An actual link to the story about late Gene Kan might have nicer than just mentioning how no one has mentioned it. It took literally five seconds with Google and wasn't even vitrol-powered.
I don't think this is terribly off-topic, as Gnutella is one of the reasons we're at this story, after all.
In all the three pages, it was only mentioned once. Yes, it's old, yes it's dated, but Tangerine Dream was building their own instruments when I was still playing with blocks. They were going strong when people were still trying to figure out what to call their music. Whenever I hear about "electronica" (or the older "ambient" category), I first think of TD.
Sure, this post is buried on page three without the advantage of a naked woman, but at least listen to something from TD. Even if you then scoff and go on to some more modern choices, it's an education to see how this music style evolved.
Quite a good ruse, roping college students in to write piracy software for peanuts.
Consider the number of people who have written one for free. (G'wan, check out Freshmeat.)
Of course, the article also mentions that AudioGalaxy turned into a place for Artists to host their own material. Sure AG also turned into "share anything" system, but the article does not discuss when, how or why this happened. With settlement complete, I'd like to hear if this was a conscientious decision and if so who made it and why.
Even so, the parent post to this reply smacks of soapboxing, to me.
The moral thing to do, of course... ... is to consider the implications behind supporting the RIAA and its treatment of signed artists and its neigh monopolistic practices and the many immoral and deeply questionable things it does. Can you do this then stand up and say, "I'm moral because I do what these people tell me."
Some people consider it moral to go against this idea. So who's the more moral?
The subject line is purposefully alarmist, mostly to make fun of the others who seriously think the subject line is true.
The difference I see between Apple and Microsoft in this respect is fairly simple: Microsoft bought up the competition while Apple is (presumably) buying up resources. You squash competition. You use resources.
If (and only if) Apple turns around and releases crap products in the same fields as the companies they're buying up will I conceed that Apple is using sleazy business tactics. Unfortunately, it's something hard to tell until it's too late.
For now, I applaud Apple's efforts to expanding their presence in their strongest professional market.
Just For The Record, the reason for the ungodly load/save times is that the save system is too complete. (This, to me, is like beer being too free.) Every city/segment that the character enters is then saved, whether or not the character has interacted with a person or object. They're saved with the rest of the area. However, and this is the important part, even if you don't re-enter an area since the last save, it is still re-saved.
This is also why Fallout (and, later, Fallout 2 and Planescape) slows down so much when there are a lot of people and objects in an area: Even if you can't see it, it's still checking the script every "heartbeat", usually every two seconds. (Obviously, this doesn't happen in areas the character isn't in -- we don't all have a new 40 TFlop system.)
As Fallout "re-broke the mold" (Fallout is a wonderful revisioning of the ancient and Mac-Only game "Wasteland" -- goofy and fun), some technical issues is neither surprising nor a reason not to play the game.
The visionaries behind Fallout have formed a new company somewhat-recently. Troika's only released game is Arcanum, a Gaslight Fantasy. Yes, the graphics are lackluster and everyone looks like they're tall and anorexic, but the RPG engine is fun and it's about as well scripted as Fallout. It makes up for it in many ways that there are gobs of side-quests and different stats could give you an entirely different path along the plot-arc and three ways to "win".
I've strayed, but I liked the game. But then, I still like text adventures.
The old adage came to mind, today, when reading through all the Slashdot comments about how the words this man is using are lies, damned lies and misinformation.
"Repeat something enough times and it becomes true."
The RIAA is quite obviously using this tactic. If they repeat how something is "theft" and "copyright infringment", then more and more people (both Joe Public and Mr. Congresman) will think of this not as "something that I don't know very much about" but as "truth". After all, thinks the uneducated public, these smart people who are in charge of this industry is calling it theft then, well, it must be so! (I'm not implying that the public is stupid, just ignorant; there is a difference.)
Nevermind this is complete and utter bunk, but repetition of a lie to make it truth is the Orwellian reality.
I just hope everyone who sees lies where they are don't just come here and preach to the choir.
Um, shouldn't the government be in charge of the.za domain name? I mean who do you think should be? some random person who happens to have control at the moment?
Well, yes. Isn't that the definition of a government?
Okay, of course it's not; you also need to stay in control. So, can the guy stay in control of the.za domain? If so, guess what: He's in charge of it.
I don't mean to imply that South Africa shouldn't have control of their own domain name, but in reality the idea of "posession is 9/10ths of the law" is remarkably universal. I'm sure there are plenty of malicious things that can be done to try to reassert control, but I'm hoping we don't get into a new age of DNS Attacks or the threat of military action against this gentleman. After all, is what he is doing "espoionage" or, worse still, "terrorism"? (If they consider the right to the domain 'sovereign', than it very well could be. I disagree, but I'm not South Africa and couldn't say how they feel about this.)
Of course not. The promises made so far haven't panned out. Expecting promises at this point would be like... expecting promises from a game company. I don't know why I ever got my hopes up about a multi-platform release.
As an aside, all my PC friends are laughing at me. (Well, a few are; I'm not kidding.) When will Mac martyrdom end?
There is still no information on whether or not NWN will be available for Mac OS X or just Mac OS 8/9, or both, or what. In fact, they don't even mention the platform in the press release.
You think they'd know by now, wouldn't you? I get the feeling that it just isn't ready yet.
I can imagine so. Not only because you can probably consider all individual map- and texture-makers working in an "almost open-source" environment already. Sure, there might have been some debate recently over who owns mods created for a specific game, but on the whole game designers seem to encourage this kind of behavior by not restricting mod creation too unreasonably. We can only hope Verant doesn't become a big player in moddable games.
Some might say some open-source games to be fairly pretty already. Admittedly, there aren't many open-source 3-D games out there, but the more people can use a 3-D engine the better they get -- like pretty much anything -- so we have only good things to look forward to.
Well, we also have bad things to look forward to until then, but we've always had to deal with this anyway.
Normally I wouldn't reply to my own posts, but I thought about this some more and thought it was interesting. Though I have all my anti-aliasing turned off, or as much as I could possibly get away with, the nature of the TiBook's screen still displays fonts with a little bit of blur, effectively making even proportional fonts a little anti-aliased.
Does anyone know if the new screen on the 800mhz TiBook is any crisper? I surely don't have any complaints about the older TiBook's display except for when reading text.
I like typing that. "Lookit me, I'm a Macaddict. TiBook, TiBook, TiBook." Thank you.
Ironically, I've been going through a lot of trouble to turn off as much anti-aliasing as possible on my TiBook. It may look nice on a big screen, but I keep having to lean in and read twice on quite a few of the fonts, due to the red-and-blue that anti-aliasing seems to create.
I don't know if this is a problem with me, the screen, or the rendering. The only drawback seems to be that Quartz apps that expect anti-aliasing don't always know when it's turned off and the spacing on proportional fonts sometimes ends up quite strange.
Still, it's nice to see that the tradition of Small, Useful Mac Plugins continues. It's the enthusiasm of programmers that have kept me far from disappointed in the Macintosh.
You'd think so, but, amazement of all amazements, Fox ordered up a new sci-fi series from Joss Whedon (Buffy/Angel/Ripper) called "Firefly". Sure, it looks like it might be Buffy In Space, but as Joss put it (and I wish like hell I could find the quote, so this is a paraphrase), it will be humans doing evil things to humans; no aliens need apply.
YMMV, but I'm looking forward to at least giving it a try, hoping that he has enough clout to keep the fingers of money-hungry network execs from making it the kind of pablum you'd expect from Fox. (Mind you, I won't scream if the show has a little soft-core porn.)
And if it flies, Joss would have his shows on four major TV networks. (Fox, BBC, WB, UPN.) Go rah.
quote: entertainment has, ultimately, zero effect or worth to a population
If this statement wasn't in this ideology, I would happily nod and "Me Too" to this blog. But this statment strikes me as insensitive to the those things that we find entertaining.
Seseme Street: Entertaining, educational, positive effect or worth to a population.
WW2 Propoganda Cartoons: Entertaining, helped remind people of (relatively positive) civic duties, positive effect or worth to a population.
The Seven Samurai: Entertaining (to most of us), examines and describes a cultural legend with beautiful filmography, positive effect or worth to a population.
The point being is these things are art and art (like the specific subset of pornography) is a deeply subjective idea.
And whose to say there is no societal value to being able to sit and numb the brain for a while? "Geniuses" like to relax their brains, so why can't everyone else?
I am not making a case for the RIAA or any other heavy-IP control group. But the idea that all entertainment is "superfluous recreation" is decidedly erroneous.
I would like to "Me Too" on the taxpayer comment if it wasn't for the fact that taxpayer money also funds PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as other "positive effect or worth to the population" that we might call entertainment.
If we are to can the RIAA (et al.) from getting any taxpayer money (and we should), it should be for a better reason than "it's just entertainment".
I just have to say that it's enheartening that the idea of critical disappointment in reviews is not some aspect of a cynical new age, but because the human race hase always been cynics. It gives some hope that the world isn't getting crappier, it's just as crappy as it seemed to people in the past.
I also wanted to say that the tone of this review strikes me exactly as describing the plot to (and LucasFilms' hyping of) Episode One. But then, I think I was E.B. White in a past life.
I'm pretty sure he meant "find all trekkies that are not techies" and implied that there aren't any. So his select statement is correct.
Under your table structure, it would look like:
mysql> select * from human where (human.trekkie='YES' and human.techie='NO');
Mind you, I would like to see a non-human techie. I mean, really, a pet that prefers Star Trek to, say, Bengi or Ally McBeal.
No, strike that. I really don't want to meet an animal Trekkie. I mean, it could do real damage demanding I call it a "Treker".
My mother (and doesn't this just tag me as a generational geek) has been a Trekkie since the original series originally aired. (She was also a ballerina and beatnik, two nontechie professions.)
And yet, even to this very day, she has problems programming the VCR or understanding that wacky "folders" concept on computer GUIs.
Star Trek was originally more about social commentary (a brightly coloured version of the Twilight Zone) than about science. I always got the impression that Star Trek was originally sci-fi almost by accident, just to be different for television.
And we all know that without computers we can't teach.
Well, we can't teach computers.
Well, we can't teach everything about computers.
Well, darnit, without all those computers running Windows, what can we do? I mean, only edit text, layout, graphics, videos and sound, expore the universe, work with physics, learn about the periodic table of elements and program. Maybe one or two other things.
But this is "nothing left to work with", so let's nevermind about the whole issue, shall we.
And for us Mac OS/X users, a stripped-down, more *nix-standardized version of the developer's CD would be nice. It was a little frustrating to have to bounce around web sites to see how to make plain ol' "gcc" work.
Slashdot Mirror
An actual link to the story about late Gene Kan might have nicer than just mentioning how no one has mentioned it. It took literally five seconds with Google and wasn't even vitrol-powered.
I don't think this is terribly off-topic, as Gnutella is one of the reasons we're at this story, after all.
In all the three pages, it was only mentioned once. Yes, it's old, yes it's dated, but Tangerine Dream was building their own instruments when I was still playing with blocks. They were going strong when people were still trying to figure out what to call their music. Whenever I hear about "electronica" (or the older "ambient" category), I first think of TD.
Sure, this post is buried on page three without the advantage of a naked woman, but at least listen to something from TD. Even if you then scoff and go on to some more modern choices, it's an education to see how this music style evolved.
Well, and I love 'em. Who can beat that!
Quite a good ruse, roping college students in to write piracy software for peanuts.
... is to consider the implications behind supporting the RIAA and its treatment of signed artists and its neigh monopolistic practices and the many immoral and deeply questionable things it does. Can you do this then stand up and say, "I'm moral because I do what these people tell me."
Consider the number of people who have written one for free. (G'wan, check out Freshmeat.)
Of course, the article also mentions that AudioGalaxy turned into a place for Artists to host their own material. Sure AG also turned into "share anything" system, but the article does not discuss when, how or why this happened. With settlement complete, I'd like to hear if this was a conscientious decision and if so who made it and why.
Even so, the parent post to this reply smacks of soapboxing, to me.
The moral thing to do, of course...
Some people consider it moral to go against this idea. So who's the more moral?
Yeah, and Laurie Anderson sued me over my computer program written in BASIC.
(If you got the Phillip Glass joke, I hope you got this. Take *that*, Bembridge Scholars!)
They'll only have the last move when we stand still.
The subject line is purposefully alarmist, mostly to make fun of the others who seriously think the subject line is true.
The difference I see between Apple and Microsoft in this respect is fairly simple: Microsoft bought up the competition while Apple is (presumably) buying up resources. You squash competition. You use resources.
If (and only if) Apple turns around and releases crap products in the same fields as the companies they're buying up will I conceed that Apple is using sleazy business tactics. Unfortunately, it's something hard to tell until it's too late.
For now, I applaud Apple's efforts to expanding their presence in their strongest professional market.
Just For The Record, the reason for the ungodly load/save times is that the save system is too complete. (This, to me, is like beer being too free.) Every city/segment that the character enters is then saved, whether or not the character has interacted with a person or object. They're saved with the rest of the area. However, and this is the important part, even if you don't re-enter an area since the last save, it is still re-saved.
This is also why Fallout (and, later, Fallout 2 and Planescape) slows down so much when there are a lot of people and objects in an area: Even if you can't see it, it's still checking the script every "heartbeat", usually every two seconds. (Obviously, this doesn't happen in areas the character isn't in -- we don't all have a new 40 TFlop system.)
As Fallout "re-broke the mold" (Fallout is a wonderful revisioning of the ancient and Mac-Only game "Wasteland" -- goofy and fun), some technical issues is neither surprising nor a reason not to play the game.
The visionaries behind Fallout have formed a new company somewhat-recently. Troika's only released game is Arcanum, a Gaslight Fantasy. Yes, the graphics are lackluster and everyone looks like they're tall and anorexic, but the RPG engine is fun and it's about as well scripted as Fallout. It makes up for it in many ways that there are gobs of side-quests and different stats could give you an entirely different path along the plot-arc and three ways to "win".
I've strayed, but I liked the game. But then, I still like text adventures.
The old adage came to mind, today, when reading through all the Slashdot comments about how the words this man is using are lies, damned lies and misinformation.
"Repeat something enough times and it becomes true."
The RIAA is quite obviously using this tactic. If they repeat how something is "theft" and "copyright infringment", then more and more people (both Joe Public and Mr. Congresman) will think of this not as "something that I don't know very much about" but as "truth". After all, thinks the uneducated public, these smart people who are in charge of this industry is calling it theft then, well, it must be so! (I'm not implying that the public is stupid, just ignorant; there is a difference.)
Nevermind this is complete and utter bunk, but repetition of a lie to make it truth is the Orwellian reality.
I just hope everyone who sees lies where they are don't just come here and preach to the choir.
Um, shouldn't the government be in charge of the .za domain name? I mean who do you think should be? some random person who happens to have control at the moment?
.za domain? If so, guess what: He's in charge of it.
Well, yes. Isn't that the definition of a government?
Okay, of course it's not; you also need to stay in control. So, can the guy stay in control of the
I don't mean to imply that South Africa shouldn't have control of their own domain name, but in reality the idea of "posession is 9/10ths of the law" is remarkably universal. I'm sure there are plenty of malicious things that can be done to try to reassert control, but I'm hoping we don't get into a new age of DNS Attacks or the threat of military action against this gentleman. After all, is what he is doing "espoionage" or, worse still, "terrorism"? (If they consider the right to the domain 'sovereign', than it very well could be. I disagree, but I'm not South Africa and couldn't say how they feel about this.)
...but no promises so far.
... expecting promises from a game company. I don't know why I ever got my hopes up about a multi-platform release.
Of course not. The promises made so far haven't panned out. Expecting promises at this point would be like
As an aside, all my PC friends are laughing at me. (Well, a few are; I'm not kidding.) When will Mac martyrdom end?
There is still no information on whether or not NWN will be available for Mac OS X or just Mac OS 8/9, or both, or what. In fact, they don't even mention the platform in the press release.
You think they'd know by now, wouldn't you? I get the feeling that it just isn't ready yet.
I can imagine so. Not only because you can probably consider all individual map- and texture-makers working in an "almost open-source" environment already. Sure, there might have been some debate recently over who owns mods created for a specific game, but on the whole game designers seem to encourage this kind of behavior by not restricting mod creation too unreasonably. We can only hope Verant doesn't become a big player in moddable games.
Some might say some open-source games to be fairly pretty already. Admittedly, there aren't many open-source 3-D games out there, but the more people can use a 3-D engine the better they get -- like pretty much anything -- so we have only good things to look forward to.
Well, we also have bad things to look forward to until then, but we've always had to deal with this anyway.
Normally I wouldn't reply to my own posts, but I thought about this some more and thought it was interesting. Though I have all my anti-aliasing turned off, or as much as I could possibly get away with, the nature of the TiBook's screen still displays fonts with a little bit of blur, effectively making even proportional fonts a little anti-aliased.
Does anyone know if the new screen on the 800mhz TiBook is any crisper? I surely don't have any complaints about the older TiBook's display except for when reading text.
I like typing that. "Lookit me, I'm a Macaddict. TiBook, TiBook, TiBook." Thank you.
Ironically, I've been going through a lot of trouble to turn off as much anti-aliasing as possible on my TiBook. It may look nice on a big screen, but I keep having to lean in and read twice on quite a few of the fonts, due to the red-and-blue that anti-aliasing seems to create.
I don't know if this is a problem with me, the screen, or the rendering. The only drawback seems to be that Quartz apps that expect anti-aliasing don't always know when it's turned off and the spacing on proportional fonts sometimes ends up quite strange.
Still, it's nice to see that the tradition of Small, Useful Mac Plugins continues. It's the enthusiasm of programmers that have kept me far from disappointed in the Macintosh.
You'd think so, but, amazement of all amazements, Fox ordered up a new sci-fi series from Joss Whedon (Buffy/Angel/Ripper) called "Firefly". Sure, it looks like it might be Buffy In Space, but as Joss put it (and I wish like hell I could find the quote, so this is a paraphrase), it will be humans doing evil things to humans; no aliens need apply.
YMMV, but I'm looking forward to at least giving it a try, hoping that he has enough clout to keep the fingers of money-hungry network execs from making it the kind of pablum you'd expect from Fox. (Mind you, I won't scream if the show has a little soft-core porn.)
And if it flies, Joss would have his shows on four major TV networks. (Fox, BBC, WB, UPN.) Go rah.
quote: entertainment has, ultimately, zero effect or worth to a population
If this statement wasn't in this ideology, I would happily nod and "Me Too" to this blog. But this statment strikes me as insensitive to the those things that we find entertaining.
Seseme Street: Entertaining, educational, positive effect or worth to a population.
WW2 Propoganda Cartoons: Entertaining, helped remind people of (relatively positive) civic duties, positive effect or worth to a population.
The Seven Samurai: Entertaining (to most of us), examines and describes a cultural legend with beautiful filmography, positive effect or worth to a population.
The point being is these things are art and art (like the specific subset of pornography) is a deeply subjective idea.
And whose to say there is no societal value to being able to sit and numb the brain for a while? "Geniuses" like to relax their brains, so why can't everyone else?
I am not making a case for the RIAA or any other heavy-IP control group. But the idea that all entertainment is "superfluous recreation" is decidedly erroneous.
I would like to "Me Too" on the taxpayer comment if it wasn't for the fact that taxpayer money also funds PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as other "positive effect or worth to the population" that we might call entertainment.
If we are to can the RIAA (et al.) from getting any taxpayer money (and we should), it should be for a better reason than "it's just entertainment".
I am posting this from a club! And violating the DMCA at the same time! You can too, just ask me how!
Offer void if taken seriously. Mind you, it could be done.)
I just have to say that it's enheartening that the idea of critical disappointment in reviews is not some aspect of a cynical new age, but because the human race hase always been cynics. It gives some hope that the world isn't getting crappier, it's just as crappy as it seemed to people in the past.
I also wanted to say that the tone of this review strikes me exactly as describing the plot to (and LucasFilms' hyping of) Episode One. But then, I think I was E.B. White in a past life.
No, strike that. I really don't want to meet an animal Trekkie. I mean, it could do real damage demanding I call it a "Treker".
My mother (and doesn't this just tag me as a generational geek) has been a Trekkie since the original series originally aired. (She was also a ballerina and beatnik, two nontechie professions.)
And yet, even to this very day, she has problems programming the VCR or understanding that wacky "folders" concept on computer GUIs.
Star Trek was originally more about social commentary (a brightly coloured version of the Twilight Zone) than about science. I always got the impression that Star Trek was originally sci-fi almost by accident, just to be different for television.
And we all know that without computers we can't teach.
Well, we can't teach computers.
Well, we can't teach everything about computers.
Well, darnit, without all those computers running Windows, what can we do? I mean, only edit text, layout, graphics, videos and sound, expore the universe, work with physics, learn about the periodic table of elements and program. Maybe one or two other things.
But this is "nothing left to work with", so let's nevermind about the whole issue, shall we.
Hey, I could get my cyberwear on the cheap, this way. Just walk into a lab and snort the research. Excellent!
Hey, wait, hasn't Transformers been revived so many times that it should be shut down for illegal cloning?
There was Transformers, then the Hypercube, then me in college so I'm not sure what incarnation happened, then Beast Wars.
G.I. Joe ranks second for The Series That Wouldn't Die. And that's not a close second.
And for us Mac OS/X users, a stripped-down, more *nix-standardized version of the developer's CD would be nice. It was a little frustrating to have to bounce around web sites to see how to make plain ol' "gcc" work.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these government officials!
Or, er, something. Maybe it'd be a good way to test some inverse-proportion theories such as "the chain is as strong as weakest link".