The social aspects of online communication are, I'm sure, well known to most slashdot folks, but certain things do need to be looked at, or at least thought about. Is it good for people to do all their communicating from behind a terminal rather than in person? Is it really healthy to prefer spending a day on your own browsing the web or MUDding to going out with friends or walking in the hills?
No. It's not healthy. But often, these people have no "outside" friends to turn to, and either no idea or no willingness to get some. Personally, I spend a lot of time online because I've lost touch with all the folks I used to hang out and play games with.. our gathering place closed, and we had nowhere to meet.. and then the active members all moved. I still have friends, though, and still keep in verbal, visual, and tactile "touch" with people every day. But every night, when I've got nothing better to do, I get online to read and play.
Myself, I'm fascinated by the difference between people's writing styles on Usenet, IRC, whatever, and the way they are when you meet them in real life. Can the constant switching between online persona and real-life personality affect your image of who you really are, or does it improve your self-image by letting you explore aspects that you wouldn't usually explore in reality?
First, you misuse "affect". Of course this stuff affects you; it's almost always a learning experience to log on and look around.
On to the next thing. I've made a personal project of analyzing self-descriptions of MU* players' characters, and the aspects of themselves that pop up in conversation. There's an interesting correlation between the feeling evoked by a description and the feelings evoked by the person's speech and actions; and an even more interesting thing happens when those feelings are dissonant. Attitude plays a big part in this. While I don't have solid numbers or relational charts, I have learned to stay away from most "twinks". The next step would be to meet with more of these people, and especially more of them I've met online already. But before that, I need a car.. this town is only now relearning public transportation.
And yup, I know this is supposed to be a technical discussion, but there's more to the Net than just routers and hosts.
Something I recognized within two months of first getting a connection from a university. Life is out there, if you can see it.. another draw to the folks who feel a need to disconnect from reality. All the serious decades-long studies on the Internet's true effects on mental health are probably just taking off, now that all the hype is getting old.
That depends. Once the basic math, reading, and science are out of the way, education is really about in-depth learning on specific topics. Basic skills are re-taught in college because they were never learned in high school, due to whatever process blocks the actual material from entering the students' heads.
Past what is *required* of formal education, I do happen to think that you can learn from many informal sources, including Web-based BBS systems. And what about home-schooling, anyway? How formal does that have to be? (entirely different topic, so I'll leave it be for now)
No telnet to/from Aussie servers? Excuuuuse me, but remote-administration tools aside, I'd much rather have the frame and guts of a shell prompt... Not to mention a number of my friends would have to leave the socials, talkers, and MU*'s we meet on.
What a way to go... purged by the republic for no good reason...
Sixty or seventy pounds of film, eh? That's two or three trips for one person, considering a twenty-four-pack of soda (commonly lifted by one person) weighs close to twenty-six pounds.. and in fact, I've been known to carry two twenty-four-packs at once, and can carry my own weight on my back for short distances.
In other words, someone who came prepared could take the film alone.. but probably had accomplices who let him/her in. And of course, if you're going to let your friend in to do this, you might as well help carry it out...
Games. MS OSs are good for games. That's right, W95/98 is just a game machine. That's nearly all I do with it, is games and 'Net. And I could do 'Net from pretty much any other OS.
It's possible to hate any job. I would get burned out playing the same games all hours, build relationships and reputations, and then sell it all away. But then, I'm not the callous sort of person I'd have to be to do that.
Odd. UF still makes me smile every so often. So far, I'm waiting for the current storyline's payoff.
And as for published web-comics, how about both Sluggy Freelance, and Kevin and Kell, comics I read daily. In fact, K&K has two volumes out (working on a third soon), and Sluggy is currently printing their second volume.
It's just that I'd like to see more and better UF; a book gives me that opportunity. And since it'll be sold primarily in bookstores, rather than online, I'll have the chance to look it over before I take it to the counter.
Easy. They're proud of their little toy that they raised to be superficial, because he's a success at something that's real and meaningful to him. But all they see is the success, not why you do it.
Over 700,000 of us, and you assume that we're all going to be there? I doubt I'll ever see it in the theaters. I may never "be there" for it.
But you're right about me being a LucasFilm customer. I happen to be seeking a replacement for my copy of the Dark Crystal, among other videos stolen last year. D'you know how *hard* it is to find a cheap, legal tape of that?
Heh. Those 300-400 some people who have JonKatz gagged didn't get to hear of this in any direct fashion... this may be the biggest thing to ever hit Slashdot (I wouldn't know, I only got here a few months ago), and they missed it the first time around.
Another good argument for not hitting that "go-away" button without some serious thought beforehand.
Actually, I regularly read articles with fewer comments, just because I'm more likely to see an opportunity to contribute. The fewer the comments, the more likely it is to attract my attention as being esoteric, unusual, or just plain new.
One thing I really like is, I never ever see "First post!" as both subject and complete body of a message anymore; and I didn't have to gag it in my checkboxes. As a few try to abuse the system, the majority try to give it intelligence, rationality, and life. So far the majority is winning.
I try to avoid shopping at Electronics Boutique. The name of the store just says "sold on showiness" (the only electronics I see are joysticks, oddly enough)... and they sure do offer a lot of showy do-nothing titles... Not that another software shop would fill their shelves with better, of course, but that name has pretensions of being a little bit classier than what they are.
Actually, this is how I imagine MS code is written: some randomly-collected blob of sleepless overworked programmers are handed a set of vague guidelines, a list of features, and a picture of the finished product as design specs.
The half-dead coders just pick some details and toss the revised spec into a source-generator that makes the pretty pictures appear to work. After the alpha demo, they add spaghetti to make the features do something almost useful.
After the beta is released and they've had a few hours' sleep and some coffee, the original programming team picks a new team to do the post-sales commercial version, which fixes the most blatant bugs now that some cash is coming in from the product.
But maybe that's not how it's done (yeah, right, tell that to the people who don't know what division they're in anymore).
RedHat works much better for me w/ the exception of crappy Win modems.
I can tell you why, as if you didn't know:
Winmodems are just DSP chips with phone ports. The driver does *everything* else associated with a modem, from generating the blue-tones to adjusting the compression. The drivers are large and cumbersome because of it, but the cards are frickin' cheap; so the price goes down some. Thusly greed generates another bad idea...
Programmers should learn how to optimize the size of their code w/ out compromising the speed or the operation of it.
Isn't that the sort of thing that the first small groups of hackers were proud to have done, when the only available space was about 1-3K? When you had to fit an entire video game in 2048 bytes, and used all sorts of interesting tricks to do it?
I remember this from a book on the subject, and a few such tricks were mentioned:
Using data as instructions (weird but useful in a fractal sort of way) Understanding and using the full instruction set of a CPU (makes for proprietary code, but we're talking ASM at the time anyway --which is much more efficient just because of what it is) Simple compression algorythms (using the small free memory space to store uncompressed pages of code) Overlay files (Inefficient use of disk space, but efficient use of RAM)
and so on...
Even with enormous sloppy APIs, certain things don't ever go out of style... like well-organized program structure, efficient algorhythms, et cetera.
Actually, rotating r/w heads are an excellent idea. Just pop in a square chip with a notch in the corner, and the two heads will lock in and spin like cyclones...
And as discussed elsewhere, with multiple heads on each platter you have vastly-reduced seek times and potentially extended disk life (the arm doesn't vibrate so much when it's a disc).
Then again, the head doesn't have to rotate, necessarily. In fact, it might just be another plate of magnets, cone-shaped this time. Kind of like old-time core memory (mini-donut magnets wrapped in wire), we would in fact have a new kind of stable RAM chip. 2Gig flash RAM, anyone?:)
But it is not the technology that is to blame. A predator will use whatever means are available to further his predation.
Too true. I know one or two predators... and just because hundreds of people recognize them on sight does not mean they won't destroy a person if given the opportunity.
I also speak from experience, as a good friend of mine (whom I met online) was emotionally and verbally abused over the course of several months by the nastiest person I know.. it ended in a horrible mess that indirectly involved a score of other people. I'm still angry about it, over a year later; I'll never forget that trauma, and I was only an observer after the fact.
Oh, c'mon. Yeah, I'd get most of the software online, but my local Barnes & Noble stocks Linux in 2 distros, RedHat and Slackware... with manuals, no less. Plus various CGI stuff on the next shelf.
Not that I'm actually bragging (can't get computer shops to sell Linux, but the bookstores have it all over the place?)
If you actually read the article, remote viewing has next to nothing to do with it.
Bull.
He's using remote viewing as a direct example of the kind of mental processing people experience while online. I really wouldn't have chosen that example, but it *is* apt in several ways (described above in the article).
Yeah, he used salt shakers. Several types, in fact.
But speaking of tricorders, I don't find the everything-in-a-pen type shown on that Voyager time travel episode very realistic. The interface just wouldn't be practical for anyone but the designers (in other words, it's a status symbol "my stick is better than yours"), whereas the standard palmtop-type tricorders would probably be used extensively for their friendlier appearance.
I do believe that biochips could be easily used for something with is posited to sense bioelectric fields and the reflection of various energy types; just think how your nose feels after someone lightly rubs a steel nail against it.. usually, people tell me the bone tingles a little. And don't forget that birds home in partly via Earth's magnetic field.
But how long would a biochip be good for, before it dies or becomes corrupted?
Slashdot Mirror
The social aspects of online communication are, I'm sure, well known to most slashdot folks, but certain things do need to be looked at, or at least thought about. Is it good for people to do all their communicating from behind a terminal rather than in person? Is it really healthy to prefer spending a day on your own browsing the web or MUDding to going out with friends or walking in the hills?
No. It's not healthy. But often, these people have no "outside" friends to turn to, and either no idea or no willingness to get some. Personally, I spend a lot of time online because I've lost touch with all the folks I used to hang out and play games with.. our gathering place closed, and we had nowhere to meet.. and then the active members all moved. I still have friends, though, and still keep in verbal, visual, and tactile "touch" with people every day. But every night, when I've got nothing better to do, I get online to read and play.
Myself, I'm fascinated by the difference between people's writing styles on Usenet, IRC, whatever, and the way they are when you meet them in real life. Can the constant switching between online persona and real-life personality affect your image of who you really are, or does it improve your self-image by letting you explore aspects that you wouldn't usually explore in reality?
First, you misuse "affect". Of course this stuff affects you; it's almost always a learning experience to log on and look around.
On to the next thing. I've made a personal project of analyzing self-descriptions of MU* players' characters, and the aspects of themselves that pop up in conversation. There's an interesting correlation between the feeling evoked by a description and the feelings evoked by the person's speech and actions; and an even more interesting thing happens when those feelings are dissonant. Attitude plays a big part in this. While I don't have solid numbers or relational charts, I have learned to stay away from most "twinks". The next step would be to meet with more of these people, and especially more of them I've met online already. But before that, I need a car.. this town is only now relearning public transportation.
And yup, I know this is supposed to be a technical discussion, but there's more to the Net than just routers and hosts.
Something I recognized within two months of first getting a connection from a university. Life is out there, if you can see it.. another draw to the folks who feel a need to disconnect from reality. All the serious decades-long studies on the Internet's true effects on mental health are probably just taking off, now that all the hype is getting old.
But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
That depends. Once the basic math, reading, and science are out of the way, education is really about in-depth learning on specific topics. Basic skills are re-taught in college because they were never learned in high school, due to whatever process blocks the actual material from entering the students' heads.
Past what is *required* of formal education, I do happen to think that you can learn from many informal sources, including Web-based BBS systems. And what about home-schooling, anyway? How formal does that have to be? (entirely different topic, so I'll leave it be for now)
Rant all you want, supporting newbie UNIX users is *not* an easy task.
And supporting Windows slop is?
To quote: "Dangit, that little arrow is getting in the way again!"
No telnet to/from Aussie servers? Excuuuuse me, but remote-administration tools aside, I'd much rather have the frame and guts of a shell prompt... Not to mention a number of my friends would have to leave the socials, talkers, and MU*'s we meet on.
What a way to go... purged by the republic for no good reason...
Sixty or seventy pounds of film, eh? That's two or three trips for one person, considering a twenty-four-pack of soda (commonly lifted by one person) weighs close to twenty-six pounds.. and in fact, I've been known to carry two twenty-four-packs at once, and can carry my own weight on my back for short distances.
In other words, someone who came prepared could take the film alone.. but probably had accomplices who let him/her in. And of course, if you're going to let your friend in to do this, you might as well help carry it out...
You know, if you used a real E-mail to submit your account, you can just type in the username and tell Slashdot to send your password to you.
But that would be following instructions.
Games. MS OSs are good for games. That's right, W95/98 is just a game machine. That's nearly all I do with it, is games and 'Net. And I could do 'Net from pretty much any other OS.
It's possible to hate any job. I would get burned out playing the same games all hours, build relationships and reputations, and then sell it all away. But then, I'm not the callous sort of person I'd have to be to do that.
Odd. UF still makes me smile every so often. So far, I'm waiting for the current storyline's payoff.
And as for published web-comics, how about both Sluggy Freelance, and Kevin and Kell, comics I read daily. In fact, K&K has two volumes out (working on a third soon), and Sluggy is currently printing their second volume.
It's just that I'd like to see more and better UF; a book gives me that opportunity. And since it'll be sold primarily in bookstores, rather than online, I'll have the chance to look it over before I take it to the counter.
Easy. They're proud of their little toy that they raised to be superficial, because he's a success at something that's real and meaningful to him. But all they see is the success, not why you do it.
Over 700,000 of us, and you assume that we're all going to be there? I doubt I'll ever see it in the theaters. I may never "be there" for it.
But you're right about me being a LucasFilm customer. I happen to be seeking a replacement for my copy of the Dark Crystal, among other videos stolen last year. D'you know how *hard* it is to find a cheap, legal tape of that?
Heh. Those 300-400 some people who have JonKatz gagged didn't get to hear of this in any direct fashion... this may be the biggest thing to ever hit Slashdot (I wouldn't know, I only got here a few months ago), and they missed it the first time around.
Another good argument for not hitting that "go-away" button without some serious thought beforehand.
Makes me wish Andy Rooney was still doing his commentary at the end of 60 Minutes. He'd probably do just that.
Actually, I regularly read articles with fewer comments, just because I'm more likely to see an opportunity to contribute. The fewer the comments, the more likely it is to attract my attention as being esoteric, unusual, or just plain new.
One thing I really like is, I never ever see "First post!" as both subject and complete body of a message anymore; and I didn't have to gag it in my checkboxes. As a few try to abuse the system, the majority try to give it intelligence, rationality, and life. So far the majority is winning.
I try to avoid shopping at Electronics Boutique. The name of the store just says "sold on showiness" (the only electronics I see are joysticks, oddly enough)... and they sure do offer a lot of showy do-nothing titles... Not that another software shop would fill their shelves with better, of course, but that name has pretensions of being a little bit classier than what they are.
Actually, this is how I imagine MS code is written: some randomly-collected blob of sleepless overworked programmers are handed a set of vague guidelines, a list of features, and a picture of the finished product as design specs.
The half-dead coders just pick some details and toss the revised spec into a source-generator that makes the pretty pictures appear to work. After the alpha demo, they add spaghetti to make the features do something almost useful.
After the beta is released and they've had a few hours' sleep and some coffee, the original programming team picks a new team to do the post-sales commercial version, which fixes the most blatant bugs now that some cash is coming in from the product.
But maybe that's not how it's done (yeah, right, tell that to the people who don't know what division they're in anymore).
RedHat works much better for me w/ the exception of crappy Win modems.
I can tell you why, as if you didn't know:
Winmodems are just DSP chips with phone ports. The driver does *everything* else associated with a modem, from generating the blue-tones to adjusting the compression. The drivers are large and cumbersome because of it, but the cards are frickin' cheap; so the price goes down some. Thusly greed generates another bad idea...
Programmers should learn how to optimize the size of their code w/ out compromising the speed or the operation of it.
Isn't that the sort of thing that the first small groups of hackers were proud to have done, when the only available space was about 1-3K? When you had to fit an entire video game in 2048 bytes, and used all sorts of interesting tricks to do it?
I remember this from a book on the subject, and a few such tricks were mentioned:
Using data as instructions (weird but useful in a fractal sort of way)
Understanding and using the full instruction set of a CPU (makes for proprietary code, but we're talking ASM at the time anyway --which is much more efficient just because of what it is)
Simple compression algorythms (using the small free memory space to store uncompressed pages of code)
Overlay files (Inefficient use of disk space, but efficient use of RAM)
and so on...
Even with enormous sloppy APIs, certain things don't ever go out of style... like well-organized program structure, efficient algorhythms, et cetera.
But you knew that.
Actually, rotating r/w heads are an excellent idea. Just pop in a square chip with a notch in the corner, and the two heads will lock in and spin like cyclones...
:)
And as discussed elsewhere, with multiple heads on each platter you have vastly-reduced seek times and potentially extended disk life (the arm doesn't vibrate so much when it's a disc).
Then again, the head doesn't have to rotate, necessarily. In fact, it might just be another plate of magnets, cone-shaped this time. Kind of like old-time core memory (mini-donut magnets wrapped in wire), we would in fact have a new kind of stable RAM chip. 2Gig flash RAM, anyone?
Nobody ever deserves his favorite poodle to be painted green either, but it doesn't mean that painting poodles green is worse than a murder.
I insult you. (Place least desired term here.)
You dare reduce the serious and violent act of rape to the level of the silly and annoying act of painting curly-haired toy dogs an odd color?
Absurd. And just as much a wrong attitude as the cop held/holds.
You mean like the Green Card posts all over Usenet a few years back?
Not a bad idea...
"This post brought to you by Mr. Whatsisname, the detective who thinks the Internet is built by and for rapists and sex fiends."
But it is not the technology that is to blame. A predator will use whatever means are available to further his predation.
Too true. I know one or two predators... and just because hundreds of people recognize them on sight does not mean they won't destroy a person if given the opportunity.
I also speak from experience, as a good friend of mine (whom I met online) was emotionally and verbally abused over the course of several months by the nastiest person I know.. it ended in a horrible mess that indirectly involved a score of other people. I'm still angry about it, over a year later; I'll never forget that trauma, and I was only an observer after the fact.
Oh, c'mon. Yeah, I'd get most of the software online, but my local Barnes & Noble stocks Linux in 2 distros, RedHat and Slackware... with manuals, no less. Plus various CGI stuff on the next shelf.
Not that I'm actually bragging (can't get computer shops to sell Linux, but the bookstores have it all over the place?)
If you actually read the article, remote viewing has next to nothing to do with it.
Bull.
He's using remote viewing as a direct example of the kind of mental processing people experience while online. I really wouldn't have chosen that example, but it *is* apt in several ways (described above in the article).
Yeah, he used salt shakers. Several types, in fact.
But speaking of tricorders, I don't find the everything-in-a-pen type shown on that Voyager time travel episode very realistic. The interface just wouldn't be practical for anyone but the designers (in other words, it's a status symbol "my stick is better than yours"), whereas the standard palmtop-type tricorders would probably be used extensively for their friendlier appearance.
I do believe that biochips could be easily used for something with is posited to sense bioelectric fields and the reflection of various energy types; just think how your nose feels after someone lightly rubs a steel nail against it.. usually, people tell me the bone tingles a little. And don't forget that birds home in partly via Earth's magnetic field.
But how long would a biochip be good for, before it dies or becomes corrupted?