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Let's solve the "support for Linux" issue once and for all, and just port Linux to this card! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Since code is considered speech by some people, they're probably just making sure that it's all written in French, without any American idioms creeping into the language...

*ducks*
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Is there a difference? ;)

Still, Karma Whore or not, it was still a pretty good post. (and I got flamed by an AC for it, it had to be good!)

So how're you doing?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The real question is, will I be able to wait long enough to get a "Spitfire"...

It's good to see a review mention "Price" early on. That's a big concern to me. My computer never costs more than $1,100, and I always try to get something better (at least twice as good every two years).

Oh yeah, and I'm buying a new system. But I'm pretty sure my current K6/300 setup wouldn't be able to handle an Athlon. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

To anyone saying something stupid about their intentions, or public forums and fair use and blah blah blah...

READ THIS FIRST.

As much as some of you might hate him, Signal 11 has some relevant stuff to say, and from what I know about copyrights, it sounds good to me.

This is a real issue, and I'd like to know what Katz and Slashdot are going to do about it.

Comments?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Excellent link. I might just repost that up higher...

Yeah, Sig11 usually has something reasonable to say, but that's impressive, even for him.

Of course, no one will see our posts, because they're down here. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'd be tempted to do that, at least for their older stuff. Metallica used to be a really cool band, with some good messages. (believe it or not; some people don't know how to listen to the words)

Nowadays, though, their music was just crappy. I remember when they started trying to make a comeback, and I saw them on TV doing another video of "Enter Sandman", and I was like, "That's not bad, but it's not Metallica!". Imagine my surprise when I found out it was, but that they just started sucking. Not too long after that, Load came out, and then they started playing it on the pop music stations...

After that, and this record company pandering, I've lost respect for them. I'd be happy to pay the old Metallica for their music, probably more than they got paid in the first place. But I'd be paying for "Metallica", "And Justice For All", and basically everything but the new stuff...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

My post got lost in a wormhole. Damn you, Taco... :)

pb writes "Picture a world where information about your every move on Slashdot is all shipped off to many third parties, with the willing cooperation of your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Check out guru CmdrTaco's latest offering at Andover.net's Secret Labs on Predictive Networks plan to know everything you do... no book rights... no story moderation... just everything you do all the time."

"He knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you're awake he knows when you've been trolling lots, so you'd better be good for goodness sake!"

Does this strike anyone else as a little paranoid? First, "Internet Privacy" is a sick oxymoron. Second, there are technical solutions which can allow a user privacy regardless.

And finally, if they *really* want to store all my web information, so be it. They will get sued, or pretty soon they won't be able to fit the (damn doubleclick.com) logs on their servers. And either way, I'll still be laughing at them.

Heck, combine some technologies. Have a fake (alladvantage.com) web-browsing program that goes to wherever you want, just to confuse them, and a real (private) connection, cryptographically secure and all that jazz.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Maybe that will change once IRIX is gone, and Linux on Merced is one of the few surviving UNIXes, with possibly the most "new" cool features.

In any case, anything that allows the different flavors of Unix to consolidate into one single, better Unix system is a miracle, IMO. And even the old Unix hackers in the military, which are all backed up on tape and dumped back as needed, I'm sure, will recognize this.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, Windows could use some stability and some *real* memory protection. People keep telling me that Windows 2000 actually is better, but the system requirements look sick, and the "New Features" were already better implemented in Unix, like 15-25 years ago.

Netscape 4.x is quite possibly the most evil piece of software available for Linux. Yeah, I'm using it now, because for some things it works. But when it crashes and burns, it pisses me off because it doesn't want to die. Then I use Mozilla for a while. :)

Does it freeze everything *solid*? Does it lock the console, (Caps Lock doesn't work, SysRq doesn't work, etc., etc.) and can you telnet in (if possible)? The only time I have anything actually lock solid on me is when I have a real driver conflict, or two apps running as root that both directly play with the video card, or something like that. (SVGALib and xawtv step on each other, on my system; I'm pretty sure it's something to do with how they use DGA)

Yes, Windows is the OS of the masses. And I guess I'm just different. Logically, I should be using Windows right now. I know a lot about computers, and I used DOS for a long time, but I found myself implementing Unix-like commands in Pascal before I knew what Unix was. I didn't like Win 3.1, and I refused to run Win '95 on my system. By then, I knew what Unix was, and found out about Linux. And now there's no turning back, baby.

The bottom line is, if Microsoft cared about its power users, I'd be running Windows 2000 or something right now. As it stands, most of the people I know with a release copy of Win 2000 pirated it. They get no respect.

(1,000,000 web sites running on Win 2000, and at least 5% paid for it! ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Heh heh. "MacOS is secure out of the box!" :)

Remove the nobody group. Install VMWare. Run Linux...

Registry hacking is sick. Windows 3.1 had everything organized in nice text configuration files, and Microsoft had to screw it up. At least the apps are technically storing their preferences in the Windows directory, but they can still step on each other's toes, and create duplicate entries, etc., etc. In Win 3.1, this was limited to MYPROG.INI or whatnot; it didn't mess up your whole system.

But, that's Microsoft Integration for you. It's *easier* to use! It's a feature!

? As in '' or '&', '>', '<'? Looks ok by me. But for your posting mode, "Choose, but choose wisely". I like "Plain Old Text", but remember that it includes everything *except for* non-breaking spaces, less-than signs, and greater-than signs, and accepts HTML tags. I think "Plain Old Text" should convert that too (except maybe valid tags), but what do you want with three options. Just call it something else, like "Mostly Text", and have an explanation.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Linux is a Unix.
NT is a sick VMS hybrid.

Unix works.
NT does whatever it wants to.

Linux is free.

But, "We're an NT shop," and we have enough problems as it is without having to *learn* anything else.

God forbid you should have to learn something useful. I know how hectic it is in a business, and I'm sure its worse in the military, but sitting around trying to force Windows Apps to coexist and not die doesn't sound like my idea of a productive day. Give me a good package manager (that keeps track of my libraries!) any day.

Linux is extensible. But you don't have to mess with it if you don't want to. Heck, don't install a C compiler or any dev tools on the client machine, don't give your users root, and give them a disk quota of 50MB or whatever. That should solve most of your problems.

Ultimately, we'll see. I'm sure Linux will get adopted more in the military and the gov't. And knowing them, they'll probably do some surveys on it, and eventually we'll see who's more productive, and who got the work done this year. I'll continue to put my money on Unix.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Can we expect to see SCO officially supporting SCO apps packaged for Linux?

Since ix86 Linux has iBCS2, which runs SCO binaries, could we expect to see specifically SCO Merge packaged for Linux? I'd love to see a free (at least as in beer) alternative to VMWare, and FreeMWare (or whatever they're calling it this week) isn't anywhere close. SCO Merge looks cool, but SCO puts stuff in some *weird* directories, and I wasn't about to unpack that package in / on my Linux distro. (it took me long enough to figure out what they *did* to cpio to make the archive in the first place! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'm not really impressed by our 'friends' at sightsound.com. On the one hand, designing a site that "needs" Java, IE5, Microsoft Media Player, Shockwave Flash, etc., etc. is pretty mean, and they don't give you any feedback if those aren't present. (You need Java to find out that you need IE5, etc., etc.)

However, they did give me a reason to test out IE5 for UNIX again, and it's okay. It looks significantly better than the old IE4 for UNIX, (it loaded for me, maybe that's because I'm running on an older SPARC, or maybe they finally fixed some of those version-specific issues they had.) but it doesn't support any plug-ins, or no one has written any. (same thing?) Oh, and they're using Sun's JVM on Solaris. I got a kick out of that. :)

Anyhow, yet again, I'd love to live in a world where web sites really were cross-platform, or companies would bite the bullet, and develop apps properly. It looks like IE5 for UNIX should work great as long as (a) you have enough RAM for it, and (b) you don't plan on doing anything else.

If Microsoft would release a decent version of IE5 for Linux, they could really capture some market share where it matters, or if the Wine project develops to the point where IE5 runs decently, (the installer too, please...) they might get some converts anyhow. But as it stands, I'm not too impressed with their attitude either.

Looks like another reason to use Mozilla, and write friendly letters to companies: "I'd love to use your software, but..."
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

8. The compression apparatus of claim 6 in which said hash function generation means comprises means for providing said predetermined number of hash signals in response to a code signal and a character signal so that a code signal hashed with different character signals provides different hash signals, respectively.

"In the subroutine OpenMultipeFilesForNoGoodReason (hereafter refered to as the subroutine), the buffer apparatus, BufferFileArray, comprising of no more than BufferFileLength multiplied by BufferFileBlockSize ASCII character elements, expects BufferFileBlockNum minus one fixed units of character stream data of size BufferFileBlockSize, followed by a final unit of character stream data which may be of variable size, but no more than size BufferFileBlockSize"...

Well, if you'd take a moment to read my post, you'd see that I couldn't get through and indeed even requested someone to mirror it for me!

Any other tidbits you'd like to share?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

How so?

Do you *have* one?

(Don't get me wrong: I'd *love* to have one. But if it doesn't come out in the next few months, I won't...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Technopop is here (big surprise).

It looks like they do BeOS stuff. Anyone know if this is going to be BeOS-based?

Oh. And they "make industrial strength games!!!"

I'm guessing from the host names involved that this is the Real-Time Strategy, Real-Time OS project. If anyone gets to the server, mirror it for us!

host www.beia.org
www.beia.org is a nickname for quantum3d.beia.org
quantum3d.beia.org has address 209.220.46.173

host quantum3d.technopop.com
quantum3d.technopop.com has address 209.220.46.173
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What happened to them sounded pretty lame, I hate it when people can't just fess up and admit they made a mistake.

The rules sounded somewhat weird, but it's probably no weirder than the programming contest I've been doing lately (its monthly, so hold your horses). (and MazeMan can admit he makes mistakes. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Wow, some people just can't take a joke.

There was an X-Files episode where they had a bug crawl across the screen, I thought it was very well-done.

And who breaks a TV trying to swat a bug? Or sues over it?

I wish I could say "I'm a moron, give me money!" and have it work. Especially since I need the money for college... ;)

...and they say *we* can't figure out what reality is...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's an excellent point.

Also, a capitalist societly like the US will be happy to take your money and defend your freedom. Okay, not that internet stocks are doing wonderfully or anything now, (right, Taco?) but I could see how this might send a chill through the British ISP market, or make people think twice before hosting their site there.

Heck, get one of those K00L country code domains, I *know* they don't care what you do with them...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Didn't anyone watch "Real Genius"? Sheesh.... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Thanks for the information!

That first part sounds like what the O'Reilly book was saying. And yes, since much of this is still talent or black magic, it's often better to design an algorithm for a given purpose instead of adapting a popular one for a new purpose.

(I was looking through my old code for finding possible "large" prime numbers, (in my case, I think 100 digits is "large" :) and *that* looked like black magic, even if it was a "simple", well-known algorithm in number theory... And as a C programmer, I never would have come up with it in a million years, I'd still be modding by all the primes I could find, or worse. :)

That last part sounds interesting... First, I assume you mean they would sign it with their private key, or am I completely misunderstanding you here? The server would know the public keys of the users, and thus be able to verify the signature, right? You might want to use more data than just a timestamp, or otherwise make it harder to decrypt/fake on the way, but basically that sounds good (not obviously flawed :).

It sounds like a good idea to me because it's simple. Basically it uses the signature as defense against tampering with the timestamp as proof of identity, instead of falling back on a more complex and also flawed system, such as using evidence, certificates, trust models, blah blah blah, and *still* having some of the same problems.

It amazes me how many concepts in cryptography are actually vapor, but are talked about just as seriously as the ones used every day. Government key escrow sounds like an intractable problem, but they keep talking about it as if they can legislate it into the future. And there's always that magical algorithm around the corner that could break all block ciphers in polynomial time, at least. :)

I don't know whether to blame the politicians or the mathematicians for this strange theoretical grounding that cryptography has...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Thanks, that's good to know. I was tempted to take a look at the algorithm again, it's been a while.

But in this case I don't think you'd have any plaintext... (unless you count the salt?)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

How many (other) people thought "PS/2? A weapons platform? I can't even get the microchannel support working!"

Please, call it something else, or I'll be confused forever!

(even "Sony PS2", as opposed to "IBM PS/2"...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's right, because there isn't enough information. You have to do dictionary lookups, and whatnot. I haven't tried to prove it, but I'm sure it's been done. That's the point of using secure algorithms. Here's a reference.

Apparently 25 rounds of DES produces something pretty ugly, and no one has found a way to reverse-engineer it. There are probably more formal papers out there, but from the little I know about DES, *I* sure wouldn't want to try it, it's messy. :)

Heh heh. "Assuming a password is only used on one system"... Having "the password" in that case is no different than having "plaintext that gets the same hash value" (also "the password"). But good luck finding one.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's right, but there's no good way to find this.

If you have a good hashing algorithm, you'd still have to brute-force search the keyspace to find a password that hashes to that value. And chances are, there aren't many other values that hash to it (hopefully none, use more bits for the hash if needed...)

If you had a *really* bad hashing algorithm, then there would be a lot of collisions, and it would be easy to find another password. But that's why we have peer review and whatnot...

And you can't reverse a hash to steal a password, that's the big advantage. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Don't encrypt passwords, hash them! Make sure there's enough information to identify a correct password, but not enough to reproduce it!

That having been said, I don't know enough to write a secure crypto algorithm without following in someone else's footsteps. (I know the basics of public-key cryptography, I could probably code that) But you know what? I wouldn't try to reinvent the wheel here, not unless I proved it mathematically first. :)

...and if that decryption algorithm works, this'll be really embarrassing for them. (because it's *so* computationally simple, it should run in no time at all. I just don't have any random QNX "encrypted" data lying around to try it with...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I thought all they really had patents on was the psychoacoustic model they use, but their lawyers just hate everybody.

Anyone know (or have a good guess?) how legal mp3 encoders that don't pay them the "mp3 encoder tax" are, why, and which patents are being violated?

('cause I sure don't. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Getting someone else to change their license isn't that hard if they're the only people who own the code. With a GPL'ed app, though, you'd need to ask all the contributors, which is a mess. I hope it works for you.

If it doesn't, though, there's always freshmeat, and there are lots of audio libraries out there, some of them GPL'ed, LGPL'ed, and whatnot.

I would love to see someone working on porting Cubic (now OpenCP) to Linux, it already runs under DOS, and "runs" under Win '95 too, and they've been planning on porting it to Unix, but I can't wait that long! :)

There's the Open Source Audio Library Project, which is LGPL'ed, and unfinished but has a plan and some code to hack on... And apparently they use mpg123 for their mp3 routines, which does not suck. Don't believe the hype, if it isn't the fastest decoder, it's one of the fastest, really.

There are some nice looking mp3 libraries in the "free to use but restricted" category. Since I don't know what your requirements are, I figure I'd mention that.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yes, actually. And that should be "Right". Just because you don't understand what it means, or you think it's obvious doesn't mean it can't be profound, or important.

For a deeper understanding of this, read about The New Jersey approach. That's why Unix is more popular than Lisp machines, nowadays; sometimes "The Right Way To Do It" is too expensive...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

John explained that there are "two reasons for not doing the right thing - you don't
know how to do the right thing, or you choose to do it wrong for a good reason".

I haven't messed with NFS support, over here we use AFS instead.

Transarc's AFS Clients are decent, and I recently tried using arla instead. (so I could upgrade kernels, and also try out the open source solution...) At first, it was *really* slow, but I traced that back to an ethernet card problem. Now it runs even faster!

I know there's also the Coda project, which sounded really cool, but I guess that isn't so far along?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Anyone remember the Benchmarking HOWTO?

There are *lots* of open-source benchmarks, and of course we can make new and better ones, and get a test suite together.

For starters, the LBT (Linux Benchmarking Toolkit):
Run the BYTEmarks (and the old UNIX ones too, they're funny), Whetstone, XBench... oh, and compile a stock kernel (and don't fiddle with the options, 2.0.0 was recommended then.)

Personally, I'd also suggest bonnie, it's a good benchmark for disk performance, but you'd have to have a range of options here. (testing disk performance and cache, so you'd really want a large number here too, just to be fair. 2*RAM?)

Also, when RedHat boots up, it has those RAID checksumming tests, those are good. They test different implementations of the same algorithm, so they say a lot about the individual chip. (whether it likes MMX, works well with different optimizations, and whatnot)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hmm, let's see...

Maybe you want to code?

Or write a paper?

Maybe you can go into civilization occasionally, to purchase software on CD-ROMs?

I used computers just fine before I ever knew "net access" existed. I could play games, type in programs, and generally do anything I wanted to on my computer.

Also, I didn't know about *computers* when I lived in the mountains as a child, but when I came back to visit, I'm sure the people in the local commune were very glad they could run their laptop off of solar power. (and yes, there are places where people have phones, but aren't on the grid, too) I know they were using the laptop to teach the kids, and probably for other uses, besides.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

We were talking about this in my Science Fiction class. (because my teacher remembers when the *book* was getting hyped and promoted; he's still got some donated "limited edition" posters that were apparently being used as a tax shelter/deduction...)

Dude, I didn't expect John Travolta to be an alien! (the alien race is ST:TNG Klingons with straws up their noses? WTF?!??!)

All I can say is, if the movie looks as slick as the flash intro does, it should be pretty cool. We need more demostyle intros, even written in Flash, yeah! (and it didn't bug me about what platform I was running, which is good, since that isn't supposed to matter that much on the web, and browser id's are unreliable anyhow...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Shut up, dude, no one is doing the boy's homework for him, he merely asked for some pointers.

It's about as bad as me going up to a teacher or a friend who knows about the subject in question, and saying "I don't know where to get started, could you help me find some references?"

The *real* work is actually getting 18 pages out of this. Nanotech is pretty theoretical right now, and although computers are getting smaller and smarter, we don't have tiny robots or wonderful AI, so we can only speculate on what self-organizing nanites would behave like, or if they will ever exist.

Personally, I'd pick a subject with more information, but if he pulls it off, I'm sure it will be a great paper, even with no help from you!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, the modem network play was a really cool feature, I just wish I had done that back then more, instead of playing it solo.

Bit planes? Was that like the later levels on the SNES port? Those looked really cool, and pretty freaky, besides...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Oh man, I loved that game. And Masters of Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic III, and Little Computer People. :)

I haven't played Dungeon Keeper yet, but I heard it was good, so I'll have to check it out.

Hey guys, was the sequel (or later PC releases) to Populous any good, and would I have a chance in getting them to run on Linux? I know they had ports of the old game on lots of systems too, but most of those were harder to control than the original, and wouldn't map that well back to the PC. (well, ok, maybe the Amiga one would, but I'd end up having to use an Amiga emulator, and I don't know them as well, anyhow.)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That patent is ridiculous! How broad is the coverage on a patent like that? It looks like it wouldn't cover your game (your game isn't on a ROM or cartridge, so don't put it on one...) but should be invalid because of prior art. (without the examples that make it clear they're talking about a Dr. Mario-style game, I see nothing really different from, say, Tetris, which would be prior art.)

Of course, I know *why* they do this: they don't want any copycats, like Bulletproof software and their ultra-rare Tengen Tetris. Yep, competition is evil in the software market, at least when you're a big company. Or even if you're patent-happy. You've got to wonder how these people operate. Could I just sit around all day, prototyping ideas and calling my lawyers?

"Hmm, what metaphors can I patent today... How about an interactive, client-server app for easy ordering and delivery of food, on the web, using cookies and Java? 'Look, ma, a resturant menu, online!' For my next patent..."
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I wouldn't want to see this technology in use if someone wrote a "virus"...

Who owns the NASA technology, anyhow? I know, we always hear about the benefits of "space-age" technology, but... do they license their patents, or does the gov't reap the benefits? And couldn't that money go towards NASA funding? Please?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I hope Microsoft is forced to retool Windows and add some more user-interface and safety features.

Then travesties like this wouldn't happen!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No, I wasn't confusing the two. I was happy that Aardman Animations was doing something useful, and sad that The Times in Britain looked so ugly. My ranting applies to the latter. I'd rather see people making good movies and giving them away for free than idly talking about it in bad HTML with weird licensing issues. Make more sense now?

Did you read both of my posts in this thread? I suppose not.

I was surprised that my post got moderated up to 5 too, but I don't see what "Offtopic" has to do with this. If the story didn't have to do with web content, please enlighten me as to the topic.

I'm also sickened that Alex, who took the time to reply to my post, got moderated down for being "Offtopic". He was completely *on* topic! Why? Because he was replying to my post. Reserve "Offtopic" for someone who posts on a story and just can't stop talking about how cool fried bananas are in his blender, okay? *That's* Offtopic. (it might also be "Funny" too. :)

However, thank you for replying instead of wasting mod points. I'd much rather get *actual* feedback as opposed to some monkey clicking 'Offtopic' and never telling me why. (don't worry, one of those monkeys took your advice, too)

later,

Peter

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I agree, my reply *was* hasty. It was a rant. I wasn't expecting a +5 for it! (see how far the moderators have slipped? :)

I care more about having a site at least look nice in most web browsers (at least IE, Netscape and w3m) because let's face it, people don't write pages for specs, and specs don't view pages. However, the Times page couldn't even do that. From a coding, design, *or* user interface point of view, it's just sorry.

Slashdot, however, at least works well. It has a functional design that people like to copy. And the validator people usually point to is somewhat overzealous. (no doctype? ALT tags are required?) I'm also not a big fan of later HTML specs, because I'd be happier without Frames, but they've taken over somewhat. So it isn't perfect, but it's definitely usable, and not openly offensive.

You didn't miss anything, except that I tend to free associate a tad too much. Yes, that's what I meant to say. No, that's not how you're supposed to interpret it. And why can't I say it in the same breath? Slashdot does, they just don't tell you. Besides, my point holds: if the web designers for The Times would make silly movie files instead, I'd be very thankful. ;)

Ah, but *if* you have an account, the contract you agreed to by getting that account is in the U.K., and it's meant to be interpreted under their laws (says so at the bottom). I don't know how they expect to *enforce* such a badly-written and ad-hoc agreement, but there you are. Oh, and I linked to their "Terms & Conditions" page, so *if* I had an account, I would have broken the terms already. And if they were written in 1998, the more reason to change them.

Actually, the trademark issue *is* hard to understand, from the contract. I don't believe that's what it says. It might be precisely what they *meant*, but it certainly isn't what it says. That's why legal contracts *need* to be 10 times longer, and written in legalese. The same goes for your other point about changing the rules, it's all pretty vague and threatening, trying to get more mileage out of the law than it actually allows.

Heh heh. Funny story at the end, there. I say, if they can weasel their way in there, they can subject the Chinese populace to their crappy 'media'. We know corporations have no ethics, and I'm amused when they find themselves having to prove it to governments that have no ethics (read: governments). Competition is a good thing when it works, and I'm not sure if that's an instance of this. (it's like going from a one-party system to a two-party system. Either you have one real option, or you have a choice, sorta, but it's a choice between evils..)

I try not to follow politics if I can help it, and I don't watch that much TV just because it's so *BAD*. This is the same issue, really. If all the content on the web dropped out, I wouldn't surf, I'd find something better to do with my time, like code, maybe. :)

Thanks for the reply, Alex, nice post.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I wasn't really talking about freedom, but more about personal preferences and good design. A business or a news outlet is going to do whatever they think is in their best interest. I would assume that their clients would enter into this somewhere.

Whenever you can make the world more useful and less annoying, you will find supporters. Originally, the web served this purpose, at least in part, and the web sites that succeeded furthered these goals.

(I'm thinking of places like google or freshmeat, they do something people want, and they do it well. Yahoo and slashdot were once squarely in this category, and I'd add all the IM software in it too, if they could work together...)

However, corporations ignore all that. They try to replace personability with reputation, and courtesy with lawsuits, and goodwill with money. And that can get you far in life, but it doesn't always get you to where you'd want to go.

Oh. And I'm *usually* a dumb bitch? Speak out, my man! Post your opinion. Even this little comment is something. Constructive feedback is a good thing...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yes, this is slashdot, where the trolls get more rabid and the moderators get more irrational, but remember, folks, it isn't just you: the whole WWW gets uglier with each passing day.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the creators of all cool-looking animated movie files for their work, because I'd rather be watching their movies than reading their HTML.

What inspired me, in my baseless ranting? I'm glad you asked! Not only does the story linked from slashdot look horrible, but so does its HTML--it's really broken. The HTML tag is commented out, the ads are in JavaScript, so not only are they annoying, but they output broken HTML if Java/JavaScript is not turned on; the commenting looks like some of the joking in the polls (this is the TITLE tag...), and the background and page layout doesn't scale at all.

Beyond that, their Terms & Conditions are also a travesty. First, the whole thing is invalid because condition #1 is false!

(I have no User Account with them, and I wish I didn't have to have one for *EVERY* frickin' web site I ever visit. That isn't the answer. A universal ID isn't, either, but I'm sure we could use some sort of common challenge/response method, at least...)

Let's hope our friends at Slashdot don't have an account, because you're not allowed to link below the main page of their site without express written permission from the webmaster. Oh, and you can only display the page on the screen or on paper, so you'd better delete that netscape cache...

You also need their express written permission to use the trademarks "The Times" and "The Sunday Times". So can I say "My grandfather likes to read The Sunday Times"? Can I write it? Sue me already, I'd love to see it.

Oh, and my favorite: we reserve the right to add or change this agreement, so if you do something we don't like, we can change that contract you agreed to, and sue you under the new one. Yeah, that's fair.

Summary: Screw corporations. Take back the web. If you need to have a DISCLAIMER on a web page, feel a need to sue your client base, or don't want to learn how to write HTML correctly, leave. If you'd rather make pretty pictures and movies, and let everyone see them, stay.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

We of issue world who are [a]. [Linux] put thorough. We of issue world who are against gravel put thorough. We are Window. We are
Door. We are [Microsoft]. We are plate. We are disengaged. [Linux] [on]. bad Window [on]. affable [Linux] [on]. bad Window [on]. affable.
[Ender's] Lame regulations. We of issue world who are [a]. [Linux] put thorough. Finland [on]. inferior.

InterTran
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, make your own decisions. The information is easy enough to find, and Theo's e-mail is damning enough.

However, this is what I was talking about before -- I finally found the reference. It's sad how information can die out, on the net.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Oh yeah, I know how it happens, but I don't know why they do it. But these are technical sites, people! They should know enough not to do this, or at least clean up after a bad authoring tool.

(My text editor never uses a non-standard character set, therefore it's a great authoring tool! ;)

I've seen this the most with Office--the latest version of Office only outputs good HTML for the latest version of IE for the latest version of Windows--sometimes.

(no, of course they aren't tied together, Microsoft would *never* do that, they just make up standards that no one has heard of before--the Microsoft Standards. Fun fun fun...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, I've seen some of the e-mails that were tossed around when OpenBSD split, and some of the server logs...

You're right about the "script kiddies don't write their own material" part, in the strict definition of one, Theo knows enough to write his own tools if he has to.

But he *acts* like a script kiddie, which I guess was my point. Also, OpenBSD would be a good target user base. Hey, at least we'd get some script kiddies with real sysadmin skills, right? Future BOFH's of the world, unite!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.