The internet is a worldwide network. If one country banned or censored it, it would make almost no difference to everyone else - expect that the amount of spam might be down a little.
Now it is. What about in its infancy? Without the US, would Finland house the ICANN lookalike?
Literal answer to a rhetorical question: Finland has had a very good electronics industry with curious innovations, there's been interest in computer science in academia for a long time, the businesses have been very enthusiastic about applied computing, and politicians have been fairly supportive of technological advances. So hell yes. ICANN was founded in 1998, and by then, Finnish internet infrastructure was already pretty good. (Remember the Penet remailer? Fucking with Scientology since nineteen frigging ninety three?)
got to the first mention of Microsoft Bob, and promptly closed the page. The level of absurdity in the article is so high,
Oh, yeah. Ridiculous noob mistakes like this undermine the credibility of the article. The service was actually called The Microsoft Network (MSN). Urrrgh. (Yes, I actually remember one prominent Microsoft supporter hyping how much better MSN was compared to the Internet and how it was not at all a mistake for Microsoft to put Internet connection tools to Windows 95, because obviously everyone would be using MSN, the technically superior network built right into Windows.)
The latest XBL EULA update was shown to me in Swedish. I've specified that I'm in Finland, the email notices from XBL come in Finnish, I'm using the dashboard in English (Finnish isn't available), and the xbox.com website shows up in Finnish for me. And boom, EULA in Swedish. What the hell. Granted, it's one of the official languages, but it's, um, a bit rusty for me. I definitely can't comprehend legalese.
Anyway, the whole idea of the guy above thinking that you should be made
fun of for learning with Pascal is a bit silly. First, you were a newbie
and probably had no choice. Second, if you're any good at all, the first
language you learn won't cause brain dammage. I beg to differ with other
famous experts in the field who say otherwise. If BASIC damages you, it's your
own damn fault.
Yup. I learnt Commodore BASIC - not a particularly good and expressive dialect of BASIC, mind you - when I was a kid. At school, we used GW-BASIC, which was sort of familiar because I had also used Spectravideo BASIC previously. (All of these BASICs were Microsoft-built, though.)
I wrote a lot of rubbish. I took to my heart the weird unstructured, GOTO-filled mental model that BASIC required.
Then, the school, and every cool kid, moved on to Turbo Pascal. I kept trying to wrap my head around these "procedure" things. I couldn't do it. And then, one winter day, I was walking outside when it suddenly snapped in my head and I understood how to do all sorts of stuff without GOTOs. Then I realised that I hadn't really understood BASIC either; a better understanding of GOSUB/RETURN would have made me a much better BASIC coder.
I didn't want to use del.icio.us, because by the time I started using social bookmarking, it was already owned by Yahoo!, and I specifically wanted something that might have been independent.
So I started using ma.gnolia. Awesome, fast service with nice little features and general Web 2.0-friendliness all around. They just failed to make working backups. Boom.
So I started using Twine. Leet folksonomic RDF-what-the-fuckery. Slowish. Yawn. Never quite figured out if it was possible to import bookmarks there. And by the time I started sort of getting interested of what other features the service supported, the thing got bought out. So much for that thing.
So I started using Simpy. An old service. No frills, but also rather fast, and rather well-functional. Did exactly what I wanted it to do. Even let me download a backup of the bookmarks if or when I wanted to. I said "yeah, whatever, I'll take a look at it later on" and wandered off. Surely this service wouldn't get off the net while I was away for a while? Wrong! They got eaten by fucking Reuters and shut down. Why? Why? Millions of victims demand answers, Reuters.
At this point, a few little doubts had started to come to my mind about the whole social bookmarking idea. People said "Ha ha! That's what you'll get for not doing the logical thing and using Delicious! We're old, we're established, we're a known brand. Yahoo! can't possibly kill us."
*sigh* *rueful headshake*
Folks, if you want a good example of my favourite Web 2.0 services, look at GitHub, because GitHub demands that you make local backups of your stuff, and you can migrate your stuff on another Git host in 5 seconds flat for whatever damn reason you happen to have in your head. Why can't we do the same thing to other Web 2.0 sites?
Wikileaks can't, and shouldn't, and probably don't want to have monopoly on leaked information. Cryptome has been around a long time. People have been babbling about leaks for a long time. Redundancy is good. If one site goes down, the others can keep the information live. The Man® may keep an inconvenient document down by silencing a critic, but they just might not be able to silence the order to shut down being published. At some point they have to scream, from the bottom of their lungs, "stop writing down everything I say, dammit". And then the jig is up. That's transparency for you. That's journalism for you.
People have been saying lately how Wikileaks isn't about "journalism". What is journalism but distributed dissemination of information? Why couldn't the same thing be done to leaked documents? Why have one site where people discuss particular documents, when you can have many?
Yes, cry that someone is trying to help Linux development. Get pissed because they're not doing it in a way that YOU want.
I know it's easy to point out that "but it isn't GPL! waah!" is not exactly a good argument. Obviously.
But I think it'd be much easier to say "but we already have GPL engines! waah! How does this contest inspire us to do something we were already avoiding doing?"
The problem with open source games, or Linux gaming in general, isn't the lack of 3D engines. It's the lack of budget (time, effort, talent?) for creating nice game assets and developing the content. An engine donation isn't going to make the game instantly awesome. It just raises the same question as always: "where the hell are we going to get the assets from?" It fails to give a great, new answer to the other burning question: "can we sell the game as closed source?" (because there are plenty of 3D engines out there that are under LGPL/BSD/MIT license.)
Obligatory Car Analogy: It's kind of like lending a Ferrari to someone, who just replies "thanks, dude, but I don't have a driver's license and live in a hick town with only damn twisty mud roads, no much use for a sports car anyway. My dad promised me his old Lada when I grow up."
That software mimics the DC product, so that is where the infringement suit comes in. [...] If you really wish to migrate off, you need to design new software to interface with the DB2, so once your data is safe on DB2, you will not need 2BDB2 afterward.
And this is different from Wine/libwine... how?
You need to keep running Wine "indefinitely" to run Windows apps under Linux, or "indefinitely" include libwine in your app to recompile an unmodified Windows app to run natively on Linux. If you want a true port, you need to actually extensively modify the original application to use native Linux APIs. And when you use Wine, you don't need to pay for a Windows license.
Why hasn't Microsoft sued the Wine project's asses off, based on the same rhetoric? They've had 17 bloody years to do so. Call me gullible, but if there's some sort of a submarine lawsuit buried in this, I don't think Microsoft's strategy is very brilliant.
Because writing software that maintains API compatibility is perfectly legal, as long as it's reverse-engineered and you don't outright copy the original software's code. Software license agreements only cover the actual software.
Maybe I need to RTFA, but I just went to http://google.com/wave and it worked fine. I know it's no longer developed, but it still exists
Not for long. Earlier, Google announced that they would wrap things up with Wave, but they also said that the service would stay alive at least until the end of this year. (They probably just want to give people a headstart if they want to move their stuff away from Wave.) After that, it's anyone's guess.
I'm kinda torn about this. Publication channels have editorial control, which means a lot of people along the way will have to work toward making the final product into something that people might actually want to buy and enjoy and tell others about. This trend toward independence tends to think that raw output from one person is something that can be sold. It's rarely the case. People expect quality control. People expect to buy the books from regular stores, so you need to work out the distribution channels too.
I'd just hope the same model that book publishers currently use would be applicable to other forms of art. People create works, publishers make them sell. Authors retain copyrights to their works. Author gets a non-refundable advance and agents get a percentage out of that, so the publisher has a motivation to recoup their loss. There are unions, but whether or not you're a member your chances of getting published are the same, and some unions require you to actually get something published first on your own. While authors are backed by giant corporate machinery, they still remain independent. Publishers don't really advertise their own brand, they have books that need promotion, and later on, it's the author's name that sells. There's just no room for *AA-like bullying in this scheme. If it rears its ugly head, people get grumpy. (example: SFWA's recent retarded effort to set up intricate anti-ebook-piracy effort which most people felt was waste of good money)
If it's not in the Holst suite, it's not a planet.
In other words, King Koopa's airship is a planet. Seriously: play "Mars" and then the Airship theme.
But it's a widely known fact that quite a bit of Warcraft soundtrack was inspired by Mars. Oh, darn. Azeroth is a real planet? Do I need to start playing that ridiculous newfangled Internet game?
Instead of noticing that we loathe any and all of the ads, they are going to ask: "Which one did you enjoy the most?"
This assumes that we enjoyed any of the ads.
We don't, but that's not what they're measuring is it...
The funny thing is, I enjoy ads... as a supplement to the product, and as a form of art of their own. But not for their intended purpose. I noticed I tend to enjoy ads of products I've already decided to buy or already own and like. So if it's clever, interesting or a funny ad of something I care about, then yes, it's thumbs up from me.
But that still leaves out a crucial detail that the advertisers actually want to know: Was the advertisement interesting and did it influence my decision to buy a product? Usually no. Seeing a product live can possibly make me buy a product if I already considered it, but reviews and word-of-mouth are usually the things that do the selling these days.
Notepad is a raw text editor. You open a file in it and it shows you exactly what the text in it is. That's what it's for, wordpad does all that shiny stuff like make things pretty, notepad shows you what is there.
I know. Hence the comparison to Emacs, also a raw text editor (according to the legend, anyway =).
Notepad doesn't know how to properly interpret some non-printable characters, non-CRLF-style newlines in particular. If you open up a file that has Unix-style LF newlines, you get a very weird end result with funky display glitches. Heavens willing, you may even get one long line that you can sort of read if you turn on line wrap. (This is the case in XP and earlier; I don't know if they have fixed it since.) As a result, Notepad can't really open these files - not in a manner that would benefit the user, anyway.
What I was trying to say is that almost every other text editor on the planet seems to know that either a) you allow many interpretations of the newline characters or b) don't mess up the characters you can't do anything about. They emphatically don't randomly bug out and mess up the whole display Because The Standard Said So.
Actually, it is. If the standard is stupid, then applications must implement the stupid standard in a sensible manner. Anything else is passive-aggressive politicking: "it's not our damn fault the program is screwed up, blame the standard guys".
Notepad may implement the letter of the standard. It's not implementing the spirit. It's not implementing a text editor that end users would care to use. The last point is, you know, rather crucial.
If the standard says both line ends are allowed, then the editor should support both. Every other text editor on the planet seems to either gleefully auto-detect the EOL characters used, or at least not completely mess up the editor, like what happens if you open a LF-ended file in Notepad. (For example, some older setups of Emacs fail to detect DOS line endings, but they show "^M" in the line endings and will happily save them as is, resulting in a perfectly functional file.) Also, they tend to offer the choice over which line endings should be used when the file is saved.
1) Editing: Have you read any recent books? Between word usage, entire sentences cut off, and flat basic gammar errors many newer novels don't appear to have anything beyond the basic spell check run, if that. Add that to the mistakes added on purpose to "detect illicit copies" and it's painful to read some books. Not just small publishers either - larger houses such as Tor have this problem.
Typos in the published books are horrible, but you should see the ones that they caught. Editors do far more than just check for typos, they act as the last line of sanity-checks.
If I need to edit my text, it requires me to take distance. I need to quit acting like a writer for a while. I only notice some of the the big flaws in my own texts after enough time has passed I've basically forgotten the text; I don't have a reset button in my head that would let me take a fresh look on the text whenever I'd like. I might need to hire someone else to edit the text. Hmm, that sounds expensive.
2) Marketing: In this case it'll be handled, for free, but your readership. Get some decent reviews on Amazon, end up on their "You might also like" list, and things go from there. Classic word of mouth only with a much larger potential base. If you get mentioned on a blog with a decent reader base things will move even quicker.
How do I get the readership? Why should I approach bloggers when I know my text isn't necessarily up to my standards?
Writing is much harder to market by word-of-mouth in the Internet, because it's not exactly enjoyed the same way most other "viral" material these days. The readers need a lot of time and brainpower to process the text. It's not like music or YouTube videos, where people just spend 5 minutes of their life and can immediately tell whether something rules or sucks. People sort of need to make a conscious investment of time - "fine, this sounds interesting, I'll spend half a hour reading this thing".
3) Cover/format: Format can be handled by any modern word processor with templates (search online - free ones abound, for everything from novels to screenplays), and cover can be done for a small fee to a decent artist or (if you have them) friends with talent. Why pay the publisher rate?
Folks in graphic design will see red every time someone suggests word processors for layout. There's a good reason for that.
As for cover art, the "publisher rate" is pretty hard to beat when they foot the bill. In publishing, the money is supposed to flow toward the author. The publisher pays the author for the publication rights and royalties, and that's that. Their job is to make the book sell. Part of that is hiring a cover artist.
In summary: I'd much prefer it if I could just write stuff and not really worry about readership in any shape or form. I fancy myself as a somewhat tolerable writer, even though I often look at my stuff, sigh ruefully and mutter something about needing a damn editor. I suck at using social websites. My greatest successes include linking my newly released stuff in Identica/Twitter, so I may get 20 hits instead of 2. (I'm aware hit counts don't necessarily translate to readership, but 20 hits doesn't exactly imply I'd have any readership to speak of, don't you agree?) Reddit has greeted my creations so far with a yawn; I quit submitting my webcomic there because all I ever got was a dutiful downvote for each. I can draw, but probably not well enough to make decent, attention-grabbing cover art. I'd rather spend all excess time and creative energy on writing.
So, my current options are 1) stay as an internet nobody or 2) hope to get some of the stuff published through existing publication channels, because they have an infrastructure. How do you propose I get the option 3) become an instant internet celebrity without requiring me shift my focus away from writing itself, or spending money on external services? It'd be kind of hard to make a living out of this stuff if I had to pay for everything, you know.
Weta Digital in Wellington was heavily involved in 3-D visual effects for James Cameron's Avatar and is also working in 3-D for the first Tintin film, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Look at Microsloth Word: it keeps getting more and more like a page layout program, and less and less like a tool to get text in the computer.
Exactly my sentiments. WYSIWYG word processors put too much emphasis on the formatting.
When I type, all I really need is *emphasis*, some "correct"---dare I say, as I mess it up anyway---typography, and paragraphs. I'd preferrably need a way to cross out parts of the text without deleting it (marking it as "to be rewritten"). When I type text, I just want to see white text on blue, the way WordPerfect intended. When I print out the drafts, they should look like drafts -- monospace, doublespaced -- and not have any darn "highly polished looks". I don't need to tweak the formatting while I type text. I have LaTeX for that.
I have been looking for a perfect workflow myself - because no program is good for everything. Currently, I type stuff with TextRoom (a full-screen writer-oriented text editor that can save as pseudo-HTML or plain text - I just use plain text with Markdown). I use OpenOffice.org for further editing of text, spell/grammar check, typography and proofreading. I produce printable drafts and final PDFs with LaTeX and hand-massage HTML for online releases. My only real wish is that TextRoom and all other tools would just toss around ODF files so I wouldn't need to convert stuff between editing. It would be awesome if the metadata would be preserved, too, so I could see the editing clock too =)
Awww, just a portable Z-machine interpreter. I was hoping this was a new commercial publication channel for text adventures. You know, TextFire all over again?
That said, text adventures are pretty fun on portable platforms. I used to play some text adventures on Frobnitz (for PalmOS) back in the day, and it was awesome even without keyboard. Didn't really play it that much though...
Meh. I always use PNG anyway. With the advent of faster web connections, there is no need for more compression.
But that attitude means only one thing: People will upgrade their connections because it's the lesser of two evils. Either maintain the same sucky experience they have right now by upgrading the hardware, or choose not to upgrade and get an absolutely horrible experience in future when the data is uncompressed. Who wins? Um... hardware manufacturers, probably. Certainly not the users, not the content providers, not the ISPs.
New compression methods allow us to send more data. Faster connections allow us to send more data. Use the two together, and you send even more data. It's surprising how easy this equation is to mess up.
I'd be happy enough to pay for good Git tooling on Windows, but there doesn't appear to be a way to do so.
What are you talking about? msysgit is dead simple to install, and provides you with a perfectly functional Bash shell.
Yeah, I've been wondering how to increase the usability further, by using zsh instead of Bash, but this is not really a pressing issue since Bash is pretty awesome too.
I don't think Star Wreck even had known actors, and yet it's original distribution channel was, *gasp*, torrent.
A few small corrections: Star Wreck had a couple of professional actors (Kari Väänänen as the Russian president, Jari Ahola as Karigrandi/Festerbester, and Karoliina Blackburn in a small part as a science officer.) And they did release the DVD before the Internet release. (And if you want to nitpick further, they even opposed the torrent use a little bit, because they were confident their webhost could handle it just fine. Ultimately, they did use BT as well.) But still, I recall the staff complaining that the big reason why the film appeared in the IMDB so slowly was that majority of the crew were new entries to the database, and thus it needed a lot of work.
Then point out to the moron senators that space is full of vacuum and we should declare war on it.
Suddenly NASA has all the money it needs.
But then the moron senators declare that these newfangled manned NASA crafts are no longer scientific vessels, they're warships, and should be equipped with weapons. In this early phase, NASA may need to drop a few pieces of life support gear to make space for that stuff...
She's made it clear that she's trademarked her name and using it is 'illegal... without prior written permission.'
Last week, like just about everyone else, I was playing through the Halo: Reach campaign. Somehow, I got thinking of a very curious fact: the game is set in 26th century, and it totally appears as if the Red Cross had ceased to exist at that point of history. Really. You see medical supplies marked with red "H" or Staff of Aesculapius. But not red cross.
Of course, the real reason why this happens is that Red Cross objects to the use of red crosses on video game health-kits and like. But the thought that the Red Cross had completely disappeared obviously came to my mind - there's no mention of the organisation anywhere, and all of the symbols are conspicuously missing. You go around a city, looking to stop invaders in a bloody hospital and you're glad your navigation AI tells where you should go, because it's kind of harder to identify the building from a helicopter...
I guess the moral of the parable is that if you don't want your name to remain, the chances are that it won't.
Dear Diaspora folks: The reason I was interested of Diaspora is that it's on Rails, which means it should come with out of box support for weird databases, including SQLite. (My average cheapo hosting provider charges ridiculous extra fees for MySQL, but they're cool with SQLite - anything that needs daemons is out.) If you want it to be the "wordpress of social networks", then it damn well should be deployable on your average server that lets you build stuff from scratch, and run CGI scripts, but not run background processes.
Now, Rails is still relatively less known and not all hosting services provide Ruby, but if you have ssh access and the host has a C compiler, dependencies shouldn't be entirely painful to deploy a Rails app as a CGI. Build Ruby, fetch gems, tada.
I can deploy Movable Type 4 with no problems. Drupal 7's alphas have worked great so far. Will your software run?
Slashdot Mirror
The internet is a worldwide network. If one country banned or censored it, it would make almost no difference to everyone else - expect that the amount of spam might be down a little.
Now it is. What about in its infancy? Without the US, would Finland house the ICANN lookalike?
Literal answer to a rhetorical question: Finland has had a very good electronics industry with curious innovations, there's been interest in computer science in academia for a long time, the businesses have been very enthusiastic about applied computing, and politicians have been fairly supportive of technological advances. So hell yes. ICANN was founded in 1998, and by then, Finnish internet infrastructure was already pretty good. (Remember the Penet remailer? Fucking with Scientology since nineteen frigging ninety three?)
got to the first mention of Microsoft Bob, and promptly closed the page. The level of absurdity in the article is so high,
Oh, yeah. Ridiculous noob mistakes like this undermine the credibility of the article. The service was actually called The Microsoft Network (MSN). Urrrgh. (Yes, I actually remember one prominent Microsoft supporter hyping how much better MSN was compared to the Internet and how it was not at all a mistake for Microsoft to put Internet connection tools to Windows 95, because obviously everyone would be using MSN, the technically superior network built right into Windows.)
You think that's weird?
The latest XBL EULA update was shown to me in Swedish. I've specified that I'm in Finland, the email notices from XBL come in Finnish, I'm using the dashboard in English (Finnish isn't available), and the xbox.com website shows up in Finnish for me. And boom, EULA in Swedish. What the hell. Granted, it's one of the official languages, but it's, um, a bit rusty for me. I definitely can't comprehend legalese.
Anyway, the whole idea of the guy above thinking that you should be made fun of for learning with Pascal is a bit silly. First, you were a newbie and probably had no choice. Second, if you're any good at all, the first language you learn won't cause brain dammage. I beg to differ with other famous experts in the field who say otherwise. If BASIC damages you, it's your own damn fault.
Yup. I learnt Commodore BASIC - not a particularly good and expressive dialect of BASIC, mind you - when I was a kid. At school, we used GW-BASIC, which was sort of familiar because I had also used Spectravideo BASIC previously. (All of these BASICs were Microsoft-built, though.)
I wrote a lot of rubbish. I took to my heart the weird unstructured, GOTO-filled mental model that BASIC required.
Then, the school, and every cool kid, moved on to Turbo Pascal. I kept trying to wrap my head around these "procedure" things. I couldn't do it. And then, one winter day, I was walking outside when it suddenly snapped in my head and I understood how to do all sorts of stuff without GOTOs. Then I realised that I hadn't really understood BASIC either; a better understanding of GOSUB/RETURN would have made me a much better BASIC coder.
I didn't want to use del.icio.us, because by the time I started using social bookmarking, it was already owned by Yahoo!, and I specifically wanted something that might have been independent.
So I started using ma.gnolia. Awesome, fast service with nice little features and general Web 2.0-friendliness all around. They just failed to make working backups. Boom.
So I started using Twine. Leet folksonomic RDF-what-the-fuckery. Slowish. Yawn. Never quite figured out if it was possible to import bookmarks there. And by the time I started sort of getting interested of what other features the service supported, the thing got bought out. So much for that thing.
So I started using Simpy. An old service. No frills, but also rather fast, and rather well-functional. Did exactly what I wanted it to do. Even let me download a backup of the bookmarks if or when I wanted to. I said "yeah, whatever, I'll take a look at it later on" and wandered off. Surely this service wouldn't get off the net while I was away for a while? Wrong! They got eaten by fucking Reuters and shut down. Why? Why? Millions of victims demand answers, Reuters.
At this point, a few little doubts had started to come to my mind about the whole social bookmarking idea. People said "Ha ha! That's what you'll get for not doing the logical thing and using Delicious! We're old, we're established, we're a known brand. Yahoo! can't possibly kill us."
*sigh* *rueful headshake*
Folks, if you want a good example of my favourite Web 2.0 services, look at GitHub, because GitHub demands that you make local backups of your stuff, and you can migrate your stuff on another Git host in 5 seconds flat for whatever damn reason you happen to have in your head. Why can't we do the same thing to other Web 2.0 sites?
Wikileaks can't, and shouldn't, and probably don't want to have monopoly on leaked information. Cryptome has been around a long time. People have been babbling about leaks for a long time. Redundancy is good. If one site goes down, the others can keep the information live. The Man® may keep an inconvenient document down by silencing a critic, but they just might not be able to silence the order to shut down being published. At some point they have to scream, from the bottom of their lungs, "stop writing down everything I say, dammit". And then the jig is up. That's transparency for you. That's journalism for you.
People have been saying lately how Wikileaks isn't about "journalism". What is journalism but distributed dissemination of information? Why couldn't the same thing be done to leaked documents? Why have one site where people discuss particular documents, when you can have many?
Yes, cry that someone is trying to help Linux development. Get pissed because they're not doing it in a way that YOU want.
I know it's easy to point out that "but it isn't GPL! waah!" is not exactly a good argument. Obviously.
But I think it'd be much easier to say "but we already have GPL engines! waah! How does this contest inspire us to do something we were already avoiding doing?"
The problem with open source games, or Linux gaming in general, isn't the lack of 3D engines. It's the lack of budget (time, effort, talent?) for creating nice game assets and developing the content. An engine donation isn't going to make the game instantly awesome. It just raises the same question as always: "where the hell are we going to get the assets from?" It fails to give a great, new answer to the other burning question: "can we sell the game as closed source?" (because there are plenty of 3D engines out there that are under LGPL/BSD/MIT license.)
Obligatory Car Analogy: It's kind of like lending a Ferrari to someone, who just replies "thanks, dude, but I don't have a driver's license and live in a hick town with only damn twisty mud roads, no much use for a sports car anyway. My dad promised me his old Lada when I grow up."
That software mimics the DC product, so that is where the infringement suit comes in. [...] If you really wish to migrate off, you need to design new software to interface with the DB2, so once your data is safe on DB2, you will not need 2BDB2 afterward.
And this is different from Wine/libwine... how?
You need to keep running Wine "indefinitely" to run Windows apps under Linux, or "indefinitely" include libwine in your app to recompile an unmodified Windows app to run natively on Linux. If you want a true port, you need to actually extensively modify the original application to use native Linux APIs. And when you use Wine, you don't need to pay for a Windows license.
Why hasn't Microsoft sued the Wine project's asses off, based on the same rhetoric? They've had 17 bloody years to do so. Call me gullible, but if there's some sort of a submarine lawsuit buried in this, I don't think Microsoft's strategy is very brilliant.
Because writing software that maintains API compatibility is perfectly legal, as long as it's reverse-engineered and you don't outright copy the original software's code. Software license agreements only cover the actual software.
Maybe I need to RTFA, but I just went to http://google.com/wave and it worked fine. I know it's no longer developed, but it still exists
Not for long. Earlier, Google announced that they would wrap things up with Wave, but they also said that the service would stay alive at least until the end of this year. (They probably just want to give people a headstart if they want to move their stuff away from Wave.) After that, it's anyone's guess.
I'm kinda torn about this. Publication channels have editorial control, which means a lot of people along the way will have to work toward making the final product into something that people might actually want to buy and enjoy and tell others about. This trend toward independence tends to think that raw output from one person is something that can be sold. It's rarely the case. People expect quality control. People expect to buy the books from regular stores, so you need to work out the distribution channels too.
I'd just hope the same model that book publishers currently use would be applicable to other forms of art. People create works, publishers make them sell. Authors retain copyrights to their works. Author gets a non-refundable advance and agents get a percentage out of that, so the publisher has a motivation to recoup their loss. There are unions, but whether or not you're a member your chances of getting published are the same, and some unions require you to actually get something published first on your own. While authors are backed by giant corporate machinery, they still remain independent. Publishers don't really advertise their own brand, they have books that need promotion, and later on, it's the author's name that sells. There's just no room for *AA-like bullying in this scheme. If it rears its ugly head, people get grumpy. (example: SFWA's recent retarded effort to set up intricate anti-ebook-piracy effort which most people felt was waste of good money)
If it's not in the Holst suite, it's not a planet.
In other words, King Koopa's airship is a planet. Seriously: play "Mars" and then the Airship theme.
But it's a widely known fact that quite a bit of Warcraft soundtrack was inspired by Mars. Oh, darn. Azeroth is a real planet? Do I need to start playing that ridiculous newfangled Internet game?
Instead of noticing that we loathe any and all of the ads, they are going to ask: "Which one did you enjoy the most?"
This assumes that we enjoyed any of the ads.
We don't, but that's not what they're measuring is it...
The funny thing is, I enjoy ads... as a supplement to the product, and as a form of art of their own. But not for their intended purpose. I noticed I tend to enjoy ads of products I've already decided to buy or already own and like. So if it's clever, interesting or a funny ad of something I care about, then yes, it's thumbs up from me.
But that still leaves out a crucial detail that the advertisers actually want to know: Was the advertisement interesting and did it influence my decision to buy a product? Usually no. Seeing a product live can possibly make me buy a product if I already considered it, but reviews and word-of-mouth are usually the things that do the selling these days.
abort, retry, fail?
Sounds like Microsoft's mobile phone strategy.
Ah, but you forgot the crucial part of that plan: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail... =)
Notepad is a raw text editor. You open a file in it and it shows you exactly what the text in it is. That's what it's for, wordpad does all that shiny stuff like make things pretty, notepad shows you what is there.
I know. Hence the comparison to Emacs, also a raw text editor (according to the legend, anyway =).
Notepad doesn't know how to properly interpret some non-printable characters, non-CRLF-style newlines in particular. If you open up a file that has Unix-style LF newlines, you get a very weird end result with funky display glitches. Heavens willing, you may even get one long line that you can sort of read if you turn on line wrap. (This is the case in XP and earlier; I don't know if they have fixed it since.) As a result, Notepad can't really open these files - not in a manner that would benefit the user, anyway.
What I was trying to say is that almost every other text editor on the planet seems to know that either a) you allow many interpretations of the newline characters or b) don't mess up the characters you can't do anything about. They emphatically don't randomly bug out and mess up the whole display Because The Standard Said So.
That's not actually an issue with notepad.
Actually, it is. If the standard is stupid, then applications must implement the stupid standard in a sensible manner. Anything else is passive-aggressive politicking: "it's not our damn fault the program is screwed up, blame the standard guys".
Notepad may implement the letter of the standard. It's not implementing the spirit. It's not implementing a text editor that end users would care to use. The last point is, you know, rather crucial.
If the standard says both line ends are allowed, then the editor should support both. Every other text editor on the planet seems to either gleefully auto-detect the EOL characters used, or at least not completely mess up the editor, like what happens if you open a LF-ended file in Notepad. (For example, some older setups of Emacs fail to detect DOS line endings, but they show "^M" in the line endings and will happily save them as is, resulting in a perfectly functional file.) Also, they tend to offer the choice over which line endings should be used when the file is saved.
1) Editing: Have you read any recent books? Between word usage, entire sentences cut off, and flat basic gammar errors many newer novels don't appear to have anything beyond the basic spell check run, if that. Add that to the mistakes added on purpose to "detect illicit copies" and it's painful to read some books. Not just small publishers either - larger houses such as Tor have this problem.
Typos in the published books are horrible, but you should see the ones that they caught. Editors do far more than just check for typos, they act as the last line of sanity-checks.
If I need to edit my text, it requires me to take distance. I need to quit acting like a writer for a while. I only notice some of the the big flaws in my own texts after enough time has passed I've basically forgotten the text; I don't have a reset button in my head that would let me take a fresh look on the text whenever I'd like. I might need to hire someone else to edit the text. Hmm, that sounds expensive.
2) Marketing: In this case it'll be handled, for free, but your readership. Get some decent reviews on Amazon, end up on their "You might also like" list, and things go from there. Classic word of mouth only with a much larger potential base. If you get mentioned on a blog with a decent reader base things will move even quicker.
How do I get the readership? Why should I approach bloggers when I know my text isn't necessarily up to my standards?
Writing is much harder to market by word-of-mouth in the Internet, because it's not exactly enjoyed the same way most other "viral" material these days. The readers need a lot of time and brainpower to process the text. It's not like music or YouTube videos, where people just spend 5 minutes of their life and can immediately tell whether something rules or sucks. People sort of need to make a conscious investment of time - "fine, this sounds interesting, I'll spend half a hour reading this thing".
3) Cover/format: Format can be handled by any modern word processor with templates (search online - free ones abound, for everything from novels to screenplays), and cover can be done for a small fee to a decent artist or (if you have them) friends with talent. Why pay the publisher rate?
Folks in graphic design will see red every time someone suggests word processors for layout. There's a good reason for that.
As for cover art, the "publisher rate" is pretty hard to beat when they foot the bill. In publishing, the money is supposed to flow toward the author. The publisher pays the author for the publication rights and royalties, and that's that. Their job is to make the book sell. Part of that is hiring a cover artist.
In summary: I'd much prefer it if I could just write stuff and not really worry about readership in any shape or form. I fancy myself as a somewhat tolerable writer, even though I often look at my stuff, sigh ruefully and mutter something about needing a damn editor. I suck at using social websites. My greatest successes include linking my newly released stuff in Identica/Twitter, so I may get 20 hits instead of 2. (I'm aware hit counts don't necessarily translate to readership, but 20 hits doesn't exactly imply I'd have any readership to speak of, don't you agree?) Reddit has greeted my creations so far with a yawn; I quit submitting my webcomic there because all I ever got was a dutiful downvote for each. I can draw, but probably not well enough to make decent, attention-grabbing cover art. I'd rather spend all excess time and creative energy on writing.
So, my current options are 1) stay as an internet nobody or 2) hope to get some of the stuff published through existing publication channels, because they have an infrastructure. How do you propose I get the option 3) become an instant internet celebrity without requiring me shift my focus away from writing itself, or spending money on external services? It'd be kind of hard to make a living out of this stuff if I had to pay for everything, you know.
wtf?
This was the first I had heard of it, too... It appears to be based on Rackham's Treasure arc. Yay for sharks with frigging laser beams! I mean, faux-shark submarines!
Look at Microsloth Word: it keeps getting more and more like a page layout program, and less and less like a tool to get text in the computer.
Exactly my sentiments. WYSIWYG word processors put too much emphasis on the formatting.
When I type, all I really need is *emphasis*, some "correct"---dare I say, as I mess it up anyway---typography, and paragraphs. I'd preferrably need a way to cross out parts of the text without deleting it (marking it as "to be rewritten"). When I type text, I just want to see white text on blue, the way WordPerfect intended. When I print out the drafts, they should look like drafts -- monospace, doublespaced -- and not have any darn "highly polished looks". I don't need to tweak the formatting while I type text. I have LaTeX for that.
I have been looking for a perfect workflow myself - because no program is good for everything. Currently, I type stuff with TextRoom (a full-screen writer-oriented text editor that can save as pseudo-HTML or plain text - I just use plain text with Markdown). I use OpenOffice.org for further editing of text, spell/grammar check, typography and proofreading. I produce printable drafts and final PDFs with LaTeX and hand-massage HTML for online releases. My only real wish is that TextRoom and all other tools would just toss around ODF files so I wouldn't need to convert stuff between editing. It would be awesome if the metadata would be preserved, too, so I could see the editing clock too =)
Awww, just a portable Z-machine interpreter. I was hoping this was a new commercial publication channel for text adventures. You know, TextFire all over again?
That said, text adventures are pretty fun on portable platforms. I used to play some text adventures on Frobnitz (for PalmOS) back in the day, and it was awesome even without keyboard. Didn't really play it that much though...
Meh. I always use PNG anyway. With the advent of faster web connections, there is no need for more compression.
But that attitude means only one thing: People will upgrade their connections because it's the lesser of two evils. Either maintain the same sucky experience they have right now by upgrading the hardware, or choose not to upgrade and get an absolutely horrible experience in future when the data is uncompressed. Who wins? Um... hardware manufacturers, probably. Certainly not the users, not the content providers, not the ISPs.
New compression methods allow us to send more data. Faster connections allow us to send more data. Use the two together, and you send even more data. It's surprising how easy this equation is to mess up.
I'd be happy enough to pay for good Git tooling on Windows, but there doesn't appear to be a way to do so.
What are you talking about? msysgit is dead simple to install, and provides you with a perfectly functional Bash shell.
Yeah, I've been wondering how to increase the usability further, by using zsh instead of Bash, but this is not really a pressing issue since Bash is pretty awesome too.
I don't think Star Wreck even had known actors, and yet it's original distribution channel was, *gasp*, torrent.
A few small corrections: Star Wreck had a couple of professional actors (Kari Väänänen as the Russian president, Jari Ahola as Karigrandi/Festerbester, and Karoliina Blackburn in a small part as a science officer.) And they did release the DVD before the Internet release. (And if you want to nitpick further, they even opposed the torrent use a little bit, because they were confident their webhost could handle it just fine. Ultimately, they did use BT as well.) But still, I recall the staff complaining that the big reason why the film appeared in the IMDB so slowly was that majority of the crew were new entries to the database, and thus it needed a lot of work.
No..
declare only terrorists own vacuums..
Then point out to the moron senators that space is full of vacuum and we should declare war on it.
Suddenly NASA has all the money it needs.
But then the moron senators declare that these newfangled manned NASA crafts are no longer scientific vessels, they're warships, and should be equipped with weapons. In this early phase, NASA may need to drop a few pieces of life support gear to make space for that stuff...
(Not my joke, though)
She's made it clear that she's trademarked her name and using it is 'illegal... without prior written permission.'
Last week, like just about everyone else, I was playing through the Halo: Reach campaign. Somehow, I got thinking of a very curious fact: the game is set in 26th century, and it totally appears as if the Red Cross had ceased to exist at that point of history. Really. You see medical supplies marked with red "H" or Staff of Aesculapius. But not red cross.
Of course, the real reason why this happens is that Red Cross objects to the use of red crosses on video game health-kits and like. But the thought that the Red Cross had completely disappeared obviously came to my mind - there's no mention of the organisation anywhere, and all of the symbols are conspicuously missing. You go around a city, looking to stop invaders in a bloody hospital and you're glad your navigation AI tells where you should go, because it's kind of harder to identify the building from a helicopter...
I guess the moral of the parable is that if you don't want your name to remain, the chances are that it won't.
it doesn't work on apache ... mongodb ...
Dear Diaspora folks: The reason I was interested of Diaspora is that it's on Rails, which means it should come with out of box support for weird databases, including SQLite. (My average cheapo hosting provider charges ridiculous extra fees for MySQL, but they're cool with SQLite - anything that needs daemons is out.) If you want it to be the "wordpress of social networks", then it damn well should be deployable on your average server that lets you build stuff from scratch, and run CGI scripts, but not run background processes.
Now, Rails is still relatively less known and not all hosting services provide Ruby, but if you have ssh access and the host has a C compiler, dependencies shouldn't be entirely painful to deploy a Rails app as a CGI. Build Ruby, fetch gems, tada.
I can deploy Movable Type 4 with no problems. Drupal 7's alphas have worked great so far. Will your software run?