Ah, yes.... gimmie gimmie gimmie, cuz I deserve it!
I'm not so foolish to forget that once upon a time, there were no such things as hospitals, housing plans, and fossil fuels. All of these, without exception, are luxuries, and in my opinion, not really worth regulating. They are merely the creations of society, people working together, and have generally benefited the most through those that embrace both personal altruism and and capitalism. When you get right down to it, if some massive horrible event or a simple energy crisis completely destroys the modern incarnations of health care, transportation, and employment, the world will keep on turning.
Regulating healthcare, energy prices, and employment the way you seem to suggest is a bit like building levees around the Mississippi and draining the Lousiana wetlands. Sure, there may be some short term good, but sooner or later... usually sooner... it's all going to break down.
Eventually, the world may get to a point where the hospital is a relic of an overpopulated and wealthy planet, horses will again become a primary means of transportaion, and out old people will start dying earlier. It's not necessarily a bad thing, just a bit different and a bit more inconvenient.
As seen in the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins:
Nobody knows how mankind will meet its long-term energy needs -- nor should we expect anyone to. We didn't rely on clairvoyance and planning to build a civilization on hydrocarbons, but on market systems that adapt to whatever reality confronts them.
"I can certainly understand it them stealing all of that. It's hard for people to understand unless they've actually lived and been through a situation like that."
"Salvaging no stuff? No, it's not my store, it's everybody's store."
Oh, wait... my bad, those weren't mp3 pirates. Rather, it's those pathetic looters that decided to stay in a town that lies below sea level when a massive hurricane came through.
I have a feeling that Spark's main goal in doing multiple expansion packs would be to get the consumers to buy into multiple games with similar content, with the next two expansion packs costing a lot less than the first... To which I would have to say... Ugh. Call of Duty fanboys must be even more nuts than Sonic or Transformers groupies.
"That'd be most transportation, utility, and manufacturing companies. And the effect of "losing" is that the cost of production of their goods goes up during the changeover to cleaner production methods. That means that everyone is paying more - a lot more - for the same goods they bought last year, without a corresponding increase in wages. Sales decrease, so profits decrease, so people lose jobs."
For someone throwing around words like "GDP" and "metric", you seem to fail to realize that money spent does not simply disappear... Rather, it's economic activity that gives money any value at all. Spend money on Joe, Joe spends it on Bob, and Bob spends it on you, and the money keeps circulating. With the rest of the world intent on keeping the US from gaining energy independence and shutting off the gravy train, I'd personally love to see a closed loop here form around alternative energy.
Also, I find the notion of the average consumer being the first to buy in on alternative energy to be absurd... Look to trucking fleets, manufacturing, etc. to do it first.
In fact, it's probably a lot better than any of the other comments, the dead openusability website, or whatever that site may or may not have posted about this. Simply put, it looks like the gimp is merely a project that has been registered by one of the developers to see what or if any good can from from those guys. That's all. No massive throw-in from the collective force of Gimp users and developers.
I've got a ton or respect for the dude (I've fixed far fewer bugs in GNOME bugzilla:) ), but honestly, I've not yet seen OpenUsability do anything worth bragging about. At all. Just a couple of flimsy "ooooh boy this is great KDE is JOINING FORCES with OpenUsability, which is GRATE because everyone KNOWS programmers don't no jack about usability." stories.
Feel free to call me the stop-motion energy guy... I'm just skeptical.
"Too many Hollywood movies these days, they say, just are not good enough."
They got really close here, but the honest truth is that many people who would have gone to movies simply aren't quite as bored as they once were. While not all information is free, the internet makes it much easier to access information and people... There's plenty of people learning, socializing, or just getting a load of visual kicks off the net that movies just can't compete with.
To be quite honest, why _should_ people have cared about Cotton coming to Harlem in the first place, what the Matrix is, or if the funky looking chick from that unfunny Bill Murray movie can escape an island? Arguably, they didn't. Most people just want to avoid boredom or spend time with their mates without actually having to converse. There will always be a market for movies, but probably not quite as big a share of the market ever again.
That, and the modern theater experience sucks. $3.50 for popcorn is a huge markup, 10 minutes of previews is about 10 minutes too many.
Actually, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, is one of the best games I have ever played.... and it was released in 1985.
Part of my fondness for the game came from learning that to add a member to your party from the towns, you actually had to embody the virtues that the people of that town respect.... To get Iolo the Bard to join your crew, you must be compassionate. Generally, this means don't attack harmless creatures just to gain experience, run from bad guys that aren't really evil, and give the beggars some pocket change when they ask for it.
I can understand and appreciate what the author is trying to do here, but to be completely honest, I don't see that much development and maturity, or at least nothing noteworthy. Sure, the consoles of today are more mathematically powerful than they were, but it's not that big of a deal... Tekken loads up 3d models and texture maps which then get pushed down a pipe and into a drawable, playable characters. The NES wasn't exactly a tin can and string by comparison: Nekketsu Kakutou Densetsu did animation of fighting moves for up to four completely different characters at once by switching several different pages of ROM directly off the cart, into and out of the video address space.
The sad part about the article is that it doesn't quite realize how bad and stale the game industry is these days. Dominated by publishers that are so addicted to the big money that comes from a market of $50-a-pop games that they believe games are all about finding the right market and developing a genre game geared to it, preferably with a promotional movie tie-in.
If that's industry maturity, you can have it back.
Will Microsoft release their own version of it and crush everyone?
Of course, the answer is "Yes". And "No".
Yes, they've got something called XAML.... I've personally not used it, but I hear that writing a script to convert an SVG file to XAML is trivial.
No, because... well, let's just say that Windows Vista beta seems to be shipping a version of solitaire that seems identical to the one they've been shipping since the early 90's, rather than taking advantage of vector graphics. Meanwhile, other desktops have been adapting (shameless plug).
"And advertisers' representatives have criticised the new Olympics bill because they believe it will make it almost impossible for most companies to even acknowledge that the Games are happening without getting into trouble."
Good. It's time to kill of the olympics.
A event like this only means something when the organization running it isn't corrupt from top to bottom. They have the nerve to tell ticket holders that "You can't drink Dr. Pepper here, but you can buy a $20 can of Coke! Coke is it!". The "Olympic Village" is now corporate-sponsored Sodom and Gomorrah. Home improvement companies spend millions on advertisements to say that they are proud to support their olympians ("You've got no marketable skills outside of athletics, so as long as you work 9-to-5 for minimum wage, we've got your back!").... I'm absolutley not surprised to see London sell themselves out by grabbing the Olympic bid.
Now, if nobody CAN mention the Olympics, perhaps they'll just go away. We'll all be better off for it.
There's a Nolan Bushnell interview linked to slashdot somewhere in the last two years where he talks about Atari's past and part of Breakout's design. He mentioned that one of the intentional goals, though the player didn't realize it, was to encourage the player to get the ball "stuck" so that the game would play by itself for a short while. The player gets a break from the paddle while watching the fireworks, feels a sense of accomplishment by getting the game to do that, and can get back into the game after that brief interlude.
So... you descredit intelligent design by saying that Evolution is NOT RANDOM, then descredit it again by saying that a RANDOM SYSTEM is capable of creating a living system.
If you're a firm believer in natural selection, you've probably got a bit more to worry about than I would.
It's really hard to tell, though, since most of that article was covering ground in the past about how the Catholic Church had reacted to theories regarding evolution and history... In a nutshell, it says you've got to be pretty dense if you think that the design of human beings, Earth, and everything else in the universe came about as a result of chance and necessity. In other words, He is a busy man.
The pathetic thing about all of this is that pundits on both sides use the confines that scientific research must exist in as a means of trying to discredit each other... Science only looks at things that are known and can be measured, bringing with it a sense that everyone in the sciences has no problem denying the existence of God or his role in our universe. Any physicist worth his weight can tell you simply that it's not so much that God must be denied, rather that he can't be measured. Alas, this is why the word "mystery" is used so often in the Church. His way are not necessarily just unseen, but possibly far beyond comprehension: $10 bucks to the first guy who can explain to me how exactly a quantum leap works, how exactly a subatomic particle can instantaneously move from one position to another without actually traversing that distance.
Finally, there's the heart of the matter touched on briefly at the bottom of the article. Superstring theory will be used by plenty of people (many of them lovingly known as "Slashdot Trolls") to somehow deny the existence of God. The Catholic Church will likely not endorse it, but simply for the same reasons that Scientist can't endorse God... The church can't measure and prove string theory, and the scientists can't measure and prove God. Will there be room for the Church to say that string theory may indeed have validity? Of course. After all, someone's got to be pulling on all the strings around here.
Mahjongg doesn't include any violence at all. Single-player games just have you remove the tiles, while the multiplayer game is about collecting groups of tiles under rules similar to Canasta.
Mozilla predates Internet Explorer by quite a large margin. It's not some fresh, pimply-faced startup project.... I was contrasting those who create new projects against those who maintain existing, established projects.
I've never, ever been a fan of the wretched SVG files that Sodipodi and Inkcape produces, and as I professionally use Illustrator CS, I just can't get the sort of smooth workflow going in Inkscape. It's been a few months, but modifying nodes was just about unbearable last time I tried.
Adobe Illustrator is just about flawless with SVG output... but only after you screen out the massive ammount of metadata junk it forces on output.
"Sourceforge is littered with the remains of OSS projects that were fun to code and get working, but that nobody wants to maintain anymore."
This was true once, but I don't think it holds much water anymore. There's much more esteem these days given to the guys who do the hard work of maintaining a project that actually works... There is a point where people want to maintain a project that is important and makes a different in people's lives, a point beyond the fun-hack level, and you rarely see entry level developers there.
Anybody can start up an open source project, but most of them never get to the point where the project is usable and well-made. The only exceptional new project I've seen lately is Ruby on Rails, and it's functional and well-documented to the point where it can't probably can't fail at the point where the initial developers lose steam.
The BBC is reporting on a study by digital music research firm The Leading Question, which found that people who download music from peer to peer networks paid for four and a half times more music than regular music fans.
I may eventually regret using Yahoo Music Unlimited, but one of the nice things about it is that you get to find out which CDs really stink and aren't worth buying.... Turns out, almost all CDs out there are really bad.
I'm sure that this isn't a shocking revelation, but the fact that M.C. Hawking has the best album I've heard in the past month is rather disappointing.
On the other hand, music pirates don't know how bad an entire album is until they cave in and buy it. Suckers.
Slashdot Mirror
The scene was more like this:
Balmer: 'I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google.'
BillG: YEAH!
Balmer: Then I'm going to take this frikkin chair, smash his face with it, and lick the blood off the ring.
BillG: Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Watcha gonna dooooo....
Balmer: BUT DO YOU KNOW WHAT I'M REALLY PUMPED UP ABOUT!?!?!
BillG: Oooooh Yeah!
Balmer: I just saved a boatload of money by switching to Geico.
(Running on excercise machine)
BillG: You can dooo it!!!
I'm not so foolish to forget that once upon a time, there were no such things as hospitals, housing plans, and fossil fuels. All of these, without exception, are luxuries, and in my opinion, not really worth regulating. They are merely the creations of society, people working together, and have generally benefited the most through those that embrace both personal altruism and and capitalism. When you get right down to it, if some massive horrible event or a simple energy crisis completely destroys the modern incarnations of health care, transportation, and employment, the world will keep on turning.
Regulating healthcare, energy prices, and employment the way you seem to suggest is a bit like building levees around the Mississippi and draining the Lousiana wetlands. Sure, there may be some short term good, but sooner or later... usually sooner... it's all going to break down.
Eventually, the world may get to a point where the hospital is a relic of an overpopulated and wealthy planet, horses will again become a primary means of transportaion, and out old people will start dying earlier. It's not necessarily a bad thing, just a bit different and a bit more inconvenient.
As seen in the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins:
Looks like the author, Greg Costikyan, is operator of a cell phone games company that made a movie license game called Mean Girls: Wannabe
In fact, I've been hearing it a lot today...
"Nobody's going to stop me from taking it."
"I can certainly understand it them stealing all of that. It's hard for people to understand unless they've actually lived and been through a situation like that."
"Salvaging no stuff? No, it's not my store, it's everybody's store."
Oh, wait... my bad, those weren't mp3 pirates. Rather, it's those pathetic looters that decided to stay in a town that lies below sea level when a massive hurricane came through.
I have a feeling that Spark's main goal in doing multiple expansion packs would be to get the consumers to buy into multiple games with similar content, with the next two expansion packs costing a lot less than the first... To which I would have to say... Ugh. Call of Duty fanboys must be even more nuts than Sonic or Transformers groupies.
Now that you've joined IRC, you'll be able to do just about anything!
Except work.
"That'd be most transportation, utility, and manufacturing companies. And the effect of "losing" is that the cost of production of their goods goes up during the changeover to cleaner production methods. That means that everyone is paying more - a lot more - for the same goods they bought last year, without a corresponding increase in wages. Sales decrease, so profits decrease, so people lose jobs."
For someone throwing around words like "GDP" and "metric", you seem to fail to realize that money spent does not simply disappear... Rather, it's economic activity that gives money any value at all. Spend money on Joe, Joe spends it on Bob, and Bob spends it on you, and the money keeps circulating. With the rest of the world intent on keeping the US from gaining energy independence and shutting off the gravy train, I'd personally love to see a closed loop here form around alternative energy.
Also, I find the notion of the average consumer being the first to buy in on alternative energy to be absurd... Look to trucking fleets, manufacturing, etc. to do it first.
A link to Sven Neumann's blog has more on this.
:) ), but honestly, I've not yet seen OpenUsability do anything worth bragging about. At all. Just a couple of flimsy "ooooh boy this is great KDE is JOINING FORCES with OpenUsability, which is GRATE because everyone KNOWS programmers don't no jack about usability." stories.
In fact, it's probably a lot better than any of the other comments, the dead openusability website, or whatever that site may or may not have posted about this. Simply put, it looks like the gimp is merely a project that has been registered by one of the developers to see what or if any good can from from those guys. That's all. No massive throw-in from the collective force of Gimp users and developers.
I've got a ton or respect for the dude (I've fixed far fewer bugs in GNOME bugzilla
Feel free to call me the stop-motion energy guy... I'm just skeptical.
$99 for a 20 gig hard disk? You can get a 250 gig hard disk for less than that!
No, you can't.
"Too many Hollywood movies these days, they say, just are not good enough."
They got really close here, but the honest truth is that many people who would have gone to movies simply aren't quite as bored as they once were. While not all information is free, the internet makes it much easier to access information and people... There's plenty of people learning, socializing, or just getting a load of visual kicks off the net that movies just can't compete with.
To be quite honest, why _should_ people have cared about Cotton coming to Harlem in the first place, what the Matrix is, or if the funky looking chick from that unfunny Bill Murray movie can escape an island? Arguably, they didn't. Most people just want to avoid boredom or spend time with their mates without actually having to converse. There will always be a market for movies, but probably not quite as big a share of the market ever again.
That, and the modern theater experience sucks. $3.50 for popcorn is a huge markup, 10 minutes of previews is about 10 minutes too many.
Actually, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, is one of the best games I have ever played.... and it was released in 1985.
Part of my fondness for the game came from learning that to add a member to your party from the towns, you actually had to embody the virtues that the people of that town respect.... To get Iolo the Bard to join your crew, you must be compassionate. Generally, this means don't attack harmless creatures just to gain experience, run from bad guys that aren't really evil, and give the beggars some pocket change when they ask for it.
I can understand and appreciate what the author is trying to do here, but to be completely honest, I don't see that much development and maturity, or at least nothing noteworthy. Sure, the consoles of today are more mathematically powerful than they were, but it's not that big of a deal... Tekken loads up 3d models and texture maps which then get pushed down a pipe and into a drawable, playable characters. The NES wasn't exactly a tin can and string by comparison: Nekketsu Kakutou Densetsu did animation of fighting moves for up to four completely different characters at once by switching several different pages of ROM directly off the cart, into and out of the video address space.
The sad part about the article is that it doesn't quite realize how bad and stale the game industry is these days. Dominated by publishers that are so addicted to the big money that comes from a market of $50-a-pop games that they believe games are all about finding the right market and developing a genre game geared to it, preferably with a promotional movie tie-in.
If that's industry maturity, you can have it back.
Will Microsoft release their own version of it and crush everyone?
Of course, the answer is "Yes". And "No".
Yes, they've got something called XAML.... I've personally not used it, but I hear that writing a script to convert an SVG file to XAML is trivial.
No, because... well, let's just say that Windows Vista beta seems to be shipping a version of solitaire that seems identical to the one they've been shipping since the early 90's, rather than taking advantage of vector graphics. Meanwhile, other desktops have been adapting (shameless plug).
"And advertisers' representatives have criticised the new Olympics bill because they believe it will make it almost impossible for most companies to even acknowledge that the Games are happening without getting into trouble."
Good. It's time to kill of the olympics.
A event like this only means something when the organization running it isn't corrupt from top to bottom. They have the nerve to tell ticket holders that "You can't drink Dr. Pepper here, but you can buy a $20 can of Coke! Coke is it!". The "Olympic Village" is now corporate-sponsored Sodom and Gomorrah. Home improvement companies spend millions on advertisements to say that they are proud to support their olympians ("You've got no marketable skills outside of athletics, so as long as you work 9-to-5 for minimum wage, we've got your back!").... I'm absolutley not surprised to see London sell themselves out by grabbing the Olympic bid.
Now, if nobody CAN mention the Olympics, perhaps they'll just go away. We'll all be better off for it.
There's a Nolan Bushnell interview linked to slashdot somewhere in the last two years where he talks about Atari's past and part of Breakout's design. He mentioned that one of the intentional goals, though the player didn't realize it, was to encourage the player to get the ball "stuck" so that the game would play by itself for a short while. The player gets a break from the paddle while watching the fireworks, feels a sense of accomplishment by getting the game to do that, and can get back into the game after that brief interlude.
Sorry, Darl... I'm still busy reading the arguments your lawyers submitted to the IBM case. I'll get to it later.
"2. They don't eat absolutely unheathy crap like you do."
Ah, but Penguins... They do eat absolutely healthy carp like you do.
So... you descredit intelligent design by saying that Evolution is NOT RANDOM, then descredit it again by saying that a RANDOM SYSTEM is capable of creating a living system.
If you're a firm believer in natural selection, you've probably got a bit more to worry about than I would.
It's really hard to tell, though, since most of that article was covering ground in the past about how the Catholic Church had reacted to theories regarding evolution and history... In a nutshell, it says you've got to be pretty dense if you think that the design of human beings, Earth, and everything else in the universe came about as a result of chance and necessity. In other words, He is a busy man.
The pathetic thing about all of this is that pundits on both sides use the confines that scientific research must exist in as a means of trying to discredit each other... Science only looks at things that are known and can be measured, bringing with it a sense that everyone in the sciences has no problem denying the existence of God or his role in our universe. Any physicist worth his weight can tell you simply that it's not so much that God must be denied, rather that he can't be measured. Alas, this is why the word "mystery" is used so often in the Church. His way are not necessarily just unseen, but possibly far beyond comprehension: $10 bucks to the first guy who can explain to me how exactly a quantum leap works, how exactly a subatomic particle can instantaneously move from one position to another without actually traversing that distance.
Finally, there's the heart of the matter touched on briefly at the bottom of the article. Superstring theory will be used by plenty of people (many of them lovingly known as "Slashdot Trolls") to somehow deny the existence of God. The Catholic Church will likely not endorse it, but simply for the same reasons that Scientist can't endorse God... The church can't measure and prove string theory, and the scientists can't measure and prove God. Will there be room for the Church to say that string theory may indeed have validity? Of course. After all, someone's got to be pulling on all the strings around here.
"Chess, Checkers, Mahjong, etc. etc."
Mahjongg doesn't include any violence at all. Single-player games just have you remove the tiles, while the multiplayer game is about collecting groups of tiles under rules similar to Canasta.
Mozilla predates Internet Explorer by quite a large margin. It's not some fresh, pimply-faced startup project.... I was contrasting those who create new projects against those who maintain existing, established projects.
I actually don't like Inkscape. Full disclosure, I'm familiar with vector graphics.
I've never, ever been a fan of the wretched SVG files that Sodipodi and Inkcape produces, and as I professionally use Illustrator CS, I just can't get the sort of smooth workflow going in Inkscape. It's been a few months, but modifying nodes was just about unbearable last time I tried.
Adobe Illustrator is just about flawless with SVG output... but only after you screen out the massive ammount of metadata junk it forces on output.
"Sourceforge is littered with the remains of OSS projects that were fun to code and get working, but that nobody wants to maintain anymore."
This was true once, but I don't think it holds much water anymore. There's much more esteem these days given to the guys who do the hard work of maintaining a project that actually works... There is a point where people want to maintain a project that is important and makes a different in people's lives, a point beyond the fun-hack level, and you rarely see entry level developers there.
Anybody can start up an open source project, but most of them never get to the point where the project is usable and well-made. The only exceptional new project I've seen lately is Ruby on Rails, and it's functional and well-documented to the point where it can't probably can't fail at the point where the initial developers lose steam.
The BBC is reporting on a study by digital music research firm The Leading Question, which found that people who download music from peer to peer networks paid for four and a half times more music than regular music fans.
I may eventually regret using Yahoo Music Unlimited, but one of the nice things about it is that you get to find out which CDs really stink and aren't worth buying.... Turns out, almost all CDs out there are really bad.
I'm sure that this isn't a shocking revelation, but the fact that M.C. Hawking has the best album I've heard in the past month is rather disappointing.
On the other hand, music pirates don't know how bad an entire album is until they cave in and buy it. Suckers.
Intel,
Maker of overpriced, underperforming processors...
AMD,
Leading manufacturer of budget CPUs.....
Microsoft,
Singlehandedly proved that breaking antitrust law can be worth the hassle....
IBM,
Services provider de jour....
Dell
Master of manufacturing, jack of no other trades.
HP
Titanic 2000.
Wow, what a dream team.