Back in 1979, Apple was a hacker company, breaking new ground.
Now they're a boutique. Their products aren't technological innovations, but re-use of existing technology in more comfy or trendy ways.
What computer science breakthroughs occurred with the mp3 player, or tablet?
With comfy/trendy products, you buy status symbols for conspicuous consumption. "Who are you better than?" is the eternal question of the fearful, and buying an iPad makes you for at least six weeks seem a lot cooler than your neighbor without one.
I experience this often: if you go looking for information on a procedure, like tethering a smart phone, you find not one reputable source with all the answers, but hundreds or thousands of competing similar answers.
Each of these misses some vital piece of the information, but has the rest.
It's like life needs an editor or an ego to take in all this great information, filter out the crap and fix the errors, and produce one definitive solution.
The rest of the world are rolling their eyes at you.
Oh no! The Crowd disapproves. And they have never, ever been shown to be wrong years after being sure they were right and persecuting all the Galileos they could find.
This study suggests that iPhone users report more sexual partners.
That doesn't necessarily mean more sex.
One guy who marries a woman, loves her and has mind-blowing sex with her three times a week, is clearly ahead of some guy with an iPhone who had ten one-night stands.
While the prevailing hacker ethic is that "information wants to be free," that doesn't mean those acts do not have consequences.
Dead NATO troops are dead people. Dead local collaborators are dead people. People are dying and more will die because of Wikileaks.
And what was proven by Wikileaks? That all wars have dubious "reasons" except for the basic reason, which is one monkey clobbering another so that a social order stands.
It's a social fashion to oppose anything our governments do, but at least in America, these are my friends and neighbors out there fighting -- and endangered by the Wikileaks document release.
Hang 'em high for treason. Bradley Manning, at least; I don't know where Assange is from but a little time in an American prison should instill in him a healthy respect for the need to fight, or be anally subjugated.
Fisher, an actress who has appeared on the reality TV show "Age of Love" and in softcore porn movies in the 1990s, claimed she felt Hurd pressured her to have sex, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Hurd denied it. Both Hurd and Fisher said there was no sexual relationship.
This looks like classic extortion:
She "felt" he pressured her to have sex?
So one person who probably crazy (actress, reality show) makes an accusation and they fire a quality CEO?
I bought a hybrid to show I'm better than you. Even if my parents were a disaster, my grades are bad and my job is so boring a RealDoll would quit, I've now got proof that I'm better than you. Look out there, in the driveway. I'm fighting global warming. And what do YOU do, again?
Yeah, I thought so. I'm much cooler.
The Internet as mass appetites
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If you want to know why the "Information wants to be free" attitude is dying, it is because the Internet has been taken over by business interests; the original network of academics and hackers is just a tiny fraction of what the Internet has now become.
If you want to know why that happened, look at the post-1996 audience for the internet: people who would otherwise be watching television.
They're looking for entertainment and socialization, not "information" in the colloquial sense of knowledge-bearing data.
This makes us wonder if it wasn't a bias artifact to begin with.
Creativity in the USA is declining because the USA is declining and -- the article did not mention this -- the average US IQ has also dropped. We were near Germany's 107 average at the turn of the century but now are probably closer to 98.
Things that are making college degrees less valuable, and therefore necessary for an even wider range of jobs:
1. High school degrees are now worthless. "Bill showed up for four years." 2. Affirmative action. "Even though Jake got a 950 on his SAT, he can go to Harvard." 3. Grade inflation. "We wanted Suzy to feel on par with her classmates, so the lowest anyone can get is a B." 4. Politicization. "If you want an A in English Literature with Dr. Rosenberg, you'd better write about feminist theories of hermeneutics." 5. Dumbing down. "The staff decided it's too hard to code up a parser on a 64k Apple II, so we're going to start you off on Logo for Windows 7."
Thanks to the feelgood policies of the 1970s, every precious snowflake feels entitled for just showing up. Schools have responded by making sure everyone has a place. The result: college degrees are no longer worth much, since they're easy to get.
Rarity of college degree = value of college degree
It's like having $100. If you give everyone in America an extra $100, the value of your $100 declines because there's more money floating around.
While I believe in science, natural selection/evolution, and in the importance of the scientific method, science is not absolute any more than the Pope is.
Science is made up of scientists. Some of these are fallible; all of them are potentially manipulated by their political views, their in-group interests, and of course self-interest. They can take bribes, payola or simply come up with a "theory" that many people like. They can then sell books, give $10,000 speeches and so on from it.
Scientists need to stop following a political and personal agenda about the following, although the list may be longer:
* Biological diversity; * IQ and heritability; * Overpopulation; * The toxicity of everyday chemicals, and other issues.
The fallout of public deception on those issues is distrust of "scientism," or a religious belief in science. Not all science is good science.
The climate change debate has been politicized from the beginning, and it's unclear that one side is at fault. Many people however distrust the METHODS of solving the problem that went along with the diagnosis.
Science needs to rebuild faith in its work by being more accurate, not avoiding taboos and sticking to experimental rigor instead of political agendas.
* Disk labels for an Apple ][e * PC/XT to PS/2 keyboard converters * PS/2 to USB keyboard converters * A 14.4k modem * A chip extractor tool * A laplink cable
Archaic, but small enough to overlook for another decade. I put it all back of course.
Linux itself is well established and basically a fulfillment of the UNIX idea, borrowing from other flavors of UNIX (yes, I know Linux is not UNIX). The real world is going on with specialized distributions, and distributions specialized for tools like FreeNAS (which is BSD, but you get the idea).
Restrain the stupid from doing things that might hurt themselves, and also restrain the smart from doing anything similar.
Soon, we will be perfectly safe because our activities will be as standardized as production in factories.
How boring. It's what I don't like about GUIs: they are so eager to "hide complexity" that they also tie your hands when you need to execute any complex task outside what 90% of the users are doing 90% of the time.
Good. Now we can end racism and breed everyone into one uniform Grey Race that will be the future of humankind. We will preserve diversity by creating uniformity. It will be a victory for equality!
Yes, clearly the human species needs more distance from reality. It's not like ignoring reality created all of our problems so far.
Linux is still not ready for desktop use
on
Ubuntu on a Dime
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Windows persists because it's designed to be a desktop operating system. Linux is an adaptation of a server operating system. All of the software is there in Windows, and it has the nifty interface and a company backing it up by writing professional documentation, hordes of device drivers, and being there to issue updates in a timely manner.
No offense intended to the Ubuntu folks, but there's a reason the market often beats the volunteer efforts: it can pay for in addition to inspiring great performance. Open source can inspire great performance by individuals, but what makes a great OS is more than good code; it's good interface design, support and really boring work like driver development.
In addition, while I use KDE and like it, I'm never going to fool myself into thinking this software matches professional level stuff. Even Office 2007 beats the pants off Open Office, Abiword, and Kwrite, hands down. There simply is no competition once you get past the "one page document" stage.
I will always have a FreeBSD machine at home to play with. But I wouldn't want to drop it into an office. For all its flaws, Windows makes desktop computing tasks easy, fast and relatively reliable.
They've found a backdoor around it: either you pay for the new, expedited, luxury internet, or you and the other slow sites can molder on page 41 of a Google search.
Your land use is not just your dwelling. It's roads, hospitals, schools, stores, bars, gov't agencies and so forth.
If anything, cities use more land because they offer more services and cater to people who want more things like fast food, nail polishing, designer haircuts, etc.
How this idiotic and unscientific article got on the front page of Slashdot... I'm guessing it's just an easy pitch for troll batting practice.
Human impact on the environment has multiple consequences. Climate change, while one of them, is not the whole of the issue. Let's look at the issues in order:
* Habitat loss. We are eliminating the amount of land in which natural species can live and breed. Just like you need room to roam outside your apartments, they need more land than you'd think. But we cut it up with roads and fences and find other ways to squeeze them out.
* Overpopulation. There are too many of us. If any other species grew this fast, and was this numerous at the size we are, we'd kill them off because they would be a cancer onto the earth.
* Land consumption. We are taking up too much land. Land is needed to remain in pristine state as a form of regulatory mechanism, whether forests absorbing carbon or fields of legumes replenishing nutrients. (There are too many instances to count.)
* Species depletion. We are overfishing, we have overhunted, and we have found other ways (habitat loss, toxic pollutants) to kill off other species. This means extinction and loss of segments of the food chain and ecosystem maintenance chains. That's like randomly deleting code from your kernel.
* Pollution. We may be dumping carbon in excess, but we are also dumping everything else: plastics, fertilizers, meds, solvents and toxic chemicals.
The root of our problem is overpopulation, specifically in the third world, and the habitat loss it creates. Drive an SUV if you must -- just leave 100 acres of forested land for the animals. Live in a big house if you must -- just surround it with a few miles of forest, prairie, desert or whatever's natural where you live. But not everyone can do that because not everyone has the money.
We then have two possible solutions:
(1) Reduce everyone to the same uniform level of poverty; equality. (2) Let some be rich and reduce our population so that we can have fewer, but richer and smarter people; natural selection.
The latter is politically unpopular, and so we need a reason to do the former. Global warming because the political symbol designed to justify option #1 -- and that is why the right and anyone else with a working brain is opposing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in 1979, Apple was a hacker company, breaking new ground.
Now they're a boutique. Their products aren't technological innovations, but re-use of existing technology in more comfy or trendy ways.
What computer science breakthroughs occurred with the mp3 player, or tablet?
With comfy/trendy products, you buy status symbols for conspicuous consumption. "Who are you better than?" is the eternal question of the fearful, and buying an iPad makes you for at least six weeks seem a lot cooler than your neighbor without one.
I experience this often: if you go looking for information on a procedure, like tethering a smart phone, you find not one reputable source with all the answers, but hundreds or thousands of competing similar answers.
Each of these misses some vital piece of the information, but has the rest.
It's like life needs an editor or an ego to take in all this great information, filter out the crap and fix the errors, and produce one definitive solution.
Instead we have informational chaos.
Great news! We've found our new test at the polls. Present them with this:
4+3+2=( )+2
And if they cannot correctly evaluate it, pitch their chad/digital vote into the burn bin.
It's a pretty obvious test. Something + something else = Mystery number + the same something else.
If you can't figure it out... well, you're probably better at memorizing facts than thinking.
If we want to avoid letting a strong regulatory body decide, I suggest using civil law to fix the problem of net neutrality:
Allow plaintiffs to claim damages based on the inequality of their traffic.
This way, if Joe Small Site finds out that Crazy Big Network is dropping or delaying his packets, he can sue them.
Fear of lawsuits seems to trump even fear of the death penalty in this country, so it might work...
The rest of the world are rolling their eyes at you.
Oh no! The Crowd disapproves. And they have never, ever been shown to be wrong years after being sure they were right and persecuting all the Galileos they could find.
Right?
This study suggests that iPhone users report more sexual partners.
That doesn't necessarily mean more sex.
One guy who marries a woman, loves her and has mind-blowing sex with her three times a week, is clearly ahead of some guy with an iPhone who had ten one-night stands.
While the prevailing hacker ethic is that "information wants to be free," that doesn't mean those acts do not have consequences.
Dead NATO troops are dead people. Dead local collaborators are dead people. People are dying and more will die because of Wikileaks.
And what was proven by Wikileaks? That all wars have dubious "reasons" except for the basic reason, which is one monkey clobbering another so that a social order stands.
It's a social fashion to oppose anything our governments do, but at least in America, these are my friends and neighbors out there fighting -- and endangered by the Wikileaks document release.
Hang 'em high for treason. Bradley Manning, at least; I don't know where Assange is from but a little time in an American prison should instill in him a healthy respect for the need to fight, or be anally subjugated.
Fisher, an actress who has appeared on the reality TV show "Age of Love" and in softcore porn movies in the 1990s, claimed she felt Hurd pressured her to have sex, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Hurd denied it. Both Hurd and Fisher said there was no sexual relationship.
This looks like classic extortion:
She "felt" he pressured her to have sex?
So one person who probably crazy (actress, reality show) makes an accusation and they fire a quality CEO?
What were they thinking?
I bought a hybrid to show I'm better than you. Even if my parents were a disaster, my grades are bad and my job is so boring a RealDoll would quit, I've now got proof that I'm better than you. Look out there, in the driveway. I'm fighting global warming. And what do YOU do, again?
Yeah, I thought so. I'm much cooler.
If you want to know why the "Information wants to be free" attitude is dying, it is because the Internet has been taken over by business interests; the original network of academics and hackers is just a tiny fraction of what the Internet has now become.
If you want to know why that happened, look at the post-1996 audience for the internet: people who would otherwise be watching television.
They're looking for entertainment and socialization, not "information" in the colloquial sense of knowledge-bearing data.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/02/flynn-flynn-effect-has-reversed-among.html
This makes us wonder if it wasn't a bias artifact to begin with.
Creativity in the USA is declining because the USA is declining and -- the article did not mention this -- the average US IQ has also dropped. We were near Germany's 107 average at the turn of the century but now are probably closer to 98.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
It seems to me that average IQ is the cause of a nation's degree of wealth, not an effect of it. Which came first?
Things that are making college degrees less valuable, and therefore necessary for an even wider range of jobs:
1. High school degrees are now worthless. "Bill showed up for four years."
2. Affirmative action. "Even though Jake got a 950 on his SAT, he can go to Harvard."
3. Grade inflation. "We wanted Suzy to feel on par with her classmates, so the lowest anyone can get is a B."
4. Politicization. "If you want an A in English Literature with Dr. Rosenberg, you'd better write about feminist theories of hermeneutics."
5. Dumbing down. "The staff decided it's too hard to code up a parser on a 64k Apple II, so we're going to start you off on Logo for Windows 7."
Thanks to the feelgood policies of the 1970s, every precious snowflake feels entitled for just showing up. Schools have responded by making sure everyone has a place. The result: college degrees are no longer worth much, since they're easy to get.
Rarity of college degree = value of college degree
It's like having $100. If you give everyone in America an extra $100, the value of your $100 declines because there's more money floating around.
While I believe in science, natural selection/evolution, and in the importance of the scientific method, science is not absolute any more than the Pope is.
Science is made up of scientists. Some of these are fallible; all of them are potentially manipulated by their political views, their in-group interests, and of course self-interest. They can take bribes, payola or simply come up with a "theory" that many people like. They can then sell books, give $10,000 speeches and so on from it.
Scientists need to stop following a political and personal agenda about the following, although the list may be longer:
* Biological diversity;
* IQ and heritability;
* Overpopulation;
* The toxicity of everyday chemicals, and other issues.
The fallout of public deception on those issues is distrust of "scientism," or a religious belief in science. Not all science is good science.
The climate change debate has been politicized from the beginning, and it's unclear that one side is at fault. Many people however distrust the METHODS of solving the problem that went along with the diagnosis.
Science needs to rebuild faith in its work by being more accurate, not avoiding taboos and sticking to experimental rigor instead of political agendas.
In my electronics box I found:
* Disk labels for an Apple ][e
* PC/XT to PS/2 keyboard converters
* PS/2 to USB keyboard converters
* A 14.4k modem
* A chip extractor tool
* A laplink cable
Archaic, but small enough to overlook for another decade. I put it all back of course.
Only Perl is true!
Linux itself is well established and basically a fulfillment of the UNIX idea, borrowing from other flavors of UNIX (yes, I know Linux is not UNIX). The real world is going on with specialized distributions, and distributions specialized for tools like FreeNAS (which is BSD, but you get the idea).
Send pictures of your dong to Microsoft now!
Ban all that offends.
Ban all that might hurt.
Restrain the stupid from doing things that might hurt themselves, and also restrain the smart from doing anything similar.
Soon, we will be perfectly safe because our activities will be as standardized as production in factories.
How boring. It's what I don't like about GUIs: they are so eager to "hide complexity" that they also tie your hands when you need to execute any complex task outside what 90% of the users are doing 90% of the time.
Good. Now we can end racism and breed everyone into one uniform Grey Race that will be the future of humankind. We will preserve diversity by creating uniformity. It will be a victory for equality!
Yes, clearly the human species needs more distance from reality. It's not like ignoring reality created all of our problems so far.
Windows persists because it's designed to be a desktop operating system. Linux is an adaptation of a server operating system. All of the software is there in Windows, and it has the nifty interface and a company backing it up by writing professional documentation, hordes of device drivers, and being there to issue updates in a timely manner.
No offense intended to the Ubuntu folks, but there's a reason the market often beats the volunteer efforts: it can pay for in addition to inspiring great performance. Open source can inspire great performance by individuals, but what makes a great OS is more than good code; it's good interface design, support and really boring work like driver development.
In addition, while I use KDE and like it, I'm never going to fool myself into thinking this software matches professional level stuff. Even Office 2007 beats the pants off Open Office, Abiword, and Kwrite, hands down. There simply is no competition once you get past the "one page document" stage.
I will always have a FreeBSD machine at home to play with. But I wouldn't want to drop it into an office. For all its flaws, Windows makes desktop computing tasks easy, fast and relatively reliable.
They've found a backdoor around it: either you pay for the new, expedited, luxury internet, or you and the other slow sites can molder on page 41 of a Google search.
Please make sure my kids can see all the anal porn, racism, bomb-making instructions and meth recipes possible. Thanks!
People in the country own more land.
But they use fewer resources.
Your land use is not just your dwelling. It's roads, hospitals, schools, stores, bars, gov't agencies and so forth.
If anything, cities use more land because they offer more services and cater to people who want more things like fast food, nail polishing, designer haircuts, etc.
How this idiotic and unscientific article got on the front page of Slashdot... I'm guessing it's just an easy pitch for troll batting practice.
Human impact on the environment has multiple consequences. Climate change, while one of them, is not the whole of the issue. Let's look at the issues in order:
* Habitat loss. We are eliminating the amount of land in which natural species can live and breed. Just like you need room to roam outside your apartments, they need more land than you'd think. But we cut it up with roads and fences and find other ways to squeeze them out.
* Overpopulation. There are too many of us. If any other species grew this fast, and was this numerous at the size we are, we'd kill them off because they would be a cancer onto the earth.
* Land consumption. We are taking up too much land. Land is needed to remain in pristine state as a form of regulatory mechanism, whether forests absorbing carbon or fields of legumes replenishing nutrients. (There are too many instances to count.)
* Species depletion. We are overfishing, we have overhunted, and we have found other ways (habitat loss, toxic pollutants) to kill off other species. This means extinction and loss of segments of the food chain and ecosystem maintenance chains. That's like randomly deleting code from your kernel.
* Pollution. We may be dumping carbon in excess, but we are also dumping everything else: plastics, fertilizers, meds, solvents and toxic chemicals.
The root of our problem is overpopulation, specifically in the third world, and the habitat loss it creates. Drive an SUV if you must -- just leave 100 acres of forested land for the animals. Live in a big house if you must -- just surround it with a few miles of forest, prairie, desert or whatever's natural where you live. But not everyone can do that because not everyone has the money.
We then have two possible solutions:
(1) Reduce everyone to the same uniform level of poverty; equality.
(2) Let some be rich and reduce our population so that we can have fewer, but richer and smarter people; natural selection.
The latter is politically unpopular, and so we need a reason to do the former. Global warming because the political symbol designed to justify option #1 -- and that is why the right and anyone else with a working brain is opposing it.