The watches also include an infrared and wireless radio connection and a touch-screen display. This could make meeting interesting people a lot easier.
Imagine you're at a public place (a bar, a conference, a bus). Your watch contains some things you're interested in or that make you interesting (let's say you speak a weird language, have some furniture you want to sell, loved Stephen King's latest novel, are looking for someone to go white-water rafting next week). This information is continuously broadcast from your watch. Other people wearing/using a similar device can see a small picture of you if something catches their interest. They can then walk up to you and start up a conversation. Or if they're shy, call you or send an instant message.
Hotmail about to collapse under load I know other people have complained about the headline, but jeez guys, what kind of crummy and misleading sensationalism is that? Not to mention wishful thinking. Grow up.
Micropayments are definitely a holy grail for the internet
I'm sorry, this makes me sad, perhaps because on the internet I'm a user, not a publisher.
I live in France where for about 15 years they've had this thingy called the Minitel, which is basically a really dysfunctional Internet where you pay by the minute. It sucks pretty big time.
Please, I know things may happen whether we like them or not, but don't you like the free as in beer Internet? Don't you think it's tainted enough by money and commercialism as it is? Don't you see what a horror having to check your wallet whenever you do anything on the internet will be?
I know the term is "micro"payments. That sounds like your wallet doesn't take a significant hit. But don't be fooled.
Do you like highway tolls? Would you like to pay for every little trip you took in your car, more or less according to the hour or the type of road you drive? That kind of scheme already exists, and it's called taxes, and we pay plenty of those already. You want to pay "micro"taxes whenever you scratch your nose?
It's a cruel, uncaring net. Click carefully out there.
The point is, of course I click carefully if I'm at some random unknown web site. If I'm on Slashdot however, I have some measure of trust that writers are doing the Right Thing for the dozen or so stories they post every day, and that they're not cruel and uncaring.
Now, taking a shortcut to "just that information that's relevant" in a web site is sometimes justified, but often common courtesy is to point to some part of the site that the author would like you to point to. Slashdot generally respects this, even if the practice cannot be formalized.
So when you post a link that deliberately avoids the author's warnings about downloading, I find that's rude. Especially when it's combined with a self-important rant about why this is wrong or doomed or whatever due to Hofstadter's law or whatever. It has the unpleasant feeling of Slashdot pushing its weight around.
The number one reason I come to Slashdot is for the links. The second one is for the comments by users. The third, well after the first two, is for Slashdot staff opinion. Along with reason number one is trust in Slashdot's judgment on what you link to and, yes, how you link to it.
Or at least could timothy *please* put some content in the lead of each Slashback, such as a brief summary of each update/correction/feedback, so it's possible to decide whether you want click and read more details?
Also I don't find the humorous/ironic metaphor-fest that funny, anyway.
If you're serving.gif ads, in addition to specifying width and height, you could use basic JavaScript to only load the ad when the rest of the page has been completely loaded.
Something like this would run on Netscape >= 3 and IE > 3 (approximate, untested code):
I find these Slashback articles way too cute. I read Slashdot for news first, and for neato stylistic effects second or maybe fifth.
I like CmdrTaco's Quickies because they have a good news-to-verbiage ratio: often silly topics, but blissfully short and to the point. Slashback, on the other hand, gives you little or no idea of what it's talking about unless you click on the article and wade through even more cutesy titles and formulations.
Publishing errata and addenda is great, but they should be up there with the rest of the news, not buried in increasingly unreadable attempts at humor.
No doubt the guys at Slashdot feel the need to blow off steam in the constant pressure cooker of news and opinionated comments (like this grumpy one;), but come on, guys, isn't there a better way to do it, if the from the insert-clever-remark dept. line isn't enough for you?
Initially interested in how something could be done along those ideas, my eyes glazed over when I started looking at the referenced document. Clearly, it's not adressed to the general public or to anyone who knows much about the "new" economy. Who reads this kind of boilerplate, party-line prose?
'Knowledge is now the critical component to production, and access to it represents a key divide between rich and poor.' (OI ACC Planning Papers).
Oo, that's a deep insight isn't it. Glad they quoted the exact formulation by OI ACC, whoever or whatever it is.
This proposal specifically addresses the OI Global SCO 4.1
Gee that's nice. I guess bureaucrats can be as cryptic as geeks. But if this is a call to thought or action, it should be thought-provoking and inspiring, not as deadening as a 3-hour Party Chairman speech.
Heroes: Richard Stallman, Indigenous rights movements, Librarians.
A queer, sparse list, suggesting they're just tagging along to a new bandwagon they saw passing by. Or hopefully this is just a rough draft, 'cause it's too long and not interesting enough.
Sorry to be grumpy, but if you want to influence people outside your narrow circle (that is the whole point, no?), I suspect you need to make your argument in a more user-friendly way.
Maybe my problem is that for me, Adams has near-god status, and Pratchett just pales in comparison. To me. And he seems a little derivative too. I know many people like him though.
1. I remember Adams saying in an interview that he didn't read scifi much, because if it's bad, it's bad, and if it's good, he'll get jealous or depressed...
2. Personally I find Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett quite different: Adams is kind of a tortured, unproductive writer, whose every single word is weighed, with an elegant style and subtle humor when he can get something out; the only book I've read of Pratchett's I found not that funny, not that well written, and I tremble at the thought that there's 30 more of them (could be wrong). There's also that Adams is scifi, while Pratchett seems more like fantasy...
these users are committing theft by distributing MP3s Stupid question: is there anything wrong with having a lot of legally ripped MP3s (for own personal use) happen to appear on a server? Isn't it the people who download them that are committing theft? Suppose I want to share my entire hard disk (something I often do on the LAN at work, for convenience). Am I breaking the law if this allows people to make pirate copies of whatever software or music I legally have on my disk? That is, am I responsible for taking active steps to protect the stuff I own/have a license to use? What if I "don't realize" I'm sharing them?
As I remember the Orcs tend to resemble traditional Aryan enemies a lot, in their looks (swarthy), weapons (scimitars), language (which resemble Turkish or Arabic).
It's the kind of thing I didn't realize the first dozen times I read the book as a kid, and wouldn't have cared about much. Actually, I don't think I care about it much now -- art draws on deep parts of our collective unconscious.
I found the article scary when I read it, but less compelling when I tried to explain it to my girlfriend.
In the end Bill Joy seems worried by two very different things: 1. emergent intelligence, and 2. emergent ability to destroy our environment.
So far I see no evidence of 1. It could well turn out to be one of the "great failed hopes" Vernor Vinge writes about in his last book. Ray Kurzweil does a fair amount of hand-waving in his predictions, something he's pretty good at.
However there's been plenty of evidence of 2. for a long time. That's scary at lots of different levels, but it's nothing new. I find "gray goo" and the more mundane biological, environmental, military, industrial threats way scarier than AI.
Then there's the "demonstration that the world will end" that somebody told me a long time ago that I've never been able to disprove:
1. The power available to an individual is increasing over time. 2. Someday that power will include the ability to destroy the world. 3. In a given population, there's always a few crazies. 4. At some point, a crazy will have the power to destroy the world, and will do it.
And there's always the possibility that 4. will happen unintentionally, just by mistake...
What sort of interest is there in the slashdot comunity for a windows based open source project?"
I think the interest will be proportional first to the functionalities you plan to develop, and second to their portability.
There's no reason why an open source project developed for Windows wouldn't interest people interested in Open Source -- plenty of people have to deal with Windows. For myself, augmenting Windows with as much GNU software as possible makes me happy.
That is, if you're doing something useful, that doesn't already exist in open source, people will be interested. If in addition it does not tie you excessively to the platform (say for example, a pretty-printer for the DOS "DIR" command probably wouldn't interest anyone who didn't use Windows), than you would of course broaden that interest considerably, even if you don't even worry about portability at this point.
I'm happy to have read the Fool column. When I first got a DVD player on my PC a few months ago, I thought, cool, I can buy DVDs in the US (I'm American and live in France). Then I read about this region stuff, spent time on DVD FAQs, and had these reactions:
1. I was disappointed, 2. this felt somehow very wrong 3. I started to think of ways I could get around it 4. I started to feel like I might be cheating or stealing to get around it.
I'm happy now to read stuff that explains this is just STUPID!
Hi, OK, I still like Slashdot, still waste lotsa time on it, still learn from it. So you've been doing a great job for a long time.
I usually set my comment level at 3, mostly for time reasons (I don't usually want to spend time reading more than 10-20 comments). One thing I don't like at that level is a kind of uniformity of tone and opinion. I like to read wildly opposing opinions: in combination they're often more useful, not to mention more stimulating, than endless "slashdotically correct" prose.
So here's my idea to fix that, based on the Amazon.com feature: "people who purchased this book also purchased...", which I often find useful.
Everybody can moderate, though, like today, only selected people's moderation gets used for the "general" slashdot comment scores. Now that you get everybody's opinion on various comments, you can determine groups of similarly minded moderators (you can also use meta-moderation input for this). You could then propose a view of slashdot moderated by people who think like me, or rather, who think about thinking like me. There'd always be the option to return to the general mass-view, of course.
This would encourage high-quality moderation and possibly return us to the more personal, small-scale slashdot experience we use to have. Moderation would be more spontaneous, selfish, and less ponderous. Groups might evolve for the politically correct, the humor-seekers, the crude, those who value originality, facts, who knows what? Possibly these self-generating "communities", once identified, could be very valuable, and maybe make you even more money, but I'm sure you'd see that as a side-effect of a neat idea.
This is not so strange: if you don't already have a monopoly, then you favor open standards:
If your goal is to maintain a monopoly, jack up prices, and limit consumer choices, then you can't live with open standards.
Microsoft's browser has been more standards-compliant than Netscape's because it was, until recently, on the losing side of the browser wars.
Similarly, companies or countries tend to be in favor of free trade if they don't have a monopoly to protect, particularly if they want to break in to someone else's monopoly. But they will be protectionist if they have any hopes of maintaining their monopoly.
Simple, no? It's just immediate self-interest that determines what they do, not a global view of what's in the public's best interest. Welcome to capitalism as practised by the players.
Besides transmission of non-virtual things, bandwidth is the other reason the post office or equivalent physical-mail services will be around for a long time.
Say in the near future I've put my 500 records/CDs on a half-dozen MP3 DVDs, and I want to share them with my friends. Even assuming I only have cool friends with high-bandwidth connections, I bet they'll be happier to receive a small package in the mail then to have to wait a week until they've downloaded everything (my server will be happier too).
Same goes for movies, pictures, maps. It's best not to understimate the storage capacity of the physical world.
Slashdot Mirror
What a great idea! Too bad the Japanese have had devices like that for about two years.
Why too bad? Good for them. But I bet we could make it better and more "open", if what they have is anything like the phone services I know.
PS: No, not "ribit": coâa, coâa (French frog)
The watches also include an infrared and wireless radio connection and a touch-screen display.
This could make meeting interesting people a lot easier.
Imagine you're at a public place (a bar, a conference, a bus). Your watch contains some things you're interested in or that make you interesting (let's say you speak a weird language, have some furniture you want to sell, loved Stephen King's latest novel, are looking for someone to go white-water rafting next week). This information is continuously broadcast from your watch. Other people wearing/using a similar device can see a small picture of you if something catches their interest. They can then walk up to you and start up a conversation. Or if they're shy, call you or send an instant message.
Everything he says is true, or funny, or so wrong it's right, or endearingly mistaken. What can you do?
C'mon folks, this is what Netcraft has said; /. is merely quoting them.
/. opinion, not news.
I think it's a good story to post, it's just that the headline is false, and has nothing to do with the article they refer to.
They're just anticipating that maybe Hotmail will have troubles like the last time MS tried this, but that's strictly
Hotmail about to collapse under load
I know other people have complained about the headline, but jeez guys, what kind of crummy and misleading sensationalism is that? Not to mention wishful thinking. Grow up.
Micropayments are definitely a holy grail for the internet
I'm sorry, this makes me sad, perhaps because on the internet I'm a user, not a publisher.
I live in France where for about 15 years they've had this thingy called the Minitel, which is basically a really dysfunctional Internet where you pay by the minute. It sucks pretty big time.
Please, I know things may happen whether we like them or not, but don't you like the free as in beer Internet? Don't you think it's tainted enough by money and commercialism as it is? Don't you see what a horror having to check your wallet whenever you do anything on the internet will be?
I know the term is "micro"payments. That sounds like your wallet doesn't take a significant hit. But don't be fooled.
Do you like highway tolls? Would you like to pay for every little trip you took in your car, more or less according to the hour or the type of road you drive? That kind of scheme already exists, and it's called taxes, and we pay plenty of those already. You want to pay "micro"taxes whenever you scratch your nose?
This makes me sad.
Now, taking a shortcut to "just that information that's relevant" in a web site is sometimes justified, but often common courtesy is to point to some part of the site that the author would like you to point to. Slashdot generally respects this, even if the practice cannot be formalized.
So when you post a link that deliberately avoids the author's warnings about downloading, I find that's rude. Especially when it's combined with a self-important rant about why this is wrong or doomed or whatever due to Hofstadter's law or whatever. It has the unpleasant feeling of Slashdot pushing its weight around.
The number one reason I come to Slashdot is for the links. The second one is for the comments by users. The third, well after the first two, is for Slashdot staff opinion. Along with reason number one is trust in Slashdot's judgment on what you link to and, yes, how you link to it.
It's really boring.
Thanks for putting content in the lead -- it's a lot more readable.
Or at least could timothy *please* put some content in the lead of each Slashback, such as a brief summary of each update/correction/feedback, so it's possible to decide whether you want click and read more details?
Also I don't find the humorous/ironic metaphor-fest that funny, anyway.
Slashback too cute
If you're serving .gif ads, in addition to specifying width and height, you could use basic JavaScript to only load the ad when the rest of the page has been completely loaded.
Something like this would run on Netscape >= 3 and IE > 3 (approximate, untested code):
<html>
...
<script>
function getAd() {
document.images[0].src = "http//ads.com/some_ad.gif"
}
</script>
<body onLoad="getAd()">
...
I find these Slashback articles way too cute. I read Slashdot for news first, and for neato stylistic effects second or maybe fifth.
;), but come on, guys, isn't there a better way to do it, if the from the insert-clever-remark dept. line isn't enough for you?
I like CmdrTaco's Quickies because they have a good news-to-verbiage ratio: often silly topics, but blissfully short and to the point. Slashback, on the other hand, gives you little or no idea of what it's talking about unless you click on the article and wade through even more cutesy titles and formulations.
Publishing errata and addenda is great, but they should be up there with the rest of the news, not buried in increasingly unreadable attempts at humor.
No doubt the guys at Slashdot feel the need to blow off steam in the constant pressure cooker of news and opinionated comments (like this grumpy one
Initially interested in how something could be done along those ideas, my eyes glazed over when I started looking at the referenced document. Clearly, it's not adressed to the general public or to anyone who knows much about the "new" economy. Who reads this kind of boilerplate, party-line prose?
'Knowledge is now the critical component to production, and access to it represents a key divide between rich and poor.' (OI ACC Planning
Papers).
Oo, that's a deep insight isn't it. Glad they quoted the exact formulation by OI ACC, whoever or whatever it is.
This proposal specifically addresses the OI Global SCO 4.1
Gee that's nice. I guess bureaucrats can be as cryptic as geeks. But if this is a call to thought or action, it should be thought-provoking and inspiring, not as deadening as a 3-hour Party Chairman speech.
Heroes: Richard Stallman, Indigenous rights movements, Librarians.
A queer, sparse list, suggesting they're just tagging along to a new bandwagon they saw passing by. Or hopefully this is just a rough draft, 'cause it's too long and not interesting enough.
Sorry to be grumpy, but if you want to influence people outside your narrow circle (that is the whole point, no?), I suspect you need to make your argument in a more user-friendly way.
I think the first one, I forget the title.
Maybe my problem is that for me, Adams has near-god status, and Pratchett just pales in comparison. To me. And he seems a little derivative too. I know many people like him though.
Can't resist giving this one a shot:
1. I remember Adams saying in an interview that he didn't read scifi much, because if it's bad, it's bad, and if it's good, he'll get jealous or depressed...
2. Personally I find Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett quite different: Adams is kind of a tortured, unproductive writer, whose every single word is weighed, with an elegant style and subtle humor when he can get something out; the only book I've read of Pratchett's I found not that funny, not that well written, and I tremble at the thought that there's 30 more of them (could be wrong). There's also that Adams is scifi, while Pratchett seems more like fantasy...
these users are committing theft by distributing MP3s
Stupid question: is there anything wrong with having a lot of legally ripped MP3s (for own personal use) happen to appear on a server?
Isn't it the people who download them that are committing theft?
Suppose I want to share my entire hard disk (something I often do on the LAN at work, for convenience). Am I breaking the law if this allows people to make pirate copies of whatever software or music I legally have on my disk? That is, am I responsible for taking active steps to protect the stuff I own/have a license to use? What if I "don't realize" I'm sharing them?
As I remember the Orcs tend to resemble traditional Aryan enemies a lot, in their looks (swarthy), weapons (scimitars), language (which resemble Turkish or Arabic).
It's the kind of thing I didn't realize the first dozen times I read the book as a kid, and wouldn't have cared about much. Actually, I don't think I care about it much now -- art draws on deep parts of our collective unconscious.
I found the article scary when I read it, but less compelling when I tried to explain it to my girlfriend.
In the end Bill Joy seems worried by two very different things: 1. emergent intelligence, and 2. emergent ability to destroy our environment.
So far I see no evidence of 1. It could well turn out to be one of the "great failed hopes" Vernor Vinge writes about in his last book. Ray Kurzweil does a fair amount of hand-waving in his predictions, something he's pretty good at.
However there's been plenty of evidence of 2. for a long time. That's scary at lots of different levels, but it's nothing new. I find "gray goo" and the more mundane biological, environmental, military, industrial threats way scarier than AI.
Then there's the "demonstration that the world will end" that somebody told me a long time ago that I've never been able to disprove:
1. The power available to an individual is increasing over time.
2. Someday that power will include the ability to destroy the world.
3. In a given population, there's always a few crazies.
4. At some point, a crazy will have the power to destroy the world, and will do it.
And there's always the possibility that 4. will happen unintentionally, just by mistake...
There's no reason why an open source project developed for Windows wouldn't interest people interested in Open Source -- plenty of people have to deal with Windows. For myself, augmenting Windows with as much GNU software as possible makes me happy.
That is, if you're doing something useful, that doesn't already exist in open source, people will be interested. If in addition it does not tie you excessively to the platform (say for example, a pretty-printer for the DOS "DIR" command probably wouldn't interest anyone who didn't use Windows), than you would of course broaden that interest considerably, even if you don't even worry about portability at this point.
I'm happy to have read the Fool column. When I first got a DVD player on my PC a few months ago, I thought, cool, I can buy DVDs in the US (I'm American and live in France). Then I read about this region stuff, spent time on DVD FAQs, and had these reactions:
1. I was disappointed,
2. this felt somehow very wrong
3. I started to think of ways I could get around it
4. I started to feel like I might be cheating or stealing to get around it.
I'm happy now to read stuff that explains this is just STUPID!
is that bogus stories about it, like the one about Linux becoming the "official" OS of China, are posted here.
What's next? Linux Rumored To Be Most Popular OS on Mars! or maybe Previously Unknown Abyssal Fish Species Rumored Never To Use Windows!
Give us a break... Real news from China might be interesting, however.
kai
Hi, OK, I still like Slashdot, still waste lotsa time on it, still learn from it. So you've been doing a great job for a long time.
I usually set my comment level at 3, mostly for time reasons (I don't usually want to spend time reading more than 10-20 comments). One thing I don't like at that level is a kind of uniformity of tone and opinion. I like to read wildly opposing opinions: in combination they're often more useful, not to mention more stimulating, than endless "slashdotically correct" prose.
So here's my idea to fix that, based on the Amazon.com feature: "people who purchased this book also purchased...", which I often find useful.
Everybody can moderate, though, like today, only selected people's moderation gets used for the "general" slashdot comment scores. Now that you get everybody's opinion on various comments, you can determine groups of similarly minded moderators (you can also use meta-moderation input for this). You could then propose a view of slashdot moderated by people who think like me, or rather, who think about thinking like me. There'd always be the option to return to the general mass-view, of course.
This would encourage high-quality moderation and possibly return us to the more personal, small-scale slashdot experience we use to have. Moderation would be more spontaneous, selfish, and less ponderous. Groups might evolve for the politically correct, the humor-seekers, the crude, those who value originality, facts, who knows what? Possibly these self-generating "communities", once identified, could be very valuable, and maybe make you even more money, but I'm sure you'd see that as a side-effect of a neat idea.
k a i
This is not so strange: if you don't already have a monopoly, then you favor open standards:
If your goal is to maintain a monopoly, jack up prices, and limit consumer choices, then you can't live with open standards.
Microsoft's browser has been more standards-compliant than Netscape's because it was, until recently, on the losing side of the browser wars.
Similarly, companies or countries tend to be in favor of free trade if they don't have a monopoly to protect, particularly if they want to break in to someone else's monopoly. But they will be protectionist if they have any hopes of maintaining their monopoly.
Simple, no? It's just immediate self-interest that determines what they do, not a global view of what's in the public's best interest. Welcome to capitalism as practised by the players.
Who cares?
Besides transmission of non-virtual things, bandwidth is the other reason the post office or equivalent physical-mail services will be around for a long time.
Say in the near future I've put my 500 records/CDs on a half-dozen MP3 DVDs, and I want to share them with my friends. Even assuming I only have cool friends with high-bandwidth connections, I bet they'll be happier to receive a small package in the mail then to have to wait a week until they've downloaded everything (my server will be happier too).
Same goes for movies, pictures, maps. It's best not to understimate the storage capacity of the physical world.