If this story were written by anyone other than Jon Katz:
Some of us have long argued that culture isn't being destroyed in cyberspace, but is actually being reborn here.
Hi there.
Many journalists, politicians and educators still haven't grasped this,
I was bored today...
perhaps because they rarely visit or report on sites like The Company Therapist.
...but I found this nifty web page.
The public still often thinks of the Net in terms of thievery, retailing, pornography, and hacking and cracking,
I showed it to my co-workers, but they didn't seem interested.
but the arts are rapidly moving online, sometimes in quite revolutionary ways.
But they're a bunch of losers anyways.
This hi-tech story-telling experiment, which turns storytelling upside down and uses hypertext to create a collaborative narrative, is a terrific case in point.
Galeon's ability to customize completely acceptance of cookies and images from IP addresses is incredibly useful. With mozilla you cannot get there by right-clicking on the image (yet, I suspect).
That's not true. I'm using Mozilla 0.9.8 right now, and I've been using this feature via the "Block images from this server" context-menu item since 0.9.6, I believe. Anyway, I do agree with the parent post that this is a great feature in both Mozilla and Galeon.
Even as PC prices continue to fall, it seems that most people are continuing to pay around $1500 or so for a computer because that is what they expect to pay for a computer.
If this story were published eight years ago you would saying, "People are continuing to pay around $2500 for a computer because that is what they expect to pay..." Today's $1500 price for a mid-range computer is ridiculously cheap from the perspective of the preceding decade. Sure, there's a lag between actual hardware costs and consumer expectations, but we're already seeing the norm pushed below a thousand dollars, and in another five years I doubt that many people will expect to pay more than a few hundred.
Linus has in the past changed Linux's license to GPL v2 and "no other version". This he was not allowed to do in the first place because he didn't ask permission to the many contributors [...]
This is incorrect. Before the change in terms, all GPL code in the kernel could be licensed under the GPL v2 or any later version, at the licensee's option. That means that I can take that code and and use it under the terms of the GPL v2 specifically. These terms allow me, among other things, to incorporate the code into any product distributed under the GPL v2.
This is essentially what Linus did: All the GPL code contributed to him for inclusion in the kernel was under the GPL v2, though the authors may have allowed other licenses also. The authors of such code, by allowing Linus to license it under GPL v2, gave him explicit permission to redistribute it according to the terms of that license. The "or higher version" clause does not require that he follow the terms of all available licenses; it allows him to choose among the allowed licenses and use one of them.
Dr. Faloutsos gave a colloquium talk to the CS department at my college recently, including a dozen or so simple examples of his DANCE system. It was really very impressive.
Faloutsos' work is not actually focused on the physics models, but on the control programs for the virtual actors. This allows dynamic, force-based animation (as opposed to kinematic, position-based animation). Each model has a set of controllers for various tasks like walking, running, jumping forward, moving from a prone position to a standing position, etc. Each controller knows its "competencies" -- the conditions under which it can successfully guide the model. These are used to hand off control from one controller to the next as the model goes through a complex motion or reacts to external forces.
The sample movies that Faloutsos showed were mostly unscripted. They would start with a model in a simple standing state, which would then respond to user-controlled forces like pushing or throwing simulated balls at the model from various angles. Various balance-recovery controllers would take over depending on how the model was displaced; if none of them were succesful then the model would fall down, and then use one of its controllers for returning to a standing position. All of this appeared incredibly realistic and human.
Also, as another poster noted, DANCE is available under a "free for non-commercial use" license (not free under the FSF or Debian definitions, but a good deal in my opinion). He encouraged us to try it out, explaining that research like his has suffered from a lack of common infrastructure, leading to a lot of reinvented wheels. He expressed hope that the DANCE framework would allow more innovative research with less duplicated work.
Re:They support MacOS^H^H^H^H^HRiscOS wrappers
on
ROX Desktop Update
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· Score: 2
Wow, I just took a look and the ROX Filer is truly revolutionary. This is the first simple example of the powerful Nextstep and MacOS X concept of "app wrappers" brought to Linux.
Funny you should call them MacOS X style app wrappers because they are based on a much older system from Acorn RiscOS:-) Hence ROX - Risc Os on X.
And of course, the MacOS X version should properly be known as "NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP-style bundles."
Nice for expatriated Mac users
on
ROX Desktop Update
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I grew up with Macintosh System 6. That was a long time ago; first I jumped ship to BeOS back in the PR1 days and became a bash and vi junkie; later moving to Debian and becoming a free software hacker. For the most part I abandoned my MacOS roots.
I never managed to shake a nagging feeling of loss: I missed the Finder. Oh, I tried various graphical file managers -- Midnight Commander, assorted OS/2 and NeXT clones, and more recently Nautilus. None of them worked for me; I tried to use them but always found myself switching back to the shell to get anything done. Most recently, I tried MacOS X and had the same problem! My beloved Finder -- constant from System 6 all the way to MacOS 9 -- had been replaced by this strange marriage of Windows Explorer and the NeXT Workspace Manager.
What did I want that all these tools failed to deliver? A physical feeling of the filesystem. The idea that this directory is here... and this one is over there... and I can reach through the screen with my mouse, scoop up a bunch of files, and drop them in a new location. Also a sense of immediacy. The file manager must be lightweight and optimized enough that opening a new directory is, perceptually, a zero-cost operation. The interface must be sparse enough that you feel you are working in the filesystem, not through a bunch of widgets and menus. Sure, browsers like Nautilus or the OS X Finder support classic Finder-style browsing, but they don't stay out of your way enough for you to ignore the browser and focus on the files.
The introduction on the ROX pages sums up some of how I feel:
However, recent desktop efforts (such as KDE and GNOME) seem to be following the Windows approach of trying to hide the filesystem and get users to do things via a Start-menu or similar. Modern desktop users, on Windows or Unix, often have no idea where their programs are installed, or even where their data files are saved. This leads to a feeling of not being in control, and a poor understanding of how the system works.
One other system managed to give me the same intuitive feel for the filesystem, and that was the Be Tracker, a blatant but well-crafted Finder clone. Despite serious flaws (no hierarchal list views!), it was so nice to use that it was my primary interface into my computer when I used BeOS. The ROX Filer looks like a promising start. I will download it and hope, and contribute where I can.
Another academic study of EverQuest, from a different angle: Cal State Fullerton business professor Edward Castranova did an economic survey of Norrath, which he plans to publish in an economics journal.
First, add lines to your sources.list for "sid" or "unstable". Then run one of these commands to install the latest mozilla packages. The first command will cause your system to keep mozilla up-to-date with the unstable distribution. The second one will just install the version currently in sid, but will leave woody as the default distribution.
In fact, I believe that if you rename an RTF file so that it has the.DOC extension, it will appear to Windows users to be a normal Word document. Opening it will launch Word, which handles the file without complaining. This can be a useful trick for sending to recipients who require.doc files. You shouldn't abuse it too much, because it will inconvenience non-Word users who can deal better with RTF than DOC.
Re:Hurd vs Linux vs *BSD
on
Hurd: H2 CD Images
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Who is going to use it? Linux has all the bells and whistles for people who love the GPL, and the BSD people who like pure unix and freedom (I know, what is pure unix anyway) are going to stick with *BSD.
Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote
their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying
to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you
finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-
nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just
for you:-)
Important how? Does anyone here megabyte and think "oh, a million bytes."?
Yes. I've actually had to work with communications engineers, and in the technical jargon of that field, "megabit" and "megabyte" have their traditional base-10 meanings. In my college info/comm engineering class, I (a comp. sci student) had to get used to using 1MB for 1E6 bytes. The difference, as I said, is just a mathematical detail at that level, but it becomes more important for larger quantities. Now that terabit capacity is fairly common (students at my school are creating test hardware for a 200 gigabit/s link), it will lead to increasingly serious miscommunications between hardware and software engineers. These are not just numerical differences that show up in the arithmetic, but real qualitative distinctions. It may not be important to everybody, but in my field it could matter a great deal if you think I mean 10% more capacity than I really do.
The problem is not that the terminology is inherently wrong; the problem is that it's been overloaded in a way unsuitable for technical jargon. The "mebi" prefixes make this distinction clearer, which is very important for engineers who have to deal with both the binary and decimal powers on a regular basis.
This is not to say I think it will catch on. I believe the new terminology is doomed. Just like the US adopting the metric system, it would be nice but I'm not counting on it.
Look, I don't know where you learned programming, but if you use 2E15, you get 32768... are american physicians using a different math system or was it just that your teacher was a crackhead?
Unix printf(1) command:
$ printf "%f\n" 2E15
2000000000000000.000000
The C programming language:
$ cat sci.c
#include
int main(void) { printf("%f\n", 2E15); }
$ cc sci.c
$./a.out
2000000000000000.000000
The different between a gigabyte and a gibibyte is pretty small (7%), but once terabyte and larger arrays become more common, the distinction becomes more and more important. The different between a petabyte and a pebibyte is 13%. An exbibyte is more than 15% larger than an exabyte, which will surely lead to worse confusion than today's "80GB" hard drive specificiations...
Business Week: 6 Million in the US
on
Sony vs Modchips
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· Score: 2
The article states the PS2 already passed 20 million sold... which is quite off, at least according to Buisiness Week, stating it's more in the ball park of 6 millions.
The Business Week article leaves out Asia and Europe. The PS2 sold millions of units in Japan before it was even released in the US. Sony's latest quarterly report placed the worldwide sales of the PS2 hardware at "over 19.57 million units."
You must have meant to write something else. Euclid has a simple proof that there are infinitely many primes.
The writer most likely was thinking of the famous open question, Are there an infinite number of twin primes? Twin primes are pairs of primes whose difference is 2, for example 17 & 19, or 41 & 43. It is conjectured but unproven that the twin primes are inexhaustible.
Yeah for sure, most of us are developing sickening feelings whenever we see how our culture is being overridden by americanization. Not just with computer software, but with music and movies etc too.
At that bit rate, it's not the artifacts that are evident, but the complete lack of stereo separation. After all, correlations between the left and right channels is one of the means of eliminating "redundant" information and reducing file sizes.
Did you try the obvious solution of encoding without channel coupling, or with lossless channel coupling?
Actually, up until the latest release (RC2), oggenc performed no coupling at all; it just encoded each channel as an independent stream. Nowadays vorbis supports a variety of stereo modes, including two that disable all stereo-separation loss.
[Note that stereo modes aren't user-configurable in the released version of oggenc.]
What good is lossless storage of music???... When there is not such thing as a audiophile quality sound card.
There are plenty of sound cards with digital output. An optical cable goes straight from the card to your fancy receiver, so no information loss occurs before the signal reaches the amp. Even cheap receivers these days have very good DACs, so you can easily get all the way to the analog portion of the signal train with no measurable degredation.
An optical-out sound card runs about US$1000, which is a minor cost to an audiophile. Personally, I'm happy with 128 kbps compression and a pair of cheap headphones.
Slashdot Mirror
I use the Lo-Fi Classic theme for its nice small buttons. Note: I haven't tried the theme with Mozilla 0.9.9 yet.
That's not true. I'm using Mozilla 0.9.8 right now, and I've been using this feature via the "Block images from this server" context-menu item since 0.9.6, I believe. Anyway, I do agree with the parent post that this is a great feature in both Mozilla and Galeon.
If this story were published eight years ago you would saying, "People are continuing to pay around $2500 for a computer because that is what they expect to pay..." Today's $1500 price for a mid-range computer is ridiculously cheap from the perspective of the preceding decade. Sure, there's a lag between actual hardware costs and consumer expectations, but we're already seeing the norm pushed below a thousand dollars, and in another five years I doubt that many people will expect to pay more than a few hundred.
This is incorrect. Before the change in terms, all GPL code in the kernel could be licensed under the GPL v2 or any later version, at the licensee's option. That means that I can take that code and and use it under the terms of the GPL v2 specifically. These terms allow me, among other things, to incorporate the code into any product distributed under the GPL v2.
This is essentially what Linus did: All the GPL code contributed to him for inclusion in the kernel was under the GPL v2, though the authors may have allowed other licenses also. The authors of such code, by allowing Linus to license it under GPL v2, gave him explicit permission to redistribute it according to the terms of that license. The "or higher version" clause does not require that he follow the terms of all available licenses; it allows him to choose among the allowed licenses and use one of them.
I believe in the second coming of Amiga! Death to the nonbelievers!
Faloutsos' work is not actually focused on the physics models, but on the control programs for the virtual actors. This allows dynamic, force-based animation (as opposed to kinematic, position-based animation). Each model has a set of controllers for various tasks like walking, running, jumping forward, moving from a prone position to a standing position, etc. Each controller knows its "competencies" -- the conditions under which it can successfully guide the model. These are used to hand off control from one controller to the next as the model goes through a complex motion or reacts to external forces.
The sample movies that Faloutsos showed were mostly unscripted. They would start with a model in a simple standing state, which would then respond to user-controlled forces like pushing or throwing simulated balls at the model from various angles. Various balance-recovery controllers would take over depending on how the model was displaced; if none of them were succesful then the model would fall down, and then use one of its controllers for returning to a standing position. All of this appeared incredibly realistic and human.
Also, as another poster noted, DANCE is available under a "free for non-commercial use" license (not free under the FSF or Debian definitions, but a good deal in my opinion). He encouraged us to try it out, explaining that research like his has suffered from a lack of common infrastructure, leading to a lot of reinvented wheels. He expressed hope that the DANCE framework would allow more innovative research with less duplicated work.
I never managed to shake a nagging feeling of loss: I missed the Finder. Oh, I tried various graphical file managers -- Midnight Commander, assorted OS/2 and NeXT clones, and more recently Nautilus. None of them worked for me; I tried to use them but always found myself switching back to the shell to get anything done. Most recently, I tried MacOS X and had the same problem! My beloved Finder -- constant from System 6 all the way to MacOS 9 -- had been replaced by this strange marriage of Windows Explorer and the NeXT Workspace Manager.
What did I want that all these tools failed to deliver? A physical feeling of the filesystem. The idea that this directory is here... and this one is over there... and I can reach through the screen with my mouse, scoop up a bunch of files, and drop them in a new location. Also a sense of immediacy. The file manager must be lightweight and optimized enough that opening a new directory is, perceptually, a zero-cost operation. The interface must be sparse enough that you feel you are working in the filesystem, not through a bunch of widgets and menus. Sure, browsers like Nautilus or the OS X Finder support classic Finder-style browsing, but they don't stay out of your way enough for you to ignore the browser and focus on the files.
The introduction on the ROX pages sums up some of how I feel:
One other system managed to give me the same intuitive feel for the filesystem, and that was the Be Tracker, a blatant but well-crafted Finder clone. Despite serious flaws (no hierarchal list views!), it was so nice to use that it was my primary interface into my computer when I used BeOS. The ROX Filer looks like a promising start. I will download it and hope, and contribute where I can.
Another academic study of EverQuest, from a different angle: Cal State Fullerton business professor Edward Castranova did an economic survey of Norrath, which he plans to publish in an economics journal.
apt-get install mozilla-browser/unstable
apt-get install mozilla-browser -t unstable
MacOnLinux has the same feature, for those of us not in Intel land.
In fact, I believe that if you rename an RTF file so that it has the .DOC extension, it will appear to Windows users to be a normal Word document. Opening it will launch Word, which handles the file without complaining. This can be a useful trick for sending to recipients who require .doc files. You shouldn't abuse it too much, because it will inconvenience non-Word users who can deal better with RTF than DOC.
Time to repost the famous announcement again:
-- Linus Torvalds, October 1991Yes. I've actually had to work with communications engineers, and in the technical jargon of that field, "megabit" and "megabyte" have their traditional base-10 meanings. In my college info/comm engineering class, I (a comp. sci student) had to get used to using 1MB for 1E6 bytes. The difference, as I said, is just a mathematical detail at that level, but it becomes more important for larger quantities. Now that terabit capacity is fairly common (students at my school are creating test hardware for a 200 gigabit/s link), it will lead to increasingly serious miscommunications between hardware and software engineers. These are not just numerical differences that show up in the arithmetic, but real qualitative distinctions. It may not be important to everybody, but in my field it could matter a great deal if you think I mean 10% more capacity than I really do.
The problem is not that the terminology is inherently wrong; the problem is that it's been overloaded in a way unsuitable for technical jargon. The "mebi" prefixes make this distinction clearer, which is very important for engineers who have to deal with both the binary and decimal powers on a regular basis.
This is not to say I think it will catch on. I believe the new terminology is doomed. Just like the US adopting the metric system, it would be nice but I'm not counting on it.
Unix printf(1) command:
The C programming language:
The Perl programming language:
And no, this is not an Americanism. It is standard engineering notation, used worldwide.
"2E15" means 2*10^15. What you want to say is 2^15, or 2**15, or 2<sup>15</sup>.
The different between a gigabyte and a gibibyte is pretty small (7%), but once terabyte and larger arrays become more common, the distinction becomes more and more important. The different between a petabyte and a pebibyte is 13%. An exbibyte is more than 15% larger than an exabyte, which will surely lead to worse confusion than today's "80GB" hard drive specificiations...
The Business Week article leaves out Asia and Europe. The PS2 sold millions of units in Japan before it was even released in the US. Sony's latest quarterly report placed the worldwide sales of the PS2 hardware at "over 19.57 million units."
You must have an awfully short memory.
Sony makes a profit on the PS2 hardware.
The writer most likely was thinking of the famous open question, Are there an infinite number of twin primes? Twin primes are pairs of primes whose difference is 2, for example 17 & 19, or 41 & 43. It is conjectured but unproven that the twin primes are inexhaustible.
Well, you know there are only four things America does better than anyone else: Music, movies, microcode, and high-speed pizza delivery.
Did you try the obvious solution of encoding without channel coupling, or with lossless channel coupling?
Actually, up until the latest release (RC2), oggenc performed no coupling at all; it just encoded each channel as an independent stream. Nowadays vorbis supports a variety of stereo modes, including two that disable all stereo-separation loss. [Note that stereo modes aren't user-configurable in the released version of oggenc.]
There are plenty of sound cards with digital output. An optical cable goes straight from the card to your fancy receiver, so no information loss occurs before the signal reaches the amp. Even cheap receivers these days have very good DACs, so you can easily get all the way to the analog portion of the signal train with no measurable degredation.
An optical-out sound card runs about US$1000, which is a minor cost to an audiophile. Personally, I'm happy with 128 kbps compression and a pair of cheap headphones.