Seriously, is DNS control even necessary? My 'utopian' internet future doesn't see much need for DNS. Bit-torrent doesn't need it, Google lets me find information anywhere without needing to remember domain names, and portable bookmarks make my life simple.
How do you find your trackers, by IP?
How does Google find all that wonderful information when you go asking for it?
Maybe you mean there's a way to do without root servers (I imagine there is with lots of peering ala bit-torrent), but DNS is a necessity as long as we can't ensure that IPs are constant.
If you think I'm the clueless one, visit my web site at http://65.39.170.204/ and leave a comment, unless of course the server IP has changed since I checked, or if I happen to move my site to another hosting service.
Why do we do anything with dead people other than run them through meat grinders and then drop the result in a compost heap? Obviously, whether with or without religious convictions, most of us want to show respect to the dead and the people they have left behind. This is far more important to most people than the value of a few pounds of solid matter that make up a typical human body. When you think logically, even the practice of encasing each dead person in a wood or steel box, and then dropping said box in a plot of land, leaving that land unusable for any other purpose forever is unsustainable. If human custom remains this way long enough, the entire Earth would be one giant cemetery with billions of steel boxes wasting incredible resources. I suspect our customs will change long before this becomes an issue. On the other hand, perhaps it is hubris to assume that humanity will survive long enough for this to become a problem.
Cool. Keep encouraging him.
on
Space Tourism?
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· Score: 1
Every now and then my 6 yr. old daughter decides she will be an astronaut (We recently saw Magnificent Desolation and that kicked up the idea again). Whenever she says that, besides telling her she can, all I say is "Just remember to take me with you."
It's the Professional Engineer, a designation that confers both authority and responsibility to those who pass the exams to qualify. This is serious stuff - licensed, regulated, and absolutely required in some job positions. You sign off on designs, plans, etc. and if hell breaks loose because that design is bad, you pay. I know it's an essential part of Civil Engineering, and I imagine in many other categories. I studied Computer Engineering in college, which is different from Computer Science, but has neither the regulation or testing that a P.E. requires. The idea of making us become P.E.'s has been bandied about for years and years.
I don't think it can work:
- Our industry is not nearly mature enough. Civil engineering has existed for thousands of years (Roman aqueducts are fine examples). How long have distributed web applications existed?
- The cost is completely prohibitive. A P.E. working on a building knows the suppliers of the parts going into the building. He can investigate their credentials and require sub-contractors to sign off (just as he does) on their part of the project. I wouldn't put my P.E. stamp on a piece of software unless I had sign-offs for every library included in it, making the developers of those libraries, not me, liable if they screwed up. Good luck! Obviously this goes for the OS too.
- Software is exponentially more complex than hardware. It's not an excuse for bugs, just a fact. Physical systems can often be modeled as lumped parameter systems and simplified. How many 'use cases' does a 2x4 have? Software must often handle dozens and dozens of cases that the marketing dept. can't even imagine, so they have no problem specifying behaviors that make the programmer's life a nightmare.
Expectations are not clear.
- The margin of error for a lot of software is zero. This is related to the last point but not the same. A single bit error can kill plenty of applications. Our capacity and techniques for catching and handling exceptions are not sophisticated enough to completely counter this problem. "Hey look, my bio-medical app. didn't GPF, but it didn't deliver the right dose of chemo either." Oops.
Many people, including myself, simple use their DVR/TIVO to record the pay-per-view movie then watch the movie at their convenience as often as they want for as long as they want, all for $4. One is only limited by the size of their hard drive.
I think you can expect that to become impossible in the near future (see also 'broadcast flag'). You may find the PPV movie unrecordable, or the recording gets auto-deleted in a week.
I don't think the results of your test would be as useful. There are a lot more Windows users that might switch to Linux than computer newbies that haven't been biased by either one yet. My kids were pushing a mouse around Windows 9x by preschool. You aren't going to get many chances to catch unbiased users.
I think figuring out how to make Linux more usable for existing Windows users is worthwhile in itself, whether the hard-core Linux crowd likes it or not.
Furthermore, I doubt your true usability test could provide a successful argument for Linux in the corporate world. Why should a CIO care which OS lets people learn basic tasks faster, when every job candidate had better have those skills -before- bothering to send in a resume? Corporations are no longer willing to teach (at least in the U.S. it seems).
The 'winner' was an unbelievably enthusiastic co-ed - the 'contest' was just another bit of absurdity. So even Nobel laureates can't get a date. Although, maybe he did try to get her back to the lab to 'look at his slides'.
You, on the other hand, might be able to get a date about the time you get that machine finished.
In fact, I show up in the webcast, crossing in front of the stage at exactly 3:25, the last of a small group wearing nerdly flashing pendants. Well, not all that nerdly, the Major Domo saw us before the ceremony and asked for one. You might catch it blinking beneath his shirt from time to time.
Commence exhortations of envy. Outstanding gnashing of teeth and groveling may win you mod points. Or not.
The inventor of the comb-over patented his work in 1977, and won the igNobel prize last year. I'm sure the comb-over technique operates in an optical frequency range in order to be effective.
to imply that the old need to die and get out of the way for the young to take over and push humanity forward. There's no assurance that 'attitude and bias' get replaced by 'fresh, more adapted views'. There are lots of people (many on/.) horrified to see that the U.S. appears to be headed in exactly the opposite direction.
Wisdom comes with age (at least for some), and one thing we learn is that the next generation is not so different from the last as they would like to believe.
Regarding the guy born in 1750, I'm guessing a healthy, well-educated Thomas Jefferson would do a bang-up job making decisions on stuff like the Internet. Yes, to meet my standards he would need an enormous change of heart regarding slavery and racism, but I believe that's possible. It doesn't -have- to wait for the next generation.
The safety expectations for a self-driving car will be exponentially greater than we demand of our own stupid selves. Even if self-driving cars kill people in only 5% of the situations where a human driver would, it will be too much liability for the market to bear. I'm not saying it makes sense. We accept (out of necessity) that human drivers are fallible, and expect profound remorse (as well as prison time) if they make mistake that takes a life. If a machine kills, it can't be remorseful and we can't punish it. Human nature will push us to -find- somebody to punish, and out of fear and frustration, the punishment will be extreme.
Forget about all those relatively static conditions and consider this one: a 5 year-old girl runs out from behind a parked van right in front of the self-driving car. Until a lot of people are 99.99999999% sure that the car will A) stop as bloody fast as it can, B) swerve to avoid the child, or C) 'realize' that slamming into the van is actually preferable to running over the kid, nobody will let these things loose anywhere but a war zone.
The military wants autonomous vehicles. The Grand Challenge is designed to prod the private sector into trying to accomplish that task. As long as the vehicle can meet the military objectives, I don't think they care if it's as dumb as a brick. Of course, it will need significant real-time processing capabilities to succeed, that's not the same as a learning system. No AI required.
putting "The Onion" and "Experts" in the same sentence.:) Hey, I'm actually an Onion fan, but even I can see how repetitive and formulaic it can be. Just how many "Ask a [member of non-sequitor profession]" articles does the world need? Do I expect that Jackie Harvey will actually get something right in the next Outside Scoop article? A couple years ago Mad magazine ran a spoof of The Onion. After seeing it I realized I'll never really need to read The Onion again (but I will anyway).
I figure the world can't get enough humor, so I'll try to put in a feeble attempt, and continue to admire the likes of Dave Barry and Andy Borowitz for having a more fertile imagination than I do.
"Elsewhere, Dave Barry was overheard in a Miami bistro saying that 'Katrina and the Waves' would be a terrible name for a rock band."
and I've already burst a few blood vessels in my skull. I know zero about Photoshop and squat about graphic design in general, but this program seems to take 'non-intuitive' to a new level. And, when I start searching online for more information, I keep running into the same attitude of 'Lump it, l4m3r' if you ask why GIMP doesn't do X the way other software does. I found one interesting Usability Study report which revealed five or six of these issues, but only made half-baked recommendations like 'make this more obvious, put a message here' instead of really changing how the UI works.
A little recognition that users matter would go a long way. I'd be willing to try alternative skins on top of GIMP.
Thirty years ago the U.S. landed one of the Apollo missions within a few hundred yards of an unmanned lander (on purpose - the idea was to walk over and retrieve some parts for examination).
You don't need 22nd century technology to accomplish this: 20th century tech. will work just fine.
If the Chinese do accomplish a moon landing, I suspect they will be able to set down anywhere they damn well please (at least after the first one or two flights). However, I seriouly doubt their objective will be an Apollo landing site.
I agree with you that hearing aids no longer raise eyebrows. Thankfully, most people are beyond that, and perhaps the 'graying of America' will also have an influence. However, I suspect that people whose hearing loss is combined with speech impediments (it's hard to learn how to speak without the feedback most of us take for granted) still face stigma and discrimination.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you find your trackers, by IP?
How does Google find all that wonderful information when you go asking for it?
Maybe you mean there's a way to do without root servers (I imagine there is with lots of peering ala bit-torrent), but DNS is a necessity as long as we can't ensure that IPs are constant.
If you think I'm the clueless one, visit my web site at http://65.39.170.204/ and leave a comment, unless of course the server IP has changed since I checked, or if I happen to move my site to another hosting service.
Why do we do anything with dead people other than run them through meat grinders and then drop the result in a compost heap? Obviously, whether with or without religious convictions, most of us want to show respect to the dead and the people they have left behind. This is far more important to most people than the value of a few pounds of solid matter that make up a typical human body. When you think logically, even the practice of encasing each dead person in a wood or steel box, and then dropping said box in a plot of land, leaving that land unusable for any other purpose forever is unsustainable. If human custom remains this way long enough, the entire Earth would be one giant cemetery with billions of steel boxes wasting incredible resources. I suspect our customs will change long before this becomes an issue. On the other hand, perhaps it is hubris to assume that humanity will survive long enough for this to become a problem.
Every now and then my 6 yr. old daughter decides she will be an astronaut (We recently saw Magnificent Desolation and that kicked up the idea again). Whenever she says that, besides telling her she can, all I say is "Just remember to take me with you."
I don't think it can work:
- Our industry is not nearly mature enough. Civil engineering has existed for thousands of years (Roman aqueducts are fine examples). How long have distributed web applications existed?
- The cost is completely prohibitive. A P.E. working on a building knows the suppliers of the parts going into the building. He can investigate their credentials and require sub-contractors to sign off (just as he does) on their part of the project. I wouldn't put my P.E. stamp on a piece of software unless I had sign-offs for every library included in it, making the developers of those libraries, not me, liable if they screwed up. Good luck! Obviously this goes for the OS too.
- Software is exponentially more complex than hardware. It's not an excuse for bugs, just a fact. Physical systems can often be modeled as lumped parameter systems and simplified. How many 'use cases' does a 2x4 have? Software must often handle dozens and dozens of cases that the marketing dept. can't even imagine, so they have no problem specifying behaviors that make the programmer's life a nightmare. Expectations are not clear.
- The margin of error for a lot of software is zero. This is related to the last point but not the same. A single bit error can kill plenty of applications. Our capacity and techniques for catching and handling exceptions are not sophisticated enough to completely counter this problem. "Hey look, my bio-medical app. didn't GPF, but it didn't deliver the right dose of chemo either." Oops.
I think figuring out how to make Linux more usable for existing Windows users is worthwhile in itself, whether the hard-core Linux crowd likes it or not.
Furthermore, I doubt your true usability test could provide a successful argument for Linux in the corporate world. Why should a CIO care which OS lets people learn basic tasks faster, when every job candidate had better have those skills -before- bothering to send in a resume? Corporations are no longer willing to teach (at least in the U.S. it seems).
Where were the hidden cameras?
More neuticles = ?
You, on the other hand, might be able to get a date about the time you get that machine finished.
Commence exhortations of envy. Outstanding gnashing of teeth and groveling may win you mod points. Or not.
The inventor of the comb-over patented his work in 1977, and won the igNobel prize last year. I'm sure the comb-over technique operates in an optical frequency range in order to be effective.
Wisdom comes with age (at least for some), and one thing we learn is that the next generation is not so different from the last as they would like to believe.
Regarding the guy born in 1750, I'm guessing a healthy, well-educated Thomas Jefferson would do a bang-up job making decisions on stuff like the Internet. Yes, to meet my standards he would need an enormous change of heart regarding slavery and racism, but I believe that's possible. It doesn't -have- to wait for the next generation.
The safety expectations for a self-driving car will be exponentially greater than we demand of our own stupid selves. Even if self-driving cars kill people in only 5% of the situations where a human driver would, it will be too much liability for the market to bear. I'm not saying it makes sense. We accept (out of necessity) that human drivers are fallible, and expect profound remorse (as well as prison time) if they make mistake that takes a life. If a machine kills, it can't be remorseful and we can't punish it. Human nature will push us to -find- somebody to punish, and out of fear and frustration, the punishment will be extreme.
Forget about all those relatively static conditions and consider this one: a 5 year-old girl runs out from behind a parked van right in front of the self-driving car. Until a lot of people are 99.99999999% sure that the car will A) stop as bloody fast as it can, B) swerve to avoid the child, or C) 'realize' that slamming into the van is actually preferable to running over the kid, nobody will let these things loose anywhere but a war zone.
The military wants autonomous vehicles. The Grand Challenge is designed to prod the private sector into trying to accomplish that task. As long as the vehicle can meet the military objectives, I don't think they care if it's as dumb as a brick. Of course, it will need significant real-time processing capabilities to succeed, that's not the same as a learning system. No AI required.
Forget the children, what about the kittens?
I figure the world can't get enough humor, so I'll try to put in a feeble attempt, and continue to admire the likes of Dave Barry and Andy Borowitz for having a more fertile imagination than I do.
"Elsewhere, Dave Barry was overheard in a Miami bistro saying that 'Katrina and the Waves' would be a terrible name for a rock band."
A little recognition that users matter would go a long way. I'd be willing to try alternative skins on top of GIMP.
Can The GIMP draw Happy Fun Ball [trying to stay on-topic and failing]?
welcome our remotely monitoring GPS enabled automotive surveillance overlords.
You don't need 22nd century technology to accomplish this: 20th century tech. will work just fine.
If the Chinese do accomplish a moon landing, I suspect they will be able to set down anywhere they damn well please (at least after the first one or two flights). However, I seriouly doubt their objective will be an Apollo landing site.
The Earth has been drinking way too much Pepsi.
I agree with you that hearing aids no longer raise eyebrows. Thankfully, most people are beyond that, and perhaps the 'graying of America' will also have an influence. However, I suspect that people whose hearing loss is combined with speech impediments (it's hard to learn how to speak without the feedback most of us take for granted) still face stigma and discrimination.
Hearing Aids for the Unimpaired http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,68419,00. html