People will get along with people they know they are going to be working with for a long, long time. People aren't going to form emotional attachments to people who may mysteriously vanish from their cubicals after the next quarterly results. Older workers know the game... the younger ones are still naive about what lays ahead.
I believe there is a general principle here that goes beyond the technology at hand: any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from white noise.
This is probably all redundant after hundreds of posts have already been made, but here are my 2 cents.
Spinoff tech happens from any megaproject - the human genome project, the current military adventures. Changing which projects are a priority does not mean the end of new tech.
We can wax poetic about the lost horizons all we want, but getting people into space has always been about national pride, not need. It was the nation-state equivalent of gorilla chest-thumping between the US and USSR: awe the world and subtly show such confidence in missile reliability that they'll put a man on it (how else do your demonstrate - to others and to yourself - that your ICBMs are the real deal and can all be expected to reach their targets; having the confidence to put a man on top of one proves their reliability). Now that space and the moon have been set as the litmus test of proving you're an advanced civilization, the next generation of pride-pounding will be between China and India.
The dream of real human colonization of space are never going to get off the ground unless (1) we can get material (human or otherwise) out of atmosphere at a tiny fraction of the current cost: not half the current cost - we're talking on the order of a thousandth and (2) we can demonstrate the ability to produce energy production equipment completely on-site (not just assemble what we send there, not just construct out of local materials, but construct it AND all the equipment needed to construct the next generation out of only material and energy there).
Overcome those two barriers and human colonization will simply happen. Don't tackle them and the space junk we leave behind will just be our version of the pyramids: awesome achievements of engineering but ultimately useless.
My measure of a game's value is how many features find their way into my own games, stories and conversations.
I know my opinion is probably an anomaly, but I hate dead entertainment that one just experiences then never uses - if it's just some time-passing endorphin rush, it's as pointless as taking drugs.
Doesn't Nortel have an entire class A network (47.x.x.x) to itself? Having that returned to the pool after the death roll is complete should presumably buy a little time?
(I guess that falls into the "On the other hand, ARIN is also having some success in reclaiming unused IPv4 address space back from organizations that aren't using all of their addresses." line from the article?)
I've always felt virtualization was pushed too heavily as a concept, making up for failings of the operating systems and how they are used. Many admins have become so used to consolidating existing legacy servers together that we start thinking every app should be wrapped in its own private copy of an OS - as if the whole point of the concepts of users and groups and limits have been forgotten.
What's the backup plan in case a massive solar flare fries our power and computing infrastructure? Have we reached the point where that's the end of civilization anyway? Or am I underestimating the ability of people to muddle through on cash an informal IOUs for a while in a pinch?
Influence mapping scares me deeply. It completely devalues the entire concept of friendship, turning every relationship into a marketing channel, every person into a spambot zombie hoping for a discount from sellers or a better performance appraisal at work.
I would love to see the practice outlawed, but data mining is becoming so pervasive I don't know how you prove its even happening without catching differential pricing caught in the act.
Doesn't that depend on how much the other side of the issue is offering?
Ultimately a politician is a broker of priorities - the goal of the most earnest idealist is to do the most good for the most people while doing as little harm to as few people as possible. The ideal politician sits in the middle of this storm of costs and benefits of different actions just the way a stock broker sits in the middle of an exchange of money. Since it's hard to measure the true value of every priority to every constituent, lobbying effort becomes a proxy measure... whoever is willing to throw the most money at an issue needs it the most. Obviously this model breaks down when not everyone has the same amount of money to commit to lobbying, but when the participants are roughly equal in resources and there isn't a clear right or wrong answer, just creating big donation bins labeled "yes" and "no" isn't an entirely bad idea.
That's not the lesson I see. To me it says that a user-based security model are insufficient - apps are too free to call/use each other - the threat has moved from "rooting a box" but rather to "rooting a user". OSes (and users) need to start looking at the user as a system administrator of many threads of personal data.
Web browsers have already discovered much of this - different tabs on your web browser are like different apps and just as a sysadmin cannot trust all the users to play nice with each others' data, users can't trust different apps with full access to all other apps.
That was my experience as well... although I was not directly involved in any SOX work, I saw it dredging up all sorts of atrociously bad practices all around that were time bombs waiting to go off (application interfaces open to the world, critical servers never being backed up, root accounts still active for people laid off years ago). Outsourcing, entropy plus plausible deniability is a dangerous cocktail in IT.
It's always more fun to be breaking new ground on a project where people appreciate every contribution than it is to maintain a mature project against the normal background of misunderstandings, agendas and entropy. This is hardly unique to wikipedia.
Actually, I'd use Magic:the Gathering as an example of game balance done right.
Classes are themselves the problem with class balance - you're forcing devs (or more likely large dev teams) to imagine and understand every situation a character can find it in, every tactic they could use and create lists of abilities for each class that give the same total output. The more that's added to the game, the more complex and intractable the problem becomes.
MtG on the other hand, pitches the whole problem over to the players, making it part of the game. Players themselves decide what the classes (decks) are by mixing and matching abilities within a structure of resources that makes some cards/abilities combo well and some combo poorly.
The other thing MtG does well that MMORPGs are loath to do is that they create new formats (zones) where only a subset of abilities can be used.
More importantly to Canada, it means roughly a third of the entire country is on Facebook. That's getting into the realm of national security concerns when detailed information that much of your population resides in a foreign country.
But is this different from any other movement, organization, business or community in history? You have pioneers with the vision, the dedicated hard core settlers, a bureaucracy that grows to preserve and efficiently ritualize that core workings and then a self-sustaining isolation and elitism that comes of being on a successful island in the tide of humanity sweeping past in search of their place in the world.
I don't think it's not really a "problem", it's merely the natural wisdom and wrinkles of any collective "growing up", for all the good and ill that entails.
As long as there is a program around 100 years from now that can still read the archives of stuff I write today, I'm happy.
There's nothing so frustrating as pulling up a document I wrote 20 years ago to get some quotes and finding that no modern editor understands the format, forcing me to hack through the binary to pull out my work.
The way I see it, the recording/copying technology created the industry in the first place at the cost of local/family musicians. The next iteration of technology made them obsolete. Recording execs are like telephone switchboard operators - one wave of technology created the role, the next wave destroys it. They're just trying to manipulate the law to defy the reality of technology... why should this be different than any other industry since the start of the industrial revolution? (oh right, nobody's "profiting" off this change - can't allow anything to happen that doesn't make the rich richer, can we?).
However the budget-challenged, direct-to-video sequel to the D&D movie, although not a masterpiece of storytelling, actually managed to capture the feel and pace of playing an old-fashioned late-1st edition D&D game of high level (9th-10th level) characters. If they've continued churning out a series of films in that style, I would have happily bought them up.
A fun question to ask people is: "if you could only have one, which would you rather do: author a successful book or be parent to a successful child (raised by others)". The answers tell you whether the person sees themselves as a bundle of genes or as a bundle of memes.
The overgrown human brain is just a big appendix the body provides as a home for symbiotic memes:)
(obviously, it's not Hawkings' area of expertise so we expect to find people who have already had the idea)
A pleasant side effect of Canada fractured, regionalized politics and it's inability to elect a majority government any more is that as soon as someone tries to cash in a political favor, it's ammunition the opposition parties (plural!) can use to threaten an election and alter the balance of power. There's an actual incentive to call out the ruling party on unpopular special-interest gimmies! And since parties receive a few pennies a year of funding for every vote they get, every voter matters.
Canada consistently gets better, more innovative, progressive and balanced policies during minority governments despite how much they all whine that they can't get anything done without a majority.
Slashdot Mirror
1. profit 2. ??? 3. innovation
People will get along with people they know they are going to be working with for a long, long time. People aren't going to form emotional attachments to people who may mysteriously vanish from their cubicals after the next quarterly results. Older workers know the game ... the younger ones are still naive about what lays ahead.
I believe there is a general principle here that goes beyond the technology at hand: any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from white noise.
This is probably all redundant after hundreds of posts have already been made, but here are my 2 cents.
Spinoff tech happens from any megaproject - the human genome project, the current military adventures. Changing which projects are a priority does not mean the end of new tech.
We can wax poetic about the lost horizons all we want, but getting people into space has always been about national pride, not need. It was the nation-state equivalent of gorilla chest-thumping between the US and USSR: awe the world and subtly show such confidence in missile reliability that they'll put a man on it (how else do your demonstrate - to others and to yourself - that your ICBMs are the real deal and can all be expected to reach their targets; having the confidence to put a man on top of one proves their reliability). Now that space and the moon have been set as the litmus test of proving you're an advanced civilization, the next generation of pride-pounding will be between China and India.
The dream of real human colonization of space are never going to get off the ground unless (1) we can get material (human or otherwise) out of atmosphere at a tiny fraction of the current cost: not half the current cost - we're talking on the order of a thousandth and (2) we can demonstrate the ability to produce energy production equipment completely on-site (not just assemble what we send there, not just construct out of local materials, but construct it AND all the equipment needed to construct the next generation out of only material and energy there).
Overcome those two barriers and human colonization will simply happen. Don't tackle them and the space junk we leave behind will just be our version of the pyramids: awesome achievements of engineering but ultimately useless.
My measure of a game's value is how many features find their way into my own games, stories and conversations.
I know my opinion is probably an anomaly, but I hate dead entertainment that one just experiences then never uses - if it's just some time-passing endorphin rush, it's as pointless as taking drugs.
Doesn't Nortel have an entire class A network (47.x.x.x) to itself? Having that returned to the pool after the death roll is complete should presumably buy a little time?
(I guess that falls into the "On the other hand, ARIN is also having some success in reclaiming unused IPv4 address space back from organizations that aren't using all of their addresses." line from the article?)
I've always felt virtualization was pushed too heavily as a concept, making up for failings of the operating systems and how they are used. Many admins have become so used to consolidating existing legacy servers together that we start thinking every app should be wrapped in its own private copy of an OS - as if the whole point of the concepts of users and groups and limits have been forgotten.
What's the backup plan in case a massive solar flare fries our power and computing infrastructure? Have we reached the point where that's the end of civilization anyway? Or am I underestimating the ability of people to muddle through on cash an informal IOUs for a while in a pinch?
Influence mapping scares me deeply. It completely devalues the entire concept of friendship, turning every relationship into a marketing channel, every person into a spambot zombie hoping for a discount from sellers or a better performance appraisal at work.
I would love to see the practice outlawed, but data mining is becoming so pervasive I don't know how you prove its even happening without catching differential pricing caught in the act.
Doesn't that depend on how much the other side of the issue is offering?
Ultimately a politician is a broker of priorities - the goal of the most earnest idealist is to do the most good for the most people while doing as little harm to as few people as possible. The ideal politician sits in the middle of this storm of costs and benefits of different actions just the way a stock broker sits in the middle of an exchange of money. Since it's hard to measure the true value of every priority to every constituent, lobbying effort becomes a proxy measure ... whoever is willing to throw the most money at an issue needs it the most. Obviously this model breaks down when not everyone has the same amount of money to commit to lobbying, but when the participants are roughly equal in resources and there isn't a clear right or wrong answer, just creating big donation bins labeled "yes" and "no" isn't an entirely bad idea.
That's not the lesson I see. To me it says that a user-based security model are insufficient - apps are too free to call/use each other - the threat has moved from "rooting a box" but rather to "rooting a user". OSes (and users) need to start looking at the user as a system administrator of many threads of personal data.
Web browsers have already discovered much of this - different tabs on your web browser are like different apps and just as a sysadmin cannot trust all the users to play nice with each others' data, users can't trust different apps with full access to all other apps.
That was my experience as well ... although I was not directly involved in any SOX work, I saw it dredging up all sorts of atrociously bad practices all around that were time bombs waiting to go off (application interfaces open to the world, critical servers never being backed up, root accounts still active for people laid off years ago). Outsourcing, entropy plus plausible deniability is a dangerous cocktail in IT.
It's always more fun to be breaking new ground on a project where people appreciate every contribution than it is to maintain a mature project against the normal background of misunderstandings, agendas and entropy. This is hardly unique to wikipedia.
I assume all the same logic applies to global labor laws, a global minimum wage and global tax rate?
Has Canada gotten so messed up that they actually believe the dead have privacy rights?
Why not? Copyright doesn't expire on death so why should privacy?
Actually, I'd use Magic:the Gathering as an example of game balance done right.
Classes are themselves the problem with class balance - you're forcing devs (or more likely large dev teams) to imagine and understand every situation a character can find it in, every tactic they could use and create lists of abilities for each class that give the same total output. The more that's added to the game, the more complex and intractable the problem becomes.
MtG on the other hand, pitches the whole problem over to the players, making it part of the game. Players themselves decide what the classes (decks) are by mixing and matching abilities within a structure of resources that makes some cards/abilities combo well and some combo poorly.
The other thing MtG does well that MMORPGs are loath to do is that they create new formats (zones) where only a subset of abilities can be used.
More importantly to Canada, it means roughly a third of the entire country is on Facebook. That's getting into the realm of national security concerns when detailed information that much of your population resides in a foreign country.
But is this different from any other movement, organization, business or community in history? You have pioneers with the vision, the dedicated hard core settlers, a bureaucracy that grows to preserve and efficiently ritualize that core workings and then a self-sustaining isolation and elitism that comes of being on a successful island in the tide of humanity sweeping past in search of their place in the world.
I don't think it's not really a "problem", it's merely the natural wisdom and wrinkles of any collective "growing up", for all the good and ill that entails.
As long as there is a program around 100 years from now that can still read the archives of stuff I write today, I'm happy.
There's nothing so frustrating as pulling up a document I wrote 20 years ago to get some quotes and finding that no modern editor understands the format, forcing me to hack through the binary to pull out my work.
The way I see it, the recording/copying technology created the industry in the first place at the cost of local/family musicians. The next iteration of technology made them obsolete. Recording execs are like telephone switchboard operators - one wave of technology created the role, the next wave destroys it. They're just trying to manipulate the law to defy the reality of technology ... why should this be different than any other industry since the start of the industrial revolution? (oh right, nobody's "profiting" off this change - can't allow anything to happen that doesn't make the rich richer, can we?).
However the budget-challenged, direct-to-video sequel to the D&D movie, although not a masterpiece of storytelling, actually managed to capture the feel and pace of playing an old-fashioned late-1st edition D&D game of high level (9th-10th level) characters. If they've continued churning out a series of films in that style, I would have happily bought them up.
A fun question to ask people is: "if you could only have one, which would you rather do: author a successful book or be parent to a successful child (raised by others)". The answers tell you whether the person sees themselves as a bundle of genes or as a bundle of memes.
The overgrown human brain is just a big appendix the body provides as a home for symbiotic memes :)
(obviously, it's not Hawkings' area of expertise so we expect to find people who have already had the idea)
A pleasant side effect of Canada fractured, regionalized politics and it's inability to elect a majority government any more is that as soon as someone tries to cash in a political favor, it's ammunition the opposition parties (plural!) can use to threaten an election and alter the balance of power. There's an actual incentive to call out the ruling party on unpopular special-interest gimmies! And since parties receive a few pennies a year of funding for every vote they get, every voter matters.
Canada consistently gets better, more innovative, progressive and balanced policies during minority governments despite how much they all whine that they can't get anything done without a majority.
Like the US has never spread FUD to undermine a regime they disapprove of.
Whatever the truth of the situation, I find that more and more news these days smells like propaganda.
So ... what's the typical kickback to the markers?