Essentially they're looking to charge you money for promoting their products.
They're doing that already. Radio stations shell out (rather hefty) fees to broadcast what is, essentially, free publicity for the label. Really an interesting business model. Just about everyone I know listens to the radio hunting for interesting new stuff, eventually buys the CD, and keeps listening to the radio for more new music. So we're paying (by listening to the commercials) for the opportunity to find new things to spend our money on.
If these devices work, we can find them if they are there.
K, I grasp that once the technology is there, it's easily possible that we'd find one that's there to be found relatively quickly. But I guess the point that I was trying to make is, where's that threshold? Without actually detecting one, do we actually know that we're at or near the technology level required to detect one?
Umm, forgive me if there's something I'm missing, but isn't it just as much shooting in the dark to say that we'll soon have the ability to detect something?
I mean, it's one thing to say that ``We will soon have what -may- allow us to detect Earth-like planets'', but can we really say that technology X will give us that ability until we actually detect such a planet with that specific technology?
While he's not saying that we'll find another habitable planet soon, it's still not a major statement, or really a valid claim. And it won't be until we actually -do- find one.
Really, most people don't. I mean, I rarely hear someone make a comment like ``I'm not going to do business with them; look, their website runs on a machine from Bob's House of Discounted Server Software''. But, really, this is a lot to do with image. Techies drooling over Apache or chuckling at the guy using IIS aren't the people that are going to really take notice.
It's the bosses, CxOs, and the like that are looking for a technology solution and see ``We can get you out of the trap of using Unix. Our stuff is just as good, and cheaper to boot, and will server your needs as well. Please ignore the fact that we're not using our own technology. We can still produce kickass stuff. We're just not using it outselves for... uhh... irony.''
And those people are the ones that you don't want to pull a poorly handled shell game on, because, in the end, they're the ones that make the buying decisions.
yeah, just look at what all their "auditing" has done for OpenSSH..! How many times have I patched OpenSSH recently..? 3..? Don't buy into their "auditing," as it's a ploy to be more "secure" than FreeBSD.
I'm confused. Isn't that the point of the auditing? ``Here, we found this problem. Here's a patch to fix.'', ``Here, this code was sloppy, here's a patch to clean it up so it doesn't create a problem in the future'', etc?
Nuns on Wheels was an RPG system (sorta). Full title was ``Renegade Nuns on Wheels'', and was part of the same series of games as ``Macho Women with Guns'' (Home of B'thulhu, the Puppies of Tindalos and the flaw Topheavy).
Absolutely frightful game. A little complex for my tastes, though.
I'm sure there are feminist groups out there that would see voluntarily wearing a burqa indecent. The woman in question would be wearing it by choice, but it'd only be chosen because the alternative would be to not be on the net at all.
I think there is also a third problem, similar to the first that you pointed out, and that's the fact that every page is accessable anywhere.
To continue the storefront analogy, people will often use your store not because it's the best place to go, but because it's convenient for them; on the way home from work, down the street, whatever. On the web, -everything- is convenient, and people are always more comfortable with what they're familiar with.
So even if you have the greatest site on a topic in the world, if someone has something that's not as good, even if it's a -lot- not as good, people will still read there rather than your site, simply because it's more familiar, and there are the intangibles that come from having a history with a site. (C'mon, don't tell me you longtimers don't get a whistful twinge at the thought of Signal11.)
Really, if you're not the first kid on the block, you need to have something -really- spectacular to get and hold a crowd.
After all, I haven't heard too many religious leaders condemn experimentation on Chimpanzees ( >90% their DNA similar to ours).
I don't see what the problem would be when the hybrid has only 50% of our DNA then...
I think what would set off the religious would be that we would be 'tampering with God's handiwork', or something similar. It's not an issue of how much DNA we have in common, it's more a question of are we actively changing the world that God provided for us.
What I've always wondered, though, is just what sets these people off? I mean, I don't remember hearing about an uproar over the seedless bannanna, or anything similar, when, essentially, we're doing the same thing, altering the game field in our favor. Is it that we're actually using the tools that 'God gave us' to do the changes this time? Or the fact that this is something non trivial?
Isn't that exactly what happened with the interview that/. did with Lars Ulrich? I seem to recall it was verbatum, right down to the 'ummm's and such.
Sounded to me more like someone dangling a treat in front of a puppy than an interview. ``Lookie what I did. I talked to Bruce. If you're good little Slashbots, I'll let you read a summary.''
I think you'd be utterly amazed. Anyone I know that isn't deeply computer savvy does just that. And heaven help them if it points to a different company. ``I didn't know that foo.com did contract assassination, too! I thought they were just a bakery!''.
And really, sometimes the search engine doesn't help, either. Until I saw multiple people do it, I always thought people inputting company.com into an engine's search field was just a joke. And then they get confused again. ``Looking for Foo Baking online doesn't work. I put foo.com into Google, and it only brought up links to foo.com, and at the store they told me it was foo-bakers.com.''
the ONLY action GNU wants to take away from you is your ability to take freedom away from other people
And this is power. Power used by people who are acting in an 'I know what's best for you and for society' mindset, but power nevertheless. And really, it's power that developers need to have.
I don't think that People don't have the right to take freedom from other people is spelled out anywhere in the GPL, because that's -exactly- what the GPL does. It grants some rights, and it takes some away. Wether this is a good or bad thing is an entirely separate debate, but it doesn't change the fact that people do have this right.
Or maybe you'd like to try running Linux without the GNU system. Good luck
This statement has confused me for a long time. I know that Linux dropped into the GNU system and magically became a fully functional system because of the two working in tandem, but everyone that subscribes to this sort of belief seems to think that it was the only way. The GNU system is a really great thing, but if it wasn't there, is it so much of a stretch to think that something else would have been written? Plenty of other OSen out there have their own subsystems keeping everything running.
Wow. Honestly, dude, I didn't think that was your point at all. Up until this post, you seemed to be contending that we shouldn't be working on multiple OS projects because that would split the developer pool.
While I understand that you never said anything to the effect that Linux should have 100% market/mindshare, that seemed to be what you were driving at. ``We must band together and make Linux better or Microsoft will always have dominion over us!'' seemed to be the gist of it.
I think a lot of us get your point, but most of us just didn't know that -that- was what your point was.
Actually, 'Atheos' is Greek, roughly analagous to the word 'atheist'. IIRC, AtheOS's author didn't realize that, and the name wasn't designed to reflect anything, but the corrolation is there, nevertheless.
Back when I was using Debian, I figured this was the oute that I'd have to take, but didn't know enough about dpkg to pull it off, and didn't do enough with the box that required 'bleeding edge' libraries, so never got around to reading up on it.
Seems like some major effort, though. When it comes to package managers, though, I'd love to see an interface that allows you to specify options as already installed during package-add. Something akin to:
Package Foo.deb requires Bar, install Bar (y/n/a),
where A is is 'Already installed', and then specify the path to the lib, and have the package database make a note of it. This would get more than a little wonky, though, when you start needing library packages that include multiple shared objects. There are probably other places where it would get use as bad to work with, but since I'm using BSDs ports these days, haven't given it much thought as of late.
Re:From the "Reminds me of this classic prose" guy
on
Review: Harry Potter
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· Score: 1
What about, "I am a kid" or "My friends like to read..."
Well, I'm 23, most people I know still call me a kid. Does that count?;) In all seriousness, though, I think people keep saying that just because you won't find many kids on/. talking about HP. The closest you can get on here is people who have kids talking about them. I -have- talked to my friends' kids about HP at different points, though. Does that count?
And I'd say ``My friends like to read...'', but most of my friends don't, unfortunately. The syndrom that children suffer from (Watching television instead) is just as prevalent in adults. Moreso, I think, because any time I'm with friends who have kids, the children are watching TV and playing, or doing homework, or doing something else. The adults just sit and stare.
I do share your view on teen psychology books, though. Dispite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary, adults still seem to think that they won't forget what childhood was like, and how they dealt with things, and they still seem to think that their methods of coping with childhood traumas apply to the next generation, or the one after. Sad, in some ways.
And while I'm writing to another Redwall fan (We seem to be sorta on the rare side), have you noticed that Jaques seems to have gone into Stephen King mode in the last few years? When I was in high school, I'd occasionally be in the bookstore and had reason to say 'Whoa! A new Redwall book!'.. Seems more and more these days I'll have reason to say 'God damn! Four new Redwall books??' Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I haven't read most of the newer ones, and dunno how good they are...
If you use a decent system (read Debian;) then the package wouldn't be available to install if all its dependencies weren't available either. So you wouldn't have this problem.
I don't think that's really what he's talking about.. With both rpm and apt, if you compile a library from source, the package manager won't consider said library to be installed. So once you upgrade your library, the pm will still tell you 'Library foo.so not available' and not install (Or worse, install a different copy when you're not looking.)
This becomes especially nasty when a package maintainer hasn't updated their package yet, and you need a bugfix/feature that the newer version has.
Re:From the "Reminds me of this classic prose" guy
on
Review: Harry Potter
·
· Score: 1
But he's not talking about you. The fact that you're commenting on the 'depth', and making comparisons to other authors proves that.
He's talking about the people with the 'reading is for dweebs' mindset that Must See TV and the like are aimed at. These are the people who can pick up something like HP to see what all the hype is about, find 'a cute fun read', and have it slide their perception more towards 'this reading thing isn't bad'.
And I'm sure there are a lot of people reading 'Harry Potter and Harry potter only, period', but that broad generalization is just that. Generalization. From my friends with kids in the HP age range, and other people I know, for every three or four people on the HP bandwagon wherever it leads, there's one or two that want to check out something else. (See one of my earlier posts about Redwall. My copies are really making the rounds these days)
Re:From the "Reminds me of this classic prose" guy
on
Review: Harry Potter
·
· Score: 1
Umm... I'm sorry, I don't think I quite get what you're trying to say. What I'm getting from your posts is that the HP books might be teaching kids to -only- want to read HP, and that they might not branch out from that. I'm going from that assumption, so if that wasn't your intent, most of the rest of this likely won't make much sense.
I don't think that breaking it down into those two cases is really accurate. Case 1 is really a superset of 2, imho. When I was in early grade school, I started reading books like the Chronicles of Narnia. Loved 'em. And I learned to love to read about Aslan's world (Case 2). But, from that, I learned to love to read anything that I found enjoyable.
I don't think that it's really possible to achieve 1 without first having gotten to 2. Can you really enjoy reading without having characters/settings that you love to read about?
Of course there are always going to be people that never find anything else that interests them once they finish HP (And if you find people like this, make them run, not walk, to go get Jaques' Redwall books, which are a lot like the HP books, in the 'easy fantasy stories for kids and adults' way..), but that's true of just about everything good. I'm sure there are people who won't read anything except Seuss (I graduated high school with lots of them). But the fact that these people are out there isn't a point against Rowling's books.
The points that you raise do seem to be valid, but applied to the wrong part of this equation. Rather than criticize books for people enjoying them but not developing a reading habit, shouldn't the criticism be directed at the people who will start to flaunt the 'It's not Harry Potter, and if it's not Harry Potter, I'm not interested.' mentality?
A lot of times this is true, but there was definitely an adult crowd at the showing I went to. Most of the kids that just had 'adult supervision' were in their own little groups, led by one or two adults. Looked almost like those parents lost a bet with their neighbors (Okay, everyone on the block draw straws. Short straw takes everyone's kids.)
The show I was at was actually mostly adults. Watching people as we left, there seemed to be a 2 or 3 to 1 ratio of adults to kids.
Slashdot Mirror
They're doing that already. Radio stations shell out (rather hefty) fees to broadcast what is, essentially, free publicity for the label. Really an interesting business model. Just about everyone I know listens to the radio hunting for interesting new stuff, eventually buys the CD, and keeps listening to the radio for more new music. So we're paying (by listening to the commercials) for the opportunity to find new things to spend our money on.
Groovy, thanks for the link. Being quite a bit less well informed, I wasn't sure where to start questing through Google myself.
If these devices work, we can find them if they are there.
K, I grasp that once the technology is there, it's easily possible that we'd find one that's there to be found relatively quickly. But I guess the point that I was trying to make is, where's that threshold? Without actually detecting one, do we actually know that we're at or near the technology level required to detect one?
Umm, forgive me if there's something I'm missing, but isn't it just as much shooting in the dark to say that we'll soon have the ability to detect something?
I mean, it's one thing to say that ``We will soon have what -may- allow us to detect Earth-like planets'', but can we really say that technology X will give us that ability until we actually detect such a planet with that specific technology?
While he's not saying that we'll find another habitable planet soon, it's still not a major statement, or really a valid claim. And it won't be until we actually -do- find one.
Shouldn't that be sever?
;)
Quite possibly, indeed.
Really, most people don't. I mean, I rarely hear someone make a comment like ``I'm not going to do business with them; look, their website runs on a machine from Bob's House of Discounted Server Software''. But, really, this is a lot to do with image. Techies drooling over Apache or chuckling at the guy using IIS aren't the people that are going to really take notice.
... uhh ... irony.''
It's the bosses, CxOs, and the like that are looking for a technology solution and see ``We can get you out of the trap of using Unix. Our stuff is just as good, and cheaper to boot, and will server your needs as well. Please ignore the fact that we're not using our own technology. We can still produce kickass stuff. We're just not using it outselves for
And those people are the ones that you don't want to pull a poorly handled shell game on, because, in the end, they're the ones that make the buying decisions.
I thought he was? Or, at least, Microsoft was throwing their weight against the bill, along with Intel and a couple of other heavy players.
Umm, I hate to sound unlearned here, but what was his ``vengeance on Symbolics``?
I'm confused. Isn't that the point of the auditing? ``Here, we found this problem. Here's a patch to fix.'', ``Here, this code was sloppy, here's a patch to clean it up so it doesn't create a problem in the future'', etc?
Nuns on Wheels was an RPG system (sorta). Full title was ``Renegade Nuns on Wheels'', and was part of the same series of games as ``Macho Women with Guns'' (Home of B'thulhu, the Puppies of Tindalos and the flaw Topheavy).
Absolutely frightful game. A little complex for my tastes, though.
I'm sure there are feminist groups out there that would see voluntarily wearing a burqa indecent. The woman in question would be wearing it by choice, but it'd only be chosen because the alternative would be to not be on the net at all.
I think there is also a third problem, similar to the first that you pointed out, and that's the fact that every page is accessable anywhere.
To continue the storefront analogy, people will often use your store not because it's the best place to go, but because it's convenient for them; on the way home from work, down the street, whatever. On the web, -everything- is convenient, and people are always more comfortable with what they're familiar with.
So even if you have the greatest site on a topic in the world, if someone has something that's not as good, even if it's a -lot- not as good, people will still read there rather than your site, simply because it's more familiar, and there are the intangibles that come from having a history with a site. (C'mon, don't tell me you longtimers don't get a whistful twinge at the thought of Signal11.)
Really, if you're not the first kid on the block, you need to have something -really- spectacular to get and hold a crowd.
I don't see what the problem would be when the hybrid has only 50% of our DNA then...
I think what would set off the religious would be that we would be 'tampering with God's handiwork', or something similar. It's not an issue of how much DNA we have in common, it's more a question of are we actively changing the world that God provided for us.
What I've always wondered, though, is just what sets these people off? I mean, I don't remember hearing about an uproar over the seedless bannanna, or anything similar, when, essentially, we're doing the same thing, altering the game field in our favor. Is it that we're actually using the tools that 'God gave us' to do the changes this time? Or the fact that this is something non trivial?
Isn't that exactly what happened with the interview that /. did with Lars Ulrich? I seem to recall it was verbatum, right down to the 'ummm's and such.
Sounded to me more like someone dangling a treat in front of a puppy than an interview. ``Lookie what I did. I talked to Bruce. If you're good little Slashbots, I'll let you read a summary.''
I think you'd be utterly amazed. Anyone I know that isn't deeply computer savvy does just that. And heaven help them if it points to a different company. ``I didn't know that foo.com did contract assassination, too! I thought they were just a bakery!''.
And really, sometimes the search engine doesn't help, either. Until I saw multiple people do it, I always thought people inputting company.com into an engine's search field was just a joke. And then they get confused again. ``Looking for Foo Baking online doesn't work. I put foo.com into Google, and it only brought up links to foo.com, and at the store they told me it was foo-bakers.com.''
And this is power. Power used by people who are acting in an 'I know what's best for you and for society' mindset, but power nevertheless. And really, it's power that developers need to have.
I don't think that People don't have the right to take freedom from other people is spelled out anywhere in the GPL, because that's -exactly- what the GPL does. It grants some rights, and it takes some away. Wether this is a good or bad thing is an entirely separate debate, but it doesn't change the fact that people do have this right.
Or maybe you'd like to try running Linux without the GNU system. Good luckThis statement has confused me for a long time. I know that Linux dropped into the GNU system and magically became a fully functional system because of the two working in tandem, but everyone that subscribes to this sort of belief seems to think that it was the only way. The GNU system is a really great thing, but if it wasn't there, is it so much of a stretch to think that something else would have been written? Plenty of other OSen out there have their own subsystems keeping everything running.
Wow. Honestly, dude, I didn't think that was your point at all. Up until this post, you seemed to be contending that we shouldn't be working on multiple OS projects because that would split the developer pool.
While I understand that you never said anything to the effect that Linux should have 100% market/mindshare, that seemed to be what you were driving at. ``We must band together and make Linux better or Microsoft will always have dominion over us!'' seemed to be the gist of it.
I think a lot of us get your point, but most of us just didn't know that -that- was what your point was.
Actually, 'Atheos' is Greek, roughly analagous to the word 'atheist'. IIRC, AtheOS's author didn't realize that, and the name wasn't designed to reflect anything, but the corrolation is there, nevertheless.
Back when I was using Debian, I figured this was the oute that I'd have to take, but didn't know enough about dpkg to pull it off, and didn't do enough with the box that required 'bleeding edge' libraries, so never got around to reading up on it.
Seems like some major effort, though. When it comes to package managers, though, I'd love to see an interface that allows you to specify options as already installed during package-add. Something akin to:
Package Foo.deb requires Bar, install Bar (y/n/a),
where A is is 'Already installed', and then specify the path to the lib, and have the package database make a note of it. This would get more than a little wonky, though, when you start needing library packages that include multiple shared objects. There are probably other places where it would get use as bad to work with, but since I'm using BSDs ports these days, haven't given it much thought as of late.
Well, I'm 23, most people I know still call me a kid. Does that count? ;) In all seriousness, though, I think people keep saying that just because you won't find many kids on /. talking about HP. The closest you can get on here is people who have kids talking about them. I -have- talked to my friends' kids about HP at different points, though. Does that count?
And I'd say ``My friends like to read...'', but most of my friends don't, unfortunately. The syndrom that children suffer from (Watching television instead) is just as prevalent in adults. Moreso, I think, because any time I'm with friends who have kids, the children are watching TV and playing, or doing homework, or doing something else. The adults just sit and stare.
I do share your view on teen psychology books, though. Dispite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary, adults still seem to think that they won't forget what childhood was like, and how they dealt with things, and they still seem to think that their methods of coping with childhood traumas apply to the next generation, or the one after. Sad, in some ways.
And while I'm writing to another Redwall fan (We seem to be sorta on the rare side), have you noticed that Jaques seems to have gone into Stephen King mode in the last few years? When I was in high school, I'd occasionally be in the bookstore and had reason to say 'Whoa! A new Redwall book!'.. Seems more and more these days I'll have reason to say 'God damn! Four new Redwall books??' Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I haven't read most of the newer ones, and dunno how good they are...
I don't think that's really what he's talking about.. With both rpm and apt, if you compile a library from source, the package manager won't consider said library to be installed. So once you upgrade your library, the pm will still tell you 'Library foo.so not available' and not install (Or worse, install a different copy when you're not looking.)
This becomes especially nasty when a package maintainer hasn't updated their package yet, and you need a bugfix/feature that the newer version has.
But he's not talking about you. The fact that you're commenting on the 'depth', and making comparisons to other authors proves that.
He's talking about the people with the 'reading is for dweebs' mindset that Must See TV and the like are aimed at. These are the people who can pick up something like HP to see what all the hype is about, find 'a cute fun read', and have it slide their perception more towards 'this reading thing isn't bad'.
And I'm sure there are a lot of people reading 'Harry Potter and Harry potter only, period', but that broad generalization is just that. Generalization. From my friends with kids in the HP age range, and other people I know, for every three or four people on the HP bandwagon wherever it leads, there's one or two that want to check out something else. (See one of my earlier posts about Redwall. My copies are really making the rounds these days)
Umm... I'm sorry, I don't think I quite get what you're trying to say. What I'm getting from your posts is that the HP books might be teaching kids to -only- want to read HP, and that they might not branch out from that. I'm going from that assumption, so if that wasn't your intent, most of the rest of this likely won't make much sense.
I don't think that breaking it down into those two cases is really accurate. Case 1 is really a superset of 2, imho. When I was in early grade school, I started reading books like the Chronicles of Narnia. Loved 'em. And I learned to love to read about Aslan's world (Case 2). But, from that, I learned to love to read anything that I found enjoyable.
I don't think that it's really possible to achieve 1 without first having gotten to 2. Can you really enjoy reading without having characters/settings that you love to read about?
Of course there are always going to be people that never find anything else that interests them once they finish HP (And if you find people like this, make them run, not walk, to go get Jaques' Redwall books, which are a lot like the HP books, in the 'easy fantasy stories for kids and adults' way..), but that's true of just about everything good. I'm sure there are people who won't read anything except Seuss (I graduated high school with lots of them). But the fact that these people are out there isn't a point against Rowling's books.
The points that you raise do seem to be valid, but applied to the wrong part of this equation. Rather than criticize books for people enjoying them but not developing a reading habit, shouldn't the criticism be directed at the people who will start to flaunt the 'It's not Harry Potter, and if it's not Harry Potter, I'm not interested.' mentality?
A lot of times this is true, but there was definitely an adult crowd at the showing I went to. Most of the kids that just had 'adult supervision' were in their own little groups, led by one or two adults. Looked almost like those parents lost a bet with their neighbors (Okay, everyone on the block draw straws. Short straw takes everyone's kids.)
The show I was at was actually mostly adults. Watching people as we left, there seemed to be a 2 or 3 to 1 ratio of adults to kids.
www.pond.com/~russotto/zplet/ifol.html
That's the home of Zplet, which is a rather nice java interpreter, which, iirc, handles save/restore functions now as well.
But you're right, it's not a whole lot better than a standard interpreter. (Especially as pond.com seems to be down at the moment.)