I've seen a number of stories in the media about vista and none of them bring up DRM at all. By far the most important change from a user's perspective and no one wants to talk about.
... why not Luxembourg? With a population of only 465,000 we'd made a majority of the population and be able to form a governmenmt.
For starters because Luxembourg won't let you move in and get citizenship all that easily.
And the population is rich enough to enforce their will: Pretty much every adult is an officer of several international corporations, at some serious pay each. This is because Luxembourg's laws make it advantageous to headquarter there, but require at least one citizen as a major officer.
Besides: Taking over by settling creates serious (sometimes deadly) opposition from those already there who FORMERLY ran their own government.
If you want to create a settlement where you can run your own government up to a significant level, try Oregon. If they remain true to their history, once you've established a significant colony of like-minded people, if you have a beef with the rest of your county they'll split it and give you your own county composed of you and your like-minded settlers. Then you can elect your own supervisors and sheriff, tax each other, maintain the roads your way, etc.
(Which is what makes the Ragneeshi's attempted takeover of Wasco county - by food-poisoning a salad bar at a local restaurant shortly before the election - such a stupid move: The state had already offered them a county composed of their own settlement and the roads to it.) -1 Buzzkill
I'm ready to move.So where should we put the city ? Well I was thinking Canada or Europe, heck why not Luxembourg? With a population of only 465,000 we'd made a majority of the population and be able to form a governmenmt.
One issue they mention (and many people here will mention) is
"1) Users who have dynamic IP addresses will likely be counted multiple times, which inflates the number by some amount."
To counteract this once you hit the 6 month mark you simply delete IPs that haven't been used in 1-2 months, by doing that you pratically guarante that whatever number you have is an underestimate and that number becomes a lot more authoritative.
Still it's awesome to see the numbers for Fedora are that high considering the dissapointing Linux penetration I see even among CS people. Heck we could all band together and form our own city! We could call it Fedoraville and our sports teams could compete against our rival city Ubuntuville!!
Regardless of whether or not Bush could have done anything to prevent 9/11 I severely doubt his 9 months of foreign policy actually caused 9/11 (which was probably in the works long before).
Very true. I wasn't pinning the blame of 9-11 on Bush's foreign policy, but pointing out that 9-11 proved that the US is not immune from attack and can not simply "turtle" into our shell.
I fail to see how not taking aggressive international action (not just invading other countries Iraq but exerting significant pressure on their internal politics) could be described as "turtling". The US wasn't attacked because terrorists hate freedom, it was attacked because the US continually, and aggressively, involves itself in Middle Eastern politics. Honestly if the US stopped with Afghanistan then worked to make friends with the Middle East I very much believe that most, if not all of the major attacks against the west (ie train and subway bombings) would not have occurred. Now much of this aggressiveness is due to things like support for Israel which you may believe is a worthy cause, nevertheless that's why Islamic extremists are attacking the West and not countries like China.
What if the US spends less money on defense , and instead behaves less like a dick. Instead we should concentrate on being a little less arrogant, and be more world friendly. Foreign relations has really taken a turn or the worse in the last 6 years or so.
Actually, isolationism was Bush's plan for about the 9 months ranging from January-Sept 11, 2001 (remember that whole "We are not into nation-building" stuff?). It didn't work out to well.
Regardless of whether or not Bush could have done anything to prevent 9/11 I severely doubt his 9 months of foreign policy actually caused 9/11 (which was probably in the works long before).
Aside from the utter impracticality everyones been talking about I don't really see the use. This legisation appears to be targeted directly at sites like http://handsoff.org/blog/, in other words astroturfing. However, I don't see what the 500 reader mark would do other than give a pass to people who are astroturfing, but really suck at it. What kind of sites is the 500 reader mark supposed to protect that wouldn't already be covered by the previous safeguards?
I mean, it's a good metaphor. Regardless of the medium (electrical or optical) the internet really kind of IS a series of tubes of varying capacity, interconnecting a bunch of nodes. Well there are two reasons, first there are metaphors already around that do a better job of explaining how the internet works (such as a series of roadways), there's no real need to invent a new metaphor when the point he was trying to make could have been made more accurately using a very popular existing methaphor. That being said tubes isn't a particularly bad metaphor.
But what was a much bigger cause for ridicule (at least to me) was the rest of the speech which showed he didn't have the slightest clue how the internet works,
"I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially"
I know people can occationally jumble terms but even my parents wouldn't confuse the terms "Internet" and "email". Not to mention the lateness of the email would of had nothing to do with time it took to travel over the internet (unless the email was several gigs large!).
The reason he got so much flack was because he headed the committee that controlled the Internet and knew less about the Internet than the average clueless person. The reason so much was made of tubes is because that's how the media works, "tubes" was the easiest way to refer to the incident, and even if it wasn't the most ridiculous part it's easy to make sound ridiculous in a sound byte.
Metric is nothing special. For example, the meter is based on an erroneous measurement across France. This bad measurement was used to estimate the size of the Earth so that the meter could be claimed to have a tie to the size of the Earth. (which isn't unchanging anyway, even if it were perfectly round!) We might as well use a foot defined as the distance traveled by light in a particular amount of time, with that time amount chosen so that a foot just happens to match King George's foot. Who cares?
It doesn't make one difference whether the meter was originally defined based on some measurement of the Earth or how far some drunk guy missed the outhouse by, what matters is that we now have a standard way of defining it (which we do) so everyone knows exactly what you're talking about when you say something is 2m long.
Base 10 isn't special either. Base 10 is special because it corresponds to the number of fingers and toes we have. I don't know of any research into the matter but I'm sure this helps children learn to count, probably into adulthood it makes people more comfortable in base-10 as opposed to something that doesn't have a parallel in biology.
Now granted base-12 doesn't have one advanatage over base-10, you can divide 12 by 2,3,4,6 while you can only divide 10 by 2,5. However, unless we start breeding for 6-fingered people I believe that the massive predisposition society as a whole has towards base-10 makes it the logical choice for a mesuring system.
Remember there's only so much shame to go around. The fact is there's now thousands of videos on youtube of people doing stuff way more embarrasing than Star Wars means that we're getting past the point of focusing that much attention on a single person. Even if once in a blue moon something goes bigtime like the Stolen Sidekick thing we're beginning to get to the point that we understand that it's not such a big deal and these things go bigtime mostly for their novelty (which will soon ware off). Afterall, if there's a few thousand people doing the exact same thing you can't be that big of a dork. People will snicker at the guy stealing the paper but no one is going to give him harassment like with Sidekick and Star Wars.
I think we're in the process of changing our perceptions of what we consider to be private and what people feel shame over. People put so much of their lives on-line, including a lot of very intimate details, the revelation I have when I read these details isn't "wow! how scandalous!" it's "wow! They're not embarassed to write that... hmm I guess they don't have any reason to be embarassed". Just like how clothing has changed over the years, when everyone starts showing more of themselves those hidden bits aren't quite as important.
The effect of this is we're being exposed to so many different ways of living our lives we're beginning to understand two things. First all those little things we were embarassed about aren't so bad after all. And second, the only real metric for morality is the effect is has on other people.
This is interesting since Fedora Core packages are maintained only by Red Hat employees whereas extras contains both Red Hat and user maintained packages. I wonder if Red Hat will continue to mark a few important packages in the unified repo as Red Hat only, or if they might have more direct leadership over the unified repo than they currently do over extras.
First off, I'm a big supporter of the OLPC project. I think it's a fantastic idea that will do alot of good.
The UI they have created (see video) seems like a strange choice, however. It is a very simple and seemingly restrictive interface. It appears childish and maybe even somewhat insulting to the user. Actually I was quite impressed by the interface. Note that these computers are being put in environments where it's quite possible that there is no one has ever used a computer before. With no one to show them the ropes it's essential that the interface be as simple as possible otherwise the teacher may just decide not to use them.
I thought that the OLPC was supposed to specifically encourage children to (1) truly learn how to use computers (not merely use them as applicances), and (2) encourage them to tinker/modify the system.
With regard to (1) it should be clear that providing a contrived UI specifically tailored to 'kid tasks' may be useful for the first week, but ultimately is a disservice to the children, as they are not learning about the true power and beauty of computers. They are not learning about modern computer capabilities or conventions if they are stuck in a primitive UI.
With regard to (2), my understanding was that Linux was chosen as the OS specifically because it allows for the students to modify, tinker, extent, and customize. The idea was that (unlike with a proprietary OS), they would be able to learn about the inner functions of computers and become truly interested and skilled with computer work. A simplistic UI that hides the true behind-the-scenes working of the computer hardly accomplishes this goal.
I may be mistaken about the UI. Perhaps what we see in the demonstration is an introductory UI that will be used by very young students (with a more normal GUI and system behind the scenes?... accessible to students if they have the desire/skill to use it?). Hopefully that simple UI can be switched to a 'real' UI and this will be done for all but the youngest students.
Kids are very smart... and I believe they would have little trouble dealing with a modern, full-featured UI and OS. So why the simplistic interface? The demo didn't address this but I'm sure there is a way they can customize the system and start tinkering around. However, note that they don't exactly have skilled Linux users on hand so they may want to ensure a certain level of competence before the students starts changing things and possibly make their machine unusable. Current Linux user interfaces simply offer too many ways to shoot yourself. Also note that the point of these machines isn't to teach computer science, but to teach them to use the computer as a tool to access information, a job I think it can do well (from the demo). Also I don't think the interface will be a huge problem in restricting what they'll find out, users who aren't interested in the inner workings will just click along no matter what, but inquisitive users try to find out a little more no matter what UI they're in.
Also rather than learning window managers in order to learn computers one is better off learning user interfaces in general. This computer hsd applications with standard user interfaces (firefox, abiword, etc) and the metaphors the users pick up using these applications will be much more useful than those acquired from a more complicated WM.
Overall I was quite impressed by this demo. I can really see a group of children who have never seen a computer before quickly becoming comfortable, and productive, with this interface.
Maybe it has to do with self defense? In FPS the enemy is usually trying to kill you. In Civ they aren't (if they have a treaty).Still doesn't explain military combat where soldiers have physcological problems after. That may have to do with them starting to rethink their actions (it being real people). Where as in your game you don't rethink them after the fact. Hmm, I can see a self defense angle but I don't think it's the case. In Civ (esp the older versions) even if you had a treaty at the end of the day you were still enemies and only one could triumph.
I think it boils down first to fairness and social contracts, in Civ a treaty means someone is trusting you, if you break that treaty than on a certain level you're violating the rules. In an RPG if I kill a non-hostile NPC I feel like I've just broken a rule (even if there are no negative concequences). This relates to FPS where if I feel I'm doing something that gives me a very unfair advantage (not cheating, more of a really cheap tactic) I may start to feel guilty.
The second factor is on a certain level I consider the computer player to be a living entity. In Civ if I wipe out a civilization I feel to an extent that civilization is alive, if I kill an NPC it feels like killing someone (not very much though:). Not quite sure why I don't feel bad about killing a bad guy NPCs though (could be the fact that they are just evil stereotypes but I do empathise with real people who are generally considered evil). Interestingly in a multiplayer game, where there are definitely intelligent entities behind other players, I feel no moral compunctions about killing since I understand that the controlling intelligence still exists.
We do this all the time. It's called "Conspiracy to commit ZZZZZ". Most often that's 'murder'.
You can plan a murder, buy all the supplies, etc... but take no action and you've still committed a crime.
It's brave, new world out there... There's a critical difference since in that case you're planning an action that will harm someone, therefore you're not imprisoning someone for their thoughts, you're imprisoning them because they intend to harm someone else.
In this case the poster seemed to be suggesting the reason to imprison them was because the thoughts themselves were wrong and worthy of punishment.
I can relate. I know I've always been very hesitant to inflict harm on innocents in video games, heck I don't even break treaties in Civ since I feel bad about doing so. On the other hand I don't feel the slightest moral issues about taking out an enemy in an average FPS.
I also know that in real life I again am much more hesitant than most to inflict injury or inflict any kind of negative concequences to someone than the average person.
I'd be curious to see how much of a corrolation there is between empathy for virtual characters and real people. Not to give any credence to the people who claim that virtual violence make you significantly more prone to real violence, but it would be interesting to see the reactions of non-gamers to virtual situations compared to their reactions with real situations.
Something I've yet to see discussed is how this will impact perception of 'photoshopped' pornography. Right now it is illegal to possess any form of 'child' pornography (rightfully so) - and there have been some defense attempts to show that the images aren't real- they're photoshopped. But if they affect the brain in the same manner... well, I'm certainly not qualified to judge the ramifications. Perhaps steeper sentences will come about- who knows... ? Interesting.
You're basically discussing people being imprisoned on the basis of their thoughts.
I can't believe they left out the enhance functionality, making a someones face from twenty feet away appear crystal clear on a 320x240 ATM camera. The article is about unrealistic interfaces and usability issues that vanish in the movies and TV, image enhancement is unrealistic from a technologic perspective but not from a UI perspective.
"I remember watching "The Lone Gunman" one day (thank God that show didn't make it!) and they needed more processing power to crack a password to take over a hijacked plane. "We could do this if had one of those new Octium 4's!" Well, they get one, right before the plane hits the building, they pull out their existing processor, I assume and Octium 3, and drop in the new Octium 4, without so much as powering the machine off... and BAM! They had their password and saved the plane. Oh, and no processors had any type of thermal anything!"
Nothing odd. On mainframes you can pull complete assembies off, and add without powering down. Some of the old timers here can tell you of hardware that could take almost anything and survive. It's just consumer equipment that has lowered everyone's expectations. Also maybe the Octium 4's had quantum subprocessors which allowed them to crack the password!
To keep this thing ticking over you need full time sys-admins, support teams, server farms, bandwidth and various other reasonably expensive things.
Open Sourcing it would seem to alleviate the expense of the actual game developers, but not much more. I can't load the site right now but I've looked before and that they state in their FAQ that to play on official servers you will have to pay.
Anytime somebody tries to show me a code sample, the first thing I ask them is where they downloaded it from. Seriously, any employer that asks for a code sample has no clue what they're doing. They should put you at a whiteboard with a pen and have you write something on the fly. A whiteboard is a lot different than a computer and all its associated resources. I've seen great coders freeze up when asked to code on a whiteboard and useless people come up with something great, especially when how clever they can be when writing an algorithm isn't what I'm interested in.
Programs are large and very complicated systems, in my opinion a great programmer isn't someone who can write the fastest sort, it's the person with the skill and determination to quickly understand, and extend, large complicated programs.
Thus when interviewing I like to have someone bring in a bit of their code. I then ask them to give an overview of what it does and how it works. I then ask them about how they would go about making a certain change in the requirements. What I'm looking for is how thoroughly they understand the design of the code and how well they can communicate that code to someone else. Even if they did download it they still have to really understand it and that's the hard part.
Any language is only as good as the programmer using it. I actually have a philosophy when writing applications that is almost the complete opposite of that.
Anytime the tool does something that the user doesn't want it's a bug.
This applies to applications, programming languages, heck even cars if you want.
The fact is that if the user gets something they didn't want, no matter how stupidly they tried to use it, the tool still bears some of the blame. I don't care how dumb a thing the user did, there was something there that made them think they could do that and it's a bug.
With programming languages if the language allows the user to create a security hole it's the fault of the language on some level. Sure you can get stupid programmers but blaming the programmer entirely discourages the search for a better language. Yeah if I overrun my array in C it's my fault. But can it be entirely my fault when in Java that same bug wouldn't be a security exploit? Hey, if I drive my car straight off a cliff, is that my fault? Yeah. But a car with a computer failsafe driver wouldn't of gone off the cliff (hey, if two jetliners are on a collision course the computer takes over).
You can never make the perfect tool, even a big green button that will do everything you ever wanted will still have a bunch of people who didn't think to push the button. But it forces you to realize, you can never fix users but you can always fix your code.
The more sensitive among us might think this is a bad thing but it frees up resources for the fittest to become even fitter. Free's up resources? Well in that case we should wipe out every species on the planet except for outselves. Then we'll have an entire planet or resources all to ourselves, sure those resources will be barren wasteland but they'll be all ours!
The strength of an ecosystem is proportional to its diversity. When you eliminate a species from an ecosystem you're not only harming that species but every other species that evolved alongside it and depends on its presence for its own adaptions to help.
Yes I still consider extinction due to human interference to still be "natural selection" of a sort. But its different from the normal kind in two critical ways. First humans driving species to extinction happens WAAAY faster than normal extinction. Normally a species role is slowly marginalized until it finally vanishes, the slow speed allows the surrounding ecosystem to compensate. But with human driven extinction multiple species are wiped out in just a few generations. This leaves a significantly bigger hole in the ecosystem. Secondly, we actually have a lot of control over human driven natural selection, thus if we see our actions harming our ecosystem (an ecosystem we are part of!) the correct response isn't to go "ahh well, I guess that's Darwin" it's to protect those species because we are actually harming ourselves in the process!!
Darwin isn't some guarantee that we'll end up with a healthy ecosystem, it's a description of how species evolve. But we're changing the environment so quickly that a lot of animals (particularly the larger ones) simply don't reproduce fast enough to keep up (including ourselves). Personally I would like to leave my grandchildren the world that millions of years of evolution designed for them. If you think that I'm exaggerating here consider the massive portions or our population with respiratory illnesses such as asthma, you may consider this natural selection though top endurance athletes have a much higher incidence of asthma than the general public (maybe there are some valuable genes that might get thrown out with asthma), or you could consider the fact of sunburn (and skin cancer), doesn't it seem bizarre that we've changed the planet enough so that we can't go outside in the sun for a few hours without harming ourselves?!?
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen a number of stories in the media about vista and none of them bring up DRM at all. By far the most important change from a user's perspective and no one wants to talk about.
For starters because Luxembourg won't let you move in and get citizenship all that easily.
And the population is rich enough to enforce their will: Pretty much every adult is an officer of several international corporations, at some serious pay each. This is because Luxembourg's laws make it advantageous to headquarter there, but require at least one citizen as a major officer.
Besides: Taking over by settling creates serious (sometimes deadly) opposition from those already there who FORMERLY ran their own government.
If you want to create a settlement where you can run your own government up to a significant level, try Oregon. If they remain true to their history, once you've established a significant colony of like-minded people, if you have a beef with the rest of your county they'll split it and give you your own county composed of you and your like-minded settlers. Then you can elect your own supervisors and sheriff, tax each other, maintain the roads your way, etc.
(Which is what makes the Ragneeshi's attempted takeover of Wasco county - by food-poisoning a salad bar at a local restaurant shortly before the election - such a stupid move: The state had already offered them a county composed of their own settlement and the roads to it.) -1 Buzzkill
Welcome to Fedoraland!
One issue they mention (and many people here will mention) is
"1) Users who have dynamic IP addresses will likely be counted multiple times, which inflates the number by some amount."
To counteract this once you hit the 6 month mark you simply delete IPs that haven't been used in 1-2 months, by doing that you pratically guarante that whatever number you have is an underestimate and that number becomes a lot more authoritative.
Still it's awesome to see the numbers for Fedora are that high considering the dissapointing Linux penetration I see even among CS people. Heck we could all band together and form our own city! We could call it Fedoraville and our sports teams could compete against our rival city Ubuntuville!!
They also blocked access to one of their unions websites during a strike.
The Zune has only been out for something like a month and people have just noticed this out now??
Just how unpopular is it?!?
Very true. I wasn't pinning the blame of 9-11 on Bush's foreign policy, but pointing out that 9-11 proved that the US is not immune from attack and can not simply "turtle" into our shell.
I fail to see how not taking aggressive international action (not just invading other countries Iraq but exerting significant pressure on their internal politics) could be described as "turtling". The US wasn't attacked because terrorists hate freedom, it was attacked because the US continually, and aggressively, involves itself in Middle Eastern politics. Honestly if the US stopped with Afghanistan then worked to make friends with the Middle East I very much believe that most, if not all of the major attacks against the west (ie train and subway bombings) would not have occurred. Now much of this aggressiveness is due to things like support for Israel which you may believe is a worthy cause, nevertheless that's why Islamic extremists are attacking the West and not countries like China.
Actually, isolationism was Bush's plan for about the 9 months ranging from January-Sept 11, 2001 (remember that whole "We are not into nation-building" stuff?). It didn't work out to well.
Regardless of whether or not Bush could have done anything to prevent 9/11 I severely doubt his 9 months of foreign policy actually caused 9/11 (which was probably in the works long before).
I'm a bit confused as to the 500 reader mark.
Aside from the utter impracticality everyones been talking about I don't really see the use. This legisation appears to be targeted directly at sites like http://handsoff.org/blog/, in other words astroturfing. However, I don't see what the 500 reader mark would do other than give a pass to people who are astroturfing, but really suck at it. What kind of sites is the 500 reader mark supposed to protect that wouldn't already be covered by the previous safeguards?
But what was a much bigger cause for ridicule (at least to me) was the rest of the speech which showed he didn't have the slightest clue how the internet works,
"I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially"
I know people can occationally jumble terms but even my parents wouldn't confuse the terms "Internet" and "email". Not to mention the lateness of the email would of had nothing to do with time it took to travel over the internet (unless the email was several gigs large!).
The reason he got so much flack was because he headed the committee that controlled the Internet and knew less about the Internet than the average clueless person. The reason so much was made of tubes is because that's how the media works, "tubes" was the easiest way to refer to the incident, and even if it wasn't the most ridiculous part it's easy to make sound ridiculous in a sound byte.
It doesn't make one difference whether the meter was originally defined based on some measurement of the Earth or how far some drunk guy missed the outhouse by, what matters is that we now have a standard way of defining it (which we do) so everyone knows exactly what you're talking about when you say something is 2m long. Base 10 isn't special either. Base 10 is special because it corresponds to the number of fingers and toes we have. I don't know of any research into the matter but I'm sure this helps children learn to count, probably into adulthood it makes people more comfortable in base-10 as opposed to something that doesn't have a parallel in biology.
Now granted base-12 doesn't have one advanatage over base-10, you can divide 12 by 2,3,4,6 while you can only divide 10 by 2,5. However, unless we start breeding for 6-fingered people I believe that the massive predisposition society as a whole has towards base-10 makes it the logical choice for a mesuring system.
How many more Star Wars Kids will we have though?
Remember there's only so much shame to go around. The fact is there's now thousands of videos on youtube of people doing stuff way more embarrasing than Star Wars means that we're getting past the point of focusing that much attention on a single person. Even if once in a blue moon something goes bigtime like the Stolen Sidekick thing we're beginning to get to the point that we understand that it's not such a big deal and these things go bigtime mostly for their novelty (which will soon ware off). Afterall, if there's a few thousand people doing the exact same thing you can't be that big of a dork. People will snicker at the guy stealing the paper but no one is going to give him harassment like with Sidekick and Star Wars.
I think we're in the process of changing our perceptions of what we consider to be private and what people feel shame over. People put so much of their lives on-line, including a lot of very intimate details, the revelation I have when I read these details isn't "wow! how scandalous!" it's "wow! They're not embarassed to write that... hmm I guess they don't have any reason to be embarassed". Just like how clothing has changed over the years, when everyone starts showing more of themselves those hidden bits aren't quite as important.
The effect of this is we're being exposed to so many different ways of living our lives we're beginning to understand two things. First all those little things we were embarassed about aren't so bad after all. And second, the only real metric for morality is the effect is has on other people.
I think these are both good things.
This is interesting since Fedora Core packages are maintained only by Red Hat employees whereas extras contains both Red Hat and user maintained packages. I wonder if Red Hat will continue to mark a few important packages in the unified repo as Red Hat only, or if they might have more direct leadership over the unified repo than they currently do over extras.
The UI they have created (see video) seems like a strange choice, however. It is a very simple and seemingly restrictive interface. It appears childish and maybe even somewhat insulting to the user. Actually I was quite impressed by the interface. Note that these computers are being put in environments where it's quite possible that there is no one has ever used a computer before. With no one to show them the ropes it's essential that the interface be as simple as possible otherwise the teacher may just decide not to use them. I thought that the OLPC was supposed to specifically encourage children to (1) truly learn how to use computers (not merely use them as applicances), and (2) encourage them to tinker/modify the system.
With regard to (1) it should be clear that providing a contrived UI specifically tailored to 'kid tasks' may be useful for the first week, but ultimately is a disservice to the children, as they are not learning about the true power and beauty of computers. They are not learning about modern computer capabilities or conventions if they are stuck in a primitive UI.
With regard to (2), my understanding was that Linux was chosen as the OS specifically because it allows for the students to modify, tinker, extent, and customize. The idea was that (unlike with a proprietary OS), they would be able to learn about the inner functions of computers and become truly interested and skilled with computer work. A simplistic UI that hides the true behind-the-scenes working of the computer hardly accomplishes this goal.
I may be mistaken about the UI. Perhaps what we see in the demonstration is an introductory UI that will be used by very young students (with a more normal GUI and system behind the scenes?
Kids are very smart... and I believe they would have little trouble dealing with a modern, full-featured UI and OS. So why the simplistic interface? The demo didn't address this but I'm sure there is a way they can customize the system and start tinkering around. However, note that they don't exactly have skilled Linux users on hand so they may want to ensure a certain level of competence before the students starts changing things and possibly make their machine unusable. Current Linux user interfaces simply offer too many ways to shoot yourself. Also note that the point of these machines isn't to teach computer science, but to teach them to use the computer as a tool to access information, a job I think it can do well (from the demo). Also I don't think the interface will be a huge problem in restricting what they'll find out, users who aren't interested in the inner workings will just click along no matter what, but inquisitive users try to find out a little more no matter what UI they're in.
Also rather than learning window managers in order to learn computers one is better off learning user interfaces in general. This computer hsd applications with standard user interfaces (firefox, abiword, etc) and the metaphors the users pick up using these applications will be much more useful than those acquired from a more complicated WM.
Overall I was quite impressed by this demo. I can really see a group of children who have never seen a computer before quickly becoming comfortable, and productive, with this interface.
I think it boils down first to fairness and social contracts, in Civ a treaty means someone is trusting you, if you break that treaty than on a certain level you're violating the rules. In an RPG if I kill a non-hostile NPC I feel like I've just broken a rule (even if there are no negative concequences). This relates to FPS where if I feel I'm doing something that gives me a very unfair advantage (not cheating, more of a really cheap tactic) I may start to feel guilty.
The second factor is on a certain level I consider the computer player to be a living entity. In Civ if I wipe out a civilization I feel to an extent that civilization is alive, if I kill an NPC it feels like killing someone (not very much though
You can plan a murder, buy all the supplies, etc... but take no action and you've still committed a crime.
It's brave, new world out there... There's a critical difference since in that case you're planning an action that will harm someone, therefore you're not imprisoning someone for their thoughts, you're imprisoning them because they intend to harm someone else.
In this case the poster seemed to be suggesting the reason to imprison them was because the thoughts themselves were wrong and worthy of punishment.
I can relate. I know I've always been very hesitant to inflict harm on innocents in video games, heck I don't even break treaties in Civ since I feel bad about doing so. On the other hand I don't feel the slightest moral issues about taking out an enemy in an average FPS.
I also know that in real life I again am much more hesitant than most to inflict injury or inflict any kind of negative concequences to someone than the average person.
I'd be curious to see how much of a corrolation there is between empathy for virtual characters and real people. Not to give any credence to the people who claim that virtual violence make you significantly more prone to real violence, but it would be interesting to see the reactions of non-gamers to virtual situations compared to their reactions with real situations.
You're basically discussing people being imprisoned on the basis of their thoughts.
Nothing odd. On mainframes you can pull complete assembies off, and add without powering down. Some of the old timers here can tell you of hardware that could take almost anything and survive. It's just consumer equipment that has lowered everyone's expectations. Also maybe the Octium 4's had quantum subprocessors which allowed them to crack the password!
Open Sourcing it would seem to alleviate the expense of the actual game developers, but not much more. I can't load the site right now but I've looked before and that they state in their FAQ that to play on official servers you will have to pay.
Programs are large and very complicated systems, in my opinion a great programmer isn't someone who can write the fastest sort, it's the person with the skill and determination to quickly understand, and extend, large complicated programs.
Thus when interviewing I like to have someone bring in a bit of their code. I then ask them to give an overview of what it does and how it works. I then ask them about how they would go about making a certain change in the requirements. What I'm looking for is how thoroughly they understand the design of the code and how well they can communicate that code to someone else. Even if they did download it they still have to really understand it and that's the hard part.
Anytime the tool does something that the user doesn't want it's a bug.
This applies to applications, programming languages, heck even cars if you want.
The fact is that if the user gets something they didn't want, no matter how stupidly they tried to use it, the tool still bears some of the blame. I don't care how dumb a thing the user did, there was something there that made them think they could do that and it's a bug.
With programming languages if the language allows the user to create a security hole it's the fault of the language on some level. Sure you can get stupid programmers but blaming the programmer entirely discourages the search for a better language. Yeah if I overrun my array in C it's my fault. But can it be entirely my fault when in Java that same bug wouldn't be a security exploit? Hey, if I drive my car straight off a cliff, is that my fault? Yeah. But a car with a computer failsafe driver wouldn't of gone off the cliff (hey, if two jetliners are on a collision course the computer takes over).
You can never make the perfect tool, even a big green button that will do everything you ever wanted will still have a bunch of people who didn't think to push the button. But it forces you to realize, you can never fix users but you can always fix your code.
The strength of an ecosystem is proportional to its diversity. When you eliminate a species from an ecosystem you're not only harming that species but every other species that evolved alongside it and depends on its presence for its own adaptions to help.
Yes I still consider extinction due to human interference to still be "natural selection" of a sort. But its different from the normal kind in two critical ways. First humans driving species to extinction happens WAAAY faster than normal extinction. Normally a species role is slowly marginalized until it finally vanishes, the slow speed allows the surrounding ecosystem to compensate. But with human driven extinction multiple species are wiped out in just a few generations. This leaves a significantly bigger hole in the ecosystem. Secondly, we actually have a lot of control over human driven natural selection, thus if we see our actions harming our ecosystem (an ecosystem we are part of!) the correct response isn't to go "ahh well, I guess that's Darwin" it's to protect those species because we are actually harming ourselves in the process!!
Darwin isn't some guarantee that we'll end up with a healthy ecosystem, it's a description of how species evolve. But we're changing the environment so quickly that a lot of animals (particularly the larger ones) simply don't reproduce fast enough to keep up (including ourselves). Personally I would like to leave my grandchildren the world that millions of years of evolution designed for them. If you think that I'm exaggerating here consider the massive portions or our population with respiratory illnesses such as asthma, you may consider this natural selection though top endurance athletes have a much higher incidence of asthma than the general public (maybe there are some valuable genes that might get thrown out with asthma), or you could consider the fact of sunburn (and skin cancer), doesn't it seem bizarre that we've changed the planet enough so that we can't go outside in the sun for a few hours without harming ourselves?!?