The question is: who needs those services, and for how long will anyone need them? (Has MTV actually started playing music videos again?:)) People already know they can get music from the net; is it really that big a step to finding out about new artists via the net rather than from the Evil companies?
On the contrary; it's hard to actually generate random sequences, and examples people generate by hand may not be random enough to really test the hypothesis. (Any links to the original paper to see how they scrambled the letters?)
Also, short words are easy to unscramble (n! grows very quickly), so potentially, verbiage of sesquipedalian raconteurs subverts attempts to render permuted renditions thereof intelligible.
"If the best features of BeOS live on in Linux I do see that as a benifit but what gain is there in spending the time and effort in reviving a dead horse?"
It's their choice. They could be out flying ultralights or customizing cars instead (and in some ways your question is like "Why refurbish that 56 Chevy?"), but they choose to make an Open Source BeOS clone instead, or whatever. (Some folks I know are working on getting TCP/IP going on the Tandy CoCo 3. Why not? If nothing else, I can then ftp my CoCo's hard drive's contents over to my Linux box for backup or so I can emulate the CoCo under MESS.) Who is any of us to kvetch about how other people spend their spare time, if it hurts nobody?
Since it's open source, the best features can end up in Linux. Second, there's nothing like a labor of love for motivation (OK, for voluntary motivation). How many programmers might be cutting their teeth on device drivers or file systems or kernels doing this work? What they learn will serve them well in the future--and some of them may turn their attention to Linux.
Nothing's stopping you. In fact, if a bunch of people do that, that will just feed the economy of scale, which will even help the people who will be running AmigaOS on it.
...why would you be listening to internet radio continuously? Wouldn't it grate on your nerves after a while? And, don't you have an FM radio? Or a stereo? Or cable TV?
Have you listened to FM radio lately? It's become the "vast wasteland" that Newton Minow once called TV. And even with a large CD collection, you'd burn out on your home stereo sooner than you would internet radio.
If you've got a contract for a set price for a set amount of bandwith, the fuckers should honor it.
That's a pretty big if. I urge you to go check out the terms of service of the cable companies' "broadband" services. They read much like EULAs; in fact, I think that they could be down 100% of the time and you still wouldn't have any basis for complaint under the terms of service.
The ISP I use explicitly says that they make no guarantees whatsoever:
OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE,
AS TO LACK OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL ELEMENTS,
AS TO THE SECURITY OF CUSTOMER'S OR ANY USER'S COMPUTER, NETWORK, SYSTEMS, FILES OR DATA,
AS TO ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS OR SECURITY OF DATA, INFORMATION, RESPONSES OR RESULTS,
AS TO THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THE SERVICE TO ANY DESCRIPTION,
OF TITLE OR NON-INFRINGEMENT,
OF ADEQUACY OR SUTIABILITY OF THE SERVICE TO MEET CUSTOMER'S OR ANY USER'S NEEDS OR REQUIREMENTS,
THAT ANY SOFTWARE OR TECHNOLOGY, INCLUDING ANY ANTI-VIRUS, SECURITY, PARENTAL CONTROL OR BLOCKING OR FILTERING SOFTWARE, THAT MEDIACOM, IN ITS SOLE DISCRETION, MAKES AVAILABLE FOR USE IN CONNECTI0N WITH THE SERVICE WILL BE EFFECTIVE;
THAT THE SERVICE OR ANY RELATED EQUIPMENT, SOFTWARE OR OTHER ITEM WILL OPERATE ERROR FREE, OR IN AN UNINTERRUPTED FASHION, OR THAT ANY DEFECTS OR ERRORS WILL BE CORRECTED,
THAT THE SERVICE, EQUIPMENT OR SOFTWARE IS COMPATIBLE WITH ANY PARTICULAR OPERATING SYSTEM, PLATFORM OR OTHER EQUIPMENT OR SOFTWARE,
THAT ANY COMMUNICATION, DATA OR FILE SENT BY OR SOUGHT TO BE ACCESSED BY CUSTOMER OR ANY USER WILL BE TRANSMITTED OR RECEIVED SUCCESSFULLY, AT ANY PARTICULAR SPEED, WITHIN ANY PERIOD OF TIME, WITHOUT INTERRUPTION OR IN UNCORRUPTED FORM, OR
IMPLIED OR RESULTING FROM COURSE OF DEALING OR COURSE OF PERFORMANCE.
(the upper case is in the original)
I especially like the "correspondence of the service to any description." Sounds like they are saying that they can lie through their teeth about the service, and you have no legal recourse. Lord knows the instant access they show on the ads has minimal correspondence with reality.
Sure. Aside from the first PClonish computer I ever had (a NexGen, and since AMD bought them and used the technology in the K6 and Athlon, even that is arguable in a way)--and a Cyrix long ago, come to think of it--all the PClones I've bought have been AMD-based. Counting hand-me-downs, that would be half a dozen, four of which are sitting within a yard and a half of me as I type, churning merrily away.
First, the most motivated worker is the one whose job is on the line, like it or not.
Bullshit. I was the most motivated when I worked insane hours for a company that made something that I believed in. That company was bought, and I was laid off.
It's hard to be motivated and dedicated when you're wondering when the knife in the back will come next time and thinking about how to be ready for the next job.
I'm not familiar enough with Niven's work to say, but there is a chance that you're thinking of Asimov's "The Dying Night," in the Earth is Room Enough anthology.
Now (in theory) blogs will be a lot more literate - or at least slightly less illiterate.
No, it's just that the illiteracy will be of a different sort; computer-aided, so to speak. A spell checker won't save people who confuse "there," "their," and "they're" or "its" and "it's," use "loose" where they mean "lose," or use apostrophes for plurals.
Do a web search for "my tail is dun." I burned out on the Xanth series long ago, but I would love to see that little scene from Centaur Aisle handed to everyone entering junior high. Humor drives points home very well indeed.
Science fiction used to be fantasy, an esape from reality.
Eh? Time to go back and read volume one of Before the Golden Age, edited by the Good Doctor himself. He comments on precisely this issue, after a story from the 1920s that brings up the issue of depletion of natural resources. Some escapism it is that makes people think about important matters forty years before the general public catches on.
People are able to rationalize a lot. I know I'm tripping over Godwin's Law, but it's going to take the equivalent of the "good Germans" being taken on concentration camp tours to drive home to MS employees the evil that they have participated in.
It's not at all clear that the average person will create, if not a masterwork, then at least something that people will on the whole consider worthwhile.
I recall a fellow where I used to live who, when I passed him on the street, would tell me at great length about what he was doing. It didn't take much listening before I realized that his "extensive research" was unlikely to turn up much, and that his connection to the world as we know it was very different from mine to say the least.
So...will all these people funded with $25K/year be churning out best-sellers or writing the Great American Program, or dementedly chasing windmills and pseudoscience... or, perhaps more likely, settle into a "bread and circuses"-enabled stupor?
Remember, or ever heard of the Monkees? A band that was put together for how they look, had music written for them etc.
What's so wonderful about writing your own songs? Division of labor is a fine thing in other fields; if I were a singer I'd want to sing the best songs, and if I were a songwriter I'd want the best singers to sing my songs. I listen to Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Torme even when they sing other people's songs, and I'd be the poorer for it if I couldn't.
For that matter, honesty compels me to say that many of those songs the Monkees performed are far more musically interesting than much of the pop music of today, which appears to be based on endlessly repeating a two-bar phrase and chord progression (save where they're sampling a riff from an oldie).
Yes, but... to some extent, SF needs something like the fictional "Rule of One" in Lloyd Biggle Jr.'s wonderful The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets, so that you only get one contrafactual frammistan per story. No dei ex machina...it's called playing fair with the audience.
Yup. I spent two and a half years at the part of Bell Labs where they make phone switches...and later on saw, alas, Lawnmower Man. I had to restrain myself from standing up in the theater at the end and yelling out, "That's BS! Phone switches have a limited number of ringer circuits because very few phones ring at any one time! Jobe can't make every phone ring simultaneously!"
I agree with you wholeheartedly that the income tax needs to die immediately, and the Sixteenth Amendment must be repealed to put the stake through its heart; moreover, paying for health care and education is not the business of government...but to some extent that 1895 test is a canard.
- As you can see from the text of the test, the rules for capital letters have changed a lot since the test was written; it's not at all clear that there are nine rules for them nowadays. - As a former math major, I'd say it's less important to know what some text calls "the fundamental rules of arithmetic" than to actually know how to do arithmetic. Being able to regurgitate the rules upon command requires no understanding. - In 1895 in an agricultural state, it was probably important to know conversions between obscure units and the density of wheat. I hope that we'll eventually switch to metric so that we needn't have to worry about kings' feet and arms and thumbs, and lengths of furrows. - Simple or compound interest? The question about the loan doesn't give sufficient data. - It would be interesting to know what the test writer thought the "elementary sounds" are; English has, if memory serves, forty-odd phonemes, but perhaps the answer they were looking for is equivalent to the number of characters in the IPA.
Slashdot Mirror
Three words: Metal Machine Music.
The question is: who needs those services, and for how long will anyone need them? (Has MTV actually started playing music videos again? :)) People already know they can get music from the net; is it really that big a step to finding out about new artists via the net rather than from the Evil companies?
I doubt you'll find good music that doesn't make you shake sumthang.
I infer that you don't think "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" is good music, or Tibetan monks chanting...
Not just killer metallic salt and pepper shakers, but killer metallic salt and pepper shakers that would rule the universe were it not for stairs.
On the contrary; it's hard to actually generate random sequences, and examples people generate by hand may not be random enough to really test the hypothesis. (Any links to the original paper to see how they scrambled the letters?)
Also, short words are easy to unscramble (n! grows very quickly), so potentially, verbiage of sesquipedalian raconteurs subverts attempts to render permuted renditions thereof intelligible.
"If the best features of BeOS live on in Linux I do see that as a benifit but what gain is there in spending the time and effort in reviving a dead horse?"
It's their choice. They could be out flying ultralights or customizing cars instead (and in some ways your question is like "Why refurbish that 56 Chevy?"), but they choose to make an Open Source BeOS clone instead, or whatever. (Some folks I know are working on getting TCP/IP going on the Tandy CoCo 3. Why not? If nothing else, I can then ftp my CoCo's hard drive's contents over to my Linux box for backup or so I can emulate the CoCo under MESS.) Who is any of us to kvetch about how other people spend their spare time, if it hurts nobody?
Since it's open source, the best features can end up in Linux. Second, there's nothing like a labor of love for motivation (OK, for voluntary motivation). How many programmers might be cutting their teeth on device drivers or file systems or kernels doing this work? What they learn will serve them well in the future--and some of them may turn their attention to Linux.
Nothing's stopping you. In fact, if a bunch of people do that, that will just feed the economy of scale, which will even help the people who will be running AmigaOS on it.
...why would you be listening to internet radio continuously? Wouldn't it grate on your nerves after a while? And, don't you have an FM radio? Or a stereo? Or cable TV?
Have you listened to FM radio lately? It's become the "vast wasteland" that Newton Minow once called TV. And even with a large CD collection, you'd burn out on your home stereo sooner than you would internet radio.
If you've got a contract for a set price for a set amount of bandwith, the fuckers should honor it.
That's a pretty big if. I urge you to go check out the terms of service of the cable companies' "broadband" services. They read much like EULAs; in fact, I think that they could be down 100% of the time and you still wouldn't have any basis for complaint under the terms of service.
The ISP I use explicitly says that they make no guarantees whatsoever:
OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE,
AS TO LACK OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL ELEMENTS,
AS TO THE SECURITY OF CUSTOMER'S OR ANY USER'S COMPUTER, NETWORK, SYSTEMS, FILES OR DATA,
AS TO ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS OR SECURITY OF DATA, INFORMATION, RESPONSES OR RESULTS,
AS TO THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THE SERVICE TO ANY DESCRIPTION,
OF TITLE OR NON-INFRINGEMENT,
OF ADEQUACY OR SUTIABILITY OF THE SERVICE TO MEET CUSTOMER'S OR ANY USER'S NEEDS OR REQUIREMENTS,
THAT ANY SOFTWARE OR TECHNOLOGY, INCLUDING ANY ANTI-VIRUS, SECURITY, PARENTAL CONTROL OR BLOCKING OR FILTERING SOFTWARE, THAT MEDIACOM, IN ITS SOLE DISCRETION, MAKES AVAILABLE FOR USE IN CONNECTI0N WITH THE SERVICE WILL BE EFFECTIVE;
THAT THE SERVICE OR ANY RELATED EQUIPMENT, SOFTWARE OR OTHER ITEM WILL OPERATE ERROR FREE, OR IN AN UNINTERRUPTED FASHION, OR THAT ANY DEFECTS OR ERRORS WILL BE CORRECTED,
THAT THE SERVICE, EQUIPMENT OR SOFTWARE IS COMPATIBLE WITH ANY PARTICULAR OPERATING SYSTEM, PLATFORM OR OTHER EQUIPMENT OR SOFTWARE,
THAT ANY COMMUNICATION, DATA OR FILE SENT BY OR SOUGHT TO BE ACCESSED BY CUSTOMER OR ANY USER WILL BE TRANSMITTED OR RECEIVED SUCCESSFULLY, AT ANY PARTICULAR SPEED, WITHIN ANY PERIOD OF TIME, WITHOUT INTERRUPTION OR IN UNCORRUPTED FORM, OR
IMPLIED OR RESULTING FROM COURSE OF DEALING OR COURSE OF PERFORMANCE.
(the upper case is in the original)
I especially like the "correspondence of the service to any description." Sounds like they are saying that they can lie through their teeth about the service, and you have no legal recourse. Lord knows the instant access they show on the ads has minimal correspondence with reality.
Sure. Aside from the first PClonish computer I ever had (a NexGen, and since AMD bought them and used the technology in the K6 and Athlon, even that is arguable in a way)--and a Cyrix long ago, come to think of it--all the PClones I've bought have been AMD-based. Counting hand-me-downs, that would be half a dozen, four of which are sitting within a yard and a half of me as I type, churning merrily away.
First, the most motivated worker is the one whose job is on the line, like it or not.
Bullshit. I was the most motivated when I worked insane hours for a company that made something that I believed in. That company was bought, and I was laid off.
It's hard to be motivated and dedicated when you're wondering when the knife in the back will come next time and thinking about how to be ready for the next job.
I'm not familiar enough with Niven's work to say, but there is a chance that you're thinking of Asimov's "The Dying Night," in the Earth is Room Enough anthology.
No worse than having to look past similar categories of dead tree publication--actually better, because you can let a search engine filter for you.
Now (in theory) blogs will be a lot more literate - or at least slightly less illiterate.
No, it's just that the illiteracy will be of a different sort; computer-aided, so to speak. A spell checker won't save people who confuse "there," "their," and "they're" or "its" and "it's," use "loose" where they mean "lose," or use apostrophes for plurals.
Do a web search for "my tail is dun." I burned out on the Xanth series long ago, but I would love to see that little scene from Centaur Aisle handed to everyone entering junior high. Humor drives points home very well indeed.
Science fiction used to be fantasy, an esape from reality.
Eh? Time to go back and read volume one of Before the Golden Age, edited by the Good Doctor himself. He comments on precisely this issue, after a story from the 1920s that brings up the issue of depletion of natural resources. Some escapism it is that makes people think about important matters forty years before the general public catches on.
...for fellows whom it hurts to think, as A.E. Housman said.
Fantasy is like that. SF done right is hard work, and requires actual thought. People today want escapism.
People are able to rationalize a lot. I know I'm tripping over Godwin's Law, but it's going to take the equivalent of the "good Germans" being taken on concentration camp tours to drive home to MS employees the evil that they have participated in.
That's disingenuous at best. Without the free availability of Linux, those distributions wouldn't be able to get a foot in the door.
People generally wouldn't buy a new computer with an OS they know nothing about.
I'm not sure about that--how many people actually know anything about Windows?
It's not at all clear that the average person will create, if not a masterwork, then at least something that people will on the whole consider worthwhile.
I recall a fellow where I used to live who, when I passed him on the street, would tell me at great length about what he was doing. It didn't take much listening before I realized that his "extensive research" was unlikely to turn up much, and that his connection to the world as we know it was very different from mine to say the least.
So...will all these people funded with $25K/year be churning out best-sellers or writing the Great American Program, or dementedly chasing windmills and pseudoscience... or, perhaps more likely, settle into a "bread and circuses"-enabled stupor?
No human being can shriek for two hours and then be expected to hit high notes with any precision.
Such human beings will end their careers soon enough anyway thanks to larynx abuse. They'd better learn to treat their vocal apparatus decently.
Remember, or ever heard of the Monkees? A band that was put together for how they look, had music written for them etc.
What's so wonderful about writing your own songs? Division of labor is a fine thing in other fields; if I were a singer I'd want to sing the best songs, and if I were a songwriter I'd want the best singers to sing my songs. I listen to Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Torme even when they sing other people's songs, and I'd be the poorer for it if I couldn't.
For that matter, honesty compels me to say that many of those songs the Monkees performed are far more musically interesting than much of the pop music of today, which appears to be based on endlessly repeating a two-bar phrase and chord progression (save where they're sampling a riff from an oldie).
Yes, but... to some extent, SF needs something like the fictional "Rule of One" in Lloyd Biggle Jr.'s wonderful The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets, so that you only get one contrafactual frammistan per story. No dei ex machina...it's called playing fair with the audience.
Why can't people just take a movie for what it is? These aren't documentaries, you know.
Yeah, but my disbelief shouldn't need independent twin I-beam suspension!
Not that it's confined to movies. How 'bout that Mimi belting out an aria while she's dying of tuberculosis?
Yup. I spent two and a half years at the part of Bell Labs where they make phone switches...and later on saw, alas, Lawnmower Man. I had to restrain myself from standing up in the theater at the end and yelling out, "That's BS! Phone switches have a limited number of ringer circuits because very few phones ring at any one time! Jobe can't make every phone ring simultaneously!"
I agree with you wholeheartedly that the income tax needs to die immediately, and the Sixteenth Amendment must be repealed to put the stake through its heart; moreover, paying for health care and education is not the business of government...but to some extent that 1895 test is a canard.
- As you can see from the text of the test, the rules for capital letters have changed a lot since the test was written; it's not at all clear that there are nine rules for them nowadays.
- As a former math major, I'd say it's less important to know what some text calls "the fundamental rules of arithmetic" than to actually know how to do arithmetic. Being able to regurgitate the rules upon command requires no understanding.
- In 1895 in an agricultural state, it was probably important to know conversions between obscure units and the density of wheat. I hope that we'll eventually switch to metric so that we needn't have to worry about kings' feet and arms and thumbs, and lengths of furrows.
- Simple or compound interest? The question about the loan doesn't give sufficient data.
- It would be interesting to know what the test writer thought the "elementary sounds" are; English has, if memory serves, forty-odd phonemes, but perhaps the answer they were looking for is equivalent to the number of characters in the IPA.