The problem is you get it bundled with other software and, apparently, it installs itself (overriding Gozilla et al) without asking permission first. To your average clueless newbie, this is a problem.
They are creating a program for the express purpose of doing one thing: aiding downloads. It is bundled without mention with other Real software, and it installs itself without permission as the default file-download handler on your system. But what it does is provide RealNetworks with unprecedented access to the downloading habits of users; it's not software it's a trojan horse! Its most useful function is to real, and its method of inclusion is suspicious. They don't need that data to make anything for you more convenient -- it is entirely to aid their marketing program!
They shouldn't be allowed to do that. I don't know how to stop them, but that shit should be illegal. Or at least force them to advertise functions which do not directly relate to the purpose you bought the software for: it's like buying a word processor with an undocumented feature which changes your networking settings, it's not what you bought it to do.
This is not significant
on
Boo No More
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· Score: 4
I admit that I, too, temporarily gave this event more significance than it really merits: an e-commerce company is collapsing! Help! The bubble is bursting! Get out now! Sell! Sell!
But it's not like that. Boo was a badly mismanged site -- their launch was delayed by five months due to technical problems, and they spent way too much on marketing (surprise!).
People have forgotten than 90% of Internet companies are supposed to fail; only 1 in 10 business startups of any kind last more than a few years. It's just that a whole load of Internet companies started up at the same time in the big, big boom last year and now the weaker ones are beginning to fail, but there are a lot of them. Investors got this idea that a Dot-Com was a sure investment, guaranteed to make them rich, and that's not true. Business sense, a solid business model and good management matter as much as they ever did. Amazon.Com is run by a businessman, not a geek, and that's usually the case for sucessful technology companies (e.g., um, Microsoft? Bill's more businessman than geek).
Unfortunately, no one will listen and even really good e-commerce ventures are going to have a tough time getting VC in the next twelve months. Eventually, it'll level out and there will be no difference between getting VC for an online business and an offline one (in fact, since all business will be online in some way, there will be no difference at all).
Looking directly ahead of me, my coherent visual field can encompass an area twice the width of my current monitor with no problem (and maybe 20% more height). Humans are designed for peripheral vision, a 100-degree field of view, but we insist on using squarish monitors which waste a lot of visual area. Multiple monitors are nice, but there's all that blank space between them: we need a visual system like MIT's Cave that utilises as much visual area as your eyes can handle. The productivity boost would be more than worth the expense.
Research needs to be done into the size and shape of the maximum monitor size a human being can use without straining their neck all the time, and then somebody can get rich manufacturing.
Recommend ratio: 1 C.S.R. per customer buying/browsing at any one time. The ones who are currently buying and don't need help are balanced by the ones who need after-sales service.
Real ratio: 3 versus 1000 daily:-) Nobody ever has enough C.S.R., 'cause they're too expensive. As for what is an economical number to have, I dunno.
(First-ish post, but it's not like I was trying to...)
I mean, the most basic issue is that HTML -- not including any sever-side scripting, javascript, whatever -- is ridiculously simple. What are they gonna do, copyright their unique use of <B>? If they don't own the content, then it's just markup, and it could very well be argued that the I.P. here is the design, not the tools used to create it. It's equivalent to a paper company trying to sue a magazine because they used the printing company's paper! It's just dumb.
The other thing is that I always, always consider my HTML markup -- and my Javascript, too -- to be in the public domain, simply because once the page is published, anybody could view the source and take it without telling me anyway. Whether they'd want to, given the quality of code I write, is another matter:-)
Chimps and dolphins are demonstrably intelligent. I personally would rank them as being sentient beings. They have language. They have emotions. They sometimes do things for inexplicable reasons. They're already at or just under our level.
So if they are at our level, then it's a question of equal rights. If they're not at our level, we have a responsibility to Uplift them: see below.
The problem is that nobody really wants to see chimps or dolphins that can communicate with any old human.
Um, so I'm nobody? The fact that there are still people who are xenophobic based on race is by no means an argument for aiding these species along the path to full sentience. Just because some idiots don't like it doesn't mean you don't do it: see the abolition of slavery, women's sufferage, and gay rights.
Forget it. It'd be impossible. What you would do is make your "elevated" chimps and dolphins miserable--condemned to live in a world where they can't enjoy the company of their fellows and can't fit in with the people who made them what they are. They'd always be circus freaks, outsiders, doomed to perpetual loneliness and isolation.
To quote Yoda, "I sense much fear in you." Why can't they enjoy the company of their fellow chimps and dolphins? We are uplifting a species, not a few lonely specimens! They will all be intelligent. They will have their own society quite apart from our own (especially Dolphins). The only reason not to do it is xenophobia, which as I've explained, is no reason at all. Conquering fear of the unknown is what brought us all of mankind's greatest discoveries.
As for sentient machines, I am equally in favour of them, but more in terms of turning humans into them than inventing them separately; while we are busy uplifting Dolphins we can also bootstrap ourselves up to higher levels of existence, perhaps turning into 2001-esque space-roving machines/energy beings who do not need a planet -- which we can then leave to the chimps and dolphins.
Think of the new ideas and concepts you might discover by creating a non-human culture; it's an easier way of doing it than meeting extraterrestrials. We'd have to be careful not to create a mere mimic of our own society, of course, but if you read the Uplift novels you'll see Brin's conception of why that is unlikely to happen. As for the territorial instincts of chimps, humans are way more territorial than chimps. And I'm much more interested in the Uplift of dolphins than chimps, to tell you the truth... the difference between an aquatic species and our own would be far more interesting. Plus, uplifting an aquatic species would also remove any competition for territory: you guys get the ocean, we get the land.
Not so! It is true that SF is frequently -- even usually -- very badly written. It's not something we should be proud of. But this is not what attracts us to SF, it is the ideas and concepts, not the writing. If it was the writing, then "fiction" stories (the same old plots every time, in-depth explorations of the same emotions, endless iterations on the theme of "feelings" and "turmoil") set in a futuristic setting would not do well. This is why (a) true geeks are frequently disappointed by supposed "sci-fi" movies, because they are just romance/cops-and-robbers/whatever stories rehashed in a futuristic/foreign environment, and (b) why real SF is hugely popular with us, even when set in (moderately) mundane settings. Take the Matrix for example: 95% a standard action movie, but the concepts made it a huge geek favourite. That, and, in my particular case, the sight of Keanu in tight leather pants:-)
It's not the writing, it's the ideas behind the writing that keeps us hooked. We wish the writing were better, but it's not essential.
We could do a lot worse than colonise Mars according to the future K.S. Robinson mapped out in the Mars trilogy; we could avoid a lot of the pitfalls too. Robinson's ideas on multinational corporations becoming transnationals becoming metanationals, with equal power/more power than governments, is one getting frighteningly closer every day.
Other inventions we could use that come from recent SF:
Vacuum Power / The Gravitic Engine, both essentially limitless energy sources created by Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, respectively.
Uplifted Chimpanzee and/or Dolphins, as created by David Brin. It's high time mankind created some companions instead of just exterminating wildlife.
Neural nanonics! These are the greatest one, as created by Peter F. Hamilton in the Night's Dawn trilogy, a thoroughly scary series of books.
Habitats/the Edenist culture in general: also coming from Peter F. Hamilton, the social structure of Edenism is far superior to any human society currently existing.
Any other suggestions? These are just the first ones to pop into my head...
The difference between the thoughts of sentient life and the thoughts of other kind of life are, IMHO of course, abstract thoughts: thoughts about the thinker, thoughts about thoughts, thoughts about things which do not exist in the real world. Math is one of the subjects that is closest to pure abstract thought, and this is why I feel it is also one of the most valuable subjects.
Granted, practical subjects, which teach you actual physical skills in how to manipulate objects, are useful, but it is essentially true that you could also teach a monkey to do those things. The difficult part is the thought behind those actions; knowing whether to build a table, rather than how to build a table.
Students who are good at math (and other abstract subjects, like music for example) are treated as more "intelligent" because they are in fact more sentient, assuming it is possible to be "more sentient".
I would also say that students would be better prepared, and better educated, if more attention were paid to developing their capacity for abstract thought with (a) greater attention paid to math (b) some or more attention paid to topics like music and, yes, computing where abstract, logical thought is often key (unless you're using a Microsoft product:-)
Re:They can not only pull ...
on
NASA Snake-Bots
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· Score: 1
Cool in theory, but limited in actual application, since a robot would need to be made out of certain materials, which would not necessarily be the ideal material to make the structure out of: using self-assembling robots made of metal and plastic to assemble a structure that would be better served by a block of carbon-concrete would be a waste of time. And the strength of a structure made of robots would worry me, too. This is why no one suggests that nanobots should compose the structures they create; they will merely use nearby raw material to create it.
Some additional information to an already very informative post:
It doesn't just do databases. It provides quick, easy and painless interfaces to useful things like encryption (of various kinds), basic GIF-image-manipulation (for things like bar charts etc.), as well as time-saving features like common array functions, file-management and file-editing functions, and FTP. Also, little built-in features like the way it deals on a single line with the infamous sendmail is a huge time-saver, and doesn't lose flexibility.
Unfortunately, I'm not happy about the Zend engine, at least in the way it's not free (beer). It smacks of a Microsoft free-trial: you can write your application in this language, but you can't really do anything useful with the app until you purchase this "extension". Of course, it's not as severe as all that, but the restrictions on the use of Zend for various purposes are really annoying.
Lots of people -- including, until recently, me -- say that PHP will be or even already is a successor/replacement to Perl. I don't think so. They have different strengths, but together they rock da house for CGI programming. The way it works is: Standard problems: use PHP. Anything that is even vaguely similar to something already attempted in CGI can be done in PHP. PHP also excellently fulfills one of the prime requirements of CGI: as an interface to back-end technology. It's built-in support for a ridiculous variety of technologies in a very easy-to-use way puts it well ahead of the rest in this regard. For 95-98% of all scripting, PHP will do you just fine and get it done much quicker than the same task in Perl. PHP is faster to develop and, recently, faster to run than Perl. Tricky stuff: Call in the big guns. For all its power, PHP falls down in the area of doing new and complicated things on a low level. You can, but it's a bit of a stretch. Perl excels at getting down into the guts of things and will produce (when properly used) tough, fast code that gets the job done, and IMHO will do it better than PHP can. You can then use PHP to take the results of the heavy processing that Perl has done and use it to easily create a nice interface.
Essentially, use PHP for interface work and use Perl for behind the scenes stuff, and don't get confused about which is which.
And in an ideal world, archaeologists would be out of a job. And that's not just because an enemy of mine is an archaeologist:-) The reason it is both valuable and necessary to be able to store all kinds of documents in perpetuity is two-fold: (a) you will never lose anything by having more information available to you (b) only hindsight can tell you what kind of information will be valuable.
If we had been able to store all the information about past civilisations then we wouldn't need archaeologists, who are in essence glorified hardware-based search engines!
A far-fetched example to illustrate point B: far in the future, years after chickenpox and all other viral diseases have been eradicated, a random mutation creates a new chickenpox-like disease. Diseases were eradicated, so people decided storing information about how to cure them was unnecessary. The plague of ChickTwo wipes out all life on earth:-) (Hmm, I smell next year's blockbuster...)
A more down-to-earth example (I always think of them later) for point A would be that you encounter an engineering problem that was attempted but never solved years ago: it would seem documenting a failed attempt at doing something would be a bad idea, but in reality being able to check what everybody else has already tried would greatly accellerate your own attempts to solve the problem.
Information is going to be so easy to store in such large amounts that soon the issue of whether to bother to store it will fade away. What does need work, as numerous others have mentioned, are better search engines and methods of ranking items by relevance, not importance: this is not the same as throwing them away.
Relevance-based searching, as opposed to popularity-based, is why Google is a better search engine than most/all others.
The sooner the US has a software community instead of a software industry the better! I want free beer!:-) However, apart from the dangerous implications for commercial software, I'm worried about the effect on micro-programmers. I believe there was some question of liability if a programmer released software as "freeware" or some similarly badly-defined software. I'm pretty sure GPL is safe, but how many single-weekend programs have an agreement at all? People will stop releasing these often-useful programs if they have to go through the hassle of licensing each one. If we're going to hold a demonstration, I vote we get 1000s of copies of boxed software and burn the shrinkwrap off them!:-) The EPA would probably kick our asses for the hydrocarbon release though...
Re:Maybe genuinely secure laptops make more sense.
on
Laptop Lojack?
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· Score: 3
As far as reports so far have told said, the data on the laptops is encrypted -- but it's also unique. The issue is not that other people won't be able to read the data -- I don't think they can -- but that the security agency itself will have lost the data!
Of course, if you had a system which blew up the data if it got out of tracking range, you'd still lose the data.... so maybe this is all a dumb idea on my part:-)
Reliability issues galore!
on
Laptop Lojack?
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· Score: 2
I would worry about that kind of system! To work, it would have to be completely unbypassable (sp?). However, the way GPS/all tracking technology works this would cause problems. Either: (a) whenever the device was in a tunnel, out of signal, or whatever, you'd lose all your data! (b) if you allow it to lose signal without a problem, then the person who steals it merely has to block it from the signal and they can run off with it.
How easy is it to block the signal from a GPS satellite? I heard the new units are more reliable (smaller wavelength) but I bet it still wouldn't work in the Tube:-) BY THE WAY, abusing style sheets can be fun...
While not nearly enough has been done to keep the shuttles up to date, some work has been done on the shuttles -- recently, as reported on Slashdot I believe, Columbia was fitted with a "glass cockpit" -- LCD displays instead of hardwired controls. The links shows work that's been done on Columbia, plus other info about Columbia in general.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is you get it bundled with other software and, apparently, it installs itself (overriding Gozilla et al) without asking permission first. To your average clueless newbie, this is a problem.
They shouldn't be allowed to do that. I don't know how to stop them, but that shit should be illegal. Or at least force them to advertise functions which do not directly relate to the purpose you bought the software for: it's like buying a word processor with an undocumented feature which changes your networking settings, it's not what you bought it to do.
But it's not like that. Boo was a badly mismanged site -- their launch was delayed by five months due to technical problems, and they spent way too much on marketing (surprise!).
People have forgotten than 90% of Internet companies are supposed to fail; only 1 in 10 business startups of any kind last more than a few years. It's just that a whole load of Internet companies started up at the same time in the big, big boom last year and now the weaker ones are beginning to fail, but there are a lot of them. Investors got this idea that a Dot-Com was a sure investment, guaranteed to make them rich, and that's not true. Business sense, a solid business model and good management matter as much as they ever did. Amazon.Com is run by a businessman, not a geek, and that's usually the case for sucessful technology companies (e.g., um, Microsoft? Bill's more businessman than geek).
Unfortunately, no one will listen and even really good e-commerce ventures are going to have a tough time getting VC in the next twelve months. Eventually, it'll level out and there will be no difference between getting VC for an online business and an offline one (in fact, since all business will be online in some way, there will be no difference at all).
Looking directly ahead of me, my coherent visual field can encompass an area twice the width of my current monitor with no problem (and maybe 20% more height). Humans are designed for peripheral vision, a 100-degree field of view, but we insist on using squarish monitors which waste a lot of visual area. Multiple monitors are nice, but there's all that blank space between them: we need a visual system like MIT's Cave that utilises as much visual area as your eyes can handle. The productivity boost would be more than worth the expense.
Research needs to be done into the size and shape of the maximum monitor size a human being can use without straining their neck all the time, and then somebody can get rich manufacturing.
Recommend ratio:
:-) Nobody ever has enough C.S.R., 'cause they're too expensive. As for what is an economical number to have, I dunno.
1 C.S.R. per customer buying/browsing at any one time. The ones who are currently buying and don't need help are balanced by the ones who need after-sales service.
Real ratio:
3 versus 1000 daily
(First-ish post, but it's not like I was trying to...)
The other thing is that I always, always consider my HTML markup -- and my Javascript, too -- to be in the public domain, simply because once the page is published, anybody could view the source and take it without telling me anyway. Whether they'd want to, given the quality of code I write, is another matter :-)
I'm no expert, but is hydrazine a fossil fuel? H202 is made some other way, isn't it?
So if they are at our level, then it's a question of equal rights. If they're not at our level, we have a responsibility to Uplift them: see below.
The problem is that nobody really wants to see chimps or dolphins that can communicate with any old human.
Um, so I'm nobody? The fact that there are still people who are xenophobic based on race is by no means an argument for aiding these species along the path to full sentience. Just because some idiots don't like it doesn't mean you don't do it: see the abolition of slavery, women's sufferage, and gay rights.
Forget it. It'd be impossible. What you would do is make your "elevated" chimps and dolphins miserable--condemned to live in a world where they can't enjoy the company of their fellows and can't fit in with the people who made them what they are. They'd always be circus freaks, outsiders, doomed to perpetual loneliness and isolation.
To quote Yoda, "I sense much fear in you."
Why can't they enjoy the company of their fellow chimps and dolphins? We are uplifting a species, not a few lonely specimens! They will all be intelligent. They will have their own society quite apart from our own (especially Dolphins). The only reason not to do it is xenophobia, which as I've explained, is no reason at all. Conquering fear of the unknown is what brought us all of mankind's greatest discoveries.
As for sentient machines, I am equally in favour of them, but more in terms of turning humans into them than inventing them separately; while we are busy uplifting Dolphins we can also bootstrap ourselves up to higher levels of existence, perhaps turning into 2001-esque space-roving machines/energy beings who do not need a planet -- which we can then leave to the chimps and dolphins.
Think of the new ideas and concepts you might discover by creating a non-human culture; it's an easier way of doing it than meeting extraterrestrials.
We'd have to be careful not to create a mere mimic of our own society, of course, but if you read the Uplift novels you'll see Brin's conception of why that is unlikely to happen. As for the territorial instincts of chimps, humans are way more territorial than chimps. And I'm much more interested in the Uplift of dolphins than chimps, to tell you the truth... the difference between an aquatic species and our own would be far more interesting. Plus, uplifting an aquatic species would also remove any competition for territory: you guys get the ocean, we get the land.
It is true that SF is frequently -- even usually -- very badly written. It's not something we should be proud of. But this is not what attracts us to SF, it is the ideas and concepts, not the writing. If it was the writing, then "fiction" stories (the same old plots every time, in-depth explorations of the same emotions, endless iterations on the theme of "feelings" and "turmoil") set in a futuristic setting would not do well. This is why
(a) true geeks are frequently disappointed by supposed "sci-fi" movies, because they are just romance/cops-and-robbers/whatever stories rehashed in a futuristic/foreign environment, and
(b) why real SF is hugely popular with us, even when set in (moderately) mundane settings. Take the Matrix for example: 95% a standard action movie, but the concepts made it a huge geek favourite. That, and, in my particular case, the sight of Keanu in tight leather pants
It's not the writing, it's the ideas behind the writing that keeps us hooked. We wish the writing were better, but it's not essential.
Other inventions we could use that come from recent SF:
Any other suggestions? These are just the first ones to pop into my head...
Granted, practical subjects, which teach you actual physical skills in how to manipulate objects, are useful, but it is essentially true that you could also teach a monkey to do those things. The difficult part is the thought behind those actions; knowing whether to build a table, rather than how to build a table.
Students who are good at math (and other abstract subjects, like music for example) are treated as more "intelligent" because they are in fact more sentient, assuming it is possible to be "more sentient".
I would also say that students would be better prepared, and better educated, if more attention were paid to developing their capacity for abstract thought with :-)
(a) greater attention paid to math
(b) some or more attention paid to topics like music and, yes, computing where abstract, logical thought is often key (unless you're using a Microsoft product
Cool in theory, but limited in actual application, since a robot would need to be made out of certain materials, which would not necessarily be the ideal material to make the structure out of: using self-assembling robots made of metal and plastic to assemble a structure that would be better served by a block of carbon-concrete would be a waste of time. And the strength of a structure made of robots would worry me, too.
This is why no one suggests that nanobots should compose the structures they create; they will merely use nearby raw material to create it.
Standard problems: use PHP. Anything that is even vaguely similar to something already attempted in CGI can be done in PHP. PHP also excellently fulfills one of the prime requirements of CGI: as an interface to back-end technology. It's built-in support for a ridiculous variety of technologies in a very easy-to-use way puts it well ahead of the rest in this regard. For 95-98% of all scripting, PHP will do you just fine and get it done much quicker than the same task in Perl. PHP is faster to develop and, recently, faster to run than Perl.
Tricky stuff: Call in the big guns. For all its power, PHP falls down in the area of doing new and complicated things on a low level. You can, but it's a bit of a stretch. Perl excels at getting down into the guts of things and will produce (when properly used) tough, fast code that gets the job done, and IMHO will do it better than PHP can. You can then use PHP to take the results of the heavy processing that Perl has done and use it to easily create a nice interface.
Essentially, use PHP for interface work and use Perl for behind the scenes stuff, and don't get confused about which is which.
The reason it is both valuable and necessary to be able to store all kinds of documents in perpetuity is two-fold:
(a) you will never lose anything by having more information available to you
(b) only hindsight can tell you what kind of information will be valuable.
If we had been able to store all the information about past civilisations then we wouldn't need archaeologists, who are in essence glorified hardware-based search engines!
A far-fetched example to illustrate point B: far in the future, years after chickenpox and all other viral diseases have been eradicated, a random mutation creates a new chickenpox-like disease. Diseases were eradicated, so people decided storing information about how to cure them was unnecessary. The plague of ChickTwo wipes out all life on earth :-) (Hmm, I smell next year's blockbuster...)
A more down-to-earth example (I always think of them later) for point A would be that you encounter an engineering problem that was attempted but never solved years ago: it would seem documenting a failed attempt at doing something would be a bad idea, but in reality being able to check what everybody else has already tried would greatly accellerate your own attempts to solve the problem.
Information is going to be so easy to store in such large amounts that soon the issue of whether to bother to store it will fade away. What does need work, as numerous others have mentioned, are better search engines and methods of ranking items by relevance, not importance: this is not the same as throwing them away.
Relevance-based searching, as opposed to popularity-based, is why Google is a better search engine than most/all others.
The sooner the US has a software community instead of a software industry the better! I want free beer! :-) :-) The EPA would probably kick our asses for the hydrocarbon release though...
However, apart from the dangerous implications for commercial software, I'm worried about the effect on micro-programmers. I believe there was some question of liability if a programmer released software as "freeware" or some similarly badly-defined software. I'm pretty sure GPL is safe, but how many single-weekend programs have an agreement at all? People will stop releasing these often-useful programs if they have to go through the hassle of licensing each one.
If we're going to hold a demonstration, I vote we get 1000s of copies of boxed software and burn the shrinkwrap off them!
Of course, if you had a system which blew up the data if it got out of tracking range, you'd still lose the data.... so maybe this is all a dumb idea on my part :-)
(a) whenever the device was in a tunnel, out of signal, or whatever, you'd lose all your data!
(b) if you allow it to lose signal without a problem, then the person who steals it merely has to block it from the signal and they can run off with it.
How easy is it to block the signal from a GPS satellite? I heard the new units are more reliable (smaller wavelength) but I bet it still wouldn't work in the Tube :-) BY THE WAY, abusing style sheets can be fun...
While not nearly enough has been done to keep the shuttles up to date, some work has been done on the shuttles -- recently, as reported on Slashdot I believe, Columbia was fitted with a "glass cockpit" -- LCD displays instead of hardwired controls. The links shows work that's been done on Columbia, plus other info about Columbia in general.