I'd glad to hear that they're happy to help with tests, but I suspect they'd have problems if home owners were encouraged to test their 911 service monthly.
It is BSD-like, but old BSD with advertizing clauses. It requires you to include a set of notices in your derived work, and restricts the names you can give a derived work. RMS's statement should be read as:
It is a non-copyleft free software license (okay) which is incompatible with the GNU GPL (bad).
That is, while there are non-copyleft free software licenses which are compatible with the GNU GPL (e.g., new BSD), this is not one of them. It is true that PHP users won't care about the difference, but it may discourage developers of composite systems, as they cannot legally be derived from both GPL software and PHP.
When I punched my PI number into my AT machine, it didn't give me any money. On the other hand, it did let me draw a nice circle...
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
I think the fundamental issue is one of game balance. How do you make a game which is interesting and fun in which it is advantageous to behave in a moral fashion without having blatant propaganda? I suspect it's possible, but it is a significant leap in game design away from the current styles.
I'm imagining a game a bit like the Final Fantasy series, where you can steal things out of people's houses if you want. But if you do so too much, the towns fall into poverty as the game progresses, making the end very difficult. On the other hand, you could give items and money to people and they will do better, giving your side in the final conflict more resources. In encounters in the wilderness, experience would be available for any way of dealing with the siutation; you can kill things, but this causes more dangerous monsters to flourish. A player who went through the game in the normal RPG way would turn out at the end to actually be the ultimate evil, having ravanged the world in a quest for power (but, perhaps, able to intentionally lose the final battle and win posthumous forgiveness).
Of course, the most common explicitly anti-christian sentiment in RPGs (the church turns out to actually be evil) is straight out of the gospel. The plot of FFX is essentially "Popular religious figure and band of followers find that the religious organization really just wants power. It tries to do them in, but they miraculously continue. Rejecting the church-supported idea that continual sacrifice is necessary, they set out to break the cycle of violence and bring redemption to the world." If there were multiple forms of money, you'd probably be able to exchange them in the temples.
It actually makes sense for 911 calls to use a switched network, because it matters that all of the packets get through. VoIP isn't designed to provide the other end with a complete recording, just to make a best effort to get the sound there with a low constant latency. Of course, at least currently, you don't actually need phone service to call 911 on a POTS phone.
For that matter, they could use a simpler network to get 911 service over phone lines, because you don't need long distance connections or even connections beyond the local emergency center.
Related issue: there really ought to be a way to test 911. The phone where I am now requires you to dial 9 before most number. Does this apply to 911? There are also a bunch of phone jacks in the office. How can I tell if 911 will work on them (some aren't connected to anything)? It would probably be good for the reliability of the system if people could call 911 and hold 0 and get a recorded message telling them what emergency response center they'd reached. Of course, testing the line will become more important when regular calls aren't testing most of it.
I think there are plenty of people with those skills who would like to help out. The issue is that they would need to learn to code and become familiar with the internals of the project before they could actually change things as systems are done currently.
My feeling is that the useability issue will be solved once UI implementation doesn't require any significant coding. At that point, users with ideas about how UIs should be done will work on projects.
I think a substantial aspect is that there is a substantial component to the performance of the task. In mathematics, if you know the solution to something, it is trivial to reproduce it (and knowing a related solution is a major advantage). So it becomes increasingly a matter of luck in getting problems you've already done as you become more experienced. It would be a bit like having a marathon in which anyone who had run that exact route could just finish instantly, having reduced the sport to a previously solved problem.
The story was submitted a while ago, but you know how long it takes for the editors to get around to posting stuff...
Re:For What It's Worth...
on
TMBG on DRM
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· Score: 1
TMBG's stuff doesn't have DRM either (except, perhaps, against theft by the RIAA; they talk about making sure they own their own digital rights). In fact, the password protection on their web site for downloading songs doesn't actually work (I typed the wrong thing for the password and it worked anyway).
TMBG has always taken the path of just producing stuff, and getting paid, and not trying to make too strong a connection between these things.
A good camera will come preset to the normal conditions. If you want to take a picture focused at the center of the frame of something at a moderate distance in either good light or with the flash, you aim and push the button. The more your desires differ from these conditions, the more you have to fiddle with settings. That's what he means by making common usage easy. The special settings won't help at all for 75% of your pictures, because they're already set right. The other 25% could be improved with different settings, due to the lighting conditions and activity being different and uncommon.
The thing I noticed about Squeak in the demo description is collaboration using a shared workspace via intercontinental IM. I think that's a better example of something computers should do than he gives in the article.
All OSes support custom URI handlers which will execute arbitrary applications. Said URIs are not expected to be necessarily safe.
Why do they support this, then? It's not safe to use with untrusted URIs, but there aren't any programs that only get trusted URIs. It therefore should never be used without a bunch of code to check for unsafe schemes (which won't necessarily be sufficient if you can add new handlers later or if you get a new version of the OS). The operating system should provide an API for using URIs in a safe way. Maybe, as a secondary feature, it could provide another API for using URIs in a way that requires trusting the source of the URIs.
Linux is a good thing to use with Oracle, becuase it's what Oracle suggests for best performance these days. It also gives you clustering, which means you can replace your 20 separate databases with a 20 machine cluster and have the single database not overloaded.
You definitely want a supported enterprise Linux for your production machines, but it's also worthwhile to give developers on workstations copies of Oracle to use locally. Development can be a lot easier when you have a database that's all your own to test against, where you don't have to worry about other stuff going on and interacting with your tests.
Just wait 400 years, and anything that was sufficiently popular to still be around will be considered erudite. Shakespeare wrote for the illiterate lower classes (Romeo and Juliet: sex, violence, innuendo, suicide; moral of the story: sucks to be them). Catullus was the Green Day of his time (one of his poems is making fun of a friend's accent). Most of the entertainment at any particular time isn't going to be very challenging until the masses can't understand it without footnotes or a dictionary.
Stuff that's not fundamentally pretty simple may be better, but it's not as much fun after a long day of intellectually challenging work.
The voters of MA choose, among themselves and only themselves, who MA's votes for president go to. The voters of FL choose, among themselves and only themselves, who FL's votes for president go to. A MA vote and a FL vote are separate in the same way that a goal in one football game and a goal in another one are separate. Each of them goes towards a different win, and the total of the wins goes towards determining the overall winner. It doesn't matter how much you win a game by in determining your record. Sure, there are a lot of statistics that are kept across games, but the one that really matters isn't one of those.
In fact, it's for a similar reason: it biases the result towards those who are consistently good over those who have a small amount of overwhelming success.
Well, rover lifespan is a small part of the project. If the rovers had lasted only 90 days as planned, but hadn't made it to Mars, it would have been a failure. If they'd lasted 90 days, but the sensors had broken right away, that would have been similarly bad. If the rover would last 90 days under unfavorable conditions, and forever under good weather, they designed it with the right lifespan.
I'm probably somewhat biased in being from New England (traditionally heavily immigrant), but here, at least, there are people with dozens of different nations of origin all in the same place. Really, they speak Dutch, German, French, and Spanish in all of those states. In all of the member states, the only language common to a large portion of the population was English, so the laws of San Antonio, Philidelphia, and Boston were all written in English. The EU has to deal with states that are each less diverse, and are different.
JPEG is good for anything that's already irregular, because the artifacts it creates aren't easily visible. These days, more and more graphics are like that, so lossless image compression is less important. But try looking at a JPEG screenshot with a bunch of overlapping windows; you'll find that it looks much less clean than a PNG version.
It's certainly possible that the textbooks are overstating the range of images which benefit from lossless compression these days, though. Most stuff doesn't have the clean areas and sharp lines that JPEGs mess up.
Not at all. All US voting is actually by state, in that each state's citizens determine the state's vote or votes in the federal election, or each state's citizens determine the state's representatives. A Massachusetts presidential vote and a Florida presidential vote don't get combined for any official purpose, so there's no reason that they should be collected in the same way.
It certainly allows you to not vote for anyone in a section; I've often left a section blank when either someone I didn't like was unopposed or where I didn't care about the office. The validation would be to catch cases where you voted for too many people in a section (we have alderman-at-large elections where you can vote for up to four out of the group) or put marks in the vote column that could not be read as votes (e.g., between the bits you're supposed to connect). You'd basically only want to reject ballots when the machine couldn't figure out how it should update its totals.
Movies are free if you don't see them. If a movie is bad enough that I wouldn't pay to see it, I'd walk out even if it were free. Actually, having paid to see a movie, I'd be more likely to waste a couple of hours on it, just in case it got better.
The accounting for the movie business, like any other IP-based business, is hard to make any sense of, because it doesn't cost the movie company anything for someone to see the movie. Pricing is based not on per-unit cost, but on what people are willing to pay. Notice that you pay a fixed rate in the theater per person to see a movie once, a fixed rate to rent it and show it to as many people as will fit in your living room as many times as you want for two days, and a fixed rate to buy it and show it to many people many times as long as you keep it; clearly, there's no fixed price for a person seeing a movie. So there's no answer to how much they should have made.
There really aren't any answers to the economics of producing content. The only things we can judge the movie industry on are the actions they take, the amount we enjoy movies, and the amount we spend on them.
It all started in December of '87, when I was playing with the IBM PC XT my father brought home from work. Near the end of the month, I'd gotten it to print some messages and start a program instead of saying "Non-system disk or disk error". A few nights later, I was really excited, because not only was it Christmas, I had lost another one of my baby teeth. If I was really lucky, I'd get some new games and a bit of spending money for myself. As it turned out, I got Zelda II that year, and played it constantly until school started again. As a result, I didn't think to look for the floppy that I'd been working on for quite some time, and assumed that I'd lost it or put something else on it or something. Little did I know that two gift-giving fictional characters, bereft of snacks, had decided to ransack the computer room. Meanwhile, in Finland, a high school student was carefully brushing his teeth...
Nothing is wrong with it. There are plenty of area in the US (including where I vote) that use paper ballots you write on. I actually think that the local one is ideal: you use a black marker to connect two parts of an arrow which points to the name you want to vote for. You then put the ballot into a machine which scans it and retains it for record-keeping. I suspect that the machine will tell you if the ballot was invalid, and have you try again. It's very clear visually what is a vote and what isn't (how many stray pencil marks in a circle make a vote?).
It's also worth considering that Microsoft has reportedly recently restarted IE development. Microsoft has had lots of trouble in the past getting people to upgrade. If they can get people to try Firefox and then release a version of IE which is as good as Firefox but works better on Windows (in the sense of being preloaded and having its components used in system behavior), people will get the upgrade.
I think that most of the useability problems with the web are actually due to bad web browser behavior, rather than bad page design. Browsers shouldn't ever render a single section of text into a space wider than the window, no matter what the document says. Browsers shouldn't ever overlap images and text (unless the image is a background). Of course, there are bad web pages which make it difficult to determine what the site is trying to do, which makes it hard for the browser to do sensible things (e.g., images for borders should sometimes be scaled in only one direction or truncated, rather than scaled in both directions), but browsers should arrange that all sites be as useable as possible, even if that makes ill-designed sites ugly.
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I'd glad to hear that they're happy to help with tests, but I suspect they'd have problems if home owners were encouraged to test their 911 service monthly.
It is BSD-like, but old BSD with advertizing clauses. It requires you to include a set of notices in your derived work, and restricts the names you can give a derived work. RMS's statement should be read as:
It is a non-copyleft free software license (okay) which is incompatible with the GNU GPL (bad).
That is, while there are non-copyleft free software licenses which are compatible with the GNU GPL (e.g., new BSD), this is not one of them. It is true that PHP users won't care about the difference, but it may discourage developers of composite systems, as they cannot legally be derived from both GPL software and PHP.
When I punched my PI number into my AT machine, it didn't give me any money. On the other hand, it did let me draw a nice circle...
I think the fundamental issue is one of game balance. How do you make a game which is interesting and fun in which it is advantageous to behave in a moral fashion without having blatant propaganda? I suspect it's possible, but it is a significant leap in game design away from the current styles.
I'm imagining a game a bit like the Final Fantasy series, where you can steal things out of people's houses if you want. But if you do so too much, the towns fall into poverty as the game progresses, making the end very difficult. On the other hand, you could give items and money to people and they will do better, giving your side in the final conflict more resources. In encounters in the wilderness, experience would be available for any way of dealing with the siutation; you can kill things, but this causes more dangerous monsters to flourish. A player who went through the game in the normal RPG way would turn out at the end to actually be the ultimate evil, having ravanged the world in a quest for power (but, perhaps, able to intentionally lose the final battle and win posthumous forgiveness).
Of course, the most common explicitly anti-christian sentiment in RPGs (the church turns out to actually be evil) is straight out of the gospel. The plot of FFX is essentially "Popular religious figure and band of followers find that the religious organization really just wants power. It tries to do them in, but they miraculously continue. Rejecting the church-supported idea that continual sacrifice is necessary, they set out to break the cycle of violence and bring redemption to the world." If there were multiple forms of money, you'd probably be able to exchange them in the temples.
It actually makes sense for 911 calls to use a switched network, because it matters that all of the packets get through. VoIP isn't designed to provide the other end with a complete recording, just to make a best effort to get the sound there with a low constant latency. Of course, at least currently, you don't actually need phone service to call 911 on a POTS phone.
For that matter, they could use a simpler network to get 911 service over phone lines, because you don't need long distance connections or even connections beyond the local emergency center.
Related issue: there really ought to be a way to test 911. The phone where I am now requires you to dial 9 before most number. Does this apply to 911? There are also a bunch of phone jacks in the office. How can I tell if 911 will work on them (some aren't connected to anything)? It would probably be good for the reliability of the system if people could call 911 and hold 0 and get a recorded message telling them what emergency response center they'd reached. Of course, testing the line will become more important when regular calls aren't testing most of it.
I think there are plenty of people with those skills who would like to help out. The issue is that they would need to learn to code and become familiar with the internals of the project before they could actually change things as systems are done currently.
My feeling is that the useability issue will be solved once UI implementation doesn't require any significant coding. At that point, users with ideas about how UIs should be done will work on projects.
I think a substantial aspect is that there is a substantial component to the performance of the task. In mathematics, if you know the solution to something, it is trivial to reproduce it (and knowing a related solution is a major advantage). So it becomes increasingly a matter of luck in getting problems you've already done as you become more experienced. It would be a bit like having a marathon in which anyone who had run that exact route could just finish instantly, having reduced the sport to a previously solved problem.
The story was submitted a while ago, but you know how long it takes for the editors to get around to posting stuff...
TMBG's stuff doesn't have DRM either (except, perhaps, against theft by the RIAA; they talk about making sure they own their own digital rights). In fact, the password protection on their web site for downloading songs doesn't actually work (I typed the wrong thing for the password and it worked anyway).
TMBG has always taken the path of just producing stuff, and getting paid, and not trying to make too strong a connection between these things.
A good camera will come preset to the normal conditions. If you want to take a picture focused at the center of the frame of something at a moderate distance in either good light or with the flash, you aim and push the button. The more your desires differ from these conditions, the more you have to fiddle with settings. That's what he means by making common usage easy. The special settings won't help at all for 75% of your pictures, because they're already set right. The other 25% could be improved with different settings, due to the lighting conditions and activity being different and uncommon.
The thing I noticed about Squeak in the demo description is collaboration using a shared workspace via intercontinental IM. I think that's a better example of something computers should do than he gives in the article.
All OSes support custom URI handlers which will execute arbitrary applications. Said URIs are not expected to be necessarily safe.
Why do they support this, then? It's not safe to use with untrusted URIs, but there aren't any programs that only get trusted URIs. It therefore should never be used without a bunch of code to check for unsafe schemes (which won't necessarily be sufficient if you can add new handlers later or if you get a new version of the OS). The operating system should provide an API for using URIs in a safe way. Maybe, as a secondary feature, it could provide another API for using URIs in a way that requires trusting the source of the URIs.
Linux is a good thing to use with Oracle, becuase it's what Oracle suggests for best performance these days. It also gives you clustering, which means you can replace your 20 separate databases with a 20 machine cluster and have the single database not overloaded.
You definitely want a supported enterprise Linux for your production machines, but it's also worthwhile to give developers on workstations copies of Oracle to use locally. Development can be a lot easier when you have a database that's all your own to test against, where you don't have to worry about other stuff going on and interacting with your tests.
Just wait 400 years, and anything that was sufficiently popular to still be around will be considered erudite. Shakespeare wrote for the illiterate lower classes (Romeo and Juliet: sex, violence, innuendo, suicide; moral of the story: sucks to be them). Catullus was the Green Day of his time (one of his poems is making fun of a friend's accent). Most of the entertainment at any particular time isn't going to be very challenging until the masses can't understand it without footnotes or a dictionary.
Stuff that's not fundamentally pretty simple may be better, but it's not as much fun after a long day of intellectually challenging work.
The voters of MA choose, among themselves and only themselves, who MA's votes for president go to. The voters of FL choose, among themselves and only themselves, who FL's votes for president go to. A MA vote and a FL vote are separate in the same way that a goal in one football game and a goal in another one are separate. Each of them goes towards a different win, and the total of the wins goes towards determining the overall winner. It doesn't matter how much you win a game by in determining your record. Sure, there are a lot of statistics that are kept across games, but the one that really matters isn't one of those.
In fact, it's for a similar reason: it biases the result towards those who are consistently good over those who have a small amount of overwhelming success.
Well, rover lifespan is a small part of the project. If the rovers had lasted only 90 days as planned, but hadn't made it to Mars, it would have been a failure. If they'd lasted 90 days, but the sensors had broken right away, that would have been similarly bad. If the rover would last 90 days under unfavorable conditions, and forever under good weather, they designed it with the right lifespan.
I'm probably somewhat biased in being from New England (traditionally heavily immigrant), but here, at least, there are people with dozens of different nations of origin all in the same place. Really, they speak Dutch, German, French, and Spanish in all of those states. In all of the member states, the only language common to a large portion of the population was English, so the laws of San Antonio, Philidelphia, and Boston were all written in English. The EU has to deal with states that are each less diverse, and are different.
JPEG is good for anything that's already irregular, because the artifacts it creates aren't easily visible. These days, more and more graphics are like that, so lossless image compression is less important. But try looking at a JPEG screenshot with a bunch of overlapping windows; you'll find that it looks much less clean than a PNG version.
It's certainly possible that the textbooks are overstating the range of images which benefit from lossless compression these days, though. Most stuff doesn't have the clean areas and sharp lines that JPEGs mess up.
Not at all. All US voting is actually by state, in that each state's citizens determine the state's vote or votes in the federal election, or each state's citizens determine the state's representatives. A Massachusetts presidential vote and a Florida presidential vote don't get combined for any official purpose, so there's no reason that they should be collected in the same way.
It certainly allows you to not vote for anyone in a section; I've often left a section blank when either someone I didn't like was unopposed or where I didn't care about the office. The validation would be to catch cases where you voted for too many people in a section (we have alderman-at-large elections where you can vote for up to four out of the group) or put marks in the vote column that could not be read as votes (e.g., between the bits you're supposed to connect). You'd basically only want to reject ballots when the machine couldn't figure out how it should update its totals.
Movies are free if you don't see them. If a movie is bad enough that I wouldn't pay to see it, I'd walk out even if it were free. Actually, having paid to see a movie, I'd be more likely to waste a couple of hours on it, just in case it got better.
The accounting for the movie business, like any other IP-based business, is hard to make any sense of, because it doesn't cost the movie company anything for someone to see the movie. Pricing is based not on per-unit cost, but on what people are willing to pay. Notice that you pay a fixed rate in the theater per person to see a movie once, a fixed rate to rent it and show it to as many people as will fit in your living room as many times as you want for two days, and a fixed rate to buy it and show it to many people many times as long as you keep it; clearly, there's no fixed price for a person seeing a movie. So there's no answer to how much they should have made.
There really aren't any answers to the economics of producing content. The only things we can judge the movie industry on are the actions they take, the amount we enjoy movies, and the amount we spend on them.
It all started in December of '87, when I was playing with the IBM PC XT my father brought home from work. Near the end of the month, I'd gotten it to print some messages and start a program instead of saying "Non-system disk or disk error". A few nights later, I was really excited, because not only was it Christmas, I had lost another one of my baby teeth. If I was really lucky, I'd get some new games and a bit of spending money for myself. As it turned out, I got Zelda II that year, and played it constantly until school started again. As a result, I didn't think to look for the floppy that I'd been working on for quite some time, and assumed that I'd lost it or put something else on it or something. Little did I know that two gift-giving fictional characters, bereft of snacks, had decided to ransack the computer room. Meanwhile, in Finland, a high school student was carefully brushing his teeth...
Nothing is wrong with it. There are plenty of area in the US (including where I vote) that use paper ballots you write on. I actually think that the local one is ideal: you use a black marker to connect two parts of an arrow which points to the name you want to vote for. You then put the ballot into a machine which scans it and retains it for record-keeping. I suspect that the machine will tell you if the ballot was invalid, and have you try again. It's very clear visually what is a vote and what isn't (how many stray pencil marks in a circle make a vote?).
It's also worth considering that Microsoft has reportedly recently restarted IE development. Microsoft has had lots of trouble in the past getting people to upgrade. If they can get people to try Firefox and then release a version of IE which is as good as Firefox but works better on Windows (in the sense of being preloaded and having its components used in system behavior), people will get the upgrade.
I think that most of the useability problems with the web are actually due to bad web browser behavior, rather than bad page design. Browsers shouldn't ever render a single section of text into a space wider than the window, no matter what the document says. Browsers shouldn't ever overlap images and text (unless the image is a background). Of course, there are bad web pages which make it difficult to determine what the site is trying to do, which makes it hard for the browser to do sensible things (e.g., images for borders should sometimes be scaled in only one direction or truncated, rather than scaled in both directions), but browsers should arrange that all sites be as useable as possible, even if that makes ill-designed sites ugly.