Being a recent c-span junkie I came across an hearing on filesharing that I think brought up some interesting points...
The main thrust of the issue as I see it is that organizations like the RIAA are legitimately losing money from p2p, but it's only because they refuse to give up any control in the way their content is distributed. They've had a strangle-hold on the market for decades and now they're crying because they didn't think of p2p first. Networks like kazaa have been trying to work with the RIAA to get licensed content from RIAA, but have been turned down at every opportunity.
Chuck D summed it up well when he said "As far as I'm concerned P2P means 'Power to the People'" I don't think that the proponents of P2P filesharing are anti-business necessarily, but the one's in control have for such a long time been the execs in the music industry that many see the losses they're taking right now as a leveling of the playing field. P2P isn't going away, and the sooner the RIAA recognizes that and plays ball with networks like Kazaa, the sooner everyone benifits and makes money.
Anyone interested should check out c-span's site at c-span.org and look for this video (requires realplayer):
Sen. Subcmte. Hearing on File Sharing & the Entertainment Industry (10/02/2003)
go about 2 hours and 1 minutes in to hear Chuck D's testimony... I must say it really made my day to hear the RIAA and MPAA get verbally spanked so eloquently!
This announcement seems a little premature seeing as there haven't been any actual source files submitted to sourceforge yet. Screenshots are fine and good, but where's the source?
There are some legitimate uses for PDAs, primarily having to do with what they were designed for; storing phone numbers. I used mine as a graphing calculator while I was taking Calculus, which for me justified the cost. I've even developed some of my own software for Palm and put it up on sourceforge (shameless plug: minibar).
When it comes down to the bottomline though, PDAs are more toys than they are tools. It's not that they aren't capable of being useful, but the killer app for a handheld device just doesn't really exist. You have your class of native applications like Address Book and Datebook, which are pretty much all replaceable by a paper equivalent. Then there's a class of applications that allow integration with existing desktop software (excel, word, outlook), which may be somewhat useful if you need this info on a handheld device for some reason, but laptops are much better for this and have fewer synchronization problems.
What does this leave you? Entertainment. Games are a huge chunk of the handheld software market, and the drive in the hardware seems to be more towards multimedia applications. Whether the marketing depts for these devices will ever admit this is another story. For some reason the word "productivity" makes it much easier for people to part with their money.
I'm suprised Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World wasn't included in this review. It may not be Murakami's best work, but it is the most Sci-fi oriented and argualby the most closely related to Phillip Dick's writing.
All of Murakami's novels have a certain mystical element reminicent of Dick's later books. The world created, like Dick's, lasts largely intact from novel to novel. But what makes it interesting is that Murakami's world is a much less hostile one. Although the paranoia is justified, and the femme fatal always double crosses, you get the feeling that the main character suspected it all along and went along just for the crazy ride.
Why do today's software and consumer electronics users expect to be able to fire up their new toy and magically have a complete understanding of how to use it
Haven't you ever watched Star Trek? Whenever the crew is finds itself on the bridge of an alien ship, it usually takes them about 5 seconds to figure out how to download the entire database, transport the stranded crew member and turn off the self destruct sequence. And meanwhile I'm still looking for a powerful IDE with a decent interface:(
Ok, first of all why would you want pointers in a scripting language? It's a SCRIPTING language we're talking about here!!! Scripting languages are supposed to be an easy way to expose the functionality of a program, not a tool to create security holes and logic errors. Introducing pointers into something like this will create more bugs (both intended and accidental) and be a major pain in the butt for the script programmers to deal with.
Also, since when is goto a major feature of C? One of its very few legitimate uses is to break out of a deeply nested loop. Ok, so other than this one use (which optimizes some code only some of the time), what is it good for?
Finally, #defines are a nice feature of c, but again, this is a SCRIPTING language. If you just need a constant, declare one const. If you need a function that returns the bigger of two numbers, write the function! I fail to see what features they've left out that are really needed in a scripting language.
p.s. I do agree with you that CSS is a pretty bad choice of acronyms.
While it may be true that we tend to forget more detailed information, I would argue that we are getting better at "knowing where to look" for the info we require. There have been countless times that I've forgotten the url of some page I once visited, yet was able to successfully retrace my navigation path from some point ten pages upstream.
Technology allows us to play with bigger and bigger building blocks; one consequence of this may be that the mind takes the smaller ones for granted. Is this such a bad thing?
...optoelectronics, another buzzword we encourage you to start using immediately.
Optoelectronics? This is one buzzword which will never catch on. I know nothin about optics or electronics, I'm just a programmer, but it seems obvious that "Optronics" is the clear choice among buzzwords for this emerging field. I say shun the (soon to be depracated) term Optoelectronics; adopt the much more advanced term, Optronics!
Maybe its just because I've learned programming starting with c++, and un-learning object oriented design in order to code in C is hard enough, but the prospect of taking another step back to asm is daunting as all hell. But saying that z80 ASM is "pretty easy"? Isn't asm just a bunch of memory addresses held together with the equivalent of gotos from BASIC?
I just recently started looking into programming for the gameboy and have found out there's a huge online community. In fact, the biggest development tool out there (the c compiler gbdk) is a sourceforge project. From what I understand there is no 'official' gameboy compiler because commercial gameboy games are ALL written in assembly! I don't know about you, but I'd much rather mess around with pointers in C than fiddle with registers in asm! I know, I know, real programmers twiddle the bits on there hard drives with tiny magnets. Still, I opt for a compiler. If you absolutely have no desire for any speed of exectution, theres also a BASIC interpreter out there for gameboy.
Nintendo claims that the gameboy is the best selling game system of all time, and considering how many there are out there in the world, its really not all that suprising that it has such a strong development community. Still it sends shivers down my spine to see people taking a closed source model and turning it around, making it accessable to all.
I've also heard rumors of a gameboy emulator for palm. Can anyone confirm this? I think something like this would really open up the floodgates to legitimate gameboy development, since you would no longer need fancy flash rom carts or eprom burners to get some code running on an actual portable.
Anyway, here's the best gb development sites I've found on the net so far...
The motherload for gameboy development: GameBoy Devrs
Slashdot Mirror
Being a recent c-span junkie I came across an hearing on filesharing that I think brought up some interesting points...
The main thrust of the issue as I see it is that organizations like the RIAA are legitimately losing money from p2p, but it's only because they refuse to give up any control in the way their content is distributed. They've had a strangle-hold on the market for decades and now they're crying because they didn't think of p2p first. Networks like kazaa have been trying to work with the RIAA to get licensed content from RIAA, but have been turned down at every opportunity.
Chuck D summed it up well when he said "As far as I'm concerned P2P means 'Power to the People'" I don't think that the proponents of P2P filesharing are anti-business necessarily, but the one's in control have for such a long time been the execs in the music industry that many see the losses they're taking right now as a leveling of the playing field. P2P isn't going away, and the sooner the RIAA recognizes that and plays ball with networks like Kazaa, the sooner everyone benifits and makes money.
Anyone interested should check out c-span's site at c-span.org and look for this video (requires realplayer):
Sen. Subcmte. Hearing on File Sharing & the Entertainment Industry (10/02/2003)
go about 2 hours and 1 minutes in to hear Chuck D's testimony... I must say it really made my day to hear the RIAA and MPAA get verbally spanked so eloquently!
This announcement seems a little premature seeing as there haven't been any actual source files submitted to sourceforge yet. Screenshots are fine and good, but where's the source?
There are some legitimate uses for PDAs, primarily having to do with what they were designed for; storing phone numbers. I used mine as a graphing calculator while I was taking Calculus, which for me justified the cost. I've even developed some of my own software for Palm and put it up on sourceforge (shameless plug: minibar).
When it comes down to the bottomline though, PDAs are more toys than they are tools. It's not that they aren't capable of being useful, but the killer app for a handheld device just doesn't really exist. You have your class of native applications like Address Book and Datebook, which are pretty much all replaceable by a paper equivalent. Then there's a class of applications that allow integration with existing desktop software (excel, word, outlook), which may be somewhat useful if you need this info on a handheld device for some reason, but laptops are much better for this and have fewer synchronization problems.
What does this leave you? Entertainment. Games are a huge chunk of the handheld software market, and the drive in the hardware seems to be more towards multimedia applications. Whether the marketing depts for these devices will ever admit this is another story. For some reason the word "productivity" makes it much easier for people to part with their money.
I'm suprised Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World wasn't included in this review. It may not be Murakami's best work, but it is the most Sci-fi oriented and argualby the most closely related to Phillip Dick's writing.
All of Murakami's novels have a certain mystical element reminicent of Dick's later books. The world created, like Dick's, lasts largely intact from novel to novel. But what makes it interesting is that Murakami's world is a much less hostile one. Although the paranoia is justified, and the femme fatal always double crosses, you get the feeling that the main character suspected it all along and went along just for the crazy ride.
Why do today's software and consumer electronics users expect to be able to fire up their new toy and magically have a complete understanding of how to use it
Haven't you ever watched Star Trek? Whenever the crew is finds itself on the bridge of an alien ship, it usually takes them about 5 seconds to figure out how to download the entire database, transport the stranded crew member and turn off the self destruct sequence. And meanwhile I'm still looking for a powerful IDE with a decent interface :(
Ok, first of all why would you want pointers in a scripting language? It's a SCRIPTING language we're talking about here!!! Scripting languages are supposed to be an easy way to expose the functionality of a program, not a tool to create security holes and logic errors. Introducing pointers into something like this will create more bugs (both intended and accidental) and be a major pain in the butt for the script programmers to deal with.
Also, since when is goto a major feature of C? One of its very few legitimate uses is to break out of a deeply nested loop. Ok, so other than this one use (which optimizes some code only some of the time), what is it good for?
Finally, #defines are a nice feature of c, but again, this is a SCRIPTING language. If you just need a constant, declare one const. If you need a function that returns the bigger of two numbers, write the function! I fail to see what features they've left out that are really needed in a scripting language. p.s. I do agree with you that CSS is a pretty bad choice of acronyms.
While it may be true that we tend to forget more detailed information, I would argue that we are getting better at "knowing where to look" for the info we require. There have been countless times that I've forgotten the url of some page I once visited, yet was able to successfully retrace my navigation path from some point ten pages upstream.
Technology allows us to play with bigger and bigger building blocks; one consequence of this may be that the mind takes the smaller ones for granted. Is this such a bad thing?
Optoelectronics? This is one buzzword which will never catch on. I know nothin about optics or electronics, I'm just a programmer, but it seems obvious that "Optronics" is the clear choice among buzzwords for this emerging field. I say shun the (soon to be depracated) term Optoelectronics; adopt the much more advanced term, Optronics!
Maybe its just because I've learned programming starting with c++, and un-learning object oriented design in order to code in C is hard enough, but the prospect of taking another step back to asm is daunting as all hell. But saying that z80 ASM is "pretty easy"? Isn't asm just a bunch of memory addresses held together with the equivalent of gotos from BASIC?
I just recently started looking into programming for the gameboy and have found out there's a huge online community. In fact, the biggest development tool out there (the c compiler gbdk) is a sourceforge project. From what I understand there is no 'official' gameboy compiler because commercial gameboy games are ALL written in assembly! I don't know about you, but I'd much rather mess around with pointers in C than fiddle with registers in asm! I know, I know, real programmers twiddle the bits on there hard drives with tiny magnets. Still, I opt for a compiler. If you absolutely have no desire for any speed of exectution, theres also a BASIC interpreter out there for gameboy.
Nintendo claims that the gameboy is the best selling game system of all time, and considering how many there are out there in the world, its really not all that suprising that it has such a strong development community. Still it sends shivers down my spine to see people taking a closed source model and turning it around, making it accessable to all.
I've also heard rumors of a gameboy emulator for palm. Can anyone confirm this? I think something like this would really open up the floodgates to legitimate gameboy development, since you would no longer need fancy flash rom carts or eprom burners to get some code running on an actual portable.
Anyway, here's the best gb development sites I've found on the net so far...
The motherload for gameboy development:
GameBoy Devrs
A great forum for gameboy developers:
GBdev bulletin board