Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I keep on hearing that "open source" is about freedom.
Correction: "Open source" is buzzword meaning a various bunch of licences that corporations use, that are usually watered down versions of "free software".
Anyway, I also don't see how Google would be more "ethical" if they made their AdWords algorithm/program "free software" or "open source" or anything. A big community of developers looking at it could find the algorithm's faults and be able enhance it for everyone's benefit, but if it's already good enough for Google, then why give it out to others, who would just use it for competing AdWords services? Maybe the poster means that the algorithm should just be made "viewable" to people, while retaining all the rights to using it... The way to implement that would probably be a patent... Are you sure it's not already patented?
Ah, OK... I thought the numbers appearing inside the tube were pretty sci-fi, but looking at the big picture on that page, it seems there's actually 10 little tubes inside there, bent to the shape of numbers, and I guess it just picks one to light up. Apparently they hadn't come up with the idea of using just 7 segments yet.:-)
Can you bend cold cathode tubes (that people use to light up the insides of their computers) over a candle..?
That's just it. mxtabs.com is down, taborama.com won't show anything signed.. It's definitely had an effect. I appreciate your point about it improving people's abilities, but my point is that what harm are they causing in the first place?
I was half kidding, and I definitely don't appreciate the industry for what they're doing to those helpful sites. And I'm not a regular user of any site like that, so I don't know if maybe some actually great and reliable resources have been lost...
But I have looked up some tabs and notes and especially lyrics with Google, and there always seems to be *lots* of hits in all kinds of sites, all over the world, and most of them are various people's home pages. And you always have to go through many of those to find a correct version.:-) Can they cease & decist them all? I don't think so. I hope not. Especially not
this one.
I really fear for modern music. Not sure how well the/. community is familiar with guitar tabbing, but it's essentially an ASCII way of rendering guitar music that even AOLers can understand. Now all the major tab sites are being forced to close or remove all tabs for signed artists due to a new music industry function.
If they really could get a significant amount of tabs taken off the net and stop them circulating around on paper (and they really can't), I doubt it would hurt modern music much. Just more people will have to learn to listen and figure out the tabs out of songs for themselves... And that could actually lead to a positive effect on their musical abilities.:-)
It's insane; how are such things possibly hurting the bands?
Apparently sanity has nothing to do with it. After they're done with the lyrics and tabs, sooner or later they will sue a fan for putting a band's logo up on a fanpage (without signing up for the official fanclub, for instance)...
Similarly, Microsoft and MTV are two corporations (a word that has nothing to do with music) that really don't appear to understand music as anything more than a marketable economy, which is just sad. Just like Orwell said the hope is in the Proles, for music, the hope is in the indies.
Indeed. I bet they will just go wild and shoot themselves in the foot with some unbelievable DRM scam.
I use sawfish, no gnome, and I don't have any gnome-settings-daemon... I've managed to avoid installing almost all the libraries, even.
I pretty much honestly thought everyone always runs gnome-settings-daemon and kdeinit both. I guess I should consider dropping one...:-)
Though it's always a shock when I try installing some teeny CD player app or something, and find it pulling in 100MB+ of libraries... Luckily, aptitude has an undo.:)
Even if you installed all the libs, then next time you want another app, you have to download upgrades to most of the libs again, because everything always depends on the latest version of everything, as opposed to the minimal required version.:-(
So your way is actually pretty cool, but I wouldn't want to learn to live without 97,7% of all the apps out there.
I can also recommend this one. As a prequisite I think it does require a bit of enthusiasm about old computers and all this stuff. In a few places it goes pretty deep into cool nerdy things like explaining how the chip manufacturing process worked at MOS technology, and sometimes there's surprisingly detailed information about how some chips or software works. But it's not a complete hardware reference manual though... I would have really liked to read even more about the internals of the SID, for example.:-)
Most of the time the stories are quoted straight from the people who developed the chips and computers, and they are the heroes and I guess mostly the marketing people are the bad guys.
The book mentions a lot of early VIC-20 and C64 games by name, or some demos that they made for computer shows, and it might say something like "they demonstrated all the graphic possibilities of the VIC chip and there was stuff scrolling on the screen and it was really awesome"... So I think it pretty much fails to mention that those early-80's productions, impressive as they may have been at the time, must have been actually really lame compared to the stuff that some gamemakers and especially demomakers have been able to pull out of a Commodore 64 in the following 10-20 years.
Then again I haven't RTFB *all* the way through yet!:-) It won't take long at this pace though...
I have 2 retired KT7's in the basement, one is completely dead and the other one just sometimes wouldn't boot. I've always suspected the caps, but I've been way too lazy to replace them all. I'll have to go check for bulges...
However, it would really help business customers if there was far warning before you go and interrupt our businesses. This is especially true for some of my customers who use Paypal as the exclusive internet gateway for their ecommerce ventures. Letting people know after the fact, when you have already put their businesses on hold is simply unacceptable. The fact that your call center representative could not tell me why the limitations were placed on the account is even worse.
Did they tell your customers that your account was closed?
I had a bad Paypal (/eBay) experience a while ago myself. The seller, who I paid, claimed his account was closed, a bit like yours, and that he had to prove his identity to Paypal, and he'd called them and had his lawyer send them letters, etc etc... But Paypal never said anything about it to me.
Luckily, I got my money back in the end. I filed a "buyer complaint" or something in Paypal, and *very conveniently* the seller got his account back and refunded me, on the same last day that the complaint was due for a review by a Paypal employee. And that took 10 impatient days of waiting or something... Which was not fun.
But the really suckiest part about it all was that I was never able to confirm if any of his troubles were real, or if it was some kind of lame scam attempt. I didn't call Paypal, since I'm in another country... But I wrote at least three very precise and to-the-point complaints about the different stupid aspects of this deal in the Paypal feedback system... and I never got any reply besides the automatic ones.
So they value the privacy of their customers so much, that even if someone wants to tell you that their account is closed, they won't confirm it. Or something. I guess I'm supposed to think it doesn't matter whether it was a scam attempt or not: At least the buyer complaint system was there, even if it was incredibly slow. I don't think it was a scam, I mean if he just wanted to take my money, he could have sent me bricks in a package or something... But who knows.
The wussies don't need to have their software patched to work with IDE64.:-) Except maybe to support other device numbers besides 8.
Life was easier when you only had a choice of 4 of 16 colors, and then only a 320x200 bitmap to put those colors on.
At least the pixels in today's bitmaps are in the correct order one after another and they can be addressed without rotating bits. Mapping graphics to a 2-bit bitmap that is made out of 8-byte blocks, so after every 4 pixels you need to jump over 7 bytes to draw a straight horizontal line, with 2 global colors + 2 colors that are chosen for that particular block... I never got to the point where I could say that was "easy".:-(
I wouldn't want to sit on a bar stool for the amounts of time I typically spend at the computer. I imagine the ergonomics geeks won't be happy with that, either.
I used to have barstools in my garage. It's not bad at all, as long as the desk is high enough. I don't have a garage any more - the current place has an extra room for "my stuff" instead. It turns out I preferred the garage. I definitely want one again next time.
Heaven forbid anyone try to use a controller that isnt a carbon copy of the damn PS2 controller! Fuck you Rockstar, you can keep your damn coffee, just give me a usable control scheme!
Comfortable and furious?:-) I went out and bought what appears to be a carbon copy of the damn PS2 controller, and I still had to spend quite some time configuring all the buttons to make it work like it did on the PS2. I've been mostly happy with it though -- especially the auto-aim is in some situations a lot nicer than aiming manually, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work in the hot coffee or the dancing scenes... I've had to use the arrows on the keyboard. And shooting down the RC airplanes from Zero's roof is easy pie with the mouse, and next to impossible with the tiny thumb-joystick.
a word processor is NOT trying to allow the editing of any type of document. It's rather obviously trying to allow the editing of the kind of document that involves representing the marking of a canvas, typically a piece of paper. It's a very specialised meaning of the word document, in word-processor context.
True, word processors are made to look like there's a virtual piece of paper in there, so the user can imagine what it's going to look like if it was on paper. But does that mean you shouldn't use the program if you're not going to print?
You shouldn't include a video clip because it wouldn't work if someone printed it? Just because your context typically involves a piece of paper, it really doesn't have to. The only context in which it makes sense to open a word processor for the sole purpose of printing out paper, and not having an ulterior motive like using it was a medium for storing and sharing useful or artful information, is testing the word processor's features, or testing the printer or something.
Are you really going to argue that it makes sense for a 'Microsoft Word document' or a 'OO Writer' document to be able to mean a marked rock? I'll predict your answer: no.
The rock is just a medium, a paper is just a medium, the word processor is just a medium, file formats are just media, the mapping of bits to characters is just a medium, letters are just media, words are just media, language is just a medium... The physical qualities of a rock can be media: It looks like spearhead, it was radioactively measured to be so-and-so old, and it was found in some place... Everything we know or think it represents can be written down to words, including some extra conclusions and whatever. But ultimately researchers aren't writing that stuff down for the specific purpose of printing it on paper, they're writing to archive it somewhere and for themselves and other people to come back and read it later.
Printing and archiving documents using ink on paper is very traditional, and working out quite well so far, but it's going to be replaced sooner or later, and it should probably not be the only guideline for word processor design any more.
But hey, trees will never run out like oil does, they just grow right back!:-)
So, we're limiting what type of document we're referring to. I'm going to argue that that definition is 'stuff that can be printed onto a piece of paper or canvas', because that's generally the ultimate output of something created in a word processor.
A document can be many things; a document in the context of a word processor cannot.
To the programmer, I guess it would seem that paper-like editing and printing is all the users "want" to do with the program. I suppose most of the users would say that's what they want. But the motives don't really stop there. The reason the document author wants write down stuff is so someone else (or themselves) can read it later. Maybe the authors are specifically targetting paper, as a medium. But the "ultimate output" is definitely not the medium where the stuff is going, the "ultimate output" happens when the stuff is once again read by someone and decoded back into thoughts inside a brain.
Spellchecking and throwing a clippy at your face to suggest traditional templates of communication -- that's a couple of bad examples I can think of, where word processors jump up and interfere with the actual content and meaning of your document. I'm trying to offer this as evidence, that maybe even the programmers are aware that the user's real motivation is actually some kind of communication.:-)
Typically you get a representation of a canvas (usually paper), onto which you put stuff. In *that* context, embedding video, sound, etc. is silly. In the contect of any old computer 'document' (I personally call them files), obviously embedding may make a lot more sense.
I think you're looking at it backwards. I don't want to turn this into an argument about what the dictionary says a document is, (but I will do just that anyway) I think the meaning of the word SHOULD be something deeper, that does not involve the representation or medium in any way. Some random people created some text symbols and languages and started to make paper to scribble that stuff on a long time ago... And now some other people, only a tiny bit more clever, have made up computers and keyboards and character maps and file formats and stuff, and wow, now documents have a lot more possibilities, but I don't think that a collection of bits and bytes is what a document is either. It's anything that serves the purpose of the human tendency to document things that have happended, things that are happening right now, and some things that we're planning to do! A piece of rock with some markings can be a "document" about something that has been going on there, our genes are "documents" of evolution, etc. A blank piece of paper is not much of a "document" usually -- when paper is involved then the "document" is more likely to be the content that is printed on it, and BTW you can print video onto paper, it can play nicely at 10fps for example, if you can flip through the papers at a nice constant speed.
But it makes no sense in any context to say that documents were meant to be printed on paper, because paper is just one thing that was created for the needs of people who wanted to document their documents onto something, and ink on paper is in no way the only way to represent any kind of document.
I don't just think embedding of video/audio in documents isn't necessary, I think it's very stupid. A document should be able to be printed out!!! Clearly, these things cannot be printed out and held on paper; ergo they do not belong in documents. The same goes for anything else that cannot be printed out and held on paper.
If you want those things, put them in some other computer format, but don't warp the meaning of 'document' to mean 'anything you can hold and represent on a computer, mushed into one file', because that's just silly.
I think you're a little late: The meaning of the word "document" was warped decades ago. A "document" these days has as little to do with paper, as a "soundtrack" or a "video" has to do with magnetic tape.
I agree that there's a lot of things about computer documents that are stupid, but still, in my world, printing to paper is the stupidest thing ever. Digital documents are easy to edit, you can use a repository for shared access and version control, you can compress them losslessly, protect them with a password, check the hash checksum, make lots of copies and spread them around without much of an effort at all. Whereas printing out on paper means that the document has to be flattened down to a single view from a given angle, it has to be chopped into pages, cropped and rendered to a given zoom on a given paper size, you need a scanner or a copier or a fax machine or a monastery full of monks (and more paper and ink) to make a copy, you need a shredder or a fire to remove the paper document... And the links won't work any more.
...and that's just silly. The five people that found your printing fetish "insightful" were smoking crack.
If you didn't RTFA then you missed the student's website
Wow. That reminds me of 8th grade when a nasty teacher rounded up a bunch of computer nerds and shouted at us for 10-15 minutes, quoting the huge prices of their brand new 386SX computers and how we'd have to pay, and I think she also said something about games, but she never said what we had supposedly done wrong. We weren't allowed to speak. Then I think she got word from the CS teacher that everything was ok now, and we were let go with no explanations or apologies.
I guess that was just her usual way of dealing with students whenever someone was suspected of doing something wrong. Oh yeah, we found out later that some gamer had taken out the autoexec.bat and config.sys from one of the computers and forgot to put them back, so it didn't boot like it was supposed to that day.
I was just royally pissed that these computer illiterates (==stupid people) would target an Amigist like me, who didn't know too much about the startup files of a PC anyway, and on top of all was going through a phase where I pretended I wasn't into gaming but "productive" demoscene activity instead...
Anyway now I wish it had occurred to me then to somehow get the point across to them, that shouting at random students is not necessarily the best fix for every situation.
If you not good enough to compete with the public domain, then it's time to rethink your career.
Indeed. I don't think the exec in TFA is being short-sighted at all. These works are in the public domain, and now these performances are in the public domain, and they're online. If this starts happening more, we could soon have good quality public domain performances of all classical works. This could lead to classical orchestras over the world competing on who can create the best performance. People would rate their recorded and live performances, which will get the best of these orchestras free fame and gigs. Unfair!
What if some rock & pop musicians find that these online channels based on free distribution might be a better way than going to a record company for a haircut and dance lessons, and to be told exactly what to do? Slipperysloping some more, soon the record company exec's only business will be to sell artists back their rights to their own music, so they can publish it online. The question is WTF, besides whining, are they going to do about it?
Extend copyrights, implement DRM's, sue kids...? How much time will that buy them?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, I also don't see how Google would be more "ethical" if they made their AdWords algorithm/program "free software" or "open source" or anything. A big community of developers looking at it could find the algorithm's faults and be able enhance it for everyone's benefit, but if it's already good enough for Google, then why give it out to others, who would just use it for competing AdWords services? Maybe the poster means that the algorithm should just be made "viewable" to people, while retaining all the rights to using it... The way to implement that would probably be a patent... Are you sure it's not already patented?
Yeah.. Xenon schmenon!
Ah, OK... I thought the numbers appearing inside the tube were pretty sci-fi, but looking at the big picture on that page, it seems there's actually 10 little tubes inside there, bent to the shape of numbers, and I guess it just picks one to light up. Apparently they hadn't come up with the idea of using just 7 segments yet. :-)
Can you bend cold cathode tubes (that people use to light up the insides of their computers) over a candle..?
But I have looked up some tabs and notes and especially lyrics with Google, and there always seems to be *lots* of hits in all kinds of sites, all over the world, and most of them are various people's home pages. And you always have to go through many of those to find a correct version.
Apparently sanity has nothing to do with it. After they're done with the lyrics and tabs, sooner or later they will sue a fan for putting a band's logo up on a fanpage (without signing up for the official fanclub, for instance)...
Indeed. I bet they will just go wild and shoot themselves in the foot with some unbelievable DRM scam.
Even if you installed all the libs, then next time you want another app, you have to download upgrades to most of the libs again, because everything always depends on the latest version of everything, as opposed to the minimal required version.
So your way is actually pretty cool, but I wouldn't want to learn to live without 97,7% of all the apps out there.
I used Enlightenment for a while but now I'm back to Afterstep again.
I can also recommend this one. As a prequisite I think it does require a bit of enthusiasm about old computers and all this stuff. In a few places it goes pretty deep into cool nerdy things like explaining how the chip manufacturing process worked at MOS technology, and sometimes there's surprisingly detailed information about how some chips or software works. But it's not a complete hardware reference manual though... I would have really liked to read even more about the internals of the SID, for example. :-)
:-) It won't take long at this pace though...
Most of the time the stories are quoted straight from the people who developed the chips and computers, and they are the heroes and I guess mostly the marketing people are the bad guys.
The book mentions a lot of early VIC-20 and C64 games by name, or some demos that they made for computer shows, and it might say something like "they demonstrated all the graphic possibilities of the VIC chip and there was stuff scrolling on the screen and it was really awesome"... So I think it pretty much fails to mention that those early-80's productions, impressive as they may have been at the time, must have been actually really lame compared to the stuff that some gamemakers and especially demomakers have been able to pull out of a Commodore 64 in the following 10-20 years.
Then again I haven't RTFB *all* the way through yet!
Not if YOU get replaced first due to bulging at the top, standing tilted and leaking brownish ooze.
I have 2 retired KT7's in the basement, one is completely dead and the other one just sometimes wouldn't boot. I've always suspected the caps, but I've been way too lazy to replace them all. I'll have to go check for bulges...
Less tribbles... less troubles
But Nestlé pwnz Valio ice cream :-(
I had a bad Paypal (/eBay) experience a while ago myself. The seller, who I paid, claimed his account was closed, a bit like yours, and that he had to prove his identity to Paypal, and he'd called them and had his lawyer send them letters, etc etc... But Paypal never said anything about it to me.
Luckily, I got my money back in the end. I filed a "buyer complaint" or something in Paypal, and *very conveniently* the seller got his account back and refunded me, on the same last day that the complaint was due for a review by a Paypal employee. And that took 10 impatient days of waiting or something... Which was not fun.
But the really suckiest part about it all was that I was never able to confirm if any of his troubles were real, or if it was some kind of lame scam attempt. I didn't call Paypal, since I'm in another country... But I wrote at least three very precise and to-the-point complaints about the different stupid aspects of this deal in the Paypal feedback system... and I never got any reply besides the automatic ones.
So they value the privacy of their customers so much, that even if someone wants to tell you that their account is closed, they won't confirm it. Or something. I guess I'm supposed to think it doesn't matter whether it was a scam attempt or not: At least the buyer complaint system was there, even if it was incredibly slow. I don't think it was a scam, I mean if he just wanted to take my money, he could have sent me bricks in a package or something... But who knows.
Here's the best part: You don't need to sign up! Just ATDT 929292
First you do need to go back in time a few years though.
At least the pixels in today's bitmaps are in the correct order one after another and they can be addressed without rotating bits. Mapping graphics to a 2-bit bitmap that is made out of 8-byte blocks, so after every 4 pixels you need to jump over 7 bytes to draw a straight horizontal line, with 2 global colors + 2 colors that are chosen for that particular block... I never got to the point where I could say that was "easy".
Being from Finland, I wish they brought back TeleSampo and Freenet (not the anonymous P2P network).
Or not.
Those started a lot of IRCing careers though...
The rock is just a medium, a paper is just a medium, the word processor is just a medium, file formats are just media, the mapping of bits to characters is just a medium, letters are just media, words are just media, language is just a medium... The physical qualities of a rock can be media: It looks like spearhead, it was radioactively measured to be so-and-so old, and it was found in some place... Everything we know or think it represents can be written down to words, including some extra conclusions and whatever. But ultimately researchers aren't writing that stuff down for the specific purpose of printing it on paper, they're writing to archive it somewhere and for themselves and other people to come back and read it later.
Printing and archiving documents using ink on paper is very traditional, and working out quite well so far, but it's going to be replaced sooner or later, and it should probably not be the only guideline for word processor design any more.
But hey, trees will never run out like oil does, they just grow right back!
To the programmer, I guess it would seem that paper-like editing and printing is all the users "want" to do with the program. I suppose most of the users would say that's what they want. But the motives don't really stop there. The reason the document author wants write down stuff is so someone else (or themselves) can read it later. Maybe the authors are specifically targetting paper, as a medium. But the "ultimate output" is definitely not the medium where the stuff is going, the "ultimate output" happens when the stuff is once again read by someone and decoded back into thoughts inside a brain.
Spellchecking and throwing a clippy at your face to suggest traditional templates of communication -- that's a couple of bad examples I can think of, where word processors jump up and interfere with the actual content and meaning of your document. I'm trying to offer this as evidence, that maybe even the programmers are aware that the user's real motivation is actually some kind of communication.
But it makes no sense in any context to say that documents were meant to be printed on paper, because paper is just one thing that was created for the needs of people who wanted to document their documents onto something, and ink on paper is in no way the only way to represent any kind of document.
I agree that there's a lot of things about computer documents that are stupid, but still, in my world, printing to paper is the stupidest thing ever. Digital documents are easy to edit, you can use a repository for shared access and version control, you can compress them losslessly, protect them with a password, check the hash checksum, make lots of copies and spread them around without much of an effort at all. Whereas printing out on paper means that the document has to be flattened down to a single view from a given angle, it has to be chopped into pages, cropped and rendered to a given zoom on a given paper size, you need a scanner or a copier or a fax machine or a monastery full of monks (and more paper and ink) to make a copy, you need a shredder or a fire to remove the paper document... And the links won't work any more.
I guess that was just her usual way of dealing with students whenever someone was suspected of doing something wrong. Oh yeah, we found out later that some gamer had taken out the autoexec.bat and config.sys from one of the computers and forgot to put them back, so it didn't boot like it was supposed to that day.
I was just royally pissed that these computer illiterates (==stupid people) would target an Amigist like me, who didn't know too much about the startup files of a PC anyway, and on top of all was going through a phase where I pretended I wasn't into gaming but "productive" demoscene activity instead...
Anyway now I wish it had occurred to me then to somehow get the point across to them, that shouting at random students is not necessarily the best fix for every situation.
What if some rock & pop musicians find that these online channels based on free distribution might be a better way than going to a record company for a haircut and dance lessons, and to be told exactly what to do? Slipperysloping some more, soon the record company exec's only business will be to sell artists back their rights to their own music, so they can publish it online. The question is WTF, besides whining, are they going to do about it?
Extend copyrights, implement DRM's, sue kids...? How much time will that buy them?