He deviates from the topic to carry on for five paragraphs justifying why he pays his workers so little. Posting that on/. is like jumping into a pit of lions covered in Worchestershire sauce - there is no explanation as to why somebody would do this except to elicit hateful responses. I recommend some self-help books on guilt or conseling, because he's clearly consumed with guilt.
Economics is more than just supply and demand. If it were that simple, then there would be no economists, no economics professors, and the only book necessary for an exhaustive understanding of the economy would be The Wealth of Nations. There's another side to business: you have to give in order to get. I've watched more than a few restaurants go under because the owner was an indifferent jerk. No matter how good the food is, if the company's ugly, you'll leave. Likewise, a well-treated worker is more efficient than one who gets treated like shit, because being paid well and being valued by your employer raise your self-esteem.
Why do you think Google is the envy of all of Silicon Valley? In order for Parent to have any semblance of sense, Google's HR policies would not only have to be incorrect, but totally fallacious. Judging by the fact that their stock is 423 bucks right now, there are at least a few people out there who believe Google is doing something right.
Here's how I'd look at the problem. I'm not a developer, but I'm decent with Java, C++, Python, and Perl. If I look at some random Java project, I can pretty much grok what it's saying and make the changes I need. The same is true for many languages I'm not really familiar with, like Lua and php (I've been updating a WoW mod that was dropped by its creator).
Now, mind you I might just be upset because I looked at RoR and didn't instantly understand everything. But I was generally put off by the amount of things that were being invoked as if by magic, and I'm even less of a magician than I am a developer. At least with some Java project I've got all the code in that directory, and I know which parts of the standard API and which 3rd party modules are being imported. I looked at some of the stack traces that I got and I was totally bewildered.
One thing that could alleviate this is good documentation. The majority of RoR docs I've found are written by people who either have no intention to truly impart knowledge or don't have the competence, and are directed at non-programmers. They're consummately infuriating. I would much rather hear the ugly truth (I read Programming Perl and Python in a Nutshell for leisure sometimes) than be treated like a child. This pretty much means I have to read the API specs, which ain't no walk in the park.
What this boils down to is if I were in a management situation, I wouldn't know how to hire or deal with a Ruby dev. First off, I couldn't just get somebody I thought had good character, work ethic, an excellent track record and a portable skill set, I'd have to hire a Ruby on Rails Developer. I mean, there are some times when you really want an expert in the field, but those people are hard to come by. Then if I hired him I'd be like, "Hey John, what's this function over here do?" and he'd be stirring a black pot in a pointy hat while cackling, "Double, double, boil and trouble / Fire burn and cauldron bubble!"
Reforming keyboard design is like trying to reform orthography: noble, logical, and in the words of one of my professors, "Quixotic." QWERTY is at least as stupid and weird in its configuration as words like "through," which has almost twice the letters that it needs, vowels that can have any number of actual sounds (A: ash, calm, able). But as long as we keep writing like this, even though I, a Californian, only understand people in Yorkshire half the time (and that's if they want me to), can read the menus and signs, and I can read texts from 500 years ago even though the language has changed quite a bit. Likewise, I can type on any keyboard without feeling like a boob because it's ABC or Dvorak. Like with Windows and X86, it's all about backwards compatibility and portability.
It's okay, take off your tinfoil hat. The bill didn't say that every signal generated by recording equipment had to embed copy protection, it just said it had to notice if it was there and act accordingly.
I don't disagree that independent movie makers are a thorn in Hollywood's side. Their ability to create increasingly good movies frightens the fuck out of the MPAA, even as your typical Hollywood drivel gets less and less watchable. However, the big studios are not the only business interests in the country - electronics manufacturers and video editing software developers make a killing on people with dreams of producing their own movie. That market is not going away, and everybody from Apple to S--y will make sure of it.
Balderdash. Raising your spirits helps you get well - that's why there's a statistical link between religion (or optimism) and health. In one case (no, I don't have a link to support it), a double-blind study showed a correlation between a negative attitude going into heart surgery and dying in said heart surgery.
There's a difference between charity to save somebody's life - be it giving toys to a kid with cancer so he doesn't die of despair, or giving clean water to somebody in Africa so he doesn't die of dysentery - and charity to finance somebody's continued economic indifference and unwillingness to support themselves. A living person at least has a chance of economic contribution but a dead person has none, unless you're talking soylent green.
I am waiting for the industry to force us all to buy new cd players so they can create some super secure format.
And as long as it has a component audio out, I can rip it.
They have all sorts of plans, the least of which would make even the most level-headed person strap tinfoil onto their head and genitals. However, they've sold us so many damn gadgets that they just can't do it. What they really want is for every single device to have DRM hardcoded in it, so it can pick up watermarks in copyrighted content and blink them out. For example, your camcorder would not work when pointed at the television, or would put a censor box over it.
Of course, it's not going to work any time soon. Even some middle-aged people I know, who are barely computer literate, own digital cameras, digital camcorders, dvd burners, and HDTVs. You tell these people they're going to have to replace all of their I/O devices, and possibly their amplifier, speakers, and cables, and they'll ask, "Oh, is it better," and of course the bottom line will be "No, it's far more sluggish because of all of the decrypting that it needs to do," despite what the sales/marketing slimeballs say, they'll say, "Fuck you, I don't want to spend 20 grand replacing all of my equipment," more than likely. Also, it'll require total industry collusion and a complete exclusion of any pre-East Fork devices.
What strikes me as the most profound absurdity, though, is that the world has fundamentally changed, and they need to create an artificial environment in which their outmoded business model can still function, rather than changing with the times. It's like adding more and more life-support systems to a person who's braindead and rapidly dying - no matter what you do, you can't cheat the inevitable.
And if you're going to just say no to Microsoft, Apple isn't necessarily the way to go. You're still locked into all sorts of proprietary software and apps.
I don't think the problem is really that he recommends Apple, but that he only recommends Apple.
Now, let's be honest here: most people don't give a hoot and a holler about being locked into proprietary formats and applications. I use a lot of FOSS applications on my Powerbook (Emacs, Pan, Xalan, OpenOffice.org) but I don't exactly feel like Adobe has put me in shackles with Photoshop, or that I'm somehow living in a neo-capitalist bloc country because I use iChat. I use what I use because it's good, or, in the case of OOo, because it's free. And I'm not some kind of fanboy. This is my first apple system - I've been using Linux for the last two years, and Wintel ad infinitum before that. I bought it because I wanted a laptop that I could use Unix stuff with and play World of Warcraft on too.
Ultimately, however, we are in concordence - the best way to start out is with Linux. Hell, I bought a whole new hard drive to put Linux on, and these days, that's dirt cheap. When even slightly savvy people think of Linux, they think of command prompts all over the place. They don't think KDE, which these days looks far, far better than Windows in terms of raw visual appeal. They don't think of the sheer number of applications that you get right out of the box with many distros.
Furthermore, a lot of the English were very convinced that God was an Englishman. I mean, Neal Stephenson didn't have Waterhouse being prepared from birth to greet Jesus when he came to England in the year 1666 in Quicksilver for nothing. Say what you want, but he does his research. My favorite scholar on the subject (okay, my English prof, but whatever) said many times that it was the common assumption that 1) The rest of Europe were being subverted by the Antichrist (or the Pope as he is officiallly called), 2) England was the only remaining bastion of true holiness, and 3) The Apocalypse was imminent, therefore, God was English because he intended for the English alone to be saved all along. Then, the most zealous of the English believed that it was the work of the Antichrist which overthrew their perfect, Godly state under Cromwell, and that sense of despair created both the mass exodus to New England (as in, The Shiny England with which we will replace the Old, Corrupt England) and Paradise Lost.
No. Fundies and evangelicals are not the majority. I don't have the stats right in front of me, so I'll just pull some out of my ass: estimates range from 10% at the low end to 30% at the high end, depending on how you ask the question. My sources are a quick google search and what I remember from my American Religions class at Berkeley.
Now, what fundamentalists are is loud, self-righteous and well-placed. They believe that the bible is inerrant, so if they follow it to the letter they are also without error, and that their thoughts and actions are inspired and guided by God almight, halleluja, etc. A lot of them also believe that God and Jesus are Americans (as it is our Promised Land), and that their native tongue is English. However, this is something that goes back to the Brits, and is not really their fault. Most Americans, by contrast, are sorta quiet and filled with doubt, as shown by voter turnout and the amount of therapy we need.
All nerds who live in their parents basements who have hot girlfriends disagree with you!
Yeup. I'm six months out of college, and I just finished fixing up the basement with my a fresh coat of floor paint, light fixtures, conduit, and some calking. All it need is a desk, a chair and an ethernet hub. No rent and free food are pretty awesome, especially when you have an awesome job.
And my girlfriend is pretty hot, but the coolest part is that she plays World of Warcraft.
I've got a lot of friends who still live with their parents, and I'd consider myself one of the most functional of all my friends, whether they've left the nest or not.
Monday: Band shirt, jeans, sneakers.
Tuesday: Band shirt, jeans, combat boots.
Wednesday: Band shirt, jeans, birkenstocks.
Thursday: College shirt, jeans, combat boots.
Friday: Same as Thursday, I don't care anymore.
algorithmically generated randomality sufficient to provide "realistic" variation across all graphical elements
Yeah, I see what you mean now. World of Warcraft DOES have only like 5 inns - 2 human ones (which are, with a little change in lighting, undead) a Dwarf inn, an Orc inn, and a Night Elf inn. Would it be so hard to at least make the woodgrain algorithmically generated? How about skin texture and blemishes (sort of akin to 'virtual reality will never look real until they figure out how to put dirt in there').
It really surprises me that they can't provide more variation. I'm going to go off on a slightly different point. My uncle, who's a QA engineer by trade, made this pseudo-random level generator for Doom in his spare time. It's really good, really fast, and even smart enough to make sure that the total amount of weapons and ammunition in the level is sufficient to defeat its enemies, and that all areas are traversible. It's even smart enough to put shotgun guys in your blind spot so you get blasted as soon as you walk through a doorway. Now, he's a bona fide genius if you ask me, but a college graduate he ain't. I'm really shocked that this isn't a commonplace thing in games aside from Daggerfall and Diablo. You wouldn't even have to include the random generator in the game - though that would be very cool - you could just use it as a development tool.
Furthermore, I think it'd be more realisitic than it sounds on the surface. Most houses in a given area were probably built at about the same time. Usually, they were made by a small set of contractors, according to a limited number of designs, and given small personal touches to set them apart from one another. Take a walk down almost any street of San Francisco and you'll see it in the Victorians. It doesn't look artificial, it looks natural. We're used to seeing it. And honestly, I think a computer could generate 500 arbitrary generic buildings from templates better than I could. I'd get bored really quick.
I think that kind of 'realism' is pretty doable. I think realistic landscapes would be a bit harder, though.
And yeah, like the other respondant said, it's the flicker/interlacing that makes me hate SD. I stare at a monitor all day long, I don't need any more eye strain than I get by necessity. DVDs on computers is fine. I'm actually thinking of getting a tv tuner card or box.
Considering that SDTV still manages to provide an image that looks much more realistic than any game on a PC running at 1700x1200 (consider a well mastered DVD), I think there's a long way we could go yet with SD games. HDTV on games is like polishing a turd (if you'll excuse the crass analogy). It looks like a prettier turd, but it's still a turd.
While I don't dispute the validity of your statement, I think it's armchair quarterbacking and ignores the level of craft involved in art.
FYI: Drawing is a very labor-intensive activity. I once worked with a writer who did nothing but bitch at me, saying I wasn't drawing fast enough. This was, I think on the erroneous assumption that something should take about the same amount of time to draw as to write. Wrong. That's like saying that the number of man-hours it took to write the Blade Runner screenplay are equivalent to the number of man-hours that went into making the movie.
In order to make that turd look absolutely realistic (and I'd say we have the technology to do this), you have to define every contour and lump, every anus-induced ripple, every texture, and even the little pool of liquid at the base. That takes a lot of work. Look at the amount of labor that went into Doom versus Grand Theft Auto. Before, you just had to put some brown pixels down. Now the production cost of video games has increased exponentially. If we had people animating feces like you suggest, they would increase exponentially again, EA would be even more evil than it is now, and games would probably cost $120 a pop.
By contrast, gains made by increasing the resolution act as scalars. All they have to do is upgrade the hardware and the engine and the whole game is made new. While that is itself a labor-intensive activity, it works for an arbitrary number of turds.
Going to HD rather than staying SD with more processing power only hurts the immersion and simulation of reality.
And staying in SD hurts my eyes.
It is also erroneous to suggest that the purpose of art is to simulate reality. It's not. That's this weird idea that Europeans got in their heads in the Renaissance and Western culture has yet to properly shake it off. If you look at a lot of medieval art, you get the idea that these people could certainly sculpt realistically, they just didn't want to. There was no value in it. It took until the late 19th century in France for Europeans to figure out, again, that art just had to look good. Furthermore, most cultures in the world have long, complicated artistic traditions that bear no resemblance to reality. Japan, whose art was one of the biggest influences on the Post-Impressionists, also got copies of Western paintings in the trade routes, and they were so alien that people actually published pamphlets telling you how to look at them and how to display them. Realism is not a universal virtue in art.
Likewise, I'll take my cartoonish World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy over some ultra-realistic NFL game any day. I've already GOT the NFL on my television, so I have no desire to buy some shoddy ripoff made by the most evil game company in the world. I don't live in a colorful fantasy world of spikey hair and orcs.
If the switch to Intel is going to allow Apple to make their laptops thinner, lighter, more power-efficient, and more powerful, wouldn't it be a mistake to upgrade iBooks without upgrading PowerBooks?
Apple has said that the pro lines are going to be updated later on. I'm assuming that this means iBook -> Mini -> iMac -> PowerBook -> PowerMac.
Now, this isn't because PowerBook users aren't thirsting for an upgrade anytime soon. Gahh, you have no idea! But, the people in the iBook/Mini/iMac market don't use that many, applications aside from the ones that will work out-of-box on the Mactels. They're college students and home users. They need to burn CDs, listen to music, make presentations and papers, and organize photos.
People who use the professional equipment aren't going to buy a Mactel until all of the programs they need are ported. For me, this means Photoshop, Illustrator, Carbon Emacs and World of Warcraft. A previous poster said Adobe's looking at late 06 or early 07. Carbon Emacs will probably not be hard to port. I don't know what Blizzard's timetable is.
I know it's a questionable decision, but I'm probably going to purchase one of the current PowerMacs. It's a choice between getting something sooner that will be instantly obsolete and getting something a year from now that has dodgy software support.
It may indeed be difficult to program for. The whole triple-core PPC thing is sorta 'sexy' console design over practical console design. After all, we know that Apple is jumping ship, and from Carmack's responses we know that there is a real performance gap between PPC and x86. Hell, screw that line of thought. Are you seriously telling me that the PPC is an ideal gaming platform, when I'm sitting in front of a G4 Powerbook right now?
Besides, can you even imagine writing game code that saturates 3 processing cores? It's REALLY hard. Most games only have enough to offload some of the easy, non-graphical stuff to a second processor, and only now is Epic working on a 3d engine that can take advantage of multiple processors.
Yeah, I have no doubt that it will eventually see some great games that saturate all of those cores. But I think we shouldn't be so quick to get down on the developers, when in fact MS may have made a number of decisions based on how cheaply they could get snake oil from IBM, rather than what would provide developers with the best tools to succeed in making good games.
Actually, hasn't it been traditional (at least recently) for stable branches to be even versions (2.2, 2.4, 2.6) and dev branches to be odd? Then I remember some story about breaking that tradition by putting experimental code right into the 2.6 branch. Given those two conditions, the next logical release WOULD be 2.8.
While I usually go easy on people for making typographical errors like this, and dislike nit-picking over such things by an online community of hecklers, it's pretty funny.
FYI, to those who haven't scanned the pdf, they also request:
"All documents concerning IBM's contributions to" ten specific Linux projects, including "development work," and "all documents concerning contributions to Linux" through several additional specific Linux projects.
So it doesn't seem to indicate that the memo is null and void, or that the lawyers don't know anything about technology, just that the lawyers are being very hasty and don't check their facts. Of course, SCO has not demonstrated much regard for "facts" at all in this case.
I have been working with PCs for 17 years and I have never had to deal with a virus.
Clearly you've never been connected to a college lan. I've only been working with PCs since I was 8, so that gives me a piddly 14 years of user experience. I had a really nasty worm/rootkit problem when I was in the dorms, and it caused me no end of problems. Since they I connect from behind a NAT most of the time.
Your argument is a fallacy. It's a bit like saying, "I've been smoking for 50 years, and I've never gotten cancer," or perhaps "I've had sex with at least 100 Southeast-Asian prostitutes, and I don't have HIV"." Just because nothing bad has happened to you does not mean you haven't been engaging in risky behavior.
...those switching are lazy, incompetent and conformist, a sad blend of handicapped common sense, self-loathing and kinked vision of what having a computer means...
Lazy: Making 40k straight out of college with an English degree. Clearly I must be doing something.
Incompetent: See above. I think landing the job had something to do with saving an entire man-month of tedious labor in my campus job with a problem that an entire phalanx of programmers in another depart said couldn't be done.
Conformist: I'm a goth. It's a clique that's self-consciously anti-conformist. Beat that, rebel!
Self-loathing: Just had my engagement party yesterday, I'm actually feeling pretty good about myself.
Kinked: Well, yeah, I am kinda kinky, but why is that your business
What a computer means:
You know, I loved Linux to death when I was in college and I could devote the time and resources to debugging obscure problems. However, after a while, concluding that I was pretty much the grand pimp of the universe and had learned everything I needed to about *NIX, I decided that cuddling with my fiancée was more appealing than hunting down weird shard library locking problems in Gentoo, and I got a Powerbook. I've never been happier, and plus, I spend most of my time in Emacs and Terminal. My boss, who's a doctor of physics, a former assembly hacker, and the biggest Linux nerd I know, is very jealous. I've decided that debugging is not what a computer means. I've decided it means actually using the damn computer.
These types of groups only work when all of their members are out there demonstrating and mad as hell. If, for example, NRA members looked at a bill in the Senate which proposes to take away people's antitank RPGs and VX nerve gas and thought "Well, that isn't so bad. I don't use Bouncing Betty very much" the organization simply wouldn't have the same "pop." To them, anything whatsoever that infringes upon their pet issue is the end of the world. I'll bet there were a significant number of people who thought that the Brady Bill was an irrefutable sign of the Rapture, and that soon, Jesus would come down from heaven to take them away, golden harp and shotgun in hand.
Same thing with radical nutjob environmentalists (those environmentalists who ARE radical nutjobs, not to say that all environmentalists are necessarily). They won't settle for anything less than a malthusian population crash and a return to hunter-gatherer societies.
Bollocks, I typed too fast again. I just wanted to catch it before some slashturd started cat-calling "NEENER NEENER ENGLISH GEEK! You made a grammar mistake!"
Well, I'm pretty sure he's actually right there. Properly speaking, administrate is an erroneous back-formation. However, it's used so often that it's gaining acceptance.
The only difference is that words like "multiplicate" are totally hilarious, whereas most people think of administrate as a an accepted part of the language. I wouldn't get out my red pen if I saw administrate, personally, though I to avoid using it in official materials.
Screw that. Let's just abandon politics now and create a metal god for ourselves: a giant, impersonal, intelligent supercomputer that knows all and sees all. I don't care if it's called Helios, Multivac, Amalgamus, Skynet, VIKI, Femputer, The Borg Queen, Imperious Leader, or Deep Thought, just so long as it attaches a happy chip to my brain stem, a suicide device to my heart, and it's running Linux. The Matrix wouldn't be so bad either. I look positively dashing in both shiny trenchcoats and business suits.
1) The matinees are $7.00 - $7.50 where I live. Gurrah.
2) After having seen Corpse Bride, Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Hitchhiker's Guide and Doom, there simply isn't anything left this year that looks even remotely interesting to me, aside from Harry Potter 4. The 2 cgi offerings that are in previews, both with furry animals, look like a perfect example of group writing: no respect for storytelling or uniting vision, very fast paced, very, very jokey. Couple blaxploitation gangster movies coming out, *yawn*, and a few war movies. Come on, Hollywood: there must be a few writers left in the United States, penning screenplays in dirty apartments, brimming with creativity and capable of writing an actual story instead of an episodic series of comedic outtakes. Oh wait, creativity is illegal in the united states now.
Or, put a little bit differently, the symptoms are software patents, plot patents, and what I'm planning, the "antics patent, which allows me to patent grating cheddar cheese over my head while strutting around in stripper heels. The disease, the root of the problem, lies in the laws governing the patents. And the root of that is the fact that money can be made by big corporations by litigating smaller companies to death on shaky grounds: radix malorum est cupiditas.
Slashdot Mirror
He deviates from the topic to carry on for five paragraphs justifying why he pays his workers so little. Posting that on /. is like jumping into a pit of lions covered in Worchestershire sauce - there is no explanation as to why somebody would do this except to elicit hateful responses. I recommend some self-help books on guilt or conseling, because he's clearly consumed with guilt.
Economics is more than just supply and demand. If it were that simple, then there would be no economists, no economics professors, and the only book necessary for an exhaustive understanding of the economy would be The Wealth of Nations. There's another side to business: you have to give in order to get. I've watched more than a few restaurants go under because the owner was an indifferent jerk. No matter how good the food is, if the company's ugly, you'll leave. Likewise, a well-treated worker is more efficient than one who gets treated like shit, because being paid well and being valued by your employer raise your self-esteem.
Why do you think Google is the envy of all of Silicon Valley? In order for Parent to have any semblance of sense, Google's HR policies would not only have to be incorrect, but totally fallacious. Judging by the fact that their stock is 423 bucks right now, there are at least a few people out there who believe Google is doing something right.
Best thing since Tank Girl.
Here's how I'd look at the problem. I'm not a developer, but I'm decent with Java, C++, Python, and Perl. If I look at some random Java project, I can pretty much grok what it's saying and make the changes I need. The same is true for many languages I'm not really familiar with, like Lua and php (I've been updating a WoW mod that was dropped by its creator).
Now, mind you I might just be upset because I looked at RoR and didn't instantly understand everything. But I was generally put off by the amount of things that were being invoked as if by magic, and I'm even less of a magician than I am a developer. At least with some Java project I've got all the code in that directory, and I know which parts of the standard API and which 3rd party modules are being imported. I looked at some of the stack traces that I got and I was totally bewildered.
One thing that could alleviate this is good documentation. The majority of RoR docs I've found are written by people who either have no intention to truly impart knowledge or don't have the competence, and are directed at non-programmers. They're consummately infuriating. I would much rather hear the ugly truth (I read Programming Perl and Python in a Nutshell for leisure sometimes) than be treated like a child. This pretty much means I have to read the API specs, which ain't no walk in the park.
What this boils down to is if I were in a management situation, I wouldn't know how to hire or deal with a Ruby dev. First off, I couldn't just get somebody I thought had good character, work ethic, an excellent track record and a portable skill set, I'd have to hire a Ruby on Rails Developer. I mean, there are some times when you really want an expert in the field, but those people are hard to come by. Then if I hired him I'd be like, "Hey John, what's this function over here do?" and he'd be stirring a black pot in a pointy hat while cackling, "Double, double, boil and trouble / Fire burn and cauldron bubble!"
Reforming keyboard design is like trying to reform orthography: noble, logical, and in the words of one of my professors, "Quixotic." QWERTY is at least as stupid and weird in its configuration as words like "through," which has almost twice the letters that it needs, vowels that can have any number of actual sounds (A: ash, calm, able). But as long as we keep writing like this, even though I, a Californian, only understand people in Yorkshire half the time (and that's if they want me to), can read the menus and signs, and I can read texts from 500 years ago even though the language has changed quite a bit. Likewise, I can type on any keyboard without feeling like a boob because it's ABC or Dvorak. Like with Windows and X86, it's all about backwards compatibility and portability.
It's okay, take off your tinfoil hat. The bill didn't say that every signal generated by recording equipment had to embed copy protection, it just said it had to notice if it was there and act accordingly.
I don't disagree that independent movie makers are a thorn in Hollywood's side. Their ability to create increasingly good movies frightens the fuck out of the MPAA, even as your typical Hollywood drivel gets less and less watchable. However, the big studios are not the only business interests in the country - electronics manufacturers and video editing software developers make a killing on people with dreams of producing their own movie. That market is not going away, and everybody from Apple to S--y will make sure of it.
Balderdash. Raising your spirits helps you get well - that's why there's a statistical link between religion (or optimism) and health. In one case (no, I don't have a link to support it), a double-blind study showed a correlation between a negative attitude going into heart surgery and dying in said heart surgery.
There's a difference between charity to save somebody's life - be it giving toys to a kid with cancer so he doesn't die of despair, or giving clean water to somebody in Africa so he doesn't die of dysentery - and charity to finance somebody's continued economic indifference and unwillingness to support themselves. A living person at least has a chance of economic contribution but a dead person has none, unless you're talking soylent green.
And as long as it has a component audio out, I can rip it.
They have all sorts of plans, the least of which would make even the most level-headed person strap tinfoil onto their head and genitals. However, they've sold us so many damn gadgets that they just can't do it. What they really want is for every single device to have DRM hardcoded in it, so it can pick up watermarks in copyrighted content and blink them out. For example, your camcorder would not work when pointed at the television, or would put a censor box over it.
Of course, it's not going to work any time soon. Even some middle-aged people I know, who are barely computer literate, own digital cameras, digital camcorders, dvd burners, and HDTVs. You tell these people they're going to have to replace all of their I/O devices, and possibly their amplifier, speakers, and cables, and they'll ask, "Oh, is it better," and of course the bottom line will be "No, it's far more sluggish because of all of the decrypting that it needs to do," despite what the sales/marketing slimeballs say, they'll say, "Fuck you, I don't want to spend 20 grand replacing all of my equipment," more than likely. Also, it'll require total industry collusion and a complete exclusion of any pre-East Fork devices.
What strikes me as the most profound absurdity, though, is that the world has fundamentally changed, and they need to create an artificial environment in which their outmoded business model can still function, rather than changing with the times. It's like adding more and more life-support systems to a person who's braindead and rapidly dying - no matter what you do, you can't cheat the inevitable.
I don't think the problem is really that he recommends Apple, but that he only recommends Apple.
Now, let's be honest here: most people don't give a hoot and a holler about being locked into proprietary formats and applications. I use a lot of FOSS applications on my Powerbook (Emacs, Pan, Xalan, OpenOffice.org) but I don't exactly feel like Adobe has put me in shackles with Photoshop, or that I'm somehow living in a neo-capitalist bloc country because I use iChat. I use what I use because it's good, or, in the case of OOo, because it's free. And I'm not some kind of fanboy. This is my first apple system - I've been using Linux for the last two years, and Wintel ad infinitum before that. I bought it because I wanted a laptop that I could use Unix stuff with and play World of Warcraft on too.
Ultimately, however, we are in concordence - the best way to start out is with Linux. Hell, I bought a whole new hard drive to put Linux on, and these days, that's dirt cheap. When even slightly savvy people think of Linux, they think of command prompts all over the place. They don't think KDE, which these days looks far, far better than Windows in terms of raw visual appeal. They don't think of the sheer number of applications that you get right out of the box with many distros.
Furthermore, a lot of the English were very convinced that God was an Englishman. I mean, Neal Stephenson didn't have Waterhouse being prepared from birth to greet Jesus when he came to England in the year 1666 in Quicksilver for nothing. Say what you want, but he does his research. My favorite scholar on the subject (okay, my English prof, but whatever) said many times that it was the common assumption that 1) The rest of Europe were being subverted by the Antichrist (or the Pope as he is officiallly called), 2) England was the only remaining bastion of true holiness, and 3) The Apocalypse was imminent, therefore, God was English because he intended for the English alone to be saved all along. Then, the most zealous of the English believed that it was the work of the Antichrist which overthrew their perfect, Godly state under Cromwell, and that sense of despair created both the mass exodus to New England (as in, The Shiny England with which we will replace the Old, Corrupt England) and Paradise Lost.
No. Fundies and evangelicals are not the majority. I don't have the stats right in front of me, so I'll just pull some out of my ass: estimates range from 10% at the low end to 30% at the high end, depending on how you ask the question. My sources are a quick google search and what I remember from my American Religions class at Berkeley.
Now, what fundamentalists are is loud, self-righteous and well-placed. They believe that the bible is inerrant, so if they follow it to the letter they are also without error, and that their thoughts and actions are inspired and guided by God almight, halleluja, etc. A lot of them also believe that God and Jesus are Americans (as it is our Promised Land), and that their native tongue is English. However, this is something that goes back to the Brits, and is not really their fault. Most Americans, by contrast, are sorta quiet and filled with doubt, as shown by voter turnout and the amount of therapy we need.
Yeup. I'm six months out of college, and I just finished fixing up the basement with my a fresh coat of floor paint, light fixtures, conduit, and some calking. All it need is a desk, a chair and an ethernet hub. No rent and free food are pretty awesome, especially when you have an awesome job.
And my girlfriend is pretty hot, but the coolest part is that she plays World of Warcraft.
I've got a lot of friends who still live with their parents, and I'd consider myself one of the most functional of all my friends, whether they've left the nest or not.
Monday: Band shirt, jeans, sneakers. Tuesday: Band shirt, jeans, combat boots. Wednesday: Band shirt, jeans, birkenstocks. Thursday: College shirt, jeans, combat boots. Friday: Same as Thursday, I don't care anymore.
Yeah, I see what you mean now. World of Warcraft DOES have only like 5 inns - 2 human ones (which are, with a little change in lighting, undead) a Dwarf inn, an Orc inn, and a Night Elf inn. Would it be so hard to at least make the woodgrain algorithmically generated? How about skin texture and blemishes (sort of akin to 'virtual reality will never look real until they figure out how to put dirt in there').
It really surprises me that they can't provide more variation. I'm going to go off on a slightly different point. My uncle, who's a QA engineer by trade, made this pseudo-random level generator for Doom in his spare time. It's really good, really fast, and even smart enough to make sure that the total amount of weapons and ammunition in the level is sufficient to defeat its enemies, and that all areas are traversible. It's even smart enough to put shotgun guys in your blind spot so you get blasted as soon as you walk through a doorway. Now, he's a bona fide genius if you ask me, but a college graduate he ain't. I'm really shocked that this isn't a commonplace thing in games aside from Daggerfall and Diablo. You wouldn't even have to include the random generator in the game - though that would be very cool - you could just use it as a development tool.
Furthermore, I think it'd be more realisitic than it sounds on the surface. Most houses in a given area were probably built at about the same time. Usually, they were made by a small set of contractors, according to a limited number of designs, and given small personal touches to set them apart from one another. Take a walk down almost any street of San Francisco and you'll see it in the Victorians. It doesn't look artificial, it looks natural. We're used to seeing it. And honestly, I think a computer could generate 500 arbitrary generic buildings from templates better than I could. I'd get bored really quick.
I think that kind of 'realism' is pretty doable. I think realistic landscapes would be a bit harder, though.
And yeah, like the other respondant said, it's the flicker/interlacing that makes me hate SD. I stare at a monitor all day long, I don't need any more eye strain than I get by necessity. DVDs on computers is fine. I'm actually thinking of getting a tv tuner card or box.
While I don't dispute the validity of your statement, I think it's armchair quarterbacking and ignores the level of craft involved in art.
FYI: Drawing is a very labor-intensive activity. I once worked with a writer who did nothing but bitch at me, saying I wasn't drawing fast enough. This was, I think on the erroneous assumption that something should take about the same amount of time to draw as to write. Wrong. That's like saying that the number of man-hours it took to write the Blade Runner screenplay are equivalent to the number of man-hours that went into making the movie.
In order to make that turd look absolutely realistic (and I'd say we have the technology to do this), you have to define every contour and lump, every anus-induced ripple, every texture, and even the little pool of liquid at the base. That takes a lot of work. Look at the amount of labor that went into Doom versus Grand Theft Auto. Before, you just had to put some brown pixels down. Now the production cost of video games has increased exponentially. If we had people animating feces like you suggest, they would increase exponentially again, EA would be even more evil than it is now, and games would probably cost $120 a pop.
By contrast, gains made by increasing the resolution act as scalars. All they have to do is upgrade the hardware and the engine and the whole game is made new. While that is itself a labor-intensive activity, it works for an arbitrary number of turds.
And staying in SD hurts my eyes.
It is also erroneous to suggest that the purpose of art is to simulate reality. It's not. That's this weird idea that Europeans got in their heads in the Renaissance and Western culture has yet to properly shake it off. If you look at a lot of medieval art, you get the idea that these people could certainly sculpt realistically, they just didn't want to. There was no value in it. It took until the late 19th century in France for Europeans to figure out, again, that art just had to look good. Furthermore, most cultures in the world have long, complicated artistic traditions that bear no resemblance to reality. Japan, whose art was one of the biggest influences on the Post-Impressionists, also got copies of Western paintings in the trade routes, and they were so alien that people actually published pamphlets telling you how to look at them and how to display them. Realism is not a universal virtue in art.
Likewise, I'll take my cartoonish World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy over some ultra-realistic NFL game any day. I've already GOT the NFL on my television, so I have no desire to buy some shoddy ripoff made by the most evil game company in the world. I don't live in a colorful fantasy world of spikey hair and orcs.
Apple has said that the pro lines are going to be updated later on. I'm assuming that this means iBook -> Mini -> iMac -> PowerBook -> PowerMac.
Now, this isn't because PowerBook users aren't thirsting for an upgrade anytime soon. Gahh, you have no idea! But, the people in the iBook/Mini/iMac market don't use that many, applications aside from the ones that will work out-of-box on the Mactels. They're college students and home users. They need to burn CDs, listen to music, make presentations and papers, and organize photos.
People who use the professional equipment aren't going to buy a Mactel until all of the programs they need are ported. For me, this means Photoshop, Illustrator, Carbon Emacs and World of Warcraft. A previous poster said Adobe's looking at late 06 or early 07. Carbon Emacs will probably not be hard to port. I don't know what Blizzard's timetable is.
I know it's a questionable decision, but I'm probably going to purchase one of the current PowerMacs. It's a choice between getting something sooner that will be instantly obsolete and getting something a year from now that has dodgy software support.
It may indeed be difficult to program for. The whole triple-core PPC thing is sorta 'sexy' console design over practical console design. After all, we know that Apple is jumping ship, and from Carmack's responses we know that there is a real performance gap between PPC and x86. Hell, screw that line of thought. Are you seriously telling me that the PPC is an ideal gaming platform, when I'm sitting in front of a G4 Powerbook right now?
Besides, can you even imagine writing game code that saturates 3 processing cores? It's REALLY hard. Most games only have enough to offload some of the easy, non-graphical stuff to a second processor, and only now is Epic working on a 3d engine that can take advantage of multiple processors.
Yeah, I have no doubt that it will eventually see some great games that saturate all of those cores. But I think we shouldn't be so quick to get down on the developers, when in fact MS may have made a number of decisions based on how cheaply they could get snake oil from IBM, rather than what would provide developers with the best tools to succeed in making good games.
Actually, hasn't it been traditional (at least recently) for stable branches to be even versions (2.2, 2.4, 2.6) and dev branches to be odd? Then I remember some story about breaking that tradition by putting experimental code right into the 2.6 branch. Given those two conditions, the next logical release WOULD be 2.8.
While I usually go easy on people for making typographical errors like this, and dislike nit-picking over such things by an online community of hecklers, it's pretty funny.
FYI, to those who haven't scanned the pdf, they also request:
So it doesn't seem to indicate that the memo is null and void, or that the lawyers don't know anything about technology, just that the lawyers are being very hasty and don't check their facts. Of course, SCO has not demonstrated much regard for "facts" at all in this case.
Clearly you've never been connected to a college lan. I've only been working with PCs since I was 8, so that gives me a piddly 14 years of user experience. I had a really nasty worm/rootkit problem when I was in the dorms, and it caused me no end of problems. Since they I connect from behind a NAT most of the time.
Your argument is a fallacy. It's a bit like saying, "I've been smoking for 50 years, and I've never gotten cancer," or perhaps "I've had sex with at least 100 Southeast-Asian prostitutes, and I don't have HIV"." Just because nothing bad has happened to you does not mean you haven't been engaging in risky behavior.
You know, I loved Linux to death when I was in college and I could devote the time and resources to debugging obscure problems. However, after a while, concluding that I was pretty much the grand pimp of the universe and had learned everything I needed to about *NIX, I decided that cuddling with my fiancée was more appealing than hunting down weird shard library locking problems in Gentoo, and I got a Powerbook. I've never been happier, and plus, I spend most of my time in Emacs and Terminal. My boss, who's a doctor of physics, a former assembly hacker, and the biggest Linux nerd I know, is very jealous. I've decided that debugging is not what a computer means. I've decided it means actually using the damn computer.
These types of groups only work when all of their members are out there demonstrating and mad as hell. If, for example, NRA members looked at a bill in the Senate which proposes to take away people's antitank RPGs and VX nerve gas and thought "Well, that isn't so bad. I don't use Bouncing Betty very much" the organization simply wouldn't have the same "pop." To them, anything whatsoever that infringes upon their pet issue is the end of the world. I'll bet there were a significant number of people who thought that the Brady Bill was an irrefutable sign of the Rapture, and that soon, Jesus would come down from heaven to take them away, golden harp and shotgun in hand.
Same thing with radical nutjob environmentalists (those environmentalists who ARE radical nutjobs, not to say that all environmentalists are necessarily). They won't settle for anything less than a malthusian population crash and a return to hunter-gatherer societies.
Bollocks, I typed too fast again. I just wanted to catch it before some slashturd started cat-calling "NEENER NEENER ENGLISH GEEK! You made a grammar mistake!"
Well, I'm pretty sure he's actually right there. Properly speaking, administrate is an erroneous back-formation. However, it's used so often that it's gaining acceptance.
See here:
noun : verb
calucation : calculate
articulation : articulate
demonstration : demonstrate
even the hideous
dissertation:dissertate
is technically correct.
However, this stuff isn't:
administration : administrate - wrong, administer
amplification : amplificate - wrong, amplify
multiplication : multiplicate - wrong, multiply
indemnification : indemnificate - wrong, indemnify
The only difference is that words like "multiplicate" are totally hilarious, whereas most people think of administrate as a an accepted part of the language. I wouldn't get out my red pen if I saw administrate, personally, though I to avoid using it in official materials.
Screw that. Let's just abandon politics now and create a metal god for ourselves: a giant, impersonal, intelligent supercomputer that knows all and sees all. I don't care if it's called Helios, Multivac, Amalgamus, Skynet, VIKI, Femputer, The Borg Queen, Imperious Leader, or Deep Thought, just so long as it attaches a happy chip to my brain stem, a suicide device to my heart, and it's running Linux. The Matrix wouldn't be so bad either. I look positively dashing in both shiny trenchcoats and business suits.
1) The matinees are $7.00 - $7.50 where I live. Gurrah.
2) After having seen Corpse Bride, Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Hitchhiker's Guide and Doom, there simply isn't anything left this year that looks even remotely interesting to me, aside from Harry Potter 4. The 2 cgi offerings that are in previews, both with furry animals, look like a perfect example of group writing: no respect for storytelling or uniting vision, very fast paced, very, very jokey. Couple blaxploitation gangster movies coming out, *yawn*, and a few war movies. Come on, Hollywood: there must be a few writers left in the United States, penning screenplays in dirty apartments, brimming with creativity and capable of writing an actual story instead of an episodic series of comedic outtakes. Oh wait, creativity is illegal in the united states now.
3) ACD.
Or, put a little bit differently, the symptoms are software patents, plot patents, and what I'm planning, the "antics patent, which allows me to patent grating cheddar cheese over my head while strutting around in stripper heels. The disease, the root of the problem, lies in the laws governing the patents. And the root of that is the fact that money can be made by big corporations by litigating smaller companies to death on shaky grounds: radix malorum est cupiditas.