As best I know, the problem isn't that e-cash hasn't been invented. It's that it hasn't been innovated yet. That is, it hasn't been turned into a product or service or thing that regular people can and want to use.
Although, I heard someone chat about being able to store money on our (nation-specific) debit cards.
The purpose I heard was eliminating the delay when the terminals call up the bank and ask whether it should OK a transaction.
The card holder first runs a protocol between him and the bank to store money on the card. When the money is stored on the card, the card holder and the seller can then run a local protocol to transfer the e-cash to the seller, which the seller can then turn into real money (real as in "numbers in a computer") by talking to the bank some other time.
I don't know whether the talk was specifically about Brand's e-cash scheme, but it has the same communication structure (i.e. which pairs of people talk together at which relative point in time).
But as I said: I just heard it sort of passing by. But I think it would take involvement of the state to make changes to what is considered legal tender. And if e-cash isn't, how do you buy anything else than WoW loot (or "faceville" crops, or items from some other isolated virtual world) with it? How does it cross national borders?
But do would want to drive across a bridge built by an engineer who designs them as a hobby on weekends [and other examples]
Since I put my life at risk, I'm thinking maybe I wouldn't (note that listening to bad music won't kill me---if you were aiming for an analogy to transfer a conclusion, here's where it breaks down).
On the other hand, if hobby engineers can become competent enough to design a bridge as safe as those designed today by professional engineers, the fact that the engineer doesn't get money for his work wouldn't hold me back. I would want the design to be reviewed by someone competent, money or not.
unless they had been tested and screened by qualified professionals who are usually trained and paid well for their work.
Professionals tend to be paid, sorta' by definition. I'm really worried about competence, not money changing hands.
Now, I don't know how you'd motivate hobbyist engineers to become competent and have them motivated enough to do the socially beneficial works.
All I'm saying is that I see that thing happening in the world of music.
Again, I think you're right that some amateurs are really good. But without incentives, I think the quality and number of people who devote themselves to artistic production will decrease.
Yes. How much will it decrease? How much value is lost? How much value (of a different kind) is gained by being free to share the music with your friends?
[on teachers] We can see the results in the American educational system. Do we want to encourage that trend in artistic production as well?
The difference here is that you can be stuck with a bad teacher. You can't really be stuck in the same way with a bad musician---you just listen to someone else.
Maybe if everybody started doing e-learning, they could study under their favourite teacher. Then again, unless the teacher is only recording lectures (in text, audio or video), or rather if you expect the teacher to spend some time per student, there's a limit to how many people can be taught by the same teacher.
There's no such limit to how many people can listen to the same musician. You just grab the mp3s off the net and start listening.
There is in live performances due to physical rooms not being infinitely big; but there's nothing stopping people from charging admission fees for live performances in order to allocate the limited resource (space).
Your analogies break down for this reason: music (and books and films) is information whose value is realised by copying it and the consumer observing (hearing, reading, watching) it. It's easy to not consume, it's easy to change your consumption.
Medicine, bridges, teaching doesn't have this property. If there's only one bridge across the Thames, you can't really choose a different engineer. Your choice in teachers is limited to those who teach in your area and/or your willingness to relocate or commute. And medicine with nasty side effects is hard to undo. You can't stop having taken it, and stopping taking it might not be enough.
There's a good reason why I don't extend my argument to where I haven't seen evidence that it could work well enough.
Whether I have seen enough evidence and is being fair in my reporting is a different matter; I think someone qualified [probably a professional:)] should gather evidence in a rigorous and scientific way about what good copyright policy would look like.
Well, these people still need to eat. They need physical goods to be able to do their work. That means they need to get paid.
I have bought four guitars, two amps, cables, effect pedals, a saxophone and a clarinet, pooling together summer job wages, birthday gifts, savings of allowances, et cetera. I've been in a recording studio twice; I've performed on the local town square once, and at several events locally. Back when I was a kid (~14-18yo) and didn't have any real money.
Musicians want to play. Actors want to act. Writers want to write.
The publishers acted as quality assurance; they did searching and pruning, so we could have the best art. You know what also does that? A moderation system (/.). A review system (amazon). A simple counting mechanism ("most downloaded this day/week/month/year").
None of them are perfect. So aren't the studios. And some artists already choose a life of material poverty in return for wealth in terms of self-expression and self-actualization.
Exactly why is it that the people's need for art can't be satisfied well enough this way? Some amateurs are really good. Oh, so we'll go to the theatre and look at people rather than go to the cinema and look at screens, because making films is rather resource-intensive (i.e. expensive). Or we'll watch more shorts and/or more animated films. Won't we still be entertained?
Almost every aspect of open source/creative commons etc. requires attribution
Not only that, Eric Raymond argues in The Cathedral and the Bazaar that one motivation for writing open source code is to earn the esteem of your fellow coders. For that, proper attribution is crucial. Not only don't we disrespect artistic ownership, we want our peers to respect ours.
and even pirates don't bother removing credits.
In fact, pirates add their own credits to stuff. Have you ever seen an anime video with "Fansubbed by SuchAndSuch" or "Ripped by SoAndSo" banners? Or downloaded the newest film released by aXXo?
Everybody wants fame and esteem.
(Not everybody wants it as much as $other_thing, or are willing to do the things it takes to earn it, but we all like to hear "you are important to me" and "I love the things you do for me")
Your 'artistic ownership' goes nowhere.
I disagree---it doesn't go nowhere, it goes the other way.
On top of that, the open source culture around software may decrease piracy.
Back before I discovered gaim (now called pidgin), my favourite multi-protocol IM chat client was Trillian. Before I discovered the GIMP, I used Paint Shop Pro. And so forth. I won't link to scan-ins of my receipts; you might steal my serialz or something;)
By allowing people to share freely, and by the fact that Free (as in talking beer) software exists that solves most of most peoples' software needs, there's less need to pirate non-FOSS software.
I don't think he's right. At least I have made a good argument for why he might be wrong. But really this is a question of fact, so to settle the matter we really ought to collect some evidence. What would be good evidence?
How about this experiment: pull people into your psych lab, teach them about open source and free software ideas and ideals, then let them back out into their lives. Some months later (1? 3? 6? 12? More than once?), pull them back and ask them how they feel about copyright infringement and how much copyright infringement they did.
As controls, pull in some other people and talk to them about something unrelated. Pull them back in on the same schedule as the others. Compare the answers of the two groups.
Maybe you want to divide the copyright infringement questions into different types (software, music, films, books, other). And maybe you want a baseline measurement from when you first pull them in; maybe even both before and after talking about FLOSS.
Wouldn't that settle the matter? Because, as far as I can tell, all we have now is biased opinions---including my own, I'm just thinking more clearly about his bias because he disagrees with me. Don't you just love human nature?;)
Object-oriented languages in general require less documentation since good design and properly named methods and properties do document things relatively well.
I think it's the object-oriented program structure, not language features, that makes things easier to understand. And only where that structure makes sense.
For example, have a look at Simon Tatham's puzzle collection. It's object oriented C code, with excellent developer documentation.
There's an interface "Game", implemented by Sudoku, Minesweeper, etc., which basically defines all of the game.
This interface and the interfaces it can talk to are all documented outside of the code. Each of the implementations have comments in the code explaining the implementation.
Class-level documentation is much more important than documenting the details of the methods themselves.
More important---they're more useful towards which end, exactly?
You bring up Java. I find that in java, whenever you want to pass around a method, you have to duct tape it onto a class and instantiate that. See for example Comparator; really you just want to pass a comparison function to the sort method.
This tends to introduce "spurious classes"; classes that you have to create because of constraints in your language, not because they're the logical way to organize your program.
In those cases, I think it's much more important to have good higher-level architecture documentation; "these are the classes involved in setting up a network connection. Here's how they relate. Here's the order in which you instantiate them, and the methods for doing so."
I think this springs out of a good usability idea: have the user's (programmer's) task in mind. Instead of documenting the tools `find' and `grep' and `locate', document the process of searching for your stuff.
Instead of documenting the Socket and Packet classes, document the process of shoving bits onto the wire(lesse)s.
Perl and C code, on the other hand [vs. Java and.NET], can be unmaintainable even with a number of comments, because the old functional design is not easily maintainable.
Again, it's program structure, not language features. You can implement most structures in most languages (except maybe B&D Pascal, but hasn't Pascal become less B&D over the years? I haven't kept up).
A minor nit: ML/Haskell/Lisp programmers might not agree with your choice of the word "Functional". They'd call the paradigm procedural; I don't know if there's consensus about which word to use for the typical designs, if there are typical designs. In any case, there's no "The" way to design C/Perl programs. Oh, and perl is OO nowadays.
Consider rewriting these in a more modern language.
Consider understanding the capabilities of the less modern languages and the restrictions of the more modern languages.
I'd instead recommend refactoring the code instead of changing languages. It seems like something you could do faster and cheaper. Hey, I just saved our department more money than you did:P
It doesn't answer my question, though; not explicitly at least.
What I think is going on is the two of you having a shared economy, and you're making the purchase decision. But, from your vantage point, "I'm spending our money on [...]". In what you're saying, you're conflating the decision-maker with the money-spender.
When DRM get implemented such that the ARTISTS get the money, then I'll have respect for it.
I won't.
The reason is the nature of DRM.
What is DRM? It is a technical end-run around our rights; eventually, any copyrighted work will become public domain---it will belong to the people. DRM that works prevents this from happening effectively.
It's like a company bidding to provide a public service, then building a wall around the place where they provide the service so you can't access it.
They're taking what belongs to us. They're denying us the exercise of our rights. I don't think I will ever respect this.
Trash created pre-DRM like Mozart or Wagner just can't compare to the majesty modern DRM'ed works like Justin Timberlake or Britney spears.
Might there be a selection bias going on? We don't preserve everything from "back then"; we sure don't listen to all of it. I predict that in the future, people will still listen to, say, The Beatles. Or Elvis. Or rock out to that riff from Smoke on the Water. Maybe some Michael Jackson song will be preserved.
Not all old music was great. Not all new music is crap. Not even all good new music is worth preserving for ever. But some is.
The real problem is that record companies have shifted their function. It used to be that they discovered and selected talent; now they "produce" talent.
South Park tells a story about this too; see the Guitar Queer-o episode: "The next time you bring me some talent, make sure they're talented". And then in Fingerbang: "These are The New Boys from the Back Alley Zone. They're the new hit." (I'm paraphrasing the name.)
99% of people want 1 advanced feature in their word processor. Thing is, they all want a different advanced feature which the other 98% will consider unnecessary.
This explains why GNOME is the way it is: it's designed for all the other 98 percents.
I think the preference for relative motion is mostly just due to familiarity.
Fair enough. How do I do a 720 degree turn on an absolute axis, while still being able to do the fine-grained aiming at ~1 degree turns or less, such that the control scheme is intuitive?
By the way, what happens if I get stuck in a corner? How do I go even further then?
This has always puzzled me. Please share your solution to this problem with me; It'll make me very happy to discover that there's a simple solution to this:)
It's really only the mouse---you can make a perfectly fun FPS that's playable with the buttons on, say, a wiimote plus nunchuk (one stick for moving, 8 buttons in B/C/Z/d-pad/A).
What's really missing is the fine-grained relative motion of the mouse.
It needs to be fine-grained; anyone who has tried to aim with a joystick will understand why.
It needs to be relative, as anyone having played Metroid Prime 3: Corruption on the Wii will know.
Roughly speaking, you point at an absolute point on the monitor plane; your character yaws and pitches gradually to aim at that point, the speed being monotonously increasing in the distance between your current aim point and the target aim point.
What are the implications? Either you point at where you want to shoot and it takes a while to aim there, or you point way past where you want to shoot and you get to where you want to go really fast but move away again really fast.
What you really want to do is overshoot by infinity (or $BIGNUM), then aim at the target point when your character points exactly at it: then you get to your target fast and stay there. This is virtually impossible, and trying to do it is unpleasant.
That's why you need a mouse for FPSs; you can make games that only take 8 buttons, so I don't buy the "you need a keyboard". Maybe specific FPSs require keyboards, and maybe there's really no way to design around that without making the game a different game---I'll buy that. But really it's the mouse.
It still wouldn't work well for rock band
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OnLive One Step Closer
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· Score: 3, Interesting
A game like rock band could 'tune it in'. [it=500ms lag]
I really don't think it could.
Here's the reason: suppose I'm to go red-green-blue-yellow-orange-yellow-blue-green-red really fast (say, at the end of the TTFAF intro), and it's one big hammer-on-pull-off sequence which can't realistically be strummed (or the rules of the game have changed so I have to HOPO).
I miss the first green.
I only get to know that I missed the first green 500ms later. I have already HOPO'ed the rest of the sequence. There's no way I can go back in time 450ms and strum the blue I HOPO'ed, undoing the not-playing-correctly.
It's not just that you have to compensate for lag between inputs and outputs. You also have to make the lag inside a feedback loop very small. A minimal lag of 500ms is too much for rock band.... Even if the audio and video is perfectly synchronous, and the game compensates for the output lag by virtually moving your inputs back in time. The game can never move the reaction to the output, which happens in your brain, back in time to before the output.
Yeah sure... replace a low-bandwidth, local application with a remote one that heavily relies on a fast network [...] Am I missing something here
You're missing ssh + screen + emacs. That used to work fine on 9600 baud terminals; it should work fine over even a measly 1 megabit intertube. In fact, I know it does; I use ssh + screen almost every day (sometimes including emacs).
2.) Liberals love the idea of government control. It's the solution to absolutely everything.
Economic theory suggests that the Free Market Is Good. It also suggests that sometimes it fails. In those cases, Government Intrusion Is Good.
One case is public construction: in areas with very high fixed costs, it's more efficient to only build one of "them" and let everyone use it, rather than have several parties each build their own. Good examples are roads, electricity, telephony, internet.
Another one is natural monopolies, most often seen with network effects, where the value of "owning it" increases with how many people also "owns it". Again, roads, telephones, internet. Also Facebook accounts, and other networks overlaid on the internet.
If government did its job well, government stepping in would actually be The Right Thing.
What (some hardcore) right-wingers don't acknowledge is the sound theory. What (some hardcore) left-wingers don't acknowledge is the unsound practice of said theory.
If you want to know, empirically, how well the theory is converted into practice, I recommend the most recent episode of EconTalk (grab it at http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/12/winston_on_mark.html), where the guest talks about exactly this.
Slashdot Mirror
At least I'll win something in my life. Even if it takes my life to win it.
Actually, by the award criteria, you won't win a Darwin award in your life but rather just off the far end of it.
(Or, given your dispositions, it might actually be the near end :P)
How about getting around to inventing digital cash?
Look around the internet, or your cryptography textbooks, for Brand's Electronic Cash Scheme (or e-cash scheme).
If you can, have a look at this: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/9746/30738/01423662.pdf%3Farnumber%3D1423662&authDecision=-203
As best I know, the problem isn't that e-cash hasn't been invented. It's that it hasn't been innovated yet. That is, it hasn't been turned into a product or service or thing that regular people can and want to use.
Although, I heard someone chat about being able to store money on our (nation-specific) debit cards.
The purpose I heard was eliminating the delay when the terminals call up the bank and ask whether it should OK a transaction.
The card holder first runs a protocol between him and the bank to store money on the card. When the money is stored on the card, the card holder and the seller can then run a local protocol to transfer the e-cash to the seller, which the seller can then turn into real money (real as in "numbers in a computer") by talking to the bank some other time.
I don't know whether the talk was specifically about Brand's e-cash scheme, but it has the same communication structure (i.e. which pairs of people talk together at which relative point in time).
But as I said: I just heard it sort of passing by. But I think it would take involvement of the state to make changes to what is considered legal tender. And if e-cash isn't, how do you buy anything else than WoW loot (or "faceville" crops, or items from some other isolated virtual world) with it? How does it cross national borders?
All the community, all the good works, but without [...] any involvement with volcanoes.
Why do you hate xenu so much? :(
Maybe it'll come with a Voight-Kampff machine built in.
I was thinking the OS would come with a screen saver showing electric sheep :)
But do would want to drive across a bridge built by an engineer who designs them as a hobby on weekends [and other examples]
Since I put my life at risk, I'm thinking maybe I wouldn't (note that listening to bad music won't kill me---if you were aiming for an analogy to transfer a conclusion, here's where it breaks down).
On the other hand, if hobby engineers can become competent enough to design a bridge as safe as those designed today by professional engineers, the fact that the engineer doesn't get money for his work wouldn't hold me back. I would want the design to be reviewed by someone competent, money or not.
unless they had been tested and screened by qualified professionals who are usually trained and paid well for their work.
Professionals tend to be paid, sorta' by definition. I'm really worried about competence, not money changing hands.
Now, I don't know how you'd motivate hobbyist engineers to become competent and have them motivated enough to do the socially beneficial works.
All I'm saying is that I see that thing happening in the world of music.
Again, I think you're right that some amateurs are really good. But without incentives, I think the quality and number of people who devote themselves to artistic production will decrease.
Yes. How much will it decrease? How much value is lost? How much value (of a different kind) is gained by being free to share the music with your friends?
[on teachers] We can see the results in the American educational system. Do we want to encourage that trend in artistic production as well?
The difference here is that you can be stuck with a bad teacher. You can't really be stuck in the same way with a bad musician---you just listen to someone else.
Maybe if everybody started doing e-learning, they could study under their favourite teacher. Then again, unless the teacher is only recording lectures (in text, audio or video), or rather if you expect the teacher to spend some time per student, there's a limit to how many people can be taught by the same teacher.
There's no such limit to how many people can listen to the same musician. You just grab the mp3s off the net and start listening.
There is in live performances due to physical rooms not being infinitely big; but there's nothing stopping people from charging admission fees for live performances in order to allocate the limited resource (space).
Your analogies break down for this reason: music (and books and films) is information whose value is realised by copying it and the consumer observing (hearing, reading, watching) it. It's easy to not consume, it's easy to change your consumption.
Medicine, bridges, teaching doesn't have this property. If there's only one bridge across the Thames, you can't really choose a different engineer. Your choice in teachers is limited to those who teach in your area and/or your willingness to relocate or commute. And medicine with nasty side effects is hard to undo. You can't stop having taken it, and stopping taking it might not be enough.
There's a good reason why I don't extend my argument to where I haven't seen evidence that it could work well enough.
Whether I have seen enough evidence and is being fair in my reporting is a different matter; I think someone qualified [probably a professional :)] should gather evidence in a rigorous and scientific way about what good copyright policy would look like.
In other words, the more the incumbents tighten their grip on technology, the more scientists will slip through their fingers?
his statement has gotten his name air-time.
Who? I'll probably forget the name of... what's-his-name-again... before even finishing reading the summary of the next story.
Well, these people still need to eat. They need physical goods to be able to do their work. That means they need to get paid.
I have bought four guitars, two amps, cables, effect pedals, a saxophone and a clarinet, pooling together summer job wages, birthday gifts, savings of allowances, et cetera. I've been in a recording studio twice; I've performed on the local town square once, and at several events locally. Back when I was a kid (~14-18yo) and didn't have any real money.
Musicians want to play. Actors want to act. Writers want to write.
The publishers acted as quality assurance; they did searching and pruning, so we could have the best art. You know what also does that? A moderation system (/.). A review system (amazon). A simple counting mechanism ("most downloaded this day/week/month/year").
None of them are perfect. So aren't the studios. And some artists already choose a life of material poverty in return for wealth in terms of self-expression and self-actualization.
Exactly why is it that the people's need for art can't be satisfied well enough this way? Some amateurs are really good. Oh, so we'll go to the theatre and look at people rather than go to the cinema and look at screens, because making films is rather resource-intensive (i.e. expensive). Or we'll watch more shorts and/or more animated films. Won't we still be entertained?
Almost every aspect of open source/creative commons etc. requires attribution
Not only that, Eric Raymond argues in The Cathedral and the Bazaar that one motivation for writing open source code is to earn the esteem of your fellow coders. For that, proper attribution is crucial. Not only don't we disrespect artistic ownership, we want our peers to respect ours.
and even pirates don't bother removing credits.
In fact, pirates add their own credits to stuff. Have you ever seen an anime video with "Fansubbed by SuchAndSuch" or "Ripped by SoAndSo" banners? Or downloaded the newest film released by aXXo?
Everybody wants fame and esteem.
(Not everybody wants it as much as $other_thing, or are willing to do the things it takes to earn it, but we all like to hear "you are important to me" and "I love the things you do for me")
Your 'artistic ownership' goes nowhere.
I disagree---it doesn't go nowhere, it goes the other way.
On top of that, the open source culture around software may decrease piracy.
Back before I discovered gaim (now called pidgin), my favourite multi-protocol IM chat client was Trillian. Before I discovered the GIMP, I used Paint Shop Pro. And so forth. I won't link to scan-ins of my receipts; you might steal my serialz or something ;)
By allowing people to share freely, and by the fact that Free (as in talking beer) software exists that solves most of most peoples' software needs, there's less need to pirate non-FOSS software.
I don't think he's right. At least I have made a good argument for why he might be wrong. But really this is a question of fact, so to settle the matter we really ought to collect some evidence. What would be good evidence?
How about this experiment: pull people into your psych lab, teach them about open source and free software ideas and ideals, then let them back out into their lives. Some months later (1? 3? 6? 12? More than once?), pull them back and ask them how they feel about copyright infringement and how much copyright infringement they did.
As controls, pull in some other people and talk to them about something unrelated. Pull them back in on the same schedule as the others. Compare the answers of the two groups.
Maybe you want to divide the copyright infringement questions into different types (software, music, films, books, other). And maybe you want a baseline measurement from when you first pull them in; maybe even both before and after talking about FLOSS.
Wouldn't that settle the matter? Because, as far as I can tell, all we have now is biased opinions---including my own, I'm just thinking more clearly about his bias because he disagrees with me. Don't you just love human nature? ;)
- 1 comment - the single word "midlertidig"
FWIW, "midlertidig" means temporary. My guess is that it wasn't used for a local variable in a `swap' method ;)
Object-oriented languages in general require less documentation since good design and properly named methods and properties do document things relatively well.
I think it's the object-oriented program structure, not language features, that makes things easier to understand. And only where that structure makes sense.
For example, have a look at Simon Tatham's puzzle collection. It's object oriented C code, with excellent developer documentation.
There's an interface "Game", implemented by Sudoku, Minesweeper, etc., which basically defines all of the game.
This interface and the interfaces it can talk to are all documented outside of the code. Each of the implementations have comments in the code explaining the implementation.
Class-level documentation is much more important than documenting the details of the methods themselves.
More important---they're more useful towards which end, exactly?
You bring up Java. I find that in java, whenever you want to pass around a method, you have to duct tape it onto a class and instantiate that. See for example Comparator; really you just want to pass a comparison function to the sort method.
This tends to introduce "spurious classes"; classes that you have to create because of constraints in your language, not because they're the logical way to organize your program.
In those cases, I think it's much more important to have good higher-level architecture documentation; "these are the classes involved in setting up a network connection. Here's how they relate. Here's the order in which you instantiate them, and the methods for doing so."
I think this springs out of a good usability idea: have the user's (programmer's) task in mind. Instead of documenting the tools `find' and `grep' and `locate', document the process of searching for your stuff.
Instead of documenting the Socket and Packet classes, document the process of shoving bits onto the wire(lesse)s.
Perl and C code, on the other hand [vs. Java and .NET], can be unmaintainable even with a number of comments, because the old functional design is not easily maintainable.
Again, it's program structure, not language features. You can implement most structures in most languages (except maybe B&D Pascal, but hasn't Pascal become less B&D over the years? I haven't kept up).
A minor nit: ML/Haskell/Lisp programmers might not agree with your choice of the word "Functional". They'd call the paradigm procedural; I don't know if there's consensus about which word to use for the typical designs, if there are typical designs. In any case, there's no "The" way to design C/Perl programs. Oh, and perl is OO nowadays.
Consider rewriting these in a more modern language.
Consider understanding the capabilities of the less modern languages and the restrictions of the more modern languages.
I'd instead recommend refactoring the code instead of changing languages. It seems like something you could do faster and cheaper. Hey, I just saved our department more money than you did :P
The most appropriate story for me to post in, if only for my sig.
For anyone who comes back and reads this when you've changed your sig, here is it as it were on january 2nd 2010 when I read it:
People who need govt to enforce their religion must not have much faith in the power of its message.
Also, well said good sir!
You know you're a nerd when your IQ is a larger number than your bench press. :)
Hey, don't dilute our brand! I don't think most people can bench press 100 kg.
On the other hand, here in metric-land, what with the Celcius scale and all, "Your IQ resembles room temperature" is much more insulting :->
Thanks for your reply :)
It doesn't answer my question, though; not explicitly at least.
What I think is going on is the two of you having a shared economy, and you're making the purchase decision. But, from your vantage point, "I'm spending our money on [...]". In what you're saying, you're conflating the decision-maker with the money-spender.
Did I get that right?
(If so, there's nothing left I don't understand.)
When DRM get implemented such that the ARTISTS get the money, then I'll have respect for it.
I won't.
The reason is the nature of DRM.
What is DRM? It is a technical end-run around our rights; eventually, any copyrighted work will become public domain---it will belong to the people. DRM that works prevents this from happening effectively.
It's like a company bidding to provide a public service, then building a wall around the place where they provide the service so you can't access it.
They're taking what belongs to us. They're denying us the exercise of our rights. I don't think I will ever respect this.
Trash created pre-DRM like Mozart or Wagner just can't compare to the majesty modern DRM'ed works like Justin Timberlake or Britney spears.
Might there be a selection bias going on? We don't preserve everything from "back then"; we sure don't listen to all of it. I predict that in the future, people will still listen to, say, The Beatles. Or Elvis. Or rock out to that riff from Smoke on the Water. Maybe some Michael Jackson song will be preserved.
Not all old music was great. Not all new music is crap. Not even all good new music is worth preserving for ever. But some is.
The real problem is that record companies have shifted their function. It used to be that they discovered and selected talent; now they "produce" talent.
South Park tells a story about this too; see the Guitar Queer-o episode: "The next time you bring me some talent, make sure they're talented". And then in Fingerbang: "These are The New Boys from the Back Alley Zone. They're the new hit." (I'm paraphrasing the name.)
Suggested by my original parent.
So, for her PC, I fork out the $$ and buy Office.
Maybe this is just a stupid question, but why doesn't she fork out the $$ for her PC?
What am I missing? Some universal truth about human nature? Or just a social norm in your society? Or something third?
99% of people want 1 advanced feature in their word processor. Thing is, they all want a different advanced feature which the other 98% will consider unnecessary.
This explains why GNOME is the way it is: it's designed for all the other 98 percents.
I think the preference for relative motion is mostly just due to familiarity.
Fair enough. How do I do a 720 degree turn on an absolute axis, while still being able to do the fine-grained aiming at ~1 degree turns or less, such that the control scheme is intuitive?
By the way, what happens if I get stuck in a corner? How do I go even further then?
This has always puzzled me. Please share your solution to this problem with me; It'll make me very happy to discover that there's a simple solution to this :)
the richer control setup of keyboard and mouse.
It's really only the mouse---you can make a perfectly fun FPS that's playable with the buttons on, say, a wiimote plus nunchuk (one stick for moving, 8 buttons in B/C/Z/d-pad/A).
What's really missing is the fine-grained relative motion of the mouse.
It needs to be fine-grained; anyone who has tried to aim with a joystick will understand why.
It needs to be relative, as anyone having played Metroid Prime 3: Corruption on the Wii will know.
Roughly speaking, you point at an absolute point on the monitor plane; your character yaws and pitches gradually to aim at that point, the speed being monotonously increasing in the distance between your current aim point and the target aim point.
What are the implications? Either you point at where you want to shoot and it takes a while to aim there, or you point way past where you want to shoot and you get to where you want to go really fast but move away again really fast.
What you really want to do is overshoot by infinity (or $BIGNUM), then aim at the target point when your character points exactly at it: then you get to your target fast and stay there. This is virtually impossible, and trying to do it is unpleasant.
That's why you need a mouse for FPSs; you can make games that only take 8 buttons, so I don't buy the "you need a keyboard". Maybe specific FPSs require keyboards, and maybe there's really no way to design around that without making the game a different game---I'll buy that. But really it's the mouse.
A game like rock band could 'tune it in'. [it=500ms lag]
I really don't think it could.
Here's the reason: suppose I'm to go red-green-blue-yellow-orange-yellow-blue-green-red really fast (say, at the end of the TTFAF intro), and it's one big hammer-on-pull-off sequence which can't realistically be strummed (or the rules of the game have changed so I have to HOPO).
I miss the first green.
I only get to know that I missed the first green 500ms later. I have already HOPO'ed the rest of the sequence. There's no way I can go back in time 450ms and strum the blue I HOPO'ed, undoing the not-playing-correctly.
It's not just that you have to compensate for lag between inputs and outputs. You also have to make the lag inside a feedback loop very small. A minimal lag of 500ms is too much for rock band. ... Even if the audio and video is perfectly synchronous, and the game compensates for the output lag by virtually moving your inputs back in time. The game can never move the reaction to the output, which happens in your brain, back in time to before the output.
Yeah sure... replace a low-bandwidth, local application with a remote one that heavily relies on a fast network [...] Am I missing something here
You're missing ssh + screen + emacs. That used to work fine on 9600 baud terminals; it should work fine over even a measly 1 megabit intertube. In fact, I know it does; I use ssh + screen almost every day (sometimes including emacs).
c) Sup dawg! We herd u like gaming, so we put a video game on your video sharing site so you can video game while u watch videos.
2.) Liberals love the idea of government control. It's the solution to absolutely everything.
Economic theory suggests that the Free Market Is Good. It also suggests that sometimes it fails. In those cases, Government Intrusion Is Good.
One case is public construction: in areas with very high fixed costs, it's more efficient to only build one of "them" and let everyone use it, rather than have several parties each build their own. Good examples are roads, electricity, telephony, internet.
Another one is natural monopolies, most often seen with network effects, where the value of "owning it" increases with how many people also "owns it". Again, roads, telephones, internet. Also Facebook accounts, and other networks overlaid on the internet.
If government did its job well, government stepping in would actually be The Right Thing.
What (some hardcore) right-wingers don't acknowledge is the sound theory. What (some hardcore) left-wingers don't acknowledge is the unsound practice of said theory.
If you want to know, empirically, how well the theory is converted into practice, I recommend the most recent episode of EconTalk (grab it at http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/12/winston_on_mark.html), where the guest talks about exactly this.