I could not agree more. People's view of risk seems to be entirly related to what the media and politicians pump into their brains, rather than the actual statistics.
Just think how often you have been in a car crash - not vey often, right? Then think that the chance of being caught up in terroism is a tiny fraction of this, and the chance of being injured in in a geological event is so close to zero that all reasonably numerate people would call it zero.
Ok, someone is going to tell me how often they have been in a Californian earthquake - taken across the entire population over an average life span, the risk is still very small.
Like many perople I grew up in the days when there was nothing else and I have long advocated that one should use the right tool for the job, and very often the correct tool for interacting with the OS is the command line.
In the days of showing users how to use DOS there was a lot less to remember and no hand-eye coordiantion skills to learn, to get started. Over the last few years my mother has started using a computer and she finds it very hard to double click wihtout moving the mouse - I've taught her the keystrokes to get round this - but here life would be a lot simpler is there was no mouse.
I also find that, like other posters have said, people who have never used the command line do not know what they can do with it. And so a lot of simple taks (recursively delete all files called *.log that are over 7 days old) become a real chore.
This only only true for single purpose machines. I agree with you that the problem with current PCs/Laptops is that they are generic machines.
What will really lead to what you advocate is not more power and intellegence but reduced size and cost. How often have you used a pocket calcualtor rather than the calc app on your desktop? the reason? it feels better to use a dedicated machine rather than a multipurpose one (why hasn't the Swiss Army Knife done away with a box full of tools?).
When we can have one machine per task (a "note pad" for writing, a "calculator" for spreadsheets, a stack of "electronic" forms for database apps) we won't need UIs.
I think the future is a computer that is the size of a sheet of paper and as thick as a sheet of card - which I can interface with by writing - and costs $20
It seems to me that the most likely failure was that it failed to unfold. I believe the antenna was under the solar panels which were in turn in the clam-shell. All that needed to happen was for it to land up against a large rock, it couldn't then unfold fully and so had no power and a sheilded antenna
If we could see the source we could work with them, if the developer community cannot see inside the the functions they have to call they cannot be certain that the call will have an outcome that does not case a security hole
You are quite right, this is what really prevented Java applets from getting of the ground - 12-20Mb runtime download.
The thing is that in 2-4 years pretty much every one will have the.NET frame work as part of the OS (even MONO on Linux) so they will not have to down load it. Then.NET will become mainstream.
May be disposability is not is primary purpose, only that it is so cheap that one would not mind of disposing of it after it has performed useful work.
A lot of new inventions seemed a bit pointless until they found real world uses and then changed lives.
One of the problems with computers today is their multi-functional nature. Most good things do one job well (washing the dishes in the washing machine isn't to great). And yet we expect one computer to hundreds of tasks - It's got to be better to have a lot of dedicated machines rather than one general purpose one.
There is nothing wrong with chopping down trees for paper, if fact it is probably a good thing! Pulp for paper generally comes from managed forests that are economically viable. If there was no paper, no new trees would be planted and the trees that are standing would be burned down to clear the land for other economic activity
The early automobiles had to be compatible with unsurfaced roads full of ruts. You could not take a modern car (and alot of SUVs) on a road of 100 years ago. If the manufacturers had produced cars with 6" ground clearance no one would have bough them.
Confess I don't know anything about DRM but lower frequency generally means lower bandwidth. It's simple, at 500kHz, 50kHz of bandwith represents 10% but at 5MHz it only represents 1%
The balance needs redressing. If more people voted and took an active interest in what their politican was doing, then the politician would take more notice of the people - they would have to - or they would loose office and therefore funding.
That said I belive it is impossible to separate free as in speech and free as in beer in most politicans and lawyers minds. So lobbying against current moves in this area will always be put down as wanting to avoid paying a work's creator.
I would love someone to come up with a concrete, relevant and meaningful to the "man on the clapham omnibus" example of why copyright holders should not seek as much protection against piracy as they can
But not for much longer and definietly not on the frequencies Seti is searching. I give our current single carrier based broadcast signals another 70 years before they are completely replaced by cable, line of sight, spread specturm, laser or whatever. Any of which will substantially reduce power and/or off-planet radiation.
SETI doesn't search the easy to use frequecies used by broadcast media because they would be swamped by terestrial signals. But they argue that some benevolent advaned race (the Vulcans I guess) will be broadcasting in some strange area of the microwave spectrum because it has something to do with water (you're gonna have fun with that aren't you).
So put all that together and plug it into the famous equation and I get a probablility of $lt;1 that we will find ET. 150 years of braodcast in a >10 billion year old universe!
But for all we know the signals from aliens could be encoded in the DNA of space fairing viruses. Aliens who "see" with radio could be happily spewing light into the galaxy for anyone to detect. A non-water based life form may be broadcasting to us at the "sulphuring hole" frequencies.
I find myself really puzzled about your comments. In general I am not in support of DRM but I do support the principal of copyright. The thing that exercises my mind is this: You assert that DRM "restricts the spread of information", the more I think about it the more I think it does no such thing. DRM ensures that the creators and producers of works get paid. The work can be "enjoyed" by anyone who pays. Up until very recently it has always been like this. Was Shakespear "hamper[ing] culural progress massively" when he charged people to see his plays?
Furthermore we can split information into two very broad categories - factual and creative (my categories, I just made them up and I'm sure plenty of you can find fault with these) - when we look at the factual content e.g. news, science, humanities, next to none of it is covered by DRM. And I would argue that from a purely utilitarian view point the factual information is far more important to the future of humanity than the latest single by [insert name of popstar] or the latest computer game.
It is also true that copyright only lasts for a certain length of time after which a work is freely reproduceable. And if we look back over history, the important stuff (Shakespear, Mozart, Picasso and 1000's of others) is constantly reproduced in the latest modern formats. I have seen others arguing that DRM will prevent future civilisations digging up our CDs and finding out what is on them. But this was true of heiroglyphs and cuniform texts until lucky breaks came along. I don't think we should over estimate our importance to future millenia (and certainly not the importance of our cultural works - which I suspect will be largely consigned to oblivion), the good stuff will survive or be rediscovered.
Figures such as "centimeters per year" for continental drift are averages. The problem with an average is it need not be present in the data set at all. What we see in most places on earth is no movement for a long time and then an earth quake which may give metres of movement.
The fact is that cars used to breakdown (nearly?) as often as yor computer crashes, back in the days when the car industry was as immature as the software industry (i.e. 1930's?).
Another way of looking at it is to look at top-end race cars (Formula 1 etc.) They cost millions and break down pretty regularly- for some it must be approaching 1 failure every 50-100 hours.
So now think about IT. We have an industry that is pretty immature running on cutting edge technology. It's like giving a modern day race car to a 1930's mechanic. It is simply not going to run reliably.
Ford made billions selling cars that were good for their day (they still broke down, you had to know where to put oil and water, you had to be careful not to flood the engine when starting) but now they just run and all you have to do is get them serviced once a year.
Bottom line -- its about market forces. At the time ford was selling the Model T, Rolls Royce were selling much more expensive cars. They both still sell cars of different quality to different markets.
If you want more reliability pay for it, if you want something that for all practical purposes does the job, go for the cheaper option.
Of course when I plugged mu USB Drive into my Linux box... NOTHING HAPPENED. So I went off, got the driver, which some guy had developed and released out of the goodnes of his heart, compiled it, blah, blah, blah. Rebooted (but of course you never have to reboot Linux) and... NOTHING HAPPENED.
So I could either spend all of my free time for the next couple of years solving the problem, or leave it connected to the Windows box and use the Windows box to copy stuff from the USB drive to the Linux box.
Me - I prefer the Win98 approach of being honest and saying "we don't support that - get an upgrade"
If these people want a shop sign, they pay a signwriter - very few would do it themselves. If they want leaflets, stationary or business cards, they pay a printer and may be a graphics designer.
It seems to me that the issue here is the cost justification. For most small shops a web site is very intangible, especially if they don't sell through it. If they do sell from it it then starts to get complicated and expensive (compared to brochureware).
Someone was bound respond with this, so it might as well be me. I've put my own central heating into two houses now, and it doesn't leak, the disruption to the house and family is minimal, I get the job I want, when I want it.
Most of your examples, and the majoirty of things I would want would be met by splitting the problem in to two parts: 1) do a normal search for the non-regex parts; 2) apply the regex to rank the results (maybe pick the top n sites to limit the subset for the regex search).
So for example, "Fred* Bloggs" would search for all pages with "Bloggs" and then regex for the Fred part.
To do a date search, e.g. find events on your birthday - 29/02/???? - find all pages with "29/02" then find 29/02/????.
not perfect but seems like a good compromise. The real drawback is it assumes there would always be a non-regex part to the search, however as I suggested, this is very iften the case.
It's strange that the "is it art" question really only ever comes up with visual arts. If someone gets up on stage and plays music from Stockhausen to Madonna, Bach to Kylie, no one asks "is it music", we might comment on it being good or bad, but no quesitons what it is.
One of the few distinguishing fetures of Visual arts is that they have no utility. Anything that has utility is craft, not art.
So if this has no utility and is put up by it's creators as art then yes, it is art. BUT the real question is IS IT GOOD ART?
The demographics don't support you on this one. Yes Osama and Saddam have lots of wealth and are extremists, but the people doing the dying are poor and oppressed. Rockerfeller might have wanted a bit more but he stopped short of dying to get it.
Wealthy people, people with property and kids and jobs and something to live for, might have extreme views but very, very few of them are prepared to give up their comforts, let alone their lives.
I'm seriously against removing a significant mass of material from earth, and certainly from beyond earth's garvity.
We simply do not understand the how the environment works, and what the impact of our changes are. If we start removing matter (even things that we think are dangerous - i.e are dangerous to humans) we could irrevocably alter the environment, and the potential for bio-deverity.
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Just think how often you have been in a car crash - not vey often, right? Then think that the chance of being caught up in terroism is a tiny fraction of this, and the chance of being injured in in a geological event is so close to zero that all reasonably numerate people would call it zero.
Ok, someone is going to tell me how often they have been in a Californian earthquake - taken across the entire population over an average life span, the risk is still very small.
In the days of showing users how to use DOS there was a lot less to remember and no hand-eye coordiantion skills to learn, to get started. Over the last few years my mother has started using a computer and she finds it very hard to double click wihtout moving the mouse - I've taught her the keystrokes to get round this - but here life would be a lot simpler is there was no mouse.
I also find that, like other posters have said, people who have never used the command line do not know what they can do with it. And so a lot of simple taks (recursively delete all files called *.log that are over 7 days old) become a real chore.
What will really lead to what you advocate is not more power and intellegence but reduced size and cost. How often have you used a pocket calcualtor rather than the calc app on your desktop? the reason? it feels better to use a dedicated machine rather than a multipurpose one (why hasn't the Swiss Army Knife done away with a box full of tools?).
When we can have one machine per task (a "note pad" for writing, a "calculator" for spreadsheets, a stack of "electronic" forms for database apps) we won't need UIs.
I think the future is a computer that is the size of a sheet of paper and as thick as a sheet of card - which I can interface with by writing - and costs $20
It seems to me that the most likely failure was that it failed to unfold. I believe the antenna was under the solar panels which were in turn in the clam-shell. All that needed to happen was for it to land up against a large rock, it couldn't then unfold fully and so had no power and a sheilded antenna
If we could see the source we could work with them, if the developer community cannot see inside the the functions they have to call they cannot be certain that the call will have an outcome that does not case a security hole
The thing is that in 2-4 years pretty much every one will have the .NET frame work as part of the OS (even MONO on Linux) so they will not have to down load it. Then .NET will become mainstream.
A lot of new inventions seemed a bit pointless until they found real world uses and then changed lives.
One of the problems with computers today is their multi-functional nature. Most good things do one job well (washing the dishes in the washing machine isn't to great). And yet we expect one computer to hundreds of tasks - It's got to be better to have a lot of dedicated machines rather than one general purpose one.
Staring at /. can be as edifying as staring at woods and squirrels
There is nothing wrong with chopping down trees for paper, if fact it is probably a good thing! Pulp for paper generally comes from managed forests that are economically viable. If there was no paper, no new trees would be planted and the trees that are standing would be burned down to clear the land for other economic activity
The early automobiles had to be compatible with unsurfaced roads full of ruts. You could not take a modern car (and alot of SUVs) on a road of 100 years ago. If the manufacturers had produced cars with 6" ground clearance no one would have bough them.
Confess I don't know anything about DRM but lower frequency generally means lower bandwidth. It's simple, at 500kHz, 50kHz of bandwith represents 10% but at 5MHz it only represents 1%
Yeah, if you just put the spammers in Guantanamo Bay with out trial or a release date, then America (land of the free?) would be much better off!
That said I belive it is impossible to separate free as in speech and free as in beer in most politicans and lawyers minds. So lobbying against current moves in this area will always be put down as wanting to avoid paying a work's creator.
I would love someone to come up with a concrete, relevant and meaningful to the "man on the clapham omnibus" example of why copyright holders should not seek as much protection against piracy as they can
But not for much longer and definietly not on the frequencies Seti is searching. I give our current single carrier based broadcast signals another 70 years before they are completely replaced by cable, line of sight, spread specturm, laser or whatever. Any of which will substantially reduce power and/or off-planet radiation.
SETI doesn't search the easy to use frequecies used by broadcast media because they would be swamped by terestrial signals. But they argue that some benevolent advaned race (the Vulcans I guess) will be broadcasting in some strange area of the microwave spectrum because it has something to do with water (you're gonna have fun with that aren't you).
So put all that together and plug it into the famous equation and I get a probablility of $lt;1 that we will find ET. 150 years of braodcast in a >10 billion year old universe!
But for all we know the signals from aliens could be encoded in the DNA of space fairing viruses. Aliens who "see" with radio could be happily spewing light into the galaxy for anyone to detect. A non-water based life form may be broadcasting to us at the "sulphuring hole" frequencies.
You've got to be pretty lucky to find an alien.
I find myself really puzzled about your comments. In general I am not in support of DRM but I do support the principal of copyright. The thing that exercises my mind is this: You assert that DRM "restricts the spread of information", the more I think about it the more I think it does no such thing. DRM ensures that the creators and producers of works get paid. The work can be "enjoyed" by anyone who pays. Up until very recently it has always been like this. Was Shakespear "hamper[ing] culural progress massively" when he charged people to see his plays?
Furthermore we can split information into two very broad categories - factual and creative (my categories, I just made them up and I'm sure plenty of you can find fault with these) - when we look at the factual content e.g. news, science, humanities, next to none of it is covered by DRM. And I would argue that from a purely utilitarian view point the factual information is far more important to the future of humanity than the latest single by [insert name of popstar] or the latest computer game.
It is also true that copyright only lasts for a certain length of time after which a work is freely reproduceable. And if we look back over history, the important stuff (Shakespear, Mozart, Picasso and 1000's of others) is constantly reproduced in the latest modern formats. I have seen others arguing that DRM will prevent future civilisations digging up our CDs and finding out what is on them. But this was true of heiroglyphs and cuniform texts until lucky breaks came along. I don't think we should over estimate our importance to future millenia (and certainly not the importance of our cultural works - which I suspect will be largely consigned to oblivion), the good stuff will survive or be rediscovered.
Another way of looking at it is to look at top-end race cars (Formula 1 etc.) They cost millions and break down pretty regularly- for some it must be approaching 1 failure every 50-100 hours.
So now think about IT. We have an industry that is pretty immature running on cutting edge technology. It's like giving a modern day race car to a 1930's mechanic. It is simply not going to run reliably.
Ford made billions selling cars that were good for their day (they still broke down, you had to know where to put oil and water, you had to be careful not to flood the engine when starting) but now they just run and all you have to do is get them serviced once a year.
Bottom line -- its about market forces. At the time ford was selling the Model T, Rolls Royce were selling much more expensive cars. They both still sell cars of different quality to different markets.
If you want more reliability pay for it, if you want something that for all practical purposes does the job, go for the cheaper option.
So I could either spend all of my free time for the next couple of years solving the problem, or leave it connected to the Windows box and use the Windows box to copy stuff from the USB drive to the Linux box.
Me - I prefer the Win98 approach of being honest and saying "we don't support that - get an upgrade"
It seems to me that the issue here is the cost justification. For most small shops a web site is very intangible, especially if they don't sell through it. If they do sell from it it then starts to get complicated and expensive (compared to brochureware).
now... where did I put that engine hoist
Nah, its more like Programming - The art of making a sledgehammer with a Swiss watch
So for example, "Fred* Bloggs" would search for all pages with "Bloggs" and then regex for the Fred part.
To do a date search, e.g. find events on your birthday - 29/02/???? - find all pages with "29/02" then find 29/02/????.
not perfect but seems like a good compromise. The real drawback is it assumes there would always be a non-regex part to the search, however as I suggested, this is very iften the case.
One of the few distinguishing fetures of Visual arts is that they have no utility. Anything that has utility is craft, not art.
So if this has no utility and is put up by it's creators as art then yes, it is art. BUT the real question is IS IT GOOD ART?
Wealthy people, people with property and kids and jobs and something to live for, might have extreme views but very, very few of them are prepared to give up their comforts, let alone their lives.
We simply do not understand the how the environment works, and what the impact of our changes are. If we start removing matter (even things that we think are dangerous - i.e are dangerous to humans) we could irrevocably alter the environment, and the potential for bio-deverity.