I think people would be happier if the ideals of Amateurism made a comeback. We might even get better art in some ways.
Vonnegut thought so too, I think. In Bluebeard (and some other novels, IIRC) he wrote about how mass media had so devalued hobby-level talent at social and artistic activities (sports, music playing, singing, writing, painting, whatever) that people who might have found great fulfillment by being a good enough, say, guitar player to entertain a family or community were crowded out by such ready, universal access to the best-of-the-best at everything via records, radio, TV, the internet, etc.
That was one major facet of Vonnegut's views on the breakdown of large social/family units and the negative effects of that on society, and one of the more interesting ones IMO.
Why listen to Uncle Jim twang away on his guitar at the family get-together or neighborhood barbecue when you can just jack your MP3 player into the stereo and set a few hundred hours of music recorded by one-in-fifty-thousand musicians (and one-in-a-million song writers) to "shuffle"?
Why watch the community theater perform Shakespeare when you can pop in a DVD of some of the best actors in the world performing the same play, or any other play you feel like watching instead?
Vonnegut's point didn't seem to be that these things hurt the people "consuming" the media, but rather they harmed the community as a whole and especially the people whose lives might have been greatly improved by having an outlet for their creative impulse, and having their meager talents be truly valued by others.
I would say it's not so much about size as it is about access. US Americans can't easily travel to other countries. That means your average Joe off the street has no need for a foreign language in his daily life and his exposure to foreign cultures will be extremely limited. It's unfortunate, but there's not much that can be done about it.
Not to mention that it's about a bazillion times harder to learn a language without hearing it spoken by and/or conversing with a native speaker at least every now and then. For a big chunk of the U.S., that means your only real option is the Mexican flavor of Spanish.
Actually, the idea behind the electoral college is that you don't vote for the president--you vote for someone you trust to go find out all the facts and get to know the candidates, then cast their vote for you, since it's patently absurd to expect anything but a popularity contest to result if you make candidates campaign nationally rather than to a handful of electors.
It's totally different from them picking something regardless of the outcome. As long as the popular elector is the one going, your will was carried out, since that's the only person you're voting for.
That's the idea, anyway. Practice is that we get the worst of both worlds (popular vote and an elector system) and should just toss it out. It's a pretty good idea, though.
A while back I remember seeing frequent gibberish posts that were just similar enough that they seemed to be coming from the same source. They always had the same subject, IIRC.
I figured they were someone's attempt at what the parent mentioned, though far less hidden.
Precisely what I was thinking. My first thought when I saw this thing was, "holy shit, it's not just a smart remote for an HTPC, it's possibly the smartest remote ever!"
I don't want it to be smaller, though. The screen's the perfect size. The iPod is something for carrying around with you everywhere, while this seems to be something for carrying around your house (or office, I guess). I also have zero interest in the app store; existing, free apps could do everything I'd want on this device (I read somewhere down the comments that it's Linux based, so just take your pick of the applications that would do the things I mentioned)
This'd be much better for toting around the house to watch movies or browse in odd places (bed, tub, etc.) than a laptop is. It could be a portable home media center control interface and media access device. I'd certainly much rather watch movies, browse, and read books on this thing than on an iPod or iPhone, though clearly those would be the better ultra-mobile choices for those tasks.
In short, it's the first netbook-like device I've seen that is sufficiently different from a full-fledged laptop or a much more portable solution like the iPod Touch you mentioned to capture my interest. IMO, it looks like it might nicely fill a niche between those two.
I think it's the perfect size. Big enough for "real" websites and a large-ish touchscreen keyboard. Big enough for 2 people to watch Hulu on without eye strain. Still small enough to tote around the house with ease.
Half the size? Just buy an iPhone. Mobile broadband? C'mon, this thing isn't for watching movies in your car. Again, just buy an iPhone, or any number of other devices that already cater to that market.
IMO, this is the best "netbook" concept I've seen yet. If it can do just a bit more than just browse (handle video streamed from a MythTV box, for instance, and display ebooks/PDFs) then I'd love to have one. All the other netbooks I've seen have utterly failed to hit the sweet-spot for what I want out of a device that size.
I'd love this thing if it could do a bit more than just browse. Hardware's beefy enough, just give it a few more apps--NFS/SMB file sharing support, a video and music player (surely it's already got a headphone jack), and an ebook/pdf reader.
It's the first "netbook"-like thing that I've seen that I might actually be interested in. All the others were too much like laptops for my taste, while lacking the horsepower of a real laptop. It'd work great as a main interface for a computer-based home-theater setup. Play music remotely anywhere in the house, control your MythTV box from any room, take it to the bath to watch a movie while you soak (laptops are really inconvenient for that task), etc. Oh, VNC or similar would be nice, too.
As just a "net appliance" it's every bit as stupid as the last generation of those (though at least it's not almost the size of a real PC, like a lot of those were) but as a "anything networked that doesn't require local storage or a real mouse+keyboard" appliance... holy shit, that's pretty cool, especially at that price.
At $150 you'll maybe think about getting $30 internet + top-tier TV for a couple tv's in the house, rather than having your four-person family racking up 300GB a month watching HD shows on Hulu, loads of Youtube, Netflix streaming, and maybe pirating the occasional HBO series.
Youtube and FLV were a breath of fresh air when they came out. "Holy crap, video that works, does it well, has a better player than 99% of the specific-plugin-based ones, and runs on Flash which everyone has anyway!" It was awesome.
Give web designers something with as broad support and which is guaranteed to work well and they'll use it. Until then, trying to use anything else is just asking for headaches (i.e. clients bitching that they can't get their video to play on the site you built for them because they're still running IE6 on WinME or something stupid like that)
What you are saying is that a game studio should go to their publisher and push for porting to another platform that has around 1% market share of desktop operating system.
Whoa now, I never said they should port games to Linux. I'd love it if they would, as it's the only thing I use Windows for and dual-booting sucks, but it's probably a poor business decision for most companies.
I just said that there won't be any significant difference in the ease of piracy on either platform.
That platform is also an OS that makes it even easier to defeat DRM schemes. All of that because people work to crack software on a more difficult platform to crack?
I'm betting crack writers would still just released cracked binaries rather than something that modifies the OS to work around the DRM. I doubt the "scene" would handle a Linux game much differently from a Windows one. I therefore don't expect that Windows programs are, in effect, any more difficult to produce a crack for than Linux programs.
"The Future is Open" and "Linux pub" were my favorites.
My only concern with "Linux pub" is that it made it seem like Linux is some kind of Windows-fixing program, or something to help you repair your computer. I like the overall concept, though, and the penguin is great. Well-written, decently acted.
Both (but especially "The Future is Open") would need to be re-shot before use on TV, as they're a bit rough.
If the government were prohibited from interfering in the economy, there wouldn't be any incentive for a oil company to renovate a politician's house, of all things.
Kind of like cutting off your arm to get rid of a hangnail, eh?
Ubuntu. Horrible idea. Hopefully it'll be un-broken in the next release. I'd just switch distros, but I've got Vista on this laptop anyway so I just stay in it for now.
This will mean occasional brokenness as seen with KDE4, pulseaudio, networkmanager, etc. Obviously, Fedora does not want to put out a broken distribution and so they work hard to get things usable. But if you are looking for the stability of RedHat distributions, Fedora is the wrong place to look.
Ubuntu released that same stuff around the same time. Maybe they're being more bleeding edge than they ought to be, but Fedora doesn't sound all that "out there" to me. Of course, with the exception of PulseAudio, Ubuntu generally just made the software available but not default until it was good enough to be the default, so that may be the difference.
That said, I'd completely forgotten about CentOS, as a couple others had mentioned.
I had to killall firefox after watching videos in order to get sound working in other apps.
You're lucky--for a lot of us, it just crashed FF. Mine would do it 9/10 times if I closed at tab with flash in it. Bizarre.
Also broke VLC, and loads of other stuff. Fixes for different apps are often conflicting and half the time they don't work. So irritating.
I'd have welcomed this if they'd done it five or six years ago when Linux audio was truly awful, but as I've said, I hadn't had trouble with it in quite a while. Like, years. Back then the brokenness wouldn't have been that different from what I already had and at least the new sound system would have been a step in the right direction, but now putting a new layer in the audio system that isn't very stable and very compatible is an enormous step backwards.
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Plus the swapping is 100% painless. You don't even lose the character's turn--they come in, and you get to use them immediately.
Vonnegut thought so too, I think. In Bluebeard (and some other novels, IIRC) he wrote about how mass media had so devalued hobby-level talent at social and artistic activities (sports, music playing, singing, writing, painting, whatever) that people who might have found great fulfillment by being a good enough, say, guitar player to entertain a family or community were crowded out by such ready, universal access to the best-of-the-best at everything via records, radio, TV, the internet, etc.
That was one major facet of Vonnegut's views on the breakdown of large social/family units and the negative effects of that on society, and one of the more interesting ones IMO.
Why listen to Uncle Jim twang away on his guitar at the family get-together or neighborhood barbecue when you can just jack your MP3 player into the stereo and set a few hundred hours of music recorded by one-in-fifty-thousand musicians (and one-in-a-million song writers) to "shuffle"?
Why watch the community theater perform Shakespeare when you can pop in a DVD of some of the best actors in the world performing the same play, or any other play you feel like watching instead?
Vonnegut's point didn't seem to be that these things hurt the people "consuming" the media, but rather they harmed the community as a whole and especially the people whose lives might have been greatly improved by having an outlet for their creative impulse, and having their meager talents be truly valued by others.
Not to mention that it's about a bazillion times harder to learn a language without hearing it spoken by and/or conversing with a native speaker at least every now and then. For a big chunk of the U.S., that means your only real option is the Mexican flavor of Spanish.
Actually, the idea behind the electoral college is that you don't vote for the president--you vote for someone you trust to go find out all the facts and get to know the candidates, then cast their vote for you, since it's patently absurd to expect anything but a popularity contest to result if you make candidates campaign nationally rather than to a handful of electors.
It's totally different from them picking something regardless of the outcome. As long as the popular elector is the one going, your will was carried out, since that's the only person you're voting for.
That's the idea, anyway. Practice is that we get the worst of both worlds (popular vote and an elector system) and should just toss it out. It's a pretty good idea, though.
A while back I remember seeing frequent gibberish posts that were just similar enough that they seemed to be coming from the same source. They always had the same subject, IIRC.
I figured they were someone's attempt at what the parent mentioned, though far less hidden.
Precisely what I was thinking. My first thought when I saw this thing was, "holy shit, it's not just a smart remote for an HTPC, it's possibly the smartest remote ever!"
I don't want it to be smaller, though. The screen's the perfect size. The iPod is something for carrying around with you everywhere, while this seems to be something for carrying around your house (or office, I guess). I also have zero interest in the app store; existing, free apps could do everything I'd want on this device (I read somewhere down the comments that it's Linux based, so just take your pick of the applications that would do the things I mentioned)
This'd be much better for toting around the house to watch movies or browse in odd places (bed, tub, etc.) than a laptop is. It could be a portable home media center control interface and media access device. I'd certainly much rather watch movies, browse, and read books on this thing than on an iPod or iPhone, though clearly those would be the better ultra-mobile choices for those tasks.
In short, it's the first netbook-like device I've seen that is sufficiently different from a full-fledged laptop or a much more portable solution like the iPod Touch you mentioned to capture my interest. IMO, it looks like it might nicely fill a niche between those two.
I think it's the perfect size. Big enough for "real" websites and a large-ish touchscreen keyboard. Big enough for 2 people to watch Hulu on without eye strain. Still small enough to tote around the house with ease.
Half the size? Just buy an iPhone. Mobile broadband? C'mon, this thing isn't for watching movies in your car. Again, just buy an iPhone, or any number of other devices that already cater to that market.
IMO, this is the best "netbook" concept I've seen yet. If it can do just a bit more than just browse (handle video streamed from a MythTV box, for instance, and display ebooks/PDFs) then I'd love to have one. All the other netbooks I've seen have utterly failed to hit the sweet-spot for what I want out of a device that size.
I'd love this thing if it could do a bit more than just browse. Hardware's beefy enough, just give it a few more apps--NFS/SMB file sharing support, a video and music player (surely it's already got a headphone jack), and an ebook/pdf reader.
It's the first "netbook"-like thing that I've seen that I might actually be interested in. All the others were too much like laptops for my taste, while lacking the horsepower of a real laptop. It'd work great as a main interface for a computer-based home-theater setup. Play music remotely anywhere in the house, control your MythTV box from any room, take it to the bath to watch a movie while you soak (laptops are really inconvenient for that task), etc. Oh, VNC or similar would be nice, too.
As just a "net appliance" it's every bit as stupid as the last generation of those (though at least it's not almost the size of a real PC, like a lot of those were) but as a "anything networked that doesn't require local storage or a real mouse+keyboard" appliance... holy shit, that's pretty cool, especially at that price.
Bingo. AC wins, for once.
At $150 you'll maybe think about getting $30 internet + top-tier TV for a couple tv's in the house, rather than having your four-person family racking up 300GB a month watching HD shows on Hulu, loads of Youtube, Netflix streaming, and maybe pirating the occasional HBO series.
Conflicting standards, shitty implementations, inconsistent support.
Youtube and FLV were a breath of fresh air when they came out. "Holy crap, video that works, does it well, has a better player than 99% of the specific-plugin-based ones, and runs on Flash which everyone has anyway!" It was awesome.
Give web designers something with as broad support and which is guaranteed to work well and they'll use it. Until then, trying to use anything else is just asking for headaches (i.e. clients bitching that they can't get their video to play on the site you built for them because they're still running IE6 on WinME or something stupid like that)
Is there an alternative that's as easy to use and allows embedding of the videos on other sites?
MSSQL? PostgreSQL?
Yep.
Mine burn out more often than the incandescent.
Must have a shitty power grid, I guess, though this one's seemed rock solid. Was the same way the last place I lived, too.
Whoa now, I never said they should port games to Linux. I'd love it if they would, as it's the only thing I use Windows for and dual-booting sucks, but it's probably a poor business decision for most companies.
I just said that there won't be any significant difference in the ease of piracy on either platform.
I'm betting crack writers would still just released cracked binaries rather than something that modifies the OS to work around the DRM. I doubt the "scene" would handle a Linux game much differently from a Windows one. I therefore don't expect that Windows programs are, in effect, any more difficult to produce a crack for than Linux programs.
Are there any DRM'd programs on Windows that haven't been cracked despite the closed nature of the platform? Any that are remotely popular, I mean.
There are even ways around Steam's protection.
Hahaha, so true.
I liked the actors. I knew what was coming at the end, but the delivery of the "il n'y a pas" line still made me chuckle.
"The Future is Open" and "Linux pub" were my favorites.
My only concern with "Linux pub" is that it made it seem like Linux is some kind of Windows-fixing program, or something to help you repair your computer. I like the overall concept, though, and the penguin is great. Well-written, decently acted.
Both (but especially "The Future is Open") would need to be re-shot before use on TV, as they're a bit rough.
Kind of like cutting off your arm to get rid of a hangnail, eh?
That was Dr. Savage on top of a building after the underwater base level, but (IIRC) ONLY if you managed to rescue his daughter.
Ubuntu. Horrible idea. Hopefully it'll be un-broken in the next release. I'd just switch distros, but I've got Vista on this laptop anyway so I just stay in it for now.
Ubuntu released that same stuff around the same time. Maybe they're being more bleeding edge than they ought to be, but Fedora doesn't sound all that "out there" to me. Of course, with the exception of PulseAudio, Ubuntu generally just made the software available but not default until it was good enough to be the default, so that may be the difference.
That said, I'd completely forgotten about CentOS, as a couple others had mentioned.
You're lucky--for a lot of us, it just crashed FF. Mine would do it 9/10 times if I closed at tab with flash in it. Bizarre.
Also broke VLC, and loads of other stuff. Fixes for different apps are often conflicting and half the time they don't work. So irritating.
I'd have welcomed this if they'd done it five or six years ago when Linux audio was truly awful, but as I've said, I hadn't had trouble with it in quite a while. Like, years. Back then the brokenness wouldn't have been that different from what I already had and at least the new sound system would have been a step in the right direction, but now putting a new layer in the audio system that isn't very stable and very compatible is an enormous step backwards.