'cause I don't plan on downloading, but I'd just like to give a little thanks to id and Raven (didn't Raven develop RTCW?) for being such good supporters of the Linux commmunity. I do believe id is the only game development company in the world that will make a game readily available to Linux users without the game first being a huge hit (although I'm sure RTCW will be a huge hit, at least in sales).
It means a lot that they are this willing to put in the extra effort. Thanks, id.
Not at all. Most of the music I enjoy is of the rock or jazz variety (Weezer, Ben Folds, Squirrel Nut Zippers, etc) and is created with more traditional instruments.
As a matter of fact, I don't own a single techno CD and have very few (less than 10) techno MP3s on my hard drive. I'm only really exposed to techno when I'm out in the club scene, which is a rarity these days.
As far as comparing the HPDJ to "musical skill", I don't think it can ever been said that AI, no matter how complex, is as creative as a human being. As far as "creating" music goes, this technology will probably never have a creative application in the world of professional music. It is most useful for presenting music that humans have composed and gauging reaction. Almost as a bonus it can do the cross-fading DJs employ to keep the music going non-stop.
But for small-to-mid-size clubs who want to keep the music interesting without having to depend on human DJs (who need breaks, cancel appearances, etc), it could be useful.
Man, I wish I had read all the way through the article before posting...*grin*
Pardon the vulgarity, but the part about leaving the club with the music you helped create sounds just too fucking sweet. I'd club every free weekend if that were an available service in my area.
...but when the wife and I do get away for an evening so that we may get our collective groove on, I always find the music to be more exciting when the DJ lays out a track that I wasn't expecting but works well anyway. I get bored when the same general tempo and melody get rehashed for too longer, which is my main beef against techno/dance music in the first place. (It must not make that much of a difference when you're high on ecstacy:) ) I'm supposing that a system like this would continue playing similar tracks until a general majority of an audience has a negative response to it. But what then? Does it read that everyone is stopping dancing, so it had better switch gears to a slow song? When the best DJs I've been around notice the crowd slowing down, they might throw on something mellow for a bit, but they're moreso busy trying to find the next P-H-A-T phat hook to get people back on the floor.
But I could see this as a pretty neat technology in office waiting areas. If you have to wait around, it would probably be a more tolerable experience if the music system could know what type of mood and guage your response to the current music (or musak as it most likely is).
I suppose it would be pretty cool for home use, too. I don't know if I'd pay for it or not (I don't have that much need for constant background noise), but having a home audio system that could detect my mood and response and play music accordingly would be awfully sweet.
...profit-hungry recording companies. The artists are, for the most part, getting ripped off by RIAA companies, but some of what they do doesn't sound all that out of the ordinary to me.
First, the bad: RIAA companies that contract musicians under the "works for hire" type contracts really try hard to screw musicians out of ownership of their songs. Heck, even HBO claimed that they owned Tenacious D's songs that were made for the one and only season of their cable television show. To me, that sounds like the argument many academic institutions have used to claim patents/credit for innovations: "If you hadn't been using our resources, you wouldn't have come up with the result."
Now, the "not out of the ordinary". I remember reading Courtney Love's rather well-written tirade about the behavior of RIAA companies and they way they (the companies) spend money in advance on recording, promotion, touring, etc and expect to be paid back. I don't really see that as a problem. The recording company is, in effect, an investor in an artist. The company will spend the money on all the aforementioned things in an effort to sell a product and make a profit. Sure, I wish people weren't greedy and they didn't expect to make so much of a profit, but humans will be humans. Love explains that after all the bills are paid back, many artists don't make much money. Well, Courtney, most working people in the world don't have much money left after the bills are all paid, this applies perhaps even more so to those in the arts. Contracted musicians aren't a special social class who deserve to earn a 6-figure-plus salary. I'd be willing to bet that the figures are more or less proportionate. Artists who sell a lot earn a lot. Artists who sell relatively little get paid relatively little.
Just as an example, one of my best friends was actually a performing musician in Nashville for a while. He wrote a song that was recorded on an album by a contracted, professional pop/rock group. The album, consequently, went platinum. Just royalties on that song along made my friend just over $50k that year. I would hope the recording artists receive much more compensation than that, given live performances, t-shirt sales, etc.
So, yeah, I've heard it all before and I agree with most of it. The RIAA is evil, tramples on personal property rights, is clueless when it comes to protecting intellectual property, bought lawmakers, persecuted the Christians, sold crack to kids, broke my lawnmower, yada, yada , yada. They are a business and like any other business, they are struggling to protect their paradigm. Some of the ways they do it are just normal for business. Too many, though, are just brutal.
Man, I'm late getting into this thread. Oh well...
While I think the technology behind this is a fine idea, it leaves me wondering as to the overall effectiveness and, more importantly, the point.
I can see this being used in schools, I suppose, like when I was in high school and my Literature teacher fast-forwarded past a somewhat steamy love scene in a film version of Romeo and Juliet. And I suppose one could use it to throw out types of scenes one finds distasteful (foul language, for instance). A parent could, indeed, filter an R movie down to a PG movie this way.
The question it leaves me with is: why view the movie in the first place? If foul language or sex scenes offend you, you're going to miss the delivery of the story by cutting them out. You'd probably have a more enjoyable movie-watching experience by simply watching something that is already rated at the level you wish to watch.
As a parent, I can't think of one good reason I'd want to bother with snipping out pieces of an r-rated film so my kids could watch it. Chances are, the R-rated movie has adult themes on purpose and if removing the R-rated content actually affected the adult overtones of the story at all, it could only make less sense. I'd be much better off by allowing my children to watch something that is already made with the intention of children watching it.
As always, there are plenty of exceptions (I'm sure kids get a hoot out of Shrek, but I'd cut out some of Donkey's language for my kids), but for the most part this seems like a technology that might be nice to have, but IMHO seems silly to even bother using.
I think I'd have to hear more of an explanation about that credit-taking statement. As it stands, it doesn't make any sense.
I mean, sure, open source might not even be an issue if companies like MS weren't hell-bent on performing in monopolistic ways. But him saying MS is responsible for the open source movement is like saying the Romans who persecuted the early Christians should have credit for it's spread.
Gates: "Well, shareholders, I know the world thinks I'm an evil son-of-a-bitch, but if I wasn't an evil son-of-a-bitch, there wouldn't be this great open source movement going on!"
We had come to the opinion that IT/IS departments that had gotten used to UNIX systems feel more comfortable about moving to Linux than IT/IS departments that had gotten comfortable with Windows. There still seems to be a strong feeling of uncertainty when it comes to planning for migration headaches (which are inevitable).
It's still awfully hard to penetrate into markets where the people involved are only aware of doing things a certain way. I can recall having a job in college where I became responsible for a file server running a quite old version of NetWare. I wasn't thrilled about it and the company that sold the box to my employer wasn't around anymore to support it. But it ran and I prayed that the box wouldn't conk out, because I feared having to convince my boss to migrate to another OS.
Peer-to-peer, like many other technologies, has it's advantages and disadvantages. For some purposes (not just file-swapping), it's absolutely ideal (OK, OK so I'm a fan of SETI@Home:) ).
I just find it rather surprising that academia has taken this long to embrace p2p. It's not as if p2p has been an unknown or undiscussed topic in the realm of computer science. When I was in college, it seemed that the university was eager to stress the importance of object-oriented programming and relational databases...well, as soon as the market stressed their importance.:) As I was taking my mandatory networking classes (which I wish I had paid more attention during), we discussed p2p quite a bit. By my senior year (Waaaaay back in...'98:) ) there had already been several groups of students who created p2p final projects.
Is the market the core of the issue? Do colleges only adapt to teaching new technologies quickly when the market demands it? If that's the case, it would seem like more CS degress would be the equivalent of training at a vocational/technical school.
There are parts of your statements I don't disagree with. Like saying that the problem is the perception that the affluence we of Western cultures (re: The U.S.) comes at the expense of others. I agree, that's a significant part of the problem.
And I also don't believe for a second that the majority of Muslims (or any other religion in the world, for that matter) want us dead. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that these extremists want us dead and our society destroyed. And there is absolutely nothing we can peacefully do, politically or otherwise, to change that. There is no reasoning with these extremists because their end goal is the complete and utter destruction of our (re: most average Americans') way of life.
Oh, and as far as military action in the Middle East for centuries goes...don't forget war amongst the tribes, fueding warlords, etc, etc. It ins't just the West that's been fighting there.
If there were effective alternatives to forcefully protecting ourselves, then I'd love to hear them. And just what is the West trying to accomplish in Afghanistan? Exactly what I said, the West is trying to make an example. It's just common sense that you can't stop people from hating. But, you can make it clear to other nations that a given government will not be allowed to exist if said government either turns a blind eye to terrorists operating in its borders or, even worse, endorses and supports terrorists. Terrorists, in this view, are seen as active extensions of a given government, which is how they should be seen.
You know, it's a real tragedy that we can't stop people from being afraid of the spreading of a culture they either can't or don't want to be part of. And it's an even bigger tragedy that those people can't be reasoned with or peacefully placated.
God....damn.
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Globalization
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· Score: 3, Insightful
For those of you who can't stand being enlightened, avert your eyes. Here's some truth for you:
The fundamentalists hate Western culture and they want everyone who lives a life any different from theirs to die. They want Western culture destroyed and will willingly put themselves to death to further their cause.
Why? Because the want their culture to be the dominant one, that's why. It's as simple as that. When one Northern Alliance soldier was asked why he was fighting the Taliban, he said "Because they are not from my tribe." Tribes. That's all this is.
We, and by we I mean the whole of Western society, are a tribe. That's all we are in the eyes of those who want us dead. We are a tribe and the fundamentalists can never belong to our tribe because our way of life is incompatible with theirs. But the fundamentalists can't slow down the spread of our tribe because people the world over and absolutely dying to become part of our tribe. The fundamentalists have been passed over and left in the "has-been" section of the primitive world. And, because of fear, lack of understanding, desperation, whatever, the fundamentalists seek to tear apart the society to which they can not belong.
As I look around the room where I work, I see people who wouldn't assume that they are the same as me. We've got different color skin, different religious backgrounds. But to these terrorists, these religious extremists...we are the same. And we are not them. And thus, we must die.
I want to take a moment to address another couple of statements I read in this thread, without bothering to make multiple repies.
Yes, we've most likely killed more Afghan civilians than whoever is putting Anthrax in the mail has with their attacks. From all accounts, that still leaves more than 5,000 civilians on our side. If you want to draw parallels between agressive acts, you'd better include all of them.
Violence creates more violence. Indeed. But what choice do we have? It is obvious that there are people in the world who hate us so much, they would like nothing better than to kill our people. No political or humanitarian acts will ever stop this way of thinking. The very existence of our nation is a threat to the way of life for extermists such as the terrorists holed up in Afghanistan. Therefore, the only choice we have is to make an example of the Taliban. An example that illustrates a point to other governments: "If you don't keep it under control, you won't stay in power."
Back to globalization. Pay close attention to this, because it's 100% pure truth. We can't stop globilization of Western culture. Why? BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE WANT IT! The Japanese imported music, movies and baseball just to be more like us! Envy for our success and relatively secure life will drive other cultures to want to be like Western cultures. We don't have to be active in the globalization of Western culture...it'll happen without us.
There is nothing IE-specific in what they are presenting.
Now, another/.er just posted a rather lengthy (and informative) response that said MSN fails the W3C's standards check. So if everyone else is playing by the standard and MS has decided to change the rules for IE, then MSN is presenting something IE-specific.
As ludicrous as it might sound, if MS knows they are not conforming to the standard but everyone else is, then they truly are doing something they can't expect everyone else to do.
But, no one said that MSN was playing by the standard rules. It's pretty well known that MS has a habit of changing standards to meet their needs, which has been especially true when it comes to HTML/Web standards.
Microsoft has indeed been declared a monoploy. MSN, which, to my knowledge, is a seperate company has not. MSN is a content and ISP. They are certainly not a monopoly in that industry.
Like I said, if MS implements an IE-specific feature, they shouldn't be expected to verify that it works in other browsers. It's IE-specific. Whether or not the feature actually works in another browser is a product of the efforts of other browser makers and MS can't be expected to verify it or even make an effort to verify it.
MSN is a content provider. If the manner in which they want their content to be displayed utilizes IE-specific features, they have the right not to allow other browsers to render the content since they can't be expected to make sure the content works in anything but IE.
Regardless of what your (or my, for that matter) opinion is on why Microsoft has chosen to actively prevent a browser from even trying the render the page, the fact of the matter is that MSN can choose to implement features in their website that, as far as they know, are specific to IE. That doesn't stop other browser makers from implementing support for those features, but Microsoft can aruge (successfully, I might add) that they can't rely on other people's browsers to handle these features correctly. It is irrelevant that the browsers do handle them correctly. They aren't MS's browser and MS is using IE-specific features.
In the past, I've done some work in the industrial electrical parts industry. I've encountered instances where a customer had bought a fuse box, we'll say it was built by Westinghouse (who hasn't built a fuse box in years, but just for the sake of argument). The customer needed new fuses, but wouldn't buy anything but Westinghouse-certified fuses. It didn't matter than every other fuse on the market could do the same thing and was made of the same materials. If Westinghouse couldn't guarantee the fuse would work, they wouldn't endorse it and the customer wouldn't buy it.
Again, this is probably not MS's intent. MSN is a popular site and I'm sure they intend to leverage that for more market share. All I'm saying is that there is more than one reason to start rejecting other browsers, if that's the route a content provider wants to go.
Seems like a while back there was a post about building your own really small rack-mounted servers. I was wondering about resources for building things like your own cases, perhaps resources on packing components into smaller spaces. I'd love to build a small PC-in-a-shoebox for set-top general use.
As terrible as it is that Microsoft is prohibiting other web browsers from accessing MSN, it's not as if Microsoft has a monopoly on news and content on the web (at least not yet). As a company, they can decide how they want their content rendered and if IE (no matter how self-serving it is) is the only browser that does the job perfectly, then so be it.
I develop web applications and there are times when a client asks for something that simply isn't feasible (or perhaps possible) in Netscape 4.x, so we inform the client of that and, effectively, prohibit them from using Netscape 4.x to access the application. I don't see much of a difference here.
Now I would see a major difference if there weren't news and content alternatives (and plenty of them) to MSN. Heck, IMO they could limit access to only IP addresses that are on the MSN network. Didn't Prodigy do that?
Yeah, it's self-serving and perhaps borderline unethical. But it's not illegal (yet) and if they want to make a sight that uses IE features they can't guarantee are supported in other browers, that's their call.
From your statement, I can only guess that you are somehow drawing a correlation between being a citizen (of the U.S., I'm assuming) and having the "birthright" to a free society. At least in the case of the United States, those born as citizens do enjoy the same freedoms as the rest of the citizens. In that kind of argument, I suppose you could say freedom is a birthright. But that's not what I'm intending to argue against.
What I'm intending to say is that the world owes you, I and everyone else nothing. Freedom is not a given. Freedom is not a fundamental law of nature. Saying that I, by supporting my government's efforts to provide better security for my fellow citizens, am betraying the birthright of my children has no validity to me because I don't consider freedom something that is gifted upon birth and automatically assumed for life.
As I said, I can see your argument. A given country allows the right of it's citizens to live in a "free society". When a person is born in said country, the person is given citizenship by default. Therefore, the right to live in a "free society" is a birthright. Good logic...except that the right to live in a "free society" came at (and will always come at) a cost. It may not be paid by you, so you'll never know about it and may even feel that freedom really is your "birthright". But don't be fooled.
Our generation may well end up paying the price for the freedom of future generations. That's something I can live with.
First of all, let me say that taking away civil liberties, especially those dealing with privacy, leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. Also, just as a point, living in a free society is not a birthright. It is something fought and suffered for.
That being said, I'd like to remind you that we are now living in a time where there are people who not only want badly to kill us but are willing to die so long as we, the relatively innocent masses, are killed as well.
Given that our government have many, many surveillance techniques at their disposal, wouldn't you think it to be prudent that they use said techniques in an effort to prevent more heinous acts like these from happening to our citizens?
And yes IMHO, once it reaches to the next generation, it does become more important. My generaion is dead to me, now. Once we have children, it becomes almost obvious to me (in a very primal sense) that I'm no longer alive for my benefit, but for that of my children. My productive, rather happy life is a great bonus, rather than the entire goal. As such, I see our children inheriting two different possible societies. In one, we (my generation and older) have had to suffer some temporary indignations in the hopes of keeping our nation strong. In the other, we still have an underpowered intelligence and law-enforcement community, or perhaps, no such community at all since the nation has shaken itself apart in fear.
Apocolyptic? Sure. All I can hope for at the moment is that it's just the paranoia talking and everything'll work out just fine.
A good friend of mine once said that if MS's development track record held up, that the X-Box would be a flop. To paraphrase, he said: "People don't expect their console to crash. If it does, they'll return it."
Now I know the PS2 had some backward-compatibility problems, but other than that, has it been rock-solid? I know I've never had so much as a hiccup from my Dreamcast.
If you are American, there are not just people who want to kill you, there are people who are still trying to kill you. All of you. As many as possible in the most horrific fashion possible. And there is no means too vile or deplorable to consider.
Perhaps I should put this another way. I am a parent. I have a family. If I can't directly protect my family against the types of weapons that anti-Americans would willingly use , then I expect my government to help with the protection. If one of the ways of coming close to having protection is by searching people who are coming into and going out of government facilities, so be it. If our government can only protect us by exercising more power in the area of surveillance, so be it.
The alternative, of course, is to leave our intelligence forces as emasculated and impotent as they have been for the last 10 years. And we all saw how effective they were on Sept. 11th.
Keep bitching and moaning about your rights being chipped away. But think about the alternatives in a world where someone wants you dead. Wouldn't you want law enforcement to be able to find out who wants you dead so that they can be stopped? For the safety of my family, I know that's what I want.
Still waiting on these...
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Ultima Revived
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· Score: 2
Just my opinion, but I'd love to see remakes of Pirates! (Pirates Gold, which was a lovely pile of toss, doesn't count) and Stunts (pc racing game).
Pirates! just had a fantastically simple interface for a game with as much open-ended play as it had. And Stunts had a great track editor (especially for the time, around '89 or '90 IIRC).
I know this is getting off-topic, but has anyone besides me ever imagined Pirates! in an online, persistant world (MMORPG, like Everquest)? Man, if you could just figure out a good time scaling for ocean travel, that game might just rock.:)
Slashdot Mirror
'cause I don't plan on downloading, but I'd just like to give a little thanks to id and Raven (didn't Raven develop RTCW?) for being such good supporters of the Linux commmunity. I do believe id is the only game development company in the world that will make a game readily available to Linux users without the game first being a huge hit (although I'm sure RTCW will be a huge hit, at least in sales).
It means a lot that they are this willing to put in the extra effort. Thanks, id.
Not at all. Most of the music I enjoy is of the rock or jazz variety (Weezer, Ben Folds, Squirrel Nut Zippers, etc) and is created with more traditional instruments.
As a matter of fact, I don't own a single techno CD and have very few (less than 10) techno MP3s on my hard drive. I'm only really exposed to techno when I'm out in the club scene, which is a rarity these days.
As far as comparing the HPDJ to "musical skill", I don't think it can ever been said that AI, no matter how complex, is as creative as a human being. As far as "creating" music goes, this technology will probably never have a creative application in the world of professional music. It is most useful for presenting music that humans have composed and gauging reaction. Almost as a bonus it can do the cross-fading DJs employ to keep the music going non-stop.
But for small-to-mid-size clubs who want to keep the music interesting without having to depend on human DJs (who need breaks, cancel appearances, etc), it could be useful.
Man, I wish I had read all the way through the article before posting...*grin*
Pardon the vulgarity, but the part about leaving the club with the music you helped create sounds just too fucking sweet. I'd club every free weekend if that were an available service in my area.
...but when the wife and I do get away for an evening so that we may get our collective groove on, I always find the music to be more exciting when the DJ lays out a track that I wasn't expecting but works well anyway. I get bored when the same general tempo and melody get rehashed for too longer, which is my main beef against techno/dance music in the first place. (It must not make that much of a difference when you're high on ecstacy :) ) I'm supposing that a system like this would continue playing similar tracks until a general majority of an audience has a negative response to it. But what then? Does it read that everyone is stopping dancing, so it had better switch gears to a slow song? When the best DJs I've been around notice the crowd slowing down, they might throw on something mellow for a bit, but they're moreso busy trying to find the next P-H-A-T phat hook to get people back on the floor.
But I could see this as a pretty neat technology in office waiting areas. If you have to wait around, it would probably be a more tolerable experience if the music system could know what type of mood and guage your response to the current music (or musak as it most likely is).
I suppose it would be pretty cool for home use, too. I don't know if I'd pay for it or not (I don't have that much need for constant background noise), but having a home audio system that could detect my mood and response and play music accordingly would be awfully sweet.
...profit-hungry recording companies. The artists are, for the most part, getting ripped off by RIAA companies, but some of what they do doesn't sound all that out of the ordinary to me.
First, the bad: RIAA companies that contract musicians under the "works for hire" type contracts really try hard to screw musicians out of ownership of their songs. Heck, even HBO claimed that they owned Tenacious D's songs that were made for the one and only season of their cable television show. To me, that sounds like the argument many academic institutions have used to claim patents/credit for innovations: "If you hadn't been using our resources, you wouldn't have come up with the result."
Now, the "not out of the ordinary". I remember reading Courtney Love's rather well-written tirade about the behavior of RIAA companies and they way they (the companies) spend money in advance on recording, promotion, touring, etc and expect to be paid back. I don't really see that as a problem. The recording company is, in effect, an investor in an artist. The company will spend the money on all the aforementioned things in an effort to sell a product and make a profit. Sure, I wish people weren't greedy and they didn't expect to make so much of a profit, but humans will be humans. Love explains that after all the bills are paid back, many artists don't make much money. Well, Courtney, most working people in the world don't have much money left after the bills are all paid, this applies perhaps even more so to those in the arts. Contracted musicians aren't a special social class who deserve to earn a 6-figure-plus salary. I'd be willing to bet that the figures are more or less proportionate. Artists who sell a lot earn a lot. Artists who sell relatively little get paid relatively little.
Just as an example, one of my best friends was actually a performing musician in Nashville for a while. He wrote a song that was recorded on an album by a contracted, professional pop/rock group. The album, consequently, went platinum. Just royalties on that song along made my friend just over $50k that year. I would hope the recording artists receive much more compensation than that, given live performances, t-shirt sales, etc.
So, yeah, I've heard it all before and I agree with most of it. The RIAA is evil, tramples on personal property rights, is clueless when it comes to protecting intellectual property, bought lawmakers, persecuted the Christians, sold crack to kids, broke my lawnmower, yada, yada , yada. They are a business and like any other business, they are struggling to protect their paradigm. Some of the ways they do it are just normal for business. Too many, though, are just brutal.
Man, I'm late getting into this thread. Oh well...
While I think the technology behind this is a fine idea, it leaves me wondering as to the overall effectiveness and, more importantly, the point.
I can see this being used in schools, I suppose, like when I was in high school and my Literature teacher fast-forwarded past a somewhat steamy love scene in a film version of Romeo and Juliet. And I suppose one could use it to throw out types of scenes one finds distasteful (foul language, for instance). A parent could, indeed, filter an R movie down to a PG movie this way.
The question it leaves me with is: why view the movie in the first place? If foul language or sex scenes offend you, you're going to miss the delivery of the story by cutting them out. You'd probably have a more enjoyable movie-watching experience by simply watching something that is already rated at the level you wish to watch.
As a parent, I can't think of one good reason I'd want to bother with snipping out pieces of an r-rated film so my kids could watch it. Chances are, the R-rated movie has adult themes on purpose and if removing the R-rated content actually affected the adult overtones of the story at all, it could only make less sense. I'd be much better off by allowing my children to watch something that is already made with the intention of children watching it.
As always, there are plenty of exceptions (I'm sure kids get a hoot out of Shrek, but I'd cut out some of Donkey's language for my kids), but for the most part this seems like a technology that might be nice to have, but IMHO seems silly to even bother using.
I think I'd have to hear more of an explanation about that credit-taking statement. As it stands, it doesn't make any sense.
I mean, sure, open source might not even be an issue if companies like MS weren't hell-bent on performing in monopolistic ways. But him saying MS is responsible for the open source movement is like saying the Romans who persecuted the early Christians should have credit for it's spread.
Gates: "Well, shareholders, I know the world thinks I'm an evil son-of-a-bitch, but if I wasn't an evil son-of-a-bitch, there wouldn't be this great open source movement going on!"
We had come to the opinion that IT/IS departments that had gotten used to UNIX systems feel more comfortable about moving to Linux than IT/IS departments that had gotten comfortable with Windows. There still seems to be a strong feeling of uncertainty when it comes to planning for migration headaches (which are inevitable).
It's still awfully hard to penetrate into markets where the people involved are only aware of doing things a certain way. I can recall having a job in college where I became responsible for a file server running a quite old version of NetWare. I wasn't thrilled about it and the company that sold the box to my employer wasn't around anymore to support it. But it ran and I prayed that the box wouldn't conk out, because I feared having to convince my boss to migrate to another OS.
Peer-to-peer, like many other technologies, has it's advantages and disadvantages. For some purposes (not just file-swapping), it's absolutely ideal (OK, OK so I'm a fan of SETI@Home :) ).
:) As I was taking my mandatory networking classes (which I wish I had paid more attention during), we discussed p2p quite a bit. By my senior year (Waaaaay back in...'98 :) ) there had already been several groups of students who created p2p final projects.
I just find it rather surprising that academia has taken this long to embrace p2p. It's not as if p2p has been an unknown or undiscussed topic in the realm of computer science. When I was in college, it seemed that the university was eager to stress the importance of object-oriented programming and relational databases...well, as soon as the market stressed their importance.
Is the market the core of the issue? Do colleges only adapt to teaching new technologies quickly when the market demands it? If that's the case, it would seem like more CS degress would be the equivalent of training at a vocational/technical school.
There are parts of your statements I don't disagree with. Like saying that the problem is the perception that the affluence we of Western cultures (re: The U.S.) comes at the expense of others. I agree, that's a significant part of the problem.
And I also don't believe for a second that the majority of Muslims (or any other religion in the world, for that matter) want us dead. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that these extremists want us dead and our society destroyed. And there is absolutely nothing we can peacefully do, politically or otherwise, to change that. There is no reasoning with these extremists because their end goal is the complete and utter destruction of our (re: most average Americans') way of life.
Oh, and as far as military action in the Middle East for centuries goes...don't forget war amongst the tribes, fueding warlords, etc, etc. It ins't just the West that's been fighting there.
If there were effective alternatives to forcefully protecting ourselves, then I'd love to hear them. And just what is the West trying to accomplish in Afghanistan? Exactly what I said, the West is trying to make an example. It's just common sense that you can't stop people from hating. But, you can make it clear to other nations that a given government will not be allowed to exist if said government either turns a blind eye to terrorists operating in its borders or, even worse, endorses and supports terrorists. Terrorists, in this view, are seen as active extensions of a given government, which is how they should be seen.
You know, it's a real tragedy that we can't stop people from being afraid of the spreading of a culture they either can't or don't want to be part of. And it's an even bigger tragedy that those people can't be reasoned with or peacefully placated.
For those of you who can't stand being enlightened, avert your eyes. Here's some truth for you:
The fundamentalists hate Western culture and they want everyone who lives a life any different from theirs to die. They want Western culture destroyed and will willingly put themselves to death to further their cause.
Why? Because the want their culture to be the dominant one, that's why. It's as simple as that. When one Northern Alliance soldier was asked why he was fighting the Taliban, he said "Because they are not from my tribe." Tribes. That's all this is.
We, and by we I mean the whole of Western society, are a tribe. That's all we are in the eyes of those who want us dead. We are a tribe and the fundamentalists can never belong to our tribe because our way of life is incompatible with theirs. But the fundamentalists can't slow down the spread of our tribe because people the world over and absolutely dying to become part of our tribe. The fundamentalists have been passed over and left in the "has-been" section of the primitive world. And, because of fear, lack of understanding, desperation, whatever, the fundamentalists seek to tear apart the society to which they can not belong.
As I look around the room where I work, I see people who wouldn't assume that they are the same as me. We've got different color skin, different religious backgrounds. But to these terrorists, these religious extremists...we are the same. And we are not them. And thus, we must die.
I want to take a moment to address another couple of statements I read in this thread, without bothering to make multiple repies.
Yes, we've most likely killed more Afghan civilians than whoever is putting Anthrax in the mail has with their attacks. From all accounts, that still leaves more than 5,000 civilians on our side. If you want to draw parallels between agressive acts, you'd better include all of them.
Violence creates more violence. Indeed. But what choice do we have? It is obvious that there are people in the world who hate us so much, they would like nothing better than to kill our people. No political or humanitarian acts will ever stop this way of thinking. The very existence of our nation is a threat to the way of life for extermists such as the terrorists holed up in Afghanistan. Therefore, the only choice we have is to make an example of the Taliban. An example that illustrates a point to other governments: "If you don't keep it under control, you won't stay in power."
Back to globalization. Pay close attention to this, because it's 100% pure truth. We can't stop globilization of Western culture. Why? BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE WANT IT! The Japanese imported music, movies and baseball just to be more like us! Envy for our success and relatively secure life will drive other cultures to want to be like Western cultures. We don't have to be active in the globalization of Western culture...it'll happen without us.
You are correct. I was mistaken about MSN being seperate (hey, I admit when I'm wrong :) ).
Actually, I'm sure their true purpose is to use their site to influence the market share in their direction. I'm just sayin'... :)
Now, another
As ludicrous as it might sound, if MS knows they are not conforming to the standard but everyone else is, then they truly are doing something they can't expect everyone else to do.
Doesn't surprise me a bit.
But, no one said that MSN was playing by the standard rules. It's pretty well known that MS has a habit of changing standards to meet their needs, which has been especially true when it comes to HTML/Web standards.
Microsoft has indeed been declared a monoploy. MSN, which, to my knowledge, is a seperate company has not. MSN is a content and ISP. They are certainly not a monopoly in that industry.
Like I said, if MS implements an IE-specific feature, they shouldn't be expected to verify that it works in other browsers. It's IE-specific. Whether or not the feature actually works in another browser is a product of the efforts of other browser makers and MS can't be expected to verify it or even make an effort to verify it.
MSN is a content provider. If the manner in which they want their content to be displayed utilizes IE-specific features, they have the right not to allow other browsers to render the content since they can't be expected to make sure the content works in anything but IE.
Regardless of what your (or my, for that matter) opinion is on why Microsoft has chosen to actively prevent a browser from even trying the render the page, the fact of the matter is that MSN can choose to implement features in their website that, as far as they know, are specific to IE. That doesn't stop other browser makers from implementing support for those features, but Microsoft can aruge (successfully, I might add) that they can't rely on other people's browsers to handle these features correctly. It is irrelevant that the browsers do handle them correctly. They aren't MS's browser and MS is using IE-specific features.
In the past, I've done some work in the industrial electrical parts industry. I've encountered instances where a customer had bought a fuse box, we'll say it was built by Westinghouse (who hasn't built a fuse box in years, but just for the sake of argument). The customer needed new fuses, but wouldn't buy anything but Westinghouse-certified fuses. It didn't matter than every other fuse on the market could do the same thing and was made of the same materials. If Westinghouse couldn't guarantee the fuse would work, they wouldn't endorse it and the customer wouldn't buy it.
Again, this is probably not MS's intent. MSN is a popular site and I'm sure they intend to leverage that for more market share. All I'm saying is that there is more than one reason to start rejecting other browsers, if that's the route a content provider wants to go.
Reading about set-top boxes got me thinking...
Seems like a while back there was a post about building your own really small rack-mounted servers. I was wondering about resources for building things like your own cases, perhaps resources on packing components into smaller spaces. I'd love to build a small PC-in-a-shoebox for set-top general use.
I'm going to get flamed for this...
As terrible as it is that Microsoft is prohibiting other web browsers from accessing MSN, it's not as if Microsoft has a monopoly on news and content on the web (at least not yet). As a company, they can decide how they want their content rendered and if IE (no matter how self-serving it is) is the only browser that does the job perfectly, then so be it.
I develop web applications and there are times when a client asks for something that simply isn't feasible (or perhaps possible) in Netscape 4.x, so we inform the client of that and, effectively, prohibit them from using Netscape 4.x to access the application. I don't see much of a difference here.
Now I would see a major difference if there weren't news and content alternatives (and plenty of them) to MSN. Heck, IMO they could limit access to only IP addresses that are on the MSN network. Didn't Prodigy do that?
Yeah, it's self-serving and perhaps borderline unethical. But it's not illegal (yet) and if they want to make a sight that uses IE features they can't guarantee are supported in other browers, that's their call.
From your statement, I can only guess that you are somehow drawing a correlation between being a citizen (of the U.S., I'm assuming) and having the "birthright" to a free society. At least in the case of the United States, those born as citizens do enjoy the same freedoms as the rest of the citizens. In that kind of argument, I suppose you could say freedom is a birthright. But that's not what I'm intending to argue against.
What I'm intending to say is that the world owes you, I and everyone else nothing. Freedom is not a given. Freedom is not a fundamental law of nature. Saying that I, by supporting my government's efforts to provide better security for my fellow citizens, am betraying the birthright of my children has no validity to me because I don't consider freedom something that is gifted upon birth and automatically assumed for life.
As I said, I can see your argument. A given country allows the right of it's citizens to live in a "free society". When a person is born in said country, the person is given citizenship by default. Therefore, the right to live in a "free society" is a birthright. Good logic...except that the right to live in a "free society" came at (and will always come at) a cost. It may not be paid by you, so you'll never know about it and may even feel that freedom really is your "birthright". But don't be fooled.
Our generation may well end up paying the price for the freedom of future generations. That's something I can live with.
Just for the sake of continuing the debate...
First of all, let me say that taking away civil liberties, especially those dealing with privacy, leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. Also, just as a point, living in a free society is not a birthright. It is something fought and suffered for.
That being said, I'd like to remind you that we are now living in a time where there are people who not only want badly to kill us but are willing to die so long as we, the relatively innocent masses, are killed as well.
Given that our government have many, many surveillance techniques at their disposal, wouldn't you think it to be prudent that they use said techniques in an effort to prevent more heinous acts like these from happening to our citizens?
And yes IMHO, once it reaches to the next generation, it does become more important. My generaion is dead to me, now. Once we have children, it becomes almost obvious to me (in a very primal sense) that I'm no longer alive for my benefit, but for that of my children. My productive, rather happy life is a great bonus, rather than the entire goal. As such, I see our children inheriting two different possible societies. In one, we (my generation and older) have had to suffer some temporary indignations in the hopes of keeping our nation strong. In the other, we still have an underpowered intelligence and law-enforcement community, or perhaps, no such community at all since the nation has shaken itself apart in fear.
Apocolyptic? Sure. All I can hope for at the moment is that it's just the paranoia talking and everything'll work out just fine.
A good friend of mine once said that if MS's development track record held up, that the X-Box would be a flop. To paraphrase, he said: "People don't expect their console to crash. If it does, they'll return it."
Now I know the PS2 had some backward-compatibility problems, but other than that, has it been rock-solid? I know I've never had so much as a hiccup from my Dreamcast.
If you are American, there are not just people who want to kill you, there are people who are still trying to kill you. All of you. As many as possible in the most horrific fashion possible. And there is no means too vile or deplorable to consider.
Perhaps I should put this another way. I am a parent. I have a family. If I can't directly protect my family against the types of weapons that anti-Americans would willingly use , then I expect my government to help with the protection. If one of the ways of coming close to having protection is by searching people who are coming into and going out of government facilities, so be it. If our government can only protect us by exercising more power in the area of surveillance, so be it.
The alternative, of course, is to leave our intelligence forces as emasculated and impotent as they have been for the last 10 years. And we all saw how effective they were on Sept. 11th.
Keep bitching and moaning about your rights being chipped away. But think about the alternatives in a world where someone wants you dead. Wouldn't you want law enforcement to be able to find out who wants you dead so that they can be stopped? For the safety of my family, I know that's what I want.
Just my opinion, but I'd love to see remakes of Pirates! (Pirates Gold, which was a lovely pile of toss, doesn't count) and Stunts (pc racing game).
:)
Pirates! just had a fantastically simple interface for a game with as much open-ended play as it had. And Stunts had a great track editor (especially for the time, around '89 or '90 IIRC).
I know this is getting off-topic, but has anyone besides me ever imagined Pirates! in an online, persistant world (MMORPG, like Everquest)? Man, if you could just figure out a good time scaling for ocean travel, that game might just rock.