Actually, what it means is that you can use a high-performance, industry standard query language like SQL to extract data, instead of having to kluge together a patchwork of file and stream manipulation tools.
I'm no database expert, so here's a question: would it be possible and practical to have a virtual, read-only file system based on a database so database records could be viewed as files in a special hierarchy? Then you could have the advantages of both.
But what practical advantage did the proto-giraffe who had a neck 1mm longer than his colleagues have that caused him to be the only one to pass on his genetic material?
Why assume such a tiny difference? Human height variability is much wider, and we're not facing much in the way of evolutionary pressures.
However, the general supposition for this is that one gets punctuated equilibrium. That is, species tend to stay relatively unchanged once they are reasonably well adapted to their current environments. It either takes a significant useful mutation or a change in the environment to get the species to change much; global warming or cooling, changes due to continental drift, a few members stranded on a distant island, etc.
It's even possible that the rate of mutation is itself selected for or against; that is, a species under pressure from changes in the environ might select for higher mutation rates (from DNA transcription errors, etc.) and thus mutate faster than one in a more stable setting. Then, once mutation is not statistically an advantage, species members who mutate less breed more successfully and the mutation rate slows down.
I tend toward saying that the plan is somewhere encoded in nature, but that a plan that detailed had to have been put there intelligently -- that is, God exists.
A reasonable belief for Christians, it seems to me, is that God created us a world to learn about. And creating a multi-billion year history -- even if it existed only in the mind of God -- is one way of giving us information to discover about that world. And yes, an onmipotent God could create one that would be capable of evolving humans through random chance -- when he chose the initial seed value.
PG currently only requires ASCII text. Doesn't that make dealing with foreign languages difficult? Is there a Unicode format that might be more appropriate, at least for foreign language files?
Also, it seems slightly incorrect to say you're not using a markup language, when in fact you do use a trivial one; using blank line separators to indicate chapter and other breaks. Wouldn't the creation of a trivial markup language (or now, selecting a simple subset of HTML) be worthwhile?
Plus there are the issues of making sure that the X-Box's DVD drive could read the Dreamcast's GD-Roms.
Not at all. Y'see, if this is the plan, then instead of (or as well as) GD-ROMs, Dreamcast developers would make XBox DVDs. That adds scads of room for an emulator program, no disk switching needed.
Sega has only recently decided to discontinue the Dreamcast hardware thus I don't think they would have been considering this X-Box angle previously, though it is possible.
My bet is that the discontinuation of the Dreamcast is *because* Microsoft was willing to do a Dreamcast emulator, not that these are separate decisions. Sega found that building the Dreamcast was making them dive into the red, but they were getting money from developers. They don't want to abandon the platform completely, because those developers (and their money) go away and never, ever come back. But make an emulator, give Microsoft a cut, and suddenly they've got all profits, no new losses. Meanwhile Microsoft gets more games and a pop culture icon associated with their platform (Sonic and the gang.) It makes too much sense not to be true.
Yep, the proof that emulation is definitely a possibility.
Look, people, what's not said in these weasel word press releases is as or even more important than what is said. Being publicly held companies, making false statements can get them in serious hot water. So if they don't deny something (such as emulation), it's probably because they can't.
Sega didn't deny halting Dreamcast production, they talked about their commitment to the platform. Microsoft didn't deny the emulation plans. I'd bet a C-note that Dreamcast will be emulated on X-Box, it fits the facts (Sega losing money, X-Box needing games when it first comes out, and these carefully worded denials.)
I received free lunches through high school, and even though not having to wait in line to pay was cool, the stigma attached to "doing something different" was harsh.
I paid for an entire year of my son's lunches at a Maryland public school in advance. No forgetting or losing his lunch money, no bullies taking it, it's wonderfully convenient. And as far as I know there would be no identification of free lunch vs. pre-paid lunch. It's very nice.
So at what point did the open source crowd, which has been around a lot longer than Linux
No it hasn't, at least not in widespread use.
Note that Stallman's FSF is the Free Software Foundation, not the Open Source Foundation. Open Source as the buzzword has really only been around for ~4 years, whereas Linux will soon hit its 10th birthday.
I work for a commercial, proprietary software company. Our product costs hundreds of dollars. We provide it on an unprotected CD, and have a 30(?) day money-back guarantee. You do not need to have the CD to run the program. Our sole anti-piracy measure is a network check for unique serial numbers. I have seen warez vendors with our product on their disks.
You know what? We actually still manage to sell our program and make decent money.
Obviously, computer games don't save lives (if anyone cares to disagree with me on that one, I'd love to hear your argument)
A number of simulations actually provide decent training, and better training can save lives. While Starcraft may never save a life, Flightgear might be used as the basis of a commercial simulator, and make better pilots. So it could happen.
In an email reply, it takes all your new text from where it should be (directly under the part replied to) and automatically moves it above the original message.
Both formats have problems. While I love the direct response system of the unix style, it doesn't fit so well in this age of variable size windows for reading e-mail. It doesn't word-wrap. HTML is (justifiably) panned for all the crap people have put it in, but a separation between the data and the display would be a good thing.
Heck, I used it in this post, by italicizing the comment I'm replying to. I can't do that so easily in e-mail.
Re:light stopped? Or destroyed and re-emitted...
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 1
Despite the fact that this perfect replica would be absolutely indistinguishable from you, it would only be so to anyone BUT yourself. To me, this is almost like the scientific proof of something similar to a soul.
Actually, I would think it would be quite the opposite. Most religion's concepts of a soul is something non-material/measurable/detectable, created by the "Divine Breath", and not something mankind can ever create or copy. If we can copy a person by copying its physical presence, and that copy is to all perceptions the same as the original, that would set off some serious theological alarms. Would killing the copy be murder, or just making an obscene clone fall? And how do you tell which is which? And does the copy have a soul, and if so does that mean we are just the sum of our matter or have we become Gods?
Is it truly the role of government to protect us all from any infringement of our interests, even the ones we are equipped to handle ourselves?
At the very least, government should not be in cahoots with the infringers. See DeCSS, DMCA, Macrovision, etc.... It is a government agency that ruled that 2600 can't provide DeCSS source or links to it.
I guess the assumption that Corps are only worried about the "big time" pirates are over.
The entire existence of Macrovision, from its implementation to its inclusion in all VCRs to its legal support, should prove this was never the case.
Think about it. Any pirate with half a clue knows that you can get equipment for as little as $15 that defeats Macrovision. It's only John Q. Public who doesn't know how to defeat it, so it *only* restricts "casual" copying.
Make no mistake. "Big time" pirates may be feared by the MPAA, but they use them as an excuse to stop casual copying too -- because that could possibly cost them money.
Actually, the Apple mouse is a *great* mouse for kids, who rarely need anything other than the left button. I've been considering buying one for the PC for my young'ns. Never heard Apple mention this, though.
People who dismiss OO out of hand are making the same mistake as zealots who insist that it must be used for everything by rejecting a useful tool.
I think the issue, really, is one of control. A large part of OO is the compiler taking care of details for you, such as C++ destructors. But to C "purists", this is horrible. They want complete control over all these details, over what happens and when it happens.
Now, if you're a good coder with the time to do this, you can get code that's more heavily optimized in size and/or performance than an OO-er will ever manage. But you pay a price in development time having to manage all those details, relative to a good OO coder. Personally, I'd rather not have to hassle with all those details, unlike, say, Alan Cox.
DVDs are storage media. The resolution of the data stored on them depends on the format. Current formats would look good on HDTV, but a higher bitrate format would look better. Current DVDs aren't generally using the full possible density of the medium anyway, and could store almost twice as many bits per side as is currently done, so it should be possible to fit most movies, encoded to a high-quality HDTV-compatible level, on a single side of a DVD.
Current DVD players would not be able to play such a disc, since they expect current data formats. Computers with DVD-ROMs should be able to handle them, however.
Okay, lets say that all drugs were legalized. Do you think the current distribution scheme is just going to go away?
Seen many bootleggers recently?
When Prohibition ended, the illegal alcohol trade essentially disappeared. There's no reason to believe anything different would happen for currently illegal drugs.
There are 'bigtime pirates' out there and they cost some of these companies HUGE amounts of money in lost revenue.
There isn't that much money in SE Asia to turn into revenue. If dirt cheap copies weren't available, they wouldn't sell very many legal copies. And more realistically, if there was the political will to shut down the big-time pirates, people would just go the wares route.
Copy restrictions' are meant to prevent all unauthorised copying
C'mon, you *can't* believe this. VCDs of movies are often made from camcorders in the theatres. The quality can then be bumped up once the DVD is in the U.S. market, by encoding the DVD video output (thus CSS is largely irrelevant) or by copying the whole thing. What "big-time" pirate is Macrovision ever going to stop?
My fear is that we, as Linux/Unix users, will start having a system that dictates to us how it is to be used as much as the Windows system does today.
But why do you have this fear? Has anything in Linux's history so far ever indicated that anything like this is even remotely likely to happen? I can see some distributions making it standard, even to the point of requiring you to disable it after installation by hand, but there's plenty of distros, some aimed at techies while others aren't. It just seems an irrational fear to me.
And, as always, these devices will only hurt the average consumer who has never cost "content providers" any money at all
What? Sure you have! (Hear me out...)
The big-time pirates generally don't cost these companies much, since they sell in markets the MPAAers generally ignore due to too low sales.
No, copy restrictions exist to stop that casual copying. Your copy of the "Lion King" got trashed when your kid got curious about what was behind that little door? If you had a backup copy and don't buy a new one, that's money out of Mr. Eisner's pocket. Can't have that, thus we have Macrovision. Doesn't stop your content pirate -- even small-timers could just buy a "video stabilizer" -- but it stops your average consumer.
The RIAA knows just how much extra they made selling you the same music twice, first on vinyl and then on CDs. Now there's a new format, but they don't get a cut. Horrors! Kill it quick!
Illegal copies may be the rationalization, but let's be very clear here; it's the money that *legal* copying would keep out of their pockets that they're worried about. Ditto region coding, which exists supposedly so they can sell DVDs in the US while they're in the theaters elsewhere. So why is "Casablanca" region-coded? It's because exclusive distribution contracts keep the cash flowing in.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, what it means is that you can use a high-performance, industry standard query language like SQL to extract data, instead of having to kluge together a patchwork of file and stream manipulation tools.
I'm no database expert, so here's a question: would it be possible and practical to have a virtual, read-only file system based on a database so database records could be viewed as files in a special hierarchy? Then you could have the advantages of both.
God does not play dice with the universe.
--Albert Einstein
"Albert, stop telling God what to do."
--Niels Bohr
"God not only plays dice with the universe, he
sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen."
--Stephen Hawking
But what practical advantage did the proto-giraffe who had a neck 1mm longer than his colleagues have that caused him to be the only one to pass on his genetic material?
Why assume such a tiny difference? Human height variability is much wider, and we're not facing much in the way of evolutionary pressures.
However, the general supposition for this is that one gets punctuated equilibrium. That is, species tend to stay relatively unchanged once they are reasonably well adapted to their current environments. It either takes a significant useful mutation or a change in the environment to get the species to change much; global warming or cooling, changes due to continental drift, a few members stranded on a distant island, etc.
It's even possible that the rate of mutation is itself selected for or against; that is, a species under pressure from changes in the environ might select for higher mutation rates (from DNA transcription errors, etc.) and thus mutate faster than one in a more stable setting. Then, once mutation is not statistically an advantage, species members who mutate less breed more successfully and the mutation rate slows down.
I tend toward saying that the plan is somewhere encoded in nature, but that a plan that detailed had to have been put there intelligently -- that is, God exists.
A reasonable belief for Christians, it seems to me, is that God created us a world to learn about. And creating a multi-billion year history -- even if it existed only in the mind of God -- is one way of giving us information to discover about that world. And yes, an onmipotent God could create one that would be capable of evolving humans through random chance -- when he chose the initial seed value.
PG currently only requires ASCII text. Doesn't that make dealing with foreign languages difficult? Is there a Unicode format that might be more appropriate, at least for foreign language files? Also, it seems slightly incorrect to say you're not using a markup language, when in fact you do use a trivial one; using blank line separators to indicate chapter and other breaks. Wouldn't the creation of a trivial markup language (or now, selecting a simple subset of HTML) be worthwhile?
Plus there are the issues of making sure that the X-Box's DVD drive could read the Dreamcast's GD-Roms.
Not at all. Y'see, if this is the plan, then instead of (or as well as) GD-ROMs, Dreamcast developers would make XBox DVDs. That adds scads of room for an emulator program, no disk switching needed.
Sega has only recently decided to discontinue the Dreamcast hardware thus I don't think they would have been considering this X-Box angle previously, though it is possible.
My bet is that the discontinuation of the Dreamcast is *because* Microsoft was willing to do a Dreamcast emulator, not that these are separate decisions. Sega found that building the Dreamcast was making them dive into the red, but they were getting money from developers. They don't want to abandon the platform completely, because those developers (and their money) go away and never, ever come back. But make an emulator, give Microsoft a cut, and suddenly they've got all profits, no new losses. Meanwhile Microsoft gets more games and a pop culture icon associated with their platform (Sonic and the gang.) It makes too much sense not to be true.
There's the proof.
Yep, the proof that emulation is definitely a possibility.
Look, people, what's not said in these weasel word press releases is as or even more important than what is said. Being publicly held companies, making false statements can get them in serious hot water. So if they don't deny something (such as emulation), it's probably because they can't.
Sega didn't deny halting Dreamcast production, they talked about their commitment to the platform. Microsoft didn't deny the emulation plans. I'd bet a C-note that Dreamcast will be emulated on X-Box, it fits the facts (Sega losing money, X-Box needing games when it first comes out, and these carefully worded denials.)
I received free lunches through high school, and even though not having to wait in line to pay was cool, the stigma attached to "doing something different" was harsh.
I paid for an entire year of my son's lunches at a Maryland public school in advance. No forgetting or losing his lunch money, no bullies taking it, it's wonderfully convenient. And as far as I know there would be no identification of free lunch vs. pre-paid lunch. It's very nice.
So at what point did the open source crowd, which has been around a lot longer than Linux
No it hasn't, at least not in widespread use.
Note that Stallman's FSF is the Free Software Foundation, not the Open Source Foundation. Open Source as the buzzword has really only been around for ~4 years, whereas Linux will soon hit its 10th birthday.
This is what Office 2000 does.
Nope, our program doesn't "phone home", it just checks for clones locally. You don't have to be connected to the internet to run.
Well, you're obviously not a coder then.
I work for a commercial, proprietary software company. Our product costs hundreds of dollars. We provide it on an unprotected CD, and have a 30(?) day money-back guarantee. You do not need to have the CD to run the program. Our sole anti-piracy measure is a network check for unique serial numbers. I have seen warez vendors with our product on their disks.
You know what? We actually still manage to sell our program and make decent money.
Obviously, computer games don't save lives (if anyone cares to disagree with me on that one, I'd love to hear your argument)
A number of simulations actually provide decent training, and better training can save lives. While Starcraft may never save a life, Flightgear might be used as the basis of a commercial simulator, and make better pilots. So it could happen.
In an email reply, it takes all your new text from where it should be (directly under the part replied to) and automatically moves it above the original message.
Both formats have problems. While I love the direct response system of the unix style, it doesn't fit so well in this age of variable size windows for reading e-mail. It doesn't word-wrap. HTML is (justifiably) panned for all the crap people have put it in, but a separation between the data and the display would be a good thing.
Heck, I used it in this post, by italicizing the comment I'm replying to. I can't do that so easily in e-mail.
Despite the fact that this perfect replica would be absolutely indistinguishable from you, it would only be so to anyone BUT yourself. To me, this is almost like the scientific proof of something similar to a soul.
Actually, I would think it would be quite the opposite. Most religion's concepts of a soul is something non-material/measurable/detectable, created by the "Divine Breath", and not something mankind can ever create or copy. If we can copy a person by copying its physical presence, and that copy is to all perceptions the same as the original, that would set off some serious theological alarms. Would killing the copy be murder, or just making an obscene clone fall? And how do you tell which is which? And does the copy have a soul, and if so does that mean we are just the sum of our matter or have we become Gods?
...part of a 150 page brief...
Only a lawyer could call 150 pages "brief."
Is it truly the role of government to protect us all from any infringement of our interests, even the ones we are equipped to handle ourselves?
At the very least, government should not be in cahoots with the infringers. See DeCSS, DMCA, Macrovision, etc.... It is a government agency that ruled that 2600 can't provide DeCSS source or links to it.
I guess the assumption that Corps are only worried about the "big time" pirates are over.
The entire existence of Macrovision, from its implementation to its inclusion in all VCRs to its legal support, should prove this was never the case.
Think about it. Any pirate with half a clue knows that you can get equipment for as little as $15 that defeats Macrovision. It's only John Q. Public who doesn't know how to defeat it, so it *only* restricts "casual" copying.
Make no mistake. "Big time" pirates may be feared by the MPAA, but they use them as an excuse to stop casual copying too -- because that could possibly cost them money.
Nova even has a companion web site
here
for their show "The Diamond Deception."
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/diamond/
for those who worry about the goat...)
C'mon, a 1 button mouse is not very useful.
Actually, the Apple mouse is a *great* mouse for kids, who rarely need anything other than the left button. I've been considering buying one for the PC for my young'ns. Never heard Apple mention this, though.
People who dismiss OO out of hand are making the same mistake as zealots who insist that it must be used for everything by rejecting a useful tool.
I think the issue, really, is one of control. A large part of OO is the compiler taking care of details for you, such as C++ destructors. But to C "purists", this is horrible. They want complete control over all these details, over what happens and when it happens.
Now, if you're a good coder with the time to do this, you can get code that's more heavily optimized in size and/or performance than an OO-er will ever manage. But you pay a price in development time having to manage all those details, relative to a good OO coder. Personally, I'd rather not have to hassle with all those details, unlike, say, Alan Cox.
DVDs really aren't capable of HD resolutions
DVDs are storage media. The resolution of the data stored on them depends on the format. Current formats would look good on HDTV, but a higher bitrate format would look better. Current DVDs aren't generally using the full possible density of the medium anyway, and could store almost twice as many bits per side as is currently done, so it should be possible to fit most movies, encoded to a high-quality HDTV-compatible level, on a single side of a DVD.
Current DVD players would not be able to play such a disc, since they expect current data formats. Computers with DVD-ROMs should be able to handle them, however.
Okay, lets say that all drugs were legalized. Do you think the current distribution scheme is just going to go away?
Seen many bootleggers recently?
When Prohibition ended, the illegal alcohol trade essentially disappeared. There's no reason to believe anything different would happen for currently illegal drugs.
On the other hand, I'm probably just a fucking idiot spouting off because he's too afraid of a future filled with drooling morons.
I'm afraid the the future *is* filled with drooling morons. Fortunately, there's enough other folks to make things still worthwhile...
There are 'bigtime pirates' out there and they cost some of these companies HUGE amounts of money in lost revenue.
There isn't that much money in SE Asia to turn into revenue. If dirt cheap copies weren't available, they wouldn't sell very many legal copies. And more realistically, if there was the political will to shut down the big-time pirates, people would just go the wares route.
Copy restrictions' are meant to prevent all unauthorised copying
C'mon, you *can't* believe this. VCDs of movies are often made from camcorders in the theatres. The quality can then be bumped up once the DVD is in the U.S. market, by encoding the DVD video output (thus CSS is largely irrelevant) or by copying the whole thing. What "big-time" pirate is Macrovision ever going to stop?
My fear is that we, as Linux/Unix users, will start having a system that dictates to us how it is to be used as much as the Windows system does today.
But why do you have this fear? Has anything in Linux's history so far ever indicated that anything like this is even remotely likely to happen? I can see some distributions making it standard, even to the point of requiring you to disable it after installation by hand, but there's plenty of distros, some aimed at techies while others aren't. It just seems an irrational fear to me.
And, as always, these devices will only hurt the average consumer who has never cost "content providers" any money at all
What? Sure you have! (Hear me out...)
The big-time pirates generally don't cost these companies much, since they sell in markets the MPAAers generally ignore due to too low sales.
No, copy restrictions exist to stop that casual copying. Your copy of the "Lion King" got trashed when your kid got curious about what was behind that little door? If you had a backup copy and don't buy a new one, that's money out of Mr. Eisner's pocket. Can't have that, thus we have Macrovision. Doesn't stop your content pirate -- even small-timers could just buy a "video stabilizer" -- but it stops your average consumer.
The RIAA knows just how much extra they made selling you the same music twice, first on vinyl and then on CDs. Now there's a new format, but they don't get a cut. Horrors! Kill it quick!
Illegal copies may be the rationalization, but let's be very clear here; it's the money that *legal* copying would keep out of their pockets that they're worried about. Ditto region coding, which exists supposedly so they can sell DVDs in the US while they're in the theaters elsewhere. So why is "Casablanca" region-coded? It's because exclusive distribution contracts keep the cash flowing in.