It is a v_e_r_y complex message to get across...
on
CIOs Looking At OSS
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· Score: 1
Listen, Mr Exec: this stuff is cheep. It costs you nothing in licenses and you can use it for free. Like all software it is raw material, so be prepared to invest in making it work. But it is about the best raw material out there, and it is (did we mention this) free, costing exactly nothing.
It is a powerful argument and one that the OSS community should not be shy of using. Forget the discussion of 'free as in beer' and 'TCO'. Microsoft did not earn their billions from TCO but from plain license sales: for every billion spent on MS licenses, businesses probably spent 10-20 times getting the damn stuff to work.
Even the stupidest CEO/CIO understands the difference between prices. OSS is cheap. CHEAP.
On this subject... any smart organization should be putting a "Microsoft Exit Plan" into place. Move away from Office, away from Windows clients, and away from Windows servers. The presence/absence of a valid MEP should figure in their annual reports. As a stockmarket investor I'd invest in businesses that did this - it would show that the guys in charge had some idea what they were doing.
The future of movies and television seems to be changing towards one that is advert-free but sponsored by product placement. Given that content is becoming plastic - copied and manipulated as wanted - this seems the only way to pay for films that people want to watch.
A recent film made in Africa - where copying is rife and people are poor anyhow - demonstrates this wonderfully. Critical Assignment, paid for by Guiness, is a kind of African James Bond action film with sexy women and a cheesy plot. The hero is Michael Power, already famous as the kung-fu kicking hero of Guiness adverts across Nigeria and other countries. I've driven past a huge poster of him in Lagos many times.
While businesses like AOL and Sony are worrying about how to (a) keep their customers and (b) make money from movies and (c) prevent piracy, other more pragmatic businesses are thinking: "piracy is inevitable, so let's use that to our advantage".
To be honest, films like Critical Assignment (which I've not seen, just read about) are probably really bad, but then many commercial efforts are as well. And as competition for viewers heats up (when Guiness's competitors, like South African Breweries and Heineken make their own action movies), quality will go up (or down, if you like).
I think the US/Japanese/Western content industry is too old and inflexible to understand how to use the new digital economy usefully. Expect the next Hollywoods to be in South Africa, Bombay, and Hong Kong, catering for audiences that number in the billion range.
Dynamic load libraries are a hack to save memory. No serious developer is happy relying on DLLs that can be arbitrarily swapped in and out. A serious operating system (and I'm thinking of something like VMS) demand-swaps process images into memory so that the actual executable size is pretty irrelevant. The fact that Windows stupidly loads the entire.exe is shoddy design from the start, DLLs are a cheap and nasty work around, and this is just one more misguided patch that ignores the real problem.
Applications should be statically linked. They should install into private directories so that they do not interfere with each other. If there is a need to reduce application size to save memory, the answer is to write better code that does not simple link the entire known universe into the executable.
Clearly the result of this approach is going to be one set of DLLs per significant application, each loaded, and essentially the same as a set of statically linked applications. It sucks.
It is thankfully a moot discussion - Windows is already dead and like a seventy-five year old man with terminal liver failure, is fighting by transplanting organs. The move to the commodity OS (Linux) has become unstoppable.
Now... if there was a way to stop those nasty shared libraries on Linux...
Where notebooks go, desktop screens follow. This indicates that within a year, WXSXGA (or whatever that excessive i've-got-yet-a-longer-TLA word was) LCD screens will be priced to sell, and this is the final nail in the coffin of those 21" monsters sitting around our offices.
If this notebook sounds heavy, just consider the weight of the alternatives. Personally, though, I'm happier than a bishop in amsterdam with my ASUS. Three thumbs up.
Step 1: flood the world with cheap conventional antibiotics, thus rendering all bacteria resistant, and all conventional antibiotics useless.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
Where '???' is protected by the DMCA and any attempts to discover it will be prosecuted.
By the way, Copyright (and probably Patent Pending) 2003 by ites. The MP3 and video are coming along, but there seems to be a small proible wist the compsuere ans x dahs! ALL YOUR WINDOWS ARE BELONG TO US IMAGINE A BEOWULF CLUSTER OF BILLY GEES AND IN RUSSIA NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU DOT
The Devil came to Redmond, looking for some souls to steal,
and there he met with Billy G, who was just about to make a deal.
Said the Devil, "Hey Billy, you look bored, would you care to make a bet?"
And Billy he smiled slyly, and said "Dude, there ain't a deal that I've missed yet."
So the Devil took his keyboard and showed Billy his new game,
Saying "I wrote this quick, in VB6, now see if you can do the same."
Billy G, he just smiled his smile, and took the keyboard away,
and said, "Devil, you're behind the times, and you clicked on the EULA,
"Now you've run Windows Update, and your soul belongs to me."
And the Devil knew he'd met his match, so he turned and tried to flee,
But Billy G was much to fast, and he caught the Devil's long black cape,
Saying, "Devil, stay and play a while, we have a whole wide world to rape."
It seems that patents are copyrights are converging, thanks to the sheer unstoppable volume of communication that our digital world is creating. No-one can seem to enforce copyright on digital media, and no-one can seem to grant patents in any meaningful manner. The US patent office is basically doing to patents what P2P has done to intellectual property, and what every young geek wants to do to Nathalie Portman.
Now, this has interesting possibilities. (I don't mean Miss Portman, or perhaps I do...) At some point, say 10 years from now, patents will become a totally debased currency, arbitration of which the courts will at first try and then abandon as claim and counter claim come piling in. There is probably a magic ratio of junk-to-valid patents which will cause this tipping. Commercial copyright, similarly, is becoming a debased concept. I don't believe for a second that DRM can recover control of that. We are thus heading for a world where the notion of the state as the ultimate arbitrer (and thus, ultimate owner) of all intellectual property is going to vanish. Think about this for a second. The trademark in question here may nominally belong to Amazon, but it is the US government that actually gets to decide its fate.
We should welcome junk patents. They are each an indelible ratchet step on the way to full public ownership of what is, after all, our common intellectual birthright.
Any specified Turing Test can be defeated in much the same way as a lock-pick can defeat any specified lock, so perhaps we should move up one level of abstraction. I propose the "Meta Turing Test" which is as follows: specifying the conditions of the Turing Test (ability to lie, sense of humour, etc.) should allow a true human to design an automaton that fools the turing test, while a computer will not be able to do so.
Alternatively, why not just abandon the myth that human intelligence is some kind of mystical cloud, and see it for what it is, namely a set of thinking organs each designed (or adapted, if you prefer the 'evolution is a passive process' concept) to solve specific problems, in the same way as my hand is adapted to handling objects. Then, test each of these tools carefully. Anything - computer or human - that passes the tests can be defined as 'human'. Many beings that we today consider human will probably fail. Borg borg.
Sadam Hussein has quit Iraq and is now providing his services to the US arms establishment as a consultant specializing in making defense laboratories bloody difficult to find.
All we need is a bunch of UN arms inspectors touring the US looking for nukes in the presidential palaces and such security issues will soon be fixed!
Uh, duh. Boss. Chief. The Big Man. He who leads. Does this mean anything to you? Microsoft is 100% Bill Gates' vision as the Ultimate Money Making Machine. Let's face it: many people have spent much time trying to build such things, dreaming of such things, wondering what it would be like to have an endless flow of dollars. Billy G just happened - by luck, family, and intelligence - to make it come true. If you choose to use words like "blame", then you must point the finger at the right person, and that is William H. Gates III personally.
But the entire discussion is tedious and vapid. Wealth comes from careful and lucky negotiation of the (male) networks that thread our business world. Get born into the right family, with the right brain, and at the right time, and you stand a good chance of being rich. Choose the wrong parents, genes, and place and time, and you will dish out hamburgers.
Talking about it just mixes jealousy and ignorance. History shows that wealth never stays in one place for very long. Inequality of wealth creates the condititions for its own redistribution.
With Microsoft, its very stranglehold on PC operating systems has been a major stimulus behind the development of what will become the de-facto standard operating system, being Linux of course. Without Microsoft as the enemy, would so many people really have focussed on one single reliable alternative? It certainly did not happen before.
So, sit back, and watch history in action. We are approaching a period in which the Linux OS is becoming a standard commodity product, and in which all businesses that rely on control over one or other OS will die. If Microsoft realize this within two or three years and embrace Linux fully, they will survive. If they continue to rely on Windows, they will fail.
Yes, LoTF is a moralistic parable about the evils of war, but remember that this book was written soon after a world war, and as such is an attempt to explain the unexplainable: why did civilized peoples do such barbarous things to each other. LoTF does try to shock, but basically it just tries to reverse the 'noble savage' myth, saying that without the cloak of civilisation (represented by the adults in the book), we are doomed to descend into barbarism. And this statement has so little value that it can be dismissed easily. Firstly, the greatest horrors of the second world war were perpetuated by those societies with the highest level of organization. The cloak served to hide and organize horror, not prevent it. Secondly, there were ample demonstrations in that same war, if Golding had looked, of abandoned orphans acting in precisely the opposite way. When the adults had killed each other, in the ghettos and ruins, the orphans of Europe were quick to look after each other and share. Thirdly, a serious examination of violence between individuals and groups shows that this is most definitely not "nature red in tooth and claw" but a simple application of the economics of reproduction. Men will be violent when and as it gives them selective advantage. A large part of the violence in "primitive" societies involves men fighting or killing other men (from other groups) in order to get access to their women. Like it or not - violence and war are mainly caused by adult males competing for sexual and other resources. When you understand this, you see that depictions such as LoTF are based on a falsehood - namely that our violent nature is like an appetite or an itch... when in fact it is like a strategy. As far as I can see, LoTF is taught in schools because it makes the teachers feel important. Propganda, thus.
And here is my review:
The author has studied at the Hollywood "more blood, more guts" school of horror writing. After a few pages, one gets a feeling of numbness. Our heroine is skinned alive, raped by a zombie, shot and mutilated several times... each chapter seems to try to elevate the shock factor, but manages only to become tiresome, reflecting the heroine's own boredom with a world where the normal checks and balances of social life have been erased, and normality with it.
The basis of this novel is that a supercomputer of some kind has decided to digitise all life in the name of saving life. Fair enough, we've all wondered at some point "what if all life is digital and we just think we are alive". Many novelists have tried this route with varying success - see Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series.
What makes this story plot different is that the now-digital humans know that they are just imitations of life, and appear to take indecent pleasure in abusing that fact - killing themselves and others in the most unpleasant ways. Yes, possibly.
It is an interesting social question: what would happen if all the normal checks and balances of human life were removed? The "descent into barbarism" thesis has been tried before, in William Golding's propogandist "Lord of the Flies", which teachs young children that without the grace of adult supervision they would soon be impaling each other on sharpened sticks. In Metamorphosis, it seems, the supervising adult is quite happy to see the children impale each other.
So why does this novel leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth? It's not because of the graphic language - this just makes the reader bored. No, there is something fundamentally skewed with the thesis. Maybe it is this: human social controls are not something we dream to live without, unless we are sociopaths. They are the only measure by which we exist. This future world, in which anything goes, and no-one cares, is a distopia of massive proportions. Humanity has been reduced to something of less importance and less interest than the humans in Terminator or The Matrix. In this world, we have simply become immortal psychotic teenage males, and that is frankly horrible.
By my definition "cool" is that which most people have not yet discovered. Example: that... ah, but I'm not going to tell you. Perhaps this method can tell you what just became cool, but it's hard to track something that is by definition under the radar. Otherwise, just track Google searches. You'll soon see what's popular.
If it's true that urban industrial infrasound pollution disturbs our bodies and minds, would it be possible to design passive or active noise reduction strategies to create a healthier living and working environment?
E.g. silent rooms with insulation specifically designed to cut-out infrasound, or with anti-noise panels that actively eliminate it?
I'm reminded of the effects of infrasound on marine mammals. Various armed forces use ultra-low level sound waves for carrying information across oceans, and some researchers believe this interferes with the navigation systems of whales and dolphins. Think cetecean brown noise...
Perhaps the point here is less about what Google does today (which is largely to provide a very useful service to millions of people), and more about what Google represents and may or will become. Or, if you like your paranoia hot, what the unspoken googles of the NSA and suchlike are busy with. The technology exists to archive and index the entirity of our digital culture, be it public or private. So, it will happen.
Whether or not you believe that the total destruction of private information is a good thing (and personally, I do), Google will be instrumental in this happening.
Google is becoming the global memory...
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Should you Fear Google?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
In which everything that has been recorded will find its way into Google's caches. Today: every web page in existence, every newsgroup article ever posted (but where is that ABEPB cache, I wonder?), tomorrow every click you make, every step you take.
I think paranoia is not an extreme reaction, because although Google has been exemplary in their behavior so far, such a centralization of information will, one day, become a target for malicious groups.
Yeah, why not just carry a plastic replica if you want something that looks cool. Too small for a PDA, too large for a phone.
I've been using a wireless bluetooth headset for the last month or two, and this is a much better indicator of the future of mobile phones.
Split the headset from the phone, and you get something more practical: a larger box that can do more and that you do not have to lift to your ear like a small well-designed brick.
And... which you can actually write on with your stylus while you are making a call.
Of course you can - all you need to do is get a GPRS connection on your phone, and enable your Linux web server via a WASP (wireless application service provider), then exchange your data over MMS. It's so simple that dozens, even hundred of people will do this by 2004!
Or, you could just use a serial cable.
After virtual theft, can we expect to see virtual estate agents ("it's a real bargain, sir!"), virtual cops ("I'll track down your thief for a mere 10m gold pieces, ma'am!"), virtual lawyers ("my client was temporarily insane due to the pressure of game conformity, m'lod"), virtual punishments ("...and banished for life to MSN"), and virtual sex ("50m gold pieces and I'll tell you a nasty little secret...").
Can't wait.
I don't think I said that "all men are the same" or "all women are the same". There are huge differences between a man at 20, at 30, at 40, and at 50. But... and you just have to look honestly around you... the bulk of men go through the same kinds of changes, as do women. This is how marketing people 'segment' their target populations. It works for soap, cars, clothes, whatever. We are not random plastic bunches of external influences. We are incredibly fine-tuned instruments *designed* (and this is the correct term, even if he design happened over millions of years through evolution) to work as social animals. What we are, what we want, what makes us happy, what makes us unhappy... all the answers lie almost exclusively in our own social structures.
And family is, as I've said, the main one of these. Ignore it, sure, if you're young and still figuring out your life. If you're sterile or gay, that does not mean you are without family, only that you won't be a parent.
People hate looking at themselves as animals, as a species with functional solutions to problems, but our minds are built in the same way as a bat's radar or an elephant's trunk: through eons of evolutionary pressure to solve problems.
The question is: what problems do our minds solve? And the answer is: other people. Think about it... it will make life suddenly much easier to understand.
Well, I'm glad I started a good discussion on this subject. Slashdot is too full of "hey wow, gadget!" with too little "hey, dude, what is life about?"
>It's pretty ridiculous to try to package people's wants/desires into arbitrary groupings like that.
In the same way as it's pretty ridiculous to try to segment a population the way marketing people do... and yet it works amazingly well. Treat an 18 year old student as you would a 40 year old and your business won't work. So are people really all that different? What do you base this statement on? Genetically we are so close that we are almost clones. Of course we only see the differences, but we're not objective observers of our own species.
How can gender be irrelevant when the economics of sexual reproduction are so different? Or do you not believe that such rules apply to us? Can I, a man, get pregnant? Can a woman produce sperm rather than an egg just by willpower?
Of course many people don't want a family, but it's easy to guess you're a young man. Ask every woman you know and you'll get a different range of answers.
Modding a serious comment down to Troll is a poor way of replying. I agree that the simplistic formula of "seek happiness in your family" does not apply to all people, but IMHO the people who cannot find happiness through this route will never find it.
I'd be interested to hear of anyone actually being truly happy because they earn lots of money, or have lots of sex, or whatever. Sure: such things strike a pleasure point, but that is not the same thing.
Don't mod me down. Think about what I've said and get over your prejudice that "all people are the same and society makes us different", and its cousin "men and women are just the same except for the external organs, and it's our rotten education system that makes us different". They are both pure BS and the cause of much misery. We are not random blobs of genetic material, but finely designed answers to very specific questions. Our hands, our minds, our bodies... all tools of one kind or another.
Happiness comes from discovering one's true nature and satisfying that. Ask yourself whether humans are designed for modern urban life, and if so, what evolutionary mechanism would work that fast. And if not, what are we designed for?
The rest is simple honest observation and deduction.
At the risk of being modded down for extreme flamebait, I will summarize
my answer to "what should I do with my life" in a few lines.
First,
men and women are not the same (surprise!), so there are two
different answers. Secondly, the only real rule for measuring whether
where you're going is "right" is when you're happy and not making other
people unhappy. So here goes...
If you're a man, work hard while
you're young, learn a profession that interests you, be it music, art,
business, programming, whatever. Find someone to teach you, learn, work
hard for ten years or so, then start on an independent basis. Have
girlfriends but do not get married before your life has gelled. Use
your work to invest in a family, look after that with your life, and
you will die a happy man surrounded by your kids and grandkids.
If you're a woman, stick close to your family and learn the basic skills
of looking after people: health, food, business, crafts. Date young
men if you have to, but do not try to marry a man who is still changing.
Best bet: marry a man who is 10 to 15 years older, and can look after
you in the style you expect. Invest everything you can in your children
and in the structures that keep them healthy. You'll get old and
wrinkled like everyone does, but you'll be happy.
In work and outside work, we are only really happy when we're in a group
that works like a healthy extended family. This means: mother and father
figure, various aunts and uncles, and children. The social contract in
such a group is: give everything you have to the group and you will be
protected in all conditions.
Most people live in a different world, where the group says: you are
totally free to do what you like, but the only ties we know are based
on money and power. It's artificial and unsatisfying, and you will know
the difference the first time your boss gets into financial troubles
and his reaction is either (a) we all take a pay cut and find a way to
fix our problems, or (b) you're fired and you can clear out your desk
tomorrow.
I know it's not a complex philosophy, and it may sound sexist, but
it's really not: healthy communities depend on each person, each gender,
playing their role to the full.
>What do you need a company for?
Because it has to cost about $199 max and this means making millions of the damn things. Flood the world with a Linux-driven set-top hard-drive TV recording any media-playing p2p sharing boxes. Anarchy. Evil.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Listen, Mr Exec: this stuff is cheep. It costs you nothing in licenses and you can use it for free. Like all software it is raw material, so be prepared to invest in making it work. But it is about the best raw material out there, and it is (did we mention this) free, costing exactly nothing. /absence of a valid MEP should figure in their annual reports. As a stockmarket investor I'd invest in businesses that did this - it would show that the guys in charge had some idea what they were doing.
It is a powerful argument and one that the OSS community should not be shy of using. Forget the discussion of 'free as in beer' and 'TCO'. Microsoft did not earn their billions from TCO but from plain license sales: for every billion spent on MS licenses, businesses probably spent 10-20 times getting the damn stuff to work.
Even the stupidest CEO/CIO understands the difference between prices. OSS is cheap. CHEAP.
On this subject... any smart organization should be putting a "Microsoft Exit Plan" into place. Move away from Office, away from Windows clients, and away from Windows servers. The presence
The future of movies and television seems to be changing towards one that is advert-free but sponsored by product placement. Given that content is becoming plastic - copied and manipulated as wanted - this seems the only way to pay for films that people want to watch.
A recent film made in Africa - where copying is rife and people are poor anyhow - demonstrates this wonderfully. Critical Assignment, paid for by Guiness, is a kind of African James Bond action film with sexy women and a cheesy plot. The hero is Michael Power, already famous as the kung-fu kicking hero of Guiness adverts across Nigeria and other countries. I've driven past a huge poster of him in Lagos many times.
While businesses like AOL and Sony are worrying about how to (a) keep their customers and (b) make money from movies and (c) prevent piracy, other more pragmatic businesses are thinking: "piracy is inevitable, so let's use that to our advantage".
To be honest, films like Critical Assignment (which I've not seen, just read about) are probably really bad, but then many commercial efforts are as well. And as competition for viewers heats up (when Guiness's competitors, like South African Breweries and Heineken make their own action movies), quality will go up (or down, if you like).
I think the US/Japanese/Western content industry is too old and inflexible to understand how to use the new digital economy usefully. Expect the next Hollywoods to be in South Africa, Bombay, and Hong Kong, catering for audiences that number in the billion range.
Dynamic load libraries are a hack to save memory. No serious developer is happy relying on DLLs that can be arbitrarily swapped in and out. A serious operating system (and I'm thinking of something like VMS) demand-swaps process images into memory so that the actual executable size is pretty irrelevant. The fact that Windows stupidly loads the entire .exe is shoddy design from the start, DLLs are a cheap and nasty work around, and this is just one more misguided patch that ignores the real problem.
Applications should be statically linked. They should install into private directories so that they do not interfere with each other. If there is a need to reduce application size to save memory, the answer is to write better code that does not simple link the entire known universe into the executable.
Clearly the result of this approach is going to be one set of DLLs per significant application, each loaded, and essentially the same as a set of statically linked applications. It sucks.
It is thankfully a moot discussion - Windows is already dead and like a seventy-five year old man with terminal liver failure, is fighting by transplanting organs. The move to the commodity OS (Linux) has become unstoppable.
Now... if there was a way to stop those nasty shared libraries on Linux...
Where notebooks go, desktop screens follow. This indicates that within a year, WXSXGA (or whatever that excessive i've-got-yet-a-longer-TLA word was) LCD screens will be priced to sell, and this is the final nail in the coffin of those 21" monsters sitting around our offices.
If this notebook sounds heavy, just consider the weight of the alternatives. Personally, though, I'm happier than a bishop in amsterdam with my ASUS. Three thumbs up.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
Where '???' is protected by the DMCA and any attempts to discover it will be prosecuted.
By the way, Copyright (and probably Patent Pending) 2003 by ites. The MP3 and video are coming along, but there seems to be a small proible wist the compsuere ans x dahs! ALL YOUR WINDOWS ARE BELONG TO US IMAGINE A BEOWULF CLUSTER OF BILLY GEES AND IN RUSSIA NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU DOT
The Devil came to Redmond, looking for some souls to steal,
and there he met with Billy G, who was just about to make a deal.
Said the Devil, "Hey Billy, you look bored, would you care to make a bet?"
And Billy he smiled slyly, and said "Dude, there ain't a deal that I've missed yet."
So the Devil took his keyboard and showed Billy his new game,
Saying "I wrote this quick, in VB6, now see if you can do the same."
Billy G, he just smiled his smile, and took the keyboard away,
and said, "Devil, you're behind the times, and you clicked on the EULA,
"Now you've run Windows Update, and your soul belongs to me."
And the Devil knew he'd met his match, so he turned and tried to flee,
But Billy G was much to fast, and he caught the Devil's long black cape,
Saying, "Devil, stay and play a while, we have a whole wide world to rape."
It seems that patents are copyrights are converging, thanks to the sheer unstoppable volume of communication that our digital world is creating. No-one can seem to enforce copyright on digital media, and no-one can seem to grant patents in any meaningful manner. The US patent office is basically doing to patents what P2P has done to intellectual property, and what every young geek wants to do to Nathalie Portman.
Now, this has interesting possibilities. (I don't mean Miss Portman, or perhaps I do...) At some point, say 10 years from now, patents will become a totally debased currency, arbitration of which the courts will at first try and then abandon as claim and counter claim come piling in. There is probably a magic ratio of junk-to-valid patents which will cause this tipping. Commercial copyright, similarly, is becoming a debased concept. I don't believe for a second that DRM can recover control of that. We are thus heading for a world where the notion of the state as the ultimate arbitrer (and thus, ultimate owner) of all intellectual property is going to vanish. Think about this for a second. The trademark in question here may nominally belong to Amazon, but it is the US government that actually gets to decide its fate.
We should welcome junk patents. They are each an indelible ratchet step on the way to full public ownership of what is, after all, our common intellectual birthright.
Any specified Turing Test can be defeated in much the same way as a lock-pick can defeat any specified lock, so perhaps we should move up one level of abstraction. I propose the "Meta Turing Test" which is as follows: specifying the conditions of the Turing Test (ability to lie, sense of humour, etc.) should allow a true human to design an automaton that fools the turing test, while a computer will not be able to do so.
Alternatively, why not just abandon the myth that human intelligence is some kind of mystical cloud, and see it for what it is, namely a set of thinking organs each designed (or adapted, if you prefer the 'evolution is a passive process' concept) to solve specific problems, in the same way as my hand is adapted to handling objects. Then, test each of these tools carefully. Anything - computer or human - that passes the tests can be defined as 'human'. Many beings that we today consider human will probably fail. Borg borg.
Sadam Hussein has quit Iraq and is now providing his services to the US arms establishment as a consultant specializing in making defense laboratories bloody difficult to find.
All we need is a bunch of UN arms inspectors touring the US looking for nukes in the presidential palaces and such security issues will soon be fixed!
Uh, duh. Boss. Chief. The Big Man. He who leads. Does this mean anything to you? Microsoft is 100% Bill Gates' vision as the Ultimate Money Making Machine. Let's face it: many people have spent much time trying to build such things, dreaming of such things, wondering what it would be like to have an endless flow of dollars. Billy G just happened - by luck, family, and intelligence - to make it come true. If you choose to use words like "blame", then you must point the finger at the right person, and that is William H. Gates III personally.
But the entire discussion is tedious and vapid. Wealth comes from careful and lucky negotiation of the (male) networks that thread our business world. Get born into the right family, with the right brain, and at the right time, and you stand a good chance of being rich. Choose the wrong parents, genes, and place and time, and you will dish out hamburgers.
Talking about it just mixes jealousy and ignorance. History shows that wealth never stays in one place for very long. Inequality of wealth creates the condititions for its own redistribution.
With Microsoft, its very stranglehold on PC operating systems has been a major stimulus behind the development of what will become the de-facto standard operating system, being Linux of course. Without Microsoft as the enemy, would so many people really have focussed on one single reliable alternative? It certainly did not happen before.
So, sit back, and watch history in action. We are approaching a period in which the Linux OS is becoming a standard commodity product, and in which all businesses that rely on control over one or other OS will die. If Microsoft realize this within two or three years and embrace Linux fully, they will survive. If they continue to rely on Windows, they will fail.
Yes, LoTF is a moralistic parable about the evils of war, but remember that this book was written soon after a world war, and as such is an attempt to explain the unexplainable: why did civilized peoples do such barbarous things to each other. LoTF does try to shock, but basically it just tries to reverse the 'noble savage' myth, saying that without the cloak of civilisation (represented by the adults in the book), we are doomed to descend into barbarism. And this statement has so little value that it can be dismissed easily. Firstly, the greatest horrors of the second world war were perpetuated by those societies with the highest level of organization. The cloak served to hide and organize horror, not prevent it. Secondly, there were ample demonstrations in that same war, if Golding had looked, of abandoned orphans acting in precisely the opposite way. When the adults had killed each other, in the ghettos and ruins, the orphans of Europe were quick to look after each other and share. Thirdly, a serious examination of violence between individuals and groups shows that this is most definitely not "nature red in tooth and claw" but a simple application of the economics of reproduction. Men will be violent when and as it gives them selective advantage. A large part of the violence in "primitive" societies involves men fighting or killing other men (from other groups) in order to get access to their women. Like it or not - violence and war are mainly caused by adult males competing for sexual and other resources. When you understand this, you see that depictions such as LoTF are based on a falsehood - namely that our violent nature is like an appetite or an itch... when in fact it is like a strategy. As far as I can see, LoTF is taught in schools because it makes the teachers feel important. Propganda, thus.
And here is my review:
The author has studied at the Hollywood "more blood, more guts" school of horror writing. After a few pages, one gets a feeling of numbness. Our heroine is skinned alive, raped by a zombie, shot and mutilated several times... each chapter seems to try to elevate the shock factor, but manages only to become tiresome, reflecting the heroine's own boredom with a world where the normal checks and balances of social life have been erased, and normality with it.
The basis of this novel is that a supercomputer of some kind has decided to digitise all life in the name of saving life. Fair enough, we've all wondered at some point "what if all life is digital and we just think we are alive". Many novelists have tried this route with varying success - see Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series.
What makes this story plot different is that the now-digital humans know that they are just imitations of life, and appear to take indecent pleasure in abusing that fact - killing themselves and others in the most unpleasant ways. Yes, possibly.
It is an interesting social question: what would happen if all the normal checks and balances of human life were removed? The "descent into barbarism" thesis has been tried before, in William Golding's propogandist "Lord of the Flies", which teachs young children that without the grace of adult supervision they would soon be impaling each other on sharpened sticks. In Metamorphosis, it seems, the supervising adult is quite happy to see the children impale each other.
So why does this novel leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth? It's not because of the graphic language - this just makes the reader bored. No, there is something fundamentally skewed with the thesis. Maybe it is this: human social controls are not something we dream to live without, unless we are sociopaths. They are the only measure by which we exist. This future world, in which anything goes, and no-one cares, is a distopia of massive proportions. Humanity has been reduced to something of less importance and less interest than the humans in Terminator or The Matrix. In this world, we have simply become immortal psychotic teenage males, and that is frankly horrible.
By my definition "cool" is that which most people have not yet discovered. Example: that... ah, but I'm not going to tell you. Perhaps this method can tell you what just became cool, but it's hard to track something that is by definition under the radar. Otherwise, just track Google searches. You'll soon see what's popular.
If it's true that urban industrial infrasound pollution disturbs our bodies and minds, would it be possible to design passive or active noise reduction strategies to create a healthier living and working environment?
E.g. silent rooms with insulation specifically designed to cut-out infrasound, or with anti-noise panels that actively eliminate it?
I'm reminded of the effects of infrasound on marine mammals. Various armed forces use ultra-low level sound waves for carrying information across oceans, and some researchers believe this interferes with the navigation systems of whales and dolphins. Think cetecean brown noise...
Perhaps the point here is less about what Google does today (which is largely to provide a very useful service to millions of people), and more about what Google represents and may or will become. Or, if you like your paranoia hot, what the unspoken googles of the NSA and suchlike are busy with. The technology exists to archive and index the entirity of our digital culture, be it public or private. So, it will happen.
Whether or not you believe that the total destruction of private information is a good thing (and personally, I do), Google will be instrumental in this happening.
I think paranoia is not an extreme reaction, because although Google has been exemplary in their behavior so far, such a centralization of information will, one day, become a target for malicious groups.
Yeah, why not just carry a plastic replica if you want something that looks cool. Too small for a PDA, too large for a phone.
I've been using a wireless bluetooth headset for the last month or two, and this is a much better indicator of the future of mobile phones.
Split the headset from the phone, and you get something more practical: a larger box that can do more and that you do not have to lift to your ear like a small well-designed brick.
And... which you can actually write on with your stylus while you are making a call.
Of course you can - all you need to do is get a GPRS connection on your phone, and enable your Linux web server via a WASP (wireless application service provider), then exchange your data over MMS. It's so simple that dozens, even hundred of people will do this by 2004!
Or, you could just use a serial cable.
After virtual theft, can we expect to see virtual estate agents ("it's a real bargain, sir!"), virtual cops ("I'll track down your thief for a mere 10m gold pieces, ma'am!"), virtual lawyers ("my client was temporarily insane due to the pressure of game conformity, m'lod"), virtual punishments ("...and banished for life to MSN"), and virtual sex ("50m gold pieces and I'll tell you a nasty little secret..."). Can't wait.
And family is, as I've said, the main one of these. Ignore it, sure, if you're young and still figuring out your life. If you're sterile or gay, that does not mean you are without family, only that you won't be a parent.
People hate looking at themselves as animals, as a species with functional solutions to problems, but our minds are built in the same way as a bat's radar or an elephant's trunk: through eons of evolutionary pressure to solve problems.
The question is: what problems do our minds solve? And the answer is: other people. Think about it... it will make life suddenly much easier to understand.
Well, I'm glad I started a good discussion on this subject. Slashdot is too full of "hey wow, gadget!" with too little "hey, dude, what is life about?"
In the same way as it's pretty ridiculous to try to segment a population the way marketing people do... and yet it works amazingly well. Treat an 18 year old student as you would a 40 year old and your business won't work. So are people really all that different? What do you base this statement on? Genetically we are so close that we are almost clones. Of course we only see the differences, but we're not objective observers of our own species.
How can gender be irrelevant when the economics of sexual reproduction are so different? Or do you not believe that such rules apply to us? Can I, a man, get pregnant? Can a woman produce sperm rather than an egg just by willpower?
Of course many people don't want a family, but it's easy to guess you're a young man. Ask every woman you know and you'll get a different range of answers.
I'd be interested to hear of anyone actually being truly happy because they earn lots of money, or have lots of sex, or whatever. Sure: such things strike a pleasure point, but that is not the same thing.
Don't mod me down. Think about what I've said and get over your prejudice that "all people are the same and society makes us different", and its cousin "men and women are just the same except for the external organs, and it's our rotten education system that makes us different". They are both pure BS and the cause of much misery. We are not random blobs of genetic material, but finely designed answers to very specific questions. Our hands, our minds, our bodies... all tools of one kind or another.
Happiness comes from discovering one's true nature and satisfying that. Ask yourself whether humans are designed for modern urban life, and if so, what evolutionary mechanism would work that fast. And if not, what are we designed for?
The rest is simple honest observation and deduction.
First, men and women are not the same (surprise!), so there are two different answers. Secondly, the only real rule for measuring whether where you're going is "right" is when you're happy and not making other people unhappy. So here goes...
If you're a man, work hard while you're young, learn a profession that interests you, be it music, art, business, programming, whatever. Find someone to teach you, learn, work hard for ten years or so, then start on an independent basis. Have girlfriends but do not get married before your life has gelled. Use your work to invest in a family, look after that with your life, and you will die a happy man surrounded by your kids and grandkids.
If you're a woman, stick close to your family and learn the basic skills of looking after people: health, food, business, crafts. Date young men if you have to, but do not try to marry a man who is still changing. Best bet: marry a man who is 10 to 15 years older, and can look after you in the style you expect. Invest everything you can in your children and in the structures that keep them healthy. You'll get old and wrinkled like everyone does, but you'll be happy.
In work and outside work, we are only really happy when we're in a group that works like a healthy extended family. This means: mother and father figure, various aunts and uncles, and children. The social contract in such a group is: give everything you have to the group and you will be protected in all conditions.
Most people live in a different world, where the group says: you are totally free to do what you like, but the only ties we know are based on money and power. It's artificial and unsatisfying, and you will know the difference the first time your boss gets into financial troubles and his reaction is either (a) we all take a pay cut and find a way to fix our problems, or (b) you're fired and you can clear out your desk tomorrow.
I know it's not a complex philosophy, and it may sound sexist, but it's really not: healthy communities depend on each person, each gender, playing their role to the full.
>What do you need a company for? :)
Because it has to cost about $199 max and this means making millions of the damn things. Flood the world with a Linux-driven set-top hard-drive TV recording any media-playing p2p sharing boxes. Anarchy. Evil.