The school runs for 18 months. Years have been 12 months long for quite some time.
I'd hope more is taught about being a developer and designer of games than level design, art design and FPS design.
Me too, if it were running three years. But it's not. Personally, I think 18 months of play-school game-hacking crunch time, combined with some expert tutelage, would be all that was needed to turn sharp CS skills into sharp CG developing skills.
Do it like this:
Think about what you could do if you didn't have to work for 18 months and spent that time pursuing your interests. Now think about what you could do with the same time, surrounded by people of like-mind and sharp skills. Now think about what you could do with that time if you also had expert guides. If your estimate hasn't reached "take over the world", then you're not as creative as you think you are.
Where are the classes on designing puzzles, creative writing, composing music, and everything else that goes into being a game designer and developer?
You don't teach creativity, you nurture it. You provide an environment that is conducive to its growth, like being surrounded by creative, talented peers with nothing to do but code and play video games. Computers get programmed - not people. People program themselves.
That's the two cents of someone who went through college "all wrong" and has a helluva lot to show for it.
Obviously the status of fictional characters as "human" or not is completely absurd, and not at all what the case was about.
No, the irony of it all is that this was exactly what the case was about!
The X-Men series broke new ground when it began in 1963 by confronting racism and intolerance head-on. The good-hearted mutants rallied around their mentor, the wheelchair-bound Prof. Charles Xavier, to protect mankind, even as humans shunned and despised them.
This is hilarious. This is a US judge ruling on whether or not mutants are human - it's straight out of the comic book! The specific case is a now-dead tariff on toys, but the principle is whether the X-Men would be human. The racism and intolerance of 1963 that the comic book was written to combat seem just as alive and well today in America, despite how progressive we like to paint ourselves. And to prove it, we have life imitating art as X-Men are declared inhuman in the courtroom, denying them the enjoyment of the same human rights guaranteed to those of us not in Guantanamo Bay or off the coast of North Carolina in a Navy brig.
Dude, don't get trolled on slashdot. =) You don't have to reply to anonymous, cowardly trolls. No one will think any less of your opinions or findings if you don't.
Anyway, I found your collection very informative and thought-provoking, and after reading it, have spent the last four hours blazing a path through the web on news items that I haven't heard trumpeted on the New York Times and CNN. Still synthesizing, but I'll send some feedback your way to your email address on the page.
Forgive the other poster. It's hard to hear this stuff in the US unless you go out of your way to find foreign reports on it, and it's hard to believe that, if it's credible, it wouldn't be reported in our "free press". The end result is to discard it without critical evaluation. This is all-too typical and often more socially respectable than asking unpopular questions. It will take a while for most to realize that we've been let down by the mass media.
Responding in the general to your science fiction argument -> "I guess so." You've got valid points, but you're comparing a short story to novels. I dunno, I find myself enjoying many different kinds of things, and I'm sure that if Cory was going to expand his short story into a novel, he'd concentrate much more on the characters than the description. You'll find that a lot. Wasn't Johnny Mnemonic in a similar way?
As for language... I think we're disagreeing about the same thing.
That is incorrect. Complex written linguistic expressions seldom make it to the spoken language, although the other way might be true.
That's exactly what I'm saying. That's always the way it's been, which is why the modern case is a departure from the norm.
Historically, linguistic evolution from a niche group to the many is unlikely, especially given the fact that it demands addition of expressions and language external to the group
Well, I would argue that most of "historically" is human pre-history. Less glib, and more recently, advances in mass-communication have made it much more likely that expressions used by a small external group are adopted by others. Example: kwyjibo. Google returns 4120 hits. This is a "word" that was made up by a fictional character and used once on a single episode... and has entered the lexicon of Simpsons watchers, which includes our entire community. Fascinating. Otherwise, look at the French efforts to prevent English from "corrupting" their language, ala Spanglish. And even the words I cited, like "cool", and "rock n' roll", and "hip hop", so much slang originates from a small hip or urban group and is distributed through media channels... shouldn't be a surprise. How much of your vocab wasn't in your parents' dictionary? Your grandparents'?
And oh, being an NLP & Data-mining researcher, I would pay a penny to shoot dead every damn guy who would use such fancy words and trouble us:-)
I'm guessing the Linguists you work with don't agree...
Re:Most science fiction
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I can't figure out why the reaction to the 0wNz0red story in August was so bad on slashdot. I thought it was a very entertaining, enjoyable, and thought-provoking read, in the grande style of good science fiction.
I think most of it was a reaction to the language, which strikes me as bizarre. This is how we think! Maybe shutter-geeks are intolerant of words coined after 1960, but I hate to tell you folks, look how many pieces of language we owe to Gibson's contribution.
Check out Tales for the 1337 presents: Romeo & Juliet". That's funny shit, because of the way it illustrates how language is changing with the kids. Before you dismiss them as punks, remember that in ten years they'll be dismissing us as foges.
It's always been the case that language is purely the spoken word, and that writing is only linguistically interesting in the sense that it helps us track the progress of language. That's not exactly what I mean, but close enough. Anyway, what's come to be known as '1337' (but I'll generalize as "chat colloquialisms" b/c ppl ph34r th4t w0rd) is the first time that writing is dictating language. kewl.
When you find yourself saying - outloud - "bbl", or "brb", or "haxor, fuxor, suxor", or "warez, filez, skillz" in 'real life', you know you're part of the change. Hell, when I say "owned" wrt computer security, I know it's spelled with a zero. Writing is leading language in this case, unlike others, because within this particular group of people, writing has become the dominant communication medium. Otherwise, it would follow the same slang-path that you are probably more familiar with, like "cool", "sweet", "rock", etc, which progresses from within spoken circles to the dictionary in an orderly fashion.
I'd like to thank the submitter of the story for calling it a "weblog" instead of some lame-ass made-up-for-the-sake-of-making-a-name-up name like a "blog" or a "wiki".:)
I'm sure I'm not alone in my praise:)
He's right, he's not alone. But I'm not with him. I have a blog. I blog things on my blog. This comment will probably be blogged in some shape or form. And I'm thinking about starting a wiki for a different project. 'Wiki' is the only word there is for a wiki. The only way I can think of to avoid using it is to not think about the idea that 'wiki' represents... which just seems faulty.
It's nice to see someone play with language, and it's nice to see someone who apparently knows a little bit of something (instead of a whole lot of nothing) about computers writing speculative fiction, for a change. Or don't you guys get a little bit annoyed about totally impossible (instead of wildly improbable) computers (and/or technology) in speculative fiction?
Aren't we progressive? Aren't we adaptive? I've got a lot of hope riding on this generation of geeks, to look forward to the future, optimizing the world, if you will... I shudder to think that, underneath it all, we geeks think that our own language and the way we think should be constant and unchanging throughout our (adult) lives...
But don't you think it would be even better to create a freshmeat/sourceforge project for the specs as that way we (anyone interested) can see progress - and maybe people in your (our) position in the future (but with time to hack code) could actually start implementing it?
Hmm. I kinda figured we'd just be taking up space on freshmeat/sourceforge until someone (even me) had actually committed to coding on the project... but you may have a point. Perhaps advertising on fm/sf for coders and design help would attract people to the project, or even help guide them in their own mp3-player related activities.
Ok, I'll throw something up there. Thanks for the suggestion.
Posting on slashdot is a long way short of actually *doing* something about it. But you knew that already.... Doing that may attract people but certainly knocking on their door is best.
Who knows, maybe you're supposed to take this project over? =)
I'll probably end up hacking away at the specs some more, plus talking to the developers of the closest projects (MM, WMP, some OS projects). Anything I come up with I'll post to my journal, if you're interested...
Appreciate the reply, but a couple things you said lead me to believe you didn't read my post...
Perhaps it's down to you to start such a project - if you can't code then that's fine because every project needs management and someone with a crystal clear vision with the drive to see it through.
The worksheet tag is a link to my journal, where I've outlined in more detail the specific features of what I'm talking about. It's not that my self-centered opinion of the players out there is that they fail to serve my needs, it's that my needs are different from most people. But that will change soon, because the sizes of people's collections is not decreasing. Eventually, we'll all have 100gig collections, and the only software that can handle that right now is WMP9. But it has stuff wrong with it, too.
I specifically state that I'm looking for projects that I might be able to hack on, or write plugins for, so obviously I can code. Additionally, I also state that I no longer feel I have the time to start one from scratch, but would love to help someone else plan theirs.
Why not contact all of the people working on these different projects in an effort to find a way to work together.
That's kind of what I'm attempting to do with the parent post...
For playing media there are already many solutions for all intersting platforms, and the only reason for using WMP would be for the DRM stuff...which no-one honestly likes.
I have to disagree here. My quest last week was to find a decent media player, on any platform, and I failed. The only requirement for "decent" was that it supports my needs, mainly a 100gig+ mp3 collection.
There are many "solutions" on different platforms, but they all solve the same problem. Do a search on freshmeat for XMMS. About 128 projects come back. So flip through those and you'll see what I mean. Dozens of people all built the same solution, without seeming to look at what was already out there before they went off and coded some Apache+mod_perl or Python or XMMS Plugin or whatever. There must be 40 implementations of a media player with an album/artist/song-centric interface, but none of them have an AutoDJ (ala MusicMatch) or AutoPlaylist (ala WMP9) feature, which is absolutely critical when you start pushing beyond ~20 gigs of music. When you want a new playlist for your party, being able to filter on your library by "Dance Music", "Very good or better", "Techno, Latin, or Party Rap" is incredibly useful. Maintaining playlists, and adding to them as you acquire music over time is much less worthwhile, and you have huge problems when you change the location or filename of any of your files.
I've got a little worksheet I threw together from my notes on last week's failed quest, detailing what features I think an mp3 player needs to have to handle that size of library, and an analysis of all the ways the current offerings fail. Check it out. I promise I won't say anything else until you get back.
Ok, assuming you've read that... Any good MP3 player needs to copy most of MusicMatch's functionality, which WMP9 does a pretty good job of, with a few notable exceptions. But MusicMatch isn't tenable because of its horrible library back-end DB implementation. Ugh. At least I can load all my files into WMP9, it just doesn't index them as well as MusicMatch does. Either way, both of these apps are Win only, which pisses me off when I'm on Linux. Anyone have any ideas about coding something in Mozilla's XPFE?
I wish the community had a simple mechanism for finding out what projects are already out there, and avoiding duplication of effort without meaningful contribution. I thought it was freshmeat, but apparently that doesn't work for everyone... Ironic that all the entries I read about on freshmeat hadn't seemed to do a search of freshmeat before starting their own projects...
Try not to have any liquids in mouth loading page.
rofl... I was drinking coffee, about to click the link, and then read the rest of your comment JUST IN TIME. I swallowed my coffee, put my mug down, and then proceeded, and the reason I'm typing this instead of mopping coffee up off my monitor and keyboard was your timely warning.
Thank you sir =)
He's not joking, kids! PUT YOUR COFFEE DOWN OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES!
Results of the thought screen helmet exceeded expectations. Since January 2000 aliens have not taken any abductees while they were wearing thought screen helmets using Velostat shielding ... "Thank you Michael for the work you are doing to save all humanity."
the best comment on that was the first one I saw, here Search engines look at robots.txt, maybe a similar txt file could be placed that is meant for metanewssites or similar stuff. Let's call it mirror.txt and you put in there something like
temporary=yes validity=2days
etc. That way smaller sites could indicate that they want to be mirrored to esape being slashdottet.
Mozilla uses XML (XUL and XBL, actually) and JavaScript to build its UI.
I'm just getting started in Mozilla XPFEapplication building, and curious whether the Perl interface that's constantly referred to in the Oreilly book as "almost ready" is an actual replacement for javascript (yet). Anyone know? thx
Seriously. The BSA isn't the Gestapo or something. They don't set their agenda to 'Evil'. They are the attack dogs of a lot of companies interested in making money. When they think they're losing money from piracy, the BSA kicks down some doors at the public schools. When they think they're losing money from bad legislation, the BSA politely and sweetly whispers soothing words of influence and control to our lords and masters.
The goal is the same: make money.
Tactics might be different, but who really thinks you make as many friends in Congress by kicking down their doors as you do at public schools? ; )
Lucky for you. Half an hour later, and I'm getting 17K/s. Would somebody who's downloaded the files already put it on a P2P network? I would, but at this rate it'll be another three hours before I have just Act 1-3.
Here's two free mod-points. =)
Seriously, Can people who have already d/led these please get them up on the P2P networks? How about renaming them starshipexeter_actone.mov, etc. ?
Then you're automatically cutting out about 10 hours of your day, the majority of your waking hours, 5 days a week (at least). You may start living in the margins, "working for the weekend", ie not taking advantage of weeknights because you have to work the next day, saving your fun for the weekend, dreading the start of the next week, etc. etc.
How much better to enjoy everything you do, to wonder to yourself how you happened to find people who would pay you to do what you want, though you would do it for free.
The medival feudalism arguement attempts to compare a 95% agrarian society in which people have to work 12+ hours a day in order to simply eat with our modern society in which perhaps the work of 2-5% of the populace is sufficent to fill a supermarket.
How does it matter whether 95% of society must work 12+ hours per day in the fields to simply eat vs. 95% of society working 12+ hours per day in the cube farms to simply eat.
I'll concede that's too grande an exaggeration, but I'm sure plenty of today's working poor are putting in their 12 hours in order to feed themselves and their family, pay rent, electricity, etc. And the cube farmers are putting in their 12 hours, not to simply eat, but to pay for the modern amenities that our consumer society has equated to be as fundamental to our survival as food, ie cable television, a phone, cell phone, car payments and gas, rent, health insurance and medical bills, internet access, new clothes, seven pairs of shoes,... and that's without fulfilling the material desires of one's spouse and children...
In Work Without End, Ben ascribes the depression of 1920-21 to increases in industrialization causing mass overproduction - there was much more of everything than anyone wanted to buy. The response by the industrialists was to create the art of modern advertising, and with it the modern condition of consumerism, convincing people they need more than they have. "Always keep the Consumer Dissastisfied" became the marchstep of America. The increase in wages since then could have been spent to reduce the amount of time one works, or could be spent to increase the amount of goods purchased... two guesses as to which way it turned out.
Ben Hunnicut at the University of Iowa has had the lifelong question
sorry for the teaser... preview/submit error:)
Ben Hunnicut is author of Work Without End and is a history prof at UofI. Had the opportunity to chat with him a bit. He has devoted a serious part of his life to wondering about the worth of leisure time in American society. Work Without End is a look at the "shorter-hours" movement in this country from the late nineteenth century up to 1940 or so. We kind of take the 8-hour/5-day work week for granted these days, but it wasn't always so. The shorter-hours movement, both from within labor and without, got the work day from 12-hour to 10-hour, and finally 8-hour, and then got the week shortened to 5-day. The Kellogs factory workers even went down to 6-hour.
And then after WWII, the movement just kinda stopped. No one is questioning the 40-hour work-week, no one is calling for more leisure. Why?
What is leisure time good for? Improving oneself, contemplating the larger questions of Life, Love, and Happiness (insert God if you wish), studying the democratic process in order to be a better citizen, kernel hacking... when you get right down to it, I don't want to do anything that someone has to pay me to get me to do.
Ben points to a lot of utopians, socialists, Progressives, and authors that always figured that increasing industrialization would eventually mean that machines did most of the labor, and humans would be left with pure Leisure. Of course we are in a very good position to rule on what utter bullshit that turned out to be. As long as corporations own the machines, the People do not, hence the profit on the labor of the machines goes to the owners. Instead we find ourselves forced now to keep up with the pace of the Machine.
Don't get me wrong, wouldn't trade it for The Way We Was, but I would fix it. We should always be using Technology to study and answer the really big questions that are fundamentally human. Like communication, love, politics, work, play, war, and so forth. Questions that people have always had to answer, but haven't always had the tech that we do with which to answer them.
For what it's worth, I consider that to be my life's Work. Applying modern technology to answering the fundamental human questions. My dream is to be able to make the quality of life on this planet tied to the progress of technology, so that increasing technological progress brings a corresponding increase in the quality of life. I think this is slightly different than the way it has been for awhile, in that increasing technological progress has brought better ways with which to kill each other, while our political and cultural systems are largely stagnant and always looking backward to the glory days behind us...
Ok I'm monopolizing the discussion, someone take over. ; )
Uh, hold on a sec, I've got to go write a business plan and call some friends of mine at Google.
No joke. Give me a call if you get anything started.
I seriously doubt in 10 years if most weblogs entries from today will still be around in any form.
You may be right. I would hope that more companies become active in archival projects, ala the Wayback Machine, but if they can't make any money on it for 50 years, it'll be tough. Perhaps the job should be done by history book publishers who are reasonably certain that they will be around in 50 years... or at least know they'll be able to sell it to whoever replaces them.
So get back on the phone to Google, tell them we know who's footing the bill. =)
Do you think most people don't want to back-up their blogs? I tend to think that people won't just abandon their diaries, and that they must have considered the difference in terms of longevity between weblogging and traditional diaries. Perhaps it should be people saving backup CDROMs in their paper correspondence and photo boxes.
Now I could totally see someone not having proper backups in place in case of total hard-drive failure, or their hosting company going out of business without advance notice. These folks (myself included;) will probably have to be burned once before they start taking backups seriously. But everyone else will probably want to keep their blog around in some form or another for posterity.
To blogging software developers: solve our problems! Incorporate easy backup and flat-text export utilities into your software, and encourage your users to make periodic backups.
To bloggers: think about how interesting every random scrap of information you think of will be in the future. Your trip to the mall, what you told Jeanette the other day, the economies of trading webcam pictures to lonely geeks for goodies from Amazon, everything. So back it up! Use blogging software with a backup feature, and keep a record that you can look at in 40 years, and show to your kids (depending on what your kids are into ; )
Are you kidding??! Do you realize how coveted correspondence, diaries, personal logs and photo albums are from 50 years ago? 100 years ago? 300 years ago?!
We are changing the way history will be written. We are creating an army of primary sources, the people who don't write about history - they are history. In 100 years, people will be able to formulate insights about our lives, not based on their conjecture, their agenda, and a few scraps of preserved-information (probably from the ruling , literate classes); but based on the daily records of hundreds of thousands of people from many walks of life.
Weblogs are democratizing history. Or open-sourcing it, if you prefer. And right now the history that's being preserved is by-and-large that of the geek elite that always runs ahead of the general public curve. But ten years from now, weblogging will be as ubiquitous to the average American as the Internet is today. Give the rest of the world time, and they'll catch up with us. You won't get everyone's story, but you'll get many of them. Too many of them to conveniently gloss over the unpopular truths of our time. Will anyone in the future ever be able to write that our country united with a single voice behind the humanitarian, populist, environmentally-sound policies of the Bush Administration? Not as long as there are archives of the weblogs that are being written today.
I see weblogging as the most interesting thing to come out of this whole Internet experiment. Err, I mean, the most interesting thing after slashdot. =)
Yes, the clueless, khaki/t-shirt/black sweater management core from Redwood Shores that such an idea would make the game, "more accessable". It never dawned on them that it also removed all interactivity from an interactive entertainment product.
Ok, so how did it turn out? I mean, for a company with a market cap of ~$8 billion, they must be doing something right. If the employees are truly treated like shit, in a horrible working environment, as everyone here has said, and the managers are clueless PHBs, and the CEO is presumably equally skilled at making games and baking quiches... "why they so rich?"
Seems like a recipe for disaster, not unrivaled success...
Slashdot Mirror
That's the two cents of someone who went through college "all wrong" and has a helluva lot to show for it.
Oh, and by "helluva lot", I mean, "a job." =p
If you're going to be there for 3 years...
The school runs for 18 months. Years have been 12 months long for quite some time.
I'd hope more is taught about being a developer and designer of games than level design, art design and FPS design.
Me too, if it were running three years. But it's not. Personally, I think 18 months of play-school game-hacking crunch time, combined with some expert tutelage, would be all that was needed to turn sharp CS skills into sharp CG developing skills.
Do it like this:
Think about what you could do if you didn't have to work for 18 months and spent that time pursuing your interests. Now think about what you could do with the same time, surrounded by people of like-mind and sharp skills. Now think about what you could do with that time if you also had expert guides. If your estimate hasn't reached "take over the world", then you're not as creative as you think you are.
Where are the classes on designing puzzles, creative writing, composing music, and everything else that goes into being a game designer and developer?
You don't teach creativity, you nurture it. You provide an environment that is conducive to its growth, like being surrounded by creative, talented peers with nothing to do but code and play video games. Computers get programmed - not people. People program themselves.
That's the two cents of someone who went through college "all wrong" and has a helluva lot to show for it.
Obviously the status of fictional characters as "human" or not is completely absurd, and not at all what the case was about.
No, the irony of it all is that this was exactly what the case was about!
The X-Men series broke new ground when it began in 1963 by confronting racism and intolerance head-on. The good-hearted mutants rallied around their mentor, the wheelchair-bound Prof. Charles Xavier, to protect mankind, even as humans shunned and despised them.
This is hilarious. This is a US judge ruling on whether or not mutants are human - it's straight out of the comic book! The specific case is a now-dead tariff on toys, but the principle is whether the X-Men would be human. The racism and intolerance of 1963 that the comic book was written to combat seem just as alive and well today in America, despite how progressive we like to paint ourselves. And to prove it, we have life imitating art as X-Men are declared inhuman in the courtroom, denying them the enjoyment of the same human rights guaranteed to those of us not in Guantanamo Bay or off the coast of North Carolina in a Navy brig.
How can you miss the irony?
The first time I read this, I thought you meant "so we could hax0r his account later." ; )
Dude, don't get trolled on slashdot. =) You don't have to reply to anonymous, cowardly trolls. No one will think any less of your opinions or findings if you don't.
Anyway, I found your collection very informative and thought-provoking, and after reading it, have spent the last four hours blazing a path through the web on news items that I haven't heard trumpeted on the New York Times and CNN. Still synthesizing, but I'll send some feedback your way to your email address on the page.
Forgive the other poster. It's hard to hear this stuff in the US unless you go out of your way to find foreign reports on it, and it's hard to believe that, if it's credible, it wouldn't be reported in our "free press". The end result is to discard it without critical evaluation. This is all-too typical and often more socially respectable than asking unpopular questions. It will take a while for most to realize that we've been let down by the mass media.
Haha. From your journal: Check. And. Mate. =)
Bloggish? I don't think I've ever heard that use of "blog" before. You just make that up? ; ) Indeed it does, my friend, indeed it does...
Responding in the general to your science fiction argument -> "I guess so." You've got valid points, but you're comparing a short story to novels. I dunno, I find myself enjoying many different kinds of things, and I'm sure that if Cory was going to expand his short story into a novel, he'd concentrate much more on the characters than the description. You'll find that a lot. Wasn't Johnny Mnemonic in a similar way?
:-)
As for language... I think we're disagreeing about the same thing.
That is incorrect. Complex written linguistic expressions seldom make it to the spoken language, although the other way might be true.
That's exactly what I'm saying. That's always the way it's been, which is why the modern case is a departure from the norm.
Historically, linguistic evolution from a niche group to the many is unlikely, especially given the fact that it demands addition of expressions and language external to the group
Well, I would argue that most of "historically" is human pre-history. Less glib, and more recently, advances in mass-communication have made it much more likely that expressions used by a small external group are adopted by others. Example: kwyjibo. Google returns 4120 hits. This is a "word" that was made up by a fictional character and used once on a single episode... and has entered the lexicon of Simpsons watchers, which includes our entire community. Fascinating. Otherwise, look at the French efforts to prevent English from "corrupting" their language, ala Spanglish. And even the words I cited, like "cool", and "rock n' roll", and "hip hop", so much slang originates from a small hip or urban group and is distributed through media channels... shouldn't be a surprise. How much of your vocab wasn't in your parents' dictionary? Your grandparents'?
And oh, being an NLP & Data-mining researcher, I would pay a penny to shoot dead every damn guy who would use such fancy words and trouble us
I'm guessing the Linguists you work with don't agree...
I think most of it was a reaction to the language, which strikes me as bizarre. This is how we think! Maybe shutter-geeks are intolerant of words coined after 1960, but I hate to tell you folks, look how many pieces of language we owe to Gibson's contribution.
Check out Tales for the 1337 presents: Romeo & Juliet". That's funny shit, because of the way it illustrates how language is changing with the kids. Before you dismiss them as punks, remember that in ten years they'll be dismissing us as foges.
It's always been the case that language is purely the spoken word, and that writing is only linguistically interesting in the sense that it helps us track the progress of language. That's not exactly what I mean, but close enough. Anyway, what's come to be known as '1337' (but I'll generalize as "chat colloquialisms" b/c ppl ph34r th4t w0rd) is the first time that writing is dictating language. kewl.
When you find yourself saying - outloud - "bbl", or "brb", or "haxor, fuxor, suxor", or "warez, filez, skillz" in 'real life', you know you're part of the change. Hell, when I say "owned" wrt computer security, I know it's spelled with a zero. Writing is leading language in this case, unlike others, because within this particular group of people, writing has become the dominant communication medium. Otherwise, it would follow the same slang-path that you are probably more familiar with, like "cool", "sweet", "rock", etc, which progresses from within spoken circles to the dictionary in an orderly fashion.
Quoth sirinek,
He's right, he's not alone. But I'm not with him. I have a blog. I blog things on my blog. This comment will probably be blogged in some shape or form. And I'm thinking about starting a wiki for a different project. 'Wiki' is the only word there is for a wiki. The only way I can think of to avoid using it is to not think about the idea that 'wiki' represents
Interrobang,
Aren't we progressive? Aren't we adaptive? I've got a lot of hope riding on this generation of geeks, to look forward to the future, optimizing the world, if you will... I shudder to think that, underneath it all, we geeks think that our own language and the way we think should be constant and unchanging throughout our (adult) lives...
But don't you think it would be even better to create a freshmeat/sourceforge project for the specs as that way we (anyone interested) can see progress - and maybe people in your (our) position in the future (but with time to hack code) could actually start implementing it?
Hmm. I kinda figured we'd just be taking up space on freshmeat/sourceforge until someone (even me) had actually committed to coding on the project... but you may have a point. Perhaps advertising on fm/sf for coders and design help would attract people to the project, or even help guide them in their own mp3-player related activities.
Ok, I'll throw something up there. Thanks for the suggestion.
Posting on slashdot is a long way short of actually *doing* something about it. But you knew that already. ... Doing that may attract people but certainly knocking on their door is best.
Who knows, maybe you're supposed to take this project over? =)
I'll probably end up hacking away at the specs some more, plus talking to the developers of the closest projects (MM, WMP, some OS projects). Anything I come up with I'll post to my journal, if you're interested...
Appreciate the reply, but a couple things you said lead me to believe you didn't read my post...
Perhaps it's down to you to start such a project - if you can't code then that's fine because every project needs management and someone with a crystal clear vision with the drive to see it through.
The worksheet tag is a link to my journal, where I've outlined in more detail the specific features of what I'm talking about. It's not that my self-centered opinion of the players out there is that they fail to serve my needs, it's that my needs are different from most people. But that will change soon, because the sizes of people's collections is not decreasing. Eventually, we'll all have 100gig collections, and the only software that can handle that right now is WMP9. But it has stuff wrong with it, too.
I specifically state that I'm looking for projects that I might be able to hack on, or write plugins for, so obviously I can code. Additionally, I also state that I no longer feel I have the time to start one from scratch, but would love to help someone else plan theirs.
Why not contact all of the people working on these different projects in an effort to find a way to work together.
That's kind of what I'm attempting to do with the parent post...
For playing media there are already many solutions for all intersting platforms, and the only reason for using WMP would be for the DRM stuff...which no-one honestly likes.
I have to disagree here. My quest last week was to find a decent media player, on any platform, and I failed. The only requirement for "decent" was that it supports my needs, mainly a 100gig+ mp3 collection.
There are many "solutions" on different platforms, but they all solve the same problem. Do a search on freshmeat for XMMS. About 128 projects come back. So flip through those and you'll see what I mean. Dozens of people all built the same solution, without seeming to look at what was already out there before they went off and coded some Apache+mod_perl or Python or XMMS Plugin or whatever. There must be 40 implementations of a media player with an album/artist/song-centric interface, but none of them have an AutoDJ (ala MusicMatch) or AutoPlaylist (ala WMP9) feature, which is absolutely critical when you start pushing beyond ~20 gigs of music. When you want a new playlist for your party, being able to filter on your library by "Dance Music", "Very good or better", "Techno, Latin, or Party Rap" is incredibly useful. Maintaining playlists, and adding to them as you acquire music over time is much less worthwhile, and you have huge problems when you change the location or filename of any of your files.
I've got a little worksheet I threw together from my notes on last week's failed quest, detailing what features I think an mp3 player needs to have to handle that size of library, and an analysis of all the ways the current offerings fail. Check it out. I promise I won't say anything else until you get back.
Ok, assuming you've read that... Any good MP3 player needs to copy most of MusicMatch's functionality, which WMP9 does a pretty good job of, with a few notable exceptions. But MusicMatch isn't tenable because of its horrible library back-end DB implementation. Ugh. At least I can load all my files into WMP9, it just doesn't index them as well as MusicMatch does. Either way, both of these apps are Win only, which pisses me off when I'm on Linux. Anyone have any ideas about coding something in Mozilla's XPFE?
I wish the community had a simple mechanism for finding out what projects are already out there, and avoiding duplication of effort without meaningful contribution. I thought it was freshmeat, but apparently that doesn't work for everyone... Ironic that all the entries I read about on freshmeat hadn't seemed to do a search of freshmeat before starting their own projects...
Try not to have any liquids in mouth loading page.
rofl... I was drinking coffee, about to click the link, and then read the rest of your comment JUST IN TIME. I swallowed my coffee, put my mug down, and then proceeded, and the reason I'm typing this instead of mopping coffee up off my monitor and keyboard was your timely warning.
Thank you sir =)
He's not joking, kids! PUT YOUR COFFEE DOWN OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES!
Results of the thought screen helmet exceeded expectations. Since January 2000 aliens have not taken any abductees while they were wearing thought screen helmets using Velostat shielding
...
"Thank you Michael for the work you are doing to save all humanity."
=p
the best comment on that was the first one I saw, here
Search engines look at robots.txt, maybe a similar txt file could be placed that is meant for metanewssites or similar stuff. Let's call it mirror.txt and you put in there something like
temporary=yes
validity=2days
etc. That way smaller sites could indicate that they want to be mirrored to esape being slashdottet.
Mozilla uses XML (XUL and XBL, actually) and JavaScript to build its UI.
I'm just getting started in Mozilla XPFE application building, and curious whether the Perl interface that's constantly referred to in the Oreilly book as "almost ready" is an actual replacement for javascript (yet). Anyone know? thx
Seriously. The BSA isn't the Gestapo or something. They don't set their agenda to 'Evil'. They are the attack dogs of a lot of companies interested in making money. When they think they're losing money from piracy, the BSA kicks down some doors at the public schools. When they think they're losing money from bad legislation, the BSA politely and sweetly whispers soothing words of influence and control to our lords and masters.
The goal is the same: make money.
Tactics might be different, but who really thinks you make as many friends in Congress by kicking down their doors as you do at public schools? ; )
Hate to cross-post, but...
Can people who have already d/led these please get them up on the P2P networks? How about renaming them starshipexeter_actone.mov, etc. ?
Thanks
Lucky for you. Half an hour later, and I'm getting 17K/s. Would somebody who's downloaded the files already put it on a P2P network? I would, but at this rate it'll be another three hours before I have just Act 1-3.
Here's two free mod-points. =)
Seriously, Can people who have already d/led these please get them up on the P2P networks? How about renaming them starshipexeter_actone.mov, etc. ?
Thanks
Then you're automatically cutting out about 10 hours of your day, the majority of your waking hours, 5 days a week (at least). You may start living in the margins, "working for the weekend", ie not taking advantage of weeknights because you have to work the next day, saving your fun for the weekend, dreading the start of the next week, etc. etc.
How much better to enjoy everything you do, to wonder to yourself how you happened to find people who would pay you to do what you want, though you would do it for free.
The medival feudalism arguement attempts to compare a 95% agrarian society in which people have to work 12+ hours a day in order to simply eat with our modern society in which perhaps the work of 2-5% of the populace is sufficent to fill a supermarket.
... and that's without fulfilling the material desires of one's spouse and children...
How does it matter whether 95% of society must work 12+ hours per day in the fields to simply eat vs. 95% of society working 12+ hours per day in the cube farms to simply eat.
I'll concede that's too grande an exaggeration, but I'm sure plenty of today's working poor are putting in their 12 hours in order to feed themselves and their family, pay rent, electricity, etc. And the cube farmers are putting in their 12 hours, not to simply eat, but to pay for the modern amenities that our consumer society has equated to be as fundamental to our survival as food, ie cable television, a phone, cell phone, car payments and gas, rent, health insurance and medical bills, internet access, new clothes, seven pairs of shoes,
In Work Without End, Ben ascribes the depression of 1920-21 to increases in industrialization causing mass overproduction - there was much more of everything than anyone wanted to buy. The response by the industrialists was to create the art of modern advertising, and with it the modern condition of consumerism, convincing people they need more than they have. "Always keep the Consumer Dissastisfied" became the marchstep of America. The increase in wages since then could have been spent to reduce the amount of time one works, or could be spent to increase the amount of goods purchased... two guesses as to which way it turned out.
I don't buy it.
Doesn't matter, you're still paying for it...
Ben Hunnicut at the University of Iowa has had the lifelong question
:)
sorry for the teaser... preview/submit error
Ben Hunnicut is author of Work Without End and is a history prof at UofI. Had the opportunity to chat with him a bit. He has devoted a serious part of his life to wondering about the worth of leisure time in American society. Work Without End is a look at the "shorter-hours" movement in this country from the late nineteenth century up to 1940 or so. We kind of take the 8-hour/5-day work week for granted these days, but it wasn't always so. The shorter-hours movement, both from within labor and without, got the work day from 12-hour to 10-hour, and finally 8-hour, and then got the week shortened to 5-day. The Kellogs factory workers even went down to 6-hour.
And then after WWII, the movement just kinda stopped. No one is questioning the 40-hour work-week, no one is calling for more leisure. Why?
What is leisure time good for? Improving oneself, contemplating the larger questions of Life, Love, and Happiness (insert God if you wish), studying the democratic process in order to be a better citizen, kernel hacking... when you get right down to it, I don't want to do anything that someone has to pay me to get me to do.
Ben points to a lot of utopians, socialists, Progressives, and authors that always figured that increasing industrialization would eventually mean that machines did most of the labor, and humans would be left with pure Leisure. Of course we are in a very good position to rule on what utter bullshit that turned out to be. As long as corporations own the machines, the People do not, hence the profit on the labor of the machines goes to the owners. Instead we find ourselves forced now to keep up with the pace of the Machine.
Don't get me wrong, wouldn't trade it for The Way We Was, but I would fix it. We should always be using Technology to study and answer the really big questions that are fundamentally human. Like communication, love, politics, work, play, war, and so forth. Questions that people have always had to answer, but haven't always had the tech that we do with which to answer them.
For what it's worth, I consider that to be my life's Work. Applying modern technology to answering the fundamental human questions. My dream is to be able to make the quality of life on this planet tied to the progress of technology, so that increasing technological progress brings a corresponding increase in the quality of life. I think this is slightly different than the way it has been for awhile, in that increasing technological progress has brought better ways with which to kill each other, while our political and cultural systems are largely stagnant and always looking backward to the glory days behind us...
Ok I'm monopolizing the discussion, someone take over. ; )
Uh, hold on a sec, I've got to go write a business plan and call some friends of mine at Google.
;) will probably have to be burned once before they start taking backups seriously. But everyone else will probably want to keep their blog around in some form or another for posterity.
No joke. Give me a call if you get anything started.
I seriously doubt in 10 years if most weblogs entries from today will still be around in any form.
You may be right. I would hope that more companies become active in archival projects, ala the Wayback Machine, but if they can't make any money on it for 50 years, it'll be tough. Perhaps the job should be done by history book publishers who are reasonably certain that they will be around in 50 years... or at least know they'll be able to sell it to whoever replaces them.
So get back on the phone to Google, tell them we know who's footing the bill. =)
Do you think most people don't want to back-up their blogs? I tend to think that people won't just abandon their diaries, and that they must have considered the difference in terms of longevity between weblogging and traditional diaries. Perhaps it should be people saving backup CDROMs in their paper correspondence and photo boxes.
Now I could totally see someone not having proper backups in place in case of total hard-drive failure, or their hosting company going out of business without advance notice. These folks (myself included
To blogging software developers: solve our problems! Incorporate easy backup and flat-text export utilities into your software, and encourage your users to make periodic backups.
To bloggers: think about how interesting every random scrap of information you think of will be in the future. Your trip to the mall, what you told Jeanette the other day, the economies of trading webcam pictures to lonely geeks for goodies from Amazon, everything. So back it up! Use blogging software with a backup feature, and keep a record that you can look at in 40 years, and show to your kids (depending on what your kids are into ; )
It's just not that interesting a phenomenon.
Are you kidding??! Do you realize how coveted correspondence, diaries, personal logs and photo albums are from 50 years ago? 100 years ago? 300 years ago?!
We are changing the way history will be written. We are creating an army of primary sources, the people who don't write about history - they are history. In 100 years, people will be able to formulate insights about our lives, not based on their conjecture, their agenda, and a few scraps of preserved-information (probably from the ruling , literate classes); but based on the daily records of hundreds of thousands of people from many walks of life.
Weblogs are democratizing history. Or open-sourcing it, if you prefer. And right now the history that's being preserved is by-and-large that of the geek elite that always runs ahead of the general public curve. But ten years from now, weblogging will be as ubiquitous to the average American as the Internet is today. Give the rest of the world time, and they'll catch up with us. You won't get everyone's story, but you'll get many of them. Too many of them to conveniently gloss over the unpopular truths of our time. Will anyone in the future ever be able to write that our country united with a single voice behind the humanitarian, populist, environmentally-sound policies of the Bush Administration? Not as long as there are archives of the weblogs that are being written today.
I see weblogging as the most interesting thing to come out of this whole Internet experiment. Err, I mean, the most interesting thing after slashdot. =)
Gnutella Developers Front?
=p
Yes, the clueless, khaki/t-shirt/black sweater management core from Redwood Shores that such an idea would make the game, "more accessable". It never dawned on them that it also removed all interactivity from an interactive entertainment product.
Ok, so how did it turn out? I mean, for a company with a market cap of ~$8 billion, they must be doing something right. If the employees are truly treated like shit, in a horrible working environment, as everyone here has said, and the managers are clueless PHBs, and the CEO is presumably equally skilled at making games and baking quiches... "why they so rich?"
Seems like a recipe for disaster, not unrivaled success...