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Recent Posts

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3701
Living Room / Re: Must read articles on publishing standards and the future of public libraries
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 08, 2012, 12:32 PM »
That library article is a little strange in one sense - the elephant in the room is Copyright. Publishers grudgingly put up with libraries precisely because of the clunky nature of having to travel there, and either stay in the reading room, or borrow and return books. Middle class people and up bought their own copies of stuff.

However, without fancy DRM there is no such thing as "borrowing" a digital file. So I can certainly see how the internet would tangle up a library. Except for aesthetics, why ever buy a book again?

Remember when for about a decade libraries tried to get all modern and have music and movie collections? Wham! Watch how *that* will slam into the future-that-is-now! "Borrow a song"?

I'm far from having a complete answer, but my best suggestion has to do with what we now call "Pirates" is *free labor*. Posting the digital copy to torrents or download sites - trade that labor into digital files somehow. My glimmer of a clue I'll offer is that Eric Flint of Baen wrote somewhere, something like "it's too much work to digitize and/or clean up old paper books so it's not worth our money so we won't do it."
3702
Living Room / Re: Proposals for the UN ITU to govern/control the Internet being considered by US
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 08, 2012, 10:05 AM »
Taxing communications is pure, unmitigated, evil.
Taxing it? Way, way, way off the charts.  :mad:

Like seriously? WTF are these criminals thinking?
-Renegade (June 08, 2012, 09:43 AM)

We have a fun little game going Renegade. You have all these great adjectives. Then they do even worse things. So what's worse than pure, unmitigated evil?
3703
Living Room / Re: Proposals for the UN ITU to govern/control the Internet being considered by US
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 08, 2012, 09:59 AM »

Here's a funny angle: Will they go after spammers for tax evasion?
3704
Living Room / Re: Proposals for the UN ITU to govern/control the Internet being considered by US
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 08, 2012, 08:34 AM »
Then you get this idea:

U.N. could tax U.S.-based Web sites, leaked docs show

Global Internet tax suggested by European network operators, who want Apple, Google, and other Web companies to pay to deliver content, is proposed for debate at a U.N. agency in December.

http://news.cnet.com...es-leaked-docs-show/

Am I the only one seeing the bear trap setup? "Put it all in the cloud!" "Let's tax data!"

3705
General Software Discussion / Re: Math-O-Mir: Equation Editing bug
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 08, 2012, 08:01 AM »
Hi TaoPhoenix, can you provide more details (can you repeat the steps that crashed the Math-o-mir). I would like to debug this.
Danijel Gorupec
-Danijel (June 08, 2012, 12:43 AM)

Oho! So you are the author! Welcome!

Unfortunately, it is about as simple as clicking on the white area makes a little box thingie, and then a couple more clicks dragging that box thingie then produces and error that says "sorry, this program must close."

3706
General Software Discussion / Re: Math-O-Mir: Equation Editing (and a new approach to GUI input)
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 07, 2012, 09:44 PM »
Unfortunately, it crashes pretty fast on my Win XP machine. (About 7 clicks and mouse drags).
3707
Living Room / Re: Secure deletion: a single overwrite will do it
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 07, 2012, 09:40 PM »
Slightly OT but this is something that's been perplexing me for a while.

I have a friend who had a bad HDD crash a couple of years back and handed it to some professional data recovery guys. He swears that the amount of data recovered was much more than the actual capacity of the hard disk.
-nosh (January 18, 2009, 11:59 PM)

This just oscillates between hilarious and scary the more you think about it! Can't he do a data dump and look at the "retrieved" data? Did the recovery guys give him someone else's data!?
3708
General Software Discussion / Re: Wall off section of screen
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 07, 2012, 07:36 AM »
What about setting some bizarre screen settings? (Horozontal half or vertical half?) So just for example, find a program that faciliates this, then something like 480 X 1080 resolution or something?

That doesn't feel like the whole answer, but maybe it's a piece of the answer.
3709
Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 07, 2012, 04:29 AM »
Random entry:
Christopher Anvil collection RX For Chaos.
Interesting note: It came out in 2008, and I just got around to looking at Wikipedia and noticed that the author passed on only a year after that. So Baen books must have decided to ask him for republishing rights while he was still alive both to make him feel good / send him a little money for his funeral costs, and maybe to avoid estate wrangling.

At a glacial pace, I am doing a project relating certain fiction which was ahead of its time with subsequent news stories that cast the original story in new context of relevance. Turns out that a full third of what were once SciFi stories he wrote are *just now* hitting the news. Typical example: A hilarious pseudo-documentary from *1978* called "A Handheld Primer" is just now describing the iPhone-Android wars.
3710
Living Room / Re: It's a Google world
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 07, 2012, 04:21 AM »

Good enough that I don't use Google anyway. I've used Startpage or the related Ixquick (one day when startpage was misbehaving on me). Not many ads there.
3711
Living Room / Re: It's a Google world
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 07, 2012, 04:11 AM »

Yikes. They must also have some kind of location thing using your IP address by region because when I type "pizza" I get *eight* listings for local restaurants in my town! I'm not even logged in to any Google services!   :o

I don't yet know what I have to fiddle with to turn that off. 
3712
Living Room / Re: Lost my father
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 07, 2012, 03:56 AM »
Mine as well.

It's nice to see the regulars taking time out to wish you well too.  : )
3713
Living Room / Re: Reader's Corner - The Library of Utopia
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 05, 2012, 09:44 PM »
Interesting article.

After a warmup around some issues like libaries, it gets to the meat of it all: Copyright.

"It's the same question that confronted Google Book Search and that bedevils every other effort to create an expansive online library: how do you navigate the country's onerous copyright restrictions? "The legal problems are staggering," Darnton says. "
3714
Living Room / Re: A judge with programming experience, maybe there is hope?
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 04, 2012, 09:34 AM »
Yeah, from what I read briefly, we got the correct result *this time*.

If it had gone the other way from what I gathered (correct me if I'm wrong) it would have had nasty effects.
3715
General Software Discussion / Re: Are we heading towards a tech armageddon?
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on May 30, 2012, 11:41 PM »
So that's some of my basic ideas about innovation. (And look, I "innovated" by splitting my posts so that if someone quotes me, it's not One Long Incredibly Unbroken Post Moving From Topic To Topic.")

Now let's make some guesses about innovation. Hoping my wording doesn't sound facile, Microsoft is Microsoft, Apple is Apple, Google is Google, Facebook is Facebook, and they'll sit there on the corporate landscape being themselves. Then once you get off that little narrow perch, you get a mind numbing explosion of "companies that are not themselves". Sun is not really Sun anymore, it's Oracle's excuse for a lawsuit. Borders Books is not Borders Books anymore, having become Nothing. RIM which used to be spoken of in hushed tones for its Blackberry line, joins the multitudes of companies that are "not really themselves anymore", but they still technically exist for now.

I think the current impression of "mobile tablets" is a brilliant marketing cover-up for the fact that Tablets are *currently* underpowered all-in-one computers. If I imagine my current computer screen instead as a 24 inch tablet, sitting on a dock base, with a keyboard and mouse, I can do "real work". Then I can put it on the car seat and lay it on a restaurant table and switch to the touch interface. All that it takes is a few years replacing fragile spin-disk hard drive storage with solid state storage, better power usage, and a few other things, and there's your Computer of the Future. Then you just have 3+1 form factors, based on screen size: Phone, "Lap-Tablet", and "Work Tablet". (The fourth +1 factor is Monitor Glasses, where the computer is your phone in your pocket.)

But then let's go back to one of Paul Keith's original phrases: "then nothing". I'm kinda nervous about never getting past the Microsoft-Apple-Google-Facebook quad. (Facebook astounds me, it feels like a Less-Is-More version of AOL. "Look, it's full of Faces and everyone likes Faces! They're so cute and smiley!")

So between that "final form factor trilogy" on the tech side, and that corporate quad and your choice of four more, what if we hit a "temporary gap" in innovation? (Say we're 20 years out from the Driverless Cars.) So without any real innovation, what do we do with ourselves?

I think the unfortunate answer is definitely becoming one giant fishbowl, but with mechanized systems to do the dystopian functions. And yes, it is 1984, as well as Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451, and several more "Warning" books that are being taken as guidebooks! THAT is the current cultural feature that is maddening me the most! Instead of warnings, all those old stories are in the hands of power mongers and they're all going "neat, let's do that!"  :mad:


3716
General Software Discussion / Re: Are we heading towards a tech armageddon?
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on May 30, 2012, 11:20 PM »
Hmm.

Getting back to the non-lightsaber topics, I'll float some ideas on these themes. Yes, there is an Armageddon coming, "but not with a bang, but a whimper". Drawing on the pun, the whimpering will be us. Some of this won't quite hold logical consistency with itself, but here goes.

I'm on the side that innovation is a technical thing. It's a function of *doing something*. In one sense, it's impossible *not* to innovate because at the ultra smallest sense, every action of any kind that isn't performed to a tight process spec, is innovation. If you are in accounting and you are entering an invoice, and your spec is to enter five pieces of info into the computer system, there isn't much room for innovation, because there is only "one correct answer". But nearly everything else is "small innovation". Borrowing a writer's trick for breaking writer's block, let me tell you about a nice square piece of paper. What is "more boring" than paper? So I'll fold it in half. (Mock drama). "Look at me! I folded a piece of paper in half!!!" Well okay, I'm being funny. But *six* folds later, I have a 3d visual representation of an *upright piano*! Isn't that innovative? Now what if we were in a world when the grand piano style was invented first, and "all pianos must be the grand design because it simply doesn't work any other way" would be the "conventional wisdom". Then some salesman walks into a boardroom pitching his new piano design, and makes seven folds in a piece of paper and shows them a vertical design that costs 80% less to make. *Now* is it innovation?

But part of the problem with innovation is that it's the tree falling in a forest problem. If I innovate, and never show anyone, is it still innovation? So then there's some of those old philosophy chestnuts going on here. Your typical mad scientist, and all that. That's why it's always frustrating when techies tend to get outplayed by ex-jocks in suits who get the good-ol-boy-network thing. What use is my innovation if they have a vested stake in something else?

Then we have innovation vs utility. Right this minute I can probably dream up something innovative ... let's see... a data glove input alphabet system that goes to the monitor eyeglasses you wear for the perfect "meatspace" privacy in computing. Plenty innovative, but if an idea is too far ahead of its time, especially if it has some usability design mistakes, then it's still innovation and someone will go "gee, that's innovative, I'm going back to what I know now."

More in the next post.



3717
Living Room / Re: When you make your 100'th Post
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on May 30, 2012, 08:53 AM »
^ mouser and josh :-)
 (see attachment in previous post)
from Preparing for the inevitable
-tomos (May 30, 2012, 04:40 AM)

Great you caught him red-handed, tomos :Thmbsup:

Congrats to mouser for half a life invested into DC :-*
-Ath (May 30, 2012, 05:20 AM)

Breakout those old camp songs!
And now I can relax because 30,000 is not here yet!
3718
Living Room / Re: Preparing for the inevitable
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on May 30, 2012, 08:51 AM »


I saw what you did there.
-mouser (May 30, 2012, 04:18 AM)

I knew you would :) And that was your 29000th post!
....
[/quote]

Heh thanks Josh - this has been bugging me for a week now, and last night it was sitting at 28,999!

And Go Mouser!
3719
Living Room / Re: When you make your 100'th Post
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on May 27, 2012, 08:29 AM »
Hey everyone, since I might be away for it, someone make sure to catch Mouser's 29,000th post!
3720
Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on May 26, 2012, 12:49 AM »
Here it is, although in Alpha form. (Edit: My project for a layout plugin stalled.)

These are the books in my Science Fiction Becoming News project.

http://www.freevoteu...Books/Bookindex.html

There's nothing in the sub nodes yet, but I'm excited with the dynamic menu.

3721
Living Room / Re: The Downfall of Internet Advertising
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on May 24, 2012, 11:11 PM »
I don't have an answer yet either - but we have a tremendous legacy owed to the culture-of-free because it jump started many low level components of the info age. Ads vs selling data vs ... hmm.
3722
Living Room / Re: Is Linux just a hobby?
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on May 23, 2012, 08:48 PM »
Dell has been on-off with Linux. I lost track of it.
3723
Living Room / Re: Is Linux just a hobby?
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on May 23, 2012, 09:07 AM »
Re: Having to upgrade the OS, at my limited understanding that wasn't FUD, it was an artifact of the Linux Package system, where upgrading more than a version or two of an application like Firefox required whole new libraries, ... that usually only appeared with the next update of the OS.

I lost a month of my life trying to resolve dependencies by hand once.
3724
General Software Discussion / Re: Windows Aero (transparent window borders, etc.) is dead.. Good riddance
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on May 22, 2012, 01:31 PM »

Yeah, I'm an Aero hater too. There's room for a little style, and for years I was doing a "SciFi" color set with brooding dark colors, but the layout was still opaque. I didn't like the glassy stuff at all.

Unfortunately, Metro looks ugly as getout, so this feels like Zune for the desktop.
3725
General Software Discussion / Re: Write text over the wallpaper
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on May 22, 2012, 01:02 PM »
I'll ask a different question which is "what are we trying to do here". If the idea is "jam a note onto the computer where it can remind us of stuff", I like the Stickies approach. But then I get too many, and they become a mess. So frankensteining widgets together, I use Transdesk from here to open the big batch of stickies in its own desktop-space. Then in the "primary space" I make the one *new* sticky I need for that day. Then you can "roll it up" and park it out of the way in a corner and unroll it again an hour later when the boss calls back.
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