LOL! I have the 300kbps NASA TV stream running here at work. They were printing the "morning mail" on Discovery. They have a laptop apparently running Windows, hooked up to a Thermal Impact printer. They apparently have a pretty nice setup, nicer than I would have expected. They can do colour or black and white print-outs, they have MS Office, etc.
They get daily messages sent up from Mission Control with data and instructions, checklist changes, etc for the upcoming day's activities. I wonder if it's a standard email system with a TCP/IP stack on the laptop, or if it's some shuttle specific protocol?
Well anyway, they apparently had a paper jam in the printer this morning. I had a good chuckle as I listened to the conversation between CAPCOM Chris Hadfield and John Grunsfeld in orbit as he fixed it. He was opening documents in MS Word and printing out single pages, describing garble characters, pagination problems, etc. It was neat to hear them talking about this stuff that a lot of us have dealt with in luser support. They were talking about computer stuff in Astronaut terminology.
First, the story clearly stated that the pics might not be available for up to an hour, so have some patience, cowboy. Second, don't you know how to hack a URL? The correct location is probably going to be something like http://kurt.andover.net/bazar/fsf - It looks like maybe Roblimo got a bit confused in the cut and paste or else the URL got interpereted as a relative rather than absolute URL.
Anyhow, until the Bazaar pics are up, you can still waste your time looking at the fun pics from the/. trek to Comdex last month or whenever that was... The URL for that is http://kurt.andover.net/
Buying some COMS could actually be a very good idea if you want a piece of the PALM IPO. What's going to happen is, on the day of the IPO they'll split the COMS shares into two entities. There will be some equation to determine what fraction of the old COMS share value was PALM and what fraction was the rest of COMS.
They'll take however many shares of COMS you own as of some date, run it through the calculation, and give you X shares of the new PALM and X shares of the new (rest of) COMS. After that, the shares trade basically independently and you can buy or sell as you like.
I have no idea what the date you have to own COMS is, for all I know it alrady passed. I also have no idea what the calculation is going to be or how to determine if it will be beneficial to you. Consult your financial advisor. YMMV, IANAL and IANASB
I assume you mean MS? What I talked about is the basic building process of the internet. Even though MS was around during the formative years and even if they have recently tried to bastartdize the standards for themselves, they still have to suport HTTP, POP3, SMTP, etc in their internet products, otherwise the products are useless on the internet. (some would argue they are sill useless on the internet)
I guess the idea is, if you accept the premise that the whole reason the internet exists is because everybody uses the same open protocols, then you have to accept that the IETF/RFC process is the reason.
If we have organizations that don't follow the process, then we have the incompatible mess that is IM currently.
Whether the company is a monopoly doesn't enter into it by my way of thinking.
AOL is not a monopoly, there are other ISP's (unless you consider they have a virtual monopoly on the clueless newbie luser demographic). Yahoo is not a monopoly, there are other portals. ATT Worldnet is not a monopoly. I was about to say ICQ is not a monopoly, except AOL owns them now. Not sure what that makes ICQ...
Yet these products and the MS product to not interoperate well - becuase they don't follow an open standard. Whether a company is a monopoly or not is not a factor. IMO.
What you described is what the IETF and the RFC mechanism is for.
In fact, they already have a working group on the Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol (impp)
What's really needed is one basic, open, interoperable standard. Think of email. Every ISP runs an SMTP server for their customers, and any ISP can email any other ISP's customers. The network is set up so that individual nodes can figure out where things go by MX records and other standardized mechanisms.
We need something like that for IM.
Since there is no financial incentive to allow your competitors to access your servers (and you customers), it seems to me that the only way around this is a global service run on a not for profit basis, that allows _anyone_ to use it with any client they like (ie, open the message protocols to the public).
NO NO NO! First of all, if there were "no financial incentive to let competitors access your servers", there would be no such thing as email.
Do you remember how back in the eighties, there were all these proprietary email services, and you could only send somebody a message if you were on the same service as them? Remember Compuserve, MCIMail, ATTMail, Fidonet, and then there were those internet people in the universtities.
Ever heard of Metcalfe's law? Bob Metcalfe, the former CEO of 3COM and inventor of "Ethernet" networking technology is credited with this idea, commonly referred to as Metcalfe's Law:
(Paraphrased) The power of a network increases exponentially with each additional node...
That's why it made sense for everybody to drop the proprietary email protocols, and use the open standard. That's why it's in everybody's interest to have one unified, decentralized, open IM protocol that everyone can use.
Secondly, this is NOT an area where governments belong.
Finally, a way I can get my Hockey Night In Canada fix down here. The Hockey coverage on US TV really stinks. Sure there's lots of games, but the announcers, camera work and all the friggin graphics make it impossible to follow the game. Watch the old CBC and CTV feeds of Stanley Cup and Canada Cup games on ESPN Classic to see how Hockey was meant to be covered...
It's never been about money and financial gain for the developers! It's about writing Free Software. By definition that means it's OK for others to make money off the software. (provided they follow the license terms, source code must be available, derivative works must remain GPL, etc.)
If Linus was only interested in making money off his software, and stopping others from doing the same, he never would have used the GPL.
I'm not a developer myself so I don't presume to speak for them, but everythign I've read seems to indicate they are ecstatic that Linux has become so popular, and it seems they mostly appreciate the role RHAT has had in that.
Everything I've read indicates they've been an upstanding member of the Open Source community, they encourage (and more importantly, fund) a lot of good packages and developers, and they have always followed the GPL with their own code.
And what's with that dumb-ass last post remark in your sig, anyway? Lousy troll...
This guy hit it right on the head with two comments:
I wanted a Red Hat distro because I wanted a company with... an eye towards an experienced DOS/Windows geek... looking to join the revolution.... learning UNIX meant I was beginning from worse than zero once I realized DOS is UNIX with Down's Syndrome.
Red Hat brought Linux to the non-UNIX types, and don't ever forget it.
That sums up my experience with Linux exactly. When I started playing with Linux about 2 years ago, it was becuase I borrowed a friend's RedHat 4.x CD.
I had known about Linux before, but all I ever knew was you had to download the floppy images and it was a pain to install anyway. Being a newbie, all I was interested in was throwing it on a PC to play with for a couple weekends to tinker and see how it worked. The whole download-copy-install ordeal was not something I was prepared to do. My bad for being lazy, but I had other things to spend my time on.
Over the last two years, every time I got a new computer, I would install whatever the current Red Hat was on it just to see for myself how far Linux had come. It wasn't until Red hat 6 that I found something I considered worth building a PC around.
I would never have done that if I still had to download floppy images (although I now realize how neat it is that an OS exists where you can do that and it's actually encouraged!)
Wow. That metamute article was really a trip. I'd like some of whatever that guy's smoking...
But despite their proclaimed warlike verisimilitude,
What the heck is a verisimilitude?
'Accurate' combat simulations such as the recently released F15 and USNF
Navy Fighters is over 3 years old and nobody ever mistook it for accurate. Jane's F15 is going on two years old now... Just when was this article written? There's no date on it anywhere.
Rarely are they accused of playing the slightest part in the 'moral corruption of our children'.
Now we can start to see where he's going with this. It's all downhill from here...
Not that you'd guess it from the press releases, which foreground the realism of the simulations whilst giving hardly a mention to the violence implicit in the origination of the technologies they simulate:
What does this guy want?! All game press releases to run a disclaimer like the business wire stories that say stuff like "This press release includes forward looking statements..."?
Now all Combat oriented games have to say "This product may contain simulations of war and para-millitary activity. Wars are violent. In real life, people are injured and killed in war." Bollocks!
No-one stops to think about the downright awfulness of the worldview they portend. This view is often both politically and ethically unsound
Hello? It's only a game? It's a fantasy world! What's next, you're going to condemn books like Neuromancer and Snow Crash becuase you don't like the "worldview" they portend?
the simulations are predominantally US or NATO biased, with the the player very rarely (if ever) getting to play the part of the Axis or the Soviets (the 'Enemy'); when this is permitted players are made fully aware that they are taking the role of the 'Enemy' - that they are on the side of 'Wrong' and 'Evil'.
The reason they are US and NATO based is we have all the cool toys to simulate, and there is data available that allows developers to create reasonable facsimilies of them.
I have been flying combat sims since forever, and I have never been made to feel 'wrong' or 'evil' when I play the Red Team.
All of the 'campaigns' that one can fly here are based on US involvement in situations that are, to say the least, politically sensitive. Not that this stops Jane's: the ghost of 'Vietnam' looms frigteningly large, and along with the old Soviet Union it is the most popular 'theatre' of war within these games.
Either this article is a couple years old or this guy has no idea where the sim market is these days. There are many products now that cover non-US situations. Israeli Air Force, SU27 Flanker, EF 2000, etc.
The Vietnamese, likewise, are submitted to blatant racism: (snip...)
If that's the worst you can come up with for "blatant racism" you're stretching it. This section was covered by a previous post so I won't expand on it...
And what if the consumer is not interested in the politics, but is rather attracted by and interested in the technical brilliance of these games? Well this is really the big deal- that the ideology of war comes silently packaged with the technological simulation. 'Fire power', 'speed', 'targeting', 'strategy', 'logistics', 'reconnaissance', 'losses' and 'gains' - this is the language of the Combat Sim, and it is also the language of modern warfare. The horrific experience of war itself is never mentioned,
This is the passage I have the most problems with in the whole article.
The horrific experience of war is self-evident. Any enterprise that involves the intentional taking of lives is obviously horrific, we don't need a game to point that out to us.
Speaking for myself, I always have at the back of my mind the knowledge that what these products simulate is very serious and dangerous and violent. I have great respect for the people of the armed forces worldwide, and I know that no matter how "realistic" a sim may be, does not even begin to scratch the surface of what real armed forces do on a daily basis.
And what's wrong if I'm "not interested in the politics, but is rather attracted by and interested in the technical brilliance of these games?" Why is that a bad thing?
Fantasy games, although more graphically gory, do not conceal any implicit political agenda.
Neither do Combat sims. Sometime a Game is just a Game.
Ian McClelland was until recently a copywriter at Electronic Arts
Very interesting. EA is the publisher for most of the Jane's series. Is this guy a disgruntled former employee with an axe to grind?
Anybody else check out the pics on kust.andover.net, as he chronicles the construction of the Andover booth? That LCD the have in the/. "living room" section looks schweet! Anybody know the brand, model and cost of that unit?
Reminds me of gates at the press conference MS held after being declared a monopoly.. his answer to every questions was something along the lines of "We are simply trying to make innovative software".
I also heard a lot of free adrertising for Win2K...
This page made the rounds at my work about 3 weeks ago. I was susprised I never saw it here - I assumed they knew about it but decided not to post it since it's so stooopid!
The free version of mp3enc is a time-limited demo and not suitable for production use.
Xing did some really wacky stuff with pipe I/O in their latest release that broke Scott's liveice code spectacularly.
As for LAME, it was the best candidate I could find for an encoder, but still not suitable for my needs. Unfourtunately for me, I wanted to encode at fairly low bitrates (24 or 32 kbps) so I could serve modem users. LAME seemed to produce really bad, hissy, scratchy audio with a nasty spike around 11 KHz. It didn't matter what I did with settings, I never could clean it up.
I eventually gave up on liveice and just re-encoded my MP3s for shout.
This was back in June or July of this year that I was setting this stuff up, so maybe there have been advances since then, I don't know.
To the other person who said they wanted a plugin to broadcast icecast streams.. uhh that's pretty ridiculous.
Having recently set up an icecast server, I think I know what that other guy is talking about. I think he was looking for some way to use XMMS as a more "user friendly" front end to produce an MP3 audio stream for icecast.
As it is right now, actually producing the audio stream for icecast to serve out to the world is something of a black art (IMO).
Your 3 choices are:
First option - shout: Easiest to get running, but less flexible. It only allows you to stream your MP3s at the same bitrate they were encoded at. In other words, no real-time re-encoding.
If you want to stream the same audio at several bitrates (to give people with slower connections an option of lower quality but less skipping), you need to be able to re-encode the MP3 data on the fly. You also need re-time re-encoding if your source MP3s were encoded at different bitrates and you want to give one consistent bitrate for your stream. (this would be a good idea, since some players get out of sync if you change the bitrate within the stream)
Second option - liveice: Much more flexible but a bear to set up. It allows you to re-encode real time, and manipulate the playlist, mix tracks together, and do more of the things you hear on over the air radio.
The complexity comes from the "modular" nature of the software. There are license restrictions on the MP3 encoding algorithm, so there can't legally be any GPL encoders. This means that Scott Manley can't include MP3 encoding code directly in his program. He has to rely on the encoding coming from an external source, such as a commercial encoding package like Xing or from one of the "underground" packages like LAME that are simple wrappers around the unoptimized MP3 reference encoder.
Since most people doing icecast servers want to keep things open source, they aren't very well going to pay hundreds of dollars for a commercial encoder. That leaves the "underground" packages.
There are several packages available for Linux to encode MP3, but the stability, audio quality, and program interface varies widely among them. Scott usually has a tough task getting his code and somebody else's to play nice.
I had such a difficult and unreliable experience trying to get an encoder to run, produce decent sound, and not crash with liveice that I eventually abandoned it and used shout. I manually re-encoded my MP3s at 24kbps and I just stream them statically. They say doing that usually produces better audio quality anyway.
BTW, I'm fully prepared to concede my inablility to get liveice running stems from my own incompetence and NOT from flaws in Linux or mistakes of the icecast developers. YMMV...
Third option - Winamp with DSP Plugin: Believe it or not, there are people who keep a Windoze machine around just to produce a stream to the icecast server.
For all it's shortcomings, M$ has done one nice thing in its life and that is pay for a distribution licence for the Fraunhofer MP3 codec. Fraunhofer is acknowledged to be the most efficient, stable, and best sounding MP3 codec around. M$ included it in the Windows Media Player server tools/authoring package which you can download for free.
What you do is, you get that MS package, winamp, and a Shoutcast DSP plugin that re-directs the MP3 output to an IP address/port you specify, and configure the bitrate and audio quality all from a nice user friendly dialog box. Then you load up your winamp playlists and you are "on the air", with less hassle than liveice. (unless you consider rebooting a crashing Doze box every few hours or days a hassle...)
So what I think the other guy was looking for is some way to make XMMS give similar functionality and user-friendliness to what winamp provides under the windows platform, except provide it with the stability and performace of linux, and license it under the GPL.
I think the functionality can certainly be written by somebody, we have a lot of real smart developers in the open source world and XMMS/icecast in particular. The tough nut is going to be a high quality, free MP3 encoder.
The best option would be a freely distributable version of the Fraunhofer encoder for Linux. This could actaully be done, the only barrier is money. It costs MEGABUCKS (several thousands) for a distribution license from Fraunhofer, and the result would not be possible to put under GPL since the algorithm iself has license and NDA restrictions. So the best we could do is get a binary only encoder that would only run on whatever distribution and platform it was compiled for, and we'd have to find a charitible sugar daddy to pay for the license. And we would still have to hold our noses and accept a non-GPL solution.
BTW, if anybody cares, my icecast server is online at http://24.5.234.110:8000. I have several hours worth of Dave Matthews Band live show bootlegs up there. If you're a DMB fan, giv it a listen sometime. [/me hunkers down for the/. effect...]
I mean Disney's marketing of the same movies in different packaging, etc is brilliant and shows that it's even possible to sell people the same movies they already OWN!!
How much of this re-buying the same movie is just becuase the munchkins wore out by constant re-watching (or spilled grape juice on) their video of the Little Mermaid? You know kids and fragile electronics don't mix.
I was going to say you won't see this re-buying happening when everything is DVD which doesn't wear out, but then it occured to me that DVD's are easier to wreck than videotape. I have already ruined my DVD of the Matrix, and that was even before I even watched it! (dumbass me didn't have the disc centered in my tray and the disc got caught and scratched on the edge...)
Kids are gonna be MURDER on DVDs. There would have to be some kind of kid-proof cartridge for these things if they ever catch on.
So your basic point is absolutely correct, the way to combat piracy is to inovate, and market, and make people NOT WANT to buy the pirate copy. As to whether hollywood and big business are up to that challenge is an exercise for the reader...
Gee, I thought you were going to talk about the upcoming "User Friendly" book by O'Reily and Assoc. I was expecting some terribly insightful observation on the irony of a comic strip-for-geeks that has existed (mainly) in a purely electronic format being released in book form. Possibly a comment about how it might seem that an artist such as Illiad can't truly be considered to "hit the big time" until he's published on some dead trees. Or maybe that has nothing to do with it, I dunno...
They reached the moon. No one else has ever done anything like this before or since (from our planet ). What has changed??
I believe that what has changed is that the fire has gone away at NASA. People are treating it as their jobs, not as "I'm so lucky to be here. I'm going to do the best I can."
In the Apollo days, there was just as much if not more of people sliding by treating it as "just a job". Consider that at the height of the program there were 400,000 people working on it. Sure you get a lot of the gung-ho starry-eyed folks in there, but in that large of a population, you can't generalize that the attitude most folks had was "I'm so lucky to be here. I'm going to do the best I can."
Then and now, what you see as the "Type-A Go-Getters" comes from the Astronauts themselves and the few NASA employees you see on the TV.
The difference between then and now is that we've had 30 years to romanticize the Apollo days, in books, movies, TV shows, etc. None of the hum-drum everyday folks are the ones who got written about in books or dramatized in movies.
Probably the closest we've see to a view of what Project Apollo was like in all it's less exciting details was "From the Earth to the Moon". Becuase of the time they had (12 hours!), they could spend more than a couple token seconds on people like Joe Shea, Dee O'Hara, Geunter Wendt, etc. Even then, what you saw on screen was far more dramatized than it would have been in reality, becasue you were seeing actors, not real people. People in general going about their day-to-day jobs aren't that exciting to watch on TV.
And you know what? There were parts of that series that most people find extremely BORING anyway! None of my friends would watch it with me, becasue there were no explosions, car chases and such all the time. I was enthralled of course. What we saw was a unique product of an opportunity for Tom Hanks (a self professed space nut as big as any) to indulge himself and produce THE definitive account of Project Apollo.
What's happening now doesn't seem as special as Apollo precisely becuase it is what's happening now. We see today's space program on a day-to-day basis, not in a 30 year old history lesson. We're too wrapped up in it.
I guarentee if you could have watched day-to-day covereage of Apollo like we can with the present day program, it would have seemed just as routine, and it must have seemed that way to those directly working on the program.
Just so nobody gets the wrong impression, I'm about the biggest space fan there is. I watch NASA TV on realvideo every chance I get, and keep it running all day on my desk at work during shuttle missions.
Apollo 13 is my favorite movie. I've read "A Man on the Moon" more times than I can count and my copy is dog-eared enough to show it. I've bought about every major book in the last 5 years on Apollo and the space program (still need "Last on the Moon" and "Full Moon" though...) I watched all 12 hours of "From the Earth to the Moon" so many times my videotape is wearing out (need DVD!).
I built Space Shuttle models as a kid. I was traumatized by the Challenger accident. I was freaked out like you wouldn't believe at the funnies STS-93 had on ascent which I watched live in it's entirety and stayed up way too late on a work night to catch the post-launch press conference to hear what the hell happened.
I'm sure I just described half the readership of/. so I'm not saying that I'm anything special, just trying to give perspective of where I'm coming from.
So here's my perspective on what's missing in today's space program in comparison to Apollo: What's missing is a singular purpose. We need a simple goal that can be stated in a simple sentence and everbody can understand.
"This nation should comit itself to the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."
There it is, Project Apollo in one simple sentence. Actually accomplishing the goal was mind-numbingly complicated, and expensive, and dangerous, and involved the largest single concentration of human effort in history short of war. Getting from 1961 to July 1969 invloved 3 manned space programs, even more unmanned missions, and 30-some-odd billion dollars.
Despite all the complexity, people always knew what THE GOAL was and that has a tremendous psycological value. Don't forget the psycology of the Cold War either. The reason we were able to swing that kind of commitment in money and effort was that we had to beat the Russians.
There will never be another effort to match Apollo until some group of people feels as threatened as the Americans did by the Soviets. When it comes right down to it, people are more motivated by fear than by co-operation.
We need a clearly stated goal that can capture the imiagination of the world and compel us to action just like Kennedy and the Space Race proppeled the US forward in the 60's.
Is the goal a manned mission to Mars? (I think it should be)
If so, lay out the mission requirements. If the mission is going to require new technology, data, and skills like Apollo gong to the moon needed, then fine, fund whatever intermediate programs are required - but always know what you need to get out of that program to be a building block to the real goal.
Programs like the Shuttle and the Station were sold as being building blocks to Mars, but became programs unto themselves with no end in sight and no knowledge of what we'd want to have at the end anyway.
So more money and sponsorships and all the rest won't do it. We need a REAL vision of where we want to go in space or we'll never get there.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL! I have the 300kbps NASA TV stream running here at work. They were printing the "morning mail" on Discovery. They have a laptop apparently running Windows, hooked up to a Thermal Impact printer. They apparently have a pretty nice setup, nicer than I would have expected. They can do colour or black and white print-outs, they have MS Office, etc.
They get daily messages sent up from Mission Control with data and instructions, checklist changes, etc for the upcoming day's activities. I wonder if it's a standard email system with a TCP/IP stack on the laptop, or if it's some shuttle specific protocol?
Well anyway, they apparently had a paper jam in the printer this morning. I had a good chuckle as I listened to the conversation between CAPCOM Chris Hadfield and John Grunsfeld in orbit as he fixed it. He was opening documents in MS Word and printing out single pages, describing garble characters, pagination problems, etc. It was neat to hear them talking about this stuff that a lot of us have dealt with in luser support. They were talking about computer stuff in Astronaut terminology.
First, the story clearly stated that the pics might not be available for up to an hour, so have some patience, cowboy. Second, don't you know how to hack a URL? The correct location is probably going to be something like http://kurt.andover.net/bazar/fsf - It looks like maybe Roblimo got a bit confused in the cut and paste or else the URL got interpereted as a relative rather than absolute URL.
/. trek to Comdex last month or whenever that was... The URL for that is http://kurt.andover.net/
Anyhow, until the Bazaar pics are up, you can still waste your time looking at the fun pics from the
Buying some COMS could actually be a very good idea if you want a piece of the PALM IPO. What's going to happen is, on the day of the IPO they'll split the COMS shares into two entities. There will be some equation to determine what fraction of the old COMS share value was PALM and what fraction was the rest of COMS.
They'll take however many shares of COMS you own as of some date, run it through the calculation, and give you X shares of the new PALM and X shares of the new (rest of) COMS. After that, the shares trade basically independently and you can buy or sell as you like.
I have no idea what the date you have to own COMS is, for all I know it alrady passed. I also have no idea what the calculation is going to be or how to determine if it will be beneficial to you. Consult your financial advisor. YMMV, IANAL and IANASB
And I never thought there was any problem with part numbers anyway. What would the P4 be, the 80986?
I guess it ould be worse, they could use the Microsoft version numbering scheme. Pentium '99 anyone? How about the Xeon 2003?
I assume you mean MS? What I talked about is the basic building process of the internet. Even though MS was around during the formative years and even if they have recently tried to bastartdize the standards for themselves, they still have to suport HTTP, POP3, SMTP, etc in their internet products, otherwise the products are useless on the internet. (some would argue they are sill useless on the internet)
I guess the idea is, if you accept the premise that the whole reason the internet exists is because everybody uses the same open protocols, then you have to accept that the IETF/RFC process is the reason.
If we have organizations that don't follow the process, then we have the incompatible mess that is IM currently.
Whether the company is a monopoly doesn't enter into it by my way of thinking.
AOL is not a monopoly, there are other ISP's (unless you consider they have a virtual monopoly on the clueless newbie luser demographic). Yahoo is not a monopoly, there are other portals. ATT Worldnet is not a monopoly. I was about to say ICQ is not a monopoly, except AOL owns them now. Not sure what that makes ICQ...
Yet these products and the MS product to not interoperate well - becuase they don't follow an open standard. Whether a company is a monopoly or not is not a factor. IMO.
-James
What you described is what the IETF and the RFC mechanism is for.
In fact, they already have a
working group on the Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol (impp)
What's really needed is one basic, open, interoperable standard. Think of email. Every ISP runs an SMTP server for their customers, and any ISP can email any other ISP's customers. The network is set up so that individual nodes can figure out where things go by MX records and other standardized mechanisms.
We need something like that for IM.
Since there is no financial incentive to allow your competitors to access your servers (and you customers), it seems to me that the only way around this is a global service run on a not for profit basis, that allows _anyone_ to use it with any client they like (ie, open the message protocols to the public).
NO NO NO! First of all, if there were "no financial incentive to let competitors access your servers", there would be no such thing as email.
Do you remember how back in the eighties, there were all these proprietary email services, and you could only send somebody a message if you were on the same service as them? Remember Compuserve, MCIMail, ATTMail, Fidonet, and then there were those internet people in the universtities.
Ever heard of Metcalfe's law? Bob Metcalfe, the former CEO of 3COM and inventor of "Ethernet" networking technology is credited with this idea, commonly referred to as Metcalfe's Law:
(Paraphrased) The power of a network increases exponentially with each additional node...
That's why it made sense for everybody to drop the proprietary email protocols, and use the open standard. That's why it's in everybody's interest to have one unified, decentralized, open IM protocol that everyone can use.
Secondly, this is NOT an area where governments belong.
-James
Finally, a way I can get my Hockey Night In Canada fix down here. The Hockey coverage on US TV really stinks. Sure there's lots of games, but the announcers, camera work and all the friggin graphics make it impossible to follow the game. Watch the old CBC and CTV feeds of Stanley Cup and Canada Cup games on ESPN Classic to see how Hockey was meant to be covered...
You have BADLY missed the point.
It's never been about money and financial gain for the developers! It's about writing Free Software. By definition that means it's OK for others to make money off the software. (provided they follow the license terms, source code must be available, derivative works must remain GPL, etc.)
If Linus was only interested in making money off his software, and stopping others from doing the same, he never would have used the GPL.
I'm not a developer myself so I don't presume to speak for them, but everythign I've read seems to indicate they are ecstatic that Linux has become so popular, and it seems they mostly appreciate the role RHAT has had in that.
Everything I've read indicates they've been an upstanding member of the Open Source community, they encourage (and more importantly, fund) a lot of good packages and developers, and they have always followed the GPL with their own code.
And what's with that dumb-ass last post remark in your sig, anyway? Lousy troll...
-James
This guy hit it right on the head with two comments:
... an eye towards an experienced DOS/Windows geek ... looking to join the revolution. ... learning UNIX meant I was beginning from worse than zero once I realized DOS is UNIX with Down's Syndrome.
I wanted a Red Hat distro because I wanted a company with
Red Hat brought Linux to the non-UNIX types, and don't ever forget it.
That sums up my experience with Linux exactly. When I started playing with Linux about 2 years ago, it was becuase I borrowed a friend's RedHat 4.x CD.
I had known about Linux before, but all I ever knew was you had to download the floppy images and it was a pain to install anyway. Being a newbie, all I was interested in was throwing it on a PC to play with for a couple weekends to tinker and see how it worked. The whole download-copy-install ordeal was not something I was prepared to do. My bad for being lazy, but I had other things to spend my time on.
Over the last two years, every time I got a new computer, I would install whatever the current Red Hat was on it just to see for myself how far Linux had come. It wasn't until Red hat 6 that I found something I considered worth building a PC around.
I would never have done that if I still had to download floppy images (although I now realize how neat it is that an OS exists where you can do that and it's actually encouraged!)
-James
/me (shudders...)
Wow. That metamute article was really a trip. I'd like some of whatever that guy's smoking...
But despite their proclaimed warlike verisimilitude,
What the heck is a verisimilitude?
'Accurate' combat simulations such as the recently released F15 and USNF
Navy Fighters is over 3 years old and nobody ever mistook it for accurate. Jane's F15 is going on two years old now... Just when was this article written? There's no date on it anywhere.
Rarely are they accused of playing the slightest part in the 'moral corruption of our children'.
Now we can start to see where he's going with this. It's all downhill from here...
Not that you'd guess it from the press releases, which foreground the realism of the simulations whilst giving hardly a mention to the violence implicit in the origination of the technologies they simulate:
What does this guy want?! All game press releases to run a disclaimer like the business wire stories that say stuff like "This press release includes forward looking statements..."?
Now all Combat oriented games have to say "This product may contain simulations of war and para-millitary activity. Wars are violent. In real life, people are injured and killed in war." Bollocks!
No-one stops to think about the downright awfulness of the worldview they portend. This view is often both politically and ethically unsound
Hello? It's only a game? It's a fantasy world! What's next, you're going to condemn books like Neuromancer and Snow Crash becuase you don't like the "worldview" they portend?
the simulations are predominantally US or NATO biased, with the the player very rarely (if ever) getting to play the part of the Axis or the Soviets (the 'Enemy'); when this is permitted players are made fully aware that they are taking the role of the 'Enemy' - that they are on the side of 'Wrong' and 'Evil'.
The reason they are US and NATO based is we have all the cool toys to simulate, and there is data available that allows developers to create reasonable facsimilies of them.
I have been flying combat sims since forever, and I have never been made to feel 'wrong' or 'evil' when I play the Red Team.
All of the 'campaigns' that one can fly here are based on US involvement in situations that are, to say the least, politically sensitive. Not that this stops Jane's: the ghost of 'Vietnam' looms frigteningly large, and along with the old Soviet Union it is the most popular 'theatre' of war within these games.
Either this article is a couple years old or this guy has no idea where the sim market is these days. There are many products now that cover non-US situations. Israeli Air Force, SU27 Flanker, EF 2000, etc.
The Vietnamese, likewise, are submitted to blatant racism: (snip...)
If that's the worst you can come up with for "blatant racism" you're stretching it. This section was covered by a previous post so I won't expand on it...
And what if the consumer is not interested in the politics, but is rather attracted by and interested in the technical brilliance of these games? Well this is really the big deal- that the ideology of war comes silently packaged with the technological simulation. 'Fire power', 'speed', 'targeting', 'strategy', 'logistics', 'reconnaissance', 'losses' and 'gains' - this is the language of the Combat Sim, and it is also the language of modern warfare. The horrific experience of war itself is never mentioned,
This is the passage I have the most problems with in the whole article.
The horrific experience of war is self-evident. Any enterprise that involves the intentional taking of lives is obviously horrific, we don't need a game to point that out to us.
Speaking for myself, I always have at the back of my mind the knowledge that what these products simulate is very serious and dangerous and violent. I have great respect for the people of the armed forces worldwide, and I know that no matter how "realistic" a sim may be, does not even begin to scratch the surface of what real armed forces do on a daily basis.
And what's wrong if I'm "not interested in the politics, but is rather attracted by and interested in the technical brilliance of these games?" Why is that a bad thing?
Fantasy games, although more graphically gory, do not conceal any implicit political agenda.
Neither do Combat sims. Sometime a Game is just a Game.
Ian McClelland was until recently a copywriter at Electronic Arts
Very interesting. EA is the publisher for most of the Jane's series. Is this guy a disgruntled former employee with an axe to grind?
the extra 8 bits are usually used for z-buffer and other effects.
doh! moron. http://kurt.andover.net
Anybody else check out the pics on kust.andover.net, as he chronicles the construction of the Andover booth? That LCD the have in the /. "living room" section looks schweet! Anybody know the brand, model and cost of that unit?
It's a big world. There's more to it than computers.
There is?
Linux is communist, or at the least Anarcho-Syndicalist
Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help help! I'm being repressed!
Reminds me of gates at the press conference MS held after being declared a monopoly.. his answer to every questions was something along the lines of "We are simply trying to make innovative software".
I also heard a lot of free adrertising for Win2K...
...for /. to pick up on this story.
This page made the rounds at my work about 3 weeks ago. I was susprised I never saw it here - I assumed they knew about it but decided not to post it since it's so stooopid!
The free version of mp3enc is a time-limited demo and not suitable for production use.
Xing did some really wacky stuff with pipe I/O in their latest release that broke Scott's liveice code spectacularly.
As for LAME, it was the best candidate I could find for an encoder, but still not suitable for my needs. Unfourtunately for me, I wanted to encode at fairly low bitrates (24 or 32 kbps) so I could serve modem users. LAME seemed to produce really bad, hissy, scratchy audio with a nasty spike around 11 KHz. It didn't matter what I did with settings, I never could clean it up.
I eventually gave up on liveice and just re-encoded my MP3s for shout.
This was back in June or July of this year that I was setting this stuff up, so maybe there have been advances since then, I don't know.
YMMV,
-James
To the other person who said they wanted a plugin to broadcast icecast streams.. uhh that's pretty ridiculous.
/. effect...]
Having recently set up an icecast server, I think I know what that other guy is talking about. I think he was looking for some way to use XMMS as a more "user friendly" front end to produce an MP3 audio stream for icecast.
As it is right now, actually producing the audio stream for icecast to serve out to the world is something of a black art (IMO).
Your 3 choices are:
First option - shout: Easiest to get running, but less flexible. It only allows you to stream your MP3s at the same bitrate they were encoded at. In other words, no real-time re-encoding.
If you want to stream the same audio at several bitrates (to give people with slower connections an option of lower quality but less skipping), you need to be able to re-encode the MP3 data on the fly. You also need re-time re-encoding if your source MP3s were encoded at different bitrates and you want to give one consistent bitrate for your stream. (this would be a good idea, since some players get out of sync if you change the bitrate within the stream)
Second option - liveice: Much more flexible but a bear to set up. It allows you to re-encode real time, and manipulate the playlist, mix tracks together, and do more of the things you hear on over the air radio.
The complexity comes from the "modular" nature of the software. There are license restrictions on the MP3 encoding algorithm, so there can't legally be any GPL encoders. This means that Scott Manley can't include MP3 encoding code directly in his program. He has to rely on the encoding coming from an external source, such as a commercial encoding package like Xing or from one of the "underground" packages like LAME that are simple wrappers around the unoptimized MP3 reference encoder.
Since most people doing icecast servers want to keep things open source, they aren't very well going to pay hundreds of dollars for a commercial encoder. That leaves the "underground" packages.
There are several packages available for Linux to encode MP3, but the stability, audio quality, and program interface varies widely among them. Scott usually has a tough task getting his code and somebody else's to play nice.
I had such a difficult and unreliable experience trying to get an encoder to run, produce decent sound, and not crash with liveice that I eventually abandoned it and used shout. I manually re-encoded my MP3s at 24kbps and I just stream them statically. They say doing that usually produces better audio quality anyway.
BTW, I'm fully prepared to concede my inablility to get liveice running stems from my own incompetence and NOT from flaws in Linux or mistakes of the icecast developers. YMMV...
Third option - Winamp with DSP Plugin: Believe it or not, there are people who keep a Windoze machine around just to produce a stream to the icecast server.
For all it's shortcomings, M$ has done one nice thing in its life and that is pay for a distribution licence for the Fraunhofer MP3 codec. Fraunhofer is acknowledged to be the most efficient, stable, and best sounding MP3 codec around. M$ included it in the Windows Media Player server tools/authoring package which you can download for free.
What you do is, you get that MS package, winamp, and a Shoutcast DSP plugin that re-directs the MP3 output to an IP address/port you specify, and configure the bitrate and audio quality all from a nice user friendly dialog box. Then you load up your winamp playlists and you are "on the air", with less hassle than liveice. (unless you consider rebooting a crashing Doze box every few hours or days a hassle...)
So what I think the other guy was looking for is some way to make XMMS give similar functionality and user-friendliness to what winamp provides under the windows platform, except provide it with the stability and performace of linux, and license it under the GPL.
I think the functionality can certainly be written by somebody, we have a lot of real smart developers in the open source world and XMMS/icecast in particular. The tough nut is going to be a high quality, free MP3 encoder.
The best option would be a freely distributable version of the Fraunhofer encoder for Linux. This could actaully be done, the only barrier is money. It costs MEGABUCKS (several thousands) for a distribution license from Fraunhofer, and the result would not be possible to put under GPL since the algorithm iself has license and NDA restrictions. So the best we could do is get a binary only encoder that would only run on whatever distribution and platform it was compiled for, and we'd have to find a charitible sugar daddy to pay for the license. And we would still have to hold our noses and accept a non-GPL solution.
BTW, if anybody cares, my icecast server is online at http://24.5.234.110:8000. I have several hours worth of Dave Matthews Band live show bootlegs up there. If you're a DMB fan, giv it a listen sometime. [/me hunkers down for the
-James
How much of this re-buying the same movie is just becuase the munchkins wore out by constant re-watching (or spilled grape juice on) their video of the Little Mermaid? You know kids and fragile electronics don't mix.
I was going to say you won't see this re-buying happening when everything is DVD which doesn't wear out, but then it occured to me that DVD's are easier to wreck than videotape. I have already ruined my DVD of the Matrix, and that was even before I even watched it! (dumbass me didn't have the disc centered in my tray and the disc got caught and scratched on the edge...)
Kids are gonna be MURDER on DVDs. There would have to be some kind of kid-proof cartridge for these things if they ever catch on.
So your basic point is absolutely correct, the way to combat piracy is to inovate, and market, and make people NOT WANT to buy the pirate copy. As to whether hollywood and big business are up to that challenge is an exercise for the reader...
And it makes a lot more money (Andover, IPO and all...)
Silly Hu-man! Your P.O.S. Ford will be no match for our tractor beam, and our deflector screens are impervious to feeble lead pellets.
Gee, I thought you were going to talk about the upcoming "User Friendly" book by O'Reily and Assoc. I was expecting some terribly insightful observation on the irony of a comic strip-for-geeks that has existed (mainly) in a purely electronic format being released in book form. Possibly a comment about how it might seem that an artist such as Illiad can't truly be considered to "hit the big time" until he's published on some dead trees. Or maybe that has nothing to do with it, I dunno...
They reached the moon. No one else has ever done anything like this before or since (from our planet ). What has changed??
/. so I'm not saying that I'm anything special, just trying to give perspective of where I'm coming from.
I believe that what has changed is that the fire has gone away at NASA. People are treating it as their jobs, not as "I'm so lucky to be here. I'm going to do the best I can."
In the Apollo days, there was just as much if not more of people sliding by treating it as "just a job". Consider that at the height of the program there were 400,000 people working on it. Sure you get a lot of the gung-ho starry-eyed folks in there, but in that large of a population, you can't generalize that the attitude most folks had was "I'm so lucky to be here. I'm going to do the best I can."
Then and now, what you see as the "Type-A Go-Getters" comes from the Astronauts themselves and the few NASA employees you see on the TV.
The difference between then and now is that we've had 30 years to romanticize the Apollo days, in books, movies, TV shows, etc. None of the hum-drum everyday folks are the ones who got written about in books or dramatized in movies.
Probably the closest we've see to a view of what Project Apollo was like in all it's less exciting details was "From the Earth to the Moon". Becuase of the time they had (12 hours!), they could spend more than a couple token seconds on people like Joe Shea, Dee O'Hara, Geunter Wendt, etc. Even then, what you saw on screen was far more dramatized than it would have been in reality, becasue you were seeing actors, not real people. People in general going about their day-to-day jobs aren't that exciting to watch on TV.
And you know what? There were parts of that series that most people find extremely BORING anyway! None of my friends would watch it with me, becasue there were no explosions, car chases and such all the time. I was enthralled of course. What we saw was a unique product of an opportunity for Tom Hanks (a self professed space nut as big as any) to indulge himself and produce THE definitive account of Project Apollo.
What's happening now doesn't seem as special as Apollo precisely becuase it is what's happening now. We see today's space program on a day-to-day basis, not in a 30 year old history lesson. We're too wrapped up in it.
I guarentee if you could have watched day-to-day covereage of Apollo like we can with the present day program, it would have seemed just as routine, and it must have seemed that way to those directly working on the program.
Just so nobody gets the wrong impression, I'm about the biggest space fan there is. I watch NASA TV on realvideo every chance I get, and keep it running all day on my desk at work during shuttle missions.
Apollo 13 is my favorite movie. I've read "A Man on the Moon" more times than I can count and my copy is dog-eared enough to show it. I've bought about every major book in the last 5 years on Apollo and the space program (still need "Last on the Moon" and "Full Moon" though...) I watched all 12 hours of "From the Earth to the Moon" so many times my videotape is wearing out (need DVD!).
I built Space Shuttle models as a kid. I was traumatized by the Challenger accident. I was freaked out like you wouldn't believe at the funnies STS-93 had on ascent which I watched live in it's entirety and stayed up way too late on a work night to catch the post-launch press conference to hear what the hell happened.
I'm sure I just described half the readership of
So here's my perspective on what's missing in today's space program in comparison to Apollo:
What's missing is a singular purpose. We need a simple goal that can be stated in a simple sentence and everbody can understand.
"This nation should comit itself to the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."
There it is, Project Apollo in one simple sentence. Actually accomplishing the goal was mind-numbingly complicated, and expensive, and dangerous, and involved the largest single concentration of human effort in history short of war. Getting from 1961 to July 1969 invloved 3 manned space programs, even more unmanned missions, and 30-some-odd billion dollars.
Despite all the complexity, people always knew what THE GOAL was and that has a tremendous psycological value. Don't forget the psycology of the Cold War either. The reason we were able to swing that kind of commitment in money and effort was that we had to beat the Russians.
There will never be another effort to match Apollo until some group of people feels as threatened as the Americans did by the Soviets. When it comes right down to it, people are more motivated by fear than by co-operation.
We need a clearly stated goal that can capture the imiagination of the world and compel us to action just like Kennedy and the Space Race proppeled the US forward in the 60's.
Is the goal a manned mission to Mars? (I think it should be)
If so, lay out the mission requirements. If the mission is going to require new technology, data, and skills like Apollo gong to the moon needed, then fine, fund whatever intermediate programs are required - but always know what you need to get out of that program to be a building block to the real goal.
Programs like the Shuttle and the Station were sold as being building blocks to Mars, but became programs unto themselves with no end in sight and no knowledge of what we'd want to have at the end anyway.
So more money and sponsorships and all the rest won't do it. We need a REAL vision of where we want to go in space or we'll never get there.
-James