Umm, maybe if I didn't use a PC at all and instead played games on a console of some kind, you could draw the conclusion that I was a "console gamer". Since I use my PC for games, one might instead come to the conclusion that I am some kind of "PC Gamer", or something like that. Heck, in an ideal world there might even be a magazine dedicated to people like me.
Regardless of what you've chosen to label me, I fail to see your point. If you're suggesting that I could simply swap my PC for Console X and rid the world of a copy of Windows XP, I'm sorry to inform you even though I'm the happy owner of three other game systems (PS2, GameCube, GBA), I still generally prefer PC titles over those released for consoles.
That's probably true, strictly in terms of numbers, but is a vastly different statement than "Most games that you would want to play on a PC are also available on consoles."
I have a PS2, a GameCube, a GameBoy Advance, and a Windows PC, and most of the games I'm really interested in (and therefore end up buying) are exclusively for the PC. A very small minority of those games are also available for Mac or Linux, but the numbers really aren't there to justify switching.
Why bother? As a gamer, 80% of my home computer-using time is spent playing games (90% of which don't run in Linux). The remaining 20% is taken up by web browsing (using FireFox) and email (using Thunderbird).
As I said in another post, if you're primarily a gamer, chances are that Windows is "good enough" for any non-gaming application you want to use. If you've got a firewall installed and don't use IE, chances are good you've never run into anything like the author of the article describes. At which point, there's really no appeal to the bother of rebooting every time you want to switch between game and non-game applications.
But why would I, one of the unwashed, game-playing masses, start using another OS?
Sure, I could stop playing 95% of the games I like, install Linux, and then let my computer sit idle (I really don't use my home computer for anything other than playing games) while I wait for game developers to start producing games for my new OS of choice. But I'm not that altruistic. And neither is anyone else.
The fact of the matter is that Windows is currently by far the best platform for playing PC games, and, with a little bit of technical sense ("use a firewall"), it's "good enough" for pretty much everything else. There is currently no compelling reason for gamers to switch OSes, and as a result, no compelling reason for the bulk of publishers to release games for anything other than Windows.
I think for a certain segment of users, that's certainly the case.
For myself, I've stuck with Windows because about the only thing I use my home computer for is playing games, and I'm fairly certain I'm not alone in this.
Yes, there are games available on other OSes, but unless you've got very specific tastes, chances are you'd be missing out on a lot of titles if you decided to purchase a Mac as your dedicated games machine.
I had the same experience with Police Quest 3 - didn't catch some guy speeding at the beginning, so when I showed up at a guy's house for the big showdown at the end, he's not there. Of course, I had to go out and spend $15 on a hint book to figure out what was going on.
At the time, I thought Sierra games were great, and I still have fond memories of a lot of them. In retrospect though, Lucasarts' offerings were much better put together.
Diesels don't have a rep for low power - most farm machinery as well as heavier-duty trucks use diesel engines because they typically provide more power than you would get out of a comparably sized gasoline engine.
Diesel cars do have a reputation for poor get-up-and-go, and having owned a Jetta, it's a deserved reputation. However, this is the result of the engine being small (and efficient), and has nothing to do with it being diesel. A 1.8 litre gasoline engine has only marginally more pick-up than a 1.8 litre TDI, but consumes noticeably more fuel.
"Intelligent Design" is neither a particularly new theory, nor a particularly compelling one.
The chances of all of those variables being "perfectly tuned" to allow human life to evolve are certainly small, but are only statistically interesting if you presume that human life was some sort of universal "goal" from the outset. At that point, arguing for Inetlligent Design is just question begging.
Strictly speaking, when I put a song up on Kazaa, and you decide to download it, you're not making a copy of it - my computer is making a copy of it for you, and sending that copy over the internet to your computer. The fact that you were the one that initiated the process doesn't matter.
Additionally, section 80, subsection 2, paragraph (c) of the act specifically forbids making copies for the purpose of "communicating to the public by telecommunication", which could easily encompass P2P networks.
However, with the advent of online music stores (itunes.com, buymusic.com, etc.), now those MP3's in your shared folder could be argued to be the originals, and the people coming in and downloading them are making copies.
Those were originally my thoughts on the matter as well, but I've since seen a different interpretation that makes me far less convinced.
If I have an mp3 sitting on my computer and you request a copy of it, you're not actually making the copy - my computer makes a copy for you, and sends the copy over the internet. Running Kazaa, or whatever, could be argued to be effectively the same as running a service where people mail you requests, you burn a CD for them, and mail it back to them.
The important bit is that it is legal to make a copy for personal use, but it is not legal to make a copy for the purposes of distribution (whether or not it's for money) or for "communicating to the public by telecommunication" (which could be argued to include P2P systems).
The article leaves out mention of subsection 2 of the relevant section.
Subsection 2 states that copying is not allowed if it is for the purposes of: (a) selling or renting out, or by way of trade exposing or offering for sale or rental; (b) distributing, whether or not for the purpose of trade; (c) communicating to the public by telecommunication; or (d) performing, or causing to be performed, in public.
It seems to me that it would not be hard to make a legal argument that P2P file sharing is prohibited by either section (b) or (c).
With regard to your first question, Thunderbird keeps your mail folders/preferences separate from its installation directory. To install Tb0.2 you just need to delete your existing Thunderbird directory and put the new one in it's place. You can check out the installation instructions here.
With regards to your second question, generally speaking "bouncing" is something that only mail servers can do. What Thunderbird can do is identify spam and filter it to a "Junk" folder (or just delete it right away).
Well, for what it's worth, Thunderbird is currently taking up about 15 megs of ram on my W2K box, though I think part of it may depend on things like how much mail is in the currently active folder.
I just started up OE (having never used it before) and it clocked in at about 12 megs.
The argument that we should suddenly rewrite and reinterpret the past 200 years of copyright law (in which noncommercial infringement was generally held to be inactionable) just to kowtow to what the misguided oligopoly trying to retain their control over mass expression and culture mistakenly feels is their own self-interest is utterly absurd.
If you wrote the book well and expressed new ideas having used Lewis's ideas as a starting point, then your work could be praised as "creative".
Re:Can't say I agree with you completely...
on
Flatterland
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps I phrased that badly. The original idea wasn't Stewart's creation, but the story and character usage were. There isn't a simple "translation" he could have done to automatically generate Flatterland from Flatland - writing the book required creativity.
Your idea to write satire from the perspective of a demon would not be considered "creative". If you wrote the book well and expressed new ideas using the characters having used Lewis's ideas as a starting point, then your work could be praised as "creative".
The Planiverse is still available
on
Flatterland
·
· Score: 1
Actually, Chapters.ca (if you're in Canada) and Amazon.com (if you're elsewhere) both list Planiverse as "usually shipping in 24 hours".
I did see a copy of it on the shelf at the local Chapters, so it seems to still be available.
Can't say I agree with you completely...
on
Flatterland
·
· Score: 2
I'd agree with basically the last part of the review - Flatterland is an excellent introduction to mathematical and cosmological ideas like multi-dimensional space, wormholes, the possibility of time travel, and string theory.
On the subject of creativity, I'd disagree. I would say that Flatterland is a creatively written book on physics. Perhaps not original in it's use of allegory, but to say that using "living" characters and story twists to successfully explain complex spatial concepts isn't creative, is selling Ian Stewart short.
Regarding social satire, the reviewer is right - there isn't any (or at least very little). But then, I didn't pick up Flatterland in the "social satire" section of the book store (if such a section exists); I picked it up in the "Mathematics" section (incidentally, Flatland was in the literature section). To critisize the book for poor social commentary seems to miss the point of the book entirely. Flatterland does claim to be a sequel to Flatland in that it's an expansion on the spacial ideas presented in the original book. At no point does it claim to also be a clever satire of modern society. Quite honestly, Flatterland gave me enough to think about - adding any significant amount of satire would only serve to clutter the book and confuse the reader.
Briefly, it's a free site that allows you to write a journal that other members (and the general public) can read. It's a little more interesting than that, but I can't really do it justice.
ANYWAY, they've set it up as a free site and given their users the option of paying $25 to use the site. I think only 2% of the (now) 100,000 or so users have paid, but they have enough money to keep upgrading servers and have even started paying some of the staff, who up until now were working for free.
Actually, at the University of Waterloo in CS we've got a real-time computing course in which one of term-long projects you can choose to do is write a system for controlling a set of trains.
Only the Computer Science students get to drive trains here... who knows what the Comp. Engineers do:)
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Umm, maybe if I didn't use a PC at all and instead played games on a console of some kind, you could draw the conclusion that I was a "console gamer". Since I use my PC for games, one might instead come to the conclusion that I am some kind of "PC Gamer", or something like that. Heck, in an ideal world there might even be a magazine dedicated to people like me.
Regardless of what you've chosen to label me, I fail to see your point. If you're suggesting that I could simply swap my PC for Console X and rid the world of a copy of Windows XP, I'm sorry to inform you even though I'm the happy owner of three other game systems (PS2, GameCube, GBA), I still generally prefer PC titles over those released for consoles.
Most games now are on consoles.
That's probably true, strictly in terms of numbers, but is a vastly different statement than "Most games that you would want to play on a PC are also available on consoles."
I have a PS2, a GameCube, a GameBoy Advance, and a Windows PC, and most of the games I'm really interested in (and therefore end up buying) are exclusively for the PC. A very small minority of those games are also available for Mac or Linux, but the numbers really aren't there to justify switching.
Why bother? As a gamer, 80% of my home computer-using time is spent playing games (90% of which don't run in Linux). The remaining 20% is taken up by web browsing (using FireFox) and email (using Thunderbird).
As I said in another post, if you're primarily a gamer, chances are that Windows is "good enough" for any non-gaming application you want to use. If you've got a firewall installed and don't use IE, chances are good you've never run into anything like the author of the article describes. At which point, there's really no appeal to the bother of rebooting every time you want to switch between game and non-game applications.
But why would I, one of the unwashed, game-playing masses, start using another OS?
Sure, I could stop playing 95% of the games I like, install Linux, and then let my computer sit idle (I really don't use my home computer for anything other than playing games) while I wait for game developers to start producing games for my new OS of choice. But I'm not that altruistic. And neither is anyone else.
The fact of the matter is that Windows is currently by far the best platform for playing PC games, and, with a little bit of technical sense ("use a firewall"), it's "good enough" for pretty much everything else. There is currently no compelling reason for gamers to switch OSes, and as a result, no compelling reason for the bulk of publishers to release games for anything other than Windows.
I think for a certain segment of users, that's certainly the case.
For myself, I've stuck with Windows because about the only thing I use my home computer for is playing games, and I'm fairly certain I'm not alone in this.
Yes, there are games available on other OSes, but unless you've got very specific tastes, chances are you'd be missing out on a lot of titles if you decided to purchase a Mac as your dedicated games machine.
I had the same experience with Police Quest 3 - didn't catch some guy speeding at the beginning, so when I showed up at a guy's house for the big showdown at the end, he's not there. Of course, I had to go out and spend $15 on a hint book to figure out what was going on.
At the time, I thought Sierra games were great, and I still have fond memories of a lot of them. In retrospect though, Lucasarts' offerings were much better put together.
Diesels don't have a rep for low power - most farm machinery as well as heavier-duty trucks use diesel engines because they typically provide more power than you would get out of a comparably sized gasoline engine.
Diesel cars do have a reputation for poor get-up-and-go, and having owned a Jetta, it's a deserved reputation. However, this is the result of the engine being small (and efficient), and has nothing to do with it being diesel. A 1.8 litre gasoline engine has only marginally more pick-up than a 1.8 litre TDI, but consumes noticeably more fuel.
"Intelligent Design" is neither a particularly new theory, nor a particularly compelling one.
The chances of all of those variables being "perfectly tuned" to allow human life to evolve are certainly small, but are only statistically interesting if you presume that human life was some sort of universal "goal" from the outset. At that point, arguing for Inetlligent Design is just question begging.
Unfortunately, it's not that cut-and-dried.
Strictly speaking, when I put a song up on Kazaa, and you decide to download it, you're not making a copy of it - my computer is making a copy of it for you, and sending that copy over the internet to your computer. The fact that you were the one that initiated the process doesn't matter.
Additionally, section 80, subsection 2, paragraph (c) of the act specifically forbids making copies for the purpose of "communicating to the public by telecommunication", which could easily encompass P2P networks.
However, with the advent of online music stores (itunes.com, buymusic.com, etc.), now those MP3's in your shared folder could be argued to be the originals, and the people coming in and downloading them are making copies.
Those were originally my thoughts on the matter as well, but I've since seen a different interpretation that makes me far less convinced.
If I have an mp3 sitting on my computer and you request a copy of it, you're not actually making the copy - my computer makes a copy for you, and sends the copy over the internet. Running Kazaa, or whatever, could be argued to be effectively the same as running a service where people mail you requests, you burn a CD for them, and mail it back to them.
The relevant link is here.
The important bit is that it is legal to make a copy for personal use, but it is not legal to make a copy for the purposes of distribution (whether or not it's for money) or for "communicating to the public by telecommunication" (which could be argued to include P2P systems).
To perhaps clarify my last post, what you said is not actually wrong - it is legal to download copies of music from the internet for personal use.
It is not legal to make or distribute copies to the "public" (which could be easily construed as "everyone on Kazaa").
So, it is legal to be a mooch in Canada.
The article leaves out mention of subsection 2 of the relevant section.
Subsection 2 states that copying is not allowed if it is for the purposes of: (a) selling or renting out, or by way of trade exposing or offering for sale or rental; (b) distributing, whether or not for the purpose of trade; (c) communicating to the public by telecommunication; or (d) performing, or causing to be performed, in public.
It seems to me that it would not be hard to make a legal argument that P2P file sharing is prohibited by either section (b) or (c).
A billion dollar recording industry and 20 billion dollar movie rental industry has shown thhat you're wrong.
No, both have simply shown that when you hold a monopoly on content you get to play by different rules.
With regard to your first question, Thunderbird keeps your mail folders/preferences separate from its installation directory. To install Tb0.2 you just need to delete your existing Thunderbird directory and put the new one in it's place. You can check out the installation instructions here.
With regards to your second question, generally speaking "bouncing" is something that only mail servers can do. What Thunderbird can do is identify spam and filter it to a "Junk" folder (or just delete it right away).
Well, for what it's worth, Thunderbird is currently taking up about 15 megs of ram on my W2K box, though I think part of it may depend on things like how much mail is in the currently active folder.
I just started up OE (having never used it before) and it clocked in at about 12 megs.
The argument that we should suddenly rewrite and reinterpret the past 200 years of copyright law (in which noncommercial infringement was generally held to be inactionable) just to kowtow to what the misguided oligopoly trying to retain their control over mass expression and culture mistakenly feels is their own self-interest is utterly absurd.
:)
That was poetic
Yes... that was the whole point.
Are they going to sue you for copyright infringement? Of course not. They're just demonstrating the silliness of it all.
Rather:
If you wrote the book well and expressed new ideas having used Lewis's ideas as a starting point, then your work could be praised as "creative".
Perhaps I phrased that badly. The original idea wasn't Stewart's creation, but the story and character usage were. There isn't a simple "translation" he could have done to automatically generate Flatterland from Flatland - writing the book required creativity.
Your idea to write satire from the perspective of a demon would not be considered "creative". If you wrote the book well and expressed new ideas using the characters having used Lewis's ideas as a starting point, then your work could be praised as "creative".
Actually, Chapters.ca (if you're in Canada) and Amazon.com (if you're elsewhere) both list Planiverse as "usually shipping in 24 hours".
I did see a copy of it on the shelf at the local Chapters, so it seems to still be available.
I'd agree with basically the last part of the review - Flatterland is an excellent introduction to mathematical and cosmological ideas like multi-dimensional space, wormholes, the possibility of time travel, and string theory.
On the subject of creativity, I'd disagree. I would say that Flatterland is a creatively written book on physics. Perhaps not original in it's use of allegory, but to say that using "living" characters and story twists to successfully explain complex spatial concepts isn't creative, is selling Ian Stewart short.
Regarding social satire, the reviewer is right - there isn't any (or at least very little). But then, I didn't pick up Flatterland in the "social satire" section of the book store (if such a section exists); I picked it up in the "Mathematics" section (incidentally, Flatland was in the literature section). To critisize the book for poor social commentary seems to miss the point of the book entirely. Flatterland does claim to be a sequel to Flatland in that it's an expansion on the spacial ideas presented in the original book. At no point does it claim to also be a clever satire of modern society. Quite honestly, Flatterland gave me enough to think about - adding any significant amount of satire would only serve to clutter the book and confuse the reader.
Have a look at www.livejournal.com.
Briefly, it's a free site that allows you to write a journal that other members (and the general public) can read. It's a little more interesting than that, but I can't really do it justice.
ANYWAY, they've set it up as a free site and given their users the option of paying $25 to use the site. I think only 2% of the (now) 100,000 or so users have paid, but they have enough money to keep upgrading servers and have even started paying some of the staff, who up until now were working for free.
Actually, at the University of Waterloo in CS we've got a real-time computing course in which one of term-long projects you can choose to do is write a system for controlling a set of trains.
Only the Computer Science students get to drive trains here... who knows what the Comp. Engineers do :)