Not trying to pick a fight, though I suppose in these days of polarized thinking anything other than fawning politeness and enthusiastic agreement is considered an attack. I took exception with the thinking implied by your brief original statement and commented on it while disagreeing with your point. (Notice I didn't accuse you personally of being a douche or picking a fight - thanks for that.) Your subsequent clarification of the reasoning behind your position gives context to your original statement, and I disagree less as a consequence. Well, I disagree differently.:-)
You're right. Pull-based ways of getting information *does* revolutionize things. The success of the internet is testament to that. The popularity of YouTube suggests the same (perceived quality of what's available there notwithstanding. There lies a whole other discussion of elitism vs. popular culture). I'd say the trend you hope for is already happening, though people don't recognize it for what it is because they associate content production with the traditional big players, so it's not real until they join the party. My argument is that we don't necessarily need big content on board to bring about the 'revolution' - it happened without them. They would certainly be welcome (big entertainment produces a lot of fine material). And people are already showing that they can deal just fine with an abundance of choices - that was my original point. As a matter of fact, they aren't just capable of dealing with a rich variety of content to choose from, they are quite capable of *producing* it as well. On their own, without the help of big content. This doesn't strike me as the vast wasteland of couch potatoes that people imagine. I'd go so far as to argue that cause and effect is reversed - the couch potato nation is the *result* of the stranglehold of big content on entertainment media and it's resulting homogenization, not because that's all people are capable of. My experience suggests that the vast majority of people are capable of quite a lot - it's just not always noticeable because people focus their energies specifically on what interests them - the resulting diversity is hard to categorize because it's... well... diverse.
Exactly. We can quibble about whether a sales pitch is more or less crass/callous than other motivators to produce creative work that aren't 'artistically pure' like paying the rent or making car payments. (I don't really think a sales pitch is inherently more crass/callous, though many *dishonest* sale pitches are, but that's just me.) Labeling a particular form of art "crass" and "callous" is a personal value judgement that has very little to do with the level of creativity required to produce it, or the quality of the output. If you want crass and callous, consider how many musicians are motivated by the prospect of getting laid. That is considered a pretty low motive by many, but it still results in some great music.
People in the US look forward to the Superbowl ads every year (well, until they started to suck), and I'd argue the reason is because they represent (or used to) some of the finest examples of creative and entertaining commercial art.
Movie trailers are another example. They are clearly sales pitches, but they are also examples of very short form cinematic storytelling and can be quite artistic and creative. Heck, trailers are often artistically superior to the very films they are pitching.
Tell the countless musicians, designers and artists who write jingles, create beautiful layouts or appealing book covers that they aren't creative because they are trying to sell something. They would probably take exception to blanket condemnation of their work just because they like to eat and stay warm in the winter.
Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) says it's not worth it. Ads are creative content (dare I even say "art") like everything else - they just have a specific purpose. What you're really bothered about is the fact that ads are forced upon you rather than chosen by you. You are therefore more painfully aware of the crappy 90%, since you can't control whether or not to watch them. Losing ads completely reduces the opportunity for the awesome 10% to be experienced, reducing the overall opportunity for good art to find an audience. The right answer is to find a better balance for controlling how and when you view ads ("skip this ad after 10 seconds" is one reasonable way to reasonably balance things). Even better would be a feedback mechanism that would *actively* assign negative value to the ads nobody wants to see and offer a greater incentive to produce the good stuff.
I'd say you haven't thought this through, or you wouldn't have raised the point at all (and you should have used a more honest term like "the unwashed masses" instead of hiding your elitist and condescending view of people behind the "general public" label).
Of course people can handle this - they have always been able to do so. Just look at who is being dragged kicking/screaming into the future and who is doing the dragging. Hint: The "general public" are doing the dragging. Follow the sound of kicking and screaming to identify who can't handle the possibility of greater choice. This is about control, not the ability of people to choose for themselves.
No lawyer or MBA every invented any widget of any value or built a great idea into a great company. At best, these two professions grease the wheels of commerce. And these days, US business needs more grit and less grease.
Don't you have that backward? "Greasing the wheels" makes things run more smoothly, grit adds friction to slow things down and reduce efficiency.
They are not quite the same. Drizzle seems to be striving for minimalism, while MariaDB is trying to follow the pre-Oracle development path. Also, MariaDB has the following albatross around its neck: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius. His post-Oracle "Save MySQL" campaign was all kinds of annoying.
Just out of interest - i've always wondered why Postgres seems to trail in popularity to MySQL. I know the limitations of the latter having used it far too much, does anybody know where Postgres trails MySQL?
In my experience (since the last quarter of the 1990s), PostgreSQL never really trailed MySQL because there was anything wrong with it, it just fell in an awkward spot along the database spectrum. On one end of the spectrum (well, Berkeley DB was at the extreme end, just above flat files, but MySQL was next in line) MySQL fit the needs of the majority of data-driven webapps at the time.
A lot of web developers didn't need a proper database and often didn't recognize when they did need one, and couldn't design a decent schema in any case. MySQL was a good match for this skillset - it was easy for someone to set up and instance, throw together some tables and start coding. Any deficiencies were often just handled by throwing the logic into the code. MySQL was also pretty darned fast, which was important due to the hardware limitations of the time, and it could scale well enough for most needs. That got it a toehold and mindshare. Over the years as the demands of the web grew, Monty and friends made sure it stayed in that sweet spot. On the other end of the spectrum, if you *really* needed a proper database or massive scalability, you were usually doing something enterprise-ish, and that usually meant there was enough money available to pay for Oracle (or MS-SQL) and a Solaris machine. You had DBAs trained to manage the beast and design proper databases. Somewhere in between was PostgreSQL. Not as fast as MySQL (being ACID compliant was harder work), more difficult to setup, more demanding of hardware, not quite as powerful as Oracle, few people were trained to use it. Being free (of charge) didn't matter, because there was generally more to lose if things went wrong than the cost of the database, so Oracle was a safer bet. So, though it was more than good enough, PostgreSQL just didn't end up being as popular as MySQL. Didn't really matter, IMHO, because PostgreSQL did just fine and found a niche of it's own where it is doing quite well. Popularity isn't everything.
In my opinion nytimes.com is one of the best sources of journalism
Based on other comments, it seems you should consider re-examining the basis for your opinion, since they seem to indicate that the proper term is "used to be", not "is".
on the web
Even on the web, given that it is a superset of what is available through traditional media channels.
Correlation between the location reported by the secret GPS device in the kindle and the nearest cell phone would suffice, I suppose. The kindle probably doesn't have built in location tracking yet, but it could. Barring that, being able to sense and identify nearby devices that incorporate location tracking would do the trick.
Amazon may not be able to determine who possesses the physical device right now (and presumably reading it), but the ability to do so isn't that far-fetched.
He has spent years advocating a concept of free software that is not exactly perfectly in tune with the capitalist system as it involves giving stuff away that could be charged for.
Bullshit. Nothing in the 'concept of free software' stipulates giving away stuff for free - it can be charged for. The problem for the connoisseur of monetization is that others aren't prohibited from sharing source code free of charge if that is what they wish, thus making business models based on scarcity difficult. The latter the challenge for capitalists seeking an easy way to force payment from people, but that's not the same as mandating 'free of charge'. Get your facts straight.
EAC under Wine works perfectly well and can rip to FLAC with CUE sheets, extraction logs and such. That's what I use most of the time. The downside is you are obliged to use a GUI, so no easy way to script rips once you've found the settings that suit you. Not a problem for the occasional rip, but can get tedious if you are doing your entire CD collection.
morituri (http://thomas.apestaart.org/morituri/trac/wiki) is trying to get there, but seems to be moving slowly and isn't quite ready for general use, IMHO. No GUI, and not many configurable options yet. Seems like a good fallback if you prefer commandline, though. When it works the rip is verifiably good, at least according to AccurateRip.
Somebody else in the thread mentioned Rubyripper (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Rubyripper). Seems to be what morituri wants to be when it grows up. I'll have to give it a try.
When I don't care that much for EAC-level validated accuracy (that is to say, rips that are probably perfectly good, but not validated as accurate during ripping), abcde (http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/) is the best for convenience and configurability.
Did you miss the term "hypothetical" in the first sentence of that article? The singularity has more in common with fiction than it does science. I wouldn't count on it happening to you, though you will probably continue to be able to read some nice stories and articles about it.
(or perhaps better said, the innovative, forward looking economists)
I'll concede that Krugman may indeed be a popular bloviator who uses his economics credentials for credibility rather than knowledge, but to be honest, I don't really hear anything on the traditional information channels from anyone labeled an economist that is any more informative or useful. Mostly I hear from experts in the details of current economic systems that can (in sportscaster-like fashion) describe clearly why some particular thing is happening to the economy, or tea-leaf readers that make predictions (like meteorologists) about what our current economic system is going to do next. I guess that's better that total b.s., but not by much.
I'd like very much to hear from people who are equipped to inform us about how to productively and positively adapt economic systems to changing conditions (such as the rise of technology) rather than just being buffeted about by economic storms, or who can propose new and better economic models which might suit us better than the currently established ones as the world changes. I get the impression than economics as a discipline isn't operating at that level, based on what bubbles up to the popular consciousness, at least.
Sequels and prequels will leave the original untouched to bask in its perfection. It still exists for you to enjoy in its pristine beauty. Wait - which original did you mean? There are so many versions...
How about a prequel [to Casablanca], where Rick is *in* Paris?
That's an awesome idea, actually. If it's good, I'll appreciate it for what it is. If it sucks, I'll ignore it (since it was obviously not in continuity, lol).
Get over yourself. I don't care where people take inspiration from - if they do a good job that's all that matters. This nonsense about avoiding "sacred" stories or 'franchises' is just silly. If someone can tell a story better, or if they can tell a better story in the context of an existing 'fictional framework', I want them to be able to do so.
ESR described the most efficient way to release/produce free/libre/open_source software long ago.
Mozilla seems to be late to the game in realizing that the cathedral approach is not the best way to manage software releases when you are actually participants in the bazaar.
Quite ironic, actually, since Netscape was the first publicly visible software product to embrace to "open source" philosophy back in the day. The release of the Netscape source code was quite shocking and simultaneously gratifying at the time. I was quite gratified personally to be able to compile a Netscape browser from source and surf the web back then. Thank you, ESR.
It's a shame people (in general) don't vote with their wallets enough. I like my PS3, but as with my 360, I am not interested in supporting future efforts to close me off from the tinkering.
I suspect it's because they realize it's at some level a meaningless gesture or at least a very personal gesture with little wider effect. Silently refraining from purchase isn't exactly the way to "make a statement" hoping to change the behavior of a company. An organized effort large enough to get their attention, like a nation- or world-wide boycott, that might work, particularly if it is widely publicized in a way that resonates with public sympathies. Otherwise, "voting with your wallet" doesn't accomplish much beyond the personal satisfaction derived from avoiding a bad purchase. That's not always enough of a reason to forego the purchase of something, particularly if it meets your needs and the reasons for avoiding a purchase don't directly impact you.
The amusing thing is, those pictures are probably all drawn by *his* kids, since I doubt he can just walk into a school and get artwork from other children to post to the web just to trash them in public. That's some quality parenting, for sure.
(Could be from friends or relatives, I suppose, but still...)
Not quite. The content being produced may be of interest, but the delivery method is crucially important. High definition content is pretty nice, but it's not worth the chains that come with the delivery method. Providing more chains does not make it more appealing. Less chains might make it a better value.
You damn well know they do, or they wouldn't be going on and on and on and on about piracy. They desperately want that $40, cumulatively, from everyone.
The next step is probably obligatory DRM, so your collection of ripped movies won't play on your home entertainment system any longer. Only licensed stuff allowed.
Slashdot Mirror
Not trying to pick a fight, though I suppose in these days of polarized thinking anything other than fawning politeness and enthusiastic agreement is considered an attack. I took exception with the thinking implied by your brief original statement and commented on it while disagreeing with your point. (Notice I didn't accuse you personally of being a douche or picking a fight - thanks for that.) Your subsequent clarification of the reasoning behind your position gives context to your original statement, and I disagree less as a consequence. Well, I disagree differently. :-)
You're right. Pull-based ways of getting information *does* revolutionize things. The success of the internet is testament to that. The popularity of YouTube suggests the same (perceived quality of what's available there notwithstanding. There lies a whole other discussion of elitism vs. popular culture). I'd say the trend you hope for is already happening, though people don't recognize it for what it is because they associate content production with the traditional big players, so it's not real until they join the party. My argument is that we don't necessarily need big content on board to bring about the 'revolution' - it happened without them. They would certainly be welcome (big entertainment produces a lot of fine material). And people are already showing that they can deal just fine with an abundance of choices - that was my original point. As a matter of fact, they aren't just capable of dealing with a rich variety of content to choose from, they are quite capable of *producing* it as well. On their own, without the help of big content. This doesn't strike me as the vast wasteland of couch potatoes that people imagine. I'd go so far as to argue that cause and effect is reversed - the couch potato nation is the *result* of the stranglehold of big content on entertainment media and it's resulting homogenization, not because that's all people are capable of. My experience suggests that the vast majority of people are capable of quite a lot - it's just not always noticeable because people focus their energies specifically on what interests them - the resulting diversity is hard to categorize because it's ... well ... diverse.
Exactly. We can quibble about whether a sales pitch is more or less crass/callous than other motivators to produce creative work that aren't 'artistically pure' like paying the rent or making car payments. (I don't really think a sales pitch is inherently more crass/callous, though many *dishonest* sale pitches are, but that's just me.) Labeling a particular form of art "crass" and "callous" is a personal value judgement that has very little to do with the level of creativity required to produce it, or the quality of the output. If you want crass and callous, consider how many musicians are motivated by the prospect of getting laid. That is considered a pretty low motive by many, but it still results in some great music.
People in the US look forward to the Superbowl ads every year (well, until they started to suck), and I'd argue the reason is because they represent (or used to) some of the finest examples of creative and entertaining commercial art.
Movie trailers are another example. They are clearly sales pitches, but they are also examples of very short form cinematic storytelling and can be quite artistic and creative. Heck, trailers are often artistically superior to the very films they are pitching.
Tell the countless musicians, designers and artists who write jingles, create beautiful layouts or appealing book covers that they aren't creative because they are trying to sell something. They would probably take exception to blanket condemnation of their work just because they like to eat and stay warm in the winter.
Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) says it's not worth it. Ads are creative content (dare I even say "art") like everything else - they just have a specific purpose. What you're really bothered about is the fact that ads are forced upon you rather than chosen by you. You are therefore more painfully aware of the crappy 90%, since you can't control whether or not to watch them. Losing ads completely reduces the opportunity for the awesome 10% to be experienced, reducing the overall opportunity for good art to find an audience. The right answer is to find a better balance for controlling how and when you view ads ("skip this ad after 10 seconds" is one reasonable way to reasonably balance things). Even better would be a feedback mechanism that would *actively* assign negative value to the ads nobody wants to see and offer a greater incentive to produce the good stuff.
I'd say you haven't thought this through, or you wouldn't have raised the point at all (and you should have used a more honest term like "the unwashed masses" instead of hiding your elitist and condescending view of people behind the "general public" label).
Of course people can handle this - they have always been able to do so. Just look at who is being dragged kicking/screaming into the future and who is doing the dragging. Hint: The "general public" are doing the dragging. Follow the sound of kicking and screaming to identify who can't handle the possibility of greater choice. This is about control, not the ability of people to choose for themselves.
I wish you both had brains.
No lawyer or MBA every invented any widget of any value or built a great idea into a great company. At best, these two professions grease the wheels of commerce. And these days, US business needs more grit and less grease.
Don't you have that backward? "Greasing the wheels" makes things run more smoothly, grit adds friction to slow things down and reduce efficiency.
They are not quite the same. Drizzle seems to be striving for minimalism, while MariaDB is trying to follow the pre-Oracle development path. Also, MariaDB has the following albatross around its neck: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius. His post-Oracle "Save MySQL" campaign was all kinds of annoying.
Just out of interest - i've always wondered why Postgres seems to trail in popularity to MySQL. I know the limitations of the latter having used it far too much, does anybody know where Postgres trails MySQL?
In my experience (since the last quarter of the 1990s), PostgreSQL never really trailed MySQL because there was anything wrong with it, it just fell in an awkward spot along the database spectrum. On one end of the spectrum (well, Berkeley DB was at the extreme end, just above flat files, but MySQL was next in line) MySQL fit the needs of the majority of data-driven webapps at the time.
A lot of web developers didn't need a proper database and often didn't recognize when they did need one, and couldn't design a decent schema in any case. MySQL was a good match for this skillset - it was easy for someone to set up and instance, throw together some tables and start coding. Any deficiencies were often just handled by throwing the logic into the code. MySQL was also pretty darned fast, which was important due to the hardware limitations of the time, and it could scale well enough for most needs. That got it a toehold and mindshare. Over the years as the demands of the web grew, Monty and friends made sure it stayed in that sweet spot. On the other end of the spectrum, if you *really* needed a proper database or massive scalability, you were usually doing something enterprise-ish, and that usually meant there was enough money available to pay for Oracle (or MS-SQL) and a Solaris machine. You had DBAs trained to manage the beast and design proper databases. Somewhere in between was PostgreSQL. Not as fast as MySQL (being ACID compliant was harder work), more difficult to setup, more demanding of hardware, not quite as powerful as Oracle, few people were trained to use it. Being free (of charge) didn't matter, because there was generally more to lose if things went wrong than the cost of the database, so Oracle was a safer bet. So, though it was more than good enough, PostgreSQL just didn't end up being as popular as MySQL. Didn't really matter, IMHO, because PostgreSQL did just fine and found a niche of it's own where it is doing quite well. Popularity isn't everything.
In my opinion nytimes.com is one of the best sources of journalism
Based on other comments, it seems you should consider re-examining the basis for your opinion, since they seem to indicate that the proper term is "used to be", not "is".
on the web
Even on the web, given that it is a superset of what is available through traditional media channels.
Correlation between the location reported by the secret GPS device in the kindle and the nearest cell phone would suffice, I suppose. The kindle probably doesn't have built in location tracking yet, but it could. Barring that, being able to sense and identify nearby devices that incorporate location tracking would do the trick.
Amazon may not be able to determine who possesses the physical device right now (and presumably reading it), but the ability to do so isn't that far-fetched.
He has spent years advocating a concept of free software that is not exactly perfectly in tune with the capitalist system as it involves giving stuff away that could be charged for.
Bullshit. Nothing in the 'concept of free software' stipulates giving away stuff for free - it can be charged for. The problem for the connoisseur of monetization is that others aren't prohibited from sharing source code free of charge if that is what they wish, thus making business models based on scarcity difficult. The latter the challenge for capitalists seeking an easy way to force payment from people, but that's not the same as mandating 'free of charge'. Get your facts straight.
Pish posh. You just need to apply a dust protectant upon storage and then periodically dust the files off if they accumulate too much: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Parchive
EAC under Wine works perfectly well and can rip to FLAC with CUE sheets, extraction logs and such. That's what I use most of the time. The downside is you are obliged to use a GUI, so no easy way to script rips once you've found the settings that suit you. Not a problem for the occasional rip, but can get tedious if you are doing your entire CD collection.
morituri (http://thomas.apestaart.org/morituri/trac/wiki) is trying to get there, but seems to be moving slowly and isn't quite ready for general use, IMHO. No GUI, and not many configurable options yet. Seems like a good fallback if you prefer commandline, though. When it works the rip is verifiably good, at least according to AccurateRip.
Somebody else in the thread mentioned Rubyripper (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Rubyripper). Seems to be what morituri wants to be when it grows up. I'll have to give it a try.
When I don't care that much for EAC-level validated accuracy (that is to say, rips that are probably perfectly good, but not validated as accurate during ripping), abcde (http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/) is the best for convenience and configurability.
Did you miss the term "hypothetical" in the first sentence of that article? The singularity has more in common with fiction than it does science. I wouldn't count on it happening to you, though you will probably continue to be able to read some nice stories and articles about it.
(or perhaps better said, the innovative, forward looking economists)
I'll concede that Krugman may indeed be a popular bloviator who uses his economics credentials for credibility rather than knowledge, but to be honest, I don't really hear anything on the traditional information channels from anyone labeled an economist that is any more informative or useful. Mostly I hear from experts in the details of current economic systems that can (in sportscaster-like fashion) describe clearly why some particular thing is happening to the economy, or tea-leaf readers that make predictions (like meteorologists) about what our current economic system is going to do next. I guess that's better that total b.s., but not by much.
I'd like very much to hear from people who are equipped to inform us about how to productively and positively adapt economic systems to changing conditions (such as the rise of technology) rather than just being buffeted about by economic storms, or who can propose new and better economic models which might suit us better than the currently established ones as the world changes. I get the impression than economics as a discipline isn't operating at that level, based on what bubbles up to the popular consciousness, at least.
Leave Blade Runner alone. It's perfect as it is.
Sequels and prequels will leave the original untouched to bask in its perfection. It still exists for you to enjoy in its pristine beauty. Wait - which original did you mean? There are so many versions ...
How about a prequel [to Casablanca], where Rick is *in* Paris?
That's an awesome idea, actually. If it's good, I'll appreciate it for what it is. If it sucks, I'll ignore it (since it was obviously not in continuity, lol).
Get over yourself. I don't care where people take inspiration from - if they do a good job that's all that matters. This nonsense about avoiding "sacred" stories or 'franchises' is just silly. If someone can tell a story better, or if they can tell a better story in the context of an existing 'fictional framework', I want them to be able to do so.
The OP talked about a full bladder, not a full colon. Apples vs. Oranges.
Seriously.
alphadogg - you suck.*
ESR described the most efficient way to release/produce free/libre/open_source software long ago.
Mozilla seems to be late to the game in realizing that the cathedral approach is not the best way to manage software releases when you are actually participants in the bazaar.
Quite ironic, actually, since Netscape was the first publicly visible software product to embrace to "open source" philosophy back in the day. The release of the Netscape source code was quite shocking and simultaneously gratifying at the time. I was quite gratified personally to be able to compile a Netscape browser from source and surf the web back then. Thank you, ESR.
Should I just be grateful that there is no SciFi "reality" show yet?
Mythbusters.
It's a shame people (in general) don't vote with their wallets enough. I like my PS3, but as with my 360, I am not interested in supporting future efforts to close me off from the tinkering.
I suspect it's because they realize it's at some level a meaningless gesture or at least a very personal gesture with little wider effect. Silently refraining from purchase isn't exactly the way to "make a statement" hoping to change the behavior of a company. An organized effort large enough to get their attention, like a nation- or world-wide boycott, that might work, particularly if it is widely publicized in a way that resonates with public sympathies. Otherwise, "voting with your wallet" doesn't accomplish much beyond the personal satisfaction derived from avoiding a bad purchase. That's not always enough of a reason to forego the purchase of something, particularly if it meets your needs and the reasons for avoiding a purchase don't directly impact you.
The amusing thing is, those pictures are probably all drawn by *his* kids, since I doubt he can just walk into a school and get artwork from other children to post to the web just to trash them in public. That's some quality parenting, for sure.
(Could be from friends or relatives, I suppose, but still ...)
Not quite. The content being produced may be of interest, but the delivery method is crucially important. High definition content is pretty nice, but it's not worth the chains that come with the delivery method. Providing more chains does not make it more appealing. Less chains might make it a better value.
You damn well know they do, or they wouldn't be going on and on and on and on about piracy. They desperately want that $40, cumulatively, from everyone.
The next step is probably obligatory DRM, so your collection of ripped movies won't play on your home entertainment system any longer. Only licensed stuff allowed.