*
In a perfect world spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many Ningerian men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship.
Fixed =)
It's because we don't have breakthroughs anymore, just slow, normal , progress. We are in the modern dark ages. We are using the same engine, same types of energy, same methods of flight and construction, same communication methods and machines. We are just contstantly improving them, nothing more.
We don't have flight, radio, nuclear power, combustion kind of progress... we have flat screens instead of normal screens, a smaller mobile phones, we are going from analog to digital, etc... People don't do breakthroughs any more.
Job's did not invent anything of significant or of scientific value, he is the CEO(?) of a tech-toy company for rich people. Trovals didn't either, he is a gifted programmer that coordinates the effor of building a nice *nix OS, which is no way is revolutionary (And Trovalds is a relatively anonymous person). And while Rutan is a very gifted engineer, he is also far from being a household name. Hawking is a stunning man, but the fact that he is famous is attributed to his best-selling books and physical condition, and not his contribution to Theoretical physics.
Cell phones ? Cell phones were invented in 1945. And we don't have commercial rocket flights yet, and myspace is just a young niche website I don't even see how that fits into "technology" in any way. Angelfire, Lycos, Geocities and others sold for billions also, and nobody cares what they are for nowadays . And what the hell does plastic surgery has to do with anything?
Dotcom boom "technology" ?!?!!? Dotcom boom was not about technology, it was about doing the same business, but online. The biggest "bombs" were e-tailers like Pets, Boo, online markets, etc... When I am talking technology, I mean real things. Like the fact that we still use the combustion engine, like the fact that we still have power lines, the fact that space exploration has gone nowhere, we don't have cloning, immortality, cure for cancer, real alternative power sources, etc... "American" technologies like Plastic surgeries and myspace and the dotcoms have nothing to do with what I am talking about.
Thing is, we are living in the most peaceful era in human history.
We are living in unexciting times, science and technology are developing slowly and in a linear manner, normal progress instead of breakthroughs. It has been so for the last 50 years. I envy the people that got to see 1880-1960 - they could wake up and see their world upside-down due to a breakthrough(or a war...). Flight, television, nuclear power, space travel, transistors, jets, relativity... They actually had hero-scientists/engineers back then. We don't have a single mainstream-known scientist or engineer nowadays. There is no Bell, Wright, Einstein, Tesla...
Just think about how long it would take to get the atom bomb (or nuclear power station) without WW2, how long it would take to get to space without the cold-war race, how long would it take before we'd have Jet engines without the need for better warplanes. What is more annoying , is that real space exploration and colonization can only be done in a society that doesn't see money as top priority, and it is sad to see China breaking under pressure and becoming more capitalistic/democratic instead of the the world moving away from that model.
Anyway, the next 40 years will be a total waste. Corporations and not governments direct research nowadays, so don't expect significant space exploration/travel in the near future. Bleh
DARPA issues a 2 million $ challenge to build a driverless car. A brilliant engineer built such a car, that was able to navigate in complex environments at high speeds by predicting the size, shape and behavior of surroundings on its path through simulation, according to the behavior of similar environment and path structures it has already passed. This causes the car to actually gain speed and statistical confidence in its own upcoming actions simply by acquiring enough experience of driving in similar environment. Same kind of algorithm can of course be applied to any machine that is expected to operate for a long time in a complex semi-predictable environment - such as forex trading, poker, or a battlefield This is the story on Wired
I haven't dealt with processors, but I used to own an office supplies/electronics business, and ANYTHING I didn't sell, I simply notified the supplier, and got a full refund, either in merchandise or money (wire/cheque). Same goes for most products for a restaurant I used to run. We would buy a lot of milk, and if we had any milk go bad due to low latte sales, we would get a full refund for any milk we didn't use, they would just take the bad milk back. I know this is not the case when dealing imported goods, but not all chips are imported, so maybe some merchants do get compensated for overstocking.
Do not refer to such microscopic and non-influential issues such as Sony rootkit or some radio host's comments as important things. That's another illusion created by the blogosphere - since most bloggers are often media or tech guys, certain issues get massive coverage credit and exposure without having any influence on the real world.
He has something right about blogging - the current state of affairs was made possible by the Internet. People think that they protest by expressing thoughts online, commenting and writing. Newsflash - you don't protest by blogging, or commenting, or making videos. You protest in the streets.
The reason why you have less angry people on the streets, protesting and marching against RIAA, against the Wars, against bad leaders, is because the Internet creates an illusion of "we are doing something by getting together and expressing it everywhere". It's just an illusion. People that would otherwise make a huge difference by marching, protesting, suing, find it much more comfortable to Blog, which is just meaningless masturbation.
There is no need to learn about computers to be a good manager. I personally develop Thermochemical real-time control devices; the owner of the company I work for doesn't own a computer, and all his email is managed by his secretary. He is a brilliant mechanical engineer and a good businessman, much more competent than the email/berry/collaboration obsessed middle-managers that you probably consider the tech-savvy personnel that should lead companies.
YouTube (and Digg actually) proved once and for all, that "Web 2.0" is NOT about user generated content, but commercial-grade content being selected by users.
As a blogger, it's hard for me to say this, but honestly almost nobody reads (or shoud read) blogs but bloggers (and journalists, etc...), almost nobody watches vlogs but other vloggers, and in the end of the day, these are probably barely 5% of the Internet users. Regretfully, Google with it's idiotic blog fetish constantly sticks blog links into the result page, and I, like many others have already learned how to avoid blog-looking URLs. The ridiculous thing, is that too often the results are actually short stories that just link to the content users are looking for.
YouTube's "most watched" top 100 are a clear indication to that - the top videos are generally news, Sport clips, music videos, show episodes. Out of top 100, there might be 4-5 original user-made videos, everything else is pretty much "The best things that were on TV today". And if you aggregate total Blogosphere's/Video sharing/Bookmarking sites/ output into some top-topic list, you will see that the content is dictated daily by CNN, NYT, BBC, Wired, Cnet, etc... The user generated "content" is just the middleman in 95% percent of the cases.
I know for a fact that the Owner/President(not the CEO) of the company I work for, doesn't use email. The man is smart, rich, and an accomplished Mechanical Engineer, simply doesn't have a computer at any of his person offices (in the multipe factories that belong to him)
Now, every other person online will mock him for not knowing how to use email, and being "low tech". There is no reason why a person should use such new technology, when most of you probably spend all your time sitting of furniture you have no idea how to build (most have no idea how to build a chair that lasts a week), spend a life inside a home with no understanding of architecture or even the most basic ability to alter your surroundings, no ability to fix a broken toilet, repair a frozen refrigerator, fix a broken washing machine, or just replace a window in your house with a new one. And these are things that people live with from their early childhood, unavoidable parts of everyone's lives."Low tech" so to speak.
But when a person doesn't use email? OMG ROFL ROFL ROFL WHAT A DUMBASS NEWB.
I have to agree here.
I run several sites, blog, have a youtube channel and am a an active Wikipedian(now that's an annoying word) and generally am an annoying Web2.0 whore to most people. I also buy books online, read reviews, etc... Never if my fucking life have I heard of a blook. This is clearly a very well executed marketing stunt to promote the usage of the term blook, and the phenomena itself. Remember, that even silly ideas with microscopic demand (such as podcasts), once fueled with enough hype and publicity, and 3-5 analyst reviews claiming some start-up in that field is worth 100 million, can generate enough buzz for Google/Yahoo/MS to buy some of the Blook-platform-providing companies, just in case.
As someone already pointed out, there is a per-machine fee charged by Microsoft, mainly due to the way licences are sold in volumes to OEMs (per machine, not per copy). It would be very interesting to see the implications of forcing Microsoft to move away from this kind of licensing, and present numbers based on the actual Windows copy installations instead of OEM per-machine licensing numbers. While it won't change the market much and the actual number of copies installed, the updated numbers could very well indicate a market share lower than 85% for Windows.
Just my 2c. I might be horribly wrong:)
Slashdot is as much of a blog as I am a Egyptian gerbil. Slashdot links to stories that generate discussions. Slashdot is NOT about the people that create the posts, but about the people that comment here.
I find it extremely annoying the google indexes blogs. Blogs are read only by bloggers and the press, and present absolutely no interest to normal people (including me). Currently, because of google's idiotic blog fetish, I have to eliminate 50% of the results just based on URLs, hoping that I won't stumble upon someone's personal ramblings. Blogs became popular only due to google's absolutely unexplainable love to blog content, and sticking it into perfectly normal search results, it's like searching in a world-wide-Myspace now.
The most amazing thing is when Google puts blog search results above the source of the story, to which the blogs are linking in the first place. I'm just waiting for this fad to die out like podcasting did. Unfortunatly, google controls the popularity blogging so it won't die out naturally, google at least has to stop indexing them... or put a "show/hide blog results" checkbox...
You never shop online ? Because if you don't, people that do shop online probably look as strange to you as you to them. All big retailers advertise via Google's platform...
It doesn't take money from hands of idiots - the users reach sites that advertise via google, not spam. The only side that pays in this trasaction are the advertising businesses.
Slashdot Mirror
* In a perfect world spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many Ningerian men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship. Fixed =)
It's because we don't have breakthroughs anymore, just slow, normal , progress. We are in the modern dark ages. We are using the same engine, same types of energy, same methods of flight and construction, same communication methods and machines. We are just contstantly improving them, nothing more.
We don't have flight, radio, nuclear power, combustion kind of progress... we have flat screens instead of normal screens, a smaller mobile phones, we are going from analog to digital, etc... People don't do breakthroughs any more.
Because saving money = hurting economy. Technically, saving money is a very bad thing.
Job's did not invent anything of significant or of scientific value, he is the CEO(?) of a tech-toy company for rich people. Trovals didn't either, he is a gifted programmer that coordinates the effor of building a nice *nix OS, which is no way is revolutionary (And Trovalds is a relatively anonymous person). And while Rutan is a very gifted engineer, he is also far from being a household name. Hawking is a stunning man, but the fact that he is famous is attributed to his best-selling books and physical condition, and not his contribution to Theoretical physics.
Cell phones ? Cell phones were invented in 1945. And we don't have commercial rocket flights yet, and myspace is just a young niche website I don't even see how that fits into "technology" in any way. Angelfire, Lycos, Geocities and others sold for billions also, and nobody cares what they are for nowadays . And what the hell does plastic surgery has to do with anything?
Dotcom boom "technology" ?!?!!? Dotcom boom was not about technology, it was about doing the same business, but online. The biggest "bombs" were e-tailers like Pets, Boo, online markets, etc... When I am talking technology, I mean real things. Like the fact that we still use the combustion engine, like the fact that we still have power lines, the fact that space exploration has gone nowhere, we don't have cloning, immortality, cure for cancer, real alternative power sources, etc... "American" technologies like Plastic surgeries and myspace and the dotcoms have nothing to do with what I am talking about.
Thing is, we are living in the most peaceful era in human history.
We are living in unexciting times, science and technology are developing slowly and in a linear manner, normal progress instead of breakthroughs. It has been so for the last 50 years. I envy the people that got to see 1880-1960 - they could wake up and see their world upside-down due to a breakthrough(or a war...). Flight, television, nuclear power, space travel, transistors, jets, relativity... They actually had hero-scientists/engineers back then. We don't have a single mainstream-known scientist or engineer nowadays. There is no Bell, Wright, Einstein, Tesla...
Just think about how long it would take to get the atom bomb (or nuclear power station) without WW2, how long it would take to get to space without the cold-war race, how long would it take before we'd have Jet engines without the need for better warplanes.
What is more annoying , is that real space exploration and colonization can only be done in a society that doesn't see money as top priority, and it is sad to see China breaking under pressure and becoming more capitalistic/democratic instead of the the world moving away from that model.
Anyway, the next 40 years will be a total waste. Corporations and not governments direct research nowadays, so don't expect significant space exploration/travel in the near future. Bleh
I am not an astronomer/astrophysicis, but this is a really interesting story, it's a real shame that 80% of the >filter comments are "Funny".
DARPA issues a 2 million $ challenge to build a driverless car.
A brilliant engineer built such a car, that was able to navigate in complex environments at high speeds by predicting the size, shape and behavior of surroundings on its path through simulation, according to the behavior of similar environment and path structures it has already passed. This causes the car to actually gain speed and statistical confidence in its own upcoming actions simply by acquiring enough experience of driving in similar environment.
Same kind of algorithm can of course be applied to any machine that is expected to operate for a long time in a complex semi-predictable environment - such as forex trading, poker, or a battlefield
This is the story on Wired
I haven't dealt with processors, but I used to own an office supplies/electronics business, and ANYTHING I didn't sell, I simply notified the supplier, and got a full refund, either in merchandise or money (wire/cheque).
Same goes for most products for a restaurant I used to run. We would buy a lot of milk, and if we had any milk go bad due to low latte sales, we would get a full refund for any milk we didn't use, they would just take the bad milk back. I know this is not the case when dealing imported goods, but not all chips are imported, so maybe some merchants do get compensated for overstocking.
Do not refer to such microscopic and non-influential issues such as Sony rootkit or some radio host's comments as important things. That's another illusion created by the blogosphere - since most bloggers are often media or tech guys, certain issues get massive coverage credit and exposure without having any influence on the real world.
He has something right about blogging - the current state of affairs was made possible by the Internet. People think that they protest by expressing thoughts online, commenting and writing. Newsflash - you don't protest by blogging, or commenting, or making videos. You protest in the streets.
The reason why you have less angry people on the streets, protesting and marching against RIAA, against the Wars, against bad leaders, is because the Internet creates an illusion of "we are doing something by getting together and expressing it everywhere". It's just an illusion. People that would otherwise make a huge difference by marching, protesting, suing, find it much more comfortable to Blog, which is just meaningless masturbation.
There is no need to learn about computers to be a good manager.
I personally develop Thermochemical real-time control devices; the owner of the company I work for doesn't own a computer, and all his email is managed by his secretary. He is a brilliant mechanical engineer and a good businessman, much more competent than the email/berry/collaboration obsessed middle-managers that you probably consider the tech-savvy personnel that should lead companies.
+1 WeAgreeWithYou to you, sir.
YouTube (and Digg actually) proved once and for all, that "Web 2.0" is NOT about user generated content, but commercial-grade content being selected by users. /Bookmarking sites/ output into some top-topic list, you will see that the content is dictated daily by CNN, NYT, BBC, Wired, Cnet, etc... The user generated "content" is just the middleman in 95% percent of the cases.
As a blogger, it's hard for me to say this, but honestly almost nobody reads (or shoud read) blogs but bloggers (and journalists, etc...), almost nobody watches vlogs but other vloggers, and in the end of the day, these are probably barely 5% of the Internet users. Regretfully, Google with it's idiotic blog fetish constantly sticks blog links into the result page, and I, like many others have already learned how to avoid blog-looking URLs. The ridiculous thing, is that too often the results are actually short stories that just link to the content users are looking for.
YouTube's "most watched" top 100 are a clear indication to that - the top videos are generally news, Sport clips, music videos, show episodes. Out of top 100, there might be 4-5 original user-made videos, everything else is pretty much "The best things that were on TV today". And if you aggregate total Blogosphere's/Video sharing
I know for a fact that the Owner/President(not the CEO) of the company I work for, doesn't use email. The man is smart, rich, and an accomplished Mechanical Engineer, simply doesn't have a computer at any of his person offices (in the multipe factories that belong to him)
Now, every other person online will mock him for not knowing how to use email, and being "low tech".
There is no reason why a person should use such new technology, when most of you probably spend all your time sitting of furniture you have no idea how to build (most have no idea how to build a chair that lasts a week), spend a life inside a home with no understanding of architecture or even the most basic ability to alter your surroundings, no ability to fix a broken toilet, repair a frozen refrigerator, fix a broken washing machine, or just replace a window in your house with a new one. And these are things that people live with from their early childhood, unavoidable parts of everyone's lives."Low tech" so to speak.
But when a person doesn't use email? OMG ROFL ROFL ROFL WHAT A DUMBASS NEWB.
I have to agree here.
I run several sites, blog, have a youtube channel and am a an active Wikipedian(now that's an annoying word) and generally am an annoying Web2.0 whore to most people. I also buy books online, read reviews, etc...
Never if my fucking life have I heard of a blook. This is clearly a very well executed marketing stunt to promote the usage of the term blook, and the phenomena itself. Remember, that even silly ideas with microscopic demand (such as podcasts), once fueled with enough hype and publicity, and 3-5 analyst reviews claiming some start-up in that field is worth 100 million, can generate enough buzz for Google/Yahoo/MS to buy some of the Blook-platform-providing companies, just in case.
As someone already pointed out, there is a per-machine fee charged by Microsoft, mainly due to the way licences are sold in volumes to OEMs (per machine, not per copy). :)
It would be very interesting to see the implications of forcing Microsoft to move away from this kind of licensing, and present numbers based on the actual Windows copy installations instead of OEM per-machine licensing numbers. While it won't change the market much and the actual number of copies installed, the updated numbers could very well indicate a market share lower than 85% for Windows.
Just my 2c. I might be horribly wrong
Where do I donwload Internet 2 ?
80% of all statistics are made up.
Slashdot is as much of a blog as I am a Egyptian gerbil. Slashdot links to stories that generate discussions. Slashdot is NOT about the people that create the posts, but about the people that comment here.
I find it extremely annoying the google indexes blogs.
Blogs are read only by bloggers and the press, and present absolutely no interest to normal people (including me). Currently, because of google's idiotic blog fetish, I have to eliminate 50% of the results just based on URLs, hoping that I won't stumble upon someone's personal ramblings. Blogs became popular only due to google's absolutely unexplainable love to blog content, and sticking it into perfectly normal search results, it's like searching in a world-wide-Myspace now.
The most amazing thing is when Google puts blog search results above the source of the story, to which the blogs are linking in the first place. I'm just waiting for this fad to die out like podcasting did. Unfortunatly, google controls the popularity blogging so it won't die out naturally, google at least has to stop indexing them... or put a "show/hide blog results" checkbox...
You never shop online ? Because if you don't, people that do shop online probably look as strange to you as you to them. All big retailers advertise via Google's platform...
It doesn't take money from hands of idiots - the users reach sites that advertise via google, not spam. The only side that pays in this trasaction are the advertising businesses.