available presumably to benefit consumers (with ease of use) and the transportation system (reduced cost), the facility to track each user's movement was built into the system. Way back when some of us learned that, a phone hackers' group immediately instituted a "recycling" basket for the used cards. (Make your trip, then exchange your metro-card for another's spent card.) Recently, the first case involving the "criminal justice" system's use of the tracking potential was reported in the mainstream media. (It was used to crack an alibi.) The tone of the report clearly questioned whether New Yorkers want their movements tracked in this way. I think our distaste for this is near-instinctive.
- Some states have automated tracking the speed of cars issued passes on throughway/freeway-type highways. Speeding traffic tickets are sent to cars where the passes indicate the time was insufficient for the milage, given the legal speed limit. How do you feel about that?
Cheers!I realized we don't live in the age of competition when I founded my first company. It was really obvious -- I was attempting to fill a whole in the existing business landscape, after all.
If you really understood that "publishing predictions such as this fellow just made actually produce the result.." you (and the poor fools you teach) would no longer be putting practically all your eggs in the basket called "the market." You see, the economy is doing fine, but the capitalization schema currently in use in that economy are doomed... precisely because the market is going up because it is going up, then going down because it is going down. I'm not going to explain it again... if you want an explanation, simply read a little engineering. Specifically, read about positive feedback loops, then think about their relevance to the technological changes still taking over the classical "market" (bonds, stocks, options, whatever).
There is no adjustment that economists need to make to figure out the difference between today and the early period of industrialization.
Uh, huh -- so of course if you had a great idea for some new product you would be out there trying to raise all the capital to create all the pieces yourself, right? Then you'd hire the cheapest possible workers to asssemble the whole thing (on an assembly line) yourself -- and market to the whole world instead of any niche market... You wouldn't be at all interested in trying to create standards, or find out what economic "ecosystem" you fit... Yeah, right.
Try reading Moore's "The Death of Competition." He may not have the whole picture, but he's got more on the ball than you do!
Yup, I do believe they do. You can get 2.5" drives anyway, without buying laptop, or get the IDE interface -- and IDE is a standard, after all.
Thought you might like to see an unabashed example of the way these people think:
I have predicted, several times, to several persons, and even written a paper (part of a business plan) about how in the future, economists will finally discover the concept of limits (well-known to other mathematicians) because of the Internet, particularly that most popular part of it known as the Web. This guy is correct about the overvaluation, but I doubt he understands exactly which kinds of business models will work. After all, he thought Amazon.Com would someday return a profit sufficient to pay off that enormous capitalization, proving he doesn't even understand the way the 'Net transforms ordinary retailing!
Btw, in a second (smaller) paper, I have described how publishing predictions such as this fellow just made actually produce the result... The entire capitalization machine (based on shares, stocks, etc.) has, via changing technology (and its increasing ubiquity!), become a mechanism with ever-decreasing periodicity and ever-increasingly efficient positive feedback loops (in the engineering sense).
Capitalism is a very specific system (using money to make money) arising from the historically brief age of industrialization... Further, we now live in the age of cooperation and specialization, not competition. Economists who can make this adjustment to a new paradigm are, of course, few and far between! They think the entire world has always run the way it ran for just the past few centuries, and have invested an enormous amount of learning time, professional experience, and ego in it.
I assume your question is rhetorical -- you must know the reason nothing comes bundled with IJB or other privacy-protective software or hardware... But for anyone who doesn't integrate so-called "real world" (i.e., business/commerce) facts into their technical understanding:
Unless you're creating a page for that 5K contest... (-8
Actually, once you are able to read the article (I got through to the site and read it a few minutes ago -- 4:45pm EST Friday), you will see this has nothing to do with other theories at all. It is a completely original speculation about how, taking an arbitrary matrix of scalars (with some constraints, such that each is close to zero) and performing (iterated?) matrix manipulations, one arrives at a MATHEMATICALLY-GENERATED structure with properties that bear a remarkable resemblance to what we think of as the universe.
Btw, the concept these mathematicians have labelled "gebit" (sp?) has already been around for years in the MDS (multi-dimensional scaling) work of Dr. Joseph Woelfel... who uses it in the mathematically/statistically more demanding world of the "soft" sciences! It has applications in marketing, persuasion, etc. Back in long-gone days at MSU, I was a graduate student working with Joe's Galileo (MDS) program. Aside from his professorship (SUNY, I think -- Rochester), he has an informative Web site for his consulting work, in case anyone is interested... I *think* it's http://www.terranova.com.
Many companies are looking into basic (really basic!) research now for better keyboards, though few (if any) are offering a great product. I don't suffer RSI, but for other reasons (wearable computing!) I am very interested in the report that vertical keyboarding (a al accordians) creates far less stress in the wrists.
If a vertical, double-sided, very lightweight keyboard (hanging around the neck, perhaps) became available, would your friend be able to use one?
Btw, it's interesting that pianists never seem to suffer RSI, isn't it? I suspect many who develop carpal tunnel syndrome hit the keys too hard -- sometimes because the keyboards are too stiff!
Newspaper columns are much too small for optimal reading! As I said, good lines (best fitting the eye's abilities) are 45-60 characters, or 6-8 words, across. Furthermore, unless you are talking about reading an open spread (of tabloid or anything else), how do you know a tabloid is wider than a monitor?
Of course, when I lay out a Web page, unless there is particular reason to do something different, I use a single, reduced-width column. I am always infuriated by Web pages laid out like newspapers or magazines, where I'm supposed to scroll down to read a column of text, then scroll back up to continue the story!
If you will reread the original inquiry, you will notice that this chemist is NOT a frequent user of Mathematica and therefore probably forgets how to use it (between rare occasions).
You are correct -- for typeset pages -- that it is good to have about 45-60 characters or 6-8 words across a line for optimal readability. Once we are online, however, all (most) bets are off! We cannot read online at all as well as we can read text in books. But it would certainly help is so-called Web designers spent a little time thinking about the aspect ratio of a screen (wide) vs. a book/magazine/newspaper (long), and skipped the endless scroll-to-read-then-scroll-back-up columns!
I don't think it will be necessary to penalize Amazon beyond the penalties imposed by their own "business plan." Whatever it is. After all, Amazon.Com is just a retailer, and no retailer can succeed in the long run online without taking on one of two characteristics (neither of which is possible for Amazon.Com as a profit-making entity).
Of course, those angry at patenting "1-Click Shopping" appear to have forgotten that Microsoft started threatening to sue persons and companies that used the word "Bookshelf" years ago. Remember? And we all know what happened to MS. (Ooops, I forgot my timeline... that hasn't happened yet -- rewind!)
Okay, I have to admit I gave up on the NYTimes the first time I attended an event (an anti-V-war march in Washington) and then saw the incredibly-biased-posing-as-objective coverage of that event. Now, that was back around 1970.
Around 1993, however, I began happily to read New York Newsday. Coverage of local issues -- complete with an overt point of view and references to other related (sometimes behind the scenes) events -- was excellent. I often read this paper cover to cover.
Now, Newsday started out in Long Island, and I think there's a Queens version, too, and those are both still going strong -- but the NYC (Manhattan) edition was killed. Deliberately. By its publisher, who could (according to chat on the Charlie Rose Show the night it was declared murdered) have started to see profits (!) within another year or two.
The writing was great, coverage was great, I even kinda went along with the editorial slant (which wasn't pseudo-objective, thank heaven). So they killed it.
There are no good papers in NYC. If there are no good papers left here, why should I expect to see any good papers anywhere else? The "alternative" trash papers are available here for free, but again, the good writers (with a point of view, reporting and extrapolating from events) have disappeared and what's left is junk, self-absorbed filler around which to arrange "related" advertising.
My "regular" sources of news include the Web (BBC, PPS and these also on radio sometimes), Science News, /., "In These Times" (terrible technical/science coverage, but okay on keeping me current with the old-fashioned "Left"), but I can't imagine anyone in this country ever making a newspaper work again. It takes a lot of money, and that means taking a risk, and no rich person wants to do that. Nor do rich folks have any interest, generally, in reporting on real issues and thereby threatening the status quo.
One relevant statistic is that the percentage of girls qualifying for and accepting positions at the special NYC high schools (those with a focus on science) is declining, and has been for years. The high point was decades ago now, and the current ratio is about 37% girls (although the ratio of girls in the general school population is the usual 50% or slightly more). When asked why they won't attend these schools, girls often cite the isolation they expect to face.
Not coincidentally, statistics were most promising when the "women's liberation" movement was powerful, and began to plunge again in the late 70's. (These days, most girls or women preface any statement asserting their equality with "I'm not a feminist, but...")
But it seems I'd have to be doing some kind of "official" school research to pull this off, and since I'm not actively seeking a degree in education (and refuse to pay for any more formal education, anyway!), it ain't gonna happen. Unless some woman out there sees this and tries it? (-8
Btw, it is also still true that teachers (men and women both) call more often on boys for answers, spend more time looking at boys and speaking with them, and generally still ignore girls. (This research was reported in Science News a year or so ago.) No wonder some think girls' gangs are actually a sign of progress!
Speaking as a woman, I have to disagree strongly with your statement. Every time I ever took an "aptitude" test, the results always strongly indicated I should become a mechanic. In fact, the first time my father invited me to look over a piece of machinery with him (a failing odometer), I spotted the problem before him -- and he's a pretty good engineer. I am also a serious chess player (well, I do it for fun, but I'm serious about it!), and poker player, and adore almost all game-playing, especially RPG.
Of course, I hardly ever get to play such games. In case you don't realize it, male chess players don't wish to play females: if they lose, they're embarrassed, and there's no upside to winning. And, although I'm a good programmer, I'm hardly ever seriously considered for hard-tech positions. In fact, when I showed (male) presenters at conventions my Web site some years back, their constant reaction seemed to be "gosh, you must have worked so hard to learn how to do this really hard thing." (Yeah, I read one book for a couple hours, then wrote a program to translate my WP output to HTML, and wrote a set of macros to write future files for the site on-the-fly. Real hard work.)
I believe I've previously noted in this forum that when I applied for a Web-content-creator job advertised as immediately available, the idiot interviewing me not only didn't know that PhotoShop does compression (which he called "optimization") but even after he stole the background graphic I used PhotoShop to create (or fix, rather) on one site I showed him, he wasn't interested in hiring me.
Women don't take CS courses for the same reason they don't take science courses and labs -- the boys crowd them out, and they are treated like freaks. I was never allowed to actually perform lab experiments in chemistry or physics, and was extremely frustrated with noting down the way-off measurements that resulted when the boys took charge. (They always agreed to fake the numbers so the experiments came out according to the book, which is actually why I finally dropped my hard-science major my first term in college. I don't know why I thought college would be any better than high school... just once I would have liked to run an experiment doing all the measurements and procedures myself, instead of just taking notes, to see how it "really" came out!)
Of course, if we are impervious to ridicule or social ostracism (like me), more severe sanctions are sometimes employed. When I was taking CS courses way back in my college years ('69+), us girls submitted our punched decks for the overnight turnaround (yeah, we got a big 1 run/day for our debugging!)... The boys, however, quickly discovered that if they hung around the computer building late at night (around midnight), they could get multiple runs, and really quick turnaround. (They did not share this information with those of the opposite gender -- I learned their trick when I asked friends how they had managed to get enough runs to make their code work.) If I went out at night, I ran a serious risk of being raped (I almost was, twice, when I went out as late as 10pm).
I was in my mid-20's before I made my peace with being female. One reason I'm such a good poker player is that I am a balanced person: sure, I can calculate odds on the fly, but I'm also great at dissembling (poker face+) and reading others' body language and vocal tension. I'm a pretty good programmer despite being unemployable as a coder, but that's a low-level occupation, anyway; much better for me to review specs (or write them) and help programmers achieve consistent, intuitive interfaces -- or teach users how to make a system do what they need it to do (the techies typically want to teach users how to do the neatest features, which isn't at all the same thing!).
I'm about to look for a job. I know it will be hard because I'm female (with white hair, no less). But I know eventually I'll find something, because I'm better than about 95% of the other candidates. Eventually I'll find someone who'll judge me based on what I have done and can do, rather than my appearance. And I also know (based on my consulting experience) that the company that employs me -- or at least those who work closely with me -- will be greatly impressed by my skills, very steep learning curve, flexibility, and broad & deep technical understanding.
As to living on an emotional plane, it's been my experience that it is men who think with their... well, their hormones, let's say. Women are much cooler in business, except for those who manipulate men (in the usual way). Sheer projection!
Sometime in the past few months, I was looking up Linux in one of the main search engines, and found reference to a site which specifically offered project management facilities for open-source projects. I'm sorry I didn't save the reference, but I was very impressed with the facilities at a quick glance. Some coder out there might want to replicate my search and publicise the site (I don't do code these days -- or at least, not very much!)
I suspect that the growing proportion of "seniors" on the 'Net is actually accounted for by the fact that they have the financial resources to get online, rather than the extra time. A very large proportion of (American) youngsters live in poverty, remember?
In addition, many older persons are allowed access (free) to colleges and senior centers, where courses or speakers "hold their hands" as they take their tentative first steps online. I'm not aware of any comparable programs for over-school-age, under-retirement-age folks, at any cost.
Just-graduated young adults probably connect at work, but are typically saddled with huge debt (for college graduates, student loans and student credit cards) or other restrictions (must have car! must buy engagement ring!) and can't afford a home PC. (Or at least, they think they can't, which comes to the same thing.)
One of the reasons Linux (and anything else) has such a large window of opportunity is that even though MS claims to focus on corporate users (and they do, they do!), even so-called wealthy and powerful corporations can't force MS to clean up its act. Those who realize there are bugs, and call attention to them, are brushed off just like the lowliest home users.
I've already written somewhere (probably here at /.) how Toshiba couldn't get MS to fix a utility program it had custom-written, back in the early- to mid-80's. It doesn't help that those who understand just what the major problems are with MS products are the techies segregated in low-ranking IT positions, of course. Just try explaining to some high-level IT or managerial personnel why idiosyncratic, hidden, embedded formatting is not a good idea. I can do it, but it takes several minutes, and most of them forget all about it in a few seconds.
Finally, even when IT personnel review networks/packages/OS's for installation in a corporate environment, they tend to read the blurb on the package (or the brochures) -- meaning, usually, just the features list. Then, it's usually a shock to discover half the features aren't implemented, or are misleadingly worded. One example: a bank for which I was consulting switched from Freelance to Powerpoint for presentations....
I personally spent about 3 hours reading manuals, calling tech support, and experimenting (searching for work-arounds) before concluding that Powerpoint really was not "integrated" with any form of WP file... work for which my client was charged rather a large sum of money... also, of course, they had to pay for my time cutting and pasting the text I'd already prepared using the MS WP (as requested) into Powerpoint.
If I am reading the signs correctly, wearable computers (modular, replacing cell-phone AND PDA AND laptop) will be big very soon... and the Transmeta processor will be VERY big in wearables (-8.
Thanks for the interpretation! I had missed that one.... 8-)
Seriously, though, couldn't some bright young (i.e., quick) company put together a splendid batch of wearable computers with the upcoming Transmeta 5400, Linux OS, and custom apps specifically tailored for group-ware-type tasks? After all, a Navy ship seems like a good place to assume wireless computing can be used for effective communication/collaboration (as on the spaceship Enterprise!)....
I use Ecco, however, without taking advantage of its "group-ware" features, since others I work with don't have it. Had great reviews, though... I've also used the previously-Lotus now-IBM package (Organizer?), and didn't appreciate it at all. It's too clumsy, not customizable for effective individual use, not very intuitive.
All these packages are actually forms of databases, anyway; groupware is database-with-networking features.
Btw, I guess if /. moves up to the new XHTML standard, we'll all have to use <p> and <p/> for our comments longer than one paragraph?
Don't you mean, "Lack of sleep is a dangerous drug?"