Then people carry a pen-like or card-like device to grab URLs off of everything (a can of baked beans, back of a cereal box, off a business card, in a newspaper, etc.) to take back to your computer later to load the appropriate page.
That's a neat idea. It would work very nicely with small portable wireless devices too. It should be simple enough to build in barcode readers in them as a standard (or you could use digital camera capabilities that they may have in the future).
the user has already learned the interface. (The learning curve for command-line interfaces is steeper than for GUIs, especially if the user has first experience with a GUI. With a blank slate computer user, the learning curve is about the same...but how many blank slates who've never used Windows -- or a video game controller -- do you find?
The reason GUIs are easier to learn than command line interfaces is that GUIs show all the actions that are possible at a given time. With a command line interface you have no such presentation of things you can do with the system, instead you have to know the name of a command you want to use.
"Give everyone wireless networked PDA's, and five days to vote on every issue"
Just what I want, I country full of uninformed people spending 10 seconds to decide every important issue.
So create some suitable real time trust network or moderation system, where intelligent suggestions and domain 'experts' get more influence. And tune the dynamics so that it doesn't stagnate, and so that differing view points are represented.
Also make it localized, so that citizens can select what to take an interest in, for example local neighbourhood / city / state issues, or issues dealing with their work, free time activities, areas of interest or expertice, etc.
A feedback type process to improve on the voting system itself could also be developed, where the aim is to learn well from mistakes, and improve the system while maintaining some original goals or constitution.
It's not easy to design, and will not be 'just' (but nothing save a single person country could be that), but it might be better than current systems for some things.. At least it is an interesting thought experiment, and something that would be interesting to play around with in an online world or game.
But I deeply dislike the default mandrake cute fuzzy blue and yellow for everything -category icons. Replacing them with the standard gnome category icons (of much higher quality IMHO) would be a pain to do manually.
It would be nice if the icon set/style used in the mandrake menus could be switched.
The problem is that few people want to read ads, except for secondary reasons, such as supporting a site, or if they happen to be looking for a particular product. But in those cases a search on pricewatch, google, usenet, or other such places gives more impartial information anyway.
Yes, I agree that supporting independent journalism is a noble goal. I'm just pointing out the fact that in most cases ads are distracting and annoying.
So what could be an alternative?
I don't know. Perhaps ads is an necessary evil for some sites. Certain community centered or otherwise useful sites could live on a donation model. Lum The Mad and Penny Arcade are examples of two sites that seem to be more or less working with this method. Sites like these can also sell T-shirts and similar, this way fans get something tangible and feel that they support their favourite site.
Other sites could try to get sponsoring from some suitable corporation or organization, in these cases some 'hosted by' -logo is often reuired, but it is often much less visually distracting than pop up ads.
I suppose this will still leave a lot of high traffic sites that need some alternative way to make income.
But pretending that ads are enjoyable just because they provide a living for some possibly good sites is self-deception and will not help solve the problem.
Interesting that they publish a study on OSS in.doc, MS's *closed* doc format.
Because free software WYSIWYG word processors are inferior, and because M$Word is the defacto standard in corporate and goverment officies.
How many would have been able to read an AbiWord document? Or an OpenOffice document?
They did produce a PDF too, so it's not like they are completely closing the document.
Preferably they should have released it in plain text or HTML too, as you said, or RTF. Of course that would have lost the fancy formatting.
Seems like we need a good open standardized WYSIWYG oriented xml based format for editing and storage. PDF and PS is a bit problematic to load into an editor... How good are the various formats used by open source word processors and office suites? Could they settle on one format to standardize?
I have been looking for some icon collections recently too, and didn't find anything on themes.org.
What I was looking for was generic icons, to use for drawers that I like to organize my most frequently used programs in. Not any application or system icons, but more generic, like the apple or tiger icons by Tigert. On windows there are lots of desktop icon collections available through different sources.
I think it would be great if themes.org or some other site could set up a categorized repository for Free icons.
If you've done nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide, and applaud this system for making the streets safer for our children.
As always with technology like this, the problem is the opportunity for missuse.
Advertisers for one would be very interested to know more about your mevement habits, what places you visit, etc. So there's a strong motivation by corporately lobbied capitalist nations to sell out this information. And then it will be available to stalkers, harassers, and direct marketers too.
Not that it couldn't have good uses too.
Movement patterns would help in city planning, in creating timetables for public transportation, etc. The problem is when the data has direct references to individuals, instead of being anonymous.
I can see that the program had a point about critiquing typical sensational mass hysteria, but their own journalistic tactics are quite dirty too:
The celebrities were furious and said they had been misled. "I was approached to participate in a video which would be released to schools and young people to advise them on the dangers of the Internet and its misuse by pedophiles," Mr. Rapson told Radio 4. "We had to use gobbledygook language. They said that unless you used some of their terminology, young people wouldn't take it as credible."
Of course a sentence can be intonated in many different ways, to give it different types of meanings. This information is not present in the text itself, so it has to be provided separately.
One system for that is the Speech Synthesis Markup Language being developed by the W3C. This will allow you to use XML style markup for emphasis, voice type, etc.
Here's an example (not sure if it is 100% syntactically correct):
<speak>
<voice gender="female">
<voice category="elder">
Free Software is about
<emphasis level="strong"> freedom </emphasis>,
not price!
</voice>
</voice>
</speak>
I don't know if it is used by AT&Ts system in the article.
Detecting hand gestures, eye movement, body position, etc, can be done through a webcam.
Current ones don't have a high refresh rate, so the gestures could not include ones with much motion.
Being able to detect where the user looks would open up a field for new user interface inventions.
Being able to detect wether there is a person sitting in front of the computer could be usefull too.
Or reading the user expression (smiling, laughing, scowling, yawning, etc). Scowl and look at the paper clip to make it go away, rate web comics depending on if you smile or laugh when lookin at them. Have the IRC cliet insert "lol" automatically. Aargh.
What game / graphics library to use is something that each project has to decide by themselves. Allegro has perhaps a more high level core than SDL; whether this is good or bad is a holy war type question.;-)
Otherwise they seem to follow the same pattern; the Allegro developers try to only put things that need access to the Allegro internals in the core library. Other things can be done as add on libraries.
For example, UTF-8 and I18N need to be supported by all the text functions, so they went into the core library, while things like MP3 and MOD support are in separate libraries.
It is a bit more high level than SDL, providing functions from mouse & joystick access to MIDI and sound output, many different hardware accelerated blitting and drawing operations, interrupt driven timers, support for packed data, 3D math routines, and more.
It is also ported to a lot of different platforms, and there are a number of add on libraries (including OpenGL rendering).
It's been around for a number of years, but developement is still going strong.
The allegro.cc site is a good resource for add on libraries and community news.
Well, we know nothing about possible multicellular life on other planets, but we know that many of the most intelligent forms of life here on earth have not done the kind of parallel evolution you're referring to. Dolphins and whales don't have "two or more manipulator arms," nor do elephants.
"Parallel evolution" refers to the fact that species living in similar echological niches evolve similar body shapes and behaviour.
Sharks and dolphins are both relatively large animals living in the sea and hunting fish. They have similar body shapes, because that body shape is the most practical for moving quickly in water.
Humans and a potential alien species living in similar ways, namely as tree-climbing, tool using, social omnivores could resemble each other, because a humanoid form is useful for these conditions.
Note that I do not state that this is true far all possible aliens. There's no doubt plenty of other possible echological niches that would allow intelligent, technology-using species to evolve. I was discussing the probability or possibility for humanoid aliens.
Goverments, echonomy, wars, art, etc. would be expected in a society of social intelligent animals.
Why would a solitary-living whale species invent government?
Please note that I was talking about social species. These do not live solitary lives, at least by my undersatnding of the meaning of 'social'.
As for goverments, that arised mainly as a result of agriculture for humans. I think tool usage and good communication is probably a requirement for goverments. It is somewhat questionable wether an aquatic species would develop tools or agriculture easily. But I don't think it is impossible.. you would need some manipulator arms to use tools though, so whales wouldn't be very likely tool users (a squid shape would work better).
'homo' would be human. Homo Sapiens is a species / race of humans. A term that includes other sentient beings could be 'person', 'sentient', etc. Various terms have been invented and used in science fiction, they could be a good source to borrow from. (For example the neutral pronouns 've', 'ver', etc, found in Greg Egans books (not sure if they were used somewhere else before)).
Actually, if the first multi-cellular(or equivalent) life on an alien planet starts out similar to ours (central digestien tract, mirrored body with four limbs and spine) then there is a pretty strong case that parallel evolution would produce some species that resemble our own (moving upright on two or more legs, two or more manipulator arms, senses placed close together on a head that contains the brain also).
Of course there would be differences in the appearance and proportions, but ears make sense to be placed on the sides of the head, a mouth (if it is in the face) would be best under the eyes, so that they are not obscured while eating, a nose makes sense to be located above the mouth, where it can sense the odours from the food, etc.
Similarily, cases can be made for parallel cultural evolution. Goverments, echonomy, wars, art, etc. would be expected in a society of social intelligent animals.
Of course, there is very likely a large number of probable non-humanoid intelligent species, and possibly cultures with very different components than found on earth.
For a number of very good articles of potential ET life and intelligence, take a look at the The Life Sciences Site.
The new blend, basically glass riddled with holes, can be made into thick
films and does not shrink -- problems inherent in previous materials for
holographic data storage.
This is a very interesting technology, and it seems like some type of three dimensional optical storage would enable a storage capacity one or twe magnitudes larger than the ones used today.
It is usually said that glass is a liquid, and flows slowly, as seen in old church windows that are thicker at the bottom edge.
However, a bit of googling seems to suggest that glass flowing over time is an urban legend (church windows apparently just had an imperfect manufacturing process, and were installed thick edge down). Whether to call glass a liquid or solid seems to be a toughter question.
But aside from flowing, is there something else about glass that could make it unsuitable for longtime information storage?
Right now, the Linux community is protected by RMS's bulldogs, because they fight to make sure what we do stays in the public domain
Just a small correction: GPL licensed software is NOT in the public domain. Public domain means that anyone can take the software and do anything with it, including releasing a modified or unmodified version under their own license.
Yeah, much advertising is about building up recognition for your products, no matter if it is positive or negative (you don't necessarily remember where you heard about some product, or what you heard about it, only that it is more familiar, and thus a more trustworthy and safe alternative when comparing two equal products).
Personally I _hate_ all ads, especially when embedded in applications. It is rude, because it distracts you and breaks your work flow with screaming colors or blinking animations, or by just chaning every minute.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a neat idea. It would work very nicely with small portable wireless devices too. It should be simple enough to build in barcode readers in them as a standard (or you could use digital camera capabilities that they may have in the future).
This was a very interesting and thoughtfull post about document templates, but my browser ate it. Feel free to imagine something nice here.
Just what I want, I country full of uninformed people spending 10 seconds to decide every important issue.
So create some suitable real time trust network or moderation system, where intelligent suggestions and domain 'experts' get more influence. And tune the dynamics so that it doesn't stagnate, and so that differing view points are represented.
Also make it localized, so that citizens can select what to take an interest in, for example local neighbourhood / city / state issues, or issues dealing with their work, free time activities, areas of interest or expertice, etc.
A feedback type process to improve on the voting system itself could also be developed, where the aim is to learn well from mistakes, and improve the system while maintaining some original goals or constitution.
It's not easy to design, and will not be 'just' (but nothing save a single person country could be that), but it might be better than current systems for some things.. At least it is an interesting thought experiment, and something that would be interesting to play around with in an online world or game.
But I deeply dislike the default mandrake cute fuzzy blue and yellow for everything -category icons. Replacing them with the standard gnome category icons (of much higher quality IMHO) would be a pain to do manually.
It would be nice if the icon set/style used in the mandrake menus could be switched.
The problem is that few people want to read ads, except for secondary reasons, such as supporting a site, or if they happen to be looking for a particular product. But in those cases a search on pricewatch, google, usenet, or other such places gives more impartial information anyway.
Yes, I agree that supporting independent journalism is a noble goal. I'm just pointing out the fact that in most cases ads are distracting and annoying.
So what could be an alternative?
I don't know. Perhaps ads is an necessary evil for some sites. Certain community centered or otherwise useful sites could live on a donation model. Lum The Mad and Penny Arcade are examples of two sites that seem to be more or less working with this method. Sites like these can also sell T-shirts and similar, this way fans get something tangible and feel that they support their favourite site.
Other sites could try to get sponsoring from some suitable corporation or organization, in these cases some 'hosted by' -logo is often reuired, but it is often much less visually distracting than pop up ads.
I suppose this will still leave a lot of high traffic sites that need some alternative way to make income.
But pretending that ads are enjoyable just because they provide a living for some possibly good sites is self-deception and will not help solve the problem.
Well, that's my 0.05 €
Because free software WYSIWYG word processors are inferior, and because M$Word is the defacto standard in corporate and goverment officies.
How many would have been able to read an AbiWord document? Or an OpenOffice document?
They did produce a PDF too, so it's not like they are completely closing the document.
Preferably they should have released it in plain text or HTML too, as you said, or RTF. Of course that would have lost the fancy formatting.
Seems like we need a good open standardized WYSIWYG oriented xml based format for editing and storage. PDF and PS is a bit problematic to load into an editor... How good are the various formats used by open source word processors and office suites? Could they settle on one format to standardize?
What I was looking for was generic icons, to use for drawers that I like to organize my most frequently used programs in. Not any application or system icons, but more generic, like the apple or tiger icons by Tigert. On windows there are lots of desktop icon collections available through different sources.
I think it would be great if themes.org or some other site could set up a categorized repository for Free icons.
As always with technology like this, the problem is the opportunity for missuse.
Advertisers for one would be very interested to know more about your mevement habits, what places you visit, etc. So there's a strong motivation by corporately lobbied capitalist nations to sell out this information. And then it will be available to stalkers, harassers, and direct marketers too.
Not that it couldn't have good uses too.
Movement patterns would help in city planning, in creating timetables for public transportation, etc. The problem is when the data has direct references to individuals, instead of being anonymous.
--PinKNoiSe
One system for that is the Speech Synthesis Markup Language being developed by the W3C. This will allow you to use XML style markup for emphasis, voice type, etc.
Here's an example (not sure if it is 100% syntactically correct):
<speak> <voice gender="female"> <voice category="elder"> Free Software is about <emphasis level="strong"> freedom </emphasis>, not price! </voice> </voice> </speak>
I don't know if it is used by AT&Ts system in the article.
As for the argument of using kites to build pyramids, I think it falls on Occams Razor.. Sloping planes, wheels, and a lot of slaves were available.
Do you mean that Slashdot is revolutionary? Or withering away?
Arguments could be made for both cases...
Well, enjoy your Tetris game then.
Some people actually think programming is fun, but I suppose that is a minority view on slashdot nowdays.
Being able to detect where the user looks would open up a field for new user interface inventions. Being able to detect wether there is a person sitting in front of the computer could be usefull too.
Or reading the user expression (smiling, laughing, scowling, yawning, etc). Scowl and look at the paper clip to make it go away, rate web comics depending on if you smile or laugh when lookin at them. Have the IRC cliet insert "lol" automatically. Aargh.
Otherwise they seem to follow the same pattern; the Allegro developers try to only put things that need access to the Allegro internals in the core library. Other things can be done as add on libraries.
For example, UTF-8 and I18N need to be supported by all the text functions, so they went into the core library, while things like MP3 and MOD support are in separate libraries.
It is a bit more high level than SDL, providing functions from mouse & joystick access to MIDI and sound output, many different hardware accelerated blitting and drawing operations, interrupt driven timers, support for packed data, 3D math routines, and more. It is also ported to a lot of different platforms, and there are a number of add on libraries (including OpenGL rendering).
It's been around for a number of years, but developement is still going strong.
The allegro.cc site is a good resource for add on libraries and community news.
"Parallel evolution" refers to the fact that species living in similar echological niches evolve similar body shapes and behaviour. Sharks and dolphins are both relatively large animals living in the sea and hunting fish. They have similar body shapes, because that body shape is the most practical for moving quickly in water.
Humans and a potential alien species living in similar ways, namely as tree-climbing, tool using, social omnivores could resemble each other, because a humanoid form is useful for these conditions. Note that I do not state that this is true far all possible aliens. There's no doubt plenty of other possible echological niches that would allow intelligent, technology-using species to evolve. I was discussing the probability or possibility for humanoid aliens.
Why would a solitary-living whale species invent government?
Please note that I was talking about social species. These do not live solitary lives, at least by my undersatnding of the meaning of 'social'.
As for goverments, that arised mainly as a result of agriculture for humans. I think tool usage and good communication is probably a requirement for goverments. It is somewhat questionable wether an aquatic species would develop tools or agriculture easily. But I don't think it is impossible.. you would need some manipulator arms to use tools though, so whales wouldn't be very likely tool users (a squid shape would work better).
'homo' would be human. Homo Sapiens is a species / race of humans. A term that includes other sentient beings could be 'person', 'sentient', etc. Various terms have been invented and used in science fiction, they could be a good source to borrow from. (For example the neutral pronouns 've', 'ver', etc, found in Greg Egans books (not sure if they were used somewhere else before)).
Of course there would be differences in the appearance and proportions, but ears make sense to be placed on the sides of the head, a mouth (if it is in the face) would be best under the eyes, so that they are not obscured while eating, a nose makes sense to be located above the mouth, where it can sense the odours from the food, etc.
Similarily, cases can be made for parallel cultural evolution. Goverments, echonomy, wars, art, etc. would be expected in a society of social intelligent animals.
Of course, there is very likely a large number of probable non-humanoid intelligent species, and possibly cultures with very different components than found on earth.
For a number of very good articles of potential ET life and intelligence, take a look at the The Life Sciences Site.
This is a very interesting technology, and it seems like some type of three dimensional optical storage would enable a storage capacity one or twe magnitudes larger than the ones used today.
It is usually said that glass is a liquid, and flows slowly, as seen in old church windows that are thicker at the bottom edge.
However, a bit of googling seems to suggest that glass flowing over time is an urban legend (church windows apparently just had an imperfect manufacturing process, and were installed thick edge down). Whether to call glass a liquid or solid seems to be a toughter question.
But aside from flowing, is there something else about glass that could make it unsuitable for longtime information storage?
Just a small correction: GPL licensed software is NOT in the public domain. Public domain means that anyone can take the software and do anything with it, including releasing a modified or unmodified version under their own license.
pinkNoise
Yeah, much advertising is about building up recognition for your products, no matter if it is positive or negative (you don't necessarily remember where you heard about some product, or what you heard about it, only that it is more familiar, and thus a more trustworthy and safe alternative when comparing two equal products).
Personally I _hate_ all ads, especially when embedded in applications. It is rude, because it distracts you and breaks your work flow with screaming colors or blinking animations, or by just chaning every minute.
Actually, it seems some properties of Quantum computers can't be simulated with Turing machines.
,-._- pinkNoise `-_,