Indeed - I still have my original Commodore VIC-20, and a second one, because I was careless with the first one day while poking around in it with a voltmeter as I executed code. Schematic and memory map were not only fun but really needed to do anything powerful beyond BASIC.
I'd never want to go back to hand-assembling and poking machine code or laying out arrays of ASCII characters on the screen, then changing their bitmaps to plot graphics on screen, but having done so once was priceless.
This is my problem in general with a lot of what we call software "engineering". It isn't engineering. When the price of fixing a problem is just recompiling, as opposed to having a building fall down, it seems nothing is planned well or constructed right the first time.
Quite simply, I wouldn't spend $100 + $50 insuring a $600 product. Especially one that depreciates as fast as a cell phone.
Perhaps taking the 1 year agreement with your cell plan provider would work out better. It's usually not that much more, and you play the odds that you can make it out 1 year without doing something serious to your current phone.
Slackware has the slackware-current branch, where everything is upgraded very often and bug reports are accepted in order to vet the next stable release. If there is a security problem, it will be corrected in the stable releases. I'm sure all the other distros have something similar.
This was reported quite a while ago. As a challenge, I try to leave extra distance and look ahead and see if I can't "break the wave" by being the first car not to touch its brake lights off.
I agree with you, would rather pay the buck for the CD, but just to be pedantic, a CD is also a "digital replica of a song". It's a matter of how much quality you want to pay for (I'll take the CD unless I'm after only one or two songs).
I'm not too grieved about the lack of a Linux full-album downloader at the moment. If I want the entire album, I'll probably pay an extra $1 (based on a few albums I checked), and get the physical CD (that's worth a buck for me). Of course, you need to buy three or so to get free shipping.
But at what point will the Federal Government try to link federal funds & REAL ID complaince?
Like they link seat belt law compliance and federal highway funding?
New Hampshire doesn't care. Apparently they are the only state that has refused to pass a law telling adults they have to buckle up so that they can get their share of the federal money.
Amen. We just did a three city "tour" in which I recall being happy we sold two CDs and a T-shirt because it would pay a few tolls. I used to get kind of cranky when I saw people sneaking in the back to avoid the cover, but after playing a few empty rooms I realized the fun was in the people digging your music and not the piddly amount of cash they gave you.
Fixing an actual sales price is illegal, but setting a lowest allowed ADVERTISED price is for some reason not. In buying some music gear, for example, the companies all advertise the same price, but you can call and get it beat, or they all throw in various amounts of extras or shipping discounts.
New Hampshire already passes on some Federal funding (bribes), being the only state in the union that has refused to pass a seat belt law at the expense of highway funding.
You present some points in a respectful way, unlike the other "you lose" poster, so I will reply. Except don't set up me up as a straw man. In many cases, the difference between infringement and "stealing" is a legal one that one couldn't explain to one's grandmother (to use Slashdot terms), and your boldfacing it does not make it an absolute truth. You cannot set up a debate by asserting the foundation of your argument is undebatable. And we are not in a court of law here, debating semantics. But some of what you are arguing about isn't even my opinion and certainly can't be extracted from the few sentences I posted.
"When I buy a container of beer and bring it home"
This is the exact opposite of what I actually wrote. The person in my analogy did not buy the container. He did not pay for it. He did not like the container, so he did not buy the container and transfer the contents. My analogy of downloading to drinking off the (near infinite) original supply was far from good, but I never implied when I said "stealing" that he was paying any money for what he was consuming. Most of what you are debating isn't even my opinion.
You claimed that you were providing a better analogy, when in fact your analogy of stealing beer from a key was horribly bad. We are NOT talking about stealing beer. We are talking about someone doing their own work creating their own copy of something.
Here is one place we can really disagree. I believe the "work" is in the making of the music or movie. Assuming its a desirable end product, that's where the skill, labor and (hopefully) genius lies. Pressing the disc was the easy part. Saying someone is doing their own work by copying it is really underestimating the effort it takes to make a movie.
Yes, my analogy was pretty flawed. I retract any claims that it is a better one.
My point was that people don't like the "container" (DRM laden disc) that their movies are being shipped in, but they are not willing to do without the "content" (the movie).
By going home and brewing your own keg... you mean, you are making your own movies and music instead of viewing/listening to commercial work? No, I didn't think so.
I think you guys are a bit touchy... the idea of removing something from the keg was not that important. But I think the word "stealing" touches a nerve around Slashdot because a lot of people are very eager to somehow justify the disc-loads of bits for which they didn't pay anyone (including the artists).
And I'm not sure why I'd give two bits about moderation, so do what you want with your tags (you can have mine for that matter, 99% of them expire unused as most people's probably should).
Prohibition was a few third parties pushing their morality in between someone making a product for sale and someone wanting to buy that product.
What's happening with the RIAA/MPAA is more like someone is making booze that people want but they don't like paying for the bottle, so they're stealing drinks right off the keg.
Playing against most RTS AIs right now is like
a matador leading a bull.
Put some defensive structures up where you want
the AI to attack. He'll spend his entire economy
banging his army against it, even if it doesn't
guard anything useful.
Lure small groups of AI armies to their death.
They'll never walk away from a fight, no matter
how mismatched.
On the flip side, the AI never seems to have a
SENSE for when its winning. If it whips me to
within a flicker of my death, but has to weaken
its economy below some limit to do so, it'll
wait to recover before coming at me again. By
then, I've recovered too. Can't it ever take
a chance?
The current design strategy to make AIs competitive
seems to be to let them cheat economically. Which
typically means the player needs to turtle until
resources run dry. Pretty boring after you've done
it a few times.
Your analogy is slightly flawed (aren't they all).
There's not just one shipping company (UPS). In the
case of the internet there may be a half dozen.
You paid the two on the ends of the route only.
I've been a amateur drummer for 25 years, and have tried a few software packages, but here are the ones I actually find useful.
Under Windows, for overdubbing wav and midi I mostly use Cakewalk (warning: link contains annoying self-playing music). I use the cheaper Home Studio. They have a real product differentiation problem as Sonar is the expensive product, and then they market or bundle cheaper versions that may cover your needs just fine (its hard to tell from the product descriptions which features are grayed out). I use Cakewalk because the Windows drivers can be used in a very low-latency mode, and I always have a Windows laptop kicking around. I have not liked the scoring side of Cakewalk.
Also under Windows, I have used Sibelius (version 3 and 4). It is a phenominal scoring program that produces great looking sheet music. This is the only thing I do with a PC that I think is really better than without the PC. If you score with a program that plays back what you've written via midi, you can correct many mistakes on the fly. Sibelius is unfortuately still phenominally expensive for my uses, and I've never purchased it (nor has anyone I know).
Under linux, the equivalent of Cakewalk is Rosegarden. It is very impressive at the moment. Building it is a royal pain for me. It doesn't use your standard autotools driven make, it uses Scons (not in my distribution). Scons requires a Python module that's not available in the stable version of Python. Hey, people writing free software can use whatever they want, its just a shame some people won't try their product because of the barrier to entry. I've had latency issues with Rosegarden + JACK which I think can be sorted out but I have to decide if I want to run the tools as root or pull in the whole SELinux overhead + realtime module (no different than Cakewalk in Windows -- it does not work well as non-admin). Rosegarden's scoring is coming along but not quite there for me.
For scoring under Linux, I'm using Lilypond. Lilypond is phenominal, but many won't like it because its markup-based (like writing Latex). You have to go through the compile cycle to view what you've written, and dump midi to hear it. Fortunately for me, rythym section music is very repetitive. The quality of printed music it can produce is unmatched. I'm sure more programs will start using Lilypond as a processing back-end.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed - I still have my original Commodore VIC-20, and a second one, because I was careless with the first one day while poking around in it with a voltmeter as I executed code. Schematic and memory map were not only fun but really needed to do anything powerful beyond BASIC. I'd never want to go back to hand-assembling and poking machine code or laying out arrays of ASCII characters on the screen, then changing their bitmaps to plot graphics on screen, but having done so once was priceless.
How about a smaller sample of people and a large sperm and egg bank instead?
This is my problem in general with a lot of what we call software "engineering". It isn't engineering. When the price of fixing a problem is just recompiling, as opposed to having a building fall down, it seems nothing is planned well or constructed right the first time.
Quite simply, I wouldn't spend $100 + $50 insuring a $600 product. Especially one that depreciates as fast as a cell phone. Perhaps taking the 1 year agreement with your cell plan provider would work out better. It's usually not that much more, and you play the odds that you can make it out 1 year without doing something serious to your current phone.
Sales tax is a usage tax. You are taxed on place of delivery.
They used to give speeding tickets before the marketing of the radar gun. Law enforcement officers were called trained observers.
Slackware has the slackware-current branch, where everything is upgraded very often and bug reports are accepted in order to vet the next stable release. If there is a security problem, it will be corrected in the stable releases. I'm sure all the other distros have something similar.
Can programmers stop calling themselves software "engineers"?
This was reported quite a while ago. As a challenge, I try to leave extra distance and look ahead and see if I can't "break the wave" by being the first car not to touch its brake lights off.
I agree with you, would rather pay the buck for the CD, but just to be pedantic, a CD is also a "digital replica of a song". It's a matter of how much quality you want to pay for (I'll take the CD unless I'm after only one or two songs).
I'm not too grieved about the lack of a Linux full-album downloader at the moment. If I want the entire album, I'll probably pay an extra $1 (based on a few albums I checked), and get the physical CD (that's worth a buck for me). Of course, you need to buy three or so to get free shipping.
But at what point will the Federal Government try to link federal funds & REAL ID complaince?
Like they link seat belt law compliance and federal highway funding?
New Hampshire doesn't care. Apparently they are the only state that has refused to pass a law telling adults they have to buckle up so that they can get their share of the federal money.
Massachusetts royally screwed up car insurance too, long ago.n /editorials/articles/2006/01/05/real_insurance_ref orm/
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinio
Amen. We just did a three city "tour" in which I recall being happy we sold two CDs and a T-shirt because it would pay a few tolls. I used to get kind of cranky when I saw people sneaking in the back to avoid the cover, but after playing a few empty rooms I realized the fun was in the people digging your music and not the piddly amount of cash they gave you.
Fixing an actual sales price is illegal, but setting a lowest allowed ADVERTISED price is for some reason not. In buying some music gear, for example, the companies all advertise the same price, but you can call and get it beat, or they all throw in various amounts of extras or shipping discounts.
New Hampshire already passes on some Federal funding (bribes), being the only state in the union that has refused to pass a seat belt law at the expense of highway funding.
You present some points in a respectful way, unlike the other "you lose" poster, so I will reply. Except don't set up me up as a straw man. In many cases, the difference between infringement and "stealing" is a legal one that one couldn't explain to one's grandmother (to use Slashdot terms), and your boldfacing it does not make it an absolute truth. You cannot set up a debate by asserting the foundation of your argument is undebatable. And we are not in a court of law here, debating semantics. But some of what you are arguing about isn't even my opinion and certainly can't be extracted from the few sentences I posted.
"When I buy a container of beer and bring it home"
This is the exact opposite of what I actually wrote. The person in my analogy did not buy the container. He did not pay for it. He did not like the container, so he did not buy the container and transfer the contents. My analogy of downloading to drinking off the (near infinite) original supply was far from good, but I never implied when I said "stealing" that he was paying any money for what he was consuming. Most of what you are debating isn't even my opinion.
You claimed that you were providing a better analogy, when in fact your analogy of stealing beer from a key was horribly bad. We are NOT talking about stealing beer. We are talking about someone doing their own work creating their own copy of something.
Here is one place we can really disagree. I believe the "work" is in the making of the music or movie. Assuming its a desirable end product, that's where the skill, labor and (hopefully) genius lies. Pressing the disc was the easy part. Saying someone is doing their own work by copying it is really underestimating the effort it takes to make a movie.
Yes, my analogy was pretty flawed. I retract any claims that it is a better one.
no argument you give on the subject has any worth
Sigh...My point was that people don't like the "container" (DRM laden disc) that their movies are being shipped in, but they are not willing to do without the "content" (the movie).
By going home and brewing your own keg... you mean, you are making your own movies and music instead of viewing/listening to commercial work? No, I didn't think so.
I think you guys are a bit touchy... the idea of removing something from the keg was not that important. But I think the word "stealing" touches a nerve around Slashdot because a lot of people are very eager to somehow justify the disc-loads of bits for which they didn't pay anyone (including the artists).
And I'm not sure why I'd give two bits about moderation, so do what you want with your tags (you can have mine for that matter, 99% of them expire unused as most people's probably should).
Prohibition was a few third parties pushing their morality in between someone making a product for sale and someone wanting to buy that product. What's happening with the RIAA/MPAA is more like someone is making booze that people want but they don't like paying for the bottle, so they're stealing drinks right off the keg.
I'd rather see this technology used to track my focus on the desktop.
Playing against most RTS AIs right now is like a matador leading a bull.
Put some defensive structures up where you want the AI to attack. He'll spend his entire economy banging his army against it, even if it doesn't guard anything useful.
Lure small groups of AI armies to their death. They'll never walk away from a fight, no matter how mismatched.
On the flip side, the AI never seems to have a SENSE for when its winning. If it whips me to within a flicker of my death, but has to weaken its economy below some limit to do so, it'll wait to recover before coming at me again. By then, I've recovered too. Can't it ever take a chance?
The current design strategy to make AIs competitive seems to be to let them cheat economically. Which typically means the player needs to turtle until resources run dry. Pretty boring after you've done it a few times.
Your analogy is slightly flawed (aren't they all). There's not just one shipping company (UPS). In the case of the internet there may be a half dozen. You paid the two on the ends of the route only.
When I can get to a PC, I can usually get to the net. Do they offer hardcopies instead?
I've been a amateur drummer for 25 years, and have tried a few software packages, but here are the ones I actually find useful.
Under Windows, for overdubbing wav and midi I mostly use Cakewalk (warning: link contains annoying self-playing music). I use the cheaper Home Studio. They have a real product differentiation problem as Sonar is the expensive product, and then they market or bundle cheaper versions that may cover your needs just fine (its hard to tell from the product descriptions which features are grayed out). I use Cakewalk because the Windows drivers can be used in a very low-latency mode, and I always have a Windows laptop kicking around. I have not liked the scoring side of Cakewalk.
Also under Windows, I have used Sibelius (version 3 and 4). It is a phenominal scoring program that produces great looking sheet music. This is the only thing I do with a PC that I think is really better than without the PC. If you score with a program that plays back what you've written via midi, you can correct many mistakes on the fly. Sibelius is unfortuately still phenominally expensive for my uses, and I've never purchased it (nor has anyone I know).
Under linux, the equivalent of Cakewalk is Rosegarden. It is very impressive at the moment. Building it is a royal pain for me. It doesn't use your standard autotools driven make, it uses Scons (not in my distribution). Scons requires a Python module that's not available in the stable version of Python. Hey, people writing free software can use whatever they want, its just a shame some people won't try their product because of the barrier to entry. I've had latency issues with Rosegarden + JACK which I think can be sorted out but I have to decide if I want to run the tools as root or pull in the whole SELinux overhead + realtime module (no different than Cakewalk in Windows -- it does not work well as non-admin). Rosegarden's scoring is coming along but not quite there for me.
For scoring under Linux, I'm using Lilypond. Lilypond is phenominal, but many won't like it because its markup-based (like writing Latex). You have to go through the compile cycle to view what you've written, and dump midi to hear it. Fortunately for me, rythym section music is very repetitive. The quality of printed music it can produce is unmatched. I'm sure more programs will start using Lilypond as a processing back-end.