This is so tired! Only about a trillion companies in the last fifty years have had their CEOs get together and try and look cool by copying various movies, TV shows and celebrities. They end up looking like idiots but everyone has to clap along, and try not to groan too loudly. Of course, with Gates and Ballmer, there's pretty much no way they could do anything without looking like complete dorks anyway...
It's also pretty stupid to do anything with the Matrix - it's been spoofed, parodied and sent up into oblivion anyway, in everything from Shrek, Scary Movie and Kung Pow to endless crappy TV skits and sitcoms, to the guys who trot their crappy Morpheus costume out every Halloween, to the legions of black clad goth dudes and dudettes who dress like that all the time anyway. Put down the whip, leave the horse alone. It's dead. It's been dead for bloody years!
The crazy thing is that every time this stunt is pulled, the CEOs think they are being stunningly, paradigm-shattering creative. You're not funny. You're not cool. You look stupid. We would rather hammer nails into our genitals than sit through your clip again. Please, just give a neat little speech and go back to the gold course.
The best book I've ever read on why Europe dominates history is Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. I found it pretty heavy going (I'm still only 3/4 ways through it, and I'm reading a few chapters at a time, then taking time off to digest all the information) but it has tonnes of well-researched, logically-supported evidence.
One of his most compelling reasons (at least for me) for the rapid and creative development of Europe was geographical - Europe had hundreds of countries, duchies, kingdoms and such jammed up next to each other, each with their own inventions, systems, ideas and cultures and the autonomy to develop them. Tonnes of silly ideas were developed under the patronage of loony Dukes, but the best ideas were spread around Europe by travellers (and uh, warlike countries) and strengthened the entire area.
This is only one of the many influencing factors he discusses, but I liked it (kinda like natural selection for ideas).
True. I think the best answer is to structure the app to use plugins, or extensions, or mods, or whatever else you want to call them. Then users can pick and choose what parts of the application they wish to include. Of course, the downside is that it introduces an additional level of complexity to the entire system...
It would also be great to reach a point where the entire OS worked this way, so you could say "this spell checker sucks, I'll add in a new one" and as long as it followed the plug-in protocols it would work nicely.
The critical aspect of this is clear definitions of the structures involved, which is equivalent to "documenting the APIs", which may sound familiar to most slashdot readers...
Cool concept... reminds me of something else I was reading recently about how money removes the need to form relationships. Without money, you have to resort to reason, understanding and empathy, and often work towards a compromise between two parties. With money, you just give them a cheque and say "I don't give a crap what you think about this, just do it".
1 - Exactly. Most spammers would gladly pay 1c per email - these guys are (unfortunately) making lots of cash doing what they're doing, so they can easily afford it. Then all this idea does is make something cheap expensive, and the spammers continue on their merry way.
I injured my left knee about seven years ago, and had to have an arthroscopy to have them check everything out. This involves slipping a thin wire-like camera inside the knee and taking a look at the damage inside. The process involved a day in hospital, general anaesthetic, and several weeks of knee soreness before I was able to walk about freely.
About five years ago, I hurt my OTHER knee. MRI tech was available, so to check things out, I had to lie very still in a machine that looked like a huge washing machine... for about 45 minutes. No surgery, no anaesthesia, no hobbling about for weeks. The MRI even produced an cool-looking "slice by slice" view of the soft structures in my knee.
I don't know whether Texans need more acid per se - more ecstasy or weed would be fine, but a Texan on a bad trip... jeez, it would be like a force five hurricane, plowing through the landscape, leaving a trail of wreckage and wanton destruction. I'm sure they lost quite a few towns like that before the laws were beefed up.
I don't really know enough about the subject, but might it be possible to train a firewall that certain types of DDOS attacks might be "bad traffic", such as repeated requests on certain ports, opening large numbers of http connections without continuing the transaction, etc?
I'm pretty sure some firewalls do this sort of thing already, too...
I think as long as the context is free-market capitalism, society will be hopeless. There's no answer within the system. I'd prefer to ditch the raw capitalism. Something more like partly-cooked capitalism would suit me. Somehow manage some system where somebody does a reasonably okay job of finding people and projects that do benefit society and quality of life, and bankroll the buggers.
I agree - pure, raw capitalism is toxic to a society, because the citizens themselves are treated as competition, and they're easier targets than other companies. The only way to defend yourself is to learn the rules, get in the game, and start pushing everyone else down. It sucks, and eats your soul.
My partly-cooked capitalist utopia has everyone provided with enough water, food and shelter to survive. Forget about education and medicine - that would be great, but as definable subjects they're just too damn complex. Having those basic needs fulfilled means that people at least have a choice to walk out when confronted by the sharp edge of capitalism.
I'm wondering if RFID tech can't be used to our advantage - either by changing RFID tags to our own codes (almost sure this won't be possible, but hey, who knows?), or even just grabbing a bunch of *our own* tags to add to our stuff so we can do neat things like type "grep socks" and actually have it work. It's like William Gibson said: "... the street finds its own use for things."
I suspect that detecting and removing most company RFID tags would be fairly straightforward, unless the company is being annoying and embeds them inside the core of a steel-belted radial.
You may be right that the only thing stopping the movie industry from imploding is the lack of widespread uber-bandwidth, but movies and music are actually fairly different mediums, and those factors may change the way movies and music are treated by consumers in such a world.
The first factor is the time invested in watching a movie, when compared with music. Movies are around 1 1/2 hours, while songs are around 3 minutes each. Pulling down 50 songs means a total of 2 1/2 hours of listening, broken up into bite-sized chunks for flexible, easy consumption. 50 movies is a staggering 75 hours of viewing, in annoyingly large 1 1/2 hour blocks.
Even if bandwidth reached speeds where pulling down 50 movies inside a minute would be possible, who would have time to watch them? This kind of time investment creates a far greater personal emphasis on the quality of a piece of entertainment - after all, if I'm going to invest 1 1/2 hours of my precious time, the movie better be damn good.
This emphasis on quality gives rise to different social behaviour, such as wanting to experience a movie in a high-quality cinema, with a group of friends, or even with someone special. It's not uncommon for people to refuse to see low-quality versions of movies, preferring to make the viewing the best quality event possible. It's almost unheard-of to invite friends over just to listen to a song, or an album, or an artist. Perhaps a genre might work (Jazz nights) but this is pushing the comparison so far from the sharing of an individual movie, it doesn't really work anymore.
Movie entertainment is also far more "active" than songs, requiring a quiet environment and significant personal attention for viewing. Songs are far more "passive", being played during travel, at work, while doing chores, or funnily enough, as background during movies themselves. In some ways, this "devalues" music, making it ripe for carefree sharing.
The scale difference between movies and music is also huge - finding 50 decent new songs would be reasonably easily, given a modicum of intelligence, experience and knowledge, while 50 decent new movies... that selection might encompass the whole of cinema, depending on your taste!
I'm unsure whether these points make any sense to anyone else, or whether they'll have any effect when the bandwidth walls come down. Perhaps the movie industry have been brainwashing me, but I believe that movies might be treated a little differently to music.
Exactly. Chaps, hats, covered wagons, revolvers with pearl handles, drawling accents, chewing baccy and that horrible twangy guitar music. It was like the human race got wiped out by a comet, and the only ones to get away were die-hard wild west revivalists, on a battlecruiser full of authentic props and musical instruments.
Even beyond the fact that the resulting melee was ludicrous and painful and bizarre, the Wild West was always a pretty annoying setting, so it made the whole show even worse. It was like watching Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel with his crew of Sub-Yokels search the galaxy for moonshine and grits...
From my experience with Microsoft people, they use their software pretty extensively, but do so using infrastructure that simply isn't available to "normal" businesses. They have the latest desktop hardware, huge servers and massive bandwidth, and in that environment, their stuff usually runs pretty nicely.
The disconnect becomes painfully apparent when they come out to advise small businesses, and they say things like "well you really should get another three servers and divide the load" or "yeah it does run a bit slow, maybe you should upgrade all these old desktop machines" and people just laugh.
Average companies simply don't have the resources to cycle their desktops every year, or install DRM servers in each branch office, or add a bunch of international T1 lines to make sure document security works properly. These days they're trying to *reduce costs*, which is a concept that I doubt has ever been imagined at Microsoft.
A rather unreliable friend of mine gave me similar advice regarding that initial hump of paranoia. He said:
1) Drink a beer first. 2) Toke the joint. You'll start to feel a little odd, but you won't freak out because of the beer. 3) Have another beer. 4) Have another toke. Two beers and two tokes will get you over the Wall of Paranoia to the Fields of Sunshine. 5) Take your pill of ecstacy. It'll take a while to come on, but in the meantime, you can always... 6) Have another toke. Repeat. 7) When you are more interested in hugging everyone than having another toke, this means the e has kicked in. This is the perfect moment to... 8) Drop your acid. Your mood will be sky-high, which will help in having a good trip. 9) When you get that "my mind is flying but my body is just destroyed" effect, this is when you snort your speed. 10) Don't take anything for a while. You probably won't be able to anyway, or even remember your own name. 11) When everything starts getting grey and scratchy, start toking again. Repeat until happy unconsciousness.
He had a variant recipe that involved cocaine and horse tranquilizers, but he never could quite remember what it was...
I agree totally - the claim that Slashdot is a "content site" is fairly bogus, particularly in the way that Louis Borders uses the word content. The occasional interview, book review or feature does appear, but the HUGE majority are links to other people's content. The "value-add" (to use dronespeak) is the comments forum, but without that, Slashdot is basically a rolling list of links about nerdy stuff. That's all.
The fact that people actually pay money to *subscribe* to a no-content site like Slashdot must make Louis Borders' brain want to explode. It's almost the exact opposite of what he's trying to float with KeepMedia, and it's thriving!
Reminds me of that stat that the entire music industry makes in a year about as much as the telecoms industry makes in a month... people don't want "content", they just want to talk to one another.
I think Sony's strategy is to jump-start the PSP by porting across all the games from the PS2. Nintendo have been doing this with the GBA (Spy Hunter, Ghouls and Ghosts, Super Mario Advance, etc) using old NES, SNES and N64 games.
It's a good cheap way to get the platform started, but it's true that in the long run, people want to progress beyond the games they played in high school...
Perhaps the next step is either: a) A sharp edge on the handle that samples your blood and tests it for alcohol content b) A rim around the edge that samples your saliva and does the same or c) A mike in the glass with Sensi-Drunk (tm) voice sampling technology that measures the volume, content (sexual references, fart jokes and ways to solve the world's problems are a giveaway) and slur factor of your voice and cuts you off (usually when you start yelling incoherently about how the situation in the middle east could be solved by a really really big, fat reefer)
Wow, I was just asking some visiting Japanese friends about Nagasaki just the other day - just how *did* they clean up these cities? Anyone know?
Hiroshima was bombed on August 6th, 1945 and Nagasaki 3 days later - this is less than 60 years ago, and today they're large, thriving cities. Did they dig out most of the city and replace it with clean dirt, or what?
Slashdot Mirror
This is so tired! Only about a trillion companies in the last fifty years have had their CEOs get together and try and look cool by copying various movies, TV shows and celebrities. They end up looking like idiots but everyone has to clap along, and try not to groan too loudly. Of course, with Gates and Ballmer, there's pretty much no way they could do anything without looking like complete dorks anyway...
It's also pretty stupid to do anything with the Matrix - it's been spoofed, parodied and sent up into oblivion anyway, in everything from Shrek, Scary Movie and Kung Pow to endless crappy TV skits and sitcoms, to the guys who trot their crappy Morpheus costume out every Halloween, to the legions of black clad goth dudes and dudettes who dress like that all the time anyway. Put down the whip, leave the horse alone. It's dead. It's been dead for bloody years!
The crazy thing is that every time this stunt is pulled, the CEOs think they are being stunningly, paradigm-shattering creative. You're not funny. You're not cool. You look stupid. We would rather hammer nails into our genitals than sit through your clip again. Please, just give a neat little speech and go back to the gold course.
The best book I've ever read on why Europe dominates history is Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. I found it pretty heavy going (I'm still only 3/4 ways through it, and I'm reading a few chapters at a time, then taking time off to digest all the information) but it has tonnes of well-researched, logically-supported evidence.
One of his most compelling reasons (at least for me) for the rapid and creative development of Europe was geographical - Europe had hundreds of countries, duchies, kingdoms and such jammed up next to each other, each with their own inventions, systems, ideas and cultures and the autonomy to develop them. Tonnes of silly ideas were developed under the patronage of loony Dukes, but the best ideas were spread around Europe by travellers (and uh, warlike countries) and strengthened the entire area.
This is only one of the many influencing factors he discusses, but I liked it (kinda like natural selection for ideas).
True. I think the best answer is to structure the app to use plugins, or extensions, or mods, or whatever else you want to call them. Then users can pick and choose what parts of the application they wish to include. Of course, the downside is that it introduces an additional level of complexity to the entire system...
It would also be great to reach a point where the entire OS worked this way, so you could say "this spell checker sucks, I'll add in a new one" and as long as it followed the plug-in protocols it would work nicely.
The critical aspect of this is clear definitions of the structures involved, which is equivalent to "documenting the APIs", which may sound familiar to most slashdot readers...
And we haven't been buying the N-Gage, even though Nokia says that we have...
Cool concept... reminds me of something else I was reading recently about how money removes the need to form relationships. Without money, you have to resort to reason, understanding and empathy, and often work towards a compromise between two parties. With money, you just give them a cheque and say "I don't give a crap what you think about this, just do it".
That thought got me thinking...
"Japan Sends Giant Robot Piloted by Cute Schoolgirl Into Space"
"New Zealand Sends Sheep Into Space"
"USA Sends Iraq Into Space"
"French Send Jerry Lewis Into Space, Then Return Him Safely"
"Germans Launch Brewery Into Space, Aliens Impressed"
"Australians Would Send Man Into Space, But Instead Got Drunk and Went Fishing"
"England Sends Own Cricket Team Into the Sun"
etc...
1 - Exactly. Most spammers would gladly pay 1c per email - these guys are (unfortunately) making lots of cash doing what they're doing, so they can easily afford it. Then all this idea does is make something cheap expensive, and the spammers continue on their merry way.
Knees are where MRIs are really, really useful.
I injured my left knee about seven years ago, and had to have an arthroscopy to have them check everything out. This involves slipping a thin wire-like camera inside the knee and taking a look at the damage inside. The process involved a day in hospital, general anaesthetic, and several weeks of knee soreness before I was able to walk about freely.
About five years ago, I hurt my OTHER knee. MRI tech was available, so to check things out, I had to lie very still in a machine that looked like a huge washing machine... for about 45 minutes. No surgery, no anaesthesia, no hobbling about for weeks. The MRI even produced an cool-looking "slice by slice" view of the soft structures in my knee.
It's a hugely improved process. Good on them.
I don't know whether Texans need more acid per se - more ecstasy or weed would be fine, but a Texan on a bad trip... jeez, it would be like a force five hurricane, plowing through the landscape, leaving a trail of wreckage and wanton destruction. I'm sure they lost quite a few towns like that before the laws were beefed up.
I don't really know enough about the subject, but might it be possible to train a firewall that certain types of DDOS attacks might be "bad traffic", such as repeated requests on certain ports, opening large numbers of http connections without continuing the transaction, etc?
I'm pretty sure some firewalls do this sort of thing already, too...
I think as long as the context is free-market capitalism, society will be hopeless. There's no answer within the system. I'd prefer to ditch the raw capitalism. Something more like partly-cooked capitalism would suit me. Somehow manage some system where somebody does a reasonably okay job of finding people and projects that do benefit society and quality of life, and bankroll the buggers.
I agree - pure, raw capitalism is toxic to a society, because the citizens themselves are treated as competition, and they're easier targets than other companies. The only way to defend yourself is to learn the rules, get in the game, and start pushing everyone else down. It sucks, and eats your soul.
My partly-cooked capitalist utopia has everyone provided with enough water, food and shelter to survive. Forget about education and medicine - that would be great, but as definable subjects they're just too damn complex. Having those basic needs fulfilled means that people at least have a choice to walk out when confronted by the sharp edge of capitalism.
Yep, me as well. BT 3.3 and QT6 and it crashes at 1:42. Bit annoying...
I'm wondering if RFID tech can't be used to our advantage - either by changing RFID tags to our own codes (almost sure this won't be possible, but hey, who knows?), or even just grabbing a bunch of *our own* tags to add to our stuff so we can do neat things like type "grep socks" and actually have it work. It's like William Gibson said: "... the street finds its own use for things."
I suspect that detecting and removing most company RFID tags would be fairly straightforward, unless the company is being annoying and embeds them inside the core of a steel-belted radial.
"Your 2.6 tonne art installation is not complete until it has Linux doing something unexpectedly funky in it."
You may be right that the only thing stopping the movie industry from imploding is the lack of widespread uber-bandwidth, but movies and music are actually fairly different mediums, and those factors may change the way movies and music are treated by consumers in such a world.
The first factor is the time invested in watching a movie, when compared with music. Movies are around 1 1/2 hours, while songs are around 3 minutes each. Pulling down 50 songs means a total of 2 1/2 hours of listening, broken up into bite-sized chunks for flexible, easy consumption. 50 movies is a staggering 75 hours of viewing, in annoyingly large 1 1/2 hour blocks.
Even if bandwidth reached speeds where pulling down 50 movies inside a minute would be possible, who would have time to watch them? This kind of time investment creates a far greater personal emphasis on the quality of a piece of entertainment - after all, if I'm going to invest 1 1/2 hours of my precious time, the movie better be damn good.
This emphasis on quality gives rise to different social behaviour, such as wanting to experience a movie in a high-quality cinema, with a group of friends, or even with someone special. It's not uncommon for people to refuse to see low-quality versions of movies, preferring to make the viewing the best quality event possible. It's almost unheard-of to invite friends over just to listen to a song, or an album, or an artist. Perhaps a genre might work (Jazz nights) but this is pushing the comparison so far from the sharing of an individual movie, it doesn't really work anymore.
Movie entertainment is also far more "active" than songs, requiring a quiet environment and significant personal attention for viewing. Songs are far more "passive", being played during travel, at work, while doing chores, or funnily enough, as background during movies themselves. In some ways, this "devalues" music, making it ripe for carefree sharing.
The scale difference between movies and music is also huge - finding 50 decent new songs would be reasonably easily, given a modicum of intelligence, experience and knowledge, while 50 decent new movies... that selection might encompass the whole of cinema, depending on your taste!
I'm unsure whether these points make any sense to anyone else, or whether they'll have any effect when the bandwidth walls come down. Perhaps the movie industry have been brainwashing me, but I believe that movies might be treated a little differently to music.
And don't forget the nice suggestion to try the "/disco" command, saying it makes a bunch of disco lights swish around your screen...
** RocketDude disconnected
** Ov3rl0rd disconnected
** PowerNewb disconnected
Exactly. Chaps, hats, covered wagons, revolvers with pearl handles, drawling accents, chewing baccy and that horrible twangy guitar music. It was like the human race got wiped out by a comet, and the only ones to get away were die-hard wild west revivalists, on a battlecruiser full of authentic props and musical instruments.
Even beyond the fact that the resulting melee was ludicrous and painful and bizarre, the Wild West was always a pretty annoying setting, so it made the whole show even worse. It was like watching Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel with his crew of Sub-Yokels search the galaxy for moonshine and grits...
From my experience with Microsoft people, they use their software pretty extensively, but do so using infrastructure that simply isn't available to "normal" businesses. They have the latest desktop hardware, huge servers and massive bandwidth, and in that environment, their stuff usually runs pretty nicely.
The disconnect becomes painfully apparent when they come out to advise small businesses, and they say things like "well you really should get another three servers and divide the load" or "yeah it does run a bit slow, maybe you should upgrade all these old desktop machines" and people just laugh.
Average companies simply don't have the resources to cycle their desktops every year, or install DRM servers in each branch office, or add a bunch of international T1 lines to make sure document security works properly. These days they're trying to *reduce costs*, which is a concept that I doubt has ever been imagined at Microsoft.
Lucky bastard... all my girlfriends' names end in ".jpg"
A rather unreliable friend of mine gave me similar advice regarding that initial hump of paranoia. He said:
1) Drink a beer first.
2) Toke the joint. You'll start to feel a little odd, but you won't freak out because of the beer.
3) Have another beer.
4) Have another toke. Two beers and two tokes will get you over the Wall of Paranoia to the Fields of Sunshine.
5) Take your pill of ecstacy. It'll take a while to come on, but in the meantime, you can always...
6) Have another toke. Repeat.
7) When you are more interested in hugging everyone than having another toke, this means the e has kicked in. This is the perfect moment to...
8) Drop your acid. Your mood will be sky-high, which will help in having a good trip.
9) When you get that "my mind is flying but my body is just destroyed" effect, this is when you snort your speed.
10) Don't take anything for a while. You probably won't be able to anyway, or even remember your own name.
11) When everything starts getting grey and scratchy, start toking again. Repeat until happy unconsciousness.
He had a variant recipe that involved cocaine and horse tranquilizers, but he never could quite remember what it was...
I agree totally - the claim that Slashdot is a "content site" is fairly bogus, particularly in the way that Louis Borders uses the word content. The occasional interview, book review or feature does appear, but the HUGE majority are links to other people's content. The "value-add" (to use dronespeak) is the comments forum, but without that, Slashdot is basically a rolling list of links about nerdy stuff. That's all.
The fact that people actually pay money to *subscribe* to a no-content site like Slashdot must make Louis Borders' brain want to explode. It's almost the exact opposite of what he's trying to float with KeepMedia, and it's thriving!
Reminds me of that stat that the entire music industry makes in a year about as much as the telecoms industry makes in a month... people don't want "content", they just want to talk to one another.
I swear this just happened... I read the story and went "Ha! What a bunch of nasty freaks, with their sweaty clammy hands!" and went back to working.
2 hours later and my BLOODY HANDS WON'T STOP SWEATING! The gods, in their ever-ironic wisdom, have cursed me for my scoffing.
Don't look at me... don't look at meeeeee...
I think Sony's strategy is to jump-start the PSP by porting across all the games from the PS2. Nintendo have been doing this with the GBA (Spy Hunter, Ghouls and Ghosts, Super Mario Advance, etc) using old NES, SNES and N64 games.
It's a good cheap way to get the platform started, but it's true that in the long run, people want to progress beyond the games they played in high school...
Perhaps the next step is either:
a) A sharp edge on the handle that samples your blood and tests it for alcohol content
b) A rim around the edge that samples your saliva and does the same
or
c) A mike in the glass with Sensi-Drunk (tm) voice sampling technology that measures the volume, content (sexual references, fart jokes and ways to solve the world's problems are a giveaway) and slur factor of your voice and cuts you off (usually when you start yelling incoherently about how the situation in the middle east could be solved by a really really big, fat reefer)
Wow, I was just asking some visiting Japanese friends about Nagasaki just the other day - just how *did* they clean up these cities? Anyone know?
Hiroshima was bombed on August 6th, 1945 and Nagasaki 3 days later - this is less than 60 years ago, and today they're large, thriving cities. Did they dig out most of the city and replace it with clean dirt, or what?