I agree with most of it. I take issue with a few points, though.
But the majority of real-world examples are an illusory, not real, replacement of a prior product on the basis of overwhelming merit: Electric toothbrushes. Anti-lock brakes. Automotive Air bags. Electric bug zappers (they don't work against mosquitoes). Sonic bug repellers (they don't work at all).
I'm glad I have airbags and antilock brakes in my car. If the author thinks they don't do what they say they do, he'd better cite some evidence before I'll believe him.
in order to consume as we do, we must first be programmed to regard everyday experiences as completely unsatisfactory.
This aspect of marketing has a lot in common with traditional religious practices:
The truth is hidden from view.
Your reward lies in the hereafter.
True happiness in only available to the initiated, the "insiders."
Everyday reality is a sham, a waste of time, an illusion.
We are all defective, our personal experiences have no legitimacy without the validation of priests.
This anti-religion digression contradicts the authors original point that consumerism is something new, and certainly is a subjective opinion not shared by everyone, and might vary considerably by religion (they aren't all the same no matter what people try to say), though his comments are probably valid for most forms of folk religion (in which people pray to their god, go to church, etc.. in exchange for immediate material blessings - though that would contradict his second bullet point). It's hard to say what he meant by "traditional religious practices".
My (biased Christian) point of view is that:
The truth is available to anyone interested in looking for it. This might involve a bit of reading and talking to people but it's not hidden in the sense of being some sort of big secret.
Your reward is partially in the hereafter, but your relationship with God is a reward in itself.
True happiness comes from a good relationship with God, but life can still suck a lot even so.
Most aspects of everyday reality aren't as important as we make them out to be, but our relationships with and love of God and other people is relevant.
We are defective, but Jesus died as punishment for our mistakes. Priests (or pastors, or whatever you happen to call your members of clergy) serve no official role other than organization and education (most large groups of people need to have some sort of leader to function)
That's FCC part 15 - anyone can use it. There's more rules, of course, but the legal limit is much higher than the 35mw that most wireless cards use. The 23 cm ham band overlaps the ISM band, so hams can use much more (their maximum allowable power is between 200 and 1500 watts on most frequencies, though there is another rule that says they have to use the minimum power necessary to communicate).
That said, I believe television to be much more dangerous to the attention span than anything else.
And the 30-second TV advertisement the most dangerous of all. When I went to college, I would go a good part of the year without watching any TV at all. When I did watch a show, I was appalled by the idiocy of the commercials -- how did I ever accept them as a normal aspect of daily entertainment? They teach people to accept simple emotional appeals instead of complex logical arguments, and tend to encourage vices (buy stuff you don't need with money you don't have, convince yourself you deserve a higher standard of living than the people around you) instead of virtues (solve your own problems, be happy with what you have).
Digression: short attention spans are a threat to society because they cause people to be intellectually lazy and assume that the world is simpler than it really is. Then they make poor decisions based on their incomplete understanding.
I try to avoid TV now, but I keep having the misfortune of living with someone who can't live without it.
TV is also disruptive to anyone within earshot who wants to do something else (like read a book). I wonder how often people are drawn to the tube because someone else insists on watching something and they say to themselves "oh well, as long as its on, I might as well watch because I can't concentrate on anything else."
This seems like as good a place as any to throw in a plug for Project Gutenberg (old books for free!) and the Internet Booklist (a good place to go if you don't know what to read).
I doubt it would upset the standing wave ratio too much, but you'd have to ask a real RF engineer. At least, it wouldn't be nearly as bad as unplugging the antenna while the card is on. Has anyone out there actually fried a card doing that?
Fiber optic networking is great technology, and its not that expensive to get old fiber optic ethernet to coper ethernet media converters (typically ~$150 for 100mbps multimode, ~$200 for 100mbps singlemode). On ebay such equipment is much cheaper, especially if you go with old 10mbps 10baseFL media converters.
If laying your own cable is an option, this would give you a great upgrade path. 10mbps now, 10gbps in a few years.
The big choice is singlemode or multimode. Single mode equipment is harder to find and a little bit more expensive. The range (20-100 km for SM, 2km for MM) and theoretical information capacity (terabits per second vs gigabits) is much greater, though. I've heard that SM is harder to terminate unless you can afford a fusion splicer.
Has anyone out there inexpensively set up a community network with fiber?
For a large wireless network, you'll probably want a robust ad-hoc routing protocol like aodv or dsr. Most cheap wireless access points don't support that sort of thing, though. Take a look at roofnet if you want to see what's possible. This is still an active area of research, though. Any success stories out there about large wireless ad-hoc networks?
It's not clear that any voting method should ever be trusted, for exactly the same reason. Any system can be tampered with.
A system where a third party can independently verify the tally is much more trustworthy than one in which everyone is required to trust the tally. There will always be opportunities for fraud, but that doesn't mean we should make massive election fraud easy and undetectable.
Besides, even if Diebold (or other E-voting terminal manufacturer) doesn't manipulate elections, the possibility that they could casts a shadow of doubt over the whole democratic process.
It's not clear that E-voting should ever be trusted under any circumstance (unless there's a paper audit trail so the election results can be independently verified). The potential for tampering on the part of whoever tallies the vote is too high.
Analogy: E-voting is like having a paper election, and giving all the ballots to one person. That person goes into a locked room, counts the ballots, and then shreds them. He comes out of the room and tells everyone what the tally was.
"Open source game servers"? What does open source have to do with the issue?
Running game servers costs the game company money (bandwidth, hosting, hardware, support staff). Letting gamers run their own servers on whatever hardware/os combination they have lying around does not cost the game company money. (It doesn't have to be open source, as long as its publicly available, or at least cheap.)
The graphics were very well done... in most places. But to me it didn't feel quite like Zelda (I'm aware there are two schools of thought on this issue). Just because the graphics were well done doesn't mean they were appropriate for the atmosphere of the game. I also could never quite get over the fact that the hero's head was spherical. Maybe I've spent too much time tinkering with raytracers, where spheres are the simplest primitive imaginable.
I've heard Iwata-san pontificate on this multiple times. He believes MS and (to a lesser extent) Sony have staked too much on online games without thinking through the costs for consumers. To be honest, I agree... for most games in other genres, other than some clearly community-centric and dynamic examples, such as MMORPGS and virtual communities like Second Life, it's not reasonable for users to pay $50 or so for a game, and then pay a monthly fee to play.
I mostly agree, but just because the business model is lousy doesn't mean that Nintendo should shun online games altogether. They could instead come up with a better business plan (like free or very cheap online access, or open source game servers)
Iwata also said games should not be targeted exclusively at children or adults. "Game software should neither be exclusively targeted at children nor adults," said Iwata. "Instead, we will develop software which anyone can instantly understand. At the same time, production of software readily acceptable to adults is worth studying."
Yay, someone understands! Down with the objectionably cartoony link with the ellipsoid head! (And no, I don't mind cartoon-style rendering if its done right.)
The difference is that one is unstable and easy to use while the other is stable and hard to use.
Windows is catching up on stability and Linux is catching up on ease of use. These will likely be more or less resolved problems in a couple of years. On the other hand, one system will allow allow you to do whatever you want with your computer (as long as its possible, and you know how to tell the computer what you want it to do), and the other will allow you to do whatever someone else wants you to be able to do with your computer.
If the 150 million that lived in America then are distinct from the 300 million today (which is probably mostly true), that's at least 450 million used SSNs, or about 45%. But as an earlier reply stated, they recycle SSNs, so its more like 30% are in use.
The HomePNA product you cite has a range of 1000 feet. It wasn't obvious what the throughput is. It also wasn't clear if it is capable of linking multiple houses, which might go through a transformer.
I've personally tested a five mile 802.11 link. It wasn't terribly fast, but it worked. And I didn't need five miles of wire.
The project I linked to is a research project at MIT. Last I checked, they were using 802.11b with 8db omnidirectional antennas attached to 200mw wireless cards. Throughput depends on usage, but its not likely to be more than 1 or 2 mbps in a mesh. This is probably slower than the local broadband, but at least you get a good fast uplink to anyone else in the mesh (which is, I believe, connected to the campus network).
Ad-hoc routing is a (relatively) new technology, and there are still a few issues to resolve. They'll get better (faster, cheaper, more reliable) over time.
Network connectivity is not as ubiquitous as electrical power. There are many places where a power outlet is available but an ethernet jack is not. Besides, you can generate your own power if you have to.
If you're having trouble imagining the uses for a mesh network, take a look at this.
Typical consumer-grade access points allow you to set up networks that involve a single wireless hop (from the client to the AP). Most APs don't know how to talk to each other wirelessly - if you want a bigger network than a single AP can cover, you have to string ethernet cable between the access points. This is frequently inconvenient, especially when the network spans a large area.
Mesh networks use one of the many ad-hoc routing protocols (such as AODV, DSR, TORA, or DSDV) to decide the optimal path for each packet to travel (where optimal might mean shortest path, most reliable path, fewest number of expected transmissions, etc).
In theory, they are also easier to set up.
Also, having a "hackable" AP has benefits of its own - you can set up a captive portal, or a web server, or a web proxy, or a print server, or a file server, or anything else that might not come standard on a commodity access point.
I've recently been trying to understand the significance of RDF (I picked up the o'reiley book, but haven't gotten around to reading much of it yet). It seems that it allows you to represent data in a graph structure instead of a tree structure, as in XML.
What do people out there think of RDF? Can it represent the same things that people use relational databases for? What is it good at? What is it not good at?
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting article. Here is a clickable link.
I agree with most of it. I take issue with a few points, though.
I'm glad I have airbags and antilock brakes in my car. If the author thinks they don't do what they say they do, he'd better cite some evidence before I'll believe him.
This anti-religion digression contradicts the authors original point that consumerism is something new, and certainly is a subjective opinion not shared by everyone, and might vary considerably by religion (they aren't all the same no matter what people try to say), though his comments are probably valid for most forms of folk religion (in which people pray to their god, go to church, etc.. in exchange for immediate material blessings - though that would contradict his second bullet point). It's hard to say what he meant by "traditional religious practices".
My (biased Christian) point of view is that:
-jim
That's FCC part 15 - anyone can use it. There's more rules, of course, but the legal limit is much higher than the 35mw that most wireless cards use. The 23 cm ham band overlaps the ISM band, so hams can use much more (their maximum allowable power is between 200 and 1500 watts on most frequencies, though there is another rule that says they have to use the minimum power necessary to communicate).
-jim
And the 30-second TV advertisement the most dangerous of all. When I went to college, I would go a good part of the year without watching any TV at all. When I did watch a show, I was appalled by the idiocy of the commercials -- how did I ever accept them as a normal aspect of daily entertainment? They teach people to accept simple emotional appeals instead of complex logical arguments, and tend to encourage vices (buy stuff you don't need with money you don't have, convince yourself you deserve a higher standard of living than the people around you) instead of virtues (solve your own problems, be happy with what you have).
Digression: short attention spans are a threat to society because they cause people to be intellectually lazy and assume that the world is simpler than it really is. Then they make poor decisions based on their incomplete understanding.
I try to avoid TV now, but I keep having the misfortune of living with someone who can't live without it.
TV is also disruptive to anyone within earshot who wants to do something else (like read a book). I wonder how often people are drawn to the tube because someone else insists on watching something and they say to themselves "oh well, as long as its on, I might as well watch because I can't concentrate on anything else."
-jim
This seems like as good a place as any to throw in a plug for Project Gutenberg (old books for free!) and the Internet Booklist (a good place to go if you don't know what to read).
-jim
I doubt it would upset the standing wave ratio too much, but you'd have to ask a real RF engineer. At least, it wouldn't be nearly as bad as unplugging the antenna while the card is on. Has anyone out there actually fried a card doing that?
-jim
Your rules in the UK must be more strict than ours in the US, we get to use 4 watts EIRP in the ISM band (more info).
-jim
Fiber optic networking is great technology, and its not that expensive to get old fiber optic ethernet to coper ethernet media converters (typically ~$150 for 100mbps multimode, ~$200 for 100mbps singlemode). On ebay such equipment is much cheaper, especially if you go with old 10mbps 10baseFL media converters.
If laying your own cable is an option, this would give you a great upgrade path. 10mbps now, 10gbps in a few years.
The big choice is singlemode or multimode. Single mode equipment is harder to find and a little bit more expensive. The range (20-100 km for SM, 2km for MM) and theoretical information capacity (terabits per second vs gigabits) is much greater, though. I've heard that SM is harder to terminate unless you can afford a fusion splicer.
Has anyone out there inexpensively set up a community network with fiber?
-jim
For a large wireless network, you'll probably want a robust ad-hoc routing protocol like aodv or dsr. Most cheap wireless access points don't support that sort of thing, though. Take a look at roofnet if you want to see what's possible. This is still an active area of research, though. Any success stories out there about large wireless ad-hoc networks?
-jim
A system where a third party can independently verify the tally is much more trustworthy than one in which everyone is required to trust the tally. There will always be opportunities for fraud, but that doesn't mean we should make massive election fraud easy and undetectable.
Besides, even if Diebold (or other E-voting terminal manufacturer) doesn't manipulate elections, the possibility that they could casts a shadow of doubt over the whole democratic process.
-jim
It's not clear that E-voting should ever be trusted under any circumstance (unless there's a paper audit trail so the election results can be independently verified). The potential for tampering on the part of whoever tallies the vote is too high.
Analogy: E-voting is like having a paper election, and giving all the ballots to one person. That person goes into a locked room, counts the ballots, and then shreds them. He comes out of the room and tells everyone what the tally was.
-jim
How about selling high quality games for ~$50 each? (Online capability could be seen as a feature to compel users to buy, not a revenue stream.)
-jim
Running game servers costs the game company money (bandwidth, hosting, hardware, support staff). Letting gamers run their own servers on whatever hardware/os combination they have lying around does not cost the game company money. (It doesn't have to be open source, as long as its publicly available, or at least cheap.)
-jim
The graphics were very well done... in most places. But to me it didn't feel quite like Zelda (I'm aware there are two schools of thought on this issue). Just because the graphics were well done doesn't mean they were appropriate for the atmosphere of the game. I also could never quite get over the fact that the hero's head was spherical. Maybe I've spent too much time tinkering with raytracers, where spheres are the simplest primitive imaginable.
-jim
I mostly agree, but just because the business model is lousy doesn't mean that Nintendo should shun online games altogether. They could instead come up with a better business plan (like free or very cheap online access, or open source game servers)
-jim
Yay, someone understands! Down with the objectionably cartoony link with the ellipsoid head! (And no, I don't mind cartoon-style rendering if its done right.)
-jim
Are the licenses nontransferable just because the EULA says so? Does this violate fair use (In the legal, not the ethical sense)?
-jim
Good idea, here's a link to the gutenberg cd project.
-jim
Windows is catching up on stability and Linux is catching up on ease of use. These will likely be more or less resolved problems in a couple of years. On the other hand, one system will allow allow you to do whatever you want with your computer (as long as its possible, and you know how to tell the computer what you want it to do), and the other will allow you to do whatever someone else wants you to be able to do with your computer.
-jim
If the 150 million that lived in America then are distinct from the 300 million today (which is probably mostly true), that's at least 450 million used SSNs, or about 45%. But as an earlier reply stated, they recycle SSNs, so its more like 30% are in use.
-jim
How long until we run out of SSNs? 9 digits == 1 billion unique combinations. Are they efficiently allocated?
-jim
The HomePNA product you cite has a range of 1000 feet. It wasn't obvious what the throughput is. It also wasn't clear if it is capable of linking multiple houses, which might go through a transformer.
I've personally tested a five mile 802.11 link. It wasn't terribly fast, but it worked. And I didn't need five miles of wire.
The project I linked to is a research project at MIT. Last I checked, they were using 802.11b with 8db omnidirectional antennas attached to 200mw wireless cards. Throughput depends on usage, but its not likely to be more than 1 or 2 mbps in a mesh. This is probably slower than the local broadband, but at least you get a good fast uplink to anyone else in the mesh (which is, I believe, connected to the campus network).
Ad-hoc routing is a (relatively) new technology, and there are still a few issues to resolve. They'll get better (faster, cheaper, more reliable) over time.
-jim
Network connectivity is not as ubiquitous as electrical power. There are many places where a power outlet is available but an ethernet jack is not. Besides, you can generate your own power if you have to.
If you're having trouble imagining the uses for a mesh network, take a look at this.
-jim
Typical consumer-grade access points allow you to set up networks that involve a single wireless hop (from the client to the AP). Most APs don't know how to talk to each other wirelessly - if you want a bigger network than a single AP can cover, you have to string ethernet cable between the access points. This is frequently inconvenient, especially when the network spans a large area.
Mesh networks use one of the many ad-hoc routing protocols (such as AODV, DSR, TORA, or DSDV) to decide the optimal path for each packet to travel (where optimal might mean shortest path, most reliable path, fewest number of expected transmissions, etc).
In theory, they are also easier to set up.
Also, having a "hackable" AP has benefits of its own - you can set up a captive portal, or a web server, or a web proxy, or a print server, or a file server, or anything else that might not come standard on a commodity access point.
-jim
I've recently been trying to understand the significance of RDF (I picked up the o'reiley book, but haven't gotten around to reading much of it yet). It seems that it allows you to represent data in a graph structure instead of a tree structure, as in XML.
What do people out there think of RDF? Can it represent the same things that people use relational databases for? What is it good at? What is it not good at?
-jim
Freedom. Standards compliance. Sourcecode. The scrutiny of independant experts. No one else controls what you can do with your computer.
-jim