Linux needs solutions providers - one company that sells the hardware, the operating system and the support. Someone the government can call if it breaks and say "fix it!" - and have someone working on it less than 4 hours later. If some Linux company can provide that, then we have a chance.
...if anyone's getting inspired by this...
...I'm thinking any company like that will probably be immediately and consistently assaulted by "the enemy."
The concept being discussed is to introduce new facilities to create new jobs. (at least as I understood it -- I read the article pretty quickly, because I had to pee:-) )
So obviously, there's a new expense, but it's not in re-training the workers, but in training them to begin with, which would be necessary anyway (if that -- there are lots of unemployed, yet skilled tech people out there, no?).
The plan makes the government look good, for creating jobs, it makes "us" happy, for promoting open source development, and (IAN an economist, mind you) makes for a better economy (locally and beyond (?)), with the lower unemployment and all.
I agree that coding for the government could offer some pretty dull projects. But the private sector can, too. Even in school, you can run into some very inane projects that are time-consuming and teach you little to nothing. If there was a reasearch facility, though, for the government, that was offering me a job, that's already more interesting.
Not necessarily better, but, I think, potentially so.
the Web these days is mostly about sex, free news, entertainment and retailing"
This is an opinon, not a fact.
What you get out of the web is (usually) exactly what you're looking for from it.
I can see how Mr. Katz can theorize that the web is mostly about these things if they're what he uses it for. But, as for myself: the web is a resource for information (and not necessarily news). And I'm sure others have different views.
The point is: the web, by its very nature, isn't about anything. It's a medium.
the Web these days is mostly about sex, free news, entertainment and retailing
This is an opinon, not a fact. What you get out of the web is (usually) exactly what you're looking for from it. I can see how Mr. Katz can theorize that the web is mostly about these things if they're what he uses it for. But, as for myself: the web is a resource for information (and not necessarily news). And I'm sure others have different views. The point is: the web, by its very nature, isn't about anything. It's a medium.
The interesting aspect of it is that it is such a far-reaching and innovative medium, which, as it sounds, is what the book is about. (I have not read the book, though, so I will not talk on it. Although, I have my doubts as to whether Katz has actually read it...)
---
David Weinberger, one of the co-authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual, is one of many celebrated practitioners of what loosely came to be known as cybertheory. The Manifesto began with the memorable phrase "People of Earth" and was "aimed squarely at the solar plexus of corporate America," one reviewer alleged. (You remember those days. Everything about the Net was aimed at the solar plexus of one thing or another). The book purported to show how the Internet was turning business upside down. But that, of course, was then, and this is now. Nobody seems to have noticed that if anything has been turned upside down, it's the Net. Weinberger has struck again in his new book Small Pieces Loosely Joined, (Perseus) a "unified theory of the Web." This time, the Web is changing life itself. Is he on the same Web? Mostly, what this book suggests is the end of CyberBS. And good riddance. Small Pieces Loosely Joined
author David Weinberger
pages 211
publisher Perseus
rating 4/10
reviewer Jon Katz
ISBN 0-7382-0543-5
summary the Web is changing life itself
Despite the staggering amount of hype everyone has had to endure (and some of us have contributed to), Weinberger's premise is that the Web hasn't been hyped enough. The Web, he claims, is not only altering social institutions like business and government, but transforming fundamental concepts of our culture: space, time, reality itself.
This is the sort of stuff that gets publishers, media people and academics breathing heavily, even though reality suggests that a) it simply isn't so, and b) such declarations are the intellectual equivalent of tech support: the more deeply you look, the less seems to be there. The outside world continues to see the Net as an atom-smashing alien force, when it is, in fact, a transforming technology whose future nature and impact remains unclear. There is the persistent belief out there that for the Net and the Web to be interesting, they must be portrayed as changing everything about everything, and the search for the seer who can explain how has been relentless, although not by the book-buying public. This has given rise to a whole genre of Cyber BS.
Weinberger is obviously bright and observant. And he's quite correct in suggesting that the hyperlinking era the Web begins is astounding, even revolutionary. But is it changing the nature of our lives? Decide for yourselves.
Weinberger proposes four concepts (plus the nature of life itself) that the Web is altering: he uses eBay as an illustration.
- 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.
- 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."
- 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.
- Knowledge. Weinberger began his eBay experience ignorant about quilts. But he learned by listening to other quilters and wound up knowing quite a bit.
The upshot? "If a simple auction at eBay is based on new assumptions about space, time, self and knowledge, the Web is more than a place for disturbed teen-agers to try out roles and more than a good place to buy cheap quilts."
The Web has sent an enormous jolt through our culture, he continues, zapping our economy, our ideas about the sharing of creative works, possibly even our institutions such as religion and government. Suppose that the Web is a new world we're just beginning to inhabit. We can't characterize ourselves without simultaneously drawing a picture of how the world seems to us, Weinberger says, nor can we describe our world without describing the type of people we are. If we are entering a new world, then we are also becoming new people.
Heady stuff. Weinberger, an NPR commentator and the publisher of JOHO (Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization) understands hyperlinks and their stunning impact. It isn't as if his observations are wrong. The things he sees are new, interesting and significant.
But his book also reminds us that this age of Cybertheorizing began to die with the demise of the original Wired. This is bad news for over-heated tech writers and academics feasting on cyber-culture courses. In case Weinberger hasn't noticed -- and he hasn't, if the book is any indication -- the Web these days is mostly about sex, free news, entertainment and retailing. For better or worse, we remain the same people we were. You could argue that the Web has triggered a monumental wave of hostility, self-referential blabber and commercialism. In the post dot-com era, we see that the Net and the Web aren't changing everything about the world, just taking the things people have always liked to do -- shop, read, yak, play, masturbate -- and making them easier. Business and politicians are also drearily unchanged. Even the hackers have been largely tamed by lawsuits and the numerous fences sprouting all over the cyber frontier.
"Once we are on the Web," Weinberger claims, "we find the ground has dropped out from beneath us. The normal constraints, on which we have built the common sense that guides us, fall away. And so we get to improvise and to invent... We are sharing this new world not because we have to but because we want to. We are sharing this world not because we find ourselves next to someone due to the inevitable accident of proximity but because we have chosen to join with someone based on the common ground of shared passions."
Is this your Net, your Web? I don't think so. The ground seems pretty solid where I go, and normal constraints are everywhere.
I'd like to get on Weinberger's Web. The one I can access is increasingly hard-headed and utilitarian, dominated by movie reservatiion sites, customized news delivery, retail ordering, and the ubiquity of digital communications -- mailing lists, e-mail, IM systems. Flamers and spammers have driven many underground, where we communicate in exclusive media more peacefully in peace, but with a less diverse and decidedly non-passionate group of people.
It's too bad, really, but it seems to be the contemporary reality of life online. Small Pieces Loosely Joined is not convincing. The age of the cyber-manifesto is ending. The Web isn't altering the nature of reality. It is, of course, only reflecting.
He bettered it. Made an OS that behaves the same way from scratch and had many people to help improve. That's just my meager understanding, though. I'm not really in the know in that department. (It's a wonder I read/., eh?)
Charging for a "good search" kind of implies a lower quality in the normal search, no?
I'd be very upset if I ran a search on Google (because I'll seldom search on Yahoo!), and it gave me no useful results, but told me that I could pay for actual results. I'd go use something else.
I understand that Yahoo's not making much money offering this service, but changing the original service that made it successuful is probably far from the right way to fix that.
It works the other way around as well, though. Many's the time I get killed by a high-ping player after I think I've gotten around a corner already. On his screen, I haven't, and I'm dead.
The robots will undoubtedly affect the environment. If the engineer(-ing students?) involved do their job correctly, though, they'll minimize potential harmful impact.
Well, you already saw the parts you liked. They were funny, right? Well, good. Isn't that all you need?
When I see a joke in a trailer, even if it is funny, I virtually never laugh at it in the final film, because I know it's coming. You should be happy that the filmmakers filled the running time with fresh material, rather than recycle the stuff they used for the trailer. And as long as the film didn't betray the way the trailer marketed it (which I really doubt), you're not being robbed of anything, because the trailer is probably widely available for d/l.
Should intelligent reviews really get a redundant nod? I'm always eager to hear what intelligent people have to say (even if it is about something trite, like what looks like a forgettable road comedy).
It seems several people are complaining about this post being redundant and "not 'News for Nerds.'" Then don't read it. I, for one, lament the fact that there aren't more posts on Slashdot. I tend to read even the ones that discuss things I know nothing about, because I learn, and because there's always somebody out there who will make me laugh.
As an aside: does it seem to anyone else like Jon Katz just sends these things in and doesn't ever read the responses he gets? Every time the guy makes a post, there are hundreds of people flaming his very existence. That would make me feel kind of unwelcome...
reading this, sitting here at my university, down in the basement of the math building with about 20 servers humming away.
The thing is: wouldn't more bandwitdh raise tuition even more? (It's more than enough now.) If there's a real demand for it, it'll be satisfied. But I'm not so sure there is, considering the cost.
(But I guess many students wouldn't care, just because they don't have to pay tuition, whether due to parents' benevolence or student aid.) *shrug*
Well, if broadband is widely available and not many people are using it, it stands to reason that people do not consider the service to be worth what is currently being charged for it (which is my contention), or that it is simply not a good service (and to say this would be both bogus and sad).
Nothing is holding back broadband; the value of broadband compared to its price is holding people back, from getting broadband. Several people have told me this.
Slashdot Mirror
"Ya, all sorts of horrible things happen to me when companies can't sell my personal information. :)"
Yeah, I might not get all that porno spam that I apparently want.
"The best UI people on the planet are those working in the car industry. "
Too many bugs in the car industry. (Ha!)
(Somebody was gonna say it.)
The best UI people on the planet are those working in the car industry. "
So the people that brought us spoilers and racing stripes should be desinging my OS?
"The best UI people on the planet are those working in the car industry. "
Naw, too many bugs in the car industy.
(Somebody was gonna say it.)
The best UI people on the planet are those working in the car industry.
So people that brought us spoilers and racing stripes should be designing my OS?
Isn't providing the proper contexts for sarcasm vs. genuity (is that a word? it should be.).
Linux needs solutions providers - one company that sells the hardware, the operating system and the support. Someone the government can call if it breaks and say "fix it!" - and have someone working on it less than 4 hours later. If some Linux company can provide that, then we have a chance.
...if anyone's getting inspired by this...
...I'm thinking any company like that will probably be immediately and consistently assaulted by "the enemy."
The concept being discussed is to introduce new facilities to create new jobs. (at least as I understood it -- I read the article pretty quickly, because I had to pee :-) )
/rambling
So obviously, there's a new expense, but it's not in re-training the workers, but in training them to begin with, which would be necessary anyway (if that -- there are lots of unemployed, yet skilled tech people out there, no?).
The plan makes the government look good, for creating jobs, it makes "us" happy, for promoting open source development, and (IAN an economist, mind you) makes for a better economy (locally and beyond (?)), with the lower unemployment and all.
I agree that coding for the government could offer some pretty dull projects. But the private sector can, too. Even in school, you can run into some very inane projects that are time-consuming and teach you little to nothing. If there was a reasearch facility, though, for the government, that was offering me a job, that's already more interesting.
Not necessarily better, but, I think, potentially so.
Because this was a picture Calista Flockhart and not CowboyNeal or Linus or a Linux Penguin.
Heh.
the Web these days is mostly about sex, free news, entertainment and retailing"
This is an opinon, not a fact.
What you get out of the web is (usually) exactly what you're looking for from it.
I can see how Mr. Katz can theorize that the web is mostly about these things if they're what he uses it for. But, as for myself: the web is a resource for information (and not necessarily news). And I'm sure others have different views.
The point is: the web, by its very nature, isn't about anything. It's a medium.
the Web these days is mostly about sex, free news, entertainment and retailing
This is an opinon, not a fact. What you get out of the web is (usually) exactly what you're looking for from it. I can see how Mr. Katz can theorize that the web is mostly about these things if they're what he uses it for. But, as for myself: the web is a resource for information (and not necessarily news). And I'm sure others have different views. The point is: the web, by its very nature, isn't about anything. It's a medium.
The interesting aspect of it is that it is such a far-reaching and innovative medium, which, as it sounds, is what the book is about. (I have not read the book, though, so I will not talk on it. Although, I have my doubts as to whether Katz has actually read it...) --- David Weinberger, one of the co-authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual, is one of many celebrated practitioners of what loosely came to be known as cybertheory. The Manifesto began with the memorable phrase "People of Earth" and was "aimed squarely at the solar plexus of corporate America," one reviewer alleged. (You remember those days. Everything about the Net was aimed at the solar plexus of one thing or another). The book purported to show how the Internet was turning business upside down. But that, of course, was then, and this is now. Nobody seems to have noticed that if anything has been turned upside down, it's the Net. Weinberger has struck again in his new book Small Pieces Loosely Joined, (Perseus) a "unified theory of the Web." This time, the Web is changing life itself. Is he on the same Web? Mostly, what this book suggests is the end of CyberBS. And good riddance. Small Pieces Loosely Joined author David Weinberger pages 211 publisher Perseus rating 4/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-7382-0543-5 summary the Web is changing life itself Despite the staggering amount of hype everyone has had to endure (and some of us have contributed to), Weinberger's premise is that the Web hasn't been hyped enough. The Web, he claims, is not only altering social institutions like business and government, but transforming fundamental concepts of our culture: space, time, reality itself. This is the sort of stuff that gets publishers, media people and academics breathing heavily, even though reality suggests that a) it simply isn't so, and b) such declarations are the intellectual equivalent of tech support: the more deeply you look, the less seems to be there. The outside world continues to see the Net as an atom-smashing alien force, when it is, in fact, a transforming technology whose future nature and impact remains unclear. There is the persistent belief out there that for the Net and the Web to be interesting, they must be portrayed as changing everything about everything, and the search for the seer who can explain how has been relentless, although not by the book-buying public. This has given rise to a whole genre of Cyber BS. Weinberger is obviously bright and observant. And he's quite correct in suggesting that the hyperlinking era the Web begins is astounding, even revolutionary. But is it changing the nature of our lives? Decide for yourselves. Weinberger proposes four concepts (plus the nature of life itself) that the Web is altering: he uses eBay as an illustration. - 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. - 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." - 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. - Knowledge. Weinberger began his eBay experience ignorant about quilts. But he learned by listening to other quilters and wound up knowing quite a bit. The upshot? "If a simple auction at eBay is based on new assumptions about space, time, self and knowledge, the Web is more than a place for disturbed teen-agers to try out roles and more than a good place to buy cheap quilts." The Web has sent an enormous jolt through our culture, he continues, zapping our economy, our ideas about the sharing of creative works, possibly even our institutions such as religion and government. Suppose that the Web is a new world we're just beginning to inhabit. We can't characterize ourselves without simultaneously drawing a picture of how the world seems to us, Weinberger says, nor can we describe our world without describing the type of people we are. If we are entering a new world, then we are also becoming new people. Heady stuff. Weinberger, an NPR commentator and the publisher of JOHO (Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization) understands hyperlinks and their stunning impact. It isn't as if his observations are wrong. The things he sees are new, interesting and significant. But his book also reminds us that this age of Cybertheorizing began to die with the demise of the original Wired. This is bad news for over-heated tech writers and academics feasting on cyber-culture courses. In case Weinberger hasn't noticed -- and he hasn't, if the book is any indication -- the Web these days is mostly about sex, free news, entertainment and retailing. For better or worse, we remain the same people we were. You could argue that the Web has triggered a monumental wave of hostility, self-referential blabber and commercialism. In the post dot-com era, we see that the Net and the Web aren't changing everything about the world, just taking the things people have always liked to do -- shop, read, yak, play, masturbate -- and making them easier. Business and politicians are also drearily unchanged. Even the hackers have been largely tamed by lawsuits and the numerous fences sprouting all over the cyber frontier. "Once we are on the Web," Weinberger claims, "we find the ground has dropped out from beneath us. The normal constraints, on which we have built the common sense that guides us, fall away. And so we get to improvise and to invent... We are sharing this new world not because we have to but because we want to. We are sharing this world not because we find ourselves next to someone due to the inevitable accident of proximity but because we have chosen to join with someone based on the common ground of shared passions." Is this your Net, your Web? I don't think so. The ground seems pretty solid where I go, and normal constraints are everywhere. I'd like to get on Weinberger's Web. The one I can access is increasingly hard-headed and utilitarian, dominated by movie reservatiion sites, customized news delivery, retail ordering, and the ubiquity of digital communications -- mailing lists, e-mail, IM systems. Flamers and spammers have driven many underground, where we communicate in exclusive media more peacefully in peace, but with a less diverse and decidedly non-passionate group of people. It's too bad, really, but it seems to be the contemporary reality of life online. Small Pieces Loosely Joined is not convincing. The age of the cyber-manifesto is ending. The Web isn't altering the nature of reality. It is, of course, only reflecting.
He bettered it. Made an OS that behaves the same way from scratch and had many people to help improve. That's just my meager understanding, though. I'm not really in the know in that department. (It's a wonder I read/., eh?)
...is not about proof anymore. It's about money now.
Charging for a "good search" kind of implies a lower quality in the normal search, no?
I'd be very upset if I ran a search on Google (because I'll seldom search on Yahoo!), and it gave me no useful results, but told me that I could pay for actual results. I'd go use something else.
I understand that Yahoo's not making much money offering this service, but changing the original service that made it successuful is probably far from the right way to fix that.
I thought the new dialogue was excellent -- it was written by Neil Gaiman.
But I can't judge between the two, as I've not (yet?) gotten the chance to see the film with the original dialogue.
I'm giving up my plans to move to China, as of this very minute. Thank you, Slashdot. Thank you.
Here she is at MSNBC.
It works the other way around as well, though. Many's the time I get killed by a high-ping player after I think I've gotten around a corner already. On his screen, I haven't, and I'm dead.
What's a counter-terrorist to do?
The robots will undoubtedly affect the environment. If the engineer(-ing students?) involved do their job correctly, though, they'll minimize potential harmful impact.
Right?
From the article: The fastest PC processors today top out just above 1GHz.
I think I speak for us all when I say:
What?
Well, you already saw the parts you liked. They were funny, right? Well, good. Isn't that all you need?
When I see a joke in a trailer, even if it is funny, I virtually never laugh at it in the final film, because I know it's coming. You should be happy that the filmmakers filled the running time with fresh material, rather than recycle the stuff they used for the trailer. And as long as the film didn't betray the way the trailer marketed it (which I really doubt), you're not being robbed of anything, because the trailer is probably widely available for d/l.
Just some thoughts is all...
Should intelligent reviews really get a redundant nod? I'm always eager to hear what intelligent people have to say (even if it is about something trite, like what looks like a forgettable road comedy).
It seems several people are complaining about this post being redundant and "not 'News for Nerds.'" Then don't read it. I, for one, lament the fact that there aren't more posts on Slashdot. I tend to read even the ones that discuss things I know nothing about, because I learn, and because there's always somebody out there who will make me laugh.
As an aside: does it seem to anyone else like Jon Katz just sends these things in and doesn't ever read the responses he gets? Every time the guy makes a post, there are hundreds of people flaming his very existence. That would make me feel kind of unwelcome...
Hm.
reading this, sitting here at my university, down in the basement of the math building with about 20 servers humming away.
The thing is: wouldn't more bandwitdh raise tuition even more? (It's more than enough now.) If there's a real demand for it, it'll be satisfied. But I'm not so sure there is, considering the cost.
(But I guess many students wouldn't care, just because they don't have to pay tuition, whether due to parents' benevolence or student aid.) *shrug*
Well, if broadband is widely available and not many people are using it, it stands to reason that people do not consider the service to be worth what is currently being charged for it (which is my contention), or that it is simply not a good service (and to say this would be both bogus and sad).
:)
Nothing is holding back broadband; the value of broadband compared to its price is holding people back, from getting broadband. Several people have told me this.
Ah, but once you get it, there's no going back.