Microsoft and Sony will use their cash to push Nintendo out of the hardware market.
It's not quite that easy -- Nintendo also has tons of cash, because of the success of the GB/GBA; they're actually quite good at making money, even if they lag a bit in the hype department. Microsoft could probably do it if they bled money like mad for a long time, but I'm not sure even MS is that crazy.
All the players in this war are strong, and I think they're all in it for the long haul. And remember, Nintendo, unlike MS & Sony, doesn't do anything else except games -- they can't afford to lose.
Mainly because it has only TV and not real movie qualities. So why offer a joyful day at work for a low quality flick? OK, it has nice pictures but the story sucks donkey balls.
Um, think about it: a movie with a great plot but sucky visuals would transfer well to TV, but a movie with great visuals and a sucky plot (as you say of SW) is exactly the sort you want to catch while it's still at the theatre.
[and anyway, SW is a `crowd movie' -- seeing it in a packed theatre definitely enhances the experience.]
I think Lagavulin is nicer -- Laphroiag is a bit, er, over the top. Lagavulin still has the strong Islay character (think ultrasmoke), but stops short of whacking you over the head with a crowbar; instead, it... seduces you. Christ I can't begin to explain how perfect the stuff is. Just try it.
That's a silly argument; TLDs are quite often meaningful, and useful, as long as they're used correctly. Of course, in the rabid world of commercial entities trying to grab all mindshare, the usefulness of the system often gets trampled.
Most of the (original) TLDs describe types of organizations so they're obviously the most useful when your site is that of one. Some TLDs contain mostly organizational host names (like.edu and.gov), so those are obviously the most focused and meaningful.
`slashdot' doesn't name an organization at all so naturally it doesn't fit well into the system.
The problems with TLDs mostly seem to be caused by the attempts to ignore them, trying to get around user cluelessness by using `.com' as a sort of `constant suffix for keywords'. This attempt to pretend that that domain names are handy keywords seems pretty hopeless (there's too much conflict), but I suppose people aren't going to stop doing it.
I wish they'd just allow domain names without TLDs for this sort of `keyword' usage, allowing the TLDs to remain for domain names where they're useful (especially.edu). This would even help the existing TLDs a bit, by freeing up namespace currently used for `keywords' for use by real organizations.
[Of course, I also wish the DNS admins would enforce some sort of `reasonableness', e.g., `no, you can't have coke.net, you're already coke.com!... and no, you can't have coke.net, because you're a pr0n-meister trying to leech off of users' innocent mistakes!' Based on what happened in Australia, I guess it's not going to happen though...]
It'd be great if this worked, but in practice it's usually not so simple.
The main problem of course, is that most people are downright awful at assessing future risk, especially when compared to immediate gain. So Store B might be violating privacy left and right -- but then they offer prices a penny lower, and the consumer says `hmmmm, maybe store B will forget to sell my information, and hey, a penny!' [and then subsequently loses all he owns in a blood-frenzy of con-men]
[Now I'll just step back for the chorus of `let them screw themselves! I'm elite, I'd never fall for it!']
The site doesn't pop right out as a criticism site.
That's because it's not a `criticism site.' It's just this student's personal website about various lsu law-school related stuff, which happened to contain some criticism (and presumably a bit more now that they're suing him!).
From the article, it sounds like he thought that the original `criticism' was not very major, and was surprised that they cared at all.
As far as sweatshop-free athletic shoes, the least of many evils appears to be New Balance
Yeah, but...
The last time I was on Microsoft's Redmond campus (granted, this was a long time ago, in '94), New Balance was everywhere.* I was horrified, and immediately went home and got rid of all my NB shoes.
Sure, if you wear Nike, you're condemning countless innocent people to lives of degradation and misery -- but is that really worse than wearing the Shoes of the Beast?
Think long and hard before you go that way...
[* Note, this is quite true, and I really did swear off NB after that, though I suppose that says more about me than about NB...:-']
Well those bell-labs guys have never been very good at UIs, though often they seem to invent great algorithms for making their cheese.:-)
[Another funny point -- the names of the (cpu-specific) linker programs (at least in a previous incarnation of plan9) were things like `l8', `lm', etc -- e.g., the letter `l', and a single letter code for the cpu type -- for a program which you don't invoke manually 99% of the time. I can understand why making `rm' short is a good idea, but the linker?
I'd hate to have the job of coming up with new non-conflictng single-letter cpu codes...]
I'm just surprised how often it turns up BEFORE someone asks if the technical merits might make what the license is a moot point.
That's because the `technical merits' have no power to make the license a moot point (unless I suppose the software is so horrible that no one cares). If the license makes it impossible for you to realistically use the software, then you can't use it, no matter how great it is.
I guess you could study it to get good ideas -- but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that there are patents lurking in there too (especially considering that it's from bell labs)...
Better yet, a version of Super Smash Brothers featuring Clippy! Seeing how much people complain about him, there are probably millions of people willing to buy the system if they'd get get a chance to beat the little bastard to a pulp, again, and again, and again.
[Maybe that's the killer app the xbox needs... they could start a whole subgenre of `torture clippy' games... `Clippy Tied to a Post Knife Party'... ]
How many people really want to customise thier UI to the 9th degree ? - urely the majority of people simply want a plain and effective UI that helps there productivity ?
More customisation = more code = more bugs = slower UI
Sure. It's great to have UI that novices can use easily without hassle.
But if you target novices so narrowly that you end up with a very easy to use, uncustomizable, interface that I (a hacker, who loves to customize everything) hate, then I'm going to stop using it, and make my own interface that I like. Maybe I'll fork your UI to do it (presuming it is free software).
If all the other hackers do the same thing, then your UI stops being a FS/OS `community' thing, and becomes yet another corporate UI. That means it loses whatever benefits accrue from having a large community of people hacking on it out of a love of what they're doing; whether that's a big loss or not, I'll leave to you to decide.
Sony tried this with the minidisc all thru the 90's and failed.
Well, failed in the U.S., anyway. In Japan it rocks the casbah.
Note that they've become a replacement for cassettes, not CDs, and serve that purpose quite well (I bought my girlfriend an MD player a couple of years ago, and at the time you could still find small racks of pre-recorded MDs in some record stores, but I don't see them anymore at all -- racks of blank MDs, on the other hand, are bloody everywhere...).
Who would you rather give you 20 dollars a month to? 90-minute wait times to a stressed call center or to a place that gives its workers some leeway.
I'll bet those workers are positively giddy with enthusiasm when they (instantly) answer a call... `How may I help you dear customer -- dear lovely customer who makes it possible for me to get payed for playing games all night? What seems to be the problem? Would you like your feet licked? Blowjob?'
[hmmm, maybe it's not such a good idea after all...]
That is probably why they don't have a military (I think they now have a token military but not a real one)
Actually, Japan has one of the largest military budgets in the world. They call their military the `Self Defense Forces', but it's the real thing, with big ships, tanks, fighter jets, and all that good stuff. No nukes though.
Sure, the HP books are good, entertaining reads; they are certainly above average in a market filled with dreck.
But personally, I think that an award like this should given to something truly exceptional -- and that, HP was not (except perhaps in popularity).
These are clearly meant for adults
Um.... no. They were completely filled with themes that seem far more aimed at kids than adults.
Consider: Harry's ignored and oppressed by his parents -- but they're not his real parents; his real parents loved him very much, and gave their all for him. He harbors within him great skills that no one around appreciates, and he basically escapes to a magical castle, where at ever meal he eats plates piled high with his favorite cakes and sweets. He encounters a bully, but manages to show him up. He wins the big match. He wins the respect of all by triumphing over evil -- not so much through hard work or skill, but mainly by hanging on and gritting his teeth (plus a bit of help from those real parents who loved him so dearly -- even though they're dead). etc., etc.
[Well, OK, I could go for all that too, but I'm kinda down there on the maturity scale...]
The GPL distinguishes between modifications published (for which source is required) and modifications for internal use (for which source is not required).
Care to share where you got this idea?
I've read the GNU GPL, and it seems to make no such distinction. If you really believe that it does, please quote the relevant section of the GPL.
If you give a GPL'd binary to your employee Bob, you've gotta give Bob the source code too (of course, since you're probably going to fire Bob's sorry ass if he complains, he's not likely to push the point).
Unfortunately it's a feature of aptitude, not the underlying apt libraries -- so if you use apt-get to install something, you may end up with automatically installed stuff that isn't marked as such.
Also, as you guessed, when you first start out using aptitude, all of your previously installed packages will be considered `intentionally installed'.
However, one result of aptitude's cool search system is that it's not too unpleasant to go through and retroactively mark those things which should be marked `auto' -- the example search string I gave in my previous post actually is one I used while doing that:
aptitude markauto "(lib)~i!~M!-dev"
of course in practice I used slightly more hairy search strings, and had to tweak the results, but it was surprisingly painless -- and to tell the truth, rather fun. However newbies had better use aptitude from the start, since they might not be so amused by this kind of thing...:-)
Hopefully this functionality will be moved into the apt libraries in a future release.
Since I really do think aptitude rocks, I'm going to reply to myself to point out a few of the cool features it has, beyond the nice user interface:
It tracks which packages were installed `automatically' (e.g., to satisfy a dependency). If such `auto' packages later become unnecessary because nothing depends on them anymore, they will be uninstalled automatically.
It has a powerful and useful search system -- you can search not only for package names, but for descriptions (and other package fields), various special attributes, and boolean combinations of these things. For instance, the search string `(lib)~i!~M!-dev' will find packages who's name matches the string `lib', and are installed, and were not automatically installed (see above), and who's name doesn't match the string `-dev'.
These search expressions can be used not only in interactive searches (which, incidentally, are incremental, like Emacs's isearch), but also to limit the set of packages displayed, or to perform various operations in command-line mode. I could use the command `aptitude remove "(lib)~i!~M!-dev"' to remove all packages matching that expression (but I won't, since that it happens to match libc6).
As you can see, although aptitude is great for the non-expert user, because of the simple and intuitive interface, it's not just for them. Even when I want to install something from the shell, I now always use aptitude's command-line interface instead of apt-get, because of the above features.
Check out the aptitude program (you'll have to install the package of the same name) -- it's really good and getting even better fast; the author really seems to be on the ball (it used to be pretty bad, so if you tried it before and dismissed it, try it again). Not only does it provide a great full-screen apt interface, but it also has a command-line mode that improves on apt-get!
This is the package management interface that debian's been waiting for, IMHO.
[another alternative is `deity' (ne `console-apt'), but though it's rather colorful, the UI basically sucks; aptitude is much better.]
Because the user has access to the source code, it's possible for him to make the modifications himself. In fact, the GPL encourages this. So chances are, he won't pay someone else to do it.
Of course he can, but I think the point is that many customers don't want to, because it means they've got to become experts themselves. So unless the prices for support/enhancement are too high, many customers will buy support anyway. Note that it's possible for other companies to offer support for the product, but I guess the conventional thought is that the original supplier has an advantage (as long as their prices are reasonable) because they are more knowledgable about the product (having written it), and probably more familiar to the customer (having supplied them).
It would seem that the effect of the GPL would be to keep prices reasonably low -- but not at zero!
Slashdot Mirror
" No serious work is being done outside of Bitkeeper - if you can't see it in the LKML you're blind. "
Rght.. I suppose Larry Mcvoy's mass of changes to the FS layer doesn't qualify as "serious work".
Um, you meant Al Viro, right?
[Larry McVoy wrote Bitkeeper -- even if he actually did hack on the Linux FS layer, you'd hope he'd use BK to do it!]
Microsoft and Sony will use their cash to push Nintendo out of the hardware market.
It's not quite that easy -- Nintendo also has tons of cash, because of the success of the GB/GBA; they're actually quite good at making money, even if they lag a bit in the hype department. Microsoft could probably do it if they bled money like mad for a long time, but I'm not sure even MS is that crazy.
All the players in this war are strong, and I think they're all in it for the long haul. And remember, Nintendo, unlike MS & Sony, doesn't do anything else except games -- they can't afford to lose.
Mainly because it has only TV and not real movie qualities. So why offer a joyful day at work for a low quality flick? OK, it has nice pictures but the story sucks donkey balls.
Um, think about it: a movie with a great plot but sucky visuals would transfer well to TV, but a movie with great visuals and a sucky plot (as you say of SW) is exactly the sort you want to catch while it's still at the theatre.
[and anyway, SW is a `crowd movie' -- seeing it in a packed theatre definitely enhances the experience.]
I think Lagavulin is nicer -- Laphroiag is a bit, er, over the top. Lagavulin still has the strong Islay character (think ultrasmoke), but stops short of whacking you over the head with a crowbar; instead, it ... seduces you. Christ I can't begin to explain how perfect the stuff is. Just try it.
That's a silly argument; TLDs are quite often meaningful, and useful, as long as they're used correctly. Of course, in the rabid world of commercial entities trying to grab all mindshare, the usefulness of the system often gets trampled.
.edu and .gov), so those are obviously the most focused and meaningful.
.edu). This would even help the existing TLDs a bit, by freeing up namespace currently used for `keywords' for use by real organizations.
... and no, you can't have coke.net, because you're a pr0n-meister trying to leech off of users' innocent mistakes!' Based on what happened in Australia, I guess it's not going to happen though...]
Most of the (original) TLDs describe types of organizations so they're obviously the most useful when your site is that of one. Some TLDs contain mostly organizational host names (like
`slashdot' doesn't name an organization at all so naturally it doesn't fit well into the system.
The problems with TLDs mostly seem to be caused by the attempts to ignore them, trying to get around user cluelessness by using `.com' as a sort of `constant suffix for keywords'. This attempt to pretend that that domain names are handy keywords seems pretty hopeless (there's too much conflict), but I suppose people aren't going to stop doing it.
I wish they'd just allow domain names without TLDs for this sort of `keyword' usage, allowing the TLDs to remain for domain names where they're useful (especially
[Of course, I also wish the DNS admins would enforce some sort of `reasonableness', e.g., `no, you can't have coke.net, you're already coke.com!
It'd be great if this worked, but in practice it's usually not so simple.
The main problem of course, is that most people are downright awful at assessing future risk, especially when compared to immediate gain. So Store B might be violating privacy left and right -- but then they offer prices a penny lower, and the consumer says `hmmmm, maybe store B will forget to sell my information, and hey, a penny!' [and then subsequently loses all he owns in a blood-frenzy of con-men]
[Now I'll just step back for the chorus of `let them screw themselves! I'm elite, I'd never fall for it!']
The site doesn't pop right out as a criticism site.
That's because it's not a `criticism site.' It's just this student's personal website about various lsu law-school related stuff, which happened to contain some criticism (and presumably a bit more now that they're suing him!).
From the article, it sounds like he thought that the original `criticism' was not very major, and was surprised that they cared at all.
As far as sweatshop-free athletic shoes, the least of many evils appears to be New Balance
...
:-']
Yeah, but
The last time I was on Microsoft's Redmond campus (granted, this was a long time ago, in '94), New Balance was everywhere.* I was horrified, and immediately went home and got rid of all my NB shoes.
Sure, if you wear Nike, you're condemning countless innocent people to lives of degradation and misery -- but is that really worse than wearing the Shoes of the Beast?
Think long and hard before you go that way...
[* Note, this is quite true, and I really did swear off NB after that, though I suppose that says more about me than about NB...
Well those bell-labs guys have never been very good at UIs, though often they seem to invent great algorithms for making their cheese. :-)
[Another funny point -- the names of the (cpu-specific) linker programs (at least in a previous incarnation of plan9) were things like `l8', `lm', etc -- e.g., the letter `l', and a single letter code for the cpu type -- for a program which you don't invoke manually 99% of the time. I can understand why making `rm' short is a good idea, but the linker?
I'd hate to have the job of coming up with new non-conflictng single-letter cpu codes...]
I'm just surprised how often it turns up BEFORE someone asks if the technical merits might make what the license is a moot point.
That's because the `technical merits' have no power to make the license a moot point (unless I suppose the software is so horrible that no one cares). If the license makes it impossible for you to realistically use the software, then you can't use it, no matter how great it is.
I guess you could study it to get good ideas -- but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that there are patents lurking in there too (especially considering that it's from bell labs)...
Better yet, a version of Super Smash Brothers featuring Clippy! Seeing how much people complain about him, there are probably millions of people willing to buy the system if they'd get get a chance to beat the little bastard to a pulp, again, and again, and again.
... they could start a whole subgenre of `torture clippy' games ... `Clippy Tied to a Post Knife Party'... ]
[Maybe that's the killer app the xbox needs
How many people really want to customise thier UI to the 9th degree ? - urely the majority of people simply want a plain and effective UI that helps there productivity ?
More customisation = more code = more bugs = slower UI
Sure. It's great to have UI that novices can use easily without hassle.
But if you target novices so narrowly that you end up with a very easy to use, uncustomizable, interface that I (a hacker, who loves to customize everything) hate, then I'm going to stop using it, and make my own interface that I like. Maybe I'll fork your UI to do it (presuming it is free software).
If all the other hackers do the same thing, then your UI stops being a FS/OS `community' thing, and becomes yet another corporate UI. That means it loses whatever benefits accrue from having a large community of people hacking on it out of a love of what they're doing; whether that's a big loss or not, I'll leave to you to decide.
Sony tried this with the minidisc all thru the 90's and failed.
Well, failed in the U.S., anyway. In Japan it rocks the casbah.
Note that they've become a replacement for cassettes, not CDs, and serve that purpose quite well (I bought my girlfriend an MD player a couple of years ago, and at the time you could still find small racks of pre-recorded MDs in some record stores, but I don't see them anymore at all -- racks of blank MDs, on the other hand, are bloody everywhere...).
Who would you rather give you 20 dollars a month to? 90-minute wait times to a stressed call center or to a place that gives its workers some leeway.
... `How may I help you dear customer -- dear lovely customer who makes it possible for me to get payed for playing games all night? What seems to be the problem? Would you like your feet licked? Blowjob?'
I'll bet those workers are positively giddy with enthusiasm when they (instantly) answer a call
[hmmm, maybe it's not such a good idea after all...]
Actually, Japan has one of the largest military budgets in the world. They call their military the `Self Defense Forces', but it's the real thing, with big ships, tanks, fighter jets, and all that good stuff. No nukes though.
But personally, I think that an award like this should given to something truly exceptional -- and that, HP was not (except perhaps in popularity).
These are clearly meant for adults
Um.... no. They were completely filled with themes that seem far more aimed at kids than adults.
Consider: Harry's ignored and oppressed by his parents -- but they're not his real parents; his real parents loved him very much, and gave their all for him. He harbors within him great skills that no one around appreciates, and he basically escapes to a magical castle, where at ever meal he eats plates piled high with his favorite cakes and sweets. He encounters a bully, but manages to show him up. He wins the big match. He wins the respect of all by triumphing over evil -- not so much through hard work or skill, but mainly by hanging on and gritting his teeth (plus a bit of help from those real parents who loved him so dearly -- even though they're dead). etc., etc.
[Well, OK, I could go for all that too, but I'm kinda down there on the maturity scale...]
The GPL distinguishes between modifications published (for which source is required) and modifications for internal use (for which source is not required).
Care to share where you got this idea?
I've read the GNU GPL, and it seems to make no such distinction. If you really believe that it does, please quote the relevant section of the GPL.
If you give a GPL'd binary to your employee Bob, you've gotta give Bob the source code too (of course, since you're probably going to fire Bob's sorry ass if he complains, he's not likely to push the point).
Too bad representation isn't based on IQ/EQ (Emotional Quotient, not EverQuest =P )
Whoa! IQ divided by EQ? Geeks would rule!
Unfortunately it's a feature of aptitude, not the underlying apt libraries -- so if you use apt-get to install something, you may end up with automatically installed stuff that isn't marked as such.
:-)
Also, as you guessed, when you first start out using aptitude, all of your previously installed packages will be considered `intentionally installed'.
However, one result of aptitude's cool search system is that it's not too unpleasant to go through and retroactively mark those things which should be marked `auto' -- the example search string I gave in my previous post actually is one I used while doing that:
aptitude markauto "(lib)~i!~M!-dev"
of course in practice I used slightly more hairy search strings, and had to tweak the results, but it was surprisingly painless -- and to tell the truth, rather fun. However newbies had better use aptitude from the start, since they might not be so amused by this kind of thing...
Hopefully this functionality will be moved into the apt libraries in a future release.
- It tracks which packages were installed `automatically' (e.g., to satisfy a dependency). If such `auto' packages later become unnecessary because nothing depends on them anymore, they will be uninstalled automatically.
- It has a powerful and useful search system -- you can search not only for package names, but for descriptions (and other package fields), various special attributes, and boolean combinations of these things. For instance, the search string `(lib)~i!~M!-dev' will find packages who's name matches the string `lib', and are installed, and were not automatically installed (see above), and who's name doesn't match the string `-dev'.
- These search expressions can be used not only in interactive searches (which, incidentally, are incremental, like Emacs's isearch), but also to limit the set of packages displayed, or to perform various operations in command-line mode. I could use the command `aptitude remove "(lib)~i!~M!-dev"' to remove all packages matching that expression (but I won't, since that it happens to match libc6).
As you can see, although aptitude is great for the non-expert user, because of the simple and intuitive interface, it's not just for them. Even when I want to install something from the shell, I now always use aptitude's command-line interface instead of apt-get, because of the above features.Check out the aptitude program (you'll have to install the package of the same name) -- it's really good and getting even better fast; the author really seems to be on the ball (it used to be pretty bad, so if you tried it before and dismissed it, try it again). Not only does it provide a great full-screen apt interface, but it also has a command-line mode that improves on apt-get!
This is the package management interface that debian's been waiting for, IMHO.
[another alternative is `deity' (ne `console-apt'), but though it's rather colorful, the UI basically sucks; aptitude is much better.]
Well, you never know.
Perhaps, as a child, he spent many happy hours in front of a TV with a broken flyback transformer.
So now he gets a warm nostalgic feeling whenever he hears a high-pitched whine...
So what you're saying is that RMS is pragmatic about being dogmatic. :-)
My sister used to have a kitten that for some reason (incompetent parents?) didn't know how to wash.
... to butter him. They'd spread butter in a thin layer all over his fur.
Whenever this kitten started to smell, the way they got him to wash was
I guess he must have really liked the taste of butter, 'cause he would then proceed to lick himself very clean.
[I suppose they could have just tried to wash him themselves, but that is a task from which few return alive...]
Of course he can, but I think the point is that many customers don't want to, because it means they've got to become experts themselves. So unless the prices for support/enhancement are too high, many customers will buy support anyway. Note that it's possible for other companies to offer support for the product, but I guess the conventional thought is that the original supplier has an advantage (as long as their prices are reasonable) because they are more knowledgable about the product (having written it), and probably more familiar to the customer (having supplied them).
It would seem that the effect of the GPL would be to keep prices reasonably low -- but not at zero!