think you've hit the nail right on the head here!! it's more the rebel without a cause heer rather than any real revolution. It's basically vandals going, let's see if i can seriously piss off some people and have all these stupidly rich people in a head-spin.. which they evidently have. It's all for a bit of a kick really...
i guess my status right now is like an upcoming tekkie-wanna-be, some would say just another one of those plebs that are flooding/. but I always find a Katz article interesting to read.
Nevertheless, the follow-ups are by far more intruiging read than the article itself. Since Katz' areticles are usually somewhat more subjective and speculative in nature (rather than some sort of "We can clock this Athlon to 2 squillion GHz"), the comments by/.ers are actually very diverse and interesting... all the flames, moans & groans and a couple serious oppinions here and there make reading threads from a katz article a real eye opener personally
a step in a very wrong direction...
on
Live or Memorex?
·
· Score: 1
I guess this just furthers the increasingly popular theory the mainstream media "news" that we see may not actually be what is really going on out there. As has been posted previously, this fairly fundamental tendency to provide certain points of views or certain aspects as hard "facts" by the news medium have been around for yonkers. By selecting what to show and what not to show, they can often alter the tone and focus of a piece by highlighted particular points. Alas, being "mis-quoted" or quoted out of context is a popular excuse these days...
The problem here is really that the media now not only have the capability to munipiltae and alter the news slightly, but they also have the means to concoct convincing scenes to be called news. Okay i know, i'm getting a bit ahead of myself here, it's only replacing billboards with their own ads but every journey starts with a single step. This would seem a step in a dangerous direction. More worrying was the fairly devious piece where the public seemed to be duped that a footage shot in a studio was actually something otherwise. If they are tricking the public now, even to this fairly insignificant extent,what is there to come?
We expect,perhaps unrealistically, that news and media should serve to inform not deceive us. I think, although not much by itself, the digital munipilation of "live" footage being passed as "real" footage and TV executives deciding what's relevant news and what is not for the audience, is a step in the very wrong direction...
Let me prefece all this with, I know very little about how these things work exactly so bear with me.
It would seem from the article that although the K7 & the 7400 are pretty comaparble at the moment, the 7400 would have much more room to grow as well as being a much more efficient chip.
To me the fact that the K7 has to decode all this x86 legacy stuff would suggest that the K7 is basically like a brute little monster truck that basically rampages over its flaws by packing a lot of punch, in this case by basically bumping on more and more transitors.
The 7400 seems to produce a sleeker more elegant solution to the whole thing. It's more the sleek sports car with speed, and elegant, efficient power VS the brute force of the K7. So I guess in that regard, the 7400 wins out on efficiency and future sustained growth potential...
Must be said though that a mate of mine owns an Athlon and it rocks the house down, so even if it's like a brute little monster truck instead of the sleek sports car of the G4, it still packs a pretty hefty punch. I guess they both kinda rock the house down...
Prevention is the best cure.. but..
on
Apocalypse Not
·
· Score: 1
it's not the most impressive...
It seems the media is now out for blood. After a squillions dollars have been spent to prevent a disaster they now want some sort of proof that a catastrophic disasters would've occurred if all the money was not spent...
Here lies one of the keys to why so many things are pretty screwed up in our world. Although people often say they want to avoid disaster completely and prevent it completely rather than wit for it to happen and then clean up the mess, the reality is usually often not the same. If people never see the ill effects of something right in front of them, they seem to assume that it's not worth spending time and effort fixing. I guess the fact that the industry spent so much fixing up Y2K before it happened would seem to point to an industry that is thorough and cautious. Yet, the public doesn't seem to quite agree saying that since nothing happened, nothing was going to happen anyway. The fact is that it's clear that during the extensive Y2K testing that was done, plenty of things did go wrong. From payrolls screwing up to shutdowns of big mainframes and whatever else. This is something that seems be ignored now. It's not like major companies just took the Y2K upgrade advice blindly, they actually did their own tests on their own systems and saw that there was a problem there to be fixed. And fixed it they did.
The danger now is that the IT is going to suffer from the Boy who cried wolf syndrome... As been mentioned already, this could mean that some technological disaster may not be treated with such respect in the future. Undoubtedly, the cost of such ignorance will be much higher than the cost of preventing it... Undoubtedly though, it will be a test of foresight for the media and the public to determine whether the cost of prevention outweighs the risk of a calamatic event or not.
One of my favourite Darwin awards of all time must be the one where a guy was demonstrating how strong the window was by running straight at it. As fate should have it he went straight through and plunged 25 stories to his untimely end.
I guess what made it memorble was the thought by Adam Spencer, "25 stories is just about enough time to realise what an idiot you were"...
PS it's always strange how we find wierd and whacky deaths so humourous really. I mean if all this stuff is true then their respective families and friends mightn't laughing as much as we are...
i think before linux can really make it big it pretty much needs to become slightly more idiot-proof. Something along the lines of, you whack a CD in your drive, click on some icon to install and voila there it is... but then again that's prolly not linux is really all about...
think the fact that it's predominatlyly an OS for people who knows what they're doing and/or people who are interested in computers enough to learn something about it... the moajority of computer users are still people who turns on their new user-friendly iMac to just look at stuff round the web and type up the occasional word doco here and there.. they don't give a toss really about what goes on, and i doubt they could be really bothered to just to learn about linux
Surely their decision NOT to patent is merely an open invitation to all those opportunists out there to go ahead and patent the technology?
I have no real idea about what you can and can't patent and maybe other people can't patent it (pls tell me if this is the case) but if they could then the patent would almost surely be saught after by someone else?
I think this just highlights how bloody hard it is to really make up your mind about anything you read any more these days... So is it the MS consirators out in force or the Bill Gates sympathisers dishing out their side of the propaganda...
Though I guess at the end of the day "Annonymous Cowards" with no reference bar towing the line "don't be fooled by the roaming MS hating mob", is somewhat less creditable than people who you can reference to.
Still... it's kinda hard to figure out whose version of the truth reflects what really happened... I guess we'll never know
What will they think of next...
on
RoboFly
·
· Score: 1
What will they think of next... Robo-Ali stings like a bee, floats like a fly? they've GOT be some dodgy issues with mouting a camera on this tiny little big thing surely.. where's privacy in this world?
actually, the bill was very much about politicking and not particularly about any real government objections to freedom on the internet.
The deal basically was that the government needed support of an independent senator to pass the bill to sell off of another part of the mostly government owned telecommunications giant, Telstra. This was going to the government squillions of dollars, so getting the ultra-conservative senator on-side was pretty much the key here. This guy is also highly anti-pornography and i suspect doesn't have much idea about this little fad called the Internet, bar that it has lotsa naughty pictures on it. This bill was introduced pretty much entirely to make this guy join sides with the government and let them sell off Telstra. So in another words, one senator, who hails from the tiniest state in Australia in which (correct me if i'm wrong) they are so backward that homosexuality is still illegal. Surely most states would have gotten over that by now...
There seems to also be a bit of a moan and groan about how the Australian public haven't really joined forces to rally against this. I think one of the main reasons is that being so "laid back" we don't seem to really notice this creeping in. I mean i haven't heard anything about this for months now in the mainstream press; it's hardly big news. The general consensus in the public, I think, is that the bill is so unworkable and vague that nothing's really going to be done about it. Even the opposition party admitted that it was just a worthless token bill to suck up to the senator (who i STILL can't remember the name of...). Apathy seems all that it deserves...
But basically the chances of this bill really making any practical difference is virtually ziltch
All this fiasco with apple lately can't be doing Apple's new found stream-lined image any good. The "new" Apple under Jobs was meant to be deliver their promises and give the pedestrian, simple-minded PC user a simple choice for entry level computing. Recently though it would seem that they are gradually reverting back to the dark old days of the mid-90s, where promises were broken and Apple had a product line as long as the great wall. All these uncertainties about shipping and such is undoing any work they did in trying not to appear confusing to the clue less consumer. As far as I know one of the many reasons that Apple suffered their big crash was that they were announcing things that they could not deliver. As the pre-orders came in, the deadline for the newbies were pushed back. By the time it came out on the market the public had already moved on to other things. Although this maybe not a major reason's for apple's fall, disillusionment & disappointment was rife among the consumers who were told that their new Macs won't be on our door step for another 4 months or so. I hope Apple surely doesn't fall down this same path again & undo all the good work they have been doing. With all that had happened in the past 2 months or so, you'd be forgiven for being a bit sceptical...
But think of those hundreds of thousands of jobs M$ has created in the field of IT support. It had virtually created a new boom industry by building crappy software... All these people supporting WIn95, Win NT... Bill Gates' dream no doubt (unless they are using pirated copies, in whcih case he'll be most unhappy)
Man playing God have always been a bit of a touchy subject and I think with good reason.
DNA, Genetics and Cloning are issues that challenges our ideas of what make us human or what we really want humans to be. It seems sad that human values are derived from "success", namely status & wealth, in the rat race not merely for the sake of living. This attitude seems to be adopted by the bioethicist in the article. "In a competitive market society, people are going to want to give their kids an edge" So the point of life then is to have "an edge" over your competitors? So these children's lives are nothing more than beating and competing with the other robots that's going to come out of this? Maybe I'm a backward romantic on life but it would seem that it would be a wrong ideal to enforce on children.
Another problem I can see is the inevitable division of societies into the haves and the have nots. It will create an elitist society, differentiated by some pre-determined conditioning and genetic engineering, much like in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World". The gaps in the wealthy and the poor will not only be entrenched by material wealth but physical superiority as well.
And not that pleasure in "doing" something isn't already hard enough to find. People used to be able to just enjoy the simple things in life, like fixing things that are broken, building that shed in the backyard. Now, the pressures of the rat-race would force most people to just hire in someone to do it for them. It would seem that in the future, no longer will you be able to enjoy the challenges of learning new things by yourself but you'll be able to download and know everything by the click of the button. But what bloody good is that? Sure no one likes exams and you always want to know more, but half the enjoyment is the sense of satisfaction that you have endured and achieved a particular thing. If all you ever wanted to know about everything can be downloaded in minutes- like downloading French as mentioned in the article- then what is there left for you to do?
Happiness is hard enough to find without all these distractions
It seems a major worry that the all powerful and o-so-trustworthy M$ will become the central cross-roads to a bulk to electronic trading on the net & be the holder of such important market research statistic... From where I'm standing it seems to be just a bit of a scam to help along M$'s marketing juggernaught. With each registered user, M$ is gaining a valuable and accurate segment of gigantic web-market shopping demographic. They will be able to track and analyse the spending patterns of all their registered users for next to nothing. Would you really want M$ to have the means to leach off information like that off you? TO me it's just another piece of the jigsaw that will just add to m$'s profit maximising schemes
AT the moment you can usually CHOOSE whether or not you become part of a particular company's marketing survey or not. By choosing M$ wallet you are essentialling signing yourself up to volunteer, perhaps unwittingly, to help out with M$ massive marketing research department. Doubtless, this will just lead to M$ finding more ways to rip off poorly-informed e-commerce users.
It kinda depends what you mean by Earth-like really... It's very very likely that there's no sprawling civlization with Ion cannons and there's unlikely to be even any real life. Really all this tells us is that there is a planet which is a bit like ours(& mars) and by the assumption that what we actually see is not very much at all, you can kinda deduce that there's plenty more planets like Earth & mars & we should keep looking
And also planets don't change an awful lot in a coupla million years. The species may be completely different and the continents may not be the same, but the potential for it to support life would remain pretty much unchanged.
Like some old proverbe went, every long journey begins with just one step. (or sth like that) Discovering gigantic planets was first achieved hardly a decade ago and now we've found a small rocky planet like ours. Soon we may be able see them clearly enough to analyse its atmosphere through the light it reflects to see if it would be fit for life... One things lead to another in the world of science
Slashdot Mirror
think you've hit the nail right on the head here!! it's more the rebel without a cause heer rather than any real revolution. It's basically vandals going, let's see if i can seriously piss off some people and have all these stupidly rich people in a head-spin.. which they evidently have. It's all for a bit of a kick really...
i guess my status right now is like an upcoming tekkie-wanna-be, some would say just another one of those plebs that are flooding /. but I always find a Katz article interesting to read.
Nevertheless, the follow-ups are by far more intruiging read than the article itself. Since Katz' areticles are usually somewhat more subjective and speculative in nature (rather than some sort of "We can clock this Athlon to 2 squillion GHz"), the comments by /.ers are actually very diverse and interesting... all the flames, moans & groans and a couple serious oppinions here and there make reading threads from a katz article a real eye opener personally
I guess this just furthers the increasingly popular theory the mainstream media "news" that we see may not actually be what is really going on out there. As has been posted previously, this fairly fundamental tendency to provide certain points of views or certain aspects as hard "facts" by the news medium have been around for yonkers. By selecting what to show and what not to show, they can often alter the tone and focus of a piece by highlighted particular points. Alas, being "mis-quoted" or quoted out of context is a popular excuse these days...
The problem here is really that the media now not only have the capability to munipiltae and alter the news slightly, but they also have the means to concoct convincing scenes to be called news. Okay i know, i'm getting a bit ahead of myself here, it's only replacing billboards with their own ads but every journey starts with a single step. This would seem a step in a dangerous direction. More worrying was the fairly devious piece where the public seemed to be duped that a footage shot in a studio was actually something otherwise. If they are tricking the public now, even to this fairly insignificant extent,what is there to come?
We expect,perhaps unrealistically, that news and media should serve to inform not deceive us. I think, although not much by itself, the digital munipilation of "live" footage being passed as "real" footage and TV executives deciding what's relevant news and what is not for the audience, is a step in the very wrong direction...
Let me prefece all this with, I know very little about how these things work exactly so bear with me.
It would seem from the article that although the K7 & the 7400 are pretty comaparble at the moment, the 7400 would have much more room to grow as well as being a much more efficient chip.
To me the fact that the K7 has to decode all this x86 legacy stuff would suggest that the K7 is basically like a brute little monster truck that basically rampages over its flaws by packing a lot of punch, in this case by basically bumping on more and more transitors.
The 7400 seems to produce a sleeker more elegant solution to the whole thing. It's more the sleek sports car with speed, and elegant, efficient power VS the brute force of the K7. So I guess in that regard, the 7400 wins out on efficiency and future sustained growth potential...
Must be said though that a mate of mine owns an Athlon and it rocks the house down, so even if it's like a brute little monster truck instead of the sleek sports car of the G4, it still packs a pretty hefty punch. I guess they both kinda rock the house down...
it's not the most impressive...
It seems the media is now out for blood. After a squillions dollars have been spent to prevent a disaster they now want some sort of proof that a catastrophic disasters would've occurred if all the money was not spent...
Here lies one of the keys to why so many things are pretty screwed up in our world. Although people often say they want to avoid disaster completely and prevent it completely rather than wit for it to happen and then clean up the mess, the reality is usually often not the same. If people never see the ill effects of something right in front of them, they seem to assume that it's not worth spending time and effort fixing. I guess the fact that the industry spent so much fixing up Y2K before it happened would seem to point to an industry that is thorough and cautious. Yet, the public doesn't seem to quite agree saying that since nothing happened, nothing was going to happen anyway. The fact is that it's clear that during the extensive Y2K testing that was done, plenty of things did go wrong. From payrolls screwing up to shutdowns of big mainframes and whatever else. This is something that seems be ignored now. It's not like major companies just took the Y2K upgrade advice blindly, they actually did their own tests on their own systems and saw that there was a problem there to be fixed. And fixed it they did.
The danger now is that the IT is going to suffer from the Boy who cried wolf syndrome... As been mentioned already, this could mean that some technological disaster may not be treated with such respect in the future. Undoubtedly, the cost of such ignorance will be much higher than the cost of preventing it... Undoubtedly though, it will be a test of foresight for the media and the public to determine whether the cost of prevention outweighs the risk of a calamatic event or not.
One of my favourite Darwin awards of all time must be the one where a guy was demonstrating how strong the window was by running straight at it. As fate should have it he went straight through and plunged 25 stories to his untimely end.
I guess what made it memorble was the thought by Adam Spencer, "25 stories is just about enough time to realise what an idiot you were"...
PS it's always strange how we find wierd and whacky deaths so humourous really. I mean if all this stuff is true then their respective families and friends mightn't laughing as much as we are...
i think before linux can really make it big it pretty much needs to become slightly more idiot-proof. Something along the lines of, you whack a CD in your drive, click on some icon to install and voila there it is... but then again that's prolly not linux is really all about...
think the fact that it's predominatlyly an OS for people who knows what they're doing and/or people who are interested in computers enough to learn something about it... the moajority of computer users are still people who turns on their new user-friendly iMac to just look at stuff round the web and type up the occasional word doco here and there.. they don't give a toss really about what goes on, and i doubt they could be really bothered to just to learn about linux
Surely their decision NOT to patent is merely an open invitation to all those opportunists out there to go ahead and patent the technology?
I have no real idea about what you can and can't patent and maybe other people can't patent it (pls tell me if this is the case) but if they could then the patent would almost surely be saught after by someone else?
I think this just highlights how bloody hard it is to really make up your mind about anything you read any more these days... So is it the MS consirators out in force or the Bill Gates sympathisers dishing out their side of the propaganda...
Though I guess at the end of the day "Annonymous Cowards" with no reference bar towing the line "don't be fooled by the roaming MS hating mob", is somewhat less creditable than people who you can reference to.
Still... it's kinda hard to figure out whose version of the truth reflects what really happened... I guess we'll never know
What will they think of next... Robo-Ali stings like a bee, floats like a fly? they've GOT be some dodgy issues with mouting a camera on this tiny little big thing surely.. where's privacy in this world?
actually, the bill was very much about politicking and not particularly about any real government objections to freedom on the internet.
The deal basically was that the government needed support of an independent senator to pass the bill to sell off of another part of the mostly government owned telecommunications giant, Telstra. This was going to the government squillions of dollars, so getting the ultra-conservative senator on-side was pretty much the key here. This guy is also highly anti-pornography and i suspect doesn't have much idea about this little fad called the Internet, bar that it has lotsa naughty pictures on it. This bill was introduced pretty much entirely to make this guy join sides with the government and let them sell off Telstra. So in another words, one senator, who hails from the tiniest state in Australia in which (correct me if i'm wrong) they are so backward that homosexuality is still illegal. Surely most states would have gotten over that by now...
There seems to also be a bit of a moan and groan about how the Australian public haven't really joined forces to rally against this. I think one of the main reasons is that being so "laid back" we don't seem to really notice this creeping in. I mean i haven't heard anything about this for months now in the mainstream press; it's hardly big news. The general consensus in the public, I think, is that the bill is so unworkable and vague that nothing's really going to be done about it. Even the opposition party admitted that it was just a worthless token bill to suck up to the senator (who i STILL can't remember the name of...). Apathy seems all that it deserves...
But basically the chances of this bill really making any practical difference is virtually ziltch
All this fiasco with apple lately can't be doing Apple's new found stream-lined image any good. The "new" Apple under Jobs was meant to be deliver their promises and give the pedestrian, simple-minded PC user a simple choice for entry level computing. Recently though it would seem that they are gradually reverting back to the dark old days of the mid-90s, where promises were broken and Apple had a product line as long as the great wall. All these uncertainties about shipping and such is undoing any work they did in trying not to appear confusing to the clue less consumer. As far as I know one of the many reasons that Apple suffered their big crash was that they were announcing things that they could not deliver. As the pre-orders came in, the deadline for the newbies were pushed back. By the time it came out on the market the public had already moved on to other things. Although this maybe not a major reason's for apple's fall, disillusionment & disappointment was rife among the consumers who were told that their new Macs won't be on our door step for another 4 months or so. I hope Apple surely doesn't fall down this same path again & undo all the good work they have been doing. With all that had happened in the past 2 months or so, you'd be forgiven for being a bit sceptical...
But think of those hundreds of thousands of jobs M$ has created in the field of IT support. It had virtually created a new boom industry by building crappy software... All these people supporting WIn95, Win NT... Bill Gates' dream no doubt (unless they are using pirated copies, in whcih case he'll be most unhappy)
"Absolutely, somewhere in the next millennium, making babies sexually will be rare"
This is assuming of course that you'll also create genes stop hormonal 18 year old boys bonking the girl next door. Not bloody likely.
"Absolutely, somewhere in the next millennium, making babies sexually will be rare"
This is assuming of course that you'll also create genes stop hormonal 18 year old boys bonking the girl next door. Not bloody likely.
Man playing God have always been a bit of a touchy subject and I think with good reason.
DNA, Genetics and Cloning are issues that challenges our ideas of what make us human or what we really want humans to be. It seems sad that human values are derived from "success", namely status & wealth, in the rat race not merely for the sake of living. This attitude seems to be adopted by the bioethicist in the article. "In a competitive market society, people are going to want to give their kids an edge" So the point of life then is to have "an edge" over your competitors? So these children's lives are nothing more than beating and competing with the other robots that's going to come out of this? Maybe I'm a backward romantic on life but it would seem that it would be a wrong ideal to enforce on children.
Another problem I can see is the inevitable division of societies into the haves and the have nots. It will create an elitist society, differentiated by some pre-determined conditioning and genetic engineering, much like in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World". The gaps in the wealthy and the poor will not only be entrenched by material wealth but physical superiority as well.
And not that pleasure in "doing" something isn't already hard enough to find. People used to be able to just enjoy the simple things in life, like fixing things that are broken, building that shed in the backyard. Now, the pressures of the rat-race would force most people to just hire in someone to do it for them. It would seem that in the future, no longer will you be able to enjoy the challenges of learning new things by yourself but you'll be able to download and know everything by the click of the button. But what bloody good is that? Sure no one likes exams and you always want to know more, but half the enjoyment is the sense of satisfaction that you have endured and achieved a particular thing. If all you ever wanted to know about everything can be downloaded in minutes- like downloading French as mentioned in the article- then what is there left for you to do?
Happiness is hard enough to find without all these distractions
It seems a major worry that the all powerful and o-so-trustworthy M$ will become the central cross-roads to a bulk to electronic trading on the net & be the holder of such important market research statistic... From where I'm standing it seems to be just a bit of a scam to help along M$'s marketing juggernaught. With each registered user, M$ is gaining a valuable and accurate segment of gigantic web-market shopping demographic. They will be able to track and analyse the spending patterns of all their registered users for next to nothing. Would you really want M$ to have the means to leach off information like that off you? TO me it's just another piece of the jigsaw that will just add to m$'s profit maximising schemes
AT the moment you can usually CHOOSE whether or not you become part of a particular company's marketing survey or not. By choosing M$ wallet you are essentialling signing yourself up to volunteer, perhaps unwittingly, to help out with M$ massive marketing research department. Doubtless, this will just lead to M$ finding more ways to rip off poorly-informed e-commerce users.
It kinda depends what you mean by Earth-like really... It's very very likely that there's no sprawling civlization with Ion cannons and there's unlikely to be even any real life. Really all this tells us is that there is a planet which is a bit like ours(& mars) and by the assumption that what we actually see is not very much at all, you can kinda deduce that there's plenty more planets like Earth & mars & we should keep looking
And also planets don't change an awful lot in a coupla million years. The species may be completely different and the continents may not be the same, but the potential for it to support life would remain pretty much unchanged.
Like some old proverbe went, every long journey begins with just one step. (or sth like that) Discovering gigantic planets was first achieved hardly a decade ago and now we've found a small rocky planet like ours. Soon we may be able see them clearly enough to analyse its atmosphere through the light it reflects to see if it would be fit for life... One things lead to another in the world of science
& i guess that's why us in australia were never taught who invented the computer in the firdt place... cuz no one here came up with much