Something that the article doesn't really mention, that helped explain a lot of things about corporate support of OSS, is a theory that (as far as I remember) Joel Spolsky wrote about. It's best explained by an analogy.
The analogy runs as follows. Suppose that a street has a bunch of bun vendors and a bunch of people who sell sausages to put in the buns (wow, talk about decoupled designs). People might be willing to spend $1.50 for a bun plus a sausage - nominally $1 for the sausage and $0.50 for the bun.
Now, suppose that someone in the sausage industry comes up with a way of "open-sourcing" buns - now buns are free! This happening, you've got a bunch of customers wandering around buying sausages with an extra $0.50 in their pockets. They were clearly willing to spend more on the sausage+bun combination, so maybe you can jack up your price to $1.10 or $1.20 (very unlikely you'll be able to go to $1.50).
Of course, like all simplistic analogies, this depends on a lot of assumptions. For instance, we expect that the customer won't go off and buy something new (a 50 cent Coke, maybe).
Now, think about companies that have major OSS support. The best example is IBM - which makes its money of hardware and services. Are they the sausage vendors in this case?
I don't know if this is nonsense, but it's an interesting theory. If anyone has a good counter-argument, let's hear it. If anyone has a silly pun about "open-saucing" hot dogs, well, remember that I'm a computer scientist and can generate an enormous static charge from your keyboard to Get You.
The numbers quoted in other responses to this post seem to vastly understate spending on hunger, by reducing the definition down to a single program. This excludes any kinds of agricultural subsidies (which of course are far from a anti-hunger program, but usually do have the effect of reducing prices of food for poor people in addition to the usual propping up of farmers that's the real point of them). This also ignores any kind of social welfare support to poor people that will almost certainly have a large proportion spent on food. Presumably there are also state and regional programs, although I don't know about that.
On the other side, the total IT budget is treated around as if it's all licensing fees for proprietary software, which it almost certainly isn't.
So as usual, Barlow is overstating his case. What a shock.
I've spent an inordinate amount of the last decade sitting around in coffee houses of varying degrees of corporateness (Starbucks obviously being on one end of the scale). Quite frankly, one of the reasons that I've stopped spending time at coffee houses are people using coffee houses in exactly this way.
I don't mind people working in coffee houses. I don't mind people meeting in coffee houses. What I do mind is when people start doing things like presentations to enough other people that they have to raise their voices, talk loudly and endlessly on their damn cell phones (not to mention taking endless calls), and blather away like they own the whole place. Guess what - it's not your office, guys. It's really not.
Tech nerds are usually fairly good about this. Some of the local business types are just complete pricks about this, though. It's like they've never considered the idea that the whole place isn't interested in the unique, dynamic work environment that their chain restaurant is going to provide.
I'm not under the delusion that coffee houses should be some sort of library-like atmosphere, or that no-one should ever conduct business there, or anything like that. I'd just like (for a change) for people who are doing business in a coffeehouse to recognize that they aren't in their own office.
Perhaps I don't understand the subtleties here, but why should Ballmer get credit for piling up a lot of cash?
Shouldn't this be going towards developing new products and services (whether they are internally developed or just bought lock-stock-and-barrel from outside)?
Understanding this code, frankly, doesn't prove anything like what people like Joel seem to think that it proves. What it shows is that you know a very terse C idiom that is occasionally useful. However, like many terse, elegant solutions, it's extremely inefficient and brittle to boot (potentially copying off the end of buffers).
I wrote some assembly-language string functions for the Alpha for the Alpha port of Plan 9 a long time ago, and there was about a factor of 50 execution speed difference in the worst case between naive code like the above and a hand-coded strcpy.
I love all the "l33t C hacker" weenies on this thread applauding themselves for writing "efficient" code like this...
Wow, that's about a perfect example of the Ultimate Perspectiveless Slashdot Post:
"the immorality of copyright,... Jim Crow laws".
That's right, someone making it illegal to distribute endless perfect copies of copyrighted material is similar to Jim Crow. I'm just hoping that someone will do a sit-in to save all those poor oppressed upper-middle-class computer nerds, college students, etc. from their horrible fate.
In fact, I think that's too weak a metaphor. Perhaps the fact that the MPAA and RIAA do the occasional annoying thing on the net should be characterized in terms of slavery? Ecological destruction? Wait - I know: Stalin, or Hitler, or the Holocaust. Leaving copyright issues to the RIAA is like leaving Europe to Hitler. Ah, that's better.
"It looks like the real reason for offshoring is corporations looking for warmer weather."
Why does every third Slashdot story have to contain some sophomoric, contentious and/or unfounded sentence in the lead-in? These sorts of things generate, as a rule, a huge amount of off-topic flaming and often frame the actual article in question in a distorted light ("Ask Unix Co-Creator (sic) Rob Pike"). It'd be nice if there was a little less raw opinion and random editorializing splattered across the actual stories. It's only a few lines; for heaven's sake try to be a little professional.
- Both made their name with shorter, interesting books that played to their strengths (Crying of Lot 49, Snow Crash)
- Both went on to write undiscplined, monster-length big sellers of no real merit, that gave legions of true believers the illusory sense that they were grappling with serious issues and great literature.
Absolutely correct. It frustrates me that the police do nothing, but then they're under-funded and over-worked in this town and have more important things to do.
They should just be able to hand out a small, 'nuisance' ticket that is far more trouble to fight than just pay. Blast your stereo, pay $10. Rinse, repeat, until your car gets repossessed.
You're correct in many ways, and I think that you understate your case. I'm about to agree with you at somewhat excessive length...
As far as AI goes, the notion that 'strong AI' (that is, not some narrowly defined task like optical character recognition - but a machine that supposedly reasons like or better than a human in a generalized, complex domain) is somewhere right around the corner has been around for about 30 years. Progress in this field is pathetic.
Further, a lot of people may have jumped on to try to debunk your claim about Intel's 4Ghz failures indicating that Moore's law is dead. They will be half-right, of course - Moore's law doesn't predict clock speed but complexity available at a given price (actually, it's even more complicated than that, but I can't be bothered to go into it here).
However, Intel's problems with 4Ghz may be transient, and may be side-steppable, but most knowledgeable people involved with current semi-conductor manufacturing processes don't blithely predict Moore's law carrying on until 2050 or 2100 or something like that. Some think that things will start to get ugly in 2010-2020, and that we've got a few more doublings only.
Now of course, we could wind up doing something else entirely - cue the usual molecular/DNA/quantum/... speculation-fest. But silicon is the only thing that people have managed to do in any great quantity in an economic and scalable fashion. Just because some physics geniuses can herd together 5 qubits doesn't necessarily mean that we'll ever be able to scale one of these methods up to a mass-produceable state. And worse still, the economics might never quite come together - if silicon is 'good enough' at the hypothetical 'end of Moore's law' stage of 2020 (to do word processing, play stolen video files and allow people to yell obnoxiously into cell phones the size of their fingernails), the demand might never surface to push beyond that.
It's pretty funny that people like to imagine that Moore's law can just keep going on regardless of economics, as if maybe alien overlords are going to descend in a few years and _force_ us to keep building smaller feature sizes even if there aren't any compelling new applications.
Most futurists - Kurzweil included - have an overly rosy notion of technology growing very quickly, almost on its own. But the Romans invented the steam engine and had absolutely no use for it aside from opening and closing temple doors in some shrine somewhere; absent the other conditions of the industrial revolution, it was a non-starter. Regardless of whether Intel can build a 10Ghz Pentium M with 16 cores in the same area, it's not clear whether the market will keep providing them the capital to do this.
Right, it's my job to do a careful, detailed analysis of Drexler-style nanotechnology, wild claims about hard AI, life-extension, etc. All in a tiny little text box for free, on a Sunday, yet.
This is a pointless ad hominem response. What, you have to be a 56-year-old or older to assess life extension technologies and the claims made for them? I doubt that I'm all that much more comfortable with the idea of dying than Kurzweil, but it doesn't mean that I'm going to throw reason out the window at age 56 and start swilling pills in a panic.
Incidentally, I'm not sure that you know how to use the word sarcasm in a sentence. I think you might have been looking for 'sarcasm about'. Hope this helps.
Incidentally, while he may think that he's 'really 40', his biological age of 56 is very, very obvious: who else but a baby boomer could be such a pioneer in this kind of pretentious selfishness?
I can at least hope that he has to stuff a reasonable portion of those pills up his ass.
Kurzweil has done some impressive stuff in his day. But sadly, he's turned into a parody of one of those 90's futurists - more embarrassing in 2004, though. The list goes on and on: life extension, nanobots in our bloodstream, strong AI, the singularity, we're going to be spending lots of time in Virtual Reality (sure thing, dude).
The foundation for 90% of the things he says are a bunch of hand-waving. Sure, we're about 20 years from discovering how to build nanobots that can do something useful in our bloodstream (oh, yeah, love those Drexler designs for nano-mechanisms - so pratical). Sure, there's an actual test that really measures aging. Sure, life extension is right around the corner and all you have to do is pop a big bunch of pills. Sure, after about 40 years of failure, strong AI is right around the corner (all we need is another 100 years of Moore's law to turn SHRDLU into HAL, really).
He may admit that he's a neophyte in most of the fields that he allegedly 'tracks'. That's not an excuse to throw all caution to the wind.
At best it's just silly. At worst it's pseudo-science and a pathetic desire on the part of your standard rich white guy to spend loads of money on living forever. I find it kind of disgusting, because we've got finite resources to spend on real problems, and these guys are busy pumping everything they can into the "Science" of "Me Extension".
Meanwhile, evil old Bill Gates is pissing around doing things like spending tens of millions of year trying to eliminate malaria - doesn't he know that the singularity is coming? He should buckle down to serious work - like designing flying nanobots to hunt down all those mosquitoes, instead.
In short, Kurzweil is a kook. He's utterly blinded by his own selfishness and wishful thinking that he couldn't track a real technology trend to save his life.
Re:Fun Fiction to Regurgitated Erudition Ratio?
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
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· Score: 1
Haha, moderated by Stephenson fans. I knew it, I knew it.
I think what we'd all like to get at here is some notion of differential pricing. In an ideal universe, they could scan your brain and find out that you weren't really all that interested in owning the new Eminem CD but you'd pay $1.53 for a non-transferrable (that is, not transferrable to other people, not other devices that you control) electronic copy.
However, that isn't the world we live in. The world we live in, unfortunately, is much more limited in its choices - although there's always the library, the second-hand store and the radio.
Uh, it's hard to imagine what people mean when they say "theft of services", then. If I flee Supercuts after getting my hair cut, I'm not denying anyone a subsequent haircut from the same person, but I am definitely stealing something.
This seems to be a popular semantic game on/. whenever this topic comes up; redefine 'theft' narrowly and then celebrate the fact that software piracy doesn't equal theft.
Next up: someone will no doubt assure us that it's permissible to pirate stuff because it's 'low quality' or because they want to 'try before they buy' or some such. Like all that stolen IP out there is this big protest against capitalist exploitation and mediocrity.
Fun Fiction to Regurgitated Erudition Ratio?
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
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· Score: -1, Troll
When are you going to resume writing books that are as good as Snow Crash?
We get it, we get it. You're a clever guy. You've read lots of books on all sorts of interesting topics. The point has been made - more than made - with ox-stunners like Cryptonomicon and your latest monster-size trilogy.
Please, take a couple of deep breaths before you decide to force your publishers to start innovating in the book-binding and font size departments. Write a kick-ass, wild, fun, _normal_ _length_ (or even a short one if you really want a challenge) science fiction book and if you also feel that you've got some cool real-world stuff to share with us, write a big book of non-fiction essays too.
Thank you.
Love, A fan of your imagination, not your library.
Re Stephenson books: Phenomenally large? Phenomenally self-indulgent? Phenomenally didactic?
At any rate, it's an amusing story.
All that hand-waving is vaguely reminiscent of "Mars Direct" or whatever they're calling it these days. Once upon a time, we didn't have to eat in space because of the absence of gravity. Now, we just hand-wave away radiation damage to the crew and the logistics of setting up a nuclear reactor on Mars to produce fuel for the return journey.
I think there might, just possibly, be a little bit of bitterness over the fact that Linux is a highly celebrated _clone_ of previous original work, like many other major - and over-celebrated - Open Source projects.
I think a lot of people out there were hoping to see something new. That might be unrealistic; perhaps OS progress is something that now must be done incrementally from now on. I certainly understand how disappointing the latter prospect would be to people who experienced a more exciting period of developments in computer science.
Why is it that no-one can ever discuss education without an huge number of the posts being about how due to the wonders of { "a rigorous Jesuitical education", "a fascinating yet socially integrated homeschooling setup", "a high-school from the wrong side of the tracks with teachers who Really Cared", "nothing but caning, rugby, rowing and Latin",...} they are now admirable people whose intellect, creativity, success and social grace towers above ordinary mortals.
Something about discussions of education seems to trigger wild excesses of self-congratulation that no other topic does. I suppose it's a pretty easy way to covertly praise oneself, but really....
I presume it's because most of you, unlike me, didn't go to an selective Australian public high school, where the best of the best receive absolutely first-rate educations, while maintaining an astonishing level of intellectual self-discipline, humility and public dignity.
Oh, hell yes. I've played both Populouses (Populi?) - avoiding Populous 3 as it sounded completely generic and unlike the first two in that it was almost a RTS, Dungeon Keeper I and II and Black and White - and have to say that Dungeon Keeper was definitely the best of the lot. Black and White was simply too ambitious - fascinating, but ultimately not very interesting as a game.
Aside from being a satisfying game to play - with the level of dark humour and odd perspective - Dungeon Keeper was a bizarrely addictive game with a lot of potentially interesting strategies. I found this to be the ideal balance of open-endedness and consistency; B&W just tried too much and failed. Easier to work out the range of actions in a 2D dungeon world, I suppose.
I honestly wish that they just drop everything else and concentrate on a really kick-ass Dungeon Keeper 3. Who needs some pretentious moral choice system? Let's just be bad for once(in the parodic sense, that is - we're not butchering Sudanese refugees here); we'll make our choices when we pick up the game box at the store, thanks very much...
Interesting but violence/torture fetish gets old
on
Broken Angels
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· Score: 1
I sort of enjoyed parts of these books, but I have to say, the gruesome fixation on extreme levels of violence and torture turned me off. I've wallowed in enough Genet and Burroughs in my day to have a strong stomach about these things, but I get the feeling that Morgan is merely sensationalistic about the unpleasant content in his books. Particularly, the extreme ugliness just seemed to be there to
1) justify massive amounts of violence on the part of the protagonists as a reasonable retaliation (a tacky device not unfamiliar to anyone who watches action movies these days),
and
2) Open up a reasonable amount of territory so that the 'tortured, morally ambiguous heroes' can seem like they're in some sort of decent middle ground; just by making the bad guys really, really bad. Err, no, you don't achieve moral complexity by making the bad guys 20 times as bad so that the good guy can still be a real asshole and still seem like a decent guy in the end.
There are a lot of more worthwhile books out there (although not much recent science fiction that isn't retarded, which is a criticism that I would _not_ levy at these books). Ultimately, if you like cheap, nasty thrills, you'll love these books. Enjoy, you sick bastards...:-)
(alternately, read Iain M. Banks, who is well above this guy in the food chain even if he has some similar issues of his own to work out)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, yeah, like people who spend lots of time making fun of these guys have girlfriends either.
Something that the article doesn't really mention, that helped explain a lot of things about corporate support of OSS, is a theory that (as far as I remember) Joel Spolsky wrote about. It's best explained by an analogy.
The analogy runs as follows. Suppose that a street has a bunch of bun vendors and a bunch of people who sell sausages to put in the buns (wow, talk about decoupled designs). People might be willing to spend $1.50 for a bun plus a sausage - nominally $1 for the sausage and $0.50 for the bun.
Now, suppose that someone in the sausage industry comes up with a way of "open-sourcing" buns - now buns are free! This happening, you've got a bunch of customers wandering around buying sausages with an extra $0.50 in their pockets. They were clearly willing to spend more on the sausage+bun combination, so maybe you can jack up your price to $1.10 or $1.20 (very unlikely you'll be able to go to $1.50).
Of course, like all simplistic analogies, this depends on a lot of assumptions. For instance, we
expect that the customer won't go off and buy something new (a 50 cent Coke, maybe).
Now, think about companies that have major OSS support. The best example is IBM - which makes its money of hardware and services. Are they the sausage vendors in this case?
I don't know if this is nonsense, but it's an interesting theory. If anyone has a good counter-argument, let's hear it. If anyone has a silly pun about "open-saucing" hot dogs, well, remember that I'm a computer scientist and can generate an enormous static charge from your keyboard to Get You.
The numbers quoted in other responses to this post seem to vastly understate spending on hunger, by reducing the definition down to a single program. This excludes any kinds of agricultural subsidies (which of course are far from a anti-hunger program, but usually do have the effect of reducing prices of food for poor people in addition to the usual propping up of farmers that's the real point of them). This also ignores any kind of social welfare support to poor people that will almost certainly have a large proportion spent on food. Presumably there are also state and regional programs, although I don't know about that.
On the other side, the total IT budget is treated around as if it's all licensing fees for proprietary software, which it almost certainly isn't.
So as usual, Barlow is overstating his case. What a shock.
I've spent an inordinate amount of the last decade sitting around in coffee houses of varying degrees of corporateness (Starbucks obviously being on one end of the scale). Quite frankly, one of the reasons that I've stopped spending time at coffee houses are people using coffee houses in exactly this way.
I don't mind people working in coffee houses. I don't mind people meeting in coffee houses. What I do mind is when people start doing things like presentations to enough other people that they have to raise their voices, talk loudly and endlessly on their damn cell phones (not to mention taking endless calls), and blather away like they own the whole place. Guess what - it's not your office, guys. It's really not.
Tech nerds are usually fairly good about this. Some of the local business types are just complete pricks about this, though. It's like they've never considered the idea that the whole place isn't interested in the unique, dynamic work environment that their chain restaurant is going to provide.
I'm not under the delusion that coffee houses should be some sort of library-like atmosphere, or that no-one should ever conduct business there, or anything like that. I'd just like (for a change) for people who are doing business in a coffeehouse to recognize that they aren't in their own office.
Perhaps I don't understand the subtleties here, but why should Ballmer get credit for piling up a lot of cash?
Shouldn't this be going towards developing new products and services (whether they are internally developed or just bought lock-stock-and-barrel from outside)?
You're right.
Understanding this code, frankly, doesn't prove anything like what people like Joel seem to think that it proves. What it shows is that you know a very terse C idiom that is occasionally useful. However, like many terse, elegant solutions, it's extremely inefficient and brittle to boot (potentially copying off the end of buffers).
I wrote some assembly-language string functions for the Alpha for the Alpha port of Plan 9 a long time ago, and there was about a factor of 50 execution speed difference in the worst case between naive code like the above and a hand-coded strcpy.
I love all the "l33t C hacker" weenies on this thread applauding themselves for writing "efficient" code like this...
Wow, that's about a perfect example of the Ultimate Perspectiveless Slashdot Post:
... Jim Crow laws".
"the immorality of copyright,
That's right, someone making it illegal to distribute endless perfect copies of copyrighted material is similar to Jim Crow. I'm just hoping that someone will do a sit-in to save all those poor oppressed upper-middle-class computer nerds, college students, etc. from their horrible fate.
In fact, I think that's too weak a metaphor. Perhaps the fact that the MPAA and RIAA do the occasional annoying thing on the net should be characterized in terms of slavery? Ecological destruction? Wait - I know: Stalin, or Hitler, or the Holocaust. Leaving copyright issues to the RIAA is like leaving Europe to Hitler. Ah, that's better.
Very true. Unless I am in the surprising position of getting an e-mail from Prince, I don't want to see "U", "C", "4" and so on as 'words'.
"It looks like the real reason for offshoring is corporations looking for warmer weather."
Why does every third Slashdot story have to contain some sophomoric, contentious and/or unfounded sentence in the lead-in? These sorts of things generate, as a rule, a huge amount of off-topic flaming and often frame the actual article in question in a distorted light ("Ask Unix Co-Creator (sic) Rob Pike"). It'd be nice if there was a little less raw opinion and random editorializing splattered across the actual stories. It's only a few lines; for heaven's sake try to be a little professional.
Here's a couple more:
- Both made their name with shorter, interesting books that played to their strengths (Crying of Lot 49, Snow Crash)
- Both went on to write undiscplined, monster-length big sellers of no real merit, that gave legions of true believers the illusory sense that they were grappling with serious issues and great literature.
Absolutely correct. It frustrates me that the police do nothing, but then they're under-funded and over-worked in this town and have more important things to do.
They should just be able to hand out a small, 'nuisance' ticket that is far more trouble to fight than just pay. Blast your stereo, pay $10. Rinse, repeat, until your car gets repossessed.
You're correct in many ways, and I think that you understate your case. I'm about to agree with you at somewhat excessive length...
As far as AI goes, the notion that 'strong AI' (that is, not some narrowly defined task like optical character recognition - but a machine that supposedly reasons like or better than a human in a generalized, complex domain) is somewhere right around the corner has been around for about 30 years. Progress in this field is pathetic.
Further, a lot of people may have jumped on to try to debunk your claim about Intel's 4Ghz failures indicating that Moore's law is dead. They will be half-right, of course - Moore's law doesn't predict clock speed but complexity available at a given price (actually, it's even more complicated than that, but I can't be bothered to go into it here).
However, Intel's problems with 4Ghz may be transient, and may be side-steppable, but most knowledgeable people involved with current semi-conductor manufacturing processes don't blithely predict Moore's law carrying on until 2050 or 2100 or something like that. Some think that things will start to get ugly in 2010-2020, and that we've got a few more doublings only.
Now of course, we could wind up doing something else entirely - cue the usual molecular/DNA/quantum/... speculation-fest. But silicon is the only thing that people have managed to do in any great quantity in an economic and scalable fashion. Just because some physics geniuses can herd together 5 qubits doesn't necessarily mean that we'll ever be able to scale one of these methods up to a mass-produceable state. And worse still, the economics might never quite come together - if silicon is 'good enough' at the hypothetical 'end of Moore's law' stage of 2020 (to do word processing, play stolen video files and allow people to yell obnoxiously into cell phones the size of their fingernails), the demand might never surface to push beyond that.
It's pretty funny that people like to imagine that Moore's law can just keep going on regardless of economics, as if maybe alien overlords are going to descend in a few years and _force_ us to keep building smaller feature sizes even if there aren't any compelling new applications.
Most futurists - Kurzweil included - have an overly rosy notion of technology growing very quickly, almost on its own. But the Romans invented the steam engine and had absolutely no use for it aside from opening and closing temple doors in some shrine somewhere; absent the other conditions of the industrial revolution, it was a non-starter. Regardless of whether Intel can build a 10Ghz Pentium M with 16 cores in the same area, it's not clear whether the market will keep providing them the capital to do this.
(of course, gamers just might)
Right, it's my job to do a careful, detailed analysis of Drexler-style nanotechnology, wild claims about hard AI, life-extension, etc. All in a tiny little text box for free, on a Sunday, yet.
Oops, more sarcasm.
This is a pointless ad hominem response. What, you have to be a 56-year-old or older to assess life extension technologies and the claims made for them? I doubt that I'm all that much more comfortable with the idea of dying than Kurzweil, but it doesn't mean that I'm going to throw reason out the window at age 56 and start swilling pills in a panic.
Incidentally, I'm not sure that you know how to use the word sarcasm in a sentence. I think you might have been looking for 'sarcasm about'. Hope this helps.
Incidentally, while he may think that he's 'really 40', his biological age of 56 is very, very obvious: who else but a baby boomer could be such a pioneer in this kind of pretentious selfishness?
I can at least hope that he has to stuff a reasonable portion of those pills up his ass.
Kurzweil has done some impressive stuff in his day. But sadly, he's turned into a parody of one of those 90's futurists - more embarrassing in 2004, though. The list goes on and on: life extension, nanobots in our bloodstream, strong AI, the singularity, we're going to be spending lots of time in Virtual Reality (sure thing, dude).
The foundation for 90% of the things he says are a bunch of hand-waving. Sure, we're about 20 years from discovering how to build nanobots that can do something useful in our bloodstream (oh, yeah, love those Drexler designs for nano-mechanisms - so pratical). Sure, there's an actual test that really measures aging. Sure, life extension is right around the corner and all you have to do is pop a big bunch of pills. Sure, after about 40 years of failure, strong AI is right around the corner (all we need is another 100 years of Moore's law to turn SHRDLU into HAL, really).
He may admit that he's a neophyte in most of the fields that he allegedly 'tracks'. That's not an excuse to throw all caution to the wind.
At best it's just silly. At worst it's pseudo-science and a pathetic desire on the part of your standard rich white guy to spend loads of money on living forever. I find it kind of disgusting, because we've got finite resources to spend on real problems, and these guys are busy pumping everything they can into the "Science" of "Me Extension".
Meanwhile, evil old Bill Gates is pissing around doing things like spending tens of millions of year trying to eliminate malaria - doesn't he know that the singularity is coming? He should buckle down to serious work - like designing flying nanobots to hunt down all those mosquitoes, instead.
In short, Kurzweil is a kook. He's utterly blinded by his own selfishness and wishful thinking that he couldn't track a real technology trend to save his life.
Haha, moderated by Stephenson fans. I knew it, I knew it.
Correct.
I think what we'd all like to get at here is some notion of differential pricing. In an ideal universe, they could scan your brain and find out that you weren't really all that interested in owning the new Eminem CD but you'd pay $1.53 for a non-transferrable (that is, not transferrable to other people, not other devices that you control) electronic copy.
However, that isn't the world we live in. The world we live in, unfortunately, is much more limited in its choices - although there's always the library, the second-hand store and the radio.
Uh, it's hard to imagine what people mean when they say "theft of services", then. If I flee Supercuts after getting my hair cut, I'm not denying anyone a subsequent haircut from the same person, but I am definitely stealing something.
/. whenever this topic comes up; redefine 'theft' narrowly and then celebrate the fact that software piracy doesn't equal theft.
This seems to be a popular semantic game on
Next up: someone will no doubt assure us that it's permissible to pirate stuff because it's 'low quality' or because they want to 'try before they buy' or some such. Like all that stolen IP out there is this big protest against capitalist exploitation and mediocrity.
When are you going to resume writing books that are as good as Snow Crash?
We get it, we get it. You're a clever guy. You've read lots of books on all sorts of interesting topics. The point has been made - more than made - with ox-stunners like Cryptonomicon and your latest monster-size trilogy.
Please, take a couple of deep breaths before you decide to force your publishers to start innovating in the book-binding and font size departments. Write a kick-ass, wild, fun, _normal_ _length_ (or even a short one if you really want a challenge) science fiction book and if you also feel that you've got some cool real-world stuff to share with us, write a big book of non-fiction essays too.
Thank you.
Love,
A fan of your imagination, not your library.
Re Stephenson books: Phenomenally large? Phenomenally self-indulgent? Phenomenally didactic?
At any rate, it's an amusing story.
All that hand-waving is vaguely reminiscent of "Mars Direct" or whatever they're calling it these days. Once upon a time, we didn't have to eat in space because of the absence of gravity. Now, we just hand-wave away radiation damage to the crew and the logistics of setting up a nuclear reactor on Mars to produce fuel for the return journey.
I think there might, just possibly, be a little bit of bitterness over the fact that Linux is a highly celebrated _clone_ of previous original work, like many other major - and over-celebrated - Open Source projects.
I think a lot of people out there were hoping to see something new. That might be unrealistic; perhaps OS progress is something that now must be done incrementally from now on. I certainly understand how disappointing the latter prospect would be to people who experienced a more exciting period of developments in computer science.
Why is it that no-one can ever discuss education without an huge number of the posts being about how due to the wonders of { "a rigorous Jesuitical education", "a fascinating yet socially integrated homeschooling setup", "a high-school from the wrong side of the tracks with teachers who Really Cared", "nothing but caning, rugby, rowing and Latin", ...} they are now admirable people whose intellect, creativity, success and social grace towers above ordinary mortals.
Something about discussions of education seems to trigger wild excesses of self-congratulation that no other topic does. I suppose it's a pretty easy way to covertly praise oneself, but really....
I presume it's because most of you, unlike me, didn't go to an selective Australian public high school, where the best of the best receive absolutely first-rate educations, while maintaining an astonishing level of intellectual self-discipline, humility and public dignity.
Oh, hell yes. I've played both Populouses (Populi?) - avoiding Populous 3 as it sounded completely generic and unlike the first two in that it was almost a RTS, Dungeon Keeper I and II and Black and White - and have to say that Dungeon Keeper was definitely the best of the lot. Black and White was simply too ambitious - fascinating, but ultimately not very interesting as a game.
Aside from being a satisfying game to play - with the level of dark humour and odd perspective - Dungeon Keeper was a bizarrely addictive game with a lot of potentially interesting strategies. I found this to be the ideal balance of open-endedness and consistency; B&W just tried too much and failed. Easier to work out the range of actions in a 2D dungeon world, I suppose.
I honestly wish that they just drop everything else and concentrate on a really kick-ass Dungeon Keeper 3. Who needs some pretentious moral choice system? Let's just be bad for once(in the parodic sense, that is - we're not butchering Sudanese refugees here); we'll make our choices when we pick up the game box at the store, thanks very much...
I sort of enjoyed parts of these books, but I have to say, the gruesome fixation on extreme levels of violence and torture turned me off. I've wallowed in enough Genet and Burroughs in my day to have a strong stomach about these things, but I get the feeling that Morgan is merely sensationalistic about the unpleasant content in his books. Particularly, the extreme ugliness just seemed to be there to
:-)
1) justify massive amounts of violence on the part of the protagonists as a reasonable retaliation (a tacky device not unfamiliar to anyone who watches action movies these days),
and
2) Open up a reasonable amount of territory so that the 'tortured, morally ambiguous heroes' can seem like they're in some sort of decent middle ground; just by making the bad guys really, really bad. Err, no, you don't achieve moral complexity by making the bad guys 20 times as bad so that the good guy can still be a real asshole and still seem like a decent guy in the end.
There are a lot of more worthwhile books out there (although not much recent science fiction that isn't retarded, which is a criticism that I would _not_ levy at these books). Ultimately, if you like cheap, nasty thrills, you'll love these books. Enjoy, you sick bastards...
(alternately, read Iain M. Banks, who is well above this guy in the food chain even if he has some similar issues of his own to work out)