You made the exact point I was going to make...and I'm also a musician who also does my own digital recording.
With new high capacity solid state drives - there will be little reason to continue using compressed formats (other than the RIAA wanting to limit reproducability). So we can just move to.wav files which would be on par with CD audio quality:
From Wikipedia.org -
Though a WAV file can hold compressed audio, the most common WAV format contains uncompressed audio in the pulse-code modulation (PCM) format. PCM audio is the standard audio file format for CDs, containing two channels of 44,100 samples per second, 16 bits per sample. Since PCM uses an uncompressed, lossless storage method, which keeps all the samples of an audio track, professional users or audio experts may use the WAV format for maximum audio quality. WAV audio can also be edited and manipulated with relative ease using software.
I haven't really looked, but are there any portable players that will play.wav files? If so, then that would be the way to go if you want fuller sound from a portable device - as long as the hardware can support the analog output to match. As for a hi-fi setup -- I play the CDs in my stereo in the living room, and ripped.wav files through my Bose computer speakers from my server (large hard drive).
The main difference between MP3 and lossless formats that I can detect - given the same sound system (quality speakers/headphones) - is the loss of multiple voicings, particularly noticeable for very high and very low frequency voicings (on some recordings I've heard it actually drop out backing vocals on one channel - causing the output to show up on the right side, for example, rather than centered as in the original recording). This matches up with the MP3 compression codec that eliminates multiple voicings that it determines to be nearly 'identical'. Most people won't notice this. Musicians and audiophiles will because of the loss of harmonics between duplicate tracks (in fact a key technique for creating a fuller sound in a recording is to create multiple copies of the same track - and layer them with different equalization in order to capture the full range of tones created by a given instrument over the frequency spectrum. Most instruments that are not purely electronic, will produce sympathetic vibrations in other parts of the instrument that will be picked up as harmonic patterns in the recording, and recording engineers go to lengths to produce these same patterns via signal processing for instruments that don't - this is in addition to creating the ambiance/acoustics of a performance space via digital echo/reverberation processing). These nuances are the 'lost' parts in the lossy formats.
You are missing the point. I am not talking about implementation of a given production system - of course you want to use what is the best tool for the job.
What I am talking about is when learning a subject, be it pointers or concurrency - theory is not enough and furthermore the tool chosen to illustrate the concept from an application standpoint should provide simple primitives that force the student to actually build that first 'wheel' themselves. That proves, if not to the teacher, certainly to the student, that not only do they understand the theory, but that they can also translate that theory into practice.
When higher level concepts, such as garbage collection are introduced, a clear picture of memory management can be drawn between that and the primitive structures (linked lists, trees, hashes) that were built in the introductory class. This part is missing from the vast majority of CS courses today.
My systems programming Prof would give us assignments and quizes - and expected our code to run. If it didn't run, we would lose points based on his analysis of how broken our code was. This forced us to think, not only about the theory, but about the application of that theory.
If you RTFM, you'll see that they come around and say there is a place for Java in the CS curriculum and spell it out - it is just not the 'only' place.
This is exactly what I've been railing about for years.
The first PC generation (those kids who first wrote programs in the late 70's and 80's) were blessed with having to learn all of this low level stuff to make their systems sing on the limited resources at the time.
Since then, students have been getting farther and farther from the key understandings that would make them excellent regardless of the language they would use in the future. The best programmers understand the underlying implimentation so they can leverage it.
Now industry is calling for more developers who can do concurrent applications - but how can you expect them to understand and build a system that avoids race conditions, when they don't even understand pointers?
The quality of software will continue to suffer until Universities get their act together and standardize system programming (including assembly, as well as C/C++, and scripting - shell, Perl, awk, sed, Python).
This looks great...until they break compatibility in some clever way to marginalize some segment.
Its not about the tool itself; it is about what the Microsoft management/lawyers will do with it to negate their competition. They've done it before, many times. They've been convicted in an antitrust case, dragging it out long enough for a sympathetic administration to bail them out of hot water. They will do it again.
Microsoft tools are snake oil.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 1
I've got Lyx and I love it.
That being said, looking at Scrivener - I can see the usefulness of its integrated features (storyboard, keyword indexing, outlining). I've been planning to build a similar system myself - to manage my projects. Now I don't have to. The nice thing is I can export the output of Scrivener in a format that LaTeX can use for generating the typeset via templates into whatever format I want (.pdf.html etc).
What are these 'airwaves' you speak of? I get my TV through a cable (part of the tubes/interwebs?). As for the public good - there is public access TV...all the good news comes in over that channel for the 33 people in the Metro area who happen to be watching.
I realize it is not going to happen over night. Nonetheless, I see it as a geometric progression - so the curve will increase probably faster than we think.
That is true - if you assume a model where the middlemen control production. The reality today is an artist can produce their own recordings as good as (or in many instances even better than - many of the recordings I've heard lately are cr&p - hot levels, bland mixing and equalization, etc.) multimillion dollar recording studios - thanks to digital recording software and low cost computers to run it. What once was an arcane subject, and a costly proposition, is not any more.
Given that senario - I think what I said stands: as artists shift to an independent model, there is not a lot the record companies can do. If I produce my own recordings, market and distribute them via the net under a creative commons license, that is one less portfolio that is being managed by the record companies. If you multiply that times thousands or hundreds of thousands of artists (and in particular when this business model starts getting the attention of the mainstream bands - a la Radio Head - and they start dropping their labels) - then the record companies will become irrelevant; I can't see what they can do to combat that.
The record companies will cling to their old portfolios, and try to attack people for pirating from that - but that will only last so long. Even as long as they have extended the copyright protections, eventually those works will fall into the public domain. In the meantime, these recordings will become less and less relevant to the current music scene - and I would also argue that artists/portfolio holders that attempt to lock down old music, will relegate whatever advancements the artists may have made to the dustbin of history. Copies of the songs will be so few and far between, that few will remember what made a given track a milestone because fewer ears are listening (I already see this happening with my children - indy music is becoming a larger part of their music, and older music - even if they wanted to listen to it for historical reference - is becoming harder to come by given limited funds). I am saddened by this; a young bassist could learn some nuances from listening to Paul McCartney, for example, but won't because it is too cost prohibitive. Of course, that may lead to invention and new technique, so it is probably a glass half full, glass half empty proposition.
They may try to attack indy artists for copyright infringement - maybe a phrase in the song sounds the same or very similar to a phrase in a protected work. I don't think they have much chance of winning this battle because music, much like the alphabet, is a limited domain. While there are literally millions (maybe billions) of ways of combining notes, there are a lesser number that are appropriate for a given piece of music due to the physics of the harmonics of sound waves. To win such a battle, the recording industry would have to prove that you copied a large proportion of your song from a protected work - not likely, if you create independent works. This will more probably effect people who mix existing recordings to create mash-ups - but again, most problems can be avoided if you use indy music - particularly music that is provided via a creative commons or equivalent license.
I think the landscape will be quite a bit different in 10 to 20 years from now - what we are seeing today is just the beginning of a wave. Bookmark this thread. If I'm right, then this can remind you of my vision; if I'm wrong, you can come here and rub my face in it. Reality will probably be somewhere inbetween; record companies will survive and be a lot smaller, and won't do business the way they do today; most artists will be indy artists.
Get with the program -- the new paradigm is to become your own boss - contract your work and do what you love (and therefore do very well indeed) instead of being an employee.
In the next 10 years or so companies are going to have to play ball, because there will just not be enough of us to do all the work that needs to be done after the boomers retire.
The crying for assistance from what I call the 'middle-man model' companies is only a symptom of a broader shift: more and more people are looking elsewhere for their music, movies and other entertainment.
What we are seeing is only the tip of the iceberg, and the changes will take place on a logarithmic curve - so it will only get worse for these companies faster.
That being said, what relevance will these middlemen have when the artists are producing and distributing their own works via what I call the 'no-middleman model', and what impact with this have for people in general? I can think of a few things:
1. Middle-men will be marginalized to the point where their sales are only a fraction of the overall market - provided they don't change their business models to adapt. 2. People (traditionally called 'consumers') will get the content they want how they want it, and they will have more options to contribute to the process that looks more like a long term collaborative relationship, rather than a one-time contractual exchange. Consumer, as a useful description will be limited to food and durable goods. 3. Artists will have more options to produce and promote their work. Their business model will not be limited to the traditional sale of a CD, but more and more of their revenue will come from non traditional payments (virtual tip jar, expansion of venues to include online and virtual worlds exposure - exposure way beyond the numbers of people they can reach today on their own). 4. New artists will be able to get more exposure, and will enjoy more of the profit than they would under a traditional corporate model.
So - in this environment DMCA will be virtually irrelevant. If 99% of the art is distributed with an open commons type license, then protection of that other 1% will be largely irrelevant to you if you don't patronize it - given the quality of corporate produced music and movies continues to deteriorate as it has been over the years, that is not a bad assumption. Even if the split looks more like 50%/50% - open commons/proprietary, the artists that choose the proprietary route (e.g. selling CDs, or using a closed distribution model - like iTunes) don't have to opt-in to DMCA driven DRM protections (didn't Steve Jobs get buy-in from his providers that the music on iTunes would not be DRM'd?) - and probably wouldn't want to, given how these attempts to lock down content has failed so many times, and is seen as a boondoggle for many people.
Artists will be able to focus more on the creative side in concert with fans and contractors (cheaper than the blood money the corporations demand for promotions) - providing full featured 'teaser' works, and other ancillary things (websites, and virtual space/world presence - e.g. 'Gorillas' website, and 2nd Life artist storefronts and free events) - which will garner larger audiences (provided they have talent, of course) - and increase their own income as this model becomes more and more mainstream.
If an artist refuses to DRM their work, wants to give away their art for free online, and put up a virtual tip jar for appreciative patrons, I don't see what the DMCA, corporate middlemen or congress can do to stop it.
When food becomes scarce in the future as the result of global realignment of the environment, the 'smarties' will be able to use their army of robots to harvest the more numerous 'dummies', thus extending life, and thus surviving to populate the new tropical 'arctic' continent. So, I would say this is in fact a splitting of two species - revenge of the nerds indeed!
Actually if you used emacs correctly you would only have that initial overhead when you launched the app. Once in the editor, you could navigate your directory structure with your mouse or keyboard, or conversely run shell commands from within emacs and capture the output. Opening a file inside of emacs takes microseconds. You can generate PDF output as well, and interface with version control repositories. Saying vim has the same features as emacs is stretching the truth more than a little bit.
I think the large amount of misunderstanding concerning emacs comes from poor habits learned early on by neophyte unix developers who tried to take their command line paradigm (do everything from the command line, launching the editor when I want to edit a file) into a completely different system (provide a framework from which to accomplish anything - extensible via modules). I have emacs sessions (local and remote) that have been running for weeks on end; I can come back to my work without interruption. Efficient software development is about limiting interruptions and maintaining continuity of thought over long periods of time. Emacs does that for me.
While vi may be the most popular editor (2 to 1 over emacs in a general population), among the cognoscenti emacs is the overwhelming choice (3 to 1); popular does not equate to best - only commonplace.
Of course, this is all irrelevant. Whatever works for the individual is what is 'best' - aside from team environments where standardization is required for specific functionality (e.g. eclipse for UML, JEE, MYLIN(sic), etc support) in which case you don't get a vote. For that matter, there is much to be said for slowing down people with itchy editor fingers...
Running top on my machine shows emacs reserving 12 MB --- actual use with a few small files open is 19K give or take. That is version 22.1.1. I rounded up to 20 MB to cover general usage. Given most modern desktop/laptop machines have *at* *least* 1GB ram, and most servers have 4 GB +, I don't think the emacs footprint on disk or in ram is a significant argument against using it.
What kind of machine are you using - an 8088? I just started emacs on my Dell laptop here at work, timed it - and it took 1 second to display, and by 2 seconds I was opening up the directory to load a file in the kill ring. I have the same response time on my personal Macbook Pro (Core 2 Duo and 2GB RAM) using the Mac native version of Emacs (Carbon I think). When I start a remote instance from our remote server farm (located 300 miles away), it is very close to the same response time 1.5 seconds to display.
Is one or two seconds too slow? Do you have a bunch of.el modules loaded? I've only loaded the python module - but haven't seen any difference in launch time before or after loading the module.
This "emacs is slow, vi/vim is fast" argument does not jibe with my own experience. Please share some specifics to support your argument.
Used both...
on
Hacking VIM
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· Score: 2, Informative
RSM must have a time machine tucked away at the FSF. Emacs was ahead of its time - and in many respects still is. Its 20 MB footprint is slim in comparison to other tools on the market today. Vi, via vim, is getting more bloated - and at some point will look enough like Emacs to make the matter moot.
Ostensibly the idea is to study human populations. The nature of RPG games (or FPSs or Combat Flight Sims etc) is not conducive to that goal. Of course, I could have told them that for considerably less than the $$$ they spent.
I would have chosen a model like Second Life - set up the conditions/environment/physics, and let the users/test subjects run with it.
The problem comes about when you distribute the book via electronic media. Copies can be had very cheaply and distributed all over the world in a blink of an eye.
The business model is what causes this friction. The old business model does not take into account a digital world. Rather than change the business model, the publishers would rather do whatever it takes to keep the cash cow producing - and if technology can make it even more profitable, all the better.
Traditional artist/middleman/consumer business model just hit an iceberg, and they don't even know they are sinking yet.
1st Objection - How does an author get started? Who is going to pay a penny for an unknown author to write something? 1st Answer - New authors just have to suck it up, the way the majority already do today and give away some of their work in order to develop a reputation.
And of course there is the ubiquitous virtual tip-jar - offer your work for free, but provide a means for folks who like your work to contribute to its continuation. A few bucks to help pay for coffee every now and then might help you keep writing - and the consistency with which people are enthused about your writing enough to give you a tip is probably a direct indicator of whether you should continue, change your writing style, or find some other line of work.
Linden dollars don't do anything either outside the context of a game.
Actually they do. You can sell your Lindens for Dollars (The current exchange rate is 266L per $1.) So if you have a successful online business there, you could make enough real dollars to live off of in the real world. Difficult, but not impossible. SL has a vibrant economy - Check out this link for specifics.
That is aside from the personal networking, professional and career contacts you can make in SL that can equate to job offers/contracts in the real world (writers, graphic artists, media developers and programmers in particular - but there are other fields, such as education [distance learning], music [live concerts streamed in SL], and many others that lend themselves to the environment).
I've played the same games (mostly FPS, RPG and flight simulations) on Windows XP, Linux (on the same hardware), and on Mac, and Bootcamp'd XP (on the same hardware).
In my experience, the Linux versions actually played faster on the same hardware. I couldn't tell the difference playing games on the Mac under OSX Tiger or under the bootcamped Windows XP. I am curious to see how well they play under OSX Leopard - with its 64 bit display code (any examples of speed up under Leopard out there?)
So - Linux could be a competitive gaming machine - if one or more distributions decide to tackle the problem of integrating games to work as well as other FOSS software. That being said, Apple's agreement from key game developers points to the answer imho: people want to do everything with their machines - including video gaming.
Slashdot Mirror
With new high capacity solid state drives - there will be little reason to continue using compressed formats (other than the RIAA wanting to limit reproducability). So we can just move to
From Wikipedia.org -
I haven't really looked, but are there any portable players that will play
The main difference between MP3 and lossless formats that I can detect - given the same sound system (quality speakers/headphones) - is the loss of multiple voicings, particularly noticeable for very high and very low frequency voicings (on some recordings I've heard it actually drop out backing vocals on one channel - causing the output to show up on the right side, for example, rather than centered as in the original recording). This matches up with the MP3 compression codec that eliminates multiple voicings that it determines to be nearly 'identical'. Most people won't notice this. Musicians and audiophiles will because of the loss of harmonics between duplicate tracks (in fact a key technique for creating a fuller sound in a recording is to create multiple copies of the same track - and layer them with different equalization in order to capture the full range of tones created by a given instrument over the frequency spectrum. Most instruments that are not purely electronic, will produce sympathetic vibrations in other parts of the instrument that will be picked up as harmonic patterns in the recording, and recording engineers go to lengths to produce these same patterns via signal processing for instruments that don't - this is in addition to creating the ambiance/acoustics of a performance space via digital echo/reverberation processing). These nuances are the 'lost' parts in the lossy formats.
Point taken.
*tips hat*
You are missing the point. I am not talking about implementation of a given production system - of course you want to use what is the best tool for the job.
What I am talking about is when learning a subject, be it pointers or concurrency - theory is not enough and furthermore the tool chosen to illustrate the concept from an application standpoint should provide simple primitives that force the student to actually build that first 'wheel' themselves. That proves, if not to the teacher, certainly to the student, that not only do they understand the theory, but that they can also translate that theory into practice.
When higher level concepts, such as garbage collection are introduced, a clear picture of memory management can be drawn between that and the primitive structures (linked lists, trees, hashes) that were built in the introductory class. This part is missing from the vast majority of CS courses today.
My systems programming Prof would give us assignments and quizes - and expected our code to run. If it didn't run, we would lose points based on his analysis of how broken our code was. This forced us to think, not only about the theory, but about the application of that theory.
If you RTFM, you'll see that they come around and say there is a place for Java in the CS curriculum and spell it out - it is just not the 'only' place.
I don't see that as java bashing.
This is exactly what I've been railing about for years.
The first PC generation (those kids who first wrote programs in the late 70's and 80's) were blessed with having to learn all of this low level stuff to make their systems sing on the limited resources at the time.
Since then, students have been getting farther and farther from the key understandings that would make them excellent regardless of the language they would use in the future. The best programmers understand the underlying implimentation so they can leverage it.
Now industry is calling for more developers who can do concurrent applications - but how can you expect them to understand and build a system that avoids race conditions, when they don't even understand pointers?
The quality of software will continue to suffer until Universities get their act together and standardize system programming (including assembly, as well as C/C++, and scripting - shell, Perl, awk, sed, Python).
This looks great...until they break compatibility in some clever way to marginalize some segment.
Its not about the tool itself; it is about what the Microsoft management/lawyers will do with it to negate their competition. They've done it before, many times. They've been convicted in an antitrust case, dragging it out long enough for a sympathetic administration to bail them out of hot water. They will do it again.
Microsoft tools are snake oil.
I've got Lyx and I love it.
.html etc).
That being said, looking at Scrivener - I can see the usefulness of its integrated features (storyboard, keyword indexing, outlining). I've been planning to build a similar system myself - to manage my projects. Now I don't have to. The nice thing is I can export the output of Scrivener in a format that LaTeX can use for generating the typeset via templates into whatever format I want (.pdf
I'm sold.
What are these 'airwaves' you speak of? I get my TV through a cable (part of the tubes/interwebs?). As for the public good - there is public access TV...all the good news comes in over that channel for the 33 people in the Metro area who happen to be watching.
"Programming As If People Mattered" Nathaniel S. Borenstein -Princeton University Press 1991 - ISBN: 0-691-03763-9
Dated, but simple and very much applicable today. Humorous segways and examples abound.
Now we know the true source of Steve Ballmer's chair throwing monkey dance.
You, sir, are a genius.
Yep we are saying the same thing.
I realize it is not going to happen over night. Nonetheless, I see it as a geometric progression - so the curve will increase probably faster than we think.
That is true - if you assume a model where the middlemen control production. The reality today is an artist can produce their own recordings as good as (or in many instances even better than - many of the recordings I've heard lately are cr&p - hot levels, bland mixing and equalization, etc.) multimillion dollar recording studios - thanks to digital recording software and low cost computers to run it. What once was an arcane subject, and a costly proposition, is not any more.
Given that senario - I think what I said stands: as artists shift to an independent model, there is not a lot the record companies can do. If I produce my own recordings, market and distribute them via the net under a creative commons license, that is one less portfolio that is being managed by the record companies. If you multiply that times thousands or hundreds of thousands of artists (and in particular when this business model starts getting the attention of the mainstream bands - a la Radio Head - and they start dropping their labels) - then the record companies will become irrelevant; I can't see what they can do to combat that.
The record companies will cling to their old portfolios, and try to attack people for pirating from that - but that will only last so long. Even as long as they have extended the copyright protections, eventually those works will fall into the public domain. In the meantime, these recordings will become less and less relevant to the current music scene - and I would also argue that artists/portfolio holders that attempt to lock down old music, will relegate whatever advancements the artists may have made to the dustbin of history. Copies of the songs will be so few and far between, that few will remember what made a given track a milestone because fewer ears are listening (I already see this happening with my children - indy music is becoming a larger part of their music, and older music - even if they wanted to listen to it for historical reference - is becoming harder to come by given limited funds). I am saddened by this; a young bassist could learn some nuances from listening to Paul McCartney, for example, but won't because it is too cost prohibitive. Of course, that may lead to invention and new technique, so it is probably a glass half full, glass half empty proposition.
They may try to attack indy artists for copyright infringement - maybe a phrase in the song sounds the same or very similar to a phrase in a protected work. I don't think they have much chance of winning this battle because music, much like the alphabet, is a limited domain. While there are literally millions (maybe billions) of ways of combining notes, there are a lesser number that are appropriate for a given piece of music due to the physics of the harmonics of sound waves. To win such a battle, the recording industry would have to prove that you copied a large proportion of your song from a protected work - not likely, if you create independent works. This will more probably effect people who mix existing recordings to create mash-ups - but again, most problems can be avoided if you use indy music - particularly music that is provided via a creative commons or equivalent license.
I think the landscape will be quite a bit different in 10 to 20 years from now - what we are seeing today is just the beginning of a wave. Bookmark this thread. If I'm right, then this can remind you of my vision; if I'm wrong, you can come here and rub my face in it. Reality will probably be somewhere inbetween; record companies will survive and be a lot smaller, and won't do business the way they do today; most artists will be indy artists.
Get with the program -- the new paradigm is to become your own boss - contract your work and do what you love (and therefore do very well indeed) instead of being an employee.
In the next 10 years or so companies are going to have to play ball, because there will just not be enough of us to do all the work that needs to be done after the boomers retire.
The crying for assistance from what I call the 'middle-man model' companies is only a symptom of a broader shift: more and more people are looking elsewhere for their music, movies and other entertainment.
What we are seeing is only the tip of the iceberg, and the changes will take place on a logarithmic curve - so it will only get worse for these companies faster.
That being said, what relevance will these middlemen have when the artists are producing and distributing their own works via what I call the 'no-middleman model', and what impact with this have for people in general? I can think of a few things:
1. Middle-men will be marginalized to the point where their sales are only a fraction of the overall market - provided they don't change their business models to adapt.
2. People (traditionally called 'consumers') will get the content they want how they want it, and they will have more options to contribute to the process that looks more like a long term collaborative relationship, rather than a one-time contractual exchange. Consumer, as a useful description will be limited to food and durable goods.
3. Artists will have more options to produce and promote their work. Their business model will not be limited to the traditional sale of a CD, but more and more of their revenue will come from non traditional payments (virtual tip jar, expansion of venues to include online and virtual worlds exposure - exposure way beyond the numbers of people they can reach today on their own).
4. New artists will be able to get more exposure, and will enjoy more of the profit than they would under a traditional corporate model.
So - in this environment DMCA will be virtually irrelevant. If 99% of the art is distributed with an open commons type license, then protection of that other 1% will be largely irrelevant to you if you don't patronize it - given the quality of corporate produced music and movies continues to deteriorate as it has been over the years, that is not a bad assumption. Even if the split looks more like 50%/50% - open commons/proprietary, the artists that choose the proprietary route (e.g. selling CDs, or using a closed distribution model - like iTunes) don't have to opt-in to DMCA driven DRM protections (didn't Steve Jobs get buy-in from his providers that the music on iTunes would not be DRM'd?) - and probably wouldn't want to, given how these attempts to lock down content has failed so many times, and is seen as a boondoggle for many people.
Artists will be able to focus more on the creative side in concert with fans and contractors (cheaper than the blood money the corporations demand for promotions) - providing full featured 'teaser' works, and other ancillary things (websites, and virtual space/world presence - e.g. 'Gorillas' website, and 2nd Life artist storefronts and free events) - which will garner larger audiences (provided they have talent, of course) - and increase their own income as this model becomes more and more mainstream.
If an artist refuses to DRM their work, wants to give away their art for free online, and put up a virtual tip jar for appreciative patrons, I don't see what the DMCA, corporate middlemen or congress can do to stop it.
The train is coming. Time to get off the track.
When food becomes scarce in the future as the result of global realignment of the environment, the 'smarties' will be able to use their army of robots to harvest the more numerous 'dummies', thus extending life, and thus surviving to populate the new tropical 'arctic' continent. So, I would say this is in fact a splitting of two species - revenge of the nerds indeed!
;)
Soylent green is people!
Actually if you used emacs correctly you would only have that initial overhead when you launched the app. Once in the editor, you could navigate your directory structure with your mouse or keyboard, or conversely run shell commands from within emacs and capture the output. Opening a file inside of emacs takes microseconds. You can generate PDF output as well, and interface with version control repositories. Saying vim has the same features as emacs is stretching the truth more than a little bit.
I think the large amount of misunderstanding concerning emacs comes from poor habits learned early on by neophyte unix developers who tried to take their command line paradigm (do everything from the command line, launching the editor when I want to edit a file) into a completely different system (provide a framework from which to accomplish anything - extensible via modules). I have emacs sessions (local and remote) that have been running for weeks on end; I can come back to my work without interruption. Efficient software development is about limiting interruptions and maintaining continuity of thought over long periods of time. Emacs does that for me.
While vi may be the most popular editor (2 to 1 over emacs in a general population), among the cognoscenti emacs is the overwhelming choice (3 to 1); popular does not equate to best - only commonplace.
Of course, this is all irrelevant. Whatever works for the individual is what is 'best' - aside from team environments where standardization is required for specific functionality (e.g. eclipse for UML, JEE, MYLIN(sic), etc support) in which case you don't get a vote. For that matter, there is much to be said for slowing down people with itchy editor fingers...
Running top on my machine shows emacs reserving 12 MB --- actual use with a few small files open is 19K give or take. That is version 22.1.1. I rounded up to 20 MB to cover general usage. Given most modern desktop/laptop machines have *at* *least* 1GB ram, and most servers have 4 GB +, I don't think the emacs footprint on disk or in ram is a significant argument against using it.
What kind of machine are you using - an 8088? I just started emacs on my Dell laptop here at work, timed it - and it took 1 second to display, and by 2 seconds I was opening up the directory to load a file in the kill ring. I have the same response time on my personal Macbook Pro (Core 2 Duo and 2GB RAM) using the Mac native version of Emacs (Carbon I think). When I start a remote instance from our remote server farm (located 300 miles away), it is very close to the same response time 1.5 seconds to display.
.el modules loaded? I've only loaded the python module - but haven't seen any difference in launch time before or after loading the module.
Is one or two seconds too slow? Do you have a bunch of
This "emacs is slow, vi/vim is fast" argument does not jibe with my own experience. Please share some specifics to support your argument.
RSM must have a time machine tucked away at the FSF. Emacs was ahead of its time - and in many respects still is. Its 20 MB footprint is slim in comparison to other tools on the market today.
Vi, via vim, is getting more bloated - and at some point will look enough like Emacs to make the matter moot.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained through incompetence/ignorance.
I have a hard time with that one; some things just scream out, "I'm a shill"!
Ostensibly the idea is to study human populations. The nature of RPG games (or FPSs or Combat Flight Sims etc) is not conducive to that goal. Of course, I could have told them that for considerably less than the $$$ they spent.
I would have chosen a model like Second Life - set up the conditions/environment/physics, and let the users/test subjects run with it.
The problem comes about when you distribute the book via electronic media. Copies can be had very cheaply and distributed all over the world in a blink of an eye.
The business model is what causes this friction. The old business model does not take into account a digital world. Rather than change the business model, the publishers would rather do whatever it takes to keep the cash cow producing - and if technology can make it even more profitable, all the better.
Traditional artist/middleman/consumer business model just hit an iceberg, and they don't even know they are sinking yet.
And of course there is the ubiquitous virtual tip-jar - offer your work for free, but provide a means for folks who like your work to contribute to its continuation. A few bucks to help pay for coffee every now and then might help you keep writing - and the consistency with which people are enthused about your writing enough to give you a tip is probably a direct indicator of whether you should continue, change your writing style, or find some other line of work.
Actually they do. You can sell your Lindens for Dollars (The current exchange rate is 266L per $1.) So if you have a successful online business there, you could make enough real dollars to live off of in the real world. Difficult, but not impossible. SL has a vibrant economy - Check out this link for specifics.
That is aside from the personal networking, professional and career contacts you can make in SL that can equate to job offers/contracts in the real world (writers, graphic artists, media developers and programmers in particular - but there are other fields, such as education [distance learning], music [live concerts streamed in SL], and many others that lend themselves to the environment).
I've played the same games (mostly FPS, RPG and flight simulations) on Windows XP, Linux (on the same hardware), and on Mac, and Bootcamp'd XP (on the same hardware).
In my experience, the Linux versions actually played faster on the same hardware. I couldn't tell the difference playing games on the Mac under OSX Tiger or under the bootcamped Windows XP. I am curious to see how well they play under OSX Leopard - with its 64 bit display code (any examples of speed up under Leopard out there?)
So - Linux could be a competitive gaming machine - if one or more distributions decide to tackle the problem of integrating games to work as well as other FOSS software. That being said, Apple's agreement from key game developers points to the answer imho: people want to do everything with their machines - including video gaming.