I disagree about the CLI. When I sit down at a decade-old SGI or even a 5-year old RS/6000 running AIX, I find the CLI so primitive as to be almost useless. The GNU readline characters don't work for command editing, the history is almost unusable, there is no tab completion of binaries, filenames, or hostnames. ls is not in color, tar can't gunzip or bunzip2 (it requires a separate step), and tools like head and tail are missing command line options that I find invaluable.
And this is just the simple stuff. Since most of the afforementioned machines probably have tcsh as their best shell, doing something like a for loop on the command line is impossible. Don't even get me started about the pain of using an old version of Perl, "real" vi (rather than vim), or the very limited regular expressions of standard grep.
IMO comparing the CLI from a decade or more ago is like comparing the GUIs of then to those of now. Sure, Windows 1.0, a Mac circa 1985, or even a Lisa had a mouse, overlapping windows, and scrollbars. But it was crude and primitive compared to the powerful and polished GUI elements of KDE, Mac OS X, or even modern Windows. The CLI is just the same - it looks about the same to the untrained eye, but if you sit down and try to actually use it you'll see how far we have come.
Er, like who? Thomas Jefferson, for example, had a lifelong career as a lawyer (which he hated, interestingly) before holding various offices leading up to president. He was one of the most respected of the Founding Fathers and one of the most loved Presidents of all time. I have trouble believing there were many people arguing that he should not have been president, with the exception of the Federalists.
I actually ran into Ben Browder (plays the main char on the show) on Halloween night in Hollywood. He was talking to a couple of people who were dressed up as characters from the show and carrying "Save Farscape" signs. What's amazing is that he was standing there expressing his incredible gratitude to these geeks for showing such devoting to the show. Now _that's_ a counterpoint to William Shatner, or in fact most Trek actors. Actual gratitude toward the audience, instead of contempt!
There are many areas where the apps are lacking, but photopaint is not one of them. Scroll down towards the bottom of this and look for the quote about Photoshop vs the Gimp from a professional artist:
People are comparing Mac OS X to Linux, but that's not very fair - modern Linux is _blazingly_ fast thanks to those kernel gurus. OS X seems a bit slow compared to it, but that's just qualifies it as "slower than the fasting thing out there", which is not "slow."
10.2 is much faster - I'm glad that they got a stable, usable OS first and saved the optimzations for later. I find the speed of 10.2 for standard operations (web browsing, working in a shell) on a single-processor 800mhz G4 to be comparable to a 1.2ghz Athlon running Red Hat 7.3. (RH8 is much faster so in that case the G4 will lose...)
The many reasons posted so far make sense; but most of them are either a symptom, such as the game sucking (why did they make a game that sucks?), or reasons why a game company fails (which is really just one of the many ways a company in any industry can fail).
With almost a decade of experience working in the game industry, let me share my theory.
A game itself fails because it is a piece of art, and good art is very difficult to make. It requires focus and direction; it requires a visionary who imagines an end product which will communicate something unique to the audience. Normally this is done by a single person, and in other types of art (painting, photography, music, writing, etc) one person can create a finished piece themselves. But modern games cannot be made by one or even just a couple of people; most often it is a team of 15 or 20, and you have people joining and leaving the team throughout the project. Oftentimes the team is completely different at the end than it was at the beginning.
So how the heck can you have a focused piece of art when you have so many people (many of them just drifting in and out of the project more or less at random) working on it? You don't see novels written by a team of 15 writers, or songs written by 15 musicians. (Go look at the writing credits for your favorite band's songs; in most cases, they are all written by one or two key members of the band.) But games simply require too many elements, both technically and artistically, to be done by a single person. They are highly interactive, compared to other forms of art which are generally not even slightly interactive. So you have a catch-22 - they need the direction and focus of a single person's work, but require a huge team in order to produce the required art and technology.
There are two ways to do it. One is by dumb luck (this one rarely happens). The other is by having a dedicated leader who puts his or her heart and soul into directing the rest of the team, picking a chosing the art and gameplay that fits with their vision and throwing out the rest. This method is how most good games are made. However, it has many production-level downsides; everyone on the team will hate them (because they throw out 90% of the art that is produced) and the management/investors will hate them (because they throw out perfectly good work, causing production of the game to be 10 times as expensive as it would be otherwise).
Crossover is for people who have PCs. They are emulating an x86 OS (Windows) on Linux for x86. Running OS X applications would require processor emaultion as well - not only a whole new ball of wax, but likely to be very slow.
It would make sense for Linux PPC to be able to have a WINE-alike that can run OS X apps, and in fact it probably does have such a thing. But this is not big news because Linux PPC is a minority inside a minority.
I don't get it. The two screenshots he shows to compare (923.png and 930.png) look identical to me, except that one has anti-aliasing and one doesn't. He claims the second one looks better, but I don't see it.
In fact, I think his screenshots look pretty ugly in general. He's managed to duplicate the blocky, hard-edged look of Windows 9x quite well, but I hardly consider this attractive. Red Hat 8.0's fonts look significantly better than his screenshots.
Mac OS X still has a wide lead on best look fonts, but IMO a modern Linux box has superior fonts to any version of Windows.
Of course organized crime is going to abuse the power that technology brings. They aren't regulated and don't answer to anyone. We could wipe out these cartels overnight by legalizing and regulated the trade of cocaine and other recreational drugs - just like we do for alcohol.
As a professional musician (dance music, specifically trance), let me share my experience. Software synths such as Reason or Acid have a lot of potential for the future, but right now they just don't cut it. Compare the sounds you get out of reason to the sounds that come out of a piece of pro audio equipment, such as a Roland JP-8080, the Novation Nova, or even the two-decade-old Roland TB303. The sounds from Reason are much thinner and lacking in character. If you want thickly layered leads, sweeping pads, or strong, phat bass, you want hardware.
Why is it that they've yet to duplicate that richness in software synths? I'm not sure - I guess they just haven't been doing it as long. I have no doubt that in a few years - maybe as few as five - software synths will be rapidly outpacing their hardware counterparts.
But for the time being, if you want to create professional-quality audio, the kind that a top name DJ will spin into their set, forget about software. It's just not good enough yet.
This was an awesome victory for those of us in the reform movement. Quite simply, the drug reform movement is about as grassroots as you can get, and most of our journalism is online: DRCnet, MAP, Cannabis News, and of course Narconews, as mentioned in the article.
The print media has begun to acknowledge the worldwide shift in attitude towards drugs (and especailly, the war on them) - but still mass media outlets including large American newspapers and especially TV still spew ridiculous retoric straight out of 1980's Just Say No propoganda.
What this article also didn't mention is that the EFF had a hand in helping Narconews with their court victory. Bravo to these brave individuals!
I said:
The organization of their sets and impeccable taste in tracks can never be replaced by aritifical intelligence.
Fyndo said:
Also, a computer will never defeat a grandmaster at chess. They won't be able to replicate the inventiveness of a human player.
There's a big difference. Chess is not subjective; winning or losing (and even the individual moves) are easy to evaluate with an algorithm. How do you write an algorithm which decides what music is most pleasing to the human ear? Humans can't even agree with each other. Programming a computer to do it would be a monumental task.
That said, you're right: I shouldn't say "never." Crazier things have happened. But in my professional opinion, as both an experienced computer programmer and as a professional DJ, it won't happen anytime in the next (say) decade.
Uh, I don't get it - it there a bandwidth limitation of CDs in comparison with vinyl? At the end of the day, the two analog output signals of a CD and the same work on vinyl should be very similar over a wide band. Which frequencies aren't being represented? Or is there some kind of whack feedback between the speakers and the stylus?
Yes - what you say is correct. Anyone that says that vinyl is a better representation of the "true" sound is full of crap.
From a non-technical point of view, I just know that it sounds different. In fact, a good DJ takes advantage of that sound to beatmatch - when the kickdrums are dead on, it gets that special vinyl-only overlapping kickdrum sound. When it's not quite on, you don't hear that.
I think, though I am not sure, that it has to do with the behavior of the analogue waveform when it caps out. An analogue singal gets "rounded" as it hits peak; a digital signal just cuts off, completely square. Normally this isn't a problem because you're not overloading your signal, but in the special case of two strong kickdrums dead on, you hear it. For me (and many dance music listeners) that sound is very pleasing and very important to the dance music performance.
When only one song is playing - that is, when you're not in a mix - it doesn't sound any different than a CD. So you could argue that my point is very minor. But it does matter to me.
I'm a professional club/rave DJ, and I've also been in the "scene" for several years just as a raver, so here's my perspective.
DJs such as Christopher Lawrence, Nicholas Bennison, Sandra Collins will never be replaced by a program like this. The organization of their sets and impeccable taste in tracks can never be replaced by aritifical intelligence. What they do is as much an act of pure human artistry as Mozart or Chopin.
That said, what _most_ rave/club DJs produce is just a bunch of semi-related tracks beatmatched together in a more or less random order. A program like this could easily match or beat your average human DJ in this regard. Especially because the article specified that the program is mixing together prewritten tracks (I assume written by humans). If it was composing completely from scratch I doubt that it would be very compelling.
One final point: many people don't realize this, but a big part of what makes rave/club music sound the way that it does is the fact that it's on vinyl. In particular, the sound of two tracks mixing together (mainly the way the waveforms for the bassdrums interact) is very distinct, and a big part of the live DJ sound. You don't get this sound when people are mixing with CDs, you don't get it when performers are playing "live" with synthesizers, and you won't get it from a computer (assuming that it is not using a robotic arm and turntables to play the tracks).
This is a question I think everyone asks when they first get politically active. The answer is, "Mostly...kinda." There are ways that are effective for lobbying; but to a certain degree, if what you're asking for veers to far away from either 1) public perception or 2) their own personal beliefs, they will end up ignoring you. This is a major failure of our legal system, IMO, but there's a solution: vote people into office who more closely represent the views of American citizens.
There's a longish section on our site about this subject, here.
In a nutshell, though, email just isn't very effective. Fax and snail mail is good; phone calls are especially effective if you are articulate. Stating your opinion clearly and concisely is important; if you ramble on about civil liberties, they won't quite "get" it. If you say, "Vote no on this particular bill, and here's why" that is more likely to have an effect.
The final point is this: right now everyone's in a hubbub, and 10x as many people as usual are contacting their representatives. They are just going to be less responsive right now. On top of that, everyone is so concerned with _feeling_ that they don't have time for _thinking_. This is unfortunate, but I think that it will pass as time goes on.
These auto-writers were how I got started. The first one takes litterally ten seconds to send a letter with. Then as I got more comfortable with what should be said in such a letter, I found myself willing to invest a couple of minutes writing an email of my own. These days I usually take the time to call. I have my representatives' office phone numbers on hand and I can call and give my opinion in about four minutes. On occasion I take the time to write a paper letter (which gives me a chance to test out the latest version of KWord while I'm at it) and drop it in the mail.
You can't force users to stay up to date with security patches or even know anything at all about security. But there are things that OS and distribution maintainers can do to make their software more secure out of the box. I realize that many Linux distributions already do some of this stuff, but I don't think any do all of it. And, it applies to any OS, including those written by Microsoft.
By default, don't run any services! Windows 98 is more "secure" than Windows NT because it doesn't run services. A machine that is not explictly set up by the admin to be a server has no business running web, ftp, or ssh access.
By default, firewall all incoming and outgoing traffic over the public interface. Leave the ports open on private interfaces (192.168.* and 10.0.0.*) so that they can still share files and printers and things on their LAN without frustration. There's no reason to make firewalling an option. If someone wants to run an external server, they need to explicitly punch a hole in the firewall to the outside world. If they want to turn off the firewall completely, they can do so - but doing so should be difficult enough that they have to know what they are doing to do so.
Get rid of telnet and rsh. Install them, maybe, but never have them run by default. Instead, give them ssh as a remote login option. Make sure ssh is properly configured (no root logins, no blank password logins).
Encourage users to use blank passwords for desktop use, and then make it possible to login in only from the console when your password is blank. This applies to root, too. Since it's convenient, people will do it - and if it's impossible to log in remotely when a user has a blank password, it's secure, too.
Authors of server software have to make security a priority from the begining. All user input should be carefully verified with a single, highly paranoid function that clips length and filters out any characters that are not explicitly needed. Keep careful track of "trusted" versus "untrusted" values in the code, possibly going as far to give them special names like untrusted_buf or trusted_url.
Disitributions should GET RID of old, clunky, insecure programs such as sendmail (replace with postfix), wuftp (replace with proftpd), inetd (replace with xinetd), etc.
Following these steps, I think that distributions will be fairly safe from any discovered server vulnerabilities, and probably most client-side ones, as well.
The site itself is about the War on Drugs, but all of the points on effective lobying (and other methods of influencing the direction of our government and society) are applicable to protecting privacy or any other civil issue.
Professional game developer says: There is!
on
Programming Linux Games
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I've been a professional game developer for over ten years. I've programmed DOS, Windows, N64, Dreamcast, and Playstation 2. I've used DirectX for many years. Through all of this, my complaint about game programming has always been: the tools are horrible! And DirectX (although it's a million times better in its recent incarnations) is no exception to this. Writing games is fun _despite_ the tools, not because of them.
Recently I had the oportunity to use SDL. It took me less than five minutes to have a program running which displayed a 24-bit BMP, full screen, on my Linux box. About fifteen minutes later, I had put together a small Tetris clone. I was stunned. SDL rocks the hell out of anything I have used on any other platform - and that includes five years of developing on Windows, and using the $20,000 Sony PS2 dev kit.
Best of all, SDL is portable to all other UNIXes, Windows, BeOS, MacOS 9, and Mac OS X. I can't vouch for how well it works on those other platforms, but if it's as easy as I suspect, then any game developer should be in heaven using it.
So perhaps by saying "there is no DirectX equivilent" you mean to say that "there is no graphics/input/sound/3D toolkit for Linux which sucks balls"?
All human beings, and probably most semi-intelligent life-forms, have one underlying goal to everything they do: to make stuff happen. Humans want to poke and prod at the world, and see things change as a result of our input. When we manage to make a large change to our environment, we feel satisfaction and gratification. When we are trying to make a chance but nothing much seems to be happening, that's when we get frustrated and unhappy.
Some people want to make changes by having power over others. Some like to blow things up. Some like to build new things. Some like to affect other people mentally or emotionally, for good or for bad. But we all want to see our input to the world produce a noticable change.
Once upon a time, individual software developers really did make a difference in the technology we use. Nowadays, that is rarely true anymore. We're just cogs in the machine, and if we write good code or bad, it all evens out in the end. That's frustrating, because we feel like what we do doesn't matter.
That's why Open Source is the ultimate in coder gratification. Individual developers can introduce code that really does make a splash, without needing all the infrastructure of a corporation. We see the "extreme" cases where one or two coders, working from home, has managed to topple a big part of corporate America. (Linux, DeCSS, Mandrake's distro, Slashdot, the list goes on...) We see these and think that we'd rather be doing something like that, that really makes a difference and affects our world, than be a corporate cog in the machine where at best we can hope to make a lot of money, but never to have a huge effect on the world around us.
I love the United States, I really do. I think a lot of the reason why it's such a great place to live has to do with the government. But more and more I'm starting to think that it's getting seriously out of sync with modern life that I wonder if we're not headed for catastrophe.
I'm part of a citizen's reform group that is working for change on an unrelated issue (website). But the things I see in the Skylov case are strangely similar to my group's fight: politicians that don't understand the trappings of modern life (in Skylov's case, technology), blindly make laws without consulting with what the people want, and then they afraid that they will look stupid if they back down on something they were obvious wrong about.
What they don't seem to realize is that they look even dumber for not acknowledging that a mistake was made, that they misunderstood the situation, and that there are situations that they failed to forsee which were not fairly covered under the legislation they created.
To a certain degree I hold the American people at fault for not being more proactively involved with their government, keeping a close eye on the things their representatives are doing. Hell, pretty much the whole purpose of the Neoteric website is to try to get people to contact their representatives. But I still think there's a failing to the entire system, something that is getting worse, and not better.
I think we need to find a new way of doing things, and fast. Technology, and society as a whole, are changing too fast for our current government (good as it has been for the last 200 years) to keep up. And a government out of sync with its people is a dangerous thing indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree about the CLI. When I sit down at a decade-old SGI or even a 5-year old RS/6000 running AIX, I find the CLI so primitive as to be almost useless. The GNU readline characters don't work for command editing, the history is almost unusable, there is no tab completion of binaries, filenames, or hostnames. ls is not in color, tar can't gunzip or bunzip2 (it requires a separate step), and tools like head and tail are missing command line options that I find invaluable.
And this is just the simple stuff. Since most of the afforementioned machines probably have tcsh as their best shell, doing something like a for loop on the command line is impossible. Don't even get me started about the pain of using an old version of Perl, "real" vi (rather than vim), or the very limited regular expressions of standard grep.
IMO comparing the CLI from a decade or more ago is like comparing the GUIs of then to those of now. Sure, Windows 1.0, a Mac circa 1985, or even a Lisa had a mouse, overlapping windows, and scrollbars. But it was crude and primitive compared to the powerful and polished GUI elements of KDE, Mac OS X, or even modern Windows. The CLI is just the same - it looks about the same to the untrained eye, but if you sit down and try to actually use it you'll see how far we have come.
Er, like who? Thomas Jefferson, for example, had a lifelong career as a lawyer (which he hated, interestingly) before holding various offices leading up to president. He was one of the most respected of the Founding Fathers and one of the most loved Presidents of all time. I have trouble believing there were many people arguing that he should not have been president, with the exception of the Federalists.
Don't forget ~$40 billion per year spent in hopeless efforts to try to stop people from smoking pot.
I actually ran into Ben Browder (plays the main char on the show) on Halloween night in Hollywood. He was talking to a couple of people who were dressed up as characters from the show and carrying "Save Farscape" signs. What's amazing is that he was standing there expressing his incredible gratitude to these geeks for showing such devoting to the show. Now _that's_ a counterpoint to William Shatner, or in fact most Trek actors. Actual gratitude toward the audience, instead of contempt!
Amazing.
There are many areas where the apps are lacking, but photopaint is not one of them. Scroll down towards the bottom of this and look for the quote about Photoshop vs the Gimp from a professional artist:
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http://people.trustcommerce.com/~adam/office2.htm
When can I get GPS+wireless internet in a Zaurus for live map navigation?
People are comparing Mac OS X to Linux, but that's not very fair - modern Linux is _blazingly_ fast thanks to those kernel gurus. OS X seems a bit slow compared to it, but that's just qualifies it as "slower than the fasting thing out there", which is not "slow."
10.2 is much faster - I'm glad that they got a stable, usable OS first and saved the optimzations for later. I find the speed of 10.2 for standard operations (web browsing, working in a shell) on a single-processor 800mhz G4 to be comparable to a 1.2ghz Athlon running Red Hat 7.3. (RH8 is much faster so in that case the G4 will lose...)
The many reasons posted so far make sense; but most of them are either a symptom, such as the game sucking (why did they make a game that sucks?), or reasons why a game company fails (which is really just one of the many ways a company in any industry can fail).
With almost a decade of experience working in the game industry, let me share my theory.
A game itself fails because it is a piece of art, and good art is very difficult to make. It requires focus and direction; it requires a visionary who imagines an end product which will communicate something unique to the audience. Normally this is done by a single person, and in other types of art (painting, photography, music, writing, etc) one person can create a finished piece themselves. But modern games cannot be made by one or even just a couple of people; most often it is a team of 15 or 20, and you have people joining and leaving the team throughout the project. Oftentimes the team is completely different at the end than it was at the beginning.
So how the heck can you have a focused piece of art when you have so many people (many of them just drifting in and out of the project more or less at random) working on it? You don't see novels written by a team of 15 writers, or songs written by 15 musicians. (Go look at the writing credits for your favorite band's songs; in most cases, they are all written by one or two key members of the band.) But games simply require too many elements, both technically and artistically, to be done by a single person. They are highly interactive, compared to other forms of art which are generally not even slightly interactive. So you have a catch-22 - they need the direction and focus of a single person's work, but require a huge team in order to produce the required art and technology.
There are two ways to do it. One is by dumb luck (this one rarely happens). The other is by having a dedicated leader who puts his or her heart and soul into directing the rest of the team, picking a chosing the art and gameplay that fits with their vision and throwing out the rest. This method is how most good games are made. However, it has many production-level downsides; everyone on the team will hate them (because they throw out 90% of the art that is produced) and the management/investors will hate them (because they throw out perfectly good work, causing production of the game to be 10 times as expensive as it would be otherwise).
Crossover is for people who have PCs. They are emulating an x86 OS (Windows) on Linux for x86. Running OS X applications would require processor emaultion as well - not only a whole new ball of wax, but likely to be very slow.
It would make sense for Linux PPC to be able to have a WINE-alike that can run OS X apps, and in fact it probably does have such a thing. But this is not big news because Linux PPC is a minority inside a minority.
I don't get it. The two screenshots he shows to compare (923.png and 930.png) look identical to me, except that one has anti-aliasing and one doesn't. He claims the second one looks better, but I don't see it.
In fact, I think his screenshots look pretty ugly in general. He's managed to duplicate the blocky, hard-edged look of Windows 9x quite well, but I hardly consider this attractive. Red Hat 8.0's fonts look significantly better than his screenshots.
Mac OS X still has a wide lead on best look fonts, but IMO a modern Linux box has superior fonts to any version of Windows.
Of course organized crime is going to abuse the power that technology brings. They aren't regulated and don't answer to anyone. We could wipe out these cartels overnight by legalizing and regulated the trade of cocaine and other recreational drugs - just like we do for alcohol.
http://neoteric.nu/history.html
http://desktoplinux.com/articles/AT9664091996.html
As a professional musician (dance music, specifically trance), let me share my experience. Software synths such as Reason or Acid have a lot of potential for the future, but right now they just don't cut it. Compare the sounds you get out of reason to the sounds that come out of a piece of pro audio equipment, such as a Roland JP-8080, the Novation Nova, or even the two-decade-old Roland TB303. The sounds from Reason are much thinner and lacking in character. If you want thickly layered leads, sweeping pads, or strong, phat bass, you want hardware.
Why is it that they've yet to duplicate that richness in software synths? I'm not sure - I guess they just haven't been doing it as long. I have no doubt that in a few years - maybe as few as five - software synths will be rapidly outpacing their hardware counterparts.
But for the time being, if you want to create professional-quality audio, the kind that a top name DJ will spin into their set, forget about software. It's just not good enough yet.
This was an awesome victory for those of us in the reform movement. Quite simply, the drug reform movement is about as grassroots as you can get, and most of our journalism is online: DRCnet, MAP, Cannabis News, and of course Narconews, as mentioned in the article.
The print media has begun to acknowledge the worldwide shift in attitude towards drugs (and especailly, the war on them) - but still mass media outlets including large American newspapers and especially TV still spew ridiculous retoric straight out of 1980's Just Say No propoganda.
What this article also didn't mention is that the EFF had a hand in helping Narconews with their court victory. Bravo to these brave individuals!
I said:
The organization of their sets and impeccable taste in tracks can never be replaced by aritifical intelligence.
Fyndo said:
Also, a computer will never defeat a grandmaster at chess. They won't be able to replicate the inventiveness of a human player.
There's a big difference. Chess is not subjective; winning or losing (and even the individual moves) are easy to evaluate with an algorithm. How do you write an algorithm which decides what music is most pleasing to the human ear? Humans can't even agree with each other. Programming a computer to do it would be a monumental task.
That said, you're right: I shouldn't say "never." Crazier things have happened. But in my professional opinion, as both an experienced computer programmer and as a professional DJ, it won't happen anytime in the next (say) decade.
Uh, I don't get it - it there a bandwidth limitation of CDs in comparison with vinyl? At the end of the day, the two analog output signals of a CD and the same work on vinyl should be very similar over a wide band. Which frequencies aren't being represented? Or is there some kind of whack feedback between the speakers and the stylus?
Yes - what you say is correct. Anyone that says that vinyl is a better representation of the "true" sound is full of crap.
From a non-technical point of view, I just know that it sounds different. In fact, a good DJ takes advantage of that sound to beatmatch - when the kickdrums are dead on, it gets that special vinyl-only overlapping kickdrum sound. When it's not quite on, you don't hear that.
I think, though I am not sure, that it has to do with the behavior of the analogue waveform when it caps out. An analogue singal gets "rounded" as it hits peak; a digital signal just cuts off, completely square. Normally this isn't a problem because you're not overloading your signal, but in the special case of two strong kickdrums dead on, you hear it. For me (and many dance music listeners) that sound is very pleasing and very important to the dance music performance.
When only one song is playing - that is, when you're not in a mix - it doesn't sound any different than a CD. So you could argue that my point is very minor. But it does matter to me.
I'm a professional club/rave DJ, and I've also been in the "scene" for several years just as a raver, so here's my perspective.
DJs such as Christopher Lawrence, Nicholas Bennison, Sandra Collins will never be replaced by a program like this. The organization of their sets and impeccable taste in tracks can never be replaced by aritifical intelligence. What they do is as much an act of pure human artistry as Mozart or Chopin.
That said, what _most_ rave/club DJs produce is just a bunch of semi-related tracks beatmatched together in a more or less random order. A program like this could easily match or beat your average human DJ in this regard. Especially because the article specified that the program is mixing together prewritten tracks (I assume written by humans). If it was composing completely from scratch I doubt that it would be very compelling.
One final point: many people don't realize this, but a big part of what makes rave/club music sound the way that it does is the fact that it's on vinyl. In particular, the sound of two tracks mixing together (mainly the way the waveforms for the bassdrums interact) is very distinct, and a big part of the live DJ sound. You don't get this sound when people are mixing with CDs, you don't get it when performers are playing "live" with synthesizers, and you won't get it from a computer (assuming that it is not using a robotic arm and turntables to play the tracks).
This is a question I think everyone asks when they first get politically active. The answer is, "Mostly...kinda." There are ways that are effective for lobbying; but to a certain degree, if what you're asking for veers to far away from either 1) public perception or 2) their own personal beliefs, they will end up ignoring you. This is a major failure of our legal system, IMO, but there's a solution: vote people into office who more closely represent the views of American citizens.
There's a longish section on our site about this subject, here.
In a nutshell, though, email just isn't very effective. Fax and snail mail is good; phone calls are especially effective if you are articulate. Stating your opinion clearly and concisely is important; if you ramble on about civil liberties, they won't quite "get" it. If you say, "Vote no on this particular bill, and here's why" that is more likely to have an effect.
The final point is this: right now everyone's in a hubbub, and 10x as many people as usual are contacting their representatives. They are just going to be less responsive right now. On top of that, everyone is so concerned with _feeling_ that they don't have time for _thinking_. This is unfortunate, but I think that it will pass as time goes on.
What, you mean like this?
http://www.stopthedrugwar.org/walters/
Or this?
http://capwiz.com/norml2/home/
These auto-writers were how I got started. The first one takes litterally ten seconds to send a letter with. Then as I got more comfortable with what should be said in such a letter, I found myself willing to invest a couple of minutes writing an email of my own. These days I usually take the time to call. I have my representatives' office phone numbers on hand and I can call and give my opinion in about four minutes. On occasion I take the time to write a paper letter (which gives me a chance to test out the latest version of KWord while I'm at it) and drop it in the mail.
Following these steps, I think that distributions will be fairly safe from any discovered server vulnerabilities, and probably most client-side ones, as well.
This is what the BSD'ers mean when they say that the BSD license is truly free, because you can use it for anything.
Let's face it, the GPL is more "selfish" - we just don't see it that way because we are comparing it to proprietary software licensing.
...can be found here:
http://www.neoteric.nu
The site itself is about the War on Drugs, but all of the points on effective lobying (and other methods of influencing the direction of our government and society) are applicable to protecting privacy or any other civil issue.
I've been a professional game developer for over ten years. I've programmed DOS, Windows, N64, Dreamcast, and Playstation 2. I've used DirectX for many years. Through all of this, my complaint about game programming has always been: the tools are horrible! And DirectX (although it's a million times better in its recent incarnations) is no exception to this. Writing games is fun _despite_ the tools, not because of them.
Recently I had the oportunity to use SDL. It took me less than five minutes to have a program running which displayed a 24-bit BMP, full screen, on my Linux box. About fifteen minutes later, I had put together a small Tetris clone. I was stunned. SDL rocks the hell out of anything I have used on any other platform - and that includes five years of developing on Windows, and using the $20,000 Sony PS2 dev kit.
Best of all, SDL is portable to all other UNIXes, Windows, BeOS, MacOS 9, and Mac OS X. I can't vouch for how well it works on those other platforms, but if it's as easy as I suspect, then any game developer should be in heaven using it.
So perhaps by saying "there is no DirectX equivilent" you mean to say that "there is no graphics/input/sound/3D toolkit for Linux which sucks balls"?
All human beings, and probably most semi-intelligent life-forms, have one underlying goal to everything they do: to make stuff happen. Humans want to poke and prod at the world, and see things change as a result of our input. When we manage to make a large change to our environment, we feel satisfaction and gratification. When we are trying to make a chance but nothing much seems to be happening, that's when we get frustrated and unhappy.
Some people want to make changes by having power over others. Some like to blow things up. Some like to build new things. Some like to affect other people mentally or emotionally, for good or for bad. But we all want to see our input to the world produce a noticable change.
Once upon a time, individual software developers really did make a difference in the technology we use. Nowadays, that is rarely true anymore. We're just cogs in the machine, and if we write good code or bad, it all evens out in the end. That's frustrating, because we feel like what we do doesn't matter.
That's why Open Source is the ultimate in coder gratification. Individual developers can introduce code that really does make a splash, without needing all the infrastructure of a corporation. We see the "extreme" cases where one or two coders, working from home, has managed to topple a big part of corporate America. (Linux, DeCSS, Mandrake's distro, Slashdot, the list goes on...) We see these and think that we'd rather be doing something like that, that really makes a difference and affects our world, than be a corporate cog in the machine where at best we can hope to make a lot of money, but never to have a huge effect on the world around us.
I love the United States, I really do. I think a lot of the reason why it's such a great place to live has to do with the government. But more and more I'm starting to think that it's getting seriously out of sync with modern life that I wonder if we're not headed for catastrophe.
I'm part of a citizen's reform group that is working for change on an unrelated issue (website). But the things I see in the Skylov case are strangely similar to my group's fight: politicians that don't understand the trappings of modern life (in Skylov's case, technology), blindly make laws without consulting with what the people want, and then they afraid that they will look stupid if they back down on something they were obvious wrong about.
What they don't seem to realize is that they look even dumber for not acknowledging that a mistake was made, that they misunderstood the situation, and that there are situations that they failed to forsee which were not fairly covered under the legislation they created.
To a certain degree I hold the American people at fault for not being more proactively involved with their government, keeping a close eye on the things their representatives are doing. Hell, pretty much the whole purpose of the Neoteric website is to try to get people to contact their representatives. But I still think there's a failing to the entire system, something that is getting worse, and not better.
I think we need to find a new way of doing things, and fast. Technology, and society as a whole, are changing too fast for our current government (good as it has been for the last 200 years) to keep up. And a government out of sync with its people is a dangerous thing indeed.