There's a utility I use on my powerbook called uControl, one of whose options is to turn the function key into a toggle for the track pad becoming a scroll mouse. Hold down function and you can use the track pad more easily than a scroll wheel.
It's not as simple as "the cart before the horse"
on
The Hundred-Buck PC
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· Score: 1
Information technology, at least the software end of it, has an extremely low cost of training and participation. If developing nations can get access to serviceable computers and a connection to the network, perhaps they can bootstrap a small IT knowledge base in their populations. Unlike industrial manufacturing, world-class code can be written from huts with cheap computers and solar panels. It could be just the solution these nations need to lift themselves out of poverty. If they can reach knowledge on the network and learn by contributing, that's one step closer. We've had years to yammer about needing roads, bla bla bla. But this computer thing is something new. If even a small percentage of those exposed to the technology go on to learn to use it and create more of it, the effect could be dramatic.
I think that this article is a huge reason why the "open source" model is working... not just because it is a development strategy that may or may not be superior, but because it is a political alternative to the sort of corporate politics that are almost inevitable in a capital/industrial environment.
Econodwarf wisdom idealizes a competition as a deliverer of optimal performance... tighten the screws, and output increases. but the competitive mindset doesn't disappear when employees clock in. The pressure that drives companies to compete among each other can also generate the internal competition that drives this sort of political BS.
And the more complex and collaborative the problem is, the more vulnerable it becomes to this internal ego jockeying. I conjecture that's a huge reason why we see politics playing such a deadly role in the development of software.
The problem with the "economic incentive" model that we seem to hold as the solution to all of societies problems and the deliverer of all of our culture's wants is that the incentive emphasizes the wrong thing. It pushes us to promote ourselves, whether for the sake of vanity or survival, and the product that results is often merely byproduct. Better would be an incentive that drove each toward the collective goal.
In free software projects the incentive, while perhaps somewhat vanity oriented, seems much more about loyalty to the creation itself. The systems may break down along less integrated lines, like two unrelated projects that mesh together after the fact for an unplanned-for synergy, like the LAMP platform, but less energy is wasted in painful CYA-like activity.
Obviously not every project can be developed collectively like this. Any ideas on how the community spirit can be better harnessed in an environment in which the job is less fun? Managers, from my experience of layer upon layer of them, don't seem to be it. How do companies make people want to work toward the project working? Is the current, sad, mess of a situation the best we can do? What do developers suggest?
What ever happened to the time when Nanotechnology meant millions of tiny robots that swarmed through your bloodstream to repair artery damage and self-replicated? It's been turned into just another buzz-word for marketing hype. Like putting rocket fins on a Chevy.
Universal free communication
on
SBC Might Buy AT&T
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· Score: 3, Interesting
If we can get the corporations out of our airwaves and build wireless mesh networks, we won't have to worry about monopolies. That should be the goal.
I don't see how the reach in Dvorak (in which the 'c' is now the Qwerty 'i' and the 'v' is the Qwerty '.') is so much more of a stretch than reaching down with the left hand...
It's not about the majority of users; it's about the creators. If they created their software in service of a political goal, freedom, then can't you understand how they prefer that this goal be preserved in the naming of the software they created for the purpose of its advancement? Free software was written by people with political, not technical, motives. Precision is not the motivation behind asking that people remember and use the correct term. Saying "open source" is like putting words in the mouths of people who have toiled in promotion of something much larger, far more important than mere software. Don't we owe their lifelong efforts some sort of respect? Next time you use GCC, Emacs, glibc, etc think about how little is asked of you in return for what you are using. Just one little term... why not support it?
The purity of the data / processor partnership has been lost as the amount of data we rely upon for daily computer use increases. Memory used to be all there was, with hard drives or other storage media being treated more like accessories than integral parts of the system. But now treating long-term storage so differently from RAM interferes with abstraction. Refences to data are unstable because the data are serialized in some ad-hoc fashion between program executions, so a large amount of potentially useful information remains locked away in the file system. The OS needs to provide a richer foundation than simple address spaces, instead supporting data structures in a manner similar to a Lisp top-level and automating their persistence to disk in a standardized manner. This way, once data was created once it could always be reached in the same way... a sort of "stability of data reference".
Bias and innaccuracy reflected clearly in arguments on the talk page still beat bias on behalf of a corporation, because it is clearly visible to anyone with interest. Some pages may be victims of controversy, but the vast majority presend the most coherent and well balanced information available on the Internet. So long as individuals are aware that Wikipedia is a work in progress, they can avoid the pitfalls of collaboration. Bias isn't the problem... invisible bias is.
My goal is not to steal other people's work but instead to make it impossible for the current controllers of media to continue their stranglehold on society. Once we make their business model impossible we can replace it with one that is fair to the artists instead of just making the distributors of their work rich. Think outside the brainwashing of the current controllers of society.
Has anyone determined if it would be theoretically possible to create a file sharing system whose users would be impervious to legal attack? Could files be somehow split up into millions of pieces and storage be shared to create some sort of networked soup of data in which no one person could be held responsible for holding an entire file? Is such a system even mathematically possible? If so, we need it.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a utility I use on my powerbook called uControl, one of whose options is to turn the function key into a toggle for the track pad becoming a scroll mouse. Hold down function and you can use the track pad more easily than a scroll wheel.
Information technology, at least the software end of it, has an extremely low cost of training and participation. If developing nations can get access to serviceable computers and a connection to the network, perhaps they can bootstrap a small IT knowledge base in their populations. Unlike industrial manufacturing, world-class code can be written from huts with cheap computers and solar panels. It could be just the solution these nations need to lift themselves out of poverty. If they can reach knowledge on the network and learn by contributing, that's one step closer. We've had years to yammer about needing roads, bla bla bla. But this computer thing is something new. If even a small percentage of those exposed to the technology go on to learn to use it and create more of it, the effect could be dramatic.
I think that this article is a huge reason why the "open source" model is working... not just because it is a development strategy that may or may not be superior, but because it is a political alternative to the sort of corporate politics that are almost inevitable in a capital/industrial environment. Econodwarf wisdom idealizes a competition as a deliverer of optimal performance... tighten the screws, and output increases. but the competitive mindset doesn't disappear when employees clock in. The pressure that drives companies to compete among each other can also generate the internal competition that drives this sort of political BS. And the more complex and collaborative the problem is, the more vulnerable it becomes to this internal ego jockeying. I conjecture that's a huge reason why we see politics playing such a deadly role in the development of software. The problem with the "economic incentive" model that we seem to hold as the solution to all of societies problems and the deliverer of all of our culture's wants is that the incentive emphasizes the wrong thing. It pushes us to promote ourselves, whether for the sake of vanity or survival, and the product that results is often merely byproduct. Better would be an incentive that drove each toward the collective goal. In free software projects the incentive, while perhaps somewhat vanity oriented, seems much more about loyalty to the creation itself. The systems may break down along less integrated lines, like two unrelated projects that mesh together after the fact for an unplanned-for synergy, like the LAMP platform, but less energy is wasted in painful CYA-like activity. Obviously not every project can be developed collectively like this. Any ideas on how the community spirit can be better harnessed in an environment in which the job is less fun? Managers, from my experience of layer upon layer of them, don't seem to be it. How do companies make people want to work toward the project working? Is the current, sad, mess of a situation the best we can do? What do developers suggest?
Next is the R.I.P. Nice to see a monster start to fall though. Maybe the borg will follow.
Definitely not very useful for data with any kind of structure. Why not s-expressions though?
What ever happened to the time when Nanotechnology meant millions of tiny robots that swarmed through your bloodstream to repair artery damage and self-replicated? It's been turned into just another buzz-word for marketing hype. Like putting rocket fins on a Chevy.
If we can get the corporations out of our airwaves and build wireless mesh networks, we won't have to worry about monopolies. That should be the goal.
I don't see how the reach in Dvorak (in which the 'c' is now the Qwerty 'i' and the 'v' is the Qwerty '.') is so much more of a stretch than reaching down with the left hand...
It's not about the majority of users; it's about the creators. If they created their software in service of a political goal, freedom, then can't you understand how they prefer that this goal be preserved in the naming of the software they created for the purpose of its advancement? Free software was written by people with political, not technical, motives. Precision is not the motivation behind asking that people remember and use the correct term. Saying "open source" is like putting words in the mouths of people who have toiled in promotion of something much larger, far more important than mere software. Don't we owe their lifelong efforts some sort of respect? Next time you use GCC, Emacs, glibc, etc think about how little is asked of you in return for what you are using. Just one little term... why not support it?
The purity of the data / processor partnership has been lost as the amount of data we rely upon for daily computer use increases. Memory used to be all there was, with hard drives or other storage media being treated more like accessories than integral parts of the system. But now treating long-term storage so differently from RAM interferes with abstraction. Refences to data are unstable because the data are serialized in some ad-hoc fashion between program executions, so a large amount of potentially useful information remains locked away in the file system. The OS needs to provide a richer foundation than simple address spaces, instead supporting data structures in a manner similar to a Lisp top-level and automating their persistence to disk in a standardized manner. This way, once data was created once it could always be reached in the same way... a sort of "stability of data reference".
Bias and innaccuracy reflected clearly in arguments on the talk page still beat bias on behalf of a corporation, because it is clearly visible to anyone with interest. Some pages may be victims of controversy, but the vast majority presend the most coherent and well balanced information available on the Internet. So long as individuals are aware that Wikipedia is a work in progress, they can avoid the pitfalls of collaboration. Bias isn't the problem... invisible bias is.
My goal is not to steal other people's work but instead to make it impossible for the current controllers of media to continue their stranglehold on society. Once we make their business model impossible we can replace it with one that is fair to the artists instead of just making the distributors of their work rich. Think outside the brainwashing of the current controllers of society.
Has anyone determined if it would be theoretically possible to create a file sharing system whose users would be impervious to legal attack? Could files be somehow split up into millions of pieces and storage be shared to create some sort of networked soup of data in which no one person could be held responsible for holding an entire file? Is such a system even mathematically possible? If so, we need it.