As long as it's mostly bored hackers who are buying the systems, rather than Industrial Light & Magic, the manufacturers would be sensible to encourage the trend. After all, who is going to buy a Dreamcast and then *not* play games on it?
Unfortunately I don't really expect console manufacturers to have such an enlightened attitude to intellectual property - their paranoia will probably lead them to lock down the platform even though a little bit of openness could encourage a disproportionate amount of interest from hacker types.
The closest I came to finding a working foundation for distributed functional programming (with object semantics) was a synthesis between David P. Reed's distributed file system transaction protocols and Arvind and Gostellow's U-Interpreter for dataflow computations (see the special "Dataflow" issue of IEEE "Computer", I believe it was December 1980). It turns out that Reed, Arvind and Gostellow had come, from two distinct directions, on virtual machines to describe their programming systems that were isomorphic to one another. Reed's distributed transaction file system was based on the object oriented CLU programming language developed for OO research at MIT, and Arvind and Gostellow had come at theirs from the work on dataflow computers arising from the excitement inspired by Backus's previously mentioned Turing Award Lecture.
As the sample moves back and forth, the head detects the strength and direction of the magnetic field at millions of points. A computer then can make a topographic image from the data or interpret the data directly-into sound, for instance.
Imagine the possibilities: you could record sound onto a piece of magnetic material - a loop of tape coated with powdered iron oxide, for example - and this advanced computer technology would allow you to play back that sound at will! The gramophone will be a thing of the past! I predict that in ten years' time room-sized devices based on this technology will be available, making it possible to listen to music anywhere there is access to a 24 kW power supply (required to run the computer). Now if only we could find a smaller, less power-hungry replacement for vacuum tubes...
Unfortunately for the FBI, the world's script kiddies and child porn peddlers have an invincible weapon at their disposal. No, not strong cryptography. Hotmail! Now all their email traffic goes via port 80, while the feds sit scratching their heads wondering why master criminals get so little mail.
And you don't think this is just another case of an amoral corporation pretending to make a moral stand to gain credibility? Customer loyalty is something most companies value highly, and what better way to get it than sticking up for their customers when the big, bad FBI threatens their privacy?
EROS, an operating system with a capability-based security model and "orthogonal persistence" - basically, you can pull the plug out of the wall, and when you reboot your apps won't even know it happened.
Berlin, a windowing system which has many of X's strengths (toolkit independence, network transparency) but few of its weaknesses (primitive framebuffer-based graphics model, bitmap fonts, no alpha channel, high bandwidth requirements).
Fiasco, a free microkernel which is a drop-in replacement for L4, used in several research operating systems.
How many members does the Republican party have? Both organisations would claim (with some justification) to represent a larger group of people than their membership indicates.
Then of course you have the problem of closed source and i'm sure a zillion other people will point out that you cant trust a system until it is fully open sourced...
If you really believe you can trust a program just because you've read the source code, I strongly urge you to read Ken Thompson's article Reflections on Trusting Trust. In it, he shows that you can't trust any program on your system unless you wrote the assembler, linker, loader and compiler yourself. In machine code.
For example, think about the current issues in the next election: abortion, gun control, crime, technology, or religion in schools. You'll note none of those are extremes likely shared by your peers. We could all care less - I mean, yeah, I have an opinion... but will I go out and vote for it?
And there you have it. Another report to quietly edge the people away from the truth.
Yeah, when is the important issue of alien cow abductions going to rise to the top of the electoral agenda? Only when the special interest groups stop jamming the airwaves with "politics" and other such distractions.
This is why groups like the Christian Coalition and the National Organization of Women (NOW) are so influential - they take a very small percentage of the voter population and make sure most of them vote.
Um, I think women are a fairly large percentage of the voting population... around 50% in fact.
Their entire system sounds basically like a system that takes all the email in the system, applies a set of regexs to the headers and takes all email too and from there target.
I doubt it. It seems more likely that they would hook into the ISP's DHCP kit and whenever the suspect dialled in, record all the data comprising his/her PPP session. That way they would get all the suspect's traffic and none of anyone else's. This method is similar to a conventional wiretap (it identifies the suspect with a phone number and assumes the right to intercept any traffic on that phone line), so they would probably have less legal hassles using this method than waiting for the data to leave the ISP's computers and then filtering it. After all, if they wanted to do that, they could just as easily do it from the Pentagon and not bother driving out to Sticksville TN to install a Carnivore... $ cat </dev/mouse
True, but the aim of the GNU project has been to create a complete free system, and I think that's determined the agenda for a lot of free software development. Obviously even GNU had to develop with non-free tools at some stage.:)
From the article: Another option might be to Open Source all the software for the game, but require that the data files (art, sounds, maps, movies, etc) be purchased. This approach is similar to what companies like id Software have done for years, releasing enough source code to allow users to modify the game and create their own add-ons, but still requiring users to purchase the full game in order to use any of those mods.
This approach is not similar to what id has done. Id has released a proprietary game engine and allowed users to add their own artwork (skins, textures, levels). The popularity of Doom/Quake mods shows that if a game attracts a following, artwork can be produced by volunteers and enthusiasts which matches the quality of the original professional artwork.
As for game engines, there are several examples cited in the article of open source engines. The interviewee believes that this is the area of game development which lends itself most readily to an open source development model. So the only component which is still needed before a fully free game can be developed is a fan base. If a single project can build up enough of a following, there is no reason why engine and artwork alike shouldn't be produced in a distributed fashion.
I think you're probably right about creativity requiring high-bandwidth discussions. But bear in mind also that most of the current effort in open source / free software is directed towards replacing existing proprietary system components (OS, GUI, productivity apps) with free equivalents. This is a problem most proprietary software vendors don't have to worry about. When id starts designing a new game, they don't have to first write an editor, then an assembler, then a linker, then a compiler, then a kernel, then command-line tools, then a GUI, then desktop tools, then an IDE, then a game. They just write the game. Free software has covered an immense amount of ground in the last fifteen years, but it's really still in its infancy, still at the stage of "reinventing the wheel". Once the boring work has been done (and I think we're nearly there), I'm sure we will see some more creative and imaginative projects emerging.
... and Aussie Leeanna Walsman, who'll take on the physically-demanding role of a new highly-[s]killed bounty hunter.
And speaking of bounty hunters, Boba Fett fans will be happy to learn that the ruthless bounty hunter and Han Solo nemesis will be making an appearance in Episode II. How much of an appearance is debatable, though, since Lucas is mum on the storyline as usual.
I bet you any money you like Boba Fett turns out to be a woman. I wouldn't put it past George Lucas to pull the "ruthless bounty hunter in a helmet turns out to be an attractive woman" trick twice.
Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol - B.E.E.P. Pronounced "beep". But what did they call it? B.X.X.P. Pronounced "bee ex ex pee" or perhaps "eggs", just to exclude a few more people.
You should read Tor Norretranders' The User Illusion, an excellent book which discusses consciousness and social interaction in terms of information theory. Norretranders argues that the bandwidth of consciousness is several orders of magnitude lower than the bandwidth of sensory experience, so when we take the subconscious elements away from a conversation (for example, when we have the same conversation on IRC instead of on the telephone, or face to face) we leave the brain starved of information and unable to feel empathy for the person we are conversing with.
I felt that if I were to understand my own position, I should understand the other side of the coin (kind of like reading Marx and Rand when you consider yourself an Anarchist, or the Bible when you consider yourself to be an atheist).
I have to disagree - to understand your own position, you should only speak to like-minded people, collectively branding anyone who disagrees with you an idiot and a heretic.
The great thing about this is that while your philosophy demands that you try to see my point of view, my philisophy makes no such demands, leaving me free to give you the finger. And while you're standing with your face screwed up trying to work out the recursive paradoxical implications of opposing your own opinion, I can steal your wallet.
I don't know whether or not this will turn out for the best in the end - but in order for it to stand a chance it's going to require an educated and aware populace - something the US has a real problem with at the moment. If they can change this, then this could be the best idea in ages, otherwise it looks like it could all go horribly wrong.
Sorry to be cynical, but politicians have nothing to gain from a well-educated populace. Education and public discussion of political issues are important to democracy no matter what technology the voting process uses. We should not expect politicians to take them more seriously just because the voting technology changes. Politicians will not try to improve education or levels of political awareness any time soon, because it is educated people who make their lives difficult by demanding that they do their jobs, and firing them if they don't. Couch potatoes make fewer demands and are less likely to throw their representatives out if they make a mistake.
Just think about who will benefit if people think less about the issues before voting, while politicians are able to claim a stronger democratic mandate because voting levels shoot up. Increasing turnout at elections is not necessarily a good thing; uninformed voting benefits only the politicians.
My biggest worry with such a measure would be "impulse voting" - if all you had to do to express your opinion was click a button on a web page, would you take your responsibility seriously?
I've frequently bought things online that I didn't really need, partly because it was so easy. I know it's not hard for most of us to walk down to the polling station and check a box, but neither is it difficult to walk down to the shops. Impulse buying is definitely more of a problem on the internet than it is in physical shops, so there is reason to believe impulse voting would become a problem too.
Imagine a world in which voting only took a second of your time: the party with the shortest and most easily digestible message would win, while those who tried to produce reasonable, well-considered arguments would be drowned out. Internet voting threatens to take the culture of the soundbite to its logical extreme, where grabbing someone's attention for a moment is all that politicians are interested in and glib sloganeering is the route to power.
Interesting that it hooks up to the controller port, though.
Interesting and bizarre. The Playstation has an RS232 serial port, and I understand that's what mobile phones use too. So why connect it to the controller port? I can only assume it's so that Sony can sell another proprietary interface cable (you should see how much they charge for digital audio cables for their DAT recorders).
Re:Anime as a way of learning Japanses
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 1
Better still, get non-dubbed non-subtitled anime and start learning Japanese.
Now that's a scary idea. I'm sure your anime vocabulary would come in useful when using your super powers to defeat armoured cyborg demon-robots intent on stealing the secret of eternal life, but I can't imagine it would help you much if you were asking for directions to the nearest subway station.
Sample real-life Japanese dialogue: "Did you finish reading that book I lent you?" "I'm sorry, I think I left it on the bus. Or maybe it's at school. I'll buy you another copy if I can't find it."
Sample anime dialogue: "Tetsuo!" "Kaneda!" "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!" Explosion "Help me! Aaaaagh! I'm... expanding... I can't breathe! Kaneda!" Sound of a paper bag full of rice pudding being dropped from a great height "TETSUO! Noooooooooo!" Tetsuo turns into a neutron star
Slashdot Mirror
As long as it's mostly bored hackers who are buying the systems, rather than Industrial Light & Magic, the manufacturers would be sensible to encourage the trend. After all, who is going to buy a Dreamcast and then *not* play games on it?
Unfortunately I don't really expect console manufacturers to have such an enlightened attitude to intellectual property - their paranoia will probably lead them to lock down the platform even though a little bit of openness could encourage a disproportionate amount of interest from hacker types.
the excitement inspired by Backus's previously mentioned Turing Award Lecture.
Obviously I was vey, vey drunk indeed.
$ cat < /dev/mouse
As the sample moves back and forth, the head detects the strength and direction of the magnetic field at millions of points. A computer then can make a topographic image from the data or interpret the data directly-into sound, for instance.
Imagine the possibilities: you could record sound onto a piece of magnetic material - a loop of tape coated with powdered iron oxide, for example - and this advanced computer technology would allow you to play back that sound at will! The gramophone will be a thing of the past! I predict that in ten years' time room-sized devices based on this technology will be available, making it possible to listen to music anywhere there is access to a 24 kW power supply (required to run the computer). Now if only we could find a smaller, less power-hungry replacement for vacuum tubes...
$ cat < /dev/mouse
$ cat < /dev/mouse
$ cat < /dev/mouse
Look here.
$ cat < /dev/mouse
Berlin, a windowing system which has many of X's strengths (toolkit independence, network transparency) but few of its weaknesses (primitive framebuffer-based graphics model, bitmap fonts, no alpha channel, high bandwidth requirements).
Fiasco, a free microkernel which is a drop-in replacement for L4, used in several research operating systems.
$ cat < /dev/mouse
$ cat < /dev/mouse
If you really believe you can trust a program just because you've read the source code, I strongly urge you to read Ken Thompson's article Reflections on Trusting Trust. In it, he shows that you can't trust any program on your system unless you wrote the assembler, linker, loader and compiler yourself. In machine code.
$ cat < /dev/mouse
And there you have it. Another report to quietly edge the people away from the truth.
Yeah, when is the important issue of alien cow abductions going to rise to the top of the electoral agenda? Only when the special interest groups stop jamming the airwaves with "politics" and other such distractions.
$ cat < /dev/mouse
Um, I think women are a fairly large percentage of the voting population... around 50% in fact.
$ cat < /dev/mouse
I doubt it. It seems more likely that they would hook into the ISP's DHCP kit and whenever the suspect dialled in, record all the data comprising his/her PPP session. That way they would get all the suspect's traffic and none of anyone else's. This method is similar to a conventional wiretap (it identifies the suspect with a phone number and assumes the right to intercept any traffic on that phone line), so they would probably have less legal hassles using this method than waiting for the data to leave the ISP's computers and then filtering it. After all, if they wanted to do that, they could just as easily do it from the Pentagon and not bother driving out to Sticksville TN to install a Carnivore... /dev/mouse
$ cat <
He's angrier than RMS!
True, but the aim of the GNU project has been to create a complete free system, and I think that's determined the agenda for a lot of free software development. Obviously even GNU had to develop with non-free tools at some stage. :)
This approach is not similar to what id has done. Id has released a proprietary game engine and allowed users to add their own artwork (skins, textures, levels). The popularity of Doom/Quake mods shows that if a game attracts a following, artwork can be produced by volunteers and enthusiasts which matches the quality of the original professional artwork.
As for game engines, there are several examples cited in the article of open source engines. The interviewee believes that this is the area of game development which lends itself most readily to an open source development model. So the only component which is still needed before a fully free game can be developed is a fan base. If a single project can build up enough of a following, there is no reason why engine and artwork alike shouldn't be produced in a distributed fashion.
I think you're probably right about creativity requiring high-bandwidth discussions. But bear in mind also that most of the current effort in open source / free software is directed towards replacing existing proprietary system components (OS, GUI, productivity apps) with free equivalents. This is a problem most proprietary software vendors don't have to worry about. When id starts designing a new game, they don't have to first write an editor, then an assembler, then a linker, then a compiler, then a kernel, then command-line tools, then a GUI, then desktop tools, then an IDE, then a game. They just write the game. Free software has covered an immense amount of ground in the last fifteen years, but it's really still in its infancy, still at the stage of "reinventing the wheel". Once the boring work has been done (and I think we're nearly there), I'm sure we will see some more creative and imaginative projects emerging.
And speaking of bounty hunters, Boba Fett fans will be happy to learn that the ruthless bounty hunter and Han Solo nemesis will be making an appearance in Episode II. How much of an appearance is debatable, though, since Lucas is mum on the storyline as usual.
I bet you any money you like Boba Fett turns out to be a woman. I wouldn't put it past George Lucas to pull the "ruthless bounty hunter in a helmet turns out to be an attractive woman" trick twice.
Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol - B.E.E.P. Pronounced "beep". But what did they call it? B.X.X.P. Pronounced "bee ex ex pee" or perhaps "eggs", just to exclude a few more people.
You should read Tor Norretranders' The User Illusion , an excellent book which discusses consciousness and social interaction in terms of information theory. Norretranders argues that the bandwidth of consciousness is several orders of magnitude lower than the bandwidth of sensory experience, so when we take the subconscious elements away from a conversation (for example, when we have the same conversation on IRC instead of on the telephone, or face to face) we leave the brain starved of information and unable to feel empathy for the person we are conversing with.
I have to disagree - to understand your own position, you should only speak to like-minded people, collectively branding anyone who disagrees with you an idiot and a heretic.
The great thing about this is that while your philosophy demands that you try to see my point of view, my philisophy makes no such demands, leaving me free to give you the finger. And while you're standing with your face screwed up trying to work out the recursive paradoxical implications of opposing your own opinion, I can steal your wallet.
Sorry to be cynical, but politicians have nothing to gain from a well-educated populace. Education and public discussion of political issues are important to democracy no matter what technology the voting process uses. We should not expect politicians to take them more seriously just because the voting technology changes. Politicians will not try to improve education or levels of political awareness any time soon, because it is educated people who make their lives difficult by demanding that they do their jobs, and firing them if they don't. Couch potatoes make fewer demands and are less likely to throw their representatives out if they make a mistake.
Just think about who will benefit if people think less about the issues before voting, while politicians are able to claim a stronger democratic mandate because voting levels shoot up. Increasing turnout at elections is not necessarily a good thing; uninformed voting benefits only the politicians.
My biggest worry with such a measure would be "impulse voting" - if all you had to do to express your opinion was click a button on a web page, would you take your responsibility seriously?
I've frequently bought things online that I didn't really need, partly because it was so easy. I know it's not hard for most of us to walk down to the polling station and check a box, but neither is it difficult to walk down to the shops. Impulse buying is definitely more of a problem on the internet than it is in physical shops, so there is reason to believe impulse voting would become a problem too.
Imagine a world in which voting only took a second of your time: the party with the shortest and most easily digestible message would win, while those who tried to produce reasonable, well-considered arguments would be drowned out. Internet voting threatens to take the culture of the soundbite to its logical extreme, where grabbing someone's attention for a moment is all that politicians are interested in and glib sloganeering is the route to power.
Interesting and bizarre. The Playstation has an RS232 serial port, and I understand that's what mobile phones use too. So why connect it to the controller port? I can only assume it's so that Sony can sell another proprietary interface cable (you should see how much they charge for digital audio cables for their DAT recorders).
Even a tiny nation like Iraq? Get a globe.
Now that's a scary idea. I'm sure your anime vocabulary would come in useful when using your super powers to defeat armoured cyborg demon-robots intent on stealing the secret of eternal life, but I can't imagine it would help you much if you were asking for directions to the nearest subway station.
Sample real-life Japanese dialogue:
"Did you finish reading that book I lent you?"
"I'm sorry, I think I left it on the bus. Or maybe it's at school. I'll buy you another copy if I can't find it."
Sample anime dialogue:
"Tetsuo!"
"Kaneda!"
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!"
Explosion
"Help me! Aaaaagh! I'm... expanding... I can't breathe! Kaneda!"
Sound of a paper bag full of rice pudding being dropped from a great height
"TETSUO! Noooooooooo!"
Tetsuo turns into a neutron star