I think your argument that the government should regulate P2P because / in the same way that they regulate guns and cars is fallacial.
First of all, a gun is a product. If you regulate guns, you regulate them on the production end (what guns you are allowed to sell) or the retail end (what guns you are allowed to buy). The same thing happens with cars, the government says "you can't produce a car without these safety features".
Now, let's talk about the nebulous "P2P". First, you suggest in your post that P2P is a product; instead, P2P is a storefront through which content (the product) is delivered to the consumer. P2P is equivalent to a gun store or a car lot.
Also, realize that most government controls on markets is to make sure the consumer doesn't get screwed by the producer, not the other way around. Indeed, it is a BAD IDEA to controls on the retail side; the only example of these kinds of controls I can think of is in the gun shop analogy. You don't have to show paperwork to prove you're a responsible lamp-buyer to buy a lamp from Wal-Mart. You shouldn't have to show paperwork (i.e. DRM) to prove you're a responsible music-buyer before you buy a CD from Wal-Mart or download an mp3 from a P2P service.
If you want to impose regulation on a market, first ask who you are protecting and ask yourself if they need your protection. The recording industry doesn't need protection from music downloaders.
-inq
P.S. I downloaded a pile of Opeth tunes the other day. Now I have the irrational urge to buy a pile of Opeth CDs. Am I going to go to piracy hell?
For some reason I highly doubt that Fusedocs are a substitute for proper system analysis and design. Sure, it might be smart enough to analyze the interrelations between modules and create class diagrams and generate documentation. However, automated systems still have a fundamental flaw: while they can tell you how everything is interrelated, they can't tell the people using the documentation WHY it was implemented the way it was, which has CRITICAL implications for maintenance. Automated systems can reveal structure but not purpose.
Also, tools that generate documentation from code give you the design documentation just when design documentation is the least helpful. At best, documentation of this kind will only serve to show you how brain-dead your initial design was (because by the time the tool is useful to "reverse-engineer" your code it's already far, far too late to correct your boneheaded design gaffs).
Finally, the title made sense to me but yes, it is a double negative; consider it revised to "Documentation can't be pulled from the ether...". Creating the documentation from nothingness is a classic case of selling the horse to buy the cart.
A lot of people are posting saying basically "use system X to keep track of your documentation" or "use system Y to keep track of it" but are not addressing the main problem: it really doesn't matter how documentation is archived. Sure, CVS or DocBook have advantages over papers in a filing cabinet, but efficient access to documentation means nothing if the documentation itself is garbage.
What documentation would I consider garbage? A lot of these replies suggest you use "literate programming" and "comments in the code", and while these are very useful to maintenance programmers they are nowhere near as important the specification, analysis, and design documents that should have been generated before implementation had begun. For example, I'm sure none of the/. crowd would have any trouble figuring out what a 200-line, uncommented module does when they have access to the complete and accurate specification, analysis, and design documentation. On the other hand, it's ridiculously easy to cause a regression fault nightmare when you are modifying a 200-line module with copious comments but without the detailed specification, analysis, and design of the product handy.
What you should be asking yourself: 1) For each of the projects we are currently working on, do we have the design documentation? 2) If 1, is the code we are writing completely consistent with the original design documentation?
if (1 == false), you are in BIG trouble. While development on a project such as that may go okay, maintenance will be a minor disaster area. It's unreasonable to expect maintenance programmers to maintain a project that's so poorly documented, and for such a small organization spending gobs of time hunting regression faults because the idiot down the hall made a change to a module that he didn't understand and that wasn't documented could be fatal.
if (1 == true) but (2 == false), you are still in trouble. Wrong documentation is orders of magnitude worse than no documentation, because what happens is that maintenance programmers don't realize that the code doesn't fit the specification and end up trashing half the project until someone finally catches the mistake.
My suggestion? If you have projects like #1 or #2, consider all the work you've done so far as a rapid prototype, trash all the code, and start from scratch with a reanalysis of the specifications. It might sound brutal, but you'll spend less cash in the long run doing a total overhaul now rather than waiting until later and letting it all catch up to you on the bill for maintenance.
If your projects are well-specified, analyzed, and designed, your employees already have the competence and the CASE tools they need to document their code well. Remember, the emphasis is on COMPLETE, COHERENT, CONSISTENT documentation; hell, even resort to printing your documentation on dead tree if you have to, as long as it's complete, coherent, and consistent it won't matter that much. Accuracy of documentation over efficiency of access.
I understand that this particular license clause is designed to keep you from using Windows XP as a terminal server without buying licenses. However, in our world of lawyering even though the SPIRIT of the clause may be indifferent to VNC, by the LETTER using VNC is against the license agreement.
The point I want to raise is this: VNC is an innocuous program. It's not Napster or Morpheus, which I could see Microsoft actually blocking. It's instead something you throw on a box to make your life as an admin easier. In short, VNC is about the/last/ program I would expect the Windows XP license to prohibit you from using.
My question: Windows XP has been out there for what, a year? It took people that long to realize that the license agreement disallows the use of VNC? How much longer is it going to be before someone finds the clause that disallows the use of OpenOffice? If such a clause existed, would people be able to find it and realize its implications? Furthermore, how much longer is it going to be before network admins decide that they'd rather not use an operating system where they don't even have any idea what applications they are allowed to run on it? Again, VNC is an extremely common and handy tool, it seemed like the LAST app MS would disallow. If VNC is disallowed, what's next?
Though Metropolis may be Columbia/Tristar's first anime release, it won't be their last. AnimeOnDVD reported yesterday that the DVD release of Metropolis (expected in March) will come with a special mini-DVD that will contain trailers of Metropolis itself, FF: The Spirits Within, and... Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door.
If there's one anime movie that has a good shot of breaking the US market wide open it's Cowboy Bebop. Think about it, they have a ready-made market created by Cartoon Network, and everyone who has ever seen a 572398572th generation fansub (or digisub ^^) will/drag/ their friends out to see it, it's that good.
the number of times per second the operating systems polls the mouse for positional data. on my windows machine with a ps2 mouse, my options are anywhere from 20 to 100 times per second. some USB mice can tolerate polling rates of 400 refreshes per second, which makes them convenient for "twitch" shooters and the like.
-inq
Re:In no way do videogames constitute art
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 2
YES YES YES
Planescape: Torment has to be one of the most artful games ever produced... if you care to make the art vs. entertainment separation, Ps:T falls heavily on the art side of the spectrum.
1. The plot is sublimely beautiful. Black Isle outdid themselves with the writing and the musical score. The plot isn't a rehash typical fantasy plot; if extracted from the game and made into a novel, it would stand on its own as an acclaimed work. Marvelous.
2. The game did a fantastic job of getting the player interested in the plot. As you became more and more familiar with the gameplay and the interface it seemed to vanish and become a transparent conduit for the rest of the plot.
In my humble opinion, these are the marks of a video game that can be truly called "art": an engrossing plot and a good interface to pipe the player to the plot and its ultimate conclusion. Using these criteria, the only other games I can think of that would constitute "art" would be System Shock 2 and Half-Life. If you haven't played SS2, you owe it to yourself to go to Wal/K-mart/Target and pick it up for 10$ out of the bargain bin, along with Ps:T, which should be there for 15$. That will be the best 25$ you will ever spend by a long shot.
why mix IDE and SCSI? you saw the anti-IDE rant in that article, and personally with the problems IDE devices have given me in the past i would probably make the same decision.
haha, when i saw american pie i was like 'irony alert'!
first, it looks like they banned the original but not madonna's deplorable, vomit-worthy remix; and also maybe it was before my time, but american pie was an anti-war song in the first place, right?
hmm, banning anti-war hymns... a good idea in this time of national focus-to-go-kick-some-ass, right?
the DSS satellites beam the digital signal to practically every square foot of land in the united states of america. last time i checked, it has never been illegal to intercept a signal that is being delivered to your property.
so what exactly is being stolen here?? let's see, they broadcast a signal at me that i did not ask for. i intercept the signal and do what i will with it. if you pay some company, they will furnish you with equipment which makes it easier to use the signal (that is being beamed at you, with or without your consent).
does this "crackdown" seem ludicrious to anyone else? how do you steal what you are being beamed for free?
quick launch does the same thing as giving the mozilla binary the "-turbo" switch at the command line. it instructs mozilla to keep its libraries in memory even after the program exits. this allows mozilla to start up just as fast as IE, which keeps its libraries perpetually in memory anyway.
collecting micropayments through the ISPs would solve the credit card problem in a heartbeat, though it would pose a few other problems.
here's how it works. say you pay an extra 25% for your internet access, and give your ISP permission to log your web access and fold those logs into an aggregate log. those logs are used to distribute the cash.
problems:
1. the largest ISPs would generate the most cash. the largest ISPs also have the most commercial ties with some of the companies which would get the cash:
AOL --> Time/Warner --> MPAA --> potential for abuse
this could cause skewed distribution, as guys like Keenspot would get less cash and the MPAA and RIAA would get more.
2. how do you decide which artist "deserves" more money? and on a similar note, how many mp3s is a comic strip worth?
let's say that in an arbitrary time period, there are 1,000,000 mp3s downloaded from napster, and online comic sites get a total of 100,000 hits. do you then decide that comics are worth 1/10 of what mp3s are, and pay them accordingly?
3. overhead overhead overhead. this system would generate lots of 'funny munny'. i can see administrative overhead eating a significant portion of this cash.
these problems notwithstanding, the major problem with micropayments is that people don't want to put their CC# in their computer, and have sites silently charge them cash behind their backs, but people also don't want to fill out 5 page forms every day to read their freaking webcomics.
1. natural language is considered to be expressive under the first amendment.
2. as programming languages achieve higher and higher levels of abstraction, they become more and more like natural language.
evidence: first, take object code. Almost everyone that looked at object code in the raw would agree that it's not natural language and therefore not expressive.
Now, take an assembly language, which is reduced to object code. assembly languages employ lexical shortcuts to make them more human readable; however, most people would still agree that assembly language is too concrete to be considered expressive.
Now, take a high level langrage like Java. Java is reducible to an assembly language (Java bytecode). However, unlike lower level languages, it has requirements for both syntax of key words and also they order they come in the "sentence" (one line of code, a control statement, etc.). In this sense, Java is much more like a natural language than the lower level languages that we have looked at, yet it is still reducable into them.
Now, look many years into the future. Given a technology which is sufficiently advanced, it is conceivable to write a program that would do the following things:
a) allow a programmer to describe algorithms using natural language, and
b) parse that natural language and create algorithmic structures that can be reduced correctly to lower level code.
So where now is the distinction between natural language and source code? It has fallen away.
My argument: the only reason that this case is even being argued is because of our level of technology. When we get to the level of technology when we can talk to our computer in algorithms and the computer will execute them, the source code speech argument will be moot, because it is idiotic to contend that a description of an algorithm in natural language written down on paper is speech but that same language fed to a computer to make a program is not.
this now concludes my pithy argument. flame at will.
-inq
Remember all that buzz about the iOpener? It was loved here on/. because it made a good X client; a computer in your kitchen!
This seems to me to be a MUCH better solution. Just set up a dedicated server in your attic running this Linux distro and buy two or three of those thin clients to put around your house. It may be marginally more expensive to do it this way, but if the server soft is as easy to use as the site proclaims, the ease of setup and use would more than make up for the price difference.
Hmm... manipulating existing law for your own purposes... it's funny how much this reminds me of the GPL.
GPL: using copyright law to create a "copyleft" license that guarantees your right to redistribute program code.
Aimster: using the DMCA to create a network that is at once peer-to-peer and NOT peer-to-peer and is protected from the prying eyes of copyright lawyers.
Now, here is my concern. This "unclean hands" concept kind of has me worried; the Aimster terms of use agreement and the GPL are NOT what I would call traditional interpretations of existing law. If, in the upcoming peer-to-peer witchhunt, someone manages to take Aimster down, could the GPL get caught in the area of effect?
Well, here at school I have arseloads of bandwidth, so it wouldn't be a problem for me... HOWEVER, the guy that made the site has one of those damn right-clck protection Javascript things installed so no one steals his images... those are SO annoying.
But yea, if I manage to catch a site before it becomes unavailaboe next time, I'll make a copy so that the original site has some time to recover.
The reason this site went down so fast is because it is mostly pictures of the work this gentleman has done. However, Google has all the text, so go here for the first page, and here for the second.
It only looks like this guy has the cabinet built... no wiring has been done yet.
I personally am a fanboy of this service, which can be found at http://www.hushmail.com, so you may want to take my comments with a grain of salt. However, I must say that I have found Hushmail to be a superior email service.
1. The service is free, unlike some solutions that offer encryted mail.
2. You can choose a user name, and supply a very small amount of personal information (mainly first and last name), OR you can create an anon######@hushmail.com account and supply NO personal information.
3. You check your mail through a java applet that encrypts traffic to and from their servers.
4. You can select a passphrase of arbitrary length. I think mine is 40 or 50 characters.
5. Your inbox on their servers is encrypted. If your inbox is ever subject to subpoena, Hushmail will happily supply the legal authorities with unintelligible, heavily encrypted junk. Drawback: if you forget your passphrase, there is no way to recover your account.
6. If you send an email to another Hushmail user, your message is never converted into plain text; it goes encrypted straight from your Java applet to their inbox.
The one issue I feel Hushmail still needs to address is PGP integration. If you receive a PGP encrypted message in your Hushmail, you have to copy the text and paste it into Notepad to decrypt it, and if you send a message to a user that is not on Hushmail, there is no choice but to send it in plaintext. However, this issue has been acknowledged, and will be addressed in a future service upgrade.
All around I'm happy with Hushmail, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to the Slashdot community.
I realize this... and reading back on that post I also realize that I interchanged my terms and sometimes got more specific when I should have been getting more general.
Think of the web as an information space. Now, slice it up in terms of transfer protocols. Next slice it up in terms of the type of content delivered over those protocols.
so you get resource locators looking like
ftp://txt:recipes/pies/mom's strawberry pie recipe
and
http://class:financial services/home banking/fifth third/lexington ky/my home baanking
and
news://bin:1337/warez/l4m3w4r3z.iso
You could even pull some symlink mojo, like trunchating that ugly http RL that points you to your bank's online account management software to just
http://class:mybank
cool stuff, eh?
/me zips up the flamesuit for this next one
Philosophical angle. The problem with this scheme is that it would be dan easy for a controlling body to snip off one arm of the tree. remember, we are talking about a tree, not the amoeba that we had before. Someone could just decide to go up and disallow
http://img:png/erotica
and then where would you be?
I really think an architecture like Freenet lends itself to this kind of arrangement. a heirarchially arranged, distributed metafilesystem. wow, I think I just coined a new buzzword!
"distributed content metafilesystem"
(now 100% buzzword compliant!)
</sarcasm>
but again, seriously, right now the only order the information web has is the order that is imposed upon it. The web would be a friendlier place if this order were built into the foundation itself.
hmm... but how to deal with censorship... go freenet!
Now, I am a relative newbie to Unix in general. Don't even think of asking me to say anything intelligent about how DNS works or about how BIND works or about exactly what happens when I type a domain name into my web browser past the fact that it goes out to a DNS server and fetches an IP address.
My feeling for a while now is that while Uniform Resource Locators make sense, domain names don't. Think about it from this perspective, and see if it makes any sense.
In the context of your computer, there is a string that you can specify that can point to any particular file, or resource, on your entire machine. For example, my directory would be/home/inquis. All the user directories are subordinate to the/home directory. The/home directory and my home directory within that/home directory are logically linked.
Jump over to a win9x box. The contents of the Windows directory are logically linked to the identity of the Windows directory itself. Everything in the windows directory belongs in that directory, because everything in there is a part of windows.
Now look at our idiotic system of using domain names to access resources over the web. First of all, nothing requires that the domain name itself have anything to do with the content that can be accessed by using that domain name. This would be akin to sitting down at your linux box, moving to your/home directory, looking at the contents of that directory, and finding it filled with/sbin crap.
Another problem I have with DNS is that related content is not grouped together by default. This harks back to the previous problem (you can't tell the content from the domain name). And I'm not simply talking about going to a portal that indexes web content and drilling down through the links, I'm talking about a fundamental archetecture change.
Look at it this way. Say you want to look up newbie Linux sites, but you don't know where to begin looking. As it stands now, you can go to Google and hope that their spider has picked all of them up; you can go to Yahoo and hope that they have manually indexed them all; either way, you miss out on content.
now, check this out... wouldn't it be easier on you and everyone else if you could just do this?
As the web stands now, it is analogous to a linux box with every single file on the entire machine crammed in the root directory. You have to know what exactly you are looking for and how to find it before you can actually find it. A more efficient system would allow even the most braindead user to shoot in the dark and still manage to find somehting useful quite quickly.
(Response to one obvious counterpoint: you can grep a directory to find what you are looking for quickly even if you don't know its name. However, grepping the web is not trivial. The closest tool we have for doing that is Google, and we all know that while it is pretty good, it is not perfect.)
Allright, this now ends my directionless rant. Mods, respond to this if you disagree instead of modding it down.
Thanks, and everyone have a good day. I just pulled an allnighter writing polysci paper, so I needed a good rant.
-inq
Re:Gnutella will never improve.
on
Scour is Dead
·
· Score: 1
I feel I must dissent.
Why is Gnutella not improving? Look at the reference client. The current version is 0.56, and a vast number of Gnutella users are using this client. All the other clones were coded using information derived by reverse engineering this first client.
Now, we don't have the source to this "official' client, so we can only do so much work with the derivatives before we get stymied because of the inertia that is inherent in the community. Let's say I release a fantastic new Gnutella-style servant that solves all the problems with Gnutella and is basically the best thing since sliced bread. The problem is is that since my new client and the old Gnutella 0.56 are still interoperable, I have given no compelling reason to these other people to upgrade to me God client. Therefore, not having the source to the real Gnutella is holding the project back.
Two things could happen to "save" Gnutella: for one, we could get the source for the original Gnutella. I would suspect that the code quality in this original Gnutella is pretty bad. Now, what this does for us is that the bugs in that code would tell us where we should work to improve the network. If we find out that the reason that Gnutella is so damn slow is because of buggy 0.56 code, that could be changed and everyone who is using the "official" client because it is official could switch over. The other way Gnutella can be saved is by creating an entire new protocol (the Next Generation Gnutella Protocol) which would just create an entire new network. If compelling enough, people would switch over in droves.
Of course, this is outright ignoring a third option, which is Freenet finally getting its shit together and rendering Gnutella obselete. I think this would be better for all concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
I think your argument that the government should regulate P2P because / in the same way that they regulate guns and cars is fallacial.
First of all, a gun is a product. If you regulate guns, you regulate them on the production end (what guns you are allowed to sell) or the retail end (what guns you are allowed to buy). The same thing happens with cars, the government says "you can't produce a car without these safety features".
Now, let's talk about the nebulous "P2P". First, you suggest in your post that P2P is a product; instead, P2P is a storefront through which content (the product) is delivered to the consumer. P2P is equivalent to a gun store or a car lot.
Also, realize that most government controls on markets is to make sure the consumer doesn't get screwed by the producer, not the other way around. Indeed, it is a BAD IDEA to controls on the retail side; the only example of these kinds of controls I can think of is in the gun shop analogy. You don't have to show paperwork to prove you're a responsible lamp-buyer to buy a lamp from Wal-Mart. You shouldn't have to show paperwork (i.e. DRM) to prove you're a responsible music-buyer before you buy a CD from Wal-Mart or download an mp3 from a P2P service.
If you want to impose regulation on a market, first ask who you are protecting and ask yourself if they need your protection. The recording industry doesn't need protection from music downloaders.
-inq
P.S. I downloaded a pile of Opeth tunes the other day. Now I have the irrational urge to buy a pile of Opeth CDs. Am I going to go to piracy hell?
For some reason I highly doubt that Fusedocs are a substitute for proper system analysis and design. Sure, it might be smart enough to analyze the interrelations between modules and create class diagrams and generate documentation. However, automated systems still have a fundamental flaw: while they can tell you how everything is interrelated, they can't tell the people using the documentation WHY it was implemented the way it was, which has CRITICAL implications for maintenance. Automated systems can reveal structure but not purpose.
Also, tools that generate documentation from code give you the design documentation just when design documentation is the least helpful. At best, documentation of this kind will only serve to show you how brain-dead your initial design was (because by the time the tool is useful to "reverse-engineer" your code it's already far, far too late to correct your boneheaded design gaffs).
Finally, the title made sense to me but yes, it is a double negative; consider it revised to "Documentation can't be pulled from the ether...". Creating the documentation from nothingness is a classic case of selling the horse to buy the cart.
-inq
A lot of people are posting saying basically "use system X to keep track of your documentation" or "use system Y to keep track of it" but are not addressing the main problem: it really doesn't matter how documentation is archived. Sure, CVS or DocBook have advantages over papers in a filing cabinet, but efficient access to documentation means nothing if the documentation itself is garbage.
/. crowd would have any trouble figuring out what a 200-line, uncommented module does when they have access to the complete and accurate specification, analysis, and design documentation. On the other hand, it's ridiculously easy to cause a regression fault nightmare when you are modifying a 200-line module with copious comments but without the detailed specification, analysis, and design of the product handy.
What documentation would I consider garbage? A lot of these replies suggest you use "literate programming" and "comments in the code", and while these are very useful to maintenance programmers they are nowhere near as important the specification, analysis, and design documents that should have been generated before implementation had begun. For example, I'm sure none of the
What you should be asking yourself:
1) For each of the projects we are currently working on, do we have the design documentation?
2) If 1, is the code we are writing completely consistent with the original design documentation?
if (1 == false), you are in BIG trouble. While development on a project such as that may go okay, maintenance will be a minor disaster area. It's unreasonable to expect maintenance programmers to maintain a project that's so poorly documented, and for such a small organization spending gobs of time hunting regression faults because the idiot down the hall made a change to a module that he didn't understand and that wasn't documented could be fatal.
if (1 == true) but (2 == false), you are still in trouble. Wrong documentation is orders of magnitude worse than no documentation, because what happens is that maintenance programmers don't realize that the code doesn't fit the specification and end up trashing half the project until someone finally catches the mistake.
My suggestion? If you have projects like #1 or #2, consider all the work you've done so far as a rapid prototype, trash all the code, and start from scratch with a reanalysis of the specifications. It might sound brutal, but you'll spend less cash in the long run doing a total overhaul now rather than waiting until later and letting it all catch up to you on the bill for maintenance.
If your projects are well-specified, analyzed, and designed, your employees already have the competence and the CASE tools they need to document their code well. Remember, the emphasis is on COMPLETE, COHERENT, CONSISTENT documentation; hell, even resort to printing your documentation on dead tree if you have to, as long as it's complete, coherent, and consistent it won't matter that much. Accuracy of documentation over efficiency of access.
-inq
I understand that this particular license clause is designed to keep you from using Windows XP as a terminal server without buying licenses. However, in our world of lawyering even though the SPIRIT of the clause may be indifferent to VNC, by the LETTER using VNC is against the license agreement.
/last/ program I would expect the Windows XP license to prohibit you from using.
The point I want to raise is this: VNC is an innocuous program. It's not Napster or Morpheus, which I could see Microsoft actually blocking. It's instead something you throw on a box to make your life as an admin easier. In short, VNC is about the
My question: Windows XP has been out there for what, a year? It took people that long to realize that the license agreement disallows the use of VNC? How much longer is it going to be before someone finds the clause that disallows the use of OpenOffice? If such a clause existed, would people be able to find it and realize its implications? Furthermore, how much longer is it going to be before network admins decide that they'd rather not use an operating system where they don't even have any idea what applications they are allowed to run on it? Again, VNC is an extremely common and handy tool, it seemed like the LAST app MS would disallow. If VNC is disallowed, what's next?
-inq
Though Metropolis may be Columbia/Tristar's first anime release, it won't be their last. AnimeOnDVD reported yesterday that the DVD release of Metropolis (expected in March) will come with a special mini-DVD that will contain trailers of Metropolis itself, FF: The Spirits Within, and... Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door.
/drag/ their friends out to see it, it's that good.
If there's one anime movie that has a good shot of breaking the US market wide open it's Cowboy Bebop. Think about it, they have a ready-made market created by Cartoon Network, and everyone who has ever seen a 572398572th generation fansub (or digisub ^^) will
-inq
the number of times per second the operating systems polls the mouse for positional data. on my windows machine with a ps2 mouse, my options are anywhere from 20 to 100 times per second. some USB mice can tolerate polling rates of 400 refreshes per second, which makes them convenient for "twitch" shooters and the like.
-inq
YES YES YES
Planescape: Torment has to be one of the most artful games ever produced... if you care to make the art vs. entertainment separation, Ps:T falls heavily on the art side of the spectrum.
1. The plot is sublimely beautiful. Black Isle outdid themselves with the writing and the musical score. The plot isn't a rehash typical fantasy plot; if extracted from the game and made into a novel, it would stand on its own as an acclaimed work. Marvelous.
2. The game did a fantastic job of getting the player interested in the plot. As you became more and more familiar with the gameplay and the interface it seemed to vanish and become a transparent conduit for the rest of the plot.
In my humble opinion, these are the marks of a video game that can be truly called "art": an engrossing plot and a good interface to pipe the player to the plot and its ultimate conclusion. Using these criteria, the only other games I can think of that would constitute "art" would be System Shock 2 and Half-Life. If you haven't played SS2, you owe it to yourself to go to Wal/K-mart/Target and pick it up for 10$ out of the bargain bin, along with Ps:T, which should be there for 15$. That will be the best 25$ you will ever spend by a long shot.
-inq
why mix IDE and SCSI? you saw the anti-IDE rant in that article, and personally with the problems IDE devices have given me in the past i would probably make the same decision.
google already is kind of an 'everything' portal; the portal functionality is just hidden beyond the front page.
if i am looking for ANYTHING in a general caregory, i ALWAYS check down there before i run a google search.
http://directory.google.com/
relevant categories, relevant pages under each category. no paid placement. heaven!
-inq
haha, when i saw american pie i was like 'irony alert'!
first, it looks like they banned the original but not madonna's deplorable, vomit-worthy remix; and also maybe it was before my time, but american pie was an anti-war song in the first place, right?
hmm, banning anti-war hymns... a good idea in this time of national focus-to-go-kick-some-ass, right?
-inq
the DSS satellites beam the digital signal to practically every square foot of land in the united states of america. last time i checked, it has never been illegal to intercept a signal that is being delivered to your property.
so what exactly is being stolen here?? let's see, they broadcast a signal at me that i did not ask for. i intercept the signal and do what i will with it. if you pay some company, they will furnish you with equipment which makes it easier to use the signal (that is being beamed at you, with or without your consent).
does this "crackdown" seem ludicrious to anyone else? how do you steal what you are being beamed for free?
-inq
quick launch does the same thing as giving the mozilla binary the "-turbo" switch at the command line. it instructs mozilla to keep its libraries in memory even after the program exits. this allows mozilla to start up just as fast as IE, which keeps its libraries perpetually in memory anyway.
-inq
collecting micropayments through the ISPs would solve the credit card problem in a heartbeat, though it would pose a few other problems.
here's how it works. say you pay an extra 25% for your internet access, and give your ISP permission to log your web access and fold those logs into an aggregate log. those logs are used to distribute the cash.
problems:
1. the largest ISPs would generate the most cash. the largest ISPs also have the most commercial ties with some of the companies which would get the cash:
AOL --> Time/Warner --> MPAA --> potential for abuse
this could cause skewed distribution, as guys like Keenspot would get less cash and the MPAA and RIAA would get more.
2. how do you decide which artist "deserves" more money? and on a similar note, how many mp3s is a comic strip worth?
let's say that in an arbitrary time period, there are 1,000,000 mp3s downloaded from napster, and online comic sites get a total of 100,000 hits. do you then decide that comics are worth 1/10 of what mp3s are, and pay them accordingly?
3. overhead overhead overhead. this system would generate lots of 'funny munny'. i can see administrative overhead eating a significant portion of this cash.
these problems notwithstanding, the major problem with micropayments is that people don't want to put their CC# in their computer, and have sites silently charge them cash behind their backs, but people also don't want to fill out 5 page forms every day to read their freaking webcomics.
comments?
-inq
1. natural language is considered to be expressive under the first amendment. 2. as programming languages achieve higher and higher levels of abstraction, they become more and more like natural language. evidence: first, take object code. Almost everyone that looked at object code in the raw would agree that it's not natural language and therefore not expressive. Now, take an assembly language, which is reduced to object code. assembly languages employ lexical shortcuts to make them more human readable; however, most people would still agree that assembly language is too concrete to be considered expressive. Now, take a high level langrage like Java. Java is reducible to an assembly language (Java bytecode). However, unlike lower level languages, it has requirements for both syntax of key words and also they order they come in the "sentence" (one line of code, a control statement, etc.). In this sense, Java is much more like a natural language than the lower level languages that we have looked at, yet it is still reducable into them. Now, look many years into the future. Given a technology which is sufficiently advanced, it is conceivable to write a program that would do the following things: a) allow a programmer to describe algorithms using natural language, and b) parse that natural language and create algorithmic structures that can be reduced correctly to lower level code. So where now is the distinction between natural language and source code? It has fallen away. My argument: the only reason that this case is even being argued is because of our level of technology. When we get to the level of technology when we can talk to our computer in algorithms and the computer will execute them, the source code speech argument will be moot, because it is idiotic to contend that a description of an algorithm in natural language written down on paper is speech but that same language fed to a computer to make a program is not. this now concludes my pithy argument. flame at will. -inq
Remember all that buzz about the iOpener? It was loved here on /. because it made a good X client; a computer in your kitchen!
This seems to me to be a MUCH better solution. Just set up a dedicated server in your attic running this Linux distro and buy two or three of those thin clients to put around your house. It may be marginally more expensive to do it this way, but if the server soft is as easy to use as the site proclaims, the ease of setup and use would more than make up for the price difference.
-inq
Hmm... manipulating existing law for your own purposes... it's funny how much this reminds me of the GPL.
GPL: using copyright law to create a "copyleft" license that guarantees your right to redistribute program code.
Aimster: using the DMCA to create a network that is at once peer-to-peer and NOT peer-to-peer and is protected from the prying eyes of copyright lawyers.
Now, here is my concern. This "unclean hands" concept kind of has me worried; the Aimster terms of use agreement and the GPL are NOT what I would call traditional interpretations of existing law. If, in the upcoming peer-to-peer witchhunt, someone manages to take Aimster down, could the GPL get caught in the area of effect?
-inq
LOL
;)
Google must not have found the updated wiring page then
Just goes to show you, don't believe everything you see.
-inq
Well, here at school I have arseloads of bandwidth, so it wouldn't be a problem for me... HOWEVER, the guy that made the site has one of those damn right-clck protection Javascript things installed so no one steals his images... those are SO annoying.
But yea, if I manage to catch a site before it becomes unavailaboe next time, I'll make a copy so that the original site has some time to recover.
-inq
The reason this site went down so fast is because it is mostly pictures of the work this gentleman has done. However, Google has all the text, so go here for the first page, and here for the second.
It only looks like this guy has the cabinet built... no wiring has been done yet.
Still, it looks cool!
-inq
I personally am a fanboy of this service, which can be found at http://www.hushmail.com, so you may want to take my comments with a grain of salt. However, I must say that I have found Hushmail to be a superior email service.
1. The service is free, unlike some solutions that offer encryted mail.
2. You can choose a user name, and supply a very small amount of personal information (mainly first and last name), OR you can create an anon######@hushmail.com account and supply NO personal information.
3. You check your mail through a java applet that encrypts traffic to and from their servers.
4. You can select a passphrase of arbitrary length. I think mine is 40 or 50 characters.
5. Your inbox on their servers is encrypted. If your inbox is ever subject to subpoena, Hushmail will happily supply the legal authorities with unintelligible, heavily encrypted junk. Drawback: if you forget your passphrase, there is no way to recover your account.
6. If you send an email to another Hushmail user, your message is never converted into plain text; it goes encrypted straight from your Java applet to their inbox.
The one issue I feel Hushmail still needs to address is PGP integration. If you receive a PGP encrypted message in your Hushmail, you have to copy the text and paste it into Notepad to decrypt it, and if you send a message to a user that is not on Hushmail, there is no choice but to send it in plaintext. However, this issue has been acknowledged, and will be addressed in a future service upgrade.
All around I'm happy with Hushmail, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to the Slashdot community.
-inq
Google's cached copy of the explination of how the machine works
This makes my brain hurt, but wow, I find it amazing that someone took the time to create this. Bravo!
-inq
I realize this... and reading back on that post I also realize that I interchanged my terms and sometimes got more specific when I should have been getting more general.
Think of the web as an information space. Now, slice it up in terms of transfer protocols. Next slice it up in terms of the type of content delivered over those protocols.
so you get resource locators looking like
ftp://txt:recipes/pies/mom's strawberry pie recipe
and
http://class:financial services/home banking/fifth third/lexington ky/my home baanking
and
news://bin:1337/warez/l4m3w4r3z.iso
You could even pull some symlink mojo, like trunchating that ugly http RL that points you to your bank's online account management software to just
http://class:mybank
cool stuff, eh?
/me zips up the flamesuit for this next one
Philosophical angle. The problem with this scheme is that it would be dan easy for a controlling body to snip off one arm of the tree. remember, we are talking about a tree, not the amoeba that we had before. Someone could just decide to go up and disallow
http://img:png/erotica
and then where would you be?
I really think an architecture like Freenet lends itself to this kind of arrangement. a heirarchially arranged, distributed metafilesystem. wow, I think I just coined a new buzzword!
"distributed content metafilesystem"
(now 100% buzzword compliant!)
</sarcasm>
but again, seriously, right now the only order the information web has is the order that is imposed upon it. The web would be a friendlier place if this order were built into the foundation itself.
hmm... but how to deal with censorship... go freenet!
-inq
Now, I am a relative newbie to Unix in general. Don't even think of asking me to say anything intelligent about how DNS works or about how BIND works or about exactly what happens when I type a domain name into my web browser past the fact that it goes out to a DNS server and fetches an IP address.
/home/inquis. All the user directories are subordinate to the /home directory. The /home directory and my home directory within that /home directory are logically linked.
/home directory, looking at the contents of that directory, and finding it filled with /sbin crap.
y /lowerLevelCategory
My feeling for a while now is that while Uniform Resource Locators make sense, domain names don't. Think about it from this perspective, and see if it makes any sense.
In the context of your computer, there is a string that you can specify that can point to any particular file, or resource, on your entire machine. For example, my directory would be
Jump over to a win9x box. The contents of the Windows directory are logically linked to the identity of the Windows directory itself. Everything in the windows directory belongs in that directory, because everything in there is a part of windows.
Now look at our idiotic system of using domain names to access resources over the web. First of all, nothing requires that the domain name itself have anything to do with the content that can be accessed by using that domain name. This would be akin to sitting down at your linux box, moving to your
Another problem I have with DNS is that related content is not grouped together by default. This harks back to the previous problem (you can't tell the content from the domain name). And I'm not simply talking about going to a portal that indexes web content and drilling down through the links, I'm talking about a fundamental archetecture change.
Look at it this way. Say you want to look up newbie Linux sites, but you don't know where to begin looking. As it stands now, you can go to Google and hope that their spider has picked all of them up; you can go to Yahoo and hope that they have manually indexed them all; either way, you miss out on content.
now, check this out... wouldn't it be easier on you and everyone else if you could just do this?
http://xml/linux/newbie
transferProtocol://contentType/highLevelCategor
As the web stands now, it is analogous to a linux box with every single file on the entire machine crammed in the root directory. You have to know what exactly you are looking for and how to find it before you can actually find it. A more efficient system would allow even the most braindead user to shoot in the dark and still manage to find somehting useful quite quickly.
(Response to one obvious counterpoint: you can grep a directory to find what you are looking for quickly even if you don't know its name. However, grepping the web is not trivial. The closest tool we have for doing that is Google, and we all know that while it is pretty good, it is not perfect.)
Allright, this now ends my directionless rant. Mods, respond to this if you disagree instead of modding it down.
Thanks, and everyone have a good day. I just pulled an allnighter writing polysci paper, so I needed a good rant.
-inq
I feel I must dissent.
Why is Gnutella not improving? Look at the reference client. The current version is 0.56, and a vast number of Gnutella users are using this client. All the other clones were coded using information derived by reverse engineering this first client.
Now, we don't have the source to this "official' client, so we can only do so much work with the derivatives before we get stymied because of the inertia that is inherent in the community. Let's say I release a fantastic new Gnutella-style servant that solves all the problems with Gnutella and is basically the best thing since sliced bread. The problem is is that since my new client and the old Gnutella 0.56 are still interoperable, I have given no compelling reason to these other people to upgrade to me God client. Therefore, not having the source to the real Gnutella is holding the project back.
Two things could happen to "save" Gnutella: for one, we could get the source for the original Gnutella. I would suspect that the code quality in this original Gnutella is pretty bad. Now, what this does for us is that the bugs in that code would tell us where we should work to improve the network. If we find out that the reason that Gnutella is so damn slow is because of buggy 0.56 code, that could be changed and everyone who is using the "official" client because it is official could switch over. The other way Gnutella can be saved is by creating an entire new protocol (the Next Generation Gnutella Protocol) which would just create an entire new network. If compelling enough, people would switch over in droves.
Of course, this is outright ignoring a third option, which is Freenet finally getting its shit together and rendering Gnutella obselete. I think this would be better for all concerned.
-inq
a goatse.cx link just got modded up.
All is lost. The Trolls have won.
</JOKE> (if you couldnt tell already)
-inq