Hell, I like the non-doubleclick ads on/., most of them are for sites like Think Geek, where I buy tons of stuff!
Agreed, I don't mind seeing ads for "considered cool by geeks" stuff. Targeted ads that are accurately targeted (/. readers are interested in geek things, google users are interested in their search string) are kind of cool, occasionally even helpful, whereas other ads are kind of annoying.
Why doesn't/. already have an ad rating system like the post rating system? I'd turn doubleclick back on, if I could slap a "+1 Funny" or "-1 Off Topic" on whatever it served me, and eventually only see the ads that were strong enough to survive.
I don't know about you but I kept expecting a scene where the Jedi council is waiting for the report on Anakin's farandolae to come back from the lab. "Hmm. Echthroi. Prognosis not good. To the Dark Side he will turn."
Click-through isn't everything.:-) It sure looks like "porn ads under Nintendo" would still be disallowed for other reasons, such as lack of relevancy and failure to use appropriate keywords.
Rules aren't everything either though... they're useless unless they are feasible to enforce. In the general case it would be difficult to automate a check for relevancy/appropriateness, much more difficult than checking click-through which requires no understanding of human language. (So of course irrelevant poetry would be reprimanded for the readily discernable symptom of irrelevancy: low click-through.)
However, I think for a specific "irrelevant" topic, there would be a decent chance of understanding ads of that topic automatically and checking their relevancy to the query, even if, as you suggest, the Nintendo kiddies are clicking through. 'Cause then you're in "natural language understanding in a restricted domain" (where domain == pr0n), and your most pressing research issue is probably to figure out how much of the system you have to whitewash in order to get your papers accepted for publication.
Overall, Toni Räsänen has programmed a very nice clone. Moreover, he is willing to share the sourcecode with everyone who is interested in continuing the project (under certain conditions, of course)! Hence, if you'd like to continue his excellent work, you should visit Imagination's homepage (http://www.ee.oulu.fi/~taur) to get the sourcecode and all further details.
I downloaded the code to get the "further details". The file opensrc.doc has info on its license, which seems to be basically "You may do any modifications you please, as long as we (the original authors) are credited for original work, and end user is informed of your modifications.... Do feel free to use any code of the game for your own programs, as long as I am (or, if not me, the author responsible for the code you use, is) credited." This file also mentions that the game is written in DJGPP C.
ok, now somebody port this puppy to Linux and PalmOS...;-)
Well... if I recall correctly, people didn't believe Troy existed either until Schliemann said he'd dug it up. (though there seems to be dispute over whether that really was Troy.) Some things don't change much, eh.
I'm not sure how this is crazier than people who assert in polls that, if the technology were available, they would choose to raise only children that were blonde. But then, I consider that pretty dashed crazy.
I agree, the first five Amber books seem pretty feasible in terms of technology. They're not even all that long. Herewith I express guarded hopefulness. It really depends on whether they preserve the "attitude".
Smokers chose to smoke? Yes, they did. Usually in junior high, if not earlier, because it was cool, because they see people doing it in ads and movies and sometimes in their own homes, and because every teenager is convinced they are by-God immortal. Eventually some of them decide that smoking was a really bad idea, and some subset of them eventually manage to quit. (Trendy Gen-Xers who picked up cigar smoking last year are another matter entirely, for them I have no pity.)
I have nothing particular to say about Everquest, except that I've played it, I've played MUDs, I've played ye olde Dungeons and Dragons, I've played live-action role-playing games, and all manner of things. If it's a week-long LARP, eventually it's over and "we return you to your regularly scheduled life" until the next session. Computer games (such as MUDs and netrek and Civ and SimEarth... and Everquest, but it's too new a game for me personally to know someone who flunked classes on it) are never over per se, so in some sense the "safety" is off. The game does not stop, the player has to make himself stop. For some folks this is easier than for others (this is so trite that I trust no one disbelieves it).
And, yes, you can watch a normal fellow student who deprives themselves of sleep suddenly start to exhibit symptoms of depression (goes away when they get regular sleep again)... given a game of non-finite duration that rewards an irregular sleep cycle, I can see that in some cases people could get into a downward spiral.
Like I said, I hadn't read the agreement in months. It does look better written than I remember from last year, disregarding various typos - I may well have hashed it into the same mental bin as their API documentation by mistake (I will assume that that has improved in the meantime). But you've failed to mention that although I don't actually need a fax receiving number (if I have an email account with enough space to receive a scanned contract that might be all 8 pages if they're feeling thorough), I do still need to fax them the contract after I sign it.
I could go down to Mailboxes Etc. and pay them for the privilege of using their machine to send and/or receive, or I could even go down to Office Despot or whatever and buy a fax machine of my Very Own for perhaps the price of a double latte at Starbucks.
And then I could support a platform that involves having to reboot from linux to windows on every compile-and-test cycle just to use the emulator. Handera was extreeeemely borderline for this reason, and requiring me to jump through an extra hoop for the ROM contract, trivial though it may be!, puts Sony one baby step over the edge. If they switch to a clickwrap, sure, I'll suck it up and reboot a lot for them too. Or if a linux port of their emulator magically appears (fat chance even if they do release the source), sure, I'll cough up the dough for their little fax handshake, seeing as how I have now spent more time posting in this thread than it would have taken me to walk (uphill both ways, in the snow,) to the nearest copyshop that offers fax service.
Of course my own personal quibbles (about which no one but me really cares and I'm not even sure about me) are beside the original point of this thread, which is that yes Sony is still in violation of the GPL with respect to the executable-only release of their latest emulator.
I went to their third-party developers page one more time to check it out. It still says "source code will be available with the final version". (What's wrong with this picture...) There are two download links labelled Emulator ("PEG-T600C/T400/T415" and "PEG-S and PEG-N Series") and one download link labelled Source ("PEG-S and PEG-N Series"). This sounds to me like they have gotten, at most, half of a clue.
Not that I'm likely to develop for their platform when they require a fax number, which I don't have, to complete the handshake protocol for the ROM download contract, which last time I looked at it (months ago) didn't look like anything I wanted to sign anyway. (Not that I objected to the terms, but that I couldn't parse the terms. I can deal with legalese or with foreign-instruction-manual English but please not both at once.)
[NO, I'm not trying to say Tolkien invented Elves. But the genre of modern fantasy did begin with him.]
To keep this/.ish, I'd argue that Tolkien invented Elves in the same way that Xerox invented {things that people now attribute to say Apple or Microsoft or Al Gore}: a few different versions of the thing were kicking around, shrunken and vaguely malicious perhaps; and then suddenly there is this fully detailed, fleshed-out, working implementation of Elves; and now today there are a million of them with the serial numbers filed off, and a few massive corporations profiting from them (not the originator, of course); and no one can imagine Elves being any other way, with the exception of Keebler and rebellious authors like Brust and Cherryh.
This reminds me of a friend who (after working too many long hours) once he had some free time again, had forgotten what he used to do for fun. Sometimes it's hard to think back to that after it's been buried under a lot of mindless grinding and sleep deprivation. You gotta try to think back to "things that you did even though no one told you that you had to do them".
I think a lot of non-adrenaline-based non-social fun has this in common: a challenge, that is not too hard to meet, but that gives a sense of accomplishment afterwards. Ideally it should be silly and/or have no useful impact on the world (like a cross-stitch project or a hike - not like cleaning the basement or a class assignment). Once you remember what fun is like, then you can get back to considering making an impact, because any piece of code that makes an impact requires support and maintenance and stability and responsibility, which, if you're already in a black mood and drowning in tedium, will probably not help matters.
[This advice is unspecific because I discovered that my friend and I do not do any of the same things for fun (I like write-only perl, he likes contemplating algorithms and theory?), so I do not think a list of "stuff I hacked up on a lark" will help jog anyone's memory of what part of CS they used to like.]
I think they're worth reading for a different reason: learning, through positive and negative examples, how one can put forward a claim that the ideas in someone's essay are not well supported (either by reality or by the arguments made in that essay), without making the (necessary) references to the essay's author sufficiently colorful and witty that it becomes imperative to add an aside of the form "I don't actually think the author is an idiot, just wrong-headed" to prevent readers from drawing the wrong conclusion. (The matter of whether either side in this instance is in fact correct, I found actually to be of less interest than this intriguing, if subtle, contrast in tone.)
I know this is off-topic, but I have to ask: who is this Theo deRaadt and why do you (I'm guessing from context) consider it bad to be him?
Allegations of "threats" aside, I'd also like to note that there are any number of perfectly innocuous and sensible reasons, legal and otherwise, for a project leader to keep full control/copyright of their project.
I think you could argue rather strongly that you are taking such action in the interest of public safety.
I think you could argue that rather strongly too, but I also think that the prosecution will make mincemeat of it unless you have a really good lawyer arguing rather strongly alongside you, in which case the prosecution will have to settle for making something less finely ground, such as Dinty Moore beef stew, of it.
Whether you agree with "choice is good, fragmentation is bad" depends on whether your vision of "the ideal future of Open Source" is a single unified competitor that will crush other companies (such as Microsoft), or a logical grouping of a bunch of competitors who are free to compete amongst themselves as well as with other companies (such as Microsoft). What we have is the latter, and what the article that started this discussion asks is whether it is reasonable/plausible/desirable to move in the direction of the former.
Someone who believes strongly in the first of the two visions will say that of course your two statements are compatible, because one describes competition within an entity (or within what he thinks ought to be a single entity) and the other describes competition between entities. (In the general case, I personally would not expect that any two "similar" open source projects/companies could in practice be made a single entity even in a limited sense; unless maybe everyone agreed to have their egos and personal preferences surgically removed.)
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, I like the non-doubleclick ads on /., most of them are for sites like Think Geek, where I buy tons of stuff!
/. already have an ad rating system like the post rating system? I'd turn doubleclick back on, if I could slap a "+1 Funny" or "-1 Off Topic" on whatever it served me, and eventually only see the ads that were strong enough to survive.
Agreed, I don't mind seeing ads for "considered cool by geeks" stuff. Targeted ads that are accurately targeted (/. readers are interested in geek things, google users are interested in their search string) are kind of cool, occasionally even helpful, whereas other ads are kind of annoying.
Why doesn't
The LAWRENCE OF ARABIA spoiler should read "The trick is not minding that your legs fall asleep."
The epiphany you're refering to is in the GPL.
;-)
I sometimes wonder how many people who theoretically ought to have read the GPL actually have read it.
"He got better"
Post-Episode I, it's a blood condition.
I don't know about you but I kept expecting a scene where the Jedi council is waiting for the report on Anakin's farandolae to come back from the lab. "Hmm. Echthroi. Prognosis not good. To the Dark Side he will turn."
where the advertising messages are so deeply intertwined with the gameplay that you can't avoid the product shots and ad messages.
Sounds just like the movies, come to think of it.
Eat the right candy, and you too can get a friendly alien to live in your closet! (Personally, I was holding out for an alien that preferred M&Ms.)
Click-through isn't everything. :-) It sure looks like "porn ads under Nintendo" would still be disallowed for other reasons, such as lack of relevancy and failure to use appropriate keywords.
Rules aren't everything either though... they're useless unless they are feasible to enforce. In the general case it would be difficult to automate a check for relevancy/appropriateness, much more difficult than checking click-through which requires no understanding of human language. (So of course irrelevant poetry would be reprimanded for the readily discernable symptom of irrelevancy: low click-through.)
However, I think for a specific "irrelevant" topic, there would be a decent chance of understanding ads of that topic automatically and checking their relevancy to the query, even if, as you suggest, the Nintendo kiddies are clicking through. 'Cause then you're in "natural language understanding in a restricted domain" (where domain == pr0n), and your most pressing research issue is probably to figure out how much of the system you have to whitewash in order to get your papers accepted for publication.
"See your Google
Click-throughs rise,
When they laugh
In mild surprise.
Burma Shave."
I downloaded the code to get the "further details". The file opensrc.doc has info on its license, which seems to be basically "You may do any modifications you please, as long as we (the original authors) are credited for original work, and end user is informed of your modifications.
ok, now somebody port this puppy to Linux and PalmOS...
Well... if I recall correctly, people didn't believe Troy existed either until Schliemann said he'd dug it up. (though there seems to be dispute over whether that really was Troy.) Some things don't change much, eh.
(no blonde jokes intended)
I agree, the first five Amber books seem pretty feasible in terms of technology. They're not even all that long. Herewith I express guarded hopefulness. It really depends on whether they preserve the "attitude".
You got an email saying that their privacy policy had been changed /. today.
Hm... I don't think I got one. Lucky thing I was reading
I have nothing particular to say about Everquest, except that I've played it, I've played MUDs, I've played ye olde Dungeons and Dragons, I've played live-action role-playing games, and all manner of things. If it's a week-long LARP, eventually it's over and "we return you to your regularly scheduled life" until the next session. Computer games (such as MUDs and netrek and Civ and SimEarth... and Everquest, but it's too new a game for me personally to know someone who flunked classes on it) are never over per se, so in some sense the "safety" is off. The game does not stop, the player has to make himself stop. For some folks this is easier than for others (this is so trite that I trust no one disbelieves it).
And, yes, you can watch a normal fellow student who deprives themselves of sleep suddenly start to exhibit symptoms of depression (goes away when they get regular sleep again)... given a game of non-finite duration that rewards an irregular sleep cycle, I can see that in some cases people could get into a downward spiral.
I can't remember... was 6 the one with the Klingons?
</tongue in cheek>
I could go down to Mailboxes Etc. and pay them for the privilege of using their machine to send and/or receive, or I could even go down to Office Despot or whatever and buy a fax machine of my Very Own for perhaps the price of a double latte at Starbucks.
And then I could support a platform that involves having to reboot from linux to windows on every compile-and-test cycle just to use the emulator. Handera was extreeeemely borderline for this reason, and requiring me to jump through an extra hoop for the ROM contract, trivial though it may be!, puts Sony one baby step over the edge. If they switch to a clickwrap, sure, I'll suck it up and reboot a lot for them too. Or if a linux port of their emulator magically appears (fat chance even if they do release the source), sure, I'll cough up the dough for their little fax handshake, seeing as how I have now spent more time posting in this thread than it would have taken me to walk (uphill both ways, in the snow,) to the nearest copyshop that offers fax service.
Of course my own personal quibbles (about which no one but me really cares and I'm not even sure about me) are beside the original point of this thread, which is that yes Sony is still in violation of the GPL with respect to the executable-only release of their latest emulator.
Not that I'm likely to develop for their platform when they require a fax number, which I don't have, to complete the handshake protocol for the ROM download contract, which last time I looked at it (months ago) didn't look like anything I wanted to sign anyway. (Not that I objected to the terms, but that I couldn't parse the terms. I can deal with legalese or with foreign-instruction-manual English but please not both at once.)
To keep this /.ish, I'd argue that Tolkien invented Elves in the same way that Xerox invented {things that people now attribute to say Apple or Microsoft or Al Gore}: a few different versions of the thing were kicking around, shrunken and vaguely malicious perhaps; and then suddenly there is this fully detailed, fleshed-out, working implementation of Elves; and now today there are a million of them with the serial numbers filed off, and a few massive corporations profiting from them (not the originator, of course); and no one can imagine Elves being any other way, with the exception of Keebler and rebellious authors like Brust and Cherryh.
I think a lot of non-adrenaline-based non-social fun has this in common: a challenge, that is not too hard to meet, but that gives a sense of accomplishment afterwards. Ideally it should be silly and/or have no useful impact on the world (like a cross-stitch project or a hike - not like cleaning the basement or a class assignment). Once you remember what fun is like, then you can get back to considering making an impact, because any piece of code that makes an impact requires support and maintenance and stability and responsibility, which, if you're already in a black mood and drowning in tedium, will probably not help matters.
[This advice is unspecific because I discovered that my friend and I do not do any of the same things for fun (I like write-only perl, he likes contemplating algorithms and theory?), so I do not think a list of "stuff I hacked up on a lark" will help jog anyone's memory of what part of CS they used to like.]
Interesting. Was this the normal Kerberos, or the bearded Kerberos from the imperial Mirror Universe?
I think they're worth reading for a different reason: learning, through positive and negative examples, how one can put forward a claim that the ideas in someone's essay are not well supported (either by reality or by the arguments made in that essay), without making the (necessary) references to the essay's author sufficiently colorful and witty that it becomes imperative to add an aside of the form "I don't actually think the author is an idiot, just wrong-headed" to prevent readers from drawing the wrong conclusion. (The matter of whether either side in this instance is in fact correct, I found actually to be of less interest than this intriguing, if subtle, contrast in tone.)
Allegations of "threats" aside, I'd also like to note that there are any number of perfectly innocuous and sensible reasons, legal and otherwise, for a project leader to keep full control/copyright of their project.
I think you could argue that rather strongly too, but I also think that the prosecution will make mincemeat of it unless you have a really good lawyer arguing rather strongly alongside you, in which case the prosecution will have to settle for making something less finely ground, such as Dinty Moore beef stew, of it.
My solution is a nice-looking yet deceptively large purse. ...'course, I suppose this is one of those times when it helps to be female.
Someone who believes strongly in the first of the two visions will say that of course your two statements are compatible, because one describes competition within an entity (or within what he thinks ought to be a single entity) and the other describes competition between entities. (In the general case, I personally would not expect that any two "similar" open source projects/companies could in practice be made a single entity even in a limited sense; unless maybe everyone agreed to have their egos and personal preferences surgically removed.)