Such a dump apparently also exists in the North Sea, in front of the Belgium coast. If that stuff goes up at the wrong time (i.e. wrong wind direction) it might also kill a lot of people.
Anyway, I have seen the spot where the Montgomery lies buried; ferries between the UK and the Netherlands pass pretty close by. A veteran told me about the wreck and its history, and he pointed out that the houses on the shore would get wiped out if the wreck were to explode.
"What houses?" I wondered. Then I looked really hard, and it dawned on me that he meant the small specks I could barely see on the horizon.
It's been 15 years since I made that trip, and I forget most of the other things I saw, but that one has stayed with me alright...
Other people have already mentioned some of the problems we might expect, but think of the upside: all the pigeons will go and shit on things on the southern hemisphere!
I doubt it. A movie must be consumed in one sitting, while games can be played in chunks, saving inbetween. The need that drives movie length just doesn't exist in games.
However, the rising cost of producing content will probably continue to drive down game length. Since this can only asymptotically approach 0, in that sense you are right that there is some standardization going on.
Personally, i can't afford to buy games i don't plan on buying.
Looks like a sound financial strategy to me;-)
I have a bunch of games lying around that I picked up at bargain prices - yesterday I bougt Silent Hill 2 and 3 for the combined sum of 15 euro. However, I have a couple of other games lying around that I also bought at such prices and never came around to playing: Evil Twin, Septerra Core, Metal Gear Solid, Outcast, maybe some more. Will I come around to playing them eventually? I don't know. Do I feel sorry for buying them? Well, not at that price. I feel sorry for buying Unreal 2, because I bought it full price and it stinks.
There are lots of reasons, really. Fundamentally, ads are annoying. They are designed to grab attention and I visit the website to look at something else. I don't want my attention diverted by flashing graphics or popups.
Having established why I want them blocked, here are some further thoughts:
- It is a free world. Web sites cannot actually require me to look at the ads, I am free to look at the content in any way I damn well please. If they do not like that they can change their methods (like including the contents and ads in a single block of flash, perhaps). In response I will decide if it is still worth it or not. Ultimately the market will decide.
- I *really* do not care about unsustainable business methods. I am under no obligation to keep anyones company afloat, unless I am actually paid to do so. This is not the case for websites.
- Finally, the notion that web sites for which I do pay (either through subscription or ads) would be impartial (even in the limited "non-sponsored" form) is laughable. Take a look at/., see how "impartial" it is, even with ads.
If bandwidth is the problem, website owners should come up with ways to keep cost down. I can see a future for a distributed web (ala bittorrent) - such a thing would be great to avoid the/. effect too.
I visited the US two years ago. I'm from the Netherlands, a country that desperately tries to prove it can play with the big boys by following US policy wherever it can no matter how bad the cost to ourselves. If people are guessing my nationality, they tend to say "swedish". And finally, I don't really have much of an accent when speaking english. So let us examine some of my travel options shall we?
- I travelled by train from Boston to New York. To buy the ticket I had to show my passport. Excuse me!? Was I going to cross an international border, then? At home I can buy a ticket to wherever I please without showing any identification.
- I travelled by rental car, twice. Identification was required. Well, I understand that since they give me an expensive piece of equipment, but I couldn't have rented the card anonymously.
- I travelled by plane, once internally and of course coming in and leaving. Not only did I have to show ID, but _each_ _single_ _time_ I was asked to step out of the line for a "random" search. Yeah, like that is really random.
Ironically, the one place where noone was interested in my ID at all was at the immigration desk, where I was waved right through. Noone thought to check my papers, or my bag (and I was hiding a dangerous Nail Clipper of Mass Destruction in it too, carrying it around the US for two weeks with impunity!)
So saying "don't fly" is cheap, since it only leaves you the option of not travelling at all. And not being able to move about, being imprisoned in your little region as it were, that's not freedom at all...
They disagreed with France as the location because of Frances opposition to the Iraq war. Of course now Europe has dug its heels into the sand and won't agree to any choice the US finds acceptable.
I just love to see the only _really good_ energy source that is in our future being delayed and delayed because of petty politics.
1. It will devastate the foundation for our current economic system.
This is because it will eliminate any job related to production, whether it is assembly in a factory, or food production (farmers, fishers), or production of raw materials (since the nano-factories would of course reuse our waste). That's a _lot_ of people suddenly without jobs.
Indeed, there would only be jobs left in services, design, and energy production. And design jobs would be constantly under fire from nano-pirates.
2. It will force a re-think of how we structure society.
So half the country is suddenly out of a job, yet thanks to nano-assembly there is more than enough of everything (food, clothing, cars,...) for everyone. Will the poor half sit back under their bridges and accept their fate? Or will they demand equal wealth, given the fact that wealth itself is now so common it has lost all value? One possibility is that this really depends on how well-armed each side is. A more enlightened possibility is that people will realize that the "old" structure where people work for money is now obsolete and that it is stupid and immoral to let half the country starve, even though the means are available for feed them all for essentially nothing. In any case, there will be either massive upheaval, or civil war. And the enlightened possibility may kill as all as surely as letting those people starve to death, because...
3. It will remove the impulse to do any work whatsoever for large numbers of people.
I'm not so idealistic to believe we would all be artists or poets after the raw _need_ to work for money disappears. Instead, significant parts of the population would fill their days doing absolutely nothing. This in itself could destroy us as a race. Why learn anything anymore? Why strive to achieve anything? There may not be enough people left that are willing to work to keep society running (plumbers, doctors, firemen,...), let alone make any progress in science or art. Why would _you_ go to the office when your neighbour (who had a factory job before) sits on his lawn and plays with his kids every day?
Assuming we really do develop nano-assemblers, the one thing that could stop this future would be the cost of energy to run the assemblers (although our total energy usage will be much less, after all we will stop hauling goods and people around). But if you can run them from a solar panel we may be in real trouble.
The idea here is that SF works by extrapolating from our current situation, not so much in terms of technology but rather our social situation (think about it: all the good SF books use SF as a vehicle to examine the human condition from a unique angle). The singularity, in this context, is an event that will change our society beyond recognition, and probably almost overnight. What that event could be, or even if we will ever see it, is of course subject to speculation, but it is not outside the realm of the possible and it may even be close (i.e. somewhere in the 21st century). Now, the very nature of the singularity makes it impossible to predict how our society will look like afterwards. For this reason SF cannot continue to extrapolate from current society to build a believable future society - it is blinded.
As for what the singularity could be, there are plenty of options. Development of a working nano assembler might do it (manufacturing capabilities would instantly become meaningless, since we would be able to produce enough of _everything_ for _everyone_. Don't tell me that won't change things...). Development of an AI would probably also do it, since it could itself develop better, faster versions - faster than we could ever hope to keep up with. Or there is contact with an alien race. Perhaps even something as mundane as the FTL drive or anti-gravity... Anyway, the singularity is rather fascinating, even though it is itself SF for now;-)
Although your answer is appreciated, it is not the answer people are looking for. Let me rephrase the question:
I have a PC with five partitions. Two of these I use for Windows 2000. The other three are currently used for an AMD64 installation of Mandrake that doesn't have a working video card driver and is therefore almost useless to me. I'd like to install a new Linux there (in fact I need it badly), but I'm scared shitless that I may corrupt those Windows 2000 partitions and will have to spend a week rebuilding the damn thing, not to mention losing the stuff I forgot to backup. So, will any random modern distribution fuck up my Windows 2000? Or has that risk now been removed(1)? What do I need to look for in order to be able to determine this myself?
See, that's the point. People are scared of losing existing partitions, and we need to know if that is going to happen or not. Whether it was caused by the kernel, the bootloader, or your uncle Vinny really isn't all that relevant.
(1) I'm just talking about Linux here, what Windows 2000 does on its own is a completely separate subject...
What you really need is a one-button mouse that contains alt, shift, and control keys, so you don't have to reach for the keyboard all the time. Hey, we could be onto something revolutionary here!
...or in our case, Linux will not be threatened by Microsoft patents. Do you really believe it? Or would they, perhaps, be holding back until patent law is in place in all major territories?
If Microsoft strikes before Europe introduces software patents, the future of those software patents might very well be rather limited in Europe. Thus they wait until those laws are on record before acting.
If that doesn't convince you, this *Microsoft* we are talking about - one of the most ruthlessly aggressive companies there is. Why would they hold back against what they perceive as their most important competitor? That just doesn't make sense, unless it is part of a greater strategy.
It is true Germany has a reputation for engineering excellence. Think about it: they built cars that last forever, they were the first to land on the moon (by proxy, but still)...
...can we please have an extension to automatically replace certain URLs by other URLs? So we can automatically translate "http://it.slashdot.org/..." with "http://slashdot.org/..."?
Because he is probably right. The reason we haven't seen patent action by Microsoft _yet_ is because they aren't ready to strike a killing blow. But they will be, soon enough...
AI has been 15-20 years away for as long as we have computers (about 50 years). I fully expect it to stay 15-20 years away for the foreseeable future, i.e. at least the next 15-20 years;-)
Movie reviewers appear to operate on the principle that if a movie is popular, it is also automatically crap, whereas if it is "arty" (i.e. boring and nobody except a self-selected elite would watch it) it gets an excellent rating. I read a popular paper, yet I do not find myself agreeing with the movie reviews very often. And visitor numbers appear to agree with me.
As for bad writing, I haven't seen any of that recently, but maybe that is because I'm reading a quality publication for my games reviews (Edge, in case you are curious) instead of some crappy fanboy website like IGN? You get what you pay for - in the case of IGN, that would be "nothing". Or do I get to subtract value for wasting my time with endless ads?
That is still a design effort first. Look, writing computer programs, or maintaining them, is about as much about typing in instruction as architecture is about drawing lines. Go find an architect and tell hem that you nephew of 3 can do as well as he can because he can draw lines too. See what funny color he turns before exploding.
I recommend a good book on refactoring to pick up some ideas wrt. methodologies for maintenance.
I read the articles on the site, and their point appears to be that we should do away with function calls and replace it all by message sending, preferably expressed as a graphical program. There are some problems with this approach:
- Graphical programming usually turns out to be unfeasible as problem size increases. The ability to still understand the graphs drops off far more rapidly than the ability to understand an equivalent text solution.
- The notion that you cannot make incorrect software using graphical programming is, at best, misguided. The gap between "what the user wants" and "what the developer thought the user wants" remains, wide as ever. The developer may, or may not, have slightly more success eliminating some types of crashes, but certainly not all (unless things like mathematical operators are also disallowed you'll still have the opportunity for division by zero, for example).
- I fail to see how you can write software without the two of the three basic constructs of programming (choice and repetition, the remaining one being iteration). Show me a "program" that reads a file with 100 lines of data, sorts it, and writes it back _without using an algorithm_. I'm not sure how one would weasel his way out of calling the sorting an algorithm, but it will sure be fun to watch...
Some random flames based on this post:
- The word "algorithm" simply means "method". I am inclined to believe that you do not know this, and are using it for something else, although what exactly escapes me.
- Signal passing software makes sense in an asynchronous environment. Synchronous signal passing is no different from normal function calls, and in fact does not allow the concurrency you envision.
- However, asynchronous environments involve all sorts of intricate race conditions, leading to all sorts of unpleasant problems that would not be present in "normal" programs.
- "Becoming proficient in their use often requires years of training and experience. This is a sign of the chronic immaturity of the software industry." There are numerous mature industries that require years of training: law, medicine, any research job, teaching, etc.
- While I agree there is a _lot_ of redundant fluff on the market these days that serve no purpose other than wasting everyone's time (typically anything that labels itself "middleware", and at least half the stuff put out by Microsoft), I don't think your call for the single tool will find many takers. Would you go into a machine shop and tell them they only need one tool? Or would you expect them to use the appropriate tool for each problem they solve? If the last, why would IT be any different?
Have you actually solved any problems using your methodology? I'm asking because I find it hard to believe it would work except for the most trivial problems.
I read the articles too, and their point appears to be that we should do away with function calls and replace it all by message sending, preferably expressed as a graphical program. There are some problems with this approach:
- Graphical programming usually turns out to be unfeasible as problem size increases.
- The notion that you cannot make incorrect software using graphical programming is, at best, misguided. The gap between "what the user wants" and "what the developer thought the user wants" remains, wide as ever. The developer may, or may not, have slightly more success eliminating some types of crashes, but certainly not all (unless things like mathematical operators are also disallowed you'll still have the opportunity for division by zero, for example).
- I fail to see how you can write software without the two of the three basic constructs of programming (choice and repetition, the remaining one being iteration). Show me a "program" that reads a file with 100 lines of data, sorts it, and writes it back _without using an algorithm_. I'm not sure how one would weasel his way out of calling the sorting an algorithm, but it will sure be fun to watch...
Slashdot Mirror
See title. DVD sales, at least where I live (Netherlands), are way up, according to a recent article in the paper.
Anyway, I have seen the spot where the Montgomery lies buried; ferries between the UK and the Netherlands pass pretty close by. A veteran told me about the wreck and its history, and he pointed out that the houses on the shore would get wiped out if the wreck were to explode.
"What houses?" I wondered. Then I looked really hard, and it dawned on me that he meant the small specks I could barely see on the horizon.
It's been 15 years since I made that trip, and I forget most of the other things I saw, but that one has stayed with me alright...
Other people have already mentioned some of the problems we might expect, but think of the upside: all the pigeons will go and shit on things on the southern hemisphere!
However, the rising cost of producing content will probably continue to drive down game length. Since this can only asymptotically approach 0, in that sense you are right that there is some standardization going on.
Looks like a sound financial strategy to me ;-)
I have a bunch of games lying around that I picked up at bargain prices - yesterday I bougt Silent Hill 2 and 3 for the combined sum of 15 euro. However, I have a couple of other games lying around that I also bought at such prices and never came around to playing: Evil Twin, Septerra Core, Metal Gear Solid, Outcast, maybe some more. Will I come around to playing them eventually? I don't know. Do I feel sorry for buying them? Well, not at that price. I feel sorry for buying Unreal 2, because I bought it full price and it stinks.
Having established why I want them blocked, here are some further thoughts:
- It is a free world. Web sites cannot actually require me to look at the ads, I am free to look at the content in any way I damn well please. If they do not like that they can change their methods (like including the contents and ads in a single block of flash, perhaps). In response I will decide if it is still worth it or not. Ultimately the market will decide.
- I *really* do not care about unsustainable business methods. I am under no obligation to keep anyones company afloat, unless I am actually paid to do so. This is not the case for websites.
- Finally, the notion that web sites for which I do pay (either through subscription or ads) would be impartial (even in the limited "non-sponsored" form) is laughable. Take a look at /., see how "impartial" it is, even with ads.
If bandwidth is the problem, website owners should come up with ways to keep cost down. I can see a future for a distributed web (ala bittorrent) - such a thing would be great to avoid the /. effect too.
No, that's Schrodingers patch. The one you are thinking of is where you either don't know if it has been installed, or on what machine.
If that were so I would expect them to look in my bags when I enter the country, but like I said: that was the only time I wasn't searched.
- I travelled by train from Boston to New York. To buy the ticket I had to show my passport. Excuse me!? Was I going to cross an international border, then? At home I can buy a ticket to wherever I please without showing any identification.
- I travelled by rental car, twice. Identification was required. Well, I understand that since they give me an expensive piece of equipment, but I couldn't have rented the card anonymously.
- I travelled by plane, once internally and of course coming in and leaving. Not only did I have to show ID, but _each_ _single_ _time_ I was asked to step out of the line for a "random" search. Yeah, like that is really random.
Ironically, the one place where noone was interested in my ID at all was at the immigration desk, where I was waved right through. Noone thought to check my papers, or my bag (and I was hiding a dangerous Nail Clipper of Mass Destruction in it too, carrying it around the US for two weeks with impunity!)
So saying "don't fly" is cheap, since it only leaves you the option of not travelling at all. And not being able to move about, being imprisoned in your little region as it were, that's not freedom at all...
I just love to see the only _really good_ energy source that is in our future being delayed and delayed because of petty politics.
1. It will devastate the foundation for our current economic system.
This is because it will eliminate any job related to production, whether it is assembly in a factory, or food production (farmers, fishers), or production of raw materials (since the nano-factories would of course reuse our waste). That's a _lot_ of people suddenly without jobs.
Indeed, there would only be jobs left in services, design, and energy production. And design jobs would be constantly under fire from nano-pirates.
2. It will force a re-think of how we structure society.
So half the country is suddenly out of a job, yet thanks to nano-assembly there is more than enough of everything (food, clothing, cars, ...) for everyone. Will the poor half sit back under their bridges and accept their fate? Or will they demand equal wealth, given the fact that wealth itself is now so common it has lost all value? One possibility is that this really depends on how well-armed each side is. A more enlightened possibility is that people will realize that the "old" structure where people work for money is now obsolete and that it is stupid and immoral to let half the country starve, even though the means are available for feed them all for essentially nothing. In any case, there will be either massive upheaval, or civil war. And the enlightened possibility may kill as all as surely as letting those people starve to death, because...
3. It will remove the impulse to do any work whatsoever for large numbers of people.
I'm not so idealistic to believe we would all be artists or poets after the raw _need_ to work for money disappears. Instead, significant parts of the population would fill their days doing absolutely nothing. This in itself could destroy us as a race. Why learn anything anymore? Why strive to achieve anything? There may not be enough people left that are willing to work to keep society running (plumbers, doctors, firemen, ...), let alone make any progress in science or art. Why would _you_ go to the office when your neighbour (who had a factory job before) sits on his lawn and plays with his kids every day?
Assuming we really do develop nano-assemblers, the one thing that could stop this future would be the cost of energy to run the assemblers (although our total energy usage will be much less, after all we will stop hauling goods and people around). But if you can run them from a solar panel we may be in real trouble.
As for what the singularity could be, there are plenty of options. Development of a working nano assembler might do it (manufacturing capabilities would instantly become meaningless, since we would be able to produce enough of _everything_ for _everyone_. Don't tell me that won't change things...). Development of an AI would probably also do it, since it could itself develop better, faster versions - faster than we could ever hope to keep up with. Or there is contact with an alien race. Perhaps even something as mundane as the FTL drive or anti-gravity... Anyway, the singularity is rather fascinating, even though it is itself SF for now ;-)
Someone explain to me how a question related to the risk of installing a new kernel is offtopic in an article about that very same kernel...?
I have a PC with five partitions. Two of these I use for Windows 2000. The other three are currently used for an AMD64 installation of Mandrake that doesn't have a working video card driver and is therefore almost useless to me. I'd like to install a new Linux there (in fact I need it badly), but I'm scared shitless that I may corrupt those Windows 2000 partitions and will have to spend a week rebuilding the damn thing, not to mention losing the stuff I forgot to backup. So, will any random modern distribution fuck up my Windows 2000? Or has that risk now been removed(1)? What do I need to look for in order to be able to determine this myself? See, that's the point. People are scared of losing existing partitions, and we need to know if that is going to happen or not. Whether it was caused by the kernel, the bootloader, or your uncle Vinny really isn't all that relevant.
(1) I'm just talking about Linux here, what Windows 2000 does on its own is a completely separate subject...
What you really need is a one-button mouse that contains alt, shift, and control keys, so you don't have to reach for the keyboard all the time. Hey, we could be onto something revolutionary here!
You appear to be reading slashdot, and yet be a productive individual. How?
If Microsoft strikes before Europe introduces software patents, the future of those software patents might very well be rather limited in Europe. Thus they wait until those laws are on record before acting.
If that doesn't convince you, this *Microsoft* we are talking about - one of the most ruthlessly aggressive companies there is. Why would they hold back against what they perceive as their most important competitor? That just doesn't make sense, unless it is part of a greater strategy.
It is true Germany has a reputation for engineering excellence. Think about it: they built cars that last forever, they were the first to land on the moon (by proxy, but still)...
...can we please have an extension to automatically replace certain URLs by other URLs? So we can automatically translate "http://it.slashdot.org/..." with "http://slashdot.org/..."?
Because he is probably right. The reason we haven't seen patent action by Microsoft _yet_ is because they aren't ready to strike a killing blow. But they will be, soon enough...
AI has been 15-20 years away for as long as we have computers (about 50 years). I fully expect it to stay 15-20 years away for the foreseeable future, i.e. at least the next 15-20 years ;-)
As for bad writing, I haven't seen any of that recently, but maybe that is because I'm reading a quality publication for my games reviews (Edge, in case you are curious) instead of some crappy fanboy website like IGN? You get what you pay for - in the case of IGN, that would be "nothing". Or do I get to subtract value for wasting my time with endless ads?
I recommend a good book on refactoring to pick up some ideas wrt. methodologies for maintenance.
- Graphical programming usually turns out to be unfeasible as problem size increases. The ability to still understand the graphs drops off far more rapidly than the ability to understand an equivalent text solution.
- The notion that you cannot make incorrect software using graphical programming is, at best, misguided. The gap between "what the user wants" and "what the developer thought the user wants" remains, wide as ever. The developer may, or may not, have slightly more success eliminating some types of crashes, but certainly not all (unless things like mathematical operators are also disallowed you'll still have the opportunity for division by zero, for example).
- I fail to see how you can write software without the two of the three basic constructs of programming (choice and repetition, the remaining one being iteration). Show me a "program" that reads a file with 100 lines of data, sorts it, and writes it back _without using an algorithm_. I'm not sure how one would weasel his way out of calling the sorting an algorithm, but it will sure be fun to watch...
Some random flames based on this post:
- The word "algorithm" simply means "method". I am inclined to believe that you do not know this, and are using it for something else, although what exactly escapes me.
- Signal passing software makes sense in an asynchronous environment. Synchronous signal passing is no different from normal function calls, and in fact does not allow the concurrency you envision.
- However, asynchronous environments involve all sorts of intricate race conditions, leading to all sorts of unpleasant problems that would not be present in "normal" programs.
- "Becoming proficient in their use often requires years of training and experience. This is a sign of the chronic immaturity of the software industry." There are numerous mature industries that require years of training: law, medicine, any research job, teaching, etc.
- While I agree there is a _lot_ of redundant fluff on the market these days that serve no purpose other than wasting everyone's time (typically anything that labels itself "middleware", and at least half the stuff put out by Microsoft), I don't think your call for the single tool will find many takers. Would you go into a machine shop and tell them they only need one tool? Or would you expect them to use the appropriate tool for each problem they solve? If the last, why would IT be any different?
Have you actually solved any problems using your methodology? I'm asking because I find it hard to believe it would work except for the most trivial problems.
- Graphical programming usually turns out to be unfeasible as problem size increases.
- The notion that you cannot make incorrect software using graphical programming is, at best, misguided. The gap between "what the user wants" and "what the developer thought the user wants" remains, wide as ever. The developer may, or may not, have slightly more success eliminating some types of crashes, but certainly not all (unless things like mathematical operators are also disallowed you'll still have the opportunity for division by zero, for example).
- I fail to see how you can write software without the two of the three basic constructs of programming (choice and repetition, the remaining one being iteration). Show me a "program" that reads a file with 100 lines of data, sorts it, and writes it back _without using an algorithm_. I'm not sure how one would weasel his way out of calling the sorting an algorithm, but it will sure be fun to watch...