I don't know if that was caused by a spell-checker run amok, English as a second language, or an intentional editorial stance. And I don't care. A new and highly useful descriptive phrase has entered my vocabulary.
The weird thing is, with services like Rhapsody and the iTunes store going strong, why is there any controversy about this anymore? Why aren't all the labels rushing to hop onto the gravy train?
I've been using Rhapsody for many months and haven't downloaded an illegal track since getting the service. But there are big gaps in their catalog (generated by uncooperative labels) that are tempting me back onto the path of eeeeeevil. Wouldn't they be better off throwing their whole catalogs onto Rhapsody (or iTunes, or whatever) and collecting more money from more people? Why do we have to beg and cajole the RIAA and the record companies to do something so seemingly beneficial to them? Is there a business downside to online music that I'm missing? Is the record industry really controlled by a shadowy cartel of CD and jewel-case manufacturers, or what?
Seti@Home has produced something; thanks to this work, we can now make pretty firm statements about what kinds of ET signals are *not* present. This is a valid and extremely important scientific accomplishment. It allows us to refine models of what is out there, and saves us the trouble of looking in already well-explored experimental territory.
By analogy, physicists tried for a decade to produce Higgs bosons before finally getting some evidence that they'd produced a few. The earlier experiments were not "failures", though. Each of them proved that the Higgs had some minimum energy higher than what that experiment had reached, and that proof allowed theories to be confirmed or revised as appropriate.
Note that there's a technical name for this philsophical position: Solipsism, from roots meaning "Only itself". Solipsism is a favorite discovery of geeky college freshmen in each new generation. The interesting thing is that there's no way to disprove it; the catch is that it doesn't lead to any productive conclusions.
It's closely related to Phenomenology, a philosophy most brilliantly explained in John Carpenter's movie "Dark Star", which, if you have not seen it, you should drop everything and view immediately. Being able to murmur "Um.....bomb?" at appropriate moments is essential to good debugging practice.
This is how the world will look for the next fifty years or so. Formerly, markets and labor pools were isolated from one another by transport and regulatory barriers, with the result that standards of living could vary wildly from one part of the planet to another. Now, the barriers are low or gone, which means that the places with lower-priced labor are pulling jobs from higher-priced areas. Of course, this decreases the econonmic level of the former and increases the latter, causing wages to fall in the source country and rise in the sink country. Let this process run long enough, and the whole world will have roughly comparable labor pools working for roughly comparable wages at a roughly comparable standard of living. If we're lucky, we'll get everyone at something close to the current "first world" standard; if not, we'll get a straight averaging of the current world situation.
If Fleury is smart, he'll keep them on the core commit team and wish them all the best with their venture, and quietly hire replacements -- there's plenty of good J2EE talent around. That makes him look like a mensch, scores community brownie points, helps the public image of OSS, and (the real reason) does nothing to frighten paying corporate clients away from The JBoss Group. If he does *anything* that looks like flinching about the loss of a few developers, corporations will flee to the waiting arms of BEA or IBM, because it will prove to them that the whole thing was a house of cards to start with.
The anlogy has some difficulties. With heart surgery, the range for creativity is a little narrower, and the outcome is valued on a very different scale. With purely creative work, anyone can claim to be doing it, and the only guideline as to who is successful is critical and popular acknowledgement. And you'll note (just for example) that nearly every successful abstract artist started his career learning and mastering realism, because realism hones the skills that make successful abstract art possible.
Yes, but for the apprentice artists, learning to duplicate the brushstrokes or camera angles of a Master will allow them to put their own brush or camera in exactly the right place when it's their turn to be creative. If I have a brilliant painting in my head but I can't put paint on canvas as I imagine it, I will fail. The same idea applies to all creative disciplines. Mechanics are not the interesting part, but they're utterly necessary and often best learned through imitation.
Back in Ye Olde Days, this was a standard part of being an apprentice artisan. Before you got set loose to create new designs, you had to practice recreating old ones until you could do it perfectly. I think there's a lot to be said for this system, and it's rather cool that a certain kind of geek imposes it on him- or herself as if by instinct.
Exactly. I've been using Rhapsody for many months and burned only a handful of songs. With the full catalog available for unlimited on-demand streaming, and the fact I don 99% of my serious listening while working at my audio-maximized home machine, it's a great deal for me.
Is it true philanthropy or just another tactic to assimilate everyone into the MS collective?
This just jumped past the JavaOne session "Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) or.NET: An Objective Technology Comparison" to the top of my "predictable answer hall of fame" list.
Your points are all true but miss the key observation that dang few people were creating web sites -- much less doing "web design" -- prior to 1994. The web was "available" in 1993, but much more so by mid-94. Mosaic was "available" in 1993, but began to reach significant numbers of users in mid-94. And ISPs can be used for services other than the web, of course.
Entering a murky world In 1998, Shiels quit his patrol sergeant job at the Adelanto Police Department in Southern California and moved back home to Portland to start a full-time career in Web design, a hobby he had been dabbling in for five years.
So he started in 1993, the year the first creaky Mosaic browser began filtering out of the lab? I mean, I consider myself a pretty cutting-edge tech dude, and I didn't build my first site until 1994.
Depending on the likely residents, I'd be a bit worried about sharing a T1 (1.5 Mbps) between 160 units. Even if you figure that at peak only 10% of the units are doing bandwidth-hungry operations (media streaming, large file downloads), that still leaves only around 100 kbps per unit, which is pretty bad. If 20% try for 'heavy' access at once, they'd be better off using dialup. In other words, 30 teenage kids or similarly high-bandwidth users could crater your entire scheme.
I suspect that in many cases there is no real product (or even 'real' company) behind the sleazier spams. The whole thing is a trick to get your money, and probably your CC number for further fun and games. After all, most people will be too embarrassed to complain to the cops that their penis enlargment pills never arrived.
Kind of odd when I can 12 channels on my civilian model (with admittedly lower spatial accuracy).
I'd also imagine that yours would be unlikely to continue working if, say, dropped onto concrete from fifteen feet up, or if a bomb went off ten yards away from it, or if it took a glancing impact from a bullet. Say what you like about US military gear, the stuff is amazingly rugged. Ten year old tech that keeps working under battlefield conditions is far more valuable to a soldier than bleeding-edge tech that quits if it gets damp.
And that's why tech today is qualitatively different from tech of the past. Fire could keep you alive in the winter or make you quite dead if you let it get out of control, but whatever *you* did with it, the clan in the next valley over wouldn't be killed if you made the wrong choice or got unlucky. With modern science, we're in danger of killing everyone all at once with one experiment gone awry. That is why scientists and ethicists are beginning to talk about the need to reevaluate the "free for all" model of research.
Of course, moving all the most dangerous work out to the outer solar system would be the best solution.
It's been a standard Indian trick for absorbing enemies for millennia. Where do you think the caste system came from? Every new wave of would-be conquerors got absorbed as a new upper-tier caste, leaving the core system unchanged.
This strategy also seems to work for operating systems.
Slashdot Mirror
The weird thing is, with services like Rhapsody and the iTunes store going strong, why is there any controversy about this anymore? Why aren't all the labels rushing to hop onto the gravy train?
I've been using Rhapsody for many months and haven't downloaded an illegal track since getting the service. But there are big gaps in their catalog (generated by uncooperative labels) that are tempting me back onto the path of eeeeeevil. Wouldn't they be better off throwing their whole catalogs onto Rhapsody (or iTunes, or whatever) and collecting more money from more people? Why do we have to beg and cajole the RIAA and the record companies to do something so seemingly beneficial to them? Is there a business downside to online music that I'm missing? Is the record industry really controlled by a shadowy cartel of CD and jewel-case manufacturers, or what?
Seti@Home has produced something; thanks to this work, we can now make pretty firm statements about what kinds of ET signals are *not* present. This is a valid and extremely important scientific accomplishment. It allows us to refine models of what is out there, and saves us the trouble of looking in already well-explored experimental territory.
By analogy, physicists tried for a decade to produce Higgs bosons before finally getting some evidence that they'd produced a few. The earlier experiments were not "failures", though. Each of them proved that the Higgs had some minimum energy higher than what that experiment had reached, and that proof allowed theories to be confirmed or revised as appropriate.
Note that there's a technical name for this philsophical position: Solipsism, from roots meaning "Only itself". Solipsism is a favorite discovery of geeky college freshmen in each new generation. The interesting thing is that there's no way to disprove it; the catch is that it doesn't lead to any productive conclusions.
It's closely related to Phenomenology, a philosophy most brilliantly explained in John Carpenter's movie "Dark Star", which, if you have not seen it, you should drop everything and view immediately. Being able to murmur "Um.....bomb?" at appropriate moments is essential to good debugging practice.
This is how the world will look for the next fifty years or so. Formerly, markets and labor pools were isolated from one another by transport and regulatory barriers, with the result that standards of living could vary wildly from one part of the planet to another. Now, the barriers are low or gone, which means that the places with lower-priced labor are pulling jobs from higher-priced areas. Of course, this decreases the econonmic level of the former and increases the latter, causing wages to fall in the source country and rise in the sink country. Let this process run long enough, and the whole world will have roughly comparable labor pools working for roughly comparable wages at a roughly comparable standard of living. If we're lucky, we'll get everyone at something close to the current "first world" standard; if not, we'll get a straight averaging of the current world situation.
I was using it in its Yiddish sense, actually, although it's of course borrowed from German.
http://www.bartleby.com/61/97/M0219700.html
If Fleury is smart, he'll keep them on the core commit team and wish them all the best with their venture, and quietly hire replacements -- there's plenty of good J2EE talent around. That makes him look like a mensch, scores community brownie points, helps the public image of OSS, and (the real reason) does nothing to frighten paying corporate clients away from The JBoss Group. If he does *anything* that looks like flinching about the loss of a few developers, corporations will flee to the waiting arms of BEA or IBM, because it will prove to them that the whole thing was a house of cards to start with.
The anlogy has some difficulties. With heart surgery, the range for creativity is a little narrower, and the outcome is valued on a very different scale. With purely creative work, anyone can claim to be doing it, and the only guideline as to who is successful is critical and popular acknowledgement. And you'll note (just for example) that nearly every successful abstract artist started his career learning and mastering realism, because realism hones the skills that make successful abstract art possible.
Yes, but for the apprentice artists, learning to duplicate the brushstrokes or camera angles of a Master will allow them to put their own brush or camera in exactly the right place when it's their turn to be creative. If I have a brilliant painting in my head but I can't put paint on canvas as I imagine it, I will fail. The same idea applies to all creative disciplines. Mechanics are not the interesting part, but they're utterly necessary and often best learned through imitation.
Back in Ye Olde Days, this was a standard part of being an apprentice artisan. Before you got set loose to create new designs, you had to practice recreating old ones until you could do it perfectly. I think there's a lot to be said for this system, and it's rather cool that a certain kind of geek imposes it on him- or herself as if by instinct.
That just goes to show you what having two decades between you and your last systems engineering course will do. :)
s/pilot/copilot/
s/left/right/
Exactly. I've been using Rhapsody for many months and burned only a handful of songs. With the full catalog available for unlimited on-demand streaming, and the fact I don 99% of my serious listening while working at my audio-maximized home machine, it's a great deal for me.
There's no "P" in "QA".
Your points are all true but miss the key observation that dang few people were creating web sites -- much less doing "web design" -- prior to 1994. The web was "available" in 1993, but much more so by mid-94. Mosaic was "available" in 1993, but began to reach significant numbers of users in mid-94. And ISPs can be used for services other than the web, of course.
The story says that in 1998 he left his police job to pursue web design, "a hobby he had been dabbling in for five years". 1998 - 5 = 1993.
Depending on the likely residents, I'd be a bit worried about sharing a T1 (1.5 Mbps) between 160 units. Even if you figure that at peak only 10% of the units are doing bandwidth-hungry operations (media streaming, large file downloads), that still leaves only around 100 kbps per unit, which is pretty bad. If 20% try for 'heavy' access at once, they'd be better off using dialup. In other words, 30 teenage kids or similarly high-bandwidth users could crater your entire scheme.
I suspect that in many cases there is no real product (or even 'real' company) behind the sleazier spams. The whole thing is a trick to get your money, and probably your CC number for further fun and games. After all, most people will be too embarrassed to complain to the cops that their penis enlargment pills never arrived.
Somewhere, Theodore Roszak is either grinning or wincing.
And that's why tech today is qualitatively different from tech of the past. Fire could keep you alive in the winter or make you quite dead if you let it get out of control, but whatever *you* did with it, the clan in the next valley over wouldn't be killed if you made the wrong choice or got unlucky. With modern science, we're in danger of killing everyone all at once with one experiment gone awry. That is why scientists and ethicists are beginning to talk about the need to reevaluate the "free for all" model of research.
Of course, moving all the most dangerous work out to the outer solar system would be the best solution.
It's been a standard Indian trick for absorbing enemies for millennia. Where do you think the caste system came from? Every new wave of would-be conquerors got absorbed as a new upper-tier caste, leaving the core system unchanged.
This strategy also seems to work for operating systems.