Heh, but you're using units no one will understand. How about:
The newer models should be capable of frying an area the size of Texas covered in ants/second, while the Hubble is only able to fry a Library of Congress worth of ants/second.
The A.I. online promotion (archived at http://cloudmakers.org) had easter eggs at the heart of its premise. Clues/puzzles embedded in HTML code and images, pages that would serve different answers to puzzles depending on what browser you used from Mosaic to Earthnet 31 or thereabouts... Check it out, it was really cool.
One day, the internet will be distributing films before they're even filmed! Someone should stop this rampant piracy before it ruins us all! Will somebody think of the children?!
Three hundred years ago? Are you completely mad? Have you actually read the book? The narrative switches between that set in the first world war and that which is set _now_.
Chris, the guy who got the email from KPMG and who owns the raettig.org domain, also rather graciously hosts my mail and webserver. From the end of his bed, of course, sitting on the end of a t1 line. Now, when this story broke on Tuesday on FuckedCompany, Metafilter and a few of the more well-known weblogs, we all thought it was rather amusing (and still do, really). On the other hand, it meant that the t1 got saturated pretty quickly.
This morning, when the Wired article appeared, I bet him it wasn't going to be more than 24 hours before his box got slashdotted. Needless to say, five minutes ago I tried checking my mail and was surprised that nothing at all was happening. Quick brainwave: check slashdot. And there the box is. Excellent explanation!
Oh, and anyway, one of these links is obligatory...
Flash *is* bad. Caveat: Flash is bad when used badly. And it's quite easy to use Flash badly. A lot of UI conventions are broken when you use flash: forward and back browser buttons Just Don't Work unless you do a shitload of cunning coding on your pages. You can't print pages. You can't (without a lot of work) do resizing.
As always, think about *why* you're using something. A few more reasons: Flash still requires a plugin. Turning off irritating audio isn't even built into the plugin!
For those who insist on building an entire site whose only real content is a blurb about what they do and a few content numbers, that kind of functionality doesn't require flash at all.
Make sure you design for your audience and you make your content *easy to use* and *accessible*.
This isn't p2p astronomy
on
Virtual Astronomy
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Most posters here haven't seem to have grasped the fact that these projects aren't dealing with letting the public access data in a Seti@home manner. That's not the aim at all. What they're trying to do is consolidate all the data that they do have available, and make that accessible to researchers. That way, you don't have to bid for expensive telescope time, you just make a requisition for the data, which would just get squirted at you over the net.
Want a particular portion of the sky at a particular wavelength? Just check the database for it. Simple as that. With the amount of machine-controlled telescopes and the new arrays developed, sucking in all this data, managing it, consolidating it and allowing people to access it in an easy way is a great move forward.
Welcome to the A.I. game from the maintainer of the Trail. Please check out the Cloudmakers website--we've put a lot of work into this and there's a tonne of resources for people who are new to the game.
Come join us! We need heads:)
Dan (a Cloudmaker, a Cloudmaker Moderator and the Trail Guy)
In some ways, it's nice sitting back and watching the US Presidential elections. You've got your candidates, neither of whom are particularly appealing in the slightest (I had been edging for McCain, but since he dropped out, it's marginally Gore over Bush, for what seems to me to be obvious reasons).
Well, into the fray jumped Jon Katz over at slashdot.org">, with his article (though I'm more inclined to term it an op-ed) Dark Hearts And The Net.
It was nearly a good article. George Bush Jnr. apparently "implied Wednesday night that the Net can, by itself, turn otherwise bright and youthful hearts dark, and even goad youth to murder -- an allegation that comes in the context of a long-standing cultural civil war. It exploits the worst fears of parents who are too often ignorant of their children's technological and cultural lives".
Here, I agree. Yes, it's political pandering. Yes, it's appealing to the misinformed by feeding them more misinformation and relying more on people's lack of knowledge than it is on enlightenment, and in no way does it smack of a resonable, reasoned debate. But this is politics we're talking about here, so Bush is forgiven.
Katz spoils it all, though, by managing to spout the largest pile of useless bile three paragraphs later: And what a load of bollocks he's spoken. Why? What's he said?
"This hysterical pandering has nothing to do with the reality of children's lives, or their welfare. If either Bush, Cheney, Gore or Lieberman cared a whit about children, they would shriek instead about the paucity of decent Internet access -- and even decent computers -- in America's public elementary and middle schools."
I beg to differ, but I think anyone who's seriously interested in children wouldn't even contemplate shrieking about the paucity of decent internet access. I'd rather hope that such shrieking would be the last thign on such an interested body's mind, and that it wouldn't even be shrieking: a mere mewling I could tolerate.
Excuse me? Paucity of net access? How about educational standards? How about child abuse? How about welfare? How about illiteracy? How about employment? How about giving disaffected kids something, anything, a reason to stay in school and not to muck around? How about educating mall rats (and I may be stereotyping, but unfortunately stereotypes exist for a reason), whose knowledge of world affairs, well, doesn't exist?
Katz comments that "the sad political truth is that access to the Net, the Web and broadband equals creativity, confidence and opportunity". No, Jon, you're completely wrong. Completely, utterly and totally.
Yes, technology can empower people. Yes it can make a difference, it can improve creativity, confidence and opportunity. But it's not the be-all and end-all, not by a long way.
Is Katz seriously insinuating that he'd rather schools spent money on internet access than textbooks? Are we to suggest that we should wire up schools whilst neglecting the fact that a startling number are attempting to drop or de-emphasise the teaching of evolution in biology classes in favour of creation science?
You can't, and shouldn't assume that throwing computers and technology at kids is going to make the world a better place, and it's rather ill though-out to say so: what kids need are teachers. They need adequate teaching facilties. They need well-stocked labs. They need teachers who know enough about the subject, and care enough about their subject to want to and to inspire their charges. Fortunately, I'm not the only one on slashdot who thinks this.
My old school has computers falling out of its ears. I was lucky. I went to a good school, we had enough money, we had good (in most parts), teachers. I was given the right chances, the right opportunities and I was pushed. This same school had computers falling out of its ears. Fibre optic backbones. A ratio of computers to pupils that puts my current university to shame. Did those resources help anyone pass exams? Did the classrooms full of PCs help anyone understand English literature? Did they directly inspire any kids to go out and do something, did they directly inspire kids to learn? Or did they simply allow kids to check their Hotmail at lunch and send emails like the following during their lessons?
At 15:56 23/05/00 +0100, you wrote:
>what do you suck?
>not what you do
Technology's just there. Like everything, it's what you do with it that counts: if you don't have the teachers to take advantage of it, where are you going to go? You'll have thirty pieces of beige-box equipment sitting being more or less abused on a daily basis, and you're not unlocking any potential anywhere. You're wasting it. These kids don't know anymore about the net because of net access. They know the latest football scores. They know what new single's at number one. They try, vainly, to look for porn, and were surprised when we came down on them like a tonne of bricks. They send idiotic, abusive emails to each other, in a new form of playground insult. Are these kids empowered because we sat them in front of a 15 inch CRT and told them to surf the net for an hour? Of course not.
People must realise that throwing technology at things doesn't make anything any better. Wiring up schools, wiring up hospitals, sharing information doesn't necessarily make anything any better unless you have better people. Technology in itself doesn't make better people, either. It can help, but you stick thirty kids down in front of your wonderful government-funded net access workstations with a horribly inept, disillusioned teacher and you have a waste of money of the highest degree.
Katz says "What a shame that the many real issues surrounding technology are perverted in this shamelessly exploitive way."
Yes, that's a shame. It's a shame that politicans are looking at the negative aspects of the internet in order to gain votes. Yes, it's a shame that politicians are capitalising on fear founded due to lack of knowledge. But it's also a shame that Katz is perpetuating the myth that many seem to share, including the politicians he so despairs of: technology doesn't help. People do.
More Katz: "The biggest social, cultural and political issues in the country almost all relate to technology: yadda yadda gene mapping, yadda yadda birth selection, intellectual property, management of new technologies from supercomuting (sic) to AI to nanotechnology."
Yes, these issues are important. Ethical considerations have to be examined. The foundation for intellectual property has to be re-examined. But before that, please look after your people. Katz is right: the internet isn't turning young hearts dark and murderous. But have you thought of what might be? Why are so many kids disaffected? Why are so many apathetic? Isn't it ironic that when adults complain about the children of this century, they complain that they're materialistically motivated, that they are so apathetic when its crass commercialism that has been drummed into their heads? Kids these days are mass-marketed into submission, and it's not as if they're "growing up" any slower.
Don't be preoccupied with technology. Work out how to use it properly, and how to teach people to use it properly before you start throwing it at everyone and expect them to intuitively know how to use it positively.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, but you're using units no one will understand. How about:
The newer models should be capable of frying an area the size of Texas covered in ants/second, while the Hubble is only able to fry a Library of Congress worth of ants/second.
Actually, sounds to me they're pinning their hopes on OS X, not the hardware.
The A.I. online promotion (archived at http://cloudmakers.org) had easter eggs at the heart of its premise. Clues/puzzles embedded in HTML code and images, pages that would serve different answers to puzzles depending on what browser you used from Mosaic to Earthnet 31 or thereabouts... Check it out, it was really cool.
One day, the internet will be distributing films before they're even filmed! Someone should stop this rampant piracy before it ruins us all! Will somebody think of the children?!
Three hundred years ago? Are you completely mad? Have you actually read the book? The narrative switches between that set in the first world war and that which is set _now_.
Chris, the guy who got the email from KPMG and who owns the raettig.org domain, also rather graciously hosts my mail and webserver. From the end of his bed, of course, sitting on the end of a t1 line. Now, when this story broke on Tuesday on FuckedCompany, Metafilter and a few of the more well-known weblogs, we all thought it was rather amusing (and still do, really). On the other hand, it meant that the t1 got saturated pretty quickly.
This morning, when the Wired article appeared, I bet him it wasn't going to be more than 24 hours before his box got slashdotted. Needless to say, five minutes ago I tried checking my mail and was surprised that nothing at all was happening. Quick brainwave: check slashdot. And there the box is. Excellent explanation!
Oh, and anyway, one of these links is obligatory...
Flash *is* bad. Caveat: Flash is bad when used badly. And it's quite easy to use Flash badly. A lot of UI conventions are broken when you use flash: forward and back browser buttons Just Don't Work unless you do a shitload of cunning coding on your pages. You can't print pages. You can't (without a lot of work) do resizing.
As always, think about *why* you're using something. A few more reasons: Flash still requires a plugin. Turning off irritating audio isn't even built into the plugin!
For those who insist on building an entire site whose only real content is a blurb about what they do and a few content numbers, that kind of functionality doesn't require flash at all.
Make sure you design for your audience and you make your content *easy to use* and *accessible*.
Most posters here haven't seem to have grasped the fact that these projects aren't dealing with letting the public access data in a Seti@home manner. That's not the aim at all. What they're trying to do is consolidate all the data that they do have available, and make that accessible to researchers. That way, you don't have to bid for expensive telescope time, you just make a requisition for the data, which would just get squirted at you over the net.
Want a particular portion of the sky at a particular wavelength? Just check the database for it. Simple as that. With the amount of machine-controlled telescopes and the new arrays developed, sucking in all this data, managing it, consolidating it and allowing people to access it in an easy way is a great move forward.
Welcome to the A.I. game from the maintainer of the Trail. Please check out the Cloudmakers website--we've put a lot of work into this and there's a tonne of resources for people who are new to the game.
:)
Come join us! We need heads
Dan (a Cloudmaker, a Cloudmaker Moderator and the Trail Guy)
In some ways, it's nice sitting back and watching the US Presidential elections. You've got your candidates, neither of whom are particularly appealing in the slightest (I had been edging for McCain, but since he dropped out, it's marginally Gore over Bush, for what seems to me to be obvious reasons).
Well, into the fray jumped Jon Katz over at slashdot.org">, with his article (though I'm more inclined to term it an op-ed) Dark Hearts And The Net.
It was nearly a good article. George Bush Jnr. apparently "implied Wednesday night that the Net can, by itself, turn otherwise bright and youthful hearts dark, and even goad youth to murder -- an allegation that comes in the context of a long-standing cultural civil war. It exploits the worst fears of parents who are too often ignorant of their children's technological and cultural lives".
Here, I agree. Yes, it's political pandering. Yes, it's appealing to the misinformed by feeding them more misinformation and relying more on people's lack of knowledge than it is on enlightenment, and in no way does it smack of a resonable, reasoned debate. But this is politics we're talking about here, so Bush is forgiven.
Katz spoils it all, though, by managing to spout the largest pile of useless bile three paragraphs later: And what a load of bollocks he's spoken. Why? What's he said?
"This hysterical pandering has nothing to do with the reality of children's lives, or their welfare. If either Bush, Cheney, Gore or Lieberman cared a whit about children, they would shriek instead about the paucity of decent Internet access -- and even decent computers -- in America's public elementary and middle schools."
I beg to differ, but I think anyone who's seriously interested in children wouldn't even contemplate shrieking about the paucity of decent internet access. I'd rather hope that such shrieking would be the last thign on such an interested body's mind, and that it wouldn't even be shrieking: a mere mewling I could tolerate.
Excuse me? Paucity of net access? How about educational standards? How about child abuse? How about welfare? How about illiteracy? How about employment? How about giving disaffected kids something, anything, a reason to stay in school and not to muck around? How about educating mall rats (and I may be stereotyping, but unfortunately stereotypes exist for a reason), whose knowledge of world affairs, well, doesn't exist?
Katz comments that "the sad political truth is that access to the Net, the Web and broadband equals creativity, confidence and opportunity". No, Jon, you're completely wrong. Completely, utterly and totally.
Yes, technology can empower people. Yes it can make a difference, it can improve creativity, confidence and opportunity. But it's not the be-all and end-all, not by a long way.
Is Katz seriously insinuating that he'd rather schools spent money on internet access than textbooks? Are we to suggest that we should wire up schools whilst neglecting the fact that a startling number are attempting to drop or de-emphasise the teaching of evolution in biology classes in favour of creation science?
You can't, and shouldn't assume that throwing computers and technology at kids is going to make the world a better place, and it's rather ill though-out to say so: what kids need are teachers. They need adequate teaching facilties. They need well-stocked labs. They need teachers who know enough about the subject, and care enough about their subject to want to and to inspire their charges. Fortunately, I'm not the only one on slashdot who thinks this.
My old school has computers falling out of its ears. I was lucky. I went to a good school, we had enough money, we had good (in most parts), teachers. I was given the right chances, the right opportunities and I was pushed. This same school had computers falling out of its ears. Fibre optic backbones. A ratio of computers to pupils that puts my current university to shame. Did those resources help anyone pass exams? Did the classrooms full of PCs help anyone understand English literature? Did they directly inspire any kids to go out and do something, did they directly inspire kids to learn? Or did they simply allow kids to check their Hotmail at lunch and send emails like the following during their lessons?
At 15:56 23/05/00 +0100, you wrote:
>what do you suck?
>not what you do
Technology's just there. Like everything, it's what you do with it that counts: if you don't have the teachers to take advantage of it, where are you going to go? You'll have thirty pieces of beige-box equipment sitting being more or less abused on a daily basis, and you're not unlocking any potential anywhere. You're wasting it. These kids don't know anymore about the net because of net access. They know the latest football scores. They know what new single's at number one. They try, vainly, to look for porn, and were surprised when we came down on them like a tonne of bricks. They send idiotic, abusive emails to each other, in a new form of playground insult. Are these kids empowered because we sat them in front of a 15 inch CRT and told them to surf the net for an hour? Of course not.
People must realise that throwing technology at things doesn't make anything any better. Wiring up schools, wiring up hospitals, sharing information doesn't necessarily make anything any better unless you have better people. Technology in itself doesn't make better people, either. It can help, but you stick thirty kids down in front of your wonderful government-funded net access workstations with a horribly inept, disillusioned teacher and you have a waste of money of the highest degree.
Katz says "What a shame that the many real issues surrounding technology are perverted in this shamelessly exploitive way."
Yes, that's a shame. It's a shame that politicans are looking at the negative aspects of the internet in order to gain votes. Yes, it's a shame that politicians are capitalising on fear founded due to lack of knowledge. But it's also a shame that Katz is perpetuating the myth that many seem to share, including the politicians he so despairs of: technology doesn't help. People do.
More Katz: "The biggest social, cultural and political issues in the country almost all relate to technology: yadda yadda gene mapping, yadda yadda birth selection, intellectual property, management of new technologies from supercomuting (sic) to AI to nanotechnology."
Yes, these issues are important. Ethical considerations have to be examined. The foundation for intellectual property has to be re-examined. But before that, please look after your people. Katz is right: the internet isn't turning young hearts dark and murderous. But have you thought of what might be? Why are so many kids disaffected? Why are so many apathetic? Isn't it ironic that when adults complain about the children of this century, they complain that they're materialistically motivated, that they are so apathetic when its crass commercialism that has been drummed into their heads? Kids these days are mass-marketed into submission, and it's not as if they're "growing up" any slower.
Don't be preoccupied with technology. Work out how to use it properly, and how to teach people to use it properly before you start throwing it at everyone and expect them to intuitively know how to use it positively.
This post also appears on my blog at http://danhon.com/ec/.