Interesting side effect of the difference in AC power frequencies between US (60 Hz) and Europe (50 Hz). I recall reading about a study that asked groups of participants to mediate and then collectively hum a tone of "primal unity"
The USian group centred on a B-flat (multiple of 60 Hz), while the Europeans centred on an A-natural (multiple of 50 Hz).
Hardly qualifies as a controlled study. But still suggestive that the background EMF frequency and device hum has some unconcious influence on the psyche?
Don't forget These guys, who have copyrighted all of the phone numbers, due to their being expressed as musicall melodies/compositions on a touch-tone phone.
I'd call (202) 456-1414 to complain, but the RIAA would then be after me.
I always thought that POET was renamed for the USian market, to make it sound less intimidating. Similar to the way Harry Potter's "philosopher's stone" (which actually has historical meaning) was dumbed down to "sourcerer's stone" to sound less intimidating to USian masses.
The temperature data for the past earth shows wide/rapid swings and periodicity on a number of timescales. Depending on the window you adopt, you can find data to support/refute just about any position you'd like to make a political case for.
Interesting article with an enlightening series of graphs can be found here
Strength - A property of materials under elastic deformation, meaning the degree to which the material bends under load, and then springs back to its original shape. At sufficiently high loading, the material deforms plastically, meaning it stays bent. Strong materials deflect very little under load (low strain per unit stress), and can take high loads before plastic deformation occurs.
Toughness - A property of materials that contain microcracks or other fracture-inducing characteristics. Such flaws cause localized increases in stress levels and thereby cause fractures to expand until the material fails catastrophically. This is the mechanism underlying stress-corrosion cracking and fretting fatigue. Tough materials do not have high localizes stress at crack tips, and can tolerate microcracks without catastrophic propagation and failure.
Hardness - The strength of a material at its surface. Measured empircally by poking it with sharp objects. Hard materials resist scratches and dents. But whether they deform (elastically or plastically) has nothing to do with their hardness. It has to do we their bulk strength.
What new managers and future-PHBs knew but all-too-quickly forget is that geeks really do know what is possible and what is not, and when they tell you what is Good from the tech point of view, you should listen real hard.
What techies who abhor management don't know, or at least fail to appreciate sufficiently, is that running a company involves all sorts of real-world trade-offs, and that technological Goodness is just one of dozens of factors that go into business decision-making. Having the best technology or product was never a recipe to business success (and the resulting ability to continue to pay techies and buy new toys).
Upshot: when the techies tell you how long something will take, believe them. Don't arbitrarily shorten the schedule to please the Big Boss. Have the guts to tell senior management the truth (this is the essence of "standing up for your people"). But when the realities of business balancing acts turns unfavourable to the techies (eg, top management says "no" to GPL code), try to explain the rationale and legitimate logic of the decision. Corollary: if there isn't valid logic to explain, then you've failed at the "tell the boss the truth" step.
More to the point about "napsterization" of video content, there are starting to emerge companies that are providing non-DRM solutions to allow free unrestricted file sharing of TV and movie programming.
We keep talking on/. about the stoopid record industry and how they just don't get that file locking via DRM and subscription models are Bad Ideas (TM). Maybe the video folks can actually learn from their mistakes.
What I like about these emerging solutions is how they address the underlying "business model" issues - instead of blindly trusting in DRM. Just maybe they will come to understand that you aren't going to get consumers to pay for the online content - get over it. Now what?
Omigod, I find myself agreeing with most of what JonKatz is saying.
Sure the web has changed some human behavious (or more precisely, changed the way we instantiate the same old behaviours), but changed the very nature of life? Not likely. What seems to have changed is the amount of bathwater being consumed by the technocultural press
To address the e-bay examples used:
- Space. eBay is a Web space that occupies no space, whose links are based not on contiguity but on human interest. eBay demonstrates that the geography of the Web is as ephemeral as human interest iself, each of us looking across the space that is eBay and seeing vastly different landscapes -- of games, quilts, Star Wars memorabilia, battery chargers.
Relationships based on human interest, not contiguity? That would mean I'd have to leave home to make friends
- Time. The real world, Weinberger says, is a series of ticks to which schedules are tied. As he investigated different kinds of eBay auctions, checking back every few hours to see if he'd been outbid on quilts, "I felt as if I were returning to a story that was in progress, waiting for me whenever I wanted. I could break off in the middle when, for example, my son came home, and go back whenever I wanted."
Like a book, perhaps? Or stepping out of a meeting room for a while? Imagine that, life continues while you do other things, and you can later rejoin.
- Self. Buyers and sellers on eBay adopt a name by which they will be known. The real world person behind the handle firewife30 may have other eBay identities, as well. Unlike non-virtual selves, these eBay selves are intermittent and, most important, they are in writing.
RPG. Or even the fact that although I know the JonKatz id and the inimitable writing style, does anyone really know the full person?
- Knowledge. Weinberger began his eBay experience ignorant about quilts. But he learned by listening to other quilters and wound up knowing quite a bit.
Like being a newbie who joins a club? The end of life as we know it (TM)
Seems we all agree that one major item for govt wishlist would be a mechanism to hold software vendors accountable when they willfully neglect basic security in their products. (Microsoft Outlook and IIS, are you listening?)
Legislatively, this is probably most easily dealt with under commercial law/UCC as a "fitness for use" issue. I buy some piece of internet software, I expect it to provide internet functionality without endangering my system through obvious security vulnerabilities. Software that fails to abide by this is simply unfit for purpose.
Why introduce any new laws? Simply enforce this one. If there is some loophole that exempts software form fitness requirements (IANAL), then cl,ose the loophole - don't replicate the law's effect with yet another law enacting a software-specific concept of commercial fitness.
Things "get into" the office environment when they make business sense to do so. Which happens when the benefits exceed the costs, the reward exceeds the risk, and when these are exceeded by an amount greater than the next best alternative.
In the case of office platforms, the big "corporate IT" issue re this analysis in representing the complete true costs - Total Cost of Ownership - which includes the relative expense of good Unix sysadmins or the cost of retraining Win admins (clue injection), the cost of managing the environments, the cost of supporting moronic end users, the costs of reduced application availability (sure you can have a nice GUI, but where's the Linux industrial-strength Accounts Payable system?), or of building interfaces to whatever the rest of the world uses (eg., the cost of reverse engineering.doc format for word processing). The actual cost of the OS (free beer) is almost irrelevant.
On the risk side, corporate IT departments value stability of the infrastructure above all. So, the corporate IT folks are herd-following conformists. No one will move to Linux office until everyone else does. And there will have to be a huge TCO advantage before that inertia gets overcome.
It's actually a rational position, but not very cool or fun. Sticking with the herd, and moving en masse with the herd has advanatges. The herd is big enough that it gets what it wants: robust techinical support, business applications developed for the platform of their choice, peer groups and conferences in Boca Raton, whatever.
Of course, you lose out on the advanatges of doing something different/better than competitors. It all depends on what you value more.
(PHB off)
Just kidding of course. This was posted from a Linux system hiding in a 50,000 person company.
As we come full circle...
on
Electronic Abacus
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
1. How can robotic action teach us about human relations? Humans are so much more complicated than capacitors...
What a non sequitur. From "humans are complicated" it follows that nothing can be learned from simplifications? Kinda refutes 400 years of scientific progress, huh? The whole point is that nature is complex, and that only by isolating subphenomena can we attempt to undersnatnd their individual operations. And finally, we can re combined the isolated parts to being to understand the holistic interactions and interdependencies.
2. Humans are so much more complicated than capacitors, circuits and processing units. Without meaning to trigger another flame war between the AI camps, this statement is observably false. Humans are instantiated as physcial objects, subject to the same physics as other collections of electrical, emchanical, chemical processes. The interesting distinction arise from level of complexity.
Speed is of no interest wrt scientific objectives (although it may be of some value in engineering - the application of scientific knowledge for practical benefit). The biggest problem in trying to figure out how the world works, and get some reliable "knowledge", is that nature is extremely subtle and we humans are very good at fooling ourselves into believing our latest theories are actually true descriptions of nature. Hence the rigorous insistence on peer review as just one more mechanism to try to ensure researchers are not inadvertently deluding themselves.
I can't understand why anyone would think "It's the age-old debate". Seems crystal clear to me that the value of science as a method of generating knowledge lies in not making errors (and does not lie in making errors quickly).
Re-read The Feynman Lectures for a refresher on this?
I thought the one clear prediction Star Trek made around e-books was their rejection. Starship captains always made such a big deal about having genuine leather-bound books for their pleasure reading. Sure, e-books are fine as a query interface to a computer system, or as a data capture device. But nobody wants to use them for reading. Thirty years later the e-book makers still don't get it. Just maybe there's more to "reading a book" than the viewing of text on a page-by-page basis?
Digitally capture those current film stars who, let's face it, just can't act worth a damn. They've got box-office appeal due to looks or fame carried over from another arena (musicians, wrestlers, etc). Now we have the technology to give them the acting talent they so sorely lack.
I was going to name the specific "actors" I was proposing - but it seems unkind. They are so lame, they're sitting ducks.
Good on ya, EFF. But I can't help but think eventually even the RIAA will figure out that playing legal "whack-a-mole" with P2P network providers is a losing proposition. I just hope the MPAA is a little more clued-in and doesn't take so long in dicking around with lawsuits and/or DRM subscription services that nobody's gonna use.
This recent article on Wired seems to offer some hope that the music industry is starting to get a clue that the sustainable solution to the piracy threat is in co-option of the existence if P2P networks. It's in the creation of business models (ugh, sounds like MBA-speak) that accept that file sharing is here to stay, and seek new ways to still make a fair $ return.
I don't know what I think about the "jiveplayer.com" approach that EMI is taking. I'm willing to accept some degree of correctly targeted ads and deep site links, to offset the cost of truly free content sharing. But maybe it's just a new attempt to scam a buck that otherwise might actual flow to the artists?
So when we boil down this analysis of H vs other energy sources, what do we get?
Some axioms:
- There are no energy sources, just temporary energy storage forms. The only true energy source on earth is sunlight.
- Every use of energy creates some form of "pollution" (1st law of thermodynamics). What differs is how much, how unpleasant it is for humans, at where it is created. (eg, electric cars still create air pollution, but it is moved back to the generating station, instead of the car tailpipe)
- Every conversion of energy from one form to another is lossy (3rd law of thermo). And constitutes a "use" of energy, which creates "pollution".
So, the real questions about comparing energy sources amount to these criteria:
- What does it cost us to find and access the stored energy?
- How easy/cheap is it to convert the stored energy into a useful form (eg, rotational kinetic energy of a car driveshaft)?
- How efficient is that conversion? How much of the sourced energy is lost as general thermal radiation (ie, friciton losses, i^2r transmission line losses, etc)
- Doing so creates what form of pollution, in what amounts, and at what locations?
- How politically acceptable is that particular pollution arrangement? Who benefits, who suffers?
Slashdot Mirror
The USian group centred on a B-flat (multiple of 60 Hz), while the Europeans centred on an A-natural (multiple of 50 Hz).
Hardly qualifies as a controlled study. But still suggestive that the background EMF frequency and device hum has some unconcious influence on the psyche?
I'd call (202) 456-1414 to complain, but the RIAA would then be after me.
Of course, the design challenge with pencils is what happens when they break. Broken lead tips and cedar shavings in zero-g can be troublesome.
I always thought that POET was renamed for the USian market, to make it sound less intimidating. Similar to the way Harry Potter's "philosopher's stone" (which actually has historical meaning) was dumbed down to "sourcerer's stone" to sound less intimidating to USian masses.
And conversely, when they say something won't happen within a long time frame, it almost certainly will.
Sorry, but I can't remember the correct attribution for this observation - some SF writer no doubt. Perhaps another ./er remembers who?
- Office doors are helpful
- It's easier to read someone's screen when sitting beside them, than when shoulder-surfing
- Natural light is good
- Window view is nice
- Programmers like foosball and other dot-com era goodies
I must have missed the "bionic" part.
- social science
- creation science
(asbestos suit on)
- computer science
Bill Beatty started the conversation on this phenomonon, and the use of antiwaves to cancel it. You can read it and view the animations here
Interesting article with an enlightening series of graphs can be found here
Btu I'm dsexyilc, you issveniitne cold!
Which is just a branch of atomic physics.
Which is just a branch of subatomic physics.
Which is just a branch of quantum mechanics.
Which is just a branch of psychology.
Which is just a branch of biology.
Which is just a branch of chemistry.
Which is...
Uhmm. Nevermind.
Strength - A property of materials under elastic deformation, meaning the degree to which the material bends under load, and then springs back to its original shape. At sufficiently high loading, the material deforms plastically, meaning it stays bent. Strong materials deflect very little under load (low strain per unit stress), and can take high loads before plastic deformation occurs.
Toughness - A property of materials that contain microcracks or other fracture-inducing characteristics. Such flaws cause localized increases in stress levels and thereby cause fractures to expand until the material fails catastrophically. This is the mechanism underlying stress-corrosion cracking and fretting fatigue. Tough materials do not have high localizes stress at crack tips, and can tolerate microcracks without catastrophic propagation and failure.
Hardness - The strength of a material at its surface. Measured empircally by poking it with sharp objects. Hard materials resist scratches and dents. But whether they deform (elastically or plastically) has nothing to do with their hardness. It has to do we their bulk strength.
What new managers and future-PHBs knew but all-too-quickly forget is that geeks really do know what is possible and what is not, and when they tell you what is Good from the tech point of view, you should listen real hard.
What techies who abhor management don't know, or at least fail to appreciate sufficiently, is that running a company involves all sorts of real-world trade-offs, and that technological Goodness is just one of dozens of factors that go into business decision-making. Having the best technology or product was never a recipe to business success (and the resulting ability to continue to pay techies and buy new toys).
Upshot: when the techies tell you how long something will take, believe them. Don't arbitrarily shorten the schedule to please the Big Boss. Have the guts to tell senior management the truth (this is the essence of "standing up for your people"). But when the realities of business balancing acts turns unfavourable to the techies (eg, top management says "no" to GPL code), try to explain the rationale and legitimate logic of the decision. Corollary: if there isn't valid logic to explain, then you've failed at the "tell the boss the truth" step.
We keep talking on /. about the stoopid record industry and how they just don't get that file locking via DRM and subscription models are Bad Ideas (TM). Maybe the video folks can actually learn from their mistakes.
What I like about these emerging solutions is how they address the underlying "business model" issues - instead of blindly trusting in DRM. Just maybe they will come to understand that you aren't going to get consumers to pay for the online content - get over it. Now what?
Sure the web has changed some human behavious (or more precisely, changed the way we instantiate the same old behaviours), but changed the very nature of life? Not likely. What seems to have changed is the amount of bathwater being consumed by the technocultural press
To address the e-bay examples used:
- Space. eBay is a Web space that occupies no space, whose links are based not on contiguity but on human interest. eBay demonstrates that the geography of the Web is as ephemeral as human interest iself, each of us looking across the space that is eBay and seeing vastly different landscapes -- of games, quilts, Star Wars memorabilia, battery chargers.
Relationships based on human interest, not contiguity? That would mean I'd have to leave home to make friends
- Time. The real world, Weinberger says, is a series of ticks to which schedules are tied. As he investigated different kinds of eBay auctions, checking back every few hours to see if he'd been outbid on quilts, "I felt as if I were returning to a story that was in progress, waiting for me whenever I wanted. I could break off in the middle when, for example, my son came home, and go back whenever I wanted."
Like a book, perhaps? Or stepping out of a meeting room for a while? Imagine that, life continues while you do other things, and you can later rejoin.
- Self. Buyers and sellers on eBay adopt a name by which they will be known. The real world person behind the handle firewife30 may have other eBay identities, as well. Unlike non-virtual selves, these eBay selves are intermittent and, most important, they are in writing.
RPG. Or even the fact that although I know the JonKatz id and the inimitable writing style, does anyone really know the full person?
- Knowledge. Weinberger began his eBay experience ignorant about quilts. But he learned by listening to other quilters and wound up knowing quite a bit.
Like being a newbie who joins a club? The end of life as we know it (TM)
Legislatively, this is probably most easily dealt with under commercial law/UCC as a "fitness for use" issue. I buy some piece of internet software, I expect it to provide internet functionality without endangering my system through obvious security vulnerabilities. Software that fails to abide by this is simply unfit for purpose.
Why introduce any new laws? Simply enforce this one. If there is some loophole that exempts software form fitness requirements (IANAL), then cl,ose the loophole - don't replicate the law's effect with yet another law enacting a software-specific concept of commercial fitness.
Things "get into" the office environment when they make business sense to do so. Which happens when the benefits exceed the costs, the reward exceeds the risk, and when these are exceeded by an amount greater than the next best alternative.
In the case of office platforms, the big "corporate IT" issue re this analysis in representing the complete true costs - Total Cost of Ownership - which includes the relative expense of good Unix sysadmins or the cost of retraining Win admins (clue injection), the cost of managing the environments, the cost of supporting moronic end users, the costs of reduced application availability (sure you can have a nice GUI, but where's the Linux industrial-strength Accounts Payable system?), or of building interfaces to whatever the rest of the world uses (eg., the cost of reverse engineering .doc format for word processing). The actual cost of the OS (free beer) is almost irrelevant.
On the risk side, corporate IT departments value stability of the infrastructure above all. So, the corporate IT folks are herd-following conformists. No one will move to Linux office until everyone else does. And there will have to be a huge TCO advantage before that inertia gets overcome.
It's actually a rational position, but not very cool or fun. Sticking with the herd, and moving en masse with the herd has advanatges. The herd is big enough that it gets what it wants: robust techinical support, business applications developed for the platform of their choice, peer groups and conferences in Boca Raton, whatever.
Of course, you lose out on the advanatges of doing something different/better than competitors. It all depends on what you value more.
(PHB off)
Just kidding of course. This was posted from a Linux system hiding in a 50,000 person company.
- Giant central computor (cool spelling, wot?)
- DP department of technocrats
- Mega systems development
- Unresponsive DP, unsatisfied business users
- Guerilla IT, illicit PCs
- RYO IT infrastructure
- Lack of professional systems admin
- Chaos and incompatibility
- Power grab by IT folks
- PC becomes fat client
- Fat client becomes thin
- Thin client becomes NC or ZAW
- Becomes dumb terminal on giant computer
GOTO TOP
My mother ordered 2 of them.
- Woody Allen
What a non sequitur. From "humans are complicated" it follows that nothing can be learned from simplifications? Kinda refutes 400 years of scientific progress, huh? The whole point is that nature is complex, and that only by isolating subphenomena can we attempt to undersnatnd their individual operations. And finally, we can re combined the isolated parts to being to understand the holistic interactions and interdependencies.
2. Humans are so much more complicated than capacitors, circuits and processing units. Without meaning to trigger another flame war between the AI camps, this statement is observably false. Humans are instantiated as physcial objects, subject to the same physics as other collections of electrical, emchanical, chemical processes. The interesting distinction arise from level of complexity.
Speed is of no interest wrt scientific objectives (although it may be of some value in engineering - the application of scientific knowledge for practical benefit). The biggest problem in trying to figure out how the world works, and get some reliable "knowledge", is that nature is extremely subtle and we humans are very good at fooling ourselves into believing our latest theories are actually true descriptions of nature. Hence the rigorous insistence on peer review as just one more mechanism to try to ensure researchers are not inadvertently deluding themselves.
I can't understand why anyone would think "It's the age-old debate". Seems crystal clear to me that the value of science as a method of generating knowledge lies in not making errors (and does not lie in making errors quickly).
Re-read The Feynman Lectures for a refresher on this?
I thought the one clear prediction Star Trek made around e-books was their rejection. Starship captains always made such a big deal about having genuine leather-bound books for their pleasure reading. Sure, e-books are fine as a query interface to a computer system, or as a data capture device. But nobody wants to use them for reading. Thirty years later the e-book makers still don't get it. Just maybe there's more to "reading a book" than the viewing of text on a page-by-page basis?
I was going to name the specific "actors" I was proposing - but it seems unkind. They are so lame, they're sitting ducks.
This recent article on Wired seems to offer some hope that the music industry is starting to get a clue that the sustainable solution to the piracy threat is in co-option of the existence if P2P networks. It's in the creation of business models (ugh, sounds like MBA-speak) that accept that file sharing is here to stay, and seek new ways to still make a fair $ return.
I don't know what I think about the "jiveplayer.com" approach that EMI is taking. I'm willing to accept some degree of correctly targeted ads and deep site links, to offset the cost of truly free content sharing. But maybe it's just a new attempt to scam a buck that otherwise might actual flow to the artists?
Some axioms:
- There are no energy sources, just temporary energy storage forms. The only true energy source on earth is sunlight.
- Every use of energy creates some form of "pollution" (1st law of thermodynamics). What differs is how much, how unpleasant it is for humans, at where it is created. (eg, electric cars still create air pollution, but it is moved back to the generating station, instead of the car tailpipe)
- Every conversion of energy from one form to another is lossy (3rd law of thermo). And constitutes a "use" of energy, which creates "pollution".
So, the real questions about comparing energy sources amount to these criteria:
- What does it cost us to find and access the stored energy?
- How easy/cheap is it to convert the stored energy into a useful form (eg, rotational kinetic energy of a car driveshaft)?
- How efficient is that conversion? How much of the sourced energy is lost as general thermal radiation (ie, friciton losses, i^2r transmission line losses, etc)
- Doing so creates what form of pollution, in what amounts, and at what locations?
- How politically acceptable is that particular pollution arrangement? Who benefits, who suffers?