As someone who has a friend who is voting for the most "pro mars" candidate, I think it is important to note that Mars is a very big issue in the geek community. I would say it's probably number two right now, with crypto legislation being number one.
This is an election year, folks. Who is the most "pro mars", anyway? I can picture the dirty campaign ads -- accusing Al Gore of inventing the Iridium system.
IF you feel this way about it, then don't enroll... but for a lot of people, this would be great... suppose you want to keep current in a field that you studied in college... or just want to do a few credits of coursework in the subject... the goal to create a high quality online university is really just the goal of creating high quality free educational content on the web... if you oppose that, then there isn't much hope that you'd learn anything from it anyway...
First, when television came out, people had AM radio. FM didn't become popular until a while after television caught on. Thus, the forward-thinking people were arguing that "picture and sound will replace sound only"...
Clearly, they were wrong about that.
However, as far as I can tell, AM radio is fairly close to dead in many areas of the country.
Newspapers will definitely continue to exist... that is if you consider the NY Times on the web to be a newspaper even though there isn't actually any paper involved in reading it.
It's sort of remeniscent of the way people call plastic utensils 'plastic silverware'.
Down with Karma. If you knew you didn't want to read the (often less than purely nerd-oriented) Katz stories, then you should have turned off his posts long ago. In light of the controversy surrounding his posts, and in light of your obviously extremely high standards of what is appropriate to post on the internet (this is meant with sarcasm, since your post is of startlingly poor quality), you could have certainly avoided the mishap of reading the review had you been thinking clearly at the time.
I second that. Java in a Nutshell is not only the best book on Java that I've seen, but one of the best programming references I've seen.
Oreilly also publishes a book of examples designed to go along with Java in a Nutshell, as well as two other companion books, The Java Foundation Classes in a Nutshell (which covers awt/swing, etc.) and Java Enterprise in a Nutshell (which covers servlets, and well, the title is self-explanitory).
if we assume that Apple is made up of fairly decent people, and I don't see why we shouldn't at this point
We need not assume anything. The fact is, Apple is a company which is out to make money. Apple wants to be able to continue to make money, and so it protects its interest.
Being selfish is to be expected, but refusing to support defective products like the powerbook 5300 is purely irresponsible. Apple made an enemy of me several years ago, and I can't see the good in a company that would do that to a customer (and a student who would have potentially bought a lot more of their stuff, at that!).-- end rant
Today Apple benefits from the same kind of hype that Amazon.com, linuxone.com, and Microsoft... colored plastic, huge advertising budgets, and corporate interests characterize the Apple computer of today. Let the buyer beware!
If we must put up with ads, then why shouldn't they be targeted? If I am going to see ads, I at least want to see ads for products that I might want to buy.
I make a rational choice when I use services that demand information in exchange for a service... I opt out of systematic junk emailings and give them the info that they request in exchange for the service that they provide.
Take, for example, one of my favorite sites on the net, Moviecritic.com. This site has saved me lots of money and time by helping me to avoid movies that I wouldn't like. The site uses collaborative filtering to do so, but in the process also asks for some demographic information. Now, I'm sure that the demographic data which moviecritic collects is highly valuable. I'm also sure that its owner (the person who collected it from consenting moviegoers like me) sells it to movie studios, etc. I don't care. I like the service and just because there is capitalism and age/sex/zipcode information involved doesn't mean it's evil.
Uh, it's probably a conspiracy created by the US government in cooperation with the russian mafia in order to discredit the kgb, all for the sake of getting the story linked on slashdot, america's number one e-conspiracy resource.
This is just another example of how archaic technologies like ftp and telnet are getting pushed aside by new and groundbreaking technologies.
It should be noted that Microsoft Internet Explorer is perfectly able to load web pages from sites like www.e-.com. Anybody who needs to use telnet should wake up, install Windows 2000, and enter the future. Why use telnet when you can have dynamic and exciting content automatically loaded onto your own Active desktop?
What would anyone use telnet or ftp for anyway? Files can be transferred with Outlook just by clicking on them, and if I want to send someone a message, I can just use the Microsoft messaging client.
I'm sure most slashdotters will agree (at least the 60% who read slashdot from within Windows) that it's high time that something like this happened. Out with the old, in with the new!
.
the above was all in jest... I just thought it would be fun to express a counterpoint.
I found the comments that Rob and Jeff decided to answer to be (for the most part) fairly bland. In particular, they didn't respond to my question about collaborative filtering.
I think it would be very cool to see a front-end written for slashdot that allowed collaboratively filtered moderation... if I were a good enough programmer, I'd write it.
I realize that there have been a lot of questions/comments posted about moderation, but please hear me out.
Is the following possible, if so, why not do it:
Use collaborative filtering to improve the moderation system so that each individual's definition of what makes a "good comment" can be used to filter through other comments.
Further, why not post more stories and allow users to rate each one, thereby creating a list of collaboratively filtered story-preferences for each user and further customizing Slashdot to the individual.
The major complaint that people make about Slashdot is that moderation and coverage is rather groupthinkish. A system implementing collaborative filtering would seem only to bring benefits. Also, if you guys couldn't program it yourselves, I'm sure that the community would contribute (if the current source were opened, etc.).
If you aren't familiar with collaborative filtering, check out Moviecritic.com. Collaborative filtering uses a small set of preferences to make generalizations about likely preferences over a large space of data. It's the perfect technology for a site like slashdot.
I remember the christmas morning when I, nine years old, found an Apple//c under the christmas tree. Within a few weeks I had joined the local Apple User's Group, and had begun tinkering with AppleSoft Basic and played the occasional game of Lemonade Stand.
For me, as for many other Slashdot readers, the tinkering was the essence of the computer. As a nine year-old, I had no use for any kind of productivity applications. It was just fun to make the computer do things. I ended up writing some simple programs to play sounds, and to draw shapes on the screen.
As computers have become more sophisticated, is there a way we can capture the imagination and creativity of today's youth? Perhaps toys like Lego Mindstorms will be the inspiration for tomorrow's nine-year-old tinkerers.
I'm curious to know your thoughts on the melding of youth, creativity, and programming, and its potential import for the future.
You're lucky that your high school computer teacher went to college. At my high school, the computers were just used to teach typing. No programming (or anything other than typing) was taught. I'm still trying to figure out if I can take the district to court over this.
Decoding the human genome is (since we're doing it) part of our "extended phenotype", as Dawkins would put it. In that sense, if we destroy ourselves in the process of discovering things about our genome, we will have happened upon a new and powerful aspect of natural selection.
Thus, ethics as they pertain to genome research are just strategies which, if used by everyone, will benefit everyone, just like many religious beliefs.
But someone will always defect. In our current climate of populist interests pitted against corporate interests, corporations are moving toward a strategy of ignoring some of the ethical issues.
The problem is not the corporations, however. As many on Slashdot have pointed out before, it is the irresponsible cluelessness on the part of the patent office (and the courts that enforce patents) that have driven the system to its current state.
bingo. As fascinating as much of it is, I must say that I don't find very much neuroscience research to be all that scientific.
I want a real time pet-scanner that scans a whole room full of people... Then I want to watch the colorful show on the monitor as I play Mozart in the room, as well as the view of brains in heated conversation...
Bingo, you're right on. Intelligence is so diverse that it's almost impossible to measure it outside of a relatively narrow domain.
Speaking of sports, I have to reccommend a book. It's called "Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans", by Tim McCarver. It's a great book. After reading it, I can't wait for next baseball season to begin.
I'd like to vote for slashdot itself. It's a truly unique concept on the internet, and though it hasn't been around for 30 years, I'm sure it will end up being seen as highly influential to the way that humans will use the web over the next 30 years.
Slashdot Mirror
is voting for the most "pro mars"
candidate, I think it is important
to note that Mars is a very big
issue in the geek community. I would say
it's probably number two right now,
with crypto legislation being number
one.
This is an election year, folks. Who is
the most "pro mars", anyway? I can picture
the dirty campaign ads -- accusing Al Gore
of inventing the Iridium system.
Three cheers for earth!
IF you feel this way about it, then don't enroll... but for a lot of people, this would be great... suppose you want to keep current in a field that you studied in college... or just want to do a few credits of coursework in the subject... the goal to create a high quality online university is really just the goal of creating high quality free educational content on the web... if you oppose that, then there isn't much hope that you'd learn anything from it anyway...
First, when television came out, people had AM radio. FM didn't become popular until a while after television caught on. Thus, the forward-thinking people were arguing that "picture and sound will replace sound only"...
Clearly, they were wrong about that.
However, as far as I can tell, AM radio is fairly close to dead in many areas of the country.
Newspapers will definitely continue to exist... that is if you consider the NY Times on the web to be a newspaper even though there isn't actually any paper involved in reading it.
It's sort of remeniscent of the way people call plastic utensils 'plastic silverware'.
Down with moderation!
I thought one of the recent infographics was absolutely hillarious...
Down with Karma. If you knew you didn't want to read the (often less than purely nerd-oriented) Katz stories, then you should have turned off his posts long ago. In light of the controversy surrounding his posts, and in light of your obviously extremely high standards of what is appropriate to post on the internet (this is meant with sarcasm, since your post is of startlingly poor quality), you could have certainly avoided the mishap of reading the review had you been thinking clearly at the time.
Down with moderation! Down with Karma!
Is this supposed to say linux?.
Oreilly also publishes a book of examples designed to go along with Java in a Nutshell, as well as two other companion books, The Java Foundation Classes in a Nutshell (which covers awt/swing, etc.) and Java Enterprise in a Nutshell (which covers servlets, and well, the title is self-explanitory).
I had to put in a plug, they're great books!
We need not assume anything. The fact is, Apple is a company which is out to make money. Apple wants to be able to continue to make money, and so it protects its interest.
Being selfish is to be expected, but refusing to support defective products like the powerbook 5300 is purely irresponsible. Apple made an enemy of me several years ago, and I can't see the good in a company that would do that to a customer (and a student who would have potentially bought a lot more of their stuff, at that!).-- end rant
Today Apple benefits from the same kind of hype that Amazon.com, linuxone.com, and Microsoft... colored plastic, huge advertising budgets, and corporate interests characterize the Apple computer of today. Let the buyer beware!
I make a rational choice when I use services that demand information in exchange for a service... I opt out of systematic junk emailings and give them the info that they request in exchange for the service that they provide.
Take, for example, one of my favorite sites on the net, Moviecritic.com. This site has saved me lots of money and time by helping me to avoid movies that I wouldn't like. The site uses collaborative filtering to do so, but in the process also asks for some demographic information. Now, I'm sure that the demographic data which moviecritic collects is highly valuable. I'm also sure that its owner (the person who collected it from consenting moviegoers like me) sells it to movie studios, etc. I don't care. I like the service and just because there is capitalism and age/sex/zipcode information involved doesn't mean it's evil.
Uh, it's probably a conspiracy created by the US government in cooperation with the russian mafia in order to discredit the kgb, all for the sake of getting the story linked on slashdot, america's number one e-conspiracy resource.
It should be noted that Microsoft Internet Explorer is perfectly able to load web pages from sites like www.e-.com. Anybody who needs to use telnet should wake up, install Windows 2000, and enter the future. Why use telnet when you can have dynamic and exciting content automatically loaded onto your own Active desktop?
What would anyone use telnet or ftp for anyway? Files can be transferred with Outlook just by clicking on them, and if I want to send someone a message, I can just use the Microsoft messaging client.
I'm sure most slashdotters will agree (at least the 60% who read slashdot from within Windows) that it's high time that something like this happened. Out with the old, in with the new!
.
the above was all in jest... I just thought it would be fun to express a counterpoint.
I think you are spendnig too much time humoring the trolls...
if you ignore them, they'll go away.
mmm
I think it would be very cool to see a front-end written for slashdot that allowed collaboratively filtered moderation... if I were a good enough programmer, I'd write it.
Is the following possible, if so, why not do it:
Use collaborative filtering to improve the moderation system so that each individual's definition of what makes a "good comment" can be used to filter through other comments.
Further, why not post more stories and allow users to rate each one, thereby creating a list of collaboratively filtered story-preferences for each user and further customizing Slashdot to the individual.
The major complaint that people make about Slashdot is that moderation and coverage is rather groupthinkish. A system implementing collaborative filtering would seem only to bring benefits. Also, if you guys couldn't program it yourselves, I'm sure that the community would contribute (if the current source were opened, etc.).
If you aren't familiar with collaborative filtering, check out Moviecritic.com. Collaborative filtering uses a small set of preferences to make generalizations about likely preferences over a large space of data. It's the perfect technology for a site like slashdot.
mmm
Comics like UserFriendly and Dillbert become funny only when an individual's selfhood is so wrapped up in his job that life begins to imitate kitch.
It is better to remain silent and have people think you ignorant than to mention Calvin and Hobbes and remove all doubt.
I remember the christmas morning when I, nine years old, found an Apple //c under the christmas tree. Within a few weeks I had joined the local Apple User's Group, and had begun tinkering with AppleSoft Basic and played the occasional game of Lemonade Stand.
For me, as for many other Slashdot readers, the tinkering was the essence of the computer. As a nine year-old, I had no use for any kind of productivity applications. It was just fun to make the computer do things. I ended up writing some simple programs to play sounds, and to draw shapes on the screen.
As computers have become more sophisticated, is there a way we can capture the imagination and creativity of today's youth? Perhaps toys like Lego Mindstorms will be the inspiration for tomorrow's nine-year-old tinkerers.
I'm curious to know your thoughts on the melding of youth, creativity, and programming, and its potential import for the future.
Matt
You're lucky that your high school computer teacher went to college. At my high school, the computers were just used to teach typing. No programming (or anything other than typing) was taught. I'm still trying to figure out if I can take the district to court over this.
Thus, ethics as they pertain to genome research are just strategies which, if used by everyone, will benefit everyone, just like many religious beliefs.
But someone will always defect. In our current climate of populist interests pitted against corporate interests, corporations are moving toward a strategy of ignoring some of the ethical issues.
The problem is not the corporations, however. As many on Slashdot have pointed out before, it is the irresponsible cluelessness on the part of the patent office (and the courts that enforce patents) that have driven the system to its current state.
I want a real time pet-scanner that scans a whole room full of people... Then I want to watch the colorful show on the monitor as I play Mozart in the room, as well as the view of brains in heated conversation...
Speaking of sports, I have to reccommend a book. It's called "Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans", by Tim McCarver. It's a great book. After reading it, I can't wait for next baseball season to begin.
(I'd vote for napster too, www.napster.com)