Give me a break-- Columbus, Magellan and the Mayflower used existing technology that could relatively easily be repurposed for their exploratory voyages. If you could take a 747 and fly it to Mars with some extra fuel and food supplies there might be some similarity, but that ain't gonna get you to Mars. The extra expense of getting humans to Mars and back is by no means equivalent to the extra expense incurred by the early exploratory voyages...
HDTV broadcasts are over compressed and suffer with pulldown issues. Movies are shot in 24fps, only decent HD TVs support proper 24fps, normally under the guise of 1080p/24. Regular "1080p" is 50/60Hz, hence juddering pans. Most people don't notice of care, the fanatic or discerning viewer does.
Are you kidding? I've yet to buy an HD monitor-- partly because the first time I took a good look at the wall of them in Best Buy the motion jitter stood out significantly. If all I wanted to do is look at still images, it's great, but HD motion is like watching action under a strobe light...
If you're sitting around thinking that so and so is molesting children, either they are indeed molesting children, and we need to get that sorted out right away before it happens again, or you're sitting there imagining horrors that aren't real to fill in the gaps of your ignorance and fear, and we need to get that sorted out right away before you do something stupid.
What about the horrors that you are imagining here?
how is that different that leaving a CD physically out in the open? someone else is able to grab it and copy it. would that make me liable for leaving it there?
I'm not sure about that-- but it reminds me that years ago (before the advent of the CD) there used to be this little independent "archive" in Burbank that had a huge collection of records where you could go to the desk and request something to be transferred to cassette. The idea here was, I think, that in order to preserve the condition of the originals they wouldn't let you have your hands on them but could get cassette dups of anything for a modest fee. I used them once to get copies of a few records by an obscure group from the '60s whos original records had become almost impossible to find.
I don't know whether or not what they were doing was actually "legal" but they had been around for awhile and was smack in the middle of the recording-studio and film and TV area in Burbank so I expect the resource was used for things like movie producers who were looking to select music to use in movies (to subsequently procure proper licensing) and was an important resource to the industry(s) so it could be just that a blind eye was turned due to the need of the intdustry for such an archive. Anyone could utilize the resource though.
Which makes me wonder about libraries-- do libraries get a free pass on some of this? I can go to my local public library and check out CDs & DVDs by the score and dup them if I choose. But could a library choose to protect their originals and only allow you to check out a dup of these materials? At what point would it be distribution, and what if anything would keep an individual from doing the same-- is there something that a "resource" would have to do to qualify as a "library" if there are special library rules?
Not arguing for religion here, but where do you think scientific proof comes from? Many times scientists take a belief they have and then set out to 'prove' it. Now they always don't find that what they believe is supported and should adjust accordingly, but don't think believing something w/o proof is wrong in any way. Lets not even get into what constitutes 'proof'.
Such belief, if it should even be called that, should be held extremely tentatively-- which is certainly not the case in religion. I strive to eliminate as much belief as possible-- it is bias, pure and simple, and generally undesirable. It is not possible to eliminate all belief, but is a worthy goal. Only things that aren't true need to be believed in-- things that are true are true whether you believe them or not. I prefer to discover what is true, to the extent possible, rather than believe it. While there may be some fundamental beliefs necessary in order for this to happen, (such as "I exist," and "reality is logical and consistent") they should be minimized.
Not all religion is vile. The problem with some forms of Christinaity (and not just Christianity for that matter) is when they take things too literally. There are alot of religious people out there who are just fine with their fellow human and arent about yelling down science or killing the gays or bombing abortion clinics. Give those folks some credit.
I agree, let's all give them credit for not being complete idiots.
But that does not mean we should give them a free pass with regards to criticism of remaining idiocies...
People are supposedly free to believe whatever they want when it comes to a religion. When you attack that religion you are attacking that freedom. If you understood that you wouldn't be asking why people say your anti religion.
Aren't you similarly attacking my freedom to believe that these people are idiots? And my freedom of speech to freely talk about why?
There seems to be this myth that everyone should respect everyone elses beliefs. I don't respect the beliefs of a lot of groups-- the KKK, Nazi sympathizers, or Al-Quaeda for instance. While I find it obvious that religious beliefs may want and even need special treatment, what I don't see is any reason why religious beliefs deserve any special treatment.
In my book faith is not a virtue, and does not automatically deserve respect. Respect must be earned, and faith has failed consistently in that regard.
Someone steps up and says "I believe that eternal punishment exists," despite the fact that if it did would be completely useless to a God because it delivers neither rehabilitation, restitution or deterrence for the disbelievers that supposedly must endure it. So I then say, "eternal punishment has no utility to a God, a belief in it is gullible and cowardly." Or I say the concept of God is meaningless because the characteristics that such a being is presumed to have are incoherent. So what is the best counterargument you can then muster? To simply say that I am "anti-religion?" Perhaps that is not entirely inaccurate, but seems to me to be an attack on the messenger in lieu of the message.
There's nothing "morally superior" about trying to change things within a nation that isn't yours. If you don't like the actions of that nation's government, bombing the nation is one allowable reaction. Changing the government is the job of the people of that nation. If they're not willing to change their government, then it's only their own fault if they get bombed.
Hmmm... It seems to me that Al-Quaeda make about that same argument as a justification for 9/11...
Somebody please please explain to me why microsoft is hated more than apple....i really really don't understand this one.
It's about adapatability. Mac OS X & Linux are at opposite ends of the adaptability spectrum. Windows is somewhere in the middle. And it's not simply due to open source, though that certainly helps. It's more about what sort of assumptions are or are not made in the software. The Mac universe too often confuses "limited options" with "ease of use."
Hopefully, the folks at Dell will realize that they have an army of people out here who want them to succeed and will actually go out of their way to help in the process, and Dell will see it as a benefit rather than a nuisance.
One possibility I suppose however, is MS put them up to it with the idea of helping the product to make a poor showing and MS can then say "I told you so, it's crap," or something of that nature.
If this is the case though, I won't pity Dell for what will likely happen to them in the process. Perhaps we should call it the "Novell Effect."
He left out an important one-- Richard Greene published a paper on it in 1985: "Richard Greene, The drawing prism: a versatile graphic input device, Proceedings of the 12th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.103-110, July 1985," and I saw one of his early custom built models not long after that at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. In fact, he's still making them here. In his case, he uses water on paint brushes (or any available bright object, including fingers) to implement a more artist-friendly paintbox application.
I would think that the Zune team should be working on making a better mp3 player instead of trying to guilt trip MS employees into giving up their iPods.
It's completely consistent with Microsoft's general psychology-- a serious lack of self-esteem. They don't have confidence in their abilities so they must find some way to game or coerce the system into favoring their inferior products. They certainly do it with their OS-- proprietary lock ins, threatening patent lawsuits-- it's clearly their standard MO. If they really thought they could build products people would prefer, they wouldn't feel the need to pull that kind of crap.
As the usual jerk who complains about feature bloat, I actually don't have a problem with it utilizing sqllite-- it's a lean and mean database that I've used in a bunch of situations-- it works really well and has a small footprint. I would like to see a lean-and-mean minimalist browser though-- at one time Firefox was that, and that is what attracted me to it. So far I'm still running FF 1.5, as I've seen nothing to convince me to upgrade. If it ain't broke, STFU about upgrading.
It's the typical media conglomerate definition of "balanced." Pick someone far more extreme than our position, then pick a centrist and have them debate it, presenting them as the "two sides" of the issue. Then when the "middle ground" compromise is identified, it's right on target...
And unfortunately, it does actually fool a lot of people into thinking it's a "balanced" debate...
Most users buy the computer for the applications they can run on it. Pick some of the major interest areas. What choice of applications for that interest area are available on Windows? On Mac? On Linux? I would wager that nearly all of the available end-user oriented apps for a given interest area will run on Windows, but very few will run on Linux. Consequently, it's a no brainer-- unless you're an OS geek who cares about such things, Windows gives you far more choices WRT what you can run on your computer. The choice is very easy. Even the Mac does far better than Linux in this area, many many significant applications run on either Windows or Mac platforms.
The question you have to ask yourself is not what do end users think about Linux (they don't think about it), but what to commercial developers think about it? Why aren't they porting their apps to Linux as well as Mac and Windows? When you answer *that* question, you may have some idea as to why Linux isn't ready for end-users...
The thing is, if he writes open source code that "competes" with your day job business, you can choose to just use that code, and instead work on something else to add value to the business that he's not working on. Why should everyone be reinventing the same old wheel-- it just gets you thousands of wheels, when if someone were to take those wheels and build a cart, someone else would take the cart and build something else with it-- we'd far more quickly get to more sophisticated applications by leveraging each others work. By sharing building blocks we can all more quickly move to bigger and better buildings...
It's the same kind of reasoning that universities and professional organizations share their ideas via publications in journals. Why in software engineering should that simply be limited to journal articles and not actual useful source code as well?
What do they expect-- you can only browbeat your development staff into quickly producing unsupportable crap for so long before it all melts down-- they've had to pull out many OS features in order to keep the reactor from overheating as it is. With Vista, MS has painted themselves into a corner from which they are beginning to realize and looking for a means of escape, or at least of postponing the inevitable...
of old and new features, deprecated and new APIs, etc... I'm amazed any developer can keep enough of it in their head to write a well behaved application on Windows. Oh, wait... there are some, aren't there?
Many developers were no doubt spending far too much time converting all their string calls to *_s "safe" versions or for 16 bit characters to get around to figuring out what they need to do for UAC. Either that or they just turned UAC and all the compiler warnings off and are completely oblivious to what they're doing wrong...
If Windows wasn't such a rats nest of work-arounds and redesigns, applications would be far more stable and well behaved-- and even Microsoft often can't seem to follow their own rules. The "virtualization" of "program files" and the registry is an ad-hoc kludge if I ever saw one, just one more convoluted whacky factor to mess things up. Oh yeah, it works great-- transparent until you start working with backup programs or migrating or replicating users or user configurations.
Actually I would say more specifically, when you do what you love because you NEED to for that reward of money which you require to survive, you start to see what you onced loved stressful work that you start to dread and eventually get sick of.
When you do things for the pure sake of doing it, it's easier to love. That's why a lot of people like to keep their hobbies "pure".
I for one, essentially agree with your point-- but I think the referenced article may miss a few nuances regarding the "why."
When you're doing something creative for gain, presumably the source of that gain is someone else. Consequently, you are no longer doing the creative thing for the sheer pleasure of it-- you are no longer doing it to just to please yourself. You now have to insure that this someone else will be pleased with it, and thereby lose a lot of the creative freedom and control, which may very well be the source of the pleasure in the activity in the first place (certainly for me it is).
The most creative people are ahead of their time-- this is shown time and time again when artists and inventors produce works that aren't really appreciated for years, often after they've passed away. But you can't be "ahead of your time" if your goal is to make a living at it-- you have to please the unwashed masses today. And less creative people may enjoy the process but not produce things that are all that saleable-- you have to start somewhere, and great creations rarely occur in a vacuum-- it often takes years of practice and experimentation to produce great works. In the meantime you may produce a lot of crap that nobody would want to buy. And if your talent or taste just aren't up to snuff with your "public" that may be as far as you ever get.
The examples in the referenced article seem to be classroom situations where the tasks are probably not a significant source of enjoyment to many of the participants anyway, and offering a carrot simply causes them them to focus on that rather than the enjoyment or creativity of the task-- this may be a little different when we are talking about individuals who have been doing the task for their own enjoyment for years and have developed some associated pride. Consequently, the measure of the "quality of the output" may differ significantly. Also, we are concerned here more about the "quality of life" than the "quality of output"-- the article's results seem to imply a tradeoff between the two and I don't think it's as simple as that by any means.
And frankly, this New Age woowoo, "you can be whatever you want," is simply a load of crap and not supported by evidence, IMHO...
Why not encrypt something using the IP address values of the AACS site? It's not a 128 bit number, but you could then send a C&D to get the number pulled from the DNS servers...
The nice thing about championing the global warming cause is, even if humans aren't responsible for global warming, finding new economically sound ways to reduce polluting emissions is still a pretty darn good idea (unless you're a puppet of the corporations who may stand to lose out in that deal, I suppose). Reducing emissions by making engines more efficient saves money-- the idea that reducing waste "costs more" is erroneous, IMHO...
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Give me a break-- Columbus, Magellan and the Mayflower used existing technology that could relatively easily be repurposed for their exploratory voyages. If you could take a 747 and fly it to Mars with some extra fuel and food supplies there might be some similarity, but that ain't gonna get you to Mars. The extra expense of getting humans to Mars and back is by no means equivalent to the extra expense incurred by the early exploratory voyages...
HDTV broadcasts are over compressed and suffer with pulldown issues. Movies are shot in 24fps, only decent HD TVs support proper 24fps, normally under the guise of 1080p/24. Regular "1080p" is 50/60Hz, hence juddering pans. Most people don't notice of care, the fanatic or discerning viewer does.
Are you kidding? I've yet to buy an HD monitor-- partly because the first time I took a good look at the wall of them in Best Buy the motion jitter stood out significantly. If all I wanted to do is look at still images, it's great, but HD motion is like watching action under a strobe light...
If you're sitting around thinking that so and so is molesting children, either they are indeed molesting children, and we need to get that sorted out right away before it happens again, or you're sitting there imagining horrors that aren't real to fill in the gaps of your ignorance and fear, and we need to get that sorted out right away before you do something stupid.
What about the horrors that you are imagining here?
So how long does it take to download a copyrighted major motion picture?
how is that different that leaving a CD physically out in the open? someone else is able to grab it and copy it. would that make me liable for leaving it there?
I'm not sure about that-- but it reminds me that years ago (before the advent of the CD) there used to be this little independent "archive" in Burbank that had a huge collection of records where you could go to the desk and request something to be transferred to cassette. The idea here was, I think, that in order to preserve the condition of the originals they wouldn't let you have your hands on them but could get cassette dups of anything for a modest fee. I used them once to get copies of a few records by an obscure group from the '60s whos original records had become almost impossible to find.
I don't know whether or not what they were doing was actually "legal" but they had been around for awhile and was smack in the middle of the recording-studio and film and TV area in Burbank so I expect the resource was used for things like movie producers who were looking to select music to use in movies (to subsequently procure proper licensing) and was an important resource to the industry(s) so it could be just that a blind eye was turned due to the need of the intdustry for such an archive. Anyone could utilize the resource though.
Which makes me wonder about libraries-- do libraries get a free pass on some of this? I can go to my local public library and check out CDs & DVDs by the score and dup them if I choose. But could a library choose to protect their originals and only allow you to check out a dup of these materials? At what point would it be distribution, and what if anything would keep an individual from doing the same-- is there something that a "resource" would have to do to qualify as a "library" if there are special library rules?
Not arguing for religion here, but where do you think scientific proof comes from? Many times scientists take a belief they have and then set out to 'prove' it. Now they always don't find that what they believe is supported and should adjust accordingly, but don't think believing something w/o proof is wrong in any way. Lets not even get into what constitutes 'proof'.
Such belief, if it should even be called that, should be held extremely tentatively-- which is certainly not the case in religion. I strive to eliminate as much belief as possible-- it is bias, pure and simple, and generally undesirable. It is not possible to eliminate all belief, but is a worthy goal. Only things that aren't true need to be believed in-- things that are true are true whether you believe them or not. I prefer to discover what is true, to the extent possible, rather than believe it. While there may be some fundamental beliefs necessary in order for this to happen, (such as "I exist," and "reality is logical and consistent") they should be minimized.
Not all religion is vile. The problem with some forms of Christinaity (and not just Christianity for that matter) is when they take things too literally. There are alot of religious people out there who are just fine with their fellow human and arent about yelling down science or killing the gays or bombing abortion clinics. Give those folks some credit.
I agree, let's all give them credit for not being complete idiots.
But that does not mean we should give them a free pass with regards to criticism of remaining idiocies...
People are supposedly free to believe whatever they want when it comes to a religion. When you attack that religion you are attacking that freedom. If you understood that you wouldn't be asking why people say your anti religion.
Aren't you similarly attacking my freedom to believe that these people are idiots? And my freedom of speech to freely talk about why?
There seems to be this myth that everyone should respect everyone elses beliefs. I don't respect the beliefs of a lot of groups-- the KKK, Nazi sympathizers, or Al-Quaeda for instance. While I find it obvious that religious beliefs may want and even need special treatment, what I don't see is any reason why religious beliefs deserve any special treatment.
In my book faith is not a virtue, and does not automatically deserve respect. Respect must be earned, and faith has failed consistently in that regard.
Someone steps up and says "I believe that eternal punishment exists," despite the fact that if it did would be completely useless to a God because it delivers neither rehabilitation, restitution or deterrence for the disbelievers that supposedly must endure it. So I then say, "eternal punishment has no utility to a God, a belief in it is gullible and cowardly." Or I say the concept of God is meaningless because the characteristics that such a being is presumed to have are incoherent. So what is the best counterargument you can then muster? To simply say that I am "anti-religion?" Perhaps that is not entirely inaccurate, but seems to me to be an attack on the messenger in lieu of the message.
Time to start a "War on P2P." We know how lucrative and endless those other wars on tactics are, it's time to cash in here as well...
There's nothing "morally superior" about trying to change things within a nation that isn't yours. If you don't like the actions of that nation's government, bombing the nation is one allowable reaction. Changing the government is the job of the people of that nation. If they're not willing to change their government, then it's only their own fault if they get bombed.
Hmmm... It seems to me that Al-Quaeda make about that same argument as a justification for 9/11...
Somebody please please explain to me why microsoft is hated more than apple....i really really don't understand this one.
It's about adapatability. Mac OS X & Linux are at opposite ends of the adaptability spectrum. Windows is somewhere in the middle. And it's not simply due to open source, though that certainly helps. It's more about what sort of assumptions are or are not made in the software. The Mac universe too often confuses "limited options" with "ease of use."
Hopefully, the folks at Dell will realize that they have an army of people out here who want them to succeed and will actually go out of their way to help in the process, and Dell will see it as a benefit rather than a nuisance.
One possibility I suppose however, is MS put them up to it with the idea of helping the product to make a poor showing and MS can then say "I told you so, it's crap," or something of that nature.
If this is the case though, I won't pity Dell for what will likely happen to them in the process. Perhaps we should call it the "Novell Effect."
He left out an important one-- Richard Greene published a paper on it in 1985: "Richard Greene, The drawing prism: a versatile graphic input device, Proceedings of the 12th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.103-110, July 1985," and I saw one of his early custom built models not long after that at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. In fact, he's still making them here. In his case, he uses water on paint brushes (or any available bright object, including fingers) to implement a more artist-friendly paintbox application.
I would think that the Zune team should be working on making a better mp3 player instead of trying to guilt trip MS employees into giving up their iPods.
It's completely consistent with Microsoft's general psychology-- a serious lack of self-esteem. They don't have confidence in their abilities so they must find some way to game or coerce the system into favoring their inferior products. They certainly do it with their OS-- proprietary lock ins, threatening patent lawsuits-- it's clearly their standard MO. If they really thought they could build products people would prefer, they wouldn't feel the need to pull that kind of crap.
As the usual jerk who complains about feature bloat, I actually don't have a problem with it utilizing sqllite-- it's a lean and mean database that I've used in a bunch of situations-- it works really well and has a small footprint. I would like to see a lean-and-mean minimalist browser though-- at one time Firefox was that, and that is what attracted me to it. So far I'm still running FF 1.5, as I've seen nothing to convince me to upgrade. If it ain't broke, STFU about upgrading.
It's the typical media conglomerate definition of "balanced." Pick someone far more extreme than our position, then pick a centrist and have them debate it, presenting them as the "two sides" of the issue. Then when the "middle ground" compromise is identified, it's right on target...
And unfortunately, it does actually fool a lot of people into thinking it's a "balanced" debate...
Most users buy the computer for the applications they can run on it. Pick some of the major interest areas. What choice of applications for that interest area are available on Windows? On Mac? On Linux? I would wager that nearly all of the available end-user oriented apps for a given interest area will run on Windows, but very few will run on Linux. Consequently, it's a no brainer-- unless you're an OS geek who cares about such things, Windows gives you far more choices WRT what you can run on your computer. The choice is very easy. Even the Mac does far better than Linux in this area, many many significant applications run on either Windows or Mac platforms.
The question you have to ask yourself is not what do end users think about Linux (they don't think about it), but what to commercial developers think about it? Why aren't they porting their apps to Linux as well as Mac and Windows? When you answer *that* question, you may have some idea as to why Linux isn't ready for end-users...
The thing is, if he writes open source code that "competes" with your day job business, you can choose to just use that code, and instead work on something else to add value to the business that he's not working on. Why should everyone be reinventing the same old wheel-- it just gets you thousands of wheels, when if someone were to take those wheels and build a cart, someone else would take the cart and build something else with it-- we'd far more quickly get to more sophisticated applications by leveraging each others work. By sharing building blocks we can all more quickly move to bigger and better buildings...
It's the same kind of reasoning that universities and professional organizations share their ideas via publications in journals. Why in software engineering should that simply be limited to journal articles and not actual useful source code as well?
What do they expect-- you can only browbeat your development staff into quickly producing unsupportable crap for so long before it all melts down-- they've had to pull out many OS features in order to keep the reactor from overheating as it is. With Vista, MS has painted themselves into a corner from which they are beginning to realize and looking for a means of escape, or at least of postponing the inevitable...
As Clark Adams put it:
"If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!"
of old and new features, deprecated and new APIs, etc... I'm amazed any developer can keep enough of it in their head to write a well behaved application on Windows. Oh, wait... there are some, aren't there?
Many developers were no doubt spending far too much time converting all their string calls to *_s "safe" versions or for 16 bit characters to get around to figuring out what they need to do for UAC. Either that or they just turned UAC and all the compiler warnings off and are completely oblivious to what they're doing wrong...
If Windows wasn't such a rats nest of work-arounds and redesigns, applications would be far more stable and well behaved-- and even Microsoft often can't seem to follow their own rules. The "virtualization" of "program files" and the registry is an ad-hoc kludge if I ever saw one, just one more convoluted whacky factor to mess things up. Oh yeah, it works great-- transparent until you start working with backup programs or migrating or replicating users or user configurations.
Actually I would say more specifically, when you do what you love because you NEED to for that reward of money which you require to survive, you start to see what you onced loved stressful work that you start to dread and eventually get sick of. When you do things for the pure sake of doing it, it's easier to love. That's why a lot of people like to keep their hobbies "pure".
I for one, essentially agree with your point-- but I think the referenced article may miss a few nuances regarding the "why."
When you're doing something creative for gain, presumably the source of that gain is someone else. Consequently, you are no longer doing the creative thing for the sheer pleasure of it-- you are no longer doing it to just to please yourself. You now have to insure that this someone else will be pleased with it, and thereby lose a lot of the creative freedom and control, which may very well be the source of the pleasure in the activity in the first place (certainly for me it is).
The most creative people are ahead of their time-- this is shown time and time again when artists and inventors produce works that aren't really appreciated for years, often after they've passed away. But you can't be "ahead of your time" if your goal is to make a living at it-- you have to please the unwashed masses today. And less creative people may enjoy the process but not produce things that are all that saleable-- you have to start somewhere, and great creations rarely occur in a vacuum-- it often takes years of practice and experimentation to produce great works. In the meantime you may produce a lot of crap that nobody would want to buy. And if your talent or taste just aren't up to snuff with your "public" that may be as far as you ever get.
The examples in the referenced article seem to be classroom situations where the tasks are probably not a significant source of enjoyment to many of the participants anyway, and offering a carrot simply causes them them to focus on that rather than the enjoyment or creativity of the task-- this may be a little different when we are talking about individuals who have been doing the task for their own enjoyment for years and have developed some associated pride. Consequently, the measure of the "quality of the output" may differ significantly. Also, we are concerned here more about the "quality of life" than the "quality of output"-- the article's results seem to imply a tradeoff between the two and I don't think it's as simple as that by any means.
And frankly, this New Age woowoo, "you can be whatever you want," is simply a load of crap and not supported by evidence, IMHO...
Why not encrypt something using the IP address values of the AACS site? It's not a 128 bit number, but you could then send a C&D to get the number pulled from the DNS servers...
... before I'd watch that kind of crap.
They want it both ways, but I ain't buying...
I don't pay for services that are supported by advertising-- if it has ads, it better darn well be free as in beer.
I take no magazine or newspaper subscriptions either.
The nice thing about championing the global warming cause is, even if humans aren't responsible for global warming, finding new economically sound ways to reduce polluting emissions is still a pretty darn good idea (unless you're a puppet of the corporations who may stand to lose out in that deal, I suppose). Reducing emissions by making engines more efficient saves money-- the idea that reducing waste "costs more" is erroneous, IMHO...