When all of the obvious, trivial methods of computation are patented, how will I, the "after working hours, pursuing my dream" programmer be able to produce the next new whiz bang program?
Doesn't the US like the small startups anymore?
Not that it matters, but I get corrected on this everytime I post using it and get a cheap laugh out of it. Grammar correction is the closest thing to rhetorical surrender that you can get in online discussion and each time, I reach over to my virtual scoreboard and cut another knotch.
It does suck. As everybody has pointed out already, this price is for any song irregardless if its new or old, and the old songs have like zero costs to them, they've made their promotion costs, theres no media costs, this is simple pricing in reaction to rising demand. Apple should in reality get bigger cuts of the pie for older stuff, they're the one taking the risk of the online music venture.
Pricing for new music should be high, older stuff could be much lower. If older stuff would be priced less (in any format), I'd buy a ton of music, but right now I don't bother.
I live in an area with lots of tall pines. My plan is to make the worlds biggest slingshot. So far I'm a bit short of orbital velocity, so I might apply for some money to get better rubber bands.
As I sat patiently with my irc client and 2 or 3 telnet sessions, I watched the Efnet (pronounced "arfnet") servers split and join quite regularily. During one extended split, I joined #chat, and sat around with a few folks who had also recently joined up during the latest split and we shot the shit, shared the newly obtained ops on the freshly created channel and exchanged "a/s/l" (age sex location) and c-t-c's (care to cyber) and "brb" (big round breasts) and what not. The few other folks had stuff to do I guess so I casually asked for ops, they opped me.
I nonchalently joined with a few other clients on other servers, apparently they weren't split like mine, they sat idle and then it happened, the magic moment, I saw some sporadic, bursty joins, any serverops on the recent joins, I replied with a corresponding deop, and as my other clients joined, I opped them.
Although I'm basically a computer poser and don't know jack, I am a reasonably good typist, so what I lacked in "war scripts", I made up with timely accurate typing, and pretty soon, the servers were all joined up, and I was the man.
Of course, first up was to ban Baron and his army of fags, and next was to reverse the draconian maze of *!*aol.com and *!*compuserv.com bans, remove the freedom hating channel limits and -t the channel, so that any true patriot of any country could help the channel out with new topics. I was king of #chat for maybe an hour and a half, everyone agreed that I was the best op #chat had ever seen, I opped many new helpers and for one brief moment in time, I ran the best fucking chat channel on the net, until I was ultimately defeated by the nonscaleability of irc in general and the pisspoor net conditions that awarded me the channel to begin with.
But man, the afterglow of my shining moment on top of irc's "hierarchy", heck, it lasted for darn near the rest of the day! I highly recommend irc and all the lamousity that goes with it (although op's now have to be nabbed with social engineering, the ircd coders have sucked much of the fun out of chat nowadays).
I rarely browse with just one window. For slashdot replies, I subconciously open a new window.
Especially noticeable on dialup, I find that most browsers when hitting the back button will often want to reload some of the previous page, so right clicking a link for a new window isn't just a personal quirk, its a way of browsing. I bet if folks took a poll, you'd find the single window browsing folks are in the minority.
When I worked on VMS, it had this big filesystem, I loved having btree index's available without any third party software needed. Still, these systems played nice with other protocols, most noteably when you put a good tcp stack on VMS they were hardy internet machines. You surely didn't have other software hitting these file systems directly, but with VMS and decent tcp, they'd export their filesystems in a friendly way.
Is direct filesystem access really a must? With the price of boxes, are dual boot systems really a compelling business case? (I like them, but I have a house full of junk computers hehe)
Microsoft will have to play nice with the network, additionally, by the time longhorn comes out there may be enough samba servers around that compatibility (on the client side) may be important. Do you really have to be at version X of SMB fileservices with any given version of Microsofts software? Sure there are going to be shops that want the 100 percent Microsoft solution, but if Linux/BSD is up to it, theres nothing saying that in a few years running OSS will simply be the competitive thing to do.
Clearly Microsoft isn't going to lower their prices, not with this monster of a development project pigging out on excess product release schedules.
With Mono, compatibility was always a matter of how much paranoia the developers could tolerate in their planning.
As for patents, Microsoft is only doing what the patent office allows.
Heck I can stick to the Windows environment for less than that if you strech it out over the normal 2 to 3 years between releases of new MS products.
The downside to that is of course you'd have to run the Windows environment.
The Linux corporate desktop is probably going to need support to take off. Some company's going to have to step up with a game plan and see who bites, so this seems to be a pretty natural thing for Redhat to do, after all, they're in the business of making Linux work.
Well, from the way I look at it, why MUST a parent send their children to school at all?
Probably home schooling is the answer to that. Done properly, the little ones can handle full time jobs to boot, and this was probably how it was done when the US could still innovate.
Sure, you're pulling money out of the public schools for school vouchers, but if a district gets $7000 per kid (national average) and gives out a $3500 voucher for a kid to attend private school, that means the school district has an additional $3500 it can distribute to the other children while reducing the class size. What's the disadvantage?
I'm ok with extra money. I would informally call this a "scholarship" grant. If it doesn't reduce the public education budget, how could I object?
Besides, what ever happened to "pro-choice" thought? I have the choice whether to abort my child, but I don't have a choice of what school to send them to unless I have lots of money and can afford a private education? That seems... wrong. But the liberals seem to think it's okay to keep the poor and underpriviledged under the rug.
I guess it would be worth reconsidering vouchers, for instance, could they conceivably completely replace the public school system? What do we do with the atypical students, do we make a private institution for them, with an emphasis on control rather than education? During the transition to private education institutions, would we have a time period that wrecked an entire class of students as we abandoned the sinking ship of public education?
If we have a voucher system that took funds from public education, we'd simply reduce public education. If we had a voucher system that was in fact new money, we'd hurt the budget.
If we're strictly talking choice here, why not choose to put the kid to work full time at 16 to help pay the family bills? (Ok, thats flamebait;-)
The problem with the attempt to "improve public schools" is that the ONLY way people propose improving is by increasing funding. The problem is that the U.S. already spends more money per student than ANY OTHER COUNTRY yet our results are less than first. So obviously money isn't the issue.
Its a bit of a self reinforcing problem. If the US could improve its basic research, perhaps we could research the learning process itself, yet the very problem we're discussing is a general decline of research in the US, and I do believe its rooted in the politicalizing of science from both the left and the right.
I can also point out that this results from a real lack of discourse on matters of importance and the solution seems to be to remove money from public education rather than fixing what is broke.
Politicizing public education means that at least one political segment of the population favors public education and one side doesn't, and all this looks to be is a mess. What happened to the US taking pride in the universal access to good public education, regardless of political affiliation?
Compare classic conservative thought with the "new right". With the new right wing, there is a constant disregard and spinning of scientific thought and a seeming reliance upon patriotic and moralistic catchphrases rather than real thoughtful discourse. I'm not the only one who feels that way, and thats why I included that thought as part of the problem.
Regarding the voucher system, all I see is money steered away from the public education system. This, combined with subjective evaluations of who's gifted and who's not makes for bad karma, do you really advance the brilliant kids, or just the conventional kids who the teachers believe are exceptionally conforming?
When you privatize, you do so at the risk of forgetting the public good and neglecting areas that can benefit from public oversight. If you can't successfully evaluate and improve public schools while having every element having public oversight, what makes you feel that privatization is going to work any better, what with the possibilities of removing many elements of the education process from public scrutany.
The US needs to honestly reexamine its value system and this includes the left as well as the right. The current climate of political discourse is simply divisive and excludes deliberate debate of the issues that really matter and focuses on who has the better 30 second soundbite.
What with the right wing dominancy, corporate patent frenzy, and general all around discouragement of any thinking that isn't part of the patriotic mainstream (you're either with us or against us), I can understand why the search for truth and understanding gets short thrift in the US.
With the newer better EU, and the technological progress of the far eastern region coupled with the sudden roll of cultural trendsetters, the US could easily settle into a new roll as the greatest trailer park in the world.
Not to mention that the US has to hitch space rides with the Soviets nowadays. Tough times for close minds.
I've been having some interest in the java world lately, being a VB slug I thought I'd look at the other side of the programming world and while java looks great, and J2EE has success, I'm not seeing the warm fuzzies I was hoping for regarding enterprise javabeans (EJB) and wonder if I should even take the plunge to learn this tech.
Good thread about this EJB stuff, apparently in reply to a very interesting critique about EJB, seems like the technology might not match the hype. Since the open source versions may still need to follow the (apparently ever moving) spec from Sun, are there even compelling reasons to study this technology?
This product in development speaks for the possibility of a legal linux dvd player. If there were trusted versions of linux (perfectly possible with a signed kernel), there could indeed be a licensed dvd player for linux. The problem is of course that since the DVD encryption is so pathetic, nobody's going to pay serious money for a linux player when a few lines of perl will do the job.
I for one am fine with DRM'ed digital media. If the large media producers only released their products with unbreakable DRM, we wouldn't have things like the RIAA suing downloaders and all of this fear of an otherwise wonderful thing (the net). RMS is dead on with his worries that oppressive copyright enforcement can lead to a police-like state, but at the same time, the US and other countries have so much of their economies depending on white collar intellectual property development that this makes the elimination of IP pretty darn tough to stomach, what with the accompanying elimination of an entire large segment of the economy.
Folks have to remember that as much as DRM and draconian copyright policies suck, eliminating the development of software for pay would clearly be tough, heck just look at the fear outsourcing strikes in programmers.
The problem with the compatibility argument is that it's wrong. The primary purpose of the license string is to track whether the kernel has loaded a closed-source module.
This is much the same as Microsofts signed drivers strategy, only without the robustness and cheat prevention. While the advantage is clear with open source and troubleshooting, how are you going to really get an advantage from a "GPL" marker if me, joe the amateur c hacker removes a line or two from a module source code to make it run faster, leaves the "GPL" marker, then sends a bogus bug report?
Clearly theres going to be an implied trust factor with bug reporters, whereas signed code tends to focus somewhat less on trust and more on enforcement.
maybe the same audio could be scanned several times with different filters for different bands of frequencies. (Assuming there are digital bandpass filters, not that I'd know how to make one %^)
Seems like it could make things more manageable or otherwise get on top of the note speed vs resolution problem. I had imagined some time ago doing the entire thing with enough bandpass filters but then the more precise the bandpass filters (analog thinking) the more "ring" they'd produce and this would indeed cut into the time accuracy. Clearly the human ear and brain can do it though and this is done with many sensors looking for a their own particular frequency and we humans can appreciate fast notes, of course where it goes in the brain is anybodys guess.
Looks like when you post stuff to hacked (or otherwise aquired) servers, they'd turn into warez honeypots that can allow some insight into the "primary crack" levels.
How do they skew? From reading, an application of FFT is to move from the time domain to the frequency domain. Visualizing this, it seems to me that results would produce values indicating what frequencies were active during a given time interval. Given this, can you then have a graph of frequencies updated periodically (say for some microseconds) then with further work, determine what notes are actually playing? Watching how midi software can actively write sheet music based on what keys are played on a keyboard then "quantify" the results to line notes up to their nearest interval (say 16th or 32nd notes), seems then it would be a simple as searching sheet music. Noise in the audio could be clipped at some level to narrow the search.
FFT (fast fourier transforms?) actually works on an mp3's audio content and analyzes the waveforms encoded in the file. Bit by bit comparisons aren't needed, and the tag isn't part of the audio content so probably wouldn't be looked at.
The last time I tried entrophy, it was still small and the encryption was trivial and non robust. As much as I'd like to see a c based freenet workalike, I'd hazard a guess that entrophy's still an experiment at this point.
Thats not ray tracing, thats something called the "painters" algorithm for graphics rendering.
Ray tracing is a poor choice for video games, more for realistic rendering of images and its quite slow, for each pixel visible, a "ray" is sent out from the viewport so to speak and the corresponding pixel's brightness is then determined by what that ray encounters, this makes shadows, reflections, and all that other stuff that makes for great photorealistic computer rendering, much like the dreamworks and pixar studio work.
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When all of the obvious, trivial methods of computation are patented, how will I, the "after working hours, pursuing my dream" programmer be able to produce the next new whiz bang program? Doesn't the US like the small startups anymore?
Cheers!
Pricing for new music should be high, older stuff could be much lower. If older stuff would be priced less (in any format), I'd buy a ton of music, but right now I don't bother.
I live in an area with lots of tall pines. My plan is to make the worlds biggest slingshot. So far I'm a bit short of orbital velocity, so I might apply for some money to get better rubber bands.
I nonchalently joined with a few other clients on other servers, apparently they weren't split like mine, they sat idle and then it happened, the magic moment, I saw some sporadic, bursty joins, any serverops on the recent joins, I replied with a corresponding deop, and as my other clients joined, I opped them.
Although I'm basically a computer poser and don't know jack, I am a reasonably good typist, so what I lacked in "war scripts", I made up with timely accurate typing, and pretty soon, the servers were all joined up, and I was the man.
Of course, first up was to ban Baron and his army of fags, and next was to reverse the draconian maze of *!*aol.com and *!*compuserv.com bans, remove the freedom hating channel limits and -t the channel, so that any true patriot of any country could help the channel out with new topics. I was king of #chat for maybe an hour and a half, everyone agreed that I was the best op #chat had ever seen, I opped many new helpers and for one brief moment in time, I ran the best fucking chat channel on the net, until I was ultimately defeated by the nonscaleability of irc in general and the pisspoor net conditions that awarded me the channel to begin with.
But man, the afterglow of my shining moment on top of irc's "hierarchy", heck, it lasted for darn near the rest of the day! I highly recommend irc and all the lamousity that goes with it (although op's now have to be nabbed with social engineering, the ircd coders have sucked much of the fun out of chat nowadays).
Especially noticeable on dialup, I find that most browsers when hitting the back button will often want to reload some of the previous page, so right clicking a link for a new window isn't just a personal quirk, its a way of browsing. I bet if folks took a poll, you'd find the single window browsing folks are in the minority.
Is direct filesystem access really a must? With the price of boxes, are dual boot systems really a compelling business case? (I like them, but I have a house full of junk computers hehe)
Microsoft will have to play nice with the network, additionally, by the time longhorn comes out there may be enough samba servers around that compatibility (on the client side) may be important. Do you really have to be at version X of SMB fileservices with any given version of Microsofts software? Sure there are going to be shops that want the 100 percent Microsoft solution, but if Linux/BSD is up to it, theres nothing saying that in a few years running OSS will simply be the competitive thing to do.
Clearly Microsoft isn't going to lower their prices, not with this monster of a development project pigging out on excess product release schedules.
With Mono, compatibility was always a matter of how much paranoia the developers could tolerate in their planning.
As for patents, Microsoft is only doing what the patent office allows.
The downside to that is of course you'd have to run the Windows environment.
The Linux corporate desktop is probably going to need support to take off. Some company's going to have to step up with a game plan and see who bites, so this seems to be a pretty natural thing for Redhat to do, after all, they're in the business of making Linux work.
Probably home schooling is the answer to that. Done properly, the little ones can handle full time jobs to boot, and this was probably how it was done when the US could still innovate.
Sure, you're pulling money out of the public schools for school vouchers, but if a district gets $7000 per kid (national average) and gives out a $3500 voucher for a kid to attend private school, that means the school district has an additional $3500 it can distribute to the other children while reducing the class size. What's the disadvantage?
I'm ok with extra money. I would informally call this a "scholarship" grant. If it doesn't reduce the public education budget, how could I object?
Besides, what ever happened to "pro-choice" thought? I have the choice whether to abort my child, but I don't have a choice of what school to send them to unless I have lots of money and can afford a private education? That seems... wrong. But the liberals seem to think it's okay to keep the poor and underpriviledged under the rug.
I guess it would be worth reconsidering vouchers, for instance, could they conceivably completely replace the public school system? What do we do with the atypical students, do we make a private institution for them, with an emphasis on control rather than education? During the transition to private education institutions, would we have a time period that wrecked an entire class of students as we abandoned the sinking ship of public education?
If we have a voucher system that took funds from public education, we'd simply reduce public education. If we had a voucher system that was in fact new money, we'd hurt the budget.
If we're strictly talking choice here, why not choose to put the kid to work full time at 16 to help pay the family bills? (Ok, thats flamebait ;-)
The problem with the attempt to "improve public schools" is that the ONLY way people propose improving is by increasing funding. The problem is that the U.S. already spends more money per student than ANY OTHER COUNTRY yet our results are less than first. So obviously money isn't the issue.
Its a bit of a self reinforcing problem. If the US could improve its basic research, perhaps we could research the learning process itself, yet the very problem we're discussing is a general decline of research in the US, and I do believe its rooted in the politicalizing of science from both the left and the right.
I can also point out that this results from a real lack of discourse on matters of importance and the solution seems to be to remove money from public education rather than fixing what is broke.
Politicizing public education means that at least one political segment of the population favors public education and one side doesn't, and all this looks to be is a mess. What happened to the US taking pride in the universal access to good public education, regardless of political affiliation?
Compare classic conservative thought with the "new right". With the new right wing, there is a constant disregard and spinning of scientific thought and a seeming reliance upon patriotic and moralistic catchphrases rather than real thoughtful discourse. I'm not the only one who feels that way, and thats why I included that thought as part of the problem.
Regarding the voucher system, all I see is money steered away from the public education system. This, combined with subjective evaluations of who's gifted and who's not makes for bad karma, do you really advance the brilliant kids, or just the conventional kids who the teachers believe are exceptionally conforming?
When you privatize, you do so at the risk of forgetting the public good and neglecting areas that can benefit from public oversight. If you can't successfully evaluate and improve public schools while having every element having public oversight, what makes you feel that privatization is going to work any better, what with the possibilities of removing many elements of the education process from public scrutany.
The US needs to honestly reexamine its value system and this includes the left as well as the right. The current climate of political discourse is simply divisive and excludes deliberate debate of the issues that really matter and focuses on who has the better 30 second soundbite.
With the newer better EU, and the technological progress of the far eastern region coupled with the sudden roll of cultural trendsetters, the US could easily settle into a new roll as the greatest trailer park in the world.
Not to mention that the US has to hitch space rides with the Soviets nowadays. Tough times for close minds.
Good thread about this EJB stuff, apparently in reply to a very interesting critique about EJB, seems like the technology might not match the hype. Since the open source versions may still need to follow the (apparently ever moving) spec from Sun, are there even compelling reasons to study this technology?
This product in development speaks for the possibility of a legal linux dvd player. If there were trusted versions of linux (perfectly possible with a signed kernel), there could indeed be a licensed dvd player for linux. The problem is of course that since the DVD encryption is so pathetic, nobody's going to pay serious money for a linux player when a few lines of perl will do the job.
I for one am fine with DRM'ed digital media. If the large media producers only released their products with unbreakable DRM, we wouldn't have things like the RIAA suing downloaders and all of this fear of an otherwise wonderful thing (the net). RMS is dead on with his worries that oppressive copyright enforcement can lead to a police-like state, but at the same time, the US and other countries have so much of their economies depending on white collar intellectual property development that this makes the elimination of IP pretty darn tough to stomach, what with the accompanying elimination of an entire large segment of the economy.
Folks have to remember that as much as DRM and draconian copyright policies suck, eliminating the development of software for pay would clearly be tough, heck just look at the fear outsourcing strikes in programmers.
This is much the same as Microsofts signed drivers strategy, only without the robustness and cheat prevention. While the advantage is clear with open source and troubleshooting, how are you going to really get an advantage from a "GPL" marker if me, joe the amateur c hacker removes a line or two from a module source code to make it run faster, leaves the "GPL" marker, then sends a bogus bug report?
Clearly theres going to be an implied trust factor with bug reporters, whereas signed code tends to focus somewhat less on trust and more on enforcement.
Thats what I'd do.
I broke down and learned enough vi to work when debian's woody pushed joe to cd 2.
Seems like it could make things more manageable or otherwise get on top of the note speed vs resolution problem. I had imagined some time ago doing the entire thing with enough bandpass filters but then the more precise the bandpass filters (analog thinking) the more "ring" they'd produce and this would indeed cut into the time accuracy. Clearly the human ear and brain can do it though and this is done with many sensors looking for a their own particular frequency and we humans can appreciate fast notes, of course where it goes in the brain is anybodys guess.
Looks like when you post stuff to hacked (or otherwise aquired) servers, they'd turn into warez honeypots that can allow some insight into the "primary crack" levels.
How do they skew? From reading, an application of FFT is to move from the time domain to the frequency domain. Visualizing this, it seems to me that results would produce values indicating what frequencies were active during a given time interval. Given this, can you then have a graph of frequencies updated periodically (say for some microseconds) then with further work, determine what notes are actually playing? Watching how midi software can actively write sheet music based on what keys are played on a keyboard then "quantify" the results to line notes up to their nearest interval (say 16th or 32nd notes), seems then it would be a simple as searching sheet music. Noise in the audio could be clipped at some level to narrow the search.
FFT (fast fourier transforms?) actually works on an mp3's audio content and analyzes the waveforms encoded in the file. Bit by bit comparisons aren't needed, and the tag isn't part of the audio content so probably wouldn't be looked at.
The last time I tried entrophy, it was still small and the encryption was trivial and non robust. As much as I'd like to see a c based freenet workalike, I'd hazard a guess that entrophy's still an experiment at this point.
Verisign itself bought the domain name "ohfuck.com".
Ray tracing is a poor choice for video games, more for realistic rendering of images and its quite slow, for each pixel visible, a "ray" is sent out from the viewport so to speak and the corresponding pixel's brightness is then determined by what that ray encounters, this makes shadows, reflections, and all that other stuff that makes for great photorealistic computer rendering, much like the dreamworks and pixar studio work.