Slashdot is like any other group of ordinary people - it has it's own prejudices, which may be based in fact but are kept alive by intuitions. Facts are just a tool to validate those intuitions.
Slashdot is not a research facility, it's not a debtate, it's an informal discussion, and you can't come in and demand that people involved in the discussion be less biased - accept that this is the tone of the group, and if you want to, join in.
Google derives a hell of a lot of meaning from your semantically-empty links. Admittedly, the issue is open for debate... On the other hand, attributes can just as easily carry semantic information as tags.
You don't necessarily need to impress anybody that has an IT background. I've rolled together countless little apps in a few days (or even hours) that have really impressed whoever it was intended for. The key is that I understood what their problem was, and was able to efficiently solve that, and let that which did not matter truly slide.
Don't think "is this cool technology?" "who is this useful for and why?" It's not an easy thing to do, especially for a software developer, but if you can pull it off.
I use two monitors on my deskop PC, and it's fantastic, much better than using Alt-tab. Given your post, I'm guessing that this would suprise you, mayb it's not something one can really grasp until you've used it a bunch.
I guess that the dual-screen gameboy would be a similar situation.
It's clear that we're never going to agree with each other on this issue. However, I will respond, if only for the silent listeners...
Your comment that working in a field is somehow more important that working in more abstract professional is just silly. And I'm not hellbent on creating that world - it already exists, and I quite enjoy the fact that we're not all hunter-gatherers.
I'm lucky. I'm able to make a full-time job out of my passion. However, I know a lot of musicians / artists / cartoonists / writers / designers / etc who are forced to work shitty jobs to survive, moonlighting on their real passions. I think that this is a bad thing, and I would like to see it changed. If you're situation isn't like that, then good for you.
There's no denying that creation has a lot of non-financial benefits - it's what many people live for. However, the people doing this need to live, and it would be nice for them to live at something greater than a subsistence level.
As for the comment about increasing output:
You're the only one comparing yourself to a piece of machinery. Calm down.
Just because you can't reach perfection doesn't mean that you can say that situation is better and another is worse.
I'm not going to debate the pros and cons of capitalism, that's way too big a discussion, and for the next wee while, it's a reality we're going to accept.
Micropayments lower the barrier to entry into the content market - under subscription models, you need to have a certain level of quantity in order to justify the charge - a level of quantity that is difficult to fulfil by one person.
Anything that lowers the barrier to entry to a market improves the distribution of wealth - it gives the 5% "kings" less leverage for staying on top. Therefore, micropayments are probably a good thing.
Of course, it could turn out that the micropayment providers are the only ones that win, as there's a big potential for a monopoly to arise there. This, perhaps, is the "history repeating itself" that you refer to.
We live in a capitalist society where people's work is assigned value by the money people are willing to pay for it. You are saying that all the great work that people are doing isn't worth paying for, and therefore is of very little value.
The export processing zones in 3rd world countries function because workers there have no choice but to accept the shitty wages that the employers are offering. Just because a system is set up to disadvantage a certain group, doesn't mean that it's right.
You have to be pretty short-sightedly selfish to say that creatives shouldn't be rewarded for their work. Short-sighted to the point of offsensive.
People should be rewarded for doing work. Micropayments is a potential way of making it feasible to get away from the "rock star" system, where very few succeed, but those that succeed phenomenally.
And for the selfish: the quantity of quality content would increase dramatically as people are able to start living off the money they make from their work, and therefore can devote themselves full time to it. There are very few for-free creatives who would not up their output if they could make money out of it.
Something I'd be keen to see is digital audio over bluetooth. My living room has a stereo with a sizeable list of stuff plugged into it - but the list is hardly extraordinary.
External CD Player
PC
DVD
VCR
Turntables
(radio built into the amp)
The result? A clutter of tables and periodic fiddling behind the back of my stereo to change cables (not enough inputs).
It would be nice if all of the sound devices could connect to the amp, and the amp would give me a little LCD menu of the devices. And when someone brings over their latest sound toy, the amp would pick it up and add it to the menu. No cables, no hassles.
By a tablet with a swivel monitor and a keyboard underneath.
Folded down screen for tablet uses. Open with keyboard for other times.
There doesn't seem to be any direct need for a fancy "clip-on" keyboard. Just the presense of keys.
Sarcasm aside, you seem to be assuming that a swivel monitor will add some cost, either financially or in terms of weight / carrying-around-convenience. However, I imagine that a seperately purchased clip-on keyboard would cost more than the swivel hinge (tablets cost about $30 more to make than notebooks) Plus, it's a hell of a lot less convenient (two things instead of one. I imagine a swivel table is roughly the same size/weight as a notebook)
First off, it's not false without examples, it's unsubstantiated. Big difference.
For starters, it's not necessary that all comments on earth need be substantiated. If it's intuitively reasonable to the listener (as this was to me) people can accept things at face value. We're not writing an essay here...
Secondly, a point someone else made, is that the original poster need not be the one to substantiate the claim - if you care, you can substantiate it. This is the 21st century, we have Google now. Use it, and quit with the sarcastic whinging.
If Verisign got away with this, they would consider their "innovation" experiment a success.
Successful experiments lead to repitition.
Eventually, DNS would become about as useful for name resolution as MS Passport is for security.
Verisign has a great deal of power, and if they try to start "leveraging that asset", the web will be at their mercy.
Slashdot is a reactionary minority, yes, but a reactionary minority is needed to let the people with power know what could happen. It's a vital part of any healthy debate.
As for unthinking, there are always going to be some idiot posts in an open discussion board, but
the signal to noise ratio is pretty good
there have been many interesting points raised on the issue.
I know, personally I go a little mad if I'm on holiday for more than a few weeks!
However, I don't think that the "majority stagnating" is something we should just roll over and accept... It's basically a question of engineering social values, which is possible in some situations - in New Zealand, drink-driving is a good example of this. But it takes decades to do this, so you have to start early.
You're post appears to in essence be a defense of capitalism over communism.
Although i'm no expert on Marxism, I did read in a summary of his views by The Economist that Marx originally thought that Communism would come, not after feudalism/monarchy as it did in Russia, but after Capitalism falls under it's own massively productive weight.
Maybe the natural time for a socialist regime is after mechanisation removes the need for the bulk of the population to work. under capitalism, you only eat if you have something useful to provide to the economy. if there comes a time when robots are a more efficient source for anything a large chunk of the population might provide, then capitalism ceases to be good for society as a whole.
Complete speculation of course, but I think it's an interesting idea nonetheless.
The problem is that the distribution of wealth becomes more and more disproportionate. The point that the article makes is that for large numbers of people, there may not be replacement jobs. Therefore, there will be hordes of unemployed, with only the elite actually being in a position to get a job.
The simple solution is to increase taxes in order to fund the growing welfare state. However, then we get closer and closer to socialism, and the question becomes - will people actually find something productive to do, or will everyone just go out and get drunk/etc every night, since there's no real need to work.
For it to work, we need to convince people that a) being on welfare is a perfectly normal thing and b) they should find something productive to do with their life, even though they don't have to.
I don't know what you are reading but work is good for you is a CAPITALIST argument. If anything, socialism calls more minimizing work (hence the stereotypical view that socialists are lazy and don't do anything). Capitalists are the ones that are against reduced work weeks, etc.
I disagree. Capitalism provides a reward for working hard, because it knows people are inherently lazy - it's efficient. Socialism provides equal reward no matter how hard people work - so, people don't, and national productivity stagnates. Instead, you get a whole lotta propaganda to brainwash people into working.
That said, in my experience people tend to need *something* productive to do in order to stay sane; the question is what. a lot of people want to spend their time persuing less profitable things such as art, music, non-commericalisable science and research. it's difficult to do this under pure capitalism, so we have university grants, artist benefits, etc, instead (well we have the AB in New Zealand)
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is not a research facility, it's not a debtate, it's an informal discussion, and you can't come in and demand that people involved in the discussion be less biased - accept that this is the tone of the group, and if you want to, join in.
No one's forcing you to read....
Google derives a hell of a lot of meaning from your semantically-empty links. Admittedly, the issue is open for debate... On the other hand, attributes can just as easily carry semantic information as tags.
Damn dot commers.. ran the economy down to the ground and they still want to put the carriage before the horse.
A start-up is like the old-west - a 6 shooter and a saddle are more than enough
Come on, rules are made to be broken! You don't need to form a company just to start writing code.... ;)
Don't think "is this cool technology?" "who is this useful for and why?" It's not an easy thing to do, especially for a software developer, but if you can pull it off.
Only if by "this world" you mean the USA.
If you're wanting to guarantee success, you're not the right person to start a business. Period. ;)
I don't imagine that debian spend much money on marketing, yet it has a significant share of the Linux pie.
I guess that the dual-screen gameboy would be a similar situation.
So what you're saying is that to we've just got to make the internet bigger? Okay... good luck.
It's clear that we're never going to agree with each other on this issue. However, I will respond, if only for the silent listeners...
Your comment that working in a field is somehow more important that working in more abstract professional is just silly. And I'm not hellbent on creating that world - it already exists, and I quite enjoy the fact that we're not all hunter-gatherers.
I'm lucky. I'm able to make a full-time job out of my passion. However, I know a lot of musicians / artists / cartoonists / writers / designers / etc who are forced to work shitty jobs to survive, moonlighting on their real passions. I think that this is a bad thing, and I would like to see it changed. If you're situation isn't like that, then good for you.
There's no denying that creation has a lot of non-financial benefits - it's what many people live for. However, the people doing this need to live, and it would be nice for them to live at something greater than a subsistence level.
As for the comment about increasing output:
I'm not going to debate the pros and cons of capitalism, that's way too big a discussion, and for the next wee while, it's a reality we're going to accept.
Micropayments lower the barrier to entry into the content market - under subscription models, you need to have a certain level of quantity in order to justify the charge - a level of quantity that is difficult to fulfil by one person.
Anything that lowers the barrier to entry to a market improves the distribution of wealth - it gives the 5% "kings" less leverage for staying on top. Therefore, micropayments are probably a good thing.
Of course, it could turn out that the micropayment providers are the only ones that win, as there's a big potential for a monopoly to arise there. This, perhaps, is the "history repeating itself" that you refer to.
We live in a capitalist society where people's work is assigned value by the money people are willing to pay for it. You are saying that all the great work that people are doing isn't worth paying for, and therefore is of very little value.
The export processing zones in 3rd world countries function because workers there have no choice but to accept the shitty wages that the employers are offering. Just because a system is set up to disadvantage a certain group, doesn't mean that it's right.
You have to be pretty short-sightedly selfish to say that creatives shouldn't be rewarded for their work. Short-sighted to the point of offsensive.
People should be rewarded for doing work. Micropayments is a potential way of making it feasible to get away from the "rock star" system, where very few succeed, but those that succeed phenomenally.
And for the selfish: the quantity of quality content would increase dramatically as people are able to start living off the money they make from their work, and therefore can devote themselves full time to it. There are very few for-free creatives who would not up their output if they could make money out of it.
- External CD Player
- PC
- DVD
- VCR
- Turntables
- (radio built into the amp)
The result? A clutter of tables and periodic fiddling behind the back of my stereo to change cables (not enough inputs).It would be nice if all of the sound devices could connect to the amp, and the amp would give me a little LCD menu of the devices. And when someone brings over their latest sound toy, the amp would pick it up and add it to the menu. No cables, no hassles.
OR
By a tablet with a swivel monitor and a keyboard underneath.
Folded down screen for tablet uses. Open with keyboard for other times.
There doesn't seem to be any direct need for a fancy "clip-on" keyboard. Just the presense of keys.
Sarcasm aside, you seem to be assuming that a swivel monitor will add some cost, either financially or in terms of weight / carrying-around-convenience. However, I imagine that a seperately purchased clip-on keyboard would cost more than the swivel hinge (tablets cost about $30 more to make than notebooks) Plus, it's a hell of a lot less convenient (two things instead of one. I imagine a swivel table is roughly the same size/weight as a notebook)
On the surface, your comment makes no sense to me. What convenience of each do you lose by having a combined device?
First off, it's not false without examples, it's unsubstantiated. Big difference.
For starters, it's not necessary that all comments on earth need be substantiated. If it's intuitively reasonable to the listener (as this was to me) people can accept things at face value. We're not writing an essay here...
Secondly, a point someone else made, is that the original poster need not be the one to substantiate the claim - if you care, you can substantiate it. This is the 21st century, we have Google now. Use it, and quit with the sarcastic whinging.
Aren't the modifications that MS are making to IE supposed to sidestep this patent? Essentially, you need to render your object tag with a piece of javascript.
If Verisign got away with this, they would consider their "innovation" experiment a success.
Successful experiments lead to repitition.
Eventually, DNS would become about as useful for name resolution as MS Passport is for security.
Verisign has a great deal of power, and if they try to start "leveraging that asset", the web will be at their mercy.
Slashdot is a reactionary minority, yes, but a reactionary minority is needed to let the people with power know what could happen. It's a vital part of any healthy debate.
As for unthinking, there are always going to be some idiot posts in an open discussion board, but
I know, personally I go a little mad if I'm on holiday for more than a few weeks!
However, I don't think that the "majority stagnating" is something we should just roll over and accept... It's basically a question of engineering social values, which is possible in some situations - in New Zealand, drink-driving is a good example of this. But it takes decades to do this, so you have to start early.
You're post appears to in essence be a defense of capitalism over communism.
Although i'm no expert on Marxism, I did read in a summary of his views by The Economist that Marx originally thought that Communism would come, not after feudalism/monarchy as it did in Russia, but after Capitalism falls under it's own massively productive weight.
Maybe the natural time for a socialist regime is after mechanisation removes the need for the bulk of the population to work. under capitalism, you only eat if you have something useful to provide to the economy. if there comes a time when robots are a more efficient source for anything a large chunk of the population might provide, then capitalism ceases to be good for society as a whole.
Complete speculation of course, but I think it's an interesting idea nonetheless.
The problem is that the distribution of wealth becomes more and more disproportionate. The point that the article makes is that for large numbers of people, there may not be replacement jobs. Therefore, there will be hordes of unemployed, with only the elite actually being in a position to get a job.
The simple solution is to increase taxes in order to fund the growing welfare state. However, then we get closer and closer to socialism, and the question becomes - will people actually find something productive to do, or will everyone just go out and get drunk/etc every night, since there's no real need to work.
For it to work, we need to convince people that a) being on welfare is a perfectly normal thing and b) they should find something productive to do with their life, even though they don't have to.
I don't know what you are reading but work is good for you is a CAPITALIST argument. If anything, socialism calls more minimizing work (hence the stereotypical view that socialists are lazy and don't do anything). Capitalists are the ones that are against reduced work weeks, etc.
I disagree. Capitalism provides a reward for working hard, because it knows people are inherently lazy - it's efficient. Socialism provides equal reward no matter how hard people work - so, people don't, and national productivity stagnates. Instead, you get a whole lotta propaganda to brainwash people into working.
That said, in my experience people tend to need *something* productive to do in order to stay sane; the question is what. a lot of people want to spend their time persuing less profitable things such as art, music, non-commericalisable science and research. it's difficult to do this under pure capitalism, so we have university grants, artist benefits, etc, instead (well we have the AB in New Zealand)