Yuppy works hard, accumulates trophies of success. Yuppy gets the girl, marries and moves to nice loft in the bad part of town. So cool to live on the wrong side of the tracks. Yuppy wakes up one morning to discover meaning of "local wealth distribution". Somewhere, happy youth criminals are playing with yuppy's Minidisc and digital camera.
Actually, life without toys and TV is quite fun. I don't think the tendency to accumulating toys has to last for ever - perhaps it's just a phase?
As far as I can see, computing and biology are exactly the same thing, only taken at different timescales appear to be different things. Computing is about applying logical steps to solve problems. Biology is about applying logical steps to solve problems. The difference is that we don't expect or design our computers to take millions of years to come up with solutions. Biology is analogue... well, so is computing. Binary zeroes and ones are a convention, the matter of a computer is as analogue as you and me. Similarly, biology is digital (GTCA) at one level, a convention that allows information to be stored and reproduced.
Life is an information processing machine, this should be obvious from the fact that it starts and ends with genetics. Biology is the expression of life...
It's the timescale which throws us off. We are not used to seeing problems solved by the application of time rather than brute force. And yet many computational problems also evolve solutions slowly... take the development of simple yet subtle technologies like XML. Decades to arrive at a nice design, with something very similar to biological competition selecting mutations for success.
This is true, but it is the problem faced by many people during such times of change. What is good for the global economy is good for everyone, but it can take a long time to become clear. For example, your $6k/yr will go a lot further when you can buy food and household goods and insurance that are much cheaper. Your rent will, eventually, go down as well, as property prices fall to compensate for lower demand.
(And then there will be a hoard of people complaining that they are bankrupt because they cannot pay off their housing loans.)
The world is heading towards equalization, and this can only be a good thing. Wealth is not like a cake, to be shared, it is like a fire: spreading it around creates more for everyone.
Remember that the last boom was largely built on the IT boom, which was itself built on ever-cheaper hardware, which itself was possible because of massive shifts of production from rich to poorer countries.
Cheaper services, like cheaper PCs, is good for anyone who needs it, and the current outsourcing wave is likely to be very good for the global economy in the long term. It just means we in the service sector have to find other ways of passing our time, getting paid less and working on smaller, local projects.
Hmmm, after the "war on crime", "war on drugs", what's next? A government department with a "Spam Czar" who sends the troops into muddy 3rd world countries because they allow spam?
Spam is so easy to kill: add authentication to SMTP and create a new email network of authenticated email. Servers won't accept email from unauthenticated sources, and spammers will be unable to hide their tracks.
This is a very important point. I believe that modern humans came through this near-extinction episode with a different social structure, and that was what allowed us to compete with and beat the Neanderthals. We are basically, since that time, very closely related, almost clones. Neanderthals (like most other species) had much more variation, and so could not relate to each other on any large scale. Whereas Neanderthals could do very well in small groups, modern post-disaster humans could work in huge groups, hundreds or thousands, and basically our success as a species stems from this.
That, anyhow, is my interpretation of this episode and the way we organize today.
The point is not just about overtaking, it is about attitude towards one's customers and what this means for the eventual product.
Microsoft stopped trying to make things people need about 8-10 years ago, and instead concentrated on making things people can't get away from. It's quite a different business, and the two are incompatible.
At a certain point, Microsoft will overshoot the perception barrier and start talking to people who are irrelevant. This is what happened to IBM in the late 80's as Unix and PCs became the growth market for IT. Microsoft's strengths - ability to buy attention at any price - are a weakness, and one which OSS can and does exploit not because OSS programmers are better or smarter or because they compete better, but simply because the whole OSS process is much more closely tied to true customer requirements, not attempts to manipulate customer perception.
This is not new, and many groups have successfully competed with Microsoft in the past - look at Borland's compilers for a good example. The problem is that no group can compete (and this is the key point) on a commercial basis. But OSS...? It is an unfair playing field, worse there are two seperate playing fields.
Microsoft are right to feel extreme hate and fear at the idea of OSS.
The Microsoft Mountain is very hard to move, but that does not mean it's not worth trying. OpenOffice.org (I hate that.org part, it's like a third leg) is a top class tool, and we use it for all our work. The nice thing about it is the slow but steady accumulation of features that really count. This is the big plus of OSS, something people often forget. Producing PDF files, for instance... a completely vital part of our business - we never send documents that the client can edit. We used to use Acrobat, "Print to PDF". OK, it works. In OOo we did the save to PostScript, mangle PostScript, etc. Now the latest version of OOo creates PDFs with a single click. This is a _killer_ feature.
Each release, one or two new killer features that people actually want, and over the years we will see an application that has a reputation as a killer, not just a clone.
I predict that in 3 years time, MS will be playing catch-up with Mozilla and OOo, finding that OSS is not just an interesting development methodology, but more vitally, a much faster tool for market research. I predict that in 10 years' time, MS will finally produce the villain who designed the Paper Clip, and we can dance on his head.
I keep having these dreams about things exploding. Tonight it was my microwave. I filled it with AOL CD's, set it to 'Aggressive Defrost', and sat down with a beer. The explosion took off the roof of my house and sent it into space. This dream gave me another great idea I can't wait to try: sending cargo into space by blowing up AOL CDs.
Wednesday, 7pm.
It did not work. The neighbour wants back his microwave, and my son is asking me where his music collection went to. Well, that's one positive angle, anyhow.
Thursday, 5am.
That dream again. My subconscious is trying to tell me something. Maybe I was using the wrong brand of microwave...
Friday, 8pm.
I think I've cracked it. Instead of just one microwave, you have to imagine a Beowulf cluster of the things...
Companies with content simply can't bring themselves to create decent media tools. Look at Sony, handicapping themselves because they own Columbia records, while Apple do the right thing by the consumer, digitizing every media format they can.
It just goes to show how the "synergy" arguments of the 1990's are actually complete bullshit.
Reliable news sources (possibly an Iraqi Minister of Information, or worse, a White House Official) tell us that due to disagreements between Digital Research and Microsoft, the latest MS-DOS release (11.2a) will no longer be compatible with DR-DOS 11.x.
All five remaining DOS users are likely to be severely complacement. For more information on this stunning development, we asked...
> You appear ignorant of the basic science and technology that generally underpins any SF worth reading.
Hmmm, perhaps I'm ignorant of the basic unstoppable faith in science and technology that generally underpins any such discussion. Really, Fox is not a good basis for judging humanity. Go spend some time in a country where people really do die because of a lack of simply things like clean water to drink. Then you will see that masturbatory space chases are really not a sensible use of resources.
Your response is typical, and I don't blame you, but in invoking random grand schemes, don't you think you are doing exactly what generations of rich nerds have done over time?
Perhaps I'm wrong, and space elevators will save humanity. Shucks. Why not? I mean, it used to be nuclear toasters. But somehow those were too complex to get working.
And my post was no troll. Serious comment has to start by debating the underlying position of any argument, not its details. Saying that "technology will save us from ourselves" is a facile and basically worthless argument, self-evident if you study history, and obvious if you look around you.
This is from my latest novel, "the Complexity Trap":
Mankind found themselves trapped on a small, smelly, dying planet. Reaching the moon seemed easy, but this nascent race of spacefarers soon found that gravity was much easier to beat than complexity. For every step forwards, they took twenty steps sideways and five steps back. It took generations and a genius to understand that they were trapping themselves in their own technology. The solution, finally, was simple. They created a simple, robust artificial organism and launched it into space. Instead of trying to overcome the challenges of interplanetary and interstellar travel by intellectual brute force, they would let evolution and selection do the the work for them.
Time went by... and the organisms dispersed and flourished. Eating methane space crumbs, basking in solar radiation, they spread to the farthest, darkest corners of the solar system, and - hitching a ride on the occasional comet - beyond.
An Eon passed, and mankind forgot all about their space seedlings. But deep in the liquid depths of one of the giants of their solar system, something stirred...
Next episode coming soon...
OK, my point is: let's concentrate on trying to get clean water to everyone on earth before throwing such huge amounts away on space games. Simple things make life better for all, and humanity's basic resource is not knowledge, science, or exploration, but humans.
There are huge possibilities for BT. When commercial on-line music starts to fit the reality of people's needs, imagine BT technology for distribution. Then, why not for renting movies?
You will be able to make good money from BT if you package the technology in such a way that commercial interests can use it.
My advice would be to license the source code under the GPL for OSS projects, and additionally under a commercial license for businesses.
Provide BT technology for incorporation into random commercial products. Resell your consulting skills at a good rate. Train others to be able to do the same. With licensing and consulting fees, you will do nicely.
As a way of trumping the Microsoft-sponsored nonsense SCO is putting out. SCO is attacking the Linux brand, which IBM has invested so much in, and Microsoft hates and fears to totally. IBM will not go to court: this would be playing the game Microsoft is hoping for - a 20-year battle over the rights to use Linux (and maybe by association, all OSS?) in the business context.
Expect IBM to make an offer for SCO, to publically announce that it has now "bought the rights to Linux", and it will start to assert control over it.
Nah, "simulation" is the right term. Only the simulation is coming from our own heads. That's the point. Seeing the world as a bunch of easy-to-manage objects, as humans do, is not about illusion. The cup on my desk is not an illusion. It is a virtual reality simulation, faked by my mind so that my hand can find it. Illusions are not tangible, but simulations can be.
This statement is circular. Real is what exists, and yes, existence is real. But you have no independent measure of 'existence' and 'real' except your own mind. It's the observer paradox: you cannot observe yourself as you really are.
A "simulation" does not necessarily have a design or will behind it. But perhaps the word was badly chosen. The point is this: reality is a protocol, nothing more. It is an agreement, an understanding, a frame of reference. Of course we cannot know this, only believe it. Having that understanding does not remove us from the reality, so we end up acting it out, even if we believs it's all a simulation...
But Occam's razor says we do not need to assume humans and computers are resonsible for it. The simulation is all around us... some examples:
- you consider the world to be composed of things with surfaces and textures, yet in fact most of everything is interatomic space. Matter is a simulation.
- you consider yourself to be a being, complete and individual, yet you are built from trillions of cells each with a lifecycle, not to mention hosts of other organisms that cohabit your body, even your gene pool. Individuality is a simulation.
- you think you are reading this text, and yet it is just a sprinkling of letters and dots and random ideas. Language is a simulation, the Internet also.
- you believe you exist, and yet we are truly just temporary assemblages of matter acting as hosts for the multilevel game of life. Existence is a simulation.
But none of this means much: as in the Matrix, if I stab your simulated heart with a simulated knife, your simulated body will simulate death. And your simulated consciousness will try very, very hard to avoid that. Welcome to the Real World.
This is about market segmentation
on
Nokia 5100 Reviewed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Nokia was one of the first to actually (gasp!) design mobile phones for specific market segments rather than assume we're all geeks. This phone is for - I'm guessing, because I never met anyone who used a alorie burner - young urban women who would not know what Bluetooth was if it came up and slapped them on the buns.
The design, feature set, and price is not intended to make this phone "compete" directly against other phones, it is instead supposed to make certain people - who the/. crowd almost by definition will not identify with - say "hey, that's MY phone!"
LawGeek writes "Aimee Deep is probably most famously known as the
face that demonstrated that geeks are easily manipulated by a
sweet smile and the promise of a pair of tits. It says here that
I'm supposed to call her "highly attractive", and that's fine,
cause I've had a few, and goddam, even my cat is starting to make
eyes at me. Anyhow, back to the quote whoring. Since being
exploited by her obnoxious dad (boy, do I hate that bastard) as
a cheap and nasty (can I say "nasty"? I mean, she's actually quite
sweet, especially when she does that "can I sit on your lap and get
a lolipop thing") cover girl for his cheap and nasty Napster knockoff
business. He keeps telling me some big corporation is going to buy
his company for billions. Damn, where was I. Oh, yeah... Since being
exploited from the underage of 16 as a face for her dad's corrupt and
tortured business dealings, lots of geeks seem to have gotten the
hots for her. Something to do with her pics appearing on a.b.p.teen,
maybe. So, we've decided it's time to give her a brain as well as
tits, and we've now invented an "interview" (haha!) with my old buddy
Mikael Pawlo, who will do anything for a couple of gins and a quick
one behind the bar. Oh shit, can I delete that? Anyhow, he
"interviewed" the girl, which took about five seconds. "Maddy,"
he said, "Is your dad home?" "Uh, dunno, lemme see... yeah".
"Right, get the fuck off the phone and let me talk to him!". "Hey,
you don't have to talk to me like that, you motherfuck, I'm famous!"
"Yeah, whatever, just pass him to me"...
Slashdot Mirror
(Warning: context required)
Actually, life without toys and TV is quite fun. I don't think the tendency to accumulating toys has to last for ever - perhaps it's just a phase?
Life is an information processing machine, this should be obvious from the fact that it starts and ends with genetics. Biology is the expression of life...
It's the timescale which throws us off. We are not used to seeing problems solved by the application of time rather than brute force. And yet many computational problems also evolve solutions slowly... take the development of simple yet subtle technologies like XML. Decades to arrive at a nice design, with something very similar to biological competition selecting mutations for success.
(And then there will be a hoard of people complaining that they are bankrupt because they cannot pay off their housing loans.)
The world is heading towards equalization, and this can only be a good thing. Wealth is not like a cake, to be shared, it is like a fire: spreading it around creates more for everyone.
Cheaper services, like cheaper PCs, is good for anyone who needs it, and the current outsourcing wave is likely to be very good for the global economy in the long term. It just means we in the service sector have to find other ways of passing our time, getting paid less and working on smaller, local projects.
Spam is so easy to kill: add authentication to SMTP and create a new email network of authenticated email. Servers won't accept email from unauthenticated sources, and spammers will be unable to hide their tracks.
That, anyhow, is my interpretation of this episode and the way we organize today.
Microsoft stopped trying to make things people need about 8-10 years ago, and instead concentrated on making things people can't get away from. It's quite a different business, and the two are incompatible.
At a certain point, Microsoft will overshoot the perception barrier and start talking to people who are irrelevant. This is what happened to IBM in the late 80's as Unix and PCs became the growth market for IT. Microsoft's strengths - ability to buy attention at any price - are a weakness, and one which OSS can and does exploit not because OSS programmers are better or smarter or because they compete better, but simply because the whole OSS process is much more closely tied to true customer requirements, not attempts to manipulate customer perception.
This is not new, and many groups have successfully competed with Microsoft in the past - look at Borland's compilers for a good example. The problem is that no group can compete (and this is the key point) on a commercial basis. But OSS...? It is an unfair playing field, worse there are two seperate playing fields.
Microsoft are right to feel extreme hate and fear at the idea of OSS.
Clearly the solution is a Java applet that emulates a BASIC interpreter. Something like COCOA?
Each release, one or two new killer features that people actually want, and over the years we will see an application that has a reputation as a killer, not just a clone.
I predict that in 3 years time, MS will be playing catch-up with Mozilla and OOo, finding that OSS is not just an interesting development methodology, but more vitally, a much faster tool for market research. I predict that in 10 years' time, MS will finally produce the villain who designed the Paper Clip, and we can dance on his head.
I keep having these dreams about things exploding. Tonight it was my microwave. I filled it with AOL CD's, set it to 'Aggressive Defrost', and sat down with a beer. The explosion took off the roof of my house and sent it into space. This dream gave me another great idea I can't wait to try: sending cargo into space by blowing up AOL CDs.
Wednesday, 7pm.
It did not work. The neighbour wants back his microwave, and my son is asking me where his music collection went to. Well, that's one positive angle, anyhow.
Thursday, 5am.
That dream again. My subconscious is trying to tell me something. Maybe I was using the wrong brand of microwave...
Friday, 8pm.
I think I've cracked it. Instead of just one microwave, you have to imagine a Beowulf cluster of the things...
It just goes to show how the "synergy" arguments of the 1990's are actually complete bullshit.
Reliable news sources (possibly an Iraqi Minister of Information, or worse, a White House Official) tell us that due to disagreements between Digital Research and Microsoft, the latest MS-DOS release (11.2a) will no longer be compatible with DR-DOS 11.x.
All five remaining DOS users are likely to be severely complacement. For more information on this stunning development, we asked...
Your response is typical, and I don't blame you, but in invoking random grand schemes, don't you think you are doing exactly what generations of rich nerds have done over time?
Perhaps I'm wrong, and space elevators will save humanity. Shucks. Why not? I mean, it used to be nuclear toasters. But somehow those were too complex to get working.
And my post was no troll. Serious comment has to start by debating the underlying position of any argument, not its details. Saying that "technology will save us from ourselves" is a facile and basically worthless argument, self-evident if you study history, and obvious if you look around you.
"40 years" is his dad speaking. RTFA.
Which gives me a genius idea... the only people able to operate P2P sites in the future will be minors. Great move RIAA, push teenagers into crime.
Mankind found themselves trapped on a small, smelly, dying planet. Reaching the moon seemed easy, but this nascent race of spacefarers soon found that gravity was much easier to beat than complexity. For every step forwards, they took twenty steps sideways and five steps back. It took generations and a genius to understand that they were trapping themselves in their own technology. The solution, finally, was simple. They created a simple, robust artificial organism and launched it into space. Instead of trying to overcome the challenges of interplanetary and interstellar travel by intellectual brute force, they would let evolution and selection do the the work for them.
Time went by... and the organisms dispersed and flourished. Eating methane space crumbs, basking in solar radiation, they spread to the farthest, darkest corners of the solar system, and - hitching a ride on the occasional comet - beyond.
An Eon passed, and mankind forgot all about their space seedlings. But deep in the liquid depths of one of the giants of their solar system, something stirred...
Next episode coming soon...
OK, my point is: let's concentrate on trying to get clean water to everyone on earth before throwing such huge amounts away on space games. Simple things make life better for all, and humanity's basic resource is not knowledge, science, or exploration, but humans.
There are huge possibilities for BT. When commercial on-line music starts to fit the reality of people's needs, imagine BT technology for distribution. Then, why not for renting movies?
My advice would be to license the source code under the GPL for OSS projects, and additionally under a commercial license for businesses.
Provide BT technology for incorporation into random commercial products. Resell your consulting skills at a good rate. Train others to be able to do the same. With licensing and consulting fees, you will do nicely.
Expect IBM to make an offer for SCO, to publically announce that it has now "bought the rights to Linux", and it will start to assert control over it.
Sleep with an elephant at your own risk.
Nah, "simulation" is the right term. Only the simulation is coming from our own heads. That's the point. Seeing the world as a bunch of easy-to-manage objects, as humans do, is not about illusion. The cup on my desk is not an illusion. It is a virtual reality simulation, faked by my mind so that my hand can find it. Illusions are not tangible, but simulations can be.
A "simulation" does not necessarily have a design or will behind it. But perhaps the word was badly chosen. The point is this: reality is a protocol, nothing more. It is an agreement, an understanding, a frame of reference. Of course we cannot know this, only believe it. Having that understanding does not remove us from the reality, so we end up acting it out, even if we believs it's all a simulation...
- you consider the world to be composed of things with surfaces and textures, yet in fact most of everything is interatomic space. Matter is a simulation.
- you consider yourself to be a being, complete and individual, yet you are built from trillions of cells each with a lifecycle, not to mention hosts of other organisms that cohabit your body, even your gene pool. Individuality is a simulation.
- you think you are reading this text, and yet it is just a sprinkling of letters and dots and random ideas. Language is a simulation, the Internet also.
- you believe you exist, and yet we are truly just temporary assemblages of matter acting as hosts for the multilevel game of life. Existence is a simulation.
But none of this means much: as in the Matrix, if I stab your simulated heart with a simulated knife, your simulated body will simulate death. And your simulated consciousness will try very, very hard to avoid that. Welcome to the Real World.
The design, feature set, and price is not intended to make this phone "compete" directly against other phones, it is instead supposed to make certain people - who the /. crowd almost by definition will not identify with - say "hey, that's MY phone!"
LawGeek writes "Aimee Deep is probably most famously known as the face that demonstrated that geeks are easily manipulated by a sweet smile and the promise of a pair of tits. It says here that I'm supposed to call her "highly attractive", and that's fine, cause I've had a few, and goddam, even my cat is starting to make eyes at me. Anyhow, back to the quote whoring. Since being exploited by her obnoxious dad (boy, do I hate that bastard) as a cheap and nasty (can I say "nasty"? I mean, she's actually quite sweet, especially when she does that "can I sit on your lap and get a lolipop thing") cover girl for his cheap and nasty Napster knockoff business. He keeps telling me some big corporation is going to buy his company for billions. Damn, where was I. Oh, yeah... Since being exploited from the underage of 16 as a face for her dad's corrupt and tortured business dealings, lots of geeks seem to have gotten the hots for her. Something to do with her pics appearing on a.b.p.teen, maybe. So, we've decided it's time to give her a brain as well as tits, and we've now invented an "interview" (haha!) with my old buddy Mikael Pawlo, who will do anything for a couple of gins and a quick one behind the bar. Oh shit, can I delete that? Anyhow, he "interviewed" the girl, which took about five seconds. "Maddy," he said, "Is your dad home?" "Uh, dunno, lemme see... yeah". "Right, get the fuck off the phone and let me talk to him!". "Hey, you don't have to talk to me like that, you motherfuck, I'm famous!" "Yeah, whatever, just pass him to me"...