This article suggests to me that a market could exist for a game that is used as a training tool.
The game would resemble existing strategy/RPG/text adventure games but take into account cultural differences as a major part of the game.
IANAGD(I Am Not A Game Designer) but perhaps various companies would compete for some goal. The project would be so large that multiple corporations and multiple companies must cooperate (while also competing). The creation of a space elevator might be an example.
The player could play an American tossed into, say a French company, or an Indian subcontractor to an American company.
Early levels would train them how their supposed culture thinks. They would work at the home office for a while. Then in upper levels they would be transfered to the foreign team.
Instead of scoring being based on straight quest accomplishments or accumulation of salary/bonuses you could score points based on how true the player is to his role as well as how well he still manages to fit in with the foreign co-workers.
I would guess this could be done in a similiar way to alignments are done in NetHack (Good/Evil Chaotic/Lawful).
A nice feature would be to change the actual goals of the players depending on what company/culture he works for. (Accumulation of wealth, accumulation of respect, helping the group gets you more points, buying a BMW/porsche gets you more points etc.)
This would help teach, for example, an American what an Indian or French worker must feel like when they have to work with Americans if he plays it as one of those nationalities being sent to America.
The game could be marketed to Human Resource Departments. Companies whose employees played the game would become more flexible in working with overseas/outsourced groups. Employees better at working with foreign groups would be more marketable.
P.S. I am sure that you would not be able to call the American cultural simulations "Americans". Any game would have to oversimplify cultural differences and play into stereotypes. This would lead to charges of racism and fascism and a bunch of other -isms.
The best way around this would be to set it in some Science Fiction scenario (far future or alien society) where the various cultures happen to act in ways that could be mapped to egalitarian/hierarchical pushy&loud/quiet&subtle clannish/indivdualistic or various other cultural factors.
I find it interesting what was once meant by the "East".
The Orient Express train went to Buda-Pest. This was consider an exotic foreign land where people did things differently (at leat in English speaking countries).
The East used to mean Eastern Europe and Constantinople (Istanbul).
Then it meant China and Japan and the other "Easts" became "Eastern Europe", "the Near East" and "The Far East".
Now it is politically correct to say "East Asia" (China/Japan/Siberia on the Pacific Coast?) "South Asia" (India) SouthWest Asia (Iraq/Persian Gulf) "Central Asia" (Mongolia? Some of the former Soviet Republics?)
I haven't seen "West Asia" that much. I guess that would be Israel/Sinai/Lebanon. Turkey is still called Asia Minor and Anatolia as far as I can tell. The rest of "West Asia" would be Russia east of the Ural mountains (West of the Urals would be Europe).
I agree that East/West by itself is no longer meaningful.
If this ever becomes stable and useful, OEM's who now have contracts with MS that requires them to pay so much per box to MS whether or not Windows is installed can now start providing Windows + a Linux distribution of choice, at the factory as an option.
The can advertise their box as coming with hundreds of free software programs by throwing in a knoppix cd. Best of both worlds for the OEMs
NYT calls it "the Copy Left". I think they are using this term to refer to the group of people who have concerns about where IP law is going. They mean "the Copy Left" the way people mean "the Left" and "the Extreme Right" or "the Environmental Movement". It seems to be a label for a group of people with similiar ideas but no single organization.
I do not think they are referring to Copyleft as in GPL.
You can use a Nuclear Submarine Blueprint. Replace the missle bays with hydrogen tanks. Use the electricity from the engines for splitting the hydrogen from seawater while out at sea somewhere hidden. Come in near the coast to offload.
In order to make it harder to guess where the sub is while offloading run multiple temp pipelines into the water. The sub docks with a random one of these out at sea and pumps in the hydrogen to a land based fuel station. When you are done, the sub goes out to deep water and hides and the pipelines get rolled up and put on a plane.
It is classic Linux-advocate style to redefine the user's problem to fit Linux's needs rather than the other way around. Some people like to get a new digital camera once a year. Some people like to install a new game once a month. Some people like to buy the latest and greatest MP3 players, video cards, wi-fi devices, photo printers, hand-held devices and all of it comes with software.
I think you and your parent post are both right. I guess if won't hurt my karma to blame Microsoft.
What the parent (this message's grandparent) is describing is a computer in a corporate environment. What the parent is describing is a personal computer that is sitting in a place of business.
If you do Desktop support for 300-500 computers you would like them to be all the same and stay the same except for upgrades which should be run centrally not by the end user and not with a visit to the desktop.
If you are a Salesguy, or an Accountant or a Receptionist you really want the same thing even if you don't know it. IT and programmers want to mess with their computers all day and Microsoft wants to make everyone need to mess with their computers all day but users shouldn't need to. They should be able to just do their job, not do IT.
If you are a Computer savy worker you don't want the IT department messing with your computer. You want to install what you want when you want.
If you are an AOL'er at home you want to run AOL for mail, web browsing, IM etc and maybe have a word processor installed too. I know AOLer's who don't even know how to start IE.
If you are a gamer you want a different set of features.
Windows wants you to use the same exact system if you are the CTO or if you are Grandma. They want you to have IE and WMP running on all desktops. They want you to be able to install Grand Theft Auto on you PC if you are the receptionist. They want you to be able to install a program with one click on an email attachment.
This is wrong. A business desktop should not make it easy for end users to install programs. If the Linux Desktop initiatives produces a product that lets a company like IBM role out a nice consistent easy to use desktop with business apps then it won't need to have easy, one-click install of applications. It would just need to be able to install the same desktop and applications as every other PC in that class on a bare metal PC.
If I were designing things I would create an installer that would call an install/upgrade server. On the install/upgrade server would be a config file and all the packages needed. The config file would list all the packages that a desktop needs. A different config file would have different categories of user (Programmer, Receptionist, Accounting). Only appropriate programs would load onto appropriate PC's (maybe the PC's would have static IPs or you would have a different install CD/floppy for different types of computer).
All user home directories would be on another server, so if a user's PC blows up you bring a new box down to his desk, stick in a floppy, boot and it installs the complete OS and set of Apps that the user had before the explosion. The user's personal files aren't on the PC so nothing is lost or needs to be restored from backup.
If you can taylor the apps you can also taylor the hardware. The Microsoft way requires you to get a monster PC with loads of ram and a souped up graphics card for the receptionist so it can run XP. The other way, the receptionist can get something with just enough horsepower to run whatever apps she needs and no more. With the leftover money the programmer can get the monster machine s/he deserves:)
Workers aren't wasting time installing games. Viruses are not getting installed through random clicks on web pages and email attachments. For a business and an IT department it is a much better world.
This type of Desktop would not work for a Gamer/AOLer/Grandma/Home PC but IT SHOULDN'T. A business PC and a Home PC are two different things. Just because Microsoft wants you to think they aren't doesn't mean it is true.
Other Desktops can be created for each specific use of the above.
A Blanket statement like "Prior to European conquest of Africa, the natives largely existed as hunter-gatherers" is bound to be wrong. You should be careful when talking about a whole continent.
Africa contains Egypt which was planting crops when Europeans were still competeing with squirrels for nuts and berries.
Upstream from the Egyptians were the Nubians who farmed just as long. Ethiopia where they have so many famines in recent times, was farming during Roman times, way before "Europeans" conquered "Africa".
Many crops such a millet had there origin in Africa, meaning the Africans taught how to farm them to the Europeans, not vice versa.
There were parts of Africa that were mainly hunting and gathering or herding economies but large parts were agricultural before any European stepped foot there.
If you want to blame Europeans for famines in Africa I would point to overpopulation caused through improved medicine. Lower infant mortality caused the "population explosion" not the introduction of agriculture.
The biggest cause though is probably the imposition of arbitrary national boundaries. Various tribes and what in Europe would be called "nationalities" are arbitrarily divided up in varying proportions by national boundaries drawn in Europe. Compare a map of Africa to a map of Europe. How many straight line borders do you see on the European map compared to the African map? Most of the borders split up what would be nationalities and put them into countries with other nationalities where they fight for control of the government.
These groups have been fighting civil wars for the last 50 years trying to control the artificial countries. These wars cause disruption in planting and when crops fail, the various groups try to block food aid from being delivered to their enemies, causing widespread deaths.
Which brings us back to the Irish Potato Famine. During that particular event many Englishmen had the same opinion as you with "It is a well-known fact that the Irish Potato Famine wasn't caused by a lack of potatoes; rather it was an overabundance of Irishmen" There was an abundance of food in Ireland during the famine but the English government decided to ship wheat out of Ireland to England while Irish people starved. The English deny this was genocide but the behaviour resembles the warring tribes in Africa today.
I know this is off topic but I took your post personally.
Since you seem to be a programmer I have a question that you might be able to answer.
This seems to be an arms race between spammers and filterers. If you were a spammer wouldn't you write some kind of adaptive gibberish producer?
I would imagine a genetic algorithm would be useful. Send out one version of a spam to 1000 people. Version 2 to 1000 people...Version n to 1000 people.
Whichever version got the highest response rate (and some bozos do respond to spammers...idiots). Then the variation becomes the new basis for the next generation. Eventually, you should get an algorithm that generates the kind of gibberish that gets through.
Genetic algorithms work off volume and repetition. Spam seems a perfect candidate for a genetic algorithm.
If the spammers come up with adaptive spam how can an adaptive filter compete?
Another question: As long as I am writing, whats up with these people who respond? I know there are maybe 100 people in the whole world but they are the ones the spammers point to when they try to sell their services to businesses. There should be a honeypot setup not to catch spammers, but to catch responders. When the repsonders are found send someone over to clip their DSL, cable or phone line so they don't encourage these spam guys.
I would further expect that my approach would be soundly defeated by first encrypting the information to be hidden, since encrypted data looks a lot more random than normal data anyway.
It would still be somewhat valuable to know that encrypted messages were being sent even if you do not know what the content is. If you know bad guy #1 is posting some steg encoded pictures on his porn site and bad guy #2 visits it on a regular basis (along with 1000's of other non-bad guys) you could at least get a clue that something is up if bad guy#1 changes the frequency or number of his updates. In short, traffic analysis.
If you cannot detect any kind of steg whatsoever, you can't even get this info.
I think it should still be X times the lowest paid employee.
That way when the company does offshore any jobs then the lowest paid employees might end up getting paid 50 cents an hour. CEO then gets a pay cut.
If you keep it a median or average then the CEO will only pay Y number of employees enough to raise the median or average pay leaving a large gap between lowest and median.
Of course, I am sure they could play with the definition of "employee". Like Microsoft has all those "part-time" and "temporary" employees that have worked there for 20 years but don't get benefits. I am sure HP could just contract offshore companies to do work so those subsidiaries don't count as employees.
How about instead of passing a law that says no exporting jobs overseas, we pass a law that says executive compensation cannot exceed X times the lowest paid employee's salary.
Then when a CEO wants a raise s/he will have to give his peons a raise also. Likewise board members,senior management all forms of compensation so the weasels don't find a way around it.
You know, painful as it is to those who pay the price, one can make the argument that this trend will, in the long run, help to minimize the economic disparities...
"In the long run.... we are all dead." - John Maynard Keynes, Economist
In reading the original article, the Space.com article and some of the other posts I have seen some people say that we should use Orbital Power satellites instead of Moon based ones.
I would agree, but as we see in the ISS, it is very expensive to build such massive projects. The Space.com article mentions that the Moon based project could be built in stages and in pieces.
This gave me an idea. What if small orbital power satellites were built. I mean small, less than a square foot in area. The solar array on them would be hexagonal and they would be designed to plug into other copies on either side.
Then, everytime anyone launches anything you stick a couple of these in any free space in the launch module. NASA launches would require you to add one to each launch as a cost of doing business or in return for a tax break or other incentive.
Each unit would have a small booster on them and they would fly slowly up to a predefined location and hook up with their brothers into a larger array, maybe built around a prelaunched rectenna unit. Maybe the booster would be an ion rocket powered by the solar array. If you are patient you would only need to get them to LEO.
If the Xbox prize guys come through they could go into a side business of launching these units also, maybe get a % of any money generated by selling the resulting electricity.
The big advantage is that if any unit fails or gets blown up during launch you're not out a lot of money. If they are mass produced and optimized they should be cheaper than one large station and maybe more than one company could make them.
It is true that a computer is a tool to be used and not an end in itself. Not all people should change their professions from scientist, banker, or teacher to computer programer.
People have said that a computer is like a car or like a pencil. I believe that the car metaphor is weak. As has been said before, a car is a single purpose device with a single interface. A computer an be turned into a Word Processor and if someone only uses it as a Word Processor there is no reason for them to learn other uses for it. In this way only is a computer like a car when it is reduced to a single purpose consumer device ("dumbed down").
Saying a computer is like a pencil is closer to the truth. In a child's hands a pencil can make a scrawl on a piece of paper. In a poet's hands a pencil can express great beauty and cleverness. In a writer's hands a pencil can express great ideas. In an artist's hands it can reproduce great visual beauty.
A computer has as much flexibility as a pencil, and more.
To an artist, a pencil can be used in a infinite number of ways. The tip can be pointed or blunted. The artist usually does not use a pencil sharpener. He carves it with a knife to a shape suitable to the effect he wishes to achieve. He might even get rid of the wood casing and use the whole side of the graphite, or grind the graphite into a powder and rub it onto the paper directly with fingers or a rolled up piece of paper (called a stump).
When you learn the properties and capabilities of your tools, what you can accomplish with them is greatly expanded and enhanced. A pencil is extremly flexible but a computer is more so.
In fact a computer can be not only one pencil, but a whole box of pencils in all different colors. It is a box of pencils and paint brushes, conte crayons, watercolors, a whole artist's toolkit, and a writers toolkit with dictionaries, theosauri, and research libraries in multiple languages. It can be a movie camera and editing station. It is a whole range of tools that can be blended one into the other and shaped into new tools on the fly. If, that is, the user knows enough about the computer and how to shape it.
The use of a GUI as expressed in the article is not the problem. It is the attitude that a computer should be turned into a car, a simple single purpose tool which no one needs to know how to use or modify beyond the intended purpose. The author of the article is right in that the better a user knows his tools the more that can be done with them. The more that a person can do, the better off they are to themselves, the market, and society.
If you do not know the computer beyond the Word Processor program or the OS's GUI then you will be less able to take advantage of its abilities. To know nothing of the capabilities of a tool is a choice and an option but a craftsman who knows his tools is worth more than one who does not.
What happens when they get out? "Wicked, I'm not being tracked anymore! I can do whatever I want to do, consequence free!"
This line arguement reminds me about my experience in the Air Force. After basic training, where they tell you when to sleep, when to get up, when to eat, what to wear and when to take a dump, you go to Tech School for training. They used to just let you do whatever you wanted once you got to tech school, but it was just like SirSlud said, everyone went batshit insane, ran into town and partook in general mayhem and too much merriment. They had to put a system in place so that you were slowly given back one freedom after another in phases. In phase one you could wear civilian clothes but only inside. Phase two you could wear them outside but you couldn't get off base. I don't remember all the stages but it took six weeks to get to "normal" freedom.
To try to get on topic again, we could say that it is human nature to react to oppression and ill-treatment in exact magnitude in the opposite direction. When people are subjected to extreme controls they will act in an uncontrolled manner when let free. When they are overly controlled, they will expect to be able to control others in like manner once they get in charge. I hope none of those kids gets elected President or to Congress. They will think that it is perfectly all right to try to control the rest of the population the way they were controlled and would probably use all the tools (violence) at their disposal to deal with the "unreasonable" (from their point of view) people who protest.
We're actually exporting electricity to our neighbors which would hint that our cost is competitive.
Or that some well-connected fat-cats are benefitting from previous government investment and current government subsidies to sell that electricity at below total production costs (that is, without initial investment, maintenance, waste disposal costs) to your neighbors. I am not criticizing, more power to you (or to your neighbors) it is just that any government sponsored/subsidised industry hides the true cost of the power source. (And it could be argued that oil is just as sposored/subsidised in US of A and W as nuk-ku-lar, as George would say, is in France).
With all of the complaints I've sent to the SEC (and I'm sure thousands of other Slashdot and Groklaw readers have done the same), I'm surprised that the SEC hasn't done anything yet. But in any case, I don't think the SEC won't be able to sit around idly once IBM is through with SCO.
You know, a lot of the recent Wall Street Scandals weren't investigated by the SEC, they were investigated and prosecuted by the New York State Attorney General. I know SCO is a Utah company but since they sell their stock in NY can the NYSAG investigate them instead of (or in addition to, the SEC)??
I am not an advocate of Socialism. I am, however, someone who has experienced the bad effects of the current recession/jobless recovery and am becoming disillusioned.
I do not agree with the ideas of the parent post advocating taking from the rich and giving to the poor. I am a true believer in the Free Market.
Having said this, something is definitely out of wack. It seems to me that the current system seems to reward certain people in ways disproportionate to their contributions to society. It is true that the Market is self correcting and that some of those taking unfair advantage are now being punished. As examples take Enron or some of the telecom management facing legal charges.
But those being punished are few. The Market may be ultimately fair and self correcting but it is a blind force of Nature and it operates beneath a layer of rules and traditions that we have built over it in the form of laws, regulations and conventions. There are people who do not actually make contributions but take advantage of this layer to enrich themselves without making any significant contribution themselves.
This layer can be compared to an Operating System. The Free Market itself is the hardware. There are people who yell that the Market is fair and the Market will reward all those who deserve it but no one really deals with the Market. They deal with the OS: Corporate Law, Wall Street, VC's, the FCC, government regulations, Tax Code and built in Tax Shelters etc. etc.
There are hidden API's and lots and lots of obfuscated code in the OS so that parts are impossible to understand. There are chunks of code that don't do what they say they do. I would say the OS is more a Microsoft type OS than BSD or Linux.
There are people who take advantage of these flaws in the OS to give themselves and their buddies on Corporate boards hugely inflated salaries. They take over good companies with good ideas by packing the boards with their own cronies and squeezing out truely innovative people who should be getting the rewards of the marketplace. They fiddle with stock prices,IPO's and steal money from Mutual Funds. They make dummy corporations and buy and sell non-existant services to themselves in order to trick investors out of their money and workers out of their pensions.
In the long run some of these scammers are found out and punished. The OS is patched and everyone says the problem is fixed but meanwhile years go by and the cheaters, the viruses in the system get to enjoy the fruits of their corruption. And worst of all the underlying flaws are still there. I fear that the current trials of Corporate CEO's are like Microsoft patches and service packs. They are presented to the public as a fix of the system when they more oftewn than not introduce new flaws and exploits and ignore even bigger flaws that crop up in a few weeks or months.
Maybe the posters to Slashdot seem to be anti-Free Market when what they really are is against a badly designed, proprietary OS that runs on top of the Free Market. This OS does not allow the average person to control their own access to the power that lies in the market.
Working under the current system seems to be like writing Utilities or Applications for a MS OS, like Stacker or Netscape. If you do it well, MS comes in and steals your idea or shuts it down. MS changes the rules or the OS so your app cannot work or steals it out from under you and release a version they control. For MS read Wall Street, VC's government lobbyists or what have you.
Maybe some RMS or Linus can come up with a GPL or Linux OS that accesses the Free Market directly with different rules, a different API, that rewards engineers, inventors, workers, employees in a way more proportionate to their contribution instead of rewarding management, corporate lawyers and investment bankers for things they did not create.
I used to make PDF's with Perl Scripts from Database reports. I made HTML Documents from the database queries and then used HTML2PS to make Postscript files. I could make PDF's from the Postscript files, see GSView it comes with a script ps2pdf. The results were mailed to interested parties.
I made use of "Programming Web Graphics with Perl and GNU Software" O'Reilly Book and some extra research on the Web. It was mostly a pretty print of lots of HTML tables as PDF's + text.
Some customers demanded Word docs. I tried using RTF to produce Word doc files and found it was easier to output HTML and put a.doc extension on the file. I found MS-Word will automatically open it up and it will look nice.
I did not output Graphs. You could try using Gnuplot to output graphs in postscript. A little cutting and pasting of the Poscript files ( tables, text from HTML2PS, in one file, graphs from gnuplot in another) paste them together with perl and turn the whole thing into a PDF (html2ps then ps2pdf) should produce something, though, I do not know if it would duplicate your Crystal Reports.
I doubt anyone is going to have the dexterity to not hit those letter keys while meaning to just use the numeric part of the keypad.
This is just a wild guess but I think that this keypad depends on you "fat-fingering" it, meaning hitting more keys than you intended. I could imagine a keypad that takes into account the surrounding extra keys that are hit and averaging that into a center key. This is like a touch screen that localizes pressure in an area and translates that into a single point. If this keypad doesn't do that, how about someone putting one out that does? It would be cheaper than a real touch screen since the display would never change.
If this keypad works like I think it does, hitting one of the corner/letter keys outputs that letter, Hitting the center key and 2,3 or 4 letter keys simultaneously outputs the number key in the center. I am guessing that the center number key doesn't even depress, it could be just a picture. The average of the letter key gives the output. You fat finger the numbers when dialing, so you can be less careful in the most often used function and you are more precise when typing out a message with the text keys.
Why can't nanotubes be built through some kind of biological process like celluose fibers or wood fibers? Aren't long chains of molecules pieced together in cells by various enzymes? Shouldn't a process exist to genetically engineer a bacterium to extrude a nanotube out its but as long as sufficient raw materials and energy are supplied to it? It is not like nanotubes are chemically complicated, it is just carbon, carbon and more carbon?
Any one know of any projects using an organic approach instead of a chemical approach (which is what I think is being used now?)
Of course you are right, and of course this is a stupid way of collecting tax.
It is not a stupid way of gaining control over who travels where, when. You can track people everywhere, give them speeding tickets and throw them in jail if they tamper with the system to prevent this.
The final piece to this would be to install a remote kill switch that would turn off the engine. Each remote switch would have an id number like a cell phone and could be activated by radio broadcast or through a celluar network. It would be mandatorily installed as an anti-theft device or as a means to improve public safety (no hi-speed chases endangering the public). The police would be able to locate and stop any vehicle across Europe. In a national emergency, they could do a broadcast and shut down every non-government car nationwide, to free up the roads for emergency traffic (or prevent the public fleeing while the stormtroopers go in to take over).
In less paranoid, more cynical mode, it is also a way to justify big contracts to friends of politicians to make the little black boxes, create and maintain the tracking system and justify the cost of putting the Galileo system in orbit.
Your model of hiring in-house programmers who may/may not contribute to Open Source while maintaining/customising software causes me to ask if there are other professions already in existence using a similiar model.
The sciences come to mind. Some companies, like pharmaceuticals, employ researchers, some of whom publish some studies and keep other research proprietary.
There are also engineers/scientists like those from Bell Labs, publishing papers and developing products at the same time.
I am unfamiliar with other, for profit, companies that employ professionals to produce materials for internal use and also allow the employee to contribute to an exterior body of work that is mutually beneficial to both the company and the profession (Writing? Advertising?, Art?). If others, more familiar with such things, could compile a list, it may be useful to hold up as a model of the future of software in opposition to a future of Microsofts (or Microsoft wannabes like SCO).
(As an aside, it would be silly to have a company called, say "ScienceSoft" that monopolised all scientific research in the world, having taken out a patent on the scientific method. If you worked in a Biotech company, you would have to wait for "Biology 2003" to come out and then wait for service packs and updates to find out things like the SARS genome. A refinery or drug company might have a site license for "Chemistry 2000" or "Organic Chemistry XP".
Letting such a business exist would be just plain stupid. Likewise, Microsoft is stupid. Open Source software is the collection of published code like science journals are the collection of published science. Software and Science should not be made into a product and monopolised. Software engineers can find work the same way scientists find work Daryl and BillG don't write code, they should not be complaining that people can't make money off writing code anymore. What's going on is that CEO's can't make money from purely code companies. That should be fine.)
Slashdot Mirror
This article suggests to me that a market could exist for a game that is used as a training tool.
The game would resemble existing strategy/RPG/text adventure games but take into account cultural differences as a major part of the game.
IANAGD(I Am Not A Game Designer) but perhaps various companies would compete for some goal. The project would be so large that multiple corporations and multiple companies must cooperate (while also competing). The creation of a space elevator might be an example.
The player could play an American tossed into, say a French company, or an Indian subcontractor to an American company.
Early levels would train them how their supposed culture thinks. They would work at the home office for a while. Then in upper levels they would be transfered to the foreign team.
Instead of scoring being based on straight quest accomplishments or accumulation of salary/bonuses you could score points based on how true the player is to his role as well as how well he still manages to fit in with the foreign co-workers.
I would guess this could be done in a similiar way to alignments are done in NetHack (Good/Evil Chaotic/Lawful).
A nice feature would be to change the actual goals of the players depending on what company/culture he works for. (Accumulation of wealth, accumulation of respect, helping the group gets you more points, buying a BMW/porsche gets you more points etc.)
This would help teach, for example, an American what an Indian or French worker must feel like when they have to work with Americans if he plays it as one of those nationalities being sent to America.
The game could be marketed to Human Resource Departments. Companies whose employees played the game would become more flexible in working with overseas/outsourced groups. Employees better at working with foreign groups would be more marketable.
P.S. I am sure that you would not be able to call the American cultural simulations "Americans". Any game would have to oversimplify cultural differences and play into stereotypes. This would lead to charges of racism and fascism and a bunch of other -isms.
The best way around this would be to set it in some Science Fiction scenario (far future or alien society) where the various cultures happen to act in ways that could be mapped to egalitarian/hierarchical pushy&loud/quiet&subtle clannish/indivdualistic or various other cultural factors.
I find it interesting what was once meant by the "East".
The Orient Express train went to Buda-Pest. This was consider an exotic foreign land where people did things differently (at leat in English speaking countries).
The East used to mean Eastern Europe and Constantinople (Istanbul).
Then it meant China and Japan and the other "Easts" became "Eastern Europe", "the Near East" and "The Far East".
Now it is politically correct to say "East Asia" (China/Japan/Siberia on the Pacific Coast?)
"South Asia" (India)
SouthWest Asia (Iraq/Persian Gulf)
"Central Asia" (Mongolia? Some of the former Soviet Republics?)
I haven't seen "West Asia" that much. I guess that would be Israel/Sinai/Lebanon. Turkey is still called Asia Minor and Anatolia as far as I can tell. The rest of "West Asia" would be Russia east of the Ural mountains (West of the Urals would be Europe).
I agree that East/West by itself is no longer meaningful.
...they should combine this 'seeding the ocean with iron' with eliminating SUV's.
;)
This is how you do it: You build giant wood chippers with the ejection shoots aimed out over the ocean.
Then line up all the SUV's in the USA and make people drive them into the chippers.
The steel from the SUV's will shoot out and fertilize the plankton.
To be humane you can let the drivers jump out at the last minute. Unless they're too busy talking on their cell phones to jump.
Hey, I'm sure the plankton could do with elements other than iron for fertilizer.
If this ever becomes stable and useful, OEM's who now have contracts with MS that requires them to pay so much per box to MS whether or not Windows is installed can now start providing Windows + a Linux distribution of choice, at the factory as an option.
The can advertise their box as coming with hundreds of free software programs by throwing in a knoppix cd.
Best of both worlds for the OEMs
NYT calls it "the Copy Left". I think they are using this term to refer to the group of people who have concerns about where IP law is going.
They mean "the Copy Left" the way people mean "the Left" and "the Extreme Right" or "the Environmental Movement". It seems to be a label for a group of people with similiar ideas but no single organization.
I do not think they are referring to Copyleft as in GPL.
This reminds me of the South Park episode where Cartman buys a failed amusement park and doesn't let anyone else in.
Soon everyone wants in, mostly because Cartman keeps telling everyone they can't get in.
He slowly has to let people in to get money to maintain it. Once all the people get in Cartman hates the place and sells it.
I still like the idea.
You can use a Nuclear Submarine Blueprint. Replace the missle bays with hydrogen tanks. Use the electricity from the engines for splitting the hydrogen from seawater while out at sea somewhere hidden. Come in near the coast to offload.
In order to make it harder to guess where the sub is while offloading run multiple temp pipelines into the water. The sub docks with a random one of these out at sea and pumps in the hydrogen to a land based fuel station. When you are done, the sub goes out to deep water and hides and the pipelines get rolled up and put on a plane.
It is classic Linux-advocate style to redefine the user's problem to fit Linux's needs rather than the other way around. Some people like to get a new digital camera once a year. Some people like to install a new game once a month. Some people like to buy the latest and greatest MP3 players, video cards, wi-fi devices, photo printers, hand-held devices and all of it comes with software.
:)
I think you and your parent post are both right. I guess if won't hurt my karma to blame Microsoft.
What the parent (this message's grandparent) is describing is a computer in a corporate environment.
What the parent is describing is a personal computer that is sitting in a place of business.
If you do Desktop support for 300-500 computers you would like them to be all the same and stay the same except for upgrades which should be run centrally not by the end user and not with a visit to the desktop.
If you are a Salesguy, or an Accountant or a Receptionist you really want the same thing even if you don't know it. IT and programmers want to mess with their computers all day and Microsoft wants to make everyone need to mess with their computers all day but users shouldn't need to. They should be able to just do their job, not do IT.
If you are a Computer savy worker you don't want the IT department messing with your computer. You want to install what you want when you want.
If you are an AOL'er at home you want to run AOL for mail, web browsing, IM etc and maybe have a word processor installed too. I know AOLer's who don't even know how to start IE.
If you are a gamer you want a different set of features.
Windows wants you to use the same exact system if you are the CTO or if you are Grandma. They want you to have IE and WMP running on all desktops. They want you to be able to install Grand Theft Auto on you PC if you are the receptionist. They want you to be able to install a program with one click on an email attachment.
This is wrong. A business desktop should not make it easy for end users to install programs. If the Linux Desktop initiatives produces a product that lets a company like IBM role out a nice consistent easy to use desktop with business apps then it won't need to have easy, one-click install of applications. It would just need to be able to install the same desktop and applications as every other PC in that class on a bare metal PC.
If I were designing things I would create an installer that would call an install/upgrade server. On the install/upgrade server would be a config file and all the packages needed. The config file would list all the packages that a desktop needs. A different config file would have different categories of user (Programmer, Receptionist, Accounting). Only appropriate programs would load onto appropriate PC's (maybe the PC's would have static IPs or you would have a different install CD/floppy for different types of computer).
All user home directories would be on another server, so if a user's PC blows up you bring a new box down to his desk, stick in a floppy, boot and it installs the complete OS and set of Apps that the user had before the explosion. The user's personal files aren't on the PC so nothing is lost or needs to be restored from backup.
If you can taylor the apps you can also taylor the hardware. The Microsoft way requires you to get a monster PC with loads of ram and a souped up graphics card for the receptionist so it can run XP. The other way, the receptionist can get something with just enough horsepower to run whatever apps she needs and no more. With the leftover money the programmer can get the monster machine s/he deserves
Workers aren't wasting time installing games. Viruses are not getting installed through random clicks on web pages and email attachments. For a business and an IT department it is a much better world.
This type of Desktop would not work for a Gamer/AOLer/Grandma/Home PC but IT SHOULDN'T. A business PC and a Home PC are two different things. Just because Microsoft wants you to think they aren't doesn't mean it is true.
Other Desktops can be created for each specific use of the above.
A Blanket statement like "Prior to European conquest of Africa, the natives largely existed as hunter-gatherers" is bound to be wrong. You should be careful when talking about a whole continent.
Africa contains Egypt which was planting crops when Europeans were still competeing with squirrels for nuts and berries.
Upstream from the Egyptians were the Nubians who farmed just as long. Ethiopia where they have so many famines in recent times, was farming during Roman times, way before "Europeans" conquered "Africa".
Many crops such a millet had there origin in Africa, meaning the Africans taught how to farm them to the Europeans, not vice versa.
There were parts of Africa that were mainly hunting and gathering or herding economies but large parts were agricultural before any European stepped foot there.
If you want to blame Europeans for famines in Africa I would point to overpopulation caused through improved medicine. Lower infant mortality caused the "population explosion" not the introduction of agriculture.
The biggest cause though is probably the imposition of arbitrary national boundaries. Various tribes and what in Europe would be called "nationalities" are arbitrarily divided up in varying proportions by national boundaries drawn in Europe. Compare a map of Africa to a map of Europe. How many straight line borders do you see on the European map compared to the African map? Most of the borders split up what would be nationalities and put them into countries with other nationalities where they fight for control of the government.
These groups have been fighting civil wars for the last 50 years trying to control the artificial countries. These wars cause disruption in planting and when crops fail, the various groups try to block food aid from being delivered to their enemies, causing widespread deaths.
Which brings us back to the Irish Potato Famine. During that particular event many Englishmen had the same opinion as you with "It is a well-known fact that the Irish Potato Famine wasn't caused by a lack of potatoes; rather it was an overabundance of Irishmen" There was an abundance of food in Ireland during the famine but the English government decided to ship wheat out of Ireland to England while Irish people starved. The English deny this was genocide but the behaviour resembles the warring tribes in Africa today.
I know this is off topic but I took your post personally.
Since you seem to be a programmer I have a question that you might be able to answer.
...Version n to 1000 people.
This seems to be an arms race between spammers and filterers. If you were a spammer wouldn't you write some kind of adaptive gibberish producer?
I would imagine a genetic algorithm would be useful.
Send out one version of a spam to 1000 people. Version 2 to 1000 people
Whichever version got the highest response rate (and some bozos do respond to spammers...idiots). Then the variation becomes the new basis for the next generation. Eventually, you should get an algorithm that generates the kind of gibberish that gets through.
Genetic algorithms work off volume and repetition. Spam seems a perfect candidate for a genetic algorithm.
If the spammers come up with adaptive spam how can an adaptive filter compete?
Another question:
As long as I am writing, whats up with these people who respond? I know there are maybe 100 people in the whole world but they are the ones the spammers point to when they try to sell their services to businesses. There should be a honeypot setup not to catch spammers, but to catch responders. When the repsonders are found send someone over to clip their DSL, cable or phone line so they don't encourage these spam guys.
I would further expect that my approach would be soundly defeated by first encrypting the information to be hidden, since encrypted data looks a lot more random than normal data anyway.
It would still be somewhat valuable to know that encrypted messages were being sent even if you do not know what the content is. If you know bad guy #1 is posting some steg encoded pictures on his porn site and bad guy #2 visits it on a regular basis (along with 1000's of other non-bad guys) you could at least get a clue that something is up if bad guy#1 changes the frequency or number of his updates. In short, traffic analysis.
If you cannot detect any kind of steg whatsoever, you can't even get this info.
I think it should still be X times the lowest paid employee.
That way when the company does offshore any jobs then the lowest paid employees might end up getting paid 50 cents an hour. CEO then gets a pay cut.
If you keep it a median or average then the CEO will only pay Y number of employees enough to raise the median or average pay leaving a large gap between lowest and median.
Of course, I am sure they could play with the definition of "employee". Like Microsoft has all those "part-time" and "temporary" employees that have worked there for 20 years but don't get benefits. I am sure HP could just contract offshore companies to do work so those subsidiaries don't count as employees.
I agree with both parents (me too!)
How about instead of passing a law that says no exporting jobs overseas, we pass a law that says executive compensation cannot exceed X times the lowest paid employee's salary.
Then when a CEO wants a raise s/he will have to give his peons a raise also. Likewise board members,senior management all forms of compensation so the weasels don't find a way around it.
You know, painful as it is to those who pay the price, one can make the argument that this trend will, in the long run, help to minimize the economic disparities...
.... we are all dead." - John Maynard Keynes, Economist
"In the long run
In reading the original article, the Space.com article and some of the other posts I have seen some people say that we should use Orbital Power satellites instead of Moon based ones.
I would agree, but as we see in the ISS, it is very expensive to build such massive projects. The Space.com article mentions that the Moon based project could be built in stages and in pieces.
This gave me an idea. What if small orbital power satellites were built. I mean small, less than a square foot in area. The solar array on them would be hexagonal and they would be designed to plug into other copies on either side.
Then, everytime anyone launches anything you stick a couple of these in any free space in the launch module. NASA launches would require you to add one to each launch as a cost of doing business or in return for a tax break or other incentive.
Each unit would have a small booster on them and they would fly slowly up to a predefined location and hook up with their brothers into a larger array, maybe built around a prelaunched rectenna unit. Maybe the booster would be an ion rocket powered by the solar array. If you are patient you would only need to get them to LEO.
If the Xbox prize guys come through they could go into a side business of launching these units also, maybe get a % of any money generated by selling the resulting electricity.
The big advantage is that if any unit fails or gets blown up during launch you're not out a lot of money. If they are mass produced and optimized they should be cheaper than one large station and maybe more than one company could make them.
Slowly, eventually a huge array would be built.
It is true that a computer is a tool to be used and not an end in itself. Not all people should change their professions from scientist, banker, or teacher to computer programer.
People have said that a computer is like a car or like a pencil. I believe that the car metaphor is weak. As has been said before, a car is a single purpose device with a single interface. A computer an be turned into a Word Processor and if someone only uses it as a Word Processor there is no reason for them to learn other uses for it. In this way only is a computer like a car when it is reduced to a single purpose consumer device ("dumbed down").
Saying a computer is like a pencil is closer to the truth. In a child's hands a pencil can make a scrawl on a piece of paper. In a poet's hands a pencil can express great beauty and cleverness. In a writer's hands a pencil can express great ideas. In an artist's hands it can reproduce great visual beauty.
A computer has as much flexibility as a pencil, and more.
To an artist, a pencil can be used in a infinite number of ways. The tip can be pointed or blunted. The artist usually does not use a pencil sharpener. He carves it with a knife to a shape suitable to the effect he wishes to achieve. He might even get rid of the wood casing and use the whole side of the graphite, or grind the graphite into a powder and rub it onto the paper directly with fingers or a rolled up piece of paper (called a stump).
When you learn the properties and capabilities of your tools, what you can accomplish with them is greatly expanded and enhanced. A pencil is extremly flexible but a computer is more so.
In fact a computer can be not only one pencil, but a whole box of pencils in all different colors. It is a box of pencils and paint brushes, conte crayons, watercolors, a whole artist's toolkit, and a writers toolkit with dictionaries, theosauri, and research libraries in multiple languages. It can be a movie camera and editing station. It is a whole range of tools that can be blended one into the other and shaped into new tools on the fly. If, that is, the user knows enough about the computer and how to shape it.
The use of a GUI as expressed in the article is not the problem. It is the attitude that a computer should be turned into a car, a simple single purpose tool which no one needs to know how to use or modify beyond the intended purpose. The author of the article is right in that the better a user knows his tools the more that can be done with them. The more that a person can do, the better off they are to themselves, the market, and society.
If you do not know the computer beyond the Word Processor program or the OS's GUI then you will be less able to take advantage of its abilities. To know nothing of the capabilities of a tool is a choice and an option but a craftsman who knows his tools is worth more than one who does not.
What happens when they get out? "Wicked, I'm not being tracked anymore! I can do whatever I want to do, consequence free!"
This line arguement reminds me about my experience in the Air Force. After basic training, where they tell you when to sleep, when to get up, when to eat, what to wear and when to take a dump, you go to Tech School for training. They used to just let you do whatever you wanted once you got to tech school, but it was just like SirSlud said, everyone went batshit insane, ran into town and partook in general mayhem and too much merriment. They had to put a system in place so that you were slowly given back one freedom after another in phases. In phase one you could wear civilian clothes but only inside. Phase two you could wear them outside but you couldn't get off base. I don't remember all the stages but it took six weeks to get to "normal" freedom.
To try to get on topic again, we could say that it is human nature to react to oppression and ill-treatment in exact magnitude in the opposite direction. When people are subjected to extreme controls they will act in an uncontrolled manner when let free. When they are overly controlled, they will expect to be able to control others in like manner once they get in charge. I hope none of those kids gets elected President or to Congress. They will think that it is perfectly all right to try to control the rest of the population the way they were controlled and would probably use all the tools (violence) at their disposal to deal with the "unreasonable" (from their point of view) people who protest.
We're actually exporting electricity to our neighbors which would hint that our cost is competitive.
Or that some well-connected fat-cats are benefitting from previous government investment and current government subsidies to sell that electricity at below total production costs (that is, without initial investment, maintenance, waste disposal costs) to your neighbors. I am not criticizing, more power to you (or to your neighbors) it is just that any government sponsored/subsidised industry hides the true cost of the power source. (And it could be argued that oil is just as sposored/subsidised in US of A and W as nuk-ku-lar, as George would say, is in France).
With all of the complaints I've sent to the SEC (and I'm sure thousands of other Slashdot and Groklaw readers have done the same), I'm surprised that the SEC hasn't done anything yet. But in any case, I don't think the SEC won't be able to sit around idly once IBM is through with SCO.
You know, a lot of the recent Wall Street Scandals weren't investigated by the SEC, they were investigated and prosecuted by the New York State Attorney General. I know SCO is a Utah company but since they sell their stock in NY can the NYSAG investigate them instead of (or in addition to, the SEC)??
I am not an advocate of Socialism. I am, however, someone who has experienced the bad effects of the current recession/jobless recovery and am becoming disillusioned.
I do not agree with the ideas of the parent post advocating taking from the rich and giving to the poor. I am a true believer in the Free Market.
Having said this, something is definitely out of wack. It seems to me that the current system seems to reward certain people in ways disproportionate to their contributions to society. It is true that the Market is self correcting and that some of those taking unfair advantage are now being punished. As examples take Enron or some of the telecom management facing legal charges.
But those being punished are few. The Market may be ultimately fair and self correcting but it is a blind force of Nature and it operates beneath a layer of rules and traditions that we have built over it in the form of laws, regulations and conventions. There are people who do not actually make contributions but take advantage of this layer to enrich themselves without making any significant contribution themselves.
This layer can be compared to an Operating System. The Free Market itself is the hardware. There are people who yell that the Market is fair and the Market will reward all those who deserve it but no one really deals with the Market. They deal with the OS: Corporate Law, Wall Street, VC's, the FCC, government regulations, Tax Code and built in Tax Shelters etc. etc.
There are hidden API's and lots and lots of obfuscated code in the OS so that parts are impossible to understand. There are chunks of code that don't do what they say they do. I would say the OS is more a Microsoft type OS than BSD or Linux.
There are people who take advantage of these flaws in the OS to give themselves and their buddies on Corporate boards hugely inflated salaries. They take over good companies with good ideas by packing the boards with their own cronies and squeezing out truely innovative people who should be getting the rewards of the marketplace. They fiddle with stock prices,IPO's and steal money from Mutual Funds. They make dummy corporations and buy and sell non-existant services to themselves in order to trick investors out of their money and workers out of their pensions.
In the long run some of these scammers are found out and punished. The OS is patched and everyone says the problem is fixed but meanwhile years go by and the cheaters, the viruses in the system get to enjoy the fruits of their corruption. And worst of all the underlying flaws are still there. I fear that the current trials of Corporate CEO's are like Microsoft patches and service packs. They are presented to the public as a fix of the system when they more oftewn than not introduce new flaws and exploits and ignore even bigger flaws that crop up in a few weeks or months.
Maybe the posters to Slashdot seem to be anti-Free Market when what they really are is against a badly designed, proprietary OS that runs on top of the Free Market. This OS does not allow the average person to control their own access to the power that lies in the market.
Working under the current system seems to be like writing Utilities or Applications for a MS OS, like Stacker or Netscape. If you do it well, MS comes in and steals your idea or shuts it down. MS changes the rules or the OS so your app cannot work or steals it out from under you and release a version they control. For MS read Wall Street, VC's government lobbyists or what have you.
Maybe some RMS or Linus can come up with a GPL or Linux OS that accesses the Free Market directly with different rules, a different API, that rewards engineers, inventors, workers, employees in a way more proportionate to their contribution instead of rewarding management, corporate lawyers and investment bankers for things they did not create.
I used to make PDF's with Perl Scripts from Database reports. I made HTML Documents from the database queries and then used HTML2PS to make Postscript files. I could make PDF's from the Postscript files, see GSView it comes with a script ps2pdf. The results were mailed to interested parties.
.doc extension on the file. I found MS-Word will automatically open it up and it will look nice.
I made use of "Programming Web Graphics with Perl and GNU Software" O'Reilly Book and some extra research on the Web. It was mostly a pretty print of lots of HTML tables as PDF's + text.
Some customers demanded Word docs.
I tried using RTF to produce Word doc files and found it was easier to output HTML and put a
I did not output Graphs. You could try using Gnuplot to output graphs in postscript. A little cutting and pasting of the Poscript files ( tables, text from HTML2PS, in one file, graphs from gnuplot in another) paste them together with perl and turn the whole thing into a PDF (html2ps then ps2pdf) should produce something, though, I do not know if it would duplicate your Crystal Reports.
I doubt anyone is going to have the dexterity to not hit those letter keys while meaning to just use the numeric part of the keypad.
This is just a wild guess but I think that this keypad depends on you "fat-fingering" it, meaning hitting more keys than you intended. I could imagine a keypad that takes into account the surrounding extra keys that are hit and averaging that into a center key. This is like a touch screen that localizes pressure in an area and translates that into a single point. If this keypad doesn't do that, how about someone putting one out that does? It would be cheaper than a real touch screen since the display would never change.
If this keypad works like I think it does, hitting one of the corner/letter keys outputs that letter, Hitting the center key and 2,3 or 4 letter keys simultaneously outputs the number key in the center. I am guessing that the center number key doesn't even depress, it could be just a picture. The average of the letter key gives the output. You fat finger the numbers when dialing, so you can be less careful in the most often used function and you are more precise when typing out a message with the text keys.
Why can't nanotubes be built through some kind of biological process like celluose fibers or wood fibers? Aren't long chains of molecules pieced together in cells by various enzymes? Shouldn't a process exist to genetically engineer a bacterium to extrude a nanotube out its but as long as sufficient raw materials and energy are supplied to it? It is not like nanotubes are chemically complicated, it is just carbon, carbon and more carbon?
Any one know of any projects using an organic approach instead of a chemical approach (which is what I think is being used now?)
Of course you are right, and of course this is a stupid way of collecting tax.
It is not a stupid way of gaining control over who travels where, when. You can track people everywhere, give them speeding tickets and throw them in jail if they tamper with the system to prevent this.
The final piece to this would be to install a remote kill switch that would turn off the engine. Each remote switch would have an id number like a cell phone and could be activated by radio broadcast or through a celluar network. It would be mandatorily installed as an anti-theft device or as a means to improve public safety (no hi-speed chases endangering the public). The police would be able to locate and stop any vehicle across Europe. In a national emergency, they could do a broadcast and shut down every non-government car nationwide, to free up the roads for emergency traffic (or prevent the public fleeing while the stormtroopers go in to take over).
In less paranoid, more cynical mode, it is also a way to justify big contracts to friends of politicians to make the little black boxes, create and maintain the tracking system and justify the cost of putting the Galileo system in orbit.
Your model of hiring in-house programmers who may/may not contribute to Open Source while maintaining/customising software causes me to ask if there are other professions already in existence using a similiar model.
The sciences come to mind. Some companies, like pharmaceuticals, employ researchers, some of whom publish some studies and keep other research proprietary.
There are also engineers/scientists like those from Bell Labs, publishing papers and developing products at the same time.
I am unfamiliar with other, for profit, companies that employ professionals to produce materials for internal use and also allow the employee to contribute to an exterior body of work that is mutually beneficial to both the company and the profession (Writing? Advertising?, Art?). If others, more familiar with such things, could compile a list, it may be useful to hold up as a model of the future of software in opposition to a future of Microsofts (or Microsoft wannabes like SCO).
(As an aside, it would be silly to have a company called, say "ScienceSoft" that monopolised all scientific research in the world, having taken out a patent on the scientific method. If you worked in a Biotech company, you would have to wait for "Biology 2003" to come out and then wait for service packs and updates to find out things like the SARS genome. A refinery or drug company might have a site license for "Chemistry 2000" or "Organic Chemistry XP".
Letting such a business exist would be just plain stupid. Likewise, Microsoft is stupid. Open Source software is the collection of published code like science journals are the collection of published science. Software and Science should not be made into a product and monopolised. Software engineers can find work the same way scientists find work Daryl and BillG don't write code, they should not be complaining that people can't make money off writing code anymore. What's going on is that CEO's can't make money from purely code companies. That should be fine.)