If Mr. Hillis is the genius you say he is, then perhaps he has a better idea of what might be important in the future than you or I.
Possibly true, but his day job is at Disney. Hard to see that working for Disney offers much opportunity to change the world. Rather, it appears to be the move of a man who found that his doctoral work was not wanted by the market. The "Long Now Foundation" and it's big clock is an interesting experiment in pyramid building, but the learn a little about the history of the pyramids to see just how pointless it is trying to build anything less rugged than a huge stone pile.
Reading about this, I can't help thinking about the brilliant and doomed Connection Machine. It was a hypercube of ~65000 processors engineered by Danny Hillis, a genius engineer in the same class as Cray.
But they never sold well enough, not because of the cost, but because there were few programmers who could imagine how to break a problem down so it could be run efficiently on all these processors. Other than real-time ray-tracing and weather simulations (astonishing particle systems) people couldn't figure it out.
If someone had managed to figure out how to perform a database queries efficiently with this type of massively parallel machine, they would have sold like very expensive hotcakes, Thinking Machines Corp would still be around, and Danny Hillis wouldn't be wasting his time dicking around with a huge dumb clock.
Given that we didn't know what to do with a machine that could deliver ~65,000 answers at once, what do we expect to do with one that can deliver all possible answers at once?
Ah...it's appears you've confused "Legos" with "L'Eggos", the snap-together waffle breakfast. I can remember many enjoyable hours making fun toys out of these otherwise inedible breakfast treats, asking my Mom to toast just a few more so I can finish what I was building.
It also has built in ethernet. For a camera it's pretty cool. Although the video capture is only crummy at best.
More than that: It has a built in IP stack for that Ethernet (actually in the battery replacement power supply) and...wait for it...a Web Server!
I know, because I demoed this unit for an audio-video store in Kansas City. You can set the IP to anything you want, and serve an intranet with the sucker. Works passably well, though I wouldn't want to actually put it on the big, bad Internet (H3y d00D!!!! I 0wN y3r Cam3ra!!!!!!!)
It's one of those "what the..." products that the Japanese seem to come out with as trial balloons. It's a poor choice for a video recorder, but a killer video-res still camera...2600 stills on one disc should keep even the snap-happiest happy. The idea purchaser is a person who needs to shoot loads of 640 x 480 images and share them quickly. A real estate agent is a logical buyer.
No, not in current usage, but back when Carlin came up with his list (1970s) it most definitely was. Of course, Carlin himself had a later routine about all the swear words he had forgotten to include. But his "seven words" became canonical when a Pacifica radio station played his bit and was slapped by the FCC. It went all the way to the Supreme Court, if I'm not mistaken.
Wha? Whats going on here? Do we need censorship? Cartman was right. What's wrong with fuck? Why do we need to *bleep* every word that might infect childrens minds? Parents complain saying that their kids shouldn't hear those words. Then they go off, when they are mad, and feed the words to the face of the kid when they blow their top or start arguing.
Right. Anyone claiming to be offended by a particular "profane" word is a hypocrite. Seriously. If you know the word, then the profanity exists within you already. If you know what the word "fuck" means, then any "offense" you may feel is a reaction to the profane knowledge you already possess. If you don't know what a word means, or if it has no profane connotations for you (for instance, Americans using the Commonwealth swear words "bloody" and "shag" without the associated offensive intent) then it's not profane. Little Timmy is not going to be warped by hearing the word "fuck", and more than he would be hearing the same idea in a foreign language.
Realistically. What makes the damned words bad? For example. Shit. Usual meaning: poo. So, if i say "poo" to someone, does that make it an offensive word?
An even better example: you can use any number of swear words on TV if they're in a language most viewers won't know. Schmuck and putz are OK, even on shows where calling someone a dick wouldn't be acceptable.
Whiye knot holed the solder in yer mouthe? I no it's made uf lead butt eye doo it all het time und eye hav had know problums yet.
Hehehehe...
Seriously though, I can't even begin to imagine the long-term effects of half of the toxic substances I used have to deal with my job. Between the pot of boiling lead for tinning wires and carcinogenic chemicals we used to watch the resin off the boards, I don't believe I want to know what my anticipated life expectancy is.
Lucky for me, I am now dealing with components only after they've been assembled, the toxic residue of the computer industry being confined to poor people in countries far away from us.
And why not? I've always wanted a third hand -- wouldn't that be COOL?
What, you mean soldering doesn't excite you?
Yeah, a real hacker would figure out a way to hold the extra items without having to use his hands.
Well, don't know if I'm a "real hacker"...I suspect I solder far too well to be a hacker. Most of the electronics hackers I've known had the soldering skills of a chimp on acid. I can say this because I used to build all the one-offs and production prototypes for a company. The hacked piles of wires and chips that I got to work from were rife with cold joints, globbed solder, etc.
But you do eventually learn to hold more than two things with two hands...holding a coil of solder in the fingers of the same hand that holds the soldering iron, holding the board and a pair of plyers with the other hand.
However, I wasn't aware that the word 'tits' had become acceptable. 'Teats' maybe... 'Piss' I'd believe though.
"Tits" was first un-bleeped on the "Tonight Show". I heard Simon LeBon of Duran Duran use the word. This was several years ago. "Piss" they only seem to allow as part of "pissed off", rather than "I gotta piss like a racehorse" or "piss off".
George Carlin's original "7 Words You Can't Say on TV" were:
Shit
Piss
Fuck
Cunt
Cocksucker
Mutherfucker
Tits
Of course two of the words, piss and tits, are now ok. What's next? I have my my money on "shit". It's a very useful word, and all the alternatives are either childish (poop) or overly prim (feces).
I heard they axed the musical production numbers from the oscars this year. good riddance.
Production numbers (the huge, insipid, time-wasting "tributes" and such like the "Lord of The Dance" idiocy of a year or two ago) are different than the songs. Yeah, good riddance to them, but not having the songs performed is something entirely different. That's like not having a clip from the Best Movie nominiees.
Though I supposed the avoided the far superior "UncleFucka" for obvious reasons. I would have gone with that or "What Would Brian Boitano Do" for sure.
The really wonderful bit is imagining the huge stupid Academy Awards production number to the song! Debbie Allen is going to have a conniption fit trying to come up with something for all the idiotic dancers to do for the song.
On a sad note, the singer of most of the song, Mary Kay Bergman took her own life. They'll have to get somebody else to do it...Ceilene Dion maybe?
..under the name of VHS v. Beta fiasco. Oh well...
Actually, it's not DVD vs. Beta (both of which were successful for a time) as it is the usual "Sony does something, so Panasonic does something different" thing. Sony introduced their "Memory Stick", so Panasonic introduced their "SD Module". Why? Because they wanted to have something that was NOT Sony. Sony introduced the Mini-disc, Philips introduced the DCC (remember that?). Sony is as guilty. In the consumer video market, the DV format is universal and wel like. But in the Pro market, Sony came out with DVCAM, Panasonic came out with DVC-PRO, both with limited downward compatibility. The laughable part? Neither format is actually better quality...both are the same level of compression as the consumer product!
This is about each Japanese manufacturer and Philips trying to push their own format and make a huge pile from being the winner and licencing their format to the losers. What we need is a format that they can all agree on and put the patents into a pool.
Re:Hate to be a spoilsport, but...
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Yeah, maybe true, but he was referring to the see through perspex case mentioned earlier
Exactly, thanks. Transparent cases might be a lot of fun, but if someone ran a pair of over-clocked processors and an overclocked graphics card in one, they'd put out as much RF garbage as the average blender!
I'll give you an idea how much history has been re-written. The Chicago electric utility Commonwealth Edison produced a TV program for kids that claimed Thomas Edison provided the electricity for that World's Fair! When I called them on it, they claimed the information had been provided by a Northwestern University history professor!
Edison, at the time, was electrocuting elephants in front of live audiences to "prove" how evil AC power was.
Of course, the real forgotton man in all this was Charles Proteus Steinmetz, who actually invented all the bit that made AC distribution work.
Hate to be a spoilsport, but...
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Cases are usually made out of metal for a very good reason - RF interference. I have most of my computers in the same room as all my audio and video equipment. I went through and used metal foil tape on all the large holes in each of my computer cases (like unused drive bay openings), added chokes to each of the video cables, and used a sheilded AC cord on each machine.
The result? Less noise on my cable TV, a lower noise floor on my audio and a feeling of pride that I'm not contributing to the sea of RF hash generated by all those people pushing their computers past the limits of sanity.
P.S. Plastic cases from reputable makers have metal shields inside. Macs have RF generating bits individually shielded.
Yes, but you have done those things precisely because you wanted to hack these things in your life. Car freaks hack their cars. If they are just putting new fuzzy dice and matching seat covers, they're doing a lame job of hacking. If they are turning a straight car into a racing machine, they are doing some serious hacking, and deserve to be respected for it as hackers.
But that does not get around the basic fact that the vast majority of the cars on the road, refriderators in the kitchen, and TVs in the living rooms are bog standard, and un-hacked.
This is normal. The first computer owners, people who bought Altairs and the like, had to build the freaking things from scratch, soldering each connector and chip in, and write their own OSes. Later people were able to buy pre-built hardware and get software and OSes written by other people. Do you know anyone who still builds his/her own motherboards? Who'd toggle an entire OS in by hand in octal via front-panel switches?
It's progress. At some point, computers will essentially disappear, in the same way that motors "disappeared" into all the appliances in your home.
When electric appliances first appeared, people bought a single motor and a variety of different attachments. One motor would function for a mixer, sewing machine, drill...whatever. Eventually electric motors became cheap enough that people started buying "appliances" (devices that the motors were "applied" to) with built-in motors.
And that's where we are. Currently you have a single large, fast processor in a box, with various boards and software "applied" to it. But it's just nowhere near as flexible as having individual devices optimized their own purposes.
For instance, you can watch TV on your computer monitor exclusivley...but few of us do. A TV set does the job (usually) as well. Even though there are some things the PC TV tuner card can do that the TV set cannot (creating automatic transcripts), the interface of the average TV set is hard to beat.
Personally, I'd like to have a bullet-proof box to recommend to people. My brother the plumber does not want, or need, the flexibility of a full-fleged computer to check his e-mail, browse the web and write a few letters. Neither does my Mom...and I could live without the support hassles.
If it had BeOS in it, so much the better. This is a no-brainer from my point of view. No downside. Besides, this is what will make FreeBe possible...seed the developers with a free OS to play with, and cheap to include in finished products.
The following is a letter I wrote several months ago to the editor of "Performing Songwriter" magazine about a column written by Bill Parsons" about the "Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act" and the "Fairness In Music Licencing Act". I make a number of points that I believe are valid and would like to share them with a larger number of people. The editor never responded.
We've been subscribers to Performing Songwriter for a number of years.
In general, we enjoy the content, especially Janis Ian's column. But one item has always bothered me. Your lack of a letters column. I realize that your publishing schedule and limited editorial space might make this a bit more difficult, but the fact is that you don't do so even on your web site, where space is for all practical purposes unlimited.
This lack has kept me from writing about something else that has annoyed me to no end for quite some time: Bill Parson's "Legislative Update". I realize Parsons is a performing songwriter, but I suspect that is not his primary source of income. He is singing from the RIAA/ASCAP/BMI songbook, and in the interest of full disclosure perhaps you should reveal who he has received a paycheck from this year. My point is, he sounds exactly like a lobbyist. His web page on songs.com states that he is "...a former aide to consumer advocate Ralph Nader". I have no problem with that...just with who is he *currently* aiding?*
Now, I have no problem with political debate, but you have provided no forum for anyone to respond to Parson's ill-considered attacks on the public domain, and passionate defense of the rights of huge publishing empires under the disingenuous guise of "protecting the rights of songwriters".
But this latest, an attack on Eric Eldred is the worst. As the editor, did you bother to visit the Eldred Press web site? Parsons paints Eldred as a commercial publisher, trying to weasel out of paying for work. This is so far from the truth that it verges on libelous.
Does this look like the commercial entity that Parson's implies? I quote Parsons:
"Eldrich Press is run by Eric Eldred, who publishes old and lesser known books on the internet. To minimize his costs, Eldred focuses mainly on works whose copyrights have fallen into the public domain and are therefore available to the public to use free of charge."
The implication is that Eldred has a commercial interest (a reasonable assumption from someone I assume to be a lobbyist). The truth is, he does not, and never has. Also, the use of the loaded term "fallen into the public domain". Read the Constitution: the public domain is the intended repository of all creative works. Copyright is a limited right, granted for a limited period of time. For 28 years to be extended to 150 years is a mockery.
Perhaps this is hard to grasp, the intention of the framers that everything should naturally fall into the public domain. I find it useful to imagine that Benjamin Franklin had never invented the public lending library. Imagine that tomorrow, someone tried to do so. Imagine the uproar from copyright holders:
"What! You want to use tax dollars to buy our product and let people use it for free?!? You want to put copy machines in thebuilding?!"
This modern day Franklin would never get away with it...they'dcrucify him.
Also, I'd suggest exercising some editorial discretion and rein in Parson's annoying habit of referring to the "(Un)Fairness In Music Licensing Act". It might have been "cute" the first time, but lacking a balancing opposing viewpoint, it's just childish.
And frankly, childishness is the major issue here. It takes children some years to learn to share, and to realize the greater good for all accomplished by sharing. And that's what this is about - the desire of one man (Eldred) to share works that are no longer producing income for their original creators, as the very grown-up framers of the Constitution intended. Here's the passage fromArticle 1:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to theirrespective Writings and Discoveries"
You can find a lot more about this from the following page:
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension act was bought and paid for by a group that contributed more lobbying money than the tobacco companies combined. Parsons claims that it benefits performing songwriters. This is a damned lie. It extends the term of copyright from 50 years after any songwriter is dead and gone to 70 years after their heart has stopped beating. In what possible way does this benefit any songwriter? That, in the unlikely event one of your songs remains popular for 70 years after you're dead, your great-grandchildren rather than your grandchildren will be on the gravy train? And it is a nice train..."Rhapsody In Blue" sold to United Airlines for a cool half-million - providing a lot of money to use to ensure the train keep right on running.
Parsons is appealing to songwriters, none of whom will receive the any benefit from it, that this act is a good thing. Do you believe that there is some great social good accomplished by making a few "trust fund babies" that outweighs the vast social good accomplished by having a large and thriving public domain? Because, that's the ultimate goal of the copyright extensionists. The elimination of the public domain.
Try to imagine a world where Stephen Foster's songs had never entered the public domain. Public domain keeps songs alive, by making it easy for publishers to keep them in print, to provide a world of tunes that songwriters can use to embroider into their own work.
Because the truth is, songwriters do not create melodies. They discover them. In western music, there are a finite number of possible melodies, even fewer in the popular keys. Every songwriter "creates" a melody at some time, only to later find out that Mozart had used it while he was still in diapers. Try to imagine that the basic 4-bar blues riff was copyrighted; that's the world that Parsons wants for us.
A good example of how overly long copyright periods inhibit artists: Kate Bush wrote a song using Molly Bloom's speech from "Ulysses". The song fit the words beautifully and it was nearly ready from release when the Joyce estate refused permission. No amount of bargaining could get Joyce's grandson to relent, and Kate had to "re-write the speech" into her song "The Sensual World". James Joyce didn't refuse Kate permission, his grandson did. He's proven to be the bane of Joyce scholars his entire life, and now will for generations to come.
There's a lot more I could write about this, but the fact that you have no avenue for your readers to respond, to present the opposing side of a political lobbying effort, makes my effort seem pointless. I can only hope that you'll make an effort to see the entire picture, and not just the one that some people are paid to promote. When looking at political issuse, the phrase "follow the money" is apt: look to see which side has a large amount of money to promote it's effort; the side that has less money is the one more likely to have the public's best interest at heart.
Didn't get to be judges because they're stupid, I think.. Who knows, maybe one will come along soon to prove me wrong..
Well...we lucked out with a bright judge. Tons of judges are political appointees or ran for office, and are often as bright as a single mini Christmas-tree bulb.
There's an old lawyer joke:
Q: "What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 80? A: "Your Honor"
It was Disney and Universal vs. Sony over the Betamax. It went to the Supreme Court, and the gist of the opinion was (IMO) a privacy issue. That Americans have the right to do what they wish in the privacy of their own home.
This is why we have three branches in our government...so when the legislature is too beholden to special interests, and too dependent on getting re-elected, the appointed-for-life Justices will balance it out by canceling bad laws.
I think you mean the Hughes/JVC system. One thing that people haven't really been talking about, and it's a biggy, is that the mediocre digital images may have been shown in 1080i. I've seen both systems with both progressive and interlaced. Interlaced HD can show interline artifacts.
Come on, virtually every effects-laden movie has been digitized at least once. Kodak's Cineon system, Inferno, whatever. The film is used for image capture of live scenes and final projection in the theater. Between then, there are any number of digital steps.
Re:The solution to NASA's funding woes
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Install cameras and charge pay-per-view. That would get most of America's attention. Hell, you could pay for a lot more than 2.5 years under that funding model.
Been done. Private, the Swedish p0rn giant, produced the "Uranus Project" featuring the first sex in zero-g. They rented a plane like the famous "Vomit Comet" that Ron Howard used to shoot "Apollo 13". Personally, I'm amazed that anyone could perform in a plane climbing and diving, over and over. The wonders of Viagra.
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Possibly true, but his day job is at Disney. Hard to see that working for Disney offers much opportunity to change the world. Rather, it appears to be the move of a man who found that his doctoral work was not wanted by the market. The "Long Now Foundation" and it's big clock is an interesting experiment in pyramid building, but the learn a little about the history of the pyramids to see just how pointless it is trying to build anything less rugged than a huge stone pile.
Reading about this, I can't help thinking about the brilliant and doomed Connection Machine. It was a hypercube of ~65000 processors engineered by Danny Hillis, a genius engineer in the same class as Cray.
But they never sold well enough, not because of the cost, but because there were few programmers who could imagine how to break a problem down so it could be run efficiently on all these processors. Other than real-time ray-tracing and weather simulations (astonishing particle systems) people couldn't figure it out.
If someone had managed to figure out how to perform a database queries efficiently with this type of massively parallel machine, they would have sold like very expensive hotcakes, Thinking Machines Corp would still be around, and Danny Hillis wouldn't be wasting his time dicking around with a huge dumb clock.
Given that we didn't know what to do with a machine that could deliver ~65,000 answers at once, what do we expect to do with one that can deliver all possible answers at once?
Ah...it's appears you've confused "Legos" with "L'Eggos", the snap-together waffle breakfast. I can remember many enjoyable hours making fun toys out of these otherwise inedible breakfast treats, asking my Mom to toast just a few more so I can finish what I was building.
Or maybe it was just me.
More than that: It has a built in IP stack for that Ethernet (actually in the battery replacement power supply) and...wait for it...a Web Server!
I know, because I demoed this unit for an audio-video store in Kansas City. You can set the IP to anything you want, and serve an intranet with the sucker. Works passably well, though I wouldn't want to actually put it on the big, bad Internet (H3y d00D!!!! I 0wN y3r Cam3ra!!!!!!!)
It's one of those "what the..." products that the Japanese seem to come out with as trial balloons. It's a poor choice for a video recorder, but a killer video-res still camera...2600 stills on one disc should keep even the snap-happiest happy. The idea purchaser is a person who needs to shoot loads of 640 x 480 images and share them quickly. A real estate agent is a logical buyer.
No, not in current usage, but back when Carlin came up with his list (1970s) it most definitely was. Of course, Carlin himself had a later routine about all the swear words he had forgotten to include. But his "seven words" became canonical when a Pacifica radio station played his bit and was slapped by the FCC. It went all the way to the Supreme Court, if I'm not mistaken.
Almost, but not quite. Carlin's "Seven Deadly Words" are:
Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits"
Right. Anyone claiming to be offended by a particular "profane" word is a hypocrite. Seriously. If you know the word, then the profanity exists within you already. If you know what the word "fuck" means, then any "offense" you may feel is a reaction to the profane knowledge you already possess. If you don't know what a word means, or if it has no profane connotations for you (for instance, Americans using the Commonwealth swear words "bloody" and "shag" without the associated offensive intent) then it's not profane. Little Timmy is not going to be warped by hearing the word "fuck", and more than he would be hearing the same idea in a foreign language.
An even better example: you can use any number of swear words on TV if they're in a language most viewers won't know. Schmuck and putz are OK, even on shows where calling someone a dick wouldn't be acceptable.
Hehehehe...
Seriously though, I can't even begin to imagine the long-term effects of half of the toxic substances I used have to deal with my job. Between the pot of boiling lead for tinning wires and carcinogenic chemicals we used to watch the resin off the boards, I don't believe I want to know what my anticipated life expectancy is.
Lucky for me, I am now dealing with components only after they've been assembled, the toxic residue of the computer industry being confined to poor people in countries far away from us.
Note: The above is sarcasm.
Well, don't know if I'm a "real hacker"...I suspect I solder far too well to be a hacker. Most of the electronics hackers I've known had the soldering skills of a chimp on acid. I can say this because I used to build all the one-offs and production prototypes for a company. The hacked piles of wires and chips that I got to work from were rife with cold joints, globbed solder, etc.
But you do eventually learn to hold more than two things with two hands...holding a coil of solder in the fingers of the same hand that holds the soldering iron, holding the board and a pair of plyers with the other hand.
"Tits" was first un-bleeped on the "Tonight Show". I heard Simon LeBon of Duran Duran use the word. This was several years ago. "Piss" they only seem to allow as part of "pissed off", rather than "I gotta piss like a racehorse" or "piss off".
Just to clarify:
George Carlin's original "7 Words You Can't Say on TV" were:
Of course two of the words, piss and tits, are now ok. What's next? I have my my money on "shit". It's a very useful word, and all the alternatives are either childish (poop) or overly prim (feces).
Production numbers (the huge, insipid, time-wasting "tributes" and such like the "Lord of The Dance" idiocy of a year or two ago) are different than the songs. Yeah, good riddance to them, but not having the songs performed is something entirely different. That's like not having a clip from the Best Movie nominiees.
The really wonderful bit is imagining the huge stupid Academy Awards production number to the song! Debbie Allen is going to have a conniption fit trying to come up with something for all the idiotic dancers to do for the song.
On a sad note, the singer of most of the song, Mary Kay Bergman took her own life. They'll have to get somebody else to do it...Ceilene Dion maybe?
Actually, it's not DVD vs. Beta (both of which were successful for a time) as it is the usual "Sony does something, so Panasonic does something different" thing. Sony introduced their "Memory Stick", so Panasonic introduced their "SD Module". Why? Because they wanted to have something that was NOT Sony. Sony introduced the Mini-disc, Philips introduced the DCC (remember that?). Sony is as guilty. In the consumer video market, the DV format is universal and wel like. But in the Pro market, Sony came out with DVCAM, Panasonic came out with DVC-PRO, both with limited downward compatibility. The laughable part? Neither format is actually better quality...both are the same level of compression as the consumer product!
This is about each Japanese manufacturer and Philips trying to push their own format and make a huge pile from being the winner and licencing their format to the losers. What we need is a format that they can all agree on and put the patents into a pool.
Exactly, thanks. Transparent cases might be a lot of fun, but if someone ran a pair of over-clocked processors and an overclocked graphics card in one, they'd put out as much RF garbage as the average blender!
I'll give you an idea how much history has been re-written. The Chicago electric utility Commonwealth Edison produced a TV program for kids that claimed Thomas Edison provided the electricity for that World's Fair! When I called them on it, they claimed the information had been provided by a Northwestern University history professor!
Edison, at the time, was electrocuting elephants in front of live audiences to "prove" how evil AC power was.
Of course, the real forgotton man in all this was Charles Proteus Steinmetz, who actually invented all the bit that made AC distribution work.
Cases are usually made out of metal for a very good reason - RF interference. I have most of my computers in the same room as all my audio and video equipment. I went through and used metal foil tape on all the large holes in each of my computer cases (like unused drive bay openings), added chokes to each of the video cables, and used a sheilded AC cord on each machine.
The result? Less noise on my cable TV, a lower noise floor on my audio and a feeling of pride that I'm not contributing to the sea of RF hash generated by all those people pushing their computers past the limits of sanity.
P.S. Plastic cases from reputable makers have metal shields inside. Macs have RF generating bits individually shielded.
Yes, but you have done those things precisely because you wanted to hack these things in your life. Car freaks hack their cars. If they are just putting new fuzzy dice and matching seat covers, they're doing a lame job of hacking. If they are turning a straight car into a racing machine, they are doing some serious hacking, and deserve to be respected for it as hackers.
But that does not get around the basic fact that the vast majority of the cars on the road, refriderators in the kitchen, and TVs in the living rooms are bog standard, and un-hacked.
This is normal. The first computer owners, people who bought Altairs and the like, had to build the freaking things from scratch, soldering each connector and chip in, and write their own OSes. Later people were able to buy pre-built hardware and get software and OSes written by other people. Do you know anyone who still builds his/her own motherboards? Who'd toggle an entire OS in by hand in octal via front-panel switches?
It's progress. At some point, computers will essentially disappear, in the same way that motors "disappeared" into all the appliances in your home.
When electric appliances first appeared, people bought a single motor and a variety of different attachments. One motor would function for a mixer, sewing machine, drill...whatever. Eventually electric motors became cheap enough that people started buying "appliances" (devices that the motors were "applied" to) with built-in motors.
And that's where we are. Currently you have a single large, fast processor in a box, with various boards and software "applied" to it. But it's just nowhere near as flexible as having individual devices optimized their own purposes.
For instance, you can watch TV on your computer monitor exclusivley...but few of us do. A TV set does the job (usually) as well. Even though there are some things the PC TV tuner card can do that the TV set cannot (creating automatic transcripts), the interface of the average TV set is hard to beat.
Personally, I'd like to have a bullet-proof box to recommend to people. My brother the plumber does not want, or need, the flexibility of a full-fleged computer to check his e-mail, browse the web and write a few letters. Neither does my Mom...and I could live without the support hassles.
If it had BeOS in it, so much the better. This is a no-brainer from my point of view. No downside. Besides, this is what will make FreeBe possible...seed the developers with a free OS to play with, and cheap to include in finished products.
The following is a letter I wrote several months ago to the editor of "Performing Songwriter" magazine about a column written by Bill Parsons" about the "Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act" and the "Fairness In Music Licencing Act". I make a number of points that I believe are valid and would like to share them with a larger number of people. The editor never responded.
We've been subscribers to Performing Songwriter for a number of years.
In general, we enjoy the content, especially Janis Ian's column. But one item has always bothered me. Your lack of a letters column. I realize that your publishing schedule and limited editorial space might make this a bit more difficult, but the fact is that you don't do so even on your web site, where space is for all practical purposes unlimited.
This lack has kept me from writing about something else that has annoyed me to no end for quite some time: Bill Parson's "Legislative Update". I realize Parsons is a performing songwriter, but I suspect that is not his primary source of income. He is singing from the RIAA/ASCAP/BMI songbook, and in the interest of full disclosure perhaps you should reveal who he has received a paycheck from this year. My point is, he sounds exactly like a lobbyist. His web page on songs.com states that he is "...a former aide to consumer advocate Ralph Nader". I have no problem with that...just with who is he *currently* aiding?*
Now, I have no problem with political debate, but you have provided no forum for anyone to respond to Parson's ill-considered attacks on the public domain, and passionate defense of the rights of huge publishing empires under the disingenuous guise of "protecting the rights of songwriters".
But this latest, an attack on Eric Eldred is the worst. As the editor, did you bother to visit the Eldred Press web site? Parsons paints Eldred as a commercial publisher, trying to weasel out of paying for work. This is so far from the truth that it verges on libelous.
Here's Eric Eldred's web site:
http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net/
Does this look like the commercial entity that Parson's implies? I quote Parsons:
The implication is that Eldred has a commercial interest (a reasonable assumption from someone I assume to be a lobbyist). The truth is, he does not, and never has. Also, the use of the loaded term "fallen into the public domain". Read the Constitution: the public domain is the intended repository of all creative works. Copyright is a limited right, granted for a limited period of time. For 28 years to be extended to 150 years is a mockery.
Perhaps this is hard to grasp, the intention of the framers that everything should naturally fall into the public domain. I find it useful to imagine that Benjamin Franklin had never invented the public lending library. Imagine that tomorrow, someone tried to do so. Imagine the uproar from copyright holders:
This modern day Franklin would never get away with it...they'dcrucify him.
Also, I'd suggest exercising some editorial discretion and rein in Parson's annoying habit of referring to the "(Un)Fairness In Music Licensing Act". It might have been "cute" the first time, but lacking a balancing opposing viewpoint, it's just childish.
And frankly, childishness is the major issue here. It takes children some years to learn to share, and to realize the greater good for all accomplished by sharing. And that's what this is about - the desire of one man (Eldred) to share works that are no longer producing income for their original creators, as the very grown-up framers of the Constitution intended. Here's the passage fromArticle 1:
You can find a lot more about this from the following page:
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension act was bought and paid for by a group that contributed more lobbying money than the tobacco companies combined. Parsons claims that it benefits performing songwriters. This is a damned lie. It extends the term of copyright from 50 years after any songwriter is dead and gone to 70 years after their heart has stopped beating. In what possible way does this benefit any songwriter? That, in the unlikely event one of your songs remains popular for 70 years after you're dead, your great-grandchildren rather than your grandchildren will be on the gravy train? And it is a nice train..."Rhapsody In Blue" sold to United Airlines for a cool half-million - providing a lot of money to use to ensure the train keep right on running.
Parsons is appealing to songwriters, none of whom will receive the any benefit from it, that this act is a good thing. Do you believe that there is some great social good accomplished by making a few "trust fund babies" that outweighs the vast social good accomplished by having a large and thriving public domain? Because, that's the ultimate goal of the copyright extensionists. The elimination of the public domain.
Try to imagine a world where Stephen Foster's songs had never entered the public domain. Public domain keeps songs alive, by making it easy for publishers to keep them in print, to provide a world of tunes that songwriters can use to embroider into their own work.
Because the truth is, songwriters do not create melodies. They discover them. In western music, there are a finite number of possible melodies, even fewer in the popular keys. Every songwriter "creates" a melody at some time, only to later find out that Mozart had used it while he was still in diapers. Try to imagine that the basic 4-bar blues riff was copyrighted; that's the world that Parsons wants for us.
A good example of how overly long copyright periods inhibit artists: Kate Bush wrote a song using Molly Bloom's speech from "Ulysses". The song fit the words beautifully and it was nearly ready from release when the Joyce estate refused permission. No amount of bargaining could get Joyce's grandson to relent, and Kate had to "re-write the speech" into her song "The Sensual World". James Joyce didn't refuse Kate permission, his grandson did. He's proven to be the bane of Joyce scholars his entire life, and now will for generations to come.
There's a lot more I could write about this, but the fact that you have no avenue for your readers to respond, to present the opposing side of a political lobbying effort, makes my effort seem pointless. I can only hope that you'll make an effort to see the entire picture, and not just the one that some people are paid to promote. When looking at political issuse, the phrase "follow the money" is apt: look to see which side has a large amount of money to promote it's effort; the side that has less money is the one more likely to have the public's best interest at heart.
Well...we lucked out with a bright judge. Tons of judges are political appointees or ran for office, and are often as bright as a single mini Christmas-tree bulb.
There's an old lawyer joke:
Q: "What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 80?
A: "Your Honor"
It was Disney and Universal vs. Sony over the Betamax. It went to the Supreme Court, and the gist of the opinion was (IMO) a privacy issue. That Americans have the right to do what they wish in the privacy of their own home.
This is why we have three branches in our government...so when the legislature is too beholden to special interests, and too dependent on getting re-elected, the appointed-for-life Justices will balance it out by canceling bad laws.
Pretty damn smart, those Founding Fathers.
I think you mean the Hughes/JVC system. One thing that people haven't really been talking about, and it's a biggy, is that the mediocre digital images may have been shown in 1080i. I've seen both systems with both progressive and interlaced. Interlaced HD can show interline artifacts.
Come on, virtually every effects-laden movie has been digitized at least once. Kodak's Cineon system, Inferno, whatever. The film is used for image capture of live scenes and final projection in the theater. Between then, there are any number of digital steps.
Been done. Private, the Swedish p0rn giant, produced the "Uranus Project" featuring the first sex in zero-g. They rented a plane like the famous "Vomit Comet" that Ron Howard used to shoot "Apollo 13". Personally, I'm amazed that anyone could perform in a plane climbing and diving, over and over. The wonders of Viagra.