The red cross on a white background has come to symbolize basically any emergencymedicalsupport. Like the term "Asprin," it is in broad use enough that it doesn't represent a company or group, but (in this case) a service.
It's not like it was a particularly original symbol to begin with.
I think your experience sums it up perfectly: there is a market out there for high-end commodity hardware.
SGI could easily sell an amazing, high-end but commodity artist's station for 5k. SGI is a legendary brand, and could easily compete with Alienware for the multi-thousand dollar multi-graphics card gaming market. Or external "renderfarms in a box." Or one of a million other things that they could do with some technical wizardry on commodity hardware.
Specialty hardware and OS's are going away. It is just too much RnD money to sink into chipsets that will only go into a few thousand machines, let alone the software layers required to make working with that power easy.
In WoW (and AC / AO / etc) you can kill wimpy strawlings far, far below your level for 100 XP, or you can pick on a giant demon of instadeath and after a long and epic fight walk away with 150. You can lure enemies out once at a time the easy way for 100 XP each, or you can take them on the manly way two at a time for... 100 XP each. It seems like MMPORPG's are the perfect place to reward players for trying insane things and surviving, but the winning strategy is the riskless plod.
I don't see how this is a union. PEER is a recruiting company, and all of their goals revolve around this. "advance professional external recruiting," "improve and manifest the livelihoods of the candidates seeking career growth opportunities," "develop and improve the necessary skills to achieve high performance in professional external recruiting."
Sure, it's a recruiting company with noble goals, and if I needed a recruiter that's who I would turn to. But it is a recruiting company, not a union.
Unlike traditional dataveilance like Echelon, ADVISE aims to find terrorists before they strike and even deduce their motivations in wanting to commit their crimes.
"Hmm... ADVISE seems to think the terrorists are fed up with the 'nazi-like spy regime,' and are planning to use undead monsters to attack its servers.
Also, the terrorists want more boobies."
This was a good use of a few billion dollars to Haliburton.
I love how there are a lot of solutions to the problem that the basic act in most MMPORPG's is boring. You grind away, killing baby spiders of tenderness or sickly sewer rats until hours and hours later you level, at which point you can go buy a bunch of new spells and some new abilities. Then you test them out in combat, and head back out to grind for another 6 hours to level one more time.
Combat always seems to be too straightforward. I've been playing world of warcraft dwdfor about 80 hours, and so far I've found one enemy that I couldn't kill with a default strategy. Sure, towards the endgame I could group up and do interesting things, but for now it is a grindfest. At least they don't make you sit down for a half hour like Everquest did: 60 seconds or so of wasted time is enough in WoW.
If your game can be easily scripted, you haven't made an interesting enough game. Every single MMPORPG out there suffers from this.
Free leveling would be a great way of drawing people back in to play if they haven't been on in a while, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that what you're asking the player to do should be fun.
They had been intending on including it with v 8.5, and prior to that 8.0. They've been working on it for a while now.
On the other hand, I'm guessing the average firefox developer has a bittorrent client already, and why download a plug-in for your browser when you can just download a separate app?
Sorry, should have said "no non-torrent p2p." Torrents are reasonally well behaved if you set limits, but the more lawless P2P world can really suck down an upstream.
I have a hard time buying the whole "Stealing things they're broadcasting anyway" theory. Sure, the stations are not getting commercial revenue and that is a legitimate gripe, but that seems more of a problem of rating systems not keeping up with technology and broadcasters hesitant to embrace a new medium. Cable companies, who have enjoyed a highly profitable legal monopoly with zero competition and lowest customer satisfaction for years... They win a consolation prize of the world's tiniest violin.
The dude is a college student. He's got basically no income. He should be a letch off society for a few years as he is making himself valuable to everybody. Once his earnings are up, he should pay for everything properly. I say this personally as a content creator: if the kid's living off of beans and ketchup while he figures out how to make the world a better place, he can pay later.
Though yes, there is nothing worse in society than leeching torrents. Don't do it.
Oh no! I'm challenging global warming rhetoric with scientific studies! Damn!! There goes my Karma! *sniff* Goodbye sweet Karma
You weild "scientific studies" with all the deftness that a small fingerless child weilds a TV remote control.
The study is an interesting possibility. However, this is A: one study, not multiple, based upon B: data that only showed up after being "corrected for errors," and C: wouldn't have a climate changing effect unless it had been going on for a lot longer than we have records of. It is an interesting possibility deserving of study, but it's certainly not enough evidence to declare something fact.
A true test of a scientific theory is its ability to predict things. Global Warming was predicted based upon greenhouse gas theories and models long before we detected it. That's pretty heavy evidence that at least one cause of global warming is the amount of CO2 and other gasses that are released when we burn gasoline.
Plastic over the windows. You can buy the really good kind or just use big cheap sheets. Either way works. Check the windows first to see if they are double-pane, though.
Check around the edges of windows, especially in older buildings. Frequently, cracks will form around the edges where you can clearly feel cold leaking in. Get some silicone sealant from the local hardware, and close those holes.
Put cloth underneath and around any doors that have any space. Taking the doors off and stapling them is ideal, but in a pinch you can use glue or staple the strips to the front and back.
Compact Flourescent bulbs are a lot more energy efficient than regular ones, and last longer. And if you look around, there have been a few batches at dollar stores recently... can't beat more efficient, longer lasting, and cheaper.
Turn off your monitors when not in use. This will save as much as shutting off your computer, and is less of a pain in the arse.
Don't get a house phone. Get high speed 'net access, skype, and use cellphones. But keep the landlines away. While you're at it, halve your costs: go in for high-speed access with the people above or below you, and run your own cable. Just make a no-uploading rule or you'll find your pipe clogged in no time.
No cable: get utorrent and download shows.
Avoid even thinking about World of Warcraft.
Have a parking space you're not using? Sublet it.
No offence, but don't worry so much about the "legally" part. Everyone assumes you sublet despite what your lease says. Everyone assumes you will do things to change the apartment like paint it. People share network access all the time. It's just built in. If you screw things up, it gives them legal right to sue you, but otherwise it is just business as usual.
Don't buy any furnature. Wait until the students are moving out, if you can, to pick some up for free. Of course, you'll probably be moving out then too, so I guess that plan works best for the rest of us.
The people that bitch about the "linux desktop" haven't normally ever tried Linux and want something that feels like their WinXP desktop. If you're looking for that, yes, there's nothing like it now and probably won't be for a while. If you want an useable Unix desktop, there's a lot of excellent ones arround.
The OS that supplants Windows will not need to be "Windows Like" It will need to be vastly superior to Windows, in the same way that DVD's were vastly superior to VHS.
Linux, sad to say, is not superior in the desktop category. To uninstall things in Linux (real distros, sorry Red Hat), you run "Apt-get update, apt-get remove Package_If_You_Can_Remember_The_Official_Name". To uninstall things in Windows, you go to the control pannel, select it from a list, and watch as the uninstall routine crashes. To uninstall things in OSX, you throw it out. To arrange your files and applications in OSX, you move folders around until you have an aesthetically pleasing organization. To arrange files and applications in Windows, you carefully plan out your structure ahead of time and install applications only to the areas you have designated for those types of utilities. To arrange files and applications in Linux: forget it. You'll just break everything.
Either way you look at it, 'tis not the year of desktop linux.
what Windows-only applications, if ported to Linux, would increase the likelihood that people would switch to Linux
It's not that Dreamweaver is necessary for making sites on linux. It would make it easier to transition between the two OS's for dreamweaver shops... which are most of 'em.
More of a concern, is if/when game developing companies become hooked on Ad revenue to support thier games, at what point will we see the decline of some gametypes?
I'm interested in seeing the rise of other game types. Think about the current gaming experience: long, drawn out, and laborous, or intense and short. What about creating periodic content that would draw people back into the game to watch ads a few times? Something intense, short, but continued every few days?
What if game developers kept adding content to their games so that you would keep coming back to watch the ads?
What if World of Warcraft allowed guilds to buy advertising space for their guild and gamey-related activities?
There is a lot of what iffs there, but there also seem to be a lot of possibilities.
You know, that's very hypocritical of him to write: plagiarism has long been the foundation of the writer's humble craft. (For example, that last sentence was stolen from somewhere.)
Why the frack should they change? To please you? You don't like how they access the net?
Allright Starbuck, here you go.
1. AOL's login takes too long. 2. AOL doesn't allow a lot of network traffic through. 3. AOL users get a lot more spam than everyone else. 4. AOL kicks for inactivity at random intervals. 5. AOL slimes your system with adverts and links to partners. 6. AOL requires you to use their mail system. 7. AOL's version of I.E. is terrible. 8. AOL is basically impossible to cancel. 9. AOL is slower than other dial-up connections. They used to lie about the connection speed, now it is just an issue of overhead. 10. AOL is now charging senders for incoming messages. 11. AOL sells its members list to spammers, even going so far as having a preferred spammer program. 12. AOL's software is buggy and has an annoying habit of crippling computers. 13. AOL charges more for dial-up than everyone else.
If you really think they should have DSL, just set them up with DSL and see if they like it. They're not going to change on their own even if they want to. It's up to you now.
I work in the industry, and plan on doing so for the rest of my life.
But I do still love games. It's not a job, it's a passion. It's also a tough dichotomy. The people most likely to hold strong opinions are the ones most likely to work in the industry. And the industry is small enough that chances are you will have worked with someone or will work with someone at some point.
For example, I own a DS, but don't own a PSP. I love the industry enough that I want the PSP to do well, so I will talk about its shortcomings and where I think it can improve. But I also work with Sony... daily. Well, frequently anyway. If I post here that I think that Nintendo's focus on new play experiences with the DS has paid off, and that the PSP needs to branch out to more experimental projects, could that upset relations with Sony? In legal theory no, because I haven't violated any NDA's. But everyone fears that the real answer is yes.
This guy grossly violated his NDA. He clearly talked about the size of teams, the number of dev kits in the US (which even most industry people don't know), durations, etc. But that doesn't change the perception is he was fired for saying that something sucks. And we all have strong opinions, and sometimes something does suck.
And he was expressing a phenomenon that people have been expecting and experiencing: diminishing returns. Each new generation of system is less and less deficient overall, and so the experiential delta between subsequent systems becomes smaller and smaller. That's just a fact of developing technologies, and I blogged about it in 2003. Now with the Xbox 360's launch lineup generally accepted as good but not particularly mind blowing, could that article come back to haunt me? Could that last sentence?
It is a fine line that a lot of people walk. Your job is your life, your passion. Nobody gets paid enough to put up with this shit if they didn't love it. But with that comes the fear that you can't critique anything or else you're out of the club.
In contrast, should Linux ever be used for DRMs, which have, as far as I know, not killed anyone, most people here would be up in arms, if the recent story on GPL and the DRM is to be taken as a guide.
Doesn't work. You can't embed DRM into software that you have full access to the interworkings of. It is a question of restricted information. Encryption works because the information necessary to encrypt is basically much, much smaller than the information required to decrypt (/simplification). DRM on a full-access system doesn't work that way.
There are legitimate uses for linux and other pieces of technology in the military. There are basically no legitimate uses for DRM in people's day-to-day lives. We need a military, though it would be nice if our leaders took the decision to put their lives on the line more seriously. We don't need legal and physical protections for rich music executives' livelyhoods.
What can we, as individuals, really do? We honestly live in what appears to be the most well managed, well thought out, and well prepared oppressive regime in history.
I used to believe this, but it really isn't true. An individual who has the strength to be a intelligent, tenatious pain in the ass can change things. And the intelligent part is optional.
For example, If you found the phone numbers to the board members of AT&T and complained every, single, day about the wiretapping, you would probably annoy them enough to avoid the next batch of wiretaps, if not just change their phone numbers. If you want companies to change the conditions in their workers plants, you smuggle video cameras in. If you want to get the US out of Iraq, you get photographs of the dead, you get video footage of people's lives destroyed, and you secretly "leak" it to newspapers and tabloids.
Legal tactics largely don't work. I don't mean the legal system, I mean waving flags from the "free speech zones" 5 miles from the actual political event. I'm really sad when I see protesters separating themselves out into the "I want to be arrested" pile and the "I don't want to be arrested" pile. If you don't want the G8 conference in your hometown, and you REALLY mean it, everyone go get your shovels and dig up the fucking roads.
That degree of breaking the law isn't usually what is called for... many an injustice has been brought to an end by a janitor who found a memo in someone's locked filing cabinet.
People can change things. So few realize it, though, that things stay good for a select few.
Unless a person finds themselves accepted into social circles filled with already-powerful individuals the desire to excel is a sentence of lifelong misery. Ridicule and ostricism comes from the average folk--the overwhelming majority--and denial, ridicule, harassment, and ostricism comes from the priveleged folk.
The secret to getting into any circle is tenacity. Want to be with the powerful and rich people? Pick groups and activities with them (sailing, skiing, particular bars, etc). Build up your contact lists, and get credibility through raw face time. Eventually you will form a close friendship with ONE of them, which you can work and leverage into being allowed into the club. After 5 years you will be known. After 10 years you will be an integral part of the society. After 20 years you will be a pillar that holds the society up.
Sadly, rich people are boring... Except for the crazy rich people, but they don't seem to congregate with the others.
And while I'm at it, turn on, tune in, and drop out. I've met people who live entirely on picking up things they found outside of grocery stores while they biked across the country. I've met people who make a very good living selling drugs to cops. I know someone who sells muffins from their kitchen to local stores, maybe even legally. There are people in New York that make a fine living dominating other people's apartments while they are locked outside. I deal with people daily who make their living through nothing more regimented than music.
The control of the system is illusory. It is only real when we believe that it is real. We only obey because we don't realize that more than 1/2 of all murders go unsolved, and most crimes are far, far lower.
Take control of your life and see what happens. Don't worry too much, short of getting a disease or losing your kids anything you fuck up now can be smoothed over in a few years.
have them indexed by day and hour for recall, pretty easily.
I have a friend who has photographic memory. She can take pictures of things with her mind, and look back at them later. If she wants, she can snap an entire textbook and read it later.
The problem is, though, that whenever she wants data she still has to read it. If she doesn't study for tests, then she has to flip through textbooks in her mind to try and find the data, which is a lot more tedious than you would think. If you had a recording of your life and wanted to know your boss's exact statement about your project 6 months ago, you will need to spend hours and hours and hours flipping through footage looking for it.
A 24-7 documentation of your life would take 24-7 to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
They can't do that by targeting a miniscule niche of buyers.
What are they doing now?
I doubt they could target a single miniscule niche of buyers. But if they targeted all of them, they could probably do well for themselves.
The red cross on a white background has come to symbolize basically any emergency medical support. Like the term "Asprin," it is in broad use enough that it doesn't represent a company or group, but (in this case) a service.
It's not like it was a particularly original symbol to begin with.
I think your experience sums it up perfectly: there is a market out there for high-end commodity hardware.
SGI could easily sell an amazing, high-end but commodity artist's station for 5k. SGI is a legendary brand, and could easily compete with Alienware for the multi-thousand dollar multi-graphics card gaming market. Or external "renderfarms in a box." Or one of a million other things that they could do with some technical wizardry on commodity hardware.
Specialty hardware and OS's are going away. It is just too much RnD money to sink into chipsets that will only go into a few thousand machines, let alone the software layers required to make working with that power easy.
Very true.
In WoW (and AC / AO / etc) you can kill wimpy strawlings far, far below your level for 100 XP, or you can pick on a giant demon of instadeath and after a long and epic fight walk away with 150. You can lure enemies out once at a time the easy way for 100 XP each, or you can take them on the manly way two at a time for... 100 XP each. It seems like MMPORPG's are the perfect place to reward players for trying insane things and surviving, but the winning strategy is the riskless plod.
I don't see how this is a union. PEER is a recruiting company, and all of their goals revolve around this. "advance professional external recruiting," "improve and manifest the livelihoods of the candidates seeking career growth opportunities," "develop and improve the necessary skills to achieve high performance in professional external recruiting."
Sure, it's a recruiting company with noble goals, and if I needed a recruiter that's who I would turn to. But it is a recruiting company, not a union.
Unlike traditional dataveilance like Echelon, ADVISE aims to find terrorists before they strike and even deduce their motivations in wanting to commit their crimes.
"Hmm... ADVISE seems to think the terrorists are fed up with the 'nazi-like spy regime,' and are planning to use undead monsters to attack its servers.
Also, the terrorists want more boobies."
This was a good use of a few billion dollars to Haliburton.
I love how there are a lot of solutions to the problem that the basic act in most MMPORPG's is boring. You grind away, killing baby spiders of tenderness or sickly sewer rats until hours and hours later you level, at which point you can go buy a bunch of new spells and some new abilities. Then you test them out in combat, and head back out to grind for another 6 hours to level one more time.
Combat always seems to be too straightforward. I've been playing world of warcraft dwdfor about 80 hours, and so far I've found one enemy that I couldn't kill with a default strategy. Sure, towards the endgame I could group up and do interesting things, but for now it is a grindfest. At least they don't make you sit down for a half hour like Everquest did: 60 seconds or so of wasted time is enough in WoW.
If your game can be easily scripted, you haven't made an interesting enough game. Every single MMPORPG out there suffers from this.
Free leveling would be a great way of drawing people back in to play if they haven't been on in a while, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that what you're asking the player to do should be fun.
They had been intending on including it with v 8.5, and prior to that 8.0. They've been working on it for a while now.
On the other hand, I'm guessing the average firefox developer has a bittorrent client already, and why download a plug-in for your browser when you can just download a separate app?
Except that they haven't.
As the article points out, in Japan you can get 30Mbps for 15 dollars a month. The US has some of the highest cost-to-bandwidth in the world.
Sorry, should have said "no non-torrent p2p." Torrents are reasonally well behaved if you set limits, but the more lawless P2P world can really suck down an upstream.
I have a hard time buying the whole "Stealing things they're broadcasting anyway" theory. Sure, the stations are not getting commercial revenue and that is a legitimate gripe, but that seems more of a problem of rating systems not keeping up with technology and broadcasters hesitant to embrace a new medium. Cable companies, who have enjoyed a highly profitable legal monopoly with zero competition and lowest customer satisfaction for years... They win a consolation prize of the world's tiniest violin.
The dude is a college student. He's got basically no income. He should be a letch off society for a few years as he is making himself valuable to everybody. Once his earnings are up, he should pay for everything properly. I say this personally as a content creator: if the kid's living off of beans and ketchup while he figures out how to make the world a better place, he can pay later.
Though yes, there is nothing worse in society than leeching torrents. Don't do it.
Oh no! I'm challenging global warming rhetoric with scientific studies! Damn!! There goes my Karma! *sniff* Goodbye sweet Karma
You weild "scientific studies" with all the deftness that a small fingerless child weilds a TV remote control.
The study is an interesting possibility. However, this is A: one study, not multiple, based upon B: data that only showed up after being "corrected for errors," and C: wouldn't have a climate changing effect unless it had been going on for a lot longer than we have records of. It is an interesting possibility deserving of study, but it's certainly not enough evidence to declare something fact.
A true test of a scientific theory is its ability to predict things. Global Warming was predicted based upon greenhouse gas theories and models long before we detected it. That's pretty heavy evidence that at least one cause of global warming is the amount of CO2 and other gasses that are released when we burn gasoline.
A classic Shenmue video.
What's the opposite of a simulator?
From Something Awful.
Psst. Button in the bottom right corner.
Plastic over the windows. You can buy the really good kind or just use big cheap sheets. Either way works. Check the windows first to see if they are double-pane, though.
Check around the edges of windows, especially in older buildings. Frequently, cracks will form around the edges where you can clearly feel cold leaking in. Get some silicone sealant from the local hardware, and close those holes.
Put cloth underneath and around any doors that have any space. Taking the doors off and stapling them is ideal, but in a pinch you can use glue or staple the strips to the front and back.
Compact Flourescent bulbs are a lot more energy efficient than regular ones, and last longer. And if you look around, there have been a few batches at dollar stores recently... can't beat more efficient, longer lasting, and cheaper.
Turn off your monitors when not in use. This will save as much as shutting off your computer, and is less of a pain in the arse.
Don't get a house phone. Get high speed 'net access, skype, and use cellphones. But keep the landlines away. While you're at it, halve your costs: go in for high-speed access with the people above or below you, and run your own cable. Just make a no-uploading rule or you'll find your pipe clogged in no time.
No cable: get utorrent and download shows.
Avoid even thinking about World of Warcraft.
Have a parking space you're not using? Sublet it.
No offence, but don't worry so much about the "legally" part. Everyone assumes you sublet despite what your lease says. Everyone assumes you will do things to change the apartment like paint it. People share network access all the time. It's just built in. If you screw things up, it gives them legal right to sue you, but otherwise it is just business as usual.
Don't buy any furnature. Wait until the students are moving out, if you can, to pick some up for free. Of course, you'll probably be moving out then too, so I guess that plan works best for the rest of us.
The people that bitch about the "linux desktop" haven't normally ever tried Linux and want something that feels like their WinXP desktop. If you're looking for that, yes, there's nothing like it now and probably won't be for a while. If you want an useable Unix desktop, there's a lot of excellent ones arround.
The OS that supplants Windows will not need to be "Windows Like" It will need to be vastly superior to Windows, in the same way that DVD's were vastly superior to VHS.
Linux, sad to say, is not superior in the desktop category. To uninstall things in Linux (real distros, sorry Red Hat), you run "Apt-get update, apt-get remove Package_If_You_Can_Remember_The_Official_Name". To uninstall things in Windows, you go to the control pannel, select it from a list, and watch as the uninstall routine crashes. To uninstall things in OSX, you throw it out. To arrange your files and applications in OSX, you move folders around until you have an aesthetically pleasing organization. To arrange files and applications in Windows, you carefully plan out your structure ahead of time and install applications only to the areas you have designated for those types of utilities. To arrange files and applications in Linux: forget it. You'll just break everything.
Either way you look at it, 'tis not the year of desktop linux.
what Windows-only applications, if ported to Linux, would increase the likelihood that people would switch to Linux
It's not that Dreamweaver is necessary for making sites on linux. It would make it easier to transition between the two OS's for dreamweaver shops... which are most of 'em.
And it runs Windows?
Why have I been wasting my life working? Excuse me for 10 minutes while I write a very small shell script...
More of a concern, is if/when game developing companies become hooked on Ad revenue to support thier games, at what point will we see the decline of some gametypes?
I'm interested in seeing the rise of other game types. Think about the current gaming experience: long, drawn out, and laborous, or intense and short. What about creating periodic content that would draw people back into the game to watch ads a few times? Something intense, short, but continued every few days?
What if game developers kept adding content to their games so that you would keep coming back to watch the ads?
What if World of Warcraft allowed guilds to buy advertising space for their guild and gamey-related activities?
There is a lot of what iffs there, but there also seem to be a lot of possibilities.
You know, that's very hypocritical of him to write: plagiarism has long been the foundation of the writer's humble craft. (For example, that last sentence was stolen from somewhere.)
Why the frack should they change? To please you? You don't like how they access the net?
Allright Starbuck, here you go.
1. AOL's login takes too long.
2. AOL doesn't allow a lot of network traffic through.
3. AOL users get a lot more spam than everyone else.
4. AOL kicks for inactivity at random intervals.
5. AOL slimes your system with adverts and links to partners.
6. AOL requires you to use their mail system.
7. AOL's version of I.E. is terrible.
8. AOL is basically impossible to cancel.
9. AOL is slower than other dial-up connections. They used to lie about the connection speed, now it is just an issue of overhead.
10. AOL is now charging senders for incoming messages.
11. AOL sells its members list to spammers, even going so far as having a preferred spammer program.
12. AOL's software is buggy and has an annoying habit of crippling computers.
13. AOL charges more for dial-up than everyone else.
If you really think they should have DSL, just set them up with DSL and see if they like it. They're not going to change on their own even if they want to. It's up to you now.
I work in the industry, and plan on doing so for the rest of my life.
But I do still love games. It's not a job, it's a passion. It's also a tough dichotomy. The people most likely to hold strong opinions are the ones most likely to work in the industry. And the industry is small enough that chances are you will have worked with someone or will work with someone at some point.
For example, I own a DS, but don't own a PSP. I love the industry enough that I want the PSP to do well, so I will talk about its shortcomings and where I think it can improve. But I also work with Sony... daily. Well, frequently anyway. If I post here that I think that Nintendo's focus on new play experiences with the DS has paid off, and that the PSP needs to branch out to more experimental projects, could that upset relations with Sony? In legal theory no, because I haven't violated any NDA's. But everyone fears that the real answer is yes.
This guy grossly violated his NDA. He clearly talked about the size of teams, the number of dev kits in the US (which even most industry people don't know), durations, etc. But that doesn't change the perception is he was fired for saying that something sucks. And we all have strong opinions, and sometimes something does suck.
And he was expressing a phenomenon that people have been expecting and experiencing: diminishing returns. Each new generation of system is less and less deficient overall, and so the experiential delta between subsequent systems becomes smaller and smaller. That's just a fact of developing technologies, and I blogged about it in 2003. Now with the Xbox 360's launch lineup generally accepted as good but not particularly mind blowing, could that article come back to haunt me? Could that last sentence?
It is a fine line that a lot of people walk. Your job is your life, your passion. Nobody gets paid enough to put up with this shit if they didn't love it. But with that comes the fear that you can't critique anything or else you're out of the club.
In contrast, should Linux ever be used for DRMs, which have, as far as I know, not killed anyone, most people here would be up in arms, if the recent story on GPL and the DRM is to be taken as a guide.
Doesn't work. You can't embed DRM into software that you have full access to the interworkings of. It is a question of restricted information. Encryption works because the information necessary to encrypt is basically much, much smaller than the information required to decrypt (/simplification). DRM on a full-access system doesn't work that way.
There are legitimate uses for linux and other pieces of technology in the military. There are basically no legitimate uses for DRM in people's day-to-day lives. We need a military, though it would be nice if our leaders took the decision to put their lives on the line more seriously. We don't need legal and physical protections for rich music executives' livelyhoods.
And we'll finally get to see Konqueror in action.
Too bad about Gimp, though.
What can we, as individuals, really do? We honestly live in what appears to be the most well managed, well thought out, and well prepared oppressive regime in history.
I used to believe this, but it really isn't true. An individual who has the strength to be a intelligent, tenatious pain in the ass can change things. And the intelligent part is optional.
For example, If you found the phone numbers to the board members of AT&T and complained every, single, day about the wiretapping, you would probably annoy them enough to avoid the next batch of wiretaps, if not just change their phone numbers. If you want companies to change the conditions in their workers plants, you smuggle video cameras in. If you want to get the US out of Iraq, you get photographs of the dead, you get video footage of people's lives destroyed, and you secretly "leak" it to newspapers and tabloids.
Legal tactics largely don't work. I don't mean the legal system, I mean waving flags from the "free speech zones" 5 miles from the actual political event. I'm really sad when I see protesters separating themselves out into the "I want to be arrested" pile and the "I don't want to be arrested" pile. If you don't want the G8 conference in your hometown, and you REALLY mean it, everyone go get your shovels and dig up the fucking roads.
That degree of breaking the law isn't usually what is called for... many an injustice has been brought to an end by a janitor who found a memo in someone's locked filing cabinet.
People can change things. So few realize it, though, that things stay good for a select few.
Unless a person finds themselves accepted into social circles filled with already-powerful individuals the desire to excel is a sentence of lifelong misery. Ridicule and ostricism comes from the average folk--the overwhelming majority--and denial, ridicule, harassment, and ostricism comes from the priveleged folk.
The secret to getting into any circle is tenacity. Want to be with the powerful and rich people? Pick groups and activities with them (sailing, skiing, particular bars, etc). Build up your contact lists, and get credibility through raw face time. Eventually you will form a close friendship with ONE of them, which you can work and leverage into being allowed into the club. After 5 years you will be known. After 10 years you will be an integral part of the society. After 20 years you will be a pillar that holds the society up.
Sadly, rich people are boring... Except for the crazy rich people, but they don't seem to congregate with the others.
And while I'm at it, turn on, tune in, and drop out. I've met people who live entirely on picking up things they found outside of grocery stores while they biked across the country. I've met people who make a very good living selling drugs to cops. I know someone who sells muffins from their kitchen to local stores, maybe even legally. There are people in New York that make a fine living dominating other people's apartments while they are locked outside. I deal with people daily who make their living through nothing more regimented than music.
The control of the system is illusory. It is only real when we believe that it is real. We only obey because we don't realize that more than 1/2 of all murders go unsolved, and most crimes are far, far lower.
Take control of your life and see what happens. Don't worry too much, short of getting a disease or losing your kids anything you fuck up now can be smoothed over in a few years.
have them indexed by day and hour for recall, pretty easily.
I have a friend who has photographic memory. She can take pictures of things with her mind, and look back at them later. If she wants, she can snap an entire textbook and read it later.
The problem is, though, that whenever she wants data she still has to read it. If she doesn't study for tests, then she has to flip through textbooks in her mind to try and find the data, which is a lot more tedious than you would think. If you had a recording of your life and wanted to know your boss's exact statement about your project 6 months ago, you will need to spend hours and hours and hours flipping through footage looking for it.
A 24-7 documentation of your life would take 24-7 to watch.