That's a lower ratio in years past, but not by much. An attrition rate of 50-55% is normal, so this year's rate of 58% is on the high side but not outrageously so.
Actually, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy came smack dab in the middle of the big text-adventure boom of the 1980s. If you want early, go check out the Zork trilogy or Scott Adams's games. (No, not that Scott Adams.) And if you'd like to try Hitchhiker's, it's playable on the web at Douglas Adams's site.
Hi, I'm the competition organizer. A few words of instruction and explanation. The basic idea is that you're to download and play at least five of the forty games, and then rate them on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the best. Full instructions are in the competition readme file.
You've got until November 15th to vote. Even if you don't want to vote, feel free to play the games anyway. And if this really gets you jonesing to play more of the recently-released interactive fiction, stop by Baf's Guide to the IF Archive for reviews of many of the games on the IF Archive. Oh, and a minor plug for my IF site, Brass Lantern.
>While I'm sympathetic to those who want to tweak OS X, my teeth are set on edge by the phrases chosen by those who are reverse-engineering the hidden APIs. "They're stifling innovation!" Translation: "They're not letting me do what I want to do!"
So what's wrong with doing the things that I want to do?
I don't know. But the things you want to do don't automatically mean innovation, as some of the folks in the article seem to want to say. But saying "The meanies won't let me play like I want!" doesn't get people up in arms like the button-pushing "They're stifling innovation!" does.
I've used computers running MacOS from 6 through X. One thing that always made me cringe when I started up a pre-OS-X Mac was the sight of all those little extensions loading away, piling one on top of the other into a giant pyramid. Sometimes things worked okay, but often they didn't. The MacOS extensions were reminiscent of the old TSR programs under DOS -- when you had a bunch of them, things became flaky.
Given Apple's desire to have a more stable OS, not to mention their rigid UI approach, is it really that surprising that they don't want to go down the old Extensions road?
While I'm sympathetic to those who want to tweak OS X, my teeth are set on edge by the phrases chosen by those who are reverse-engineering the hidden APIs. "They're stifling innovation!" Translation: "They're not letting me do what I want to do!"
Were Apple breaking documented and open APIs, then you'd really have something to get up in arms about. As it is, if you're using undocumented APIs, expect them to change. You're going to be in the same land that all of us TSR writers of the 1980s were in: you'll have to modify your code each and every time a new OS version ships.
The Sci-Fi Channel has been killing off original programming that hasn't done well, like The Chronicle.
They've been killing off original programming that has done well, like Farscape.
I have no idea what the ratings for Stargate: SG-1 are like, but given the logic above, anyone care to join in my deadpool for the show? Bonus points for correctly predicting whether or not the Sci-Fi Channel will replace SG-1 with old reruns of Automan.
I still agree with the parent post. Most technical print magazines have very little useful content. The only reasons I keep a magazine subscription going is to know what the buzzwords-of-the-month are and to see what the hot-products-of-the-month are. In this respect, the advertisements are actually the content.
I'll certainly agree that magazines often have very little useful content. But that wasn't what the parent post was arguing. It was arguing that what drives up advertising revenue is having an audience receptive to buying stuff, and that that was linked to liking pictures over content. That's not what drives advertising revenue: it's audience size and audience demographic. The value of the content has less to do with that, beyond its value in attracting new readers.
I just don't see a large market for most any Open Source magazine beyond the broad ones like Linux Magazine. One for GCC, as the parent poster suggested, wouldn't fly, and not because it would be more content than other tech magazines.
Re:Periodicals are advertising supported...
on
RIP: The Perl Journal
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Advertising revenue is directly proportional to the audience of the magazine and its demographic makeup. A distant third, barely visible on the horizon, is the audience's perceived receptiveness to advertising.
You mention that there are mountains of magazines for "toys" such as Windows,.Net, and VB, and insinuate that that's because people there like ooh pretty shiny things over content. I counterclaim that a) it's because the audience for such magazines is vastly larger than that for *BSD, Perl, or GCC, leading to far more advertising revenue than is possible for a magazine centered on any of the latter three things, and b) the size of the audience is in large part determined by how little most people are willing to pay for documentation about Open Source software. "I can always just read the man pages or check Google and Google Groups. Why would I pay for a print magazine?"
To top it off, what advertisers are going to be buying ad space in your hypothetical GCC magazine? "Richard Stallman, live and uncensored, on the hot new tape, When Gurus Go Wild!"
It's not about content versus pretty pictures; it's about audience size and how much of that audience is willing to pay for things.
Actually, it can be a CO2 laser. CO2 lasers produce light at a wavelength of 10.6 microns, but CO2 itself is not a very strong absorber at that wavelength. In a CO2 laser you're exciting a certain molecular vibrational-rotational state of the CO2, modified by the presence of nitrogen and helium. Because CO2 is such a weak absorber at 10.6 microns, and because CO2 makes up such a small fraction of the atmosphere, the atmosphere in total doesn't absorb much at 10.6 microns. As you yourself hint at, the big atmospheric IR absorption peak is around 9.6 microns.
The calculation isn't an easy one, as there are a number of factors involved:
* Is this near infrared or far? A CO2 laser will put out far IR, with a wavelength of 10.6 microns. At that wavelength the light will damage the cornea, and possibly the lens of the eye. Near IR (under 1.4 microns) will damage the retina, possibly causing a foveal blind spot.
* Specular or diffuse reflection? The big problem with lasers is that you have a serious amount of power focused in a very collimated beam, all of which can get focused into a very small part of the eye. It's a question of intensity -- power per area. Diffuse reflection will send the laser power all over the map, but less of it will get in the eye. Direct reflection won't be spread out over as much of an area, but if it gets in your eye, eyoikes.
We're talking 100 kW, which is a giant dumptruck full of power. A 100-watt CO2 laser, which is nice and invisible, will give you serious burns with a beam that's a centimeter in diameter. Now imagine focusing that power down into your eye. And that's three orders of magnitude less power than this 100 kW laser.
But not sueing people for writing virtual machines isn't coolness, it's just basic law.
Sure, but that's never stopped companies from suing those who do such reverse engineering. Heck, look at Sony versus Bleem. I'm sad that it's gotten to the point that I thank companies for doing what they're supposed to do, but here we are anyway.
Once upon a time, there was a company that had a bunch of games that ran under a virtual machine. Eventually, people who loved those games reverse-engineered the virtual machine and wrote interpreters for the VM that ran on everything and anything, from Palms to BeOS to OS/2. And the company decided that that was okay.
The company was Activision, which bought up Infocom in the late 1980s. Remember all those Infocom text adventures? People reverse-engineered the virtual machine, known as the z-machine, and wrote plenty of z-machine interpreters, all of which are freely available. Activision apparently decided that this was fine with them, as long as the games themselves weren't being distributed.
Now LucasArts is in a similar situation. Will they be as calm about a new VM interpreter as Activision was? Sadly, I'm not so sure.
I'm fine with my computer tracking what I do and working to anticipate my moves -- this kind of pattern matching is what computers are good for, and we're getting to the point that most of the time we've got the spare cycles lying around. But for any such system there better be two things about it:
Let me turn it off if I want to, either temporarily or completely, and
Give me control over where the information goes
Anyone care to lay odds on Microsoft giving me those two items?
Wasn't it using the 5th ammendment which got US corporations declared to be "legal people" in the first place?
The 14th, actually, based on a Supreme Court case: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, in 1886. The Court's decision was later used to justify giving corporations most of the protections afforded citizens under the 5th Amendment, but not all. The clause against self-incrimination has been curtailed where corporations are concerned.
The Fifth Amendment clause preventing self-incrimination applies to individuals, not to organizations or corporations. That's why a company can't object to a subpoena of its records or, say, a disclosure of its financial books during the discovery phase merely because the information contained therein might incriminate them.
Personally, this seems like a Very Good Thing to me, since I don't want companies to avoid having their wrongdoing come to light just because the main evidence is internal.
For those of you who are law-geeky enough to care about references, check United States v. White, 322 U.S. 694, 701 (1944); Baltimore & O.R.R. v. ICC, 221 U.S. 612, 622 (1911); Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43, 69-70, 74-75 (1906).
Yearly raises recently came around at the company I work for, and my raise was 0.5%, a percent of a percent. So, I did what any self-respecting working stiff would do, I found a new job for a company that makes enough money to pay its employees.
Does the new company do math like you do, or do they take "a percent of a percent" to mean.01%? If it's the former, I'd like to know the name of the company -- I have a few projects to pitch them, and it'll only cost them a percentage of what the other fellows would charge.
Sure. I'll buy that the RIAA has even a harder time proving their theory, as the correlation between Napster and their sales is in the exact opposite direction. And I certainly could believe that Napster helped drive album sales to a certain extent. I'm just not sure that other factors, like the weak economy and overall loss in jobs trimming the amount of discretionary money people spend on CDs, aren't more to blame for the RIAA's current woes.
I've seen this "analysis" before (that Napster boosted CD sales and that its shutdown caused the recent decline in profits), and I'm not sure I buy it. It smacks of the usual after this, therefore because of this thinking. It's like the hemline theory. Someone noticed that stock prices and the length of womens' hemlines seemed to track together. Look! The stock market is determined by how long skirts are!
It's possible that Napster had a hand in both driving up revenues and then later driving them back down. But without more evidence other than "See! See! They happened at the same time!" I'm going to remain skeptical.
Actually, there are plenty of "Infocom-like" games still being made, though the games I'm talking about range from the traditional to the not so traditional.
Duplication of Effort is *Okay*
on
OpenPKG 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I've already seen a number of people saying, "Yeah, great, but why didn't you port an existing system [usually Debian's] instead of writing your own solution? We don't need another package management system." This drumbeat of "don't create multiple approaches" opinion continues to get louder, and as it does so irritates me more and more.
It's *good* that there is more than one way to do it. I'm glad that open source not only provides for the possibility of multiple approaches (the built-in allowances for forking), it has a long history of such.
Don't like sendmail? Write a different mailer, and perhaps like postfix it will become popular. Think that the available desktop managers were built wrongly? Try coding one using your preferred approach. Having diverse solutions can help improve them all, as features from one program are pulled into others.
The OpenPKG folks saw a need and decided to base their solution on RPM. You may not think that was the wisest choice, but they get to choose where they apply their effort. There is no One Approach to bind all open-source programmers, no One Application in any given niche to which all should contribute. One of the beauties of OSS is that I can choose where I wish to contribute.
That is, in fact, why I put the word "objective" in quotes. (Yes, I know it's faddish to use quote marks to indicate emphasis rather than what is being referred to is not quite right. It's also wrong.) I s'pose, had I wanted to be correct, I should have said, "Hundreds of years of time as viewed from the local frame of Earth, keeping in mind that the Earth is not exactly an inertial reference frame, passed."
Slashdot Mirror
That's a lower ratio in years past, but not by much. An attrition rate of 50-55% is normal, so this year's rate of 58% is on the high side but not outrageously so.
The competition web site is on a new server this year, one that is both more stable and has more bandwidth. Beyond that, um, crossed fingers?
Oh, well, if you're going to mention Inform, I'll have to respond with links to TADS and Hugo.
Actually, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy came smack dab in the middle of the big text-adventure boom of the 1980s. If you want early, go check out the Zork trilogy or Scott Adams's games. (No, not that Scott Adams.) And if you'd like to try Hitchhiker's, it's playable on the web at Douglas Adams's site.
Hi, I'm the competition organizer. A few words of instruction and explanation. The basic idea is that you're to download and play at least five of the forty games, and then rate them on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the best. Full instructions are in the competition readme file.
Most of the games run in a virtual machine, so you'll need to download interpreters for those machines. For the TADS 2 and 3 games, grab the unified TADS 2 and 3 source tarball for Unix. For the z-code games, try Nitfol or Unix Frotz. For the Glulx game, try Linux Glulxe or Solaris Glulxe. For the ALAN games, grab GlkALAN for Linux.
You've got until November 15th to vote. Even if you don't want to vote, feel free to play the games anyway. And if this really gets you jonesing to play more of the recently-released interactive fiction, stop by Baf's Guide to the IF Archive for reviews of many of the games on the IF Archive. Oh, and a minor plug for my IF site, Brass Lantern.
Stephen
So what's wrong with doing the things that I want to do?
I don't know. But the things you want to do don't automatically mean innovation, as some of the folks in the article seem to want to say. But saying "The meanies won't let me play like I want!" doesn't get people up in arms like the button-pushing "They're stifling innovation!" does.I've used computers running MacOS from 6 through X. One thing that always made me cringe when I started up a pre-OS-X Mac was the sight of all those little extensions loading away, piling one on top of the other into a giant pyramid. Sometimes things worked okay, but often they didn't. The MacOS extensions were reminiscent of the old TSR programs under DOS -- when you had a bunch of them, things became flaky.
Given Apple's desire to have a more stable OS, not to mention their rigid UI approach, is it really that surprising that they don't want to go down the old Extensions road?
While I'm sympathetic to those who want to tweak OS X, my teeth are set on edge by the phrases chosen by those who are reverse-engineering the hidden APIs. "They're stifling innovation!" Translation: "They're not letting me do what I want to do!"
Were Apple breaking documented and open APIs, then you'd really have something to get up in arms about. As it is, if you're using undocumented APIs, expect them to change. You're going to be in the same land that all of us TSR writers of the 1980s were in: you'll have to modify your code each and every time a new OS version ships.
Did anyone else read this as a patent auction instead?
I did, and thought, what a great idea! All patents should be biddable on eBay!
Let me make sure I've got this straight.
The Sci-Fi Channel has been killing off original programming that hasn't done well, like The Chronicle.
They've been killing off original programming that has done well, like Farscape.
I have no idea what the ratings for Stargate: SG-1 are like, but given the logic above, anyone care to join in my deadpool for the show? Bonus points for correctly predicting whether or not the Sci-Fi Channel will replace SG-1 with old reruns of Automan.
I still agree with the parent post. Most technical print magazines have very little useful content. The only reasons I keep a magazine subscription going is to know what the buzzwords-of-the-month are and to see what the hot-products-of-the-month are. In this respect, the advertisements are actually the content.
I'll certainly agree that magazines often have very little useful content. But that wasn't what the parent post was arguing. It was arguing that what drives up advertising revenue is having an audience receptive to buying stuff, and that that was linked to liking pictures over content. That's not what drives advertising revenue: it's audience size and audience demographic. The value of the content has less to do with that, beyond its value in attracting new readers.
I just don't see a large market for most any Open Source magazine beyond the broad ones like Linux Magazine. One for GCC, as the parent poster suggested, wouldn't fly, and not because it would be more content than other tech magazines.
Advertising revenue is directly proportional to the audience of the magazine and its demographic makeup. A distant third, barely visible on the horizon, is the audience's perceived receptiveness to advertising.
You mention that there are mountains of magazines for "toys" such as Windows, .Net, and VB, and insinuate that that's because people there like ooh pretty shiny things over content. I counterclaim that a) it's because the audience for such magazines is vastly larger than that for *BSD, Perl, or GCC, leading to far more advertising revenue than is possible for a magazine centered on any of the latter three things, and b) the size of the audience is in large part determined by how little most people are willing to pay for documentation about Open Source software. "I can always just read the man pages or check Google and Google Groups. Why would I pay for a print magazine?"
To top it off, what advertisers are going to be buying ad space in your hypothetical GCC magazine? "Richard Stallman, live and uncensored, on the hot new tape, When Gurus Go Wild!"
It's not about content versus pretty pictures; it's about audience size and how much of that audience is willing to pay for things.
Actually, it can be a CO2 laser. CO2 lasers produce light at a wavelength of 10.6 microns, but CO2 itself is not a very strong absorber at that wavelength. In a CO2 laser you're exciting a certain molecular vibrational-rotational state of the CO2, modified by the presence of nitrogen and helium. Because CO2 is such a weak absorber at 10.6 microns, and because CO2 makes up such a small fraction of the atmosphere, the atmosphere in total doesn't absorb much at 10.6 microns. As you yourself hint at, the big atmospheric IR absorption peak is around 9.6 microns.
The calculation isn't an easy one, as there are a number of factors involved:
* Is this near infrared or far? A CO2 laser will put out far IR, with a wavelength of 10.6 microns. At that wavelength the light will damage the cornea, and possibly the lens of the eye. Near IR (under 1.4 microns) will damage the retina, possibly causing a foveal blind spot.
* Specular or diffuse reflection? The big problem with lasers is that you have a serious amount of power focused in a very collimated beam, all of which can get focused into a very small part of the eye. It's a question of intensity -- power per area. Diffuse reflection will send the laser power all over the map, but less of it will get in the eye. Direct reflection won't be spread out over as much of an area, but if it gets in your eye, eyoikes.
We're talking 100 kW, which is a giant dumptruck full of power. A 100-watt CO2 laser, which is nice and invisible, will give you serious burns with a beam that's a centimeter in diameter. Now imagine focusing that power down into your eye. And that's three orders of magnitude less power than this 100 kW laser.
But not sueing people for writing virtual machines isn't coolness, it's just basic law.
Sure, but that's never stopped companies from suing those who do such reverse engineering. Heck, look at Sony versus Bleem. I'm sad that it's gotten to the point that I thank companies for doing what they're supposed to do, but here we are anyway.
Once upon a time, there was a company that had a bunch of games that ran under a virtual machine. Eventually, people who loved those games reverse-engineered the virtual machine and wrote interpreters for the VM that ran on everything and anything, from Palms to BeOS to OS/2. And the company decided that that was okay.
The company was Activision, which bought up Infocom in the late 1980s. Remember all those Infocom text adventures? People reverse-engineered the virtual machine, known as the z-machine, and wrote plenty of z-machine interpreters, all of which are freely available. Activision apparently decided that this was fine with them, as long as the games themselves weren't being distributed.
Now LucasArts is in a similar situation. Will they be as calm about a new VM interpreter as Activision was? Sadly, I'm not so sure.
I'm fine with my computer tracking what I do and working to anticipate my moves -- this kind of pattern matching is what computers are good for, and we're getting to the point that most of the time we've got the spare cycles lying around. But for any such system there better be two things about it:
Anyone care to lay odds on Microsoft giving me those two items?
Wasn't it using the 5th ammendment which got US corporations declared to be "legal people" in the first place?
The 14th, actually, based on a Supreme Court case: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, in 1886. The Court's decision was later used to justify giving corporations most of the protections afforded citizens under the 5th Amendment, but not all. The clause against self-incrimination has been curtailed where corporations are concerned.
The Fifth Amendment clause preventing self-incrimination applies to individuals, not to organizations or corporations. That's why a company can't object to a subpoena of its records or, say, a disclosure of its financial books during the discovery phase merely because the information contained therein might incriminate them.
Personally, this seems like a Very Good Thing to me, since I don't want companies to avoid having their wrongdoing come to light just because the main evidence is internal.
For those of you who are law-geeky enough to care about references, check United States v. White, 322 U.S. 694, 701 (1944); Baltimore & O.R.R. v. ICC, 221 U.S. 612, 622 (1911); Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43, 69-70, 74-75 (1906).
Yearly raises recently came around at the company I work for, and my raise was 0.5%, a percent of a percent. So, I did what any self-respecting working stiff would do, I found a new job for a company that makes enough money to pay its employees.
Does the new company do math like you do, or do they take "a percent of a percent" to mean .01%? If it's the former, I'd like to know the name of the company -- I have a few projects to pitch them, and it'll only cost them a percentage of what the other fellows would charge.
Sure. I'll buy that the RIAA has even a harder time proving their theory, as the correlation between Napster and their sales is in the exact opposite direction. And I certainly could believe that Napster helped drive album sales to a certain extent. I'm just not sure that other factors, like the weak economy and overall loss in jobs trimming the amount of discretionary money people spend on CDs, aren't more to blame for the RIAA's current woes.
I've seen this "analysis" before (that Napster boosted CD sales and that its shutdown caused the recent decline in profits), and I'm not sure I buy it. It smacks of the usual after this, therefore because of this thinking. It's like the hemline theory. Someone noticed that stock prices and the length of womens' hemlines seemed to track together. Look! The stock market is determined by how long skirts are!
It's possible that Napster had a hand in both driving up revenues and then later driving them back down. But without more evidence other than "See! See! They happened at the same time!" I'm going to remain skeptical.
Instead of performing the registry surgery yourself, you can use something like xp-AntiSpy, a nice piece of freeware which will let you do just that.
Actually, there are plenty of "Infocom-like" games still being made, though the games I'm talking about range from the traditional to the not so traditional.
If you're interested in finding out more, I'd suggest reading reviews of recent text adventures from a site or two and then downloading the games from the Interactive Fiction Archive.
I've already seen a number of people saying, "Yeah, great, but why didn't you port an existing system [usually Debian's] instead of writing your own solution? We don't need another package management system." This drumbeat of "don't create multiple approaches" opinion continues to get louder, and as it does so irritates me more and more.
It's *good* that there is more than one way to do it. I'm glad that open source not only provides for the possibility of multiple approaches (the built-in allowances for forking), it has a long history of such.
Don't like sendmail? Write a different mailer, and perhaps like postfix it will become popular. Think that the available desktop managers were built wrongly? Try coding one using your preferred approach. Having diverse solutions can help improve them all, as features from one program are pulled into others.
The OpenPKG folks saw a need and decided to base their solution on RPM. You may not think that was the wisest choice, but they get to choose where they apply their effort. There is no One Approach to bind all open-source programmers, no One Application in any given niche to which all should contribute. One of the beauties of OSS is that I can choose where I wish to contribute.
That is, in fact, why I put the word "objective" in quotes. (Yes, I know it's faddish to use quote marks to indicate emphasis rather than what is being referred to is not quite right. It's also wrong.) I s'pose, had I wanted to be correct, I should have said, "Hundreds of years of time as viewed from the local frame of Earth, keeping in mind that the Earth is not exactly an inertial reference frame, passed."
The quote marks seemed briefer.