First of all, let me say "good riddance". Hopefully, this will lead the better sharers to give up on the FastTrack network entirely and turn to something with better design, like ed2k.
But shutting down the hacked Kazaa client doesn't mean that a totally different client can't be written to connect to even the updated FastTrack. Doesn't Shareaza already do this? I don't know... I don't touch that ad-driven crap.
It was a nice idea to remove all the crap from the standard Kazaa client. But now that it's shut down, maybe it's time to rewrite a client from the ground up, or maybe to add FastTrack compatibility to some already-awesome open-source client like DC++ or eMule.
What's Sherman gonna do? Cry that it's reverse-engineering, banned by the DMCA? Ha! What court will listen?
I'm afraid you're right. This might not be a fatal flaw in the bounty system if there are project-appointed bounty cops which make a ruling on whether the bounty was properly discharged (maintainable code, etc.).
Real-life bounties have this problem as well. The US offered bounties on Afghan "Al Quada members", and for this reason, many of the people caged up in Guantanamo are just farmers, taxi-drivers and 13-year-old kids who were turned in by some very nasty people who wanted bounty money. To solve this problem, they need a committe to determine when a bounty is properly paid. A similar system could also make calls about bounty paymets for software. Sure, it's a bit of extra work, but much easier than writing the code yourself.
Polygamy also has other downsides. With 50/50 distribution of men and women, for every man that marries a few, there will be a few who necessarily get none. In Utah they call these unfortunate guys "Slashdot readers" for some reason.
This is the most insightful comment that I've read here for weeks. It squares exactly with my experience. And the larger point about capitalism being unsuited for an age of abundance is something that we all need to think about very hard.
Yeah, I did mean KHTML. I'm pretty impressed with what Safari and Konqueror can do.
Mozilla extensions/plugins already make it very easy to add new features like encryption. So I don't worry about feature stagnation. And I know there are still bugs, but they hardly bite anymore.
Your point about Internet Explorer is a good one: It has stagnated, and Microsoft is essentially giving up on further development. This kills the most important reason that once made it urgent for browsers to keep changing: new online standards being implemented by websites. Now, Mozilla can relax about things like CSS2 for a while. Since IE can't render that stuff anyway, there won't be websites that use it. There's no harm done to Mozilla if it stagnates in parallel with IE, and just squashes some bugs and adds/improves a few plugins. It's already so much better, it's biggest problem now is just getting people to try it. That gives developers the breathing room to work on a more ambitious project from scratch or from KHTML.
Well, I would envy the people who get this deal... if they didn't live in Utah. Don't get me wrong, I think Utah is beautiful, but unless they put in all new people along with the cables, I'm staying away.
I hate to admit to such a thing, but I'm really greatful for AOL's life support for the Mozilla project. Now Mozilla isn't just good, it's the best browser ever made, and its modular design makes it easy to add extensions to it (which in the end make for its coolest features, like mouse gestures and adblock).
I honestly haven't noticed any really significant improvements in my Mozilla experience in the last 6 months. As far as I'm concerned, Mozilla is done. Sure, it's nice to stomp some bugs and increase performance by ever-diminishing increments, but I think we've passed the point when the average user on a good computer even notices.
That's intended as a huge compliment to Mozilla.
I also think the remaining hackers are doing the right thing in trying to furhter modularize the code. These are the sorts of things that end-users (hopefully) don't notice, but they make the individual components more useable.
But I have to wonder whether Mozilla requires the huge programming push that it has needed two years ago. Is there ever a time when you just basically declare it done and leave it in the hands of some maintainers, like the 2.4 kernel?
What made Mozilla great is that it was a start from scratch, and it was (at least initially) architectured according to sane principles. Maybe the best thing Mozilla developers can do now is to leave it alone and work on Safari. The Konqueror code is where Mozilla was 2 years ago, except much smaller, more readable, and faster (not faster than Mozilla now, but certainly faster than Mozilla 2 years ago). I don't consider it blasphemy for a huge Mozilla fan like me to accept the fact that Mozilla is more-or-less done, and that volunteers who understand it well enough to contribute would make better use of their skills working on something like Konq rather that building angels in the Mozilla architecture (which no one but God can see). Or, go and write good open-source office software. There's a real need for improvement there... as there isn't in Mozilla.
Transcoding is a huge waste of quality, and of resources (both processor cycles and network capacity). There have long been players like the KISS that just play DivX movies straight from disk. Now if they just got a network interface, that seems like the sane way to handle the situation. We are living in a time when a cheap CPU can decode DVD-resolution MPEG4 using only passive cooling. There are no real barriers to decoding in the living room.
So, nice try but no thanks. For now, small form-factor PCs are still a much better idea for home entertainment purposes.
Why can't manufacturers get it right and make a simple interface for a networked living room device that decodes video based on MPlayer codecs (that are extensible) and can also record, TiVO like, on a hard drive or (even better) to a drive on the network? Or, best of all, stream video to a good computer on the network with a lossless codec, where it's buffered it and converted to 1-pass Xvid in real time? Come on people, the technology for all this is available. There are no barriers of legality. Just make the good stuff already.
Of course, if being honor students, gifted muscicians, eagle scouts, and a 4 of the damn nicest people I've ever had the joy of knowing is "messed up" I'm also damn glad I don't take this view.
Yeah, wait till they get to college when you're not there to wipe their asses. They'll have professors like me, who have no intention being their substitute-daddy. We, unlike you, don't ration their privilidges to drink and screw and experiment with all sorts of substances, people and situations.
I know it's natural for parents to feel proud and protective of their children, but you have to be 100% certain that when they're at home they're following the rules because they want to, and not simply because the rules are enforced. This is because you will have to let them out of your sights before too long. And believe me, we won't enforce your rules here in college!
Yes, Acronis TrueImage is really some of the best sofware that's for sale anywhere. The bootable CD and ease of recovery are far better than the more famous products. In general, Acronis makes great software. They are an unjustly-neglected company.
Seriously, for people who aren't soldiers are able-bodied, what is the point of wearable computers? This reminds me of the "toaster that's on the internet... for some reason" hype.
Yes, companies will send their best stuff to reviewers, but there is a push from the opposite direction: they want reviewers to get their stuff early. In the computer world, this means that reviewers often get essentially prototypes. I've found that "first test" reviews of CPU's get processors that are worse than what the consumer will buy once production ramps up, because by then, many bugs get ironed out. AMD chips overclock much better later into the production process compared to the "for review only" samples. That's just one example.
Damn, seriously, this is the first proposed pop-up ad which I think is a good idea! Make it as annoying as possible, and have it say: "If you see this annoying window, you are using obsolete software. Upgrade for free with Mozilla."
If you think overpriced textbooks are terrible from the student's perspective, things look even more dirty from the other side.
I'm teaching some introductory humanities courses and every semester I receive a big pile of unsolicited desk copies of textbooks that would never consider using. It seems like our department mailboxes are stuffed full of mysterious FedEx packages from publishers whenever I show up at the department. The books are printed on crappy paper with terrible binding.
But it gets worse. It's at the point where we have textbook pushers roaming the halls and crashing my office hours. I kid you not! Instead of watches lining their trenchcoat, they try to "hook me up" with desk copies of textbooks that I don't need.
Of course, what they don't tell you in their pitch is how much the students are being charged for their books. The idea appears to be: Why should I care when they're free for me? Out of curiosity, I checked. A shoddy (both in content and construction) 140p small paperback textbook which was being offered to me would cost almost US$80 for each of my students. That's about $70 more than a paperback novel of comperable size and print quality. Of course, the cost of all the sleazy hard selling the publishers do gets passed on to the students.
I imagine that people complained. I didn't formally (I did recently throw a pusher out of my office somewhat undiplomatically). To appease us, publishers have stopped imprinting desk copies as such, foregoing the familiar "evaluation copy, do not sell" markings. Colleagues of mine are just selling these things back to the bookstore where they reemerge as used textbooks for the following semester (apparently, some professors somewhere do teach from that crap). I think I will sell mine as well, but I initially felt dirty about it, because strictly speaking, all those unsolicited and unwelcome gifts were paid with the money of my students. So I decided that I will throw my students a "textbook feast" at the end of the semester. I'm serious, I'll be able to buy quite a few large pizzas.
Another reaction to all this unpleasantness: for the first time, I'm teaching a class with no textbook at all. All the readings are "on reserve," which is handled through online PDF's that I encourage the students to print out. It's a lot of printing, but only of the stuff they have to read, and they would have to do some of it anyway, since there is no anthology that has all the readings I want to cover. It's worked out great, and I want to encourage others who are in my position and have this option to follow suit.
So what do you think will run faster: MSOffice ($300) or StarOffice on a new processor and a gig of RAM (less than $300). I don't need to remind you that there are other advantages of taking the second option...
Usually it's not a good idea to attach a lifeboat to a sinking ship. Novel should be selling off/spinning off divisions that have a chance of surviving, not acquiring more units to pull under.
There is a Chinese space program to go to the moon.
Yeah, because there are long-term payoffs from the high technology that would need to be developed for such a trip to succeed. Plus, China is quite wise to get millions of Chinese kids excited about space. That will put them far ahead of the US kids, excited about Pokemon.
There is a program to build a navy to rival the US's.
If you saw a potentially hostile and unpredictable country attacking countries for economic reasons the way the US has been, you'd want to deter them as well. This is not patriotism, this is simple self-protection. In addition to all this, they are going full steam ahead on a nuclear warheards program that will eventually be able to completely destroy the USA, even after our missile defense is in place. At this point, all China can do is nuke a few dozen US cities, and that might not be deterrent enough.
There was their version of linux
No one can fail to see why this is good for all Chinese-speaking people of the world - and by extention, for all people in general. Everybody benefits when the Microsoft monopoly is broken, and a billion Chinese Linux users would do much to contribute to this good thing.
What China is resisting is foreign occupation. They are trying to maintain their autonomy in a world where the USA is in a position to control just about everything and everyone. To find fault with that is very hard for me to understand. I'm glad that not everyone is just laying down before us.
Compare human rights records. Example: The US has more forced prison laborers than all of China, even though our population is 1/4 of theirs. We start wars and vaporize innocent people. As an American, I think it would be much more reasonable to boycott US standards/products on political grounds than to worry about China's.
Oh, shut the fuck up. The US has fired on defenseless protesters on countless ocasions. I'm not just talking about the massacre at Kent State. Just yesterday, they killed several in Iraq. And how many wars did the "brutal regime" of China start in the last 20 years?
Anyway, the US has more forced prison laborers than all of China, even though we have only 1/4 of the population. Kinda makes you wonder who's more brutal.
"His attendance, discipline, grades, and test scores are down, but he's rich, so that counts in his favor."
"Her attendance, discipline, grades, and test scores are great, but she's poor, so let's put her on the watch list."
That's the current system, which you apparently have no problem with. I don't think what you wrote sounds any more stupid than this. I mean, it will always sound bad when you plug in some social marker, like immigration status or whatever. And it's not like the whole assessment is based on that one thing, so if all your academic stuff were in order, you would almost surely be clear even if you were poor and black.
So, simply including socioeconomic status of a person's family effectively predicts the same things as race.
It predicts something, though consider immigrants from East Asia and Central America: same immigration status, (let's assume) same socioeconomic class status, but clearly different dropout probabilities. This is one example among many where taking race into account (in addition to all the other stuff) would dramatically increase the accuracy of the system.
Seriously, if you take this spin further, you get something very ugly.
I'm picturing a "special retention class" into which the people who score high on this metric are segregated. In order to "keep them enrolled" they basically teach them how to calculate the area of a circle... year after year. After all, they don't want to overburden them with education and homework, because that might make them drop out. "And besides," they will say "the low-risk kids can now afford to cover more material while the retention-challenged get lessons more targeted at their abilities."
Slashdot Mirror
But shutting down the hacked Kazaa client doesn't mean that a totally different client can't be written to connect to even the updated FastTrack. Doesn't Shareaza already do this? I don't know... I don't touch that ad-driven crap.
It was a nice idea to remove all the crap from the standard Kazaa client. But now that it's shut down, maybe it's time to rewrite a client from the ground up, or maybe to add FastTrack compatibility to some already-awesome open-source client like DC++ or eMule.
What's Sherman gonna do? Cry that it's reverse-engineering, banned by the DMCA? Ha! What court will listen?
Real-life bounties have this problem as well. The US offered bounties on Afghan "Al Quada members", and for this reason, many of the people caged up in Guantanamo are just farmers, taxi-drivers and 13-year-old kids who were turned in by some very nasty people who wanted bounty money. To solve this problem, they need a committe to determine when a bounty is properly paid. A similar system could also make calls about bounty paymets for software. Sure, it's a bit of extra work, but much easier than writing the code yourself.
Polygamy also has other downsides. With 50/50 distribution of men and women, for every man that marries a few, there will be a few who necessarily get none. In Utah they call these unfortunate guys "Slashdot readers" for some reason.
amen
This is the most insightful comment that I've read here for weeks. It squares exactly with my experience. And the larger point about capitalism being unsuited for an age of abundance is something that we all need to think about very hard.
Mozilla extensions/plugins already make it very easy to add new features like encryption. So I don't worry about feature stagnation. And I know there are still bugs, but they hardly bite anymore.
Your point about Internet Explorer is a good one: It has stagnated, and Microsoft is essentially giving up on further development. This kills the most important reason that once made it urgent for browsers to keep changing: new online standards being implemented by websites. Now, Mozilla can relax about things like CSS2 for a while. Since IE can't render that stuff anyway, there won't be websites that use it. There's no harm done to Mozilla if it stagnates in parallel with IE, and just squashes some bugs and adds/improves a few plugins. It's already so much better, it's biggest problem now is just getting people to try it. That gives developers the breathing room to work on a more ambitious project from scratch or from KHTML.
Well, I would envy the people who get this deal... if they didn't live in Utah. Don't get me wrong, I think Utah is beautiful, but unless they put in all new people along with the cables, I'm staying away.
I honestly haven't noticed any really significant improvements in my Mozilla experience in the last 6 months. As far as I'm concerned, Mozilla is done. Sure, it's nice to stomp some bugs and increase performance by ever-diminishing increments, but I think we've passed the point when the average user on a good computer even notices.
That's intended as a huge compliment to Mozilla.
I also think the remaining hackers are doing the right thing in trying to furhter modularize the code. These are the sorts of things that end-users (hopefully) don't notice, but they make the individual components more useable.
But I have to wonder whether Mozilla requires the huge programming push that it has needed two years ago. Is there ever a time when you just basically declare it done and leave it in the hands of some maintainers, like the 2.4 kernel?
What made Mozilla great is that it was a start from scratch, and it was (at least initially) architectured according to sane principles. Maybe the best thing Mozilla developers can do now is to leave it alone and work on Safari. The Konqueror code is where Mozilla was 2 years ago, except much smaller, more readable, and faster (not faster than Mozilla now, but certainly faster than Mozilla 2 years ago). I don't consider it blasphemy for a huge Mozilla fan like me to accept the fact that Mozilla is more-or-less done, and that volunteers who understand it well enough to contribute would make better use of their skills working on something like Konq rather that building angels in the Mozilla architecture (which no one but God can see). Or, go and write good open-source office software. There's a real need for improvement there... as there isn't in Mozilla.
So, nice try but no thanks. For now, small form-factor PCs are still a much better idea for home entertainment purposes.
Why can't manufacturers get it right and make a simple interface for a networked living room device that decodes video based on MPlayer codecs (that are extensible) and can also record, TiVO like, on a hard drive or (even better) to a drive on the network? Or, best of all, stream video to a good computer on the network with a lossless codec, where it's buffered it and converted to 1-pass Xvid in real time? Come on people, the technology for all this is available. There are no barriers of legality. Just make the good stuff already.
Yeah, wait till they get to college when you're not there to wipe their asses. They'll have professors like me, who have no intention being their substitute-daddy. We, unlike you, don't ration their privilidges to drink and screw and experiment with all sorts of substances, people and situations.
I know it's natural for parents to feel proud and protective of their children, but you have to be 100% certain that when they're at home they're following the rules because they want to, and not simply because the rules are enforced. This is because you will have to let them out of your sights before too long. And believe me, we won't enforce your rules here in college!
For how many days, I wonder? What if after 20 days, the pure fun just goes away for me? Do you take it in for a free repair?
Yes, Acronis TrueImage is really some of the best sofware that's for sale anywhere. The bootable CD and ease of recovery are far better than the more famous products. In general, Acronis makes great software. They are an unjustly-neglected company.
Seriously, for people who aren't soldiers are able-bodied, what is the point of wearable computers? This reminds me of the "toaster that's on the internet... for some reason" hype.
Yes, companies will send their best stuff to reviewers, but there is a push from the opposite direction: they want reviewers to get their stuff early. In the computer world, this means that reviewers often get essentially prototypes. I've found that "first test" reviews of CPU's get processors that are worse than what the consumer will buy once production ramps up, because by then, many bugs get ironed out. AMD chips overclock much better later into the production process compared to the "for review only" samples. That's just one example.
Damn, seriously, this is the first proposed pop-up ad which I think is a good idea! Make it as annoying as possible, and have it say: "If you see this annoying window, you are using obsolete software. Upgrade for free with Mozilla."
I'm teaching some introductory humanities courses and every semester I receive a big pile of unsolicited desk copies of textbooks that would never consider using. It seems like our department mailboxes are stuffed full of mysterious FedEx packages from publishers whenever I show up at the department. The books are printed on crappy paper with terrible binding.
But it gets worse. It's at the point where we have textbook pushers roaming the halls and crashing my office hours. I kid you not! Instead of watches lining their trenchcoat, they try to "hook me up" with desk copies of textbooks that I don't need.
Of course, what they don't tell you in their pitch is how much the students are being charged for their books. The idea appears to be: Why should I care when they're free for me? Out of curiosity, I checked. A shoddy (both in content and construction) 140p small paperback textbook which was being offered to me would cost almost US$80 for each of my students. That's about $70 more than a paperback novel of comperable size and print quality. Of course, the cost of all the sleazy hard selling the publishers do gets passed on to the students.
I imagine that people complained. I didn't formally (I did recently throw a pusher out of my office somewhat undiplomatically). To appease us, publishers have stopped imprinting desk copies as such, foregoing the familiar "evaluation copy, do not sell" markings. Colleagues of mine are just selling these things back to the bookstore where they reemerge as used textbooks for the following semester (apparently, some professors somewhere do teach from that crap). I think I will sell mine as well, but I initially felt dirty about it, because strictly speaking, all those unsolicited and unwelcome gifts were paid with the money of my students. So I decided that I will throw my students a "textbook feast" at the end of the semester. I'm serious, I'll be able to buy quite a few large pizzas.
Another reaction to all this unpleasantness: for the first time, I'm teaching a class with no textbook at all. All the readings are "on reserve," which is handled through online PDF's that I encourage the students to print out. It's a lot of printing, but only of the stuff they have to read, and they would have to do some of it anyway, since there is no anthology that has all the readings I want to cover. It's worked out great, and I want to encourage others who are in my position and have this option to follow suit.
So what do you think will run faster: MSOffice ($300) or StarOffice on a new processor and a gig of RAM (less than $300). I don't need to remind you that there are other advantages of taking the second option...
Usually it's not a good idea to attach a lifeboat to a sinking ship. Novel should be selling off/spinning off divisions that have a chance of surviving, not acquiring more units to pull under.
Yeah, because there are long-term payoffs from the high technology that would need to be developed for such a trip to succeed. Plus, China is quite wise to get millions of Chinese kids excited about space. That will put them far ahead of the US kids, excited about Pokemon.
There is a program to build a navy to rival the US's.
If you saw a potentially hostile and unpredictable country attacking countries for economic reasons the way the US has been, you'd want to deter them as well. This is not patriotism, this is simple self-protection. In addition to all this, they are going full steam ahead on a nuclear warheards program that will eventually be able to completely destroy the USA, even after our missile defense is in place. At this point, all China can do is nuke a few dozen US cities, and that might not be deterrent enough.
There was their version of linux
No one can fail to see why this is good for all Chinese-speaking people of the world - and by extention, for all people in general. Everybody benefits when the Microsoft monopoly is broken, and a billion Chinese Linux users would do much to contribute to this good thing.
What China is resisting is foreign occupation. They are trying to maintain their autonomy in a world where the USA is in a position to control just about everything and everyone. To find fault with that is very hard for me to understand. I'm glad that not everyone is just laying down before us.
Compare human rights records. Example: The US has more forced prison laborers than all of China, even though our population is 1/4 of theirs. We start wars and vaporize innocent people. As an American, I think it would be much more reasonable to boycott US standards/products on political grounds than to worry about China's.
Anyway, the US has more forced prison laborers than all of China, even though we have only 1/4 of the population. Kinda makes you wonder who's more brutal.
"Her attendance, discipline, grades, and test scores are great, but she's poor, so let's put her on the watch list."
That's the current system, which you apparently have no problem with. I don't think what you wrote sounds any more stupid than this. I mean, it will always sound bad when you plug in some social marker, like immigration status or whatever. And it's not like the whole assessment is based on that one thing, so if all your academic stuff were in order, you would almost surely be clear even if you were poor and black.
Maybe you can't... but they do.
It predicts something, though consider immigrants from East Asia and Central America: same immigration status, (let's assume) same socioeconomic class status, but clearly different dropout probabilities. This is one example among many where taking race into account (in addition to all the other stuff) would dramatically increase the accuracy of the system.
I'm picturing a "special retention class" into which the people who score high on this metric are segregated. In order to "keep them enrolled" they basically teach them how to calculate the area of a circle... year after year. After all, they don't want to overburden them with education and homework, because that might make them drop out. "And besides," they will say "the low-risk kids can now afford to cover more material while the retention-challenged get lessons more targeted at their abilities."