So. ..you can share songs with friends, right? And how long do you have to stand around waiting for the thing to transfer songs? Will it depend on interference from other ambient wifi networks? Isn't that going to cut down a bit on the whole theory of "spontaneous social networking"? Is it really that much of an improvement over all the IM'ing people do and their ability to transfer songs through that?
I'd be a bit surprised if that turned out to be true.
Seems to be the lack of perspective this story that's most disturbing:
1. Complete failure to understand their comparators. Are consumers really demanding more "realism" out of photography? What? Was there a lack of realistic photographs, or do cameras only take abstracts? In movies, the authors might be forgiven for thinking that the demand for more realistic special effects is a demand for realism, but isn't "photorealism" the ultimate standard for graphics?
2. Complete failure to understand their heritage. Video games don't necessarily replace movies and photographs -- there were games before them, and still are; and most of those games were designed for human interaction. I remember sitting down in front of the NES with the family or friends, don't they?
3. Confusion over history. The NES didn't kill the Atari, that generation was already dead at the hands of endless revisitation of the same game. ..wait a minute. ..shouldn't that have been their point?
It's one thing to call for tolerance towards expertise and specialization, and another entirely to put it into effect.
Who determines what areas are specialized enough to warrant closer consideration? How?
Same two questions, on the subject of who is an expert?
These problems aren't clearly resolved among the academics and professionals who work in the relevant fields. Areas of chemistry and biology frequently overlap, and a celebrated expert in German Idealism might contribute a diatribe on Marxist philosophy, rather than a thoughtful article.
It's for this reason that encyclopedia articles have both expertise and careful, professional editing. I'm not sure how such things could be implemented within the structure of wiki.
In most rental situations, I can tell you that new wiring and, depending on where and how you install it, antennas, repeaters, etc., could be considered as 'fixtures'.
Often, fixtures become the landlord's property by law and lease once installed, rather than the tenant having the option to remove them.
It's certainly the case in much of Canada, and could well be in most of the states.
I'm really astonished that I have yet to hear anyone dealing with this work to refer to Henri Bergson's "Essay concerning the immediate data of consciousness".
In what was his doctoral defense [well, the equivalent], Bergson, a French geometrician working at the turn of the twentieth century, provided precisely this response to Zeno's paradox, with almost the same level of detail. It's nice to see someone doing more work with it, but shouldn't there be better recognition of one's forebears? Isn't peer review supposed to accomplish that?
Part of the cost of maintenance on the Linux platform is surely regular installation of upgrades which are freely available.
By contrast, who keeps a Microsoft product for five years without upgrading it? Especially in a corporate environment? That means that two years down the road, it's time to pay for a new version. ..
It's not counterproductive to have people pushing the envelope, it's counterproductive to have people outside of the mainstream dictating to those in it what their needs are.
Despite advances in UIs, computers are still designed as general-purpose hobby devices, rather than for the specific functions for which the majority of their sales are used. When users complain that it doesn't make sense to have to log in to a system or to "start" a word processor, or to "double-click" to "open" a file through a graphical icon, they're simply told that they don't understand the technology. Same when they have to figure out [to avoid being scammed] what kind of RAM they need with their new P4 processors.
The point is that for products to be useful and effective, they need to be designed with more consideration for the needs of the user; and much of the time, that which is "neat" to enthusiasts has held sway over design at the expense of what would be useful [see featurebloat].
BTW: impractical thinking is not necessarily visionary. It might just be impractical.
This idea really only works if the bond backers cannot produce the software more cheaply by hiring programmers themselves. Of course, the assumption is that the backers want the product, not the capital returns; but investment is a major factor in providing capital.
Even if the investor were to receive the interest accumulated, if the money from the bond backers must go into an interest-bearing account, to be released only when the product is finished, then investors would not see a high enough rate of return to cover interest on the value of the bank loans the programmer has to take out -- which must be covered before the investor could see any return at all.
More simply, the rate of interest which the programmer faces on the loan will be higher than the rate of interest earned on the bonds. Although the bank won't provide anything near the entire value of the bonds for a loan amount, the difference must be made up entirely in the difference between the programming costs and the final value of the bonds.
This is great for programmers; but these bonds would be worthless to anyone actually interested in investment. And without a heavy influx of investment capital, today's tech companies wouldn't be able to do much of anything.
As an excercise in communitarian ventures, it's a great idea.
Actually, I know quite a few people who DO use Sympatico's High Speed Service for several computers. It's just as easy to do with Sympatico as with Rogers.
There was an excellent article at Suck.com last month, pointing out one simple fact:
Banner ads probably do work
The problem has been [to loosely paraphrase] that the companies selling and managing banner ads thought that advertising on the Internet would be different from advertising in other media.
Unfortunately, they're wrong. The clickthrough rates are low, sure. But how often does an ad for, say, jeans, make you head out and buy them [the rough equivalent of a 'click-through']?
Ads are designed to get you to remember the product when you're heading out to buy products, thereby establishing brand recognition and making you more likely to choose that manufacturer's product over the hundred or so nearly identical competing brands'.
Just because it's a new medium doesn't mean we've changed that much, and as the article points out, with the cultural recognition of that damned monkey, it could probably sell us just about anything.
This reminds me of an interesting question I'd been thinking over recently:
Has there really been much in the way of innovation in computer science since the heady days of the 1970s, or have the last few decades been more of a playing out of the various innovations and ideas produced back then, now merely possible thanks to lower costs and cheaper prices.
Considering:
Successive products now tend to improve on things by brute force, rather than by finding new alternatives [eg. bloatware, rising transistor counts].
Many things heralded almost as new technologies are refinements of existing ones, rather than significantly new processes or methods [eg..18-.13 micron fabrication, Gigabit/100 base T Ethernet].
Are there, perhaps, other examples? I don't believe that these "scientists" are necessarily upset with the work done by CS workers. I think they, quite rightly, object to the popular notion, seldom disputed by the industry, that constant innovation and invention are part and parcel of the marketplace.
The analysis of statistics, the backbone of much scientific research work on computers, may be aided at present more by the application of brute processing power than by any inventions since the transistor.
Given that, who's to say they don't have a point. ..
Larsal
The Lighter Side of Dark Ages
on
The Renaissance
·
· Score: 2
I'm sick of seeing things written about the Rennaissance as a spontaneous or instant emergence from the Dark Ages. There were at least two other "rennaissances" prior to the Italian Rennaissance of the 15th through 17th centuries.
The first of those other Rennaissances, under Charlemagne, began with the rediscovery of crop rotation, bringing about enough food surplus to let the population thrive rather than live perpetually on the edge of starvation. This allowed Charlemagne to establish schools throughout his dominions, in which lay the roots of what would become the Universities of the future.
The second began in the 11th or 12th century, as the rediscovery and profusion of many extant classical sources [including those which came from the Muslim world] led to the "Humanist" rennaissance, reawakening interest in the earthly state of existence and its exigencies in the nascent University communities.
The third, as Italian city-states became filled with educated lawmakers, was less a new direction than a fruition of the previous six centuries. The Rennaissance was not a grand new profusion of technology, but an ideological state in which technology could give fruit to a reborn Europe-wide civic culture.
As far as technology goes, it wasn't stagnant from the fall of Rome to the Rennaissance. Water power was harnessed in new ways to drive mills, hammers, and clocks. Masonry and carpentry were refined, as were agricultural techniques several times over [2-crop to 3-crop rotation].
For technology, the Romans made only three contributions over their thousand-year history: the arch, concrete, and the crane. Their record on the development of technology was far worse than that of Europe over the thousand years that followed their fall.
You might be interested to know that the PC Microscope was in some demand on university campuses. If you disconnected the mediocre-to-poor microscope from the camera portion of the device, you could use that camera with more powerful microscopes, hooking them up to computers for image-capture on the cheap.
Sometimes simple or frivolous things are unexpectedly useful. ..
A number of calendar applications I've used over the years allow you to add notes to events on the calendar. On occasion, that's become good enough to serve as a basic journal, helping me keep track of what I thought of various meetings, etc.
It would be nice to be able to link those notes together by searching for similar terms, searching through repeating events, etc. and compiling them into extended text documents, separated by date:time markers.
Novice users are already distracted from the work they're desperately trying to figure out by every blink on their DSL modems, every whirr of their hard drives, and every change in the "helpful" indicators, telling them that they're on line 8.6", no, wait, 9.4" of their document.
Now try to imagine the same people believing, thanks to a new, ritalin-demanding UI, that they're supposed to be dealing with all the random odds and ends of software and background apps [already needlessly numerous] the UI decides they've been paying attention to!
"Am I supposed to deal with the 'Task . . . scheduler' now?"
"No, you're writing an essay."
"But it came up and. ..look! The calculator just started! Oh! 'Help'! That must be useful. .."
Of course, all this is dependent on the notion that the concept of time in relativity which is necessary to perform the mathematical equations treating it as a dimension [hence, with qualities relatively difficult to distinguish from those of threespace] is sufficient.
The equations which employ time as a variable, hence treating it as a dimension do not exhaust the qualities which must be understood in order to consider the effects of such things as causality.
The simplest solution, as Henri Bergson pointed out when relativity was first presented, may be that the way we conceive of time is fundamentally flawed. [Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience]
Unfortunately, most work has allowed time to remain in a kind of limbo, sharing the qualities both of a spatial dimension and those special characteristics which give us causality without stopping to consider why or how it is that these two potentially contradictory aspects may come to be. Such a question would take us closer to the root of what time actually is.
I know more recently of a small number of physicists concerned with questions about the nature of time, but it hasn't received even enough mainstream press to permit me to recall the names here. Perhaps someone around has a notion of who's working on time? Larsal
Don't forget that the automobile was also a 19th century invention -- the only significant contribution to it in this century was the development of turbo-charging. Aside from that, the technology is basically unchanged.
> Existence for the sake of existence is meaningless.
So is information for the sake of information.
The current problem is not that we worship information or knowledge -- it's that we worship it without any grounding or context.
Someone draws our attention at dinner to the fact that Tomatoes are a fruit, or that white smoke signals the Pope's accession, and we're supposed to be impressed -- stunned by the individual who's assimilated useless pieces of trivia. [didja know that 76% of trivia is useless?]
Until we realise that knowledge needs to be contextualised to be useful [of course it does, that's how we come to use it], we'll continue to believe that it's alright to run around doing research and insisting that the consequences are dependent on others, not ourselves.
There's a real differance in writing between the "comfort" method and what, perhaps we really love about great classics of every literary genre. If fantasy is simply about writing a story with elves, magic, warriors, and the looming mystique of lost ages of glory and grace, then it's simply "comfort". If SF is simply about incorporating lots of techno-garble into a very tried and tested story, then it's simply "comfort". Either way, I'm not interested; and I don't think any "classics" of either fall into that category. Great stories, SF or Fantasy, come about when the special qualities of the genre bring us to terms with something special or illuminating about the human condition -- the only thing we really understand. How does technology's ability to transcend our human limitations change our lives? How do mere humans react when confronted with the epic proportions of fantasy's legends? It's these questions [successfully answered] that really provide us with good SF and fantasy; and curiously, they're the qualities of any good work of art. The pulp fiction of the middle of the century did a fantastic job -- realising that it took more than just an element of scientific credibility to produce stories worthy of our attention. The contemporary obsession with "accuracy" and "credulity" could be cutting off many budding SF-inclined minds, who don't realise that what they need to do is understand how science, real or imagined, relates to people; and not how warp drives or time machines really work. After all, what sufficiently advanced technology is distinguishable from magic? The giants of yesteryear understood the human condition. Perhaps once we move back towards an integration of science into our lives, we'll realise a renaissance in SF writing [and, probably, fantasy, too]. Perhaps in the passing of Mr. Van Vogt, we can take a minute to think about what makes the classics so valuable. Hopefully, that contemplation will bode well for those who follow him and remain. Larsal
Slashdot Mirror
So. . .you can share songs with friends, right? And how long do you have to stand around waiting for the thing to transfer songs? Will it depend on interference from other ambient wifi networks? Isn't that going to cut down a bit on the whole theory of "spontaneous social networking"? Is it really that much of an improvement over all the IM'ing people do and their ability to transfer songs through that?
I'd be a bit surprised if that turned out to be true.
Larsal
And, of course, the basic problem underlying the "OMG he's got, like, 40 BILLION dollars worth of stock!":
Where's the 40 Billion dollars in surplus cash that's aching to snap the stock up?
Selling's fine, but you do have to find enough buyers. . .
Larsal
More like a non-sociologist had a field day with a sociology text.
Larsal
Seems to be the lack of perspective this story that's most disturbing:
.wait a minute. . .shouldn't that have been their point?
1. Complete failure to understand their comparators. Are consumers really demanding more "realism" out of photography? What? Was there a lack of realistic photographs, or do cameras only take abstracts? In movies, the authors might be forgiven for thinking that the demand for more realistic special effects is a demand for realism, but isn't "photorealism" the ultimate standard for graphics?
2. Complete failure to understand their heritage. Video games don't necessarily replace movies and photographs -- there were games before them, and still are; and most of those games were designed for human interaction. I remember sitting down in front of the NES with the family or friends, don't they?
3. Confusion over history. The NES didn't kill the Atari, that generation was already dead at the hands of endless revisitation of the same game. .
What absolute crap.
Larsal
It's one thing to call for tolerance towards expertise and specialization, and another entirely to put it into effect.
Who determines what areas are specialized enough to warrant closer consideration? How?
Same two questions, on the subject of who is an expert?
These problems aren't clearly resolved among the academics and professionals who work in the relevant fields. Areas of chemistry and biology frequently overlap, and a celebrated expert in German Idealism might contribute a diatribe on Marxist philosophy, rather than a thoughtful article.
It's for this reason that encyclopedia articles have both expertise and careful, professional editing. I'm not sure how such things could be implemented within the structure of wiki.
Larsal
Thanks for the complementary point about Israeli textbooks.
Since nothing you've said contradicts or offers anything against the first poster's point, why do you claim that he/she is miseducating anyone?
Isn't it just possible that more than one side is guilty of propaganda?
But then, anonymous cowards aren't known for thinking.
Larsal
Often, fixtures become the landlord's property by law and lease once installed, rather than the tenant having the option to remove them.
It's certainly the case in much of Canada, and could well be in most of the states.
Larsal
I'm really astonished that I have yet to hear anyone dealing with this work to refer to Henri Bergson's "Essay concerning the immediate data of consciousness".
In what was his doctoral defense [well, the equivalent], Bergson, a French geometrician working at the turn of the twentieth century, provided precisely this response to Zeno's paradox, with almost the same level of detail. It's nice to see someone doing more work with it, but shouldn't there be better recognition of one's forebears? Isn't peer review supposed to accomplish that?
Larsal
Part of the cost of maintenance on the Linux platform is surely regular installation of upgrades which are freely available.
By contrast, who keeps a Microsoft product for five years without upgrading it? Especially in a corporate environment? That means that two years down the road, it's time to pay for a new version. . .
Just a thought.
Larsal
It's not counterproductive to have people pushing the envelope, it's counterproductive to have people outside of the mainstream dictating to those in it what their needs are.
Despite advances in UIs, computers are still designed as general-purpose hobby devices, rather than for the specific functions for which the majority of their sales are used. When users complain that it doesn't make sense to have to log in to a system or to "start" a word processor, or to "double-click" to "open" a file through a graphical icon, they're simply told that they don't understand the technology. Same when they have to figure out [to avoid being scammed] what kind of RAM they need with their new P4 processors.
The point is that for products to be useful and effective, they need to be designed with more consideration for the needs of the user; and much of the time, that which is "neat" to enthusiasts has held sway over design at the expense of what would be useful [see featurebloat].
BTW: impractical thinking is not necessarily visionary. It might just be impractical.
Larsal
This idea really only works if the bond backers cannot produce the software more cheaply by hiring programmers themselves. Of course, the assumption is that the backers want the product, not the capital returns; but investment is a major factor in providing capital.
Even if the investor were to receive the interest accumulated, if the money from the bond backers must go into an interest-bearing account, to be released only when the product is finished, then investors would not see a high enough rate of return to cover interest on the value of the bank loans the programmer has to take out -- which must be covered before the investor could see any return at all.
More simply, the rate of interest which the programmer faces on the loan will be higher than the rate of interest earned on the bonds. Although the bank won't provide anything near the entire value of the bonds for a loan amount, the difference must be made up entirely in the difference between the programming costs and the final value of the bonds.
This is great for programmers; but these bonds would be worthless to anyone actually interested in investment. And without a heavy influx of investment capital, today's tech companies wouldn't be able to do much of anything.
As an excercise in communitarian ventures, it's a great idea.
Larsal
Actually, I know quite a few people who DO use Sympatico's High Speed Service for several computers. It's just as easy to do with Sympatico as with Rogers.
LarsalThere was an excellent article at Suck.com last month, pointing out one simple fact:
Banner ads probably do workThe problem has been [to loosely paraphrase] that the companies selling and managing banner ads thought that advertising on the Internet would be different from advertising in other media.
Unfortunately, they're wrong. The clickthrough rates are low, sure. But how often does an ad for, say, jeans, make you head out and buy them [the rough equivalent of a 'click-through']?
Ads are designed to get you to remember the product when you're heading out to buy products, thereby establishing brand recognition and making you more likely to choose that manufacturer's product over the hundred or so nearly identical competing brands'.
Just because it's a new medium doesn't mean we've changed that much, and as the article points out, with the cultural recognition of that damned monkey, it could probably sell us just about anything.
Larsal
This reminds me of an interesting question I'd been thinking over recently:
Has there really been much in the way of innovation in computer science since the heady days of the 1970s, or have the last few decades been more of a playing out of the various innovations and ideas produced back then, now merely possible thanks to lower costs and cheaper prices.
Considering:
Are there, perhaps, other examples? I don't believe that these "scientists" are necessarily upset with the work done by CS workers. I think they, quite rightly, object to the popular notion, seldom disputed by the industry, that constant innovation and invention are part and parcel of the marketplace.
The analysis of statistics, the backbone of much scientific research work on computers, may be aided at present more by the application of brute processing power than by any inventions since the transistor.
Given that, who's to say they don't have a point. . .
Larsal
I'm sick of seeing things written about the Rennaissance as a spontaneous or instant emergence from the Dark Ages. There were at least two other "rennaissances" prior to the Italian Rennaissance of the 15th through 17th centuries.
The first of those other Rennaissances, under Charlemagne, began with the rediscovery of crop rotation, bringing about enough food surplus to let the population thrive rather than live perpetually on the edge of starvation. This allowed Charlemagne to establish schools throughout his dominions, in which lay the roots of what would become the Universities of the future.
The second began in the 11th or 12th century, as the rediscovery and profusion of many extant classical sources [including those which came from the Muslim world] led to the "Humanist" rennaissance, reawakening interest in the earthly state of existence and its exigencies in the nascent University communities.
The third, as Italian city-states became filled with educated lawmakers, was less a new direction than a fruition of the previous six centuries. The Rennaissance was not a grand new profusion of technology, but an ideological state in which technology could give fruit to a reborn Europe-wide civic culture.
As far as technology goes, it wasn't stagnant from the fall of Rome to the Rennaissance. Water power was harnessed in new ways to drive mills, hammers, and clocks. Masonry and carpentry were refined, as were agricultural techniques several times over [2-crop to 3-crop rotation].
For technology, the Romans made only three contributions over their thousand-year history: the arch, concrete, and the crane. Their record on the development of technology was far worse than that of Europe over the thousand years that followed their fall.
Larsal
You might be interested to know that the PC Microscope was in some demand on university campuses. If you disconnected the mediocre-to-poor microscope from the camera portion of the device, you could use that camera with more powerful microscopes, hooking them up to computers for image-capture on the cheap.
Sometimes simple or frivolous things are unexpectedly useful. . .
Larsal
A number of calendar applications I've used over the years allow you to add notes to events on the calendar. On occasion, that's become good enough to serve as a basic journal, helping me keep track of what I thought of various meetings, etc.
It would be nice to be able to link those notes together by searching for similar terms, searching through repeating events, etc. and compiling them into extended text documents, separated by date:time markers.
Just a wistful thought,
Larsal
Novice users are already distracted from the work they're desperately trying to figure out by every blink on their DSL modems, every whirr of their hard drives, and every change in the "helpful" indicators, telling them that they're on line 8.6", no, wait, 9.4" of their document.
Now try to imagine the same people believing, thanks to a new, ritalin-demanding UI, that they're supposed to be dealing with all the random odds and ends of software and background apps [already needlessly numerous] the UI decides they've been paying attention to!
"Am I supposed to deal with the 'Task . . . scheduler' now?"
"No, you're writing an essay."
"But it came up and. . .look! The calculator just started! Oh! 'Help'! That must be useful. . ."
"It's the 'Help' function for the calculator. . ."
"I wonder if it can help me write the essay?"
Larsal [It's Worse than an Animated Einstein]
Of course, all this is dependent on the notion that the concept of time in relativity which is necessary to perform the mathematical equations treating it as a dimension [hence, with qualities relatively difficult to distinguish from those of threespace] is sufficient.
The equations which employ time as a variable, hence treating it as a dimension do not exhaust the qualities which must be understood in order to consider the effects of such things as causality.
The simplest solution, as Henri Bergson pointed out when relativity was first presented, may be that the way we conceive of time is fundamentally flawed. [Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience]
Unfortunately, most work has allowed time to remain in a kind of limbo, sharing the qualities both of a spatial dimension and those special characteristics which give us causality without stopping to consider why or how it is that these two potentially contradictory aspects may come to be. Such a question would take us closer to the root of what time actually is.
I know more recently of a small number of physicists concerned with questions about the nature of time, but it hasn't received even enough mainstream press to permit me to recall the names here. Perhaps someone around has a notion of who's working on time? Larsal
Larsal
> Existence for the sake of existence is meaningless.
So is information for the sake of information.
The current problem is not that we worship information or knowledge -- it's that we worship it without any grounding or context.
Someone draws our attention at dinner to the fact that Tomatoes are a fruit, or that white smoke signals the Pope's accession, and we're supposed to be impressed -- stunned by the individual who's assimilated useless pieces of trivia. [didja know that 76% of trivia is useless?]
Until we realise that knowledge needs to be contextualised to be useful [of course it does, that's how we come to use it], we'll continue to believe that it's alright to run around doing research and insisting that the consequences are dependent on others, not ourselves.
Larsal
There's a real differance in writing between the "comfort" method and what, perhaps we really love about great classics of every literary genre. If fantasy is simply about writing a story with elves, magic, warriors, and the looming mystique of lost ages of glory and grace, then it's simply "comfort". If SF is simply about incorporating lots of techno-garble into a very tried and tested story, then it's simply "comfort". Either way, I'm not interested; and I don't think any "classics" of either fall into that category. Great stories, SF or Fantasy, come about when the special qualities of the genre bring us to terms with something special or illuminating about the human condition -- the only thing we really understand. How does technology's ability to transcend our human limitations change our lives? How do mere humans react when confronted with the epic proportions of fantasy's legends? It's these questions [successfully answered] that really provide us with good SF and fantasy; and curiously, they're the qualities of any good work of art. The pulp fiction of the middle of the century did a fantastic job -- realising that it took more than just an element of scientific credibility to produce stories worthy of our attention. The contemporary obsession with "accuracy" and "credulity" could be cutting off many budding SF-inclined minds, who don't realise that what they need to do is understand how science, real or imagined, relates to people; and not how warp drives or time machines really work. After all, what sufficiently advanced technology is distinguishable from magic? The giants of yesteryear understood the human condition. Perhaps once we move back towards an integration of science into our lives, we'll realise a renaissance in SF writing [and, probably, fantasy, too]. Perhaps in the passing of Mr. Van Vogt, we can take a minute to think about what makes the classics so valuable. Hopefully, that contemplation will bode well for those who follow him and remain. Larsal