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Slashback: Hoaxery, New Math, Gestures
At least the jurors don't get to set the value of Pi. openbear writes: "According to a story at c|net the jurors meant for MP3.com to pay $3 million and not $300,000 in the court decision made last week. This may sound bad for MP3.com, but considering that TVT was originally going for $8.5 million I suppose that $3 million still looks like a good ruling. Espically since they have $42.9 million set aside for damage awards in pending suits."
(Here are some other articles about MP3.com as well.)
Parroting the (ORA, ActiveState, etc.) company line: rjoseph writes: "Perl.com's managing editor Simon Cozens has written a quick article on O'Reilly.com that explains the April Fools joke of the faked colaboration between Perl and Python to produce Parrot. He explains how the most interesting aspect about the whole affair is the fact that, to pull it off succesfully, the Perl and Python communities had to work together more than they had in a long time!"
Humor may suffer from analysis, but this is a cool explanation of what it took to pull off what turned out to be probably the most convincing Fool of the year, at least for those in the very small Venn diagram with the background and motivation to care about open-source programming languages and their creators;) Of course, now no one will believe it when the two do actually merge. (For a while I thought that the talk of "Python 3000" was a joke, too.)
Small steps on tiny machines n7lyg writes: "IEEE Computer has an article this month about a prototype PDA developed at Compaq's Western Research Labs: Itsy: Stretching the Bounds of Mobile Computing. Itsy has been through two implementations and has several unique features, including using MEMS accelerometers to implement a gesture interface (Rock'n'Scroll). This is all just research, but it does show promise for Linux-based PDA's. Itsy runs the X Window System and Qt Palmtop. The WRL website for Itsy is here."
This is really cool background material; now the earlier Itsy work has led to Linux on the iPAQ, I wish Compaq would actually sell a PDA with the size and shape of the Itsy itself. And tiny accelerometers for gesture-control would be welcome on my visor as well, and surely for small video game systems.
Big Blue, Big Blue, your transmission is fading, please say again, over. An Onymous Coward writes: "This sucks. At LWCE there was a big display at the KDE booth using ViaVoice to control KDE apps through Qt. Now it looks like the project is dead in the water, according to this article at Newsforge -- maybe lack of interest from IBM?"
What with the billion dollars that IBM has pledged to spend on Linux-related projects, and the fact that ViaVoice has shipped for a while with the high-end boxed version of Mandrake, hopefully this is just an oversight. ViaVoice is a cool technology -- but if things don't work out between Qt and IBM, perhaps KDE (and GNOME, and others, level playing field here!) can work on integration with Sphinx. An Apache-style license should be all-around friendly, right?
FOOL! The value of pi is 3!
The value of 3! is 6.
The education of my children starts at home.
The education of my children ends at home.
The responsibility to see that my children are educated is mine, and my wife's alone.
We support the teachers at school, as they are helping us to educate our children.
Where the classes are lacking in material content at school, we suppliment.
A sub-optimal instructor at a school simply means more work is required on my part.
When your kids come out of school, completly unprepaired to go to college, or even unable to read, or find their home country on a globe, don't you dare blame the schools. The job of educating your children is yours. If you are unwilling to take on that responsibility, don't have kids.
It's kinda sad that the best april fools joke (Parrot) was ruined by too many stupid april fools jokes on slashdot.
http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2384/LWD010410maccomme nts/
You know, Linus Torvalds said April 8 that reports of him trashing the new Mac OS X are simply misquotes, as he has "never commented on OS X."
But, this is slashdot. Suggest that something said about THE CREATOR was wrong? *gasp*
I'm so tired of getting really worked up about the Itsy here on /. only to discover that they're STILL NOT MAKING IT AVAILABLE TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC!
p _p ract/cp3.htm
CRAP!
The picture at the bottom of this page is PURE SEX!! How come us mortals aren't allowed to have any of that?!!! FUKC~!!
http://computer.org/computer/homepage/april/com
Anyway, sorry about that. I just really, really, really want my own Itsy.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The cost is $25 a year (not month, year- about $2 a month), so I would have to resoundingly agree that it must be cheaper to buy all that disk storage than to dicker with the major labels :D
Ampcast is also sticking with their 'six cent payment to artists per download' though some of the artists actually would like Ampcast to drop that as well and just focus on stuff like the CD program they're coming out with (on the assumption that since nobody pays to download mp3s, getting paid for such downloads is stupid and liable to hurt the music service provider in the long run). However, there's a twist- Ampcast streaming has never paid a royalty, just the downloads- and with the CD program, artists will be sorta encouraged to make tracks 'streaming only'. All real geeks know this is meaningless- read an m3u file lately? ;) but it would certainly be meaningful in the sense of not having to cost Ampcast six cents a download.
I'm told BeSonic is delivering a new option to insist that page visitors pay to download files- I host on BeSonic at the moment but wasn't aware of this because naturally I consider the idea extremely silly :)
More on mp3.com- they have polarized their artist base (probably still the largest collection of artists in the industry- and the most spotty in quality) by establishing a Premium Artist program- in order to qualify for being paid anything, you pay them $20 a month (_not_ year). They have also started something called 'Back The Band': effectively, it is an auction for graffiti space on artist's band pages. If you bid highest and pay with your credit card, you can write "This band sucks!" on anyone's page if they are not Madonna. You can also write they LOVE your music and link to your own page- all they can do about such lies is outbid you or complain to management. Management prioritises paying artists more and causes 'free' artists to wait weeks for any response. The money from Back The Band is split- half goes to mp3.com and half goes to the artist whose page you deface. In theory it's for writing nice comments, but that illusion was very quickly dispelled when it went into action. Finally, mp3.com has expanded the class of music content to which it grabs perpetual rights- and subtly altered their contract to permit them to make changes and edit your actual music if they choose. This clears the way for 'Back The Tune', so that in future, you may get 50% of the money someone pays when they bid for the chance to place an audio clip of a fart onto the official mp3.com DAM CD of your album, or a commercial for them! It all makes a twisted kind of sense.
Any other status reports from music service provider customers?
A friend of mine (Who was ABD in Math) once told me he knew a High School Math teacher who for years had been telling her class that pi was 22/7. Didn't know it was irrational never mind transendental.
The mind boggles.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
I used one at a Usenix wrap party, or maybe one of the other parties that happen at Usenix. It was fast enough (it wasn't lightning fast though). The display was nice enough. The rock n' scroll was very cool. But it was heavy. For a PDA not noticeably larger then a Palm Pilot it felt like it was at least four times as heavy. It would never ever be comfortable in a shirt pocket. It wouldn't even be as unobtrusive in pants pocket. I wouldn't use it as a PDA just because I wouldn't carry it around.
Of corse if you were to spin a new design of it it couldn't help but get lighter...
Meanwhile.... I use myplay.com and I can have all the best tracks from my favourite albums in my locker. Since I'm doing the ripping/uploading I can even stick stuff in there I've recorded off the radio.
Bast of all though - I can put all my stuff in my locker in Vorbis format.
I'm sorry - you sound like you've been brainwashed by mp3.com
They've got less than 20,000 active users for their my.mp3.com service, and the number of *paying* users is a hall of a lot less. Supposedly they had 500,000 sign ups initially, but everyone stopped using it after they encoutnered the licensing problems.
Considering they spent >100 million on the licenses for beam-it that works out at $5,000 per user.
Meanwhile, Musicbank Just closed its Doors today, another company that licensed stuff from the music business. These guys Never got round to Launching a product though.
Which leaves myplay.com as the only music service provider looking healthy, it must be cheaper to buy all that disk storage than it is to pay those label licenses.....
The ViaVoice SDK and runtimes are still available for free, so if you don't like it, fix it.
-
It wouldn't even be as unobtrusive in pants pocket.
"I hear you've got an Itsy in your pocket."
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
In pure mathematics, significant digits are not relevant? Pure math, 1 = 1.0 = 1.000000000000 = 1.00000... It's not relevant to your math class. What class was it, anyway? What 'upper-level' math class teaches trig? That's highschool...
Significant digits come into play when doing real-world calculations/measurements so as not to introduce useless error, or not to provide an apparently 'highly accurate' answer when in fact, everything past the first 2 digits is totally meaningless.
Was this not their first clue that SOMETHING was awry? Perhaps a little pre-service exam would be usefull...
[ ] Check this box if you are an idiot, please.
Hey, if it's not required to vote in presidential elections...
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
I had a high school chemistry teacher who was so bad at the subject that after a decade of teaching it, he could barely do the problems. For that reason, he would use the same problems, using the exact same numbers, over and over again. When it came to the final exam, I got 80% of the answers from memory, without even having to do simple multiplication.
But that didn't stop him from getting it wrong all the time anyway. I used to correct him, not because I was being a smartass, but because I thought it was unfair that kids who were trying really hard were getting screwed that way. On at least on occasion, I had to read the formulas from the textbook back to him to convince anyone. Anyway, it must have made some kind of impression on him, because two years later my younger brother did the same thing; he would stutter and call him by *my* name.
The thing was, I saw cars that he restored and even rode in them. He was a very talented mechanic, just a shitty high school chemistry teacher.
I used to think "that's just the way it is" until I got to college and realized that I was hopelessly behind kids who had real educations at private high schools - in subjects I would have been *very* good at. You just can't make it all up in college, not if you really want to excel. It's like asking a rising tennis star to take 4 years off for college; by the time they get back into it, it's too late to be the best.
BTW, high pay tends to preclude the formation of unions.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Glove type input devices never caught on because they were never meant to be used when you could still see your hand - they were meant to be used when wearing an HMD for immersive work, when one would normally be moving most of the body anyway.
The problem was the same as using a mouse for drawing on the screen - can it be done? Yes. Is it the optimal tool? No.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Uhhhh... OK, we can agree to remove the Christian Coalition strawman. No problem. How about we replace it with "right-wing Republican fuckheads"? That is a more accurate, albeit inflammatory, description of my target demographic. The Christian Coalition is convenient, however, in that they have attempted to be a highly-organized flock of fuckheads, instead of the usual irregular fuckheads... and thus is a more concise target. But whatever, man, I'm not gonna argue semantics.
By the way, you know why leftists have had a "stranglehold" in education? It's because more educated people tend to be leftists. Or, a corollary, not all Republicans are stupid people, but most stupid people are Republican... which, while I may not be able to quote you a statistic, or a reference, or a strawman blahblahblah, is the single truest thing I have ever heard in my life. Might as well be carved in granite and handed down from Mt. Sinai, far as I'm concerned. So that's where I'm coming from.
And as far as the NEA buying elections, well, that's just funny. Tell me, what evils have befallen the Republic due to the wily and pervasive influence of the NEA? The Trial Lawyers Association, OK, offhand, that's a pretty believable scapegoat, but the NEA... please. I could be quite mistaken about that, granted; I haven't been keeping up with The Limbaugh Letter much these days, so no doubt I'm woefully underinformed and could use a little education...
Beats me if unions are good or bad in the case of teachers, but my counterpoint to yours would be this:
A) Teaching is a very, very political profession. School board elections are notorious for being low-turnout, low-interest. It makes it relatively simple for right-wing wack jobs to get into office (this is/was, in fact, a Christian Coalition political tactic, to "infiltrate" these low-level elected positions and build from there). Once they're in office they could, if not for the teachers unions, do pretty much whatever they like. The union is the most effective tool the teachers have to exert influence back up the chain of command.
B) It's not like teachers can just go get another job. Think about it... if you're a teacher and you get into a scrape with the school officials, where do you go? How many other school districts might there be within a commuting distance? Pretty much, you have to sell your house and move. OK, so that's not so bad, it's a small point, but:
C) At least where I grew up, teaching was a motherfuckin' thankless job. All anyone in my town could do was bitch and piss and moan about how "rich" the teachers were, and how they had it made, and they don't even work all year! If not for the union, the people of my town would've only elected school board members who promised to cut teacher's pay to $12,000/year or something. Now, you think teachers are stupid now - and brother, I hear you and agree - try paying them poverty level wages and see what shakes out of the gene pool.
Thankfully, I live in a place where education is given priority... but you better believe there are vast freakin' swaths of this country where people would LOVE to see teachers get paid minimum wage... and five'll get ya ten, they're the same right-wing wackos who'll grassroots themselves a Christian Coalition school board.
So... the unions maybe do suck and let bad teachers stay in positions where they don't belong, but on the other hand, maybe they do help good teachers stay in bad places. There's always bad employees in any organization... maybe there'd be fewer bad teachers without the unions, and maybe there'd be fewer good teachers, too.
Pure speculation on my part, just based on my experiences...
Oh man, you have never taught. Granted, there's teachers that are flakes, but there's lots that aren't, too, and to be even a barely competent teacher, you have to:
Doing this well, heck, even doing it passably, is really, really hard. It's such an important job that lots of people are willing to do it despite the fact that it's such hard work for (usually) such low pay. And there are rewards, for example when you get to see someone learn a difficult new idea. But don't ever say it's easy till you've spent a year or two trying it. You've got no idea.
--Bruce Fields
The very first post on Slashdot set the tone for all of April Fool's. LZip with compression down to %0 of the file size. That ruined any possibility of anything being taken seriously. The ensuing crap that followed didn't help either. I would have thought that intelligent people could have had better execution than on the site that pathetic day.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
Was that joke about Tim Berners-Lee and some MIT guy creating a new scripting language (like we need another) called CURL except they want to charge people up the ass to use it....haahahhahahha. Yeah right....oh wait......
Hey, you think your house is cool?
SetVal Mike = JoelVal/2
SetVal Crow = Good
SetVal Perl = Good
SetVal Pearl Forrester = Very Very Bad
Exe Skit
END
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Autodesk put considerable work into VR, imagining designers with gloves and goggles putting together machines and buildings. The result was less usable than mouse and keyboard. Flythrough is great, but that's about all.
Basic problem: pointing in free space is not a good way to do input. It gets tiring fast, and it's not very accurate. This is partly why glove-type input devices never caught on. The GyroMouse people have found a niche market as a mouse replacement for people giving PowerPoint presentations, but that's about as useful as it gets.
Compaq actually gives the information needed, so that you can build your own Itsy. Maybe a group of Linux hackers could put together a site that would take orders for the Itsies, and once they reached enough requests, they could start building them and selling them to those who placed an order (and put down a deposit).
Anyway, I am sure some of the more hardware skilled peeps that read slashdot could put together an Itsy, if they had the resources.
Cartesian coordinates are defined whatever you like, as long as it is on a flat Euclidean space and the +y/+x are orthogonal to each other by 90 degrees (not necessary true in an arbitrary geometry). For example, I can take +x to be up and +y to be right. (Or +x to be NE and +y to be SE etc..)
Btw, is your teacher blond, slim, and good-looking too?
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
and what did the guy behind the counter say? Did he try to talk you into keeping it?
"Helloooo, Polly.." (whap, whap, whap)
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
At least the jurors don't get to set the value of Pi. openbear writes: "According to a story at c|net the jurors meant for MP3.com to pay $3 million and not $300,000 in the court decision made last week.
In Indiana, there used to be a law setting pi equal to 4 instead of the more common value of 3.141592653589793238462650133. It was repealed, though. More info here.
---
The AOL-Time Warner-Microsoft-Intel-CBS-ABC-NBC-Fox corporation:
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Linuxtoday has Linus dispelling the flamewar zdnet tried to brew between our two camps. http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2384/LWD010410maccomme nts/
Shame on slashback for not noticeing. I get my newz from www.macsurfer.com
:)
--------
get jiggy w/ ayn rand!
Well... that's much better than the math teacher's approximation, which was only good to three significant digits. This one is good to six.
Anyway, what do you expect? I forget the name of the book, but Thomas Sowell (a really smart professor-type from Yale) writes about secondary-school educators (and below) being absolutely the most stupid group of college-attending individuals. He's got test scores to prove it. I personally didn't learn much in high school that wasn't self-taught, and I had my fair share of bouts with moronic teachers.
What you have to remember is that teaching is a low-paying profession. The job is easy, because (especially in elementary school) you can say anything and little children will believe it. There is no drive for excellence when the customer can't recognize it.
Not to mention that teaching is a union-controlled industry, and as we've consistently seen in the past, unionized workers aren't of the highest caliper. Just think about it; unions are formed to protect employees from oppressive employers, poor working conditions and low wages, right? But a highly-skilled, competent worker is too valuable to be treated like shit, so he doesn't need a union to secure his job. Quite frankly, unions are only good for forcing people to hire idiots at overpriced wages. They're rather irresponsible about it, too... halting companies' functions by striking. If I ever own a unionized business, and they strike, I'm firing every last one of them and hiring a whole new crew. I don't care how much it costs; it's about principle here.
Need a good example of excellence without unions? Look at Michael Jordan, forced member of the NBA Players' Union. He was the highest-paid athlete in the NBA (of any sport?), because he was such an outstanding player. Hell, he was THE reason I followed basketball from 1986-1998. You think his salary was so high because the union made it so? Not a chance. If the union were responsible, every player would make as much as Jordan. Jordan was paid so much because he was the basketball god, plain and simple.
Compounding the teacher problem is the fact that it's so damn hard to fire a lousy one, it would be easier just to shut up and keep paying them. In effect, the unions have created a form of tenure, an absolute perversion of its university cousin.
I remember one time, in sixth grade, my fresh-out-of-school science teacher telling the class that humans had 54 chromosomes. "46," I said. We argued for, oh, 15 minutes, until he conceded, appending a "whatever" to his admission of error. A 24-year-old kid passing of a 12-year-old kid as full of shit, when DAMNIT, I was right. That year was a good year... I got in many arguments with that guy. After the year was over, and I'm not kidding, he gave up science for sixth graders and taught third grade. There was that one time I slammed his door so hard in protest, people down the hall looked at me funny. I got sent to the Principal's Office (TM) for that one, but it was worth it. In the end, I won the argument (over the grade on a test) and got an "A". Heh. Fuck you, Mr. Lauer!
A new year calls for a new signature.
Good point, it is indeed "caliber."
The error was not a grammatical or spelling mistake, however. Nor was it the product of poor teachers... as I said, I learned very little in high school.
The problem was that I was studying (or rather worrying) about an exam I had to take the next morning, covering such things as Lebesgue integration and Fourier series.
Compound the fact that I am not held accountable for anything I say here, and what you have is a classic case of talking out of my ass... I put very little thought into posting on slashdot.
Take it from me... when you're concerned about whether a function is integrable if its generating function has a limit, the significance of "caliber vs. caliper" goes to zero very rapidly.
I assure you, if I had to think about the things I post on slashdot, I would never submit anything. The reason I post things is to vent, not to spout streams of wisdom.
But thanks for the correction... the distinction has been noted, and would have been noted before posting time if the forum were more serious.
A new year calls for a new signature.
You're wrong. MJ got paid what he did because he made the Bulls richer than their wildest dreams. True, all players' salaries increased because of unions--that is what unions try to do. My point is that MJ made enormously more money than any NBA player had ever seen, current or past. If his money came from a union, it would have been an amount similar to other players.
The Bulls paid Jordan so much because they knew that without him, ticket sales would approach zero and the United Center would go empty. Keeping Jordan happy was important not because it kept the union from getting pissed off, but because if Jordan got pissed and left, the Bulls went back to the poorhouse. I forget the figures, but I'm certain Jordan increased the value of the Bulls franchise more than tenfold.
This is also why the Bulls put up with Pippen and Jackson for so long. It is well known that Jackson and Pippen had severe disagreements with Bulls management. Hell, the Bulls hired a replacement coach without bothering to tell Jackson. But Jordan told the Bulls to fuck off, that he'd walk if Jackson didn't coach. So what happened? Jackson's replacement got some phony title like "VP of Basketball Operations" and Jackson remained coach.
Jordan wasn't treated like a king because unions made it so. Jordan was treated like a king because the Bulls wanted Jordan to stay happy. No matter what they paid him, he was worth more in terms of ticket and merchandise revenue. Plus, you can't forget the prestige factor... how cool would it be to say you've got the best player in the NBA?
A new year calls for a new signature.
Teachers are not educated people. Cf. my last few posts on this thread. Teachers tend to be the dumbest of the flock. Therefore (A) and (B) have nothing to do with each other.
Let me tell you how the political lines typically divde:
A new year calls for a new signature.
This is further proof that only the stupidest people in the country can't figure out how to get out of jury duty. Is this such a good idea? I hope I'm never defending myself in front of a jury!
Now that they have PDA's that can detect acceleration, how long before they have airbags in 'em? Your days of painful collisions with other angry pedestrians while playing tetris would be over.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Unions have nothing to do with it
Ok, well, sure they could. But they don't. Why? Because teaching sucks no one wants to teach, not anyone in their right minds anyhow. Basicly you have to take shity wages for the privilages of standing in front of a class room full of bitter, hostile, and (more and more frequently) armed teenagers with unstable hormonal ballances.
Small wonder there's a teacher shortage. Which is why we have so many shitty teachers. Something is better than nothing. That's why we have football coaches teaching history. That's why any nimrod can get a job teaching your children.
Now you'd think that supply and demand would catch up with this system, but it hasn't yet. I for the life of me can't figgure out why. If you started paying teachers 45,000 to 50,000 a year you could start demanding a hell of a lot more of them. More to the point, there are a lot of people who have teaching cirtificates as a "backup" who might make awsome teachers. Start paying a reasonably sane wage and they might go ahead and give it a try. Can't hurt.
Of course, the final problem is the fact that teachers have to deal with parrents. Seriously, you go the the doctor, he diagnoses that pain in your ear as an ear infection, gives you antibiodics. You take them... why? Cause he's a doctor, he knows what he's talking about right? Same thing if your lawyer tells you that clause in your will is full of holes, you fix it. Why? Cause he's a lawyer, he knows his shit. But when a teacher tells you that you need to spend more time reading to your kid and helping him with his homework, or that your kid might have a learning disability... that's for some reason unaccecptable. People actualy go off a teachers for this sort of thing. Teachers have lost their jobs (yes I know people this happened to) for this stuff.
You've REALLY gotta love those kids to put up with that shit. That's the argument for keeping the job horrid. Of course, you might not love them, you might just be a lazy bastard that dosn't want to have to strain intelectualy. Sounds like we've encountered both kinds. I'm open to any solution, but I've yet to hear one that will be 100% effective.
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Two jurors left voice-mail messages Friday evening for a court clerk indicating that the $3,125 figure "was supposed to be $31,250," Rakoff said. He said it was possible that jurors had arrived at a grand total during deliberations, then "divided it wrongly."
Was this not their first clue that SOMETHING was awry? Perhaps a little pre-service exam would be usefull...
[ ] Check this box if you are an idiot, please.
Here's your sign....
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--The Kid
the liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perception
www.quantumheresy.com