Re:Why do cell phones need interchangable memory?
on
3G VAIO Mobile Phones?
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· Score: 1
Your phone list. Your address book. Your appointments. Your WAP bookmarks. Your private keys. Your WAP Push channel setup. Your WAP downloads. Your music. Your background image. Your pictures that you took with the 3G Phone camera. The pictures that were sent to you. Your outgoing message.
Tons of stuff that you'll want to somehow get on and off your 3G phone, to swap or archive. You can hope and wait for Bluetooth, or you can also have a slot that creates a new memory location when the old is full.
First of all, I had a really hard time following this discussion. Is it me or is it really hard to get a sense of timeline from this site?
This aint about philosophy, it's about code.
No it's not, not for Lessig. One of the things he argues is that the Open Source movement is part of society and as such will be subject to society's norms, whether it likes it or not. As such the question about where the government (should) stand is not going to be about actual code at all, but whether the Open Source movement is going to be able to have an effective voice in shaping those rules and laws, or is going to done in by its own arrogance about how smart we are and how we don't need anyone and we are our own marketplace.
Sure, the US government could go in a regulate the internet as we use it into oblivion, but I don't think that such action would be allowed to stand.
When enough money is involved, anything can be regulated. Happily coding around, thinking that this spectre will pass you by, that you can extract yourself from society by clever technocracy, that is exactly what is going to lead to a very rude awakening.
DCMA. UCITA. DeCSS. It all happened while we were asleep at the wheel thinking that we could save ourselves and that the government was something far away.
The real question that ESR et al need to be brave enough to face is whether the structure of this movement allows the emergence of a voice that can represent and further the needs and benefits of the OSS environment, or whether this movement is doomed to be an incoherent collective, scrambling and scurrying and blindsided by big business lobbyists putting the next self-serving law into place.
I mean, good heavens, how did we let the DMCA get so far? How asleep were we?
That's all nice, but there was one thing about your priorities in creating code that was blatantly missing. It is the one thing that I did manage to learn in school, that was hammered in hard, and that I consider the defining element of who I want to work with for long stretches of time, and the thing that I see many people who just rolled into this job firmly lacking.
Maintainability.
6 months from now, can the author undertsand the code? Can the other programmers? Can the project manager? Well enough to be able to make an informed decision whether it can be moved forward in a certain direction?
Maintainability. It's not just about writing comments, it's about clean design, a sense of what separation, encapsulation, and inheritance truly is for. It isn't just to debug better, and certainly not to make faster code (but code faster, maybe).
Maybe your code is perfect now. But it won't be 6 months from now. That's what my degree taught me, and boy am I grateful.
It's why I dare call myself a software engineer. Maybe I am a lousy engineer, but at least I understand the priorities involved in that word.
Re: Commodities and art - Warhol's view
on
Pay Lars
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· Score: 2
It's interesting you invoke Warhol, and rightly so, he's the first one who came to my mind when I read Lars' art/commodities quote. I was like, baby, where have you been the last 40 years? Ignored Warhol's take on Pop Art, of making commodities art? Forgotten all the cheap designs that take art and make it into commodities and decorations for everyday objects? What is Art and what is a Commodity has been a central theme in so many works and exhibitions, and now is spilling over into the digital domain with all new implications and modes. It has been discussed for a long time leading to startling conclusions and ideas about ownership and identity. But Lars knows exactly when what is what.
I dunno too much about this Lars dude, but one thing's obvious: the most exciting innovations in actual art and artist communities of the last couple of decades have completly passed him by. For somebody from the Bay Area, a place that for so long has had a vibrant community of artists, that's really sad.
Obviously the customers thought differently and decided that "drool-proof" was indeed an added value worth paying extra for.
And this has led to a huge installed base that creates its own added value by itself. I joined after years and years of looking down my nose because certain communities are already big and up and running, filled with actual real people, wher it was irrelevant whether they needed drool-proof software or not. Specifically for me it was the gay male community out to hook up for quick sex - and since I preferr 'em big and stupid the whole drool-proof aspect is only an advantage, I guess. When it comes to connecting to humans within your own metropolitan area for some non-geek activity, the technological superiority of IMAP and HTML 1.1 and IRC just don't cut it over the non-geek drool-proof ISP filled with scores and scores of actual humans who just wanted to get online quickly to do the same thing.
A quick look around other communities on AOL shows that it's the same for other groups, like, say, the teen market. But I really, really think that AOL made it almost overwhelmingly because of adults wanting to get laid in some form or another, an aspect of their growth nobody really wants to admit.
When it comes to paying, drool-proof seriously rules for most people out there. The future is not going to be like Star Trek, the future is on its way to look more like LEXX
Creating a model that fits the user is just half the story, and I take exception to drawing conclusions on how well UIs can get by just stopping there. The final goal is not to just make a program fit the actual tasks that need to be done, but to expose the mental model and functions of the program in a way that is coherent, acknowledges human cognitive limitations, and fits the user's overall goals. When the program exposes a coherent model this way, (inter)actions becomes predictable for the user, and the user can explore, learn, and get the task done. Educate the user, yes, but you can try to do that by havng the UI show what it does and can do, with just a minimal need for refrences and help-systems. Maybe only a 'Getting Started', after that it should just be clear.
Yes, this is hard. Yes, it requires multiple testing iterations with actual users for complex programs. And yes, those cycles really are mega-frustrating on the ego of the developers. (No, Bob wasn't the answer, nor that Paperclip.)
Even the programmers must have had a clear idea of the things and tasks that their program was suitable for. If they didn't, and thus made a muddled mess of a program of which they do not know how to expose the functionality in the UI, they should go back to the drawing board. Telling the user that they're stupid and should just read and remember more is just plain rude and elitist and, actually, an admission of deafeat.
This is tough cookies in the UNIX OS world because actual execution units that need to be configured are usually the result of a mashing of small programs, each with their own model of reality and syntax to manipulate; witness the mess of having to configure an actual system to do something else besides what the installer enabled. Apple bit the bullet and is at least trying to create a consumer-level solution, albeit for advanced consumers; we shall see how their XML based unified solution to sysadmining actually plays out
The real question is how intent LINUX really is on taking over the world. But making better programs, programs with UIs in text or graphics that get out of the way because they are easy to "get", can't be so bad, even for the UNIX elite, can it? There is nothing efficient about having to look up man pages for switches and syntax. Nothing. It may be an historical accident that things evolved this way, but that doesn't make it inherently superior.
I have a small Toshiba Libretto 110ct I picked new up on an online auction (800x480 24bit LCD, 32Mb, 4.1 Gig) with a iNet Spider CDPD modem card running. The service is called Airbridge from Bell Atlantic Mobile, and it works just fine. Ok, so it isn't really a 19k2 but more of a bursty 11k connection, and coverage is spotty in the suburbs, but hardware wise it works. I read Usenet over telnet, I email, I even browse (slooooowly) with this tiny package. You could do slashdot with it. The screen's really good for the size. It's just a sweet little gadget. I am happy as a clam with it. I read and browse on the couch, in the bus, everywhere.
I've een thinking of replacing the current Win98 with some kine of *BSD, but I am not sure whether that will support the PCMCIA CDPD modem, so I haven't invested the time yet. Considering this is just a small comms machine, I also don't think it is worth it.
I'm not a geek, not a technical person, and have no desire to be one.
See, this is really my biggest problem with the whole way "Geek" culture is being treated right now. The way it is being written about now, the way that Katz himself describes it in the posted chapter from his book, is from the angles of power - which geeks supposedly wield in the New Economy - and fear. 'Who are these geeks? Didn't we use to pester them? How will they retaliate? Have our misfits become our all-powerful priests?' (I keep waiting for the big geek-resentment backlash like every fad gets, and then I remember, oh wait, geeks already are and were defined with resentment and anger as our heads were held in the toilet-bowls at school or work or camp. When the backlash comes, how will we ever tell?:) )
But here it is again, the next pundit talking about geeks this and geeks that and power this and alienation that. But take a good look at the definitions of "geek" that, for example, ESR wrote up (and that ring true to me): "geek" was and is a term of derision and hostility, and you shouldn't use it on someone unless you'd be proud to identify as one yourself. Well, look above what Katz thinks.
Katz is basically writing about us, peddling another book about us, getting exposure and income from us, over our backs and years of isolation to the culture we have become, and as a sublime example of the calloussness with which he approaches his next cash-cow, he keeps calling his subjects by epithets of very complex usage like 'niggers' and 'fags'. Any heterosexual who calls me a fag can be sure to met qith quite a lot of suspicion. Same goes for non-technical people randomly talking 'bout geeks.
And to top it off, he just doesn't get the revolution in communications and technology that well. Just witness his problems with the moderation system and what he thinks it does to civil discourse - eventhough the moderation system, the creation of individual trust-based networks of vetos and fiats, is what saving civil discourse in a marketing-numbed over-connected world in which every channel eventually descends into insipid anchorperson hawking of tooth-paste grins.
I think geek culture desrves geek journalism, and not to be examined like some odd out-there tribe by yet another uberculture "journalist" who grew up professionally among such publications awash in cynical marketing and demographics peddling like Rolling Stone. We all know he is waiting for the next best thing to come along.
I think many readers of Slashdot sense on some level that he isn't "one of us". And as misused and dangerous the "one of us" sentiment is and has been in groups, as much as it has been misused againts geeks themselves and we should be wary of it, we have good reasons to be suspicious of other people bearing gifts; all too often, they ended up just wanting us to do their homework all over again.
First, as any experienced software engineer would point out (backed by experimental data), 90% of a program's execution time is spent in 10%(!) percent of its code. What this means is that if ONLY that 10% of the code is optimized, it will speed up 90% of program's execution time. Crusoe's code caching mechanism helps this immensely because as a program runs, these 10% become cached in native code and translation from non-native machine code is done only ONCE.
Well, let's hope then that there's plenty o' room in that code-cache for optimized code that is not the system idle process, because that's the first process that's going to get optimized and it will never be kicked out.
Puh-leaze. This is MIT culture. This is the Media Lab culture. It doesn't have to be remotely useful, or even work. Just model it with the 3d printer, call it "prototype", "future vision", "alpha model", strap it on Vendela, and watch the press-releases go out and invenstors roll in. Slashdot is right now just another avenue for a cynical commercial.
We've got this very specific rule in my household: 'Only one of us can work in a startup at any given time.'
Worth it? The pay-off is so uncertain, and cashing in the paper money is so even more uncertain (I have one friend now who is being sent to a place he doesn't want to go, for work that he doesn't want to do, because he isn't vested yet, management told him to move or quit, and he financed his mega-loft with his paper money) that the work now had better be worth it. You can't eat the future. Not for long.
Perhaps the first and most important thing is to help him understand that there is another way of life. People who have been beaten down all their lives come to accept it; the first step towards radical change is to understand that change is possible [...]
Our peasant needs to make the most of his meager resources. How can I build a warmer, drier hut? How can I dig a better well? How can I irrigate my fields? How can I take care of my sick kids [...]
Peasant ain't gonna find it. All peasant is really going to discover in those three days before he starves is More Geek's Opinions on Star Trek. In English. If Peasant is lucky, he gets to die with images of happy porno on his mind.
Efficiency. Clinicians already lead an interrupt-driven life, and the more non-time-critical communication can be routed through channels that allow the clinicians to focus, re-prioritize on a moment's notice, and asynchronize their communication, the more efficient (and grateful) these clinicians will be. The e-mail allows clinicians to answer their patients as in-depth and complete as they want, on a designated turn-around time, sequentially, while they get to better manage their case-loads.
As an aside...I can see why banks are targets (I work for an major bank and our dialin systems are secured with one-time key systems) but why would someone want to pretend to be me when talking to my doctor?? What would motivate the cracker in question to spend however long it takes to bruteforce/man-in-the-middle this website?
Isurance companies, HMO's, and credit reporting companies like Equifax and TRS would love to get data like this, however unreliable. And they would pay to get it, as long as they could seemingly feign ignorance at the source of the data.
As good a linux is at the server end even Linus has said Linux isn't ready for the desktop because it can be still unfriendly to a newbie. As such prehaps the ability to have office etc running on Linux might help make the tranistion into the market place a bit easier.
Just a nit to pick here, but the M$ 'productivity' suites are so complex now that putting them on Linux isn't going to make Linux any friendlier to newbies - just more familiar in certain ways. That will indeed ease transition into market.
However, as complex as the full Win32 experiences are, they do offer a certain level of coherency and interoperability that will be sorely missed by putting these apps on a Linux platform. It's like getting the worst of both worlds.
I don't see the limitation issue. After poking around extensively on their web-site, I conclude that, to the user, this set-up is pretty much like the X11 terminal/workstations farms I worked on in college: lots and lots of GUI terminals that execute all the programs on the server. What these programs are is up to the admins, but we were running terms and reading news and compiling C++ and running emacs - in essence we were sharing all these computer resources and every program that would run on those SPARCS. So how limited these things are going to be is up to the admins, and it looks as if you can create very rich access schemes, with your creative highflyers being able to execute all they want with mondo resources at their disposal, while thing can be kept locked down for your data-entry drones.
The smartcard instant-on/off would be wonderful in my previous place of work, a hospital, where docs had to do a lot of data entry but were constantly going from room to room. It would be fantastic.
What I _do_ want to see SUN raked over the coals for is for re-invetning X in a way that requires even more bandwidth. I mean, look at those recommendations... sheesh.
Slashdot Mirror
Tons of stuff that you'll want to somehow get on and off your 3G phone, to swap or archive. You can hope and wait for Bluetooth, or you can also have a slot that creates a new memory location when the old is full.
First of all, I had a really hard time following this discussion. Is it me or is it really hard to get a sense of timeline from this site?
This aint about philosophy, it's about code.
No it's not, not for Lessig. One of the things he argues is that the Open Source movement is part of society and as such will be subject to society's norms, whether it likes it or not. As such the question about where the government (should) stand is not going to be about actual code at all, but whether the Open Source movement is going to be able to have an effective voice in shaping those rules and laws, or is going to done in by its own arrogance about how smart we are and how we don't need anyone and we are our own marketplace.
Sure, the US government could go in a regulate the internet as we use it into oblivion, but I don't think that such action would be allowed to stand.
When enough money is involved, anything can be regulated. Happily coding around, thinking that this spectre will pass you by, that you can extract yourself from society by clever technocracy, that is exactly what is going to lead to a very rude awakening.
DCMA. UCITA. DeCSS. It all happened while we were asleep at the wheel thinking that we could save ourselves and that the government was something far away.
The real question that ESR et al need to be brave enough to face is whether the structure of this movement allows the emergence of a voice that can represent and further the needs and benefits of the OSS environment, or whether this movement is doomed to be an incoherent collective, scrambling and scurrying and blindsided by big business lobbyists putting the next self-serving law into place.
I mean, good heavens, how did we let the DMCA get so far? How asleep were we?
Maintainability.
6 months from now, can the author undertsand the code? Can the other programmers? Can the project manager? Well enough to be able to make an informed decision whether it can be moved forward in a certain direction?
Maintainability. It's not just about writing comments, it's about clean design, a sense of what separation, encapsulation, and inheritance truly is for. It isn't just to debug better, and certainly not to make faster code (but code faster, maybe).
Maybe your code is perfect now. But it won't be 6 months from now. That's what my degree taught me, and boy am I grateful.
It's why I dare call myself a software engineer. Maybe I am a lousy engineer, but at least I understand the priorities involved in that word.
I dunno too much about this Lars dude, but one thing's obvious: the most exciting innovations in actual art and artist communities of the last couple of decades have completly passed him by. For somebody from the Bay Area, a place that for so long has had a vibrant community of artists, that's really sad.
And this has led to a huge installed base that creates its own added value by itself. I joined after years and years of looking down my nose because certain communities are already big and up and running, filled with actual real people, wher it was irrelevant whether they needed drool-proof software or not. Specifically for me it was the gay male community out to hook up for quick sex - and since I preferr 'em big and stupid the whole drool-proof aspect is only an advantage, I guess. When it comes to connecting to humans within your own metropolitan area for some non-geek activity, the technological superiority of IMAP and HTML 1.1 and IRC just don't cut it over the non-geek drool-proof ISP filled with scores and scores of actual humans who just wanted to get online quickly to do the same thing.
A quick look around other communities on AOL shows that it's the same for other groups, like, say, the teen market. But I really, really think that AOL made it almost overwhelmingly because of adults wanting to get laid in some form or another, an aspect of their growth nobody really wants to admit.
When it comes to paying, drool-proof seriously rules for most people out there. The future is not going to be like Star Trek, the future is on its way to look more like LEXX
No.
Creating a model that fits the user is just half the story, and I take exception to drawing conclusions on how well UIs can get by just stopping there. The final goal is not to just make a program fit the actual tasks that need to be done, but to expose the mental model and functions of the program in a way that is coherent, acknowledges human cognitive limitations, and fits the user's overall goals. When the program exposes a coherent model this way, (inter)actions becomes predictable for the user, and the user can explore, learn, and get the task done. Educate the user, yes, but you can try to do that by havng the UI show what it does and can do, with just a minimal need for refrences and help-systems. Maybe only a 'Getting Started', after that it should just be clear.
Yes, this is hard. Yes, it requires multiple testing iterations with actual users for complex programs. And yes, those cycles really are mega-frustrating on the ego of the developers. (No, Bob wasn't the answer, nor that Paperclip.)
Even the programmers must have had a clear idea of the things and tasks that their program was suitable for. If they didn't, and thus made a muddled mess of a program of which they do not know how to expose the functionality in the UI, they should go back to the drawing board. Telling the user that they're stupid and should just read and remember more is just plain rude and elitist and, actually, an admission of deafeat.
This is tough cookies in the UNIX OS world because actual execution units that need to be configured are usually the result of a mashing of small programs, each with their own model of reality and syntax to manipulate; witness the mess of having to configure an actual system to do something else besides what the installer enabled. Apple bit the bullet and is at least trying to create a consumer-level solution, albeit for advanced consumers; we shall see how their XML based unified solution to sysadmining actually plays out
The real question is how intent LINUX really is on taking over the world. But making better programs, programs with UIs in text or graphics that get out of the way because they are easy to "get", can't be so bad, even for the UNIX elite, can it? There is nothing efficient about having to look up man pages for switches and syntax. Nothing. It may be an historical accident that things evolved this way, but that doesn't make it inherently superior.
FJ!!I've een thinking of replacing the current Win98 with some kine of *BSD, but I am not sure whether that will support the PCMCIA CDPD modem, so I haven't invested the time yet. Considering this is just a small comms machine, I also don't think it is worth it.
FJ!!
But here it is again, the next pundit talking about geeks this and geeks that and power this and alienation that. But take a good look at the definitions of "geek" that, for example, ESR wrote up (and that ring true to me): "geek" was and is a term of derision and hostility, and you shouldn't use it on someone unless you'd be proud to identify as one yourself. Well, look above what Katz thinks.
Katz is basically writing about us, peddling another book about us, getting exposure and income from us, over our backs and years of isolation to the culture we have become, and as a sublime example of the calloussness with which he approaches his next cash-cow, he keeps calling his subjects by epithets of very complex usage like 'niggers' and 'fags'. Any heterosexual who calls me a fag can be sure to met qith quite a lot of suspicion. Same goes for non-technical people randomly talking 'bout geeks.
And to top it off, he just doesn't get the revolution in communications and technology that well. Just witness his problems with the moderation system and what he thinks it does to civil discourse - eventhough the moderation system, the creation of individual trust-based networks of vetos and fiats, is what saving civil discourse in a marketing-numbed over-connected world in which every channel eventually descends into insipid anchorperson hawking of tooth-paste grins.
I think geek culture desrves geek journalism, and not to be examined like some odd out-there tribe by yet another uberculture "journalist" who grew up professionally among such publications awash in cynical marketing and demographics peddling like Rolling Stone. We all know he is waiting for the next best thing to come along.
I think many readers of Slashdot sense on some level that he isn't "one of us". And as misused and dangerous the "one of us" sentiment is and has been in groups, as much as it has been misused againts geeks themselves and we should be wary of it, we have good reasons to be suspicious of other people bearing gifts; all too often, they ended up just wanting us to do their homework all over again.
Well, let's hope then that there's plenty o' room in that code-cache for optimized code that is not the system idle process, because that's the first process that's going to get optimized and it will never be kicked out.
Try this for size: Usenet, 1993
Specs?
Puh-leaze. This is MIT culture. This is the Media Lab culture. It doesn't have to be remotely useful, or even work. Just model it with the 3d printer, call it "prototype", "future vision", "alpha model", strap it on Vendela, and watch the press-releases go out and invenstors roll in. Slashdot is right now just another avenue for a cynical commercial.
We've got this very specific rule in my household: 'Only one of us can work in a startup at any given time.'
Worth it? The pay-off is so uncertain, and cashing in the paper money is so even more uncertain (I have one friend now who is being sent to a place he doesn't want to go, for work that he doesn't want to do, because he isn't vested yet, management told him to move or quit, and he financed his mega-loft with his paper money) that the work now had better be worth it. You can't eat the future. Not for long.
Our peasant needs to make the most of his meager resources. How can I build a warmer, drier hut? How can I dig a better well? How can I irrigate my fields? How can I take care of my sick kids [...]
Peasant ain't gonna find it. All peasant is really going to discover in those three days before he starves is More Geek's Opinions on Star Trek. In English. If Peasant is lucky, he gets to die with images of happy porno on his mind.
Efficiency. Clinicians already lead an interrupt-driven life, and the more non-time-critical communication can be routed through channels that allow the clinicians to focus, re-prioritize on a moment's notice, and asynchronize their communication, the more efficient (and grateful) these clinicians will be. The e-mail allows clinicians to answer their patients as in-depth and complete as they want, on a designated turn-around time, sequentially, while they get to better manage their case-loads.
Isurance companies, HMO's, and credit reporting companies like Equifax and TRS would love to get data like this, however unreliable. And they would pay to get it, as long as they could seemingly feign ignorance at the source of the data.
Just a nit to pick here, but the M$ 'productivity' suites are so complex now that putting them on Linux isn't going to make Linux any friendlier to newbies - just more familiar in certain ways. That will indeed ease transition into market.
However, as complex as the full Win32 experiences are, they do offer a certain level of coherency and interoperability that will be sorely missed by putting these apps on a Linux platform. It's like getting the worst of both worlds.
The smartcard instant-on/off would be wonderful in my previous place of work, a hospital, where docs had to do a lot of data entry but were constantly going from room to room. It would be fantastic.
What I _do_ want to see SUN raked over the coals for is for re-invetning X in a way that requires even more bandwidth. I mean, look at those recommendations... sheesh.