Most of the mainstream religions seemed to have started out cults. A young feisty cult has few members so tends to demand more both financially and personally. For the cult to grow it has to moderate both its demands and dogma. Most people seem to be looking for a sense of belonging and surety about "the hard questions" but aren't willing to disregard workaday sensibilities in the process. So you have most people belonging to long established religions that themselves have adapted to what society will tolerate and indeed become part of "the establishment" themselves.
Scientology seems to want it both ways. They want both a large membership and extreme commitments from their parishioners. In time, they could follow the path of the Mormons before them but the current leadership is incapable of it. Furthermore, their "innermost teachings" are a common and easy target of ridicule. So they have a hard row to hoe to become a mainstream religion. I wouldn't say it is impossible but they'll need to retconn the whole Xenu thing and give up their addiction to every last bit of cash they can hard sell out of their members.
The other truth in what you say is that music as a business will be lots of little pies with lots of slices for everybody. What is making the big labels nutz is that centralized control of what's coming is a lot harder. If anything, with the RIAA goons out of way music will likely be an even bigger industry. Things like payola for radio stations meant that the big labels got richer but it also meant that local guys that might have gotten a chance once no longer do. But for kids these days, the radio is irrelevant. And that local guy can buy some webhosting or just have a really snazzy MySpace page.
Besides the politician buying and other forms of thuggery these crooks have engaged in, I'll tell you another reason why I don't feel sorry for these guys. As a teen in the mid-eighties, I thought about how neat it would be to have music on a computerized device that was entirely solid state. Given the state of things then I knew it was impractical but given enough memory, miniaturization, and processing power music without physical media was obvious to me even then. After all, digital sampling was starting to be used to create music wasn't it? Roll forward ten years or so and "mp3 files" are just starting to get going by word of mouth. At that point, there was still time for the industry to figure out how to ride that wave. Instead, they stood on beach and first wagged their fingers and then started desperately firing heavy weapons it. The tsunami barely noticed and didn't care.
Is KDE's cross-platform approach going to backfire?
Not on KDE it won't. Being able to run on other platforms will simply gain them new users and alternatives already exist for most everything KDE provides. To the extent that KDE is a 'nix desktop, it may be bad for eventual mindshare on Solaris, BSD, and Linux but I doubt any such hit will be all that bad. It isn't like 'nix users are all on KDE anyway so I believe cross-platform KDE is more likely to act as a bridge to 'nix rather than from it.
It doesn't sound like KWin is coming to other platforms either as it is still an X11 window manager. What IS being ported is the KDE backend frameworks and apps. So no kwin or kde panels but one WILL be able to run things like Konqueror, Amarok, and KOffice once the ports are sorted out.
Companies like MySQL AB and I assume Trolltech require copyright assignment for any contribution they accept. So no one gets "exploited" that way. Since you presumably don't like a company like MySQL alternately licensing work you do in the community spirit, I presume that you would contribute to some other project instead.
Myself, I prefer to use wholly community based projects when possible but I won't necessarily turn my nose up at a MySQL. Those who are primarily concerned with bugs still have options that wholly closed alternatives do not. The project also has hedges against the company dying or turning evil so I still count such corporate Open Source as an overall win.
MySQL also has alternative licensing so companies can build proprietary products using MySQL as the engine. I wasn't seeing much mention of that in the comments.
It goes back further than the Sixties. I believe it is a hangover from this country's early history. Way back when, the US had a primarily agriculture based economy centered on family farms. Time spent in school was heavily begrudged because those kids could have been working on the farm. Furthermore, we weren't a terribly literate country then either and "book larnin'" was of no help on unautomated farms operating on a sustenance basis.
Unfortunately, aspects of the attitude persisted through industrialization and urbanization of the country. Cartoons from the forties and fifties had some nerd-bashing in them too and you can see American sterotypes towards educated people well before that.
You're correct about one thing though: Other cultures don't have this attitude towards intelligence and education and will cheerfully eat our lunch for us. As Chris Rock put it, "'I'm keeping it reaaaaaaaalll!'"
One of Pratchett's books talked about "stygium". It was a metal blacker than anything else in the Discworld and would incandescence and melt seconds after exposure to direct sunlight. I don't think this stuff would do that but if the spectrum is wide on this stuff, you could make some nice solar water heaters out of it.
When I was in the Army deployed to Iraq they told us that they had to scan our computers before we left to look for secrets and obscene material. Well this made me very angry so first I offered my services to a few friends and setup truecrypt volumes for them. Then I took a picture of myself flipping off a camera, labeled them things like Fuck Me hard(several different variations on that theme) and distributed 30,000 copies all over my hdd.
Just curious. Weren't you a little worried that you might have gotten fucked over a bit for those shenanagans? I applaud your feisty spirit but ranking officers and non-coms have options for screwing with you that aren't available to the typical PHB. It isn't like they have to court martial you or anything to give you a bad time.
My Dad was in the Army in the late fifties. He had a few ways of screwing with them too. All of the guys were griping because inspecting Sergeants liked to poke the soldiers at attention in the nose with the hard brims of their hats. Dad had everyone spread on a super-thin layer of Vaseline where they liked to jab with those hat brims. Jabbing one guy wouldn't stain a brim but jabbing a whole platoon would and it wouldn't be immediately noticeable by the Sarge. "And then some officer would get to chew him out for a stained hat after chewing us!"
Inspecting officers and non-coms were also fond of measuring the exact placement of collar insignia. They had to be within some fraction of an inch on the lapels. So Dad had them put the insignia just inside regulation boundaries but each man would do it in a completely different direction from the man next to him. So when you looked down a line of men at attention, those collar insignia were all over the place yet when measured they were within regulation. Basically, if you gave Dad a small fraction of inch he found a way to turn it into a mile.
Come the mid 90s, however, neither IBM or Apple still had the market share or influence to anoint HiFD, LS120, Zip etc. as the successor.
Zip did better than any of those others and had a five year or so window where it could have been the proverbial "it". Zip was it's own worst enemy and was done in by the "click of death". Once a clicky drive tried to destroy some of my backups, I hastily transferred it to CD-R and I used CD-R in place of Zips until USB flash and external hard drives came into their own. Though I wasn't burned, I knew some people who got nailed by "Jaz" drives as well.
How would you make money with this as a purely closed source app? To make money as a closed source app, it has to have some polish and depth of functionality out of the box. You'll have to put it into it precisely what you say there isn't time or energy for. Implicit in making it a FOSS app is the hope that others will supply some of that time or energy but you have to trade off at least some of the personal exclusivity you could enjoy if you keep it proprietary.
If you go some sort of FOSS route then is there any data this applications depends on to run. Financial apps in many domains have to be aware of tax rates or some sort of other specific data that has to be compiled for it to be useful. Compiling that data and keeping it current is at least as big a job as writing the code. If your app is in that category, then I suggest opening the code and charging for the domain specific data it needs to be useful.
I've had multiple Debian and Debian derivative installs last through years of my installing, removing, trying things out, and just generally being mean to the system. I've had to fix minor package manager faults but that wasn't anything like the trouble I've had manually managing dependencies and cruft on non-Debian based systems. For the most part, Debian's package maintenance systems Just Work.
I've built several things from Sid on Ubuntu Gutsy by following these instructions from Debian's FAQ:
7.13 How do I install a source package?
Debian source packages can't actually be "installed", they are just unpacked in whatever directory you want to build the binary packages they produce.
Source packages are distributed on most of the same mirrors where you can obtain the binary packages. If you set up your APT's sources.list(5) to include the appropriate "deb-src" lines, you'll be able to easily download any source packages by running
apt-get source foo
To help you in actually building the source package, Debian source package provide the so-called build-dependencies mechanism. This means that the source package maintainer keeps a list of other packages that are required to build their package. To see how this is useful, run
apt-get build-dep foo
before building the source.
If you want just to compile the package, you may cd into foo-version directory and issue the command
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
to build the package (note that this also requires the fakeroot package), and then
I'm inviting a flame war here, but isn't math - at least in the sense that we teach it - an artificial construct that we invented to describe our observations? Math can contain theories, but I don't think it could ever be classified as one because we actually know what it is.
If math is anything, it's just bloody minded self consistency. So-called "pure math" doesn't have to describe anything. With any math, you state a set of axioms that don't contradict each other and then run with them. Differing sets of axioms can contradict others. The "plane geometry" many of us learned in HS isn't the only one for instance.
If we "encode" our observations of the natural world to create axioms, then we can use mathematical tools to create scientific models. Most importantly we can model things that don't map well to everyday workaday experience or just don't lend themselves to spoken language well. Nothing stops you from describing a universe completely different from ours and perhaps impossible in an absolute sense. Properly executed math will describe that world as well as ours as long as the system is self-consistent.
Math is often a tool of science but it is not itself science.
A mild irony is that the keyboard on its Atari 800 big brother was quite good. While we're on the subject of Atari keyboards, the keyboard on the Atari ST deserves at least an honorable mention in this worst of list. The layout wasn't insane. The suckiness of this keyboard was both subtle and gross. On the gross side, they had a very mushy feel with no tactile feedback. The most popular hardware upgrade for the ST back in the day was a set of "MegaTouch Springz" to stiffen up the keyboard. The subtle part was the dimension and spacing of the keys themselves. They were a tad square and large and about 1mm too much space between them. My hands are tad large so I never noticed but more than one small handed magazine reviewer noticed.
This parent of an autistic child became a hard boiled skeptic on "miracle cures" like chelation very quickly. Some autistics DO respond favorably to a restricted diet but but by no means all. The only thing that I'm convinced works consistently is intensive structured activities. I'm honestly not sure whether or under what conditions thimerosal is harmful. Even if it isn't terribly harmful to adults, I have severe doubts about pumping large amounts of it into very small very young bodies. It is true that correlation isn't causation but some of our child's most heartbreaking regressions came shortly after vaccines. It is very very easy to be blasé about such things if you aren't faced with parenting such a child and if you are it is very very easy to agonize over whether something you allowed to happen damaged your child.
I also wonder whether the vaccines themselves aggravate a tendency towards autism disorders. Thimerosal may well be a red herring masking something real. Our kids get hep-b shots pumped into them immediately after birth and a whole rainbow of shots come in the first year. Vaccinating is done much more aggressively then when I was a kid. 20 or 30 years ago, many of these shots weren't given until between the ages of 4 and 6. The most critical neurological developments take place in the first five years of life and it is only recently that we started vaccinating the hell out of kids that young.
When my child was less than a year old and we were new parents, it seemed to me that the relative risk of disease versus negative effects of vaccines favored getting the shots. We've had a lot of anguish over whether that was the right thing to do. So I'm no conspiracy theorist but you might want to try a mile in these shoes before dismissing concerns about vaccines so readily.
You might remember Tipper Gore's campaign on hollywood and game violence.
Not especially but my memory on the subject of "porn rock" is very very long indeed.
Re:I still want AAC - AAC vs. MP3
on
Sony BMG Dropping DRM
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I'm curious. What makes LAME "crappy"? I don't know about low-bitrates like 128kbit and lower but I've done alt-preset-extreme VBRs with it for years and those mp3s sound as good as anything else I've heard. Even with decent amps and speakers, they sound about as good as the CDs I made them from. I'll grant the filesize is a tad large but all the music I've been collecting for 18 odd years still fits under 20GB.
A computer can't simulate itself but it can simulate an identical machine running it's own instances of software. It's slower but if the clock on the simulated machine is allowed to keep it's own time then processes running on it wouldn't even see the difference. The operator of both real and simulated machines can see that the simulation is slower but processes within the simulation can experience a wholly consistent "real time" of their own.
In the same vein, if the universe IS a simulation that doesn't stop us from modeling and simulating either a universe that follows the same rules as ours or another universe entirely. This is yet another way that things are turtles all the way up and down.
If you still have one of your old Commodore 64 disk drives then you can cable the drive to your PC and create images of the C-64 disks and use them in an emulator.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the mainstream religions seemed to have started out cults. A young feisty cult has few members so tends to demand more both financially and personally. For the cult to grow it has to moderate both its demands and dogma. Most people seem to be looking for a sense of belonging and surety about "the hard questions" but aren't willing to disregard workaday sensibilities in the process. So you have most people belonging to long established religions that themselves have adapted to what society will tolerate and indeed become part of "the establishment" themselves.
Scientology seems to want it both ways. They want both a large membership and extreme commitments from their parishioners. In time, they could follow the path of the Mormons before them but the current leadership is incapable of it. Furthermore, their "innermost teachings" are a common and easy target of ridicule. So they have a hard row to hoe to become a mainstream religion. I wouldn't say it is impossible but they'll need to retconn the whole Xenu thing and give up their addiction to every last bit of cash they can hard sell out of their members.
The other truth in what you say is that music as a business will be lots of little pies with lots of slices for everybody. What is making the big labels nutz is that centralized control of what's coming is a lot harder. If anything, with the RIAA goons out of way music will likely be an even bigger industry. Things like payola for radio stations meant that the big labels got richer but it also meant that local guys that might have gotten a chance once no longer do. But for kids these days, the radio is irrelevant. And that local guy can buy some webhosting or just have a really snazzy MySpace page.
Besides the politician buying and other forms of thuggery these crooks have engaged in, I'll tell you another reason why I don't feel sorry for these guys. As a teen in the mid-eighties, I thought about how neat it would be to have music on a computerized device that was entirely solid state. Given the state of things then I knew it was impractical but given enough memory, miniaturization, and processing power music without physical media was obvious to me even then. After all, digital sampling was starting to be used to create music wasn't it? Roll forward ten years or so and "mp3 files" are just starting to get going by word of mouth. At that point, there was still time for the industry to figure out how to ride that wave. Instead, they stood on beach and first wagged their fingers and then started desperately firing heavy weapons it. The tsunami barely noticed and didn't care.
Is KDE's cross-platform approach going to backfire?
Not on KDE it won't. Being able to run on other platforms will simply gain them new users and alternatives already exist for most everything KDE provides. To the extent that KDE is a 'nix desktop, it may be bad for eventual mindshare on Solaris, BSD, and Linux but I doubt any such hit will be all that bad. It isn't like 'nix users are all on KDE anyway so I believe cross-platform KDE is more likely to act as a bridge to 'nix rather than from it.It doesn't sound like KWin is coming to other platforms either as it is still an X11 window manager. What IS being ported is the KDE backend frameworks and apps. So no kwin or kde panels but one WILL be able to run things like Konqueror, Amarok, and KOffice once the ports are sorted out.
Companies like MySQL AB and I assume Trolltech require copyright assignment for any contribution they accept. So no one gets "exploited" that way. Since you presumably don't like a company like MySQL alternately licensing work you do in the community spirit, I presume that you would contribute to some other project instead.
Myself, I prefer to use wholly community based projects when possible but I won't necessarily turn my nose up at a MySQL. Those who are primarily concerned with bugs still have options that wholly closed alternatives do not. The project also has hedges against the company dying or turning evil so I still count such corporate Open Source as an overall win.
MySQL also has alternative licensing so companies can build proprietary products using MySQL as the engine. I wasn't seeing much mention of that in the comments.
It goes back further than the Sixties. I believe it is a hangover from this country's early history. Way back when, the US had a primarily agriculture based economy centered on family farms. Time spent in school was heavily begrudged because those kids could have been working on the farm. Furthermore, we weren't a terribly literate country then either and "book larnin'" was of no help on unautomated farms operating on a sustenance basis.
Unfortunately, aspects of the attitude persisted through industrialization and urbanization of the country. Cartoons from the forties and fifties had some nerd-bashing in them too and you can see American sterotypes towards educated people well before that.
You're correct about one thing though: Other cultures don't have this attitude towards intelligence and education and will cheerfully eat our lunch for us. As Chris Rock put it, "'I'm keeping it reaaaaaaaalll!'"
"Yeah!, Real dumb!"
It's like hiring a lawyer. Nobody likes lawyers but you need their services occasionally.
One of Pratchett's books talked about "stygium". It was a metal blacker than anything else in the Discworld and would incandescence and melt seconds after exposure to direct sunlight. I don't think this stuff would do that but if the spectrum is wide on this stuff, you could make some nice solar water heaters out of it.
When I was in the Army deployed to Iraq they told us that they had to scan our computers before we left to look for secrets and obscene material. Well this made me very angry so first I offered my services to a few friends and setup truecrypt volumes for them. Then I took a picture of myself flipping off a camera, labeled them things like Fuck Me hard(several different variations on that theme) and distributed 30,000 copies all over my hdd.
Just curious. Weren't you a little worried that you might have gotten fucked over a bit for those shenanagans? I applaud your feisty spirit but ranking officers and non-coms have options for screwing with you that aren't available to the typical PHB. It isn't like they have to court martial you or anything to give you a bad time.My Dad was in the Army in the late fifties. He had a few ways of screwing with them too. All of the guys were griping because inspecting Sergeants liked to poke the soldiers at attention in the nose with the hard brims of their hats. Dad had everyone spread on a super-thin layer of Vaseline where they liked to jab with those hat brims. Jabbing one guy wouldn't stain a brim but jabbing a whole platoon would and it wouldn't be immediately noticeable by the Sarge. "And then some officer would get to chew him out for a stained hat after chewing us!"
Inspecting officers and non-coms were also fond of measuring the exact placement of collar insignia. They had to be within some fraction of an inch on the lapels. So Dad had them put the insignia just inside regulation boundaries but each man would do it in a completely different direction from the man next to him. So when you looked down a line of men at attention, those collar insignia were all over the place yet when measured they were within regulation. Basically, if you gave Dad a small fraction of inch he found a way to turn it into a mile.
Come the mid 90s, however, neither IBM or Apple still had the market share or influence to anoint HiFD, LS120, Zip etc. as the successor.
Zip did better than any of those others and had a five year or so window where it could have been the proverbial "it". Zip was it's own worst enemy and was done in by the "click of death". Once a clicky drive tried to destroy some of my backups, I hastily transferred it to CD-R and I used CD-R in place of Zips until USB flash and external hard drives came into their own. Though I wasn't burned, I knew some people who got nailed by "Jaz" drives as well.How would you make money with this as a purely closed source app? To make money as a closed source app, it has to have some polish and depth of functionality out of the box. You'll have to put it into it precisely what you say there isn't time or energy for. Implicit in making it a FOSS app is the hope that others will supply some of that time or energy but you have to trade off at least some of the personal exclusivity you could enjoy if you keep it proprietary.
If you go some sort of FOSS route then is there any data this applications depends on to run. Financial apps in many domains have to be aware of tax rates or some sort of other specific data that has to be compiled for it to be useful. Compiling that data and keeping it current is at least as big a job as writing the code. If your app is in that category, then I suggest opening the code and charging for the domain specific data it needs to be useful.
I've had multiple Debian and Debian derivative installs last through years of my installing, removing, trying things out, and just generally being mean to the system. I've had to fix minor package manager faults but that wasn't anything like the trouble I've had manually managing dependencies and cruft on non-Debian based systems. For the most part, Debian's package maintenance systems Just Work.
I've built several things from Sid on Ubuntu Gutsy by following these instructions from Debian's FAQ:
../foo_version-revision_arch.deb
7.13 How do I install a source package?
Debian source packages can't actually be "installed", they are just unpacked in whatever directory you want to build the binary packages they produce.
Source packages are distributed on most of the same mirrors where you can obtain the binary packages. If you set up your APT's sources.list(5) to include the appropriate "deb-src" lines, you'll be able to easily download any source packages by running
apt-get source foo
To help you in actually building the source package, Debian source package provide the so-called build-dependencies mechanism. This means that the source package maintainer keeps a list of other packages that are required to build their package. To see how this is useful, run
apt-get build-dep foo
before building the source.
If you want just to compile the package, you may cd into foo-version directory and issue the command
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
to build the package (note that this also requires the fakeroot package), and then
dpkg -i
to install the newly-built package(s).
I'm inviting a flame war here, but isn't math - at least in the sense that we teach it - an artificial construct that we invented to describe our observations? Math can contain theories, but I don't think it could ever be classified as one because we actually know what it is.
If math is anything, it's just bloody minded self consistency. So-called "pure math" doesn't have to describe anything. With any math, you state a set of axioms that don't contradict each other and then run with them. Differing sets of axioms can contradict others. The "plane geometry" many of us learned in HS isn't the only one for instance.
If we "encode" our observations of the natural world to create axioms, then we can use mathematical tools to create scientific models. Most importantly we can model things that don't map well to everyday workaday experience or just don't lend themselves to spoken language well. Nothing stops you from describing a universe completely different from ours and perhaps impossible in an absolute sense. Properly executed math will describe that world as well as ours as long as the system is self-consistent.
Math is often a tool of science but it is not itself science.
Try these guys:
http://www.best-electronics-ca.com/520_1040.htm
You have played Guitar Hero long enough to earn one million points!
YOU
ARE
FAGS!
A mild irony is that the keyboard on its Atari 800 big brother was quite good. While we're on the subject of Atari keyboards, the keyboard on the Atari ST deserves at least an honorable mention in this worst of list. The layout wasn't insane. The suckiness of this keyboard was both subtle and gross. On the gross side, they had a very mushy feel with no tactile feedback. The most popular hardware upgrade for the ST back in the day was a set of "MegaTouch Springz" to stiffen up the keyboard. The subtle part was the dimension and spacing of the keys themselves. They were a tad square and large and about 1mm too much space between them. My hands are tad large so I never noticed but more than one small handed magazine reviewer noticed.
Also, don't ever underestimate the bandwidth potential of a pack of blank DVDs and a parcel post.
Yeah, but the latency is just awful.
This parent of an autistic child became a hard boiled skeptic on "miracle cures" like chelation very quickly. Some autistics DO respond favorably to a restricted diet but but by no means all. The only thing that I'm convinced works consistently is intensive structured activities. I'm honestly not sure whether or under what conditions thimerosal is harmful. Even if it isn't terribly harmful to adults, I have severe doubts about pumping large amounts of it into very small very young bodies. It is true that correlation isn't causation but some of our child's most heartbreaking regressions came shortly after vaccines. It is very very easy to be blasé about such things if you aren't faced with parenting such a child and if you are it is very very easy to agonize over whether something you allowed to happen damaged your child.
I also wonder whether the vaccines themselves aggravate a tendency towards autism disorders. Thimerosal may well be a red herring masking something real. Our kids get hep-b shots pumped into them immediately after birth and a whole rainbow of shots come in the first year. Vaccinating is done much more aggressively then when I was a kid. 20 or 30 years ago, many of these shots weren't given until between the ages of 4 and 6. The most critical neurological developments take place in the first five years of life and it is only recently that we started vaccinating the hell out of kids that young.
When my child was less than a year old and we were new parents, it seemed to me that the relative risk of disease versus negative effects of vaccines favored getting the shots. We've had a lot of anguish over whether that was the right thing to do. So I'm no conspiracy theorist but you might want to try a mile in these shoes before dismissing concerns about vaccines so readily.
Amazingly
networksolutionsofficersshouldrotinjail.com
was available then unavailable. Stinking autosquatters, I was going to register that
You might remember Tipper Gore's campaign on hollywood and game violence.
Not especially but my memory on the subject of "porn rock" is very very long indeed.
I'm curious. What makes LAME "crappy"? I don't know about low-bitrates like 128kbit and lower but I've done alt-preset-extreme VBRs with it for years and those mp3s sound as good as anything else I've heard. Even with decent amps and speakers, they sound about as good as the CDs I made them from. I'll grant the filesize is a tad large but all the music I've been collecting for 18 odd years still fits under 20GB.
A computer can't simulate itself but it can simulate an identical machine running it's own instances of software. It's slower but if the clock on the simulated machine is allowed to keep it's own time then processes running on it wouldn't even see the difference. The operator of both real and simulated machines can see that the simulation is slower but processes within the simulation can experience a wholly consistent "real time" of their own.
In the same vein, if the universe IS a simulation that doesn't stop us from modeling and simulating either a universe that follows the same rules as ours or another universe entirely. This is yet another way that things are turtles all the way up and down.
If you still have one of your old Commodore 64 disk drives then you can cable the drive to your PC and create images of the C-64 disks and use them in an emulator.
http://sta.c64.org/xcables.html
There are options for your Amiga floppies as well:
http://www.amigaforever.com/kb/3-118.html