Bad news those who can't deal with 3D....
on
3D TV For The Masses?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's all great fun, unless you, like me, happen to be one of the estimated 20 - 40 percent of people who suffer from "simulator sickness". "Simulator sickness" is the virtual world's cousin to motion sickness, and it takes the form of strained eyesight, nausea, vertigo, headaches and vomiting. Of those who suffer simulator sickness, more than half feel only a twinge when watching T2 3D at Universal Studios, or playing Quake 3. For the remainder - still a sizeable percentage - the symptoms are so bad they simply cannot watch these movies, or play these games.
It seems corporate america, and the bearded linux hippie game developers don't really care about the 17-20 percent of us who suffer badly. Somehow, this lack of concern feels familiar. I guess that's because I'm also a member of that other minority, left-handers, who are constantly ignored by most joystick and mouse manufacturers.
The real worry is that the 3D mania will spread not just throughout TV programming and movies, but to other software, and we'll start seeing 3D databases (in fact, they already exist), disk defragmenters and even operating systems. I hope it doesn't go so far.
I know many Slashdot readers love the 3D trend. As a (semi-dormant) programmer, I can't help but admire the realism of modern 3D graphics in movies, on TV, and in game engines. But I hope that developers wake up to the fact that they're making a sizeable slice of their potential customers sick to their stomachs.
It is true, that if you integrate this over the whole visible angle, you can easily evaluate the real angle in your head. However, we do not accept, nowadays, as it happened in the past, that our perceptive world is just the plain result of an encounter between a "naive" brain and the physical properties of a stimulus. Actually, perceptions differ, in quality, from those physical characteristics, because the brain extracts an information from the stimulus and interprets it, according to previous similar experiences.
We experiment electromagnetic waves, not as waves, but as images and colours. We experiment vibrating objects, not as vibrations, but as sounds. We experiment the beards of linux hippies, as they blow softly in the wind. We experiment chemical compounds dissolved in air or water, not as chemicals, but as specific smells and tastes. Colours, sounds, smells and tastes are products of our minds, built from sensory experiences.
They do not exist, as such, outside our brain. Actually, the universe is colourless, inodorous, insipid and silent. Therefore, we can now answer one of the questions of traditional philosophy : Does a sound exist when a tree falls in a forest, if nobody is present to hear it ? No, the fall of the tree only creates vibrations. The sound occurs if vibrations are perceived by a living being.
Information from the environment or from the body itself, is picked up by the sensory systems and utilized by the brain for perception, regulating corporeal movements and maintaining arousal. A sensory system starts to work when a stimulus, usually from the outside world, is detected by a sensitive neuron, the first sensorial receptor. This receptor converts the physical expression of the stimulus (light, sound, heat, pressure, taste, smell) into action potentials , which transforms it into electric signs.
From there, the signs are conducted to a nearby area of primary processing, where the initial characteristics of the information are elaborated, according to the nature of the original stimulus : colour, shape, distance, shade, etc. Then, the already modified information is transmitted to zones of secondary processing in the thalamus (if originated by olfactory stimuli, it is processed in the olfactory bulbs and then directly conducted to the medial area of the temporal lobe).
In the thalamic zones, older data, originated from both the cortex and the limbic system and containing similar experiences, link to the new information, in order to form a message, which is carried to its specific cortical centre. There, the meaning and importance of the new detected stimulus are determined by a conscious process of identification called perception.
Although two human beings share the same genetic and biological architecture and function, perhaps what I perceive as a dintinct color and smell is not exatly equal to the the color and smell you perceive. For example, you may like a certain Thinkgeek T-shirt with a pseudo-pithy statement about emacs on it. I may think it's lame, and that it clashes with your beard. We give the same name to this perception but we cannot know how they relate to the reality of the outside world. Perhaps we never will.
I've been working on a similar project, but for a different application. Our laboratory has concentrated on the design of the user interface and the software infrastructure. After experimenting with indoor AR systems in the early 1990s, we decided to build our first outdoor system in 1996 to find out how it might help a tourist exploring an unfamiliar environment. We called our initial prototype the Touring Machine (with apologies to Alan M. Turing, whose abstract Turing machine defines what computers are capable of computing). Because we wanted to minimize the constraints imposed by current technology, we combined the best components we could find to create a test bed whose capabilities are as close as we can make them to the more powerful machines we expect in the future. We avoided (as much as possible) practical concerns such as cost, size, weight and power consumption, confident that those problems will be overcome by hardware designers in the coming years. Trading off physical comfort for performance and ease of software development, we have built several generations of prototypes using external-frame backpacks. In general, we refer to these as mobile AR systems (or MARS, for short).
Our current system uses a Velcro-covered board and straps to hold many of the components: the laptop computer (with its 3-D graphics chip set and IEEE 802.11b wireless network card), trackers (a real-time kinematic GPS receiver, a GPS corrections receiver and the interface box for the hybrid orientation tracker), power (batteries and a regulated power supply), and interface boxes for the head-worn display and interaction devices. The total weight is about 11 kilograms (25 pounds). Antennas for the GPS receiver and the GPS corrections receiver are mounted at the top of the backpack frame, and the user wears the head-worn see-through display and its attached orientation tracker sensor. Our MARS prototypes allow users to interact with the display--to scroll, say, through a menu of choices superimposed on the user's view--by manipulating a wireless trackball or touch pad.
From the very beginning, our system has also included a handheld display (with stylus input) to complement the head-worn see-through display. This display is specially fitted so as not to interfere with the beards sported by many linux hippies. This hybrid user interface offers the benefits of both kinds of interaction: the user can see 3-D graphics on the see-through display and, at the same time, access additional information on the handheld display.
Just look at the stock market. Biotech is the future, my friend. In the new annual ranking of the Nasdaq 100 index--made up of the 100 largest nonfinancial companies ranked by market capitalization--seven of the 13 companies added were in biotech. The new entrants include such familiar names as ImClone Systems (IMCL ), Cephalon (CEPH ), Sepracor (SEPR ), and Invitrogen (IVGN ); they replace 13 faltering tech, telecom, and Internet outfits, including onetime stars CMGI (CMGI ), 3Com (COMS ), and Palm (PALM ). All told, biotech companies now represent 12.7% of the market capitalization of all the companies in the index, nearly triple the share they held only two years ago.
Sounds an awful lot like the Internet bubble all over again, I know. And in one sense, it is: The high market capitalization of many of these stocks suggests that investors are paying a lot in anticipation of future earnings that may never materialize. It costs tens of millions of dollars and can take five to 15 years to get a drug from the test tube to the clinic--and many drugs simply don't make it.
In several ways, however, this boom is different. The industry is more mature than it was a decade ago, when it last rose and fell. New alliances, new products, and new financing should combine to produce lasting growth in this once-turbulent field. There are some 300 biotech products in Phase III testing, the final stage of human experimentation before seeking Food & Drug Administration approval. The FDA issued 32 approvals for biotech drugs in 2000, a 45% increase over 1999. Sales of biotech products rose from $16.1 billion in 1999 to $18.1 billion in 2000, an increase of 12%. And there were 22 profitable biotechs in 1999, up from 17 in 1997. In addition, there is a distinct lack of bearded linux hippies in biotech, making it a much more attractive market segment to the general public.
Furthermore, unlike many Internet companies, the biotech companies are targeting clear and existing markets. Many Internet companies devised products without knowing whether there were markets for them. Others, such as Yahoo!, aimed for ad revenues that proved far smaller than hoped. Biotech companies don't have that problem: A drug for arthritis or cancer, say, has a huge market. If their drugs work, the biotechs will make money.
Excitement in biotech will likely get another boost when the climate for initial public offerings improves. There are 50-100 biotech companies waiting to go public, says Oronsky. That's where casual investors should be especially careful. Some of today's most promising biotechs will undoubtedly fall short of the hype. Unfortunately, that's one way this boom won't differ much from the last.
What is indisputable, whether you blame the courts, the legislators, or the lawyers, is the fact that our system of governance can't figure out how to ban what everyone knows should be banned. This should be shocking for people of common sense. And it should be embarrassing to us as citizens.
Look: I understand that censorship is the sugar in the gas tank of our political culture, it makes everything stutter and shimmy and eventually grind to a halt.
But, it seems to me, this also reveals the prissy, cowardly, and -- most of all -- spoiled nature of our political leaders. Most arguments about government control have a certain logic to them. We allow the most stuff, the stuff out on the periphery of social and legal behavior for the simple reason that if we allow the stuff on the fringe, the freedoms at the core of our constitutional order will be preserved. For people who zealously defend our Second Amendment rights, this means arguing about the right to carry concealed weapons into churches, schools, airports, wherever.
Abortion rights and pro-life activists follow the same logic. Not long ago the NARAL crowd wouldn't even concede that killing a live baby -- after the umbilical cord was cut! -- constituted murder. Pro-lifers argue that a tiny clump of cells has rights.
Whether you agree with the substance of their positions, the logic is generally consistent. Indeed, even if you believe -- as I do -- that the Founding Fathers would have burst into laughter at the idea that a school couldn't have a nondenominational prayer before graduation, these slippery-slope arguments still have to be taken seriously.
But this overly mechanistic logic careens into wild, self-serving hypocrisy when it comes to the issue of censorship. For some reason the editorial pages, Congress, hordes of academics, and, of course, Hollywood types, honestly, truly believe that the state cannot proscribe images of women getting it on with horses in public libraries for fear we'll skid down the slippery slope to tyranny. At the same time, however, they fervently believe that the federal government can regulate the content of political ads leading up to an election.
This throws out the whole doctrine of protecting the fringe to safeguard our essential freedoms. If you think some talentless boob who defecates in a tuna can and calls it art is the canary in the coalmine of our free-speech rights, fine. Or if you feel that some hacked-out code from a bearded linux hippie that lives in his parents' basement is speech, wonderful. But, if you believe that, I am at a loss as to how you can tolerate a federal government that attaches all sorts of strings to the fundamental liberties the Founders considered essential to a free society.
Lamar Alexander noted a long time ago that if our current laws existed at America's Founding, Tom Paine would have been required to register "Common Sense" with the FEC.
For examle, in its decision overturning the federal anti-child-porn law, the Court answered critics that some images of pedophilia might entice or encourage would-be pedophiles or child pornographers, the Court replied, "the prospect of a crime...by itself does not justify laws suppressing protected speech."
This is the same Court that regularly holds that "the appearance of corruption" is sufficient justification for draconian regulations of political speech at the heart of our republic. The "appearance of corruption" is a standard which acknowledges no crime has been committed at all. Things just look corrupt because some people are too stupid or too lazy to discern the truth or too cynical to believe the truth when they see it. Don't get me wrong, of course there's corruption in politics -- though vastly less than at any other time in American history -- but saying that citizens spending money on speech creates the "appearance of corruption" -- and therefore it's worth regulating -- is an insult to our collective intelligence.
When Thomas Jefferson put the idea of intellectual property into the Constitution of the United States, he did so because he realized that information leaks; once people learn something, they can reuse that knowledge. If there was no protection to intellectual property, people would not be encouraged to share knowledge with others. Writers would not write, inventors would not invent, artists would not . So in the US Constitution, it says:
Congress shall have the power [...] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The reason why this is important is spelled out in Jefferson's own writings:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it...He who receives an idea from me, receives instructions himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should be spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature... Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
His assumptions are based on the fact that you can not control what people do with information that you give to them. If you hand someone a book, they can transcribe it. If you give someone a physical invention, they can disassemble it. But if you give them a new form of media, say, a song on a copy-protected CD, and they can no longer listen to it except on approved devices that they cannot copy from, why should the government provide the same protection to you?
The record companies and movie studios want to have their cake and eat it too. They want traditional copyright protection, technological copyright protection, and a government guarantee of technological copyright protection. They want to deprive all those bearded Linux hippies their DeCSS, so they can't watch bootleg Buffy the Vanpire Slayer DVDs in their parents' basement. But if they have technological protection, then why should the government give them traditional protection? It was only there because information was hard to protect as property.
How far are we going to let the copyrighters go? We need to remind people that copyright, like most laws in the US, is a balance between two forces, and the scale should not be tipped too far to one side.
I've already been operating a 12VDC powered cellular jamming system in my truck for over a year. It is simple to make (just a PA driver and some circuitry to generate a null signal). With a 10W amp, it saturates the entire 800 MHz and 1.9 GHz cellular bands with an active carrier, making it impossible for other phones to reach the cell towers. It's about the size of a phone handset. My coworker and I found the range to vary from 80 yards to 110 yards. I am presently dumping the signal out of my own cellular phone antenna, though I have considered using a rotatable omnidirectional antenna to target particular vehicles, but this would be quite conspicuous; a bearded linux hippie would most likely call me in to the Highway patrol, so I have to stick with the smaller iteration. Yes, it's illegal, but how many cops are searching cars for cell phone jammers?
It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed liens and unknown liabilities lawsuits and vexatious accountings for profits made in good faith. (Atlantic Works v. Brady, 1017 U.S. 192, 200 (1882)).
It certainly appears from this Supreme Court opinion, written over a century ago, that the US patent office was already out of control. Sad to say, things have only gotten worse. Thanks largely to the League for Programming Freedom (yes, I'm a member), software patents have gotten at least some of the notoriety they deserve. But the more patents I read, the more I come to the conclusion that things are just as bad in the more traditional hardware areas.
It seems that every day somebody finds a patent that just makes everyone's jaws drop open in utter astonishment. Here's one I just discovered: US patent 5,443,036 covers the use of a laser pointer in playing with a cat. Check it out; this is not a joke, unless you consider (as I do) the entire US patent system to be one very sick joke.
To their credit, in 1994 the Patent Office put out a call for comments on "obviousness" standards for patents, asking if perhaps they have been inappropriately lowered. (Is the Pope Polish? Are your taxes too high? Does a bear...well, you know.) Here are the comments I filed in response. Naturally, they were ignored.
Recently a Slashdot reader hit on a brilliant analogy that ties it all together for me, and I'm not even a bearded linux hippie: patents, he said, are merely a form of industrial pollution. After all, both pollution and patents are economic externalities that can enrich individuals or companies at the expense of society as a whole. And both are often defended as economic necessities. At one time, society celebrated the belching black clouds of smoke and soot from steam locomotives, power plants and steel mills as signs of progress and economic prosperity, but this changed. I fervently hope that I live to see a similar sea change in public attitudes toward the patent system.
Getting past the protection is only the first step. The next problem is the distribution. Homemade servers have lots of file space because the pirate put his own hard drive in, but bandwidth is low, because his connection is cable (or worse). Free internet hosting has a great deal of bandwidth at your disposal, but the pirate is generally limited by the amount of space in which he can put files. This causes him to make multiple accounts under pseudonyms to store all the files. IRC channels and Usenet are often posted with links to the locations of the files, as are the pirates websites. Distribution is sometimes active, sometimes passive, depending upon the pirate's personality and motives.
On the note of motives, back to the idea that for some it is prestige. One of the goals with pirating, in the underground, is to get a pirated copy on the internet and widely available on the first day that the movie is released. Hence, a 0-Day movie is a pirated copy that was released the same day as the legal copy.
The internet is without question the largest mode for wide scale piracy. But one often overlooked area of piracy is that of person-to-person piracy. Most don't consider this as piracy, because the person is generally a friend, and as such we see it as a favor, rather than as stealing. It skips our mind that it takes away revenue from the software producers. In such a form of piracy, we lend our Installation CD to a friend to either copy or install from, and then we get it back (or perhaps we get a copy from a friend). Person-to-person copying often goes on to result in commercial copying (copying for profit). This mode is often difficult for bearded linux hippies, as they are often without friends.
I must say that despite piracy being a bane to the movie companies, there is honor among thieves. I've noted that many sites actually encourage those who download to purchase the movie if it is good. They say to support the companies, which indicates that they at least know the repercussions of their actions. Another one of the major repercussions of piracy is the spread of viruses. A little while back, CIH (Chernobyl virus) was spread rather widely through inclusion in pirated software, as it infected a few of the major underground software centers.
All in all, I do not condone wanton piracy. However, I must take the stance that it must exist. Not only from the stance that order cannot exist without anarchy (sounds cheesy), but from another stance. One's muscle does not develop without resistance. So also does the evolution of software protection not occur without resistance to it.
They should pick an OS and go with it, preferably what's best for the person that has to use it every day, regardless of cost (or in some cases, taking total end cost into consideration) I'm all for standards. Standards solve issues ranging from product compatibility to addressing consumer safety and health concerns. Standards also simplify product development and reduce non-value-adding costs thereby increasing a user's ability to compare competing products. They also are fundamental building blocks for international trade. Only through the use of standards can the requirements of interconnectivity and interoperability be assured and the credibility of new products and new markets verified enabling the rapid implementation of technology. It's too bad so many of you bearded linux hippies insist on doing things your own kludged-together way.
Is this laser powered airplane really a solution? All these so-called 'solutions' overlook the fact that energy sources are not the problem. The people who live in the third world - and that is most people - do not have anything like the amount of energy consumption that we do. Their low life expectancy and ill health is due to the fact that all the good land is taken up by western corporations to overfeed us, not because of a lack of televisions or electric toothbrushes. These people are living proof that the power consumption of the rich world is totally unnecessary. All these 'renewable' energy sources are not solutions at all, they are irrelevant to the problem.
The major problem that this planet has today is the incredible capacity a minority of humans has to consume ever increasing quantities of everything. This is the problem, yet it is never addressed; never even recognised. Instead the problem is seen as one of continuing to consume as much as possible; of finding alternative things to consume when the current consumables run out. The green gurus keep parroting out the same old crap about treading lightly on the earth, and their followers keep lapping it all up, sending in their subscriptions, buying the videos, going to the meetings, writing their letters, recycling their ideologies and reciting their platitudes - anything rather than face up to the fact that the party is over and hard times are on the way.
We are running out of slaves. There is a world shortage of slave material and the rich idle West is too deeply habituated to the 'good' life to see that it is time to face up to that reality. Never mind all the other species, we don't even provide the whole human population with this level of consumption, most of the rest of humanity are slaves of the west too! The clever slave driver will not drive the slaves too hard; they are no use to him dead. We have not even been clever. Now we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. We have used up most of the earth's available stored energy, and are laying into the latest deliveries. The soon-to-come shift into large scale plundering of this energy will further accellerate the already alarming rate of devastation. That these 'solutions' are being touted as 'green' is the ultimate example of Orwellian doublespeak. These people claim to be looking towards a new future - as indeed they are, with the same rapacious eye that the first colonialists viewed the 'new' world of 500 years ago.
So what is the solution then? All we need to do is to look at the problem: Consumption. It is very, very simple. We must reduce consumption. Now. Not in 2002 when the UN sets some kind of target. Not next year when the government raises some kind of tax a bit. What kind of lifeforms are we who need some kind of financial incentive to save ourselves from oblivion? Are we really so powerless that we can't stop buying things until the government tells us we have to? Is it really the government's fault that millions of supposedly free-thinking individuals go shopping in vast depersonalised hypermarkets miles from their homes on new bypasses built specially for that purpose?
We must stop buying these things. We can't extricate ourselves from the sick parasitic system overnight - the grip is too tight, real alternatives either don't exist or are on the way out and very fragile. So this must be our priority. We must seek out those places, co-ops, small grocers etc and support them, find other people and work with them in the hope that we will enhance each other's efforts. The alternatives may be difficult to get but this is of no relevance, if an alternative exists it is the thing to do, regardless of inconvenience. If no alternative exists this is usually a non-essential item.
(It is said that the main reason that community supported agriculture has not taken off is because the corporations are opposed to it. Could it perhaps be because the vast majority of the population are too apathetic to get up and find out about these things?)
You must stop working for the system, as well as contributing to the infrastructure that maintains that system, whether that necessitates the removal of your open source code from the public domain so large conglomerates cannot benefit of it, or ceasing from buying stupid T-shirts from ThinkGeek with pseudo-pithy statements on the front that do nothing save corrupt the environment further and/or prove that you're a bearded, long haired linux geek that lives in your parents' basement. We must do this regardless of the personal hardship this may seem to entail. This is a personal thing. There is no set course, we must all find our own and help each other. No leader will be needed, we must take back our self-respect and stop relying on cult figures and green gurus, who are obviously not up to the task. We don't need any experts to tell us what to do, we pretend that we need them because we don't really want to do it.
Unfortunately, history is a good example of why problems like this are usually cancerous in nature, and require a violent, unjustifiable (and yet completely justifiable, at a macroscopic level) response.
Of course. We must stop buying these things. We can't extricate ourselves from the sick parasitic system overnight - the grip is too tight, real alternatives either don't exist or are on the way out and very fragile. So this must be our priority. We must seek out those places, co-ops, small grocers etc and support them, find other people and work with them in the hope that we will enhance each other's efforts. The alternatives may be difficult to get but this is of no relevance, if an alternative exists it is the thing to do, regardless of inconvenience. If no alternative exists this is usually a non-essential item.
(It is said that the main reason that community supported agriculture has not taken off is because the corporations are opposed to it. Could it perhaps be because the vast majority of the population are too apathetic to get up and find out about these things?)
You must stop working for the system, as well as contributing to the infrastructure that maintains that system, whether that necessitates the removal of your open source code from the public domain so large conglomerates cannot benefit of it, or ceasing from buying stupid T-shirts from ThinkGeek with pseudo-pithy statements on the front that do nothing save corrupt the environment further and/or prove that you're a bearded, long haired linux geek that lives in your parents' basement. We must do this regardless of the personal hardship this may seem to entail. This is a personal thing. There is no set course, we must all find our own and help each other. No leader will be needed, we must take back our self-respect and stop relying on cult figures and green gurus, who are obviously not up to the task. We don't need any experts to tell us what to do, we pretend that we need them because we don't really want to do it.
Stop consuming.
It seems bad, but if we do it, maybe we will start living again.
Is this cell charger really a solution? All these so-called 'solutions' overlook the fact that energy sources are not the problem. The people who live in the third world - and that is most people - do not have anything like the amount of energy consumption that we do. Their low life expectancy and ill health is due to the fact that all the good land is taken up by western corporations to overfeed us, not because of a lack of televisions or electric toothbrushes. These people are living proof that the power consumption of the rich world is totally unnecessary. All these 'renewable' energy sources are not solutions at all, they are irrelevant to the problem.
The major problem that this planet has today is the incredible capacity a minority of humans has to consume ever increasing quantities of everything. This is the problem, yet it is never addressed; never even recognised. Instead the problem is seen as one of continuing to consume as much as possible; of finding alternative things to consume when the current consumables run out. The green gurus keep parroting out the same old crap about treading lightly on the earth, and their followers keep lapping it all up, sending in their subscriptions, buying the videos, going to the meetings, writing their letters, recycling their ideologies and reciting their platitudes - anything rather than face up to the fact that the party is over and hard times are on the way.
We are running out of slaves. There is a world shortage of slave material and the rich idle West is too deeply habituated to the 'good' life to see that it is time to face up to that reality. Never mind all the other species, we don't even provide the whole human population with this level of consumption, most of the rest of humanity are slaves of the west too! The clever slave driver will not drive the slaves too hard; they are no use to him dead. We have not even been clever. Now we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. We have used up most of the earth's available stored energy, and are laying into the latest deliveries. The soon-to-come shift into large scale plundering of this energy will further accellerate the already alarming rate of devastation. That these 'solutions' are being touted as 'green' is the ultimate example of Orwellian doublespeak. These people claim to be looking towards a new future - as indeed they are, with the same rapacious eye that the first colonialists viewed the 'new' world of 500 years ago.
So what is the solution then? All we need to do is to look at the problem: Consumption. It is very, very simple. We must reduce consumption. Now. Not in 2002 when the UN sets some kind of target. Not next year when the government raises some kind of tax a bit. What kind of lifeforms are we who need some kind of financial incentive to save ourselves from oblivion? Are we really so powerless that we can't stop buying things until the government tells us we have to? Is it really the government's fault that millions of supposedly free-thinking individuals go shopping in vast depersonalised hypermarkets miles from their homes on new bypasses built specially for that purpose?
How come when someone posts unimpressive, uninteresting, tiresome blogs about their day at work/school/home, they receive an abundance of comments for that blog, but when someone posts a real good thought-provoking blog, the number of comments left for it barely even exceeds zero? Do people feel intimidated? Or do they just have no brain and cannot be bothered to come up with a response? It is nice to see that a few people take some initiative and comment, as small as that number of people may be. Except slashdot, where it's all goatse and bearded linux hippies.
Linux usres should sue Hollywood for the same thing, so OSS doesn't get the DMCA smack-down sometime in the not-so-distant future.
Unfortunately, given that you corduroy-wearing bearded linux hippies can't even get it together for a coherent boycott, I doubt a class-action suit will surface anytime soon.
In Elementary School, we played Wolfenstein 3D, Nibbles, Gorillas, Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, Carmen Sandiego and a whole bunch of pirated Apple II games in various classes.
Wolfenstein 3D? Wow, you're pretty young. In elementary school, all we had were Apple IIe's with Oregon trail.
Parents weren't upset about the guns in that game then, but I guess guns in videogames weren't so much of a media ratings-booster back then either.
If the school has sufficient funds for computers of this calliber, then perhaps it has spent funds poorly. Give the teachers a raise. Learning typing, word processors, spreadsheets, or programming requires far less capable computers.
I would say that if a school doesn't have computers better than these requirements, then it spends funds poorly:
Starcraft/Broodwar:
Windows 95, 98 or NT 4.0
Pentium 90MHz or higher
16MB RAM
80MB of free hard disk space
DirectX compatible SVGA video card
2x CD-ROM drive
Mechwarrior IV:
Pentium 2 300MHz processor
Windows 95/98/ME/2000
64Mb ram
650Mb hard drive space
8xCd rom
Age of Empires:
Windows 95/98
166Mhz Processor
32MB Ram
4X CD-ROM Drive
200-300MB free HD space
16-bit PCI/AGP Graphics Card
16-bit Sound Blaster compatible Sound Card with Speakers
256 Colour Monitor supporting high colour(16-bit) at 800x640 resolution
If these "hackers" are anything like the Linux people I know, Norway is screwed. You know what I'm talking about, they do the following:
a) Pretend Windows doesn't do certain things. ("You can run DNS with Windows?" "Do I need Trumpet Winsock with Windows XP?")
b) Downplay everything that sucks about Linux every chance you get. (TT fonts are "blurry", and "hurt my eyes" - I like my jagged fonts, I think linux fonts are fine!)
c) Research every new Windows feature and figure out how *nix got it first. Then make it sound like the feature has been necessary for mission critical applications and servers, and that only recently has MS "figured it out". If a third party app accomplishes this in Windows, that doesn't count, even though your whole Linux distro is nothing more than a collection of third party apps to begin with.
d) When Linux gets a new feature that Windows has had forever, downplay the feature. ("Yeah, TTF fonts, we got them now, if it'll shut you up, now that I have them, I don't see what the big deal is.")
e) If anything in Linux doesn't have that feature, it is not important. ("Noone uses that junk in Office anyway")
f) You switched to Debian, but you still hate Red Hat because the copy Red Hat you tried 6 years ago sucked.
g) Pray everytime you try a new USB device - ditto for adding new hardware AFTER you've installed linux. Chicken out and use the PS/2 adapter, blame the hardware manufacturer.
h) Blame X11 for every graphical performance measure in your subsystem, even though you have no idea what you're talking about. Complain that X needs to be scrapped for something like Berlin, even though you've never even been to the Berlin website. But everyone says X11 sucks, you just don't know why, but enough people say it on/. that you won't sound like a total idiot if you just toe the party line.
i) Doesn't matter if you install Gnome or KDE, your menu's are going to have 42 text editors, but not one decent word processor.
j) Find a reason to hate GCC 2.96 even though you've never compiled anything in your life.
k) Doesn't matter if you install Gnome or KDE, because you're going to like Evolution, Konqueror, Kate, GVIM, Gnapster, and Koffice. you're going to like Gnome's applets, but the KDE panel. KDE let's you put a seperate background in each virtual desktop, but Gnome lets you mouse from desktop to desktop. Mozilla looks out of place in both. The one or two motif apps you use make you want to punch your monitor. You decide it's impossible to go with a 100% desktop either way or the other, so you say fuck it and just install them both and run twice the libraries that you need to. Now nothing is consistent, your themes don't match, and now you've got twice as much bloat in your system. When some asks you what you run, you say "GNOME, KDE sucks!" or "KDE, GNOME sucks!" even though you know damn well you don't care.
l) You're too lazy to learn a new window manager, but when another *nix guy asks what you use, you say "FWVM, with nothing but xterms, that's all X is good for."
m) If it doesn't run well on your Pentium II 350, it's slow and bloated.
n) Ten years from now, if it doesn't run well on your Pentium II 350, it's slow and bloated.
o) Blame Red Hat for attempting to destroy/take over the linux community, all the while searching for that SuSE.iso that doesn't exist.
p) You hate Microsoft because Windows cost $200 and Office costs $400, and it's too expensive to be affordable and how you're poor blah blah, but you're too cheap to send $10 to debian.org/Mandrake Club.
q) When you compare features between Windows and Linux, you compare Windows 95's features to the latest CVS builds of GNOME/KDE.
r) Make fun of DLL Hell in windows, even though you know damn well you --force your RPMs all the time.
s) Your first answer to a new user in #linux is "recompile your kernel", even though all he needs to do is double-click the little icon his distro gave him. When someone else points that out, complain that real men edit/etc by hand. When newbie leaves, continue to wonder why Linux on the desktop is taking so long.
t) You wait for someone to ask how to install something so you can say "apt-get install foo", just so you can start on your 25 minute tirade on why his distribution sucks compared to Debian.
u) You believe recompiling everything from source will give you a substantial performance benefit, even though you probably just recompiled that app with the default flags, but you didn't know any better. If it doesn't compile, see GCC2.96 comment above.
v) When above user posts problems with GCC2.96, link to http://www.bero.org/gcc296.html and flame user for trying to compile "shitty code", even though a week ago, you were doing the same exact thing.
w) You've been saying that Mozilla has been your only browser since M18, though you know that it took until.9.x for you to REALLY use it. You preach that Galeon is the best browser, even though it only loads.5 seconds faster than regular Mozilla.
x) You hated Macintosh your entire life until you saw the bash console on a Mac at CompUSA. You feel kindred with MacOSX fans, but hate Apple because they won't let you rip off their user interface.
The difference lies in the fact that you can choose what OS/Kernel/distribution you want to use, but you can't choose not to use ICANN if you want to use the Internet.
Ok, so why is this "non-election" issue a problem when it comes to ICANN, but when it comes to the non-elected people that decide what's part of the Linux kernel, then it's ok?
Both are deciding things for a community, and none are elected. Hypocritical to complain about one and not the other, don't you think?
I can tell you that no serious music (tech) lover will take this seriously.
Most musicians are not engineers, and vice/versa. (I happen to be both, so I'll be glad to translate). Musicians are interested in sound production, and everyone else in sound REproduction. These are two totally unrelated things. A guitar amp is SUPPOSED to add distortion and tonal coloration to the signal. In fact tests for frequency response and distortion as applied to Hi-Fidelity equipment mean nothing when done on a guitar amplifier. We WANT to modify the original sound. That's exactly what the designers at Martin were doing from day 1. An acoustic guitar has a resonating chamber, a sound hole, and a front and back surface that act as diaphragms. If we could plot the frequency response of a single string played back on a good acoustic guitar, we would see all kinds of nastiness. Violins... the same thing. Saxophones... ditto. Pianos... of course. The sound quality of an instrument, what we call timbre (pronounced tam'ber) is a highly desired characteristic. It's what separates the Steinways from the Wulitzer uprights and the Martins from the Hondos, you get the idea.
In an electric instrument, there are no resonating chambers to add flavor, so we add it with distortion instead. Distortion, the crux of the biscuit..... sometimes we want it, other times we don't. That's what always bugs engineers and audiophiles alike. When you're trying to REproduce an already distorted sound, you don't want to add any additional distortion from the amplifiers. And you certainly don't want to add transistor distortion products. Sometimes tube distortion on a clean signal is OK. What, did I just contradict myself? No way, Jose'.
Here's the point of this whole exercise:
TUBE AMPLIFIERS SOUND DIFFERENT FROM TRANSISTOR AMPLIFIERS PRIMARILY WHEN THEY DISTORT!
You can see it on a o'scope, hear it with your ears, and prove it on paper, so I know it's true. And here's why: Transistors and tubes use different principles of physics for operation. Valve amps (the original name for tube amplifiers) are basically voltage driven, so when they distort, even-order harmonics are produced (2nd, 4th, 6th, etc...) while transistor amps are current driven and produce odd-order harmonics (3rd, 5th, 7th, etc....) When you look at them both on an oscilloscope, the transistor amp flattens out the waveform, while the tube amp sort of makes a triangle wave. If we look at the inherent resonances of acoustic instruments we find that things like violins make lots of even order harmonics, while things like clarinets make lots of odd order harmonics.
Now, do we want our guitar to sound more like a violin, or a clarinet? Ah yes, the violin is much more "sweet" sounding. That's because the human brain likes and will tolerate much more even-order distortion than it will odd-order. One of the great distortion boxes in recent history is the Aphex Aural Exciter. The guys who designed this thing were marketing geniuses. The original units were sealed boxes with tamper proof hardware. They were leased to studios for final mix down. Once a few big artists like Linda Rondstat and Fleetwood Mac used and liked them, their place in audio gadgetry was assured. Of course they just use a clever method of picking out the fundamental note of say a human voice, making a little distortion, and adding it back to the original signal. This adds "warmth" or "depth" to the sound that can be, well, exciting. Our theory about odd vs. even distortion holds up because while the first units made lots of odd harmonics, several years later I remember an engineering release that hyped a new distortion circuit with increased the 2nd order distortions, while reducing the 3rd order products. Sound's very interesting doesn't it? They made a way to produce "tube" sound in a device that's basically used on vocals and strings. Again, the brain likes even-order distortion while finding odd-order somewhat irritating.
There's some tricks to be used for making distortion. You can get transistors that are voltage driven called MOSFETS. In my opinion, they can be made to sound like tubes if properly designed. Also, once a signal is digitized, it can be made to sound like anything in theory, if the proper algorithm is applied. The problem is, they've been working on the sound of a Strat going through a Marshall for a long time. It's hard to beat the sound of a well designed tube amp, but they're beginning to learn how. Some of the new Multi-EFX boxes like the Quadraverb do an amazing job at processing a guitar. But I've found that they still need to go through a speaker to smooth out the sound. (There's additional distortion, coloration and bandwidth limiting produced by all loudspeakers)
Now for all you guys and gals who like their transistor amps and fuzz boxes, there's nothing wrong with what you do. Sometimes odd-harmonics are needed to cut through the mix. I sometimes purposefully loop a guitar track back into an overdriven channel on my board just to "dirty" it up a little. It can make a bland lead really stand out at times. But it's just a matter of taste. I really like the even-order distorted, bandwidth limited, compressed sound of a traditional tube amp for guitar.
But REproduction is a different story. I've got preamps that are rated in parts-per-million distortion. I tweak all my tape decks for the flattest response possible, and work hard to get the best signal-to-noise ratio possible. That's because I like the final sound to be as faithful to the original as possible.
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It's all great fun, unless you, like me, happen to be one of the estimated 20 - 40 percent of people who suffer from "simulator sickness". "Simulator sickness" is the virtual world's cousin to motion sickness, and it takes the form of strained eyesight, nausea, vertigo, headaches and vomiting. Of those who suffer simulator sickness, more than half feel only a twinge when watching T2 3D at Universal Studios, or playing Quake 3. For the remainder - still a sizeable percentage - the symptoms are so bad they simply cannot watch these movies, or play these games.
It seems corporate america, and the bearded linux hippie game developers don't really care about the 17-20 percent of us who suffer badly. Somehow, this lack of concern feels familiar. I guess that's because I'm also a member of that other minority, left-handers, who are constantly ignored by most joystick and mouse manufacturers.
The real worry is that the 3D mania will spread not just throughout TV programming and movies, but to other software, and we'll start seeing 3D databases (in fact, they already exist), disk defragmenters and even operating systems. I hope it doesn't go so far.
I know many Slashdot readers love the 3D trend. As a (semi-dormant) programmer, I can't help but admire the realism of modern 3D graphics in movies, on TV, and in game engines. But I hope that developers wake up to the fact that they're making a sizeable slice of their potential customers sick to their stomachs.
It is true, that if you integrate this over the whole visible angle, you can easily evaluate the real angle in your head. However, we do not accept, nowadays, as it happened in the past, that our perceptive world is just the plain result of an encounter between a "naive" brain and the physical properties of a stimulus. Actually, perceptions differ, in quality, from those physical characteristics, because the brain extracts an information from the stimulus and interprets it, according to previous similar experiences.
We experiment electromagnetic waves, not as waves, but as images and colours. We experiment vibrating objects, not as vibrations, but as sounds. We experiment the beards of linux hippies, as they blow softly in the wind. We experiment chemical compounds dissolved in air or water, not as chemicals, but as specific smells and tastes. Colours, sounds, smells and tastes are products of our minds, built from sensory experiences.
They do not exist, as such, outside our brain. Actually, the universe is colourless, inodorous, insipid and silent. Therefore, we can now answer one of the questions of traditional philosophy : Does a sound exist when a tree falls in a forest, if nobody is present to hear it ? No, the fall of the tree only creates vibrations. The sound occurs if vibrations are perceived by a living being.
Information from the environment or from the body itself, is picked up by the sensory systems and utilized by the brain for perception, regulating corporeal movements and maintaining arousal. A sensory system starts to work when a stimulus, usually from the outside world, is detected by a sensitive neuron, the first sensorial receptor. This receptor converts the physical expression of the stimulus (light, sound, heat, pressure, taste, smell) into action potentials , which transforms it into electric signs.
From there, the signs are conducted to a nearby area of primary processing, where the initial characteristics of the information are elaborated, according to the nature of the original stimulus : colour, shape, distance, shade, etc. Then, the already modified information is transmitted to zones of secondary processing in the thalamus (if originated by olfactory stimuli, it is processed in the olfactory bulbs and then directly conducted to the medial area of the temporal lobe).
In the thalamic zones, older data, originated from both the cortex and the limbic system and containing similar experiences, link to the new information, in order to form a message, which is carried to its specific cortical centre. There, the meaning and importance of the new detected stimulus are determined by a conscious process of identification called perception.
Although two human beings share the same genetic and biological architecture and function, perhaps what I perceive as a dintinct color and smell is not exatly equal to the the color and smell you perceive. For example, you may like a certain Thinkgeek T-shirt with a pseudo-pithy statement about emacs on it. I may think it's lame, and that it clashes with your beard. We give the same name to this perception but we cannot know how they relate to the reality of the outside world. Perhaps we never will.
I've been working on a similar project, but for a different application. Our laboratory has concentrated on the design of the user interface and the software infrastructure. After experimenting with indoor AR systems in the early 1990s, we decided to build our first outdoor system in 1996 to find out how it might help a tourist exploring an unfamiliar environment. We called our initial prototype the Touring Machine (with apologies to Alan M. Turing, whose abstract Turing machine defines what computers are capable of computing). Because we wanted to minimize the constraints imposed by current technology, we combined the best components we could find to create a test bed whose capabilities are as close as we can make them to the more powerful machines we expect in the future. We avoided (as much as possible) practical concerns such as cost, size, weight and power consumption, confident that those problems will be overcome by hardware designers in the coming years. Trading off physical comfort for performance and ease of software development, we have built several generations of prototypes using external-frame backpacks. In general, we refer to these as mobile AR systems (or MARS, for short).
Our current system uses a Velcro-covered board and straps to hold many of the components: the laptop computer (with its 3-D graphics chip set and IEEE 802.11b wireless network card), trackers (a real-time kinematic GPS receiver, a GPS corrections receiver and the interface box for the hybrid orientation tracker), power (batteries and a regulated power supply), and interface boxes for the head-worn display and interaction devices. The total weight is about 11 kilograms (25 pounds). Antennas for the GPS receiver and the GPS corrections receiver are mounted at the top of the backpack frame, and the user wears the head-worn see-through display and its attached orientation tracker sensor. Our MARS prototypes allow users to interact with the display--to scroll, say, through a menu of choices superimposed on the user's view--by manipulating a wireless trackball or touch pad.
From the very beginning, our system has also included a handheld display (with stylus input) to complement the head-worn see-through display. This display is specially fitted so as not to interfere with the beards sported by many linux hippies. This hybrid user interface offers the benefits of both kinds of interaction: the user can see 3-D graphics on the see-through display and, at the same time, access additional information on the handheld display.
Just look at the stock market. Biotech is the future, my friend. In the new annual ranking of the Nasdaq 100 index--made up of the 100 largest nonfinancial companies ranked by market capitalization--seven of the 13 companies added were in biotech. The new entrants include such familiar names as ImClone Systems (IMCL ), Cephalon (CEPH ), Sepracor (SEPR ), and Invitrogen (IVGN ); they replace 13 faltering tech, telecom, and Internet outfits, including onetime stars CMGI (CMGI ), 3Com (COMS ), and Palm (PALM ). All told, biotech companies now represent 12.7% of the market capitalization of all the companies in the index, nearly triple the share they held only two years ago.
Sounds an awful lot like the Internet bubble all over again, I know. And in one sense, it is: The high market capitalization of many of these stocks suggests that investors are paying a lot in anticipation of future earnings that may never materialize. It costs tens of millions of dollars and can take five to 15 years to get a drug from the test tube to the clinic--and many drugs simply don't make it.
In several ways, however, this boom is different. The industry is more mature than it was a decade ago, when it last rose and fell. New alliances, new products, and new financing should combine to produce lasting growth in this once-turbulent field. There are some 300 biotech products in Phase III testing, the final stage of human experimentation before seeking Food & Drug Administration approval. The FDA issued 32 approvals for biotech drugs in 2000, a 45% increase over 1999. Sales of biotech products rose from $16.1 billion in 1999 to $18.1 billion in 2000, an increase of 12%. And there were 22 profitable biotechs in 1999, up from 17 in 1997. In addition, there is a distinct lack of bearded linux hippies in biotech, making it a much more attractive market segment to the general public.
Furthermore, unlike many Internet companies, the biotech companies are targeting clear and existing markets. Many Internet companies devised products without knowing whether there were markets for them. Others, such as Yahoo!, aimed for ad revenues that proved far smaller than hoped. Biotech companies don't have that problem: A drug for arthritis or cancer, say, has a huge market. If their drugs work, the biotechs will make money.
Excitement in biotech will likely get another boost when the climate for initial public offerings improves. There are 50-100 biotech companies waiting to go public, says Oronsky. That's where casual investors should be especially careful. Some of today's most promising biotechs will undoubtedly fall short of the hype. Unfortunately, that's one way this boom won't differ much from the last.
What is indisputable, whether you blame the courts, the legislators, or the lawyers, is the fact that our system of governance can't figure out how to ban what everyone knows should be banned. This should be shocking for people of common sense. And it should be embarrassing to us as citizens.
Look: I understand that censorship is the sugar in the gas tank of our political culture, it makes everything stutter and shimmy and eventually grind to a halt.
But, it seems to me, this also reveals the prissy, cowardly, and -- most of all -- spoiled nature of our political leaders. Most arguments about government control have a certain logic to them. We allow the most stuff, the stuff out on the periphery of social and legal behavior for the simple reason that if we allow the stuff on the fringe, the freedoms at the core of our constitutional order will be preserved. For people who zealously defend our Second Amendment rights, this means arguing about the right to carry concealed weapons into churches, schools, airports, wherever.
Abortion rights and pro-life activists follow the same logic. Not long ago the NARAL crowd wouldn't even concede that killing a live baby -- after the umbilical cord was cut! -- constituted murder. Pro-lifers argue that a tiny clump of cells has rights.
Whether you agree with the substance of their positions, the logic is generally consistent. Indeed, even if you believe -- as I do -- that the Founding Fathers would have burst into laughter at the idea that a school couldn't have a nondenominational prayer before graduation, these slippery-slope arguments still have to be taken seriously.
But this overly mechanistic logic careens into wild, self-serving hypocrisy when it comes to the issue of censorship. For some reason the editorial pages, Congress, hordes of academics, and, of course, Hollywood types, honestly, truly believe that the state cannot proscribe images of women getting it on with horses in public libraries for fear we'll skid down the slippery slope to tyranny. At the same time, however, they fervently believe that the federal government can regulate the content of political ads leading up to an election.
This throws out the whole doctrine of protecting the fringe to safeguard our essential freedoms. If you think some talentless boob who defecates in a tuna can and calls it art is the canary in the coalmine of our free-speech rights, fine. Or if you feel that some hacked-out code from a bearded linux hippie that lives in his parents' basement is speech, wonderful. But, if you believe that, I am at a loss as to how you can tolerate a federal government that attaches all sorts of strings to the fundamental liberties the Founders considered essential to a free society.
Lamar Alexander noted a long time ago that if our current laws existed at America's Founding, Tom Paine would have been required to register "Common Sense" with the FEC.
For examle, in its decision overturning the federal anti-child-porn law, the Court answered critics that some images of pedophilia might entice or encourage would-be pedophiles or child pornographers, the Court replied, "the prospect of a crime...by itself does not justify laws suppressing protected speech."
This is the same Court that regularly holds that "the appearance of corruption" is sufficient justification for draconian regulations of political speech at the heart of our republic. The "appearance of corruption" is a standard which acknowledges no crime has been committed at all. Things just look corrupt because some people are too stupid or too lazy to discern the truth or too cynical to believe the truth when they see it. Don't get me wrong, of course there's corruption in politics -- though vastly less than at any other time in American history -- but saying that citizens spending money on speech creates the "appearance of corruption" -- and therefore it's worth regulating -- is an insult to our collective intelligence.
The reason why this is important is spelled out in Jefferson's own writings: His assumptions are based on the fact that you can not control what people do with information that you give to them. If you hand someone a book, they can transcribe it. If you give someone a physical invention, they can disassemble it. But if you give them a new form of media, say, a song on a copy-protected CD, and they can no longer listen to it except on approved devices that they cannot copy from, why should the government provide the same protection to you? The record companies and movie studios want to have their cake and eat it too. They want traditional copyright protection, technological copyright protection, and a government guarantee of technological copyright protection. They want to deprive all those bearded Linux hippies their DeCSS, so they can't watch bootleg Buffy the Vanpire Slayer DVDs in their parents' basement. But if they have technological protection, then why should the government give them traditional protection? It was only there because information was hard to protect as property.
How far are we going to let the copyrighters go? We need to remind people that copyright, like most laws in the US, is a balance between two forces, and the scale should not be tipped too far to one side.
I've already been operating a 12VDC powered cellular jamming system in my truck for over a year. It is simple to make (just a PA driver and some circuitry to generate a null signal). With a 10W amp, it saturates the entire 800 MHz and 1.9 GHz cellular bands with an active carrier, making it impossible for other phones to reach the cell towers. It's about the size of a phone handset. My coworker and I found the range to vary from 80 yards to 110 yards. I am presently dumping the signal out of my own cellular phone antenna, though I have considered using a rotatable omnidirectional antenna to target particular vehicles, but this would be quite conspicuous; a bearded linux hippie would most likely call me in to the Highway patrol, so I have to stick with the smaller iteration. Yes, it's illegal, but how many cops are searching cars for cell phone jammers?
Oh, crap. I forgot to include the href while typing it out. Oh well.
It certainly appears from this Supreme Court opinion, written over a century ago, that the US patent office was already out of control. Sad to say, things have only gotten worse. Thanks largely to the League for Programming Freedom (yes, I'm a member), software patents have gotten at least some of the notoriety they deserve. But the more patents I read, the more I come to the conclusion that things are just as bad in the more traditional hardware areas. It seems that every day somebody finds a patent that just makes everyone's jaws drop open in utter astonishment. Here's one I just discovered: US patent 5,443,036 covers the use of a laser pointer in playing with a cat. Check it out; this is not a joke, unless you consider (as I do) the entire US patent system to be one very sick joke.
To their credit, in 1994 the Patent Office put out a call for comments on "obviousness" standards for patents, asking if perhaps they have been inappropriately lowered. (Is the Pope Polish? Are your taxes too high? Does a bear...well, you know.) Here are the comments I filed in response. Naturally, they were ignored.
Recently a Slashdot reader hit on a brilliant analogy that ties it all together for me, and I'm not even a bearded linux hippie: patents, he said, are merely a form of industrial pollution. After all, both pollution and patents are economic externalities that can enrich individuals or companies at the expense of society as a whole. And both are often defended as economic necessities. At one time, society celebrated the belching black clouds of smoke and soot from steam locomotives, power plants and steel mills as signs of progress and economic prosperity, but this changed. I fervently hope that I live to see a similar sea change in public attitudes toward the patent system.
Getting past the protection is only the first step. The next problem is the distribution. Homemade servers have lots of file space because the pirate put his own hard drive in, but bandwidth is low, because his connection is cable (or worse). Free internet hosting has a great deal of bandwidth at your disposal, but the pirate is generally limited by the amount of space in which he can put files. This causes him to make multiple accounts under pseudonyms to store all the files. IRC channels and Usenet are often posted with links to the locations of the files, as are the pirates websites. Distribution is sometimes active, sometimes passive, depending upon the pirate's personality and motives.
On the note of motives, back to the idea that for some it is prestige. One of the goals with pirating, in the underground, is to get a pirated copy on the internet and widely available on the first day that the movie is released. Hence, a 0-Day movie is a pirated copy that was released the same day as the legal copy.
The internet is without question the largest mode for wide scale piracy. But one often overlooked area of piracy is that of person-to-person piracy. Most don't consider this as piracy, because the person is generally a friend, and as such we see it as a favor, rather than as stealing. It skips our mind that it takes away revenue from the software producers. In such a form of piracy, we lend our Installation CD to a friend to either copy or install from, and then we get it back (or perhaps we get a copy from a friend). Person-to-person copying often goes on to result in commercial copying (copying for profit). This mode is often difficult for bearded linux hippies, as they are often without friends.
I must say that despite piracy being a bane to the movie companies, there is honor among thieves. I've noted that many sites actually encourage those who download to purchase the movie if it is good. They say to support the companies, which indicates that they at least know the repercussions of their actions. Another one of the major repercussions of piracy is the spread of viruses. A little while back, CIH (Chernobyl virus) was spread rather widely through inclusion in pirated software, as it infected a few of the major underground software centers.
All in all, I do not condone wanton piracy. However, I must take the stance that it must exist. Not only from the stance that order cannot exist without anarchy (sounds cheesy), but from another stance. One's muscle does not develop without resistance. So also does the evolution of software protection not occur without resistance to it.
This is kind of like the sysadmin where I work. His head is hollow, but he can still process BSODs.
They should pick an OS and go with it, preferably what's best for the person that has to use it every day, regardless of cost (or in some cases, taking total end cost into consideration) I'm all for standards. Standards solve issues ranging from product compatibility to addressing consumer safety and health concerns. Standards also simplify product development and reduce non-value-adding costs thereby increasing a user's ability to compare competing products. They also are fundamental building blocks for international trade. Only through the use of standards can the requirements of interconnectivity and interoperability be assured and the credibility of new products and new markets verified enabling the rapid implementation of technology. It's too bad so many of you bearded linux hippies insist on doing things your own kludged-together way.
Is this laser powered airplane really a solution? All these so-called 'solutions' overlook the fact that energy sources are not the problem. The people who live in the third world - and that is most people - do not have anything like the amount of energy consumption that we do. Their low life expectancy and ill health is due to the fact that all the good land is taken up by western corporations to overfeed us, not because of a lack of televisions or electric toothbrushes. These people are living proof that the power consumption of the rich world is totally unnecessary. All these 'renewable' energy sources are not solutions at all, they are irrelevant to the problem.
The major problem that this planet has today is the incredible capacity a minority of humans has to consume ever increasing quantities of everything. This is the problem, yet it is never addressed; never even recognised. Instead the problem is seen as one of continuing to consume as much as possible; of finding alternative things to consume when the current consumables run out. The green gurus keep parroting out the same old crap about treading lightly on the earth, and their followers keep lapping it all up, sending in their subscriptions, buying the videos, going to the meetings, writing their letters, recycling their ideologies and reciting their platitudes - anything rather than face up to the fact that the party is over and hard times are on the way.
We are running out of slaves. There is a world shortage of slave material and the rich idle West is too deeply habituated to the 'good' life to see that it is time to face up to that reality. Never mind all the other species, we don't even provide the whole human population with this level of consumption, most of the rest of humanity are slaves of the west too! The clever slave driver will not drive the slaves too hard; they are no use to him dead. We have not even been clever. Now we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. We have used up most of the earth's available stored energy, and are laying into the latest deliveries. The soon-to-come shift into large scale plundering of this energy will further accellerate the already alarming rate of devastation. That these 'solutions' are being touted as 'green' is the ultimate example of Orwellian doublespeak. These people claim to be looking towards a new future - as indeed they are, with the same rapacious eye that the first colonialists viewed the 'new' world of 500 years ago.
So what is the solution then? All we need to do is to look at the problem: Consumption. It is very, very simple. We must reduce consumption. Now. Not in 2002 when the UN sets some kind of target. Not next year when the government raises some kind of tax a bit. What kind of lifeforms are we who need some kind of financial incentive to save ourselves from oblivion? Are we really so powerless that we can't stop buying things until the government tells us we have to? Is it really the government's fault that millions of supposedly free-thinking individuals go shopping in vast depersonalised hypermarkets miles from their homes on new bypasses built specially for that purpose?
We must stop buying these things. We can't extricate ourselves from the sick parasitic system overnight - the grip is too tight, real alternatives either don't exist or are on the way out and very fragile. So this must be our priority. We must seek out those places, co-ops, small grocers etc and support them, find other people and work with them in the hope that we will enhance each other's efforts. The alternatives may be difficult to get but this is of no relevance, if an alternative exists it is the thing to do, regardless of inconvenience. If no alternative exists this is usually a non-essential item.
(It is said that the main reason that community supported agriculture has not taken off is because the corporations are opposed to it. Could it perhaps be because the vast majority of the population are too apathetic to get up and find out about these things?)
You must stop working for the system, as well as contributing to the infrastructure that maintains that system, whether that necessitates the removal of your open source code from the public domain so large conglomerates cannot benefit of it, or ceasing from buying stupid T-shirts from ThinkGeek with pseudo-pithy statements on the front that do nothing save corrupt the environment further and/or prove that you're a bearded, long haired linux geek that lives in your parents' basement. We must do this regardless of the personal hardship this may seem to entail. This is a personal thing. There is no set course, we must all find our own and help each other. No leader will be needed, we must take back our self-respect and stop relying on cult figures and green gurus, who are obviously not up to the task. We don't need any experts to tell us what to do, we pretend that we need them because we don't really want to do it.
Unfortunately, history is a good example of why problems like this are usually cancerous in nature, and require a violent, unjustifiable (and yet completely justifiable, at a macroscopic level) response.
Of course. We must stop buying these things. We can't extricate ourselves from the sick parasitic system overnight - the grip is too tight, real alternatives either don't exist or are on the way out and very fragile. So this must be our priority. We must seek out those places, co-ops, small grocers etc and support them, find other people and work with them in the hope that we will enhance each other's efforts. The alternatives may be difficult to get but this is of no relevance, if an alternative exists it is the thing to do, regardless of inconvenience. If no alternative exists this is usually a non-essential item.
(It is said that the main reason that community supported agriculture has not taken off is because the corporations are opposed to it. Could it perhaps be because the vast majority of the population are too apathetic to get up and find out about these things?)
You must stop working for the system, as well as contributing to the infrastructure that maintains that system, whether that necessitates the removal of your open source code from the public domain so large conglomerates cannot benefit of it, or ceasing from buying stupid T-shirts from ThinkGeek with pseudo-pithy statements on the front that do nothing save corrupt the environment further and/or prove that you're a bearded, long haired linux geek that lives in your parents' basement. We must do this regardless of the personal hardship this may seem to entail. This is a personal thing. There is no set course, we must all find our own and help each other. No leader will be needed, we must take back our self-respect and stop relying on cult figures and green gurus, who are obviously not up to the task. We don't need any experts to tell us what to do, we pretend that we need them because we don't really want to do it.
Stop consuming.
It seems bad, but if we do it, maybe we will start living again.
Is this cell charger really a solution? All these so-called 'solutions' overlook the fact that energy sources are not the problem. The people who live in the third world - and that is most people - do not have anything like the amount of energy consumption that we do. Their low life expectancy and ill health is due to the fact that all the good land is taken up by western corporations to overfeed us, not because of a lack of televisions or electric toothbrushes. These people are living proof that the power consumption of the rich world is totally unnecessary. All these 'renewable' energy sources are not solutions at all, they are irrelevant to the problem.
The major problem that this planet has today is the incredible capacity a minority of humans has to consume ever increasing quantities of everything. This is the problem, yet it is never addressed; never even recognised. Instead the problem is seen as one of continuing to consume as much as possible; of finding alternative things to consume when the current consumables run out. The green gurus keep parroting out the same old crap about treading lightly on the earth, and their followers keep lapping it all up, sending in their subscriptions, buying the videos, going to the meetings, writing their letters, recycling their ideologies and reciting their platitudes - anything rather than face up to the fact that the party is over and hard times are on the way.
We are running out of slaves. There is a world shortage of slave material and the rich idle West is too deeply habituated to the 'good' life to see that it is time to face up to that reality. Never mind all the other species, we don't even provide the whole human population with this level of consumption, most of the rest of humanity are slaves of the west too! The clever slave driver will not drive the slaves too hard; they are no use to him dead. We have not even been clever. Now we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. We have used up most of the earth's available stored energy, and are laying into the latest deliveries. The soon-to-come shift into large scale plundering of this energy will further accellerate the already alarming rate of devastation. That these 'solutions' are being touted as 'green' is the ultimate example of Orwellian doublespeak. These people claim to be looking towards a new future - as indeed they are, with the same rapacious eye that the first colonialists viewed the 'new' world of 500 years ago.
So what is the solution then? All we need to do is to look at the problem: Consumption. It is very, very simple. We must reduce consumption. Now. Not in 2002 when the UN sets some kind of target. Not next year when the government raises some kind of tax a bit. What kind of lifeforms are we who need some kind of financial incentive to save ourselves from oblivion? Are we really so powerless that we can't stop buying things until the government tells us we have to? Is it really the government's fault that millions of supposedly free-thinking individuals go shopping in vast depersonalised hypermarkets miles from their homes on new bypasses built specially for that purpose?
How come when someone posts unimpressive, uninteresting, tiresome blogs about their day at work/school/home, they receive an abundance of comments for that blog, but when someone posts a real good thought-provoking blog, the number of comments left for it barely even exceeds zero? Do people feel intimidated? Or do they just have no brain and cannot be bothered to come up with a response? It is nice to see that a few people take some initiative and comment, as small as that number of people may be. Except slashdot, where it's all goatse and bearded linux hippies.
Linux usres should sue Hollywood for the same thing, so OSS doesn't get the DMCA smack-down sometime in the not-so-distant future.
Unfortunately, given that you corduroy-wearing bearded linux hippies can't even get it together for a coherent boycott, I doubt a class-action suit will surface anytime soon.
In Elementary School, we played Wolfenstein 3D, Nibbles, Gorillas, Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, Carmen Sandiego and a whole bunch of pirated Apple II games in various classes.
Wolfenstein 3D? Wow, you're pretty young. In elementary school, all we had were Apple IIe's with Oregon trail.
Parents weren't upset about the guns in that game then, but I guess guns in videogames weren't so much of a media ratings-booster back then either.
If the school has sufficient funds for computers of this calliber, then perhaps it has spent funds poorly. Give the teachers a raise. Learning typing, word processors, spreadsheets, or programming requires far less capable computers.
I would say that if a school doesn't have computers better than these requirements, then it spends funds poorly:
Starcraft/Broodwar:
Windows 95, 98 or NT 4.0
Pentium 90MHz or higher
16MB RAM
80MB of free hard disk space
DirectX compatible SVGA video card
2x CD-ROM drive
Mechwarrior IV:
Pentium 2 300MHz processor
Windows 95/98/ME/2000
64Mb ram
650Mb hard drive space
8xCd rom
Age of Empires:
Windows 95/98
166Mhz Processor
32MB Ram
4X CD-ROM Drive
200-300MB free HD space
16-bit PCI/AGP Graphics Card
16-bit Sound Blaster compatible Sound Card with Speakers
256 Colour Monitor supporting high colour(16-bit) at 800x640 resolution
If these "hackers" are anything like the Linux people I know, Norway is screwed. You know what I'm talking about, they do the following:
/. that you won't sound like a total idiot if you just toe the party line.
.iso that doesn't exist.
/etc by hand. When newbie leaves, continue to wonder why Linux on the desktop is taking so long.
.9.x for you to REALLY use it. You preach that Galeon is the best browser, even though it only loads .5 seconds faster than regular Mozilla.
a) Pretend Windows doesn't do certain things. ("You can run DNS with Windows?" "Do I need Trumpet Winsock with Windows XP?")
b) Downplay everything that sucks about Linux every chance you get. (TT fonts are "blurry", and "hurt my eyes" - I like my jagged fonts, I think linux fonts are fine!)
c) Research every new Windows feature and figure out how *nix got it first. Then make it sound like the feature has been necessary for mission critical applications and servers, and that only recently has MS "figured it out". If a third party app accomplishes this in Windows, that doesn't count, even though your whole Linux distro is nothing more than a collection of third party apps to begin with.
d) When Linux gets a new feature that Windows has had forever, downplay the feature. ("Yeah, TTF fonts, we got them now, if it'll shut you up, now that I have them, I don't see what the big deal is.")
e) If anything in Linux doesn't have that feature, it is not important. ("Noone uses that junk in Office anyway")
f) You switched to Debian, but you still hate Red Hat because the copy Red Hat you tried 6 years ago sucked.
g) Pray everytime you try a new USB device - ditto for adding new hardware AFTER you've installed linux. Chicken out and use the PS/2 adapter, blame the hardware manufacturer.
h) Blame X11 for every graphical performance measure in your subsystem, even though you have no idea what you're talking about. Complain that X needs to be scrapped for something like Berlin, even though you've never even been to the Berlin website. But everyone says X11 sucks, you just don't know why, but enough people say it on
i) Doesn't matter if you install Gnome or KDE, your menu's are going to have 42 text editors, but not one decent word processor.
j) Find a reason to hate GCC 2.96 even though you've never compiled anything in your life.
k) Doesn't matter if you install Gnome or KDE, because you're going to like Evolution, Konqueror, Kate, GVIM, Gnapster, and Koffice. you're going to like Gnome's applets, but the KDE panel. KDE let's you put a seperate background in each virtual desktop, but Gnome lets you mouse from desktop to desktop. Mozilla looks out of place in both. The one or two motif apps you use make you want to punch your monitor. You decide it's impossible to go with a 100% desktop either way or the other, so you say fuck it and just install them both and run twice the libraries that you need to. Now nothing is consistent, your themes don't match, and now you've got twice as much bloat in your system. When some asks you what you run, you say "GNOME, KDE sucks!" or "KDE, GNOME sucks!" even though you know damn well you don't care.
l) You're too lazy to learn a new window manager, but when another *nix guy asks what you use, you say "FWVM, with nothing but xterms, that's all X is good for."
m) If it doesn't run well on your Pentium II 350, it's slow and bloated.
n) Ten years from now, if it doesn't run well on your Pentium II 350, it's slow and bloated.
o) Blame Red Hat for attempting to destroy/take over the linux community, all the while searching for that SuSE
p) You hate Microsoft because Windows cost $200 and Office costs $400, and it's too expensive to be affordable and how you're poor blah blah, but you're too cheap to send $10 to debian.org/Mandrake Club.
q) When you compare features between Windows and Linux, you compare Windows 95's features to the latest CVS builds of GNOME/KDE.
r) Make fun of DLL Hell in windows, even though you know damn well you --force your RPMs all the time.
s) Your first answer to a new user in #linux is "recompile your kernel", even though all he needs to do is double-click the little icon his distro gave him. When someone else points that out, complain that real men edit
t) You wait for someone to ask how to install something so you can say "apt-get install foo", just so you can start on your 25 minute tirade on why his distribution sucks compared to Debian.
u) You believe recompiling everything from source will give you a substantial performance benefit, even though you probably just recompiled that app with the default flags, but you didn't know any better. If it doesn't compile, see GCC2.96 comment above.
v) When above user posts problems with GCC2.96, link to http://www.bero.org/gcc296.html and flame user for trying to compile "shitty code", even though a week ago, you were doing the same exact thing.
w) You've been saying that Mozilla has been your only browser since M18, though you know that it took until
x) You hated Macintosh your entire life until you saw the bash console on a Mac at CompUSA. You feel kindred with MacOSX fans, but hate Apple because they won't let you rip off their user interface.
The difference lies in the fact that you can choose what OS/Kernel/distribution you want to use, but you can't choose not to use ICANN if you want to use the Internet.
Oh Really? Are you sure?
Is it something slashdot, as an organized body could file complains to?
You're joking, right?
Ok, so why is this "non-election" issue a problem when it comes to ICANN, but when it comes to the non-elected people that decide what's part of the Linux kernel, then it's ok?
Both are deciding things for a community, and none are elected. Hypocritical to complain about one and not the other, don't you think?
I only know about RF amps, and assumed it was the same...and went brain dead on the grid/plate thing.
/. reader to know that. Your response is what I would expect.
I wouldn't expect the typical
I can tell you that no serious music (tech) lover will take this seriously.
Most musicians are not engineers, and vice/versa. (I happen to be both, so I'll be glad to translate). Musicians are interested in sound production, and everyone else in sound REproduction. These are two totally unrelated things. A guitar amp is SUPPOSED to add distortion and tonal coloration to the signal. In fact tests for frequency response and distortion as applied to Hi-Fidelity equipment mean nothing when done on a guitar amplifier. We WANT to modify the original sound. That's exactly what the designers at Martin were doing from day 1. An acoustic guitar has a resonating chamber, a sound hole, and a front and back surface that act as diaphragms. If we could plot the frequency response of a single string played back on a good acoustic guitar, we would see all kinds of nastiness. Violins... the same thing. Saxophones... ditto. Pianos... of course. The sound quality of an instrument, what we call timbre (pronounced tam'ber) is a highly desired characteristic. It's what separates the Steinways from the Wulitzer uprights and the Martins from the Hondos, you get the idea.
In an electric instrument, there are no resonating chambers to add flavor, so we add it with distortion instead. Distortion, the crux of the biscuit..... sometimes we want it, other times we don't. That's what always bugs engineers and audiophiles alike. When you're trying to REproduce an already distorted sound, you don't want to add any additional distortion from the amplifiers. And you certainly don't want to add transistor distortion products. Sometimes tube distortion on a clean signal is OK. What, did I just contradict myself? No way, Jose'.
Here's the point of this whole exercise:
TUBE AMPLIFIERS SOUND DIFFERENT FROM TRANSISTOR AMPLIFIERS PRIMARILY WHEN THEY DISTORT!
You can see it on a o'scope, hear it with your ears, and prove it on paper, so I know it's true. And here's why: Transistors and tubes use different principles of physics for operation. Valve amps (the original name for tube amplifiers) are basically voltage driven, so when they distort, even-order harmonics are produced (2nd, 4th, 6th, etc...) while transistor amps are current driven and produce odd-order harmonics (3rd, 5th, 7th, etc....) When you look at them both on an oscilloscope, the transistor amp flattens out the waveform, while the tube amp sort of makes a triangle wave. If we look at the inherent resonances of acoustic instruments we find that things like violins make lots of even order harmonics, while things like clarinets make lots of odd order harmonics.
Now, do we want our guitar to sound more like a violin, or a clarinet? Ah yes, the violin is much more "sweet" sounding. That's because the human brain likes and will tolerate much more even-order distortion than it will odd-order. One of the great distortion boxes in recent history is the Aphex Aural Exciter. The guys who designed this thing were marketing geniuses. The original units were sealed boxes with tamper proof hardware. They were leased to studios for final mix down. Once a few big artists like Linda Rondstat and Fleetwood Mac used and liked them, their place in audio gadgetry was assured. Of course they just use a clever method of picking out the fundamental note of say a human voice, making a little distortion, and adding it back to the original signal. This adds "warmth" or "depth" to the sound that can be, well, exciting. Our theory about odd vs. even distortion holds up because while the first units made lots of odd harmonics, several years later I remember an engineering release that hyped a new distortion circuit with increased the 2nd order distortions, while reducing the 3rd order products. Sound's very interesting doesn't it? They made a way to produce "tube" sound in a device that's basically used on vocals and strings. Again, the brain likes even-order distortion while finding odd-order somewhat irritating.
There's some tricks to be used for making distortion. You can get transistors that are voltage driven called MOSFETS. In my opinion, they can be made to sound like tubes if properly designed. Also, once a signal is digitized, it can be made to sound like anything in theory, if the proper algorithm is applied. The problem is, they've been working on the sound of a Strat going through a Marshall for a long time. It's hard to beat the sound of a well designed tube amp, but they're beginning to learn how. Some of the new Multi-EFX boxes like the Quadraverb do an amazing job at processing a guitar. But I've found that they still need to go through a speaker to smooth out the sound. (There's additional distortion, coloration and bandwidth limiting produced by all loudspeakers)
Now for all you guys and gals who like their transistor amps and fuzz boxes, there's nothing wrong with what you do. Sometimes odd-harmonics are needed to cut through the mix. I sometimes purposefully loop a guitar track back into an overdriven channel on my board just to "dirty" it up a little. It can make a bland lead really stand out at times. But it's just a matter of taste. I really like the even-order distorted, bandwidth limited, compressed sound of a traditional tube amp for guitar.
But REproduction is a different story. I've got preamps that are rated in parts-per-million distortion. I tweak all my tape decks for the flattest response possible, and work hard to get the best signal-to-noise ratio possible. That's because I like the final sound to be as faithful to the original as possible.