For the most part you can't make a community, especially if youre a big company trying to build a fan community around yourself. Creating a forum usually gives your critics a high podium to shout from, without much of an interest in actual discourse.
There are notable exceptions (TiVo comes to mind), but a lot of companies (and other organizations) get the idea that if they build a room, it'll become a community.
The truth is the web is so much vacuum that creating an empty space by no means ensures it will be filled with content. True online communities don't have one single home. Slashdot members form a community, but Slashdot itself isn't the community. Bloggers form hundreds of tight-knit communities, but Blogger isn't a community, nore were they trying to be one when they started. All three of these sites tried to provide a great service, and the community grew organically.
TiVo's web board was just a quick addition to satisfy customer requests for a common area, and now it's flourishing grandly on its own. WebTV's community center is the same way.
Communities are emergent entities. You can't build them intentionally unless you realize that and create a product, service, or theme which inspires people to want to talk to others, not specifically to 'be part of a community,' but because they want to share at the more basic level.
I always thought they had access to two security cams, and extrapolated the 3-D architecture based on those. This isn't impossible, or even improbable. they're doing it right now at Berkeley... Kevin Fox
Unquestionably, my best teacher was Fred Carrington, Physics teacher at Ulysses S. Grant High School, in Van Nuys, California.
A Music Studies major, with a Physics minor, Derf got his teaching credential back when they gave blanket credentials to teach any subject. Teaching Physics, Derf's primary motivations were to make learning fun, and to make Physics intuitive.
Thanks to Derf, I can still derive kinematic laws, EM equasions for magnetic flux insolonoids, even Lorentz Transformations, solely by remembering how physics (even special relativity) work intuitively, then deriving the math from there.
Derf was responsible for my getting a double 5 on the Physics BC AP test in 11th grade, and was more interested in the lives of his students than any other teacher I've known. From sponsoring, organizing, and leading the Backpacking Club (even when it cost him a finger!!) to the Physics Olympiad, the Paper Airplane Contest, Egg Drops, April Fools stunts (did anyone ever get the tire over the flagpole?), and all the rest, Derf is a benchmark by which all other teachers are measured.
Now that I find myself a TA/tutor for a graduate course, I'm looking back to the lessons Drf taught me, not just in Physics, but in learning.
I salute you, Derf, for all that you've done for so many people, and I thank you.
Recent NASA press briefings have also hinted at the possibility that in the coming decade one or more NASA scientists will make a journey to the Empire State Building to drop pennies on passersby.
Current research is exploring various exit strategies to ensure a safe return home. The estimated expenditure for this project is $50,000,000.04 and is expected to launch in 2008
I'd love to see someone do this with Dance Dance Revolution. If you got the ball rolling (so to speak) people wouldn't just compete with people, arcades could compete with arcades! "You hang out at the Metreon? Damn, those people know how to stomp. I've seen the stats (and the replays)!"
Then of course there's playing Street Fighter N against someone in another city or country. eventually there won't be such a thing as a 1P game, they'll all either be physical head to head, or networked against someone in Taiwan or Amsterdam. Nifty.
Kevin Fox
Re:Freedom to innovate... new interfaces?
on
First Looks At XBox
·
· Score: 1
Read my post. I'm not talking about what's printed in the specs or on the box. I'm not using Gates in the 'Gates=Microsoft' sense. I'm refering directly to his CES keynote where he says "And the controllers use USB, only we use a different connector, but you'll be amazed at what comes out for it." That's what I'm taking issue with. No more, no less.
Just another example of Microsoft Gas for Microsoft Roads, only this time there's a Microsoft Car too!
Kevin Fox
Re:Freedom to innovate... new interfaces?
on
First Looks At XBox
·
· Score: 3
Why aren't you complaining that you can't use your ThrustMaster FCS on your Platstation? Maybe it's because the Playstation isn't a PC either. But I don't see near as many people on slashdot bashing the PS. Maybe because the PS isn't MS.
To put it briefly, I'm complaining because Gates is trying to ingratiate himself to people who like standards by touting USB compatability while at the same time keying it to the X-Box so people have to buy new equipment. Microsoft is trying to give with one hand and take with the other.
Playstations and Dreamcasts make no claim to support standards so I don't berate them for doing so in the wrong way.
That's a bit of a self-centered outlook, isn't it?
Great, you and your other top 0.5% cohorts get around the precious content protection. Good for you. Do you think that 0.5% represents any obstacle at all to those media companies who want to restrict access?
If a director like Spielberg can feel that way about a movie like Raiders, it's not a surprise that Lucas might have some second thoughts here and there. I'm betting that it'll turn out fine; Lucas has great instincts.
What worries me (and I'm sure I'm not alone) is that however Speilberg felt about Radiers, Nobody got any indication that Lucas felt Episode One was anything but gold. After such a thud, I think it's legitimate to worry about a sequel the producers themselves are worried about.
On the other hand, I hyave no idea of tghe validity of these rumors. It's exactly the sort of thing you want to hear out of ILM, right? I'd feel better hearing they're worried about a rough cut than hearing that they think everything's hunky-dorey. At least this way they might be on to what joe-moviegoer is thinking and make a bid to improve it.
Of course so far this is totally unenforcable, since it would render search engines worthless
I'm not sure what CmdrTaco meant to say, but the above makes no sense. Whether linkfees make search engines worthless or not has nothing to do with whether they are enforcable.
As for enforcing a linkfee policy, that's easy. A small script on the server checks the referrer URL against a list of valid 'subscriber' URLs and pushes up content or an error message depending on the result. This is trivial.
The idea seems disgusting en-masse, but I could see several areas where referrer-verifying would be a valid technology. Some sites already use it to prevent deep-linking to content from an external site, and it's no huge leap to see that some sites wold be willing to grant deep-linking rights for a fee.
13 isn't a very human number. It seems like it would be great if there were the same number of months in a year as days in a month.
Sqrt(365) is 19.1, which would amount to 19 months with 19 days each, totaling 361 days. We could then have either 4 or 5 days at the end of the year (non-leapyear/leapyear), which would be perfect for holiday vacations.
This is almost exactly what the Mayans used. They had 18 months of 20 days each (much nicer for subdividing than 19) and a 19th 'month' that held the 5 extra days. these were 'days out of time' where people could do whatever they wanted, as they didn't have consequence on the 'terrestrial' calendar.
Mayans also clustered years into groups of 20 (a 'Katun') and those into groups of 20 more (400 years, or a 'Baktun'). It seems that this makes more sense when looking at history. A century is either too long a cognitive unit of measure, and a decade too short.
Okay, now I'm just rambling, but considering almost no system has any hope of being approved because it would make Y2K look like a walk in the park, but if you could rebuild from scratch, what would you make? Metric time? Swatch 'beats'? What particularly bugs me is the lack of correlation between days of the week and the rest of the calendar. Each could exist entirely seperately from the other...
AP Comp Sci is supposed to teach concepts like OOP, recursion, data structures, and well encapsulated code. Why should it be taught in a language that has so much overhead code as C++?
The implementation shouldn't matter. A class that's supposed to teach concepts should use the language that best demonstrates those concepts without clutter. For many lessons, this is Java.
The first programming course CS majors at Berkeley take are taught in Scheme (basically Lisp). Nobody pretends it's a practical application to write real software in, but it illustrates fundamental coding principles (especially recursion). That's why Java is the second language taught at Berkeley. It teaches the principles.
If you're going to ITT Tech, then you should expect to be taught C++. If you're getting a Bachelors from a good school, you should be learning theory, not a trade. The rest you should be able to hack out on your own.
Back when I was a kid, we learned AP Comp Sci (A and B) on Apple IIs, using UCSD Pascal, which 'compiled' (into a non-executable) at 1 line per second! And we liked it! We loved it!
As for the AP test, java what? the AP test was entirely on paper! We coded the old fashioned way, with scratch paper and a #2 pencil!
Again, Turing Machines aren't simulations. A pocket calculator is a real, honest-to-whatever, Turing Machine. No simulation about it. It can solve a problem via symbolic manipulation. Bam: Turing Machine.
Universal Turing Machines are simulations, because of the infinite tape (and time) needed.
Sorry. You've got Turing Machines and Universal Turing Machines confused. Any device that can complete even a single function via symbolic manipulation is by definition a Turing Machine. A device that can complete any computable function is a Universal Turing Machine.
The Church-Turing Thesis is the preposition that any discrete function can be solved by symbolic manipulation. A Turing Machine is defined as a device which can solve a computable function by means of symbolic manipulation (like 1s and 0s, for example). (A Universal Turing Machine is a machine that can emulate any Turing Machine, and can therefore solve any discrete function.)
Basically, this means every computer that operates by rules of logic (AND, OR, NOT, etc, as opposed to chaotic or fuzzy systems) is a Turing Machine. Your desktop PC, your Nokia, your calculator watch, your Chinese water clock, are all examples of Turing Machines.
Personally, I'd be far more amazed by a JVM that was implemented by a device that was not a Turing Machine.
Look at CORBA, for example. A bunch of companies tried to ensure that their latest, greatest coolest features were in the standard and the end result was an ugly, unweildy and complicated standard.
Right, but XML isn't like that at all. The idea behind XML is creating a minimal framework (a (gak) meta-standard, if you will) which can be extended through DTDs for specific tasks. XML is already being used, nobody is sitting on their hands saying they can't incorporate XML because it's not final, yet companies out there are trying to modify it and call their implementation the standard.
HTML is a better example. When two companies take a standard and try to make it evolve along divergent paths (Netscape's D-HTML and IE's HTML4.0), the public suffers, as browsers will implement one or the other, and is therefore non-standard and means massive incompatability or doubled efforts in website creation.
Sure, Microsoft's implementation wins in the end. As you say, it's Darwinian evolution. but the point is that this evolution is always going on, and though it may leave a trail of accepted standards in its wake, they're no longer the area of market focus, and aren't as important as the 'next thing' that's being worked on, inevitably by more than one company with different business plans and marketing goals.
The article says that it got a 16bit/s downlink from the satellite, but then later it says that all the instruments are turned off. What the hell is it transmitting then? Anyone know?
"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I'm half-crazy, falling in love with you..."
The web co-ordinator for a large government agency has "read numerous articles on web design"? Hmm... not to be harsh, but doesnt it seem that a more qualified person should be in that kind of role?
Don't mind me, I'm just bitter because it's finals week.
Kevin Fox
Re:Damn. Got all excited...
on
New Crypto-OS
·
· Score: 2
Slashdot Mirror
For the most part you can't make a community, especially if youre a big company trying to build a fan community around yourself. Creating a forum usually gives your critics a high podium to shout from, without much of an interest in actual discourse.
There are notable exceptions (TiVo comes to mind), but a lot of companies (and other organizations) get the idea that if they build a room, it'll become a community.
The truth is the web is so much vacuum that creating an empty space by no means ensures it will be filled with content. True online communities don't have one single home. Slashdot members form a community, but Slashdot itself isn't the community. Bloggers form hundreds of tight-knit communities, but Blogger isn't a community, nore were they trying to be one when they started. All three of these sites tried to provide a great service, and the community grew organically.
TiVo's web board was just a quick addition to satisfy customer requests for a common area, and now it's flourishing grandly on its own. WebTV's community center is the same way.
Communities are emergent entities. You can't build them intentionally unless you realize that and create a product, service, or theme which inspires people to want to talk to others, not specifically to 'be part of a community,' but because they want to share at the more basic level.
Kevin Fox
I always thought they had access to two security cams, and extrapolated the 3-D architecture based on those. This isn't impossible, or even improbable. they're doing it right now at Berkeley...
Kevin Fox
Unquestionably, my best teacher was Fred Carrington, Physics teacher at Ulysses S. Grant High School, in Van Nuys, California.
A Music Studies major, with a Physics minor, Derf got his teaching credential back when they gave blanket credentials to teach any subject. Teaching Physics, Derf's primary motivations were to make learning fun, and to make Physics intuitive.
Thanks to Derf, I can still derive kinematic laws, EM equasions for magnetic flux insolonoids, even Lorentz Transformations, solely by remembering how physics (even special relativity) work intuitively, then deriving the math from there.
Derf was responsible for my getting a double 5 on the Physics BC AP test in 11th grade, and was more interested in the lives of his students than any other teacher I've known. From sponsoring, organizing, and leading the Backpacking Club (even when it cost him a finger!!) to the Physics Olympiad, the Paper Airplane Contest, Egg Drops, April Fools stunts (did anyone ever get the tire over the flagpole?), and all the rest, Derf is a benchmark by which all other teachers are measured.
Now that I find myself a TA/tutor for a graduate course, I'm looking back to the lessons Drf taught me, not just in Physics, but in learning.
I salute you, Derf, for all that you've done for so many people, and I thank you.
Sincerely, and with utmost gratitude,
Kevin
-------
Kevin Fox
And scissors. Eunuchs will be saved, don't you know.
Dude, he said UNIX, not eunuchs.
Hope it's not too lake with those scissors.
Kevin Fox
Recent NASA press briefings have also hinted at the possibility that in the coming decade one or more NASA scientists will make a journey to the Empire State Building to drop pennies on passersby.
Current research is exploring various exit strategies to ensure a safe return home. The estimated expenditure for this project is $50,000,000.04 and is expected to launch in 2008
Kevin Fox
I'd love to see someone do this with Dance Dance Revolution. If you got the ball rolling (so to speak) people wouldn't just compete with people, arcades could compete with arcades! "You hang out at the Metreon? Damn, those people know how to stomp. I've seen the stats (and the replays)!"
Then of course there's playing Street Fighter N against someone in another city or country. eventually there won't be such a thing as a 1P game, they'll all either be physical head to head, or networked against someone in Taiwan or Amsterdam. Nifty.
Kevin Fox
Read my post. I'm not talking about what's printed in the specs or on the box. I'm not using Gates in the 'Gates=Microsoft' sense. I'm refering directly to his CES keynote where he says "And the controllers use USB, only we use a different connector, but you'll be amazed at what comes out for it." That's what I'm taking issue with. No more, no less.
Just another example of Microsoft Gas for Microsoft Roads, only this time there's a Microsoft Car too!
Kevin Fox
Why aren't you complaining that you can't use your ThrustMaster FCS on your Platstation? Maybe it's because the Playstation isn't a PC either. But I don't see near as many people on slashdot bashing the PS. Maybe because the PS isn't MS.
To put it briefly, I'm complaining because Gates is trying to ingratiate himself to people who like standards by touting USB compatability while at the same time keying it to the X-Box so people have to buy new equipment. Microsoft is trying to give with one hand and take with the other.
Playstations and Dreamcasts make no claim to support standards so I don't berate them for doing so in the wrong way.
Kevin Fox
Gates: "The controllers use USB, but it's a different kind of port. Still you'll be amazed with the kinds of controllers that will come out for it."
Yay standards!
Kevin Fox
Wow can that guy not grab a room, even when he has worthy hardware.
Watching Gates try to sell the X-Box reminds me of going to Frys and having people tell me why Windows ME is the best OS.
Kevin Fox
Actually, monoliths reproduce at a geometric rate.
Like Starbucks. Sure, it started out with just one in Seattle, but then there's 2, then 4, then 8, and before you know it, they'll be everywhere.
Kevin Fox
That's a bit of a self-centered outlook, isn't it?
Great, you and your other top 0.5% cohorts get around the precious content protection. Good for you. Do you think that 0.5% represents any obstacle at all to those media companies who want to restrict access?
Kevin Fox
If a director like Spielberg can feel that way about a movie like Raiders, it's not a surprise that Lucas might have some second thoughts here and there. I'm betting that it'll turn out fine; Lucas has great instincts.
What worries me (and I'm sure I'm not alone) is that however Speilberg felt about Radiers, Nobody got any indication that Lucas felt Episode One was anything but gold. After such a thud, I think it's legitimate to worry about a sequel the producers themselves are worried about.
On the other hand, I hyave no idea of tghe validity of these rumors. It's exactly the sort of thing you want to hear out of ILM, right? I'd feel better hearing they're worried about a rough cut than hearing that they think everything's hunky-dorey. At least this way they might be on to what joe-moviegoer is thinking and make a bid to improve it.
Kevin Fox
Of course so far this is totally unenforcable, since it would render search engines worthless
I'm not sure what CmdrTaco meant to say, but the above makes no sense. Whether linkfees make search engines worthless or not has nothing to do with whether they are enforcable.
As for enforcing a linkfee policy, that's easy. A small script on the server checks the referrer URL against a list of valid 'subscriber' URLs and pushes up content or an error message depending on the result. This is trivial.
The idea seems disgusting en-masse, but I could see several areas where referrer-verifying would be a valid technology. Some sites already use it to prevent deep-linking to content from an external site, and it's no huge leap to see that some sites wold be willing to grant deep-linking rights for a fee.
Kevin Fox
13 isn't a very human number. It seems like it would be great if there were the same number of months in a year as days in a month.
Sqrt(365) is 19.1, which would amount to 19 months with 19 days each, totaling 361 days. We could then have either 4 or 5 days at the end of the year (non-leapyear/leapyear), which would be perfect for holiday vacations.
This is almost exactly what the Mayans used. They had 18 months of 20 days each (much nicer for subdividing than 19) and a 19th 'month' that held the 5 extra days. these were 'days out of time' where people could do whatever they wanted, as they didn't have consequence on the 'terrestrial' calendar.
Mayans also clustered years into groups of 20 (a 'Katun') and those into groups of 20 more (400 years, or a 'Baktun'). It seems that this makes more sense when looking at history. A century is either too long a cognitive unit of measure, and a decade too short.
Okay, now I'm just rambling, but considering almost no system has any hope of being approved because it would make Y2K look like a walk in the park, but if you could rebuild from scratch, what would you make? Metric time? Swatch 'beats'? What particularly bugs me is the lack of correlation between days of the week and the rest of the calendar. Each could exist entirely seperately from the other...
Kevin Fox
AP Comp Sci is supposed to teach concepts like OOP, recursion, data structures, and well encapsulated code. Why should it be taught in a language that has so much overhead code as C++?
The implementation shouldn't matter. A class that's supposed to teach concepts should use the language that best demonstrates those concepts without clutter. For many lessons, this is Java.
The first programming course CS majors at Berkeley take are taught in Scheme (basically Lisp). Nobody pretends it's a practical application to write real software in, but it illustrates fundamental coding principles (especially recursion). That's why Java is the second language taught at Berkeley. It teaches the principles.
If you're going to ITT Tech, then you should expect to be taught C++. If you're getting a Bachelors from a good school, you should be learning theory, not a trade. The rest you should be able to hack out on your own.
At least, that's what they keep telling me...
Kevin Fox
(and this true story was only 12 years ago)
Back when I was a kid, we learned AP Comp Sci (A and B) on Apple IIs, using UCSD Pascal, which 'compiled' (into a non-executable) at 1 line per second! And we liked it! We loved it!
As for the AP test, java what? the AP test was entirely on paper! We coded the old fashioned way, with scratch paper and a #2 pencil!
And we liked it!
Kevin Fox
Again, Turing Machines aren't simulations. A pocket calculator is a real, honest-to-whatever, Turing Machine. No simulation about it. It can solve a problem via symbolic manipulation. Bam: Turing Machine.
Universal Turing Machines are simulations, because of the infinite tape (and time) needed.
Kevin Fox
Sorry. You've got Turing Machines and Universal Turing Machines confused. Any device that can complete even a single function via symbolic manipulation is by definition a Turing Machine. A device that can complete any computable function is a Universal Turing Machine.
Kevin Fox
The Church-Turing Thesis is the preposition that any discrete function can be solved by symbolic manipulation. A Turing Machine is defined as a device which can solve a computable function by means of symbolic manipulation (like 1s and 0s, for example). (A Universal Turing Machine is a machine that can emulate any Turing Machine, and can therefore solve any discrete function.)
Basically, this means every computer that operates by rules of logic (AND, OR, NOT, etc, as opposed to chaotic or fuzzy systems) is a Turing Machine. Your desktop PC, your Nokia, your calculator watch, your Chinese water clock, are all examples of Turing Machines.
Personally, I'd be far more amazed by a JVM that was implemented by a device that was not a Turing Machine.
Kevin Fox
Look at CORBA, for example. A bunch of companies tried to ensure that their latest, greatest coolest features were in the standard and the end result was an ugly, unweildy and complicated standard.
Right, but XML isn't like that at all. The idea behind XML is creating a minimal framework (a (gak) meta-standard, if you will) which can be extended through DTDs for specific tasks. XML is already being used, nobody is sitting on their hands saying they can't incorporate XML because it's not final, yet companies out there are trying to modify it and call their implementation the standard.
HTML is a better example. When two companies take a standard and try to make it evolve along divergent paths (Netscape's D-HTML and IE's HTML4.0), the public suffers, as browsers will implement one or the other, and is therefore non-standard and means massive incompatability or doubled efforts in website creation.
Sure, Microsoft's implementation wins in the end. As you say, it's Darwinian evolution. but the point is that this evolution is always going on, and though it may leave a trail of accepted standards in its wake, they're no longer the area of market focus, and aren't as important as the 'next thing' that's being worked on, inevitably by more than one company with different business plans and marketing goals.
Kevin Fox
The logic is supposed to be that open standards are created, then software and 'initiatives' are built upon that standard, not the other way around.
If a standard is worth its salt, it can be extended by a vendor to accomodate the vendor's needs. That's why XML is an eXtensible Markup Language.
Next thing you know Microsoft is going to try to restandardize English grammar so it'll work better with MS Word's grammar checker.
Kevin Fox
The article says that it got a 16bit/s downlink from the satellite, but then later it says that all the instruments are turned off. What the hell is it transmitting then? Anyone know?
"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I'm half-crazy, falling in love with you..."
Kevin Fox
The web co-ordinator for a large government agency has "read numerous articles on web design"? Hmm... not to be harsh, but doesnt it seem that a more qualified person should be in that kind of role?
Don't mind me, I'm just bitter because it's finals week.
Kevin Fox
Don't even say it.
I already feel so dumb.
(Always read the WHOLE blurb!)
Kevin Fox