Yeah, I picked it up during their election promo, and I'm really impressed with it. Comparing my attempts to install Civilization 4 with Wine, vs. doing it with Crossover, Crossover was pure heaven.
Well, these days, hardware support is a big one. I don't use Windows myself, but I had to help some friends reinstall Windows on an infected machine. It wouldn't even find drivers for the network card without network access and manual selection! When I popped in an Ubuntu memory stick, it detected everything. Even the fricking webcam was functional during the installation process.
It's really amazing, considering that 7 years ago it was totally the other way around, you couldn't count on e.g. wireless cards working.
That's one of the factors keeping me on Linux, I suppose. I bet if I tried to build a Windows gaming rig, I would be stuck in driver hell and/or end up with a half-broken, underperforming system.
Interesting fact: Sam Lantinga and Ryan C. Gordon, who now work with Steam on Linux, also ported the original Alpha Centauri game for Loki. Apparently it had some extremely hairy self-modifying assembly code to make the modular units crawl on hills correctly. I'd say those guys are very qualified.
The most important development that will push games to Linux isn't Linux adoption by gamers, but lower costs of porting.
Increasingly, cross-platform development is a necessity. And if you're already being careful about not using platform-specific stuff (which you are if you're developing for Windows, consoles and OSX already), it becomes a simple question of middleware support. More and more engines support Linux these days, and Valve is committed to it. It will happen.
Meanwhile, I'm happy with Crossover and emulators/retrogames.
A confession should not be the end of the story. An instructive case in the news these days is the story of Sture Bergwall, better known under his serial killer name Thomas Quick. It turns out he likely didn't kill a single person - he was just a disturbed drug addict who made up stories (mostly under the influence of strong sedatives and "repressed memory therapy") to fit unsolved cases. They glossed over his inaccuracies, contradictions and the total lack of evidence in case after case, year after year.
(An interesting bit is that Bergwall's defender was the lawyer/politician Claes Borgstöm, who's currently infamous for pursuing Julian Assange. If he had done any due dilligence at all, he must have suspected something was amiss. You got to wonder if there was something in his ideology which caused that gross failure.)
A lot of people, who aren't so smart and are aware of it, tend to be totally dominated by supposedly scienfific authorities. If the authority says it's absolutely certain you did it, they would rather doubt their own recall than the authority.
Likewise these markets are not going to reflect the way people vote or feel but they are instead going to reflect their calculated confidence of a political win or a trend.
They didn't this time around. Nate Silver soundly beat intrade. Of course, that would be pretty funny if you were in the minority on Intrade who thought Nate Silver was realistic;)
1) Yeah, but if Google's previous practices are any indication, they tend to only sporadically remember there are markets outside the US. They're not IBM, different cultures tend to confuse them.
2) Agreed. I may be worried about Google's increased competence in mining my data, but when it comes to willingness (and eagerness to sell it/cooperate with government) I can't think of any telecom I trust more - quite the opposite.
Since Google will be vertically integrated(or fairly close to anyway)
If suddenly Google services worked better on Google networks, they would be in monopoly trouble. But I hope (and believe) that Google want the networks to stay "dumb pipes", to better serve their core business
If Google follow their general model, they're not doing this to make money directly, but to pave the way for their main product when unacknowledged monopolies and soft cartels threaten their advance.
See also: Android.
If the telecoms have any sense, the mere threat of competition ought to scare them in line. But don't count on it.
The more noise (e.g. fuzz) on your instruments, the less fat chords you can use, because the overtones becomes a jumble. Conversely, women's choir sung plainly (and without vibrato, not classical or jazz style) can support really fat chords without even sounding dissonant, because it has so few overtones. We're probably biased to discern overtones typical of voices, too.
Actually, he was only about half right. Used tastefully and in moderation, dissonance can create mood in ways that consonance cannot easily match.
That would not make him halfway right, because it was romantic composers believed before him. What they thought was that there was a (Hegel-style) historical law that led to ever greater dissonance in music. This was of course a self-fulfilling idea, since everyone wanted to make music that would be popular in the future - the more ahead of your time you are, the better. Schoenberg just decided to jump the queue (not to say the shark) entirely.
In other words, he though harmony was just an arbitrary social convention.
Over the last century, he has been proven conclusively wrong: despite a century of institutional reverence for his ideas, even the most total classical music nuts listen to fifty times as much tonal music as twelve-tone. And in turn, the institutions going all-in on atonal theories has reduced all classical music to a tiny niche. Nice job, Schoenberg.
If that wasn't enough, you could look at ethnographic data. Every single music system, apart from one, is based on the harmonic series. The exception is some Balinese music (which uses the ratios of gong weights instead, possibly from making a similar misunderstanding as the anecdotal Pythagoras).
Then you could of course look at studies like this...
> that provide you with everything you eat, drink, wear, and use in your entire life, from the cradle to the grave.
No, they don't do that, and to the degree they do, they are certainly well enough compensated that we don't owe them a debt of gratitude.
The people we are talking about here aren't the people just doing their jobs to get by, as oil field workers or truckers or HR managers at power plants or what have you. It's the people consciously lobbying and manipulating the public against climate action, despite actually knowing they are wrong. It's like the tobacco lobbyists - in many cases, it is actually the tobacco lobbyists. People like S. Fred Singer have been on the wrong side of virtually every single scientific issue which called for government action and regulation, from tobacco to asbestos to CFCs to acid rain to global warming, for the last 40 years. They have a whole cottage industry of think tanks based on one of two ideas:
1. the one that the market can't possibly be wrong, ever, or 2. Every idea, no matter how bad, wrong, or evil, is entitled to an attorney defending it to the public as if it were an accused in a court of law.
And drinking the pool water. Ugh, these metaphors got disgusting pretty quickly.
Point is, non-anthropogenic production of CO2 is on balance with non-anthropogenic sequestration of carbon - at least on the time scales which would otherwise have been relevant for us.
What if it's really dragons on Mars, breathing fire towards Earth? Oh wait, I tend to forget that this theory was rejected before there was even done research on it.
It isn't the CO2 in the upper levels of the atmosphere itself which causes the mentioned effect. It's the effect this upper-level CO2 has on temperatures up there.
But this effect is part and parcel of the increased greenhouse effect. Increased greenhouse effect has two prominent effects on atmospheric temperature: warming the lower parts, and cooling the upper parts. It's just that you don't hear much about the latter part (well, unless you read sites like skepticalscience.com, where they point out it's a greenhouse warming signature) because the warming surface temperatures are a far bigger deal for us on the whole. The effects can't be separated, though: If you accept that CO2 is cooling the upper layers of the atmosphere as described, you implicitly accept that the lower are warming.
It's predictable that the denier contigent of slashdot downplays this and says it "just proves increased CO2". But fact is, it also gives us yet more evidence supporting the physical models of the impact of increased CO2.
Both men were good men and would try to serve this country.
Of course, you're allowed to put your treshold for "good man" wherever you like. But personally, I'd like to not include leaders who claim the right to extrajudicially assassinate their own citizens.
Anwar al-Awlaki may have been a terrorist, but Obama felt it wasn't necessary to prove that in court. As far as we're concerned, he was simply a political extremist who (unlike most similar political extremists) was able to make his arguments in English on YouTube. Anwar al-Awlaki's son Abdulrahman, who was 16 years old, wasn't even that. He still got murdered by a targeted assassination two weeks after his father was.
They were both American-born American citizens.
Romney, of course, has no objections to the president's extrajudicial killing program, and it's a fair bet he would have continued it if he got the chance.
Something he doesn't seem to worry about is that government (or large organizations) have a lot more power than ever to process information "they don't care about", to get information that they do. And use it.
For instance, by itself, it's very uninteresting for government to know that I read Dilbert. But if it knows of my Dilbert reading habits, it can correlate that information with other things about me. Maybe they can even draw causal inferences, like that people tend to change their political attitudes ever so slightly after reading Dilbert for years. With enough data and processing power, that's feasible.
The government can then decide to do something about Scott Adams. Not murder him, that's overkill. But maybe give him some personal problems, so that he becomes less influential. Or manipulating his attitudes, so that his role as an opinion-shaper becomes more to their liking. Again, with enough data and processing power, they can probably figure out an effective, non-violent way of changing Adams' behavior.
This wouldn't be cost-effective, you may say. I say it might well be. Influencing a lot of people ever so slightly is really a very powerful thing to be able to. Most governments though history would have leaped at the opportunity to have this level of control, in a non-intrusive manner - compared to the clumsy heavyhandedness of harassment and ruling through fear, it's both less risky and potentially more profitable (given enough data and processing power).
I think it's not feasible to keep processing power and data out of the government/big organizations' hands. Data is just too flightly - if it doesn't actually want to be free, at least it's very hard to contain. But we can get this flightly quality of information to work for us, rather than against us, by demanding radical transparency, and taking it if we don't get it (see Wikileaks).
One of the things you're not allowed to do with a monopoly, is using the power of it to gain a monopoly in a different market. Apple is stepping dangerously close to this any time they disallow an app for competing with iOS built in services/Apple apps. Especially if they didn't offer that app/service before. It's just like Microsoft's Internet Explorer bundling, except MS at least allowed you to install competing products (if not removing their own).
(And yes, I know the standard argument, that Apple doesn't have a monopoly because other touchscreen phones sell better in aggregate. But this doesn't hold because it's not clear that the touchscreen phone should be the relevant unit for monopoly. If I control the world's fish supply, I can't just claim it's not a monopoly because people eat things other than fish. A monopoly in a limited sphere is still a monopoly.)
Slashdot Mirror
I think Flashback, originally developed for the Amiga, is one of the most ported games in history.
Yeah, I picked it up during their election promo, and I'm really impressed with it. Comparing my attempts to install Civilization 4 with Wine, vs. doing it with Crossover, Crossover was pure heaven.
Well, these days, hardware support is a big one. I don't use Windows myself, but I had to help some friends reinstall Windows on an infected machine. It wouldn't even find drivers for the network card without network access and manual selection! When I popped in an Ubuntu memory stick, it detected everything. Even the fricking webcam was functional during the installation process.
It's really amazing, considering that 7 years ago it was totally the other way around, you couldn't count on e.g. wireless cards working.
That's one of the factors keeping me on Linux, I suppose. I bet if I tried to build a Windows gaming rig, I would be stuck in driver hell and/or end up with a half-broken, underperforming system.
Interesting fact: Sam Lantinga and Ryan C. Gordon, who now work with Steam on Linux, also ported the original Alpha Centauri game for Loki. Apparently it had some extremely hairy self-modifying assembly code to make the modular units crawl on hills correctly. I'd say those guys are very qualified.
The most important development that will push games to Linux isn't Linux adoption by gamers, but lower costs of porting.
Increasingly, cross-platform development is a necessity. And if you're already being careful about not using platform-specific stuff (which you are if you're developing for Windows, consoles and OSX already), it becomes a simple question of middleware support. More and more engines support Linux these days, and Valve is committed to it. It will happen.
Meanwhile, I'm happy with Crossover and emulators/retrogames.
Nethack was fun, but it hasn't been developed in almost a decade. There are far better roguelikes out there today.
A confession should not be the end of the story. An instructive case in the news these days is the story of Sture Bergwall, better known under his serial killer name Thomas Quick. It turns out he likely didn't kill a single person - he was just a disturbed drug addict who made up stories (mostly under the influence of strong sedatives and "repressed memory therapy") to fit unsolved cases. They glossed over his inaccuracies, contradictions and the total lack of evidence in case after case, year after year.
(An interesting bit is that Bergwall's defender was the lawyer/politician Claes Borgstöm, who's currently infamous for pursuing Julian Assange. If he had done any due dilligence at all, he must have suspected something was amiss. You got to wonder if there was something in his ideology which caused that gross failure.)
A lot of people, who aren't so smart and are aware of it, tend to be totally dominated by supposedly scienfific authorities. If the authority says it's absolutely certain you did it, they would rather doubt their own recall than the authority.
They didn't this time around. Nate Silver soundly beat intrade. Of course, that would be pretty funny if you were in the minority on Intrade who thought Nate Silver was realistic ;)
Yes... because Apple also only tend to boast that it's sold out.
1) Yeah, but if Google's previous practices are any indication, they tend to only sporadically remember there are markets outside the US. They're not IBM, different cultures tend to confuse them.
2) Agreed. I may be worried about Google's increased competence in mining my data, but when it comes to willingness (and eagerness to sell it/cooperate with government) I can't think of any telecom I trust more - quite the opposite.
Vertical integration. You keep using those words. What do you mean with it, exactly, in this context?
If suddenly Google services worked better on Google networks, they would be in monopoly trouble. But I hope (and believe) that Google want the networks to stay "dumb pipes", to better serve their core business
If Google follow their general model, they're not doing this to make money directly, but to pave the way for their main product when unacknowledged monopolies and soft cartels threaten their advance.
See also: Android.
If the telecoms have any sense, the mere threat of competition ought to scare them in line. But don't count on it.
Because intrusiveness is what Google is famous for! It's what made them out-compete search engines such as Excite and Lycos!
The more noise (e.g. fuzz) on your instruments, the less fat chords you can use, because the overtones becomes a jumble. Conversely, women's choir sung plainly (and without vibrato, not classical or jazz style) can support really fat chords without even sounding dissonant, because it has so few overtones. We're probably biased to discern overtones typical of voices, too.
That would not make him halfway right, because it was romantic composers believed before him. What they thought was that there was a (Hegel-style) historical law that led to ever greater dissonance in music. This was of course a self-fulfilling idea, since everyone wanted to make music that would be popular in the future - the more ahead of your time you are, the better. Schoenberg just decided to jump the queue (not to say the shark) entirely.
In other words, he though harmony was just an arbitrary social convention.
Over the last century, he has been proven conclusively wrong: despite a century of institutional reverence for his ideas, even the most total classical music nuts listen to fifty times as much tonal music as twelve-tone. And in turn, the institutions going all-in on atonal theories has reduced all classical music to a tiny niche. Nice job, Schoenberg.
If that wasn't enough, you could look at ethnographic data. Every single music system, apart from one, is based on the harmonic series. The exception is some Balinese music (which uses the ratios of gong weights instead, possibly from making a similar misunderstanding as the anecdotal Pythagoras).
Then you could of course look at studies like this...
> that provide you with everything you eat, drink, wear, and use in your entire life, from the cradle to the grave.
No, they don't do that, and to the degree they do, they are certainly well enough compensated that we don't owe them a debt of gratitude.
The people we are talking about here aren't the people just doing their jobs to get by, as oil field workers or truckers or HR managers at power plants or what have you. It's the people consciously lobbying and manipulating the public against climate action, despite actually knowing they are wrong. It's like the tobacco lobbyists - in many cases, it is actually the tobacco lobbyists. People like S. Fred Singer have been on the wrong side of virtually every single scientific issue which called for government action and regulation, from tobacco to asbestos to CFCs to acid rain to global warming, for the last 40 years. They have a whole cottage industry of think tanks based on one of two ideas:
1. the one that the market can't possibly be wrong, ever, or
2. Every idea, no matter how bad, wrong, or evil, is entitled to an attorney defending it to the public as if it were an accused in a court of law.
Sometimes a perverse combination of the two.
And drinking the pool water. Ugh, these metaphors got disgusting pretty quickly.
Point is, non-anthropogenic production of CO2 is on balance with non-anthropogenic sequestration of carbon - at least on the time scales which would otherwise have been relevant for us.
What if it's really dragons on Mars, breathing fire towards Earth? Oh wait, I tend to forget that this theory was rejected before there was even done research on it.
It isn't the CO2 in the upper levels of the atmosphere itself which causes the mentioned effect. It's the effect this upper-level CO2 has on temperatures up there.
But this effect is part and parcel of the increased greenhouse effect. Increased greenhouse effect has two prominent effects on atmospheric temperature: warming the lower parts, and cooling the upper parts. It's just that you don't hear much about the latter part (well, unless you read sites like skepticalscience.com, where they point out it's a greenhouse warming signature) because the warming surface temperatures are a far bigger deal for us on the whole. The effects can't be separated, though: If you accept that CO2 is cooling the upper layers of the atmosphere as described, you implicitly accept that the lower are warming.
It's predictable that the denier contigent of slashdot downplays this and says it "just proves increased CO2". But fact is, it also gives us yet more evidence supporting the physical models of the impact of increased CO2.
Of course, you're allowed to put your treshold for "good man" wherever you like. But personally, I'd like to not include leaders who claim the right to extrajudicially assassinate their own citizens.
Anwar al-Awlaki may have been a terrorist, but Obama felt it wasn't necessary to prove that in court. As far as we're concerned, he was simply a political extremist who (unlike most similar political extremists) was able to make his arguments in English on YouTube. Anwar al-Awlaki's son Abdulrahman, who was 16 years old, wasn't even that. He still got murdered by a targeted assassination two weeks after his father was.
They were both American-born American citizens.
Romney, of course, has no objections to the president's extrajudicial killing program, and it's a fair bet he would have continued it if he got the chance.
Scott Adams is trolling. Not for the first time.
Something he doesn't seem to worry about is that government (or large organizations) have a lot more power than ever to process information "they don't care about", to get information that they do. And use it.
For instance, by itself, it's very uninteresting for government to know that I read Dilbert. But if it knows of my Dilbert reading habits, it can correlate that information with other things about me. Maybe they can even draw causal inferences, like that people tend to change their political attitudes ever so slightly after reading Dilbert for years. With enough data and processing power, that's feasible.
The government can then decide to do something about Scott Adams. Not murder him, that's overkill. But maybe give him some personal problems, so that he becomes less influential. Or manipulating his attitudes, so that his role as an opinion-shaper becomes more to their liking. Again, with enough data and processing power, they can probably figure out an effective, non-violent way of changing Adams' behavior.
This wouldn't be cost-effective, you may say. I say it might well be. Influencing a lot of people ever so slightly is really a very powerful thing to be able to. Most governments though history would have leaped at the opportunity to have this level of control, in a non-intrusive manner - compared to the clumsy heavyhandedness of harassment and ruling through fear, it's both less risky and potentially more profitable (given enough data and processing power).
I think it's not feasible to keep processing power and data out of the government/big organizations' hands. Data is just too flightly - if it doesn't actually want to be free, at least it's very hard to contain. But we can get this flightly quality of information to work for us, rather than against us, by demanding radical transparency, and taking it if we don't get it (see Wikileaks).
One of the things you're not allowed to do with a monopoly, is using the power of it to gain a monopoly in a different market. Apple is stepping dangerously close to this any time they disallow an app for competing with iOS built in services/Apple apps. Especially if they didn't offer that app/service before. It's just like Microsoft's Internet Explorer bundling, except MS at least allowed you to install competing products (if not removing their own).
(And yes, I know the standard argument, that Apple doesn't have a monopoly because other touchscreen phones sell better in aggregate. But this doesn't hold because it's not clear that the touchscreen phone should be the relevant unit for monopoly. If I control the world's fish supply, I can't just claim it's not a monopoly because people eat things other than fish. A monopoly in a limited sphere is still a monopoly.)
SPARC isn't gone? Where is it, then?