I think the real worry is that, instead of producing crap movies on a big budget, as they do now, the internet will be flooded with youtube stuff that is even worse, and nobody will be able to afford to produce real art.
And yes, I doubt that people would be willing to pay for an episode of something as soon as possible, when they could get it a day later on BT. I think the real source of revenue would be franchises (ie, overpriced t-shirts for die-hard fans) and advertising.
AJAX is by no means cross platform. AJAX, for all intents and purposes, is a firefox platform. I can't count how often I get web2.0 sites that are broken with Konqueror, simply because they use firefox JS extensions. Hell, look at the poster child for AJAX, gmail. It doesn't use AJAX for IE, it uses activeX. For firefox, it uses JS. It is just broken with everything else.
Java and flash are better at this sort of thing, but they open up another bag of worms by requiring your users to download plugins.
I think a well-implemented DRM is possible. You could imbed use restrictions as a watermark in your data, using an open format. The only problem is that media players would have to voluntarily obey the watermark. Something like VLC would probably ignore the watermark, but all the commercial players would probably obey it.
The big advantage of this would be attribution. An artist could embed a paypal donate link in his track, and nobody could strip it out without corrupting the watermark.
I am not a physicist. However, I know that there are other physical processes that do not change entropy, for example, mechanical and some electrical ones. So, I suppose it makes sense that computational processes can be reversible, as all you are doing is twiddling bits anyway. However, just as mechanical systems must be ultimately powered by heat engines, computers must ultimately do IO. Sure, you could use your computer to find the trillionth Ramsey number, but that wouldn't have anything to do with the physical world. I imagine that as IO needs increase, we'll have a giant pile of supporting junk around a single, ultrafast processor. The processor would be relatively cool, but the IO would generate heat, due to the quantum effects of trying to measure stuff. Otherwise, you could get around the second law by predicting the future. ( I imagine that statistical thermodynamics and quantum mechanics must apply to macroscopic stuff too, like human populations). I think you already see this with things that really do generate enormous amounts of data, like particle accelerators. The energy for processing the data is not negligible, but it's a hell of a lot less than the energy to run the accelerator. Conversely, taking 3D data that the computer understands, and flattening it down to 2D without losing very much is also very intensive, relative to the amount of computation that goes into game physics, for example.
But this is just me bullshitting.
I can't say I'm surprised that apple's stuff is incompatible with vista. I've never experienced this myself, but I've heard reports that iTunes has to install a whole CD driver for burning. I know that quicktime starts itself via the registry (and was relatively difficult to turn off) so I wouldn't be surprised if there are some rather deep-reaching "features" in the software that make it incompatible with the new security in vista. At any rate, while Microsoft would probably love to break compatibility for apple, any idiot with internet could have gotten the beta, so it's not really microsoft's fault if apple didn't get it ready for vista.
Mod parent up. The difference between WP and EB is like the difference between email and snail mail. They're sort of analogous, but at heart they're completely different beasts.
I doubt that wikipedia is really supposed to be anything more than a reasonably accurate resource. I mean, it's really not it's intended purpose to be a peer-reviewed, academically acceptable authority on any given subject. That doesn't mean it isn't useful though. If you want info on anything from math to anime, it has it. And, yes, may people want pages on specific harry potter characters.
This is why I'm fine with citizendium and wikipedia; both fill completely different niches. If I look up "petersen graph", for example, I don't really give a shit whether it's peer reviewed or not, I just want some accurate facts about it. On the other hand, if I'm looking for a source to cite in a philosophy paper, I'm going to stay the hell away from wikipedia.
I don't think it makes sense to mix social welfare programs with tax breaks like that. If you want to help poor people get to work, give them rebates for free public transit, don't change the gasoline tax. If someone is disabled and can't work, give them housing credits, don't lower everyone's property taxes. If someone neglected saving enough money for retirement, or didn't use birth control and had 8 kids...well, those are tough ones, but whatever we decide to do to help them it doesn't make sense to mess with everybody else's tax rates too.
I'm not so sure about that. I think the ideal would be to pay as little welfare as possible; the idea of taxing poor people for gas either directly or indirectly (by raising the cost of shipping, for example) and then giving them cash back seems a little funny to me. Because, of course, if you tax gas, you raise the cost of everything. It is also probably inefficient as well, because some of that money is bound to rub off as it passes through the government's hands. Now, obviously, you need some kinds of welfare programs, but the ideal would be to minimize the loopback. Because, otherwise, you're just having the government spend your money for you.
It is a step in the right direction to not REQUIRE a compiler, but the arrogance of supposing that your distro is complete enough to do without one is mind-boggling.
Ditto. The windows file dialog has a surprising number of features that are ignored in the gnome dialog. Like, maybe I want to be able to move folders around. Or rename them. Or delete them. Or view hidden files.
I think that they designed the GTK dialog to be like OSX, but just making stuff "like osx" does not mean that it is automatically more "usable".
And, yes, Gnome has interface quirks too. For example, why does the Screen Resolution dialog box automatically close itself? And why can't I edit menus without a special tool?
Personally, I think KDE is actually more consistent than gnome. Unlike gnome, it is not consistent with OSX, but it is internally consistent. So, while a single app may have several configuration dialogs, I know what they are all for, and I know that most every app will have them.
You are a fucking moron. package managers are all about providing centralized updates. Instead of having all my applications trying to update themselves when I get online, I can set it to run at midnight. I don't use OSX, but I doubt it has an API such that applications can update themselves in a centralised manner.
Tracking down drivers and the like can be difficult on Linux, at least the first time you install it. But, subsequent reinstalls are much easier. I now know enough about ubuntu to get flash, msfonts, and all that stuff to get it installed as fast as I can download it. And it's not like it's easy to install drivers on windows, either. At one lab, all of the xp computers were running the vesa drivers, because the tech couldn't be bothered to install the nvidia ones.
Basically, it doesn't usually work correctly on windows out of the box either, but more people know how to fix it, and are generally so familiar with the problems that they don't notice them anyway.
Yeah, I do that a lot. The best way to do it is just typing stuff in the address bar -- firefox does an IFL search by default. With konqueror, you can get a wikipedia search with wp, google with gg, debian package, with deb, etc. Actually navigating to google and then typing it into the box is what's dumb.
So, it's ok for the US to subponea for search records, but if China wants stuff blocked it is a major civil leberties violation? Something is a little weird here.
Are you sure we will be able to read "hardcopy" at all in, say, 200 years? IMHO, anything that isn't digitized before the singuarity will be effectively lost, as it is not searchable; furthermore, it will be too much work to go dig it up and enter it in, unless it is really important. That's why I think the google book project is so important.
Nah, archival isn't something you do once, and then let it sit there; it's an active process. You have to keep migrating it forward, keeping it indexed. Remember, if you can't find it, it's the same as not having it in the first place. If that's too much work, the data probably wasn't that important anyway.
I first realized this when I tried to find radio broadcast archives before 97 on the internet. For all intents and purposes, they do not exist. If I was really serious, I could have written to the radio station, assuming they still had that stuff. Assuming I knew which radio station broadcast it, and when. There is also a radio archive in illinois, I think, where they keep the stuff on analog tapes, and you can request them through the mail. How long will we have tape players? They're already obsolete. How long will we even be able to hear in analog? Etc, etc.
Manuscripts are a different story, because paper currently has a higher resolution than a computer screen. And, yes, it is more reliably readable, as of now. But, keep in mind, EVERYTHING is subject to "bit rot", be it the latest youtube movie that simply loses popularity, or ancient heiroglyphics in stone that nobody knows how to read anymore. The oldest stuff that is still easily readable is stuff like the Bible or the Odyssey, that has been republished over the years and kept alive.
I guess oral tradition is surest way to go, heh, heh, heh.
Boy, that DDT was pretty good stuff. Too bad they stopped making it. Lucky for me, I've still got some left, heh, heh, heh.
But why on earth do you run games on a 486 when an emulator will run faster than the real thing? I mean, I can understand running BSD or something on it for fun, but DOS? *rolls eyes*.
Do you even have a NIC in that thing? Keep in mind, you don't actually need real networking to transfer files, you can also do it over a null-modem connection.
Just to add to that, there's a big difference between latency and total throughput. With bittorrent, you could get away with several seconds of lag. With quake, you want it in the tens of milliseconds. QOS is good.
What's bad is when you start blocking your competitor's voip.
Exactly. The monopoly itself isn't really all that bad, usually. I mean, even with a near-total monopoly like microsoft, there are still people on the fringe selling alternatives -- and they can make money on it, by either selling something higher quality, or much cheaper. Also, keep in mind that crazy competition (like the oil business, before rockafeller took over) is usually incredibly sub-optimal. The formation of the monopoly is just the pendulum swinging back, just like anarchistic revolutions tend to lead to dictatorships.
However, if the monopoly becomes too powerful, they can directly buy politicians and market share. The government HAS to kill something like that, just out of self-defense. I'm not sure it's something they could avoid if they wanted to. I mean, if a company has enough money, they would literally rival the government in power, they would no longer need to buy politicians at all, and politicians hate that sort of thing.
What I liked about google video was the fact that the stream was seekable. You could drag the little slider past the end of the buffer, the video would start buffering from that point, and it still play. That doesn't work with youtube.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the real worry is that, instead of producing crap movies on a big budget, as they do now, the internet will be flooded with youtube stuff that is even worse, and nobody will be able to afford to produce real art.
And yes, I doubt that people would be willing to pay for an episode of something as soon as possible, when they could get it a day later on BT. I think the real source of revenue would be franchises (ie, overpriced t-shirts for die-hard fans) and advertising.
AJAX is by no means cross platform. AJAX, for all intents and purposes, is a firefox platform. I can't count how often I get web2.0 sites that are broken with Konqueror, simply because they use firefox JS extensions. Hell, look at the poster child for AJAX, gmail. It doesn't use AJAX for IE, it uses activeX. For firefox, it uses JS. It is just broken with everything else.
Java and flash are better at this sort of thing, but they open up another bag of worms by requiring your users to download plugins.
I think a well-implemented DRM is possible. You could imbed use restrictions as a watermark in your data, using an open format. The only problem is that media players would have to voluntarily obey the watermark. Something like VLC would probably ignore the watermark, but all the commercial players would probably obey it. The big advantage of this would be attribution. An artist could embed a paypal donate link in his track, and nobody could strip it out without corrupting the watermark.
I am not a physicist. However, I know that there are other physical processes that do not change entropy, for example, mechanical and some electrical ones. So, I suppose it makes sense that computational processes can be reversible, as all you are doing is twiddling bits anyway. However, just as mechanical systems must be ultimately powered by heat engines, computers must ultimately do IO. Sure, you could use your computer to find the trillionth Ramsey number, but that wouldn't have anything to do with the physical world. I imagine that as IO needs increase, we'll have a giant pile of supporting junk around a single, ultrafast processor. The processor would be relatively cool, but the IO would generate heat, due to the quantum effects of trying to measure stuff. Otherwise, you could get around the second law by predicting the future. ( I imagine that statistical thermodynamics and quantum mechanics must apply to macroscopic stuff too, like human populations). I think you already see this with things that really do generate enormous amounts of data, like particle accelerators. The energy for processing the data is not negligible, but it's a hell of a lot less than the energy to run the accelerator. Conversely, taking 3D data that the computer understands, and flattening it down to 2D without losing very much is also very intensive, relative to the amount of computation that goes into game physics, for example. But this is just me bullshitting.
Yes, it's not totally 100% anonymous, just anonomous enough to make it very, very difficult to figure out who you are.
I can't say I'm surprised that apple's stuff is incompatible with vista. I've never experienced this myself, but I've heard reports that iTunes has to install a whole CD driver for burning. I know that quicktime starts itself via the registry (and was relatively difficult to turn off) so I wouldn't be surprised if there are some rather deep-reaching "features" in the software that make it incompatible with the new security in vista. At any rate, while Microsoft would probably love to break compatibility for apple, any idiot with internet could have gotten the beta, so it's not really microsoft's fault if apple didn't get it ready for vista.
Mod parent up. The difference between WP and EB is like the difference between email and snail mail. They're sort of analogous, but at heart they're completely different beasts.
I doubt that wikipedia is really supposed to be anything more than a reasonably accurate resource. I mean, it's really not it's intended purpose to be a peer-reviewed, academically acceptable authority on any given subject. That doesn't mean it isn't useful though. If you want info on anything from math to anime, it has it. And, yes, may people want pages on specific harry potter characters.
This is why I'm fine with citizendium and wikipedia; both fill completely different niches. If I look up "petersen graph", for example, I don't really give a shit whether it's peer reviewed or not, I just want some accurate facts about it. On the other hand, if I'm looking for a source to cite in a philosophy paper, I'm going to stay the hell away from wikipedia.
Can't you give it any extension you damn well please?
I AM a script, you insensitive clod!
It is a step in the right direction to not REQUIRE a compiler, but the arrogance of supposing that your distro is complete enough to do without one is mind-boggling.
You probably meant, the Klever wordplay.
Ditto. The windows file dialog has a surprising number of features that are ignored in the gnome dialog. Like, maybe I want to be able to move folders around. Or rename them. Or delete them. Or view hidden files. I think that they designed the GTK dialog to be like OSX, but just making stuff "like osx" does not mean that it is automatically more "usable". And, yes, Gnome has interface quirks too. For example, why does the Screen Resolution dialog box automatically close itself? And why can't I edit menus without a special tool? Personally, I think KDE is actually more consistent than gnome. Unlike gnome, it is not consistent with OSX, but it is internally consistent. So, while a single app may have several configuration dialogs, I know what they are all for, and I know that most every app will have them.
You are a fucking moron. package managers are all about providing centralized updates. Instead of having all my applications trying to update themselves when I get online, I can set it to run at midnight. I don't use OSX, but I doubt it has an API such that applications can update themselves in a centralised manner.
Tracking down drivers and the like can be difficult on Linux, at least the first time you install it. But, subsequent reinstalls are much easier. I now know enough about ubuntu to get flash, msfonts, and all that stuff to get it installed as fast as I can download it. And it's not like it's easy to install drivers on windows, either. At one lab, all of the xp computers were running the vesa drivers, because the tech couldn't be bothered to install the nvidia ones.
Basically, it doesn't usually work correctly on windows out of the box either, but more people know how to fix it, and are generally so familiar with the problems that they don't notice them anyway.
Yeah, I do that a lot. The best way to do it is just typing stuff in the address bar -- firefox does an IFL search by default. With konqueror, you can get a wikipedia search with wp, google with gg, debian package, with deb, etc. Actually navigating to google and then typing it into the box is what's dumb.
Or sign the damned thing. It isn't exactly rocket science.
So, it's ok for the US to subponea for search records, but if China wants stuff blocked it is a major civil leberties violation? Something is a little weird here.
Are you sure we will be able to read "hardcopy" at all in, say, 200 years? IMHO, anything that isn't digitized before the singuarity will be effectively lost, as it is not searchable; furthermore, it will be too much work to go dig it up and enter it in, unless it is really important. That's why I think the google book project is so important.
Nah, archival isn't something you do once, and then let it sit there; it's an active process. You have to keep migrating it forward, keeping it indexed. Remember, if you can't find it, it's the same as not having it in the first place. If that's too much work, the data probably wasn't that important anyway.
I first realized this when I tried to find radio broadcast archives before 97 on the internet. For all intents and purposes, they do not exist. If I was really serious, I could have written to the radio station, assuming they still had that stuff. Assuming I knew which radio station broadcast it, and when. There is also a radio archive in illinois, I think, where they keep the stuff on analog tapes, and you can request them through the mail. How long will we have tape players? They're already obsolete. How long will we even be able to hear in analog? Etc, etc.
Manuscripts are a different story, because paper currently has a higher resolution than a computer screen. And, yes, it is more reliably readable, as of now. But, keep in mind, EVERYTHING is subject to "bit rot", be it the latest youtube movie that simply loses popularity, or ancient heiroglyphics in stone that nobody knows how to read anymore. The oldest stuff that is still easily readable is stuff like the Bible or the Odyssey, that has been republished over the years and kept alive.
I guess oral tradition is surest way to go, heh, heh, heh.
That reminds me of my grandfather:
Boy, that DDT was pretty good stuff. Too bad they stopped making it.
Lucky for me, I've still got some left, heh, heh, heh.
But why on earth do you run games on a 486 when an emulator will run faster than the real thing? I mean, I can understand running BSD or something on it for fun, but DOS? *rolls eyes*.
Do you even have a NIC in that thing? Keep in mind, you don't actually need real networking to transfer files, you can also do it over a null-modem connection.
Just to add to that, there's a big difference between latency and total throughput. With bittorrent, you could get away with several seconds of lag. With quake, you want it in the tens of milliseconds. QOS is good.
What's bad is when you start blocking your competitor's voip.
Exactly. The monopoly itself isn't really all that bad, usually. I mean, even with a near-total monopoly like microsoft, there are still people on the fringe selling alternatives -- and they can make money on it, by either selling something higher quality, or much cheaper. Also, keep in mind that crazy competition (like the oil business, before rockafeller took over) is usually incredibly sub-optimal. The formation of the monopoly is just the pendulum swinging back, just like anarchistic revolutions tend to lead to dictatorships.
However, if the monopoly becomes too powerful, they can directly buy politicians and market share. The government HAS to kill something like that, just out of self-defense. I'm not sure it's something they could avoid if they wanted to. I mean, if a company has enough money, they would literally rival the government in power, they would no longer need to buy politicians at all, and politicians hate that sort of thing.
What I liked about google video was the fact that the stream was seekable. You could drag the little slider past the end of the buffer, the video would start buffering from that point, and it still play. That doesn't work with youtube.