"A Computer on every desktop! Microsoft in every computer! We win!! Hey, where did everybody go?"
We're outside in the sunshine with wireless multi-touch internet enabled tablets and a million other places.
The world has outgrown MS's vision. If you want to make money you gotta either predict or create the future.
What does MS say to me these days?
"Other people's UIs are nice."
"You must use our software at work"
"Do you remember how much you liked XP?"
"DRM is good"
"We like your tablet - here's a cabinet sized version."
"We've cut our boot time to 30s!"
"Develop for our platform - that's where all the cool kids hang out!!"
Etc etc.
Get a clue MS!
Find someone who's been hidden away in a cave for the last 20 years and ask them what people will need *tomorrow*.
I was really surprised by the huge number of negative replies in this thread. Actually I found it really depressing. Computers are tools. I don't see any difference between withholding a compo until some arbitrary age and withholding a pencil. You try to introduce them early so that your children have a chance to have a natural ability with the item rather than a forced education in later life.
My own children however gravitated to the technological devices in the house without any input from my wife or myself. We felt that as long as you can make the item in question safe and can accept the loss of that item then it is appropriate that they investigate.
To help them along I dug out an old touch screen. The joy on my, then, one year old's face when he realised that *he* could make the ducky appear and go "quack quack" by pressing the big green bush (on the screen) will stay with me for a long time.
The sad fact is however that much of modern computing isn't fun. Perhaps this is the reason that so many writers here want to shield children from what they see as drudgery and frustration. If you can remember that a compo can still be used to empower and bring a sense of achievement, that it can be a wonderful creative tool and provide pretty much instant feedback then maybe you can understand exactly why it's not a problem if it's a part of a younger child's day. Interestingly the same ideas go a long way to help us to understand where we've gone wrong in Software Engineering. Without any sense of irony I can say that much of what we do would be improved if it were designed to keep a 2 year old happy. Conversely, all of the things that frustrate and delay us in our every day usage of computers are things that a 2 year old simply wouldn't stand for!
I got 'I can press keys' for my two year old from http://www.icangames.com/ican/games/presskeys.html (I have no association with the author). The program prints up simple full screen animations in response to (almost) any key press. The result? It didn't take long for my kid to associate the M key with the mice - especially if you 'go nuts' every time there are mice all over the screen! I don't know how much intrinsic value this has but it is hard to see how it is harming him as other posts seem to suggest.
>> Eps 1-3 are dull because they tell the backstory. We already know how it ends, we already know pretty much what happens.
> The prequels are dull, but not because they are backstory.
Sometime after ROJ a mate told me about GL's vision for 3 prequels. My heart sank. Sci Fi is supposed to be about the future not the past. Years later the prequals did turn out to be shit. Sure, the over-use of cgi removed any soul from the actors performances but I think the OP does have a point. Prequels/backstory may have a place in other genres but *not* in Sci Fi - and certainly not when too many of the same characters are involved.
SW was successful because it was a grand fantasy. It opened minds and stimulated both adreneline and the imagination. When you tell a story arse-backwards you'd better be Tarrantino with your script if you want the keep the movie interesting. Even if you are that good, Sci-Fi lives and dies on two things (neither of which are special effects):
1) Interesting ideas per minute.
2) A glimpse of just how fucking big *our* universe actually is, or could be.
Prequels destroy both of these: You're contantly having to limit your new ideas to handle the fan's desire for complete consistency; and instead of expanding your universe with a second big bang, all you're doing is running head long into a big crunch: a singular well known end point.
It is the entire concept of a being a prequel that made 'Enterprise' still-born and the same thing will fuck up the new Star Trek film (and therefore the entire franchise):
"Oooh, I wonder if baby Spock and baby Kirk will ever get through this???"...
"Oh yeah, of course they will,...yawn.".
The script is hamstrung at the outset so there's nothing left to do but fill the screen with special effects. Really, prequels equals dream-sequence in terms of boring and pissing your audience off. Just imagine for two seconds the new ideas all that CGI could have been used to build!!!
>> This comment is particularly ill-conceived, even for Slashdot [Star Wars] posts.
Mmm, what's the Creative Commons status on your post? This'd make me a great/. sig. Can I use it?:)
"How relevant or useful is it to learn Assembly programming language in the current era?"
Pretty amazingly relevant actually.
Since the point of Assembly is to have a pretty much one to one relationship with the machine code of the target processor and all languages have to produce (or in the case of an interpreted language string together at run time) machine executable code at some point all programmers are essentially writing in assembly already. Compilers, interpreters etc are an intermediate stage designed to save the programmer work.
There are two points to remember when discussing these intermediate coding stages: firstly you don't get portability, high level coding, object orientation or other benefits at no *cost*. There is always a trade-off between program size, program speed and ease of code generation. The second point to remember is that a lot of us assume that the compiler will do a pretty much perfect job in the conversion to assembly without first having a look at the actual output of our favourite one.
As a final note, remember that that which looks beautiful, elegant and simple in a high level language can look like a dog when it comes to the assembly output or in execution (think recursive functions).
To understand these points and make the most appropriate language choice for a given project there is simply no substitute for an understanding of Assembly Language. It's like trying to say you can learn to program without bothing to 'look under the hood' at all that ''Boolean logic'' stuff!
Btw. 'Learning Assembly' means writing some real projects with it - not just reading about it in the bathroom for a couple of dumps.
"Instead of having a print head that moves side to side like current inkjets, the print head spans the full width of the page, containing 70,400 nozzles in the A4 version"
a Google search on my name comes up with a lot of stuff that isn't me and could be very harmful to my reputation if it were. Even worse, the other person with my name is about the same age as I am, at least as far as I can tell from the pictures
Nice try, but I think you're attempting a double bluff. You are that 'other' guy!
Tickle it and get ready for the ride of your lives
on
Futurama Returns
·
· Score: 1
>"While I'm not a huge fan of immersing children in technology, there is
>a certain point at which you must expose them to the tools that will
>help them be successful in the world"
I'm not sure I understand your reticence. Computers are not dangerous 'Krell' educating machines! They are vital part of
a modern child's exposure to the world. By their very nature children are attracted to technology of all forms. The number
that can fully operate the DVD player by age 2 is amazing and demonstrates an innate interest and attraction. This kinda
thing should be encouraged!
When I look back to my own youth I can see a whole heap of time spent in front of the telly. Part of this amounts to
nothing more than the usual, and I believe pretty harmless, squandering of time that all kids do (ie it's a *good* thing that
they're not forced to run around the maze with a head full of tasks at such an age). However my own viewing also left me
with an amazing amount of knowledge about the world. Tv is always lambasted for it's brain rotting properties but I tend to
think that it has produced the most 'tuned in' human population ever.
The internet is going to be an amazing sink of time and energy for my own kid. He's going to spend unbelievable amounts of
time and energy on there. I think that, in the end, his generation will be even more wired in than ours. I think that this
will be a good thing.
The idea that there is any distinction between the world 'in there' and the world outside is kinda bizarre to me. 'Go out
and play' is all very well if you're trying to teach your kid that their body requires use to remain healthy, but is kinda
missing the point if it assumes that the backyard is going to provide 'better' stimulation than the tv or computer. Of
course there's fun and learning to be had outside but it's no better or worse.
I guess this feeling that computers are brain rotting devices like tv stems from the current trend towards users as
consumers rather than producers. I am convinced that this will quickly change as the older tv-fed generation simply dies
off. Computers are a stunning tool for production, imagination and raw thought. Their fundamental position at the heart of
modern communication places them at a world-changing level of importance.
I've got a touch monitor lying around the place. My kid can play 'Dora the Explorer' or paint on it even though he hasn't
got the required mouse skills. In the future I hope he will use computers to express himself creatively and learn more about
the world than I could hope to. If all this makes him more successful at work then great but it's not necessarily my
priority. All I want him to have is access to the technology and to end up with a relaxed and natural usage of it.
Others have commented that their parents, by holding back the tech until the kids were are bursting point, ensured that
they appreciated the gifts that much more. I don't know about this. While I find myself to be a soft touch with my own in
regard to toys (this'll have to stop, sorry Bob!), computers are simply too important. I think we've past the point where
they're a novelty or toy. Holding them back just seems to be taking the kids back in time 30 years for no very good reason.
If they have value then the kid will find it.
I guess I think this way because of my own experience. Home micros arrived when I was about 8 and I just,..I can't
express it. Let's just say we were soulmates! Lol. About 5 years later the ROM blew on my Sinclair Spectrum and my parents
didn't get it fixed. I was left writing programs on reams of paper. ("Paper?? You were lucky, we had to program on a
cardboard box in 't middle of the road.."). Hmmm. It's left me with the feeling that no kid of mine is going to be without
a computer! It's like taking away all their pencils and books!
Technology isn't going to take over their lives. They go out, they play u
I was trying my damnedest to avoid a spelling discussion, that's why I used 'sic' so many times in the first place! As it turns out I was aware that it doesn't stand for 'Spelling Is Correct' or whatever and was going by the definition at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic
-
"to indicate that an unusual (or incorrect) spelling, phrase, or other preceding quoted material is intended to be read or printed exactly as shown and is not a transcription error"
...but now I see that even this definition is under dispute. Natural language is a funny thing. You can't even attempt to remove all doubt about how you spelt something let alone what you actually meant to say!
In regard to '-ise', as a Brit., I'm given the choice. I like the softer look and sound. The 'z's look to me to be the way a Dalek would say it: "You will obey the Daleks! You will be organized! Seek! Locate! Organize!"
Let's face it, if we're discussing improvements to Windows XP Search then a fish on the end of a stick would be an improvement. The fact that MS now realise[sic] that a change here is important is a big thing.
Organisation[sic] in itself is simply not a solution to the overwhelming amounts of data on a hard drive. Consider the relative successes of Yahoo Search and Yahoo directory, or Google Search and Google directory. Further, consider the difference between a CLI and a GUI treeview. The former gives speed by flexibility, the latter gets you there in the end but is far slower in comparison.
My HD is unbelieveably well organised[sic Goddamnit!] but I still find it easier to type a search into Google to find information, even when I know that I already have a local copy it. This is really mad and needs work.
Unfortunately, of course, it looks like the metadata handling required to pull off desktop search has already been hamstrung by the removal of 'virtual folders' - just about the most important 'innovation' in Vista. Looks like users will continue to have to attempt to file all of their lives in a single organisational[sic] hierarchy for a little while longer.
I started updating a web site about a medical condition that I suffer from a good few years back. It wasn't called blogging in them days (and I lived in a cardboard box in t'middle of the road etc).
I was really surprised at just how much better it made me feel. Certainly a lot of the therapeutic value came from letting off steam but there was a lot more to it than this.
I'd put up with a load of shit from the medical profession and the site really helped me to deal with it. In my mind it kinda redressed the balance of truth a little. I felt that by speaking the truth, as I saw it, in a public forum I could better deal with the very real effects of my illness and counteract the ignorance that the medical profession were constantly spreading at the time.
Blogging gives you a voice. In the right niche, this can be an extremely loud and far reaching voice. It can be truly cathartic to rid yourself of your personal concerns in this way, however, it also gives you the chance to build real strength. I now get a lot less shit from the medical profession, partially because they've moved on a bit, and partially because now I have the self confidence that comes from a thousand messages from people with the same condition and experience as my own.
Until someone does prove it was an approximation, we'll use it.
Once that occurs, we will use the new figure until someone else is able to make it more accurate.
I'm really not trying to pick holes in what you're saying here but I'd really like to make the following observation:
Considering a scientific theory in this way assumes that the theory itself is computable in the same way as, say, pi is computable. From this viewpoint, yes, it follows that the more you work on on a theory, the more accurate your picture of the universe becomes.
Unfortunately at least some physical theories are probably going to be uncomputable. This means that they are found at an unpredictable times and are going to be capable of being entirely revolutionary.
What does all this mean? Well, it pays to remember that just because it's 'Einstein' or 'Newton' it doesn't mean that it doesn't get entirely replaced in the future if that becomes necessary.
It's somewhat dismaying to read one of the comments from Jolene Blalock in the article, apparently regarding the final episode of Enterprise....."The final episode is... appalling."
Without any hint of humour whatsoever I can say - What do you expect? The other episodes were appalling too.
I'm far more concerned about the following attempt to defibrillate the trek movies:
...also a prequel, supposedly set between the Enterprise era and the original adventures of Capt. Kirk.
The idea being, one can fairly safely deduce, to re-purpose expensive existing props and sets while hiring an all-new cast of unknowns, rather than pay the inflated fees routinely demanded by established series actors.
Am I alone in thinking that this sounds like it could be really really shit and completely kill off trek for a decade?
SciFi is supposed to be about the future - to look forward. Prequels while still supposedly about our future are still the plain old past in respect to the Trek (and the viewers') timeline and will instantly loose something because of it. It's like hobbling yourself and admitting that you have no vision to share right from the outset. Once you loose your audience's trust, trust that you know where you're going (B5) and that both the journey and the destination will be of interest, you simply loose the audience. Trek writers have often slipped up on this one. The wretched Holodeck had all the interest and drama of a dream sequence and, while I personally always enjoy time travel stories, I can understand that if your brain files time travel and 'Holodeck' together that you would want to gnaw one of your own legs off* listening to them all the time.
1) Lazy plot devices bore audiences to death.
2) No surprises, no vision of the future, no trust.
3) No Audience.
*(Really happened to the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council)
'..you should know what you talk about first before you talk. You are misusing the term "cellular automata" where in reality what you were looking for was the term "autonomous agents".'
Lol. No. The term I was looking for and used correctly was 'Cellular Automata'. If you are still in doubt consider 'Langton's Ant' here, (random example) here or do a search.
While you certainly can try to model Ant behaviour using MultiAgent systems (/'Adaptive Agents'/'Autonomous Agents'), I hope you will agree that, you can also have a serious stab at it with Cellular Automata. Personally I still consider the latter a fruitful branch on the tree of knowledge hence my selection of term. Finally, both Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms have also been used to model ant-inspired behavior. In the latter the distributed and 'social' properties of 'Agents' are not as important as simulated evolutionary processes.
I think that this is a really important avenue of research but can't help wondering why exactly this project was funded.
Robotics is of course great fun and can certainly be inspiring but all this was presented (albeit indirectly by a superficial BBC report) as a valid study in terms of what the miniture robots can achieve.
It doesn't take the 'Milliard Gargantubrain' to work out that all this stuff is better and cheaper simulated on computers. Cellular Automata have in various incarnations been here before (including countless ant based examples) . How does making it physically real advance the subject at all? Aside from the obvious 'it looks cool' and 'it allows us to write in general terms about ants instead of the truly vexing question of how intelligence can function equally well as a distributed system'.
Really, help me out here. Surely any one of us could have created and run 50,000 simulations in the time it took them to solder up the PICs (or whatever microcontrollers it was that they used). I'm not penny pinching here I'm just wondering if this was the best way to go about the problem.
"Myrmecology, noun, - The Scientific Study Of Ants. This has been Roseanne, your guide to the world of facts."
I'm getting bored of the hype required to get any science/technology advances written up. It's not an invisibility cloak, you knew it before you wrote the article and I knew it before I read the article. Why does good science need to hide behind stupid banner headlines?
Also, (because I'm grumpy today), Chameleons do not change colour to blend with their background. FFS. See Wikipedia: Chameleon.
If only someone had invented a fusion reactor that ran on pure bullshit we'd all be rolling in it (so to speak).
On the general issue of x minutes of silence being a stupid, head up one's own arse, pretentious load of crap idea, of course it is.
However if you think about it, the silent tracks are only a waste of money because they're so inaccurate. I'd happily pay good money for an entirely silent track that was exactly 4.123332949843985439843843... minutes long - ie where the mantissa contained a couple of MB of information (with a good beat)!
"The government estimates it will issue security alerts about six to 10 times a year"
"Those signing up will only be told about the most serious security threats that have the potential to affect millions of people."
This sounds like a particularly ineffectual and pointless exercise. This level of virus information could be picked up from doing nothing more than watching BBC news or reading their site during the year. Further, it makes you wonder if the whole project will be run by a single guy who's job description has just been extended to include 'watch BBC news programs then forward email warnings to UK PC owning in-duh-viduals'.
However, it is also an extremely cheap way of getting +ve headlines (even Reg refers to it as an 'initiative'). I guess each government department has been told to come up with crap like this because we're in the run up to a general election.
"I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle. As soon as I reach some kind of definite policy about what is my kind of radio show and my kind of book, and my kind of tv series, people start blowing up my kind of movie and throwing me out of their kind of movie theatres. It's so hard to build up anything coherent. Well, I'm sorry, all this must sound rather fatuous to you."
Slashdot Mirror
'It anticipates my needs,'
Didn't Sirrus Cybernetics already do this with lifts?
Yeah, but intelligence can also determine the external context.
Absolutely. This would make it a Strange Loop indeed.
Intelligent -> working in a patent office.
Unintelligent -> falling into red-hot magma.
Society can therefore even flip a man's intelligence by overruling his personal choice of context.
Albert Einstein in patent office = Law of Photoelectric Effect.
Albert Einstein in red-hot ' 'magma' ' = "Tssssssh."
Thus external context is of equal importance to innate ability within the expression of intelligence.
Also, when the bars start flicking like that, from one side to another, that's how I know when I've had enough to drink.
You could go the other way to solve this problem: make the batts/caps smaller and able to hold *less* charge.
Phone needs charge; Phone spends most of it's time in my jacket; Phone receives pwr from jacket pocket.
Jacket needs charge; Jacket spends most of it's time on the coat hook. Wire coat hooks to the mains electricity supply.
Planet needs charge; Planet spends most of it's time orbiting a star; Wire planet directly to sun;
Sun needs charge: Someone else's problem.
"A Computer on every desktop! Microsoft in every computer! We win!! Hey, where did everybody go?"
We're outside in the sunshine with wireless multi-touch internet enabled tablets and a million other places.
The world has outgrown MS's vision. If you want to make money you gotta either predict or create the future.
What does MS say to me these days?
"Other people's UIs are nice."
"You must use our software at work"
"Do you remember how much you liked XP?"
"DRM is good"
"We like your tablet - here's a cabinet sized version."
"We've cut our boot time to 30s!"
"Develop for our platform - that's where all the cool kids hang out!!"
Etc etc.
Get a clue MS!
Find someone who's been hidden away in a cave for the last 20 years and ask them what people will need *tomorrow*.
I bet I'll lose this bet.
I was really surprised by the huge number of negative replies in this thread. Actually I found it really depressing. Computers are tools. I don't see any difference between withholding a compo until some arbitrary age and withholding a pencil. You try to introduce them early so that your children have a chance to have a natural ability with the item rather than a forced education in later life.
My own children however gravitated to the technological devices in the house without any input from my wife or myself. We felt that as long as you can make the item in question safe and can accept the loss of that item then it is appropriate that they investigate.
To help them along I dug out an old touch screen. The joy on my, then, one year old's face when he realised that *he* could make the ducky appear and go "quack quack" by pressing the big green bush (on the screen) will stay with me for a long time.
The sad fact is however that much of modern computing isn't fun. Perhaps this is the reason that so many writers here want to shield children from what they see as drudgery and frustration. If you can remember that a compo can still be used to empower and bring a sense of achievement, that it can be a wonderful creative tool and provide pretty much instant feedback then maybe you can understand exactly why it's not a problem if it's a part of a younger child's day. Interestingly the same ideas go a long way to help us to understand where we've gone wrong in Software Engineering. Without any sense of irony I can say that much of what we do would be improved if it were designed to keep a 2 year old happy. Conversely, all of the things that frustrate and delay us in our every day usage of computers are things that a 2 year old simply wouldn't stand for!
I got 'I can press keys' for my two year old from http://www.icangames.com/ican/games/presskeys.html (I have no association with the author). The program prints up simple full screen animations in response to (almost) any key press. The result? It didn't take long for my kid to associate the M key with the mice - especially if you 'go nuts' every time there are mice all over the screen! I don't know how much intrinsic value this has but it is hard to see how it is harming him as other posts seem to suggest.
Mod up the parent!!
>> Eps 1-3 are dull because they tell the backstory. We already know how it ends, we already know pretty much what happens.
...yawn.".
/. sig. Can I use it? :)
> The prequels are dull, but not because they are backstory.
Sometime after ROJ a mate told me about GL's vision for 3 prequels. My heart sank. Sci Fi is supposed to be about the future not the past. Years later the prequals did turn out to be shit. Sure, the over-use of cgi removed any soul from the actors performances but I think the OP does have a point. Prequels/backstory may have a place in other genres but *not* in Sci Fi - and certainly not when too many of the same characters are involved.
SW was successful because it was a grand fantasy. It opened minds and stimulated both adreneline and the imagination. When you tell a story arse-backwards you'd better be Tarrantino with your script if you want the keep the movie interesting. Even if you are that good, Sci-Fi lives and dies on two things (neither of which are special effects):
1) Interesting ideas per minute.
2) A glimpse of just how fucking big *our* universe actually is, or could be.
Prequels destroy both of these: You're contantly having to limit your new ideas to handle the fan's desire for complete consistency; and instead of expanding your universe with a second big bang, all you're doing is running head long into a big crunch: a singular well known end point.
It is the entire concept of a being a prequel that made 'Enterprise' still-born and the same thing will fuck up the new Star Trek film (and therefore the entire franchise):
"Oooh, I wonder if baby Spock and baby Kirk will ever get through this???"...
"Oh yeah, of course they will,
The script is hamstrung at the outset so there's nothing left to do but fill the screen with special effects. Really, prequels equals dream-sequence in terms of boring and pissing your audience off. Just imagine for two seconds the new ideas all that CGI could have been used to build!!!
>> This comment is particularly ill-conceived, even for Slashdot [Star Wars] posts.
Mmm, what's the Creative Commons status on your post? This'd make me a great
James/.
"How relevant or useful is it to learn Assembly programming language in the current era?"
Pretty amazingly relevant actually.
Since the point of Assembly is to have a pretty much one to one relationship with the machine code of the target processor and all languages have to produce (or in the case of an interpreted language string together at run time) machine executable code at some point all programmers are essentially writing in assembly already. Compilers, interpreters etc are an intermediate stage designed to save the programmer work.
There are two points to remember when discussing these intermediate coding stages: firstly you don't get portability, high level coding, object orientation or other benefits at no *cost*. There is always a trade-off between program size, program speed and ease of code generation. The second point to remember is that a lot of us assume that the compiler will do a pretty much perfect job in the conversion to assembly without first having a look at the actual output of our favourite one.
As a final note, remember that that which looks beautiful, elegant and simple in a high level language can look like a dog when it comes to the assembly output or in execution (think recursive functions).
To understand these points and make the most appropriate language choice for a given project there is simply no substitute for an understanding of Assembly Language. It's like trying to say you can learn to program without bothing to 'look under the hood' at all that ''Boolean logic'' stuff!
Btw. 'Learning Assembly' means writing some real projects with it - not just reading about it in the bathroom for a couple of dumps.
"Instead of having a print head that moves side to side like current inkjets, the print head spans the full width of the page, containing 70,400 nozzles in the A4 version"
Head cleaning in progress - Please wait.
Print nozzle check pattern.
Head cleaning in progress - Please wait.
Print nozzle check pattern.
Head cleaning in progress - Please wait.
Print nozzle check pattern.
Head cleaning in progress - Please wait.
Print nozzle check pattern.
a Google search on my name comes up with a lot of stuff that isn't me and could be very harmful to my reputation if it were. Even worse, the other person with my name is about the same age as I am, at least as far as I can tell from the pictures
Nice try, but I think you're attempting a double bluff. You are that 'other' guy!
BEND me!
>"While I'm not a huge fan of immersing children in technology, there is >a certain point at which you must expose them to the tools that will >help them be successful in the world"
I'm not sure I understand your reticence. Computers are not dangerous 'Krell' educating machines! They are vital part of a modern child's exposure to the world. By their very nature children are attracted to technology of all forms. The number that can fully operate the DVD player by age 2 is amazing and demonstrates an innate interest and attraction. This kinda thing should be encouraged!
When I look back to my own youth I can see a whole heap of time spent in front of the telly. Part of this amounts to nothing more than the usual, and I believe pretty harmless, squandering of time that all kids do (ie it's a *good* thing that they're not forced to run around the maze with a head full of tasks at such an age). However my own viewing also left me with an amazing amount of knowledge about the world. Tv is always lambasted for it's brain rotting properties but I tend to think that it has produced the most 'tuned in' human population ever.
The internet is going to be an amazing sink of time and energy for my own kid. He's going to spend unbelievable amounts of time and energy on there. I think that, in the end, his generation will be even more wired in than ours. I think that this will be a good thing.
The idea that there is any distinction between the world 'in there' and the world outside is kinda bizarre to me. 'Go out and play' is all very well if you're trying to teach your kid that their body requires use to remain healthy, but is kinda missing the point if it assumes that the backyard is going to provide 'better' stimulation than the tv or computer. Of course there's fun and learning to be had outside but it's no better or worse.
I guess this feeling that computers are brain rotting devices like tv stems from the current trend towards users as consumers rather than producers. I am convinced that this will quickly change as the older tv-fed generation simply dies off. Computers are a stunning tool for production, imagination and raw thought. Their fundamental position at the heart of modern communication places them at a world-changing level of importance.
I've got a touch monitor lying around the place. My kid can play 'Dora the Explorer' or paint on it even though he hasn't got the required mouse skills. In the future I hope he will use computers to express himself creatively and learn more about the world than I could hope to. If all this makes him more successful at work then great but it's not necessarily my priority. All I want him to have is access to the technology and to end up with a relaxed and natural usage of it.
Others have commented that their parents, by holding back the tech until the kids were are bursting point, ensured that they appreciated the gifts that much more. I don't know about this. While I find myself to be a soft touch with my own in regard to toys (this'll have to stop, sorry Bob!), computers are simply too important. I think we've past the point where they're a novelty or toy. Holding them back just seems to be taking the kids back in time 30 years for no very good reason. If they have value then the kid will find it.
I guess I think this way because of my own experience. Home micros arrived when I was about 8 and I just, ..I can't
express it. Let's just say we were soulmates! Lol. About 5 years later the ROM blew on my Sinclair Spectrum and my parents
didn't get it fixed. I was left writing programs on reams of paper. ("Paper?? You were lucky, we had to program on a
cardboard box in 't middle of the road.."). Hmmm. It's left me with the feeling that no kid of mine is going to be without
a computer! It's like taking away all their pencils and books!
Technology isn't going to take over their lives. They go out, they play u
: D Lol!
...but now I see that even this definition is under dispute. Natural language is a funny thing. You can't even attempt to remove all doubt about how you spelt something let alone what you actually meant to say!
I was trying my damnedest to avoid a spelling discussion, that's why I used 'sic' so many times in the first place! As it turns out I was aware that it doesn't stand for 'Spelling Is Correct' or whatever and was going by the definition at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic
- "to indicate that an unusual (or incorrect) spelling, phrase, or other preceding quoted material is intended to be read or printed exactly as shown and is not a transcription error"
In regard to '-ise', as a Brit., I'm given the choice. I like the softer look and sound. The 'z's look to me to be the way a Dalek would say it: "You will obey the Daleks! You will be organized! Seek! Locate! Organize!"
Whoa there!
Let's face it, if we're discussing improvements to Windows XP Search then a fish on the end of a stick would be an improvement. The fact that MS now realise[sic] that a change here is important is a big thing.
Organisation[sic] in itself is simply not a solution to the overwhelming amounts of data on a hard drive. Consider the relative successes of Yahoo Search and Yahoo directory, or Google Search and Google directory. Further, consider the difference between a CLI and a GUI treeview. The former gives speed by flexibility, the latter gets you there in the end but is far slower in comparison.
My HD is unbelieveably well organised[sic Goddamnit!] but I still find it easier to type a search into Google to find information, even when I know that I already have a local copy it. This is really mad and needs work.
Unfortunately, of course, it looks like the metadata handling required to pull off desktop search has already been hamstrung by the removal of 'virtual folders' - just about the most important 'innovation' in Vista. Looks like users will continue to have to attempt to file all of their lives in a single organisational[sic] hierarchy for a little while longer.
I started updating a web site about a medical condition that I suffer from a good few years back. It wasn't called blogging in them days (and I lived in a cardboard box in t'middle of the road etc).
I was really surprised at just how much better it made me feel. Certainly a lot of the therapeutic value came from letting off steam but there was a lot more to it than this.
I'd put up with a load of shit from the medical profession and the site really helped me to deal with it. In my mind it kinda redressed the balance of truth a little. I felt that by speaking the truth, as I saw it, in a public forum I could better deal with the very real effects of my illness and counteract the ignorance that the medical profession were constantly spreading at the time.
Blogging gives you a voice. In the right niche, this can be an extremely loud and far reaching voice. It can be truly cathartic to rid yourself of your personal concerns in this way, however, it also gives you the chance to build real strength. I now get a lot less shit from the medical profession, partially because they've moved on a bit, and partially because now I have the self confidence that comes from a thousand messages from people with the same condition and experience as my own.
Until someone does prove it was an approximation, we'll use it. Once that occurs, we will use the new figure until someone else is able to make it more accurate.
I'm really not trying to pick holes in what you're saying here but I'd really like to make the following observation:
Considering a scientific theory in this way assumes that the theory itself is computable in the same way as, say, pi is computable. From this viewpoint, yes, it follows that the more you work on on a theory, the more accurate your picture of the universe becomes.
Unfortunately at least some physical theories are probably going to be uncomputable. This means that they are found at an unpredictable times and are going to be capable of being entirely revolutionary.
What does all this mean? Well, it pays to remember that just because it's 'Einstein' or 'Newton' it doesn't mean that it doesn't get entirely replaced in the future if that becomes necessary.
The shuttle needs some serious design revisions and these latest findings only serve to underline this. I think the following changes are required:
a) Separate the rear propulsion units from the main vehicle and keep them as far apart as possible.
b) Increase the area of the heat shield, while allowing for a narrow profile in orbit (using, say, a large saucer shape).
c) Fit a big deflector shield to the front of the main drive section.
d) Install maintenance tunnels throughout the ship (all of which can be based on exactly the same design)
e) Give the captain a bigger, more comfortable, chair and tell him to lighten up with his crewmen at the end of each encounter.
It's somewhat dismaying to read one of the comments from Jolene Blalock in the article, apparently regarding the final episode of Enterprise...
Without any hint of humour whatsoever I can say - What do you expect? The other episodes were appalling too.
I'm far more concerned about the following attempt to defibrillate the trek movies:
The idea being, one can fairly safely deduce, to re-purpose expensive existing props and sets while hiring an all-new cast of unknowns, rather than pay the inflated fees routinely demanded by established series actors.
Am I alone in thinking that this sounds like it could be really really shit and completely kill off trek for a decade?
SciFi is supposed to be about the future - to look forward. Prequels while still supposedly about our future are still the plain old past in respect to the Trek (and the viewers') timeline and will instantly loose something because of it. It's like hobbling yourself and admitting that you have no vision to share right from the outset. Once you loose your audience's trust, trust that you know where you're going (B5) and that both the journey and the destination will be of interest, you simply loose the audience. Trek writers have often slipped up on this one. The wretched Holodeck had all the interest and drama of a dream sequence and, while I personally always enjoy time travel stories, I can understand that if your brain files time travel and 'Holodeck' together that you would want to gnaw one of your own legs off* listening to them all the time.
1) Lazy plot devices bore audiences to death.
2) No surprises, no vision of the future, no trust.
3) No Audience.
*(Really happened to the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council)
'..you should know what you talk about first before you talk. You are misusing the term "cellular automata" where in reality what you were looking for was the term "autonomous agents".'
Lol. No. The term I was looking for and used correctly was 'Cellular Automata'. If you are still in doubt consider 'Langton's Ant' here, (random example) here or do a search.
While you certainly can try to model Ant behaviour using MultiAgent systems (/'Adaptive Agents'/'Autonomous Agents'), I hope you will agree that, you can also have a serious stab at it with Cellular Automata. Personally I still consider the latter a fruitful branch on the tree of knowledge hence my selection of term. Finally, both Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms have also been used to model ant-inspired behavior. In the latter the distributed and 'social' properties of 'Agents' are not as important as simulated evolutionary processes.
I think that this is a really important avenue of research but can't help wondering why exactly this project was funded.
Robotics is of course great fun and can certainly be inspiring but all this was presented (albeit indirectly by a superficial BBC report) as a valid study in terms of what the miniture robots can achieve.
It doesn't take the 'Milliard Gargantubrain' to work out that all this stuff is better and cheaper simulated on computers. Cellular Automata have in various incarnations been here before (including countless ant based examples) . How does making it physically real advance the subject at all? Aside from the obvious 'it looks cool' and 'it allows us to write in general terms about ants instead of the truly vexing question of how intelligence can function equally well as a distributed system'.
Really, help me out here. Surely any one of us could have created and run 50,000 simulations in the time it took them to solder up the PICs (or whatever microcontrollers it was that they used). I'm not penny pinching here I'm just wondering if this was the best way to go about the problem.
"Myrmecology, noun, - The Scientific Study Of Ants. This has been Roseanne, your guide to the world of facts."
I'm getting bored of the hype required to get any science/technology advances written up. It's not an invisibility cloak, you knew it before you wrote the article and I knew it before I read the article. Why does good science need to hide behind stupid banner headlines?
Also, (because I'm grumpy today), Chameleons do not change colour to blend with their background. FFS. See Wikipedia: Chameleon.
If only someone had invented a fusion reactor that ran on pure bullshit we'd all be rolling in it (so to speak).
On the general issue of x minutes of silence being a stupid, head up one's own arse, pretentious load of crap idea, of course it is.
However if you think about it, the silent tracks are only a waste of money because they're so inaccurate. I'd happily pay good money for an entirely silent track that was exactly 4.123332949843985439843843... minutes long - ie where the mantissa contained a couple of MB of information (with a good beat)!
"The government estimates it will issue security alerts about six to 10 times a year"
"Those signing up will only be told about the most serious security threats that have the potential to affect millions of people."
This sounds like a particularly ineffectual and pointless exercise. This level of virus information could be picked up from doing nothing more than watching BBC news or reading their site during the year. Further, it makes you wonder if the whole project will be run by a single guy who's job description has just been extended to include 'watch BBC news programs then forward email warnings to UK PC owning in-duh-viduals'.
However, it is also an extremely cheap way of getting +ve headlines (even Reg refers to it as an 'initiative'). I guess each government department has been told to come up with crap like this because we're in the run up to a general election.
"I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle. As soon as I reach some kind of definite policy about what is my kind of radio show and my kind of book, and my kind of tv series, people start blowing up my kind of movie and throwing me out of their kind of movie theatres. It's so hard to build up anything coherent. Well, I'm sorry, all this must sound rather fatuous to you."