riiiiight, and Mir was going to be saved by MirCorp... unless space exploration/exploitation starts getting some real commercial sense, and stops the sentimentalism, we're stuck to the ground except for the selected few.
sure i know people will start telling me how it's cheaper to use iridium satellites than to launch new ones, and to those i say: research! why do you think it didn't work in the first place?, they're technically flawed and too expensive to maintain. yes on a 5-8 year plan, it's chepaer to launch new equipment.
As the general manager of a medium sized ecommerce company in my country, i wouldn't accept anything BUT flex time. my reasons:
1- not everyone is productive during the same hours of the day, and noone is productive all day long. basically by giving employees the ability to choose their schedule, productivity tends to go up.
2- by basing work requirements on deliverables, instead of hours, individual tend to take more responsibility for their job thus resulting in much more creative solutions and higher quality results
3- we do not meet. if we need to comunicate, we chat, email, call or leave post-it notes on each other desks. once you have an automated system where you can assign and retreive tasks, the need to meet is reduced to a few occasious where you can usually just conference call the parties and discuss, wherever they are.
4- higher employee retention and overall satisfaction
there is a downside for flex time though, employees tend to work much more due to the fact that management usually assumes that flextime means you're ther 24/7.
I don't believe consciencenous is anything special. Its just the superposition of hundreds or thousands of neural networks all owrking together.
you know, i used to think that same thing, but lately i'm not so sure. the more i think about it, the more there's a limit to how things can just happen without intent. when you get down to the pre-big bang singularity, or the combinations of conditions required for inteligent life, you start wondering if the laws of physics are really everything. and after that you start wonderin where the laws of physics came from...
is being conscious really that simple or is it that it's too complicated for us to understand with the available information? if that's the case, then that explains why we try to oversimplify it...
I wasn't going to post, but god damn it makes me mad. Why oh why do slashdotters keep slamming 3d environment projects??? can't you see it??? i thought we were supposed to be the technically savvy type...
let me answer your post directly: 3d environments will do to you what windows did to you a few years ago (unless you're one of those guys that refuses to use a windowing system and stays in text mode), it will increase your productivity by giving you the ability to visualize your work better. whatever your work is. for example, if you're a programmer, then you like me probably have the same problems: i need more than just a few windows open and displayed at the same time. soemtimes i need at least 10 things open at the same time in order to feel that i'm really being productive. current windows systems (whatever your flavor) are limitted to the amount of data that can be presented at any given time. (usually 4-5 windows at a time) before you start swapping from window to window...with a 3d environment in a monitor you can improve some (you'll probably be able to see those 10 windows at the same time, but not much more before resolution/readability become an issue); but a 3d environment with some kind of headset where you can _look_ around would probably be enough for me.
same thing goes for most applications. accounting and finance (data cubes, huge financial reports, accounting books, etc.), progamming, engineering, graphics design, writting letters (you can have the rolodex, several reference documents, and the spreadsheet with the tables you're integrating all at the same time), the list goes on. actually i'm having a hard time thinking of an application that wouldn't benefit from a 3d environment.
the point is, if all you do is just run one progarm, then stick to a windowing system, but the minute you want to have more than 2-3 windows open and displayed at the same time (which we usually want to do but end up not doing it because it's awkward) you'd be much more productive using 3d.
as for navigation, i've said it before and i'll say it again, i can move in 3d very well playing quake and using truspace, 3dstudio max, whatever, and it's also very intuitive. i don't think navigation is an issue.
The way I see it, the EC system is great for one thing that outweights everything else: to make sure minorities are not excluded. Imagine a system of direct election, candidates would just address the issues of the mayority country wide and forget about minorities. But currently minorities have an impact in several important state presidential elections and can help win that states EC.
read the article linked to this story with the mathematical explanation. it's pretty good.
I live in Panama. we have a solid democracy and are very good at civil rights and all that. but the BSA actually storms into offices with judge orders and check computers, files, etc. they have penalized several high profile companies already with tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars (and we're talking offices of influential people or government officials as well as small companies)
we all know tha the main backer of BSA is microsoft (in the panama branch at least). So far they haven't broken any laws by doing what they do, they're just bullies at it....
IF you ask me, this could well be the killer app that would put linux and/or other opensource/free software OS' on every desktop. (you do realize we need a killer app for that right?)
Surely a lot of people will just say no! waste of cycles, waste of memory, waste of time!, but i couldn't disagree more. If i could have a 3d view of 6 different programming sessions with a real time representation of runtime results i would. it doesn't matter how much hardware i throw at my current system, i just can't do this today. same for designers, engineers, etc. this would mean a real productivity boost.
which brings me to my point... with the current pointer/icon/double-click/window interface, there isn't much to gain on the productivity side even if you throw in 5 years of moore's law. we're stuck. it's the same thing that happened when the GUI first came along, everyone said it was a waste of resources, but now that we have the hardware we're glad they worked on it nonetheless.
of course we need a good navigation system an efficient way to handle objects, but both exist today: i'm pretty efficient in moving around in quake and homeworld, and i can move objects in 3d pretty easily using truspace or Max...
actually i think we're late in doing this. the hardware to support a totally 3d desktop is here (GTS Ultra, 1GHz CPU, 512MB Ram would probably do the job). it's just a few years before similar hardware is standard configuration for most. If by then linux (or similar) are the only platform that will give you an intuitive 3d environment, lots of people would get it.
What would happen if we can store all the information of internet in a sugar cube, in 2010?
well that's easy, microsoft windows 2010 (released on 2011) would fill a few pounds worth of sugar...
on a more serious note, i wonder if the rate at which humanity generates information (regardless of it relevance) will grow exponantially at the same rate as the media we use to hold it. so far it seems they've been pretty much the same for a while, i've always felt the same way about a HD, it seems huge when you buy it, but you always fill it out...
i guess eventually storage media's capacity will grow that much faster, when will that be? opinions?
What?!?!?! you mean it crashes in three weeks? THREE weeks???? this has got to be a major breakthrough! I use win2000, and it's absolutely great, it can stay on and up for, like, four days and i was very impressed the first time i saw this, me coming from nt4 and all, but THREE weeks? i gotta get me one of those!...
That's ok, because Abode is just a cover company for the real Adobe with no assets, so if they loose the lawsuit macromidia can have that company...kinda like a decoy.
guys please do some double checking, at least on the headline...
Here's a solution to the RIAA problem (they ARE a pest):
Andover should create a site like sourceforge, but dedicated to independant artists, so that they can post their songs and mass distribute it that way. use slashcode to moderate the songs and voila.
I'm pretty sure there are other sites that do something similar, but with Andover's sites recognition and popularitiy, they might very well be near critical mass.
and where's the business plan? ah, share profits from banner advertising on the site with the artists based on a per download share. the more you songs are downloaded, bigger your share in profits.
I DONT'T know why digital television and HDTV has been so slow at been adopted, I understand it's been widely available in japan for a long time, so my opinion on this issue is as good as the next guy's.
that said, isn't it possible that maybe the fact that anti-piracy technology was not included is why it's taken forever for digital television and HDTV to be more available? I mean, if the powers that be (media) don't like it because it's a "risky scheme", they would just not support it enough and then it would not make sense to buy one...
After reading the interview and thinking a bit about what it would be like to play the sims online, for some reason i started thinking that there could be a real social value to this game.
I'm not a shrink, but wouldn't this kind of interaction help the rehabilitation of inmates or similar? I mean, put some computers in correctional centers, for example, and have the inmates socialize through somethink like simsonline, maybe that could be a safe way to learn some values? I know it sounds crazy and far fetched, but if you think about it, maybe it could help develop interest in being part of a community.
To me, the only way to prevent crackers from getting into some system and steal credit card numbers is to not store them in your system... I run an ecommerce site and every transaction made, once cleared with the bank, gets its credit card info deleted.
the advantages of storing users credit card numbers does not justify the risk. It's like a restaurant that keeps your credit card number so that next time you eat there you don't have to wait for the check...
sure there could be trojan horses that store credit card info as soon as it arrives to the server, but that seems to be less common.
Based on the fact that the UN is usually involved with more earthly affairs and hasn't shown a real interest in the development of space or related issues, and considering that there are other groups already searching for ET (SETI) and have been so far unsuccesful, I just don't understand why they would fund something like this..
The only logical conculssion so far for my conspiratory mind is that they know exactly what they'll be looking for...maybe they know more than we do about alien life???
Look, I'm panamanian. Spanish is my first language (it is Panamá, not Panama), but i just can't agree with this because i don't think it's practical at the moment. Take for example this web site we're building called galeriacentral.com. everyone knows automatically how to acces it when they hear an ad for it on the radio, but with the intl characters allowd, I would have to register galeriacentral.com, galeríacentral.com (correct form) and galerìacentral.com. and then someone would register galeríacentrál.com and i'd be screwed (cybersquattin is allowed in most parts of the world)...
my recomendation would be to leave it up to the countrlies TLD's. so if i want to register cualquiercosa.com.pa then ok, but the regular.com/net/org are already abused enough to leave more room for stuff like slashdog.org.
Cuando a un mensaje como este no le quiten puntos de moderacion solo por estar en espanol, sabremos que el ingles no es el idioma oficial de las nuevas tecnologias. Mientras tanto, es casi necesario saber ingles para poder estar al dia con el desarrollo tecnologico...
Let me tell you a story about life in Latin America.
I live in Panama, and I used to watch the local news back in the days when i was even more clueless. I also watched CNN a lot (the only half decent international news media we got here) Then the net came along (96 for me) and the whole thing changed. I now get 90% of my news from CNN.com, News.com, Slashdot and some very specialized web sites like tecsoc.org and spaceref. It's hard to get good local news when you live in these parts of the world, and most good international news sites are US based and they don't hide it, so you end up feeling like you're part of the US in some strange way, yet you aren't. I don't know how relevant this is, or how will it all end, but i can tell you that many many people, in many parts of the world, feel the same way.
To me, this means that if I use KDE instead of Gnome, and get to like it a lot, and get used to it after years of usage, and never care to use Gnome because despite the fact that Gnome is truly free, KDE is currently free and somewhat better for me, one day the KDE guys get real crazy and decide to charge for KDE then I'm screwed (i'm not even sure their license allows them to do this, but you get my point. I guess they could at least make me pay them royalties if I develop for KDE).
Both the Cube and PS2 have similar technical specs, making a declaration of one as king impossible. To me, it will al go down to which system has the best and easiest to work with development platform. Sure people always says "it's about the games stupid!", but a good deal of how good the games are depends on how good the development platform is, which is mainly why most developers are going crazy about the X-Box even if many gamefans are still skeptical.
I've heard PS2's development system is a nightmare, but t
...will develop, manufacture and supply to Nintendo a proprietary DVD disk drive for incorporation into the Cube. Note that a DVD disk drive does not guarantee that Cube will be able to play Hollywood DVD movies.
will it play independant films? or how about french movies? note to journalists: not all movies are hollywood movies...
First I thought of porn (like everyone else it seems). then i say myself feeling for the borders of a window in order to resize it and think it'd be kinda cool, but couldn't put my finger on real value.. then it hit me.
wouldn't this make a terrific tool for the disabled? just come up with a brailey(sp) like code and all a blind person would have to do is move the mouse over the lines of text and he's reading it... the mouse would have to be very sensitive, but even if it isn't, with the right setup, heck it could feedback morse code back to the reader!.. just a thought
Slashdot Mirror
riiiiight, and Mir was going to be saved by MirCorp... unless space exploration/exploitation starts getting some real commercial sense, and stops the sentimentalism, we're stuck to the ground except for the selected few.
sure i know people will start telling me how it's cheaper to use iridium satellites than to launch new ones, and to those i say: research! why do you think it didn't work in the first place?, they're technically flawed and too expensive to maintain. yes on a 5-8 year plan, it's chepaer to launch new equipment.
As the general manager of a medium sized ecommerce company in my country, i wouldn't accept anything BUT flex time. my reasons:
1- not everyone is productive during the same hours of the day, and noone is productive all day long. basically by giving employees the ability to choose their schedule, productivity tends to go up.
2- by basing work requirements on deliverables, instead of hours, individual tend to take more responsibility for their job thus resulting in much more creative solutions and higher quality results
3- we do not meet. if we need to comunicate, we chat, email, call or leave post-it notes on each other desks. once you have an automated system where you can assign and retreive tasks, the need to meet is reduced to a few occasious where you can usually just conference call the parties and discuss, wherever they are.
4- higher employee retention and overall satisfaction
there is a downside for flex time though, employees tend to work much more due to the fact that management usually assumes that flextime means you're ther 24/7.
I don't believe consciencenous is anything special. Its just the superposition of hundreds or thousands of neural networks all owrking together.
you know, i used to think that same thing, but lately i'm not so sure. the more i think about it, the more there's a limit to how things can just happen without intent. when you get down to the pre-big bang singularity, or the combinations of conditions required for inteligent life, you start wondering if the laws of physics are really everything. and after that you start wonderin where the laws of physics came from...
is being conscious really that simple or is it that it's too complicated for us to understand with the available information? if that's the case, then that explains why we try to oversimplify it...
OH now i get it!! i thought the .kids WAS for porn...
I wasn't going to post, but god damn it makes me mad. Why oh why do slashdotters keep slamming 3d environment projects??? can't you see it??? i thought we were supposed to be the technically savvy type...
let me answer your post directly: 3d environments will do to you what windows did to you a few years ago (unless you're one of those guys that refuses to use a windowing system and stays in text mode), it will increase your productivity by giving you the ability to visualize your work better. whatever your work is. for example, if you're a programmer, then you like me probably have the same problems: i need more than just a few windows open and displayed at the same time. soemtimes i need at least 10 things open at the same time in order to feel that i'm really being productive. current windows systems (whatever your flavor) are limitted to the amount of data that can be presented at any given time. (usually 4-5 windows at a time) before you start swapping from window to window...with a 3d environment in a monitor you can improve some (you'll probably be able to see those 10 windows at the same time, but not much more before resolution/readability become an issue); but a 3d environment with some kind of headset where you can _look_ around would probably be enough for me.
same thing goes for most applications. accounting and finance (data cubes, huge financial reports, accounting books, etc.), progamming, engineering, graphics design, writting letters (you can have the rolodex, several reference documents, and the spreadsheet with the tables you're integrating all at the same time), the list goes on. actually i'm having a hard time thinking of an application that wouldn't benefit from a 3d environment.
the point is, if all you do is just run one progarm, then stick to a windowing system, but the minute you want to have more than 2-3 windows open and displayed at the same time (which we usually want to do but end up not doing it because it's awkward) you'd be much more productive using 3d.
as for navigation, i've said it before and i'll say it again, i can move in 3d very well playing quake and using truspace, 3dstudio max, whatever, and it's also very intuitive. i don't think navigation is an issue.
The way I see it, the EC system is great for one thing that outweights everything else: to make sure minorities are not excluded. Imagine a system of direct election, candidates would just address the issues of the mayority country wide and forget about minorities. But currently minorities have an impact in several important state presidential elections and can help win that states EC.
read the article linked to this story with the mathematical explanation. it's pretty good.
I live in Panama. we have a solid democracy and are very good at civil rights and all that. but the BSA actually storms into offices with judge orders and check computers, files, etc. they have penalized several high profile companies already with tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars (and we're talking offices of influential people or government officials as well as small companies)
we all know tha the main backer of BSA is microsoft (in the panama branch at least). So far they haven't broken any laws by doing what they do, they're just bullies at it....
oh, and they usually do it on friday at 4:50PM...
IF you ask me, this could well be the killer app that would put linux and/or other opensource/free software OS' on every desktop. (you do realize we need a killer app for that right?)
Surely a lot of people will just say no! waste of cycles, waste of memory, waste of time!, but i couldn't disagree more. If i could have a 3d view of 6 different programming sessions with a real time representation of runtime results i would. it doesn't matter how much hardware i throw at my current system, i just can't do this today. same for designers, engineers, etc. this would mean a real productivity boost.
which brings me to my point... with the current pointer/icon/double-click/window interface, there isn't much to gain on the productivity side even if you throw in 5 years of moore's law. we're stuck. it's the same thing that happened when the GUI first came along, everyone said it was a waste of resources, but now that we have the hardware we're glad they worked on it nonetheless.
of course we need a good navigation system an efficient way to handle objects, but both exist today: i'm pretty efficient in moving around in quake and homeworld, and i can move objects in 3d pretty easily using truspace or Max...
actually i think we're late in doing this. the hardware to support a totally 3d desktop is here (GTS Ultra, 1GHz CPU, 512MB Ram would probably do the job). it's just a few years before similar hardware is standard configuration for most. If by then linux (or similar) are the only platform that will give you an intuitive 3d environment, lots of people would get it.
What would happen if we can store all the information of internet in a sugar cube, in 2010?
well that's easy, microsoft windows 2010 (released on 2011) would fill a few pounds worth of sugar...
on a more serious note, i wonder if the rate at which humanity generates information (regardless of it relevance) will grow exponantially at the same rate as the media we use to hold it. so far it seems they've been pretty much the same for a while, i've always felt the same way about a HD, it seems huge when you buy it, but you always fill it out...
i guess eventually storage media's capacity will grow that much faster, when will that be? opinions?
What?!?!?! you mean it crashes in three weeks? THREE weeks???? this has got to be a major breakthrough! I use win2000, and it's absolutely great, it can stay on and up for, like, four days and i was very impressed the first time i saw this, me coming from nt4 and all, but THREE weeks? i gotta get me one of those!...
i'd heard that linux was good but damn!.
That's ok, because Abode is just a cover company for the real Adobe with no assets, so if they loose the lawsuit macromidia can have that company...kinda like a decoy.
guys please do some double checking, at least on the headline...
Here's a solution to the RIAA problem (they ARE a pest):
Andover should create a site like sourceforge, but dedicated to independant artists, so that they can post their songs and mass distribute it that way. use slashcode to moderate the songs and voila.
I'm pretty sure there are other sites that do something similar, but with Andover's sites recognition and popularitiy, they might very well be near critical mass.
and where's the business plan? ah, share profits from banner advertising on the site with the artists based on a per download share. the more you songs are downloaded, bigger your share in profits.
think about the possibilities!
I DONT'T know why digital television and HDTV has been so slow at been adopted, I understand it's been widely available in japan for a long time, so my opinion on this issue is as good as the next guy's.
that said, isn't it possible that maybe the fact that anti-piracy technology was not included is why it's taken forever for digital television and HDTV to be more available? I mean, if the powers that be (media) don't like it because it's a "risky scheme", they would just not support it enough and then it would not make sense to buy one...
just a thought.
After reading the interview and thinking a bit about what it would be like to play the sims online, for some reason i started thinking that there could be a real social value to this game.
I'm not a shrink, but wouldn't this kind of interaction help the rehabilitation of inmates or similar? I mean, put some computers in correctional centers, for example, and have the inmates socialize through somethink like simsonline, maybe that could be a safe way to learn some values? I know it sounds crazy and far fetched, but if you think about it, maybe it could help develop interest in being part of a community.
Well, it seems pretty obvious to me, VA Linux/Andover will buy Kuro5hin.
To me, the only way to prevent crackers from getting into some system and steal credit card numbers is to not store them in your system... I run an ecommerce site and every transaction made, once cleared with the bank, gets its credit card info deleted.
the advantages of storing users credit card numbers does not justify the risk. It's like a restaurant that keeps your credit card number so that next time you eat there you don't have to wait for the check...
sure there could be trojan horses that store credit card info as soon as it arrives to the server, but that seems to be less common.
Based on the fact that the UN is usually involved with more earthly affairs and hasn't shown a real interest in the development of space or related issues, and considering that there are other groups already searching for ET (SETI) and have been so far unsuccesful, I just don't understand why they would fund something like this..
The only logical conculssion so far for my conspiratory mind is that they know exactly what they'll be looking for...maybe they know more than we do about alien life???
Look, I'm panamanian. Spanish is my first language (it is Panamá, not Panama), but i just can't agree with this because i don't think it's practical at the moment. Take for example this web site we're building called galeriacentral.com. everyone knows automatically how to acces it when they hear an ad for it on the radio, but with the intl characters allowd, I would have to register galeriacentral.com, galeríacentral.com (correct form) and galerìacentral.com. and then someone would register galeríacentrál.com and i'd be screwed (cybersquattin is allowed in most parts of the world)...
.com/net/org are already abused enough to leave more room for stuff like slashdog.org.
my recomendation would be to leave it up to the countrlies TLD's. so if i want to register cualquiercosa.com.pa then ok, but the regular
Cuando a un mensaje como este no le quiten puntos de moderacion solo por estar en espanol, sabremos que el ingles no es el idioma oficial de las nuevas tecnologias. Mientras tanto, es casi necesario saber ingles para poder estar al dia con el desarrollo tecnologico...
Oviously, Moderator, you didn't get it. I made a mistake in my original post and this message was to correct that mistake...
Let me tell you a story about life in Latin America.
I live in Panama, and I used to watch the local news back in the days when i was even more clueless. I also watched CNN a lot (the only half decent international news media we got here) Then the net came along (96 for me) and the whole thing changed. I now get 90% of my news from CNN.com, News.com, Slashdot and some very specialized web sites like tecsoc.org and spaceref. It's hard to get good local news when you live in these parts of the world, and most good international news sites are US based and they don't hide it, so you end up feeling like you're part of the US in some strange way, yet you aren't. I don't know how relevant this is, or how will it all end, but i can tell you that many many people, in many parts of the world, feel the same way.
just my $0.02
Disclaimer: this is not flamebait
To me, this means that if I use KDE instead of Gnome, and get to like it a lot, and get used to it after years of usage, and never care to use Gnome because despite the fact that Gnome is truly free, KDE is currently free and somewhat better for me, one day the KDE guys get real crazy and decide to charge for KDE then I'm screwed (i'm not even sure their license allows them to do this, but you get my point. I guess they could at least make me pay them royalties if I develop for KDE).
Both the Cube and PS2 have similar technical specs, making a declaration of one as king impossible. To me, it will al go down to which system has the best and easiest to work with development platform. Sure people always says "it's about the games stupid!", but a good deal of how good the games are depends on how good the development platform is, which is mainly why most developers are going crazy about the X-Box even if many gamefans are still skeptical.
I've heard PS2's development system is a nightmare, but t
...will develop, manufacture and supply to Nintendo a proprietary DVD disk drive for incorporation into the Cube. Note that a DVD disk drive does not guarantee that Cube will be able to play Hollywood DVD movies.
will it play independant films? or how about french movies? note to journalists: not all movies are hollywood movies...
First I thought of porn (like everyone else it seems). then i say myself feeling for the borders of a window in order to resize it and think it'd be kinda cool, but couldn't put my finger on real value.. then it hit me.
wouldn't this make a terrific tool for the disabled? just come up with a brailey(sp) like code and all a blind person would have to do is move the mouse over the lines of text and he's reading it... the mouse would have to be very sensitive, but even if it isn't, with the right setup, heck it could feedback morse code back to the reader!.. just a thought