I love the erudite literacy of these AC guys
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Darwin's Radio
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!
Offtopic:Strings of atoms
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Darwin's Radio
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Can you explain what your sigfile's signifying?
Hard science fiction is soft
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Darwin's Radio
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I think we should discontinue all further use of the term "hard science fiction" - there are NO hard sci-fi writers, even among those (like Bear) with strong science groundings. Let's enjoy these books for what they are - great stories - but remember they're works of fiction and fantasy, not bound by the laws of physics.
Most interesting thing is how it blurs the line between PC and devices yet further. This is good news for devices - and bad news for companies writing everything-but-the-kitchen-sink OSs that don't strip down well to device needs.
Is it possible these efforts to patent Homo Sapiens's source code, along with "patent parasitism" from companies that don't make anything, overbroad software patents, and patenting ideas rather than products will actually hasten the death of the patent system?
All the above just demonstrate, to more and more people, that offline laws aren't right for the Net. In the sense that efforts like Celera's convince more people that it's wrong, it may lead to a complete overhaul of world legal systems sooner rather than later. And that would be a Good Thing.
Like many outside the USA, I'm repeatedly struck by the huge difference in the cultures of Europe and the USA regarding religion. Here in Europe religion just isn't a big force in most people's lives, yet Stateside something like 75% of people believe in the god theory. Just how bad is it over there? Is Pat Buchanan (whose views seem extreme here) really a mainstream presidential candidate? It's all the more odd because on my 4 or so annual trips to the US I see little evidence of such extremity in everyday life. Comments gratefully received....
The technical book on the real discipline of nanotech is Nanosystems, by father of the field Eric Drexler. While Engines of Creation explores the vision, Nanosystems explores how we'll really get there.
Anyone interested in real nanotech, try...
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The Diamond Age
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...the technical book on the real discipline: Nanosystems, by father of the field Eric Drexler. While Engines of Creation explores the vision, Nanosystems explores how we'll really get there.
Guess what? The guy who created that 1984 TV ad (his name's Steve Hayden) for the Mac now heads up advertising work for... IBM. (I know this because he's arguably my boss.)
There's no ideology in this game, people, just the perceptions media helps create. It's just companies selling stuff, that's all. Don't forget that down the years it's Apple that's closed every machine into sealed proprietarydom, Apple who shut down clone vendors when they became too successful, Apple that makes it an invalidating offence to lift the hood.
It's not what companies build that matters; it's what users do with the machines. And in the ad industry I've grown very bored with the whiny dogma of the Macolytes in the design studio; they've sounded the same in all five countries I've lived in. Give me my rusty, ragtag box of thrown-together junk over a Mac any day.
The article says $50 is cost of manufacture...
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2.3TB drives for $50
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I met Ted Nelson a few months back and, like nanotechnologist Eric Drexler who documented the effort in a chapter of "Engines of Creation", he's a fascinating guy - neural connections just chaotic enough to create something like this.
What I really want to know, though, is will it layer well over the web infrastructure? Its technical superiority won't win it users; it's not enough of a paradigm shift on its own. Let's hope it plugs into today's web and lets the networked society truly get a grip.
The "collapsings" the article talks about are also collapsings of distinctions - the disctinctions between hardware and software, and the distinctions between mechanical and electronic. When your information's patterned as shapes of molecules, the hardware is the software and the software shapes the hardware. And when 0s and 1s are represented by flipping the shapes of molecules, you're performing mechanical work with electronic computation. Of course, this is exactly how it works now - EXCEPT that the mapping is far less precise.
Perhaps this is the destiny of computers: to shape not just the Net, but also the physical world. There's a lot of sand in the Sahara I'd like to pattern my MP3s into.
Celebration was doomed from the start. Large corps still don't realise that useful, community-centred things can't be planned top down by people who think they know best. They grow from the grassroots, messily and often haphazardly, but with the intense involvement of people with a stake in its outcome. It's why the Net grew and why Communism failed. I think I'll buy the book and see if this theme comes out...
...Yes, governments worldwide are scared of the web, and cracking down. But it's like nailing jelly: the tighter you try to grip it, the more of it will slip through your fingers.
Their desire to keep the vast syrupy organism of government alive will only hasten its demise. Yes, many of us will be hurt in the process; many martyrs will be created. But in the end, the net will win and government will die, irrelevant, unneeded, and unloved. Give it ten years.
This week's SNS newsletter, a memo on technology strategy, talks about how personal chat is overwhelming business talk on cellular phones. That creates hell for spooks - can you imagine being the guy listening to 2000 hours of meaningless banter that Echelon flagged as significant?
As governments around the world realise the Net makes them irrelevant, they will strike out to protect their own existence; we have a few scary years before governments are truly harmless. But remember it's their own paranoia that will kill them. Because wasting tremendous resources checking out really stupid stuff will eventually cause them to collapse under their own weight... letting the web's freedom and libertarianism emerge into the world at large.
I think I'll let them install one on my older PC, set it to randomly spam Microsoft addresses with chapters of spy novels, and mention the words "terrorist" and "FBI" in the sigfile.
So few companies are on the cluetrain that I want to buy from this company without even knowing what they make! How refreshing to hear a human voice on a corporate website.
In marketing and other endeavours, there are several stages corresponding (usually) to industry shakeouts.
First there's a stage of doing something because it works. The first ads were written because they sold product.
Next, there's a stage of formalising these rules, trying to become respectable. This is where ads were in the 1970s, when big agencies ruled the ad world.
Then there's a stage of following the rules while forgetting the reasons those rules were written - the "because that's how we've always done them" model.
Finally, the rules collapse under their own weight and real human creativity comes to the fore again. This is what my ad agency's going through now... but PR companies are slower still.
A press release today is not written to disseminate useful information; it is written to get the client's name into the papers. And, following the rulebook, they use selling techniques to write them... dehumanising the speaker and twisting his words into something he never said.
The nearest thing I've got to a boss, Mike Windsor of Ogilvy Interactive, is a smart guy with a real grip on how the web works. But Ogilvy's press releases paint him as the most autocued, teleprompted, on-the-record, overadvised and underopinionated man alive. I don't recognise Mike in our releases, and I doubt he ever recognises himself.
So if anyone feels like Slashdot-effecting the Ogilvy NY PR division... email me and I'll give out some names. Might shake up the industry a little to have form rather than content critiqued.
Chris Worth Read the Microsoft Matrix at http://chrisworth.com/oddments/the_microsoft_matri x.html
I'm no cynic, but this will be a bad film. The book - which was my bible for a year - reflected the paranoid 80's cold-war zeitgeist, not the wonderful world we're moving into as governments slowly become irrelevant. The film can't win: if it's true to the book it'll be no more relevant than 1930's "Metropolis", and if it updates the film with Internet refs it won't do justice to the book.
Either way, I expect effects will substitute for acting, since Hollywood's forgotten how to act. Argh!
A friend wanted my advice and bought me lunch. Another friend wanted an hour's brainstorming and cooked me dinner. I can buy food with ideas.
>>I can't pay my rent with ideas.
The fastest growing method of buying property in Silicon Valley is signing over stock. These people are all "paying rent" with ideas.
>>I can't retire on ideas.
Arabs came up with the idea of selling access to the black sticky stuff their camels slipped in. Breeders sell the idea that their prize bull's semen might produce great cows. Plenty of ideas have huge value before they produce a penny in profit.
>>Sooner or later it has to come down to money. Somebody's got to come up with a way to make money off of all of these ideas, and so far the batting average of internet-based companies is pretty low.
Here you're right... and this was my only point. Value isn't just about revenues. It's about potential. And the web is only a couple of years into a forty-year phenomenon - which creates lots of potential.
I believe Michael Robertson's holding of over a billion in stock makes him worth more than all senior executives of all music companies combined. Great! Someone who believes in freedom... with the resources to fight back. Let's hope it doesn't corrupt him too soon.
A note for anyone valuing this company (or any other Net stock) by obsolete metrics like revenues: those billions are built on the concept, not the company. Concepts in the end are more powerful than earnings. After all, a little concept called "money" was powerful enough to survive losing the only thing that gave it value - being backed by gold.
I'd bet people were saying the same thing about paper money then as they say about Net stocks now.
The whole candy-colored iMac thing has been more about form than content from the start... if these things work, it'd be a big step towards Dilbertdom taking Apple seriously instead of treating them as toys for the nose-ring brigade. Hell, I might even start buying Apple stuff myself.
The reason many Old Media sources act so hurt when compared with community news sites is that they've forgotten who to be accountable too. Slashdot has essentially no fact checking, no source verifying, no journalistic standards - but because I'm open to say things like this here, the value of these services is reduced, since anyone who's really in the know can put the story right.
In the final analysis, I feel Slashdot's advantage over Old Media is that it lets people exercise their critical judgement when news gathering; news isn't spoonfed to them and expected to be accepted at face value. And that can only be a good thing.
(PS. Anyone interested in the musings of a Linux newbie can read http://chrisworth.com/oddments/the_microsoft.matri x.html)
Slashdot Mirror
!
Can you explain what your sigfile's signifying?
I think we should discontinue all further use of the term "hard science fiction" - there are NO hard sci-fi writers, even among those (like Bear) with strong science groundings. Let's enjoy these books for what they are - great stories - but remember they're works of fiction and fantasy, not bound by the laws of physics.
Most interesting thing is how it blurs the line between PC and devices yet further. This is good news for devices - and bad news for companies writing everything-but-the-kitchen-sink OSs that don't strip down well to device needs.
Chris Worth
Is it possible these efforts to patent Homo Sapiens's source code, along with "patent parasitism" from companies that don't make anything, overbroad software patents, and patenting ideas rather than products will actually hasten the death of the patent system?
All the above just demonstrate, to more and more people, that offline laws aren't right for the Net. In the sense that efforts like Celera's convince more people that it's wrong, it may lead to a complete overhaul of world legal systems sooner rather than later. And that would be a Good Thing.
Chris
Like many outside the USA, I'm repeatedly struck by the huge difference in the cultures of Europe and the USA regarding religion. Here in Europe religion just isn't a big force in most people's lives, yet Stateside something like 75% of people believe in the god theory. Just how bad is it over there? Is Pat Buchanan (whose views seem extreme here) really a mainstream presidential candidate? It's all the more odd because on my 4 or so annual trips to the US I see little evidence of such extremity in everyday life. Comments gratefully received....
The technical book on the real discipline of nanotech is Nanosystems, by father of the field Eric Drexler. While Engines of Creation explores the vision, Nanosystems explores how we'll really get there.
...the technical book on the real discipline: Nanosystems, by father of the field Eric Drexler. While Engines of Creation explores the vision, Nanosystems explores how we'll really get there.
I'm INTJ and a media drone too - but the type's penetration here is something I hadn't thought about. Any guesses as to what the percentage is?
Guess what? The guy who created that 1984 TV ad (his name's Steve Hayden) for the Mac now heads up advertising work for... IBM. (I know this because he's arguably my boss.)
There's no ideology in this game, people, just the perceptions media helps create. It's just companies selling stuff, that's all. Don't forget that down the years it's Apple that's closed every machine into sealed proprietarydom, Apple who shut down clone vendors when they became too successful, Apple that makes it an invalidating offence to lift the hood.
It's not what companies build that matters; it's what users do with the machines. And in the ad industry I've grown very bored with the whiny dogma of the Macolytes in the design studio; they've sounded the same in all five countries I've lived in. Give me my rusty, ragtag box of thrown-together junk over a Mac any day.
....and not recommended retail price.
I met Ted Nelson a few months back and, like nanotechnologist Eric Drexler who documented the effort in a chapter of "Engines of Creation", he's a fascinating guy - neural connections just chaotic enough to create something like this.
What I really want to know, though, is will it layer well over the web infrastructure? Its technical superiority won't win it users; it's not enough of a paradigm shift on its own. Let's hope it plugs into today's web and lets the networked society truly get a grip.
>>>>>>>>>
Read a Linux newbie's musings in The Microsoft Matrix.
The "collapsings" the article talks about are also collapsings of distinctions - the disctinctions between hardware and software, and the distinctions between mechanical and electronic. When your information's patterned as shapes of molecules, the hardware is the software and the software shapes the hardware. And when 0s and 1s are represented by flipping the shapes of molecules, you're performing mechanical work with electronic computation. Of course, this is exactly how it works now - EXCEPT that the mapping is far less precise.
Perhaps this is the destiny of computers: to shape not just the Net, but also the physical world. There's a lot of sand in the Sahara I'd like to pattern my MP3s into.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Read The Microsoft Matrix at chrisworth.com for a newbie's struggles towards Linux.
Celebration was doomed from the start. Large corps still don't realise that useful, community-centred things can't be planned top down by people who think they know best. They grow from the grassroots, messily and often haphazardly, but with the intense involvement of people with a stake in its outcome. It's why the Net grew and why Communism failed. I think I'll buy the book and see if this theme comes out...
...Yes, governments worldwide are scared of the web, and cracking down. But it's like nailing jelly: the tighter you try to grip it, the more of it will slip through your fingers.
Their desire to keep the vast syrupy organism of government alive will only hasten its demise. Yes, many of us will be hurt in the process; many martyrs will be created. But in the end, the net will win and government will die, irrelevant, unneeded, and unloved. Give it ten years.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Read The Microsoft Matrix at chrisworth.com
This week's SNS newsletter, a memo on technology strategy, talks about how personal chat is overwhelming business talk on cellular phones. That creates hell for spooks - can you imagine being the guy listening to 2000 hours of meaningless banter that Echelon flagged as significant?
As governments around the world realise the Net makes them irrelevant, they will strike out to protect their own existence; we have a few scary years before governments are truly harmless. But remember it's their own paranoia that will kill them. Because wasting tremendous resources checking out really stupid stuff will eventually cause them to collapse under their own weight... letting the web's freedom and libertarianism emerge into the world at large.
I think I'll let them install one on my older PC, set it to randomly spam Microsoft addresses with chapters of spy novels, and mention the words "terrorist" and "FBI" in the sigfile.
So few companies are on the cluetrain that I want to buy from this company without even knowing what they make! How refreshing to hear a human voice on a corporate website.
"Claimer": I'm a marketroid, not a geek.
i x.html
In marketing and other endeavours, there are several stages corresponding (usually) to industry shakeouts.
First there's a stage of doing something because it works. The first ads were written because they sold product.
Next, there's a stage of formalising these rules, trying to become respectable. This is where ads were in the 1970s, when big agencies ruled the ad world.
Then there's a stage of following the rules while forgetting the reasons those rules were written - the "because that's how we've always done them" model.
Finally, the rules collapse under their own weight and real human creativity comes to the fore again. This is what my ad agency's going through now... but PR companies are slower still.
A press release today is not written to disseminate useful information; it is written to get the client's name into the papers. And, following the rulebook, they use selling techniques to write them... dehumanising the speaker and twisting his words into something he never said.
The nearest thing I've got to a boss, Mike Windsor of Ogilvy Interactive, is a smart guy with a real grip on how the web works. But Ogilvy's press releases paint him as the most autocued, teleprompted, on-the-record, overadvised and underopinionated man alive. I don't recognise Mike in our releases, and I doubt he ever recognises himself.
So if anyone feels like Slashdot-effecting the Ogilvy NY PR division... email me and I'll give out some names. Might shake up the industry a little to have form rather than content critiqued.
Chris Worth
Read the Microsoft Matrix at http://chrisworth.com/oddments/the_microsoft_matr
I'm no cynic, but this will be a bad film. The book - which was my bible for a year - reflected the paranoid 80's cold-war zeitgeist, not the wonderful world we're moving into as governments slowly become irrelevant. The film can't win: if it's true to the book it'll be no more relevant than 1930's "Metropolis", and if it updates the film with Internet refs it won't do justice to the book.
Either way, I expect effects will substitute for acting, since Hollywood's forgotten how to act. Argh!
>>I can't buy food with ideas.
A friend wanted my advice and bought me lunch. Another friend wanted an hour's brainstorming and cooked me dinner. I can buy food with ideas.
>>I can't pay my rent with ideas.
The fastest growing method of buying property in Silicon Valley is signing over stock. These people are all "paying rent" with ideas.
>>I can't retire on ideas.
Arabs came up with the idea of selling access to the black sticky stuff their camels slipped in. Breeders sell the idea that their prize bull's semen might produce great cows. Plenty of ideas have huge value before they produce a penny in profit.
>>Sooner or later it has to come down to money. Somebody's got to come up with a way to make money off of all of these ideas, and so far the batting average of internet-based companies is pretty low.
Here you're right... and this was my only point. Value isn't just about revenues. It's about potential. And the web is only a couple of years into a forty-year phenomenon - which creates lots of potential.
You can't - IPO launches aren't open to individual investors, unless you have an auction IPO like Salon. (Selling: $10.50. Closed first day: $10.50.)
I believe Michael Robertson's holding of over a billion in stock makes him worth more than all senior executives of all music companies combined. Great! Someone who believes in freedom... with the resources to fight back. Let's hope it doesn't corrupt him too soon.
A note for anyone valuing this company (or any other Net stock) by obsolete metrics like revenues: those billions are built on the concept, not the company. Concepts in the end are more powerful than earnings. After all, a little concept called "money" was powerful enough to survive losing the only thing that gave it value - being backed by gold.
I'd bet people were saying the same thing about paper money then as they say about Net stocks now.
The whole candy-colored iMac thing has been more about form than content from the start... if these things work, it'd be a big step towards Dilbertdom taking Apple seriously instead of treating them as toys for the nose-ring brigade. Hell, I might even start buying Apple stuff myself.
Sorry, the correct link ist rix.html
http://chrisworth.com/oddments/the_microsoft_ma
The reason many Old Media sources act so hurt when compared with community news sites is that they've forgotten who to be accountable too. Slashdot has essentially no fact checking, no source verifying, no journalistic standards - but because I'm open to say things like this here, the value of these services is reduced, since anyone who's really in the know can put the story right.
i x.html)
In the final analysis, I feel Slashdot's advantage over Old Media is that it lets people exercise their critical judgement when news gathering; news isn't spoonfed to them and expected to be accepted at face value. And that can only be a good thing.
(PS. Anyone interested in the musings of a Linux newbie can read http://chrisworth.com/oddments/the_microsoft.matr