I believe the proper response, upon realization that the earth is about to be smashed to bits, is to immediately head down to the pub for a couple of pints.
Either that or wet a towel and wrap it tightly around your head.
And here I thought/. readers were all hardcore Neal Stephenson fans. You ought to go read *Zodiac*, and see if you feel like railing against greenpeace THEN. sheesh.
I definitely agree that the book is an interesting read. Until i came across it, I'd always had the misconception that seafarers could actually determine their relative position to a fixed departure point via the stars. when in fact only the latitude was figurable.
(there is also a description in the book about the rival scheme involving telescopes and star charts fiercely backed by the Royal Astronomer)(can't recall his name -- Maskelyne?)
if you think about it, the pre-Harrison sea captains were a pretty courageous lot -- imagine setting out on a journey and not *really* knowing for sure how far you'd actually travelled! (in terms of degrees of longitude)
OT, but this/. obsession with case modification -- a practice which i can't relate to -- makes me think of the classic story of Andy Ihnakto's 'anti-case-mod':
He did the reverse -- he kept the case intact, but substituted something else more interesting for the innards. Specifically, he made an aquarium out of his old Mac 512. (no pics, but if you hunt around on google there's lots of 'em people have done)
Who needs a fish screensaver when you can have real ones swimming around...
Here in toronto the keynote speaker for CMW (a mildly pretentious and industry-oriented music festival) was moby, a guy who has been successful not so much in making good music but rather for selling snippets from every track of his last album for commercials.
He had, I thought, an interesting and pragmatic take of the future. Especially given that his audience was mostly people in the music industry. He thinks that the ways in which music is made, marketed, distributed, and sold must change radically over the next ten years. He said that bands oriented towards live performances would be successful, citing the Bare Naked Ladies and Nirvana as examples.
The quote that i remember was, "You can't download a concert. You can't download a t-shirt." That is to say, you can't replicate the experience of live music. His follow up comment was, "you can listen to a recording of live music, but compared to being there it's like watching porno in a hotel room instead of actually having sex with someone".
In a way it's like a shift back to Mozart's day -- you had to go around performing and composing prolifically to make a living.
He also noted how the a large chunk of the generation of his 14 year old cousin had "grown up without ever having bought an album. they download everything." So he was trying to make people in the industry aware that a cultural shift is already taking place with respect to consumer's attitudes towards 'ownership' of music.
He also dismissed conventionally 'manufactured pop' and boy bands, and cited himself ironically as an example of an act becoming successful outside of the mainstream labels.
Without us, there is no/. Pay for a subscription to what we are creating? Hell no!
I agree most wholeheartedly Comrade! Slashdot is created by a collective process... but the wealth that results is not shared equally -- the surplus value is being appropriated by pigdog capitalist imperialist corporations! The noble proletariat laborers of slashdot... must rise up and seize control... of the means of production... and abolish that dangerous bourgeois reactionary, JonKatz...
Yes Comrades, the class struggle continues. The only ad banner I need to read is the one that declares, "(A Post) From each according to his ability, (A ModPoint) to each according to his needs."
This discussion reminds me of an interesting article in last month's Wired regarding the standardization of screw threading.
The article relates how William Sellers actively campaigned for his 'Sellers thread' screw to replace the then semi-standard 'Whitworth' screw standard from England.
His thread design was simpler,cheaper and easier to fabricate than the Whitworth design. (analogy here of.txt or.rtf vs.doc). Sellars gave an impassioned speech in 1864 "On a Uniform System of Screw Threads" where he noted "In this country, no organized attempt has as yet been made to establish any system, each manufacturer having adopted whatever his judgment may have dictated as the best, or as most convenient for himself." (sound familiar?)
The article goes on to detail how Sellers had to tap into his political and economic connections in order to create momentum for his standard, which was opposed by many machinists. He first convinced the Navy, then Pennsylvania Railroad, then the Master Car Builder's association. By 1901 the Sellers thread design had become the standard in america.
But (and here's the 'interoperability' part of the analogy) Britain stuck with the Whitworth screw. This didn't create any problems for a long time... until the winter of 1941, when Germany's Afrika Korps started pummelling the Eighth Army in the desert. British tanks and trucks wore out, broke down, etc in the course of war. American factories churned out vehicles and parts for the British. But when the supplies arrived in North Africa... everyone was surprised to discover that American nuts did not fit British bolts.
("crap, that idiot in marketing sent me another unreadable.doc file...")
American factories retooled and ran two separate assembly lines for the rest of the war. In 1948, Britain decided next time, incompatible screws would not be a good reason to risk losing a battle, and adopted the Sellers thread standard.
I thought it was interesting how Microsoft was the only company cited by the article as rejecting Chinese gov't demands:
When Chinese authorities ordered Microsoft to surrender its software's underlying source codes--the keys to encryption--as the price of doing business there, Microsoft chose to fight, spearheading an unprecedented Beijing-based coalition of American, Japanese, and European Chambers of Commerce. Faced with being left behind technologically, the Chinese authorities dropped their demands.
Although presumably in this case, MS's reasons were capitalistically motivated, i.e. protection of IP.
As to the question, 'what if the US decided they needed to monitor citizen internet communications?' Well, who's to say this isn't already occurring...
I guess this IPO won't do that well in Louisiana, where that state's banking regulators have deemed it an unlicensed banking operation.
Monday's filing conceded that the company's regulatory problems in Louisiana might not be isolated. New York has also indicated the company is operating an unlicensed banking operation. Other states that have indicated a need for licensing include Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Massachusetts, Maryland, Texas, Virginia and Vermont.
somewhat offtopic, but the Bruce Sterling/William Gibson collaboration *The Difference Engine* was an interesting alternate history novel, in which a key subplot involved the use of (what were essentially) punchcards.
The idea was that Charles Babbage did construct his Analytical Engine, and from that a steam-driven information age has developed as a result.
CNET had an interesting article about the everquest economy a couple weeks back.
"Based on a review of thousands of completed auctions for "EverQuest" items and in-game currency, Castronova concluded that players earn an average wage of $3.42 for every hour they play the game and collectively produce annual gross "exports" of more than $5 million.
And if the "EverQuest" universe of Norrath were a country, its per-capita gross national product would be $2,266--comparable to the 77th richest country on Earth and ranking it between Russia and Bulgaria. Platinum pieces, the in-game currency known as pp, end up with an exchange rate of about a penny per pp, making "EverQuest" currency more valuable than the Japanese yen and the Spanish peseta. "
The issue with a pure tech approach to tracking ratings (vs. the Neilson approach) is that although you get much better tracking of *what* got watched, you don't get a log of *who* was watching it at the time (i.e. was it mom? dad? the kids? the kids and their friends?), which is an essential component of how Neilson's ratings are sold/used to market advertisements. (i.e. "35% of males aged 18-30 watched program X when star Y was on it, compared to only 20% when star Y was not on it")
alas, here in Canada (at least in this chunk of SW Ontario), we never get to see the superbowl ads in the first place, 'cause they're typically substituted for cheesy local advertising by the Canadian broadcasters showing the event.
here's the CRTC's lousy explanation. (the CRTC is i guess a loathesome canuck version of the FCC, except considerably more pretentious and out of touch with reality.)
apple's big brother? sock puppets? anti-terrorism? nope, more like just another "Leon's No Money Down Miracle Event!". (and no, my building doesn't allow satellite dishes)
The other severely annoying bit that they mess around with is virtual ads. Basically, the broadcaster superimposes logos and other teeny corporate markers over top of crowds, the first down line, and billboard shots. It's usually quite glaring.
i just wish they would broadcast an unadulterated signal!!!
...it costs more than its weight in gold to put something in orbit.
So I guess if you put some gold in orbit, then it would be free since the gold would be weightless.:-)
(my snarky OT way of commenting, when we're talking about launch costs, it should be in dollars per unit of mass. get with the future baby, it's metric!) (something that still seems to be a problem at NASA; certain Mars probes come to mind...)
There is definitely an argument to be made in favor of trying to do a quiet rollout.
This allows them to work out the kinks, and figure out where they're going to have problems as they scale up.
They only need to look at the Japanese experience with 3G. NTT DoCoMo's FOMA system, which claims to be the first "true" 3G network (though technically the South Koreans have 1XRTT, over which it's debatable whether it's 3G or 2.5G) has been plagued by technical problems.
Much better to work the major issues out discreetly, rather than jumping the gun and having to endure months of newspaper headlines shouting "Verizon's 3G network suffers problems".
As a side example to this discussion of 'what constitutes a large database', the NOAA's National Climate Data Centre maintains a database of digital data of about a petabyte of climatological data. The Centre takes in about a quarter of a terabyte of data *daily*.
Kahle's idea is actually quite reminiscent of Vannevar Bush's seminal 1945 description in The Atlantic Monthly of the memex, a device that would "give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages".
The frequency with which this article (the Bush article, that is) has been cited in hypertext research attests to its importance.
I am sure there are bigger systems out there (e.g. Wal-Mart's or GM's ERP systems come to mind)
Just to nitpick, in the interview Mr. Kahle does explicitly mention that the database is in fact bigger than Walmart's. No mention is made of GM's, however.
"It's larger than Walmart's, American Express', the IRS. It's the largest database ever built. "
he says. Whether the claim is credible is a different matter.
Slashdot Mirror
than CRTs to throw off the tops of buildings.
note: use extreme caution and some common sense when throwing anything from a rooftop.
I believe the proper response, upon realization that the earth is about to be smashed to bits, is to immediately head down to the pub for a couple of pints.
Either that or wet a towel and wrap it tightly around your head.
And here I thought /. readers were all hardcore Neal Stephenson fans. You ought to go read *Zodiac*, and see if you feel like railing against greenpeace THEN. sheesh.
I definitely agree that the book is an interesting read. Until i came across it, I'd always had the misconception that seafarers could actually determine their relative position to a fixed departure point via the stars. when in fact only the latitude was figurable.
(there is also a description in the book about the rival scheme involving telescopes and star charts fiercely backed by the Royal Astronomer)(can't recall his name -- Maskelyne?)
if you think about it, the pre-Harrison sea captains were a pretty courageous lot -- imagine setting out on a journey and not *really* knowing for sure how far you'd actually travelled! (in terms of degrees of longitude)
OT, but this /. obsession with case modification -- a practice which i can't relate to -- makes me think of the classic story of Andy Ihnakto's 'anti-case-mod':
He did the reverse -- he kept the case intact, but substituted something else more interesting for the innards. Specifically, he made an aquarium out of his old Mac 512. (no pics, but if you hunt around on google there's lots of 'em people have done)
Who needs a fish screensaver when you can have real ones swimming around...
academic plagiarism = peer to peer idea sharing.
They appear to have contacted Pioneer! Here's a short article on it.
"The signal was loud and clear and I'd like to say this contact worked like a charm," said Larry Lasher, the mission's project manager.
A radio telescope in Spain received the response 22 hours and six minutes after the signal was sent from us on friday.
Cool!
Here in toronto the keynote speaker for CMW (a mildly pretentious and industry-oriented music festival) was moby, a guy who has been successful not so much in making good music but rather for selling snippets from every track of his last album for commercials.
He had, I thought, an interesting and pragmatic take of the future. Especially given that his audience was mostly people in the music industry. He thinks that the ways in which music is made, marketed, distributed, and sold must change radically over the next ten years. He said that bands oriented towards live performances would be successful, citing the Bare Naked Ladies and Nirvana as examples.
The quote that i remember was, "You can't download a concert. You can't download a t-shirt." That is to say, you can't replicate the experience of live music. His follow up comment was, "you can listen to a recording of live music, but compared to being there it's like watching porno in a hotel room instead of actually having sex with someone".
In a way it's like a shift back to Mozart's day -- you had to go around performing and composing prolifically to make a living.
He also noted how the a large chunk of the generation of his 14 year old cousin had "grown up without ever having bought an album. they download everything." So he was trying to make people in the industry aware that a cultural shift is already taking place with respect to consumer's attitudes towards 'ownership' of music.
He also dismissed conventionally 'manufactured pop' and boy bands, and cited himself ironically as an example of an act becoming successful outside of the mainstream labels.
Without us, there is no /. Pay for a subscription to what we are creating? Hell no!
I agree most wholeheartedly Comrade! Slashdot is created by a collective process... but the wealth that results is not shared equally -- the surplus value is being appropriated by pigdog capitalist imperialist corporations! The noble proletariat laborers of slashdot... must rise up and seize control... of the means of production... and abolish that dangerous bourgeois reactionary, JonKatz...
Yes Comrades, the class struggle continues. The only ad banner I need to read is the one that declares, "(A Post) From each according to his ability, (A ModPoint) to each according to his needs."
Viva la Revolution!
This discussion reminds me of an interesting article in last month's Wired regarding the standardization of screw threading.
.txt or .rtf vs .doc). Sellars gave an impassioned speech in 1864 "On a Uniform System of Screw Threads" where he noted "In this country, no organized attempt has as yet been made to establish any system, each manufacturer having adopted whatever his judgment may have dictated as the best, or as most convenient for himself." (sound familiar?)
.doc file...")
The article relates how William Sellers actively campaigned for his 'Sellers thread' screw to replace the then semi-standard 'Whitworth' screw standard from England.
His thread design was simpler,cheaper and easier to fabricate than the Whitworth design. (analogy here of
The article goes on to detail how Sellers had to tap into his political and economic connections in order to create momentum for his standard, which was opposed by many machinists. He first convinced the Navy, then Pennsylvania Railroad, then the Master Car Builder's association. By 1901 the Sellers thread design had become the standard in america.
But (and here's the 'interoperability' part of the analogy) Britain stuck with the Whitworth screw. This didn't create any problems for a long time... until the winter of 1941, when Germany's Afrika Korps started pummelling the Eighth Army in the desert. British tanks and trucks wore out, broke down, etc in the course of war. American factories churned out vehicles and parts for the British. But when the supplies arrived in North Africa... everyone was surprised to discover that American nuts did not fit British bolts.
("crap, that idiot in marketing sent me another unreadable
American factories retooled and ran two separate assembly lines for the rest of the war. In 1948, Britain decided next time, incompatible screws would not be a good reason to risk losing a battle, and adopted the Sellers thread standard.
I thought it was interesting how Microsoft was the only company cited by the article as rejecting Chinese gov't demands:
When Chinese authorities ordered Microsoft to surrender its software's underlying source codes--the keys to encryption--as the price of doing business there, Microsoft chose to fight, spearheading an unprecedented Beijing-based coalition of American, Japanese, and European Chambers of Commerce. Faced with being left behind technologically, the Chinese authorities dropped their demands.
Although presumably in this case, MS's reasons were capitalistically motivated, i.e. protection of IP.
As to the question, 'what if the US decided they needed to monitor citizen internet communications?' Well, who's to say this isn't already occurring...
I guess this IPO won't do that well in Louisiana, where that state's banking regulators have deemed it an unlicensed banking operation.
Monday's filing conceded that the company's regulatory problems in Louisiana might not be isolated. New York has also indicated the company is operating an unlicensed banking operation. Other states that have indicated a need for licensing include Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Massachusetts, Maryland, Texas, Virginia and Vermont.
somewhat offtopic, but the Bruce Sterling/William Gibson collaboration *The Difference Engine* was an interesting alternate history novel, in which a key subplot involved the use of (what were essentially) punchcards.
The idea was that Charles Babbage did construct his Analytical Engine, and from that a steam-driven information age has developed as a result.
Definitely something to check out.
CNET had an interesting article about the everquest economy a couple weeks back.
"Based on a review of thousands of completed auctions for "EverQuest" items and in-game currency, Castronova concluded that players earn an average wage of $3.42 for every hour they play the game and collectively produce annual gross "exports" of more than $5 million.
And if the "EverQuest" universe of Norrath were a country, its per-capita gross national product would be $2,266--comparable to the 77th richest country on Earth and ranking it between Russia and Bulgaria. Platinum pieces, the in-game currency known as pp, end up with an exchange rate of about a penny per pp, making "EverQuest" currency more valuable than the Japanese yen and the Spanish peseta. "
"Stringfellow Hawk has not been reached for comment".
Perhaps Officer Frank Murphy is available.
The issue with a pure tech approach to tracking ratings (vs. the Neilson approach) is that although you get much better tracking of *what* got watched, you don't get a log of *who* was watching it at the time (i.e. was it mom? dad? the kids? the kids and their friends?), which is an essential component of how Neilson's ratings are sold/used to market advertisements. (i.e. "35% of males aged 18-30 watched program X when star Y was on it, compared to only 20% when star Y was not on it")
Hmm. imagine if you had to log in to watch tv...
if someone farts in the elevator, it's a damn long wait before you can open the door...
On the other hand, think of the positive possibilities. How does that song go? Love in an elevator...
(does that make aerosmith the purveyors of elevator music?)
(insert 'shaft' pun here).
The American excuses himself, puts his left thumb to his ear and his left pinky finger to his mouth and proceeds to have a phone conversation.
This technology has already been patented. By the Japanese.
alas, here in Canada (at least in this chunk of SW Ontario), we never get to see the superbowl ads in the first place, 'cause they're typically substituted for cheesy local advertising by the Canadian broadcasters showing the event.
here's the CRTC's lousy explanation. (the CRTC is i guess a loathesome canuck version of the FCC, except considerably more pretentious and out of touch with reality.)
apple's big brother? sock puppets? anti-terrorism? nope, more like just another "Leon's No Money Down Miracle Event!". (and no, my building doesn't allow satellite dishes)
The other severely annoying bit that they mess around with is virtual ads. Basically, the broadcaster superimposes logos and other teeny corporate markers over top of crowds, the first down line, and billboard shots. It's usually quite glaring.
i just wish they would broadcast an unadulterated signal!!!
...it costs more than its weight in gold to put something in orbit.
:-)
So I guess if you put some gold in orbit, then it would be free since the gold would be weightless.
(my snarky OT way of commenting, when we're talking about launch costs, it should be in dollars per unit of mass. get with the future baby, it's metric!) (something that still seems to be a problem at NASA; certain Mars probes come to mind...)
There is definitely an argument to be made in favor of trying to do a quiet rollout.
This allows them to work out the kinks, and figure out where they're going to have problems as they scale up.
They only need to look at the Japanese experience with 3G. NTT DoCoMo's FOMA system, which claims to be the first "true" 3G network (though technically the South Koreans have 1XRTT, over which it's debatable whether it's 3G or 2.5G) has been plagued by technical problems.
Much better to work the major issues out discreetly, rather than jumping the gun and having to endure months of newspaper headlines shouting "Verizon's 3G network suffers problems".
As a side example to this discussion of 'what constitutes a large database', the NOAA's National Climate Data Centre maintains a database of digital data of about a petabyte of climatological data. The Centre takes in about a quarter of a terabyte of data *daily*.
Kahle's idea is actually quite reminiscent of Vannevar Bush's seminal 1945 description in The Atlantic Monthly of the memex, a device that would "give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages".
The frequency with which this article (the Bush article, that is) has been cited in hypertext research attests to its importance.
I am sure there are bigger systems out there (e.g. Wal-Mart's or GM's ERP systems come to mind)
Just to nitpick, in the interview Mr. Kahle does explicitly mention that the database is in fact bigger than Walmart's. No mention is made of GM's, however.
"It's larger than Walmart's, American Express', the IRS. It's the largest database ever built. "
he says. Whether the claim is credible is a different matter.
Judging by the different answers provided by various /.ians in this thread, the idea of using this problem as an entrance filter seems to be working!