Or is it a publisher's nightmare? Authors skipping the usual agent/publisher pipeline are pulling in a far larger percentage of ebook sales than the publishers offer. Now wait until some massively popular author figures that out. Can you imagine Stephanie Meyer excreting a new string of mindless Twilight-related dribble directly to the Kindle, pulling in 70% of sales? She'd make more money than the rest of her books combined.
Don't say that. It's false hope. You don't know that for sure, and neither does anyone else. We still haven't cured the common cold. The best we can do is address the symptoms. Treating Alzheimer may involve just that as well. Treating the symptoms, but not the direct cause.
A better example might be diabetes. Part of the reason why the common cold isn't cured is because generally it's not a big deal (only for people with suppressed immune systems).
Not to mention the common cold is a virus and is not related to Alzheimer's in any way. He might as well say we don't have flying cars yet so how could we cure Alzheimer's?
Wow, how are so many people in this thread wrong in so many different ways?
First of all, they *did* run this competition before, but they are re-running it next month. That's why if you play follow the links you get to the actual contest page and you see this:
We have decided to run the competition for CIG 2011 (in addition to CEC 2012 next year)! We will open the submission server on July 1, 2011; you can then submit and evaluate your controllers. The deadline for final submissions will be August 17, 2011
Second of all, the contest is not just about writing Pac-Man AI, because you can enter ghost team AI as well. It turns out they are using Ms Pac-Man, but the original game's randomness doesn't matter. They've also tweaked certain aspects of the original game for balance, e.g. no slight speedup going around corners.
Now, if they would only provide more language interfaces than just Java, it'd be fantastic. The Google AI challenge last November was awesome and it had tons of languages including Lisp, in which the winning entry was written. If anybody from the contest team is reading this, add C++ or Python, please!
Personally, I have long since ignored local news media outlets because of the level of bias they all seem to carry. There are more choices for national and international news, you can find more sources online and sources based overseas, but here in America most of the media is pushing the same agenda - why would I waste my time watching what are essentially 20 minute news-based political cartoons?
The internet didn't kill local news or newspapers, they killed themselves by deciding to stop reporting news and start shaping and creating news.
My local internet-only news is actually quite good, but the TV news is exactly as you say. There's usually brief segments of news, weather, and sports, followed by the lengthy feature story about how likely I am to be murdered if I sell something on Craigslist or how terrorists can make my computer explode if I share too much personal information on Facebook.
I think perhaps Barnes & Noble gets the idea, people want access to their hardware.
+1. B&N deserves customer loyalty far more than Amazon. For now at least; I could very well end up eating those words once some dipshit bigwig looks at how locked down Kindles are and decides to play follow the leader.
It seems almost custom made for Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles-style games. That was pretty awesome if you had three friends and all of you had gameboy advances and link cables.
Please don't let the only decent linux graphics card vendor (sorry, AMD's still not up to it and intel's not powerful enough) get too much in bed with microsoft.
I know this was true couple years ago, but I was under the impression that this is changing very rapidly, especially if you have a certain subset of cards that are highly supported by the open source AMD driver. I was planning on choosing AMD for my next desktop build, and I'm not saying that just for the whole Freedom thing. I will agree about Intel, though.
Hahahahaha. Good joke. Wyden supports something similar to what this bill does just in a more limited scope. If you thought he did this because he was against the whole idea you are sadly mistaken.
Typically I'm as cynical as anybody else when it comes to politicians, but after voting against bailouts, COICA and now this, Wyden seems like one of the few non-corporate-owned Congressmen left. Though he does support drastically reducing the corporate tax rate, he doesn't bow to their every wish like most of his colleagues. Hopefully he's beaten his prostate cancer and sticks with us for a while.
-Missing mass (not dark matter, but matter which was seen to exist during creation of universe but is now someplace different) turns out to have migrated to filaments that span across the universe.
Sounds like physical philotic rays to me. Is that you, Jane?
Basing your choice of distro entirely on the package system it uses seems a bit short sighted to me. synaptic is definitely better than yumex, but not that much better.
Probably just a comfort thing, plus a bad experience several years ago. My first experience with Linux was Mandrake, and I ran into dependency issues pretty quickly without knowing how to fix them. I hopped around a bit - even trying Gentoo stage 1 - then found Ubuntu way back before the alphabetical days...oh yes, Warty Warthog and it's nudie pictures. As a result of the distro-hopping I was a bit smarter so even though I hit dependency issues I was able to work around them. But the aversion to RPM distros stuck. Of course these days it hardly matters at all what you're using. I go back and forth between apt-get, aptitude, and pacman without any issues except for the occasional forgetting which system I'm on.
As far as I recall it does a step further: there are still a few things in Mono that are not covered by (1) the ECMA standard, (2) Microsoft's promise, or (3) the Novell deal. ASP and ADO.NET for example, and I think Windows Forms. I entirely avoid C# so I forget the list, but I do remember that Microsoft offered no comment when asked about people using these specific parts. I thought, as the GP said, the Mono project was going to offer a minimal distribution that stripped out the offending parts, but it doesn't look like that ever happened.
Well here's the thing, they always were a bunch of small groups. In fact, they are a bunch of individuals that only rarely work together, and only when they feel like it. Each attack that they supposedly launch is only joined by a tiny subset of them, because most of them are just there to share porn. They attack each other and try to trick (i.e. make money off of) each other far more often than they flip on their LOICs and point them at a designated target.
Now don't get me wrong, some of them (e.g. the ones who've used LOIC) are criminals, and all of them are at least a bit shady. But all these news stories saying there is a spokesperson or a public face just makes me laugh.
No mod points today so a simple thank you will have to suffice. I've recently been more and more annoyed at summaries lacking the essential point for the post to make any sense. Maybe I'm just getting old or something.
No, I fully agree, excellent GP post. However, we are still a step ahead of (or is it behind?) several other news websites, where so many interesting-looking article titles turn out to be videos without accompanying text. That pisses me off just thinking about it.
I'm not sure I buy this. Debugging code and designing code are two different skill sets. Granted, you usually pick them up together, but it certainly be possible to be quite skilled at running valgrind and parsing its output, while at the same time having little or no idea of how to put together maintainable non-spaghetti code yourself.
+1 - this is me. I can debug and make small additions/modifications to programs written in several languages, but I haven't really written anything substantial from scratch (and luckily my job doesn't depend on that experience). I've written many small utilities (mostly tinkering with different languages), a few simple games, some PSP homebrew a few years ago, etc. Certainly nothing that has needed a detailed design. Of course I want to and have plans to rectify this, but i tend to spend my leisure time on attainable goals - reading a few chapters of a book or tinkering with my computers or catching up with some friends. The big projects are daunting - I guess that's why the article is saying finding people that can tackle the big projects are the ones to look for.
Well ideally these days we'd be launching interceptors, as opposed to a counterattack. That's why we're pouring money into mid-course missile defense, after all.
"I'm a strong believer in free enterprise, so my natural instinct is to oppose government intervention," he said. But "these are not normal circumstances. The market is not functioning properly. There has been a widespread loss of confidence.
"Without immediate action by Congress, America can slip into a major panic."
"If Congress fails to approve the rescue plan, the nation could face a "long and painful recession," Bush said.
I'm curious if anything has really happened with community development of titles open sourced in the previous two bundles. I'd be interested in checking out community builds.
And while Jack Claw is Windows only in this release, I wonder how long it will take to get ported since the source is being released.
Reading through one of the release announcements there was a guy (joel) who said Jack Claw was initially a windows release but will be released for Linux soon. I'm hoping that's the case myself.
I purchased the bundle and the first thing I downloaded was the Jack Claw source. It includes license terms as follows (lowercase'd for posting):
jack claw source code license
the computer code ("source code") contained herein is the sole property of frozenbyte ltd. ("frozenbyte").
frozenbyte grants to end-users a royalty-free, perpetual license to use, display, modify, distribute and
create derivative works of the source code, so long as such action is for non-commercial, royalty-free
and revenue-free purposes. in no event shall the end-user take any action whereby the source code contained
herein would be used for revenue-bearing purposes. the end-user understands and agrees to the terms herein
and accepts the same by using the source code in any way.
the source code is provided as-is and frozenbyte makes no warranty as to the usability or correctness
of the source code. any use is at your own risk.
frozenbyte retains the right to alter these license terms at any time for any reason.
So it certainly won't be OSI approved anytime soon. I'd be a little wary if I decided I wanted to tinker with the source code and share my findings...for example what if I (far-fetched as it may be) cloned into Github, made it run on Linux, and placed a link on a website with ads? However they go on to say they were mostly taking the CYA approach, and seem to have a good relationship with their community.
Between PayPal, Amazon Payments and Google Checkout, which has the lowest fees (for the payment amount chosen)?
If you pay less than $10, Amazon Payments takes the smallest cut (5% + $0.05). If you pay more than $10 and less than a few thousand dollars, they're all the same (2.9% + $0.30).
Note that this is assuming a normal payment. Wolfire/Humble, Inc. could very well have some business account with reduced fees or something.
Yep, it's an a element with no href attribute, something I've never seen before.
Really? I thought that was the old way to make hyperlinks to different parts of the same HTML document (i.e. <a name="foo">. I'm not sure when the "normal" way switched to using the id tag inside any element.
A larger desktop market share and acceptance by the general population?
Larger desktop share would be nice, but technically I would say Linux (especially the kernel) is accepted by the general population even if they don't know it's Linux running their phone, gps, web page, etc.
Meh, I'm fine with the current desktop Linux marketshare. If 90% of the population want to perform the computing equivalent of diving in front of bullets for me, who am I to stop them?
What's in any theory of "origin of species": based on evolution or Creation, is "demonstrable, repeatable and self-correcting"?
All that theory of origin does is giving theoretical arguments for the belief in origin.
There are no experiments, there is no repetition in "origin". What is being demonstrated that observable picture does not contradict the theory which is now so broad that it would cover every possible paleontological finding.
Only if you plug your ears and listen to mentally incompetent creationists that pretend that evolution means that life should spontaneously erupt from a jar of peanut butter. It's been half a century since scientists first blasted jars of elements and molecules that were very likely to have existed on primordial Earth with electricity and formed amino acids. Since then scientists have been postulating ways RNA and then DNA could have formed from those amino acids - and there are many possibilities. One of the oldest involves Earth being bombarded with untold numbers of meteorites - it's possible that key components of life came to Earth that way: born in conditions that weren't present on Earth. In short, yes, we are working on the origin of life being demonstrable. This is not to mention the possibility of finding life on other planets, which should increase our knowledge exponentially.
As for evolution (if you want to ignore the mountain of evidence of microevolution and the idea that macroevolution is just the extension of it), we are running a perpetual experiment right now. Recorded history is a mere fraction of the time scales required to observe these processes. Write a letter to your descendants 10,000 years from now (assuming our species lives that long) and tell them your beliefs. It always amuses me to think about how primitive we'll look in their eyes.
It's more expensive than a lot of laptops, and almost all netbooks.
A lot of laptops and almost all netbooks cost less that $250???
$250 is for the barebones system: it doesn't even include the motherboard. You have to pay $595 for a fully functional one, unless you can build it cheaper yourself from the barebones.
Actually despite initial reservations, Clinton urged Congress to continue funding it. Congress opted not to do so due to costs associated with developing the ISS.
Unrelated note: if you haven't clicked on TFA, you should. Don't worry, it's mostly pictures.
Slashdot Mirror
Or is it a publisher's nightmare? Authors skipping the usual agent/publisher pipeline are pulling in a far larger percentage of ebook sales than the publishers offer. Now wait until some massively popular author figures that out. Can you imagine Stephanie Meyer excreting a new string of mindless Twilight-related dribble directly to the Kindle, pulling in 70% of sales? She'd make more money than the rest of her books combined.
Don't say that. It's false hope. You don't know that for sure, and neither does anyone else. We still haven't cured the common cold. The best we can do is address the symptoms. Treating Alzheimer may involve just that as well. Treating the symptoms, but not the direct cause.
A better example might be diabetes. Part of the reason why the common cold isn't cured is because generally it's not a big deal (only for people with suppressed immune systems).
Not to mention the common cold is a virus and is not related to Alzheimer's in any way. He might as well say we don't have flying cars yet so how could we cure Alzheimer's?
Wow, how are so many people in this thread wrong in so many different ways?
First of all, they *did* run this competition before, but they are re-running it next month. That's why if you play follow the links you get to the actual contest page and you see this:
We have decided to run the competition for CIG 2011 (in addition to CEC 2012 next year)! We will open the submission server on July 1, 2011; you can then submit and evaluate your controllers. The deadline for final submissions will be August 17, 2011
Second of all, the contest is not just about writing Pac-Man AI, because you can enter ghost team AI as well. It turns out they are using Ms Pac-Man, but the original game's randomness doesn't matter. They've also tweaked certain aspects of the original game for balance, e.g. no slight speedup going around corners.
Now, if they would only provide more language interfaces than just Java, it'd be fantastic. The Google AI challenge last November was awesome and it had tons of languages including Lisp, in which the winning entry was written. If anybody from the contest team is reading this, add C++ or Python, please!
Personally, I have long since ignored local news media outlets because of the level of bias they all seem to carry. There are more choices for national and international news, you can find more sources online and sources based overseas, but here in America most of the media is pushing the same agenda - why would I waste my time watching what are essentially 20 minute news-based political cartoons?
The internet didn't kill local news or newspapers, they killed themselves by deciding to stop reporting news and start shaping and creating news.
My local internet-only news is actually quite good, but the TV news is exactly as you say. There's usually brief segments of news, weather, and sports, followed by the lengthy feature story about how likely I am to be murdered if I sell something on Craigslist or how terrorists can make my computer explode if I share too much personal information on Facebook.
I think perhaps Barnes & Noble gets the idea, people want access to their hardware.
+1. B&N deserves customer loyalty far more than Amazon. For now at least; I could very well end up eating those words once some dipshit bigwig looks at how locked down Kindles are and decides to play follow the leader.
It seems almost custom made for Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles-style games. That was pretty awesome if you had three friends and all of you had gameboy advances and link cables.
Please don't let the only decent linux graphics card vendor (sorry, AMD's still not up to it and intel's not powerful enough) get too much in bed with microsoft.
I know this was true couple years ago, but I was under the impression that this is changing very rapidly, especially if you have a certain subset of cards that are highly supported by the open source AMD driver. I was planning on choosing AMD for my next desktop build, and I'm not saying that just for the whole Freedom thing. I will agree about Intel, though.
A politician who acts based on common sense???
Hahahahaha. Good joke. Wyden supports something similar to what this bill does just in a more limited scope. If you thought he did this because he was against the whole idea you are sadly mistaken.
Typically I'm as cynical as anybody else when it comes to politicians, but after voting against bailouts, COICA and now this, Wyden seems like one of the few non-corporate-owned Congressmen left. Though he does support drastically reducing the corporate tax rate, he doesn't bow to their every wish like most of his colleagues. Hopefully he's beaten his prostate cancer and sticks with us for a while.
-Missing mass (not dark matter, but matter which was seen to exist during creation of universe but is now someplace different) turns out to have migrated to filaments that span across the universe.
Sounds like physical philotic rays to me. Is that you, Jane?
Basing your choice of distro entirely on the package system it uses seems a bit short sighted to me. synaptic is definitely better than yumex, but not that much better.
Probably just a comfort thing, plus a bad experience several years ago. My first experience with Linux was Mandrake, and I ran into dependency issues pretty quickly without knowing how to fix them. I hopped around a bit - even trying Gentoo stage 1 - then found Ubuntu way back before the alphabetical days...oh yes, Warty Warthog and it's nudie pictures. As a result of the distro-hopping I was a bit smarter so even though I hit dependency issues I was able to work around them. But the aversion to RPM distros stuck. Of course these days it hardly matters at all what you're using. I go back and forth between apt-get, aptitude, and pacman without any issues except for the occasional forgetting which system I'm on.
As far as I recall it does a step further: there are still a few things in Mono that are not covered by (1) the ECMA standard, (2) Microsoft's promise, or (3) the Novell deal. ASP and ADO.NET for example, and I think Windows Forms. I entirely avoid C# so I forget the list, but I do remember that Microsoft offered no comment when asked about people using these specific parts. I thought, as the GP said, the Mono project was going to offer a minimal distribution that stripped out the offending parts, but it doesn't look like that ever happened.
Well here's the thing, they always were a bunch of small groups. In fact, they are a bunch of individuals that only rarely work together, and only when they feel like it. Each attack that they supposedly launch is only joined by a tiny subset of them, because most of them are just there to share porn. They attack each other and try to trick (i.e. make money off of) each other far more often than they flip on their LOICs and point them at a designated target.
Now don't get me wrong, some of them (e.g. the ones who've used LOIC) are criminals, and all of them are at least a bit shady. But all these news stories saying there is a spokesperson or a public face just makes me laugh.
No mod points today so a simple thank you will have to suffice. I've recently been more and more annoyed at summaries lacking the essential point for the post to make any sense. Maybe I'm just getting old or something.
No, I fully agree, excellent GP post. However, we are still a step ahead of (or is it behind?) several other news websites, where so many interesting-looking article titles turn out to be videos without accompanying text. That pisses me off just thinking about it.
If everyone buys secondhand, then how will new music filter down into seconhand venues?
That's the point: RIAA artists stop making money so they leave RIAA labels and release their music directly. Everybody* wins.
* As the RIAA is made up of soulless automatons, I figure they don't count as people.
I'm not sure I buy this. Debugging code and designing code are two different skill sets. Granted, you usually pick them up together, but it certainly be possible to be quite skilled at running valgrind and parsing its output, while at the same time having little or no idea of how to put together maintainable non-spaghetti code yourself.
+1 - this is me. I can debug and make small additions/modifications to programs written in several languages, but I haven't really written anything substantial from scratch (and luckily my job doesn't depend on that experience). I've written many small utilities (mostly tinkering with different languages), a few simple games, some PSP homebrew a few years ago, etc. Certainly nothing that has needed a detailed design. Of course I want to and have plans to rectify this, but i tend to spend my leisure time on attainable goals - reading a few chapters of a book or tinkering with my computers or catching up with some friends. The big projects are daunting - I guess that's why the article is saying finding people that can tackle the big projects are the ones to look for.
Well ideally these days we'd be launching interceptors, as opposed to a counterattack. That's why we're pouring money into mid-course missile defense, after all.
Here's a direct quote from this CNN article dated 9/24/2008:
"I'm a strong believer in free enterprise, so my natural instinct is to oppose government intervention," he said. But "these are not normal circumstances. The market is not functioning properly. There has been a widespread loss of confidence.
"Without immediate action by Congress, America can slip into a major panic."
"If Congress fails to approve the rescue plan, the nation could face a "long and painful recession," Bush said.
Oh yeah? I'm fairly certain my high IQ score is the cause of my intelligence.
I'm fairly certain your intelligence is the cause of your high IQ score.
And all this time I thought my intelligence was the cause of my high IQ score.
Flawless double whoosh.
I'm curious if anything has really happened with community development of titles open sourced in the previous two bundles. I'd be interested in checking out community builds.
And while Jack Claw is Windows only in this release, I wonder how long it will take to get ported since the source is being released.
Reading through one of the release announcements there was a guy (joel) who said Jack Claw was initially a windows release but will be released for Linux soon. I'm hoping that's the case myself.
I purchased the bundle and the first thing I downloaded was the Jack Claw source. It includes license terms as follows (lowercase'd for posting):
jack claw source code license
the computer code ("source code") contained herein is the sole property of frozenbyte ltd. ("frozenbyte"). frozenbyte grants to end-users a royalty-free, perpetual license to use, display, modify, distribute and create derivative works of the source code, so long as such action is for non-commercial, royalty-free and revenue-free purposes. in no event shall the end-user take any action whereby the source code contained herein would be used for revenue-bearing purposes. the end-user understands and agrees to the terms herein and accepts the same by using the source code in any way.
the source code is provided as-is and frozenbyte makes no warranty as to the usability or correctness of the source code. any use is at your own risk.
frozenbyte retains the right to alter these license terms at any time for any reason.
So it certainly won't be OSI approved anytime soon. I'd be a little wary if I decided I wanted to tinker with the source code and share my findings...for example what if I (far-fetched as it may be) cloned into Github, made it run on Linux, and placed a link on a website with ads? However they go on to say they were mostly taking the CYA approach, and seem to have a good relationship with their community.
Between PayPal, Amazon Payments and Google Checkout, which has the lowest fees (for the payment amount chosen)?
If you pay less than $10, Amazon Payments takes the smallest cut (5% + $0.05). If you pay more than $10 and less than a few thousand dollars, they're all the same (2.9% + $0.30).
Note that this is assuming a normal payment. Wolfire/Humble, Inc. could very well have some business account with reduced fees or something.
Yep, it's an a element with no href attribute, something I've never seen before.
Really? I thought that was the old way to make hyperlinks to different parts of the same HTML document (i.e. <a name="foo">. I'm not sure when the "normal" way switched to using the id tag inside any element.
A larger desktop market share and acceptance by the general population?
Larger desktop share would be nice, but technically I would say Linux (especially the kernel) is accepted by the general population even if they don't know it's Linux running their phone, gps, web page, etc.
Meh, I'm fine with the current desktop Linux marketshare. If 90% of the population want to perform the computing equivalent of diving in front of bullets for me, who am I to stop them?
"demonstrable, repeatable and self-correcting"
What's in any theory of "origin of species": based on evolution or Creation, is "demonstrable, repeatable and self-correcting"?
All that theory of origin does is giving theoretical arguments for the belief in origin.
There are no experiments, there is no repetition in "origin". What is being demonstrated that observable picture does not contradict the theory which is now so broad that it would cover every possible paleontological finding.
Only if you plug your ears and listen to mentally incompetent creationists that pretend that evolution means that life should spontaneously erupt from a jar of peanut butter. It's been half a century since scientists first blasted jars of elements and molecules that were very likely to have existed on primordial Earth with electricity and formed amino acids. Since then scientists have been postulating ways RNA and then DNA could have formed from those amino acids - and there are many possibilities. One of the oldest involves Earth being bombarded with untold numbers of meteorites - it's possible that key components of life came to Earth that way: born in conditions that weren't present on Earth. In short, yes, we are working on the origin of life being demonstrable. This is not to mention the possibility of finding life on other planets, which should increase our knowledge exponentially.
As for evolution (if you want to ignore the mountain of evidence of microevolution and the idea that macroevolution is just the extension of it), we are running a perpetual experiment right now. Recorded history is a mere fraction of the time scales required to observe these processes. Write a letter to your descendants 10,000 years from now (assuming our species lives that long) and tell them your beliefs. It always amuses me to think about how primitive we'll look in their eyes.
It's more expensive than a lot of laptops, and almost all netbooks.
A lot of laptops and almost all netbooks cost less that $250???
$250 is for the barebones system: it doesn't even include the motherboard. You have to pay $595 for a fully functional one, unless you can build it cheaper yourself from the barebones.
Actually despite initial reservations, Clinton urged Congress to continue funding it. Congress opted not to do so due to costs associated with developing the ISS.
Unrelated note: if you haven't clicked on TFA, you should. Don't worry, it's mostly pictures.