Just Minimize or Bring Back The Music Player
I wonder if anyone has mined Gebraltar (gepr.net) or Gnosis (gnosis2000.net) and produced webs like music-map does? Feed that back into Pandora, that would be interesting!
I've been saying this for years. Have a utility belt! The belt would come with it's own power and local area network infrastructure built in. Take the utility belt off, dock it and everything gets both power for recharging and a WAN connection. Un-dock it and put it on and you're ready in well under a minute. Hell if it's good enough for Han, Luke and Batman it's got to be great!
Personal Satisfaction - That would make a good way of looking at a continuing ed course.
As for how to teach it, I have a three pronged approach to suggest.
"I know why things are this way."
One branch is simply the history of what happened, so that we can see how personalities and philosophies were cross-pollinated by different hardware and software that was available at the time. Consider the birth of Unix as one example, Microsoft as another and Linux third.
"I know how to how to do it."
Another would be the practical aspect of it. Make up some teams, give each the chance to scrounge around for some freebies, older computers (not necessairly pc's) and see what they can find that will run on the hardware. How to select an operating system, how to download, install and configure it.
"I know how to give and get support."
Now that there is a working system, give them the challenge of making it do something useful. Web server, mail server, end user workstation, whatever. Have them choose the software components and glue them together with a scripting language. Help them to learn how to use the web and newsgroups to ask and answer questions.
I think that this, along with the ability to select a possible replacement for any given strategy, hardware, software, design would be the way to go. The key is to equip the students with a rudamentary skillset to make decisions about OSS, when its use is or is not appropriate, etc.
This is a great example of the failure of single source solutions, specifically FEMA's IE6 only site. Sure it is easy to maintain a single source solution and it can help to keep costs down. Unfortunately, in this case it failed to be open enough to provide help to the people it was designed to help nor did it support the people it was created to support. In a disaster you will be lucky to get anything in the way of hardware, software and support, so the environment to support the disaster teams needs to be very very forgiving. Too bad it wasn't.
Two things are happening here, one of them is IMHO a damn fine movie, go see it; the other is a quiet, elegant miracle that should speak volumes to the entertainment industry.
Fox wanted not to just broadcast Firefly, they wanted to manipulate it to pander to their low perception of their audiences' values. Fox failed to appreciate what they really had and they canned it. So if something this good is unavailable on television, especially if it is not available on Fox; well, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Fans of the show assembled an absolutely unprecedented response, one greater than all of their predecessors, to raise the funds, take the ads out in Variety and they rook it to the web. Why did they do it? It's just like OSC said; they cared about the characters.
And who was the one person in all of Hollywood who didn't snooze through it? Chalk that one up to Mary Parent.
Now failure for this kind of project is always an option, don't get me wrong, but after all, this was and is a risky business.
So what actually did happen? Well they re-assembled cast & crew and conceived a fine, hand crafted and heart felt movie.
The decision to share the movie with friends and fans was also a huge risk. But the word of mouth was good and there were no spoilers. Because the fans 'Believed.' Belief's a funny thing. Maybe Hollywood should take a lesson from that one single point, as it alone will be responsible for the success of Serenity.
I'm working on a method of addressing this issue at home. It's a very small combination of a Bar and a Computer Science Lab. The notes may be taken on napkins, and the writing may benefit (or suffer) from a certain 'fluidity' depending on the hour. However the fact that some people actually will take the time to delve into the mysteries of raw, historic, computer science is priceless. Today we honor and venerate the folks who similarly flew by the seat of their pants just to see if they could play space traveler on a PDP-7. Now a days I'd like to know that a system administrator knows more about core wars than GTA.
The fact that I can hand someone a core memory board, or a 16 bit adder made with individual transistors. That I can hand them a chipset like the 4004. Or that I can show that with the right algorithm and code, that I can solve the same problem set on an old Unix box in less time than it takes for them to get their solution to run on their GHz laptops. That's when the light goes on. That's when they begin to see that they can do a hell of a lot more with a hell of a lot less than they thought. That's when they begin to realize that quality makes a difference. That's when they begin to see that they can save themselves a lot of time and trouble, save their companies a lot of time and money and become the next shining star in the IT department.
We live in a world where a lot of stupid things are not just possible, but down right idiotically easy. Or at least they appear that way to those with shallow understandings of how things work, until the day when they fail to meet expectations and the 'Old-Geezer' call is made. And sure enough, he can take a look, pinpoint the problem and fix it. Because he knows what is really happening. Because he was using 'Data-Blocks' before the authors of XML were born.
The history is important. Today we are incredibly lucky. If we were talking philosophy, we could never actually talk to Plato or Socrates. If we were talking Medicine, we could not speak with Hippocrates or Galen. And while we have already lost pioneers like Vannevar Bush, we can still actually hear Knuth, Ritchie & the like because almost everything they did happened in our lifetimes.
Real code written by real human beings with a true calling and a passion for their art. Not some company pushing a library of a million lines of buggy, over generalized code asking "Where Do You Want To Go Today."
Clear Quality Understanding --> Clean Tight Code --> Problem Solved.
A spell checker would be nice, you have several typos. Other than that, it appears that the site is rendered in plone; and that pretty well summs it up.
Ok, I give you that a full mirror which includes the entire disk image would be impractical. So how about something a little more intelligent which ignores things liks static application files and temporary files? Or maybe setting up a partition with the stuff that you want to save and have it mirror just that partition?
Now that all those old computer geeks can't get their viagra and other drugs, they'll stop downloading all that pr0n and when they remember that computers aren't just for 'getting off' anymore, we can expect to see a whole range of new and serious uses for the computer, and faster downloading times for everything else!;^)
Why should it be slow? How much data is actually getting changed? If you were creating a movie and actually doing the rendering more data would be going through your pc than would be going out to the mirror-network.
I was just thinking about this the other day, it's a perfect solution to the stacks problem. A copy is always on hamd as long as there is a blank book ready for it.
Most local theaters have a special showing some weekday morning where moms can brings their kids and babies and just let it all hang out. That is a good thing for that crowd. So how about se have talking and non talking shows. How about taking the non-talking theater and sheilding it so that pagers and cell phones just don't work? How about screenings where it is restricted to adults and beer is served? My point is that the audience has changed, but the theaters haven't adapted. Theaters are still showing movies the way that they did in the 40's-60's. The only improvements theaters have made are color, air-conditioning, sound and lately, better seating. The only thing a theater can do for you that you can't do at home has to do with the group experience. But the groups are too diverse to put up with one-anothers expectations. Back at Expo '67 the Romanians had a theater where the viewers 'voted' during the picture, and based on the votes, the picture took certain turns and plot twists, kind of like those 'find-your-fate' books. With just 5 choices in one film it would be possible to see 25 different movies! That will keep them back in the theaters. Get some interaction and some interactivity going and the whole group can enjoy it. Bore them with the shlock that is showing now and they'll get fed up and act out, it's only human nature. If you make a blockbuster, great; but you can't re-make a film to that same standard and expect it to be a big hit, because we've allready seen that before and we're looking for a 'new experience.' Have 'MST3K' night and let everyone yell at the damn screen. Anything but the expectation that we will pay big bucks and 'sit silently in awe' for boring, poorly made films.
I have a signature series theramin from Big Briar, back when he had lost the use of his own name in his business. It's a beautiful instrument, painted black with chromed antennas and since it's the signature series it has his name on it in silver pen.
Back when I was a kid my dad made one for my mom, that used optical sensors. It always fascinated me, and I enjoyed the way it was used in so many shows and movies, everything from The Outer Limits to The Day The Earth Stood Still.
Guess I'll get it out tonight and play a song for Bob, and thank him for all his many contributions that have enriched so many of our lives.
While there are a lot of new technologies out there, they all have 'roots' in older technologies. Python is written in C for one example.
IMHO, the next language breakthroughs will be developed with programmable hardware, a CPU that is a non-directed series of gates, which can be recombined to form whole new series of CPU's. With that kind of system a whole new construct of operations can be experimented with, and can be bound directly to the languages of the future. Functions become commands, commands become operands and so forth. Pipelining on demand, as many channels as you want. Virtualized sub processors each with it's own unique I/O. Imagine running the program, it 'compiles' it's own virtual cpu based around the task at hand. Those new 'instructions' could become the swappible DNA of a new generation of processors. And the languages will have the ability to develop lust as natural languages do, by evolving.
Trouble is that your 'professionals' will most likely be as clueless as you are. You'll probably find a stinky kid there who never sees the light of day who will fix you up for pizza (and beer if he's old enough). Take one on as an 'intern' of sorts and you'll learn what you need to know.
Slashdot Mirror
Just Minimize or Bring Back The Music Player I wonder if anyone has mined Gebraltar (gepr.net) or Gnosis (gnosis2000.net) and produced webs like music-map does? Feed that back into Pandora, that would be interesting!
Spread it across a bunch of servers, and as soon as you have enough parts rebuild the file. Maybe use a meta search engine to find the parts.
I've been saying this for years. Have a utility belt! The belt would come with it's own power and local area network infrastructure built in. Take the utility belt off, dock it and everything gets both power for recharging and a WAN connection. Un-dock it and put it on and you're ready in well under a minute. Hell if it's good enough for Han, Luke and Batman it's got to be great!
Energy becomes matter.
Personal Satisfaction - That would make a good way of looking at a continuing ed course. As for how to teach it, I have a three pronged approach to suggest. "I know why things are this way." One branch is simply the history of what happened, so that we can see how personalities and philosophies were cross-pollinated by different hardware and software that was available at the time. Consider the birth of Unix as one example, Microsoft as another and Linux third. "I know how to how to do it." Another would be the practical aspect of it. Make up some teams, give each the chance to scrounge around for some freebies, older computers (not necessairly pc's) and see what they can find that will run on the hardware. How to select an operating system, how to download, install and configure it. "I know how to give and get support." Now that there is a working system, give them the challenge of making it do something useful. Web server, mail server, end user workstation, whatever. Have them choose the software components and glue them together with a scripting language. Help them to learn how to use the web and newsgroups to ask and answer questions. I think that this, along with the ability to select a possible replacement for any given strategy, hardware, software, design would be the way to go. The key is to equip the students with a rudamentary skillset to make decisions about OSS, when its use is or is not appropriate, etc.
This is a great example of the failure of single source solutions, specifically FEMA's IE6 only site. Sure it is easy to maintain a single source solution and it can help to keep costs down. Unfortunately, in this case it failed to be open enough to provide help to the people it was designed to help nor did it support the people it was created to support. In a disaster you will be lucky to get anything in the way of hardware, software and support, so the environment to support the disaster teams needs to be very very forgiving. Too bad it wasn't.
Fox wanted not to just broadcast Firefly, they wanted to manipulate it to pander to their low perception of their audiences' values. Fox failed to appreciate what they really had and they canned it. So if something this good is unavailable on television, especially if it is not available on Fox; well, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Fans of the show assembled an absolutely unprecedented response, one greater than all of their predecessors, to raise the funds, take the ads out in Variety and they rook it to the web. Why did they do it? It's just like OSC said; they cared about the characters.
And who was the one person in all of Hollywood who didn't snooze through it? Chalk that one up to Mary Parent.
Now failure for this kind of project is always an option, don't get me wrong, but after all, this was and is a risky business.
So what actually did happen? Well they re-assembled cast & crew and conceived a fine, hand crafted and heart felt movie.
The decision to share the movie with friends and fans was also a huge risk. But the word of mouth was good and there were no spoilers. Because the fans 'Believed.' Belief's a funny thing. Maybe Hollywood should take a lesson from that one single point, as it alone will be responsible for the success of Serenity.
The fact that I can hand someone a core memory board, or a 16 bit adder made with individual transistors. That I can hand them a chipset like the 4004. Or that I can show that with the right algorithm and code, that I can solve the same problem set on an old Unix box in less time than it takes for them to get their solution to run on their GHz laptops. That's when the light goes on. That's when they begin to see that they can do a hell of a lot more with a hell of a lot less than they thought. That's when they begin to realize that quality makes a difference. That's when they begin to see that they can save themselves a lot of time and trouble, save their companies a lot of time and money and become the next shining star in the IT department.
We live in a world where a lot of stupid things are not just possible, but down right idiotically easy. Or at least they appear that way to those with shallow understandings of how things work, until the day when they fail to meet expectations and the 'Old-Geezer' call is made. And sure enough, he can take a look, pinpoint the problem and fix it. Because he knows what is really happening. Because he was using 'Data-Blocks' before the authors of XML were born.
The history is important. Today we are incredibly lucky. If we were talking philosophy, we could never actually talk to Plato or Socrates. If we were talking Medicine, we could not speak with Hippocrates or Galen. And while we have already lost pioneers like Vannevar Bush, we can still actually hear Knuth, Ritchie & the like because almost everything they did happened in our lifetimes. Real code written by real human beings with a true calling and a passion for their art. Not some company pushing a library of a million lines of buggy, over generalized code asking "Where Do You Want To Go Today."
Clear Quality Understanding --> Clean Tight Code --> Problem Solved.
Now we'll never meet the Vulcans!
If the Big-Bang was discovered to be just a stage in the Steady State Theory?
That's 16 Tonnes, thank you!
Face it, our form of government is not democracy, but rather a form of kleptocracy. And that's just the start of what they're covering up ...
A spell checker would be nice, you have several typos. Other than that, it appears that the site is rendered in plone; and that pretty well summs it up.
Ok, I give you that a full mirror which includes the entire disk image would be impractical. So how about something a little more intelligent which ignores things liks static application files and temporary files? Or maybe setting up a partition with the stuff that you want to save and have it mirror just that partition?
Now that all those old computer geeks can't get their viagra and other drugs, they'll stop downloading all that pr0n and when they remember that computers aren't just for 'getting off' anymore, we can expect to see a whole range of new and serious uses for the computer, and faster downloading times for everything else! ;^)
Why should it be slow? How much data is actually getting changed? If you were creating a movie and actually doing the rendering more data would be going through your pc than would be going out to the mirror-network.
I was just thinking about this the other day, it's a perfect solution to the stacks problem. A copy is always on hamd as long as there is a blank book ready for it.
I'd rather have a wifi link and have my scsi hosted in a nice safe place. Make it 'mirror' over a wifi.
Most local theaters have a special showing some weekday morning where moms can brings their kids and babies and just let it all hang out. That is a good thing for that crowd. So how about se have talking and non talking shows. How about taking the non-talking theater and sheilding it so that pagers and cell phones just don't work? How about screenings where it is restricted to adults and beer is served? My point is that the audience has changed, but the theaters haven't adapted. Theaters are still showing movies the way that they did in the 40's-60's. The only improvements theaters have made are color, air-conditioning, sound and lately, better seating. The only thing a theater can do for you that you can't do at home has to do with the group experience. But the groups are too diverse to put up with one-anothers expectations. Back at Expo '67 the Romanians had a theater where the viewers 'voted' during the picture, and based on the votes, the picture took certain turns and plot twists, kind of like those 'find-your-fate' books. With just 5 choices in one film it would be possible to see 25 different movies! That will keep them back in the theaters. Get some interaction and some interactivity going and the whole group can enjoy it. Bore them with the shlock that is showing now and they'll get fed up and act out, it's only human nature. If you make a blockbuster, great; but you can't re-make a film to that same standard and expect it to be a big hit, because we've allready seen that before and we're looking for a 'new experience.' Have 'MST3K' night and let everyone yell at the damn screen. Anything but the expectation that we will pay big bucks and 'sit silently in awe' for boring, poorly made films.
Since Microsoft needs enemies they have to foster competition in every sector they can. It's a living proof that they are not a monopoly. :^)
Back when I was a kid my dad made one for my mom, that used optical sensors. It always fascinated me, and I enjoyed the way it was used in so many shows and movies, everything from The Outer Limits to The Day The Earth Stood Still.
Guess I'll get it out tonight and play a song for Bob, and thank him for all his many contributions that have enriched so many of our lives.
While there are a lot of new technologies out there, they all have 'roots' in older technologies. Python is written in C for one example. IMHO, the next language breakthroughs will be developed with programmable hardware, a CPU that is a non-directed series of gates, which can be recombined to form whole new series of CPU's. With that kind of system a whole new construct of operations can be experimented with, and can be bound directly to the languages of the future. Functions become commands, commands become operands and so forth. Pipelining on demand, as many channels as you want. Virtualized sub processors each with it's own unique I/O. Imagine running the program, it 'compiles' it's own virtual cpu based around the task at hand. Those new 'instructions' could become the swappible DNA of a new generation of processors. And the languages will have the ability to develop lust as natural languages do, by evolving.
Trouble is that your 'professionals' will most likely be as clueless as you are. You'll probably find a stinky kid there who never sees the light of day who will fix you up for pizza (and beer if he's old enough). Take one on as an 'intern' of sorts and you'll learn what you need to know.
What's it like to promote honesty in an environment where everyone's first impression of you is as "The Enemy?"
Or maybe the ... ... Red Dwarf!?