Despite all the Linux crowd rants you have attracted, I have to say I agree with you totally.
Word is a dog.
BUT...
You have to come up with something obviously better. An order of magnitude better.
Otherwise you are a geek, in the worst meanings of the word. You have no understanding of how the real world works, you think that best=winner, except that's not what happens.
STOP BITCHING
Take the power which Moores Law has given you and come up with something obviously better, otherwise
GIVE UP, Word has won.
PS I use Word, rather than MS Word, since that is the extent to which it has won. Wordprocessing = Word - and its going to take something spectacular to change that.
"Because of all the Word viruses, my firewall doesn't allow MS Word through. Try saving it as RTF and you'll have more luck."
That way you have a good reason, and you question their sanity for using Word.
No usual user has heard of Linux, but they are afraid of virii and will do anything you say.
There's a reason that stealth aircraft travel subsonic, anything going faster than Mach 1 is VERY detectable, and trackable.
As for interception, just throw something reasonably solid in front of the missile. Don't forget, at that speed it is very difficult to detect and avoid something in enough time.
There is one reason to go fast, so that your difficult to stop. Cruise missiles have to go too far to be practical users of this in anything but the final stages (for which you use a conventional ramjet).
I have to say, the moderation on Slashdot is just plain crap.
Hundreds of boring comments saying nothing interesting on the subject, and two dimwits moderate this down.
Fuck you lot then.
Sure memory is cheap. So is hard disk space, processor power and just about everything else we used to lust after.
Problem is, even though just about everything is at least an order of magnitude, well MORE, than it was 5 years ago; we are STILL just doing the same old things with it.
Granted we now have MP3 players and Tivos; but where are the dramatically different day-to-day machines. Why is it I'm still stuck in front of a machine which at heart isn't much different to the old PC XT?
Is it going to roll around to 2030 and I'll be sitting in front of a 2,000,000 GHz Pentium X with 16,000 Gb memory and a 1000 Tb - and still be trying to get Microsoft Word to deal with a document bigger than 10 pages ?
When do we get a step change in the underlying structure? When do we start using this massive power for something more impressive than spinning a chart in a Powerpoint presentation ?
But for now warfare is needed to stabilize the situation.
Warfare isn't there to stabilise, its there to shake up things. The usual hope is that you can then use that instability to your benefit - to impose your will.
Problem is, the issue here is an idea. The idea that the US is the 'satan' and that it should.... MUST.... be fought. This approach does nothing to shake that idea, instead it reinforces it.
Sure, this will shake the obvious command and control - however that's not the real battlefield.
I sure hope they have a whole lot of food, its the best weapon they currently have in their limited arsenal.
Basically what's needed is more imagination. Support the afghan people, supply food, ignore the Talaban, say that you don't accept their legitimacy......and send in the Special Forces to find and remove the key individuals.
Above all, appear to the rest of the Arab world as a country that doesn't need to play silly games, one that is something to be looked up to rather than down upon. And one not to be underestimated.
The unfortunate reality is that everything the US is doing is predictable, and almost certainly HAS been predicted. Hence the response will already be in place.
I fear the US may win the battle and lose the war.
Looks like they are playing the same old gameplan. Knock out comms and power, limit government control, pick up the pieces and attempt to win hearts and minds.
Question is, what will the response be?
I'd expect the Arab countries to close ranks, to say that this is the end, not the beginning. I'd expect pictures of civilian dead. And I'd expect another type of strike back - another 'terrorist' attack, probably outside the US.
Just how do you win a war against an idea, one that can survive the death of any one person?
Sure lots of people died, sure it was a shock to you that warfare is now global.
However, speaking as someone who has lived through a sustained series of terrorist bombing attempts, fixating on it is the worst thing you can do.
You could die tomorrow, under a car.
You could choke on a peanut.
You get on and live your life instead. You accept that your understanding of the way the world works was wrong; you adapt.
You live in the moment. That moment might include a LAN party.
You need to get a grip. Living life is what's important. Growing to be more than you are at the moment is important. Some god-fearing nutter is not important. Not unless you can DO something about it - and YOU can't.
"We, the majority of the world inhabitants have got more than a little bored and annoyed by obvious flaws in your patent and legal system. We see no reason why either should prevent successful invention and manufacture, and thus henceforth we will be setting aside any and all patents claims made on US patents until it can be demonstrated that you have reformed the system and removed bogus patents."
God I'd love to see someone make this happen. It seems that until someone makes the US government get off their fat backsides they do nothing, about anything.
This example IS obvious, as are many of the US patents. It seems the US patent system lets anything through, then hopes the courts will discard the bad ones. The upshot is that someone who actually has the guts to do something gets ambushed by spurious patent claims, and rather than paying loads of money for the court case pays the licence fee.
The US government has a responsibility to fix their flawed system. What will make them take it seriously?
Re:We can find you, anywhere, anytime.
on
GPS Meets PCS
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Put your turned off mobile in an antistatic bag. That should be enough to prevent any signals.
Face it, even if you are the most law abiding person around, DivX;) performs the useful task of limiting the film studios power.
Without a force to counter the natural greed of big business they will milk anything, and everything, to the last drop. Control the actors and directors, control the content, control the distribution, control the branding. Maximise the return on investiment, minimise the risk. Piracy provides a countering force, and DivX;) is the latest tool to effect that force.
Once government might have fulfiled that limitation role, might have kept big business in check, but no longer. Do you think they pay attention to what the public say? Providing they won't talk with their feet (and they won't), then the movie companies know they can ignore the protests - just mouth reassurances.
Now when the movie studios want to increase prices, there is a counter. When they want to limit distribution to the timing they like, there is a counter. When they want to only distribute their choices, there is a counter.
Piracy is the only effective weapon to really be noticed by big business. Say thank you.
I read the collected comments here and I wonder if human intelligence has much to recommend it?
So many responders seem completely wrapped up some simple minded arguments.
I'm creative, computers aren't, I'm superior.
Well, are you that creative? What do you mean by creativity? There have been computers that paint, computers that compose, computers that win at chess, and computers that can create patents (remember the slashdot story?). Humans are basically limited to keeping seven elements in their heads at once, coupled with some sematic connections from their constrained knowledge store. Computers don't have the same limitations, expect them to come up with different types of ideas, but don't get too fired up about how wonderful human creativity is, there are whole classes of innovation that we are extremely poor at.
Computers aren't intelligent, therefore computers will never be intelligent.
Take a look at some of the info available on Vinge's Singularity. If you make some reasonable assumptions about where we are today, and the scalability of intelligence, then human level intelligence is only 35 years away. I personally doubt this intelligence will be the same as ours, but I'm fairly confident that it is possible. Things only really start getting interesting when computers start designing themselves, which is beginning to happen in chip design. Maybe software design is next, after all its a limited set of well defined elements with set patterns in algorithms - seems quite possible...
Expect to see computers exceed humans in certain narrow fields first, say chess or chip design, etc. and then grow out from there.
Hawkings is losing his marbles/doesn't know what he's talking about.
Excuse me, but who told you that you were fit to judge? Hawkings has a track record of understanding complex things and coming up with new ideas. He maybe right, he maybe wrong, but until you have managed to equal his record you don't really have the right to state he's wrong.
No way would I turn myself into an android.
Fine, who cares? Ignoring for a moment the number of devices which commonly get used to suppliment or extend human capability, your entitled to not supplement your intelligence, or that of your children.
What your not entitled to do is stop others, or bitch about it when they get the jobs and you don't. IA, genetic modification, or any one of a whole series of other possibilities is a personal decision, but commercial/evolutionary pressures will drive it forward at a rate that I don't feel you are ready to accept. Tough.
The reality is, computers will continue to get smarter, very probably at an exponential rate. Human intelligence is currently fixed. At some time they cross.
Get used to it.
Or, look seriously at the ways in which your intelligence could be expanded, be it genetic modification, or IA, or just life long learning and early nights.
What makes you think they are doing this for passenger flight ?
Imagine a shell, or a missile, fitted with one of these scramjets. High speed = higher impact energy & greater range.
Maybe they will use them as part of NMD as a last ditch weapon? You can imagine a developed version having the speed to reach the reentry vehicle, and the energy to do something about it when it did.
As the fun over the unaffordability of a Concorde replacement has shown, passenger aircraft is the last thing on their minds.
Providing you accept that the growth of the Internet/Web is a revolution, the question remains: Why do you think this is still the dawn ?
One of the obvious trends that information technology brings about is the shortening of the time between inception and acceptance. It steepens the s-curve. In short, predicting the future of the Internet from the time it took for the steam engine to change the world is a mug's game - the world of today isn't that world.
True, the human machine can only accept change at a certain rate. But even that rate is increasing. In prehistory the adoption of a new technology took hundreds of years. By the time of the railroad it was 50-100. Today we are closer to 5-10 years. We are conditioned to accept change at a faster rate, to latch on to the latest and newest every year, not every generation.
My guess is that we have basically passed the inflection point for adoption of the Internet/Web Mk1. Many people are out there trying to find its replacement, the Internet/Web Mk2. Maybe its wearable computers and wireless; maybe its the semantic web. While it will have its roots in the Internet of today, it will be different.
Yes, the Internet is a revolution, but its nearly over. Long live the next revolution.
I always thought that for something to be patented it had to be non obvious, and the product of creative thought.
Anything that this array of GP computers can create by a process of natural selection must by definition be an obvious consequence of the basic building blocks. After all, no creative thought it being exercised here, just a purely mechanical process.
If so, those patents must have been granted in error (not an uncommon thing for the patent system), and so should be revoked immediately.
That goes for anything else that can be evolved in a similar way.
Maybe we have an automatic way of weeding the many bad patents out of the system. I wonder if the powers that be will be interested...
By all means learn what an MBA has to teach. If nothing else it will allow you to understand what certain managers are talking about.
But
You will very quickly realise that just about every managment fad is lacking an intellectual rigour. You will see through the 2 by 2 matrices and think, but...
Only go for a full MBA course if you really want the type of post that goes with one - otherwise just read the books and think.
Most MBAs tend to focus on very iffy concepts, which don't standup to serious thought, let alone reality. So if you do read the books, make sure you read the 'other' books as well - particularly those that say that you don't really need those people with MBAs in the first place.
I thought the idea was the bigger the corporation, the slower moving and more like a dinosaur it was ?
I thought the small, agile, companies were going to rule in this era of increasing change ?
What went wrong ?
Some of those stats explain part of it; companies that are countries in all but name (you are now entering Walmartland). They have the size to weather a few years of storms, and the size to gobble up any smaller player they want.
The smaller companies can nibble around the edges, but seldom do they want to take on a massive company head on - potential agility counts for nothing when you've a rampaging elephant bearing down on you and you've been hamstrung by their rules and regs.
However, at heart those companies are just people. If you want to change the way the company acts, change the way the people act. If its socially unacceptable to drink and drive, make it socially unacceptable to profit from others misery, to act like sheep rather than citizens in the company setting.
Yes, but he says he's 'European', which is something no true English man would ever state . Hence it probably means he was on the 'other' side during the war.
The technology for remotely piloted or fully autonomous operation has been around for years; after all hook up the FMC with ground sensing radar and missile approach warners and your half way there.
The problem has always been the lawyers.
"What if X happens, what if Y happens". "No, you can't use these in war - you might kill someone not originally specified as the objective, we could be sued". Couple that with the unwillingness of the fly boys to see their careers shot down and you have the current situation.
Take a look a LOCAAS, its much more the likely future of such things, small, cheap, autonomous and effective. Who needs to spend x million, the tech isn't that difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
Word is a dog.
BUT...
You have to come up with something obviously better. An order of magnitude better.
Otherwise you are a geek, in the worst meanings of the word. You have no understanding of how the real world works, you think that best=winner, except that's not what happens.
STOP BITCHING
Take the power which Moores Law has given you and come up with something obviously better, otherwise
GIVE UP, Word has won.
PS I use Word, rather than MS Word, since that is the extent to which it has won. Wordprocessing = Word - and its going to take something spectacular to change that.
That way you have a good reason, and you question their sanity for using Word.
No usual user has heard of Linux, but they are afraid of virii and will do anything you say.
As for interception, just throw something reasonably solid in front of the missile. Don't forget, at that speed it is very difficult to detect and avoid something in enough time.
There is one reason to go fast, so that your difficult to stop. Cruise missiles have to go too far to be practical users of this in anything but the final stages (for which you use a conventional ramjet).
$1000 a year to develop and use .NET, and in doing so help to protect and bolster Microsoft's position. Sounds like fair recompense.
Sounds like its very worthwhile.
Hang on, they want ME to pay THEM.....not the other way round?
Is that right?
Microsoft. Go for a long walk off a short pier.
I have to say, the moderation on Slashdot is just plain crap. Hundreds of boring comments saying nothing interesting on the subject, and two dimwits moderate this down. Fuck you lot then.
Problem is, even though just about everything is at least an order of magnitude, well MORE, than it was 5 years ago; we are STILL just doing the same old things with it.
Granted we now have MP3 players and Tivos; but where are the dramatically different day-to-day machines. Why is it I'm still stuck in front of a machine which at heart isn't much different to the old PC XT?
Is it going to roll around to 2030 and I'll be sitting in front of a 2,000,000 GHz Pentium X with 16,000 Gb memory and a 1000 Tb - and still be trying to get Microsoft Word to deal with a document bigger than 10 pages ?
When do we get a step change in the underlying structure? When do we start using this massive power for something more impressive than spinning a chart in a Powerpoint presentation ?
Where is the brave new future?
What a moron.
Warfare isn't there to stabilise, its there to shake up things. The usual hope is that you can then use that instability to your benefit - to impose your will.
Problem is, the issue here is an idea. The idea that the US is the 'satan' and that it should .... MUST .... be fought. This approach does nothing to shake that idea, instead it reinforces it.
Sure, this will shake the obvious command and control - however that's not the real battlefield.
I sure hope they have a whole lot of food, its the best weapon they currently have in their limited arsenal.
Fighting won't either.
Basically what's needed is more imagination. Support the afghan people, supply food, ignore the Talaban, say that you don't accept their legitimacy......and send in the Special Forces to find and remove the key individuals.
Above all, appear to the rest of the Arab world as a country that doesn't need to play silly games, one that is something to be looked up to rather than down upon. And one not to be underestimated.
The unfortunate reality is that everything the US is doing is predictable, and almost certainly HAS been predicted. Hence the response will already be in place.
I fear the US may win the battle and lose the war.
Question is, what will the response be?
I'd expect the Arab countries to close ranks, to say that this is the end, not the beginning. I'd expect pictures of civilian dead. And I'd expect another type of strike back - another 'terrorist' attack, probably outside the US.
Just how do you win a war against an idea, one that can survive the death of any one person?
However, speaking as someone who has lived through a sustained series of terrorist bombing attempts, fixating on it is the worst thing you can do.
You could die tomorrow, under a car.
You could choke on a peanut.
You get on and live your life instead. You accept that your understanding of the way the world works was wrong; you adapt.
You live in the moment. That moment might include a LAN party.
You need to get a grip. Living life is what's important. Growing to be more than you are at the moment is important. Some god-fearing nutter is not important. Not unless you can DO something about it - and YOU can't.
God I'd love to see someone make this happen. It seems that until someone makes the US government get off their fat backsides they do nothing, about anything.
This example IS obvious, as are many of the US patents. It seems the US patent system lets anything through, then hopes the courts will discard the bad ones. The upshot is that someone who actually has the guts to do something gets ambushed by spurious patent claims, and rather than paying loads of money for the court case pays the licence fee.
The US government has a responsibility to fix their flawed system. What will make them take it seriously?
Faraday strikes back.
Without a force to counter the natural greed of big business they will milk anything, and everything, to the last drop. Control the actors and directors, control the content, control the distribution, control the branding. Maximise the return on investiment, minimise the risk. Piracy provides a countering force, and DivX;) is the latest tool to effect that force.
Once government might have fulfiled that limitation role, might have kept big business in check, but no longer. Do you think they pay attention to what the public say? Providing they won't talk with their feet (and they won't), then the movie companies know they can ignore the protests - just mouth reassurances.
Now when the movie studios want to increase prices, there is a counter. When they want to limit distribution to the timing they like, there is a counter. When they want to only distribute their choices, there is a counter.
Piracy is the only effective weapon to really be noticed by big business. Say thank you.
So many responders seem completely wrapped up some simple minded arguments.
Well, are you that creative? What do you mean by creativity? There have been computers that paint, computers that compose, computers that win at chess, and computers that can create patents (remember the slashdot story?). Humans are basically limited to keeping seven elements in their heads at once, coupled with some sematic connections from their constrained knowledge store. Computers don't have the same limitations, expect them to come up with different types of ideas, but don't get too fired up about how wonderful human creativity is, there are whole classes of innovation that we are extremely poor at.
Take a look at some of the info available on Vinge's Singularity. If you make some reasonable assumptions about where we are today, and the scalability of intelligence, then human level intelligence is only 35 years away. I personally doubt this intelligence will be the same as ours, but I'm fairly confident that it is possible. Things only really start getting interesting when computers start designing themselves, which is beginning to happen in chip design. Maybe software design is next, after all its a limited set of well defined elements with set patterns in algorithms - seems quite possible...
Expect to see computers exceed humans in certain narrow fields first, say chess or chip design, etc. and then grow out from there.
Excuse me, but who told you that you were fit to judge? Hawkings has a track record of understanding complex things and coming up with new ideas. He maybe right, he maybe wrong, but until you have managed to equal his record you don't really have the right to state he's wrong.
Fine, who cares? Ignoring for a moment the number of devices which commonly get used to suppliment or extend human capability, your entitled to not supplement your intelligence, or that of your children.
What your not entitled to do is stop others, or bitch about it when they get the jobs and you don't. IA, genetic modification, or any one of a whole series of other possibilities is a personal decision, but commercial/evolutionary pressures will drive it forward at a rate that I don't feel you are ready to accept. Tough.
The reality is, computers will continue to get smarter, very probably at an exponential rate. Human intelligence is currently fixed. At some time they cross.
Get used to it.
Or, look seriously at the ways in which your intelligence could be expanded, be it genetic modification, or IA, or just life long learning and early nights.
Lets be honest, you need it.
Imagine a shell, or a missile, fitted with one of these scramjets. High speed = higher impact energy & greater range.
Maybe they will use them as part of NMD as a last ditch weapon? You can imagine a developed version having the speed to reach the reentry vehicle, and the energy to do something about it when it did.
As the fun over the unaffordability of a Concorde replacement has shown, passenger aircraft is the last thing on their minds.
One of the obvious trends that information technology brings about is the shortening of the time between inception and acceptance. It steepens the s-curve. In short, predicting the future of the Internet from the time it took for the steam engine to change the world is a mug's game - the world of today isn't that world.
True, the human machine can only accept change at a certain rate. But even that rate is increasing. In prehistory the adoption of a new technology took hundreds of years. By the time of the railroad it was 50-100. Today we are closer to 5-10 years. We are conditioned to accept change at a faster rate, to latch on to the latest and newest every year, not every generation.
My guess is that we have basically passed the inflection point for adoption of the Internet/Web Mk1. Many people are out there trying to find its replacement, the Internet/Web Mk2. Maybe its wearable computers and wireless; maybe its the semantic web. While it will have its roots in the Internet of today, it will be different.
Yes, the Internet is a revolution, but its nearly over. Long live the next revolution.
Anything that this array of GP computers can create by a process of natural selection must by definition be an obvious consequence of the basic building blocks. After all, no creative thought it being exercised here, just a purely mechanical process.
If so, those patents must have been granted in error (not an uncommon thing for the patent system), and so should be revoked immediately.
That goes for anything else that can be evolved in a similar way.
Maybe we have an automatic way of weeding the many bad patents out of the system. I wonder if the powers that be will be interested ...
What happens with the IS department head gets delusions of adequacy.
But
You will very quickly realise that just about every managment fad is lacking an intellectual rigour. You will see through the 2 by 2 matrices and think, but...
Only go for a full MBA course if you really want the type of post that goes with one - otherwise just read the books and think.
Most MBAs tend to focus on very iffy concepts, which don't standup to serious thought, let alone reality. So if you do read the books, make sure you read the 'other' books as well - particularly those that say that you don't really need those people with MBAs in the first place.
-
Both attempt to impose their world view on everyone else
-
Both protect themselves above the good of the world.
-
Both spy on their friends for commercial gain.
-
Both are overly proud of their own countries, despite the obvious problems and inadaquacies.
The only difference, the US is big enough to get its way - at the moment.When China's economy grows large enough to take its place at the foremost world nation, then things could get really dangerous.
Remember, France used to be a world power, and it didn't disappear quietly.
I thought the small, agile, companies were going to rule in this era of increasing change ?
What went wrong ?
Some of those stats explain part of it; companies that are countries in all but name (you are now entering Walmartland). They have the size to weather a few years of storms, and the size to gobble up any smaller player they want.
The smaller companies can nibble around the edges, but seldom do they want to take on a massive company head on - potential agility counts for nothing when you've a rampaging elephant bearing down on you and you've been hamstrung by their rules and regs.
However, at heart those companies are just people. If you want to change the way the company acts, change the way the people act. If its socially unacceptable to drink and drive, make it socially unacceptable to profit from others misery, to act like sheep rather than citizens in the company setting.
In short, how worried are you really ?
They were spared SPAM.
- a consumer friendly box with
- an MPEG2/4 encoder/decoder,
- space for several hard disks (IDE)
- a floppy drive,
- ability to accept a CD or DVD burner,
- and a remote control.
Oh, and no media mogul friendly protection.I will then add one or more of my old hard disks, get schedule updates online, and add them with the floppy drive.
Such a thing should cost ~£150 (~$200), right in the hot part of the market, it would sell millions.
Surely someone will create it?
The technology for remotely piloted or fully autonomous operation has been around for years; after all hook up the FMC with ground sensing radar and missile approach warners and your half way there.
The problem has always been the lawyers.
"What if X happens, what if Y happens". "No, you can't use these in war - you might kill someone not originally specified as the objective, we could be sued". Couple that with the unwillingness of the fly boys to see their careers shot down and you have the current situation.
Take a look a LOCAAS, its much more the likely future of such things, small, cheap, autonomous and effective. Who needs to spend x million, the tech isn't that difficult.
And that is what really frightens the DoD guys.