I resent that remark. E2 has been immensely valuable to me since it's creation. Whenever I need to look up a pop culture reference, or need some advanced physics explained in layman's terms, or just want a definition of some thing beyond "Just the facts, ma'am", I head to the E2 search box. It's got its good people and bad people, just like any other community, but that's no reason to dis it.
And the moderation system is way better than Slashdot's. I can even have a say in what appears on the front page if I like, instead of just occasionally moderating people's comments.
The only "problem" is that the Internet is simply too large for one engine to index. People go to Google expecting to search every web document that's online, a labor comparable to going to your local library and expecting their database to tell you about every book in existence on a particular topic or by a particular author. Even the Library of Congress isn't that comprehensive.
I disagree with the article's claim that "much of the most interesting and valuable content [on the Web] remains hard to find." I think that the most interesting and valuable content is easy to find, provided that you start looking in the right place. Which means that if I want information on the latest US school shootings, I don't go to Yahoo or Google and search for "school shootings", I go to those sites and search for major news sources (BBC, CNN, Reuters, etc.) and use their up-to-the-minute search engines.
The role of search engines isn't "shrinking" by a long shot; it's just becoming less comprehensive. Searching on the Web is now a two-step process instead of a one-step process, and you have to apply a little more intelligence than you could back in 1995. If high school students researching their latest humanities paper have a problem with that, well, they should ask us twentysomethings what it was like to have to use card catalogs and microfiche for our own high school projects.
...MacWEEK has had an ongoing series called "The Road to Mac OS X", which is rather more informative and in-depth. A three-part series of articles details the UNIX aspects of the new OS.
...you might be surprised how many people really don't have an immediate need for those drivers. And the ones who do will just wait for the first round of updates, the same as any sensible WinXX upgrader will do.
It's not entirely true that ASP is useless without COM. COM is what makes ASP great, but ASP is mainly popular among web developers and developees because it's free on Microsoft servers.
Chili!Soft is good because it lets you take non-COM ASP scripts from a Microsoft server and stick it on Apache -- and, if a BSD port happens, on MacOS X as well. This saves oodles of time in moving scripts to Perl or Python or another UNIX-based language of your choice, since you can take your time porting the VBScript itself.
When I bought my first DVD recently, the store employees told me that connecting it through the VCR wouldn't produce a good picture -- for precisely that reason. (It'd be a pain to have to turn the VCR on everytime I wanted to watch a disc, anyways.) The store showed me where I could buy a $40 box which let me switch between the two with a button press -- another inconvenience, but a more intuitive one than turning on the VCR -- and also pointed out that all new room-size televisions today have multiple inputs to solve this problem.
In other words: the industry is aware of the problems, and is trying to make the Macrovision inconvenience as little as possible. If it's a pain for you, well, it's not their fault your television predates VCRs and practically needs to be retrofitted to watch tapes in the first place.
...sell the project you've been working on in your spare time to your own company. Let your company sell it to the client. The client gets what they want in an unexpectedly short time frame, you get paid, your company gets paid, and hopefully, you get some extra recognition for helping your company in your spare time.
Am I the only one here that thinks that a C|Net article on OCing has no bearing to most of the slashdot community?
Well, I'm a member of the Slashdot community, and I know next to nothing about serious overclocking -- least of all the complicated cooling systems involved in it. I got a good oversight from the article, and a better one from the ensuing discussion here. Not *all* nerds and geeks practice overclocking, you know; some just do code.
In addition, C|Net provided a heap of external and internal links to additional overclocking information in the right-hand bar of the story. So if you wanted to know more, they gave you plenty of more-authoritative places to go.
As a postscript, that's only half the reason I submitted this story to Slashdot. The other half was to see what it finally took to get a story admitted by Slashdot, since my last eight eclecticly-chosen submissions were rejected while a duplicate article on Napster was posted just yesterday by an editor who didn't know how to use his own site's search engine. My conclusion: the only thing I did with this submission that I didn't do with the others was submit it as early in the day as possible. *shrug*
The core recipe of humanity carries clumps of genes that show we are descended from bacteria. There is no other way to explain the jerry-rigged nature of the genes that control key aspects of our development.
That's just one of the "no one"s, "no other"s, and "no doubt"s that permeate this article. Without taking positions for or against, it's hard to take the above quote as a compelling argument that the human genome proves evolution as the sole cause for humanity's origin. Methinks the writer is just a teensy bit biased.
Of course, so is Slashdot. "Kansas agrees" because their original reason for removing Darwin from the curriculum was flawed, according to the linked article, not because they read this guy and came to the abrupt conclusion that There Is No God.
...it's about the medium. Books will always exist for a few simple reasons:
They're portable. An e-book text file may be lightweight and easy to recycle, but if you don't have a reader or batteries, it's unreadable. Paper books can be read anytime, anywhere, in any conditions save soaking wet.
They're easy to understand. There's no learning curve for using a paper book. The read-flip-read "book user interface" has been in place almost since the invention of paper, and it actually has advantages that computer files don't. You have an intuitive sense of where you are in a book (near the beginning, halfway through, etc.) that you don't have with a computer file; you can stick a bookmark between the pages or dog-ear the corner; you can highlight important passages; you can scribble notes in the margins. And you can do all this no matter what book you're reading or how old it might be.
They're durable. Books can be burned or soaked, but short of that they're remarkably hard to destroy. Books from centuries ago have been preserved and read, despite the aging fragility of the paper; I can't even emulate computer software that was written forty years ago.
It's not like we haven't heard this spiel before. For years the likes of Lotus and Microsoft have been saying that our offices will be completely digital any day now and paper documentation will become a thing of the past, and all the while companies like Xerox have continued to make money on the simple reality that everyone, everywhere, still needs paper.
It's natural and obvious that the e-book publishers would be announcing that "that the day of ordinary books, magazines and newspapers was almost over." They, after all, want to make money on its replacement. But there are some things computers just can't replace, and this is one of them. E-books will supplement paper books in the Western world, but they will never replace them.
"It sounded like something crashing into the surface. Zarbonn, I thought you said you'd fixed the problem!"
"I did, I did! Just let me go take a look...."
time passes
"...Aw, geez."
"Well, what was it?"
It's that stupid shiny box with wings. It crashed *again*, this time on the other side of the asteroid."
"What!? You mean they sent a second one?"
"No, no, it's the same one. It lifted off and crashed down again."
"How did it do that? I thought you said you'd broken all the electronic bits off!"
I said I'd broken the camera off so it couldn't see us. I didn't think it'd be able to lift off again after being beat up that bad in the first crash, so I left it alone. I figured the garbagemen would pick it up next Wurblesday anyhow, so I left it alone."
"Well, that's just great. Now I'm going to have to help you pick it up and carry it all the way to the other side of the rock so that they *do* pick it up."
"No, just relax, I'll give Zarkkel a call tomorrow afternoon and have him bring his tow rocket. He owes me a favor anyways."
"Well, go up and break all the rest of the bits off so that it doesn't go off a third time. The last thing we need is to have that thing crashing through our ceiling like those poor Martians did just last cycle."
"Already done. By the way, I thought I could swipe those solar cells and hook them up to the transmitter next weekend. If they provide enough extra power, we should be able to pick up the pay-per-view movie channel they're broadcasting from Titan."
"Great! Say, you don't think that shiny transmitter box could have come from Earth, do you?"
"I doubt it. After we buzzed their last box and made it crash into Mars instead of orbiting it, you'd think they'd have learned their lesson."
Their business model makes a lot of sense: they won't sell CDs, they will sell access to the massively multiplayer server.
This might be a mistake. There are people who would prefer to buy the game, even a simple jewel-case with a paper insert and no box, because of the convenience of having a hard backup or not having to download the whole offline. And there are others who would gladly buy the game, if it was good enough, even after downloading it, just to show support.
They may as well offer the option, even if it's only over the Web instead of in retail stores. Why turn down more money?
This, I have to say, is a novel concept; paying a middle man when there (technically) isn't one.
Not true. Napster's software is performing the service of a middleman, connecting the two individuals easily in a way they probably never could have done without the software, and then asking payment for the cost of making the software and running the servers. eBay charges for the same sort of thing; why should it seem so strange now?
It's tough to imagine a more urgent moral issue than the fate of children without access to computers or the Net
I was going to comment on this very quote, in the very same manner -- I'm not surprised someone else beat me to it.
When I first read that sentence, I thought it was sarcasm. I scrolled down a few paragraphs for the reality check, and never found one. It seems JonKatz really does believe that a lack of Net access and RPG gaming (?!?) is solely responsible for poor children's low education scores and their inability to break into higher-income jobs when they reach adulthood -- as if an Internet connection to Slashdot and a copy of 'Everquest' would be able to liberate the poor, downtrodden inner-city masses from their shackles of poverty in one fell swoop.
Regarding the topic, though, is this truly the way the web is going to become, with semi-intelligent linking, bringing relevant topics to the forefront and allowing the irrelevant to wither in obscurity?
I think that it is. The WWW is all about the democracy of information -- anyone can publish anywhere, and be read by anyone. Its size has made it more difficult to find new information, but self-adaptive sites and search engines take it one level further: democratic editing, where other users and web-based publishers vote on and link to the most useful information.
How come the person who successfully hacks a system can win $50,000 while in an unrelated contest the person who can track down a hacker wins a copy of McGraw-Hill's Hacking Exposed, a $28 value?
Because it's generally easier to sell someone a security system to keep your house from being broken into, than a camera that will only tell you where they went after they left.
First Dune, then Ender's Game, now this -- I'm silently elated. Hard sci-fi movies are like evangelism for geeks. I mean, it would be better if everyone thought like Stanley Kubrick did and realized that rockets don't make any sound in outer space (2001), but I know we can't have everything.
Anyone else know of other plans to start bringing "real" science fiction to the silver screen? I'd love to compile the definitive list.
CHAT ROOM MONITOR--This is a job that only a saint could love, and only a really dumb saint. Being a chat room monitor is like being a referee in a basketball game pitting inmates from the local prison against inmates from the local insane asylum. Ostensibly, your job is to ensure that a civilized level of discourse prevails in an environment dominated by perverts, sociopaths, lunatics, and teenage boys. It's like trying to referee a polite nuclear war.
...but will it keep up with the upgrades?
on
Laser-equipped 747
·
· Score: 3
The one thing I didn't see in this news article was any description of how the computer-guided tracking system identifies something as a missile rather than, say, a pigeon or a stealth bomber.
I wonder how long it would be before someone else can develop a type of missile which isn't identified as such by this system? And how much more will it cost them to release a patch?
Slashdot Mirror
Buy the t-shirts, of course! (I'm working on designing some new ones, really I am....)
I resent that remark. E2 has been immensely valuable to me since it's creation. Whenever I need to look up a pop culture reference, or need some advanced physics explained in layman's terms, or just want a definition of some thing beyond "Just the facts, ma'am", I head to the E2 search box. It's got its good people and bad people, just like any other community, but that's no reason to dis it.
And the moderation system is way better than Slashdot's. I can even have a say in what appears on the front page if I like, instead of just occasionally moderating people's comments.
Ah well, it was fun while it lasted. :-)
The only "problem" is that the Internet is simply too large for one engine to index. People go to Google expecting to search every web document that's online, a labor comparable to going to your local library and expecting their database to tell you about every book in existence on a particular topic or by a particular author. Even the Library of Congress isn't that comprehensive.
I disagree with the article's claim that "much of the most interesting and valuable content [on the Web] remains hard to find." I think that the most interesting and valuable content is easy to find, provided that you start looking in the right place. Which means that if I want information on the latest US school shootings, I don't go to Yahoo or Google and search for "school shootings", I go to those sites and search for major news sources (BBC, CNN, Reuters, etc.) and use their up-to-the-minute search engines.
The role of search engines isn't "shrinking" by a long shot; it's just becoming less comprehensive. Searching on the Web is now a two-step process instead of a one-step process, and you have to apply a little more intelligence than you could back in 1995. If high school students researching their latest humanities paper have a problem with that, well, they should ask us twentysomethings what it was like to have to use card catalogs and microfiche for our own high school projects.
- Part 1
- Part 2
- Part 3
Also:OS X features OS-level support for multiple processors, multithreading, and protected memory. If you're going to troll, try harder.
...you might be surprised how many people really don't have an immediate need for those drivers. And the ones who do will just wait for the first round of updates, the same as any sensible WinXX upgrader will do.
This has got to be a historic first. I... I feel faint...
Chili!Soft is good because it lets you take non-COM ASP scripts from a Microsoft server and stick it on Apache -- and, if a BSD port happens, on MacOS X as well. This saves oodles of time in moving scripts to Perl or Python or another UNIX-based language of your choice, since you can take your time porting the VBScript itself.
In other words: the industry is aware of the problems, and is trying to make the Macrovision inconvenience as little as possible. If it's a pain for you, well, it's not their fault your television predates VCRs and practically needs to be retrofitted to watch tapes in the first place.
...sell the project you've been working on in your spare time to your own company. Let your company sell it to the client. The client gets what they want in an unexpectedly short time frame, you get paid, your company gets paid, and hopefully, you get some extra recognition for helping your company in your spare time.
Am I the only one here that thinks that a C|Net article on OCing has no bearing to most of the slashdot community?
Well, I'm a member of the Slashdot community, and I know next to nothing about serious overclocking -- least of all the complicated cooling systems involved in it. I got a good oversight from the article, and a better one from the ensuing discussion here. Not *all* nerds and geeks practice overclocking, you know; some just do code.
In addition, C|Net provided a heap of external and internal links to additional overclocking information in the right-hand bar of the story. So if you wanted to know more, they gave you plenty of more-authoritative places to go.
As a postscript, that's only half the reason I submitted this story to Slashdot. The other half was to see what it finally took to get a story admitted by Slashdot, since my last eight eclecticly-chosen submissions were rejected while a duplicate article on Napster was posted just yesterday by an editor who didn't know how to use his own site's search engine. My conclusion: the only thing I did with this submission that I didn't do with the others was submit it as early in the day as possible. *shrug*
That's just one of the "no one"s, "no other"s, and "no doubt"s that permeate this article. Without taking positions for or against, it's hard to take the above quote as a compelling argument that the human genome proves evolution as the sole cause for humanity's origin. Methinks the writer is just a teensy bit biased.
Of course, so is Slashdot. "Kansas agrees" because their original reason for removing Darwin from the curriculum was flawed, according to the linked article, not because they read this guy and came to the abrupt conclusion that There Is No God.
It's not like we haven't heard this spiel before. For years the likes of Lotus and Microsoft have been saying that our offices will be completely digital any day now and paper documentation will become a thing of the past, and all the while companies like Xerox have continued to make money on the simple reality that everyone, everywhere, still needs paper.
It's natural and obvious that the e-book publishers would be announcing that "that the day of ordinary books, magazines and newspapers was almost over." They, after all, want to make money on its replacement. But there are some things computers just can't replace, and this is one of them. E-books will supplement paper books in the Western world, but they will never replace them.
"OW! Great Vrebzjneb, what the photon was THAT?"
"It sounded like something crashing into the surface. Zarbonn, I thought you said you'd fixed the problem!"
"I did, I did! Just let me go take a look...."
time passes
"...Aw, geez."
"Well, what was it?"
It's that stupid shiny box with wings. It crashed *again*, this time on the other side of the asteroid."
"What!? You mean they sent a second one?"
"No, no, it's the same one. It lifted off and crashed down again."
"How did it do that? I thought you said you'd broken all the electronic bits off!"
I said I'd broken the camera off so it couldn't see us. I didn't think it'd be able to lift off again after being beat up that bad in the first crash, so I left it alone. I figured the garbagemen would pick it up next Wurblesday anyhow, so I left it alone."
"Well, that's just great. Now I'm going to have to help you pick it up and carry it all the way to the other side of the rock so that they *do* pick it up."
"No, just relax, I'll give Zarkkel a call tomorrow afternoon and have him bring his tow rocket. He owes me a favor anyways."
"Well, go up and break all the rest of the bits off so that it doesn't go off a third time. The last thing we need is to have that thing crashing through our ceiling like those poor Martians did just last cycle."
"Already done. By the way, I thought I could swipe those solar cells and hook them up to the transmitter next weekend. If they provide enough extra power, we should be able to pick up the pay-per-view movie channel they're broadcasting from Titan."
"Great! Say, you don't think that shiny transmitter box could have come from Earth, do you?"
"I doubt it. After we buzzed their last box and made it crash into Mars instead of orbiting it, you'd think they'd have learned their lesson."
"You'd think. 'Intelligent life' my berizzekl."
This might be a mistake. There are people who would prefer to buy the game, even a simple jewel-case with a paper insert and no box, because of the convenience of having a hard backup or not having to download the whole offline. And there are others who would gladly buy the game, if it was good enough, even after downloading it, just to show support.
They may as well offer the option, even if it's only over the Web instead of in retail stores. Why turn down more money?
Emigrate.
I agree. GUIs have no place in the world of true software.
I mean, come on -- is mixing code with the display really that different from putting the display in your code?
Not true. Napster's software is performing the service of a middleman, connecting the two individuals easily in a way they probably never could have done without the software, and then asking payment for the cost of making the software and running the servers. eBay charges for the same sort of thing; why should it seem so strange now?
I was going to comment on this very quote, in the very same manner -- I'm not surprised someone else beat me to it.
When I first read that sentence, I thought it was sarcasm. I scrolled down a few paragraphs for the reality check, and never found one. It seems JonKatz really does believe that a lack of Net access and RPG gaming (?!?) is solely responsible for poor children's low education scores and their inability to break into higher-income jobs when they reach adulthood -- as if an Internet connection to Slashdot and a copy of 'Everquest' would be able to liberate the poor, downtrodden inner-city masses from their shackles of poverty in one fell swoop.
I think that it is. The WWW is all about the democracy of information -- anyone can publish anywhere, and be read by anyone. Its size has made it more difficult to find new information, but self-adaptive sites and search engines take it one level further: democratic editing, where other users and web-based publishers vote on and link to the most useful information.
Because it's generally easier to sell someone a security system to keep your house from being broken into, than a camera that will only tell you where they went after they left.
First Dune, then Ender's Game, now this -- I'm silently elated. Hard sci-fi movies are like evangelism for geeks. I mean, it would be better if everyone thought like Stanley Kubrick did and realized that rockets don't make any sound in outer space (2001), but I know we can't have everything.
Anyone else know of other plans to start bringing "real" science fiction to the silver screen? I'd love to compile the definitive list.
I wonder how long it would be before someone else can develop a type of missile which isn't identified as such by this system? And how much more will it cost them to release a patch?