As a third matter, given the architecture of the Internet and personal computers, the simple act of viewing a downloaded image, listening to webcasting, or sending an email message, creates an incidental or temporary reproduction. And many consumer electronic products temporarily store bits representing audio clips or audio visual works in a buffer as part of the normal operation of that device or appliance. These temporary copies, which are essential to the operation of digital products and networks, should be made unequivocally lawful under the copyright law, and an amendment to that effect should be adopted.
It's nice that someone finally thought to mention that.
Is anybody besides me just the slightest bit concerned about the raging credulity on T.V. these days? Actually, I guess it's nothing new, I mean I suppose it's always been this way, but it's still agravatiing and alarming.
It's fun to ask "what if" questions, but it's wrong to intentionally mislead people and misrepresent evidence for the sake of ratings. (I know, I know--that you, Captain Obvious.)
I have to agree with the other posters on this. For a little bit I was thinking, "cool", but then reality set in. As other people have stated, one immediate question is reliablity. But another really important concern is speed. Has everyone forgotten how horribly, horribly slow these things are? It takes *forever* to copy a meg to/from (especially to) one of these things. They would have to improve the transfer rate by many, *many* orders of magnitude to prevent people from having to wait hours to get all 32MB copied to/from their little floppy. Also, about the reliablity thing again: doesn't it seem like if you put *more* onto the disk surface, you're going to get something that's *less* reliable? So there's something else they'd have to work against...
This is cool. I like the fact that the company mostly fought back in a technical way, rather than through the courts.
As to whether or not what they were doing should be called and what term best describes them, careful consultation of The Jargon File seems to indicate that they were, in fact, cracking the system, not hacking it. At the same time, however, it's clear that they (mostly at least) weren't script kiddies or warez d00dz. Perhaps more terminology is in order. Maybe hacker-cracker? (Just kidding)
Don't these guys realize that when people hold their hands up for a while they get tired?
Has anyone here ever heard of the light pen for MS-DOS? No? Well, there you have it. Before the time of the squeky thingie (i.e. mouse), there was some PC (I think PC jr, so I guess it was PC-DOS, not MS-DOS) that had support for a light pen pointing device. It flopped. Know why? Because a person's hand gets tired after he/she has to hold it in front of the screen for a while. It's called ergonomics and common sense, folks.
Also, if you read the comments at the bottom of the page, there are quite a few people claiming that this idea isn't new anyway.
Yes, the article is overzelous.
Yes, the article is light on raw data...
However, buried in with all the noise are a few actual valid points and interesting concepts.
First, there's the point that OOP isn't necessarily the right way to solve every problem. Second, there's the point that if you want to argue that OOP is unconditionally better than procedural, you *shouldn't* use C as an example of procedural, b/c C isn't very representative of its group. Third, there's the interesting possibility of using some paradigm other than procedural or OOP. OOP isn't necessarilly the only way to support info-hiding and such like.
Okay, okay, I know I should at least *read* the article before I bash the fools that came up with this idea, but this is too easy!
When I read the part about the huge size being used as a deterrent to copying, I laughed out loud. So lemmie get this.. the plan is just to make it too huge to fit on a disk or tranfer over the net, huh? Yeah, bloat! As several other people have pointed out:
1. It shouldn't take enterprising young hackers long to break the encryption (if there is encryption). After this, it should be trivial to compress the big fat thing.
2. What with the size of hard disks growing exponentially, or at least really fast, it shouldn't be too long before it can fit on a hard disk uncompressed anyway.
3. The whole thing is moot as long as the cost of the device is prohibitive.
Okay, spam is bad, and we all hate when bad things happen to good people.. but Verizon is bad people. I don't have DSL access from them, but www.2600.com does. They have a special domain name just for verizon:
http://www.verizonreallysucks.com
I vote brain cells! Oh wait..it's supposed to be what's likely! Oh. Uhhm, in that case, probably the lego thing, or *maybe* the keyboard, but I doubt it. The flex CD isn't gonna happen and the quantum computer isn't something you'd really want to use for day-to-day computing even if it did work like it was supposed to:
Programmer1: Hey, how come I can't get this pseudo-random number generator to generate the same numbers it did before?
Programmer2: Oh that's 'cause you're usin' a `Quantum Computer'. See it uses the principle of quantum indeterminancy to generate, not *pseudo* random numbers, but actual random numbers.
Programmer1: So I can't make it recreate the same sequence of numbers it did last time?
Programmer2: No. Also, the computer is capable of generating non-deterministic behavor.
Programmer1: What kind of behavior?
Programmer2: Well, just last week, it grew a mouth and ate a programmer who hit it's keyboard too hard.
Programmer1: I think there's a Dell over there with my name on it. That `bleeding edge' technology stuff is getting a little too weird for me...
So this Katz person always writes like this, huh? Oh well. Maybe it's intentionally written in this flagrant, overbearing style to try to stirr up controversy.
I mostly agree with this paragraph:
The media cover technology poorly as a rule, but their shallow portrayal of gaming culture as destructive and profane is a particular scandal, more so all the time as gaming becomes sophisticated, creative and intellectually challenging.
As for the rest of it...well it's not so much that I think that it's wrong as it is that I think it's being way overstated. Like making Mount Everest out of an anthill.
I don't think people's reactions to video games in general meet the requirements for "moral panic" (are those like kernel panics?;)) mentioned in the article. I will grant you that people have reacted rather negatively to first person shooters and (in the past, at least) to D&D, but {first_person_shooters, RPGs} is a proper subset of the set Gaming. i.e. (fps && D&D) != Gaming
Even when it comes to fps && D&D, I don't think we've quite met the standard (given in the article) for moral panic. When it comes to gaming in general, we certainly haven't. If people are so terribly concerned, why aren't they trying to ban the sale of PS2's? What about the upcoming D&D movie? (my friends and I are going to K.C. to see it--if the Christian Coalition attacks us, I'll be sure to let ya know.)
I think Katz has a couple nice ideas in there somewhere, but not really enough info to flesh out a three-piece article. The Jargon File defines this kind of article as content-free.
Is this post meant to be flame bait, or does it just seem like that to me?
Okay, look--you're allowed to raise your kids anyway you see fit and that's great. I mean it's great to hear you're actually taking an interest in how they develop unlike some parents.
However, I have to disagree, at least a little, with your criticisms of sci fi and fantasy.
Firstly, I'm not sure if you're aware of this or not, but Dune is a fairly oldish book. This is not some recent thing. If you saw the movie and thought, "Wow, this new fangled SF things just keep moving farther and farther away from what's real," then you are in error insofaras you may have thought that the story itself was new--it isn't.
Second, whether or not something is "removed from reality" depends on how you look at it. Obviously the fictional world of Dune is not the real world we live in. But look at the themes and ideas in the story. Those characters have thoughts and feelings and have to fight battles and wars--just like people have had to do in the past and still do today and will have to do in the future in our world. It's not really so different from the real world when you break it down to the fundamentals. Of course they have fantastical creatures and powers in their world, but that's partly just to keep things interesting and give the reader/viewer something new to think about. You can learn a lot about the world you live in by reading about some fictional world and comparing it with the real one.
I guess I can understand you wanting to keep your children mentally "grounded on this plane of existence" so-to-speak, just please don't go overboard. Maybe when they're a little older, like fifteen or sixteen, you might want to consider letting them play some D&D on occasion, if they're still interested. After all, if you don't let them, and they really want to do it, they might just do it anyway behind you're back--and then you'd have no control over it...
Okay, I basically agree with your opinion, but there is an odd thing in your post:
"games that simulate things
girls like to do (play house, design cities, run around a little maze gathering power pellets) are more heavily favored by girls."
?
I guess I missed that day in Home Ec class, or maybe I just haven't dated those kinds of girls.:-)
`program' was spelt that way because they're British, but I agree with you that the article did smell bad. The best solution is just to MiSTy (Mystery Science Theater 3000) the thing.
It sounds like he (Gildred) is doing all this by the seat of his pants. It's just like a big gamble... and the odds are probably against him.
There's no announced games, there probably won't be any games until just before the thing releases--*if* it releases.
Also, about speed:
Typically, having a fully multi-user Unix-derivative OS is not a plus for a game console. I mean we want to be able to access the hardware as fast as we possibly can with as little an amount of stuff in the way as possible. I think there's a lot of stuff that a standard complete OS does that are not condusive to this goal. This system won't really be a console system, it'll be PC-in-a-console-box.
It would, of course, be nice to have a console system that was hack-friendly, but it seems unlikely to me that this one's going to make it.
Okay, granted "computing power != intelligence", but I have read about little robots that can "act like" ants. I'm not saying they're as smart as ants--actually, I have know idea how to determine the smartness/stupidness of an ant--but these robots were able to "act like" them. Of course, I'm pretty sure the robots were only in one controled setting. There's no guarentee that the robots' behavior would still be ant-like in a different setting. Also, I'm not sure if they mimicked ants perfectly or not.
But really, think about it. How many different behaviors is a single ant capable of? Couldn't you program a robot that relatively small number of behaviors? And if you could, then all you have to do is have a bunch of robots with the same programming and--you've got ants! Of course, you'd also have a robot carrying out the role of queen. One problem would be the larvae...
Anyway, the ZD-Net article was weak, but it's not such an open-and-shut deal to say that robots can't "act smart". Just as it's not so easy to say that robots can "be smart". If you really think about it... what *is* intelligence?
I've been waiting for movies to start using digital picture for some time now. I hate paying six bucks to hear state-of-the-art surround sound, blah, blah, blah, whatever--and then suddenly the film brakes. It's very annoying.
Personally, I didn't much care for Willow. I really hated Mission to Mars. I had a feeling it was going to be a bad movie (when I saw the `face' in one of the previews). I only went b/c my friend wanted to go. I thought, "well, at least I can watch his reaction". It was an enjoyable experience for me.
However, unlike the critic, I liked this movie, Red Planet. I can't deny the fact that the characters were just a little too indifferent to the distress of their comrades. Also, and I would've thought this were a no-brainer, if you're gonna have a little droid thingie, that's cool but *don't* have it programmed for things like "search and destroy" when the only targets on the target planet will be friendlies!
In spite of these things, I liked it anyway. I think I liked it mostly b/c Val and Carrie are cool.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, then maybe you should tell Tim that instead of just venting here.
I kind of got the feeling the links were munged on purpose. Perhaps they were trying to prevent against slashdot-effect.
Maybe we should all just start making our own electronics.
Microchips and all! It should be easy! (sarcasm)
Is anybody besides me just the slightest bit concerned about the raging credulity on T.V. these days? Actually, I guess it's nothing new, I mean I suppose it's always been this way, but it's still agravatiing and alarming.
It's fun to ask "what if" questions, but it's wrong to intentionally mislead people and misrepresent evidence for the sake of ratings. (I know, I know--that you, Captain Obvious.)
I have to agree with the other posters on this. For a little bit I was thinking, "cool", but then reality set in. As other people have stated, one immediate question is reliablity. But another really important concern is speed. Has everyone forgotten how horribly, horribly slow these things are? It takes *forever* to copy a meg to/from (especially to) one of these things. They would have to improve the transfer rate by many, *many* orders of magnitude to prevent people from having to wait hours to get all 32MB copied to/from their little floppy. Also, about the reliablity thing again: doesn't it seem like if you put *more* onto the disk surface, you're going to get something that's *less* reliable? So there's something else they'd have to work against...
Your floppy is dead; and no one cares.
No. To be properly correct, it should only happen when it turns out that the math problem/puzzle still isn't really solved yet.
As to whether or not what they were doing should be called and what term best describes them, careful consultation of The Jargon File seems to indicate that they were, in fact, cracking the system, not hacking it. At the same time, however, it's clear that they (mostly at least) weren't script kiddies or warez d00dz. Perhaps more terminology is in order. Maybe hacker-cracker? (Just kidding)
Don't these guys realize that when people hold their hands up for a while they get tired?
Has anyone here ever heard of the light pen for MS-DOS? No? Well, there you have it. Before the time of the squeky thingie (i.e. mouse), there was some PC (I think PC jr, so I guess it was PC-DOS, not MS-DOS) that had support for a light pen pointing device. It flopped. Know why? Because a person's hand gets tired after he/she has to hold it in front of the screen for a while. It's called ergonomics and common sense, folks.
Also, if you read the comments at the bottom of the page, there are quite a few people claiming that this idea isn't new anyway.
Hey you commenter, people...
Yes, the article is overzelous.
Yes, the article is light on raw data...
However, buried in with all the noise are a few actual valid points and interesting concepts.
First, there's the point that OOP isn't necessarily the right way to solve every problem. Second, there's the point that if you want to argue that OOP is unconditionally better than procedural, you *shouldn't* use C as an example of procedural, b/c C isn't very representative of its group. Third, there's the interesting possibility of using some paradigm other than procedural or OOP. OOP isn't necessarilly the only way to support info-hiding and such like.
Okay, okay, I know I should at least *read* the article before I bash the fools that came up with this idea, but this is too easy!
When I read the part about the huge size being used as a deterrent to copying, I laughed out loud. So lemmie get this.. the plan is just to make it too huge to fit on a disk or tranfer over the net, huh? Yeah, bloat! As several other people have pointed out:
1. It shouldn't take enterprising young hackers long to break the encryption (if there is encryption). After this, it should be trivial to compress the big fat thing.
2. What with the size of hard disks growing exponentially, or at least really fast, it shouldn't be too long before it can fit on a hard disk uncompressed anyway.
3. The whole thing is moot as long as the cost of the device is prohibitive.
Okay, spam is bad, and we all hate when bad things happen to good people.. but Verizon is bad people. I don't have DSL access from them, but www.2600.com does. They have a special domain name just for verizon:
http://www.verizonreallysucks.com
The movie certainly had the "D&D funk" to it. Think about it:
The movie had really bad acting...
Just like a normal D&D game.
The movie had really bad dialog...
Just like a normal D&D game.
The movie had a really bad plot...
Just like a normal D&D game.
The movie stole mercilessly from other sources...
Just like a normal D&D game.
The movie had a cheese-factor so high, it *almost* made the movie good, even though it was so bad...
Just like a normal D&D game.
In case you couldn't tell, I don't really like D&D much. TSR/WotC should be happy someone managed to capture the true spirit of D&D so well.
I vote brain cells! Oh wait..it's supposed to be what's likely! Oh. Uhhm, in that case, probably the lego thing, or *maybe* the keyboard, but I doubt it. The flex CD isn't gonna happen and the quantum computer isn't something you'd really want to use for day-to-day computing even if it did work like it was supposed to:
Programmer1: Hey, how come I can't get this pseudo-random number generator to generate the same numbers it did before?
Programmer2: Oh that's 'cause you're usin' a `Quantum Computer'. See it uses the principle of quantum indeterminancy to generate, not *pseudo* random numbers, but actual random numbers.
Programmer1: So I can't make it recreate the same sequence of numbers it did last time?
Programmer2: No. Also, the computer is capable of generating non-deterministic behavor.
Programmer1: What kind of behavior?
Programmer2: Well, just last week, it grew a mouth and ate a programmer who hit it's keyboard too hard.
Programmer1: I think there's a Dell over there with my name on it. That `bleeding edge' technology stuff is getting a little too weird for me...
I mostly agree with this paragraph:
As for the rest of it...well it's not so much that I think that it's wrong as it is that I think it's being way overstated. Like making Mount Everest out of an anthill.I don't think people's reactions to video games in general meet the requirements for "moral panic" (are those like kernel panics? ;)) mentioned in the article. I will grant you that people have reacted rather negatively to first person shooters and (in the past, at least) to D&D, but {first_person_shooters, RPGs} is a proper subset of the set Gaming. i.e. (fps && D&D) != Gaming
Even when it comes to fps && D&D, I don't think we've quite met the standard (given in the article) for moral panic. When it comes to gaming in general, we certainly haven't. If people are so terribly concerned, why aren't they trying to ban the sale of PS2's? What about the upcoming D&D movie? (my friends and I are going to K.C. to see it--if the Christian Coalition attacks us, I'll be sure to let ya know.)
I think Katz has a couple nice ideas in there somewhere, but not really enough info to flesh out a three-piece article. The Jargon File defines this kind of article as content-free.
Is this post meant to be flame bait, or does it just seem like that to me?
Okay, look--you're allowed to raise your kids anyway you see fit and that's great. I mean it's great to hear you're actually taking an interest in how they develop unlike some parents.
However, I have to disagree, at least a little, with your criticisms of sci fi and fantasy.
Firstly, I'm not sure if you're aware of this or not, but Dune is a fairly oldish book. This is not some recent thing. If you saw the movie and thought, "Wow, this new fangled SF things just keep moving farther and farther away from what's real," then you are in error insofaras you may have thought that the story itself was new--it isn't.
Second, whether or not something is "removed from reality" depends on how you look at it. Obviously the fictional world of Dune is not the real world we live in. But look at the themes and ideas in the story. Those characters have thoughts and feelings and have to fight battles and wars--just like people have had to do in the past and still do today and will have to do in the future in our world. It's not really so different from the real world when you break it down to the fundamentals. Of course they have fantastical creatures and powers in their world, but that's partly just to keep things interesting and give the reader/viewer something new to think about. You can learn a lot about the world you live in by reading about some fictional world and comparing it with the real one.
I guess I can understand you wanting to keep your children mentally "grounded on this plane of existence" so-to-speak, just please don't go overboard. Maybe when they're a little older, like fifteen or sixteen, you might want to consider letting them play some D&D on occasion, if they're still interested. After all, if you don't let them, and they really want to do it, they might just do it anyway behind you're back--and then you'd have no control over it...
I guess I missed that day in Home Ec class, or maybe I just haven't dated those kinds of girls.
But we don't all just spectate, we participate as well. We just do it electronically.
(like with this response to your comment)
Could this be FUD? Or is it a bug?
FUD or bug
FUD or bug
it matters not at all
for if be FUD,
the fear will kill
and if be bug,
the code "be broke"
and either way
the stock shall fall and fall
Ok, this is sort of a "mee too".
It sounds like he (Gildred) is doing all this by the seat of his pants. It's just like a big gamble... and the odds are probably against him.
There's no announced games, there probably won't be any games until just before the thing releases--*if* it releases.
Also, about speed:
Typically, having a fully multi-user Unix-derivative OS is not a plus for a game console. I mean we want to be able to access the hardware as fast as we possibly can with as little an amount of stuff in the way as possible. I think there's a lot of stuff that a standard complete OS does that are not condusive to this goal. This system won't really be a console system, it'll be PC-in-a-console-box.
It would, of course, be nice to have a console system that was hack-friendly, but it seems unlikely to me that this one's going to make it.
Okay, granted "computing power != intelligence", but I have read about little robots that can "act like" ants. I'm not saying they're as smart as ants--actually, I have know idea how to determine the smartness/stupidness of an ant--but these robots were able to "act like" them. Of course, I'm pretty sure the robots were only in one controled setting. There's no guarentee that the robots' behavior would still be ant-like in a different setting. Also, I'm not sure if they mimicked ants perfectly or not.
But really, think about it. How many different behaviors is a single ant capable of? Couldn't you program a robot that relatively small number of behaviors? And if you could, then all you have to do is have a bunch of robots with the same programming and--you've got ants! Of course, you'd also have a robot carrying out the role of queen. One problem would be the larvae...
Anyway, the ZD-Net article was weak, but it's not such an open-and-shut deal to say that robots can't "act smart". Just as it's not so easy to say that robots can "be smart". If you really think about it... what *is* intelligence?
I've been waiting for movies to start using digital picture for some time now. I hate paying six bucks to hear state-of-the-art surround sound, blah, blah, blah, whatever--and then suddenly the film brakes. It's very annoying.
"Hey, I liked Willow!" -- Crow T. Robot
Personally, I didn't much care for Willow. I really hated Mission to Mars. I had a feeling it was going to be a bad movie (when I saw the `face' in one of the previews). I only went b/c my friend wanted to go. I thought, "well, at least I can watch his reaction". It was an enjoyable experience for me.
However, unlike the critic, I liked this movie, Red Planet. I can't deny the fact that the characters were just a little too indifferent to the distress of their comrades. Also, and I would've thought this were a no-brainer, if you're gonna have a little droid thingie, that's cool but *don't* have it programmed for things like "search and destroy" when the only targets on the target planet will be friendlies!
In spite of these things, I liked it anyway. I think I liked it mostly b/c Val and Carrie are cool.