Because let's be honest, wouldn't we love to live in a world where all almost all menial labour is performed by automated machines with only a handful of skilled experts controlling the machines? I wouldn't really mind being one of the experts while freeing up a large portion of the population to do whatever they want. If we ever get to the point where less than 20% or so of the population is required to work in order to support the rest of the population then people really wouldn't have to work anymore
That is a very naive attitude. When the menial laborers are replaced by machines, who do you think will pay the now obsolete laborers? No one. And they'll still have bill to pay. In this case, "freedom" means "freedom from having money" not "freedom to do what you want". More than likely, instead of having leisure time, those folks will spend their time slowly starving.
I'm not necessarily advocating that we do not employ robotic assistance to save the jobs of the menial laborers; I'm suggesting that the transition will come with economic tumult and fierce resistance. If you advocate robotic replacements for humans, you should expect that reaction or you will have your policies surprisingly defeated.
I was going to moderate your comment down, but instead, fine: I'll rise to the bait.
Frankly, your comment isn't very insightful, and it doesn't inspire much conversation. You're simply not as thought provoking as you apparently think that you are.
Maybe that's what behind your moderation, instead of some vast/. groupthink.
Even if your point has a shred of interesting commentary, you lose that behind aggressive and inflammatory language. There is a way to make a point without using insulting language. If anything, it's for the tone, and not the comment, for which you will be modded down.
Finally, if you don't like/., go start your own site. Start a blog, call it wiki-hater-blog, whatever. Then you can write whatever you like, and if people find you interesting they'll read your comments, drive ad revenue to you, leave comments, etc.
There. There's your conversation. Fun, huh?
The most disturbing development is that the Kremlin intends to develop a Russian Internet which is separate from the global Internet
It's worth noting that a good bit of the spam and plain criminal activity on the internet comes out of Russia--the Storm botnet is largely thought to be owned and operated by the Russian mafia. The RIAA would be happy to have mp3.com inaccessible from Western markets.
A segregation of the internet into World portions and Russian portions might have a short-term benefit as this stuff is firewalled away. Of course, the long term cost of the those ciitzens not having access to outside sources of information makes the cure worse than the disease.
I wonder if the/. effect might be possible to achieve on indirectly linked site, like dictionary.com--as thousands of/. readers all search the same word.
It appears from the comments that most folks don't use dictionary.com as their first reference point for words that they don't know, and use either Google or wikipedia. Interesting.
That's no sign of an impending move from Vista to Mac OS X; if it was, people would have moved away from Windows in the XP days.
Apple has been claiming that number for as long as I can remember--for as long as their retail stores have been open, at least. Every quarter for at least the last 6 years, "50% of the purchases were to first time Mac users".
Apple has grown during that time--but not by 50% each quarter. I think it actually means that there's a good many Mac owners who get a Windows PC next time instead, and the 50% of purchases that went to first time Mac users were partially replacement for the losses.
eg I have 100 users in Q1; my market grows by 10%, so I have sold 110 computers in Q2. If 50% of my users are new to the platform, I sold 55 computers to them. I also sold 55 new computers to my previous customers. So what happened to the other (100-55=45) 45 customers I had previously? They went somewhere else.
I'm doing this on a hellafast workstation, yet I've been spending most of my morning surfing the net and sucking coffee while Adobe's bitch chomps through my frames to deliver low-res previews.
And Adobe thinks I'm going to add Interweb pipes into the equation?
I think you answered your own question, but you apparently don't realize it. e Adobe is going to sell "web services", not just on the basis of everything that we've heard before (updates, data security, work anywhere, etc), but in Adobe's case specifically on the ability to deliver tremendous computing power for your rendering. You have a single fast computer--great. How much faster would your morning have gone if you could take advantage of 10,000 very fast, parallelized, dedicated rendor nodes? Your renders might be just about instant.
The only question then becomes how do you get your raw data up to the cloud at an acceptable speed. I dunno--matbe you send them raw data in a can. Perhaps they figure that you will be patient enough to leave the upload running unattnded since it doesn't reqiure interaction; but the tradeoff is that you get instant results during the time when you want to be interacting.
Think about the benefits of having a massive Adobe data center at your disposal for rendering. The only one that should be scared is the vendor of that workstation that you currently have.
As long as the US continues its patchwork enforcement of laws
We call those "State Rights". The Constitution does not grant the US Fed Gov the right or ability to regulate gambling. Therefore, that right reverts to the states. And as a consequence, you're going to get 50 different interpretations.
This is consistent, if you recognize that we should move regulation and control closer to the people, and not further from it. We are a "patchwork"--we're a patchwork of states, each able to make their own decisions.
My wife worked in the Claims department of a large rental car company. If you were hit by a rental car of this company, and the driver accepted the insurance at the time of rental, you would contact her to get your claims fulfilled. Yes it sucked. Notice the tense.
Anyway, she received a letter from an attorney that demanded a response, but stipulated that form letters would not be accepted as legit response.
She sent a letter, but it was returned with "FORM LETTER REJECTED" stamped all over it, and the lawyer subsequently demanded more communication.
Which she ignored, because: a) it wasn't a form letter; b) even it was, the attorney couldn't possibly prove it; c) even if he could prove it, you can't dictate the terms of the response as long as it's legally sufficient; d) his stamping of the letter provided nice verification that he had received it and read it. He may as well have signed for receipt.
He kept demanding further response, and she followed up with letters that basically said "see previous".
Do I know you, sir? You're handle is certainly familiar enough I don't believe so. My handle comes from a Gibson story, which was made into a pretty poorly regarded Keanu Reeves movie. I have other ties to the handle, naturally, but like most they're pretty boring to anyone but me. Send me an email if you want to compare job histories.
And no, I do not read at -1 when I moderate because I do NOT play the game of moderation While that's what I tried to do, and failed, I meant: do you read at -1 all the time, then? Every article? If you don't, you're just a hypocrite. You're taking advantage of the moderation done by others, but decrying it's usefulness and refuse to participate in it yourself. Wouldn't you be afraid that some "elitist snob" has unfairly modded an article down below your threshold, and so you're missing out on it? The only way to prevent that kind of abuse is to read at -1 or -2.
If you do read at -1, or even -2, you're a braver man than me. I've tried. I think that if one were to read slashdot at -1 unprepared, you might not even be able to determine that it was a technology news site at all--the random bits of coherent posts would be simply washed away in the torrent of puerile and sophomoric postings. Rather, I'm thankful for it, and I find it a pretty effective system. I can and have been unfairly moderated, I think--witness my previous response to you, which is now at +1 flamebait. And it's not. But it is "off-topic", and it's really no skin off my nose. I haven't read many insightful or informative posts that are less than 3, and whenever I read at even less than 5 I'm almost always sorry I wasted my time with posts still at 3 or 4.
I think a moderation hater is moderating today, and trying to prove that moderation can be unfair. Which it can be. But it's still a damn sight better than reading at -1, or -2 even.
Re:Negative value reorganization of moderation?
on
Novell to SCO - Pay Up
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I've already expressed my meta-moderation opinion about the anonymous and elitist moderation system: It sucks.
Do you really read at -1, then? I've tried. I tried the first couple of times that I moderated, to make sure I wasn't missing any hidden gems. And basically it made the comments unreadable. If you do this too, I don't wonder that you leave on a regular basis.
On the contrary, I find the moderation system to be rather genius. It made a system of open posting readable. I too well remember the days of having each of my favorite Usenet groups made unreadable through spam, and I was glad to find a system that prevented that.
Google's market cap is larger than Nokia's by about $34B. GOOG has 3.5B in the bank, and 7.7B in "short-term" investments. That's not enough to purchase a lot of Nokia outright, but they are peers in the marketplace.
A cash and stock swap could get Google a controlling interest in Nokia overnight. Then Google gets maps for free, and placement of their services on every Nokia handheld.
It's about good citizenship, not an extra two cents profit per device.
Boy, are you wrong. I'm sure you'd like to think that, but it has simply never been the case that a company has acted out of "citizenship" instead of "2c profit per device". That's 2c they get to keep and spend on something they want to spend it on, instead of doing you a favor.
If you don't like the terms of the license, don't use it. It's as simple as that. If you can't bear to see your code used for free, with nothing in return, well, you have standard copyrights to use. "Freely use" includes acting in ways you don't like.
After twenty five years watching technology try to not suck
If you've found a solution to a problem, consider carefully wrapping some other technology around it just because.
If you had been around for thirty five years instead of just 25, you would have fought the introduction of the microcomputer, the GUI, and the mouse. And frankly, you've been around long enough to have seen the conversion from C to C++. In fact, I find it interesting that you consider Windows the status quo that should be defended--there was as day, not too long ago, that it was the new thing on the block. Would you have resisted it's adoption then, simply because Windows was the new girlfriend?
I think what you mean to say is that 90% of all new developments suck. But it takes awhile to find the 10% that are truly useful, so we have to explore each development in turn. If you believe that 0%, or 100%, of new developments suck, you're going to either waste a lot of money, or stagnate.
ps If you really think we would have better off with neither the mouse nor the GUI, you need to pull your head out of your ass and take a look around--it's the 21st century, where everyone has access to a computer.
I was blocked for a few days until I went through their system
Hm. I wonder if it would help to have a queue of articles that have been edited, but do not yet show up on the main page? Then the wiki Nazis could monitor that queue, and catch vandalism before it actually made it the published pages. After a period of time--say 24 hours, the edits are automatically published.
This would have the disadvantage of introducing a latency to good fixes, but I think it would really cut down on vandalism and graffiti. It also requires an army of editors to watch that queue, and I don't know if there are enough of them to really do that.
It also would do nothing to improve Wiki's main problem, imo, which is the well-meaning factual errors of the "truth by consensus" problem.
2. Fire contributors who screw up, depriving them of that revenue.
Who determines if #2 happens? Who gets to decide if a statement is not factual? You can only use other experts to decide that--so are you proposing finding 3 experts for every subject matter? We have that now, btw. It's called the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
And you didn't even address where the money for #1 would come from. Ads? Then we would risk having advertiser bias. Subscriptions? Then how is this better than the Enc Brit?
It's getting to be time to have one of those snarky checkbox forms for how to fix the Wikipedia's credibility, as there are an infinite number of ideas, and none of them will work.
I think reaching the truth via consensus is realistic; it seems to work pretty well in the scientific world.
No. No it doesn't. At every major breakthrough of science, the entire preceding body of work has to be challenged and rewritten. Truth comes first. The consensus comes later.
At every breakthrough, if the truth was subject to a vote, the new discovery would be outvoted--you have one guy (or team) with his experimental data, against every one else who still believes in the old perspective.
And yet, in spite of all of this "whiz-bang" 007 technology, I feel no safer. I wish that they had taken that multi-billion dollar budget and done something useful, productive, and boring with it.
It makes me wonder whose interests they're serving.
in fact the story on/. was probably from a shill for them in the first place
In fact, it absolutely was. Check the guy's email address on the linked submission; it goes to @cio.com; and the article was written by the same user. Please. I know it's was a fad and is now passe to complain about the editors on/., but can we have some more review of the articles that are posted than this? Not linking to the same domain as the submitter's email address would be start, especially if that's coupled with a uid that has accumulated some karma (so shows that they've been active in the community).
They list The Dalles Data Center as one of the 7 wonders in the IT world, but they admit themselves that they have no idea what's inside of it? Those warehouses may be full of hay, for all we know. The design of it may be terrible and inefficient, even if it has servers. It's a pretty cheeky thing to claim on zero evidence.
Which is only par for the course. That was one of the worst signal-to-noise ratios of any news site, besides, oh, the last time/. linked to a CIO World article. Seriously, can we stop linking to them? They have nothing but crap articles, with no insight, surrounded by a 100-to-1 ad ratio. Linking to them only validates their strategy, and in fact the story on/. was probably from a shill for them in the first place.
"Why do malicious users have physical access to our machines."
I guess you don't have any users that use work provided laptops? They never get stolen?
With physical access youre pretty much sunk. Someone could moutn ntfs, write to the registry where its stores your admin password, and set it to null. I dont care what OS you use, physical access usually means trouble.
This won't work on Mac OS X's FileVault protected home directories. Yes, with physical access you can change the user's password--or remove the drive--but without the original password you still can not mount the directory. I can only believe that this is true with Window's encryption too. It had better be, or it's just as worthless as you say.
Slashdot Mirror
Because let's be honest, wouldn't we love to live in a world where all almost all menial labour is performed by automated machines with only a handful of skilled experts controlling the machines? I wouldn't really mind being one of the experts while freeing up a large portion of the population to do whatever they want. If we ever get to the point where less than 20% or so of the population is required to work in order to support the rest of the population then people really wouldn't have to work anymore
That is a very naive attitude. When the menial laborers are replaced by machines, who do you think will pay the now obsolete laborers? No one. And they'll still have bill to pay. In this case, "freedom" means "freedom from having money" not "freedom to do what you want". More than likely, instead of having leisure time, those folks will spend their time slowly starving.
I'm not necessarily advocating that we do not employ robotic assistance to save the jobs of the menial laborers; I'm suggesting that the transition will come with economic tumult and fierce resistance. If you advocate robotic replacements for humans, you should expect that reaction or you will have your policies surprisingly defeated.
I was going to moderate your comment down, but instead, fine: I'll rise to the bait. Frankly, your comment isn't very insightful, and it doesn't inspire much conversation. You're simply not as thought provoking as you apparently think that you are. Maybe that's what behind your moderation, instead of some vast /. groupthink.
Even if your point has a shred of interesting commentary, you lose that behind aggressive and inflammatory language. There is a way to make a point without using insulting language. If anything, it's for the tone, and not the comment, for which you will be modded down.
Finally, if you don't like /., go start your own site. Start a blog, call it wiki-hater-blog, whatever. Then you can write whatever you like, and if people find you interesting they'll read your comments, drive ad revenue to you, leave comments, etc.
There. There's your conversation. Fun, huh?
The most disturbing development is that the Kremlin intends to develop a Russian Internet which is separate from the global Internet
It's worth noting that a good bit of the spam and plain criminal activity on the internet comes out of Russia--the Storm botnet is largely thought to be owned and operated by the Russian mafia. The RIAA would be happy to have mp3.com inaccessible from Western markets.
A segregation of the internet into World portions and Russian portions might have a short-term benefit as this stuff is firewalled away. Of course, the long term cost of the those ciitzens not having access to outside sources of information makes the cure worse than the disease.
I wonder if the
It appears from the comments that most folks don't use dictionary.com as their first reference point for words that they don't know, and use either Google or wikipedia. Interesting.
That's no sign of an impending move from Vista to Mac OS X; if it was, people would have moved away from Windows in the XP days.
Apple has been claiming that number for as long as I can remember--for as long as their retail stores have been open, at least. Every quarter for at least the last 6 years, "50% of the purchases were to first time Mac users".
Apple has grown during that time--but not by 50% each quarter. I think it actually means that there's a good many Mac owners who get a Windows PC next time instead, and the 50% of purchases that went to first time Mac users were partially replacement for the losses.
eg I have 100 users in Q1; my market grows by 10%, so I have sold 110 computers in Q2. If 50% of my users are new to the platform, I sold 55 computers to them. I also sold 55 new computers to my previous customers. So what happened to the other (100-55=45) 45 customers I had previously? They went somewhere else.
Either that, or the number is just made up.
If no one is interested in it, there's a blog.
I'm doing this on a hellafast workstation, yet I've been spending most of my morning surfing the net and sucking coffee while Adobe's bitch chomps through my frames to deliver low-res previews.
And Adobe thinks I'm going to add Interweb pipes into the equation?
I think you answered your own question, but you apparently don't realize it.
e
Adobe is going to sell "web services", not just on the basis of everything that we've heard before (updates, data security, work anywhere, etc), but in Adobe's case specifically on the ability to deliver tremendous computing power for your rendering. You have a single fast computer--great. How much faster would your morning have gone if you could take advantage of 10,000 very fast, parallelized, dedicated rendor nodes? Your renders might be just about instant.
The only question then becomes how do you get your raw data up to the cloud at an acceptable speed. I dunno--matbe you send them raw data in a can. Perhaps they figure that you will be patient enough to leave the upload running unattnded since it doesn't reqiure interaction; but the tradeoff is that you get instant results during the time when you want to be interacting.
Think about the benefits of having a massive Adobe data center at your disposal for rendering. The only one that should be scared is the vendor of that workstation that you currently have.
As long as the US continues its patchwork enforcement of laws
We call those "State Rights". The Constitution does not grant the US Fed Gov the right or ability to regulate gambling. Therefore, that right reverts to the states. And as a consequence, you're going to get 50 different interpretations.
This is consistent, if you recognize that we should move regulation and control closer to the people, and not further from it. We are a "patchwork"--we're a patchwork of states, each able to make their own decisions.
.Mac can be, if you communicate with other .Mac users. The .Mac system takes care of the private/public key business.
I have a jabber client that works over SSL too. I believe it uses SSL for the entire stream, not just the login.
My wife worked in the Claims department of a large rental car company. If you were hit by a rental car of this company, and the driver accepted the insurance at the time of rental, you would contact her to get your claims fulfilled. Yes it sucked. Notice the tense.
Anyway, she received a letter from an attorney that demanded a response, but stipulated that form letters would not be accepted as legit response.
She sent a letter, but it was returned with "FORM LETTER REJECTED" stamped all over it, and the lawyer subsequently demanded more communication.
Which she ignored, because:
a) it wasn't a form letter;
b) even it was, the attorney couldn't possibly prove it;
c) even if he could prove it, you can't dictate the terms of the response as long as it's legally sufficient;
d) his stamping of the letter provided nice verification that he had received it and read it. He may as well have signed for receipt.
He kept demanding further response, and she followed up with letters that basically said "see previous".
Do I know you, sir? You're handle is certainly familiar enough
I don't believe so. My handle comes from a Gibson story, which was made into a pretty poorly regarded Keanu Reeves movie. I have other ties to the handle, naturally, but like most they're pretty boring to anyone but me. Send me an email if you want to compare job histories.
And no, I do not read at -1 when I moderate because I do NOT play the game of moderation
While that's what I tried to do, and failed, I meant: do you read at -1 all the time, then? Every article? If you don't, you're just a hypocrite. You're taking advantage of the moderation done by others, but decrying it's usefulness and refuse to participate in it yourself. Wouldn't you be afraid that some "elitist snob" has unfairly modded an article down below your threshold, and so you're missing out on it? The only way to prevent that kind of abuse is to read at -1 or -2.
If you do read at -1, or even -2, you're a braver man than me. I've tried. I think that if one were to read slashdot at -1 unprepared, you might not even be able to determine that it was a technology news site at all--the random bits of coherent posts would be simply washed away in the torrent of puerile and sophomoric postings. Rather, I'm thankful for it, and I find it a pretty effective system. I can and have been unfairly moderated, I think--witness my previous response to you, which is now at +1 flamebait. And it's not. But it is "off-topic", and it's really no skin off my nose. I haven't read many insightful or informative posts that are less than 3, and whenever I read at even less than 5 I'm almost always sorry I wasted my time with posts still at 3 or 4.
I think a moderation hater is moderating today, and trying to prove that moderation can be unfair. Which it can be. But it's still a damn sight better than reading at -1, or -2 even.
I've already expressed my meta-moderation opinion about the anonymous and elitist moderation system: It sucks.
Do you really read at -1, then? I've tried. I tried the first couple of times that I moderated, to make sure I wasn't missing any hidden gems. And basically it made the comments unreadable. If you do this too, I don't wonder that you leave on a regular basis.
On the contrary, I find the moderation system to be rather genius. It made a system of open posting readable. I too well remember the days of having each of my favorite Usenet groups made unreadable through spam, and I was glad to find a system that prevented that.
Google's market cap is larger than Nokia's by about $34B. GOOG has 3.5B in the bank, and 7.7B in "short-term" investments. That's not enough to purchase a lot of Nokia outright, but they are peers in the marketplace.
A cash and stock swap could get Google a controlling interest in Nokia overnight. Then Google gets maps for free, and placement of their services on every Nokia handheld.
It's about good citizenship, not an extra two cents profit per device.
Boy, are you wrong. I'm sure you'd like to think that, but it has simply never been the case that a company has acted out of "citizenship" instead of "2c profit per device". That's 2c they get to keep and spend on something they want to spend it on, instead of doing you a favor.
If you don't like the terms of the license, don't use it. It's as simple as that. If you can't bear to see your code used for free, with nothing in return, well, you have standard copyrights to use. "Freely use" includes acting in ways you don't like.
After twenty five years watching technology try to not suck
If you've found a solution to a problem, consider carefully wrapping some other technology around it just because.
If you had been around for thirty five years instead of just 25, you would have fought the introduction of the microcomputer, the GUI, and the mouse. And frankly, you've been around long enough to have seen the conversion from C to C++. In fact, I find it interesting that you consider Windows the status quo that should be defended--there was as day, not too long ago, that it was the new thing on the block. Would you have resisted it's adoption then, simply because Windows was the new girlfriend?
I think what you mean to say is that 90% of all new developments suck. But it takes awhile to find the 10% that are truly useful, so we have to explore each development in turn. If you believe that 0%, or 100%, of new developments suck, you're going to either waste a lot of money, or stagnate.
ps If you really think we would have better off with neither the mouse nor the GUI, you need to pull your head out of your ass and take a look around--it's the 21st century, where everyone has access to a computer.
But shouldn't it be people with experience in the subject matter of the topic who go through and find what is wrong?
Yes! Yes! But a) how do you find those people, and provided that you do, b) how do you get them to work for free?
I was blocked for a few days until I went through their system
Hm. I wonder if it would help to have a queue of articles that have been edited, but do not yet show up on the main page? Then the wiki Nazis could monitor that queue, and catch vandalism before it actually made it the published pages. After a period of time--say 24 hours, the edits are automatically published.
This would have the disadvantage of introducing a latency to good fixes, but I think it would really cut down on vandalism and graffiti. It also requires an army of editors to watch that queue, and I don't know if there are enough of them to really do that.
It also would do nothing to improve Wiki's main problem, imo, which is the well-meaning factual errors of the "truth by consensus" problem.
2. Fire contributors who screw up, depriving them of that revenue.
Who determines if #2 happens? Who gets to decide if a statement is not factual? You can only use other experts to decide that--so are you proposing finding 3 experts for every subject matter? We have that now, btw. It's called the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
And you didn't even address where the money for #1 would come from. Ads? Then we would risk having advertiser bias. Subscriptions? Then how is this better than the Enc Brit?
It's getting to be time to have one of those snarky checkbox forms for how to fix the Wikipedia's credibility, as there are an infinite number of ideas, and none of them will work.
I think reaching the truth via consensus is realistic; it seems to work pretty well in the scientific world.
No. No it doesn't. At every major breakthrough of science, the entire preceding body of work has to be challenged and rewritten. Truth comes first. The consensus comes later.
At every breakthrough, if the truth was subject to a vote, the new discovery would be outvoted--you have one guy (or team) with his experimental data, against every one else who still believes in the old perspective.
And yet, in spite of all of this "whiz-bang" 007 technology, I feel no safer. I wish that they had taken that multi-billion dollar budget and done something useful, productive, and boring with it.
It makes me wonder whose interests they're serving.
But you do post Anonymously, as a Coward. So I guess there are limits to your bravado, afterall.
in fact the story on
In fact, it absolutely was. Check the guy's email address on the linked submission; it goes to @cio.com; and the article was written by the same user. Please. I know it's was a fad and is now passe to complain about the editors on
They list The Dalles Data Center as one of the 7 wonders in the IT world, but they admit themselves that they have no idea what's inside of it? Those warehouses may be full of hay, for all we know. The design of it may be terrible and inefficient, even if it has servers. It's a pretty cheeky thing to claim on zero evidence.
Which is only par for the course. That was one of the worst signal-to-noise ratios of any news site, besides, oh, the last time
"Why do malicious users have physical access to our machines."
I guess you don't have any users that use work provided laptops? They never get stolen?
With physical access youre pretty much sunk. Someone could moutn ntfs, write to the registry where its stores your admin password, and set it to null. I dont care what OS you use, physical access usually means trouble.
This won't work on Mac OS X's FileVault protected home directories. Yes, with physical access you can change the user's password--or remove the drive--but without the original password you still can not mount the directory. I can only believe that this is true with Window's encryption too. It had better be, or it's just as worthless as you say.