Well, peer-review isn't very costly. Nowadays, as a reviewer, you typically get sent the text by email in the same format (the same files) as the writer submitted, minus the name. You read and review, and send your comments back, by email. You don't get paid for doing this; not very expensive in other words.
Besides, as we've all suspected and some studies have shown lately, peer review isn't all that effective as a vetting procedure. Too often a paper will get reviewed based on the author on affiliation as much as on the content (it's often impossible to truly hide the origin), or busy, harried people will dash off a "review" based on a five-minute glance through the abstract and conclusion. The system is certainly in need of an overhaul, and the emergence of a new, parallel model for publishing should open a window of opportunity to do so.
Actually, I saw Episode I, found out it sucked badly, and avoided Episode II until I could be reassured that it wasn't as hideously bad. Of course, it seems it was even worse, so I will likely never see it, or Episode III. Or, probably, anything more by Lucas.
Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to find that guy who "could care less".
Well, if someone posts somewhere about something, saying they could care less, they are factually and linguistically entirely correct. They could care less - and not post at all.
But simple of tools can lead to a verbose and inefficient product.
Again, it is simply immaterial.
Any netwoekred system like this depends on building a mass of users. If you make it easy to grasp and easy (and cheap) to use, then you have a good shot. If not, you don't - and it won't matter if your system will cure cancer, end world hunger and give everybody a promotion in ten years time. If it's not the easiest, most graspable offering _right_now_, you are very likely to fail.
This really is an epsilon-greedy or evolutionary-type algorithm; people, in aggregate, will not look to what is best in the future, but will go with the flow, take the easy way out, use the path of least resistance - with some pertubations, making for the occasional surprise.
The problem is that we're wrapping new technology around a culture instead of building a new culture around technology.
And that attitude is likely a large part of the explanation of why Xanadu (and other blue-sky projects) never seem to get any traction no matter how good they are on the surface.
People will _not_ change their culture and society to accomodate a new technology, and especially not when you have an alternative technology that will accommodate itself instead of requiring society to do so. Of course, the technology may lead to huge changes down the road (cars, anyone?), but they need to not require it for simple initial adoption at least.
"It is also simple to use; just make it point. No need to keep track of who is pointing to me; no need to worry about what span to actually point to; no need to worry about the origins of the text that will be the result."
Tell that to Google. The amount of effort that they have put into working round the web's faults through keeping track of backlinks for you is immense.
It is simple to use for the user - the people who are needed to actually fill the web with material, and read it. That is what is important for a system like this to work and to take off in the first place.
With Xanadu you may never have needed a Google, but that's because there'd be no masses of material to index in the first place.
The gripes you have about the web are _exactly_ why html and the web succeeded where something like Xanadu did not.
Firstly, I can only link one thing at a time.[...]Secondly, HTML is linear.
Or, in other words, the concepts are simple to understand - a link just points a finger from here to some other spot somewhere in ordinary linear documents, which we all are used to create, read and manipulate. The text you see is the text you have; any text from the outside is either in the form of a reference marker (a link) or as a quotation (which has nothing to do with hypertext at all, but is a very pervasive standard).
It is also simple to use; just make it point. No need to keep track of who is pointing to me; no need to worry about what span to actually point to; no need to worry about the origins of the text that will be the result.
Oh, and it fails gracefully. A dead link is just that, and no more. Parts of your document doesn't suddenly go missing.
You are exactly describing creating a theme for Gtk. The actual wodget drawing is a separate plugin system, so you can do exactly what you describe by writing a theme engine. And of course, people have done this already; if you try some theme engine like IceWM, you'll notice it will be a lot faster than the pixmap engine. It won't be nearly as configurable either, but that's what you "pay".
Generally, however, Gtk is pretty fast for what it does. "Slimming" it down would entail removing real functionality. And what is "unnessesary" functionality changes from user to user and app to app. You may not care about accessibility stuff or i18n for example, but that doesn't mean it's not important for a lot of other users.
But then it's been proven that the world is round... just keep walking in a straight line (making sure to learn how to walk on water and up vertical surfaces) and you can see for yourself.
Invisible magical blue-scaled lizard midgets. When anybody comes close to the edge, they will magically put them to sleep and run them to the opposite side of the disc in their secret network of extradimensional tunnels. once there, they reposition the person in exactly the same way they were, and wake them up.
Now, this is at least as convincing a theory as ID, with just as much evidence and falsifiability, and deserves all the same repsect and classroom time.
Now, I agree fully about preventative care being a great way to spend resources (and that would inlcude things like discouraging or disallowing smoking, drinking, gun ownershipo and so on). Also, these policies would make greater effect the younger people are - so age limits on stuff like the above is a really great idea.
However, I'm not too sure I (or anybody) really would like where a strict implementation of these policies would lead.
If you really focus health resources (and, of course, any other resources - why waste food or ownership laws on those who don't benefit?) in proportion to life expectancy, people with lower life expectancy (older people, young people with chronic or debilitating diseases) will get little, and those with almost no life expectancy (like the very old, or people with grave injuries) will get almost nothing at all. So they will tend to die in greater numbers.
This will alter the allocation yet more in the favour of the very healthy, and very young, lowering the life expectancy of everybody else yet more. At least under some conditions, you will get a sharp cutoff.
You'll have full access to societal resources up until some age (which would probably be quite low) or until you actually manage to get an injury or disease that is serious enough - at which point you are chained to a working place to work as a slave until weakness gets the better of you and your body is milled down to recover valuable chemicals.
Kind of like shooting horses once they get a serious enough leg injury, really.
``If I remember correctly, that is still under patent. Until they expire, the format will be a nonstarter.''
You mean like GIF and MPEG and MP3 and probably this new scheme?
I should have elaborated. I remember when this was first written about. It was pretty amazing, but the inventors were charging for the right to implement a decoder, and (at least in the beginning) would not even let others to encode at all; the business model was apparently that you'd send them the images and they'd encode it for you.
Even without that last bit of stupidity, the fact that you needed to pay to implement a decoder meant that nobody did, since there was no images to decode anyway. And not many would want to encode in a format that nobody could read since they didn't have a decoder.
I agree with you about what a good idea it isn't; that is why I am extrapolating stuff, to get a feel for where it is a bad idea.
At the same time, there likely is _some_ line where the state probably should not go. Where that line is depends on the importance for society of a given function, but also on whether we are talking state monopoly; state-run and subsidized; state-owned; or public corporation with the state having a stake.
You could make a good case that the state should stay out of such things as "normal" retail (food, clothing, toys, electronics) and production, including food, altogether. Of course, hardly any state (including the US) actually does; import quotas and other subsidies abound in almost every economic sector.
If you do not argue for the most intrusive versions of government involvement, though (such as state-owned monopolies), there really are very few areas where you can argue that they should not be allowed to go. A state-owned company, required to bear its own costs, should be allowed to compete with the same premises as its private competitors. After all, if private business really is more efficient, that will show in the marketplace, won't it?
There are private police forces, they just can't be law enforcement. There are private armies, the just can't commit treason. Also, I doubt there is any business model that can support a fire department.
Sure they can. Just have the city/community contract it out. Decide what should be accomplished and hire a company to do it. Since the state is authorizing and backing them, they _are_ the law/fire brigade/marines - well, until another bidder goes lower the next bidding round. Efficient!
Since by definition (by some) the state is less efficient than private enterprise, it should resign itself to collecting funds and farm out the execution of, well, anything to the low bidder. There is absolutely no reason why we could not achieve the same savings and efficiencies in law enforcement, fire fighting or social services.
And why stop there? Why not farm out the court system, for example? The body of case law we already have provides an excellent foundation for the requirements of the contract - just let an efficient private company do the work instead of that wasteful bureocracy.
In fact, you can do this with the _entire_ government. Have elections - not of parties or individuals, but of policy documents. They would detail the policies and principles with which to govern the country for the next period. Then sell the job of implementing those policies to private enterprise. It _is_, after all, definitionally much more efficient, and we all want that, right.
Could guard companies rightly claim that a municipal police force is robbing them of business opportunities? Could someone start a private firebrigade and rightly stop the city from providing that service itself?
What about people building private armies? The Pentagon is denying them their livelihood!
I'm only slightly facetious here; the question really is serious.
So, what the blurb is saying is that people are communicating with people instead of watching television - and that is seen as cutting socializing time?
And disregarding the slashdot blurb, if this is communicating with friends using IM or email, rather than by phone (as seems to be the case among people I know), how is that in any ways worse?
From the chinese I know here, this is only partly true, and depends a lot on the style of writing used.
It is true that Kanji was taken from the Chinese from the beginning. Also, a large corpus of words written onloy using Kanji have been borrowed; they tend to be abstract terms or high-status words, while the older, indigenuous words are more familiar (think "ascertain" versus "make sure").
However, the actual meaning of the Kanji have tended to shift or extend somewhat differently, and so have the borrowed words. And Japanese is written with two other writing systems in combination with Kanji. This includes the all-important particles that determine what role each word has in the sentence.
Being able to decipher Kanji is helpful, but will give you only the barest inkling of the intended meaning, and that only with sentences that are straightforward - with signs probably being among the easiest.
It is worth noting here that in train stations and the like, signs are usually in Chinese, Korean and English as well. And at least in Kyoto subway, announcements are bilingual too. You aren't totally lost when you come here. The biggest problem really is being able to communicate with people, not read signs.
Tourist areas all over the world manage this without PDAs.
And when you don't want to be confined to the tourist traps?
English is widespread, but not _that_ widespread. Many visitors to Japan aren't Westerners, but Chinese or Korean. That second language should probably be Mandarin, which likely wouldn't help most slashdotters much. A restaurant not close to the usual tourist haunts may get foreign customers a few times a year at most; that would be a lot of work keeping the menus up to date in three languages just for those few occasions.
And since English knowledge in general is not up to the standard where you are confident to write a legible menu, who is going to do that translation work to begin with?
I think this is a pretty good idea. It may give visitors the confidence needed to go off the beaten tourist path a bit and try some really different experiences. There's a lot more to Japan than temples and expensive fish restaurants.
Also note that while they'll be passing them out freely during the pilot, nothing precludes the use of a deposit system, or even rental, if the trials pan out.
I did not include starting under own power - that is even more difficult than to lift. The Wright brothers' machine would qualify in my mind as it was able to stay aloft - and gain altitude - under its own power (no need to thermals or anything).
I believe flight is to be able to lift and stay aloft under your own power. Anything else would fall(sic) somewhere between gliding and falling. Using thermals would not be "real" flight, for instance. Ballons? I have no idea.
This is simply not true. It's the same old effect that only those who really dislike a feature have the motivation to speak out about it, while those who have no problems with it have better things to do than to post about how they haven't had any problems with it today either.
Never, _ever_ judge something like this simply based on volume of posts - and the same goes for letter feedback to media and politicians, as well, of course.
I like the Gimp UI. And you can snap toghether or pull apart the windows in whatever combinations you want, so I don't see why people are still complaining about "free-floating" windows.
Nothing happens by chance. Chance is simply a statiscal tool to rate probability of things observable. If you disagree, please explain to me by what power comes chances causation?
Um, none? Having quantum effects is quite enough.
That won't preclude causation in the normal sense for macroscopic objects, of course.
What is it about coding that draws these types? Was it being beaten up in school, and now they're nuts about the one thing they're good at?
Nothing. This is a known phenomena, and not limited to coding. When people pour a lot of time and effort into something, they get very possessive and defensive about the thing. It's an unconcious psychological mechanism - "I have spent a lot of effort on this. If it sucks, I have wasted all that time, money and energy. That would be really stupid of me, and I don't want to be stupid. In other words, it doesn't suck at all."
This is true for coders, but also for architects, designers, illustrators, engineers - anywhere you have the same kind of dynamic of spending a lot of time on a single issue. And it's not only individuals either - companies behave the same way, frequently holding on to their in-hous projects long after they should have been dropped in favour of an existing external option.
This is part of the reason you want to do UI design before anything else - it becomes a _lot_ harder to change anything after a first version is out, as the developers/designers/whatever are so protective of the stuff they've already accomplished. Even when it is obvious that some aspect needs changing, the prospect of having to rip out a lot of finished work causes quite understandable anguish.
Well, the blodless semi-transparent white is getting a bit long in the tooth to be honest. The benefit of basic black is that it never really gets old.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, peer-review isn't very costly. Nowadays, as a reviewer, you typically get sent the text by email in the same format (the same files) as the writer submitted, minus the name. You read and review, and send your comments back, by email. You don't get paid for doing this; not very expensive in other words.
Besides, as we've all suspected and some studies have shown lately, peer review isn't all that effective as a vetting procedure. Too often a paper will get reviewed based on the author on affiliation as much as on the content (it's often impossible to truly hide the origin), or busy, harried people will dash off a "review" based on a five-minute glance through the abstract and conclusion. The system is certainly in need of an overhaul, and the emergence of a new, parallel model for publishing should open a window of opportunity to do so.
Actually, I saw Episode I, found out it sucked badly, and avoided Episode II until I could be reassured that it wasn't as hideously bad. Of course, it seems it was even worse, so I will likely never see it, or Episode III. Or, probably, anything more by Lucas.
Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to find that guy who "could care less".
Well, if someone posts somewhere about something, saying they could care less, they are factually and linguistically entirely correct. They could care less - and not post at all.
'Fax Bush a heart!'
I just love the way that he has vowed to fight all other tyrants.
"There can be only one"
Forget the heart; give him a sword and send him out into the world. A cheap sword, with a blunt edge. Please.
But simple of tools can lead to a verbose and inefficient product.
Again, it is simply immaterial.
Any netwoekred system like this depends on building a mass of users. If you make it easy to grasp and easy (and cheap) to use, then you have a good shot. If not, you don't - and it won't matter if your system will cure cancer, end world hunger and give everybody a promotion in ten years time. If it's not the easiest, most graspable offering _right_now_, you are very likely to fail.
This really is an epsilon-greedy or evolutionary-type algorithm; people, in aggregate, will not look to what is best in the future, but will go with the flow, take the easy way out, use the path of least resistance - with some pertubations, making for the occasional surprise.
The problem is that we're wrapping new technology around a culture instead of building a new culture around technology.
And that attitude is likely a large part of the explanation of why Xanadu (and other blue-sky projects) never seem to get any traction no matter how good they are on the surface.
People will _not_ change their culture and society to accomodate a new technology, and especially not when you have an alternative technology that will accommodate itself instead of requiring society to do so. Of course, the technology may lead to huge changes down the road (cars, anyone?), but they need to not require it for simple initial adoption at least.
Xanadu is a failure, but an instructive one.
"It is also simple to use; just make it point. No need to keep track of who is pointing to me; no need to worry about what span to actually point to; no need to worry about the origins of the text that will be the result."
Tell that to Google. The amount of effort that they have put into working round the web's faults through keeping track of backlinks for you is immense.
It is simple to use for the user - the people who are needed to actually fill the web with material, and read it. That is what is important for a system like this to work and to take off in the first place.
With Xanadu you may never have needed a Google, but that's because there'd be no masses of material to index in the first place.
The gripes you have about the web are _exactly_ why html and the web succeeded where something like Xanadu did not.
Firstly, I can only link one thing at a time.[...]Secondly, HTML is linear.
Or, in other words, the concepts are simple to understand - a link just points a finger from here to some other spot somewhere in ordinary linear documents, which we all are used to create, read and manipulate. The text you see is the text you have; any text from the outside is either in the form of a reference marker (a link) or as a quotation (which has nothing to do with hypertext at all, but is a very pervasive standard).
It is also simple to use; just make it point. No need to keep track of who is pointing to me; no need to worry about what span to actually point to; no need to worry about the origins of the text that will be the result.
Oh, and it fails gracefully. A dead link is just that, and no more. Parts of your document doesn't suddenly go missing.
You are exactly describing creating a theme for Gtk. The actual wodget drawing is a separate plugin system, so you can do exactly what you describe by writing a theme engine. And of course, people have done this already; if you try some theme engine like IceWM, you'll notice it will be a lot faster than the pixmap engine. It won't be nearly as configurable either, but that's what you "pay".
Generally, however, Gtk is pretty fast for what it does. "Slimming" it down would entail removing real functionality. And what is "unnessesary" functionality changes from user to user and app to app. You may not care about accessibility stuff or i18n for example, but that doesn't mean it's not important for a lot of other users.
But then it's been proven that the world is round ... just keep walking in a straight line (making sure to learn how to walk on water and up vertical surfaces) and you can see for yourself.
Invisible magical blue-scaled lizard midgets. When anybody comes close to the edge, they will magically put them to sleep and run them to the opposite side of the disc in their secret network of extradimensional tunnels. once there, they reposition the person in exactly the same way they were, and wake them up.
Now, this is at least as convincing a theory as ID, with just as much evidence and falsifiability, and deserves all the same repsect and classroom time.
Now, I agree fully about preventative care being a great way to spend resources (and that would inlcude things like discouraging or disallowing smoking, drinking, gun ownershipo and so on). Also, these policies would make greater effect the younger people are - so age limits on stuff like the above is a really great idea.
However, I'm not too sure I (or anybody) really would like where a strict implementation of these policies would lead.
If you really focus health resources (and, of course, any other resources - why waste food or ownership laws on those who don't benefit?) in proportion to life expectancy, people with lower life expectancy (older people, young people with chronic or debilitating diseases) will get little, and those with almost no life expectancy (like the very old, or people with grave injuries) will get almost nothing at all. So they will tend to die in greater numbers.
This will alter the allocation yet more in the favour of the very healthy, and very young, lowering the life expectancy of everybody else yet more. At least under some conditions, you will get a sharp cutoff.
You'll have full access to societal resources up until some age (which would probably be quite low) or until you actually manage to get an injury or disease that is serious enough - at which point you are chained to a working place to work as a slave until weakness gets the better of you and your body is milled down to recover valuable chemicals.
Kind of like shooting horses once they get a serious enough leg injury, really.
``If I remember correctly, that is still under patent. Until they expire, the format will be a nonstarter.''
You mean like GIF and MPEG and MP3 and probably this new scheme?
I should have elaborated. I remember when this was first written about. It was pretty amazing, but the inventors were charging for the right to implement a decoder, and (at least in the beginning) would not even let others to encode at all; the business model was apparently that you'd send them the images and they'd encode it for you.
Even without that last bit of stupidity, the fact that you needed to pay to implement a decoder meant that nobody did, since there was no images to decode anyway. And not many would want to encode in a format that nobody could read since they didn't have a decoder.
If I remember correctly, that is still under patent. Until they expire, the format will be a nonstarter.
Just think long and hard about what you're advocating here, it's quite scary.
Ever heard of "satirical exaggeration for polemical effect"?
I agree with you about what a good idea it isn't; that is why I am extrapolating stuff, to get a feel for where it is a bad idea.
At the same time, there likely is _some_ line where the state probably should not go. Where that line is depends on the importance for society of a given function, but also on whether we are talking state monopoly; state-run and subsidized; state-owned; or public corporation with the state having a stake.
You could make a good case that the state should stay out of such things as "normal" retail (food, clothing, toys, electronics) and production, including food, altogether. Of course, hardly any state (including the US) actually does; import quotas and other subsidies abound in almost every economic sector.
If you do not argue for the most intrusive versions of government involvement, though (such as state-owned monopolies), there really are very few areas where you can argue that they should not be allowed to go. A state-owned company, required to bear its own costs, should be allowed to compete with the same premises as its private competitors. After all, if private business really is more efficient, that will show in the marketplace, won't it?
There are private police forces, they just can't be law enforcement. There are private armies, the just can't commit treason. Also, I doubt there is any business model that can support a fire department.
Sure they can. Just have the city/community contract it out. Decide what should be accomplished and hire a company to do it. Since the state is authorizing and backing them, they _are_ the law/fire brigade/marines - well, until another bidder goes lower the next bidding round. Efficient!
Since by definition (by some) the state is less efficient than private enterprise, it should resign itself to collecting funds and farm out the execution of, well, anything to the low bidder. There is absolutely no reason why we could not achieve the same savings and efficiencies in law enforcement, fire fighting or social services.
And why stop there? Why not farm out the court system, for example? The body of case law we already have provides an excellent foundation for the requirements of the contract - just let an efficient private company do the work instead of that wasteful bureocracy.
In fact, you can do this with the _entire_ government. Have elections - not of parties or individuals, but of policy documents. They would detail the policies and principles with which to govern the country for the next period. Then sell the job of implementing those policies to private enterprise. It _is_, after all, definitionally much more efficient, and we all want that, right.
Who decides what is private business?
Could guard companies rightly claim that a municipal police force is robbing them of business opportunities? Could someone start a private firebrigade and rightly stop the city from providing that service itself?
What about people building private armies? The Pentagon is denying them their livelihood!
I'm only slightly facetious here; the question really is serious.
So, what the blurb is saying is that people are communicating with people instead of watching television - and that is seen as cutting socializing time?
And disregarding the slashdot blurb, if this is communicating with friends using IM or email, rather than by phone (as seems to be the case among people I know), how is that in any ways worse?
From the chinese I know here, this is only partly true, and depends a lot on the style of writing used.
It is true that Kanji was taken from the Chinese from the beginning. Also, a large corpus of words written onloy using Kanji have been borrowed; they tend to be abstract terms or high-status words, while the older, indigenuous words are more familiar (think "ascertain" versus "make sure").
However, the actual meaning of the Kanji have tended to shift or extend somewhat differently, and so have the borrowed words. And Japanese is written with two other writing systems in combination with Kanji. This includes the all-important particles that determine what role each word has in the sentence.
Being able to decipher Kanji is helpful, but will give you only the barest inkling of the intended meaning, and that only with sentences that are straightforward - with signs probably being among the easiest.
It is worth noting here that in train stations and the like, signs are usually in Chinese, Korean and English as well. And at least in Kyoto subway, announcements are bilingual too. You aren't totally lost when you come here. The biggest problem really is being able to communicate with people, not read signs.
Tourist areas all over the world manage this without PDAs.
And when you don't want to be confined to the tourist traps?
English is widespread, but not _that_ widespread. Many visitors to Japan aren't Westerners, but Chinese or Korean. That second language should probably be Mandarin, which likely wouldn't help most slashdotters much. A restaurant not close to the usual tourist haunts may get foreign customers a few times a year at most; that would be a lot of work keeping the menus up to date in three languages just for those few occasions.
And since English knowledge in general is not up to the standard where you are confident to write a legible menu, who is going to do that translation work to begin with?
I think this is a pretty good idea. It may give visitors the confidence needed to go off the beaten tourist path a bit and try some really different experiences. There's a lot more to Japan than temples and expensive fish restaurants.
Also note that while they'll be passing them out freely during the pilot, nothing precludes the use of a deposit system, or even rental, if the trials pan out.
I did not include starting under own power - that is even more difficult than to lift. The Wright brothers' machine would qualify in my mind as it was able to stay aloft - and gain altitude - under its own power (no need to thermals or anything).
I believe flight is to be able to lift and stay aloft under your own power. Anything else would fall(sic) somewhere between gliding and falling. Using thermals would not be "real" flight, for instance. Ballons? I have no idea.
This is simply not true. It's the same old effect that only those who really dislike a feature have the motivation to speak out about it, while those who have no problems with it have better things to do than to post about how they haven't had any problems with it today either.
Never, _ever_ judge something like this simply based on volume of posts - and the same goes for letter feedback to media and politicians, as well, of course.
I like the Gimp UI. And you can snap toghether or pull apart the windows in whatever combinations you want, so I don't see why people are still complaining about "free-floating" windows.
Nothing happens by chance. Chance is simply a statiscal tool to rate probability of things observable. If you disagree, please explain to me by what power comes chances causation?
Um, none? Having quantum effects is quite enough.
That won't preclude causation in the normal sense for macroscopic objects, of course.
What is it about coding that draws these types? Was it being beaten up in school, and now they're nuts about the one thing they're good at?
Nothing. This is a known phenomena, and not limited to coding. When people pour a lot of time and effort into something, they get very possessive and defensive about the thing. It's an unconcious psychological mechanism - "I have spent a lot of effort on this. If it sucks, I have wasted all that time, money and energy. That would be really stupid of me, and I don't want to be stupid. In other words, it doesn't suck at all."
This is true for coders, but also for architects, designers, illustrators, engineers - anywhere you have the same kind of dynamic of spending a lot of time on a single issue. And it's not only individuals either - companies behave the same way, frequently holding on to their in-hous projects long after they should have been dropped in favour of an existing external option.
This is part of the reason you want to do UI design before anything else - it becomes a _lot_ harder to change anything after a first version is out, as the developers/designers/whatever are so protective of the stuff they've already accomplished. Even when it is obvious that some aspect needs changing, the prospect of having to rip out a lot of finished work causes quite understandable anguish.
Well, the blodless semi-transparent white is getting a bit long in the tooth to be honest. The benefit of basic black is that it never really gets old.