"What information do you think is valuable and relevant to give future archaeologists?"
I've got one, though it isn't a book or even text:
Reruns of "I Love Lucy."
I'm serious. It was the first television program to be prerecorded before broadcast, thus it was in turn the first show to go into syndication and has been available as re-runs for decades now. Turn on your 150 channel tv right now amd there's a pretty good chance that at least one of those channels is running "I Love Lucy" right now.
I don't even like the show that much, but in many ways television defined the leisure life of most people in the industrialized world in the last half of the twentieth century, and I think "I Love Lucy" is an excellent artifact of this era.
It would also give a decent -- flawed, but decent -- view of what a typical urban lifestyle was like for the era, not just in writing, but in movement, speech, and setting. All told, archaeologists of 10,000 years from now could do a whole lot worse. Consider all those styrofoam McDonald's boxes, for example. Surely a sitcom is just a little bit kinder than that.
I'm not sure if this storage medium is capable (in a useful way) of storing video data, but if it is, this is my vote...
No, I'm not all that great at math now that you mention it:), but I still see a pattern. Logarithmic? Exponential? I'm not sure, I lack the vocabulary to explain what I see.
And I'm not saying that one is causing the other, this has nothing to do with the astrologer comment or seeing pattersn everywhere a la Pi or anything like that. But when a pattern is noticed and a possible correlation is suggested, I think it's worth asking if there is a reason for it. Maybe there isn't -- that's very possible. But maybe there is -- that's very interesting.
I'm just curious if anyone else has noticed this and put forth an explanation or refutation of the link.
These guys say communications traffic is doubling every nine months.
Moore's law says that computing power doubles every eighteen months
The two seem to be moving at proportional rates. Interesting coincidence. Anyone wanna speculate about reasons for this? Just a glitch of the numbers, or does one have something to do with the other? How far back does this growth in communications speed go? Moore's law is claimed by some to go back in some way to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and with the telegraph and such I don't think it's impossible to speculate that communications has been doing the same thing.
So. Anyone care to put forth a hypothesis to explain this coincidence?
Interesting possibility: movie theatres could become what drive-ins are today -- a nostalgic niche thing, rare or absent in most areas, a relic of the past.
I dunno, maybe. One thing about the movies though is that it's a very social activity. Think of going to the movies with friends or a date back in high school and still today. I would like to think that an institution like that woud persist, but obviously if it's going to then there has to be some incentive for it.
Consider the economics of it. If home theatre gets good and gets cheap, then the number of people going to traditional theatres will fall. In response, ticket prices will probably have to fall in order to attract viewers, but that might or might not be enough to bring people in. In any event, it will mean decreased revenues, which in turn will mean a tighter budget for the studios. That could go two ways -- either the trend for huge expensive $100 million+ movies will slope off, or the studios will focus on them and make fewer other movies. It would all come down to whichever makes more money for them, and unfortunately, I think it's the smaller films that would take the hit there.
But those films would also have a backup plan -- the home theatres themselves. Home theatree will presumably be much cheaper than the Cineplex, once you've paid for all the equipment of course, and I'd like to think that people will have access to much greater variety of films. This could be a boon for the arthouse type stuff.
I think that would be my guess then. (I'm thinking aloud if that isn't obvious:). If the possibilities for watchign first-run high quality cinema at home come into fruition, then this change will mainly hurt smaller arthouse type movies (since most people aren't too worried about seeing them on the big screen anyway), but big budget blockbusters will be at least partly immune to any slump in the industry. Thus theatres will show more junk like Armageddon, Battlefield Earth, and Matrix;), while the little indie ones will be pushed home.
All reckless speculation, of course, and only time will show which way things go...
"Geez this guy is sick, 39 minutes on one picture"
Actually, this doesn't tell you much of anything at all. Examples:
Browsing in two windows. Load picture in window #1. Open Slashdot in window #2. Spend half an hour wishing Katz would shut the hell up, wanting not to hear any more about grits or trousers or Portman. Close window #2, remember that window #1 has been open with that picture all this time, and close it too after following a link or two and deciding that you aren't interested in this site.
Load page. Get invited to lunch. Turn off monitor and leave. Come back, rememmber that you left Netscape on, and reload the page, then think better of it and decide you'll take a look after work.
Those are just obvious examples. More than that, I don't think the HTTP protocol really allows you to gather the sort of information you're talking about. All these people could find out was that you loaded their image once at, say, 10:00, and then you loaded another at 10:39. What you did between those two clicks is a complete mystery to them. You could have, for example, hopped over to Google, searched for whatever for a while, then came back to what you were doing previously. This example is only different in that it doesn't mean you weren't paying attention to the browser & the tagged page -- you were.
This isn't to say that there aren't frightening Big Brother aspects of this all. Certainly, I'm sure it's possible to make some more or less accurate guesses about what people are doing. But because of the basically stateless nature of HTTP (neverminding cookies for a minute), the most these peopel can get is an imperfect view of your travels, and everything else is just statistics, probabilty, and educated guesswork.
Privacy is, of course, very important, and it's important to know what information you are giving away whenever you use the web. But it's also important to know what you aren't giving away, at least with current technology, and to use that as a starting point in trying to defend your privacy.
All the cool people I know work for Oven UK in London. This is mainly an odd coincidence -- I know a bunch of British people from a mailing list, and over the last year or so they've all ended up there. BY all accounts it's a great place to work, but that is of course hearsay.
If anyone actually applies for work there, tell them Dave told you to. This will win you lots and lots and lots of points. Trust me, it'll be funny, you might not get it at first but itll be funny.
Oh shut up Katz, being a quote-unquote Pundit has gone to your head. I didn't really have an opinion on your rants before this, but now I'm just tired of it. I'll go shopping for my melodrama elsewhere thankyouverymuch.
...and I don't even like computer games, aside from maybe Tetris or Freecell or Dope Wars, but hey whatever you kids wanna buy, I'll sell it to ya! hahaha
Yeah, but...I hated the Matrix. Pseudo-intellectual claptrap with cheesy special effects (look, they were, admit it) and a plot ripped off from, say, Ben Hur but dressed up in modern clothes & shot through with ancient terminology ripped out of a freshman year mythology 101 book. The cool thing about the Star Wars series is that it had all the same stuff -- effects, mythological overtones, etc -- yet it was better woven into the story and something that you discover & come to appreciate afte a few watchings, not just something hammered into you with ships named Nebucharadnezzar and such.
Plus, and this can't be understated, Star Wars didn't have Keanu Reeves. Big edge there:)
It's possible to have a movie that balances special effects against a good story. Forrest Gump, for example -- I didn't like it all that much, but it's the sort of thing I'm talking about. City of Lost Children is a great example though -- one of the "characters" is a flea assassin, shown in closeup several times. You need special effects to get a flea-eyed view of a flea. You don't need them to show Keanu beating up the guy from The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
Frankly, I'm sick & tired of movies like that, and I can't fathom why they're so popular. It wouldn't be so incomprehensible if they weren't so universally homogenous and boring, but they are and I just don't get it.
Personally, I have high hopes for the next Star Wars movie, even if the last one did royally suck. A friend of mine and I were... um, that is, some people that I was reading about but have never met before and certainly wouldn't want anything to do with... were suggesting holding Lucas' children hostage for the duration of the next two movies -- if the next one is good, he can have one back; if the next one sucks the kid dies and he better try real hard if he ever wants to see the other again. But of course this would be terribly mean and overreactive and treating a movie way outside of reality and I'm certainly not condoning any harm come down on the dear Lucas children. Not at all. I just think ol' Georgie better do it right this time, that's all;)
Whoa! Did you see the pictures of the rocket? It looks like something that Marvin the Martian from the cartoons would be flying! I think this guy spent just a bit too much time reading Flash Gordon comics as a kid. I thought this sounded cool at first (and still do... sorta...), but now it looks more like some kind of bizarre high budget mid life crisis.
Still and all, if it goes well it can only be a good thing overall. Has anyone heard anythign about the X-Prize recently? Last time I checked, they were trying to get funding to sponsor an award for the first craft that could bring a crew into space twice in like two weeks. It doesn't seem to be his goal, but this "Rocketguy" just might be on track to claim the prize if he so chose...
Maybe I'm just not with the program, but I don't see why this language is such big news around here. (But then I don't really care for Java either so what do I know?;) I've got a whole bunch of questions that I haven't seen addressed yet.
"Microsoft has its own unique programming model with Visual Basic. But it's not designed to be a scaleable, multi-user system like Java"
How, exactly, is a multi-user language different from a single-user language? That seems to me to be a feature of the programs you write, and not of the language you write them in. That's like saying my pencil is multilingual capable, isn't it?
"Java, a technology developed [....] as the language programmers can use to write software once and have it run across all types of computing systems"
sed 's%#!c:\progra~1\perl%#!/usr/bin/perl#' <*.pl >*.pl
...and hey presto, your scripts have been ported from Windows to *nix. I can't say I've ever been too impressed by that goal:)
"It provides operating system independence (which Java provides), but it also provides language independence, which Java can't provide."
Okay, here's the one that really confuses me. How can a language be language agnostic? I can see where the compiler or virtual machine or whatever can be (e.g. JPython running on the JVM), but that's not the same thing. This sounds to me more like "a feature we developed in parallel with C# allows...", and that suggests to me that any platforms that support this are going to need a native interpreter of some kind, like the JVM. If this interpreter can accept, say, Visual Basic code -- an interesting possibility -- then this could backfire by allowing M$ apps written in VB to run on any platform that has the interpreter. Thus, taking it to the conclusion, Wine may become irrelevant and Office may get recompiled & ported to Linux etc very, very soon -- much sooner than I was expecting. I want to hear more about this particular statement.
"It's a platform-agnostic method of building these rapidly distributed applications."
<voice sounds-like="Mr Rogers">Can you say Trojan Horse? Can you say DDOS? I knew you could!</voice>
"Goodhew added that C# allows "developers (to) access any hardware and software." C# provides "complete access to (the) underlying platform."
How do they rationalize saying that it offers better security than Java in one breath, and this crap in the next? I was under the impression that you tend to get better security by abstracting the platform specific stuff -- but again, I don't pretend to be an expert and these people are obviously smarter than I am...
"Last year, unconfirmed reports circulated that Microsoft was building a new language called "Cool" that would be similar to Java but free of technological or licensing obligations to Sun."
...but not free of technological and licensing obligations to M$. How exactly is an improvement of affairs in the average consumer's life? Isn't this one of those "out of the frying pan, into the fire" deals?
I dunno guys, I just don't see it. I don't see why this is a good idea, and I sort of think we should pay it no mind. It doesn't seem to offer anything we don't already have in, say, Perl, Python, and Java, it's not really offering any interesting new functionality (except maybe that cross platform language agnostic malarkey), and it's Yet Another Embrace & Extend maneuver from our favorite predatory monopolists. I'd be interested to hear a good defence of this language, but this article wasn't it.
Wow cool, this was an exhibit at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London a year or so ago, but being in Alabama I couldn't exactly attend and I was never able to find a decent web site &/or sample of the music. I'm looking forward to listening to this.
You might be interested to know that Man or Astroman? are using the same trick on their new album, in a track called -- fittingly, A Simple Text File. Supposedly there's an mp3 of it laying around, but I haven't heard it yet.
Friends of mine are all into this kind of music. I remember hearing about one that did more or less the same as this dot matrix stuff, only with a room full of hard drives and very precisely accessed text files & a bit of perl magic. If you find this sort of thing interesting, you might want to listen to (void).mp3 by Alex MacLean, which was 100% generated with a perl script and the logs of a mailing list, and generative.net, where people that are in to this sort of stuff congregate and exchange ideas about what art really is. All very fascinating stuff...
Something's really funny here, I keep trying to submit this comment and Slashdot won't let me. Tried a different strategy and it posted anonymously. Odd. Hopefully it'll go though as me this time...
I've got several questions about this new language of theirs, and I'd like to hear what the Slashdot audience might ahve to say about them. Any takers?
"...more likely that life started once on one of the two planets..."
True if and only if the development of life is a rare, freak occurance. It's entirely possible, however, that it is a natural and even likely result of a series of reactions that occur constantly in primordial type conditions.
Amino acids, for example, seem to be abundant in the cosmos. They have been found in comets, for example, as well as dispersed in the interstellar gases. The late Dr Sidney Fox did an experiment in the fifties in which he showed that various mixtures of amino acids would, when gently heated in solution, gradually (minutes) coalesce into what he called "proteinoid microspheres" -- structures that in many ways resemble bacterial fossils found in precambrian rocks in Australia and northern Canada and Greenland.
These spheres may not count as life, of course, but they show many properties of it -- they grow, metabolize materials from their environment, reproduce, respond to stimuli, etc. The main thing that divides them from life forms as we know them today is the lack of RNA -- it just isn't present here. But otherwise, these spheres seem, to me at least, to be a very likely precursor to life as we know it.
What's really interesting to me is that these spheres are really easy to produce -- mix, dissolve, bunsen burner for a minute or so (a catalyst only -- heat isn't required but it speeds things up considerably), then go get some lunch. By the time you get back, the solution will be filled with the things. The only reason that these structures aren't found today is that, being protein, they're food to other organisms so they never last long enough to fossilize. But, I think there's ever reason to believe that they can and probably will be found in abundance wherever the conditions are right. All that's needed is a pool of brackish water and time; Mars has had plenty of time, and now it seems like it has the water as well. My guess is that structures of at least this complexity are going to be found in abundance when we get there.
Maybe now we'll finally see some progress towards getting people up there, and on a semi-permanent basis at that. This kind of exploration is going to take a lot longer than the "footprints & photos" type stuff we did on the Moon...
I use what I hope is a more or less useful 404 page on my site (useful in that it links to Google; better still would be linking a search for that document, but I haven't had a chance to try that).
But, I think that this one is much more fun, in a clever little funny on IE funny on Lynx kinda way....
This idea looks okay and all, but is it necessary? It seems to me that the simplest solution would just to have well behaved site maintainance -- mainly by making liberal use of things like server redirects & aliases, which should take care of 85% of the problem or something. If I rename a document on my site, I add a redirect so that the old name still works; if I delete a document, I consider redirecting to a Google search for similar documents -- at least it doesn't leave the user completely lost.
Yeah, these methods are kind of a pain in the ass, but they're only worse if this new plan can do no better. But look at it -- they want every single link out there to be rewritten to their spec. Who does that help? Millions of web authors out there trying to rewrite documents to filter into this (really small) database can't possibly be easier than having the much smaller set of web admins adding server redirects whenever they notice more than a handful of 404 errors on the same document.
Interesting point: are stability & user friendliness mutually exclusive? You imply that Windows has it and the others don't, while the others have stability and Windows doesn't, implying that it's an either/or proposition. Do you really believe that?
By citing the stock market, I think you're missing the point. Having running water or flowing electricity had a direct & immediate impact on the quality of life for millions of people. Being able to buy or sell shares of stock faster is a nice perk for a small percentage, but even for them has little impact on quality of life. You may have have a good point, but this isn't the evidence to prove it.
I can't decide if all this digital hoohah is making the world a better place or not. Certainly there is a considerable minority that stands to gain much from it -- I would include the Slashdot audience among that number. But there's a much larger majority that, if they feel any impact from it, it's only going to be indirectly -- at least for now.
Access to quick information keeps getting bandied about as the next big revolution, in the spirit of the space age, the industrial age, etc. I dunno, I guess. Certainly the current new wave of technological innovation [1] has had a massive impact on our economy. But are these changes good? Profits are up, salaries aren't. Job security is a relic. Stock holders are cashing in -- and more people are becomign stock holders -- but that leaves a couple of problems, like what about the rest of us that aren't in on the market. More importantly, what about the ones that are in the market -- if it crashes, as I'm sure it will sooner or later, where will these young workers with crap salaries and worthless stock options be? Our success is by no means assured.
But that's just the economic side of things. Things like water, electricity, and the telephone had benefits far beyond the economic. They enabled a whole new range of activities while making a large number of older ones simpler or even unnecessary (going to the well, etc). What does the info revolution offer to the average Joe? On one hand, he doesn't ever have to go to a library again if all the books are already out there. Why call your friends cross country when you can chat for free at your computer? Why, indeed, would you ever have to leave your home at all?
The digital age unquestionably brings great benefits, but it also brings great dangers. It's not unique in this (plumbing might have brought, say, cholera, and electricity of course brought electrocution) and I'm not yet sure how the good and bad sides balance out here. I think that won't be clear for several years to come. If we transform from a nation of couch potatos into a nation of desk potatos, that isn't necessarily an improvement. I am looking to see how things unfold over the coming years before forming an opinion on this matter...
[1] (Does anyone else hate using that word now? Is it just me?)
Isn't it kinda hard to criticize a group of people (Americans in this case) about their lack of knowledge of the rest of the world (which might or might not be a fair statement), and then turn around and show how you don't know much about them either? America doesn't have 52 states, not yet anyway, even if you count Puerto Rico, which you can't.
While on one hand I agree that the Interent is too US-centric, I think you need to recognize that it's natural for people to think in local terms, and this doesn't exclude Americans. Now this doesn't mean to ignore the rest of the world -- not by any means -- and it's very reasonable to ask for I18N of big sites and services.
But complaining that Americans ignore the rest of the world is a cheap shot to begin with, and you scuttle it by showing that you don't know any more about us than we know about your country. If you want to find ways to bridge that gap, you can do better than that, can't you? Can't we, I should say?
Yo conosco puedamos, si mi amigo? (Lo siento, mi espanol esta muy mal...)
I actually got to go to Space Camp back in the day -- it was a blast. We got to hear Alan Shepard give a talk, got to run a shuttle flight simulation in a mockup of the nose section (you have no idea how big that thing is...), and though it didn't work out, we were going to see a test firing of the shuttle as well.
But the downside was they showed us that damn movie about fifteen frickin' times -- as if they knew the stuff we were doing was fun but nothing like that, so every time there was a slow moment they'd plop us down in front of a TV / VCR and play it again. It was actually the first thing we did upon arrival [great first impression guys], and several more times over the week. Ek...
It's funny this has come up here today, I was just thinking about the camp & the movie this morning for the first time in a couple of years, it seems. I was thinkng of renting it again to see how well the movie has aged -- hopefully it has done better than, say, "Top Gun":). The IMDB page notes that a bunch of would-one-day-be-famous actors were in it, so it might be interesting to see that... ho hum, probably won't worry about it...
All the posts about IBM's relationship with Linux seem a bit odd to me; I can't see why it's such a big surprise or matter of debate.
Think about it. IBM sells a *wide* variety of products, from laptops to mainframes and from software to service. It complicates matters for them if they have to be "multilingual" with their platform systems; Linux gives them a way around this by, as suggested in the Halloween documents, treating the OS as basically a generic commodity.
The more popular Linux gets, and the better IBM's equipment works with it, the better their bottom line gets. If Linux gives them a platform to standardize around, then they can sell more hardware and support services and not have to worry as much about certain problems (compatibility, stability, etc) that live at the OS level. This is very much in their interest, but it's also in the interest of consumers as well, if Linux becomes a reliable system component along the lines of, say, a hard drive or a word processor. The consumer gets the benefit or a robust & rewarding system platform that works on most any equipment available; IBM gets the benefit of having their entire product range appeal to customers because it all speaks the lingua franca of the computer world that they are positively contributing to.
Consider EBCDIC. Wasn't that the standard text format on IBM machines back in the day? Is it in use on any modern system? [I'm asking -- not rhetorical...] It seems to me that they had the wisdom to (eventually) switch to the open ASCII standard before, and are promoting the new Linux standard now. I see no reason to be suspicious of this behavior -- everyone stands to benefit, or at least everyone that isn't trying to shill a proproetary in-house OS...:)
Slashdot Mirror
Reruns of "I Love Lucy."
I'm serious. It was the first television program to be prerecorded before broadcast, thus it was in turn the first show to go into syndication and has been available as re-runs for decades now. Turn on your 150 channel tv right now amd there's a pretty good chance that at least one of those channels is running "I Love Lucy" right now.
I don't even like the show that much, but in many ways television defined the leisure life of most people in the industrialized world in the last half of the twentieth century, and I think "I Love Lucy" is an excellent artifact of this era.
It would also give a decent -- flawed, but decent -- view of what a typical urban lifestyle was like for the era, not just in writing, but in movement, speech, and setting. All told, archaeologists of 10,000 years from now could do a whole lot worse. Consider all those styrofoam McDonald's boxes, for example. Surely a sitcom is just a little bit kinder than that.
I'm not sure if this storage medium is capable (in a useful way) of storing video data, but if it is, this is my vote...
And I'm not saying that one is causing the other, this has nothing to do with the astrologer comment or seeing pattersn everywhere a la Pi or anything like that. But when a pattern is noticed and a possible correlation is suggested, I think it's worth asking if there is a reason for it. Maybe there isn't -- that's very possible. But maybe there is -- that's very interesting.
I'm just curious if anyone else has noticed this and put forth an explanation or refutation of the link.
Moore's law says that computing power doubles every eighteen months
The two seem to be moving at proportional rates. Interesting coincidence. Anyone wanna speculate about reasons for this? Just a glitch of the numbers, or does one have something to do with the other? How far back does this growth in communications speed go? Moore's law is claimed by some to go back in some way to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and with the telegraph and such I don't think it's impossible to speculate that communications has been doing the same thing.
So. Anyone care to put forth a hypothesis to explain this coincidence?
I dunno, maybe. One thing about the movies though is that it's a very social activity. Think of going to the movies with friends or a date back in high school and still today. I would like to think that an institution like that woud persist, but obviously if it's going to then there has to be some incentive for it.
Consider the economics of it. If home theatre gets good and gets cheap, then the number of people going to traditional theatres will fall. In response, ticket prices will probably have to fall in order to attract viewers, but that might or might not be enough to bring people in. In any event, it will mean decreased revenues, which in turn will mean a tighter budget for the studios. That could go two ways -- either the trend for huge expensive $100 million+ movies will slope off, or the studios will focus on them and make fewer other movies. It would all come down to whichever makes more money for them, and unfortunately, I think it's the smaller films that would take the hit there.
But those films would also have a backup plan -- the home theatres themselves. Home theatree will presumably be much cheaper than the Cineplex, once you've paid for all the equipment of course, and I'd like to think that people will have access to much greater variety of films. This could be a boon for the arthouse type stuff.
I think that would be my guess then. (I'm thinking aloud if that isn't obvious :). If the possibilities for watchign first-run high quality cinema at home come into fruition, then this change will mainly hurt smaller arthouse type movies (since most people aren't too worried about seeing them on the big screen anyway), but big budget blockbusters will be at least partly immune to any slump in the industry. Thus theatres will show more junk like Armageddon, Battlefield Earth, and Matrix ;), while the little indie ones will be pushed home.
All reckless speculation, of course, and only time will show which way things go...
Actually, this doesn't tell you much of anything at all. Examples:
Those are just obvious examples. More than that, I don't think the HTTP protocol really allows you to gather the sort of information you're talking about. All these people could find out was that you loaded their image once at, say, 10:00, and then you loaded another at 10:39. What you did between those two clicks is a complete mystery to them. You could have, for example, hopped over to Google, searched for whatever for a while, then came back to what you were doing previously. This example is only different in that it doesn't mean you weren't paying attention to the browser & the tagged page -- you were.
This isn't to say that there aren't frightening Big Brother aspects of this all. Certainly, I'm sure it's possible to make some more or less accurate guesses about what people are doing. But because of the basically stateless nature of HTTP (neverminding cookies for a minute), the most these peopel can get is an imperfect view of your travels, and everything else is just statistics, probabilty, and educated guesswork.
Privacy is, of course, very important, and it's important to know what information you are giving away whenever you use the web. But it's also important to know what you aren't giving away, at least with current technology, and to use that as a starting point in trying to defend your privacy.
If anyone actually applies for work there, tell them Dave told you to. This will win you lots and lots and lots of points. Trust me, it'll be funny, you might not get it at first but itll be funny.
Oh shut up Katz, being a quote-unquote Pundit has gone to your head. I didn't really have an opinion on your rants before this, but now I'm just tired of it. I'll go shopping for my melodrama elsewhere thankyouverymuch.
...and I don't even like computer games, aside from maybe Tetris or Freecell or Dope Wars, but hey whatever you kids wanna buy, I'll sell it to ya! hahaha
Did anyone else want to just let Lucas have it? I sure did... hahaha
Plus, and this can't be understated, Star Wars didn't have Keanu Reeves. Big edge there :)
It's possible to have a movie that balances special effects against a good story. Forrest Gump, for example -- I didn't like it all that much, but it's the sort of thing I'm talking about. City of Lost Children is a great example though -- one of the "characters" is a flea assassin, shown in closeup several times. You need special effects to get a flea-eyed view of a flea. You don't need them to show Keanu beating up the guy from The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
Frankly, I'm sick & tired of movies like that, and I can't fathom why they're so popular. It wouldn't be so incomprehensible if they weren't so universally homogenous and boring, but they are and I just don't get it.
Personally, I have high hopes for the next Star Wars movie, even if the last one did royally suck. A friend of mine and I were... um, that is, some people that I was reading about but have never met before and certainly wouldn't want anything to do with... were suggesting holding Lucas' children hostage for the duration of the next two movies -- if the next one is good, he can have one back; if the next one sucks the kid dies and he better try real hard if he ever wants to see the other again. But of course this would be terribly mean and overreactive and treating a movie way outside of reality and I'm certainly not condoning any harm come down on the dear Lucas children. Not at all. I just think ol' Georgie better do it right this time, that's all ;)
Still and all, if it goes well it can only be a good thing overall. Has anyone heard anythign about the X-Prize recently? Last time I checked, they were trying to get funding to sponsor an award for the first craft that could bring a crew into space twice in like two weeks. It doesn't seem to be his goal, but this "Rocketguy" just might be on track to claim the prize if he so chose...
Uh, was this before or after they did that show in the seventies?
What? Oh, Sanford and Sun?
Nevermind...
How, exactly, is a multi-user language different from a single-user language? That seems to me to be a feature of the programs you write, and not of the language you write them in. That's like saying my pencil is multilingual capable, isn't it?
sed 's%#!c:\progra~1\perl%#!/usr/bin/perl#' <*.pl >*.pl
...and hey presto, your scripts have been ported from Windows to *nix. I can't say I've ever been too impressed by that goal :)
Okay, here's the one that really confuses me. How can a language be language agnostic? I can see where the compiler or virtual machine or whatever can be (e.g. JPython running on the JVM), but that's not the same thing. This sounds to me more like "a feature we developed in parallel with C# allows...", and that suggests to me that any platforms that support this are going to need a native interpreter of some kind, like the JVM. If this interpreter can accept, say, Visual Basic code -- an interesting possibility -- then this could backfire by allowing M$ apps written in VB to run on any platform that has the interpreter. Thus, taking it to the conclusion, Wine may become irrelevant and Office may get recompiled & ported to Linux etc very, very soon -- much sooner than I was expecting. I want to hear more about this particular statement.
<voice sounds-like="Mr Rogers">Can you say Trojan Horse? Can you say DDOS? I knew you could!</voice>
How do they rationalize saying that it offers better security than Java in one breath, and this crap in the next? I was under the impression that you tend to get better security by abstracting the platform specific stuff -- but again, I don't pretend to be an expert and these people are obviously smarter than I am...
...but not free of technological and licensing obligations to M$. How exactly is an improvement of affairs in the average consumer's life? Isn't this one of those "out of the frying pan, into the fire" deals?
I dunno guys, I just don't see it. I don't see why this is a good idea, and I sort of think we should pay it no mind. It doesn't seem to offer anything we don't already have in, say, Perl, Python, and Java, it's not really offering any interesting new functionality (except maybe that cross platform language agnostic malarkey), and it's Yet Another Embrace & Extend maneuver from our favorite predatory monopolists. I'd be interested to hear a good defence of this language, but this article wasn't it.
You might be interested to know that Man or Astroman? are using the same trick on their new album, in a track called -- fittingly, A Simple Text File. Supposedly there's an mp3 of it laying around, but I haven't heard it yet.
Friends of mine are all into this kind of music. I remember hearing about one that did more or less the same as this dot matrix stuff, only with a room full of hard drives and very precisely accessed text files & a bit of perl magic. If you find this sort of thing interesting, you might want to listen to (void).mp3 by Alex MacLean, which was 100% generated with a perl script and the logs of a mailing list, and generative.net, where people that are in to this sort of stuff congregate and exchange ideas about what art really is. All very fascinating stuff...
I've got several questions about this new language of theirs, and I'd like to hear what the Slashdot audience might ahve to say about them. Any takers?
This got a five score for being informative? Eh??? Maybe I wasn't playing it with too straight of a face after all :)
True if and only if the development of life is a rare, freak occurance. It's entirely possible, however, that it is a natural and even likely result of a series of reactions that occur constantly in primordial type conditions.
Amino acids, for example, seem to be abundant in the cosmos. They have been found in comets, for example, as well as dispersed in the interstellar gases. The late Dr Sidney Fox did an experiment in the fifties in which he showed that various mixtures of amino acids would, when gently heated in solution, gradually (minutes) coalesce into what he called "proteinoid microspheres" -- structures that in many ways resemble bacterial fossils found in precambrian rocks in Australia and northern Canada and Greenland.
These spheres may not count as life, of course, but they show many properties of it -- they grow, metabolize materials from their environment, reproduce, respond to stimuli, etc. The main thing that divides them from life forms as we know them today is the lack of RNA -- it just isn't present here. But otherwise, these spheres seem, to me at least, to be a very likely precursor to life as we know it.
What's really interesting to me is that these spheres are really easy to produce -- mix, dissolve, bunsen burner for a minute or so (a catalyst only -- heat isn't required but it speeds things up considerably), then go get some lunch. By the time you get back, the solution will be filled with the things. The only reason that these structures aren't found today is that, being protein, they're food to other organisms so they never last long enough to fossilize. But, I think there's ever reason to believe that they can and probably will be found in abundance wherever the conditions are right. All that's needed is a pool of brackish water and time; Mars has had plenty of time, and now it seems like it has the water as well. My guess is that structures of at least this complexity are going to be found in abundance when we get there.
Maybe now we'll finally see some progress towards getting people up there, and on a semi-permanent basis at that. This kind of exploration is going to take a lot longer than the "footprints & photos" type stuff we did on the Moon...
Ahh, was this before or after Dawrin quite his job in the Swiss patent office? I can never keep track which came first... ;)
But, I think that this one is much more fun, in a clever little funny on IE funny on Lynx kinda way....
Yeah, these methods are kind of a pain in the ass, but they're only worse if this new plan can do no better. But look at it -- they want every single link out there to be rewritten to their spec. Who does that help? Millions of web authors out there trying to rewrite documents to filter into this (really small) database can't possibly be easier than having the much smaller set of web admins adding server redirects whenever they notice more than a handful of 404 errors on the same document.
Interesting point: are stability & user friendliness mutually exclusive? You imply that Windows has it and the others don't, while the others have stability and Windows doesn't, implying that it's an either/or proposition. Do you really believe that?
I can't decide if all this digital hoohah is making the world a better place or not. Certainly there is a considerable minority that stands to gain much from it -- I would include the Slashdot audience among that number. But there's a much larger majority that, if they feel any impact from it, it's only going to be indirectly -- at least for now.
Access to quick information keeps getting bandied about as the next big revolution, in the spirit of the space age, the industrial age, etc. I dunno, I guess. Certainly the current new wave of technological innovation [1] has had a massive impact on our economy. But are these changes good? Profits are up, salaries aren't. Job security is a relic. Stock holders are cashing in -- and more people are becomign stock holders -- but that leaves a couple of problems, like what about the rest of us that aren't in on the market. More importantly, what about the ones that are in the market -- if it crashes, as I'm sure it will sooner or later, where will these young workers with crap salaries and worthless stock options be? Our success is by no means assured.
But that's just the economic side of things. Things like water, electricity, and the telephone had benefits far beyond the economic. They enabled a whole new range of activities while making a large number of older ones simpler or even unnecessary (going to the well, etc). What does the info revolution offer to the average Joe? On one hand, he doesn't ever have to go to a library again if all the books are already out there. Why call your friends cross country when you can chat for free at your computer? Why, indeed, would you ever have to leave your home at all?
The digital age unquestionably brings great benefits, but it also brings great dangers. It's not unique in this (plumbing might have brought, say, cholera, and electricity of course brought electrocution) and I'm not yet sure how the good and bad sides balance out here. I think that won't be clear for several years to come. If we transform from a nation of couch potatos into a nation of desk potatos, that isn't necessarily an improvement. I am looking to see how things unfold over the coming years before forming an opinion on this matter...
[1] (Does anyone else hate using that word now? Is it just me?)
While on one hand I agree that the Interent is too US-centric, I think you need to recognize that it's natural for people to think in local terms, and this doesn't exclude Americans. Now this doesn't mean to ignore the rest of the world -- not by any means -- and it's very reasonable to ask for I18N of big sites and services.
But complaining that Americans ignore the rest of the world is a cheap shot to begin with, and you scuttle it by showing that you don't know any more about us than we know about your country. If you want to find ways to bridge that gap, you can do better than that, can't you? Can't we, I should say?
Yo conosco puedamos, si mi amigo? (Lo siento, mi espanol esta muy mal...)
But the downside was they showed us that damn movie about fifteen frickin' times -- as if they knew the stuff we were doing was fun but nothing like that, so every time there was a slow moment they'd plop us down in front of a TV / VCR and play it again. It was actually the first thing we did upon arrival [great first impression guys], and several more times over the week. Ek...
It's funny this has come up here today, I was just thinking about the camp & the movie this morning for the first time in a couple of years, it seems. I was thinkng of renting it again to see how well the movie has aged -- hopefully it has done better than, say, "Top Gun" :). The IMDB page notes that a bunch of would-one-day-be-famous actors were in it, so it might be interesting to see that... ho hum, probably won't worry about it...
Think about it. IBM sells a *wide* variety of products, from laptops to mainframes and from software to service. It complicates matters for them if they have to be "multilingual" with their platform systems; Linux gives them a way around this by, as suggested in the Halloween documents, treating the OS as basically a generic commodity.
The more popular Linux gets, and the better IBM's equipment works with it, the better their bottom line gets. If Linux gives them a platform to standardize around, then they can sell more hardware and support services and not have to worry as much about certain problems (compatibility, stability, etc) that live at the OS level. This is very much in their interest, but it's also in the interest of consumers as well, if Linux becomes a reliable system component along the lines of, say, a hard drive or a word processor. The consumer gets the benefit or a robust & rewarding system platform that works on most any equipment available; IBM gets the benefit of having their entire product range appeal to customers because it all speaks the lingua franca of the computer world that they are positively contributing to.
Consider EBCDIC. Wasn't that the standard text format on IBM machines back in the day? Is it in use on any modern system? [I'm asking -- not rhetorical...] It seems to me that they had the wisdom to (eventually) switch to the open ASCII standard before, and are promoting the new Linux standard now. I see no reason to be suspicious of this behavior -- everyone stands to benefit, or at least everyone that isn't trying to shill a proproetary in-house OS... :)