On one side, information wants to be free!!!! And we can all live in David Brin's Transparent society. And you can all have no privacy. And nobody gets rewarded for intellectual property they produce, because it's a lot easier to just make a copy. And nobody spends their time making music anymore, because they can't afford to. And nobody spends their time writing books anymore, because they can't afford to. And I can spy on you making out with your girlfriend because "hey, it's just information in digital form."
You don't speak for all of Slashdot's readers, because you don't speak for me.
Am I the only one who gets fed up with people saying that they speak for everyone on Slashdot, as if Slashreaders were a homogenous group with carefully allocated centrally planned ideologies????
This is just the latest of waves in the whole media revolution, starting with the invention of writing through the printing press, movies, radio, television and now the internet.
It's constantly getting easier to spread information, and that constantly dismays the people in charge, for whom ignorance is bliss, as long as it's our ignorance.
To think that this is some kind of new edge, and not just the constantly advancing crest of the communications wave, is to ignore th vast history leading up to this point.
There is an indie scene in Games. It's the people doing mods for the Quake engine, producing new games based on Unreal, producing scenery for MS Flight Simulator.
There's an indie scene producing engines (see Crystal Space, for one of many examples).
There's many, many people out there working on products. No, they can't compete with the big boys, but they can produce real games, played by real gamers.
And just because sometimes these small groups are sometimes funded by the big boys, doesn't stop them from being just as real.
In some ways, game producers are always going to be small groups. It's very hard to write code with more than a few people. ID Software started to have problems when it got too big. Lionhead have decided to stick to less than 20 people.
Virtual communities happen when like-minded people get together and care about the community.
I'm a member of a couple of small, exclusive communities. Mostly email based and the only way to get in is if someone recommends you _and_ nobody has any objections.
That way, we keep the yammering idiots out and we keep the group small enough to have meaningful conversations. _____
It's the code in the programs that was largely at fault.
If your date comparison code was simply snipping the last two figures off of the system date (or whereever) it didn't matter if you were running on DOS, Windows, Unix or Macintosh. _____
It strikes me that instant messaging is one of those areas where _everyone_ needs to either be on the same service, or the services all need to be open to each other.
Since there is no financial incentive to allow your competitors to access your servers (and you customers), it seems to me that the only way around this is a global service run on a not for profit basis, that allows _anyone_ to use it with any client they like (ie, open the message protocols to the public).
No company could make money from this (after all, if you can write your own client, you'd leave out the bit that displayed the advertising, wouldn't you?), so it seems to be a prime target for a government funded initiative.
Now, I don't like the idea of "The Government" being involved in my messaging any more than you do, but it does seem that some sort of international task force, funded by a variety of governments (or the UN) would solve a lot of these kind of problems.
All critisicms are, of course, gratefully recieved.
While I enjoyed the first three books in this set, I found that the last one degraded into bad scifi babble and then just nonsense at the end. I throughly recommend that you pick up a copy, just stop after book 3.
Finally, somewhere where the EU is ahead of the USA.
We've had digital TV here now for about a year, and it's a _major_ advance over analogue. More channels, easy channel selection (Sky digital has a cool, easy to use menu system) and no picture problems at all.
I haven't seen digital cable yet, but i'm looking forward to it....
Ahem. I want to have all my music with me at all times. This provides a way for me to do that.
If you want to use that same tech for a 'computing device' (although what exactly you mean by that I'm not sure, converting digital files into audio seems like a computing function to me) then feel free.
I like specific devices (sometimes) that perform a function I want perfectly. This sounds like that.
Yet again, an article in which people talk about the wonderful (and terrible) things that nanotechnology has in store for us. These people don't seem to have any idea about the massive scale we're looking at here.
I don't want to be a killjoy, but we're still taking the very, very first few step. The equivalent of looking at Hero's engine and talking about spaceships.
Nanotech will be very very useful for certain things, but I suspect it will be a niche product for a long time, happily taking one very simple thing and turning it into another simple thing.
Remember, we still know very, very little about how our own cells are constructed. Trying to create a nanobot than can go in there and create new ones is a great idea, but it's not going to be here next week (or next year, or maybe not next century).
I suspect that our only hopy will be developing AI powerful enough to do all the hard work for us... (and that's another really big job)
The number of relationships in a community grow exponentially (1+2+3+....+n-1) for n people.
The bigger the group, the harder it is to organise effectivley (ie, not as a mob). More than a certain number of people and it's very hard to say 'you do this and he'll do that' without spending your whole time organising people.
Also, the more people are allready on the list, the harder it is to find your voice on it and feel like you belong to the community. And as many people have ppointed out, the reason many people help out with Linux is because they like the community.
I used to spend hours every day reading newsgroups, reading email and checking web sites.
Then I was forced to spend two weeks without email.
And you know what? When I cam back, I caught up on the _important_ stuff in less than two hours.
If something world changing occurs, you won't miss it if you don't scan the web today - because the important stuff will still be here next week.
Every day billions of events occur - but you have to realise that you really don't care about 99.999% of them - and that you can cope without most of the rest.
Strangley, I've heard exactly the opposite in numerous places: Universities ought to be using Windows and teaching the skills that are most in demand (like VB), so as to produce marketable graduates.
I think there's room for both arguments, and that students need to be taught (if possible) both.
Real Jukebox will happily convert straight from CD to MP3. It'll use a digital connection to do so (rather than playing the CD and recording it), it records at 6x speed on my machine and if I use error checking, I almost never get skips on the CD. It also has CDDB access.
Recommended - although it only runs under Windows, so you'll have to rip under that and then come back to Linux.
Of course Adobe don't care about Open Source! They care about making money. If they can do that through Open Source, they will do. If they can't, they won't.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't program at low level.
And therefore I can get away with:
Do Form X
(or, if I wan't to get a result back from the form/dialog):
do form X to Y
Simple, easy and no low level code at all.
There are almost no games that couldn't be greatly improved by a chainsaw.
Even Elite (Ramming speed!!!!)
The correct pronounciation is Gojira, meaning God Monster.
The whole point of computer games is to lose yourself in the experience.
compare "I pressed this button, these pixels move up the screen and caused those pixels to move in various directions. My score increase by 1"
to
"I pulled the trigger and put a rocket launcher right in his back. Gibs _everywhere_. One more frag for me!"
If the game looks more like real life (or at least more like the Matrix), it's easier to get involved.
Of course, it helps if the gameplay rocks too, but graphics can add an awful lot.
Well, some of us aren't in the USA, and over here it's past midday.
Not all Slashdotters are living in the same time-zone ya know.
It's a matter of balance.
On one side, information wants to be free!!!!
And we can all live in David Brin's Transparent society. And you can all have no privacy. And nobody gets rewarded for intellectual property they produce, because it's a lot easier to just make a copy. And nobody spends their time making music anymore, because they can't afford to. And nobody spends their time writing books anymore, because they can't afford to. And I can spy on you making out with your girlfriend because "hey, it's just information in digital form."
How far do we go?
How far down this road do you want to go
You don't speak for all of Slashdot's readers, because you don't speak for me.
Am I the only one who gets fed up with people saying that they speak for everyone on Slashdot, as if Slashreaders were a homogenous group with carefully allocated centrally planned ideologies????
We're always living on the edge.
This is just the latest of waves in the whole media revolution, starting with the invention of writing through the printing press, movies, radio, television and now the internet.
It's constantly getting easier to spread information, and that constantly dismays the people in charge, for whom ignorance is bliss, as long as it's our ignorance.
To think that this is some kind of new edge, and not just the constantly advancing crest of the communications wave, is to ignore th vast history leading up to this point.
There is an indie scene in Games.
It's the people doing mods for the Quake engine, producing new games based on Unreal, producing scenery for MS Flight Simulator.
There's an indie scene producing engines (see Crystal Space, for one of many examples).
There's many, many people out there working on products. No, they can't compete with the big boys, but they can produce real games, played by real gamers.
And just because sometimes these small groups are sometimes funded by the big boys, doesn't stop them from being just as real.
In some ways, game producers are always going to be small groups. It's very hard to write code with more than a few people. ID Software started to have problems when it got too big. Lionhead have decided to stick to less than 20 people.
>PDA's don't necessarily need x86 compatibility, as we've seen. (Unless you're one of those evil Wince people :)).
Win CE doesn't require x86 compatibility either. It's designed to compile on all sorts of chips.
Virtual communities happen when like-minded people get together and care about the community.
I'm a member of a couple of small, exclusive communities. Mostly email based and the only way to get in is if someone recommends you _and_ nobody has any objections.
That way, we keep the yammering idiots out and we keep the group small enough to have meaningful conversations.
_____
Um, Foxpro stores dates with 4 digits for the 'years' field. Always has done.
It can display with 2 or 4 digits for the year, by using the "Set Century ON|OFF" command, but it's always stored with 4 digits.
It's 100% Y2K compliant.
It's the code in the programs that was largely at fault.
If your date comparison code was simply snipping the last two figures off of the system date (or whereever) it didn't matter if you were running on DOS, Windows, Unix or Macintosh.
_____
It strikes me that instant messaging is one of those areas where _everyone_ needs to either be on the same service, or the services all need to be open to each other.
Since there is no financial incentive to allow your competitors to access your servers (and you customers), it seems to me that the only way around this is a global service run on a not for profit basis, that allows _anyone_ to use it with any client they like (ie, open the message protocols to the public).
No company could make money from this (after all, if you can write your own client, you'd leave out the bit that displayed the advertising, wouldn't you?), so it seems to be a prime target for a government funded initiative.
Now, I don't like the idea of "The Government" being involved in my messaging any more than you do, but it does seem that some sort of international task force, funded by a variety of governments (or the UN) would solve a lot of these kind of problems.
All critisicms are, of course, gratefully recieved.
While I enjoyed the first three books in this set, I found that the last one degraded into bad scifi babble and then just nonsense at the end. I throughly recommend that you pick up a copy, just stop after book 3.
Finally, somewhere where the EU is ahead of the USA.
We've had digital TV here now for about a year, and it's a _major_ advance over analogue. More channels, easy channel selection (Sky digital has a cool, easy to use menu system) and no picture problems at all.
I haven't seen digital cable yet, but i'm looking forward to it....
Ahem.
I want to have all my music with me at all times.
This provides a way for me to do that.
If you want to use that same tech for a 'computing device' (although what exactly you mean by that I'm not sure, converting digital files into audio seems like a computing function to me) then feel free.
I like specific devices (sometimes) that perform a function I want perfectly. This sounds like that.
Yet again, an article in which people talk about the wonderful (and terrible) things that nanotechnology has in store for us. These people don't seem to have any idea about the massive scale we're looking at here.
I don't want to be a killjoy, but we're still taking the very, very first few step. The equivalent of looking at Hero's engine and talking about spaceships.
Nanotech will be very very useful for certain things, but I suspect it will be a niche product for a long time, happily taking one very simple thing and turning it into another simple thing.
Remember, we still know very, very little about how our own cells are constructed. Trying to create a nanobot than can go in there and create new ones is a great idea, but it's not going to be here next week (or next year, or maybe not next century).
I suspect that our only hopy will be developing AI powerful enough to do all the hard work for us... (and that's another really big job)
The number of relationships in a community grow exponentially (1+2+3+....+n-1) for n people.
The bigger the group, the harder it is to organise effectivley (ie, not as a mob). More than a certain number of people and it's very hard to say 'you do this and he'll do that' without spending your whole time organising people.
Also, the more people are allready on the list, the harder it is to find your voice on it and feel like you belong to the community. And as many people have ppointed out, the reason many people help out with Linux is because they like the community.
I used to spend hours every day reading newsgroups, reading email and checking web sites.
Then I was forced to spend two weeks without email.
And you know what? When I cam back, I caught up on the _important_ stuff in less than two hours.
If something world changing occurs, you won't miss it if you don't scan the web today - because the important stuff will still be here next week.
Every day billions of events occur - but you have to realise that you really don't care about 99.999% of them - and that you can cope without most of the rest.
Strangley, I've heard exactly the opposite in numerous places:
Universities ought to be using Windows and teaching the skills that are most in demand (like VB), so as to produce marketable graduates.
I think there's room for both arguments, and that students need to be taught (if possible) both.
I just went and looked at the tweak3d guide ( http://www.tweak3d.net/reviews/nvidia/geforce256/1 .shtml ) and good god this card kicks ass.
The addition of Transform and Lighting really _is_ revolutionary. Once you've used one of these babies, you won't want to go back.
There's a list of useful links at Blues News (www.bluesnews.com)
Real Jukebox will happily convert straight from CD to MP3. It'll use a digital connection to do so (rather than playing the CD and recording it), it records at 6x speed on my machine and if I use error checking, I almost never get skips on the CD. It also has CDDB access.
Recommended - although it only runs under Windows, so you'll have to rip under that and then come back to Linux.
Of course Adobe don't care about Open Source!
They care about making money. If they can do that through Open Source, they will do. If they can't, they won't.
Why should they care about Open Source?
I saw a report earlier this year sometime that they'd managed to boot NT on their simulation.
Which must give them some hope.