a, I believe Kabul was the target of US government policy, not popular demand for action. There is no proof that US popular opinion wanted war after Sept. 11th. More likely, public opinion in the US would have gone for insulation, rejection of the outside world, possibly some xenophobia.
b, New Labour is relatively clean, despite being the most powerful UK government since Thatcher's Tories. Of course there are scandals, but they are mostly banal. In some respects, it's a superstar government since they came to power from outside the London political scene (being an essentially Scottish party). Having no power does not make a party clean, as the UK Conservatives have shown.
c, Peron was not a populist, but an extreme example of government by political machine. He ruined the economy for standard reasons: using the country's economy to pander to friendly interest groups.
Powerful governments are not necessarily corrupt. There seem to be two factors: how long the government has been part of the mainstream political system, and thus open for "sale", and how long they can expect to stay in power, and thus able to exploit their position for gain.
Superstar governments have neither of these: quickly elected and quickly dismissed. It remains to be shown that this "populism" is actually bad in any way.
And in the 1970's, they thought that digital watches were the coolest thing. Sure, this machine almost fast enough to divx my library of DVDs before I die, but that's not real computing. What I'm waiting for is a machine powerful enough to calculate the DNA sequences for artificial life. Now that's hard work. Another 20 years or so of Moore's law, and we'll be there. Then I can just scan and clone myself, with a few improvements.
One interesting aspect of this kind of election is that it starts to resemble the viewer-elections we see on reality shows. We are starting to see something that looks like instant democracy. Now, what's cool about this is that it breaks the back of the traditional political system.
I've noticed that those famous and/or powerful people who are not corrupt are invariably those elected by rapid popular vote, namely superstars of pop, sports, and so on.
A long, slow election process just gives all parties time to negotiate with interest groups. Slow elections generate corrupt politicians, and the semi-permanent election process we see in certain countries just creates completely corrupt political parties.
Electing politicians like this is going to annoy the established political parties. It's also going to raise a generation of politicians who have popular support but no real political network. But it's hard to see what the impact of this will be.
More junk food! Sad thing is it's inevitable. Little Soylent Green slabs of stuff grown in factories from reprocessed organic waste repurposed from dead pets, cow brains, post-corporal digestive residude, failed clones, and... well, why the heck not, dead bodies.
Everyfood we've invented in the last 2,000 years is junk food: white starch, white sugar, white fat, white beer. White meat is the obvious next step.
'Xcuse me but I'm going to stick to my diet of edible roots and leaves, nuts, whole grains, seafood, goat, milk, and cheese. Luckily alcohol was invented more than 5,000 years ago, so it makes it onto my "good" list.
Cheers! And happy Hogmanay to all of you.
Roll on the day when I can buy programmes of my choice and get them sent to my hard drive to watch at my leisure. There is the small issue of payment and copy protection but it's not a killer. I'd be happy to pay for (e.g.) a season of online Futurama if I could get a hardcopy on DVD.
Anyhow, the obvious solution is product placement. Bite my shiny metal Pepsi ass!
I'd agree with you about major religions acting like cults in many cases. There are differences but they are mostly because religions get tired after a while. The intention is the same. As the Jesuits used to say: "Give me a child at twelve, and he will be ours for life."
However, having had relatives caught in cults and in religions, I can say that there is a real difference. Religions rarely screw with your mind quite as thoroughly as cults do (and abusive intimacy is part of this).
I've no praise for any group that recruits actively. End of opinion.
There is nothing cool about Raelism. It's a cult, pure and simple. Cults create private realities, and then sell these to their members little by little. The "free sex" angle just gets young men hooked and young girls broken before they realize that the only ones getting free sex are the cult leaders.
Any group that actively recruits is dangerous because it inevitably puts the welfare of the group ahead that of its members. Recruiting school children into a cult ranks around the same as giving them free heroine.
Check out the Cult Information Centre if you still think cults are cool.
Boring and nasty work compared to boldly going where no hacker has gone before, but totally vital. MS showed that software competition is about feature lists, and Linux has to be able to match and then beat Windows on every feature list. There is a good chance this project will get sued but that also means publicity.
Personally, though, I think that playing catch-up with the Monster from Redmond can only work so far. What the FOSS world needs is a killer application, something so radical and useful that it transcends all discussion of look and feel.
The Web was almost this application, but MS caught up just in time. So, what's next? Opinions, please?
Re:Wireless comms has already changed our lives
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 2
Only an American could say that wireless comms have not changed our lives. Go to Europe, Asia, and Africa, look at how people communicate, and wireless is having a serious impact. For various reasons the US is _way_ behind here, with about 30% of people having a handset, against (e.g.) over 90% in South Korea.
Wireless comms has already changed our lives
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Living in Europe it is clear that GSMs have already changed our lives and societies. It's not quite clear how, but with 70% of the population (pensioners to babies) having mobile phones and using them heavily, the dynamics of social contact have definitely changed.
I'd agree that we are on the verge of a revolution similar to that in 1992-95 with the PC and Internet. Never before have so many people had such easy access to communications. And since human society is essentially about communications, this makes for extremely interesting times.
But I think many sociologists make the mistake of thinking that technology can change us in some way. It changes the way we behave, but it just reinforces the way we are. People stick with family and friends above all, and do not just form mobs because it's possible. If anything, totally flexible mobile communications will reinforce existing social structures (like family) that are constantly under attack from modern urban life, rather than creating new social forms.
In Belgium, the SMS short-message service is extremely heavily used but mainly for saying 'honey, I'm almost home', playing trivial games, chatting with sex lines (actually robots or operators) and voting in TV contests. Smart mobs? Not really.
If Digital or MS had given away MSVC for Alpha, we'd have seen a decent range of NT/Alpha software. The problem is Windows was popular mainly thanks to the wide range of available software. NT/Alpha could never catch up.
'No software' is always an exageration. The question is 'enough software to compete?' and for NT/Alpha, the answer was always 'not yet'.
Finally, although NT ran well enough on the Alpha, as did many other OSes, this was never enough reason for businesses buying Alphas. NT is not an enterprise OS! Digital Unix and OpenVMS are.
Again, I definitely defend Disney's right to create a hundred thousand unhappy customers, just as I'd defend the right of United to deliver bad service at high prices and go bankrupt.
My comment was ironic, fgs. Anyhow, what happened to the color adjustment buttons that used to make TV such fun?
Agent Smith had a political agenda
on
Prey
·
· Score: 2
Of course he was making the comparison to justify a nasty exploitative system. But yes, there does not seem to be any intrinsic value in human society (except to us humans), nor any real difference between the way we work (choose the best strategy to play the genetic cards we receive at conception) and the way any other lifeform (alien or not) would work.
All life is a swarm. We share a common ancestor with every virus.
Well, evolution does not give a rat's ass for stability. It is just a mechanism for filtering the blind-man's walk of random mutation into winning and losing genetic strategies.
Oops, got side-tracked there. Actually I wanted to say that 'mindless hive swarm' describes humanity pretty well. Our structures (cities, businesses, networks) follow Zipf's law whether we believe we're in control or not.
It is a myth that Lindows has 'proprietary' software. Everything can be downloaded by FTP. The only difference from conventional FOSS projects is that you actually have to buy the product before being given the link. But it's just an anonymous FTP site and I've posted the address before on/.
The Alpha was never a Windows machine, obvious from the start. We did several projects on NT/Alpha and the sheer difficulty of getting software for the CPU meant it could never compete with Intel. In the Unix market, the combination of Alpha/Digital Unix was very reliable, and we still support some customers who use this, but frankly we can run the same applications on Linux/Intel and it's unclear what advantages the Alpha boxes give. Lastly, the Alpha/OpenVMS combination gave the best results, because OpenVMS is a really solid OS that makes excellent use of the Alpha. We also support a customer (a large tour operator) who uses this configuration: Alpha/OpenVMS/RDB/ACMS.
DEC's strength was always engineering, not marketing, but they were killed by the commoditization of IT due to the twin forces of IT marketing giants (Compaq, Microsoft, Oracle) and open software (mainly Linux). It's clear today that any advantages the Alpha and/or OpenVMS give are completely wiped out by the cheapness of mass produced solutions.
HP is not taking a big risk betting on Itanium because the CPU is almost entirely irrelevant in today's market. My notebook runs 2-3 times faster than the front-end Alpha's used by our tour operator client, and it's only the lack of decent software such as the multithreading ACMS clients we wrote (able to handle 500+ terminals on a modest Alpha) that prevents us using Linux instead, on whatever box happens to be lying around. (And yes, we'll do a port of ACMS and the multithreaded clients so that our client can switch away from his Alpha/OpenVMS clusters).
Anyhow, the demise of Digital and all their technology was clear from the day Dave Custer and his team went to work for Microsoft on NT.
When a company makes an inferior product consumers can simply stop buying it. Even with a color tint, a film is perfectly watchable, so there are no grounds for a lawsuit. What's next? Let's sue Hollywood for films with bad acting, poor direction or lousy scripts. Or perhaps we can sue a restaurant where the food tastes lousy.
I defend Disney here - every business has the right to produce inferior products and watch its consumers walk away.
Nature has no say in the matter.
Humans exploit the cognitive niche
and this means that we push forward.
There is no inevitability in our progress
nor even in our presence, but short-term
predictions are quite safe: present a problem,
and if it is solvable, someone will solve it.
Is there any proof that life is not digital?
Nothing is ever simple, but complexity is not a barrier by itself.
In other words, any solvable problem, no matter how complex, will be solved.
Is digital life solvable? That is the question.
If the answer is 'yes' (and all signs are that this it is) then it is inevitable that we will eventually make it as common-place as all the other 'magical' technologies that we use today.
To understand the true impact of genetic research, look at it like this: today we still see life as hardware, something that has physical shape. We are rapidly approaching the state where we will see life as software, something to be programmed and copied infinitely cheaply.
Human-mouse hybrids? So what. Within a generation you will be able to design any lifeform you can imagine on your computer screen, and 'print' it into a virgin cell that will grow into your animal or plant.
It is an inevitable progression. DNA is a digital code, and it is just a matter of horsepower to crack and then manipulate it.
Surely/. can do better than this. A new OS is always interesting, but how about a review that clarifies (a) what is special about this OS, (b) why the combination of HD+OS works, assuming it does, (c) how his can be used in combination with existing OSes , (d) etc.
What I've seen so far is one very thin infomercial followed by an uninformed discussion about useless details. Has anyone actually tried GNU-Darwin?
You are correct about the need for face-to-face communications, but my opinions on "cheap connectivity" come from experience, not trend hopping.
My best collaborations are with people I've worked with closely, but the Internet makes it possible to sustain these collaborations when they would otherwise die.
This effect takes time but allows the existence of technical networks that would otherwise be impossible.
If you look at most of the really interesting work coming from academic and independent research, you'll find that such networks are really vital.
All technology is about communicating abstracted knowledge, and programming is the most abstract of them all, so the value of the Internet in improving programming should be seen as obvious.
Small-scale development has always been efficient. The challenge facing the industry has been to find ways of doing large-scale development (the type Fred Brooks was talking about) cheaply and effectively.
And in this domain, there has been a revolution, namely the Internet, and the arrival of cheap connectivity between developers anywhere in the world.
Prior to this, the only way for developers to collaborate was to be hired by the same company, work on the same network. Inefficient as hell.
Today any group anywhere in the world can create a project and work on this as efficiently as a small group in the past.
The irony is that the revolution does not care a shit about the technology used, and works as well for COBOL programmers as for companies cracking the human genome. It's about solving a purely human problem: communications.
Slashdot Mirror
a, I believe Kabul was the target of US government policy, not popular demand for action. There is no proof that US popular opinion wanted war after Sept. 11th. More likely, public opinion in the US would have gone for insulation, rejection of the outside world, possibly some xenophobia.
b, New Labour is relatively clean, despite being the most powerful UK government since Thatcher's Tories. Of course there are scandals, but they are mostly banal. In some respects, it's a superstar government since they came to power from outside the London political scene (being an essentially Scottish party). Having no power does not make a party clean, as the UK Conservatives have shown.
c, Peron was not a populist, but an extreme example of government by political machine. He ruined the economy for standard reasons: using the country's economy to pander to friendly interest groups.
Powerful governments are not necessarily corrupt. There seem to be two factors: how long the government has been part of the mainstream political system, and thus open for "sale", and how long they can expect to stay in power, and thus able to exploit their position for gain.
Superstar governments have neither of these: quickly elected and quickly dismissed. It remains to be shown that this "populism" is actually bad in any way.
And in the 1970's, they thought that digital watches were the coolest thing. Sure, this machine almost fast enough to divx my library of DVDs before I die, but that's not real computing. What I'm waiting for is a machine powerful enough to calculate the DNA sequences for artificial life. Now that's hard work. Another 20 years or so of Moore's law, and we'll be there. Then I can just scan and clone myself, with a few improvements.
One interesting aspect of this kind of election is that it starts to resemble the viewer-elections we see on reality shows. We are starting to see something that looks like instant democracy. Now, what's cool about this is that it breaks the back of the traditional political system.
I've noticed that those famous and/or powerful people who are not corrupt are invariably those elected by rapid popular vote, namely superstars of pop, sports, and so on.
A long, slow election process just gives all parties time to negotiate with interest groups. Slow elections generate corrupt politicians, and the semi-permanent election process we see in certain countries just creates completely corrupt political parties.
Electing politicians like this is going to annoy the established political parties. It's also going to raise a generation of politicians who have popular support but no real political network. But it's hard to see what the impact of this will be.
More junk food! Sad thing is it's inevitable. Little Soylent Green slabs of stuff grown in factories from reprocessed organic waste repurposed from dead pets, cow brains, post-corporal digestive residude, failed clones, and... well, why the heck not, dead bodies.
Everyfood we've invented in the last 2,000 years is junk food: white starch, white sugar, white fat, white beer. White meat is the obvious next step.
'Xcuse me but I'm going to stick to my diet of edible roots and leaves, nuts, whole grains, seafood, goat, milk, and cheese. Luckily alcohol was invented more than 5,000 years ago, so it makes it onto my "good" list.
Cheers! And happy Hogmanay to all of you.
Roll on the day when I can buy programmes of my choice and get them sent to my hard drive to watch at my leisure. There is the small issue of payment and copy protection but it's not a killer. I'd be happy to pay for (e.g.) a season of online Futurama if I could get a hardcopy on DVD.
Anyhow, the obvious solution is product placement. Bite my shiny metal Pepsi ass!
I'd agree with you about major religions acting like cults in many cases. There are differences but they are mostly because religions get tired after a while. The intention is the same. As the Jesuits used to say: "Give me a child at twelve, and he will be ours for life."
However, having had relatives caught in cults and in religions, I can say that there is a real difference. Religions rarely screw with your mind quite as thoroughly as cults do (and abusive intimacy is part of this).
I've no praise for any group that recruits actively. End of opinion.
There is nothing cool about Raelism. It's a cult, pure and simple. Cults create private realities, and then sell these to their members little by little. The "free sex" angle just gets young men hooked and young girls broken before they realize that the only ones getting free sex are the cult leaders.
Any group that actively recruits is dangerous because it inevitably puts the welfare of the group ahead that of its members. Recruiting school children into a cult ranks around the same as giving them free heroine.
Check out the Cult Information Centre if you still think cults are cool.
Boring and nasty work compared to boldly going where no hacker has gone before, but totally vital. MS showed that software competition is about feature lists, and Linux has to be able to match and then beat Windows on every feature list. There is a good chance this project will get sued but that also means publicity.
Personally, though, I think that playing catch-up with the Monster from Redmond can only work so far. What the FOSS world needs is a killer application, something so radical and useful that it transcends all discussion of look and feel.
The Web was almost this application, but MS caught up just in time. So, what's next? Opinions, please?
Only an American could say that wireless comms have not changed our lives. Go to Europe, Asia, and Africa, look at how people communicate, and wireless is having a serious impact. For various reasons the US is _way_ behind here, with about 30% of people having a handset, against (e.g.) over 90% in South Korea.
Living in Europe it is clear that GSMs have already changed our lives and societies. It's not quite clear how, but with 70% of the population (pensioners to babies) having mobile phones and using them heavily, the dynamics of social contact have definitely changed.
I'd agree that we are on the verge of a revolution similar to that in 1992-95 with the PC and Internet. Never before have so many people had such easy access to communications. And since human society is essentially about communications, this makes for extremely interesting times.
But I think many sociologists make the mistake of thinking that technology can change us in some way. It changes the way we behave, but it just reinforces the way we are. People stick with family and friends above all, and do not just form mobs because it's possible. If anything, totally flexible mobile communications will reinforce existing social structures (like family) that are constantly under attack from modern urban life, rather than creating new social forms.
In Belgium, the SMS short-message service is extremely heavily used but mainly for saying 'honey, I'm almost home', playing trivial games, chatting with sex lines (actually robots or operators) and voting in TV contests. Smart mobs? Not really.
If Digital or MS had given away MSVC for Alpha, we'd have seen a decent range of NT/Alpha software. The problem is Windows was popular mainly thanks to the wide range of available software. NT/Alpha could never catch up.
'No software' is always an exageration. The question is 'enough software to compete?' and for NT/Alpha, the answer was always 'not yet'.
Finally, although NT ran well enough on the Alpha, as did many other OSes, this was never enough reason for businesses buying Alphas. NT is not an enterprise OS! Digital Unix and OpenVMS are.
Again, I definitely defend Disney's right to create a hundred thousand unhappy customers, just as I'd defend the right of United to deliver bad service at high prices and go bankrupt.
My comment was ironic, fgs. Anyhow, what happened to the color adjustment buttons that used to make TV such fun?
All life is a swarm. We share a common ancestor with every virus.
Well, evolution does not give a rat's ass for stability. It is just a mechanism for filtering the blind-man's walk of random mutation into winning and losing genetic strategies.
Oops, got side-tracked there. Actually I wanted to say that 'mindless hive swarm' describes humanity pretty well. Our structures (cities, businesses, networks) follow Zipf's law whether we believe we're in control or not.
It is a myth that Lindows has 'proprietary' software. Everything can be downloaded by FTP. The only difference from conventional FOSS projects is that you actually have to buy the product before being given the link. But it's just an anonymous FTP site and I've posted the address before on /.
DEC's strength was always engineering, not marketing, but they were killed by the commoditization of IT due to the twin forces of IT marketing giants (Compaq, Microsoft, Oracle) and open software (mainly Linux). It's clear today that any advantages the Alpha and/or OpenVMS give are completely wiped out by the cheapness of mass produced solutions.
HP is not taking a big risk betting on Itanium because the CPU is almost entirely irrelevant in today's market. My notebook runs 2-3 times faster than the front-end Alpha's used by our tour operator client, and it's only the lack of decent software such as the multithreading ACMS clients we wrote (able to handle 500+ terminals on a modest Alpha) that prevents us using Linux instead, on whatever box happens to be lying around. (And yes, we'll do a port of ACMS and the multithreaded clients so that our client can switch away from his Alpha/OpenVMS clusters).
Anyhow, the demise of Digital and all their technology was clear from the day Dave Custer and his team went to work for Microsoft on NT.
When a company makes an inferior product consumers can simply stop buying it. Even with a color tint, a film is perfectly watchable, so there are no grounds for a lawsuit. What's next? Let's sue Hollywood for films with bad acting, poor direction or lousy scripts. Or perhaps we can sue a restaurant where the food tastes lousy.
I defend Disney here - every business has the right to produce inferior products and watch its consumers walk away.
Digital != binary.
DNA is a base-4 digital message, similar to the tape in a Turing machine.
Nature has no say in the matter.
Humans exploit the cognitive niche
and this means that we push forward.
There is no inevitability in our progress
nor even in our presence, but short-term
predictions are quite safe: present a problem,
and if it is solvable, someone will solve it.
Is there any proof that life is not digital?
Nothing is ever simple, but complexity is not a barrier by itself.
In other words, any solvable problem, no matter how complex, will be solved.
Is digital life solvable? That is the question.
If the answer is 'yes' (and all signs are that this it is) then it is inevitable that we will eventually make it as common-place as all the other 'magical' technologies that we use today.
To understand the true impact of genetic research, look at it like this: today we still see life as hardware, something that has physical shape. We are rapidly approaching the state where we will see life as software, something to be programmed and copied infinitely cheaply.
Human-mouse hybrids? So what. Within a generation you will be able to design any lifeform you can imagine on your computer screen, and 'print' it into a virgin cell that will grow into your animal or plant.
It is an inevitable progression. DNA is a digital code, and it is just a matter of horsepower to crack and then manipulate it.
Surely /. can do better than this. A new OS is always interesting, but how about a review that clarifies (a) what is special about this OS, (b) why the combination of HD+OS works, assuming it does, (c) how his can be used in combination with existing OSes , (d) etc.
What I've seen so far is one very thin infomercial followed by an uninformed discussion about useless details. Has anyone actually tried GNU-Darwin?
You are correct about the need for face-to-face communications, but my opinions on "cheap connectivity" come from experience, not trend hopping.
My best collaborations are with people I've worked with closely, but the Internet makes it possible to sustain these collaborations when they would otherwise die.
This effect takes time but allows the existence of technical networks that would otherwise be impossible.
If you look at most of the really interesting work coming from academic and independent research, you'll find that such networks are really vital.
All technology is about communicating abstracted knowledge, and programming is the most abstract of them all, so the value of the Internet in improving programming should be seen as obvious.
Small-scale development has always been efficient. The challenge facing the industry has been to find ways of doing large-scale development (the type Fred Brooks was talking about) cheaply and effectively.
And in this domain, there has been a revolution, namely the Internet, and the arrival of cheap connectivity between developers anywhere in the world.
Prior to this, the only way for developers to collaborate was to be hired by the same company, work on the same network. Inefficient as hell.
Today any group anywhere in the world can create a project and work on this as efficiently as a small group in the past.
The irony is that the revolution does not care a shit about the technology used, and works as well for COBOL programmers as for companies cracking the human genome. It's about solving a purely human problem: communications.
Moderators! Please mod down parent post, it's a terrible new variation on the Goatse.cx link!!!