The government often pays for things to be beuilt by contract. Instead of listing every item and price on invoices or work orders or whatever the hell they are, they take the price of the entire contract and divide it by however many items there are. Thus, though a computer system on an F-16 may cost $10,000 and the special gold tempered cockpit glass may cost $50,000 per bubble, a hammer used by Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics (aren't they the same company now or something?) still only costs $15 or $20.
BAH! I subscribe to the "Independence Day" scenario.
Scene: Area 51 lab
President Whitmore: I don't understand. Where does all this come from? How do you get funding for something like this?
Julius Levinson: You don't honestly belive they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toliet seat do you?
It all feeds into a manufactured perception that the DOD is incompetent. That way everyone (including the foreign powers) underestimates them.
Hell the mob has been doing it for years. Do you really think the little Italian restaurant really needs to replace all their platess every 6 months.
This isn't enough. Just the other day I was gruesomly by a mallet wielding child.
I was watching with the 4 year old child what I assumed to be a a family show about a talking duck and a talking rabbit. Soon the show turned violent when the rabbit hit the duck with a very large mallet. (Later, this same rabbit was seen wearing a dress and makeup. An obvious homosexual propaganda attempt to steal our children's prescious innocence and make them turn to the homosexual lifestyle.) Not five minutes later, the child left the room, got my large mallet from the garage, snuck back into the room, climbed onto the back of the couch and walloped me on the head 4 or 5 times.
I thought the child was going to kill me. Luckily the child's mother came home and found me in laying in a pool of my own blood with her child standing overme with the blood stained weapon.
Why did the child do this? "I wanted to play with the birdies."
Write your congressman and senator now!!! Hearings need to take place before another child blungons someone!!!!
As a pretty hard core fan, some of my current picks may not even be available yet this side of the Pacific.
Anime fans remind me of ska fans back in the mid 90s. If it was a band you heard of, they suck. If it's some nobody, they're cool. If the nobody became popular, they become instantly (and retroactivly) sucky.
Stuff To Avoid: Pokemon
PIIIIIKAAAAAACHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!
DragonBall Z
Mr. Piccalo will kick your ass for that. It's just fun.
Sailor Moon
You're just jellous of Tuxedo Mask. (no in all honesty it's not very good. About on level of Ronin Warriors *groan*.
Any "Alternate Universe" Gundam (ie Gundam Wing)
Now I haven't seen the other Gundams, but Gundam Wing cool. The animation is good. It's pretty. Sure, theres episodes that stop right when the action starts, but some how it all flows. Alot like B5 (which I was ever that big a fan of).
Yes it is pretty much impossible to join in the middle. That's why when I told a friend about it, to wait until the series recycled. Even if you miss certain episodes, you're lost for a little while.
Hell, I've watched about 97% of the series starting at episode 1, and I STILL have no idea who the Magnanok Corps is. They just kind of follow Quatra around and blow stuff up for no real reason. (Having a private army must be nice though.)
Oh and they move the Gundams away because they don't want them captured. (Even though one shot by a beam cannon tends to destroy an entire division.)
I agree with your second statement. The web isn't broke... people just aren't using it properly. There are so many corporate sites that look like brochures. It's sickening. My previous job was to set up a web page for a small business, and all they wanted me to do was scan each page of their brochure into GIF's, put them up on the web, and put "forward" and "backward" buttons on the bottom to navigate between pages. I said, WTF!?!? The concept of actually including text information and links to other resources was totally absurd to my boss.
These kinds of people think of the web only as a marketing tool, and thus can't take advantage of the power it has to offer.
Look at news sites. Howmany times do you come across a articles that are word-for-word taken directly from the printed page. (Almost to the fact that it says, "continued on page 3C".)
The worst part is the page-turning. You know, the "next page" links at the bottom of articles. That right there is a sign that your sight is broken. You're using a static and linear approach in a dynamic and nonlinear medium.
Break the story up. Link God damn it! If a comany gets mentioned link to it, not one of those pathetic stock quote drivels that news sites make. If some person made a speech, don't just quote the one or two sentences, link to the speech.
I'm convinced that the web is going to suck until our children ascend to power. Look at television. In the early days of the late 40s and 50s everything was very rigid. You basically had radio programs being done in front of a cammera. After a generation was raised on televions did you actually get programs that started to take advantage of the medium. Compare how news was done in 1950 to how it's done today. Look at educational television. Before you had the monotone droning voice of an old man, and now you have Sesame Street. The same thing is going to happen to the web.
I'm in the process of making my own right now. (The RFC822 parser is about 80% complete).
It'll be called Birch. I'm doing it because well frankly I think all mailreaders out there suck. I'm an engineer, so I'm making my own. Whether anyone uses or not, I don't care. It's what I want.
think the obvious solution is to forget about paper newspapers, and perfect light, long-battery-life portable computers.
Of course I assume ultra-cheapness would also have to be a consern, since:
1. It would be a Good Thing(tm) If they become ubiquitous like normal paper. 2. People like to have multiple documents openned and infront of them simultaneously. Simply looking at my desk here at work I have 4 documents opened (3 on my desk, one on my computer). I for one find it much easier to refer to a real world document when typing rather than having to constantly switch between windows. (You could aliviate this by having multiple monitors, but I digress.)
Another requirement for these computers would have to be ease (and choice) of input. People like writting in the margins and underlining in books and newspapaers. You need to be able to do that, and then transmit that annotated version to someone.
You need choice of inputs because:
1. typing isn't always the best entry 2. my handwritting is really a scrawl and is slow compared to my typing. 3. voice recognition isn't a panacea. In fact I find it for most things the complely wrong interface. Additionally you have the "Are you talkin' to me?" problem.)
Just push the "download New York Times" control every morning, and pay your credit card bill every month.
In all honesty you shouldn't have to do that. The Times should be downloaded automagically and then combined with other news sources to create a composite document. When I read the news all I want is for it come from a trusted source (user definable.) I don't give a damn if it came from some schmuck at the NYT, or some nobody at the AP, or CNN. It's all the same news.
Of course "personalized newspapers" will never happen because the media conglomerates would loose control. "My God! You mean anyone can just pick and choose the stories they want? You mean they want hyperlinks directly to the sources rather than to internal stub pages? What are they some sort of communists?"
What I want to see from the media in the future is nonlinear storytelling. The web is diffrent medium than the paper world. I don't want to be led down a path. I don't want to have "turn pages" at websites (a sure sign of bad design). Give me as much information as possible and make each part not only related, but also capable of being read independently from the whole. That's what I want.
(a) archaic (I remember barcode programs from the days of Commodore & Vegetable Games)
Huh? Sure barcodes have been around for a while. There`s a reason: they work. The latest barcode technology I've seen isn't really a barcode, but rather a 2D bitmap. (There`s one on my stick of deoderant.) That way you can increase the information density. (This bitmap is about.25 inches square.)
Just because a technology has been around for a long time, doesn't automatically make it archaic, I submit:
fire wheel writting mathematics
(b) prone to errors (even barcodes on TV guides are little more than a cute gimic) and
This can be fixed by high-definition printing. It`s simply an engineering problem.
(c) entirely the wrong way round.
What would be better, then? What about thin plastic newspapers, using that fluid LCD technology that got posted a while back?
Yeah, I'll don my crash helmet and aluminium foil jumpsuit, jump in my atomic powered hovercar and go out and pick one up.
Yes having flexible color screens that can be folded (just imagine the paper airplanes!) and bound would be idea;; but this is 2000. They don't exist in any meaningful way yet (by "meaningful", I mean "commercial ready at a damn cheap price"). If you want to have offline links, you have to go with what's available today. Barcodes and webcams are it.
Personally I like the barcode idea better than the webcam idea. By holding up a page infront of a cammera, there's no way to have multiple links on a page. Sure you could look for the hand, and then the finger, or have the user point with a flourescent orange pencil, but these solutiions either take too long or are awkward. (I have a hard enough time keeping track of my palm stylus, I don't want to have to search my apartment for another stylus whenever I want to read a magazine.)
The problem with barcodes is you need extra hardware, but that`s pretty much inescapable. Now if this technology was implimented in say a PDA, then you'd have something.
Nah. It's just hack "journalism". It's no different from marketeers using the same damn tired cliches again and again.
-- Krusty the Klown Marketeer: "What we need is something new. Something out there. Something in your face. Poochie is going to do that. We're talking total paradigm shift." Krusty the Klown: "So he's real pro-active huh?" Krusty Marketeer: "Totally." Krusty Writer: "Paradigm? Pro-active? Aren't these just words that dumb people use to make themselves sound important?"
Where is porn on that list? Camon guys, that's gotta be one of the top inventions of the 20th century.
I mean, in the 19th century. It was very hard to find porn. Now, you don't even have to go outside to get porn. Making porn easily accessibly is gotta be the top invention of the 20th century.
Considering that these things run WinCE straight from the Evil Empire, I think they should be called SITH: Soldier's Information and Tactical... um, H-something...
Slashdot Mirror
BAH! I subscribe to the "Independence Day" scenario.
It all feeds into a manufactured perception that the DOD is incompetent. That way everyone (including the foreign powers) underestimates them.
Hell the mob has been doing it for years. Do you really think the little Italian restaurant really needs to replace all their platess every 6 months.
We definitely need an X-rated cartoon network for anime and the occasional feature film like "Fritz the Cat."
His name is "Felix".
This isn't enough. Just the other day I was gruesomly by a mallet wielding child.
I was watching with the 4 year old child what I assumed to be a a family show about a talking duck and a talking rabbit. Soon the show turned violent when the rabbit hit the duck with a very large mallet. (Later, this same rabbit was seen wearing a dress and makeup. An obvious homosexual propaganda attempt to steal our children's prescious innocence and make them turn to the homosexual lifestyle.) Not five minutes later, the child left the room, got my large mallet from the garage, snuck back into the room, climbed onto the back of the couch and walloped me on the head 4 or 5 times.
I thought the child was going to kill me. Luckily the child's mother came home and found me in laying in a pool of my own blood with her child standing overme with the blood stained weapon.
Why did the child do this? "I wanted to play with the birdies."
Write your congressman and senator now!!! Hearings need to take place before another child blungons someone!!!!
ahh yes I forgot that. Episode 3.1 was geeks31.mp3 I remember thinking "Why didn't thy just make it "'geeks3.1.mp3'?"
Oooo! We're so grown up! We no longer use digits, but rather spell out our numbers.
We're just as cool as Matchbox20^H^HTwenty!!
As a pretty hard core fan, some of my current picks may not even be available yet this side of the Pacific.
Anime fans remind me of ska fans back in the mid 90s. If it was a band you heard of, they suck. If it's some nobody, they're cool. If the nobody became popular, they become instantly (and retroactivly) sucky.
Stuff To Avoid:
Pokemon
PIIIIIKAAAAAACHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!
DragonBall Z
Mr. Piccalo will kick your ass for that. It's just fun.
Sailor Moon
You're just jellous of Tuxedo Mask.
(no in all honesty it's not very good. About on level of Ronin Warriors *groan*.
Any "Alternate Universe" Gundam (ie Gundam Wing)
Now I haven't seen the other Gundams, but Gundam Wing cool. The animation is good. It's pretty. Sure, theres episodes that stop right when the action starts, but some how it all flows. Alot like B5 (which I was ever that big a fan of).
Plus, Noin is damn hot.
NO! A whole hour! And I still want Kurt to show up.
Yes it is pretty much impossible to join in the middle. That's why when I told a friend about it, to wait until the series recycled. Even if you miss certain episodes, you're lost for a little while.
Hell, I've watched about 97% of the series starting at episode 1, and I STILL have no idea who the Magnanok Corps is. They just kind of follow Quatra around and blow stuff up for no real reason. (Having a private army must be nice though.)
Oh and they move the Gundams away because they don't want them captured. (Even though one shot by a beam cannon tends to destroy an entire division.)
What the hell? Gundam Wing doesn't suck! Sure it's giant robots fighting each other, but it's still cool.
Sure it's odd, to the point of stupidity, that every one is fighting to show how futile fighting is, but for some reason I liked it.
And you should too!
So sayeth me.
> The web is broke. We're not using it properly
I agree with your second statement. The web isn't broke... people just aren't using it properly. There are so many corporate sites that look like brochures. It's sickening. My previous job was to set up a web page for a small business, and all they wanted me to do was scan each page of their brochure into GIF's, put them up on the web, and put "forward" and "backward" buttons on the bottom to navigate between pages. I said, WTF!?!? The concept of actually including text information and links to other resources was totally absurd to my boss.
These kinds of people think of the web only as a marketing tool, and thus can't take advantage of the power it has to offer.
Look at news sites. Howmany times do you come across a articles that are word-for-word taken directly from the printed page. (Almost to the fact that it says, "continued on page 3C".)
The worst part is the page-turning. You know, the "next page" links at the bottom of articles. That right there is a sign that your sight is broken. You're using a static and linear approach in a dynamic and nonlinear medium.
Break the story up. Link God damn it! If a comany gets mentioned link to it, not one of those pathetic stock quote drivels that news sites make. If some person made a speech, don't just quote the one or two sentences, link to the speech.
I'm convinced that the web is going to suck until our children ascend to power. Look at television. In the early days of the late 40s and 50s everything was very rigid. You basically had radio programs being done in front of a cammera. After a generation was raised on televions did you actually get programs that started to take advantage of the medium. Compare how news was done in 1950 to how it's done today. Look at educational television. Before you had the monotone droning voice of an old man, and now you have Sesame Street. The same thing is going to happen to the web.
Am I the only one who feels insulted by the Big All Knowing Corporation keeping me from doing what I want for "my own good"?
Damn.
It's Los Alamos. Not Las Alamos.
Los is masculine, while Las is feminine. Alamos is a masculine noun. (You can tell because it ends in "o".)
I'm in the process of making my own right now. (The RFC822 parser is about 80% complete).
It'll be called Birch. I'm doing it because well frankly I think all mailreaders out there suck. I'm an engineer, so I'm making my own. Whether anyone uses or not, I don't care. It's what I want.
Looks too much like outlook to me. (If only it had those annoying perveted menu widgets...)
Repeat this with me people:
Microsoft does not have the best ideas.
Alot of Microsoft's ideas suck ass.
Microsoft does not have the best ideas.
Alot of Microsoft's ideas suck ass.
Microsoft does not have the best ideas.
Alot of Microsoft's ideas suck ass.
Now go forth my son.
If it was me my, "official response" would read in it's entirety:
think the obvious solution is to forget about paper newspapers, and perfect light, long-battery-life portable computers.
Of course I assume ultra-cheapness would also have to be a consern, since:
1. It would be a Good Thing(tm) If they become ubiquitous like normal paper.
2. People like to have multiple documents openned and infront of them simultaneously. Simply looking at my desk here at work I have 4 documents opened (3 on my desk, one on my computer). I for one find it much easier to refer to a real world document when typing rather than having to constantly switch between windows. (You could aliviate this by having multiple monitors, but I digress.)
Another requirement for these computers would have to be ease (and choice) of input. People like writting in the margins and underlining in books and newspapaers. You need to be able to do that, and then transmit that annotated version to someone.
You need choice of inputs because:
1. typing isn't always the best entry
2. my handwritting is really a scrawl and is slow compared to my typing.
3. voice recognition isn't a panacea. In fact I find it for most things the complely wrong interface. Additionally you have the "Are you talkin' to me?" problem.)
Just push the "download New York Times" control every morning, and pay your credit card bill every month.
In all honesty you shouldn't have to do that. The Times should be downloaded automagically and then combined with other news sources to create a composite document. When I read the news all I want is for it come from a trusted source (user definable.) I don't give a damn if it came from some schmuck at the NYT, or some nobody at the AP, or CNN. It's all the same news.
Of course "personalized newspapers" will never happen because the media conglomerates would loose control. "My God! You mean anyone can just pick and choose the stories they want? You mean they want hyperlinks directly to the sources rather than to internal stub pages? What are they some sort of communists?"
What I want to see from the media in the future is nonlinear storytelling. The web is diffrent medium than the paper world. I don't want to be led down a path. I don't want to have "turn pages" at websites (a sure sign of bad design). Give me as much information as possible and make each part not only related, but also capable of being read independently from the whole. That's what I want.
> It`s simply an engineering problem.
You must be a mathematician.
Nope. Software Engineer.
It seems like this is:
(a) archaic (I remember barcode programs from the days of Commodore & Vegetable Games)
Huh? Sure barcodes have been around for a while. There`s a reason: they work. The latest barcode technology I've seen isn't really a barcode, but rather a 2D bitmap. (There`s one on my stick of deoderant.) That way you can increase the information density. (This bitmap is about
Just because a technology has been around for a long time, doesn't automatically make it archaic, I submit:
fire
wheel
writting
mathematics
(b) prone to errors (even barcodes on TV guides are little more than a cute gimic) and
This can be fixed by high-definition printing. It`s simply an engineering problem.
(c) entirely the wrong way round.
What would be better, then? What about thin plastic newspapers, using that fluid LCD technology that got posted a while back?
Yeah, I'll don my crash helmet and aluminium foil jumpsuit, jump in my atomic powered hovercar and go out and pick one up.
Yes having flexible color screens that can be folded (just imagine the paper airplanes!) and bound would be idea;; but this is 2000. They don't exist in any meaningful way yet (by "meaningful", I mean "commercial ready at a damn cheap price"). If you want to have offline links, you have to go with what's available today. Barcodes and webcams are it.
Personally I like the barcode idea better than the webcam idea. By holding up a page infront of a cammera, there's no way to have multiple links on a page. Sure you could look for the hand, and then the finger, or have the user point with a flourescent orange pencil, but these solutiions either take too long or are awkward. (I have a hard enough time keeping track of my palm stylus, I don't want to have to search my apartment for another stylus whenever I want to read a magazine.)
The problem with barcodes is you need extra hardware, but that`s pretty much inescapable. Now if this technology was implimented in say a PDA, then you'd have something.
If your last two albums were entitled "Load" and "Reload", can we expect your next one to be called, "Unload"?
Nah. It's just hack "journalism". It's no different from marketeers using the same damn tired cliches again and again.
--
Krusty the Klown Marketeer: "What we need is something new. Something out there. Something in your face. Poochie is going to do that. We're talking total paradigm shift."
Krusty the Klown: "So he's real pro-active huh?"
Krusty Marketeer: "Totally."
Krusty Writer: "Paradigm? Pro-active? Aren't these just words that dumb people use to make themselves sound important?"
Hey,
Where is porn on that list? Camon guys, that's gotta be one of the top inventions of the 20th century.
I mean, in the 19th century. It was very hard to find porn. Now, you don't even have to go outside to get porn. Making porn easily accessibly is gotta be the top invention of the 20th century.
I think that goes under "Internet".
Kurt needs to show up sometime relatively soon. Perhaps he could fill in for Rob next time he's gone.
:)
I'm sure he would enjoy it.
Carmen. He's a rapper. He's an R&B crooner. He's rock & roller. He is the ultimate musical giggalo.
Themeability.
Nothing's more iportant than having EVERY WINDOW look absolutly different with inconsistent controls!
Considering that these things run WinCE straight from the Evil Empire, I think they should be called SITH: Soldier's Information and Tactical... um, H-something...
Handheld