I think they are only talking about the location of the Voyager spacecraft as a reference, I don't think there's any suggestion that they would have been expected to detect a large scale effect like this. It would be like expecting to determine the shape of the Mid Atlantic Ridge from two Bathyscaphe dives.
I was reminded of Richard Feynman's story about how he couldn't make head nor tail of what his literature and philosophy professors were writing about, so he wrote about what he wanted to, dressed it up with some of the jargon, and got A and B+ on his papers anyway. There's no content there, it's all about making the psychobabble sound right.
The character is not a "skin", not part of the user interface. A character is part of the content. The user interface, the skin, is in the controls, the dialogs, the framing of the game. Skins don't need to be customizable by the user interface, either. I've used the programs JWZ is talking about. Creating a new skin is like creating a complete new UI from scratch. Nobody bothers with it... they still have to suffer from the restrictions and limitations built into the UI to support skins.
All video games are skinned applications, they all have a unique UI. I don't know a single video game that uses the native OS UI, and I don't recall a single video game where I haven't some time or another wanted to apply Makali's audio-cock technology to the author.
Eugene, you're welcome to create your own network with controlled access and tight protocol control. It will fail horribly, but you're welcome to try.
There were dozens of network in the '80s, competing with the Internet. The Internet won because it was open. If the Internet hadn't been open, something else that *was* would have won instead.
There is not enough schadenfreude in the world to satisfy the demand when it comes to Microsoft pulling something like "a Microsoft-made plug-in pushed to Firefox users eight months ago in an update delivered via Windows Update."
Come on, you tell me, what on earth justifies that?
But if you're an educated person of culture and refinement, you don't like reading on a computer screen. You enjoy the tactile sensation of turning pages and reading real books.
Bah, this newfangled "paper" stuff is pretty cheap and nasty looking when you compare it with real parchment. Educated people are willing to pay extra for professionally illuminated manuscripts.
"I have sent for you, Dodgers, because we are facing a crisis. The world supply of Illudium Phosdex, the shaving cream atom, is alarmingly low. Now we have reason to believe that the only remaining source is on Planet X, somewhere in this area."
"And you want me to find Planet X, eh?"
"Can you do it, Dodgers?
"Indubitubly, sir, because there's no one knows his way around outer space like... Duck Dodgers, in the twenty-fourth and a half century!"
Bring back the menu bar, the task bar, the simple start menu. Adding more layers of spam to the user interface doesn't make me happy. Simplify, simplify, simplify...
Mine objects to me dropping a vowel in the middle of a hole and getting 21 points from two words at once, instead of "opening up the board" with an 8 letter word that nets me 12 points and sets her up for a triple.
There's only a factor of 8 difference between a typical scan dose and one large enough to cause hair loss and skin damage?
Yeh, that's what I was thinking. I thought that X ray machines were designed to stay well away from dangerous levels these days. I'll keep that in mind next time my doctor suggests a CT scan.
Yes, but more than that, you have to trust your ISP.
I have to trust my doctor, as well.
I don't, however, have to trust my ISP plus everyone in my friends list on Facebook or all my followers on Twitter.
So I take it you either don't use email for talking about those things, or you run your own server, right?
As it happens, I do run my own server (and have since the mid-80s), but that's a peripheral issue. There are a huge variety of email service providers who provide a huge variety of degrees of anonymity, pseudonymity, and terms of service. None of them (openly, at least) offer "spy on your friends private lives" as a service option.
Application centric user interfaces are already a problem. On both Windows and Mac these days there's an increasing level of application-centric organization, and that breaks the task-centric workflow badly. I normally have a separate workspace for each task, with windows from each application all visible simultaneously. I can surround each primary document with windows of all sizes, to the sides, above, and below. The 10/GUI control model looks very very good, and would work well for a multi-desktop window-oriented workflow, but the Con10uum user interface would be a huge obstacle multi-document workflow.
OK, maybe it could have been reduced to one slash, since there's no:/ smiley elsewhere in the URL pattern, but you need to be able to distinguish relative URLs from absolute ones. Without some unique token sequence that was guaranteed not to occur elsewhere in a URI you're going to run into problems. Start removing components from a fully specified URI and see how quickly you run into ambiguities:
The reasons for the// convention for the "super root" in networks like OpenNet and FutureNet, that he was copying, are still valid in URIs. You need something that's easily parsed by computers, and easily recognized by humans. When I first saw the syntax I was all "slash slash whiskey tango foxtrot?", but after using it for a while I was convinced that I was wrong and he was right, and even if he's forgotten why... I still think he was right the first time.
Would you trust Facebook, with its odd history of rights control, with a corporate Excel file?
Hell no. I wouldn't even trust Facebook to reassure my mother about a doctor's visit, or talk to my brother about his family. It's creepy the things people use social networking tools for, sometimes. It's like going down to the local bar and yelling out the results of your blood tests to whatever yobboes happened to be in earshot.
Yes, technically, email can be intercepted. So can phone calls and physical letters. And someone can be listening in on you in the restaurant, even if you keep your voice down. But... damn...
There is no measurable or meaningful difference between the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many Worlds model. The collapse of the state vector is a simplifying assumption, not a measurable event. Quantum Solipsism is an oversimplification... nervous tissue is designed to damp, not magnify, quantum noise. That's why it takes multiple photons hitting a cell in your retina to trigger the effect of light. So when you pull the trigger, any quantum level events that determined whether your state vector is going to be entangled with the bullet's state vector happened long before you spun the barrel. Quantum physics isn't an end run around macroscopic determinism.
But that'll generate a negative space wedgie of enormous power! We'll have to counter it with a swirly energy thingy and we're over budget for CGI this episode!
We're already hitting clock speed "brownouts", and using parallel processing to get around them. To really tell where the limits are you need to look at how small you can make a processor (best case, something like say one bit per Planck length) and how much latency you can afford as information propagates from processor to processor at the speed of light or less.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they are only talking about the location of the Voyager spacecraft as a reference, I don't think there's any suggestion that they would have been expected to detect a large scale effect like this. It would be like expecting to determine the shape of the Mid Atlantic Ridge from two Bathyscaphe dives.
Adults don't use obscenity as punctuation.
I was reminded of Richard Feynman's story about how he couldn't make head nor tail of what his literature and philosophy professors were writing about, so he wrote about what he wanted to, dressed it up with some of the jargon, and got A and B+ on his papers anyway. There's no content there, it's all about making the psychobabble sound right.
The character is not a "skin", not part of the user interface. A character is part of the content. The user interface, the skin, is in the controls, the dialogs, the framing of the game. Skins don't need to be customizable by the user interface, either. I've used the programs JWZ is talking about. Creating a new skin is like creating a complete new UI from scratch. Nobody bothers with it... they still have to suffer from the restrictions and limitations built into the UI to support skins.
All video games are skinned applications, they all have a unique UI. I don't know a single video game that uses the native OS UI, and I don't recall a single video game where I haven't some time or another wanted to apply Makali's audio-cock technology to the author.
Eugene, you're welcome to create your own network with controlled access and tight protocol control. It will fail horribly, but you're welcome to try.
There were dozens of network in the '80s, competing with the Internet. The Internet won because it was open. If the Internet hadn't been open, something else that *was* would have won instead.
There is not enough schadenfreude in the world to satisfy the demand when it comes to Microsoft pulling something like "a Microsoft-made plug-in pushed to Firefox users eight months ago in an update delivered via Windows Update."
Come on, you tell me, what on earth justifies that?
I think you meant to say "Back when giving someone internet access meant they gave me SOMETHING under the table, ...".
You do realize we're talking about people like Dilbert and Wally, right? o_O
But if you're an educated person of culture and refinement, you don't like reading on a computer screen. You enjoy the tactile sensation of turning pages and reading real books.
Bah, this newfangled "paper" stuff is pretty cheap and nasty looking when you compare it with real parchment. Educated people are willing to pay extra for professionally illuminated manuscripts.
It was AOL joining the Internet that STARTED the problem, you newb.
When kiddies from the Eternal September are acting like crunchy old fogies, something is very wrong.
Back when Internet Access was something you got under the table, THEN it really MEANT something.
"I have sent for you, Dodgers, because we are facing a crisis. The world supply of Illudium Phosdex, the shaving cream atom, is alarmingly low. Now we have reason to believe that the only remaining source is on Planet X, somewhere in this area."
"And you want me to find Planet X, eh?"
"Can you do it, Dodgers?
"Indubitubly, sir, because there's no one knows his way around outer space like... Duck Dodgers, in the twenty-fourth and a half
century!"
You mean the big bubbly XP Start button and the safe rounded edges?
That's just a theme. You can turn that off and switch to Classic. Even in Vista. But not in Windows 7.
Bring back the menu bar, the task bar, the simple start menu. Adding more layers of spam to the user interface doesn't make me happy. Simplify, simplify, simplify...
You want intense, try playing Scrabble with the chief editor of an encyclopedia.
I think that's an excellent example of the ST:TNG writers (and many SF writers in general) just not thinking things through.
Oh yes, they definitely set themselves up the plot hole. I just appreciate the fact that they even bloody noticed.
Now my wife won't play Scrabble with me any more.
Mine objects to me dropping a vowel in the middle of a hole and getting 21 points from two words at once, instead of "opening up the board" with an 8 letter word that nets me 12 points and sets her up for a triple.
The machine didn't build itself!
SPEAK FOR YOURSELF, MEATSACK!
There's only a factor of 8 difference between a typical scan dose and one large enough to cause hair loss and skin damage?
Yeh, that's what I was thinking. I thought that X ray machines were designed to stay well away from dangerous levels these days. I'll keep that in mind next time my doctor suggests a CT scan.
Yes, but more than that, you have to trust your ISP.
I have to trust my doctor, as well.
I don't, however, have to trust my ISP plus everyone in my friends list on Facebook or all my followers on Twitter.
So I take it you either don't use email for talking about those things, or you run your own server, right?
As it happens, I do run my own server (and have since the mid-80s), but that's a peripheral issue. There are a huge variety of email service providers who provide a huge variety of degrees of anonymity, pseudonymity, and terms of service. None of them (openly, at least) offer "spy on your friends private lives" as a service option.
Application centric user interfaces are already a problem. On both Windows and Mac these days there's an increasing level of application-centric organization, and that breaks the task-centric workflow badly. I normally have a separate workspace for each task, with windows from each application all visible simultaneously. I can surround each primary document with windows of all sizes, to the sides, above, and below. The 10/GUI control model looks very very good, and would work well for a multi-desktop window-oriented workflow, but the Con10uum user interface would be a huge obstacle multi-document workflow.
OK, maybe it could have been reduced to one slash, since there's no :/ smiley elsewhere in the URL pattern, but you need to be able to distinguish relative URLs from absolute ones. Without some unique token sequence that was guaranteed not to occur elsewhere in a URI you're going to run into problems. Start removing components from a fully specified URI and see how quickly you run into ambiguities:
method://username:password@host:port/paths/terminal?token=value&token=value
The reasons for the // convention for the "super root" in networks like OpenNet and FutureNet, that he was copying, are still valid in URIs. You need something that's easily parsed by computers, and easily recognized by humans. When I first saw the syntax I was all "slash slash whiskey tango foxtrot?", but after using it for a while I was convinced that I was wrong and he was right, and even if he's forgotten why... I still think he was right the first time.
Come on, one of the most notoriously funny quotes on bash.org is about someone caught cybering on a Scrabble website.
NSFW
SCRABBLE: Rated AO for sexual content! And that's not even counting a triple word score for "epididymis".
Would you trust Facebook, with its odd history of rights control, with a corporate Excel file?
Hell no. I wouldn't even trust Facebook to reassure my mother about a doctor's visit, or talk to my brother about his family. It's creepy the things people use social networking tools for, sometimes. It's like going down to the local bar and yelling out the results of your blood tests to whatever yobboes happened to be in earshot.
Yes, technically, email can be intercepted. So can phone calls and physical letters. And someone can be listening in on you in the restaurant, even if you keep your voice down. But... damn...
There is no measurable or meaningful difference between the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many Worlds model. The collapse of the state vector is a simplifying assumption, not a measurable event. Quantum Solipsism is an oversimplification... nervous tissue is designed to damp, not magnify, quantum noise. That's why it takes multiple photons hitting a cell in your retina to trigger the effect of light. So when you pull the trigger, any quantum level events that determined whether your state vector is going to be entangled with the bullet's state vector happened long before you spun the barrel. Quantum physics isn't an end run around macroscopic determinism.
But that'll generate a negative space wedgie of enormous power! We'll have to counter it with a swirly energy thingy and we're over budget for CGI this episode!
We're already hitting clock speed "brownouts", and using parallel processing to get around them. To really tell where the limits are you need to look at how small you can make a processor (best case, something like say one bit per Planck length) and how much latency you can afford as information propagates from processor to processor at the speed of light or less.