"...I had two buttons on my mac in '92...They're availalbe all over the place, and come with the software to make that second button do whatever you want . .."
So, for the past 9 years Company A has been making what you consider an inferior product but you are still buying and patching it to do what you want. When there are superior products out there that do it correctly out of the box.
The joke here isn't "single button mice make macs hard to use" it is "the persistence of the single button mouse design error shows how little Apple really cares about usability".
People here have pointed out the lack of the touted paperless office. I'd like to add this thought to that: People have been trying since the 70's (at least) to get rid the penny. Check your pockets for the success factor there.
People stop using things when they become useless. No amount of marketing by "eMoney" companies or wishful thinking by self-professed "geeks" will make it go away.
"A satellite can't monitor such an area constantly, since Manhatten isn't on the equator."
And goodness knows we've only got one.
Satellite imaging is really the only way to get constant monitoring over an urban area. A mile long tether is inviting disaster (what's to keep planes from flying into it?)
Playing with nerf guns in a converted factory is fun...but is it a job?
My job is as a programmer/admin. I enjoy it and the company receives good value. Pre-1995 this would have been defined as heaven. To you dot-bomb losers it is apparently hell.
"The only thing governments should be providing for us are public goods which the private sector cannot or will not provide us."
Maybe downtown Seattle has a lot of choices, but out here near the sticks I have exactly one broadband choice: Verizon. People actually IN the sticks have zero options.
Right after I read it I was really excited about this idea. Get out from under Verizon? You betcha!
But, during the (10 second) interval it took between when I clicked "post comment" and when the textbox finally appeared, I rethought. Provide to whom? As a gov't service they can't discriminate. Which is great for us Linux users--no more crappy DHCP/VPN-disabled junk. But pretty sucky for the administrators who have to have configs available for everything from Win98 to VMS to OS2 to BeOS.
Of course, in actual practice they'd only provide service for the "popular" OS's. Which defeats the whole purpose of having a public utility in the first place.
For the love of God, Covad, run a damn line to my house so I can get Speakeasy! Or at least give me a estimate of when you CAN do it so I know how long the wait will be.
"I've found that it takes my 1.2 Ghz Athlon to reach 80 degrees Celsius in about 6 minutes, from time of starting machine. The results of running without a heatsink at all are....interesting."
One time my stopped working heatsink and the to go first thing was spell/grammar check my.
I've been using Moz daily for almost a year now for both web and mail. I downloaded a daily a couple days ago and it's getting better all the time. The most notable improvement: The mailer isn't a time-sink like it used to be. Even in 0.9.3 it would take me upwards of 1 or even 2 minutes to click "new msg", put in 3 recip addrs, type a subject line and then start writing the body. Luckily I only write about 3 emails a week...
What happens during tornado/hurricane/santa-ana-style winds? Sure, they can turn the props off (although won't they break?) but what about the shape of the building "focussing" the wind down near the ground?
If packets can communicate with each other to give routing info, they can also communicate with the outside world to do the same. This allows packet tracing under all conditions, rather than just ideal conditions as it is now.
...that the men and women in the USAF would be willing to employ F-16s and drop nuclear weapons on Des Moines, Los Angeles and Dallas? Especially considering that there may be only 10% of them who are "resisting"? And that many resisters are in charge of infrastructure items like dams, power plants, banking systems, and information technology?
Large weapons are good for large targets. A resisting populace is a bunch of little targets. F-16s and nuclear weapons are no good against your own people. You have to send the army in with guns. And locals armed with light arms ARE an OK match for that kind of warfare. As we proved in 1776.
"Just because a store researches something doesn't mean they're going to make the shopping experience better for the consumer."
Who said anything about improved shopping experiences?
My point here is not "Big Brother watches us to Keep Us Safe, so stop complaining". My point is "This happens in real life already, so why is it in a section called Your Rights Online?" My answer: Slashdot needs hype and is doing exactly what it professes to despise. Taking a minor (albeit semi-important to some) real-life problem and blowing it all out of proportion when it comes to The Net.
I must have missed the part where it said how Cheese could read your diary, peek in your underwear drawer and see what color your carpet is. I only read up through the part where it follows the mouse on a webpage. Much the same way they ALREADY follow your clicks between pages.
Again, I'm not saying I like it. I'm just saying it's not new to the online world.
"It's quite another for online sites to track our movements in our homes or whereever we use a computer."
If they were doing that, you'd be right. But that's not what they are doing. The software can't tell what MP3 you are listening to or what you are typing in your IRC client. All it is tracking is your movement in their store (i.e. on the pages of their site). All (serious) ecommerce sites already track your movement from page to page. How is tracking your movement within a page any different?
I'm not saying this practice is good or even acceptable. I'm just saying it's identical to Real Life store behavior and that being outraged at the one and not the other is hypocritical, naive and pointless.
For crying out loud,/., lighten up. Remember back in '95 when you couldn't turn on the TV or read a news magazine without some lame story about online stalking or pedophiles in chatrooms? And we all mocked them by saying "that's no different than real-life, what's all the hullabaloo"?
"Brick and mortar" stores do exactly this same thing. Many have cameras, the rest use "secret shoppers" (people who look like they are shopping but are really watching YOU) to discourage shoplifting, check competitor prices AND research in-store "migratory patterns". For instance, haven't you ever noticed that ALL grocery stores have the fresh fruits and vegetables right by the door?
This isn't "Your Rights Online". This is "Translating Nothing Cares About In RealLife Into A Scare Story About 'The Net' In Order To Attract Eyeballs To Slashdot."
If all you are trying to teach them is how to turn on a computer, move a mouse and double-click a "bag of holding" or whatever, keep doing what you are doing.
But if you want them to actually LEARN something, teach them to read. Then give them some books. Supplement and reward this learning with software. For instance, have a science lesson about simple machines (levers, pulleys, wheels, etc) THEN break out The Incredible Machine to demo it. And if Joe Icepick hasn't read his assignment yet, no Lemmings for him at Game Time.
Open Source developers do it for the same reason ALL volunteers do it: because they see a need that they are passionate about filling.
I recently volunteered to help out at my local elementary school's computer lab (first meeting is next week). Ask Senator Boucher if I'm crazy communist or a valuable citizen. Now tell him that I wrote and GPL'd an app that literally dozens of people have thanked me for (some calling it a "godsend"). Then ask him again if I'm crazy...
What is it with British mathematical physicists? First Penrose, now Hawking.
I don't know what makes Taco (or whoever) say that Hawking is "one of few" well-placed to talk about this--neither one has any inside knowledge about computers OR human intelligence. Remember they are mathematicians and physicists. Just because you use your brain doesn't mean you know how it works.
Moore's law is NOT the bottleneck the AI community is experiencing. The issue here is not "our computers aren't small/fast enough". The problem is that nobody yet knows how to write a program that is isomorphic to the one creating this sentence. Read that again--the trouble here is not that we don't have a sufficiently powerful computer to RUN such a program...the trouble isn't even that we don't HAVE such a program. The trouble is that we don't know how to write it.
The insights we need will come from psychology/cognitive science. Hawking, as smart and capable as he is, has no special training or knowledge in these areas.
This reads *exactly* like what my life was like, late '97 to late '99. Uglier and uglier NT network (we had roughly 35 NT domains with only 2000 users), more and more fragile services (mostly mail and printing because our file serving was from NetWare), higher and higher costs (and more and more time) to get anything done.
I kept suggesting Linux (yes, back then). I even setup a non-crashing backup print server--but I was the only one who used it regularly (of course, everybody used it about twice a week....). Unfortunately three factors worked against me:
1) Linux wasn't quite as big then as it is now.
2) The network admin was nearly techno-illiterate. She could do the stuff she had been trained to in a couple of NT classes but nothing else. Linux scared her. And she wasn't the kind of person to educate herself to conquer fear--her method was to insult and ignore the source.
3) We were about 1 hour from Redmond. It's hard to shield yourself from The Presence when you are that close.
We all made fun of the Dilbertian e-commerce sites that went under because they were idiots and then blamed "the economy". And yet here we are accepting the same argument from "Progeny" and their "NOW project". And how do I know they were idiots? I've never ever heard of them. I read all the major Linux sites, and I never had them or their project catch my eye. I subscribe to the Debian Weekly News and AFAIK they've never been mentioned.
If you want somebody to care about your product, you'll have to first tell them what it is (or at least that it exists).
Are these the superintelligent ones from last year? I hope so, because it seems like regular mice wouldn't be smart enough to perform experiments in microgravity.
Animals of a porcine persuasion, though, are much more intelligent. Plus, we'd get to say piiiiigssssss iiiiinnnnnn spaaaaaaaacccccce
* Max power 500 mW @ 1.8 V, with 25 computers running
500 milliWatts is.5 J/s. Divided by 60,000 million instructions/second implies that this can execute 1 instruction while consuming only 8.3e-6 Joules of energy. What I'd like to know: Pretending for a moment that the instruction was simply to flip a single bit, how close does this come to the absolute limit dictated by Information Theory?
Slashdot Mirror
"...I had two buttons on my mac in '92...They're availalbe all over the place, and come with the software to make that second button do whatever you want . . ."
So, for the past 9 years Company A has been making what you consider an inferior product but you are still buying and patching it to do what you want. When there are superior products out there that do it correctly out of the box.
The joke here isn't "single button mice make macs hard to use" it is "the persistence of the single button mouse design error shows how little Apple really cares about usability".
But utterly unlikely.
People here have pointed out the lack of the touted paperless office. I'd like to add this thought to that: People have been trying since the 70's (at least) to get rid the penny. Check your pockets for the success factor there.
People stop using things when they become useless. No amount of marketing by "eMoney" companies or wishful thinking by self-professed "geeks" will make it go away.
"A satellite can't monitor such an area constantly, since Manhatten isn't on the equator."
And goodness knows we've only got one.
Satellite imaging is really the only way to get constant monitoring over an urban area. A mile long tether is inviting disaster (what's to keep planes from flying into it?)
Playing with nerf guns in a converted factory is fun...but is it a job?
My job is as a programmer/admin. I enjoy it and the company receives good value. Pre-1995 this would have been defined as heaven. To you dot-bomb losers it is apparently hell.
So Microsoft is monopolisitic and overbearing.
Whoda thunk it?
"The only thing governments should be providing for us are public goods which the private sector cannot or will not provide us."
Maybe downtown Seattle has a lot of choices, but out here near the sticks I have exactly one broadband choice: Verizon. People actually IN the sticks have zero options.
Right after I read it I was really excited about this idea. Get out from under Verizon? You betcha!
But, during the (10 second) interval it took between when I clicked "post comment" and when the textbox finally appeared, I rethought. Provide to whom? As a gov't service they can't discriminate. Which is great for us Linux users--no more crappy DHCP/VPN-disabled junk. But pretty sucky for the administrators who have to have configs available for everything from Win98 to VMS to OS2 to BeOS.
Of course, in actual practice they'd only provide service for the "popular" OS's. Which defeats the whole purpose of having a public utility in the first place.
For the love of God, Covad, run a damn line to my house so I can get Speakeasy! Or at least give me a estimate of when you CAN do it so I know how long the wait will be.
"I've found that it takes my 1.2 Ghz Athlon to reach 80 degrees Celsius in about 6 minutes, from time of starting machine. The results of running without a heatsink at all are....interesting."
One time my stopped working heatsink and the to go first thing was spell/grammar check my.
I've been using Moz daily for almost a year now for both web and mail. I downloaded a daily a couple days ago and it's getting better all the time. The most notable improvement: The mailer isn't a time-sink like it used to be. Even in 0.9.3 it would take me upwards of 1 or even 2 minutes to click "new msg", put in 3 recip addrs, type a subject line and then start writing the body. Luckily I only write about 3 emails a week...
What happens during tornado/hurricane/santa-ana-style winds? Sure, they can turn the props off (although won't they break?) but what about the shape of the building "focussing" the wind down near the ground?
It'll never take off.
If packets can communicate with each other to give routing info, they can also communicate with the outside world to do the same. This allows packet tracing under all conditions, rather than just ideal conditions as it is now.
...that the men and women in the USAF would be willing to employ F-16s and drop nuclear weapons on Des Moines, Los Angeles and Dallas? Especially considering that there may be only 10% of them who are "resisting"? And that many resisters are in charge of infrastructure items like dams, power plants, banking systems, and information technology?
Large weapons are good for large targets. A resisting populace is a bunch of little targets. F-16s and nuclear weapons are no good against your own people. You have to send the army in with guns. And locals armed with light arms ARE an OK match for that kind of warfare. As we proved in 1776.
...that at least one pair of extremists can get along.
"Just because a store researches something doesn't mean they're going to make the shopping experience better for the consumer."
Who said anything about improved shopping experiences?
My point here is not "Big Brother watches us to Keep Us Safe, so stop complaining". My point is "This happens in real life already, so why is it in a section called Your Rights Online?" My answer: Slashdot needs hype and is doing exactly what it professes to despise. Taking a minor (albeit semi-important to some) real-life problem and blowing it all out of proportion when it comes to The Net.
I must have missed the part where it said how Cheese could read your diary, peek in your underwear drawer and see what color your carpet is. I only read up through the part where it follows the mouse on a webpage. Much the same way they ALREADY follow your clicks between pages.
Again, I'm not saying I like it. I'm just saying it's not new to the online world.
"It's quite another for online sites to track our movements in our homes or whereever we use a computer."
If they were doing that, you'd be right. But that's not what they are doing. The software can't tell what MP3 you are listening to or what you are typing in your IRC client. All it is tracking is your movement in their store (i.e. on the pages of their site). All (serious) ecommerce sites already track your movement from page to page. How is tracking your movement within a page any different?
I'm not saying this practice is good or even acceptable. I'm just saying it's identical to Real Life store behavior and that being outraged at the one and not the other is hypocritical, naive and pointless.
For crying out loud, /., lighten up. Remember back in '95 when you couldn't turn on the TV or read a news magazine without some lame story about online stalking or pedophiles in chatrooms? And we all mocked them by saying "that's no different than real-life, what's all the hullabaloo"?
"Brick and mortar" stores do exactly this same thing. Many have cameras, the rest use "secret shoppers" (people who look like they are shopping but are really watching YOU) to discourage shoplifting, check competitor prices AND research in-store "migratory patterns". For instance, haven't you ever noticed that ALL grocery stores have the fresh fruits and vegetables right by the door?
This isn't "Your Rights Online". This is "Translating Nothing Cares About In RealLife Into A Scare Story About 'The Net' In Order To Attract Eyeballs To Slashdot."
If all you are trying to teach them is how to turn on a computer, move a mouse and double-click a "bag of holding" or whatever, keep doing what you are doing.
But if you want them to actually LEARN something, teach them to read. Then give them some books. Supplement and reward this learning with software. For instance, have a science lesson about simple machines (levers, pulleys, wheels, etc) THEN break out The Incredible Machine to demo it. And if Joe Icepick hasn't read his assignment yet, no Lemmings for him at Game Time.
Open Source developers do it for the same reason ALL volunteers do it: because they see a need that they are passionate about filling.
I recently volunteered to help out at my local elementary school's computer lab (first meeting is next week). Ask Senator Boucher if I'm crazy communist or a valuable citizen. Now tell him that I wrote and GPL'd an app that literally dozens of people have thanked me for (some calling it a "godsend"). Then ask him again if I'm crazy...
What is it with British mathematical physicists? First Penrose, now Hawking.
I don't know what makes Taco (or whoever) say that Hawking is "one of few" well-placed to talk about this--neither one has any inside knowledge about computers OR human intelligence. Remember they are mathematicians and physicists. Just because you use your brain doesn't mean you know how it works.
Moore's law is NOT the bottleneck the AI community is experiencing. The issue here is not "our computers aren't small/fast enough". The problem is that nobody yet knows how to write a program that is isomorphic to the one creating this sentence. Read that again--the trouble here is not that we don't have a sufficiently powerful computer to RUN such a program...the trouble isn't even that we don't HAVE such a program. The trouble is that we don't know how to write it.
The insights we need will come from psychology/cognitive science. Hawking, as smart and capable as he is, has no special training or knowledge in these areas.
This reads *exactly* like what my life was like, late '97 to late '99. Uglier and uglier NT network (we had roughly 35 NT domains with only 2000 users), more and more fragile services (mostly mail and printing because our file serving was from NetWare), higher and higher costs (and more and more time) to get anything done.
I kept suggesting Linux (yes, back then). I even setup a non-crashing backup print server--but I was the only one who used it regularly (of course, everybody used it about twice a week....). Unfortunately three factors worked against me:
1) Linux wasn't quite as big then as it is now.
2) The network admin was nearly techno-illiterate. She could do the stuff she had been trained to in a couple of NT classes but nothing else. Linux scared her. And she wasn't the kind of person to educate herself to conquer fear--her method was to insult and ignore the source.
3) We were about 1 hour from Redmond. It's hard to shield yourself from The Presence when you are that close.
We all made fun of the Dilbertian e-commerce sites that went under because they were idiots and then blamed "the economy". And yet here we are accepting the same argument from "Progeny" and their "NOW project". And how do I know they were idiots? I've never ever heard of them. I read all the major Linux sites, and I never had them or their project catch my eye. I subscribe to the Debian Weekly News and AFAIK they've never been mentioned.
If you want somebody to care about your product, you'll have to first tell them what it is (or at least that it exists).
Are these the superintelligent ones from last year? I hope so, because it seems like regular mice wouldn't be smart enough to perform experiments in microgravity.
Animals of a porcine persuasion, though, are much more intelligent. Plus, we'd get to say piiiiigssssss iiiiinnnnnn spaaaaaaaacccccce
* 5 x 5 array of cores: 60,000 Mips
.5 J/s. Divided by 60,000 million instructions/second implies that this can execute 1 instruction while consuming only 8.3e-6 Joules of energy. What I'd like to know: Pretending for a moment that the instruction was simply to flip a single bit, how close does this come to the absolute limit dictated by Information Theory?
...
* Max power 500 mW @ 1.8 V, with 25 computers running
500 milliWatts is