"The community can't make sample-based music because sample-based music relies on evoking the connotations of the original work, which requires the original work to be well-known, and all the well-known samples are locked up at the labels behind proprietary all-rights-reserved licenses."
No, sample-based music does not need the original work to be well known. (It does not even need to use samples from existing music). Eg De La Soul - ever heard of The Turtles?, Public Enemy, Mechanics of Destruction, negativland.
Sample-based music that isn't just using a catchy sample to bootstrap some appeal is common enough, and some of it is very good. Such music can use samples of arbitrary things (including other music) effectively as new instruments.
Haha. But seriously the grammar checker in the last version of Word I tried (2000) was annoying. It's hard to turn off the more pointless quibbles ("This sentence is long" for sentences with anything more than 2 clauses) - "ignore all" only lasts till reload. The really useful ones (like word doubling) are worth using in isolation, but for a real check you need a proof reader with common sense about what is important.
It's just less incremental. All sample-based music builds on parts that already existed and makes a new work. Original != not generated by modifying older art. It's not much different to talking about influences, just more direct.
One-time Object Relational Mapping code generation is only useful if you get the data structure right first time and the requirements don't change. This rarely happens, in my experience. Martin Fowler's (of Refactoring, Analysis Patterns fame) employer offer a consultancy service (I read in one of Fowler's articles) for automatic DB change management, tied in with code changes. The other way to do it is all at runtime and in code, but you need runtime support for class creation etc. (like in CLOS-MOP). This works by having the simplest, most general way of accessing data, but you have to handle all the possibilities at runtime.
Summary: needs way of keeping generated code in synch with changing DB schema.
It's more about newspapers: yesterday's news is not news. The assumtion is that old news is worthless; therefore, old newspapers are worthless.
Old newspapers are nearly worthless. It is worth having an archive, but only a few of them, so old newspapers are worth very much less than their cover price.
So... by anology, old software must be worthless. Hmm. 'Old' webservers are useless ('cos they will get r00ted in no time). But old, offline typesetting software? Pfft. 'Old' here really means 'unmaintained'. I think that an analogy with rusty machinery is a better one for unmaintained open source software:
at any point you can take it to a mechanic to get an estimate on repairs;
old models continue to be useful, in certain applications, as long as they are adequately maintained.
You don't address the grandparent's point: that some things that were bad are no longer. "So it's still socially acceptable to mock blacks, women and other minorities, and denigrate them in public? The income levels for these minorities haven't risen?"
Do you deny these claims, or deny that the constitute a good change? Ceteris paribus, they constitute progress, I think. With reference to your JE, perhaps the grandparent is broadly correct (no claims of universal truth an'all) and, in particular, correct that it is unacceptable to be overtly racist in public life: eg. in a publicly broadcast political advert.
To anticipate replies, this could be called simple 'political correctness' and hypocrisy, where racist newsreaders are made-up by ethnic minority workers and read carefully worded articles that show no racism. Be that as it may, that's still an improvement since a) when the hypocrites are revealed, they are punished; b) many kids grow up never hearing a racial slur, or other mocking.
Anyway, I'm not in a position to judge accurately the facts, but if the grandparent is correct, I'd say that constitutes progress, however incomplete.
'KDE 3.3' (in packaging terms) is ambiguous. There are several KDE source packages: kdebase (including konqueror etc.), kdelibs (kdelibs! etc.), kdenetwork (kopete, kppp etc.), kdepim (knode, kmail etc.).
Probably even more (I'm not counting kdevelop and other applications.
Each with several binary packages...
This leads to bizarre discontinuities. There is also the problem that kde 3.2 has outstanding security bugs which don't look like being fixed in sarge.
kdepim 3.3 was in experimental last week. I had no problems upgrading (but havn't caught the latest uploads to unstable). I'll try them now.
perhaps it's 'cos I don't want American TV....
Like most satire, you get the superficial feeling of amusement from the video ("haha Wubya is dancing around the sceen like David Hasselhopf in that South Park episode!"), but with 'The Message' at the same time. I remember watching Rory Bremner (at his peak - British satirical impersonating comic) and laughing and wondering whether I agreed with the policy being criticized, or with Bremner, or had a different opinion. Good satire will address important issues (like Bremner often did). Perhaps it's 'cos I couldn't see them (see above) but I only saw 1 issue raised in the video: Iraq. Perhaps that is the only issue that really separates the Democrats and Republicans...
Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 2000. The most successful software product line in history. Each was an almost complete re-write. Each re-write was necessitated by the predecessor being un-improvable (and no-longer-adequate). If we are talking market success, being re-written is a sign of success, not failure (since being funded to be re-written requires that the product made some money in the first place).
It does seem strange. I don't think I would voluntarily use managed C++, only native C++ wrapped in C# (or even VB.NET!). The sheer annoyance of using a language that looks superficially familiar but is fundamentally different (all RAII code would break, IIUC etc.) would make it easier to learn a separate language for.NET-CLI work (like Java for JVM work).
But I like reading and writing as portable code as possible. I find reading code that uses eg. GCC extensions (PDF) unpleasant.
only part of KDE 3.3 is in unstable. some (all?) of the rest is in experimental. this means that 3.3 in toto will not make it into sarge. it would be crazy to have part 3.2, part 3.3 in a release (not to mention potential conflicts etc).
"Also, note that there are quite a few RC bugs in KDE 3.2.3 including
security holes and kmail eating your email, etc. Upstream does not
consider non-security issues to be big enough to backport to a no longer
current release, since KDE 3.3 has already been released to packagers." Source.
Basically someone is going to have to backport these critical fixes (probably Ben Burton) cos the Release Managers don't want KDE 3.3 in sarge (for obvious reasons).
"Adobe Acrobat has always been a Windows-3.1-esque piece of junk; it's probably the only modern viewer-style application that noticeably pauses between page flips."
Try ghostview + gsview (on windows). On complicated ps, pdf you can see it render:). Ps,pdf is non-trivial to interpret. Im sure that implementing pre-caching wouldnt be too hard though.
"Adobe's mission of a general-purpose, cross-platform, academic-friendly document format"
Minor nit: ps, pdf is for printers. It's designed to be non-editable so is of limited academic use, except for publication. It's a publishing format, not an academic format. (Mathematicians use TeX AFAIK).
Slashdot Mirror
"The community can't make sample-based music because sample-based music relies on evoking the connotations of the original work, which requires the original work to be well-known, and all the well-known samples are locked up at the labels behind proprietary all-rights-reserved licenses."
No, sample-based music does not need the original work to be well known. (It does not even need to use samples from existing music). Eg De La Soul - ever heard of The Turtles?, Public Enemy, Mechanics of Destruction, negativland. Sample-based music that isn't just using a catchy sample to bootstrap some appeal is common enough, and some of it is very good. Such music can use samples of arbitrary things (including other music) effectively as new instruments.
Haha. But seriously the grammar checker in the last version of Word I tried (2000) was annoying. It's hard to turn off the more pointless quibbles ("This sentence is long" for sentences with anything more than 2 clauses) - "ignore all" only lasts till reload. The really useful ones (like word doubling) are worth using in isolation, but for a real check you need a proof reader with common sense about what is important.
It's just less incremental. All sample-based music builds on parts that already existed and makes a new work. Original != not generated by modifying older art. It's not much different to talking about influences, just more direct.
an example of an ORM for Common Lisp that uses the MOP is elephant (open source, 0.1 release alpha, uses Berkeley DB).
One-time Object Relational Mapping code generation is only useful if you get the data structure right first time and the requirements don't change. This rarely happens, in my experience. Martin Fowler's (of Refactoring, Analysis Patterns fame) employer offer a consultancy service (I read in one of Fowler's articles) for automatic DB change management, tied in with code changes. The other way to do it is all at runtime and in code, but you need runtime support for class creation etc. (like in CLOS-MOP). This works by having the simplest, most general way of accessing data, but you have to handle all the possibilities at runtime.
Summary: needs way of keeping generated code in synch with changing DB schema.
what about a desktop? they are so much harder to steal.
It's more about newspapers: yesterday's news is not news. The assumtion is that old news is worthless; therefore, old newspapers are worthless.
Old newspapers are nearly worthless. It is worth having an archive, but only a few of them, so old newspapers are worth very much less than their cover price.
So... by anology, old software must be worthless. Hmm. 'Old' webservers are useless ('cos they will get r00ted in no time). But old, offline typesetting software? Pfft. 'Old' here really means 'unmaintained'. I think that an analogy with rusty machinery is a better one for unmaintained open source software:
at any point you can take it to a mechanic to get an estimate on repairs;
old models continue to be useful, in certain applications, as long as they are adequately maintained.
... perhaps because that is the business model he knows best?
You don't address the grandparent's point: that some things that were bad are no longer.
"So it's still socially acceptable to mock blacks, women and other minorities, and denigrate them in public? The income levels for these minorities haven't risen?"
Do you deny these claims, or deny that the constitute a good change? Ceteris paribus, they constitute progress, I think. With reference to your JE, perhaps the grandparent is broadly correct (no claims of universal truth an'all) and, in particular, correct that it is unacceptable to be overtly racist in public life: eg. in a publicly broadcast political advert.
To anticipate replies, this could be called simple 'political correctness' and hypocrisy, where racist newsreaders are made-up by ethnic minority workers and read carefully worded articles that show no racism. Be that as it may, that's still an improvement since a) when the hypocrites are revealed, they are punished; b) many kids grow up never hearing a racial slur, or other mocking.
Anyway, I'm not in a position to judge accurately the facts, but if the grandparent is correct, I'd say that constitutes progress, however incomplete.
'KDE 3.3' (in packaging terms) is ambiguous. There are several KDE source packages:
kdebase (including konqueror etc.),
kdelibs (kdelibs! etc.),
kdenetwork (kopete, kppp etc.),
kdepim (knode, kmail etc.).
Probably even more (I'm not counting kdevelop and other applications.
Each with several binary packages...
This leads to bizarre discontinuities. There is also the problem that kde 3.2 has outstanding security bugs which don't look like being fixed in sarge. kdepim 3.3 was in experimental last week. I had no problems upgrading (but havn't caught the latest uploads to unstable). I'll try them now.
just 'cos it has 86 in the name, doesn't mean it doesn't run on other arches.
examples of what GNOME does that KDE does not?
that doesn't require proprietary software! :)
And it's in Debian experimental
perhaps it's 'cos I don't want American TV....
Like most satire, you get the superficial feeling of amusement from the video ("haha Wubya is dancing around the sceen like David Hasselhopf in that South Park episode!"), but with 'The Message' at the same time. I remember watching Rory Bremner (at his peak - British satirical impersonating comic) and laughing and wondering whether I agreed with the policy being criticized, or with Bremner, or had a different opinion. Good satire will address important issues (like Bremner often did). Perhaps it's 'cos I couldn't see them (see above) but I only saw 1 issue raised in the video: Iraq. Perhaps that is the only issue that really separates the Democrats and Republicans...
anyone else find the video somewhat short of hilarious?
"original artist"?
orbitz.com (running http://www.itasoftware.com/) for one: see google groups.
Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 2000. The most successful software product line in history. Each was an almost complete re-write. Each re-write was necessitated by the predecessor being un-improvable (and no-longer-adequate). If we are talking market success, being re-written is a sign of success, not failure (since being funded to be re-written requires that the product made some money in the first place).
never built a real world system?
"C++ sucks if you want to use .Net anyway;"
.NET-CLI work (like Java for JVM work).
It does seem strange. I don't think I would voluntarily use managed C++, only native C++ wrapped in C# (or even VB.NET!). The sheer annoyance of using a language that looks superficially familiar but is fundamentally different (all RAII code would break, IIUC etc.) would make it easier to learn a separate language for
But I like reading and writing as portable code as possible. I find reading code that uses eg. GCC extensions (PDF) unpleasant.
But nothing prevented anyone else from writing another test suite...
only part of KDE 3.3 is in unstable. some (all?) of the rest is in experimental. this means that 3.3 in toto will not make it into sarge. it would be crazy to have part 3.2, part 3.3 in a release (not to mention potential conflicts etc).
"Also, note that there are quite a few RC bugs in KDE 3.2.3 including security holes and kmail eating your email, etc. Upstream does not consider non-security issues to be big enough to backport to a no longer current release, since KDE 3.3 has already been released to packagers."
Source.
Basically someone is going to have to backport these critical fixes (probably Ben Burton) cos the Release Managers don't want KDE 3.3 in sarge (for obvious reasons).
try in your /etc/apt/sources.list: (watch for wrapping)
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main
then:
apt-get update && apt-get install mplayer-686
(assuming u have a p6 era chip).
"Adobe Acrobat has always been a Windows-3.1-esque piece of junk; it's probably the only modern viewer-style application that noticeably pauses between page flips."
:). Ps,pdf is non-trivial to interpret. Im sure that implementing pre-caching wouldnt be too hard though.
Try ghostview + gsview (on windows). On complicated ps, pdf you can see it render
"Adobe's mission of a general-purpose, cross-platform, academic-friendly document format"
Minor nit: ps, pdf is for printers. It's designed to be non-editable so is of limited academic use, except for publication. It's a publishing format, not an academic format. (Mathematicians use TeX AFAIK).