It's much the same as the experience I had some years ago. I was playing the online combat flightsim 'Warbirds', and had got myself a 200Mhz 604e CPU card for my Mac. A number of other gamers were having problems with view freezing- if they looked to the side, for instance, it'd be an appreciable fraction of a second before they got an updated view. This wasn't happening to me, but it was happening with Macs as fast as 300mhz... running 603s and 603es. You could say the 604e had more 'torque' and not be too far wrong... in practice this meant the lower-Mhz 604e would _easily_ outperform the higher-Mhz 603s in just about any realworld situation.
The 604e had a huge aluminum heatsink but no fan- it ran fairly hot for a PPC chip, being a 166mhz 604e hopped up to 200mhz by Daystar Digital. After a while, I got a 300 mhz G3 card in another upgrade (still have the 604e card, too). The G3s are said to be the next-generation equivalents of the old 603es- power-efficient, higher-Mhz, that sort of thing. Mine ended up roughly twice as fast as the 604e for most tasks, most easily measured by POV renders which take a good long time- also, FPS framerates at least doubled, when Q3test came out I was unable to try it as the 200Mhz 604e made it a slideshow. The 300Mhz G3 started to make things vaguely playable.
The G4s apparently are to the G3s as my old 604e was to the 603s. Be afraid. Be very afraid. That, or gloat a lot if you have one;) lord knows I am tempted to waste a bunch of money and spring for a G4, even though not a thing that I do really requires one.
One factor that should be considered is how much code is tailored to the weaknesses of x86. As things develop, this should even out- apart from a tendency in the high-end x86 world to turn to increasingly byzantine compilers in desperate attempts to make these complicated mechanisms work:) such things have little appeal to _me_, though, and I enjoy running a (admittedly 300Mhz-slow) computer that uses comparatively simple and straightforward compilers and happily spins its tiny wheels for me, cooled only by a purple heatsink the size of an ornate postage stamp. Small is fscking beautiful, I say.:)
Download a copy of a book from your public library.
Read it. Keep it. Read it more. It's not like you're removing it from the shelf so someone else can't get it...
As to expiring stuff- I truly hate that stuff, because all too often the situation is this- I use an early version, it works great, I try a later version and they SCREWED IT UP. Then the early version expires and I'm hosed. Furrfu. Software shouldn't expire. It's all too prone to obsolescence anyhow, why _guarantee_ that it will become useless? It's like sabotage.
It strikes me that, for the most part, if I took my 8-track ADAT master tapes and made new mixes of tunes, 'polishing' the old mixes and trying to keep everything the same- the new mixes would match.
This naturally leads me to wonder what differences would end up matching, and what would cause a failure to match. I think it's pretty safe to say that reducing or increasing the volume of an instrument slightly would not lose the match- the basic shape of the waveform would be the same, only the proportions would be slightly different.
MOVING an instrument, say from right to left in the stereo image, would probably obliterate the match. Both channels would be significantly different. However, a minor shift in the middle of the stereo image would _not_ lose the match.
Finally, if I had doubled instruments (for instance, I can refer you to mp3.com/chrisj for examples- "B17 Flying Fortress" has doubled basses, and "DeHavilland Mosquito" has doubled acoustic guitars) panned hard left and hard right, I could effectively obliterate a match while leaving the music 'unaltered' for a listener (sort of). This is because on the tracks I mention (and on many other tracks that exist) this doubling technique is used to thicken the mix by playing two takes of the same part, as identically as humanly possible. Musically, there's no particular reason one track should be on one side and not the other. If you swapped them, the musical effect would be basically nil, barring minor glitches that would be registered as coming from the other side now. But when you play acoustic or electric instruments the waveforms are not as predictable as synths- so for the purposes of the fingerprinting, the original track and the track with doubled instruments reversed would be _hugely_ different, even though to the listener they would be musically alike.
Absolutely. All you'd need to do is record enough of the tune off _whatever_ you're listening to it on (mp3, ATRAC, mp3 of atrac of 22K wav) and you'd have enough of a pattern to give to some database. All the database needs is the patterns of any music it hopes to recognise, no matter what the source, and ability to search through that quickly. Result- there would be a place you could ask 'What is this? *play snippet*' and it would always be able to tell you.
HAPPY FREAKIN' THOUGHT
Hey, there would be nothing stopping me from putting _my_ music's patterns on such a database! There would be no legitimate argument to _prevent_ me doing it and every reason to do so (same for the majors- they'd put up everything they could). Then, anybody no matter where they are could get information on where to get my music, even if they only heard a snippet and went 'That was neat, what's it from?'
VERY cool. Currently, without this, it's a lot easier for random music listeners to identify stuff that is pushed by the major labels. Add this ability to effectively free-associate and still get results and music-recognition becomes effectively random access, reducing the importance of the mainstream industry. (Something I would _love_ to see...)
As a final note, imagine humming or singing into a mike, making a snippet of that, 'fingerprinting' it and then sending it out as a search! On the one hand you could make horrible noises just to see what music out there contains horrible noises. But it goes a hell of a lot deeper than that- for instance, there's a song, "Green-Eyed Lady" that I used to have (was hell to find, too). I never remember the band's name, they were a one hit wonder, but I can still remember the neat spooky feel of the tune- and, more relevantly, I remember that at one point the lyric is 'green-eyed lady, windswept lady', and 'windswept' is articulated with unusual clearness. I have to wonder- if I made a little recording of me trying to sing 'windswept' with the intonation and articulation I remember- would it, on some level, match the original? Would it return me the information on the song itself?
The harder you look at this idea, the more it starts to look like the best sort of science fiction fantasising. Hum the refrain of the tune you can't remember to the computer and it looks through its databanks and (depending on how well you hum!) it tells you what the tune was, better than most humans ever could. This alone would make the idea a killer idea- the added decentralisation that it brings (I can submit all my music to the database and anyone can search for it- just as I can upload a web page and anyone (mostly) can connect to it) makes it even more exciting.
What superfluous header data? You're looking with a microscope, and you ought to be looking with a fisheye lens. Covered in vaseline. In a snowstorm;)
Inspect the whole file all you want- you might even see interesting wiggles in the waveform which are of course exactly the sort of thing this will pick up on. You can go in and invert chunks of those waveform wiggles, and that will render that little snippet unmatchable with the original tune- at the expense of making the audio go sputter sputter sputter. Pitch-shifting the whole tune up about 2 octaves would work too:) or timestretching it to about twice its normal length- maybe only 1 1/2 times its normal length. That would work if you like slow dancing;) most effective? Well, you know how some mp3 files ripped off CDs go BZRRRP every now and then 'cause the CD player choked? The data formerly existing during the section where it goes BZRRRP is rendered TOTALLY UNMATCHABLE by this technique;) therefore you can completely destroy the fingerprint by simply arranging for the rip to be 100% bzrrrrp. I think I can safely say that this would be a completely effective way of eradicating fingerprintability, at least until they start fingerprinting CD failure modes:)
But it gets better- since all recorded music HAS this signature already (easily determined off copies of the music), this all just _begs_ for the record companies to start a 'Not a tenth of a second may be sampled from OUR PROPERTY' campaign. After all, using this type of technology you could identify individual snare hits. Sorry that's _John Bonham's_ bassdrum, and we own it...
The kicker is this- there will still be a huge false positive count. Consider this- I own a Proteus/1 synth. Some sounds I have modified and altered, but some I use 'stock'. Play a certain note or melody with a certain sound and BAM- "Excuse me, we can legally prove you sampled 'j_random_80s_band', see you in court". Playing an acoustic instrument, it's very unlikely that you'll exactly duplicate a waveform simply by playing the same notes, but with sample-based synthesizer modules that ship with ROM banks?
Good job- yes, I can see how this would work. You could get 'thrown' by certain sampled music (it's Rick James' "Super Freak"! It's MC Hammer "U Can't Touch This"! It's a floor wax! It's a dessert topping!) in certain circumstances, but on the whole, you've really got something- the key concept, to me, is that it's not about embedding computer codes in the music (yech), but about finding the irreducible information minimum in a snippet of audio.
I think I can help explain- let me put it this way. I've got a tune (obLink: see URL link above) called "Rain Dragon". There's a point toward the beginning where a 'mutating' synthesiser tone enters with a sort of warpy noise, on a beat that kicks really hard with bass drum and a splash cymbal. The total impact is quite aggressive- the synth sort of bursts in, and does so in a way that defines the range of unusual sounds that patch can produce.
Take that as an example sound snippet to work with. Now, let's say for the sake of argument that the impact of the splash and bassdrum and synth are all perfectly synchronised (splash and bassdrum are in fact sequenced and are perfectly synchronised to within MIDI spec, synth was a lucky hit that seemed to link up extra nicely). Call the phase of the splash's initial attack A, the phase of the bassdrum B, the phase of the attack of the synth C. These may all be in phase, adding up to a big transient. Some may be out of phase- for instance, the splash may come through unaltered but the syn attack and bassdrum attack may be going opposite directions and cancel each other out.
This is a very large level feature of the waveform- to alter it you would have to do such violence to the waveform as to render it unlistenable. Nothing you can do is going to make that syn attack and bassdrum attack be in different phase- obliterate the bass and you have a wimpy thin version of the same musical event signature, listen to it on a transistor radio and you have mostly the overtones and some distortions on the same musical event signature, record the transistor radio and it's the same deal- the LARGE SCALE waveform shapes are going to have a recognisable pattern if the music itself is still recognisable at all. In the crudest possible form you'd have to physically edit out certain drum hits or notes to alter the recognition- the crudest possible form for this type of identification is, say, MIDI. If there's a particularly interesting drum fill in something you can sequence it painstakingly in MIDI (not quantising but accurately placing each drum event in time) and get an instantly recognisable 'copy' of the original recording despite obliterating even the very sounds themselves and falling back on nothing but timing alone...
There's a great deal of pre-existing work in other fields, such as image tracking, that defines fingerprinting as 'imposing a subtle added signal onto the media and then reading it back'. That's a far cry from what you're doing- might I suggest 'bodyprinting' instead?;) after all, what you're doing is much closer to plunking the 'body' of a music snippet down in sand and recording the large scale attributes. It doesn't much matter what the details are. If you mixed one tune with a different tune, the 'bodyprint' of the one would gradually fade (not be instantly obliterated!) by increasing loudness of the other, and at the halfway point you'd be getting a 'bodyprint' that registered about equally for BOTH tunes (!).
Now that you have this concept so nicely worked out, what do you intend to do with it? Are you going to give to the record industry the ability to track down unauthorised music wherever it may present itself- most notably, to identify samples used in other songs and bring lawsuits over them?
I was trying to think of other ways the RIAA could abuse this technology, but I drew a blank- because at this time it's not necessary to _prove_ a music copy is from a particular source, to bring suit. Nobody has argued that britney spears mp3s are NOT the same tune as the original CDs because it's stupidly obvious that they're effectively the same tune. Hence, this process simply adds a level of certainty to a process of identification that's already enough to stand up in court. Is there any likelihood of this level of authentication of a copy becoming necessary in practice?
nothing inherently evil about joining MS
on
NYT On Open Source
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· Score: 2
Is this not based on the assumption that none of their closed source competitors do things significantly differently?
I can, to some extent, sympathise with this rather cynical viewpoint, but their competitors are not in court over their basic business practices. MS is, and has repeatedly been, certainly as far back as Jim Gray's defection to MS. He had to know.
Just an observation. To me, if there is evil it is in what you are willing to condone...
Considering the total cultural chasm between traditional Unix hackers and traditional MacOS hackers, this is a huge development. Plus it includes some of the greatest titles ever to break sales records on the Mac (most notably, the game Marathon).
I agree that MacOS is moving on to better things. It appears to be moving on to Open Source.:)
Bowie says things that reek of crazed Randite psychological reductionism:) I mean, honestly. "Ultimately, no one will work for free, if they know the guy next to them is doing the same work for pay"? Um. People have been doing the same sort of work for pay for YEARS, and now more and more are choosing to work for 'free' for motivations Bowie does not understand or acknowledge. His response? "No they're not!" oh, but they _are_... "Well, they'll all stop, you just wait!"
When you are considering someone's argument, it's really quite important to not simply buy into their default assumptions- if you do, you might even feel that Twinge of alarm, the disconcerting feeling that something's broken somewhere in your worldview. What if he is right? O_O
When you _do_ look at their default assumptions, it gives a much better foundation for understanding the validity of their argument. In Bowie's case, these default assumptions appear to include things like this:
Nobody does something for nothing
Everybody only acts in their own self-interest, always
If someone isn't, it must be because they have been TRICKED!:o
Once the people who are doing this 'free' stuff realise that other people are paid MONEY to do it, they will all stop, as...
what other motivation is there?
*hee, hee, hee...*
Now really, can you take this line of reasoning seriously? If so, aren't you a rather cold, unpopular person without friends, scheming and plotting to further your personal wealth?:D
Honestly- there _are_ other values. Go look at a sunset for five minutes without attempting to figure out how to sell it. Get a pet that is not an investment. Get laid without paying for it, if you can! Do something that sidesteps the neat little dead-end of power and wealth your head's stuck in. You might just like it!;)
What big ones? Please, one example. I realise I sound like a crazed anti-intellectual-property commie when I say that, but as so often happens when I make such arguments, I don't care:) kindly define the sort of 'big idea' that must be restricted and kept under wraps and never ever shared with others, whether YOU can implement it ideally or are just 'banking it' so nobody ELSE can implement it. I could easily argue that no idea so important should be owned any more than mathematical algorithms can be owned- that you should be limited to withholding your _implementation_ of said Big Idea, which presumably must be better than that of your competition. What gives you the right to own Big Ideas? Stick to laying claim to methods and implementations- Big Ideas are the property of society, and you should make your money off being the quickest off the mark with the Big Idea, first to market, and the one with the best implementation. If this implementation is sufficiently original, you can even patent it- but that process was never meant to lay claim to Big Ideas, only to make others have to work on their own versions of the Big Idea.
It's quite possible that the device's direct beam could induce extremely severe headaches, either slowly or even right away. Supersonic frequencies are picked up by humans through bone conduction and not really sensed as sound per se, but they do play a role- when I want my stereo to convincingly reproduce the tonalities of incredibly loud sounds, I develop the high-frequency capabilities until it's able to produce very strong ultrasonic output, across the whole signal chain. This is known to be fatiguing to the listener- you have to rein it in quite a bit to allow continuous listening, because some sounds (for instance, abrasive raw electric guitars through peavey amps) are intensely fatiguing to the ear themselves.
Do these MIT speakers kill bugs? Do they cause dogs to howl and cats to hide under the couch? The parallel to a spotlight is apt- it's not safe to look directly into a spotlight.
How have your license agreements and terms of use been evolving over the years? What recourse do you have for problems, what legal rights are given you, what are you allowed to do with the software you're talking about? It would be hard to argue that MS products are anywhere near something like Linux for ability to take a disk and install its software on all the computers you have handy- or even in the ability to take a problem and find a point of accountability, however vague. Microsoft licensing tends to refuse all responsibility- you can't even bring antitrust suits when all else fails, because you'd have to be the OEMs to do that, and they're not going to do it for obvious reasons, they daren't end up on the MS Enemies List. In the Linux arena you can't force anything to happen either, but you can at least establish communications with the people writing the stuff and even take over and start rewriting it yourself if there's a really big problem.
Performance (even realworld performance, let's not get into benchmark fun) isn't the only criterion. One must look at the conditions under which you are allowed to use the product. This, in the age of UCITA, is where Microsoft will hurt themselves the worst. Given a weapon, they attack. This time they are busily attacking their own customers and setting more and more restrictive rules on their customers, as well as more and more harsh penalties for rulebreakers. At some point you end up going 'hell with this, let me find something lame but harmless'.
Microsoft makes _new_ huge blunders. I would say primarily this is in the area of hubris and arrogance- their entire business model and behavior is based on the idea that if they can gain strategic and tactical control of the market, they do not NEED to produce acceptable products- just destroy other products and stop competition until they are the only choice and therefore the best option. The assumption is that people cannot look beyond the end of their own noses to imagine anything else.
This has worked very well against other business, because MS has not been held accountable to the laws of the USA for what they do. It has _not_ been effective in a larger sense- to a large extent it is just this behavior that has produced Linux and the open source movement in general. Honestly, if you could start a business making computer software and build a small company that took some reasonable market share, where is the need for open source? If Microsoft did not hold their customers and the rest of the industry (not to mention the judiciary...) in contempt, where would the emotional drive to rebel through open source be? Yet, at this time you can't reasonably expect to run a small business selling many types of software, because Microsoft owns the market and dictates what will survive and what will be destroyed- and venture capitalists will in fact check with Microsoft about whether to invest in your business, on that bases. And Microsoft does indeed hold most of the rest of the world in contempt- so in a very real sense they are forcing the growth of open source, by taking great pains to make everything else's future seem even more nasty, brutish and short.
This is a very real error, though they are not likely to be able to turn on a dime and fix it- their ability to whirl about and kill unexpected commercial competitors simply makes the case for open source and 'amateur' development stronger. The less opportunity there is for pro-level developers to practice their craft commercially, the more of them there are to practice it as 'amateurs', and the more likely they are to do that. It's much like a present-day rock band choosing to release mp3s instead of seeking a record deal, _knowing_ that the present-day record deals are so horrid that they might as well 'stay in the garage' because their future is a wasteland should they try the traditional, major label way. It's similar in some ways for programmers- the only people with _any_ credibility for making a competitive office suite, browser etc are those willing to do it for free, because Microsoft will obviously destroy anything resembling a commercial venture, and this certainty is enough to freeze up financial support from potential investors.
Only Microsoft could possibly force open source, developed-for-free software to take over- and they are rapidly causing just that to happen, by the utter thoroughness of their destruction of the commercial sphere. Every time they destroy an entire market segment they produce the conditions for open source projects covering that market segment, produced by people who desire a choice and won't get that choice in any other way.
"Hey, if I come up with a great idea, I sure as hell ain't gonna let it get out for free. No way!"
Then why on earth should anybody cooperate with you? Nice trolling, but if there's an atom of sincerity in your claims, it's rather sad, as you're crippling yourself by refusing to have your ideas (whatever they are, if any) exist in a social context with the ideas of others.
This translates roughly to 'I am smarter than everybody else in the world regarding the field in which I work'. You won't ever communicate your ideas- they are for franchising only, not for discussion. There are few people who have any business whatsoever taking such an attitude- among them, possibly, John Carmack- who opensources his old engines, pitches in on opensource projects, and posts to Slashdot like any member of the community.
It looks like the people who _really_ have ideas and aren't just wanking about it tend to be the people who are discussing them with others and placing more importance on their superior ability to reach a synthesis with the ideas of the community, rather than those who say 'if' I come up with a great idea I will defend it with my life and never tell anybody.
This might be a little counterintuitive- but it's so well established that it bears closer examination. Essentially, the people most capable of continuing to turn out competitive work are the ones most likely to want to cross-pollenate with other developers in the community, secure in the belief that they can execute on the ideas better than their competition. And on the other hand, the people (and companies) least capable of coming up with new ideas or executing on their existing ideas are the ones who most want to chain up the ideas themselves, the ones saying 'I wouldn't let an idea go out there for free, are you crazy?'.
It looks to me like this is a convenient little litmus test, to distinguish between classes of developer and their relative capacities. In a way, to act from a presumption of idea scarcity almost _proves_ you don't have many... if you can't consistently come up with new ideas for new situations so easily that you can afford to give them away, what business do you have aspiring to be a professional programmer?
...under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act? Since the judge's ruling that DeCSS has no legitimate use, effectively? And considering _maximum_ penalties (which makes for a better sound bite) for intentionally violating the DMCA? Let's say a judge threw the book at you- my understanding is that you can be hit with greater _maximum_ penalties than the crimes I mentioned.
Um, I'd be happy to be corrected, but before I believe possession of DeCSS in source form is NOT a felony with the stated maximum penalties under DMCA, I'd want to hear a lawyer confirm it in his professional capacity. Your common sense opinion is regrettably not the final word on the matter: more's the pity. If it was that simple and sensible, a lot of people would have less to worry about. Where does the law stand NOW? Is it not the case that you can be charged with a felony crime for knowing possession of DeCSS (specifically) in source code form?
Why not stand in front of Blockbuster allowing everyone to go in and giving them all copies of the source code to DeCSS, printed on paper? That would be a nice form of civil disobedience. Tell them they're not allowed to have that information and are committing a felony crime with maximum penalties worse than for rape and armed robbery, and give them the printout of the source code. When the police come to take you to jail, give them a copy of the source code too, and go nonviolently. When you are in prison get access to something that lets you print stuff out, and print up copies of the source code- when another inmate asks what you are in for, tell them it's the felony crime of giving people this information, and give them a copy (be nice- warn them that if they keep it they are committing a felony).
I am going to try fiddling with the code to see if I can get it to print attractively on one sheet of paper. I figure I can do a certain amount of this without going to jail, as long as _I_ don't stand in front of Blockbuster handing them out.
How about mailing copies to your Senators and representatives, asking if they would be good enough to simply keep the copy despite the fact that keeping that information is a felony crime? Might make for good sound bites, politicians like to be seen doing dramatic stuff like holding a press conference to say,
"I've just been mailed this sheet of paper by one of my constituents. It's some information, computer code that's been ruled illegal despite the protests of industry, education, and my own constituency. I'm framing it- it's going on my office wall to remind me what freedom is, and what it ain't. To the people who wanted to make this information illegal- if you want my copy, you can send over the police to come and get it. I'll hold another press conference, and you can take this information away from me on television!"
Now, how would that be? We need some politicians to recognize how media-friendly this situation can be to them.:)
Natural selection's epiphenomenon, not moral law
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TigerCloning
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· Score: 2
With all this talk of Darwinism one would think it was a moral imperative. It's not. Natural selection is an epiphenomenon, not a moral law. If you don't know what an epiphenomenon is I'd argue you're not fit to hold an opinion on _this_ particular subject- in case there is anyone who doesn't know what an epiphenomenon is, I'll try to explain it.
Take a sprinter, who can repeatably run X distance in 13.5 seconds. Where is the 13.5 stored in him? To make him faster do you go and change the '13.5' to '13.2' or lower? No- that number is the product of all the different variables (body mass, muscle effectiveness, air drag on whatever clothing he's wearing, wind, air pressure at whatever altitude he's at and ability to use lungs to get oxygen from said air mid-race) that make the sprinter up. None of these variables are morally right or wrong- the fact of air pressure is not morally wrong. The fact that the sprinter has body mass is not morally wrong. All this produces the epiphenomenon of his repeatable sprint time of 13.5 seconds- which might take on great importance, but this doesn't change the fact that it's the product of all the variables that make up the sprinter.
By the same token, existence of the Tasmanian tigerwolf is an epiphenomenon. It wouldn't even be extinct if a bunch of humans with guns hadn't blown 'em all away. Its existence is neither more nor less important to 'natural selection' as any other animal- natural selection is an EPIPHENOMENON, it does not need to be cared for by wise humans in order to work- this attitude is much like insisting that people must _care_ that 2+2=4 or mathematics will be lost. 2+2=4 is an epiphenomenon of certain ways of thinking about number, and fits with the real world, explaining certain processes accurately. Natural selection is an epiphenomenon of ways of thinking about populations, and likewise fits with the real world, explaining certain processes accurately. It does not need to be _protected_. It is.
If the Tasmanian tigerwolf is reintroduced to the world, this too is an epiphenomenon- because the environment of wild animals _unavoidably_ includes what humans think about them. If humans think it is ecologically, morally, or even aesthetically better for some species to persist in the face of human expansion, and take action about it, that human opinion becomes _part_ of the animal's environment, and the epiphenomenon may be survival of that species. For whatever reason it would be 'fitter'...
I'm reminded of a SF story, Cordwainer Smith's 'Norstrilia', in which there are huge, deformed, sick sheep that produce an immortality drug. These sheep are tended by humans, like a crop. In those hypothetical circumstances, that is 'fitness'.
However, one needn't get fictional to find an example that contradicts people's simpler Darwinesque beliefs- look at the wolf. Wolves have formidable natural weaponry, yet the species also possess formidable 'mental blocks' against injuring a submissive member of their own pack. If a wolf rolls over and bares its throat, an attacking packmate will find it impossible to finish off the first wolf, no matter how important that might be to the attacker at the time. This is purely a mental block- Darwinistically, one might think that it'd be better for the attacker to get to kill all competitors and control the gene pool, dominate completely. Unfortunately, wolves are such deadly fighters that this would lead to obliteration of entire packs through infighting- and so the epiphenomenon of natural selection leads to wolves with mental blocks towards hurting submissive packmates- wolves whose _minds_ have a direct influence on the survival of other animals.
By the same token it is not at all unreasonable to suggest that the general ecological concerns of many humans are natural selection- on the one hand it may be the Tasmanian tigerwolf, and in other areas it may be a town objecting to the death of a river through intense industrial pollution killing other industries such as fisheries, or it may be the objecting to oil tanker spills and the dumping of contaminated bilgewater. The objections, the protests, are themselves part of natural selection, and in many cases they are as survival-enhancing as the wolf's suppressed killer instincts- they serve the _population_, without which there would be no individuals. If all the world was individualistic oil-dumping river-poisoning clear-cutting species-obliterating extremes of 'Darwinist' behavior, the planet would be more or less lifeless in not many thousands of years, because some types of self-interested behavior are _destructive_. And so, given the human capacity to think about such things, natural selection produces the environmentalist in increasing numbers, preying on the industrialist and keeping the whole 'pack' of humans going for the long term, much as the suppressed attack instinct of the wolf towards submissive wolves keeps the wolf population going for the long term.
It's not unthinkable that, with the human capacity for thought, natural selection begins to encompass the entire biosphere of the whole world- with environmentalists beginning to forge 'suppressed eco-obliteration' instincts in other humans, the survival trait being the flourishing of the entire ecosphere. There's huge benefit to the uncontrolled diversity of biology on the planet. It's not simply aesthetic benefit but scientific benefit as well, and also raises issues of whether it's an unsafe gamble to kill off vast numbers of species and reduce the complexity of the biosphere to a simpler, possibly unsustainable condition in the long run. NOW is the time to consider these things, not 100 years too late.
Let them bring back the tigerwolf. It should not have been eradicated so quick in the first place. We don't know what possible benefits there might be from having them 100 years on.
Why must it be a gang?
on
Free For All
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· Score: 2
Why must the idea of free software always be associated with gangs of hackers working in concert to produce better software than gangs of corporate programmers? Why don't people think of the products of individuals- individuals who happen to share their work with society under a free software license? Those exist, but maybe since they are _not_ vast overblown projects they fail to be noticed? I would think the important part is not forming a committee and getting 10,000 eyes behind the code, it is getting the stuff out there in a way that allows it to be re-used (and in my way of thinking, in a way that furthers the intent of getting more stuff out there under the same terms.)
The neatest part, to my mind, is that you also get access to compilers and linkers. Yes, sure, 99% of the inner-city kids are only going to be interested in browsing the web. Maybe only one percent, or one percent of one percent of those inner-city kids will light up and start hacking on the computer and writing programs and creating stuff.
But what is it worth to give such powerful, free tools to that one kid who can use them and might never get the chance otherwise?
Sneak that ol' gcc on there, or perl or something. One day you might be glad you 'wasted' that HD space on it, when you come in and some little display hack is zipping about the screen:)
Um- 'insightful'? I could see '+1 Funny' and I bet there's one in there, but 'insightful'? Methinks somebody isn't getting a joke even when clouted over the head with it. Ouch:)
I wonder if I can moderate a moderation as funny?:)
Speak for yourself;) my nice little g3 keeps plugging along quite happily. I remember when I switched in the g3 daughtercard (Sonnet aftermarket part) for the 604e I'd been using (Daystar modified Apple processor card- slick!). The 604e had a huge big heatsink on it, that took up most of the card and looked very imposing (no fan, haha;) ) Imagine my surprise when the g3, easily twice as fast as the 604e in normal use, turned out to have a dainty little purple anodized aluminum heatsink on the chip- just a bit bigger than the actual chip itself, which is about the size of a postage stamp. My whole computer was happier- running cooler with less strain on the power supply. That made me happy too:)
Ya know, these things run Linux too. Think about it;) *g*
The beautiful thing is, X/Linux is messy anyhow, and very much being developed/kluged into something more like a modern rendering system. There aren't that many consumer GUI apps out there for it yet, which means the form is still malleable.
Set things up so the popular Linux GUI environments can scale to vastly larger resolutions, and you get the following delightful result:
screens continue to expand and expand so users can have DSWs and one-up each other in boardrooms
MacOSX/vector/no problem!
Linux/some hack or other/here we are at 16000x12000, fun fun
Windows: ow ow ow!
If this REALLY gets going, Windows' legacy of holding 90% or so of the app mindshare will cause lots of major hurting:) you _know_ most of those software companies wouldn't be able to adapt to the new environment, and the more of them croak, the less reason there is to go Windows. The end result might be Windows looking (space-wise) like the old 9" screen black and white desktop Macs- 'why would anybody want more room?' (yah right). That would be very amusing to watch- though what you'd see would be Windows kluging itself to adapt, and then the majority of the software base out there failing to clear the bar, causing ever more unreliability and inconsistency in the Windows platform...
Slashdot Mirror
The 604e had a huge aluminum heatsink but no fan- it ran fairly hot for a PPC chip, being a 166mhz 604e hopped up to 200mhz by Daystar Digital. After a while, I got a 300 mhz G3 card in another upgrade (still have the 604e card, too). The G3s are said to be the next-generation equivalents of the old 603es- power-efficient, higher-Mhz, that sort of thing. Mine ended up roughly twice as fast as the 604e for most tasks, most easily measured by POV renders which take a good long time- also, FPS framerates at least doubled, when Q3test came out I was unable to try it as the 200Mhz 604e made it a slideshow. The 300Mhz G3 started to make things vaguely playable.
The G4s apparently are to the G3s as my old 604e was to the 603s. Be afraid. Be very afraid. That, or gloat a lot if you have one ;) lord knows I am tempted to waste a bunch of money and spring for a G4, even though not a thing that I do really requires one.
One factor that should be considered is how much code is tailored to the weaknesses of x86. As things develop, this should even out- apart from a tendency in the high-end x86 world to turn to increasingly byzantine compilers in desperate attempts to make these complicated mechanisms work :) such things have little appeal to _me_, though, and I enjoy running a (admittedly 300Mhz-slow) computer that uses comparatively simple and straightforward compilers and happily spins its tiny wheels for me, cooled only by a purple heatsink the size of an ornate postage stamp. Small is fscking beautiful, I say. :)
Read it. Keep it. Read it more. It's not like you're removing it from the shelf so someone else can't get it...
As to expiring stuff- I truly hate that stuff, because all too often the situation is this- I use an early version, it works great, I try a later version and they SCREWED IT UP. Then the early version expires and I'm hosed. Furrfu. Software shouldn't expire. It's all too prone to obsolescence anyhow, why _guarantee_ that it will become useless? It's like sabotage.
This naturally leads me to wonder what differences would end up matching, and what would cause a failure to match. I think it's pretty safe to say that reducing or increasing the volume of an instrument slightly would not lose the match- the basic shape of the waveform would be the same, only the proportions would be slightly different.
MOVING an instrument, say from right to left in the stereo image, would probably obliterate the match. Both channels would be significantly different. However, a minor shift in the middle of the stereo image would _not_ lose the match.
Finally, if I had doubled instruments (for instance, I can refer you to mp3.com/chrisj for examples- "B17 Flying Fortress" has doubled basses, and "DeHavilland Mosquito" has doubled acoustic guitars) panned hard left and hard right, I could effectively obliterate a match while leaving the music 'unaltered' for a listener (sort of). This is because on the tracks I mention (and on many other tracks that exist) this doubling technique is used to thicken the mix by playing two takes of the same part, as identically as humanly possible. Musically, there's no particular reason one track should be on one side and not the other. If you swapped them, the musical effect would be basically nil, barring minor glitches that would be registered as coming from the other side now. But when you play acoustic or electric instruments the waveforms are not as predictable as synths- so for the purposes of the fingerprinting, the original track and the track with doubled instruments reversed would be _hugely_ different, even though to the listener they would be musically alike.
HAPPY FREAKIN' THOUGHT
Hey, there would be nothing stopping me from putting _my_ music's patterns on such a database! There would be no legitimate argument to _prevent_ me doing it and every reason to do so (same for the majors- they'd put up everything they could). Then, anybody no matter where they are could get information on where to get my music, even if they only heard a snippet and went 'That was neat, what's it from?'
VERY cool. Currently, without this, it's a lot easier for random music listeners to identify stuff that is pushed by the major labels. Add this ability to effectively free-associate and still get results and music-recognition becomes effectively random access, reducing the importance of the mainstream industry. (Something I would _love_ to see...)
As a final note, imagine humming or singing into a mike, making a snippet of that, 'fingerprinting' it and then sending it out as a search! On the one hand you could make horrible noises just to see what music out there contains horrible noises. But it goes a hell of a lot deeper than that- for instance, there's a song, "Green-Eyed Lady" that I used to have (was hell to find, too). I never remember the band's name, they were a one hit wonder, but I can still remember the neat spooky feel of the tune- and, more relevantly, I remember that at one point the lyric is 'green-eyed lady, windswept lady', and 'windswept' is articulated with unusual clearness. I have to wonder- if I made a little recording of me trying to sing 'windswept' with the intonation and articulation I remember- would it, on some level, match the original? Would it return me the information on the song itself?
The harder you look at this idea, the more it starts to look like the best sort of science fiction fantasising. Hum the refrain of the tune you can't remember to the computer and it looks through its databanks and (depending on how well you hum!) it tells you what the tune was, better than most humans ever could. This alone would make the idea a killer idea- the added decentralisation that it brings (I can submit all my music to the database and anyone can search for it- just as I can upload a web page and anyone (mostly) can connect to it) makes it even more exciting.
_Good_ _job_ :)
Inspect the whole file all you want- you might even see interesting wiggles in the waveform which are of course exactly the sort of thing this will pick up on. You can go in and invert chunks of those waveform wiggles, and that will render that little snippet unmatchable with the original tune- at the expense of making the audio go sputter sputter sputter. Pitch-shifting the whole tune up about 2 octaves would work too :) or timestretching it to about twice its normal length- maybe only 1 1/2 times its normal length. That would work if you like slow dancing ;) most effective? Well, you know how some mp3 files ripped off CDs go BZRRRP every now and then 'cause the CD player choked? The data formerly existing during the section where it goes BZRRRP is rendered TOTALLY UNMATCHABLE by this technique ;) therefore you can completely destroy the fingerprint by simply arranging for the rip to be 100% bzrrrrp. I think I can safely say that this would be a completely effective way of eradicating fingerprintability, at least until they start fingerprinting CD failure modes :)
The kicker is this- there will still be a huge false positive count. Consider this- I own a Proteus/1 synth. Some sounds I have modified and altered, but some I use 'stock'. Play a certain note or melody with a certain sound and BAM- "Excuse me, we can legally prove you sampled 'j_random_80s_band', see you in court". Playing an acoustic instrument, it's very unlikely that you'll exactly duplicate a waveform simply by playing the same notes, but with sample-based synthesizer modules that ship with ROM banks?
I think I can help explain- let me put it this way. I've got a tune (obLink: see URL link above) called "Rain Dragon". There's a point toward the beginning where a 'mutating' synthesiser tone enters with a sort of warpy noise, on a beat that kicks really hard with bass drum and a splash cymbal. The total impact is quite aggressive- the synth sort of bursts in, and does so in a way that defines the range of unusual sounds that patch can produce.
Take that as an example sound snippet to work with. Now, let's say for the sake of argument that the impact of the splash and bassdrum and synth are all perfectly synchronised (splash and bassdrum are in fact sequenced and are perfectly synchronised to within MIDI spec, synth was a lucky hit that seemed to link up extra nicely). Call the phase of the splash's initial attack A, the phase of the bassdrum B, the phase of the attack of the synth C. These may all be in phase, adding up to a big transient. Some may be out of phase- for instance, the splash may come through unaltered but the syn attack and bassdrum attack may be going opposite directions and cancel each other out.
This is a very large level feature of the waveform- to alter it you would have to do such violence to the waveform as to render it unlistenable. Nothing you can do is going to make that syn attack and bassdrum attack be in different phase- obliterate the bass and you have a wimpy thin version of the same musical event signature, listen to it on a transistor radio and you have mostly the overtones and some distortions on the same musical event signature, record the transistor radio and it's the same deal- the LARGE SCALE waveform shapes are going to have a recognisable pattern if the music itself is still recognisable at all. In the crudest possible form you'd have to physically edit out certain drum hits or notes to alter the recognition- the crudest possible form for this type of identification is, say, MIDI. If there's a particularly interesting drum fill in something you can sequence it painstakingly in MIDI (not quantising but accurately placing each drum event in time) and get an instantly recognisable 'copy' of the original recording despite obliterating even the very sounds themselves and falling back on nothing but timing alone...
There's a great deal of pre-existing work in other fields, such as image tracking, that defines fingerprinting as 'imposing a subtle added signal onto the media and then reading it back'. That's a far cry from what you're doing- might I suggest 'bodyprinting' instead? ;) after all, what you're doing is much closer to plunking the 'body' of a music snippet down in sand and recording the large scale attributes. It doesn't much matter what the details are. If you mixed one tune with a different tune, the 'bodyprint' of the one would gradually fade (not be instantly obliterated!) by increasing loudness of the other, and at the halfway point you'd be getting a 'bodyprint' that registered about equally for BOTH tunes (!).
Now that you have this concept so nicely worked out, what do you intend to do with it? Are you going to give to the record industry the ability to track down unauthorised music wherever it may present itself- most notably, to identify samples used in other songs and bring lawsuits over them?
I was trying to think of other ways the RIAA could abuse this technology, but I drew a blank- because at this time it's not necessary to _prove_ a music copy is from a particular source, to bring suit. Nobody has argued that britney spears mp3s are NOT the same tune as the original CDs because it's stupidly obvious that they're effectively the same tune. Hence, this process simply adds a level of certainty to a process of identification that's already enough to stand up in court. Is there any likelihood of this level of authentication of a copy becoming necessary in practice?
I can, to some extent, sympathise with this rather cynical viewpoint, but their competitors are not in court over their basic business practices. MS is, and has repeatedly been, certainly as far back as Jim Gray's defection to MS. He had to know.
Just an observation. To me, if there is evil it is in what you are willing to condone...
Considering the total cultural chasm between traditional Unix hackers and traditional MacOS hackers, this is a huge development. Plus it includes some of the greatest titles ever to break sales records on the Mac (most notably, the game Marathon).
I agree that MacOS is moving on to better things. It appears to be moving on to Open Source. :)
No :)
When you are considering someone's argument, it's really quite important to not simply buy into their default assumptions- if you do, you might even feel that Twinge of alarm, the disconcerting feeling that something's broken somewhere in your worldview. What if he is right? O_O
When you _do_ look at their default assumptions, it gives a much better foundation for understanding the validity of their argument. In Bowie's case, these default assumptions appear to include things like this:
- Nobody does something for nothing
- Everybody only acts in their own self-interest, always
- If someone isn't, it must be because they have been TRICKED!
:o
- Once the people who are doing this 'free' stuff realise that other people are paid MONEY to do it, they will all stop, as...
- what other motivation is there?
*hee, hee, hee...*Now really, can you take this line of reasoning seriously? If so, aren't you a rather cold, unpopular person without friends, scheming and plotting to further your personal wealth? :D
Honestly- there _are_ other values. Go look at a sunset for five minutes without attempting to figure out how to sell it. Get a pet that is not an investment. Get laid without paying for it, if you can! Do something that sidesteps the neat little dead-end of power and wealth your head's stuck in. You might just like it! ;)
What big ones? Please, one example. I realise I sound like a crazed anti-intellectual-property commie when I say that, but as so often happens when I make such arguments, I don't care :) kindly define the sort of 'big idea' that must be restricted and kept under wraps and never ever shared with others, whether YOU can implement it ideally or are just 'banking it' so nobody ELSE can implement it. I could easily argue that no idea so important should be owned any more than mathematical algorithms can be owned- that you should be limited to withholding your _implementation_ of said Big Idea, which presumably must be better than that of your competition. What gives you the right to own Big Ideas? Stick to laying claim to methods and implementations- Big Ideas are the property of society, and you should make your money off being the quickest off the mark with the Big Idea, first to market, and the one with the best implementation. If this implementation is sufficiently original, you can even patent it- but that process was never meant to lay claim to Big Ideas, only to make others have to work on their own versions of the Big Idea.
Do these MIT speakers kill bugs? Do they cause dogs to howl and cats to hide under the couch? The parallel to a spotlight is apt- it's not safe to look directly into a spotlight.
Performance (even realworld performance, let's not get into benchmark fun) isn't the only criterion. One must look at the conditions under which you are allowed to use the product. This, in the age of UCITA, is where Microsoft will hurt themselves the worst. Given a weapon, they attack. This time they are busily attacking their own customers and setting more and more restrictive rules on their customers, as well as more and more harsh penalties for rulebreakers. At some point you end up going 'hell with this, let me find something lame but harmless'.
This has worked very well against other business, because MS has not been held accountable to the laws of the USA for what they do. It has _not_ been effective in a larger sense- to a large extent it is just this behavior that has produced Linux and the open source movement in general. Honestly, if you could start a business making computer software and build a small company that took some reasonable market share, where is the need for open source? If Microsoft did not hold their customers and the rest of the industry (not to mention the judiciary...) in contempt, where would the emotional drive to rebel through open source be? Yet, at this time you can't reasonably expect to run a small business selling many types of software, because Microsoft owns the market and dictates what will survive and what will be destroyed- and venture capitalists will in fact check with Microsoft about whether to invest in your business, on that bases. And Microsoft does indeed hold most of the rest of the world in contempt- so in a very real sense they are forcing the growth of open source, by taking great pains to make everything else's future seem even more nasty, brutish and short.
This is a very real error, though they are not likely to be able to turn on a dime and fix it- their ability to whirl about and kill unexpected commercial competitors simply makes the case for open source and 'amateur' development stronger. The less opportunity there is for pro-level developers to practice their craft commercially, the more of them there are to practice it as 'amateurs', and the more likely they are to do that. It's much like a present-day rock band choosing to release mp3s instead of seeking a record deal, _knowing_ that the present-day record deals are so horrid that they might as well 'stay in the garage' because their future is a wasteland should they try the traditional, major label way. It's similar in some ways for programmers- the only people with _any_ credibility for making a competitive office suite, browser etc are those willing to do it for free, because Microsoft will obviously destroy anything resembling a commercial venture, and this certainty is enough to freeze up financial support from potential investors.
Only Microsoft could possibly force open source, developed-for-free software to take over- and they are rapidly causing just that to happen, by the utter thoroughness of their destruction of the commercial sphere. Every time they destroy an entire market segment they produce the conditions for open source projects covering that market segment, produced by people who desire a choice and won't get that choice in any other way.
Poetic justice... and hubris, ate
Then why on earth should anybody cooperate with you? Nice trolling, but if there's an atom of sincerity in your claims, it's rather sad, as you're crippling yourself by refusing to have your ideas (whatever they are, if any) exist in a social context with the ideas of others.
This translates roughly to 'I am smarter than everybody else in the world regarding the field in which I work'. You won't ever communicate your ideas- they are for franchising only, not for discussion. There are few people who have any business whatsoever taking such an attitude- among them, possibly, John Carmack- who opensources his old engines, pitches in on opensource projects, and posts to Slashdot like any member of the community.
It looks like the people who _really_ have ideas and aren't just wanking about it tend to be the people who are discussing them with others and placing more importance on their superior ability to reach a synthesis with the ideas of the community, rather than those who say 'if' I come up with a great idea I will defend it with my life and never tell anybody.
This might be a little counterintuitive- but it's so well established that it bears closer examination. Essentially, the people most capable of continuing to turn out competitive work are the ones most likely to want to cross-pollenate with other developers in the community, secure in the belief that they can execute on the ideas better than their competition. And on the other hand, the people (and companies) least capable of coming up with new ideas or executing on their existing ideas are the ones who most want to chain up the ideas themselves, the ones saying 'I wouldn't let an idea go out there for free, are you crazy?'.
It looks to me like this is a convenient little litmus test, to distinguish between classes of developer and their relative capacities. In a way, to act from a presumption of idea scarcity almost _proves_ you don't have many... if you can't consistently come up with new ideas for new situations so easily that you can afford to give them away, what business do you have aspiring to be a professional programmer?
Um, I'd be happy to be corrected, but before I believe possession of DeCSS in source form is NOT a felony with the stated maximum penalties under DMCA, I'd want to hear a lawyer confirm it in his professional capacity. Your common sense opinion is regrettably not the final word on the matter: more's the pity. If it was that simple and sensible, a lot of people would have less to worry about. Where does the law stand NOW? Is it not the case that you can be charged with a felony crime for knowing possession of DeCSS (specifically) in source code form?
I am going to try fiddling with the code to see if I can get it to print attractively on one sheet of paper. I figure I can do a certain amount of this without going to jail, as long as _I_ don't stand in front of Blockbuster handing them out.
How about mailing copies to your Senators and representatives, asking if they would be good enough to simply keep the copy despite the fact that keeping that information is a felony crime? Might make for good sound bites, politicians like to be seen doing dramatic stuff like holding a press conference to say,
Now, how would that be? We need some politicians to recognize how media-friendly this situation can be to them.Take a sprinter, who can repeatably run X distance in 13.5 seconds. Where is the 13.5 stored in him? To make him faster do you go and change the '13.5' to '13.2' or lower? No- that number is the product of all the different variables (body mass, muscle effectiveness, air drag on whatever clothing he's wearing, wind, air pressure at whatever altitude he's at and ability to use lungs to get oxygen from said air mid-race) that make the sprinter up. None of these variables are morally right or wrong- the fact of air pressure is not morally wrong. The fact that the sprinter has body mass is not morally wrong. All this produces the epiphenomenon of his repeatable sprint time of 13.5 seconds- which might take on great importance, but this doesn't change the fact that it's the product of all the variables that make up the sprinter.
By the same token, existence of the Tasmanian tigerwolf is an epiphenomenon. It wouldn't even be extinct if a bunch of humans with guns hadn't blown 'em all away. Its existence is neither more nor less important to 'natural selection' as any other animal- natural selection is an EPIPHENOMENON, it does not need to be cared for by wise humans in order to work- this attitude is much like insisting that people must _care_ that 2+2=4 or mathematics will be lost. 2+2=4 is an epiphenomenon of certain ways of thinking about number, and fits with the real world, explaining certain processes accurately. Natural selection is an epiphenomenon of ways of thinking about populations, and likewise fits with the real world, explaining certain processes accurately. It does not need to be _protected_. It is.
If the Tasmanian tigerwolf is reintroduced to the world, this too is an epiphenomenon- because the environment of wild animals _unavoidably_ includes what humans think about them. If humans think it is ecologically, morally, or even aesthetically better for some species to persist in the face of human expansion, and take action about it, that human opinion becomes _part_ of the animal's environment, and the epiphenomenon may be survival of that species. For whatever reason it would be 'fitter'...
I'm reminded of a SF story, Cordwainer Smith's 'Norstrilia', in which there are huge, deformed, sick sheep that produce an immortality drug. These sheep are tended by humans, like a crop. In those hypothetical circumstances, that is 'fitness'.
However, one needn't get fictional to find an example that contradicts people's simpler Darwinesque beliefs- look at the wolf. Wolves have formidable natural weaponry, yet the species also possess formidable 'mental blocks' against injuring a submissive member of their own pack. If a wolf rolls over and bares its throat, an attacking packmate will find it impossible to finish off the first wolf, no matter how important that might be to the attacker at the time. This is purely a mental block- Darwinistically, one might think that it'd be better for the attacker to get to kill all competitors and control the gene pool, dominate completely. Unfortunately, wolves are such deadly fighters that this would lead to obliteration of entire packs through infighting- and so the epiphenomenon of natural selection leads to wolves with mental blocks towards hurting submissive packmates- wolves whose _minds_ have a direct influence on the survival of other animals.
By the same token it is not at all unreasonable to suggest that the general ecological concerns of many humans are natural selection- on the one hand it may be the Tasmanian tigerwolf, and in other areas it may be a town objecting to the death of a river through intense industrial pollution killing other industries such as fisheries, or it may be the objecting to oil tanker spills and the dumping of contaminated bilgewater. The objections, the protests, are themselves part of natural selection, and in many cases they are as survival-enhancing as the wolf's suppressed killer instincts- they serve the _population_, without which there would be no individuals. If all the world was individualistic oil-dumping river-poisoning clear-cutting species-obliterating extremes of 'Darwinist' behavior, the planet would be more or less lifeless in not many thousands of years, because some types of self-interested behavior are _destructive_. And so, given the human capacity to think about such things, natural selection produces the environmentalist in increasing numbers, preying on the industrialist and keeping the whole 'pack' of humans going for the long term, much as the suppressed attack instinct of the wolf towards submissive wolves keeps the wolf population going for the long term.
It's not unthinkable that, with the human capacity for thought, natural selection begins to encompass the entire biosphere of the whole world- with environmentalists beginning to forge 'suppressed eco-obliteration' instincts in other humans, the survival trait being the flourishing of the entire ecosphere. There's huge benefit to the uncontrolled diversity of biology on the planet. It's not simply aesthetic benefit but scientific benefit as well, and also raises issues of whether it's an unsafe gamble to kill off vast numbers of species and reduce the complexity of the biosphere to a simpler, possibly unsustainable condition in the long run. NOW is the time to consider these things, not 100 years too late.
Let them bring back the tigerwolf. It should not have been eradicated so quick in the first place. We don't know what possible benefits there might be from having them 100 years on.
Why must the idea of free software always be associated with gangs of hackers working in concert to produce better software than gangs of corporate programmers? Why don't people think of the products of individuals- individuals who happen to share their work with society under a free software license? Those exist, but maybe since they are _not_ vast overblown projects they fail to be noticed? I would think the important part is not forming a committee and getting 10,000 eyes behind the code, it is getting the stuff out there in a way that allows it to be re-used (and in my way of thinking, in a way that furthers the intent of getting more stuff out there under the same terms.)
I suggest changing Microsoft to Lancre Stick And Bucket Dance ;) ...it seems to have the same basic spirit...
But what is it worth to give such powerful, free tools to that one kid who can use them and might never get the chance otherwise?
Sneak that ol' gcc on there, or perl or something. One day you might be glad you 'wasted' that HD space on it, when you come in and some little display hack is zipping about the screen :)
I wonder if I can moderate a moderation as funny? :)
Ya know, these things run Linux too. Think about it ;) *g*
Set things up so the popular Linux GUI environments can scale to vastly larger resolutions, and you get the following delightful result:
- screens continue to expand and expand so users can have DSWs and one-up each other in boardrooms
- MacOSX/vector/no problem!
- Linux/some hack or other/here we are at 16000x12000, fun fun
- Windows: ow ow ow!
If this REALLY gets going, Windows' legacy of holding 90% or so of the app mindshare will cause lots of major hurting