We should see these things coming a mile away? Here are some that might be on the horizon, although some or all may be a stretch, and some may already be happening. What do you all think? Are there any others?
Adobe and.ps/.pdf formats
Microsoft and their.doc format
Sun with Java(script)
Napster
Bluetooth
The zero-emmission vehicles that run on that special juice
Sony et al. with Hi-quality CDs
Free isps like Juno
HP with printer drivers (now their free, but once market dominance is assured...you pay)
hotmail et al.
/. (wouldn't you pay $1.00/month for a access/posting privileges/a +2 bonus/10 karma points/etc.)
The applix anywhere java office suite
Free on-line disk space/storage companies
I'm not totally happy with these items--none seem as obvious as the mp3/.gif examples. Oh well, it goes to show that there is an important difference between free and Free.
Every time some web site/software company makes me give them my email address, I enter "support@verizon.com" or "sales@verizon.com". I guess it has just added up so much that it brought their servers down.
Re:Edit|Preferences screwed up... anybody else?
on
Mozilla .6 Released
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· Score: 2
Those are mail/composer/newsgroup prefs. I have them fine. Maybe you didn't install the full version.
There was no director's cut. I assume you are talking of the "Alan Smithee" version, which is about as far from a directors cut as you can get, because the director pulled his name from it.
From what I've seen here, I predict that we will see this post in 12 months:
I just saw Peter Jackson's feeble attempt at making the Fellowship of the Rings. Now, I have read the trilogy five times, and I didn't expect it to be that good, but it really sucked ass.
First of all, you can't really expect the beauty and scope of a 500 page masterpiece to translate to 2 hours of film? They shouldn't have even tried. WHY did they have to write such bad dialogue--it was not middle earth-like at all. And who decided to leave out Tom Bombadil? He was like the most important character. And It was stupid to introduce Strider after Frodo realizes about gandalf and the ring. The casting decisions were horrible--I didn't believe Sean Astin as a hobbit for a minute. The shrinking effects were horrible and not-too-compelling. The costumes were stupid--they dwarves looked like they were wearing Tevas, for goodness sake. And don't get me started on the accents--who would ever believe that Elves have an English accent, when we know that Modern English didn't come into use until at least 2000 years after all the elves sailed from the havens. I'm definitely not going to waste my time or money by seeing the rest of these marketroid potboilers!
Personnaly, I'm just glad that I can find joy in other's perspectives about the things I cherish, and enjoy revisiting a world that I found interesting.
...of a project that was assigned in a class on Artificial Intelligence using LISP several years ago. We were assigned to write an TCP interface for an internet agent in Mac Lisp. The trick was that there was already a C++ version implemented, and we could use it for reference.
Well, most of the other students were experienced C programmers, and so they just wrote a bunch of LISP wrappers for the available api. They ended being less efficient, buggier, and more difficult to deal with, and the students didn't learn how to use lisp to do actual tasks.
Probably any scheme/database library you find will be poorly documented and buggy. Its not worth it--do yourself a favor and use the power of the native language to solve your problem. It may even give you ideas about how to design better databases in the future.
Well, the first viewing is over. I enjoyed it. Some details have changed, granted, but I don't think they affected the story or the atmosphere much. I felt that Dr. Yueh wasn't mentioned enough before The Betrayal, but that would probably only matter to those who haven't read the book or seen the Lynch movie. Also, I think the early introduction of the Princess Irulan and Stilgar were interesting ways to make those aspects more transparent, albeit non-canonical. Also, there were a couple ripoffs from the first film that weren't necessarily taken from the novel.
All in all, I know I could have done no better, and appreciate a look at the story from a slightly different perspective. I wish all the loudmouth whiners who have been posting before viewing the movie enjoyed the movie for what it is, and not expect it to include every single detail that the 500 page novel did.
What are other's views on the deviations from the original, and how the story was handled???
Emusic is one of the sponsors of the Freeamp open source music player (which has limited support for.ogg formats, and is available for Linux and Windows). They have teamed with a company called Relatable, and another project called MusicBrainz, to categorize and catalog mp3s and cds. Relatable has a signaturing system that I believe uses acoustic fingerprinting--which is robust to small errors (or maybe even large errors) in songs. MusicBrainz takes these fingerprints and uses them to determine what songs you actually have, and then can use collaboritive filtering techniques to suggest playlists to you. I think this combination and seamless integration is making freeamp a very attractive player, although it still needs a little work and a little more help from interested developers.
What does all of this have to do with napster and you? Well, freeamp allows you to download/stream music from emusic fairly easily (for a fee--something like $10 a month). So, if the napster distribution channel dries up, they become a quite attractive alternative. No more crappy searches, no more little red dots beside the songs, linux integration, artist-tipping support. Now, I'm not saying that emusic's actions here are good or bad, but do have a legal approach to digital music, while napster/gnutella/etc are questionable at the very least. They do support an open source project as well.
...was that after the first two books, its never too late to stop reading. Even if you finished 5 1/2 books, you can stop there and it would be worth it. I scoffed at the advice initially, but I have only made it through the first two books, and could never finish any of the others. This advice probably applies equally well to the prequels. Anyway, with all the comments about "milking it for all its worth", people are not recognizing that Frank Herbert was essentially doing exactly the same thing.
Of course, since I never made it through the rest, maybe I'm missing the big picture here. But I'm still really excited about the SciFi miniseries that I think is due out next month.
Forget the boss, what about the husband, wife, father, union boss, or next-door-neighbor who floated you a loan? Anyone who holds any type of power over another might be able to use this to coerce another person to vote a certain way. Or somebody might offer to buy votes--but only if you can produce proof (like a computer-printed reciept of your selections). I could even imagine NRA or AFL/CIO banquets where the admission price is proof that you voted for a certain candidate. There are a number of other ways this type of receipt can be a problem. Providing records one's voting selections to citizens fundamentally disenfranchises them. This is also why internet voting is fundamentally flawed--there is no guarantee of privacy.
However, it may be ok to give a reciept with an identifiable number that can be traced back to the selections in the voter database--although I doubt any laws out there allow one to check or change their ballot after it has been cast. How many Floridian Buchanan or Nader supporters do you think would recast their votes now if given the opportunity?
The submitter wrote:
I believe that things like perception and reasoning are beyond the scope of raw power."
Actually, these two areas of artificial intelligence that are probably understood better than any others. (Language and Memory--now those are problems people are still clueless about, IYAM.) Neuroscientists have mapped out the perceptual system with great detail (at least the visual perceptual system), and there are some fairly advanced neural network models that embody these findings. On the other hand, Newell and Simon were able to understand and explain many kinds of "reasoning" very well in the 1970s--today the main descendent of this work, "SOAR", can work with 10,000 or more rules. It can fly planes in simulated combat and make strategic and tactical decisions. Maybe it is unable to do everything a pilot does, but I would argue that it is still reasoning.
So, it is technically correct to say that these things are beyond the scope of raw power, but the theoretical advancements have already been made. The only thing holding these system back from real-time performance is raw power.
Did he mean the turn of the 20th century, or the 21st? Because, technically, the internet/html/etc is "turn of the 21st century technology", and some day 65 years from now, people will be refering to it with nostalgia as "turn-of-the-century technology"
Anyway, turn-of-the-20th-century technology was wax cylinders, rotograveures, and stereoscopes. I think the recording industry has advanced a little from that point.
6 hours * 5 channels * 3600 seconds/hour * 44000 samples/second *4 bytes/sample=19,008,000,000 bytes. Maybe they should invest in 100.19 TB worth of disk space.
Did anyone else notice that on their site, http://www.chilliware.net/, they have a news column on the left that just links to news stories on this site? This obviously won't fool any savvy linux users, but it makes it appear that they are connected and a solid part of the community. I guess they feel its ok to take other people's work and include it in your own. Let's just hope that they haven't done this for their upcoming apps as well.
It seems to me that the people writing crappy OSS text editors today are the same ilk who were writing crappy shareware text editors and such 10-15 years ago. Almost nobody made any money off them (with a few notable exceptions), and they probably got the biggest kick out of the dozen or so souls who sent them a $25 check for some game they spent 1000s of hours writing. They aren't being paid for their time, but it is fun nonetheless. This is the same mentality as OSS developers, but nowadays, we've given up the illusion of getting rich off writing a text editor. Everything that the article's author said about OSS is doubly true for shareware, but shareware has played a large role in putting Microsoft where it is today.
The large number of Windows shareware apps out there adds to the applications count, which at least has an impact in marketing terms: right now, you have to show a CEO a chart that shows Windows as having 50,000 applications, but Linux as having 10,000. (numbers are made up) Where do the extra ~40,000 come from? Crappy shareware games, text editors, disk monitors, and inhouse stuff nobody will ever see, etc. Maybe someone can write a perl script that generates OSS text editor projects, and let it run overnight.
Didn't PeeWee Herman offer $10,000 for the safe return of his bike? With the plan of not giving the reward because the returner obviously was the guilty party? I think the sample song for technology D was "Tequila".
I remember seeing stuff about a TeX macro set for making slides call SliTeX. From what I saw, it did'nt look like it was that great, but I have never tried it. But, some people use it. Has anybody here used it?
What really surprises me about this is that the amnesics did not improve. One consistent finding is that your standard temporal-lobe amnesic has trouble with declarative, not procedural memory. (i.e. they would not remember playing tetris the next day, but they they would play better.) Something is probably wrong with their experiment if amnesics did not improve.
It has long been known that sleep affects memory consolidation. For instance, we all fall asleep every night, but we almost never remember falling asleep, or the events that take place up to about five minutes before. In fact, a lot of people who claim that they 'have conversations while asleep' or 'sleepwalk' are actually awake during this time, but they don't consolidate those memories and so don't remember it.
I think the original post made that classic geometry error we have probably all made, and substituted radius for diameter. If his calculations are correct, you can fit 26 million inside the sphere measured out by mars, but the quote implied that the _diameter_ of the sphere is about the distance between the sun and mars.
Is there really anybody who got rich off shareware that wasn't crippled? Is there anybody who got rich off shareware at all? I think that even Doom was crippleware--they had some registration scheme that got you a premium version. A principle of rationality is that if there are two alternatives with equal utility (as with identical alternatives), one should prefer the option that incurs less cost (the "free" one.) If anyone wants to make money by selling music to rational people (what American consumers supposedly are), they must make their option preferable to the alternative.
This can be done in two ways: either making the non-free music more desireable, or making the free music less desireable. Those that will survive have to use the first approach, because it will then also be preferred to the equal-quality non-free music. Unfortunately, the current record execs are trying the second approach, by deprecating free music and attempting to make it punishable.
...is because the:cat really isn't that useful. People have had the ability to type in the ISBNs and barcode numbers for years, which can be done almost as fast as you can scan them (maybe faster). Why hasn't everyone been cataloging their books and CDs for years? Very few people are so compulsive that they need an electronic copy of their library.
In the cue cat box I swiped from my neighbor's mailbox (thank-you:Forbes:Magazine), there also was a neat 8-foot long connector thing called a:Convergence:Cable (tm). It has a 1/8th inch stereo plug on one end and a:male and a:female RCA jack on the other. It looks like the thing I need to hook up my TV audio to my computer.
This cable is supposed to capture special bookmarks embedded within TV ads and forward you to the web site of their choice. It saves a lot of hassle, because you no longer have to type in "http://www.forbes.com" just to order an official:Forbes:Magazine:Golf:Shirt. Surely, this is also part of their:Intellectual:Property and took up some of their five years of engineering and development.
Why aren't they coming after people who are reverse engineering the:Convergence:Cable, those who circumvent their EULA by using it to make.ogg files out of their ":South:Park" video tape collection? Maybe somebody should put up a "How to:Reverse:Engineer the:Convergence:Cable":web:site.
Could someone please tell me what the difference is between the:Cue:Cat and the:Convergence:Cable?
What if the instructions with every light bulb said "please discard this bulb after 2 weeks and buy another", but the light bulb really lasts for months? Would you suggest that we should all follow the company's rules on light bulbs so that the company can make extra money?
Ever read your shampoo bottle: "Lather, Rinse Repeat. Rumor has it that, as we argue here, Prell is hiring lawyers to stop people from circumventing their instructions.
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I'm not totally happy with these items--none seem as obvious as the mp3/.gif examples. Oh well, it goes to show that there is an important difference between free and Free.
Every time some web site/software company makes me give them my email address, I enter "support@verizon.com" or "sales@verizon.com". I guess it has just added up so much that it brought their servers down.
Those are mail/composer/newsgroup prefs. I have them fine. Maybe you didn't install the full version.
There was no director's cut. I assume you are talking of the "Alan Smithee" version, which is about as far from a directors cut as you can get, because the director pulled his name from it.
I just saw Peter Jackson's feeble attempt at making the Fellowship of the Rings. Now, I have read the trilogy five times, and I didn't expect it to be that good, but it really sucked ass.
First of all, you can't really expect the beauty and scope of a 500 page masterpiece to translate to 2 hours of film? They shouldn't have even tried. WHY did they have to write such bad dialogue--it was not middle earth-like at all. And who decided to leave out Tom Bombadil? He was like the most important character. And It was stupid to introduce Strider after Frodo realizes about gandalf and the ring. The casting decisions were horrible--I didn't believe Sean Astin as a hobbit for a minute. The shrinking effects were horrible and not-too-compelling. The costumes were stupid--they dwarves looked like they were wearing Tevas, for goodness sake. And don't get me started on the accents--who would ever believe that Elves have an English accent, when we know that Modern English didn't come into use until at least 2000 years after all the elves sailed from the havens. I'm definitely not going to waste my time or money by seeing the rest of these marketroid potboilers!
Personnaly, I'm just glad that I can find joy in other's perspectives about the things I cherish, and enjoy revisiting a world that I found interesting.
Well, most of the other students were experienced C programmers, and so they just wrote a bunch of LISP wrappers for the available api. They ended being less efficient, buggier, and more difficult to deal with, and the students didn't learn how to use lisp to do actual tasks.
Probably any scheme/database library you find will be poorly documented and buggy. Its not worth it--do yourself a favor and use the power of the native language to solve your problem. It may even give you ideas about how to design better databases in the future.
All in all, I know I could have done no better, and appreciate a look at the story from a slightly different perspective. I wish all the loudmouth whiners who have been posting before viewing the movie enjoyed the movie for what it is, and not expect it to include every single detail that the 500 page novel did.
What are other's views on the deviations from the original, and how the story was handled???
What does all of this have to do with napster and you? Well, freeamp allows you to download/stream music from emusic fairly easily (for a fee--something like $10 a month). So, if the napster distribution channel dries up, they become a quite attractive alternative. No more crappy searches, no more little red dots beside the songs, linux integration, artist-tipping support. Now, I'm not saying that emusic's actions here are good or bad, but do have a legal approach to digital music, while napster/gnutella/etc are questionable at the very least. They do support an open source project as well.
Of course, since I never made it through the rest, maybe I'm missing the big picture here. But I'm still really excited about the SciFi miniseries that I think is due out next month.
However, it may be ok to give a reciept with an identifiable number that can be traced back to the selections in the voter database--although I doubt any laws out there allow one to check or change their ballot after it has been cast. How many Floridian Buchanan or Nader supporters do you think would recast their votes now if given the opportunity?
I believe that things like perception and reasoning are beyond the scope of raw power."
Actually, these two areas of artificial intelligence that are probably understood better than any others. (Language and Memory--now those are problems people are still clueless about, IYAM.) Neuroscientists have mapped out the perceptual system with great detail (at least the visual perceptual system), and there are some fairly advanced neural network models that embody these findings. On the other hand, Newell and Simon were able to understand and explain many kinds of "reasoning" very well in the 1970s--today the main descendent of this work, "SOAR", can work with 10,000 or more rules. It can fly planes in simulated combat and make strategic and tactical decisions. Maybe it is unable to do everything a pilot does, but I would argue that it is still reasoning.
So, it is technically correct to say that these things are beyond the scope of raw power, but the theoretical advancements have already been made. The only thing holding these system back from real-time performance is raw power.
Anyway, turn-of-the-20th-century technology was wax cylinders, rotograveures, and stereoscopes. I think the recording industry has advanced a little from that point.
6 hours * 5 channels * 3600 seconds/hour * 44000 samples/second *4 bytes/sample=19,008,000,000 bytes. Maybe they should invest in 100.19 TB worth of disk space.
--Torrance's mother in "Bring it On"
Did anyone else notice that on their site, http://www.chilliware.net/, they have a news column on the left that just links to news stories on this site? This obviously won't fool any savvy linux users, but it makes it appear that they are connected and a solid part of the community. I guess they feel its ok to take other people's work and include it in your own. Let's just hope that they haven't done this for their upcoming apps as well.
The large number of Windows shareware apps out there adds to the applications count, which at least has an impact in marketing terms: right now, you have to show a CEO a chart that shows Windows as having 50,000 applications, but Linux as having 10,000. (numbers are made up) Where do the extra ~40,000 come from? Crappy shareware games, text editors, disk monitors, and inhouse stuff nobody will ever see, etc. Maybe someone can write a perl script that generates OSS text editor projects, and let it run overnight.
Hey, cool. Let us know when you have it done. I've been trying to think of a way to use my cuecat. ;-).
Didn't PeeWee Herman offer $10,000 for the safe return of his bike? With the plan of not giving the reward because the returner obviously was the guilty party? I think the sample song for technology D was "Tequila".
I remember seeing stuff about a TeX macro set for making slides call SliTeX. From what I saw, it did'nt look like it was that great, but I have never tried it. But, some people use it. Has anybody here used it?
It has long been known that sleep affects memory consolidation. For instance, we all fall asleep every night, but we almost never remember falling asleep, or the events that take place up to about five minutes before. In fact, a lot of people who claim that they 'have conversations while asleep' or 'sleepwalk' are actually awake during this time, but they don't consolidate those memories and so don't remember it.
I think the original post made that classic geometry error we have probably all made, and substituted radius for diameter. If his calculations are correct, you can fit 26 million inside the sphere measured out by mars, but the quote implied that the _diameter_ of the sphere is about the distance between the sun and mars.
This can be done in two ways: either making the non-free music more desireable, or making the free music less desireable. Those that will survive have to use the first approach, because it will then also be preferred to the equal-quality non-free music. Unfortunately, the current record execs are trying the second approach, by deprecating free music and attempting to make it punishable.
...is because the :cat really isn't that useful. People have had the ability to type in the ISBNs and barcode numbers for years, which can be done almost as fast as you can scan them (maybe faster). Why hasn't everyone been cataloging their books and CDs for years? Very few people are so compulsive that they need an electronic copy of their library.
This cable is supposed to capture special bookmarks embedded within TV ads and forward you to the web site of their choice. It saves a lot of hassle, because you no longer have to type in "http://www.forbes.com" just to order an official :Forbes :Magazine :Golf :Shirt. Surely, this is also part of their :Intellectual :Property and took up some of their five years of engineering and development.
Why aren't they coming after people who are reverse engineering the :Convergence :Cable, those who circumvent their EULA by using it to make .ogg files out of their ":South :Park" video tape collection? Maybe somebody should put up a "How to :Reverse :Engineer the :Convergence :Cable" :web :site.
Could someone please tell me what the difference is between the :Cue :Cat and the :Convergence :Cable?
Ever read your shampoo bottle: "Lather, Rinse Repeat. Rumor has it that, as we argue here, Prell is hiring lawyers to stop people from circumventing their instructions.