D) The best thing the internet can do for us is bring us in such regular contact with people around the world that we will no longer want nor need to go to war with them, and will readily stop those who do.
1. When Crusoe comes out, suddenly long battery life will be all the rage, and with it, low powered chips. What's more, the iMac uses a 400 MHz G3 and needs no fan, although it could get away with a 100 MHz 603 for most purposes. Also, offices will see the wisdom of purchasing used PCs with 100-200 MHz chips rather than new PCs with 1000-2000 MHz chips.
2. The iMac uses a Rage128, which needs no fan. However, you are correct that for 90% of the population, 3D graphics chips are a frill. Offices can save money by purchasing custom-made 3D-free PCs. And of course, 3D free notebooks last longer on the battery.
3. LCD monitors can become very large without using much power. The Apple Cinema Display takes only 50 watts or so and is 17x11 inches. Now if reflective LCDs (think Game Boy Color) come back in style, we could see wall-sized monitors that take under 100 watts.
I can imagine Steve Jobs demoing this technology under the name "SeaPort" at Sea World: While Shamu swims in the tank, he'll throw in a waterproofed iBook and use a "SeaPorted" keyboard, mouse to view web sites with it. Then he brings up a picture of sardines and then Shamu jumps out of the pool to give him a kiss.
I too was feared for overreacting. A few months ago, one of my classmates who ran a local AM radio show invited me and others to call in about "What would you do for money? Lie? Cheat? Steal? Kill?" And I responded that I would dress up as a video game character and kill its inventors. Not only was I cut off midsentence, but inside of an hour the sherrif was at my house asking me what I had on my mind.
The next day, I asked the guy why he even bothered to ask that question if he would just turn his callers into the cops afterwards, and he replied that technically I had crossed the line because he threatened a specific party. The truth was it was just Columbine phobia. Anyway, we didn't get too mad at eachother, mainly because it was his boss who pulled the plug on me and called the cops, but I was convinced that he and his radio station didn't know how to handle serious questions.
One month later, they put up fliers for a call-in session about "Columbine - One Year Later, How do you feel?" I didn't even bother calling in, but I just hope whoever did knew had some friends in the ACLU.
If we want to save trees by going paperless, we have to make paperless as comfortable as paperful. How do we do that?
1: Bigger monitors. If you get rid of all the paper on your desk, in your cabinets and in your shelves, you have a lot of space left, right? How about taking up all that space with a really large monitor! Say an 18 * 32 inch flatscreen at 1800 * 3200 resolution! It could be something you hang on your wall, or something that you lay on your desk. With all that screen space, you would have plenty of screen space for your apps and docs without any overlap. IMO for the next few years sub-$2000 PC technology should stay put while monitors get bigger and flatter.
2: Touchscreen OS. Another thing people like about paper that PCs don't do is that they're tangible. Well, let's make PC screens tangible! It would be a fairly direct transition; instead of a mouse cursor you touch the screen. Of course, many elements in today's OSs are too small to touch, so OS designers would have to make every tangible onscreen element no smaller than 1 cm^2. For this system, as you switch resolutions, the onscreen elements would keep their size but just change in detail.
2: Better integration of helpscreens. Microsoft had a good idea, but bad implementation, to put those dancing cartoons in Office. As many of you said, there must be some way to make non-print help elements simply easier to access. There are many possible ways to do this, and IMO all of them involve rebuilding app delivery from the ground up. Maybe future apps will be delivered as web sites and the help screen will be part of the browser screen. Maybe apps will always dedicate a part of the screen to help. What are your ideas?
Games can avoid manuals in some cases. Some of Nintendo's games, especially Zeldas, have a mockup of the controller onscreen so you know what the buttons do just by looking at the screen. Also, some fighting games (something from SNK or Capcom) superimpose some button sequences on top of the game action.
Is it possible to run an ISP from a moving vehicle, such as a boat or plane? If an ISP is past the three mile border, isn't it officially unregulable? How about an ISP on a sub with satellite dish? It stays surfaced while transmitting, but if someone tries to find it, it just submerges! How about the moon?
According to some news show, NASA has prototype airborne satellites: Essentially a flying PC with some sensing equipment, a giant solar array/wing with propellors and battery for night flying attached. The theoretical advantage is that this "flying wing" would perform the same jobs as satellites at $5M instead of $200M. They would take more monitoring as they are flying in the atmosphere but on the whole would be much easier than vacuum satellites. Might this work for Irridium too?
By the time students could get their hands on the propulsion system in the Irridium satellites, MS will have their own AA missile-defense battery to stop it. And besides, wouldn't the atmosphere burn the satellites first?
If Irridium was a threat to dictatorships, they would never have let the project begun. It would be much easier to stop a program before money is spent, otherwise they must compete politically with investors who now expect a return.
Though printed text is more comfortable to read than onscreen text, doesn't it cost a lot of trees? What percentage of the trees that the human race consumes go to printed materials? What percentage of landfill space goes to their disposal? I imagine that the E-book and competitors could be made convenient and comfortable enough so that people could enjoy them. So isn't the development of E-books sort of an environmental duty?
How does this apply to behavior-modifying eugenics, in which successful expriments result in smarter people coming out of test tubes, regardless of popular opinion? How can the common man rule when an individul can craft what a man is?
The reason content on the web (or AOL) doesn't work yet is because no on has devised a convenient and safe payment scheme for online content. An online payment scheme must account for the most fickle user, and probably charge by the second. So all we get is banner ads in with our web content, which we hate. If AOL does succeed with pay-per-view broadband content, they could really strike rich. Of course not everyone wants to pay for their content so there should be both a free-with-ads and a cost-without-ads option.
But in order to keep it simple they have to keep out dissent, such as the ACLU, and make a strict divide between content creators and content consumers. AOL resembles a TV set more than any other network service, and unfortunately that is destroying the culture of initiative on the net, and transforming it instead to hyper-accessible one-way consumerism. AOL may have eaten the most diverse media dinosaur on the planet, but in doing so they have become a dinosaur themselves, more interested in eating other dinosaurs than creating swift, diverse progress. And when they are done, when they have eaten all of the old media dinosaurs and become just as bloated and redundant as the old world they have consumed, some new swift upstart will arrive and tear AOL to the ground just as AOL tore down the older world before them. AOL's failure to preserve individual initiative in the face of old-media buyouts makes techno-economic Darwnism a sad reality.
That's the way it's always been. How do you think Pokemon became so popular on a 1 MHz processor with 8K of RAM, while Dreamcast games like VF3tb flopped with a 200 MHz processor and 26 MB of RAM?
I think hardware limits depend not on market share but on what software developers want to get done. Today's hardware may be capable of 8-speaker 3D sound and photorealistic 3D graphics at 120 FPS, but if developers have no need for it - perhaps they're more into interactive smell or force feedback - then the hardware guys just aren't going to put it in. Technology only exists to assist the rest of society, after all.
According to psychologist David Keirsey, the ideal match for any individual is someone who is a near opposite in personality. First, rate yourself in the following four categories: 1) Are you talkative or quiet? If you're talkative, givee yourself an "E", if you're quiet, give yourself an "I". 2) Do you mostly pay attention to what is, or what could be? If the former, give yourself an "S", if the latter, an "N". 3) Do you rely mainly on your feelings ("F") or your thoughts ("T")? 4) Do you like to focus on what you do ("J") or do you like to experiment and jump from activity to activity ("P")? Now, see what all the letters are. To find your ideal match, switch all of the letters except for the second one. So it should go something like this: you mate INTJ ENFP INTP ENFJ ENTP INFJ ENTJ INFP ISTP ESFJ ESTP ISFJ ISFP ESTJ ESFP ISTJ And vice versa. Just look for these four qualities in others, and if you see the right match, spend time with that person. You can read more about this on www.keirsey.org or in the books "Please Understand Me" and "Please Understand Me II", also by Keirsey.
1: I was also relegated to the dregs of my middle school. In 8th grade when I complained to my guidance councellor about the other kids in my science and social studies classes, she forced me into a special ed class that was effectively a kindergarten.
2: I must question at what point to intelligence and introspection/introversion meet. I am quite computer literate and generally clumsy, victimized, and inconsiderate of my surroundings, yet I am quite able to pick up emotional cues from others, and I have done very poorly in math and science classes. How do you explain that?
All you say is true, but I think eventually the web will get so crowded that a web site's URL will have no more effect on its success than a person's phone number or street address. A rose by any other name...
Slashdot Mirror
D) The best thing the internet can do for us is bring us in such regular contact with people around the world that we will no longer want nor need to go to war with them, and will readily stop those who do.
1. When Crusoe comes out, suddenly long battery life will be all the rage, and with it, low powered chips. What's more, the iMac uses a 400 MHz G3 and needs no fan, although it could get away with a 100 MHz 603 for most purposes. Also, offices will see the wisdom of purchasing used PCs with 100-200 MHz chips rather than new PCs with 1000-2000 MHz chips.
2. The iMac uses a Rage128, which needs no fan. However, you are correct that for 90% of the population, 3D graphics chips are a frill. Offices can save money by purchasing custom-made 3D-free PCs. And of course, 3D free notebooks last longer on the battery.
3. LCD monitors can become very large without using much power. The Apple Cinema Display takes only 50 watts or so and is 17x11 inches. Now if reflective LCDs (think Game Boy Color) come back in style, we could see wall-sized monitors that take under 100 watts.
I can imagine Steve Jobs demoing this technology under the name "SeaPort" at Sea World: While Shamu swims in the tank, he'll throw in a waterproofed iBook and use a "SeaPorted" keyboard, mouse to view web sites with it. Then he brings up a picture of sardines and then Shamu jumps out of the pool to give him a kiss.
The sub probably must send data in all directions, but perhaps the bouys can send data to eachother with more direct sound waves?
I too was feared for overreacting. A few months ago, one of my classmates who ran a local AM radio show invited me and others to call in about "What would you do for money? Lie? Cheat? Steal? Kill?" And I responded that I would dress up as a video game character and kill its inventors. Not only was I cut off midsentence, but inside of an hour the sherrif was at my house asking me what I had on my mind.
The next day, I asked the guy why he even bothered to ask that question if he would just turn his callers into the cops afterwards, and he replied that technically I had crossed the line because he threatened a specific party. The truth was it was just Columbine phobia. Anyway, we didn't get too mad at eachother, mainly because it was his boss who pulled the plug on me and called the cops, but I was convinced that he and his radio station didn't know how to handle serious questions.
One month later, they put up fliers for a call-in session about "Columbine - One Year Later, How do you feel?" I didn't even bother calling in, but I just hope whoever did knew had some friends in the ACLU.
If we want to save trees by going paperless, we have to make paperless as comfortable as paperful. How do we do that?
1: Bigger monitors. If you get rid of all the paper on your desk, in your cabinets and in your shelves, you have a lot of space left, right? How about taking up all that space with a really large monitor! Say an 18 * 32 inch flatscreen at 1800 * 3200 resolution! It could be something you hang on your wall, or something that you lay on your desk. With all that screen space, you would have plenty of screen space for your apps and docs without any overlap. IMO for the next few years sub-$2000 PC technology should stay put while monitors get bigger and flatter.
2: Touchscreen OS. Another thing people like about paper that PCs don't do is that they're tangible. Well, let's make PC screens tangible! It would be a fairly direct transition; instead of a mouse cursor you touch the screen. Of course, many elements in today's OSs are too small to touch, so OS designers would have to make every tangible onscreen element no smaller than 1 cm^2. For this system, as you switch resolutions, the onscreen elements would keep their size but just change in detail.
2: Better integration of helpscreens. Microsoft had a good idea, but bad implementation, to put those dancing cartoons in Office. As many of you said, there must be some way to make non-print help elements simply easier to access. There are many possible ways to do this, and IMO all of them involve rebuilding app delivery from the ground up. Maybe future apps will be delivered as web sites and the help screen will be part of the browser screen. Maybe apps will always dedicate a part of the screen to help. What are your ideas?
Games can avoid manuals in some cases. Some of Nintendo's games, especially Zeldas, have a mockup of the controller onscreen so you know what the buttons do just by looking at the screen. Also, some fighting games (something from SNK or Capcom) superimpose some button sequences on top of the game action.
Most Slashdot readers are over 18 now. Just start voting!
Is it possible to run an ISP from a moving vehicle, such as a boat or plane? If an ISP is past the three mile border, isn't it officially unregulable? How about an ISP on a sub with satellite dish? It stays surfaced while transmitting, but if someone tries to find it, it just submerges! How about the moon?
If someone can't post something potential libel in the UK, can't they just post it on a US server? It would get out to everyone just the same.
According to some news show, NASA has prototype airborne satellites: Essentially a flying PC with some sensing equipment, a giant solar array/wing with propellors and battery for night flying attached. The theoretical advantage is that this "flying wing" would perform the same jobs as satellites at $5M instead of $200M. They would take more monitoring as they are flying in the atmosphere but on the whole would be much easier than vacuum satellites. Might this work for Irridium too?
By the time students could get their hands on the propulsion system in the Irridium satellites, MS will have their own AA missile-defense battery to stop it. And besides, wouldn't the atmosphere burn the satellites first?
If Irridium was a threat to dictatorships, they would never have let the project begun. It would be much easier to stop a program before money is spent, otherwise they must compete politically with investors who now expect a return.
Though printed text is more comfortable to read than onscreen text, doesn't it cost a lot of trees? What percentage of the trees that the human race consumes go to printed materials? What percentage of landfill space goes to their disposal? I imagine that the E-book and competitors could be made convenient and comfortable enough so that people could enjoy them. So isn't the development of E-books sort of an environmental duty?
I have CDs that are like 13 years old. If you handle them right they can probably last for decades.
How does this apply to behavior-modifying eugenics, in which successful expriments result in smarter people coming out of test tubes, regardless of popular opinion? How can the common man rule when an individul can craft what a man is?
The reason content on the web (or AOL) doesn't work yet is because no on has devised a convenient and safe payment scheme for online content. An online payment scheme must account for the most fickle user, and probably charge by the second. So all we get is banner ads in with our web content, which we hate. If AOL does succeed with pay-per-view broadband content, they could really strike rich. Of course not everyone wants to pay for their content so there should be both a free-with-ads and a cost-without-ads option.
But in order to keep it simple they have to keep out dissent, such as the ACLU, and make a strict divide between content creators and content consumers. AOL resembles a TV set more than any other network service, and unfortunately that is destroying the culture of initiative on the net, and transforming it instead to hyper-accessible one-way consumerism. AOL may have eaten the most diverse media dinosaur on the planet, but in doing so they have become a dinosaur themselves, more interested in eating other dinosaurs than creating swift, diverse progress. And when they are done, when they have eaten all of the old media dinosaurs and become just as bloated and redundant as the old world they have consumed, some new swift upstart will arrive and tear AOL to the ground just as AOL tore down the older world before them. AOL's failure to preserve individual initiative in the face of old-media buyouts makes techno-economic Darwnism a sad reality.
Isn't it better to die than live without a hand?
That's the way it's always been. How do you think Pokemon became so popular on a 1 MHz processor with 8K of RAM, while Dreamcast games like VF3tb flopped with a 200 MHz processor and 26 MB of RAM?
I think hardware limits depend not on market share but on what software developers want to get done. Today's hardware may be capable of 8-speaker 3D sound and photorealistic 3D graphics at 120 FPS, but if developers have no need for it - perhaps they're more into interactive smell or force feedback - then the hardware guys just aren't going to put it in. Technology only exists to assist the rest of society, after all.
According to psychologist David Keirsey, the ideal match for any individual is someone who is a near opposite in personality. First, rate yourself in the following four categories: 1) Are you talkative or quiet? If you're talkative, givee yourself an "E", if you're quiet, give yourself an "I". 2) Do you mostly pay attention to what is, or what could be? If the former, give yourself an "S", if the latter, an "N". 3) Do you rely mainly on your feelings ("F") or your thoughts ("T")? 4) Do you like to focus on what you do ("J") or do you like to experiment and jump from activity to activity ("P")? Now, see what all the letters are. To find your ideal match, switch all of the letters except for the second one. So it should go something like this: you mate INTJ ENFP INTP ENFJ ENTP INFJ ENTJ INFP ISTP ESFJ ESTP ISFJ ISFP ESTJ ESFP ISTJ And vice versa. Just look for these four qualities in others, and if you see the right match, spend time with that person. You can read more about this on www.keirsey.org or in the books "Please Understand Me" and "Please Understand Me II", also by Keirsey.
Several agreements and disagreements...
1: I was also relegated to the dregs of my middle school. In 8th grade when I complained to my guidance councellor about the other kids in my science and social studies classes, she forced me into a special ed class that was effectively a kindergarten.
2: I must question at what point to intelligence and introspection/introversion meet. I am quite computer literate and generally clumsy, victimized, and inconsiderate of my surroundings, yet I am quite able to pick up emotional cues from others, and I have done very poorly in math and science classes. How do you explain that?
Where are the records that say which companies have been approached, and how far each request has gotten?
All you say is true, but I think eventually the web will get so crowded that a web site's URL will have no more effect on its success than a person's phone number or street address. A rose by any other name...