Ah, this is a harbinger of hope that my most fondly held ambition may yet become a reality: I get to spend old age in space. Think about the advantages of old people's homes in space: no more falling down and having to say you can't get up. No more weight on those calcified joints, no more aching feet, no more dragging yourself out of bed.
I figure that when Bill Gates gets to be old enough to feel the pains of decrepitude, then he will jump at a chance to fund such a project--and so will lots of other rich millionaires. The only question will be: can I afford it?
I'd imaging that it could mean that if you are going 5 miles or more over the speed limit you could get a ticket mailed to you.
That would be great, because if everyone got speeding tickets for violating our (US) ridiculously low speed limits, then there would be such a public clamor that they'd have to give in and raise the speed limits to reasonable levels. I gotta drive to work on a superhighway with a 60MPH speed limit on most of it. Everybody goes 80, and the cops just randomly pick people off to collect "speed tax". I got hit with two tickets in 6 months...the last one cost me $300. Grrrrr.
So you think shooters make people more reluctant to kill, and more aware of the fragility of their own lives? It would be nice if this were so, but I believe you are doing some wishful thinking.
Your assertion would be believable if players (especially kids) reacted with repugnance to the violence they encounter in these games. But if that were so, the game wouldn't be enjoyable, and they would stop playing. Instead, they enjoy the experience, and play the games over and over again. Does that mean everyone who plays shooters will become a killer? Of course not, but at the very least, these games won't turn players into kinder and gentler people. (And there has been research showing that violent media tend to make kids behave more violently toward each other.)
Do shooters teach the player about his mortality? I hardly think so. If anything, players learn that after you die, you just hit "New Game". No pain, no consequences.
As for getting the violence "out of their system," the notion that acting out violent feelings makes people calmer is an old pop-psych notion that has been discredited by more recent research. Acting violently makes you madder--it escalates anger, it doesn't diffuse it. Why do you think the US Army distributes a free shooter called "America's Army"? Because it discourages enlistments?
This reasoning doesn't just apply to scientific publication, but publication in general. Right now, any authors can put their novels, stories, philosophical treatises, etc. up on their web pages for anybody to download, either for free or for pay. Yet, very little of my substantial reading comes from downloads; most of it comes from paper books I buy from Amazon or the local bookstore--and I think this is true for most people who read a lot.
The reasons for this are the same as those cited by the parent--publishers act as a filter. Not everything that is distributed by well-known publishing houses is good, but chances of finding something good among published books is far better than hunting around the web looking for gems amid the piles of self-published junk. The publishing houses look for talented authors, pay successful ones well to keep writing, give them editorial support and encouragement, and produce their work in an easy to read form called "books".
There are some signs that this model is not working as well as it did in the past. (Check the price of paperback books recently?) But I think that the needed changes don't include getting rid of publishers so much as thinking up new ways for them to distribute their product. The crucial innovation might be a technology that makes downloading books and instant-printing practical, or (more likely) the advent of a really good electronic book.
The question as to whether these comments apply also to the music industry is left as an exercise for the reader.
Anybody know if this applies to any of Netgear's wired products? I have a Netgear router at home (FR[somemore_numbers]). I disabled remote admin on it. Would that make a difference? Man, I'm glad I resisted the temptation to go with WiFi, at least.
Thanks,/. Now I can worry until I get home from work...
I've sworn a bloody oath not to upgrade from Win 2K Pro forever because I can't swallow an OS that makes me ask for permission before I can run it. If they drop that stupid licensing scheme, maybe I'll actually upgrade. Someday. Maybe. Hmmm. When I think of a good reason, anyway.
My experience as a Windows 2K user is that it is indeed more stable than its predecessors, and doesn't flake out...unless something goes wrong. Then you have a flaky box, and there is very little you can do about fixing it other than to wipe the disk and reinstall the whole #&@#^@% OS. That's not how the trouble-shooting procedure on a good OS should go.
Let me ask you something...if XP is so good, why is "Longhorn" a complete rewrite from scratch? Could it be that MS recognizes that the existing codebase is not maintainable? That is a BAD THING, my friends, and I see no determination to change this fundamental flaw in Longhorn. What I want MS to do is to STOP coming up with new OSs; I want them to finally release an OS that can be fixed and upgraded without having to be completely trashed and rewritten. Because when you have to trash your OS and write a new one from scratch, you are throwing away a known set of bugs and fixes...and acquiring a whole universe of new bugs. Contrast that with Linux/Unix--in its various incarnations it's been around for a long time...long enough to have most of its bugs fixed.
Why does MS do this? Because MS has convinced the world that having a completely new OS every few years is a good thing, that we should welcome the advent of the new "improved" OS with hallelujahs and showers of $100 bills. Thus, they have no incentive to build an OS that will last--they just want to build an OS that will last 4 years.
As for the MS "office" products, they are truly pathetic. Look at Word: it used to be a fairly good (if somewhat buggy and quirky) word processor back in 1989; NOW it's an unusable word processor with a bad case of elephantiasis. Why? Because in order to continue selling something for the ridiculous prices that Mr. Gates charges, you have to justify it in terms of "new features". Never mind fixing the old bugs--it's not like people will buy something else; you just have to give some justification for continuing to charge those high prices.
So called "office productivity software" is no longer rocket science--it's well-mapped territory. Everyone knows what a word processor or a spreadsheet is supposed to do. The idea of improving the word processor through more advanced features is like improving the pencil--there's nothing much you can do to make this thing fundamentally better. What you could do is address the usability issues in the present products. But MS has no incentive to do that. What are they going to say in their advertisements? "Now, finally a usable word processor!" Or maybe "Simpler is better!". I don't think so.
In addition to a stable OS that just runs our programs what we need is a set of cheap user-friendly and simple applications. Remember the old MacWrite? It could have used a couple more features (like the idea of paragraph styles), but it was a word processor I could give to my 8 year old, and she could use it immediately. That is the kind of "progress" we need now in "productivity" tools.
Your argument makes no sense anyway. If today's music is so crap, why do so many people pirate it? It's a copout to say, "Well, maybe if they would just produce good music."
Maybe pirates are paying the price they think the product is worth?
Musical tastes (and qualitative judgments) aside, I rarely buy CDs--I copy them from a friend who does, and who has a huge collection of folk and Gaelic music. If he were to stop letting me copy his CDs, I'd probably buy maybe 1 CD every other month, tops. They are just too darn expensive--I feel like I'm getting ripped off when I pay for them, even if it's stuff I really like. If CDs were $4.99, then I'd probably buy a dozen a month.
Well yes, 90% of all the comments will be on the order of:
This doesn't make sense
Can't tell what you mean here
So, why do you think so? Give some reasons
You really need an argument for this!
Give some examples of this so I can tell what you mean
No, [insert philosopher] is stating is opponent's view here, not his own
I'm not at all sure that it is possible to write a "semantic evaluator" that will even make comments of this sort, let alone the far more complicated responses you have to make when someone actually gets past the preliminary misunderstandings. Heck, the next step would be to write something you can have an interesting philosophical discussion with, and that would count as passing the Turing test, no?
I won't say it's not possible to write such a program--I don't know enough to say that. In fact, I can't even imagine it. (Unless I'm in science fiction mode, of course. Then I can imagine just about anything.)
In one of my previous mini-careers (or "careens", if you prefer) was teaching philosophy to undergraduates (never got a tenure track position, that's why I'm here with you geeks). Yes, 95% of the essays sucked, and if I could have had a computer grade them for me, I would have been tempted to chuck them into the hopper. No doubt, the computer would have picked up on incomplete or run-on sentences, lack of paragraph breaks, and would have satisfyingly whacked the people who randomly sprinkle commas throughout their writing as though punctuation were a condiment, like pepper.
Probably, the computer would have given the same number of Bs and B+s as I did. But what about the precious few, the shining jewels I found buried in the muck? What about the guy who offered a unique insight on Descartes' dream argument, or the girl who timidly wrote a criticism of a passage in Bertrand Russell's Problems of Philosophy, but then said she must be wrong, "because I'm not as smart as Bertrand Russell". Would the computer have given those people an A? Would it have made encouraging comments in the margins? Heck, some of these insightful people even made spelling errors, or wrote more than 5 paragraphs.
While I agree with the previous poster that way too many kids graduate from high school lacking even the rudiments of writing ability, I don't think the answer is to have computers grade their essays. Why? Well, for one thing there is more than one way to write a good essay. The best writing doesn't fit into a mold; often, it breaks the rules and succeeds brilliantly. I'd like to see a software algorithm that can recognize such writing. My prediction is that computer grading will become yet another way the educational establishment enforces mediocrity and groupthink. I suppose it will be an intelligence test, of sorts: the smart kids will figure out how to play the system, just like smart kids have always done OK. Creative individuals who don't have that kind of analytical manipulative skill will just be out of luck.
Obviously, this poster is at the age where everyone over 28 seems ancient to him. I'm in my mid-fifties (well, the downhill side, if you must know), and I've been working in the computer industry for over 25 years. Yeah, I used to program abacuses in machine language, and walked to work through miles of shoulder-high snowdrifts. I also started back when you could talk your way into a programming job with a liberal arts degree, because there weren't many people around who had a CS degree. I never got used to having stuff spoon-fed to me--I always figured you just have to go out and teach yourself what you need to know.
Believe me, there are still plenty of gadgets out there that I want, and I'm learning lots of new techie stuff every week. Some of it even has to do with work. I just got over a forced career realignment when I was riffed by one company and had to find a way to use my computer skills for a totally different type of company and environment. Let's see you roll with those punches, whippersnapper! You'd give up and go back to pharmacy school.
Of course, the people you would find in a nursing home now are in their eighties or nineties, and they missed out on the big computer wave. And people that age normally aren't that interested in acquiring new skills. But that's not true of everybody who's that age, of course. Just like it's not true that everyone under 25 is a rude twit.
As for the iPod, heck you're right--I couldn't care less. The stuff iTunes sells I wouldn't buy at a penny a song. I hate modern music--if it was composed less than 200 years ago, it's crap. Well, except for 50s and 60s rock, of course...
Insightful?
Re:What is money? - how about banking?
on
The Confusion
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· Score: 1
I've always been fascinated by the concept of money. However, I think the role of banking is at least as interesting as the question of what money is--and I think you can't understand money if you don't understand banking. Despite what Lietaer says, money isn't just a social contract to accept some currency. If it were, we could all agree to accept dust bunnies as currency, and be rich. I suspect (though I never studied economics and don't pretend to know anything about it) that private banks had a great deal to do with the creation of modern currency.
Governments have issued gold coins for use use currency for a long, long time. But even gold is not terribly portable (especially if you have a lot of it), and coinage has been notoriously subject to debasement and counterfeiting. (It's called the former when done by the government, the latter when done by unlicensed individuals, but in both cases it means passing coins that have a lower than advertised content of precious metals.)
But a "letter of credit" from a bank is very portable, and keeps its value as long as the bank continues to exist. (I.e., so long as their banca isn't rotta.) Letters of credit, bank drafts, bank notes and so forth are, I suspect, the real beginning of modern currency.
Stephenson talks about this stuff? Dang. Maybe I should buy the books after all! --Though, come to think of it, why doesn't he just write essays?
When Cryptonomicon came out, a lot of people asked "is this science fiction?". My question was more fundamental: "Is this a novel?". So since I thought Crypto was pretty flaccid in the plot department, I'm not going to bother with Quicksilver et. al.
One might also keep in mind that Neil Stephenson has never written a satisfactory ending. He really seems to have a good time writing novels, but seems to put little thought into driving things to a logical conclusion. It is therefore unlikely that this new series will ever actually have an ending. A termination, maybe--but not an ending.
Leave it to me to see the leaden lining of every silver cloud. If you have four processors, then won't you have to buy a server-class Windows license? IIRC, AFAIK, IMHO, etc. etc. the limit of regular Windows OS licenses is two processors.
It so happens that Unix IS a true multi-user system, while Windows is just barely getting there with Windows 2000.
You were making good sense until that last part. What do mean "just barely getting there" with Windows 2000? Windows 2K is nowhere near anything that resembles a multi-user OS, and neither is XP. I've heard lots of hype about Longhorn, but the words, "true multi-user operating system" didn't come up.
I've been working in a Windows shop for nearly a year now, since I was cast out of Heaven as the result of a RIF. Everyone here has their own little "personal computer" on their desk, and it's administered by a bunch of fascists called the "IT Department" that tries to make sure all the little boxes stay exactly the same. So they're personal...and each one is just like all the others...in theory.
Of course, they're never really the same, because everyone tries to outwit IT to do something they're not allowed to, or because they don't have a clue about how to run a computer. So what we have is utter unmanageable chaos--and the poor IT devils regularly electrocute themselves to ease the pain. How sweet and sensible it would be to have some mainframes with a true multi-user OS--like *IX. If we had that instead of these stupid "personal computers" with single-user operating systems, it would be easy to share files and applications securely, and I.T. could spend their time managing something that was designed from the ground up to be a multi-user system, and was designed to be managed.
But like I said, I was cast out of Heaven, so I know where I am now, and why we use Windows.
Obligatory Military Application
on
Directed Sound
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· Score: 1
So what happens if you build one a couple of meters across and put a few hundred thousand watts through it?
The US has been a "minor player" in "basic science" for most of its history except for the time after WW II? That's an odd assertion. First of all, a good portion of all the interesting scientific stuff has happened since WW II, so this is sort of like saying "Motor racing was not a popular past-time in the United States, except for the period beginning circa 1900".
But the question that really interests me is, just what is "basic science"? The author seems to equate it with "useless science"--that is, neat stuff that we can't see a use for. I guess one might feel moved to give money for the discovery of neat useless stuff...as long as the money belongs to someone else. If it's your money, wouldn't you prefer to invest it in endeavors that have some reasonable chance of yielding useful results? I would.
The super-collider (remember the super-collider?) is an excellent case in point. Here you had some guys who wanted the public to invest billions in a huge facility that would provide employment to physicists who would use it to shoot subatomic particles at other subatomic particles at very huge velocities. The problem is that no one could articulate what useful results this endeavor would yield. Indeed, no one managed to articulate any conceivable gain from building this thing, except money in the pockets of physicists who would then write papers that were incomprehensible even to other physicists. I'm not saying there weren't good reasons to build the super-collider, just that if there were such reasons, no one managed to state them clearly. So what did we lose by not building it?
I guess I just don't see why we should subsidize something--especially something hugely expensive--just because some scientists think it's neat. Maybe I'm wrong...but can someone provide examples of massive government funding directed at research that had no practical end, but resulted in a major breakthrough? And tell me please, if a project results in a breakthrough, is it still "basic science"? --Oops, we made a mistake, this thing is useful, let's kill it!
Frankly, I think that this claim that we ought to support useless research is a pretty strange one, and I would like to see some argument for it.
Also, aren't those 100,000 people the ones who are most likely to be inventing new stuff? These are people who like to fiddle around with hardware and software, the creative elite...whom Mr. Valenti would like to choke in the cradle. Evil old man.
I've always said that paper will be replaced just as soon as they invent something just as good. Judging from this Sony product, we're not there yet.
I think what we need is an electronic display medium that not only looks like paper, but feels like it. In other words, I want an e-display book I can riffle through. I want to page the display by...turning a page. I want the print to be as clear and crisp as in a good-quality book (resizeable type would be nice as my eyes get worse). And I want it to weigh next to nothing.
What I've got in mind is something that looks like a small hard-bound book, say 5" x 6", has about 50 real physical pages that display digital ink, and all the electronics (including the battery) in the binding and covers. It doesn't have to have color or even grayscale (though naturally those would be nice eventually)--most of the books I read these days don't have pictures. As I load the novel I want to read (using a menu in the unobtrusive touch-me GUI inside the front cover), the e-display book shows me the first 50 pages. The book senses when I've read to page 45, and replaces the first 40 e-display pages with pages 51 through 90 of the text.
DRM shouldn't be a problem, I'd happily pay for digital text to download. And hey, no more piles of books getting dusty by my bedside! My wife would be so happy.
Organizing a union sounds just great in theory; the practice is a bit rougher.
To do any good, a union occasionally has to strike. You might think twice about the attractiveness of unions when you have to decide between collecting a paycheck and walking a picket line...betting on the chance that the union will win and you get a raise, instead of having your job shipped to India. You ready to beat up the scabs (your ex-friends)? You ready to get the shit kicked out of you by management goons? Gonna put up with all the BS rules the union hierarchy imposes in addition to your employer's BS rules?
There are worse things than working extra hours for a PHB, so I think union talk is going to stay just that: empty talk. At least I hope so.
Re:Your office is not defending the USA
on
Weapons in Space
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· Score: 1
Terrorism is the future of warfare. Repeat it until you believe it. The next attack on the US will cost less than the fuel for one US missile.
Probably so. But what about the one after that? And the one after that one? The future has a way of surprising us, and it's smart to hedge our bets. Need I remind you of the dependency of our military operations on satellite communications and GPS? Those satellites have to be defended--and there are several countries in the world now that have a satellite killer capability
As for the argument that China would never attack us because then we'd refuse to buy their stuff...well who ever told you countries have to act rationally? There were intelligent well-informed people who argued that a major war was impossible, because the world was too tightly knit by commerce...in 1910. Yeah, it was crazy, but it happened anyway.
"The future will surprise you"--repeat it until you believe it.
It seems to me that the perennial discussions of "outsourcing" jobs on/. keep revolving around the same narrow issues of immediate gains or losses in jobs or dollars. Nobody seems to look at the more subtle consequences of this practice, and at the long-term effects. In their focus on immediate profit and loss, slash-dotters are no more insightful than the average corporate executive.
In the past 100 years, the United States has been a world leader in technological innovation because we have gathered a vast pool of talented individuals and gave them an environment that rewarded hard creative work. We are now in the process of demolishing this environment, and one of the most destructive wrecking balls is the inappropriate use of "outsourcing".
When a company "outsources" a job, they are saying that they place no value on the expertise required for this job or on the knowledge gained while performing it--they desire only the end-product, and they want it as cheaply as possible. If they thought that the knowledge and skills of the workers was valuable, they would seek to retain this value by hiring the workers.
In the past, American companies like AT&T, IBM and HP went to great lengths to nurture their pool of talented inventors, theorists and engineers, and jealously guarded these valuable individuals against poaching by rival corporations. They recognized the value of in-house expertise and accumulaed institutional knowledge, and they did not shy away from incurring short-term costs in the interest of the long-term gains that could be had through innovation and invention.
This practice has been largely abandoned by the new breed of corporate executives who look only to quarterly reports for vindication, who think that marketing is far more important than discovering new principles that may some day become saleable products. These people are a self-perpetuating oligarchy that seeks only its own advantage, and who regard corporations as a means to obtaining that advantage. They are responsible to no one, they set their own wages, they are rewarded as well for failure as for success. That, my friends, is the evil face of capitalism.
Please note what I am not saying. I am not saying that foreigners are less intelligent or less creative than Americans. That would be silly, since immigrants have always been the main wellspring of creativity and innovation in America. I am saying that to have an innovative and creative culture, we must value those qualities in individuals, and we must maintain an environment where such individuals are not only rewarded, but where they are abundant enough to form a critical mass. Real talent is cooperative; real invention is the result of collaboration, of cross-fertilization. Though scientists and engineers working for an American company can teleconference with their contracted counterparts in India, this is not a climate that often facilitates creative collaboration. No matter where they are located or what their nationality, outside contractors are seen as what they are: outsiders. They are temporary, their expertise is valued only in terms of what they immediately produce. When the job is done, they will be gone. Why work hard at establishing a relationship with them? Real collaboration requires physical proximity and a degree of permanence.
The destructive effects of inappropriate "outsourcing" are manifold. First, the work that is farmed out is seen as being less valuable; second the individuals that perform the work are perceived to have no intrinsic value at all. Third, a crucially valuable resource--the worlds best pool of creative thinkers and doers--is being frittered away. And that's a crime.
Actually, it's not clear what information is going which way. The article says that private organizations can submit names "for screening", but it doesn't say what is done with the results of the screening. Does the government report back to the private company about who passes and who is associated with a "terrorist nexus"? Or maybe--yikes!--the names that are submitted get added to the government black list? Truly, obfuscatory language is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
I couldn't agree more. I actually kind of enjoyed the rigid discipline imposed on me by Python when I wrote my first program in that language. I figured it kind of made up for my not attending Catholic school when I was a kid. However, my first Python program suddenly became my last Python program when my text editor inadvertently ate all the indents. Now, if this had been Perl, I could have figured out what was what by looking for the curly braces...but since it was Python, all I had was one long file of flush-left statements. To top it off, this mishap occurred just after a flurry of rewriting, so it was a tossup whether I went back to the last backup or tried to reconstruct what I had. Oh, the suffering.
Another reason for the evilness of meaningful white space is that it flies in the face of well-established text processing conventions. With the exception of word spaces, white space is almost always disregarded in XML and HTML--it's simply removed when the document is parsed. I think we should write programs that can be treated and processed as documents--the program is a type of data. That doesn't mean programs have to be written in XML, but it does mean that their structure should be discernable by delimiters other than spaces or whatever your system uses as tabs.
Slashdot Mirror
I figure that when Bill Gates gets to be old enough to feel the pains of decrepitude, then he will jump at a chance to fund such a project--and so will lots of other rich millionaires. The only question will be: can I afford it?
That would be great, because if everyone got speeding tickets for violating our (US) ridiculously low speed limits, then there would be such a public clamor that they'd have to give in and raise the speed limits to reasonable levels. I gotta drive to work on a superhighway with a 60MPH speed limit on most of it. Everybody goes 80, and the cops just randomly pick people off to collect "speed tax". I got hit with two tickets in 6 months...the last one cost me $300. Grrrrr.
So bring on those RFID tags.
Your assertion would be believable if players (especially kids) reacted with repugnance to the violence they encounter in these games. But if that were so, the game wouldn't be enjoyable, and they would stop playing. Instead, they enjoy the experience, and play the games over and over again. Does that mean everyone who plays shooters will become a killer? Of course not, but at the very least, these games won't turn players into kinder and gentler people. (And there has been research showing that violent media tend to make kids behave more violently toward each other.)
Do shooters teach the player about his mortality? I hardly think so. If anything, players learn that after you die, you just hit "New Game". No pain, no consequences.
As for getting the violence "out of their system," the notion that acting out violent feelings makes people calmer is an old pop-psych notion that has been discredited by more recent research. Acting violently makes you madder--it escalates anger, it doesn't diffuse it. Why do you think the US Army distributes a free shooter called "America's Army"? Because it discourages enlistments?
The reasons for this are the same as those cited by the parent--publishers act as a filter. Not everything that is distributed by well-known publishing houses is good, but chances of finding something good among published books is far better than hunting around the web looking for gems amid the piles of self-published junk. The publishing houses look for talented authors, pay successful ones well to keep writing, give them editorial support and encouragement, and produce their work in an easy to read form called "books".
There are some signs that this model is not working as well as it did in the past. (Check the price of paperback books recently?) But I think that the needed changes don't include getting rid of publishers so much as thinking up new ways for them to distribute their product. The crucial innovation might be a technology that makes downloading books and instant-printing practical, or (more likely) the advent of a really good electronic book.
The question as to whether these comments apply also to the music industry is left as an exercise for the reader.
Thanks, /. Now I can worry until I get home from work...
I've sworn a bloody oath not to upgrade from Win 2K Pro forever because I can't swallow an OS that makes me ask for permission before I can run it. If they drop that stupid licensing scheme, maybe I'll actually upgrade. Someday. Maybe. Hmmm. When I think of a good reason, anyway.
Let me ask you something...if XP is so good, why is "Longhorn" a complete rewrite from scratch? Could it be that MS recognizes that the existing codebase is not maintainable? That is a BAD THING, my friends, and I see no determination to change this fundamental flaw in Longhorn. What I want MS to do is to STOP coming up with new OSs; I want them to finally release an OS that can be fixed and upgraded without having to be completely trashed and rewritten. Because when you have to trash your OS and write a new one from scratch, you are throwing away a known set of bugs and fixes...and acquiring a whole universe of new bugs. Contrast that with Linux/Unix--in its various incarnations it's been around for a long time...long enough to have most of its bugs fixed.
Why does MS do this? Because MS has convinced the world that having a completely new OS every few years is a good thing, that we should welcome the advent of the new "improved" OS with hallelujahs and showers of $100 bills. Thus, they have no incentive to build an OS that will last--they just want to build an OS that will last 4 years.
As for the MS "office" products, they are truly pathetic. Look at Word: it used to be a fairly good (if somewhat buggy and quirky) word processor back in 1989; NOW it's an unusable word processor with a bad case of elephantiasis. Why? Because in order to continue selling something for the ridiculous prices that Mr. Gates charges, you have to justify it in terms of "new features". Never mind fixing the old bugs--it's not like people will buy something else; you just have to give some justification for continuing to charge those high prices.
So called "office productivity software" is no longer rocket science--it's well-mapped territory. Everyone knows what a word processor or a spreadsheet is supposed to do. The idea of improving the word processor through more advanced features is like improving the pencil--there's nothing much you can do to make this thing fundamentally better. What you could do is address the usability issues in the present products. But MS has no incentive to do that. What are they going to say in their advertisements? "Now, finally a usable word processor!" Or maybe "Simpler is better!". I don't think so.
In addition to a stable OS that just runs our programs what we need is a set of cheap user-friendly and simple applications. Remember the old MacWrite? It could have used a couple more features (like the idea of paragraph styles), but it was a word processor I could give to my 8 year old, and she could use it immediately. That is the kind of "progress" we need now in "productivity" tools.
Maybe pirates are paying the price they think the product is worth?
Musical tastes (and qualitative judgments) aside, I rarely buy CDs--I copy them from a friend who does, and who has a huge collection of folk and Gaelic music. If he were to stop letting me copy his CDs, I'd probably buy maybe 1 CD every other month, tops. They are just too darn expensive--I feel like I'm getting ripped off when I pay for them, even if it's stuff I really like. If CDs were $4.99, then I'd probably buy a dozen a month.
I'm not at all sure that it is possible to write a "semantic evaluator" that will even make comments of this sort, let alone the far more complicated responses you have to make when someone actually gets past the preliminary misunderstandings. Heck, the next step would be to write something you can have an interesting philosophical discussion with, and that would count as passing the Turing test, no?
I won't say it's not possible to write such a program--I don't know enough to say that. In fact, I can't even imagine it. (Unless I'm in science fiction mode, of course. Then I can imagine just about anything.)
Probably, the computer would have given the same number of Bs and B+s as I did. But what about the precious few, the shining jewels I found buried in the muck? What about the guy who offered a unique insight on Descartes' dream argument, or the girl who timidly wrote a criticism of a passage in Bertrand Russell's Problems of Philosophy, but then said she must be wrong, "because I'm not as smart as Bertrand Russell". Would the computer have given those people an A? Would it have made encouraging comments in the margins? Heck, some of these insightful people even made spelling errors, or wrote more than 5 paragraphs.
While I agree with the previous poster that way too many kids graduate from high school lacking even the rudiments of writing ability, I don't think the answer is to have computers grade their essays. Why? Well, for one thing there is more than one way to write a good essay. The best writing doesn't fit into a mold; often, it breaks the rules and succeeds brilliantly. I'd like to see a software algorithm that can recognize such writing. My prediction is that computer grading will become yet another way the educational establishment enforces mediocrity and groupthink. I suppose it will be an intelligence test, of sorts: the smart kids will figure out how to play the system, just like smart kids have always done OK. Creative individuals who don't have that kind of analytical manipulative skill will just be out of luck.
Believe me, there are still plenty of gadgets out there that I want, and I'm learning lots of new techie stuff every week. Some of it even has to do with work. I just got over a forced career realignment when I was riffed by one company and had to find a way to use my computer skills for a totally different type of company and environment. Let's see you roll with those punches, whippersnapper! You'd give up and go back to pharmacy school.
Of course, the people you would find in a nursing home now are in their eighties or nineties, and they missed out on the big computer wave. And people that age normally aren't that interested in acquiring new skills. But that's not true of everybody who's that age, of course. Just like it's not true that everyone under 25 is a rude twit.
As for the iPod, heck you're right--I couldn't care less. The stuff iTunes sells I wouldn't buy at a penny a song. I hate modern music--if it was composed less than 200 years ago, it's crap. Well, except for 50s and 60s rock, of course...
Insightful?
But a "letter of credit" from a bank is very portable, and keeps its value as long as the bank continues to exist. (I.e., so long as their banca isn't rotta.) Letters of credit, bank drafts, bank notes and so forth are, I suspect, the real beginning of modern currency.
Stephenson talks about this stuff? Dang. Maybe I should buy the books after all! --Though, come to think of it, why doesn't he just write essays?
One might also keep in mind that Neil Stephenson has never written a satisfactory ending. He really seems to have a good time writing novels, but seems to put little thought into driving things to a logical conclusion. It is therefore unlikely that this new series will ever actually have an ending. A termination, maybe--but not an ending.
Caveat emptor.
Leave it to me to see the leaden lining of every silver cloud. If you have four processors, then won't you have to buy a server-class Windows license? IIRC, AFAIK, IMHO, etc. etc. the limit of regular Windows OS licenses is two processors.
You were making good sense until that last part. What do mean "just barely getting there" with Windows 2000? Windows 2K is nowhere near anything that resembles a multi-user OS, and neither is XP. I've heard lots of hype about Longhorn, but the words, "true multi-user operating system" didn't come up.
I've been working in a Windows shop for nearly a year now, since I was cast out of Heaven as the result of a RIF. Everyone here has their own little "personal computer" on their desk, and it's administered by a bunch of fascists called the "IT Department" that tries to make sure all the little boxes stay exactly the same. So they're personal...and each one is just like all the others...in theory.
Of course, they're never really the same, because everyone tries to outwit IT to do something they're not allowed to, or because they don't have a clue about how to run a computer. So what we have is utter unmanageable chaos--and the poor IT devils regularly electrocute themselves to ease the pain. How sweet and sensible it would be to have some mainframes with a true multi-user OS--like *IX. If we had that instead of these stupid "personal computers" with single-user operating systems, it would be easy to share files and applications securely, and I.T. could spend their time managing something that was designed from the ground up to be a multi-user system, and was designed to be managed.
But like I said, I was cast out of Heaven, so I know where I am now, and why we use Windows.
Sorry, but I gotta ask...
But the question that really interests me is, just what is "basic science"? The author seems to equate it with "useless science"--that is, neat stuff that we can't see a use for. I guess one might feel moved to give money for the discovery of neat useless stuff...as long as the money belongs to someone else. If it's your money, wouldn't you prefer to invest it in endeavors that have some reasonable chance of yielding useful results? I would.
The super-collider (remember the super-collider?) is an excellent case in point. Here you had some guys who wanted the public to invest billions in a huge facility that would provide employment to physicists who would use it to shoot subatomic particles at other subatomic particles at very huge velocities. The problem is that no one could articulate what useful results this endeavor would yield. Indeed, no one managed to articulate any conceivable gain from building this thing, except money in the pockets of physicists who would then write papers that were incomprehensible even to other physicists. I'm not saying there weren't good reasons to build the super-collider, just that if there were such reasons, no one managed to state them clearly. So what did we lose by not building it?
I guess I just don't see why we should subsidize something--especially something hugely expensive--just because some scientists think it's neat. Maybe I'm wrong...but can someone provide examples of massive government funding directed at research that had no practical end, but resulted in a major breakthrough? And tell me please, if a project results in a breakthrough, is it still "basic science"? --Oops, we made a mistake, this thing is useful, let's kill it!
Frankly, I think that this claim that we ought to support useless research is a pretty strange one, and I would like to see some argument for it.
Also, aren't those 100,000 people the ones who are most likely to be inventing new stuff? These are people who like to fiddle around with hardware and software, the creative elite...whom Mr. Valenti would like to choke in the cradle. Evil old man.
I think what we need is an electronic display medium that not only looks like paper, but feels like it. In other words, I want an e-display book I can riffle through. I want to page the display by...turning a page. I want the print to be as clear and crisp as in a good-quality book (resizeable type would be nice as my eyes get worse). And I want it to weigh next to nothing.
What I've got in mind is something that looks like a small hard-bound book, say 5" x 6", has about 50 real physical pages that display digital ink, and all the electronics (including the battery) in the binding and covers. It doesn't have to have color or even grayscale (though naturally those would be nice eventually)--most of the books I read these days don't have pictures. As I load the novel I want to read (using a menu in the unobtrusive touch-me GUI inside the front cover), the e-display book shows me the first 50 pages. The book senses when I've read to page 45, and replaces the first 40 e-display pages with pages 51 through 90 of the text.
DRM shouldn't be a problem, I'd happily pay for digital text to download. And hey, no more piles of books getting dusty by my bedside! My wife would be so happy.
To do any good, a union occasionally has to strike. You might think twice about the attractiveness of unions when you have to decide between collecting a paycheck and walking a picket line...betting on the chance that the union will win and you get a raise, instead of having your job shipped to India. You ready to beat up the scabs (your ex-friends)? You ready to get the shit kicked out of you by management goons? Gonna put up with all the BS rules the union hierarchy imposes in addition to your employer's BS rules?
There are worse things than working extra hours for a PHB, so I think union talk is going to stay just that: empty talk. At least I hope so.
Probably so. But what about the one after that? And the one after that one? The future has a way of surprising us, and it's smart to hedge our bets. Need I remind you of the dependency of our military operations on satellite communications and GPS? Those satellites have to be defended--and there are several countries in the world now that have a satellite killer capability
As for the argument that China would never attack us because then we'd refuse to buy their stuff...well who ever told you countries have to act rationally? There were intelligent well-informed people who argued that a major war was impossible, because the world was too tightly knit by commerce...in 1910. Yeah, it was crazy, but it happened anyway.
"The future will surprise you"--repeat it until you believe it.
In the past 100 years, the United States has been a world leader in technological innovation because we have gathered a vast pool of talented individuals and gave them an environment that rewarded hard creative work. We are now in the process of demolishing this environment, and one of the most destructive wrecking balls is the inappropriate use of "outsourcing".
When a company "outsources" a job, they are saying that they place no value on the expertise required for this job or on the knowledge gained while performing it--they desire only the end-product, and they want it as cheaply as possible. If they thought that the knowledge and skills of the workers was valuable, they would seek to retain this value by hiring the workers.
In the past, American companies like AT&T, IBM and HP went to great lengths to nurture their pool of talented inventors, theorists and engineers, and jealously guarded these valuable individuals against poaching by rival corporations. They recognized the value of in-house expertise and accumulaed institutional knowledge, and they did not shy away from incurring short-term costs in the interest of the long-term gains that could be had through innovation and invention.
This practice has been largely abandoned by the new breed of corporate executives who look only to quarterly reports for vindication, who think that marketing is far more important than discovering new principles that may some day become saleable products. These people are a self-perpetuating oligarchy that seeks only its own advantage, and who regard corporations as a means to obtaining that advantage. They are responsible to no one, they set their own wages, they are rewarded as well for failure as for success. That, my friends, is the evil face of capitalism.
Please note what I am not saying. I am not saying that foreigners are less intelligent or less creative than Americans. That would be silly, since immigrants have always been the main wellspring of creativity and innovation in America. I am saying that to have an innovative and creative culture, we must value those qualities in individuals, and we must maintain an environment where such individuals are not only rewarded, but where they are abundant enough to form a critical mass. Real talent is cooperative; real invention is the result of collaboration, of cross-fertilization. Though scientists and engineers working for an American company can teleconference with their contracted counterparts in India, this is not a climate that often facilitates creative collaboration. No matter where they are located or what their nationality, outside contractors are seen as what they are: outsiders. They are temporary, their expertise is valued only in terms of what they immediately produce. When the job is done, they will be gone. Why work hard at establishing a relationship with them? Real collaboration requires physical proximity and a degree of permanence.
The destructive effects of inappropriate "outsourcing" are manifold. First, the work that is farmed out is seen as being less valuable; second the individuals that perform the work are perceived to have no intrinsic value at all. Third, a crucially valuable resource--the worlds best pool of creative thinkers and doers--is being frittered away. And that's a crime.
Actually, it's not clear what information is going which way. The article says that private organizations can submit names "for screening", but it doesn't say what is done with the results of the screening. Does the government report back to the private company about who passes and who is associated with a "terrorist nexus"? Or maybe--yikes!--the names that are submitted get added to the government black list? Truly, obfuscatory language is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
Another reason for the evilness of meaningful white space is that it flies in the face of well-established text processing conventions. With the exception of word spaces, white space is almost always disregarded in XML and HTML--it's simply removed when the document is parsed. I think we should write programs that can be treated and processed as documents--the program is a type of data. That doesn't mean programs have to be written in XML, but it does mean that their structure should be discernable by delimiters other than spaces or whatever your system uses as tabs.
The world may not be logical, but arguments should be. Or is this load of horse manure an intentional parody of obfuscatory anti-intellectualism?