Now 24, he has landed his dream job... "I don't consider this work. Smiling and having fun with video games is just the best," he said. "How can you go wrong?"
So, picture a chubby whale of a kid figuring the same thing about working for McDonalds on account of how much he likes burgers.
An employee telling a corporation how much he loves his job is a bit like an altar boy telling a Catholic priest how much he likes to be spanked.
Otherwide, anyone with a DVD-RW could make a copy from a local Blockbuster (or download an ISO off the net but blockbuster is more convinient).
I'll never understand the American fascination with Blockbuster! How is it more convenient to drive down to Blockbuster, pay $5 or whatever it is, drive back home, copy the disc, drive back to Blockbuster to return the movie and then, at long last, drive back home? If you have a decent connection, why not just type in a name into Kazaa Lite and press enter? It's not like you can't do other things during the few hours the download takes.
And all this driving around! If you're going to pirate movies, at least do it in an ecologically sound way.
Hardly. If widespread modding, driven by a quite likely boom in Divx Movie piracy, becomes a reality, Xbox Linux could, no doubt much to the horror of "real" Linux folk, become by far the most popular form of consumer/home Linux.
That's a pretty tall order, but possible. It might have been a good entry for the Google programming contest. Also, one could use Google's API to hack something like this.
I can't help but feel that the programming contest was just a way for Google to get some coding done on the cheap; you can be sure that the Google engineers have an excellent sense of what can and should be done. For something like this, an enhancement of results by specifically drawing from the collective IQs of forums, Google should put some serious inhouse investment into action.
The difficult part would be writing modules to deal with the plethora of rating systems on different sites. Advogato, kuro5hin,/. & lots of other sites each have their own system.
Actually, there's an idea: Google should weigh in behind one of the open source CMS/forum projects, preferably PostNuke, and contribute programmer-hours to help evolve it into a eminently searchable sysytem. I honestly believe that, once they mature, Content Management Systems like PostNuke are going to play a leading role in the future of the 'Net; that's Google's future too, so, they should get onboard in a major way now.
Since it's legal to install cameras in public places, you could potentially be monitored almost anywhere. Hmm, this reminds me of a certain novel by George Orwell (not the one with the pigs.)
Yeah, well, something tells me there's going to be plenty of pigs involved with this technology.
daypop is another good blog scourer, with searching functionality too.
Interiot, that is such a useful site, thanks. Used together, Daypop and the other site you mentioned, Blogdex, are an excellent introduction to the whole phenomenon of blogging.
When mainstream journalists have picked up stories that first appeared on/. or other independent sites they rarely, if ever, attribute where they got the lead. I'm not saying they plagiarize, just that they get story ideas from/. and elsewhere and do their own research into the story.
I guess/. is a pretty big rock in the memepool.
If you do a Google search with your/. handle, it comes up with some of your older comments. So Google does index/. but they just rank too low to see if you use overly general wording in your search.
Fascinating, it never occured to me that my spur-the-moment bullshit here was actually being indexed somewhere!
What would be interesting, though, would be some sort of feature within Google that stored and presented comments from/. and other forums, taking into consideration how that particular comment was peer-ranked within it's forum. For instance, a highly ranked/. comment on a given subject, particularly the ones deemed "informative", tend to be a good way of finding links to a bunch of relevant resources all in one go. Perhaps Google could create an optional side panel that would throw up such comments, harvested from established forums and the Google Groups archive.
Anyway, thanks for pointing out how Google does currently index/.
One of Slashdot's downsides compared to blogs is that it's really pretty slow. Usually by the time one of the editors makes the decision to post a story to the front page, the story is several days old.
Actually, they can be pretty fast. I've seen one of my submissions posted after just ten minutes. Twelve hours is about the longest delay I've personally experienced between submission and actual posting. At the moment I have a submission pending about Greg Allan's tragic death, it'll be interesting to see how long that takes although there might be some sort of personal politics I don't know about that stops it getting posted at all. Hopefully, however, they will post it soon enough for people to send their condolences in time for the funeral. Christ, it's a pretty bleak day.
Google ratings are only a side benefit of blogs. Many actual humans actually read them.
Yes, but I would argue that a far higher number of people read Slashdot than the the technically-oriented blogs. Having said that, the kind of people who spend enough time online to consistently follow blogs, to have developed the blog habit, are sufficiently ahead of the curve to represent a higher "quality" of reader, one reason why Google rates links that spread via blogs so highly.
One thing that I wonder about is Slashdot's searchability, how it's rated by Google and other search engines. I've never once been directed to a Slashdot thread as a result of a search which is a pity because there's such excellent information and insight here at times. I wonder if Slashdot have taken steps to improve the searchability/URL indexing of Slashcode-based sites.
BTW, thanks for pointing out Blogdex, looks very interesting; I'm one of those who haven't yet developed the blog habit.
Actually, I saw a far more hubaloo on the blogs than I did on Slashdot. And I'd hazard a guess that there were many more links (or readers, if you lean that way) to the original BoingBoing post than there were to the Slashdot story.
Yeah, but I'd hazzard a guess that/. probably represent the greatest single block of unique readers and possibly even constituted a straightforward majority of complainants to the NPR. There's also the fact that many of the Blog writers might have picked up on the story here.
As far as I can make out, Slashdot can direct a tremendous mass of attention, whereas Blogs are better at cumulatively building up a site's Google-rating.
For fast reactions like this one against NPR's linking policy, Slashdot is probably a more effective instrument, largely because of the time it takes Google-ratings to take effect.
Steak vs. goop? Hmm... I think I'll live in fantasy world, thanks.
If life was just a question of consumption, of watching the pretty colors go by, sure.
But perhaps it's about leaving your mark on the world, the real world. Cows might be happy but, essentially, we've redirected them from their destiny to serve our ends.
I'm not saying that there is a specific point to life but, getting very minimalistic about it, you could say that our "purpose" is to pass on our genes in the ongoing dance of evolution. If we are not at least partially in control of our destinies we no longer get to participate in that, the continuance of our lines.
It's not so much a question of Steak vs. Goop but what you do with your goop.
It wouldn't be "shit to actually live in" - it'd be the same as our world.
No.
It wouldn't be "the same", it would be pretending to be the same as our world.
It's like when you've got a friend who's living in a complete fantasy world: he might be perfectly happy right now but, as his friend, you have a duty to at least try making him see reality because if he realizes it for himself years later, he'll bitterly regret pissing away valuable years of his life working for and believing in something that actually wasn't at all what he thought it was.
It's kinda scary that the reporter is, in a sense, selling us on this aspect of the ever more frightening reach of surveillance into our lives by tying it in so heavily with one of the coolest films of recent years, The Matrix.
While the film itself was pretty damn cool, we should bear in mind that the world it depicted would be pretty damn shit to actually live in.
Obviously, eye-scans will help to identify one-eyed, ex-Taleban Head of State and Bin Laden buddy Mullah Mohammed Omar, and prevent him boarding Northwest Airlines flights.
I'd like a tablet pc, or that groovy Wacom thing, but then again, I like to draw. For real work I still use a keyboard.
I can't find the link but quite recently, within the last month or so, some manufacturer was touting a hybrid laptop/tablet design in which an outer casing held both a screen and keyboard in conventional laptop style. Their innovation was to place the brains of the computer behind the screen rather than under the keyboard, allowing the user to detach the screen and use it as a tablet. If I remember rightly, communication between the keyboard and the docked screen was via Bluetooth, allowing full laptop functionality.
I would suggest that this laptop/tablet format is going to predominate. I just want them to throw in the extra touch screen sensitivity that will allow the tablet to be used as professional-level graphics tablet.
Slashdot Mirror
From the CNN article:
So, picture a chubby whale of a kid figuring the same thing about working for McDonalds on account of how much he likes burgers.
An employee telling a corporation how much he loves his job is a bit like an altar boy telling a Catholic priest how much he likes to be spanked.
And all this driving around! If you're going to pirate movies, at least do it in an ecologically sound way.
From the actual Xbox-Linux.SourceForge.net Press Release:
But please don't be hard on yourself about this, I actually find it quite a strain to be right all the time.Hardly. If widespread modding, driven by a quite likely boom in Divx Movie piracy, becomes a reality, Xbox Linux could, no doubt much to the horror of "real" Linux folk, become by far the most popular form of consumer/home Linux.
Sometimes success can arrive in unexpected forms.
So, do they win the $200, 000 Award?
Just don't turn up late for class, these guys are packing mini-nukes and chainsaw weaponry.
I actually have quite a good profile but only if you catch me from my right-hand side.
What would be interesting, though, would be some sort of feature within Google that stored and presented comments from /. and other forums, taking into consideration how that particular comment was peer-ranked within it's forum. For instance, a highly ranked /. comment on a given subject, particularly the ones deemed "informative", tend to be a good way of finding links to a bunch of relevant resources all in one go. Perhaps Google could create an optional side panel that would throw up such comments, harvested from established forums and the Google Groups archive.
Anyway, thanks for pointing out how Google does currently index /.
One thing that I wonder about is Slashdot's searchability, how it's rated by Google and other search engines. I've never once been directed to a Slashdot thread as a result of a search which is a pity because there's such excellent information and insight here at times. I wonder if Slashdot have taken steps to improve the searchability/URL indexing of Slashcode-based sites.
BTW, thanks for pointing out Blogdex, looks very interesting; I'm one of those who haven't yet developed the blog habit.
And getting cooler.
As far as I can make out, Slashdot can direct a tremendous mass of attention, whereas Blogs are better at cumulatively building up a site's Google-rating.
For fast reactions like this one against NPR's linking policy, Slashdot is probably a more effective instrument, largely because of the time it takes Google-ratings to take effect.
But perhaps it's about leaving your mark on the world, the real world. Cows might be happy but, essentially, we've redirected them from their destiny to serve our ends.
I'm not saying that there is a specific point to life but, getting very minimalistic about it, you could say that our "purpose" is to pass on our genes in the ongoing dance of evolution. If we are not at least partially in control of our destinies we no longer get to participate in that, the continuance of our lines.
It's not so much a question of Steak vs. Goop but what you do with your goop.
It wouldn't be "the same", it would be pretending to be the same as our world.
It's like when you've got a friend who's living in a complete fantasy world: he might be perfectly happy right now but, as his friend, you have a duty to at least try making him see reality because if he realizes it for himself years later, he'll bitterly regret pissing away valuable years of his life working for and believing in something that actually wasn't at all what he thought it was.
One of my friends used to work for Microsoft.
I'm a normal, red-blooded male but when I look at that it just makes me ... uh... uh... huuuuu!!
Oh, crap.
It's kinda scary that the reporter is, in a sense, selling us on this aspect of the ever more frightening reach of surveillance into our lives by tying it in so heavily with one of the coolest films of recent years, The Matrix.
While the film itself was pretty damn cool, we should bear in mind that the world it depicted would be pretty damn shit to actually live in.
Obviously, eye-scans will help to identify one-eyed, ex-Taleban Head of State and Bin Laden buddy Mullah Mohammed Omar, and prevent him boarding Northwest Airlines flights.
There's also the fact that Transmeta seem to be making progress in this area, lending the whole tablet concept Torvalds-powered street cred.
I would suggest that this laptop/tablet format is going to predominate. I just want them to throw in the extra touch screen sensitivity that will allow the tablet to be used as professional-level graphics tablet.