If the lights don't dim when you power your baby up, you ain't worthy! Heck, I've seen my light dim when my _heater_ powers back up, never mind the PC....
This is a cool idea, but I probably won't use it. Why?
Because most of the local advertising is primed to feed me to local programs, so that's what I'm (mostly) interested in watching. The size of the local economy keeps the buying power of the local station down, so most of the US/UK made programs screening down here are ~2 years old.
Besides, I want to see the Dr. Who that a local program is screening, from approx the beginning (for those episodes that haven't been destroyed/lost)
Do we really need another TLD? How much are they going to charge for them anyway?
When Tuvalu sold off.tv , one of my bosses asked for us to get a domain in that space (id.tv), where it matched one of our trademarks (idtv, a local digital television service). We were told: auction, starting at us$10k. Sorry, no. Not interested.
Adding a TLD is a good money-spinner, but it doesn't make much sense: getting the existing space re-organised (yes, I know, painful idea) would be so much more beneficial IMHO
If the IA-64 can run x86 code then it'll be worth an upgrade.
As for those people who thought I was on to a dead end, you're probably right. But my system is a PII-233, with 32Mb Ram. At this point it's only just behind the eight-ball as it is.
While I think about it, why aren't processors flashable? My SoundCard's firmware can be upgraded without opening the case. When do we get CPUs that can do this? I do realise that most processors upgrades fiddle with the transistor count, but if someone works out a way to do something better, why should me make pieces of silicon obsolete?
I realise this comes close to interrupting the revenue streams for the chip makers, but surely a chip like that could be sold for quite a nice package...
Disclaimers: I'm a software developer. I make no representation about that idea being possible. These ideas were written immediately I thought them up. The haven't been passed through a sane mind.
In all deference to the "aint-it-cool" factor offerered by a new, better architecture, I'm probably not going to buy a Merced.
At one point (about a year back) I was, but the picture has all changed.
Most of the software I have is distinctly x86 bound. Most of it isn't open, and came to me via binaries. A large portion of it runs on an OS from that company in Washington State. Almost none of it can pretend to be anything other than games.
For my money, I can't think of anything that looks more interesting in the processor market than TransMeta's Crusoe chip. Technically this is still on the "coming-to-market real-soon-now" list, but so is the Merced (now officialy IA-64).
Given that, I'd rather settle for continuing to be able to run my existing software. I upgrade my system bit-by-bit. Compatibility and continuity are very important!
>... the US has strange and/or callous laws about dual citizenship
I hold dual citizenships, in the country of my birth, and in a country where my parents held citizenship (they later nationalised to the country of my birth). One of these countries is in the European Community.
Having two passports can make travelling overseas much easier. Just as a Nth American passport gives you ability to walk to Canada and back, many countries have "open-border" style agreements with neighbours for citizens (eg: EU, Australia+NZ).
AFAIK the US law (along with some other countries) says: If you're a US citizen you are only a US citizen. I'm sure you'll all understand if I find this a little restrictive. I'm sure Mr Torvalds wants to continue to be Finnish.
This is news, and interesting, but not really a big surprise.
Note: what follows is what I remember about MS structure, after reading some books
When he was at PARC, Charles Symonyi[0] (sp?) designed a scheme for writing code, where a meta-programmer gave programming instructions to ~50 actual coders. He later moved to Microsoft.
Bill Gates has always seen himself as a meta-meta-programmer. This change will enable him to function more on programming... after all, he did originally start as a coder way back when. So he's taking charge of what he does on a day-to-day basis, good for him.
This won't change MS much: he's still the owner....
0] This is the Hungarian who brought the world the questionable advancement that is Hungarian Notation,
This could just be legal! Some countries (I know New Zealand (home) used to have the ability for only certain companies to import trademarked products.
Thus Sony Music (NZ) held all rights to import Sony CDs into the country etc. Only The Levi Strauss Co. could import commercial quantities of Levi Jeans into the country.
Then the law changed, so now (if I had $$) could go and buy bulk in places where product happens to be cheap, and import and resell at a profit by undercutting the original manufacturer.
In being the only company able to import SUSE Linux into Uruguay, they may just have made a legal coup.
But still, it's Linux. If you don't want to buy the 'Official' version, you have the freedom (for the GPLed portion) to copy someone elses (although it lacks some of the features of the original (like RH offer bundled support for official users..)
I'm in Auckland, New Zealand, where the current time is GMT+13. It's almost 6pm local time, and I'm just trying to psych myself up for the New Year's party that's due shortly.
IDG NZ have set up a nice Y2k news site. Also, according to Dave Winer has commented that Dave Gilmore (spelling, URL) has prepared 2 columns, depending on whether or not we have local power.
I'm currently more worried about the beer supplies holding up until the shops re-open on Sunday. Donations of Heineken gratefully accepted
I know we could just use these predictions to attack all and sundry, but let's try to be more positive (new years resolution: try to be more positive. Hmmm I wonder how long that'll last. About 5 seconds probably. Damn, there goes another one...) Why not use these "predictions" as directions to work towards. They think all *nixes should be able to run each others binaries? To work! We've got code to hack. Let's do it. This may involve writing a generic Linux/x86 environment so other architectures can run x86 code, but it can't be a bad thing....
Sid Meier? Sid Meier was involved in Civilisation (note: not CTP), Alpha Centauri, and Gettysburg! He recently left Microprose to set up Firaxis Games. He wrote the original Railroad Tycoon.
On the other hand, Transport Tycoon was written by someone else (albeit for the same vendor). I can't remember the name (Chris Carter springs to mind), but the same author recently released Rollercoaster Tycoon.
All these mentioned are great games! Many don't come for Linux, which is why I still boot to MS....
It's just that the act of revolution rarely changes anything. Revolution: something that spins, ie it changes for a time but ends up the same again later.
So there's a revolution, so what?
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" -- The Who, "Won't get fooled again"
Maybe you don't understand. That's cool. I don't necessarily get art.
I can't understand how that butt-ugly sculpture is art, or what some more avant-garde stuff is actually about.
Calling something 'music' rather than just 'sound' or 'noise' implies that you've made a judgement call. One of my criteria for music is human expression, in a partially structured form. People singing "Here we go" at a football match are musicians. Those people playing power tools in those spoof scenes on Home Improvement are musicians. Some one in a blacksmith's apron hammering out a piece of red-hot steel for a horse-shoe is not creating music, unless that is their intent.
Music is possibly similar to software. Software does not really exist! It's just small bits of information, that happened to be arranged in an interesting form. An unformatted HD may be very similar in parts to the source code for (say) the new Linux kernel, but as it wasn't what was intended we don't count it as software.
Maybe this is just me being picky. It seemed like a good argument at the time.
I remember, back when I spent a year in Canada (1991), I was a counselor at a summer music camp.
For the final presentation I remember one of the adults brought out a fanfare and a group of us learnt it and played it.
Some months ago, when I got my snazzy new SoundBlaster Live card with some MIDI software, I tried to transpose it. The fanfare opened with multiple arpeggios in unison, across four trumpets. Scoring this through MIDI did not result in the sound of four trumpets playing in unision, it resulted in one trumpet, louder.
In 15 years of playing trumpet, I have managed to play a short passage in perfect tonal unison only once, with one other player. We were stopped, and made to play it again. It was unduplicateable.
And if MIDI isn't music, then this certainly isn't.
Music is personal expression. At production (as opposed to CD, MP3 reproduction) it as always unique. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Computers (at least until they're totally self-aware and need to learn just like people) just can't cut it.
(disclaimer: I am not a professional musician. I have, however, been taking making music for 17 years (with lessons for the first 12 or so...))
I'm sorry, no. I really don't think the music scene is equipped for this sort of thing.
Music is interpretation, it isn't an equation. You should not simply use some sort of hokey Scoring + Emotion = Music equation and expect to have something worthwhile come out. Maybe for genuine on-the-fly stuff like context-sensitive game music stuff it could be welcome.
The key here, is art. Music, like other more physical art forms, is all about human imput. If Mike Oldfield's classic 'Tubular Bells' album was released today, and he'd played synthesiser, instead of actually learning and playing that myriad my instruments, it just wouldn't get it.
Even for a group, flexibility is key. I've played with (concert) band conductors who refused to say 'in the concert we will do it this way'. He preferred to deal with the specifics as the situation developed. Things like the crowd are getting bored, let's play this bit faster; the acoustics here really suck, let's make that instrument a bit louder..)
Maybe it would be good for bland elevator/Mc Donalds background music, but not for anything else.
Music is my recreation (listening, playing, creation). Anything that takes that away is bad.
In what seems like an increasingly common case of bad patents, this looks like the biggest so far.
Any challenge to this should quote those shopping carts that seem to be everywhere. Surely those are better than this proposed 1-Click mechanism, which seems to make separate transactions out of every item.P I would certainly wonder if MS Passport + shopping carts counted as a patent violation. (of course it shouldn't, if the patent office had a clue)...
Moore's law is about transistor volumes on smaller and smaller pieces of silicon.
I'm more interested in continuing the net effect of Moore's Law: That computing power doubles along with transistor counts. As long as we continue to get more power, I don't really care how it was attained.
Let's stop trying to get faster by using bigger and bigger (or maybe smaller and smaller is the better term) sticks. Let's do it better.
This seems to be the approach that Transmeta are working through.
Linus doesn't seem to have changed his mind at all. What he seems to be saying (to me, anyway) is: "Either be a wolf, or a sheep. But don't play dress-up. Don't pretend to be open-source if your licence is really non-free".
It's a valuable point. If you write your own license, you shouldn't pretend it's free if it isn't. It brings everything down.
As for Microsoft's push to make parts of Windows free: I think they've missed the point. We need the whole to be free, or nothing. If only inbuilt, interdependent components are free then we still can't do anything.
I have heard bad comments regarding Win98Se.... from what I hear, I don't intend to touch it at all... worse than Win98 initial release.
Mind you, for quite a while I was running Win98 RC-1 that Mickeysoft nicely sent to me. The again, the flatmate (Americanised: room-mate) the said this thinks I should run Windows 2000, but hey...
I remember having similar sort of troubles adding hardware to my Win98 PC (all the software I have is Windows based. I use my PC mostly for gaming, and Linux support lags way behind.).
Add Voodoo Banshee. Install drivers with supplied disk. Throw away S3Virge. Discover half stuff crashes. Download new drivers off web. Most things run better. Except Quake II based stuff. Go off to 3dfx and pickup new 3dfx.dll for Banshee. QII runs better.
Then I tried to run the same system on linux (thank godness for Partition Magic:). Banshee drivers _do_ exist for Linux: they're alpha. I managed somehow to get it set up. Then I decide the resolution is too high to actually see. Run XConfigurator. It coredumps. Leave linux alone for a month. Delete partition because I wasn't using it...
I tend to run a policy of periodically buying bleeding edge hardware. Neither Linux nor Windows particularly like this, but Linux does it better. It's way easier to find a web page that says "Linux doesn't support this" than "Ummm.... certain Win32 apps don't really like this card..."
Because Linux geeks like new h/ware you can usually find information fast!
Slashdot Mirror
If the lights don't dim when you power your baby up, you ain't worthy! Heck, I've seen my light dim when my _heater_ powers back up, never mind the PC....
Because most of the local advertising is primed to feed me to local programs, so that's what I'm (mostly) interested in watching. The size of the local economy keeps the buying power of the local station down, so most of the US/UK made programs screening down here are ~2 years old.
Besides, I want to see the Dr. Who that a local program is screening, from approx the beginning (for those episodes that haven't been destroyed/lost)
When Tuvalu sold off .tv , one of my bosses asked for us to get a domain in that space (id.tv), where it matched one of our trademarks (idtv, a local digital television service).
We were told: auction, starting at us$10k. Sorry, no. Not interested.
Adding a TLD is a good money-spinner, but it doesn't make much sense: getting the existing space re-organised (yes, I know, painful idea) would be so much more beneficial IMHO
The independence of the United States is a myth! It's really just a buffer zone, protecting Canada from the rest of the world.
As for those people who thought I was on to a dead end, you're probably right. But my system is a PII-233, with 32Mb Ram. At this point it's only just behind the eight-ball as it is.
While I think about it, why aren't processors flashable? My SoundCard's firmware can be upgraded without opening the case. When do we get CPUs that can do this? I do realise that most processors upgrades fiddle with the transistor count, but if someone works out a way to do something better, why should me make pieces of silicon obsolete?
I realise this comes close to interrupting the revenue streams for the chip makers, but surely a chip like that could be sold for quite a nice package...
Disclaimers: I'm a software developer. I make no representation about that idea being possible. These ideas were written immediately I thought them up. The haven't been passed through a sane mind.
At one point (about a year back) I was, but the picture has all changed.
Most of the software I have is distinctly x86 bound. Most of it isn't open, and came to me via binaries. A large portion of it runs on an OS from that company in Washington State. Almost none of it can pretend to be anything other than games.
For my money, I can't think of anything that looks more interesting in the processor market than TransMeta's Crusoe chip. Technically this is still on the "coming-to-market real-soon-now" list, but so is the Merced (now officialy IA-64).
Given that, I'd rather settle for continuing to be able to run my existing software. I upgrade my system bit-by-bit. Compatibility and continuity are very important!
I hold dual citizenships, in the country of my birth, and in a country where my parents held citizenship (they later nationalised to the country of my birth). One of these countries is in the European Community.
Having two passports can make travelling overseas much easier. Just as a Nth American passport gives you ability to walk to Canada and back, many countries have "open-border" style agreements with neighbours for citizens (eg: EU, Australia+NZ).
AFAIK the US law (along with some other countries) says: If you're a US citizen you are only a US citizen. I'm sure you'll all understand if I find this a little restrictive. I'm sure Mr Torvalds wants to continue to be Finnish.
Hello? Is there a Mr A.B. Stain in attendance?
<Downloads source>
Yeeek! Welcome to the Jungle, baby!
Is the next release to be called Axl?
To understand my point, consider id Software. Todd Hollensomething is CEO, but John Carmack is in charge, AFAIK.
Bill Gates will always be in charge, but he may have less paperwork to do. This just changes the names around a bit....
Note: what follows is what I remember about MS structure, after reading some books
When he was at PARC, Charles Symonyi[0] (sp?) designed a scheme for writing code, where a meta-programmer gave programming instructions to ~50 actual coders. He later moved to Microsoft.
Bill Gates has always seen himself as a meta-meta-programmer. This change will enable him to function more on programming... after all, he did originally start as a coder way back when. So he's taking charge of what he does on a day-to-day basis, good for him.
This won't change MS much: he's still the owner....
0] This is the Hungarian who brought the world the questionable advancement that is Hungarian Notation,
Thus Sony Music (NZ) held all rights to import Sony CDs into the country etc. Only The Levi Strauss Co. could import commercial quantities of Levi Jeans into the country.
Then the law changed, so now (if I had $$) could go and buy bulk in places where product happens to be cheap, and import and resell at a profit by undercutting the original manufacturer.
In being the only company able to import SUSE Linux into Uruguay, they may just have made a legal coup.
But still, it's Linux. If you don't want to buy the 'Official' version, you have the freedom (for the GPLed portion) to copy someone elses (although it lacks some of the features of the original (like RH offer bundled support for official users..)
I'm in Auckland, New Zealand, where the current time is GMT+13. It's almost 6pm local time, and I'm just trying to psych myself up for the New Year's party that's due shortly.
IDG NZ have set up a nice Y2k news site. Also, according to Dave Winer has commented that Dave Gilmore (spelling, URL) has prepared 2 columns, depending on whether or not we have local power.
I'm currently more worried about the beer supplies holding up until the shops re-open on Sunday. Donations of Heineken gratefully accepted
Why not use these "predictions" as directions to work towards. They think all *nixes should be able to run each others binaries? To work! We've got code to hack. Let's do it. This may involve writing a generic Linux/x86 environment so other architectures can run x86 code, but it can't be a bad thing....
Just an idea.
They're called bugs.
Stuff like that happens. Not that this in any way lets Carmack+Co. off anything....
On the other hand, Transport Tycoon was written by someone else (albeit for the same vendor). I can't remember the name (Chris Carter springs to mind), but the same author recently released Rollercoaster Tycoon.
All these mentioned are great games! Many don't come for Linux, which is why I still boot to MS....
It's just that the act of revolution rarely changes anything.
Revolution: something that spins, ie it changes for a time but ends up the same again later.
So there's a revolution, so what?
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"
-- The Who, "Won't get fooled again"
I can't understand how that butt-ugly sculpture is art, or what some more avant-garde stuff is actually about.
Calling something 'music' rather than just 'sound' or 'noise' implies that you've made a judgement call. One of my criteria for music is human expression, in a partially structured form. People singing "Here we go" at a football match are musicians. Those people playing power tools in those spoof scenes on Home Improvement are musicians. Some one in a blacksmith's apron hammering out a piece of red-hot steel for a horse-shoe is not creating music, unless that is their intent.
Music is possibly similar to software. Software does not really exist! It's just small bits of information, that happened to be arranged in an interesting form. An unformatted HD may be very similar in parts to the source code for (say) the new Linux kernel, but as it wasn't what was intended we don't count it as software.
Maybe this is just me being picky. It seemed like a good argument at the time.
For the final presentation I remember one of the adults brought out a fanfare and a group of us learnt it and played it.
Some months ago, when I got my snazzy new SoundBlaster Live card with some MIDI software, I tried to transpose it. The fanfare opened with multiple arpeggios in unison, across four trumpets. Scoring this through MIDI did not result in the sound of four trumpets playing in unision, it resulted in one trumpet, louder.
In 15 years of playing trumpet, I have managed to play a short passage in perfect tonal unison only once, with one other player. We were stopped, and made to play it again. It was unduplicateable.
And if MIDI isn't music, then this certainly isn't.
Music is personal expression. At production (as opposed to CD, MP3 reproduction) it as always unique. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Computers (at least until they're totally self-aware and need to learn just like people) just can't cut it.
I'm sorry, no. I really don't think the music scene is equipped for this sort of thing.
Music is interpretation, it isn't an equation. You should not simply use some sort of hokey Scoring + Emotion = Music equation and expect to have something worthwhile come out. Maybe for genuine on-the-fly stuff like context-sensitive game music stuff it could be welcome.
The key here, is art. Music, like other more physical art forms, is all about human imput. If Mike Oldfield's classic 'Tubular Bells' album was released today, and he'd played synthesiser, instead of actually learning and playing that myriad my instruments, it just wouldn't get it.
Even for a group, flexibility is key. I've played with (concert) band conductors who refused to say 'in the concert we will do it this way'. He preferred to deal with the specifics as the situation developed. Things like the crowd are getting bored, let's play this bit faster; the acoustics here really suck, let's make that instrument a bit louder..)
Maybe it would be good for bland elevator/Mc Donalds background music, but not for anything else.
Music is my recreation (listening, playing, creation). Anything that takes that away is bad.
Any challenge to this should quote those shopping carts that seem to be everywhere. Surely those are better than this proposed 1-Click mechanism, which seems to make separate transactions out of every item.P I would certainly wonder if MS Passport + shopping carts counted as a patent violation. (of course it shouldn't, if the patent office had a clue)...
Moore's law is about transistor volumes on smaller and smaller pieces of silicon.
I'm more interested in continuing the net effect of Moore's Law: That computing power doubles along with transistor counts. As long as we continue to get more power, I don't really care how it was attained.
Let's stop trying to get faster by using bigger and bigger (or maybe smaller and smaller is the better term) sticks. Let's do it better.
This seems to be the approach that Transmeta are working through.
Linus doesn't seem to have changed his mind at all. What he seems to be saying (to me, anyway) is: "Either be a wolf, or a sheep. But don't play dress-up. Don't pretend to be open-source if your licence is really non-free".
It's a valuable point. If you write your own license, you shouldn't pretend it's free if it isn't. It brings everything down.
As for Microsoft's push to make parts of Windows free: I think they've missed the point. We need the whole to be free, or nothing. If only inbuilt, interdependent components are free then we still can't do anything.
Mind you, for quite a while I was running Win98 RC-1 that Mickeysoft nicely sent to me. The again, the flatmate (Americanised: room-mate) the said this thinks I should run Windows 2000, but hey...
- Add Voodoo Banshee. Install drivers with supplied disk. Throw away S3Virge. Discover half stuff crashes. Download new drivers off web. Most things run better. Except Quake II based stuff. Go off to 3dfx and pickup new 3dfx.dll for Banshee. QII runs better.
- Then I tried to run the same system on linux (thank godness for Partition Magic
:). Banshee drivers _do_ exist for Linux: they're alpha. I managed somehow to get it set up. Then I decide the resolution is too high to actually see. Run XConfigurator. It coredumps. Leave linux alone for a month. Delete partition because I wasn't using it...
I tend to run a policy of periodically buying bleeding edge hardware. Neither Linux nor Windows particularly like this, but Linux does it better. It's way easier to find a web page that says "Linux doesn't support this" than "Ummm.... certain Win32 apps don't really like this card..."Because Linux geeks like new h/ware you can usually find information fast!