I first experienced this "these graphics are just good enough to freak me the hell out" effect when playing whatever the flagship basketball game was for the Dreamcast last century. The graphics were great, but the faces and joints looked "off".
The "Uncanny Valley" has appeared on/. before, but who cares?
Though I would naturally expect them to eventually realize that cores that you program into an FPGA is actually a lot like software that they don't, and do whatever they can to end the availability of those as well.
Look... whatever... nobody is going to ban PCs or pen & paper or your brain or math or your TV set.
Right. And if that's all it takes to make you happy...
Though we already know that the general-purpose PC is directly in the sights of these companies for termination. But as long as your rented locked-down media-center pay-per-view system came from Dell and it has a Pentium in it, it's still a PC, right?
These people have their own agenda, however they aren't stupid by any stretch (which they would have to be if these interpreted outcomes have any chance of happening; think about it, don't just react). Calm down, go back to what you were doing and forget about this...
Yes, think about it. The point is not that this will result in the outlawing of PCs or paper, but the fact that it could. When they could apply the law to anything that means they will apply it to everything they want to. Someday, that just might include something you don't want them to. But you missed your chance, because you believed it couldn't happen.
This is exactly the same technique behind the passage of the PATRIOT act. "Oh, but it will only be used against terrorists!" they said, even though nothing in the act itself ensured that this was the case -- it could be applied to practically anything, but just calm down about it because that won't happen, okay? Then a couple years later, morons (particularly Democrats) in Congress are shocked and dismayed that *gasp* the PATRIOT act powers were used in many (mostly) non-terrorism investigations! "I never would have voted for it if I'd known that was going to happen!" they said. Shite. Idiots.
And what will be your excuse when you still have your "PC", but you can't install any software that wasn't approved by the Powers That Be because that software might not respect the new rights they just gave themselves? When that and your precious pen & paper is all you have? Well?
I don't have the numbers, but I have to believe that it is cheaper to provide reasonable speed wi-fi to an entire motel/hotel than it is to provide air conditioning -- the initial hardware, maintenance, and electricity costs of AC are all much higher. The cost of commercial DSL or cable can't really make up the difference.
The $20/day for internet access that some are quoting is ludicrous. That's a crazy amount of profit (assuming anyone is willing to pay) akin to the hostage pricing of beverages at theatres and concerts. Unfortunately for the profiteers, unlike the drink stands in the lines of amusement park rides, people don't really need wi-fi, and it can be fairly simply to find other, cheaper (free) access points without even moving. Hard to hold people hostage in that situation.
"Wah! Wah! People don't want to pay out the arse for something that's so cheap many are offering it for free! I won't be able to retire until I'm fifty at this rate, and it's not fair!" It sickens me. It's one thing to charge "what the market will bear" even if its a lot higher than your own costs, but to whine when people don't fall for your "$20 for $0.50 of service" scam is just pathetic.
Sustainable business model for wi-fi: stop screwing people.
And here's the big difference between us (the US) and them (the Islamic fundamentalists). Those soldiers are standing trial.
A few are, seven to be exact. Scapegoats, you could call them. That's not justice, it's spin control.
Rumsfeld knew about the abuse for months from a report quoting "sadistic, wanton abuse", but didn't even bother to look at the pictures until they had been leaked to the public. No prosecutions were undertaken until well after the scandal broke. Face it, if it wasn't ordered, our government knew but didn't care about the abuse until it was in the media.
That's the real difference between "us" and "them". When our corrupt leadership is exposed, we can do something about it. Of course, keeping the population complacent with ignorance has shown to be a good way of getting around that.
But forget I said anything. The guy that killed hundreds of thousands with meat grinders and poison gas should've been left alone and the soldiers that killed a few (not saying it's right) are the devil incarnate and their entire country is evil.
If you could possibly show me how U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners had anything to do with ending the atrocities of Saddam, you might have a point. Instead, we're just continuing the legacy. Don't introduce a false dichotomy of "Saddam is evil, or we are evil, but not both".
But don't make the mistake of thinking that must mean they are just as bad. If you'll remember, the attacks on the occupying forces went up sharply last December, after Saddam was captured, reflecting the Iraqi opinion shown in polls: Being ruled by the U.S. isn't great, but it is better than Saddam coming back.
That's not an excuse for one second of the abuse at Abu Ghraib.
If they were reporting on real atrocities (being humiliated is not an atrocity, at least you're still alive) then they would've covered the beheading a whole helluvalot more than they did.
Being raped by a broomstick is an atrocity. It's more than just humiliating to be beaten with a chair.
Some of them aren't alive anymore, in case you aren't satisfied yet that something more than harmless "humiliation" is occuring.
In case you believed the official excuse, it isn't just a few individuals.
Bias and hate don't mitigate facts. There's a reason this is news.
Hey smarty, where did the money come from, and what was it spent on? Answer: It comes from us, the taxpayers, and goes to the defense and reconstruction contractors, many of whom have ties to the administration.
So yes, it is quite clearly a huge win for them.
Just not for you and me.
If oil prices are high... well, it's obvious a lot of what has happened in Iraq hasn't gone as the administration planned, isn't it?
A plumber who will not relinquish control of the pipes is.
Would you pay an architect who wouldn't allow you see the blueprints for the building?
It's not about "All plumbing should be done for free." As usual, the meanings of free allow this reversal in English. It's about freedom, and that has nothing to do with not paying people for their work.
As long as there are programs that need to be written, then programmers will have jobs.
Who said anything about users becoming contributors?
The review did. I quoted it, the two sentences after the introduction of the word "antirival".
You're right about seeding the market with free copies, even pirated ones. However this is specifically about open source, which doesn't always imply free-as-in-beer, and has unique yet related advantages of its own that are worth mentioning.
As more copies are made and put into use, value increases as a result of a larger market and the small percentage of users that contribute bug reports and possibly patches. This turns the traditional "free rider" problem into an advantage.
The idea is that as your usage base grows, some small percentage of that base will become active contributors, as opposed to just free riders. In other scenarios not involving open source the opportunity for a free rider to become a contributor may not exist, or be limited to bug reports. Basically, with open source increasing your market share can also mean increasing your development force.
I'm not sure that turns free riders into an "advantage" per se, but it does help explain how open source projects scale. Clearly, giving "free riders" a chance to not be free riders if they have the talent and time is better than making it impossible for them to contribute.
"...interesting perspective on the events." "...Larry McVoy's original Unix is dying troll" "...it is occasionally redundant in telling one story from multiple social angles." "This section also contains the most insightful observations..." "Other claims are close to flamebait..." "However, Weber's ideas are timely and informative..." "and occasionally funny account of what Open Source is and means," "While some of the issues involved are offtopic for this book,..."
Now the only question remaining after this review is whether any portions of the book may be over or underrated. Also, knowing if the author has a karma bonus would help in what is otherwise a tie of positive and negative mods.
I enjoyed Wind Waker a lot, and thought the cell-shaded graphics were great. I never saw the realistic Zelda trailer that seemed to cause so much dissapointment when the cell graphics were revealed. Personally, I think it carries the style of the older games -- especially Link to the Past, the greatest of Zeldas -- perfectly. Graphically, anyway. The game itself wasn't perfect, but lots of fun. I'm not going to complain about the graphics in the new one, though -- they look great too.
Veering off topic, Beyond Good and Evil is a cell-shaded adventure game similar to WW but superior in almost every way, IMNSHOBIK. The graphics are better, the environments more detailed, the story more interesting, the characters more entertaining. My one complaint is that it's short -- about as long as WW minus the scour-the-ocean bits. Which is sort of a theme of the game: not annoying the players. Suitable for children, too.
Six hundred years ago, it was forbidden to perform autopsies to study anatomy.
Why is this more apt than eugenics? Because the subject of study is already dead. Any objection with abortion is as moot as any objection with death -- it has happened, now let it benefit the living.
You're right, though, that this neither begins nor ends Bush.
Are they implying that we don't kill each other now with current technologies?
They're trying to imply a doomsday scenario where we kill each other completly.
I'm not sure I believe it -- we won't know if its possible until we know what form nanotech finally arrives in.
Our economy, and wealth, is currently based on a system of scarcity.
And it still will be, unless you know of a source of infinite energy we can use to power our personal nano-factories.
Also, I don't know of any claimed nanotech that would allow transmutation of one element into another, so if your schemtic for a car needs eg tungsten then tungsten you must aquire.
Not that I don't think it would be a great improvement. Just don' expect a star trek no-money-or-competition-for-resources future to appear from it.
Perhaps I'm confused, but isn't the easiest way to get "zero-install" applications within a company simply a networked FS? I have tons of "zero install" applications available from my workstation through NFS. It even has a nifty caching architecture, so stuff I use is local and fast but stuff I don't isn't using my disk space, but of course is still available.
Install a 7 meg browser? Why? It's already on the network! So what sense does it make to use mozilla (or java) to distribute these apps when we already have an efficient delivery system -- the one you use to run mozilla/java!
This is of course totally different than the extra-corporate world, where eg you want a home user to use your app. But for within a business -- even out-of-office, with VPN -- "zero install" is an ancient, solved problem.
First, instead of assuming something (like that lying was necessary to make the module load, like so many fools here) you ask politely. Then, rather than wait for the answer to be spoon fed to you, you look it up yourself and post the results. Very commendable, but I have to ask... are you sure you're at the right website?
It's not a clone, it's an evironment that allows portable code. That is one of the points of.NET; with a written VM, the code can run on anything. Like Java, except Microsoft isn't writing the VM's for other platforms, it's down to the users, hence Miguel.
That's just like Java. MS wrote the VM for Windows, and of course didn't write the VM for other platforms. What was the result? Their version deliberately broke compatability, and Sun sued them so they couldn't call their broken implementation Java anymore. Thus J++, a language with a future (snicker).
That's exactly what is going to happen with Mono. Only this time, WHEN* MS breaks compatability with Mono there's nobody to sue since MS is the one defining the "standard".
The impact of Mono is going to be this: applications written for Mono will run on Unix and Windows (and Mac, and...). Applications written for MS's implementation will run on Windows and... Windows.
* Can anyone honestly tell me that this isn't going to happen? Is there anything where they haven't at least tried this strategy? Java, SMB, HTML, AFS...
We simply can't wait to collect a geologically significant body of data.
If pollution is causing unnatural global warming, then we can't wait until said warming is undeniable fact before we act.
I suggest an experiment: let's attempt to drastically reduce our emissions, as if we were addressing a real global warming problem. Then we can study temperature changes. If the rise in temprature decelerates or reverses, we could reasonably conclude that our pollution was the cause. If not, then we've made our air and water cleaner for no good reason, but at least we'd know!
I'm not really trying to defend Diebold here, but a lot of their statements really do seem to be incompetence rather than scheming. They may simply be out of their league here.
The crappiness and hackability of their machines may simply be due to incompetence.
Their attempts to cover up said crappiness cannot be attributed to incompetence.
They have done everything in their power to prevent knowledge of how weak their systems are from spreading, and have done everything in their power to avoid fixing the problems that were known and reported to them. That is not incompetence. That is malice.
I started programming in BASIC on the TI-99 when I was nine. I already knew how to read rather well, thanks. Record books -- buy them for your children! Yeah, I know that makes me abnormal, but it surely isn't that rare. A lot of geeks got their start in the BASIC languages that came with computers back in that era -- be they TRS-80, C-64, or TI-99.
No complaints with what else you said, just pointing this out.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like the Web to me.
Heh, good point.
I wonder why they did not build a meta-searchengine instead.
Because there are a ton of those, and none of them survived either... Not that I don't agree that it's a much better idea than what they have.
If it takes as long for it to die as it did to create it? That'd be pretty good for a .com, I think...
the historic goths? :)
That's right. They drees in black, pretend to be vampires, and re-enact the Battle of Hastings. It's just creepy.
I first experienced this "these graphics are just good enough to freak me the hell out" effect when playing whatever the flagship basketball game was for the Dreamcast last century. The graphics were great, but the faces and joints looked "off".
/. before, but who cares?
The "Uncanny Valley" has appeared on
I agree completely.
Though I would naturally expect them to eventually realize that cores that you program into an FPGA is actually a lot like software that they don't, and do whatever they can to end the availability of those as well.
Hopefully they'll have lost by then.
Look... whatever... nobody is going to ban PCs or pen & paper or your brain or math or your TV set.
Right. And if that's all it takes to make you happy...
Though we already know that the general-purpose PC is directly in the sights of these companies for termination. But as long as your rented locked-down media-center pay-per-view system came from Dell and it has a Pentium in it, it's still a PC, right?
These people have their own agenda, however they aren't stupid by any stretch (which they would have to be if these interpreted outcomes have any chance of happening; think about it, don't just react). Calm down, go back to what you were doing and forget about this...
Yes, think about it. The point is not that this will result in the outlawing of PCs or paper, but the fact that it could. When they could apply the law to anything that means they will apply it to everything they want to. Someday, that just might include something you don't want them to. But you missed your chance, because you believed it couldn't happen.
This is exactly the same technique behind the passage of the PATRIOT act. "Oh, but it will only be used against terrorists!" they said, even though nothing in the act itself ensured that this was the case -- it could be applied to practically anything, but just calm down about it because that won't happen, okay? Then a couple years later, morons (particularly Democrats) in Congress are shocked and dismayed that *gasp* the PATRIOT act powers were used in many (mostly) non-terrorism investigations! "I never would have voted for it if I'd known that was going to happen!" they said. Shite. Idiots.
And what will be your excuse when you still have your "PC", but you can't install any software that wasn't approved by the Powers That Be because that software might not respect the new rights they just gave themselves? When that and your precious pen & paper is all you have? Well?
I think that is right.
I don't have the numbers, but I have to believe that it is cheaper to provide reasonable speed wi-fi to an entire motel/hotel than it is to provide air conditioning -- the initial hardware, maintenance, and electricity costs of AC are all much higher. The cost of commercial DSL or cable can't really make up the difference.
The $20/day for internet access that some are quoting is ludicrous. That's a crazy amount of profit (assuming anyone is willing to pay) akin to the hostage pricing of beverages at theatres and concerts. Unfortunately for the profiteers, unlike the drink stands in the lines of amusement park rides, people don't really need wi-fi, and it can be fairly simply to find other, cheaper (free) access points without even moving. Hard to hold people hostage in that situation.
"Wah! Wah! People don't want to pay out the arse for something that's so cheap many are offering it for free! I won't be able to retire until I'm fifty at this rate, and it's not fair!" It sickens me. It's one thing to charge "what the market will bear" even if its a lot higher than your own costs, but to whine when people don't fall for your "$20 for $0.50 of service" scam is just pathetic.
Sustainable business model for wi-fi: stop screwing people.
Slashdot has never had, nor will it ever need, an article on "How to Avoid Women".
And here's the big difference between us (the US) and them (the Islamic fundamentalists). Those soldiers are standing trial.
A few are, seven to be exact. Scapegoats, you could call them. That's not justice, it's spin control.
Rumsfeld knew about the abuse for months from a report quoting "sadistic, wanton abuse", but didn't even bother to look at the pictures until they had been leaked to the public. No prosecutions were undertaken until well after the scandal broke. Face it, if it wasn't ordered, our government knew but didn't care about the abuse until it was in the media.
That's the real difference between "us" and "them". When our corrupt leadership is exposed, we can do something about it. Of course, keeping the population complacent with ignorance has shown to be a good way of getting around that.
But forget I said anything. The guy that killed hundreds of thousands with meat grinders and poison gas should've been left alone and the soldiers that killed a few (not saying it's right) are the devil incarnate and their entire country is evil.
If you could possibly show me how U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners had anything to do with ending the atrocities of Saddam, you might have a point. Instead, we're just continuing the legacy. Don't introduce a false dichotomy of "Saddam is evil, or we are evil, but not both".
But don't make the mistake of thinking that must mean they are just as bad. If you'll remember, the attacks on the occupying forces went up sharply last December, after Saddam was captured, reflecting the Iraqi opinion shown in polls: Being ruled by the U.S. isn't great, but it is better than Saddam coming back.
That's not an excuse for one second of the abuse at Abu Ghraib.
If they were reporting on real atrocities (being humiliated is not an atrocity, at least you're still alive) then they would've covered the beheading a whole helluvalot more than they did.
Being raped by a broomstick is an atrocity. It's more than just humiliating to be beaten with a chair.
Some of them aren't alive anymore, in case you aren't satisfied yet that something more than harmless "humiliation" is occuring.
In case you believed the official excuse, it isn't just a few individuals.
Bias and hate don't mitigate facts. There's a reason this is news.
Hey smarty, where did the money come from, and what was it spent on? Answer: It comes from us, the taxpayers, and goes to the defense and reconstruction contractors, many of whom have ties to the administration.
So yes, it is quite clearly a huge win for them.
Just not for you and me.
If oil prices are high... well, it's obvious a lot of what has happened in Iraq hasn't gone as the administration planned, isn't it?
A plumber who charges for their work is not evil.
A plumber who will not relinquish control of the pipes is.
Would you pay an architect who wouldn't allow you see the blueprints for the building?
It's not about "All plumbing should be done for free." As usual, the meanings of free allow this reversal in English. It's about freedom, and that has nothing to do with not paying people for their work.
As long as there are programs that need to be written, then programmers will have jobs.
Who said anything about users becoming contributors?
The review did. I quoted it, the two sentences after the introduction of the word "antirival".
You're right about seeding the market with free copies, even pirated ones. However this is specifically about open source, which doesn't always imply free-as-in-beer, and has unique yet related advantages of its own that are worth mentioning.
The idea is that as your usage base grows, some small percentage of that base will become active contributors, as opposed to just free riders. In other scenarios not involving open source the opportunity for a free rider to become a contributor may not exist, or be limited to bug reports. Basically, with open source increasing your market share can also mean increasing your development force.
I'm not sure that turns free riders into an "advantage" per se, but it does help explain how open source projects scale. Clearly, giving "free riders" a chance to not be free riders if they have the talent and time is better than making it impossible for them to contribute.
"...interesting perspective on the events." ..."
"...Larry McVoy's original Unix is dying troll"
"...it is occasionally redundant in telling one story from multiple social angles."
"This section also contains the most insightful observations..."
"Other claims are close to flamebait..."
"However, Weber's ideas are timely and informative..."
"and occasionally funny account of what Open Source is and means,"
"While some of the issues involved are offtopic for this book,
Now the only question remaining after this review is whether any portions of the book may be over or underrated. Also, knowing if the author has a karma bonus would help in what is otherwise a tie of positive and negative mods.
I enjoyed Wind Waker a lot, and thought the cell-shaded graphics were great. I never saw the realistic Zelda trailer that seemed to cause so much dissapointment when the cell graphics were revealed. Personally, I think it carries the style of the older games -- especially Link to the Past, the greatest of Zeldas -- perfectly. Graphically, anyway. The game itself wasn't perfect, but lots of fun. I'm not going to complain about the graphics in the new one, though -- they look great too.
Veering off topic, Beyond Good and Evil is a cell-shaded adventure game similar to WW but superior in almost every way, IMNSHOBIK. The graphics are better, the environments more detailed, the story more interesting, the characters more entertaining. My one complaint is that it's short -- about as long as WW minus the scour-the-ocean bits. Which is sort of a theme of the game: not annoying the players. Suitable for children, too.
Six hundred years ago, it was forbidden to perform autopsies to study anatomy.
Why is this more apt than eugenics? Because the subject of study is already dead. Any objection with abortion is as moot as any objection with death -- it has happened, now let it benefit the living.
You're right, though, that this neither begins nor ends Bush.
Are they implying that we don't kill each other now with current technologies?
They're trying to imply a doomsday scenario where we kill each other completly.
I'm not sure I believe it -- we won't know if its possible until we know what form nanotech finally arrives in.
Our economy, and wealth, is currently based on a system of scarcity.
And it still will be, unless you know of a source of infinite energy we can use to power our personal nano-factories.
Also, I don't know of any claimed nanotech that would allow transmutation of one element into another, so if your schemtic for a car needs eg tungsten then tungsten you must aquire.
Not that I don't think it would be a great improvement. Just don' expect a star trek no-money-or-competition-for-resources future to appear from it.
Perhaps I'm confused, but isn't the easiest way to get "zero-install" applications within a company simply a networked FS? I have tons of "zero install" applications available from my workstation through NFS. It even has a nifty caching architecture, so stuff I use is local and fast but stuff I don't isn't using my disk space, but of course is still available.
Install a 7 meg browser? Why? It's already on the network! So what sense does it make to use mozilla (or java) to distribute these apps when we already have an efficient delivery system -- the one you use to run mozilla/java!
This is of course totally different than the extra-corporate world, where eg you want a home user to use your app. But for within a business -- even out-of-office, with VPN -- "zero install" is an ancient, solved problem.
What am I missing?
First, instead of assuming something (like that lying was necessary to make the module load, like so many fools here) you ask politely. Then, rather than wait for the answer to be spoon fed to you, you look it up yourself and post the results. Very commendable, but I have to ask... are you sure you're at the right website?
It's not a clone, it's an evironment that allows portable code. That is one of the points of .NET; with a written VM, the code can run on anything. Like Java, except Microsoft isn't writing the VM's for other platforms, it's down to the users, hence Miguel.
That's just like Java. MS wrote the VM for Windows, and of course didn't write the VM for other platforms. What was the result? Their version deliberately broke compatability, and Sun sued them so they couldn't call their broken implementation Java anymore. Thus J++, a language with a future (snicker).
That's exactly what is going to happen with Mono. Only this time, WHEN * MS breaks compatability with Mono there's nobody to sue since MS is the one defining the "standard".
The impact of Mono is going to be this: applications written for Mono will run on Unix and Windows (and Mac, and...). Applications written for MS's implementation will run on Windows and... Windows.
* Can anyone honestly tell me that this isn't going to happen? Is there anything where they haven't at least tried this strategy? Java, SMB, HTML, AFS...
We simply can't wait to collect a geologically significant body of data.
If pollution is causing unnatural global warming, then we can't wait until said warming is undeniable fact before we act.
I suggest an experiment: let's attempt to drastically reduce our emissions, as if we were addressing a real global warming problem. Then we can study temperature changes. If the rise in temprature decelerates or reverses, we could reasonably conclude that our pollution was the cause. If not, then we've made our air and water cleaner for no good reason, but at least we'd know!
I'm not really trying to defend Diebold here, but a lot of their statements really do seem to be incompetence rather than scheming. They may simply be out of their league here.
The crappiness and hackability of their machines may simply be due to incompetence.
Their attempts to cover up said crappiness cannot be attributed to incompetence.
They have done everything in their power to prevent knowledge of how weak their systems are from spreading, and have done everything in their power to avoid fixing the problems that were known and reported to them. That is not incompetence. That is malice.
Granted, but that's a completely different point than "Linux can't identify sound cards", isn't it?
I started programming in BASIC on the TI-99 when I was nine. I already knew how to read rather well, thanks. Record books -- buy them for your children! Yeah, I know that makes me abnormal, but it surely isn't that rare. A lot of geeks got their start in the BASIC languages that came with computers back in that era -- be they TRS-80, C-64, or TI-99.
No complaints with what else you said, just pointing this out.