This is interesting. Moore's Law has become so internalized that my current computer's absolute speed is irrelevant. What's relevant is how fast it is compared to the average speed. This determines whether I'm capable of running cutting-edge apps or only allowed to web surf.
CEOs and such always say, "give me the top-of-the-line." Joe consumer says, "I just want something that can take care of the basics." So given these consumer scenarios, it makes sense to mask the actual guts of the machine and just give it a level rating. (maybe provide a software that gauges the level, so that pre-owned models, when re-sold, get calibrated).
Also, this is important because there are so many numbers these days--megs of ram, gigaflops, gigaherz, bus speed--that it's hard to tell whether the latest iMac G5 is a higher class than my current custom-built workstation. By certain numbers, like Ghz etc., gigaflops whatever, theirs is faster. But based on my tests of trying to open and close Photoshop CS, my old AMD 2000+ does it in half the speed.
IMHO, I think the best IT marketers have to be cut from the cloth of a computer nerd.
Because every great killer app does not begin in the mind of a creative marketer or exec, but in some small script or some small app that some hacker/nerd put together to take care of something he immediately needed.
Think about. Every single useful app, I bet, has its ancestry hidden in the roots of some hacker who did it for free.
This doesn't mean all computer nerds make good marketers, but that computer nerds do have the vision to see new openings for products and features. The market can only complain about today, but it really cannot tell you what it will need tomorrow.
volunteer work is always biased in favor of satisfice of the creator and to the consumer.
corporate work is always biased in favor of the bottom line, which is more correlated to the favor of the consumer than volunteer work.
this bias cannot be overcome without selling out or drastically changing the way humans behavior works.
sorry.
When Dean's winning, we have a group of pundits saying "this changes everything." Now that he's out, we have pundit saying, "this changes nothing."
It's interesting how truth enters the noosphere. Ppl are like bits, believing one simplistic statement or another. When enough ppl believe a certain statement, poof, that becomes reality.
For example, the Earth is round. I have no evidence to believe that, but it has such a saturation, 99.999999% that it IS truth.
religion only has 75% saturation, perhaps, so this is still to be determined, but a "probably" to most people.
just interesting to see this kind of memetics.
Most ppl chiming in on this here too are participating in pundtry and picking a simplistic argument.
How about Tetrinet? I remember socializing a lot with that. No headset though.
Or just play a game with them and be on the phone with them at the same time... I rememember back in 1996, being on the phone for hours with a buddy while were playing Quake.
- Philosophistry
1) First, hackers are heroes to the tech community. Actually, hackers are heroes in a all communities. Keaneu Reeves in the Matrix, Matthew Broderick in WarGames, Ed Furlong in T2, and the guys from Office Space. There is something about sticking it to the man through technology. One because you don't see the victim as you would when someone robs a liquor store, two because there is no physical violence, and three if its done against a major corporation then it's like they deserve it somehow. Plus there is the whole "concentrated gain, dispersed loss" thing For a big telco, three phreakers using free service does not dent their pocket book but certainly helps the attackers.
2) It's in a foreign country. Americans have a numbness to foreign pain. Look how the 20,000 large death toll from Iranian's earthquake did not rattle Americans. So when we hear about Israelis getting hacked by blind Palestinians we are equally passive, especially since many feel the Israeli's deserve it in someway.
3) Their blind and they're overcoming challenge.
"People said that God cursed our mother by giving her three blind sons," recalls Ramy. "Children beat us on the backs of our legs. Those abuses left scars on our hearts. But they also forced us to grow stronger."
When you hear that it cannot help but make you feel proud for these guys. Overcoming their obstacle of blindness is just amazing in general. It's a testament to human resilience and therefore the type of story that inspires hope--something much needed in our outsourcing-paranoid IT workers.
If these were, on the other hand, three blind robbers in San Francisco who stole purses from Old Grannies, yeah, this wouldn't get the same coverage.
This was in 1996, I was 14, and I registered gamespotlight.com. I then e-mailed gamespot.com and asked them if they had a problem with it, and they said in fact they did (I was surprised for some reason). They offered to pay me to transfer the domain name, and rather than taking the money, I just did it for free: back then internic let you transfer domains because of trademark disputes for free.
The good deed was graciously recieved. After meeting up with some of the guys at E3, GameSpot then offered me a paid summer internship in San Francisco when I was 16.
Do we have privacy in public transit? We buy tickets and have schedules that can determine precisely where you are and at what speed you are going.
Likewise, maybe we should view driving in the same light.
Why should we view driving as a public affair? Well, because we all depend on it, the government pays for the roads (tracks) and other electronic equipment to keep it safe. Also, it kills many citizens every year. It is of public interest.
A lot of slashdotters are all about public transit anyways, isn't tracking automobiles as the same as tracking cars that go on railroad tracks?
Plus, when we have automated guidance systems, we'll need these kind of monitoring anyways.
This seems useful to me. Back when I did more programming, if I had a perl question or what not, I'd first go to IRC and ask around, and one time out of four, I'd get a decent response. I think it would be nice to search through stuff like that.
Already Google is used for searching archived tech support in the form of forums; web forums however are not the end all be all for that kind of stuff.
Why can't we treat companies like people? If a friend of your group all of a sudden has all this money, but abuses it by playing little Napoleon, why can't you treat him with disrespect and ostracize him?
When AOL needed help setting up their blogging software, who did they talk to? People like Dave Winer and other members of the net community.
So shouldn't there be some sort of Karma here where we, the blogging community, ostracize a bad player. They do it to spammers all the time, why not to the big guys. They'll eventually realize that it's not profitable to do so, and conform.
We could choose to disallow AOL urls into weblogs. We could prevent anybody with an AOL account having an RSS feed to a Blogger or LiveJournal. We could ban them from our conferences. Sounds like we're being assholes or "closed" by doing so, but I think it's important for people to check the bully to in the long-term enable the most openess possible.
Man, what's wrong with the ppl on here. SUVs suck, cellphone's suck, anything new and shiny sucks... but I uphold Linux like a religion and am anti DMCA anti PATRIOT act... it's like a hypocritical unabomber here...
Anyways. Having cell phones on planes would rock! Most of the time I'm there, nestled between two big, depressed guys, who would want nothing better to do that just like be depressed, smelly, and put their arms on my armrest. So I'm there, bored from the crap I'm reading, and want to start conversations with these ppl, at least, to remove the burden of suffering that I'm under right then... but no, they don't even want to talk!
Now, if I had my cell phones, I could be in touch with my family, loved ones, friends, etc... and then the 4-hour plane ride from coast-to-coast wouldn't be such a drag... having no cellphones on the plane is like asking ppl to not speak in the car while daddy's busy driving.
Nerds whine about the Internet like men whine about annoying girlfriends. Sure, when you first met her, it was fun. You were making out, running your own free IRC servers on corporate T1s and using Napster. Then you started to get STDs, e-mail viruses, and pop-ups. Other parties all of a sudden became interested in your affairs such as parents asking for grandchildren and IPOs. Eventually, you realized that love is truly blind, as the dot-coms busted. Love was something that had to be paid for, i.e. iTunes. And that love involved, among other things, the law.
The Internet is not perfect, it's not all that bad. It can be gerat at times, and at other times it's a nuisance. What we all realize is that we can't live without it, and so we're pissed off when a part of our lives is far from ideal. Nonetheless, an air of detachment might help. Be practical, the Internet is just another tool for what you want to do: entertainment, communication, productivity. You can use or misuse it and nobody is forcing it down your throat. It feels that way though, because it has become habit, but an air of detachment is helpful.
I feel that the Register is putting too much emphasis on the negative aspects of blogging. Blogging is a legitamite way to help rank pages. Upper 10% intelligent people who mine the web everyday discern their favorite sites, take the effort to put it on a site, and as a result, should be given credit for making the quality of google searches what it is.
I agree, there may be cases where this clique will help links bubble up that only satisfy their specific needs. But aren't they customers too? I bet Blog writers use google more than anybody else. Also, can't they come up with a compromise like just discounting blogs' PR value? Rather than separating them as a sort of "bastard part of the net" why not just put a discount value or some diminishing function on the number of blogs that point to a certain site.
I agree journals have become something separate than plain old web pages. But they shouldn't be written out completely or shunned into their own separate space. The voices of the bloggers matter in the value of the content that bubbles up, they're not just a "bunch of kids" linking for "vanity" and participating in some "fad" like the stodgies would like to have you believe.
Why is this even a question? Why is this even up for debate?
Let me take a stab here. All music should be free. Besides the "law," artists shouldn't be compensated for their music. Do we compensate picasso everytime someone looks at a digital version of his paintings on line? Even if his family is, WHO CARES?!
They say, there will be no incentive for artists to make music. Well damn, if money's the incentive behind the music I have, I'd rather not listen to it.
The idea that money is the source of art stinks. The idea that money is the way to get access to art stinks.
- philipd
Let's get with the times.
Education shouldn't have to be paid for but freely given. Any idea that a limited set of chosen people get the chance to then pay large amounts of money in order to get the keys to more money and more "chosen"-ness, that's whack. No matter how much affirmative action you put in there, it's never going to be fair one way or the other. It's getting harder, so just give the education for free. Information's ultimate goal is to be free, can't you get that!?
As for the Olympics, eventually that has to become an obsolete relic. History will eventually write it off as a thermometor of natural selection's greatest muscular, muscular-coordinative, and muscular-coordinative-motivational synthesis. Once robots, GMs, etc.. are marching around, the Olympics will be an improper gauge of world progress as A) nobody will care about that specific arena B) the physical achievents of the unmodified will look like a wading pool compared to what the modified will be able to do.
Okay, if this is truly expected to work, it begs the question why hasn't its nonexistent ancestor ever worked? Why isn't there a business model where I can just get paid for my spare CPU cycles. Why give the money to the muscians. Just give it to me.
Because such a thing hasn't been made by our uber-fast progress of dot-com creation, then most likely, it doesn't work.
Suicide is the true mark of an advanced civilization
- philipd
This is like all those companies who base everything on "personalization modules" or "customizable agents" that are supposed to alert you to coupons when you pass by movie theaters. People have been talking about making these "tailored" or "push" like experiences for years with nothing to show. I hate guided tours, why do I want a computer attempting to kiss my ass everywhere I turn. I spank that computer's ass and tell it what to do. Not vice-versa.
- philipd Suicide is the true mark of an advanced civilization
Unfortunately because there's no external pressure to strive for innovative improvements, it's no surprise that OSS stagnates when it comes to creating "features." The OSS nerds pour their heart out on OSS mostly because of the programming gestalt that comes from making elegant code. The MS nerds, on the other hand, probably have a stronger motivation coming from fear of losing their job and therefore their survival, and as a result, seek new features.
- philipd
Do you have a link to the essay you wrote? I would like to read it.
- philipd
Re:Best part - REAL cost of Windows being exposed
on
AOL's new Linux PC
·
· Score: 1
Man, I never thought of it this way. But the price of windows is 50% the price of the whole Lindows machine. Shows the considerable disparity between the value of hardware and software.
Slashdot Mirror
I've read this all over the place. Can't somebody do a "for example" or something of what would be a sample prize for?
This is interesting. Moore's Law has become so internalized that my current computer's absolute speed is irrelevant. What's relevant is how fast it is compared to the average speed. This determines whether I'm capable of running cutting-edge apps or only allowed to web surf.
CEOs and such always say, "give me the top-of-the-line." Joe consumer says, "I just want something that can take care of the basics." So given these consumer scenarios, it makes sense to mask the actual guts of the machine and just give it a level rating. (maybe provide a software that gauges the level, so that pre-owned models, when re-sold, get calibrated).
Also, this is important because there are so many numbers these days--megs of ram, gigaflops, gigaherz, bus speed--that it's hard to tell whether the latest iMac G5 is a higher class than my current custom-built workstation. By certain numbers, like Ghz etc., gigaflops whatever, theirs is faster. But based on my tests of trying to open and close Photoshop CS, my old AMD 2000+ does it in half the speed.
IMHO, I think the best IT marketers have to be cut from the cloth of a computer nerd.
Because every great killer app does not begin in the mind of a creative marketer or exec, but in some small script or some small app that some hacker/nerd put together to take care of something he immediately needed.
Think about. Every single useful app, I bet, has its ancestry hidden in the roots of some hacker who did it for free.
This doesn't mean all computer nerds make good marketers, but that computer nerds do have the vision to see new openings for products and features. The market can only complain about today, but it really cannot tell you what it will need tomorrow.
volunteer work is always biased in favor of satisfice of the creator and to the consumer. corporate work is always biased in favor of the bottom line, which is more correlated to the favor of the consumer than volunteer work. this bias cannot be overcome without selling out or drastically changing the way humans behavior works. sorry.
When Dean's winning, we have a group of pundits saying "this changes everything." Now that he's out, we have pundit saying, "this changes nothing." It's interesting how truth enters the noosphere. Ppl are like bits, believing one simplistic statement or another. When enough ppl believe a certain statement, poof, that becomes reality. For example, the Earth is round. I have no evidence to believe that, but it has such a saturation, 99.999999% that it IS truth. religion only has 75% saturation, perhaps, so this is still to be determined, but a "probably" to most people. just interesting to see this kind of memetics. Most ppl chiming in on this here too are participating in pundtry and picking a simplistic argument.
Wow, I've been so influenced by /. that as I read the parent I thought it was Microsoft not McDonald's.
The only problem with penny e-mail postage stamps is when you need to send a newsletter to 100,000 subscribers.
RSS solves that by creating a new medium for opt-in mass e-mailings, allowing e-mail to diverge into pay-per-play e-mails.
Plus RSS and regular e-mail can appear in the same inbox, thus making the transition seamless.
How about Tetrinet? I remember socializing a lot with that. No headset though. Or just play a game with them and be on the phone with them at the same time... I rememember back in 1996, being on the phone for hours with a buddy while were playing Quake. - Philosophistry
1) First, hackers are heroes to the tech community. Actually, hackers are heroes in a all communities. Keaneu Reeves in the Matrix, Matthew Broderick in WarGames, Ed Furlong in T2, and the guys from Office Space. There is something about sticking it to the man through technology. One because you don't see the victim as you would when someone robs a liquor store, two because there is no physical violence, and three if its done against a major corporation then it's like they deserve it somehow. Plus there is the whole "concentrated gain, dispersed loss" thing For a big telco, three phreakers using free service does not dent their pocket book but certainly helps the attackers.
2) It's in a foreign country. Americans have a numbness to foreign pain. Look how the 20,000 large death toll from Iranian's earthquake did not rattle Americans. So when we hear about Israelis getting hacked by blind Palestinians we are equally passive, especially since many feel the Israeli's deserve it in someway.
3) Their blind and they're overcoming challenge.
"People said that God cursed our mother by giving her three blind sons," recalls Ramy. "Children beat us on the backs of our legs. Those abuses left scars on our hearts. But they also forced us to grow stronger."
When you hear that it cannot help but make you feel proud for these guys. Overcoming their obstacle of blindness is just amazing in general. It's a testament to human resilience and therefore the type of story that inspires hope--something much needed in our outsourcing-paranoid IT workers.
If these were, on the other hand, three blind robbers in San Francisco who stole purses from Old Grannies, yeah, this wouldn't get the same coverage.
This was in 1996, I was 14, and I registered gamespotlight.com. I then e-mailed gamespot.com and asked them if they had a problem with it, and they said in fact they did (I was surprised for some reason). They offered to pay me to transfer the domain name, and rather than taking the money, I just did it for free: back then internic let you transfer domains because of trademark disputes for free.
The good deed was graciously recieved. After meeting up with some of the guys at E3, GameSpot then offered me a paid summer internship in San Francisco when I was 16.
Bam! Those were the good ol' days.
- Philosopistry
Do you mind if I reprint this on my blog, Philosophistry
Do we have privacy in public transit? We buy tickets and have schedules that can determine precisely where you are and at what speed you are going.
Likewise, maybe we should view driving in the same light.
Why should we view driving as a public affair? Well, because we all depend on it, the government pays for the roads (tracks) and other electronic equipment to keep it safe. Also, it kills many citizens every year. It is of public interest.
A lot of slashdotters are all about public transit anyways, isn't tracking automobiles as the same as tracking cars that go on railroad tracks?
Plus, when we have automated guidance systems, we'll need these kind of monitoring anyways.
- Philosophistry
This seems useful to me. Back when I did more programming, if I had a perl question or what not, I'd first go to IRC and ask around, and one time out of four, I'd get a decent response. I think it would be nice to search through stuff like that.
Already Google is used for searching archived tech support in the form of forums; web forums however are not the end all be all for that kind of stuff.
+1 Usefulish
When AOL needed help setting up their blogging software, who did they talk to? People like Dave Winer and other members of the net community.
So shouldn't there be some sort of Karma here where we, the blogging community, ostracize a bad player. They do it to spammers all the time, why not to the big guys. They'll eventually realize that it's not profitable to do so, and conform.
We could choose to disallow AOL urls into weblogs. We could prevent anybody with an AOL account having an RSS feed to a Blogger or LiveJournal. We could ban them from our conferences. Sounds like we're being assholes or "closed" by doing so, but I think it's important for people to check the bully to in the long-term enable the most openess possible.
Man, what's wrong with the ppl on here. SUVs suck, cellphone's suck, anything new and shiny sucks... but I uphold Linux like a religion and am anti DMCA anti PATRIOT act... it's like a hypocritical unabomber here...
Anyways. Having cell phones on planes would rock! Most of the time I'm there, nestled between two big, depressed guys, who would want nothing better to do that just like be depressed, smelly, and put their arms on my armrest. So I'm there, bored from the crap I'm reading, and want to start conversations with these ppl, at least, to remove the burden of suffering that I'm under right then... but no, they don't even want to talk!
Now, if I had my cell phones, I could be in touch with my family, loved ones, friends, etc... and then the 4-hour plane ride from coast-to-coast wouldn't be such a drag... having no cellphones on the plane is like asking ppl to not speak in the car while daddy's busy driving.
It's a TRAP!
Nerds whine about the Internet like men whine about annoying girlfriends. Sure, when you first met her, it was fun. You were making out, running your own free IRC servers on corporate T1s and using Napster. Then you started to get STDs, e-mail viruses, and pop-ups. Other parties all of a sudden became interested in your affairs such as parents asking for grandchildren and IPOs. Eventually, you realized that love is truly blind, as the dot-coms busted. Love was something that had to be paid for, i.e. iTunes. And that love involved, among other things, the law.
The Internet is not perfect, it's not all that bad. It can be gerat at times, and at other times it's a nuisance. What we all realize is that we can't live without it, and so we're pissed off when a part of our lives is far from ideal. Nonetheless, an air of detachment might help. Be practical, the Internet is just another tool for what you want to do: entertainment, communication, productivity. You can use or misuse it and nobody is forcing it down your throat. It feels that way though, because it has become habit, but an air of detachment is helpful.
I feel that the Register is putting too much emphasis on the negative aspects of blogging. Blogging is a legitamite way to help rank pages. Upper 10% intelligent people who mine the web everyday discern their favorite sites, take the effort to put it on a site, and as a result, should be given credit for making the quality of google searches what it is. I agree, there may be cases where this clique will help links bubble up that only satisfy their specific needs. But aren't they customers too? I bet Blog writers use google more than anybody else. Also, can't they come up with a compromise like just discounting blogs' PR value? Rather than separating them as a sort of "bastard part of the net" why not just put a discount value or some diminishing function on the number of blogs that point to a certain site. I agree journals have become something separate than plain old web pages. But they shouldn't be written out completely or shunned into their own separate space. The voices of the bloggers matter in the value of the content that bubbles up, they're not just a "bunch of kids" linking for "vanity" and participating in some "fad" like the stodgies would like to have you believe.
Why is this even a question? Why is this even up for debate? Let me take a stab here. All music should be free. Besides the "law," artists shouldn't be compensated for their music. Do we compensate picasso everytime someone looks at a digital version of his paintings on line? Even if his family is, WHO CARES?! They say, there will be no incentive for artists to make music. Well damn, if money's the incentive behind the music I have, I'd rather not listen to it. The idea that money is the source of art stinks. The idea that money is the way to get access to art stinks. - philipd
As for the Olympics, eventually that has to become an obsolete relic. History will eventually write it off as a thermometor of natural selection's greatest muscular, muscular-coordinative, and muscular-coordinative-motivational synthesis. Once robots, GMs, etc.. are marching around, the Olympics will be an improper gauge of world progress as A) nobody will care about that specific arena B) the physical achievents of the unmodified will look like a wading pool compared to what the modified will be able to do.
Because such a thing hasn't been made by our uber-fast progress of dot-com creation, then most likely, it doesn't work.
Suicide is the true mark of an advanced civilization - philipd
- philipd
Suicide is the true mark of an advanced civilization
Unfortunately because there's no external pressure to strive for innovative improvements, it's no surprise that OSS stagnates when it comes to creating "features." The OSS nerds pour their heart out on OSS mostly because of the programming gestalt that comes from making elegant code. The MS nerds, on the other hand, probably have a stronger motivation coming from fear of losing their job and therefore their survival, and as a result, seek new features. - philipd
Do you have a link to the essay you wrote? I would like to read it.
- philipd
Man, I never thought of it this way. But the price of windows is 50% the price of the whole Lindows machine. Shows the considerable disparity between the value of hardware and software.