This idea that artists control their work forever is unfair to everyone.
The French would disagree with this. They have single handedly foisted on the world ever longer copyrights since the 19th century. I don't know why the French are this way, but given that they have invented croissants, mayonaisse and champagne, I'm inclined to believe them.
So it looks like the French are our new political football in America. Liberals loved the French when they were anti-war, and now, here we are, conservatives, saying, "hey, look at how great France is", in order to support copyrights.
Oh France! Some Americans will always hate you, but America as a whole will always love you!
Ironically enough the French stole the croissant from the Austrians - perhaps Vienna should lodge a DMCA takedown notice against every patisserie in Paris.
> (a leftover relic from the mainframe era that needed to die over a decade ago)
No no no. Binary coded decimal is necessary and useful. When you divide 1 by 10, you should get 0.1, not 0.10000000000000001 (which is what you get if you for instance open up a python interpreter and ask for 1.0 / 10.0).
Monetary amounts, and currency conversion rates are examples of something you should never, ever use standard binary floats for.
Fact: Many major databases use some form of BCD for representing currency values. Enough so that IBM added a dedicated decimal FPU for their power6 series - it's so common on business database servers that it actually saves a lot.
Here's a useful document from Sun on the matter (warning: pdf). The title is absolutely spot on: "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic"
[blockquote]The original definition of "byte" was the number of bits used to encode a character of text and is the basic memory-addressable element in a computer. It never originally meant "8 bits".[/blockquote]
That is the definition of 'octet', a term frequently used in telecom. People confuse byte and octet all the time, because popular hardware architectures use an octet as a byte.
Really? I was under the impression that it was the other way around. ie. the reason it's called an octet is because it has 8 bits.
If you have some definitive evidence to the contrary I'd really be interested in seeing it.
I do have personal hatred for x86 that runs pretty deep. There's not a single bit of code that I ever run that requires it, so I can safely move away from it. The Cell Cards are nice, but I can get more pervasive use out of the Cell architecture if I go with the PS3 set up. It's easier to do GCC flags for an all Cell set up instead and get good use out of it for everything I happen to run (so long as I can "hide the latency" from the applications) rather than having to patch things together to make good use of the cards. Plus, my latency will be lower anyway than having to rely on transfer along the expansion card bus. I really just want to build a neat little toy. You should check out the offerings from Fixstars Solutions http://us.fixstars.com/ for their PS3 clusters. A quick Google search should turn up some good results on what they've been used for.
Honestly, I just want to do what everyone in the industry should have done at least a decade ago (if not more) and wave goodbye to the x86.
I understand where you're coming from: my personal hatred for x86 also runs deep but unfortunately it's outweighed by my personal hatred for Sony. So no PS3 cluster for me.
I did not agree with the tiny 10-page article that barely had enough substance for 1 physical paper.
It's worse than that. I hate to spoil the ending for you but he comes to the conclusion that the British outlet is the greatest with a 10 out of 10 score. Why? Safety features. Features like shuttering and built in fuses. Both of which are optional on American outlets as well -- I'm sure -- as they are on outlets around the world. Maybe they're standard in the UK but they're optional in the US. I'd rather have the option than even more regulation. Also, the picture for the US is ungrounded. I'm beginning to think this article was written by someone who's never really cared to understand the diversity of plugs in countries other than his own (which I would never use in the US and very rarely see). Nationalistic garbage is about all this amounts to. Yawn.
"I'd rather have the option than even more regulation": how stereotypically American.
"Nationalistic garbage is about all this amounts to": pot vs kettle methinks.
I wish people would stop claiming that OS X is a FreeBSD/NetBSD derivative... some of the _userspace_ stuff was brought in from these systems but the OS X kernel is derived from neither of these projects.
Would people who have never looked at the kernel code please stop having opinions about it? At the very least glance through a copy of Amit Singh's excellent book and you'll see a massive amount of FreeBSD code in OS X. Or just scan the copyright headers on the source files. The BSD subsystem in the XNU kernel is a modified version of the FreeBSD kernel. On OPENSTEP, it was a modified fork of the 4BSD kernel. This is the part of the kernel that manages processes and threads, handles the filesystem, manages the network, handles system calls, and so on. Almost everything you do with OS X goes at least via the BSD layer, and often is serviced entirely by this layer.
Hey I'm not disagreeing with that (I've got a copy of Amit's book right above me on the shelf)... but the hybrid Mach part is what sets it apart.... although I will admit I haven't looked at the 10.6 code yet... the way things have been going it will probably eventually morph into something which is 99% bsd and maybe they'll just let the Mach portions slip into the aether
All I was saying is that it isn't freebsd and most of the people who go around saying that it is don't know about it's history
You don't think the BSD bits in XNU have been updated since 1986? Guess where they came from?
Granted. But I don't think that qualifies as making NeXT/OS X "derived" from Free/NetBSD. Besides, do _you_ think that the majority of people you hear saying that OSX _is_ FreeBSD actually realise any of this?
I'd also respectfully suggest that any one taking a cursory glance over the source of these systems would realise that there is some shared code but you only have to look at IOKit to realise that in many ways they are wildly different.
In any case I was exercising my right as a pedantic prat slashdotter by correcting GGP's claim that NeXT was derived from FreeBSD;-)
Was that supposed to be clever? Apple owns OS X. No one claimed they owned BSD. OS X was developed, marketed, and sold by Apple. It is not BSD, although it has it's roots in BSD. NeXT was based on FreeBSD and NetBSD. OS X was derived from NeXT.
Think you could do better? It's perfectly legal to take open source, package it, and sell it if the license allows. Take the path that Apple did. Of course you'd need developers, tons of money, and then more cash to market it. They own OS X. Any arguments to the contrary are just slight of hand.
Psystar didn't do that. They took a product owned by someone else and sold it as their own. Hell, they are doing the same thing to the OSX86 community and all their work. I find it curious that people will try to defend Psystar when they are turning their thumbs at the very same open source community.
Slightly off-topic, but I wish people would stop claiming that OS X is a FreeBSD/NetBSD derivative... some of the _userspace_ stuff was brought in from these systems but the OS X kernel is derived from neither of these projects.
As for your claim that NeXT was a FreeBSD or NetBSD derived system well I think you should re-check that one: both FreeBSD and NetBSD were started in 1993, NeXT was first shown around in 1986.
Neither the NeXT kernel nor the more modern OS X equivalent Darwin are strict BSD derivatives as often claimed. Both kernel's are derivatives of Mach an early microkernel OS that in theory could have a userspace servers provide the API of multiple existing OS's including MS-DOS, UNIX and ironically the traditional 68K based MacOS. However AFAIK the Mach team actually only implemented one which was 4.3 BSD Unix, dubbed the BSD single server. Later in the Mach project the BSD Single Server was put back into kernel space and this is what NeXT (and then Apple) used as the basis of their respective OS releases.
In other words OS X might look and feel a bit BSD-ish but it's only a half truth to call it BSD.
Well, most people don't go to church every Sunday and get practice belting out hymns. I'm a terrible singer, and I'm sure a lot of people think the same, so do you think they'd merrily come 'round the piano and belt out a nightmarish version of Auld Lang Syne?
Yes I agree, most people wouldn't want to hear me trying to sing either (myself included;-) but I think you have outlined the reason for this in your comment - the fact the music is something that most of us passively engage in from an early age is the reason most of us can't sing. I'm not suggesting that we are innately born with Maria Callas's voice but being able to perform musically (or participate in sport for that matter) is the same as any other activity from driving a car through to solving differential equations if you don't do it often you won't be very proficient.
I also realise that some people are tone-deaf and will probably never be able to learn, that's ok, but the vast bulk of the population is not born tone deaf.
...music and sport are both things that everyone should be encouraged to enjoy. By setting up both activities as something that should only be actively pursued by those with elite levels of talent you are pandering to the moneyed interests within our society that aim to steal culture from us and then charge us to passively engage in it.
Well, seriously, I think it's a little premature to take it this far.
Last I heard, Little League was still going strong and "soccer mom" is a familiar idiom to any American. I don't see lack of talent stopping any teenager from picking up an electric guitar or a drum machine (not least of all the world's most popular bands).
Sure, commercial music publishing companies love the idea of offering up musicians as "rock stars," but even back in the 1800s you had Charles Dickens traveling the country, giving readings of his novels. Few people give him the credit for destroying the American pastime of reading books, though.
I can see this turning into and endless rally of comments, but I'll try again:
I am not saying that a proportion of the population doesn't engage in either sport or music but in the case of music it is far from a majority and in the case of sport it is something that children do but adults don't - how much of the adult population do you honestly think participates in regular sporting activities.
Besides which I was defending my original post against jedidiah's complaint which seemed to me to be posing the argument that that unless you're extremely talented you shouldn't participate. (apologies to jedidiah if that is not what he was trying to say)
Oh! and yeah thanks for making the discussion USA-centric- apologies to all those Americans on slashdot who aren't guilty of this but you've managed to yet again alienate the large number of people here who are not American (me included)
Nowadays, instruments are cheap and ubiquitous. With a midi board and GarageBand, you can come up with almost anything you can imagine.
I, for one, am terrible with transcribing music. Like my father I'm the "play by ear" type - I need to hear it to play it. So when I come up with a tune, I put it all together in GarageBand with the simple midi instruments. Once I feel I've got it to the right basic sound, timing, etc. then I get on real instruments and record it.
I'm glad that you enjoy participating in the performance and creation of music - I am also a play-it-by-ear person.
As for performing, I haven't seen any shortage of musicians or street performers lately, and a cursory stroll through YouTubeville will show that there are millions of musicians out there of all skill levels who are performing for the whole world to see.
Yes there are plenty of people who do participate but you'll note that I said "most people" don't participate - at the risk of inciting a flame war about class warfare the street performers you see are more often than not students (with a predominance of liberal arts majors) or people from lower socio-economic groups. As a general rule you don't see middle class urban professionals standing in your local mall busking or posting their latest ballad on u-toob
Performing is not "creating music". All of the "creation" is being done by the guy that wrote the original bit of sheet music. So we are not that much more passive than we already were. We're just no longer in the practice of making our own mediocre performances at home based off of works that are sufficiently dumbed down.
OK. Perhaps I should have said performed rather than create (although don't underestimate the ability of people to improvise when they are encouraged to engage with music from an early age)
However your comments about mediocrity are exactly what I'm getting at, not all of us is Mozart or Beckham but music and sport are both things that everyone should be encouraged to enjoy. By setting up both activities as something that should only be actively pursued by those with elite levels of talent you are pandering to the moneyed interests within our society that aim to steal culture from us and then charge us to passively engage in it.
Note that I am not saying we should not also encourage those with elite levels of talent but I believe that there is a healthy balance from which we've long strayed
Actually it looks like John Philip Sousa's prediction was correct. We Don't sit-around home pianos in our parlors listening to somebody music, but I don't cry about it anymore than I cry that the horsewhip or candlestick makers no longer exist. Some forms of technology are obsolete and have been replaced by better forms, like direct recordings from far-off places.
Actually I do lament that fact that our culture has become one of passive engagement with music, and for the matter sport. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone but by-and-large most people listen to music rather that create music, most people watch sport rather that play sport. But I don't think that the various content industries share this sentiment, quite the opposite in fact as the entire content ownership and distribution system relies on the commoditisation of culture
I agree, and don't think it's anywhere near the science/CS-education bottleneck either. It's true that it can be useful to work with some non-trivial data even in relatively early education: sifting through a few thousand records for patterns, testing hypotheses on them, etc., can lead to a way of thinking about problems that is hard to get if you're working only toy examples of 5 data points or something. But I think there's very little of core science education that needs to be done at "internet-scale". If we had a generation of students who solidly grasped the foundations of the scientific method, of computing, of statistics, of data-processing, etc., but their only flaw was that they were used to processing data on the orders of a few megabytes, and needed to learn how to scale up bigger--- well that'd be a good problem for us to have.
Apart from very specific knowledge, like actually studying scaling properties of algorithms to very-large data sets, I don't see much core science education even benefiting from huge data sets. If your focus in a class isn't on scalability of algorithms, but on something else, is there any reason to make students deal with an unwieldy 30 TB of data? Even "real" scientists often do their exploratory work on a subset of the full data set.
I disagree with your agreement:-)
I suspect that what the article is getting at is that when you deal with very large sets of data you have to think about different algorithmic approaches rather than the cookie-cutter style of "problem solving" that most software engineering courses focus on.
These kinds of problems require a very good understanding of not just the engineering side of things but also a comprehensive idea of statistical, numerical and analytical methods as well as an encyclopaedic knowledge of computability, complexity and information theory.
Just think about how different the Lucene library or MapReduce
are from the way most developers would have approached the problems that these tools address.
...Unfortunately I think a lot of people will still think "That's funny, that isn't my normal picture..." and enter their information anyway.
I don't think Joe Sixpack is soley to blame for this; most of the population (slashdot-types included) have become somewhat de-sensitised to these sorts of changes because some dickhead from the marketing department has convinced their in-bred management brethren that yet another new look is needed for the "brand" and that a new "campaign" is needed.
While it would be nice to see name-brand, region-free players, it's just not going to happen.
The multinationals *can't* make region-free players, even if they wanted to, because it would violate their agreements with the DVD Consortium. And if they violate that agreement the US government *would* prevent the import of their players. They'd probably rather give up the AU market than the US market, so the AU government is not terribly interested in forcing their hand.
I think the answer is to setup a DVD player mfg. in AU (with region-free players of course), then sue the government to require enforcement of the anti-competition laws. As a DVD player consumer you don't have a terribly actionable cause, but as a mfg. you certainly do.
Au contraire, there is no need to start manufacturing players to enable you to bring suit.
Unfortunately of course regardless of which position you find yourself in (consumer of local manufacturer) you still need very deep pockets to take on the multinationals and the government.... as I implied in my original post, the laws are there to protect the wealthy not the end-user nor the local and/or small manufacturer.
Flying the flag outside your home is not at all *common* here in Australia. It happens, but it's very rare. it's probably more common to see the Eureka flag outside of or on non-government buildings than the Australian flag, and that's usually a symbol of union movement solidarity rather than patriotism. and private display of the aboriginal flag is probably more common too (at least in the cities where most of the au population lives) - again as a symbol of solidarity.
while Howard tried very hard during his decade as PM to introduce american-style nationalistic jingoism here, it only really worked with a small segment of the population...extreme rednecks and racists and other low-brow types. and even then it mostly only comes out at certain times of year, like around Anzac day (which, unfortunately, Howard successfully managed to convert from a day of remembrance for those who died, to a day of nationalistic propaganda for flag-waving cretins...taking advantage of the fact that there are none of the old WWI diggers left alive to undermine the glorification propaganda with their inconvenient comments)
I think you're confusing "common" with "majority", that is to say that less than 1/2 the population does it (actually quite a bit less than that I'd reckon) but it's not so rare that it stops you in your tracks with surprise. It also varies by area, you mention that asshole Howard, I live in his (former) electorate and the practice is not uncommon here, but in other areas of town (further west) the frequency of occurrence grows noticably.
I whole heartedly agree with your summation of ANZAC day... it's now sadly a shameful display of jingoism.
Hey. You weren't complaining when region free DVD players stopped honoring the "intellectual property" of the DVD content "owners".
Region codes don't have anything to do with honoring or not honoring intellectual property of DVD content producers. They are technological measures designed to segment the market so that producers can price discriminate more easily. The only reason they would be related to copyright law is because they can also be construed as a copy protection measure, and circumventing that is a violation of the DMCA. As everyone around here should know, it's entirely possible to violate the DMCA without actually infringing copyrights.
If region-free DVD players are illegal, it would only be because the manufacturers of such players signed on to the DVD spec and didn't abide by it, or because they never signed on to the spec in the first place and are perhaps infringing on patents that the DVD Forum allows its members to use. That's a problem for the DVD Forum and its rivals to sort out, and doesn't really have to do with the content on the DVD so much as the licensing agreement surrounding the DVD spec.
The whole thing with region-coding is laughable anyway. Region coding was found to be illegal under Australian anti-competition laws yet every major electronics chain still stocks dozens of infringing units from Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, etc. al. And just about every DVD sold here is region encoded.
The authorities have not brought a single case against any of the multinationals.
Yet another data-point that shows so called "Intellectual Property" laws are about one thing and one thing alone: protecting the interests of large corporations over those of both the producers and the consumers of content.
It's impossible to make an arcade/console game system emulator with any semblance of accuracy that can use SMP, or OS-provided and scheduled threads, for multi-chip emulation, unless the OS and CPU are specifically designed for *extremely* low overhead inter-chip synchronization, and even with that the performance benefit may not be worth it and you might as well just program an FPGA.:b
Now, if you don't care so much about accuracy because games on newer systems are generally more tolerant of timing inaccuracies, SMP will help to a degree. And of course you could use queues and buffers to defer CPU-intensive processing whose results are unreadable(in any way, shape, or form) to the emulated program to another core, but that would result in significantly increased complexity and significantly hurt performance on non-SMP systems.
Impossible you say.
I would agree that most OS threading models would get in the way but having SMP is an orthogonal issue: all that is required is a good real-time scheduler to take advantage of the extra processing power. That said I suspect most programmers could do with the assistance of a decent run-time as well, something supporting the actor model would make constructing such a beast easier.
Slashdot Mirror
I once had a freshman student write in a paper, "The bathroom smelled in a way that is not relevant to life."
Thank you for that: I laughed so hard I puked.
This idea that artists control their work forever is unfair to everyone.
The French would disagree with this. They have single handedly foisted on the world ever longer copyrights since the 19th century. I don't know why the French are this way, but given that they have invented croissants, mayonaisse and champagne, I'm inclined to believe them.
So it looks like the French are our new political football in America. Liberals loved the French when they were anti-war, and now, here we are, conservatives, saying, "hey, look at how great France is", in order to support copyrights.
Oh France! Some Americans will always hate you, but America as a whole will always love you!
Ironically enough the French stole the croissant from the Austrians - perhaps Vienna should lodge a DMCA takedown notice against every patisserie in Paris.
Also a child can have totally different DNA from the parent in rare cases because some women have two wombs where one is not used.
Whoosh!
WTF?
> (a leftover relic from the mainframe era that needed to die over a decade ago)
No no no. Binary coded decimal is necessary and useful. When you divide 1 by 10, you should get 0.1, not 0.10000000000000001 (which is what you get if you for instance open up a python interpreter and ask for 1.0 / 10.0).
Monetary amounts, and currency conversion rates are examples of something you should never, ever use standard binary floats for.
Fact: Many major databases use some form of BCD for representing currency values. Enough so that IBM added a dedicated decimal FPU for their power6 series - it's so common on business database servers that it actually saves a lot.
Here's a useful document from Sun on the matter (warning: pdf). The title is absolutely spot on: "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic"
That's what I was saying; read the thread again.
That is indeed what I thought you may have meant, but I won't matter how many times I re-read it you will still be saying the opposite.
[blockquote]The original definition of "byte" was the number of bits used to encode a character of text and is the basic memory-addressable element in a computer. It never originally meant "8 bits".[/blockquote]
That is the definition of 'octet', a term frequently used in telecom. People confuse byte and octet all the time, because popular hardware architectures use an octet as a byte.
Really? I was under the impression that it was the other way around. ie. the reason it's called an octet is because it has 8 bits.
If you have some definitive evidence to the contrary I'd really be interested in seeing it.
Please mod parent up 1,000,000+ insightful
I do have personal hatred for x86 that runs pretty deep. There's not a single bit of code that I ever run that requires it, so I can safely move away from it. The Cell Cards are nice, but I can get more pervasive use out of the Cell architecture if I go with the PS3 set up. It's easier to do GCC flags for an all Cell set up instead and get good use out of it for everything I happen to run (so long as I can "hide the latency" from the applications) rather than having to patch things together to make good use of the cards. Plus, my latency will be lower anyway than having to rely on transfer along the expansion card bus. I really just want to build a neat little toy. You should check out the offerings from Fixstars Solutions http://us.fixstars.com/ for their PS3 clusters. A quick Google search should turn up some good results on what they've been used for.
Honestly, I just want to do what everyone in the industry should have done at least a decade ago (if not more) and wave goodbye to the x86.
I understand where you're coming from: my personal hatred for x86 also runs deep but unfortunately it's outweighed by my personal hatred for Sony. So no PS3 cluster for me.
Rather than playing with just another un*x clone, try something like Haiku or FreeVMS or my personal favourite Plan 9
I did not agree with the tiny 10-page article that barely had enough substance for 1 physical paper.
It's worse than that. I hate to spoil the ending for you but he comes to the conclusion that the British outlet is the greatest with a 10 out of 10 score. Why? Safety features. Features like shuttering and built in fuses. Both of which are optional on American outlets as well -- I'm sure -- as they are on outlets around the world. Maybe they're standard in the UK but they're optional in the US. I'd rather have the option than even more regulation. Also, the picture for the US is ungrounded. I'm beginning to think this article was written by someone who's never really cared to understand the diversity of plugs in countries other than his own (which I would never use in the US and very rarely see). Nationalistic garbage is about all this amounts to. Yawn.
"I'd rather have the option than even more regulation": how stereotypically American.
"Nationalistic garbage is about all this amounts to": pot vs kettle methinks.
I wish people would stop claiming that OS X is a FreeBSD/NetBSD derivative... some of the _userspace_ stuff was brought in from these systems but the OS X kernel is derived from neither of these projects.
Would people who have never looked at the kernel code please stop having opinions about it? At the very least glance through a copy of Amit Singh's excellent book and you'll see a massive amount of FreeBSD code in OS X. Or just scan the copyright headers on the source files. The BSD subsystem in the XNU kernel is a modified version of the FreeBSD kernel. On OPENSTEP, it was a modified fork of the 4BSD kernel. This is the part of the kernel that manages processes and threads, handles the filesystem, manages the network, handles system calls, and so on. Almost everything you do with OS X goes at least via the BSD layer, and often is serviced entirely by this layer.
Hey I'm not disagreeing with that (I've got a copy of Amit's book right above me on the shelf)... but the hybrid Mach part is what sets it apart.... although I will admit I haven't looked at the 10.6 code yet... the way things have been going it will probably eventually morph into something which is 99% bsd and maybe they'll just let the Mach portions slip into the aether
All I was saying is that it isn't freebsd and most of the people who go around saying that it is don't know about it's history
You don't think the BSD bits in XNU have been updated since 1986? Guess where they came from?
Granted. But I don't think that qualifies as making NeXT/OS X "derived" from Free/NetBSD. Besides, do _you_ think that the majority of people you hear saying that OSX _is_ FreeBSD actually realise any of this?
I'd also respectfully suggest that any one taking a cursory glance over the source of these systems would realise that there is some shared code but you only have to look at IOKit to realise that in many ways they are wildly different.
In any case I was exercising my right as a pedantic prat slashdotter by correcting GGP's claim that NeXT was derived from FreeBSD ;-)
Was that supposed to be clever? Apple owns OS X. No one claimed they owned BSD. OS X was developed, marketed, and sold by Apple. It is not BSD, although it has it's roots in BSD. NeXT was based on FreeBSD and NetBSD. OS X was derived from NeXT.
Think you could do better? It's perfectly legal to take open source, package it, and sell it if the license allows. Take the path that Apple did. Of course you'd need developers, tons of money, and then more cash to market it. They own OS X. Any arguments to the contrary are just slight of hand.
Psystar didn't do that. They took a product owned by someone else and sold it as their own. Hell, they are doing the same thing to the OSX86 community and all their work. I find it curious that people will try to defend Psystar when they are turning their thumbs at the very same open source community.
Slightly off-topic, but I wish people would stop claiming that OS X is a FreeBSD/NetBSD derivative... some of the _userspace_ stuff was brought in from these systems but the OS X kernel is derived from neither of these projects.
As for your claim that NeXT was a FreeBSD or NetBSD derived system well I think you should re-check that one: both FreeBSD and NetBSD were started in 1993, NeXT was first shown around in 1986.
Neither the NeXT kernel nor the more modern OS X equivalent Darwin are strict BSD derivatives as often claimed. Both kernel's are derivatives of Mach an early microkernel OS that in theory could have a userspace servers provide the API of multiple existing OS's including MS-DOS, UNIX and ironically the traditional 68K based MacOS. However AFAIK the Mach team actually only implemented one which was 4.3 BSD Unix, dubbed the BSD single server. Later in the Mach project the BSD Single Server was put back into kernel space and this is what NeXT (and then Apple) used as the basis of their respective OS releases.
In other words OS X might look and feel a bit BSD-ish but it's only a half truth to call it BSD.
Well, most people don't go to church every Sunday and get practice belting out hymns. I'm a terrible singer, and I'm sure a lot of people think the same, so do you think they'd merrily come 'round the piano and belt out a nightmarish version of Auld Lang Syne?
Yes I agree, most people wouldn't want to hear me trying to sing either (myself included ;-) but I think you have outlined the reason for this in your comment - the fact the music is something that most of us passively engage in from an early age is the reason most of us can't sing. I'm not suggesting that we are innately born with Maria Callas's voice but being able to perform musically (or participate in sport for that matter) is the same as any other activity from driving a car through to solving differential equations if you don't do it often you won't be very proficient.
I also realise that some people are tone-deaf and will probably never be able to learn, that's ok, but the vast bulk of the population is not born tone deaf.
...music and sport are both things that everyone should be encouraged to enjoy. By setting up both activities as something that should only be actively pursued by those with elite levels of talent you are pandering to the moneyed interests within our society that aim to steal culture from us and then charge us to passively engage in it.
Well, seriously, I think it's a little premature to take it this far.
Last I heard, Little League was still going strong and "soccer mom" is a familiar idiom to any American. I don't see lack of talent stopping any teenager from picking up an electric guitar or a drum machine (not least of all the world's most popular bands).
Sure, commercial music publishing companies love the idea of offering up musicians as "rock stars," but even back in the 1800s you had Charles Dickens traveling the country, giving readings of his novels. Few people give him the credit for destroying the American pastime of reading books, though.
I can see this turning into and endless rally of comments, but I'll try again:
I am not saying that a proportion of the population doesn't engage in either sport or music but in the case of music it is far from a majority and in the case of sport it is something that children do but adults don't - how much of the adult population do you honestly think participates in regular sporting activities.
Besides which I was defending my original post against jedidiah's complaint which seemed to me to be posing the argument that that unless you're extremely talented you shouldn't participate. (apologies to jedidiah if that is not what he was trying to say)
Oh! and yeah thanks for making the discussion USA-centric- apologies to all those Americans on slashdot who aren't guilty of this but you've managed to yet again alienate the large number of people here who are not American (me included)
To quote Col. Potter, "Horse hockey!"
Nowadays, instruments are cheap and ubiquitous. With a midi board and GarageBand, you can come up with almost anything you can imagine.
I, for one, am terrible with transcribing music. Like my father I'm the "play by ear" type - I need to hear it to play it. So when I come up with a tune, I put it all together in GarageBand with the simple midi instruments. Once I feel I've got it to the right basic sound, timing, etc. then I get on real instruments and record it.
I'm glad that you enjoy participating in the performance and creation of music - I am also a play-it-by-ear person.
As for performing, I haven't seen any shortage of musicians or street performers lately, and a cursory stroll through YouTubeville will show that there are millions of musicians out there of all skill levels who are performing for the whole world to see.
Yes there are plenty of people who do participate but you'll note that I said "most people" don't participate - at the risk of inciting a flame war about class warfare the street performers you see are more often than not students (with a predominance of liberal arts majors) or people from lower socio-economic groups. As a general rule you don't see middle class urban professionals standing in your local mall busking or posting their latest ballad on u-toob
People like you are why I read at -1
LMFAO
Performing is not "creating music". All of the "creation" is
being done by the guy that wrote the original bit of sheet
music. So we are not that much more passive than we already
were. We're just no longer in the practice of making our own
mediocre performances at home based off of works that are
sufficiently dumbed down.
OK. Perhaps I should have said performed rather than create (although don't underestimate the ability of people to improvise when they are encouraged to engage with music from an early age)
However your comments about mediocrity are exactly what I'm getting at, not all of us is Mozart or Beckham but music and sport are both things that everyone should be encouraged to enjoy. By setting up both activities as something that should only be actively pursued by those with elite levels of talent you are pandering to the moneyed interests within our society that aim to steal culture from us and then charge us to passively engage in it.
Note that I am not saying we should not also encourage those with elite levels of talent but I believe that there is a healthy balance from which we've long strayed
Good thing we have sheetmusictorrent.
Actually it looks like John Philip Sousa's prediction was correct. We Don't sit-around home pianos in our parlors listening to somebody music, but I don't cry about it anymore than I cry that the horsewhip or candlestick makers no longer exist. Some forms of technology are obsolete and have been replaced by better forms, like direct recordings from far-off places.
Actually I do lament that fact that our culture has become one of passive engagement with music, and for the matter sport. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone but by-and-large most people listen to music rather that create music, most people watch sport rather that play sport. But I don't think that the various content industries share this sentiment, quite the opposite in fact as the entire content ownership and distribution system relies on the commoditisation of culture
I agree, and don't think it's anywhere near the science/CS-education bottleneck either. It's true that it can be useful to work with some non-trivial data even in relatively early education: sifting through a few thousand records for patterns, testing hypotheses on them, etc., can lead to a way of thinking about problems that is hard to get if you're working only toy examples of 5 data points or something. But I think there's very little of core science education that needs to be done at "internet-scale". If we had a generation of students who solidly grasped the foundations of the scientific method, of computing, of statistics, of data-processing, etc., but their only flaw was that they were used to processing data on the orders of a few megabytes, and needed to learn how to scale up bigger--- well that'd be a good problem for us to have.
Apart from very specific knowledge, like actually studying scaling properties of algorithms to very-large data sets, I don't see much core science education even benefiting from huge data sets. If your focus in a class isn't on scalability of algorithms, but on something else, is there any reason to make students deal with an unwieldy 30 TB of data? Even "real" scientists often do their exploratory work on a subset of the full data set.
I disagree with your agreement :-)
I suspect that what the article is getting at is that when you deal with very large sets of data you have to think about different algorithmic approaches rather than the cookie-cutter style of "problem solving" that most software engineering courses focus on.
These kinds of problems require a very good understanding of not just the engineering side of things but also a comprehensive idea of statistical, numerical and analytical methods as well as an encyclopaedic knowledge of computability, complexity and information theory.
Just think about how different the Lucene library or MapReduce
are from the way most developers would have approached the problems that these tools address.
...Unfortunately I think a lot of people will still think "That's funny, that isn't my normal picture..." and enter their information anyway.
I don't think Joe Sixpack is soley to blame for this; most of the population (slashdot-types included) have become somewhat de-sensitised to these sorts of changes because some dickhead from the marketing department has convinced their in-bred management brethren that yet another new look is needed for the "brand" and that a new "campaign" is needed.
While it would be nice to see name-brand, region-free players, it's just not going to happen.
The multinationals *can't* make region-free players, even if they wanted to, because it would violate their agreements with the DVD Consortium. And if they violate that agreement the US government *would* prevent the import of their players. They'd probably rather give up the AU market than the US market, so the AU government is not terribly interested in forcing their hand.
I think the answer is to setup a DVD player mfg. in AU (with region-free players of course), then sue the government to require enforcement of the anti-competition laws. As a DVD player consumer you don't have a terribly actionable cause, but as a mfg. you certainly do.
Au contraire, there is no need to start manufacturing players to enable you to bring suit.
Unfortunately of course regardless of which position you find yourself in (consumer of local manufacturer) you still need very deep pockets to take on the multinationals and the government.... as I implied in my original post, the laws are there to protect the wealthy not the end-user nor the local and/or small manufacturer.
Flying the flag outside your home is not at all *common* here in Australia. It happens, but it's very rare. it's probably more common to see the Eureka flag outside of or on non-government buildings than the Australian flag, and that's usually a symbol of union movement solidarity rather than patriotism. and private display of the aboriginal flag is probably more common too (at least in the cities where most of the au population lives) - again as a symbol of solidarity.
while Howard tried very hard during his decade as PM to introduce american-style nationalistic jingoism here, it only really worked with a small segment of the population...extreme rednecks and racists and other low-brow types. and even then it mostly only comes out at certain times of year, like around Anzac day (which, unfortunately, Howard successfully managed to convert from a day of remembrance for those who died, to a day of nationalistic propaganda for flag-waving cretins...taking advantage of the fact that there are none of the old WWI diggers left alive to undermine the glorification propaganda with their inconvenient comments)
I think you're confusing "common" with "majority", that is to say that less than 1/2 the population does it (actually quite a bit less than that I'd reckon) but it's not so rare that it stops you in your tracks with surprise. It also varies by area, you mention that asshole Howard, I live in his (former) electorate and the practice is not uncommon here, but in other areas of town (further west) the frequency of occurrence grows noticably.
I whole heartedly agree with your summation of ANZAC day... it's now sadly a shameful display of jingoism.
Hey. You weren't complaining when region free DVD players stopped honoring the "intellectual property" of the DVD content "owners".
Region codes don't have anything to do with honoring or not honoring intellectual property of DVD content producers. They are technological measures designed to segment the market so that producers can price discriminate more easily. The only reason they would be related to copyright law is because they can also be construed as a copy protection measure, and circumventing that is a violation of the DMCA. As everyone around here should know, it's entirely possible to violate the DMCA without actually infringing copyrights.
If region-free DVD players are illegal, it would only be because the manufacturers of such players signed on to the DVD spec and didn't abide by it, or because they never signed on to the spec in the first place and are perhaps infringing on patents that the DVD Forum allows its members to use. That's a problem for the DVD Forum and its rivals to sort out, and doesn't really have to do with the content on the DVD so much as the licensing agreement surrounding the DVD spec.
The whole thing with region-coding is laughable anyway. Region coding was found to be illegal under Australian anti-competition laws yet every major electronics chain still stocks dozens of infringing units from Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, etc. al. And just about every DVD sold here is region encoded.
The authorities have not brought a single case against any of the multinationals.
Yet another data-point that shows so called "Intellectual Property" laws are about one thing and one thing alone: protecting the interests of large corporations over those of both the producers and the consumers of content.
It's impossible to make an arcade/console game system emulator with any semblance of accuracy that can use SMP, or OS-provided and scheduled threads, for multi-chip emulation, unless the OS and CPU are specifically designed for *extremely* low overhead inter-chip synchronization, and even with that the performance benefit may not be worth it and you might as well just program an FPGA. :b
Now, if you don't care so much about accuracy because games on newer systems are generally more tolerant of timing inaccuracies, SMP will help to a degree. And of course you could use queues and buffers to defer CPU-intensive processing whose results are unreadable(in any way, shape, or form) to the emulated program to another core, but that would result in significantly increased complexity and significantly hurt performance on non-SMP systems.
Impossible you say.
I would agree that most OS threading models would get in the way but having SMP is an orthogonal issue: all that is required is a good real-time scheduler to take advantage of the extra processing power. That said I suspect most programmers could do with the assistance of a decent run-time as well, something supporting the actor model would make constructing such a beast easier.