...like supporting JNG encoding (JPEG done PNG style), which I'm sure people will love for porn banner ads.
I thought the same thing, though. I actually went so far as to design my own spec, which I called IMAG8 (Interim Minimal Animated Graphic - 8-bit; basically, a pixel dump of the sprites, and a list of simple frame compositions, all zlib compressed). I believe that the GIF licence will run out before MNG gets widespread support (because it's so complicated), but I thought if I designed a sufficiently simple format, it could replace GIF overnight for many uses (such as banner ads in custom programs used for one specific service, like specialized versions of ICQ).
I dropped the idea before I released it, though. It worked out okay technically (only a few hundred lines of code for the viewer; it's not that hard when you stick to the rule "implement, then document"), but I decided that I didn't really want to support the use of animated banner ads.
When you get right down to it, I don't think there's a valid use for that kind of functionality. It's just another way to grab the user's attention to something he'd rather ignore. It ought to be turned off by default in all web browsers.
A computer generates over 2000 times as much heat as a human being? Rubbish!
I think you're confusing your units; there's more than one kind of calorie. Check your numbers for common sense, before making such an absurd statement.
...before we know what the reproduction mechanisms are.
The solutions will have to depend on the actual machines we make. We're not 100% clear on what we can make yet, so the feasability of (and need for) any safety system can't be established.
It might not even be a problem. The energy requirements of reproduction are likely to be high, and I imagine that it would take a lot of hard design work to make ones that can reproduce without perfectly controlled conditions and pure chemical feedstocks. Building the gray goo seed might very well be one of the hardest things to do with nanotechnology.
I personally think that gray goo breakouts are likely to be as annoying as mould and computer viruses are today.
"Damn it, Tim, the little buggers have gotten into the acetone feedstock again! We'll have to plas-burn the whole batch." "Okay, Harry, but we should get a sample. Some idiot kid probably did it on purpose, and they usually don't know enough to cover their tracks."
I think e-gold is the best currently available system.
E-Gold: -is up and running (unlike almost everything else) -is internationally available (unlike PayPal), and supports conversion to and from several currencies -needs no special software to either send or receive -charges small transaction fees (1%, to a maximum of 50 cents) -can be used for micropayments -supports a form system, so you can put a page on your site where people can both pay and leave a comment -is easy to fund (for example, this place, lets you fund your e-gold account with your credit card; slower methods are cheaper) -is free to sign up for
However, it works in precious metals (gold, silver, platinum, palladium), not cash. Personally, I prefer this (though I trust silver to retain its value more than the others). If you don't trust precious metals, you can always just buy it as you need it, and OutExchange (have them send you a cheque for the current market value) whenever you have more than you intend to immediately spend.
I'm not sure I trust it for pay-for-view pages, but it certainly seems adequately secure for donations (as long as you pick a good password, and use a web browser with good 128-bit SSL). It also seems to be quite private, though it doesn't support truly anonymous payments.
When someone says "in this case, GPL infects this other thing" that means "in this case, you must place this other thing under the GPL, or you are in violation of the GPL, and therefor have no permission to redistribute." If some part is under another such licence (like X or Berk.), that means you must remove one or the other, or you've lost the licence to redistribute and you're violating copyright.
If you make and distribute a proprietary product that links in GPL'd code, it's a copyright violation, pure and simple.
Clauses insterted into it don't "try to make code you link 'become' GPL", they deny you that use of the code unless you GPL the code you link.
A hyperlink is just an address, the current document is still there whether the linked one exists or not. A statically linked program contains everything it's linked to. In the case of dynamic linking, the linked material must be present or the program won't run at all.
You can't mix GPL'd code with non-GPL'd code in the same compile and/or link. You can't even dynamically link non-GPL'd code to GPL'd code (though you can to LGPL'd). Of course, there's this whole fuzzy area about what is "mere aggregation" and what is linking, like plug-ins, pipes, and running one program in another. While there are common interpretations (pipes, running = okay, plug-ins = controversial, but probably okay), I think it's very open to argument in a court of law.
Example: a proprietary program, the binary of which contains a compressed archive of a GPL'd program binary. When run, it extracts the GPL'd binary to a temporary directory, runs it, uses the results, and then gets rid of the extracted binary.
Making sure that the source modifications always comes back to the originators is not the purpose of the GPL.
The purpose of the GPL is to make sure that people never get stuck with these black-box binaries that are the only way to access their data, so if something goes wrong (like a bug pops up or the source owner goes under), they can still deal with the problem and access their own data, and get it out to their friends. It's a very serious threat in the long term; how much data was lost from the early days because it was on non-standard storage media? Now we've learned to transfer everything from computer to computer before it is lost, but losing access to the software access mechanisms could be as harmful as losing access to the hardware access mechanisms was back then.
That is the freedom the GPL is about: the freedom to access your own work, and to share it with your friends, without following the terms of a distant gatekeeper. It's the freedom to write a program, and let people run it without having to buy an operating system. It's the freedom to write a document, and let people read it without buying a special program for it. It's the freedom to make a movie, and let people watch it without having to buy a special player approved and taxed by a consortium.
All software defines a standard of some sort. It might be a data standard or a usage standard, but it's something that people have to invest in, and their investment should not be controlled by the creator of the software. Seperating the standards from the source is impractical, except under unusual conditions where the standards are built first, and the programs are mere implementations of it (in that case, though, why not simply compile the standard? if it's rigorous enough to fully define compliant systems, a computer program should be able to implement it). In general, for the standards to be libre, the source must be libre.
That is why it is important that embraced and extended versions of GPL software not be proprietary. It is better that they not be created at all, no matter how much more useful and valuable they are to the end user. The infection of the system with proprietary softare (and therefore, proprietary standards) is an attack on our individual freedoms (you can't hear what another says without buying the same software they use, you can't offer them your work without forcing them to pay a third party), and must be prevented, if possible. Offering a tool to make proprietary software is like paying taxes that will be used to enslave others.
The "in-house use" loophole has always been there. It's never been a big deal. If some company has your data locked up in their servers, it doesn't matter whether you have access to the source they use, you still can't access your own work without their co-operation. For you to bother with them in the first place, they must offer it back to you in a useable form. There's no cure for it, and none is needed.
[BTW, I don't really agree with all this rubbish; I believe in public domain software. But, for that matter, I'm not entirely against censorship or even slavery. In a world where every bite you eat could go into the mouth of a starving child (of which there will never be a shortage; people who rein in their breeding will inevitably be displaced by those who don't), a morality based on egalitarian concepts like universal freedom inevitably either contradicts itself or amounts to a collective suicide. Either way, if you follow such a morality to its logical end, you will just make room for someone with less fastidious (or utterly unrelated) moral standards. All I know for sure is that I see starving children on TV every day, and I still take second helpings at dinner. After all, they're not my children.]
Millions of people got Myst and Riven included with their computer or in CD-ROM kits. A few hundred thousand bought it retail because it had pretty screenshots and everybody told them it was the best selling game around.
I've never heard anyone who's purchased more than three computer games say that either Myst or Riven was worth the full retail price.
In the game business, this is sometimes called "the Granny Factor": a game which sells because it is highly visible on shelves and has a pleasant, non-violent cover (like Granny might buy for her grandkid's birthday).
Not at all. You don't have to remove it on reselling it. The tag must be kept in place before sale so the buyer can read the information on it (like "100% new material" or "stuffed with factory-floor sweepings").
Only the ones with no business sense get screwed that badly. That happens in every field. It happens to us programmers too, if you "just want to code" and not be bothered with negotiating and grubbing for more money you can easily end up working 80-hour weeks for $20K/year and end up burnt out and unemployable in five years, dead broke because you were always too tired to take care of your money.
True, many musicians are in a lousy bargaining position. This is because they are lousy musicians, and they only become commercially valuable because of expensive marketing. They can sign up and "get screwed" while becoming famous making crappy music, or they can not sign up and go get real jobs.
Even then, if they have any mercenary instincts at all, there are ways to cash in on fame.
If you don't care enough to watch out for your own bottom line, there's sure as hell not going to be anyone else to do it.
Yeah, the current system sucks, but I'm not shedding any tears for the poor starving famous people.
For constant accleration, zero initial speed: d = (at^2)/2 t = sqrt(2d/a) a = 2d/t^2 d = 2.8 x 10^10 m (halfway) t = 45 days (halfway) t = 45*24*60*60 s t = 3.8 x 10^6 s t^2 = 1.5 x 10^13 s^2 a = 2.8 x 10^10 m / 1.5 x 10^13 s^2 a = 0.004 m/s^2
For constant acceleration, travel time is proportional to the square root of the distance. I don't know why I mentioned logarithms (except, perhaps, that it's more fun to say than "square root").
Let's see, we can work on developing constant acceleration technology that makes travel time proportional to a logarithm of the distance, or we can keep screwing around with old burst acceleration technology (rockets) that makes time directly proportional to the distance.
Once we have the good constant acceleration engines, we could go anywhere we wanted in the solar system. The Pluto round trip takes only about 7 times as long as the Mars round trip (I assume simplified trajectories; real space travellers would use quicker ones). At a very reasonable 0.01 g, that means a month and a half for the Mars round, under a year for the Pluto round.
Or we could, as you say, just launch a damn ship NOW... and have another Apollo that leads nowhere. Woohoo! Another plastic flag and some footprints on a dead world for us to not visit for decades! That's something to get excited about, isn't it?
a good pinball game, a good player, and the right atmosphere, and a good session of pinball can turn into a 2-hour workout that leaves you drenched in sweat!
That doesn't mean anything, it's not heavy workout sweat, it's excitement/stress sweat, like when you get really nervous or have a nightmare. I break out in a cold sweat playing Quake or writing a calculus exam (definitely sedentary activities); it doesn't bear any relation to the sweat that pours off my body after the 1000th squat or during the third hour of judo practice (probably not sedentary...).
Most of the profit from game publishing comes from the first couple of weeks of sales, before anyone gets much of a chance to play it. Hype, hot screenshots (whether or not they're from a pre-rendered cutscene), and a cool cardboard box sell copies. (the only exceptions are a few gamedev idols, like id, that everybody buys)
It's an inherently incompetent economic system, where demand has nothing to do with quality.
your cities seem strangely hostile to you doing anything other than working, sleeping, or spending.
<p>Blatantly false: they are clearly hostile to sleeping, too. Electric lights, late shows, night clubs, internet access: all designed to keep you working, spending, or viewing advertising when you should be sleeping.
Napster can't make money. They talk about making money in the distant future by charging membership fees, but they've already been cloned. They're in the same situation as ICQ: everybody uses them, because they were the first, but nobody will pay them, because anyone willing to open a free service could replace them.
Now, Napster sees that merchandising might produce income, but they're not the ones doing it. If they could only monopolize the merchandising, they just might make a buck.
Really, they're just another IPO raider, out to get in the news so they can fill their pockets with retirement funds and the life savings of naive day traders. That doesn't mean they won't take a real profit if they can.
Personally, I've never believed that IP law should protect merchandising. It only encourages entertainment companies to make shows for children with the sole purpose of making the children want the toys. If just anyone could churn out 10000 Jarjar dolls, would the character have been in the movie?
Slashdot Mirror
...like supporting JNG encoding (JPEG done PNG style), which I'm sure people will love for porn banner ads.
I thought the same thing, though. I actually went so far as to design my own spec, which I called IMAG8 (Interim Minimal Animated Graphic - 8-bit; basically, a pixel dump of the sprites, and a list of simple frame compositions, all zlib compressed). I believe that the GIF licence will run out before MNG gets widespread support (because it's so complicated), but I thought if I designed a sufficiently simple format, it could replace GIF overnight for many uses (such as banner ads in custom programs used for one specific service, like specialized versions of ICQ).
I dropped the idea before I released it, though. It worked out okay technically (only a few hundred lines of code for the viewer; it's not that hard when you stick to the rule "implement, then document"), but I decided that I didn't really want to support the use of animated banner ads.
When you get right down to it, I don't think there's a valid use for that kind of functionality. It's just another way to grab the user's attention to something he'd rather ignore. It ought to be turned off by default in all web browsers.
A computer generates over 2000 times as much heat as a human being? Rubbish!
I think you're confusing your units; there's more than one kind of calorie. Check your numbers for common sense, before making such an absurd statement.
...before we know what the reproduction mechanisms are.
The solutions will have to depend on the actual machines we make. We're not 100% clear on what we can make yet, so the feasability of (and need for) any safety system can't be established.
It might not even be a problem. The energy requirements of reproduction are likely to be high, and I imagine that it would take a lot of hard design work to make ones that can reproduce without perfectly controlled conditions and pure chemical feedstocks. Building the gray goo seed might very well be one of the hardest things to do with nanotechnology.
I personally think that gray goo breakouts are likely to be as annoying as mould and computer viruses are today.
"Damn it, Tim, the little buggers have gotten into the acetone feedstock again! We'll have to plas-burn the whole batch."
"Okay, Harry, but we should get a sample. Some idiot kid probably did it on purpose, and they usually don't know enough to cover their tracks."
I think e-gold is the best currently available system.
;-)
E-Gold:
-is up and running (unlike almost everything else)
-is internationally available (unlike PayPal), and supports conversion to and from several currencies
-needs no special software to either send or receive
-charges small transaction fees (1%, to a maximum of 50 cents)
-can be used for micropayments
-supports a form system, so you can put a page on your site where people can both pay and leave a comment
-is easy to fund (for example, this place, lets you fund your e-gold account with your credit card; slower methods are cheaper)
-is free to sign up for
However, it works in precious metals (gold, silver, platinum, palladium), not cash. Personally, I prefer this (though I trust silver to retain its value more than the others). If you don't trust precious metals, you can always just buy it as you need it, and OutExchange (have them send you a cheque for the current market value) whenever you have more than you intend to immediately spend.
I'm not sure I trust it for pay-for-view pages, but it certainly seems adequately secure for donations (as long as you pick a good password, and use a web browser with good 128-bit SSL). It also seems to be quite private, though it doesn't support truly anonymous payments.
Go sign up for free.
Feel free to tip me for this valuable info
I'm account # 134343
That's not what I meant.
When someone says "in this case, GPL infects this other thing" that means "in this case, you must place this other thing under the GPL, or you are in violation of the GPL, and therefor have no permission to redistribute." If some part is under another such licence (like X or Berk.), that means you must remove one or the other, or you've lost the licence to redistribute and you're violating copyright.
If you make and distribute a proprietary product that links in GPL'd code, it's a copyright violation, pure and simple.
Clauses insterted into it don't "try to make code you link 'become' GPL", they deny you that use of the code unless you GPL the code you link.
Using the same word doesn't make them equivalent.
A hyperlink is just an address, the current document is still there whether the linked one exists or not. A statically linked program contains everything it's linked to. In the case of dynamic linking, the linked material must be present or the program won't run at all.
You can't mix GPL'd code with non-GPL'd code in the same compile and/or link. You can't even dynamically link non-GPL'd code to GPL'd code (though you can to LGPL'd). Of course, there's this whole fuzzy area about what is "mere aggregation" and what is linking, like plug-ins, pipes, and running one program in another. While there are common interpretations (pipes, running = okay, plug-ins = controversial, but probably okay), I think it's very open to argument in a court of law.
Example: a proprietary program, the binary of which contains a compressed archive of a GPL'd program binary. When run, it extracts the GPL'd binary to a temporary directory, runs it, uses the results, and then gets rid of the extracted binary.
GPL violation? I'm stumped.
Making sure that the source modifications always comes back to the originators is not the purpose of the GPL.
The purpose of the GPL is to make sure that people never get stuck with these black-box binaries that are the only way to access their data, so if something goes wrong (like a bug pops up or the source owner goes under), they can still deal with the problem and access their own data, and get it out to their friends. It's a very serious threat in the long term; how much data was lost from the early days because it was on non-standard storage media? Now we've learned to transfer everything from computer to computer before it is lost, but losing access to the software access mechanisms could be as harmful as losing access to the hardware access mechanisms was back then.
That is the freedom the GPL is about: the freedom to access your own work, and to share it with your friends, without following the terms of a distant gatekeeper. It's the freedom to write a program, and let people run it without having to buy an operating system. It's the freedom to write a document, and let people read it without buying a special program for it. It's the freedom to make a movie, and let people watch it without having to buy a special player approved and taxed by a consortium.
All software defines a standard of some sort. It might be a data standard or a usage standard, but it's something that people have to invest in, and their investment should not be controlled by the creator of the software. Seperating the standards from the source is impractical, except under unusual conditions where the standards are built first, and the programs are mere implementations of it (in that case, though, why not simply compile the standard? if it's rigorous enough to fully define compliant systems, a computer program should be able to implement it). In general, for the standards to be libre, the source must be libre.
That is why it is important that embraced and extended versions of GPL software not be proprietary. It is better that they not be created at all, no matter how much more useful and valuable they are to the end user. The infection of the system with proprietary softare (and therefore, proprietary standards) is an attack on our individual freedoms (you can't hear what another says without buying the same software they use, you can't offer them your work without forcing them to pay a third party), and must be prevented, if possible. Offering a tool to make proprietary software is like paying taxes that will be used to enslave others.
The "in-house use" loophole has always been there. It's never been a big deal. If some company has your data locked up in their servers, it doesn't matter whether you have access to the source they use, you still can't access your own work without their co-operation. For you to bother with them in the first place, they must offer it back to you in a useable form. There's no cure for it, and none is needed.
[BTW, I don't really agree with all this rubbish; I believe in public domain software. But, for that matter, I'm not entirely against censorship or even slavery. In a world where every bite you eat could go into the mouth of a starving child (of which there will never be a shortage; people who rein in their breeding will inevitably be displaced by those who don't), a morality based on egalitarian concepts like universal freedom inevitably either contradicts itself or amounts to a collective suicide. Either way, if you follow such a morality to its logical end, you will just make room for someone with less fastidious (or utterly unrelated) moral standards. All I know for sure is that I see starving children on TV every day, and I still take second helpings at dinner. After all, they're not my children.]
Millions of people got Myst and Riven included with their computer or in CD-ROM kits. A few hundred thousand bought it retail because it had pretty screenshots and everybody told them it was the best selling game around.
I've never heard anyone who's purchased more than three computer games say that either Myst or Riven was worth the full retail price.
In the game business, this is sometimes called "the Granny Factor": a game which sells because it is highly visible on shelves and has a pleasant, non-violent cover (like Granny might buy for her grandkid's birthday).
Not at all. You don't have to remove it on reselling it. The tag must be kept in place before sale so the buyer can read the information on it (like "100% new material" or "stuffed with factory-floor sweepings").
Only the ones with no business sense get screwed that badly. That happens in every field. It happens to us programmers too, if you "just want to code" and not be bothered with negotiating and grubbing for more money you can easily end up working 80-hour weeks for $20K/year and end up burnt out and unemployable in five years, dead broke because you were always too tired to take care of your money.
True, many musicians are in a lousy bargaining position. This is because they are lousy musicians, and they only become commercially valuable because of expensive marketing. They can sign up and "get screwed" while becoming famous making crappy music, or they can not sign up and go get real jobs.
Even then, if they have any mercenary instincts at all, there are ways to cash in on fame.
If you don't care enough to watch out for your own bottom line, there's sure as hell not going to be anyone else to do it.
Yeah, the current system sucks, but I'm not shedding any tears for the poor starving famous people.
last to calc lines should read:
a = 2 * 2.8 x 10^10 m / 1.5 x 10^13 s^2
a = 0.004 m/s^2
For constant accleration, zero initial speed:
d = (at^2)/2
t = sqrt(2d/a)
a = 2d/t^2
d = 2.8 x 10^10 m (halfway)
t = 45 days (halfway)
t = 45*24*60*60 s
t = 3.8 x 10^6 s
t^2 = 1.5 x 10^13 s^2
a = 2.8 x 10^10 m / 1.5 x 10^13 s^2
a = 0.004 m/s^2
or roughly 0.0004 g, with your assumptions.
At 1.3*g, it would take about two days.
For constant acceleration, travel time is proportional to the square root of the distance. I don't know why I mentioned logarithms (except, perhaps, that it's more fun to say than "square root").
Hmm, let's not.
Let's see, we can work on developing constant acceleration technology that makes travel time proportional to a logarithm of the distance, or we can keep screwing around with old burst acceleration technology (rockets) that makes time directly proportional to the distance.
Once we have the good constant acceleration engines, we could go anywhere we wanted in the solar system. The Pluto round trip takes only about 7 times as long as the Mars round trip (I assume simplified trajectories; real space travellers would use quicker ones). At a very reasonable 0.01 g, that means a month and a half for the Mars round, under a year for the Pluto round.
Or we could, as you say, just launch a damn ship NOW... and have another Apollo that leads nowhere. Woohoo! Another plastic flag and some footprints on a dead world for us to not visit for decades! That's something to get excited about, isn't it?
...also threatened to fire people for taking the bus to work, instead of buying one of his cars.
a good pinball game, a good player, and the right atmosphere, and a good session of pinball can turn into a 2-hour workout that leaves you drenched in sweat!
That doesn't mean anything, it's not heavy workout sweat, it's excitement/stress sweat, like when you get really nervous or have a nightmare. I break out in a cold sweat playing Quake or writing a calculus exam (definitely sedentary activities); it doesn't bear any relation to the sweat that pours off my body after the 1000th squat or during the third hour of judo practice (probably not sedentary...).
Innovation in gameplay isn't worth the CD blanks.
Most of the profit from game publishing comes from the first couple of weeks of sales, before anyone gets much of a chance to play it. Hype, hot screenshots (whether or not they're from a pre-rendered cutscene), and a cool cardboard box sell copies. (the only exceptions are a few gamedev idols, like id, that everybody buys)
It's an inherently incompetent economic system, where demand has nothing to do with quality.
If you attack someone in a high place, you'll end up eating crow.
How 'bout you stop posting AC so you can post and then moderate down the people who piss you off in the same discussion?
Loser, yerself. I just write what I want. I didn't ask for high karma, and I'm still not going to be bothered with self-moderating.
As if anyone gives a damn.
I regularly forget to switch from Extrans to HTML; do you think I can be bothered to piss around with the other controls?
We have much better toys now, and more people are flossing.
Why the hell is the default setting to convert HTML tags to plain text?! And why isn't it labeled "Plain Text"?
Anyone else remember the good old days before "Extrans" and "Plain Old Text" inexplicably swapped functions?
your cities seem strangely hostile to you doing anything other than working, sleeping, or spending.
<p>Blatantly false: they are clearly hostile to sleeping, too. Electric lights, late shows, night clubs, internet access: all designed to keep you working, spending, or viewing advertising when you should be sleeping.
Napster can't make money. They talk about making money in the distant future by charging membership fees, but they've already been cloned. They're in the same situation as ICQ: everybody uses them, because they were the first, but nobody will pay them, because anyone willing to open a free service could replace them.
Now, Napster sees that merchandising might produce income, but they're not the ones doing it. If they could only monopolize the merchandising, they just might make a buck.
Really, they're just another IPO raider, out to get in the news so they can fill their pockets with retirement funds and the life savings of naive day traders. That doesn't mean they won't take a real profit if they can.
Personally, I've never believed that IP law should protect merchandising. It only encourages entertainment companies to make shows for children with the sole purpose of making the children want the toys. If just anyone could churn out 10000 Jarjar dolls, would the character have been in the movie?