Unless, say, an Apple IIe in the wild mated and birthed a mutant Apple IIgs, which due to advantages in the environment lived to mate more and more with other machines, then thats not evolution.
It's not biological evolution. Then again, that ought to be pretty obvious, since it's not biology.
I think it is safe to say that the Apple IIg had advantages in the business, economic, and academic environments, which enabled it to survive (for a time) - while the Apple IIe went extinct (at least, extinct in the sense that no more are being made).
Sure, you can be a purist and say this has nothing to do with evolution, but this discussion is *all about* drawing analogies between biology and computing.
So what exactly were they going for, by targeting my "voter demographic"?
Well, you know how the hispanic swing vote is proving crucial in National politics? It turns out that in State politics, they're focusing more on capturing the vote of celebrities whose poop tastes like candy".
If play is the objective, then anything that gives you the jollies is fine. Just don't impose it on others.
Pretty much says it all, doesn't it? And it just seems like such common sense. If your home PC is primarily used for playing Starcraft, go ahead and plunk a Starcraft theme on it. It would be less appropriate to use a Starcraft theme on, say, the computer your company uses to process accounts receivable.
Really, do we need an "in-depth exploration of the human psychology" to get this common-sense point across? Sure, if you get too used to the tacky theme on your home PC, you run the risk of someday thinking, "Huh.. where the hell is this shortcut by default, anyway?" And, yes, that would technically make you less productive. But, let me tell you, more tragic things have happened. I don't think skins are going to go away because of the danger of temporary moments of confusion.
I don't DO any of those things, and neither do most of my friends. Put yourself in an average agorophobic person's shoes, and think about what you just said:
Shopping: 20 minutes of driving to the mall via car == 6 hours walking.
Why would your average person drive all the way to the mall when there are plenty of convenience stores within walking distance, and you can pretty much order anything by catalog anyway? You can't underestimate the importance of exercise, something which driving will never be able to replicate.
Mail use: 15 minutes to drive to the post office, 4 hours walking.
Why would I ever go to the post office? If something gets shipped to me and I miss it, I'll just do a chargeback on my credit card and let FedX try to deliver it again.
Research: 10 minutes to drive to the library == 3 hours to walk there, 4 hours to walk back with an armload of books.
Once again, I would probably just make up facts like every other respectable college student before I tried to drive to a library. I mean, who does their research in a library? And who needs to do research anyway? Everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten.
Please realize that people like you who depend on your cars for everything are a minority. There is a market for big bloated SUVs in your demographic, sure, but my point was that this demographic wants to jog around until their feet bleed more than GM thinks, and it is market forces that killed the Pinto.
I believe I know exactly how M$ would respond to such a DoJ action...
IN A.D. 2006
WAR WAS BEGINNING.
GATES: What happen?
BALLMER: Somebody set up us the fixed OS pricing!
BALLMER: We get signal!
GATES: What!!
BALLMER: Blue screen turn on.
GATES: It's you!!
D.O.J.: HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN !!
D.O.J.: All your fixed OS prices are belong to us.
D.O.J.: You are on the way to destruction.
GATES: What you say !!
D.O.J.: You have no chance to profit make your time.
D.O.J.: HA HA HA HA...
BALLMER: Bill...
GATES: Take off every 'lawyer'!
GATES: You know what you doing.
GATES: Move 'laywer'!
GATES: Subvert justice.
So you're trying to tell me that, in a vacuum, a skier can move as fast downhill with his center of gravity three feet above the snow as with it 1.5 feet above the snow?
It just doesn't work that way. A disc and a sphere of the same weight will simply not roll downhill at the same speed, even in a vacuum. Besides, the very act of lowering one's center of gravity 1.5 feet would have a definite impact on momentum.
Now that I look back, tucking really wouldn't matter. There's no wind resistence to worry about when you aren't actually moving.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think tucking is entirely about aerodynamics.
You know how figure skaters pull their arms into their bodies to increase their rotational momentum? Or how you expand your body (read: pump your legs) in order to swing on a swingset?
My guess is that tucking has as much, if not more, to do with momentum than aerodynamics. The physics of a tight, compact body with a low center of gravity differ in more ways to a big upright high-centered body in more ways than drag.
Of course, there are definite advantages to putting sensors on someone's body.
If I fall down the stairs, what's going to happen to, say, my right arm, wrist, and hand? Sure, if I'm unconscious, that will all be dictated by physics - I'll flop around like a rag doll and you can nicely see all the reactive forces at work.
But if I'm conscious, how is the programming going to emulate my increasingly desperate attempts to keep from breaking my neck?
It seems to me that a better effect would be captured simply by hooking up motion sensors to a stuntman, telling him to take a five-minute break, and then throwing him down the stairs when he wasn't looking. The "mechanics" realm of physics has relatively simple rules; panic does not. So far, we don't have any formulas for the interaction of perceived danger, temperament, adrenaline, and what have you.
Havent the video game makers created a program that creates animation based almost solely on physics yet?;)
Sure, there's nothing I want more than to see a film where someone fires a gun at Keanu Reeves, and then he turns into a "Grand Theft Auto 3" style character made of polygons and falls to the ground with blood squirting out of his aorta.
It should be obvious that if everybody followed your logic, nobody would be able to use eBay. It would just be a bunch of people yelling "No, YOU first, asshole!"
Yes, any empire that gets larger than its carrying capacity will eventually fail. Certainly. An empire encompassing the Mediterranean, most of Europe, and some of Asia and Africa is impractical when it takes three months to get a message from one corner to the other, let alone a defense force.
The carrying capacity of a physical government, needless to say, has grown. The carrying capacity of a media corporation is likely much larger than the earth. Your argument is optimistic, but I can't say I buy it. AOL Time Warner might crumble if it tried to overextend itself to, say, Alpha Centauri, but something tells me it'll do just fine capturing, say, 99% of the market share.
Wouldn't it be pretty easy to rig some kind of machine (or beowulf cluster) to keep downloading your own song, over and over? It couldn't cost 23 cents in bandwidth and hardware to download one MP3, could it? How many of your own 2.5 meg MP3s could you reasonably download in a month over a T1 that was costing you $450?
Non-commercial private sharing poses scarce threat to copyright holders if the would JUST MEET DEMAND.
This is way too optimistic.
I'll be honest. I have a lousy job. I don't make very much money. There's a temp agency taking $4 an hour from me just for finding this lousy job for me. I am absolutely not going to pay for music (or software, or movies) unless I absolutely, absolutely have to.
I believe that there are a lot of people like me. Those of you here on Slashdot who are saying that people are willing to buy all their CDs from Tower if they were only $6 are, I'm convinced, a vocal (and affluent) minority. $6 is still too much to spend on a CD when you're searching for loose dimes to pay the rest of your DSL bill.
How many productive jobs are there really left in the U.S.?
In my mind, unless you're involved in manufacturing, mining, agriculture, or original research, you're unproductive.
I've worked as a legal secretary, a slot machine repairman, an air filter salesman, a record store clerk, and a beta tester for a bankrupt.com. I am fully aware that at no point in my entire career to date have I produced even one thing of value. Something like 95% of our economy is just people shoving money around.
I have to say, I'd feel a lot better if I had put out a nice album that people could enjoy.
Come on, man. Having sex with a girl is something almost every guy does, dozens of times over his lifetime. It's kind of like, I don't know, getting drunk, or eating a really tasty manicotti - fun! pleasurable! but mundane.
Now listening to the theme to Star Wars emanating from your girlfriend's nether region with the help of a wonderful piece of technology you've ingeniously turned into a speaker using only your amazing dexterity and skill - that's something almost no one ever gets to experience in an entire lifetime. I'm not even sure it could be done. Maybe with a lifetime of meditation and dedication to Zen?
Unless you live in a major city, you probably can choose between no more than two methods of accessing the internet. Here in southwest Reno, there simply is no cable, and no service for getting satelite feed into your home; it's DSL or dial-up. (Or, I suppose, you could pay to have a T1 run into your home like a couple guys I know.)
Monopolies on a regional scale are no worse than monopolies on a global scale. Rockefeller got his start with regional monopolies; even though the price of gas may have been a full 50 cents cheaper 40 miles away, nobody was going to drive 40 miles to fill up their tank.
Besides, isn't this like saying that it's okay for ABC to control every channel on TV, because, hell, there's still movies and radio, right?
Okay, this seems like an appropriate place to post my bewildered question:)
Is this really for real? I for one have had an opportunity to use a vibrator, and while I did notice that the pitch changed depending on how much resistance was applied to.. well, while I could change the pitch, I can't imagine that I would ever get a chord. Ever. Or emulate a french horn or a 120-piece orchestra.
So how the hell is he getting "Star Wars" out of those things? Is it really possible that vibrator, used by the most skillful hands imaginable, could be made to play "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" during foreplay, funny robot voices and all?
Three pitches, I could easily buy - some kind of cheap MIDI substitute. Human voice? Someone has to explain this better. If my girlfriend's vibrator starts talking to me, I'm ending it. Well - I guess that would depend on what it said.
Kathleen's got no idea what she's gotten herself into. Within the next few months, that picture's probably going to be viewed by horny teen geeks as often as the Rolling Stone cover of Britney Spears.
I think one of the reasons that open source works so well is that people *can* make money under most licenses.
Really, how many venture capitalists would even *glance* at Linux if the GPL included a provision saying "Don't even think about redistributing this code in some hardware you're trying to sell. This is educational stuff only."
Remember: something can't exactly be considered free (as in speech) if it tells you exactly how you're required to use it. From a law-abiding corporation's perspective, what's the difference between something you can't use and something you're not allowed to use?
Dude... the point here is that they've open-sourced the software.
Though the *company* may be unable to continue its anonymizing service in the wake of Sep. 11th, the people involved understood that their ideal could be fully realized simply by dumping the code on whoever wants to maintain it.
They may not make a pile of money this way, but, hey, did anyone really expect that this idea would rake in the cash in the first place? Anyone trying something like this must have some ulterior motive (see Neal Stevenson's Avi for a fictional counterpart).
Not flamebait. I'm just curious what the financials are? How much is an eBook, and how much is a suitably equipped Palm? Where do they meet, in terms of number of books, where you recoup your investment on the Palm?
My guess is that unless you read a book a week for twenty years, you'll never recoup your monetary investment on the Palm. However, there are some "hidden savings" and "extras" that might make it worth the price.
For example, if you're going on a plane trip, and only bringing one carry-on bag, and you want three different books to read (or refer to), it can be a real hassle to stuff them between your toothbrush and your underwear, and then try to fish them out mid-flight.
Also, although some people use bookcases as a staple of decorating, they do take up a lot of storage space, and much of the value of a residence is calculated based on its square footage. No bookcases might mean the ability to have a pool table.
Then, of course, there's the time and gas mileage involved in driving to bookstores and picking up books. Sure, this seems inconsequential, but it's the thing that makes people buy books in the first place - two trips to the library for every couple of books they read just doesn't make up for the time savings of owning your own book that you don't have to return.
Finally, and most important - your eight year old neice will never, ever squash a nasty booger between pages 182 and 183 of an eBook.
The primary argument against eBooks, really, isn't so much cost as the old truism "people don't like to read off a computer screen." Well, that's probably going to be true of nearly everybody born before 1970, but for my part, I'm sure I've read five times the amount of text on Slashdot alone that I've read in paper form over the last two or three years.
Eva starts well, then falls a little (some say a lot), and the end is anybody's guess (pick Your ending - I'm not sure which I like best).
I have to strongly, strongly disagree with you here. Eva starts strong, gets a little weak around eposides 9-12 (the introduction of Asuka with that silly "syncronized dance" episode), and then just takes off and becomes phenomenal. The first ending is a little too abrupt for my taste, but the End of Eva movies have scenes in them with as much emotional impact of any great tragedy (the death of Dr. Akagi, in my opinion, was one of the best-written tragic moments in history - Shakespeare has nothing on Anno here). To sum up, Evangelion is a masterpiece - Cowboy Bebop is, well, fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless, say, an Apple IIe in the wild mated and birthed a mutant Apple IIgs, which due to advantages in the environment lived to mate more and more with other machines, then thats not evolution.
It's not biological evolution. Then again, that ought to be pretty obvious, since it's not biology.
I think it is safe to say that the Apple IIg had advantages in the business, economic, and academic environments, which enabled it to survive (for a time) - while the Apple IIe went extinct (at least, extinct in the sense that no more are being made).
Sure, you can be a purist and say this has nothing to do with evolution, but this discussion is *all about* drawing analogies between biology and computing.
So what exactly were they going for, by targeting my "voter demographic"?
Well, you know how the hispanic swing vote is proving crucial in National politics? It turns out that in State politics, they're focusing more on capturing the vote of celebrities whose poop tastes like candy".
Who would have thought?
From the article...
If play is the objective, then anything that gives you the jollies is fine. Just don't impose it on others.
Pretty much says it all, doesn't it? And it just seems like such common sense. If your home PC is primarily used for playing Starcraft, go ahead and plunk a Starcraft theme on it. It would be less appropriate to use a Starcraft theme on, say, the computer your company uses to process accounts receivable.
Really, do we need an "in-depth exploration of the human psychology" to get this common-sense point across? Sure, if you get too used to the tacky theme on your home PC, you run the risk of someday thinking, "Huh.. where the hell is this shortcut by default, anyway?" And, yes, that would technically make you less productive. But, let me tell you, more tragic things have happened. I don't think skins are going to go away because of the danger of temporary moments of confusion.
I don't need a car!
I don't DO any of those things, and neither do most of my friends. Put yourself in an average agorophobic person's shoes, and think about what you just said:
Shopping: 20 minutes of driving to the mall via car == 6 hours walking.
Why would your average person drive all the way to the mall when there are plenty of convenience stores within walking distance, and you can pretty much order anything by catalog anyway? You can't underestimate the importance of exercise, something which driving will never be able to replicate.
Mail use: 15 minutes to drive to the post office, 4 hours walking.
Why would I ever go to the post office? If something gets shipped to me and I miss it, I'll just do a chargeback on my credit card and let FedX try to deliver it again.
Research: 10 minutes to drive to the library == 3 hours to walk there, 4 hours to walk back with an armload of books.
Once again, I would probably just make up facts like every other respectable college student before I tried to drive to a library. I mean, who does their research in a library? And who needs to do research anyway? Everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten.
Please realize that people like you who depend on your cars for everything are a minority. There is a market for big bloated SUVs in your demographic, sure, but my point was that this demographic wants to jog around until their feet bleed more than GM thinks, and it is market forces that killed the Pinto.
I believe I know exactly how M$ would respond to such a DoJ action...
...
IN A.D. 2006
WAR WAS BEGINNING.
GATES: What happen?
BALLMER: Somebody set up us the fixed OS pricing!
BALLMER: We get signal!
GATES: What!!
BALLMER: Blue screen turn on.
GATES: It's you!!
D.O.J.: HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN !!
D.O.J.: All your fixed OS prices are belong to us.
D.O.J.: You are on the way to destruction.
GATES: What you say !!
D.O.J.: You have no chance to profit make your time.
D.O.J.: HA HA HA HA
BALLMER: Bill...
GATES: Take off every 'lawyer'!
GATES: You know what you doing.
GATES: Move 'laywer'!
GATES: Subvert justice.
So you're trying to tell me that, in a vacuum, a skier can move as fast downhill with his center of gravity three feet above the snow as with it 1.5 feet above the snow?
It just doesn't work that way. A disc and a sphere of the same weight will simply not roll downhill at the same speed, even in a vacuum. Besides, the very act of lowering one's center of gravity 1.5 feet would have a definite impact on momentum.
Now that I look back, tucking really wouldn't matter. There's no wind resistence to worry about when you aren't actually moving.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think tucking is entirely about aerodynamics.
You know how figure skaters pull their arms into their bodies to increase their rotational momentum? Or how you expand your body (read: pump your legs) in order to swing on a swingset?
My guess is that tucking has as much, if not more, to do with momentum than aerodynamics. The physics of a tight, compact body with a low center of gravity differ in more ways to a big upright high-centered body in more ways than drag.
Of course, there are definite advantages to putting sensors on someone's body.
If I fall down the stairs, what's going to happen to, say, my right arm, wrist, and hand? Sure, if I'm unconscious, that will all be dictated by physics - I'll flop around like a rag doll and you can nicely see all the reactive forces at work.
But if I'm conscious, how is the programming going to emulate my increasingly desperate attempts to keep from breaking my neck?
It seems to me that a better effect would be captured simply by hooking up motion sensors to a stuntman, telling him to take a five-minute break, and then throwing him down the stairs when he wasn't looking. The "mechanics" realm of physics has relatively simple rules; panic does not. So far, we don't have any formulas for the interaction of perceived danger, temperament, adrenaline, and what have you.
Havent the video game makers created a program that creates animation based almost solely on physics yet? ;)
Sure, there's nothing I want more than to see a film where someone fires a gun at Keanu Reeves, and then he turns into a "Grand Theft Auto 3" style character made of polygons and falls to the ground with blood squirting out of his aorta.
It should be obvious that if everybody followed your logic, nobody would be able to use eBay. It would just be a bunch of people yelling "No, YOU first, asshole!"
Yes, any empire that gets larger than its carrying capacity will eventually fail. Certainly. An empire encompassing the Mediterranean, most of Europe, and some of Asia and Africa is impractical when it takes three months to get a message from one corner to the other, let alone a defense force.
The carrying capacity of a physical government, needless to say, has grown. The carrying capacity of a media corporation is likely much larger than the earth. Your argument is optimistic, but I can't say I buy it. AOL Time Warner might crumble if it tried to overextend itself to, say, Alpha Centauri, but something tells me it'll do just fine capturing, say, 99% of the market share.
Wouldn't it be pretty easy to rig some kind of machine (or beowulf cluster) to keep downloading your own song, over and over? It couldn't cost 23 cents in bandwidth and hardware to download one MP3, could it? How many of your own 2.5 meg MP3s could you reasonably download in a month over a T1 that was costing you $450?
Non-commercial private sharing poses scarce threat to copyright holders if the would JUST MEET DEMAND.
This is way too optimistic.
I'll be honest. I have a lousy job. I don't make very much money. There's a temp agency taking $4 an hour from me just for finding this lousy job for me. I am absolutely not going to pay for music (or software, or movies) unless I absolutely, absolutely have to.
I believe that there are a lot of people like me. Those of you here on Slashdot who are saying that people are willing to buy all their CDs from Tower if they were only $6 are, I'm convinced, a vocal (and affluent) minority. $6 is still too much to spend on a CD when you're searching for loose dimes to pay the rest of your DSL bill.
How many productive jobs are there really left in the U.S.?
.com. I am fully aware that at no point in my entire career to date have I produced even one thing of value. Something like 95% of our economy is just people shoving money around.
In my mind, unless you're involved in manufacturing, mining, agriculture, or original research, you're unproductive.
I've worked as a legal secretary, a slot machine repairman, an air filter salesman, a record store clerk, and a beta tester for a bankrupt
I have to say, I'd feel a lot better if I had put out a nice album that people could enjoy.
Come on, man. Having sex with a girl is something almost every guy does, dozens of times over his lifetime. It's kind of like, I don't know, getting drunk, or eating a really tasty manicotti - fun! pleasurable! but mundane.
Now listening to the theme to Star Wars emanating from your girlfriend's nether region with the help of a wonderful piece of technology you've ingeniously turned into a speaker using only your amazing dexterity and skill - that's something almost no one ever gets to experience in an entire lifetime. I'm not even sure it could be done. Maybe with a lifetime of meditation and dedication to Zen?
So are you actually telling me that a vibrator could be made to say "Ohhhh, yeah!" like the Kool-Aid guy if you pressed it down juuust right?
Unless you live in a major city, you probably can choose between no more than two methods of accessing the internet. Here in southwest Reno, there simply is no cable, and no service for getting satelite feed into your home; it's DSL or dial-up. (Or, I suppose, you could pay to have a T1 run into your home like a couple guys I know.)
Monopolies on a regional scale are no worse than monopolies on a global scale. Rockefeller got his start with regional monopolies; even though the price of gas may have been a full 50 cents cheaper 40 miles away, nobody was going to drive 40 miles to fill up their tank.
Besides, isn't this like saying that it's okay for ABC to control every channel on TV, because, hell, there's still movies and radio, right?
Okay, this seems like an appropriate place to post my bewildered question :)
Is this really for real? I for one have had an opportunity to use a vibrator, and while I did notice that the pitch changed depending on how much resistance was applied to.. well, while I could change the pitch, I can't imagine that I would ever get a chord. Ever. Or emulate a french horn or a 120-piece orchestra.
So how the hell is he getting "Star Wars" out of those things? Is it really possible that vibrator, used by the most skillful hands imaginable, could be made to play "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" during foreplay, funny robot voices and all?
Three pitches, I could easily buy - some kind of cheap MIDI substitute. Human voice? Someone has to explain this better. If my girlfriend's vibrator starts talking to me, I'm ending it. Well - I guess that would depend on what it said.
Kathleen's got no idea what she's gotten herself into. Within the next few months, that picture's probably going to be viewed by horny teen geeks as often as the Rolling Stone cover of Britney Spears.
I think one of the reasons that open source works so well is that people *can* make money under most licenses.
Really, how many venture capitalists would even *glance* at Linux if the GPL included a provision saying "Don't even think about redistributing this code in some hardware you're trying to sell. This is educational stuff only."
Remember: something can't exactly be considered free (as in speech) if it tells you exactly how you're required to use it. From a law-abiding corporation's perspective, what's the difference between something you can't use and something you're not allowed to use?
Dude... the point here is that they've open-sourced the software.
Though the *company* may be unable to continue its anonymizing service in the wake of Sep. 11th, the people involved understood that their ideal could be fully realized simply by dumping the code on whoever wants to maintain it.
They may not make a pile of money this way, but, hey, did anyone really expect that this idea would rake in the cash in the first place? Anyone trying something like this must have some ulterior motive (see Neal Stevenson's Avi for a fictional counterpart).
Or is the idea that people would use ZKS to send anonymous and untraceable Valentines?
And what a tragedy that would be.
Proof once again that there can be freedom in a terrorism-obsessed world, so long as nobody has to take the blame for it.
Not flamebait. I'm just curious what the financials are? How much is an eBook, and how much is a suitably equipped Palm? Where do they meet, in terms of number of books, where you recoup your investment on the Palm?
My guess is that unless you read a book a week for twenty years, you'll never recoup your monetary investment on the Palm. However, there are some "hidden savings" and "extras" that might make it worth the price.
For example, if you're going on a plane trip, and only bringing one carry-on bag, and you want three different books to read (or refer to), it can be a real hassle to stuff them between your toothbrush and your underwear, and then try to fish them out mid-flight.
Also, although some people use bookcases as a staple of decorating, they do take up a lot of storage space, and much of the value of a residence is calculated based on its square footage. No bookcases might mean the ability to have a pool table.
Then, of course, there's the time and gas mileage involved in driving to bookstores and picking up books. Sure, this seems inconsequential, but it's the thing that makes people buy books in the first place - two trips to the library for every couple of books they read just doesn't make up for the time savings of owning your own book that you don't have to return.
Finally, and most important - your eight year old neice will never, ever squash a nasty booger between pages 182 and 183 of an eBook.
The primary argument against eBooks, really, isn't so much cost as the old truism "people don't like to read off a computer screen." Well, that's probably going to be true of nearly everybody born before 1970, but for my part, I'm sure I've read five times the amount of text on Slashdot alone that I've read in paper form over the last two or three years.
Eva starts well, then falls a little (some say a lot), and the end is anybody's guess (pick Your ending - I'm not sure which I like best).
I have to strongly, strongly disagree with you here. Eva starts strong, gets a little weak around eposides 9-12 (the introduction of Asuka with that silly "syncronized dance" episode), and then just takes off and becomes phenomenal. The first ending is a little too abrupt for my taste, but the End of Eva movies have scenes in them with as much emotional impact of any great tragedy (the death of Dr. Akagi, in my opinion, was one of the best-written tragic moments in history - Shakespeare has nothing on Anno here). To sum up, Evangelion is a masterpiece - Cowboy Bebop is, well, fun.