With the exception of the Simpsons (as you can see from my posts in this article and things immediately surrounding it, I don't watch TV. Ever. Even on September 11th. And if the Simpsons was avaliable as high-quality downloadable video on the Internet (legally, I mean), then I'd pay to watch that, and that alone, and not even own a TV tuner. All I want a TV for is video games and the Simpsons; I can get both of those without a tuner.
a) We never attempted to sneak onto someone's system
One point in your favour.
b) We made the uninstall as painless and obvious as possible
Two points in your favour.
c) We never hid the fact that we were sending back listening statistics
Three points in your favour.
Plus, you provided an interesting and useful service. You didn't mention anything about what you did with the data once it was in your servers, but I choose to believe, lacking evidence to the contrary, that you would have been as open, upfront, and intelligent about dealing with the data once you had acquired it as you say you were when you were obtaining it - and if you were, I might well have used that service (if I cared to have personalized news of any sort delivered to me - which I dont; I don't even like having to 'dig' for all the stories/. posted today, not just the ones that are the biggest. It's not a privacy thing in this case - just a preference thing) and been quite happy with it.
And I don't think that code violates the hypothetical "Geek Oath". Your code is neither malignant nor curmudgeonly.
I stand corrected. I might take a moment here to mention that Apple's marketing department, again, doesn't sell things well enough - since if you go to Apple's Quicktime site, what you see are not things that scream interactive, extensible, object-oriented architecture with tight, seamless interaction between atoms, media, events, time streams, and datastreams...you see a player and a bunch of cool streaming video and streaming audio you can play in the player.
Flash - it's hard to miss the authoring bits, the event-drivenness of it, et cetera...even if you take only the most casual glance at things. Here I am, however - a professional, not particularly biased geek, and I had missed an entire subsection of possibility where quicktime was concerned...
For those of you disinclined to gardening, what the article is saying is basically that they have developed an improvement to the compost heap. In particular, a reaction to exctract the hydrogen from the methane plus a hydrogen-specific osmotic filter allow them to maintain the reaction...
Pretty interesting. This bodes well for the future of recycling, too...
From the text at Bloomberg:...[QuickTime] allows users to watch movies on personal computers. Macromedia has a competing product called Flash Player.
Hm. Last I checked, Quicktime and Flash occupied rather different niches in the "things move on your screen" realm of the world. Quicktime is a movie and, to a lesser extent, audio format. Flash is a vector-graphics animation and interaction product that just happens to have support for raster graphics, sounds, and now movies. Even with movie support in Flash, I wouldn't use it to/play/ movies....
He used Fontographer to create these fonts, a program which allows you to (while editing a font) set or reset the embedding bits. Does this imply that, under the DMCA, any (nominally) legal content-creation program can be ruled unlawful if it has the ability to read a file instead of merely write a file?
Say goodbye to saving your work in the middle and coming back to it. Say goodbye, potentially, to backup software, since adding registry keys post-installation may be involved in copy control, and backup software would bypass that. Say goodbye to...well...computers. (Not that this hasn't been said before elsewhere, but...)
A rat is unlikely to kill itself no matter now much you train it.
Rats are actually willing to starve themselves to receive direct-to-brain pleasure (just search for 'starvation'), so it seems likely to me that they would subject themselves to danger (including, as the article says, brightly lit environments) and potentially even death for the reward of the neural stimulation.
Well, at least he didn't start sentances with the word 'and' or 'but', cos we all know you can't do that.
But...but...but...
And another thing, young man...
Ahem. Sorry. My devil's-advocacy is coming out here, as it was when I was reading the review; I'm not OS- or platform-centric:
"All software sucks, but we still use software. All hardware sucks, but I've got quite a pile of that around me too. All social interaction sucks, but getting loved and laid beats the crap out of the alternatives much as a real OS beats the crap out of GameOS." -- adb in b.l-w
I like Macs, but I'm not a Mac advocist. I like Windows, but I'm not a Windows apologist. I like this book, from the little that I've read of it so far, and I like Scott Adams' books, and I like to read random entries in an encyclopedia...
Technical problems require technical solutions. Legislate in favour of providing people with the right to research and produce open-standards (I won't even require open-source!) and ALSO the right to research weaknesses in open standards. If you provide people with the opportunity to speak freely and candidly on such things as encryption and rights management, you/will/ get results - but if you legislate, few if any people with talent will be working on the project, and you will end up with a shoddy solution that only works because it's illegal for it not to....
> The day when the Simpsons runs out of material...
But that's just the point I was making (or trying to make) - the Simpsons won't run out of material anytime in the forseeable future, but the format it is presented in may well get old. How much interesting variation on the theme can Groening continue to come up with? And notice I say "continue" - I think he's done an amazing job thus far.
>...move ourselves out of the wasteland of ignorance and stupidity.
So, you're saying, once we start resembling Futurama more than the Simpsons? *g*
On a side note, try The Simpsons Archive for way more than you wanted to know about the Simpsons...
And the recent episodes of the X-Files are deeply conspiracy-laden, heart-wrenching and mind-busting masterpieces.
Personal preferences aside - Fox has had a history of poor choices where the schedule and programming of their stations is concerned.
On another subject, quoth the interview: But Groening is also pragmatic about the show's shelf-life. "Because animation is such an intensely painstaking process, it wears people out, and audiences are always looking for surprises. When any character is as stupid as Homer Simpson, it's hard to keep surprising the audience."
Groening has a remarkably mature and insightful view of his own mortality and the limits of a particular genre. While the Simpsons make an excelent foil for poking fun at any cultural situation, economic event, or global personality (and as such, has a much much longer life expectancy than, say, Garfield (no offense to Garfield), who has said just about all there is to say on the subjects of laziness, gluttony, and hatred of dumb-but-cute), at some point, almost certainly, the majority of people watching the show will say "Ho hum, Homer's dumb, headlines, Bart whines, Lisa's smart - who gives a fart? Pass the booze - I'd rather snooze." (Or something, perhaps in slightly less doggerel.) We can only hope that Groening recognizes this point and brings us to a stunning (and satisfying) conclusion before the show becomes bogged down with the dead weight of unfunny seasons.
Fox has a long history of utterly failing to pay attention to the worthwhileness of their shows - giving good shows the boot while bad shows - say, for instance, Greg the Bunny - get prime airtime. The Simpsons just happened to be the right combination of edgy and comfortably marketable to get and keep a prime spot for so long - and any show that doesn't live up to those standards seems to be summarilly dropped, despite the fact that the bar is unreasonably high...
Actually, USENET piracy has diminished quite a bit since the proliferation of things that look like web browsers that let people read news. (Not that it's gone away, certainly; you can still find a lot of things on USENET if you're willing to spend the time). IRC? Same thing. If you've heard of it, it doesn't have many real warez-sharing folks on it anymore. (Private or restricted IRC servers and channels are another thing altogether...)
No, the real place where warez are shared these days are peer-to-peer file transfer networks. Last time I checked on Kazaa, for instance, it reported 1.8 million users, sharing 380 million GIGABYTES of data - and a brief, mindless check turned up warez editions of just about everything you could ask for.
Not, ahem, that I'm endorsing warez-over-P2P networks. They have enough troubles as it is...
It seems to me that numerous times recently, purchasing IBM hard drives labelled as "new" from authorized IBM resellers, what is in fact received is often not new (for instance, with stale installations of Windows 2000, memos, and in one instance, porn) and - in fact - sometimes not even an IBM drive, but a similar case with a well-faked IBM label applied to the top. Every time complaints have been sent to the company, gotten the run-around, complained to IBM, gotten backup, and gotten a refund from the fradulent company - but this isn't a single, isolated event or merchant here...
Anyway, maybe that has something to do with the 'competetive' market.
- 386 12mhz, 20mb HDD, 640k RAM and a copy of Commander Keen
Wow, really? So did I! I got it for $4 on eBay, and since I had bought some other stuff, I got shipping for it for free! And Commander Keen is a pretty good deal at $20, too...
But Napster? Man, I don't know what I'd do with that. If it was an intelligent, peer-to-peer, firewall- and proxy-friendly, fast, resuming, easy-to-use file-sharing system, that'd be one thing, but to today's internet users, it's almost as much of a folk tale as, say, B1FF...
Regexp? Damn. If (assuming (blatently) such regexps can can English) such regexps can contain (parsable in P) fully English phrasing with (contrived (parseable (sort of (LISPy) (regexpy)))) complete syntax - vital to maintain accuracy - we now can despair of ever understanding politicians without the aid of a computer.
It will check to see if you're currently reading/., and if you are, it assumes that you're busy. Otherwise, anything you do can be interrupted to do some translation...
My recommendation to everybody is to go to the local library (which is a marvellous place to visit anyway) and read the first 50 pages.
I had the (mis)fortune to become acquainted with His Dark Materials just after the first book was published. I read it and was terribly hooked; I was heartbroken when the second book was delayed, pushed back, and delayed again - and then it came out! only to end on a far more perilous cliffhanger, and left me waiting even longer for the arrival of the third book.
As has been mentioned, this is a book with many layers - a superficial adventure plot, a twisting ethical and moral-groud issue or eight, the banes that befall civilization...
Not a book I suggest to immature people, be they eight or eighty, but highly recommended nonetheless.
They all look virtually the same. This problem has been brought up with regards to other game genres, too...but I think the most important thing that MMORPGs would be able to do in the future is present a really new, innovative environment - one that doesn't focus on "Wander around, kill things, get stuff, sell stuff so you can wander around, killing bigger things".
Maybe an MMORPG with some real meat to the ability to develop a world, i.e. Ultima Online 2k2 (and I mean a really new version, not just the updated client). Maybe one that has real, obvious, easy-to-get-involved with politics and stock marketing built in. Heck, maybe one like Freedom Force, where you can destroy everything, except with the addition of a building mode. Something to get out of the "Kill to get bigger to kill bigger things until you can sell your character on eBay" mindset.
"Ok, I'm bored with this now. Let's do something else."
I own the Sims and Myst both. Both have been played - maybe - four hours total. On the other hand, I have now purchased several copies of CivII, due to wearing out the manual, CD, reference page, et cetera on previous copies...
The Interactive Fiction Archive already has some useful links if you search for SoftPorn... As IANAL, I can't speak for the legal ramifications of the Apple II version, or the DOS executible, Inform remake, or other variations you might find there, but it is avaliable.
I made the selection to go with DVD+RW recently; it seems to be the more stable of the standards based on my research. It certainly burns DVDs that are readable in all of my non-writer computer DVD drives; I don't have any current need for DVD player technology support.
The author of this review also spends quite a bit of time kvetching about the writing software that comes with burners. My advice? Junk it all! Get a copy of Nero. It supports XP, DVD drives, rewritable CDs and DVDs, and has a packet-writing software avaliable. It's also bloody fast and astoundingly reliable. (Blatent Plug, but it's true.)
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With the exception of the Simpsons (as you can see from my posts in this article and things immediately surrounding it, I don't watch TV. Ever. Even on September 11th. And if the Simpsons was avaliable as high-quality downloadable video on the Internet (legally, I mean), then I'd pay to watch that, and that alone, and not even own a TV tuner. All I want a TV for is video games and the Simpsons; I can get both of those without a tuner.
One point in your favour.
b) We made the uninstall as painless and obvious as possible
Two points in your favour.
c) We never hid the fact that we were sending back listening statistics
Three points in your favour.
Plus, you provided an interesting and useful service. You didn't mention anything about what you did with the data once it was in your servers, but I choose to believe, lacking evidence to the contrary, that you would have been as open, upfront, and intelligent about dealing with the data once you had acquired it as you say you were when you were obtaining it - and if you were, I might well have used that service (if I cared to have personalized news of any sort delivered to me - which I dont; I don't even like having to 'dig' for all the stories /. posted today, not just the ones that are the biggest. It's not a privacy thing in this case - just a preference thing) and been quite happy with it.
And I don't think that code violates the hypothetical "Geek Oath". Your code is neither malignant nor curmudgeonly.
Flash - it's hard to miss the authoring bits, the event-drivenness of it, et cetera...even if you take only the most casual glance at things. Here I am, however - a professional, not particularly biased geek, and I had missed an entire subsection of possibility where quicktime was concerned...
*goes out to learn some quicktime scripting*
Pretty interesting. This bodes well for the future of recycling, too...
Hm. Last I checked, Quicktime and Flash occupied rather different niches in the "things move on your screen" realm of the world. Quicktime is a movie and, to a lesser extent, audio format. Flash is a vector-graphics animation and interaction product that just happens to have support for raster graphics, sounds, and now movies. Even with movie support in Flash, I wouldn't use it to /play/ movies....
So long as cheating in games by screwing around with the savegames never gets tagged as a DMCA-violating action.......
Say goodbye to saving your work in the middle and coming back to it. Say goodbye, potentially, to backup software, since adding registry keys post-installation may be involved in copy control, and backup software would bypass that. Say goodbye to...well...computers. (Not that this hasn't been said before elsewhere, but...)
Rats are actually willing to starve themselves to receive direct-to-brain pleasure (just search for 'starvation'), so it seems likely to me that they would subject themselves to danger (including, as the article says, brightly lit environments) and potentially even death for the reward of the neural stimulation.
But...but...but...
And another thing, young man...
Ahem. Sorry. My devil's-advocacy is coming out here, as it was when I was reading the review; I'm not OS- or platform-centric:
"All software sucks, but we still use software. All hardware sucks, but I've got quite a pile of that around me too. All social interaction sucks, but getting loved and laid beats the crap out of the alternatives much as a real OS beats the crap out of GameOS." -- adb in b.l-w
I like Macs, but I'm not a Mac advocist. I like Windows, but I'm not a Windows apologist. I like this book, from the little that I've read of it so far, and I like Scott Adams' books, and I like to read random entries in an encyclopedia...
Technical problems require technical solutions. Legislate in favour of providing people with the right to research and produce open-standards (I won't even require open-source!) and ALSO the right to research weaknesses in open standards. If you provide people with the opportunity to speak freely and candidly on such things as encryption and rights management, you /will/ get results - but if you legislate, few if any people with talent will be working on the project, and you will end up with a shoddy solution that only works because it's illegal for it not to....
But that's just the point I was making (or trying to make) - the Simpsons won't run out of material anytime in the forseeable future, but the format it is presented in may well get old. How much interesting variation on the theme can Groening continue to come up with? And notice I say "continue" - I think he's done an amazing job thus far.
> ...move ourselves out of the wasteland of ignorance and stupidity.
So, you're saying, once we start resembling Futurama more than the Simpsons? *g*
On a side note, try The Simpsons Archive for way more than you wanted to know about the Simpsons...
Greg the bunny is funny.
And the recent episodes of the X-Files are deeply conspiracy-laden, heart-wrenching and mind-busting masterpieces.
Personal preferences aside - Fox has had a history of poor choices where the schedule and programming of their stations is concerned.
On another subject, quoth the interview:
But Groening is also pragmatic about the show's shelf-life. "Because animation is such an intensely painstaking process, it wears people out, and audiences are always looking for surprises. When any character is as stupid as Homer Simpson, it's hard to keep surprising the audience."
Groening has a remarkably mature and insightful view of his own mortality and the limits of a particular genre. While the Simpsons make an excelent foil for poking fun at any cultural situation, economic event, or global personality (and as such, has a much much longer life expectancy than, say, Garfield (no offense to Garfield), who has said just about all there is to say on the subjects of laziness, gluttony, and hatred of dumb-but-cute), at some point, almost certainly, the majority of people watching the show will say "Ho hum, Homer's dumb, headlines, Bart whines, Lisa's smart - who gives a fart? Pass the booze - I'd rather snooze." (Or something, perhaps in slightly less doggerel.) We can only hope that Groening recognizes this point and brings us to a stunning (and satisfying) conclusion before the show becomes bogged down with the dead weight of unfunny seasons.
Fox has a long history of utterly failing to pay attention to the worthwhileness of their shows - giving good shows the boot while bad shows - say, for instance, Greg the Bunny - get prime airtime. The Simpsons just happened to be the right combination of edgy and comfortably marketable to get and keep a prime spot for so long - and any show that doesn't live up to those standards seems to be summarilly dropped, despite the fact that the bar is unreasonably high...
Omma asks for help with graphics for an installer, Web design, erase-of-use testers and free legal advice, among other things.
That sounds like they're asking for help with some insidious trojan, not helpful open-source!
Actually, USENET piracy has diminished quite a bit since the proliferation of things that look like web browsers that let people read news. (Not that it's gone away, certainly; you can still find a lot of things on USENET if you're willing to spend the time). IRC? Same thing. If you've heard of it, it doesn't have many real warez-sharing folks on it anymore. (Private or restricted IRC servers and channels are another thing altogether...)
No, the real place where warez are shared these days are peer-to-peer file transfer networks. Last time I checked on Kazaa, for instance, it reported 1.8 million users, sharing 380 million GIGABYTES of data - and a brief, mindless check turned up warez editions of just about everything you could ask for.
Not, ahem, that I'm endorsing warez-over-P2P networks. They have enough troubles as it is...
Anyway, maybe that has something to do with the 'competetive' market.
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("Hello, World.");
return 0;
}
because that will have similar code to other students...No, instead you must look to the code of great IOCCC winners for your homework projects...
Wow, really? So did I! I got it for $4 on eBay, and since I had bought some other stuff, I got shipping for it for free! And Commander Keen is a pretty good deal at $20, too...
But Napster? Man, I don't know what I'd do with that. If it was an intelligent, peer-to-peer, firewall- and proxy-friendly, fast, resuming, easy-to-use file-sharing system, that'd be one thing, but to today's internet users, it's almost as much of a folk tale as, say, B1FF...
Where can I find this regexp? :)
It will check to see if you're currently reading /., and if you are, it assumes that you're busy. Otherwise, anything you do can be interrupted to do some translation...
I had the (mis)fortune to become acquainted with His Dark Materials just after the first book was published. I read it and was terribly hooked; I was heartbroken when the second book was delayed, pushed back, and delayed again - and then it came out! only to end on a far more perilous cliffhanger, and left me waiting even longer for the arrival of the third book.
As has been mentioned, this is a book with many layers - a superficial adventure plot, a twisting ethical and moral-groud issue or eight, the banes that befall civilization...
Not a book I suggest to immature people, be they eight or eighty, but highly recommended nonetheless.
Maybe an MMORPG with some real meat to the ability to develop a world, i.e. Ultima Online 2k2 (and I mean a really new version, not just the updated client). Maybe one that has real, obvious, easy-to-get-involved with politics and stock marketing built in. Heck, maybe one like Freedom Force, where you can destroy everything, except with the addition of a building mode. Something to get out of the "Kill to get bigger to kill bigger things until you can sell your character on eBay" mindset.
I own the Sims and Myst both. Both have been played - maybe - four hours total. On the other hand, I have now purchased several copies of CivII, due to wearing out the manual, CD, reference page, et cetera on previous copies...
The Interactive Fiction Archive already has some useful links if you search for SoftPorn... As IANAL, I can't speak for the legal ramifications of the Apple II version, or the DOS executible, Inform remake, or other variations you might find there, but it is avaliable.
The author of this review also spends quite a bit of time kvetching about the writing software that comes with burners. My advice? Junk it all! Get a copy of Nero. It supports XP, DVD drives, rewritable CDs and DVDs, and has a packet-writing software avaliable. It's also bloody fast and astoundingly reliable. (Blatent Plug, but it's true.)