the systems got into race conditions were you had to use software to figure out the dynamic properties of the chip to see if two signals would arrive at the next gate in time to produce a stable response
Precisely one of the reasons that I shriek in horror when I hear that some hardware was 'designed' by a clever software guy. What you describe "figure out the dynamic... stable response" (a.k.a. timing analysis) is not done in debugging - it is part of the design from square one, and is part of proper hardware design practices.
The fact that FPGA's are "programmable" does not move their development into the domain of software engineers.
A whole spectrum of skills is required to do proper hardware design (being a good 'logician' is only one of them) and FPGA's are raw hardware not finished product like a motherboard. Timing and many other 'real-world' factors that must be considered bore the hell of many 'logicians', but are critical to a reliable design.
A frightening number of Rube Goldberg machines exist out there that were designed by people who know something of logic and nothing of hardware design. I've had to redesign several of these "works only under ideal conditions but it's brilliant" pieces of junk.
Before you dismiss me as a hardware snob, let me tell you that I have spent many years both sides of the street and have dedicated my most recent 10 years to learning the art of good software design (there was supposed to *cough* be a bigger future in it). Each requires a set of skills and abilities that do intersect, but many of which exist entirely outside of that intersection. The fact that "logic" is one of the intersecting skills does not make a good hardware designer good at software nor does it make a good software designer good at hardware.
If the meteorite had landed north of the equator, they'd have found mostly laevo-rotatory amino acids. Since, it landed down under, where everything turns in the opposite direction, they found mostly dextro-rotatory amino acids.
... like everyone else on the planet, I'm well aware of Microsoft's solvency and *cough* "business acumen", and do anticipate that they will still be around in 10-20 years. But I think that they will experience a similarly humbling fate to that of the IBM colossus of yore, and thus be around in a greatly diminished capacity.
Be that as it may, my point was related to the latter part of the statement - my bad for not providing the appropriate emphasis thusly:
we have the resources and ability to help you 10 years from now when you're having trouble.
You already alluded to my real point when you said:
just as much as they do today, which is another argument entirely
The only "trouble" that Microsoft seems to be genuinely concerned about helping people with is excess weight in the money pocket.
My father first put me on to your column in the newspaper and I have been reading it for over 10 years since. One of the things that I feel solidified my fandom (and persuaded me to purchase several of your books in the last 6-7 years) was finding and reading copies of your old columns on web sites and in newsgroups. 7 or 8 years ago, they were very easy to find.
Recently, I looked for a specific old column to forward to a potential future fan (who had an experience that you wrote about) and discovered that is now almost impossible to find your older works on the 'net. It looks like someone has been pursuing the copyright issue. I could therefore only vaguely describe the column to him and a potential convert may have been lost.
So, in light of that and all that is going on with respect to the value of intellectual property rights and copyright vs. the marketing potential of having old works freely available, what is your view?
Despite my best efforts, I own many of your books, read your weekly columns, have several low-flow toilets and twice as many plungers. I also have the mp3's of your band "The Rock Bottom Remainders" from mp3.com. You might want to consider the name "The Low Flow Remainders" if you get my drift (and I am certainly tired of getting it). By the way, "Tupperware Blues" smokes - were you on vacation that day?
And (I am not making this up) I used to own a copy of the LP (note to Slashdotters-look "LP" up in your history books) by your original band "The Federal Duck" which I kept it in my garden shed to scare the spiders away. I had to get rid of the LP because my neighbors kept complaining that it was keeping their property values down so, 10 years ago, I gave it to a deeply disturbed record collector friend of mine. Ever since, the shed has been infested with spiders and my friend has refused to talk to me.
As you can see, my life is hell and most roads lead back to you. You will be hearing from my lawyers.
Now that that is out the way, I'd like to ask you the following:
Do you think that low-flow toilets are a terrorist device (possibly developed in France) and on a related note that Bush and the Saddam Destroyers would be a good name for a rock band?
Snobbery, my ass. I'm tired of McMusic
on
NARAS vs. the RIAA
·
· Score: 1
When given solely the choice between eating rotting fish and starving, most people will eventually eat the rotting fish. - Snork Asaurus
Big-label and big-radio music today is rotting fish. I welcome you and everyone else to come over to the other side and find out what real music is as opposed to prefabricated McMusic. You're welcome to stay (no snobs here) and you're welcome to go back - it's your choice and your health. I really couldn't give a damn what you do. But for those who are tired of vacuous sound-alike big-label music and the empty feeling with which it leaves you- there is an alternative.
You're right - it was a poorly chosen word on my part without at least qualifying it. Perhaps "Artistic Quality", or "Quality of Composition" would be better choices, but those still seem subjective and ambiguous. In the context that I (wished to) convey the sentiment, it certainly has nothing to do with manufacturing or marketing values. I had hoped to get away with the word for the purposes of succinctness, but that was not to be. Fair enough, here goes.
I view music, however crude, as an expression of human spirit and by extension, as art.
To me, in order for it to fulfill the quality requirement, an art form must satisfy a group of criteria, some of which are subjective and some almost intangible. I think that artistic quality coveys something of the artist - that the work is indeed a labor of effort and honesty and contains originality; coveys a message and emotion yet challenges the viewer or listener to seek their own interpretation and connect with their own emotions; is not an intentional copy of elements of another work, although it may me subtlety derivative of other works; has structure and flow; follows certain guidelines yet is not bound by rules(sheesh) and has something original to say. The foregoing is a highly subjective, off-the-cuff definition and does not sit well with engineer in me, but since this is not a thesis paper, I'll go with it for now. I guess that part of the nature of art is that it is somewhat antithetical to engineering, yet contains some common elements.
(Now please don't pick the above apart, it's not woth the effort. Even I'm not totally happy with it, but I don't want to spend a month on it.)
Despite the vague definition, I do know (albeit subjectively) quality music from crap and what I hear on the radio and from big labels is more the latter than the former.
but I think that some of these oft-used arguments are a bit silly.
Either your whole post is a very good troll or you're very naive, but I'll try to treat what you said as sincere.
I'm dubious. You may not *like* best-sellers, but dismissing all of them as low-quality is, frankly, ludicrous.
You may want to work on your reading comprehension. Nowhere did I say that I don't like best sellers nor did I dismiss best sellers as low quality. I do have a problem with mindless, repetitive, banal crap. By coincidence, that seems to be mostly what the big 5 labels are pushing. Another coincidence I have found is that much more quality and creativity exists outside of the big 5 label world.
if people do not like your music, they will not buy it.
I think that you're confusing quality of music with effectiveness of product marketing and lack of choice.
You deliberately avoided buying mainstream music to *increase* your choices available?
I deliberately avoid buying mainstream music because most of it is crap and because I have contempt for the artist-screwing and customer-screwing practices of the big label cartel. The decision wasn't made over night but over several years of growing disenchantment - prices were too high and going up and more and more releases had only 1-2 good tracks and the rest was filler.
On top of that, I developed the perception of a general decline in the quality of music and creativity of artists. Eventually, I figured out that the consumer was being hosed on that issue (as well as others, like pricing) by the record cartel and swore off them. The unanticipated benefit was that I discovered that there is in fact a huge amount of choice, that much good music does exist, and creativity is alive and well. It just isn't processed and sold by the cartel and you have to work harder to find it.
Oh, that's silly. *Every* big industry is like that. I don't see people up in arms about their silverware, cordless phone, book publishers, etc, etc, etc.
It appears that you have little trouble with having fewer choices marketed to you as more. And your argument actually underscores my point - that music is viewed by the industry as a commodity like cordless phones (there is quite a difference between the "Arts" and commodity goods). I don't buy hype myself - there may be 157 different types of toothpaste on the shelf and the packages may have different colors and words, but they're all more or less the same, made by a very small group of manufacturers, and being sold on the basis of creating the perception of choice rather than giving real choice.
Isn't having more than half the US population hating you enough?
The music industry is not noted for doing things by half measures - they just hit a rest but plan to complete the piece. The working title is "Requiem for a Dinosaur".
I would argue that it's not the presence of a "free" alternative that has caused the decline in CD sales, it's the presence of competing choices offering more value and fewer hassles.
Indeed. I believe that the recording industry has completely confused cause with effect and refuses to accept the consequnces of its actions.
While I do not download copyrighted material, many years ago my music budget and I completely abandoned the regular commercial stream in favor of independent artists and recordings. The top 4 reasons were:
1) Quality
2) Choice and variety
3) Value for money
4) Contempt for an industry that would be as at home selling hamburgers - a soulless marketing machine that didn't have a clue what real music was, treated it as a commodity and treated its customers and artists with equal levels of contempt while continuing down a path towards providing less of items 1-3. I wasn't alone with my feelings and options arose - we took them. I'm not going back - I'm much happier where I am now.
Kazaa's Lawyers, Whipple & Whiple, Warn Hollyw
on
Kazaa Fights Back
·
· Score: 3, Funny
That would be cruel - isn't that how they got Noriega to surrender?
So his ideas are possibly as little as 2 years old, rather than the more typical 10-20 for that industry - a very forward thinking man. But Stringer did not appear to be joking last night. It's difficult to convey in writing the ambiguity of his use of word "could", but it almost sounded as if he was implying that they thought they had the right to do it, with impunity, but won't. Anyway, it was probably just a little FUDding on his part.
Last night, while doing something else, I flipped on the box for background noise - the channel was CNBC. I heard "muffle, entertainment mumble, corporate, CEO, the street, dividends, blah, blah" - the usual business garble.
The I heard something along the lines of "What are your plans in light of the undeniable success after Napster of peer to peer file trading software such as WinMX?" The person being queried was Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony Corp. of America.
His reply was mostly the usual babble about legal means, being proactive in providing what customers want through services such as Pressplay, etc., but the he caught my attention when he qualified the foregoing with the statement:"even though we can chase people with viruses" (and that is a verbatim quote - I wrote it down).
I asked myself:
1) Does he just not have a clue what he's talking about?
2) Have recent legislative and minor legal successes given the recording industry a greater sense of omnipotence?
3) Is he aware of some gifts that US government about to bestow on his industry
Slashdot Mirror
Precisely one of the reasons that I shriek in horror when I hear that some hardware was 'designed' by a clever software guy. What you describe "figure out the dynamic ... stable response" (a.k.a. timing analysis) is not done in debugging - it is part of the design from square one, and is part of proper hardware design practices.
The fact that FPGA's are "programmable" does not move their development into the domain of software engineers.
A whole spectrum of skills is required to do proper hardware design (being a good 'logician' is only one of them) and FPGA's are raw hardware not finished product like a motherboard. Timing and many other 'real-world' factors that must be considered bore the hell of many 'logicians', but are critical to a reliable design.
A frightening number of Rube Goldberg machines exist out there that were designed by people who know something of logic and nothing of hardware design. I've had to redesign several of these "works only under ideal conditions but it's brilliant" pieces of junk.
Before you dismiss me as a hardware snob, let me tell you that I have spent many years both sides of the street and have dedicated my most recent 10 years to learning the art of good software design (there was supposed to *cough* be a bigger future in it). Each requires a set of skills and abilities that do intersect, but many of which exist entirely outside of that intersection. The fact that "logic" is one of the intersecting skills does not make a good hardware designer good at software nor does it make a good software designer good at hardware.
It seems like only yesterday...
Case closed and make mine a Foster's. G'day.
Be that as it may, my point was related to the latter part of the statement - my bad for not providing the appropriate emphasis thusly:
we have the resources and ability to help you 10 years from now when you're having trouble.
You already alluded to my real point when you said:
just as much as they do today, which is another argument entirely
The only "trouble" that Microsoft seems to be genuinely concerned about helping people with is excess weight in the money pocket.
Were you able to keep a straight face when you typed that?
My mod points ran out yesterday. If I still had them, you'd be at +5.
Our expert system has detected that you are sharing a single connection with 4,179 computers.
You mean there are some that aren't?
Maybe someone can fill us in.
It made me laugh out loud with no 'splanation. I'd mod it up if I could.
is Linux ready for the desktop?
Recently, I looked for a specific old column to forward to a potential future fan (who had an experience that you wrote about) and discovered that is now almost impossible to find your older works on the 'net. It looks like someone has been pursuing the copyright issue. I could therefore only vaguely describe the column to him and a potential convert may have been lost.
So, in light of that and all that is going on with respect to the value of intellectual property rights and copyright vs. the marketing potential of having old works freely available, what is your view?
That should be "George Bush and the Saddam-Destroyers".
Despite my best efforts, I own many of your books, read your weekly columns, have several low-flow toilets and twice as many plungers. I also have the mp3's of your band "The Rock Bottom Remainders" from mp3.com. You might want to consider the name "The Low Flow Remainders" if you get my drift (and I am certainly tired of getting it). By the way, "Tupperware Blues" smokes - were you on vacation that day?
And (I am not making this up) I used to own a copy of the LP (note to Slashdotters-look "LP" up in your history books) by your original band "The Federal Duck" which I kept it in my garden shed to scare the spiders away. I had to get rid of the LP because my neighbors kept complaining that it was keeping their property values down so, 10 years ago, I gave it to a deeply disturbed record collector friend of mine. Ever since, the shed has been infested with spiders and my friend has refused to talk to me.
As you can see, my life is hell and most roads lead back to you. You will be hearing from my lawyers.
Now that that is out the way, I'd like to ask you the following:
Do you think that low-flow toilets are a terrorist device (possibly developed in France) and on a related note that Bush and the Saddam Destroyers would be a good name for a rock band?
Big-label and big-radio music today is rotting fish. I welcome you and everyone else to come over to the other side and find out what real music is as opposed to prefabricated McMusic. You're welcome to stay (no snobs here) and you're welcome to go back - it's your choice and your health. I really couldn't give a damn what you do. But for those who are tired of vacuous sound-alike big-label music and the empty feeling with which it leaves you- there is an alternative.
You're right - it was a poorly chosen word on my part without at least qualifying it. Perhaps "Artistic Quality", or "Quality of Composition" would be better choices, but those still seem subjective and ambiguous. In the context that I (wished to) convey the sentiment, it certainly has nothing to do with manufacturing or marketing values. I had hoped to get away with the word for the purposes of succinctness, but that was not to be. Fair enough, here goes.
I view music, however crude, as an expression of human spirit and by extension, as art. To me, in order for it to fulfill the quality requirement, an art form must satisfy a group of criteria, some of which are subjective and some almost intangible. I think that artistic quality coveys something of the artist - that the work is indeed a labor of effort and honesty and contains originality; coveys a message and emotion yet challenges the viewer or listener to seek their own interpretation and connect with their own emotions; is not an intentional copy of elements of another work, although it may me subtlety derivative of other works; has structure and flow; follows certain guidelines yet is not bound by rules(sheesh) and has something original to say. The foregoing is a highly subjective, off-the-cuff definition and does not sit well with engineer in me, but since this is not a thesis paper, I'll go with it for now. I guess that part of the nature of art is that it is somewhat antithetical to engineering, yet contains some common elements.
(Now please don't pick the above apart, it's not woth the effort. Even I'm not totally happy with it, but I don't want to spend a month on it.)
Despite the vague definition, I do know (albeit subjectively) quality music from crap and what I hear on the radio and from big labels is more the latter than the former.
Either your whole post is a very good troll or you're very naive, but I'll try to treat what you said as sincere.
I'm dubious. You may not *like* best-sellers, but dismissing all of them as low-quality is, frankly, ludicrous.
You may want to work on your reading comprehension. Nowhere did I say that I don't like best sellers nor did I dismiss best sellers as low quality. I do have a problem with mindless, repetitive, banal crap. By coincidence, that seems to be mostly what the big 5 labels are pushing. Another coincidence I have found is that much more quality and creativity exists outside of the big 5 label world.
if people do not like your music, they will not buy it.
I think that you're confusing quality of music with effectiveness of product marketing and lack of choice.
You deliberately avoided buying mainstream music to *increase* your choices available?
I deliberately avoid buying mainstream music because most of it is crap and because I have contempt for the artist-screwing and customer-screwing practices of the big label cartel. The decision wasn't made over night but over several years of growing disenchantment - prices were too high and going up and more and more releases had only 1-2 good tracks and the rest was filler.
On top of that, I developed the perception of a general decline in the quality of music and creativity of artists. Eventually, I figured out that the consumer was being hosed on that issue (as well as others, like pricing) by the record cartel and swore off them. The unanticipated benefit was that I discovered that there is in fact a huge amount of choice, that much good music does exist, and creativity is alive and well. It just isn't processed and sold by the cartel and you have to work harder to find it.
Oh, that's silly. *Every* big industry is like that. I don't see people up in arms about their silverware, cordless phone, book publishers, etc, etc, etc.
It appears that you have little trouble with having fewer choices marketed to you as more. And your argument actually underscores my point - that music is viewed by the industry as a commodity like cordless phones (there is quite a difference between the "Arts" and commodity goods). I don't buy hype myself - there may be 157 different types of toothpaste on the shelf and the packages may have different colors and words, but they're all more or less the same, made by a very small group of manufacturers, and being sold on the basis of creating the perception of choice rather than giving real choice.
According to this, it appears that some members of the RIAA have also embraced file sharing - but only as a tool for gathering marketing data.
The music industry is not noted for doing things by half measures - they just hit a rest but plan to complete the piece. The working title is "Requiem for a Dinosaur".
Indeed. I believe that the recording industry has completely confused cause with effect and refuses to accept the consequnces of its actions.
While I do not download copyrighted material, many years ago my music budget and I completely abandoned the regular commercial stream in favor of independent artists and recordings. The top 4 reasons were:
1) Quality
2) Choice and variety
3) Value for money
4) Contempt for an industry that would be as at home selling hamburgers - a soulless marketing machine that didn't have a clue what real music was, treated it as a commodity and treated its customers and artists with equal levels of contempt while continuing down a path towards providing less of items 1-3. I wasn't alone with my feelings and options arose - we took them. I'm not going back - I'm much happier where I am now.
"Don't squeeze the Sharman".
That would be cruel - isn't that how they got Noriega to surrender?
So his ideas are possibly as little as 2 years old, rather than the more typical 10-20 for that industry - a very forward thinking man. But Stringer did not appear to be joking last night. It's difficult to convey in writing the ambiguity of his use of word "could", but it almost sounded as if he was implying that they thought they had the right to do it, with impunity, but won't. Anyway, it was probably just a little FUDding on his part.
The I heard something along the lines of "What are your plans in light of the undeniable success after Napster of peer to peer file trading software such as WinMX?" The person being queried was Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony Corp. of America.
His reply was mostly the usual babble about legal means, being proactive in providing what customers want through services such as Pressplay, etc., but the he caught my attention when he qualified the foregoing with the statement: "even though we can chase people with viruses" (and that is a verbatim quote - I wrote it down).
I asked myself:
1) Does he just not have a clue what he's talking about?
2) Have recent legislative and minor legal successes given the recording industry a greater sense of omnipotence?
3) Is he aware of some gifts that US government about to bestow on his industry
4) Did he tip his hand?
5) Is he on crack?
My guess is mostly #1, a little #2 and some #3.
... claim the problems are due to the installation of bad drivers.
Sounds like you'd be lucky just to get windows up.