You're better off teaching yourself the basics and getting a tech job. You learn a much wider set of skills, develop practical problem solving, and to top it off you get paid rather than paying them. In my experience schools are behind the curve and are forced to teach down because so many schools have to wide an admitance policy. If you do want to get a college degree I'd suggest getting it in a none computers field so you can grab up highbreed jobs that require not only computer skills but knowledge in another field. Medicine, engineering, history, etc.
There is no end. It doesn't only apply to processors but all technology. The time can vary some and there are sometimes dead periods but knowledge tends to grow exponetially and with that knowledge comes faster, smaller, better gadgets.
I have a little net worm program I wrote that is essentially a virtual machine that tracks other virtual machines and passes little programs back and forth. Since dist.net came out I've been meaning to turn it into something better but never have got around to it. I'm afraid it is probably illegal to send something like that into the wild anyway even if all it does is fill spare processes. *sighs*
Does IPv6 require centrally dispatched IP's the way v4 does? ie will I still have to pay some schmoze monthly to use some number? I personally would just like to have my public encryption key as my IPv6 and let packets sent to me be encrypted with that key. If I need to kill that key and make a new key then I'd love to be able to do so. Honestly how high are the chances for IP collissions with 2^128 addresses? That is a freakin big number. On the rare occurance of a collission it could just encrypt a new key for both systems and start again. *shrugs*
The doctors told my parents to off me and now I'm perfectly normal with the exception that I'm prehaps taller/stronger than average and smarter than average. Then the doctors told my aprents to off my younger sister who is a few years younger and was born with similar problems to me. She is still handicapped but in no way is her life a waste. Her ever present laugh gives me reason to remember how precious life really is. Every step of the way has been a struggle for her and the rest of the family but she has came a long way. I think having a loving supportive family can mean a lot.
I'm not overly violent but people like this lead me to beat the crap out of them. Maybe it serves them right. They wanted to kill me and now I could kill them without breaking a sweat. If they like survival of the fittest so much lets see how they like being at the lossing end of things.:P
Does anyone know if anyone offers the service of selling me a legal copy of this on DVD and making me a copy to VHS so I can watch it already. I'm putting off buying a DVD player until the prices plunge a lil more but I don't want to wait until December to buy a VHS copy of the Matrix. Doesn't 'fair use' make it legal for me to buy a copy of my own DVD onto a VHS tape by someone who owns both and can do the copy for me?
I think we'll see more nations actually appearing but they'll become less tied to the physical world and more to idealisms. I expect to see nations accepting the fact they have little real power over their citizens. I think nations will become more like McDonalds and make their $$$ by selling the fruits of their citizens labors to other nations. Also nations will provide fewer services to their citizens largely because most of the services provided in past times will be outdated.
As for taxation of the Internet it is stupid and short sighted. They'd be slowing the growth. The smart thing to do (I say this often) is to improve the quality of the postal service and lower it's rates so that it becomes the de facto way for net companies to send packages. Once it becomes the de facto standard in the U.S.A I'd start expanding to other countries so the USPS becomes the world standard for shipping packages. Imagine the profits of having even half the packages sent in the world go through them. I have no idea how many packages get sent a day but it must be a lot and it will climb drasticlly as more things are bought and sold online. Just count the packages sent by sellers at EBay, Yahoo Auctions, and Amazon. That is almost all fresh growth I'd guess. There was no equivilant before the net.
I think for once he has the right idea although the concept of artifical life for a large part is disconnected from artifical intelligence in my experience. Life IMO details self reproduction and since AI is software this is no big deal. Any virus can do this. As someone who enjoys writing AI programs I think we are going to see human-level intelligence within the next 10 years. I doubt this constitutes any threat to us in the form of raw force. Anybody who has tried removing a virus from a network knows how hard it is. Imagine removing a virus from every computer on the global Internet and imagine that virus is as smart as you. Good luck. We may be surpassed in some ways by the AI but we have evolution on our side so we are equally useful to the AI. I agree that we will likely merge into simbiotic(sp?) species.
My main worry on such an about face is they may have made some sort of breakthru on cracking the codes thus making it irrelevant to them if they let us encrypt data. Maybe they are just giving the feds that extra cash to make it look like everything is normal. Arghh where is Mulder when you need him.:)
This article is pretty accurate I think although as is common he does seem to miss the forest for the trees. Some of the comments I've seen have been biased to one party or another in the usual flame war style. Others have taken issue with given points about why online politics will not work or isn't to be desired. The amussing thing to me is that all of this is exactly the kind of discussion a net-savvy politican should participate in. I think a successful net politician would have a very Slashdot-like site that inspires interactive community messaging. Possibly they could make a site that works in the same way but with an interest in politics and world issues rather than technology. The net-savvy politican shouldn't obey mindlessly what people tell him to do but rather take their ideas and build from them in a standard open source style his own view of what people want and add them to his own views. The Net changes the rules of communicating with the public. A savvy pol would figure out that they don't need to raise as much campaign money because the Net lowers their cost of communicating with the people. This can free them from the need to spend so much time kissing ass to actually doing what they are elected to do. A savvy pol would create a site not based only on themself but open to all pol's and prove their unbiased honesty by not moderating out posts from other pol's. Look no further than Slashdot for the future of democracy.
Anyone else going to vote for Eric Raymond or RMS? To bad we can't vote for Linus but then we wouldn't want to distract him from the kernal to much would we.:) Anyone that votes for Bill Gates I'll be forced to kill in a very bloody and violate manner with old Windows CD's notched into saw blades.
Don't be so biased. If you have actually ever talked to many poor people or if you started off poor the way I did then you'd know you really have no grounds to say people who are poor aren't online. I know many families that specificly save to buy a used computer so their kids can get online. Many of these people are more computer literate than many of their wealthier neighbors who have money to hang out at the movies and such largely because the computer is so economical as compared to other entertainment and educational resources. I'm not saying ALL poor people have computers but economics isn't nearly the dividing line in this matter that many people make it out to be. Sure rich people probably have better computers but you can surf the web as well with a good P100 as a PII 400.
I don't see that race has anything to do with it, a black man, asian woman, white teenager, whatever can all walk into the store and come back with a computer. Also there are many free access points to the net. I work at a college and there are people of all races in the labs constantly. Just walk in and browse the lab now and then. In at least this schools case even gender can't be used because the labs usually are populated by women.
Rather than try to tax the net the government needs to improve the postal service to make shipping USPS a desirable thing for online companies and their customers. They could take their profit off the shipping that way by actually offering a service which IMO is much better than taxes. Is also a lot easier than wasting half your money trying to track down people or sites who don't pay their taxes.
Slightly off topic but I think the government should also give tax breaks to open source companies to help fuel their R&D. It doesn't cost the government anything to let them keep their own money and it is cheaper for the government to have free software than paying Bill Gates for it.
Why bother encoding it like that? You can send binary data across telnet sessions (on most good implementations) anyway. Remember using Kermit and Z-Modem between machines?:)
We should set up some kind of Phrack fund to send the current editor (it seems to change a lot but I guess it's been around a long time) some funding to keep it coming out every 2 months or so. Woohoo I want a Phrack credit card! Cards that come with explanations of how to generate their numbers?:)
If they coded a small optimized kernal that did nothing but run a given web server that was only programmable by removing the disk and inserting it into another computer (hot swappable hdd's rock) then I suppose you'd have the worlds most secure web server. You could even be lazy and just use your favorite open source kernal with EVERYTHING removed that gives it a user interface of any kind or lets any non httpd services run and all the security features turned on.
Of course the down side.. it'd be a major pain to work with. I work with Windows & Macs daily, they make me want to commit suicide, so it's about the same situation. Also is it really that important to keep your web site from being hacked? I mean keeping people from hacking in and jumping to other computers in your network is important but what the @$%*# do I care if they change a few web pages? I keep backups for exactly that reason, just restore and start looking for the security hole. The MOST I'd do is reformat and install again to make sure they didn't leave any trapdoors. Last time I had to restart Linux I had all my data files in a sepperate partition so that was simple, the entire install took less then 15 minutes and about another 15 minutes to restore my settings and all user information. If you're really concerned about the security you can always recompile with all the security on, better optimization, etc and save it to a cd-r.
I'm going to keep using StarOffice but I'd still much rather have an office suite that is GPL'd. Oh well, pico is still my most used editor and I usually use command lines to work with my databases so I guess I really don't need an office suite that bad anyway.
LOL It isn't that hard to kill someone with a pointy stick. I think you forget how easy our bodies really do break. It just makes it messier and more painful for the victim and makes the thug sweat more. Didn't you ever go to camp and learn how to kill animals in the woods without a gun or knife? The same thing works on humans I'm sure.:)
They have MNG which is sort of animation tacked onto PNG. They have further information on it in their web sites. I believe they say that Paint Shop Pro's (about $60) animation studio uses MNG as it's internal format already so bringing it to the world shouldn't be to hard a jump.
Maybe this means we can fianlly get decent support for PNG/MNG in IE/Mozilla w/out needing those lame ass plugins. Maybe PNG will become popular and MNG will actually reach real people! Oh my GAWD I'm breaking a sweat! Please, please, do it!
I think letters and basic paperwork will change over to electronic form w/in the next couple years and expect to see it intergrated into the IM infrastructure as new more powerful standards become popular. I think IM's will begin to come w/ encryption/signing built-in and most likely will only require the user click an 'Update and Secure' button to download the crypto plugin from a server off in X country. IM's do to electronic messages what the WWW did to Gopher, essentially simplifying the process and interface to give more powerful features and still make them accessible to the average person.
On the other hand.. I think package delivery will increase. If the U.S. Gov't really wants to start making profits they should stop worrying about taxing email or increasing the cost of stamps and instead lower the rate to ship packages, make packages better insured to reach their destination quickly, and make a free interface that e-stores can use to figure up shipping costs, schedule package deliveries, etc. Not only could this keep the Postal Service in business it could also help pay for the Internet infrastructure w/out adding any new taxes.
You can also use recursive translations to sort for the least possible mutations. This is how I usually use it. Translate X to English then back to X and have it look for parts that don't match and so retranslate those parts and so on until you get a reasonable match. Usually the translations come out MUCH better, I've often wondered why their software doesn't do this itself. I love this service but wish they could find some better translation software and a bigger dictionary.
Is there any good open source translation software? There must be as many of the people I know who right such software do it largely for fun. I would die of joy to see such a project intergrated into Mozilla and the IM clients coming out. ICQ is the main thing I use translations for as many of my friends don't speak English and I don't speak their languages. Is sort of a pain cutting and pasting text back and forth.
I want a PCS phone w/ an intergrated MP3 player sooooo bad! They I could have Metallica play when I got a call. Also has the useful benefit of giving me one less gadget to worry about while keeping all the functionality.:) Those memory cards could double to holding my extra phone book and stuff.:) Throw in a PDA and a Game Boy and I'll bow down and kiss your feet.
The specs I've seen for a few different IM's all seemed to be rather crappy and ill thought out. Does anyone know if any of the IM protocols or proposed protocols are actually flexible, secure, and peer-peer? IMO w/out those three simple things the protocol is doomed as time passes regardless of who has the most users now. IPX seems to have lost to TCP/IP even though it had the majority of the market up to a few years ago. Remember all the IPX enabled multiplayer games? I have not followed it closely but I liked the protocol being used by Jabber which is based on XML and seems to be fairly flexible. Flexibilty is the key in a protocol such as this I think, even if it is unsecure and client-server at conception if it is flexible enough it can easily adapt as time goes on w/out breaking backwards compatibility.
Also I love the idea of having multiple IM's work under one client. AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, whatever all workable as plugin's to the client program so I only have to know one interface and can communicate to everyone under a single user list. Third, I'd love to be able to store my contact list, history, etc on a server of my choice rather than having to ftp the whole thing from machine to machine every time I need it. Just please spare me the quota idea. This is one reason I continue using ICQ the most, because Yahoo and some others limit the number of people in your contact list. How stupid is that, I am not allowed to know so many people. Well excuuuuuse meee! Arghh but please don't crypt local db files either such as ICQ does, this is causing me huge problems because I need to merge several lists under the same UIN but from different computers into a single list and it is fairly impossible. It's the OS's job to keep unauth'd people from reading my files, if Windows doesn't let Windows users upgrade to Linux as I'll do as soon as I can merge and export my ICQ db's.:P
Also I love the idea of having multiple IM's work under one client. AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, whatever all workable as plugin's to the client program so I only have to know one interface and can communicate to everyone under a single user list. Third, I'd love to be able to store my contact list, history, etc on a server of my choice rather than having to ftp the whole thing from machine to machine every time I need it. Just please spare me the quota idea. This is one reason I continue using ICQ the most, because Yahoo and some others limit the number of people in your contact list. How stupid is that, I am not allowed to know so many people. Well excuuuuuse meee! Arghh but please don't crypt local db files either such as ICQ does, this is causing me huge problems because I need to merge several lists under the same UIN but from different computers into a single list and it is fairly impossible. It's the OS's job to keep unauth'd people from reading my files, if Windows doesn't let Windows users upgrade to Linux as I'll do as soon as I can merge and export my ICQ db's.:P
I think text-adventures and text-worlds in general are still fairly popular. There are many MUD's, many types of MUD's, and many people who use them. Most of these people don't even remember Infocom and Zork, I'm looking for a PC or Linux copy of Wishbringer myself, but they still find they love these games. These games take the old stand alone text-adventures and add multi-player abilities and some even allow the player to program new parts to the games as they go along. I think this is as much, if not more, the future of games than Unreal, Quake, and Half-life.
In recent months I have done a 180 so that I now think games are perfectly suited to open source design. The majority of games use some other games engine with maybe a few tweaks to it and even new games are usually just small improvements here and there on older engines. With the engines of games as open source research is sepperate from game design and content creation which shortens the time required to create the games and empowers game players to quickly create and distribute their own games based on others. My favorite two games, Quake & Civ II, do this to some point by allowing aspects of them to be programmable and redistributed. Obviously this has helped increase the life cycle of the games as well as creating cult followings.
I am less interested in creating open source engines than open source game libraries that have virtually everything needed to quickly create a bug free game engine of my design. Prehaps even a module game engine that allows you to hook in a module to process your data files (images, sounds, scripts, etc) and then whatever modules you want for your games. A sort of Visual Game Creator. Since IMO the logic of the game should be in a script file, not inside the game executables, creating a VGC shouldn't be that hard. Pick the kind of menus you want to use, pick the type of game it is, add a few chosen extras from the library and compile. Possibly include a simple code editor for creating the default scripts and tools for importing and packaging your sounds, images, and other data. You could start by supporting the basic well established game types: text-based, scroller, card, bricks, 3D, and empire-building games and just add new types as they were invented or someone bothered to add them to the library. I think this would make Linux quickly become the OS to have the most new games coming out for it. They may not use cutting edge new engines, let Id fill that niche and release their code when they move on, but they'd be fun and stable which IMO is what matters most.
I think Linux is mostly immune to this because it is so free. There are more than one type of person and I'm sure we have some of each coding Linux. What this means I think is that we'll start to have some bells and whistles added while still maintaining a strong product. Prehaps Gnome/KDE prove this well. Both are good products technically, yet both are full of bells and whistles and are largely responsible for Linux begining to move into the desktop market which I'd suspect is where the real money is at.
Slashdot Mirror
You're better off teaching yourself the basics and getting a tech job. You learn a much wider set of skills, develop practical problem solving, and to top it off you get paid rather than paying them. In my experience schools are behind the curve and are forced to teach down because so many schools have to wide an admitance policy. If you do want to get a college degree I'd suggest getting it in a none computers field so you can grab up highbreed jobs that require not only computer skills but knowledge in another field. Medicine, engineering, history, etc.
There is no end. It doesn't only apply to processors but all technology. The time can vary some and there are sometimes dead periods but knowledge tends to grow exponetially and with that knowledge comes faster, smaller, better gadgets.
I have a little net worm program I wrote that is essentially a virtual machine that tracks other virtual machines and passes little programs back and forth. Since dist.net came out I've been meaning to turn it into something better but never have got around to it. I'm afraid it is probably illegal to send something like that into the wild anyway even if all it does is fill spare processes. *sighs*
Does IPv6 require centrally dispatched IP's the way v4 does? ie will I still have to pay some schmoze monthly to use some number? I personally would just like to have my public encryption key as my IPv6 and let packets sent to me be encrypted with that key. If I need to kill that key and make a new key then I'd love to be able to do so. Honestly how high are the chances for IP collissions with 2^128 addresses? That is a freakin big number. On the rare occurance of a collission it could just encrypt a new key for both systems and start again. *shrugs*
The doctors told my parents to off me and now I'm perfectly normal with the exception that I'm prehaps taller/stronger than average and smarter than average. Then the doctors told my aprents to off my younger sister who is a few years younger and was born with similar problems to me. She is still handicapped but in no way is her life a waste. Her ever present laugh gives me reason to remember how precious life really is. Every step of the way has been a struggle for her and the rest of the family but she has came a long way. I think having a loving supportive family can mean a lot.
:P
I'm not overly violent but people like this lead me to beat the crap out of them. Maybe it serves them right. They wanted to kill me and now I could kill them without breaking a sweat. If they like survival of the fittest so much lets see how they like being at the lossing end of things.
Does anyone know if anyone offers the service of selling me a legal copy of this on DVD and making me a copy to VHS so I can watch it already. I'm putting off buying a DVD player until the prices plunge a lil more but I don't want to wait until December to buy a VHS copy of the Matrix. Doesn't 'fair use' make it legal for me to buy a copy of my own DVD onto a VHS tape by someone who owns both and can do the copy for me?
I think we'll see more nations actually appearing but they'll become less tied to the physical world and more to idealisms. I expect to see nations accepting the fact they have little real power over their citizens. I think nations will become more like McDonalds and make their $$$ by selling the fruits of their citizens labors to other nations. Also nations will provide fewer services to their citizens largely because most of the services provided in past times will be outdated.
As for taxation of the Internet it is stupid and short sighted. They'd be slowing the growth. The smart thing to do (I say this often) is to improve the quality of the postal service and lower it's rates so that it becomes the de facto way for net companies to send packages. Once it becomes the de facto standard in the U.S.A I'd start expanding to other countries so the USPS becomes the world standard for shipping packages. Imagine the profits of having even half the packages sent in the world go through them. I have no idea how many packages get sent a day but it must be a lot and it will climb drasticlly as more things are bought and sold online. Just count the packages sent by sellers at EBay, Yahoo Auctions, and Amazon. That is almost all fresh growth I'd guess. There was no equivilant before the net.
I think for once he has the right idea although the concept of artifical life for a large part is disconnected from artifical intelligence in my experience. Life IMO details self reproduction and since AI is software this is no big deal. Any virus can do this. As someone who enjoys writing AI programs I think we are going to see human-level intelligence within the next 10 years. I doubt this constitutes any threat to us in the form of raw force. Anybody who has tried removing a virus from a network knows how hard it is. Imagine removing a virus from every computer on the global Internet and imagine that virus is as smart as you. Good luck. We may be surpassed in some ways by the AI but we have evolution on our side so we are equally useful to the AI. I agree that we will likely merge into simbiotic(sp?) species.
My main worry on such an about face is they may have made some sort of breakthru on cracking the codes thus making it irrelevant to them if they let us encrypt data. Maybe they are just giving the feds that extra cash to make it look like everything is normal. Arghh where is Mulder when you need him. :)
This article is pretty accurate I think although as is common he does seem to miss the forest for the trees. Some of the comments I've seen have been biased to one party or another in the usual flame war style. Others have taken issue with given points about why online politics will not work or isn't to be desired. The amussing thing to me is that all of this is exactly the kind of discussion a net-savvy politican should participate in. I think a successful net politician would have a very Slashdot-like site that inspires interactive community messaging. Possibly they could make a site that works in the same way but with an interest in politics and world issues rather than technology. The net-savvy politican shouldn't obey mindlessly what people tell him to do but rather take their ideas and build from them in a standard open source style his own view of what people want and add them to his own views. The Net changes the rules of communicating with the public. A savvy pol would figure out that they don't need to raise as much campaign money because the Net lowers their cost of communicating with the people. This can free them from the need to spend so much time kissing ass to actually doing what they are elected to do. A savvy pol would create a site not based only on themself but open to all pol's and prove their unbiased honesty by not moderating out posts from other pol's. Look no further than Slashdot for the future of democracy.
:) Anyone that votes for Bill Gates I'll be forced to kill in a very bloody and violate manner with old Windows CD's notched into saw blades.
Anyone else going to vote for Eric Raymond or RMS? To bad we can't vote for Linus but then we wouldn't want to distract him from the kernal to much would we.
Don't be so biased. If you have actually ever talked to many poor people or if you started off poor the way I did then you'd know you really have no grounds to say people who are poor aren't online. I know many families that specificly save to buy a used computer so their kids can get online. Many of these people are more computer literate than many of their wealthier neighbors who have money to hang out at the movies and such largely because the computer is so economical as compared to other entertainment and educational resources. I'm not saying ALL poor people have computers but economics isn't nearly the dividing line in this matter that many people make it out to be. Sure rich people probably have better computers but you can surf the web as well with a good P100 as a PII 400.
I don't see that race has anything to do with it, a black man, asian woman, white teenager, whatever can all walk into the store and come back with a computer. Also there are many free access points to the net. I work at a college and there are people of all races in the labs constantly. Just walk in and browse the lab now and then. In at least this schools case even gender can't be used because the labs usually are populated by women.
Rather than try to tax the net the government needs to improve the postal service to make shipping USPS a desirable thing for online companies and their customers. They could take their profit off the shipping that way by actually offering a service which IMO is much better than taxes. Is also a lot easier than wasting half your money trying to track down people or sites who don't pay their taxes.
Slightly off topic but I think the government should also give tax breaks to open source companies to help fuel their R&D. It doesn't cost the government anything to let them keep their own money and it is cheaper for the government to have free software than paying Bill Gates for it.
Why bother encoding it like that? You can send binary data across telnet sessions (on most good implementations) anyway. Remember using Kermit and Z-Modem between machines? :)
We should set up some kind of Phrack fund to send the current editor (it seems to change a lot but I guess it's been around a long time) some funding to keep it coming out every 2 months or so. Woohoo I want a Phrack credit card! Cards that come with explanations of how to generate their numbers? :)
If they coded a small optimized kernal that did nothing but run a given web server that was only programmable by removing the disk and inserting it into another computer (hot swappable hdd's rock) then I suppose you'd have the worlds most secure web server. You could even be lazy and just use your favorite open source kernal with EVERYTHING removed that gives it a user interface of any kind or lets any non httpd services run and all the security features turned on.
Of course the down side.. it'd be a major pain to work with. I work with Windows & Macs daily, they make me want to commit suicide, so it's about the same situation. Also is it really that important to keep your web site from being hacked? I mean keeping people from hacking in and jumping to other computers in your network is important but what the @$%*# do I care if they change a few web pages? I keep backups for exactly that reason, just restore and start looking for the security hole. The MOST I'd do is reformat and install again to make sure they didn't leave any trapdoors. Last time I had to restart Linux I had all my data files in a sepperate partition so that was simple, the entire install took less then 15 minutes and about another 15 minutes to restore my settings and all user information. If you're really concerned about the security you can always recompile with all the security on, better optimization, etc and save it to a cd-r.
I'm going to keep using StarOffice but I'd still much rather have an office suite that is GPL'd. Oh well, pico is still my most used editor and I usually use command lines to work with my databases so I guess I really don't need an office suite that bad anyway.
:)
LOL It isn't that hard to kill someone with a pointy stick. I think you forget how easy our bodies really do break. It just makes it messier and more painful for the victim and makes the thug sweat more. Didn't you ever go to camp and learn how to kill animals in the woods without a gun or knife? The same thing works on humans I'm sure.
They have MNG which is sort of animation tacked onto PNG. They have further information on it in their web sites. I believe they say that Paint Shop Pro's (about $60) animation studio uses MNG as it's internal format already so bringing it to the world shouldn't be to hard a jump.
Maybe this means we can fianlly get decent support for PNG/MNG in IE/Mozilla w/out needing those lame ass plugins. Maybe PNG will become popular and MNG will actually reach real people! Oh my GAWD I'm breaking a sweat! Please, please, do it!
I think letters and basic paperwork will change over to electronic form w/in the next couple years and expect to see it intergrated into the IM infrastructure as new more powerful standards become popular. I think IM's will begin to come w/ encryption/signing built-in and most likely will only require the user click an 'Update and Secure' button to download the crypto plugin from a server off in X country. IM's do to electronic messages what the WWW did to Gopher, essentially simplifying the process and interface to give more powerful features and still make them accessible to the average person.
On the other hand.. I think package delivery will increase. If the U.S. Gov't really wants to start making profits they should stop worrying about taxing email or increasing the cost of stamps and instead lower the rate to ship packages, make packages better insured to reach their destination quickly, and make a free interface that e-stores can use to figure up shipping costs, schedule package deliveries, etc. Not only could this keep the Postal Service in business it could also help pay for the Internet infrastructure w/out adding any new taxes.
You can also use recursive translations to sort for the least possible mutations. This is how I usually use it. Translate X to English then back to X and have it look for parts that don't match and so retranslate those parts and so on until you get a reasonable match. Usually the translations come out MUCH better, I've often wondered why their software doesn't do this itself. I love this service but wish they could find some better translation software and a bigger dictionary.
Is there any good open source translation software? There must be as many of the people I know who right such software do it largely for fun. I would die of joy to see such a project intergrated into Mozilla and the IM clients coming out. ICQ is the main thing I use translations for as many of my friends don't speak English and I don't speak their languages. Is sort of a pain cutting and pasting text back and forth.
I want a PCS phone w/ an intergrated MP3 player sooooo bad! They I could have Metallica play when I got a call. Also has the useful benefit of giving me one less gadget to worry about while keeping all the functionality. :) Those memory cards could double to holding my extra phone book and stuff. :) Throw in a PDA and a Game Boy and I'll bow down and kiss your feet.
The specs I've seen for a few different IM's all seemed to be rather crappy and ill thought out. Does anyone know if any of the IM protocols or proposed protocols are actually flexible, secure, and peer-peer? IMO w/out those three simple things the protocol is doomed as time passes regardless of who has the most users now. IPX seems to have lost to TCP/IP even though it had the majority of the market up to a few years ago. Remember all the IPX enabled multiplayer games? I have not followed it closely but I liked the protocol being used by Jabber which is based on XML and seems to be fairly flexible. Flexibilty is the key in a protocol such as this I think, even if it is unsecure and client-server at conception if it is flexible enough it can easily adapt as time goes on w/out breaking backwards compatibility.
:P
Also I love the idea of having multiple IM's work under one client. AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, whatever all workable as plugin's to the client program so I only have to know one interface and can communicate to everyone under a single user list. Third, I'd love to be able to store my contact list, history, etc on a server of my choice rather than having to ftp the whole thing from machine to machine every time I need it. Just please spare me the quota idea. This is one reason I continue using ICQ the most, because Yahoo and some others limit the number of people in your contact list. How stupid is that, I am not allowed to know so many people. Well excuuuuuse meee! Arghh but please don't crypt local db files either such as ICQ does, this is causing me huge problems because I need to merge several lists under the same UIN but from different computers into a single list and it is fairly impossible. It's the OS's job to keep unauth'd people from reading my files, if Windows doesn't let Windows users upgrade to Linux as I'll do as soon as I can merge and export my ICQ db's.
The specs I've seen for a few different IM's all seemed to be rather crappy and ill thought out. Does anyone know if any of the IM protocols or proposed protocols are actually flexible, secure, and peer-peer? IMO w/out those three simple things the protocol is doomed as time passes regardless of who has the most users now. IPX seems to have lost to TCP/IP even though it had the majority of the market up to a few years ago. Remember all the IPX enabled multiplayer games? I have not followed it closely but I liked the protocol being used by Jabber which is based on XML and seems to be fairly flexible. Flexibilty is the key in a protocol such as this I think, even if it is unsecure and client-server at conception if it is flexible enough it can easily adapt as time goes on w/out breaking backwards compatibility.
:P
Also I love the idea of having multiple IM's work under one client. AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, whatever all workable as plugin's to the client program so I only have to know one interface and can communicate to everyone under a single user list. Third, I'd love to be able to store my contact list, history, etc on a server of my choice rather than having to ftp the whole thing from machine to machine every time I need it. Just please spare me the quota idea. This is one reason I continue using ICQ the most, because Yahoo and some others limit the number of people in your contact list. How stupid is that, I am not allowed to know so many people. Well excuuuuuse meee! Arghh but please don't crypt local db files either such as ICQ does, this is causing me huge problems because I need to merge several lists under the same UIN but from different computers into a single list and it is fairly impossible. It's the OS's job to keep unauth'd people from reading my files, if Windows doesn't let Windows users upgrade to Linux as I'll do as soon as I can merge and export my ICQ db's.
I think text-adventures and text-worlds in general are still fairly popular. There are many MUD's, many types of MUD's, and many people who use them. Most of these people don't even remember Infocom and Zork, I'm looking for a PC or Linux copy of Wishbringer myself, but they still find they love these games. These games take the old stand alone text-adventures and add multi-player abilities and some even allow the player to program new parts to the games as they go along. I think this is as much, if not more, the future of games than Unreal, Quake, and Half-life.
In recent months I have done a 180 so that I now think games are perfectly suited to open source design. The majority of games use some other games engine with maybe a few tweaks to it and even new games are usually just small improvements here and there on older engines. With the engines of games as open source research is sepperate from game design and content creation which shortens the time required to create the games and empowers game players to quickly create and distribute their own games based on others. My favorite two games, Quake & Civ II, do this to some point by allowing aspects of them to be programmable and redistributed. Obviously this has helped increase the life cycle of the games as well as creating cult followings.
I am less interested in creating open source engines than open source game libraries that have virtually everything needed to quickly create a bug free game engine of my design. Prehaps even a module game engine that allows you to hook in a module to process your data files (images, sounds, scripts, etc) and then whatever modules you want for your games. A sort of Visual Game Creator. Since IMO the logic of the game should be in a script file, not inside the game executables, creating a VGC shouldn't be that hard. Pick the kind of menus you want to use, pick the type of game it is, add a few chosen extras from the library and compile. Possibly include a simple code editor for creating the default scripts and tools for importing and packaging your sounds, images, and other data. You could start by supporting the basic well established game types: text-based, scroller, card, bricks, 3D, and empire-building games and just add new types as they were invented or someone bothered to add them to the library. I think this would make Linux quickly become the OS to have the most new games coming out for it. They may not use cutting edge new engines, let Id fill that niche and release their code when they move on, but they'd be fun and stable which IMO is what matters most.
I think Linux is mostly immune to this because it is so free. There are more than one type of person and I'm sure we have some of each coding Linux. What this means I think is that we'll start to have some bells and whistles added while still maintaining a strong product. Prehaps Gnome/KDE prove this well. Both are good products technically, yet both are full of bells and whistles and are largely responsible for Linux begining to move into the desktop market which I'd suspect is where the real money is at.