Here in Beijing, there are CD/DVD shops pretty much on every block, and in none of then can you find "legal" products, at least not for non-Chinese stuff. In any place with lots of pedestrian traffic, you'll find "street merchants" with boxes full of DVDs. Stores that carry "legal" imported DVDs are quite hard to find, if you really want them.
Movies that are showing in the theatres will usually be in the stores a few days *earlier* than in the theatre; most often, they won't show in the theatres at all. And a few weeks later (about two weeks after the theatre premiere), you'll have the decent-quality DVDs, although those second-batch disks are typically either sans subtitles, with subtitles copied from some other random movie, or really bad "all your base" subtitles. The third batch are the actual DVD copies that come usually a few days before the "legal" DVDs are released in the rest of the world.
If you're a good customer, and the second batch is expected at some point in this same week, the clerk will sometimes even tell you, "no buy this, the better quality come tomorrow".
The Shanghai poster neglected to mention prices. A regular DVD costs an average 10 yuan, 15 or 20 if it comes in a box rather than envelope (not so much for the box, but because these are usually slightly better). A DVD9 ranges from 20 to 40 yuan. One USD = 8.14 yuan.
I keep the standards in my head, and design for them. Then I actually write the implementation for Firefox. Then I go back, fix all the deviations from the standard that I can fix, and validate. Then I test it in IE 6, and cripple the pages horribly till they work. Depending on the project, I'll do the same for Safari afterwards. Mostly, if people send me bug reports that my stuff looks bad on other browsers, I reply along the lines of "yeah, sad isn't it? I heard the next version is going to be actually standards compliant." (For one specific recent project, I even did that for IE6... I detect IE using their stupid conditional comments, and display a big Firefox button.)
In the end, the page usually doesn't validate. It's sad, but I need pages that render on IE 6, not pages that validate. And yes, standards-compliant pages would mean I don't have to go fix them when new browsers with different bugs and deviations come out, but what do I care? The sites I work on already require constant maintenance anyway, and I think that is true of most sites worth publishing. If I was going to put up a site that I don't expect to maintain constantly, such as an archive, then I'd go for a very simple design, and full standards compliance. I think I might even have done that a few times in the past.
I agree that D&D is not perfect, but I wouldn't call it the "Budweiser" of games. I'd call it the "vi" of games. It might not be your favorite tool, but you can find it on every *nix server you log in to. Likewise, d20 may not be as well-designed as several others out there, but you can count on finding players who know how to play it.
ergo, Budweiser. I think the parent's analogy was perfect. D&D tastes like cold piss, specially for those who already tasted a real game like Exalted or Falkenstein.
Playing on a console for more than half an hour leaves my elbows, forearms, writst and fingers all hurt. I don't think I'd be able to stand 4 hours straight on this monstrosity.
It's not only having to hold it - it's the relative position it forces your arms and hands to be from each other. It's not very natural.
I wonder, does the average slashdotter still bother to click the article link? Seems not.
Here is the relevant part:
That is not to say that the 21st century does not also require invention, creation and discovery, he said. But these days, people are looking for value that arises from a creation and not just looking at technology for its sake, he explained.
When it comes to innovation, there is a need to think collaboratively and in a multifaceted manner, as this determines who wins and who loses, he said.
All in all, he's not saying anything new, too much. But maybe it's a message that not everybody has heard yet.
ok, that's nearly what I came here to post, so I'll make it a reply here rather than a new thread:-)
So... if everything is smartly interconnected, the system needs to be extensible and flexible, because new cool gadgets will come up and I will want to integrate them.
The reconfiguring of lines should include switching tech; only 3 years ago, all this internal connectivity would be ethernet. Today, it's either gigabit ethernet with wifi on selected spots, or wifi (G) everywhere. In three more years, it will certainly be something else. I'd like to rest assured that it would only take me one day or less to make such a switch.
Because "ideal futuristic" is a relative value. The "future" is changing everyday.
_______________
On a more or less unrelated note... user interface.
I'm fine with tapping on buttons in well-placed touchscreens, or on my mobile/pda, as a secondary user interface. But the primary interface should be voice. I suppose there should be different choices here -- either it pretends to behave more or less like a human, with configurable voice/persona, or it behaves logically and structured like a computer; there will be users who prefer both.
The rationale is that it's much more natural for us to be greeted by our "valet" when we get home, even if it's a virtual and invisible "valet", and then tell it what we want. "Hello Lalo. You have 3 emails that passed your 'important' filter. No phone calls today. And there is a new episode of SG1 recorded for you." Then I'd say, "great. Get me a (insert fast food type I'm feeling like), I'll watch it now." Or, "I'm gonna read my email then, please start up some music, medium volume, the 'relaxing' playlist". Or, "hrmph. I need a bath, please prepare the tub. And lower the lights and play celtic music." You get the picture. Many people fantasise of having a person to actually do that; but even those who can afford it, often don't, because of the inconvenience and the privacy loss of having this extra person in your home, knowing everything about you -- not to mention, needing a bedroom, clothes, food, whatnot. An "invisible valet" would therefore be the natural UI for a smart house... well, IMHO.
that would also produce applications that don't run on picogui with other display drivers - which would pretty much defeat the point of the whole thing.
You have already an interesting "migration path" with the X rootless driver, which essentially turns picogui into a widget toolkit.
This is due to WineLib. Wine programs usually manage their own windows (to emulate the Windows behaviour at least WRT the API). I dunno about WineLib but it presumably defaults to the same.
Actually, you are the 'wanabe', if you are 'going to' make a living from it. Some people here are programmers who do make a living of it, paid by companies with a future such as RedHat, VA, Conectiva, SuSE or whatever.
If you plan to make a living from non-free softwaer, good luck. You better hurry, in a few years this will not be possible anymore and you will either be working at McDonalds, or working on Free Software like some of us and laughing at the foolishness of your youth.
Not anytime in the near future, because mr. Stalin and mr. McCarthy already did a pretty good job of making our civilization completely refratary to these kinds of ideas. (sigh)
The point is: GNU was making an OS. In the past few years, GNU had been busy writing and collecting tools to make up a complete Free OS.
Then from the Linux kernel to a complete OS it is still a big step. But it was easy, because all one had to do was take the collection GNU had been gathering and plug in the new kernel/libc. Presto.
So it is reasonable to say it is the GNU OS with a Linux kernel. But IMVHO it is not, because of the very spirit of the GPL.
Let us assume there was already an existing, working GNU OS by that time. Can't I take it, replace the kernel by this new toy from Finland, and call it Linux, Slackware, FnordOS or whatever I damn well want to?
These are the facts as I see them. I don't have an opinion one way or the other.
Yes, OO is not easy to learn. It's easy to do wrong and to misuse. And it's a common thread that people who can't get it like to flame it. No problem - it's your productivity, not mine:-)
What will happen: whoever looks at it will find out the code is a huge pile of crud, it will take an year or so to start looking like something, during this time the decision of opening up will be questioned a lot of times, yadda yadda. Of course, if the code has any value at all, in 2 or 3 years we will have a real killer database. (sigh) Don't people realize the difference between Opening up vs. developing openly?
So, in general, the lesson we learn here (and by "here" I probably mean the last 2 years) is that opening up some sources is not the same as developing it in the open. (And I won't start on open vs. Free here; I prefer Free, but I'm dealing with open in this line of thinking, because this doesn't really depend on freeness).
A lot of code was opened up in the past 2 years that was originally developed "in the dark". Starting from Mozilla. All of them (except the ones to which nobody really paid any attention) suffered from a similar problem: as soon as the code was out, chaos started, on account of all the crud that crept in due to the closed development. As ESR wisely points out, it's the open development proccess that does the magic; developers tend to think in different ways when they know people will be reading the source. This way leads to real power. On the other hand, developing in the dark, with no prospects of ever opening the source up, and then later opening it, leads to embarassment and insecurity. as Q1, Mozilla and others kindly proved us. And of course, leads to months of reimplementation (witness Mozilla/Gecko and QuakeForge).
So in short: it's cool that companies are seeing some light and opening up code. But it will be REALLY cool only when they see the whole light and start developing in the open to begin with. And here I pause to cheer the people behind AbiWord, XDBM, Conglomerate and other company-owned, yet openly-developed-from-start (or almost) projects.
Slashdot Mirror
that's actually my favourite one too :-) I guess I'm just outdated wrt prices. I haven't been buying anything lately...
Here in Beijing, there are CD/DVD shops pretty much on every block, and in none of then can you find "legal" products, at least not for non-Chinese stuff. In any place with lots of pedestrian traffic, you'll find "street merchants" with boxes full of DVDs. Stores that carry "legal" imported DVDs are quite hard to find, if you really want them.
Movies that are showing in the theatres will usually be in the stores a few days *earlier* than in the theatre; most often, they won't show in the theatres at all. And a few weeks later (about two weeks after the theatre premiere), you'll have the decent-quality DVDs, although those second-batch disks are typically either sans subtitles, with subtitles copied from some other random movie, or really bad "all your base" subtitles. The third batch are the actual DVD copies that come usually a few days before the "legal" DVDs are released in the rest of the world.
If you're a good customer, and the second batch is expected at some point in this same week, the clerk will sometimes even tell you, "no buy this, the better quality come tomorrow".
The Shanghai poster neglected to mention prices. A regular DVD costs an average 10 yuan, 15 or 20 if it comes in a box rather than envelope (not so much for the box, but because these are usually slightly better). A DVD9 ranges from 20 to 40 yuan. One USD = 8.14 yuan.
I keep the standards in my head, and design for them. Then I actually write the implementation for Firefox. Then I go back, fix all the deviations from the standard that I can fix, and validate. Then I test it in IE 6, and cripple the pages horribly till they work. Depending on the project, I'll do the same for Safari afterwards. Mostly, if people send me bug reports that my stuff looks bad on other browsers, I reply along the lines of "yeah, sad isn't it? I heard the next version is going to be actually standards compliant." (For one specific recent project, I even did that for IE6... I detect IE using their stupid conditional comments, and display a big Firefox button.)
In the end, the page usually doesn't validate. It's sad, but I need pages that render on IE 6, not pages that validate. And yes, standards-compliant pages would mean I don't have to go fix them when new browsers with different bugs and deviations come out, but what do I care? The sites I work on already require constant maintenance anyway, and I think that is true of most sites worth publishing. If I was going to put up a site that I don't expect to maintain constantly, such as an archive, then I'd go for a very simple design, and full standards compliance. I think I might even have done that a few times in the past.
...for a small consulting fee, I can teach you how to get rid of it.
I agree that D&D is not perfect, but I wouldn't call it the "Budweiser" of games. I'd call it the "vi" of games. It might not be your favorite tool, but you can find it on every *nix server you log in to. Likewise, d20 may not be as well-designed as several others out there, but you can count on finding players who know how to play it.
ergo, Budweiser. I think the parent's analogy was perfect. D&D tastes like cold piss, specially for those who already tasted a real game like Exalted or Falkenstein.
Nifty. Let's get venture capital and start a lightsaber factory.
absolutely... it looks horrible.
Playing on a console for more than half an hour leaves my elbows, forearms, writst and fingers all hurt. I don't think I'd be able to stand 4 hours straight on this monstrosity.
It's not only having to hold it - it's the relative position it forces your arms and hands to be from each other. It's not very natural.
Nah, I'll pass this one, thanks.
I wonder, does the average slashdotter still bother to click the article link? Seems not.
Here is the relevant part:
All in all, he's not saying anything new, too much. But maybe it's a message that not everybody has heard yet.ok, that's nearly what I came here to post, so I'll make it a reply here rather than a new thread :-)
So... if everything is smartly interconnected, the system needs to be extensible and flexible, because new cool gadgets will come up and I will want to integrate them.
The reconfiguring of lines should include switching tech; only 3 years ago, all this internal connectivity would be ethernet. Today, it's either gigabit ethernet with wifi on selected spots, or wifi (G) everywhere. In three more years, it will certainly be something else. I'd like to rest assured that it would only take me one day or less to make such a switch.
Because "ideal futuristic" is a relative value. The "future" is changing everyday.
_______________On a more or less unrelated note... user interface.
I'm fine with tapping on buttons in well-placed touchscreens, or on my mobile/pda, as a secondary user interface. But the primary interface should be voice. I suppose there should be different choices here -- either it pretends to behave more or less like a human, with configurable voice/persona, or it behaves logically and structured like a computer; there will be users who prefer both.
The rationale is that it's much more natural for us to be greeted by our "valet" when we get home, even if it's a virtual and invisible "valet", and then tell it what we want. "Hello Lalo. You have 3 emails that passed your 'important' filter. No phone calls today. And there is a new episode of SG1 recorded for you." Then I'd say, "great. Get me a (insert fast food type I'm feeling like), I'll watch it now." Or, "I'm gonna read my email then, please start up some music, medium volume, the 'relaxing' playlist". Or, "hrmph. I need a bath, please prepare the tub. And lower the lights and play celtic music." You get the picture. Many people fantasise of having a person to actually do that; but even those who can afford it, often don't, because of the inconvenience and the privacy loss of having this extra person in your home, knowing everything about you -- not to mention, needing a bedroom, clothes, food, whatnot. An "invisible valet" would therefore be the natural UI for a smart house... well, IMHO.
that's a very comfortable armchair opinion. Have you ever been to China at least?
btw, it's "Ubuntu", not "Ubuntu Linux" or "Ubuntu GNU/Linux". Just "Ubuntu". Yes, the website is "ubuntulinux", but please ignore that ;-)
2 004-September/000000.html
The official announcement: http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/
http://wiki.ubuntulinux.org/PossibleReleaseNames
that would also produce applications that don't run on picogui with other display drivers - which would pretty much defeat the point of the whole thing.
You have already an interesting "migration path" with the X rootless driver, which essentially turns picogui into a widget toolkit.
yay, found my password.
It was proposed. Perhaps the FSF couldn't afford the fee (50k, or so I heard?)
This is due to WineLib. Wine programs usually manage their own windows (to emulate the Windows behaviour at least WRT the API). I dunno about WineLib but it presumably defaults to the same.
Funny. The company where I work doesnt even have open capital, yet it somehow turns profit.
If you plan to make a living from non-free softwaer, good luck. You better hurry, in a few years this will not be possible anymore and you will either be working at McDonalds, or working on Free Software like some of us and laughing at the foolishness of your youth.
Not anytime in the near future, because mr. Stalin and mr. McCarthy already did a pretty good job of making our civilization completely refratary to these kinds of ideas. (sigh)
Then from the Linux kernel to a complete OS it is still a big step. But it was easy, because all one had to do was take the collection GNU had been gathering and plug in the new kernel/libc. Presto.
So it is reasonable to say it is the GNU OS with a Linux kernel. But IMVHO it is not, because of the very spirit of the GPL.
Let us assume there was already an existing, working GNU OS by that time. Can't I take it, replace the kernel by this new toy from Finland, and call it Linux, Slackware, FnordOS or whatever I damn well want to?
These are the facts as I see them. I don't have an opinion one way or the other.
Yes, OO is not easy to learn. It's easy to do wrong and to misuse. And it's a common thread that people who can't get it like to flame it. No problem - it's your productivity, not mine :-)
Is there any other languages you use eventually? What languages, and why?
Anyone (non-Brazilian) here knows who was Santos Dumont?
What will happen: whoever looks at it will find out the code is a huge pile of crud, it will take an year or so to start looking like something, during this time the decision of opening up will be questioned a lot of times, yadda yadda. Of course, if the code has any value at all, in 2 or 3 years we will have a real killer database. (sigh) Don't people realize the difference between Opening up vs. developing openly?
A lot of code was opened up in the past 2 years that was originally developed "in the dark". Starting from Mozilla. All of them (except the ones to which nobody really paid any attention) suffered from a similar problem: as soon as the code was out, chaos started, on account of all the crud that crept in due to the closed development. As ESR wisely points out, it's the open development proccess that does the magic; developers tend to think in different ways when they know people will be reading the source. This way leads to real power. On the other hand, developing in the dark, with no prospects of ever opening the source up, and then later opening it, leads to embarassment and insecurity. as Q1, Mozilla and others kindly proved us. And of course, leads to months of reimplementation (witness Mozilla/Gecko and QuakeForge).
So in short: it's cool that companies are seeing some light and opening up code. But it will be REALLY cool only when they see the whole light and start developing in the open to begin with. And here I pause to cheer the people behind AbiWord, XDBM, Conglomerate and other company-owned, yet openly-developed-from-start (or almost) projects.