Upside is sponsored by MSN, by the way. Nice little permanent banner and doubleclick-thru on the side of every page.
Not that I'm claiming the reporter is biased in any way. Lord forbid that any respectable journalist would be let something as trivial as ad dollars affect the truth and objectivity of his article.
Most of them didn't even know what I was talking about when I pointed out the MPEG artifacts (they called it "macro blocking").
I noticed that when talking to cable people and reading various magazines. This field, especially on the digital side, has a completely different terminology. It makes me wonder if any of the architects of digital cable have had any experience with traditional networking and telecommunications. That along with shared bandwidth has turned me off of cable. My hope is that television will eventually be broadcast over the internet ala iCraveTV, and with DSL finally give those cable bastages some real competition.
IIRC, blueprints for buildings are on public record. So anyone with (usually) $5 could just file a request with the county (or city, or parish, or whatever) clerk and get them.
They make a point of saying that cable descramblers are illegal. So why do I always see ads for them in Popular Science? And I guess the magazine is committing a crime by telling you where you can buy those "illegal" devices. Not to mention that video input devices for computers are illegal, since you could copy a movie from a VCR (or DVD player, egads!) to your computer and distribute it over the internet.
My favorite, however, is where they say they only want _licensed_ players. Effectively, they admit to being a cartel. Shouldn't we be taking the DVD-CCA to court on anti-trust allegations? Incidentally, they answered the question "What is the the DVD-CCA?" twice, but didn't mention who is in this "not-for-profit corporation" (most people assocate non-profit with charity). Though they did name all the goons in the MPAA; so are there any studios NOT involved in this conspiracy?
Well of course they're going to hire someone from outside the country to do the reviewing. The idea is to protect their citizens from being exposed to immoral ideas, and it's kind of tricky to determine if something is immoral without looking at it. So they hire a bunch of foreigners, who are heathens anyway and already going to hell, and have them pick out the smut, trash, and blasphemy.
Though I do find it slightly ironic that they're blocking sites with bomb-making information. Allah forbid that some radical Shiites would learn how to build bombs, imagine what they might do!
Yes, we all know how well the intelligent, sensible lawmakers found they could easily apply the solicitation laws to email. It's just a simple matter of treating this device the same way.
IOW, doing jack-squat about it until average people are driven mad to the point of insurrection, then hastily slapping together a loosely-bound set of poorly understood laws with loopholes large enough to drive a beowulf cluster through.
But I couldn't care less. Because I doubt I'd ever subscribe to ITV. And even if I did, I wouldn't hook one of these up to it. Or at least, I'd find away to disable it. (Don't load any paper.) But I do like that they won't be ITV-exclusive. The low profile front-loading profile would do wonders for my desk space. Or you could have rack mount it, even.
Yeah! And what's with/. always showing a picture of Einstein for every story about science? Even when it has absolutely nothing to do with relativity. It's an outrage. I want my pointless eye-candy to be accurate, dammit!
Sounds like a job for distributed computing. What will get finished first? Imaging all the main belt asteroids, or RC5-64? My money is on the asteroids.
Yeah, and then we can put an AI on it to control all the station functions. Of course, in a few hundred years it'll go rampant and make radio contact with a race of aliens that it will then come to Earth to wipe out the human race.
I'm not entirely convinced that MAD is responsible for the level of peace we've seen. I agree that the nature of warfare is drastically different because of it. (And also because of long-range weapons.) But I believe the main reason we've been spending less time trying to kill each other is the changes in communication that occurred during the 20th century.
First there was photography showing everyone what war really looked like, pure and unglamourized. Then there was telephone and radio, which allowed truces to be called as quickly as you could fire a rifle. Then, as more and more information was being made available widely, we have begun to realise at some level that we are all more alike than different.
The other aspect of peace in the 20th century is that the fruit of the industrial revolution is increased prosperity. So many people have led generally happy lives, and don't really need to declare war on somone else just to make themselves feel better.
Someone who has never heard of OCR captured a chat log of a portion of the Yahoo chat with Metallica.
After reading that, I can begin to understand and sympathize with Metallica's reason for suing Napster. It should be noted that the list of names ("LON"?) is not for the purpose of prosecuting those individuals, but to demonstrate actual examples of pirating as evidence against Napster. Metallica is only going after Napster, and with not-unjustifiable reason. (Or you can just say it's justifiable reason, whatever.) Napster knows that their software is being used for piracy, they expected it, it may even be that they promoted it to get people to use the software, and why? Napster is a for-profit corporate entity with a single purpose: to make money. They don't care about freedom of information, or community, or sharing. All they want is to either have a spectacular IPO, or that some other money-grubbing corporate entity will swallow them up, giving them a considerable amount of cash in the process.
But I can't completely support Metallica's lawsuit, because of the possible precedence setting it may create, and Metallica is aware of this. But because they are just as much a bunch of money-grubbing profiteers as Napster, they are flippant about what affect this may have on freedom of information. If this results in something other than a settlement or narrow ruling, it would allow other software or service providers to be sued because of what their clients do. Imagine EFNet being shut down because of #MP3 and #Warez. And this wouldn't be very good news for Gnutella, either.
So I hope that either Metallica loses or Napster settles. Or we could help Metallica out in their goal to see Napster shut-down. Just stop using Napster, there's already a perfect replacement that's not made by some money-grubbing faceless corporation in Gnutella. Or we could use FreeNet, or any number of ways to trade mp3s other than Napster.
And, on a completely unrelated topic, be sure to check out the RomeroDance!
Forget about lawsuits, I'd be worried more about what the UN might say. This would be a huge violation of the Geneva Convention. And I'd have to agree with the US policy of restricting the trade of software as munitions in this case.
Money to spend on special effects budgets and the like was tight. Look at just about any sci-fi made by the BBC in that timeframe. Doctor Who and Blakes' Seven in particular- cardboard sets, no FX budget at all. HHGTTG's computer graphics were all drawn by hand because the company that made them couldn't afford a computer. Things were so bad because the budget was tiny.
Actually, the FX was considered pretty damn good at the time. They even did a few things that no one had done before. (Or, at least, they didn't realise anyone had done before.) The one that comes to mind was the glass matte technique they used; which is now done with blue/green screens, but they did by hand. And the "computer" graphics ended up winning a BAFTA, as did sound production.
I also have a Newton I got for free and I've yet to find a use for it (anybody want to purchase?)
Sure, I'd be glad to buy it, and at the same price you had to pay for it. What newton is it? What does it come with?
As for DNA and Apple, he's still listed as an Apple Master, if that's worth anything. And while some of the things Apple has done may be Geek-bane, I'd have to say that they seem to fall in line with at least some of the things DNA has ranted about before. Particularly, the simplicity of the iMac reminds me of an article he wrote for Macworld a while back where he complained about the innumerable power bricks he had to carry around to power all the gizmos for his computer.
How much did you know about computers when you began writing HHGG? Has being more involved with computers affected how you write about them? Do you think it will ever be possible to build computers like Eddie, Marvin, or Deep Thought?
Also, how drunk will you (or John Lloyd) have to get to write another Meaning of Liff book? What about Last Chance to See?
I interned at a security company some eight years ago where I got to work a bit in the LOC. (Installing alarms. Lots of fun, especially the 200yo attics of the Jefferson building.) At that time they were already well underway with digitizing the collection.
One of the main reasons for digitizing is to reduce the wear-and-tear of having to handle the actual items, where the worst damage is done by well-meaning but careless patrons, not to mention ill-intentioned people who manage to get access to the stacks. That is, if they could find anything of major importance in the first place -- I got losts many times in there. Which of course is the second reason to digitize. As well as being able to deliver an item quickly, and without risking further damage to it, more than one person could be reading the same material.
I don't remember exactly how they were storing the data. I don't believe they were ordinary CD-ROMs, but in retrospect they may have just been an early type of DVD. (Or at least, a disc using DVD-like technology.) And one day I happened to walk by a disc changer they were testing out -- big mutha' that was. As for how they were scanning them, that was being taken care of some outfit in Pennsylvania.
So as for why Billington said they're not digitizing books... He must've been smoking something. I don't recall talking to a single librarian there who wasn't looking forward to the reading room to become nothing but a bunch of terminals. And while providing a web interface to the library would be incredibly difficult, I see it as only a matter of time.
But something else he said struck me as just wrong. "The internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of teevision's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing."
First: Most of the contents of the LOC are any different? It is not the role of a librarian to be saying that one type of expression is any more valid than another. He speaks of arrogance, but this is just intellectual elitism here.
Then there's the pitiful fatalism of that statement. It is precisely because the internet is the new "vast wasteland" that we need libraries and universities and such to provide a balance of content. And he says it as if the crap would somehow smother out any virtue of the LOC. He's probably thinking of walking into an adult bookstore looking for "Paradise Lost". Except that the internet has no size.
Jean Louis-Gassée highlighted this during an interview with Nightly Business Report yesterday. He was talking about trying to compete against Windows and mentioned Linux. "Why can't you walk into any store an buy a computer with an operating system other than Windows? Or a dual-boot configuration with Linux, Linux is totally free, so why isn't it more available?" (I'm paraphrasing horribly, so that may not be an exact quote.)
The point he was trying to make is a) it's damn near impossible to break into the PC OS market and b) just because something is free of cost doesn't mean it's going to immediately smother the other expensive options.
#include <std_freebeer_freespeech.h>
PS. Okay, yeah, we all know the zillions of places you can buy computers with Linux installed, or FreeBSD or some multi-boot variation. But he wasn't talking to/. he was talking to a bunch of stock brokers, CIOs, and suit-wearing Warren Buffet wannabes. And they don't buy computers from the same places you do. What he meant is being able to walk into any random BestBuy and picking up a computer with Linux installed.
PPS. Of course, the real enemy is NS and MS for putting piss-poor PNG support in their browsers. If they had done it right back when PNG was introduced, or at least in the 4.0 browsers when they had no excuse but their own laziness, and Unisys had already been making a fuss about the patent, so everyone knew that GIF was a dead-end. Not to mention the nerve-grating limitations of GIF. And you'd think that, in the heat of the "browser wars" someone would point out how much of a selling point full PNG support could be. But NOOOOO, It was more important to have fancy animated buttons! And adding all these ridiculous panes so we could all browse in a tiny window with an effective size of a postage stamp, which is entirely filled with an ugly, flashing, patented, animated GIF! AAARRRGGHHH!!!!
But then, maybe we should encourage Unisys. All those banner ad mongers will find that it's no longer cost-effective to pollute our screens with their bloated, garish, animated crap. Unisys could license all the banner ads off of the internet. Woo-Hoo!
(off to take my medicine)
Re:best punishment: fix all bugs
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 1
Am thinking vultures eating the liver of Tityus. Or Tantalus and the grapes. Sisyphus pushing the boulder. The twelve labors of Hercules. Maybe even Loki and the serpent
But this..... even the Gods could not be so cruel.
Of course, Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker were always throwing in background sight-gags during a scene. I wouldn't be surprised if, while this was being said, something was going on behind them.
IIRC (which I probably don't), this was said as a list of things "never" to do in a movie, some of the others being "Never talk directly at the camera" and... I forget. Go rent the making of Airplane. The point being, all the rules were broken in their films.
It occurs to me that this joke would work better when 4/1 falls on a weekday.
It also should've been posted earlier in the day, so I could've forwarded it to others. Now most people won't check their mail until Monday.
Ehh, screw it. It wasn't that funny anyway. I'll just send them some pr0n instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Upside is sponsored by MSN, by the way. Nice little permanent banner and doubleclick-thru on the side of every page.
Not that I'm claiming the reporter is biased in any way. Lord forbid that any respectable journalist would be let something as trivial as ad dollars affect the truth and objectivity of his article.
I noticed that when talking to cable people and reading various magazines. This field, especially on the digital side, has a completely different terminology. It makes me wonder if any of the architects of digital cable have had any experience with traditional networking and telecommunications. That along with shared bandwidth has turned me off of cable. My hope is that television will eventually be broadcast over the internet ala iCraveTV, and with DSL finally give those cable bastages some real competition.
IIRC, blueprints for buildings are on public record. So anyone with (usually) $5 could just file a request with the county (or city, or parish, or whatever) clerk and get them.
They make a point of saying that cable descramblers are illegal. So why do I always see ads for them in Popular Science? And I guess the magazine is committing a crime by telling you where you can buy those "illegal" devices. Not to mention that video input devices for computers are illegal, since you could copy a movie from a VCR (or DVD player, egads!) to your computer and distribute it over the internet.
My favorite, however, is where they say they only want _licensed_ players. Effectively, they admit to being a cartel. Shouldn't we be taking the DVD-CCA to court on anti-trust allegations? Incidentally, they answered the question "What is the the DVD-CCA?" twice, but didn't mention who is in this "not-for-profit corporation" (most people assocate non-profit with charity). Though they did name all the goons in the MPAA; so are there any studios NOT involved in this conspiracy?
Well of course they're going to hire someone from outside the country to do the reviewing. The idea is to protect their citizens from being exposed to immoral ideas, and it's kind of tricky to determine if something is immoral without looking at it. So they hire a bunch of foreigners, who are heathens anyway and already going to hell, and have them pick out the smut, trash, and blasphemy.
/.ers
Though I do find it slightly ironic that they're blocking sites with bomb-making information. Allah forbid that some radical Shiites would learn how to build bombs, imagine what they might do!
PS. Apologies to any Moslem
Yes, we all know how well the intelligent, sensible lawmakers found they could easily apply the solicitation laws to email. It's just a simple matter of treating this device the same way.
IOW, doing jack-squat about it until average people are driven mad to the point of insurrection, then hastily slapping together a loosely-bound set of poorly understood laws with loopholes large enough to drive a beowulf cluster through.
But I couldn't care less. Because I doubt I'd ever subscribe to ITV. And even if I did, I wouldn't hook one of these up to it. Or at least, I'd find away to disable it. (Don't load any paper.) But I do like that they won't be ITV-exclusive. The low profile front-loading profile would do wonders for my desk space. Or you could have rack mount it, even.
Yeah! And what's with /. always showing a picture of Einstein for every story about science? Even when it has absolutely nothing to do with relativity. It's an outrage. I want my pointless eye-candy to be accurate, dammit!
Ye gads! That's quite a lot of CDs they're gonna have to mass mail out to every address in the NSI database.
#147 - Lawn edger blade
#148 - Wind chimes
#149 - Air hockey puck
So, of course, someone has to bring this up...
Sounds like a job for distributed computing. What will get finished first? Imaging all the main belt asteroids, or RC5-64? My money is on the asteroids.
.. but this made me think of the word "Vortigons" for some reason. Hmmm....
Yeah, and then we can put an AI on it to control all the station functions. Of course, in a few hundred years it'll go rampant and make radio contact with a race of aliens that it will then come to Earth to wipe out the human race.
.... or has that been done already?
No, he meant Cleopatra:2525.
/me begins humming annoying rip-off theme song
...but it took me ten minutes to stop crying.
(Yeah, right. As if I read MSNBC.)
More
Stupid
Nincompoops
Broadcasting
Crap
I'm not entirely convinced that MAD is responsible for the level of peace we've seen. I agree that the nature of warfare is drastically different because of it. (And also because of long-range weapons.) But I believe the main reason we've been spending less time trying to kill each other is the changes in communication that occurred during the 20th century.
First there was photography showing everyone what war really looked like, pure and unglamourized. Then there was telephone and radio, which allowed truces to be called as quickly as you could fire a rifle. Then, as more and more information was being made available widely, we have begun to realise at some level that we are all more alike than different.
The other aspect of peace in the 20th century is that the fruit of the industrial revolution is increased prosperity. So many people have led generally happy lives, and don't really need to declare war on somone else just to make themselves feel better.
Someone who has never heard of OCR captured a chat log of a portion of the Yahoo chat with Metallica.
After reading that, I can begin to understand and sympathize with Metallica's reason for suing Napster. It should be noted that the list of names ("LON"?) is not for the purpose of prosecuting those individuals, but to demonstrate actual examples of pirating as evidence against Napster. Metallica is only going after Napster, and with not-unjustifiable reason. (Or you can just say it's justifiable reason, whatever.) Napster knows that their software is being used for piracy, they expected it, it may even be that they promoted it to get people to use the software, and why? Napster is a for-profit corporate entity with a single purpose: to make money. They don't care about freedom of information, or community, or sharing. All they want is to either have a spectacular IPO, or that some other money-grubbing corporate entity will swallow them up, giving them a considerable amount of cash in the process.
But I can't completely support Metallica's lawsuit, because of the possible precedence setting it may create, and Metallica is aware of this. But because they are just as much a bunch of money-grubbing profiteers as Napster, they are flippant about what affect this may have on freedom of information. If this results in something other than a settlement or narrow ruling, it would allow other software or service providers to be sued because of what their clients do. Imagine EFNet being shut down because of #MP3 and #Warez. And this wouldn't be very good news for Gnutella, either.
So I hope that either Metallica loses or Napster settles. Or we could help Metallica out in their goal to see Napster shut-down. Just stop using Napster, there's already a perfect replacement that's not made by some money-grubbing faceless corporation in Gnutella. Or we could use FreeNet, or any number of ways to trade mp3s other than Napster.
And, on a completely unrelated topic, be sure to check out the RomeroDance!
Forget about lawsuits, I'd be worried more about what the UN might say. This would be a huge violation of the Geneva Convention. And I'd have to agree with the US policy of restricting the trade of software as munitions in this case.
As for DNA and Apple, he's still listed as an Apple Master, if that's worth anything. And while some of the things Apple has done may be Geek-bane, I'd have to say that they seem to fall in line with at least some of the things DNA has ranted about before. Particularly, the simplicity of the iMac reminds me of an article he wrote for Macworld a while back where he complained about the innumerable power bricks he had to carry around to power all the gizmos for his computer.
How much did you know about computers when you began writing HHGG? Has being more involved with computers affected how you write about them? Do you think it will ever be possible to build computers like Eddie, Marvin, or Deep Thought?
Also, how drunk will you (or John Lloyd) have to get to write another Meaning of Liff book? What about Last Chance to See?
Where in the hell did you manage to find a copy of Bureaucracy?
Wait, let me rephrase that: Where in the hell can *I* manage to find a copy of Bureaucracy?
I interned at a security company some eight years ago where I got to work a bit in the LOC. (Installing alarms. Lots of fun, especially the 200yo attics of the Jefferson building.) At that time they were already well underway with digitizing the collection.
One of the main reasons for digitizing is to reduce the wear-and-tear of having to handle the actual items, where the worst damage is done by well-meaning but careless patrons, not to mention ill-intentioned people who manage to get access to the stacks. That is, if they could find anything of major importance in the first place -- I got losts many times in there. Which of course is the second reason to digitize. As well as being able to deliver an item quickly, and without risking further damage to it, more than one person could be reading the same material.
I don't remember exactly how they were storing the data. I don't believe they were ordinary CD-ROMs, but in retrospect they may have just been an early type of DVD. (Or at least, a disc using DVD-like technology.) And one day I happened to walk by a disc changer they were testing out -- big mutha' that was. As for how they were scanning them, that was being taken care of some outfit in Pennsylvania.
So as for why Billington said they're not digitizing books... He must've been smoking something. I don't recall talking to a single librarian there who wasn't looking forward to the reading room to become nothing but a bunch of terminals. And while providing a web interface to the library would be incredibly difficult, I see it as only a matter of time.
But something else he said struck me as just wrong. "The internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of teevision's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing."
First: Most of the contents of the LOC are any different? It is not the role of a librarian to be saying that one type of expression is any more valid than another. He speaks of arrogance, but this is just intellectual elitism here.
Then there's the pitiful fatalism of that statement. It is precisely because the internet is the new "vast wasteland" that we need libraries and universities and such to provide a balance of content. And he says it as if the crap would somehow smother out any virtue of the LOC. He's probably thinking of walking into an adult bookstore looking for "Paradise Lost". Except that the internet has no size.
so then it's a matter of losing quality to compression or cash to Unisys.
I'll keep the cash anyday.
/me glances at the above responses
/.ers have no sense of subtlety nor humour.
Moral of the story:
(Score: -1, Offtopic)
Jean Louis-Gassée highlighted this during an interview with Nightly Business Report yesterday. He was talking about trying to compete against Windows and mentioned Linux. "Why can't you walk into any store an buy a computer with an operating system other than Windows? Or a dual-boot configuration with Linux, Linux is totally free, so why isn't it more available?" (I'm paraphrasing horribly, so that may not be an exact quote.)
/. he was talking to a bunch of stock brokers, CIOs, and suit-wearing Warren Buffet wannabes. And they don't buy computers from the same places you do. What he meant is being able to walk into any random BestBuy and picking up a computer with Linux installed.
The point he was trying to make is a) it's damn near impossible to break into the PC OS market and b) just because something is free of cost doesn't mean it's going to immediately smother the other expensive options.
#include <std_freebeer_freespeech.h>
PS. Okay, yeah, we all know the zillions of places you can buy computers with Linux installed, or FreeBSD or some multi-boot variation. But he wasn't talking to
PPS. Of course, the real enemy is NS and MS for putting piss-poor PNG support in their browsers. If they had done it right back when PNG was introduced, or at least in the 4.0 browsers when they had no excuse but their own laziness, and Unisys had already been making a fuss about the patent, so everyone knew that GIF was a dead-end. Not to mention the nerve-grating limitations of GIF. And you'd think that, in the heat of the "browser wars" someone would point out how much of a selling point full PNG support could be. But NOOOOO, It was more important to have fancy animated buttons! And adding all these ridiculous panes so we could all browse in a tiny window with an effective size of a postage stamp, which is entirely filled with an ugly, flashing, patented, animated GIF! AAARRRGGHHH!!!!
But then, maybe we should encourage Unisys. All those banner ad mongers will find that it's no longer cost-effective to pollute our screens with their bloated, garish, animated crap. Unisys could license all the banner ads off of the internet. Woo-Hoo!
(off to take my medicine)
Am thinking vultures eating the liver of Tityus. Or Tantalus and the grapes. Sisyphus pushing the boulder. The twelve labors of Hercules. Maybe even Loki and the serpent
But this..... even the Gods could not be so cruel.
Of course, Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker were always throwing in background sight-gags during a scene. I wouldn't be surprised if, while this was being said, something was going on behind them.
IIRC (which I probably don't), this was said as a list of things "never" to do in a movie, some of the others being "Never talk directly at the camera" and... I forget. Go rent the making of Airplane. The point being, all the rules were broken in their films.
It occurs to me that this joke would work better when 4/1 falls on a weekday.
It also should've been posted earlier in the day, so I could've forwarded it to others. Now most people won't check their mail until Monday.
Ehh, screw it. It wasn't that funny anyway. I'll just send them some pr0n instead.