Somehow I suspect 321 Studios didn't have a lot of "employees" in that regard. The software itself was simple and I wouldn't be surprised if the primary coder is also the CEO of the company. Thus it's easy to squander the company funds and then blame it all on the "evil media company lawsuit". It's also possible that not enough people actually bought the software to make it worthwhile even if they did run the busness honestly.
There's already quite a bit of electronic equipment on your typical NATO soldier these days, yet basically nobody is using EMP weapons. There is a reason for this, generating electrical fields is tough if you're not allowed to use Nukes, and in general you have to land your EMP bombs pretty close to the enemy to get any effect. If you have to land a bomb next to them, it's a lot cheaper and easier just to have it blow up and kill them than release an EMP and merely disable their electronics (especially since Military electronics are reasonably EMP resistant).
IMHO, the interface on the TeX parser (or whatever it is called) is a bug. The learning curve on the command line parser is astounding, and that's before you even consider setting up the Metafont stuff. TeX has a lot of nice features, but it is a nightmare for the casual user. Fortunatly these days casual users have OpenOffice and the like, but I still have chills from back in College where we had to mark up our papers in TeX (or pay for a copy of Word and Windows 3.0 down at the Campus Bookstore).
You know, I dug up an old copy of Microsoft Bob a few months ago and my GF just loved it. It's not something you can really use on a regular basis, but it is kinda fun to fire up and play with. Heck, the package included some quiz games and a rather extensive collection of knicknacks you could accessorize the rooms with.
It's all fine that you like to read challenging works, I do too sometimes, but I think too many people mistake challenging for insightful. Many works have a few golden nuggets of ideas, but they are wrapped up metric tons of bullshit that are there to make the author look smarter (Philosophy books are especially bad in this regard). Remember, just because you don't really understand what the author is saying doesn't mean the book is just "too smart" for you, the author may just not have a coherent point or may be trying to be too clever with his wording.
Note that this doesn't apply to older works that are difficult because the language has evolved. Those works are always going to be difficult until you basically learn the old version of the language as a second language, although many old authors were as bad about obfuscating their work as modern authors.
Is it just me, or has this topic really brought out a lot of elitist assholes? "Books should be hard to read, you're just stupid!" Sheesh.
Yeah! We need to bring back all of those books that are no fun to read and serve mostly to browbeat you into the authors way of thinking! If we keep up this trend, what are schoolteachers going to assign their students to crush their joy of reading?
IMHO, authors should not hide their ideas behind obtuse syntax and plodding plotlines. Unless a book is technical in nature (like a textbook or perhaps a Philosophical tome), the author should not mask his ideas behind excessive jargon or overly convoluted construction.
I know this will be a major problem to people who like to read difficult works to impress their friends. "Wow, you finished Gravitys Rainbow? I never got past chapter 2!" I also don't think you need to make your book excessivly hard to read to discuss weighty issues, especially since most of these issues are not particularly difficult to describe once you boil off the excess jargon and technical terms in my experience. The solution may be difficult to arrive at (in fact many dilemmas have no "good" solution), but the problem should not be difficult to understand, especially at a basic level.
That's not entirely accurate either. If you want to make a sturdy, but somewhat extreme analogy, DRM would be like stores attaching little bombs to every product in the store. This stops the causal shoplifter, but the good ones figure out pretty fast how to disarm the bombs when they shoplift. Worse, honest customers occasionally set off the bombs by trying to do stuff that's legal, but not what you originally intended. Without DRM the situation is more or less like it is now. Stores have only the force of law and a bit of survellance to prevent shoplifters (nobody is advocating making illegal copies legal here). Publishers can still shut down people who are providing illegal copies of their works online today, DRM does not change that.
Bash is so hot because it is the default shell in most Linux installs. Zsh is hidden off somewhere in the package system, so you have to know about it to try it out. Because all of these people who make distros started with Bash, they assume everyone else is using it too and perpetuate the cycle.
It's the same reason IE is still the de-facto browser on the internet, for most people it came with the system. Also, if you jump around on lab machines or on other people's machine, more often than not they don't have zsh installed and you're forced to remember all of the bash syntax anyway. That said, I still use zsh for all of my machines, because the completion engine is smarter and I've got many k worth of.zshrc files built up over the years that I'd hate to have to port over to another shell.
I've never had much trouble tracking down that little code sticker on the fruits and vegetables myself. Everything over the size of a grape seems to carry one around here, and it's only a 4-5 digit number to punch in. My biggest complaint is that their scales tend to be a bit slow, so each item needs a second or two to register before you can pull out the next item. This adds up pretty quick.
The other thing that gets me sometimes is that I'll lean on the side of the machine, which can confuse the scale and make the machine very bitchy (and it can overcharge you for produce by the pound).
Overall, the self checkout is better than the express lane when you have only a few items, but once I have 15-20 or more items in my cart I opt for a regular cashier just for the speed.
Do you have those hardware stores that feel the need to stick a pricetag on every single $0.02 bolt and nut? Those places always drove me nuts, since it's a pain to take the pricetags off of a hundred nuts and bolts and it's not like the cashier can't look up the price of 3/8" bolts.
Most don't care, but it only takes one sharp eyed cashier to bust you. Of course you could probably scout out the checkout lanes for the one cashier who obviously doesn't speak English or really know how to operate the equipment (this should work especially well in K-Mart) and you can minimize your risk. Once you're past the cashier it's just a matter of getting past that guy who checks your recipt at the door, fortunatly with your product in the bag (assuming it's not a big TV or a stereo or something) it's highly unlikely that he will notice anything is amiss.
Yay, high tech shoplifting. Isn't new technology grand?
Check that: If publishers stop wanting DRM, it's the end of popular creative arts. Not as we know them, but period. If you want to run a capitalist economy - many societies are hell-bent on it - and you want quality in your art and entertainment, your artists must be paid.
So without DRM the entire entertainment industry just up and quits right? I mean it's obviously reasonable to expect your books to delete themselves after 2 weeks (who here hasn't taken more than 2 weeks to read a book?). The author of this article is smoking a bit too much of what the industry is selling. Even the concept of Copyright is a recent invention, and there were certainly entertainers before Copyright came around. Here's a newsflash: people will still buy your stuff even if you don't have DRM on it. More people will pirate it, but most of those people will pirate it anyway if it is popular enough. This is kind of like saying that a few shoplifters are going to destroy civilization as we know it.
This is a little tainted because the inital DRM efforts, in addition to being almost completely useless, were also extrememly draconian. It's no wonder people weren't buying the readers if the industry is treating them with that much hostility.
One more thing I'd like to point out. I don't know how well it's doing in the grand scheme of things, but the Baen Webscription Service doesn't seem to have killed their paperback production, even though their books are completely without DRM.
The biggest tipoff is when it starts off with "Dear Paypal user" or something like that. Most companies go to the trouble of putting your actual name in there, so if whoever is sending you the email doesn't even know your name...well, you figure it out. This tactic even worked in the example quiz! It's a great first pass (the second pass is of course to mouseover any URLs (or check the source) and see exactly where they're sending you.
The only example that really made me think was the MSN account expiring message. At first I thought that had to be a fake because what's the point of sending you an email telling you that you need to log into your email to save your account? Then I realized it was actually an ad for a related pay MSN service and immediatly knew that it was real.
I knew kids in school who had butterfly knives. With practice you can open and close those things faster than the eye can see, and the kids who had those certainly got a lot of practice. They loved flipping the thing open and closed for hours on end when there were no teachers around. I never really thought of those kids as dangerous though, it was more like something to do with their hands when they were bored.
You know, this reminds me of something Larry Wall pointed out.
From an academic perspective, there is no need for the + (Match one or more of the previous token) operator in regular expressions, since a+ is equivelent to aa*. In fact, if you want to make a language more elegant you would drop the + as it is redundant. In the real world nobody wants to retype a 14 character long token.
My big point was that the original web standards were pretty egalitarian, with just about anybody with a good (or not so good idea) able to toss up a halfway decent looking page. Nowadays the standards are becoming rather elitist, and unless you're already a master of XML and know the W3C's technical jargon well enough to read their documentation, you stand little chance of just picking up XHTML from reading the documentation.
I know the pages won't be very accessable, but the kind of people who need this are the kind of people for whom accessability is not a huge issue (these people never set ALT tags for instance). Unfortunatly, is is also these people who really made the web explode in the early days by filling the WWW with an enormous assortment of information and services. Nowadays it seems that far fewer people are creating novel services or information stores. Unusual webpages are getting harder and harder to find, and most of the content added is in the form of Blogs, which are annoyingly transitory.
Man, do you remember when writing a webpage by hand was easy? Back in 1996 or so when just about anybody with a text editor and a link to that excellent Netscape HTML manual could write a decent page without spending hours poring over obtuse documentation?
Now you have to figure out what Doctype to set, learn CSS, enter some sort of weird workaround for IE, etc... Worse, HTML used to be fairly forgiving for the author so Newbies could get a decent page without spending hours and hours trying to figure out why their page is coming up blank or trying to figure out why the validator is complaining at them. (I really hate when it says stuff like: Illegal use of <B>. And I'm left scratching my head as to why it is illegal.). It's no wonder newbies choose instead to write their webpage in Word and use the horrible "export to HTML" feature.
I don't know about you, but I hate buying music without hearing it first, and if you're not into top-40 your opportunities to hear it first are pretty slim. You can chase your band around when they go on tour (IF they go on tour), hope that they come to your hometown (ha!), or try the pirate route.
I will admit that this mentality has cut into some record sales, as I have bought far fewer albums that are complete--listen to it once and throw it away--crap. On the other hand, when an album comes out that's actually good I always buy it, after all, I want to support the artists (which is really what the whole thing is about in the first place), so they can continue to make more.
What we really need is a better way to preview music that is not:
Illegal
Lame -- Like only giving you the first 15 seconds at 20kbps of a song
Firmly in the grasp of large record companies that concerned only with their top-40 performers. It's a shame that most internet radio has been a huge letdown in this regard.
Impractical -- If you charge $100 a month, or have horrible DRM, or only work on windows with special software the screws everything else up, etc....
Obscure -- There needs to be a way to find stuff. There are some great radio stations out there that nobody knows about (and aren't available in your area).
You know what the worst part is? Most P2P applications only fail on #1, while most legal stuff fails on at least half of these bullets.
Well, our skulls do disadvantage us in the biting power department. Virtually all apes have much stronger jaws and thicker skulls (to anchor the jaw muscles on) than we do.
Heck, it has become obvious now that Stephen Hawking is a flip flopper! A waffle if you will. Adjusting your viewpoints based on new evidence is a sure sign that he does not have the moral fortitude necessary to win him any elections!
And replaced with what? Neo-Medicare? Or are you one of those "Well, if the old codgers can't afford medicine, then they should just up and die and get it over with!" types?
What is a 1.5Ghz processor anymore? A 1.5 Ghz P3 != 1.5 Ghz Athlon XP != 1.5 Ghz P4. This is very annoying, I wish they would just say "A 1.5Ghz Pentium 4 or similar processor".
The problem is that many of those Performas were real Road Apples. At least they weren't as bad as the Centris line, which seemed to combine the high cost of the high end Macs with the crummy design of the low end Macs. Saving 10% of the cost for 40% of the performace is not a good tradeoff.
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Somehow I suspect 321 Studios didn't have a lot of "employees" in that regard. The software itself was simple and I wouldn't be surprised if the primary coder is also the CEO of the company. Thus it's easy to squander the company funds and then blame it all on the "evil media company lawsuit". It's also possible that not enough people actually bought the software to make it worthwhile even if they did run the busness honestly.
There's already quite a bit of electronic equipment on your typical NATO soldier these days, yet basically nobody is using EMP weapons. There is a reason for this, generating electrical fields is tough if you're not allowed to use Nukes, and in general you have to land your EMP bombs pretty close to the enemy to get any effect. If you have to land a bomb next to them, it's a lot cheaper and easier just to have it blow up and kill them than release an EMP and merely disable their electronics (especially since Military electronics are reasonably EMP resistant).
IMHO, the interface on the TeX parser (or whatever it is called) is a bug. The learning curve on the command line parser is astounding, and that's before you even consider setting up the Metafont stuff. TeX has a lot of nice features, but it is a nightmare for the casual user. Fortunatly these days casual users have OpenOffice and the like, but I still have chills from back in College where we had to mark up our papers in TeX (or pay for a copy of Word and Windows 3.0 down at the Campus Bookstore).
You know, I dug up an old copy of Microsoft Bob a few months ago and my GF just loved it. It's not something you can really use on a regular basis, but it is kinda fun to fire up and play with. Heck, the package included some quiz games and a rather extensive collection of knicknacks you could accessorize the rooms with.
It's all fine that you like to read challenging works, I do too sometimes, but I think too many people mistake challenging for insightful. Many works have a few golden nuggets of ideas, but they are wrapped up metric tons of bullshit that are there to make the author look smarter (Philosophy books are especially bad in this regard). Remember, just because you don't really understand what the author is saying doesn't mean the book is just "too smart" for you, the author may just not have a coherent point or may be trying to be too clever with his wording.
Note that this doesn't apply to older works that are difficult because the language has evolved. Those works are always going to be difficult until you basically learn the old version of the language as a second language, although many old authors were as bad about obfuscating their work as modern authors.
Is it just me, or has this topic really brought out a lot of elitist assholes? "Books should be hard to read, you're just stupid!" Sheesh.
Now I can spend $300 on a music player AND get to use Real's spyware laden buggy hard-to-use interface! How can I loose?
Yeah! We need to bring back all of those books that are no fun to read and serve mostly to browbeat you into the authors way of thinking! If we keep up this trend, what are schoolteachers going to assign their students to crush their joy of reading?
IMHO, authors should not hide their ideas behind obtuse syntax and plodding plotlines. Unless a book is technical in nature (like a textbook or perhaps a Philosophical tome), the author should not mask his ideas behind excessive jargon or overly convoluted construction.
I know this will be a major problem to people who like to read difficult works to impress their friends. "Wow, you finished Gravitys Rainbow? I never got past chapter 2!" I also don't think you need to make your book excessivly hard to read to discuss weighty issues, especially since most of these issues are not particularly difficult to describe once you boil off the excess jargon and technical terms in my experience. The solution may be difficult to arrive at (in fact many dilemmas have no "good" solution), but the problem should not be difficult to understand, especially at a basic level.
That's not entirely accurate either. If you want to make a sturdy, but somewhat extreme analogy, DRM would be like stores attaching little bombs to every product in the store. This stops the causal shoplifter, but the good ones figure out pretty fast how to disarm the bombs when they shoplift. Worse, honest customers occasionally set off the bombs by trying to do stuff that's legal, but not what you originally intended. Without DRM the situation is more or less like it is now. Stores have only the force of law and a bit of survellance to prevent shoplifters (nobody is advocating making illegal copies legal here). Publishers can still shut down people who are providing illegal copies of their works online today, DRM does not change that.
Bash is so hot because it is the default shell in most Linux installs. Zsh is hidden off somewhere in the package system, so you have to know about it to try it out. Because all of these people who make distros started with Bash, they assume everyone else is using it too and perpetuate the cycle.
.zshrc files built up over the years that I'd hate to have to port over to another shell.
It's the same reason IE is still the de-facto browser on the internet, for most people it came with the system. Also, if you jump around on lab machines or on other people's machine, more often than not they don't have zsh installed and you're forced to remember all of the bash syntax anyway. That said, I still use zsh for all of my machines, because the completion engine is smarter and I've got many k worth of
I've never had much trouble tracking down that little code sticker on the fruits and vegetables myself. Everything over the size of a grape seems to carry one around here, and it's only a 4-5 digit number to punch in. My biggest complaint is that their scales tend to be a bit slow, so each item needs a second or two to register before you can pull out the next item. This adds up pretty quick.
The other thing that gets me sometimes is that I'll lean on the side of the machine, which can confuse the scale and make the machine very bitchy (and it can overcharge you for produce by the pound).
Overall, the self checkout is better than the express lane when you have only a few items, but once I have 15-20 or more items in my cart I opt for a regular cashier just for the speed.
Do you have those hardware stores that feel the need to stick a pricetag on every single $0.02 bolt and nut? Those places always drove me nuts, since it's a pain to take the pricetags off of a hundred nuts and bolts and it's not like the cashier can't look up the price of 3/8" bolts.
Most don't care, but it only takes one sharp eyed cashier to bust you. Of course you could probably scout out the checkout lanes for the one cashier who obviously doesn't speak English or really know how to operate the equipment (this should work especially well in K-Mart) and you can minimize your risk. Once you're past the cashier it's just a matter of getting past that guy who checks your recipt at the door, fortunatly with your product in the bag (assuming it's not a big TV or a stereo or something) it's highly unlikely that he will notice anything is amiss.
Yay, high tech shoplifting. Isn't new technology grand?
This is a little tainted because the inital DRM efforts, in addition to being almost completely useless, were also extrememly draconian. It's no wonder people weren't buying the readers if the industry is treating them with that much hostility.
One more thing I'd like to point out. I don't know how well it's doing in the grand scheme of things, but the Baen Webscription Service doesn't seem to have killed their paperback production, even though their books are completely without DRM.
The biggest tipoff is when it starts off with "Dear Paypal user" or something like that. Most companies go to the trouble of putting your actual name in there, so if whoever is sending you the email doesn't even know your name...well, you figure it out. This tactic even worked in the example quiz! It's a great first pass (the second pass is of course to mouseover any URLs (or check the source) and see exactly where they're sending you.
The only example that really made me think was the MSN account expiring message. At first I thought that had to be a fake because what's the point of sending you an email telling you that you need to log into your email to save your account? Then I realized it was actually an ad for a related pay MSN service and immediatly knew that it was real.
I knew kids in school who had butterfly knives. With practice you can open and close those things faster than the eye can see, and the kids who had those certainly got a lot of practice. They loved flipping the thing open and closed for hours on end when there were no teachers around. I never really thought of those kids as dangerous though, it was more like something to do with their hands when they were bored.
You know, this reminds me of something Larry Wall pointed out.
From an academic perspective, there is no need for the + (Match one or more of the previous token) operator in regular expressions, since a+ is equivelent to aa*. In fact, if you want to make a language more elegant you would drop the + as it is redundant. In the real world nobody wants to retype a 14 character long token.
My big point was that the original web standards were pretty egalitarian, with just about anybody with a good (or not so good idea) able to toss up a halfway decent looking page. Nowadays the standards are becoming rather elitist, and unless you're already a master of XML and know the W3C's technical jargon well enough to read their documentation, you stand little chance of just picking up XHTML from reading the documentation.
I know the pages won't be very accessable, but the kind of people who need this are the kind of people for whom accessability is not a huge issue (these people never set ALT tags for instance). Unfortunatly, is is also these people who really made the web explode in the early days by filling the WWW with an enormous assortment of information and services. Nowadays it seems that far fewer people are creating novel services or information stores. Unusual webpages are getting harder and harder to find, and most of the content added is in the form of Blogs, which are annoyingly transitory.
I guess I've ranted enough on this for now.
Man, do you remember when writing a webpage by hand was easy? Back in 1996 or so when just about anybody with a text editor and a link to that excellent Netscape HTML manual could write a decent page without spending hours poring over obtuse documentation?
Now you have to figure out what Doctype to set, learn CSS, enter some sort of weird workaround for IE, etc... Worse, HTML used to be fairly forgiving for the author so Newbies could get a decent page without spending hours and hours trying to figure out why their page is coming up blank or trying to figure out why the validator is complaining at them. (I really hate when it says stuff like: Illegal use of <B>. And I'm left scratching my head as to why it is illegal.). It's no wonder newbies choose instead to write their webpage in Word and use the horrible "export to HTML" feature.
I will admit that this mentality has cut into some record sales, as I have bought far fewer albums that are complete--listen to it once and throw it away--crap. On the other hand, when an album comes out that's actually good I always buy it, after all, I want to support the artists (which is really what the whole thing is about in the first place), so they can continue to make more.
What we really need is a better way to preview music that is not:
- Illegal
- Lame -- Like only giving you the first 15 seconds at 20kbps of a song
- Firmly in the grasp of large record companies that concerned only with their top-40 performers. It's a shame that most internet radio has been a huge letdown in this regard.
- Impractical -- If you charge $100 a month, or have horrible DRM, or only work on windows with special software the screws everything else up, etc....
- Obscure -- There needs to be a way to find stuff. There are some great radio stations out there that nobody knows about (and aren't available in your area).
You know what the worst part is? Most P2P applications only fail on #1, while most legal stuff fails on at least half of these bullets.Well, our skulls do disadvantage us in the biting power department. Virtually all apes have much stronger jaws and thicker skulls (to anchor the jaw muscles on) than we do.
Heck, it has become obvious now that Stephen Hawking is a flip flopper! A waffle if you will. Adjusting your viewpoints based on new evidence is a sure sign that he does not have the moral fortitude necessary to win him any elections!
And replaced with what? Neo-Medicare? Or are you one of those "Well, if the old codgers can't afford medicine, then they should just up and die and get it over with!" types?
What is a 1.5Ghz processor anymore? A 1.5 Ghz P3 != 1.5 Ghz Athlon XP != 1.5 Ghz P4. This is very annoying, I wish they would just say "A 1.5Ghz Pentium 4 or similar processor".
The problem is that many of those Performas were real Road Apples. At least they weren't as bad as the Centris line, which seemed to combine the high cost of the high end Macs with the crummy design of the low end Macs. Saving 10% of the cost for 40% of the performace is not a good tradeoff.