I am so fucking sick of people who object to any government-sponsored program JUST BECAUSE it is government-sponsored. Private industry has no incentive to provide equal access, as we are seeing in the current fight over distribution of urban cable-Internet services. A good-faith government, however, will try to provide equal services to all. Even if it is true that services may be more cheaply-rendered by private firms, the argument that all services should be private is fatally flawed. A fairly indisputable example is the construction of roads. Maybe Joe's Ass-fault Co., Inc., Ltd., LLC, S.A., GmBH, can built a road for a lower price than the government. However, if we turn over all responsibility for road construction to private entities, we can be pretty sure of pretty quickly not being able to get from point A to point B, because there is no incentive for Joe's to go through point B, since much more money can be had by building a toll road to the bright lights of point C. The same applies to government provision of Internet access. Along with health care, education, road-building and other services provided by responsible governments, Internet access will soon become an important resource for first-world citizens. And oh yeah, Costa Rica is not the third world. East L.A. is the third world (I live in Los Angeles).
You cannot ask a question like, "What is it like in South America?" South America is not, despite what Ronal Reagan thought, one big country. Each country is different. Cuba (well, Latin America, anyway), for instance, has near-100% literacy but a horrible lack of basic supplies like medicine due to the U.S. embargo. Brazil, though, faces massive poverty and illiteracy. Each of the others has its own story.
'Scuse me? This is News for Nerds. Nerds are a subculture. If you're clueless enough to confuse nerds with dorks, you need to go read ESPN or something.
It depends on your aims. For a fiction author who wants to make money, no doubt online publication is usually a bad idea. However, if you're writing a technical book or you don't mind not receiving all the money, dual-medium publication is not a bad idea. I bought Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line and Phil Greenspun's Database Backed Web Sites even though they were both available for free online, and each of those authors got an increased mindshare. In Greenspun's case, it's probably in his interest to give away his work, since he is now rather famous, and makes piles of cash for making other people's web sites.
Re:Other ?Massive Engineering? Stories
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· Score: 1
I agree, but I have to point out that all the Rama books after the first one sucked. This guy Gentry Lee is a horrible writer, and it's very clear which passages were written by him and which were written by Clarke. For that matter, Clarke is no Shakespeare, either, or even a Neal Stephenson. Although Childhood's End was a pretty good book.
The same technique was used in The Lost World. It turned out that some dinosaurs had escaped from Jurassic Park, unbeknowst to the rest of the world but knownst to us (sorry, I had to stick in the Spaceballs reference). Kinda sleazy, but it enabled another few bucks to fow to Crichton's pocket.
How would you turn your monitor like that? Monitors are big cubes. If you turned it so it was aiming up, you'd have to have some weird chair that would suspend you over the monitor. The only way that would make sense is if monitors were thin, like LCDs.
Sure, but don't tell me it's not inconvenient to hold down the mouse button for about a second, or alternatively to hold down one of the mod-keys, in order to get the context menu in Netscape, or to spell-check in Word. On the other hand, the three-button system in X is really of little use except when copying and pasting. I have a 3-button mouse, but I hardly ever use the middle button (well, actually, it's a wheel), except for scrolling and opening links in new windows in Netscape and Mozilla.
Okay, some of those are fair, but I don't think the iMac is very innovative. It's refreshing industrial design, but it's not any technological innovation at all. AppleScript is the same as every other scripting language. Scripting is an old technology that has existed in Unix, for example, for a long time. I'm not sure if by "Aqua" you mean the GUI or all of OS X, but if you mean the latter, I'll acknowledge that there are some pretty cool things there. However, most of them, like bundles, have been taken from the NeXT (admittedly, the theft was legitimate since Apple bought NeXT). There are some cool elements in the Aqua display system, however, which are mildly innovative, like the use of vectors and PDFs for everyday applications.
Is this the same kind of machine described in Robert Zubrin's The Case for mars? I remember that book being kind of interesting and pretty convincing when I read it a couple years ago.
These issues are discussed in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy, in some detail. By the way, that was a damn good hunk o' science fiction, although I found that the quality decreased as the books wore on.
I'm not a major fan of ESR, but I did read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and one of its foremost elements was the principle, "Release Early, Release Often." The gist of this concept is that it is desirable to have frequent unstable releases and periodic stable releases, clearly differentiated from each other. That way, users desiring stability can use the stable releases, and developers, debuggers and users desiring more features can use the unstable releases. A case in point is the Gimp. 1.0.4 is very stable, but is missing a whole raft of features. Various minor releases in the 1.1 line have been unstable to varying degrees, but have contained more features. Some of them have been rock-solid, and some have been... well, not so solid. But the point is to release often, and marke stable releases as such. I don't think anyone thinks that October Gnome (1.0.53) was unstable. I've been using 1.2 since it came out, too, and no part of it has crashed yet, even panel applets. For that matter, I used the explicitly-marked unstable 1.2 prereleases, and they were mostly stable, too, except for a few panel applets.
Does anyone have an explanation for why Itsies can't be mass-produced? Because they're so cool. Is it because price is prohibitive? Or materials? Anyone know?
since if you really do want lossless compression you wouldn't be using JPEG* to begin with
That's an erroneous assumption, since in effect, both GIF and JPEG are lossy. GIF loses color depth, which in many images is fatal, even with adaptive dithering, and JPEG loses color accuracy and detail and lotsa stuff. Sometimes JPEG is the better of the two undesirable alternatives, and PNG is impractical, such as in online publication of photos.
Well, except that a very high percentage of web users can't see them. That and they don't have animation AFAIK. Of course they're technically superior, but that doesn't mean they're better. By that logic (cliche alert!) Beta is better than VHS. Just 'cause it's superior doesn't mean you'd want to only release your blockbuster movie only on Beta. Or even on Beta and DVD.
Hey, good job, cool guy. I think you're lost. This is a discussion of a STILL-PICTURE format. Although you could, I guess, do a massive animated-GIF-style slideshow of a zillion JPEG2000s, I think a video format like MPEG might be a little more convenient. But thanks for the anti-DMCA and -MPAA vitriol. 'Cause we need free thinkers like you.
Disclaimer: I hate the DMCA and the MPAA, too. I just thought this guy was a little off-topic.
Well, see, this is a problem. Obviously, the link was useful. It made the story more convenient to find. Equally obviously, it was not 5 points' worth of convenience. Maybe it should have been a 2 or a 3. But when you're Meta-Moderating, you can't really tell which moderator you're metamodding. So how can you punish an arbitrary one, in the hopes that it was the one who made it a 5?
Uh, no they wouldn't. Cuba is completely different from China, as you might have beena ble to figure out if you'd considered the fact that the U.S.'s stance towards each is the diametric opposite of its stance towards the other. The US loves China so much it collectively masturbates to pictures of the Beijing skyline, whereas it hates Cuba so much that it won't even allow exports of medicine and food to the starving and dying citizens of that ostracized country. Why? Because China is an important export market, as well as a source of cheap labor and raw materials, not to mention a nuclear power, but Cuba is a small, powerless island with no economic significance except to cigar smokers, who aren't exactly the next Soccer Moms. China's human rights record is infinitely worse than Cuba's but we overlook that inconvenient fact because it is in our economic interest to do so.
Flashpix is actually a pretty cool format. It allows zooming and very good resolution (good enough to print), with fairly small filesizes. Unfortunately, it requires either a plugin or a Java applet, and the plugin is impossible to find. Plus, it doesn't even exist for Linux browsers. The Java applet kinda works on Netscape, and doesn't work in Mozilla M15. The GIMP can't read the format, and I'm not sure if Photoshop can, either (at least, without a plugin). It's too bad, because it's pretty nifty. Take a look at Phil Greenspun's page to see how FPX can be used well.
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Junkbuster already does this. It calls them wafers. You can configure it in all kinds of cool ways.
I am so fucking sick of people who object to any government-sponsored program JUST BECAUSE it is government-sponsored. Private industry has no incentive to provide equal access, as we are seeing in the current fight over distribution of urban cable-Internet services. A good-faith government, however, will try to provide equal services to all. Even if it is true that services may be more cheaply-rendered by private firms, the argument that all services should be private is fatally flawed. A fairly indisputable example is the construction of roads. Maybe Joe's Ass-fault Co., Inc., Ltd., LLC, S.A., GmBH, can built a road for a lower price than the government. However, if we turn over all responsibility for road construction to private entities, we can be pretty sure of pretty quickly not being able to get from point A to point B, because there is no incentive for Joe's to go through point B, since much more money can be had by building a toll road to the bright lights of point C. The same applies to government provision of Internet access. Along with health care, education, road-building and other services provided by responsible governments, Internet access will soon become an important resource for first-world citizens. And oh yeah, Costa Rica is not the third world. East L.A. is the third world (I live in Los Angeles).
You cannot ask a question like, "What is it like in South America?" South America is not, despite what Ronal Reagan thought, one big country. Each country is different. Cuba (well, Latin America, anyway), for instance, has near-100% literacy but a horrible lack of basic supplies like medicine due to the U.S. embargo. Brazil, though, faces massive poverty and illiteracy. Each of the others has its own story.
'Scuse me? This is News for Nerds. Nerds are a subculture. If you're clueless enough to confuse nerds with dorks, you need to go read ESPN or something.
A hack is not only a quick fix; it also refers to an elegant solution or idea, like this one.
It depends on your aims. For a fiction author who wants to make money, no doubt online publication is usually a bad idea. However, if you're writing a technical book or you don't mind not receiving all the money, dual-medium publication is not a bad idea. I bought Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line and Phil Greenspun's Database Backed Web Sites even though they were both available for free online, and each of those authors got an increased mindshare. In Greenspun's case, it's probably in his interest to give away his work, since he is now rather famous, and makes piles of cash for making other people's web sites.
I agree, but I have to point out that all the Rama books after the first one sucked. This guy Gentry Lee is a horrible writer, and it's very clear which passages were written by him and which were written by Clarke. For that matter, Clarke is no Shakespeare, either, or even a Neal Stephenson. Although Childhood's End was a pretty good book.
The same technique was used in The Lost World. It turned out that some dinosaurs had escaped from Jurassic Park, unbeknowst to the rest of the world but knownst to us (sorry, I had to stick in the Spaceballs reference). Kinda sleazy, but it enabled another few bucks to fow to Crichton's pocket.
Somebody took the mouse ball from my physics teacher's computer. Not the mouse. Just the ball. Smart guy.
How would you turn your monitor like that? Monitors are big cubes. If you turned it so it was aiming up, you'd have to have some weird chair that would suspend you over the monitor. The only way that would make sense is if monitors were thin, like LCDs.
Sure, but don't tell me it's not inconvenient to hold down the mouse button for about a second, or alternatively to hold down one of the mod-keys, in order to get the context menu in Netscape, or to spell-check in Word. On the other hand, the three-button system in X is really of little use except when copying and pasting. I have a 3-button mouse, but I hardly ever use the middle button (well, actually, it's a wheel), except for scrolling and opening links in new windows in Netscape and Mozilla.
Okay, some of those are fair, but I don't think the iMac is very innovative. It's refreshing industrial design, but it's not any technological innovation at all. AppleScript is the same as every other scripting language. Scripting is an old technology that has existed in Unix, for example, for a long time. I'm not sure if by "Aqua" you mean the GUI or all of OS X, but if you mean the latter, I'll acknowledge that there are some pretty cool things there. However, most of them, like bundles, have been taken from the NeXT (admittedly, the theft was legitimate since Apple bought NeXT). There are some cool elements in the Aqua display system, however, which are mildly innovative, like the use of vectors and PDFs for everyday applications.
Is this the same kind of machine described in Robert Zubrin's The Case for mars? I remember that book being kind of interesting and pretty convincing when I read it a couple years ago.
These issues are discussed in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy, in some detail. By the way, that was a damn good hunk o' science fiction, although I found that the quality decreased as the books wore on.
I'm not a major fan of ESR, but I did read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and one of its foremost elements was the principle, "Release Early, Release Often." The gist of this concept is that it is desirable to have frequent unstable releases and periodic stable releases, clearly differentiated from each other. That way, users desiring stability can use the stable releases, and developers, debuggers and users desiring more features can use the unstable releases. A case in point is the Gimp. 1.0.4 is very stable, but is missing a whole raft of features. Various minor releases in the 1.1 line have been unstable to varying degrees, but have contained more features. Some of them have been rock-solid, and some have been... well, not so solid. But the point is to release often, and marke stable releases as such. I don't think anyone thinks that October Gnome (1.0.53) was unstable. I've been using 1.2 since it came out, too, and no part of it has crashed yet, even panel applets. For that matter, I used the explicitly-marked unstable 1.2 prereleases, and they were mostly stable, too, except for a few panel applets.
I know what you mean. Helix has always had cool splashes, even if I reveal my shallowness by saying so.
Does anyone have an explanation for why Itsies can't be mass-produced? Because they're so cool. Is it because price is prohibitive? Or materials? Anyone know?
Not to be pedantic, but if you're going to say that hehe is wrong, then I have to point out that mispelling is spelled misspelling.
since if you really do want lossless compression you wouldn't be using JPEG* to begin with
That's an erroneous assumption, since in effect, both GIF and JPEG are lossy. GIF loses color depth, which in many images is fatal, even with adaptive dithering, and JPEG loses color accuracy and detail and lotsa stuff. Sometimes JPEG is the better of the two undesirable alternatives, and PNG is impractical, such as in online publication of photos.
Well, except that a very high percentage of web users can't see them. That and they don't have animation AFAIK. Of course they're technically superior, but that doesn't mean they're better. By that logic (cliche alert!) Beta is better than VHS. Just 'cause it's superior doesn't mean you'd want to only release your blockbuster movie only on Beta. Or even on Beta and DVD.
Hey, good job, cool guy. I think you're lost. This is a discussion of a STILL-PICTURE format. Although you could, I guess, do a massive animated-GIF-style slideshow of a zillion JPEG2000s, I think a video format like MPEG might be a little more convenient. But thanks for the anti-DMCA and -MPAA vitriol. 'Cause we need free thinkers like you.
Disclaimer: I hate the DMCA and the MPAA, too. I just thought this guy was a little off-topic.
Well, see, this is a problem. Obviously, the link was useful. It made the story more convenient to find. Equally obviously, it was not 5 points' worth of convenience. Maybe it should have been a 2 or a 3. But when you're Meta-Moderating, you can't really tell which moderator you're metamodding. So how can you punish an arbitrary one, in the hopes that it was the one who made it a 5?
Uh, no they wouldn't. Cuba is completely different from China, as you might have beena ble to figure out if you'd considered the fact that the U.S.'s stance towards each is the diametric opposite of its stance towards the other. The US loves China so much it collectively masturbates to pictures of the Beijing skyline, whereas it hates Cuba so much that it won't even allow exports of medicine and food to the starving and dying citizens of that ostracized country. Why? Because China is an important export market, as well as a source of cheap labor and raw materials, not to mention a nuclear power, but Cuba is a small, powerless island with no economic significance except to cigar smokers, who aren't exactly the next Soccer Moms. China's human rights record is infinitely worse than Cuba's but we overlook that inconvenient fact because it is in our economic interest to do so.
Flashpix is actually a pretty cool format. It allows zooming and very good resolution (good enough to print), with fairly small filesizes. Unfortunately, it requires either a plugin or a Java applet, and the plugin is impossible to find. Plus, it doesn't even exist for Linux browsers. The Java applet kinda works on Netscape, and doesn't work in Mozilla M15. The GIMP can't read the format, and I'm not sure if Photoshop can, either (at least, without a plugin). It's too bad, because it's pretty nifty. Take a look at Phil Greenspun's page to see how FPX can be used well.
Yeah, and it's "a General Public License," according to the article. I'm not a GNU nut, either, but I would like to see the GNU get its due.