Re:Why I think Jon Katz articles are a Good Thing
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 1
Then why is Katz turned off for the front page more than CmdrTaco?
I don't have either turned off; but if I were going to turn one of them off, it'd be Katz, because he comes in much bigger doses. With Taco, basically I just cringe at all the grammar/spelling mistakes, but his little 1-sentence blurbs on stories usually don't get to me.
Re:Why I think Jon Katz articles are a Good Thing
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 2
I think it's hard for people to resist flaming Katz (I have, with some effort, unless you count this as a flame).
When I click on a story on slashdot, I don't pay attention to which editor posted it. So when I click on a Katz story, I don't know it's a Katz story until I start reading. I usually know within 1 sentence. Usually that sentence starts off with a phrase like "Through history," "From the beginning," or something equally grand. By the second sentence, I feel like I'm reading something that the author feels is the most important thing in the world, but that I just don't see the point of.
Katz's writing has a kind of arrogance and self-importance where it seems like he thinks he's above the world and is a great scholar writing about Great Themes of the 20th (or 21st) Century. I have no idea if he really thinks that way. And I (and probably many others here) don't like to read stuff that is full of ego, especially when that stuff doesn't seem all that enlightened. I prefer people to just cut through the BS and get to it. With too many of Katz's stories, I get to the end and just think "what was the point of all that?" There's not enough coherence.
Guess it's official now, I'm a slashdot regular; I finally posted a comment about Katz...
You think the review was gushing? Hmm, let me quote one bit:
Moreover, the vibration system is much better than the pS2 Dual Shock. The vibrations are powerful and subtle at the same time...
Yeah, that was when I pretty much gave up my doubts that a raving Xbox fanboy wrote the review.
"The vibrations are powerful and subtle at the same time"?? Phew, that's really digging deep. Damn, why haven't the other companies learned to make great vibrations like that in their controllers?
How many car companies do you think want their cars portrayed as being good for killing people and committing felonies?
Well, when you put it that way...
But hey, it might still help them sell more cars.:-)
I'm assuming even the army tank has a fake name? Or is there really a tank called a Rhino? It's not so bad if a tank is portrayed as being good for killing people, right? Although I suppose they wouldn't want it portrayed the way I've been using it, driving around in a city destroying hundreds of police and FBI cars.
Speaking of product placement and Grand Theft Auto III, it is very noticeable to me that none of the cars in the game are "real". E.g. the Mafia Sentinel, it's really a Mercedes, right? But they don't call it a Mercedes. There are tons of cars in the game that look pretty much like some real car, but they all have different names. I guess they didn't want to pay to license actual vehicle names? It just feels odd, considering how many driving games have "real" cars in them.
By the way, I agree about the radio stations in GTA3. They are a blast, really great parodies. "Next up, 9 minutes of non-stop music. Right after these 10 minutes of commercials." The one about Pogo the Monkey is a hoot too.
Every once in a while some scientist likes to say something like "Ok, that's it, we know pretty much all there is to know, the rest is just a matter of filling in the details." Looks like some biologists got jealous, and decided to jump on that bandwagon but in terms of evolution.
I'd say that modern humans have certainly reduced evolutionary forces, by insulating themselves from some aspects of their environment (by setting up artificial climates, via long-range transportation of food, and through modern medicine). But we haven't removed evolutionary pressures completely. And it only takes a very little bit of selection to affect things over long periods of time. We do still have mutation, we do still have genetic variation (and in fact, I'd say genetic variation at any particular location is increasing, because there is more mixing), and we do still have some selection. Those are the requirements of evolution. (OK, mutation isn't even strictly necessary, but it prevents things from getting fixed for a particular allele due to genetic drift, so it's nice to have around.)
The mixing may reduce the amount of adaptation to local conditions that happens, but I don't think that's too big a problem.
Everyone keeps talking about how Tivos are so much better than a VCR. But I don't want the extra feature of it going and finding shows for me to watch. I want to get a Tivo and treat it like a VCR.
Right now, I usually record shows I want to watch (using my VCR), and go back and watch them later. But video tapes eventually wear out, and I do have to rewind, etc.
So I want a Tivo where I can tell it e.g. to tape CBS every Thursday from 8-9pm (to catch Survivor), and a bunch of other shows. I don't need all the bells and whistles; I'll figure out when the shows I want to watch are on every week. But here's the catch -- I also don't want to subscribe to the monthly service, because I don't want the bells and whistles. Why should I pay them $X/month for stuff I don't care about?
Can Tivo do that? In all the discussions over the years, I've never seen anyone say that it can.
All the privacy freaks can just use their standard technique of falsifying their information (as they do when registering with web sites), to make it say that they are an 84-year-old grandmother from Wyoming. Oh wait, they might encounter a little bit of trouble when checking in or boarding the airplane...
I posted my parent comment semi-seriously; this time let me say it more seriously. When I read this: "It is possibly the sharpest view of Saturn's ring system ever achieved from a ground-based observatory," I was expecting to see all sorts of details, bumps, variations in the rings, basically some texture. But Saturn and its rings look smooth, way too smooth. With the old grainy pictures, I would fill in the details with my imagination. So I guess it's kind of like a movie versus the book its based on; with the book, you just imagine what everything looks like. So yes, it's a sharp picture, but simply not high enough resolution to capture details that I thought it would.
Sorry to say it, but that picture of Saturn is just too perfect, it looks like a cheap computer rendition. Can we go back to the less sophisticated, grainy pictures? They were more exciting and seemed more "real".
All we have to do is filter any e-mail with this "Trusted Sender" Seal and cut them out.
Yeah, but Microsoft is on board with this program. How long do you think it'll be before, in Outlook, when you try to delete one of these certified spams, it asks you "Do you really want to delete this?", then "This message is certified, it's not your run-of-the-mill spam, do you REALLY want to delete it?", and "Trust us, the message is selling some good crap, and believe us, we know our crap!"?
(Of course, I've never used Outlook in my life. I use/usr/ucb/mail, and emacs rmail, so these stupid certification seals will just be another pile of HTML crap that I delete.)
Glad the article is more than I thought when I read the title "New scientist tries out copyleft" -- that some new person (who happens to be a scientist) decided to try out the GPL. I mean, I know Slashdot sometimes has slow news days, but I thought they were sinking to new lows.
If we had a Beowulf cluster of these arranged in a 2-D grid (sitting on top of a Lego desk of course), we could use it to do image processing. First image to process? Calista.
By the way, has anyone built a cellular phone out of Lego blocks yet? I.e. do we have Wireless Lego yet?
Apple is thinking of using Lego blocks, but they've announced they will only use the higher-tech, fancier (and more expensive) Lego Technic blocks, even though it's actually slower to build stuff with them.
The site is slashdotted so I can't see it. Is it made of transparent concrete Lego blocks, which are able to "trap light" and release it again, and when you look at it from just the right angle, you can see a picture of Calista Flockhart with a cartoon "speaking bubble" containing DeCSS?
I once heard a comedian describe a house as something like "to distance ourselves from the world, we build houses to live in; to get closer to the world and know what's going on outside, we cut holes in the walls; to separate ourselves again, we put glass in the holes; to feel closer to outside, we make the glass slide up so it's out of the way again; to separate ourselves, we hang curtains to block the holes in the wall; to be closer to the world; we slide the curtains out of the way -- let's just make up our mixed up minds already!"
Transparent or translucent aluminum might save us a step or two.
I don't watch much TV "live" any more, I tape most of it, and watch it later, skipping commercials (except ones which look interesting). (Yeah, I should get a Tivo.) Anyway, I'm used to being able to watch 30-minute programs in about 21 or 22 minutes, and 1-hour shows in about 43 minutes. For some shows (lighter fluff like "Friends"), I wouldn't mind being able to speed it up another couple of minutes. (With other shows, of course, I'd want them just as they were originally, sans commercials.)
The difference is, I wanna be the one with my hand on the time-dilation dial, not the networks.
If he were to extend that, and have the daemon running all the time, it could optimize his keyboard layout in real time, to keep him most efficient.
Some Windows software I use (I forget which program) moves stuff around in the menus, so that the things you use more often appear in a part of the menu that you can get to more quickly. I hate it; leave it in one place, so I can learn where it is and go to it without thinking, rather than having to go searching for it to see if it's in the "easy to find" place, and if not, go hunting for the submenu that it's under. I value consistency over such dynamic games, at least in my software's menus.
There's too much money to potentially be made with some genetic data and the associated research, so people try to guard it. Physicists still share a lot of their research -- witness this e-Print archive, which has a lot of preprints/reprints, mainly in physics, but they're adding other fields such as CS and math.
Their stats show about 2500 article submissions per month lately (it's been increasing pretty much linearly for the past 10.5 years, although I suspect that uploading a revised version also counts as a "submission" in that graph), and about 150,000 connections per day. It's been around for more than 10 years, and is still going strong. It's a great resource; I wish my particular field had something equivalent.
Okay, besides the cost, and maybe not even that, what's the difference between this kind of subscription and M$'s ?
Yeah, why are people so happy about this, when they would be foaming at the mouth if Microsoft wanted to charge you $5/month?
The difference is that Red Hat is not pointing a gun (or a team of salespeople or lawyers) at your head and forcing you to sign up for this. You can buy (or download) one copy of Red Hat, install it on your 1,000 machines, and never pay them another cent, if that's what you want to do. The fact that RH gives you that option make people (including me) happy. So far, I've chosen not to subscribe to any Red Hat services. That may very well change someday, but when I want it to.
Slashdot Mirror
Then why is Katz turned off for the front page more than CmdrTaco?
I don't have either turned off; but if I were going to turn one of them off, it'd be Katz, because he comes in much bigger doses. With Taco, basically I just cringe at all the grammar/spelling mistakes, but his little 1-sentence blurbs on stories usually don't get to me.
I think it's hard for people to resist flaming Katz (I have, with some effort, unless you count this as a flame).
When I click on a story on slashdot, I don't pay attention to which editor posted it. So when I click on a Katz story, I don't know it's a Katz story until I start reading. I usually know within 1 sentence. Usually that sentence starts off with a phrase like "Through history," "From the beginning," or something equally grand. By the second sentence, I feel like I'm reading something that the author feels is the most important thing in the world, but that I just don't see the point of.
Katz's writing has a kind of arrogance and self-importance where it seems like he thinks he's above the world and is a great scholar writing about Great Themes of the 20th (or 21st) Century. I have no idea if he really thinks that way. And I (and probably many others here) don't like to read stuff that is full of ego, especially when that stuff doesn't seem all that enlightened. I prefer people to just cut through the BS and get to it. With too many of Katz's stories, I get to the end and just think "what was the point of all that?" There's not enough coherence.
Guess it's official now, I'm a slashdot regular; I finally posted a comment about Katz...
In fact, I removed my own appendix the other day
Did you tape a note to yourself telling you to call 911 when you woke up?
You think the review was gushing? Hmm, let me quote one bit:
Moreover, the vibration system is much better than the pS2 Dual Shock. The vibrations are powerful and subtle at the same time...
Yeah, that was when I pretty much gave up my doubts that a raving Xbox fanboy wrote the review.
"The vibrations are powerful and subtle at the same time"?? Phew, that's really digging deep. Damn, why haven't the other companies learned to make great vibrations like that in their controllers?
How many car companies do you think want their cars portrayed as being good for killing people and committing felonies?
:-)
Well, when you put it that way...
But hey, it might still help them sell more cars.
I'm assuming even the army tank has a fake name? Or is there really a tank called a Rhino? It's not so bad if a tank is portrayed as being good for killing people, right? Although I suppose they wouldn't want it portrayed the way I've been using it, driving around in a city destroying hundreds of police and FBI cars.
Speaking of product placement and Grand Theft Auto III, it is very noticeable to me that none of the cars in the game are "real". E.g. the Mafia Sentinel, it's really a Mercedes, right? But they don't call it a Mercedes. There are tons of cars in the game that look pretty much like some real car, but they all have different names. I guess they didn't want to pay to license actual vehicle names? It just feels odd, considering how many driving games have "real" cars in them.
By the way, I agree about the radio stations in GTA3. They are a blast, really great parodies. "Next up, 9 minutes of non-stop music. Right after these 10 minutes of commercials." The one about Pogo the Monkey is a hoot too.
"Well, duh."
Every once in a while some scientist likes to say something like "Ok, that's it, we know pretty much all there is to know, the rest is just a matter of filling in the details." Looks like some biologists got jealous, and decided to jump on that bandwagon but in terms of evolution.
I'd say that modern humans have certainly reduced evolutionary forces, by insulating themselves from some aspects of their environment (by setting up artificial climates, via long-range transportation of food, and through modern medicine). But we haven't removed evolutionary pressures completely. And it only takes a very little bit of selection to affect things over long periods of time. We do still have mutation, we do still have genetic variation (and in fact, I'd say genetic variation at any particular location is increasing, because there is more mixing), and we do still have some selection. Those are the requirements of evolution. (OK, mutation isn't even strictly necessary, but it prevents things from getting fixed for a particular allele due to genetic drift, so it's nice to have around.)
The mixing may reduce the amount of adaptation to local conditions that happens, but I don't think that's too big a problem.
Everyone keeps talking about how Tivos are so much better than a VCR. But I don't want the extra feature of it going and finding shows for me to watch. I want to get a Tivo and treat it like a VCR.
Right now, I usually record shows I want to watch (using my VCR), and go back and watch them later. But video tapes eventually wear out, and I do have to rewind, etc.
So I want a Tivo where I can tell it e.g. to tape CBS every Thursday from 8-9pm (to catch Survivor), and a bunch of other shows. I don't need all the bells and whistles; I'll figure out when the shows I want to watch are on every week. But here's the catch -- I also don't want to subscribe to the monthly service, because I don't want the bells and whistles. Why should I pay them $X/month for stuff I don't care about?
Can Tivo do that? In all the discussions over the years, I've never seen anyone say that it can.
All the privacy freaks can just use their standard technique of falsifying their information (as they do when registering with web sites), to make it say that they are an 84-year-old grandmother from Wyoming. Oh wait, they might encounter a little bit of trouble when checking in or boarding the airplane...
Where are the little Lego people? ... It would be more fun to add some realism to it.
Realism? Uh, how big (physically) are the tapes you use for backups?
I posted my parent comment semi-seriously; this time let me say it more seriously. When I read this: "It is possibly the sharpest view of Saturn's ring system ever achieved from a ground-based observatory," I was expecting to see all sorts of details, bumps, variations in the rings, basically some texture. But Saturn and its rings look smooth, way too smooth. With the old grainy pictures, I would fill in the details with my imagination. So I guess it's kind of like a movie versus the book its based on; with the book, you just imagine what everything looks like. So yes, it's a sharp picture, but simply not high enough resolution to capture details that I thought it would.
Sorry to say it, but that picture of Saturn is just too perfect, it looks like a cheap computer rendition. Can we go back to the less sophisticated, grainy pictures? They were more exciting and seemed more "real".
All we have to do is filter any e-mail with this "Trusted Sender" Seal and cut them out.
/usr/ucb/mail, and emacs rmail, so these stupid certification seals will just be another pile of HTML crap that I delete.)
Yeah, but Microsoft is on board with this program. How long do you think it'll be before, in Outlook, when you try to delete one of these certified spams, it asks you "Do you really want to delete this?", then "This message is certified, it's not your run-of-the-mill spam, do you REALLY want to delete it?", and "Trust us, the message is selling some good crap, and believe us, we know our crap!"?
(Of course, I've never used Outlook in my life. I use
Glad the article is more than I thought when I read the title "New scientist tries out copyleft" -- that some new person (who happens to be a scientist) decided to try out the GPL. I mean, I know Slashdot sometimes has slow news days, but I thought they were sinking to new lows.
If we had a Beowulf cluster of these arranged in a 2-D grid (sitting on top of a Lego desk of course), we could use it to do image processing. First image to process? Calista.
By the way, has anyone built a cellular phone out of Lego blocks yet? I.e. do we have Wireless Lego yet?
Apple is thinking of using Lego blocks, but they've announced they will only use the higher-tech, fancier (and more expensive) Lego Technic blocks, even though it's actually slower to build stuff with them.
Just as long as you post a story to slashdot about your research when you're done. Bonus points if you get the story posted twice.
That sounds familiar. Does johnburton know you're plagiarizing his post?
The site is slashdotted so I can't see it. Is it made of transparent concrete Lego blocks, which are able to "trap light" and release it again, and when you look at it from just the right angle, you can see a picture of Calista Flockhart with a cartoon "speaking bubble" containing DeCSS?
I once heard a comedian describe a house as something like "to distance ourselves from the world, we build houses to live in; to get closer to the world and know what's going on outside, we cut holes in the walls; to separate ourselves again, we put glass in the holes; to feel closer to outside, we make the glass slide up so it's out of the way again; to separate ourselves, we hang curtains to block the holes in the wall; to be closer to the world; we slide the curtains out of the way -- let's just make up our mixed up minds already!"
Transparent or translucent aluminum might save us a step or two.
I don't watch much TV "live" any more, I tape most of it, and watch it later, skipping commercials (except ones which look interesting). (Yeah, I should get a Tivo.) Anyway, I'm used to being able to watch 30-minute programs in about 21 or 22 minutes, and 1-hour shows in about 43 minutes. For some shows (lighter fluff like "Friends"), I wouldn't mind being able to speed it up another couple of minutes. (With other shows, of course, I'd want them just as they were originally, sans commercials.)
The difference is, I wanna be the one with my hand on the time-dilation dial, not the networks.
If he were to extend that, and have the daemon running all the time, it could optimize his keyboard layout in real time, to keep him most efficient.
Some Windows software I use (I forget which program) moves stuff around in the menus, so that the things you use more often appear in a part of the menu that you can get to more quickly. I hate it; leave it in one place, so I can learn where it is and go to it without thinking, rather than having to go searching for it to see if it's in the "easy to find" place, and if not, go hunting for the submenu that it's under. I value consistency over such dynamic games, at least in my software's menus.
There's too much money to potentially be made with some genetic data and the associated research, so people try to guard it. Physicists still share a lot of their research -- witness this e-Print archive, which has a lot of preprints/reprints, mainly in physics, but they're adding other fields such as CS and math.
Their stats show about 2500 article submissions per month lately (it's been increasing pretty much linearly for the past 10.5 years, although I suspect that uploading a revised version also counts as a "submission" in that graph), and about 150,000 connections per day. It's been around for more than 10 years, and is still going strong. It's a great resource; I wish my particular field had something equivalent.
Okay, besides the cost, and maybe not even that, what's the difference between this kind of subscription and M$'s ?
Yeah, why are people so happy about this, when they would be foaming at the mouth if Microsoft wanted to charge you $5/month?
The difference is that Red Hat is not pointing a gun (or a team of salespeople or lawyers) at your head and forcing you to sign up for this. You can buy (or download) one copy of Red Hat, install it on your 1,000 machines, and never pay them another cent, if that's what you want to do. The fact that RH gives you that option make people (including me) happy. So far, I've chosen not to subscribe to any Red Hat services. That may very well change someday, but when I want it to.