Is it a binary answer to the question? No.
1. China wants to grow, build, raise its peopleâ(TM)s standard of living (I know, this is arbitrary)
2. China is a threat to the current political norm and will destroy the status quo (I know this is also arbitrary)
So... pick your poison. And this is, by now a very well trodden path of globalised angst, accept a race to the bottom fo price or live with the higher prices of local manufacture.
The ethics question is banal and hides a more insipid agenda.
Stoked
...I'm always on the lookout for brains!
Joking aside, the requirement for people with brains lives on. Right now, I'd give my eye teeth for people with the 'brains' required to develop my business. And brains doesn't necessarily mean PhD level deep thinkers, it means agility and flexibility as well as a basis in the required skillsets. Experience can be gained, skills can be taught, but the raw material...
Give me strong AI, then we can ditch the talk about the requirement for intelligent people.
Stokey
The fact that the companies who hold the copyrights are effectively immortal (certainly longer lived than any artist) means that in X years, all copyright will be held by companies who will never have to give it up...
I have to disagree.
You are consuming a service that someone else is paying for without express permission of the person paying, and all likelihood in violation of the terms of service.
No analogy or law that relates to anything else is relevant here. You know that your computer isn't connected to the Internet by default, that it requires a connection in place, and if you are using a connection that you aren't paying for, then it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to check that you have permission regardless of whether "my laptop just connects to the first network, it's not my fault" or "a user could accidentally click on the accept connection button, it's not their fault" or any other attempt to rid yourself of the responsibility of knowing what impact your actions have.
9) Ignore all of this advice and use the tool to do with it what you want.
There are loads of bad presentations made with or withouth PowerPoint. Equally, it's very powerful for creating hybrid reports (Excel integration being the most obvious one). Sometimes you do have to write longer reports that need a lot of diagrams which the Word version doesn't really provide. Sometimes you want to reuse some of the content from a report as part of a presentation. Seriously, who does the 3 bullet points per slide thing when you have 3 pictures to tell 30,000 word stories with? Excel as a database, Word as a data gathering tool, PowerPoint as a word processor: all of these tools get used incorrectly, but they are flexible, might address your need there and then and cuts down on the need to find other tools when these are "just good enough".
At the moment there are a couple of high profile cases where CCTV footage is being used as evidence.
The first is the attempted bombings after 7/7 in London and footage was shown not only of a bomber attempting to detonate a device, but of their attempted escape dressed in a bhurka.
Seondly, the conviction of a group of muggers who were terrorising the underground system where camera footage was used to identify them and convict them.
It was fascinating to see the pictures of the 7/7 bombers in the papers a couple of days after the event.
I know the parent was joking, but trust me, this data is available and is used regularly.
The laptop is for children. It is unlikely that the majority of users will be doing any kernel debugging. It is very unlikely that their class mates wil try and "pwn" their machine. It's even more unlikely that any actual user of the box will try and subvert the relatively benign off switch.
However, it's a $100 dollar device designed to be used in places where that is a reasonable amount of money. Even from a jealousy point of view, they're going to be pretty hot property. When it comes to jealousy or covetousness, the klepto in people heads for surface, particularly when it's something new and shiny.
This is a useful deterrant for those people who might attempt to steal one. All those people who have said "but think of the possible big brother overtones", get a grip. If your average teenager is using their OLPC to make political statements against the government, they are probably already known. An turning off their laptop from afar will not be the response of the government.
Interestingly, Mars confectioners have produced a new bar called the "Delight" which actually comes with a money back guaruntee.
Yes, you only get a cheque for 63p and although they've made it easy to claim, it's still more effort to go through than most people will bother with (including cashing said cheque), but the offer is there (within 28 days!).
So, theatre, cinema or prostitues may well day offer a money back guaruntee. When was the last time you walked out of a brothel and thought "now if only I could get those two hours of my life back".
Have a look at Turn IT On (www.turniton.co.uk). A company run by a friend of mine for the schools in the Oxford area, although he is branching out across the South of England. Much smaller company, individual service etc. He may be able to offer an alternative from the incumbent monopoly. From conversations I've had with him about RM, it's no wonder the IT departments in schools across the UK are banging their collective heads against the wall.
Why don't people hold their leaders to the same standards that they expect to hold us?
No people in the Western World are going to rise up in revolution, it'll jsut never happen as the comfort levels are too high, but the system exists to ensure that things like this don't happen and we just don't use it.
To free up space for some other memory intensive task like video editing?
When you shut down your machine (desktop or laptop) at the end of the day to save electricity?
There is no need to leave a machine running if you're not using it. I can't believe that the majority of computer users are running bitorrent clients 24/7, or Folding@Home or whatever.
Have we entered a new phase: Cash poor - average standard of living is low Time poor - we all have to work hard to enjoy our consumer luxuries and hence have no time Energy poor - we all have to be energy conscious which means turning things off (no stand by for you, Mr TV!) when we're not using them.
I think he made a mistake in calling this "no interface" as any interaction with the computer, by definition, requires some form of interface...
Anyhow. Imagine a call centre at a bank. The call comes in from a recognised number and the operators screen is filled with the details of the customer. After a fairly standard security process using a virtual keyboard, the operator moves into a sort of virtual desktop like the light box demo. Your accounts are blocks, the bocks can be zoomed revealing individual transactions, individual transactions can be enlarged and read off the details. Links to other accounts can be visiually represented. Other customer information can be layered, semi-transparent or otherwise, over the screen. Previous call histories, important dates, renewals etc. OK, you can probably do all of that with mouse/windows technology, but it's the speed of manipulation that's impressive here. For simple data anlysis, you do only need the pan/zoom functions alongside the virtual keyboard. It would give the call handler a much better "view" of the customer than the flat data records they have access to now.
Maybe a touch trivial? How about full 3D MRI scans tha can be viewed and manipulated on a single screen without the doc needing to use a computer. Hotel booking agents that have 3D representations of the hotel with occupied rooms in red, empty in green etc. The views from the rooms could be represented etc. Again, it's not impossible to do with today's tech, but you can manipulate the data much more quickly...
Either way though, either it's "arms up until it hurts" or heads down until my neck packs up". Ho hum...
Once more we need the presence of a FAQ for all things Slashdot.
The DMCA says that you can't be sued unless the compyright holder has given you fair notice to take down the offending material and you have failed to comply after reviewing their case. You could have 1 million pieces of flagrantly nicked pieces of film, but no one is going to sue you until you've failed to respond to their take down notices.
Do you honestly believe that Google won't have thought this through? That their experience with caching and book copyright and images and goodness knows what else hasn't prepared them to deal with the non-issue that is copyright on You Tube?
Now your very valid point is "If I make a comedy WoW video, is that fair use?", "If I show it to my friends, is that fair use?", "If I host it on the Internet, is that fair use?", "If the hosting company makes money of it, who will be sued?". I'd guess not the hosting company... Google will jsut get a take down from Blizzard... Which as someone else points out in this thread, is all that's broken with copyright today...
On the subject of building your own, I've been wondering about this for a while.
Can you scale these things down? To the micro or nano scale?
How about building flat panels of minature turbines. Rows and rows of them, sandwiched between a protective cover and the transport substrate. Each minature turbine generates tiny amounts of electricity, but you just have many thousand of them on one plate. Position the tiles on a roof in the direction of the prevailing wind with possibly a larger air intake on the front.
Darn it, need to crack open an old physics text book, can't remember any of the appropriate maths. Anyone want to chip in?
Stokey
Ha ha... I was looking for a point in the thread where I could say something similar. Whenever the opportunity to bash management arises, the Slashdot troops march past in unison with their song reverberating in my ears. "Management know nothing, anyone who tries to predict the future is an idiot, only a moron would try to change the way I work because I know best, some MBA holding tard is the reason I have to do crappy documentation".
Ever been to see Wipro or TCS in operation? Do you know what a CMMi level 5 certified organisation actually looks like? Do you know what benefits have been driven? Do you know how hard it is to describe the concepts behind SOA to the Financial Director of a Fortune 500 company and why he should care? Would you understand the level of abstraction required to explain IT concepts in timeslots of 30 minutes to a man or woman with X thousand people under their wing, multi billion dollars of spend and regulations like Basel II, SOX, MiFid being forced on them by regulators?
Their are of course a number of people who read slash who have been there, are there and are on their way there. For the rest who are put upon developers who run Linux on their toaster, bear in mind that the oil tanker which is your corporation takes time to steer, has many captains who want to go in different directions and is being buffetted at all times by tides and weather over which you have no control. At the very least, the Gartners of this world outline a number of possible courses to choose from, which believe me, is so much better than looking at a featureless ocean you would not believe.
My rant is now over.
Re:Blizzard has their work cut out for them...
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
·
· Score: 0
I'm not an MMO player but wondered about the 60 (or 70) level cap in WOW as an artificial limit. Would a sort of karate Dan system work, where beyound a certain point, there are actually restricted number of the next level up, finally up to the point where there is only one person at the highest level (per world, per server or whatever). To move into the next category up there may be some more esoteric or qualitative criteria to pass, or possible a "dead man's shoes" approach when someone with such an account quits and those in the queue have to battle it out for promotion. It would give you something constantly aim for or not depending on your bent. This may well have already been implemented elsewhere.
Does anyone know what impact this may have across geographical boundaries? I can only asume that if I (from the UK) want to get to google.com that I'll have to traverse a US network which my UK ISP will have had to peer with in some protracted way. But what about google.co.uk? Will British network providers leap on the bandwagon and start trying to double dip (I should coco) and if so,how are we going to stop them?
Anyone found a Government department willing to offer an opinion on this?
For the uneducated, might I recommend: http://www.banksy.co.uk/
A legend in his own lunchtime. When I walk home at the end of a gruelling day in the City [London], I am greeted by one of Banksy's rats holding a sign that simply says "You lie!". Makes me chuckle everytime.
The parent comment is deserving of +5 as soon as is likely.
I was in a taxi the other day and the driver was saying about how he's spent a day on Oxford Street (central London) with his son trying to get an Xbox 360 and had ultimately been unsuccessful. He'd started off by asking if I'd heard of the problems with the unit. I asked him why he didn't wait to find out if there was a problem and if it was going to be fixed but his response was "My son just had to have it".
Same mentality that makes parents hit each other over the last Buzz Lightyear doll...
I think we can safely assume that there is no way that a lessening of copyright periods will occur, nor that any other IP laws will be repealed or relaxed nor indeed that the stakeholders (as identified by another poster) will represent the people.
For my own peace of mind, I am going to try to write to Mr Gowers and ask hime whether IP laws are there for the benefit of business or society? Being ex-editor of the FT makes me think that this question has already been answered in Mr. Gower's mind.
The fact the Gordo is playing to the public will not make one jot of difference, because the majority of people will never come up against an extension to copyright as a problem and the spin on this will be:
"Britain needs to be a super power in the global knowledge economy and this can only be realised through the introduction of increasingly draconian laws surrounding your precious and flavoursome IP".
Hmmm, I'm a big fan of Nuclear power, believe that by mixing types of power source we can get a harmonious blend and so on.
However, the after effects of Chernobyl are being felt in a very real way. Not in the exclusion zone, but in, say, Belarus where contamination causes massive health problems, particularly in the child population.
A friend of runs part of a charity that brings kids from Belarus over to the UK every year to help rebuild their health.
What does it say about your mental state when you read the article title and straight away assume that the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland have found some way of recapturing their days of death and violence but through the medium of a MUD style environment?
Surely that "no, you just end up spending it in daft ways... like blowing $500 on a dinner or in other equally silly ways." deserves an "IMHO" tagged on the end.
Maybe not everyone would appreciate the aging process that went into the fine wine, or the artistry with which the chef prepared the dishes, or the knowledge of the sommelier, or the professionalism of the waiters or the extent of the cheese board etc., but you have to ask how is spending $500 on a music player sensible? Or $500 on a jacket, or on a haircut, or on DVDs or on anything that is not essential to survival.
I normally wouldn't care, but you got modded +4 Insightful?! A true waste of $500 dollars would be to roll them into tubes, make small pyre and set fire to it... (unless you're cold of course).
Slashdot Mirror
Is it a binary answer to the question? No. 1. China wants to grow, build, raise its peopleâ(TM)s standard of living (I know, this is arbitrary) 2. China is a threat to the current political norm and will destroy the status quo (I know this is also arbitrary) So... pick your poison. And this is, by now a very well trodden path of globalised angst, accept a race to the bottom fo price or live with the higher prices of local manufacture. The ethics question is banal and hides a more insipid agenda. Stoked
...I'm always on the lookout for brains! Joking aside, the requirement for people with brains lives on. Right now, I'd give my eye teeth for people with the 'brains' required to develop my business. And brains doesn't necessarily mean PhD level deep thinkers, it means agility and flexibility as well as a basis in the required skillsets. Experience can be gained, skills can be taught, but the raw material... Give me strong AI, then we can ditch the talk about the requirement for intelligent people. Stokey
Sadly,
Copyright holder != artist
The fact that the companies who hold the copyrights are effectively immortal (certainly longer lived than any artist) means that in X years, all copyright will be held by companies who will never have to give it up...
Prevent companies from owning the copyright...
I have to disagree. You are consuming a service that someone else is paying for without express permission of the person paying, and all likelihood in violation of the terms of service. No analogy or law that relates to anything else is relevant here. You know that your computer isn't connected to the Internet by default, that it requires a connection in place, and if you are using a connection that you aren't paying for, then it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to check that you have permission regardless of whether "my laptop just connects to the first network, it's not my fault" or "a user could accidentally click on the accept connection button, it's not their fault" or any other attempt to rid yourself of the responsibility of knowing what impact your actions have.
9) Ignore all of this advice and use the tool to do with it what you want.
There are loads of bad presentations made with or withouth PowerPoint. Equally, it's very powerful for creating hybrid reports (Excel integration being the most obvious one). Sometimes you do have to write longer reports that need a lot of diagrams which the Word version doesn't really provide. Sometimes you want to reuse some of the content from a report as part of a presentation.
Seriously, who does the 3 bullet points per slide thing when you have 3 pictures to tell 30,000 word stories with?
Excel as a database, Word as a data gathering tool, PowerPoint as a word processor: all of these tools get used incorrectly, but they are flexible, might address your need there and then and cuts down on the need to find other tools when these are "just good enough".
Stokey
Specialised Programming and Marketing and Henderson
SPaMaH!
Surely that's too good to be true!
At the moment there are a couple of high profile cases where CCTV footage is being used as evidence.
The first is the attempted bombings after 7/7 in London and footage was shown not only of a bomber attempting to detonate a device, but of their attempted escape dressed in a bhurka.
Seondly, the conviction of a group of muggers who were terrorising the underground system where camera footage was used to identify them and convict them.
It was fascinating to see the pictures of the 7/7 bombers in the papers a couple of days after the event.
I know the parent was joking, but trust me, this data is available and is used regularly.
Stokey
The laptop is for children. It is unlikely that the majority of users will be doing any kernel debugging. It is very unlikely that their class mates wil try and "pwn" their machine. It's even more unlikely that any actual user of the box will try and subvert the relatively benign off switch.
However, it's a $100 dollar device designed to be used in places where that is a reasonable amount of money. Even from a jealousy point of view, they're going to be pretty hot property. When it comes to jealousy or covetousness, the klepto in people heads for surface, particularly when it's something new and shiny.
This is a useful deterrant for those people who might attempt to steal one. All those people who have said "but think of the possible big brother overtones", get a grip. If your average teenager is using their OLPC to make political statements against the government, they are probably already known. An turning off their laptop from afar will not be the response of the government.
Stokey
Interestingly, Mars confectioners have produced a new bar called the "Delight" which actually comes with a money back guaruntee.
Yes, you only get a cheque for 63p and although they've made it easy to claim, it's still more effort to go through than most people will bother with (including cashing said cheque), but the offer is there (within 28 days!).
So, theatre, cinema or prostitues may well day offer a money back guaruntee. When was the last time you walked out of a brothel and thought "now if only I could get those two hours of my life back".
Hang on, I meant cinema...
Stokey
Have a look at Turn IT On (www.turniton.co.uk). A company run by a friend of mine for the schools in the Oxford area, although he is branching out across the South of England. Much smaller company, individual service etc. He may be able to offer an alternative from the incumbent monopoly. From conversations I've had with him about RM, it's no wonder the IT departments in schools across the UK are banging their collective heads against the wall.
Cheers,
Stokey
Possibly the largest thing I don't get.
Why don't people hold their leaders to the same standards that they expect to hold us?
No people in the Western World are going to rise up in revolution, it'll jsut never happen as the comfort levels are too high, but the system exists to ensure that things like this don't happen and we just don't use it.
Anyone know how to get an Impeachment started?
To free up space for some other memory intensive task like video editing?
When you shut down your machine (desktop or laptop) at the end of the day to save electricity?
There is no need to leave a machine running if you're not using it. I can't believe that the majority of computer users are running bitorrent clients 24/7, or Folding@Home or whatever.
Have we entered a new phase:
Cash poor - average standard of living is low
Time poor - we all have to work hard to enjoy our consumer luxuries and hence have no time
Energy poor - we all have to be energy conscious which means turning things off (no stand by for you, Mr TV!) when we're not using them.
Damn, I'm my Dad!
I think he made a mistake in calling this "no interface" as any interaction with the computer, by definition, requires some form of interface...
Anyhow. Imagine a call centre at a bank. The call comes in from a recognised number and the operators screen is filled with the details of the customer. After a fairly standard security process using a virtual keyboard, the operator moves into a sort of virtual desktop like the light box demo. Your accounts are blocks, the bocks can be zoomed revealing individual transactions, individual transactions can be enlarged and read off the details. Links to other accounts can be visiually represented. Other customer information can be layered, semi-transparent or otherwise, over the screen. Previous call histories, important dates, renewals etc. OK, you can probably do all of that with mouse/windows technology, but it's the speed of manipulation that's impressive here. For simple data anlysis, you do only need the pan/zoom functions alongside the virtual keyboard. It would give the call handler a much better "view" of the customer than the flat data records they have access to now.
Maybe a touch trivial? How about full 3D MRI scans tha can be viewed and manipulated on a single screen without the doc needing to use a computer. Hotel booking agents that have 3D representations of the hotel with occupied rooms in red, empty in green etc. The views from the rooms could be represented etc. Again, it's not impossible to do with today's tech, but you can manipulate the data much more quickly...
Either way though, either it's "arms up until it hurts" or heads down until my neck packs up". Ho hum...
Once more we need the presence of a FAQ for all things Slashdot.
The DMCA says that you can't be sued unless the compyright holder has given you fair notice to take down the offending material and you have failed to comply after reviewing their case. You could have 1 million pieces of flagrantly nicked pieces of film, but no one is going to sue you until you've failed to respond to their take down notices.
Do you honestly believe that Google won't have thought this through? That their experience with caching and book copyright and images and goodness knows what else hasn't prepared them to deal with the non-issue that is copyright on You Tube?
Now your very valid point is "If I make a comedy WoW video, is that fair use?", "If I show it to my friends, is that fair use?", "If I host it on the Internet, is that fair use?", "If the hosting company makes money of it, who will be sued?". I'd guess not the hosting company... Google will jsut get a take down from Blizzard... Which as someone else points out in this thread, is all that's broken with copyright today...
I believe they own Orkut.
That's a social networking site, but certainly hasn't reached the volumes MySpace has.
Stokey
On the subject of building your own, I've been wondering about this for a while. Can you scale these things down? To the micro or nano scale? How about building flat panels of minature turbines. Rows and rows of them, sandwiched between a protective cover and the transport substrate. Each minature turbine generates tiny amounts of electricity, but you just have many thousand of them on one plate. Position the tiles on a roof in the direction of the prevailing wind with possibly a larger air intake on the front. Darn it, need to crack open an old physics text book, can't remember any of the appropriate maths. Anyone want to chip in? Stokey
Ha ha... I was looking for a point in the thread where I could say something similar. Whenever the opportunity to bash management arises, the Slashdot troops march past in unison with their song reverberating in my ears.
"Management know nothing, anyone who tries to predict the future is an idiot, only a moron would try to change the way I work because I know best, some MBA holding tard is the reason I have to do crappy documentation".
Ever been to see Wipro or TCS in operation? Do you know what a CMMi level 5 certified organisation actually looks like? Do you know what benefits have been driven? Do you know how hard it is to describe the concepts behind SOA to the Financial Director of a Fortune 500 company and why he should care? Would you understand the level of abstraction required to explain IT concepts in timeslots of 30 minutes to a man or woman with X thousand people under their wing, multi billion dollars of spend and regulations like Basel II, SOX, MiFid being forced on them by regulators?
Their are of course a number of people who read slash who have been there, are there and are on their way there. For the rest who are put upon developers who run Linux on their toaster, bear in mind that the oil tanker which is your corporation takes time to steer, has many captains who want to go in different directions and is being buffetted at all times by tides and weather over which you have no control. At the very least, the Gartners of this world outline a number of possible courses to choose from, which believe me, is so much better than looking at a featureless ocean you would not believe.
My rant is now over.
I'm not an MMO player but wondered about the 60 (or 70) level cap in WOW as an artificial limit. Would a sort of karate Dan system work, where beyound a certain point, there are actually restricted number of the next level up, finally up to the point where there is only one person at the highest level (per world, per server or whatever). To move into the next category up there may be some more esoteric or qualitative criteria to pass, or possible a "dead man's shoes" approach when someone with such an account quits and those in the queue have to battle it out for promotion. It would give you something constantly aim for or not depending on your bent. This may well have already been implemented elsewhere.
Cheers,
Stokey
Does anyone know what impact this may have across geographical boundaries? I can only asume that if I (from the UK) want to get to google.com that I'll have to traverse a US network which my UK ISP will have had to peer with in some protracted way. But what about google.co.uk? Will British network providers leap on the bandwagon and start trying to double dip (I should coco) and if so,how are we going to stop them?
Anyone found a Government department willing to offer an opinion on this?
For the uneducated, might I recommend:
http://www.banksy.co.uk/
A legend in his own lunchtime. When I walk home at the end of a gruelling day in the City [London], I am greeted by one of Banksy's rats holding a sign that simply says "You lie!". Makes me chuckle everytime.
The parent comment is deserving of +5 as soon as is likely.
I was in a taxi the other day and the driver was saying about how he's spent a day on Oxford Street (central London) with his son trying to get an Xbox 360 and had ultimately been unsuccessful. He'd started off by asking if I'd heard of the problems with the unit. I asked him why he didn't wait to find out if there was a problem and if it was going to be fixed but his response was "My son just had to have it".
Same mentality that makes parents hit each other over the last Buzz Lightyear doll...
I think we can safely assume that there is no way that a lessening of copyright periods will occur, nor that any other IP laws will be repealed or relaxed nor indeed that the stakeholders (as identified by another poster) will represent the people.
For my own peace of mind, I am going to try to write to Mr Gowers and ask hime whether IP laws are there for the benefit of business or society? Being ex-editor of the FT makes me think that this question has already been answered in Mr. Gower's mind.
The fact the Gordo is playing to the public will not make one jot of difference, because the majority of people will never come up against an extension to copyright as a problem and the spin on this will be:
"Britain needs to be a super power in the global knowledge economy and this can only be realised through the introduction of increasingly draconian laws surrounding your precious and flavoursome IP".
Hmmm, I'm a big fan of Nuclear power, believe that by mixing types of power source we can get a harmonious blend and so on.
However, the after effects of Chernobyl are being felt in a very real way. Not in the exclusion zone, but in, say, Belarus where contamination causes massive health problems, particularly in the child population.
A friend of runs part of a charity that brings kids from Belarus over to the UK every year to help rebuild their health.
http://www.focc.org.uk/ for the interested.
What does it say about your mental state when you read the article title and straight away assume that the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland have found some way of recapturing their days of death and violence but through the medium of a MUD style environment?
I am wrong, get help.
Surely that "no, you just end up spending it in daft ways ... like blowing $500 on a dinner or in other equally silly ways." deserves an "IMHO" tagged on the end.
Maybe not everyone would appreciate the aging process that went into the fine wine, or the artistry with which the chef prepared the dishes, or the knowledge of the sommelier, or the professionalism of the waiters or the extent of the cheese board etc., but you have to ask how is spending $500 on a music player sensible? Or $500 on a jacket, or on a haircut, or on DVDs or on anything that is not essential to survival.
I normally wouldn't care, but you got modded +4 Insightful?! A true waste of $500 dollars would be to roll them into tubes, make small pyre and set fire to it... (unless you're cold of course).