I'm having trouble envisioning such a smart bullet. The big problem is that the process of firing a round is completely mechanical (there is no electrical signal to interrupt), the size of the rounds are carefully set standards and can't be easily changed, and standard 'dumb' ammunition can be made with pretty simple tools. I've one set of tools that take up about the same amount of space as a trade paperback when in their case.
If we invent a new type of firearm that only fires smart bullets and leave the old firearms in the market, we've done nothing. If we ban all firearms that don't fire smart bullets, then we have the same problems if we just decided to ban all guns (at the risk of hyperbole -- 'constitutional crisis').
It seems to be that there are many people who flatly reject the possibility of evolution because they see it as being against religion. I understand that this isn't a logical reason to reject evolution, but one of the reasons people see evolution as being against religion is that both Darwin (maybe unfairly) and yourself have been has been labeled as atheists and known as famous teachers of evolution. If my memory of your work is correct, you offer evolution as part of the argument against theism.
But isn't it harmful to the acceptance of science in general -- and evolution in particular -- to be tied to atheism, even if the connection is unfair or logically unsound? As a practical matter, wouldn't avoiding pitting religion against science help science -- especially in those parts of the world that most need science?
My apologies if anything here distorts what you have said or done.
The problem with traveling to another star is that once you get the project past the bubble of SciFi / Engineering / Science fans and start talking about spending real money and building real things you end up in the world of modern politics. A few issues that are almost guaranteed to come up:
* My religious book doesn't mention traveling to another star, so this is a bad idea. (You think I'm kidding?)
* You want *my* country to collect tons of impossible to replace and valuable elements... and then throw them into space? Why doesn't country Y help more? They have plenty of element foo.
* You want a multi-national government body to control all these resources? Sounds like an affront to my county's sovereignty.
* This is going to cost what? How are we going to do this and afford to [win the war on terror | achieve ecological balance | grow our economies | feed the poor | provide medical care ]
* You are going to launch how much radioactive fuel into Earth orbit?
The reason we haven't heard from other civilizations from other stars?
Right, there are already companies that offer, essentially, short-term car rentals. As long as the renter is a licensed driver (I'm assuming here that we will have a requirement for a human "stand by" driver for a while) then just hop in and tell the thing where to go.
But that would make commercial drivers of all kinds very nervous and I'm sure the lobbying and scary propaganda would be out in force.
And it reminds me of other (kind of minor, I'm sure Google has thought about them) problems with autonomous cars -- what happens when the map is out of date/wrong, does the car know where/how to park, how do you control the thing when you aren't sure exactly where you want to go, etc.
I could see people wanting the laws for autonomous vehicles to follow the laws for aircraft -- where parts and software have to be certified and it is illegal to use non-certified or modified parts. That path would make autonomous vehicles a lot more expensive (and have fewer "toy" features).
I think the real problem with autonomous vehicles is that there is a sizable percentage of people who would "bully" them. You know the thing is going to give you the right of way and slow down to keep a safe distance, so why not cut in front of them, etc. Then who wants a car with a pushover as an automatic pilot? But what lawyer would okay even a slightly aggressive autopilot?
I'd say autonomous vehicles would be great for taxis in cities with large, dense urban areas... but the taxi companies would fight that I think (unless they decided they could replace all the drivers with minimum wage button pushers).
Over a period of weeks send letters/small packages to each person with subtle clues that there will be a wedding with these certain people at this certain time and this certain place. Use everything from drawings that use obscure in-jokes and metaphors, to little refrigerator magnets on small pieces of steel that spell out a hint as to how to re-arrange them to get the real message, to little circuit boards where you have to toggle in the right binary (which was hinted at in a previous letter) to get the message to be sent out via a single led and morse code. If you are good at web development, turn the whole thing into some kind of "I love bees" confection.
Okay, no -- seriously.
There are at least three times in life where you really do need to adult up and act the way society expects you to:
1) Marriage -- Just send out normal pretty invitations, everyone already knows how those work. This isn't about how clever you are and to a lot of people marriage still is a religious service.
2) Death of someone close (Mum, Dad, Spouse, etc.) -- You really are expected to say a few kind words, help carry the coffin and talk to visitors. It doesn't really matter what you'd rather be doing or how wonderfully Atheistic/Aspergers you are, buck up and row, you don't get many chances to do this right.
3) Naming kids -- This really shouldn't be a time to show how clever or cool you are (especially if you are plain white with no real ethnic background), give them nice, neutral, hard to Google names that won't emotionally damage them or make people think you are a DB or illiterate.
Hence the reason I said they're all idiots. Charge more for internet ads, and vet them to make sure they're effective ads. Advertisers don't care about subscriber numbers. They care about sales from their ads.
Eh, well, I probably can't argue that they aren't all idiots.:-)
But as far as I can tell, no non-national newspaper has been able to charge enough and/or show objective data demonstrating the ads are effective enough.
Again, it seem that unless the ads are provided as a result of a search, most people ignore them in favor of what they are searching for. Companies still use sale papers and print ads, I'm assuming, because their research tells them that people are more likely to browse a print product (or just habit, who knows).
And I'm not saying that it can't be done -- I'm saying there is a nice career opportunity as a consultant if you can make it happen.
And yet the newspapers think that they'll make more money by putting this crap behind a pay wall. In reality, they'll just get fewer hits on their website, and thus ads, and will end up lowering their revenue way more than what they charge for access to their 'premium' content.
Let me tell you a secret, from the point of view of "most newspapers" the paywall is to get people to start buying the paper again, not an attempt to make money on the Internet. Print ads and sale papers (from Target and the like) still make more money than digital ads and there is a lot of pressure to keep subscription numbers up to attract those ads.
Because advertisers, especially local ones that are impacted by that compelling content, are willing to pay for good quality ad hits.
I'll disagree. Real Estate and Car Companies like advertising on the Internet (through Google, mostly), but have become very cynical after being hit with every single web-based-ads sales pitch in the universe. The vibe I get is that 90% of all their referrals are crap. As for the smaller companies, most of them really don't need an advertising campaign with global (or even regional) reach, or they don't have effective websites to refer to, or have the belief that advertising on the web (in terms of banners and text on a non-search website) is ignored.
What's the answer? If I knew I wouldn't be posting it on Slashdot:-) Maybe some kind of City Guide (yellow pages+wikipedia+restaurant menus) with news as a sideline (to keep the updated content high and keep the search engines coming back).
Long story short, they write to an external removable hard drive and then store the raw drives in blocks of anti-static foam cut to hold the drives that then fits into a filing cabinet.
You see, its a not too well known fact that you can create atomic bomb simulations by writing iTunes visualizer plugins. The better your design, the bigger the explosion on the screen.
And interestingly enough, all modern US atomic weapons license House of Pain's "Jump Around" directly from iTunes... something about a timing dependency, I'm not sure.
Now the rumor that the whole US economy can be modeled with a secret visualizer run against "Bohemian Rhapsody" is just crazy.
I tend to agree with the folks who have said this would be better as a grassroots thing rather than a top-down decision.
Some things you should probably find out before you start pushing:
* How much money does the state spend on non-OSS software for the schools? Most folks aren't OSS activists or care about the "freedom" of students and teachers and are going to look at OSS strictly in terms of dollars and cents. Also, Microsoft will probably be giving generous discounts to the state -- especially if you become successful in sparking interest in changing things. In fact I wouldn't be too surprised if you found "allies" who really are only concerned with getting a better deal from Microsoft.
* The replacement cost will have to include the cost of training and administration -- do you know what computers are in the school system, who has responsibility for them, what software is loaded on them, how they are used (in practice, not as documented)?
* Do you have a group of parents and teachers who want or are willing to change? The teachers especially can make your plan fail pretty easily if they feel pushed into something.
* How much software is legislatively or bureaucratically mandatory? Is there a State-wide software package (or packages) that the schools have to use? Did the state create this software themselves? Will it run on the end-user systems with the same reliability that it does now?
* Are you going to replace the servers and server software or just the end-user desktops? What part of the State bureaucracy runs the end-user stuff and what part of the State bureaucracy runs the servers (would not be surprised if it were different people)?
* What are the end-user computers used for? Will there be an untold number of overly-complex MS Office forms that won't be formatted properly in Open Office (the answer here is "yes," by the way)? How will those documents be handled? Are there any difficult to replace software packages used by the teachers? How much of the teacher's training materials will have to be fixed or dumped and re-written and how much staff time will that take? Are there gadgets that you don't care about that the staff does that may not work as expected with OSS computers?
Note that you cannot *just* aim for cheaper or "freer" (although it better be cheaper) you will need to be able to prove that OSS will provide a better experience for the admins, teachers, students and taxpayer.
You don't need to mathematically prove anything you are trying to sell. Think about it, does Match.com try to mathematically prove that their site is the best? Does Apple show the equations to prove that the iTouch is right mp3 player to buy? Yeah, they provide "statistics" -- but if you study the advertising, that isn't what they focus on.
You sell things through emotion and personality (which means a math heavy dating site might be a hit with math geeks, so maybe there you go).
I did similar stuff in High School as well, so I feel bad raining on your parade -- but "freaky and confusing" aren't good bullet points for security software. Most good security software keeps working when everyone knows the algorithm, in fact a lot of people won't trust encryption systems unless the algorithm is public. The reason people complain about security through obscurity is that it usualy fails, things built in secret by a few people contain flaws because the software isn't peer reviewed.
For example, one thing to remember is that everything from mouse waving to clicking to keyboarding is just a stream of bytes. If you've built your security program correctly, all you have is a very long key that is just as vulnerable to mouse and key capture as a short key. If you've built the program incorrectly, then it should be fairly trivial to bypass everything but the "real invisible password entry box" (which, again, is just a stream of bytes on your USB cable), and if you've done a really bad job, then dissasembling the application will give up the key itself.
Besides that, what happens to the archive once you open it? If the file is resident in RAM or in a temp file somewhere, then a bad acting application could access it then.
And -- if you have enough physical security to keep people from installing capture utilities on your machine, then you have enough security to just need a password, and the "freaky" steps are a waste of time.
That said, I'm sure your porn collection or whatever is safe.
Back when all you needed was a VT100 and computers didn't have audio devices, you didn't have all this bloat.
But if you must play mpg files, then my vote is mpg123 -- a nice command line mpg file player, you can even pipe the output to the screen. Or decode to a WAV file, modify that in Perl, then send it to a SOAP application on another server that routes it to your boombox -- all without any pointing or clicking!
If you want to have real control over your music collection, and don't want to have your files hidden by a candy interface...
$ cd ~/my_music/hip_hop $ ls MC_Frontalot $ cd MC* $ ls Nerdcore_HipHop.mp3 Penny_Arcade_Theme.mp3 $ mpg123 -qy *.mp3
Its funny because, of course, the only purpose of a Chevy is to hit people. Since no one uses them for any other purpose and no one re-uses them (because they get smashed when they hit someone) the model year of a Chevy is a good rough indicator of when a person got hit and, therefore, a way to establish a minimum age for that person.
Remember that the whole approach with the Apple iPhone has been desktop class functionality, with a familiar Mac OS X API on the backend for developers (if any are given the opportunity to do so).
With the Newton -- and I both owned and played around with development on a MessagePad 130 -- *everything* was different. The idea of how it would be used, the user interface, data storage model, the APIs... it even required its own special programing language (NewtonScript, based on Self).
Few users wanted to pay a lot of money for something that couldn't run desktop applications and a lot of potential developers were turned off by the odd-ball APIs and NewtonScript (I don't know that you could port from C, more like re-write from C).
If Apple/Cingular could comes down off their high-horse and allow third party developers then iPhone could be everything that the Newton wasn't and really have a chance of being the next Apple, Macintosh, etc. It would be great to see the basic iPhone framework, for example, licensed to folks like Axiotron so that a real Mac OS X tablet computer could be made.
As it is, I hate to think that The Next Big Thing is some consumerist toy, instead of a general purpose computing device.
If I remember correctly, there wasn't anything except the BIOS or something like it and BASIC. It used to be that any IBM PC would load (from chip, not disk) a BASIC interpreter if the BIOS couldn't find a bootable disk.
Again, if I'm remembering correctly, a quick history of desktop computers (post Altair):
1) Computers with no disk, just a tiny bit of RAM and a BASIC interpreter that loads on boot. The BASIC interpreter may have a tape loader or a way to print.
2) Computers with disks (but maybe just floppies) need a Disk Operating System (DOS, eh? Also early versions of Mac OS) so the computer can allow the operator to look at files on the disk and edit or run them. The engineers didn't call them OSs (for the most part) as they knew that the mini computers had the real OSs.
3) Computers that require hard drives and load kernels and user environments that allow more than one application to be running at the same time (Windows, Mac OS 6 (?)).
I remember books that talked about DOSes as being the next hot thing, and were full of speculation as to which one would end up on top...
If you buy a cellphone and service with a carrier and download ringtones from the carrier's ringtone store (or another store even), or buy whole songs from the carrier can you:
A) Move those songs and ringtones to a new phone with the same carrier?
B) Movie those songs and ringtones to a new phone on a different carrier?
I looked at a bunch of FAQs and the Cingular and Sony music websites and the answer was NO in BOTH cases. To me, the lock in seems much, much worse with cellphones (which are trying to be the new walkman/ipod) and yet everyone wants to jump on Apple. I would think much more of these Euro countries if they had blasted all the gadgets instead of just one popular one.
But I think it would be hilarious if there was a complicated formula for what county's laws came into play based on where the component parts came from, where it was assembled, where it was purchased and where it was used.
So if the parts came from China, it was assembled in Mexico, purchased in New York by someone who lived in Norway you could be sued by Canada for not listening to enough French language music.
From what I hear it is difficult for an American to shop the Japanese iTunes store (I think there was a story about that recently, in fact). Apple does direct people in specific countries to specific versions of the iTunes store and only accepts payments from that country. The gambling sites probably aren't bothering to do that.
Also I imagine that Apple does have some kind of presence in Norway, they are a little bit above a gambling service, after all.
My actual concern is governments interfering with people from entering into agreements with other people. Some people will react with horror that you can only share a purchased iTunes song on a handful of MS Windows or Mac OS X machines and a few other iPods, other people will think that this is a perfectly reasonable offer. I prefer governments who allow me to choose and only prevent *actual* fraud and theft.
Also (and I'm sure that this has been mentioned a million times) the iTunes store is not the only place you can purchase music in Norway. Wait... right? I mean there are CD stores and Emusic, etc. in Norway as well, right?
As long as the consumer has a choice between doing business with Apple or not, I'm not sure why there is a big fuss over the popularity of a certain family of iPods.
Full Disclosure: I own a G5 tower, purchase music from iTunes and I do have an old 10 GB iPod. But I think it is dumb for a 40-year-old to bebop around with those white earphones, no normally I listen to music at home played by the computer (and some non-crappy speakers).
Well, it is obvious to me that a device designed by an American company (regardless of where it was actually manufactured) should carry with it the force of American law regardless of the country in which it was sold or the nationality of the purchaser.
It is an egregious burden to force American companies to know and understand the rules of a bunch of countries that don't even speak English all of the time.
[This message brought to you by Echelon and the Committe to Reelect the President]
Back before I was using iTunes, I had a combination of a somewhat odd directory structure and a simple Perl script controlling mpg123 to handle my "random" shuffle.
The way it worked was this:
A command line option specified the depth of the repeat stack. The repeat stack was where the file names of the last x played songs were stored (FIFO). The repeat stack was used to prevent the same file name from being played more than once every x songs.
Another command line option specified the starting place in the directory structure.
When run, the script looked in the the starting folder and built a list of any '.mp(2|3)' files *and* any subdirectories then choose randomly from the list. If it selected a directory it would move to that directory and choose again, if it selected a song file it would pass it to mpg123, put the file name in the repeat stack and then start the main loop again (going back to the starting directory). If it selected a song file whose file name was on the repeat stack, it skipped the song and went back to the main loop. If a directory had no song files it would build a list of subdirectories and then choose one of them -- if it ran itself into a dead end, it would go back to the top of the loop and the main directory.
So, yes, if the repeat stack was larger than the number of available song files, it would eventually just sit there and do nothing.
To 'organize' my song file collection what I did was have my mp3s mostly in directories and subdirectories by genre, group, album but with some directories arranged more haphazardly and containing mixes of song files and sub directories.
Obviously, the more buried the song file was in the directory structure, the less likely it would play. So some of the stuff I had collected, but didn't always want to hear, so I would bury those files. If I was in the mood for a specific genre I'd just start at that genre's place in the directory structure. If I was going to let it run for a long time and didn't want to hear the same song twice, I'd just make the repeat stack really long.
It worked well, and I was experimenting with the option of a true random walk (i.e. don't return to the top of the directory structure each time and allow it to choose to go "up" in the directory structure as well as down) and the announcing of the song by taking the text of the tags and creating a mp3 file and playing it (or at random intervals saying "This W C R A Z Y, the time is X XX").
But then they released iTunes, and I got fat and lazy.
Slashdot Mirror
From the perspective of certain points on a light cone, the article showed up both today and 6 months ago. :-)
I'm having trouble envisioning such a smart bullet. The big problem is that the process of firing a round is completely mechanical (there is no electrical signal to interrupt), the size of the rounds are carefully set standards and can't be easily changed, and standard 'dumb' ammunition can be made with pretty simple tools. I've one set of tools that take up about the same amount of space as a trade paperback when in their case.
If we invent a new type of firearm that only fires smart bullets and leave the old firearms in the market, we've done nothing. If we ban all firearms that don't fire smart bullets, then we have the same problems if we just decided to ban all guns (at the risk of hyperbole -- 'constitutional crisis').
It seems to be that there are many people who flatly reject the possibility of evolution because they see it as being against religion. I understand that this isn't a logical reason to reject evolution, but one of the reasons people see evolution as being against religion is that both Darwin (maybe unfairly) and yourself have been has been labeled as atheists and known as famous teachers of evolution. If my memory of your work is correct, you offer evolution as part of the argument against theism.
But isn't it harmful to the acceptance of science in general -- and evolution in particular -- to be tied to atheism, even if the connection is unfair or logically unsound? As a practical matter, wouldn't avoiding pitting religion against science help science -- especially in those parts of the world that most need science?
My apologies if anything here distorts what you have said or done.
The problem with traveling to another star is that once you get the project past the bubble of SciFi / Engineering / Science fans and start talking about spending real money and building real things you end up in the world of modern politics. A few issues that are almost guaranteed to come up:
* My religious book doesn't mention traveling to another star, so this is a bad idea. (You think I'm kidding?)
* You want *my* country to collect tons of impossible to replace and valuable elements ... and then throw them into space? Why doesn't country Y help more? They have plenty of element foo.
* You want a multi-national government body to control all these resources? Sounds like an affront to my county's sovereignty.
* This is going to cost what? How are we going to do this and afford to [win the war on terror | achieve ecological balance | grow our economies | feed the poor | provide medical care ]
* You are going to launch how much radioactive fuel into Earth orbit?
The reason we haven't heard from other civilizations from other stars?
Politics.
I thought the split was "New Jersey Style" versus "MIT Approach"?
I guess its time to tell the kids to get off my lawn.
Right, there are already companies that offer, essentially, short-term car rentals. As long as the renter is a licensed driver (I'm assuming here that we will have a requirement for a human "stand by" driver for a while) then just hop in and tell the thing where to go.
But that would make commercial drivers of all kinds very nervous and I'm sure the lobbying and scary propaganda would be out in force.
And it reminds me of other (kind of minor, I'm sure Google has thought about them) problems with autonomous cars -- what happens when the map is out of date/wrong, does the car know where/how to park, how do you control the thing when you aren't sure exactly where you want to go, etc.
It will be interesting times.
I could see people wanting the laws for autonomous vehicles to follow the laws for aircraft -- where parts and software have to be certified and it is illegal to use non-certified or modified parts. That path would make autonomous vehicles a lot more expensive (and have fewer "toy" features).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parts_Manufacturer_Approval
I think the real problem with autonomous vehicles is that there is a sizable percentage of people who would "bully" them. You know the thing is going to give you the right of way and slow down to keep a safe distance, so why not cut in front of them, etc. Then who wants a car with a pushover as an automatic pilot? But what lawyer would okay even a slightly aggressive autopilot?
I'd say autonomous vehicles would be great for taxis in cities with large, dense urban areas ... but the taxi companies would fight that I think (unless they decided they could replace all the drivers with minimum wage button pushers).
Maybe they would be big in Japan :-)
Make it a puzzle!
Over a period of weeks send letters/small packages to each person with subtle clues that there will be a wedding with these certain people at this certain time and this certain place. Use everything from drawings that use obscure in-jokes and metaphors, to little refrigerator magnets on small pieces of steel that spell out a hint as to how to re-arrange them to get the real message, to little circuit boards where you have to toggle in the right binary (which was hinted at in a previous letter) to get the message to be sent out via a single led and morse code. If you are good at web development, turn the whole thing into some kind of "I love bees" confection.
Okay, no -- seriously.
There are at least three times in life where you really do need to adult up and act the way society expects you to:
1) Marriage -- Just send out normal pretty invitations, everyone already knows how those work. This isn't about how clever you are and to a lot of people marriage still is a religious service.
2) Death of someone close (Mum, Dad, Spouse, etc.) -- You really are expected to say a few kind words, help carry the coffin and talk to visitors. It doesn't really matter what you'd rather be doing or how wonderfully Atheistic/Aspergers you are, buck up and row, you don't get many chances to do this right.
3) Naming kids -- This really shouldn't be a time to show how clever or cool you are (especially if you are plain white with no real ethnic background), give them nice, neutral, hard to Google names that won't emotionally damage them or make people think you are a DB or illiterate.
-- And yes, please do get off my lawn :-)
Hence the reason I said they're all idiots. Charge more for internet ads, and vet them to make sure they're effective ads.
Advertisers don't care about subscriber numbers. They care about sales from their ads.
Eh, well, I probably can't argue that they aren't all idiots. :-)
But as far as I can tell, no non-national newspaper has been able to charge enough and/or show objective data demonstrating the ads are effective enough.
Again, it seem that unless the ads are provided as a result of a search, most people ignore them in favor of what they are searching for. Companies still use sale papers and print ads, I'm assuming, because their research tells them that people are more likely to browse a print product (or just habit, who knows).
And I'm not saying that it can't be done -- I'm saying there is a nice career opportunity as a consultant if you can make it happen.
And yet the newspapers think that they'll make more money by putting this crap behind a pay wall. In reality, they'll just get fewer hits on their website, and thus ads, and will end up lowering their revenue way more than what they charge for access to their 'premium' content.
Let me tell you a secret, from the point of view of "most newspapers" the paywall is to get people to start buying the paper again, not an attempt to make money on the Internet. Print ads and sale papers (from Target and the like) still make more money than digital ads and there is a lot of pressure to keep subscription numbers up to attract those ads.
Because advertisers, especially local ones that are impacted by that compelling content, are willing to pay for good quality ad hits.
I'll disagree. Real Estate and Car Companies like advertising on the Internet (through Google, mostly), but have become very cynical after being hit with every single web-based-ads sales pitch in the universe. The vibe I get is that 90% of all their referrals are crap. As for the smaller companies, most of them really don't need an advertising campaign with global (or even regional) reach, or they don't have effective websites to refer to, or have the belief that advertising on the web (in terms of banners and text on a non-search website) is ignored.
What's the answer? If I knew I wouldn't be posting it on Slashdot :-) Maybe some kind of City Guide (yellow pages+wikipedia+restaurant menus) with news as a sideline (to keep the updated content high and keep the search engines coming back).
This is a post from "Image Mechanics," a business that apparently manages tons of image files, on their blog:
http://www.deathtofilm.com/2006/11/12/image-mechanics-off-line-archiving-system/
Long story short, they write to an external removable hard drive and then store the raw drives in blocks of anti-static foam cut to hold the drives that then fits into a filing cabinet.
You see, its a not too well known fact that you can create atomic bomb simulations by writing iTunes visualizer plugins. The better your design, the bigger the explosion on the screen.
And interestingly enough, all modern US atomic weapons license House of Pain's "Jump Around" directly from iTunes ... something about a timing dependency, I'm not sure.
Now the rumor that the whole US economy can be modeled with a secret visualizer run against "Bohemian Rhapsody" is just crazy.
I tend to agree with the folks who have said this would be better as a grassroots thing rather than a top-down decision.
Some things you should probably find out before you start pushing:
* How much money does the state spend on non-OSS software for the schools? Most folks aren't OSS activists or care about the "freedom" of students and teachers and are going to look at OSS strictly in terms of dollars and cents. Also, Microsoft will probably be giving generous discounts to the state -- especially if you become successful in sparking interest in changing things. In fact I wouldn't be too surprised if you found "allies" who really are only concerned with getting a better deal from Microsoft.
* The replacement cost will have to include the cost of training and administration -- do you know what computers are in the school system, who has responsibility for them, what software is loaded on them, how they are used (in practice, not as documented)?
* Do you have a group of parents and teachers who want or are willing to change? The teachers especially can make your plan fail pretty easily if they feel pushed into something.
* How much software is legislatively or bureaucratically mandatory? Is there a State-wide software package (or packages) that the schools have to use? Did the state create this software themselves? Will it run on the end-user systems with the same reliability that it does now?
* Are you going to replace the servers and server software or just the end-user desktops? What part of the State bureaucracy runs the end-user stuff and what part of the State bureaucracy runs the servers (would not be surprised if it were different people)?
* What are the end-user computers used for? Will there be an untold number of overly-complex MS Office forms that won't be formatted properly in Open Office (the answer here is "yes," by the way)? How will those documents be handled? Are there any difficult to replace software packages used by the teachers? How much of the teacher's training materials will have to be fixed or dumped and re-written and how much staff time will that take? Are there gadgets that you don't care about that the staff does that may not work as expected with OSS computers?
Note that you cannot *just* aim for cheaper or "freer" (although it better be cheaper) you will need to be able to prove that OSS will provide a better experience for the admins, teachers, students and taxpayer.
You don't need to mathematically prove anything you are trying to sell. Think about it, does Match.com try to mathematically prove that their site is the best? Does Apple show the equations to prove that the iTouch is right mp3 player to buy? Yeah, they provide "statistics" -- but if you study the advertising, that isn't what they focus on.
You sell things through emotion and personality (which means a math heavy dating site might be a hit with math geeks, so maybe there you go).
In my town 911 has the "COPS" theme song as the ring-back tone.
(And then they get angry at you for not texting them instead, I think they have a rate-plan issue)
I did similar stuff in High School as well, so I feel bad raining on your parade -- but "freaky and confusing" aren't good bullet points for security software. Most good security software keeps working when everyone knows the algorithm, in fact a lot of people won't trust encryption systems unless the algorithm is public. The reason people complain about security through obscurity is that it usualy fails, things built in secret by a few people contain flaws because the software isn't peer reviewed.
For example, one thing to remember is that everything from mouse waving to clicking to keyboarding is just a stream of bytes. If you've built your security program correctly, all you have is a very long key that is just as vulnerable to mouse and key capture as a short key. If you've built the program incorrectly, then it should be fairly trivial to bypass everything but the "real invisible password entry box" (which, again, is just a stream of bytes on your USB cable), and if you've done a really bad job, then dissasembling the application will give up the key itself.
Besides that, what happens to the archive once you open it? If the file is resident in RAM or in a temp file somewhere, then a bad acting application could access it then.
And -- if you have enough physical security to keep people from installing capture utilities on your machine, then you have enough security to just need a password, and the "freaky" steps are a waste of time.
That said, I'm sure your porn collection or whatever is safe.
Back when all you needed was a VT100 and computers didn't have audio devices, you didn't have all this bloat.
But if you must play mpg files, then my vote is mpg123 -- a nice command line mpg file player, you can even pipe the output to the screen. Or decode to a WAV file, modify that in Perl, then send it to a SOAP application on another server that routes it to your boombox -- all without any pointing or clicking!
If you want to have real control over your music collection, and don't want to have your files hidden by a candy interface...
$ cd ~/my_music/hip_hop
$ ls
MC_Frontalot
$ cd MC*
$ ls
Nerdcore_HipHop.mp3 Penny_Arcade_Theme.mp3
$ mpg123 -qy *.mp3
Its funny because, of course, the only purpose of a Chevy is to hit people. Since no one uses them for any other purpose and no one re-uses them (because they get smashed when they hit someone) the model year of a Chevy is a good rough indicator of when a person got hit and, therefore, a way to establish a minimum age for that person.
See?
Remember that the whole approach with the Apple iPhone has been desktop class functionality, with a familiar Mac OS X API on the backend for developers (if any are given the opportunity to do so).
... it even required its own special programing language (NewtonScript, based on Self).
With the Newton -- and I both owned and played around with development on a MessagePad 130 -- *everything* was different. The idea of how it would be used, the user interface, data storage model, the APIs
Few users wanted to pay a lot of money for something that couldn't run desktop applications and a lot of potential developers were turned off by the odd-ball APIs and NewtonScript (I don't know that you could port from C, more like re-write from C).
If Apple/Cingular could comes down off their high-horse and allow third party developers then iPhone could be everything that the Newton wasn't and really have a chance of being the next Apple, Macintosh, etc. It would be great to see the basic iPhone framework, for example, licensed to folks like Axiotron so that a real Mac OS X tablet computer could be made.
As it is, I hate to think that The Next Big Thing is some consumerist toy, instead of a general purpose computing device.
If I remember correctly, there wasn't anything except the BIOS or something like it and BASIC. It used to be that any IBM PC would load (from chip, not disk) a BASIC interpreter if the BIOS couldn't find a bootable disk.
Again, if I'm remembering correctly, a quick history of desktop computers (post Altair):
1) Computers with no disk, just a tiny bit of RAM and a BASIC interpreter that loads on boot. The BASIC interpreter may have a tape loader or a way to print.
2) Computers with disks (but maybe just floppies) need a Disk Operating System (DOS, eh? Also early versions of Mac OS) so the computer can allow the operator to look at files on the disk and edit or run them. The engineers didn't call them OSs (for the most part) as they knew that the mini computers had the real OSs.
3) Computers that require hard drives and load kernels and user environments that allow more than one application to be running at the same time (Windows, Mac OS 6 (?)).
I remember books that talked about DOSes as being the next hot thing, and were full of speculation as to which one would end up on top...
If you buy a cellphone and service with a carrier and download ringtones from the carrier's ringtone store (or another store even), or buy whole songs from the carrier can you:
A) Move those songs and ringtones to a new phone with the same carrier?
B) Movie those songs and ringtones to a new phone on a different carrier?
I looked at a bunch of FAQs and the Cingular and Sony music websites and the answer was NO in BOTH cases. To me, the lock in seems much, much worse with cellphones (which are trying to be the new walkman/ipod) and yet everyone wants to jump on Apple. I would think much more of these Euro countries if they had blasted all the gadgets instead of just one popular one.
But I think it would be hilarious if there was a complicated formula for what county's laws came into play based on where the component parts came from, where it was assembled, where it was purchased and where it was used.
So if the parts came from China, it was assembled in Mexico, purchased in New York by someone who lived in Norway you could be sued by Canada for not listening to enough French language music.
Okay, maybe that isn't *that* funny.
From what I hear it is difficult for an American to shop the Japanese iTunes store (I think there was a story about that recently, in fact). Apple does direct people in specific countries to specific versions of the iTunes store and only accepts payments from that country. The gambling sites probably aren't bothering to do that.
... right? I mean there are CD stores and Emusic, etc. in Norway as well, right?
Also I imagine that Apple does have some kind of presence in Norway, they are a little bit above a gambling service, after all.
My actual concern is governments interfering with people from entering into agreements with other people. Some people will react with horror that you can only share a purchased iTunes song on a handful of MS Windows or Mac OS X machines and a few other iPods, other people will think that this is a perfectly reasonable offer. I prefer governments who allow me to choose and only prevent *actual* fraud and theft.
Also (and I'm sure that this has been mentioned a million times) the iTunes store is not the only place you can purchase music in Norway. Wait
As long as the consumer has a choice between doing business with Apple or not, I'm not sure why there is a big fuss over the popularity of a certain family of iPods.
Full Disclosure: I own a G5 tower, purchase music from iTunes and I do have an old 10 GB iPod. But I think it is dumb for a 40-year-old to bebop around with those white earphones, no normally I listen to music at home played by the computer (and some non-crappy speakers).
Well, it is obvious to me that a device designed by an American company (regardless of where it was actually manufactured) should carry with it the force of American law regardless of the country in which it was sold or the nationality of the purchaser.
It is an egregious burden to force American companies to know and understand the rules of a bunch of countries that don't even speak English all of the time.
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(Which is almost on topic)
Back before I was using iTunes, I had a combination of a somewhat odd directory structure and a simple Perl script controlling mpg123 to handle my "random" shuffle.
The way it worked was this:
A command line option specified the depth of the repeat stack. The repeat stack was where the file names of the last x played songs were stored (FIFO). The repeat stack was used to prevent the same file name from being played more than once every x songs.
Another command line option specified the starting place in the directory structure.
When run, the script looked in the the starting folder and built a list of any '.mp(2|3)' files *and* any subdirectories then choose randomly from the list. If it selected a directory it would move to that directory and choose again, if it selected a song file it would pass it to mpg123, put the file name in the repeat stack and then start the main loop again (going back to the starting directory). If it selected a song file whose file name was on the repeat stack, it skipped the song and went back to the main loop. If a directory had no song files it would build a list of subdirectories and then choose one of them -- if it ran itself into a dead end, it would go back to the top of the loop and the main directory.
So, yes, if the repeat stack was larger than the number of available song files, it would eventually just sit there and do nothing.
To 'organize' my song file collection what I did was have my mp3s mostly in directories and subdirectories by genre, group, album but with some directories arranged more haphazardly and containing mixes of song files and sub directories.
Obviously, the more buried the song file was in the directory structure, the less likely it would play. So some of the stuff I had collected, but didn't always want to hear, so I would bury those files. If I was in the mood for a specific genre I'd just start at that genre's place in the directory structure. If I was going to let it run for a long time and didn't want to hear the same song twice, I'd just make the repeat stack really long.
It worked well, and I was experimenting with the option of a true random walk (i.e. don't return to the top of the directory structure each time and allow it to choose to go "up" in the directory structure as well as down) and the announcing of the song by taking the text of the tags and creating a mp3 file and playing it (or at random intervals saying "This W C R A Z Y, the time is X XX").
But then they released iTunes, and I got fat and lazy.