The value of a book, movie, or cd does not lie entirely in its content. Also of value is the authority that lies behind it. The three books on my shelf that have "Knuth" written on the backs in big, bold, letters have lots of words in them, but are only useful to me because I believe that Knuth has done a tremendous amount of work for me, including only the best and most important of the available ideas, making sure that what he write's is accurate.
In the same way, a publisher publishing a book or a movie backs it with its own reputation, guaranteeing some sort of minimum quality standard. For every book that gets published, there's a ten-foot stack of rejected manuscripts that never well be, and don't deserve to be. While some people complain that this system promotes mediocrity and insulates us from the artist's themselves, I simply don't have the time or the stamina to read every manuscript in that stack, or listen to the album of every garage band out there. I'm content to let a professional do it for me.
If the only available system were something like the one proposed here, I would probably never bother to try anything new again, except on the occasional tip from a friend. The chance of success would be so small, who would have the time to bother?
Arguably, a new author or musician could just release his first few works for free, and hope to get noticed. This has obvious flaws, not the least that it eliminates the chance of any more of the lovely success stories that run like: "We maxed out six credits cards to make our movie, 'cause we knew it was great, and now it's made 1.5 million dollars!"
Systems like this are already essentially in place on a local level, where, say, a small band will press a cd if it can get enough pre-orders; I don't think they scale up past it.
Even robots need a power source. Most of the ones that need oxygen are wood-burning robots; they were used intensively in the Russian space program until the late 1960's...the universal assemblers went out of control and completely deforested space.
As a final caveat, we've all heard that humans only use 5% of their putative mental capacity---so why would a 15% increase in "processor capacity" make a difference? It would be like the difference between 2GB and 3GB of RAM on an Apple ][+!
Yep. We've all heard that. That doesn't mean that it has any connection to actual reality. This story seems to have just sprung out of no where, and keeps getting repeated 'cause it sounds so promising. (As in, Wow! What if you could use 100%?) The rather more true story is that the brain is a distributed processor--your neurons (and various other brain cells) are so heavily interconnected that it's quite difficult to say which grey lump is actually responsibe for what. (Note that the pretty looking brain-maps you see in magazines sometimes are fine as far as they go, but they're very fuzzy.)
Right. Anyway, Yea Einstein! Now let's all go out and fit some more curves through single data points.
The worm does not send itself to users on address book as Melissa did, but instead will monitor the inbox of infected system for incoming mail. Once a message is received, Worm.ExplorerZip will then send an auto-reply to the sender of the message with the message above. Clearly, the author of the worm was very unhappy about the last dozen *MAKE MONEY FAST*'s he'd gotten.
This is all actually kindof funny. According to the not-quite-finalized agreement, if you bought a modem that's in the set in question, then you are entitled to a "$15 Rebate Coupon." Not $15, mind you. A $15 coupon that's good only for purchasing more 3Com products. If it didn't have the phrase "Class-Action Suit" attached, I'd think it was just another promotional campaign.
>Why emulate? Why not go out an buy one? You would need some pretty hefty hardware to emulate one.
Emulation satifies the deep-deep down, gnawing doubts that I just can't seem to get rid of any other way. I sit in front of my new Linux/Intel machine, which can crunch numbers about a zillion times as fast as my old Commodore 64, and think, "Yeah, but... am I really happier?" Then I realize that because of emulators, anything the C64 could do, I can do now. In a window, while emulating a Gameboy on the side.
Emulation is reassuring. It makes us feel comfortably superior to where we were ten years ago, and, as a bonus, to the console crowd, too. This is not a matter for rational discussion (as in, "yeah, but you're using a $1000 machine to simulate $50 one"); we're dealing with primal urges here.
Version numbering seems to be doing the trick quite well. There seems to be widespread, though not explicitly stated agreement in the open source community that a project release will not be numbered "1.0" until it meets all the original goals, and is largely bug-free. "Alpha" and "Beta" are just short-hand terms for software that is steadily improving, but still a work in progress.
I think this is a good thing. It's much more honest, at least, than typical proprietary standard, which is to just call the first thing thrown out the door version 1.0, and try to debug from there.
Slashdot Mirror
The value of a book, movie, or cd does not lie entirely in its content. Also of value is the authority that lies behind it. The three books on my shelf that have "Knuth" written on the backs in big, bold, letters have lots of words in them, but are only useful to me because I believe that Knuth has done a tremendous amount of work for me, including only the best and most important of the available ideas, making sure that what he write's is accurate.
In the same way, a publisher publishing a book or a movie backs it with its own reputation, guaranteeing some sort of minimum quality standard. For every book that gets published, there's a ten-foot stack of rejected manuscripts that never well be, and don't deserve to be. While some people complain that this system promotes mediocrity and insulates us from the artist's themselves, I simply don't have the time or the stamina to read every manuscript in that stack, or listen to the album of every garage band out there. I'm content to let a professional do it for me.
If the only available system were something like the one proposed here, I would probably never bother to try anything new again, except on the occasional tip from a friend. The chance of success would be so small, who would have the time to bother?
Arguably, a new author or musician could just release his first few works for free, and hope to get noticed. This has obvious flaws, not the least that it eliminates the chance of any more of the lovely success stories that run like: "We maxed out six credits cards to make our movie, 'cause we knew it was great, and now it's made 1.5 million dollars!"
Systems like this are already essentially in place on a local level, where, say, a small band will press a cd if it can get enough pre-orders; I don't think they scale up past it.
>Why would robots be using ANY oxygen?
Even robots need a power source. Most of the ones that need oxygen are wood-burning robots; they were used intensively in the Russian space program until the late 1960's...the universal assemblers went out of control and completely deforested space.
As a final caveat, we've all heard that humans only use 5% of their putative mental capacity---so why would a 15% increase in "processor capacity" make a difference? It would be like the difference between 2GB and 3GB of RAM on an Apple ][+!
Yep. We've all heard that. That doesn't mean that it has any connection to actual reality. This story seems to have just sprung out of no where, and keeps getting repeated 'cause it sounds so promising. (As in, Wow! What if you could use 100%?) The rather more true story is that the brain is a distributed processor--your neurons (and various other brain cells) are so heavily interconnected that it's quite difficult to say which grey lump is actually responsibe for what. (Note that the pretty looking brain-maps you see in magazines sometimes are fine as far as they go, but they're very fuzzy.)
Right. Anyway, Yea Einstein! Now let's all go out and fit some more curves through single data points.
The worm does not send itself to users on address book as Melissa did, but instead will monitor the inbox of infected system for incoming mail. Once a message is received, Worm.ExplorerZip will then send an auto-reply to the sender of the message with the message above. Clearly, the author of the worm was very unhappy about the last dozen *MAKE MONEY FAST*'s he'd gotten.
This is all actually kindof funny. According to the not-quite-finalized agreement, if you bought a modem that's in the set in question, then you are entitled to a "$15 Rebate Coupon." Not $15, mind you. A $15 coupon that's good only for purchasing more 3Com products. If it didn't have the phrase "Class-Action Suit" attached, I'd think it was just another promotional campaign.
Back up to the main page . I think the whole site's hilarious. Of course, I haven't slept in a while either.
>Why emulate? Why not go out an buy one? You would need some pretty hefty hardware to emulate one.
... am I really happier?" Then I realize that because of emulators, anything the C64 could do, I can do now. In a window, while
Emulation satifies the deep-deep down, gnawing doubts that I just can't seem to get rid of any other way. I sit in front of my new Linux/Intel machine, which can crunch numbers about a zillion times as fast as my old Commodore 64, and think, "Yeah, but
emulating a Gameboy on the side.
Emulation is reassuring. It makes us feel comfortably superior to where we were ten years ago, and, as a bonus, to the console crowd, too. This is not a matter for rational discussion (as in, "yeah, but you're using a $1000 machine to simulate $50 one"); we're dealing with primal urges here.
Version numbering seems to be doing the trick quite well. There seems to be widespread, though not explicitly stated agreement in the open source community that a project release will not be numbered "1.0" until it meets all the original goals, and is largely bug-free. "Alpha" and "Beta" are just short-hand terms for software that is steadily improving, but still a work in progress.
I think this is a good thing. It's much more honest, at least, than typical proprietary standard, which is to just call the first thing thrown out the door version 1.0, and try to debug from there.