The only thing I really object to, although I understand it, is the cinematic differentiation of replicants from humans displayed by Leon removing an egg from boiling water. If you can stick a replicant's hand in boiling water without hurting them, then the VK test is kind of pointless. Frankly, I'd cut that scene.
But, you can't stick a mehum's hand into boiling water without hurting them. "You're in line for a job here at Tyrell. We have to test you. If you pass, you'll get six weeks of paid sick leave while you regrow the skin on your left hand."
The whole point of that world is that, comparatively, human life is valuable and fairly rare, and rolling out a bunch of fake humans to handle danger is a rational move. If that's the metric, then doing damage to any one of 'em is wrong. Thus the VK.
I saw a blog post recently asking about what are the next problems for a computer scientist, from someone who thought that computer scientist == programmer. This is not true. Computer science is about understanding and handling complexity, and great gobs of computer issues have little to do with that. The Nike+ deal where you can put an accelerometer in your shoe and it'll tell your iPod how far you've run and how many calories you've burned. A neat and useful thing that makes me want it, to be sure, but it's far closer to 'hello world' than the ends of computer science.
This is not Tim Berners-Lee saying that he's dissatisfied with the Web. Which I'm sure he is, as it's not nearly as Semantic as he hopes it to be, and I'm not sure if Web 2.0 counts as a step forward or back for him.
The thing about it, if you RTFA, it seems -- Last month, his start-up, Anagran Inc., introduced a piece of gear called the flow router that he says can help modernize the Internet. The equipment analyzes Web traffic to discern whether it is an email, a movie or a phone call and then carves out the bandwidth needed for transmission. that they want to violate Network Neutrality. Which confuses me. It's good to favor packets from Youtube because video wants fast but not because you like Youtube?
And I always thought that the glory of the internet was that it was smart on the ends, not the middle.
I agree. In the short term, say 5 years, there's nothing coming up that's GPL3 and crucial to desktop/workstation users. You can run nearly anything you want in userspace.
But, you can put together 1TB systems today for under $300, with more storage just getting cheaper. Once you hit 12TB, RAID5 becomes useless because chance of unrecoverable read error approaches guaranteed. So, ZFS. Which is GPL3. And that's kernel, not userspace. (Yes, there's FUSE, but would you tie your enterprise to that yet?)
I know people who have moved to 64-bit architecture and FreeBSD, only because of ZFS and GPL3 issues. Granted, they're big cluster geeks who work with terabytes of data and petabytes of disk, but they're there.
ZFS in FUSE is cool. I think it's undenyable that FUSE is way cool.
But if you have terabytes to petabytes of disk spread across many machines, like a friend who works on clusters does, you think about ZFS in userspace and think "that's cute", while drinking as much of the FreeBSD kool-aid as you can get your hands on.
All that is true. It takes time and investment to create an OSS project. It takes time and investment to keep a computer system running, be it Windows or Linux or BeOS or OS2/Warp or whatever.
But there are things I want my system to do that are difficult to make it do under certain operating systems and easy to do under others.
Take a bog-standard, new-install Windows system and a fresh off the install disk Ubuntu system. One has given me the freedom to create new software by having programming languages installed, and one doesn't. And it's the Free (and Open Source Software) one that does.
As we all know, IBM made a crucial mistake when they licenced DOS for the PC instead of bought it, giving Bill Gates a license to print money. Right now, they're working on Vista, but Vista's biggest competators are XP, 2000, NT, 98, etc, etc, meaning the installed base that doesn't see the value in the new one.
The Zune? That follows the iPod. The XBox, etc? Follows the PS2, etc. There are some neat things, but none of them are a printing license like the IBM license deal was.
I don't know that another such license exists. If I did, I'd be grabbing for it, not posting it here. And I'm sure I wouldn't want to give one to MS.
But it isn't. If it was, all the models would die their hair brown instead of bleaching their hair blonde. I saw the brown Zune and immediately said "ew".
Computer engineers and software developers are just that - they can create software and build computers.
True. I would also submit that there are people who do useful things with computers without building them or generating code. But, in large chunks of the world, the age when one might get this laptop is the age when one begins to be an adult and picking up responsibility, and if that person is supposed to be watching over the sheep or planting the rice they'll gather and eat next fall and instead they're playing with their computers, then that can get to be a problem.
I was thinking "the West" and "not the West" there. Sorry if any insult was taken because none was meant.
And with the large populations and recent ramp-ups in energy usage in India and China, expect to see some interesting innovation out of there soon.
Re:Why would you want an RFID blocking wallet??
on
Top Ten Geek Wallets
·
· Score: 1
OK, if I had RTFA, I would've seen that this wallet is big enough to hold a passport, making it bigger than the normal wallet. Get to that size and I'd rather stick it in a coat pocket.
But we also produce that. OK, a good chunk we buy from Venesuela or Saudi Arabia, but we discovered the means to use turbines to turn water into power, to harness internal combustion, to turn fission into electricity, to transport electricity long distances, to use solar and wind technologies into electricity, etc. etc. etc. It isn't at all like that percentage of the world's energy would still be floating around, waiting for Costa Rica or Yemen to plug in if we didn't create it.
I'm wondering if they're counting goat carts and wind-powered grain mills in that statistic.
Not gonna say not to visit the Veteran's home or help kids. Worthy things to do. But....
RAW is someone I consider a friend. Someone I haven't thought about in a while, but a friend nonetheless. I've read the Illuminatus! Trilogy, I've read what's been published of the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles (the last book never made it, which is frustrating), Cosmic Trigger and a few others. He is a big influence on how I think and what I find funny. Is there anything wrong with trying to help a friend?
Re:Why would you want an RFID blocking wallet??
on
Top Ten Geek Wallets
·
· Score: 1
I wouldn't say "bulky". A sweater is bulky. A passport slips easily into your back pocket. What it does not do is fit easily into your wallet.
The more common deal is that a deal is made with a company for product placement. House is all HP. This makes sense for me; I used to work in health care, and we standardized on Compaq, which got bought by HP. 24's good guys all use Apple, which makes far less sense to me.
As for this hot chick? I'm guessing genius-kid installed it for her.
Yeah. True. And it's far more legible than most handwriting.
But they also get Carpal Tunnel. When we have decent voice recognition user interfaces for accepting large blocks of text, then we won't get away from keyboards fast enough, and the Jakob Nielsen of that time will say that the keyboard is the biggest UI gaffe ever. But we'll still have a variant of pen computing. Or at least that's what Star Trek tells me.
I'm not saying that you don't have to adapt the system to the user, too. QWERTY is testiment to that, because when typewriters were all mechanical, going too fast would lock of the keys, so the QWERTY layout is specifically designed to slow down your typing. In it's own way, it's the networking axiom of being liberal in what you accept but conservative in what you present. We accept data as music, as images, as brightly-colored text in overlapping windows, but we present it (mostly) as keystrokes, as pressing buttons for the computer.
I find it interesting that the examples of bad GUIs are 3/4 Microsoft. While those three are bad (Clippy? Bob? Ew. I get adaptive menues, though. The idea is valid, to a point.)
The Apple example, handwriting recognition on the Newton, is a good gaff. Which is to say it isn't something that any rational person would look out and say "That's dumb. Don't do that." It isn't Clippy. It isn't Bob. It's trying to get the computer to adapt to the person rather than getting the person to adapt to the computer. The big win for Palm was that Grafitti forced the user to adapt to the computer. Our handwriting is the way it is (hopefully) so that other people can read it to. Typewriting is not a natural thing, even though some of use geeks reach WPM speeds that make it seem like it is.
When we're talking about verbal user interface gaffs, we'll find similarly goofy things, and we'll find things that made sense intellectually but didn't work in reality. That's what we call research, kids.
I thought that this was already guaranteed, that CDs deteriorated while vinyl records didn't, so barring your needle scratching out the grooves, the LP would last longer.
Ah, well. If my tunes are pure digital, I can move it to the next machine when the current machine is ready to be replaced. And, as disk sizes get bigger, we can allow for huge sizes for our songs with no problem, which means the "sounds better" aspect of analog sound will fade.
Personally, I think it's a losing battle. Then again, I know people who only listen to 78s and others who play music and don't want to sound like it's past 1957, 1945, 1936 or earlier. For the music, I can see their point, but I've never been audiophile when it comes to the gear I use to play it.
Years ago, I took English Lit II as part of a 18+ credit load. It was at 7:30am, I was habitually late or absent, but I made a point of stopping in during office hours. The prof knew me, knew I knew what I was talking about, knew I read up, and did well on the tests. I'm sure I got at least a B. Maybe an A. And with the six-and-fail rule, I'd have an F.
Years later but years ago, I took a DB class. The prof, outside of class, was pretty OK. I've dealt with some of the organizations he's worked with before getting his Ph.D. and they still think highly of him. But that class was worthless. I knew less about databases at the end of it than at the beginning. I learned more about databases in a short course on Oracle set up for staff. Literally, he gave the same lecture (about how he wrote databases for a hospital in Indianapolis) at least four times during the semester. Perhaps more. Required class, though, so there was a group of people I took classes with, and they were all in it with me, and they all started skipping with me. We passed. We went on to the next classes. And with a six-and-fail rule, we'd all have Fs. --- A squid eating dough in a polyethelyne bag is fast and bulbous, got me? Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
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I haven't used a floppy since well before the advent of the iMac.
The only thing I really object to, although I understand it, is the cinematic differentiation of replicants from humans displayed by Leon removing an egg from boiling water. If you can stick a replicant's hand in boiling water without hurting them, then the VK test is kind of pointless. Frankly, I'd cut that scene.
But, you can't stick a mehum's hand into boiling water without hurting them. "You're in line for a job here at Tyrell. We have to test you. If you pass, you'll get six weeks of paid sick leave while you regrow the skin on your left hand."
The whole point of that world is that, comparatively, human life is valuable and fairly rare, and rolling out a bunch of fake humans to handle danger is a rational move. If that's the metric, then doing damage to any one of 'em is wrong. Thus the VK.
Where's my no-prize?
Why have Vint Cerf on the payroll if you weren't going to try to do something crazy innovative with internetworking?
I saw a blog post recently asking about what are the next problems for a computer scientist, from someone who thought that computer scientist == programmer. This is not true. Computer science is about understanding and handling complexity, and great gobs of computer issues have little to do with that. The Nike+ deal where you can put an accelerometer in your shoe and it'll tell your iPod how far you've run and how many calories you've burned. A neat and useful thing that makes me want it, to be sure, but it's far closer to 'hello world' than the ends of computer science.
This is not Tim Berners-Lee saying that he's dissatisfied with the Web. Which I'm sure he is, as it's not nearly as Semantic as he hopes it to be, and I'm not sure if Web 2.0 counts as a step forward or back for him.
The thing about it, if you RTFA, it seems -- Last month, his start-up, Anagran Inc., introduced a piece of gear called the flow router that he says can help modernize the Internet. The equipment analyzes Web traffic to discern whether it is an email, a movie or a phone call and then carves out the bandwidth needed for transmission. that they want to violate Network Neutrality. Which confuses me. It's good to favor packets from Youtube because video wants fast but not because you like Youtube?
And I always thought that the glory of the internet was that it was smart on the ends, not the middle.
Yeah, that's where I got it.
Beyond the DVR, I don't think I have more than 150GB in the whole house, which keeps me well under that limit, I know.
I agree. In the short term, say 5 years, there's nothing coming up that's GPL3 and crucial to desktop/workstation users. You can run nearly anything you want in userspace.
But, you can put together 1TB systems today for under $300, with more storage just getting cheaper. Once you hit 12TB, RAID5 becomes useless because chance of unrecoverable read error approaches guaranteed. So, ZFS. Which is GPL3. And that's kernel, not userspace. (Yes, there's FUSE, but would you tie your enterprise to that yet?)
I know people who have moved to 64-bit architecture and FreeBSD, only because of ZFS and GPL3 issues. Granted, they're big cluster geeks who work with terabytes of data and petabytes of disk, but they're there.
ZFS in FUSE is cool. I think it's undenyable that FUSE is way cool.
But if you have terabytes to petabytes of disk spread across many machines, like a friend who works on clusters does, you think about ZFS in userspace and think "that's cute", while drinking as much of the FreeBSD kool-aid as you can get your hands on.
All that is true. It takes time and investment to create an OSS project. It takes time and investment to keep a computer system running, be it Windows or Linux or BeOS or OS2/Warp or whatever.
But there are things I want my system to do that are difficult to make it do under certain operating systems and easy to do under others.
Take a bog-standard, new-install Windows system and a fresh off the install disk Ubuntu system. One has given me the freedom to create new software by having programming languages installed, and one doesn't. And it's the Free (and Open Source Software) one that does.
More directly referencing the Mauser.
But didn't Spielberg go to Cuba? I'd expect he's way against villianizing commies like that.
Evil corporate types? Yeah, that'll be it.
As we all know, IBM made a crucial mistake when they licenced DOS for the PC instead of bought it, giving Bill Gates a license to print money. Right now, they're working on Vista, but Vista's biggest competators are XP, 2000, NT, 98, etc, etc, meaning the installed base that doesn't see the value in the new one.
The Zune? That follows the iPod. The XBox, etc? Follows the PS2, etc. There are some neat things, but none of them are a printing license like the IBM license deal was.
I don't know that another such license exists. If I did, I'd be grabbing for it, not posting it here. And I'm sure I wouldn't want to give one to MS.
But it isn't. If it was, all the models would die their hair brown instead of bleaching their hair blonde. I saw the brown Zune and immediately said "ew".
Well, he wouldn't be the first to suggest an armed society is a polite society. But I'm more sure that it's an American playing with European bigotry.
Computer engineers and software developers are just that - they can create software and build computers.
True. I would also submit that there are people who do useful things with computers without building them or generating code. But, in large chunks of the world, the age when one might get this laptop is the age when one begins to be an adult and picking up responsibility, and if that person is supposed to be watching over the sheep or planting the rice they'll gather and eat next fall and instead they're playing with their computers, then that can get to be a problem.
I was thinking "the West" and "not the West" there. Sorry if any insult was taken because none was meant.
And with the large populations and recent ramp-ups in energy usage in India and China, expect to see some interesting innovation out of there soon.
OK, if I had RTFA, I would've seen that this wallet is big enough to hold a passport, making it bigger than the normal wallet. Get to that size and I'd rather stick it in a coat pocket.
But we also produce that. OK, a good chunk we buy from Venesuela or Saudi Arabia, but we discovered the means to use turbines to turn water into power, to harness internal combustion, to turn fission into electricity, to transport electricity long distances, to use solar and wind technologies into electricity, etc. etc. etc. It isn't at all like that percentage of the world's energy would still be floating around, waiting for Costa Rica or Yemen to plug in if we didn't create it.
I'm wondering if they're counting goat carts and wind-powered grain mills in that statistic.
Not gonna say not to visit the Veteran's home or help kids. Worthy things to do. But....
RAW is someone I consider a friend. Someone I haven't thought about in a while, but a friend nonetheless. I've read the Illuminatus! Trilogy, I've read what's been published of the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles (the last book never made it, which is frustrating), Cosmic Trigger and a few others. He is a big influence on how I think and what I find funny. Is there anything wrong with trying to help a friend?
I wouldn't say "bulky". A sweater is bulky. A passport slips easily into your back pocket. What it does not do is fit easily into your wallet.
The more common deal is that a deal is made with a company for product placement. House is all HP. This makes sense for me; I used to work in health care, and we standardized on Compaq, which got bought by HP. 24's good guys all use Apple, which makes far less sense to me.
As for this hot chick? I'm guessing genius-kid installed it for her.
Yeah. True. And it's far more legible than most handwriting.
But they also get Carpal Tunnel. When we have decent voice recognition user interfaces for accepting large blocks of text, then we won't get away from keyboards fast enough, and the Jakob Nielsen of that time will say that the keyboard is the biggest UI gaffe ever. But we'll still have a variant of pen computing. Or at least that's what Star Trek tells me.
I'm not saying that you don't have to adapt the system to the user, too. QWERTY is testiment to that, because when typewriters were all mechanical, going too fast would lock of the keys, so the QWERTY layout is specifically designed to slow down your typing. In it's own way, it's the networking axiom of being liberal in what you accept but conservative in what you present. We accept data as music, as images, as brightly-colored text in overlapping windows, but we present it (mostly) as keystrokes, as pressing buttons for the computer.
I find it interesting that the examples of bad GUIs are 3/4 Microsoft. While those three are bad (Clippy? Bob? Ew. I get adaptive menues, though. The idea is valid, to a point.)
The Apple example, handwriting recognition on the Newton, is a good gaff. Which is to say it isn't something that any rational person would look out and say "That's dumb. Don't do that." It isn't Clippy. It isn't Bob. It's trying to get the computer to adapt to the person rather than getting the person to adapt to the computer. The big win for Palm was that Grafitti forced the user to adapt to the computer. Our handwriting is the way it is (hopefully) so that other people can read it to. Typewriting is not a natural thing, even though some of use geeks reach WPM speeds that make it seem like it is.
When we're talking about verbal user interface gaffs, we'll find similarly goofy things, and we'll find things that made sense intellectually but didn't work in reality. That's what we call research, kids.
I thought that this was already guaranteed, that CDs deteriorated while vinyl records didn't, so barring your needle scratching out the grooves, the LP would last longer.
Ah, well. If my tunes are pure digital, I can move it to the next machine when the current machine is ready to be replaced. And, as disk sizes get bigger, we can allow for huge sizes for our songs with no problem, which means the "sounds better" aspect of analog sound will fade.
Personally, I think it's a losing battle. Then again, I know people who only listen to 78s and others who play music and don't want to sound like it's past 1957, 1945, 1936 or earlier. For the music, I can see their point, but I've never been audiophile when it comes to the gear I use to play it.
That sucks.
Years ago, I took English Lit II as part of a 18+ credit load. It was at 7:30am, I was habitually late or absent, but I made a point of stopping in during office hours. The prof knew me, knew I knew what I was talking about, knew I read up, and did well on the tests. I'm sure I got at least a B. Maybe an A. And with the six-and-fail rule, I'd have an F.
Years later but years ago, I took a DB class. The prof, outside of class, was pretty OK. I've dealt with some of the organizations he's worked with before getting his Ph.D. and they still think highly of him. But that class was worthless. I knew less about databases at the end of it than at the beginning. I learned more about databases in a short course on Oracle set up for staff. Literally, he gave the same lecture (about how he wrote databases for a hospital in Indianapolis) at least four times during the semester. Perhaps more. Required class, though, so there was a group of people I took classes with, and they were all in it with me, and they all started skipping with me. We passed. We went on to the next classes. And with a six-and-fail rule, we'd all have Fs.
---
A squid eating dough in a polyethelyne bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
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