I for one feel at least encouraged by the fact that obviously Novel is very sensitive to criticism over this. I would like to even believe that they are reading Slashdot. If nothing else, that would be a very positive development. If major players and decision makers begin reading Slashdot and become sensitive to it, that would be a very positive thing for us all. Though the first few comments to this latest news show considerable skepticism, many others in previous discussions had come to the conclusion that there is really nothing to worry about.
I have followed the entire discussion, and now am prepared to add my two cents worth. In the first place, the amount of data is growing exponentially, at a rate such that we will never be able to keep up with it. For example, video games are now an important art form, taking a vast mind share away from movies. Every indication is that interactive forms of entertainment will continue to evolve and take over from former "lower-dimensional" forms of expression. Perhaps we are at the dawn of 3D television, if we are to believe recent articles. Certainly interactive television is already here, and may become dominant. Then how do you preserve these art forms? As technology progresses, it is certain that the number of dimensions will only continue to increase. Right now we have multi-channel audio, 3D images - and perhaps it won't be too long before we will have images with scent synthesis, touch, who knows?
Much of the discussion so far has been about archiving documents, images, and sounds, but as time goes by, these mediums will present a very low-dimensional view of contemporary culture - only the tip of the iceberg so to speak.
I believe the answer must lie in computers themselves as the storage medium. Perhaps there are ways of building computer chips that will last for centuries or millennium. What we need is a storage machine, that is self replicating and self repairing and capable of constantly updating itself. Then an archaeologist of the future, even a future where technology has take a huge backslide, will run across one of these machines in a cave somewhere, someday. It will sense the presence of the archaeologist and begin to project an image on the cave wall, with accompanying sound track, and tell the story of our history. It will also be capable of teaching others how to regain lost knowledge and technology.
As I perused the contents of said stack of discs, I found that almost 90% of them were redundant or out of date copies of files I had completely forgotten about.
Well then I have question that I would like to throw out to Slashdot readers. Like the person who wrote the parent, I have tons of old files on my hard drives. I always run at least two hard drives, using one for backups. Then when I upgrade computers, I bring over one of the old hard drives to the new computer, copy it to the new drive, then continue to use it to backup new material. By now I have files duplicated and triplicated all over the place. After almost a decade of this, I have many gbs of files which would probably condense down to a fraction if all the duplications were eliminated. What kind of software do I need that will analyze all my files and automatically find and remove duplicates? - or do I need to develop such software for myself?...and if I do, then is there niche for commercialization of such software?
has anyone any insight on just using harddrives that are powered up long enough to store the data on and then powered down? Will the data stored on the platters begin to deteriorate?
Of course I have pondered this question of how to maintain data, as I am sure most have. I wouldn't count on a hard drive like that. Even if you only fire it up once in a while - I don't think that makes any difference in the end. I don't think it is as much a question about how long the disk can maintain the data as it is a question of the intricate electronic components on the drive. In fact, electronic components seem less reliable that way than if you keep them running ever day. For example - many people have had the experience over the last couple of decades of putting a perfectly good television in storage for a number of months, only to discover that it no longer works later. Maybe that's not such a good example compared to a computer hard drive, but I tried to find something that many people may have actually experieneced or heard of. As well, I believe many people never shut down their computers because they seem more reliable if you keep them running 24/7. It's the in rush of current that will finally kick over a weak electronic component rather than a steady on state. So in answer to what you should use - seems to me DVDs is the way to go.
Its time we force ISPs to pull the plug on infected client machines or block entire ISPs
Of course we have heard that the ISPs won't go after their own customers, but I have another idea. Why don't we simply bombard these ISPs with requests to please stop forwarding spam to us? I mean in a big way - as individuals through something like Blue Frog tried to do - not just a polite note from an upstream carrier. Has anyone considered that? Many of us were so encouraged by Blue Frog's efforts - until they got put out of business by the spammers. Their efforts failed, because they went directly after the spammers who turned out to be too powerful an adversary. But why don't we go after the ISPs? Certainly they have to accept some responsibility, if not all of it. It's really the ISP who is sending us the spam in the end, isn't it? They are paid agents of their customers, in effect frequently being paid to relay spam on behalf of their clients. So we bomb them with requests to stop, and make it unprofitable for them to allow themselves to be used as a spam relay...and if there is a way to accurately verify the URL from which the spam originated (as opposed to being spoofed), bomb that too. Then the poor idiot with the infected machine will get knocked off the net and finally have to see that his computer is looked at by a professional. And if it is indeed a verifiable URL, but turns out to be only a temporary URL that was assigned for that email session - too bad. Then the ISP takes a hit again, when one of his innocent customers complains of a DOS attack.
Are you sure you used this quote with Google? Out of curiosity I tried it, copy and paste, with Google Directory, Google News, Froogle, Google Groups, and Google Web and didn't get any results.
Simpler than that - I used the Google toobar in my Firefox Browser.
What utter nonsense the Microsoft sponsored study is. Personally, I come to the exact opposite conclusion than their paper states.
"Most business investments in computers have yielded significantly lower returns than investments in bonds at market interest rates" Google Books: "The Trouble With Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity By Thomas K. Landauer" (the actual link is much too long to include.).
Economists agree that increase in productivity of the business sector due to use of computers is very difficult to demonstrate, if indeed it exists at all. Let us generously assume some modest improvement in productivity. Then against that we must offset capitol costs, amortized over some appropriate period. Machines that are still productive are retired because they are no longer near the cutting edge, and anticipation of retirement affects economic depreciation. If we assume some productivity gain from the general use of computers, simply amortizing that cost over a longer period will increase the value of the presumed productivity increase considerably. Specifically, if all the big corporations in Europe were to suddenly decide to keep their computers twice as long before updating them, not only will they double the value of supposed productivity gains, but save an enormous amount of money that they can invest in a thousand other ways, providing a huge boost to the economy in general (at the expense of Microsoft and their friends). As well, if nobody is upgrading there computers any more, suddenly their resale value will climb, increasing the book value of assets held.
When I wanted to find some links to back up my theses, I wondered how in the world I am going to find some article I read years ago on this question of whether computers really provide any productivity gain. After a bit of head scratching, I simply typed "Increase in productivity of the office due to computers" into Google, and found dozens of interesting references to support my point of view. Now, I certainly acknowledge that state of the art computers are essential for many specialized purposes, but the computers purchased by the thousands by the Fortune 500 companies and their counterparts in Europe already have far more capacity than they will ever need.
My dad's an international environmental consultant - and he frequently calls China, India, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia - from his office phone, home phone and cell phone.
How can you be so sure he's an environmental consultant? Sound pretty fishy to me. Obviously he must be working for the CIA - or even CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) for that matter. Have you ever considered that? Seems to me that you've been walking around your tinfoil hat pulled down over your eyes for so long, you don't even see what's going on right under your own nose:)
Pons & Flieshman suffered a big explosion one day when one of their experiments ran away on them. Their reaction vessles suddenly began putting out excessive heat - with hydrogen venting. Result: Ka-boom!
Supposedly that's how cold fusion works. It's said that the hydrogen atoms become so crowded together inside the paladium that they fuse together into helium.
...so imagine you are driving down the highway when suddenly cold fusion reactions start in your tank and you go up in a ball of flame. After all, if we are to believe the reports on cold fusion, the reactions always seem to start and stop in an unpredictable manner!
I see further down in the discussion that slashdot reader ~%24sjfsjf replied to "Paint and Sound" giving us this excellent reference Archaeoacoustics
which must be what I read about in SciAm many years ago. The relevant quote follows...
"The Woodbridge experiments"
"What is probably the first publication on the subject appeared in 1969, when Richard G. Woodbridge, III related four experiments in a letter in the Proceedings of the IEEE1. In the first experiment, he could pick up the noise produced by the potter's wheel from a pot, using a hand-held crystal cartridge (Astatic Corp. Model 2) with a wooden stylus, connected directly to a set of headphones. The second experiment yielded 60 Hz hum from the motor driving the potter's wheel. More interesting were the following experiments, with a canvas being painted while exposed to sounds. In the third experiment the canvas was painted with a variety of different paints while exposed to martial music from loudspeakers. Some of the brush strokes had a striated appearance, and "short snatches of the music" could be indentified. For the fourth experiment, the painter spoke the word "blue" during a stroke of the brush, and after a long search the word could be heard again when stroking the canvas with the stylus."
Ancient pottery can record sound too. I read an article in SciAm many year ago about an investigation into some ancient pottery. Seems the spiral groove design encircling the vase from top to bottom may have been created on the potter's wheel with the point of a wire held against it and moved slowly downward as the vase rotated. It was speculated that this could result in a primitive kind of phonograph, as any loud noise would cause the wire to vibrate and those vibrations would be indelibly recorded. The investigators mounted the vase on a lathe and attempted to "play back" whatever may have been recorded. After signal processing, they thought they could here the sound of horse's hooves on the pavement outside the potter's shop. I remember at the time I read this that just the thought of the possibility of bringing back a sound from 2000 years ago sent shivers down my spine.
A quick Google check yields a site that declares this a recent hoax:
Ancient Pottery Recorded Audio but I swear I read about this in SciAm more than 20 years ago. Unfortunately, I am not a current subsciber to SciAm so I cannot look for that article directly.
I learned about OO just about year ago, around the time I upgraded to Win XP Pro. I hadn't yet re-installed MS Word at a point when a major new release of OO was announced (I think it was 1.7) on Slashdot.
Being enthusiastic about the concept behind open software, and wishing to support OO, I decided to install that instead. I stuck with it through the learning curve. I quickly found that it was more than adequate for most of my simple word processing needs - correspondence and documentation of the software I develop - except in one essential way: support for a second language.
Routinely I have to use two languages - English and Portuguese, sometimes mixing both languages in a single document. The support for switching from one language to another in OO was horrible - it involved several mouse clicks to go back and forth. Of course that may well be much improved in current versions, but there's another problem. The spelling checker for Portuguese was not very well developed at the time I experimented with it, lacking even the simple ability to recognize verbs any other form than their infinitive.
Beyond spell checking, I doubt very much the OO has grammar checking. Even if it does now, I can't imagine it is or ever will be on par with MS Word. The thing is, I imagine that multilingual word processing is an art unto itself. In MS Word, I can write in either language, and the software instantly recognizes which I am using, does spell checking and what's even more important to me, grammar checking for the Portuguese I only learned a half dozen years ago.
When I was using OO with it's poor multilingual support, it took me two or three times longer to prepare a document in Portuguese as I had to frequently look up words in the dictionary. Although I know how to spell most common Portuguese words, I am not always sure of their gender (in the case of nouns) and without that it's not possible to get the correct form of the adjective. MS Word automatically checks my "concordances" in an instant. I doubt that OO will ever come even close to MS Word in this one, for me - essential area.
In the end, I had to abandon OO for word processing.
These are nice. Are you going to let us all vote on the winner in the end?
I have one request that is very important to me. I would like to see a more readable font on the front page. The way it is now, most posts are in italics. Anyone with a big monitor and using Firefox is going to hit Ctrl+ to enlarge the text. The italic text of the posts does get bigger, but the lines making up the letters don't get any thicker. So that's what I want to see - letters getting thicker and darker when you choose to increase the font size. Thanks.
Cool! I downloaded 30 day free trial of the software Tactile 3D, and actually read the EULA before installing to see if there might be some mention of installing adware - there wasn't. I chose the "typical" installation and installed it. Installation proceeded quickly and simply. On booting the software, ZoneAlarm informed me that Tactile 3D wanted to connect with the internet. I didn't let it. I then proceded to give it a try, without stopping to read the manual. It works! Kind of like a video game interface - sound effects and the promised 3D layout. I'll have to give it a thorough testing (and read the manual) before I can arrive at a decision as to if it is actually useful or not. Thanks for pointing that out to me.
I can't possibly imagine what a 3D Web interface would have to offer me. As pointed out by other contributors, any place on the web is right next to any other place. We will never cruise the web as if it was a highway like in the movies, because we have no idea how to get from one web site to the next (unless we do a traceroute) - nor do we need to know. It would be a completely ridiculous task to memorize all the networks one must traverse to get from point A to point B.
For me, the substance of internet is mostly text - email, articles, reading Slashdot and other forums. How can 3D do anything to enhance text? Of course more and more information is available as audio or video, and that's great to have where appropriate, but there is nothing like the printed article to be able to browse at your own pace, skipping parts that don't interest you and reading a key paragraph twice. In fact, try to imagine the opposite - like - no printed matter - images only like in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It would suck!
However, I have often wished I could experiment with a good 3D virtualization of the file system on my computer. The logical analogy is easy to imagine - buildings with rooms full of shelves and filing cabinets with drawers of folders containing files. Each room could be very different in appearance. Each filing cabinet as well may look quite different from another. You could just throw some files into a pile of miscellany on top of a table somewhere to be sorted later. You may keep some things - like your motorcycle maintenance manual - in the garden shed. Your software tools could be on a workbench in the garage. You could store secrets in wall safe hidden behind a painting where nobody would ever think to look:)
One would quickly get to know the layout, and where to find things. Imagine telling a family member where to find that article you downloaded last week: "Go down that hall and turn right at the end of the corridor. It's on top of the shelf at the back of the room". I don't think our current drive/path/name structure really means anything at all to non-technical people, and that's the push behind Google Desktop and Window's new system they have been developing.
On my computer, I always run a minimum of two hard drives, and often three. Everything I have is stored on at least two different drives for backup purposes. I maintain available at my fingertips many years worth of my files - mostly C/C++ source code I developed going back over a decade. I call this "my code library". Even though it's not in any way organized as a library, I can usually find some example of code I wrote years ago that is still relevant to some current project. From frequently browsing through old files, one gets to know right where to go.
On the other hand, of course it gets harder all the time as my files number in the 100's of thousands. Google Desktop is a wonderful tool that allowed me to find things I didn't even know that I had, but is only useful if you invoke the right search key. There have been many situations where I could not come up with a suitable search phrase to find what I was looking for. In such a situation, there is nothing like browsing through old files to trigger your memories. This would be greatly enhanced with a 3D interface as I describe.
Complete translation of the original article in the Business Journal Baguete
FISL: Stallman's autograph auctioned for R$ 22 (~US $10) 22/04/2006
An autograph from Free Software guru Richard Stallman was auctioned for R $23 (~US $11) at FISL 7.0 (International Free Software Forum) this Saturday, the 22nd. The initiative by gaucho Leonardo Vaz (Open BSB - RS) [Ed: Residents of the state of Rio Grande do Sul are called "gauchos".] caused a joyful uproar on this last day of the event when he went to personally deliver the money collected to Stallman, accompanied by about a hundred people.
Vaz bought Stallman's signature during the first edition of the Forum, six years ago. To charge contributions for the Free Software Foundation in trade for autographs or photo ops is only one of the eccentric habits of the American, who accepted the money gratefully and affirmed that it would be delivered to the recently founded Free Software Foundation of Latin America.
The auction concept summarizes the distracted atmosphere of this last day of FISL 7.0. The launch of GULA (Alcoholic Linux Users Group) is scheduled for 4:00 pm, which promises to shake up the final hours of the meeting.
[Obs. Apesar de ser canadense, moro em Brasil há seis anos agora.]
Future wars will not be faught by giant robots or ultra-enhanced bionic soldiers or UAVs. They will be faught by fleets of artificial insects with collaborative AI.
We will turn these out in our factories by the millions, dropping them over enemy territory by night. We will have "insects" that simply wait patiently, conserving their energy source, until an opportune moment to strike. Others will be capable of recharging themselves from readily available resources. Then an arms race will begin as we develop whole ecologies of these things to search out and destroy the enemy's artificial insects. Imagine the mess to clean up after a major war. The enormous problem caused left over land mines will pale in comparison. People will be swatting deadly "flies" for years after, if the flies don't get them in their sleep first. Vast tracts of territory will become uninhabitable. Hey - let's collaborate on a sci-fi thriller!
there is no evidence that microorganisms could grow at -179C
I don't think anyone is suggesting that they could. The point is that there could be hot spots on Titan or elsewhere where they could take hold. The last I read about Titan was that the surface may be water ice. There may be hot spots below this that bubble up methane - thereby explaining the methane atmosphere that must be regulary replenished. It may actually be warm under the ice from tidal forces and/or radioactive decay.
Imagine a big chunk of rock, heated up via its passage through the atmosphere, landing on the ice and penetrating it some distance to where water is in a liquid state due to pressure and some warmth.
All I ever wanted to do when I was growing up was to be a scientist and to make a positive contribution to mankind's knowledge and to society at large.
I call bullshit. This comment is a skillfully written fabrication, and exactly the the type of story slashdotter's want to read. Very few people, if any, are solely motivated by "The desire to serve". It seems to me that one's personal love of their profession alone should be sufficient motivation to continue in their carreer. Also, the USA is not the whole world, as some might believe. It's only in the US where the rise of the religious Right, support by the Bush regime, is being experienced. There is an entire world out there, full of other scientists who would be receptive to the contributions of a fellow seeker of Truth through scientific method. Nobody is going to quit a promising career because of a (hopefully) temporary swing in the political climate.
...but it must have been difficult when one went on to extrapolate from that observation indicating curvature. The problem being, if you came to the conclusion that the earth was a sphere (or at least curved), then clearly people beyond the horizon would slid right off the earth, along with trees and hills, and even the ocean would drain away. Since you knew, even in ancient times, that doesn't happen, then clearly the earth wasn't curved. The curvature had to be just an illusion of some sort. (This is only my personal speculation of how one may have reasoned.)
I have fuel for my nightmares now for several more years, thanks!
Did you ever consider that maybe the roach gets injected with pleasure causing endorphins, and spends the last days of it's little life in complete and total ecstasy? Remember that cow in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe who was bred to consider it a great honour to be eaten? - perhaps the cockroaches are something like that - the wasp is their god, and all roaches strive to be good enough to be Chosen
In an attempt to summarize what I have just said in my last two comments, I return to the original proposition of the discussion, which is "Words affect our reality". In the process of presenting my thoughts on the subject, I have come to the conclusion that in my opinion, words have little impact on our reality. I have mentioned that I have been living in a foreign culture and speaking a foreign language for the past five years. Then, what have I personally learned by achieving fluency in a second language? I have learned that words are but analogies and symbols for something else, something closer to the truth. I have noted with great academic interest that a different language can use a completely different analogy to imply the same thing, but I think in practical terms learning a second language in itself has had little impact on my perception of the world. What has had a profound impact on my perception of the world is living in another culture, with a very different perspective on things than my original culture has. I will never be the same after this experience. Language is only the tool that provided me access to that other culture and different point of view.
The informational reality that results in language is equivalent to the physical reality that results in consciousness.
This is a rather nice analogy, but it doesn't follow that...
The structure of thought must be the same as the structure of language.
I have a big problem with your use of the word "same" here, especially when you say "Our thoughts tend to be in images and nonverbal but these images are symbolic." I would say that "the structure of language" can only be mapped to "the structure of thought". However, language imposes a linear and semantic discipline on a thought that greatly restricts its original scope. Yes there are going to be similarities in the structure, but its like a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional world.
Allow me to differentiate between 1.) the state of consciousness at some given moment, 2.) the thought that examines that state of consciousness, and 3.) the words that express that thought.
I believe that at the lowest level we perceive things as a whole. Like, our reality at any given moment is the sum total of all our perception, their associations, emotions, sensations, all lumped together into one big, multidimensional blob.
Then, when we want to explore that "proto-thought" (the original state of consciousness), we trace a line from point to point within that blob. This line can traverse various dimensions, as it runs its course making a finite set of connections out of an infinite number of possibilities. This abstraction of points "and their sequence denotes order and relationships" - to use your words.
Again using your words "Our thoughts tend to be in images and nonverbal but these images are symbolic." We haven't yet reached language in my discourse - only 'thought'. Now we that wish to articulate that string of symbols, we come up with a word or phrase that maps to each of the symbols, then impose a semantic discipline to organize those words in to a grammar, then finally present that as a statement that bears little resemblance to the original thought. We add non-verbal cues such as expressions and gestures provide more details. At this point, the information content is still but a tiny fraction of the original thought, which itself was an infinitesimal abstraction from the original state of consciousness.
In summary, I would like to say that language is a very artificial construct, very much removed from the original state of consciousness that inspired a desire to communicate, and therefore, has very little influence on how one perceives the world. In fact, it has just occurred to me the perhaps culturally learned non-verbal language has more influence on how a person perceives the world than verbal language, because it is much richer in emotional content. How one should go about testing this hypothesizes I have no idea.
Slashdot Mirror
I for one feel at least encouraged by the fact that obviously Novel is very sensitive to criticism over this. I would like to even believe that they are reading Slashdot. If nothing else, that would be a very positive development. If major players and decision makers begin reading Slashdot and become sensitive to it, that would be a very positive thing for us all. Though the first few comments to this latest news show considerable skepticism, many others in previous discussions had come to the conclusion that there is really nothing to worry about.
I have followed the entire discussion, and now am prepared to add my two cents worth. In the first place, the amount of data is growing exponentially, at a rate such that we will never be able to keep up with it. For example, video games are now an important art form, taking a vast mind share away from movies. Every indication is that interactive forms of entertainment will continue to evolve and take over from former "lower-dimensional" forms of expression. Perhaps we are at the dawn of 3D television, if we are to believe recent articles. Certainly interactive television is already here, and may become dominant. Then how do you preserve these art forms? As technology progresses, it is certain that the number of dimensions will only continue to increase. Right now we have multi-channel audio, 3D images - and perhaps it won't be too long before we will have images with scent synthesis, touch, who knows?
Much of the discussion so far has been about archiving documents, images, and sounds, but as time goes by, these mediums will present a very low-dimensional view of contemporary culture - only the tip of the iceberg so to speak.
I believe the answer must lie in computers themselves as the storage medium. Perhaps there are ways of building computer chips that will last for centuries or millennium. What we need is a storage machine, that is self replicating and self repairing and capable of constantly updating itself. Then an archaeologist of the future, even a future where technology has take a huge backslide, will run across one of these machines in a cave somewhere, someday. It will sense the presence of the archaeologist and begin to project an image on the cave wall, with accompanying sound track, and tell the story of our history. It will also be capable of teaching others how to regain lost knowledge and technology.
As I perused the contents of said stack of discs, I found that almost 90% of them were redundant or out of date copies of files I had completely forgotten about.
Well then I have question that I would like to throw out to Slashdot readers. Like the person who wrote the parent, I have tons of old files on my hard drives. I always run at least two hard drives, using one for backups. Then when I upgrade computers, I bring over one of the old hard drives to the new computer, copy it to the new drive, then continue to use it to backup new material. By now I have files duplicated and triplicated all over the place. After almost a decade of this, I have many gbs of files which would probably condense down to a fraction if all the duplications were eliminated. What kind of software do I need that will analyze all my files and automatically find and remove duplicates? - or do I need to develop such software for myself? ...and if I do, then is there niche for commercialization of such software?
has anyone any insight on just using harddrives that are powered up long enough to store the data on and then powered down? Will the data stored on the platters begin to deteriorate?
Of course I have pondered this question of how to maintain data, as I am sure most have. I wouldn't count on a hard drive like that. Even if you only fire it up once in a while - I don't think that makes any difference in the end. I don't think it is as much a question about how long the disk can maintain the data as it is a question of the intricate electronic components on the drive. In fact, electronic components seem less reliable that way than if you keep them running ever day. For example - many people have had the experience over the last couple of decades of putting a perfectly good television in storage for a number of months, only to discover that it no longer works later. Maybe that's not such a good example compared to a computer hard drive, but I tried to find something that many people may have actually experieneced or heard of. As well, I believe many people never shut down their computers because they seem more reliable if you keep them running 24/7. It's the in rush of current that will finally kick over a weak electronic component rather than a steady on state. So in answer to what you should use - seems to me DVDs is the way to go.
Its time we force ISPs to pull the plug on infected client machines or block entire ISPs
Of course we have heard that the ISPs won't go after their own customers, but I have another idea. Why don't we simply bombard these ISPs with requests to please stop forwarding spam to us? I mean in a big way - as individuals through something like Blue Frog tried to do - not just a polite note from an upstream carrier. Has anyone considered that? Many of us were so encouraged by Blue Frog's efforts - until they got put out of business by the spammers. Their efforts failed, because they went directly after the spammers who turned out to be too powerful an adversary. But why don't we go after the ISPs? Certainly they have to accept some responsibility, if not all of it. It's really the ISP who is sending us the spam in the end, isn't it? They are paid agents of their customers, in effect frequently being paid to relay spam on behalf of their clients. So we bomb them with requests to stop, and make it unprofitable for them to allow themselves to be used as a spam relay ...and if there is a way to accurately verify the URL from which the spam originated (as opposed to being spoofed), bomb that too. Then the poor idiot with the infected machine will get knocked off the net and finally have to see that his computer is looked at by a professional. And if it is indeed a verifiable URL, but turns out to be only a temporary URL that was assigned for that email session - too bad. Then the ISP takes a hit again, when one of his innocent customers complains of a DOS attack.
Is there some failure in my logic???
Are you sure you used this quote with Google? Out of curiosity I tried it, copy and paste, with Google Directory, Google News, Froogle, Google Groups, and Google Web and didn't get any results.
Simpler than that - I used the Google toobar in my Firefox Browser.
What utter nonsense the Microsoft sponsored study is. Personally, I come to the exact opposite conclusion than their paper states.
"Most business investments in computers have yielded significantly lower returns than investments in bonds at market interest rates" Google Books: "The Trouble With Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity By Thomas K. Landauer" (the actual link is much too long to include.).
Economists agree that increase in productivity of the business sector due to use of computers is very difficult to demonstrate, if indeed it exists at all. Let us generously assume some modest improvement in productivity. Then against that we must offset capitol costs, amortized over some appropriate period. Machines that are still productive are retired because they are no longer near the cutting edge, and anticipation of retirement affects economic depreciation. If we assume some productivity gain from the general use of computers, simply amortizing that cost over a longer period will increase the value of the presumed productivity increase considerably. Specifically, if all the big corporations in Europe were to suddenly decide to keep their computers twice as long before updating them, not only will they double the value of supposed productivity gains, but save an enormous amount of money that they can invest in a thousand other ways, providing a huge boost to the economy in general (at the expense of Microsoft and their friends). As well, if nobody is upgrading there computers any more, suddenly their resale value will climb, increasing the book value of assets held.
When I wanted to find some links to back up my theses, I wondered how in the world I am going to find some article I read years ago on this question of whether computers really provide any productivity gain. After a bit of head scratching, I simply typed "Increase in productivity of the office due to computers" into Google, and found dozens of interesting references to support my point of view. Now, I certainly acknowledge that state of the art computers are essential for many specialized purposes, but the computers purchased by the thousands by the Fortune 500 companies and their counterparts in Europe already have far more capacity than they will ever need.
My dad's an international environmental consultant - and he frequently calls China, India, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia - from his office phone, home phone and cell phone.
How can you be so sure he's an environmental consultant? Sound pretty fishy to me. Obviously he must be working for the CIA - or even CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) for that matter. Have you ever considered that? Seems to me that you've been walking around your tinfoil hat pulled down over your eyes for so long, you don't even see what's going on right under your own nose :)
Cold fusion results in a ball of flame?
Pons & Flieshman suffered a big explosion one day when one of their experiments ran away on them. Their reaction vessles suddenly began putting out excessive heat - with hydrogen venting. Result: Ka-boom!
Supposedly that's how cold fusion works. It's said that the hydrogen atoms become so crowded together inside the paladium that they fuse together into helium.
...so imagine you are driving down the highway when suddenly cold fusion reactions start in your tank and you go up in a ball of flame. After all, if we are to believe the reports on cold fusion, the reactions always seem to start and stop in an unpredictable manner!
Develop a distributed app to make the Grid a rendering farm and contract it out to animation film companies.
[UPDATE]
I see further down in the discussion that slashdot reader ~%24sjfsjf replied to "Paint and Sound" giving us this excellent reference Archaeoacoustics which must be what I read about in SciAm many years ago. The relevant quote follows...
"The Woodbridge experiments"
"What is probably the first publication on the subject appeared in 1969, when Richard G. Woodbridge, III related four experiments in a letter in the Proceedings of the IEEE1. In the first experiment, he could pick up the noise produced by the potter's wheel from a pot, using a hand-held crystal cartridge (Astatic Corp. Model 2) with a wooden stylus, connected directly to a set of headphones. The second experiment yielded 60 Hz hum from the motor driving the potter's wheel. More interesting were the following experiments, with a canvas being painted while exposed to sounds. In the third experiment the canvas was painted with a variety of different paints while exposed to martial music from loudspeakers. Some of the brush strokes had a striated appearance, and "short snatches of the music" could be indentified. For the fourth experiment, the painter spoke the word "blue" during a stroke of the brush, and after a long search the word could be heard again when stroking the canvas with the stylus."
An oil painting can record sound.
Ancient pottery can record sound too. I read an article in SciAm many year ago about an investigation into some ancient pottery. Seems the spiral groove design encircling the vase from top to bottom may have been created on the potter's wheel with the point of a wire held against it and moved slowly downward as the vase rotated. It was speculated that this could result in a primitive kind of phonograph, as any loud noise would cause the wire to vibrate and those vibrations would be indelibly recorded. The investigators mounted the vase on a lathe and attempted to "play back" whatever may have been recorded. After signal processing, they thought they could here the sound of horse's hooves on the pavement outside the potter's shop. I remember at the time I read this that just the thought of the possibility of bringing back a sound from 2000 years ago sent shivers down my spine.
A quick Google check yields a site that declares this a recent hoax: Ancient Pottery Recorded Audio but I swear I read about this in SciAm more than 20 years ago. Unfortunately, I am not a current subsciber to SciAm so I cannot look for that article directly.
I learned about OO just about year ago, around the time I upgraded to Win XP Pro. I hadn't yet re-installed MS Word at a point when a major new release of OO was announced (I think it was 1.7) on Slashdot.
Being enthusiastic about the concept behind open software, and wishing to support OO, I decided to install that instead. I stuck with it through the learning curve. I quickly found that it was more than adequate for most of my simple word processing needs - correspondence and documentation of the software I develop - except in one essential way: support for a second language.
Routinely I have to use two languages - English and Portuguese, sometimes mixing both languages in a single document. The support for switching from one language to another in OO was horrible - it involved several mouse clicks to go back and forth. Of course that may well be much improved in current versions, but there's another problem. The spelling checker for Portuguese was not very well developed at the time I experimented with it, lacking even the simple ability to recognize verbs any other form than their infinitive.
Beyond spell checking, I doubt very much the OO has grammar checking. Even if it does now, I can't imagine it is or ever will be on par with MS Word. The thing is, I imagine that multilingual word processing is an art unto itself. In MS Word, I can write in either language, and the software instantly recognizes which I am using, does spell checking and what's even more important to me, grammar checking for the Portuguese I only learned a half dozen years ago.
When I was using OO with it's poor multilingual support, it took me two or three times longer to prepare a document in Portuguese as I had to frequently look up words in the dictionary. Although I know how to spell most common Portuguese words, I am not always sure of their gender (in the case of nouns) and without that it's not possible to get the correct form of the adjective. MS Word automatically checks my "concordances" in an instant. I doubt that OO will ever come even close to MS Word in this one, for me - essential area.
In the end, I had to abandon OO for word processing.
These are nice. Are you going to let us all vote on the winner in the end?
I have one request that is very important to me. I would like to see a more readable font on the front page. The way it is now, most posts are in italics. Anyone with a big monitor and using Firefox is going to hit Ctrl+ to enlarge the text. The italic text of the posts does get bigger, but the lines making up the letters don't get any thicker. So that's what I want to see - letters getting thicker and darker when you choose to increase the font size. Thanks.
Cool! I downloaded 30 day free trial of the software Tactile 3D, and actually read the EULA before installing to see if there might be some mention of installing adware - there wasn't. I chose the "typical" installation and installed it. Installation proceeded quickly and simply. On booting the software, ZoneAlarm informed me that Tactile 3D wanted to connect with the internet. I didn't let it. I then proceded to give it a try, without stopping to read the manual. It works! Kind of like a video game interface - sound effects and the promised 3D layout. I'll have to give it a thorough testing (and read the manual) before I can arrive at a decision as to if it is actually useful or not. Thanks for pointing that out to me.
I can't possibly imagine what a 3D Web interface would have to offer me. As pointed out by other contributors, any place on the web is right next to any other place. We will never cruise the web as if it was a highway like in the movies, because we have no idea how to get from one web site to the next (unless we do a traceroute) - nor do we need to know. It would be a completely ridiculous task to memorize all the networks one must traverse to get from point A to point B.
:)
For me, the substance of internet is mostly text - email, articles, reading Slashdot and other forums. How can 3D do anything to enhance text? Of course more and more information is available as audio or video, and that's great to have where appropriate, but there is nothing like the printed article to be able to browse at your own pace, skipping parts that don't interest you and reading a key paragraph twice. In fact, try to imagine the opposite - like - no printed matter - images only like in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It would suck!
However, I have often wished I could experiment with a good 3D virtualization of the file system on my computer. The logical analogy is easy to imagine - buildings with rooms full of shelves and filing cabinets with drawers of folders containing files. Each room could be very different in appearance. Each filing cabinet as well may look quite different from another. You could just throw some files into a pile of miscellany on top of a table somewhere to be sorted later. You may keep some things - like your motorcycle maintenance manual - in the garden shed. Your software tools could be on a workbench in the garage. You could store secrets in wall safe hidden behind a painting where nobody would ever think to look
One would quickly get to know the layout, and where to find things. Imagine telling a family member where to find that article you downloaded last week: "Go down that hall and turn right at the end of the corridor. It's on top of the shelf at the back of the room". I don't think our current drive/path/name structure really means anything at all to non-technical people, and that's the push behind Google Desktop and Window's new system they have been developing.
On my computer, I always run a minimum of two hard drives, and often three. Everything I have is stored on at least two different drives for backup purposes. I maintain available at my fingertips many years worth of my files - mostly C/C++ source code I developed going back over a decade. I call this "my code library". Even though it's not in any way organized as a library, I can usually find some example of code I wrote years ago that is still relevant to some current project. From frequently browsing through old files, one gets to know right where to go.
On the other hand, of course it gets harder all the time as my files number in the 100's of thousands. Google Desktop is a wonderful tool that allowed me to find things I didn't even know that I had, but is only useful if you invoke the right search key. There have been many situations where I could not come up with a suitable search phrase to find what I was looking for. In such a situation, there is nothing like browsing through old files to trigger your memories. This would be greatly enhanced with a 3D interface as I describe.
Complete translation of the original article in the Business Journal Baguete
FISL: Stallman's autograph auctioned for R$ 22 (~US $10) 22/04/2006
An autograph from Free Software guru Richard Stallman was auctioned for R $23 (~US $11) at FISL 7.0 (International Free Software Forum) this Saturday, the 22nd. The initiative by gaucho Leonardo Vaz (Open BSB - RS) [Ed: Residents of the state of Rio Grande do Sul are called "gauchos".] caused a joyful uproar on this last day of the event when he went to personally deliver the money collected to Stallman, accompanied by about a hundred people.
Vaz bought Stallman's signature during the first edition of the Forum, six years ago. To charge contributions for the Free Software Foundation in trade for autographs or photo ops is only one of the eccentric habits of the American, who accepted the money gratefully and affirmed that it would be delivered to the recently founded Free Software Foundation of Latin America.
The auction concept summarizes the distracted atmosphere of this last day of FISL 7.0. The launch of GULA (Alcoholic Linux Users Group) is scheduled for 4:00 pm, which promises to shake up the final hours of the meeting.
[Obs. Apesar de ser canadense, moro em Brasil há seis anos agora.]
Future wars will not be faught by giant robots or ultra-enhanced bionic soldiers or UAVs. They will be faught by fleets of artificial insects with collaborative AI.
We will turn these out in our factories by the millions, dropping them over enemy territory by night. We will have "insects" that simply wait patiently, conserving their energy source, until an opportune moment to strike. Others will be capable of recharging themselves from readily available resources. Then an arms race will begin as we develop whole ecologies of these things to search out and destroy the enemy's artificial insects. Imagine the mess to clean up after a major war. The enormous problem caused left over land mines will pale in comparison. People will be swatting deadly "flies" for years after, if the flies don't get them in their sleep first. Vast tracts of territory will become uninhabitable. Hey - let's collaborate on a sci-fi thriller!
I don't think anyone is suggesting that they could. The point is that there could be hot spots on Titan or elsewhere where they could take hold. The last I read about Titan was that the surface may be water ice. There may be hot spots below this that bubble up methane - thereby explaining the methane atmosphere that must be regulary replenished. It may actually be warm under the ice from tidal forces and/or radioactive decay.
Imagine a big chunk of rock, heated up via its passage through the atmosphere, landing on the ice and penetrating it some distance to where water is in a liquid state due to pressure and some warmth.
All I ever wanted to do when I was growing up was to be a scientist and to make a positive contribution to mankind's knowledge and to society at large.
I call bullshit. This comment is a skillfully written fabrication, and exactly the the type of story slashdotter's want to read. Very few people, if any, are solely motivated by "The desire to serve". It seems to me that one's personal love of their profession alone should be sufficient motivation to continue in their carreer. Also, the USA is not the whole world, as some might believe. It's only in the US where the rise of the religious Right, support by the Bush regime, is being experienced. There is an entire world out there, full of other scientists who would be receptive to the contributions of a fellow seeker of Truth through scientific method. Nobody is going to quit a promising career because of a (hopefully) temporary swing in the political climate.
...but it must have been difficult when one went on to extrapolate from that observation indicating curvature. The problem being, if you came to the conclusion that the earth was a sphere (or at least curved), then clearly people beyond the horizon would slid right off the earth, along with trees and hills, and even the ocean would drain away. Since you knew, even in ancient times, that doesn't happen, then clearly the earth wasn't curved. The curvature had to be just an illusion of some sort. (This is only my personal speculation of how one may have reasoned.)
I have fuel for my nightmares now for several more years, thanks!
Did you ever consider that maybe the roach gets injected with pleasure causing endorphins, and spends the last days of it's little life in complete and total ecstasy? Remember that cow in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe who was bred to consider it a great honour to be eaten? - perhaps the cockroaches are something like that - the wasp is their god, and all roaches strive to be good enough to be Chosen
In an attempt to summarize what I have just said in my last two comments, I return to the original proposition of the discussion, which is "Words affect our reality". In the process of presenting my thoughts on the subject, I have come to the conclusion that in my opinion, words have little impact on our reality. I have mentioned that I have been living in a foreign culture and speaking a foreign language for the past five years. Then, what have I personally learned by achieving fluency in a second language? I have learned that words are but analogies and symbols for something else, something closer to the truth. I have noted with great academic interest that a different language can use a completely different analogy to imply the same thing, but I think in practical terms learning a second language in itself has had little impact on my perception of the world. What has had a profound impact on my perception of the world is living in another culture, with a very different perspective on things than my original culture has. I will never be the same after this experience. Language is only the tool that provided me access to that other culture and different point of view.
The informational reality that results in language is equivalent to the physical reality that results in consciousness.
This is a rather nice analogy, but it doesn't follow that...
The structure of thought must be the same as the structure of language.
I have a big problem with your use of the word "same" here, especially when you say "Our thoughts tend to be in images and nonverbal but these images are symbolic." I would say that "the structure of language" can only be mapped to "the structure of thought". However, language imposes a linear and semantic discipline on a thought that greatly restricts its original scope. Yes there are going to be similarities in the structure, but its like a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional world.
Allow me to differentiate between 1.) the state of consciousness at some given moment, 2.) the thought that examines that state of consciousness, and 3.) the words that express that thought.
I believe that at the lowest level we perceive things as a whole. Like, our reality at any given moment is the sum total of all our perception, their associations, emotions, sensations, all lumped together into one big, multidimensional blob.
Then, when we want to explore that "proto-thought" (the original state of consciousness), we trace a line from point to point within that blob. This line can traverse various dimensions, as it runs its course making a finite set of connections out of an infinite number of possibilities. This abstraction of points "and their sequence denotes order and relationships" - to use your words.
Again using your words "Our thoughts tend to be in images and nonverbal but these images are symbolic." We haven't yet reached language in my discourse - only 'thought'. Now we that wish to articulate that string of symbols, we come up with a word or phrase that maps to each of the symbols, then impose a semantic discipline to organize those words in to a grammar, then finally present that as a statement that bears little resemblance to the original thought. We add non-verbal cues such as expressions and gestures provide more details. At this point, the information content is still but a tiny fraction of the original thought, which itself was an infinitesimal abstraction from the original state of consciousness.
In summary, I would like to say that language is a very artificial construct, very much removed from the original state of consciousness that inspired a desire to communicate, and therefore, has very little influence on how one perceives the world. In fact, it has just occurred to me the perhaps culturally learned non-verbal language has more influence on how a person perceives the world than verbal language, because it is much richer in emotional content. How one should go about testing this hypothesizes I have no idea.