Another Slashdot reader since 1998 here. Not for much longer, presumably: if Beta stays I will most certainly leave, as may others will, no doubt. Appalling.
The reason why talking to your computer is somewhat creepy is that we do perceive our computer as an extension of ourselves: the mouse pointer is "us" pointing, Google is an extension of our memory recall power, and so on. The interface is designed to be non-intrusive. Now, talking to your computer would become like talking to yourself. It's mildly creepy since it involves in the best case a split personality, or alternatively the feeling that you are the one who doesn't know squat, and has to ask to someone else. Not nice. The approach is conceivably different when you ask "Earl Grey, hot". In that case you just give a command in order to receive an item, and who wouldn't want that?
As a further alternative, there is always the Gumstix. But, overall, the Pandaboard looks like a much sweeter deal: for $174 you get a dual-core ARM A9 board with 1GB, DVI output, Bluetooth, and all the goodies. I think I'll get one really soon now.
Well, Token-Ring did have one interesting feature, which was on the other hand poorly implemented as all the rest: an hermaphroditic (or gender-neutral) connector. Each connector would mate with another connector of the exact same shape, rotated in the opposite direction. That would make cable extensions trivial, never having to worry whether you needed a male-male, female-female, or male-female cable: they were all identical! The nice concept was, sure enough, poorly executed; the connectors required additional plastic inserts to keep the thing together, as the two connectors would easily unfasten otherwise. But at least the basic concept was interesting, I used to think at the time. For an example of the way it worked see Wikipedia.
Notably, Token-Ring was not much worse, on a mechanical level, than Ethernet at the time: the latter required either a thick coaxial network cable with a clumsy external transceiver box and a further thick cable (AUI drop cable) before reaching the actual network card, or a thinner coaxial cable, again with a similar external box and a drop cable. Later, the spread of 10BaseT and the disappearance of the external transceiver box rapidly made networking a much simpler affair, and Ethernet quickly became ubiquitous.
And, for the record, Apple briefly had a Token-Ring option as well at the time, a special (incredibly large and expensive) NuBus Token-Ring card was produced by Apple: the TokenTalk NB.
Johnson's design is visually appealing, but has a major, and I say major flaw. Every designer knows that the eye tends to be captured by curved lines, and that is routinely exploited to draw the attention of the observer towards the product. Johnson's design has some fluid curved lines that draw the eye towards the top left corner, where there is absolutely nothing! The eye then wanders off the page, giving to the page an unpleasant "void" feeling. The attention level drops, and the viewer then instinctively moves on, looking for another, more interesting page.
That's not the only stupid thing they've done recently. In 2004 they decided to change their 50-odd year core colour palette.
The light gray and the dark gray changed into a light blueish gray and a dark blueish gray, which were given the derisory name "bley" by the aficionado AFOL community (AFOL=Adult Friends Of Lego).
All new sets since 2004 contain only pieces with the new grays, making it difficult for owners of existing sets to build anything without ending up with a patchwork of different shades of gray in their creations. The brown color was also changed into a more reddish colour.
As far as I am concerned, I think LEGO is aiming too much towards the market of "grown-up" children who are interested in robots and monsters. The Bionicle sets are cool, but they do not belong in the LEGO construction system. They don't even have studs, they don't interlock with the standard pieces. They sell well, good for them, but they are just one of endless companies to fight in that market.
My feeling is that LEGO could rediscover its roots (and sell) by targeting once again the small children market, with small sets mostly made of standard pieces, as in the famed Legoland series, or the much-loved Classic Space series.
The fact that LEGO is currently showing no sense of direction saddens me to no end.
To conclude with a further tiny bit of information, if you want to find again the old sets that you loved as a child, you might find this site quite interesting: www.bricklink.com
I suppose the end result of this research is eventually still selling you something, by suggesting stuff that you may like.
I find a basic fallacy in this approach, as in the recommandations of Amazon and the like. People do not get entertainment from stuff they know already, but from *new* stuff, that surprises and sounds/looks unusual and different. It is the same fallacy that leads music producers to look for the a magical "formula" to create pop music, and that only leads to a massive production of crappy music that all sounds the same.
Talking about music with rich and unusual harmonic structures, I think an Honorable Mention should be made for "Election Day" by Arcadia (formed by some Duran Duran members back in 1985). While the sounds may appear almost normal now, I recall that at the time the song was a total mistery until something clicked in your brain and you "got" it. Some older people I know of were openly acknowledging that the song was just too unusual for them to understand. Remarkable.
Also, I suppose it was unavoidable to have a list focuse on English-language productions, but I would NEVER leave out Raumpatrouille, a superb German series from the sixties.
I would also remember Star Maidens, although I might not put it among the best 50...:)
Methinks no computer system is completely secure, considering both the technical and human aspects.
Your role is just to supply a system that respects the specifications, except you were probably given fuzzy specifications. If something bad happens, you will be the one getting blamed, certainly not the ones giving you fuzzy specifications and having high security expectations.
Hence, you'd better minimizing your personal responsability, delegating the task to a vendor. You will accomplish two results: having someone already knowledgeable involved, which never hurts, and removing yourself from a very hot spot, in the remote case that something untowards does eventually happen.
Do not do this yourself if you do not have suitable know-how already. Knowledge has a cost for a reason. Delegate to vendors, repeating exactly the same fuzzy specification you were given.
There is an interesting aspect in the whole copyright argument that I think is not being discussed enough. Why, in the first place, do people want to accumulate so much software/movies/music, most of which will never be looked at again after download? The desire to possess can be part of the justification, but I believe there is a further issue: the desire, almost the compelling need to save material from disappearing. Think about the retrogames saved from distruction, fragments of television advertising, old time radio, music videos and the such. Isn't this part of what humans have always done, preserving their history? The worrying part is that, while copyright laws have good reasons to exist, their enforcement is in direct contradiction with the aforementioned need. Libraries would never have been invented in modern times: they would have been raided by police. For instance, they store CDs that anyone can listen to and copy. Does that not mean they facilitate piracy? Another example: a person duplicating a show on a tape can be seen as violating copyrights today. Yet, in 50 years, that tape might be the only copy of the show in existance. And so the list goes on. My point is that copyright laws exist in order to preserve the ability of content producers to make money. But an exception should ALWAYS be made for archival purposes, on a level that legislators should care to define. That need is not catered for when software or digital content is involved today. As a result, we risk losing a tremendously important part of our history.
It is becoming increasingly common. Interestingly, in other languages the double negative has long been the rule rather than the exception. Italian, for instance: "Non ho niente", literally "I don't have nothing". Except it is actually grammatically correct!
Growing muscle tissue on demand actually means growing meat. Which can be edible meat.
Is the science-fiction scenario of growing meat without farming closer? It sure would represent a whole new source of high-quality, "ethically correct" proteins.
...is this really "stuff that matters"? Slashdot is definitely going down the drain. Time to look for a new publication, I suppose, something that really has "News for nerds", as opposed to pointless noise. Any suggestions?
No, really. Is there anything else as addictive as Slashdot, but more satisfying for computer nerds?
Good point. Self-replication has an emotive impact because we tend to associate it with life, but life is defined by having a metabolism.
These robots, although they "self-replicate" according to some loose definition of the term, are most definitely not "alive". Similarly, as per your example, prions replicate but are not alive according to the common criteria.
So, even being very generous on the definition of "self-replication", what these robots do should not be misinterpreted as involving any kind of "artificial life", by any means.
Something that has been inexplicably missing for a long time from Microsoft's Smartphone software is Microsoft Reader.
Now that all the versions of Windows Mobile have been unified, it is legitimate to expect Microsoft Reader to move to smartphones as well. It is a market Microsoft has surprisingly neglected to explore so far.
The technology is interesting and promising, but further development is necessary. A price tag of $20000 is not justifiable over 120km. You can drive that distance in a couple of hours, and that is a) cheaper and b) enables face-to-face interaction. I wonder whather they are really expecting anyone to buy such a system, or rather they just really want to stir interest on the technology instead.
Funny how advertisers believe it is their sacrosanct right to do whatever they feel like in the name of free market (including cluttering your mailbox with pamphlets, for example) but when you try to defend yourself against the aggression all of a sudden you "violate social values".
What about the violation of my rights not be harassed by mail or phone? What about my rights not to have to use a "fidelity card" (which implies disclosing my personal shopping habits) in order to have reasonable prices at the local supermarket?
Either they are real rights, and so is their delivering advertising through the web, or they are violating a social contract in the first place by intruding in our lives, as much as we do by defending ourselves against that.
To begin with, if the financial gain is really important DST could be standardized across the whole of the US. In Indiana alone there are three separate regions where time and DST are handled differently from one another...
Slashdot Mirror
Another Slashdot reader since 1998 here. Not for much longer, presumably: if Beta stays I will most certainly leave, as may others will, no doubt. Appalling.
The reason why talking to your computer is somewhat creepy is that we do perceive our computer as an extension of ourselves: the mouse pointer is "us" pointing, Google is an extension of our memory recall power, and so on. The interface is designed to be non-intrusive. Now, talking to your computer would become like talking to yourself. It's mildly creepy since it involves in the best case a split personality, or alternatively the feeling that you are the one who doesn't know squat, and has to ask to someone else. Not nice.
The approach is conceivably different when you ask "Earl Grey, hot". In that case you just give a command in order to receive an item, and who wouldn't want that?
As a further alternative, there is always the Gumstix. But, overall, the Pandaboard looks like a much sweeter deal: for $174 you get a dual-core ARM A9 board with 1GB, DVI output, Bluetooth, and all the goodies. I think I'll get one really soon now.
Well, Token-Ring did have one interesting feature, which was on the other hand poorly implemented as all the rest: an hermaphroditic (or gender-neutral) connector. Each connector would mate with another connector of the exact same shape, rotated in the opposite direction. That would make cable extensions trivial, never having to worry whether you needed a male-male, female-female, or male-female cable: they were all identical! The nice concept was, sure enough, poorly executed; the connectors required additional plastic inserts to keep the thing together, as the two connectors would easily unfasten otherwise. But at least the basic concept was interesting, I used to think at the time. For an example of the way it worked see Wikipedia.
Notably, Token-Ring was not much worse, on a mechanical level, than Ethernet at the time: the latter required either a thick coaxial network cable with a clumsy external transceiver box and a further thick cable (AUI drop cable) before reaching the actual network card, or a thinner coaxial cable, again with a similar external box and a drop cable. Later, the spread of 10BaseT and the disappearance of the external transceiver box rapidly made networking a much simpler affair, and Ethernet quickly became ubiquitous.
And, for the record, Apple briefly had a Token-Ring option as well at the time, a special (incredibly large and expensive) NuBus Token-Ring card was produced by Apple: the TokenTalk NB.
I agree, the space sets were fantastic. You can still buy them on BrickLink. New in their box those sets sell for thousand of dollars.
Johnson's design is visually appealing, but has a major, and I say major flaw. Every designer knows that the eye tends to be captured by curved lines, and that is routinely exploited to draw the attention of the observer towards the product. Johnson's design has some fluid curved lines that draw the eye towards the top left corner, where there is absolutely nothing! The eye then wanders off the page, giving to the page an unpleasant "void" feeling. The attention level drops, and the viewer then instinctively moves on, looking for another, more interesting page.
...what could possibly go wrong?
That's not the only stupid thing they've done recently. In 2004 they decided to change their 50-odd year core colour palette.
3 .htm.
The light gray and the dark gray changed into a light blueish gray and a dark blueish gray, which were given the derisory name "bley" by the aficionado AFOL community (AFOL=Adult Friends Of Lego).
All new sets since 2004 contain only pieces with the new grays, making it difficult for owners of existing sets to build anything without ending up with a patchwork of different shades of gray in their creations. The brown color was also changed into a more reddish colour.
The official response from the LEGO CEO can be read here: http://f24.parsimony.net/forum61776/messages/9746
As far as I am concerned, I think LEGO is aiming too much towards the market of "grown-up" children who are interested in robots and monsters. The Bionicle sets are cool, but they do not belong in the LEGO construction system. They don't even have studs, they don't interlock with the standard pieces. They sell well, good for them, but they are just one of endless companies to fight in that market.
My feeling is that LEGO could rediscover its roots (and sell) by targeting once again the small children market, with small sets mostly made of standard pieces, as in the famed Legoland series, or the much-loved Classic Space series.
The fact that LEGO is currently showing no sense of direction saddens me to no end.
To conclude with a further tiny bit of information, if you want to find again the old sets that you loved as a child, you might find this site quite interesting: www.bricklink.com
It doesn't seem to contain Star Trek: The Animated Series!...
> I have an even better Idea .
> Let's send 6 lesbians porn stars and a A film crew.
This sounds like the plot of "Lesbian Spank Inferno"...
I suppose the end result of this research is eventually still selling you something, by suggesting stuff that you may like.
I find a basic fallacy in this approach, as in the recommandations of Amazon and the like. People do not get entertainment from stuff they know already, but from *new* stuff, that surprises and sounds/looks unusual and different. It is the same fallacy that leads music producers to look for the a magical "formula" to create pop music, and that only leads to a massive production of crappy music that all sounds the same.
Talking about music with rich and unusual harmonic structures, I think an Honorable Mention should be made for "Election Day" by Arcadia (formed by some Duran Duran members back in 1985). While the sounds may appear almost normal now, I recall that at the time the song was a total mistery until something clicked in your brain and you "got" it. Some older people I know of were openly acknowledging that the song was just too unusual for them to understand. Remarkable.
Deep Space 9 and Farscape, but also The Prisoner and Sapphire and Steel.
:)
Also, I suppose it was unavoidable to have a list focuse on English-language productions, but I would NEVER leave out Raumpatrouille, a superb German series from the sixties.
I would also remember Star Maidens, although I might not put it among the best 50...
Methinks no computer system is completely secure, considering both the technical and human aspects.
Your role is just to supply a system that respects the specifications, except you were probably given fuzzy specifications. If something bad happens, you will be the one getting blamed, certainly not the ones giving you fuzzy specifications and having high security expectations.
Hence, you'd better minimizing your personal responsability, delegating the task to a vendor. You will accomplish two results: having someone already knowledgeable involved, which never hurts, and removing yourself from a very hot spot, in the remote case that something untowards does eventually happen.
Do not do this yourself if you do not have suitable know-how already. Knowledge has a cost for a reason. Delegate to vendors, repeating exactly the same fuzzy specification you were given.
There is an interesting aspect in the whole copyright argument that I think is not being discussed enough.
Why, in the first place, do people want to accumulate so much software/movies/music, most of which will never be looked at again after download?
The desire to possess can be part of the justification, but I believe there is a further issue: the desire, almost the compelling need to save material from disappearing. Think about the retrogames saved from distruction, fragments of television advertising, old time radio, music videos and the such. Isn't this part of what humans have always done, preserving their history?
The worrying part is that, while copyright laws have good reasons to exist, their enforcement is in direct contradiction with the aforementioned need. Libraries would never have been invented in modern times: they would have been raided by police. For instance, they store CDs that anyone can listen to and copy. Does that not mean they facilitate piracy? Another example: a person duplicating a show on a tape can be seen as violating copyrights today. Yet, in 50 years, that tape might be the only copy of the show in existance. And so the list goes on.
My point is that copyright laws exist in order to preserve the ability of content producers to make money. But an exception should ALWAYS be made for archival purposes, on a level that legislators should care to define. That need is not catered for when software or digital content is involved today. As a result, we risk losing a tremendously important part of our history.
It is becoming increasingly common. Interestingly, in other languages the double negative has long been the rule rather than the exception. Italian, for instance: "Non ho niente", literally "I don't have nothing". Except it is actually grammatically correct!
Growing muscle tissue on demand actually means growing meat. Which can be edible meat.
Is the science-fiction scenario of growing meat without farming closer? It sure would represent a whole new source of high-quality, "ethically correct" proteins.
But would you eat such a thing?
You must be new here...! :)
e nomena>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_troll ing_phenomena
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_post
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_trolling_ph
...is this really "stuff that matters"?
Slashdot is definitely going down the drain. Time to look for a new publication, I suppose, something that really has "News for nerds", as opposed to pointless noise. Any suggestions?
No, really. Is there anything else as addictive as Slashdot, but more satisfying for computer nerds?
Good point. Self-replication has an emotive impact because we tend to associate it with life, but life is defined by having a metabolism.
These robots, although they "self-replicate" according to some loose definition of the term, are most definitely not "alive". Similarly, as per your example, prions replicate but are not alive according to the common criteria.
So, even being very generous on the definition of "self-replication", what these robots do should not be misinterpreted as involving any kind of "artificial life", by any means.
Something that has been inexplicably missing for a long time from Microsoft's Smartphone software is Microsoft Reader.
Now that all the versions of Windows Mobile have been unified, it is legitimate to expect Microsoft Reader to move to smartphones as well. It is a market Microsoft has surprisingly neglected to explore so far.
Any reports about Reader and WM2005?
The technology is interesting and promising, but further development is necessary.
A price tag of $20000 is not justifiable over 120km. You can drive that distance in a couple of hours, and that is a) cheaper and b) enables face-to-face interaction.
I wonder whather they are really expecting anyone to buy such a system, or rather they just really want to stir interest on the technology instead.
Something that I would really like to see integrated into GCC, sooner or later, is GNU Pascal.
They always seem to be close, yet it never happens.
Funny how advertisers believe it is their sacrosanct right to do whatever they feel like in the name of free market (including cluttering your mailbox with pamphlets, for example) but when you try to defend yourself against the aggression all of a sudden you "violate social values".
What about the violation of my rights not be harassed by mail or phone? What about my rights not to have to use a "fidelity card" (which implies disclosing my personal shopping habits) in order to have reasonable prices at the local supermarket?
Either they are real rights, and so is their delivering advertising through the web, or they are violating a social contract in the first place by intruding in our lives, as much as we do by defending ourselves against that.
To begin with, if the financial gain is really important DST could be standardized across the whole of the US. In Indiana alone there are three separate regions where time and DST are handled differently from one another...
In Italy even babies know plasmons!!
Here is proof!