I tested both illusions on the link provided in the summary and neither one had the effect on me that was claimed. What would that imply?
I tried them multiple times shifting my focus to different aspects of the image than directed just to see if it had any effect and it was no different.
Optical illusions don't work for everyone.
As an undergrad I had to sit through tests involving optical illusions for the psychology students, and in my case lots of the illusions didn't work. That got me excused from further tests, because they didn't want to make their precious stats go funny by including cases like mine (and about three other people in the class I recall).
Google has the benefit of having a lot of employees, a lot of goodwill, and a lot of money, so when it takes the "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" business strategy, things have a way of working out for them.
But would this work for anyone else? Maybe Apple.
No way. Apple try hard to give off an aura of 'hey, we're just cool guys having fun', but the reality is they are very structured and don't tend to do off the wall projects.
There is really one guy making the decisions as to what is good enough to survive, or even be started, and that's Steve Jobs.
Ok, he makes a lot of good choices, but they don't have anything like the setup that Google have.
They typically launch very tightly controlled products and evolve those, adding new features as required in order to either stay ahead of the competition or to get users to re buy the latest version.
Where they win is presentation, their stuff appeals to non geeks, so people get tricked into beleiving that Apple themselves are as cool and fun as their products and advertising make them appear.
Why bother to fight DRM? DRM is not the problem, the problem is that distributing DRM workarounds is illegal. Instead, why not go after the root problem, the DMCA?
The DMCA wasn't, in itself, a bad idea. What happened was that there was no attempt made to stop companies misusing it, and this lack of early intervetion is a cause of many of the present problems.
They should have realised it wasn't working as planned as soon as companies started using DMCA takedown notices to disrupt the trading activities of other companies.
I'm obviously very happy about the Lenny release since my employer (part of Environment Canada) makes us use Debian. However, I guess there are "good" technical reasons, but I'm sad OpenOffice 3.x could not make it. One of our tech allowed us to install OO3 on our Etch machines. The result: 003 makes my Etch crash (the full OS, not just the app, to my entire surprise!). I'm not saying it's the same for everybody else, but it's a sad thing for me. (in fact, even 2.4.1 can crash Etch since I installed 3.0... and I'm no way knowledgeful enough to fix that problem:-/)
Why does computers have to be that complicated?;-)
Sounds more like a hardware issue to me, or perhaps a really badly configured Linux install.
What happens if and when 20 years from now there is serious evidence of a link between autism and some vaccines. The people who mandated them will say "sorry we didn't know," but the parents should be able to say to them "fuck you, you will pay horrifically for what you did to our kids, you miserable social engineers."
I'm pretty certain the the plagues we'd suffer in the meantime through lack of vaccine uptake would deal with any sceptics nicely.
Forcing your neighbors to pay YOUR health bills is not freedom. It's graft.
How very selfless of you. I won't bother debating the reality of the national health service to you, since you've obviously decided that being ripped off by profit led private health firms and forced to go without health care if you've not got the money to pay is a better system.
Ask our Nanny State British cousins how much they like their cameras.
For the most part? We know they are inneffective and almost all are not even watched. The main reason they irritate people is the cost of keeping them active, not for 'slashdot modpoint gaining outrage' at the erosion of our civil liberties.
Our civil liberties are doing just fine thanks, most of the problems we have no are the result of OMG TERRORISTS!!!111ONE pressure from the US, and that again is losing steam at a rapid rate.
Unlike you, our country once got the shit bombed out of it nightly for YEARS, and we survived, started up a national health service, and began a process of ensuring personal freedoms which we still enjoy today.
You guys seem to be reacting to one single bombing event by imprisoning your population behind survellance and suspicion for years and removing all pretense of freedom.
Honestly? Its great. Aside from the obviously unfinished geforce drivers, its faster than XP for me on all my machines. I'll be moving to it (buying the ultimate edition probably) as soon as it comes out.
I avoided Vista as much as I could, except for on my laptop, which I didn't choose, and there it sucks hard. That same laptop running Windows 7 beta is running very nicely indeed.
Mind you, I'm also realising that we who want/need to use the windows platform have no real choice. XP will soon be a decade old, and it won't be long before (outside of large corporations with their slow upgrade cycle and non intensive desktop hardware requirements) only the diehard 'pry XP from my cold dead hands' crowd will still be using it, which means support for new hardware will get dodgy as hell. Installing it on my current machines is increasingly cumbersome, and I really don't like using such an old version of windows any more.
It's sad that people actually think even the UK is a police state, they obviously have not read much about what being in a real police state is like, or travelled to some truly controlled parts of the world (like Zimbabwe, which I have been to).
It cheapens the term when you abuse it like that.
Agreed
I live in the UK, and I'm rather appalled that people talk of our being or becoming a police state.
It seems to me some people are desperate to prove a police state exists in a nice safe (and entirely free) country so they can get all annoyed about it and not have to deal with the real ones, or the potential dangers of protesting an actual police state.
Last I checked people weren't being dragged from their beds in the night and improsioned/shot/beaten, and we have a legal system which apportions everyone legal rights that the police cannot avoid. I can't be bothered to refute this any more though, its too nonsensical for that.
As long as there are politicians in need of a platform to rant on in order to get elected, nonsense like this will happen.
Since the overwhelming majority of people neither play, or possibly even understand, computer games, its a soft touch for some 'fear inducement' followed by 'and I can save the children from it'.
Thus far it hasn't stopped the games industry raking in billions over the years, nor will it in the future.
These were groundbreaking discoveries because they destroyed the Scholastic world-view as effectively as the Theory of Relativity replaced absolute space and time.
Contrary to populer beleif, Einstein did not replace Newtons work with his spacetime/relativity work. Rather, he enhanced it.
If it were replaced, we would no longer use it, and yet Newtons work is applied on a daily basis, both in actual space operations and research. I use his (still very cool) equations in my own research.
There may be a time when Newtons aproximations are no longer used, but I don't see it happening any time soon.
There are areas for which we cannot use Newtons equations. Without application of Einsteins work satellite systems wouldn't function and our more advanced astronomy would simply fail, not to mention physics. But when it comes to the horribly complex task of geting a spacecraft from one place to another, its still Newton all the way.
That's what it boils down to. Personally I prefer Steam, although I can apreciate the cost savings and ease of use that would atract games developers to Live.
I've tried both platforms, and right now its clear that slashdot opinion aside, Live has the upper hand in tutorial support and ease of use.
I've decided to go with Steam for my project, but it was by no means an easy choice. In spite of the reflex 'omg microsoft are teh evils!!!111one' reaction, Microsoft make pretty good game development tools.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the GNU Operating System.
No, this year marks the 25th year of work on the GNU OS. There is still no GNU OS as such, and it's pretty obvious there never will be.
I'm not saying that there's nothing to show for all that work. The GNU libraries and many GNU utilities are key components in many projects, not the least of which is Linux. (<Sarcasm> Oh, excuse me, GNU/Linux.</Sarcasm> ) These are real achievements, and so is the introduction of a new collaborative model of joint software development.
But the original goal of GNU, to create a free alternative to Unix, has never been achieved. No big loss, there are other free Unix alternatives and even true Unixes for free. I just wish that GNU and its fanboys would stop and ask themselves why they never achieved their primary goal.
Having tried to get involved a few years back, I think I know why. While I don't deny the extree skill of some of the gnu programmers, GCC, Emacs and Gnuplot are ample evidence of this, they lack, or seemed to lack then, any form of cohesive organisation.
There was a distinct impression that if you didn't code in C, you weren't good enough, and that little use should be made of widely available, and equally free technology, because it wasn't 'hard core' enough, or so it seemed. There certainly was no logical reason for it. They spent, in my opinion, far too much time trying to write clever code, and not enough time trying to make things easily accessible for prospective new members. Since those new members would probably bring in new ideas and fresh impetus, I'd have thought this was a priority. Attracting some managers would have helped.
Their mailing list for Hurd showed their problem quite well. In spite of there being plenty of solutions available for spam filtering, they used nothing, which took me somewhat by surprise. This meant I ended up having to sift through literally hundreds of viagra and porn emails each week to try and follow something.
I asked someone else about it, and he had a script he ran himself to clear the spam. Very clever, very geeky, but very useless for those who think they shouldn't have to do that themselves to make such a mailing list usable.
I gave up after a couple of months, with a much better idea why we never got Hurd.
It's the old "Limits To Growth" bullshit back again. The same people who predicted mass starvation in the 70s are now predicting massive climate change. The whole concept that new technology means you can't just extrapolate seems to be lost on them.
You don't know the power of the lecture circuit:)
Seriously, these guys make money by saying these things. Ever heard of anyone making money by saying everything will be fine and lovely?
What all these people seem to miss is that our planet, and life in general will make out just fine, its *us* who are in trouble, us and the rest of the specialised mammals. Ok, some fish may get their shit fucked up as well, but its unlikely to the point of impossible that everything will die.
No, much more likely we'd be gone, and in a few tens of millions of years, its humans who'se bones are being displayed in museum, and made the subject of animated documentaries.
Not on the desktop, but there are large number of computer users who work on headless computers, and frankly don't want anything more than a console open with ssh.
I just completed a four year ph.d, during which my *entire* research effort was conducted using a linux cluster to which I connected via putty or bash, depending on where I was.
Yes I know, and so did my colleagues, that its possible with todays faster conection speed to run a gui over that connection, but why bother when you can already get so much done in a console window?
I use GUI apps a lot, they have an important place in the world of modern computing, but so do CLI apps.
What, so internet only media companies shouldn't be allowed to make a profit? Seriously?
You need to revise your ideas I think. If all you want is good quality free services that don't advertise, you're going to have to do them yourself, because no-one else will. Companies that don't make a profit become one of two things, dead companies, or slowly degrading services that then get bought by larger companies. If the latter its rare that the original appeal survives the process. Twitter is a good example. They have no advertising, make no profits from their customers, and have millions of users. How long do you think Twitters going to last in its current form? I'd give it less than a year.
Um, they followed the law in the dark ages, they were just very bad laws. Well bad if you were a woman, or poor, or a child, or in debt, or mentally ill, or on the losing side of a war, or, um, well, you get the gist.
Have you any idea how many billions of dollers there are to be made exploiting old landfill sites? Either by mining or collecting that methane for sale.
Most people who don't like them seem to think they are just holes in the ground that get filled up with crap and left to pollute. I live less than five miles from one, have done for many years, and not once has there been any smell or environmental damage. That area has some of the best hedgerows in the county, and as they cover over finished portions, the local wildlife is left alone to repopulate.
In contrast, constant development closer to me has destroyed a marsh, displacing a population of kingfishers (among other species, but they were the most prominant to my mind) and disrupting local river systes. They even redirected one river entirely, and now it floods every few years.
Slashdot Mirror
What does copyright extension have to do with the DMCA?
I tested both illusions on the link provided in the summary and neither one had the effect on me that was claimed. What would that imply?
I tried them multiple times shifting my focus to different aspects of the image than directed just to see if it had any effect and it was no different.
Optical illusions don't work for everyone.
As an undergrad I had to sit through tests involving optical illusions for the psychology students, and in my case lots of the illusions didn't work. That got me excused from further tests, because they didn't want to make their precious stats go funny by including cases like mine (and about three other people in the class I recall).
Its not that unusual.
Google has the benefit of having a lot of employees, a lot of goodwill, and a lot of money, so when it takes the "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" business strategy, things have a way of working out for them.
But would this work for anyone else? Maybe Apple.
No way. Apple try hard to give off an aura of 'hey, we're just cool guys having fun', but the reality is they are very structured and don't tend to do off the wall projects.
There is really one guy making the decisions as to what is good enough to survive, or even be started, and that's Steve Jobs.
Ok, he makes a lot of good choices, but they don't have anything like the setup that Google have.
They typically launch very tightly controlled products and evolve those, adding new features as required in order to either stay ahead of the competition or to get users to re buy the latest version.
Where they win is presentation, their stuff appeals to non geeks, so people get tricked into beleiving that Apple themselves are as cool and fun as their products and advertising make them appear.
Why bother to fight DRM? DRM is not the problem, the problem is that distributing DRM workarounds is illegal. Instead, why not go after the root problem, the DMCA?
The DMCA wasn't, in itself, a bad idea. What happened was that there was no attempt made to stop companies misusing it, and this lack of early intervetion is a cause of many of the present problems.
They should have realised it wasn't working as planned as soon as companies started using DMCA takedown notices to disrupt the trading activities of other companies.
I'm obviously very happy about the Lenny release since my employer (part of Environment Canada) makes us use Debian. However, I guess there are "good" technical reasons, but I'm sad OpenOffice 3.x could not make it. One of our tech allowed us to install OO3 on our Etch machines. The result: 003 makes my Etch crash (the full OS, not just the app, to my entire surprise!). I'm not saying it's the same for everybody else, but it's a sad thing for me. (in fact, even 2.4.1 can crash Etch since I installed 3.0... and I'm no way knowledgeful enough to fix that problem :-/)
Why does computers have to be that complicated? ;-)
Sounds more like a hardware issue to me, or perhaps a really badly configured Linux install.
What happens if and when 20 years from now there is serious evidence of a link between autism and some vaccines. The people who mandated them will say "sorry we didn't know," but the parents should be able to say to them "fuck you, you will pay horrifically for what you did to our kids, you miserable social engineers."
I'm pretty certain the the plagues we'd suffer in the meantime through lack of vaccine uptake would deal with any sceptics nicely.
Forcing your neighbors to pay YOUR health bills is not freedom. It's graft.
How very selfless of you. I won't bother debating the reality of the national health service to you, since you've obviously decided that being ripped off by profit led private health firms and forced to go without health care if you've not got the money to pay is a better system.
Ask our Nanny State British cousins how much they like their cameras.
For the most part? We know they are inneffective and almost all are not even watched.
The main reason they irritate people is the cost of keeping them active, not for 'slashdot modpoint gaining outrage' at the erosion of our civil liberties.
Our civil liberties are doing just fine thanks, most of the problems we have no are the result of OMG TERRORISTS!!!111ONE pressure from the US, and that again is losing steam at a rapid rate.
Unlike you, our country once got the shit bombed out of it nightly for YEARS, and we survived, started up a national health service, and began a process of ensuring personal freedoms which we still enjoy today.
You guys seem to be reacting to one single bombing event by imprisoning your population behind survellance and suspicion for years and removing all pretense of freedom.
Go you...
we currently have no especially good way of ridding ourselves of orbital debris.
Gravity? Granted its slow, but it works. Everything in orbit now will be gone in, ooh, a century or so.
Honestly? Its great. Aside from the obviously unfinished geforce drivers, its faster than XP for me on all my machines. I'll be moving to it (buying the ultimate edition probably) as soon as it comes out.
I avoided Vista as much as I could, except for on my laptop, which I didn't choose, and there it sucks hard. That same laptop running Windows 7 beta is running very nicely indeed.
Mind you, I'm also realising that we who want/need to use the windows platform have no real choice. XP will soon be a decade old, and it won't be long before (outside of large corporations with their slow upgrade cycle and non intensive desktop hardware requirements) only the diehard 'pry XP from my cold dead hands' crowd will still be using it, which means support for new hardware will get dodgy as hell.
Installing it on my current machines is increasingly cumbersome, and I really don't like using such an old version of windows any more.
It's sad that people actually think even the UK is a police state, they obviously have not read much about what being in a real police state is like, or travelled to some truly controlled parts of the world (like Zimbabwe, which I have been to).
It cheapens the term when you abuse it like that.
Agreed
I live in the UK, and I'm rather appalled that people talk of our being or becoming a police state.
It seems to me some people are desperate to prove a police state exists in a nice safe (and entirely free) country so they can get all annoyed about it and not have to deal with the real ones, or the potential dangers of protesting an actual police state.
Last I checked people weren't being dragged from their beds in the night and improsioned/shot/beaten, and we have a legal system which apportions everyone legal rights that the police cannot avoid. I can't be bothered to refute this any more though, its too nonsensical for that.
Sorry, I'd never claim citizenship on the internet, after all, who'd want to live in a place that was almost entierly composed of porn?
Oh wait...
Yes, it's not like 97% of American teens play computer games or over 50% of American adults
Strangely enough, most of the world aren't Americans, and this story isn't about America either.
As long as there are politicians in need of a platform to rant on in order to get elected, nonsense like this will happen.
Since the overwhelming majority of people neither play, or possibly even understand, computer games, its a soft touch for some 'fear inducement' followed by 'and I can save the children from it'.
Thus far it hasn't stopped the games industry raking in billions over the years, nor will it in the future.
So, all those datacentres buying hardware and using electricity, are they free too?
Sooner or later there is a cost, and free services have one big problem for long term survivability, where's the profit?
A great free service may be fun, might even be useful, but sooner or later down the chain someone needs to be paid.
Or are all web developers working for no pay these days?
These were groundbreaking discoveries because they destroyed the Scholastic world-view as effectively as the Theory of Relativity replaced absolute space and time.
Contrary to populer beleif, Einstein did not replace Newtons work with his spacetime/relativity work. Rather, he enhanced it.
If it were replaced, we would no longer use it, and yet Newtons work is applied on a daily basis, both in actual space operations and research. I use his (still very cool) equations in my own research.
There may be a time when Newtons aproximations are no longer used, but I don't see it happening any time soon.
There are areas for which we cannot use Newtons equations. Without application of Einsteins work satellite systems wouldn't function and our more advanced astronomy would simply fail, not to mention physics. But when it comes to the horribly complex task of geting a spacecraft from one place to another, its still Newton all the way.
That's what it boils down to. Personally I prefer Steam, although I can apreciate the cost savings and ease of use that would atract games developers to Live.
I've tried both platforms, and right now its clear that slashdot opinion aside, Live has the upper hand in tutorial support and ease of use.
I've decided to go with Steam for my project, but it was by no means an easy choice. In spite of the reflex 'omg microsoft are teh evils!!!111one' reaction, Microsoft make pretty good game development tools.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the GNU Operating System.
No, this year marks the 25th year of work on the GNU OS. There is still no GNU OS as such, and it's pretty obvious there never will be.
I'm not saying that there's nothing to show for all that work. The GNU libraries and many GNU utilities are key components in many projects, not the least of which is Linux. (<Sarcasm> Oh, excuse me, GNU/Linux.</Sarcasm> ) These are real achievements, and so is the introduction of a new collaborative model of joint software development.
But the original goal of GNU, to create a free alternative to Unix, has never been achieved. No big loss, there are other free Unix alternatives and even true Unixes for free. I just wish that GNU and its fanboys would stop and ask themselves why they never achieved their primary goal.
Having tried to get involved a few years back, I think I know why. While I don't deny the extree skill of some of the gnu programmers, GCC, Emacs and Gnuplot are ample evidence of this, they lack, or seemed to lack then, any form of cohesive organisation.
There was a distinct impression that if you didn't code in C, you weren't good enough, and that little use should be made of widely available, and equally free technology, because it wasn't 'hard core' enough, or so it seemed. There certainly was no logical reason for it. They spent, in my opinion, far too much time trying to write clever code, and not enough time trying to make things easily accessible for prospective new members. Since those new members would probably bring in new ideas and fresh impetus, I'd have thought this was a priority. Attracting some managers would have helped.
Their mailing list for Hurd showed their problem quite well. In spite of there being plenty of solutions available for spam filtering, they used nothing, which took me somewhat by surprise. This meant I ended up having to sift through literally hundreds of viagra and porn emails each week to try and follow something.
I asked someone else about it, and he had a script he ran himself to clear the spam. Very clever, very geeky, but very useless for those who think they shouldn't have to do that themselves to make such a mailing list usable.
I gave up after a couple of months, with a much better idea why we never got Hurd.
It's the old "Limits To Growth" bullshit back again. The same people who predicted mass starvation in the 70s are now predicting massive climate change. The whole concept that new technology means you can't just extrapolate seems to be lost on them.
You don't know the power of the lecture circuit :)
Seriously, these guys make money by saying these things. Ever heard of anyone making money by saying everything will be fine and lovely?
What all these people seem to miss is that our planet, and life in general will make out just fine, its *us* who are in trouble, us and the rest of the specialised mammals. Ok, some fish may get their shit fucked up as well, but its unlikely to the point of impossible that everything will die.
No, much more likely we'd be gone, and in a few tens of millions of years, its humans who'se bones are being displayed in museum, and made the subject of animated documentaries.
Do text apps still have a place in today's world?
Not on the desktop, but there are large number of computer users who work on headless computers, and frankly don't want anything more than a console open with ssh.
I just completed a four year ph.d, during which my *entire* research effort was conducted using a linux cluster to which I connected via putty or bash, depending on where I was.
Yes I know, and so did my colleagues, that its possible with todays faster conection speed to run a gui over that connection, but why bother when you can already get so much done in a console window?
I use GUI apps a lot, they have an important place in the world of modern computing, but so do CLI apps.
It doesn't matter if it's CNN or little timmy's html experiments, if you kill people's websites and jail them for what they SAY, you are a tyrant!
Unless its an Angelfire templated website, in which case you are a mercy killer..
What, so internet only media companies shouldn't be allowed to make a profit? Seriously?
You need to revise your ideas I think. If all you want is good quality free services that don't advertise, you're going to have to do them yourself, because no-one else will.
Companies that don't make a profit become one of two things, dead companies, or slowly degrading services that then get bought by larger companies.
If the latter its rare that the original appeal survives the process.
Twitter is a good example. They have no advertising, make no profits from their customers, and have millions of users. How long do you think Twitters going to last in its current form? I'd give it less than a year.
May A nation that follows the law.
Um, they followed the law in the dark ages, they were just very bad laws. Well bad if you were a woman, or poor, or a child, or in debt, or mentally ill, or on the losing side of a war, or, um, well, you get the gist.
Have you any idea how many billions of dollers there are to be made exploiting old landfill sites? Either by mining or collecting that methane for sale.
Most people who don't like them seem to think they are just holes in the ground that get filled up with crap and left to pollute. I live less than five miles from one, have done for many years, and not once has there been any smell or environmental damage. That area has some of the best hedgerows in the county, and as they cover over finished portions, the local wildlife is left alone to repopulate.
In contrast, constant development closer to me has destroyed a marsh, displacing a population of kingfishers (among other species, but they were the most prominant to my mind) and disrupting local river systes. They even redirected one river entirely, and now it floods every few years.
I mean, since a free product stops people from looking for alternatives, everyone will switch to Linux, right?
For a given value of 'year'