Would be some serious, relatively objective, relatively trustable data on how much cell phone usage while driving increases the chance of an automobile accident. A possible >60mph crash seems to be a hell of a lot more of a vital concern than a 5% increased chance of cancer in the next 30 years, no matter how statistically or scientifically likely either one is.
there was some study or other in canada a few years ago that wound up with data suggesting that the increase in probability of accident caused by using a cell phone was equal to the increase in probability of accident caused by being drunk. I don't remember who held this survey, so i can't testify as to its validity, but if it's real that's pretty damn scary. We were handed a copy of a summary in drivers ed, and it's buried somewhere in the piles of paper in my room. During drivers ed we spent several days doing nothing but watching videos talking about how if we are caught drinking while driving, our liscences are taken away forever and we have trouble getting jobs. That piece of paper was the only thing they gave us telling us not to talk on cell phones while driving, and i was given no indication that the law would be particularly harsh on me were i to cause an accident through careless driving because i was busy with a cell phone, or that the law was taking any steps whatsoever to prevent cell phone usage from causing accidents.
I believe some federal agency recently held a study of cell phone accident statistics that indicated cell phones or other driver-distracting electronics were a factor in 25% of all automobile accidents, or some such horrifying number. I would like to request that anyone who has some actual real information on this post it.
[insert unfocused, offtopic rant here about how last time i checked Houston had the highest auto accident death rate in america, and how the bit of the 610 loop between I-10 and I-59 is pure hell and i have to drive it every day and i'm constantly having my life put in danger by people talking on cell phones who fail to notice even the most basic of things about the very dangerous environment they are in blah blah blah]
The major difference between this kind of thing and cancer from cell phone overuse is that with cell phone cancer, you the user are the only person likely to die as a result..
Anyone with any kind of further information more real than my vague recollections of statistics, please reply.
seriously, sometime i'm going to tape about half an hour of my LinuxPPC partition, drive it down to the local college radio station, and ask them to play it during the ambient music show..:) /dev/hda1 (or your corresponding equivilent) is great, though, especially if you come across any _sound files_ on your drive saved in a lossless format-- they just play at random and then disappear back into the soup.
and, for the record, you _can_ make some pretty interesting stuff just by writing very simple programs.
unsigned char n=0;/* this will result in some wierd rollover problems, which are left intentionally unfixed. to fix them, change to an int and typedef to unsigned char when you cout */ char i = 1 for(;;) { cout << (n+=i); if (n>=255) i=-(i+1); if (n=0) i=-(i-1); if (i==0) i++; }
I don't have physical access to a linux box with sound right now and i haven't compiled the program above [it was just the first example i could think of off the top of my head], so i don't know what it sounds like, but messing with that kind of pattern can give you some really trippy shit.
Or find some large databaselike data files with a lot of repetitive structure but varying information interspersed, and you get something that vaguely approaches the quality level of Coil..:)
Can ANY non-unixlike operating systems claim that they come with a built-in industrial music generator?:)
> I'm sorry, but the constat beep, beep, beep in Nintendo games is annoying as hell. Give me a modern game anyday.
Yes, of course 90% of everything is crap. The point of my post, which probably didn't get into the post because i'm only barely awake, is that early nintendo and most of SNES had this feel to it which is simply absent these days in video game music, and that some of it was simply amazing. Not all; some. And most of what makes it good, or at least unique, had to do with reasons directly related to the fact the composers were very limited by the format of the music.
> But you're probably one of those people who complains that super mario bros. had the best gameplay of all time. Sad.
Not really, but i am one of those people who can listen to [to give the most "well-known" example] aphex twin and not hear a single one of the notes because i'm listening to the sonic envelopes. Also perhaps sad.
I'm not being nostalgic for Super Mario Brothers 1, i'm being nostalgic for the Roland 303 and crappy vinyl records. 8-bit 11 khz sound can produce some truly amazing feels in the right hands, just because you are forced into applying a certain mode to everything, forced into giving everything a certain stylistic tone that makes it ideal for sampling.
Just because of the limitations of the format, the creators of that music were forced to take wierd sonic shortcuts, do strange things with pure waveforms, produce wierd noises that you just don't _find_ unless you're programming a bad sound api or echoing patterns of numbers to/dev/audio; create music with anything with even slightly higher-level abstractions and those sounds just don't come about. [not to say that everyone who attempted to create low level sound wound up creating something other than crap.] _This_ is why i would want to sample NES music; because it has a feel to it unlike the feel of anything else. What's the music in video games these days like? Just the same old thing that a synthesizer you can buy in a store does, sometimes just recorded music. Why sample that, why not just sample a non-game CD? The point of sampling something is because it brings some element to your music which you cannot produce on your own. Current videogame music is just _music_, normal music, and contains no elements that cannot be found elsewhere. Old-ass nintendo music _does_ have elements, feels, that cannot be found elseware, and thus it would make sense to sample them, to assimilate that feel..
I think my post took it as a given the listener had both listened carefully to nintendo music and had thought a lot about sampling. Those really are dumb assumptions. Sorry.
I've been wondering for YEARS when someone was going to get around to sampling Mega Man.. that stuff is just BEGGING to be integrated into some new techno.. -_- Most of that early nintendo/super nintendo stuff is just without compare in newer games [Zelda 64 was just sad.. especially the music in the big field in the center.], and it's amazing how little of it has been mined by the DJ/techno community.. seemed like nintendo games was the one thing as of yet untouched.
of course now the downside is, whenever i get around to learning how to make music, i can't sample MegaMan and be totally original. Ah well.. whatever.
I have some deeper, very relevant comment on the tip of my mind that i can't quite summon into being because it is 1:16 AM. Too bad. Goodnight.
(P.S. If anyone knows where i can get hold, legally or otherwise, of a recording of the song from the video game "Earthbound" that they played when you were fighting the atomic spherical robot things on the way to the final battle, could you let me know where i could get it?:) THAT was a good song. And if i do ever actually get around to learning any musical instruments, i want to try to make a version of it with slap bass done on an actual guitar.. -_-)
please post any and all comments involving Open Source Man, slashdot-terminal, or the Slashdot Bitchslap as replies to this post.
I still have no idea what's going on with osm, i have no pity for slashterm, and i don't particularly care, but i have a feeling this discussion is going to be littered with comments on this subject as they relate to what EBay is doing, and things would be a lot more tidy if all Bitchslap-related comments were all just dumped in one place.
It's been widely speculated that the reasons.biz and.arts and the other.vapor TLDs never came to pass is because of pressure from business groups who want to ensure the namespace becomes as small as possible to ensuring nobody infringes their copyrights/trademarks/whatever. The more new TLDs we have, the more different variations on their name Disney and the 300 other agressively defensive businesses have to register. (of course, the fact that every corporation simply registers itself in every single TLD defeats the purpose of new TLDs in the first place, but whatever.)
If you take it as given that the above paragraph is actually true, then.gnu has a pretty good chance of getting approved. After all, make a TLD in which each group must be certified as open-source, and you neatly throw out the problem of copyright disputes. I mean, orgainize nothing but free/open software and you don't have domains with copyrighted names, because all the projects are copylefted. Hence, no worries for the Men In Suits, who feel reassured by the fact the TLD isn't open to all comers. Hence, no political/monetary "pressure" on ICANN. Hence, nothing bars it, and the OSS people get a TLD.
Now, of course, you could claim that they [the Suited People] would be scared more, because free software people tend to defend their copylefted ground rather fiercely, but you'd be wrong. A.gnu TLD may result in some Etoy Vs Etoys type disputes, but in the end the fact is that there will never be a coca-cola.gnu or ford.gnu or a microsoft.gnu-- and no huge corporations feeling "threatened". (silly word to use there, i know..)
(oh, and on that last note: what if a company does _some_ open source but not _all_? Apple, as part of their Darwin project, has released code under their own APSL but has also given out [or at least is about to give out] some code *cough* *cough* EGCS enhancements *cough* as GPLed (mostly for the purpose of being integrated into an existing GPLed codebase..). Based on this, should apple get an apple.gnu TLD to map to publicsource.apple.com, even though the majority of the software there is not actually GPLed?)
As for "does the FSF deserve a TLD"..? well, hell, they give them to countries, right? I honestly think that the GNU foundation has a bigger impact on geopolitics than Christmas Island. Unfortunately the whole question becomes very painful when you bring up the question of What About BSD? and What About Qt/KDE? I'd like to hope any TLD made will have a more loose definition of "free" than "the GPL". [i like the LGPL better personally, but that's a flamewar for another day..].. In other words i'd just be a hell of a lot happier with.fsf than with.gnu, because.gnu implies less [and avoids the pronunciation problems mentioned in earlier threads..]
Umm, i can think of a way to do it, but it isn't a technological solution.
You do the same thing to a 2bit computer store that overclocks machines and sells them as legit that you do to a 2bit clothing store that sells fake versace jackets as legit. You call in the police, and the police charge them with fraud and/or misleading business practices and/or deceptive advertising. I guess they could claim that since that 500 mhz AMD overclocked to 800 mhz really was running at 800 mhz, they were telling the truth even if AMD intended it to run at 500 mhz, but i seriously doubt that they could get away with it. Not that i know anything about law.
As for how you catch them.. well, i'm not so sure about that.
Still, this isn't a technological problem. It's a socioeconomic problem. Don't try to find technological solutions to law enforcement problems; technology can always be worked around by just adding more technology to the mix. Laws can't really be worked around, and if there are holes in the laws the laws can be changed. This is, of course, assuming that the republicans don't suddenly decide that they will filibuster and block all "bills requiring computer vendors to state openly whether they have overclocked or otherwise modified the material they are selling from the state it was intended by the manufacturer" unless the bill contains a passage banning second trimester abortions. -mcc (score, 0: gibberish)
Let's think about this for a second. This cyclical rumor keeps showing up despite the fact there is no factual basis for it. The only reason for assuming it in the first place is the hideously tenuous logical link that Steve Jobs, who is the [technically unpaid-- he gets a salary of $1 a year, plus some other slight "perks". The "perks" though, have included such things as millions of dollars of stock, and an airplane.] CEO of Apple, is also CEO of Pixar. That's it. The same person is working at both companies in a management position, and one of those two companies uses a third company for distribution and promotion purposes, so somehow in the warped minds of macosrumors it would follow that the three would merge.
Let's extend this logic a bit. For the next three or four minutes, for the purpose of argument, we will say that I AM A MAC RUMORS SITE, and therefore EVERYTHING I SAY IS TRUE because i NEVER CHECK MY SOURCES FOR ANY DEGREE OF ACCURACY. Bruce Perens is an employee of Pixar. Bruce Perens is also the lead person behind the Debian open source linux distribution and head of the FSF. Whether the last two sentances are true or not is irrelivant; all i know is, like, Bruce Perens name was listed in the credits when i saw Toy Story 2, and, um, like, this r337 IRC d00d in #ircle said once that Bruce Perens ran Debian, and i'm a mac rumors site PH33R M3!!! So it must be right.
Because the same person is working at both Debian and Pixar in a coding postion, clearly the two are about to merge. This would clearly be logical, because they both involve penguins in some way, and because Debian has a [as of yet prerelease] PPC distribution in the works. So when disney buys apple, which they obviously will, Bruce Perens will make sure they buy the FSF as well because he's so attatched to it! Right? ISN"T THAT COOL!!!)@#(*!)(*!!!!!FSADFA
Please, please explain to me why the above is a lesser degree of bullshit than the rumors of apple, disney and pixar merging? You can't, can you? The apple/disney rumors ARE just as idiotic. SO WHY DO YOU KEEP POSTING THIS STUFF ON THE SLASHDOT MAIN PAGE???
oh my God, that's hilarious. after friday, i was so disgusted by some of the idiocy in the posts to certain article that will remain unnamed, i was considering never reading slashdot again. i did decide to just wander through and surf the headlines for awhile. so today i come across this thing in the headlines.. and for a minute there i remembered what it was that had drawn me to slashdot in the first place, a little bit of the feel of discovering something, of..
then i read the 50 consecutive, redundant comments in this thread saying "THIS IS LAME, POST ANOTHER PATENT STORY".
ehhhh.. never mind. now i remember why i was so disgisted before. seeya.
[go to http://ingredientx.com/ they will make you happy]
Will you PLEASE stop posting on macintosh-related subjects until you have actually USED A MACINTOSH or at least become aquainted with the community? And i don't mean "use" as in "i looked at a website on the imac kiosk at the mall, and there were some LC2s with At Ease in my high school"-- i mean become familiar to some degree with the mac and the culture behind it. Note I'm not saying you should actually do this and be a mac user-- i'm just saying you shouldn't post on things unless you know something about the subject other than predjudices and things you've inferred from commercials. This is nothing less than the most ignorant post i have ever seen on slashdot. Shame on you, and shame on the moderators.
The hood is not welded shut on the mac. If your anology would be that the hood can open but there are no user-servicable parts underneath it, you would be closer, but still wrong. (The original one-piece macs were welded shut, but not anymore. Apple has been getting better and better over time about this. The G4, which i am typing on, is the easiest case i have ever seen to get into. My previous mac, a 7200, was a far more "open" case than most of the heavy-metal screw-infested PC tower cases i've seen. NOTE TO PEOPLE WHO WILL TAKE ANY EXCUSE TO FLAME: i realize this parenthesis is not in ANY WAY RELEVANT and that the "welded shut" case was an anology. Please do not take my mention of computer cases to imply that i believe the post being replied to was talking about computer cases.)
Go to http://www.apple.com/developer/, read through it, and tell me the mac os is closed up. There are PDFs there describing how to do more or less anything you could possibly want to do, as well as all the free developer tools you need. Yes, that includes a compiler. Want to know how to change the behavior of menus in the mac os, or to make a subtle change in some appearance feature, or write a program that does something low-level and dodgy involving TCP/IP? Use those PDFs. They're free. Want to know how to do it in windows? Well, you will have to pay microsoft an awful lot of money first for those MSDN cds.. Do you know what an extention is, or what it can do, or how it works? Do you know what opendoc was, until market forces killed it? I have seen an unbelievable amount of just sheerly wierd hacking, of just low-level playing around, on the macintosh that is in no way parallelled in windows, is probably not possible in windows, and apple almost always gives some mechanism for doing that-- and if not, someone will find one. There have been cases where apple has not been flexible, and the mac users have simply flowed around it in a way that does not fit with your statement about mac users being naturally non-curious. If something enters into the mac os, someone will try to get it to work in a nonstandard way. I'm not going to give any examples, but i could. I just don't feel like spending time going and trying to locate old URLs and shareware apps just because someone posted a stupid comment on slashdot and got a score:5. But they are there, they are very much there,and whether you want to believe this is true or not, the mechanisms for allowing flexibility and an infinite degree of user control were provided by apple.
Is apple perfect? No. Does apple put as much emphasis on openness and flexibility as they should? No. Is any apple product near the openness and flexibility of linux? Of course not. But there is no way you can compare them to microsoft unless you know literally nothing more than the fact that they are the only people who sell their hardware platform.
They don't give the LinuxPPC people as much guidance as they should. They refused to go and take on the huge task of documenting everything about how to write an OS for their hardware for free just so Be wouldn't have to figure it out themselves. Steve Jobs is not a terribly likable person. This does not make them closed in anywhere near the sense most of the posts in this article take for granted. They aren't always as helpful as they could be; not all the mac os parts are particularly servicable.
But the processor is on a little daughtercard that comes right out, and the rest is relatively standard and replacable. You can upgrade these things, believe it or not. The first linux to run on a mac was created in a project funded by apple (mklinux). There is a free, open-source OS written by apple which uses most of the bsd code base but contains all of the low levels of Mac OS X. I'm pretty certain it will be possible and legal to pull out the darwin core of Mac OS X and replace it with your own, which is pretty damn open even if there's a propeitary window manager and APIs on top of it. Apple may not facilitate or make easier this action, but still it will be possible and i'm going to do it, dammit:P And how the hell can you claim apple has "closed hardware", or tries to prevent anyone from figuring out its hardware, when they make publicly available the source code to the hardware compatibility layer on their flagship product?? Even if you don't trust the APSL enough to use any code under it, there is no law i am aware of to prevent you from doing some simple clean-rooming and writing your own specs on How To Write An OS For Apple Hardware. From all reports, Mac OS X contains the same theme architecture as the current mac os, so it seems that people will be still able to micromanage their interface. (keep in mind apple is the most unpredictable force on earth, and this could obviously change, and they could obviosuly do all kinds of evil things that we don't forsee.) Yes, aqua looks pretty welded shut, but that doesn't matter; if you think that all of us are going to actually put up with aqua, you know even less than i had assumed. It will _not_ be long after OSX's release before a way to completely dismantle aqua is found without harming Quartz, even if that way isn't sanctioned by apple. The current theme architecture, by the way, which is far more powerful than any other theming or skinning scheme ever made, is completely undocumented. This seems like a pretty closed-minded and irritating thing for apple to do, and it is. But before you go and claim this proves your point, keep in mind that there is nothing whatsoever keeping apple from removing or disabling the themes; there's no reason for the os to still allow you to change themes except for the fact apple secretly doesn't mind. This is the way pretty much everything apple does goes; they don't fling open the doors and welcome you in and _help_ you, but they still leave the back window unlocked; apple never acts to make these things impossible, even when they don't act to make them easier. And if you do attempt to go around them and do something you don't want to do, they don't smack you down or anything. The two big instances of apple closing up something and making it inflexible are sherlock 2 and quicktime 4, which are nasty. But do you have _any_ idea how many interface hacks exist for those two, or any idea how many people had downloaded the sherlock 2 interface-fixing hacks within a day of OS 9 being out?
You'll make a lot of noise about apple killing clone makers, but the fact is apple simply had no choice: they couldn't financially survive with a bunch of people out there selling the same product as them, only better because they could spend the money apple spends on R&D on improving their products. Apple's market share wasn't big enough to do this. But before you say the PPC platform is closed, remember this: there is literally nothing stopping you from getting a loan and starting a small business and creating and selling a PPC motherboard, or even putting it in a case with a hard drive and a power supply and some other nice things and installing a homebrew linuxppc on it. And once you have it working, i'm sure that it would not be THAT difficult to hack some compatibility layer together to make mac os 9 boot on it. OS X should be even easier, just swap out your mach. But that doesn't matter since you don't want to run the mac OS anyway, do you? Yes, apple is the only company selling PPC computers. How is this apple's fault any more than it is your fault for not making them yourself? Apple's not welcoming anyone to PPC, but they aren't driving them off either, and the crucial "not driving off" distinction is what makes any references to antitrust law stupid. [Not that that stops slashdot posters, though.]
I am always surprised by the degree to which what little rational content slashdot has disappears completely whenever apple gets invlved, but the discussion in this article is just.. rather extreme. Believe it or not, there are people who use Macintoshes and/or the Mac OS because it is the best tool for the job, or because the interface is efficient enough it's a fair trade-off with the stability of a *n?x. Just because apple sells computers with colored cases does not mean that everyone, or even the majority of the people, who buy apples are people who base their computer decision on the color of the case. I realize that by implying the previous sentance to be possible, i am going against many firmly held beliefs of many slashdotters, but this thread has me so disgusted i don't care anymore.
I apologize if this post is a bit incendentiary; i realize i will look as if i am overreacting, and i probably am. I'm pretty sure i'm going to regret posting this, but i suspect someone, somewhere, will listen. Understand the parent post is not the only post i'm replying to here, and this one, as are a lot of others, are just as much what this long, unfocused sprawl of a post are directed at. I'm afraid you'll take my lack of conflicting evidence to conclude i'm being a one-sided zealot. I'm sorry. Apple has their bad side, there are bad parts i'm not going into. But those bad parts are inseconsequential in the end in my opinion, and i'm too tired to go into them, and there's no more room for them anyway. I would like to request anyone reading this post try to actually look at what i'm saying in order to see if there's any truth in it, and try to understand it, not decide after the first couple lines that i'm wrong and then look for ways to use the fact this post is disproportionately long and most of it can be easily interpreted as fanatical pro-mac posturing to attack me. Or else take one small passage which is off-base or badly written and conclude that invalidates everything. Or complain about my run-on sentances, or something. Ehh, whatever. I hate slashdot..
Re:Of course! It's the acronym.
on
WAP Under Fire
·
· Score: 1
the GNU Number of Unrelated Utilities [or] the GNU Number of Unpronounceable Utilities
Thank you, cdmrtaco, for brightening up my day. You have no idea how much better i feel now that i have randomly run across a Warp Records reference in an unexpected place. My morning has now been worth it.:)
I love everything2. Who thought that anything mentioning Boards of Canada, Autechre, etc. would ever wind up being linked from the slashdot main page, even unintentionally?
you vote for the one who claimed to invent the internet, because there are multiple supreme court seats up for reassignment in the next presidential term.
The idea behind an SP-style "chewbacca defense" is to locate something that easily appeals without a lot of thinking. Something that can be easily grasped, and that makes you happy to think about because it lets you easily look at the problems in terms of right/wrong. Take a complex, multifaceted issue, and insert one simple word: PIRACY. suddenly The DeCSS Hackers Are Wrong. The MPAA Is Right. Simple, Black and White, not a painful, important decision. It's not a difficult, painful issue with many sides, it's about Copyright Piracy, and Piracy is simple, and Piracy is something that they have seen on the news and that can be easily morally justified and that the plaintiff has repeated over and over often enough the jury can believe it's true.
Or, if you want a far, far more powerful word for your monkey: Children. Imply that Children are being "hurt" by one side or the other, and no matter how rediculous your justification for claiming this, no matter how tenuous your support for yuour side, no matter how valid the other side may be.. the other side is GONE. See Also "columbine".
Monopolistic tendancies of huge labels harming independant, little artists and enabling the labels to rape and screw over even signed artists do NOT make a good monkey. (try looking up sometime that essay by the guy who produced the Pixies [i think?] on how most apparently successful artists are actually deep, deep in debt to the record companies because of contract complications, and the whole Letter of Intent thing..) They can't be that easily grasped, they force you to actually (*gasp*) re-evaluate some of your assumptions about those bands you're hearing on the radio, and they may even force you to look at your mighty god 104.1 KRBE, Today's Modern Hits! as something that maybe doesn't, at heart, care that much about music. Most importantly, thinking about the true nature of the music industry as a parasite on an art form requires, well, THINKING, which defeats the entire purpose of the monkey in the first place. The point of the chewbacca defence is to keep the jury from thinking; give them something nice and happy to distract them, like The MPAA Is Stopping Piracy or The Christian Right Is Protecting Children, so that they don't actually think about the issue deeply enough to realize it's something with more than one side, something in which the side with the more valid concerns may actually not be the most obvious one.. Making the jury think is counterproductive, and besides, people don't like to think.
Basically, in this case it's easier to think about the music companies' monkey than Boies' monkey. And while the music companies' monkey may be a bit more relevant, Boies' monkey is far, far more valid.
i'm sitting here at a rather nice G4. It came with the nasty mouse and keyboard.
Anyway, i could take the mouse, although my hands are big enough that i was holding it literally with no more than the one joint nearest the end of my three middle fingers.. which got a bit annoying. But it was the keyboard that threw me. The letters were tiny and scrunched, and there was just.. something about it that my WPM went down by at least like a third, my mistakes kind of tripled and my wrists hurt every time i used it. And i don't know about you people, but i am _literally_ UNABLE TO FUNCTION without a forward-del key. Maybe i'm just wierd, but i feel like i have a whole finger missing or something without that one little key. And i'm wondering, _why_ would apple do this on a _professional_ model? With the imac it was clearly to preserve desk space, but this isn't an imac. i have a big 'ol tower sitting here, a 17-inch monitor, and no need aesthetic or otherwise to insure my keyboard is the same width as my computer.
So i was thinking about this, and i came to a very paranoid, very unrealistic, and probably correct conclusion: apple did it on purpose. Why? Well, think about it from their perspective. They're about to fully embrace a semiobscure and not-too-widely supported standard [USB] for peripherals. There is almost no market, and the form factor of the product they're selling means that the people buying it will be happier if their peripherals can be *gag* color-coordinated. How the hell are they going to get people to agree to make peripherals specifically for this thing if there's zero user base so far, apple's halfway to dead and they haven't even announced the thing?
Well, i'll tell you one thing, it's certainly not going to help sales of USB keyboards if the biggest group of USB consumers in the world [imac users] already _have_ a good keyboard. So here's my theory: Apple purposefully designed the keyboard and mouse for the imac to be [let's be nice here] inadequate, in order to stimulate growth in the USB market, to ensure that everyone who buys an imac will at some point want to go get themselves a nice new Kensington iOrbitBox or whatever, thus giving Kensington a reason to release whatever the hell it was they released. Bam! Instant market. Happy peripheral companies. USB expertise spreads throughout the industry, making new products faster to get to market; USB flowers; Apple gets away with not putting any more standard ports on the imac.
Bullshit? Of course it is. But it's something to think about.
Anyway, i'm currently typing on a very nice MacAlly iKey and using a rather ghetto-bootleg [but cheap, and most of all TWO-BUTTON] thing i found at MicroCenter called an "iMouse"-- featuring no drivers in the box [meaning until i downloaded a shareware usb driver, both of the mouse buttons did the same thing..], some very odd features on the back of the clearly badly translated box ["inconvenient powering down", "support for up to 256 devices"] and no brandname or any other hint who manufactured the thing anywhere on or inside the box. Did i mention it was cheap? So i'm happy and the [both psychological and literal] pain of the imac mouse/keyboard are far behind me. So i don't really care anymore.
But my conspiracy theory still applies: apple now has a big 'ol user base, they know the USB market will survive on whether they're competing with it or not, and non-apple corporations have started paying lots of attention to USB. So now that they no longer need to force not-cruddy imac peripherals into existence, they're reentering the market. Although if they release a mouse but not a real extended keyboard.. well, they're on crack.
your point is extremely insightful and eloquently made, but keep in mind there is an important exception to what you say, an exception which can be expressed in three words:
seeing those words set off a random train of thought that involved goatse.cx, was heavily enhanced by large amounts of sleep deprevation, and ended with me idly asking myself the question: is pentium.cx taken?
I immediately realized it was a dumb question; why would anyone want pentium.cx and what would they _do_ with it?
I would have immediately forgotten it, except i suddenly realized something that made me wonder if maybe it isn't such a dumb question after all. Alright, think about this for a minute:
It's pretty clear that intel's naming scheme no longer directly relates to reality. Moreover, the scism is getting more extreme over time. From the pentium to the pentium 2 to the pentium 3 to the pentium 4, the differences in the chip have become less apparent in usefulness and much more arbitrary. From my totally ignorant perspective, it would appear that the pentium 3 was more a marketing construct than it was anything else; just a desperate attempt to stuff a _lot_ more not-very-useful-or-realistic complexity into the pentium instruction set so they could claim "look, we did something!" and have an excuse to run a lot of commercials, just to keep intel in everyone's mind as being cutting-edge, or something. I mean, look, it has something to do with the internet, doesn't it?? and they have cool 3d graphics and a looney toons character in the ad! It must be really advanced!!! d00d L337 1 \V1LL HAVE MY DAD R3PL4C3 MY 0V3RCL0CK3D AMD R16GHT 4W4Y with a PENTIUM 3 and it will MAKE THE INTERNET M0R3 FUN 4ND 1 \V1LL H4XOR BETTER!!! The pentium 4 seems pure desperation, some extremely vague advancement just to pump the number up one more, just to release a lot of press releases and get people to buy stuff. Just to say, ok, the pentium 3 failed to change the world, but we're still here, and we're still alive and vital and moving!! If i were going to be paranoid, i'd say the point of the pentium 4 is so intel can make a lot of noise about it to distract us from the IA-64. What about the IA-64, you ask? Say, that's what i want to know exactly.
But whether i'm being too harsh, and whether i know jack shit about microchips, i think i can say with some certainty that with each new "version" of the x86, the real _meaningful_ difference between each processor is getting a good deal smaller with each iteration, and the marketing aspects of a new product launch are overshadowing the technological aspects in intel's mind with each iteration. And i can DEFINATELY say the amount of time between "releases" is getting faster and faster.
My prediction:
From this point, with each "new" chip intel releases, the fluff value of the release will increase exponentially, the time between releases will decrease exponentially, and the justification for changing numbers will decrease exponentially. Eventually, intel will get to the point where they assign a different Pentium Number for each different clockrate assignment.
Thus about two years from now, Intel will have reached the point of the Pentium 110-- which they will name the Pentium CX [roman numerals!] -- and register the domain pentium.cx for it, to commemorate the Pentium CX's simultaneous release with "Windows ME harder"!
But who knows how much the tech industry will have changed by then? Hell, by that point, there may even be multiple-core G4s on the market.
Who or what is at mu.current.nu, who is Currentek, and why are they important enough that if they have technical difficulties, Slashdot replaces their entire page with "Error:syntax error at (eval [" [insert random integer here] ") line 2, at EOF " and then intermittantly decides to replace all slashboxes with messages about mu.current.nu being down? I've never heard of these people, and their [currently not that functional] website gives no clue as to what they are. Are they some kind of hosting service or ad provider or andover.net-sponsored echelon tap?
What the hell happened earlier today?
I was going to post this earlier, but it seemed dreadfully offtopic in an interview of a guy who makes telescopes. But luckily it doesn't really seem like anything can be offtopic to slashback.. /me ducks
> "Holy sh*t!" might be a common reaction to rates that high, but the fact is that corporate income taxes, other hidden taxes, and complaince costs already add 20-40% to the price of everthing we buy -- and buy with after-tax dollars.
There is no way that american corporations will adjust their prices to allow for the hidden taxes. If they can get an excuse to increase their effective prices by 20-40%, no matter HOW unjustified that reason is, they _will_ do it, and do it in such a way that you can't boycott the companies who rise prices by 20-40% because they've _all_ done it, so there are no _other_ companies to go to instead. Meanwhile almost all of the american populace won't notice the effective increase in cost of goods was done not for the purpose of paying for a 20-40% increase in taxes, but a 20-40% increase in profits.
> Of course, it's also a good kick in the pants to Congress to think about trimming down some of that pork-barrel spending so everyone can get a tax cut.
Congress will not cut the pork barrel spending. If it is a republican-led congress, they will cut welfare. A lot. If it is a democat-led congress, they will cut something other than welfare. Meanwhile almost all of the american populace either doesn't vote, doesn't care about this, or votes solely based on who can create pork-barrel projects that benefit them.
Welcome to America.
Am i being cynical, or realistic? Is there a difference?
The constitution forbids a state government from making any laws which attempt to regulate interstate commerce. If that pie ends up in a different state than the one it begins in, either the federal government decides who gets it or no government decides who gets it.
At least, that's what the surpreme court has been saying since, like, what, 1800? If i am wrong, or the totally unsurprising possibility that the U.S. law has changed in the last 200 years has occured, feel free to correct me. Then go to John Marshall's grave, read this slashdot article over it, and listen for a spinning noise just underground.
ehhh, you're missing the point of what i said. of course, this is because the point was very badly written in the first place, but still.
Note the sentance about compatability and replacement not being quite the same thing. With a playstation, you are selling nothing _but_ the API. If you duplicate the API you duplicate _everything_. WIth windows, on the other hand, there are things other than the API there-- interface, stability, hardware compatibility, config utilities, etc. Whether or not windows _has_ any of these things is a matter of opinion, but that's not important. the important bit is there's _something there_ that Microsot can use to control its destiny. In other words, with windows, -it is possible to seperate the api from the product-. WIth the PSX, -the api IS the product-. With a PSX, by the very nature of what it is you're buying nothing but compatibility, and thus if you duplicate compatibility you duplicate everything that Sony could possibly put into the machine to get you to buy it.
The important part of the distinction here is that the Wine people are actually _creating_ something, allowing you to do something that was not possible before. "running playstation games without a playstion" is not really as far as i can tel something "new" unless the thing you use in place of the playstation is distinguishable from a real playstation in terms of implementation.
I wasn't trying to say Bleem or VGS were neccecarily immoral. I personally don't think they are at all. They're maybe in my eyes a bit more questionable than something like SNES9X, where the hardware you are creating compatibility with is no longer for sale. But still they give you something that is not in the box with a normal playstation-- namely, the ability to run things on your _existing hardware_. This may be a fuzzy distintion, but still one that think applies. And since my entire reason for writing in the first place was to point out that the whole issue itself is fuzzy.. -_- The passage you quote was meant to apply to _hardware_ _console_ implementations, not emulators, and i don't think i made that at all clear. Again, i was tired. So the issue to me is whether the reverse engineer has _created_ something-- has made something _new_ possible, has either combined ideas in a new way or produced new functionality, has made the implementation and not the api the thing you buy. Wine does this by letting you use such things like the x window system, protected memory that works such that if MSWord goes down httpd doesn't, etc-- things very much outside of the API. Interestingly enough, Bleem [and maybe vgs.. i'm not sure?] does this too-- add something new, create something, provide advantages in _implementation_. I'm referring to [among other things] the fact that because it takes advantage of your 3d card to do its rendering independently, Bleem actually is able to display some games at a a much, much higher resolution than a normal playstation can [becuase a normal playstation uses a television, and TVs have awful quality..] and so you don't wind up with just the same blocky graphics you'd have in a straight every-pixel-where-the-PSX-wants-it implementation. If you've ever seen Wild9 on bleem screenshots, its amazing.. But anyway here in _addition_ to the API and the impressive reverse engineering feat, Bleem has actually created new functionality.
The GPL has nothing to do with anything here.
I hope i made my point a little clearer here. Please let me know if i did not.
Slashdot Mirror
Everything dies.
Would be some serious, relatively objective, relatively trustable data on how much cell phone usage while driving increases the chance of an automobile accident. A possible >60mph crash seems to be a hell of a lot more of a vital concern than a 5% increased chance of cancer in the next 30 years, no matter how statistically or scientifically likely either one is.
there was some study or other in canada a few years ago that wound up with data suggesting that the increase in probability of accident caused by using a cell phone was equal to the increase in probability of accident caused by being drunk. I don't remember who held this survey, so i can't testify as to its validity, but if it's real that's pretty damn scary. We were handed a copy of a summary in drivers ed, and it's buried somewhere in the piles of paper in my room. During drivers ed we spent several days doing nothing but watching videos talking about how if we are caught drinking while driving, our liscences are taken away forever and we have trouble getting jobs. That piece of paper was the only thing they gave us telling us not to talk on cell phones while driving, and i was given no indication that the law would be particularly harsh on me were i to cause an accident through careless driving because i was busy with a cell phone, or that the law was taking any steps whatsoever to prevent cell phone usage from causing accidents.
I believe some federal agency recently held a study of cell phone accident statistics that indicated cell phones or other driver-distracting electronics were a factor in 25% of all automobile accidents, or some such horrifying number. I would like to request that anyone who has some actual real information on this post it.
[insert unfocused, offtopic rant here about how last time i checked Houston had the highest auto accident death rate in america, and how the bit of the 610 loop between I-10 and I-59 is pure hell and i have to drive it every day and i'm constantly having my life put in danger by people talking on cell phones who fail to notice even the most basic of things about the very dangerous environment they are in blah blah blah]
The major difference between this kind of thing and cancer from cell phone overuse is that with cell phone cancer, you the user are the only person likely to die as a result..
Anyone with any kind of further information more real than my vague recollections of statistics, please reply.
core is interesting, but the COOLEST is
/dev/hda1 > /dev/audio
:)
/* this will result in some wierd rollover problems, which are left intentionally unfixed. to fix them, change to an int and typedef to unsigned char when you cout */
:)
:)
cat
seriously, sometime i'm going to tape about half an hour of my LinuxPPC partition, drive it down to the local college radio station, and ask them to play it during the ambient music show..
/dev/hda1 (or your corresponding equivilent) is great, though, especially if you come across any _sound files_ on your drive saved in a lossless format-- they just play at random and then disappear back into the soup.
and, for the record, you _can_ make some pretty interesting stuff just by writing very simple programs.
unsigned char n=0;
char i = 1
for(;;) {
cout << (n+=i);
if (n>=255) i=-(i+1);
if (n=0) i=-(i-1);
if (i==0) i++;
}
I don't have physical access to a linux box with sound right now and i haven't compiled the program above [it was just the first example i could think of off the top of my head], so i don't know what it sounds like, but messing with that kind of pattern can give you some really trippy shit.
Or find some large databaselike data files with a lot of repetitive structure but varying information interspersed, and you get something that vaguely approaches the quality level of Coil..
Can ANY non-unixlike operating systems claim that they come with a built-in industrial music generator?
Whoops, sorry, did i say most? Damn.
/dev/audio; create music with anything with even slightly higher-level abstractions and those sounds just don't come about. [not to say that everyone who attempted to create low level sound wound up creating something other than crap.] _This_ is why i would want to sample NES music; because it has a feel to it unlike the feel of anything else. What's the music in video games these days like? Just the same old thing that a synthesizer you can buy in a store does, sometimes just recorded music. Why sample that, why not just sample a non-game CD?
> I'm sorry, but the constat beep, beep, beep in Nintendo games is annoying as hell. Give me a modern game anyday.
Yes, of course 90% of everything is crap. The point of my post, which probably didn't get into the post because i'm only barely awake, is that early nintendo and most of SNES had this feel to it which is simply absent these days in video game music, and that some of it was simply amazing. Not all; some. And most of what makes it good, or at least unique, had to do with reasons directly related to the fact the composers were very limited by the format of the music.
> But you're probably one of those people who complains that super mario bros. had the best gameplay of all time. Sad.
Not really, but i am one of those people who can listen to [to give the most "well-known" example] aphex twin and not hear a single one of the notes because i'm listening to the sonic envelopes. Also perhaps sad.
I'm not being nostalgic for Super Mario Brothers 1, i'm being nostalgic for the Roland 303 and crappy vinyl records. 8-bit 11 khz sound can produce some truly amazing feels in the right hands, just because you are forced into applying a certain mode to everything, forced into giving everything a certain stylistic tone that makes it ideal for sampling.
Just because of the limitations of the format, the creators of that music were forced to take wierd sonic shortcuts, do strange things with pure waveforms, produce wierd noises that you just don't _find_ unless you're programming a bad sound api or echoing patterns of numbers to
The point of sampling something is because it brings some element to your music which you cannot produce on your own. Current videogame music is just _music_, normal music, and contains no elements that cannot be found elsewhere. Old-ass nintendo music _does_ have elements, feels, that cannot be found elseware, and thus it would make sense to sample them, to assimilate that feel..
I think my post took it as a given the listener had both listened carefully to nintendo music and had thought a lot about sampling. Those really are dumb assumptions. Sorry.
[why I love (and understand why most of you hate) minimal techno]
SLEEP NOW!!! NOW!!!!
I've been wondering for YEARS when someone was going to get around to sampling Mega Man.. that stuff is just BEGGING to be integrated into some new techno.. -_- Most of that early nintendo/super nintendo stuff is just without compare in newer games [Zelda 64 was just sad.. especially the music in the big field in the center.], and it's amazing how little of it has been mined by the DJ/techno community.. seemed like nintendo games was the one thing as of yet untouched.
:) THAT was a good song. And if i do ever actually get around to learning any musical instruments, i want to try to make a version of it with slap bass done on an actual guitar.. -_-)
of course now the downside is, whenever i get around to learning how to make music, i can't sample MegaMan and be totally original. Ah well.. whatever.
I have some deeper, very relevant comment on the tip of my mind that i can't quite summon into being because it is 1:16 AM. Too bad. Goodnight.
(P.S. If anyone knows where i can get hold, legally or otherwise, of a recording of the song from the video game "Earthbound" that they played when you were fighting the atomic spherical robot things on the way to the final battle, could you let me know where i could get it?
please post any and all comments involving Open Source Man, slashdot-terminal, or the Slashdot Bitchslap as replies to this post.
I still have no idea what's going on with osm, i have no pity for slashterm, and i don't particularly care, but i have a feeling this discussion is going to be littered with comments on this subject as they relate to what EBay is doing, and things would be a lot more tidy if all Bitchslap-related comments were all just dumped in one place.
It's been widely speculated that the reasons .biz and .arts and the other .vapor TLDs never came to pass is because of pressure from business groups who want to ensure the namespace becomes as small as possible to ensuring nobody infringes their copyrights/trademarks/whatever. The more new TLDs we have, the more different variations on their name Disney and the 300 other agressively defensive businesses have to register. (of course, the fact that every corporation simply registers itself in every single TLD defeats the purpose of new TLDs in the first place, but whatever.)
.gnu has a pretty good chance of getting approved. After all, make a TLD in which each group must be certified as open-source, and you neatly throw out the problem of copyright disputes. I mean, orgainize nothing but free/open software and you don't have domains with copyrighted names, because all the projects are copylefted. Hence, no worries for the Men In Suits, who feel reassured by the fact the TLD isn't open to all comers. Hence, no political/monetary "pressure" on ICANN. Hence, nothing bars it, and the OSS people get a TLD.
.gnu TLD may result in some Etoy Vs Etoys type disputes, but in the end the fact is that there will never be a coca-cola.gnu or ford.gnu or a microsoft.gnu-- and no huge corporations feeling "threatened". (silly word to use there, i know..)
.fsf than with .gnu, because .gnu implies less [and avoids the pronunciation problems mentioned in earlier threads..]
If you take it as given that the above paragraph is actually true, then
Now, of course, you could claim that they [the Suited People] would be scared more, because free software people tend to defend their copylefted ground rather fiercely, but you'd be wrong. A
(oh, and on that last note: what if a company does _some_ open source but not _all_? Apple, as part of their Darwin project, has released code under their own APSL but has also given out [or at least is about to give out] some code *cough* *cough* EGCS enhancements *cough* as GPLed (mostly for the purpose of being integrated into an existing GPLed codebase..). Based on this, should apple get an apple.gnu TLD to map to publicsource.apple.com, even though the majority of the software there is not actually GPLed?)
As for "does the FSF deserve a TLD"..? well, hell, they give them to countries, right? I honestly think that the GNU foundation has a bigger impact on geopolitics than Christmas Island.
Unfortunately the whole question becomes very painful when you bring up the question of What About BSD? and What About Qt/KDE? I'd like to hope any TLD made will have a more loose definition of "free" than "the GPL". [i like the LGPL better personally, but that's a flamewar for another day..].. In other words i'd just be a hell of a lot happier with
You do the same thing to a 2bit computer store that overclocks machines and sells them as legit that you do to a 2bit clothing store that sells fake versace jackets as legit. You call in the police, and the police charge them with fraud and/or misleading business practices and/or deceptive advertising. I guess they could claim that since that 500 mhz AMD overclocked to 800 mhz really was running at 800 mhz, they were telling the truth even if AMD intended it to run at 500 mhz, but i seriously doubt that they could get away with it. Not that i know anything about law.
As for how you catch them.. well, i'm not so sure about that.
Still, this isn't a technological problem. It's a socioeconomic problem. Don't try to find technological solutions to law enforcement problems; technology can always be worked around by just adding more technology to the mix. Laws can't really be worked around, and if there are holes in the laws the laws can be changed. This is, of course, assuming that the republicans don't suddenly decide that they will filibuster and block all "bills requiring computer vendors to state openly whether they have overclocked or otherwise modified the material they are selling from the state it was intended by the manufacturer" unless the bill contains a passage banning second trimester abortions. -mcc (score, 0: gibberish)
Let's think about this for a second.
This cyclical rumor keeps showing up despite the fact there is no factual basis for it. The only reason for assuming it in the first place is the hideously tenuous logical link that Steve Jobs, who is the [technically unpaid-- he gets a salary of $1 a year, plus some other slight "perks". The "perks" though, have included such things as millions of dollars of stock, and an airplane.] CEO of Apple, is also CEO of Pixar. That's it. The same person is working at both companies in a management position, and one of those two companies uses a third company for distribution and promotion purposes, so somehow in the warped minds of macosrumors it would follow that the three would merge.
Let's extend this logic a bit. For the next three or four minutes, for the purpose of argument, we will say that I AM A MAC RUMORS SITE, and therefore EVERYTHING I SAY IS TRUE because i NEVER CHECK MY SOURCES FOR ANY DEGREE OF ACCURACY.
Bruce Perens is an employee of Pixar. Bruce Perens is also the lead person behind the Debian open source linux distribution and head of the FSF. Whether the last two sentances are true or not is irrelivant; all i know is, like, Bruce Perens name was listed in the credits when i saw Toy Story 2, and, um, like, this r337 IRC d00d in #ircle said once that Bruce Perens ran Debian, and i'm a mac rumors site PH33R M3!!! So it must be right.
Because the same person is working at both Debian and Pixar in a coding postion, clearly the two are about to merge. This would clearly be logical, because they both involve penguins in some way, and because Debian has a [as of yet prerelease] PPC distribution in the works. So when disney buys apple, which they obviously will, Bruce Perens will make sure they buy the FSF as well because he's so attatched to it! Right? ISN"T THAT COOL!!!)@#(*!)(*!!!!!FSADFA
Please, please explain to me why the above is a lesser degree of bullshit than the rumors of apple, disney and pixar merging?
You can't, can you? The apple/disney rumors ARE just as idiotic. SO WHY DO YOU KEEP POSTING THIS STUFF ON THE SLASHDOT MAIN PAGE???
oh my God, that's hilarious.
after friday, i was so disgusted by some of the idiocy in the posts to certain article that will remain unnamed, i was considering never reading slashdot again.
i did decide to just wander through and surf the headlines for awhile.
so today i come across this thing in the headlines.. and for a minute there i remembered what it was that had drawn me to slashdot in the first place, a little bit of the feel of discovering something, of..
then i read the 50 consecutive, redundant comments in this thread saying "THIS IS LAME, POST ANOTHER PATENT STORY".
ehhhh.. never mind. now i remember why i was so disgisted before.
seeya.
[go to http://ingredientx.com/ they will make you happy]
Will you PLEASE stop posting on macintosh-related subjects until you have actually USED A MACINTOSH or at least become aquainted with the community? And i don't mean "use" as in "i looked at a website on the imac kiosk at the mall, and there were some LC2s with At Ease in my high school"-- i mean become familiar to some degree with the mac and the culture behind it. Note I'm not saying you should actually do this and be a mac user-- i'm just saying you shouldn't post on things unless you know something about the subject other than predjudices and things you've inferred from commercials.
:P
This is nothing less than the most ignorant post i have ever seen on slashdot. Shame on you, and shame on the moderators.
The hood is not welded shut on the mac. If your anology would be that the hood can open but there are no user-servicable parts underneath it, you would be closer, but still wrong.
(The original one-piece macs were welded shut, but not anymore. Apple has been getting better and better over time about this. The G4, which i am typing on, is the easiest case i have ever seen to get into. My previous mac, a 7200, was a far more "open" case than most of the heavy-metal screw-infested PC tower cases i've seen. NOTE TO PEOPLE WHO WILL TAKE ANY EXCUSE TO FLAME: i realize this parenthesis is not in ANY WAY RELEVANT and that the "welded shut" case was an anology. Please do not take my mention of computer cases to imply that i believe the post being replied to was talking about computer cases.)
Go to http://www.apple.com/developer/, read through it, and tell me the mac os is closed up. There are PDFs there describing how to do more or less anything you could possibly want to do, as well as all the free developer tools you need. Yes, that includes a compiler. Want to know how to change the behavior of menus in the mac os, or to make a subtle change in some appearance feature, or write a program that does something low-level and dodgy involving TCP/IP? Use those PDFs. They're free. Want to know how to do it in windows? Well, you will have to pay microsoft an awful lot of money first for those MSDN cds..
Do you know what an extention is, or what it can do, or how it works? Do you know what opendoc was, until market forces killed it? I have seen an unbelievable amount of just sheerly wierd hacking, of just low-level playing around, on the macintosh that is in no way parallelled in windows, is probably not possible in windows, and apple almost always gives some mechanism for doing that-- and if not, someone will find one. There have been cases where apple has not been flexible, and the mac users have simply flowed around it in a way that does not fit with your statement about mac users being naturally non-curious. If something enters into the mac os, someone will try to get it to work in a nonstandard way. I'm not going to give any examples, but i could. I just don't feel like spending time going and trying to locate old URLs and shareware apps just because someone posted a stupid comment on slashdot and got a score:5. But they are there, they are very much there,and whether you want to believe this is true or not, the mechanisms for allowing flexibility and an infinite degree of user control were provided by apple.
Is apple perfect? No. Does apple put as much emphasis on openness and flexibility as they should? No. Is any apple product near the openness and flexibility of linux? Of course not. But there is no way you can compare them to microsoft unless you know literally nothing more than the fact that they are the only people who sell their hardware platform.
They don't give the LinuxPPC people as much guidance as they should. They refused to go and take on the huge task of documenting everything about how to write an OS for their hardware for free just so Be wouldn't have to figure it out themselves. Steve Jobs is not a terribly likable person. This does not make them closed in anywhere near the sense most of the posts in this article take for granted. They aren't always as helpful as they could be; not all the mac os parts are particularly servicable.
But the processor is on a little daughtercard that comes right out, and the rest is relatively standard and replacable. You can upgrade these things, believe it or not. The first linux to run on a mac was created in a project funded by apple (mklinux). There is a free, open-source OS written by apple which uses most of the bsd code base but contains all of the low levels of Mac OS X. I'm pretty certain it will be possible and legal to pull out the darwin core of Mac OS X and replace it with your own, which is pretty damn open even if there's a propeitary window manager and APIs on top of it. Apple may not facilitate or make easier this action, but still it will be possible and i'm going to do it, dammit
And how the hell can you claim apple has "closed hardware", or tries to prevent anyone from figuring out its hardware, when they make publicly available the source code to the hardware compatibility layer on their flagship product?? Even if you don't trust the APSL enough to use any code under it, there is no law i am aware of to prevent you from doing some simple clean-rooming and writing your own specs on How To Write An OS For Apple Hardware.
From all reports, Mac OS X contains the same theme architecture as the current mac os, so it seems that people will be still able to micromanage their interface. (keep in mind apple is the most unpredictable force on earth, and this could obviously change, and they could obviosuly do all kinds of evil things that we don't forsee.) Yes, aqua looks pretty welded shut, but that doesn't matter; if you think that all of us are going to actually put up with aqua, you know even less than i had assumed. It will _not_ be long after OSX's release before a way to completely dismantle aqua is found without harming Quartz, even if that way isn't sanctioned by apple. The current theme architecture, by the way, which is far more powerful than any other theming or skinning scheme ever made, is completely undocumented. This seems like a pretty closed-minded and irritating thing for apple to do, and it is. But before you go and claim this proves your point, keep in mind that there is nothing whatsoever keeping apple from removing or disabling the themes; there's no reason for the os to still allow you to change themes except for the fact apple secretly doesn't mind. This is the way pretty much everything apple does goes; they don't fling open the doors and welcome you in and _help_ you, but they still leave the back window unlocked; apple never acts to make these things impossible, even when they don't act to make them easier. And if you do attempt to go around them and do something you don't want to do, they don't smack you down or anything. The two big instances of apple closing up something and making it inflexible are sherlock 2 and quicktime 4, which are nasty. But do you have _any_ idea how many interface hacks exist for those two, or any idea how many people had downloaded the sherlock 2 interface-fixing hacks within a day of OS 9 being out?
You'll make a lot of noise about apple killing clone makers, but the fact is apple simply had no choice: they couldn't financially survive with a bunch of people out there selling the same product as them, only better because they could spend the money apple spends on R&D on improving their products. Apple's market share wasn't big enough to do this.
But before you say the PPC platform is closed, remember this: there is literally nothing stopping you from getting a loan and starting a small business and creating and selling a PPC motherboard, or even putting it in a case with a hard drive and a power supply and some other nice things and installing a homebrew linuxppc on it. And once you have it working, i'm sure that it would not be THAT difficult to hack some compatibility layer together to make mac os 9 boot on it. OS X should be even easier, just swap out your mach. But that doesn't matter since you don't want to run the mac OS anyway, do you?
Yes, apple is the only company selling PPC computers. How is this apple's fault any more than it is your fault for not making them yourself? Apple's not welcoming anyone to PPC, but they aren't driving them off either, and the crucial "not driving off" distinction is what makes any references to antitrust law stupid. [Not that that stops slashdot posters, though.]
I am always surprised by the degree to which what little rational content slashdot has disappears completely whenever apple gets invlved, but the discussion in this article is just.. rather extreme.
Believe it or not, there are people who use Macintoshes and/or the Mac OS because it is the best tool for the job, or because the interface is efficient enough it's a fair trade-off with the stability of a *n?x. Just because apple sells computers with colored cases does not mean that everyone, or even the majority of the people, who buy apples are people who base their computer decision on the color of the case. I realize that by implying the previous sentance to be possible, i am going against many firmly held beliefs of many slashdotters, but this thread has me so disgusted i don't care anymore.
I apologize if this post is a bit incendentiary; i realize i will look as if i am overreacting, and i probably am. I'm pretty sure i'm going to regret posting this, but i suspect someone, somewhere, will listen. Understand the parent post is not the only post i'm replying to here, and this one, as are a lot of others, are just as much what this long, unfocused sprawl of a post are directed at. I'm afraid you'll take my lack of conflicting evidence to conclude i'm being a one-sided zealot. I'm sorry. Apple has their bad side, there are bad parts i'm not going into. But those bad parts are inseconsequential in the end in my opinion, and i'm too tired to go into them, and there's no more room for them anyway.
I would like to request anyone reading this post try to actually look at what i'm saying in order to see if there's any truth in it, and try to understand it, not decide after the first couple lines that i'm wrong and then look for ways to use the fact this post is disproportionately long and most of it can be easily interpreted as fanatical pro-mac posturing to attack me. Or else take one small passage which is off-base or badly written and conclude that invalidates everything. Or complain about my run-on sentances, or something.
Ehh, whatever. I hate slashdot..
the GNU Number of Unrelated Utilities
:)
[or]
the GNU Number of Unpronounceable Utilities
reply whore
Thank you, cdmrtaco, for brightening up my day. :)
You have no idea how much better i feel now that i have randomly run across a Warp Records reference in an unexpected place. My morning has now been worth it.
I love everything2. Who thought that anything mentioning Boards of Canada, Autechre, etc. would ever wind up being linked from the slashdot main page, even unintentionally?
you vote for the one who claimed to invent the internet, because there are multiple supreme court seats up for reassignment in the next presidential term.
if there's any anyone interested in helping me write a port to the TI-8X calculator, let me know..!
[i have no idea if i'm kidding or not..]
no no no you've got it backward.
The monkey is "piracy".
The idea behind an SP-style "chewbacca defense" is to locate something that easily appeals without a lot of thinking. Something that can be easily grasped, and that makes you happy to think about because it lets you easily look at the problems in terms of right/wrong. Take a complex, multifaceted issue, and insert one simple word: PIRACY. suddenly The DeCSS Hackers Are Wrong. The MPAA Is Right. Simple, Black and White, not a painful, important decision. It's not a difficult, painful issue with many sides, it's about Copyright Piracy, and Piracy is simple, and Piracy is something that they have seen on the news and that can be easily morally justified and that the plaintiff has repeated over and over often enough the jury can believe it's true.
Or, if you want a far, far more powerful word for your monkey: Children. Imply that Children are being "hurt" by one side or the other, and no matter how rediculous your justification for claiming this, no matter how tenuous your support for yuour side, no matter how valid the other side may be.. the other side is GONE. See Also "columbine".
Monopolistic tendancies of huge labels harming independant, little artists and enabling the labels to rape and screw over even signed artists do NOT make a good monkey. (try looking up sometime that essay by the guy who produced the Pixies [i think?] on how most apparently successful artists are actually deep, deep in debt to the record companies because of contract complications, and the whole Letter of Intent thing..) They can't be that easily grasped, they force you to actually (*gasp*) re-evaluate some of your assumptions about those bands you're hearing on the radio, and they may even force you to look at your mighty god 104.1 KRBE, Today's Modern Hits! as something that maybe doesn't, at heart, care that much about music.
Most importantly, thinking about the true nature of the music industry as a parasite on an art form requires, well, THINKING, which defeats the entire purpose of the monkey in the first place. The point of the chewbacca defence is to keep the jury from thinking; give them something nice and happy to distract them, like The MPAA Is Stopping Piracy or The Christian Right Is Protecting Children, so that they don't actually think about the issue deeply enough to realize it's something with more than one side, something in which the side with the more valid concerns may actually not be the most obvious one.. Making the jury think is counterproductive, and besides, people don't like to think.
Basically, in this case it's easier to think about the music companies' monkey than Boies' monkey. And while the music companies' monkey may be a bit more relevant, Boies' monkey is far, far more valid.
i'm sitting here at a rather nice G4.
It came with the nasty mouse and keyboard.
Anyway, i could take the mouse, although my hands are big enough that i was holding it literally with no more than the one joint nearest the end of my three middle fingers.. which got a bit annoying. But it was the keyboard that threw me. The letters were tiny and scrunched, and there was just.. something about it that my WPM went down by at least like a third, my mistakes kind of tripled and my wrists hurt every time i used it. And i don't know about you people, but i am _literally_ UNABLE TO FUNCTION without a forward-del key. Maybe i'm just wierd, but i feel like i have a whole finger missing or something without that one little key. And i'm wondering, _why_ would apple do this on a _professional_ model? With the imac it was clearly to preserve desk space, but this isn't an imac. i have a big 'ol tower sitting here, a 17-inch monitor, and no need aesthetic or otherwise to insure my keyboard is the same width as my computer.
So i was thinking about this, and i came to a very paranoid, very unrealistic, and probably correct conclusion: apple did it on purpose.
Why?
Well, think about it from their perspective. They're about to fully embrace a semiobscure and not-too-widely supported standard [USB] for peripherals. There is almost no market, and the form factor of the product they're selling means that the people buying it will be happier if their peripherals can be *gag* color-coordinated. How the hell are they going to get people to agree to make peripherals specifically for this thing if there's zero user base so far, apple's halfway to dead and they haven't even announced the thing?
Well, i'll tell you one thing, it's certainly not going to help sales of USB keyboards if the biggest group of USB consumers in the world [imac users] already _have_ a good keyboard.
So here's my theory: Apple purposefully designed the keyboard and mouse for the imac to be [let's be nice here] inadequate, in order to stimulate growth in the USB market, to ensure that everyone who buys an imac will at some point want to go get themselves a nice new Kensington iOrbitBox or whatever, thus giving Kensington a reason to release whatever the hell it was they released. Bam! Instant market. Happy peripheral companies. USB expertise spreads throughout the industry, making new products faster to get to market; USB flowers; Apple gets away with not putting any more standard ports on the imac.
Bullshit? Of course it is. But it's something to think about.
Anyway, i'm currently typing on a very nice MacAlly iKey and using a rather ghetto-bootleg [but cheap, and most of all TWO-BUTTON] thing i found at MicroCenter called an "iMouse"-- featuring no drivers in the box [meaning until i downloaded a shareware usb driver, both of the mouse buttons did the same thing..], some very odd features on the back of the clearly badly translated box ["inconvenient powering down", "support for up to 256 devices"] and no brandname or any other hint who manufactured the thing anywhere on or inside the box. Did i mention it was cheap?
So i'm happy and the [both psychological and literal] pain of the imac mouse/keyboard are far behind me. So i don't really care anymore.
But my conspiracy theory still applies: apple now has a big 'ol user base, they know the USB market will survive on whether they're competing with it or not, and non-apple corporations have started paying lots of attention to USB. So now that they no longer need to force not-cruddy imac peripherals into existence, they're reentering the market. Although if they release a mouse but not a real extended keyboard.. well, they're on crack.
your point is extremely insightful and eloquently made, but keep in mind there is an important exception to what you say, an exception which can be expressed in three words:
performance... art.. programming.
May not rival the great Shakespear.. but does rival at the least those people who stand in the street with white face paint on, imitating statues..
livegoatpornium? hm.
seeing those words set off a random train of thought that involved goatse.cx, was heavily enhanced by large amounts of sleep deprevation, and ended with me idly asking myself the question: is pentium.cx taken?
I immediately realized it was a dumb question; why would anyone want pentium.cx and what would they _do_ with it?
I would have immediately forgotten it, except i suddenly realized something that made me wonder if maybe it isn't such a dumb question after all. Alright, think about this for a minute:
It's pretty clear that intel's naming scheme no longer directly relates to reality. Moreover, the scism is getting more extreme over time. From the pentium to the pentium 2 to the pentium 3 to the pentium 4, the differences in the chip have become less apparent in usefulness and much more arbitrary. From my totally ignorant perspective, it would appear that the pentium 3 was more a marketing construct than it was anything else; just a desperate attempt to stuff a _lot_ more not-very-useful-or-realistic complexity into the pentium instruction set so they could claim "look, we did something!" and have an excuse to run a lot of commercials, just to keep intel in everyone's mind as being cutting-edge, or something. I mean, look, it has something to do with the internet, doesn't it?? and they have cool 3d graphics and a looney toons character in the ad! It must be really advanced!!! d00d L337 1 \V1LL HAVE MY DAD R3PL4C3 MY 0V3RCL0CK3D AMD R16GHT 4W4Y with a PENTIUM 3 and it will MAKE THE INTERNET M0R3 FUN 4ND 1 \V1LL H4XOR BETTER!!!
The pentium 4 seems pure desperation, some extremely vague advancement just to pump the number up one more, just to release a lot of press releases and get people to buy stuff. Just to say, ok, the pentium 3 failed to change the world, but we're still here, and we're still alive and vital and moving!!
If i were going to be paranoid, i'd say the point of the pentium 4 is so intel can make a lot of noise about it to distract us from the IA-64. What about the IA-64, you ask? Say, that's what i want to know exactly.
But whether i'm being too harsh, and whether i know jack shit about microchips, i think i can say with some certainty that with each new "version" of the x86, the real _meaningful_ difference between each processor is getting a good deal smaller with each iteration, and the marketing aspects of a new product launch are overshadowing the technological aspects in intel's mind with each iteration. And i can DEFINATELY say the amount of time between "releases" is getting faster and faster.
My prediction:
From this point, with each "new" chip intel releases, the fluff value of the release will increase exponentially, the time between releases will decrease exponentially, and the justification for changing numbers will decrease exponentially. Eventually, intel will get to the point where they assign a different Pentium Number for each different clockrate assignment.
Thus about two years from now, Intel will have reached the point of the Pentium 110-- which they will name the Pentium CX [roman numerals!] -- and register the domain pentium.cx for it, to commemorate the Pentium CX's simultaneous release with "Windows ME harder"!
But who knows how much the tech industry will have changed by then? Hell, by that point, there may even be multiple-core G4s on the market.
(Score:0, Gibberish)
Who or what is at mu.current.nu, who is Currentek, and why are they important enough that if they have technical difficulties, Slashdot replaces their entire page with "Error:syntax error at (eval [" [insert random integer here] ") line 2, at EOF " and then intermittantly decides to replace all slashboxes with messages about mu.current.nu being down?
:)
I've never heard of these people, and their [currently not that functional] website gives no clue as to what they are. Are they some kind of hosting service or ad provider or andover.net-sponsored echelon tap?
What the hell happened earlier today?
I was going to post this earlier, but it seemed dreadfully offtopic in an interview of a guy who makes telescopes. But luckily it doesn't really seem like anything can be offtopic to slashback..
/me ducks
just curious
Except by the time scientific advancements reach the point your predictions _can_ come to pass, Microsoft will be no more.
So... hmm. Is a person an OS or an app?
[sorry, couldn't resist]
> so internic is now acting like an Internet Repo man.
No, they're acting like a domain squatter.
> "Holy sh*t!" might be a common reaction to rates that high, but the fact is that corporate income taxes, other hidden taxes, and complaince costs already add 20-40% to the price of everthing we buy -- and buy with after-tax dollars.
There is no way that american corporations will adjust their prices to allow for the hidden taxes. If they can get an excuse to increase their effective prices by 20-40%, no matter HOW unjustified that reason is, they _will_ do it, and do it in such a way that you can't boycott the companies who rise prices by 20-40% because they've _all_ done it, so there are no _other_ companies to go to instead. Meanwhile almost all of the american populace won't notice the effective increase in cost of goods was done not for the purpose of paying for a 20-40% increase in taxes, but a 20-40% increase in profits.
> Of course, it's also a good kick in the pants to Congress to think about trimming down some of that pork-barrel spending so everyone can get a tax cut.
Congress will not cut the pork barrel spending. If it is a republican-led congress, they will cut welfare. A lot. If it is a democat-led congress, they will cut something other than welfare. Meanwhile almost all of the american populace either doesn't vote, doesn't care about this, or votes solely based on who can create pork-barrel projects that benefit them.
Welcome to America.
Am i being cynical, or realistic? Is there a difference?
The constitution forbids a state government from making any laws which attempt to regulate interstate commerce. If that pie ends up in a different state than the one it begins in, either the federal government decides who gets it or no government decides who gets it.
At least, that's what the surpreme court has been saying since, like, what, 1800?
If i am wrong, or the totally unsurprising possibility that the U.S. law has changed in the last 200 years has occured, feel free to correct me. Then go to John Marshall's grave, read this slashdot article over it, and listen for a spinning noise just underground.
ehhh, you're missing the point of what i said. of course, this is because the point was very badly written in the first place, but still.
Note the sentance about compatability and replacement not being quite the same thing. With a playstation, you are selling nothing _but_ the API. If you duplicate the API you duplicate _everything_. WIth windows, on the other hand, there are things other than the API there-- interface, stability, hardware compatibility, config utilities, etc. Whether or not windows _has_ any of these things is a matter of opinion, but that's not important. the important bit is there's _something there_ that Microsot can use to control its destiny. In other words, with windows, -it is possible to seperate the api from the product-. WIth the PSX, -the api IS the product-. With a PSX, by the very nature of what it is you're buying nothing but compatibility, and thus if you duplicate compatibility you duplicate everything that Sony could possibly put into the machine to get you to buy it.
The important part of the distinction here is that the Wine people are actually _creating_ something, allowing you to do something that was not possible before. "running playstation games without a playstion" is not really as far as i can tel something "new" unless the thing you use in place of the playstation is distinguishable from a real playstation in terms of implementation.
I wasn't trying to say Bleem or VGS were neccecarily immoral. I personally don't think they are at all. They're maybe in my eyes a bit more questionable than something like SNES9X, where the hardware you are creating compatibility with is no longer for sale. But still they give you something that is not in the box with a normal playstation-- namely, the ability to run things on your _existing hardware_. This may be a fuzzy distintion, but still one that think applies. And since my entire reason for writing in the first place was to point out that the whole issue itself is fuzzy.. -_-
The passage you quote was meant to apply to _hardware_ _console_ implementations, not emulators, and i don't think i made that at all clear. Again, i was tired.
So the issue to me is whether the reverse engineer has _created_ something-- has made something _new_ possible, has either combined ideas in a new way or produced new functionality, has made the implementation and not the api the thing you buy. Wine does this by letting you use such things like the x window system, protected memory that works such that if MSWord goes down httpd doesn't, etc-- things very much outside of the API. Interestingly enough, Bleem [and maybe vgs.. i'm not sure?] does this too-- add something new, create something, provide advantages in _implementation_. I'm referring to [among other things] the fact that because it takes advantage of your 3d card to do its rendering independently, Bleem actually is able to display some games at a a much, much higher resolution than a normal playstation can [becuase a normal playstation uses a television, and TVs have awful quality..] and so you don't wind up with just the same blocky graphics you'd have in a straight every-pixel-where-the-PSX-wants-it implementation. If you've ever seen Wild9 on bleem screenshots, its amazing.. But anyway here in _addition_ to the API and the impressive reverse engineering feat, Bleem has actually created new functionality.
The GPL has nothing to do with anything here.
I hope i made my point a little clearer here. Please let me know if i did not.