Yeah, but the age of Pericles was much shorter than the Roman Empire and Athens was much smaller than the Roman empire. So in plays / person year Athens does much better.
Talking about surviving plays is misleading too, since lots didn't.
I don't know I think the Ancient Greeks were well on the way to this sort of thing. Unfortunately the Macedonians managed to overrun all of Greece and after that they focused on conquest rather than science. Then came the Romans and eventually the Dark Ages.
If the Athenian System could have been spread sufficiently widely that it was impossible for one tyrant to stamp it out I think that the Enlightenment could have happend a thousand years earlier.
As Carl Sagan put it, if scientific progress had been sustained from Ancient Greece, we'd by flying around the Universe in starships by now.
Take a history course, man. There is much more than just histories, and much writing was done in the Empire. Martial, writer of great epigrams, was active until the Emperor Domitian. Petronius, author of the novel Satyricon, had a place in the court of Nero. Juvenal and Persius, satirists, lived under the emperors. Ovid, who certainly ranks up there in world poetry, wrote under Augustus. Then there's masters of expository verse and rethoric like Boethius (who they're supposedly making a film of), Tertullian, Quintillian, and many, many others
And I don't know where you get the impression that slavery came in with the Empire. Slavery was part of Roman society from the very beginning. One of the earliest Latin texts, the Senatusconsultum de bacchanalibus, contains laws constraining slave's religious devotions. Cato, that old epitome of traditional Roman Republican values, decades much space in his writings to keeping slaves in line.
I've taken several history courses, man.
I know the names you mentioned and some others. But when you consider that the Roman Empire ruled most of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa for several hundred years, a shelf's worth of books is not impressive as their total literary output. The UK probably produces that in a few minutes. That's an unfair comparison perhaps but I suspect that democratic Athens was much more productive, despite being centuries earlier. Technologically there seemed to be more or less total stagnation too. Almost everything around at the end of the empire was already invented when Augustus became the first Emperor. In fact most of it was invented by the Athenians.
And never did I state that slavery was not present in the Republic. But it is true that armies of slaves working large estates became much more common in the Empire. It's hardly controversial (unless you're a Roman Plutocrat posting through a timewarp) to suggest that a transition to this sort of economy - a tiny number of plutocrats, little or no middle class and a vast number of slaves would cause a drop in the number of books written and the number of machines invented.
You're joking, right? The B.A. Classics is one of the oldest academic degrees around. A fine arts track at most universities involves at least some study of Roman arts. The Aeneid, the poetry of Catullus and the dramas of Seneca are evidentally assigned often enough to encourage new translations to come on the market every few years.
No, I'm not. The Romans ruled a lot of people for a lot of time and produced a handful of literary works, mostly histories. And most of those were produced in the Republic, not the the empire. Once the empire got started a very rich people had armies of slaves to work on their plantations literature and science stagnated. Modern capitalist society is vastly more prolific.
You can see this in Asia. Back when they were tyrannical third world shit holes where the ultra rich employed gangs of people on low wages to mass produce crap, they were no IP laws. Once local companies and artists started to make things that could sell, IP laws started to be tightened up.
We obviously are thinking of very different parts of Asia. In China and SE Asia, finding legitimate media for purchase can be a hassle. Everything sold on the street is pirated. Nonetheless, Hong Kong has a flourishing film and music scene because the local industry has adapted to a post-copyright set of affairs.
Well in the non PRC ruled parts of Asia piracy has been virtually eliminated. E.g. Japan, South Korea or Taiwan. I bet if you asked the flourishing film and music scene they'd want the same to happen there.
Also, there was no such thing has mass-copied in ancient rome. Slaves did the copying by hand.
Sufficient transcriptions could be made to create a flourishing literary market. That sounds like mass-copying to me.
Right and we should have our Intellectual Property rules inspired by society where rich aristocrats tossed a few crumbs to artists and then had slaves mass produce their works. I'm guessing the artists were more like court jesters than anything else.
Oh and the rest of the world understands the concept of copyright, especially the creators themselves.
Having met a number of indigenous artists on fieldwork expeditions and personal trips, I doubt that the notion of copyright even crosses their mind.
Well if you're talking about starving bare foot peasants somewhere that's probably true. But like a slave state run by plutocrats like Ancient Rome that is once again not the sort of society we should get legal inspiration for IP laws from.
Any society able to support intellectual workers needs some way to monetize what they produce. That's what copyright and patents are. You invent something and you have a legally protected right to it. Normally you license it to people on some mutually agreed terms.
You can see this in Asia. Back when they were tyrannical third world shit holes where the ultra rich employed gangs of people on low wages to mass produce crap, they were no IP laws. Once local companies and artists started to make things that could sell, IP laws started to be tightened up.
The real reason they exist is to give the people who actually invent something some power of the people that run the mass produced it. In Ancient Rome or Sub Saharan Africa they didn't have that power. Ancient Rome and Sub Saharan Africa are not exactly examples of cultures that were noted for their artistic achievements. Maybe there is a link between these two things.
Actually even in the US copyright was not enforced back in Dickens's time - he actually lobbied for it to be tightened up. Later on as American authors started to proliferate they pressured the government to stop piracy. Now the US produces the vast majority of intellectual property and has ultra tight IP laws.
Loosening them up will make people stop producing IP and work on something which makes some money, because without IP laws producing IP is not a rational way to spend your time.
We have laws. People that break them get locked up. Otherwise criminals could just bullshit about how they have assburgers and ADHD and poor relatives when they were caught and get away with it. In fact in your scheme they might actually get rewarded with a cushy consultancy job.
Liberate the specturm or you will suffer digital restrictions. Vista's checking of line voltages to make sure no one has clipped on an analog recording device should tell you where all of this is going. The RIAA has been screaming about "radio pirates" for 50 years. Digital broadcast gives them a way to close the "analog hole" they so dread. If the makers colude with broadcasters, only "authorized" players will have keys to decode "HD" signals. If the specturm is liberated, everything will be high quality because no one but big publishers wants to degrade music.
That "Liberate the spectrum" link is blocked from where I work, classified as Pornography.
Sure if you spot 'em before they commit a crime you should "give 'em another outlet". But after they commit the crime you have to punish them. Anything else is appeasement.
What's even worse about it is that I can see being a arsehole is kind of not your fault if you're really dumb (say IQ<80 ). But Assburgers sufferers, especially the self diagnosed ones are not that dumb. Sure they're not geniuses, but they're smarter than average, and they should learn some way to not be an arsehole.
Yeah, because criminals are evil people who need to be locked up! Not fellow humans with issues. I'm not saying compassion absolves a person of their responsibility, it doesn't, but too many people seem to have this black and white view on justice, crime, and human nature.
Criminals need to be locked up rather than given consultancy jobs because that will encourage other people not to be criminals. I'm sorry if this is too black and white for you.
Single precision only, non IEEE-754 arithmetic isn't a "real win for scientific computing". It's a win for getting the wrong answers really, really quickly.
But if that would happen, then Sony would politely ask Toshi (in deal, for undisclosed amount of money) to cease production of the laptops. You can bet.
Why would they be bothered though. This laptop is much more expensive than a PS3 I suspect. PS3s are sold at a loss, and this laptop probably costs far more to build and is sold at a profit.
Of course Sony being Sony they almost certainly would stomp a PS3 emulation project, even one that only runs on one expensive laptop, but they shouldn't care.
In what sense? These are small CPUs that only have access to 256K or on board memory. They have no MMU. You're not going to run Linux processes on them, they're meant run signal processing code. Even if Linux has a driver, it's still non trivial to modify exising applications so they can be broken up into SPE sized chunks.
Hmm, I missed that because my brain filters out sentences that include marketing gibberish like "complete product ecology". It's like a C compiler won't spot syntax errors inside comments.
Switch to decaff. And go outside for a while. This is the internet and I'm just some anonymous commenter. If my comments are making you that angry, you are taking it too seriously.
UK magazine Marxism Today called vacations like this "Cheap Holidays in Stalinist Misery", which is cool on another level because it's a Sex Pistols reference.
Actually it seems like Vista now implements something called XPS for printing, the GDI path is now legacy.
Much to my disappointment they've published the specifications and made them available royalty free, rather than patenting a few vital bits and releasing the rest to printer manufacturers under NDA. Pussies.
Well Windows is free to me, since I get a license each time I buy a laptop. Even if I had to pay $200 for it I'd still use it.
And if you read the link you described as "a funny, sad rant" properly you can see it's actually satire directed at people like you. The guy that wrote it knew a lot more about Linux than the poseur apologists he's trolling.
Your link is a sad, funny rant. Hopefully, you won't reward child-like behavior from adults by linking to their pablum again.
Hmm, wouldn't an OEM copy of Windows be cheaper?
Define cheaper. Cheaper how? If money, then yes, it's cheaper.
1. You paid too much for your copy of Windows when you bought your computer. You also paid much more for your laptop than you would Microsoft did not control the operating system market. Did you pay $100 extra? Yes, at least. Can you buy an HP printer for $100 or less? Yes.
Don't argue the costs mentioned until you fully grasp what a price maker is and the effect monopolies have on the quantity of products sold.
2. If that's too complicated for you, how much is that anti-virus/firewall/Office app/other nasty hacks required to use Windows? Freerider? Well, then you still paid too much when you bought the computer.
Finally, please do not shift your argument, or abuse other arguments.
Don't be cheap. Buy a new (or used office-class) HP and enjoy!
Hmm, wouldn't an OEM copy of Windows be cheaper?
If it works under Linux, there's a fair chance its performance under Windows will be better than a Windows-only printer. It'll be able to offload more of the workload to the printer; if the printer supports PostScript, it'll be able to offload pretty much all of the rasterization to the printer. It's like the difference between onboard video (from Intel or VIA, anyway) and a decent add-on graphics card.
If it works under Linux, it's probably a bit more expensive than the cheap Windows-only printer. This may make it more expensive up front, but it's probably going to be better built and will last longer.
Umm, not really. The best way to make a Windows printer is to rasterise using Windows's GDI, compress the bitmap and send it over the wire. It's actually quicker than trying to convert to postscript or PCL and have the printer convert back to a bitmap because the host CPU has much more horsepower than the printer one. That's how HP LIDL printers work and those do work under Linux. Linux support is a separate issue from printer intelligence.
Thanks for that information, I had no idea about MLC or its considerably reduced write cycle.
I would posit that in most real-world situations it still won't matter, though. That 6 months is at a 100% duty cycle doing nothing but writes. Even in a heavy-duty application, you'll come nowhere near, so that 6 months will be multiplied by a lot. But still, you're absolutely right that the theoretical limit is much lower than I said.
Of course SLC still exists, and still lasts essentially forever. For this new technology to be worthwhile, it would have to not only beat MLC on lifetime, but also beat SLC on price.
I dunno. I still suspect that when flash drives are launched there will be some odd use case (media centres maybe? I don't know what it would be but I can't guarantee it doesn't exist) where the drive is written very frequently. So some people will end up paying a massive premium for a drive with lousy sustained write performance and a short life. From what I've read the power consumption is not impressive either.
Of course in time these issues will be worked out somehow. But I think some early adopters might get a nasty shock.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but the age of Pericles was much shorter than the Roman Empire and Athens was much smaller than the Roman empire. So in plays / person year Athens does much better.
Talking about surviving plays is misleading too, since lots didn't.
err are you forgetting that several hundred years was well over a thousand years ago?
Democratic Athens was earlier and we have far more stuff from one city over a fifty year period than the entire Roman empire over hundreds of years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Pericles
I don't know I think the Ancient Greeks were well on the way to this sort of thing. Unfortunately the Macedonians managed to overrun all of Greece and after that they focused on conquest rather than science. Then came the Romans and eventually the Dark Ages.
If the Athenian System could have been spread sufficiently widely that it was impossible for one tyrant to stamp it out I think that the Enlightenment could have happend a thousand years earlier.
As Carl Sagan put it, if scientific progress had been sustained from Ancient Greece, we'd by flying around the Universe in starships by now.
We have laws. People that break them get locked up.
I shed a tear for the human race every time I hear a someone claiming that you should always stay on the right side of the law.
Laws should follow morality, not the other way round. Government by the people, for the people.
This guy was helping people steal credit card numbers, he's not someone that broke the law because of his conscience.
Take a history course, man. There is much more than just histories, and much writing was done in the Empire. Martial, writer of great epigrams, was active until the Emperor Domitian. Petronius, author of the novel Satyricon, had a place in the court of Nero. Juvenal and Persius, satirists, lived under the emperors. Ovid, who certainly ranks up there in world poetry, wrote under Augustus. Then there's masters of expository verse and rethoric like Boethius (who they're supposedly making a film of), Tertullian, Quintillian, and many, many others
And I don't know where you get the impression that slavery came in with the Empire. Slavery was part of Roman society from the very beginning. One of the earliest Latin texts, the Senatusconsultum de bacchanalibus, contains laws constraining slave's religious devotions. Cato, that old epitome of traditional Roman Republican values, decades much space in his writings to keeping slaves in line.
I've taken several history courses, man.
I know the names you mentioned and some others. But when you consider that the Roman Empire ruled most of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa for several hundred years, a shelf's worth of books is not impressive as their total literary output. The UK probably produces that in a few minutes. That's an unfair comparison perhaps but I suspect that democratic Athens was much more productive, despite being centuries earlier. Technologically there seemed to be more or less total stagnation too. Almost everything around at the end of the empire was already invented when Augustus became the first Emperor. In fact most of it was invented by the Athenians.
And never did I state that slavery was not present in the Republic. But it is true that armies of slaves working large estates became much more common in the Empire. It's hardly controversial (unless you're a Roman Plutocrat posting through a timewarp) to suggest that a transition to this sort of economy - a tiny number of plutocrats, little or no middle class and a vast number of slaves would cause a drop in the number of books written and the number of machines invented.
You're joking, right? The B.A. Classics is one of the oldest academic degrees around. A fine arts track at most universities involves at least some study of Roman arts. The Aeneid, the poetry of Catullus and the dramas of Seneca are evidentally assigned often enough to encourage new translations to come on the market every few years.
No, I'm not. The Romans ruled a lot of people for a lot of time and produced a handful of literary works, mostly histories. And most of those were produced in the Republic, not the the empire. Once the empire got started a very rich people had armies of slaves to work on their plantations literature and science stagnated. Modern capitalist society is vastly more prolific.
We obviously are thinking of very different parts of Asia. In China and SE Asia, finding legitimate media for purchase can be a hassle. Everything sold on the street is pirated. Nonetheless, Hong Kong has a flourishing film and music scene because the local industry has adapted to a post-copyright set of affairs.
Well in the non PRC ruled parts of Asia piracy has been virtually eliminated. E.g. Japan, South Korea or Taiwan. I bet if you asked the flourishing film and music scene they'd want the same to happen there.
Sufficient transcriptions could be made to create a flourishing literary market. That sounds like mass-copying to me.
Right and we should have our Intellectual Property rules inspired by society where rich aristocrats tossed a few crumbs to artists and then had slaves mass produce their works. I'm guessing the artists were more like court jesters than anything else.
Having met a number of indigenous artists on fieldwork expeditions and personal trips, I doubt that the notion of copyright even crosses their mind.
Well if you're talking about starving bare foot peasants somewhere that's probably true. But like a slave state run by plutocrats like Ancient Rome that is once again not the sort of society we should get legal inspiration for IP laws from.
Any society able to support intellectual workers needs some way to monetize what they produce. That's what copyright and patents are. You invent something and you have a legally protected right to it. Normally you license it to people on some mutually agreed terms.
You can see this in Asia. Back when they were tyrannical third world shit holes where the ultra rich employed gangs of people on low wages to mass produce crap, they were no IP laws. Once local companies and artists started to make things that could sell, IP laws started to be tightened up.
The real reason they exist is to give the people who actually invent something some power of the people that run the mass produced it. In Ancient Rome or Sub Saharan Africa they didn't have that power. Ancient Rome and Sub Saharan Africa are not exactly examples of cultures that were noted for their artistic achievements. Maybe there is a link between these two things.
Actually even in the US copyright was not enforced back in Dickens's time - he actually lobbied for it to be tightened up. Later on as American authors started to proliferate they pressured the government to stop piracy. Now the US produces the vast majority of intellectual property and has ultra tight IP laws.
Loosening them up will make people stop producing IP and work on something which makes some money, because without IP laws producing IP is not a rational way to spend your time.
We have laws. People that break them get locked up. Otherwise criminals could just bullshit about how they have assburgers and ADHD and poor relatives when they were caught and get away with it. In fact in your scheme they might actually get rewarded with a cushy consultancy job.
Liberate the specturm or you will suffer digital restrictions. Vista's checking of line voltages to make sure no one has clipped on an analog recording device should tell you where all of this is going. The RIAA has been screaming about "radio pirates" for 50 years. Digital broadcast gives them a way to close the "analog hole" they so dread. If the makers colude with broadcasters, only "authorized" players will have keys to decode "HD" signals. If the specturm is liberated, everything will be high quality because no one but big publishers wants to degrade music.
That "Liberate the spectrum" link is blocked from where I work, classified as Pornography.
Sure if you spot 'em before they commit a crime you should "give 'em another outlet". But after they commit the crime you have to punish them. Anything else is appeasement.
What's even worse about it is that I can see being a arsehole is kind of not your fault if you're really dumb (say IQ<80 ). But Assburgers sufferers, especially the self diagnosed ones are not that dumb. Sure they're not geniuses, but they're smarter than average, and they should learn some way to not be an arsehole.
Yeah, because criminals are evil people who need to be locked up! Not fellow humans with issues. I'm not saying compassion absolves a person of their responsibility, it doesn't, but too many people seem to have this black and white view on justice, crime, and human nature.
Criminals need to be locked up rather than given consultancy jobs because that will encourage other people not to be criminals. I'm sorry if this is too black and white for you.
Single precision only, non IEEE-754 arithmetic isn't a "real win for scientific computing". It's a win for getting the wrong answers really, really quickly.
First Post FP?
+10.
Why I didn't think of the option!!
But if that would happen, then Sony would politely ask Toshi (in deal, for undisclosed amount of money) to cease production of the laptops. You can bet.
Why would they be bothered though. This laptop is much more expensive than a PS3 I suspect. PS3s are sold at a loss, and this laptop probably costs far more to build and is sold at a profit.
Of course Sony being Sony they almost certainly would stomp a PS3 emulation project, even one that only runs on one expensive laptop, but they shouldn't care.
Linux already has full support for Cell SPEs.
In what sense? These are small CPUs that only have access to 256K or on board memory. They have no MMU. You're not going to run Linux processes on them, they're meant run signal processing code. Even if Linux has a driver, it's still non trivial to modify exising applications so they can be broken up into SPE sized chunks.
Hmm, I missed that because my brain filters out sentences that include marketing gibberish like "complete product ecology". It's like a C compiler won't spot syntax errors inside comments.
Switch to decaff. And go outside for a while. This is the internet and I'm just some anonymous commenter. If my comments are making you that angry, you are taking it too seriously.
YHBT by the way, albeit inadvertently.
UK magazine Marxism Today called vacations like this "Cheap Holidays in Stalinist Misery", which is cool on another level because it's a Sex Pistols reference.
I think they could probably get access to the Internet if they wanted, just like Kim Jong Il apparently does.
Actually it seems like Vista now implements something called XPS for printing, the GDI path is now legacy.
Much to my disappointment they've published the specifications and made them available royalty free, rather than patenting a few vital bits and releasing the rest to printer manufacturers under NDA. Pussies.
Well Windows is free to me, since I get a license each time I buy a laptop. Even if I had to pay $200 for it I'd still use it.
And if you read the link you described as "a funny, sad rant" properly you can see it's actually satire directed at people like you. The guy that wrote it knew a lot more about Linux than the poseur apologists he's trolling.
Back to the tsunami, it's disappointing to hear that the water was 290 fathoms high only very near it's source (the landslide).
Hmmph
Back to the RUSSIAN WATER TENTACLE, it's disappointing to hear that the water was 290 fathoms high only very near it's source (the landslide).
Fixed that for you.
Your link is a sad, funny rant. Hopefully, you won't reward child-like behavior from adults by linking to their pablum again.
Hmm, wouldn't an OEM copy of Windows be cheaper?
Define cheaper. Cheaper how? If money, then yes, it's cheaper.
1. You paid too much for your copy of Windows when you bought your computer. You also paid much more for your laptop than you would Microsoft did not control the operating system market. Did you pay $100 extra? Yes, at least. Can you buy an HP printer for $100 or less? Yes.
Don't argue the costs mentioned until you fully grasp what a price maker is and the effect monopolies have on the quantity of products sold.
2. If that's too complicated for you, how much is that anti-virus/firewall/Office app/other nasty hacks required to use Windows? Freerider? Well, then you still paid too much when you bought the computer.
Finally, please do not shift your argument, or abuse other arguments.
Windows costs OEMs $50
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070525-windows-tax-is-50-according-to-dell-linux-pc-pricing.html
If it works under Linux, there's a fair chance its performance under Windows will be better than a Windows-only printer. It'll be able to offload more of the workload to the printer; if the printer supports PostScript, it'll be able to offload pretty much all of the rasterization to the printer. It's like the difference between onboard video (from Intel or VIA, anyway) and a decent add-on graphics card.
If it works under Linux, it's probably a bit more expensive than the cheap Windows-only printer. This may make it more expensive up front, but it's probably going to be better built and will last longer.
Umm, not really. The best way to make a Windows printer is to rasterise using Windows's GDI, compress the bitmap and send it over the wire. It's actually quicker than trying to convert to postscript or PCL and have the printer convert back to a bitmap because the host CPU has much more horsepower than the printer one. That's how HP LIDL printers work and those do work under Linux. Linux support is a separate issue from printer intelligence.
Thanks for that information, I had no idea about MLC or its considerably reduced write cycle.
I would posit that in most real-world situations it still won't matter, though. That 6 months is at a 100% duty cycle doing nothing but writes. Even in a heavy-duty application, you'll come nowhere near, so that 6 months will be multiplied by a lot. But still, you're absolutely right that the theoretical limit is much lower than I said.
Of course SLC still exists, and still lasts essentially forever. For this new technology to be worthwhile, it would have to not only beat MLC on lifetime, but also beat SLC on price.
I dunno. I still suspect that when flash drives are launched there will be some odd use case (media centres maybe? I don't know what it would be but I can't guarantee it doesn't exist) where the drive is written very frequently. So some people will end up paying a massive premium for a drive with lousy sustained write performance and a short life. From what I've read the power consumption is not impressive either.
Of course in time these issues will be worked out somehow. But I think some early adopters might get a nasty shock.