one.
Seriously, I know there are people out there who still listen to cassettes (there are still people who listen to 8-tracks!), but for the most part they are dead.
Notice that the Apple SuperDVD and the Minidisc are steps towards the scenero proposed in the article. They already prevent fair use with copyrighted material, it is a small step after that to consider ALL material copyright. This is not far from the truth either, since everything past 1910 still is under the original copyright, and no DVDs/Next generation technology existed in 1910.
These IP cartels can even make a strong case that any unprotected medium is likely to contain some sort of ripped copyrighted material, and anybody attempting to use such material should report immediatly to the Disney/Sony/Time-Warner Happy Fun Re-education Camp.
Did you read the article? Many of these schemes being devised WILL prevent you from publishing your own work digitally unless you get a contract from one of the big recording companies or work in a movie studio.
While current technology allows you to make copies like this, you can't expect people to use this technology forever, eventually most CD players will be replaced by DVD players or whatever the newest hottest technology is (how many of you still use cassette tapes?).
The worst part is, these big companies are still exercising an economy of scarcity in a world with nearly free limitless copies. Instead of cutting out the middleman and setting up a system where bands are paid to produce music (but not charged to "publish" it, as the publishing is free), you could have thousands of happy bands making more money and selling their content for a fraction of what it costs today. The only companies that lose out in that scenero are the publishing companies that don't want to switch to the new, more efficent business. I can see why too, since they have carefully engineered a system (and even had parts of it set into law) where they can rip off not only the band/actors, but the general public as well.
This is why these "Extremely low duplication/distribution costs can only be stealing!" posts really bug me.
BZZT, sorry, your power supply does NOT draw 200 watts to operate, rather it can supply that much power to the rest of the system. Although the device is not perfect, it is nowhere near 100% inefficent. YOu can tell this by touching the power supply case of a comptuer you just turned off, it is warm to the touch, but nowhere near what it would be if it needed 200 watts to operate.
Um, actually you will have a higher power bill when running distributed processing apps (assuming you are running a modern OS) than when you are just leaving your computer idle. This goes doubly true if you would shutdown your computer at night if you weren't running some distributed application. In the long run, from a purely monetary standpoint, those lottery tickets are probabaly a better buy.
Unfortunatly, Ringworld was a fairly late novel in the "Known Space" series, and Niven seems to assume that you already know many of the characters involved, not to mention the slang.
tanj: There ain't no justice.
I think Niven considered a lot of characterization redundant for Ringworld given all of the material already available for the Known Space series, and left it out.
Any technology that requires cities to install lines that generate powerful magnetic fields underneath the sidewalks is doomed to fail.
Heres why:
There are possible health effects of keeping your body in strong magnetic fields for long periods of time
Those grids will draw a lot of power from already overtaxed power grids
chicken and Egg: why build these exensive grids (that require tearing up large sections of sidewalks and roads) when nobody has the "it". Why buy "it" when you cannot use it?
People who wear steel-toe boots will be annoyed that their feet keep sticking to the sidewalk
People who carry floppy disks/zip disks/tapes/PDAs around will be annoyed when they get home and find all of their media has been degaussed
Nearby TVs (in store windows/apartments will be distorted by the fields, not to mention computer monitors).
People won't like having to pry metal objects off of the sidewalk when they drop them, nor have the pocketknife in their pocket pull their pants down to the sidewalk (and then stick!)
I hope this is enough explanation as to why powerful magnetic fields in sidewalks is a bad idea.
IIRC, Virginia ALREADY has laws against brining pronographic materials across state lines. I wish I could find the law, but it's an old one that was never enforced in the first place. Most likly the law was passed so some politicion could claim he was fighting porno.
In reality, one of the selling points of CDRWs is that they can be played on almost any regular CD-ROM (although some cheap players certainly have problems reading CDRWs). At this point, these CDs seem to be in a race with DVDRWs (which will have more density than even 3xCDRWs). Especially damming for this technology is that you will need a special player (the burner) to read the discs one you make them.
Frankly, the smantic + markup concept gets a lot of lip service from all corners of the world, but in practice I have yet to see a system that is both "correct" and actually used in the correct way.
HTML was designed from day 1 just as you described, and what do we see? People spending days and days writing convoluted code to get the formatting "just right."[1] This is especially true when you are presenting something with no content[2]. Too many people are control freaks as well, there is no way they are ever going to let someone else see the presentation when they could have just any font, point size, or color selected (just to name a few). These people shutter at the idea of a webbrowser without the FONT tag, or those people who click "override document fonts". There is no way they are going to let their formatting be dictated by the reader!
Maybe it's a good thing to make these people let go of their control issues, but in reality anything that tries is either not going to catch on, or is going to be mutilated into something else (HTML).
[1] At least on Windows with IE
[2] 75% of all web pages, and 100% of all flash presentations
Oh No! You've just proved that late night alien visitors are responsible for all of those Outlook Trojans! We're all doomed! AaaAAaaGgggGGhhHHHHhh!11!!!1!
Re:Tetris is a trademark of The Tetris Company LLC
on
GTK+ without X!
·
· Score: 1
AARGH this site is driving me nuts! Why did it feel the need to open a new window on the site? What's with all of this Javascript formatting? Why won't it just bring me to the stupid flash site so I can download the swf and play it, since the integration with the browser is broken on my machine? In the end, despite reading though the source on almost every page to get to the next page, I never did see any of these digital art exitbits.
Wait a second, you are talking about the speed of the simulator. That's a lot different than talking about the speed of the actual chip. It's akin to saying the Playstation is slow because Bleem runs slowly on your 486.
Actually, you might be surprised. I was looking for documentation on how to use a specific Win32 COMM module, and TPJ was the only place on the web with useful documentation. I signed up on the spot.
Yes, 3com finally understands exactly what's missing with the current PDAs, decent connectivity. Current Palms only have the slow and flaky serial port or the slow and flaky IR port to communicate with. The Serial port requires a cable attached to another device, and the IR port has a range of about 2" and can be tricky to get working in some environtments.
With Bluetooth Palms (and other PDAs) can automatically form piconets (small wireless networks only a few meters across) wherever they go. This is for more than just network games (as the article mentioned) but also for true collaboration in a mobile environment.
In case anyone is wondering, Bluetooth is IEEE 802.15, and can best be summarized as 802.11a and USB rolled into one. Transfer speeds are in the 1-2Mbit range, and the protocol supports a "Service Discovery Protocol" for determing what is available in the local network.
Re:Ancient games should not be copyright released
on
Warez and Abandonware
·
· Score: 2
That's a dangerous view. Even if the software companies (if they even exist anymore) don't mind having their old games available on third party websites, the copyright lawyers sure do. One of the things the article mentioned was that many companies aren't even sure who owns the copyrights anymore (and they don't even care enough to search their records to find out), so even if the original author turns a blind eye to the abandonware some other company you never heard of (that bought part of the old software company years ago) can come out of the blue and sue you for $150,000.
Copyright law isn't really setup for the abandonware concept, and they both cause a lot of problems due to this.
Why? The entire purpose of serif fonts is to make them easier to read by drawing your eye down the line. Personally, I'd much prefer if people left the FONT tag alone. I chose the fonts that were easy for me to read, don't presume I find 6 point Arial easier on the eyes, even if you do. Actually, it got so bad there for awhile that I even clicked on the "override document fonts" checkbox, even though that tends to break those pages that are assume you're browsing with IE at 800x600 under Windows.
Yeah, and while we're at it, lets make the still suits BLACK. In the desert, that'll work real well.
You realize the Fremen generally only go out at night (to conserve water and avoid being spotted), so the black stillsuit provides you a little extra warmth (from reflected energy off of moons and the like), and makes you harder to see (although with the lack of shadows on Arrakis, this is dubious). Also, Dune doesn't appear to be all that hot of planet, since nobody ever seems to break a sweat when out in the sun, not even those sweaty Harkonnens.
Ok, a little observation: North American Numbering Plan Aministration, or NANPA for short. In Japanese (According to xjdic) NANPA means: (an) (vs) flirt; scam; scope; skirt chaser. The connotation is of course that the NANPA is a pervert.
Just one more useless fact for the day.
I thought it was interesting how everybody made a big deal about the STORM that was coming. Earlier they made a big deal about how being inside a storm will sandblast you dead in seconds, yet here they are riding on big worms and flying planes through the storm. Then the Emperor makes some comment about how his palace will be destroyed since shields can't stop a STORM. Then the storm stops right as the fremen get within knife-fighting range of the Sardukar, and 5 seconds later it is bright and sunny out and the Harkonnents have scrambled their fighters (which were tied down because of the incoming storm).
I agree with you that the Sardukar seemed to be lacking any tactics whatsoever. "Look a guy with a kinfe is running towards me (with a gun), maybe I'll try running right up to him instead of firing!"
Also, by the end, the Fremen started to use some Sardukar weapons left on the ground. My question is, why didn't they have any weapons from the 100s of patrols they ambushed? Or even from the spice miners (who CERTAINLY wouldn't be unarmed with all of the bandits/fremen/thieves running around trying to get their hands on the incredibly valuble spice they're mining).
This sounds similar to the old paper records
on
Floppy CDs And DVDs?
·
· Score: 1
Does anybody remember back in the dying days of vinyl when all of the magazines and cereal boxes started shipping with little promotional "records" that were more or less your average 45 printed on a piece of 8 1/2x11 paper (although the paper was coated IIRC). After you went through all the trouble to cut the record out you got a scratchy advertisement for Coke and maybe a song or a story. Well, that's enough nostalga for today, back to techie stuff.
Who were these Sardukar escorting the princess? When I saw them I thought These are the emporors elite troops? They look like they need a nap! When Scifi shows this again, pay particular attention to the leader of the bodyguards when the find the princess hitting on Luke...er Paul. Doesn't his expression look totally vacant, like he's just had his brain removed and he hasn't slept in the past 90 hours?
Slashdot Mirror
one. Seriously, I know there are people out there who still listen to cassettes (there are still people who listen to 8-tracks!), but for the most part they are dead.
Notice that the Apple SuperDVD and the Minidisc are steps towards the scenero proposed in the article. They already prevent fair use with copyrighted material, it is a small step after that to consider ALL material copyright. This is not far from the truth either, since everything past 1910 still is under the original copyright, and no DVDs/Next generation technology existed in 1910.
These IP cartels can even make a strong case that any unprotected medium is likely to contain some sort of ripped copyrighted material, and anybody attempting to use such material should report immediatly to the Disney/Sony/Time-Warner Happy Fun Re-education Camp.
Did you read the article? Many of these schemes being devised WILL prevent you from publishing your own work digitally unless you get a contract from one of the big recording companies or work in a movie studio.
While current technology allows you to make copies like this, you can't expect people to use this technology forever, eventually most CD players will be replaced by DVD players or whatever the newest hottest technology is (how many of you still use cassette tapes?).
The worst part is, these big companies are still exercising an economy of scarcity in a world with nearly free limitless copies. Instead of cutting out the middleman and setting up a system where bands are paid to produce music (but not charged to "publish" it, as the publishing is free), you could have thousands of happy bands making more money and selling their content for a fraction of what it costs today. The only companies that lose out in that scenero are the publishing companies that don't want to switch to the new, more efficent business. I can see why too, since they have carefully engineered a system (and even had parts of it set into law) where they can rip off not only the band/actors, but the general public as well.
This is why these "Extremely low duplication/distribution costs can only be stealing!" posts really bug me.
BZZT, sorry, your power supply does NOT draw 200 watts to operate, rather it can supply that much power to the rest of the system. Although the device is not perfect, it is nowhere near 100% inefficent. YOu can tell this by touching the power supply case of a comptuer you just turned off, it is warm to the touch, but nowhere near what it would be if it needed 200 watts to operate.
Um, actually you will have a higher power bill when running distributed processing apps (assuming you are running a modern OS) than when you are just leaving your computer idle. This goes doubly true if you would shutdown your computer at night if you weren't running some distributed application. In the long run, from a purely monetary standpoint, those lottery tickets are probabaly a better buy.
Unfortunatly, Ringworld was a fairly late novel in the "Known Space" series, and Niven seems to assume that you already know many of the characters involved, not to mention the slang.
tanj: There ain't no justice.
I think Niven considered a lot of characterization redundant for Ringworld given all of the material already available for the Known Space series, and left it out.
Heres why:
- There are possible health effects of keeping your body in strong magnetic fields for long periods of time
- Those grids will draw a lot of power from already overtaxed power grids
- chicken and Egg: why build these exensive grids (that require tearing up large sections of sidewalks and roads) when nobody has the "it". Why buy "it" when you cannot use it?
- People who wear steel-toe boots will be annoyed that their feet keep sticking to the sidewalk
- People who carry floppy disks/zip disks/tapes/PDAs around will be annoyed when they get home and find all of their media has been degaussed
- Nearby TVs (in store windows/apartments will be distorted by the fields, not to mention computer monitors).
- People won't like having to pry metal objects off of the sidewalk when they drop them, nor have the pocketknife in their pocket pull their pants down to the sidewalk (and then stick!)
I hope this is enough explanation as to why powerful magnetic fields in sidewalks is a bad idea.IIRC, Virginia ALREADY has laws against brining pronographic materials across state lines. I wish I could find the law, but it's an old one that was never enforced in the first place. Most likly the law was passed so some politicion could claim he was fighting porno.
In reality, one of the selling points of CDRWs is that they can be played on almost any regular CD-ROM (although some cheap players certainly have problems reading CDRWs). At this point, these CDs seem to be in a race with DVDRWs (which will have more density than even 3xCDRWs). Especially damming for this technology is that you will need a special player (the burner) to read the discs one you make them.
Frankly, the smantic + markup concept gets a lot of lip service from all corners of the world, but in practice I have yet to see a system that is both "correct" and actually used in the correct way.
HTML was designed from day 1 just as you described, and what do we see? People spending days and days writing convoluted code to get the formatting "just right."[1] This is especially true when you are presenting something with no content[2]. Too many people are control freaks as well, there is no way they are ever going to let someone else see the presentation when they could have just any font, point size, or color selected (just to name a few). These people shutter at the idea of a webbrowser without the FONT tag, or those people who click "override document fonts". There is no way they are going to let their formatting be dictated by the reader!
Maybe it's a good thing to make these people let go of their control issues, but in reality anything that tries is either not going to catch on, or is going to be mutilated into something else (HTML).
[1] At least on Windows with IE
[2] 75% of all web pages, and 100% of all flash presentations
Oh No! You've just proved that late night alien visitors are responsible for all of those Outlook Trojans! We're all doomed! AaaAAaaGgggGGhhHHHHhh!11!!!1!
Yes, we heard that the first time. :P
AARGH this site is driving me nuts! Why did it feel the need to open a new window on the site? What's with all of this Javascript formatting? Why won't it just bring me to the stupid flash site so I can download the swf and play it, since the integration with the browser is broken on my machine? In the end, despite reading though the source on almost every page to get to the next page, I never did see any of these digital art exitbits.
Personaly I like to think that I'm making my country a better place.
Wait a second, you are talking about the speed of the simulator. That's a lot different than talking about the speed of the actual chip. It's akin to saying the Playstation is slow because Bleem runs slowly on your 486.
Actually, you might be surprised. I was looking for documentation on how to use a specific Win32 COMM module, and TPJ was the only place on the web with useful documentation. I signed up on the spot.
:(
Naturally I get this news shortly afterward.
Hmm, I've never thought of programming as a profession you get into for the women (or men in some cases).
Becoming programming celebrities is a pretty rare event in any case, and there are better roads to take if you want fame.
It would be like getting a government job (as a clerk or something) so you can become president and get all of the women (interns).
Yes, 3com finally understands exactly what's missing with the current PDAs, decent connectivity. Current Palms only have the slow and flaky serial port or the slow and flaky IR port to communicate with. The Serial port requires a cable attached to another device, and the IR port has a range of about 2" and can be tricky to get working in some environtments.
With Bluetooth Palms (and other PDAs) can automatically form piconets (small wireless networks only a few meters across) wherever they go. This is for more than just network games (as the article mentioned) but also for true collaboration in a mobile environment.
In case anyone is wondering, Bluetooth is IEEE 802.15, and can best be summarized as 802.11a and USB rolled into one. Transfer speeds are in the 1-2Mbit range, and the protocol supports a "Service Discovery Protocol" for determing what is available in the local network.
That's a dangerous view. Even if the software companies (if they even exist anymore) don't mind having their old games available on third party websites, the copyright lawyers sure do. One of the things the article mentioned was that many companies aren't even sure who owns the copyrights anymore (and they don't even care enough to search their records to find out), so even if the original author turns a blind eye to the abandonware some other company you never heard of (that bought part of the old software company years ago) can come out of the blue and sue you for $150,000.
Copyright law isn't really setup for the abandonware concept, and they both cause a lot of problems due to this.
Sans serif fonts only
Why? The entire purpose of serif fonts is to make them easier to read by drawing your eye down the line. Personally, I'd much prefer if people left the FONT tag alone. I chose the fonts that were easy for me to read, don't presume I find 6 point Arial easier on the eyes, even if you do. Actually, it got so bad there for awhile that I even clicked on the "override document fonts" checkbox, even though that tends to break those pages that are assume you're browsing with IE at 800x600 under Windows.
Yeah, and while we're at it, lets make the still suits BLACK. In the desert, that'll work real well.
You realize the Fremen generally only go out at night (to conserve water and avoid being spotted), so the black stillsuit provides you a little extra warmth (from reflected energy off of moons and the like), and makes you harder to see (although with the lack of shadows on Arrakis, this is dubious). Also, Dune doesn't appear to be all that hot of planet, since nobody ever seems to break a sweat when out in the sun, not even those sweaty Harkonnens.
Ok, a little observation:
North American Numbering Plan Aministration, or NANPA for short. In Japanese (According to xjdic) NANPA means: (an) (vs) flirt; scam; scope; skirt chaser.
The connotation is of course that the NANPA is a pervert.
Just one more useless fact for the day.
I thought it was interesting how everybody made a big deal about the STORM that was coming. Earlier they made a big deal about how being inside a storm will sandblast you dead in seconds, yet here they are riding on big worms and flying planes through the storm. Then the Emperor makes some comment about how his palace will be destroyed since shields can't stop a STORM. Then the storm stops right as the fremen get within knife-fighting range of the Sardukar, and 5 seconds later it is bright and sunny out and the Harkonnents have scrambled their fighters (which were tied down because of the incoming storm).
I agree with you that the Sardukar seemed to be lacking any tactics whatsoever. "Look a guy with a kinfe is running towards me (with a gun), maybe I'll try running right up to him instead of firing!"
Also, by the end, the Fremen started to use some Sardukar weapons left on the ground. My question is, why didn't they have any weapons from the 100s of patrols they ambushed? Or even from the spice miners (who CERTAINLY wouldn't be unarmed with all of the bandits/fremen/thieves running around trying to get their hands on the incredibly valuble spice they're mining).
Does anybody remember back in the dying days of vinyl when all of the magazines and cereal boxes started shipping with little promotional "records" that were more or less your average 45 printed on a piece of 8 1/2x11 paper (although the paper was coated IIRC). After you went through all the trouble to cut the record out you got a scratchy advertisement for Coke and maybe a song or a story. Well, that's enough nostalga for today, back to techie stuff.
Who were these Sardukar escorting the princess? When I saw them I thought These are the emporors elite troops? They look like they need a nap! When Scifi shows this again, pay particular attention to the leader of the bodyguards when the find the princess hitting on Luke...er Paul. Doesn't his expression look totally vacant, like he's just had his brain removed and he hasn't slept in the past 90 hours?