The cool thing about Everything is that it eventually acquired its own culture (much as Slashdot has its own culture), and it became self-referential. It acquired self-awareness, and lost its dependency upon the outside world. Slashdot depends upon external ideas and information, but Everything is perfectly content writing about the things that it discovers about itself. It's a simple thought experiment that took off and became, if not a small movement, then at least something like one.
It exists on a purely conceptual level. It soon outgrew a limitation on existing ideas and began to create new ideas, such as "backwards compatibility of the toaster." Instead of describing what people thought, it made them think anew.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's cool.:)
Kids don't turn kids into killers. Video games don't turn kids into killers. MTV doesn't turn kids into killers.
Bad parents turn their kids into killers.
Parents are wholly responsible for determining the how their children are raised, what they learn, what they do, and how they fare in life. Playing Starsiege: Tribes didn't turn little Johnny into a serial killer -- his parents did, for failure to raise him into a fully functional human being.
Perhaps we're noticing a sort of de-evolution. The least responsible people are the ones having the most children, and so every generation there is a higher percentage of children with unqualified parents. It would be interesting to note that in a hundred years, perhaps only a small minority will not be born to unwed teenage mothers.
Anyway, it is the parents' responsibility to determine the cognitive, social, and ethical upbringing of their children. Don't blame Beavis and Butthead, when the problem is that the parents let their kids watch it. If you give a machine gun to a monkey, and the monkey kills someone, you don't blame the monkey.
I'm not entirely sure what's so terrible about having a band of scruffy Russian hackers knowing that my last ping-pong related purchase was over six months ago, and that my operating system is "Other."
Detailed consumer profiling is going to be a fundamental part of our future, and we ought to be developing ways to get around it, limit it, etc., instead of yammering out the usual boilerplate about how DoubleClick is the devil because they know if we like golf or not.
With the increasing sophisitication of profiling technology (and the databases that drive it), as well as the sketchiness of existing laws on the subject, it won't be long before every major company has a detailed consumer database. We complain and complain about privacy issues, but they don't know anything that we haven't made known to them. If they send us sailing magazines, it's because we clicked something somewhere to indicate that we were interested in it. We know what happens when we click those things. Everyone knows. My grandma knows.
Do you think that Linux will ever have a successful, user-friendly GUI interface? Windows' success comes mainly from the fact that people can understand it and are familiar with it; Should Linux "borrow" Microsoft's GUI ideas (as Microsoft borrowed them from Apple, who borrowed them from Xerox), or instead continue down the established path of Linux GUIs?
How has Microsoft's marketing strategies evolved over the years? How have the software market, competition, and social trends affected how Windows is packaged, advertised and sold?
Actually, I've been working on a proposal for a possible solution to this mess. It will never be implemented, of course, because the web is based on tradition and archaic protocols, not on innovation, but I think it nifty food for thought anyway.
My idea is to come up with a standard set of headers that provide directory/hierarchy information for search engines. This is much more useful than keywords, et al., because they allow for top-down directories such as Yahoo! and the Open Directory project. Sites like this could be automatically created simply by crawling the web and organizing sites according to a category specified in their header.
The problem with keywords is that it's easy to spam them. If you need more hits, just add "bestiality", "Natalie Portman", and "hot sluts" to your keywords. The keywords often have nothing to do with the actual site.
It would be much harder, however, to spam a directory structure, especially if most search engines limited the amount of directories a page could specify to, say, two or three.
The header would be easy to implement. It could be done very easily within the comment tags of existing HTML. The only problem is getting people to do it. It would work beautifully if Yahoo! or another large site were to give up on "hand-picked" sites and start letting people specify their own location on the structure. Then anyone who wanted their site to be locatable would specify a hierarchical subject category in their header.
Isn't there some kind of loophole in the User Agreement that basically states that the users never actually *own* their own domain names, but that NSI officially owns them and is just letting people use them? This whole thing could have been an evil (but brilliant) trap from the beginning -- We're basically just creating a massive list for them of every domain name anyone could ever want; and then handing possession of those names over to them.
I was playing Wolfenstein the other day, and it occurred to me that it was sort of the beginning of the whole "1st person shooter" genre. Sure, it had ancestors with similar characteristics, but it was really the first to launch the genre into the public consciousness.
It's a fine game. Sure, there's no up and down, no mouselook, etc., but it was elegant in its simplicity.
My vote is for Wolfenstein as game of the century.
Now, if only we could get a Beowolf clus....er...I mean...
It's a shame that news like this so seldom gets people excited anymore. "They made a faster, smaller microchip!? Who would have thought it?" Leaps in technology like this, however, don't happen automatically. There are researchers busting their asses daily trying to squeeze every last drop of performance out of hardware.
Do you think that Napster is going to hold its position in the market, or is it going to give way to other mp3 utilites or sites such as AudioGalaxy or MP3.com?
What's your take on the Metallica situation? Do you think that their actions are justified, or are they just a bunch of old men who want whatever few dollars they can squeeze out of the public?
Slashdot Mirror
It exists on a purely conceptual level. It soon outgrew a limitation on existing ideas and began to create new ideas, such as "backwards compatibility of the toaster." Instead of describing what people thought, it made them think anew.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's cool. :)
What was the original node, I wonder?
The most ambitious text message is simply "1 4m 2 3r337 4 u" and "1 0wn j00" interspersed with large numbers of !'s and 1's.
The first person to mention Quake loses a testicle.
Spamming isn't exactly hacking.
Tunak Tunak Tun
Hatt, Baby
Parents help determine peer groups. The way children are brought up determines what groups they hang out with.
Bad parents turn their kids into killers.
Parents are wholly responsible for determining the how their children are raised, what they learn, what they do, and how they fare in life. Playing Starsiege: Tribes didn't turn little Johnny into a serial killer -- his parents did, for failure to raise him into a fully functional human being.
Perhaps we're noticing a sort of de-evolution. The least responsible people are the ones having the most children, and so every generation there is a higher percentage of children with unqualified parents. It would be interesting to note that in a hundred years, perhaps only a small minority will not be born to unwed teenage mothers.
Anyway, it is the parents' responsibility to determine the cognitive, social, and ethical upbringing of their children. Don't blame Beavis and Butthead, when the problem is that the parents let their kids watch it. If you give a machine gun to a monkey, and the monkey kills someone, you don't blame the monkey.
I'm not entirely sure what's so terrible about having a band of scruffy Russian hackers knowing that my last ping-pong related purchase was over six months ago, and that my operating system is "Other."
With the increasing sophisitication of profiling technology (and the databases that drive it), as well as the sketchiness of existing laws on the subject, it won't be long before every major company has a detailed consumer database. We complain and complain about privacy issues, but they don't know anything that we haven't made known to them. If they send us sailing magazines, it's because we clicked something somewhere to indicate that we were interested in it. We know what happens when we click those things. Everyone knows. My grandma knows.
You are being watched. Act accordingly.
Do you think that Linux will ever have a successful, user-friendly GUI interface? Windows' success comes mainly from the fact that people can understand it and are familiar with it; Should Linux "borrow" Microsoft's GUI ideas (as Microsoft borrowed them from Apple, who borrowed them from Xerox), or instead continue down the established path of Linux GUIs?
How has Microsoft's marketing strategies evolved over the years? How have the software market, competition, and social trends affected how Windows is packaged, advertised and sold?
What are your thoughts about the "Microsoft Breakup Theory?" Is it really going to happen? If so, what will the future look like?
Is windows planning any major GUI changes in the future (as happened between Windows 3.x and Windows 95)?
My idea is to come up with a standard set of headers that provide directory/hierarchy information for search engines. This is much more useful than keywords, et al., because they allow for top-down directories such as Yahoo! and the Open Directory project. Sites like this could be automatically created simply by crawling the web and organizing sites according to a category specified in their header.
The problem with keywords is that it's easy to spam them. If you need more hits, just add "bestiality", "Natalie Portman", and "hot sluts" to your keywords. The keywords often have nothing to do with the actual site.
It would be much harder, however, to spam a directory structure, especially if most search engines limited the amount of directories a page could specify to, say, two or three.
The header would be easy to implement. It could be done very easily within the comment tags of existing HTML. The only problem is getting people to do it. It would work beautifully if Yahoo! or another large site were to give up on "hand-picked" sites and start letting people specify their own location on the structure. Then anyone who wanted their site to be locatable would specify a hierarchical subject category in their header.
Great idea. It'll never happen.
huh?
Register.com all the way, baby!
It's a fine game. Sure, there's no up and down, no mouselook, etc., but it was elegant in its simplicity.
My vote is for Wolfenstein as game of the century.
Now...back to Tribes...
It's a shame that news like this so seldom gets people excited anymore. "They made a faster, smaller microchip!? Who would have thought it?" Leaps in technology like this, however, don't happen automatically. There are researchers busting their asses daily trying to squeeze every last drop of performance out of hardware.
I'd personally like to think that it does, but I've heard some pretty powerful arguments against it as well.
...is going to be first up against the wall when the revolution comes?