The point is that if I'm a casual gamer and I don't care whether I buy a Playstation X or a Gametorus, I'm more likely to buy a Playstation X after I find out it can play a whole bunch of old, but still fun, games that I can buy used for $10.
...surround sound was encoded on the two stereo channels. At least I thought that was how it worked up until Dolby Pro-Logic wasn't the latest thing anymore and you had digital connections from the source to the AC-3 or Dolby Digital receiver or whatever. (I haven't kept up...)
I just assumed that the surround channels were basically a diff between the right and left channel and the center was a sum.
It's because there is no real consequence today for getting screwed. In fact, get a decent lawyer, and it's probably the best thing that can happen to you.
The assumption is that there will always be some organization that will watch out for the "little guy" and protect him. If there's not, there is a tremendous uproar.
It's nice to live in a society where there are no real risks, but we're all paying for it with freedom to make mistakes, and the experience that comes with it.
But I'd feel a lot safer if EVERYONE were allowed to carry weapons onto planes. I'd be damned if I'd let anybody sabotage my flight if I had a pistol handy.
Seems to me the only real solution is to level the playing field.
If you haven't read the book "Plum Island" by Nelson DeMille, do yourself a favor and go get a copy. It's one of the most entertaining books I've ever read. His detective character is hilarious.
I'd imagine most of the geeks here would appreciate the dry humour and sarcasm.
For what it's worth, I don't think the adoption of standards will really help competition all that much.
If everything is coded to a standard, the standard becomes the new "monopoly." Typically with standards, innovative groups implement their own features beyond what the standard describes, and this is how things advance.
I think standards will make things less competitive. If Microsoft and Linux adopt the same standard, who do you think is going to win? Microsoft, because people know the name and like the marketing.
Why is everyone here so much against the adoption of.Net on Linux? Because they know that if all apps run equally well on Windows and Linux, there's no real compelling reason to switch to Linux.
>They added support for one more language, to the other ones out there.
But...they haven't. The only languages supported acceptably in the environment are C, C++, and Python. Maybe Perl. Maybe Scheme. I haven't checked lately, but I doubt it. With every API change they make, they break a ton of bindings, and it's tough to keep up. cl-gtk and clg are not up to date at all. Last time I checked, I couldn't compile either on FreeBSD, or run the HelloWorld example on Linux. This was two months ago.
Not to mention, having language bindings to GTK is a far cry from the original idea of having language interoperability through CORBA. With the current development tools, writing a stable "C and Perl" Gnome app is NOT easy. You basically have to extend the C program with run-time dynamic linking, which you can do without Gnome anyway.
Gnome as a development platform is a mess. If they had stuck to the original goal, "switching" to a new language would NOT even be an issue. It would be a matter of replacing components written in one language with another. If there were a proper interface, the language and run-time wouldn't matter.
...to gnome being a project that you could code for in any language?
I think this is going to bite them in the ass. Instead of putting all of their eggs in one basket, I think a better focus would be to improve all of the bindings to higher level languages. I'd REALLY like to be able to code for gnome in Lisp, but the bindings just aren't there.
Mono and KDE seem to have the right idea. They're making what looks like a first class development platform. With the limited time I have to code, if the development platform is working against me, I'm going to drop it. Gnome's development tools are awful. Kdevelop is much better, and Mono looks promising.
And wasn't this the whole point of basing Gnome on Corba in the first place, so that you could later incorporate objects from other languages? It seems to me like they haven't thought this through at all. Use of Corba seems to be extremely limited...probably because it's a pain in the ass to use and the project has done little to make it easier for developers.
If I could suggest a direction, I'd say concentrate on Gnome the development platform, instead of Gnome the Environment that Launches Mozilla and OpenOffice. The developers they'd attract will then take care of the rest. Solve the language interoperability problem, make sure bindings are up to date, and the apps will follow.
You're confused. The feminist movement is dominated by women who believe that men are unnecessary and counter-productive to the advancement of womyn. They do NOT believe in equality whatsoever, they feel that women are vastly superior.
The whole "equal" thing is an excuse to further an agenda to destroy the traditional male-dominated society. These women do not represent what I believe to be the majority of women, who couldn't care less about the "gender war" and would much rather have a satisfying long-term realtionship with a real man.
Men and women are not "equal" in every sense of the word because we are inherintly different. If the feminist movement really was about the equality of men and women, it would include men.
Not a troll at all. You're missing the point. The point is not to not have files, or objects, or a sensible grouping of binary data that would compose an image.
The idea is that I should not have to explicity convert run-time data into a DIFFERENT format to store it permanently.
I can load an image and store it as a Java object. In my system, let's call it "Christmas Photo 2002" and reference it by Object #4234235. In a Unix system, in order to save that image, each and every program (and developer) has to manually convert it to a specific (and incompatible!) image format, explicitly page it out to disk, and handle the re-loading of that image into his program later.
IBM did a study, and foudn that one third of development time is taken up by explicitly saving things back and forth to disk.
My hypothetical system would eliminate that. This isn't a new concept, either. Take a look at this OS which supported persistent data in 1979.
The fact is, the Unix and Windows metaphor for using computers is so engrained, even in developers, that nobody will even step outside the Unix paradigm and wonder if there's a better way. (Do file systems really need to be hierarchies? Why? What if they were relational?)
Instead, they'll post articles about how some miniscule differences make their OS so much better than the other. Yay.
Other than very slight differences in stability and usability, the OS's themselves are much more similar than they are different.
In fact, there are so many different ways to interact with computers that aren't being explored because we're stuck with the ridiculous "everything is a file" interface that plagues both Unix and Windows. Both OS's are brain-dead.
You want an OS that is different in a worthwhile way? Throw out the filesystem. It's a ridiculous waste of time. All the hard disk should be is permanent storage for run-time data. RAM in a system should be nothing more than another cache between the permanent storage and the CPU.
I don't have to explicity page data in and out to the CPU cache, why should I have to page data in and out to files, just because of some misguided attempt to shoehorn a dumb "file philosophy" onto everything?
Security is pathetic from an ideal standpoint too. Why are there only two, arguably three, levels of privilege in these systems? Why do I have to become root just to bind to a low port? Shouldn't I be able to allow specific applications that specific privilege, and that specific privilege only? OS's should have much finer grained controls. This isn't impossible.
A truly innovative OS would resolve these issues. You could start by mapping devices to specific areas in the address space, and controlling access to specific areas of memory for each process/thread. There are research papers all over the net describing exactly how to do this. Nobody's implemented it beyond a toy system.
For all the back slapping and self congratulation about Linux on this site and others, and the "innovative" rally cry of the free software folks, it's pretty sad when you see that all they've done is recreate 30 year old technology with minor implementation improvements.
I'll say "innovative" when you can turn your computer on and in a few seconds be right back where you left off when you turned it off. Or when you can enable a thread to bind to a port by giving it access to the address space where the "bind" function resides, instead of giving it total control of the whole machine.
>here some would argue that everyone paying a little bit benefits society as a whole
As I see it, the problem tends to be that "society as a whole" usually refers to "a few persistent people who complain much more loudly than others."
The activity fee at your university is a perfect example. Nobody really cares enough to follow the money, but as soon as that funding were cut, you could bet the University Tiddly Winks Cadets would be knocking down the administration's doors demanding money.
The issue is not whether one person is being selfish, but rather who gets to decide which groups benefit and which groups don't. I think that's a decision best left to individuals. ALL individuals.
This happens anyway, and I'd bet it would happen to a much smaller extent if a greifer risked permanent death by killing newbies.
Not to mention, if death were permanent, even the most advanced player would have to start over as a "newbie" occasionally.
If your character ages or you risk permanent death every time you play, odds are you're going to spend more time exploring and playing than picking on newbies. And permanent death means by picking on newbies, you're more likely to be picking on an experienced player.
I don't like the idea of not dying. I think it would be a lot more interesting for all involved if death were permanent in these games.
In that case, the new guy wouldn't be at such a disadvantage to everyone who's been playing for years. The advantage to playing for a long time would be to build skill at the game, instead of acquiring items.
>Knowing what they would have done in the presence of choices we have now isn't possible, and prevents me from understanding how we've improved or worsened over time.
Dude, people are the same. Always. Given today's society and kids from the 19th century, they'd grow up just like today's kids. There will always be greed, selfishness, love, etc.
An increase in the amount of choices you have available will only mean that basic human nature is more evident as a manifestation of those choices. Whether that's a good thing, I leave to you to decide.
But keep in mind, choice for choice's sake is not necessarily a good thing. I'd argue that the "objectification" of women a few generations ago perhaps benefitted more women than it hurt. Most women I know today are very unhappy because they don't know where they fit in, having to juggle a family, career, and whatever else the feminist movement has told them they should do.
Looking at history, we can conclude that it is the destiny of human societies to decay and fail. Are we that arrogant to assume that our societies today are invulnerable? Sadly, yes.
It's the ultimate ignorance for one generation to ignore the previous generation's misgivings about the state of society. If anything, what your parents have to say about your culture is the most truthful evaluation of its state than anything else.
Eventually, moral relatism will completely take over our laws and culture, and history will drop us into the slop bucket with all of the other failed cultures that dared to be so arrogant.
>Yes, I want to be able to huff and puff about complex issues - like outsourcing of jobs to India - without any reference to reality. Unfortunately, in this life, I'm stuck in the body of a reporter/columnist.
Hmmm. He writes for the New York Times. I fail to see the problem.
Huff and puff away, good reporter! Just make sure your huffing conforms to the NYT editorial line.
Sure, but imagine how the conversation came about.
Sound to me as if your hypothetical Peace Corps volunteer went around chiding workers in the coporate world for not being in the Peace Corps, the idea being that the world would be a better place if we all devoted our lives only to feeding the poor.
This letter is a response to such nonsense.
I think he makes an excellent point about the famous free-software advocates, many of whom don't make a living doing what they advocate.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that if I'm a casual gamer and I don't care whether I buy a Playstation X or a Gametorus, I'm more likely to buy a Playstation X after I find out it can play a whole bunch of old, but still fun, games that I can buy used for $10.
Run Netscape on Windows?
Thanks for the explanation. The article is kinda light on details, but I guess they're talking about the newer surround sound.
...surround sound was encoded on the two stereo channels. At least I thought that was how it worked up until Dolby Pro-Logic wasn't the latest thing anymore and you had digital connections from the source to the AC-3 or Dolby Digital receiver or whatever. (I haven't kept up...)
I just assumed that the surround channels were basically a diff between the right and left channel and the center was a sum.
It's because there is no real consequence today for getting screwed. In fact, get a decent lawyer, and it's probably the best thing that can happen to you.
The assumption is that there will always be some organization that will watch out for the "little guy" and protect him. If there's not, there is a tremendous uproar.
It's nice to live in a society where there are no real risks, but we're all paying for it with freedom to make mistakes, and the experience that comes with it.
But I'd feel a lot safer if EVERYONE were allowed to carry weapons onto planes. I'd be damned if I'd let anybody sabotage my flight if I had a pistol handy.
Seems to me the only real solution is to level the playing field.
Don't worry. You're obviously part of the aluminum foil hat crowd, which is much less paranoid than the people who use tin.
...is this going to get left on accidentally. People will be getting fired left and right.
Or will people learn real quickly not to say "stupid (*&*(&" as soon as they hang up the phone.
If you haven't read the book "Plum Island" by Nelson DeMille, do yourself a favor and go get a copy. It's one of the most entertaining books I've ever read. His detective character is hilarious.
I'd imagine most of the geeks here would appreciate the dry humour and sarcasm.
For what it's worth, I don't think the adoption of standards will really help competition all that much.
.Net on Linux? Because they know that if all apps run equally well on Windows and Linux, there's no real compelling reason to switch to Linux.
If everything is coded to a standard, the standard becomes the new "monopoly." Typically with standards, innovative groups implement their own features beyond what the standard describes, and this is how things advance.
I think standards will make things less competitive. If Microsoft and Linux adopt the same standard, who do you think is going to win? Microsoft, because people know the name and like the marketing.
Why is everyone here so much against the adoption of
You're right. I just don't have the confidence that the Gnome folks will see this through to completion.
This is essentially a complete rewrite that Havoc's proposing. How many of those have they had? How many have been finished successfully?
>for the cost of building a mono compiler for the language.
Therein lies the problem. This is a huge cost. It remains to be seen if this can be done for some languages.
But if they succeed, that would be great. I hope they choose Mono, if and when they do this. Miguel is doing some great things.
>They added support for one more language, to the other ones out there.
But...they haven't. The only languages supported acceptably in the environment are C, C++, and Python. Maybe Perl. Maybe Scheme. I haven't checked lately, but I doubt it. With every API change they make, they break a ton of bindings, and it's tough to keep up. cl-gtk and clg are not up to date at all. Last time I checked, I couldn't compile either on FreeBSD, or run the HelloWorld example on Linux. This was two months ago.
Not to mention, having language bindings to GTK is a far cry from the original idea of having language interoperability through CORBA. With the current development tools, writing a stable "C and Perl" Gnome app is NOT easy. You basically have to extend the C program with run-time dynamic linking, which you can do without Gnome anyway.
Gnome as a development platform is a mess. If they had stuck to the original goal, "switching" to a new language would NOT even be an issue. It would be a matter of replacing components written in one language with another. If there were a proper interface, the language and run-time wouldn't matter.
...to gnome being a project that you could code for in any language?
I think this is going to bite them in the ass. Instead of putting all of their eggs in one basket, I think a better focus would be to improve all of the bindings to higher level languages. I'd REALLY like to be able to code for gnome in Lisp, but the bindings just aren't there.
Mono and KDE seem to have the right idea. They're making what looks like a first class development platform. With the limited time I have to code, if the development platform is working against me, I'm going to drop it. Gnome's development tools are awful. Kdevelop is much better, and Mono looks promising.
And wasn't this the whole point of basing Gnome on Corba in the first place, so that you could later incorporate objects from other languages? It seems to me like they haven't thought this through at all. Use of Corba seems to be extremely limited...probably because it's a pain in the ass to use and the project has done little to make it easier for developers.
If I could suggest a direction, I'd say concentrate on Gnome the development platform, instead of Gnome the Environment that Launches Mozilla and OpenOffice. The developers they'd attract will then take care of the rest. Solve the language interoperability problem, make sure bindings are up to date, and the apps will follow.
You're confused. The feminist movement is dominated by women who believe that men are unnecessary and counter-productive to the advancement of womyn. They do NOT believe in equality whatsoever, they feel that women are vastly superior.
The whole "equal" thing is an excuse to further an agenda to destroy the traditional male-dominated society. These women do not represent what I believe to be the majority of women, who couldn't care less about the "gender war" and would much rather have a satisfying long-term realtionship with a real man.
Men and women are not "equal" in every sense of the word because we are inherintly different. If the feminist movement really was about the equality of men and women, it would include men.
"The wires can stretch to over half their original length."
Is it me, or does this violate some law of grammar, physics, or both?
Not a troll at all. You're missing the point. The point is not to not have files, or objects, or a sensible grouping of binary data that would compose an image.
The idea is that I should not have to explicity convert run-time data into a DIFFERENT format to store it permanently.
I can load an image and store it as a Java object. In my system, let's call it "Christmas Photo 2002" and reference it by Object #4234235. In a Unix system, in order to save that image, each and every program (and developer) has to manually convert it to a specific (and incompatible!) image format, explicitly page it out to disk, and handle the re-loading of that image into his program later.
IBM did a study, and foudn that one third of development time is taken up by explicitly saving things back and forth to disk.
My hypothetical system would eliminate that. This isn't a new concept, either. Take a look at this OS which supported persistent data in 1979.
The fact is, the Unix and Windows metaphor for using computers is so engrained, even in developers, that nobody will even step outside the Unix paradigm and wonder if there's a better way. (Do file systems really need to be hierarchies? Why? What if they were relational?)
Instead, they'll post articles about how some miniscule differences make their OS so much better than the other. Yay.
Other than very slight differences in stability and usability, the OS's themselves are much more similar than they are different.
In fact, there are so many different ways to interact with computers that aren't being explored because we're stuck with the ridiculous "everything is a file" interface that plagues both Unix and Windows. Both OS's are brain-dead.
You want an OS that is different in a worthwhile way? Throw out the filesystem. It's a ridiculous waste of time. All the hard disk should be is permanent storage for run-time data. RAM in a system should be nothing more than another cache between the permanent storage and the CPU.
I don't have to explicity page data in and out to the CPU cache, why should I have to page data in and out to files, just because of some misguided attempt to shoehorn a dumb "file philosophy" onto everything?
Security is pathetic from an ideal standpoint too. Why are there only two, arguably three, levels of privilege in these systems? Why do I have to become root just to bind to a low port? Shouldn't I be able to allow specific applications that specific privilege, and that specific privilege only? OS's should have much finer grained controls. This isn't impossible.
A truly innovative OS would resolve these issues. You could start by mapping devices to specific areas in the address space, and controlling access to specific areas of memory for each process/thread. There are research papers all over the net describing exactly how to do this. Nobody's implemented it beyond a toy system.
For all the back slapping and self congratulation about Linux on this site and others, and the "innovative" rally cry of the free software folks, it's pretty sad when you see that all they've done is recreate 30 year old technology with minor implementation improvements.
I'll say "innovative" when you can turn your computer on and in a few seconds be right back where you left off when you turned it off. Or when you can enable a thread to bind to a port by giving it access to the address space where the "bind" function resides, instead of giving it total control of the whole machine.
That's innovative.
>here some would argue that everyone paying a little bit benefits society as a whole
As I see it, the problem tends to be that "society as a whole" usually refers to "a few persistent people who complain much more loudly than others."
The activity fee at your university is a perfect example. Nobody really cares enough to follow the money, but as soon as that funding were cut, you could bet the University Tiddly Winks Cadets would be knocking down the administration's doors demanding money.
The issue is not whether one person is being selfish, but rather who gets to decide which groups benefit and which groups don't. I think that's a decision best left to individuals. ALL individuals.
This happens anyway, and I'd bet it would happen to a much smaller extent if a greifer risked permanent death by killing newbies.
Not to mention, if death were permanent, even the most advanced player would have to start over as a "newbie" occasionally.
If your character ages or you risk permanent death every time you play, odds are you're going to spend more time exploring and playing than picking on newbies. And permanent death means by picking on newbies, you're more likely to be picking on an experienced player.
I don't like the idea of not dying. I think it would be a lot more interesting for all involved if death were permanent in these games.
In that case, the new guy wouldn't be at such a disadvantage to everyone who's been playing for years. The advantage to playing for a long time would be to build skill at the game, instead of acquiring items.
>an entire new group of people to learn to hate SCO.
Nah. You only go to Autozone if there's no Napa around.
>Knowing what they would have done in the presence of choices we have now isn't possible, and prevents me from understanding how we've improved or worsened over time.
Dude, people are the same. Always. Given today's society and kids from the 19th century, they'd grow up just like today's kids. There will always be greed, selfishness, love, etc.
An increase in the amount of choices you have available will only mean that basic human nature is more evident as a manifestation of those choices. Whether that's a good thing, I leave to you to decide.
But keep in mind, choice for choice's sake is not necessarily a good thing. I'd argue that the "objectification" of women a few generations ago perhaps benefitted more women than it hurt. Most women I know today are very unhappy because they don't know where they fit in, having to juggle a family, career, and whatever else the feminist movement has told them they should do.
>Probably. Who is to say they weren't right?
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Looking at history, we can conclude that it is the destiny of human societies to decay and fail. Are we that arrogant to assume that our societies today are invulnerable? Sadly, yes.
It's the ultimate ignorance for one generation to ignore the previous generation's misgivings about the state of society. If anything, what your parents have to say about your culture is the most truthful evaluation of its state than anything else.
Eventually, moral relatism will completely take over our laws and culture, and history will drop us into the slop bucket with all of the other failed cultures that dared to be so arrogant.
>Yes, I want to be able to huff and puff about complex issues - like outsourcing of jobs to India - without any reference to reality. Unfortunately, in this life, I'm stuck in the body of a reporter/columnist.
Hmmm. He writes for the New York Times. I fail to see the problem.
Huff and puff away, good reporter! Just make sure your huffing conforms to the NYT editorial line.
Sure, but imagine how the conversation came about.
Sound to me as if your hypothetical Peace Corps volunteer went around chiding workers in the coporate world for not being in the Peace Corps, the idea being that the world would be a better place if we all devoted our lives only to feeding the poor.
This letter is a response to such nonsense.
I think he makes an excellent point about the famous free-software advocates, many of whom don't make a living doing what they advocate.