The two arguments I buy most among the above are the ease of writing a C compiler vs a Pascal compiler and the cross-platform availability of C.
But I also think it was a marketing problem. People still think that only C let you do low level stuff, but it's not true. In Turbo Pascal you could manipulate memory and even registers directly. You could also typecast. I wrote TP apps that took buffers of bytes and chopped them up into integers and whatever I wanted. No problem. You could even include use inline Assembler code. All the hacker-friendly features in addition to the elegant, type-safe layer. The first Turbo Pascal for Windows was even released BEFORE Microsoft released C++ for Windows.
People who post in these threads STILL think musicians make money from CD sales. They generally don't, because in a standard recording contract all the expenses of production, manufacturing, distribution, advertising, etc, etc, are taken out of the musician's share. That 1% or whatever "royalty" that supposedly gets paid to the musician gets put on a balance sheet with all these expenses and becomes a ZERO.
Musicians make money by performing live, just like they did for all the centuries before recorded music was invented. What they get out of CD sales is exposure, which leads to bigger and better paying gigs. They get the same exposure whether you buy a CD, listen to it on the radio, burn a copy from your friend, download it or find it on the sidewalk.
Keep that in mind when you read the recording industry's endless whining about "artists' rights." It's all smoke and mirrors, and accounting. So you might ask, why do people like Lars Ulrich preach against file-sharing? I don't know. Why did Lars publicly give credit to tape bootleggers for helping Metallica go from garage band to superstars, and then years later decide that file-sharing was bad? Ask Lars. But don't assume it's because he's a business genius.
For a more detailed explanation of how recording contracts work read this article by Janis Ian, a pop star of the 70s who has been recording for 28 years.
Back in the 80s for me it was Turbo Pascal, originally a $39.95 wonder-package on a single 5-inch floppy. Compiled a whopping 7000 lines a minute on my 2Mhz 8080.
My never-ending project to simulate a D&D world led me to explore the mysteries of virtual method tables, linked lists, B-trees, and that other structure -- a mesh of nodes without a head -- what was it called?
My favorite TP achievement was a homegrown BBS that I ran for 2 years on my 1200-baud modem. I had no hard drive, just two 360K floppy drives. So the system and programs were on one and the msg files were on the other. There were 10 message boards. I gave some users sysop privs on individual boards. Three of them ran RPGs -- AD&D, Traveller and Robotech -- one woman ran hers as an adults-only hot tub/bar. Eventually I wrote an adventure game parser as a unit that would plug into the BBS. I only created one game for it, but many people played it through to the end and commented on it. Good memories of the pre-web era.
Is one that reminds me to stop at the store on the way home from work and get milk. And drop off the video before it gets overdue. And sit up straight! You'll give yourself a hunchback. And how can you stand to listen to that music???You're gonna make yourself deaf!
Yeah, I really didn't understand Ballmer's logic, and the article didn't seem to explain it. When the price of hardware drops, the price of the bundled software becomes a bigger part of the total price. If anything, I would expect that to make free software more attractive.
In other news: Ballmer says anything bad that happens to Microsoft is someone else's fault.
Yeah, it is a gadget, but one that seems likely to stir up more controversy about online privacy vs. the US government's perceived need to know everything. My first reaction to "Virtual Privacy Machine" was, uh-oh, don't they mean "Virtual Terrorist Machine?" Because that's how the Homeland boyz view privacy of any sort. Americans have privacy only in the sense that the government promises not to do anything improper with its unrestricted access. Will devices and software that hide anything from prying eyes survive much longer?
Rather than have any government body jump in and lay down a bunch of regs, I would prefer to let Comcast screw with VoIP and then, if necessary, see a class action lawsuit play itself out to establish what they can or can't legally do. What's more, I wish they would let the tax base provided by phone companies die rather than perpetuating it. I'm not against taxation itself, but the more it gets divided up into little pieces, the greater is the overhead of metering and collecting it. We should be moving toward a tax system where we have as few taxes as possible with as few rules as possible, instead of our present web of taxes on every little sub-category of human activity.
Just a little more info... Hopkins wrote his book in 1927 and it is still widely read. But it didn't have much impact on the advertising industry until it was republished in the 1950s. Quoting from the Marketing Hall of Fame (italics are mine):
In 1923 he wrote a slender book which was published by the advertising agency Lord & Thomas... He called it "Scientific Advertising" and almost 30 years later it was re-published by Alfred Politz, eminent researcher and devotee of the scientific marketing and advertising because "the most concentrated wealth of useful discoveries [about advertising] was presented by Claude Hopkins" and because
"present-day advertising research has a long way to go before it reaches the level of Claude Hopkins' contributions to efficient advertising".
So although a few people figured out some modern advertising techniques a long time earlier, their real impact on society started in the 50s when Madison Avenue recognized their importance and started using them widely.
Is it just me or is this one of the more ridiculous sounding things you've heard in a while?
It's you. I thought the thunderstorm was a nice metaphor. Here's another good line:
"A society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people."
But here in the Rush Limbaugh era, we place as much value on making fun of something as on making an actual point. Oh well, too bad for us.
That's an interesting scenario, but I seriously doubt that modern American overconsumption is the result of a long-term government plot, or that anybody in the advertising industry is a willing party to socialism, income tax or a welfare state. I really think the only thing going on is sellers trying as hard as they can to sell more stuff.
There are good comments in this thread. Too bad hardly anybody will read them because the main comment got modded down.
Well that's a very typical reaction -- it's their own damn fault. If they just had more self control they wouldn't have a problem.
That's very true. But my point is that resistance to modern psychological advertising techniques is not a normal ability, it's an exceptional ability. Otherwise more people WOULD stop and think before buying, and the ads wouldn't work as well as they do. Modern life tends to punish people for being average, which I don't think is right. After all, they're the majority.
Unfortunately I have nothing to suggest to fix the situation. Any attempt to regulate advertising runs into the good old Freedom of Speech defense. The problem is that there's no effective way to distinguish between Speech and Hypnotism.
The So-What is that when marketers and others get better and better at using the workings of human psychology to exert influence, eventually the definition of "free choice" loses meaning. At some point advertisers have such a psychological advantage that their techniques stop being persuasion and start being weapons.
I think we have already passed that point. People alive today are no less intelligent than their great great grandparents on the farm, but a much higher percentage of us seem to have lost all common sense when it comes to spending money. The average American family today carries, I believe, $8000 in credit card debt. That's normal behavior for normal people nowadays. But normal people don't spontaneously decide to go massively into debt, or to accumulate so much stuff that they need to rent storage places to keep it in. They have to be induced into that kind of irrational behavior, in ways that work on their insecurities, desire to be loved and so forth, things that are as basic to human nature as breathing in and out. Expecting people to be abnormally resistant to modern marketing techniques is as unreasonable as expecting them to become martial arts experts so that mugging can be legal.
Theoretically, if you want to avoid advertising you are free to turn off your television and radio, stop surfing the web, and generally withdraw from contact with the world. So in that sense it's your free choice to expose yourself to constant sales bombardment. But on the other hand, becoming a hermit isn't a reasonable expectation of anyone. Normal behavior is to associate with people around you and take part in the same cultural activities they do. I don't think wanting to walk around in public without developing irrational consumption habits is any less reasonable than wanting to breathe the air without getting lung cancer or swim in the river without getting dioxin poisoning.
In the interview I referenced, Gygax gives credit to Dave Arneson, Jeff Perren and Don Kaye for their part in creating D&D. It's an pretty good interview.
Forgotten Realms has been a great setting. One concept I really liked is the Harpers operating in the background. The new Eberron setting looks pretty interesting too. In my campaigns magic tends to be more common than in standard D&D, so I like the idea of magic being an integral part of the economy. As soon as my group finishes its current extended campaign, the next will be set in Eberron.
Robo-Kid-Similation mode - the cart randomly yanks products off the shelves and puts them in the cart when you aren't looking.
Patented "Second-Chance" Customer Assistance Technology(TM) - the cart follows you out to your car, reminding you about stuff you may have forgotten to buy.
Back when the D&D-is-evil crap started, I researched news stories about teenagers who committed suicide because they got kicked off the swim team, blew their 4.0 GPA, broke up with girl/boyfriend, parents were assholes, etc. I read that the suicide rate among RPG players was below that of the general population.
That was back in the pre-Internet days when these things took time to find. Here is an article that summarizes some of that info. I used to keep some actual numbers in my head to toss out whenever some cross-waving idiot blamed RPGs for the ills of the world. If the anti-D&D crusaders actually looked up suicide statistics, they would probably be campaigning against report cards, team sports, the senior prom, and a lot of other time-honored institutions. In the real world, fantasy gaming is generally harmless fun.
Sadly, the article only makes a passing reference to the patriarch of D&D. I guess ownership is everything nowadays. GameBanshee.com has a nice interview with Gygax accompanied by lots of D&D artwork.
Surprise! Your 9th grade social studies book was wrong. America is not a Democracy, and it's not a Republic either. It's an Oligarchy disguised as one or the other. People like Jeff Bezos aren't merely above the law, they get to surf on it.
Not being in the grocery business myself, it's hard for me to get excited about this fantastic new technology.
gives the shopper such features as: blah, blah, [trying to get you to buy more stuff] could offer such personal shopping assistance as: blah-blah, [getting you to buy even more stuff] In addition, future features could include... blah blah [additional efforts to get you to buy still more stuff]
I think the ideal UI for streaming music is a 3Com Audrey, a diskless Internet Appliance from a few years ago that failed to sell, and can now be bought on EBay for $85. It has a nice sharp color touch screen (7-inch 640x480) with a stylus, wireless keyboard, USB LAN dongle, audio output jack and a second USB port. It looks cool too, kind of like a Jetsons version of an Etch-a-Sketch. I bought steveral and am using them to stream music all over my house.
The Audrey runs QNX, an embedded version of Unix. A growing Audrey hacking community has replaced the original email, web browser and address book software with useful things like MP3 players, a nice text editor and a full-featured web browser. You can download different memory images from various people and load them via a Compact Flash card, and you can easily back up your file system to another computer's hard drive.
I found setup to be extremely easy, despite being a networking newbie. I just plugged it into my hub and it worked. All I had to do was add a couple lines to the boot file, courtesy of helpful posts on various Audrey forums, and it connects automatically to shares on my main computer. Have it run the mp3 player at startup and your parents will have no trouble using it.
This doesn't address your desire to automate ripping CDs, but for my money it's the perfect UI solution.
These days, "people" (meaning "people in general" not "the people I know") couldn't care less about science unless it affects them directly, and even then they are only interested in the effect (especially if it's frightening), not in the science. Science programming that isn't announcing an asteroid heading toward the Earth has to be watered down to pure amusement level or only geeks will watch it. That's why cars, motorcycles and home remodeling dominate Discovery Channel and TLC now.
Anyway, since you mentioned nuclear propulsion and the Saturn V, here is a long and fascinating article about a nuclear powered rocket the size of a Saturn V. Fully reusable and emitting no radiation, it would lift 1000 tons of payload into Earth orbit and return with 1000 tons of cargo to a powered landing. If they made a show about that, it would have to focus on the rocket's potential to haul up entire space hotels and recreational facilities.
Wendy's point is that anything with a traceable physical location can be physically seized, suppressed, stamped out. Freedom online, like everywhere else, varies inversely with government's ability to suppress it. Civil rights anywhere are always a tug of war between the need to track down bad guys and the need to control the definition of crime and bad guy.
In other words, what Bill is saying is that if terrorists get past airport security and blow up a plane, it's not airport security's fault or the airline's fault, because they didn't blow up the plane. It was a third party.
Bull shit. Either you get to own something and be responsible for it, or you don't get to own it. I wish all these mine-mine-mine IP fanatics would get that concept into their thick skulls.
After reading the article the first thing I did was to scroll through the posts looking for somebody to mention this very thing. Yes you could compensate for the thrust, but the article doesn't mention it at all, which I think is a big omission. Either the station would have to have twice the plasma generation capacity and a second emitter, and a way to ensure that the backwards beam didn't hit anything important, or it would have conventional thrusters of some sort and would need a constant supply of fuel shipped up to it.
These things might not be germaine to getting the basic concept across, but they get important fast when you start to translate the concept into a practical design.
Slashdot Mirror
The two arguments I buy most among the above are the ease of writing a C compiler vs a Pascal compiler and the cross-platform availability of C.
But I also think it was a marketing problem. People still think that only C let you do low level stuff, but it's not true. In Turbo Pascal you could manipulate memory and even registers directly. You could also typecast. I wrote TP apps that took buffers of bytes and chopped them up into integers and whatever I wanted. No problem. You could even include use inline Assembler code. All the hacker-friendly features in addition to the elegant, type-safe layer. The first Turbo Pascal for Windows was even released BEFORE Microsoft released C++ for Windows.
People who post in these threads STILL think musicians make money from CD sales. They generally don't, because in a standard recording contract all the expenses of production, manufacturing, distribution, advertising, etc, etc, are taken out of the musician's share. That 1% or whatever "royalty" that supposedly gets paid to the musician gets put on a balance sheet with all these expenses and becomes a ZERO.
Musicians make money by performing live, just like they did for all the centuries before recorded music was invented. What they get out of CD sales is exposure, which leads to bigger and better paying gigs. They get the same exposure whether you buy a CD, listen to it on the radio, burn a copy from your friend, download it or find it on the sidewalk.
Keep that in mind when you read the recording industry's endless whining about "artists' rights." It's all smoke and mirrors, and accounting. So you might ask, why do people like Lars Ulrich preach against file-sharing? I don't know. Why did Lars publicly give credit to tape bootleggers for helping Metallica go from garage band to superstars, and then years later decide that file-sharing was bad? Ask Lars. But don't assume it's because he's a business genius.
For a more detailed explanation of how recording contracts work read this article by Janis Ian, a pop star of the 70s who has been recording for 28 years.
Pixelized Zelda does sound pretty cool actually, for back then. Wish I had a dollar for every fun project I never finished back then.
Back in the 80s for me it was Turbo Pascal, originally a $39.95 wonder-package on a single 5-inch floppy. Compiled a whopping 7000 lines a minute on my 2Mhz 8080.
My never-ending project to simulate a D&D world led me to explore the mysteries of virtual method tables, linked lists, B-trees, and that other structure -- a mesh of nodes without a head -- what was it called?
My favorite TP achievement was a homegrown BBS that I ran for 2 years on my 1200-baud modem. I had no hard drive, just two 360K floppy drives. So the system and programs were on one and the msg files were on the other. There were 10 message boards. I gave some users sysop privs on individual boards. Three of them ran RPGs -- AD&D, Traveller and Robotech -- one woman ran hers as an adults-only hot tub/bar. Eventually I wrote an adventure game parser as a unit that would plug into the BBS. I only created one game for it, but many people played it through to the end and commented on it. Good memories of the pre-web era.
Is one that reminds me to stop at the store on the way home from work and get milk. And drop off the video before it gets overdue. And sit up straight! You'll give yourself a hunchback. And how can you stand to listen to that music???You're gonna make yourself deaf!
Yeah, I really didn't understand Ballmer's logic, and the article didn't seem to explain it. When the price of hardware drops, the price of the bundled software becomes a bigger part of the total price. If anything, I would expect that to make free software more attractive.
In other news: Ballmer says anything bad that happens to Microsoft is someone else's fault.
Yeah, it is a gadget, but one that seems likely to stir up more controversy about online privacy vs. the US government's perceived need to know everything. My first reaction to "Virtual Privacy Machine" was, uh-oh, don't they mean "Virtual Terrorist Machine?" Because that's how the Homeland boyz view privacy of any sort. Americans have privacy only in the sense that the government promises not to do anything improper with its unrestricted access. Will devices and software that hide anything from prying eyes survive much longer?
Rather than have any government body jump in and lay down a bunch of regs, I would prefer to let Comcast screw with VoIP and then, if necessary, see a class action lawsuit play itself out to establish what they can or can't legally do. What's more, I wish they would let the tax base provided by phone companies die rather than perpetuating it. I'm not against taxation itself, but the more it gets divided up into little pieces, the greater is the overhead of metering and collecting it. We should be moving toward a tax system where we have as few taxes as possible with as few rules as possible, instead of our present web of taxes on every little sub-category of human activity.
So although a few people figured out some modern advertising techniques a long time earlier, their real impact on society started in the 50s when Madison Avenue recognized their importance and started using them widely.
Is it just me or is this one of the more ridiculous sounding things you've heard in a while?
It's you. I thought the thunderstorm was a nice metaphor. Here's another good line:
"A society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people."
But here in the Rush Limbaugh era, we place as much value on making fun of something as on making an actual point. Oh well, too bad for us.
That's an interesting scenario, but I seriously doubt that modern American overconsumption is the result of a long-term government plot, or that anybody in the advertising industry is a willing party to socialism, income tax or a welfare state. I really think the only thing going on is sellers trying as hard as they can to sell more stuff.
There are good comments in this thread. Too bad hardly anybody will read them because the main comment got modded down.
Well that's a very typical reaction -- it's their own damn fault. If they just had more self control they wouldn't have a problem.
That's very true. But my point is that resistance to modern psychological advertising techniques is not a normal ability, it's an exceptional ability. Otherwise more people WOULD stop and think before buying, and the ads wouldn't work as well as they do. Modern life tends to punish people for being average, which I don't think is right. After all, they're the majority.
Unfortunately I have nothing to suggest to fix the situation. Any attempt to regulate advertising runs into the good old Freedom of Speech defense. The problem is that there's no effective way to distinguish between Speech and Hypnotism.
The So-What is that when marketers and others get better and better at using the workings of human psychology to exert influence, eventually the definition of "free choice" loses meaning. At some point advertisers have such a psychological advantage that their techniques stop being persuasion and start being weapons.
I think we have already passed that point. People alive today are no less intelligent than their great great grandparents on the farm, but a much higher percentage of us seem to have lost all common sense when it comes to spending money. The average American family today carries, I believe, $8000 in credit card debt. That's normal behavior for normal people nowadays. But normal people don't spontaneously decide to go massively into debt, or to accumulate so much stuff that they need to rent storage places to keep it in. They have to be induced into that kind of irrational behavior, in ways that work on their insecurities, desire to be loved and so forth, things that are as basic to human nature as breathing in and out. Expecting people to be abnormally resistant to modern marketing techniques is as unreasonable as expecting them to become martial arts experts so that mugging can be legal.
Theoretically, if you want to avoid advertising you are free to turn off your television and radio, stop surfing the web, and generally withdraw from contact with the world. So in that sense it's your free choice to expose yourself to constant sales bombardment. But on the other hand, becoming a hermit isn't a reasonable expectation of anyone. Normal behavior is to associate with people around you and take part in the same cultural activities they do. I don't think wanting to walk around in public without developing irrational consumption habits is any less reasonable than wanting to breathe the air without getting lung cancer or swim in the river without getting dioxin poisoning.
In the interview I referenced, Gygax gives credit to Dave Arneson, Jeff Perren and Don Kaye for their part in creating D&D. It's an pretty good interview.
Forgotten Realms has been a great setting. One concept I really liked is the Harpers operating in the background. The new Eberron setting looks pretty interesting too. In my campaigns magic tends to be more common than in standard D&D, so I like the idea of magic being an integral part of the economy. As soon as my group finishes its current extended campaign, the next will be set in Eberron.
Robo-Kid-Similation mode - the cart randomly yanks products off the shelves and puts them in the cart when you aren't looking.
Patented "Second-Chance" Customer Assistance Technology(TM) - the cart follows you out to your car, reminding you about stuff you may have forgotten to buy.
Back when the D&D-is-evil crap started, I researched news stories about teenagers who committed suicide because they got kicked off the swim team, blew their 4.0 GPA, broke up with girl/boyfriend, parents were assholes, etc. I read that the suicide rate among RPG players was below that of the general population.
That was back in the pre-Internet days when these things took time to find. Here is an article that summarizes some of that info. I used to keep some actual numbers in my head to toss out whenever some cross-waving idiot blamed RPGs for the ills of the world. If the anti-D&D crusaders actually looked up suicide statistics, they would probably be campaigning against report cards, team sports, the senior prom, and a lot of other time-honored institutions. In the real world, fantasy gaming is generally harmless fun.
Sadly, the article only makes a passing reference to the patriarch of D&D. I guess ownership is everything nowadays. GameBanshee.com has a nice interview with Gygax accompanied by lots of D&D artwork.
Surprise! Your 9th grade social studies book was wrong. America is not a Democracy, and it's not a Republic either. It's an Oligarchy disguised as one or the other. People like Jeff Bezos aren't merely above the law, they get to surf on it.
Not being in the grocery business myself, it's hard for me to get excited about this fantastic new technology.
gives the shopper such features as: blah, blah, [trying to get you to buy more stuff]
could offer such personal shopping assistance as: blah-blah, [getting you to buy even more stuff]
In addition, future features could include... blah blah [additional efforts to get you to buy still more stuff]
I think the ideal UI for streaming music is a 3Com Audrey, a diskless Internet Appliance from a few years ago that failed to sell, and can now be bought on EBay for $85. It has a nice sharp color touch screen (7-inch 640x480) with a stylus, wireless keyboard, USB LAN dongle, audio output jack and a second USB port. It looks cool too, kind of like a Jetsons version of an Etch-a-Sketch. I bought steveral and am using them to stream music all over my house.
The Audrey runs QNX, an embedded version of Unix. A growing Audrey hacking community has replaced the original email, web browser and address book software with useful things like MP3 players, a nice text editor and a full-featured web browser. You can download different memory images from various people and load them via a Compact Flash card, and you can easily back up your file system to another computer's hard drive.
I found setup to be extremely easy, despite being a networking newbie. I just plugged it into my hub and it worked. All I had to do was add a couple lines to the boot file, courtesy of helpful posts on various Audrey forums, and it connects automatically to shares on my main computer. Have it run the mp3 player at startup and your parents will have no trouble using it.
This doesn't address your desire to automate ripping CDs, but for my money it's the perfect UI solution.
These days, "people" (meaning "people in general" not "the people I know") couldn't care less about science unless it affects them directly, and even then they are only interested in the effect (especially if it's frightening), not in the science. Science programming that isn't announcing an asteroid heading toward the Earth has to be watered down to pure amusement level or only geeks will watch it. That's why cars, motorcycles and home remodeling dominate Discovery Channel and TLC now.
Anyway, since you mentioned nuclear propulsion and the Saturn V, here is a long and fascinating article about a nuclear powered rocket the size of a Saturn V. Fully reusable and emitting no radiation, it would lift 1000 tons of payload into Earth orbit and return with 1000 tons of cargo to a powered landing. If they made a show about that, it would have to focus on the rocket's potential to haul up entire space hotels and recreational facilities.
Wendy's point is that anything with a traceable physical location can be physically seized, suppressed, stamped out. Freedom online, like everywhere else, varies inversely with government's ability to suppress it. Civil rights anywhere are always a tug of war between the need to track down bad guys and the need to control the definition of crime and bad guy.
In other words, what Bill is saying is that if terrorists get past airport security and blow up a plane, it's not airport security's fault or the airline's fault, because they didn't blow up the plane. It was a third party.
Bull shit. Either you get to own something and be responsible for it, or you don't get to own it. I wish all these mine-mine-mine IP fanatics would get that concept into their thick skulls.
After reading the article the first thing I did was to scroll through the posts looking for somebody to mention this very thing. Yes you could compensate for the thrust, but the article doesn't mention it at all, which I think is a big omission. Either the station would have to have twice the plasma generation capacity and a second emitter, and a way to ensure that the backwards beam didn't hit anything important, or it would have conventional thrusters of some sort and would need a constant supply of fuel shipped up to it.
These things might not be germaine to getting the basic concept across, but they get important fast when you start to translate the concept into a practical design.