Fun little exercise: while reading above, see what happens when mentally substituting “magic” with “AI”, words like “enchantments” with “algorithms” and so on.
Wondering if its perhaps two different subsets of people, with differing opinions that haven’t so much shifted, as that primarily just one’s been highly motivated to engage at a time? (In the same way that say surveys might draw disproportionately more engagement from those that feel extremely dissatisfied)
I don't feel as if there was so much of a dominant paradigm back in 1987, when RISC OS first came out, at least not outside of the US?
I recall that period more as a melting pot of ideas and approaches from lots of manufacturers independently trying to figure out what paradigms might stick.
There were many disparate approaches to text-based OSs: MS-DOS, Acorn MOS on the BBC which is the predecessor of the shell found in RISC OS, Sinclair, Atari, etc. Likewise, separate approaches to GUIs: Mac, Gem, RISC OS / Arthur, the Amiga, etc. Windows 2. Teams from Acorn, Research Machines, Sinclair etc all basically did things in their own way.
While the Macintosh UI paradigm was considered dominant in some market segments at the time (eg DTP), there wasn't yet a universal expectation around how GUIs would work. That started happening more after Windows 3 came out, in 1990 iirc.
Certainly there must have been cross-pollination of ideas between these different groups. Pretty sure these Docks and Task Bars with icons, that we all have at the bottom of our screens now, was an idea first seen in RISC OS.
The GUI unification theory is fine but we're talking RISC OS 2023 being still like this. All the weird quirks are still there.
Other systems have merged. Even ArcaOS, the successor to OS/2 has dropped all those strange tab systems that OS/2 Warp 3 took from PenpointOS. It's fairly hard to find something that's notably different that's ostensibly still being worked on.
You can call it whatever you want but it's an inviolable horizontal container on the bottom of the screen reserved for iconified applications and storage controls upon which applications can not occlude.
Windows 1.0 doesn't really have a desktop metaphor in the modern sense as in some rectangle with free floating icons which represent arbitrary files or folders. Windows 2.0 made the icon space the entire background which can be occluded by applications and 3.0 introduced the merging of the metaphors into a "desktop" that we're all familiar with. Stating they're all equivalent I think is a bit of stretch.
> You can call it whatever you want but it's an inviolable horizontal container on the bottom of the screen reserved for iconified applications and storage controls upon which applications can not occlude.
But it wasn't a concept that Microsoft was particularly wedded to. It disappeared in Windows 3.x.
Windows itself wasn't a concept microsoft was wedded to until windows 3.0 ... after 1.0 it was mostly axed. It took a giant internal effort to get windows 2.0 resourced for development and release and then there was a bunch of politics that started with TopView (which had many clones such as quarterdeck desqview) and ended with OS/2 1.3 that got 3.0 out the door. MS was probably fully committed to OS/2 up until about 1989/90"
IBM was still pushing its MCA based PS/2 machines at the time and the writing was on the wall when the gang of nine did EISA as a response instead of forking over a license fee.
I don't know what this has to do with anything. Claiming that RISC OS invented the dock or was the first to do it is bunk. I'm a huge fan of innovation and like RISC OS but I'm a bigger fan of accurate history.
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* accounts differ on this. Some, like Ferguson in the Computer Wars depict as a bad faith sabotage, while others such as in hard drive, brush that off as a conspiracy theory while others such as in barbarians led by Bill Gates say there were fundamental opinion conflicts by important primadonna programmers. I think it's likely all the above, there's enough people involved and the theories don't necessarily conflict
There was more diversity in paradigms and technologies before Wintel stamped it out. In particular, non-American companies were more prominent. I can't speak for Intel but I feel that Microsoft held the industry back with their remarkable commitment to shoddiness and tastelessness.
I feel a tinge of sadness reflecting on this fact when I walk through the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.
Go to Living Computers in Seattle when they figure out how to reopen. CHM is a shadow of Living Computers.
There's things like Xerox Altos and Apple 1s there that you can use. Sit at and actually do things with.
They sadly do not have a Pixar image computer which is a remarkably obscure little thing I've wanted to see working for a while. I've seen 2 of them but they were just in display cases. There's a few rips online with demos https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PhhGfdkK9Ek but nothing really going over the machine
I don’t think there’s been any indication that anyone is trying to figure out how to reopen Living Computers.
Likely some other philanthropist would need to buy it and fund it in order for it to reopen.
Paul Allen’s sister seems to have little interest in continuing to fund his smaller philanthropies / interests after his death (Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum: closed 2020, sold 2022, reopened by new owner; Cinerama: closed 2020, sold 2023, reopening planned by new owner; Living Computers: closed 2020, no public updates)
Seems like a lot of vitriol and misunderstanding in these comments, so a few thoughts as someone directly affected by the McDougall Creek fire.
Imagine you run a business, doesn’t matter what kind. Prospects look up your service on, say, Google, where Google in many cases now shows them enough of an extract of your content so that they may never even have to click through to your page to learn about what you do. So you can never analyze, ab test, tag, sign up, retarget or monetize these otherwise-visitors who are no longer clicking through. Effectively Google can be argued to be leveraging your content to make their own page stickier at your expense, eg to sell more ads. How would this make you feel? Turns out many people have a real problem with this, in 2019 I realized this at a telco conference where Rand Fishkin in a keynote was advocating people take this to their members of congress.
Firstly, Bill C18 is not even in effect yet. Secondly, its primarily concerned with the intermediaries reproducing the copyrighted news content or summaries/extracts on their own sites, which is the same situation as above where visitors never come to your site because your content is being reproduced/extracted/summarized elsewhere outside of your control. The matter of links to news articles is one interpretation of the secondary concept of “facilitating access” but as already explained in some of the comments here, thats not actually the core driver of this bill and Meta etc are refusing even to participate in the drafting of the regulations around that despite being invited to do so.
On the ground, here is what is happening today: neighbours evacuated or on alert are posting questions in private neighbourhood groups, on everything from food access, water use to garbage collection, and when answers are behind news articles, Meta is stopping other neighbours from posting links to those articles in response. (Incidentally, use of news in private discussion groups is something specifically exempted by C18).
This “interference” is purposeful by Meta as a calculated protest against a bill that is not yet in effect and isn’t about that use case. Yes, some might call this kind of behaviour bullying.
They can of course do what they want, they’re not under any obligation to let anyone communicate anything. Its really just a reminder to everyone that they’re driven entirely by self interest and not the interests of whichever communities they choose to operate in. By implication this makes them unreliable as an emergency communication utility or as a foundational element of community fabric.
>Imagine you run a business, doesn’t matter what kind. Prospects look up your service on, say, Google, where Google in many cases now shows them enough of an extract of your content so that they may never even have to click through to your page to learn about what you do. So you can never analyze, ab test, tag, sign up, retarget or monetize these otherwise-visitors who are no longer clicking through.
So kinda like the yellow pages in the phone book? Where I would go to the section on lock smiths and read the ads, and call the ones I want to talk to? You're wanting to basically force prospective clients to call each locksmith even if they don't want to. The company that allows ease of access gets the business. You're free to add a robots.txt blocking google today.
>its primarily concerned with the intermediaries reproducing the copyrighted news content or summaries/extracts on their own sites,
This is factually incorrect. The bill does not say "pay to summarize" it's pay to link. The notion that the news orgs are not getting any benefit out of this is insane to me. They're paying staff to manage their Facebook and Instagram accounts. Everything I know about businesses, and especially suffering businesses is that they don't want to burn a bunch of human hours posting stories that are apparently costing them money.
>neighbours evacuated or on alert are posting questions in private neighbourhood groups, on everything from food access, water use to garbage collection, and when answers are behind news articles, Meta is stopping other neighbours from posting links to those articles in response.
Sounds like we should stop depending on our news orgs who paywall public cood content anyways. That information should be on Government run websites.
>This “interference” is purposeful by Meta as a calculated protest against a bill that is not yet in effect and isn’t about that use case.
And I for one welcome it, our news orgs have a dying model and instead of adapting they're lobbing the government to bully the tech companies as they have money. Why have 400 meetings to discuss this bill and not change the text at all?
I'm not advocating any side here, I'm simply relaying what is actually happening on the ground, because the prevailing opinion here seems to be getting shaped by a very selective cherry picking of ideas that don't represent the reality on the ground here.
In the current conditions as you can imagine there is a lot of chatter on social media from people trying to find and share up to date information. A lot of this info is by definition hearsay, and so news articles are often getting referenced when a source of authoritative info is needed. I guess that is because the reporters working for those news orgs are on the ground at the press conferences, working the phones, working their networks of contacts, and working to get verification on when there are insufficient sources to a report. So what they bring here is some combination of a measure of trust, access to info before it hits official government pages, and aggregating of many diverse sources of into fewer places.
These news orgs are not the ones you're thinking of; they're our local community news outlets that have no paywalls and who run totally open/free sites supported by display ads on their sites.
Their articles are in many cases ahead of the official info on government sites. As an example, overnight reporting on one of these news sites sourced updates about the fireline hours before the official update is set to hit the government site, comments from gvt meteorologist about the smoke visibility around the airport which gives us some sense of when the water bombers will be able to fly again, again hours before this info will become officially available, last-minute changes in garbage collection info that is more current than what's on the government site, updates about the drinkability of water and so forth. We learnt from them first that some commercial flights at the airport would resume overnight, and so on.
No matter what you might generally think about reporters and news sites during "normal" times - right now these guys seem to be doing an amazing job of delivering exactly this -- actual news -- making it an extremely valuable resource.
So, Meta's "interference" is causing a lot of people irritation by not allowing us to share links to our community news org articles in private groups, instead forcing people to reference articles by screenshot, description etc. Surely it's inevitable that for some this irritation will lead to calls to boycott FB.
Not sure where the statements about factual correctness come from because the text of C18 is publicly available. It doesn't even contain the word "link". It does speak a lot about "content". And again, it isn't actually in effect yet. Yes the idea of "linking" is one interpretation of one aspect of C18 that pertains to "access of content" -- a cherry picked one that seems calculated to stir up outrage since C18 at least to me reads far more about the use of the content itself.
I've also never seen the Yellow Pages try to dynamically answer questions about a business, so people don't have to call that business, by automatically extracting parts of collateral the business authored but didn't give permission to use in that way.
Rather, the Yellow Pages has a formal spec/interface where they and the business can agree on the extent of what is OK to show.
And this seems to me exactly what C18 is trying to establish: that Meta et all can't simply extract as much out of a news article as they wish, but that there is a framework (with rules that remain to be drafted) where they must agree with the news orgs, what level of summary they can reproduce for free. Not much different than what Apple News presumably already has in place. Except Meta is refusing even to engage in this.
Is C18 perfect? No. Are news orgs in general perfect? Hell no. Is there lobbying and cronyism related to the legacy orgs? Probably. Again I'm not arguing a specific side here, I am simply pointing out that the governing narrative in this thread seems one sided, which always makes me wonder in who's interest that is. Canada hasn't actually put into effect any law banning Meta from linking to news. Claims that that is what the plan is, would be grossly oversimplifying. Meta is not a paragon of virtue here acting on behalf of the freedom of the community at large, it is simply "negotiating" in its sole interest, and so there should be no surprise now that some in the community will advocate for us to "negotiate" back.
Again I go back to the opening thought about Google. There is a larger issue at work here than just the news and just Canada.
With acoustic instruments, sympathetic resonance can play a big role in the overall colour, because eg unplayed undamped strings also respond according to their harmonic likeness to the presence of other excited frequencies.
For example, on a piano if you undamp but don't sound one C, by setting the key down gently and holding it, then strike the C an octave below, the higher C will start ringing quite audibly and add its own partials, the same happens also of course to a lesser degree if you say undamp the G an octave + 5th above the C you're striking. This happens all the time during normal piano playing, because pianists purposefully hold long-duration keys down, and the sustain pedal keeps undamped the notes already played.
It can also work in the "downward" direction for example on the violin where the open strings are E A D G with E the highest, the well known Vivaldi A minor concerto (eg Suzuki book 4) opens with shifting on that E string to eg 3rd position to play the A which is an octave higher than the open A string. To the extent you get this perfectly in tune, presuming a properly tuned violin of sufficient quality, the open A string ie an octave lower will start "ringing" as will the D below that to a lesser degree; and if you then subsequently damp those open strings, it changes the sound significantly. This "ringing" effect is quite important to violinists in developing their sense of tuning and calibrating exactly where to set their fingers.
IANAL but also there is a specific list of classes (categories) that have to be selected from when seeking to register a trademark, design mark etc and afaik protection then applies only within those categories.
In this case they have applied for Nice classes 9 and 42.
I'm not sure, but also seem to recall that protection within those classes would be further limited to the scope of what they covered in the description they provided for each class during application.
Anyways, point it is that it's in any event really hard to see how having a fairly nondescript domain name with a blank web page could ever be construed as purveying anything in either Nice class 9 or 42.
(Eg, for all we know, such domain name might be referring to some new kind of industrial oil or lubricant, which would be Nice class 4...)
It's also useful to consider that there are contexts where the law can negate the validity of a trademark based on the registrant's lack of actively "practicing" it (including during the period between application and it being granted), or protecting it. So there's an inherent incentive for companies to be a bit "trigger happy" in staking their claim to "practicing" the band as well as acting to protect it. Although it does seem very preemptive in this case.
Wondering if anyone on this thread who’s felt this way has been able to try out biphasic sleep and can report if it made a difference? The idea of a “second sleep” after an hour or so awake seems to be gaining prevalence in popular media as something humans used to do naturally.
As the parent of a violinist and a violist, I find the role of the teacher for aspects like holding the instrument, to be less like "teaching" and much more like "debugging".
Kids grow, and every person's body is different: even when they've been playing for 10+ years and have reached the most advanced levels, they're still asking their teachers and fellow musicians to "debug" posture - because subtle changes can have outsize impact. This is why master classes exist, for instance.
There are all kinds of tools in this debugging toolkit. Some of them are rather tactile, such as feeling how much force is being transferred from the hand to the tip of the bow, feeling how "soft" the bow-hand is being held, feeling how much the bow arm's elbow is being allowed to sink under its own weight, or how much the shoulder is being tensed - because muscle tension can be a huge issue for string players. Not to mention the huge number of minute adjustments that can be made to various angles and might involve tweaks to shoulder rests, chin rests and so on.
Right now teachers have to debug, without being able to use their hands. A tall order for anyone. Just imagine being asked to debug software without being able to use your hands, or to poke at the system: no attaching a debugger, no inserting print statements - all you can do is give verbal inputs and observe outputs. It's a huge responsibility, when failing to debug, or getting it wrong, can have serious consequences (life-long problems with pain, for example).
Some teachers are much better than others at such "debugging", so yes from that perspective it sure would be nifty to invent some technology that guarantees more consistent results. But is it realistic? Every body is different physically, and the human touch and expertise plays a major role.
So, I can't help but think it would actually be a simpler problem to create an AI that can reliably debug software, vs creating AI that can reliably debug a musician's physical relationship to their instrument.
Fair enough. I should've thought about complexities of handling instruments more. My mind just raced to the memories of my piano lessons and the time a friend was teaching me guitar; the part about correct hold/finger placement were essentially pattern-matching, the kind I could see software solving right now (enough cameras + right software). But I understand now that what I've been taught was just the beginning of the beginning.
As for debugging in general, I agree and offer an analogy that might be intimately familiar to everyone here: debugging your parent's/neighbour's/friend's computer over the phone. I can handle it for about two minutes before my head hurts and I start boiling from anger. These days, I flat out refuse helping this way; if it can't wait, I only explain them how to install TeamViewer and what numbers to spell me over the phone.
