Now that we're pretty close to having LCD paper, and wireless internet access in every major city, I'm all for the next generation of money having LCD hologram foil that has a full 3-D animation of George W (or whomever is President when it's "printed") waving out from each bill. Whenever you're in range of a wireless network, the hologram can be updated to meet the current political climate, and of course banner ads can scroll between the large flashing colored denomination symbols. (Quickly pulsing red ball means $50, slower green pyramid means $20).
Now if they can get integrated micro-foil speakers too, we can have money that talks to us and cries "Spend Me!", "I've been in your wallet for 3 days, Don't you need more Cheezy-Poofs?"
Yeah, just what the world of Bloated Sac Hardware needs... another layer of GOOP to get between the programmer and the hardware.
Are all you people out there really so damn LAZY that you can't just program efficiently anymore? Has C++ and Microsoft managed to turn ALL your neurons to mush?
Anyone remember the games we had on the Commodore 64? Don't whine about how they weren't realistic, or how they didn't have UberMondoSurroundSound... they were fun! In fact, they were a hell of a lot MORE fun that 90% of the crap that takes up 3 cds and requires a Gigahertz CPU to run these days.
Yeah, go use your high level languages for writing database queries, and doing year-end financial reports... but for God's sake, don't use it for things where speed matters!
Oh yeah, to all the modern programmers out there... for every malloc(), there should be a free().
Ok, so it's bad enough to know that my productivity will be shot to hell by Neverwinter Nights next week. Now, I only have 2 weeks to get a module running DM-less? Argh!
Ok, so this is a very basic mud server with portals that are self-discovered in a peer-to-peer fasion? Sounds like a quick hack to an old copy of AberMUD would accomplish the same thing, and not require a custom client to connect (unless telnet is considered custom these days).
Sounds fine to me. Let all the nasty bugs get caught and fixed by the windoze people and then when the linux version comes out in July, it'll be nice and clean.
Number 1 son of Number 1 son buys safe pewter figurine. Drinks glass of cold water. Water filters through landfill where all "evil" lead figurines lay. Number 1 grandson has far more brain damage and has to pet three legged cat to calm himself.
Ok, when a brand new show is aired, the advertisers all buy up spots that get scattered throughout the timespace, and thus we've all signed a deal with them (in blood) to stay rivited to the TV and buy everything they say is cool.
When a show gets shown in reruns, those advertisers don't get as much money. A commercial spot during the Battlestar Galactica rerun is going to be cheaper than one during "Girls of C.O.P.S Gone Wild Live!". So does that mean, if you watch a syndicated TV show, instead of seeing the original, you're also stealing???
So everyone under the age of 30 who's ever seen the original Star Trek is a thief and should be hung from the MPAA's yardarm with the RIAA chanting exorcism rites. Go Hollywood!
Hmmm, one could always setup a squid proxy farm and allow outside access to it, but disallow links that aren't already cached from an internal hit (soas to avoid pollution of the cache by zillions of pr0n hits).
Permission to link huh? Yeah, like Google asks permission.... like the web proxy at your ISP asks permission.... yeah.
Ok, so let's all get out our magtape reels and go back in time a few decades. Obviously, this is what "UnitedLinux" wants to do... bring us back to the good old days when your OS was vendor-controlled and pretty much useless without expensive licenses and support.
What RMS says is that if your work is NOT protected by the GPL, then the UL folks can restrict it by the per-seat license garbage. Which means anyone who installed the UL distro and then decides to stop paying their license fees will need to find a replacement for the bits that get shutoff. This could be anything from your cutesy animated-mouse-pointer gizmo to their proprietary version of kswapd.
I think this is the stupidest idea I've heard of in the Linux community to date. Learn from history! Caldara tried this and paid the price, do you really want to suffer too? This is like picking up dozens of free pamphlets and tying them together with a cute pink ribbon and charging the customer $50 for the "bundle". Pfah!
This is the same mentality that insists that old black & white movies MUST be turned into pastel color movies before being rereleased.
Why the hell doesn't Lucas just accept that the original Star Wars is going to be his best-remembered film and stop meddling with it. I don't remember hearing anyone whine about how Han Solo was a "meanie", or any petitions going around to change that scene.
Yeah, ok, maybe he "messed up", but it's on film, and guess what? People like it. Sometimes the best things are unintended screwups that nonetheless become popular and well loved. Don't second guess yourself, don't ask why.. just accept and learn.
I think it's pretty clear that George got lucky with the first Star Wars. Every film thereafter has leaned more and more towards some specific marketing demographic, and has had obvious storyline sacrifices to satisfy those demands. I understand doing that when you're new on the scene and have to pay the bills.. but c'mon! George Lucas needs more money about like a 90-degree summer day near a swamp needs more mosquitoes. He can afford to tell the story for its own sake, yet he clearly bows to what the marketers tell him. I hope he enjoyed his sucess, as it's all downhill from here...
is of VITAL importance in today's piracy riddled automotive industry! With the increase of terrorist speedometers that have unprotected analog-to-digital converters in them, who knows how many copyrighted works might be sent into the hands of rebellious youths every time you step on the gas pedal?
We must put a stop to this! Next thing you know, digital thermostats will be available, and then there will be NO END to the piracy!
Actually, for many of us "slackers", it's not military service we're opposed to, it's the fact that the military strives to mold everyone into their lego-universe of fabricated roles. When dealing with large numbers of people, it's far simpler to get them all to conform to a set role, than to try and use the strengths of each individual as they're suited.
This is the same problem the public school system in America faces. It's hard to BOTH teach kids who are slow AND keep it challenging for those who are bright. There isn't enough manpower or funding to let them teach everyone at their own speed, and the result is many underachievers who simply got too bored of school, or couldn't keep up and stopped trying.
Another big source of reluctance is the general mistrust of the Government that our population has acquired. Much of that is due to the massive amounts of waste and corruption that turn up almost every week. It also comes from a lack of a defined black-and-white goal. It's not hard for people to rally behind a leader who cries 'Stamp out terrorism!', but when they see that the same bombs which hit a camp full of armed gunment are also smashing the homes of women and children, the picture gets a bit out of focus.
The biggest challenge with ANY of this is convincing the common man that he matters. If he believes that his voice can be heard, then he will care. If he cares, he will vote, lobby, and even fight for what he holds dear.
"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."
If someone feels they can't make a difference, that they have nothing to offer, then they will give up trying and just live out their lives. It's not easy to see how you matter these days, and sometimes it takes most of your life to find out.
Anyways, I'd just like to say that I appreciate the men and women who DO serve in the military. You are doing something that I cannot do. Just remember that while the Big Freedoms are essential, the little ones are what make our country worth living in. If the people who want to censor the net, control what we can do with our property, and decide how we can spend our time (hear me RIAA/MPAA/Microsoft/Lobbyists?) could figure that out, maybe we could concentrate on the important things.
It's a matter of finding things again...
on
Unlimited Airwaves
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
So, like so many other computer/data related things, it will amount to how well new equipment would be able to sort through the overlapping radio transmissions to find the one you actually want to capture and decode.
Essentially, current radio tuners are serial, in that they lock onto a single frequency and attenuate all others down. Reed's suggestion is basically to receive many frequencies in parallel and toss them out as you decode them and they prove to not be the one you want?
Sounds good. It would make security through adaptive modulation interesting.
I don't care one whit for what kind of obnoxious copy protection they shove up Celene Dion's... music, but if the DMCA wants my sharpie, they'll need to bring the National Guard!
The point you're missing here is, piracy is an illegal act of redistributing another's work without compensation to the original author. By definition, this is an illegal activity, so how is any law outlawing the tools that allow this going to prevent the act?
The legitimate customer who HAS purchased the software/DVD/widget now cannot exercise his right to make backups of the content. He also cannot transfer the content (which he purchased -- he did NOT purchase only the media, he purchased the right to use the content) from the delivery media to a media of his choice for use. This restricts his ability to use the product as he sees fit (in the privacy of his own home).
If THAT is not enough, the protection schemes many companies use on their products prevent the normal operation of the product. The region codes of the DVD are an example of this. I can buy a movie that's only distributed in Hong Kong, but if I use a region enabled player, I won't be able to view it at all, even though there IS NO EQUIVALENT for my region. Another example is software copy protection... if the copy protection can't read the non-standard CD format on a given drive, it is not useable.
The DMCA says that if I find a way to make this work on my equipment (which it does not, as the manufacturer sold it to me), or I make a backup copy of it, then I am a criminal.
This is what the DMCA does to a law-abiding citizen.
What does it do to a pirate?
Given that a pirate is intending to redistribute copyrighted material (which is itself already an illegal violation of copyright law), and that they know perfectly well that they are breaking the law by doing this... how is one more law going to deter them?
I don't believe you can defend a trademark on a common noun or verb. It doesn't make any sense (although in the legal world, that hardly matters).
Arguing about lindows vs. windows would be almost as bad as saying that it's ok for the Be company to have used that name, but if I tried to found the Me company, it'd be too confusing.
Microshaft can trademark "Microsoft Windows" all it wants, but next they'll start buying plate glass factories and trying to sue "Bob's Windows" for trademark infringement.
What's the difference between a lawyer and a leech? The leech won't charge you anything.
Well said. Unfortunately, the game I have been most looking forward to seems to have been placed on hold.
http://www.worldofmidgard.com/
From the descriptions, it sounds like a game that tries to emphasize role-playing, and politics rather than orc-bashing. I like smacking orcs as well as the next hu-man, but it would be refreshing to see a game offer something more than the kill->levelup->repeat treadmill.
Re:Design patterns and Lisp
on
Bitter Java
·
· Score: 1
Let me start by saying that I like lisp, so I'm not intentionally out to lisp-bash... but...
Having worked with C for many years, and having worked with perl for a few now, I have to say that I really miss typed-variables. Nothing catches a mistake faster than a type mismatch, and almost nothing is harder to track down than a bug where the compiler/interpreter happily turned a string into a number for you.
Consider: print "ha" if 2 > "ha";
Yeah, the compiler knows how to convert "ha" into the numnber 0, but should it? Not always, and I claim not without my explicit type-casting. If I put an (int) type there, then I think I know what I'm doing, otherwise I'd rather it error.
My only other complaint with modern programming techniques, is this simple observation:
I can build a lighthouse out of legos in 15 minutes.. it will look kinda lego-ish, but it would function as a lighthouse (provided I have a light to mount in it).
To do the same thing in clay would take several hours (probably days for me!), and yes.. it would look much better, but when you're a little ways away, and it's dark... they'll look the same.
I like lisp for the simplicity of its syntax, and in any language, I'd like to have untyped variables AVAILABLE for use... but sometimes I know I always want a 16-bit integer, and if something else gets in there, it's a bug -- then I want the language to catch it as early as possible so I don't have to sit and stare at it in the debugger trying to figure out why -11726 is the current number of records!
Does Trillian use the MSN Chat control to do the low-level communication? It's fairly common practice when programming to not re-invent the wheel if there's already one parked in the driveway. If the M$ control provides the API's to do the communication without a gui, I'd probably use that if it were present. If they did, a hole in that library object is a hole for anything that uses it too.
BY THE WAY, IT LOOKS LIKE YOUR CAPS LOCK KEY IS BROKEN...
Actually, what Microsoft seemed to have meant by "Embrace and Extend" is a little different that what most of us mean.
What they meant was, let's hurry up and release a version of our web browser that does everything the (then current) standards say, plus our own versions of things that are currently being discussed for inclusion in the next standard.
The intent was to get their version of the future standard in use out in the marketplace before the official version (which other vendors would follow) came out.
This is why, even today, you have to circumvent the original design goals of HTML and special-case your web pages if you want them to look decent in both IE *and* Netscape. If they had waited and followed the standard, things would have been simpler.
If you're going to HAVE standards, than they need to BE standards... for everyone! M$ didn't get their standard approved by popularity, they got it out there by having a virtual monopoly on the browser market and pushing it on everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that we're pretty close to having LCD paper, and wireless internet access in every major city, I'm all for the next generation of money having LCD hologram foil that has a full 3-D animation of George W (or whomever is President when it's "printed") waving out from each bill. Whenever you're in range of a wireless network, the hologram can be updated to meet the current political climate, and of course banner ads can scroll between the large flashing colored denomination symbols. (Quickly pulsing red ball means $50, slower green pyramid means $20).
Now if they can get integrated micro-foil speakers too, we can have money that talks to us and cries "Spend Me!", "I've been in your wallet for 3 days, Don't you need more Cheezy-Poofs?"
Yeah, just what the world of Bloated Sac Hardware needs... another layer of GOOP to get between the programmer and the hardware.
Are all you people out there really so damn LAZY that you can't just program efficiently anymore? Has C++ and Microsoft managed to turn ALL your neurons to mush?
Anyone remember the games we had on the Commodore 64? Don't whine about how they weren't realistic, or how they didn't have UberMondoSurroundSound... they were fun! In fact, they were a hell of a lot MORE fun that 90% of the crap that takes up 3 cds and requires a Gigahertz CPU to run these days.
Yeah, go use your high level languages for writing database queries, and doing year-end financial reports... but for God's sake, don't use it for things where speed matters!
Oh yeah, to all the modern programmers out there... for every malloc(), there should be a free().
Ok, so it's bad enough to know that my productivity will be shot to hell by Neverwinter Nights next week. Now, I only have 2 weeks to get a module running DM-less? Argh!
> the rest of the world things it's more orangish
Another 42% would have to whine about your spelling errors and say things != thinks.
Then, of course, 90% of the moderators would mod you down for being off-topic.
Ok, so this is a very basic mud server with portals that are self-discovered in a peer-to-peer fasion? Sounds like a quick hack to an old copy of AberMUD would accomplish the same thing, and not require a custom client to connect (unless telnet is considered custom these days).
God Bless You for bringing that image to mind!
Hmmmm, Hot and Pointy vs. Green and Wrinkled. I know where my spidey sense leads me...
Sounds fine to me. Let all the nasty bugs get caught and fixed by the windoze people and then when the linux version comes out in July, it'll be nice and clean.
The same level I get to use it for my hit dice rolls?
Number 1 son of Number 1 son buys safe pewter figurine. Drinks glass of cold water. Water filters through landfill where all "evil" lead figurines lay. Number 1 grandson has far more brain damage and has to pet three legged cat to calm himself.
Ok, when a brand new show is aired, the advertisers all buy up spots that get scattered throughout the timespace, and thus we've all signed a deal with them (in blood) to stay rivited to the TV and buy everything they say is cool.
When a show gets shown in reruns, those advertisers don't get as much money. A commercial spot during the Battlestar Galactica rerun is going to be cheaper than one during "Girls of C.O.P.S Gone Wild Live!". So does that mean, if you watch a syndicated TV show, instead of seeing the original, you're also stealing???
So everyone under the age of 30 who's ever seen the original Star Trek is a thief and should be hung from the MPAA's yardarm with the RIAA chanting exorcism rites. Go Hollywood!
Hmmm, one could always setup a squid proxy farm and allow outside access to it, but disallow links that aren't already cached from an internal hit (soas to avoid pollution of the cache by zillions of pr0n hits).
Permission to link huh? Yeah, like Google asks permission.... like the web proxy at your ISP asks permission.... yeah.
Riiiiing....
"Hello?", says terrorist of the week, Usr BinLinux.
"Dude! You're gettin' a Dell!", says the officer in charge of MS Cruise Missile Deployment.
Ok, so let's all get out our magtape reels and go back in time a few decades. Obviously, this is what "UnitedLinux" wants to do... bring us back to the good old days when your OS was vendor-controlled and pretty much useless without expensive licenses and support.
What RMS says is that if your work is NOT protected by the GPL, then the UL folks can restrict it by the per-seat license garbage. Which means anyone who installed the UL distro and then decides to stop paying their license fees will need to find a replacement for the bits that get shutoff. This could be anything from your cutesy animated-mouse-pointer gizmo to their proprietary version of kswapd.
I think this is the stupidest idea I've heard of in the Linux community to date. Learn from history! Caldara tried this and paid the price, do you really want to suffer too? This is like picking up dozens of free pamphlets and tying them together with a cute pink ribbon and charging the customer $50 for the "bundle". Pfah!
This is the same mentality that insists that old black & white movies MUST be turned into pastel color movies before being rereleased.
Why the hell doesn't Lucas just accept that the original Star Wars is going to be his best-remembered film and stop meddling with it. I don't remember hearing anyone whine about how Han Solo was a "meanie", or any petitions going around to change that scene.
Yeah, ok, maybe he "messed up", but it's on film, and guess what? People like it. Sometimes the best things are unintended screwups that nonetheless become popular and well loved. Don't second guess yourself, don't ask why.. just accept and learn.
I think it's pretty clear that George got lucky with the first Star Wars. Every film thereafter has leaned more and more towards some specific marketing demographic, and has had obvious storyline sacrifices to satisfy those demands. I understand doing that when you're new on the scene and have to pay the bills.. but c'mon! George Lucas needs more money about like a 90-degree summer day near a swamp needs more mosquitoes. He can afford to tell the story for its own sake, yet he clearly bows to what the marketers tell him. I hope he enjoyed his sucess, as it's all downhill from here...
is of VITAL importance in today's piracy riddled automotive industry! With the increase of terrorist speedometers that have unprotected analog-to-digital converters in them, who knows how many copyrighted works might be sent into the hands of rebellious youths every time you step on the gas pedal?
We must put a stop to this! Next thing you know, digital thermostats will be available, and then there will be NO END to the piracy!
Actually, for many of us "slackers", it's not military service we're opposed to, it's the fact that the military strives to mold everyone into their lego-universe of fabricated roles. When dealing with large numbers of people, it's far simpler to get them all to conform to a set role, than to try and use the strengths of each individual as they're suited.
This is the same problem the public school system in America faces. It's hard to BOTH teach kids who are slow AND keep it challenging for those who are bright. There isn't enough manpower or funding to let them teach everyone at their own speed, and the result is many underachievers who simply got too bored of school, or couldn't keep up and stopped trying.
Another big source of reluctance is the general mistrust of the Government that our population has acquired. Much of that is due to the massive amounts of waste and corruption that turn up almost every week. It also comes from a lack of a defined black-and-white goal. It's not hard for people to rally behind a leader who cries 'Stamp out terrorism!', but when they see that the same bombs which hit a camp full of armed gunment are also smashing the homes of women and children, the picture gets a bit out of focus.
The biggest challenge with ANY of this is convincing the common man that he matters. If he believes that his voice can be heard, then he will care. If he cares, he will vote, lobby, and even fight for what he holds dear.
"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."
If someone feels they can't make a difference, that they have nothing to offer, then they will give up trying and just live out their lives. It's not easy to see how you matter these days, and sometimes it takes most of your life to find out.
Anyways, I'd just like to say that I appreciate the men and women who DO serve in the military. You are doing something that I cannot do. Just remember that while the Big Freedoms are essential, the little ones are what make our country worth living in. If the people who want to censor the net, control what we can do with our property, and decide how we can spend our time (hear me RIAA/MPAA/Microsoft/Lobbyists?) could figure that out, maybe we could concentrate on the important things.
So, like so many other computer/data related things, it will amount to how well new equipment would be able to sort through the overlapping radio transmissions to find the one you actually want to capture and decode.
Essentially, current radio tuners are serial, in that they lock onto a single frequency and attenuate all others down. Reed's suggestion is basically to receive many frequencies in parallel and toss them out as you decode them and they prove to not be the one you want?
Sounds good. It would make security through adaptive modulation interesting.
...from my cold dead fingers!
I don't care one whit for what kind of obnoxious copy protection they shove up Celene Dion's... music, but if the DMCA wants my sharpie, they'll need to bring the National Guard!
The point you're missing here is, piracy is an illegal act of redistributing another's work without compensation to the original author. By definition, this is an illegal activity, so how is any law outlawing the tools that allow this going to prevent the act?
The legitimate customer who HAS purchased the software/DVD/widget now cannot exercise his right to make backups of the content. He also cannot transfer the content (which he purchased -- he did NOT purchase only the media, he purchased the right to use the content) from the delivery media to a media of his choice for use. This restricts his ability to use the product as he sees fit (in the privacy of his own home).
If THAT is not enough, the protection schemes many companies use on their products prevent the normal operation of the product. The region codes of the DVD are an example of this. I can buy a movie that's only distributed in Hong Kong, but if I use a region enabled player, I won't be able to view it at all, even though there IS NO EQUIVALENT for my region. Another example is software copy protection... if the copy protection can't read the non-standard CD format on a given drive, it is
not useable.
The DMCA says that if I find a way to make this work on my equipment (which it does not, as the manufacturer sold it to me), or I make a backup copy of it, then I am a criminal.
This is what the DMCA does to a law-abiding citizen.
What does it do to a pirate?
Given that a pirate is intending to redistribute copyrighted material (which is itself already an illegal violation of copyright law), and that they know perfectly well that they are breaking the law by doing this... how is one more law going to deter them?
I don't believe you can defend a trademark on a common noun or verb. It doesn't make any sense (although in the legal world, that hardly matters).
Arguing about lindows vs. windows would be almost as bad as saying that it's ok for the Be company to have used that name, but if I tried to found the Me company, it'd be too confusing.
Microshaft can trademark "Microsoft Windows" all it wants, but next they'll start buying plate glass factories and trying to sue "Bob's Windows" for trademark infringement.
What's the difference between a lawyer and a leech? The leech won't charge you anything.
Well said.
Unfortunately, the game I have been most looking forward to seems to have been placed on hold.
http://www.worldofmidgard.com/
From the descriptions, it sounds like a game that tries to emphasize role-playing, and politics rather than orc-bashing. I like smacking orcs as well as the next hu-man, but it would be refreshing to see a game offer something more than the kill->levelup->repeat treadmill.
Let me start by saying that I like lisp, so I'm not intentionally out to lisp-bash... but...
Having worked with C for many years, and having worked with perl for a few now, I have to say that I really miss typed-variables. Nothing catches a mistake faster than a type mismatch, and almost nothing is harder to track down than a bug where the compiler/interpreter happily turned a string into a number for you.
Consider: print "ha" if 2 > "ha";
Yeah, the compiler knows how to convert "ha" into the numnber 0, but should it? Not always, and I claim not without my explicit type-casting. If I put an (int) type there, then I think I know what I'm doing, otherwise I'd rather it error.
My only other complaint with modern programming techniques, is this simple observation:
I can build a lighthouse out of legos in 15 minutes.. it will look kinda lego-ish, but it would function as a lighthouse (provided I have a light to mount in it).
To do the same thing in clay would take several hours (probably days for me!), and yes.. it would look much better, but when you're a little ways away, and it's dark... they'll look the same.
I like lisp for the simplicity of its syntax, and in any language, I'd like to have untyped variables AVAILABLE for use... but sometimes I know I always want a 16-bit integer, and if something else gets in there, it's a bug -- then I want the language to catch it as early as possible so I don't have to sit and stare at it in the debugger trying to figure out why -11726 is the current number of records!
Or you can try this...
http://www.meehawl.com/Asset/nytview.html
That way you don't even have to think up what name you'll register with.
Does Trillian use the MSN Chat control to do the low-level communication? It's fairly common practice when programming to not re-invent the wheel if there's already one parked in the driveway. If the M$ control provides the API's to do the communication without a gui, I'd probably use that if it were present. If they did, a hole in that library object is a hole for anything that uses it too.
BY THE WAY, IT LOOKS LIKE YOUR CAPS LOCK KEY IS BROKEN...
Actually, what Microsoft seemed to have meant by "Embrace and Extend" is a little different that what most of us mean.
What they meant was, let's hurry up and release a version of our web browser that does everything the (then current) standards say, plus our own versions of things that are currently being discussed for inclusion in the next standard.
The intent was to get their version of the future standard in use out in the marketplace before the official version (which other vendors would follow) came out.
This is why, even today, you have to circumvent the original design goals of HTML and special-case your web pages if you want them to look decent in both IE *and* Netscape. If they had waited and followed the standard, things would have been simpler.
If you're going to HAVE standards, than they need to BE standards... for everyone! M$ didn't get their standard approved by popularity, they got it out there by having a virtual monopoly on the browser market and pushing it on everyone.