Don't ever reply to spammers. I know they all claim to be maintaining opt-out addresses according to some vague US law, but they still lie: if the address bounces it's because somebody killed their account first (I've killed seven personally, which is not a lot) and you're lucky it bounced. You're lucky it bounced because if it does _not_ bounce, rather than being removed, you are being put on a special list entitled 'Victims who are live human beings who read their email', which is sold to other spammers for a higher price. Been getting more spam since you've been doing this have you? Take heart in the idea that the email bounces you _have_ been getting are dead spammer accounts. -postmaster@airwindows.com
*g* Seriously. It's coming out in PCI, I want that because I'm hanging onto my nice old powermac for a while. I know _exactly_ what to do with all that texture bandwidth- multitexturing babeee! *g* forget polys. You'll end up with really boringly textured well sculpted shapes- geometry is NOT the weak link. I've appreciated the 3dfx strong points even through the drawbacks of 16/22 bit color- I've seen the transparencies and shading and tonal values looking better at 16 bit than the competition at 32 (not always, but in a number of cases, and always due to the 32 bit card drawing washed out tonal values). Now that 3dfx is ready to do the card with antialiasing that works with all my existing games, and with so much texture memory and fill rate that you could use it for fscking _filmmaking_ without it breathing hard *hehe*, well, I'm there. Build it, I'll buy it. My voodoo2 needs replacing, and I've never been more pleased that I didn't start planning to try and get a GeForce or something. The output of this card _will_ look better than GeForce, by an order of magnitude. That's a prediction. That's also assuming a lot of multitexturing, but hey- if it's good enough for ILM, it's good enough for _you_;)
Don't think 3200x2400x32x60: think 1024x768x32x60... ...with five specular highlights from five dynamic lightsources, flickering of torchlight on faces and more sharply from metal surfaces, and every barrel or crate or object slightly different from having each one overlay about three slightly different 'dent' or 'dirt' layers. I take it you don't read Cinefex;) if you did, you'd know that this is _precisely_ what ILM did to make the battledroids photorealistic- they were all identical models, but you had the texturemap for the robot, and then five different overlay textures putting different patterns of dirt and wear onto the droids- which were applied in combinations, of course. 'Cinematic' means impressive- means multitexturing that would _choke_ a GeForce (or indeed a Voodoo3, but that's a given). It means the modellers will still be caring about polys, but the _skinners_ can go HOG WILD. Surfacing is not merely choosing a really big texturemap- talk to rendering people- overlaying translucencies and transparent textures is when you start getting really startlingly impressive effects. This throws the door _wide_ open for really amazing stuff. Polys aren't everything (it should be OK on polys anyhow, but polys aren't everything).
Given that the practices going on during the trial were equivalent to obstruction of justice, what is the best case that you could make to argue that Bill Gates, who with Steve Ballmer sets the tone for Microsoft behavior, should be charged with obstruction of justice, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and should at the least be forbidden from running _any_ 'baby Microsofts' and at most locked up for a good long time? This assumes that Gates' personality and those of his top henchment sets the tone for not only Microsoft, but for the industry as a whole (which I think is a reasonable statement), and that the chilling effect on innovation and the choking of normal functioning of the industry can be in part attributed to the personality everyone is now worshipping and trying to emulate. Given that the result of this is wrong and unhealthy, why is there so rarely the view that 'Gee, businesswise this guy is a sociopath, mugger and a criminal', why is there so little interest in _removing_ him from any position of power running companies, and what would be a good way to argue this point? Personally, I would say the _greatest_ harm from the monopoly is the brainwashing of the entire world to believe that Bill Gates is someone to be emulated and rewarded, rather than the unprincipled business equivalent of a Mafia chieftain, someone who should be locked up, not lionized. That's _personally_, again: I think the man is _personally_ a sociopath and should not be allowed to run businesses, much less given control of one of the baby-MSes of a breakup. So, how do you make that stick?
Disney's people broke just about _all_ the ground in cel animation. Hell, Disney was doing 'layers' like you get in Photoshop in 1937!!! I'm talking about the famous Multiplane Camera- just about every aspect of this multimillion dollar monster required massive innovation in every way. To behave as if Disney was equivalent to a Gates is very stupid. He was the guy pushing for all this. That said, the Disney cartoons (especially the comics!) put across a _very_ strange worldview, and the ones intended for foreign countries actually have capitalist propaganda put into them (really!) or at least had- dunno if Disney still makes those comics. Particularly at the height of the Cold War, Disney comic books were outright 'a war effort' trying to subvert other societies. That's fair to mention. But don't be dissin' the incredible dedication and technological innovation of pre-WWII Disney! (or indeed after- Disney pioneered the Xerox photocopying process _for_ _cels_, as used in 101 Dalmatians and Robin Hood, and pioneered a version with _grey_ lines for The Rescuers).
I didn't mean specifically _Seattle_, so much as the notion that Microsoft basically owns the state government (bought and paid for) and would like to see state police going after people flaming MS on usenet- and that this would be an unreasonable action to take, but might seem acceptable to some. Unless you're one of the government representatives making excuses for what Microsoft has always done and will continue to do, it was _not_ a veiled insult at you. It was a rather unveiled insult at the integrity of Washington State legislators and representatives >;) really, I have a great deal of contempt for these ayn-rand-thumping maniacs. What is best for Microsoft IS NOT best for the people. I'm sorry you mistakenly were offended at a remark that was not directed at you- suppose I should have been blunter. I'm not sorry about hinting that MS would love to get a tame senator or cop to try arresting people for 'slander', because I am sure they'd love to do that if they had any chance of succeeding. Perhaps they'd like to start on me, by banning me from Slashdot for expressing my opinion of, not things they have done, but what I believe they'd like to do;)
I will say this: one, this is a Java emulator of the PDP-1 and not just a game written in Java. It's like a Java version of MAME only for Spacewar. I'll also say this: I'm trying it in netscape 4.08, and I know that the Netscape jvm bites. Makes me sorry I stopped using iCab;) That said: ack! I'm running a 300Mhz G3 processor here. I can run Unreal Tournament without it being too much of a slideshow. To have _spacewar_ being unplayably slow and totally unresponsive is just disgusting. Blech! And yet I am delighted to have seen it- I read 'Hackers' too but I'd never seen the actual game. It was worth the hassle to actually see those little shapes and know that this was the game that started it all:) I downloaded the class file in hopes of running it on a better JVM sometime. I freaked out when it was only 4,615 bytes, sure that I'd got the wrong file. Then did a doubletake... _wait_ a minute... *grin* *hehehehe* funny what this industry does to your sense of proportion, isn't it?
And it's in Seattle, too. Wouldn't it be cute if anyone flaming Microsoft was prohibited from posting to usenet on trumped-up grounds of _slander_? At the same time, I have to admit that usenet communities can be disrupted by 'speech'. For instance, see Russ Albery's Rant, which relates to disruption of newsgroups by spam and automated spewing by computer programs. There are also groups such as the meowers and alt.syntax.tactical which primarily intend to disrupt communication, and I've seen important useful groups rendered unusable by such attacks. I would say that as long as the balance of the legal situation is even, it'll be OK. I could really _support_ legal banning of HTML newsposting on the grounds of MIME executables being attached;) and it would be interesting and strange to see intentional attempts to _disrupt_ a functioning newsgroup as actionable. There's a point at which the frontier justice of Usenet fails to be helpful, and IMHO some of the meowers and spammers and such go over the line. You can get a spammer's account yanked (I've killed seven, which isn't even that much), but I don't think there's ever been much chance of getting someone's account pulled for trying to kill a newsgroup. That could be changing. Lastly I would question the sense of considering 'death threats' (short of Secret Service involvement in Presidential ones, which is their job), considering that many Usenet kooks are mentally about 12 and certain that they bear no responsibility for their wild statements- and considering that there are entire groups, such as alt.flame, in which the _point_ is to cause as much verbal damage as possible. In this context, assuming 'public community' rules is absurd, and counterintuitive. Do you arrest a Bible Belt evangelist for intentionally trying to disrupt alt.satanism or alt.wiccan or alt.atheism? Maybe you'd better, if you're going to be imposing penalties for disrupting Usenet at all.
Write your own and open it. If you don't like that then you can play around with mine (currently some innovative terrain generation tricks combined with techniques for POV-Ray rendering), but frankly it would be best if you wrote your own. Do the work, and free it. Trying to talk a bunch of IP holders into opening their stuff just because it's a good idea is a very hard sell. It's the whole 'stone soup' concept- you have to start with _something_. What I have may not be much, I think it has potential- anyone who thinks it is crap is invited to GPL something better, please >;) I would like to see a movie studio dedicated to open content, so people could focus on the stories they are telling. Desktop movie production is coming so soon, and it will be as much a revolution as the cassette multitrack home studio- and there are so many people working on things (such as computer game design and graphic effects) that could easily be applied to home moviemaking. There are GIF animation tools and computer image compositing tools available that do the same thing as the multimillion dollar Disney Multiplane camera used for Disney's greatest animated features. Rather than going begging to effects houses, why don't we just arrange it so they end up coming to us? If I'm not mistaken, my terrain generation trick is markedly less demanding on CPU than the techniques used, say, for the pod racer scenes in Star Wars TPM. Cutting down modelling and render times is incredibly important in professional work, there's never enough time so it's always a balance being struck between vision and reality. I've GPLed my terrain generator program, meaning that anyone who either uses a Mac, or can port a Python-like syntax to another platform, can use it in movies for nothing. Anyone who really wants that industry's technology to open up would be well advised to do their level best to accomplish _something_ cool, GPL it, and then simply let it be known as such- other stuff that wants to incorporate this can do so by going GPL itself, and we don't need to beg or pressure anybody. Really, IP on these sorts of tools is a bit like IP on brushes or pencils- you don't copyright the brush, you copyright the painting you do with it. The brush is not important compared with what's being done with it...
You've just proved why free software can be economically viable. You surely don't think Microsoft (for example) will provide a level of support that effective? Their sheer size forces them to offload the support burden onto just the sort of hostile drones you lambast. You're absolutely right that it's the support. However, there's no reason this and the rigorous checking required can't be _combined_ with non-proprietary code. Everyone can benefit from sorts of code subjected to _severely_ ruthless testing and quality control (oh look, this routine causes a race condition/wrong answer/segfault one ten billionth of the time. *tweet* outta the pool!) and the resulting code could offer lessons to all OSS projects, whether or not they must be comparably reliable and safe. And again, it all comes down to who's willing to go the farthest for the customer, who can often be quite offbase. It's not possible to monopolise on this partly for simple reasons of efficiency, but in the normal flow of business, it's quite reasonable to stake out a really _solid_ niche based on such a level of support (think the Nordstrom's department stores on the West Coast). The emphasis in recent years of monopolise, cash out, quantity over quality business is a distortion of how the markets naturally work- normally trying to stake out a service niche is not only feasible but a really winning proposition. Only in situations of extreme competitive pressure from a monopolist dumping crapware and cutting off distribution, does it become unreasonable to try to establish a quality specialty product that doesn't attempt to seize the whole of the market as cheaply as possible.
And now, in honor of this, I'd like to point out that P.D.Q. Bach predated the musical portion of this experimentation, having composed the 'Sinfonia Concertante' for orchestra, bagpipes, Left-handed Sewer Flute, Double-reed slide music stand, balalaika, ocarina and lute:) "The problems of balancing such a varied set of instruments are, as you might imagine, enormous, and they are problems that P.D.Q. _entirely_ failed to solve... when the bagpipes are playing you can't hear anything else... whereas the lute is such a soft instrument that even if another instrument is on the stage with it, you can't hear it (whether the other instrument is playing or not). But the lute looks nice... and we think that, the visual effect, is shortchanged in the modern concertgoing experience... it's a very nice lute... and we hope you enjoy it... think of it while you're listening to the bagpipes. -Peter Schickele, impresario
I watched 'Manos: Hands Of Fate' MST3K...
on
Focus Group Art
·
· Score: 2
ALL the way through. >:) I think this qualifies me to really enjoy the sick humor of this horrible piece of music:)
What would be the effect for free software interests of the inadvertent weakening of intellectual property itself? One cannot cynically trust the legal system to always reward the rich and punish the poor and disenfranchised (as seen by the recent antitrust findings of fact). Supposing this mechanism ends up in court cases where intellectual property is drastically weakened because judges or juries won't accept patentholders clubbing 'the little guy'? This could seriously weaken the usefulness and relevance of patents in general. Surely it's a bad idea to assume (out of some sense of teenager hip cynicism?) that such abuses of the IP system can just happen without consequences to the abusers? Again, I question whether this may be weakening IP in general, since patents are being granted that are clearly in error and unworthy of such status. That considered, what would the implications be for free software if the millenium saw a collapse of the significance of intellectual property- for instance, picture this patent mess and also the ludicrous behavior of the music and film industries on behalf of intellectual property. If all that ended up 'pushing it' too far and breaking the usefulness of IP, one might envision a Sampling World where everything is copied from everything else, perhaps with a layer of obscurity, perhaps as openly as mp3s of commercial music are traded. Picture software being similarly used, with the 'rules' of IP and patents so convoluted that nobody can ever in good faith keep informed on what they might be infringing on. In a world of such information fluidity, would this be an arena where free software would thrive, since it is primarily suited to maintaining information flow in situations of severe _restriction_? Perhaps it would grow like kudzu vines in the newly boundless environment:)
You want _me_ (as a reader of Slashdot, not 'me in particular') to help you write an article for Rolling Stone, at which point you'll traipse off to Orlando, weep into your powerbook at the horrors of obsessive Disney street-cleaning, and attempt to parlay your imaginary counterculture status into increased status and influence with Rolling Stone? What's wrong with this picture? I'll tell you, as _another_ person who has seen print all over the world (and yes, I was read in Australia before I was posting to the internet- as an audio writer). The problem is simply this: if you expect to deserve such massive distribution, you had damned well better have something of your own to say. Period. If the best you can do is troll for story ideas on Slashdot, the Stone will spike your proposal in favor of new Spice Girl gossip, and so they should. This is the turn of the millenium, and the people you talk to at RS are quite capable of trawling Slashdot themselves, finding people who write more clearly and passionately than you do, and sending those people to Orlando in your place. I'm sure there are at least eight Slashdotters who could do a better job writing a feature on turn-of-the-century plastic communities, and I daresay I'm one of them. (Can't go, sorry Jann;) ) Jon Katz, if you have to ask us Slashdotters for ideas on your Rolling Stone article proposal, you don't deserve to write one. You don't lack for hot air, why on earth are you turning to Slashdot for more of it? Is it that you intend to pitch the feature idea to Rolling Stone with a heavy emphasis on its being 'open source writing'? If so, you're not merely a fool, you are scum, trying as hard as you can to exploit the Slashdot community for personal gain. God help you if that's the truth: certainly your previous exploits would tend to suggest it. Are you in fact going to these people, these publications, saying 'Hire me, give me some articles- I speak for the geek community, I have write access to Slashdot.org, I am their _mouthpiece_'? Are you in fact pitching these ideas to the editors on the basis that it's not just you, but that they are buying a whole website worth of unpaid geek underground? To what extent does your access and affiliation with slashdot get used in these talks?
"To better serve your needs our ordering is going 100% online. To serve the needs of computerless customers we've established computer terminals in all our major service locations and most of the minor ones, which can be used for an inexpensive 20 dollars an hour. Customers with their own Internet access can log on to our site securely for only 10 dollars a transaction, where they can place orders and read any news of retroactively amended contracts or cancellations. This is much more immediate than postal mail, plus FOR FREE we will send email alerting customers of such changes, email like the following:
Hi! We have changed one of your contracts. This email announcement is entirely free. To read the changes for the low low fee of 10$, please click on the following link-
Tell me more about the changes in my contracts! Thank you for being one of our most valued customers!
Thank you for being one of our most valued customers! DigSigSecurityCode: HKJGHJ77867B5BMBNBHF56786876GGFNDRFGUH5745V"
"...so forget about swearing that it's a false signature- there's no such thing as a false digital signature!" "...or email viruses, and anyway as long as you don't open attachments and are sure to use the latest software, you're absolutely safe..."
Sorry man: I don't trust you or your argument. You're drunk on technology, which is great, but it's blinding you, and that's not great. I'm still stubbornly in favor of keeping as many sanity checks and old technologies effective as I can. I use plaintext email and news. I write receipts for computer repair I do on carbon paper receipt pads and have a set of file folders with all my papers organised by year and quarter. I write checks on paper, and sign them with my laborious signature. I _hate_ writing with a pen, always did, but I'm not gonna give it up for you. My checks, for instance, have certain common features all my own- if I draw a slash there is _never_ a 35/100 on it as if it were a fraction, and my signature uses some print characters rather than cursive characters. If I was to use digital signatures I'd be buying them pre-made- probably from Microsoft, as they'd try to kill everyone else in the area. Sorry, no way. I may be a programmer, I may be a geek, I may be totally 'wired' but that doesn't make me a _fscking_ _idiot_.
I have *counts* five confirmed spammer kills. That's five reports from ISPs that spammer accounts have been closed due to my reporting them. How about a Slashdot poll: I have
I totally contest the notion that feature rich email is here to stay. Email is _WORDS_. There's no justification for damaging the ability for people to openly communicate just to add stuff that can more sensibly be done in another medium. Email should be like the telephone- no matter how unpleasant somebody's words may be, they cannot cause your hard disk to erase itself. A telemarketer can try to get you to buy maple syrup, but cannot start pumping 10,000 gallons of maple syrup through the phone in case you want it. Email (and news, which is another story) _must_ be as safe and reasonable as the telephone. Having email be progressively less safe than the telephone is an incredibly bad precedent. I remember when the Good Times email virus was a complete hoax, and nothing of the sort was possible. Many of you will be able to say the same- "Grandpa, tell us about when people could read email without danger!". As I see it, there is exactly _one_ vendor that has consistently, one could even say maliciously, obliterated this safety and put maybe 50% of the world (actual users of this new software) at risk. I welcome correction suggesting that Netscape HTML email is also to blame, but am not aware of any exploits remotely comparable to this new nightmare. Forget the future, just for a second, and let's seriously consider how to progress without obliterating the benefits we used to have (that some of us still have, so far). What is so shocking about the idea of having certain basic technologies such as text email and text news remain utterly text? If you want features so badly, have the text scroll across a tickertape as the email comes in, or have it etched in neon letters on the desktop- but the written word is too important to throw away in the mad rush to meaningless features and bizarre activities done by the content in the name of improvements.
...you can get one of those for the Mac, too. It's called 'Eudora Light', doesn't even cost anything, and the settings dialogs (especially with the Esoteric Settings component) are the apex of lightly GUIed geekiness:) you can specify down to the pixel where new messages will open on the screen- who knew you could do this sort of thing on anything but Unix?
If that's so, then it's an excellent reason to make a point of voting just to vote _against_ this person seeing as they've as much as vowed support for a trust that's declared war against most of the things I like.
I expected a sharper drop, but it makes sense- things are not _physical_ enough for the beleaugered company yet. It's now open season for class action lawsuits that can draw on the findings of fact for evidence- these will be slamdunks and should be considered as part of the punitive damages from the ruling. Expect _many_ of these. When MS's once-unassailable cash reserves are obliterated fighting these suits and losing constantly (FoF counts as evidence and is pretty bulletproof), _then_ you will see their stock price go to a quarter of what it is (since it's already split so much. The way lawyers are these days, it'll be kind of like the stories of pirahnas skeletonizing a cow in 30 seconds. I expected the stock to drop much more sharply this morning, but it looks like people haven't truly thought it through. MS's valuation _cannot_ be remotely comparable to when it was a monopoly unrestrictedly destroying the industry. That should be obvious. It's probably the hordes of class action suits (everybody and his brother will want to be in on that action) which will take it down the most. MS depends utterly on having those cash reserves. A penniless MS is beneath contempt...
Slashdot Mirror
Don't ever reply to spammers. I know they all claim to be maintaining opt-out addresses according to some vague US law, but they still lie: if the address bounces it's because somebody killed their account first (I've killed seven personally, which is not a lot) and you're lucky it bounced.
You're lucky it bounced because if it does _not_ bounce, rather than being removed, you are being put on a special list entitled 'Victims who are live human beings who read their email', which is sold to other spammers for a higher price. Been getting more spam since you've been doing this have you? Take heart in the idea that the email bounces you _have_ been getting are dead spammer accounts.
-postmaster@airwindows.com
*g* ;)
Seriously. It's coming out in PCI, I want that because I'm hanging onto my nice old powermac for a while. I know _exactly_ what to do with all that texture bandwidth- multitexturing babeee! *g* forget polys. You'll end up with really boringly textured well sculpted shapes- geometry is NOT the weak link. I've appreciated the 3dfx strong points even through the drawbacks of 16/22 bit color- I've seen the transparencies and shading and tonal values looking better at 16 bit than the competition at 32 (not always, but in a number of cases, and always due to the 32 bit card drawing washed out tonal values). Now that 3dfx is ready to do the card with antialiasing that works with all my existing games, and with so much texture memory and fill rate that you could use it for fscking _filmmaking_ without it breathing hard *hehe*, well, I'm there. Build it, I'll buy it. My voodoo2 needs replacing, and I've never been more pleased that I didn't start planning to try and get a GeForce or something.
The output of this card _will_ look better than GeForce, by an order of magnitude. That's a prediction. That's also assuming a lot of multitexturing, but hey- if it's good enough for ILM, it's good enough for _you_
Don't think 3200x2400x32x60: think 1024x768x32x60...
...with five specular highlights from five dynamic lightsources, flickering of torchlight on faces and more sharply from metal surfaces, and every barrel or crate or object slightly different from having each one overlay about three slightly different 'dent' or 'dirt' layers. ;) if you did, you'd know that this is _precisely_ what ILM did to make the battledroids photorealistic- they were all identical models, but you had the texturemap for the robot, and then five different overlay textures putting different patterns of dirt and wear onto the droids- which were applied in combinations, of course.
I take it you don't read Cinefex
'Cinematic' means impressive- means multitexturing that would _choke_ a GeForce (or indeed a Voodoo3, but that's a given). It means the modellers will still be caring about polys, but the _skinners_ can go HOG WILD. Surfacing is not merely choosing a really big texturemap- talk to rendering people- overlaying translucencies and transparent textures is when you start getting really startlingly impressive effects. This throws the door _wide_ open for really amazing stuff. Polys aren't everything (it should be OK on polys anyhow, but polys aren't everything).
Given that the practices going on during the trial were equivalent to obstruction of justice, what is the best case that you could make to argue that Bill Gates, who with Steve Ballmer sets the tone for Microsoft behavior, should be charged with obstruction of justice, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and should at the least be forbidden from running _any_ 'baby Microsofts' and at most locked up for a good long time? This assumes that Gates' personality and those of his top henchment sets the tone for not only Microsoft, but for the industry as a whole (which I think is a reasonable statement), and that the chilling effect on innovation and the choking of normal functioning of the industry can be in part attributed to the personality everyone is now worshipping and trying to emulate. Given that the result of this is wrong and unhealthy, why is there so rarely the view that 'Gee, businesswise this guy is a sociopath, mugger and a criminal', why is there so little interest in _removing_ him from any position of power running companies, and what would be a good way to argue this point? Personally, I would say the _greatest_ harm from the monopoly is the brainwashing of the entire world to believe that Bill Gates is someone to be emulated and rewarded, rather than the unprincipled business equivalent of a Mafia chieftain, someone who should be locked up, not lionized. That's _personally_, again: I think the man is _personally_ a sociopath and should not be allowed to run businesses, much less given control of one of the baby-MSes of a breakup. So, how do you make that stick?
Disney's people broke just about _all_ the ground in cel animation. Hell, Disney was doing 'layers' like you get in Photoshop in 1937!!! I'm talking about the famous Multiplane Camera- just about every aspect of this multimillion dollar monster required massive innovation in every way.
To behave as if Disney was equivalent to a Gates is very stupid. He was the guy pushing for all this. That said, the Disney cartoons (especially the comics!) put across a _very_ strange worldview, and the ones intended for foreign countries actually have capitalist propaganda put into them (really!) or at least had- dunno if Disney still makes those comics. Particularly at the height of the Cold War, Disney comic books were outright 'a war effort' trying to subvert other societies. That's fair to mention. But don't be dissin' the incredible dedication and technological innovation of pre-WWII Disney! (or indeed after- Disney pioneered the Xerox photocopying process _for_ _cels_, as used in 101 Dalmatians and Robin Hood, and pioneered a version with _grey_ lines for The Rescuers).
I didn't mean specifically _Seattle_, so much as the notion that Microsoft basically owns the state government (bought and paid for) and would like to see state police going after people flaming MS on usenet- and that this would be an unreasonable action to take, but might seem acceptable to some. ;)
Unless you're one of the government representatives making excuses for what Microsoft has always done and will continue to do, it was _not_ a veiled insult at you. It was a rather unveiled insult at the integrity of Washington State legislators and representatives >;) really, I have a great deal of contempt for these ayn-rand-thumping maniacs. What is best for Microsoft IS NOT best for the people. I'm sorry you mistakenly were offended at a remark that was not directed at you- suppose I should have been blunter. I'm not sorry about hinting that MS would love to get a tame senator or cop to try arresting people for 'slander', because I am sure they'd love to do that if they had any chance of succeeding. Perhaps they'd like to start on me, by banning me from Slashdot for expressing my opinion of, not things they have done, but what I believe they'd like to do
I will say this: one, this is a Java emulator of the PDP-1 and not just a game written in Java. It's like a Java version of MAME only for Spacewar. ;) :)
I'll also say this: I'm trying it in netscape 4.08, and I know that the Netscape jvm bites. Makes me sorry I stopped using iCab
That said: ack! I'm running a 300Mhz G3 processor here. I can run Unreal Tournament without it being too much of a slideshow. To have _spacewar_ being unplayably slow and totally unresponsive is just disgusting. Blech! And yet I am delighted to have seen it- I read 'Hackers' too but I'd never seen the actual game. It was worth the hassle to actually see those little shapes and know that this was the game that started it all
I downloaded the class file in hopes of running it on a better JVM sometime. I freaked out when it was only 4,615 bytes, sure that I'd got the wrong file. Then did a doubletake... _wait_ a minute... *grin* *hehehehe* funny what this industry does to your sense of proportion, isn't it?
And it's in Seattle, too. Wouldn't it be cute if anyone flaming Microsoft was prohibited from posting to usenet on trumped-up grounds of _slander_? ;) and it would be interesting and strange to see intentional attempts to _disrupt_ a functioning newsgroup as actionable. There's a point at which the frontier justice of Usenet fails to be helpful, and IMHO some of the meowers and spammers and such go over the line. You can get a spammer's account yanked (I've killed seven, which isn't even that much), but I don't think there's ever been much chance of getting someone's account pulled for trying to kill a newsgroup. That could be changing.
At the same time, I have to admit that usenet communities can be disrupted by 'speech'. For instance, see Russ Albery's Rant, which relates to disruption of newsgroups by spam and automated spewing by computer programs. There are also groups such as the meowers and alt.syntax.tactical which primarily intend to disrupt communication, and I've seen important useful groups rendered unusable by such attacks.
I would say that as long as the balance of the legal situation is even, it'll be OK. I could really _support_ legal banning of HTML newsposting on the grounds of MIME executables being attached
Lastly I would question the sense of considering 'death threats' (short of Secret Service involvement in Presidential ones, which is their job), considering that many Usenet kooks are mentally about 12 and certain that they bear no responsibility for their wild statements- and considering that there are entire groups, such as alt.flame, in which the _point_ is to cause as much verbal damage as possible. In this context, assuming 'public community' rules is absurd, and counterintuitive. Do you arrest a Bible Belt evangelist for intentionally trying to disrupt alt.satanism or alt.wiccan or alt.atheism? Maybe you'd better, if you're going to be imposing penalties for disrupting Usenet at all.
Write your own and open it. If you don't like that then you can play around with mine (currently some innovative terrain generation tricks combined with techniques for POV-Ray rendering), but frankly it would be best if you wrote your own. Do the work, and free it. Trying to talk a bunch of IP holders into opening their stuff just because it's a good idea is a very hard sell. It's the whole 'stone soup' concept- you have to start with _something_. What I have may not be much, I think it has potential- anyone who thinks it is crap is invited to GPL something better, please >;)
I would like to see a movie studio dedicated to open content, so people could focus on the stories they are telling. Desktop movie production is coming so soon, and it will be as much a revolution as the cassette multitrack home studio- and there are so many people working on things (such as computer game design and graphic effects) that could easily be applied to home moviemaking. There are GIF animation tools and computer image compositing tools available that do the same thing as the multimillion dollar Disney Multiplane camera used for Disney's greatest animated features.
Rather than going begging to effects houses, why don't we just arrange it so they end up coming to us? If I'm not mistaken, my terrain generation trick is markedly less demanding on CPU than the techniques used, say, for the pod racer scenes in Star Wars TPM. Cutting down modelling and render times is incredibly important in professional work, there's never enough time so it's always a balance being struck between vision and reality. I've GPLed my terrain generator program, meaning that anyone who either uses a Mac, or can port a Python-like syntax to another platform, can use it in movies for nothing. Anyone who really wants that industry's technology to open up would be well advised to do their level best to accomplish _something_ cool, GPL it, and then simply let it be known as such- other stuff that wants to incorporate this can do so by going GPL itself, and we don't need to beg or pressure anybody. Really, IP on these sorts of tools is a bit like IP on brushes or pencils- you don't copyright the brush, you copyright the painting you do with it. The brush is not important compared with what's being done with it...
You've just proved why free software can be economically viable. You surely don't think Microsoft (for example) will provide a level of support that effective? Their sheer size forces them to offload the support burden onto just the sort of hostile drones you lambast.
You're absolutely right that it's the support. However, there's no reason this and the rigorous checking required can't be _combined_ with non-proprietary code. Everyone can benefit from sorts of code subjected to _severely_ ruthless testing and quality control (oh look, this routine causes a race condition/wrong answer/segfault one ten billionth of the time. *tweet* outta the pool!) and the resulting code could offer lessons to all OSS projects, whether or not they must be comparably reliable and safe. And again, it all comes down to who's willing to go the farthest for the customer, who can often be quite offbase. It's not possible to monopolise on this partly for simple reasons of efficiency, but in the normal flow of business, it's quite reasonable to stake out a really _solid_ niche based on such a level of support (think the Nordstrom's department stores on the West Coast). The emphasis in recent years of monopolise, cash out, quantity over quality business is a distortion of how the markets naturally work- normally trying to stake out a service niche is not only feasible but a really winning proposition. Only in situations of extreme competitive pressure from a monopolist dumping crapware and cutting off distribution, does it become unreasonable to try to establish a quality specialty product that doesn't attempt to seize the whole of the market as cheaply as possible.
And now, in honor of this, I'd like to point out that P.D.Q. Bach predated the musical portion of this experimentation, having composed the 'Sinfonia Concertante' for orchestra, bagpipes, Left-handed Sewer Flute, Double-reed slide music stand, balalaika, ocarina and lute :)
"The problems of balancing such a varied set of instruments are, as you might imagine, enormous, and they are problems that P.D.Q. _entirely_ failed to solve... when the bagpipes are playing you can't hear anything else... whereas the lute is such a soft instrument that even if another instrument is on the stage with it, you can't hear it (whether the other instrument is playing or not). But the lute looks nice... and we think that, the visual effect, is shortchanged in the modern concertgoing experience... it's a very nice lute... and we hope you enjoy it... think of it while you're listening to the bagpipes.
-Peter Schickele, impresario
ALL the way through. >:) :)
I think this qualifies me to really enjoy the sick humor of this horrible piece of music
Hi Jon ;) touch a nerve, did it?
What would be the effect for free software interests of the inadvertent weakening of intellectual property itself? One cannot cynically trust the legal system to always reward the rich and punish the poor and disenfranchised (as seen by the recent antitrust findings of fact). Supposing this mechanism ends up in court cases where intellectual property is drastically weakened because judges or juries won't accept patentholders clubbing 'the little guy'? This could seriously weaken the usefulness and relevance of patents in general. Surely it's a bad idea to assume (out of some sense of teenager hip cynicism?) that such abuses of the IP system can just happen without consequences to the abusers? Again, I question whether this may be weakening IP in general, since patents are being granted that are clearly in error and unworthy of such status. That considered, what would the implications be for free software if the millenium saw a collapse of the significance of intellectual property- for instance, picture this patent mess and also the ludicrous behavior of the music and film industries on behalf of intellectual property. If all that ended up 'pushing it' too far and breaking the usefulness of IP, one might envision a Sampling World where everything is copied from everything else, perhaps with a layer of obscurity, perhaps as openly as mp3s of commercial music are traded. Picture software being similarly used, with the 'rules' of IP and patents so convoluted that nobody can ever in good faith keep informed on what they might be infringing on. In a world of such information fluidity, would this be an arena where free software would thrive, since it is primarily suited to maintaining information flow in situations of severe _restriction_? Perhaps it would grow like kudzu vines in the newly boundless environment :)
It's here: http://worldforge.org/website/about/pa tents/. Credited it simply to 'slashdot' as it touches on ideas brought by many people here. You might like Ideas For Fixes.
You want _me_ (as a reader of Slashdot, not 'me in particular') to help you write an article for Rolling Stone, at which point you'll traipse off to Orlando, weep into your powerbook at the horrors of obsessive Disney street-cleaning, and attempt to parlay your imaginary counterculture status into increased status and influence with Rolling Stone? ;) )
What's wrong with this picture? I'll tell you, as _another_ person who has seen print all over the world (and yes, I was read in Australia before I was posting to the internet- as an audio writer). The problem is simply this: if you expect to deserve such massive distribution, you had damned well better have something of your own to say. Period. If the best you can do is troll for story ideas on Slashdot, the Stone will spike your proposal in favor of new Spice Girl gossip, and so they should. This is the turn of the millenium, and the people you talk to at RS are quite capable of trawling Slashdot themselves, finding people who write more clearly and passionately than you do, and sending those people to Orlando in your place. I'm sure there are at least eight Slashdotters who could do a better job writing a feature on turn-of-the-century plastic communities, and I daresay I'm one of them. (Can't go, sorry Jann
Jon Katz, if you have to ask us Slashdotters for ideas on your Rolling Stone article proposal, you don't deserve to write one. You don't lack for hot air, why on earth are you turning to Slashdot for more of it? Is it that you intend to pitch the feature idea to Rolling Stone with a heavy emphasis on its being 'open source writing'? If so, you're not merely a fool, you are scum, trying as hard as you can to exploit the Slashdot community for personal gain. God help you if that's the truth: certainly your previous exploits would tend to suggest it. Are you in fact going to these people, these publications, saying 'Hire me, give me some articles- I speak for the geek community, I have write access to Slashdot.org, I am their _mouthpiece_'? Are you in fact pitching these ideas to the editors on the basis that it's not just you, but that they are buying a whole website worth of unpaid geek underground? To what extent does your access and affiliation with slashdot get used in these talks?
Thank you for being one of our most valued customers! DigSigSecurityCode: HKJGHJ77867B5BMBNBHF56786876GGFNDRFGUH5745V"
"...so forget about swearing that it's a false signature- there's no such thing as a false digital signature!"
"...or email viruses, and anyway as long as you don't open attachments and are sure to use the latest software, you're absolutely safe..."
Sorry man: I don't trust you or your argument. You're drunk on technology, which is great, but it's blinding you, and that's not great. I'm still stubbornly in favor of keeping as many sanity checks and old technologies effective as I can. I use plaintext email and news. I write receipts for computer repair I do on carbon paper receipt pads and have a set of file folders with all my papers organised by year and quarter. I write checks on paper, and sign them with my laborious signature. I _hate_ writing with a pen, always did, but I'm not gonna give it up for you. My checks, for instance, have certain common features all my own- if I draw a slash there is _never_ a 35/100 on it as if it were a fraction, and my signature uses some print characters rather than cursive characters. If I was to use digital signatures I'd be buying them pre-made- probably from Microsoft, as they'd try to kill everyone else in the area. Sorry, no way. I may be a programmer, I may be a geek, I may be totally 'wired' but that doesn't make me a _fscking_ _idiot_.
How about a Slashdot poll:
I have
I totally contest the notion that feature rich email is here to stay. Email is _WORDS_. There's no justification for damaging the ability for people to openly communicate just to add stuff that can more sensibly be done in another medium.
Email should be like the telephone- no matter how unpleasant somebody's words may be, they cannot cause your hard disk to erase itself. A telemarketer can try to get you to buy maple syrup, but cannot start pumping 10,000 gallons of maple syrup through the phone in case you want it. Email (and news, which is another story) _must_ be as safe and reasonable as the telephone. Having email be progressively less safe than the telephone is an incredibly bad precedent.
I remember when the Good Times email virus was a complete hoax, and nothing of the sort was possible. Many of you will be able to say the same- "Grandpa, tell us about when people could read email without danger!". As I see it, there is exactly _one_ vendor that has consistently, one could even say maliciously, obliterated this safety and put maybe 50% of the world (actual users of this new software) at risk. I welcome correction suggesting that Netscape HTML email is also to blame, but am not aware of any exploits remotely comparable to this new nightmare.
Forget the future, just for a second, and let's seriously consider how to progress without obliterating the benefits we used to have (that some of us still have, so far). What is so shocking about the idea of having certain basic technologies such as text email and text news remain utterly text? If you want features so badly, have the text scroll across a tickertape as the email comes in, or have it etched in neon letters on the desktop- but the written word is too important to throw away in the mad rush to meaningless features and bizarre activities done by the content in the name of improvements.
*shrug* dunno why anybody would _want_ to sound like a little kid, but whatever :)
...you can get one of those for the Mac, too. It's called 'Eudora Light', doesn't even cost anything, and the settings dialogs (especially with the Esoteric Settings component) are the apex of lightly GUIed geekiness :) you can specify down to the pixel where new messages will open on the screen- who knew you could do this sort of thing on anything but Unix?
If that's so, then it's an excellent reason to make a point of voting just to vote _against_ this person seeing as they've as much as vowed support for a trust that's declared war against most of the things I like.
Is this Jon Katz in a wig and false bosoms? o_O
;) *
*coins revolutionary new term- Katzroturf
I expected a sharper drop, but it makes sense- things are not _physical_ enough for the beleaugered company yet.
It's now open season for class action lawsuits that can draw on the findings of fact for evidence- these will be slamdunks and should be considered as part of the punitive damages from the ruling. Expect _many_ of these.
When MS's once-unassailable cash reserves are obliterated fighting these suits and losing constantly (FoF counts as evidence and is pretty bulletproof), _then_ you will see their stock price go to a quarter of what it is (since it's already split so much. The way lawyers are these days, it'll be kind of like the stories of pirahnas skeletonizing a cow in 30 seconds.
I expected the stock to drop much more sharply this morning, but it looks like people haven't truly thought it through. MS's valuation _cannot_ be remotely comparable to when it was a monopoly unrestrictedly destroying the industry. That should be obvious. It's probably the hordes of class action suits (everybody and his brother will want to be in on that action) which will take it down the most. MS depends utterly on having those cash reserves. A penniless MS is beneath contempt...