2 things I've done with my sons (who are 7 and 9 but homeschooled so add 2 years for schooled children).
the robot game
You are the robot. The children have to give you simple commands (like forward, left, stop - think turtle) to move across the room. Your job is to be a bloody minded literal robot. Walk into walls. Bump into tables. Say "do not understand" if they give you commands requiring human knowledge. They love it, and all want to be the robot too.
Binary counting
Show them how to count up to 1023 on their fingers with binary bits. (start with 31 on one hand). Then, play the binary search guessing game - they pick a number 1 to 30, you get 5 guesses. Show them how you are setting one bit at a time. Then go to 1 to 1000 with both hands.
No, it means more than that. Google takes it to mean that the terms on the page itself are relevant. Some of your PageRank authority is conferred on that page. I want to be able to link to a page and tell Googlenot to give it any pagerank from me.
Well,as the NYT just pulled its archives from the net, you can't read the original any more, but it did not contain the phrase 'second superpower', instead having the 'two superpowers' bit that Orlowski quoted.
One of the things we discussed on the Emergent Democracy list is the problem that Google assumes a link is an endorsement. When I link to Orlowski's hogwash, I am pointing out what is wrong with it,but Google takes that as an endorsement by me. My Vote Links proposal is meant to fix this.
Separating out the bizarre attacks on Joi Ito for eating lunch, his thesis seems to be that 'A-list bloggers' have hijacked and neutered the phrase from the Anti-war (or anti-Bush) protestors, and swamped Google with this new interpretation.
In fact, the original article he cites (reproduced here) did not contain the phrase 'second superpower'; it had a throwaway rhetorical flourish in the first sentence: The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.
(Orlowski elides the first part about the Western alliance to support his these that it's all about the street, man).
As he says, this meme circulated about the web a bit, and eventually James Moore explored the idea in more detail, and a broader context than just marching against Bush, combining it with the preceding discussions on 'emergent democracy' that had been going for a while. Of course this gets a higher rank for 'second superpower' - it is in the title, and enough people found it interesting enough to link to. Instead of a lot of incoherent slogans, here are people discussing how to bring it about. Orlowski then completely distorts the quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden I posted to the list. Discussing a report on the very disruptive, street-blocking protests, where protesters in San Francisco, Boston, Washington and elsewhere shouted the same slogan, "This is what democracy looks like!"
Patrick said No, that's not what democracy looks like.
It's what protest looks like, and it's often the right thing to do. And of course "democracy" had better entail significant tolerance of unruly protest, or it's not very democratic.
But that slogan is stupid, even by the standards of slogans. Long and often boring meetings are what democracy looks like. Tiresome horse-trading is what democracy looks like. Talking to your neighbors is what democracy looks like.
Democracy can function perfectly well without people painting their faces and blocking streets. It can't function at all without that other stuff.
The emergent democracy group is about how to build tools and structures to capture democratic intent in a digital world. If you're interested in this, join in.
Perhaps what Orlowski is really worried about is that a group who aren't part of the clerisy of professional Journalists and activists are taking an interest, and actually discussing ideas calmly and rationally, and thereby attracting links from other people, Doc and Dave earned their high Google ranking by writing lots of things that people found interesting enough to link to, day after day for over 5 years.
Andrew, if you have interesting things to say about the future of democracy, join the discussion, but don't troll for cheap links by stooping to selective quotation and ad hominem attacks.
The best thing to do is add capacity, so that fewer packets get queued. However, TCP will do it's level best to saturate any link, and will always force packets to be queued (or dropped) during ramp-up, unless the total transfer length is shorter than the integrated ramp-up time. What I propose is that short packets go to the head of the queue. If you're doing file transfer with TCP, you'll be using path MTU-sized packets, whereas if you're doing VoIP or telenet, your packets will be much smaller. Move the shortest packets to the head of the queue, and TCP will accommodate.
Thier first computer, the PET, was highly risible in France, for reasons discussed above. The next computer they release was called the 'VIC', which is a far ruder word in German. No wonder the next model had a number.
I ahve a practical solution. It's detailed over at mediAgora Principles:
* Creators should be credited and rewarded for their work. * Works can be incorporated into new creative works. * When they are, all source works should be credited and rewarded. * Customers should pay a known price. * Successful promotion of work should be rewarded too. * Individuals can play multiple roles - Creator, Promoter, Customer * Prices and sales figures should be open * Relationships are based on trust and reputation * Copy protection destroys value
Goals:
* Creators have 3 main goals - getting heard, getting credited and getting paid * Customers want to find works and pay a fair price * Creators set the price, customers decide to pay it (or not) * Promoters have an incentive to promote Works, but not to compete with other promoters for the same work * Working within the system is more attractive than subverting it
I worked at the Interactive Television Unit (the BBC department that was founded for the Domesday Project) for the last 3 months of its existence in 1989 before it was spun out into the MultiMedia Corporation in Jan 1990 (I then worked at MMC until 1997, when it bacame a shell company owned bythe stockbrokers, but that's another story).
When we left the BBC, they had all the original Video data on Broadcast quality masters, and all the digital data preserved on VAX tapes. They must have thrown those out in the intervening 12 years (which wouldn't surprise me).
I know of two former MMC directors who have CD-ROM backups of the digital data and working Domesday systems.
Which is not to decry the work in emulating it - that si the real long-term answer. The Church-Turing thesis is the ultimate refutation of DRM too.
I have a market model that solev this and related issues. It is described in detail at mediAgora
In particualr, the answer to this dilemma is to reward those who promote music in a way that leads to sales by giving them some of the sale price. Details here
Once there is a way to pay the creators, and an incentive to promote sales rather than give away, the agents will emerge.
I already have a very portable gadget with specs close to that (a bit less VRAM, but a big HD). My iPod. If I could plug it into the car audio system and have the steering column channel change controls drive it. All it woudl need is a custom dash socket for it, with the headphone jack and FireWire power adaptor.
A Song of Reproduction: High Fidelity Hi-Fi's the thing for me With an LP disc and an FM set And a corner reflex cabinet High frequency range Complete with auto-change All the highest notes neither sharp nor flat The ear can't hear as high as that Still I ought to please any passing bat With my High Fidelity [...] High decibel gain Is easy to obtain With the tone control at a single touch Bel canto sounds like double Dutch But I never did care for music much, It's the high fidelity.
IMO, the gloat factor that drives people to buy such things is not really there, as they're all buying HDTV sets and Home Theater speaker systems instead, and buying DVDs instead of CDs.
Been there, done that, made the T-shirt. Lets look at it another way. Can you defend Hollywood movies as 'Science' or 'useful Arts'? Please enumerate their uses.
Can you explain how coloured celluloid is 'writing or discoveries'?
the current linklocal address spec (currently awaiting review for final approval) insists on having linklocal addresses enabled all the time, and by default - and for some reason the working group insists on it being that way!
The reason is so that it has ZERO configuration. If you have to 'turn it on' it has a configuration step.
Apps that expect addresses to be routable and stable will die with DHCP or NAT already. Networking code needs to cope with network failure.
DNS records have durations and expiry for a reason. With ZeroConf you get a stable name to relookup for the address when you need it.
Re:Epeus is a bit confused about applets
on
Open Source TV
·
· Score: 2
Bob is planning a weekly or bi-weekly show, so we'll have to make sure our browser caches are big enough to keep the applet for that time - a little tricky as half an hour of TV will be pushing everything out right afterwards.
The 'no download' mantra for Java players is very odd - of course there is a download. Nothing wrong with providinga java playback option, but ignoring the MPEG4 playback options many people already have installed is daft.
Bob is a bit confused about MPEG4
on
Open Source TV
·
· Score: 2
The "NerdTV" video player isn't a player at all, but an applet that is being supplied by the very nice people from IBM Research. This is not any shipping IBM product, but rather a custom applet IBM's Michelle Kim and her crew are whipping-up just for "NerdTV." Going with an applet means there is no player application to download and install. We don't have to make a choice between Windows Media, RealPlayer, or QuickTime (actually, I suppose what we've done is reject all three).
An applet means you have to download the Player every time you view it.
If it is MPEG4, I trust he's choosing a profile that meets interoperability standards, in which case QT Player will play it and let people edit it, and RealPlayer will play MPEG4 with the Envivio plugin. It's just Windows Media Player that is deliberately shunning MPEG4 because they want to own the codecs and decide who can play things back.
Slashdot Mirror
Over at Technorati we are counting blogged votes by vote links - explict rel="vote-for" or rel="vote-against" links.
Blog your vote today.
2 things I've done with my sons (who are 7 and 9 but homeschooled so add 2 years for schooled children). the robot game You are the robot. The children have to give you simple commands (like forward, left, stop - think turtle) to move across the room. Your job is to be a bloody minded literal robot. Walk into walls. Bump into tables. Say "do not understand" if they give you commands requiring human knowledge. They love it, and all want to be the robot too. Binary counting Show them how to count up to 1023 on their fingers with binary bits. (start with 31 on one hand). Then, play the binary search guessing game - they pick a number 1 to 30, you get 5 guesses. Show them how you are setting one bit at a time. Then go to 1 to 1000 with both hands.
You're about 10 years too late for that. Guess who has 17.*.*.*
017/8 Jul 92 Apple Computer Inc.
018/8 Jan 94 MIT
Plenty of other interesting class A owners there too:
034/8 Mar 93 Halliburton Company
044/8 Jul 92 Amateur Radio Digital Communications
051/8 Aug 94 Deparment of Social Security of UK
That works per page, not per link. I'd have to indirect each link through a refresh page with robots.txt set. Yuk.
No, it means more than that. Google takes it to mean that the terms on the page itself are relevant. Some of your PageRank authority is conferred on that page. I want to be able to link to a page and tell Googlenot to give it any pagerank from me.
Well,as the NYT just pulled its archives from the net, you can't read the original any more, but it did not contain the phrase 'second superpower', instead having the 'two superpowers' bit that Orlowski quoted.
One of the things we discussed on the Emergent Democracy list is the problem that Google assumes a link is an endorsement. When I link to Orlowski's hogwash, I am pointing out what is wrong with it,but Google takes that as an endorsement by me.
My Vote Links proposal is meant to fix this.
Separating out the bizarre attacks on Joi Ito for eating lunch, his thesis seems to be that 'A-list bloggers' have hijacked and neutered the phrase from the Anti-war (or anti-Bush) protestors, and swamped Google with this new interpretation.
In fact, the original article he cites (reproduced here) did not contain the phrase 'second superpower'; it had a throwaway rhetorical flourish in the first sentence:
The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.
(Orlowski elides the first part about the Western alliance to support his these that it's all about the street, man).
As he says, this meme circulated about the web a bit, and eventually James Moore explored the idea in more detail, and a broader context than just marching against Bush, combining it with the preceding discussions on 'emergent democracy' that had been going for a while. Of course this gets a higher rank for 'second superpower' - it is in the title, and enough people found it interesting enough to link to.
Instead of a lot of incoherent slogans, here are people discussing how to bring it about.
Orlowski then completely distorts the quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden I posted to the list. Discussing a report on the very disruptive, street-blocking protests, where protesters in San Francisco, Boston, Washington and elsewhere shouted the same slogan, "This is what democracy looks like!"
Patrick said
No, that's not what democracy looks like.
It's what protest looks like, and it's often the right thing to do. And of course "democracy" had better entail significant tolerance of unruly protest, or it's not very democratic.
But that slogan is stupid, even by the standards of slogans. Long and often boring meetings are what democracy looks like. Tiresome horse-trading is what democracy looks like. Talking to your neighbors is what democracy looks like.
Democracy can function perfectly well without people painting their faces and blocking streets. It can't function at all without that other stuff.
The emergent democracy group is about how to build tools and structures to capture democratic intent in a digital world. If you're interested in this, join in.
Perhaps what Orlowski is really worried about is that a group who aren't part of the clerisy of professional Journalists and activists are taking an interest, and actually discussing ideas calmly and rationally, and thereby attracting links from other people, Doc and Dave earned their high Google ranking by writing lots of things that people found interesting enough to link to, day after day for over 5 years.
Andrew, if you have interesting things to say about the future of democracy, join the discussion, but don't troll for cheap links by stooping to selective quotation and ad hominem attacks.
Don't forget 'The Lavender Hill Mob', 'Whisky Galore' and 'The LadyKillers'
Ultimate geek movie, starring Alec Guinness as the man who invents a fabric thta repels dirt and won't wear out.
The best thing to do is add capacity, so that fewer packets get queued. However, TCP will do it's level best to saturate any link, and will always force packets to be queued (or dropped) during ramp-up, unless the total transfer length is shorter than the integrated ramp-up time.
What I propose is that short packets go to the head of the queue. If you're doing file transfer with TCP, you'll be using path MTU-sized packets, whereas if you're doing VoIP or telenet, your packets will be much smaller. Move the shortest packets to the head of the queue, and TCP will accommodate.
Thier first computer, the PET, was highly risible in France, for reasons discussed above.
The next computer they release was called the 'VIC', which is a far ruder word in German. No wonder the next model had a number.
This give you the mountability of directories that ftp provides.
I ahve a practical solution. It's detailed over at mediAgora
Principles:
* Creators should be credited and rewarded for their work.
* Works can be incorporated into new creative works.
* When they are, all source works should be credited and rewarded.
* Customers should pay a known price.
* Successful promotion of work should be rewarded too.
* Individuals can play multiple roles - Creator, Promoter, Customer
* Prices and sales figures should be open
* Relationships are based on trust and reputation
* Copy protection destroys value
Goals:
* Creators have 3 main goals - getting heard, getting credited and getting paid
* Customers want to find works and pay a fair price
* Creators set the price, customers decide to pay it (or not)
* Promoters have an incentive to promote Works, but not to compete with other promoters for the same work
* Working within the system is more attractive than subverting it
I worked at the Interactive Television Unit (the BBC department that was founded for the Domesday Project) for the last 3 months of its existence in 1989 before it was spun out into the MultiMedia Corporation in Jan 1990 (I then worked at MMC until 1997, when it bacame a shell company owned bythe stockbrokers, but that's another story).
When we left the BBC, they had all the original Video data on Broadcast quality masters, and all the digital data preserved on VAX tapes. They must have thrown those out in the intervening 12 years (which wouldn't surprise me).
I know of two former MMC directors who have CD-ROM backups of the digital data and working Domesday systems.
Which is not to decry the work in emulating it - that si the real long-term answer. The Church-Turing thesis is the ultimate refutation of DRM too.
The ideal Dr Who cast for today would be Stephen Fry as the Doctor, Alan Rickman as the Master and Ann Friel as the assistant.
I have a market model that solev this and related issues. It is described in detail at mediAgora
In particualr, the answer to this dilemma is to reward those who promote music in a way that leads to sales by giving them some of the sale price. Details here
Once there is a way to pay the creators, and an incentive to promote sales rather than give away, the agents will emerge.
I already have a very portable gadget with specs close to that (a bit less VRAM, but a big HD). My iPod.
If I could plug it into the car audio system and have the steering column channel change controls drive it. All it woudl need is a custom dash socket for it, with the headphone jack and FireWire power adaptor.
BMW is doing it with motorbikes already.
Why not read a short story or two
His Saddam Hussein Germ Warfare novel is inexplicably out of print.
A Song of Reproduction:
High Fidelity
Hi-Fi's the thing for me
With an LP disc and an FM set
And a corner reflex cabinet
High frequency range
Complete with auto-change
All the highest notes neither sharp nor flat
The ear can't hear as high as that
Still I ought to please any passing bat
With my High Fidelity
[...]
High decibel gain
Is easy to obtain
With the tone control at a single touch
Bel canto sounds like double Dutch
But I never did care for music much,
It's the high fidelity.
IMO, the gloat factor that drives people to buy such things is not really there, as they're all buying HDTV sets and Home Theater speaker systems instead, and buying DVDs instead of CDs.
Over at mediAgora the details of just such a promotion and payment system are under discussion.
As I said on my weblog:
Been there, done that, made the T-shirt.
Lets look at it another way. Can you defend Hollywood movies as 'Science' or 'useful Arts'? Please enumerate their uses.
Can you explain how coloured celluloid is 'writing or discoveries'?
Constitutional literalism cuts both ways, Jack.
the current linklocal address spec (currently awaiting review for final approval) insists on having linklocal addresses enabled all the time, and by default - and for some reason the working group insists on it being that way!
The reason is so that it has ZERO configuration. If you have to 'turn it on' it has a configuration step.
Apps that expect addresses to be routable and stable will die with DHCP or NAT already. Networking code needs to cope with network failure.
DNS records have durations and expiry for a reason. With ZeroConf you get a stable name to relookup for the address when you need it.
Bob is planning a weekly or bi-weekly show, so we'll have to make sure our browser caches are big enough to keep the applet for that time - a little tricky as half an hour of TV will be pushing everything out right afterwards.
The 'no download' mantra for Java players is very odd - of course there is a download. Nothing wrong with providinga java playback option, but ignoring the MPEG4 playback options many people already have installed is daft.
The "NerdTV" video player isn't a player at all, but an applet that is being supplied by the very nice people from IBM Research. This is not any shipping IBM product, but rather a custom applet IBM's Michelle Kim and her crew are whipping-up just for "NerdTV." Going with an applet means there is no player application to download and install. We don't have to make a choice between Windows Media, RealPlayer, or QuickTime (actually, I suppose what we've done is reject all three).
An applet means you have to download the Player every time you view it.
If it is MPEG4, I trust he's choosing a profile that meets interoperability standards, in which case QT Player will play it and let people edit it, and RealPlayer will play MPEG4 with the Envivio plugin. It's just Windows Media Player that is deliberately shunning MPEG4 because they want to own the codecs and decide who can play things back.