Japan and Western Europe have a difficult problem. They have stopped fucking for the purpose of making babies. Their population growth is extremely low: around 1.5 children per family.
What is means is that when all the currently middle aged and young people get old, they will be either consuming all the productivity generated by people who will be working at that future time, need to import millions of workers from places who don't have anything in common with their people and culture, or use robots in a highly productive way to meet the needs of the elderly.
The Japanese are gambling that they can develop way advanced robotics technology to avoid having to import millions of non-Japanese into their country to meet their future labor shortage.
I used to think that this was mean-spirited and racist, but I have changed my mind after the Madrid train bombings. The Spanish are in the same difficult position where they will need in about thirty to fifty years to import millions of people from the islamic world to meet their labor shortage, as they too have stopped making babies.
Given a choice of buying robots to meet a labor shortage and allowing millions of immigrants who most likely would like to see your culture and way-of-life destroyed in order to satisify the requirements of their disfunctional and murder-obsessed religion, anyone would chose the robots.
And if Japan makes the most advanced and versatile robots when they become needed, well then good for them for having the long-term vision and capital to invest for needs fifty years in advance.
It's like with drugs you arrest one boss another gang takes over in no time.
This phenomonon exists in the illegal drug business because there is so much money to be made. The 'warez business' (if I understand it correctly, it is the act of providing a library for people to download useful programs that would require payment in a retail setting normally), is completely different because it is not profit driven.
It is driven politically: in the sense that the people who are doing it are obsessed with the idea that they are doing a public service by making computer programs widely available for no cost.
This is a marketing issue, no a legal one. No, this guy should not be extradited to America's prison hell for this kind of activity.
This whole issue revolves around the problem of having software cost so much money to develop. The only real long-term solution to this problem is not to throw people in jail for distributing software, but to develop tools that allow order-of-magnitude increases in software productivity so that it doesn't cost tens of thousands of dollars to develop things like device drivers and custom business applications.
If the overdeveloped world uses its legal system to imprison software distributors, then the entire software development and distribution network will move to the underdeveloped world, where they won't be hassled or extradited. This has already started indirectly with the 'outsourcing' of telephone support centers.
The Americans are shooting themselves in the foot by allowing corporation lawyers to determine their long-term software development, training, and distribution needs. In twenty years there will be little advanced software development done in the USA, EU, or any country that puts people in subhuman prisions for acting as public librarians, i.e. distributing 'warez'.
No, You're not flame baiting. You're telling an uncomfortable truth. Europeans have a LONG history of coming up with endless new ways to justify killing and imprisoning each other and stealing the property of people whom they place in group categories invented by them for this purpose.
The European Parliment seems from a distance to be just a revision of feudalism through bureaucrats instead of genetic aristrocrats. This law seems to be just a way to remove a social problem from being addressed through the legal process where it should be addressed.
There is only one example of the European people coming together to form a mutually beneficial political union that lasted over a long term. That's the USA, folks. Formed by people who were basically tossed out of Europe by their 'superiors'.
I have an easy and 'fool-proof' way to judge Linux distros. Although no one should use Linux and fool-proof in the same sentence.
The best Linux distro is the one that goes the longest period of time without presenting the user with a word not found in any spoken language on earth and not not having an explanation or a link to an explanation for what that word means.
I just so sick of Linux distros that assume unconsciously that everyone who plugs that CD into their computer is a UNIX/Linux expert. So they freely use terms like 'ls' , 'rn', 'ping', 'xmms' or a million other bizarre and incomprehensible acronyms and collections of alphanumeric symbols without any lingustic connection. Sure, you know what it means, but that doesn't everyone else needs to take the time and energy to memorize this archane techno-babble.
This is a serious problem that not only permanently limits acceptance of Linux by the general population but is also completely invisible to the techno-geek Linux/UNIX computer community.
This mentality was necessary thirty or forty years ago but it is unjustifiable in the twenty-first century. Computers that cost more than a house forty years ago now sell for less than a doorknob. (I'm thinking microcontrollers, like PICs and AVRs here)
I was watching the first one the first one last night quite late because it has to go back to the library today. It got quite late and I realized that this thing was going to be around forever. It didn't matter if I how much a saw in one session; it's never going to go away.
It will be around in fifty years like Beatle records and Star Wars videos. It doesn't matter if the DVD comes out this month or next; it's still going to be on the shelves when your an old man.
This could be simply political. Germans have a history of building up a meticulous and highly ordered societies, then burning up everything in a orgy of violence and mayhem.
Since it's been fifty years since the last cycle and since the authorities aren't exactly sure what triggers these episodes, they are hesitant to allow any new technology that could seem to be put to socially destructive ends.
While that's good in theory, it tends to look absurd in practice. Especially when they goof up and ban an innocuous technology, like low resolution video games.
Plus it makes them a stagnant society. Little innovation in completely new technologies happens there. There is however major advances made in the refinement of proven technologies.
If you want to bang two cylinders of metal together ten thousand times a minute and not have the devices move more than five thousandths of a meter within a hundred million bangs, then German engineering is the world's best. But don't count on them to figure out how to melt silicon and aluminum together to get a million microchips out of pile of sand and soda cans.
The elderly Europeans wouldn't feel so alone if they didn't spend their entire youth killing each other.
The Europeans in their eighties committed themselves in their twenties to the mass murder of millions of other Europeans of their generation, simply because of slight differences in nationality or religion.
Now they're lonely. Speaking on behalf of the 70,000,000 people killed so enthuastically by these people in the European World Wars One and Two:
Australia is giant country, so there's plenty of room for new prisons to hold the tens of thousands of ordinary people that will be made criminals in order to satisfy the fantasies of American corporations.
By the way, did the American prison corporations like Corrections Corporation of America and Wackenhut get any special tax breaks for opening this vast new market for their services?
I'm not sure how useful a Japanese-English translation device would be in Copper Harbor airport.
Perhaps the results of the trial there would seem to indicate that they would be underutilized given their cost.
I'm a little confused. We get told that this place is in semi-permanent recession. But the makers of this toy expect to sell 3000 of them at about $3800 each. About 15 inches high with some stepper motors and sensors and some microcontrollers, a microphone, ect...
What's the point? No, seriously, what's the point of doing this? Is this a prototype of a robotic product for worldwide marketing? At $3800 US a pop?
The world population is exploding. There is always going to be someone who would be willing to to do the job fow which these robots are being made: do it cheaper and better, regardless of the danger and the bad pay and working conditions.
What is the strategy for so many Japanese corporations spending so much money on development in this field. I realize that in Japan everybody 'goes along to get along' and 'the nail that sticks up gets hammered down', so possibly this is a "King's New Clothes"-type of situation where no one will be the first to openly critisize spending millions of dollars in development of pseudo-humanoid robotics.
Robots can be used for applications where it is impossible to send humans for cost or danger or life-support reasons, like outer space or ocean floor, toxic waste spills, nuclear accidents, or land mine fields. Can't really substitute third-world labor in these situations.
Robots are used to replace workers in manufacturing: boring repetitive jobs that must be done with exacting precision. Humans will always be cheaper in these situations because of the massive population growth currently happening.
Robots for microsurgery, sure. In about fifty years maybe. Robocops? Hope not.
But robots as pets, servants, and sex surrogates? Pure fantasy.
$1.80 for a CD and 18 cents for a song. This is the new public perception of what music is worth
This is an assumption of what the music downloaders would pay given a choice of downloading at home and going to a record store with a list of the same songs to be burned onto a CD-R. It's both a 'wild ass guess' and a reasonable estimate of a situation that would never happen in the real world. Usually I go by what I would pay in the circumstances, since I'm the cheapest person that I know.
The $18 price is the number that I have read people complain about. I haven't bought a new CD in about ten years or been shopping in a record store in about three years. I get most of my music from the public library, which is well stocked with everything obscure in the downtown central branch and new more commercial stuff about a year old in the suburbs. I don't listen to Clear Channel radio so I don't know what is current; and I don't know if the new stuff on the shelves of the library is commercially successful or not.
I'm impressed with the way that MP3-Napster phenomonon follows a general theory of digital technology on media. Computer technology splits a medium in ways that were inpossible and therefore nearly inconceivable before digital technology was applied to it.
For example, digital tech split typewriters into seperate actions of hitting the keys and having an inked image of a letter on paper. MIDI split musical instruments between finger movement and directly causing sound from that finger movement. This allowed 'playing piano' to make the sounds of other instruments that could not be make by move fingers on a keyboard, such as common with modern inexpensive synthesizers. Even the light bulb, the most primitive media, was split by digitization between moving a switch and inducing light. This results in moving LED displays and laser outdoor projection of video onto buildings.
MP3, the digitization of music recordings, seperated the music from the storage medium and allowed the music to be transported and copied at speeds far greater than the actual amount of time needed to play the recording. It also allowed the transport of music without quality loss over a medium that is far less quality in analog terms, i.e. downloading 192Kbps MP3s over the 8KHz bandwidth telephone.
By getting a general idea of how computer technology affects media , we may be able to get an idea it will affect a specific medium.
These people seem to have the most difficult time usderstanding that the music business is over.
There has been a order of magnitude change in the price that people are willing to pay for pre-recorded music. This change happened in 1997-2000 when the combination of MP3, CD rippers, Napster, and $100 CD burners came into public consciousness at the same time.
In other words, people aren't going to pay $18 for a CD or $1 for a song. They will pay $1.80 for a CD and 18 cents for a song.
This is the new public perception of what music is worth.
The transformation in music distribution due to a technology shift doesn't seem to have penetrated the thick skulls of the people who run the music industry.
It happened. It's a new reality. It's like the stock market crash. Yahoo! is never going to be $180 a share again. CDs are not going to bought in huge numbers at $18 each anymore.
Learn to deal with it. And stop all these insane lawsuits before somebody gets hurt. They all have six figure incomes - they're supposed to be smart. Sheezh!
I have read of another step for removing the audio common to both channels of a stereo recording. This is to delay one of the channels between one and twenty milliseconds before mixing the out-of-phase channels.
This helps get rid of all the audio artifacts found when the two channels (one normal, the other inverted 180 degreees out of phase).
I saw a circuit about ten years ago in an electronics magazine that used a 'bucket-brigade' dual channel analog audio delay chip to delay one of the channels a few milliseconds before mixing.
My favorite example of this technique is from the Beatles Anthology Two album. The song "And Your Bird Can Sing" has all the giggling and buffoonery removed from beautiful pre-recorded track.
Although it is convienient for the individual, having a super fantastic spam filter is not a good solution to the problem of spam because it doesn't change the fundamental disbalance of spam.
Spammers are stealing the surplus bandwidth of the 'information superhighway' for their own benefit. No one has the 'right' to send hundreds of thousands of emails soliciting a financial transction for their private benefit (of the benefit of those who hire spammers) over fiber optic lines that they have not paid for. They have paid for non-commercial bandwidth.
If spammers want to have a dedicated channel to hundreds of millions of people that they can use for their private gain, then let them spend hundreds of millions of dollars to lay fiber optics in the ground and across the oceans.
Until they do that, then they are just thieves. And they should be treated as thieves. This is like a trucking company demanding two lanes on every interstate highway in the country for their own private use and paying no gas, weight, or highway use tax.
Plus spam programs by their very nature must examine every piece of e-mail that comes to you. Basicly you are surrendering your e-mail privacy to a program in order to avoid being inconvienced by thieves.
No, computers AREN'T music friendly and it is a needless shame. Something must be done about it.
I totally agree. MIDI is a totally obsolete technology. I have an MPU-401 card that I can no longer use because it is just won't work on any PC made in the past five years. I try nowdays only to buy tone modules with toHost cable interfaces (standard RS-232 serial ports).
There needs to be a way to connect keyboards and sequencer programs using standard ethernet. Plus a new way to record all the subtleties that are made by a natural instrument into a standard and open format.
An advantage of MIDI was the electic isolation between the instuments. There was no shared ground connection and the data passed from computer to keyboard through an inexpensive opto-isolator. This prevented a giant surge of electricity from traveling throughout the entire stack of instruments if someone were to spill a pitcher of beer on the main keyboard.
It seems that the music industry is getting away from stand-apart synthesizers and tone modules and more towards totally software based synthesizers.
I've written an embedded firmware program for the Atmel AVR microcontroller to use the PS2 keyboard as a MIDI music keyboard. It's on Avrfreaks.com in the projects directory (search under MIDI).
Interfacing the PC keyboard is really tricky. It was necessary to use all the Warnier-Orr diagramming techniques learned in school to map out what was happening in order to get totally lost in the coding. But it does work. Press several keys down and get a chord on the synthesizer; release the keys and the notes go silent.
The real problem with using the PS2 QWERTY keyboard as a music keyboard is that certian key combinations don't work. I suspect that this is due to the scanning algorythm of the processor inside the PS2 keyboard itself. In business keyboard office applications, people don't press four or five letter keys at the same time.
Still it is a really cheap and small way to get sounds out of a MIDI tone module. This is great for using small, but beautiful sounding synthesizers (like the Roland Sound Canvas, the Yamaha TG100, or the Boss DS-330) in impromptu music sessions that usually have only acoustic guitars and/or drums and flutes or harmonicas. Use a small synth, a PS2 keyboard, a boom box, and a microcontroller PS2-to-MIDI interface to add hundreds of instrument sounds to pick-up jam sessions (ever played music in a deserted McDonald's at 9 pm?). The whole set up is light and tranportable (and cheap if it gets confiscated by the police or stolen).
Dare to be weird, strive to be stupid!
New century, new technology, new solutions!
It occurred to me recently, after having lost another file to a PC lockup, that the enormous costs of transisioning from manual business machines to PCs (over the past twenty years) are not reflected in MS's profits. The costs of learning all this new technology and the costs of all those lost files and other inefficiencies have been absorbed by the users. The economic gains have been split by the organizations that have bought PCs and Microsoft.
With Linux the costs are more equally distributed and more available for realistic analysis. What that means is that Microsoft is at its peak now in terms of being rich, fat, and happy. The period of increasing returns for them are over and that of diminishing returns on investment have begun. Mr. Balmer shouldn't gloat (like saying the sun shouldn't shine) over the transision costs of changing operating systems because (one) the costs were originally greater to transision from manual machines to PCs but Microsoft didn't pay those costs. And (two) each movement of a large organization from Windows to Linux is cheaper as the unforseen problems and their solutions get shared by the Linux community.
In their defense, Windows is a lot easier to use than Linux and Windows is not dominated by the computer geek mentality that continues to cripple Linux. Windows is dominated by the 'make Microsoft rich by providing useful tools that increase worker productivity' mentality. Since MS has been able to provide their solutions so far at a cost that is much less than the value of productivity gains of their product, they have won spectactularly over all their competitors. But that will change and is changing with every new Linux inplementation.
These guys in Redmond shouldn't gloat, it's makes them look 'white trash' and insults their customers who are not caught up in this American "business is a football game" mentality.
Sorry about the ambiguity between 'creating' and 'running' computer models.
Electronics people often hear of the advances in biology and assume that the same conditions exist between the two disciplines. But electronics is entirely self-created while biology is observation and experimentation.
It's only a matter of time, perhaps 10 or 20 years, until a grad student or third world scientist will be able to easily engineer his own deadly plague virus.
I wouldn't sell the scientific community short on this. Scientists are well aware of the consequences of their reasearch and the ethical foundations of said research. They are also aware of the various techniques that politicians use to force them into to unethical research and development and how to fight this coersion.
Scientists are not soldiers: they just don't train any street-gang psychopath into their advanced knowledge and tactics. It is expected to be able to demostrate high moral character and a deep and fundamental understanding of ethics before being trained to do genocidal or omnicidal (technology that would destroy all human life) research.
That is one of the reasons why the Soviet Union fell: scientists realized that THEY could not control the research that the paranoid WWII veteren Communist leaders were forcing them to do. So they worked behind the scenes to pull the plug on this dangerous and unpredictable government.
Give the scientists some credit. Just because no one else takes ethics seriously doesn't mean they don't.
There was also a pandemic in 400 AD (or Common Era to use the new politically correct term) that wiped out millions of people. I don't know what caused it, but it too altered history.
I suggest looking at the book "The Years of Rice and Salt" by Kim Stanley Robinson (2002). It is an alternate history of what would the world have become if the black plague had wiped out all of the Europeans in 1348, instead of 2/3s of them.
Most of the/. crowd is too damn young to remember the major pandemics...
Everyone is too young for something. That's why it's important to develop a sense of history and to be able to trust historical records. (And to develop to abilities to tell when the records are wrong or biased).
I recommend Richard Preston's books on epidemics for a good and exciting introduction to this important topic. I'm amazed that this is not covered in schools in more detail, but at least students are learning how to get educated even if they are currently being filled with information that is of secondary importance (like Algebra).
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to contribute your grandfather's experience with the Slashdot community.
The possiblility of creating a pandemic using geneticly engineered virii is too great to actually be creating this virii in labs. The technology to create these demons is far easier than that for stopping or controlling a pandemic.
Fortunately, advanced supercomputers can be used to create models of virii and their effects on cells.
It is unethical to create a mutagenic virus for study purposes when the same research can be done through computer models. Especially when the virus is influenza, smallpox, or polio. Influenze because it mutates and spreads quickly. Smallpox because it spreads so easily and has been removed from humanity and polio because it is about to be removed from humanity.
Plus we don't yet have the ability to control the people who would use biological weapons to murder millions of people for political reasons (or use religion as a cover for their psychopathic political ambitions, like Osama Bin Laden).
Why should I have to trawl through an entire explanation of your program just to find out the hardware support or the performance expectations?
Because it's easy to skim over large amounts of text when you are looking for a precise and focused type of information. But only if the piece of information is there.
Currently with the 1960's style of program documentation, the information needed isn't present in text form because the programmer assumed that the future reader and user would be able to gleam the framework of the program and the needed information from analysing the code itself.
Using a speech-to-text generator will make a stream of consciousness mass of techno-babble at first. But with practice it will become a powerful tool to give order-of-magnitude increases in software development productivity. In this case, increasing developer productivity means greatly decreasing the amount of time needed to become interactive with another programmer's code for debugging purposes.
Thank you for your response. Remember, don't take any shit from the peasants just because they have MBAs.
This is not satire. I'm serious about using a speech-to-text (other commenters noted how I accidently reversed the order in the original post) technology to increase progammer productivity.
It is really hard for geeks to talk. Putting a picture of an attactive movie star or girlfriend and seriously pretending to be interacting with them is a psychological tactic that could be used to get the framework of how a piece of software works out of the developer's mind and onto paper in order to communicate this knowledge to other programmers and co-developers.
It is weird, yes, it is embarrassing. But everyone thinks we're weird and embarrassing anyway. But if we develop and perfect techniques to increase our productivity and provide wealth and prosperity for our co-workers, our weirdness will be celebrated and rewarded (with real money, influence, and sexuality)
Thank you for your reply. Don't take any shit from the peasants just because they have MBAs.
or the text needs to be edited heavily, including producing shorter summaries for quick reference.
That would be great and quite professional. But I've noticed that even having the raw speech-to-text (commenters noticed that I got the order wrong in the original post) words would be an improvement over the sparse comments that come with most code.
My main point is that since the computer hardware has inproved by several orders of magnitude we (as developers of productive uses for this newly inexpensive and powerful computer hardware) need to come up with new approaches and solutions to take advantage of this new computational power.
I'm beginning to think that source code should look like a novel. All the comments and explanations would look like paragraphs and the actual code to is to be compilied should look like dialog.
We need to experiment with many new ways to try and get order of magnitude increases in software development productivity that matches the gains in hardware. Even color coding the source code is a tiny improvement that continues to be resisted by programmers locked into a 1970's mode of development.
Back to topic. The speech-to-text comments all thousands of lines could be edited and indexed by the others in the open-source community who use and study the code. People can generally read through large amounts of text quickly and filter out the sections that don't apply to what they are looking for. I am throughly convinced that it is much better to have 'too much' documentation than too little. And I believe that all program source code that I have seen has too little documentation.
Programmers get into a 'state' where they have focused on a section of code so much that 'interact' with it to debug it. This state is easily lost and takes many hours to regain after the code has not been looked at for months. The documentation for a program should allow the programmer to reenter the interactive debug development state within about ten minutes if it is effective documentation. The key is too find the type of text and writing that will allow this increase in productivity to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Japan and Western Europe have a difficult problem. They have stopped fucking for the purpose of making babies. Their population growth is extremely low: around 1.5 children per family.
What is means is that when all the currently middle aged and young people get old, they will be either consuming all the productivity generated by people who will be working at that future time, need to import millions of workers from places who don't have anything in common with their people and culture, or use robots in a highly productive way to meet the needs of the elderly.
The Japanese are gambling that they can develop way advanced robotics technology to avoid having to import millions of non-Japanese into their country to meet their future labor shortage.
I used to think that this was mean-spirited and racist, but I have changed my mind after the Madrid train bombings. The Spanish are in the same difficult position where they will need in about thirty to fifty years to import millions of people from the islamic world to meet their labor shortage, as they too have stopped making babies.
Given a choice of buying robots to meet a labor shortage and allowing millions of immigrants who most likely would like to see your culture and way-of-life destroyed in order to satisify the requirements of their disfunctional and murder-obsessed religion, anyone would chose the robots.
And if Japan makes the most advanced and versatile robots when they become needed, well then good for them for having the long-term vision and capital to invest for needs fifty years in advance.
It's like with drugs you arrest one boss another gang takes over in no time.
This phenomonon exists in the illegal drug business because there is so much money to be made. The 'warez business' (if I understand it correctly, it is the act of providing a library for people to download useful programs that would require payment in a retail setting normally), is completely different because it is not profit driven.
It is driven politically: in the sense that the people who are doing it are obsessed with the idea that they are doing a public service by making computer programs widely available for no cost.
This is a marketing issue, no a legal one. No, this guy should not be extradited to America's prison hell for this kind of activity.
This whole issue revolves around the problem of having software cost so much money to develop. The only real long-term solution to this problem is not to throw people in jail for distributing software, but to develop tools that allow order-of-magnitude increases in software productivity so that it doesn't cost tens of thousands of dollars to develop things like device drivers and custom business applications.
If the overdeveloped world uses its legal system to imprison software distributors, then the entire software development and distribution network will move to the underdeveloped world, where they won't be hassled or extradited. This has already started indirectly with the 'outsourcing' of telephone support centers.
The Americans are shooting themselves in the foot by allowing corporation lawyers to determine their long-term software development, training, and distribution needs. In twenty years there will be little advanced software development done in the USA, EU, or any country that puts people in subhuman prisions for acting as public librarians, i.e. distributing 'warez'.
No, You're not flame baiting. You're telling an uncomfortable truth. Europeans have a LONG history of coming up with endless new ways to justify killing and imprisoning each other and stealing the property of people whom they place in group categories invented by them for this purpose.
The European Parliment seems from a distance to be just a revision of feudalism through bureaucrats instead of genetic aristrocrats. This law seems to be just a way to remove a social problem from being addressed through the legal process where it should be addressed.
There is only one example of the European people coming together to form a mutually beneficial political union that lasted over a long term. That's the USA, folks. Formed by people who were basically tossed out of Europe by their 'superiors'.
I have an easy and 'fool-proof' way to judge Linux distros. Although no one should use Linux and fool-proof in the same sentence.
The best Linux distro is the one that goes the longest period of time without presenting the user with a word not found in any spoken language on earth and not not having an explanation or a link to an explanation for what that word means.
I just so sick of Linux distros that assume unconsciously that everyone who plugs that CD into their computer is a UNIX/Linux expert. So they freely use terms like 'ls' , 'rn', 'ping',
'xmms' or a million other bizarre and incomprehensible acronyms and collections of alphanumeric symbols without any lingustic connection. Sure, you know what it means, but that doesn't everyone else needs to take the time and energy to memorize this archane techno-babble.
This is a serious problem that not only permanently limits acceptance of Linux by the general population but is also completely invisible to the techno-geek Linux/UNIX computer community.
This mentality was necessary thirty or forty years ago but it is unjustifiable in the twenty-first century. Computers that cost more than a house forty years ago now sell for less than a doorknob. (I'm thinking microcontrollers, like PICs and AVRs here)
It's time to update the software mentality too!
I was watching the first one the first one last night quite late because it has to go back to the library today. It got quite late and I realized that this thing was going to be around forever. It didn't matter if I how much a saw in one session; it's never going to go away.
It will be around in fifty years like Beatle records and Star Wars videos. It doesn't matter if the DVD comes out this month or next; it's still going to be on the shelves when your an old man.
(yes is, not was) banned in Germany.
This could be simply political. Germans have a history of building up a meticulous and highly ordered societies, then burning up everything in a orgy of violence and mayhem.
Since it's been fifty years since the last cycle and since the authorities aren't exactly sure what triggers these episodes, they are hesitant to allow any new technology that could seem to be put to socially destructive ends.
While that's good in theory, it tends to look absurd in practice. Especially when they goof up and ban an innocuous technology, like low resolution video games.
Plus it makes them a stagnant society. Little innovation in completely new technologies happens there. There is however major advances made in the refinement of proven technologies.
If you want to bang two cylinders of metal together ten thousand times a minute and not have the devices move more than five thousandths of a meter within a hundred million bangs, then German engineering is the world's best. But don't count on them to figure out how to melt silicon and aluminum together to get a million microchips out of pile of sand and soda cans.
The elderly Europeans wouldn't feel so alone if they didn't spend their entire youth killing each other.
:
The Europeans in their eighties committed themselves in their twenties to the mass murder of millions of other Europeans of their generation, simply because of slight differences in nationality or religion.
Now they're lonely. Speaking on behalf of the 70,000,000 people killed so enthuastically by these people in the European World Wars One and Two
Fuck 'em!!
Australia is giant country, so there's plenty of room for new prisons to hold the tens of thousands of ordinary people that will be made criminals in order to satisfy the fantasies of American corporations.
By the way, did the American prison corporations like Corrections Corporation of America and Wackenhut get any special tax breaks for opening this vast new market for their services?
I'm not sure how useful a Japanese-English translation device would be in Copper Harbor airport.
Perhaps the results of the trial there would seem to indicate that they would be underutilized given their cost.
I'm a little confused. We get told that this place is in semi-permanent recession. But the makers of this toy expect to sell 3000 of them at about $3800 each. About 15 inches high with some stepper motors and sensors and some microcontrollers, a microphone, ect...
What's the point? No, seriously, what's the point of doing this? Is this a prototype of a robotic product for worldwide marketing? At $3800 US a pop?
The world population is exploding. There is always going to be someone who would be willing to to do the job fow which these robots are being made: do it cheaper and better, regardless of the danger and the bad pay and working conditions.
What is the strategy for so many Japanese corporations spending so much money on development in this field. I realize that in Japan everybody 'goes along to get along' and 'the nail that sticks up gets hammered down', so possibly this is a "King's New Clothes"-type of situation where no one will be the first to openly critisize spending millions of dollars in development of pseudo-humanoid robotics.
Robots can be used for applications where it is impossible to send humans for cost or danger or life-support reasons, like outer space or ocean floor, toxic waste spills, nuclear accidents, or land mine fields. Can't really substitute third-world labor in these situations.
Robots are used to replace workers in manufacturing: boring repetitive jobs that must be done with exacting precision. Humans will always be cheaper in these situations because of the massive population growth currently happening.
Robots for microsurgery, sure. In about fifty years maybe. Robocops? Hope not.
But robots as pets, servants, and sex surrogates? Pure fantasy.
Seriously, what't the point of this product?
$1.80 for a CD and 18 cents for a song. This is the new public perception of what music is worth
This is an assumption of what the music downloaders would pay given a choice of downloading at home and going to a record store with a list of the same songs to be burned onto a CD-R. It's both a 'wild ass guess' and a reasonable estimate of a situation that would never happen in the real world. Usually I go by what I would pay in the circumstances, since I'm the cheapest person that I know.
The $18 price is the number that I have read people complain about. I haven't bought a new CD in about ten years or been shopping in a record store in about three years. I get most of my music from the public library, which is well stocked with everything obscure in the downtown central branch and new more commercial stuff about a year old in the suburbs. I don't listen to Clear Channel radio so I don't know what is current; and I don't know if the new stuff on the shelves of the library is commercially successful or not.
I'm impressed with the way that MP3-Napster phenomonon follows a general theory of digital technology on media. Computer technology splits a medium in ways that were inpossible and therefore nearly inconceivable before digital technology was applied to it.
For example, digital tech split typewriters into seperate actions of hitting the keys and having an inked image of a letter on paper. MIDI split musical instruments between finger movement and directly causing sound from that finger movement. This allowed 'playing piano' to make the sounds of other instruments that could not be make by move fingers on a keyboard, such as common with modern inexpensive synthesizers. Even the light bulb, the most primitive media, was split by digitization between moving a switch and inducing light. This results in moving LED displays and laser outdoor projection of video onto buildings.
MP3, the digitization of music recordings, seperated the music from the storage medium and allowed the music to be transported and copied at speeds far greater than the actual amount of time needed to play the recording. It also allowed the transport of music without quality loss over a medium that is far less quality in analog terms, i.e. downloading 192Kbps MP3s over the 8KHz bandwidth telephone.
By getting a general idea of how computer technology affects media , we may be able to get an idea it will affect a specific medium.
These people seem to have the most difficult time usderstanding that the music business is over.
There has been a order of magnitude change in the price that people are willing to pay for pre-recorded music. This change happened in 1997-2000 when the combination of MP3, CD rippers, Napster, and $100 CD burners came into public consciousness at the same time.
In other words, people aren't going to pay $18 for a CD or $1 for a song. They will pay $1.80 for a CD and 18 cents for a song.
This is the new public perception of what music is worth.
The transformation in music distribution due to a technology shift doesn't seem to have penetrated the thick skulls of the people who run the music industry.
It happened. It's a new reality. It's like the stock market crash. Yahoo! is never going to be $180 a share again. CDs are not going to bought in huge numbers at $18 each anymore.
Learn to deal with it. And stop all these insane lawsuits before somebody gets hurt. They all have six figure incomes - they're supposed to be smart. Sheezh!
I have read of another step for removing the audio common to both channels of a stereo recording. This is to delay one of the channels between one and twenty milliseconds before mixing the out-of-phase channels.
This helps get rid of all the audio artifacts found when the two channels (one normal, the other inverted 180 degreees out of phase).
I saw a circuit about ten years ago in an electronics magazine that used a 'bucket-brigade' dual channel analog audio delay chip to delay one of the channels a few milliseconds before mixing.
My favorite example of this technique is from the Beatles Anthology Two album. The song "And Your Bird Can Sing" has all the giggling and buffoonery removed from beautiful pre-recorded track.
Although it is convienient for the individual, having a super fantastic spam filter is not a good solution to the problem of spam because it doesn't change the fundamental disbalance of spam.
Spammers are stealing the surplus bandwidth of the 'information superhighway' for their own benefit. No one has the 'right' to send hundreds of thousands of emails soliciting a financial transction for their private benefit (of the benefit of those who hire spammers) over fiber optic lines that they have not paid for. They have paid for non-commercial bandwidth.
If spammers want to have a dedicated channel to hundreds of millions of people that they can use for their private gain, then let them spend hundreds of millions of dollars to lay fiber optics in the ground and across the oceans.
Until they do that, then they are just thieves. And they should be treated as thieves. This is like a trucking company demanding two lanes on every interstate highway in the country for their own private use and paying no gas, weight, or highway use tax.
Plus spam programs by their very nature must examine every piece of e-mail that comes to you. Basicly you are surrendering your e-mail privacy to a program in order to avoid being inconvienced by thieves.
Better just to get rid of the thieves.
No, computers AREN'T music friendly and it is a needless shame. Something must be done about it.
I totally agree. MIDI is a totally obsolete technology. I have an MPU-401 card that I can no longer use because it is just won't work on any PC made in the past five years. I try nowdays only to buy tone modules with toHost cable interfaces (standard RS-232 serial ports).
There needs to be a way to connect keyboards and sequencer programs using standard ethernet. Plus a new way to record all the subtleties that are made by a natural instrument into a standard and open format.
An advantage of MIDI was the electic isolation between the instuments. There was no shared ground connection and the data passed from computer to keyboard through an inexpensive opto-isolator. This prevented a giant surge of electricity from traveling throughout the entire stack of instruments if someone were to spill a pitcher of beer on the main keyboard.
It seems that the music industry is getting away from stand-apart synthesizers and tone modules and more towards totally software based synthesizers.
I've written an embedded firmware program for the Atmel AVR microcontroller to use the PS2 keyboard as a MIDI music keyboard. It's on Avrfreaks.com in the projects directory (search under MIDI).
Interfacing the PC keyboard is really tricky. It was necessary to use all the Warnier-Orr diagramming techniques learned in school to map out what was happening in order to get totally lost in the coding. But it does work. Press several keys down and get a chord on the synthesizer; release the keys and the notes go silent.
The real problem with using the PS2 QWERTY keyboard as a music keyboard is that certian key combinations don't work. I suspect that this is due to the scanning algorythm of the processor inside the PS2 keyboard itself. In business keyboard office applications, people don't press four or five letter keys at the same time.
Still it is a really cheap and small way to get sounds out of a MIDI tone module. This is great for using small, but beautiful sounding synthesizers (like the Roland Sound Canvas, the Yamaha TG100, or the Boss DS-330) in impromptu music sessions that usually have only acoustic guitars and/or drums and flutes or harmonicas. Use a small synth, a PS2 keyboard, a boom box, and a microcontroller PS2-to-MIDI interface to add hundreds of instrument sounds to pick-up jam sessions (ever played music in a deserted McDonald's at 9 pm?). The whole set up is light and tranportable (and cheap if it gets confiscated by the police or stolen).
Dare to be weird, strive to be stupid!
New century, new technology, new solutions!
It occurred to me recently, after having lost another file to a PC lockup, that the enormous costs of transisioning from manual business machines to PCs (over the past twenty years) are not reflected in MS's profits. The costs of learning all this new technology and the costs of all those lost files and other inefficiencies have been absorbed by the users. The economic gains have been split by the organizations that have bought PCs and Microsoft.
With Linux the costs are more equally distributed and more available for realistic analysis. What that means is that Microsoft is at its peak now in terms of being rich, fat, and happy. The period of increasing returns for them are over and that of diminishing returns on investment have begun. Mr. Balmer shouldn't gloat (like saying the sun shouldn't shine) over the transision costs of changing operating systems because (one) the costs were originally greater to transision from manual machines to PCs but Microsoft didn't pay those costs. And (two) each movement of a large organization from Windows to Linux is cheaper as the unforseen problems and their solutions get shared by the Linux community.
In their defense, Windows is a lot easier to use than Linux and Windows is not dominated by the computer geek mentality that continues to cripple Linux. Windows is dominated by the 'make Microsoft rich by providing useful tools that increase worker productivity' mentality. Since MS has been able to provide their solutions so far at a cost that is much less than the value of productivity gains of their product, they have won spectactularly over all their competitors. But that will change and is changing with every new Linux inplementation.
These guys in Redmond shouldn't gloat, it's makes them look 'white trash' and insults their customers who are not caught up in this American "business is a football game" mentality.
Thank you for your long and detailed reply.
Sorry about the ambiguity between 'creating' and 'running' computer models.
Electronics people often hear of the advances in biology and assume that the same conditions exist between the two disciplines. But electronics is entirely self-created while biology is observation and experimentation.
Thanks for setting us straight.
It's only a matter of time, perhaps 10 or 20 years, until a grad student or third world scientist will be able to easily engineer his own deadly plague virus.
I wouldn't sell the scientific community short on this. Scientists are well aware of the consequences of their reasearch and the ethical foundations of said research. They are also aware of the various techniques that politicians use to force them into to unethical research and development and how to fight this coersion.
Scientists are not soldiers: they just don't train any street-gang psychopath into their advanced knowledge and tactics. It is expected to be able to demostrate high moral character and a deep and fundamental understanding of ethics before being trained to do genocidal or omnicidal (technology that would destroy all human life) research.
That is one of the reasons why the Soviet Union fell: scientists realized that THEY could not control the research that the paranoid WWII veteren Communist leaders were forcing them to do. So they worked behind the scenes to pull the plug on this dangerous and unpredictable government.
Give the scientists some credit. Just because no one else takes ethics seriously doesn't mean they don't.
There was also a pandemic in 400 AD (or Common Era to use the new politically correct term) that wiped out millions of people. I don't know what caused it, but it too altered history.
I suggest looking at the book "The Years of Rice and Salt" by Kim Stanley Robinson (2002). It is an alternate history of what would the world have become if the black plague had wiped out all of the Europeans in 1348, instead of 2/3s of them.
Most of the /. crowd is too damn young to remember the major pandemics...
Everyone is too young for something. That's why it's important to develop a sense of history and to be able to trust historical records. (And to develop to abilities to tell when the records are wrong or biased).
I recommend Richard Preston's books on epidemics for a good and exciting introduction to this important topic. I'm amazed that this is not covered in schools in more detail, but at least students are learning how to get educated even if they are currently being filled with information that is of secondary importance (like Algebra).
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to contribute your grandfather's experience with the Slashdot community.
I must agree!
The possiblility of creating a pandemic using geneticly engineered virii is too great to actually be creating this virii in labs. The technology to create these demons is far easier than that for stopping or controlling a pandemic.
Fortunately, advanced supercomputers can be used to create models of virii and their effects on cells.
It is unethical to create a mutagenic virus for study purposes when the same research can be done through computer models. Especially when the virus is influenza, smallpox, or polio. Influenze because it mutates and spreads quickly. Smallpox because it spreads so easily and has been removed from humanity and polio because it is about to be removed from humanity.
Plus we don't yet have the ability to control the people who would use biological weapons to murder millions of people for political reasons (or use religion as a cover for their psychopathic political ambitions, like Osama Bin Laden).
Why should I have to trawl through an entire explanation of your program just to find out the hardware support or the performance expectations?
Because it's easy to skim over large amounts of text when you are looking for a precise and focused type of information. But only if the piece of information is there.
Currently with the 1960's style of program documentation, the information needed isn't present in text form because the programmer assumed that the future reader and user would be able to gleam the framework of the program and the needed information from analysing the code itself.
Using a speech-to-text generator will make a stream of consciousness mass of techno-babble at first. But with practice it will become a powerful tool to give order-of-magnitude increases in software development productivity. In this case, increasing developer productivity means greatly decreasing the amount of time needed to become interactive with another programmer's code for debugging purposes.
Thank you for your response. Remember, don't take any shit from the peasants just because they have MBAs.
Thank you for your response.
This is not satire. I'm serious about using a speech-to-text (other commenters noted how I accidently reversed the order in the original post) technology to increase progammer productivity.
It is really hard for geeks to talk. Putting a picture of an attactive movie star or girlfriend and seriously pretending to be interacting with them is a psychological tactic that could be used to get the framework of how a piece of software works out of the developer's mind and onto paper in order to communicate this knowledge to other programmers and co-developers.
It is weird, yes, it is embarrassing. But everyone thinks we're weird and embarrassing anyway. But if we develop and perfect techniques to increase our productivity and provide wealth and prosperity for our co-workers, our weirdness will be celebrated and rewarded (with real money, influence, and sexuality)
Thank you for your reply. Don't take any shit from the peasants just because they have MBAs.
or the text needs to be edited heavily, including producing shorter summaries for quick reference.
That would be great and quite professional. But I've noticed that even having the raw speech-to-text (commenters noticed that I got the order wrong in the original post) words would be an improvement over the sparse comments that come with most code.
My main point is that since the computer hardware has inproved by several orders of magnitude we (as developers of productive uses for this newly inexpensive and powerful computer hardware) need to come up with new approaches and solutions to take advantage of this new computational power.
I'm beginning to think that source code should look like a novel. All the comments and explanations would look like paragraphs and the actual code to is to be compilied should look like dialog.
We need to experiment with many new ways to try and get order of magnitude increases in software development productivity that matches the gains in hardware. Even color coding the source code is a tiny improvement that continues to be resisted by programmers locked into a 1970's mode of development.
Back to topic. The speech-to-text comments all thousands of lines could be edited and indexed by the others in the open-source community who use and study the code. People can generally read through large amounts of text quickly and filter out the sections that don't apply to what they are looking for. I am throughly convinced that it is much better to have 'too much' documentation than too little. And I believe that all program source code that I have seen has too little documentation.
Programmers get into a 'state' where they have focused on a section of code so much that 'interact' with it to debug it. This state is easily lost and takes many hours to regain after the code has not been looked at for months. The documentation for a program should allow the programmer to reenter the interactive debug development state within about ten minutes if it is effective documentation. The key is too find the type of text and writing that will allow this increase in productivity to happen.
Thank you for your response.