Wow, that's actually a good idea... Have some sort of secure P2P network, like the pay version of Kazaa, with MP3's approved to be on the system. If you don't want to pay for music, you have to serve out to 5 other MP3s you have for each one you download. The MP3's cost 10 cents to download each, the cost of which is split 9c to musicians / producers / creators and 1c to the Kazaa hydra. As wired (I believe) estimated the bandwidth cost of an MP3 download to be 3c, and bands (who ultimately pay the production cost of the albums anyway) are lucky to see 50c per album, this would make more money all around. Even the freeloaders downloading MP3's would make up for it by providing a valuable service to the industry, and making them money. This would encourage people who wanted free music to spend more money, get more and more variety of music, and serve more to the community, at which point the cost drops significantly: in short, encouraging more than 10% of the population to share, and more than 1% of the population to supernode. Everyone gets paid, a real, honest distribution system exists... if we can convince enough artists to join in the system, and can overcome a few technical hurdles (along with aggregate billing), we'll be happy, productive, musical, and profitable to the tune of 7c per download. You could even return to the highly efficient Napster network model, as you wouldn't be at risk of being litigated out of existence.
...Nah. Let's go feed the dinosaurs. "Here Here are your teeth, Mr. Bertelsmann. Oh look, you are chewing so well today!"
I think this brings up an interesting point. And while this overall discussion is already dead and the only one likely to read this is SPH, good points are worth posting for their own sake.
How much of an artists hard work in the preceeding months should be viewed as in an attempt to recoup money on CD sales, and how much can be considered practice for live gigs? If a band generated that music through the natural course of their being a band, then decided to make a CD to sell. One could argue that 800 dollars for 4 days of work is actually quite good, though the one who argued that probably wouldn't be stuffing the envelopes.
Still, I find it ironic that you talk about small bands who can't afford to tour clubs. Most of the small bands that I know of can't afford to not tour clubs, and I would assume the same would be true for overseas bands as well. Playing downstairs at the Lizard Lounge could net you %10 of the doorcharge, but if that small club brings in 50 people, you're probably getting 50 bucks that night, plus a CD sale. That's more than you would be making at Starbucks.
Most of all artists have dayjobs... writers, actors, musicians, painters. Anything that can be considered a medium through whose expression a basic human need is satisfied will have more suppliers than a free market would otherwise demand. This does suck: I'm a firm believer that we need to maximize the number of people who do what they love for a living. However, there are several arguments against the subjective $15 price point for independent artists. The artist didn't have a magical selling power of 1,000 copies, they had priced their cd based upon an industry's demand / sales / risk curve which was set, in part, in order curttail risk-taking by the CD purchasing public. If he had set his price at $5, he would have sold more albums. Would he have sold enough to recoup the difference? I tend to think so. CD's by independents tend to sell out at concerts when priced at the near-impulse $5, but hardly ever move when pricematched to 20.
Would an artist, who already has to have a dayjob teaching music and playing clubs in order to barely scrape by, make enough on $5 or $15 CD's to give up those other pursuits? Not likely in either situation, but considering the near-zero cost of reproduction and the necessity for exposure for future sales, I would put my money on the $5 CD's any day. The true sweetspot of the demand curve is probably somewhere around $8, but it is nowhere near 15.
You should not spend $200,000 to record your album, unless your previous album sold at least 200,000 copies. The sonic equivalent of the top-of-the-line 1970's recording studio is available to anyone today willing to plunk down four digits or less per album. This might not be acceptable for an album without artistic merit, or when trying to sell a demo tape to a scout without artistic merit (the scout, not the tape), but if your sound is good live you will make a killing on sales at concerts or clubs. Nobody ever complains that Aretha Franklyn was hampered by crappy acoustics.
I will do that if you can find me a com port that puts out 100V DC. Now, I've never taken apart a Cray, but I think that is unlikely.
I have done the latter with 115v AC... Three times. Stupid cheap weedwhackers. I was never actively pushed away as you describe, I only managed to force my fingers open after several seconds of trying.
We also haven't mentioned Amperage yet, or actual wattage, but as in the normal course of computer operations the DC supplies are powered off of AC imputs, the AC supply would still have significantly higher wattage backing it.
I suppose if our homicidally negligent designers gave the system a DC-based UPS *and* gave the computer regulation over the line *and* didn't include any fuses anywhere between the UPS and the motherboard and the motherboard and the com port and the com port and the pieces on the chessboard *and* made the power regulation channel extremely beefy and insulated enough to withold a few tenths of a second of a current of sufficient magnitude to be channeled to a table and to a human being and yet find insufficient release opportunities between components on the motherboard, the controller board, the port itself, the cabling, or the table it was played on *and* didn't think to tell the guy to wear gloves then yes, it is possible that a computer could really shock someone playing chess.
It is still impossible with current technology that it would "intend" to do that.
Ah, but the editors of Slashdot have access to the peoples' preference files. If good Senor Taco writes a script to poll them (probably easy to do), he could easily see during the next round of layoffs who gets that talk. I can hardly see a more direct way to say what you want less of. "90% of the preferences files filtering out Ask Slashdot? Well, I guess they should go!"
-c
Another for those keeping score at home posts
on
Superbowl XXXVII
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· Score: 1
The above is quoting a particularly laughable piece of American 1940's WWW2 propaganda.
Computers and their programmers have been studying how human beings play chess for a significant percentage of the past century. For that matter, how many centuries have chess officionados studied the behaviors of human chess players? How long has the games played by computer chess machines been studied by the grand masters for weaknesses / strengths?
Somehow I doubt we have seen the best of the machines come out yet... nor do I think that given enough time a weakness could not be found in the optimal placement search tree algorithm for a computer that can only reach a limited distance in the tree. According to my trusty calculator there can be no more than 25,822,498,780,869,085,896,559,191,720,030,118,743,297,057,928,292,235,128,306,593,565,406,476,220,1 68,411,946,296,453,532,801,378,314,359,031,719,727,474,933,760,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000 possible games, assuming 40 available moves per round over a 200 move game (the highest number of moves with a win is 192). Assuming my calculator's rounding and the error introduced through transcription isn't too aggregious, and each move is stored as a space - maximizing 6 bits + 1/2 float (which of 40 moves this represents, and a rough desirability float per computer move), you would still need a raid array of 1,775,296,791,184,746,553,884,443,075,207,066,360, 167,273,257,009,116,507,107,830,761,269,524,013,65 7,832,130,788,118,038,009,475,911,218,343,073,126, 390,169,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000 120GB Seagate Barracudas to hold it all. Right now I doubt IBM has a working prototype of a raid array that can hold a measly trillion EIDE hard disks, let alone enough for the above application. That's a lot of room to wiggle. Even assuming that each move taken reduces the number of available following moves by one until a victory, that's still 18,698,058,574,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 hard drives. And that's with a grossly simplified, removed data structure that doesn't take into account the kind of size required for a pointer to data on a physical structure that generates 32,721,602,505.3 times the total power output of the sun as heat during standby. That's not even including the heat that the P5 would generate!
In short, I would give it another 20 years at least before we can declare a true winner in the battle between computer chess and grandmasters. And that, of course, entirely discounts the possibility of an IBM / MIT / Kaiser sponsored cyborg human player, at which point the whole debate will restart itself again and some equally outrageous headline will appear on Slashdot declaring the "last competition" between man and machine, a debate that dates back to when a monkey and a monkey with a stick sat around an ant hole and tried to find out who would starve to death first.
Not to be a spoilsport, but this is utterly impossible. For a computer to intentionally do harm to a human being through a chessboard, the computer would have to either be programmed with the knowledge that human beings are subvertable by electrocution via the output line (and therefore via the chessboard), or have inferred it from a deeper understanding of physiology. The chess program would have to be extensively meta programmed with thinking routines and structured information about the outside world, as "win at all costs" is a statement of intent, and we have not quite moved beyond where stated intent can only be a simplification of the programmer's desires when structuring routines. This, as I have said, is changing, but is very doubtful that any machine from 1993 can said to harbor a real "intent," and the self-coding capabilities to carry out that intent. The chessboard would also have to be wired in such a way as to have access to a dangerous degree of alternating current. As basically all computers and computer ports run on DC, and DC is harmless, they would have to wire a board directly to an AC power supply, and both moniter and control the flow of power by DC regulators connected the CPU. The person at the table would have to complete a circuit between some electrified part of the board and another or be sufficiently grounded while sitting at the chair, or power transmission would fail. The chess pieces would have to be entirely metal to facilitate this transmission.
For that matter, they would have to connect the computer to a physical chessboard instead of just displaying one on the screen, or (more likely) having an IO person type in the human moves and moving the computer's pieces on the board. Commercial machines that can move / react to moves with a chessboard as IO, and with questionable AI, have been available since the mid-eighties. However, they are quite limited, hardly available, and physically incapable of electrocuting someone.
Stranger things have not happened. Things that had been previously believed to be impossible through some misreading of logic have eventually come true, given time... Machines have advanced to the point where they now can play chess, a once "impossible" feat, but it was truly impossible that Wolfgang von Kempelen's Turk could play a meaningful game of chess in the 18th century. Anything is possible given enough time, but what you describe is impossible without both technology greatly in advance of what we have available today and an almost homicidal recklessness spanning far beyond accidental negligence on the part of the designers.
It has been known for a long time that the best, most profitable music and movies are made by people on drugs. And while most artists bear the financial burden of drugs through direct charges, insurance increases, legal fees, and shortened careers, the largest reward is reaped by RIAA executives who enjoy the fruits of artists labors without the associated early Cocane burnout. This is not a fair arrangement.
Therefore, it is proposed that middle-level management and above in all music-related fields be taxed at 4% of income, for the express purpose of using said money to fund such worthy prehab programs as Raves, House Parties, Bashes, Shindigs, Galas, Grateful Dead tribute concerts, and the city of Berkeley, California. In such a fashion, artists and music would be supported by those who have so far stolen their work without returning their fair share.
This levy would, of course, be void for any executive that could prove solidarity with the plight of the musicians through nosebleeds, swollen arteries, ADHD, or the propensity to use the word "Dude" as if it were insightful.
Did you know that in many countries taxes are levied on CD writers and CDR discs because of piracy?
The MPAA and BSA should be very upset that this money is going to the RIAA: Many of these CD's are going to copying Divx files and software programs (not to mention games) that are worth significantly more per CD than the latest 311 release.
You know, Theft is exactly what we should be doing. We all need to go down to the RIAA headquarters in Washington DC and Steal something. Dismantle it one piece at a time. They have stolen our money, stolen our heritage, and stolen our freedom. We paid for their servers, their files, their Lawyers' Bentleys... Can you imagine a crowd of 10,000 people walking down the street with coffee makers, filing cabinets, desks, chairs, executive zen gardens, lamps, and palm pilots?
We would have to strike many of their offices simultaneously to have the desired effect, but it could be done. We have the popular support.
I appologize if this post seems a little out of place: it is a response to a thread elsewhere on this page that I can't seem to find again.
The public does not care about 120 year copyrights because they have lived their entire lives in a prison where they have been shielded from what is possible. Presented with the counteroffer of 20 year copyrights, the public might get more excited. Let's be real, after 20 years a movie / book / song has either recouped a significant reward for the copyright holder, or has been taken out of circulation. The Beatles, Bee Gees, et al have made huge sums of money on their works, and have been justifiably rewarded hansomly, which they have invested. But for every Sonny Bono there are ten thousand smaller artists whose legacy would be better secued if *anyone* taking a fancy to their work could promote, remix, re-release, or otherwise enjoy their work. If someone were so inclined, they could release a complete collection of Soul Train episodes 1975-1980 on DVD, or a sociologically significant 1950's retrospective with every failed NBC pilot for a children's program. We could release Data CD's with true snapshots of life in the 40's, 50's, 60's, and 70's, rather than just what a corporate filter will allow.
We live in a country where 1960's vietnam protest songs can't be sung in public without a royalty check going to a corporation. There is something wrong with that. We need to organize and fight for a return to a 20 year copyright. Perhaps then will our culture be secure for our children. Perhaps then will our artistic legacy be secure.
-C
This sig is a mnemonic device to allow you to recognize this poster in the future. It is only a device.
There are actually two distinct points in this pseudo ask (philosophise) slashdot: the classic question of why many games aren't currently appealing to women, and why aren't women being hired for testing work in the US and UK gaming industry. Since so much attention has been focused on the former, I will address the latter.
1. Sports Games. The best selling types of games in america are Sports games, which we develop more of than anywhere else in the world. I would go so far as to theorize that the majority of console - based development in the US is somehow or other related to sports gaming. Whether or not the torrent of football games appeals to the woman gamer is a topic that I have said I would not get into. However, the fact that many testing jobs in the US are directly related to sports cannot make the prospect more appealing to women.
2. A lack of game-related networking. Partly due to the popularity of gaming among men and partly due to the vulnerability men traditionally feel discussing intimate personal details, video games can be a very common bonding thread between men. Many of the testers I know were hired through other testers, which is also true of the one female tester at my place of employment.
3. Game Testing isn't a career option presented to women. You only hear about testing positions through the gaming magazine industry: an industry which isn't known for its liberated prose. Male high school students discuss the posibility of taking this on as a job in a way that just isn't present in the female equvalent.
4. Diversified interests. Put less cryptically (and potentially more dangerously), women are encouraged to get out of the house, look into other things, and are generally subject to more percieved or real structuring of their time. "Boys will be boys," however, and many parents allow their male children to fill every available open second staring at that tube in a way that they wouldn't put up with in their daughters. Gamer boys have allowed gaming to become the exclusive avenue in their lives in a way that protective parents would never allow in women. Of course, it is a short hop from something you do all day to something you do all day and get paid. Certainly, it must be daunting to consider getting a job in an industry not only where you are very much an outsider, but where your competition spends any "free" time they may have obsessively studying the subject.
There are many other reasons I'm sure one could site. The perception of the lonely tester, the horrible hours, the lack of societal benefit... But it is 5:40 AM and I just came back from my testing job - my brain is fizzing. I think it is time to go to sleep......after one last round of Tony Hawk.
It's amazing how uncreative political protests have become in this country. Enter street, sit down, chain arms, repeat. Stay at home, mail letters, complain, repeat. Ever notice that neither of these involves going to statehouses and talking to or yelling at legislatures? They do let you into those things, and for free no less. Sure, you get arrested for disturbing the peace, but that's a lot more satisfying thing to have on your arrest record than parading without a permit.
The place where people should be focusing their efforts is at the mechanics of government, not venting at society. And yes, we need a clearer separation between protesters and revolutionaries so that thousands of homeowners and parents can have their voices safely heard without the risk of arrest, and thousands of fearless college students can have something truly positive to do that will land them in jail, rather than just throwing a concert.
-What else can you do? Write for papers! They really don't have any money to spend on content these days, and love to print long, interesting editorial pieces. With smaller, more specific papers you are almost guarenteed to be printed. That way, you will be read by far more people than by commenting on slashdot, and your piece will be cited by lazy high-school students for years to come.
-Give speeches. Most city council meetings have open-floor sections, and your council member is far more likely to have an ear of someone who has an ear of the president than you do.
-Get arrested for something memorable and dramatic, like being beaten by cops or hijacking the satellite TV video (but not audio) signal during the state-of-the-union address to display images of victims of american emperialist policies.
-Talk about these things with people you don't know, constantly. Talk to the people behind the counter at your supermarket, the people on the street, and generally being an information source for anyone and everyone who is willing to give you the benifit of 30 seconds. Discuss, don't give speeches.
-Send annonymous bomb tips. Shuts down just about anything, and fast. Just remember that you can and probably will be tracked down unless you cover your tracks meticulously.
-Cut out the middleman and get state referrandums passed. You need several thousand signatures to get something on the ballot, but just think of the voice that gives your cause. Did medical marajuana have a chance of being taken seriously before getting on the ballot in California? Not really, but now...
-Hang signs from freeways and billboards. (you can guess what state I'm in). No, it's not legal, and they will eventually be taken down. But they will be seen by literally thousands of people per hour on their way to work. And really, whose voice deserves the audience, one of frank political discussion or one urging the purchase of a AT&T wireless services?
Join Calperg, Massperg, the Christian Coalition, or any other organization that you believe is aligned with your political goals, and donate one night a week to bettering mankind. Campaign finance reform really needs people.
-Be creative! Why did these people join hands to shut down Washington when many of them could have parked their busses? 500 dollars isn't unheard of for a car that has just enough life left in it to drive to downtown. That wouldn't be as effective as, say, a leafletting campaign, but it would at least be more than throwing a concert in a park.
-Finally, stay goal focused. If you want to stop one nasty timber company from logging, you can chain yourself to their equipment and park a bulldozer in front of their gate. If you want to stop the spread of the timber industry in the northwest, you need to help draft and push through legislation in the logging towns that limits the company's powers to exert emminent capitalism. If you want to stop Wells Fargo Bank from exploiting the gullibility of elderly patrons you can either smash their windows down, or start up an education campaign that targets the aged, along with legislation that prohibits such arrangements.
If the protesters wanted to be truly effective at getting the message about IRAQ out, they would have hung a screen over downtown DC and played Apocolypse Now all day.
Just as a side note, I'm replying to this person not because their comment was wrong or incomplete, but because it was inspirational and needed an amen.
Your heart is in the right place, but there is something fundamental that you are missing. A GUI can only be as clean and understandable as the information it is trying to convey. Putting a pretty GUI on linux just serves to point out how totally non-intuitive most of Linux is for the home user.
I think it is time for a radical fork. Desktop Linux.
Desktop Linux would put everything you would normally find on the first level of your hard drive into a "system" folder in a "linux" folder. That linux folder would also hold the configuration and kernel utilities that are normally hidden from anything but a command prompt call. It would assume root status for specific actions of the local user if prompted by dialog box, and would auto-mount any drive it was given. There would be no remote administration utilities. A more crash-resistant low level format for the hard drive would have to be chosen, as would many, many little utilities. Nothing would require the command line. And of course, (the impossible) binary compatibility with existing Linux apps would have to be preserved.
No, I don't think it is possible either, and I rather think the better idea is to help invest in OpenBE or another desktop-oriented Open Source project.
Linux, not surprisingly, still isn't a desktop-oriented OS project.
I know IMAX theartres are struggling for survival, though apparently less so these past few years, and releasing 35 mm versions of movies on 70mm film could bring in additional revenue... at the cost of what makes the theartre interesting. This would be just, in essence, a large 35mm theartre with no additional film quality. Perhaps Episode 3 could be shot with a camera holding enough pixels to make it worthwile, but quite honestly Lucas's "digital" theartre experience looked more like a moving series of crisply colored legos than a film.
Equally doubtful would be studios (and filmmakers) shooting in IMAX and paring down to 35mm (which would be the proper process), as IMAX cameras aren't exactly standard in the studio backlots. Especially now that everyone is transitioning to a first-gen digital which reduces rather than increases studio costs.
Sadly, IMAX theartres would probably be well advised to switch to good 'old 35 mm permanently... Many of the jitters and color problems have been solved over the years, and for every wonderful IMAX documentary there are five incredible 35mm films that never see nationwide release.
Lots of reasons. For one, Subways, busses, trains, airplanes, sidewalks, and doctors offices.
Two, it's always better to have a paperback copy of documentation when fixing a computer. Even if you have another computer around (and you should), paperbacks still leave smaller holes in the wall.
Three, when you are done with it you can loan it to a colleague. I've worked with enough clueless people to know that a little education can go a long way in smoothing a long term working relationship.
Likewise, many of the supposed advantages proported of HTML are not so, namely timeliness and loanability. For some reason it seems to take as much cost to keep a site up to date after two years (or so) as it did to create the thing in the first place. Why would the publisher plunk down the coin to keep the site current? If they are going to recieve payment for updated versions of the html book, how is that any different from buying a dead-tree edition? And how, exactly, can you loan out a html book with the publisher's blessing? I understand that in HTML you can just page through and download the bloody thing, but... That seems like a lot more trouble than figuring out who you loaned your book to.
And furthermore, if you are at a computer you can look up concepts you don't understand without any trouble. The portability of white pulp doesn't preclude reading it at a computer. And when Mozilla / IE / Netscape / AOL / ICab / Opera / Lynx / Konqueror crashes your system, your paperback will still be running fine and you will still know what you were looking up. (Opera, BTW, automatically saves the windows you have open, allowing you to painlessly resume after crashes).
I don't think, in the current state, that searching and easy dissemination outweigh portability, ease-of-reading, and loanability in this circumstance.
Dead tree technology has been around for three thousand years. Three thousand years of R and D is a lot of engineering. Let's not be so quick to abandon that power, eigh?
At most any toy store you can buy a simple water rocket for about ten bucks. It will have a complex guidence control system commonly refered to as "fins."
You will note these "fins" work on a simple, clearly understood principle commonly referred to as "gyroscopic forces". You see, the larger of the two sets of fins are angled opposite to eachother, causing the rocket to spin at great speeds and preventing it from tumbling end-over-end. Many model rockets operate on this same principle.
Arrows work because the shaft is considerably longer than the girth, causing any off balance rotation to be prevented by the DRAG of the feathers, not their shaping of the airflow.
I still think this guy has some guts, but not quite as much as his life insurance company.
If I remember my calculus correctly (and this is nitpicking, btw), if an input variable is approaching another number, and it can be proven to get as close to the number as you could ask for, and that the function is continuous (contiguous?) at that point, then for all mathematical purposes a number infinitely close to another number behaves exactly like that other number, and QED is equal.
With an indefinite period of time, one can get as close to an infinite period of time as another person could ask for. Likewise, the outcome of the process will be the same. Therefore the slope of the function is the same, and QED the OJ defence has worked yet again.
"Pirates seek to profit off the enormous popularity of DVDs by using the latest in technology to illegally manufacture DVD copies of Hollywood films, and again dupe consumers into purchasing a wholly inferior product," MPAA Chief Executive Jack Valenti said in a statement.
Valenti then considered for a moment. "That's our job."
Slashdot Mirror
...Nah. Let's go feed the dinosaurs. "Here Here are your teeth, Mr. Bertelsmann. Oh look, you are chewing so well today!"
- C
I think this brings up an interesting point. And while this overall discussion is already dead and the only one likely to read this is SPH, good points are worth posting for their own sake.
How much of an artists hard work in the preceeding months should be viewed as in an attempt to recoup money on CD sales, and how much can be considered practice for live gigs? If a band generated that music through the natural course of their being a band, then decided to make a CD to sell. One could argue that 800 dollars for 4 days of work is actually quite good, though the one who argued that probably wouldn't be stuffing the envelopes.
Still, I find it ironic that you talk about small bands who can't afford to tour clubs. Most of the small bands that I know of can't afford to not tour clubs, and I would assume the same would be true for overseas bands as well. Playing downstairs at the Lizard Lounge could net you %10 of the doorcharge, but if that small club brings in 50 people, you're probably getting 50 bucks that night, plus a CD sale. That's more than you would be making at Starbucks.
Most of all artists have dayjobs... writers, actors, musicians, painters. Anything that can be considered a medium through whose expression a basic human need is satisfied will have more suppliers than a free market would otherwise demand. This does suck: I'm a firm believer that we need to maximize the number of people who do what they love for a living. However, there are several arguments against the subjective $15 price point for independent artists. The artist didn't have a magical selling power of 1,000 copies, they had priced their cd based upon an industry's demand / sales / risk curve which was set, in part, in order curttail risk-taking by the CD purchasing public. If he had set his price at $5, he would have sold more albums. Would he have sold enough to recoup the difference? I tend to think so. CD's by independents tend to sell out at concerts when priced at the near-impulse $5, but hardly ever move when pricematched to 20.
Would an artist, who already has to have a dayjob teaching music and playing clubs in order to barely scrape by, make enough on $5 or $15 CD's to give up those other pursuits? Not likely in either situation, but considering the near-zero cost of reproduction and the necessity for exposure for future sales, I would put my money on the $5 CD's any day. The true sweetspot of the demand curve is probably somewhere around $8, but it is nowhere near 15.
You should not spend $200,000 to record your album, unless your previous album sold at least 200,000 copies. The sonic equivalent of the top-of-the-line 1970's recording studio is available to anyone today willing to plunk down four digits or less per album. This might not be acceptable for an album without artistic merit, or when trying to sell a demo tape to a scout without artistic merit (the scout, not the tape), but if your sound is good live you will make a killing on sales at concerts or clubs. Nobody ever complains that Aretha Franklyn was hampered by crappy acoustics.
I will do that if you can find me a com port that puts out 100V DC. Now, I've never taken apart a Cray, but I think that is unlikely.
I have done the latter with 115v AC... Three times. Stupid cheap weedwhackers. I was never actively pushed away as you describe, I only managed to force my fingers open after several seconds of trying.
We also haven't mentioned Amperage yet, or actual wattage, but as in the normal course of computer operations the DC supplies are powered off of AC imputs, the AC supply would still have significantly higher wattage backing it.
I suppose if our homicidally negligent designers gave the system a DC-based UPS *and* gave the computer regulation over the line *and* didn't include any fuses anywhere between the UPS and the motherboard and the motherboard and the com port and the com port and the pieces on the chessboard *and* made the power regulation channel extremely beefy and insulated enough to withold a few tenths of a second of a current of sufficient magnitude to be channeled to a table and to a human being and yet find insufficient release opportunities between components on the motherboard, the controller board, the port itself, the cabling, or the table it was played on *and* didn't think to tell the guy to wear gloves then yes, it is possible that a computer could really shock someone playing chess.
It is still impossible with current technology that it would "intend" to do that.
Ah, but the editors of Slashdot have access to the peoples' preference files. If good Senor Taco writes a script to poll them (probably easy to do), he could easily see during the next round of layoffs who gets that talk. I can hardly see a more direct way to say what you want less of. "90% of the preferences files filtering out Ask Slashdot? Well, I guess they should go!"
-c
The above is quoting a particularly laughable piece of American 1940's WWW2 propaganda.
Computers and their programmers have been studying how human beings play chess for a significant percentage of the past century. For that matter, how many centuries have chess officionados studied the behaviors of human chess players? How long has the games played by computer chess machines been studied by the grand masters for weaknesses / strengths?
3 ,297,057,928,292,235,128,306,593,565,406,476,220,1 68,411,946,296,453,532,801,378,314,359,031,719,727 ,474,933,760,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000 possible games, assuming 40 available moves per round over a 200 move game (the highest number of moves with a win is 192). Assuming my calculator's rounding and the error introduced through transcription isn't too aggregious, and each move is stored as a space - maximizing 6 bits + 1/2 float (which of 40 moves this represents, and a rough desirability float per computer move), you would still need a raid array of 1,775,296,791,184,746,553,884,443,075,207,066,360, 167,273,257,009,116,507,107,830,761,269,524,013,65 7,832,130,788,118,038,009,475,911,218,343,073,126, 390,169,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000 120GB Seagate Barracudas to hold it all. Right now I doubt IBM has a working prototype of a raid array that can hold a measly trillion EIDE hard disks, let alone enough for the above application. That's a lot of room to wiggle. Even assuming that each move taken reduces the number of available following moves by one until a victory, that's still 18,698,058,574,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 hard drives. And that's with a grossly simplified, removed data structure that doesn't take into account the kind of size required for a pointer to data on a physical structure that generates 32,721,602,505.3 times the total power output of the sun as heat during standby. That's not even including the heat that the P5 would generate!
Somehow I doubt we have seen the best of the machines come out yet... nor do I think that given enough time a weakness could not be found in the optimal placement search tree algorithm for a computer that can only reach a limited distance in the tree. According to my trusty calculator there can be no more than 25,822,498,780,869,085,896,559,191,720,030,118,74
In short, I would give it another 20 years at least before we can declare a true winner in the battle between computer chess and grandmasters. And that, of course, entirely discounts the possibility of an IBM / MIT / Kaiser sponsored cyborg human player, at which point the whole debate will restart itself again and some equally outrageous headline will appear on Slashdot declaring the "last competition" between man and machine, a debate that dates back to when a monkey and a monkey with a stick sat around an ant hole and tried to find out who would starve to death first.
Not to be a spoilsport, but this is utterly impossible. For a computer to intentionally do harm to a human being through a chessboard, the computer would have to either be programmed with the knowledge that human beings are subvertable by electrocution via the output line (and therefore via the chessboard), or have inferred it from a deeper understanding of physiology. The chess program would have to be extensively meta programmed with thinking routines and structured information about the outside world, as "win at all costs" is a statement of intent, and we have not quite moved beyond where stated intent can only be a simplification of the programmer's desires when structuring routines. This, as I have said, is changing, but is very doubtful that any machine from 1993 can said to harbor a real "intent," and the self-coding capabilities to carry out that intent. The chessboard would also have to be wired in such a way as to have access to a dangerous degree of alternating current. As basically all computers and computer ports run on DC, and DC is harmless, they would have to wire a board directly to an AC power supply, and both moniter and control the flow of power by DC regulators connected the CPU. The person at the table would have to complete a circuit between some electrified part of the board and another or be sufficiently grounded while sitting at the chair, or power transmission would fail. The chess pieces would have to be entirely metal to facilitate this transmission.
For that matter, they would have to connect the computer to a physical chessboard instead of just displaying one on the screen, or (more likely) having an IO person type in the human moves and moving the computer's pieces on the board. Commercial machines that can move / react to moves with a chessboard as IO, and with questionable AI, have been available since the mid-eighties. However, they are quite limited, hardly available, and physically incapable of electrocuting someone.
Stranger things have not happened. Things that had been previously believed to be impossible through some misreading of logic have eventually come true, given time... Machines have advanced to the point where they now can play chess, a once "impossible" feat, but it was truly impossible that Wolfgang von Kempelen's Turk could play a meaningful game of chess in the 18th century. Anything is possible given enough time, but what you describe is impossible without both technology greatly in advance of what we have available today and an almost homicidal recklessness spanning far beyond accidental negligence on the part of the designers.
As you describe it, this is truly impossible.
-C
I thought it was Clear Channel.
...What's been happening to Slashdot's servers for the past 3 hours? Did Kuro5hin take them down?
It has been known for a long time that the best, most profitable music and movies are made by people on drugs. And while most artists bear the financial burden of drugs through direct charges, insurance increases, legal fees, and shortened careers, the largest reward is reaped by RIAA executives who enjoy the fruits of artists labors without the associated early Cocane burnout. This is not a fair arrangement.
Therefore, it is proposed that middle-level management and above in all music-related fields be taxed at 4% of income, for the express purpose of using said money to fund such worthy prehab programs as Raves, House Parties, Bashes, Shindigs, Galas, Grateful Dead tribute concerts, and the city of Berkeley, California. In such a fashion, artists and music would be supported by those who have so far stolen their work without returning their fair share.
This levy would, of course, be void for any executive that could prove solidarity with the plight of the musicians through nosebleeds, swollen arteries, ADHD, or the propensity to use the word "Dude" as if it were insightful.
Did you know that in many countries taxes are levied on CD writers and CDR discs because of piracy?
The MPAA and BSA should be very upset that this money is going to the RIAA: Many of these CD's are going to copying Divx files and software programs (not to mention games) that are worth significantly more per CD than the latest 311 release.
You know, Theft is exactly what we should be doing. We all need to go down to the RIAA headquarters in Washington DC and Steal something. Dismantle it one piece at a time. They have stolen our money, stolen our heritage, and stolen our freedom. We paid for their servers, their files, their Lawyers' Bentleys... Can you imagine a crowd of 10,000 people walking down the street with coffee makers, filing cabinets, desks, chairs, executive zen gardens, lamps, and palm pilots?
We would have to strike many of their offices simultaneously to have the desired effect, but it could be done. We have the popular support.
Dibs on an Aeron!
...to FPCI.org
(The F standing, of course, for Free and unaF.U.lliated)
What are you talking about? We get our brains fondled all the time by Microsoft.
I appologize if this post seems a little out of place: it is a response to a thread elsewhere on this page that I can't seem to find again.
The public does not care about 120 year copyrights because they have lived their entire lives in a prison where they have been shielded from what is possible. Presented with the counteroffer of 20 year copyrights, the public might get more excited. Let's be real, after 20 years a movie / book / song has either recouped a significant reward for the copyright holder, or has been taken out of circulation. The Beatles, Bee Gees, et al have made huge sums of money on their works, and have been justifiably rewarded hansomly, which they have invested. But for every Sonny Bono there are ten thousand smaller artists whose legacy would be better secued if *anyone* taking a fancy to their work could promote, remix, re-release, or otherwise enjoy their work. If someone were so inclined, they could release a complete collection of Soul Train episodes 1975-1980 on DVD, or a sociologically significant 1950's retrospective with every failed NBC pilot for a children's program. We could release Data CD's with true snapshots of life in the 40's, 50's, 60's, and 70's, rather than just what a corporate filter will allow.
We live in a country where 1960's vietnam protest songs can't be sung in public without a royalty check going to a corporation. There is something wrong with that. We need to organize and fight for a return to a 20 year copyright. Perhaps then will our culture be secure for our children. Perhaps then will our artistic legacy be secure.
-C
This sig is a mnemonic device to allow you to recognize this poster in the future. It is only a device.
There are actually two distinct points in this pseudo ask (philosophise) slashdot: the classic question of why many games aren't currently appealing to women, and why aren't women being hired for testing work in the US and UK gaming industry. Since so much attention has been focused on the former, I will address the latter.
...after one last round of Tony Hawk.
1. Sports Games. The best selling types of games in america are Sports games, which we develop more of than anywhere else in the world. I would go so far as to theorize that the majority of console - based development in the US is somehow or other related to sports gaming. Whether or not the torrent of football games appeals to the woman gamer is a topic that I have said I would not get into. However, the fact that many testing jobs in the US are directly related to sports cannot make the prospect more appealing to women.
2. A lack of game-related networking. Partly due to the popularity of gaming among men and partly due to the vulnerability men traditionally feel discussing intimate personal details, video games can be a very common bonding thread between men. Many of the testers I know were hired through other testers, which is also true of the one female tester at my place of employment.
3. Game Testing isn't a career option presented to women. You only hear about testing positions through the gaming magazine industry: an industry which isn't known for its liberated prose. Male high school students discuss the posibility of taking this on as a job in a way that just isn't present in the female equvalent.
4. Diversified interests. Put less cryptically (and potentially more dangerously), women are encouraged to get out of the house, look into other things, and are generally subject to more percieved or real structuring of their time. "Boys will be boys," however, and many parents allow their male children to fill every available open second staring at that tube in a way that they wouldn't put up with in their daughters. Gamer boys have allowed gaming to become the exclusive avenue in their lives in a way that protective parents would never allow in women. Of course, it is a short hop from something you do all day to something you do all day and get paid. Certainly, it must be daunting to consider getting a job in an industry not only where you are very much an outsider, but where your competition spends any "free" time they may have obsessively studying the subject.
There are many other reasons I'm sure one could site. The perception of the lonely tester, the horrible hours, the lack of societal benefit... But it is 5:40 AM and I just came back from my testing job - my brain is fizzing. I think it is time to go to sleep...
-C
It's amazing how uncreative political protests have become in this country. Enter street, sit down, chain arms, repeat. Stay at home, mail letters, complain, repeat. Ever notice that neither of these involves going to statehouses and talking to or yelling at legislatures? They do let you into those things, and for free no less. Sure, you get arrested for disturbing the peace, but that's a lot more satisfying thing to have on your arrest record than parading without a permit.
The place where people should be focusing their efforts is at the mechanics of government, not venting at society. And yes, we need a clearer separation between protesters and revolutionaries so that thousands of homeowners and parents can have their voices safely heard without the risk of arrest, and thousands of fearless college students can have something truly positive to do that will land them in jail, rather than just throwing a concert.
-What else can you do? Write for papers! They really don't have any money to spend on content these days, and love to print long, interesting editorial pieces. With smaller, more specific papers you are almost guarenteed to be printed. That way, you will be read by far more people than by commenting on slashdot, and your piece will be cited by lazy high-school students for years to come.
-Give speeches. Most city council meetings have open-floor sections, and your council member is far more likely to have an ear of someone who has an ear of the president than you do.
-Get arrested for something memorable and dramatic, like being beaten by cops or hijacking the satellite TV video (but not audio) signal during the state-of-the-union address to display images of victims of american emperialist policies.
-Talk about these things with people you don't know, constantly. Talk to the people behind the counter at your supermarket, the people on the street, and generally being an information source for anyone and everyone who is willing to give you the benifit of 30 seconds. Discuss, don't give speeches.
-Send annonymous bomb tips. Shuts down just about anything, and fast. Just remember that you can and probably will be tracked down unless you cover your tracks meticulously.
-Cut out the middleman and get state referrandums passed. You need several thousand signatures to get something on the ballot, but just think of the voice that gives your cause. Did medical marajuana have a chance of being taken seriously before getting on the ballot in California? Not really, but now...
-Hang signs from freeways and billboards. (you can guess what state I'm in). No, it's not legal, and they will eventually be taken down. But they will be seen by literally thousands of people per hour on their way to work. And really, whose voice deserves the audience, one of frank political discussion or one urging the purchase of a AT&T wireless services?
Join Calperg, Massperg, the Christian Coalition, or any other organization that you believe is aligned with your political goals, and donate one night a week to bettering mankind. Campaign finance reform really needs people.
-Be creative! Why did these people join hands to shut down Washington when many of them could have parked their busses? 500 dollars isn't unheard of for a car that has just enough life left in it to drive to downtown. That wouldn't be as effective as, say, a leafletting campaign, but it would at least be more than throwing a concert in a park.
-Finally, stay goal focused. If you want to stop one nasty timber company from logging, you can chain yourself to their equipment and park a bulldozer in front of their gate. If you want to stop the spread of the timber industry in the northwest, you need to help draft and push through legislation in the logging towns that limits the company's powers to exert emminent capitalism. If you want to stop Wells Fargo Bank from exploiting the gullibility of elderly patrons you can either smash their windows down, or start up an education campaign that targets the aged, along with legislation that prohibits such arrangements.
If the protesters wanted to be truly effective at getting the message about IRAQ out, they would have hung a screen over downtown DC and played Apocolypse Now all day.
Just as a side note, I'm replying to this person not because their comment was wrong or incomplete, but because it was inspirational and needed an amen.
amen.
Your heart is in the right place, but there is something fundamental that you are missing. A GUI can only be as clean and understandable as the information it is trying to convey. Putting a pretty GUI on linux just serves to point out how totally non-intuitive most of Linux is for the home user.
I think it is time for a radical fork. Desktop Linux.
Desktop Linux would put everything you would normally find on the first level of your hard drive into a "system" folder in a "linux" folder. That linux folder would also hold the configuration and kernel utilities that are normally hidden from anything but a command prompt call. It would assume root status for specific actions of the local user if prompted by dialog box, and would auto-mount any drive it was given. There would be no remote administration utilities. A more crash-resistant low level format for the hard drive would have to be chosen, as would many, many little utilities. Nothing would require the command line. And of course, (the impossible) binary compatibility with existing Linux apps would have to be preserved.
No, I don't think it is possible either, and I rather think the better idea is to help invest in OpenBE or another desktop-oriented Open Source project.
Linux, not surprisingly, still isn't a desktop-oriented OS project.
They have been proven as the most effective way to keep important discoveries from the public for at least 20 years.
"So, would you like your copy of LEKA on a CD or floppy?"
HERE HERE!
I know IMAX theartres are struggling for survival, though apparently less so these past few years, and releasing 35 mm versions of movies on 70mm film could bring in additional revenue... at the cost of what makes the theartre interesting. This would be just, in essence, a large 35mm theartre with no additional film quality. Perhaps Episode 3 could be shot with a camera holding enough pixels to make it worthwile, but quite honestly Lucas's "digital" theartre experience looked more like a moving series of crisply colored legos than a film.
Equally doubtful would be studios (and filmmakers) shooting in IMAX and paring down to 35mm (which would be the proper process), as IMAX cameras aren't exactly standard in the studio backlots. Especially now that everyone is transitioning to a first-gen digital which reduces rather than increases studio costs.
Sadly, IMAX theartres would probably be well advised to switch to good 'old 35 mm permanently... Many of the jitters and color problems have been solved over the years, and for every wonderful IMAX documentary there are five incredible 35mm films that never see nationwide release.
-Chris
Lots of reasons.
For one, Subways, busses, trains, airplanes, sidewalks, and doctors offices.
Two, it's always better to have a paperback copy of documentation when fixing a computer. Even if you have another computer around (and you should), paperbacks still leave smaller holes in the wall.
Three, when you are done with it you can loan it to a colleague. I've worked with enough clueless people to know that a little education can go a long way in smoothing a long term working relationship.
Likewise, many of the supposed advantages proported of HTML are not so, namely timeliness and loanability. For some reason it seems to take as much cost to keep a site up to date after two years (or so) as it did to create the thing in the first place. Why would the publisher plunk down the coin to keep the site current? If they are going to recieve payment for updated versions of the html book, how is that any different from buying a dead-tree edition? And how, exactly, can you loan out a html book with the publisher's blessing? I understand that in HTML you can just page through and download the bloody thing, but... That seems like a lot more trouble than figuring out who you loaned your book to.
And furthermore, if you are at a computer you can look up concepts you don't understand without any trouble. The portability of white pulp doesn't preclude reading it at a computer. And when Mozilla / IE / Netscape / AOL / ICab / Opera / Lynx / Konqueror crashes your system, your paperback will still be running fine and you will still know what you were looking up. (Opera, BTW, automatically saves the windows you have open, allowing you to painlessly resume after crashes).
I don't think, in the current state, that searching and easy dissemination outweigh portability, ease-of-reading, and loanability in this circumstance.
Dead tree technology has been around for three thousand years. Three thousand years of R and D is a lot of engineering. Let's not be so quick to abandon that power, eigh?
-Chris
You will note these "fins" work on a simple, clearly understood principle commonly referred to as "gyroscopic forces". You see, the larger of the two sets of fins are angled opposite to eachother, causing the rocket to spin at great speeds and preventing it from tumbling end-over-end. Many model rockets operate on this same principle.
Arrows work because the shaft is considerably longer than the girth, causing any off balance rotation to be prevented by the DRAG of the feathers, not their shaping of the airflow.
I still think this guy has some guts, but not quite as much as his life insurance company.
If I remember my calculus correctly (and this is nitpicking, btw), if an input variable is approaching another number, and it can be proven to get as close to the number as you could ask for, and that the function is continuous (contiguous?) at that point, then for all mathematical purposes a number infinitely close to another number behaves exactly like that other number, and QED is equal.
With an indefinite period of time, one can get as close to an infinite period of time as another person could ask for. Likewise, the outcome of the process will be the same. Therefore the slope of the function is the same, and QED the OJ defence has worked yet again.
Valenti then considered for a moment. "That's our job."