There's still a hell of a lot to be said for a simple, minimal mp3 player
Too bad Winamp no longer is. Plus, unless I'm mistaken, there's no Linux version (but that's OK, XMMS is a better Winamp than Winamp).
And I kind of like the extra bells and whistled in Aramok. I especially like how it finds lyrics for the song that's playing, even if the lyrics are often ((gracenote_takedown)). I'm especially impressed when I sample a cassette or LP, convert the sample to.ogg, and it STILL can find the lyrics. Impressed? Hell, I'm in awe.
Don't worry, once HIV goes the was of Smallpox and Polio, there will be an even more deadly infectious disease to fill the void.
Yes, but it will be the 1970s again before that happenes. Pennicillin was discovered in 1928, after that there were no fatal STDs. Birth control was never 100%, when abortion was legalized in 1973, and women no longer needed to fear pregnancy and nobody needed to fear dying from an STD, "free sex" happened.
It was a wonderful time to be a young man. A strange woman in a bar would just as casually come up and ask "wanna fuck?" as she would walk up and say "wanna get high?"
AIDS ended that golden age, which only lasted about ten years. But if there's another half century before another fatal STD comes along like it did between pennicillin and AIDS, the new golden age will last a hell of a lot longer.
People keep forgetting that mother nature isn't just sitting on her ass
I'm not sure which version I'm running (the drive in that PC died, I need to replace and reinstall), but the one that comes with kubuntu 11 is FAR better than the one that came with kubuntu 9. Until now I preferred XMMS, but IMO Amarok has it beat.
Anti-Sony stories are one of Slashdot's most common page-view drawing tactics
Well, after XCP, OtherOS, and sensitive customer data left unencrypted on public servers, what do you expect? Lots of Sony's victims at slashdot.
Nintendo gets a lot of love even though it has a history of being even more evil than Sony.
Submit something, then. I haven't heard about Nintendo screwing their customers, but then I haven't been one. More evil than Sony? To who, their competetitors or their customers? You're going to have to link something.
should mention that EULAs are no different from free software licenses--they are contracts you agree to the terms of in using the software.
If you're "modbombed into oblivion" (and I don't think you will be), this is the sentence that will do it. Such ignorance...
Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Niven, the rest of the old greats; Doctorow, Adams, Pratchett, all of the new guys. Hell, LOTR alone would probably get you through most of the trip. Or you could do like Scotty does and bring a bunch of engineering manuals, or Physical Review or something similar.
The fraud who stole millions uses a gun that fires cops, not bullets. Who caused the most harm? The hundred dollar guy just made a few folks shit in their pants. I've had guns pointed at me, and no it's not fun, but I'd rather you steal $100 from me at gunpoint than take my entire pension by fraud.
With Windows 7 you very rarely need to reboot when updating things now.
Yes, Win 7 is better about this than previous versions, but I've still had to reboot three times since I bought the notebook last month, oce for a virus definition update.
It's called Hibernation.
Yes, I have the notebook set to hibernate when I close the lid, but Linux has Hibernate, too. Hibernate doesn't help when MS or Adobe or Norton demand a reboot. I shut my Linux computer off every night; it has a hibernate mode, but doesn't really need it.
Sorry but if KDE was simpler than Windows then many more people would use it.
You have to know about something to use it. Most people are amazed when I teol them there's a free replacement for Windows (usually when their hard drive dies or their PC is completely trashed by viruses and they've lost the install disk). Most People don't even know what an operating system is; they think Windows is the computer.
It isn't pedantery, it's calling a presumed RIAA shill (or someone they've brainwashed) out for incindiary and false terminology.
Honestly, you people who can't get past shouting "NOT THEFT" every time anyone so much as thinks the word copyright
You only hear "NO THEFT" whan a shill or an idiot calls copyright infringement "theft". Incindiary, false language demands to be called on. When someone talks about M$ or "open sores", they're trolling and it's flamebait and needs to be called out. This is no different.
you'll find that my original point still stands; they're trying to plug the leak in the wrong place, with the wrong guy, and they've punished Sanchez disproportionately because of that misplaced effort.
I have no argument with tha point, my argument is with inflammatory, false (LYING) language. Doublespeak is not welcome. There are few here with two digit IQs, save your inflamatory language for the normtards at Yahoo news.
No, the current sample set is either four or five (earth, venus, and mars, plus these two exoplanets) or hundreds. Four or five for planets about the size of earth, depending on if you count Mars, or hundreds if you count all the known exoplanets.
I actually did that once with two chatbots. There was one I'd written back in 1983 (Artificial Insanity, or just Art), and one I found online called "Alice". I posted the resultant hilarity on my web site at the time, it's probably still at archive.org. The two bots appeared to fall in love with each other at the end of the conversation. No shit, I didn't make it up, what I posted was what came out of the bots.
My bot was a failure for what I wrote it for, which was to illustrate that AI is not sentient, but everybody I gave a copy to believed it was almost human and I couldn't convince them that it wasn't really sentient. I guess I did too good a job programming that sucker.
She was also Nurse Chapel in STOS, and the computer voice in all the Star Treks except the latest movie (and maybe Enterprise, I never watched that one. Never could get past that offal theme song).
As the Nurse, she was pretty calm and logical... most of the time. As the computer, she was entirely emotionless (as a computer SHOULD BE).
Anyway, the worrysome headstart is in the patents arena, even if talking to a computer is in science fiction and popular culture since beginning of last century, it will be a minefield for anyone trying to go near that direction.
Maybe not, Word Perfect had voice recognition in the nineties, and patents only last 20 years.
Twenty five years ago, finding an exoplanet was considered to be some forward looking science that might not ever happen, and the belief then was that planets were likely quite rare.
And twenty five years ago I could never understand why they thought planets would be rare, since there were nine of them in our own solar system. If Earth was the only planet around our star, thinking that planets would be rare would have been logical, we have so many planets (and smaller rocks) that the logic isn't there.
Perhaps it's the "I refuse to believe it until I see it" factor.
Have you learnt nothing from all your years of watching Star Trek? The women are all blue or green, have 3 breasts, and want to KILL you!
You know, I was ok with the transporter, and with warp drives going faster than light, but the idea that any outworld species would look anything like us whatever is ludicrous. And most movie and TV sci-fi does it.
Oh, and you're confusing Star Trek with Total Recall or HHTGT; I don't remember ever seeing the triple breasted whore of erotica in Star Trek, but she was a Martian in Total Recall, but a Martian decended from humans who had three tits because she was a mutant. Far more believable than a Human-Betazoid hybrid (the subject is covered in the two linked stories).
No, you're not supposed to feel sorry for the armed robber, you're supposed to be outraged that stealing a hundred dollars is worse than stealing millions of dollars. Fifteen years for armed robbery? I'd say that's about right. Forty months for stealing millions and impoverishing many people? Way too short.
Most people want to communicate with machines using human-like queries and do want to not address it as if they're an Enterprise crew member addressing the Star Trek computer.
You're making the assumption that Google's VR won't understand sentences that Siri does. I think that's a pretty unrealistic assumption.
the insider remarks that have been posted on various Android sites have so far stated that Google is not implementing Siri's "funny" remarks, for example.
If I ask you a serious question and get a smart assed answer, I'm not going to be amused, I'm going to be annoyed. Moreso if you're a machine.
You sound like an RIAA lawyer. COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT IS NOT THEFT! The supreme court decided that one a couple of decades ago. Both copyright infringement and theft are crimes, but they are completely different crimes. Copyright infringement is no more theft than rape is murder.
Theft is when you shoplift a CD from Walmart, copyright infringement is when you rip and upload it. Most thefts are misdemeanors with small fines, copyright infringement can leave the infringer destitute.
Go to Cory Doctorow's website, he's begging you to "steal" his books, all are there for download. He gets it, you and Hollywood don't. I've read hundreds of books by Isaac Asimov, I've only paid for a dozen or so. But were it not for "stealing the content" by checking it out from the library, I'd never have bought a single Asimov title.
This guy bought stolen goods
Only if the counterfeiter stole the blank CDs. The Korean sold a physical item to the guy, which contained material that infringed copyright. It wasn't stolen property.
When you have to resort to intentional misstatements like "copyright is theft" to buttress your position, your argument is damned weak and you might want to reexamine your thinking process..
There is also a huge difference between a few DVDs available in person at a few select locations and an uploaded file available to anyone with an internet connection. The latter has a much wider audience, is easier to find and has much more impact on the revenue for the film.
Yes, if the movie's a stinker and they see it's a stinker, they won't shell out the money at the theater and the crappy movie loses money. However, if it's a good movie people will want to see it in its full glory and it will do better than if it hadn't been released early.
Putting your material on the internet only hurts sales if it stinks. As Cory Doctorow points out, nobody ever went broke because of piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity.
On the other hand, If the movie is on DVD and you buy a counterfeit, you did indeed cost the studio a sale (not in this case, you would have to be able to buy a legit copy for a counterfeit to hurt sales).
But the point of the story was that all software has bugs
Are you sure of that?
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
Rather, the more lines of code written the greater likelyhood there will be bugs. I've written bug-free code, but the bug-free ones were short and trivial compared to some of the megabyte monsters we see today. For instance, you could write a six byte (iirc it was 6 bytes) program in assembly/machine code (since it was so short that an assembler was superflous) that would reboot a DOS computer. Hard to have a bug in six bytes of code.
Apple intentionally implemented "attitude" in the character of Siri to make it more endearing and friendly
I don't WANT my phone or computer to be endearing or friendly, I want the damned thing to be OBEDIENT. Siri would probably annoy me.
Apple wants to make their tools seem like expensive toys, Google just makes tools. Personally, I like the "tools as tools" rather than "tools as friends". I mean, what kind of loser has so few friends that his computer needs to be endearing and friendly?
That's one reason (of many) I prefer Linux to Windows; Windows' slick shininess kind of turns my stomach. I need a tool, not a friend. Tools make lousy friends, and friends make lousy tools.
Slashdot Mirror
There's still a hell of a lot to be said for a simple, minimal mp3 player
Too bad Winamp no longer is. Plus, unless I'm mistaken, there's no Linux version (but that's OK, XMMS is a better Winamp than Winamp).
And I kind of like the extra bells and whistled in Aramok. I especially like how it finds lyrics for the song that's playing, even if the lyrics are often ((gracenote_takedown)). I'm especially impressed when I sample a cassette or LP, convert the sample to .ogg, and it STILL can find the lyrics. Impressed? Hell, I'm in awe.
Hmm, it's been a few years since I saw 5. I'll have to watch it again.
I just did a quick google, prices on that drive are all over the map, $94 to almost $200.
Don't worry, once HIV goes the was of Smallpox and Polio, there will be an even more deadly infectious disease to fill the void.
Yes, but it will be the 1970s again before that happenes. Pennicillin was discovered in 1928, after that there were no fatal STDs. Birth control was never 100%, when abortion was legalized in 1973, and women no longer needed to fear pregnancy and nobody needed to fear dying from an STD, "free sex" happened.
It was a wonderful time to be a young man. A strange woman in a bar would just as casually come up and ask "wanna fuck?" as she would walk up and say "wanna get high?"
AIDS ended that golden age, which only lasted about ten years. But if there's another half century before another fatal STD comes along like it did between pennicillin and AIDS, the new golden age will last a hell of a lot longer.
People keep forgetting that mother nature isn't just sitting on her ass
You're a Wiccan?
I'm not sure which version I'm running (the drive in that PC died, I need to replace and reinstall), but the one that comes with kubuntu 11 is FAR better than the one that came with kubuntu 9. Until now I preferred XMMS, but IMO Amarok has it beat.
Anti-Sony stories are one of Slashdot's most common page-view drawing tactics
Well, after XCP, OtherOS, and sensitive customer data left unencrypted on public servers, what do you expect? Lots of Sony's victims at slashdot.
Nintendo gets a lot of love even though it has a history of being even more evil than Sony.
Submit something, then. I haven't heard about Nintendo screwing their customers, but then I haven't been one. More evil than Sony? To who, their competetitors or their customers? You're going to have to link something.
should mention that EULAs are no different from free software licenses--they are contracts you agree to the terms of in using the software.
If you're "modbombed into oblivion" (and I don't think you will be), this is the sentence that will do it. Such ignorance...
New Yorker? Printed??? Talk about at parties?????
Are you lost, little one? This is SLASHDOT!!
Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Niven, the rest of the old greats; Doctorow, Adams, Pratchett, all of the new guys. Hell, LOTR alone would probably get you through most of the trip. Or you could do like Scotty does and bring a bunch of engineering manuals, or Physical Review or something similar.
New Yorker? WTF?
Back when that program was written computers had no lowercase.
The fraud who stole millions uses a gun that fires cops, not bullets. Who caused the most harm? The hundred dollar guy just made a few folks shit in their pants. I've had guns pointed at me, and no it's not fun, but I'd rather you steal $100 from me at gunpoint than take my entire pension by fraud.
With Windows 7 you very rarely need to reboot when updating things now.
Yes, Win 7 is better about this than previous versions, but I've still had to reboot three times since I bought the notebook last month, oce for a virus definition update.
It's called Hibernation.
Yes, I have the notebook set to hibernate when I close the lid, but Linux has Hibernate, too. Hibernate doesn't help when MS or Adobe or Norton demand a reboot. I shut my Linux computer off every night; it has a hibernate mode, but doesn't really need it.
Sorry but if KDE was simpler than Windows then many more people would use it.
You have to know about something to use it. Most people are amazed when I teol them there's a free replacement for Windows (usually when their hard drive dies or their PC is completely trashed by viruses and they've lost the install disk). Most People don't even know what an operating system is; they think Windows is the computer.
Popular != better.
It isn't pedantery, it's calling a presumed RIAA shill (or someone they've brainwashed) out for incindiary and false terminology.
Honestly, you people who can't get past shouting "NOT THEFT" every time anyone so much as thinks the word copyright
You only hear "NO THEFT" whan a shill or an idiot calls copyright infringement "theft". Incindiary, false language demands to be called on. When someone talks about M$ or "open sores", they're trolling and it's flamebait and needs to be called out. This is no different.
you'll find that my original point still stands; they're trying to plug the leak in the wrong place, with the wrong guy, and they've punished Sanchez disproportionately because of that misplaced effort.
I have no argument with tha point, my argument is with inflammatory, false (LYING) language. Doublespeak is not welcome. There are few here with two digit IQs, save your inflamatory language for the normtards at Yahoo news.
No, the current sample set is either four or five (earth, venus, and mars, plus these two exoplanets) or hundreds. Four or five for planets about the size of earth, depending on if you count Mars, or hundreds if you count all the known exoplanets.
I actually did that once with two chatbots. There was one I'd written back in 1983 (Artificial Insanity, or just Art), and one I found online called "Alice". I posted the resultant hilarity on my web site at the time, it's probably still at archive.org. The two bots appeared to fall in love with each other at the end of the conversation. No shit, I didn't make it up, what I posted was what came out of the bots.
My bot was a failure for what I wrote it for, which was to illustrate that AI is not sentient, but everybody I gave a copy to believed it was almost human and I couldn't convince them that it wasn't really sentient. I guess I did too good a job programming that sucker.
Emotionless? Counselor's mother?
She was also Nurse Chapel in STOS, and the computer voice in all the Star Treks except the latest movie (and maybe Enterprise, I never watched that one. Never could get past that offal theme song).
As the Nurse, she was pretty calm and logical... most of the time. As the computer, she was entirely emotionless (as a computer SHOULD BE).
Anyway, the worrysome headstart is in the patents arena, even if talking to a computer is in science fiction and popular culture since beginning of last century, it will be a minefield for anyone trying to go near that direction.
Maybe not, Word Perfect had voice recognition in the nineties, and patents only last 20 years.
I'm sorry, Dave, but I'm afraid the movie studio won't let you do that.
Twenty five years ago, finding an exoplanet was considered to be some forward looking science that might not ever happen, and the belief then was that planets were likely quite rare.
And twenty five years ago I could never understand why they thought planets would be rare, since there were nine of them in our own solar system. If Earth was the only planet around our star, thinking that planets would be rare would have been logical, we have so many planets (and smaller rocks) that the logic isn't there.
Perhaps it's the "I refuse to believe it until I see it" factor.
Have you learnt nothing from all your years of watching Star Trek? The women are all blue or green, have 3 breasts, and want to KILL you!
You know, I was ok with the transporter, and with warp drives going faster than light, but the idea that any outworld species would look anything like us whatever is ludicrous. And most movie and TV sci-fi does it.
I fight bad sci-fi with more bad sci-fi.
Oh, and you're confusing Star Trek with Total Recall or HHTGT; I don't remember ever seeing the triple breasted whore of erotica in Star Trek, but she was a Martian in Total Recall, but a Martian decended from humans who had three tits because she was a mutant. Far more believable than a Human-Betazoid hybrid (the subject is covered in the two linked stories).
No, you're not supposed to feel sorry for the armed robber, you're supposed to be outraged that stealing a hundred dollars is worse than stealing millions of dollars. Fifteen years for armed robbery? I'd say that's about right. Forty months for stealing millions and impoverishing many people? Way too short.
Most people want to communicate with machines using human-like queries and do want to not address it as if they're an Enterprise crew member addressing the Star Trek computer.
You're making the assumption that Google's VR won't understand sentences that Siri does. I think that's a pretty unrealistic assumption.
the insider remarks that have been posted on various Android sites have so far stated that Google is not implementing Siri's "funny" remarks, for example.
If I ask you a serious question and get a smart assed answer, I'm not going to be amused, I'm going to be annoyed. Moreso if you're a machine.
Owning a mutual fund is now equivalent to ordering a murder?
It certainly can be.
You sound like an RIAA lawyer. COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT IS NOT THEFT! The supreme court decided that one a couple of decades ago. Both copyright infringement and theft are crimes, but they are completely different crimes. Copyright infringement is no more theft than rape is murder.
Theft is when you shoplift a CD from Walmart, copyright infringement is when you rip and upload it. Most thefts are misdemeanors with small fines, copyright infringement can leave the infringer destitute.
Go to Cory Doctorow's website, he's begging you to "steal" his books, all are there for download. He gets it, you and Hollywood don't. I've read hundreds of books by Isaac Asimov, I've only paid for a dozen or so. But were it not for "stealing the content" by checking it out from the library, I'd never have bought a single Asimov title.
This guy bought stolen goods
Only if the counterfeiter stole the blank CDs. The Korean sold a physical item to the guy, which contained material that infringed copyright. It wasn't stolen property.
When you have to resort to intentional misstatements like "copyright is theft" to buttress your position, your argument is damned weak and you might want to reexamine your thinking process..
All of this is anecdotal
"Jim! This patient is dying!"
"Well do something!"
"He's running a fever, I'll give him the anecdote!"
"Well?"
"He's dead, Jim."
"What was the crewman's name?"
"Leutenant Seagate."
There is also a huge difference between a few DVDs available in person at a few select locations and an uploaded file available to anyone with an internet connection. The latter has a much wider audience, is easier to find and has much more impact on the revenue for the film.
Yes, if the movie's a stinker and they see it's a stinker, they won't shell out the money at the theater and the crappy movie loses money. However, if it's a good movie people will want to see it in its full glory and it will do better than if it hadn't been released early.
Putting your material on the internet only hurts sales if it stinks. As Cory Doctorow points out, nobody ever went broke because of piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity.
On the other hand, If the movie is on DVD and you buy a counterfeit, you did indeed cost the studio a sale (not in this case, you would have to be able to buy a legit copy for a counterfeit to hurt sales).
But the point of the story was that all software has bugs
Are you sure of that?
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
Rather, the more lines of code written the greater likelyhood there will be bugs. I've written bug-free code, but the bug-free ones were short and trivial compared to some of the megabyte monsters we see today. For instance, you could write a six byte (iirc it was 6 bytes) program in assembly/machine code (since it was so short that an assembler was superflous) that would reboot a DOS computer. Hard to have a bug in six bytes of code.
Apple intentionally implemented "attitude" in the character of Siri to make it more endearing and friendly
I don't WANT my phone or computer to be endearing or friendly, I want the damned thing to be OBEDIENT. Siri would probably annoy me.
Apple wants to make their tools seem like expensive toys, Google just makes tools. Personally, I like the "tools as tools" rather than "tools as friends". I mean, what kind of loser has so few friends that his computer needs to be endearing and friendly?
That's one reason (of many) I prefer Linux to Windows; Windows' slick shininess kind of turns my stomach. I need a tool, not a friend. Tools make lousy friends, and friends make lousy tools.