they'll have some continuity issues, won't they?
on
New Mad Max Film
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I mean, weren't we supposed to expect the apocalypse to have happened by now already? Or is it like a James Bond or Superman thing, the old Umberto Eco concept of the Open Text. I dunno.
I think you're right Reality Master, except that we mustn't forget the strong Pygmalion impulse. You're right -- in many ways computer intelligence will probably insidiously supercede human intelligence, without ever really looking like human intelligence -- unless that's specifically what it's designed to do. And that may be an irresistible impulse to many designers.
Just imagine, 10 years from now, when we've all got 1 THz machines or whatever, and someone posts a new open source neural net onto slashdot -- you don't think someone's gonna try and mimic dopamine reception, or serotonin?
I was looking through the times and saw this article, did a search through google on the term "captchas", and based on the speed of the page's return, i immediately knew that there was a slashdot article.
I'd like to see AI figure THAT one out! I call it Automatic Slashdot Slowdown Effect Detection, or ASSED for short.
thank you for pointing this out. I placed a disclaimer on the page sending people to get flash, so lynx folks will understand why they're not seeing much.
Meanwhile, Wacky Neighbor looks just fine in lynx, by design. And I am perfectly capable of using html.
You might get farther in life with a different personality.
I do this and it works great for invoices. I still use quickbooks 99 but I will definitely be scouring this thread to try some alternates.
Most important features to me are:
invoicing
being able to generate an accountant's copy (that he can read)
If I can find a linux replacement that does those two (and basic bookkeeping) I'll never look back. The switch from outlook to evolution / spam assassin / fetchmail has been a HUGE benefit to my productivity.
Now if only they'd make flash mx, photoshop, and dreamweaver for linux I'd be down to a single machine. unfortunately i'll be running a winders machine for a while yet. Linux can't produce one of these quite yet.
figure a few years for mini-fuel cells to become available and cheap. This gives the OSS community just enough time to put together a good recognition scheme. Get crackin'. I'll be at Moe's.
The results of this kind of thing aren't always pretty, as you can see with such projects as WINE.
But i was under the impression that "WINE is not an emulator". Doesn't this mean it doesn't have to emulate x86 instructions? I honestly don't know, i'm not an expert, but that's what i thought.
Second point: CPU is not that minor a consumer. According to pcmag, it's about 2 watts during average operation for most PIII's and 4's, and at peak a P4 can draw 30watts at once. So if you're looking at a spreadsheet it's a minor concern. If you're doing something processor intensive it becomes major. Which means there's certainly a market for it, though it might not be for standard business type stuff.
Not sure if anyone else caught it, but he was on Charlie Rose tonight. Hyping the tablet.
Charlie asked him if he was scared of linux and he said that they took it very seriously. He also mentioned privacy concerns of end users (without actually mentioning Palladium directly) and talked about their continuing investment in R&D.
Is the issue here whether the banks will *work* with alternate browsers and gnucash, or whether the bank will pony up a few techies to *support* it? Big difference -- I should expect the first, just based on the idea that they should be using standards. The second would be more understandable for them to shirk for a while more, since market share for linux desktops is still small, and generally a more tech-savvy crowd.
Honestly, per bit prices are fairer than all-you-can-eat prices. Realistically, all-you-can-eat is a lot more appetizing. Probably a balanced approach would be to allow a certain amount of bandwidth for a certain pre-fixe, something along the lines of (these numbers are coming out of my ass) 20 bucks for 3 GB, then an additional charge of a few cents per meg. It would encourage better web design, discourage wastes of bandwidth, and end up putting more legal pressure on spammers. The key would be that in markets where there's no competition and one provider, prices should have some oversight; in other cases, Adam Smith's invisble hand should suffice. And whoever in the non-last mile part of the loop (bells? i dunno who runs this) is overcharging for bandwidth needs to stop; last time I heard, there was a glut of fiber.
RIAA and record execs: You want us to pay? Do this:
Make a list of everyone involved in the production. Artists, Mixers, Roadies, whatever. Estimate their costs, including cost of studio leasing, equipment. Add all this together. Add fair artist bonus for him / her to spend on bacchic pleasures, that he/she can continue to rock the Kasbah. DO NOT add any lawyering fees or your own coke habit to the tab. DO NOT add craft services, car services, gift baskets, personal assistants, psychiatrists, or groupies to the tab. Most importantly, DO NOT add promotion to the tab. I like to find my own music, through word of mouth and on the net.
Add two points above prime for your stockholders. Divide the sum by the number of expected patrons. (this is the tricky part, but you could've used the napster logs if you hadn't shut it down) THIS is your per user price. Show all your math. Make it public. Then host a pledge drive. If no one ponies up the cash, your artist is attracting an irresponsible and selfish crowd, and they can go without another studio release for a while. Put the artist on tour until he/she's got enough money to do another album, or has driven the demand of an album to such a fever pitch that the fans agree to chip in. If none of this works, you didn't have anything valuable to begin with.
What follows is not necessarily true, but a fun way to think about things. Sweeping generalizations here we come!
There's Alans and there's Flynns.
The Alans of the world go to a nice, salaried job and have a professional background in Windows APIs, C#,.net. But many of them also share mp3s and might have some personal doubts about Microsoft's hegemony, the RIAA, et al. Most dislike AOL, and all tend to have to fix family and friends' computers. Some of them even run a linux box at home.
Then there's the Flynns, the guys deeply devoted to the Gnustic mysteries. These guys have good weed, a prodigious mp3 collection, and know every nook and cranny of their/etc/ directory. They tend to be freelance, and find the idea of certification a bit silly. Most hate the notion of DRM, although some may secretly welcome the challenge of breaking new copy protection schemes.
Many of us fall somewhere on this spectrum. But the future of the system depends on how they work together to fight Dillinger and the MCP. Some Alans will join the dark side. But not all by a long shot, because the limitations imposed on systems by things like the DMCA or (god forbid) palladium run counter to the needs of the Users. And we all believe in the Users, don't we?
of course the real question is, not is it worse, but is it perceptibly worse. Now, personally i'm not an audio afficianado. I don't like it when the treble gets sort of twangy, as it does on 128. but I ripped most of this stuff at 192. So i'm gonna try ogg and see what the final result is. And if it's good enough, it's good enough.
Thanks for all your advice, i'm gonna try that Oggasm thing, Lxy.
here's where slashdot can really shine. I, like many of you out there, have scanned my album collection into mp3 format. Why? Because this was the most popular, ubiquitous format when I did it. I'd love to go to ogg. To do so, i need a simple way to recurse through about 36 gigs of mp3s and reencode them into ogg, and delete the originals. I know there's no reason why one shell command shouldn't suffice. I know if I were to do a decent search through freshmeat, i'd be able to find a command-line program to do it, and the proper args, etc. But i know someone here already knows it. ***PLEASE*** post instructions, and whatever software i need to get, and yours is the karma and everything in it.
I agree. It's an arms race. Nature's full of them Peacocks strut their hella huge tails not because it confers a survival advantage but specifically because it reduces their survival advantage, so much as to say to the female of the species, "hey baby, I can walk around with this clownery on my ass because i'm big and strong and fast enough to get away with it." Alphas in our own species do it by blowing money on old fermented grape juice, fish eggs and goose liver. And our companies do it by hemorraging their stockpayers' money on a giant thing called the superbowl. And the stockpayers love it.
What is a liability in the home may be a boon to the harried IT guy. By relegating package management to SU, and by having a server / client windows system, Linux makes the management of a large office of workstations a bit easier than windows can. This (along with price) partially explains their greater acceptance in municpal offices, Europe, etc.
In a home environment, the user must be able to add and subtract hardware and software. It's certainly possible to "set up" a linux box for grandma, as long as she sticks to the old "just mail and web" paradigm. But the moment she decides to buy a digital camera, or start playing bridge or something, she is going to need to get comfy in a console as SU. Not good enough. So, home use will be the final frontier, and we know what we have to do to get there. Can it be done?
I would love to have some sort of vga lcd screen, miniature (maybe 4x5" or so), that just runs a console off serial. Theoretically this should be cheaper than a full-blown 1024x768 LCD monitor, but economies of scale, etc.. i guess. Anyone see anything like this? I think it would be sweet to put that on the side of a box and stand it on a desk. Instant server.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, weren't we supposed to expect the apocalypse to have happened by now already? Or is it like a James Bond or Superman thing, the old Umberto Eco concept of the Open Text. I dunno.
That's just the kind of thinking that will eventually lead to flesh fairs.
I think you're right Reality Master, except that we mustn't forget the strong Pygmalion impulse. You're right -- in many ways computer intelligence will probably insidiously supercede human intelligence, without ever really looking like human intelligence -- unless that's specifically what it's designed to do. And that may be an irresistible impulse to many designers.
Just imagine, 10 years from now, when we've all got 1 THz machines or whatever, and someone posts a new open source neural net onto slashdot -- you don't think someone's gonna try and mimic dopamine reception, or serotonin?
I was looking through the times and saw this article, did a search through google on the term "captchas", and based on the speed of the page's return, i immediately knew that there was a slashdot article.
I'd like to see AI figure THAT one out! I call it Automatic Slashdot Slowdown Effect Detection, or ASSED for short.
thank you for pointing this out. I placed a disclaimer on the page sending people to get flash, so lynx folks will understand why they're not seeing much.
Meanwhile, Wacky Neighbor looks just fine in lynx, by design. And I am perfectly capable of using html.
You might get farther in life with a different personality.
I do this and it works great for invoices. I still use quickbooks 99 but I will definitely be scouring this thread to try some alternates.
Most important features to me are:
If I can find a linux replacement that does those two (and basic bookkeeping) I'll never look back. The switch from outlook to evolution / spam assassin / fetchmail has been a HUGE benefit to my productivity.
Now if only they'd make flash mx, photoshop, and dreamweaver for linux I'd be down to a single machine. unfortunately i'll be running a winders machine for a while yet. Linux can't produce one of these quite yet.
figure a few years for mini-fuel cells to become available and cheap. This gives the OSS community just enough time to put together a good recognition scheme. Get crackin'. I'll be at Moe's.
If transmeta's new Astro processor will fill this niche for an alternate. As reported here on Friday, their chip apparently outperforms a 1.8 mobile.
But i was under the impression that "WINE is not an emulator". Doesn't this mean it doesn't have to emulate x86 instructions? I honestly don't know, i'm not an expert, but that's what i thought.
Second point: CPU is not that minor a consumer. According to pcmag, it's about 2 watts during average operation for most PIII's and 4's, and at peak a P4 can draw 30watts at once. So if you're looking at a spreadsheet it's a minor concern. If you're doing something processor intensive it becomes major. Which means there's certainly a market for it, though it might not be for standard business type stuff.
Not sure if anyone else caught it, but he was on Charlie Rose tonight. Hyping the tablet.
Charlie asked him if he was scared of linux and he said that they took it very seriously. He also mentioned privacy concerns of end users (without actually mentioning Palladium directly) and talked about their continuing investment in R&D.
No big whoop.
Why not just Phat Agnus?
between those two and the haptic doohickey from before? Jackie Treehorn's vision is almost upon us.
I still jerk off manually.
Is the issue here whether the banks will *work* with alternate browsers and gnucash, or whether the bank will pony up a few techies to *support* it? Big difference -- I should expect the first, just based on the idea that they should be using standards. The second would be more understandable for them to shirk for a while more, since market share for linux desktops is still small, and generally a more tech-savvy crowd.
Honestly, per bit prices are fairer than all-you-can-eat prices. Realistically, all-you-can-eat is a lot more appetizing. Probably a balanced approach would be to allow a certain amount of bandwidth for a certain pre-fixe, something along the lines of (these numbers are coming out of my ass) 20 bucks for 3 GB, then an additional charge of a few cents per meg. It would encourage better web design, discourage wastes of bandwidth, and end up putting more legal pressure on spammers. The key would be that in markets where there's no competition and one provider, prices should have some oversight; in other cases, Adam Smith's invisble hand should suffice. And whoever in the non-last mile part of the loop (bells? i dunno who runs this) is overcharging for bandwidth needs to stop; last time I heard, there was a glut of fiber.
I think it's a fertilized easter egg that hatches during the hunt.
RIAA and record execs: You want us to pay? Do this:
Make a list of everyone involved in the production. Artists, Mixers, Roadies, whatever. Estimate their costs, including cost of studio leasing, equipment. Add all this together. Add fair artist bonus for him / her to spend on bacchic pleasures, that he/she can continue to rock the Kasbah. DO NOT add any lawyering fees or your own coke habit to the tab. DO NOT add craft services, car services, gift baskets, personal assistants, psychiatrists, or groupies to the tab. Most importantly, DO NOT add promotion to the tab. I like to find my own music, through word of mouth and on the net.
Add two points above prime for your stockholders. Divide the sum by the number of expected patrons. (this is the tricky part, but you could've used the napster logs if you hadn't shut it down) THIS is your per user price. Show all your math. Make it public. Then host a pledge drive. If no one ponies up the cash, your artist is attracting an irresponsible and selfish crowd, and they can go without another studio release for a while. Put the artist on tour until he/she's got enough money to do another album, or has driven the demand of an album to such a fever pitch that the fans agree to chip in. If none of this works, you didn't have anything valuable to begin with.
I think "combine this with photovores" should be henceforth be considered the robotics equivalent of "imagine a beowulf cluster"
What follows is not necessarily true, but a fun way to think about things. Sweeping generalizations here we come!
.net. But many of them also share mp3s and might have some personal doubts about Microsoft's hegemony, the RIAA, et al. Most dislike AOL, and all tend to have to fix family and friends' computers. Some of them even run a linux box at home.
/etc/ directory. They tend to be freelance, and find the idea of certification a bit silly. Most hate the notion of DRM, although some may secretly welcome the challenge of breaking new copy protection schemes.
There's Alans and there's Flynns.
The Alans of the world go to a nice, salaried job and have a professional background in Windows APIs, C#,
Then there's the Flynns, the guys deeply devoted to the Gnustic mysteries. These guys have good weed, a prodigious mp3 collection, and know every nook and cranny of their
Many of us fall somewhere on this spectrum. But the future of the system depends on how they work together to fight Dillinger and the MCP. Some Alans will join the dark side. But not all by a long shot, because the limitations imposed on systems by things like the DMCA or (god forbid) palladium run counter to the needs of the Users. And we all believe in the Users, don't we?
of course the real question is, not is it worse, but is it perceptibly worse. Now, personally i'm not an audio afficianado. I don't like it when the treble gets sort of twangy, as it does on 128. but I ripped most of this stuff at 192. So i'm gonna try ogg and see what the final result is. And if it's good enough, it's good enough.
Thanks for all your advice, i'm gonna try that Oggasm thing, Lxy.
ugh.... yeah i got 'em, but they're spindled on a lamp. Probably half of them are scratched beyond recognition. What a pain.
here's where slashdot can really shine. I, like many of you out there, have scanned my album collection into mp3 format. Why? Because this was the most popular, ubiquitous format when I did it. I'd love to go to ogg. To do so, i need a simple way to recurse through about 36 gigs of mp3s and reencode them into ogg, and delete the originals. I know there's no reason why one shell command shouldn't suffice. I know if I were to do a decent search through freshmeat, i'd be able to find a command-line program to do it, and the proper args, etc. But i know someone here already knows it. ***PLEASE*** post instructions, and whatever software i need to get, and yours is the karma and everything in it.
I agree. It's an arms race. Nature's full of them Peacocks strut their hella huge tails not because it confers a survival advantage but specifically because it reduces their survival advantage, so much as to say to the female of the species, "hey baby, I can walk around with this clownery on my ass because i'm big and strong and fast enough to get away with it." Alphas in our own species do it by blowing money on old fermented grape juice, fish eggs and goose liver. And our companies do it by hemorraging their stockpayers' money on a giant thing called the superbowl. And the stockpayers love it.
:)
Why do you think NBC chose a peacock?
What is a liability in the home may be a boon to the harried IT guy. By relegating package management to SU, and by having a server / client windows system, Linux makes the management of a large office of workstations a bit easier than windows can. This (along with price) partially explains their greater acceptance in municpal offices, Europe, etc.
In a home environment, the user must be able to add and subtract hardware and software. It's certainly possible to "set up" a linux box for grandma, as long as she sticks to the old "just mail and web" paradigm. But the moment she decides to buy a digital camera, or start playing bridge or something, she is going to need to get comfy in a console as SU. Not good enough. So, home use will be the final frontier, and we know what we have to do to get there. Can it be done?
I would love to have some sort of vga lcd screen, miniature (maybe 4x5" or so), that just runs a console off serial. Theoretically this should be cheaper than a full-blown 1024x768 LCD monitor, but economies of scale, etc.. i guess. Anyone see anything like this? I think it would be sweet to put that on the side of a box and stand it on a desk. Instant server.
hear hear... this author will be the first one against the wall when the Federation happens.
last thing we need on mars is another goddamn mcdonalds.