There is a difference. Yes, the automobile gets you from point A to B. It is a _doing_. There was you and the automobile at A and now you and the automobile are at B. Same components, different location.
Using a computer is a _creating_: e.g., raw data to structured output in the case of a statistical analysis. Knowledge is created as a secondary-level product in the programmed organizing process of discrete data. Something exists that didn't exist before. Doesn't matter whether you have to program it yourself or press the icon that starts the programming someone already did for you.
If all the uses you have for a computer can be handled by clicking icons someone has already programmed for you, then a computer is already easier to use than a car. If not, then you better learn programming.
I predict a natural language "Mr. Data" is really a _long_ time off. You don't have to be a cognitive scientist to see that the epistemological challenges of creating an artificial sentience with a rich phenomenology that meshes with reality are overwhelming. You just need to own a cat to be impressed with that daily.
It'll probably fall on deaf ears because we have a world empire to free while we let the home infrastructure crumble from lack of care. Besides, this is a presidency that doesn't need cabinet level advice on science.
But I suppose pessimism isn't really in order. The Russians had to shock us by orbiting first before we got it together to aim for the moon. Get a permanent Chinese moonbase and we'll see if we still have what it takes to top that. Valles Marineris here we come (taking the round-about route)!
"Dropping"? Well, it is "branching". Hard to convince a business to try a "Fedora community-based thing" because that is different now from the monolithic distribution. A few -- just as some small businesses and 3rd world offices might run OpenOffice instead of StarOffice.
In reality, it isn't much of a change. RedHat never was excited about taking on Microsoft at the desktop. But Fedora proves there's no free lunch. Nice that they are keeping a RedHat-derived option open for techies and it keeps their hand in it if the desktop does take off. At the same time, it isn't very pretty that by talking trash about linux on the desktop, they are trashing all the other companies that are working on that goal _now_.
When I started wondering whether I could offer a PostgreSQL DB product running on Cygwin, reality put a scare into me. "Well, we'll just install a few hundred meg of unix-emulation onto your boot partition and the DB server will run in that. Oh, and it'll use some ports so work that into your security." Yeah, Windows sysadmins will line up for that.
No, Cygwin ranges somewhere between "interesting" and a cool tool for unix people who have to deal with Windows boxes. I suppose they could hurt MKS some, but would it be worth it in the end?
I think that is why I find it strangely appealing. Envision the typical biker dude bounty hunter storming some high school kid's room. Does C*O*P*S do the occasional bounty hunter episode: "Bad Nerd, Bad Nerd, whacha gonna do?"
Since RedHat is apparently doing an OpenOffice/StarOffice thing (without the StarOffice) by working with Fedora, this all doesn't shake me up much. They said they weren't interested in the desktop some time ago. Guess they had a focus group and did a team chant of "Servers! Servers! Servers!". Microsoft has been getting hammered by worms the last year, linux has been getting good PR, so it is time to crank up the price to be "competitive" with W2K and go for the money. Since people value what they pay for, it will probably only enhance linux in the eyes of business.
Like a lot of people, when I think linux, I think RedHat first and Penguin second, but I'll adjust. After a couple months with a Knoppix disk and a Jumpdrive, I know RedHat isn't the only desktop in town. Presumably Novell will have the business desktop covered. The home newbies can run Lindows root. And there is Debian or Slackware if Fedora sours for the experienced. Whatever.
But the irony is that I've never been happier with a linux desktop (2+ years from August '01) than with RH 9 and the standard current programs. Mplayer plays just about "everything" in one player. Installation? Basically, just download all the.rpms at once into a separate directory and install *.rpm. Even the "untested beta" plug-in works for embedded movie trailers and such. I long ago found my favorite streaming.mp3 and RealPlayer stations. And FlightGear at.9.3 is getting to be a great flight sim. Xawtv for "LinTV". Throw in clearance copies of the Loki games and the entertainment angle is covered adequately.
Mozilla, Evolution, CUPS, OpenOffice 1.1, Scribus at 1.0, GNUCash, MySQL linked up with OpenOffice for an Office/Access team. Really? The apps aren't there to do real work?
Whatever you want to say about the books, the structure was right. You need a human protagonist. Integrating the woman into the predator clan was the proper setup to subsequent bug hunts. And would have made a mindblowing couple movies.
And the perfect actress would have been.....?
Nobody is tallying these, right?
on
Who Needs Radio?
·
· Score: 1
This is the wrong crowd to ask. Years ago, a sociology professor of mine once asked the class out of context, "What are the most read magazines?" Answers came in like:
Harpers! The New Yorker! National Geographic!
Clearly, seeing that those were insane, I cleverly suggested Reader's Digest or TV Guide. But I couldn't even think low enough: National Inquirer -- at the time.
Point is: A LOT of people will be listening to the radio for a LONG time. They just may not be prime demographic. So is the context ears or dollars?
[BTW: When Bush was sending Colin around with pictures of graineries to drum up war fever, public radio did an hour on "Socrates, the Soldierin' Years." I will always wonder how Monty Python would have presented that and I will never again think of U.S. public radio as anything but, "The Same Propaganda -- with the slant we know _YOU_ enjoy!" In truth, public radio can be _more_ fun to deconstruct than FOX because it isn't always so obvious.]
Open source violates the constitution? THE CONSTITUTION!! Show me the source -- as it were!
Does Ashcroft know about this? Every time the Amish try to instigate a communal barn raising, he better get there quick to throw their commie, pinko asses in prison. Nobody cooperates for free with anybody! Not in this country, citizen. Is that it?
We better shut down all volunteer organizations right now. You have to bet individuals freely spread their intellectual creativity around like rats in places like that.
Sorry. When these scum wrap themselves in the constitution, that is the final straw for me.
I would have said Cheap, but I guess you are right with Krap. This story annoys me. I have _several_ LGs on linux machines because they have seemed reliable and I had hoped I had found a hardware line I could trust. The "we don't have a linux machine to test our products" attitude is getting very stale in a comapany that large too. Back to the hardware database for another roll of the dice I guess.
Anybody else attend a particular lecture at Minicon (Minneapolis) c. '93? There was a guy who did a heck of a theatre piece -- or was crazy -- or a visionary. Still haven't picked just one. Story was that he was like a cousin in the Japanese solid booster rocket company's family. The problem with 100% solid rockets is apparently the relatively instantanious thrust -- they take off like, well, bottle rockets. So he was centrifuging salemanders regularly to try to figure how much they could take and what makes them resistant to g forces. If you can't change the rockets, change people! Quite a bit of detail on salemander centrifuging in fact. He did a good part of the presentation with a B&W projection in the background of a Russian experiment with a severed dog head pumped blood. "It responded for several minutes!" And suggested that people should be bred as dwarfs to fit into spacecraft better.
You would not BELIEVE how quickly a con can plaster a 20-story hotel with disclaimers that they had not screened his talk. But was he crazy -- or just "bold"?
I'm betting the salemander-people astronauts are a no-starter for a LONG time. But, hey. China admitted selecting for short people to fit into the capsule. It wouldn't be _unreasonable_ to imagine a race of dwarfs inhabiting tunnels on Demos. And what is a severed head but a crude metaphor for organic AI?
Bruce Sterling's novel Schizmatrix from ages ago: Not unreasonable to think human-directed evolution will branch the genome around the inhabited solar system.
Yeah. A few years ago, part of me being the office computer nerd was having a copy of StarOffice on my desktop. Somebody's mangled.doc attachment wouldn't open? Forward it to me and I'd send them the content back after opening it in StarOffice. Worked about 5 out of 6 times. Great 70 meg utility.
Wasn't a huge fan of OO 1.0 but I'm liking 1.1 a lot BTW. Took the time last evening to finally set up a MySQL/OpenOffice link similar to using Access with Office. Very cool and easy to use.
Corporations do have a unique mind that acts in its own interest. "Group think" -- ala social psychology. Basic Zimbardo that a person will do things in a social context that he wouldn't do alone. Not only is the prime directive the thriving of the corporation, everyone else supports that the prime directive is the thriving of the corporation and a language is shared to anchor that community belief system. Anyone who doesn't march to that mindset will be dropped from the pack in short order.
That's why outside regulation that follows through with serious and meaningful punishment _is_ necessary because it is highly improbable that change will occur through spontaneous moral enlightenment of corporate moguls.
Transnationals? I don't know. Maybe strong U.N. agreement and member enforcement that banished corporations actually have to house their executives in Haiti or whatever 3rd world hole will take them? Call their bluff and I bet the corporate heads of Nike would _love_ to have to live in Beijing.
I doubt whether the uncensored writings of Thomas Paine are on the short list of most secondary school reading. And that "Give me liberty or give me death" thing is just so gauche.
My wife's a company web developer. She says The GIMP isn't there yet, so I have to take her word for it. For my use, it is more graphics software than I need. But she has two points:
1. Features. T'ain't Illustrator. 2. Standard. It's hard to justify learning another program when it isn't the industry standard. Especially when it doesn't offer superior features yet.
To her credit, I've seen her looking through the PeachPit GIMP manual, but if it wasn't for Win4Lin for Illustrator, Flash, and, to some extent, Dreamweaver, she wouldn't be running linux at home.
Almost everything I see coming through in RedHat up2date seems to be for laboratory "potential" vulnerabilities. Am I wrong and the problems are grossly understated? What percentage of fixes are reactions to actual penetrations?
We aren't launching diddley right now, so the universal "Been there, done that -- 40 years ago" attitude of the media is a little disingenious.
Where is the evidence of this being cheap propaganda? Solar panels? A module that can be left in space? Seems like they want to move to a space station quickly. I hope they do. Shoot for the moon colony.
Science Friday the other week noted that it took 66 years to go from Kitty Hawk to the moon. What have we done in the last 34 years that is so great? Can't even take a Concorde flight anymore. I hope the Chinese do set off a second space race.
I got my notice for the Britannica 2004 update last week. $25. What was a set of Britannica selling for 25 years ago -- about $1000? Music CDs came out in the late 70s. If they were about $12 then, that means a CD is worth about 30 cents now?
Info overload, man. It's a commodity like tap water. Time to price accordingly.
I'm no expert but I have 4 of the 5 Oracle dba core classes and I remember in one of them the instructor was quite chipper about discussing a feature and then saying "db2--same but different" to orient people with db2 backgrounds (and dismissing SQLServer at the same time).
Remind your management of the cardinal maxim that _the_ most important speed factor is well-written SQL. Then you can start talking about hardware needs and db tuning for shared pool code reuse and such. And maybe security is an underlying concern?
Slashdot Mirror
You _know_ the phones must record numbers. Why else would they want you to return them?
Excuse me. I think I just heard a black helicopter land in the back yard.
There is a difference. Yes, the automobile gets you from point A to B. It is a _doing_. There was you and the automobile at A and now you and the automobile are at B. Same components, different location.
Using a computer is a _creating_: e.g., raw data to structured output in the case of a statistical analysis. Knowledge is created as a secondary-level product in the programmed organizing process of discrete data. Something exists that didn't exist before. Doesn't matter whether you have to program it yourself or press the icon that starts the programming someone already did for you.
If all the uses you have for a computer can be handled by clicking icons someone has already programmed for you, then a computer is already easier to use than a car. If not, then you better learn programming.
I predict a natural language "Mr. Data" is really a _long_ time off. You don't have to be a cognitive scientist to see that the epistemological challenges of creating an artificial sentience with a rich phenomenology that meshes with reality are overwhelming. You just need to own a cat to be impressed with that daily.
It'll probably fall on deaf ears because we have a world empire to free while we let the home infrastructure crumble from lack of care. Besides, this is a presidency that doesn't need cabinet level advice on science.
But I suppose pessimism isn't really in order. The Russians had to shock us by orbiting first before we got it together to aim for the moon. Get a permanent Chinese moonbase and we'll see if we still have what it takes to top that. Valles Marineris here we come (taking the round-about route)!
"Dropping"? Well, it is "branching". Hard to convince a business to try a "Fedora community-based thing" because that is different now from the monolithic distribution. A few -- just as some small businesses and 3rd world offices might run OpenOffice instead of StarOffice.
In reality, it isn't much of a change. RedHat never was excited about taking on Microsoft at the desktop. But Fedora proves there's no free lunch. Nice that they are keeping a RedHat-derived option open for techies and it keeps their hand in it if the desktop does take off. At the same time, it isn't very pretty that by talking trash about linux on the desktop, they are trashing all the other companies that are working on that goal _now_.
When I started wondering whether I could offer a PostgreSQL DB product running on Cygwin, reality put a scare into me. "Well, we'll just install a few hundred meg of unix-emulation onto your boot partition and the DB server will run in that. Oh, and it'll use some ports so work that into your security." Yeah, Windows sysadmins will line up for that.
No, Cygwin ranges somewhere between "interesting" and a cool tool for unix people who have to deal with Windows boxes. I suppose they could hurt MKS some, but would it be worth it in the end?
Sounds like he is auditioning to be the Rush Limbaugh of IT.
I think that is why I find it strangely appealing. Envision the typical biker dude bounty hunter storming some high school kid's room. Does C*O*P*S do the occasional bounty hunter episode: "Bad Nerd, Bad Nerd, whacha gonna do?"
But only if Gates presents the check personally.
Since RedHat is apparently doing an OpenOffice/StarOffice thing (without the StarOffice) by working with Fedora, this all doesn't shake me up much. They said they weren't interested in the desktop some time ago. Guess they had a focus group and did a team chant of "Servers! Servers! Servers!". Microsoft has been getting hammered by worms the last year, linux has been getting good PR, so it is time to crank up the price to be "competitive" with W2K and go for the money. Since people value what they pay for, it will probably only enhance linux in the eyes of business.
Like a lot of people, when I think linux, I think RedHat first and Penguin second, but I'll adjust. After a couple months with a Knoppix disk and a Jumpdrive, I know RedHat isn't the only desktop in town. Presumably Novell will have the business desktop covered. The home newbies can run Lindows root. And there is Debian or Slackware if Fedora sours for the experienced. Whatever.
But the irony is that I've never been happier with a linux desktop (2+ years from August '01) than with RH 9 and the standard current programs. Mplayer plays just about "everything" in one player. Installation? Basically, just download all the
Mozilla, Evolution, CUPS, OpenOffice 1.1, Scribus at 1.0, GNUCash, MySQL linked up with OpenOffice for an Office/Access team. Really? The apps aren't there to do real work?
Every day on the freeway will be a classic auto show day.
I have my grandfather's tube radio. Will I have anything to listen to? Or electricity?
Oh, you just aerate.
The federal contracts will be worth billions.
Whatever you want to say about the books, the structure was right. You need a human protagonist. Integrating the woman into the predator clan was the proper setup to subsequent bug hunts. And would have made a mindblowing couple movies.
And the perfect actress would have been.....?
This is the wrong crowd to ask. Years ago, a sociology professor of mine once asked the class out of context, "What are the most read magazines?" Answers came in like:
Harpers!
The New Yorker!
National Geographic!
Clearly, seeing that those were insane, I cleverly suggested Reader's Digest or TV Guide. But I couldn't even think low enough: National Inquirer -- at the time.
Point is: A LOT of people will be listening to the radio for a LONG time. They just may not be prime demographic. So is the context ears or dollars?
[BTW: When Bush was sending Colin around with pictures of graineries to drum up war fever, public radio did an hour on "Socrates, the Soldierin' Years." I will always wonder how Monty Python would have presented that and I will never again think of U.S. public radio as anything but, "The Same Propaganda -- with the slant we know _YOU_ enjoy!" In truth, public radio can be _more_ fun to deconstruct than FOX because it isn't always so obvious.]
Open source violates the constitution? THE CONSTITUTION!! Show me the source -- as it were!
Does Ashcroft know about this? Every time the Amish try to instigate a communal barn raising, he better get there quick to throw their commie, pinko asses in prison. Nobody cooperates for free with anybody! Not in this country, citizen. Is that it?
We better shut down all volunteer organizations right now. You have to bet individuals freely spread their intellectual creativity around like rats in places like that.
Sorry. When these scum wrap themselves in the constitution, that is the final straw for me.
I would have said Cheap, but I guess you are right with Krap. This story annoys me. I have _several_ LGs on linux machines because they have seemed reliable and I had hoped I had found a hardware line I could trust. The "we don't have a linux machine to test our products" attitude is getting very stale in a comapany that large too. Back to the hardware database for another roll of the dice I guess.
Anybody else attend a particular lecture at Minicon (Minneapolis) c. '93? There was a guy who did a heck of a theatre piece -- or was crazy -- or a visionary. Still haven't picked just one. Story was that he was like a cousin in the Japanese solid booster rocket company's family. The problem with 100% solid rockets is apparently the relatively instantanious thrust -- they take off like, well, bottle rockets. So he was centrifuging salemanders regularly to try to figure how much they could take and what makes them resistant to g forces. If you can't change the rockets, change people! Quite a bit of detail on salemander centrifuging in fact. He did a good part of the presentation with a B&W projection in the background of a Russian experiment with a severed dog head pumped blood. "It responded for several minutes!" And suggested that people should be bred as dwarfs to fit into spacecraft better.
You would not BELIEVE how quickly a con can plaster a 20-story hotel with disclaimers that they had not screened his talk. But was he crazy -- or just "bold"?
I'm betting the salemander-people astronauts are a no-starter for a LONG time. But, hey. China admitted selecting for short people to fit into the capsule. It wouldn't be _unreasonable_ to imagine a race of dwarfs inhabiting tunnels on Demos. And what is a severed head but a crude metaphor for organic AI?
Bruce Sterling's novel Schizmatrix from ages ago: Not unreasonable to think human-directed evolution will branch the genome around the inhabited solar system.
This sounds like a rather half-assed solution.
It's Microsoft. Your point is?
Yeah. A few years ago, part of me being the office computer nerd was having a copy of StarOffice on my desktop. Somebody's mangled
Wasn't a huge fan of OO 1.0 but I'm liking 1.1 a lot BTW. Took the time last evening to finally set up a MySQL/OpenOffice link similar to using Access with Office. Very cool and easy to use.
Corporations do have a unique mind that acts in its own interest. "Group think" -- ala social psychology. Basic Zimbardo that a person will do things in a social context that he wouldn't do alone. Not only is the prime directive the thriving of the corporation, everyone else supports that the prime directive is the thriving of the corporation and a language is shared to anchor that community belief system. Anyone who doesn't march to that mindset will be dropped from the pack in short order.
That's why outside regulation that follows through with serious and meaningful punishment _is_ necessary because it is highly improbable that change will occur through spontaneous moral enlightenment of corporate moguls.
Transnationals? I don't know. Maybe strong U.N. agreement and member enforcement that banished corporations actually have to house their executives in Haiti or whatever 3rd world hole will take them? Call their bluff and I bet the corporate heads of Nike would _love_ to have to live in Beijing.
I doubt whether the uncensored writings of Thomas Paine are on the short list of most secondary school reading. And that "Give me liberty or give me death" thing is just so gauche.
My wife's a company web developer. She says The GIMP isn't there yet, so I have to take her word for it. For my use, it is more graphics software than I need. But she has two points:
1. Features. T'ain't Illustrator.
2. Standard. It's hard to justify learning another program when it isn't the industry standard. Especially when it doesn't offer superior features yet.
To her credit, I've seen her looking through the PeachPit GIMP manual, but if it wasn't for Win4Lin for Illustrator, Flash, and, to some extent, Dreamweaver, she wouldn't be running linux at home.
I used to be afraid of shotguns and blood splatter. But I'm better now.
Really.
Almost everything I see coming through in RedHat up2date seems to be for laboratory "potential" vulnerabilities. Am I wrong and the problems are grossly understated? What percentage of fixes are reactions to actual penetrations?
We aren't launching diddley right now, so the universal "Been there, done that -- 40 years ago" attitude of the media is a little disingenious.
Where is the evidence of this being cheap propaganda? Solar panels? A module that can be left in space? Seems like they want to move to a space station quickly. I hope they do. Shoot for the moon colony.
Science Friday the other week noted that it took 66 years to go from Kitty Hawk to the moon. What have we done in the last 34 years that is so great? Can't even take a Concorde flight anymore. I hope the Chinese do set off a second space race.
I got my notice for the Britannica 2004 update last week. $25. What was a set of Britannica selling for 25 years ago -- about $1000? Music CDs came out in the late 70s. If they were about $12 then, that means a CD is worth about 30 cents now?
Info overload, man. It's a commodity like tap water. Time to price accordingly.
I'm no expert but I have 4 of the 5 Oracle dba core classes and I remember in one of them the instructor was quite chipper about discussing a feature and then saying "db2--same but different" to orient people with db2 backgrounds (and dismissing SQLServer at the same time). Remind your management of the cardinal maxim that _the_ most important speed factor is well-written SQL. Then you can start talking about hardware needs and db tuning for shared pool code reuse and such. And maybe security is an underlying concern?