There's no reason that Open Source people can't create stories and graphics every bit as good as commercial people.
Did you know Scott Adams (writes Dilbert) was a programmer? Yep - a hacker with creativity and artistic talent (note how every frame of a dilbert strip is drawn frmo a different angle). If there's one, there's probably more.
As for why people would do this, well, your post is probably a troll, but I'll answer anyway. Real artists aren't motivated by money - they're motivated by a desire to share whatever ideas, thoughts, or feelings they have. There will be artists interested in sharing their ideas and energies, just like there are programmers interested in sharing their ideas and energies.
We're working on a Free (Open Source) game at the Worldforge project (http://www.worldforge.org). Check us out, you might be surprised.
Finally, there is a popular Free video game. It's called Nethack, and it's been around for a while. Lots of people get enjoyment out of it every day, and it's *verY* creative.
A faster VM would certainly help, and perhaps better algorithms in their painting and event dispatch schemes.
Heh, painting algorithms.... Swing can paint just fine, at 640 by 480 I was getting a full 3 FPS on a simple 2d app (I had to draw about 50 circles of average radius 5, onto a black background).
And that's why Swing is worthless. Because you can't even write a turn-based space strategy game in it.
The JPEG encoder sucks. The test image was dithered - not a good candidate for JPEG encoding, *especially* with their crappy encoder.
JPEG2K may perform well with text, but it will never perform as well as PNG or GIF. That's because it's intended for photographs (hence the P in JPEG - "Joint Photographic Experts Group").
The fact is, the experiments described in the paper showed nothing. -Dave Turner.
Frnakly, the comparison above (Chew and Choo) is bogus. The sample picture of a person was dithered. And GIMP gave *much* prettier results at the same compression ratio when I converted it to a JPEG. I don't know where Chew and Choo got their encoder...
Further, 2/3s of the images they looked at were outside of JPEG territory. They were sharp-edged patterns, or text. That's what GIFs are for!
I found Raph Levien's comparison much more enlightening; I wonder if Chew and Choo were "expected" to get certain results...
I was boycotting the MPAA because of the DeCSS thing. Fortunately for me, they accidentally gave one of my friends an extra ticket, so I got in without giving the bastards any of my money. If you can manage it that way, it's probably worth slightly more than what you pay for it.
Notes: Excluding vehicles, 6 instances of product placement that my friends and I noticed. Versacci, Motorola, (jewelry company whose name I can't remember), Kodak, Macintosh, (one more I can't remember)
Look for the mention of the DNA of a virus (viruses have RNA).
If you have a good audience (we did), this is a lot of fun. At various places, people yelled things like "kill her!" "he can't, the heroine can't die", etc. Throughout all of the second half of the film, the entire audience was laughing, especially at the fight scenes.
I'm a college student. I don't have much money. But if slashdot wants to fight this, I've got $100 for their legal defense. Please do the right thing, Rob! -Dave Turner.
Usually, the photoshop benchmarks do not test compilers. This is because time-critical parts of photoshop are written in assembly language. And for short snippets like blur and scale, it's not difficult to get optimal assembly language representations.
One of these days, I'm going to learn the altivec instruction set so that I can do these tests myself - I'll submit the results to slashdot when I do. -Dave Turner.
The moderators ultimately decided to moderate me down dangerously close to losing my +1 bonus. That's OK, I'm an Everything2 addict now anyway.
I know what prompted it. I was on slashdot when the original hellmouth series ran. And I'm arguing that 1. you are on shaky legal ground and 2. you're on bad moral ground.
Legally, there's a concept of fair use that you're ignoring. Actually, you're ignoring the rest of my post too. I should have marked my first post as OT, this one is so marked - if my post should have been modded down, yours should too.
Morally, well, copyrighting slashdot posts is bad, because it means that less people will read them (assuming that they're insighful, when I assume you beleive they are). It also means that slashdot gets intp legally weird situations (it's reproducing your comment). And since slashdot is good, getting it into bad situations is not nice.
I don't know why people get so upset about this.
Now, I'll reproduce my comment on the subject from kuro5hin:
. Entire comments were not posted. Parts of comments were posterd.
Common sense points:
2. If you said the comments to a friend, you might expect him to say "A friend of mine once said 'blah'".
3. Maybe you wouldn't.... but if you write the comments on a subway wall, you probably wouldn't care if they were quoted in a book on subway wall art.
4. What if you put them, anonymously, in a school newspaper, and someone quoted you from there? Again, I don't see the big deal.
5. Comments may be owned by the poster. But it's obvious that you grant slashdot the right to republish them on the web. What's so different about slashdot publishing them on dead trees?
Your copyright notice is bizzare and immature. Slashdot reproduces your work; so do proxies. It's also OK for me to take parts of it, or in some cases all of it. If I'm using it for non-commercial purposes, then I'm almost certainly in the clear - especially given that your work is a slashdot post, rather than a novel. And especially considering that you wouldn't be making any money on it anyway. Please check www.loc.gov for more info.
If software fails to perform as advertized, or causes data loss, the software manufacturer should be liable up to the cost of the software. This is good, because it does what we expect - free software authors are not liable, and commercial software authors are liable up to a reasonable point. <BR><BR> The reason this makes legal sense is that it is a company's responsibility to protect their data. Even a perfect software system is vulnerable to theft or human error. So companies should be making back-ups regularly. But if software doesn't perform as advertized, then it is a defective product. The software company should certainly be required to provide software that does what they say it will do. -Dave Turner.
It's not as easy as you think. Jose Delgado invented a type of electrode that could, if the brain were better understood, be inserted in the brain to provide people with the sensation of pain at will. But this is nothing like mind control - it's a naked threat. It doesn't take brain surgery to control someone through fear - all it takes is a gun.
And why not? Technological inevitability doesn't mean social inevitability. It has been technically feasible to control people by embedding electrodes in their brain for a fairly long time. Somehow the practice didn't become widespread.
No, it is not possible with current technology to control someone by plugging electrodes into their brain.
In Princess Maker, your little girl could end up as a princess... but she could also end up as an of about 50 other things. Including a professional dominatrix. -Dave Turner.
No, free is not an exact translation of libre, precisely because it is ambiguous. Libre is not. It never means free of cost. There are probably other cases where exact translations do not exist, but English is perfectly happy to bring in these words ("otaku", for example).
What's wrong with englsih tenses? I guess it's a holy war, but I like having fewer forms for words. Having fewer morphological forms of word is not a bad thing in any way.
I don't know Japanese, but I do know that English has good enough provisions for forming new words, especially if you use them like I do:). "Nodelet" (and other dimunatives), "houseboat" (and other compound words), "bletcherous" (and other suffixes turning words into nouns, adjectives and verbs), "feep" (onomotopoeia). If there's some other ways to do it, I don't miss them.
You would probably call me an intellectual. I just used perl to do a statistical sampling of 200 words from the 38260 words (excluding proper nouns or any other words containing capital letters) in/usr/share/dict/words. Out of the 200 words that perl gave me, I knew all but 5. And that's not a very thorough list of words. It doesn't include a large part of my technical vocabulary, like shareware, admin, nybble or avatar. Actually, it also doesn't seem to include many foreign-derived food words, such as teriaki, linguini, or ravioli. There are probably other sets of words that it's missing as well.
At any rate, My day to day vocabulary is certainly above 1000 words (I haven't counted), because I talk about food, computers, and whatever else crosses my mind.... Not that daily vocabulary is the point. The point is to be able to say exactly what you want, even if you want to be ambiguous. And that's why I like English.
English is a good language. It has over one million words - far more than any other language. It changes rapidly, and happily assimilates words from other languages. It doesn't have an official version, so it can adapt to a changing world. It has more speakers than any language except possibly Chinese, and Chinese has mutually incomprehensible dialects (actually, written Chinese does not have these dialects). It has speakers in every part of the world, so it can spread quickly. It has good provisions for forming new words - "houseboat" is a good example of this.
The advantage of having lots of words is that it is possible to be arbitrarily accurate, and also very vague. "Set" has 450 meanings (according to the OED). "Baud" only has one meaning, AFAIK. The only word we're missing is "libre", meaning "Free as in freedom." I'm attempting to subvert free into libre, and to import gratis as "free of cost." If this fails, I'll use libre.
English is also (apparently) hard to learn. But then, so is Perl, but we still use it! -Dave Turner.
That works, until they start blocking all incomming connections, on any port. That's what my school did, although they claim to be doing it for security reasons. IF YOU WANT TO RUN ANY SORT OF SERVER, DO NOT GO TO REED COLLEGE! I asked for an exception to the firewall months ago, and I have recieved no reply.
Windows may allow scripting - but it doesn't provide it. You have to buy/beg/borrow/warez additional software to do it. And that's not good.
It is nice if a user interface teaches itself to you, but not necessary. For simple applications, it may be necessary... but for complex applications, you'll end up spending so much time using them that it's a good idea to RTFM anyway.
Are scripts user-interface features? You bet! You're a user... and you're using them to control the program.
Scripting is not sufficient for a good UI. But it is necessary. Given sufficiently powerful scripting, even the crappiest UI can be re-made into something vastly more powerful. As an example of this, someone brought up WindowBlinds.
Every decent interface I've used has scripting. Shells, Emacs, vi, GIMP, Blender - they're all scripable. An interface without scripting is like.... Windows.
Ok, you've insulted me. And that's Not Nice. I guess I'll defend myself.
It is not the case that everyone knows about E2. Maybe everyone who was on/. back when E1 was advertized knows about E1 - but I only learned (or re-learned) about E2 a month ago. And I love it.
Also, THE SLASHDOT OWNERS DO NOT GIVE OUT KARMA. It's slashdot users. Someone must have thought my post was insightful.
Maybe it was someone who had been to E2 in the last little while - someone who knows about the vast variety of public domain stories and poems that are on E2. See something missing? Node it.
Please do not insult me again. Also, anyone who calls for moderation of a post, while posting as AC, is an asshole - if you don't like a post, make a reply to it - the moderation categories are there for a reason.
ESR says:
Long before the DOJ lawsuit, the open-source movement developed its shared values
and exuberant energy in significant part as a conscious reaction against the attempted
cornering of computing technology by monopolies and governments and other power
groups. We are the Internet's antibody response against all would-be Microsofts (and
against the NSA [National Security Agency] as well). We trust the invisible hand of
the market partly because we are the invisible hand. And most (though not all) of us
believe we can punish Microsoft's misbehavior and hubris more effectively and more
ethically than could be done through government action.
I will now quote RMS to state my position on this: "I am not a member of your Open Source Movement."
If Open Source meant everything ESR said it did, it would be about one tenth of its current size; its average age would be 16, and it would be l33t.
www.everything2.com is a similar site - it's got tons of great stuff. Please read the FAW before making any nodes - E2 has an experience system, and it would suck for you if your first efforts at noding were, say, voted into the ground by vengeful elder noders:)
Slashdot Mirror
There's no reason that Open Source people can't create stories and graphics every bit as good as commercial people.
Did you know Scott Adams (writes Dilbert) was a programmer? Yep - a hacker with creativity and artistic talent (note how every frame of a dilbert strip is drawn frmo a different angle). If there's one, there's probably more.
As for why people would do this, well, your post is probably a troll, but I'll answer anyway. Real artists aren't motivated by money - they're motivated by a desire to share whatever ideas, thoughts, or feelings they have. There will be artists interested in sharing their ideas and energies, just like there are programmers interested in sharing their ideas and energies.
We're working on a Free (Open Source) game at the Worldforge project (http://www.worldforge.org). Check us out, you might be surprised.
Finally, there is a popular Free video game. It's called Nethack, and it's been around for a while. Lots of people get enjoyment out of it every day, and it's *verY* creative.
-Dave Turner.
A faster VM would certainly help, and perhaps better algorithms in their painting and event dispatch schemes.
Heh, painting algorithms.... Swing can paint just fine, at 640 by 480 I was getting a full 3 FPS on a simple 2d app (I had to draw about 50 circles of average radius 5, onto a black background).
And that's why Swing is worthless. Because you can't even write a turn-based space strategy game in it.
-Dave Turner.
None of this response addresses my concerns.
The JPEG encoder sucks. The test image was dithered - not a good candidate for JPEG encoding, *especially* with their crappy encoder.
JPEG2K may perform well with text, but it will never perform as well as PNG or GIF. That's because it's intended for photographs (hence the P in JPEG - "Joint Photographic Experts Group").
The fact is, the experiments described in the paper showed nothing.
-Dave Turner.
Frnakly, the comparison above (Chew and Choo) is bogus. The sample picture of a person was dithered. And GIMP gave *much* prettier results at the same compression ratio when I converted it to a JPEG. I don't know where Chew and Choo got their encoder...
Further, 2/3s of the images they looked at were outside of JPEG territory. They were sharp-edged patterns, or text. That's what GIFs are for!
I found Raph Levien's comparison much more enlightening; I wonder if Chew and Choo were "expected" to get certain results...
-Dave Turner.
I was boycotting the MPAA because of the DeCSS thing. Fortunately for me, they accidentally gave one of my friends an extra ticket, so I got in without giving the bastards any of my money. If you can manage it that way, it's probably worth slightly more than what you pay for it.
Notes:
Excluding vehicles, 6 instances of product placement that my friends and I noticed. Versacci, Motorola, (jewelry company whose name I can't remember), Kodak, Macintosh, (one more I can't remember)
Look for the mention of the DNA of a virus (viruses have RNA).
If you have a good audience (we did), this is a lot of fun. At various places, people yelled things like "kill her!" "he can't, the heroine can't die", etc. Throughout all of the second half of the film, the entire audience was laughing, especially at the fight scenes.
-Dave Turner.
I'm a college student. I don't have much money. But if slashdot wants to fight this, I've got $100 for their legal defense. Please do the right thing, Rob!
-Dave Turner.
Usually, the photoshop benchmarks do not test compilers. This is because time-critical parts of photoshop are written in assembly language. And for short snippets like blur and scale, it's not difficult to get optimal assembly language representations.
One of these days, I'm going to learn the altivec instruction set so that I can do these tests myself - I'll submit the results to slashdot when I do.
-Dave Turner.
The moderators ultimately decided to moderate me down dangerously close to losing my +1 bonus. That's OK, I'm an Everything2 addict now anyway.
I know what prompted it. I was on slashdot when the original hellmouth series ran. And I'm arguing that 1. you are on shaky legal ground and 2. you're on bad moral ground.
Legally, there's a concept of fair use that you're ignoring. Actually, you're ignoring the rest of my post too. I should have marked my first post as OT, this one is so marked - if my post should have been modded down, yours should too.
Morally, well, copyrighting slashdot posts is bad, because it means that less people will read them (assuming that they're insighful, when I assume you beleive they are). It also means that slashdot gets intp legally weird situations (it's reproducing your comment). And since slashdot is good, getting it into bad situations is not nice.
I don't know why people get so upset about this.
Now, I'll reproduce my comment on the subject from kuro5hin:
. Entire comments were not posted. Parts of comments were posterd.
Common sense points:
2. If you said the comments to a friend, you might expect him to say "A friend of mine once said 'blah'".
3. Maybe you wouldn't.... but if you write the comments on a subway wall, you probably wouldn't care if they were quoted in a book on subway wall art.
4. What if you put them, anonymously, in a school newspaper, and someone quoted you from there? Again, I don't see the big deal.
5. Comments may be owned by the poster. But it's obvious that you grant slashdot the right to republish them on the web. What's so different about slashdot publishing them on dead trees?
I just don't see what all the fuss is about.
-Dave Turner.
Your copyright notice is bizzare and immature. Slashdot reproduces your work; so do proxies. It's also OK for me to take parts of it, or in some cases all of it. If I'm using it for non-commercial purposes, then I'm almost certainly in the clear - especially given that your work is a slashdot post, rather than a novel. And especially considering that you wouldn't be making any money on it anyway. Please check www.loc.gov for more info.
-Dave Turner.
If software fails to perform as advertized, or causes data loss, the software manufacturer should be liable up to the cost of the software. This is good, because it does what we expect - free software authors are not liable, and commercial software authors are liable up to a reasonable point.
<BR><BR>
The reason this makes legal sense is that it is a company's responsibility to protect their data. Even a perfect software system is vulnerable to theft or human error. So companies should be making back-ups regularly. But if software doesn't perform as advertized, then it is a defective product. The software company should certainly be required to provide software that does what they say it will do.
-Dave Turner.
It's not as easy as you think. Jose Delgado invented a type of electrode that could, if the brain were better understood, be inserted in the brain to provide people with the sensation of pain at will. But this is nothing like mind control - it's a naked threat. It doesn't take brain surgery to control someone through fear - all it takes is a gun.
-Dave Turner.
And why not? Technological inevitability doesn't mean social inevitability. It has been technically feasible to control
people by embedding electrodes in their brain for a fairly long time. Somehow the practice didn't become widespread.
No, it is not possible with current technology to control someone by plugging electrodes into their brain.
Please stop spreading misinformation.
-Dave Turner.
In Princess Maker, your little girl could end up as a princess... but she could also end up as an of about 50 other things. Including a professional dominatrix.
-Dave Turner.
Many words is a strength because it allows you to say exactly what you want to say, whether that is precise or ambiguous.
There are no 2 words in english with exactly the same meaning. "Gloves" clearly has totally different connotations than hand shoes.
In iceberg, berg is not a word.
-Dave Turner.
No, free is not an exact translation of libre, precisely because it is ambiguous. Libre is not. It never means free of cost. There are probably other cases where exact translations do not exist, but English is perfectly happy to bring in these words ("otaku", for example).
:). "Nodelet" (and other dimunatives), "houseboat" (and other compound words), "bletcherous" (and other suffixes turning words into nouns, adjectives and verbs), "feep" (onomotopoeia). If there's some other ways to do it, I don't miss them.
/usr/share/dict/words. Out of the 200 words that perl gave me, I knew all but 5. And that's not a very thorough list of words. It doesn't include a large part of my technical vocabulary, like shareware, admin, nybble or avatar. Actually, it also doesn't seem to include many foreign-derived food words, such as teriaki, linguini, or ravioli. There are probably other sets of words that it's missing as well.
What's wrong with englsih tenses? I guess it's a holy war, but I like having fewer forms for words. Having fewer morphological forms of word is not a bad thing in any way.
I don't know Japanese, but I do know that English has good enough provisions for forming new words, especially if you use them like I do
You would probably call me an intellectual. I just used perl to do a statistical sampling of 200 words from the 38260 words (excluding proper nouns or any other words containing capital letters) in
At any rate, My day to day vocabulary is certainly above 1000 words (I haven't counted), because I talk about food, computers, and whatever else crosses my mind.... Not that daily vocabulary is the point. The point is to be able to say exactly what you want, even if you want to be ambiguous. And that's why I like English.
-Dave Turner.
English is a good language. It has over one million words - far more than any other language. It changes rapidly, and happily assimilates words from other languages. It doesn't have an official version, so it can adapt to a changing world. It has more speakers than any language except possibly Chinese, and Chinese has mutually incomprehensible dialects (actually, written Chinese does not have these dialects). It has speakers in every part of the world, so it can spread quickly. It has good provisions for forming new words - "houseboat" is a good example of this.
The advantage of having lots of words is that it is possible to be arbitrarily accurate, and also very vague. "Set" has 450 meanings (according to the OED). "Baud" only has one meaning, AFAIK. The only word we're missing is "libre", meaning "Free as in freedom." I'm attempting to subvert free into libre, and to import gratis as "free of cost." If this fails, I'll use libre.
English is also (apparently) hard to learn. But then, so is Perl, but we still use it!
-Dave Turner.
That works, until they start blocking all incomming connections, on any port. That's what my school did, although they claim to be doing it for security reasons. IF YOU WANT TO RUN ANY SORT OF SERVER, DO NOT GO TO REED COLLEGE! I asked for an exception to the firewall months ago, and I have recieved no reply.
-Dave Turner.
The Satanic bible is warmed over Ayn Rand with a bit of a creepy edge. If you've read Ayn Rand, you can feel safe skipping LaVey.
-Dave Turner.
I'll just reply to everyone at once.
Windows may allow scripting - but it doesn't provide it. You have to buy/beg/borrow/warez additional software to do it. And that's not good.
It is nice if a user interface teaches itself to you, but not necessary. For simple applications, it may be necessary... but for complex applications, you'll end up spending so much time using them that it's a good idea to RTFM anyway.
Are scripts user-interface features? You bet! You're a user... and you're using them to control the program.
Scripting is not sufficient for a good UI. But it is necessary. Given sufficiently powerful scripting, even the crappiest UI can be re-made into something vastly more powerful. As an example of this, someone brought up WindowBlinds.
I think that's about it.
-Dave Turner.
Every decent interface I've used has scripting. Shells, Emacs, vi, GIMP, Blender - they're all scripable. An interface without scripting is like .... Windows.
-Dave Turner.
Ok, you've insulted me. And that's Not Nice. I guess I'll defend myself.
/. back when E1 was advertized knows about E1 - but I only learned (or re-learned) about E2 a month ago. And I love it.
It is not the case that everyone knows about E2. Maybe everyone who was on
Also, THE SLASHDOT OWNERS DO NOT GIVE OUT KARMA. It's slashdot users. Someone must have thought my post was insightful.
Maybe it was someone who had been to E2 in the last little while - someone who knows about the vast variety of public domain stories and poems that are on E2. See something missing? Node it.
Please do not insult me again. Also, anyone who calls for moderation of a post, while posting as AC, is an asshole - if you don't like a post, make a reply to it - the moderation categories are there for a reason.
ESR says: Long before the DOJ lawsuit, the open-source movement developed its shared values and exuberant energy in significant part as a conscious reaction against the attempted cornering of computing technology by monopolies and governments and other power groups. We are the Internet's antibody response against all would-be Microsofts (and against the NSA [National Security Agency] as well). We trust the invisible hand of the market partly because we are the invisible hand. And most (though not all) of us believe we can punish Microsoft's misbehavior and hubris more effectively and more ethically than could be done through government action.
I will now quote RMS to state my position on this: "I am not a member of your Open Source Movement."
If Open Source meant everything ESR said it did, it would be about one tenth of its current size; its average age would be 16, and it would be l33t.
er, read the FAQ. That's what I meant. Oh and beware - it's addictive as hell.
www.everything2.com is a similar site - it's got tons of great stuff. Please read the FAW before making any nodes - E2 has an experience system, and it would suck for you if your first efforts at noding were, say, voted into the ground by vengeful elder noders :)
What, you want him to come back from the dead to edit it?