...GPS support for the recording of location information with shooting data: Location information such as latitude, longitude and altitude can be transferred from a GPS device and recorded with the shooting data for an image. Nikon has developed the new MC-35 cable (optional) for connection to NMEA0183-compatible GPS devices.
Protectionism rears its ugly head
on
Beatles vs Apple
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· Score: 1
Once again, a bunch of corporate lawyers are trying to wring every last cent out of something done 30+ years ago, and in the process, screwing someone who's trying to do something NEW, TODAY.
They want to give solar powered computers to schools with no electric power? You realize this means they have no refrigeration or electric lights?
When you have no refrigeration, you get more deaths from food poisoning and malnutrition. These people don't need computers, they need basic electric applicances like a refrigerator and indoor lights FIRST.
It is difficult to summarize Haldeman's point in a short paragraph. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say you can't write a story ABOUT aliens from their point of view. You say
What about stories dealing with how the supposed immutable human nature deals with encountering aliens whose motivations are inscrutable and, well, alien?
Well, that wouldn't be a story about aliens, that would be a story about humans. There are plenty of stories such as you describe, such as 2001:A Space Oddessy, where inscrutable alien technology has significant impact on humans. But there are no aliens in 2001, just an incomprehensible icon of their presence, and lots of emphasis on the human reactions. And many people thought 2001 was incomprehensible as a whole, which proves my point, I guess. Your analogy of Egyptian characters is irrelevant. People today live much the same lives as they did in ancient Egypt. They still eat, sleep, get sick, and die just as humans always did. They still look for love, strive for something beyond themselves, deal with religion and governments, learn a language and use it to express their thoughts, etc. Just because a culture is foreign, does not mean it is alien. Haldeman chose to describe an alien character's actions with a string of nonsense letters, which could just as easily have been a stream of atomic plasma, a sequence of odors, or any other method of communicating thoughts that mere humans cannot concieve via communication channels humans cannot perceive. THAT would be truly alien.
No, I'm saying he's proud of his ignorance, he blathers continually about his Trotskyist educational background, he's even more pedantic than the "normal" high school grads who learned "normal" subjects like math instead of socialism.
Well said. I remember hearing a lecture long ago from Joe Haldeman, who said "there are no aliens in science fiction." He said that if there were true aliens in a story, the entire story would be incomprehensible to human readers, it would just say "blork eucizn 23 cuineth." The motivations of a truly alien character would be completely different than our own, and it would find no resonance in the mind of the reader.
SF must address an audience of today, it cannot be a lecture by technofetishists about how pathetic our lives are compared to the Glorious Future (tm) when all our problems will be solved. Such writings are tedious egotistical works, they scream "lookit me! I'm so kool!"
The very point of these writers is that such a perspective is itself doomed.
And that is precisely why their work is such unreadable drivel. You completely misunderstand the Roddenbury quote. Placing the focus on technology's effect on humanity is just a way to avoid dealing with the core human vales. I guarantee you that in a hundred years, people will still be living the same basic lives, we will still be struggling to find love, to feed ourselves, to avoid sickness and death. Those fundamental human conditions will likely never change. I often think about a friend of mine, an Academy Award winning screenwriter. He told me that paleolithic man sat around the fire telling each other stories, and storytelling is such a fundamental human urge that it will never change. These are social urges, not likely to be expressed seriously by antisocial technofetishist geeks.
Doctorow was never a programmer. He is relatively uneducated, no college, he went to an "alternative" high school (meaning: the uneducatable, problem child school).
Unfortunately, Cory is also unschooled in the classic scifi genres. If he knew more about his own field, he would know his own style becomes dated more quickly than any other style. Basing one's work on current perspectives of the future is the surest way to make your work obsolete before it's ever published. As Roddenbury said, "nothing becomes dated more quickly than our perceptions of the future." It is better to base one's writing on deeper perspectives of human nature, like the classic SF writers, i.e. Phil Dick, Stanislav Lem, etc. It is easy to cobble together slangy neologisms to refer to nebulous future technomagic. It is much harder to have insight into the Human Condition.
You miss the obvious point. The Predicta has already worked for 40+ years without any upgrades. A vintage Predicta tube TV is a work of electronic art. A casemod CPU is a kluge of mass produced junk that is lucky to go 40 weeks before it's superceded by newer equipment.
The classic Predicta TV, if well maintained in working order, still receives video as well as it did when it was new, and will continue to work for many years to come. But if you tear out the guts and put in a computer, you have a box that will be obsolete within months.
Finally, someone who understands what a thin client is!
Somewhere or other, I recall seeing a really thin client, basically it was an X11 terminal stripped down to almost no features, but it ran VNC. The idea was you'd set up a humongous VNC system with multiple users running on a server, and you'd hook up dozens of client VNC terminals to it. I have no idea how it works, I don't even remember where I saw it. Maybe someone will remember the details, or perhaps the VNC site has something available.
There is a limit to what computer power can do for you. I'd rather see the money being spent on human resources: people who know what they're doing. There's an old saying in the business world, I wish I knew who first said it, "for any technological problem, the limiting factor is never technology, but rather, human resources." In other words, if your technology has problems, throwing more tech at it is unlikely to solve the problems. Only more human intelligence applied to the situation will improve things. Having the fastest supercomputer in the world won't help you one bit if nobody thinks to run a simulation of what happens when a chunk of foam blows a hole in a wing. I keep thinking about Frank Borman's statements to the Apollo 13 Commission, he said it wasn't a failure of technology, it was a failure of imagination, nobody ever imagined there could be a problem. Computers have no imagination. They give answers, but nobody's asking the right questions.
This is two stories in just a few hours pushing the usual boring media hype about movies and games. How much is the slashdot crew making under the table for product placement?
This story doesn't pass the smell test. Nobody brings a live CD to a photo shoot, where this CD was supposedly stolen. The usual industry practice is to shoot a photo of the packaging, which is provided without the actual CD, which may not even be complete at the time of the photo shoot. I used to work in product packaging, and many many times I produced package comps (full quality mockups) for CDs, DVDs and VHS tapes that would not be finished for many weeks or months. The advertising production usually precedes the finished product. Anyone who would take the final unreleased product to a photo shoot, where there are a whole lot of bozos floating around just waiting to steal anything that's not nailed down, well, they're just asking for trouble. That's the whole reason to send faked comps instead of live product to shoots.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how would adding a few Macs make the Windows systems any more secure? The monoculture issue is important for the worldwide spread of viruses and whatnot, but it's irrelevant to your point.
Yes, you're missing something MAJOR here. The point is not to make Windows secure, but to make the USERS and their data secure.
No, I'm not talking about how much it cost APPLE, I'm talking about how much it cost Duke. Apple didn't give these iPods away for free. The Duke website says the deal will cost about $500k, so we can extrapolate the wholesale cost of each iPod is around $300.
ha.. remember that musical montage scene in the movie "Real Genius" where the kid goes to physics lectures, each time he goes to class, there are fewer people and more tape recorders, until finally one day he goes in and there is nobody in the classroom, there's just a tape recorder delivering the lecture to a room full of tape recorders.
I first heard this story in 1974 when I visited MIT, they publish an annual guide for freshmen and someone gave me one, that story was in it, supposedly it was true.
But anyway, I can just see this happening with the iPods. They should have given away the Belkin voice recorder gadgets with the iPods.
Jeez, I wonder what the cost of that deal was. Even at wholesale quantity pricing, that's a boatload of money. Let's see, 1650 iPods, let's assume a hugely generous discount so the wholesale cost is $200 each, that's $330k. Yow.
Of course the students end up paying for it anyway, in the "computer fees" that are usually tacked on to tuition.
You're on to something here. Apple has a new rule against easter eggs or other hidden credits containing programmers names. The rationale is that Apple doesn't want to publicly release the names of specific programmers that worked on any specific project, it makes it easier for headhunters to poach critical personnel.
So don't get your panties in a bunch over the smithee pseudonym. Obviously someone got bored creating demo data with the same old names like John Doe and decided to have a little fun.
I can'e believe the stupid demo videos. In one segment, a guest arrives at a conference or hotel or something, he is greeted by a woman with a high-collared jacket with a panel right above her tits, it's scrolling the message "bienvenue." I wasn't aware that women needed any technological assistance to get men to stare at their chests. If the women in this scenario truly wanted to make the men feel really welcome, they'd ditch the high collar and show some cleavage. But what went way beyond stupid was the video of the girl walking down the street, she sees a sk8r b0i, she wants to hit on him, so she grabs her cel phone and types a message "cafe" to the panel on her purse. Once again, a little cleavage would do a much better job of attracting a man. The purse's display panel was pointed backwards, hanging back off the woman's ass, so I guess if you wanted to attract people stalking you from behind, that would be the perfect way.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again, a bunch of corporate lawyers are trying to wring every last cent out of something done 30+ years ago, and in the process, screwing someone who's trying to do something NEW, TODAY.
Please try to pay attention, you're not getting it.
If you have no car, nobody can smash your car window.
Don't own anything worth stealing.
They want to give solar powered computers to schools with no electric power? You realize this means they have no refrigeration or electric lights?
When you have no refrigeration, you get more deaths from food poisoning and malnutrition. These people don't need computers, they need basic electric applicances like a refrigerator and indoor lights FIRST.
Well, that wouldn't be a story about aliens, that would be a story about humans. There are plenty of stories such as you describe, such as 2001:A Space Oddessy, where inscrutable alien technology has significant impact on humans. But there are no aliens in 2001, just an incomprehensible icon of their presence, and lots of emphasis on the human reactions. And many people thought 2001 was incomprehensible as a whole, which proves my point, I guess.
Your analogy of Egyptian characters is irrelevant. People today live much the same lives as they did in ancient Egypt. They still eat, sleep, get sick, and die just as humans always did. They still look for love, strive for something beyond themselves, deal with religion and governments, learn a language and use it to express their thoughts, etc. Just because a culture is foreign, does not mean it is alien. Haldeman chose to describe an alien character's actions with a string of nonsense letters, which could just as easily have been a stream of atomic plasma, a sequence of odors, or any other method of communicating thoughts that mere humans cannot concieve via communication channels humans cannot perceive. THAT would be truly alien.
No, I'm saying he's proud of his ignorance, he blathers continually about his Trotskyist educational background, he's even more pedantic than the "normal" high school grads who learned "normal" subjects like math instead of socialism.
Well said. I remember hearing a lecture long ago from Joe Haldeman, who said "there are no aliens in science fiction." He said that if there were true aliens in a story, the entire story would be incomprehensible to human readers, it would just say "blork eucizn 23 cuineth." The motivations of a truly alien character would be completely different than our own, and it would find no resonance in the mind of the reader.
SF must address an audience of today, it cannot be a lecture by technofetishists about how pathetic our lives are compared to the Glorious Future (tm) when all our problems will be solved. Such writings are tedious egotistical works, they scream "lookit me! I'm so kool!"
And that is precisely why their work is such unreadable drivel. You completely misunderstand the Roddenbury quote. Placing the focus on technology's effect on humanity is just a way to avoid dealing with the core human vales. I guarantee you that in a hundred years, people will still be living the same basic lives, we will still be struggling to find love, to feed ourselves, to avoid sickness and death. Those fundamental human conditions will likely never change.
I often think about a friend of mine, an Academy Award winning screenwriter. He told me that paleolithic man sat around the fire telling each other stories, and storytelling is such a fundamental human urge that it will never change. These are social urges, not likely to be expressed seriously by antisocial technofetishist geeks.
Doctorow was never a programmer. He is relatively uneducated, no college, he went to an "alternative" high school (meaning: the uneducatable, problem child school).
Unfortunately, Cory is also unschooled in the classic scifi genres. If he knew more about his own field, he would know his own style becomes dated more quickly than any other style. Basing one's work on current perspectives of the future is the surest way to make your work obsolete before it's ever published. As Roddenbury said, "nothing becomes dated more quickly than our perceptions of the future." It is better to base one's writing on deeper perspectives of human nature, like the classic SF writers, i.e. Phil Dick, Stanislav Lem, etc. It is easy to cobble together slangy neologisms to refer to nebulous future technomagic. It is much harder to have insight into the Human Condition.
You miss the obvious point. The Predicta has already worked for 40+ years without any upgrades. A vintage Predicta tube TV is a work of electronic art. A casemod CPU is a kluge of mass produced junk that is lucky to go 40 weeks before it's superceded by newer equipment.
The classic Predicta TV, if well maintained in working order, still receives video as well as it did when it was new, and will continue to work for many years to come. But if you tear out the guts and put in a computer, you have a box that will be obsolete within months.
In my local area, a 14 year old girl was killed while driving an electric car designed by high school students.
Finally, someone who understands what a thin client is!
Somewhere or other, I recall seeing a really thin client, basically it was an X11 terminal stripped down to almost no features, but it ran VNC. The idea was you'd set up a humongous VNC system with multiple users running on a server, and you'd hook up dozens of client VNC terminals to it. I have no idea how it works, I don't even remember where I saw it. Maybe someone will remember the details, or perhaps the VNC site has something available.
There is a limit to what computer power can do for you. I'd rather see the money being spent on human resources: people who know what they're doing. There's an old saying in the business world, I wish I knew who first said it, "for any technological problem, the limiting factor is never technology, but rather, human resources." In other words, if your technology has problems, throwing more tech at it is unlikely to solve the problems. Only more human intelligence applied to the situation will improve things.
Having the fastest supercomputer in the world won't help you one bit if nobody thinks to run a simulation of what happens when a chunk of foam blows a hole in a wing. I keep thinking about Frank Borman's statements to the Apollo 13 Commission, he said it wasn't a failure of technology, it was a failure of imagination, nobody ever imagined there could be a problem. Computers have no imagination. They give answers, but nobody's asking the right questions.
I thought port knocking was definitively debunked as security through obscurity.
This is two stories in just a few hours pushing the usual boring media hype about movies and games. How much is the slashdot crew making under the table for product placement?
This story doesn't pass the smell test. Nobody brings a live CD to a photo shoot, where this CD was supposedly stolen. The usual industry practice is to shoot a photo of the packaging, which is provided without the actual CD, which may not even be complete at the time of the photo shoot.
I used to work in product packaging, and many many times I produced package comps (full quality mockups) for CDs, DVDs and VHS tapes that would not be finished for many weeks or months. The advertising production usually precedes the finished product. Anyone who would take the final unreleased product to a photo shoot, where there are a whole lot of bozos floating around just waiting to steal anything that's not nailed down, well, they're just asking for trouble. That's the whole reason to send faked comps instead of live product to shoots.
Yes, you're missing something MAJOR here. The point is not to make Windows secure, but to make the USERS and their data secure.
No, I'm not talking about how much it cost APPLE, I'm talking about how much it cost Duke. Apple didn't give these iPods away for free. The Duke website says the deal will cost about $500k, so we can extrapolate the wholesale cost of each iPod is around $300.
ha.. remember that musical montage scene in the movie "Real Genius" where the kid goes to physics lectures, each time he goes to class, there are fewer people and more tape recorders, until finally one day he goes in and there is nobody in the classroom, there's just a tape recorder delivering the lecture to a room full of tape recorders.
I first heard this story in 1974 when I visited MIT, they publish an annual guide for freshmen and someone gave me one, that story was in it, supposedly it was true.
But anyway, I can just see this happening with the iPods. They should have given away the Belkin voice recorder gadgets with the iPods.
Jeez, I wonder what the cost of that deal was. Even at wholesale quantity pricing, that's a boatload of money. Let's see, 1650 iPods, let's assume a hugely generous discount so the wholesale cost is $200 each, that's $330k. Yow.
Of course the students end up paying for it anyway, in the "computer fees" that are usually tacked on to tuition.
You're on to something here. Apple has a new rule against easter eggs or other hidden credits containing programmers names. The rationale is that Apple doesn't want to publicly release the names of specific programmers that worked on any specific project, it makes it easier for headhunters to poach critical personnel.
So don't get your panties in a bunch over the smithee pseudonym. Obviously someone got bored creating demo data with the same old names like John Doe and decided to have a little fun.
riiiight. And nobody would ever accuse a powerdressing business woman with a flashing sign on her chest of being tasteless..
I can'e believe the stupid demo videos. In one segment, a guest arrives at a conference or hotel or something, he is greeted by a woman with a high-collared jacket with a panel right above her tits, it's scrolling the message "bienvenue." I wasn't aware that women needed any technological assistance to get men to stare at their chests. If the women in this scenario truly wanted to make the men feel really welcome, they'd ditch the high collar and show some cleavage.
But what went way beyond stupid was the video of the girl walking down the street, she sees a sk8r b0i, she wants to hit on him, so she grabs her cel phone and types a message "cafe" to the panel on her purse. Once again, a little cleavage would do a much better job of attracting a man. The purse's display panel was pointed backwards, hanging back off the woman's ass, so I guess if you wanted to attract people stalking you from behind, that would be the perfect way.