I think many edit/content contributors also donate money. If indeed the heavy contributors I mentioned already donate as much as or more than I indicated, then of course it's not worth making it mandatory. The other stuff though still applies, especially the part that describes why ads are a very bad idea.
Even unregistered contributors are registered by IP#. Charging those people if they're above the threshold won't discourage anyone. Remember, the activity threshold is high enough that those people won't choose to stop - many cannot, as they're "addicted". They're getting out of it the satisfaction (or at least feeding) of their addiction.
I don't think that 26 edits a year is anywhere near the threshold I mentioned. "Recent" edits are probably a lot less than 6 months old, and I said 100. Those people will probably pay at least $5 for the privilege - and the glory, and perhaps more for the T-shirt. Or other branded merch, like mousepads, or glarescreens, or keyboards, or even SUVs with "Wikipedia" embossed on the side.
No, advertising would inevitably bias the content. Not just bias the editors, but also introduce a bias into those articles in which ads relate to the content. And no, they can't filter out ads that relate to the content, because that would introduce a biased editorial hand into deciding "what's related". And besides, brands have all kinds of biases that aren't necessarily evident (what does "coca-cola" mean to people whose grandparents were slaves on coca-cola plantations?), or maybe just unknown to the person setting the "relation exclusion" filter.
No, the whole point of Wikipedia is that the content of every article is totally controlled by the crowd that's editing it. Implying the editorial voice of Wikipedia endorses those products in the ads will introduce distrust of the Wikipedia editorial voice when people don't like the advertised products (or just the ad itself, or just advertising). Or introduce unwarranted trust in those people who feel more comfortable when they're embedded in a sea of familiar logos, even if they content of the article should look suspicious.
Wikipedia should just raise money in other ways that don't muddy the line between editor and publisher, just like newspapers are believed to do properly (but don't, because they embed ads).
The foundation can sell paper volumes, or magazine subscriptions about the state of Wikipedia - which could contain ads.
It could charge schools whose campuses register above some high threshold of use. Those schools are reselling the content as education, either for school tax fees or private tuitions. They can afford to pay a fee for the resale of the content, and they're too much sitting ducks to try evasive actions (like IP spoofing) that can be caught.
It could sell T-shirts and other schwag.
It could charge its most active contributors small subscription fees. Charging those people who do the most work on the content might be counterintuitive: aren't they already giving more than others, in work if not in money? But those people are clearly getting a lot more use out of Wikipedia than the average person, and are probably addicted. They're the least likely to stop being part of the community if they have to pay, while scaring the others away will kill Wikipedia. And they're the ones most likely to care about the argument "but if you don't pay a little, Wikipedia will die", because they've got so much invested in it already. If the fee is like $10 a year for people who post over 100 edits in "recent edits", that's $50,000. If it's $5 for those posting over 10 or 20 recent edits anytime in a year, that's probably several hundred thousand dollars. Those people aren't going to give up their habit. If they offer them a mandatory $5 for their name on a "page of fame", or sell them a $5 T-Shirt for $20 with their name and count on it, they could make $millions.
Wikipedia is a community. One with varying degrees, whose members get all kinds of benefit from it. There are plenty of ways to monetize the benefits, especially for those getting the most, and those with little alternative to quit it.
These cellphones can't even get continuous reception everywhere in urban USA, and they're telling me that hotspots will go extinct with their "total broadband coverage"?
They've been holding their phones too close to their heads for too long.
Since the watermarks survive, as the content plays indistinguishably with them in there, but don't prevent copying, why don't they just watermark everything?
If they charge your credit card when you download the watermarked content, they can just watermark the content with your card ID. Then if they catch a file out there in the wild, they can see who it came from, and investigate the cardholder and the contentholder with violating copyright law.
If it's even worth the bother. They'll realize that people distributing some of the content for free to their friends the best advert for more content. And even if they give all the content away free, they'll realize that the content is just a way for people to connect to its author, so the content is advertisement for all kinds of other products: presubscription premiere releases, physical copy collector's items, schwag like T-shirts/posters/actionfigures, personal appearances, "author's picks" compilations of other content, recommendations of other authors, branded SUVs with the author's signature...
The audience has already moved into the 21st Century "free content" economy. These dinosaurs are still selling CDs as if they're still in the business of selling plastic discs, that they emboss with content-encoded patterns as a marketing stunt. Well, they can't custom-watermark CDs so easily, and the costs of trucking them around is more than they "lose" on free downloads. They should get with the program before they're nothing but an obstacle.
that's got Homeland shaking in its boots (but not Bruce Schneier).
I'd feel a lot safer if the people who've trashed our Constitution, killed our soldiers (and so many foreigners), and squandered our money (and our childrens's and grandchildren's) didn't pretend to be so tough while actually fearing anything that moves. They'd probably kill a lot less people, destroy a lot less of whatever they touch, and maybe actually stop some of the threats they're supposed to.
Where's Binladen? He ain't encoded into some Manchurian Chip, that's for sure.
The Beatles constructed themselves. They started writing meaningful songs after meeting Bob Dylan, like so many others did. It was the world's good fortune that at the time such music was popular.
Pop isn't a style, it's a statistical market condition. When teenage girls are wetting their panties over music with deep roots and modern meaning, then pop can be great.
By the way, you suck. And the Beatles rule. FWIW, what do you like to listen to?
What I'm carrying beneath my clothes is private. My privacy is not limited to just how well Nature has gifted the size and shape of my body's outline.
This device could be better for some limited security tasks like scanning for weapons at building entrances. But let's not pretend that it's a cureall for invading privacy somehow without invading privacy. If we do. then it'll be in use everywhere, and privacy will be as gone as the emperor's new clothes.
Who cares whether there are articles about trivial subjects in the Wikipedia. If you're not interested, ignore it. For most people, most of the entries are too trivial not to ignore.
As for trivial content inside a less trivial article, that's what the community is for: removing article info that's not good enough to include. Whether because it's trivial, uncited, biased, or just wrong, anyone who isn't barred can clean it up.
If Wikipedia wants to do both, and encourage trivia entered by people who understand its status to be kept out of the main article, it should just add a "trivia" section that's hidden by default, perhaps linked at a separate page. Then people adding trivia can do so without bothering anyone who wants to ignore it. And it will make it easier for later editors who clean it up to move it somewhere from which it's not as likely to be just moved back in.
The standard practice of giving everything that exists the respect it deserves, even if just a small amount, is almost always the solution. Anywhere. On the Internet, we have the luxury of infinite space for everything, and infinite degrees of respect. The Wikipedia attitude started out working like that. It can continue.
I guess it's not what you want to do, but what would be cool would be a Java applet served from MythTV that is the UI to that MythTV. Then all these devices, from phones (including iPhone, once Sun is done) to Blu-Ray players, to cableboxes (across N America and Europe) could all control the MythTV box with the same UI. That remote could travel across the network, for use around the home, or across the Net (like if you want to turn on your MythTV recording while you're away). Yes, you could do that with HTML/CGI, but the Java app could run in those devices that don't necessarily even render HTML or do HTTP. And the UI could be more interactive, and include actual MythTV logic running in the UI.
That was my idea, which I'd like to see someone do, even if it's not me:).
I thought the nVidia Linux drivers don't get enough performance out of the cards to do good video framerates on Linux, or good alpha blending for compositing "picture in picture" or GUI overlays on top of the images.
Maybe that's on the latest (higher) models of cards, which actually have the performance to do TV. How come those frequently-complained driver limits don't appear in these benchmarks?
I think you're just not reading the post right. We're not saying the computer itself was at all hard to program, any more than any other contemporary 8-bit assembly platform with multiprocessing (and multiple machine codes), polyphonic synthesizer, uniform device interface... Or that the HW was limited.
To the contrary, it was an excellent HW platform - the best at its time. The problem was that the techniques and the OS code wasn't available outside Atari. Guys like Chris Crawford worked for Atari. That's why I said that I wish this guy could have taught people who didn't work for Atari, who were in the same boat as that poor guy they hired to work on Dig Dug.
That's why the lesson is still valuable for new platforms. Programming mobile phones, for example, still isn't anywhere near as open as programming Windows or Linux. Because the docs and techniques aren't shared. And Atari died from that closed communication. The best HW isn't enough when people can't find easily out how to program it, even if some few can find it out.
Music products aren't necessarily bad just because they're products. All the music you and I like, even if it's totally different (and even if we hate each other's music) was produced and distributed as a product. All the records are products. Motown was a product factory. Even Bach, Beethoven and Mozart and the rest were produced for money.
Just because it's a product doesn't make it bad. It's music that's only a product, that isn't a connection between people deeper than brand identity or cliche, that's crap.
taken out of the hands of the anarchists, the libertarians, and the State, and handed back to self-policing communities of experts
Er, "back"? Those "self policing communities of experts" which once had control of the Internet were anarchists, libertarians and the State. And they're still self-policiing communities of experts.
What Zittrain wants is the Internet for his experts. Why shouldn't he? And why should we give it to him, when he's going to make up that kind of selfserving BS to get it?
Rock & roll wasn't corporate before Elvis. It was Black. And a little bit the White people who corporations tried to pretend didn't exist. It was Elvis getting on Ed Sullivan that showed corporations that rock & roll could be exploited. And then the stuff that was corporate stopped being rock & roll.
Videogames aren't responsible for shit music. It's the music industry that's found a great vehicle for its shit music in videogames.
Pop has brief periods where it's actually good. That depends on what the public buys: when it buys music with folk (Black, White and other) roots, then pop can be good. The Beatles were the ones who reintroduced those folk roots to pop, standing on the shoulders of both the White Folk Revival and the Black Rock & Roll / R&B slowly becoming mainstream. A decade earlier, jazz was pop briefly, just as it was in the 1920s along with blues.
There's a difference between some music that's actually good which has the good fortune to be issued at a time when the people buy a lot of it, which makes it pop, and music that is nothing but pop, which has the good fortune to be sold hard to an uncritical audience.
Since sometime around 1980, there has been only rarely any music that has been both rooted in folk and sold by the formula-obsessed weasels in the music business. Since the late 1990s, there's been nearly none, as the folk-rooted artists have mostly sought alternative distribution. And so we've seen little pop that's anything but superficial product. And we watch the music business die, as that kind of pop isn't enough to go on, unless you're scoring forgettable commercial jingles. Or trying any possible stunt to keep the old pop from passing into folk, which is much harder to charge for.
That's not "rock & roll". That's pop drivel, that's not even primarily a music product. It's primarily a video product. The music is manufactured as a prop in a photoshoot for some model to sell units of some crap no one will like after the marketing push is done.
Notice how none of this crap stays in anyone's playlists or even radio stations a few years after it's new? Because it doesn't speak to, or for, anything real. It speaks to some manufactured hype of the moment. Which is all it can, because the artists are commercial artists.
That's not "rock & roll". That's corporate rock. The same manufactured pop that real rock & roll, from real people, chased from the charts back when it was real.
Third party language environments like forth, "BASIC A+", Microsoft BASIC (which for a while was all I thought MS produced) and later even a C compiler (Deep Blue C) were distributed on floppy (and maybe even on tape).
The technique I liked best was compiling assembler (which I learned on an Apple ][+, via "call -151") into bytes rendered as character strings in a BASIC program, then telling BASIC to jump to the first byte in the string. But then I would find myself typing long gibberish strings from magazines into the 40-col TV screen on my 400's membrane keyboard. The checksum utils helped, but only a 14 year old in his parents' basement would put up with that for long. And only because it looked like something out of the Dungeon Master's Guide;).
The Peter Principle says that people who do well in a job get promoted out of it to a harder job they might not do well in.
Bush was a terrible governor. To which he was "promoted" after being a failure in business. To which he was promoted after being a dropout student. To which Ivy League schools he was promoted after being a bad son... of George Bush Sr.
You're not seeing the Peter Principle at work. You're seeing the power of George Bush and dynastic politics in the Republican Party (and among American voters).
And more importantly, you're seeing the promotion of someone who's made someone powerful a lot of money with every "failure". That's not the Peter Principle. Bush has not "failed" at that work he's been given at every stage of his "incompetence". He's ripped off $TRILLIONS for his cronies who put and kept him in power. He's severely damaged the power of the US to protect its people from those corporate cronies, especially the global ones, especially the military/energy industry.
That's not the Peter Principle. That's the people who say government can't work, because it would work against them, getting the government, and making it not work, because that failure works for them.
Dismissing all that as "business as usual", when the damage and theft is unprecedented, is helping them cover it up and get away with it. Unless you're getting a check from it (and I don't mean a $300 tax rebate that can't match the debt it creates), there's no excuse to repeat it as if it were the reason.
I had a sub to Antic. I've got a stack of _The Atari Connection_ magazines going back to V1#1/Spring1981. I've even got _Atari 400/800 NEWS BITS_ going back to #1/1979:
FOR A 36 CHARACTER DISPLAY TYPE POKE 82,2: POKE 83,37 PUSH [RETURN]
FOR A 40 CHARACTER DISPLAY TYPE POKE 82,0: POKE 83,39 PUSH [RETURN]
And so began the next 4-5 years of people like me poking and peeking around memory spelunking for hooks into the science-fictional hardware we'd hooked to our TVs.
I learned character set redefinition and display list programming from _Antic_, then I pulled it all together to animate characters in the VBlank. But it was all so sketchy, disconnected. The downside was it retarded development for that multiprocessing platform. The upside was it taught me to hack. Thanks, Atari!
That is all what science and engineering is for. I didn't ask whether there's a telescope available now. I started to explore ways to go further that don't require scientific breakthroughs, just some normal science and applying it in engineering.
It seems that what I want is possible, which satisfies me, for now.
But you don't need Java to do that. A native iPhone app can send TCP/IP commands to MythTV.
What's really cool is when the MythTV server has Java applets for remote control that can run on you iPhone, and on your cablebox, and on your Blu-Ray player.
The Atari computers weren't targeting mostly games. Atari released all kinds of general purpose SW. VisiCalc ran on Atari. It had serial ports, modems and printers.
The problem was that the Atari corp was mostly not targeting. RTFA to see what a circus it was. In the early 1990s I knew the guy who wrote the Atari computer game version of "Millipede" (funny how the creeper programmers like to talk). He told me stories of how the halls of Atari were filled with people wired on coke so much, there literally was a team whose job was to collect people freaking out, usually locked inside their offices.
If Atari hadn't been first absorbed by the Warner giant conglomerate that failed to gain "computer" insights just by buying Atari and letting go its visionary founders, it might have had a great chance. Everything Amiga should have been Atari's. Atari even had a Mac-type desktop (GEM, on its 16bit 68000 versions) much truer to the Xerox PARC model, before the Mac did. That desktop was a better publishing platform than the Mac, too.
With its games attracting programmers and users, it should have had it all. But it didn't have the spirit. And mainly, it didn't have the marketing that either IBM's momentum or Steve Jobs' genius brought. It lacked either the industrial muscle or the visionary spirit to match its HW brains.
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I think many edit/content contributors also donate money. If indeed the heavy contributors I mentioned already donate as much as or more than I indicated, then of course it's not worth making it mandatory. The other stuff though still applies, especially the part that describes why ads are a very bad idea.
Even unregistered contributors are registered by IP#. Charging those people if they're above the threshold won't discourage anyone. Remember, the activity threshold is high enough that those people won't choose to stop - many cannot, as they're "addicted". They're getting out of it the satisfaction (or at least feeding) of their addiction.
I don't think that 26 edits a year is anywhere near the threshold I mentioned. "Recent" edits are probably a lot less than 6 months old, and I said 100. Those people will probably pay at least $5 for the privilege - and the glory, and perhaps more for the T-shirt. Or other branded merch, like mousepads, or glarescreens, or keyboards, or even SUVs with "Wikipedia" embossed on the side.
No, advertising would inevitably bias the content. Not just bias the editors, but also introduce a bias into those articles in which ads relate to the content. And no, they can't filter out ads that relate to the content, because that would introduce a biased editorial hand into deciding "what's related". And besides, brands have all kinds of biases that aren't necessarily evident (what does "coca-cola" mean to people whose grandparents were slaves on coca-cola plantations?), or maybe just unknown to the person setting the "relation exclusion" filter.
No, the whole point of Wikipedia is that the content of every article is totally controlled by the crowd that's editing it. Implying the editorial voice of Wikipedia endorses those products in the ads will introduce distrust of the Wikipedia editorial voice when people don't like the advertised products (or just the ad itself, or just advertising). Or introduce unwarranted trust in those people who feel more comfortable when they're embedded in a sea of familiar logos, even if they content of the article should look suspicious.
Wikipedia should just raise money in other ways that don't muddy the line between editor and publisher, just like newspapers are believed to do properly (but don't, because they embed ads).
The foundation can sell paper volumes, or magazine subscriptions about the state of Wikipedia - which could contain ads.
It could charge schools whose campuses register above some high threshold of use. Those schools are reselling the content as education, either for school tax fees or private tuitions. They can afford to pay a fee for the resale of the content, and they're too much sitting ducks to try evasive actions (like IP spoofing) that can be caught.
It could sell T-shirts and other schwag.
It could charge its most active contributors small subscription fees. Charging those people who do the most work on the content might be counterintuitive: aren't they already giving more than others, in work if not in money? But those people are clearly getting a lot more use out of Wikipedia than the average person, and are probably addicted. They're the least likely to stop being part of the community if they have to pay, while scaring the others away will kill Wikipedia. And they're the ones most likely to care about the argument "but if you don't pay a little, Wikipedia will die", because they've got so much invested in it already. If the fee is like $10 a year for people who post over 100 edits in "recent edits", that's $50,000. If it's $5 for those posting over 10 or 20 recent edits anytime in a year, that's probably several hundred thousand dollars. Those people aren't going to give up their habit. If they offer them a mandatory $5 for their name on a "page of fame", or sell them a $5 T-Shirt for $20 with their name and count on it, they could make $millions.
Wikipedia is a community. One with varying degrees, whose members get all kinds of benefit from it. There are plenty of ways to monetize the benefits, especially for those getting the most, and those with little alternative to quit it.
These cellphones can't even get continuous reception everywhere in urban USA, and they're telling me that hotspots will go extinct with their "total broadband coverage"?
They've been holding their phones too close to their heads for too long.
I've got a Diamond Rio 300. Right next to my TRS-80.
Since the watermarks survive, as the content plays indistinguishably with them in there, but don't prevent copying, why don't they just watermark everything?
If they charge your credit card when you download the watermarked content, they can just watermark the content with your card ID. Then if they catch a file out there in the wild, they can see who it came from, and investigate the cardholder and the contentholder with violating copyright law.
If it's even worth the bother. They'll realize that people distributing some of the content for free to their friends the best advert for more content. And even if they give all the content away free, they'll realize that the content is just a way for people to connect to its author, so the content is advertisement for all kinds of other products: presubscription premiere releases, physical copy collector's items, schwag like T-shirts/posters/actionfigures, personal appearances, "author's picks" compilations of other content, recommendations of other authors, branded SUVs with the author's signature...
The audience has already moved into the 21st Century "free content" economy. These dinosaurs are still selling CDs as if they're still in the business of selling plastic discs, that they emboss with content-encoded patterns as a marketing stunt. Well, they can't custom-watermark CDs so easily, and the costs of trucking them around is more than they "lose" on free downloads. They should get with the program before they're nothing but an obstacle.
The Beatles constructed themselves. They started writing meaningful songs after meeting Bob Dylan, like so many others did. It was the world's good fortune that at the time such music was popular.
Pop isn't a style, it's a statistical market condition. When teenage girls are wetting their panties over music with deep roots and modern meaning, then pop can be great.
By the way, you suck. And the Beatles rule. FWIW, what do you like to listen to?
What I'm carrying beneath my clothes is private. My privacy is not limited to just how well Nature has gifted the size and shape of my body's outline.
This device could be better for some limited security tasks like scanning for weapons at building entrances. But let's not pretend that it's a cureall for invading privacy somehow without invading privacy. If we do. then it'll be in use everywhere, and privacy will be as gone as the emperor's new clothes.
Who cares whether there are articles about trivial subjects in the Wikipedia. If you're not interested, ignore it. For most people, most of the entries are too trivial not to ignore.
As for trivial content inside a less trivial article, that's what the community is for: removing article info that's not good enough to include. Whether because it's trivial, uncited, biased, or just wrong, anyone who isn't barred can clean it up.
If Wikipedia wants to do both, and encourage trivia entered by people who understand its status to be kept out of the main article, it should just add a "trivia" section that's hidden by default, perhaps linked at a separate page. Then people adding trivia can do so without bothering anyone who wants to ignore it. And it will make it easier for later editors who clean it up to move it somewhere from which it's not as likely to be just moved back in.
The standard practice of giving everything that exists the respect it deserves, even if just a small amount, is almost always the solution. Anywhere. On the Internet, we have the luxury of infinite space for everything, and infinite degrees of respect. The Wikipedia attitude started out working like that. It can continue.
You're ignoring the way all the incompetence always benefits Bush and his cronies. That's a coincidence theory without evidence that I'm not buying.
I guess it's not what you want to do, but what would be cool would be a Java applet served from MythTV that is the UI to that MythTV. Then all these devices, from phones (including iPhone, once Sun is done) to Blu-Ray players, to cableboxes (across N America and Europe) could all control the MythTV box with the same UI. That remote could travel across the network, for use around the home, or across the Net (like if you want to turn on your MythTV recording while you're away). Yes, you could do that with HTML/CGI, but the Java app could run in those devices that don't necessarily even render HTML or do HTTP. And the UI could be more interactive, and include actual MythTV logic running in the UI.
:).
That was my idea, which I'd like to see someone do, even if it's not me
I thought the nVidia Linux drivers don't get enough performance out of the cards to do good video framerates on Linux, or good alpha blending for compositing "picture in picture" or GUI overlays on top of the images.
Maybe that's on the latest (higher) models of cards, which actually have the performance to do TV. How come those frequently-complained driver limits don't appear in these benchmarks?
I think you're just not reading the post right. We're not saying the computer itself was at all hard to program, any more than any other contemporary 8-bit assembly platform with multiprocessing (and multiple machine codes), polyphonic synthesizer, uniform device interface... Or that the HW was limited.
To the contrary, it was an excellent HW platform - the best at its time. The problem was that the techniques and the OS code wasn't available outside Atari. Guys like Chris Crawford worked for Atari. That's why I said that I wish this guy could have taught people who didn't work for Atari, who were in the same boat as that poor guy they hired to work on Dig Dug.
That's why the lesson is still valuable for new platforms. Programming mobile phones, for example, still isn't anywhere near as open as programming Windows or Linux. Because the docs and techniques aren't shared. And Atari died from that closed communication. The best HW isn't enough when people can't find easily out how to program it, even if some few can find it out.
Music products aren't necessarily bad just because they're products. All the music you and I like, even if it's totally different (and even if we hate each other's music) was produced and distributed as a product. All the records are products. Motown was a product factory. Even Bach, Beethoven and Mozart and the rest were produced for money.
Just because it's a product doesn't make it bad. It's music that's only a product, that isn't a connection between people deeper than brand identity or cliche, that's crap.
Er, "back"? Those "self policing communities of experts" which once had control of the Internet were anarchists, libertarians and the State. And they're still self-policiing communities of experts.
What Zittrain wants is the Internet for his experts. Why shouldn't he? And why should we give it to him, when he's going to make up that kind of selfserving BS to get it?
Rock & roll wasn't corporate before Elvis. It was Black. And a little bit the White people who corporations tried to pretend didn't exist. It was Elvis getting on Ed Sullivan that showed corporations that rock & roll could be exploited. And then the stuff that was corporate stopped being rock & roll.
Videogames aren't responsible for shit music. It's the music industry that's found a great vehicle for its shit music in videogames.
Pop has brief periods where it's actually good. That depends on what the public buys: when it buys music with folk (Black, White and other) roots, then pop can be good. The Beatles were the ones who reintroduced those folk roots to pop, standing on the shoulders of both the White Folk Revival and the Black Rock & Roll / R&B slowly becoming mainstream. A decade earlier, jazz was pop briefly, just as it was in the 1920s along with blues.
There's a difference between some music that's actually good which has the good fortune to be issued at a time when the people buy a lot of it, which makes it pop, and music that is nothing but pop, which has the good fortune to be sold hard to an uncritical audience.
Since sometime around 1980, there has been only rarely any music that has been both rooted in folk and sold by the formula-obsessed weasels in the music business. Since the late 1990s, there's been nearly none, as the folk-rooted artists have mostly sought alternative distribution. And so we've seen little pop that's anything but superficial product. And we watch the music business die, as that kind of pop isn't enough to go on, unless you're scoring forgettable commercial jingles. Or trying any possible stunt to keep the old pop from passing into folk, which is much harder to charge for.
That's not "rock & roll". That's pop drivel, that's not even primarily a music product. It's primarily a video product. The music is manufactured as a prop in a photoshoot for some model to sell units of some crap no one will like after the marketing push is done.
Notice how none of this crap stays in anyone's playlists or even radio stations a few years after it's new? Because it doesn't speak to, or for, anything real. It speaks to some manufactured hype of the moment. Which is all it can, because the artists are commercial artists.
That's not "rock & roll". That's corporate rock. The same manufactured pop that real rock & roll, from real people, chased from the charts back when it was real.
Third party language environments like forth, "BASIC A+", Microsoft BASIC (which for a while was all I thought MS produced) and later even a C compiler (Deep Blue C) were distributed on floppy (and maybe even on tape).
;).
The technique I liked best was compiling assembler (which I learned on an Apple ][+, via "call -151") into bytes rendered as character strings in a BASIC program, then telling BASIC to jump to the first byte in the string. But then I would find myself typing long gibberish strings from magazines into the 40-col TV screen on my 400's membrane keyboard. The checksum utils helped, but only a 14 year old in his parents' basement would put up with that for long. And only because it looked like something out of the Dungeon Master's Guide
The Peter Principle says that people who do well in a job get promoted out of it to a harder job they might not do well in.
Bush was a terrible governor. To which he was "promoted" after being a failure in business. To which he was promoted after being a dropout student. To which Ivy League schools he was promoted after being a bad son... of George Bush Sr.
You're not seeing the Peter Principle at work. You're seeing the power of George Bush and dynastic politics in the Republican Party (and among American voters).
And more importantly, you're seeing the promotion of someone who's made someone powerful a lot of money with every "failure". That's not the Peter Principle. Bush has not "failed" at that work he's been given at every stage of his "incompetence". He's ripped off $TRILLIONS for his cronies who put and kept him in power. He's severely damaged the power of the US to protect its people from those corporate cronies, especially the global ones, especially the military/energy industry.
That's not the Peter Principle. That's the people who say government can't work, because it would work against them, getting the government, and making it not work, because that failure works for them.
Dismissing all that as "business as usual", when the damage and theft is unprecedented, is helping them cover it up and get away with it. Unless you're getting a check from it (and I don't mean a $300 tax rebate that can't match the debt it creates), there's no excuse to repeat it as if it were the reason.
And so began the next 4-5 years of people like me poking and peeking around memory spelunking for hooks into the science-fictional hardware we'd hooked to our TVs.
I learned character set redefinition and display list programming from _Antic_, then I pulled it all together to animate characters in the VBlank. But it was all so sketchy, disconnected. The downside was it retarded development for that multiprocessing platform. The upside was it taught me to hack. Thanks, Atari!
That is all what science and engineering is for. I didn't ask whether there's a telescope available now. I started to explore ways to go further that don't require scientific breakthroughs, just some normal science and applying it in engineering.
It seems that what I want is possible, which satisfies me, for now.
You're welcome.
But you don't need Java to do that. A native iPhone app can send TCP/IP commands to MythTV.
What's really cool is when the MythTV server has Java applets for remote control that can run on you iPhone, and on your cablebox, and on your Blu-Ray player.
In 10 months it'll be a different "big man". That kind of king worship is exactly what this country is designed to thwart.
The Atari computers weren't targeting mostly games. Atari released all kinds of general purpose SW. VisiCalc ran on Atari. It had serial ports, modems and printers.
The problem was that the Atari corp was mostly not targeting. RTFA to see what a circus it was. In the early 1990s I knew the guy who wrote the Atari computer game version of "Millipede" (funny how the creeper programmers like to talk). He told me stories of how the halls of Atari were filled with people wired on coke so much, there literally was a team whose job was to collect people freaking out, usually locked inside their offices.
If Atari hadn't been first absorbed by the Warner giant conglomerate that failed to gain "computer" insights just by buying Atari and letting go its visionary founders, it might have had a great chance. Everything Amiga should have been Atari's. Atari even had a Mac-type desktop (GEM, on its 16bit 68000 versions) much truer to the Xerox PARC model, before the Mac did. That desktop was a better publishing platform than the Mac, too.
With its games attracting programmers and users, it should have had it all. But it didn't have the spirit. And mainly, it didn't have the marketing that either IBM's momentum or Steve Jobs' genius brought. It lacked either the industrial muscle or the visionary spirit to match its HW brains.