First off Internet incubators were not places broken eggs went to hatch, they were places bright young hens and roosters came to assemble the eggs. Gee paw, what's what mean? These incubators were not tombs of ideas that bunched together failures and hoped to reanimate them, they took 'good' ideas and tried to make them fly.
That settles your first misconception.
Your second misconception is that doing that sort of things is a good idea: it isn't. Even the title of the post (maybe changed by the editors) suggests you don't believe this idea, since hospices are places people who have given up (i e people that are terminal, and medicine is useless except to ease the pain) go to die.
The Internet doesn't need that. It needs bad ideas flushed right out. Just like taking a failing Indian restaurant and roofing it with a failing Mexican restaurant isn't going to be a good idea, putting two failing dot-coms together on one URL is also not.
Dot-coms fail for a variety of reasons, like restaurants, and it isn't always the 'food,' but also the location, timing and price. Moving it with something else that is rejected doesn't escape any of that.
The closest thing I could imagine to what your saying is an Internet warehouse that comes along and buys up unsold merchandise from different dot-coms and shops it around to buyers at discount. But that isn't the same thing.
A bad idea is a bad idea, at least for the time being.
Not to be another terse bantering fool, but it is probably just the government prepping us for Iraq with some new technologies, or perhaps the aliens checking in on us, or maybe the George Forman Grill isn't quite as safe as we suspected.
Well since Capitol Hill is using a pretty-much standard install of Windows, chances are they wouldn't get it.
And that is the most dangerous thing: that our nation's most intrusted institutions are seceptable to common failures caused by lazy programmers.
Some laws, especially American copyright laws, don't make sense to other countries. Obviously in America where most everyone can have access to the knowledge they need--not always the material posessions or food--through public libraries and educational institutions, it makes sense for us to charge for everything.
Charging $50 for a book on the flu doesn't not necessarily inhibit the dessemination of knowledge. We have informative news resources that can keep us abreast of developments, libraries and cheap access to the Internet to keep us in tune with what we need to know and even seek out specific facets of curiosity.
However in other countries some educational institutions cannot afford to stock the basics, the extreme capitalism makes sense to be bent. While it certainly does hurt the manufactures, it doesn't severly impede economic development, but may actually spur it as more people can learn, and ten build on their knowledge.
Gotta hate people ripping off Apple design just to rip off Apple design.
But, on the other hand, if the new ideas like up to muster, this sounds extremely useful. Listening to the radio, replacing--perhaps--the mini tape recorder, and hopefully it can be sold for cheaper.
Is it just me, or does anyone remember the report from a couple months back (it was on TechTV's The Screen Savers), that said that the new iMac's surfed the Internet a couples seconds slower because of the lousy refresh rate on LCDs.
I think Apple's move is partly money and, maybe, partly to stave off these kind of complaints. If Apple is going to move into the gaming world, they had better have the right hardware before they get too excited about the software.
Does anyone know if LCDs have improved their refresh rates sufficiantly?
This might be great, you're right. But it won't be: this is Real we are talking about, the pioneer of the clunky-as-all-hell media applications that do nothing for anyone but barely stream audio and crash when the juices start flowing.
On the one hand, it is nice that Real is doing this for Open Sourcers, but, on the other, what other choice did they have?
So, before anyone wets their skeeves with dreams of Open Source-everything, be prepared for this to be the first in an unwieldy trend of crap being released to be saved by open sources, with no credit given back to them.
Some people say don't look a gift horse in the mouth, well this isn't a gift horse, it is just another media dinosaur waiting in the bushes to rip everyone off.
Well the potential was there: that we, the people, could do something on our own without Dow Jones looking down our shirts. And, we still can. Look at the weblogists, like Jason Kottke and Dave from Scripting News. And, really, most of the weblogers. They have overcome commercialism and a lot of them don't even have paid-advertisment on their pages.
The potential is still there for individuals to have a voice. Just look here at SlashDot. Though corporations may loom in the background at big sites, and through big Internet services, you and I still have a voice and we can express it.
For every dollar MLB.com charges for its audio broadcasts, a new user will come along and make a fan site.
But, you are right in that we are in someone else's backyard. There always looms over us the upage in the cost of bandwidth, hosting, the conversion of free e-mail services to expensive ones and change in the cost of the Interent media content (Salon, WSJ). But there is a line between Yahoo charging for POP access and more space than Yahoo changing words in people e-mails. And, unfortunately, that line is being treaded upon, both on the internet and in our own yards.
We are in times when companies are scrambling to get money, if only on paper, anyway they can. And we are in times when the government feels that protecting us means knowing all things about all people.
I see your second point, which is a good one, but is the same not also true for the Mac? Aren't a lot of Macs used for K-12 education, aren't a lot used at design firms, and aren't a lot used by, as a recent study discussed here pointed out, by richer people who wouldn't be inclined to game, as they have actual jobs?
I am honesly asking, not being rhetorical, do these uses equally dipose the use of Macs for gaming just as office tasks do for PCs?
Only the unproductive citizens of society play Everquest, and none of them own a Macintosh.
But, seriously, the boat has passed. The only imaginable reason anyone would still play Everquest is a) being psyched up for geeky medireview-ishness by the Lord of the Rings or b) trying to relive their childhood, in the same horrible manner that people still care about Ozzy Osbourne because they were children of the 80's.
I, and my turtle 26.4 connection, seem to notice that the only time Quicktime works is when Steve Jobs is doing something.
It is disappointing that Tech TV can't get its act together. This is one of only a half-dozen events that effect the whole industry so immensly. And probably the only one that is actually worth watching at all. You can say what you want about Apple, but there is nothing in the computer industry that is more extrinsically appreciated as Steve Jobs doing his jig at MacWorld.
It is also the only thing that makes me want to endure using Quicktime for streaming anything.
But, of course, the only thing that matters is: What is Apple going to do for me? I am looking forward to a reason to use OS X--aside from Aqua--and a G4 iBook.
I think this has been missed, hopefully I can explain this as lucidly as possible:
The Information Dark Age is a real possibility, a terrorist attack against our digital infrastructure could create somewhat of a mass panic. Think of what would occur if there was a physical bombing of Yahoo's servers, or Hotmail's. Millions of people would lose their e-mails. They would even lose their addresses, their digital identities. They would have to begin again. However unlikely that is, it is a possibility.
But that is all a mute point if we look at the way our information is being handled. We, as many have pointed out, buy a machine, create documents, then throw them away as needed, then the machine may die, or be thrown away. Our documents have become much more expendable. Just look at websites that will trash content after so long or wipe clean their servers after they go under financially.
However, we aren't Abe Lincoln and we aren't hanging on to tattered books, because there is such a breadth of information at our disposal, and just as much coming each day. Information we don't need. Who needs all their old e-mail messages? Who needs the New York Times from August 21? Who needs all their old documents? No many people need them, but a lot of people want them. Information now has become trivialized. My inbox is full of Webster's Words of the Day and e-mails from friends that I just got, then saved, for no reason.
Our society is awash in digital details, the number of hits at your website, the sales of Britney Spears' latest album, the ramblings of the SlashDot postees archived. Why do we need all of these things?
We don't.
But, then, you say, 'what do we need?' We think we need Presidential archives, we think we need video of the '64 Super Bowl. We think we need all of these things, but do we?
I am an information junkie, I like to read the papers and read the goings-on here, but, in retrospect, why do we need all of these things, all of this information?
Certainly we need a base to continue building on as people, but our base isn't the '64 Super Bowl, nor is it how many records N*Sync has sold.
Perhaps as we increase our progress we can effectively decrease the need for archived and insignificant information. Perhaps, we will have to.
Think of it: If you are coming out with more and more technology, say new chipsets, doesn't your need for knowledge of the older chips decrease as your progress with the new one increases.
Another way: If you are creating more information, new information, how can you rely on old information, how can you even remember it? As we move forward quicker and quicker, if we can, is there anyway for people to look back in history in the same way? No, there simply is not a way to do this without evolving our minds to gather more information at one time.
Our society is like a file cabinet, there is only so much space for information. As we add and add to that information, to create a new society, why should be obligated to maintain the information left behind?
But, on the counter, as we progress and progress, should not our ability to handle information increase, as well as our ability to sort it?
Information is reaching a tedious point where we will have to make decisions. It is highly likely that we can store all of the world's saved information at the same archives, within the next 50 years. However, is there any reason to store some of this information? Is keeping my website, for instance, archived for the next millennia going to do the human race any good? Or will it just clog pipes of knowledge? As proud as I am of my website, and as much I want it to be saved, it does not deserve to be archived for thousands of years, because it's impact on progress is very limited, if existent at all.
In fact, as we get more new information that moves us in a new direction, how can the old information help? Remember, we need to shift the paradigms, because, as we see from today's world, the current one isn't preserving human life, nor is it getting us anywhere too fast. [The new computers look as if they will be doing the same thing only faster; the cars will be doing the same things only with more gadgets, and no horse; the way information is stored hasn't changed much since the first library, now it's only broken into different, personal, digital libraries; we still have war; and medicine is still mostly symptom-based, or the disease adapt just as the cures do.]
I think we will need to, if not delete, disregard information that today seems important, if we want to ever get anywhere. We could, of course develop a way to store and sort all of today's information--someday, maybe all of it in one disc, or whatever new media of the time stores data--, and save it for the esoteric wonderings of historians. But, again, what good does it do?
As we progress we will need to know more about that day, less about yesterday.
ICQ on a Macintosh is god-awful, it's like trying to drive a tank on water. You have to click to send messages, you have to do all this carpal-tunnel inducing reigemerant just to get a message, it's just nuts.
AOL should just give up on its dinosaurs: ICQ and Netscape.
If you want a real-world example... try get the back issues of the New York Times (or some equally presigious periodicle, movie or television show). Make unlimited copies of those back issues Set up a catalog or web site where you sell or give those copies to anyone who asks for one. I guarantee you will be slapped with a copyright infrigement lawsuit. I can almost guarantee you would loose such a battle if you challanged it.
>
I thought this at first, but it's a different medium. With the New York Times (the physical paper) they print copies, send them to libraries, the libraries pay for the subscription and allow anyone with a library card to come in and look at the Times' articles.
But, the Wayback Machine will take nytimes.com and archive what is showed to the world, for free (lets, for a second, ignore that nytimes.com requires registation to read articles--this is a seperate issue, but an interesting one). What did nytimes.com do? Instead of "slathering ink on dead trees" they pushed about some poixels onto a screen. They made avalible their content via a web server that served the thousands of people that visit their site each day.
But the server is different from the paper. The server isn't a one-to-one supplier, it is a distribution center for content. The Wayback Machine re-distributes that content in the manner in which it was originally distributed. Yes, it does things different from the New York Public Library, because it can serve thousands of people at a time, but that is the medium in which the content was presented, to be destributed to thousands of people at a time.
They Wayback Machine does what a library does in a medium-specific manner. It catalogues the content that it recieves from the site, content that is willingly and legally put there by willing writers, and hands it out to any person visiting their library.
However there are interesting legal arguments. For instance, nytimes.com charges a fee for viewing (via web browser, and, optional, saving and printing of) articles. If the WayBack machine curtails that business by offering those articles for free, is it doing something illegal? And, on a simlar note, if it does archive nytimes.com articles that are avalible to subscribers only, should it now allow that information to be accessed only by nytimes.com subscribes?
But, taking a non-registration-requiring site, like the Washington Post and dolling out the information they put out seems like a perfectly legitament, docile and resourceful tool that can only be considered a valuable tool for future generations.
The web is acid-paper, only worse. With each second paragaphs are moves, sentances shifted, facts corrrected, new things added. This provides for a consistant-with-the-now nature that is the Internet, however there is no point in relishing what is now if we have no idea what was.
Embarassing correction: I meant "If anyone is inovating it is Apple, becase at least they ARE NOT using the same plastic molds for their machines as Gateway, Dell and Compaq.
If anyone is innovating it is Apple, because at least they are using the same plastic molds for their machines as Gateway, Dell and Compaq. But, aside from that, Apple is actually putting in things that are useful, you mentioned DVD Burners, they are creating innovative software. And software is the new field, not hardware. Hardware is growing, but there is only so much we can do with it, without good software.
We are always going to stagnant with a good product: cars with four wheels, whose complaining? We are, of course, limited by the architecture of our minds and the wants of our society, but it isn't the Macintosh's fault, nor it's problem.
Yes, but when an author writes a book that is non-fiction he usually has souces, citatations and peer-review. He usually has a plan (an outline) and an editor who tells him what needs fixed.
What we see in this article is that the software writers have too little or none of these things: they don't have peer-review (only consumers' trials and errors), they don't have an outline (only envelopes), they do not even have an editor at the end (only a pretty cardboard box to be filled), nor do we have an index to see how they came to their conslusions (only a README.txt of possible conflicts and a headache).
Re:Praise, either way...
on
Wolframania
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· Score: 2
I don't think this is true at all. He has all the money he would ever need, he has spent 10 years doing this thing, which has been, according the articles I have read and the book which I have barely just skimmed, to have been exploration. I think he started out with and idea and fully explored it, making new paths each step of the way. I don't think he had the compacity for making new technologies or applything what is in this book, because he didn't know what was going to be in this book.
By the same token, it is impossible for this book's principles to be utitlized, if they can be, without having the book. There is no way for a technology to come about based on an idea that has never been presented.
If a DVD is $19/month, why are you not just buying it? That is like renting a movie for 15bucks a month--you could just own the film.
If you didn't want to keep the DVDs-which appears to be the only way this differs from purchasing a DVD-why not just bundle them together and sell on eBay?
I just don't understand renting a DVD for $19 to keep it a month when you can pay not usually more than $22 to keep one. Unless, and here is where I am ignorant, you can get boxed sets for $19 a month.
I don't think reading the Bible or the Quran or any other religious text will help you understand the strife; some good psychological studies of terrorism and schizophrenia might help.
Rex Hudson did a great study for the Library of Congress on terrorism, way back in September of 1999. Also, read some good political text, and, for something fun, try Philip Roth's Our Gang it's a wonderful parody of the Nixon White House.
This is so ironic: that a movie about how what we know is real is shutting down what is real--Sydney, Australia--to film a social commentary about what is fake, or real and unrealized.
Maybe these effects can't be done with CGI or maybe this is going to be really cool, and maybe the next Matrix movie will be some incredible social commentary on how controlled our lives by unseen forces, but it is taking away from these peoples daily lives. According to this plan, and disrupting these peoples lives, they are fighting exactly what Neo is trying to fight: bigger forces that dominate for no acceptable reason.
It is quite impossible for me to fathom why the Australians would submit to this plan. They are being dominated, controlled, having their lives screwed with by larger forces that are equally as futile as they are--they are submitting to a corporate monopoly on the unwitting plebeians who do nothing more than churn out money and fuel a larger system of nothingness.
Maybe the Matrix producers are making a great social commentary not with their impending film, but with their plan to harvest the lives of these people for their own use, under the guise of some matrix of entertainment.
Let me digress:
I am a "writer" and that is exactly the way I feel a lot of times; you put all this effort into a project, but you blind yourself to its errors, so you end up getting shot in the foot and binge drinking Vanilla Coke.
To the guy who wants to open-source: Do it because you love it, dreams of making money aren't dreams at all, but passionate fiscal-gluttony. If you want to do something, make a good product for yourself, then see if it's worth selling.
Slashdot Mirror
First off Internet incubators were not places broken eggs went to hatch, they were places bright young hens and roosters came to assemble the eggs. Gee paw, what's what mean? These incubators were not tombs of ideas that bunched together failures and hoped to reanimate them, they took 'good' ideas and tried to make them fly.
That settles your first misconception.
Your second misconception is that doing that sort of things is a good idea: it isn't. Even the title of the post (maybe changed by the editors) suggests you don't believe this idea, since hospices are places people who have given up (i e people that are terminal, and medicine is useless except to ease the pain) go to die.
The Internet doesn't need that. It needs bad ideas flushed right out. Just like taking a failing Indian restaurant and roofing it with a failing Mexican restaurant isn't going to be a good idea, putting two failing dot-coms together on one URL is also not.
Dot-coms fail for a variety of reasons, like restaurants, and it isn't always the 'food,' but also the location, timing and price. Moving it with something else that is rejected doesn't escape any of that.
The closest thing I could imagine to what your saying is an Internet warehouse that comes along and buys up unsold merchandise from different dot-coms and shops it around to buyers at discount. But that isn't the same thing.
A bad idea is a bad idea, at least for the time being.
Not to be another terse bantering fool, but it is probably just the government prepping us for Iraq with some new technologies, or perhaps the aliens checking in on us, or maybe the George Forman Grill isn't quite as safe as we suspected.
Well since Capitol Hill is using a pretty-much standard install of Windows, chances are they wouldn't get it. And that is the most dangerous thing: that our nation's most intrusted institutions are seceptable to common failures caused by lazy programmers.
If you are going to claim superiority you could at least attempt to appear somewhat superior.
Some laws, especially American copyright laws, don't make sense to other countries. Obviously in America where most everyone can have access to the knowledge they need--not always the material posessions or food--through public libraries and educational institutions, it makes sense for us to charge for everything.
Charging $50 for a book on the flu doesn't not necessarily inhibit the dessemination of knowledge. We have informative news resources that can keep us abreast of developments, libraries and cheap access to the Internet to keep us in tune with what we need to know and even seek out specific facets of curiosity.
However in other countries some educational institutions cannot afford to stock the basics, the extreme capitalism makes sense to be bent. While it certainly does hurt the manufactures, it doesn't severly impede economic development, but may actually spur it as more people can learn, and ten build on their knowledge.
Gotta hate people ripping off Apple design just to rip off Apple design.
But, on the other hand, if the new ideas like up to muster, this sounds extremely useful. Listening to the radio, replacing--perhaps--the mini tape recorder, and hopefully it can be sold for cheaper.
Is it just me, or does anyone remember the report from a couple months back (it was on TechTV's The Screen Savers), that said that the new iMac's surfed the Internet a couples seconds slower because of the lousy refresh rate on LCDs.
I think Apple's move is partly money and, maybe, partly to stave off these kind of complaints. If Apple is going to move into the gaming world, they had better have the right hardware before they get too excited about the software.
Does anyone know if LCDs have improved their refresh rates sufficiantly?
This might be great, you're right. But it won't be: this is Real we are talking about, the pioneer of the clunky-as-all-hell media applications that do nothing for anyone but barely stream audio and crash when the juices start flowing.
On the one hand, it is nice that Real is doing this for Open Sourcers, but, on the other, what other choice did they have?
So, before anyone wets their skeeves with dreams of Open Source-everything, be prepared for this to be the first in an unwieldy trend of crap being released to be saved by open sources, with no credit given back to them.
Some people say don't look a gift horse in the mouth, well this isn't a gift horse, it is just another media dinosaur waiting in the bushes to rip everyone off.
But hey, I could be wrong.
Well the potential was there: that we, the people, could do something on our own without Dow Jones looking down our shirts. And, we still can. Look at the weblogists, like Jason Kottke and Dave from Scripting News. And, really, most of the weblogers. They have overcome commercialism and a lot of them don't even have paid-advertisment on their pages.
The potential is still there for individuals to have a voice. Just look here at SlashDot. Though corporations may loom in the background at big sites, and through big Internet services, you and I still have a voice and we can express it.
For every dollar MLB.com charges for its audio broadcasts, a new user will come along and make a fan site.
But, you are right in that we are in someone else's backyard. There always looms over us the upage in the cost of bandwidth, hosting, the conversion of free e-mail services to expensive ones and change in the cost of the Interent media content (Salon, WSJ). But there is a line between Yahoo charging for POP access and more space than Yahoo changing words in people e-mails. And, unfortunately, that line is being treaded upon, both on the internet and in our own yards.
We are in times when companies are scrambling to get money, if only on paper, anyway they can. And we are in times when the government feels that protecting us means knowing all things about all people.
You forget to mention it was for System 7 users.
I see your second point, which is a good one, but is the same not also true for the Mac? Aren't a lot of Macs used for K-12 education, aren't a lot used at design firms, and aren't a lot used by, as a recent study discussed here pointed out, by richer people who wouldn't be inclined to game, as they have actual jobs?
I am honesly asking, not being rhetorical, do these uses equally dipose the use of Macs for gaming just as office tasks do for PCs?
Only the unproductive citizens of society play Everquest, and none of them own a Macintosh.
But, seriously, the boat has passed. The only imaginable reason anyone would still play Everquest is a) being psyched up for geeky medireview-ishness by the Lord of the Rings or b) trying to relive their childhood, in the same horrible manner that people still care about Ozzy Osbourne because they were children of the 80's.
Of course it is an EverQuest.
Well nothing happened anyway: the iMac got a bigger LCD screen, and OS X got a corny box.
I, and my turtle 26.4 connection, seem to notice that the only time Quicktime works is when Steve Jobs is doing something.
It is disappointing that Tech TV can't get its act together. This is one of only a half-dozen events that effect the whole industry so immensly. And probably the only one that is actually worth watching at all. You can say what you want about Apple, but there is nothing in the computer industry that is more extrinsically appreciated as Steve Jobs doing his jig at MacWorld.
It is also the only thing that makes me want to endure using Quicktime for streaming anything.
But, of course, the only thing that matters is: What is Apple going to do for me? I am looking forward to a reason to use OS X--aside from Aqua--and a G4 iBook.
I think this has been missed, hopefully I can explain this as lucidly as possible:
The Information Dark Age is a real possibility, a terrorist attack against our digital infrastructure could create somewhat of a mass panic. Think of what would occur if there was a physical bombing of Yahoo's servers, or Hotmail's. Millions of people would lose their e-mails. They would even lose their addresses, their digital identities. They would have to begin again. However unlikely that is, it is a possibility.
But that is all a mute point if we look at the way our information is being handled. We, as many have pointed out, buy a machine, create documents, then throw them away as needed, then the machine may die, or be thrown away. Our documents have become much more expendable. Just look at websites that will trash content after so long or wipe clean their servers after they go under financially.
However, we aren't Abe Lincoln and we aren't hanging on to tattered books, because there is such a breadth of information at our disposal, and just as much coming each day. Information we don't need. Who needs all their old e-mail messages? Who needs the New York Times from August 21? Who needs all their old documents? No many people need them, but a lot of people want them. Information now has become trivialized. My inbox is full of Webster's Words of the Day and e-mails from friends that I just got, then saved, for no reason.
Our society is awash in digital details, the number of hits at your website, the sales of Britney Spears' latest album, the ramblings of the SlashDot postees archived. Why do we need all of these things?
We don't.
But, then, you say, 'what do we need?' We think we need Presidential archives, we think we need video of the '64 Super Bowl. We think we need all of these things, but do we?
I am an information junkie, I like to read the papers and read the goings-on here, but, in retrospect, why do we need all of these things, all of this information?
Certainly we need a base to continue building on as people, but our base isn't the '64 Super Bowl, nor is it how many records N*Sync has sold.
Perhaps as we increase our progress we can effectively decrease the need for archived and insignificant information. Perhaps, we will have to.
Think of it: If you are coming out with more and more technology, say new chipsets, doesn't your need for knowledge of the older chips decrease as your progress with the new one increases.
Another way: If you are creating more information, new information, how can you rely on old information, how can you even remember it? As we move forward quicker and quicker, if we can, is there anyway for people to look back in history in the same way? No, there simply is not a way to do this without evolving our minds to gather more information at one time.
Our society is like a file cabinet, there is only so much space for information. As we add and add to that information, to create a new society, why should be obligated to maintain the information left behind?
But, on the counter, as we progress and progress, should not our ability to handle information increase, as well as our ability to sort it?
Information is reaching a tedious point where we will have to make decisions. It is highly likely that we can store all of the world's saved information at the same archives, within the next 50 years. However, is there any reason to store some of this information? Is keeping my website, for instance, archived for the next millennia going to do the human race any good? Or will it just clog pipes of knowledge? As proud as I am of my website, and as much I want it to be saved, it does not deserve to be archived for thousands of years, because it's impact on progress is very limited, if existent at all.
In fact, as we get more new information that moves us in a new direction, how can the old information help? Remember, we need to shift the paradigms, because, as we see from today's world, the current one isn't preserving human life, nor is it getting us anywhere too fast. [The new computers look as if they will be doing the same thing only faster; the cars will be doing the same things only with more gadgets, and no horse; the way information is stored hasn't changed much since the first library, now it's only broken into different, personal, digital libraries; we still have war; and medicine is still mostly symptom-based, or the disease adapt just as the cures do.]
I think we will need to, if not delete, disregard information that today seems important, if we want to ever get anywhere. We could, of course develop a way to store and sort all of today's information--someday, maybe all of it in one disc, or whatever new media of the time stores data--, and save it for the esoteric wonderings of historians. But, again, what good does it do?
As we progress we will need to know more about that day, less about yesterday.
*Any thoughts?
ICQ on a Macintosh is god-awful, it's like trying to drive a tank on water. You have to click to send messages, you have to do all this carpal-tunnel inducing reigemerant just to get a message, it's just nuts. AOL should just give up on its dinosaurs: ICQ and Netscape.
I thought this at first, but it's a different medium. With the New York Times (the physical paper) they print copies, send them to libraries, the libraries pay for the subscription and allow anyone with a library card to come in and look at the Times' articles.
But, the Wayback Machine will take nytimes.com and archive what is showed to the world, for free (lets, for a second, ignore that nytimes.com requires registation to read articles--this is a seperate issue, but an interesting one). What did nytimes.com do? Instead of "slathering ink on dead trees" they pushed about some poixels onto a screen. They made avalible their content via a web server that served the thousands of people that visit their site each day.
But the server is different from the paper. The server isn't a one-to-one supplier, it is a distribution center for content. The Wayback Machine re-distributes that content in the manner in which it was originally distributed. Yes, it does things different from the New York Public Library, because it can serve thousands of people at a time, but that is the medium in which the content was presented, to be destributed to thousands of people at a time.
They Wayback Machine does what a library does in a medium-specific manner. It catalogues the content that it recieves from the site, content that is willingly and legally put there by willing writers, and hands it out to any person visiting their library.
However there are interesting legal arguments. For instance, nytimes.com charges a fee for viewing (via web browser, and, optional, saving and printing of) articles. If the WayBack machine curtails that business by offering those articles for free, is it doing something illegal? And, on a simlar note, if it does archive nytimes.com articles that are avalible to subscribers only, should it now allow that information to be accessed only by nytimes.com subscribes?
But, taking a non-registration-requiring site, like the Washington Post and dolling out the information they put out seems like a perfectly legitament, docile and resourceful tool that can only be considered a valuable tool for future generations.
The web is acid-paper, only worse. With each second paragaphs are moves, sentances shifted, facts corrrected, new things added. This provides for a consistant-with-the-now nature that is the Internet, however there is no point in relishing what is now if we have no idea what was.
Embarassing correction: I meant "If anyone is inovating it is Apple, becase at least they ARE NOT using the same plastic molds for their machines as Gateway, Dell and Compaq.
Mi apologi
Who is inovative, Dell?
If anyone is innovating it is Apple, because at least they are using the same plastic molds for their machines as Gateway, Dell and Compaq. But, aside from that, Apple is actually putting in things that are useful, you mentioned DVD Burners, they are creating innovative software. And software is the new field, not hardware. Hardware is growing, but there is only so much we can do with it, without good software.
We are always going to stagnant with a good product: cars with four wheels, whose complaining? We are, of course, limited by the architecture of our minds and the wants of our society, but it isn't the Macintosh's fault, nor it's problem.
Yes, but when an author writes a book that is non-fiction he usually has souces, citatations and peer-review. He usually has a plan (an outline) and an editor who tells him what needs fixed.
What we see in this article is that the software writers have too little or none of these things: they don't have peer-review (only consumers' trials and errors), they don't have an outline (only envelopes), they do not even have an editor at the end (only a pretty cardboard box to be filled), nor do we have an index to see how they came to their conslusions (only a README.txt of possible conflicts and a headache).
I don't think this is true at all. He has all the money he would ever need, he has spent 10 years doing this thing, which has been, according the articles I have read and the book which I have barely just skimmed, to have been exploration. I think he started out with and idea and fully explored it, making new paths each step of the way. I don't think he had the compacity for making new technologies or applything what is in this book, because he didn't know what was going to be in this book. By the same token, it is impossible for this book's principles to be utitlized, if they can be, without having the book. There is no way for a technology to come about based on an idea that has never been presented.
If a DVD is $19/month, why are you not just buying it? That is like renting a movie for 15bucks a month--you could just own the film.
If you didn't want to keep the DVDs-which appears to be the only way this differs from purchasing a DVD-why not just bundle them together and sell on eBay?
I just don't understand renting a DVD for $19 to keep it a month when you can pay not usually more than $22 to keep one. Unless, and here is where I am ignorant, you can get boxed sets for $19 a month.
I don't think reading the Bible or the Quran or any other religious text will help you understand the strife; some good psychological studies of terrorism and schizophrenia might help.
Rex Hudson did a great study for the Library of Congress on terrorism, way back in September of 1999. Also, read some good political text, and, for something fun, try Philip Roth's Our Gang it's a wonderful parody of the Nixon White House.
This is so ironic: that a movie about how what we know is real is shutting down what is real--Sydney, Australia--to film a social commentary about what is fake, or real and unrealized. Maybe these effects can't be done with CGI or maybe this is going to be really cool, and maybe the next Matrix movie will be some incredible social commentary on how controlled our lives by unseen forces, but it is taking away from these peoples daily lives. According to this plan, and disrupting these peoples lives, they are fighting exactly what Neo is trying to fight: bigger forces that dominate for no acceptable reason. It is quite impossible for me to fathom why the Australians would submit to this plan. They are being dominated, controlled, having their lives screwed with by larger forces that are equally as futile as they are--they are submitting to a corporate monopoly on the unwitting plebeians who do nothing more than churn out money and fuel a larger system of nothingness. Maybe the Matrix producers are making a great social commentary not with their impending film, but with their plan to harvest the lives of these people for their own use, under the guise of some matrix of entertainment.
Let me digress: I am a "writer" and that is exactly the way I feel a lot of times; you put all this effort into a project, but you blind yourself to its errors, so you end up getting shot in the foot and binge drinking Vanilla Coke. To the guy who wants to open-source: Do it because you love it, dreams of making money aren't dreams at all, but passionate fiscal-gluttony. If you want to do something, make a good product for yourself, then see if it's worth selling.