On a serious note, it is a good space station. America used to have a space station. It had a problem with a solar panel the day it launched. Where is it now? Lessee, I think it crashed either in Australia or somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Mir, on the other hand, is still up there, still hosting missions, and now even generating a little income. So what exactly are we making fun of?
A big thing for me is portable players. I love being able to go on a run, or even mountain biking or skiing with a portable mp3 player. They're really the greatest thing to happen to music, IMHO. I don't like to listen by sitting in a room, but while I'm out doing something else.
So here's my promise: When Vorbis is finalized, I will switch to it in a heartbeat IF there is a portable player to play.ogg files. When such a player comes out, I will buy at least one.
Obviously. But some RIAA memo could "turn up" - I imagine they have their share of enemies. Of course that wouldn't swing the direction of the Napster case, because obviously it has no bearing on the Napster case.
I'm just saying that it would be sweet if internal RIAA memos were leaked. That could do wonders in the long term as far as public perception is concerned.
Anyone know what the deal is on Jabber? I know the project is alive, and they now have reached version 1.0 for their server (which incidentally is an open server-to-server protocol like another post here wished for). I just don't ever hear anything about jabber anymore unless I go to their website.
Anyway, if AOL is opening their Oscar protocol (as opposed to the TOC protocol) this could be a great help to Jabber, if they incorporate it. Let's make this thing more widespread people! If you work at an ISP, set up a jabber server and provide your customers with clients and instructions for setting it up. Same thing if you manage a University computing center or, possibly, a business. This is our chance to make a decentralized worldwide free instant messing network. And the software is _already here_.
Dan, If I keep reading your posts, I am going to get some kind of permanent brain damage from continually slapping my forehead in that frustrated but admiring, "Why didn't I think of that?"
Seriously, I hope you are right about this. If RIAA memos are released to the public, it will be worth the demise of Napster (I'd rather see Gnutella anyway).
Oh, man. I salivate just thinking about it. That would be indescribably sweet. Mmmmmmmm......
It's apparent to me that Napster in it's present form is not going to be around much longer. Enjoy it while you can, folks - hoard those songs.
What I hope is that when the huge-scale Napster operation crumbles, Gnutella or possibly Freenet will step in and fill the void. Sure, they're already here and they work, but what is needed is the SCALE. It's that HUGE community of users that makes it so convenient to find virtually any song you like. So spread the word. If Napster kicks it, I hope like the public will move to a more subversive version of the same distributed filesharing system - and with more than just songs.
If Gnutella or Freenet becomes widespread, that will only make the present community of Napster users stronger, and make it more evident that nothing can be done - especially if it crosses international boundaries. It might even sway the public's paradigm of intellectual property, showing that now, they old system CANNOT work.
-- grappler
When Napster's time is up...
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 2
It's apparent to me that Napster in it's present form is not going to be around much longer. Enjoy it while you can, folks - hoard those songs.
What I hope is that when the huge-scale Napster operation crumbles, Gnutella or possibly Freenet will step in and fill the void. Sure, they're already here and they work, but what is needed is the SCALE. It's that HUGE community of users that makes it so convenient to find virtually any song you like. So spread the word. If Napster kicks it, I hope like the public will move to a more subversive version of the same distributed filesharing system - and with more than just songs.
If Gnutella or Freenet becomes widespread, that will only make the present community of Napster users stronger, and make it more evident that nothing can be done - especially if it crosses international boundaries. It might even sway the public's paradigm of intellectual property, showing that now, they old system CANNOT work.
Oh yeah, I remember spitting out coffee through my nose on one particular morning - a headline in the newspaper read: "Student suspended for wearing Pepsi shirt on 'Coke day'"
Some high school had some coke executives coming over giving the school a bunch of money. They took a picture with the students, and right before it was snapped, a kid took his shirt off. Underneath, he had a blue and white shirt with a Pepsi logo over the left breast. The school suspended him, it made newspaper headlines across the country.
Later, a Pepsi spokesman was asked for comment on the story. He said, "This kid obviously has very good taste";-)
Hey moron, some people want just that. Take me for instance. I made my computer by buying every indivual piece (down to the internal fans and cables). Whenever a part fails or goes obsolete, I find a good deal on a replacement. I've been doing that for years now.
I never bought a floppy drive or SCSI card for my machine. There wasn't a need. What would I need a floppy drive for? To install windows? Linux installations can boot from the CD. Floppies, besides being small and unreliable (I used to have one fail on me practically every week, when I needed them at high school) are also agonizingly slow. I have a CD burner and a Zip 250, and I don't even use 'em much. Any file transfer/storage I need to do I do on my home ethernet, or across the internet.
I'd love to have a nice fast SCSI adapter, but they're just too expensive, so I can go without.
On an unrelated note - I only recognize three of the ones on their list. I would have liked to see a description of what each one does, what impact it had, and perhaps how it works. That would make for interesting reading.
Still reeling from the absence of the Ten Commandments in public schools, I reached for my news-paper on Monday and saw that they are teaching evolooshun without having the entire fossil record from the first genetic material to the present.
I demand the right to a solid platform upon which I can support my dignity. How can I feel good about myself if I am reminded that I share common ancestry with ape-brutes? I've been to the zoo, and I decline to write of the horrid, disgusting things I have seen the creatures do.
With our sense of self-worth at stake, supporters of science will talk of 'empirical evidence', 'facts', and 'logic'. Take a moment and reflect on the innocence lost the day our world left it's prominent spot at the center of the universe. And now they would have us force feed this, their evil-ution, to our kids.
Does a man who is doing his utmost to get into heaven benefit from filling his head with theories? Do we want our teachers questioning all that is good and decent, twisting things around with their fancy words? We must shift our focus back to something which is never used in an evil fashion: religion.
either his "sense of humor" is very evil, twisted, and hopelessly confused, or you just didn't read the comment you replied to. We're talking about Pauly Shore.
Thank you JonKatz, for giving US the opportunity to join the movie review community in that always-fun one-upmanship game when a bad movie comes out. Wheeeeeeeeee!!!!
Ballmer: "There's the possibility of losing a centralized Windows standard and replacing it with something similar to Linux," -zdnn jun 8,2000. This is bad how?
Of course, a big reason that Linux (and BeOS, and possibly the revival of Macintosh) got so successful is that they were given their chance to come out and not be strangled to death when M$ got hauled into court. Otherwise, those OEM deals would have been very stifling.
I was sure this article was a joke, and I had to read it, and these comments, several times to convince myself otherwise. Here's the thing though - if Napster went after Offspring for this, they are COMPLETE idiots.
By all logic, they ought to be happy that more merchandise with their logo on it is going out to the public, and that a band is saying good things about them. Where are they losing money? They can sell their own merchandise too if they want. They had a chance to REALLY make a point by not doing anything about Offspring (even though under current law Offspring is in the wrong). That would've been great!
quit yer whining. It's not like it doesn't TELL you what it is doing. If you want to sign up and don't like the "pyramid scheme", simply don't list anyone as your sponsor. That's simply their way of getting more members.
As a 5th and 6th grader, I spent hours messing around on Hypercard at my school's mac lab. I don't know if many of you have ever seen it, or if it is even still around, but man it rocked.
Basically, it was like a drawing program when you first learned to use it. You had toolboxes of fill patterns and paint tools, and just drew on the screen. Then, you want to start a new page. Well thats where "cards" come in. Choose the "new card" option and you get a new blank page. Each file you work with is called a stack, as in stack of cards. Then you find you can do things like editing a universal stack background, so all cards will share a background.
Then you start noticing these other icons in the tool box - buttons and fields and such. Instead of having to use the text paint tool to put text on the page, you can make a field that can be moved around, and have its text edited at any time. For easy navigation, you can put buttons on a page and easily link them to other pages. Perhaps make a memo page at the beginning. Neat. Now you know enough to make any kind of powerpoint style presentation.
Many hypercard users just stopped here. But wait! Hypercard had it's own scripting language, called hypertalk. How does that button I made before know to go to that page? Hmm, let's see here, it has a "script" which says,
on mouseUp go next card end mouseUp
(note - "go to" meant the same thing as "go". also, you could specify a card by number, id, or relative position to current card)
Actually, everything had an associated script - buttons, fields, cards, backgrounds, stacks - able to control any property and handle any event. I strongly suspect visual basic was modeled after this. Visual basic is more feature rich for designing an application, but man, hypercard was great for a kid fooling around.
The language was great too - it was an autoindent type thing that read almost like english. You could guess what the command for something would be without having seen it before. And you could bring up the messagebox for a command line interface. It was great stuff. By seventh and eigth grade, I had made a chess-playing stack, and gotten into encryption. My friends and I would invent codes, and use hypercard to "implement" them. I had a card with two fields - you paste something into one, hit the "Encrypt" button, and your ciphertext goes into the other. We actually had challenges where we'd invent a code, tell the other guy how it worked, and he'd try to write a routine that would break it (little did I know that this is EXACTLY what cryptographers do). Once we had enough imagination to get past simple substitution ciphers though, we could never break each others codes. Oh well.
Anyways, the thing that made it so much fun was that it was so spontaneous. For kids, you don't want something that makes it into an engineering discipline requiring planning and design. You want it to be like a moist, malleable clay that a person can just sink his hands into and mold and mold and mold...
Slashdot Mirror
On a serious note, it is a good space station. America used to have a space station. It had a problem with a solar panel the day it launched. Where is it now? Lessee, I think it crashed either in Australia or somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Mir, on the other hand, is still up there, still hosting missions, and now even generating a little income. So what exactly are we making fun of?
--
grappler
I'll add something to that.
.ogg files. When such a player comes out, I will buy at least one.
A big thing for me is portable players. I love being able to go on a run, or even mountain biking or skiing with a portable mp3 player. They're really the greatest thing to happen to music, IMHO. I don't like to listen by sitting in a room, but while I'm out doing something else.
So here's my promise: When Vorbis is finalized, I will switch to it in a heartbeat IF there is a portable player to play
Here's hoping one gets made.
--
grappler
Obviously. But some RIAA memo could "turn up" - I imagine they have their share of enemies. Of course that wouldn't swing the direction of the Napster case, because obviously it has no bearing on the Napster case.
I'm just saying that it would be sweet if internal RIAA memos were leaked. That could do wonders in the long term as far as public perception is concerned.
--
grappler
Incidentally, their page is at jabber.org.
--
grappler
Anyone know what the deal is on Jabber? I know the project is alive, and they now have reached version 1.0 for their server (which incidentally is an open server-to-server protocol like another post here wished for). I just don't ever hear anything about jabber anymore unless I go to their website.
Anyway, if AOL is opening their Oscar protocol (as opposed to the TOC protocol) this could be a great help to Jabber, if they incorporate it. Let's make this thing more widespread people! If you work at an ISP, set up a jabber server and provide your customers with clients and instructions for setting it up. Same thing if you manage a University computing center or, possibly, a business. This is our chance to make a decentralized worldwide free instant messing network. And the software is _already here_.
--
grappler
Dan, If I keep reading your posts, I am going to get some kind of permanent brain damage from continually slapping my forehead in that frustrated but admiring, "Why didn't I think of that?"
Seriously, I hope you are right about this. If RIAA memos are released to the public, it will be worth the demise of Napster (I'd rather see Gnutella anyway).
Oh, man. I salivate just thinking about it. That would be indescribably sweet. Mmmmmmmm......
--
grappler
Oh man, that's good stuff :-)
--
grappler
It's apparent to me that Napster in it's present form is not going to be around much longer. Enjoy it while you can, folks - hoard those songs.
What I hope is that when the huge-scale Napster operation crumbles, Gnutella or possibly Freenet will step in and fill the void. Sure, they're already here and they work, but what is needed is the SCALE. It's that HUGE community of users that makes it so convenient to find virtually any song you like. So spread the word. If Napster kicks it, I hope like the public will move to a more subversive version of the same distributed filesharing system - and with more than just songs.
If Gnutella or Freenet becomes widespread, that will only make the present community of Napster users stronger, and make it more evident that nothing can be done - especially if it crosses international boundaries. It might even sway the public's paradigm of intellectual property, showing that now, they old system CANNOT work.
--
grappler
It's apparent to me that Napster in it's present form is not going to be around much longer. Enjoy it while you can, folks - hoard those songs.
What I hope is that when the huge-scale Napster operation crumbles, Gnutella or possibly Freenet will step in and fill the void. Sure, they're already here and they work, but what is needed is the SCALE. It's that HUGE community of users that makes it so convenient to find virtually any song you like. So spread the word. If Napster kicks it, I hope like the public will move to a more subversive version of the same distributed filesharing system - and with more than just songs.
If Gnutella or Freenet becomes widespread, that will only make the present community of Napster users stronger, and make it more evident that nothing can be done - especially if it crosses international boundaries. It might even sway the public's paradigm of intellectual property, showing that now, they old system CANNOT work.
--
grappler
If you MUST make a call, there are phones you can use on the backs of the seats. So they cost a little more. boo hoo.
--
grappler
Oh yeah, I remember spitting out coffee through my nose on one particular morning - a headline in the newspaper read: "Student suspended for wearing Pepsi shirt on 'Coke day'"
;-)
Some high school had some coke executives coming over giving the school a bunch of money. They took a picture with the students, and right before it was snapped, a kid took his shirt off. Underneath, he had a blue and white shirt with a Pepsi logo over the left breast. The school suspended him, it made newspaper headlines across the country.
Later, a Pepsi spokesman was asked for comment on the story. He said, "This kid obviously has very good taste"
--
grappler
Hey moron, some people want just that. Take me for instance. I made my computer by buying every indivual piece (down to the internal fans and cables). Whenever a part fails or goes obsolete, I find a good deal on a replacement. I've been doing that for years now.
I never bought a floppy drive or SCSI card for my machine. There wasn't a need. What would I need a floppy drive for? To install windows? Linux installations can boot from the CD. Floppies, besides being small and unreliable (I used to have one fail on me practically every week, when I needed them at high school) are also agonizingly slow. I have a CD burner and a Zip 250, and I don't even use 'em much. Any file transfer/storage I need to do I do on my home ethernet, or across the internet.
I'd love to have a nice fast SCSI adapter, but they're just too expensive, so I can go without.
--
grappler
Only one of these was developed in my lifetime.
On an unrelated note - I only recognize three of the ones on their list. I would have liked to see a description of what each one does, what impact it had, and perhaps how it works. That would make for interesting reading.
--
grappler
;-)
what can I say? Trolling can be fun.
--
grappler
Still reeling from the absence of the Ten Commandments in public schools, I reached for my news-paper on Monday and saw that they are teaching evolooshun without having the entire fossil record from the first genetic material to the present.
I demand the right to a solid platform upon which I can support my dignity. How can I feel good about myself if I am reminded that I share common ancestry with ape-brutes? I've been to the zoo, and I decline to write of the horrid, disgusting things I have seen the creatures do.
With our sense of self-worth at stake, supporters of science will talk of 'empirical evidence', 'facts', and 'logic'. Take a moment and reflect on the innocence lost the day our world left it's prominent spot at the center of the universe. And now they would have us force feed this, their evil-ution, to our kids.
Does a man who is doing his utmost to get into heaven benefit from filling his head with theories? Do we want our teachers questioning all that is good and decent, twisting things around with their fancy words? We must shift our focus back to something which is never used in an evil fashion: religion.
--
grappler
either his "sense of humor" is very evil, twisted, and hopelessly confused, or you just didn't read the comment you replied to. We're talking about Pauly Shore.
--
grappler
Thank you JonKatz, for giving US the opportunity to join the movie review community in that always-fun one-upmanship game when a bad movie comes out. Wheeeeeeeeee!!!!
--
grappler
Ballmer: "There's the possibility of losing a centralized Windows standard and replacing it with something similar to Linux," -zdnn jun 8,2000. This is bad how?
Steve Ballmer didn't say that - Simon Moores did.
--
grappler
I guess that would make more sense than a robot running an html rendering engine...
:-)
Incidentally, Hemos, it's "interesting"
--
grappler
Of course, a big reason that Linux (and BeOS, and possibly the revival of Macintosh) got so successful is that they were given their chance to come out and not be strangled to death when M$ got hauled into court. Otherwise, those OEM deals would have been very stifling.
--
grappler
I was sure this article was a joke, and I had to read it, and these comments, several times to convince myself otherwise. Here's the thing though - if Napster went after Offspring for this, they are COMPLETE idiots.
By all logic, they ought to be happy that more merchandise with their logo on it is going out to the public, and that a band is saying good things about them. Where are they losing money? They can sell their own merchandise too if they want. They had a chance to REALLY make a point by not doing anything about Offspring (even though under current law Offspring is in the wrong). That would've been great!
--
grappler
quit yer whining. It's not like it doesn't TELL you what it is doing. If you want to sign up and don't like the "pyramid scheme", simply don't list anyone as your sponsor. That's simply their way of getting more members.
--
grappler
As a 5th and 6th grader, I spent hours messing around on Hypercard at my school's mac lab. I don't know if many of you have ever seen it, or if it is even still around, but man it rocked.
Basically, it was like a drawing program when you first learned to use it. You had toolboxes of fill patterns and paint tools, and just drew on the screen. Then, you want to start a new page. Well thats where "cards" come in. Choose the "new card" option and you get a new blank page. Each file you work with is called a stack, as in stack of cards. Then you find you can do things like editing a universal stack background, so all cards will share a background.
Then you start noticing these other icons in the tool box - buttons and fields and such. Instead of having to use the text paint tool to put text on the page, you can make a field that can be moved around, and have its text edited at any time. For easy navigation, you can put buttons on a page and easily link them to other pages. Perhaps make a memo page at the beginning. Neat. Now you know enough to make any kind of powerpoint style presentation.
Many hypercard users just stopped here. But wait! Hypercard had it's own scripting language, called hypertalk. How does that button I made before know to go to that page? Hmm, let's see here, it has a "script" which says,
on mouseUp
go next card
end mouseUp
(note - "go to" meant the same thing as "go". also, you could specify a card by number, id, or relative position to current card)
Actually, everything had an associated script - buttons, fields, cards, backgrounds, stacks - able to control any property and handle any event. I strongly suspect visual basic was modeled after this. Visual basic is more feature rich for designing an application, but man, hypercard was great for a kid fooling around.
The language was great too - it was an autoindent type thing that read almost like english. You could guess what the command for something would be without having seen it before. And you could bring up the messagebox for a command line interface. It was great stuff. By seventh and eigth grade, I had made a chess-playing stack, and gotten into encryption. My friends and I would invent codes, and use hypercard to "implement" them. I had a card with two fields - you paste something into one, hit the "Encrypt" button, and your ciphertext goes into the other. We actually had challenges where we'd invent a code, tell the other guy how it worked, and he'd try to write a routine that would break it (little did I know that this is EXACTLY what cryptographers do). Once we had enough imagination to get past simple substitution ciphers though, we could never break each others codes. Oh well.
Anyways, the thing that made it so much fun was that it was so spontaneous. For kids, you don't want something that makes it into an engineering discipline requiring planning and design. You want it to be like a moist, malleable clay that a person can just sink his hands into and mold and mold and mold...
--
grappler
You know, these comprehensive lists of "what we'll see" are becoming common enough that I think they now deserve a self-mention.
--
grappler
Just found the article (funny, I looked for it BEFORE I posted and didn't see it).
It's the Goldbach Conjecture, from two months ago.
--
grappler