Free Geek here in Portland uses volunteer labor to recycle technology. They do a bang-up job of it. They've open-sourced their business model and new ones are evidently cropping up around the country.
I don't know... I wrote about this guy in my blog yesterday (see sig) with a prediction of what was going to happen in 2009, and this just sort of bolsters that. If I got it right (like picking the lottery, don'tcha know), it'll be something to watch.
Oh, yes, hyperlinking is a step in the right direction, but it seems that we took that step, and a few more tentative ones, then said, oh, we can stop here, because we're further than we were fifteen years ago.
Okay, so if I could, I'd mod you up. Still, I feel like we've stagnated. Navigating a virtual building looking for Fred may not be a great thing, but how about a directory tool based on something like The Brain? It's about half way to true usability as a pardigm, but it's better than nothing.
Okay, you've got "out of the box" OSX and XP. Which OOTB Linux are you talking about that puts it over Windows? Oh, I'm no Windows fanboy (don't much care for it at all, actually), but my point is that one Linux distro may boot to a full-blown KDE interface that some industrial designers pored over for months, adjusting this and that, getting all the twirly things working right and the desktop gems placed here and there where people can easily use them... Then theres another Linux distro that boots up and looks just like Windows XP. So why is that one better?
Here's one problem indemic to the open source paradigm: Things like "beauty" or "ease of use" or "how you ought to do things" varies widely from one group to another. Getting everyone that develops an app for Linux to agree on one set of interface standards makes for a pretty steep uphill battle. Take a look at Gnome versus KDE: Where does an "Okay" button belong on a dialog box, left or right?
The opportunity that the open source community has is to leverage the capacity for development that has made FOSS a viable contender for hard drive space to develop something entirely new in computing. Projects like Open Office and the GIMP are great, offering alternatives to commercial software where options weren't available before. And development of those products should continue, but to what end? Sure, there's value in being able to provide a drop in, no training required replacement for the Microsoft software stack if it can be done with open standards and security. But if all you're doing is following the development of major software vendors, you're relying on them to set the pace of innovation. Even the venerated Linus Torvalds made Linux because he wanted to have a Unix-like system running on his commodity hardware (yeah, yeah, let the hatemail come).
So, tell me, where is the group that comes along and says, "Here's a new way of using a computer. Everyone come help us build it, it's gonna be great" ?? Why, after all these years, am I still forced to use the paradigm of paper-based documents (PDF, RTF, e-mail, web) to communicate most information, even if it never hits paper? Why do I have to gather information by reading text, line by line, down a page? Where's the visual depth to our digital world? Where's the alternative information delivery?
And I'm not calling for a bunch of new input or output devices that will change the way we work with a computer, though those are needed as well. Given what we have (mouse, keyboard, monitor), we ought to be able to come up with something better.
Take, for instance, the Civilization IV interface as a model for systems administration. Replace cities with servers, continents become networks, nations become domains, etc. Pan and zoom around your network, click on users to see what they're up to, double click on servers to look at their configuration and make edits to it, adjust automation, etc. etc. User apps have other opportunities for data navigation, communication, resource location, etc. But we've got to get ourselves off of the paper paradigm first. How do we do that?
You might learn Lua if you're looking for a lightweight embeddable scripting language, in which case it's one of the better choices available; or if you're working with one of the systems in which it's already embedded, in which case Lua is a foregone conclusion.
Okay, so you have me interested. Can you elaborate on just what an "embeddable scripting language" is? I mean, I have an idea, but go about it as if I have no clue. That will satisfy those that believe such.
And, just to let you know, I feel like your argument is well written and compelling. That, combined with the fact that I'm feeling less trollish today, at least has me interested in finding out more, and I'll do a little research on Lua. I will say, though, that my argument against new languages that don't bring anything significantly new in architecture to the table (the way C++ did over C) applies equally to (insert new programming language here) as it does to the (thankfully short-lived in popularity) spoken "language" of Ebonics.
Using your metaphor, the differentiation between Thai food and French food is far greater than between any two menu items at Taco Bell, particularly if your first compared item is the 7-layer burrito, which contains all but about two of their ingredients. It's one thing to start up a new cheap, fast food Tex-Mex restaurant because you want to provide a higher quality food or a different menu entirely, but putting up what's essentially a Taco Bell clone on one corner in downtown and offering an 8-layer burrito instead and Coke instead of Pepsi doesn't, to me, make a lot of sense.
I have to admit that I don't know from shineola a thing about Lua. The book review didn't do anything to compel me to find out more, though, and that's unfortunate if Lua is such a wonderful thing to behold. It's not necessarily the job of a writer of a book review to educate his readership about the subject of the book in question, but a short paragraph telling me in a few sentences why I should care about Lua might make me more susceptible to his argument that it's something I should rush right out and buy. If I don't care enough about the language by the time I get to the end of the review, I'm not going to put enough effort into finding out more to even Google it.
In my too-many years of being an IT professional, I've never been much of a programmer. I've dabbled with several languages, but left the serious work up to those with enough time on their hands to do it right. What I, as someone who spends more time gluing disparate applications together than developing new ones wants is a language that does the things I need it to today and will grow with the changing requirements of my job and information technology in general. Perl is great for a huge number of things, and a lot of what I do I choose Perl for. But give me a requirement to cobble together a GUI-based app, and I'm going to use VB.NET (I have to say that I feel like with.NET, VB has arrived at being a clean and useful language). I'm interested in Ruby because it's more cleanly object oriented than Perl, but I'm not going to put a bunch of effort into learning it because I don't see that it really adds anything to my capablities.
I guess I keep reading these book reviews in hopes that one day one will say, "Here's the language you need: It scripts well, compiles into binaries that are portable across platforms, produces GUI-based apps that bolt easily to databases, and is fast to code in. Oh, and this book tells you all about it in an easy-to-read format that will have you coding basic apps quickly and carry you through advanced concepts. Oh, yeah, and it's written assuming that the reader doesn't need to know what a variable is and how you can use one."
I suppose it's a lot to ask. I'll keep reading, though. And I'm going to look into Perl 6. Yeah, that too.
I really recommend this book to anyone interested in learning Lua, and also for those who already know how to use Lua but would like to fully master its way of thinking, the so called "Lua way" of doing things.
Every time I see one of these "Learn Language X in Your Spare Time" book reviews, I wonder, "Why another language?" Advancement of languages is good, and "new" languages like Ruby are great, but how many programming languages are we as a community going to produce? Like text editors, it would be better to focus on fewer targets and add features than keep coming up with new "my toolbox grew so big I created a compiler for it" languages.
Of course, I may just be trollish today. Hard to tell.
While I agree with you wholeheartedly, I would ask whether or not the problem is limited to North America (you really mean the U.S., right?). I don't know WoW beyond what I read about it here on Slashdot; how diverse is the population with respect to the country of residence of the players?
I hear that. Seven or eight years ago, I was out of work for an extended period. My wife was jobless at the same time, though I'm the major breadwinner in the family. Anyway, the tech market was really tight at the time, and I was having a tough time finding a job. I found Railroad Tycoon II, though, and spent hours a day in the basement playing it.
Re:Wireless Digital Monitor
on
USB To Go Wireless
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The first thing I thought of when reading the blurb was "video glasses arriving soon." I'd rather have 800x600, 16 bpp per lens at 24 fps, or 368.64 Mb/s, and get reasonable immersive 3D than I would a single stream of 1600x1200 at 24 bpp.
Over twenty years ago, when I was in college, I was introduced to a group called the SCA, "a medieval history re-enactment group," that had, at the time, been around about twenty years. Over several years of various levels of involvement with the group, I watched many of the same impacts described in TFA happen to people's "real" lives. Tens of thousands of dollars were spent on gear for tournaments over some people's lives; there were affairs and break-ups, alcoholism and job loss. I remember people going off to events without their spouses, having a weekend fling while they were there, and writing it off to an excuse of "being in character" for their chosen persona. In the worst cases, I've witnessed people draw "live steel" against one another, meaning real, sharpened blades came out and challenges were made over some perceived insult to a made-up character.
The SCA isn't the only group that this sort of involvement happens in, though. People in our society want, in the worst way, an escape from mundane reality; they want some sort of control over their environment, and want to be appreciated for the things they do. Take any area of interest (Civil War, Star Wars, News for Nerds, etc.), and somewhere there is some sort of group dedicated to its advancement. Get enough people doing it, you have a society. Concentrate hard enough, you have an alternate reality.
Chances are that we're never going to be able to create a real-world society where everyone is happy with their lot in life and how they integrate with the world around them. Until then, we're going to come up with more and better ways to escape the reality we're in, and those escapes are going to have their addicts. It's kind of unfortunate, and, as TFA points out, can be destructive. I've identified my addictive side, and deal with it as best I can. Through force of will, I only delve into addictive things to a certain degree and get out before I get really hooked (though I've recently discovered that my internal clock, otherwise very accurate, stops working when Civ IV is running; I need mechanical assistance). For those that can do the same, or don't have such addictive behaviors, great. For the others, those who pour their lives into something that doesn't add value in the outside world, well, Darwin calls.
That's not quite true, though many would accuse me of picking nits. In this case, the chemical addiction is to a chemical produced by the body, not introduced externally. Either way, it's chemical, though.
Definitely. Even if you could pack teraflops into a mote-sized computer that was powered by ambient radiation in its environment and communicated wirelessly via some sort of never-down communications medium, participating in a giant private grid computing array, you'd still need storage and backup. And even if you could get effectively infinite storage in some sort of molecular-memory device the size of a paperback book, you still have to replicate that data for site-based disaster (I work in the Portland, Oregon World Trade Center. We pay attention to such things), not to mention device-based failure (at least mirror the thing).
So data centers may shrink, but they will be around longer than any of us will. At least that's my prediction. Go ahead, someone prove me wrong.
Re:forced landings are dangerous
on
Rocket Men
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· Score: 1
This article talks about some Swiss guy that has figured out some fuel combination that will give more like six minutes of flight (something useful). Try as I might, I can't find any other info about him on the Net, even at what seems to be his own web site. I used the Wayback Machine to check, and they don't have any updated records on his site since... well... way back. I figure either a) it's a hoax, or b) he's on to something and wants to keep it under wraps so it doesn't get nabbed by someone before he can do something with it. Ponderous, indeed...
They may have used a plaster cast to fabricate the frame for the pack, but they didn't have to do it that way. Look at the construction of the other "rocket belts". The pads against the pilot's back look to be salvaged (at least by design) from trekking backpacks (no, not "Star Trek").
Slashdot Mirror
Free Geek here in Portland uses volunteer labor to recycle technology. They do a bang-up job of it. They've open-sourced their business model and new ones are evidently cropping up around the country.
I don't know... I wrote about this guy in my blog yesterday (see sig) with a prediction of what was going to happen in 2009, and this just sort of bolsters that. If I got it right (like picking the lottery, don'tcha know), it'll be something to watch.
There was a news story about it last night (can't remember the source). Anyhow, on the studio's gazillion-inch plasma display, it looked pretty cool.
I don't know what the problem is. I didn't have any trouble accessing http://www.ewetube.com/.
You have a very good description of the experience that drove me away from SUSE, after two years of twiddling with it, to OSX.
Oh, yes, hyperlinking is a step in the right direction, but it seems that we took that step, and a few more tentative ones, then said, oh, we can stop here, because we're further than we were fifteen years ago.
Okay, so if I could, I'd mod you up. Still, I feel like we've stagnated. Navigating a virtual building looking for Fred may not be a great thing, but how about a directory tool based on something like The Brain? It's about half way to true usability as a pardigm, but it's better than nothing.
Okay, you've got "out of the box" OSX and XP. Which OOTB Linux are you talking about that puts it over Windows? Oh, I'm no Windows fanboy (don't much care for it at all, actually), but my point is that one Linux distro may boot to a full-blown KDE interface that some industrial designers pored over for months, adjusting this and that, getting all the twirly things working right and the desktop gems placed here and there where people can easily use them... Then theres another Linux distro that boots up and looks just like Windows XP. So why is that one better?
Here's one problem indemic to the open source paradigm: Things like "beauty" or "ease of use" or "how you ought to do things" varies widely from one group to another. Getting everyone that develops an app for Linux to agree on one set of interface standards makes for a pretty steep uphill battle. Take a look at Gnome versus KDE: Where does an "Okay" button belong on a dialog box, left or right?
The opportunity that the open source community has is to leverage the capacity for development that has made FOSS a viable contender for hard drive space to develop something entirely new in computing. Projects like Open Office and the GIMP are great, offering alternatives to commercial software where options weren't available before. And development of those products should continue, but to what end? Sure, there's value in being able to provide a drop in, no training required replacement for the Microsoft software stack if it can be done with open standards and security. But if all you're doing is following the development of major software vendors, you're relying on them to set the pace of innovation. Even the venerated Linus Torvalds made Linux because he wanted to have a Unix-like system running on his commodity hardware (yeah, yeah, let the hatemail come).
So, tell me, where is the group that comes along and says, "Here's a new way of using a computer. Everyone come help us build it, it's gonna be great" ?? Why, after all these years, am I still forced to use the paradigm of paper-based documents (PDF, RTF, e-mail, web) to communicate most information, even if it never hits paper? Why do I have to gather information by reading text, line by line, down a page? Where's the visual depth to our digital world? Where's the alternative information delivery?
And I'm not calling for a bunch of new input or output devices that will change the way we work with a computer, though those are needed as well. Given what we have (mouse, keyboard, monitor), we ought to be able to come up with something better.
Take, for instance, the Civilization IV interface as a model for systems administration. Replace cities with servers, continents become networks, nations become domains, etc. Pan and zoom around your network, click on users to see what they're up to, double click on servers to look at their configuration and make edits to it, adjust automation, etc. etc. User apps have other opportunities for data navigation, communication, resource location, etc. But we've got to get ourselves off of the paper paradigm first. How do we do that?
You might learn Lua if you're looking for a lightweight embeddable scripting language, in which case it's one of the better choices available; or if you're working with one of the systems in which it's already embedded, in which case Lua is a foregone conclusion.
Okay, so you have me interested. Can you elaborate on just what an "embeddable scripting language" is? I mean, I have an idea, but go about it as if I have no clue. That will satisfy those that believe such.
And, just to let you know, I feel like your argument is well written and compelling. That, combined with the fact that I'm feeling less trollish today, at least has me interested in finding out more, and I'll do a little research on Lua. I will say, though, that my argument against new languages that don't bring anything significantly new in architecture to the table (the way C++ did over C) applies equally to (insert new programming language here) as it does to the (thankfully short-lived in popularity) spoken "language" of Ebonics.
Using your metaphor, the differentiation between Thai food and French food is far greater than between any two menu items at Taco Bell, particularly if your first compared item is the 7-layer burrito, which contains all but about two of their ingredients. It's one thing to start up a new cheap, fast food Tex-Mex restaurant because you want to provide a higher quality food or a different menu entirely, but putting up what's essentially a Taco Bell clone on one corner in downtown and offering an 8-layer burrito instead and Coke instead of Pepsi doesn't, to me, make a lot of sense.
I have to admit that I don't know from shineola a thing about Lua. The book review didn't do anything to compel me to find out more, though, and that's unfortunate if Lua is such a wonderful thing to behold. It's not necessarily the job of a writer of a book review to educate his readership about the subject of the book in question, but a short paragraph telling me in a few sentences why I should care about Lua might make me more susceptible to his argument that it's something I should rush right out and buy. If I don't care enough about the language by the time I get to the end of the review, I'm not going to put enough effort into finding out more to even Google it.
.NET, VB has arrived at being a clean and useful language). I'm interested in Ruby because it's more cleanly object oriented than Perl, but I'm not going to put a bunch of effort into learning it because I don't see that it really adds anything to my capablities.
In my too-many years of being an IT professional, I've never been much of a programmer. I've dabbled with several languages, but left the serious work up to those with enough time on their hands to do it right. What I, as someone who spends more time gluing disparate applications together than developing new ones wants is a language that does the things I need it to today and will grow with the changing requirements of my job and information technology in general. Perl is great for a huge number of things, and a lot of what I do I choose Perl for. But give me a requirement to cobble together a GUI-based app, and I'm going to use VB.NET (I have to say that I feel like with
I guess I keep reading these book reviews in hopes that one day one will say, "Here's the language you need: It scripts well, compiles into binaries that are portable across platforms, produces GUI-based apps that bolt easily to databases, and is fast to code in. Oh, and this book tells you all about it in an easy-to-read format that will have you coding basic apps quickly and carry you through advanced concepts. Oh, yeah, and it's written assuming that the reader doesn't need to know what a variable is and how you can use one."
I suppose it's a lot to ask. I'll keep reading, though. And I'm going to look into Perl 6. Yeah, that too.
I really recommend this book to anyone interested in learning Lua, and also for those who already know how to use Lua but would like to fully master its way of thinking, the so called "Lua way" of doing things.
Every time I see one of these "Learn Language X in Your Spare Time" book reviews, I wonder, "Why another language?" Advancement of languages is good, and "new" languages like Ruby are great, but how many programming languages are we as a community going to produce? Like text editors, it would be better to focus on fewer targets and add features than keep coming up with new "my toolbox grew so big I created a compiler for it" languages.
Of course, I may just be trollish today. Hard to tell.
While I agree with you wholeheartedly, I would ask whether or not the problem is limited to North America (you really mean the U.S., right?). I don't know WoW beyond what I read about it here on Slashdot; how diverse is the population with respect to the country of residence of the players?
I hear that. Seven or eight years ago, I was out of work for an extended period. My wife was jobless at the same time, though I'm the major breadwinner in the family. Anyway, the tech market was really tight at the time, and I was having a tough time finding a job. I found Railroad Tycoon II, though, and spent hours a day in the basement playing it.
The first thing I thought of when reading the blurb was "video glasses arriving soon." I'd rather have 800x600, 16 bpp per lens at 24 fps, or 368.64 Mb/s, and get reasonable immersive 3D than I would a single stream of 1600x1200 at 24 bpp.
I think you mean:
1) Get bored with life
2) Get account in Second Life
3) ???
4) Profit!!
Over twenty years ago, when I was in college, I was introduced to a group called the SCA, "a medieval history re-enactment group," that had, at the time, been around about twenty years. Over several years of various levels of involvement with the group, I watched many of the same impacts described in TFA happen to people's "real" lives. Tens of thousands of dollars were spent on gear for tournaments over some people's lives; there were affairs and break-ups, alcoholism and job loss. I remember people going off to events without their spouses, having a weekend fling while they were there, and writing it off to an excuse of "being in character" for their chosen persona. In the worst cases, I've witnessed people draw "live steel" against one another, meaning real, sharpened blades came out and challenges were made over some perceived insult to a made-up character.
The SCA isn't the only group that this sort of involvement happens in, though. People in our society want, in the worst way, an escape from mundane reality; they want some sort of control over their environment, and want to be appreciated for the things they do. Take any area of interest (Civil War, Star Wars, News for Nerds, etc.), and somewhere there is some sort of group dedicated to its advancement. Get enough people doing it, you have a society. Concentrate hard enough, you have an alternate reality.
Chances are that we're never going to be able to create a real-world society where everyone is happy with their lot in life and how they integrate with the world around them. Until then, we're going to come up with more and better ways to escape the reality we're in, and those escapes are going to have their addicts. It's kind of unfortunate, and, as TFA points out, can be destructive. I've identified my addictive side, and deal with it as best I can. Through force of will, I only delve into addictive things to a certain degree and get out before I get really hooked (though I've recently discovered that my internal clock, otherwise very accurate, stops working when Civ IV is running; I need mechanical assistance). For those that can do the same, or don't have such addictive behaviors, great. For the others, those who pour their lives into something that doesn't add value in the outside world, well, Darwin calls.
there is no chemical addiction going on here.
That's not quite true, though many would accuse me of picking nits. In this case, the chemical addiction is to a chemical produced by the body, not introduced externally. Either way, it's chemical, though.
The Mythbusters proved you could waterski behind a rowing shell.
Yes. Trojan ran at 1100 MW when it was running.
If only we had a storm cloak. And a lantern.
Definitely. Even if you could pack teraflops into a mote-sized computer that was powered by ambient radiation in its environment and communicated wirelessly via some sort of never-down communications medium, participating in a giant private grid computing array, you'd still need storage and backup. And even if you could get effectively infinite storage in some sort of molecular-memory device the size of a paperback book, you still have to replicate that data for site-based disaster (I work in the Portland, Oregon World Trade Center. We pay attention to such things), not to mention device-based failure (at least mirror the thing).
So data centers may shrink, but they will be around longer than any of us will. At least that's my prediction. Go ahead, someone prove me wrong.
How boring is that?
This article talks about some Swiss guy that has figured out some fuel combination that will give more like six minutes of flight (something useful). Try as I might, I can't find any other info about him on the Net, even at what seems to be his own web site. I used the Wayback Machine to check, and they don't have any updated records on his site since... well... way back. I figure either a) it's a hoax, or b) he's on to something and wants to keep it under wraps so it doesn't get nabbed by someone before he can do something with it. Ponderous, indeed...
They may have used a plaster cast to fabricate the frame for the pack, but they didn't have to do it that way. Look at the construction of the other "rocket belts". The pads against the pilot's back look to be salvaged (at least by design) from trekking backpacks (no, not "Star Trek").