... I can assure you that many readers of fiction underestimate just how much of a novel's content is simply made up. There is a common assumption among readers that much of what appears in a novel is thinly veiled and repackaged reality. You can imagine how provoking this is to a novelist who works so hard to invent it. Furthermore, since my novel actually does contain an original cryptosystem, readers are even more inclined than usual to assume that all of the crypto mentioned in the book is real.
I have to laff at all this. Obviously some folks really need to get out more often. Sometimes the reality check bounces. Sometimes paranoia pays, and sometimes it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Never seen anything like that around here, of course.
If somebody was murdered on video, Alien, do you think it would eventually make its way onto tv. I saw a show on Fox last week that showed cops run down bycars while making traffic stops.. collected from videocams in police cars..
Well last night the one minute I saw on Jerry Springer had to do with weird love relationships. One guy blew chunks on his lady as part of their love relationship. You could see the stuff covering the front of the dress. The audience flipped, of course.
And there have been shows that have played murder videos on the air, although, I will confess, the camera work was shoddy and you did not see the brains splatter all over. The people holding the camera had been freaked out by the scene, for which I do not blame them.
I suppose that everyone is going to post up their favorite theory of what life is.
The one that gets my vote is the idea that life is a game because the definition of a game supplies the metarules. Things that you need in things like things you can do, things you cannot do, loopholes to exploit, limitations due to the nature of the game itself, multiple levels of games, games within games, games you do not know about, being someone's pawn, etc.
Then you get into the philosophy of game design. It was an illuminating thought that most people would not like to live in real life that world that is their favorite gaming world. And looking at the games people play, and sometimes trap themselves inside.
The philosophical payoff is knowing what is the price you have to pay to get out of the game or change it if you want, and knowing better the games you are really playing in the first place.
But is there anything they wouldn't put on television, no matter how gruesome or sensational? John Herzfeld's 15 Minutes takes on Big Media and America's corruption by celebrity and money, and answers that question with a No.
Well I don't know that I agree with that conclusion, although I would want to. I've seen some totally screwed up repulsive stuff channel surfing late at night on "Jerry Springer". And if I see it a few months later, it's worse.
Users don't want to learn. Users think (not unreasonably) that programmers should make programs work the way the users think they should, instead of demanding that users learn the way the programmers think the program should work.
Actually, it is more a matter of thinking that they do not have the time to mess with it. Anything that would take an evening or two of reading and practice will usually get blown off by someone as too much time.
Let's face it, who has an evening or to do something or study something that is not a primary function of your job?
Granted, studying something to get a handle on it makes your job easier in the long run. But you have to be able to get over that first hump. Since many folks have a stimulus response association between pain and study, I wonder why they avoid it when they can.
;-)
Also, the learning curve for technolgy is made up of an awful lot of little things that the average slashdot reader considers intuitive, but which many users are lacking. Anyone who has taken a look at the Computer Stupidities pages has a catalogue of things not fully understood. Once you have finished laughing at the stories, it is an interesting exercise to go through them to a) figure out what is it that the person does not understand, what their blindspot is - and b) how to educate the person in order to handle this. This is excellent training for tech support. It blows you mind after awhile, too.
As also noted in the article, there is this
link to the Remote X Apps mini-HOWTO.
As it says: "This document has been written with unix-like systems in mind. If either your local or remote operating system are of another flavour, you may find here how things work. However, you will have to translate examples yourself to apply to your own system(s)."
Side Note: There is also the issue of security on this that is mentioned in several places. Given the projected use of this, security becomes rather important.
Note that mlview-dxpc is not yet for the casual user. You won't find any GUI (what do you expect from a MS1;-) and you'll need some knowledge about how X is handling its DISPLAY.
so this becomes another semi-advanced thing, depending on your expertise, etc.
i think the biggest problem with running a remote X desktop to your handheld or cell phone or whatever else would be bandwidth.. it just isn't there for little portable devices..
Agreed. However, I found this snippet on the website. Grammar aside, it sounds like they have licked a few problems. Although it is tough to stop feature creep and other oddities from bloating the software.
People who has tried it, reported mlview-dxpc to be an order of magnitude faster then any other OSS solution they tested so far. Personally we ran it, head to head, against Citrix WinFrame. Performances are comparable.
Although not a video game, Willy Higinbotham built in 1958 the very first game based around a computer and a CRT at Brookhaven National Laboratory (Upton, New-York, USA). The game was
shown to the public during two years in the labs, used an oscilloscope to generate the picture, and a vaccuum tube analog computer to calculate the trajectory of the ball. The game consisted in a
little tennis court shown in front view: a reversed 'T' as a net, and a bouncing point as the ball (you can read a very interesting article about the story of this game). Unfortunately, Willy Higinbotham did not find any interest in his game, and did not patent it. What a pitty, when we see all the money involved in video games ! This was the short story of the first game.
How typical. A guy who deserves the money that would have come from patenting the very idea of video games does not even bother,
And then all the greedy jerks who do not deserve it wind up patenting all kinds of trivial junk....
One thing it is hard to do in these games is to maintain quality. This requires a certain artistic vision as far as the universe of the game goes. Not everyone is competent as a universe maker, or knows what would work well in a certain context.
All to often you will have somthing that will break the game show up. The obvious things are easy to legislate against.
Hand grenades and beam weapons and other one sided technologies, introduced by a player, in a low end medieval fantasy world, for example.
An example of this is in song-writing. I can remember one guy writing a song, playing it for a friend, who comment was that it would be a heck of a lot better if it sounded like Led Zeppelin
Of Course , most players are smarter that this, but let's face it, you do have that class of player who wants to convert everything they touch into another shooter program.
Some of the funniest games I ever played in a pencil and paper setup were with characters that were deliberately and well under powered. (runaway! runaway!)
So I wish them luck, knowing how difficult it is to do this sort of thing right.
How Much would a typical commuter vehicle cost? Given the possibility of say charging the batteries on the rail system, this becomes more viable.
With a low enough cost, I could use this gadget for regular communiting, saving wear and tear on my regular wheels. That I would use for my special trips or whatever.
Mind you, right now I would NOT buy a metro or similar small car because of the danger it is in relative to larger tougher vehicles.
but something like that are a little larger that hooks into a rail system, well i could deal with that. I could see something that runs beside the current automotive system.
No, the situation was very different.Here the company is trying to go back on what it agreed to. IMHO he needs to talk to specialist in both IP law and labor law.
Ahhhhh...
The flip side of the coin, but still perversely connected.
Well the only way the future could be all that dark, for this to happen, would be if:
1) Lan intergration into houses was a routine low maintenance item 2) The Software for the servers were well maintained, and did not require the home owner to intervene 3) The home owner would be educated to not mess with the system (think of your usual riff-raff of corporate users. Now remember that a lot of these folks own homes. 4) The default failure mode for these system is not life threatening, but allows basic manual operation of things like heat, etc. 5) the home owner is sold on the idea that he never messes with the system. 6) The homes in a neighborhood and across the town and state, etc are integrated into a flawless system not subject to weather conditions, earthquakes, and other natural disaters. 7) Political parties would have to cooperate like factions of a mafia family, without greed, to make sure that the system is maintained in perfect harmony. 8) Commercial interests who want their fingers in the pie are kept in line
9) ETC.
Those interested might want to take another look at the piece by Harlan Elison a day or two ago.
Without stepping into the middle of the inevitable flame war that erupts on this subject, their are interesting elements for discussion here as far intellectual property rights.
Points for discusion include:
should there only be intellectual property rights at all?
If there are any intellectual property rights, who has a right to them.
If people we despise have intellectual property rights, what do we do about it?
Do Religions have Intellectual property rights? (nb your agreement/dis-agreement with the religion will color this, of course
Hubbard (founder of Scientology) was a published author in his life time, and set up an organiztion to look after and maintain the rights to his works. Does he have any intellectual property rights?
How does this relate to the rights of authors, artists, and organizations, if they have any at all.
Does the Church of Scientology have a right to the copyrights of the works of its founder, ever? under any conditions at all?
How much of this is FUD on the part of one party about the other?
How much FUD will be issued in discussing the parties in this discussion?
Basically, it comes down to:
Does any one have any rights at all, regardless of who they are?
One thing for sure, those guys are hardcore when it comes down to standing up for themselves. That has got to be annoying to their opponents.
Slashdot has covered this story in varying detail over the past few months.
Still it is an interesting story with a wild history. One thing is for sure, is that you do not want anything anything anything to go wrong. You won't burn up, although that is the first image people get.
The big problem is not tumbling like a rag doll with no way to control yourself for five or more minutes, Then being sufficiently disoriented that you become a human crater maker.
Never mind the need for redundant transistors because you go to protect against Cosmic Rays (sort of defeats the purpose, no?)
There is a thing about Moore's Law and Power density. power density keeps going up with increasing density of computational activity. At some point it gets so dense that we need insane cooling, or else we are using warp cores for computational exercises. [perks up at the thought]
Now there is a idea. Subatomic quantum computing using a warp core. That should keep Moore's law going for a while.
This is a bogus argument.. Show me a corporation that gives it secretaries a new PC, a windows install CD, the CD's for Word etc...
They don't, IT do it all for them and give them a preconfigured out of the box solution. The same happens with Linux. I have taken a group of students (life sci with no 'geek cred'), sat them in front of a preconfigured box and let them get on with it. Star Office, no problem. Other apps, no problem. Preconfigured, ready to roll with the apps one needs.. That is what appears on your desktop, not a bunch of CD's and so on.
And Your plan for bringing Linux to the masses is?
later on in the article, which is long and content laden, 5 points are made as far as getting Linux ready for the Mass market. Let's face it, the mass market is not just merely in the office. It is in the home. The reaction I cited is typical of someone who is not expert in technology, and who can get overwhelmed by it. The typical user of the mass market. Remember that a very large portion of the population is below average.
For that matter, with sufficient skill you can build your own car, and customised it to be just the way you like it. This doesn't cost that much more than getting your own from the factory. How many geeks here do that? A show of hands? I thought so.
Plainly a step in the direction of optical computing.
Although details like the reaction time of the optical effect are missing. In a world where many things are measured in nanoseconds, if these things react in millionths, for example, then this will limit the applications.
I just don't want to worry about my word processor dropping its core. It simply isn't my job to whip out GDB and debug my word processor.
From my point of view, I would vastly prefer to use a UNIX environment but even I do not want to sit around and use Linux for my writing purposes. Somehow, somewhere, it naggingly doesn't even serve my purposes. This makes me wonder - if it cannot serve my vaguely humble needs, does it serve anyone's?
This is an attitude I see alot. In alot of people. They are in it up to here, and they do not have the time, or do not want to deal with the technical details.
Ultimately, when the BS hits the fan, they do not want to deal with it. As in "y'know, after a while, I get tired of it." I get tired of doing my own car repairs, for example. So I can understand this, but there is a problem with the attitude as well.
If you deal with stuff all of the time, it pays to know how it works on more that a casual bandaid basis.
Looking through the article, I got to say that she has nailed a number of points. For Example:
Stand back away from the myriad of geeky letter slinging and imagine, just for a moment, the secretary at your place of business. She sits at the front desk, and wears a prim, black suit. She wears a mile of makeup. On her monitor are three beanie babies and a cute
grouping of Snoopy stickers. She has a picture of her kids next to her keyboard, and a mug with "1 Mom!" on it in bright red. She is sure she knows how to write up memos in Word, how to use the E-Mail client of the month, write up a spreadsheet, and maybe put together a presentation. If her computer crashes, she has to get up and bug you to come fix it, because she is terrified to reboot.
Tell this woman that her desktop is infinitely configurable. Tell her that she just has to edit this one configuration file, and it will look
however she wants it to look. Tell her she can even download templates off the web. Look, it's easy! A mere two or three hours and it will look exactly the way you want it to look! Furthermore, you can change it whenever you want!
She'll probably start crying.
This is a truth that many geeks do not want to deal with, because broad acceptance of Linux means dealing with folks just like that. Broad success means dealing with these folks, the folks that get satirized as tech support lusers.
I think that it is well agreed that the Internet is changing civilzation. The slightly tongue in cheek, but serious question is "Changing it into what?"
The spectrum of possible futures ranges from Utopian to paranoia making 1984 look like a children's tea party. And Idealism aside, there is a large class of people who like being sheeple, having all the tough decisions made for them.
So that is the question - what is the Internet changing civilization into?
Just a fantasy, of course, but with 64 megs of ram, and with minidisc hard drives coming down, could one of these things be engineered to take a full version of a regular OS?
Granted, It would have to be a stripped down or older copy, but somehow I wonder if Win 3.11 would be better than WinCE. If nothing else, it would tweak appropriate noses in Redmond
And of course, the possibility of an X-windows setup on a palm is entertaining as well. (and probably well in hand)
Slashdot Mirror
I have to laff at all this. Obviously some folks really need to get out more often. Sometimes the reality check bounces. Sometimes paranoia pays, and sometimes it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Never seen anything like that around here, of course.
Well last night the one minute I saw on Jerry Springer had to do with weird love relationships. One guy blew chunks on his lady as part of their love relationship. You could see the stuff covering the front of the dress. The audience flipped, of course.
And there have been shows that have played murder videos on the air, although, I will confess, the camera work was shoddy and you did not see the brains splatter all over. The people holding the camera had been freaked out by the scene, for which I do not blame them.
The one that gets my vote is the idea that life is a game because the definition of a game supplies the metarules. Things that you need in things like things you can do, things you cannot do, loopholes to exploit, limitations due to the nature of the game itself, multiple levels of games, games within games, games you do not know about, being someone's pawn, etc.
Then you get into the philosophy of game design. It was an illuminating thought that most people would not like to live in real life that world that is their favorite gaming world. And looking at the games people play, and sometimes trap themselves inside.
The philosophical payoff is knowing what is the price you have to pay to get out of the game or change it if you want, and knowing better the games you are really playing in the first place.
Well I don't know that I agree with that conclusion, although I would want to. I've seen some totally screwed up repulsive stuff channel surfing late at night on "Jerry Springer". And if I see it a few months later, it's worse.
Actually, it is more a matter of thinking that they do not have the time to mess with it. Anything that would take an evening or two of reading and practice will usually get blown off by someone as too much time.
Let's face it, who has an evening or to do something or study something that is not a primary function of your job?
Granted, studying something to get a handle on it makes your job easier in the long run. But you have to be able to get over that first hump. Since many folks have a stimulus response association between pain and study, I wonder why they avoid it when they can.
;-)
Also, the learning curve for technolgy is made up of an awful lot of little things that the average slashdot reader considers intuitive, but which many users are lacking. Anyone who has taken a look at the Computer Stupidities pages has a catalogue of things not fully understood. Once you have finished laughing at the stories, it is an interesting exercise to go through them to a) figure out what is it that the person does not understand, what their blindspot is - and b) how to educate the person in order to handle this. This is excellent training for tech support. It blows you mind after awhile, too.
As it says: "This document has been written with unix-like systems in mind. If either your local or remote operating system are of another flavour, you may find here how things work. However, you will have to translate examples yourself to apply to your own system(s)."
Side Note: There is also the issue of security on this that is mentioned in several places. Given the projected use of this, security becomes rather important.
Note that mlview-dxpc is not yet for the casual user. You won't find any GUI (what do you expect from a MS1 ;-) and you'll need some knowledge about how X is handling its DISPLAY.
so this becomes another semi-advanced thing, depending on your expertise, etc.
Agreed. However, I found this snippet on the website. Grammar aside, it sounds like they have licked a few problems. Although it is tough to stop feature creep and other oddities from bloating the software.
If they get this working, could be fun.I am have yet to see the article, under 3 different browsers...
between that, and the unusual number of drunken trolls... I think I'll wait wait until morning before trying to making a comment.
New scientist usually does good articles, even if a little light in content (no more that a dozen paragraphs or so).
Should be interesting.
How typical. A guy who deserves the money that would have come from patenting the very idea of video games does not even bother,
And then all the greedy jerks who do not deserve it wind up patenting all kinds of trivial junk....
feh
All to often you will have somthing that will break the game show up. The obvious things are easy to legislate against.
Hand grenades and beam weapons and other one sided technologies, introduced by a player, in a low end medieval fantasy world, for example.
An example of this is in song-writing. I can remember one guy writing a song, playing it for a friend, who comment was that it would be a heck of a lot better if it sounded like Led Zeppelin
Of Course , most players are smarter that this, but let's face it, you do have that class of player who wants to convert everything they touch into another shooter program.
Some of the funniest games I ever played in a pencil and paper setup were with characters that were deliberately and well under powered. (runaway! runaway!)
So I wish them luck, knowing how difficult it is to do this sort of thing right.
With a low enough cost, I could use this gadget for regular communiting, saving wear and tear on my regular wheels. That I would use for my special trips or whatever.
Mind you, right now I would NOT buy a metro or similar small car because of the danger it is in relative to larger tougher vehicles.
but something like that are a little larger that hooks into a rail system, well i could deal with that. I could see something that runs beside the current automotive system.
Can it accept a hard drive, can we fine tune the set up? can we load our own software so that we have our own home brew TIVO in it.
There are just so many questions, once the Genii is out of the bottle....
Just watch out for the High Voltage thingies there...
;-)
Ahhhhh ...
The flip side of the coin, but still perversely connected.
Let's see, here it is:
it is an Ask Slashdot article: "When Personal Projects Start To Conflict w/ Work?"
Not an exact repeat, but it seems pretty similar.
Okay, well I said my bit there, so I'll pass on this round.
1) Lan intergration into houses was a routine low maintenance item
2) The Software for the servers were well maintained, and did not require the home owner to intervene
3) The home owner would be educated to not mess with the system (think of your usual riff-raff of corporate users. Now remember that a lot of these folks own homes.
4) The default failure mode for these system is not life threatening, but allows basic manual operation of things like heat, etc.
5) the home owner is sold on the idea that he never messes with the system.
6) The homes in a neighborhood and across the town and state, etc are integrated into a flawless system not subject to weather conditions, earthquakes, and other natural disaters.
7) Political parties would have to cooperate like factions of a mafia family, without greed, to make sure that the system is maintained in perfect harmony.
8) Commercial interests who want their fingers in the pie are kept in line
9) ETC.
Sounds easy to me
Without stepping into the middle of the inevitable flame war that erupts on this subject, their are interesting elements for discussion here as far intellectual property rights.
Points for discusion include:
- should there only be intellectual property rights at all?
- If there are any intellectual property rights, who has a right to them.
- If people we despise have intellectual property rights, what do we do about it?
- Do Religions have Intellectual property rights? (nb your agreement/dis-agreement with the religion will color this, of course
- Hubbard (founder of Scientology) was a published author in his life time, and set up an organiztion to look after and maintain the rights to his works. Does he have any intellectual property rights?
- How does this relate to the rights of authors, artists, and organizations, if they have any at all.
- Does the Church of Scientology have a right to the copyrights of the works of its founder, ever? under any conditions at all?
- How much of this is FUD on the part of one party about the other?
- How much FUD will be issued in discussing the parties in this discussion?
Basically, it comes down to:Does any one have any rights at all, regardless of who they are?
One thing for sure, those guys are hardcore when it comes down to standing up for themselves. That has got to be annoying to their opponents.
Still it is an interesting story with a wild history. One thing is for sure, is that you do not want anything anything anything to go wrong. You won't burn up, although that is the first image people get.
The big problem is not tumbling like a rag doll with no way to control yourself for five or more minutes, Then being sufficiently disoriented that you become a human crater maker.
http://channel.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/science/08SU PE.html
now of course, Lucent has a website, with the press release here. The page with photos of the team can be found here on the bell labs site.
As Usual, the story was first reported in NATURE (NOTE - free registration gives some access, paid registration gives more)
There is a thing about Moore's Law and Power density. power density keeps going up with increasing density of computational activity. At some point it gets so dense that we need insane cooling, or else we are using warp cores for computational exercises. [perks up at the thought]
Now there is a idea. Subatomic quantum computing using a warp core. That should keep Moore's law going for a while.
And Your plan for bringing Linux to the masses is?
later on in the article, which is long and content laden, 5 points are made as far as getting Linux ready for the Mass market. Let's face it, the mass market is not just merely in the office. It is in the home. The reaction I cited is typical of someone who is not expert in technology, and who can get overwhelmed by it. The typical user of the mass market. Remember that a very large portion of the population is below average.
For that matter, with sufficient skill you can build your own car, and customised it to be just the way you like it. This doesn't cost that much more than getting your own from the factory. How many geeks here do that? A show of hands? I thought so.
Although details like the reaction time of the optical effect are missing. In a world where many things are measured in nanoseconds, if these things react in millionths, for example, then this will limit the applications.
Interesting all the same.
This is an attitude I see alot. In alot of people. They are in it up to here, and they do not have the time, or do not want to deal with the technical details.
Ultimately, when the BS hits the fan, they do not want to deal with it. As in "y'know, after a while, I get tired of it." I get tired of doing my own car repairs, for example. So I can understand this, but there is a problem with the attitude as well.
If you deal with stuff all of the time, it pays to know how it works on more that a casual bandaid basis.
Looking through the article, I got to say that she has nailed a number of points. For Example:
Stand back away from the myriad of geeky letter slinging and imagine, just for a moment, the secretary at your place of business. She sits at the front desk, and wears a prim, black suit. She wears a mile of makeup. On her monitor are three beanie babies and a cute grouping of Snoopy stickers. She has a picture of her kids next to her keyboard, and a mug with "1 Mom!" on it in bright red. She is sure she knows how to write up memos in Word, how to use the E-Mail client of the month, write up a spreadsheet, and maybe put together a presentation. If her computer crashes, she has to get up and bug you to come fix it, because she is terrified to reboot.
Tell this woman that her desktop is infinitely configurable. Tell her that she just has to edit this one configuration file, and it will look however she wants it to look. Tell her she can even download templates off the web. Look, it's easy! A mere two or three hours and it will look exactly the way you want it to look! Furthermore, you can change it whenever you want!
She'll probably start crying.
This is a truth that many geeks do not want to deal with, because broad acceptance of Linux means dealing with folks just like that. Broad success means dealing with these folks, the folks that get satirized as tech support lusers.
The spectrum of possible futures ranges from Utopian to paranoia making 1984 look like a children's tea party. And Idealism aside, there is a large class of people who like being sheeple, having all the tough decisions made for them.
So that is the question - what is the Internet changing civilization into?
Granted, It would have to be a stripped down or older copy, but somehow I wonder if Win 3.11 would be better than WinCE. If nothing else, it would tweak appropriate noses in Redmond
And of course, the possibility of an X-windows setup on a palm is entertaining as well. (and probably well in hand)