I guess they were bound to do that, with the tech sector in the toilet, but really. Microsoft? Easy on the pockets?
I've never failed to raise an eyebrow with an open source pitch simply by quoting the customer what the microsoft liscensing would require for the project, and comparing it to what I would charge for the whole deal, which is usually about the same. The only way a MS shop could compete is if they installed their crappy equipment for free.
Install it cheap, make your money off the service contract, and watch your competitors go broke trying to undercut you.
Yea, I've actually heard of stuff like this. It checks, based on the sound graph of the file and the setting you choose, and decides what you'd want to hear.
Seems interesting, but there are problems which I don't see being overcome.
Say you spend most of your time playing Unreal Tournament 2003 with winamp in the background, and so this software learns that you like ripping violent music about 90% of the time.
Then you bring home the aforementioned Chinese girl and you put on some soft guitar music and just and things are becoming interesting, the song ends, and the idiot "Brain" decides a little Rob Zombie is just what you need, based off past experience.
Half the time I don't know myself what I want to listen to...It's too closely linked to my mood to be modeled in a purely statistical manner unless my mood levels out because of some wierdness (i.e. I smoke a lot of pot so I listen to a lot of Grateful Dead, or my significant other dumps me and I listen to really depressing breakup music for a month.) Otherwise, I'm going to be oscillating all day between different types of music, so something which may please me in the morning may get skipped bigtime by the afternoon.
But even THAT isn't reliable; I could be mellow, listening to mellow stuff on Friday morning, then WHAM! Major programming meltdown at a big client! I have to mobilize my tired brain cells with brain crushing rock/metal! A reversal of my otherwise "normal" progression from violent to mellow during the course of the day, which itself is often severly affected by how much I have to deal with my boss.
I don't see how such a thing could be truly accurate unless it has the facility to somehow read my mood. I can think of several ways to do this, but I doubt blush reflex scanners, heart rate/ekg monitors, voice stress monitors, or neural feedback chips are included with the software.
I'm not sure I'd want it to be accurate anyway. Seems like it would be too easy to get lulled into a pattern, with no new input. Kind of stale. Unless it can read a new song and figure out, statistically whether or not I would like it, which sounds more like a Turing test than anything else. Maybe worse; my S.O. can't figure out what the hell I like, so if a computer COULD, well, I'd probably finally be able to write off the opposite sex.
I'm a hardcore RPG gamer. That's not all I like, but every now and then I go off on a major binge.
The problem is this: while a whole bunch of gender stereotyped Lara Croft clones with huge tits and wierd dialog might be great for 13 year old boys, its really jarring to those of us who are buying it more for the escapism than for the battle cleavage.
I don't want to get jarred out of whatever minimal plot they've kludged together by something SOOOO campy I can't even willingly suspend my raucious sarcastic laughter, more less my disbelief.
I'm not saying no softcore and no random bimbos, but it needs to be balanced and used intelligently. (If that isn't inherently contradictory.) The best selling games are those that have either phenominal gameplay, or acceptable gameplay with great plot. Over and over you see games that are technically mediocre and well written crushing games that are technically superior and thematically challenged.
What you're saying is that "Bad OOP (pOOP) is not the answer" which I agree with.
However, the idea behind object oriented programming is to break repeated tasks down to a general algorythm that can be reused at 1000 different places in the code without having to write 1000 different, but similar, pieces of code. This is always a good idea.
Bad OOP is when some jackass writes a 600 line "Swiss-Army Object" and insists on including it everywhere instead of doing any new coding.
So, what he's saying is, "We could find lots of horrible and dangerous things if we keep researching in this direction, so we shouldn't do it."
What that actually means is, "Since we actually have the kind of restriant not to use this stuff, let's let someone with less restraint come up with it first."
When Einstein gave the US his aid in building an atomic weapon he did it on the principle that someone would discover it, and that it was MUCH better that it be us, than the Nazis. It's much better that we know, and can prepare, than it is for us to be caught flat footed by something so awful we didn't even let ourselves think about it.
Sad attempt? I think the sad attempt was your attempt to deflect blame FROM the republicans.
Welfare has what to do with intellectual property?
The reason it is seen as a Republican issue is because it is a big business big money issue, and when big business speaks, the Republican party listens. They are so busy enriching themselves, they have no time to listen to anyone who is unwilling to line their pockets.
The people who are hurt by this legislation are the very people you purport to be speaking for: The hard working, american dream believing entreprenuers, who don't have corporate muscle behind them. Do you think Microsoft is being hurt by this? Sony? Intel? Dell? The RI-fricking-IA?
You want to talk partisan politics? I hate all politicians who listen harder to the rich than the poor; that includes democrats as well as republicans. Any law that favors a bloated market strangling monopoly over 99% of the rest of us can only be enacted by a government that is sitting in the pocket of corporations. This includes Republicans especially, but democrats as well.
We have a government that is so totally corrupted by big money that something like the damn DMCA could pass by the margin that it did! It's so fricking typical that you blame "big government" when you should be blaming big business!
Grow a brain man. You're getting royally screwed just like the rest of us.
The thing about consoles is this: THEY ARE SOLD FOR LESS THAN COST!!!
Sound incredible? Yes! But true! They expect to make their money and then some off the games. So they sell the hardware cheap, and there you are. You have hardware that costs less than it would actually cost you to build it, nearly unheard of today.
It's got everything you need, and more! All that hard drive is actually gravy! Video card? Gravy! All you need is the processor and memory.
Hook a dozen of them together for less than a top-of-the-line Dell! Ten grand will buy you 50(!!!) of the little things.
I won't HAVE to imagine a beowulf cluster of these little lovelies! I can actually have one in my garage!!!
When they all get remaindered because the playstation is still better, I'll buy 'em up cut-rate, build a massive cluster, and use the resultant computing power to pummel poorly secured Windows servers in an armageddon of digital irony!
The coolest thing about it is, when the guy tried to save and hit the bug he didn't immediately think, "DAMN! Screwed up my save game!" or "Stupid non-functional code!" but instead, "Hmmmmm, I wonder if I can use this to hack a half a dozen things and boot linux on my Xbox??!?"
Sanity checking is a pain in the butt. That's why visual basic is so popular. Those damn "Dim" variable declarations are almost laughably exploitable. You can hide an aircraft carrier in one of those things.
I'm not a complete idiot; I did try to download them first. It did a prior install check (like you get for the annoying windows "upgrade" disks.) and found I had no software, and then prompted for me to insert the original disk.
The worst ever driver experience wasn't sound at all...I bought a fancy 3com nic, which came bundled with some lame windows "home networking" software. I don't know why I bought it...some stupid part of my brain saw the high price tag and said, "Wow! This thing must be bad ass! Look how much it costs!" Proving conclusively that I am, indeed, a sometime retard.
So I installed the damn thing, and ended up having to spend an extra hour or so getting the damn drivers disentagled from the awful "home networking" software. Anyway, it worked, and I forgot about it.
Until my windows install crapped out...probably about 5 months down the line (Win 98). I found that I had lost the CD. Who the hell would keep a CD for NIC drivers? So I switched over to my linux box, and went looking for the driver download.
And looking.
And looking.
3com had every damn driver in the world except mine. Finally I found, down in the small print, that, since windows software had been included (Remember the crappy networking stuff?) I had to get the driver from Microsoft.
So I went to microsoft, and they claimed that I had to go to 3com. I argued with them for a while, and then, it turns out that the driver had been included on win2k, and I had to go buy a win2k disk in order to install the damn driver for the massively over-priced NIC!
Finally ended up tossing the damn thing, and picking up a 12 dollar soho-ware nic, which has performed flawlessly up until the present day (3?) years later.
Not sure what the moral is. I have to say though, I've never really had problems with linux drivers: if there actually is one, it works great.
Heh. I agree completely, especially with the "non-classical" part. I'd love to see the statistics on the sales of classical music in recent years. Seems like that would be revealing.
I've had a better audio experience with Linux than I ever did with windows.
Case in point: I recently was bequeathed a SB Audigy card (Platinum...Oooooooo.) with no driver disk.
So whay you say! I can download the driver no problem, you say!
NAY! I say, they have restricted the downloads to driver "upgrades" only. If you don't have the original, then you get NOTHING! I had to go rip off a damn copy of the original driver CD to use a physical piece of hardware. Severely annoying.
This is in windows. In LINUX, I found the driver and it worked perfectly. Took like 3 minutes. It was GREAT! No pops or crackles, just pure wonderful SOUND!
My Name is SatanicPuppy, and I'm a switcher.
=P
The cool thing about open source software
on
Too Much Free Software
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Is that it evolves like a biological system. The best parts get recycled, and the rest gets forgotten. Over time you get incredible products, far better than anything closed source could produce, simply because their software is stagnant. There is no new blood.
It is short-sighted to see the early stages of a developing tech to be imperfect or incomplete. (And yes the stage is still early.) Instead you need to measure it against the fitness of other products on the market (where it measures up well.) or against previous versions (where it measures up well.)
The thing that hurts linux on the desktop is lack of popular acceptance. It's still considered radical among grannys and baby boomers; they're worried that they won't be able to use aol on Linux, and that thus, their digital existence will come to an end. This acceptance will only come with time.
Just my opinion.
Re:Why isn't Redhat 9 iso's on KaZaA?
on
Open Source DRM
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· Score: 1
Heh. I'd put it up there, except I don't want my bandwidth to vanish for a week or so.
Besides, you should give them money. It's not like it costs very much to get the early download rights.
I only object to paying for data under the following conditions:
1) when it's a sucky overpriced product that I'm forced to use because some other jackass bought it and keeps sending me fricking documents.
2) when I hate the company that produces it, and I want to see them DIE DIE DIE.
3) or when they, in the slavish hunt for every last penny of possible revenue, implement some draconian copy protection scheme, which only serves to piss off people like me, and abuse old people and simpletons.
If none of these things apply, I have nothing against shelling out the money. I even kind of like it sometimes; I feel like I'm supporting something worthwhile. I'd just blow the money on smack and hot women anyway. =)
Just my opinion.
Open Source DRM?
on
Open Source DRM
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Isn't that like OpenSource Windows?
So let me get this straight:
This is a project that is part of a free intellectual property movement which is designed to protect intellectual property from being used by people who have not liscensed it?
What the hell?
Okay, so it's going to be released under a liscense which allows anyone to modify, copy, and distribute the source, as long as they DO distribute the source. And the point of it is to make it impossible for someone to modify, copy, or distrubute the source, whether you paid for it or not...
I'm not getting anywhere here, but I think it sucks.
Okay, so we're going to let Microsoft, a proven monopoly, control what sites we SEE?
You could look up porn and get M$.com. Microsoft porn. This is completely messed up. Having so much power left in the hands of Google is bad enough, and they have never been proven to be truly untrustworthy. Having it in the hands of Microsoft is completely intolerable.
Fortunately, they will suck.
I'm so fricking info-paranoid I've got my own spiders to find sites for me, so this kind of thing doesn't bother me too much, but still, for that portion of the population that doesn't know any better (AOL users), I shudder to think. What kind of content could they possibly find non-objectionable?
I think it's common to think of sci-fi as a sort of garbage fiction, like romances, or cheezy mysteries. Sometimes it's perfectly valid to do so.
On the other hand, here are a whole group of intelligent and imaginative people streching their minds to try and encompass a possible future growing from modern conditions. Trying to imagine future tech, and things people could need in the future.
The Diamond Age is possibly the best book ever written regarding the possible outcomes of a successful nanotechnology. Coming off that, you get William Gibson, David Brin, Robert Heinlien, Arthur C. Clarke, Issac Asimov, et al, who have had a profound effect on the perception of modern tech, if not it's development. And who's to say they had nothing to do with development?
How much of doing something is knowing it can be done? I mean, its a common joke on Slashdot:
1) Idea
2) ????
3) Profit
But what about those people who can supply the ???? if someone else gives them the idea?
What about Carl Sagan or Colin McGinn? Academics who stray over into the realm of Sci-fi because they have an idea, an idea they can't express in an academic context.
Who's to say which way the cause and effect goes, every time? Why shouldn't an idea thought up by a professional dreamer get caught by someone who can put practice to theory?
As for me personally, I don't code from sci-fi (though I will admit having lifted part of a perl script from Stephenson's Cryptonomicon), but it does occasionally stimulate an idea. So who is to say?
I'm not one for paying for anything I don't have to (Witness my email addy. Let M$ pay for anyone who wants to flame me.) but I don't see anything wrong with a kind of toll. "This user doesn't want unsolicited email, and you're not on the list, so if you want access you gotta pony up some change."
This would certainly wipe out the low end of the spam world; webcams, anatomical enlargements, etc. If some decent sized corporation wants to send me mail, that's fine.
The problem comes in through identity checking. How do you know the person who is sending you mail is on the list? I'm sure everyone here knows how to send email from a port 25 hack; even if you don't, it's completely obvious that spammers know how to forge whatever name they want.
So, in order for this to work, digital signatures would have to become much more common. Which I don't see happening any time soon. (vis a vis, if you only accepted digitally signed email, there would be no spam.)
Organic chem is good. Don't know about the rest. Make sure you know what "genomics" means.
Re:"I don't hate the war, just GWB" says it all
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· Score: 1
Liberal? I would have voted for McCain in a second, just because he had a brain and a spine, unlike either of the other two idiots. And this crap where a father and son both become president is foul. I thought this was a democracy?
If there was no one better we could have chosen, then this country is in sorry shape.
Re:I don't hate the war, just GWB
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Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
Heh. I have my liberal moments, true enough.
However, this isn't one of them. If we'd done it right the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess. Trust a republican to screw up the war. World War I...Democrat. World War II...Democrat. Korea, Vietnam...Democrats. Republicans only go to war over oil, against little countries that can't fight back, for the purposes of lining their own pockets. That's just my opinion, of course.
We should have gone in there, crushed the power structure, and set up a decent government. Then helped them rebuild their economy, and we'd have an ally in that region. Take Japan as an example; we beat them solidly in a war, then helped them get back on their feet. We got a top notch trading partner out of it and one less thing to worry about in the world.
That crap we pulled with afganistan is just the same. In the '70s we set up a government over there to serve our interests in that part of the world, we gave them weapons and training, wand when they'd beaten the russians, we forgot their names. At least until they smashed a couple of planes into a few major buildings. All that could have been avoided.
Iraq. We fricking armed Iraq! I don't care if we go into countries and try to make things better for them by deposing the dictator of the week, but jesus, can we at least not ARM them before we decide to fight them? This is so pointless! And we do it all the time!
And, as for the European community "supporting it" that is the same as saying that we "supported" the Serbian genocide in the former Yugoslavia because we didn't do anything about it. Or the Holocaust. Or the slaughter of the Kurdish rebels in Iraq...Of course we caused that, so I guess you could say we supported it.
The Iraqi leadership is pretty foul, and the world will be a better place without them, but, no doubt, our high-handed actions are causing many in the world to think the same about us.
Whether their right or wrong, we are complete idiots to think that their opinions don't matter.
Heh. I didn't know that. The paint was an oxidant? I don't see how they could have thought that was a good idea. Weren't they originally supposed to have a military role?
Slashdot Mirror
I guess they were bound to do that, with the tech sector in the toilet, but really. Microsoft? Easy on the pockets?
I've never failed to raise an eyebrow with an open source pitch simply by quoting the customer what the microsoft liscensing would require for the project, and comparing it to what I would charge for the whole deal, which is usually about the same. The only way a MS shop could compete is if they installed their crappy equipment for free.
Install it cheap, make your money off the service contract, and watch your competitors go broke trying to undercut you.
Life is sweet.
Yea, I've actually heard of stuff like this. It checks, based on the sound graph of the file and the setting you choose, and decides what you'd want to hear.
It'd be cool to put them together, somehow.
Seems interesting, but there are problems which I don't see being overcome.
Say you spend most of your time playing Unreal Tournament 2003 with winamp in the background, and so this software learns that you like ripping violent music about 90% of the time.
Then you bring home the aforementioned Chinese girl and you put on some soft guitar music and just and things are becoming interesting, the song ends, and the idiot "Brain" decides a little Rob Zombie is just what you need, based off past experience.
Half the time I don't know myself what I want to listen to...It's too closely linked to my mood to be modeled in a purely statistical manner unless my mood levels out because of some wierdness (i.e. I smoke a lot of pot so I listen to a lot of Grateful Dead, or my significant other dumps me and I listen to really depressing breakup music for a month.) Otherwise, I'm going to be oscillating all day between different types of music, so something which may please me in the morning may get skipped bigtime by the afternoon.
But even THAT isn't reliable; I could be mellow, listening to mellow stuff on Friday morning, then WHAM! Major programming meltdown at a big client! I have to mobilize my tired brain cells with brain crushing rock/metal! A reversal of my otherwise "normal" progression from violent to mellow during the course of the day, which itself is often severly affected by how much I have to deal with my boss.
I don't see how such a thing could be truly accurate unless it has the facility to somehow read my mood. I can think of several ways to do this, but I doubt blush reflex scanners, heart rate/ekg monitors, voice stress monitors, or neural feedback chips are included with the software.
I'm not sure I'd want it to be accurate anyway. Seems like it would be too easy to get lulled into a pattern, with no new input. Kind of stale. Unless it can read a new song and figure out, statistically whether or not I would like it, which sounds more like a Turing test than anything else. Maybe worse; my S.O. can't figure out what the hell I like, so if a computer COULD, well, I'd probably finally be able to write off the opposite sex.
I'm not holding my breath.
I'm a hardcore RPG gamer. That's not all I like, but every now and then I go off on a major binge.
The problem is this: while a whole bunch of gender stereotyped Lara Croft clones with huge tits and wierd dialog might be great for 13 year old boys, its really jarring to those of us who are buying it more for the escapism than for the battle cleavage.
I don't want to get jarred out of whatever minimal plot they've kludged together by something SOOOO campy I can't even willingly suspend my raucious sarcastic laughter, more less my disbelief.
I'm not saying no softcore and no random bimbos, but it needs to be balanced and used intelligently. (If that isn't inherently contradictory.) The best selling games are those that have either phenominal gameplay, or acceptable gameplay with great plot. Over and over you see games that are technically mediocre and well written crushing games that are technically superior and thematically challenged.
Just my opinion.
Well, if there was ever a way to get girls interested in games. Gotta get me one of those!
The very idea! The last thing I want is for my bar stool to move away from my drink!
What you're saying is that "Bad OOP (pOOP) is not the answer" which I agree with.
However, the idea behind object oriented programming is to break repeated tasks down to a general algorythm that can be reused at 1000 different places in the code without having to write 1000 different, but similar, pieces of code. This is always a good idea.
Bad OOP is when some jackass writes a 600 line "Swiss-Army Object" and insists on including it everywhere instead of doing any new coding.
Most of the programmers I end up working behind can't even master OOP. Ever see 10000 lines of code in a main method?
So, what he's saying is, "We could find lots of horrible and dangerous things if we keep researching in this direction, so we shouldn't do it."
What that actually means is, "Since we actually have the kind of restriant not to use this stuff, let's let someone with less restraint come up with it first."
When Einstein gave the US his aid in building an atomic weapon he did it on the principle that someone would discover it, and that it was MUCH better that it be us, than the Nazis. It's much better that we know, and can prepare, than it is for us to be caught flat footed by something so awful we didn't even let ourselves think about it.
Sad attempt? I think the sad attempt was your attempt to deflect blame FROM the republicans.
Welfare has what to do with intellectual property?
The reason it is seen as a Republican issue is because it is a big business big money issue, and when big business speaks, the Republican party listens. They are so busy enriching themselves, they have no time to listen to anyone who is unwilling to line their pockets.
The people who are hurt by this legislation are the very people you purport to be speaking for: The hard working, american dream believing entreprenuers, who don't have corporate muscle behind them. Do you think Microsoft is being hurt by this? Sony? Intel? Dell? The RI-fricking-IA?
You want to talk partisan politics? I hate all politicians who listen harder to the rich than the poor; that includes democrats as well as republicans. Any law that favors a bloated market strangling monopoly over 99% of the rest of us can only be enacted by a government that is sitting in the pocket of corporations. This includes Republicans especially, but democrats as well.
We have a government that is so totally corrupted by big money that something like the damn DMCA could pass by the margin that it did! It's so fricking typical that you blame "big government" when you should be blaming big business!
Grow a brain man. You're getting royally screwed just like the rest of us.
One word: Cluster.
;)
The thing about consoles is this: THEY ARE SOLD FOR LESS THAN COST!!!
Sound incredible? Yes! But true! They expect to make their money and then some off the games. So they sell the hardware cheap, and there you are. You have hardware that costs less than it would actually cost you to build it, nearly unheard of today.
It's got everything you need, and more! All that hard drive is actually gravy! Video card? Gravy! All you need is the processor and memory.
Hook a dozen of them together for less than a top-of-the-line Dell! Ten grand will buy you 50(!!!) of the little things.
I won't HAVE to imagine a beowulf cluster of these little lovelies! I can actually have one in my garage!!!
When they all get remaindered because the playstation is still better, I'll buy 'em up cut-rate, build a massive cluster, and use the resultant computing power to pummel poorly secured Windows servers in an armageddon of digital irony!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
Of course, that's just my opinion...
Heh.
The coolest thing about it is, when the guy tried to save and hit the bug he didn't immediately think, "DAMN! Screwed up my save game!" or "Stupid non-functional code!" but instead, "Hmmmmm, I wonder if I can use this to hack a half a dozen things and boot linux on my Xbox??!?"
Sanity checking is a pain in the butt. That's why visual basic is so popular. Those damn "Dim" variable declarations are almost laughably exploitable. You can hide an aircraft carrier in one of those things.
Makes my life SO much more fun =D
I'm not a complete idiot; I did try to download them first. It did a prior install check (like you get for the annoying windows "upgrade" disks.) and found I had no software, and then prompted for me to insert the original disk.
The worst ever driver experience wasn't sound at all...I bought a fancy 3com nic, which came bundled with some lame windows "home networking" software. I don't know why I bought it...some stupid part of my brain saw the high price tag and said, "Wow! This thing must be bad ass! Look how much it costs!" Proving conclusively that I am, indeed, a sometime retard.
So I installed the damn thing, and ended up having to spend an extra hour or so getting the damn drivers disentagled from the awful "home networking" software. Anyway, it worked, and I forgot about it.
Until my windows install crapped out...probably about 5 months down the line (Win 98). I found that I had lost the CD. Who the hell would keep a CD for NIC drivers? So I switched over to my linux box, and went looking for the driver download.
And looking.
And looking.
3com had every damn driver in the world except mine. Finally I found, down in the small print, that, since windows software had been included (Remember the crappy networking stuff?) I had to get the driver from Microsoft.
So I went to microsoft, and they claimed that I had to go to 3com. I argued with them for a while, and then, it turns out that the driver had been included on win2k, and I had to go buy a win2k disk in order to install the damn driver for the massively over-priced NIC!
Finally ended up tossing the damn thing, and picking up a 12 dollar soho-ware nic, which has performed flawlessly up until the present day (3?) years later.
Not sure what the moral is. I have to say though, I've never really had problems with linux drivers: if there actually is one, it works great.
Heh. I agree completely, especially with the "non-classical" part. I'd love to see the statistics on the sales of classical music in recent years. Seems like that would be revealing.
I've had a better audio experience with Linux than I ever did with windows.
Case in point: I recently was bequeathed a SB Audigy card (Platinum...Oooooooo.) with no driver disk.
So whay you say! I can download the driver no problem, you say!
NAY! I say, they have restricted the downloads to driver "upgrades" only. If you don't have the original, then you get NOTHING! I had to go rip off a damn copy of the original driver CD to use a physical piece of hardware. Severely annoying.
This is in windows. In LINUX, I found the driver and it worked perfectly. Took like 3 minutes. It was GREAT! No pops or crackles, just pure wonderful SOUND!
My Name is SatanicPuppy, and I'm a switcher.
=P
Is that it evolves like a biological system. The best parts get recycled, and the rest gets forgotten. Over time you get incredible products, far better than anything closed source could produce, simply because their software is stagnant. There is no new blood.
It is short-sighted to see the early stages of a developing tech to be imperfect or incomplete. (And yes the stage is still early.) Instead you need to measure it against the fitness of other products on the market (where it measures up well.) or against previous versions (where it measures up well.)
The thing that hurts linux on the desktop is lack of popular acceptance. It's still considered radical among grannys and baby boomers; they're worried that they won't be able to use aol on Linux, and that thus, their digital existence will come to an end. This acceptance will only come with time.
Just my opinion.
Heh. I'd put it up there, except I don't want my bandwidth to vanish for a week or so.
Besides, you should give them money. It's not like it costs very much to get the early download rights.
I only object to paying for data under the following conditions:
1) when it's a sucky overpriced product that I'm forced to use because some other jackass bought it and keeps sending me fricking documents.
2) when I hate the company that produces it, and I want to see them DIE DIE DIE.
3) or when they, in the slavish hunt for every last penny of possible revenue, implement some draconian copy protection scheme, which only serves to piss off people like me, and abuse old people and simpletons.
If none of these things apply, I have nothing against shelling out the money. I even kind of like it sometimes; I feel like I'm supporting something worthwhile. I'd just blow the money on smack and hot women anyway. =)
Just my opinion.
Isn't that like OpenSource Windows?
.000124611 XPD (Palladium Ounces) worth.
So let me get this straight:
This is a project that is part of a free intellectual property movement which is designed to protect intellectual property from being used by people who have not liscensed it?
What the hell?
Okay, so it's going to be released under a liscense which allows anyone to modify, copy, and distribute the source, as long as they DO distribute the source. And the point of it is to make it impossible for someone to modify, copy, or distrubute the source, whether you paid for it or not...
I'm not getting anywhere here, but I think it sucks.
Just my
Okay, so we're going to let Microsoft, a proven monopoly, control what sites we SEE?
You could look up porn and get M$.com. Microsoft porn. This is completely messed up. Having so much power left in the hands of Google is bad enough, and they have never been proven to be truly untrustworthy. Having it in the hands of Microsoft is completely intolerable.
Fortunately, they will suck.
I'm so fricking info-paranoid I've got my own spiders to find sites for me, so this kind of thing doesn't bother me too much, but still, for that portion of the population that doesn't know any better (AOL users), I shudder to think. What kind of content could they possibly find non-objectionable?
I think it's common to think of sci-fi as a sort of garbage fiction, like romances, or cheezy mysteries. Sometimes it's perfectly valid to do so.
On the other hand, here are a whole group of intelligent and imaginative people streching their minds to try and encompass a possible future growing from modern conditions. Trying to imagine future tech, and things people could need in the future.
The Diamond Age is possibly the best book ever written regarding the possible outcomes of a successful nanotechnology. Coming off that, you get William Gibson, David Brin, Robert Heinlien, Arthur C. Clarke, Issac Asimov, et al, who have had a profound effect on the perception of modern tech, if not it's development. And who's to say they had nothing to do with development?
How much of doing something is knowing it can be done? I mean, its a common joke on Slashdot:
1) Idea
2) ????
3) Profit
But what about those people who can supply the ???? if someone else gives them the idea?
What about Carl Sagan or Colin McGinn? Academics who stray over into the realm of Sci-fi because they have an idea, an idea they can't express in an academic context.
Who's to say which way the cause and effect goes, every time? Why shouldn't an idea thought up by a professional dreamer get caught by someone who can put practice to theory?
As for me personally, I don't code from sci-fi (though I will admit having lifted part of a perl script from Stephenson's Cryptonomicon), but it does occasionally stimulate an idea. So who is to say?
Just my .0759800 Malaysian Ringgits worth
I'm not one for paying for anything I don't have to (Witness my email addy. Let M$ pay for anyone who wants to flame me.) but I don't see anything wrong with a kind of toll. "This user doesn't want unsolicited email, and you're not on the list, so if you want access you gotta pony up some change."
This would certainly wipe out the low end of the spam world; webcams, anatomical enlargements, etc. If some decent sized corporation wants to send me mail, that's fine.
The problem comes in through identity checking. How do you know the person who is sending you mail is on the list? I'm sure everyone here knows how to send email from a port 25 hack; even if you don't, it's completely obvious that spammers know how to forge whatever name they want.
So, in order for this to work, digital signatures would have to become much more common. Which I don't see happening any time soon. (vis a vis, if you only accepted digitally signed email, there would be no spam.)
Blah blah. I'll just stick with my filtering.
Just my 0.113620 Egyptian pounds's worth.
Organic chem is good. Don't know about the rest. Make sure you know what "genomics" means.
Liberal? I would have voted for McCain in a second, just because he had a brain and a spine, unlike either of the other two idiots. And this crap where a father and son both become president is foul. I thought this was a democracy?
If there was no one better we could have chosen, then this country is in sorry shape.
Heh. I have my liberal moments, true enough.
However, this isn't one of them. If we'd done it right the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess. Trust a republican to screw up the war. World War I...Democrat. World War II...Democrat. Korea, Vietnam...Democrats. Republicans only go to war over oil, against little countries that can't fight back, for the purposes of lining their own pockets. That's just my opinion, of course.
We should have gone in there, crushed the power structure, and set up a decent government. Then helped them rebuild their economy, and we'd have an ally in that region. Take Japan as an example; we beat them solidly in a war, then helped them get back on their feet. We got a top notch trading partner out of it and one less thing to worry about in the world.
That crap we pulled with afganistan is just the same. In the '70s we set up a government over there to serve our interests in that part of the world, we gave them weapons and training, wand when they'd beaten the russians, we forgot their names. At least until they smashed a couple of planes into a few major buildings. All that could have been avoided.
Iraq. We fricking armed Iraq! I don't care if we go into countries and try to make things better for them by deposing the dictator of the week, but jesus, can we at least not ARM them before we decide to fight them? This is so pointless! And we do it all the time!
And, as for the European community "supporting it" that is the same as saying that we "supported" the Serbian genocide in the former Yugoslavia because we didn't do anything about it. Or the Holocaust. Or the slaughter of the Kurdish rebels in Iraq...Of course we caused that, so I guess you could say we supported it.
The Iraqi leadership is pretty foul, and the world will be a better place without them, but, no doubt, our high-handed actions are causing many in the world to think the same about us.
Whether their right or wrong, we are complete idiots to think that their opinions don't matter.
Heh. I didn't know that. The paint was an oxidant? I don't see how they could have thought that was a good idea. Weren't they originally supposed to have a military role?