Sure, but that's not it yet, by far. What I meant was some sort of centralised service for this, that works regardless of which network you're on, and that concentrates on the community idea, the idea that you use these "blogs" not to show pretty pictures to complete strangers, but to stay in touch with friends.
It might be just my personal opinion but frankly blogs for complete strangers are a bit of a waste of time... from the visitor's side, a kind of symptom of some sort of strange sort of voyeurism, and from the creator's side another expression of that symptom through the willingness to be looked at by complete strangers, to disclose your personality to any and all... and to provide a beautiful tool for any organisation that wants to to profile you and put you in a database if they decide you're dangerous.
A multimedia blog orientated more towards community building, towards maintaining a real-life community's contacts when they are split up by circumstances (such as finishing uni) seems (to my humble self) to be a more useful idea. Shame we'll probably have to wait 10-20 years before it is implemented properly in a seamless way that allows it to be used by joe average.
That would be a really cool idea actually... A sort of multimedia blog.
Imagine you go on holiday, you have your mobile phone with you. Every time you see something cool (let's hope you have good taste), you use your camera phone to take a picture of it and speak in a short message to attach to the picture. With some sort of text-to-speech package that would be very cool. Then instead of sending a post card back, you send the url of the blog which is automatically created from this, and your friends can follow your holidays and feel a bit sunny in sympathy.
That's actually something which people might pay for. The holiday use is only one, what about integrating this idea into a sort of community... everyone in the community (say of friends from univ) keeps a sort of multimedia blog from their phone, sharing things that they're doing to maintain the group bonding, etc... I know I would pay good money to keep in touch like that with my friends from uni.
Damn, the uses are practically infinite... Anyone else feel that this could be a killer app for 3G phones?
I agree. The purpose of a PVR is simple and clear, and doesn't require all the complexity (and expense!) of a PC to manage.
They would have done better to design a simple set-top box that you put on your TV and has all the fancy interfaces on the TV screen and the remote and all that, and which records the shows on an internal hard drive which is then accessible from your PC (through a Firewire, USB2, or even an ethernet cable), so that you can download/manage the files from your PC (which is good at that).
Why buy a whole PC and leave it sitting next to your TV, afraid to use it for other things (like playing that LAN game of UT2003 when friends come round!) because then it might crash or somehow fail to record the show you wanted recorded??
Hey, slashdot coders, can't you write a script that filters out this shite? It's getting annoying, and I also seeing quite often on the meta-moderation screen... Train a bayesian spam filter on it or something...
When developing a non-trivial software it's hard to resist the temptation to add a lot of features that will take time to implement and are not necessary central to the software you're building. Given that you do not have the budget limitations of a commercial software ("we won't do this because not enough customers ask for it so it's not worth doing"), how do you decide on which features to include? Is it to do with the popularity of the feature request? Or with the time it takes to implement? Or how central it is? Or something else?
The point of that being...? What? Stop the Earth in its rotation? The Coriolis effect would rip everyone off its surface. Plus it would take some axle to sustain that sort of torque... Daniel
One of the points in some of the articles linked in the comments, and the main article, was that increasing the mass doesn't help much. So your portable flywheel will probably be about 100 grams, not 1 kg, but spinning 3 times as fast... and it will hold the same amount of energy (almost).
Also, it is quite likely that such a flywheel will not be encased in a plastic box. More likely, as was mentioned, would be some kevlar casing. Since the flywheel will be made of carbon fibers rather than metal, if it is torn off its bearings by being dropped, it will (perhaps) disintegrate into thin strands of carbon. These may well be going very, very fast, but they will mostly be stopped by the kevlar coating.
Of course, even at 100g dropping one of those things on your foot could be unpleasant, but I think that's not applicable to just flywheels...
As far as I know there's no such thing as an alternating permanent magnet, and I'm a physics undergrad who's just gone through a whole term of electromagnetism so I should know.
The only way you can get an alternating magnet is by using an inductor with a soft iron core (ie a wire wound around a soft iron core). It's called an electromagnet.
The problem with this arrangement is, of course, that it costs energy to keep on alternating the magnet from one direction to another, etc. Especially if you need to do it fast.
By the way, when they talk about "using conventional motors to spin these things" they don't mean that you tie a string to the flywheel and to the motor and start the motor and keep it running until the flywheel is spinning fast enough *grin*. I'd be very surprised if you could get 60'000 rpm out of that!!!
I disagree. I don't hate microsoft, I just despise them and disagree with their business practices. Microsoft are not a good representant of what capitalism is meant to be. They represent what capitalism can degenerate into if unchecked. Daniel
The same arguments hold true for software (or did, at one point), yet people create software freely and distribute it freely now.
Well... whilst I believe that artistic creation would continue regardless of what happens to the MPAA (unless they win - then it might be strangled and stopped), I think the reasons for open-source software and open-source art are vastly different. Software can be used. Many times the reason why someone has created a piece of open source software is because they needed the software, and once they programmed it they thought "why not let others benefit from it too!"
As for art, it might be debatable whether a musician would create music so that he can listen to it, but I think it is quite clear that a writer does not write his books to read them. He writes them for altogether different reasons which I believe are much stronger than the need to use them himself. As someone else put it, he writes them because he HAS to... It's just stuck inside your mind and you have to get it out and one way to get it out is to write it out.
So I don't think you can compare the open-source software movement with art like this. They're very different things. Hopefully both open-art and open-source will win, but if so it will be for different reasons and different objectives.
Without the moderation system it wouldn't be free speech. It would be free noise.
It's not even "more free" without the moderation system. A good moderation system enhances the freedom of speech. If we didn't have the moderation system, these threads would be drowned in trolls, so that no one would be able to make themselves heard, so that no one would come here and the whole site would go down. How can the speech be more free if there's no speech left?
Also, as whoever pointed out, you can set your level as low as you want, and view all the posts. As I said moderation enhances the experience so that you can view the posts you want. But you can still view them all...
You probably don't care about my views on this, but here's my answers anyway:-P
1: Of course. This is equivalent to the "brain in a vat" problem. Could you just be a brain in a vat, tended by very careful aliens who make up a whole illusion of a world to your brain so that you think you're a human. If you allow for the aliens to be able to maintain such an illusion perfectly, then sure, you could be... Same for god. If you allow an entity to be able to do *everything*, to have infinite power, then it can do everything, including not be detected.
2: That's where religious people have a big nail planted in everyone's behinds... It's almost as hard to prove god exists as to prove god does not exist. If you went the Carl Sagan way (in his book Cosmos) and encoded something in the nth to n+1000th decimals of pi - or any other number which is intrinsically part of our universe, you would have proof that god exists. However you might argue that since pi is infinite, every possible combination of symbols will occur there so it's not really a proof... let's say god sprayed a message on the moon and appeared like a big fly flying around the moon, shouting "I'm god, god exists!", and then came down to everyone and shook their hands and answered everyone of their questions and showed them various miracles, some people would still think it's a plot from aliens who want to take over our planet. Similarly, it's impossible to disprove the existence of god - see answer 1 above...
3: Quite a while... who can possibly give any useful answer to this?:-P "we'll see" (or probably won't) is probably the best answer to this:-P
Sure, a line needs to be drawn - but the line should be whether or not the info. can be traced to you, or can harm you in any way.
That's probably the way it should be in a perfect world with nice helpful people all around and everyone holding hands and sitting on the lawn, but in this world, the line has to be drawn where it can be drawn, not where it should be drawn. It is much, much harder (probably nearly impossible with the current legal system) to make a law about what is too much and what is not that would be clear and failsafe. It is much easier to say that no information outside of the game should be transferred on the internet without the user's express consent.
to get rid of one of the worst sci-fi series of all times. Ok, this is just a personal opinion, but anyone who likes science fiction (as opposed to sci-fi like star trek which has nothing to do with science) should automatically despise Star Trek...
Yes, I know, it's generated a lot of fans out there... but so has Barbie Doll, and other stupidities... Star Trek is just one of them... I mean how anthropocentric can you get? All aliens are just humans with little bits of make-up added? So what do they want to say? The human race is perfect? Or the fact that a guy who's supposedly Captain of a spaceship goes and leaves his duty to explore planets and put himself in danger... what's up with that? What do they want to say? And then you suddenly realise the truth: They don't want to say anything. It's just a cheap popular sci-fi series...
Well, if any of you remember cooltype.com from the days before it merged with "WebPedia", it was a great, GREAT Photoshop tips site... When it merged it was less good, but still usable (it had the content but didn't have the looks anymore), and then when internet.com bought webpedia... well, just go to cooltype.com now and see if you can find more than a handful of photoshop tutorials! And they used to have DOZENS...
I hope this doesn't happen to LinuxToday as well...
Aha... but where do the children get their money? If they're smart enough to make thousands of dollars, they're smart enough to be responsible for their acts. If they're not, and their parents gave them the money, then the parents are actually buying the cards. And the parents are totally responsible for their acts, aren't they?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but that's not it yet, by far. What I meant was some sort of centralised service for this, that works regardless of which network you're on, and that concentrates on the community idea, the idea that you use these "blogs" not to show pretty pictures to complete strangers, but to stay in touch with friends.
It might be just my personal opinion but frankly blogs for complete strangers are a bit of a waste of time... from the visitor's side, a kind of symptom of some sort of strange sort of voyeurism, and from the creator's side another expression of that symptom through the willingness to be looked at by complete strangers, to disclose your personality to any and all... and to provide a beautiful tool for any organisation that wants to to profile you and put you in a database if they decide you're dangerous.
A multimedia blog orientated more towards community building, towards maintaining a real-life community's contacts when they are split up by circumstances (such as finishing uni) seems (to my humble self) to be a more useful idea. Shame we'll probably have to wait 10-20 years before it is implemented properly in a seamless way that allows it to be used by joe average.
Daniel
That would be a really cool idea actually... A sort of multimedia blog.
Imagine you go on holiday, you have your mobile phone with you. Every time you see something cool (let's hope you have good taste), you use your camera phone to take a picture of it and speak in a short message to attach to the picture. With some sort of text-to-speech package that would be very cool. Then instead of sending a post card back, you send the url of the blog which is automatically created from this, and your friends can follow your holidays and feel a bit sunny in sympathy.
That's actually something which people might pay for. The holiday use is only one, what about integrating this idea into a sort of community... everyone in the community (say of friends from univ) keeps a sort of multimedia blog from their phone, sharing things that they're doing to maintain the group bonding, etc... I know I would pay good money to keep in touch like that with my friends from uni.
Damn, the uses are practically infinite... Anyone else feel that this could be a killer app for 3G phones?
Daniel
I agree. The purpose of a PVR is simple and clear, and doesn't require all the complexity (and expense!) of a PC to manage.
They would have done better to design a simple set-top box that you put on your TV and has all the fancy interfaces on the TV screen and the remote and all that, and which records the shows on an internal hard drive which is then accessible from your PC (through a Firewire, USB2, or even an ethernet cable), so that you can download/manage the files from your PC (which is good at that).
Why buy a whole PC and leave it sitting next to your TV, afraid to use it for other things (like playing that LAN game of UT2003 when friends come round!) because then it might crash or somehow fail to record the show you wanted recorded??
Daniel
Hey, slashdot coders, can't you write a script that filters out this shite? It's getting annoying, and I also seeing quite often on the meta-moderation screen... Train a bayesian spam filter on it or something...
Daniel
When developing a non-trivial software it's hard to resist the temptation to add a lot of features that will take time to implement and are not necessary central to the software you're building. Given that you do not have the budget limitations of a commercial software ("we won't do this because not enough customers ask for it so it's not worth doing"), how do you decide on which features to include? Is it to do with the popularity of the feature request? Or with the time it takes to implement? Or how central it is? Or something else?
Daniel
Well then read the frickin' book and enjoy the gazillion jokes in there, moron... Daniel
I have written an article about this.
n ap ster
v e/ index.html
:-)
http://www.mode-x.com/articles.misc.php?target=
Also Courtney Love had a pretty interesting Salon.com piece a while ago:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/lo
It's pretty good, and if she's not an "expert", at least she's someone in the industry
Daniel
The point of that being...? What? Stop the Earth in its rotation? The Coriolis effect would rip everyone off its surface. Plus it would take some axle to sustain that sort of torque... Daniel
One of the points in some of the articles linked in the comments, and the main article, was that increasing the mass doesn't help much. So your portable flywheel will probably be about 100 grams, not 1 kg, but spinning 3 times as fast... and it will hold the same amount of energy (almost).
Also, it is quite likely that such a flywheel will not be encased in a plastic box. More likely, as was mentioned, would be some kevlar casing. Since the flywheel will be made of carbon fibers rather than metal, if it is torn off its bearings by being dropped, it will (perhaps) disintegrate into thin strands of carbon. These may well be going very, very fast, but they will mostly be stopped by the kevlar coating.
Of course, even at 100g dropping one of those things on your foot could be unpleasant, but I think that's not applicable to just flywheels...
Daniel
As far as I know there's no such thing as an alternating permanent magnet, and I'm a physics undergrad who's just gone through a whole term of electromagnetism so I should know.
The only way you can get an alternating magnet is by using an inductor with a soft iron core (ie a wire wound around a soft iron core). It's called an electromagnet.
The problem with this arrangement is, of course, that it costs energy to keep on alternating the magnet from one direction to another, etc. Especially if you need to do it fast.
By the way, when they talk about "using conventional motors to spin these things" they don't mean that you tie a string to the flywheel and to the motor and start the motor and keep it running until the flywheel is spinning fast enough *grin*. I'd be very surprised if you could get 60'000 rpm out of that!!!
Daniel
I disagree. I don't hate microsoft, I just despise them and disagree with their business practices. Microsoft are not a good representant of what capitalism is meant to be. They represent what capitalism can degenerate into if unchecked. Daniel
The same arguments hold true for software (or did, at one point), yet people create software freely and distribute it freely now.
Well... whilst I believe that artistic creation would continue regardless of what happens to the MPAA (unless they win - then it might be strangled and stopped), I think the reasons for open-source software and open-source art are vastly different. Software can be used. Many times the reason why someone has created a piece of open source software is because they needed the software, and once they programmed it they thought "why not let others benefit from it too!"
As for art, it might be debatable whether a musician would create music so that he can listen to it, but I think it is quite clear that a writer does not write his books to read them. He writes them for altogether different reasons which I believe are much stronger than the need to use them himself. As someone else put it, he writes them because he HAS to... It's just stuck inside your mind and you have to get it out and one way to get it out is to write it out.
So I don't think you can compare the open-source software movement with art like this. They're very different things. Hopefully both open-art and open-source will win, but if so it will be for different reasons and different objectives.
Daniel
Without the moderation system it wouldn't be free speech. It would be free noise.
It's not even "more free" without the moderation system. A good moderation system enhances the freedom of speech. If we didn't have the moderation system, these threads would be drowned in trolls, so that no one would be able to make themselves heard, so that no one would come here and the whole site would go down. How can the speech be more free if there's no speech left?
Also, as whoever pointed out, you can set your level as low as you want, and view all the posts. As I said moderation enhances the experience so that you can view the posts you want. But you can still view them all...
Daniel
They're leaving in a warm and sunny paradise... now what's the opposite of that on earth? Cold and bleak Antarctic!!!
:-P
And who lives in the Antarctic?...
You got it. Penguins.
Hence, Linux, hence slashdot material
Daniel
Don't worry, we've got even worse stuff coming to us here in the UK, what with all that encryption "presumed-guilty" stuff...
Daniel
rofl :-P Daniel
Just hardcode a protection preventing ppl from creating users such as hemos. or whatever...?
Daniel
You probably don't care about my views on this, but here's my answers anyway :-P
:-P "we'll see" (or probably won't) is probably the best answer to this :-P
1: Of course. This is equivalent to the "brain in a vat" problem. Could you just be a brain in a vat, tended by very careful aliens who make up a whole illusion of a world to your brain so that you think you're a human. If you allow for the aliens to be able to maintain such an illusion perfectly, then sure, you could be... Same for god. If you allow an entity to be able to do *everything*, to have infinite power, then it can do everything, including not be detected.
2: That's where religious people have a big nail planted in everyone's behinds... It's almost as hard to prove god exists as to prove god does not exist. If you went the Carl Sagan way (in his book Cosmos) and encoded something in the nth to n+1000th decimals of pi - or any other number which is intrinsically part of our universe, you would have proof that god exists. However you might argue that since pi is infinite, every possible combination of symbols will occur there so it's not really a proof... let's say god sprayed a message on the moon and appeared like a big fly flying around the moon, shouting "I'm god, god exists!", and then came down to everyone and shook their hands and answered everyone of their questions and showed them various miracles, some people would still think it's a plot from aliens who want to take over our planet.
Similarly, it's impossible to disprove the existence of god - see answer 1 above...
3: Quite a while... who can possibly give any useful answer to this?
Daniel
Sure, a line needs to be drawn - but the line should be whether or not the info. can be traced to you, or can harm you in any way.
That's probably the way it should be in a perfect world with nice helpful people all around and everyone holding hands and sitting on the lawn, but in this world, the line has to be drawn where it can be drawn, not where it should be drawn.
It is much, much harder (probably nearly impossible with the current legal system) to make a law about what is too much and what is not that would be clear and failsafe. It is much easier to say that no information outside of the game should be transferred on the internet without the user's express consent.
Daniel
Windows NT Server?
Would you recommend windows NT Server to anyone for any reason? Would you use windows NT yourself as a server?
Daniel
I was just stating my opinion. You don't have to, and obviously won't, follow my word on it...
If people can't even say what they think for fear of disagreeing with each other then where is this world going to?
Daniel
to get rid of one of the worst sci-fi series of all times. Ok, this is just a personal opinion, but anyone who likes science fiction (as opposed to sci-fi like star trek which has nothing to do with science) should automatically despise Star Trek...
Yes, I know, it's generated a lot of fans out there... but so has Barbie Doll, and other stupidities... Star Trek is just one of them... I mean how anthropocentric can you get? All aliens are just humans with little bits of make-up added? So what do they want to say? The human race is perfect? Or the fact that a guy who's supposedly Captain of a spaceship goes and leaves his duty to explore planets and put himself in danger... what's up with that? What do they want to say?
And then you suddenly realise the truth: They don't want to say anything. It's just a cheap popular sci-fi series...
Daniel
Send that one to Bill Gates!
Daniel
Well, if any of you remember cooltype.com from the days before it merged with "WebPedia", it was a great, GREAT Photoshop tips site... When it merged it was less good, but still usable (it had the content but didn't have the looks anymore), and then when internet.com bought webpedia... well, just go to cooltype.com now and see if you can find more than a handful of photoshop tutorials! And they used to have DOZENS...
I hope this doesn't happen to LinuxToday as well...
Daniel
Aha... but where do the children get their money? If they're smart enough to make thousands of dollars, they're smart enough to be responsible for their acts. If they're not, and their parents gave them the money, then the parents are actually buying the cards. And the parents are totally responsible for their acts, aren't they?
Daniel