you presume too much intelligence and forethought to 'the existing power structures'.
using your rationale, the technologies of the internet and mobile communication technologies never would have fallen into the hands of the masses for the same reasons you've cited.
truth is, the 'regimes' aren't that smart. and even the brightest minds in the world did not predict the full scope of the social, cultural and political changes enabled by our current technologies.
i think there are many more big societal shifts yet to come from emerging technologies...and politicians will be powerless to stop or control them, primarily because they won't see them coming until it's too late to reverse.
what politician (or anyone else for that matter) accurately envisioned today's interconnected landscape when prodigy's dial up service first rolled out?
Actually, I do understand that distros come with their kernels/modules precompiled. I've also configured and compiled plenty of my own kernels and know how to use the tools.
My point was that it would be nice for a gui-based kernel config/compile tool to be available for those who _don't_ understand how to do so on their own. The precompiled kernels/modules that come with most distros have lots of features that people won't ever use or need (that's the ubuntu approach). Basically, it boils down to respecting a person's hardware resources, instead of flooding resources with bloat, just because they're there and it's 'easier' for the devs to do so.
There's a legion of linux geeks who would like linux to stay just the way it is: geeky and tweaky. There's a certain snob appeal to being able to tame a bucking bronco into a usable linux system. The elitist badge of a linux hax0r will lose its sheen and street cred the day grandma can easily boot up a linux box and do everything a gentoo geek can do. Ubuntu is not terrible far away from this reality and it scares the geeks. They're all huddled up in their tree house, frantically scribbling and posting a "keep out" sign to post on their clubhouse door to try and stave off the hoardes of unclean windoze masses. They don't want their secret toy to be pulled out of their hands and shared with everybody. It's like the time when you'd see someone talking on a cell phone and think, "Wow...now _there's_ someone with clout, hipness and panache" Now every snot-nosed 11 year old in the pasteurized, sleepy suburbs is chatting and texting on one and no one is impressed if you have a cell phone anymore. It will eventually be the same with linux. What will the geeks do then? Switch to Plan 9?:)
Ultimately it's up the the kernel devs to ensure hardware support and it sure would be nice to create a front end utility on a live cd which would autodetect hardware and walk an installer through a scripted and clearly explained process of configuring and compiling the exact kernel you need as opposed to the bloaty "one size fits all" ubuntu approach.
The idea isn't bad, but the execution is. Instead of having an annoying message, "Hey, we see you're using IE, why don't you try, etc...", the code could simply detect IE and then display a small banner ad to promote Firefox in a more subtle, unobtrusive way. Some people still might not like the banner ad idea, but it's a fair compromise and the visitor will just think everyone sees the promotional banner as opposed to being notified that they were 'singled out' as an IE user. That's a bit creepy to most people.
But first do some research...learn the basics...there's only about a million books on the subject and reams of good, free info online to educate yourself.
Test out a distro or three on an older system you don't mind making mistakes on, then, after you gain a certain level of knowledge and experience, you can ask more intelligent questions of the community. But of course, you're going to run into the occasional idiot, so matter what the point of interest is. Linux doesn't own the market on arrogance and rudeness, unfortunately, that attitude pervades a lot of computer culture in general, since some very skilled and knowledgable computer geeks have no other life and it's the only authority they have and they weld it ruthlessly sometimes. Pity these folks...it's easy to be rude while you're hiding behind a keyboard in your Mom's basement.
The Blue Hat name is a play on the Black Hat conferences, which have occasionally been criticized by IT vendors. The 'Blue' part comes from the color of badges that Microsoft staffers wear on campus.
Actually the Blue Hats are a symbolic salute to their employer's greatest technical accomplishment: The Blue Screen of Death
The Bible offers the old fish cliche -- give a man a fish and he'll eat today, teach a man to fish and he'll eat forever.
The Chinese offer their own cliche -- the journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step.
I don't think it's useless to expose curious children to a technology that basically runs the civilized world. Even if they never leave the fields and build a great civilized empire in Africa as a result of this initiative, it's always worth learning something new for its own sake. If only to learn how to learn...a computer is a helpful tool that can assist with that...and don't forget that something novel like a computer in such remote communities would be embraced as something "fun" by these kids...that's certainly not useless, especially if your dire predictions of a hopeless future are correct. A little fun would be a "nothing to lose" situation in that case, wouldn't it?
I use Linux and F/OSS (on Windoze) primarily to support a philosophy of choice, freedom, and open standards, not that it's always as slick or feature-rich (bloated) than a commercial alternative. It's nice to finally have a viable alternative to the Microsoft/Apple duopoly on the desktop.
Clever, yes, but in true Microsoft fashion, their implementation of ODF will "sort of" work, but with just enough bugs, problems and dissatisfaction to leverage people's motivation to fall for the "new and improved", "increased productivity" and "new features" sales pitch that Microsoft relies on the get people to upgrade to the new "sort of" working version. They have kept that cycle going very successfully for years since their biggest competitor is their own software base.
You don't need to forsake Apple, but lets be clear about Linux and the Open Source Movement.
It's not meant to be competing against commercial software. It's presented as an another choice, another option to supplant or supplement an existing configuration. It's true that in a lot of cases, Open Source just copies off commercial software, but that's because there are useful features that people need/want. It could be argued that every car ever made is just a "copy" of Henry Ford's Model T. But in other cases, Open Source has been innovative and superior in many ways (Firefox comes to mind). And as Open Source gains more traction / acceptance, that trend of innovation will continue.
So does Linux and Open Source have all the bells, whistles, shine (and let's be honest) hype of Steve Jobs' ultracool, buzz-generating, slick interfaces? Not really, but then Open Source is really about a philosophy of choice, freedom, open standards, etc. It should not be maligned for not being "pretty" or "cool". It should be lauded for opening so many doors that have long been locked down tight by the Microsoft/Apple duopoly.
How about a side by side demo, since a lot of the basic commands / icons are similar between MSO and OO?
I'm sure a lot of the decision makers will be worried what the learning curve would be like in migrating from MSO to OO, so if you can show them that it won't be too steep, they'll be more open to the idea of a change to OO...also, along that same vein, to remind them that even an upgrade to a newer version of MSO is going to involve a learning curve, since MS likes to monkey around and change their menu/command/gui interfaces between versions, all in the name of "improvement", which in my experience is horsecrap...but anyway, it's something else you could leverage to your advantage. Additionally, I wouldn't imagine a school environment needing much beyond the basic features of office software, so again, a migration to OO shouldn't be too scary a ride if they already know how to use MSO.
As a last resort, offer to install OO on some computers on a probationary basis while the slow moving school bureaucracy are having their endless board (bored) meetings and evaluating every option ad nauseum. That's one more advantage over MSO: you can't install the latest version of MSO on a "probationary" basis without first buying the licenses.
Where did I ever say that the media was trying to dumb down the masses?
My point was that given a lack of quality choices, people will simply choose the best of the worst.
I don't think corporate america is producing loads of crap as some grand conspiracy to make people dumb, it's simply cheaper to produce crap than quality...it's simple economics.
The masses don't demand mediocrity. Media-crity is shoved down their throats!
People don't have quality choices, they have the "choices" that the providers have given them. Over time, people succumb to the lack of quality choices, resign themselves to their powerless position and settle for the cream of the crop of the shit buffet. Humans being social animals, we will congregate into groups around that which we've chosen...the headcounts of those groups implies popularity, broadcasters feed this data to advertisers, advertisers take the bait and buy commercial time, the broadcasters become more rich and powerful, the "stars" of the entertainment machine become fodder for the print and TV media money machine, which pumps out endless coverage of their pointless lives, which in turn feeds the grouping instinct of the masses and the cycle feeds itself forever.
People aren't quite the morons you think they are...they are just economically coerced and brainwashed into making moronic choices.
I wouldn't call a constant stream of sensationalized, celebrity-driven 'info-tainment' journalism. It's only meant to pull in the maximum number of eyeballs to push advertising and increase advertising revenues and ratings. It's all about business...Jon Stewart's vexations about "Hurting America" be damned! Oh look! It's Keith Obermann reading from a teleprompter...a bunch of funny words someone else wrote for him while he tries to mimick Letterman's schtick! Ho Ho...Ha Ha! He's funny.
On the other hand, many blogs are just biased blatherings on whatever the "mainstream" media is reporting. So, in a sense, the bloggers are parasitic.
Actually, come to think of it, journalism is nowhere to be found....and now a word from our sponsor.
Human Proteome Folding Project: A layperson's Explanation Proteins are essential to living beings. Just about everything in the human body involves or is made out of proteins.
What are proteins? Proteins are large molecules that are made of long chains of smaller molecules called amino acids. While there are only 20 different kinds of amino acids that make up all proteins, sometimes hundreds of them make up a single protein.
Adding to the complexity, proteins typically do not stay as long chains. As soon as the chain of amino acids is built, the chain folds and tangles up into a more compact and particular shape that lets it conduct specific and necessary functions within the human body.
Proteins fold because the different amino acids like to stick to each other following certain rules. Imagine that amino acids are pop-beads of 20 different colors. The pop-beads are sticky, but sticky in such a way that only certain combinations of colors can stick together. This makes the amino acid chains fold in a particular way that creates proteins that are useful to the human body. Human cells have mechanisms to help the proteins fold properly and, equally important, mechanisms to get rid of improperly folded proteins.
How do proteins relate to human genes? The collection of all of the human genes is known as "the human genome." Depending on how the genes are counted, there are over 30,000 genes in the human genome. Each gene, which is a section of a long chain known as DNA, dictates how to build the chain of amino acids for one of the 30,000 proteins. In recent years, scientists were able to map the sequence for each human gene. This means that we now know the sequence of amino acids in all of the human proteins. Thus, the human genome is directly related to the "human proteome," the collection of all human proteins.
The protein mystery While researchers have learned a great deal about the human proteome, the functions of most of the proteins remain a mystery. The genes do not reveal exactly how the proteins will fold into their final shape, which is critical because that determines what a protein can do and what other proteins it can connect to or interact with.
Proteins are like puzzle pieces. For example, muscle proteins connect to each other to form a muscle fiber. They join together in a specific manner because of their shape, as well as other factors relating to the shape.
Everything that goes on in cells and in the body is very specifically controlled by the shape of the proteins that do or do not let proteins interlock with other proteins. For example, the proteins of a virus or bacteria may have particular shapes that enable it to break through the cell membrane, allowing it to infect the cell.
The Human Proteome Folding Project Knowing the shapes of proteins will help researchers understand how proteins perform their desired functions and also how diseases prevent proteins from doing their necessary functions to maintain healthy cells.
The Human Proteome Folding Project will combine the power of millions of computers in a grid to help scientists understand how human proteins fold. The work to be done in this monumental task is shared across this grid, so that results can be achieved far sooner than would be possible with conventional supercomputers. With a greater understanding of protein structure, scientists can learn how diseases work and ultimately find cures for them.
When your grid agent is running, it is folding an amino acid chain in various ways and evaluating how well each folding follows the specific rules of how specific amino acids stick together or not. As computers try millions of ways to fold the chains, they attempt to fold the protein in the same way that it actually folds in the human body. The best shapes identified for each protein are returned to the scientists for further study.
Is Microsoft ever going to have the guts and vision to reinvent itself as an open-source company or will it wait until it is forced to do so by people and companies adopting superior alternatives?
Slashdot Mirror
you presume too much intelligence and forethought to 'the existing power structures'. using your rationale, the technologies of the internet and mobile communication technologies never would have fallen into the hands of the masses for the same reasons you've cited. truth is, the 'regimes' aren't that smart. and even the brightest minds in the world did not predict the full scope of the social, cultural and political changes enabled by our current technologies. i think there are many more big societal shifts yet to come from emerging technologies...and politicians will be powerless to stop or control them, primarily because they won't see them coming until it's too late to reverse. what politician (or anyone else for that matter) accurately envisioned today's interconnected landscape when prodigy's dial up service first rolled out?
I don't think it's being offered as 'free'...it's being made freely available on his website and hopefully people will pay up voluntarily.
star wars lost its way when it lost its sense of humor and started taking itself too seriously. at the end of the day...it's...just...entertainment
Actually, I do understand that distros come with their kernels/modules precompiled. I've also configured and compiled plenty of my own kernels and know how to use the tools. My point was that it would be nice for a gui-based kernel config/compile tool to be available for those who _don't_ understand how to do so on their own. The precompiled kernels/modules that come with most distros have lots of features that people won't ever use or need (that's the ubuntu approach). Basically, it boils down to respecting a person's hardware resources, instead of flooding resources with bloat, just because they're there and it's 'easier' for the devs to do so.
There's a legion of linux geeks who would like linux to stay just the way it is: geeky and tweaky. There's a certain snob appeal to being able to tame a bucking bronco into a usable linux system. The elitist badge of a linux hax0r will lose its sheen and street cred the day grandma can easily boot up a linux box and do everything a gentoo geek can do. Ubuntu is not terrible far away from this reality and it scares the geeks. They're all huddled up in their tree house, frantically scribbling and posting a "keep out" sign to post on their clubhouse door to try and stave off the hoardes of unclean windoze masses. They don't want their secret toy to be pulled out of their hands and shared with everybody. It's like the time when you'd see someone talking on a cell phone and think, "Wow...now _there's_ someone with clout, hipness and panache" Now every snot-nosed 11 year old in the pasteurized, sleepy suburbs is chatting and texting on one and no one is impressed if you have a cell phone anymore. It will eventually be the same with linux. What will the geeks do then? Switch to Plan 9? :)
Ultimately it's up the the kernel devs to ensure hardware support and it sure would be nice to create a front end utility on a live cd which would autodetect hardware and walk an installer through a scripted and clearly explained process of configuring and compiling the exact kernel you need as opposed to the bloaty "one size fits all" ubuntu approach.
I just bought a Seagate 250gb Barracuda for $95. A 60gb hd isn't even worth owning anymore much less a 20gb.
The idea isn't bad, but the execution is. Instead of having an annoying message, "Hey, we see you're using IE, why don't you try, etc...", the code could simply detect IE and then display a small banner ad to promote Firefox in a more subtle, unobtrusive way. Some people still might not like the banner ad idea, but it's a fair compromise and the visitor will just think everyone sees the promotional banner as opposed to being notified that they were 'singled out' as an IE user. That's a bit creepy to most people.
But first do some research...learn the basics...there's only about a million books on the subject and reams of good, free info online to educate yourself.
Test out a distro or three on an older system you don't mind making mistakes on, then, after you gain a certain level of knowledge and experience, you can ask more intelligent questions of the community. But of course, you're going to run into the occasional idiot, so matter what the point of interest is. Linux doesn't own the market on arrogance and rudeness, unfortunately, that attitude pervades a lot of computer culture in general, since some very skilled and knowledgable computer geeks have no other life and it's the only authority they have and they weld it ruthlessly sometimes. Pity these folks...it's easy to be rude while you're hiding behind a keyboard in your Mom's basement.
The Blue Hat name is a play on the Black Hat conferences, which have occasionally been criticized by IT vendors. The 'Blue' part comes from the color of badges that Microsoft staffers wear on campus.
Actually the Blue Hats are a symbolic salute to their employer's greatest technical accomplishment: The Blue Screen of Death
The Bible offers the old fish cliche -- give a man a fish and he'll eat today, teach a man to fish and he'll eat forever.
The Chinese offer their own cliche -- the journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step.
I don't think it's useless to expose curious children to a technology that basically runs the civilized world. Even if they never leave the fields and build a great civilized empire in Africa as a result of this initiative, it's always worth learning something new for its own sake. If only to learn how to learn...a computer is a helpful tool that can assist with that...and don't forget that something novel like a computer in such remote communities would be embraced as something "fun" by these kids...that's certainly not useless, especially if your dire predictions of a hopeless future are correct. A little fun would be a "nothing to lose" situation in that case, wouldn't it?
I heard Al Gore designed and built all one million of these things with his bare hands.
I use Linux and F/OSS (on Windoze) primarily to support a philosophy of choice, freedom, and open standards, not that it's always as slick or feature-rich (bloated) than a commercial alternative. It's nice to finally have a viable alternative to the Microsoft/Apple duopoly on the desktop.
Clever, yes, but in true Microsoft fashion, their implementation of ODF will "sort of" work, but with just enough bugs, problems and dissatisfaction to leverage people's motivation to fall for the "new and improved", "increased productivity" and "new features" sales pitch that Microsoft relies on the get people to upgrade to the new "sort of" working version. They have kept that cycle going very successfully for years since their biggest competitor is their own software base.
You don't need to forsake Apple, but lets be clear about Linux and the Open Source Movement.
It's not meant to be competing against commercial software. It's presented as an another choice, another option to supplant or supplement an existing configuration. It's true that in a lot of cases, Open Source just copies off commercial software, but that's because there are useful features that people need/want. It could be argued that every car ever made is just a "copy" of Henry Ford's Model T. But in other cases, Open Source has been innovative and superior in many ways (Firefox comes to mind). And as Open Source gains more traction / acceptance, that trend of innovation will continue.
So does Linux and Open Source have all the bells, whistles, shine (and let's be honest) hype of Steve Jobs' ultracool, buzz-generating, slick interfaces? Not really, but then Open Source is really about a philosophy of choice, freedom, open standards, etc. It should not be maligned for not being "pretty" or "cool". It should be lauded for opening so many doors that have long been locked down tight by the Microsoft/Apple duopoly.
PS3's descendants talking wirelessly to a chip in our brains is our future. ;)
How does this kind of thing happen? Just curious.
benjamin_pont's Recent Submissions
Title
Quantum leap in secure web video
Datestamp
Friday April 29, @02:09PM Rejected
How about a side by side demo, since a lot of the basic commands / icons are similar between MSO and OO?
I'm sure a lot of the decision makers will be worried what the learning curve would be like in migrating from MSO to OO, so if you can show them that it won't be too steep, they'll be more open to the idea of a change to OO...also, along that same vein, to remind them that even an upgrade to a newer version of MSO is going to involve a learning curve, since MS likes to monkey around and change their menu/command/gui interfaces between versions, all in the name of "improvement", which in my experience is horsecrap...but anyway, it's something else you could leverage to your advantage. Additionally, I wouldn't imagine a school environment needing much beyond the basic features of office software, so again, a migration to OO shouldn't be too scary a ride if they already know how to use MSO.
As a last resort, offer to install OO on some computers on a probationary basis while the slow moving school bureaucracy are having their endless board (bored) meetings and evaluating every option ad nauseum. That's one more advantage over MSO: you can't install the latest version of MSO on a "probationary" basis without first buying the licenses.
Good luck.
Where did I ever say that the media was trying to dumb down the masses?
My point was that given a lack of quality choices, people will simply choose the best of the worst.
I don't think corporate america is producing loads of crap as some grand conspiracy to make people dumb, it's simply cheaper to produce crap than quality...it's simple economics.
Cheers.
The masses don't demand mediocrity. Media-crity is shoved down their throats!
People don't have quality choices, they have the "choices" that the providers have given them. Over time, people succumb to the lack of quality choices, resign themselves to their powerless position and settle for the cream of the crop of the shit buffet. Humans being social animals, we will congregate into groups around that which we've chosen...the headcounts of those groups implies popularity, broadcasters feed this data to advertisers, advertisers take the bait and buy commercial time, the broadcasters become more rich and powerful, the "stars" of the entertainment machine become fodder for the print and TV media money machine, which pumps out endless coverage of their pointless lives, which in turn feeds the grouping instinct of the masses and the cycle feeds itself forever.
People aren't quite the morons you think they are...they are just economically coerced and brainwashed into making moronic choices.
I think the "sufficiently advanced minds" that Suso refers to will see the human race's ultimate value to them as being:
;)
A.) A fun family pet to keep in a cage.
B.) A lifeform to conduct scientific and/or medical experiments on to advance knowledge which will be of benefit to them.
C.) Tasty food.
See? Aliens aren't so different from us after all.
But this comment may fall into the off-topic catagory of: "What do we not want to hear?"
Imaginary pills for imaginary spills.
I wouldn't call a constant stream of sensationalized, celebrity-driven 'info-tainment' journalism. It's only meant to pull in the maximum number of eyeballs to push advertising and increase advertising revenues and ratings. It's all about business...Jon Stewart's vexations about "Hurting America" be damned! Oh look! It's Keith Obermann reading from a teleprompter...a bunch of funny words someone else wrote for him while he tries to mimick Letterman's schtick! Ho Ho...Ha Ha! He's funny.
...and now a word from our sponsor.
On the other hand, many blogs are just biased blatherings on whatever the "mainstream" media is reporting. So, in a sense, the bloggers are parasitic.
Actually, come to think of it, journalism is nowhere to be found.
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/
Current Project:
Human Proteome Folding Project: A layperson's Explanation
Proteins are essential to living beings. Just about everything in the human body involves or is made out of proteins.
What are proteins?
Proteins are large molecules that are made of long chains of smaller molecules called amino acids. While there are only 20 different kinds of amino acids that make up all proteins, sometimes hundreds of them make up a single protein.
Adding to the complexity, proteins typically do not stay as long chains. As soon as the chain of amino acids is built, the chain folds and tangles up into a more compact and particular shape that lets it conduct specific and necessary functions within the human body.
Proteins fold because the different amino acids like to stick to each other following certain rules. Imagine that amino acids are pop-beads of 20 different colors. The pop-beads are sticky, but sticky in such a way that only certain combinations of colors can stick together. This makes the amino acid chains fold in a particular way that creates proteins that are useful to the human body. Human cells have mechanisms to help the proteins fold properly and, equally important, mechanisms to get rid of improperly folded proteins.
How do proteins relate to human genes?
The collection of all of the human genes is known as "the human genome." Depending on how the genes are counted, there are over 30,000 genes in the human genome. Each gene, which is a section of a long chain known as DNA, dictates how to build the chain of amino acids for one of the 30,000 proteins. In recent years, scientists were able to map the sequence for each human gene. This means that we now know the sequence of amino acids in all of the human proteins. Thus, the human genome is directly related to the "human proteome," the collection of all human proteins.
The protein mystery
While researchers have learned a great deal about the human proteome, the functions of most of the proteins remain a mystery. The genes do not reveal exactly how the proteins will fold into their final shape, which is critical because that determines what a protein can do and what other proteins it can connect to or interact with.
Proteins are like puzzle pieces. For example, muscle proteins connect to each other to form a muscle fiber. They join together in a specific manner because of their shape, as well as other factors relating to the shape.
Everything that goes on in cells and in the body is very specifically controlled by the shape of the proteins that do or do not let proteins interlock with other proteins. For example, the proteins of a virus or bacteria may have particular shapes that enable it to break through the cell membrane, allowing it to infect the cell.
The Human Proteome Folding Project
Knowing the shapes of proteins will help researchers understand how proteins perform their desired functions and also how diseases prevent proteins from doing their necessary functions to maintain healthy cells.
The Human Proteome Folding Project will combine the power of millions of computers in a grid to help scientists understand how human proteins fold. The work to be done in this monumental task is shared across this grid, so that results can be achieved far sooner than would be possible with conventional supercomputers. With a greater understanding of protein structure, scientists can learn how diseases work and ultimately find cures for them.
When your grid agent is running, it is folding an amino acid chain in various ways and evaluating how well each folding follows the specific rules of how specific amino acids stick together or not. As computers try millions of ways to fold the chains, they attempt to fold the protein in the same way that it actually folds in the human body. The best shapes identified for each protein are returned to the scientists for further study.
Understanding your agent application window
Click
...how about implanting a GPS device in all these contractors and journalists getting snatched left and right in Iraq??
Is Microsoft ever going to have the guts and vision to reinvent itself as an open-source company or will it wait until it is forced to do so by people and companies adopting superior alternatives?