If you've ever seen a kid approach a rotary without having ever seen one, you'd be surprised at how they are not accustomed to such a device having grown up in a world where everything has a button. Think about it. What other device aside from a rotary would you use in that way now days? Aside from that taking your finger out of the dial and placing it over the next digit before the dial returns to speed things up is sort of a skill (not much of one and not technical) that has to be learned.
I still have a rotary phone because I for some reason like them, however the real pain of rotary is only realized by the extremely long phone cord you need in order to move the phone anywhere.
It's not that far off however. I mean I've often thought long and hard about many things I've come to the conclusion of, and I'm obviously not going to believe in things I think are incorrect. So logically from my perspective the other side would be wrong. However if you go a step farther you understand that people reach conclusions for different reasons, and that you can be just as delusional on any given topic as anyone. The "I'm right and you're wrong" mentality is now so common on both sides mainly due to media fueling polarization and a bit to the entire (American but not unique to us) attitude of "winner vs loser".
If you want to know what humans were like before society just watch the children in any major american city,
Before what society? Even apes congregate into groups. Generally I think we can assume that in any form of evolution people were always aggregated into tribes. Every tribe like culture I've ever come to known has generally been fairly close knit and people respect their elders.
I would say the degeneration of youth into packs is more of an unnatural occurrence where they lack guidance. Pretty much every step of human progress (likely before we were even "human") has had youth supervision. It's only in more recent history that we've had larger congregations of people who simply do not watch over their young.
Heh, and at least FTP/SMTP would be traceable through a firewall that logged it. Our company just got a printer in today with fax from PC capability. Everyone was like "That's great". Then I pointed out that anyone with this on their PC could potentially send any document in the company via fax, and no one would probably catch it in the phone logs.
While true it also got me the "Man I hope our I.T Manager (me) never turns on us.." look. I get one of those every month or so.
myself and my loved ones watching television far too often. Most of the time is spent just idly looking for something to watch, or watching something that no one really cares about but isn't as mediocre as whatever else may be on.
Sad but true. Yet to be fair I find myself doing the same thing on the Internet. If I don't have a specific thing to do or look up, I find I just randomly surf for whatever. As often as not I end up on Wikipedia actually reading something which is theoretically educational. The real devil is in the details with TV. If a show you want to watch is on at 5:30, you may turn it on at 5:00 and just watch whatever. Afterwards the show you may flip around "to see what else is on". An hour show can easily waste another hour in watching things you have no interest in. I'd actually say that's the norm.
Actually, I think it's more correct to say Super Mario Brothers is the sequel. Many of the franchise elements came out in the original "Mario Brothers", such as pipes, fireballs, Luigi, etc which continue to this day. Donkey Kong does seem like a bit more of a different game entirely.
It is however interesting how Second Life started out as this sort of free for all, and more and more it's starting to evolve a government out of necessity. There are many institutions that a person may think are not really needed by society, yet we see that online civilizations seem to reinvent the same things. Also interesting that this "government" has already stomped on people, and people already bitch about it. Seems like second life is getting too much like the first one.
Doesn't have to be on the chip. From the summary it says "hardware supports" but apple software doesn't allow for playback. You can play ogg vorbis files with rockbox (as I do), therefore Apple is deliberatly blocking this format according to their logic. Can't wait for the counter suit as the Zune does not play Apple AAC files as far as I know. In fact with the entire PlayForSure debackle, Microsoft should sue itself.
You'll note that this suit does not stem from Microsoft, because they could obviously see the double edged sword and where this stupidity would all go.
Keep your nose out of business you don't understand
Well that's the problem, politicians have to make choices on topics they don't understand all the time. Do you think they really understand economic theory well enough to pass many of the laws they do? Do they understand health care? Do they understand military strategy? Hardly. Sure they listen to "advisers" but basically you'll always find people arguing about if things will really work or not. This is magnified many times over in the U.S. where we only have two parties.
The best you can hope for is people yelling loud enough to stop government stupidity from passing things like "anti hacker tools" type laws. Unfortunately there's always SOMEONE yelling trying to stop everything which is part of the reasons governments do so little.
Depends on your situation. I moved away from all of my family and friends in the midwest a long time ago, and while I keep up with my very good friend and immediate family, the rest I just tend to lose contact with. Likewise I have friends in Canada but I don't get up there often to visit them. Sure I could call them up all the time, but I don't have time for that and honestly I won't remember every interesting thing that happened to me since the last call.
An online journal can be a good way to keep track of people and check up on how they are doing, and possibly stay in touch. Why not email? True email is good for contact, however social networking works like a reverse email, in which the person chooses whether or not they actually care what happens to you.
It's not for everyone, but it can have its uses. Personally I've come to a similar conclusion as you in that you end up with all of these "fringe" people you hardly know and it ends up being a big spam-pool/time waster.
Meh, I wouldn't worry about it dude. We already take what we want. It's called creating a multinational company then selling to the U.S. We already control Tim Horton's which is the linchpin of your society:)
Well negative earnings is relative - we're generally talking about paper not real money. Mainly look at the sector for mortgages. ALL of them took a dive, good and bad. Are people in America just never going to need mortgages anymore? Of course they are, so it's just a matter of finding some stable companies that will pull out just fine. We're past the big dip now, and there are some rough times ahead but many of these companies have organized capital to weather the storm just fine. Of course listening to some crazy person on slashdot isn't a good idea, but if you do a little research you'll probably come to similar conclusions that I did.
Keep in mind that the stock market is extremely vulnerable to day trading anymore. If you could draw two graphs you'd find the stable sane level for about what the stock is worth, and the insane day-trading knee jerk graph which crosses the other one repeatedly with little reasoning. I typically think of terms within 5 years or so, so I'm fairly patient with where stocks go.
Yeah this is what I did a few years ago. I can appreciate that nsf files are what, 16k? but it just became too much of a pain dealing with buggy players. I went through a binge collecting NES, SNES, Genesis, and Turbographix 16 music and just ran them all through winamp. Unfortunate that they're huge in comparison now, but they play reliably and I can even play them on my ipod.
(and you can convert them to vorbis if you want to go that way)
Generally that happens to any stock that goes down. That doesn't mean the stock is necessarily garbage. I'm investing heavily in a stock with negative EPS and a P/E of "NA". Why? Because it's a good buy and the stock just happens to be in the toilet at the moment. Of course SCOX is a sinking ship and will never come back, however you can't deduce this just by EPS and P/E.
Good luck using that CF card without DMA though. Heck I've installed OSs that simply barf trying to use CF as a hard drive because they can't figure out what to do without DMA. In my experience CF cards are good for dedicated firewalls and such that don't do much disk access. They're also not bad for storage as they're rather durable compared to the alternatives. Aside from that I wouldn't really use them for much of anything. And I doubt most CF cards bother with write leveling unless you get the industrial ones.
SSD drives on the other hand do write leveling, and support DMA. I haven't really seen them pull ahead much in my own testing as far as performance, but the low power and durability are mainly what I use them for.
If I notice this sort of person I usually avoid them or back off if following. You typically find these sorts of people have very poor reaction times and have no idea what they are reacting to. This leads them to be skittish and hit the brake all the time. The net affect is that they will either not react in time and hit something ANYWAY, or they will slam on the brakes when they didn't have to and potentially cause and accident behind them.
While I know that a tech can look at any file on the computer he/she wishes, this doesn't mean there's no expectation of privacy.
While I would say there is an expectation of privacy, I have to admit that if it were me installing the DVD drive, it's highly likely the same thing would have occured.
First you install the drive, drivers and software. Then you need to test it so you pick up files on the hard drive. What files? I seriously do not have time to prune through someone's hard drive so I would pick whatever was in "My Documents". After the burn open a few files (jpegs or whatever) to make sure it burned correctly. I'm willing to bet that the files in question were NOT stuck in some arbitrary named folder in drive C.
Taking the analogy someone else used, if I had a dead body in the back seat of my car, the car needed repair, and I didn't know how to do it I would buy a manual and do it myself. Likewise you could buy a dvd and look up tutorials on how to install it. By taking a computer with such illegal content on it to a computer tech you are rolling the dice if they should find the content. What exactly would qualify as "privacy" on such a device anyway? If the guy had kiddie porn set as a wallpaper is it the techs fault if they even boot it? To me you wave privacy to some extent if it hinders the job you were paid to do. If you're medical documents were on a PC and they were labeled "medical documents" then yes I'd say there was a moral issue. If a jpeg was named 000.jpg then I wouldn't expect that a tech may not use it to test. If it's called illegal-underage-porn.jpg then I think you may actually be legally obligated to notify someone at that point. And I think that might be the determining factor here, that if you stumble upon something illegal you may need to do the "right thing".
You do realize that you can't see "the entire world laid out below" even if it was flat. The atmosphere alone prevents that. This would infer that either the devil was showing him a "vision" of the world, or that they had some sort of superior overview that transcends normal vision - being the devil and Jesus and all. I'm not really arguing, I'm just pointing that out.
But of course, nobody would try to read something like the Bible quite so absolutely literally these days, now would they...?
Personally I think it's sort of tragic that it was just recycled. I mean for a university that has a CS department, I can't think of a more interesting testament to computer technology than a mainframe that was a part of the university infrastructure for over 40 years. I would have made an interesting display case and put it in a lobby somewhere. You can get a bunch of stuff to recycle anywhere, but something like this with history behind it just doesn't come up that often.
There is something sort of interesting here, but the article sort of misses that. You say you've seen this sort of thing as far back as 21 years ago, and I'm willing to bet back then there were older people who would tell you stuff that you just blew off, only to find out later in life that it was true (hell I know I have).
The interesting thing here is that human nature doesn't change, even after we've abstracted interaction to sitting behind computer screens. In a way we've come full circle - from tribes, city states, to nations: they all rise, and they all fall. With the internet we've gone back to tribes, but this time they're not essential to survival yet the mechanics of the tribe itself are still the same. What makes a good guild? Usually good leadership, a few charismatic members, lack of drama, etc; it's the same truth in real life.
The article makes a good point about focusing incorrectly on some aspects. Focusing on money or PvP only ensures loyalty until these things will falter. It however makes the mistake of saying that fun is the key. While true that fun is the point of a game, a guild based on fun only lasts while the fun lasts. And that's not forever. And with technology it is guaranteed that any game guild will die (in its current form). The lesson is the same as real life: if you enjoy it, enjoy it while it lasts.
Well think about it. How can Microsoft leverage all their windows bundled software they've been trying to develop for 5 years if everyone just sticks with XP? The next release of Windows isn't just the next release of Windows, it's a progression of Microsoft's marketplace strategy (like Windows Live,.NET, etc). It says a lot about how Vista took so long, Vista ended up so crappy, and how MS continues to try to push Vista despite how crappy it is.
Acedemic games no fun? That's because the focus is WRONG. Games are meant to be fun or entertaining: that must always come first. Same thing with Christian metal bands. If you focus on the message first and not the music, people aren't going to bother even listening because the music is sub par. There are more examples I could go on and on about, but simply put most educational games are misguided because that's the nature of acedemic games. I mean who is going to fund an educational game where only 5-10% vaguely seems educational? But that's what is required.
Actually I don't even think it's that hard to come up with educational games. For instance I can identify every kind of ship in the Star Wars universe and I don't even LIKE Star Wars. Why? Because when playing Tie Fighter it's just secondary knowledge that you picked up. I took a class in college where the class worked on an academic game, and it had potential. It took place in the old west and kids were meant to do various things. Now you aren't going to be able to quiz kids every 30 seconds, but you can easily drop in things that are somewhat educational like what people used to buy, what sort of horse does what task, etc. No one would be rabidly pleased at how educational your game is, but it's not that hard to get people to pick up small bits of real knowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've ever seen a kid approach a rotary without having ever seen one, you'd be surprised at how they are not accustomed to such a device having grown up in a world where everything has a button. Think about it. What other device aside from a rotary would you use in that way now days? Aside from that taking your finger out of the dial and placing it over the next digit before the dial returns to speed things up is sort of a skill (not much of one and not technical) that has to be learned.
I still have a rotary phone because I for some reason like them, however the real pain of rotary is only realized by the extremely long phone cord you need in order to move the phone anywhere.
It's not that far off however. I mean I've often thought long and hard about many things I've come to the conclusion of, and I'm obviously not going to believe in things I think are incorrect. So logically from my perspective the other side would be wrong. However if you go a step farther you understand that people reach conclusions for different reasons, and that you can be just as delusional on any given topic as anyone. The "I'm right and you're wrong" mentality is now so common on both sides mainly due to media fueling polarization and a bit to the entire (American but not unique to us) attitude of "winner vs loser".
If you want to know what humans were like before society just watch the children in any major american city,
Before what society? Even apes congregate into groups. Generally I think we can assume that in any form of evolution people were always aggregated into tribes. Every tribe like culture I've ever come to known has generally been fairly close knit and people respect their elders.
I would say the degeneration of youth into packs is more of an unnatural occurrence where they lack guidance. Pretty much every step of human progress (likely before we were even "human") has had youth supervision. It's only in more recent history that we've had larger congregations of people who simply do not watch over their young.
Heh, and at least FTP/SMTP would be traceable through a firewall that logged it. Our company just got a printer in today with fax from PC capability. Everyone was like "That's great". Then I pointed out that anyone with this on their PC could potentially send any document in the company via fax, and no one would probably catch it in the phone logs.
While true it also got me the "Man I hope our I.T Manager (me) never turns on us.." look. I get one of those every month or so.
myself and my loved ones watching television far too often. Most of the time is spent just idly looking for something to watch, or watching something that no one really cares about but isn't as mediocre as whatever else may be on.
Sad but true. Yet to be fair I find myself doing the same thing on the Internet. If I don't have a specific thing to do or look up, I find I just randomly surf for whatever. As often as not I end up on Wikipedia actually reading something which is theoretically educational. The real devil is in the details with TV. If a show you want to watch is on at 5:30, you may turn it on at 5:00 and just watch whatever. Afterwards the show you may flip around "to see what else is on". An hour show can easily waste another hour in watching things you have no interest in. I'd actually say that's the norm.
And if you don't use gnome or even have it installed?
There's no reason you can't use /dev/zero if you're not compressing anything. It should give the same results with less cpu overhead.
Actually, I think it's more correct to say Super Mario Brothers is the sequel. Many of the franchise elements came out in the original "Mario Brothers", such as pipes, fireballs, Luigi, etc which continue to this day. Donkey Kong does seem like a bit more of a different game entirely.
It is however interesting how Second Life started out as this sort of free for all, and more and more it's starting to evolve a government out of necessity. There are many institutions that a person may think are not really needed by society, yet we see that online civilizations seem to reinvent the same things. Also interesting that this "government" has already stomped on people, and people already bitch about it. Seems like second life is getting too much like the first one.
Doesn't have to be on the chip. From the summary it says "hardware supports" but apple software doesn't allow for playback. You can play ogg vorbis files with rockbox (as I do), therefore Apple is deliberatly blocking this format according to their logic. Can't wait for the counter suit as the Zune does not play Apple AAC files as far as I know. In fact with the entire PlayForSure debackle, Microsoft should sue itself.
You'll note that this suit does not stem from Microsoft, because they could obviously see the double edged sword and where this stupidity would all go.
Keep your nose out of business you don't understand
Well that's the problem, politicians have to make choices on topics they don't understand all the time. Do you think they really understand economic theory well enough to pass many of the laws they do? Do they understand health care? Do they understand military strategy? Hardly. Sure they listen to "advisers" but basically you'll always find people arguing about if things will really work or not. This is magnified many times over in the U.S. where we only have two parties.
The best you can hope for is people yelling loud enough to stop government stupidity from passing things like "anti hacker tools" type laws. Unfortunately there's always SOMEONE yelling trying to stop everything which is part of the reasons governments do so little.
Depends on your situation. I moved away from all of my family and friends in the midwest a long time ago, and while I keep up with my very good friend and immediate family, the rest I just tend to lose contact with. Likewise I have friends in Canada but I don't get up there often to visit them. Sure I could call them up all the time, but I don't have time for that and honestly I won't remember every interesting thing that happened to me since the last call.
An online journal can be a good way to keep track of people and check up on how they are doing, and possibly stay in touch. Why not email? True email is good for contact, however social networking works like a reverse email, in which the person chooses whether or not they actually care what happens to you.
It's not for everyone, but it can have its uses. Personally I've come to a similar conclusion as you in that you end up with all of these "fringe" people you hardly know and it ends up being a big spam-pool/time waster.
Meh, I wouldn't worry about it dude. We already take what we want. It's called creating a multinational company then selling to the U.S. We already control Tim Horton's which is the linchpin of your society :)
Well negative earnings is relative - we're generally talking about paper not real money. Mainly look at the sector for mortgages. ALL of them took a dive, good and bad. Are people in America just never going to need mortgages anymore? Of course they are, so it's just a matter of finding some stable companies that will pull out just fine. We're past the big dip now, and there are some rough times ahead but many of these companies have organized capital to weather the storm just fine. Of course listening to some crazy person on slashdot isn't a good idea, but if you do a little research you'll probably come to similar conclusions that I did.
Keep in mind that the stock market is extremely vulnerable to day trading anymore. If you could draw two graphs you'd find the stable sane level for about what the stock is worth, and the insane day-trading knee jerk graph which crosses the other one repeatedly with little reasoning. I typically think of terms within 5 years or so, so I'm fairly patient with where stocks go.
Yeah this is what I did a few years ago. I can appreciate that nsf files are what, 16k? but it just became too much of a pain dealing with buggy players. I went through a binge collecting NES, SNES, Genesis, and Turbographix 16 music and just ran them all through winamp. Unfortunate that they're huge in comparison now, but they play reliably and I can even play them on my ipod.
(and you can convert them to vorbis if you want to go that way)
Generally that happens to any stock that goes down. That doesn't mean the stock is necessarily garbage. I'm investing heavily in a stock with negative EPS and a P/E of "NA". Why? Because it's a good buy and the stock just happens to be in the toilet at the moment. Of course SCOX is a sinking ship and will never come back, however you can't deduce this just by EPS and P/E.
Good luck using that CF card without DMA though. Heck I've installed OSs that simply barf trying to use CF as a hard drive because they can't figure out what to do without DMA. In my experience CF cards are good for dedicated firewalls and such that don't do much disk access. They're also not bad for storage as they're rather durable compared to the alternatives. Aside from that I wouldn't really use them for much of anything. And I doubt most CF cards bother with write leveling unless you get the industrial ones.
SSD drives on the other hand do write leveling, and support DMA. I haven't really seen them pull ahead much in my own testing as far as performance, but the low power and durability are mainly what I use them for.
If I notice this sort of person I usually avoid them or back off if following. You typically find these sorts of people have very poor reaction times and have no idea what they are reacting to. This leads them to be skittish and hit the brake all the time. The net affect is that they will either not react in time and hit something ANYWAY, or they will slam on the brakes when they didn't have to and potentially cause and accident behind them.
I'm pretty sure mutt lets you use whatever (terminal) text editor you want doesn't it?
set editor=vim
Vim doesn't need to email if email clients can use vim. Aside from that you could always pipe the current document to postfix/sendmail.
While I know that a tech can look at any file on the computer he/she wishes, this doesn't mean there's no expectation of privacy.
While I would say there is an expectation of privacy, I have to admit that if it were me installing the DVD drive, it's highly likely the same thing would have occured.
First you install the drive, drivers and software. Then you need to test it so you pick up files on the hard drive. What files? I seriously do not have time to prune through someone's hard drive so I would pick whatever was in "My Documents". After the burn open a few files (jpegs or whatever) to make sure it burned correctly. I'm willing to bet that the files in question were NOT stuck in some arbitrary named folder in drive C.
Taking the analogy someone else used, if I had a dead body in the back seat of my car, the car needed repair, and I didn't know how to do it I would buy a manual and do it myself. Likewise you could buy a dvd and look up tutorials on how to install it. By taking a computer with such illegal content on it to a computer tech you are rolling the dice if they should find the content. What exactly would qualify as "privacy" on such a device anyway? If the guy had kiddie porn set as a wallpaper is it the techs fault if they even boot it? To me you wave privacy to some extent if it hinders the job you were paid to do. If you're medical documents were on a PC and they were labeled "medical documents" then yes I'd say there was a moral issue. If a jpeg was named 000.jpg then I wouldn't expect that a tech may not use it to test. If it's called illegal-underage-porn.jpg then I think you may actually be legally obligated to notify someone at that point. And I think that might be the determining factor here, that if you stumble upon something illegal you may need to do the "right thing".
You do realize that you can't see "the entire world laid out below" even if it was flat. The atmosphere alone prevents that. This would infer that either the devil was showing him a "vision" of the world, or that they had some sort of superior overview that transcends normal vision - being the devil and Jesus and all. I'm not really arguing, I'm just pointing that out.
But of course, nobody would try to read something like the Bible quite so absolutely literally these days, now would they...?
well said.
Personally I think it's sort of tragic that it was just recycled. I mean for a university that has a CS department, I can't think of a more interesting testament to computer technology than a mainframe that was a part of the university infrastructure for over 40 years. I would have made an interesting display case and put it in a lobby somewhere. You can get a bunch of stuff to recycle anywhere, but something like this with history behind it just doesn't come up that often.
There is something sort of interesting here, but the article sort of misses that. You say you've seen this sort of thing as far back as 21 years ago, and I'm willing to bet back then there were older people who would tell you stuff that you just blew off, only to find out later in life that it was true (hell I know I have).
The interesting thing here is that human nature doesn't change, even after we've abstracted interaction to sitting behind computer screens. In a way we've come full circle - from tribes, city states, to nations: they all rise, and they all fall. With the internet we've gone back to tribes, but this time they're not essential to survival yet the mechanics of the tribe itself are still the same. What makes a good guild? Usually good leadership, a few charismatic members, lack of drama, etc; it's the same truth in real life.
The article makes a good point about focusing incorrectly on some aspects. Focusing on money or PvP only ensures loyalty until these things will falter. It however makes the mistake of saying that fun is the key. While true that fun is the point of a game, a guild based on fun only lasts while the fun lasts. And that's not forever. And with technology it is guaranteed that any game guild will die (in its current form). The lesson is the same as real life: if you enjoy it, enjoy it while it lasts.
Well think about it. How can Microsoft leverage all their windows bundled software they've been trying to develop for 5 years if everyone just sticks with XP? The next release of Windows isn't just the next release of Windows, it's a progression of Microsoft's marketplace strategy (like Windows Live, .NET, etc). It says a lot about how Vista took so long, Vista ended up so crappy, and how MS continues to try to push Vista despite how crappy it is.
Acedemic games no fun? That's because the focus is WRONG. Games are meant to be fun or entertaining: that must always come first. Same thing with Christian metal bands. If you focus on the message first and not the music, people aren't going to bother even listening because the music is sub par. There are more examples I could go on and on about, but simply put most educational games are misguided because that's the nature of acedemic games. I mean who is going to fund an educational game where only 5-10% vaguely seems educational? But that's what is required.
Actually I don't even think it's that hard to come up with educational games. For instance I can identify every kind of ship in the Star Wars universe and I don't even LIKE Star Wars. Why? Because when playing Tie Fighter it's just secondary knowledge that you picked up. I took a class in college where the class worked on an academic game, and it had potential. It took place in the old west and kids were meant to do various things. Now you aren't going to be able to quiz kids every 30 seconds, but you can easily drop in things that are somewhat educational like what people used to buy, what sort of horse does what task, etc. No one would be rabidly pleased at how educational your game is, but it's not that hard to get people to pick up small bits of real knowledge.