Okay, I'm a complete doofus when it comes to phone standards. If I end up roped to a cellphone, I leave it off unless I want to make a call, and then I turn it off again. I don't know what the different networks are, and the idea of "quad band phones with wifi and bluetooth" just makes me want to ignore all manner of phone technology for another year. Somehow in the case of phones, each sufficiently advanced technology just seems to make it less and less like magic.
That said, if I wanted a phone like this OpenMoko, and I was thinking of using it in the USA and Japan (for example), what carrier must I sell my soul to, and what web/email/pots things can I do with it in both areas?
See, that's where you're misreading the announcement. The Greenphone is not the World's First Integrated Open Source Mobile Communications Platform at Open Source in Mobile Conference in Amsterdam. The Greenphone may have been first at other locations, but not this conference. So there.
There are a lot of people who have already done this soul-searching in the literary world. One fictional example is that of the book, Lolita. The movie adaptations are a pale shadow of the psychology involved, but if you've seen any of them, you can probably understand my point.
Even if you're in no way a pedophile or pederast, it can be a very challenging read. In that story, you are in the mind of a fictional character who IS a pedophile. The first half of the book is just his anticipation in his desires, his plotting and scheming, his self-loathing yet determined goal-seeking behaviors. This is uneasy enough to absorb for the reader, whether you're a parent, a real-life victim, or neither. The second half of the book, once he "consumates" his desires, is another whole exploration into the mutual consequences that both parties face.
Yet somehow the book of Lolita has gone from a sick idea, to a banned idea, and back to a respected and deeply studied piece of high literature. The author Nabokov is no longer immediately assumed to be of the same mindset as his character Humbert: there is a presenium, a barrier between the author and the character, as well as between the character and the reader.
The creators of this Columbine RPG didn't just go out on a lark splashing gore on the screen and laughing at the jock victims. From all I've seen about the game (haven't played it), they took an approach that MADE the player squirm with empathy, that defied the player's logic and made them squirm DESPITE the graphics, DESPITE the gameplay issues itself. What is highlighted is the psychology that led to the events from all parties: cruel clique objectification and lack of adult-guided social nurturing at a critical point in the adolescent mind. I don't mean to sound like a Jon Katz here, but we've already discussed this, but this work appears to have legitimate merit which should be recognized, instead of assuming that it's a depraved training manual for mayhem.
If your house looks too customized, you lose a lot of buyer interest. Statistics show that even one room with blue carpet will turn off a significant number of buyers. Heaven forbid you show the house with hot-pink shag carpet, or if you have a bathroom that looks like it was made for unusual "parties" instead of the usual daily routine.
Even if 90% of your home's visitors don't bat an eye at your Trekkie mecca, you can be sure that you'll take a massive hit in resale value if any of your Enterprise scene takes more than a few minutes to dismantle.
During the keynote, Steve was talking about how vigorously they were protecting the phone. Patents in particular numbered in the many dozens, but you know by extension that they're gonna be protective of everything related to the dang thing.
Somehow, I don't think that the brick and mortar video rental services are doomed just yet. There's a bit of a difference in picking up a movie with your groceries to watch it with the family on the big-screen in the living room, and downloading it so you can wait to buffer up enough to play it inside a web browser window with heavy compression on the small screen of the bill-paying appliance.
How and WHY is Copyright SUPPOSED to be imperfect and leaky?
First, the why: US Copyright Law was heavily architected and influenced by a couple notable figures. The first librarian and an influential publisher of (pirated) books, Benjamin Franklin. The exemplar of libertarian "smallest government intrusion possible" politics, Thomas Jefferson. They both felt that it was the government's responsibility to encourage the sharing of inventions and expressions, not discourage it, but recognized that the best way to entice an author out of their mousehole was to give them some minor form of protection.
Second, the how: US Copyright Law has enshrined a system of "common sense" provisions instead of a set of crisp delineations. A specific codification of allowed and disallowed behaviors is exactly why the Bill of Rights was so controversial at the time: it seems to be listing the few things you can DO, instead of the few things the government could impose. Copyright Law is instead written such that there are several vague categories of defense (called the Fair Use defenses), and it's not a set of rules written such that any technology could possibly solve with 100% True Positive and 0% False Positive success. It takes thinking, and communication, and trust, and social contracts as well as legal contracts, to decide if a work infringes or does not infringe. And all this is by design.
One, "defend the mark" does not equate to "fire off a lawsuit immediately." That's only one tactic that serves the purpose of defending the mark. The fact that documented negotiations exist at all is sufficient to show that they were holding up the legal requirements for defense of the mark.
Two, "fire a lawsuit" is sufficient, but to then hold press conferences or litter the WSJ with press releases explaining to uninvolved parties *why* they executed a legal option is not beneficial to their situation in any legally binding way, so why do it? Reason: public relations pressure. Cisco customers and shareholders are asking Cisco why they're being big poopy-heads when they could resolve the mark issue in a myriad of other methods.
Legalities aside, and I'm not defending the legal aspects of Apple's continued use of the mark, but I'm sure Steve was "surprised and disappointed" too. Apple was apparently talking with Cisco all that time, just to have Cisco actually ship a product with the name just a month before the MacWorld keynote. If Cisco wants to paint itself as the poor hapless guy who got shafted on a sharing agreement mid-negotiation, I don't think it will really hold water. Apple spent how much on the collateral printing for the keynote, prior to the Cisco release? If Cisco puts out an iTurd with an "iPhone" sticker, I'm sure Apple's desire to be associated with Cisco and to share the trademark drops even more.
Note that Cisco is trying to win in the court of public opinion. Apple is remaining very mum about the whole thing. Which one is going to be seen as reasonable public pre-trial behavior in a court case is actually very debatable.
Even though I do *nothing* with circuitry myself anymore, I seriously want to make/fund/use the development of a good product that is "GarageBand for circuitry." Something that is somewhere between Rocky's Boots and Simulink and the other industrial fab tools. Enough to build a Furby's guts, for example.
About ten years ago, I was going to make a little app like this. Lay out the logic gates, translate that schematic into a virtual breadboard view (good enough you could build a real one next to the computer), translate that schematic into a virtual PCB view (good enough you could print etching, drilling and silkscreening patterns, and let you play with the circuit with virtual timeline probes in any of those views. Of course, that was hobby, and my career and life had other ideas in mind for me.
Ask Slashdot: Does Google Make You Drool? An anonymous fanboy writes, "Why does POP mail still exist? Why do people still talk about Flickr and GARMIN maps? Should the Linux kernel be rewritten on a micro-google architecture? Nintendo was just copying Google when they came up with the idea of the Wiiiiiiimote. Elvis isn't dead, he's just not attending shareholder meetings anymore. The SEC and DOJ are investigating all the back-dating scandals using a secret new Google API."
I like the Apple hardware products and the OSX, but to say that Apple doesn't load their new laptops with crapware and sleazeware would be disingenuous. If I buy a $3K MacBook Pro, should I expect to get a popup asking if I want to upgrade my trial copy of QuickTime? I enjoy the iLife suite of software, but I didn't have much of a choice to buy the laptop without it. I don't think the trial edition of OpenBase or the inclusion of OmniOutliner or ComicChat can really be considered a "blank slate."
The only thing in Apple's favor here (and it's a big point in their favor) is that it's absolutely and amazingly trivial to wipe the slate clean myself: drag unwanted items to trashcan, Empty Trash. I am still annoyed that a preinstalled QuickTime on a flagship hardware image is nagware. Hello, the 70s called and want their nags back. If the alternatives like VLC and Mplayer would really integrate as a replacement for QuickTime, I'd probably use them instead.
It seems that every company that wants to get into the MMORPG game makes the same predictable mistakes. Thankfully, most of these never make it to the final "go live" moment. Some can limp along for a while but are nowhere near the leaders of the pack. It's just a waste of time when companies can't learn the mistakes they watch their competitors make.
In this case, it's making the fatal assumption that "great character-based story will make great MMO franchise." MMORPGs are about the players, not about a few trademarked names that served as the ensemble core of a story. To entertain the players, they must feel like the star of their personal story, and if the premise is about the key personalities in that world, there's a big disconnect there. Find mythical worlds which don't rely on the obvious few characters, where everyone has a chance at being great in an original way. The pre-authored content should be about the settings, the mythos, the backstories, not about the "main characters."
Example: don't make an MMORPG about Harry Potter's world. There's a huge castle, a wonderful surrounding countryside, four great built-in guilds, and more magic spells than you can shake a stick at (literally). But you're also going to have five thousand people who can't succeed without a ragged scar on their forehead in an entirely predictable way.
Example: don't make an MMORPG about Cap'n Jack Sparrow's world. There's a huge ship, a great collection of ports of call and legendary treasure to plunder. But you're also going to have five thousand people who can't succeed without swaggering around drunk on sun and rum in an entirely predictable way.
I could cut and paste a few more examples, but you could just look down the NetFlix Top 100 and the Amazon Top 100 for a lot of the ideas that are being discussed in MMORPG board rooms today.
For those who've been reading Slashdot during the gradual evolution of Stallman's pronouncements, it's interesting to see what has changed over 20 years.
I have long felt that athiesm is just another religion. It's a belief in an unprovable truth. Some have faith there IS a god, some have faith there is NOT a god. Neither one can prove the other wrong, yet they spend an enormous amount of time trying, and usually using nothing more sophisticated than parlour logic games and raising one's voice. That's how agnosticism or Unitarianism or even simple neutrality is different. Believe what you want, just don't make me follow your weird rules or yell at me for not feeling the way you do about it.
I've suggested several times in the past that it appears that democracy (as well as commercial democracy, voting with your dollars) breaks down around 10e6 to 10e8 scales. Once a governed population reaches this size, it can no longer assume that reasoned debate will be able to sway casual opinion at all. Once a customer marketplace reaches that size, no boycotts are effective and bad products don't change anything in the general perception, since so few people actually inform themselves. A politician or a company would have to be caught red-handed burying razorblades in the babyfood before the mass public will even notice and associate badness with the politician or company in question.
Blind fealty to parties and brands just compound this situation. A politician who is caught shredding the constitution is forgiven merely because they are in the favored party, as if that were salient. A technologically dangerous product is forgiven merely because the company spends a ton of cash on those "lifestyle" branding ads that don't even talk about their product anymore, completely contrary to logic.
I haven't RTFA yet, but my first question was, "is the course also free (libre)?" Can we post large non-trivial excerpts or wholesale clones elsewhere without any fear of MIT intellectual property bullying?
Erm, everything has a benefit tradeoff, and some of these are personal decisions. If she talked with doctors about her augmentation, and decided that she "knew what the health effects" would be (i.e., measurable risk of infection, corruption, or rupture), then she could make that decision. I don't see that as hypocritical at all.
Not quite the same thing as eating unlabeled genetically engineered foods or undergoing treatments involving new nano-particle concepts, while not even scientists can speak consistently and knowledgeably to the risks.
every year, this must get re-explained
on
IOCCC 2006 is now open
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Okay, the 2006 "Explanation of Why IOCCC Is Not Just Ugly Code" is now underway.
The winning entries are pieces of art, not pieces of dung. They look like they should do one thing, but they do another. They arrange the code in a visually pleasing but maintenance-proof way. They choose some concept and take it to the absurd limit, all within a tiny amount of code.
My favorite past entry is John Tromp's maze generator. In seven lines of code, he produces random mazes. The variables are named M, A, Z, E instead of useful functional mnemonics. The source code is formatted to LOOK like a maze. And even in this maze which is the source code, the passages in the maze spell out the word 'maze.' This is not just putting a pig on the lipstick, this is making the pig look *good*.
"And if you call in with your pledge of support right now, your money will be matched, dollar for dollar, by the generous contribution of ACME Inc. You will also receive a cuddly ACME logoed teddy bear and an assortment of ACME tea bags. Public broadcasting needs you to pick up that phone, and call in, to keep the airwaves free of the usual commercial breaks that other stations need to use to fund the valuable programming you hear."
I would also ask him how common spyware and viruses are, and how a user such as Ms. Lindor would be able to fix a machine infected with spyware and/or viruses without resorting to formatting her hard drive and re-installing Windows.
Then I would ask him about the Sony rootkit, and how a user should remove such unauthorized software if not by formatting and reinstalling Windows. And so on.
How about asking, "Will it finally force PayPal to follow US Federal Law regarding financial institutions, or will it continue to act as with capricious disregard for facts and evidence when there's a payment dispute?"
Slashdot Mirror
Now how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Okay, I'm a complete doofus when it comes to phone standards. If I end up roped to a cellphone, I leave it off unless I want to make a call, and then I turn it off again. I don't know what the different networks are, and the idea of "quad band phones with wifi and bluetooth" just makes me want to ignore all manner of phone technology for another year. Somehow in the case of phones, each sufficiently advanced technology just seems to make it less and less like magic.
That said, if I wanted a phone like this OpenMoko, and I was thinking of using it in the USA and Japan (for example), what carrier must I sell my soul to, and what web/email/pots things can I do with it in both areas?
See, that's where you're misreading the announcement. The Greenphone is not the World's First Integrated Open Source Mobile Communications Platform at Open Source in Mobile Conference in Amsterdam . The Greenphone may have been first at other locations, but not this conference. So there.
There are a lot of people who have already done this soul-searching in the literary world. One fictional example is that of the book, Lolita. The movie adaptations are a pale shadow of the psychology involved, but if you've seen any of them, you can probably understand my point.
Even if you're in no way a pedophile or pederast, it can be a very challenging read. In that story, you are in the mind of a fictional character who IS a pedophile. The first half of the book is just his anticipation in his desires, his plotting and scheming, his self-loathing yet determined goal-seeking behaviors. This is uneasy enough to absorb for the reader, whether you're a parent, a real-life victim, or neither. The second half of the book, once he "consumates" his desires, is another whole exploration into the mutual consequences that both parties face.
Yet somehow the book of Lolita has gone from a sick idea, to a banned idea, and back to a respected and deeply studied piece of high literature. The author Nabokov is no longer immediately assumed to be of the same mindset as his character Humbert: there is a presenium, a barrier between the author and the character, as well as between the character and the reader.
The creators of this Columbine RPG didn't just go out on a lark splashing gore on the screen and laughing at the jock victims. From all I've seen about the game (haven't played it), they took an approach that MADE the player squirm with empathy, that defied the player's logic and made them squirm DESPITE the graphics, DESPITE the gameplay issues itself. What is highlighted is the psychology that led to the events from all parties: cruel clique objectification and lack of adult-guided social nurturing at a critical point in the adolescent mind. I don't mean to sound like a Jon Katz here, but we've already discussed this, but this work appears to have legitimate merit which should be recognized, instead of assuming that it's a depraved training manual for mayhem.
If your house looks too customized, you lose a lot of buyer interest. Statistics show that even one room with blue carpet will turn off a significant number of buyers. Heaven forbid you show the house with hot-pink shag carpet, or if you have a bathroom that looks like it was made for unusual "parties" instead of the usual daily routine.
Even if 90% of your home's visitors don't bat an eye at your Trekkie mecca, you can be sure that you'll take a massive hit in resale value if any of your Enterprise scene takes more than a few minutes to dismantle.
During the keynote, Steve was talking about how vigorously they were protecting the phone. Patents in particular numbered in the many dozens, but you know by extension that they're gonna be protective of everything related to the dang thing.
Somehow, I don't think that the brick and mortar video rental services are doomed just yet. There's a bit of a difference in picking up a movie with your groceries to watch it with the family on the big-screen in the living room, and downloading it so you can wait to buffer up enough to play it inside a web browser window with heavy compression on the small screen of the bill-paying appliance.
First, the why: US Copyright Law was heavily architected and influenced by a couple notable figures. The first librarian and an influential publisher of (pirated) books, Benjamin Franklin. The exemplar of libertarian "smallest government intrusion possible" politics, Thomas Jefferson. They both felt that it was the government's responsibility to encourage the sharing of inventions and expressions, not discourage it, but recognized that the best way to entice an author out of their mousehole was to give them some minor form of protection.
Second, the how: US Copyright Law has enshrined a system of "common sense" provisions instead of a set of crisp delineations. A specific codification of allowed and disallowed behaviors is exactly why the Bill of Rights was so controversial at the time: it seems to be listing the few things you can DO, instead of the few things the government could impose. Copyright Law is instead written such that there are several vague categories of defense (called the Fair Use defenses), and it's not a set of rules written such that any technology could possibly solve with 100% True Positive and 0% False Positive success. It takes thinking, and communication, and trust, and social contracts as well as legal contracts, to decide if a work infringes or does not infringe. And all this is by design.
One, "defend the mark" does not equate to "fire off a lawsuit immediately." That's only one tactic that serves the purpose of defending the mark. The fact that documented negotiations exist at all is sufficient to show that they were holding up the legal requirements for defense of the mark.
Two, "fire a lawsuit" is sufficient, but to then hold press conferences or litter the WSJ with press releases explaining to uninvolved parties *why* they executed a legal option is not beneficial to their situation in any legally binding way, so why do it? Reason: public relations pressure. Cisco customers and shareholders are asking Cisco why they're being big poopy-heads when they could resolve the mark issue in a myriad of other methods.
Legalities aside, and I'm not defending the legal aspects of Apple's continued use of the mark, but I'm sure Steve was "surprised and disappointed" too. Apple was apparently talking with Cisco all that time, just to have Cisco actually ship a product with the name just a month before the MacWorld keynote. If Cisco wants to paint itself as the poor hapless guy who got shafted on a sharing agreement mid-negotiation, I don't think it will really hold water. Apple spent how much on the collateral printing for the keynote, prior to the Cisco release? If Cisco puts out an iTurd with an "iPhone" sticker, I'm sure Apple's desire to be associated with Cisco and to share the trademark drops even more.
Note that Cisco is trying to win in the court of public opinion. Apple is remaining very mum about the whole thing. Which one is going to be seen as reasonable public pre-trial behavior in a court case is actually very debatable.
Even though I do *nothing* with circuitry myself anymore, I seriously want to make/fund/use the development of a good product that is "GarageBand for circuitry." Something that is somewhere between Rocky's Boots and Simulink and the other industrial fab tools. Enough to build a Furby's guts, for example.
About ten years ago, I was going to make a little app like this. Lay out the logic gates, translate that schematic into a virtual breadboard view (good enough you could build a real one next to the computer), translate that schematic into a virtual PCB view (good enough you could print etching, drilling and silkscreening patterns, and let you play with the circuit with virtual timeline probes in any of those views. Of course, that was hobby, and my career and life had other ideas in mind for me.
Ask Slashdot: Does Google Make You Drool?
An anonymous fanboy writes, "Why does POP mail still exist? Why do people still talk about Flickr and GARMIN maps? Should the Linux kernel be rewritten on a micro-google architecture? Nintendo was just copying Google when they came up with the idea of the Wiiiiiiimote. Elvis isn't dead, he's just not attending shareholder meetings anymore. The SEC and DOJ are investigating all the back-dating scandals using a secret new Google API."
I like the Apple hardware products and the OSX, but to say that Apple doesn't load their new laptops with crapware and sleazeware would be disingenuous. If I buy a $3K MacBook Pro, should I expect to get a popup asking if I want to upgrade my trial copy of QuickTime? I enjoy the iLife suite of software, but I didn't have much of a choice to buy the laptop without it. I don't think the trial edition of OpenBase or the inclusion of OmniOutliner or ComicChat can really be considered a "blank slate."
The only thing in Apple's favor here (and it's a big point in their favor) is that it's absolutely and amazingly trivial to wipe the slate clean myself: drag unwanted items to trashcan, Empty Trash. I am still annoyed that a preinstalled QuickTime on a flagship hardware image is nagware. Hello, the 70s called and want their nags back. If the alternatives like VLC and Mplayer would really integrate as a replacement for QuickTime, I'd probably use them instead.
It seems that every company that wants to get into the MMORPG game makes the same predictable mistakes. Thankfully, most of these never make it to the final "go live" moment. Some can limp along for a while but are nowhere near the leaders of the pack. It's just a waste of time when companies can't learn the mistakes they watch their competitors make.
In this case, it's making the fatal assumption that "great character-based story will make great MMO franchise." MMORPGs are about the players, not about a few trademarked names that served as the ensemble core of a story. To entertain the players, they must feel like the star of their personal story, and if the premise is about the key personalities in that world, there's a big disconnect there. Find mythical worlds which don't rely on the obvious few characters, where everyone has a chance at being great in an original way. The pre-authored content should be about the settings, the mythos, the backstories, not about the "main characters."
Example: don't make an MMORPG about Harry Potter's world. There's a huge castle, a wonderful surrounding countryside, four great built-in guilds, and more magic spells than you can shake a stick at (literally). But you're also going to have five thousand people who can't succeed without a ragged scar on their forehead in an entirely predictable way.
Example: don't make an MMORPG about Cap'n Jack Sparrow's world. There's a huge ship, a great collection of ports of call and legendary treasure to plunder. But you're also going to have five thousand people who can't succeed without swaggering around drunk on sun and rum in an entirely predictable way.
I could cut and paste a few more examples, but you could just look down the NetFlix Top 100 and the Amazon Top 100 for a lot of the ideas that are being discussed in MMORPG board rooms today.
Mattel is ALREADY the next Sony; more like Sony is just copying Mattel Barbie legal tactics from the 60s.
Nothing for you to see here; move along.
Truer words never 403'd.
A war is only in its final phase when both sides build their monuments to the dead, and acknowledge the loss incurred upon the survivors.
I have long felt that athiesm is just another religion. It's a belief in an unprovable truth. Some have faith there IS a god, some have faith there is NOT a god. Neither one can prove the other wrong, yet they spend an enormous amount of time trying, and usually using nothing more sophisticated than parlour logic games and raising one's voice. That's how agnosticism or Unitarianism or even simple neutrality is different. Believe what you want, just don't make me follow your weird rules or yell at me for not feeling the way you do about it.
I've suggested several times in the past that it appears that democracy (as well as commercial democracy, voting with your dollars) breaks down around 10e6 to 10e8 scales. Once a governed population reaches this size, it can no longer assume that reasoned debate will be able to sway casual opinion at all. Once a customer marketplace reaches that size, no boycotts are effective and bad products don't change anything in the general perception, since so few people actually inform themselves. A politician or a company would have to be caught red-handed burying razorblades in the babyfood before the mass public will even notice and associate badness with the politician or company in question.
Blind fealty to parties and brands just compound this situation. A politician who is caught shredding the constitution is forgiven merely because they are in the favored party, as if that were salient. A technologically dangerous product is forgiven merely because the company spends a ton of cash on those "lifestyle" branding ads that don't even talk about their product anymore, completely contrary to logic.
I haven't RTFA yet, but my first question was, "is the course also free (libre)?" Can we post large non-trivial excerpts or wholesale clones elsewhere without any fear of MIT intellectual property bullying?
Erm, everything has a benefit tradeoff, and some of these are personal decisions. If she talked with doctors about her augmentation, and decided that she "knew what the health effects" would be (i.e., measurable risk of infection, corruption, or rupture), then she could make that decision. I don't see that as hypocritical at all.
Not quite the same thing as eating unlabeled genetically engineered foods or undergoing treatments involving new nano-particle concepts, while not even scientists can speak consistently and knowledgeably to the risks.
Okay, the 2006 "Explanation of Why IOCCC Is Not Just Ugly Code" is now underway.
The winning entries are pieces of art, not pieces of dung. They look like they should do one thing, but they do another. They arrange the code in a visually pleasing but maintenance-proof way. They choose some concept and take it to the absurd limit, all within a tiny amount of code.
My favorite past entry is John Tromp's maze generator. In seven lines of code, he produces random mazes. The variables are named M, A, Z, E instead of useful functional mnemonics. The source code is formatted to LOOK like a maze. And even in this maze which is the source code, the passages in the maze spell out the word 'maze.' This is not just putting a pig on the lipstick, this is making the pig look *good*.
"And if you call in with your pledge of support right now, your money will be matched, dollar for dollar, by the generous contribution of ACME Inc. You will also receive a cuddly ACME logoed teddy bear and an assortment of ACME tea bags. Public broadcasting needs you to pick up that phone, and call in, to keep the airwaves free of the usual commercial breaks that other stations need to use to fund the valuable programming you hear."
Then I would ask him about the Sony rootkit, and how a user should remove such unauthorized software if not by formatting and reinstalling Windows. And so on.
How about asking, "Will it finally force PayPal to follow US Federal Law regarding financial institutions, or will it continue to act as with capricious disregard for facts and evidence when there's a payment dispute?"