All of us are for automation -- as long as we own the tools in question.
We've been sold on automation ever since the first farmer poked holes in the ground and threw in tiny self-replicating nanobots (seeds). It worked better than foraging the same food in the jungle.
But in today's age ownership of tools is a problem. The first farmer 'owned' his inputs, or got them for free: seeds, sticks, land, labour; air, water, sunshine. The smith owned his bellows, the weaver owned his loom.
But workers in modern societies are raw materials in someone else's factory. Our labour is our principal asset. When it becomes unviable (age, sickness, robotization), no one continues renting this asset. Sure, we now own mobile phones and robot vacs, but can we service, customise, or clone our tools? The farmers, smiths and weavers of yore could.
Capitalism got us here. Communism simply transfers ownership of tools to someone else (the state). Perhaps we need an old doctrine with a new name -- disseminationism -- spread technological ownership to deliver the maximum benefit to the most people in the minimum amount of time. I'm sure this was widely practised in more altruistic societies in the past. Maybe open source is one embodiment.
I second that. I tried this with a 6 core Xeon. Windows Task Manager shows 12 hyperthreaded cores. Normally, 6 of these are between 5% and 20% and 6 are idle. With Salon's coin mining, all 12 jump to 80%. The fans on my normally quiet desktop roar into life.
Interesting idea, but there's no effective party protecting your safety or cost here. The OS or browser should step in and offer CPU throttling.
Physical bookstores are not innovating enough to compete with Amazon and subsidiaries (Audible, The Book Depository, etc). I worry sometimes - I like wandering in secondhand bookshops, and don't like how few there are left. I speak to people working in bookstores and there's really nothing planned, except for spinning up a website.
That won't work.
Amazon started with books because books are the ultimate fungible commodity. Each has an ISBN (instantly identifiable), each is equivalent to the other (unlike, say, fruit), there's little scope for fakes or adulteration (unlike jewellery), and the price points are right for moving significant volumes at low-risk. Selling on the web also adds value: a book is freeze-dried information anyway, so it's a natural fit for meta-information like reviews and recommendations. Putting a massive catalog online does not cost much in inventory, but it taps into a long, fat tail of all sorts of interests -- from game developers, to philosophers, to philosophical game developers -- all willing to wait a few days after purchase (or a few seconds, if using Kindle).
Physical bookstores must compete in cyberspace. However, cloning Amazon's infrastructure is the wrong approach. Instead, they must blend physical and virtual presence, so customers still find value in a physical store.
One way to do this is by turning stores into a federated hybrid marketplace.
Imagine this:
I walk into a book store. There's a book and a DVD box set tucked under my arm -- I bought these weeks or months ago and want to get rid of them. I walk up to an automated kiosk (in a low-tech scenario, I go to the cashier). It's something that resembles a reverse vending machine. and I scan my items. This machine has me quickly flip pages in my book to check its condition. It also has me insert the DVDs into a reader slot. Then it robot-wraps the products (shrink wrap, or cardboard mailer) and slots them into inventory. I walk away with a few dollars instantly available in my account. I'll be credited more 'on consignment', when the items sell.
I turn into the main store and walk the aisles. A book interests me in the Business section. I start browsing. I whip out my mobile and an app recognises the book, providing recommendations and reviews. A 'What's Related' gallery pops up related books. These are from the bookseller's extended catalog and the catalog of other booksellers this bookseller federates with. Now a different book has caught my fancy. This seems to cover the topic better. It has better, more passionate reviews. And there's a really good deal on a second-hand copy somebody deposited five minutes ago on the other side of the continent. Satisfied, I place the order. There's a bit of automated-haggling as my app negotiates the price range set by the seller, and with stores on both side of the continent. A couple of seconds, and the transaction closes successfully. My preferences request delivery to this store. I come here on weekends anyway; I'll pick it up when I'm in next, sit down on the sofa and have a read.
The cashier gives me a friendly wave. He saw the transaction go through -- I've known him a few years and my browse/buy settings are open to him. He'll probably be handing me the parcel next week (if I'm in during business hours; otherwise, it'll be the vending dispenser). We chat a bit -- turns out he's interested in the same topic. As I chat, I notice a pencil loop [amazon.com]. That'd be great for the notebook I always carry around. I purchase it and affix it to my notebook.
"everyone's understanding that the OEM software license survives any number of private party sales is wrong."
How wrong is it? When does the license expire? After the second sale? The tenth sale? Motherboard repair? CPU upgrade? Motherboard upgrade? Selling off one of the RAM modules (no licensed transfer)? MS sticker getting a bit worn? MS sticker falling off? SMPS failing?
I reckon it survives all these events: as long as you have one objectively identifiable 'computer', you are good.
Correct, OEM hardwarecannot be sold without software rights. So the hardware was licensed.
This is mostly a trademark violation case. The OS restore disks this man burned had Microsoft and Dell logos. There's may be a small amount of copyright violation here - he burned OS restore images (available for free download from Dell's website), in anticipation of selling to eventual customers: PC refurbishment companies. If he already had an understanding with his customers to sell these disks to them, you could argue he acting an agent for them, in anticipation of custom. If so, this case boils down his violation of Microsoft and Dell trademarks.
The main problem is below: The discs had labels nearly identical to the discs provided by Dell for its computers and had the Windows and Dell logos. "If I had just written 'Eric's Restore Disc' on there, it would have been fine," Lundgren said.
Haha, I went to a good GP suffering severe angina for two or three days (chest felt like it was being sqeezed or pumped up with air on the inside). He missed it completely since I was comparatively young (in my 40s), and had only one or two risk factors (one being male, the other having a historically high BP). Instead, because my pain would subside after I drank a lot of fluids, he thought I had indigestion or heartburn. The next night I had a heart attack.
He's still my GP (though I now have both a cardiologist and a consulting physician). Later, I asked him for the protocol he follows on chest pain. He didn't have one, like good hospitals do. Instead, he showed me a risk calculation spreadsheet. He also said if he performed an ECG on everyone who complained of chest pain, he would not be able to get through the day. So he made a judgement call, it was wrong and I have a small scar on my heart to prove it. I really drove the point he must treat other patients better.
I read up later that doctors in hospitals have developed protocols , similar to checklists, for various scenarios. My GP needs this technology, in the sense of a process doctors can follow in a semiautomatic manner. And like any good process, it must be both machine guided and auditable. In my case, both an ECG and what's called a Troponin-T test would have shown him what's wrong: a ST elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI). (Both tests came back positive the next night: the ECG chart itself said a STEMI was likely underway ).
Start with technology design: there's no way to link together requirements with design with the deliverable artifacts (code,, documentation) with tests that verify the solution meets requirements.
Just be careful with the eye impact of LCD screens, especially at such a young age. Google it. I think that what's being implied by the guy who replied earlier.
No. Just because something makes it convenient, doesn't transform it into something else. .
"If google/YouTube and Facebook remove everything you ever post you pretty much do not exist because it is hard to exist outside of those platforms."
Think about what you wrote for a minute. Exist? You exist. God remembers your name. Even when Youtube and Google bite the dust, there will be people who remember you - maybe as an ancestor, maybe as someone they loved.
"This is mine. All mine. I saw it first. In my mind's eye I saw it. No one else can have it. Not for the next 17 years. Maybe longer. Lawyeerss!!! Take that world + dog! "
"Now where is that watch/car/TV thingy I was working on?"
The jobs Hadlock describes -- "commoditized workers, controlled by a central system, mainly valued for their grasping capability... Show up to work, walk to the item(s), collect the items as you're told, put them in the box" -- already exist in the hundreds of thousands today. Walk into a Amazon or OfficeDepot or Staples or Walmart warehouse today, and this is what most staff do.
But these are no zen jobs. They need you fully engaged. The two people who died were probably doing jobs they considered routine, or the people operating the machinery that killed them considered routine. Machinery operated in a distracted manner is rogue machinery.
1. User Access Control - The OS ceaselessly asking me 'are you sure?', 'are you sure?'. How can I be sure? Give me a realistic option instead of just 'yes' or 'no' (maybe offer to sandbox the process and help me check if it runs OK).
2. Vista’s desktop search indexing (Windows search) - Ah, here was the OS pretending to be both goggle.com AND google's database for your local filesystem. Indexing slowed 80% of new laptops to a crawl -- especially cheap, high-volume AMD-chipped laptops from the likes of Compaq, HP, Acer.
The main issue with trains is the full train, with all its wagons, moves point-to-point. Unhitching specific wagons and sending them off in another direction with a different prime mover is hard. Why not have trains that can couple, decouple bogies automatically? Train propulsion is moving to electric these days. Perhaps, build smaller prime movers into bogies themselves. This could radically speed up rail travel, making it much more effective as well as safer (because units of mass on the network will be smaller, and collision avoidance will have to be built into bogies themselves, perhaps leveraging tech from self-driving cars).
Robot cars are one thing. But will Uber program robot trucks to try and obey Asimov's three laws? If the truck has the option of harmlessly jackknifing onto a shoulder, damaging itself but saving human life, will it? Or will Uber not program such manoeuvres, citing potential jackasses who play chicken with their trucks? Or will they program lifesaving manoeuvres anyway (bless their hearts!), and rely on cameras to bring jackasses to justice? Questions, questions! But I'd rather these be answered first, while rail is fully automated. This is because their trucks will be sharing the road with me, and commercial compulsions will drive road-train type trailers to get larger and larger (another question: how large is large enough?)
You're making a classic mistake. There are (practically) no 'zen' jobs. Instead, you have plenty of crappy, uncreative jobs that still demand full engagement, body and soul, in exchange for poor remuneration.
In an Amazon warehouse, you need to use full-body cognition because there are hazards aplenty. Three months ago, two workers were killed in a single week in their warehouses: http://www.ehstoday.com/safety...
If you drift to la-la-land, designing your next creative artifact, this could be you. Or your co-worker.
Don't get me wrong. I completely agree "jobs that allow my own mind to wander as it pleases" are a creative bonanza. Just don't expect to find them; and if you do, don't expect a living wage from them.
Pretty much, the only jobs with the potential to truly fulfill are those you design yourself - ie, a business.
Slashdot Mirror
https://christiananswers.net/s...
...Software AG.
'Cause' and 'effect' are often intertwined. Weaken one (any one) and you weaken the other.
Yes, you are.
All of us are for automation -- as long as we own the tools in question.
We've been sold on automation ever since the first farmer poked holes in the ground and threw in tiny self-replicating nanobots (seeds). It worked better than foraging the same food in the jungle.
But in today's age ownership of tools is a problem. The first farmer 'owned' his inputs, or got them for free: seeds, sticks, land, labour; air, water, sunshine. The smith owned his bellows, the weaver owned his loom.
But workers in modern societies are raw materials in someone else's factory. Our labour is our principal asset. When it becomes unviable (age, sickness, robotization), no one continues renting this asset. Sure, we now own mobile phones and robot vacs, but can we service, customise, or clone our tools? The farmers, smiths and weavers of yore could.
Capitalism got us here. Communism simply transfers ownership of tools to someone else (the state). Perhaps we need an old doctrine with a new name -- disseminationism -- spread technological ownership to deliver the maximum benefit to the most people in the minimum amount of time. I'm sure this was widely practised in more altruistic societies in the past. Maybe open source is one embodiment.
Also note: mining does not stop if you navigate to another tab, and leave the current tab open. It continues in the background
NOTE: mining does not stop if you navigate to another tab. It continues in the background
I second that. I tried this with a 6 core Xeon. Windows Task Manager shows 12 hyperthreaded cores. Normally, 6 of these are between 5% and 20% and 6 are idle. With Salon's coin mining, all 12 jump to 80%. The fans on my normally quiet desktop roar into life.
Interesting idea, but there's no effective party protecting your safety or cost here. The OS or browser should step in and offer CPU throttling.
> It's never been simpler to start writing programs.
No, it has been simpler. Remember...?
10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10
Cross-posting from SoylentNews: https://soylentnews.org/commen... Hope someone will take these ideas up.
Physical bookstores are not innovating enough to compete with Amazon and subsidiaries (Audible, The Book Depository, etc). I worry sometimes - I like wandering in secondhand bookshops, and don't like how few there are left. I speak to people working in bookstores and there's really nothing planned, except for spinning up a website.
That won't work.
Amazon started with books because books are the ultimate fungible commodity. Each has an ISBN (instantly identifiable), each is equivalent to the other (unlike, say, fruit), there's little scope for fakes or adulteration (unlike jewellery), and the price points are right for moving significant volumes at low-risk. Selling on the web also adds value: a book is freeze-dried information anyway, so it's a natural fit for meta-information like reviews and recommendations. Putting a massive catalog online does not cost much in inventory, but it taps into a long, fat tail of all sorts of interests -- from game developers, to philosophers, to philosophical game developers -- all willing to wait a few days after purchase (or a few seconds, if using Kindle).
Physical bookstores must compete in cyberspace. However, cloning Amazon's infrastructure is the wrong approach. Instead, they must blend physical and virtual presence, so customers still find value in a physical store.
One way to do this is by turning stores into a federated hybrid marketplace.
Imagine this:
I walk into a book store. There's a book and a DVD box set tucked under my arm -- I bought these weeks or months ago and want to get rid of them. I walk up to an automated kiosk (in a low-tech scenario, I go to the cashier). It's something that resembles a reverse vending machine. and I scan my items. This machine has me quickly flip pages in my book to check its condition. It also has me insert the DVDs into a reader slot. Then it robot-wraps the products (shrink wrap, or cardboard mailer) and slots them into inventory. I walk away with a few dollars instantly available in my account. I'll be credited more 'on consignment', when the items sell.
I turn into the main store and walk the aisles. A book interests me in the Business section. I start browsing. I whip out my mobile and an app recognises the book, providing recommendations and reviews. A 'What's Related' gallery pops up related books. These are from the bookseller's extended catalog and the catalog of other booksellers this bookseller federates with. Now a different book has caught my fancy. This seems to cover the topic better. It has better, more passionate reviews. And there's a really good deal on a second-hand copy somebody deposited five minutes ago on the other side of the continent. Satisfied, I place the order. There's a bit of automated-haggling as my app negotiates the price range set by the seller, and with stores on both side of the continent. A couple of seconds, and the transaction closes successfully. My preferences request delivery to this store. I come here on weekends anyway; I'll pick it up when I'm in next, sit down on the sofa and have a read.
The cashier gives me a friendly wave. He saw the transaction go through -- I've known him a few years and my browse/buy settings are open to him. He'll probably be handing me the parcel next week (if I'm in during business hours; otherwise, it'll be the vending dispenser). We chat a bit -- turns out he's interested in the same topic. As I chat, I notice a pencil loop [amazon.com]. That'd be great for the notebook I always carry around. I purchase it and affix it to my notebook.
It's been a good day. I quite enjoyed that.
"everyone's understanding that the OEM software license survives any number of private party sales is wrong."
How wrong is it? When does the license expire? After the second sale? The tenth sale? Motherboard repair? CPU upgrade? Motherboard upgrade? Selling off one of the RAM modules (no licensed transfer)? MS sticker getting a bit worn? MS sticker falling off? SMPS failing?
I reckon it survives all these events: as long as you have one objectively identifiable 'computer', you are good.
Interesting comments in the article you posted.
...the hardware has to stay with the software.
Correct, OEM hardware cannot be sold without software rights. So the hardware was licensed.
This is mostly a trademark violation case. The OS restore disks this man burned had Microsoft and Dell logos. There's may be a small amount of copyright violation here - he burned OS restore images (available for free download from Dell's website), in anticipation of selling to eventual customers: PC refurbishment companies. If he already had an understanding with his customers to sell these disks to them, you could argue he acting an agent for them, in anticipation of custom. If so, this case boils down his violation of Microsoft and Dell trademarks.
The main problem is below:
The discs had labels nearly identical to the discs provided by Dell for its computers and had the Windows and Dell logos. "If I had just written 'Eric's Restore Disc' on there, it would have been fine," Lundgren said.
Digital-only is where print goes to die.
Haha, I went to a good GP suffering severe angina for two or three days (chest felt like it was being sqeezed or pumped up with air on the inside). He missed it completely since I was comparatively young (in my 40s), and had only one or two risk factors (one being male, the other having a historically high BP). Instead, because my pain would subside after I drank a lot of fluids, he thought I had indigestion or heartburn. The next night I had a heart attack.
He's still my GP (though I now have both a cardiologist and a consulting physician). Later, I asked him for the protocol he follows on chest pain. He didn't have one, like good hospitals do. Instead, he showed me a risk calculation spreadsheet. He also said if he performed an ECG on everyone who complained of chest pain, he would not be able to get through the day. So he made a judgement call, it was wrong and I have a small scar on my heart to prove it. I really drove the point he must treat other patients better.
I read up later that doctors in hospitals have developed protocols , similar to checklists, for various scenarios. My GP needs this technology, in the sense of a process doctors can follow in a semiautomatic manner. And like any good process, it must be both machine guided and auditable. In my case, both an ECG and what's called a Troponin-T test would have shown him what's wrong: a ST elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI). (Both tests came back positive the next night: the ECG chart itself said a STEMI was likely underway ).
Start with technology design: there's no way to link together requirements with design with the deliverable artifacts (code,, documentation) with tests that verify the solution meets requirements.
Just be careful with the eye impact of LCD screens, especially at such a young age. Google it. I think that what's being implied by the guy who replied earlier.
No. Just because something makes it convenient, doesn't transform it into something else. .
"If google/YouTube and Facebook remove everything you ever post you pretty much do not exist because it is hard to exist outside of those platforms."
Think about what you wrote for a minute. Exist? You exist. God remembers your name. Even when Youtube and Google bite the dust, there will be people who remember you - maybe as an ancestor, maybe as someone they loved.
Thanks! That was quite the monster back in the day IIRC.
"working" = cookie-licking.
"This is mine. All mine. I saw it first. In my mind's eye I saw it. No one else can have it. Not for the next 17 years. Maybe longer. Lawyeerss!!! Take that world + dog! "
"Now where is that watch/car/TV thingy I was working on?"
Thanks. You run Win 10 on your Core 2 Duo, and it runs acceptably, if I understand correctly?
The jobs Hadlock describes -- "commoditized workers, controlled by a central system, mainly valued for their grasping capability... Show up to work, walk to the item(s), collect the items as you're told, put them in the box" -- already exist in the hundreds of thousands today. Walk into a Amazon or OfficeDepot or Staples or Walmart warehouse today, and this is what most staff do.
But these are no zen jobs. They need you fully engaged. The two people who died were probably doing jobs they considered routine, or the people operating the machinery that killed them considered routine. Machinery operated in a distracted manner is rogue machinery.
1. User Access Control -
The OS ceaselessly asking me 'are you sure?', 'are you sure?'. How can I be sure? Give me a realistic option instead of just 'yes' or 'no' (maybe offer to sandbox the process and help me check if it runs OK).
2. Vista’s desktop search indexing (Windows search) -
Ah, here was the OS pretending to be both goggle.com AND google's database for your local filesystem. Indexing slowed 80% of new laptops to a crawl -- especially cheap, high-volume AMD-chipped laptops from the likes of Compaq, HP, Acer.
"Long haul routes"? What about trains.
The main issue with trains is the full train, with all its wagons, moves point-to-point. Unhitching specific wagons and sending them off in another direction with a different prime mover is hard. Why not have trains that can couple, decouple bogies automatically? Train propulsion is moving to electric these days. Perhaps, build smaller prime movers into bogies themselves. This could radically speed up rail travel, making it much more effective as well as safer (because units of mass on the network will be smaller, and collision avoidance will have to be built into bogies themselves, perhaps leveraging tech from self-driving cars).
Robot cars are one thing. But will Uber program robot trucks to try and obey Asimov's three laws? If the truck has the option of harmlessly jackknifing onto a shoulder, damaging itself but saving human life, will it? Or will Uber not program such manoeuvres, citing potential jackasses who play chicken with their trucks? Or will they program lifesaving manoeuvres anyway (bless their hearts!), and rely on cameras to bring jackasses to justice? Questions, questions! But I'd rather these be answered first, while rail is fully automated. This is because their trucks will be sharing the road with me, and commercial compulsions will drive road-train type trailers to get larger and larger (another question: how large is large enough?)
You're making a classic mistake. There are (practically) no 'zen' jobs. Instead, you have plenty of crappy, uncreative jobs that still demand full engagement, body and soul, in exchange for poor remuneration.
In an Amazon warehouse, you need to use full-body cognition because there are hazards aplenty. Three months ago, two workers were killed in a single week in their warehouses: http://www.ehstoday.com/safety...
If you drift to la-la-land, designing your next creative artifact, this could be you. Or your co-worker.
Don't get me wrong. I completely agree "jobs that allow my own mind to wander as it pleases" are a creative bonanza. Just don't expect to find them; and if you do, don't expect a living wage from them.
Pretty much, the only jobs with the potential to truly fulfill are those you design yourself - ie, a business.
Haha - masterful!