makes me laugh... sites that set their sites up for 640x480 screens.. then running them in 1280x1024 or so...
What makes me laugh is people who seem to WANT their eye to travel 16" back and forth across a screen while reading. Until most people have 19" monitors, please keep your browser windows at about 800x600, unless you find sites that are broken at displaying text, such as the new DejaNews.
The Fourth Turning, by Strauss and Howe, explains how generations drive cycles in history and what this means for the present and future.
I don't know whether The Third Wave understands that a lot of what we're currently seeing has analogies in previous cycles of history. The whirling dervish of culture and society of the 90s echoes what was happening in the 20s. The scary aspect is that the next cycle is, inevitably, a "crisis" cycle in which society is likely to change quickly and enormously. According to Strauss and Howe, this should happen in the middle of the next decade.
There are problems introduced into the marketplace for doctors and lawyers BY licensing; for example, it directs the market to only work one way, increasing costs and politicizing the entire process.
And does *anyone* think that licensure of doctors means that you can go to any doctor and expect him/her to be competent and working in your best interest?
Adding licensure is adding politics to the process, and I should think that adding politics to programming is surely to goo it up, slow it down, confuse the relevant issues, etc. For instance, imagine the confusion when Bill Gates successfully lobbies for the programming equivalent of the bar exam to cover HIS protocols and HIS versions of languages.
When we want to introduce more government into a process, we like to imagine a perfect government, one where the agents act perfectly. When the agents don't act perfectly, the best intentions go wrong. Interstate highways turn into sprawl-enablers. Law enforcement becomes revenue enhancement. Programs intended to improve conditions actually hurt people.
The technology industries just happen to be the fastest-growing industries in the world. Lack of impeding regulations and licensing is one reason why. Please don't mess with it until it has had a chance to save the world...
I was very excited about these, until I found out that the advertised recording time of 14 hours is on a low-quality mode...
...and that high-quality mode would be needed to avoid artifacting on anything with more motion than a talking head...
...and that the record time on high-quality mode is closer to 4 hours.
I guess we have to wait for the next generation of cheap huge drives to come out. Of course, now with non-PC consumer devices to use them, the pressure will be on to provide for it, and perhaps the next generation will be out in six months (as opposed to the usual 12). OK, I guess I'm still excited, but I certainly won't be first on the gadget bus for this particular product.
Just before I graduated in 1985 (so what) I heard a statistic: the average professional programmer writes 14 lines of code per day.
I thought: WOW, I'm going to crush these people. They have no idea. So I got out into the real world and my first job was at Sperry (now Unisys), coding in the OS "kernel" for the series 1100/2200 mainframes -- although it wasn't really a kernel since they had never developed it along the lines of a proper OS.
I quickly learned that "14 lines per day" wasn't because these people were stupid; it was because of all the other crap that had to accompany those lines. In particular, one 500-line modification I added also required 50 pages of (mostly bureaucratic) definition and design documentation and about four months of politics.
Sperry circa 1985 is no longer a good example, but I'm sure that programmer's productivity everywhere is still completely stymied by corporate cultures that require signoffs from 7 different executive vice-presidents just to decide what doughnut selection is available in the breakroom. ("Operations is worried that powdered sugar is getting into the air vents, Personnel is angling for lower fat content to save on insurance premiums, and Steve in marketing wants them all chocolate because HE likes chocolate so therefore the rest of us should too.")
Generations aren't speeding up
on
Generations
·
· Score: 2
Computing generations move faster and faster, but that is actually a RESULT of an American generational trend -- a trend away from common experiences and towards diversification.
In the 1950s, the trend was towards commonality of experience. The nation was forced to come together, in a way, to get through the crises of the depression and second world war. As a result, differences between people were extremely de-emphasized. Consider that during WW2, Japanese Americans were systematically rounded up and put in camps. This would not be tolerated today - thank goodness.
That same attitude towards emphasizing common experiences, bringing the country together, etc. helps explain why there were only three broadcast networks. We all watched the same TV shows, ate the same foods, wore uniforms to work (or traditional black suits with black hats and black umbrellas). Movies such as "It's a Wonderful Life" emphasized the value in community thinking.
During the 60s, a generation rebelled against this sort of conformist attitudes, and slowly the subculture became the culture, permitting diversity. Today, having only three broadcast channels would be unthinkable. For many of us it would be an unimaginable horror.
It is this celebration of the individual and the diverse that has permitted computing to move boldly ahead. It is a sort of "glorious anarchy" that permits, for example, the publishing of individual websites without the okay of some sort of certifying board.
Going back to "Pleasantville" would be a horror, but there is an odd danger in our reductio ad individual. There will surely be a time when society has to come together again -- to save itself and hopefully improve itself. Strauss and Howe, in The Fourth Turning, suggest that every four generations there is an inevitable crisis period that requires common ground and brings people together to weather the storm. This crisis could be anything: international war, disease, monetary crisis, social/governmental system breakdown. In such times, once again diversity might be seen as a natural enemy.
These generational effects are quite evident if you look back in history. The same feelings you mention in your column were seen in the 1920s. Here's what Strauss and Howe say about that period: Up until the fall of 1929, American still inhabited a decade then known as "an era of wonderful nonsense." through the 1920s, America felt increasing wild, its daily life propelled ever faster by a stream of thrilling and innovative technologies.
Wow. So: the "speeding up" of technologies and lack of common experience ARE our common experience. Enjoy them now, and hope that the economic improvements and innovations come fast enough to provide us all with a good place to be once the crisis hits.
The Slashdot political mind focuses away from traditional politics and traditional politicians; and that IS its political action.
And for good reason. Anyone born after about 1962 or so cannot remember the government bringing together SQUAT. Previous generations have had common threads: the government getting people to work, getting armies together to fight evil, and in its last great collective breath, sending a man to the moon. Generations since then have seen government generating more problems than it has solved. 91% of people born after 1962 feel there won't be any social security money for them. (And they're right; amazingly, the fund is now due to call it quits just as generation X hits 65. Coincidence?)
Slashdotters reaction to all of this is to turn away from government to solve its problems. And it *has* been solving problems -- in spades. We've started by popularizing a concept so revolutionary that it could do away with any collective control of production in an entire industry. Howzat! We've shrugged off the government-for-life model, are busy shrugging off the company-man-for-life model and are establish a NEW model that works better than those dinosaurs.
You're right, Al Gore may well be the best candidate available in the next presidential election. Why doesn't that scare the shit out of you? Point made: if we seek true leadership, we must find it outside of the usual channels. Every one of us has more principles, more leadership ability, more guts and moxie than any politician in the old system. Nobody here is waiting for the USDA stamp of approval on software we write; we've found a new guarantee of quality better than any envisioned before.
And if you haven't "ruled out" Al Gore and every last one of those blood-sucking, egomanical Washington leeches, you may also be stuck trying to make the old models work. So I have one last word for you: if you aren't going to participate in this new model, at least help by getting Gore and his cronies on both sides of the aisle to stay out of the fucking way as much as possible... before they, too, are hit by the cluetrain.
I am one of the people Gore is meant to be stealling the credit for "inventing" the Internet.
Not for people who know what the internet is, you're not.
Media Lie: Gore Claimed to 'Invent' the internet. He didn't,
He did; the original story was written from a CNN transcript, not a reporter's idea of what was said.
Gore did two things which helped the Web take off. The first was to authorize the www.whitehouse.gov website. Before that went online closed proprietary systems such as Acrobat and Hyper-G were much more visible. The Whitehouse site legitimized the web. The other thing Gore did was to make all the agencies go on line first.
What kind of crap is this? What kind of idiots do you take us for? If there is one person now reading this who started participating on the I'net because of www.whitehouse.gov, please reply to this message and say so. If there is one person who believes that www.whitehouse.gov has done more for the acceptance of the net than any of the 100 top web sites out there... enough said.
Be especially cautious of the media - me included.
Thanks for the tip. Here's my tip in return: G E T - O V E R - Y O U R S E L F.
Do you really think Al Gore had anything to do with placing "Open Source" on his web site? More than likely, his campaign team hired someone to make a web page and the webmaster included the text -- thinking it would impress the technophiles.
Yup. And if he's elected, and the economy goes south, it won't be Al who did it -- it'll be the fed chairman he appointed. And if war breaks out, it won't be Al who did it -- it'll be the secretary of state he appointed. Al's a good guy!
Please, there is no excuse for the empty politics of appeal. You know why Ventura was elected: because he's a real person who says exactly what he thinks, not an empty automatron whose positions are injected into the campaign by staffers looking for keywords that the public will bite on. I'm so happy there are only a tiny minority of apologists on Slashdot. It means that reality is far more important than appearances amongst the geek culture.
I don't know! I think my reply there STARTED with a three!
I know my post on another topic was moderated up to five (I watched it go), and then somehow wound up back down at three; and another post on yet another topic seemed to go right to three and stick there, but not automatically.
I've watched about 40 DVDs on a 32" TV and only in two films did I notice artifacting. (In the first apartment scene in Blade Runner, and crowd shots in Young Frankenstein).
Only in the case of Blade Runner did it bother me, but it bothered me a *lot* less than having to watch a Pan-n-Scan blurry bulky VHS tape with metal oxides flaking off of it...
Sure they might have come up with a solution that doesn't fit in notebook computers or on your bookshelf or in the palm of your hand. Every consumer product has tradeoffs. Complaining about DVD because of artifacting is like complaining about sex because of the wet spot.
To begin with, the bottom line of this essay is that the individual is meaningless without society; the "network" analogy is just a way of, well, getting high philosophy into Slashdot.
Now then. You can argue that the individual is made "better" with the addition of society -- like, to continue to analogy, a computer is made better with the addition of a network. But to inject meaning into the argument is to take it an entirely different direction, and please don't confuse the two.
As individuals, we are always motivated by self-interest, but we can be gathered into systems that factor in that self-interest and go beyond it. Religious systems, for example, do not collect people who are "good;" they collect ordinary individuals who need a training program to become more fully human beings. They turn self-interest into mutual self-interest, transforming our possibilities for meaningful action in the process.
Well no. Even if you agree with the teachings of any one religion, you stil have to admit that most religious people do not agree with you. So either all or almost all religions are bent on reducing the meaning of lives. A Muslim, for example, would say that Christian lives are meaningless, and vice-versa. If that's not enough of a counter-example, how about suicide cults that take "ordinary" individuals and destroy them? What is the "mutual self-interest" in eating the poison pudding?
Each individual seeks meaning in his or her life, and it is the individual meaning, not the collective meaning, that is important.
...a person alone (like a desktop computer unplugged from the network) is nearly useless, a brain in a bottle. A person who isn't connected to the information and power flowing in a network is like an abandoned infant raised by wolves in a cave, unable to speak the dialect of the tribe. The network is where humanity thinks.
Suggesting that individuals have no worth? Fuck that kind of shit. Of course individuals have worth. Each individual perceiving this message is perceiving it in a universe entirely residing within their own brain. Collectively, they add their value to the whole and may -- or may not -- improve the whole, but the meaning of each individual's life is self-determined. You cannot determine my meaning and I cannot determine yours.
We are not like computers, all nearly identical on an identical network. We freely choose how to operate, which networks to join or not join, whether to act collectively or on our own, whether to think or not think. We choose which networks to associate with. We determine our values through our own thoughts. We improve the whole by collecting and concentrating individual efforts, yes, but we can also destroy the whole.
100 million people were killed by their own governments during this century. Were they improved by being a part of their network? Was their network improved? Did they perform the supreme sacrifice by giving their own lives for the world?
As humans, we have the greatest attribute possible: consciousness. Our very self-deterministic nature is what makes us better than apes, dogs, cats, mice, bees or borgs in a hive. The presence of the network does not reduce our consciousness one bit, and it is from that consciousness that meaning arises. And your meaning is, as should be obvious at this point, extremely different from mine.
Here's one last way to look at this problem using the network analogy. If individuals are meaningless without the network, and the addition of everyone into the network is what adds value, how do you explain the addition of AOL, or worse, WebTV? If it sounds like I'm being flippant, it's because I sorta am. But just like a lot of us feel AOL killed Usenet, so people's choice of networks is a part of their own concept of adding meaning. Many networks subtract meaning from my life, and I'm sure you can find similar examples in your life.
Our thoughts have meaning because we think them. Sometimes we add value to the whole because we share them. The whole is meaningless without every individual participating in it, but if we didn't have individual consciousness, the whole would be competely useless. Deathmatch games are only possible with people with NON-SHARED consciousness playing; if they think alike the game is worthless.
It appeals to the hacker mindset to come up with some sort of algorithm to pick and maintain moderators. But now we're dealing with human beings; and as meat becomes part of the algorithm, it becomes harder to predict its nature.
If people asked to become moderators, were expected to read and apply guidelines in order to stay moderators, and were occasionally reviewed to make sure they were in fact applying guidelines... the whole site would probably be more interesting in the long run.
If the guidelines are important, it will become more difficult to maintain them as more people become moderators -- no matter what sort of algorithm is applied. Think about the difference between the suggested model with thousands of moderators -- and a site with 30 moderators, all of whom are directed and good at what they do.
As it is, the algorithm is (apparently) going to now exclude moderators from operating on the stories that appeal to them the most, and anonymity prevents them from peer review and/or personal reward. This worries me. I wonder if it will inevitably end in CmdrTaco posting a lot of desperate pleas for moderators to apply the guidelines well and correctly. (Such appeals have already been necessary with hundreds of moderators, and it will only get worse.)
And I suspect that moderators will disregard requests to not simply promote messages they agree with -- and with thousands of them online it will be impossible to police them. If only 10% go that way, with no fear of reprisal, a number that is expected in other online forums (see Usenet), it will cause a lot of problems.
Lastly, as more and more minds are applied to review of anything, there is a homogenization effect that occurs -- through averaging. Extreme views, though they may be pointed, useful, interesting and important, are more likely to be moderated into average scores. Consider the difference between messages that earn half "A" and half "F" scores (resulting in a "C" grade) and messages that earn all "B" scores. Are the "B" messages more useful? They represent a certain type of message: non-offensive, lightly interesting, but *boring* in the long run... homogenized.
...look through a shoebox filled with movies (maybe have them delivered to your home in bulk via subscription - CDs can be churned out for pennies)
The DIVX discs can't be churned out for pennies, because unlike ordinary DVDs, they are all *individually* serialized. The folks at Circuit City have to know what your player has played and how to bill it. That's one reason why they still have to charge about 5 bucks for that first-time disk purchase. They would love it if they could hand them out on street corners in the hopes that DIVX owners would eventually play the movies. But they can't.
How often do you go to Blockbuster and wander around trying to decide what you want to rent? With Divx, you make a shopping trip and buy a dozen movies.
That's bullshit man. The majority of video renters check out new releases. If you buy 12 videos ahead of time and watch one per week, you are basically giving up on the idea of watching new releases... well after your first two, anyway. You're also doomed to the concept of buying flicks well in advance, because once you watch six of your twelve, you now only have six to choose from -- the six you had earlier decided you didn't want to watch -- so now it's back to the store to buy another six discs.
Furthermore, if you eventually decide you don't want to watch any of those discs (let's say your friend tells you how crappy one of them is), you are out that money, period.
WTF is so hard about going to a video store? I have four of them within three miles of my house. Are we so lazy that we can't stand a ten-minute trip outside? (If we are, we can still use NetFlix to rent over the web and get our full-DVD rentals by mail...)
DIVX encoding is just as available to the world as any other encoding scheme, and if it is ever cracked, the entire DIVX scheme will be broken. What would they do at that point? They would have to either use a new encoding scheme or give up. In either case, current DIVX players would revert to ordinary DVD players, or at least require firmware upgrades, and any "silvered" disks or pre-purchased DIVX discs out there would no longer play.
This also means that they would probably never license a DIVX-ROM device, even if they could use it to "rent" software -- it would give crackers a lot more access.
I can see why you'd feel that adding a price to/. would increase its worth to posters, but I feel that the unmoderated situation is more analogous to the tragedy of the commons. Nobody pays anything, everyone is free to post, and so irresponsible people post without trying to add value to the site.
Making people pay would create a situation where people expect to be able to post anything, without adding value, because they had paid the fee of entry.
Intelligent moderation is simply a way to disallow overgrazing (to return to the commons analogy) by sharing a portion of ownership with what appears to be a carefully selected bunch of commoners.
Perhaps the most interesting factor here is that we can very easily see if the new model is working; just look at the comments posted from here on out, and see whether they add more value than the type of comments posted under the earlier system. This promises to be facinating!
Back in 1988 when Burroughs and Sperry merged, one of the new company's first acts was to ask its entire employee base for suggestions for a new name. The idea was that it was cheaper to do that than to hire a namesmith, and would help get the employees to buy into the new organization.
The new name was announced by the board in a worldwide broadcast to employees. They announced the word with great fanfare. Everyone was on the edge of their seats. "And the new company name is....... UNISYS."
And every single employee said at the same time, "Unisys????" with a mixture of extreme sarcasm and puzzlement.
It was a sign of things to come. Five years later, they had about a third of those employees left, after massive layoffs and several restructurings.
Don't be one of those people who browse with a browser window wider than 800-900 pixels. No designers develop pages for that sort of width yet. Browsing "wide" doesn't just mean that the pages look bad, although they do. More importantly, it forces your eyes to do a lot of traveling to read text, and that causes eye strain, which can be very bad.
Well that's off-topic, but I'd wager your credit card problem happened after the secure transaction, not during. Just because the "lock" symbol appears does not mean that the system on the far side is going to protect your information after it gets there.
ZD has been bad forever -- the first I can remember is their absolutely glowing reports about Windows, buying into every single piece of MS fud, starting way back in the early part of this decade. Glowing reports on Windows 4.0 (which eventually became 95) began being issued in early 1994 from PC Magazine. ZD ought to have been bought and renamed Microsoft Press at the time, except that I'm sure they were bought under the table. From the tip of the iceberg of MS PR deals, the things that did come out, such as MS PR people writing bogus letters to the editor, MS telling employees to spout MS glory in open forums, MS acting to squelch information and competitors I'm sure that the #1 PC-oriented glossy rags were their first takeover target. Screw those people -- don't give them the hits.
This is the one I thought would never come. Huge corporations put together multi-million-dollar efforts to run their businesses on SAP. I had thought that the SAP mind-set wouldn't permit this kind of thinking, that they'd forever be only on the proprietary Unixii.
I had also thought - that something like SAP would need the big hardware and that companies would always pay a little extra for the benefits of things like hot-swappable RAID drives and fault-tolerant systems, and that these would almost certainly remain proprietary, and that the proprietary Unixii would stick around to support that vendor-specific hardware. Since SAP implementations are multi-million-dollar and this is where an hour of downtime is a loss of a million dollars of productivity for a company, I had through that a few extra hundreds of thousands on hardware might make sense.
Perhaps we're turning the corner via personnel? I would consider sysadminning a SAP implementation on Linux, but never on NT. Could it be that enough people agree at this point that NT implentations are getting impossible to staff correctly? Are you all refusing to work with NT and telling headhunters that up front? If not, why not? If Linux domination of the server continues at this rate, having NT on your resume could ACTUALLY BE A FAUX PAS! "Oh, you're an MCSE type? Sorry, we don't need any of those!"
The comments on this one are, for the first time after a Katz article, just as thought-provoking as the article itself. Oh baby! This is what it's all about!
I can only try to add something insightful myself. The biggest wall I see, and it's a long time coming down, is the wall between the net/computer-literate and the non-literate. Our world without walls is still unavailable to most people.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes me laugh is people who seem to WANT their eye to travel 16" back and forth across a screen while reading. Until most people have 19" monitors, please keep your browser windows at about 800x600, unless you find sites that are broken at displaying text, such as the new DejaNews.
I don't know whether The Third Wave understands that a lot of what we're currently seeing has analogies in previous cycles of history. The whirling dervish of culture and society of the 90s echoes what was happening in the 20s. The scary aspect is that the next cycle is, inevitably, a "crisis" cycle in which society is likely to change quickly and enormously. According to Strauss and Howe, this should happen in the middle of the next decade.
And does *anyone* think that licensure of doctors means that you can go to any doctor and expect him/her to be competent and working in your best interest?
Adding licensure is adding politics to the process, and I should think that adding politics to programming is surely to goo it up, slow it down, confuse the relevant issues, etc. For instance, imagine the confusion when Bill Gates successfully lobbies for the programming equivalent of the bar exam to cover HIS protocols and HIS versions of languages.
When we want to introduce more government into a process, we like to imagine a perfect government, one where the agents act perfectly. When the agents don't act perfectly, the best intentions go wrong. Interstate highways turn into sprawl-enablers. Law enforcement becomes revenue enhancement. Programs intended to improve conditions actually hurt people.
The technology industries just happen to be the fastest-growing industries in the world. Lack of impeding regulations and licensing is one reason why. Please don't mess with it until it has had a chance to save the world...
I guess we have to wait for the next generation of cheap huge drives to come out. Of course, now with non-PC consumer devices to use them, the pressure will be on to provide for it, and perhaps the next generation will be out in six months (as opposed to the usual 12). OK, I guess I'm still excited, but I certainly won't be first on the gadget bus for this particular product.
Yeah, but you gotta admit, that transcript is fucking beautiful poetry. I mean if it was always that good, I might consider using it!
I thought: WOW, I'm going to crush these people. They have no idea. So I got out into the real world and my first job was at Sperry (now Unisys), coding in the OS "kernel" for the series 1100/2200 mainframes -- although it wasn't really a kernel since they had never developed it along the lines of a proper OS.
I quickly learned that "14 lines per day" wasn't because these people were stupid; it was because of all the other crap that had to accompany those lines. In particular, one 500-line modification I added also required 50 pages of (mostly bureaucratic) definition and design documentation and about four months of politics.
Sperry circa 1985 is no longer a good example, but I'm sure that programmer's productivity everywhere is still completely stymied by corporate cultures that require signoffs from 7 different executive vice-presidents just to decide what doughnut selection is available in the breakroom. ("Operations is worried that powdered sugar is getting into the air vents, Personnel is angling for lower fat content to save on insurance premiums, and Steve in marketing wants them all chocolate because HE likes chocolate so therefore the rest of us should too.")
In the 1950s, the trend was towards commonality of experience. The nation was forced to come together, in a way, to get through the crises of the depression and second world war. As a result, differences between people were extremely de-emphasized. Consider that during WW2, Japanese Americans were systematically rounded up and put in camps. This would not be tolerated today - thank goodness.
That same attitude towards emphasizing common experiences, bringing the country together, etc. helps explain why there were only three broadcast networks. We all watched the same TV shows, ate the same foods, wore uniforms to work (or traditional black suits with black hats and black umbrellas). Movies such as "It's a Wonderful Life" emphasized the value in community thinking.
During the 60s, a generation rebelled against this sort of conformist attitudes, and slowly the subculture became the culture, permitting diversity. Today, having only three broadcast channels would be unthinkable. For many of us it would be an unimaginable horror.
It is this celebration of the individual and the diverse that has permitted computing to move boldly ahead. It is a sort of "glorious anarchy" that permits, for example, the publishing of individual websites without the okay of some sort of certifying board.
Going back to "Pleasantville" would be a horror, but there is an odd danger in our reductio ad individual. There will surely be a time when society has to come together again -- to save itself and hopefully improve itself. Strauss and Howe, in The Fourth Turning, suggest that every four generations there is an inevitable crisis period that requires common ground and brings people together to weather the storm. This crisis could be anything: international war, disease, monetary crisis, social/governmental system breakdown. In such times, once again diversity might be seen as a natural enemy.
These generational effects are quite evident if you look back in history. The same feelings you mention in your column were seen in the 1920s. Here's what Strauss and Howe say about that period: Up until the fall of 1929, American still inhabited a decade then known as "an era of wonderful nonsense." through the 1920s, America felt increasing wild, its daily life propelled ever faster by a stream of thrilling and innovative technologies.
Wow. So: the "speeding up" of technologies and lack of common experience ARE our common experience. Enjoy them now, and hope that the economic improvements and innovations come fast enough to provide us all with a good place to be once the crisis hits.
And for good reason. Anyone born after about 1962 or so cannot remember the government bringing together SQUAT. Previous generations have had common threads: the government getting people to work, getting armies together to fight evil, and in its last great collective breath, sending a man to the moon. Generations since then have seen government generating more problems than it has solved. 91% of people born after 1962 feel there won't be any social security money for them. (And they're right; amazingly, the fund is now due to call it quits just as generation X hits 65. Coincidence?)
Slashdotters reaction to all of this is to turn away from government to solve its problems. And it *has* been solving problems -- in spades. We've started by popularizing a concept so revolutionary that it could do away with any collective control of production in an entire industry. Howzat! We've shrugged off the government-for-life model, are busy shrugging off the company-man-for-life model and are establish a NEW model that works better than those dinosaurs.
You're right, Al Gore may well be the best candidate available in the next presidential election. Why doesn't that scare the shit out of you? Point made: if we seek true leadership, we must find it outside of the usual channels. Every one of us has more principles, more leadership ability, more guts and moxie than any politician in the old system. Nobody here is waiting for the USDA stamp of approval on software we write; we've found a new guarantee of quality better than any envisioned before.
And if you haven't "ruled out" Al Gore and every last one of those blood-sucking, egomanical Washington leeches, you may also be stuck trying to make the old models work. So I have one last word for you: if you aren't going to participate in this new model, at least help by getting Gore and his cronies on both sides of the aisle to stay out of the fucking way as much as possible... before they, too, are hit by the cluetrain.
Not for people who know what the internet is, you're not.
Media Lie: Gore Claimed to 'Invent' the internet. He didn't,
He did; the original story was written from a CNN transcript, not a reporter's idea of what was said.
Gore did two things which helped the Web take off. The first was to authorize the www.whitehouse.gov website. Before that went online closed proprietary systems such as Acrobat and Hyper-G were much more visible. The Whitehouse site legitimized the web. The other thing Gore did was to make all the agencies go on line first.
What kind of crap is this? What kind of idiots do you take us for? If there is one person now reading this who started participating on the I'net because of www.whitehouse.gov, please reply to this message and say so. If there is one person who believes that www.whitehouse.gov has done more for the acceptance of the net than any of the 100 top web sites out there... enough said.
Be especially cautious of the media - me included.
Thanks for the tip. Here's my tip in return: G E T - O V E R - Y O U R S E L F .
Yup. And if he's elected, and the economy goes south, it won't be Al who did it -- it'll be the fed chairman he appointed. And if war breaks out, it won't be Al who did it -- it'll be the secretary of state he appointed. Al's a good guy!
Please, there is no excuse for the empty politics of appeal. You know why Ventura was elected: because he's a real person who says exactly what he thinks, not an empty automatron whose positions are injected into the campaign by staffers looking for keywords that the public will bite on. I'm so happy there are only a tiny minority of apologists on Slashdot. It means that reality is far more important than appearances amongst the geek culture.
I know my post on another topic was moderated up to five (I watched it go), and then somehow wound up back down at three; and another post on yet another topic seemed to go right to three and stick there, but not automatically.
Only in the case of Blade Runner did it bother me, but it bothered me a *lot* less than having to watch a Pan-n-Scan blurry bulky VHS tape with metal oxides flaking off of it...
Sure they might have come up with a solution that doesn't fit in notebook computers or on your bookshelf or in the palm of your hand. Every consumer product has tradeoffs. Complaining about DVD because of artifacting is like complaining about sex because of the wet spot.
Now then. You can argue that the individual is made "better" with the addition of society -- like, to continue to analogy, a computer is made better with the addition of a network. But to inject meaning into the argument is to take it an entirely different direction, and please don't confuse the two.
As individuals, we are always motivated by self-interest, but we can be gathered into systems that factor in that self-interest and go beyond it. Religious systems, for example, do not collect people who are "good;" they collect ordinary individuals who need a training program to become more fully human beings. They turn self-interest into mutual self-interest, transforming our possibilities for meaningful action in the process.
Well no. Even if you agree with the teachings of any one religion, you stil have to admit that most religious people do not agree with you. So either all or almost all religions are bent on reducing the meaning of lives. A Muslim, for example, would say that Christian lives are meaningless, and vice-versa. If that's not enough of a counter-example, how about suicide cults that take "ordinary" individuals and destroy them? What is the "mutual self-interest" in eating the poison pudding?
Each individual seeks meaning in his or her life, and it is the individual meaning, not the collective meaning, that is important.
Suggesting that individuals have no worth? Fuck that kind of shit. Of course individuals have worth. Each individual perceiving this message is perceiving it in a universe entirely residing within their own brain. Collectively, they add their value to the whole and may -- or may not -- improve the whole, but the meaning of each individual's life is self-determined. You cannot determine my meaning and I cannot determine yours.
We are not like computers, all nearly identical on an identical network. We freely choose how to operate, which networks to join or not join, whether to act collectively or on our own, whether to think or not think. We choose which networks to associate with. We determine our values through our own thoughts. We improve the whole by collecting and concentrating individual efforts, yes, but we can also destroy the whole.
100 million people were killed by their own governments during this century. Were they improved by being a part of their network? Was their network improved? Did they perform the supreme sacrifice by giving their own lives for the world?
As humans, we have the greatest attribute possible: consciousness. Our very self-deterministic nature is what makes us better than apes, dogs, cats, mice, bees or borgs in a hive. The presence of the network does not reduce our consciousness one bit, and it is from that consciousness that meaning arises. And your meaning is, as should be obvious at this point, extremely different from mine.
Here's one last way to look at this problem using the network analogy. If individuals are meaningless without the network, and the addition of everyone into the network is what adds value, how do you explain the addition of AOL, or worse, WebTV? If it sounds like I'm being flippant, it's because I sorta am. But just like a lot of us feel AOL killed Usenet, so people's choice of networks is a part of their own concept of adding meaning. Many networks subtract meaning from my life, and I'm sure you can find similar examples in your life.
Our thoughts have meaning because we think them. Sometimes we add value to the whole because we share them. The whole is meaningless without every individual participating in it, but if we didn't have individual consciousness, the whole would be competely useless. Deathmatch games are only possible with people with NON-SHARED consciousness playing; if they think alike the game is worthless.
If people asked to become moderators, were expected to read and apply guidelines in order to stay moderators, and were occasionally reviewed to make sure they were in fact applying guidelines... the whole site would probably be more interesting in the long run.
If the guidelines are important, it will become more difficult to maintain them as more people become moderators -- no matter what sort of algorithm is applied. Think about the difference between the suggested model with thousands of moderators -- and a site with 30 moderators, all of whom are directed and good at what they do.
As it is, the algorithm is (apparently) going to now exclude moderators from operating on the stories that appeal to them the most, and anonymity prevents them from peer review and/or personal reward. This worries me. I wonder if it will inevitably end in CmdrTaco posting a lot of desperate pleas for moderators to apply the guidelines well and correctly. (Such appeals have already been necessary with hundreds of moderators, and it will only get worse.)
And I suspect that moderators will disregard requests to not simply promote messages they agree with -- and with thousands of them online it will be impossible to police them. If only 10% go that way, with no fear of reprisal, a number that is expected in other online forums (see Usenet), it will cause a lot of problems.
Lastly, as more and more minds are applied to review of anything, there is a homogenization effect that occurs -- through averaging. Extreme views, though they may be pointed, useful, interesting and important, are more likely to be moderated into average scores. Consider the difference between messages that earn half "A" and half "F" scores (resulting in a "C" grade) and messages that earn all "B" scores. Are the "B" messages more useful? They represent a certain type of message: non-offensive, lightly interesting, but *boring* in the long run... homogenized.
The DIVX discs can't be churned out for pennies, because unlike ordinary DVDs, they are all *individually* serialized. The folks at Circuit City have to know what your player has played and how to bill it. That's one reason why they still have to charge about 5 bucks for that first-time disk purchase. They would love it if they could hand them out on street corners in the hopes that DIVX owners would eventually play the movies. But they can't.
That's bullshit man. The majority of video renters check out new releases. If you buy 12 videos ahead of time and watch one per week, you are basically giving up on the idea of watching new releases... well after your first two, anyway. You're also doomed to the concept of buying flicks well in advance, because once you watch six of your twelve, you now only have six to choose from -- the six you had earlier decided you didn't want to watch -- so now it's back to the store to buy another six discs.
Furthermore, if you eventually decide you don't want to watch any of those discs (let's say your friend tells you how crappy one of them is), you are out that money, period.
WTF is so hard about going to a video store? I have four of them within three miles of my house. Are we so lazy that we can't stand a ten-minute trip outside? (If we are, we can still use NetFlix to rent over the web and get our full-DVD rentals by mail...)
This also means that they would probably never license a DIVX-ROM device, even if they could use it to "rent" software -- it would give crackers a lot more access.
Making people pay would create a situation where people expect to be able to post anything, without adding value, because they had paid the fee of entry.
Intelligent moderation is simply a way to disallow overgrazing (to return to the commons analogy) by sharing a portion of ownership with what appears to be a carefully selected bunch of commoners.
Perhaps the most interesting factor here is that we can very easily see if the new model is working; just look at the comments posted from here on out, and see whether they add more value than the type of comments posted under the earlier system. This promises to be facinating!
The new name was announced by the board in a worldwide broadcast to employees. They announced the word with great fanfare. Everyone was on the edge of their seats. "And the new company name is....... UNISYS."
And every single employee said at the same time, "Unisys????" with a mixture of extreme sarcasm and puzzlement.
It was a sign of things to come. Five years later, they had about a third of those employees left, after massive layoffs and several restructurings.
Don't be one of those people who browse with a browser window wider than 800-900 pixels. No designers develop pages for that sort of width yet. Browsing "wide" doesn't just mean that the pages look bad, although they do. More importantly, it forces your eyes to do a lot of traveling to read text, and that causes eye strain, which can be very bad.
Well that's off-topic, but I'd wager your credit card problem happened after the secure transaction, not during. Just because the "lock" symbol appears does not mean that the system on the far side is going to protect your information after it gets there.
ZD has been bad forever -- the first I can remember is their absolutely glowing reports about Windows, buying into every single piece of MS fud, starting way back in the early part of this decade. Glowing reports on Windows 4.0 (which eventually became 95) began being issued in early 1994 from PC Magazine. ZD ought to have been bought and renamed Microsoft Press at the time, except that I'm sure they were bought under the table. From the tip of the iceberg of MS PR deals, the things that did come out, such as MS PR people writing bogus letters to the editor, MS telling employees to spout MS glory in open forums, MS acting to squelch information and competitors I'm sure that the #1 PC-oriented glossy rags were their first takeover target. Screw those people -- don't give them the hits.
.shtml (server-parsed HTML) = shit mill.
I had also thought - that something like SAP would need the big hardware and that companies would always pay a little extra for the benefits of things like hot-swappable RAID drives and fault-tolerant systems, and that these would almost certainly remain proprietary, and that the proprietary Unixii would stick around to support that vendor-specific hardware. Since SAP implementations are multi-million-dollar and this is where an hour of downtime is a loss of a million dollars of productivity for a company, I had through that a few extra hundreds of thousands on hardware might make sense.
Perhaps we're turning the corner via personnel? I would consider sysadminning a SAP implementation on Linux, but never on NT. Could it be that enough people agree at this point that NT implentations are getting impossible to staff correctly? Are you all refusing to work with NT and telling headhunters that up front? If not, why not? If Linux domination of the server continues at this rate, having NT on your resume could ACTUALLY BE A FAUX PAS! "Oh, you're an MCSE type? Sorry, we don't need any of those!"
Oh man, it is to laugh.
I can only try to add something insightful myself. The biggest wall I see, and it's a long time coming down, is the wall between the net/computer-literate and the non-literate. Our world without walls is still unavailable to most people.