If the people who made this thing are not total idiots, it must support the iso9660 filesystem. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to release MP3 CD's that could be read both on a computer and on this special device. And you couldn't have any directories to separate the songs (which is pretty important when you have 100 songs or so). And, yeah, they could use a proprietory system, but I hope to god not.
As far as data rates, the only thing I've read about portable MP3 players not supporting data rates is one (and I don't remember which) that doesn't support 256k. Though maybe this is just because they pressume _everyone_ uses 128k, MP3 players don't mention what bit rates they support and do not support. Yes, this is another possible problem.
Okay, skeptical mode off. THIS IS WHAT I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR. I got so sick and tired of hearing about damned flash card MP3 players that hold no more than a single album (even less if you use a higher bit rate). I'll be first in line to put down $300 for this, as long as the questions you ask don't have ridiculous answers (such as it only supporting 128k).
I'm actually surprised this has come so soon, as the wide consumer market for mp3 is not with people who have CD recorders (which I don't think is a large amount of people at this point). The lack of details is scary, yes, but remember this is just a PR release. I'm very excited about it. If this one is not perfect in the details, hopefully the next one will be.
Okay, I haven't seen that, but I have heard good things about it. But the Lucas point is moot, anyway, since he's busy with Star Wars until 2005 or whatever. And while I do like all of the Star Wars movies, his moralizing in the Star Wars movies would completely make him ineligible for a Kubrick film. I mean, even Saving Private Ryan is more ambigious morally than any of the Star Wars films.
I felt the same way you did when I read the headline, but after I read the actually article, I felt a bit differently. While I agree with your general opinion of Spielberg and his movies, I don't think there is any other director who should take on this project.
First of all, if what this article says about Kubrick's and Spielberg's relationship is true, then Kubrick must know more about him than we do, and trusts his judgement, certainly since he asked Spielberg to direct while he was still alive. Who are we to judge Kubrick's judgement? And since Spielberg has talked to Kubrick directly about this movie, he has a better idea of what Kubrick wanted it to be better than anyone else, aside from perhaps his family.
And second, how many others directors could you name who have done a thought-provoking science fiction movie better than Spielberg? Don't even think about Lucas (I like Star Wars, but for entirely different reasons than I like 2001). 90% of "science fiction" movies are just excuse for loud, boring action movies. Ridley Scott, perhaps, could do it, but the last science fiction film he made was over 15 years ago. And Blade Runner was actually more film-noir than it was an operatic space movie. I actually haven't seen Close Encounters of the Third King (though I really should), but it sounds a lot better than, uh, Wing Commander.
If you need evidence that Spielberg can do an interesting, un-sentimental, non-verbal movie, check out The Duel. The whole movie is basically a businessman driving in the middle of nowhere with a tractor trailer fucking with his head. It's no intellectually sublime masterpiece, but it's much different from Schindler's List.
This also seems like a "blockbuster" project, which is perhaps why Kubrick asksed Spielberg to direct it in the first place. Nobody does that better than him.
I've always wanted to see Martin Scorsese direct a science fiction movie, and I think he'd probably do it better than Spielberg given "equal grounding" (i.e., if Spielberg had no conversations with Kubrick beforehand), but oh well. I really think the most important qualities of a director for this picture is extreme technical savvy (which Spielberg has) and an intimate knowledge of what Kubrick wanted (which it seems like Spielberg has). This is the best way to get a movie that is most like Kubrick would have made it.
Often times a story that is posted is not necessarily the whole news and the whole facts. Making the comments an integral part of Slashdot enables things that seem fishy to be judged by a wide range of people. For an example (though perhaps not the best one), look at the story about a Microsoft Linux today and how quickly it was named as a hoax by some people who did a little investigating. This was a bit too easy, because it was just an update on the already-linked news story, but you get the idea.
I'd say "just ignore the comments", but I recently got into a discussion here with people who insisted that you should just "ignore" the bad comments by setting your threshold high and I insisted that we should complain and get rid of non-registered anonymous posting. But I think the "just ignore it" idea more aptly applies here, since you can very easily ignore all of the comments if you want. Separating the good comments from the bad is a bit more difficult.
While it's not an O'Reilly book, I found a pretty good book on GTK+ published by New Riders called Developing Linux Applications with GTK+ and GDK written by Eric Harlow. I read it without having written a GUI program before and I understood it well. It lacks detailed explanations of every widget, but the online www.gtk.org documentation takes care of that for me. Here's a link to it on fatbrain.com.
The GNU project believes that the free software it releases needs free documentation to be really free for all to use. O'Reilly seems to primarily profit from selling books for free software. Since it seems that in general O'Reilly books are slanted toward the free software movement, do you have any concrete reasons for disagreeing with the GNU project on this point, aside from the obvious reason that this is how you make money? Are you planning to release any future O'Reilly titles online for free?
I don't think that MP3 is going to be (or is right now) very popular with people who are very concerned with audio quality. 128 doesn't even cut it for me, and I'm not very picky (as in, my whole stereo system probably costs about $250, excluding my computer). People with two, three, or four thousand dollar stereo systems just don't want anything "compressed" at all.
The weak link is my system sounds like it's the sound card (I have "gold" SB 64) from what you say, but I don't really notice it and I don't really care. I use MP3 (mostly at 192), because it sounds all right and it's very convenient to me.
While Microsoft may not be able to innovate in the console market, for most people, the bottom line is what games does it have. I would bet that if you ask your average game player why they have either N64 of PlayStation exclusively, they're going to say "because it has X game and the other one doesn't".
Pressuming all of the technology is basically similar (not like NES 8-bit vs. Playstation), I think people will just go where the games are. There are several things Microsoft could do with its huge amount of money to lure developers (such as was suggested earlier, not taking royalties on games (at least not _yet_)).
As for Sega, I think this is simply going to be their third failure in a row (the first two being SegaCD and Saturn (and wasn't there some kind of extension to the Genesis that was just abandoned after a couple of months when the Saturn came out?)). They seem to jump into the market a year earlier than the other guys with a new product and before Sega can get enough games to take over the older generation, a new, better system is released. Dreamcast games look better than N64 and Playstation, but they don't look so good that I absolutely have to buy one. I suspect in another year, something will be released that I feel I absolutely have to buy. This very well could be the MS system. The console system is completely proprietory, anyway, so why not go with MS. When I want to play a game, I just want it to work. I don't want to figure out all of the new damned hardware I have to buy everytime I want to play a game. Having a closed console unit makes this very simple. But my computer can still run Linux.
While this test that you suggest may or may not be a good idea in the grand scheme of things, it will never, ever happen. The theory is maybe good, that a person voting should know who they're voting for/against, but I don't think any type of test that you could devise would be able to test this accurately or politically correctly. I mean, some people bitch when a standarized test has something like "Joe has 10 ponies and Jill and 2 ponies, how many ponies do they both have?" because poor people don't have ponies and so the test is skewed to rich white people. How are you going to design a test that isn't skewed to rich white housewives who watch MSNBC all day?
And what to "test" them on? On the "issues"? So and so is for this, so and so is against that? That is really too objective. Right now in America, we basically vote for or against Democrats or Republicans. There's very little difference between them in their own party, aside from their own personality traits (which is not to say personality traits are not important), and you would have a tough time creating a test that would be anything other than how to define a Republican and how to define a Democrat. Especially if it's only 80%.
There are really a infinite number of candidates. Not all of them get on the ballot, but you can write them in. And even all of them that get on the ballot are too much for people to be bothered with. Do I care about how the Party for Legalizing Marijuana candidate for city council feels about Indian Casino Gambling? Not really. Do I need to know to make a relatively informed choice? No, not really.
Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately, voting isn't really about the issues anymore. Put a Democrat or a Republican in there and see how much your life really changes. Even put a former pro-wrestler in there and see how much it changes. No matter who you vote for, it will probably be all the same bull, and some good stuff. Let people vote for personality, I don't think it's a big deal. Frank Zappa for president!
He also looks like Rick Rubin and RMS to a point. I think anyone with long brown hair and a full beard pretty much look the same. All distinguising facial features kinda disappear. And then there's the sunglasses.
From looking at the screenshots, I just don't see this thing as a major innovation. Of course, I'm not a frightened-newbie, but I don't see the big difference between a mouse-enabled ASCII GUI and a QT GUI. It seems more user-friendly that the RedHat 5.2 installation (haven't tried 6.0 yet), but that mostly depends on how well it detects your hardware and what questions it asks.
I'd say the two most important things in a newbie installation (that may or may not already exist, I don't know), is a part that figures out your monitor and video card for X automatically (not even picking it from and list and certainly not entering in sync values) and something that does the partitions for you. Configuring X is a hell of a problem if you don't know much about your video cards/monitors and you don't have the manuals. And it's probably impossible if you don't know anything technical about modern monitors in general. Partitions are easy for someone who understands computers, but eerie to a newbie. And it should setup fstab correctly so a fskcin' user (not root) can mount the CD-ROM and floppy just by typing "mount/floppy", which is a simple text edit.
Yeah. I don't see how QT does a thing to any of this. I really think it has more to do with abstracting the frightening details of installation than presententing the frightening details in a nice GUI. But, I suppose, if they want to play Tetris, let them play Tetris.
It was perhaps a mistake for the story to posted in the first place, but I have to give credit to the people behind slashdot and the slashdot posters to not be a slave to the "facts" of a story. When something doesn't sound right or there is no evidence to back it up, if you read the comments, you'll find out pretty soon. With other news sources (tv, radio, etc.), you don't get this. And no other web news source has reader comments as such an integral part of the news experience.
And probably most impressively, slashdot is never afraid to admit that it was wrong. Every news source makes mistakes sometimes. I'd rather read something that perhaps makes more mistakes, but admits them right away than a news source that makes fewer mistakes, but never fully admits it when it does.
Oh yeah. There's also the fact that GT had no right to market the product regardless of what StarPlay was doing. What GT did was no different than if I stole cars from dealerships in the US and opened my own lot in Berlin. This is clearly wrong even if GM chose not to market their cars to Europeans.
I hate set fire to this debate, but it's not exactly the same. If you stole the specifications for Ford cars and made them yourself (as in stole the binary code and made CD's out of them), that would be the same. Starplay is only losing intellectual material, not tangible material. It's just that in the software industry, the intellectual material is 99% of the value of software, whereas in the car industry, the raw material is worth more. So, comparing the two doesn't really make sense.
While it may not be legal for someone to steal Ford's car specifications, use them to make a Taurus, and sell them in some place where Ford doesn't sell cars, I don't think it's really "wrong."
When I was younger, I used to download warez all the time and I didn't really feel too bad about it. Then once the games got bigger and CD-R's became cheap, there were a fair amount of people who would bundle a bunch of warez on a CD and sell it for $50 or something. I'm not in the "scene" that much, so I don't know how popular of a method this is to distribute warez (though I guess I was never in the "scence", just a unattached "consumer"). I always had a sneaking suspicion that paying someone else for warez is worse than downloading it for free, but I don't know how sure I am about it.
I'm not sure, but maybe this game wasn't available in Europe, so maybe they wouldn't have sold any games in Europe if it weren't for GT. And at what price? With the example of a bunch of warez for $50, the "actual value" of the CD is really probably at least a thousand dollars, so I wouldn't have bought all the software on the CD if I had to pay full price. In fact, I probably wouldn't have bought any of it.
Let's say this is actually a good game and I'm some guy in Europe that really wants it, but I can't buy it, because there are no stores that have it. Then GT comes around and sells it in Europe for less than the price it's supposed to be. So I buy it. The original writers of the game don't really "lose" anything, because no one in Europe would have been able to buy the game because of its inavailability and/or price. Anyway, I guess that's just the GNU Manifesto way of looking at it.
Sure, GT's going to be sued and they probably deserve it, if only for the sheer stupidity of doing something like this as a large company. I don't really have much sympathy for either of them. Many, many computer and video game console games are not worth the $60 you have to spend on them. Unless you have some way to try them out (i.e., warez), it's not worth the gamble of buying them if you have a limited budget.
I wrote this email to the contact listed on the press release. Hopefully someone important will read it, but probably not.
Hi, I am writing to you in response to a press release from David Bowie's official website at this address on August 30th. The Outside Org website is listed to obtain more information at the end of the release and on David Bowie's page on Outside Org, this email address is listed as the contact. Forgive me if I am directing this to the wrong place and I would appreciate it if you could forward to the right person.
While I certainly believe that digitally downloaded music is the far, if not near, future of music, I am disappointed with David Bowie's (and/or his record label's) decision to release his album in only Liquid Audio and MS Audio, encoded with SDMI. I, along with many other consumers, would have preferred the open and flexible MP3 standard, which started this digital music revolution. Because anyone is free to write an MP3 player and anyone is free to write an MP3 encoder (as long as they do not use a patented algorithm) without paying licensing fees, there is a much wider selection of MP3 players for a wide variety of computer systems. Personally, I use the open source Linux operating system, for which I believe there is no Liquid Audio or MS Audio player. A quick search on the de facto website to get Linux software (Freshmeat), reveals no matches for "SDMI" or "Liquid Audio" (I also looked at Liquid Audio's official site which only has players for Windows and Macintosh), while almost 100 matches for "MP3". This includes MP3 players, encoders, and graphical frontends which make it simple for people to create MP3's from their own purchased CDs. Without a doubt, an MP3 release would enable many more people on different hardware to have access to David Bowie's music. Not only is it wrong to force people to deal with one or two companies (in this case Microsoft and Liquid Audio) as the sole source for a certain format, it is also bad business. While the technically superior Betamax was held tight by Sony, the open VHS standard won the consumer war. I expect that formats such as Liquid Audio and MS Audio (and maybe even SDMI, though it is open) will fail in the same way.
There is a concern growing in the traditional record industry that downloadable music is more subject to piracy than normal purchased CD's and that a secure, encrypted standard that only allows play only on one device is necessary for commercially released music. This is wrong for, at least, two reasons. First, most of the music available illegally in MP3 format was not originally downloaded from a website. It was originally purchased on a CD and then encrypted to MP3 and put on the internet. There is no way to stop this from happening. If you release your album on a CD and it is popular, it is subject to being encrypted into MP3 and put onto the internet. In fact, if you ever intend for music to be listened to, then it will always be technically possible to copy it. Secondly, as fast as new "secure" formats are being created, they are being unsecured. Read this article about Microsoft's WMA format being cracked for evidence of this.
While there will always be some people who insist on pirating music, the majority of consumers simply don't have the time for it. It usually takes more than $15 worth of effort to find a CD that you would pay $15 for in MP3 format illegally on the web, especially if you want a certain CD in particular. When given the choice between affordable, easy-to-use, downloadable music in a popular format from reputable companies and illegal, hard-to-find from who-knows-where, _most_ consumers will pick the former. By using non-open standards to release digital music, such as Liquid Audio and MS Audio, and using encryption such as SDMI, you are simply making it harder for consumers to get and enjoy legal music.
There are also some interesting "facts" about David Bowie's involvement with digital music and how he is the "first" to do this and the "first" to do that. He is most certainly _not_ the first major recording artist to release an entire album online (some have even made some albums available _only_ online). Check out Emusic for this. Some of the more notable artists are Frank Black (former lead singer of the Pixies and a guest at Bowie's 50th birthday bash, where he performed with Bowie on stage at Madison Square Garden) and They Might Be Giants. But press hype is what it is. I suppose I should expect it.
Despite of this, I am a very big fan of David Bowie. I will buy his new album, though not online, because I couldn't listen to it even if I did. I will wait for the CD and encode it myself into MP3 format so that I can listen to it through my computer and on a portable MP3 player. I hope that in the future he will realize the demands of market and use an open standard that is available to everyone.
I don't understand why he's even signed to a record label. At last count, he is worth about $900 million. I suspect that David Bowie can do whatever he wants. Virgin is just along for the ride. If he _really_ disagreed about the format, he could just leave. Maybe he doesn't know what he's doing, but he really is quite "with it", more than any other popular musician. In response to an earlier comment, I think he _does_ know the difference between SDMI and MP3 and TCP/IP, but maybe he doesn't really understand all of the political issues about it. And I'm sure he doesn't use Linux.
I went through the horrible pain known as learning Scheme and Script-Fu simulatenously to do scripts for The Gimp a few months ago. I'm really excited to know that there is some good documentation on Gimp scripting and especially Perl-Fu (Perl being a much easier language to work with, at least if you have a C background), considering it is still in the development release. This sounds like it's just the thing that non-artistic programmers need to make a site with interesting visuals.
Opera was initially a windows-only browser. I think it started to get somewhat popular just about the time Microsoft made IE free and Netscape followed suit. At that point, open source wasn't nearly as popular as it was now. What distinguised Opera then was that 1. It wasn't coming from some behemoth company that tied in a bunch of marketing shit, 2. You had to (read: supposed to) pay money for it, 3. It was a hell of a lot faster (which was very important for the low end Pentiums).
Probably 99% of Windows users don't care if a product is open source. And probably 80% don't care that Microsoft and Netscape are giving them their browser only because they want them to buy other products. Opera really came at a bad time, because they wanted $35 and everyone else was giving away a browser for free. A few nerds appreciated it because of its efficiency and some of them bought it, I suppose.
Now Opera is trying to port to everything under the sun. But simply because they're going to have a Linux version doesn't necessarily mean that they adhere to the open source ideals that the Linux community has. They're a small company and a browser is a big project. Big companies can do a big project and not make people pay for it. Small companies can't. If it weren't for Netscape, we wouldn't even have Mozilla.
Opera is basically a Windows shareware company. It seems that this is becoming less and less popular (though that may only be my view, as I've moved to using Linux almost exclusively), but it's the only way Opera can make a browser. The open source fanatics are pulling for Mozilla, but some less fanatical nerds who've converted from Windows to Linux recently remember when Opera saved them from the bloat of Netscape and IE and think it's worth the $35 when their only alternatives are the crash-prone Netscape and the still unfinished Mozilla.
If Opera becomes more stable and usable than Netscape before Mozilla does, I'll be happy to pay the $35 to use a non open source browser. I like the philosophy of open source, but for practical purposes you can't expect a company to give such a valuable product away out of the goodness of their hearts. What really bugs me is Windows shareware hackers who expect you to pay $30 for their Visual C++ re-hack of Space Invaders and keep their source closed.
was transmeta nearly as "popular" before linus started working there? i don't know, but i think linus has more to do with their popularity than their secretiveness. i mean, if some random company in silicon valley said nothing about what they were doing, who would care?
the fact that linus is working there _and_ nobody knows what they're doing makes it very interesting. and while saying nothing about what they're doing is an interesting marketing plow, they're not making any money doing that, so at some point they're going to have to release an actual product that actual people will buy. it may or may not be the amiga CPU, but it will have to be _something_ whether or not it eliminates their popularity.
though this is mostly assumption, i would think that bryan adams, etc. are all signed by _american_ record companies. aside from artists that are only known in canada, what successful canadian musicians are actually signed to canadian record labels?
i don't think that linus is a millionaire. he hasn't made any money _directly_ off of linux, though certainly some indirectly. in his own words (in some interview, of course i can't remember when) "[i don't need to get rich from linux because] do you think i'm going to be unemployed any time soon?"
i think it depends on exactly what you're doing when you're online.
aimless web surfing? surfing for warez/mp3's? maybe those two aren't so good.
reading online documentation/literature? well, i'm sure no one would say you have a unhealthy addiction if you read a book four hours everyday.
chatting with friends online? is it an addiction to talk to your friends?
surfing aol chat rooms for some 18/f's to cybersex? maybe that's not so good.
of course, most people's online experiences are a mix of these things and others. like all generalizations this one isn't completely correct. it's not necessarily bad to "addicted" to something, or at least the word "addiction" gets thrown around in the wrong way. everyone is "addicted" to breathing but we wouldn't say it like that. we need/like to breathe and it doesn't do anything negative.
an "addiction" is only harmful or only a real addiction when the person can't stop it even though he knows it's ruining his life. for example, some would say that a $1,000 a week gambling habit is an addiction. but if it's bill gates doing it, losing $1,000 a week isn't going to hurt him and shouldn't be called an addiction.
being online for 4 hours a day has the possibility to ruin aspects of your life, certainly if you're married and you're surfing for cybersex (which it seems a lot of people are). or maybe you could ruin your marriage doing something more innocent online, like playing quake. or maybe doing something that has nothing to do with a computer.
anything can be an addiction. so, hey why not write an article about the internet as an addiction. it might even got posted on slashdot!
i guess i can add the internet to the things i'm addicted to.
i'm upset about this article, because it's completely misleading (or at least people here are being misled by it). as far as i can tell, a relatively small school (as in, statistically insignificant compared to something like Penn State) gave some chicks some money to be in their computer science program instead of some other school's computer science program. if this percentage increase had happened without any "proactive" effort on the part of CMU and it also happened at other schools around the country, then it would be significant. this article is not.
but now because CMU has increased from 8% to 30% or whatever, there is talk that there's some magic bullet that can make girls want to go into computers and that the male-dominated society has been oppressing women into becoming teachers and lawyers and not computer scientists. the only evidence you give of this is that some high school teachers said to girls "hey, you should be a lawyer, teacher, or journalist" and to guys "hey, you should be a engineer."
well, guess what. ignore it! do whatever you want! this is not some big conspiracy! it's some old assumptions by old people. stop playing victim!
and don't tell me that the three girls who were on "top" were necessarily any smarter or any better at science than the fourth guy. when you get into the top percentages like that, the main difference between 1st and 2nd is grade grubbing and lack of any personal motivation aside from getting perfect grades.
if you wanna be a friggin' programmer, be a friggin' programmer. if you don't, just don't. there is nothing concrete keeping girls from being programmers aside from a lack of interest. and i see no reason why we should create an interest.
why didn't anyone ever encourage me to be a hairstylist? i could've been a great one.
most male programmers aren't very attractive, either. but women are more tolerant of ugliness when money and/or intelligence is involved than men.
i don't know if you're the same AC that posted the original comment, but more women total in CS will also mean more "good" women in CS. unless there is something inherent about CS that makes it impossible to be a "good woman", i don't see your point. i dunno, if you program, you have to stay up all night and eat doritos so you get fat and ugly?
why do role models have to be of the same sex? i never understood that. i would say that liz phair is one of my role models and i'm a guy.
and what exactly is the negative feedback you've been given? the professor called you "pretty"? that's a _compliment_! it's not like he offered to give you an A for a blowjob because you're stupid and wouldn't pass the class otherwise. and, anyway, proficiency in Visual Basic is much more superficial than good looks. of course if it were a class in C, then the comment would've been completely inappropiate.
who told you that you're so good at english? your english teacher? yeah, well, so did mine. going into computer science breaks my english teacher's heart, and it has nothing to do with my gender.
in what cases has some kind of feedback limited some girl's advancement in computer science? i just don't see it happening.
but i also don't think that any type of artificial encouragement is good or necessary. nobody had to encourage me to play around with computers, yet i still did. if a girl doesn't want to, she simply doesn't want to. i'm sure that every middle class girl born nowdays has access to a computer from day one. if all she does with it is point and click to start up Word, what are you supposed to do? if the computer isn't interesting to her, it just isn't interesting. do we need a sitcom with a female computer programmer as the lead character or something?
how many of the CS girls did CMU simply prevent from going to other colleges and how many did they actually convert from a different major? the percent going to one particular school means absolutely nothing aside from clever recruiting by CMU.
Slashdot Mirror
If the people who made this thing are not total idiots, it must support the iso9660 filesystem. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to release MP3 CD's that could be read both on a computer and on this special device. And you couldn't have any directories to separate the songs (which is pretty important when you have 100 songs or so). And, yeah, they could use a proprietory system, but I hope to god not.
As far as data rates, the only thing I've read about portable MP3 players not supporting data rates is one (and I don't remember which) that doesn't support 256k. Though maybe this is just because they pressume _everyone_ uses 128k, MP3 players don't mention what bit rates they support and do not support. Yes, this is another possible problem.
Okay, skeptical mode off. THIS IS WHAT I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR. I got so sick and tired of hearing about damned flash card MP3 players that hold no more than a single album (even less if you use a higher bit rate). I'll be first in line to put down $300 for this, as long as the questions you ask don't have ridiculous answers (such as it only supporting 128k).
I'm actually surprised this has come so soon, as the wide consumer market for mp3 is not with people who have CD recorders (which I don't think is a large amount of people at this point). The lack of details is scary, yes, but remember this is just a PR release. I'm very excited about it. If this one is not perfect in the details, hopefully the next one will be.
Okay, I haven't seen that, but I have heard good things about it. But the Lucas point is moot, anyway, since he's busy with Star Wars until 2005 or whatever. And while I do like all of the Star Wars movies, his moralizing in the Star Wars movies would completely make him ineligible for a Kubrick film. I mean, even Saving Private Ryan is more ambigious morally than any of the Star Wars films.
I felt the same way you did when I read the headline, but after I read the actually article, I felt a bit differently. While I agree with your general opinion of Spielberg and his movies, I don't think there is any other director who should take on this project.
First of all, if what this article says about Kubrick's and Spielberg's relationship is true, then Kubrick must know more about him than we do, and trusts his judgement, certainly since he asked Spielberg to direct while he was still alive. Who are we to judge Kubrick's judgement? And since Spielberg has talked to Kubrick directly about this movie, he has a better idea of what Kubrick wanted it to be better than anyone else, aside from perhaps his family.
And second, how many others directors could you name who have done a thought-provoking science fiction movie better than Spielberg? Don't even think about Lucas (I like Star Wars, but for entirely different reasons than I like 2001). 90% of "science fiction" movies are just excuse for loud, boring action movies. Ridley Scott, perhaps, could do it, but the last science fiction film he made was over 15 years ago. And Blade Runner was actually more film-noir than it was an operatic space movie. I actually haven't seen Close Encounters of the Third King (though I really should), but it sounds a lot better than, uh, Wing Commander.
If you need evidence that Spielberg can do an interesting, un-sentimental, non-verbal movie, check out The Duel. The whole movie is basically a businessman driving in the middle of nowhere with a tractor trailer fucking with his head. It's no intellectually sublime masterpiece, but it's much different from Schindler's List.
This also seems like a "blockbuster" project, which is perhaps why Kubrick asksed Spielberg to direct it in the first place. Nobody does that better than him.
I've always wanted to see Martin Scorsese direct a science fiction movie, and I think he'd probably do it better than Spielberg given "equal grounding" (i.e., if Spielberg had no conversations with Kubrick beforehand), but oh well. I really think the most important qualities of a director for this picture is extreme technical savvy (which Spielberg has) and an intimate knowledge of what Kubrick wanted (which it seems like Spielberg has). This is the best way to get a movie that is most like Kubrick would have made it.
Often times a story that is posted is not necessarily the whole news and the whole facts. Making the comments an integral part of Slashdot enables things that seem fishy to be judged by a wide range of people. For an example (though perhaps not the best one), look at the story about a Microsoft Linux today and how quickly it was named as a hoax by some people who did a little investigating. This was a bit too easy, because it was just an update on the already-linked news story, but you get the idea.
I'd say "just ignore the comments", but I recently got into a discussion here with people who insisted that you should just "ignore" the bad comments by setting your threshold high and I insisted that we should complain and get rid of non-registered anonymous posting. But I think the "just ignore it" idea more aptly applies here, since you can very easily ignore all of the comments if you want. Separating the good comments from the bad is a bit more difficult.
While it's not an O'Reilly book, I found a pretty good book on GTK+ published by New Riders called Developing Linux Applications with GTK+ and GDK written by Eric Harlow. I read it without having written a GUI program before and I understood it well. It lacks detailed explanations of every widget, but the online www.gtk.org documentation takes care of that for me. Here's a link to it on fatbrain.com.
The GNU project believes that the free software it releases needs free documentation to be really free for all to use. O'Reilly seems to primarily profit from selling books for free software. Since it seems that in general O'Reilly books are slanted toward the free software movement, do you have any concrete reasons for disagreeing with the GNU project on this point, aside from the obvious reason that this is how you make money? Are you planning to release any future O'Reilly titles online for free?
I don't think that MP3 is going to be (or is right now) very popular with people who are very concerned with audio quality. 128 doesn't even cut it for me, and I'm not very picky (as in, my whole stereo system probably costs about $250, excluding my computer). People with two, three, or four thousand dollar stereo systems just don't want anything "compressed" at all.
The weak link is my system sounds like it's the sound card (I have "gold" SB 64) from what you say, but I don't really notice it and I don't really care. I use MP3 (mostly at 192), because it sounds all right and it's very convenient to me.
While Microsoft may not be able to innovate in the console market, for most people, the bottom line is what games does it have. I would bet that if you ask your average game player why they have either N64 of PlayStation exclusively, they're going to say "because it has X game and the other one doesn't".
Pressuming all of the technology is basically similar (not like NES 8-bit vs. Playstation), I think people will just go where the games are. There are several things Microsoft could do with its huge amount of money to lure developers (such as was suggested earlier, not taking royalties on games (at least not _yet_)).
As for Sega, I think this is simply going to be their third failure in a row (the first two being SegaCD and Saturn (and wasn't there some kind of extension to the Genesis that was just abandoned after a couple of months when the Saturn came out?)). They seem to jump into the market a year earlier than the other guys with a new product and before Sega can get enough games to take over the older generation, a new, better system is released. Dreamcast games look better than N64 and Playstation, but they don't look so good that I absolutely have to buy one. I suspect in another year, something will be released that I feel I absolutely have to buy. This very well could be the MS system. The console system is completely proprietory, anyway, so why not go with MS. When I want to play a game, I just want it to work. I don't want to figure out all of the new damned hardware I have to buy everytime I want to play a game. Having a closed console unit makes this very simple. But my computer can still run Linux.
While this test that you suggest may or may not be a good idea in the grand scheme of things, it will never, ever happen. The theory is maybe good, that a person voting should know who they're voting for/against, but I don't think any type of test that you could devise would be able to test this accurately or politically correctly. I mean, some people bitch when a standarized test has something like "Joe has 10 ponies and Jill and 2 ponies, how many ponies do they both have?" because poor people don't have ponies and so the test is skewed to rich white people. How are you going to design a test that isn't skewed to rich white housewives who watch MSNBC all day?
And what to "test" them on? On the "issues"? So and so is for this, so and so is against that? That is really too objective. Right now in America, we basically vote for or against Democrats or Republicans. There's very little difference between them in their own party, aside from their own personality traits (which is not to say personality traits are not important), and you would have a tough time creating a test that would be anything other than how to define a Republican and how to define a Democrat. Especially if it's only 80%.
There are really a infinite number of candidates. Not all of them get on the ballot, but you can write them in. And even all of them that get on the ballot are too much for people to be bothered with. Do I care about how the Party for Legalizing Marijuana candidate for city council feels about Indian Casino Gambling? Not really. Do I need to know to make a relatively informed choice? No, not really.
Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately, voting isn't really about the issues anymore. Put a Democrat or a Republican in there and see how much your life really changes. Even put a former pro-wrestler in there and see how much it changes. No matter who you vote for, it will probably be all the same bull, and some good stuff. Let people vote for personality, I don't think it's a big deal. Frank Zappa for president!
He also looks like Rick Rubin and RMS to a point. I think anyone with long brown hair and a full beard pretty much look the same. All distinguising facial features kinda disappear. And then there's the sunglasses.
From looking at the screenshots, I just don't see this thing as a major innovation. Of course, I'm not a frightened-newbie, but I don't see the big difference between a mouse-enabled ASCII GUI and a QT GUI. It seems more user-friendly that the RedHat 5.2 installation (haven't tried 6.0 yet), but that mostly depends on how well it detects your hardware and what questions it asks.
/floppy", which is a simple text edit.
I'd say the two most important things in a newbie installation (that may or may not already exist, I don't know), is a part that figures out your monitor and video card for X automatically (not even picking it from and list and certainly not entering in sync values) and something that does the partitions for you. Configuring X is a hell of a problem if you don't know much about your video cards/monitors and you don't have the manuals. And it's probably impossible if you don't know anything technical about modern monitors in general. Partitions are easy for someone who understands computers, but eerie to a newbie. And it should setup fstab correctly so a fskcin' user (not root) can mount the CD-ROM and floppy just by typing "mount
Yeah. I don't see how QT does a thing to any of this. I really think it has more to do with abstracting the frightening details of installation than presententing the frightening details in a nice GUI. But, I suppose, if they want to play Tetris, let them play Tetris.
It was perhaps a mistake for the story to posted in the first place, but I have to give credit to the people behind slashdot and the slashdot posters to not be a slave to the "facts" of a story. When something doesn't sound right or there is no evidence to back it up, if you read the comments, you'll find out pretty soon. With other news sources (tv, radio, etc.), you don't get this. And no other web news source has reader comments as such an integral part of the news experience.
And probably most impressively, slashdot is never afraid to admit that it was wrong. Every news source makes mistakes sometimes. I'd rather read something that perhaps makes more mistakes, but admits them right away than a news source that makes fewer mistakes, but never fully admits it when it does.
Oh yeah. There's also the fact that GT had no right to market the product regardless of what StarPlay was doing. What GT did was no different than if I stole cars from dealerships in the US and opened my own lot in Berlin. This is clearly wrong even if GM chose not to market their cars to Europeans.
I hate set fire to this debate, but it's not exactly the same. If you stole the specifications for Ford cars and made them yourself (as in stole the binary code and made CD's out of them), that would be the same. Starplay is only losing intellectual material, not tangible material. It's just that in the software industry, the intellectual material is 99% of the value of software, whereas in the car industry, the raw material is worth more. So, comparing the two doesn't really make sense.
While it may not be legal for someone to steal Ford's car specifications, use them to make a Taurus, and sell them in some place where Ford doesn't sell cars, I don't think it's really "wrong."
When I was younger, I used to download warez all the time and I didn't really feel too bad about it. Then once the games got bigger and CD-R's became cheap, there were a fair amount of people who would bundle a bunch of warez on a CD and sell it for $50 or something. I'm not in the "scene" that much, so I don't know how popular of a method this is to distribute warez (though I guess I was never in the "scence", just a unattached "consumer"). I always had a sneaking suspicion that paying someone else for warez is worse than downloading it for free, but I don't know how sure I am about it.
I'm not sure, but maybe this game wasn't available in Europe, so maybe they wouldn't have sold any games in Europe if it weren't for GT. And at what price? With the example of a bunch of warez for $50, the "actual value" of the CD is really probably at least a thousand dollars, so I wouldn't have bought all the software on the CD if I had to pay full price. In fact, I probably wouldn't have bought any of it.
Let's say this is actually a good game and I'm some guy in Europe that really wants it, but I can't buy it, because there are no stores that have it. Then GT comes around and sells it in Europe for less than the price it's supposed to be. So I buy it. The original writers of the game don't really "lose" anything, because no one in Europe would have been able to buy the game because of its inavailability and/or price. Anyway, I guess that's just the GNU Manifesto way of looking at it.
Sure, GT's going to be sued and they probably deserve it, if only for the sheer stupidity of doing something like this as a large company. I don't really have much sympathy for either of them. Many, many computer and video game console games are not worth the $60 you have to spend on them. Unless you have some way to try them out (i.e., warez), it's not worth the gamble of buying them if you have a limited budget.
I wrote this email to the contact listed on the press release. Hopefully someone important will read it, but probably not.
Hi, I am writing to you in response to a press release from David Bowie's official website at this address on August 30th. The Outside Org website is listed to obtain more information at the end of the release and on David Bowie's page on Outside Org, this email address is listed as the contact. Forgive me if I am directing this to the wrong place and I would appreciate it if you could forward to the right person.
While I certainly believe that digitally downloaded music is the far, if not near, future of music, I am disappointed with David Bowie's (and/or his record label's) decision to release his album in only Liquid Audio and MS Audio, encoded with SDMI. I, along with many other consumers, would have preferred the open and flexible MP3 standard, which started this digital music revolution. Because anyone is free to write an MP3 player and anyone is free to write an MP3 encoder (as long as they do not use a patented algorithm) without paying licensing fees, there is a much wider selection of MP3 players for a wide variety of computer systems. Personally, I use the open source Linux operating system, for which I believe there is no Liquid Audio or MS Audio player. A quick search on the de facto website to get Linux software (Freshmeat), reveals no matches for "SDMI" or "Liquid Audio" (I also looked at Liquid Audio's official site which only has players for Windows and Macintosh), while almost 100 matches for "MP3". This includes MP3 players, encoders, and graphical frontends which make it simple for people to create MP3's from their own purchased CDs. Without a doubt, an MP3 release would enable many more people on different hardware to have access to David Bowie's music. Not only is it wrong to force people to deal with one or two companies (in this case Microsoft and Liquid Audio) as the sole source for a certain format, it is also bad business. While the technically superior Betamax was held tight by Sony, the open VHS standard won the consumer war. I expect that formats such as Liquid Audio and MS Audio (and maybe even SDMI, though it is open) will fail in the same way.
There is a concern growing in the traditional record industry that downloadable music is more subject to piracy than normal purchased CD's and that a secure, encrypted standard that only allows play only on one device is necessary for commercially released music. This is wrong for, at least, two reasons. First, most of the music available illegally in MP3 format was not originally downloaded from a website. It was originally purchased on a CD and then encrypted to MP3 and put on the internet. There is no way to stop this from happening. If you release your album on a CD and it is popular, it is subject to being encrypted into MP3 and put onto the internet. In fact, if you ever intend for music to be listened to, then it will always be technically possible to copy it. Secondly, as fast as new "secure" formats are being created, they are being unsecured. Read this article about Microsoft's WMA format being cracked for evidence of this.
While there will always be some people who insist on pirating music, the majority of consumers simply don't have the time for it. It usually takes more than $15 worth of effort to find a CD that you would pay $15 for in MP3 format illegally on the web, especially if you want a certain CD in particular. When given the choice between affordable, easy-to-use, downloadable music in a popular format from reputable companies and illegal, hard-to-find from who-knows-where, _most_ consumers will pick the former. By using non-open standards to release digital music, such as Liquid Audio and MS Audio, and using encryption such as SDMI, you are simply making it harder for consumers to get and enjoy legal music.
There are also some interesting "facts" about David Bowie's involvement with digital music and how he is the "first" to do this and the "first" to do that. He is most certainly _not_ the first major recording artist to release an entire album online (some have even made some albums available _only_ online). Check out Emusic for this. Some of the more notable artists are Frank Black (former lead singer of the Pixies and a guest at Bowie's 50th birthday bash, where he performed with Bowie on stage at Madison Square Garden) and They Might Be Giants. But press hype is what it is. I suppose I should expect it.
Despite of this, I am a very big fan of David Bowie. I will buy his new album, though not online, because I couldn't listen to it even if I did. I will wait for the CD and encode it myself into MP3 format so that I can listen to it through my computer and on a portable MP3 player. I hope that in the future he will realize the demands of market and use an open standard that is available to everyone.
I don't understand why he's even signed to a record label. At last count, he is worth about $900 million. I suspect that David Bowie can do whatever he wants. Virgin is just along for the ride. If he _really_ disagreed about the format, he could just leave. Maybe he doesn't know what he's doing, but he really is quite "with it", more than any other popular musician. In response to an earlier comment, I think he _does_ know the difference between SDMI and MP3 and TCP/IP, but maybe he doesn't really understand all of the political issues about it. And I'm sure he doesn't use Linux.
I went through the horrible pain known as learning Scheme and Script-Fu simulatenously to do scripts for The Gimp a few months ago. I'm really excited to know that there is some good documentation on Gimp scripting and especially Perl-Fu (Perl being a much easier language to work with, at least if you have a C background), considering it is still in the development release. This sounds like it's just the thing that non-artistic programmers need to make a site with interesting visuals.
Opera was initially a windows-only browser. I think it started to get somewhat popular just about the time Microsoft made IE free and Netscape followed suit. At that point, open source wasn't nearly as popular as it was now. What distinguised Opera then was that 1. It wasn't coming from some behemoth company that tied in a bunch of marketing shit, 2. You had to (read: supposed to) pay money for it, 3. It was a hell of a lot faster (which was very important for the low end Pentiums).
Probably 99% of Windows users don't care if a product is open source. And probably 80% don't care that Microsoft and Netscape are giving them their browser only because they want them to buy other products. Opera really came at a bad time, because they wanted $35 and everyone else was giving away a browser for free. A few nerds appreciated it because of its efficiency and some of them bought it, I suppose.
Now Opera is trying to port to everything under the sun. But simply because they're going to have a Linux version doesn't necessarily mean that they adhere to the open source ideals that the Linux community has. They're a small company and a browser is a big project. Big companies can do a big project and not make people pay for it. Small companies can't. If it weren't for Netscape, we wouldn't even have Mozilla.
Opera is basically a Windows shareware company. It seems that this is becoming less and less popular (though that may only be my view, as I've moved to using Linux almost exclusively), but it's the only way Opera can make a browser. The open source fanatics are pulling for Mozilla, but some less fanatical nerds who've converted from Windows to Linux recently remember when Opera saved them from the bloat of Netscape and IE and think it's worth the $35 when their only alternatives are the crash-prone Netscape and the still unfinished Mozilla.
If Opera becomes more stable and usable than Netscape before Mozilla does, I'll be happy to pay the $35 to use a non open source browser. I like the philosophy of open source, but for practical purposes you can't expect a company to give such a valuable product away out of the goodness of their hearts. What really bugs me is Windows shareware hackers who expect you to pay $30 for their Visual C++ re-hack of Space Invaders and keep their source closed.
was transmeta nearly as "popular" before linus started working there? i don't know, but i think linus has more to do with their popularity than their secretiveness. i mean, if some random company in silicon valley said nothing about what they were doing, who would care?
the fact that linus is working there _and_ nobody knows what they're doing makes it very interesting. and while saying nothing about what they're doing is an interesting marketing plow, they're not making any money doing that, so at some point they're going to have to release an actual product that actual people will buy. it may or may not be the amiga CPU, but it will have to be _something_ whether or not it eliminates their popularity.
though this is mostly assumption, i would think that bryan adams, etc. are all signed by _american_ record companies. aside from artists that are only known in canada, what successful canadian musicians are actually signed to canadian record labels?
i don't think that linus is a millionaire. he hasn't made any money _directly_ off of linux, though certainly some indirectly. in his own words (in some interview, of course i can't remember when) "[i don't need to get rich from linux because] do you think i'm going to be unemployed any time soon?"
i think it depends on exactly what you're doing when you're online.
aimless web surfing? surfing for warez/mp3's? maybe those two aren't so good.
reading online documentation/literature? well, i'm sure no one would say you have a unhealthy addiction if you read a book four hours everyday.
chatting with friends online? is it an addiction to talk to your friends?
surfing aol chat rooms for some 18/f's to cybersex? maybe that's not so good.
of course, most people's online experiences are a mix of these things and others. like all generalizations this one isn't completely correct. it's not necessarily bad to "addicted" to something, or at least the word "addiction" gets thrown around in the wrong way. everyone is "addicted" to breathing but we wouldn't say it like that. we need/like to breathe and it doesn't do anything negative.
an "addiction" is only harmful or only a real addiction when the person can't stop it even though he knows it's ruining his life. for example, some would say that a $1,000 a week gambling habit is an addiction. but if it's bill gates doing it, losing $1,000 a week isn't going to hurt him and shouldn't be called an addiction.
being online for 4 hours a day has the possibility to ruin aspects of your life, certainly if you're married and you're surfing for cybersex (which it seems a lot of people are). or maybe you could ruin your marriage doing something more innocent online, like playing quake. or maybe doing something that has nothing to do with a computer.
anything can be an addiction. so, hey why not write an article about the internet as an addiction. it might even got posted on slashdot!
i guess i can add the internet to the things i'm addicted to.
i'm upset about this article, because it's completely misleading (or at least people here are being misled by it). as far as i can tell, a relatively small school (as in, statistically insignificant compared to something like Penn State) gave some chicks some money to be in their computer science program instead of some other school's computer science program. if this percentage increase had happened without any "proactive" effort on the part of CMU and it also happened at other schools around the country, then it would be significant. this article is not.
but now because CMU has increased from 8% to 30% or whatever, there is talk that there's some magic bullet that can make girls want to go into computers and that the male-dominated society has been oppressing women into becoming teachers and lawyers and not computer scientists. the only evidence you give of this is that some high school teachers said to girls "hey, you should be a lawyer, teacher, or journalist" and to guys "hey, you should be a engineer."
well, guess what. ignore it! do whatever you want! this is not some big conspiracy! it's some old assumptions by old people. stop playing victim!
and don't tell me that the three girls who were on "top" were necessarily any smarter or any better at science than the fourth guy. when you get into the top percentages like that, the main difference between 1st and 2nd is grade grubbing and lack of any personal motivation aside from getting perfect grades.
if you wanna be a friggin' programmer, be a friggin' programmer. if you don't, just don't. there is nothing concrete keeping girls from being programmers aside from a lack of interest. and i see no reason why we should create an interest.
why didn't anyone ever encourage me to be a hairstylist? i could've been a great one.
most male programmers aren't very attractive, either. but women are more tolerant of ugliness when money and/or intelligence is involved than men.
i don't know if you're the same AC that posted the original comment, but more women total in CS will also mean more "good" women in CS. unless there is something inherent about CS that makes it impossible to be a "good woman", i don't see your point. i dunno, if you program, you have to stay up all night and eat doritos so you get fat and ugly?
this is a stupid discussion.
why do role models have to be of the same sex? i never understood that. i would say that liz phair is one of my role models and i'm a guy.
and what exactly is the negative feedback you've been given? the professor called you "pretty"? that's a _compliment_! it's not like he offered to give you an A for a blowjob because you're stupid and wouldn't pass the class otherwise. and, anyway, proficiency in Visual Basic is much more superficial than good looks. of course if it were a class in C, then the comment would've been completely inappropiate.
who told you that you're so good at english? your english teacher? yeah, well, so did mine. going into computer science breaks my english teacher's heart, and it has nothing to do with my gender.
in what cases has some kind of feedback limited some girl's advancement in computer science? i just don't see it happening.
but i also don't think that any type of artificial encouragement is good or necessary. nobody had to encourage me to play around with computers, yet i still did. if a girl doesn't want to, she simply doesn't want to. i'm sure that every middle class girl born nowdays has access to a computer from day one. if all she does with it is point and click to start up Word, what are you supposed to do? if the computer isn't interesting to her, it just isn't interesting. do we need a sitcom with a female computer programmer as the lead character or something?
how many of the CS girls did CMU simply prevent from going to other colleges and how many did they actually convert from a different major? the percent going to one particular school means absolutely nothing aside from clever recruiting by CMU.