That's not simple in the sense that it's not fault-tolerant. How easy is it to say or hear "AB" instead of "AV", for example?
If, on the other hand, your name is (for example) types of fish, it's totally unambiguous -- there's only one way to spell "pike", "salmon" or "stingray" (one of the way-back-when naming schemes in my alma mater). Yes, you'll have to change topics every now and again, but if you change topic with every change of technology, you encode an extra layer of information. So all your windows XP boxes are fish and your Sparcstations are countries, for example.
The extra information is a freebie, and can be ignored by anyone who doesn't need to know, but damn straight the techy will immediately know that the guy asking to have Windows Media Player installed on Botswana is barking up the wrong tree.
seems largely fact-based. Where is X -- click on it -- get feedback -- improve at an incredible rate. But you're actually learning "concepts", because you build up a map rather than just "X is the capital of Y" etc. The map gives you an implicit understanding of geography, so you don't have to memorise a list to know all the countries neighbouring Eritrea, for example.
Then there's Slime Forest Adventure. Again, it looks as though you're learning facts (Symbol X is sound Y), but you're actually making a deeper mental association as it's the quickest way.
Or take Typing of the Dead. They don't tell you how to type, they make you do it. A few pointers, and then they rely on you tuning in to touch-typing because it's the most efficient way -- hence you need to do it to win.
So if we're talking concepts, we can actually liberate ourselves from the old boring model of answer-a-question-to-get-to-the-next-stage because that's just facts, and facts are rarely the goal. If you look at Lunar Lander and its successors (particularly Thrust), you have to get an intuitive feel for momentum to win the game. Take this on to E-Motion, and you've got a game that is built around conservation of momentum and elastic forces. These games teach you the concept without you ever learning a single fact. These can be the basis for later learning -- once you've got a concept to hang it on, learning facts is easy, because you can picture it and thus understand it.
The hard point is selling the notion to the sponsors. Sadly, too many people think education is all about facts....
Next you'll be telling me King Arthur didn't battle Judah Ben Hur in medieaval Winsconsin in order to gain control of the magical Rosetta Stone, carved by God on Mount Everest with his ten commandments to be given to Alexander the Great, pharoah of Nevada!
When I wrote my own equivalent program in C= BASIC, you weren't in a lunar module at all -- you were on foot. There was no fuel, but you had a time limit. You'd been poisoned, you see, and you had to get to hospital, quick. Go too slow, you don't reach the hospital in time, die. Go too fast, run into a wall, die.
Which makes a hell of a lot more sense than the idea that we just suddenly showed up and sprouted an entire diverse genetic pool from two people, or three, etc.
RTFA.
The article isn't talking about "mitochondrial Eves" or any single-ancestor idea of that ilk -- it's talking about three distinct sub-populations with small differences in gene pool, but still sharing a large amount of common genetical material. The populations that they're talking about would have been fairly big in themselves. Probably more on the scale a herd of wildebeest than that of a nuclear family.
It's especially bad that Square/Enix decided to wait until the game was nearly completed before the C&D.
Who says they waited? Perhaps they just (shock horro) weren't aware of it until now. Just because it's on the internet, doesn't mean they knew about it.
And maybe it's not all about creative interests and more about the author maintaining control of his creations. I once was an aspiring author (until I realised my prose stinks), and given that every character I write is a reflection of some aspect of myself, having someone else rewrite them would feel like defamation or misrepresentation of me. If someone who is supposed to reflect what I see best about myself is outed as an alcoholic child-abuse victim in a fanfic sequel... well, that's not good.
Normally I'd say "get a job", but there's not as many of those going around as there used to be. (Damn banks and their irresponsible lending.) What are the employment prospects where you are? Doing a masters is more productive than being unemployed, and much better on the CV....
HAL.
The difference between DS and PSP
on
Piracy and the PSP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The big difference between the DS and PSP is the target market. The PSP was targetted at gamers. Big mistake. Gamers know about piracy, and are becoming more and more accustomed to it by the minute.
Sony, then, pitched their product at people who were never really going to buy all that much.
Nintendo's product has found it's way into handbags and schoolbags. The kids get legitimate games as birthday presents, and the travelling woman picks up a random brain-trainer or somesuch while stuck in departures waiting for a delayed flight. There's money in that market....
It's downright dumb: Wrap your heads around this. When I muted the beginning of the song up until 0:30 (leaving the rest to play) the fingerprinter missed it. When I kept the beginning up until 0:30 and muted everything from 0:30 to the end, the fingerprinter caught it. That indicates that the content database only knows about something in the first 30 seconds of the song. As long as you cut that part off, you can theoretically use the remainder of the song without being detected. I don't know if all samples in the content database suffer from similar weaknesses, but it's something that merits further research.
But the author had already told us why this was:
Audible Magic originally wrote software for CD duplication companies. When you handed a master disc off to a duplication house, they'd check it with an Audible Magic system first. The goal was to positively identify every song on the disc, as well as the copyright/licensing status, before the company ran off 10,000 copies of your potentially pirated disc.
IE. the system was designed to identify complete songs. It is a fair assumption that someone producing a pirated music compilation CD will include the entire song, including its first 30 seconds, so only checking the first 30 seconds is a perfectly sound strategy.
It wasn't designed for the YouTube environment, and put bluntly YouTube only want to be seen to be doing something. It's in their interest to get as many views as possible, and music helps! Audible Magic is "industry standard", so they can say that they're doing everything that can be expected of them. Voilà, their backsides are covered and their faces well and truly saved, and they have a show of "good faith" to hold up in any future legal action.
We must gain superiority as a nation by trying to limit literacy in other country's. Next we will be changing our subtitles to a made up language and export them. Thank that world!
Bzzzt!
This sort of distribution protection actually promotes world literacy. Think about it:
A book on C costs £27.94 on Amazon UK, and $55.77 on Amazon US. At bookshopofindia.com it costs $7.38. That's more expensive relative to the Indian wage, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper to a US or UK citizen. If there was no geographical restriction on distribution (ie if we had "free trade" of books) no bookshops would buy the US or UK version, instead importing the Indian version. This would mean profits would collapse, and Kelly and Pohl, the authors, can't afford to live on Indian wages.
So Kelly, Pohl and their publisher Addison-Wesley would simply refuse to allow the Indian version to be printed -- if the UK/US edition was the only one available, profits in the core market would be protected. The lost profits in the Indian market would be small change.
If we go further afield, to the ex-British colonies in Africa, A Book on C probably retails at about a dollar, and that's more than a day's wage already. Free trade of books would quite literally remove that sort of book from their bookshelves. Education would suffer.
Yes, geographical IP protection is an unnatural intervention in "the market", but it is to meet the reality of wage disparity. We westerners benefit greatly from maintaining this wage disparity (cheap Chinese goods wouldn't be cheap if the Chinese workers got paid the same as us!) and so it is in our favour to use differential pricing of IP to try to foster an illusion of equality.
When I want to encrypt my data securely, I cambio de langue beaucoup des tursan en gach frase. In this way, ich puedo tres cinnteach sein that bheil only a handful of people ann a soussteheneas nere mensajea.
I've played both the NES version and the C64 port of the coin-op and I have to say the NES version, while being good enough fun, has too much back-and-forth in that very 80s console platform adventure way. The coin-op was a classic platform run-and-gun with a quite simple but very flexible control system. If you want retro, go back to the source!
Similar, not the same -- a small difference makes all the difference. You've taken a fairly elementary piece of evidence and made a very specific hypothesis from it.
The data that's missing from the observation is how quickly the females notice a change in a male's behaviour and how quickly they react to this.
This is interesting because the ability to engage in long-term exchanges requires some pretty sophisticated cognitive machinery that isn't necessary for an instantaneous trade. You have to keep track of who you have active deals with and what the running balance is,
Do you? If I buy a girl chocolates, does it really make her start doing mental accounting or does she just think "what a nice guy" and have a general warm fuzzy feeling about me?
I would even go so far as to say that Linux (and the Free Software ecosystem that surrounds it) has a lot more critics than closed software - or at least more effective critics.
Large software companies pay PR departments to generate positive coverage. Most Open Source projects have no PR effort behind them at all. So criticism of the software is less likely to be drowned out by astroturf.
RTFA -- he doesn't mean criticism == slagging off, he means criticism as is "critical evaluation". What Linux has is a lot of slaggers and very few critical evaluators. All the deconstruction of design decisions are carried out by the dev guys -- there is no detached observer.
Oh how true that is. I myself love to criticize things (I'm reading Slashdot, after all). But why don't I constructively criticize Linux?
I think a lot of has to do with what every argument or analysis starts with: base assumptions. So let's start with comparing Linux to the leading commercial operating systems and the most important thing to consumers--price. And the guy mentions this in his blog. But we can't get to questions like "Is feature X really worth Y dollars to me?" Because Linux does not cost money to install. It's like dividing by zero. It makes criticism of a missing component difficult because it doesn't cost me anything! How can I criticize it?!
From TFA:
I've made a handful of blog postings recently that have been critical of Linux (in the sense of pointing out perceived failings), and people hate it. If they explain why, it's usually a variation of the following: "Linux is free, so why are you complaining?"
Nononononono. You don't want it to be configurable. Configurable == non-standard. Too much customisation means no-one ever learns the basics and ends up unable to use anyone else's computer!
They are producing units right now, albeit well under max capacity.
Now who's being painfully naive? You know those market forces you love? Well, market forces suggest that overcapacity is a Bad Thing. Thus most people tool themselves up to cope with more or less average demand. Market forces are what could get us into this mess, not what would get us out!
Your also basing your argument on the assumption that nothing has occured since 1859 which makes our electrical grid more robust and resistant to such disturbances.
Yes, he's basing his argument on the assumption that A) electrical conductors are still affected by magnetic fields and B) power grid systems are not yet magnetically shielded.
As far as I can see A is still true (ye cannae break the laws o physics, Jim) and B is also true (the overhead powerlines running beside my office appear to be wrapped in plastic, and last I knew plastic doesn't have particularly good shielding properties).
You lack the parts? Pillage the dead transformers. There is a PRETTY good chance you can take 2 or 3 dead ones and have 1 working in under 24 hours.
Sorry, I think I missed the part where you said you were a power-systems engineer. For those of us not in the know, can you explain which parts of what is in essence little more than two large coils of wire can be salvaged when the wire has caught light?
Give one half of town 12 hours of power and then turn them off for the next 12 hours while the other half gets their 12 hours. Or 8. Or 6.
How? We're not just talking about supply problems, we're talking distribution as well. With powerlines and substations down, there's no way to switch who gets the power.
Let me tell you... you get used to 4 hours of electricity per day (or less) VERY fast.
You leave the lights on to wake you up when it comes on.
Charge the batteries, cook, wash clothes, heat up the boiler and then go about your business waiting for better times.
Again, the scenario in TFA is about complete blackout, not intermittent supply -- this is on a completely different scale. But without as many bullets and mortar bombs, hopefully.
The issue is that YouTube started with a business model of "we're a neutral carrier, and we'll make money when people use copyright material without a license, but we won't be liable". When the PRS (and whoever else internationally) came round they held off negotiating, citing "neutral carrier" and claiming that they couldn't identify infringing content. (Shenanigans! If I can whistle a tune down the phone and be told what it is, Google can detect copyright soundtracks in videos!)
In these negotiations, the whole "neutral carrier" argument is nothing more than veiled blackmail: give us everything at rates of our choosing, otherwise it'll all be there for free anyway and you'll get nothing.
And if the PRS capitulate to YouTube's demands, it either compounds Google's monopoly (by making them cheaper than everyone else) or reduces the value of music across the board.
PRS take too large a cut, in my opinion, but they're still the only way to compensate artists....
Ah, but the group that thinketh sees value in commercial use, but there's no value in personal use. Otherwise they'd have invented a retail mechanism, maybe called something like "shops", to sell to the person they might call the "consumer". What a crazy idea.
Slashdot Mirror
That was lysine. Muppet.
HAL.
That's not simple in the sense that it's not fault-tolerant. How easy is it to say or hear "AB" instead of "AV", for example?
If, on the other hand, your name is (for example) types of fish, it's totally unambiguous -- there's only one way to spell "pike", "salmon" or "stingray" (one of the way-back-when naming schemes in my alma mater). Yes, you'll have to change topics every now and again, but if you change topic with every change of technology, you encode an extra layer of information. So all your windows XP boxes are fish and your Sparcstations are countries, for example.
The extra information is a freebie, and can be ignored by anyone who doesn't need to know, but damn straight the techy will immediately know that the guy asking to have Windows Media Player installed on Botswana is barking up the wrong tree.
HAL.
I think you have to be clear as to whether you're teaching facts or concepts.
For example, the World Traveler IQ Challenge
seems largely fact-based. Where is X -- click on it -- get feedback -- improve at an incredible rate. But you're actually learning "concepts", because you build up a map rather than just "X is the capital of Y" etc. The map gives you an implicit understanding of geography, so you don't have to memorise a list to know all the countries neighbouring Eritrea, for example.
Then there's Slime Forest Adventure. Again, it looks as though you're learning facts (Symbol X is sound Y), but you're actually making a deeper mental association as it's the quickest way.
Or take Typing of the Dead. They don't tell you how to type, they make you do it. A few pointers, and then they rely on you tuning in to touch-typing because it's the most efficient way -- hence you need to do it to win.
So if we're talking concepts, we can actually liberate ourselves from the old boring model of answer-a-question-to-get-to-the-next-stage because that's just facts, and facts are rarely the goal. If you look at Lunar Lander and its successors (particularly Thrust), you have to get an intuitive feel for momentum to win the game. Take this on to E-Motion, and you've got a game that is built around conservation of momentum and elastic forces. These games teach you the concept without you ever learning a single fact. These can be the basis for later learning -- once you've got a concept to hang it on, learning facts is easy, because you can picture it and thus understand it.
The hard point is selling the notion to the sponsors. Sadly, too many people think education is all about facts....
HAL.
Next you'll be telling me King Arthur didn't battle Judah Ben Hur in medieaval Winsconsin in order to gain control of the magical Rosetta Stone, carved by God on Mount Everest with his ten commandments to be given to Alexander the Great, pharoah of Nevada!
When I wrote my own equivalent program in C= BASIC, you weren't in a lunar module at all -- you were on foot. There was no fuel, but you had a time limit. You'd been poisoned, you see, and you had to get to hospital, quick. Go too slow, you don't reach the hospital in time, die. Go too fast, run into a wall, die.
I was a very strange child.
RTFA.
The article isn't talking about "mitochondrial Eves" or any single-ancestor idea of that ilk -- it's talking about three distinct sub-populations with small differences in gene pool, but still sharing a large amount of common genetical material. The populations that they're talking about would have been fairly big in themselves. Probably more on the scale a herd of wildebeest than that of a nuclear family.
And on that topic, I wonder what his dad does for a living....
Cynical, moi?
Who says they waited? Perhaps they just (shock horro) weren't aware of it until now. Just because it's on the internet, doesn't mean they knew about it.
And maybe it's not all about creative interests and more about the author maintaining control of his creations. I once was an aspiring author (until I realised my prose stinks), and given that every character I write is a reflection of some aspect of myself, having someone else rewrite them would feel like defamation or misrepresentation of me. If someone who is supposed to reflect what I see best about myself is outed as an alcoholic child-abuse victim in a fanfic sequel... well, that's not good.
HAL.
Normally I'd say "get a job", but there's not as many of those going around as there used to be. (Damn banks and their irresponsible lending.) What are the employment prospects where you are? Doing a masters is more productive than being unemployed, and much better on the CV....
HAL.
The big difference between the DS and PSP is the target market. The PSP was targetted at gamers. Big mistake. Gamers know about piracy, and are becoming more and more accustomed to it by the minute.
Sony, then, pitched their product at people who were never really going to buy all that much.
Nintendo's product has found it's way into handbags and schoolbags. The kids get legitimate games as birthday presents, and the travelling woman picks up a random brain-trainer or somesuch while stuck in departures waiting for a delayed flight. There's money in that market....
HAL.
But the author had already told us why this was:
IE. the system was designed to identify complete songs. It is a fair assumption that someone producing a pirated music compilation CD will include the entire song, including its first 30 seconds, so only checking the first 30 seconds is a perfectly sound strategy.
It wasn't designed for the YouTube environment, and put bluntly YouTube only want to be seen to be doing something. It's in their interest to get as many views as possible, and music helps! Audible Magic is "industry standard", so they can say that they're doing everything that can be expected of them. Voilà, their backsides are covered and their faces well and truly saved, and they have a show of "good faith" to hold up in any future legal action.
HAL.
Bzzzt!
This sort of distribution protection actually promotes world literacy. Think about it:
A book on C costs £27.94 on Amazon UK, and $55.77 on Amazon US. At bookshopofindia.com it costs $7.38. That's more expensive relative to the Indian wage, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper to a US or UK citizen. If there was no geographical restriction on distribution (ie if we had "free trade" of books) no bookshops would buy the US or UK version, instead importing the Indian version. This would mean profits would collapse, and Kelly and Pohl, the authors, can't afford to live on Indian wages.
So Kelly, Pohl and their publisher Addison-Wesley would simply refuse to allow the Indian version to be printed -- if the UK/US edition was the only one available, profits in the core market would be protected. The lost profits in the Indian market would be small change.
If we go further afield, to the ex-British colonies in Africa, A Book on C probably retails at about a dollar, and that's more than a day's wage already. Free trade of books would quite literally remove that sort of book from their bookshelves. Education would suffer.
Yes, geographical IP protection is an unnatural intervention in "the market", but it is to meet the reality of wage disparity. We westerners benefit greatly from maintaining this wage disparity (cheap Chinese goods wouldn't be cheap if the Chinese workers got paid the same as us!) and so it is in our favour to use differential pricing of IP to try to foster an illusion of equality.
HAL.
Louisiana is a majority baptist area. If you're going to bash Christian sects, at least have the decency to pick the right one!
HAL.
When I want to encrypt my data securely, I cambio de langue beaucoup des tursan en gach frase. In this way, ich puedo tres cinnteach sein that bheil only a handful of people ann a soussteheneas nere mensajea.
HAL.
I've played both the NES version and the C64 port of the coin-op and I have to say the NES version, while being good enough fun, has too much back-and-forth in that very 80s console platform adventure way. The coin-op was a classic platform run-and-gun with a quite simple but very flexible control system. If you want retro, go back to the source!
Similar, not the same -- a small difference makes all the difference. You've taken a fairly elementary piece of evidence and made a very specific hypothesis from it.
The data that's missing from the observation is how quickly the females notice a change in a male's behaviour and how quickly they react to this.
HAL.
This is interesting because the ability to engage in long-term exchanges requires some pretty sophisticated cognitive machinery that isn't necessary for an instantaneous trade. You have to keep track of who you have active deals with and what the running balance is,
Do you? If I buy a girl chocolates, does it really make her start doing mental accounting or does she just think "what a nice guy" and have a general warm fuzzy feeling about me?
Indeed. What a strange article.
You say that as though you've read it.
I would even go so far as to say that Linux (and the Free Software ecosystem that surrounds it) has a lot more critics than closed software - or at least more effective critics.
Large software companies pay PR departments to generate positive coverage. Most Open Source projects have no PR effort behind them at all. So criticism of the software is less likely to be drowned out by astroturf.
RTFA -- he doesn't mean criticism == slagging off, he means criticism as is "critical evaluation". What Linux has is a lot of slaggers and very few critical evaluators. All the deconstruction of design decisions are carried out by the dev guys -- there is no detached observer.
HAL.
Oh how true that is. I myself love to criticize things (I'm reading Slashdot, after all). But why don't I constructively criticize Linux?
I think a lot of has to do with what every argument or analysis starts with: base assumptions. So let's start with comparing Linux to the leading commercial operating systems and the most important thing to consumers--price. And the guy mentions this in his blog. But we can't get to questions like "Is feature X really worth Y dollars to me?" Because Linux does not cost money to install. It's like dividing by zero. It makes criticism of a missing component difficult because it doesn't cost me anything! How can I criticize it?!
From TFA:
I've made a handful of blog postings recently that have been critical of Linux (in the sense of pointing out perceived failings), and people hate it. If they explain why, it's usually a variation of the following: "Linux is free, so why are you complaining?"
Plus ca change, plus la meme chose....
HAL.
TFA raises the concern that there won't be an advance warning unless we do something about our aging satellite stock....
Nononononono. You don't want it to be configurable. Configurable == non-standard. Too much customisation means no-one ever learns the basics and ends up unable to use anyone else's computer!
They are producing units right now, albeit well under max capacity.
Now who's being painfully naive? You know those market forces you love? Well, market forces suggest that overcapacity is a Bad Thing. Thus most people tool themselves up to cope with more or less average demand. Market forces are what could get us into this mess, not what would get us out!
Your also basing your argument on the assumption that nothing has occured since 1859 which makes our electrical grid more robust and resistant to such disturbances.
Yes, he's basing his argument on the assumption that A) electrical conductors are still affected by magnetic fields and B) power grid systems are not yet magnetically shielded.
As far as I can see A is still true (ye cannae break the laws o physics, Jim) and B is also true (the overhead powerlines running beside my office appear to be wrapped in plastic, and last I knew plastic doesn't have particularly good shielding properties).
So all in all a very sound set of assumptions.
HAL.
You lack the parts? Pillage the dead transformers. There is a PRETTY good chance you can take 2 or 3 dead ones and have 1 working in under 24 hours.
Sorry, I think I missed the part where you said you were a power-systems engineer. For those of us not in the know, can you explain which parts of what is in essence little more than two large coils of wire can be salvaged when the wire has caught light?
Give one half of town 12 hours of power and then turn them off for the next 12 hours while the other half gets their 12 hours. Or 8. Or 6.
How? We're not just talking about supply problems, we're talking distribution as well. With powerlines and substations down, there's no way to switch who gets the power.
Let me tell you... you get used to 4 hours of electricity per day (or less) VERY fast. You leave the lights on to wake you up when it comes on. Charge the batteries, cook, wash clothes, heat up the boiler and then go about your business waiting for better times.
Again, the scenario in TFA is about complete blackout, not intermittent supply -- this is on a completely different scale. But without as many bullets and mortar bombs, hopefully.
HAL.
The issue is that YouTube started with a business model of "we're a neutral carrier, and we'll make money when people use copyright material without a license, but we won't be liable". When the PRS (and whoever else internationally) came round they held off negotiating, citing "neutral carrier" and claiming that they couldn't identify infringing content. (Shenanigans! If I can whistle a tune down the phone and be told what it is, Google can detect copyright soundtracks in videos!)
In these negotiations, the whole "neutral carrier" argument is nothing more than veiled blackmail: give us everything at rates of our choosing, otherwise it'll all be there for free anyway and you'll get nothing.
And if the PRS capitulate to YouTube's demands, it either compounds Google's monopoly (by making them cheaper than everyone else) or reduces the value of music across the board.
PRS take too large a cut, in my opinion, but they're still the only way to compensate artists....
HAL.
Ah, but the group that thinketh sees value in commercial use, but there's no value in personal use. Otherwise they'd have invented a retail mechanism, maybe called something like "shops", to sell to the person they might call the "consumer". What a crazy idea.