I've been saying something like this for a long time...
There is a lot of talk about Linux on the desktop, or a Linux distribution that aunt tillie can use.
The fact is that, personally, I don't want Linux to be the dominant OS, and I don't want Aunt Tillie to be able to use it. I don't care about the philosophical superiority of free software, I care about having an OS that works the way I want it to work. I like being able to edit config files, and type arcane looking commands into a terminal, and compiling software from scratch.
Sure, a bit more love from some of the big software companies would be nice, though honestly the few bits of commercial software that I do use runs natively under Linux anyway.
The fact is that, in order to get a system that is usable bye aunt tillie and grandma, we'll have to compromise on a number of things that I think will eventually lead to what a lot of people like about linux being diluted beyond recognition.
Not that I particularly have love for windows, I think that it's a unweildy and crufty OS that is controlled too much by marketing as opposed to solid technical reasoning,
you can also use DynDNS if you don't want to get a static ip. I've been using a free account with them for a little over a year now, and have had no problems at all, They also offer a number of premium services that seem to be a little on the expensive side but still quite reasonable.
what killed Wind Waker wasn't the graphics, it was that damned endless fsking ocean that you have to sail around in for hours trying to find bits of triforce, and all the hours hacking bushes to get rupees to buy maps from tingle.
I was fond of the graphics, but I think this was the weakest zelda game to have been released. (I think OoT was the strongest)
Not to just make a "me too" post, I have to agree that RE4 is simply an AMAZING game. If you have a game cube and you don't own this game, then get up and go buy it right now.
speaking from experience, Visual Studio 6 seems to work ok under Crossover Office,.NET will work, sort of, but it's a huge pain in the butt. It's a little slow, but VMware is really your best choice if you have to do Windows development under Linux.
It seems to me like it might be more likely that google is working on something more mundane. I mean, the most reasonable guess to me would seem that google is just buying up lines while it has the cash in the hopes of being able to make money off them later, or they are just planning on putting in some new boxes over there or something.
If they were working on a new project though, it would seem more likely to me that it would be some aspect of a new search technology or something, maybe for big businesses (seems to me like google could make a killing selling custom database or indexing software for businesses, I would imagine that a lot of business problems would mirror the problem of indexing and searching information on the web, if a group of smart and talented people were to put the software together).
Just wait, they'll control these using a 1337 brigade of FPS players, then some asshat will TK our entire military presence. Shortly thereafter whatever enemy we happen to be fighting at the time will send us the gift of nukes with "pwned" spray painted on the side.
You know, i've been thinking, maybe having all of these anti-spyware programs in the long run isn't such a good thing. Maybe if people had to do a complete re-install and lose all their data everytime they do something stupid on the net, then people would learn to be a little more careful.
In all seriousness though, I've done my best to try to educate my own friend and family for whom I have to do tech support, and it seems like some of these people either don't get it at all, or have decided that it's just much easier for me to take a couple hours every couple of weeks out of my life to come over and clean up their machines. What have other people done to educate the clueless in taking proper care of their computers from malware?
I think that most reviews require a bit of critical thinking, simply by virtue of the fact that it can be a challenge to seperate out the facts of the good and bad of the game from the fluff and padding that makes it way into reviews.
It seems to me like most review sites tend to have a good summary of the good and bad points of the game, and if it's worth a purchase or maybe a rental, but it's a bit of an exercise to get to it.
I'm anticipating that a lot of people are going to bitch and moan about how it's pointless eyecandy, but if Microsoft is able to do what Apple has been doing, then it could really add to the UI.
Things like expose and translucent windows can come in amazlingly handy in OS X (I've never found anything quite as useful as transparent terminal windows in OS X allowing me to have code open in one window, and documentation in the window behind it, and look through the code window to read documentation, especially when working with an API your not familiar with).
I think that as 3D accelerated UIs become more common, we'll see even more useful features popping up. It's not like there is any good reason for new computer to have a video card that won't run this, and the type of person who would upgrade would probably either already have a newer videocard anyway.
I just wish this would make it into X, but alas I suspect that it's the sort of thing that might take a while to get properly implemented and supported.
There was a game for gameboy color IIRC called "Kirby Tilt 'n Tumble" which used this technology, been out for several years, kind of an interesting game, mostly just for the "gee-wiz" factor though.
I have to say that after reading the article, and the comments that have thus far been posted, I am quite afraid.
I play a lot of games, perhaps not as much as I used to, but I still spend the occasional weekend doing 16 hour gaming sessions.
The closes thing to this that's ever happened to me is to see things IRL that I think would make good elements to add into an area of a game (there is this one section of freeway that I drive on ever day that I later used as a central object in a THUG2 level I designed), but my thought process is always "this is real life, the game is a game,,this element of real life would be interested if placed into the game world".
The biggest problem with pay-as-you-go phones is that generally, you end up paying 2 to 3 times as much, sometimes more, for the same service that you could get with a plan. Also, most pay-as-you-go phones will only hold credit for one month, so most people (in my experience anyway) end up buying at least 1, sometimes 2 $50 cards a month, when they might as well just get more service with a plan and be careful to not go over their limits.
I used to have a pay-as-you-go phone, and was spending about $50 a month, and I would use the phone for maybe 10 to 15 minutes every couple of days, almost exclusively during the hours when you get unlimited calling on most plans (I think most cell phone plans give unlimited calling between 8pm and 5am M-F and all day Saturday and Sunday).
Of course, I've since decided that I find the idea of being reachable anytime, anyplace absolutely abysmal, and when you have a cell phone, people get pissed if you ever turn it off, so it's much easier to just not have one (YMMV of course).
It seems to me that the people who are interested in the GC for the most part already have a game cube. The thing is, nintendo used to be the sort of defacto standard for a gaming system. If someone wanted to have a console, and didn't know much about console gaming, then they got a nintendo system. Now days it seems like it's the opposite.
The majority of the people I know are not hard-core gamers, but they generally still have 1 system. Most often it's either an X-Box or a PS2.
It seems to me that nintendo (at least with their consoles) is catering to the hard core gamer market now, with a few incredibly solid titles (zelda, paper mario, the Resident Evil series), that appeal mainly to the old school type of hard core gamer who is willing to buy a system for just a few good games, doesn't buy bad games, and cares more for solid gameplay than flashy graphics or buckets of blood.
The people in this group generally will already have a game cube, and since the units don't have a habbit of breaking *cough*PS2*cough* I really wouldn't be suprised to see the sales of the game cube to continue to decline.
I played the original A Tale in the Desert quite a bit back in the day, and I've considered trying ATITD2 for a month to see what's new. I have to say that I did enjoy the original ATITD quite a bit for a while, the people at eGensis did a really great job putting together a non-combat MMORPG- but it did have problems.
I think the problem with the non-combat MMORPGs is the exact same problem as with more standard MMORPGs, just that it tends to show a bit more. The problem is the oft-discussed leveling treadmill.
A lot of people play more traditional MMORPGs because they like to gain prestige through having level 100 characters with +50 swords of dragon slaying and armor of holy protection and more money than god. In a non-combat MMORPG you take away those carrots, and basically all that's left is to see how boring a MMO game really can be at times. It's not that they are any more boring than City of Heros or Evercrack, just that without levels and rare items to work toward, the borning treadmill beneath the game shows itself a bit more
The real saving grace of ATITD was the community. With a relatively small number of people, and the afore mentioned lack of level and item status symbols, the game didn't attract griefers like many other games do, and I think that it helped having a good community, but at some point you realize that you are still doing the same thing over and over again.
Instead of "Go to A and kill mob X, then go to B and kill mob Y" it's "plant and harvest flax, let flax rot while mining for ore, seperate flax, start making cloth/canvas, make charcoal". Instead of levels, occasionally you'd get enough resources to learn a skill or complete a test.
I think the problem with many MMO games is the higherarcy of power- that is to say there really isn't one. You have the GMs who work for the company and will occasionally run games, and then you have a whole mess of players.
I think the solution to this will involve some way for players to create their own quests, more powerful characters will be able to exert more influence and run larger, more spread out quests. I think that this is the type of innovation that will probably start in a non-combat game at first anyway, if only because the logistics implementation are simpler when you don't have to deal with mobs and boss monsters and weapons and such.
Things like that were even starting to happen when I last played ATITD, larger guilds were offering rewards for rare items, or for hard-to-make items, so that they could build buildings or produce items.
I was a member of a medium sized guild, and there were cases where our guild would host a part and invite people and then offer up goods in exchange for players completing a quest, so that we could get items to trade up to a larger guild.
Anyway, I've been rambling on- somewhat incoherently, but what I was trying to say was this: I don't think the problem with non-combat MMO's is their lack of combat, I think that the problem is one that is systemic to the entire genre, and is only covered up cosmetically by the combat in more traditional MMO's. The decling interest in them is really just a symptom of the declining interest in the leveling treadmill that is present in all MMO games, however, I think that if done correctly, a non-combat MMO could bring some innovation that would eventually reach more traditional MMOs and revitalize the genre.
Ok, so I'm going to go a little bit off topic here, but gates implies that if you support free software, then you are a communist, the thing of it is, I'm not sure how exactly this is a bad thing.
Capitalism and Communism are each at opposite ends of a scale of scarcity- that is to say, Capitalism works great when there is a limited amount of stuff to go around, relative to the population size. It encourages effeciency and results in a population as a whole getting the most of what it wants from a limited pool of resources. Communism on the other hand is ideal for a world where, relative to the population size, resources are unlimited, or at least nearly unlimited. In the perfect theoreticaly communist society, the only limit to how much of something that can be made is the number of people available to make it.
Socialism is basically just the name given to the middle ground.
Now, capitalism is great for a lot of things, because as a society/country/planet today in many areas our resources are still finite. For many aspects of our world, capitalism is still the best thing we've come up with to deal with the limited resources we have, relative to the world population.
In the world of software however, we have a situation which is more closely related to the communist ideal world. Once a program is written it can be copied over and over again essentially for free. In this case, the only limit to the software that can be developed is the amount of skilled people who are able to work on it.
Looking at it like that, what I see when gates says people who support free software are communists is really his admission that we are using a superior philosophy for our little section of reality.
I never understood how it's good for Sun to prohibit the redistrobution of Java with BSD or Linux.
It seems to me that any benefits there might be would be lost because they are opening themselves up to having an open source, or at least more easily re-distributable JVM become the most common, and therefore standard, VM.
Besides, if they are giving it away for free anway, what benefit is there to forcing anyone who wants it to get it from Sun?
The article talks about the picture quality of televisions, and the lower quality of many of the flat screen TVs, but what I am wondering is, how accurate of a picture do people really need on their TV?
It's not like people are doing 3D modeling or something that requires a very sharp picture on their TVs, most people just want to watch TV or DVDs and play games.
A lot of the time, IMHO anyway, TV, movies and games look better if they are not super-clear anyway.
It seems like the guy had the right idea here, and the writing seems top notch (it's written in just the tone I would try to use to explain Linux to someone) but it seems like the organization could be a bit better. My Aunt and Uncle have constant problems with their PC due to viruses, worms, or just plain windows shitting all over itself. They've recently expressed some interest in Linux, and I've been thinking about burning them off a copy of knoppix so they could try it, and if they like it then go ahead and install Linux on their computer.
This guide looks like it might be a nice reference to go along with my instruction, but the problem is the layout. Althought the layout is resonable to a technically minded person, it seems that it might be better off putting more of the in-depth information in sidebars or something.
The boot up section started off quite well, but I think that it wasn't nessesary to go into detail about the bootup process.
Maybe he should take the first few paragraphs of each section and use them to make a basic walkthrough (you know, like those 4 step walkthroughs with pictures that come with routers) and have the current paper be a more "in-depth" look. Sadly, as it stands, as soon as people see "SCSI" or "IDE" or "PCMCIA" they'll go into idiot mode and fail to grok the rest of the paper, and resort to throwing feces at the monitor (I swear this must be how some people try to use their computers).
I wonder how this will effect people who build their own PCs. Does the tax only apply to people who buy a pre-fab machine, or will individual components also be taxed, or is it on the honor system where if you build a computer at home you are obligated to send in the ammount required by the tax.
As assinine as this is overall, I would much rather pay a $50 tax on any computer than have the media industries completely destroy or cripple beyond recognition the internet and anything remotely interesting that computers can do.
anyone have any idea if this technology will be applicable for robotics, and studying organic motion? i know high speed cameras have been used in the past to study insect motion and stuff, any idea if this will aid in that area of research, or are current cameras already fast enough?
I'm a native english speaker, fluent in German, and not quite fluent, but fairly skilled with 4 other languages. One thing that I've found to be extremely helpful in learning a language, especially tech jargon, is to join newsgroups or chatrooms in that language. Newsgroups especially, and chatrooms to a lesser extent, allow you to get used to the language and jargon without the fast pace of a conversation. Since there is already an expected delay before a response, it can give you a chance to think through the language more slowley when you construct a response, and allows you to get more used to the language.
I found that my German improved dramatically when I became interested in an open source project in which german was the native language of all of the core developers. By reading comments written in german, and participating in the german chatroom and mailing list I was able to become quite skilled with the language. I also found that the other developers were very helpful at aiding me in improving my skills in the language. Since a couple of them spoke fluent english, if there was something that I didn't know how to say, or said wrong, then they would help me to get it right. At this point, it's rare that it comes through that german isn't my native language when I'm participating in chats, and I can speak in the language much more intuitively than I was able to before.
The biggest problem with this is that I found in some cases it made my accent worse. Since I had been using german primarily via text, I had a tendancy to heavily "Americanize" the pronounciation in my head, to the point that there were a few times that when I tried to say the word aloud it was nearly unrecognizable as the actual word I was trying to say. Luckily, I found that once you know the words and the language, it's not terribly difficult (at least for me) to pick up on the correct pronounciation once you hear it a couple of times.
I think that the problem with this is that there is simply a much larger volume of changes than the system could really deal with. What's going to happen is that you are going to a situation like: user a posts an article, A. User B comes along an edit's the article by fixing some spelling and grammar, and appling some wikipediafication, resulting in article A'. Now, while A' is in the vault waiting for the approval of 5 moderators, someone else comes along and adds some information and creates A''. A'' happens to go through the system faster, and gets posted. Then A' gets approved and overwrites the additional information added with A''.
In short, slashdot's moderation system only works because once the comments are posted, they can't be changed.
An idea that might work along these lines though is a slashdot-esque karma system. Each user (and anonymous users) starts with the lowest possible karma. The lower the karma on an article, the higher the article could be listed on a section that requests review. That way, regular wikipedia-ers could check the list for new articles that were posted by less trusted users, and therefore might require additional review.
I think you're confusing "usability" with "easy to learn". I spend about 25 hours a week using photoshop, and I find the user interface to be very usable; commonly used items are easy to get to, similar tasks are grouped logically, and overall the program flows very well. That's not to say that there haven't been some braindead UI "features" in photoshop (was it version 5 or 6 where the option to export a gif with transparencey was in the "help" menu?). Gimp, in it's most recent versions, has also made great strides in usability, though I don't use Gimp very often, so I will continue to speak about photoshop, though I'm sure that much of what I say should apply to Gimp as well.
Photoshop is a large, complext bit of software designed for professionals, In otherwords, it's designed for people who really know what they are doing. To this end, it's UI focus has not been on "easy to learn" but instead "easy to use, assuming you know what you are doing" both are forms of usability.
It seems like the merging of technologies is bringing about the possibility of competition, which is a good thing. With cable and phone companies both offering phone, tv, and broadband, plus the cell phone companies offering phonelines as well as wifi in many areas, it seems like consumers are now getting more choices for service providers, which will hopefully lead to lower prices or better service.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been saying something like this for a long time...
There is a lot of talk about Linux on the desktop, or a Linux distribution that aunt tillie can use.
The fact is that, personally, I don't want Linux to be the dominant OS, and I don't want Aunt Tillie to be able to use it. I don't care about the philosophical superiority of free software, I care about having an OS that works the way I want it to work. I like being able to edit config files, and type arcane looking commands into a terminal, and compiling software from scratch.
Sure, a bit more love from some of the big software companies would be nice, though honestly the few bits of commercial software that I do use runs natively under Linux anyway.
The fact is that, in order to get a system that is usable bye aunt tillie and grandma, we'll have to compromise on a number of things that I think will eventually lead to what a lot of people like about linux being diluted beyond recognition.
Not that I particularly have love for windows, I think that it's a unweildy and crufty OS that is controlled too much by marketing as opposed to solid technical reasoning,
you can also use DynDNS if you don't want to get a static ip. I've been using a free account with them for a little over a year now, and have had no problems at all, They also offer a number of premium services that seem to be a little on the expensive side but still quite reasonable.
what killed Wind Waker wasn't the graphics, it was that damned endless fsking ocean that you have to sail around in for hours trying to find bits of triforce, and all the hours hacking bushes to get rupees to buy maps from tingle.
I was fond of the graphics, but I think this was the weakest zelda game to have been released. (I think OoT was the strongest)
Not to just make a "me too" post, I have to agree that RE4 is simply an AMAZING game. If you have a game cube and you don't own this game, then get up and go buy it right now.
speaking from experience, Visual Studio 6 seems to work ok under Crossover Office, .NET will work, sort of, but it's a huge pain in the butt. It's a little slow, but VMware is really your best choice if you have to do Windows development under Linux.
It seems to me like it might be more likely that google is working on something more mundane. I mean, the most reasonable guess to me would seem that google is just buying up lines while it has the cash in the hopes of being able to make money off them later, or they are just planning on putting in some new boxes over there or something.
If they were working on a new project though, it would seem more likely to me that it would be some aspect of a new search technology or something, maybe for big businesses (seems to me like google could make a killing selling custom database or indexing software for businesses, I would imagine that a lot of business problems would mirror the problem of indexing and searching information on the web, if a group of smart and talented people were to put the software together).
Just wait, they'll control these using a 1337 brigade of FPS players, then some asshat will TK our entire military presence. Shortly thereafter whatever enemy we happen to be fighting at the time will send us the gift of nukes with "pwned" spray painted on the side.
You know, i've been thinking, maybe having all of these anti-spyware programs in the long run isn't such a good thing. Maybe if people had to do a complete re-install and lose all their data everytime they do something stupid on the net, then people would learn to be a little more careful.
In all seriousness though, I've done my best to try to educate my own friend and family for whom I have to do tech support, and it seems like some of these people either don't get it at all, or have decided that it's just much easier for me to take a couple hours every couple of weeks out of my life to come over and clean up their machines. What have other people done to educate the clueless in taking proper care of their computers from malware?
I think that most reviews require a bit of critical thinking, simply by virtue of the fact that it can be a challenge to seperate out the facts of the good and bad of the game from the fluff and padding that makes it way into reviews.
It seems to me like most review sites tend to have a good summary of the good and bad points of the game, and if it's worth a purchase or maybe a rental, but it's a bit of an exercise to get to it.
I'm anticipating that a lot of people are going to bitch and moan about how it's pointless eyecandy, but if Microsoft is able to do what Apple has been doing, then it could really add to the UI.
Things like expose and translucent windows can come in amazlingly handy in OS X (I've never found anything quite as useful as transparent terminal windows in OS X allowing me to have code open in one window, and documentation in the window behind it, and look through the code window to read documentation, especially when working with an API your not familiar with).
I think that as 3D accelerated UIs become more common, we'll see even more useful features popping up. It's not like there is any good reason for new computer to have a video card that won't run this, and the type of person who would upgrade would probably either already have a newer videocard anyway.
I just wish this would make it into X, but alas I suspect that it's the sort of thing that might take a while to get properly implemented and supported.
There was a game for gameboy color IIRC called "Kirby Tilt 'n Tumble" which used this technology, been out for several years, kind of an interesting game, mostly just for the "gee-wiz" factor though.
I have to say that after reading the article, and the comments that have thus far been posted, I am quite afraid. ,this element of real life would be interested if placed into the game world".
I play a lot of games, perhaps not as much as I used to, but I still spend the occasional weekend doing 16 hour gaming sessions.
The closes thing to this that's ever happened to me is to see things IRL that I think would make good elements to add into an area of a game (there is this one section of freeway that I drive on ever day that I later used as a central object in a THUG2 level I designed), but my thought process is always "this is real life, the game is a game,
The biggest problem with pay-as-you-go phones is that generally, you end up paying 2 to 3 times as much, sometimes more, for the same service that you could get with a plan. Also, most pay-as-you-go phones will only hold credit for one month, so most people (in my experience anyway) end up buying at least 1, sometimes 2 $50 cards a month, when they might as well just get more service with a plan and be careful to not go over their limits.
I used to have a pay-as-you-go phone, and was spending about $50 a month, and I would use the phone for maybe 10 to 15 minutes every couple of days, almost exclusively during the hours when you get unlimited calling on most plans (I think most cell phone plans give unlimited calling between 8pm and 5am M-F and all day Saturday and Sunday).
Of course, I've since decided that I find the idea of being reachable anytime, anyplace absolutely abysmal, and when you have a cell phone, people get pissed if you ever turn it off, so it's much easier to just not have one (YMMV of course).
It seems to me that the people who are interested in the GC for the most part already have a game cube. The thing is, nintendo used to be the sort of defacto standard for a gaming system. If someone wanted to have a console, and didn't know much about console gaming, then they got a nintendo system. Now days it seems like it's the opposite.
The majority of the people I know are not hard-core gamers, but they generally still have 1 system. Most often it's either an X-Box or a PS2.
It seems to me that nintendo (at least with their consoles) is catering to the hard core gamer market now, with a few incredibly solid titles (zelda, paper mario, the Resident Evil series), that appeal mainly to the old school type of hard core gamer who is willing to buy a system for just a few good games, doesn't buy bad games, and cares more for solid gameplay than flashy graphics or buckets of blood.
The people in this group generally will already have a game cube, and since the units don't have a habbit of breaking *cough*PS2*cough* I really wouldn't be suprised to see the sales of the game cube to continue to decline.
I played the original A Tale in the Desert quite a bit back in the day, and I've considered trying ATITD2 for a month to see what's new. I have to say that I did enjoy the original ATITD quite a bit for a while, the people at eGensis did a really great job putting together a non-combat MMORPG- but it did have problems.
I think the problem with the non-combat MMORPGs is the exact same problem as with more standard MMORPGs, just that it tends to show a bit more. The problem is the oft-discussed leveling treadmill.
A lot of people play more traditional MMORPGs because they like to gain prestige through having level 100 characters with +50 swords of dragon slaying and armor of holy protection and more money than god. In a non-combat MMORPG you take away those carrots, and basically all that's left is to see how boring a MMO game really can be at times. It's not that they are any more boring than City of Heros or Evercrack, just that without levels and rare items to work toward, the borning treadmill beneath the game shows itself a bit more
The real saving grace of ATITD was the community. With a relatively small number of people, and the afore mentioned lack of level and item status symbols, the game didn't attract griefers like many other games do, and I think that it helped having a good community, but at some point you realize that you are still doing the same thing over and over again.
Instead of "Go to A and kill mob X, then go to B and kill mob Y" it's "plant and harvest flax, let flax rot while mining for ore, seperate flax, start making cloth/canvas, make charcoal". Instead of levels, occasionally you'd get enough resources to learn a skill or complete a test.
I think the problem with many MMO games is the higherarcy of power- that is to say there really isn't one. You have the GMs who work for the company and will occasionally run games, and then you have a whole mess of players.
I think the solution to this will involve some way for players to create their own quests, more powerful characters will be able to exert more influence and run larger, more spread out quests. I think that this is the type of innovation that will probably start in a non-combat game at first anyway, if only because the logistics implementation are simpler when you don't have to deal with mobs and boss monsters and weapons and such.
Things like that were even starting to happen when I last played ATITD, larger guilds were offering rewards for rare items, or for hard-to-make items, so that they could build buildings or produce items.
I was a member of a medium sized guild, and there were cases where our guild would host a part and invite people and then offer up goods in exchange for players completing a quest, so that we could get items to trade up to a larger guild.
Anyway, I've been rambling on- somewhat incoherently, but what I was trying to say was this: I don't think the problem with non-combat MMO's is their lack of combat, I think that the problem is one that is systemic to the entire genre, and is only covered up cosmetically by the combat in more traditional MMO's. The decling interest in them is really just a symptom of the declining interest in the leveling treadmill that is present in all MMO games, however, I think that if done correctly, a non-combat MMO could bring some innovation that would eventually reach more traditional MMOs and revitalize the genre.
Ok, so I'm going to go a little bit off topic here, but gates implies that if you support free software, then you are a communist, the thing of it is, I'm not sure how exactly this is a bad thing.
Capitalism and Communism are each at opposite ends of a scale of scarcity- that is to say, Capitalism works great when there is a limited amount of stuff to go around, relative to the population size. It encourages effeciency and results in a population as a whole getting the most of what it wants from a limited pool of resources. Communism on the other hand is ideal for a world where, relative to the population size, resources are unlimited, or at least nearly unlimited. In the perfect theoreticaly communist society, the only limit to how much of something that can be made is the number of people available to make it.
Socialism is basically just the name given to the middle ground.
Now, capitalism is great for a lot of things, because as a society/country/planet today in many areas our resources are still finite. For many aspects of our world, capitalism is still the best thing we've come up with to deal with the limited resources we have, relative to the world population.
In the world of software however, we have a situation which is more closely related to the communist ideal world. Once a program is written it can be copied over and over again essentially for free. In this case, the only limit to the software that can be developed is the amount of skilled people who are able to work on it.
Looking at it like that, what I see when gates says people who support free software are communists is really his admission that we are using a superior philosophy for our little section of reality.
I never understood how it's good for Sun to prohibit the redistrobution of Java with BSD or Linux.
It seems to me that any benefits there might be would be lost because they are opening themselves up to having an open source, or at least more easily re-distributable JVM become the most common, and therefore standard, VM.
Besides, if they are giving it away for free anway, what benefit is there to forcing anyone who wants it to get it from Sun?
The article talks about the picture quality of televisions, and the lower quality of many of the flat screen TVs, but what I am wondering is, how accurate of a picture do people really need on their TV?
It's not like people are doing 3D modeling or something that requires a very sharp picture on their TVs, most people just want to watch TV or DVDs and play games.
A lot of the time, IMHO anyway, TV, movies and games look better if they are not super-clear anyway.
It seems like the guy had the right idea here, and the writing seems top notch (it's written in just the tone I would try to use to explain Linux to someone) but it seems like the organization could be a bit better. My Aunt and Uncle have constant problems with their PC due to viruses, worms, or just plain windows shitting all over itself. They've recently expressed some interest in Linux, and I've been thinking about burning them off a copy of knoppix so they could try it, and if they like it then go ahead and install Linux on their computer.
This guide looks like it might be a nice reference to go along with my instruction, but the problem is the layout. Althought the layout is resonable to a technically minded person, it seems that it might be better off putting more of the in-depth information in sidebars or something.
The boot up section started off quite well, but I think that it wasn't nessesary to go into detail about the bootup process.
Maybe he should take the first few paragraphs of each section and use them to make a basic walkthrough (you know, like those 4 step walkthroughs with pictures that come with routers) and have the current paper be a more "in-depth" look. Sadly, as it stands, as soon as people see "SCSI" or "IDE" or "PCMCIA" they'll go into idiot mode and fail to grok the rest of the paper, and resort to throwing feces at the monitor (I swear this must be how some people try to use their computers).
I wonder how this will effect people who build their own PCs. Does the tax only apply to people who buy a pre-fab machine, or will individual components also be taxed, or is it on the honor system where if you build a computer at home you are obligated to send in the ammount required by the tax.
As assinine as this is overall, I would much rather pay a $50 tax on any computer than have the media industries completely destroy or cripple beyond recognition the internet and anything remotely interesting that computers can do.
anyone have any idea if this technology will be applicable for robotics, and studying organic motion? i know high speed cameras have been used in the past to study insect motion and stuff, any idea if this will aid in that area of research, or are current cameras already fast enough?
I'm a native english speaker, fluent in German, and not quite fluent, but fairly skilled with 4 other languages. One thing that I've found to be extremely helpful in learning a language, especially tech jargon, is to join newsgroups or chatrooms in that language. Newsgroups especially, and chatrooms to a lesser extent, allow you to get used to the language and jargon without the fast pace of a conversation. Since there is already an expected delay before a response, it can give you a chance to think through the language more slowley when you construct a response, and allows you to get more used to the language.
I found that my German improved dramatically when I became interested in an open source project in which german was the native language of all of the core developers. By reading comments written in german, and participating in the german chatroom and mailing list I was able to become quite skilled with the language. I also found that the other developers were very helpful at aiding me in improving my skills in the language. Since a couple of them spoke fluent english, if there was something that I didn't know how to say, or said wrong, then they would help me to get it right. At this point, it's rare that it comes through that german isn't my native language when I'm participating in chats, and I can speak in the language much more intuitively than I was able to before.
The biggest problem with this is that I found in some cases it made my accent worse. Since I had been using german primarily via text, I had a tendancy to heavily "Americanize" the pronounciation in my head, to the point that there were a few times that when I tried to say the word aloud it was nearly unrecognizable as the actual word I was trying to say. Luckily, I found that once you know the words and the language, it's not terribly difficult (at least for me) to pick up on the correct pronounciation once you hear it a couple of times.
I think that the problem with this is that there is simply a much larger volume of changes than the system could really deal with. What's going to happen is that you are going to a situation like: user a posts an article, A. User B comes along an edit's the article by fixing some spelling and grammar, and appling some wikipediafication, resulting in article A'. Now, while A' is in the vault waiting for the approval of 5 moderators, someone else comes along and adds some information and creates A''. A'' happens to go through the system faster, and gets posted. Then A' gets approved and overwrites the additional information added with A''.
In short, slashdot's moderation system only works because once the comments are posted, they can't be changed.
An idea that might work along these lines though is a slashdot-esque karma system. Each user (and anonymous users) starts with the lowest possible karma. The lower the karma on an article, the higher the article could be listed on a section that requests review. That way, regular wikipedia-ers could check the list for new articles that were posted by less trusted users, and therefore might require additional review.
I think you're confusing "usability" with "easy to learn". I spend about 25 hours a week using photoshop, and I find the user interface to be very usable; commonly used items are easy to get to, similar tasks are grouped logically, and overall the program flows very well. That's not to say that there haven't been some braindead UI "features" in photoshop (was it version 5 or 6 where the option to export a gif with transparencey was in the "help" menu?). Gimp, in it's most recent versions, has also made great strides in usability, though I don't use Gimp very often, so I will continue to speak about photoshop, though I'm sure that much of what I say should apply to Gimp as well.
Photoshop is a large, complext bit of software designed for professionals, In otherwords, it's designed for people who really know what they are doing. To this end, it's UI focus has not been on "easy to learn" but instead "easy to use, assuming you know what you are doing" both are forms of usability.
It seems like the merging of technologies is bringing about the possibility of competition, which is a good thing. With cable and phone companies both offering phone, tv, and broadband, plus the cell phone companies offering phonelines as well as wifi in many areas, it seems like consumers are now getting more choices for service providers, which will hopefully lead to lower prices or better service.