Such things could possibly also stimulate more interest in engineering and science, and work as great comunity-competence building worldwide. If enough components are available at low price, it may be very usefull things for developing nations as well.
It may be that this particular case will not work, but the idea is great. Roll it yourself systems developed, improved, forked and tested online through an open source ideology... great stuff (: One has to admire the potential social consequences of the open source ideas, both in technology, law and governance.
(this blog speaks of, amongst other things, how "open source warfare" (OSW) is the key behind the insurgency success in Iraq. The methods applied by what is essentially guerilla groups testing wildly different approaches across the nation, then learning from their success, contrary to a carefully planned and centralized military system)
If I told about this to my mom, she would say "great, the web is all porn!". To the casual observer, it may seem a good move. But in the end it is an attack on the very fabric of the revolutioneary aspect of the web: full user contribution and sharing.
There are more than enough people with power out there that will exploit it if it becomes commonplace to shut down wensites due to whaterver upsets someone. The real battle of this generation may be between the people that benefit from a lack of transparency, and those who don't (us!).
Moral, children and secrets... my precious. Transparency, freedom... bah.
This was a worrying, but good, article. I'm sure MS is a bit in a thight spot as well, if they really desire backwards compatibility (which is what they survive on in a way). But it would make more sence to make supporting legacy documents more optional.
When I save a Word 2007 document to the old.doc format, it warns me that "minor loss of fidelty" may happen. Similarly, when opening a document, supporting waybackthen formats could be optional/plug-based, and the app rather warning that "minor loss of fidelity" may happen since the document was converted from an old source.
Forcing every new app ever written to this standard to support diffuse behaviours from the good ol'days is just ridiculus. Besides, most of it appears to apply just to apperance.
I've been using it for a while now, and while the new features are cute, the new interface is what is truly excellent. It is much more adapted to larger screens with higher resolution and color than when the product-line set out back in the days.
Upgrades bringing big changes usually just introduce more bloat or simply unnessesary trouble for inexperienced users, but M$ should be give credit for actually making this powerful product's features more available with this release. The dialogs are mostly the same, its just how you get to them.
A change of our GUIs are a nessesary evil; they need to evolve as well! I guess progress comes with a price sometimes.../:
Heh, I can imagine (: We don't know Walmart over here tho', but I'd guess they have the money to hire someone with experience to do their design. Information is cheap. Like websites, the design would be a priority since it will have a huge impact on the experience.
Great site by the way, looks just like my first website back in 1998;D
This may be a tad off topic, but I still think it's interesting to imagine the effect on style and design ultra-cheap electronic paper could have. Remember the breakfast Tom Cruise had in Minority Report, where a cartoon played on his box of cereals?
If price drops enough, this may lead to inventions such as memory-cards with previews of the content showing right on the card, elecronic labels right in store shelves, changing walls in buildings, floors with directional arrows flying around, guiding you in unfamiliar places, electronic wallpaper for your appartment... add a few giftet artists to all this potential, and I'm sure the world would never look the same again (:
It may be more a question of anonymous identities than throw-away ones. The difference in behaviour in a forum where people know who you are, and those where your are essentially represented by an "avatar" is remarkable. I grew up in the Norwegian woods, where IRC became a good tool for socialicing with people from nearby, including the non-geeks. Change channel to a bigger one, with people from far away, and the world ended; the "game" begun.
People just don't loose their core personality like that tho'. The reason you get "throw-away personalities" is simply because so much of the online world essentially feels like a game. Thought we bring elements of ourselves into these games, I've yet to see someone bring elements back out. When you go to work, you're still you. When you go on a date, you are still you. When you go back to your parents, you are still you (if somewhat filtered). Any social network that reaches into our world will force you to be more like yourself online.
The problem however is when there is something weird about you in the first place... Networks may enhance sides of your personality that should probably not be strengthened. It's difficult living out your fantasies about eating people online, and not have that strengthen your desire in real life. If you get into a group with canibals talking allot about this, your mind will assume it more normal.
The latter also holds true for fundamentalism, political dogma and all those other nasty tasty spices that keeps CNN broadcasting.
I found this piece of news very interesting. Is it known how the parasite affects our behavior? If it secretes a chemical that has the effect, I'd say this could be used for treatment in a variety of medical conditions. If it "attacks" specific areas of the brain, it may reveal interesting things about it.
Things such as this hints to how our minds work, which is possibly one of the most fascinating things in the universe (:
I wonder how much the Hubble pictures cost on a per picture basis. Infinitely less than it would cost us not to build outselves a world-view based on the real universe rather than our ancient comsologies and illusions.
In a recent press release, a major fast-food chain announced to have successfully created Long-lived Super Heavy Elements by changing the oil in their deep fryers to a healthier variety.
My workplace has also noticed an increase in spam, and also spam that gets through. The once that do share the feature of being an attached picture with a message, then a text message that does not appear to be spam. I think the IT manager managed to get it under control now.
However, I must add that for private mail I use Gmail, and it is amazingly good at catching spam. I keep thinking Google should extend the service into the business market.
Who said hydrogen must be as efficient as oil and gas? We often abandon checmical for lesser effective alternatives sinec they are also less harmfull. Same should go for energy.
We need to take a wholesome look at the future, and think that it will be a combination of nuclear, fusion, wind, wave, solar power, with delivery systems such as bio-ethanol, hydrogen and batteries depending om what best suits the need. There isn't a single magic formula that will replace oil, but a bunch of good answers to individual questions that will be able to cover our needs if used together. It's like "Web 2.0", or "Oil 2.0". There really isn't such a thing. It's a collection of things that sums up as "progress".
It would be interesting if someone could point to some research invesstigating wether an integrated approach with multi-functional software is better than seperate specialised applications.
In Apple's case, I'd bet it would be nice to have iTunes for music and "iCinema"/"iSilverscreen" for movies. Then Frontrow for using the Mac as a media centre.
To me, it appear one-does-all appliactions just get complex, bloated and horrid to use, even for super-users.... but then again, I'm no usability expert.
Maybe the problem is that over time, people start seeing the trouble with the ITMS and iTunes:
1. New releases not being available. This may not be true in the US, but in Norway we fail to see many great artists. 2. Trouble with plaing music on other players. 3. Legal concerns over point two, which has had much media attention in Europe. 4. More bloat in iTunes, application gets more complex.
For each of these points, many people will distance themselves from the ITMS.
I was seriously considering buying my mom a iPod Shuffle for Xmas, but the compatibility and legal issues makes me unceritan. I'm undecided yet tho'.
It's a sweet too tempting not to touch, isn't it... integrate all state records such as police, medicare and school record to allow automatic detection of social care bodies' "insertion points" to better spend resources, and reach out to those who truly need it.
Somehow I fail to see this _not_ happening, quite simply because the smell of efficiency in resource-strained social security systems all around will feel very tempting. As a regular guy, I honestly have no clue if I'm for or againgst this. Help me, Slashdot;)
...in Visat/office 2007 that will give companies a great benefit from upgrading, why bother? I mean, it's all new, shiney and has allot of neat features, but it won't make a massive difference for most companies.
My workplace will get Office 2007 for our new SharePoint portal however, but Vista does not appear to make sense to us as far as I hear. I'm really scared we'll have problems with the new.docx files tho'.
They are going to market this thing with tons of weight, so the actual quality is irrelevant. Here i Norway, Apple prodcts is also difficult for shops to receive, handle and get support for, while M$ products comes through their normal channels. This means they will avoid the hassle, and sell Zune rather than the iPod.
It will be a success simply because M$ says so, and because they are, as allways, hungry for the market they don't have.
And I thought those huge floppy disks we used back at school were large....
Sound interesting tho', but those 256GBs seem a bit too much, unless the computer has a massive translation table for those shapes and colors that account for a staggering amount of possible meanings. This is like the mother of all barcodes;)
Fear of "new" things such as this is always a problem. If we look at the way technology is going more and more wireless, any group choosing to live by the fear will be technically backwards, and loose in the long run. Since the only thing that stops fear us understanding and knowledge (just look at medical doctors) I hope someone will educate Sebastian's mother a tad on this, or at least that the state we rely on to approve technology such as this is educated enough to make rational choices about it!
...or for that matter, get all Sebastian's food checked. Any sign of pestesides in the fruits, additives such as food colorings, or for that matter how hard it's ben fried by Sebastian's mother, could cause cancer.
Slashdot Mirror
Such things could possibly also stimulate more interest in engineering and science, and work as great comunity-competence building worldwide. If enough components are available at low price, it may be very usefull things for developing nations as well.
Actually, check the post from Friday, December 08, 2006 for a general introduction to the concepts.
It may be that this particular case will not work, but the idea is great. Roll it yourself systems developed, improved, forked and tested online through an open source ideology... great stuff (: One has to admire the potential social consequences of the open source ideas, both in technology, law and governance.
Sadly for some, this also applies to warfare.
(this blog speaks of, amongst other things, how "open source warfare" (OSW) is the key behind the insurgency success in Iraq. The methods applied by what is essentially guerilla groups testing wildly different approaches across the nation, then learning from their success, contrary to a carefully planned and centralized military system)If I told about this to my mom, she would say "great, the web is all porn!". To the casual observer, it may seem a good move. But in the end it is an attack on the very fabric of the revolutioneary aspect of the web: full user contribution and sharing.
There are more than enough people with power out there that will exploit it if it becomes commonplace to shut down wensites due to whaterver upsets someone. The real battle of this generation may be between the people that benefit from a lack of transparency, and those who don't (us!).
Moral, children and secrets... my precious. Transparency, freedom... bah.
This was a worrying, but good, article. I'm sure MS is a bit in a thight spot as well, if they really desire backwards compatibility (which is what they survive on in a way). But it would make more sence to make supporting legacy documents more optional.
.doc format, it warns me that "minor loss of fidelty" may happen. Similarly, when opening a document, supporting waybackthen formats could be optional/plug-based, and the app rather warning that "minor loss of fidelity" may happen since the document was converted from an old source.
When I save a Word 2007 document to the old
Forcing every new app ever written to this standard to support diffuse behaviours from the good ol'days is just ridiculus. Besides, most of it appears to apply just to apperance.
I've been using it for a while now, and while the new features are cute, the new interface is what is truly excellent. It is much more adapted to larger screens with higher resolution and color than when the product-line set out back in the days.
/:
Upgrades bringing big changes usually just introduce more bloat or simply unnessesary trouble for inexperienced users, but M$ should be give credit for actually making this powerful product's features more available with this release. The dialogs are mostly the same, its just how you get to them.
A change of our GUIs are a nessesary evil; they need to evolve as well! I guess progress comes with a price sometimes...
Heh, I can imagine (: We don't know Walmart over here tho', but I'd guess they have the money to hire someone with experience to do their design. Information is cheap. Like websites, the design would be a priority since it will have a huge impact on the experience.
;D
Great site by the way, looks just like my first website back in 1998
This may be a tad off topic, but I still think it's interesting to imagine the effect on style and design ultra-cheap electronic paper could have. Remember the breakfast Tom Cruise had in Minority Report, where a cartoon played on his box of cereals?
If price drops enough, this may lead to inventions such as memory-cards with previews of the content showing right on the card, elecronic labels right in store shelves, changing walls in buildings, floors with directional arrows flying around, guiding you in unfamiliar places, electronic wallpaper for your appartment... add a few giftet artists to all this potential, and I'm sure the world would never look the same again (:
More and more, I think Clarke's third law holds true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
It may be more a question of anonymous identities than throw-away ones. The difference in behaviour in a forum where people know who you are, and those where your are essentially represented by an "avatar" is remarkable. I grew up in the Norwegian woods, where IRC became a good tool for socialicing with people from nearby, including the non-geeks. Change channel to a bigger one, with people from far away, and the world ended; the "game" begun.
l as/ It's got some thought provoking ideas...
People just don't loose their core personality like that tho'. The reason you get "throw-away personalities" is simply because so much of the online world essentially feels like a game. Thought we bring elements of ourselves into these games, I've yet to see someone bring elements back out. When you go to work, you're still you. When you go on a date, you are still you. When you go back to your parents, you are still you (if somewhat filtered). Any social network that reaches into our world will force you to be more like yourself online.
The problem however is when there is something weird about you in the first place... Networks may enhance sides of your personality that should probably not be strengthened. It's difficult living out your fantasies about eating people online, and not have that strengthen your desire in real life. If you get into a group with canibals talking allot about this, your mind will assume it more normal.
The latter also holds true for fundamentalism, political dogma and all those other nasty tasty spices that keeps CNN broadcasting.
Lastly, let me reccomend the blog Global Guerrillas: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerril
*Click*
I found this piece of news very interesting. Is it known how the parasite affects our behavior? If it secretes a chemical that has the effect, I'd say this could be used for treatment in a variety of medical conditions. If it "attacks" specific areas of the brain, it may reveal interesting things about it.
Things such as this hints to how our minds work, which is possibly one of the most fascinating things in the universe (:
I'm praying for it every night! ;D
In a recent press release, a major fast-food chain announced to have successfully created Long-lived Super Heavy Elements by changing the oil in their deep fryers to a healthier variety.
My workplace has also noticed an increase in spam, and also spam that gets through. The once that do share the feature of being an attached picture with a message, then a text message that does not appear to be spam. I think the IT manager managed to get it under control now. However, I must add that for private mail I use Gmail, and it is amazingly good at catching spam. I keep thinking Google should extend the service into the business market.
Who said hydrogen must be as efficient as oil and gas? We often abandon checmical for lesser effective alternatives sinec they are also less harmfull. Same should go for energy. We need to take a wholesome look at the future, and think that it will be a combination of nuclear, fusion, wind, wave, solar power, with delivery systems such as bio-ethanol, hydrogen and batteries depending om what best suits the need. There isn't a single magic formula that will replace oil, but a bunch of good answers to individual questions that will be able to cover our needs if used together. It's like "Web 2.0", or "Oil 2.0". There really isn't such a thing. It's a collection of things that sums up as "progress".
It would be interesting if someone could point to some research invesstigating wether an integrated approach with multi-functional software is better than seperate specialised applications.
In Apple's case, I'd bet it would be nice to have iTunes for music and "iCinema"/"iSilverscreen" for movies. Then Frontrow for using the Mac as a media centre.
To me, it appear one-does-all appliactions just get complex, bloated and horrid to use, even for super-users.... but then again, I'm no usability expert.
Maybe the problem is that over time, people start seeing the trouble with the ITMS and iTunes:
1. New releases not being available. This may not be true in the US, but in Norway we fail to see many great artists.
2. Trouble with plaing music on other players.
3. Legal concerns over point two, which has had much media attention in Europe.
4. More bloat in iTunes, application gets more complex.
For each of these points, many people will distance themselves from the ITMS.
I was seriously considering buying my mom a iPod Shuffle for Xmas, but the compatibility and legal issues makes me unceritan. I'm undecided yet tho'.
It's a sweet too tempting not to touch, isn't it... integrate all state records such as police, medicare and school record to allow automatic detection of social care bodies' "insertion points" to better spend resources, and reach out to those who truly need it.
;)
Somehow I fail to see this _not_ happening, quite simply because the smell of efficiency in resource-strained social security systems all around will feel very tempting. As a regular guy, I honestly have no clue if I'm for or againgst this. Help me, Slashdot
...in Visat/office 2007 that will give companies a great benefit from upgrading, why bother? I mean, it's all new, shiney and has allot of neat features, but it won't make a massive difference for most companies.
.docx files tho'.
My workplace will get Office 2007 for our new SharePoint portal however, but Vista does not appear to make sense to us as far as I hear. I'm really scared we'll have problems with the new
They are going to market this thing with tons of weight, so the actual quality is irrelevant. Here i Norway, Apple prodcts is also difficult for shops to receive, handle and get support for, while M$ products comes through their normal channels. This means they will avoid the hassle, and sell Zune rather than the iPod.
It will be a success simply because M$ says so, and because they are, as allways, hungry for the market they don't have.
And I thought those huge floppy disks we used back at school were large....
;)
Sound interesting tho', but those 256GBs seem a bit too much, unless the computer has a massive translation table for those shapes and colors that account for a staggering amount of possible meanings. This is like the mother of all barcodes
Fear of "new" things such as this is always a problem. If we look at the way technology is going more and more wireless, any group choosing to live by the fear will be technically backwards, and loose in the long run. Since the only thing that stops fear us understanding and knowledge (just look at medical doctors) I hope someone will educate Sebastian's mother a tad on this, or at least that the state we rely on to approve technology such as this is educated enough to make rational choices about it!
...or for that matter, get all Sebastian's food checked. Any sign of pestesides in the fruits, additives such as food colorings, or for that matter how hard it's ben fried by Sebastian's mother, could cause cancer.
And I thought cars where allready hot on summer days ;) Sounds like this thing would cook your poodle full spectrum.
Sex museum? I knew I waited to long to buy it. Is it still available?