Here's to the crazy one... the misfit... the rebel... the troublemaker.
The round peg in the square hole.
The one who saw things differently. He isn't fond of rules, and has no respect for the status quo.
You can quote him, disagree with him, glorify, or villify him. About the only thing you can't do, is ignore him, because he changed things. He pushed the human race forward.
And while some may see him as the crazy one, we see genius. Because the person who is crazy enough to think he can change the world is the one who does.
Think Different. Woz.
There definitely should have been a shot of Woz in that commercial... he was one of the people that brought about this revolution. Congrats.
Why do gamers always totally bash Cyan and the Myst line of games? When I first saw Myst, I fell in love with it. It's not just pretty pictures as most people think it is. It's one of the few games that makes you think about what to do next. If Cyan had put in a time limit on the game (though that might have been unnatural to the idea of "go explore this place"), I think it would have been even more challenging.
However, here's a thought: Myst is the best selling game of all time. It has sold more copies than Quake, and was the first game to sell a million copies. Not a single game has surpassed Myst in this way. It's also the first game to, IMO, really appeal to the average non-gamer.
As is pointed out in this C|Net article, Nike invited a number of inspectors to their manufacturing plants. The inspectors found numerous violations of workers' rights.
Nike has pledged to better the conditions in which their workers work and have even put up a web site for people to track their progress, but I don't know where exactly that is. It's called "Transparency 101" though.
If you look at my site, you'll see that Chunkey Monkey licenses the name of their company/character to Ben and Jerry's to use as their ice-cream flavor.
Do you believe that a non-profit organization that sells T-shirts is a commercial organization? It's the same deal really. ChunkyMunky uses the money (as far as I know - I'm not the owner or anything) for its hosting service. I know that the owner of the site does not use it as a profit in any way.
Please read my letters at my own site here. You will see what that woman is trying to do. After I got the company to the point where they saw they would lose, they decided to send the site that letter stating that "we will *allow you* to use the domain". The point is - it was never hers to allow CM to use it.
I should have included that link in my original post as well. Sorry that the whole story isn't told on CM's front page.
Okay, Slashdot has found a way to piss me off. The following domain name disputes have been covered on Slashdot (big idjut corporation vs. little community based site):
eToys vs. eToys Digital Diva vs. Digital Divas Mattel vs. The Barbies
However, the following domain dispute wasn't (even though to my knowledge, it was submitted many times to the Slashdot submission queue):
ChunkyMunky gave up because a legal defense would have been way too expensive. But I have to wonder if a Slashdot editor had taken the 10 minutes it takes to post that story, the outcome might have been different.
(I'm from Bombay, India, so I think I can speak...:)
Railways are a bad idea, IMO. The reason is that more than half the people on the rail didn't even buy a ticket. They are literally hanging off the sides of the train, and the cops can't get them off because there's way too many of them. If they had any money to spend on Internet access, they'd be spending it on food.
A lot of the people who bought a ticket are most likely going to their families (whom they haven't seen in a long time because they didn't have the money...) and will hardly give a shit about 'net access. This isn't a sap story, it's the truth.
The other percentage that actually has the money to spend would be quite small and wouldn't give much of a return.
Where they *should* put this stuff is in those rich country club type places. Those are the only people who have enough money to put into a computer or 'net access anyway. And, placed correctly (like at a few select tables in the restaurant or something like that) could easily be a conversation piece.
Isn't it obvious that, by now, the Slashdot community should be calling Tim O'Reilley by his earned TLA? It's time to add TOR to the list of people immortalized by a TLA:P
I definitely think someone should learn a language in the context of a text / CLI environment. But, if you look at the size of projects today, it's pretty insane to do everything that way. Once you've learned a language (or more importantly, "programming"), I find it an important step to move to an IDE that is usable and helpful.
Personally, I like the ease of use of Visual Studio (note Visual Studio - *not* Visual Basic).
Basically, let's say you want to add a function to a class. Well, right click the class' name, click "Add Function" and all you have to do is type in the return type and name of the function (and its privacy class if you like). Done. It even adds the correct include statement to the header file if, say, an argument in your function is the type of a class that isn't defined in your scope.
I like that. I also like the fact that, while typing, Visual Studio will display a tooltip that highlights the arguments of a function, so I know exactly how many arguments there are, of which type, and even overloaded functions are handled fine.
I most definitely like the debugger. It's *MUCH* better than:
gdb stuff break... run * break hit next
list next
and crap like that.
People say that it's not real programming. Well guess what, IDEs are tools. They help you get the job done. Dijkstra's algorithm doesn't change whether you're using an IDE or not. IDEs, in my opinion, are glorified text editors (expensive ones too...) which do the grunt work for you.
I love my IDE, and until *nix has something like it, I seriously doubt I'll be doing heavy development for the platforms.
Well, that news is kinda old by the mailing list standard:P
If you actually see the woman's e-mail, it says "allowed" (as you hinted in your post). The problem with this is, if chunkymunky accepts this, then it's like saying "Okay, you *do* own the rights to 'chunkymunky' and we accept your grant to use the domain." The thing is, the domain was never hers to grant the rights to - it's the domain name owner's and *NO ONE ELSE'S*.
Well, the owner of the (chunkymunky) domain is currently seeing a lawyer. Also, the lawyer for the sueing site is in New Jersey, while the chunkymunky domain's owner (and lawyer) are in England.
Everyone behind ChunkyMunky.Com wants to fight this - that's for sure. As I said, the owner is currently seeing a lawyer, so we'll see where it goes from here.
Beyond the 2600.Com Cease and Desist controversey, another one (though less popular) has risen on the internet...
ChunkyMonkey.Com, a children's site owned and operated by a nice old woman who owns the trademark to the name "Chunky Monkey" (a lovable little monkey cartoon character) sent a cease and desist letter to ChunkyMunky.Com, a site devoted to desktop customization.
This is eToys vs. eToy all over again! E-mails sent back and forth between myself and ChunkyMonkey's lawyer are posted at my website here. I don't own the chunkymunky.com domain or anything, but I'm part of its community, so I took a stand:P
Well then, instead of accomodating this virus, why not take control of your desktop with an alternative shell (like a Window Manager). The main one I use is Litestep
I just finished a computer architecture course here at college (in fact, I'm just out of the final exam). Our main project for the semester was to build a behavioral and structural model of a pipelined ARM7 processor.
At this point in my life, there is not much I hate more than the ARM architecture. Well, maybe complexity theory... but that final doesn't begin for another hour, so I'm okay with it, I guess...
It's obvious that Tim O'Reilley needs to be simplified to TOR. We talk about him too much on this site for everyone to spell that last name, and everyone loves TLA's, right?
This is actually kinda cool. I was actually going to buy a PlayStation at one point to play games like Final Fantasy VIII the way they were supposed to be played - on a console where the resolutions are right.
I have a Dreamcast, and this type of thing just made my day. It seems that Sega really knows where to go in this age where they know the following invariants about console gaming:
Their console will be obsolete in about a year
The games it can play will be thrown aside along with the console
That's it. However, Sega seems to be taking the right direction. By supporting emulation of games, Sega is showing that older games are a viable source of revenue, even if it's a pittance compared to what they used to make, it's still something. Also, it might even revive a market for a long dead console. How many of us have wished for a good old Nintendo or Genesis after playing some of our favorite games in an emulator?
I like what Sega is doing, and I'll definitely be on the preorder lists for Bleem! when it comes out for Dreamcast
Also, for more E3 spectaculars (such as a WarCraft III trailer and PS2 news), check out dailyradar.com
I really believe that opening up APIs will help, but not in a "right here, right now" fashion. It will take many years for developers to catch up to Microsoft, and by then MS will have developed a new operating system with many more functions built in.
However, here's a small look at Windows' hidden APIs:
The Run dialog box in explorer is hidden. To this day, there is no export for it from any shared library, and is still often evoked by creating a function pointer to the address and calling it.
The Shutdown dialog is another one
Countless others
These are really things you would think would be readily available to other developers. they are not. It pisses me off being a shell developer and not knowing what function to call to get something to work (even though I know the functionality exists, since I see it every day).
IMO, I really think this would help. However, MS will find a way to make it really hard to find anyway. For instance, just publish the API that gets revealed right along with the current API. "Huh? That's what I'd expect!" Okay, answer me this: How in the world are you going to tell the difference and find new functionality which you really didn't see before? There's probably around a few thousand functions hanging around in the Win32 API, and it'll be pretty difficult to find that hidden API you were looking for a year ago. And by the time you find it, it will most likely be obsolete due to a new operating system.
Why is this Stuff that Matters? I'll tell you why.
Slashdot is a community of hackers. Hackers are not only programmers. In this case, we call them Building Hackers. These are not just the college pranks where one school steals the other's mascot. These are college pranks which require ingenuity to pull off.
I am not a building hacker. The reason? I have no fucking clue how to get a cow on top of a domed building. I have no clue how to build a full replica of a police car, cop inside, eating a donut all in the space of a few hours of time. I have no idea how to fit a cadillac through the doors of a lecture hall that is designed only to admit the average student body.
These "pranks" are not just pranks - they are hacks in one of the truest senses of the word. That's why it's stuff that matters - we can all learn something from, at the very least, taking awe in what someone else has done with a little bit of ingenuity.
Slashdot Mirror
(To the script of Apple's Think Different ad)
Here's to the crazy one... the misfit... the rebel... the troublemaker.
The round peg in the square hole.
The one who saw things differently. He isn't fond of rules, and has no respect for the status quo.
You can quote him, disagree with him, glorify, or villify him. About the only thing you can't do, is ignore him, because he changed things. He pushed the human race forward.
And while some may see him as the crazy one, we see genius. Because the person who is crazy enough to think he can change the world is the one who does.
Think Different. Woz.
There definitely should have been a shot of Woz in that commercial... he was one of the people that brought about this revolution. Congrats.
Why do gamers always totally bash Cyan and the Myst line of games? When I first saw Myst, I fell in love with it. It's not just pretty pictures as most people think it is. It's one of the few games that makes you think about what to do next. If Cyan had put in a time limit on the game (though that might have been unnatural to the idea of "go explore this place"), I think it would have been even more challenging.
However, here's a thought: Myst is the best selling game of all time. It has sold more copies than Quake, and was the first game to sell a million copies. Not a single game has surpassed Myst in this way. It's also the first game to, IMO, really appeal to the average non-gamer.
That's my rant for today...
As is pointed out in this C|Net article, Nike invited a number of inspectors to their manufacturing plants. The inspectors found numerous violations of workers' rights.
Nike has pledged to better the conditions in which their workers work and have even put up a web site for people to track their progress, but I don't know where exactly that is. It's called "Transparency 101" though.
Trent Reznor was once a Computer Engineering major, although I don't remember where. Check out the newest issue of Incite Video Gaming for the info.
If you look at my site, you'll see that Chunkey Monkey licenses the name of their company/character to Ben and Jerry's to use as their ice-cream flavor.
:(
So, no dice there
Do you believe that a non-profit organization that sells T-shirts is a commercial organization? It's the same deal really. ChunkyMunky uses the money (as far as I know - I'm not the owner or anything) for its hosting service. I know that the owner of the site does not use it as a profit in any way.
Please read my letters at my own site here. You will see what that woman is trying to do. After I got the company to the point where they saw they would lose, they decided to send the site that letter stating that "we will *allow you* to use the domain". The point is - it was never hers to allow CM to use it.
I should have included that link in my original post as well. Sorry that the whole story isn't told on CM's front page.
Okay, Slashdot has found a way to piss me off. The following domain name disputes have been covered on Slashdot (big idjut corporation vs. little community based site):
eToys vs. eToys
Digital Diva vs. Digital Divas
Mattel vs. The Barbies
However, the following domain dispute wasn't (even though to my knowledge, it was submitted many times to the Slashdot submission queue):
Chunky Monkey vs. ChunkyMunky
ChunkyMunky gave up because a legal defense would have been way too expensive. But I have to wonder if a Slashdot editor had taken the 10 minutes it takes to post that story, the outcome might have been different.
DivX is the name of the codec based on Microsoft's implementation of MP4. It's not the player.
Also, the statement "no sources, so not for linux" is incorrect - just because you have source doesn't mean it's for linux.
The links are correct though...
(I'm from Bombay, India, so I think I can speak... :)
Railways are a bad idea, IMO. The reason is that more than half the people on the rail didn't even buy a ticket. They are literally hanging off the sides of the train, and the cops can't get them off because there's way too many of them. If they had any money to spend on Internet access, they'd be spending it on food.
A lot of the people who bought a ticket are most likely going to their families (whom they haven't seen in a long time because they didn't have the money...) and will hardly give a shit about 'net access. This isn't a sap story, it's the truth.
The other percentage that actually has the money to spend would be quite small and wouldn't give much of a return.
Where they *should* put this stuff is in those rich country club type places. Those are the only people who have enough money to put into a computer or 'net access anyway. And, placed correctly (like at a few select tables in the restaurant or something like that) could easily be a conversation piece.
Isn't it obvious that, by now, the Slashdot community should be calling Tim O'Reilley by his earned TLA? It's time to add TOR to the list of people immortalized by a TLA :P
(Jason being the person who submitted the story)
Interesting that Jason is back at the keyboard after his very bad car crash. I'm wondering how that experience has affected him....
I definitely think someone should learn a language in the context of a text / CLI environment. But, if you look at the size of projects today, it's pretty insane to do everything that way. Once you've learned a language (or more importantly, "programming"), I find it an important step to move to an IDE that is usable and helpful.
...
Personally, I like the ease of use of Visual Studio (note Visual Studio - *not* Visual Basic).
Basically, let's say you want to add a function to a class. Well, right click the class' name, click "Add Function" and all you have to do is type in the return type and name of the function (and its privacy class if you like). Done. It even adds the correct include statement to the header file if, say, an argument in your function is the type of a class that isn't defined in your scope.
I like that. I also like the fact that, while typing, Visual Studio will display a tooltip that highlights the arguments of a function, so I know exactly how many arguments there are, of which type, and even overloaded functions are handled fine.
I most definitely like the debugger. It's *MUCH* better than:
gdb stuff
break
run
* break hit
next
list
next
and crap like that.
People say that it's not real programming. Well guess what, IDEs are tools. They help you get the job done. Dijkstra's algorithm doesn't change whether you're using an IDE or not. IDEs, in my opinion, are glorified text editors (expensive ones too...) which do the grunt work for you.
I love my IDE, and until *nix has something like it, I seriously doubt I'll be doing heavy development for the platforms.
Well, that news is kinda old by the mailing list standard :P
If you actually see the woman's e-mail, it says "allowed" (as you hinted in your post). The problem with this is, if chunkymunky accepts this, then it's like saying "Okay, you *do* own the rights to 'chunkymunky' and we accept your grant to use the domain." The thing is, the domain was never hers to grant the rights to - it's the domain name owner's and *NO ONE ELSE'S*.
Actually, they (Chunky Monkey) *licenses* the name to Ben and Jerry's for use as their ice cream flavor.
:P
So, they win on that point
Well, the owner of the (chunkymunky) domain is currently seeing a lawyer. Also, the lawyer for the sueing site is in New Jersey, while the chunkymunky domain's owner (and lawyer) are in England.
Everyone behind ChunkyMunky.Com wants to fight this - that's for sure. As I said, the owner is currently seeing a lawyer, so we'll see where it goes from here.
Beyond the 2600.Com Cease and Desist controversey, another one (though less popular) has risen on the internet...
:P
ChunkyMonkey.Com, a children's site owned and operated by a nice old woman who owns the trademark to the name "Chunky Monkey" (a lovable little monkey cartoon character) sent a cease and desist letter to ChunkyMunky.Com, a site devoted to desktop customization.
This is eToys vs. eToy all over again! E-mails sent back and forth between myself and ChunkyMonkey's lawyer are posted at my website here. I don't own the chunkymunky.com domain or anything, but I'm part of its community, so I took a stand
Well then, instead of accomodating this virus, why not take control of your desktop with an alternative shell (like a Window Manager). The main one I use is Litestep
I just finished a computer architecture course here at college (in fact, I'm just out of the final exam). Our main project for the semester was to build a behavioral and structural model of a pipelined ARM7 processor.
At this point in my life, there is not much I hate more than the ARM architecture. Well, maybe complexity theory... but that final doesn't begin for another hour, so I'm okay with it, I guess...
It's obvious that Tim O'Reilley needs to be simplified to TOR. We talk about him too much on this site for everyone to spell that last name, and everyone loves TLA's, right?
I think this was answered by Godsmack in their song "When Worlds Collide"
I have a Dreamcast, and this type of thing just made my day. It seems that Sega really knows where to go in this age where they know the following invariants about console gaming:
That's it. However, Sega seems to be taking the right direction. By supporting emulation of games, Sega is showing that older games are a viable source of revenue, even if it's a pittance compared to what they used to make, it's still something. Also, it might even revive a market for a long dead console. How many of us have wished for a good old Nintendo or Genesis after playing some of our favorite games in an emulator?
I like what Sega is doing, and I'll definitely be on the preorder lists for Bleem! when it comes out for Dreamcast
Also, for more E3 spectaculars (such as a WarCraft III trailer and PS2 news), check out dailyradar.com
However, here's a small look at Windows' hidden APIs:
These are really things you would think would be readily available to other developers. they are not. It pisses me off being a shell developer and not knowing what function to call to get something to work (even though I know the functionality exists, since I see it every day).
IMO, I really think this would help. However, MS will find a way to make it really hard to find anyway. For instance, just publish the API that gets revealed right along with the current API. "Huh? That's what I'd expect!" Okay, answer me this: How in the world are you going to tell the difference and find new functionality which you really didn't see before? There's probably around a few thousand functions hanging around in the Win32 API, and it'll be pretty difficult to find that hidden API you were looking for a year ago. And by the time you find it, it will most likely be obsolete due to a new operating system.
Why is this Stuff that Matters? I'll tell you why.
Slashdot is a community of hackers. Hackers are not only programmers. In this case, we call them Building Hackers. These are not just the college pranks where one school steals the other's mascot. These are college pranks which require ingenuity to pull off.
I am not a building hacker. The reason? I have no fucking clue how to get a cow on top of a domed building. I have no clue how to build a full replica of a police car, cop inside, eating a donut all in the space of a few hours of time. I have no idea how to fit a cadillac through the doors of a lecture hall that is designed only to admit the average student body.
These "pranks" are not just pranks - they are hacks in one of the truest senses of the word. That's why it's stuff that matters - we can all learn something from, at the very least, taking awe in what someone else has done with a little bit of ingenuity.