Well, it's hardly surprising...
on
Quake For the Blind
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
''Over the last five years,'' Chong said, ''we have become increasingly concerned that the rising use of digital media will leave out the blind.''
Well, what about the industrial revolution? My guess is that the rise of heavy machinery and high speed transportation probably made it more difficult for the blind.
My theory (though it's hardly original) is that the digital world is on course to mimic the real world in as many ways as possible. One day, having a poor sense of smell could be a serious liability in FPS games.
I certainly have sympathy for the blind -- I'm color blind myself, and routinely get myself killed in FPS and other games where "good" things are green and "bad" things are red, but both colors have the same saturation and luminosity as bad things.
I commend those doing what they can to make the digital world more inclusive, but the fact of the matter is that, in realistic digital environments, those with sensory limitations are going to have an increasingly hard time.
...Just build in something to P2P client applications which is aware of Overpeer's IP addresses. If there's unused bandwidth, download anything they're offering (and just throw it away). Drive up their bandwidth costs while simultaneously ignoring the junk they're sending out.
Sure -- just like "you can take away bombs, guns, knives, box cutters, nail clippers, and toothpicks... and air travel would be so much safer" is a flawed analogy. Oh, wait, terrorist types have shown a shocking disregard for the principle of using obviously dangerous tools.
Sure, some things are more dangerous or prone to dangerous use than others, but fact is, if someone's really looking to do evil shit, they will find a way to use a spoon if they have to. If "outlawing any implement that could possibly be used for evil" is the philosophy, you have to outlaw everything from nuclear bombs to napkins. Pure and simple.
You're absolutely right. I find it dispicable that people would release programs that terrorists could possibly use, with the weak excuse that there might be other legitimate uses! I mean, if we got rid of Steganography, PGP, Linux, MS Word, AutoCAD, MS Project, Bablefish, Oracle, OpenOffice, Squid, Rogue Spear, Mathmatica, Apache, Cu-Seeme, and KSH... why, the world would surely be a safer place!
Vivo went away because it was a pain in the butt for everyone involved. I hated it, too. I'm not sure what your point is -- of course vivo went away, with the advent of two (three, if you count quicktime) video formats that are superior, streamable, and installed on almost every PC out there. Vivo was an interim solution in the early days, and porn sites as well as mainstream sites abandoned it when something better came along.
Weird. I've been a fan of metallica's early stuff since 1983, when I was 13 years old and hacking 8088 assembly language on an original IBM PC (overclocked to 8mhz, mind you). Almost without exception, my techie friends like old metallica.
Oh, come off it. There are plenty of decent porn sites. Like most industries that have bad reputations, it's the small number of sleazy ones that give the industry a bad name.
A good place to look for respectable porn sites is: www.janesguide.com. (I have no affiliation with Jane's Guide)
First, let me say I'm not a huge Moby fan. I don't dislike the guy, but I remember when he was a basic rave DJ in the San Francisco area.
Funny that he made his money for so long by mixing records of other peoples' stuff together. Somehow I doubt he paid the appropriate ASCAP or BMI fees. So right off, I have a hard time sympathizing with his complaints about piracy.
But beyond that, isn't it notable that artists with a large fanbase in the tech community blame that fanbase whenever sales slip? Metallica was the first; Moby is just the latest.
My theory is this: Acts like Metallica or Moby build up a cult following over years. By nature, that cult following is largely techies and other folks who don't follow the Christina Spears of the month club. People who actually care about music and are willing to follow smaller bands to get what they want.
At some point, some of these bands go to pot (literally, figuratively, or both). Their later work becomes increasingly detached and less and less like the early work, eventually ending up as a mellowed out, regurgitated pablum made up of bits and pieces of all of their early work, mixed with maybe a few mainstream artists whose stolen sounds might help draw in a few more customers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfans. Fans lose interest and buy less.
And then, as the final stage of intellectual and moral decay, these acts engage in a strange form of denial crossed with egotism crossed with paranoia. "The fans must still love us!" they shout. "We're sure they're still listening to this new crap we put out, but for some reason sales are down. It's those goddamned fans! They must be stealing our crappy new stuff, because after years of paying for our old, quality stuff, they've suddenly become a backstabbing pack of thieves! Yeah, that must be it! Those fans of ours sure do suck!"
Anyways, that's my theory. It would just be sad, if it didn't have the dangerous potential of impacting our legal system.
Porn sites' choices of video codecs are based more on installed base and ease of use than technical merit or licensing costs (remember, a decent porn site is profitable and can afford to spend money to make money). Far better to pay for a solution that your clients will be able to use than try to get away with a free solution that will do nothing but cause support headaches and (the bane of adult sites) chargebacks from dissatisfied customers.
Anything that involves a download and/or installation is bad news. People don't trust downloads from porn sites (though, to the best of my knowledge, there's never been a case where a porn site used a download for nefarious purposes). Beyond that, as we all know, some percentage of installations fail for one reason or another. If you have to supply even a link to a third party download, people will blame you if it doesn't work.
For these reasons, Windows Media is clearly winning the battle for porn site content, measured by new clips produced.
Real probably still has an overall lead in clips available for legacy reasons, but nobody is producing new porn in Real format. It comes back to support and chargebacks: Real tries so hard to trick people into the "free 14 day trial, $9.95/month" player that it generates no end of customer support headaches ("You said if I paid $29.95 a month I'd get free video... and now I have to pay another $9.95 a month for the player! You bastard porn sites are all the same! Lying, cheating scum! Why can't you operate like normal, ethical businesses?").
"Sorry, folks, it looks like we're ordering pizza. I had been marinating some fantastic szechuan beef, but the fridge crashed and has been alternately freezing and cooking it for the past 12 hours."
I'll stand by my comparison of MFiaB to The Castle, especially because I read them back to back (I had read The Castle years ago, and after reading MFiaB I picked it up again). There are certainly similarities to The Trial, too; thanks for the impetus to read that one again. I'll pick it up and report back to this thread in a week or two. I'll also grab "A Scanner Darkly"; I've been re-reading a bunch of PKD recently but have't ever read that one.
As far as MFiaB and The Castle, there are numerous parallels in plot setup, sylistic devices, and plot advancement, especially (sort of spoilerish) the ironic breakthrough that finally allows the protagonist to get out of the trap (or, to at least change the nature of the trap).
If you've read the more recent (1998, I think) english translation of The Castle, you'll know what I mean. The older "translation" included all sorts of edits by Kafka's original posthumous agent, Max Brod, including the criminal truncation of the book before the actual end. It's possible that the parallels between MFiaB and The Castle weren't as clear in the botched english version which was all we had until 1998.
I don't think Lem or anyone ever claimed that MFiaB was completely original with no reference intended to Kafka's work. I saw it as clearly a homage and intentional adaptation of a great work to a different time. Nothing wrong with that, in my book.
Anyways, I can completely sympathize with thinking Lem is overrated, though I can't imagine feeling that way myself. However, I do feel that way about Joyce and a few other writers people consider classic, which gets me into all sorts of trouble with Lit. types. To each their own.
I'm curious about the Soderbergh Solaris movie myself.
However, I'm hopeful. Even though Brockovitch was hopelessly self-righteous and melodramatic, Soderbergh's other work is pretty good, especially for a mainstream hollywood director.
And, don't forget that Soderbergh's second movie (after Sex, Lies, and Videotape) was Kafka, a loose adaptation of the Castle, the book that MFiaB is an (even looser) adaptation of.
So Soderbergh's clearly got good taste in reading material, and he's got enough commercial success that hopefully the hollywood studio system won't interfere with him too much.
Most people aren't able to parse full headers, and if someone is accusing you of spamming, they'll just assume you're lying. Even a technically savvy person could just think that you borrwed the headers from their original complaint and "made" an opt-in email from them.
Even if it were technically possible to "prove" that they had sent that original opt-in email, a good portion of people simply won't believe it.
I admit that I didn't know it was even possible. Can you give a guesstimate of what kind of guaranteed audience you'd need for such a custom screening? And what kind of advance word?
Still, I find it hard to believe that you could match where the major theatres are going; within 20 years, I'd say any major theatre will be able to show pretty much any film in history with little or no notice, which is pretty darned cool.
So you're a "fix the symptoms, not the problem" kind of guy? Hope you're not in IT yourself!
Me, I'd have a lot more respect for Nader and proponents of this if they put their energy into fixing our seriously broken antitrust laws and enforcement so this situation doesn't come up again, rather than writing off the legal battle as lost and moving to a "Microsoft is playing dirty, so we will too" philosophy.
I'm clearly in the minority, though. I just hope all of this doesn't come back to bite the open source community.
Enforcement of antitrust law belongs in the Justice Department, not the OMB or any other step of the procurement process. The OMB and anyone else in the government buying software should just buy software, and not second guess the judicial system. So, yes, unless and until we have a decisive outcome in the MS trial quagmire, the OMB should consider the way the market *is*, not the way it *should be*, which they are even less qualified to talk about than Ralph Nader.
The antitrust laws are outdated, and (possibly intentionally) poorly enforced. Fix that. Don't go settting up laws that basically move judicial control into the legislature. You will not like the long term results if this becomes common practice, no matter how much you might like the short term benefits of sticking it to Microsoft by tying procurement to arbitrary demands on corporate behavior.
Please... is it really that difficult to understand? I've got to assume that either I'm not being clear, or that somehow/. readers are unanimous in their willingness to abandon the fundamental balance of power in the country in their haste to bring Microsoft down.
I run an NEC LP150 LCD projector for my home theater. Bulbs cost about $400, for 1000 hour life. The brigher bulbs needed for real theaters will either cost more, have a shorter life, or both. The costs still aren't huge, but it's not accurate to write it off as negligeable.
DLP projectors are great, once you get up to the expensive ones that use 3 DLP modules (R, G, B). Cheaper ones use a single micromirror array and a color wheel spinning in front of it to sequentially project the red, green, and blue portions of an image. Some people (like me) are sensitive to that and the picture disolves into a rainbow-like thing with any head motion at all.
However, I do think digital cinema will ultimately win, and will bring with it some very cool innovations (like, get 20 friends together and a movie threater will allocate you once screen for a midweek matinee of some classic movie).
Well, that generated quite a few responses. Let me summarize:
Microsoft is an evil big company, and it's worth mixing up our antitrust and government procurement systems to do something about their monopolies
The ends justify the means
It will be good for everyone from consumers to squirrels
There's no chance of this backfiring in the form of companies introducing legislation to outlaw procurement of open source
It won't affect the free market, because it's a one-time-only idea that only hurts Microsoft
Other companies wouldn't dream of following this precedent to push laws that legislate procurement away from their competitors
The courts are ineffective, so we might as well give up on them and move antitrust enforcement to the OMB
It doesn't really matter if this is fair or good government; it will accomplish what needs to be accomplished.
Anything that hurts Microsoft is ipso facto a GREAT THING
How's that for a summary of the predominant opinions here? This is probably the first time I've ever been glad that geeks rarely exercise political voice. I hate MS as much as any of you, but I'm not willing to throw out our entire governmental model just because MS has been whooping ass on the Justice Department in court.
The MS problem is rooted the antitrust laws themselves, and the way they (haven't been) enforced. Fix what's broken, and please please please don't encourage the government to make purchasing decisions based on the corporate favorites / enemies of legislators. There's enough of that already; the last thing we need is the entire IT budget being tied up and used as a club in political battles.
My prediction: this proposal will spur MS to introduce a counter-proposal through Hollings: since terrorists could find and exploit bugs in open source software much more easily than proprietary systems, no governmental system shall use open source software. Now, that's silly and stupid, but who do you think owns more congressmen... MS, or the open source movement? Is this really a can of worms that you want opened?
Short answer: yes, I'd rather spend money on lawyers than move our antitrust enforcement into government purchasing, where anyone could introduce a law like this targeting any company, and traditional concepts of justice -- like representation, appeals, etc -- will no longer apply.
To think otherwise is to support the "ends justify means" philosophy, with the means in question being subverting the US justice system. If you support this, you will have no right to complain if Microsoft gets a bill introduced to ban the use of open source (or Oracle, or IBM) in government work. After all, you're saying that legislation governing government procurement is a valid place for market forces to do battle (or do you think that this one time is an exception, and it's OK because the target is Microsoft?)
Nader *does not* say that he wants the government to not support convicted criminals.
What he says is, government should tie purchasing to corporate behavior modification, and place limits on software purchases unless certain behaviors are achieved. Basically, use government purchasing as an informal extension of the justice system, with no question of evidence, appeals, etc.
Like I said, I look forward to the day when open source finally takes over. However, I think this is a terrible precedent to set, and the simple fact that it's aimed at Microsoft is not enough to make me support what is ultimately a really bad idea. If this is successful, every company with a government contract will lobby to introduce legislation making it more difficult for government to buy from their competitors. Ultimately, this would be bad for everyone, even if it achieved its goals in this one case.
Let the courts do their job, or reform the courts. Mixing up our justice and procurement systems is about as bad as an idea can get.
...so, in a nutshell, Nader is saying that the government should make an effort to influence the marketplace in a certain direction, rather than letting natural market forces dictate what heppens (questionable/illegal business practices being part of the market).
I'd love to see the rise of Open Source, the fall of Microsoft, etc, as much as the next guy. But I don't want the government using my tax dollars to achieve that (except in antitrust and other legal manners).
The government should research carefully and buy what makes sense. However, no matter how much we all like Microsoft alternatives, in things like office suites, it's disengenuous to argue that there's a viable non-microsoft solution for what amounts to a company of over a million employees. What kinds of deployment and management tools do open source software suites have? How many IT workers are trained to install/troubleshoot them?
Governments in general, and the US government in particular, can just *barely* do their job as is. Asking them to take a leadership role in IT purchasing is like asking Microsoft to take a leadership role in corporate ethics. It ain't going to happen, and the attempt would be an expensive, error-infested waste of time and money for everyone involved.
My opinion is that open source will prevail in the long run -- but I'd rather wait 10 years longer if it meant not setting the precedent of government setting this kind of precedent.
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Well, what about the industrial revolution? My guess is that the rise of heavy machinery and high speed transportation probably made it more difficult for the blind.
My theory (though it's hardly original) is that the digital world is on course to mimic the real world in as many ways as possible. One day, having a poor sense of smell could be a serious liability in FPS games.
I certainly have sympathy for the blind -- I'm color blind myself, and routinely get myself killed in FPS and other games where "good" things are green and "bad" things are red, but both colors have the same saturation and luminosity as bad things.
I commend those doing what they can to make the digital world more inclusive, but the fact of the matter is that, in realistic digital environments, those with sensory limitations are going to have an increasingly hard time.
Cheers
-b
...Just build in something to P2P client applications which is aware of Overpeer's IP addresses. If there's unused bandwidth, download anything they're offering (and just throw it away). Drive up their bandwidth costs while simultaneously ignoring the junk they're sending out.
Easy.
Cheers
-b
Sure -- just like "you can take away bombs, guns, knives, box cutters, nail clippers, and toothpicks... and air travel would be so much safer" is a flawed analogy. Oh, wait, terrorist types have shown a shocking disregard for the principle of using obviously dangerous tools.
Sure, some things are more dangerous or prone to dangerous use than others, but fact is, if someone's really looking to do evil shit, they will find a way to use a spoon if they have to. If "outlawing any implement that could possibly be used for evil" is the philosophy, you have to outlaw everything from nuclear bombs to napkins. Pure and simple.
That was my point, and I'll stick by it.
Cheers
-b
You're absolutely right. I find it dispicable that people would release programs that terrorists could possibly use, with the weak excuse that there might be other legitimate uses! I mean, if we got rid of Steganography, PGP, Linux, MS Word, AutoCAD, MS Project, Bablefish, Oracle, OpenOffice, Squid, Rogue Spear, Mathmatica, Apache, Cu-Seeme, and KSH... why, the world would surely be a safer place!
Cheers
-b
Vivo went away because it was a pain in the butt for everyone involved. I hated it, too. I'm not sure what your point is -- of course vivo went away, with the advent of two (three, if you count quicktime) video formats that are superior, streamable, and installed on almost every PC out there. Vivo was an interim solution in the early days, and porn sites as well as mainstream sites abandoned it when something better came along.
Cheers
-b
Weird. I've been a fan of metallica's early stuff since 1983, when I was 13 years old and hacking 8088 assembly language on an original IBM PC (overclocked to 8mhz, mind you). Almost without exception, my techie friends like old metallica.
Metallica was the first band to go after Napster. They (Lars) were interviewed on /.. If you search for "metallica" on /., you'll find 35 stories.
I'd say they've got (or at least had) a decent techie fan base.
Cheers
-b
Oh, come off it. There are plenty of decent porn sites. Like most industries that have bad reputations, it's the small number of sleazy ones that give the industry a bad name.
A good place to look for respectable porn sites is: www.janesguide.com. (I have no affiliation with Jane's Guide)
Cheers -bFirst, let me say I'm not a huge Moby fan. I don't dislike the guy, but I remember when he was a basic rave DJ in the San Francisco area.
Funny that he made his money for so long by mixing records of other peoples' stuff together. Somehow I doubt he paid the appropriate ASCAP or BMI fees. So right off, I have a hard time sympathizing with his complaints about piracy.
But beyond that, isn't it notable that artists with a large fanbase in the tech community blame that fanbase whenever sales slip? Metallica was the first; Moby is just the latest.
My theory is this: Acts like Metallica or Moby build up a cult following over years. By nature, that cult following is largely techies and other folks who don't follow the Christina Spears of the month club. People who actually care about music and are willing to follow smaller bands to get what they want.
At some point, some of these bands go to pot (literally, figuratively, or both). Their later work becomes increasingly detached and less and less like the early work, eventually ending up as a mellowed out, regurgitated pablum made up of bits and pieces of all of their early work, mixed with maybe a few mainstream artists whose stolen sounds might help draw in a few more customers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfans. Fans lose interest and buy less.
And then, as the final stage of intellectual and moral decay, these acts engage in a strange form of denial crossed with egotism crossed with paranoia. "The fans must still love us!" they shout. "We're sure they're still listening to this new crap we put out, but for some reason sales are down. It's those goddamned fans! They must be stealing our crappy new stuff, because after years of paying for our old, quality stuff, they've suddenly become a backstabbing pack of thieves! Yeah, that must be it! Those fans of ours sure do suck!"
Anyways, that's my theory. It would just be sad, if it didn't have the dangerous potential of impacting our legal system.
Cheers
-b
Porn sites' choices of video codecs are based more on installed base and ease of use than technical merit or licensing costs (remember, a decent porn site is profitable and can afford to spend money to make money). Far better to pay for a solution that your clients will be able to use than try to get away with a free solution that will do nothing but cause support headaches and (the bane of adult sites) chargebacks from dissatisfied customers.
Anything that involves a download and/or installation is bad news. People don't trust downloads from porn sites (though, to the best of my knowledge, there's never been a case where a porn site used a download for nefarious purposes). Beyond that, as we all know, some percentage of installations fail for one reason or another. If you have to supply even a link to a third party download, people will blame you if it doesn't work.
For these reasons, Windows Media is clearly winning the battle for porn site content, measured by new clips produced.
Real probably still has an overall lead in clips available for legacy reasons, but nobody is producing new porn in Real format. It comes back to support and chargebacks: Real tries so hard to trick people into the "free 14 day trial, $9.95/month" player that it generates no end of customer support headaches ("You said if I paid $29.95 a month I'd get free video... and now I have to pay another $9.95 a month for the player! You bastard porn sites are all the same! Lying, cheating scum! Why can't you operate like normal, ethical businesses?").
Not that I'd know anything about that industry.
Cheers
-b
Damn, most pierced, painted goths have better taste in beer. Pass me a bud, and I'll install Windows 2.0 on your system.
Or, did you mean the *other* kind of bud?
Cheers
-b
Q: What could possibly have gone wrong?
A: While we acknowledge that some peoples' perception is of something having gone wrong, we believe that any wrongness is unavoidable.
Q: Well, some analysts say it's intel's fault
A: We have implemented what we could implement, and don't believe there is any implementable implementation that would implement significant gains.
Q: Analysts also say it will be 2004 before the issue is fixed
A: It is too early to talk about 2004. That said, we are committed to delivering a good product.
Q: This is really bad news for the Pocket PC platform
A: Yes, it is. However, fortunately the issue is so small that this really isn't bad news for the Pocket PC platform.
Cheers
-b
"Sorry, folks, it looks like we're ordering pizza. I had been marinating some fantastic szechuan beef, but the fridge crashed and has been alternately freezing and cooking it for the past 12 hours."
Cheers
-b
I'll stand by my comparison of MFiaB to The Castle, especially because I read them back to back (I had read The Castle years ago, and after reading MFiaB I picked it up again). There are certainly similarities to The Trial, too; thanks for the impetus to read that one again. I'll pick it up and report back to this thread in a week or two. I'll also grab "A Scanner Darkly"; I've been re-reading a bunch of PKD recently but have't ever read that one.
As far as MFiaB and The Castle, there are numerous parallels in plot setup, sylistic devices, and plot advancement, especially (sort of spoilerish) the ironic breakthrough that finally allows the protagonist to get out of the trap (or, to at least change the nature of the trap).
If you've read the more recent (1998, I think) english translation of The Castle, you'll know what I mean. The older "translation" included all sorts of edits by Kafka's original posthumous agent, Max Brod, including the criminal truncation of the book before the actual end. It's possible that the parallels between MFiaB and The Castle weren't as clear in the botched english version which was all we had until 1998.
I don't think Lem or anyone ever claimed that MFiaB was completely original with no reference intended to Kafka's work. I saw it as clearly a homage and intentional adaptation of a great work to a different time. Nothing wrong with that, in my book.
Anyways, I can completely sympathize with thinking Lem is overrated, though I can't imagine feeling that way myself. However, I do feel that way about Joyce and a few other writers people consider classic, which gets me into all sorts of trouble with Lit. types. To each their own.
Cheers
-b
Um, no. You can email me at brooks at ipolis dot net if you want to. Dunno why it didn't get linked.
Cheers
-b
I'm curious about the Soderbergh Solaris movie myself.
However, I'm hopeful. Even though Brockovitch was hopelessly self-righteous and melodramatic, Soderbergh's other work is pretty good, especially for a mainstream hollywood director.
And, don't forget that Soderbergh's second movie (after Sex, Lies, and Videotape) was Kafka, a loose adaptation of the Castle, the book that MFiaB is an (even looser) adaptation of.
So Soderbergh's clearly got good taste in reading material, and he's got enough commercial success that hopefully the hollywood studio system won't interfere with him too much.
We'll see...
Cheers
-b
Were the results really supposed to be secret until the broadcast?
If so, then how would one explain this story, from June 2
Cheers
Most people aren't able to parse full headers, and if someone is accusing you of spamming, they'll just assume you're lying. Even a technically savvy person could just think that you borrwed the headers from their original complaint and "made" an opt-in email from them.
Even if it were technically possible to "prove" that they had sent that original opt-in email, a good portion of people simply won't believe it.
Cheers
-b
I admit that I didn't know it was even possible. Can you give a guesstimate of what kind of guaranteed audience you'd need for such a custom screening? And what kind of advance word?
Still, I find it hard to believe that you could match where the major theatres are going; within 20 years, I'd say any major theatre will be able to show pretty much any film in history with little or no notice, which is pretty darned cool.
Cheers
-b
So you're a "fix the symptoms, not the problem" kind of guy? Hope you're not in IT yourself!
Me, I'd have a lot more respect for Nader and proponents of this if they put their energy into fixing our seriously broken antitrust laws and enforcement so this situation doesn't come up again, rather than writing off the legal battle as lost and moving to a "Microsoft is playing dirty, so we will too" philosophy.
I'm clearly in the minority, though. I just hope all of this doesn't come back to bite the open source community.
Cheers
-b
Can it really be that hard to understand?
Here's what I'm saying
Enforcement of antitrust law belongs in the Justice Department, not the OMB or any other step of the procurement process. The OMB and anyone else in the government buying software should just buy software, and not second guess the judicial system. So, yes, unless and until we have a decisive outcome in the MS trial quagmire, the OMB should consider the way the market *is*, not the way it *should be*, which they are even less qualified to talk about than Ralph Nader.
The antitrust laws are outdated, and (possibly intentionally) poorly enforced. Fix that. Don't go settting up laws that basically move judicial control into the legislature. You will not like the long term results if this becomes common practice, no matter how much you might like the short term benefits of sticking it to Microsoft by tying procurement to arbitrary demands on corporate behavior.
Please... is it really that difficult to understand? I've got to assume that either I'm not being clear, or that somehow /. readers are unanimous in their willingness to abandon the fundamental balance of power in the country in their haste to bring Microsoft down.
Cheers
-b
I generally agree, with a couple of caveats.
I run an NEC LP150 LCD projector for my home theater. Bulbs cost about $400, for 1000 hour life. The brigher bulbs needed for real theaters will either cost more, have a shorter life, or both. The costs still aren't huge, but it's not accurate to write it off as negligeable.
DLP projectors are great, once you get up to the expensive ones that use 3 DLP modules (R, G, B). Cheaper ones use a single micromirror array and a color wheel spinning in front of it to sequentially project the red, green, and blue portions of an image. Some people (like me) are sensitive to that and the picture disolves into a rainbow-like thing with any head motion at all.
However, I do think digital cinema will ultimately win, and will bring with it some very cool innovations (like, get 20 friends together and a movie threater will allocate you once screen for a midweek matinee of some classic movie).
Cheers
-b
Well, that generated quite a few responses. Let me summarize:
How's that for a summary of the predominant opinions here? This is probably the first time I've ever been glad that geeks rarely exercise political voice. I hate MS as much as any of you, but I'm not willing to throw out our entire governmental model just because MS has been whooping ass on the Justice Department in court.
The MS problem is rooted the antitrust laws themselves, and the way they (haven't been) enforced. Fix what's broken, and please please please don't encourage the government to make purchasing decisions based on the corporate favorites / enemies of legislators. There's enough of that already; the last thing we need is the entire IT budget being tied up and used as a club in political battles.
My prediction: this proposal will spur MS to introduce a counter-proposal through Hollings: since terrorists could find and exploit bugs in open source software much more easily than proprietary systems, no governmental system shall use open source software. Now, that's silly and stupid, but who do you think owns more congressmen... MS, or the open source movement? Is this really a can of worms that you want opened?
Cheers
-b
See my reply to http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33652&cid=3639 416
Short answer: yes, I'd rather spend money on lawyers than move our antitrust enforcement into government purchasing, where anyone could introduce a law like this targeting any company, and traditional concepts of justice -- like representation, appeals, etc -- will no longer apply.
To think otherwise is to support the "ends justify means" philosophy, with the means in question being subverting the US justice system. If you support this, you will have no right to complain if Microsoft gets a bill introduced to ban the use of open source (or Oracle, or IBM) in government work. After all, you're saying that legislation governing government procurement is a valid place for market forces to do battle (or do you think that this one time is an exception, and it's OK because the target is Microsoft?)
Cheers
-b
Nader *does not* say that he wants the government to not support convicted criminals.
What he says is, government should tie purchasing to corporate behavior modification, and place limits on software purchases unless certain behaviors are achieved. Basically, use government purchasing as an informal extension of the justice system, with no question of evidence, appeals, etc.
Like I said, I look forward to the day when open source finally takes over. However, I think this is a terrible precedent to set, and the simple fact that it's aimed at Microsoft is not enough to make me support what is ultimately a really bad idea. If this is successful, every company with a government contract will lobby to introduce legislation making it more difficult for government to buy from their competitors. Ultimately, this would be bad for everyone, even if it achieved its goals in this one case.
Let the courts do their job, or reform the courts. Mixing up our justice and procurement systems is about as bad as an idea can get.
Cheers
-b
...so, in a nutshell, Nader is saying that the government should make an effort to influence the marketplace in a certain direction, rather than letting natural market forces dictate what heppens (questionable/illegal business practices being part of the market).
I'd love to see the rise of Open Source, the fall of Microsoft, etc, as much as the next guy. But I don't want the government using my tax dollars to achieve that (except in antitrust and other legal manners).
The government should research carefully and buy what makes sense. However, no matter how much we all like Microsoft alternatives, in things like office suites, it's disengenuous to argue that there's a viable non-microsoft solution for what amounts to a company of over a million employees. What kinds of deployment and management tools do open source software suites have? How many IT workers are trained to install/troubleshoot them?
Governments in general, and the US government in particular, can just *barely* do their job as is. Asking them to take a leadership role in IT purchasing is like asking Microsoft to take a leadership role in corporate ethics. It ain't going to happen, and the attempt would be an expensive, error-infested waste of time and money for everyone involved.
My opinion is that open source will prevail in the long run -- but I'd rather wait 10 years longer if it meant not setting the precedent of government setting this kind of precedent.
Cheers
-b