1) Based on posts in this thread and related MMO game threads, a lot of people seem to think spending real money on virtual things or virtual money is insane. However, what exactly do you all think is "real" about money anyway? Money is by it's very nature a *virtual* abstraction of supposedly-objective value inherent in goods and services (which themselves may or may not be "real").
2) Saying the people playing these games need to get a life is rather disingenuous. Life is what a person experiences so how could playing a game not be part of someone's life? And if life is experience the only way to limit life (in the non-biological sense of the word) would be to experience less. Since the "real world" is the encumbent paradigm of experience it seems like adding other "virtual" realities/lives should just increase experience all the more and is actually an excellent way to "get a life". =)
I wonder if future generations will see "real world superiority" in a similar manner as we see the idea of a flat earth.
I don't use a smart phone myself but I had to setup up Treo 600s for all of the managers in the company I work for. We had 100% failure rate on the first wave of the 600s (mostly problems with the phone signal, ie difficulty hearing the other person or them having difficulty hearing you; also some problems with the screen dying), however we're now on our 2nd wave and there seem to be no problems (had them for more than a month, whereas the previous problems started less than 2 weeks after recieving the phones). Cingular (our service provider) also reports that a version of the 600 with no camera (as someone else reported the camera is pretty crappy) and a replaceable battery will be coming out soon. As to the usefulness of a smart phone the contacts linked directly to calling is handy and it's one less device to keep track of (assuming you find a PDA indispensible as I do). As for myself, I'll probably switch to a PDA phone when the no camera version of the 600 comes out.
Here's another link to the sterling article as the technology review didn't work for me (members only or something). This one's from MSNBC:-)
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3131183/
The thing that frustrates me most about online information sources that were converted from print is that they usually have the TOC and maybe footnotes linked and everything else is just plain text. Every topic/field specific word and/or phrase should be linked in a ideal world so the closer you can get the better. I think the best scenario would be to get a definition for a word/phrase in the status bar (or tooltip popup if you want to go more dhtml heavy) and then clicking would take one to the relevant section on that word/phrase if one exists otherwise it would take one to a more extensive term definition followed by links to other or related info (probably offsite links mostly). Of course scenarios like this only get really viable when you're running a database driven website (maintaining this kind of heavy linking in static pages gets ridiculous real quick) which may or may not be an option.
Another suggestion is to look at SVG for your non-photo images, they can become especially interesting if you have the relevant data in a database and generate the images on the fly.
Also, I agree with some of the other posters in that one should have an online friendly version and a print friendly version (implemented through carefully formated html or pdf, etc) rather than trying to do both or cater to just one. And tasteful use of frames can help provide easier linking to the TOC from every page.
I should qualify that - Total Information Awareness could be implemented as open source, if we had motivation to do so. However, that wouldn't serve the purposes of the administration's corporate backers, who's goals do not include clarity and transparency.
It's interesting to ponder the implications of an open-source total info project. Would the transparency and clarity of it ensure it's effect on freedom to be positive?...or is the idea absolutely negative? Of course one could use the database to discriminate, in hiring for example, based on some data contained therein (such as political or religious organization membership). But concievablely the data would also reveal anyone using it in negative ways. For example data on applicants to company x, interviewed by manager y could reveal that the manager never hires non-christians despite their qualifications. Furthermore, while data on the outside might be incorrect or incomplete data on access to the data could (relatively) easily be complete, leading to much more accurate results from "meta-analysis" than from just basic analysis...i.e. while the system might be only 60% accurate at determining terrorists in a given situation, it might be 80% accurate in recognizing abuses of the results of analysis of potential terrorist data in that given situation. What do you all think?
dragon13
It should block printing. And as far as alt-print screen or a camera, that'd get pretty impractical when you start talking about docs that are longer than a few pages. And who's gonna believe Joe Accounting Temp who claims he saw some damaging internal memo...it's certainly not like having an actual copy of the memo. I think it's pretty much assumed that everyone knows there's no such thing as 100% secure data, but properly implimented drm in office will give substantially greater security.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a couple of points...
1) Based on posts in this thread and related MMO game threads, a lot of people seem to think spending real money on virtual things or virtual money is insane. However, what exactly do you all think is "real" about money anyway? Money is by it's very nature a *virtual* abstraction of supposedly-objective value inherent in goods and services (which themselves may or may not be "real").
2) Saying the people playing these games need to get a life is rather disingenuous. Life is what a person experiences so how could playing a game not be part of someone's life? And if life is experience the only way to limit life (in the non-biological sense of the word) would be to experience less. Since the "real world" is the encumbent paradigm of experience it seems like adding other "virtual" realities/lives should just increase experience all the more and is actually an excellent way to "get a life". =)
I wonder if future generations will see "real world superiority" in a similar manner as we see the idea of a flat earth.
I don't use a smart phone myself but I had to setup up Treo 600s for all of the managers in the company I work for. We had 100% failure rate on the first wave of the 600s (mostly problems with the phone signal, ie difficulty hearing the other person or them having difficulty hearing you; also some problems with the screen dying), however we're now on our 2nd wave and there seem to be no problems (had them for more than a month, whereas the previous problems started less than 2 weeks after recieving the phones). Cingular (our service provider) also reports that a version of the 600 with no camera (as someone else reported the camera is pretty crappy) and a replaceable battery will be coming out soon. As to the usefulness of a smart phone the contacts linked directly to calling is handy and it's one less device to keep track of (assuming you find a PDA indispensible as I do). As for myself, I'll probably switch to a PDA phone when the no camera version of the 600 comes out.
Here's another link to the sterling article as the technology review didn't work for me (members only or something). This one's from MSNBC :-)
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3131183/
The thing that frustrates me most about online information sources that were converted from print is that they usually have the TOC and maybe footnotes linked and everything else is just plain text. Every topic/field specific word and/or phrase should be linked in a ideal world so the closer you can get the better. I think the best scenario would be to get a definition for a word/phrase in the status bar (or tooltip popup if you want to go more dhtml heavy) and then clicking would take one to the relevant section on that word/phrase if one exists otherwise it would take one to a more extensive term definition followed by links to other or related info (probably offsite links mostly). Of course scenarios like this only get really viable when you're running a database driven website (maintaining this kind of heavy linking in static pages gets ridiculous real quick) which may or may not be an option.
Another suggestion is to look at SVG for your non-photo images, they can become especially interesting if you have the relevant data in a database and generate the images on the fly.
Also, I agree with some of the other posters in that one should have an online friendly version and a print friendly version (implemented through carefully formated html or pdf, etc) rather than trying to do both or cater to just one. And tasteful use of frames can help provide easier linking to the TOC from every page.
I should qualify that - Total Information Awareness could be implemented as open source, if we had motivation to do so. However, that wouldn't serve the purposes of the administration's corporate backers, who's goals do not include clarity and transparency.
It's interesting to ponder the implications of an open-source total info project. Would the transparency and clarity of it ensure it's effect on freedom to be positive?...or is the idea absolutely negative? Of course one could use the database to discriminate, in hiring for example, based on some data contained therein (such as political or religious organization membership). But concievablely the data would also reveal anyone using it in negative ways. For example data on applicants to company x, interviewed by manager y could reveal that the manager never hires non-christians despite their qualifications. Furthermore, while data on the outside might be incorrect or incomplete data on access to the data could (relatively) easily be complete, leading to much more accurate results from "meta-analysis" than from just basic analysis...i.e. while the system might be only 60% accurate at determining terrorists in a given situation, it might be 80% accurate in recognizing abuses of the results of analysis of potential terrorist data in that given situation. What do you all think? dragon13It should block printing. And as far as alt-print screen or a camera, that'd get pretty impractical when you start talking about docs that are longer than a few pages. And who's gonna believe Joe Accounting Temp who claims he saw some damaging internal memo...it's certainly not like having an actual copy of the memo. I think it's pretty much assumed that everyone knows there's no such thing as 100% secure data, but properly implimented drm in office will give substantially greater security.