In the same fashion that Verizon has strung FiOS lines in my neighborhood, and yet many people do not subscribe to it.
That argument only holds up insofar as the purpose of college is the same as Verizon's business plan. I don't think that most people would agree that it's an apt comparison.
But then I believe in individual liberty and choice, which I know is a foreign concept on today's campuses.
You have the individual liberty and choice to not go to college. You have individual liberty and choice when you live off campus. Your liberty and choice don't necessarily extend to you deciding how colleges should allocate their resources. Pooling bandwidth is smart, and probably ultimately cheaper per-student.
Yeah, colleges often don't let freshmen living on campus have cars. They often don't let you choose your own room. They don't let you do whatever you want with college property, and they don't let you choose how professors spend their time. Don't make it sound like they're infringing on your civil rights.
The bill is carefully worded such that only ODF could pass its test as "open."
That's favoring one vendor over another.
I totally agree with you there, and that is what I came here to say.
I think it depends. Is it really designed to force people to use OpenOffice, or just ODF? I believe that OpenOffice isn't the only program that can read ODF, so there isn't a limit to one vendor. Microsoft can implement ODF.
But even if only ODF passes, was that intentional, or is ODF the only viable office suite format right now? I could imagine someone implementing valid rules for "openness" and it just working out that MSO files don't qualify. Text, HTML, and PDF may be fine under some circumstances, but they aren't fully-features office documents.
Coke licenses the right to install machines* and the school gets a portion of the sales. The WB/university licensing sounds like a similar arrangement, albeit more complicated.
Except that the schools are paying in this case. It's like if schools were being asked to pay Coca Cola because some of the students were setting up their own Coke machines... or something. No metaphor you use is going to make sense, because the plan doesn't really make sense.
Considering that colleges already have their network and phone system installed, what makes you think they'd save any money by not providing the service to students in their dorms? You're talking like colleges string individual expensive lines to each room, which isn't really the case.
Besides, they have a vested interest in fostering community, enabling communication, etc. Some of those resources may even be necessary for classes.
So I guess the question is, will this kind of covenant work? If it will, why not extend to other rightholders?
I think the right question might just be "huh?" As in, what are these people even talking about?
Why should universities or ISPs be asked to pay some kind of license fee or buy into any kind of "covenant"? It's... hell, I don't know, like Coca Cola asking a toll road to pay them part of the toll on the chance that someone might be smuggling cola from Mexico on that road. No, I don't think what I said made sense, but it makes as much sense as this plan.
I understand the record industry is in favor of plans that require other people pay them money. I'd like to propose that ISPs charge everyone a fee on top of the monthly service and then pay that money to me. That'd be great as far as I'm concerned, but why should anyone else go for it?
Does that mean a page that looks one way in firefox will look the same in IE8? No, for the same reason it won't look the same in Opera or Safari/Chrome -- No renderer is rendering standard compliant html exactly the same.
I was never great at web development, and haven't done any in a couple years now, so maybe some of my complaints are out of date. However, when I was developing websites, the procedure was always: code it according to standards, test it in all the browsers except IE, and then figure out whether minor tweaks were needed to get it perfect in all those browsers. Then test it in IE, it would look like total crap, and I'd have to figure out what crazy bulls$*t I had to do to make it render properly in IE. Coding it for IE alone always took 5 times as long as getting it to work in the other browsers in the first place.
In the past, IE has simply not adhered to standards. IE7 was notably better when last I checked, but still pretty bad. So the question is, how much better is IE8? If it's not much better, then I'm not going to use it.
Sorry, yeah, sure, I guess something like that could be useful. Sometimes I just get annoyed because it seems like people keep throwing in extra "features" that I won't ever use, and yet they don't do anything to solve real problems.
Yes, it does seem to work-- just so long as the US federal government, several state governments, and the whole EU are battling Microsoft to keep them from engaging in anti-competitive practices.
The free market works, but this is a case where governmental intervention is required to keep a market free.
I think you've confused me even more. If the point is just to allow you to click on an address and bring up Google Maps, and it doesn't happen automatically, then why not just put a link to Google Maps in the address?
My first question with every new release of IE is, "How well does it render valid HTML+CSS?"
Yeah, I don't really care if it's fast and has "Web Accelerators". Will it display properly written pages properly? Are developers going to have to keep putting hacks into their pages to deal with IE quirks? If they aren't adhering to standards, then it's not really worth much.
Supposedly Yoda was only a tiny little man because they couldn't figure out how to do the special effects to make a realistic looking giant. Yoda was originally supposed to be 10 feet tall, but that just didn't work.
That probably sounds random, but I think it's a decent example of what you're talking about. When faced with problems/obstacles, people are forced to get creative. Often enough, they end up coming up with something better than if the obstacle wasn't there. Lucas's movies certainly haven't gotten better now that he can use CGI to create whatever he can imagine.
Part of the reason for my post is that I'm generally of the opinion that teenagers would do better if we made better use of them. To some people that might sound opportunistic or something, like I'm advocating taking advantage of teenagers for slave labor, but I just mean we should probably stop treating them like useless idiots. If you're constantly treating young adults like they can't possibly do anything right or have anything useful to offer, then they might just live up to those expectations.
I bet your apprenticeship program really helps those students.
Yes, because it really is as simple as assigning students a project to "do an elaborate science project on your own within the confines of arbitrary rules and with no useful direction from your teacher."
Given how well that works at spurring student interest, why did the submitter even bother asking?
When I was in high school, there was some kind of pilot program that I participated in where we helped do actual scientific research.
Now I have no idea how they set it up or whether our work was ever actually taken seriously by anyone, since I was just a student at the time. I didn't have insight into that sort of thing. But the setup was that the teacher was put in touch with an organization that did research regarding weather patterns. We were given access to collect remote data from various weather stations, and even helped set up a few weather stations ourselves.
So at the beginning of the year, the organization and the teacher worked out some projects which involved a fair amount of grunt work and not a lot of expertise (i.e. something a group of students might have some hope of doing) but that might possibly be helpful to the organization (at least supposedly). We were given a few options of different questions we might pursue, and then started collecting data under the supervision of the teacher, who I believe was something of a meteorologist to begin with.
After a semester or year, whichever it was, we tried to pull together everything we'd done all year, analyze the data, and come up with a report to send to this organization, attempting to answer the question they asked us to research.
Looking back, I would be very surprised if our work was at all useful to anyone. In fact, I have no doubt that the report very quickly found its way into the circular file, though they may have kept some of the data we collected for their own purposes. But at the time, that really didn't matter. It was kind of thrilling anyway.
I don't think it was thrilling because of the science itself. Weather was far less interesting to me than something like relativity or quantum mechanics. What was thrilling about it was:
We were trying to find an actual answer to a question where no one knew the answer. This wasn't one of those experiments where they have you mix NaOH and HCl and at the end the teacher tells you that the correct answer was "you made salt water". It was something where the teacher himself couldn't say what we were going to find before we started.
It was (theoretically) actually useful research. We weren't just spinning our wheels doing busy work. Most of the time, me and my friends would make a bond fire at the end of each school year and throw all of our papers and homework on it because none of that stuff mattered or meant anything. But with this program, we were given the impression that the report would be stored someplace as real research that might actually be useful to someone at some point.
Oh, right-- I got my Thief games mixed up. When you said "Deadly Shadows" I was thinking of the first one, which was great. The second one was also great-- maybe even better than the first, but the third one was a big disappointment.
I wish the IP for that franchise would get passed to someone talented who could make a sequel that did the original some justice.
I think there's just a perception, deserved or not, that Sun is somehow holding back from really allowing their products to be open. They think that IBM hasn't open sourced all their products, but when they've contributed to FOSS projects, it's been on the up-and-up, while Sun is pretending to support FOSS but in reality dragging their feet.
I've heard people complain that Sun stonewalls improvements to OpenOffice that don't fit with their strategic vision, even if lots of people want those improvements. I've read a number of suggestions that OpenOffice should be forked, and I'm not sure why it isn't if it's really such a big problem. But then people think that Sun chose their license for OpenSolaris particularly to prevent things from being ported over to Linux. I remember people complaining that they were very slow to fully open source Java. I wouldn't pretend to know well enough to argue either way on any of these particular issues-- I'm just saying I've read the complaints.
I'm not saying these things are fair, just that the perception is floating around out there. So when people believe that IBM is more in favor of FOSS than Sun, they aren't weighing absolute contributions. It seems almost like an emotional vibe of which company they feel is more honest in their support.
Maybe I'm wrong about that, though. I'm not very knowledgeable about this.
As far as Thief goes, you have to admit at least that it was very good for the time. Making it hard to win in a fair fight made sense for the game, especially since it was one of the first sneaker games, and they kind of had to smack you over the head to let you know that you weren't supposed to run-and-gun through the game. If you didn't want to sneak, then you simply picked the wrong game.
Also, I was remembering Thief as a game that rightly didn't follow the "once your cover is broken, it's broken" thing. It was more like, if they saw you, you couldn't simply run into the nearest shadow and be safe. You had to evade them first, sufficiently that they wouldn't particularly know where you were, and then hide in the shadow. The effect wasn't perfect, but certainly you could get back into hiding after being discovered without killing the person who saw you.
I don't know what I'd think of Thief if I played it now, but at the time, it did seem to be some of the most interesting AI in a FPS, if only for how limited the enemies' knowledge was.
Yeah, plus with lots of games that include sneaking, it's like once your cover is broken it's broken. A single guard anywhere catches a glimpse of you, and suddenly the entire world is coming down on your head. Plus, there's no way to shake them unless you kill everyone in a half-mile radius. Some games do a better job than others, but the state of AI still isn't great.
Well that might be a decent hack to get something better, but it doesn't really address the issue: which is that AI in games usually isn't very good in the first place.
The computer *always* knows exactly where you are and can make a perfect shot if it wants to. So-- and this is not knowing anything about how the AI is actually developed-- it seems like developers do something like program the enemies to know what the perfect shot is, then run some random number generator, and then have their shot be off by some function of that random number. It successfully makes them miss sometimes, but it doesn't magically make the enemy into a believable person.
Real people just make very boneheaded decisions, but they don't usually stand in one place running into walls and shooting at the ground.
For all the joking about how Apple is for effete fashion victims, the biggest difference I noticed from the Dell video is that the Apple video focuses almost entirely on functional design.
Well yeah, but part of the thing is if you want to be cool and trendy, you don't walk around saying, "Hey everyone, I'm cool and trendy!"
I don't doubt that Apple was trying to make the Macbook look cool, sexy, or whatever else in their video. The difference is largely that they aren't so stupid as to try to do that by sitting someone down in front of a camera and saying "We're making this video to convince you that the new Macbook is cool and sexy and will make you more powerful."
Well yeah, part of my point is it's like they used the language the ad executive came up with before it was passed to a copywriter for... you know... actually writing the thing.
Compare to this:http://www.apple.com/macbook/the-new-macbook/
Dell even put a foreigner in front of a white background to talk about the design, except he's all out of focus. It's like a retarded copy made by amateurs, filled with marketing speak. "the union of technology with pleasure for the style-conscious individualist"? What the hell does that mean? It was "created to elicit desire and re-define the image of power"? "ultra-thin portable aphrodisiac"?
At best, it looks like it should be the rough draft that their marketing people mocked up as the pitch for some kind of ad. If Dell can't do better than this, then Apple deserves to own the reality distortion field.
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In the same fashion that Verizon has strung FiOS lines in my neighborhood, and yet many people do not subscribe to it.
That argument only holds up insofar as the purpose of college is the same as Verizon's business plan. I don't think that most people would agree that it's an apt comparison.
But then I believe in individual liberty and choice, which I know is a foreign concept on today's campuses.
You have the individual liberty and choice to not go to college. You have individual liberty and choice when you live off campus. Your liberty and choice don't necessarily extend to you deciding how colleges should allocate their resources. Pooling bandwidth is smart, and probably ultimately cheaper per-student.
Yeah, colleges often don't let freshmen living on campus have cars. They often don't let you choose your own room. They don't let you do whatever you want with college property, and they don't let you choose how professors spend their time. Don't make it sound like they're infringing on your civil rights.
The bill is carefully worded such that only ODF could pass its test as "open."
That's favoring one vendor over another.
I totally agree with you there, and that is what I came here to say.
I think it depends. Is it really designed to force people to use OpenOffice, or just ODF? I believe that OpenOffice isn't the only program that can read ODF, so there isn't a limit to one vendor. Microsoft can implement ODF.
But even if only ODF passes, was that intentional, or is ODF the only viable office suite format right now? I could imagine someone implementing valid rules for "openness" and it just working out that MSO files don't qualify. Text, HTML, and PDF may be fine under some circumstances, but they aren't fully-features office documents.
Still, it makes you want to ask how many other places this has happened without leaking.
Coke licenses the right to install machines* and the school gets a portion of the sales. The WB/university licensing sounds like a similar arrangement, albeit more complicated.
Except that the schools are paying in this case. It's like if schools were being asked to pay Coca Cola because some of the students were setting up their own Coke machines... or something. No metaphor you use is going to make sense, because the plan doesn't really make sense.
Considering that colleges already have their network and phone system installed, what makes you think they'd save any money by not providing the service to students in their dorms? You're talking like colleges string individual expensive lines to each room, which isn't really the case.
Besides, they have a vested interest in fostering community, enabling communication, etc. Some of those resources may even be necessary for classes.
So I guess the question is, will this kind of covenant work? If it will, why not extend to other rightholders?
I think the right question might just be "huh?" As in, what are these people even talking about?
Why should universities or ISPs be asked to pay some kind of license fee or buy into any kind of "covenant"? It's... hell, I don't know, like Coca Cola asking a toll road to pay them part of the toll on the chance that someone might be smuggling cola from Mexico on that road. No, I don't think what I said made sense, but it makes as much sense as this plan.
I understand the record industry is in favor of plans that require other people pay them money. I'd like to propose that ISPs charge everyone a fee on top of the monthly service and then pay that money to me. That'd be great as far as I'm concerned, but why should anyone else go for it?
Does that mean a page that looks one way in firefox will look the same in IE8? No, for the same reason it won't look the same in Opera or Safari/Chrome -- No renderer is rendering standard compliant html exactly the same.
I was never great at web development, and haven't done any in a couple years now, so maybe some of my complaints are out of date. However, when I was developing websites, the procedure was always: code it according to standards, test it in all the browsers except IE, and then figure out whether minor tweaks were needed to get it perfect in all those browsers. Then test it in IE, it would look like total crap, and I'd have to figure out what crazy bulls$*t I had to do to make it render properly in IE. Coding it for IE alone always took 5 times as long as getting it to work in the other browsers in the first place.
In the past, IE has simply not adhered to standards. IE7 was notably better when last I checked, but still pretty bad. So the question is, how much better is IE8? If it's not much better, then I'm not going to use it.
Whoop-dee-do. I can open a new tab.
Sorry, yeah, sure, I guess something like that could be useful. Sometimes I just get annoyed because it seems like people keep throwing in extra "features" that I won't ever use, and yet they don't do anything to solve real problems.
Yes, it does seem to work-- just so long as the US federal government, several state governments, and the whole EU are battling Microsoft to keep them from engaging in anti-competitive practices.
The free market works, but this is a case where governmental intervention is required to keep a market free.
I think you've confused me even more. If the point is just to allow you to click on an address and bring up Google Maps, and it doesn't happen automatically, then why not just put a link to Google Maps in the address?
My first question with every new release of IE is, "How well does it render valid HTML+CSS?"
Yeah, I don't really care if it's fast and has "Web Accelerators". Will it display properly written pages properly? Are developers going to have to keep putting hacks into their pages to deal with IE quirks? If they aren't adhering to standards, then it's not really worth much.
I hate to have to explain the joke, but we were quoting TV openings.
Sexconker went for Full House, and I responded with Family Guy.
I thought it was funny because it almost seemed like a valid conversational response.
Supposedly Yoda was only a tiny little man because they couldn't figure out how to do the special effects to make a realistic looking giant. Yoda was originally supposed to be 10 feet tall, but that just didn't work.
That probably sounds random, but I think it's a decent example of what you're talking about. When faced with problems/obstacles, people are forced to get creative. Often enough, they end up coming up with something better than if the obstacle wasn't there. Lucas's movies certainly haven't gotten better now that he can use CGI to create whatever he can imagine.
That sounds terrific.
Part of the reason for my post is that I'm generally of the opinion that teenagers would do better if we made better use of them. To some people that might sound opportunistic or something, like I'm advocating taking advantage of teenagers for slave labor, but I just mean we should probably stop treating them like useless idiots. If you're constantly treating young adults like they can't possibly do anything right or have anything useful to offer, then they might just live up to those expectations.
I bet your apprenticeship program really helps those students.
Yes, because it really is as simple as assigning students a project to "do an elaborate science project on your own within the confines of arbitrary rules and with no useful direction from your teacher."
Given how well that works at spurring student interest, why did the submitter even bother asking?
When I was in high school, there was some kind of pilot program that I participated in where we helped do actual scientific research.
Now I have no idea how they set it up or whether our work was ever actually taken seriously by anyone, since I was just a student at the time. I didn't have insight into that sort of thing. But the setup was that the teacher was put in touch with an organization that did research regarding weather patterns. We were given access to collect remote data from various weather stations, and even helped set up a few weather stations ourselves.
So at the beginning of the year, the organization and the teacher worked out some projects which involved a fair amount of grunt work and not a lot of expertise (i.e. something a group of students might have some hope of doing) but that might possibly be helpful to the organization (at least supposedly). We were given a few options of different questions we might pursue, and then started collecting data under the supervision of the teacher, who I believe was something of a meteorologist to begin with.
After a semester or year, whichever it was, we tried to pull together everything we'd done all year, analyze the data, and come up with a report to send to this organization, attempting to answer the question they asked us to research.
Looking back, I would be very surprised if our work was at all useful to anyone. In fact, I have no doubt that the report very quickly found its way into the circular file, though they may have kept some of the data we collected for their own purposes. But at the time, that really didn't matter. It was kind of thrilling anyway.
I don't think it was thrilling because of the science itself. Weather was far less interesting to me than something like relativity or quantum mechanics. What was thrilling about it was:
Oh, right-- I got my Thief games mixed up. When you said "Deadly Shadows" I was thinking of the first one, which was great. The second one was also great-- maybe even better than the first, but the third one was a big disappointment.
I wish the IP for that franchise would get passed to someone talented who could make a sequel that did the original some justice.
I think there's just a perception, deserved or not, that Sun is somehow holding back from really allowing their products to be open. They think that IBM hasn't open sourced all their products, but when they've contributed to FOSS projects, it's been on the up-and-up, while Sun is pretending to support FOSS but in reality dragging their feet.
I've heard people complain that Sun stonewalls improvements to OpenOffice that don't fit with their strategic vision, even if lots of people want those improvements. I've read a number of suggestions that OpenOffice should be forked, and I'm not sure why it isn't if it's really such a big problem. But then people think that Sun chose their license for OpenSolaris particularly to prevent things from being ported over to Linux. I remember people complaining that they were very slow to fully open source Java. I wouldn't pretend to know well enough to argue either way on any of these particular issues-- I'm just saying I've read the complaints.
I'm not saying these things are fair, just that the perception is floating around out there. So when people believe that IBM is more in favor of FOSS than Sun, they aren't weighing absolute contributions. It seems almost like an emotional vibe of which company they feel is more honest in their support.
Maybe I'm wrong about that, though. I'm not very knowledgeable about this.
It seems today that all you see is violence in movies and sex on TV, but where are those good old-fashioned values on which we used to rely?
As far as Thief goes, you have to admit at least that it was very good for the time. Making it hard to win in a fair fight made sense for the game, especially since it was one of the first sneaker games, and they kind of had to smack you over the head to let you know that you weren't supposed to run-and-gun through the game. If you didn't want to sneak, then you simply picked the wrong game.
Also, I was remembering Thief as a game that rightly didn't follow the "once your cover is broken, it's broken" thing. It was more like, if they saw you, you couldn't simply run into the nearest shadow and be safe. You had to evade them first, sufficiently that they wouldn't particularly know where you were, and then hide in the shadow. The effect wasn't perfect, but certainly you could get back into hiding after being discovered without killing the person who saw you.
I don't know what I'd think of Thief if I played it now, but at the time, it did seem to be some of the most interesting AI in a FPS, if only for how limited the enemies' knowledge was.
Yeah, plus with lots of games that include sneaking, it's like once your cover is broken it's broken. A single guard anywhere catches a glimpse of you, and suddenly the entire world is coming down on your head. Plus, there's no way to shake them unless you kill everyone in a half-mile radius. Some games do a better job than others, but the state of AI still isn't great.
Well that might be a decent hack to get something better, but it doesn't really address the issue: which is that AI in games usually isn't very good in the first place.
The computer *always* knows exactly where you are and can make a perfect shot if it wants to. So-- and this is not knowing anything about how the AI is actually developed-- it seems like developers do something like program the enemies to know what the perfect shot is, then run some random number generator, and then have their shot be off by some function of that random number. It successfully makes them miss sometimes, but it doesn't magically make the enemy into a believable person.
Real people just make very boneheaded decisions, but they don't usually stand in one place running into walls and shooting at the ground.
For all the joking about how Apple is for effete fashion victims, the biggest difference I noticed from the Dell video is that the Apple video focuses almost entirely on functional design.
Well yeah, but part of the thing is if you want to be cool and trendy, you don't walk around saying, "Hey everyone, I'm cool and trendy!"
I don't doubt that Apple was trying to make the Macbook look cool, sexy, or whatever else in their video. The difference is largely that they aren't so stupid as to try to do that by sitting someone down in front of a camera and saying "We're making this video to convince you that the new Macbook is cool and sexy and will make you more powerful."
Well yeah, part of my point is it's like they used the language the ad executive came up with before it was passed to a copywriter for... you know... actually writing the thing.
Yeah, that's pretty crazy.
Compare to this:http://www.apple.com/macbook/the-new-macbook/
Dell even put a foreigner in front of a white background to talk about the design, except he's all out of focus. It's like a retarded copy made by amateurs, filled with marketing speak. "the union of technology with pleasure for the style-conscious individualist"? What the hell does that mean? It was "created to elicit desire and re-define the image of power"? "ultra-thin portable aphrodisiac"?
At best, it looks like it should be the rough draft that their marketing people mocked up as the pitch for some kind of ad. If Dell can't do better than this, then Apple deserves to own the reality distortion field.