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No, they only want you to think that. It's not even an ad for Guinness, or their book of records! Nay, 'tis much subtler and more sinister.

It's an ad for TRANSPARENT GLASSWARE, put here by THE CHINESE MAFIA, to reduce American productivity, reducing us to ZOMBIES staring at beer bubbles FOREVER while they invade and seize our BEER PRODUCTION!

The Evidence:

The beer flows down instead of up. Therefore, it's on the other side of the planet. The Land Down Under, in fact. The mind-numbing effects of beer bubbles have already been demonstrated by the testimonials found here. And even though everyone knows that Australia was populated with criminals, my sources tell me that the Chinese Mafia are launching this as a counteroffensive, so that no one ever succeeds in that land war in Asia (by mesmerising the enemy troops with the beer bubbles, of course).

So I should clearly not choose the beer in front of me...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I wonder if we can start a SDTC (SlashDot Troll Certification program going. Then we could have something like this:

School House Trolling (Score:5, Troll)
by Anonymous Coward on 07:50 PM January 11th, 2000 EST (#92)

[...]
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SDTC --- Certified Troll #00001002


After all, if certification is practically meaningless, I'm sure we could start some practical uses for meaningless certification!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The only problem I have with that is the "don't waste your time trying to reinvent them" part. At least in Science, until recently, the whole point was that you could build on other people's discoveries, to solve really cool big problems. Patents help to stifle that in Computer Science, which means that corporations end up hampering researchers, and hold everyone back.

However, nice analogy. I wish the world were always that friendly.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Nope, the Xerox alphabet looked like crap.

This guy posted the links to them, and deserves to be moderated up.

I also agree with your post, and therefore think that Xerox doesn't deserve that much for exploiting our patent system and harassing our legal system. They only get my sympathy, for screwing up so bad. And if they ever make something really cool, maybe I'll buy it. Maybe.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Uh-oh, this includes a *character generator*! Let's hope RCA's patent has run out!

(sorry, couldn't resist, if you don't get it, read the Steve Jobs interview for more patent silliness.)

For the record, of course inventors deserve *some* credit. But I have to give a lot of credit to 3com, for successfully developing and marketing their successful PDA. No one was bringing a lawsuit against Apple when they were unsuccessful. I'll be even happier if it can be proven that 3com developed (or licensed) this technology without knowledge or use of the Xerox patent.

What's the use of patents, anyhow? It's like a big library with signs out front that say "Nyah nyah, you can't do this, I did it first!" How childish is that?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, yeah. They're a bit worried because they got sued by Stac over using an obvious and well-known compression method.

I wish there were a way to avoid this arbitrary patent awarding, selective patent enforcement, and to shorten the expiration (if not elimination) of patents relevant to computers. By the time the patent office gets around to approving something, it's often out of date these days.

Then we could keep using our .gif files if we want to, and not live in fear that someone is going to patent the next big thing, and charge us for what would become the obvious. It would be even better if we could stop corporations from buying and shelving the next big thing because it competes with their interests, but... well, we can't have everything, eh?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

You'd better *forget* how to do it real quick, and get a license from Xerox--they might sue you.

As long as no one patents *my* genes any time soon and tries to sue me for patent infringement, I'll be pretty happy. Hmm. "...consisting of a biological device able to post to http://slashdot.org/..."
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Dude, I need to shop at Electronics Boutique more now!

Thanks for the tips, guys! One day, I too hope to see the Linux section rival the Macintosh section... It was starting to happen at one CompUSA I went to... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Maybe you forgot to read my post before replying. Let me direct your attention to that stupid encryption scheme that protects the DVDs that we've already bought from being watched.

If I bought a DVD, I'd want to play it. That constitutes fair use.

I can say that information wants to be free. I wasn't, but I'll happily share most of the stuff on my hard drive that is mine to share, to my friends. If the laws ever change enough to let us legally share everything, so be it. But I don't think anyone else really wants to read my e-mail, and if they do, I probably don't want to hear from them. I don't have a problem with the information, just some of the people. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I was very happy with the job they did on Heroes of Might and Magic III when we beta-tested that.

(has anyone seen the Linux version in stores? I've seen Civ:CTP and Railroad Tycoon II in the box with the penguin on it :)

Keep up the good work, Loki! When I get a 3D card and a new computer, I'll have to see what new games you put out for us... (and if I can somehow run the PC Final Fantasy port(s)... Hrm. Time to load up Wine...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Maybe my memory just isn't what it used to be, or maybe I'm just out of the loop from being on vacation, but with no links to help me out, I wasn't sure what legal action was taking place here.

But, after searching slashdot a little, now I'm pretty confident that we're talking about DeCSS and that stupid encryption scheme that protects the DVDs that we've already bought from being watched... Hrm. (I'm not too worried about them getting copied, don't have an extra 4.5GB lying around right now, or enough time to encode one properly, but someday I'm sure it will be commonplace.)

So, now that I know what we're talking about... "Fair use". 'Nuff said.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'm sorry, dude. It's hard to protect your identity when all those other AC's steal your name like that.

I guess I'm not impressed because I got it in an e-mail before, but I remember it being pretty funny stuff. Of course, I also haven't been impressed with slashdot "moderation" for a while, but... well, too many monkeys typing for too long spoil the broth, or something. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Ooo, ooo, the *funny* offtopic posts get moderated up! I'll have to remember that one!

What happens to a funny on-topic post? Does it get marked as "Troll"?

Let's test the Slashdot moderation system once again...



Free Software Foundation sued over trademark infringement

GNU Soft, a Houston-based toy company has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against the Free Software Foundation. GNU Soft has been in the business of manufacturing plush animal toys for over thirty years, predating the FSF by over a decade. The company recently filed for a trademark of the word GNU and a logo containing a gnu covering all types of soft wares.

The company claimed that the free software foundation has been undermining their business by diluting the trademark and associating it with the word 'free'. With the recent rise in publicity of free software, GNU Soft started getting hundreds of phone calls every day requesting information about free software, including several calls from Fortune 500 companies. ``Our telephone operators just can't deal with this flood of inquiries any more'' said the company spokesman Michael Fitcherston, ``Also, the rumors that we are giving our toys away free has been causing concern among our shareholders. We were forced to sue in order to stay in business''.

The spokesman refused to comment when asked about the rumors of a possible acquisition of GNU Soft by Microsoft. However, he stated firmly that ``There has been no pressure at any point from Microsoft to start a lawsuit. Even though all our computerized soft toys use Windows operating systems, our relationship with Microsoft has always been trouble-free''.

One of the company's major products to date is Lennox the penguin. The spokesman also refused to comment on whether a lawsuit against Linus
Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system was in planning.

In a related story, the Free Software Foundation is reputedly looking into buying Micro Soft, a manufacturer of plush miniature cars, for their trademarks.





Oh, and why give credit where credit is due anymore, either? Originality is the art of concealing your sources... And do I have to post it 8,000,000 times, too, just to be like Mr. M&M AC?

Oh, okay, it's from Segfault, and I'm only posting it once. You can thank me now.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The issue as I see it is whether Microsoft *purposefully broke* compatibility with a competing product. Companies don't do that all the time, mostly it's just Microsoft. By claiming that MS-DOS & MS Windows (now '95/'98) were one product, and bundling them together, Microsoft ruined the market for other DOS variants, and their competing applications. (anyone used Stacker lately?)

And, MS-DOS was a monopoly back then. And it was bundled with the computers back then too. And Microsoft leveraged that to maintain their market dominance. That, and the fact that IBM can't market themselves out of a paper bag, and Apple immediately crushes all good ideas that involve playing well with others. Microsoft is more subtle, and more evil. Never trust people who smile like that... :)

I've used OpenDOS (now DR-DOS again?) before, and it's pretty similar, really. Just another DOS. Some things still work better with MS-DOS, but with a little tweaking, OpenDOS works just as well. *And* it had a command-line multitasker!

Sure, it only multitasked as well as Windows 3.1, but that's a feature I would have *loved* to have had, back in the day. Heck, I wish Windows had that feature today, to transparently switch from text console to text console. That's just one of the many reasons why I'm running Linux now, instead.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Okay, it's pretty neat. Definitely a great first effort. Recording to compressed Qt is way better than recording to individual uncompressed files...

I only wish that I could upgrade to 2.2.14 and get the bttv grabber working better, and get sound captured too. But I think that's really hardware/driver stuff, and not their fault. I also wish I could get full duplex out of my cheesy sound card.... And get a video player that supported some more codecs...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'd love to be able to use my cheap TV card for *something*...

Frankly, the rippers and encoders that I've seen for Linux suck. If this one does any better, I'd be thrilled. I went through hell just to try to make a short MPEG-1 movie clip (from Transformers: The Movie, yay!), and I didn't even manage to get sound. Why? Because the free stuff is hard to figure out, and isn't documented that well. If I knew more about the file format, I could probably tweak it more, but I just wanted to capture a movie!

I'll tell you guys how it works out on my (crappy) system. You really shouldn't do this stuff with IDE drives, and not that much space to boot. I'll probably have better luck once I get a new system.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I admit now that all I read was the first link, another summary.

However, what I read said that he would ask his staff to come up with a proposed set of rules to govern this stuff. Nothing like actually writing up a real standard.

If I'm wrong, then please reply with a little more detail there next time, Mr. Ben Stein.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

If the gov't thinks this process should be moving quicker, why don't they propose a standard, or build a cheaper TV set? I have no respect for those who whine about arbitrary deadlines, without considering the issues.

And what's this about illegally copying cable programs? I thought people have been legally copying them for years. Otherwise, programmable, cable-ready VCRs would be in a legal grey area, right? This sounds about as stupid as the whole "DVD encryption" fiasco.

Oh well, when I get my next computer (hopefully in less than a year) I'll be happy with my built-in DVD-ROM, and hopefully I'll be watching DVD movies on my 17" monitor in a sufficiently righteous resolution. Who needs Digitally Remastered Saved-By-The-Bell-esque crap when you have that?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No way man, if you play it in mono out of the gameboy speaker, I'm sure you could just encode all your mp3's at 32kbps or something. :)

Heck, if we're going to be this silly, why not just make the gameboy processor do the work, and play .au files?

(Oh, you want to use the *headphones*...)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Excellent choice on the part of Time Magazine for Person of the Century. Although it probably isn't very politically correct. Soon, the Weekly World News will run the story: "Time Magazine Says Some People Better Than Others!" Also, shouldn't this be in the News section instead of Science? ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Yo.

The public == In stores == Read my post next time

Later.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Amaya is a cool browser. It doesn't support Frames (they aren't standard, yeah!) and it doesn't read past the closing HTML on a page (cuts off my school's lousy disclaimer, yay!) and it allows me to laugh at people who write bad HTML (ha ha ha ha ha!).

...and if it doesn't do something that you want... why, change the source! Work on Lesstif, port the widgets to GTK, hack in graphics support or something. Or at least don't sit here and whine.

But Amaya has some cool features I'd still like to see in some browsers. Their layout view for webpages when you view source is downright nifty. I never tried compiling it, but did check out the binaries on Solaris. (Lesstif doesn't work?)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Nope, sorry guys, this *is* pure evil.

Patenting the obvious is against everything "innovation" stands for. You couldn't patent putting a link around an image, but suddenly a "click-through banner ad" is different? That's evil.

Or, you use cookies to save someone's information (including their credit card number) so that next time, when they come back, you know who they are. (sounds like Slashdot...) But now you call it "one-click shopping", and suddenly it's a new idea.

I know, I'll write up a patent on a system to keep track of people's inventions, but instead of a patent office, I'll call it "pure evil", and sue the USA and all other companies who use my system...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

First, Windows 2000 *is* the most secure OS that Microsoft has ever shipped. This is a true statement, because they haven't shipped it yet. (Seen it in stores, lately? Didn't think so...)

Second, NT *might* be C2 secure if set up properly, and not hooked up to a network. Otherwise, all bets are off.

In closing, Windows is horribly insecure and badly designed. A secure NT machine is probably running in VMWare under Linux, with all patches installed for both OSes, not connected to the network, in a locked box, and under 1,000 feet of water. A machine is only as secure as it is configured to be...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I often don't like it when journalists try to be cute, but this article was amusing.

I find it sad that no one ever draws the obvious connection, that perhaps kids with a predisposition to or fascination with violent behavior seek out violent games and TV shows. That seems to make the most sense to me.

Remember, guys, Duck Hunt doesn't kill people, angry Lt. Col.'s do. All Duck Hunk encourages is shooting that dog. And you know what? It doesn't work. He still snickers at you!

However: five of the top ten games of 1999 were Pokemon games? That's enough to make me want to shoot someone... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I'll believe it when I see it, but just to check, I load up fox.com. However, now I'm on a windows box.

All I wanted to do was view the source of the page, but this Shockwave stuff loads automatically and I can't stop it with the "Stop" button. Frickin' plug-ins.

"hard-hitting"... "always on"... "FOX.com"... "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down."

Oops. Maybe basic HTML *would* be a better idea. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Well, GNU Ed on my system is about 67k, while pico is 157k. But with gzexe they both compress to at least half their former size.

Still, I've seen the source code for ed, and it's pretty small:

while :;do read x;echo \?;done

Sadly, I know you're joking 'cause the last time I tried to load X in 4MB of RAM it didn't work, even with swap. (4MB total, for everything. I think 6MB might work, but I know 8MB does..) Time to start using stripped down versions of X and Linux...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Nah, man, after reading their review, I'm switching to Slackware! They say it takes up little disk space, but read the specs they post!

4MB RAM, 20MB Disk Space, Kernel 2.2.13, KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment... Why, I bet it even has X! That's great, since the last few reviews I read forgot that Linux had a GUI like Windows. Boy, those Linux people get things done fast. I'm *amazed* they can fit that into just 20MB of Disk Space, and run in 4MB of RAM. On my machine, the Kernel can take up 2MB of RAM by itself, and X can easily take up more than 4MB! (don't even talk to me about GNOME / Enlightenment...)

(for the humor-impaired: maybe it'd be a good idea if they listed numbers for a default install, or a typical install, or whatever, because all the information they put in their "Quick Facts" is not coherent together...)

Wow, those C|Net people *sure* know how to configure their Linux boxes. Bare-bones and Unix like. Wow, who would have thought. I wonder what was so hard to use, did they make the default editor the GNOME version of ed or something? Oh well, it is the standard text editor and all...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I believe that the number of primes grows logarithmically. Fortunately, I found a link, too! :)

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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

First, I'd like to say that this book is probably *not* for the beginner (as in, read one of the other Perl books first, and write in it for a while, I still have to read Learning Perl sometime...)

Second, I'd like to ask why a good, pseudo-code, readable language *isn't* more popular nowadays. There are many books written like this (my Operating Systems text in school, and many of the examples, are written in something that looks like Pascal with support for multiple processes, although I've never seen such a beast) and their code is very readable.

I used to write in Turbo Pascal 7, and I enjoyed writing classes ("objects") with it. All my code was inherently pretty readable, even when I used nasty tricks, unlike my C code (or most Perl code that I've seen). Later, I did convert some of it to C and C++ with p2c and some hacking on my own, but it would be nice to maintain the readable version of the code. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I'm posting this a little late, but I hope you read this. I take offense at your "they aim to create software that even an ADHD child could use" stab. Why don't you rather say "they aim to create software that even a middle-aged adult could use"? Flawed as it is, even that might be more appropriate.

All of the characteristics of ADHD go hand in hand with the same traits that many geeks have. I don't have the slightest interest in many, many subjects, but I can focus intently on a programming task for hours. I did this when I was a child, too, and I could use many, many programs, well designed or not, better than the adults who surrounded me.

So, next time, pick a different, more appropriate group to single out, insult, and pick on, and hope they aren't listening at the time.

And computers are tools. They're for everyone. If you don't know how to use it, don't be surprised when it doesn't work. However, never let your opportunity to learn be taken away from you by people who think you shouldn't know. Like all those poor ADHD kids who can't find what they're looking for because Uncle Tom took away their computer...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Actually, in MkLinux, it looked like the microkernel was unnecessary overhead, and I/O abstraction and bottleneck that slowed it down.

But perhaps if it were designed to use a microkernel from the start, it would look very different.

Either way, there have been variants of Linux that have run under Mach, so there certainly is a microkernel Linux of some sort or another out there. And, since NT is supposed to run under a microkernel too, I think this is just an implementation buzzword until it's done correctly.

We'll see what the HURD will bring, I've learned to expect great things from the FSF, that hopefully will be made useful for mere mortals by the rest of the community. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Actually WINE reimplements a *lot* of API calls. It's kind of scary. I'm surprised that a stripped binary is still as small as 4MB these days. (I remember when it was more like 2MB... *sigh*)

But yeah, you're right on the money there. I think it'd be harder to do for the VMWare people, (and they might have already *tried* to implement some of this) but as it stands my computer swaps on the initial "Checking memory..." stuff from the BIOS, and I don't think it ever frees any of that memory. The benefits would greatly outweigh the cost, IMO...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

You're taking it pretty well, since it's all stupid anyhow. I get it too, for some reason.

I see about a billion AC's in this thread not marked as "Offtopic". I wonder why *you* got moderated down... Hmm.

And, for future reference, guys, my Anonymous posts don't get treated that badly. But I have seen that behavior happen before. Try posting the same thing you would have posted anyhow, anonymously. And see if anyone looks at these silly "comment" things, anyhow. :)

But more people *do* see the logged-in posts, because some people do set their threshold above 0, guys. (I usually set mine to 1, unless I see a lot of "x comments below blah threshold", or I'm really interested in the thread, but lately I've been setting mine to -1, out of moderator mistrust) And if you see a post, and you like it, you might moderate it up.

Also, there is a lot of Anonymous Coward distrust, because they offer *no* way to contact them. They are definitely more admirable when they do. Even a slashdot account is enough, and an e-mail address (anonymous or not) is a nice touch. I distrust Anonymous Cowards because they have no reason to be accountable for what they do or say, and I don't know if I'm talking to the same person. I could post anonymously to myself and make it look like I'm being harassed to get scored up. How messed up is that? If I have a discussion with someone, and I can't see a face, I'd at least like to have a name. But really intelligent commentary will do. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Alright, let me be a little more clear. You're 100% right about what DOSEmu and Wine do (although the DOSEmu people haven't released anything lately, it looks like if they do, they'll be looking into trying to trap more of the protected mode stuff, which is basically just what VMWare does too)

My problem with the RAM is this: 8MB of RAM is perfectly acceptable overhead for VMWare, but the extra 32MB (or whatever) for the virtual machine is not. It should be able to dynamically allocate that RAM, and at least return a page of 0's for any new memory that the virtual machine wants. Otherwise, it should run faster, not both. That is my problem with the RAM.

VMWare *does* *not* emulate an entire i386 machine. (Bochs and SoftWindows do, and they're much slower, for obvious reasons) If it did, they'd release it for Solaris, and make a buttload of money. VMWare *requires* an x86 machine, because it passes through a lot of the x86 assembler instructions. (wherever possible, trapping and emulating protected mode and other nasty stuff the Host OS won't let it mess with)

I don't have a problem with that, I just have a problem with the memory. And another poster commented that they make a "flat" address space that to make it easier for them. Well, that's great, and if it's actually impossible to do it well any other way, I guess we'll have to live with that. But it is an issue, and I'm not convinced that it has to be that way, yet. (I guess they'd try to do it the other way if possible. I'm sure they had their reasons, but I'll spend my time rooting for someone to implement it in DOSEmu or even FreeMWare...)

Other stuff to mention about DOSEmu and Wine:

DOSEmu has pretty video support and some initial sound support, which is cool. If Bochs was also GPL (I don't think that'll happen, but...) the two projects could merge / share code, and DOSEmu could fix their video and maybe add a little sound, while Bochs could emulate all that DOSEmu lacks, and make something fast that uses less RAM than VMWare. At least, that would be the goal. I guess DOSEmu could share code with FreeMWare, but I haven't checked the licensing.

Wine is just like the old WABI project, except it supports a lot of new stuff. However, currently it has moved away from getting the old Win 3.1 features perfect--which is okay--and focusing more on the current new features that people need for their personal "killer apps", which makes some good sense (they can't do it *all*, but it's great to see help from Corel). Also, Wine doesn't need an existing Windows installation. In that respect, they've done a lot of work, *more* than VMWare, since they've literally had to reimplement the Windows API. You said that, but I argue that that's *much* more work than even reimplementing the x86 at a low level, IMO, just due to its sheer size. (and they did some of that, too, there's interrupt code and minimal console output in Wine. (for instance, it runs PKZIP, because it has to. :)

I think that both Wine and DOSEmu have code from the TWIN project to completely emulate an x86, and they're both attempting to merge that in for cross-platform support. But we'll see if anything happens with that.

But yes, these are all 'emulation' or reimplementations in some way or another, and they are different. But they all accomplish many of the same goals, and therefore I thought it appropriate to make a comparison. Thank you for explicitly pointing out the major differences, though, you saved me some commenting. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Won't it just wander until it hits a power of two and then terminate?

I'm sure a formal proof would be much harder, but... that one isn't very complicated.

(if you did it backwards and described the formula you used to get that number, starting with one, it'd start getting interesting, though... Hmm.)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

You know that the NWO spells trouble...

No, but my friends who watch wrasslin' sure do. Pass me a beer, guys.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Lemme look. Yep, here it is.

Don't go bashing them too much, that was pretty easy to find with the "Search" function. Usually they try to put related links in that extra box at the top, next to the story. CmdrTaco's take on reposting old stories (by mistake, this one wasn't a mistake, just an issue that Roblimo thought should be discussed again, maybe too soon...) is that there are too many stories and submissions to wade through (His estimate in Thoughts From The Furnace was around 9000)

However, if a simple search function to find old articles about the (exact) same topic before posting a new one was implemented correctly, it would be very nice. It would eliminate all of the "Didn't we already see this on Slashdot" posts, as you were saying, it could add a link to the archived version going to the new article if needed, and definitely add a link to the new article back to the old one, to let people know that we are discussing this again for a reason. And it would eliminate all posts like your own, because the problem would be solved, the new feature added, and everyone would be happy. Except for the dude who had to implement it (but he'll probably be inordinately proud of it once he's done, so that's okay). :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I've used VMWare, and it does an excellent job of emulating an x86 environment, with better compatibility than Wine, DOSEmu, or just about anything else. That's impressive.

However, for whatever reason, it needs a lot more RAM. It has to physically allocate however much RAM you tell it to use for the emulated OS, in my case 32MB for Win '98, and then it uses at least another 8MB for its devices and itself, and somewhere in there my 64MB K6/300 decides that it hates life and gets really slow... That's why they recommend at least 128MB RAM. DOSEmu, by contrast, never uses as much RAM as I tell it it can use unless it absolutely has to. Usually I give it 8MB, but when I wanted to run Callus, I gave it 20MB. Worked great, except for lacking sound. Wine generally uses 4MB above and beyond the memory usage of the Windows app, in my experience. (these numbers are all pretty rough, if you've tested this more, please post some results)

Also, I didn't like it that VMWare didn't support more options for an x86 drive. I have a lot of ext2 partitions that I use for my DOS stuff, and DOSEmu and Wine deal with that just fine. I guess I could make some native FAT partitions, but those things are nasty. And compressed drives really are a hack, but I might do that again instead. So I've got a big file where VMWare keeps its 'OS'.

And, when all is said and done, what good is it? Well, I've found that I don't really have much of a use for Win '98, and I can run a lot of other stuff with DOSEmu or Wine. Just about the only thing I'd want VMWare for would be displaying videos with proprietary, unsupported codecs, since XAnim is missing a lot of them and the companies are pretty lame about it.

So why would I want FreeMWare? Well, to play around with it. To be able to compile it with my compiler optimizations and see how it runs. (even if the VMWare team does something like this... well, I don't know about it, and I can't test it)

To see if someone hacks in ext2 support or some kind of generic drive emulation that works well. (have the IDE/SCSI faking area, or use Linux's SCSI faking, and then have the actual drive, whether it's a disk file, a FAT partition, a DOSEmu drive, a VMWare drive, or an ext2 partition...)

I'd like to see it without the weird video corruption I get with VMWare (although my video card does suck :).

And then I'll have to test out how the native sound works in DOS, that's a must for my DOS games. And then benchmark against DOSEmu. :)

Of course, first I'd like to know how it's doing now. Has anyone built the source from CVS? I normally just download the releases, but the warning on this one indicated it was anything but stable.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Wouldn't that be legalized *cracking*?

Someone teach the Australian gov't how to hack, so they can play nice with everyone again...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

You're not a karma whore, my man, you have no karma.

Looked at anyone's karma lately? Try looking at mine.

These aren't the karma whores you're looking for...

Now can we all just *try* to grow up? Please?
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Looks like elm is still safe, for the foreseeable future. :P
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

There are three programs on here that got A1 ratings!

Isn't that where you need to mathematically prove your program is secure?

(or can you just bribe them with the steak sauce?)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I had a book of stuff like this, called "The Trenton Pickle Ordinance".

A lot of it is either really old, or just have stupid mistakes in wording. Like the one where the two trains stop at a crossroads, "and neither shall go until the other has passed". Deadlock! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I wish I were wrong on this one.

But if you look, you'll see many people admitting that they prefer IE to
Netscape, for whatever reason. I don't get it yet, but maybe I missed
something. I guess if IE were on Unix, maybe it wouldn't crash the whole
operating system when it went down...

However, if it makes you feel any better, I'm browsing in w3m, because
it supports letting me write this in my favorite text editor. :)

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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

:) That doesn't surprise me one bit.

"IE for Unix" also only ran on specific versions of Solaris.

Not just 2.51 and up, but also with specific kernel patches for different
SPARCs... It was really sick, and I'm not sick enough to try to get that
to work. And that sounds like the same mess on HP/UX. Ugh.

However, even if you did get it to work, it still sucked.
Better luck emulating an x86 entirely in software.

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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Pick on whomever you want. I will still defend *that* statement.

Why do we have Word Macro Viruses? I've mentioned it before. It's a
simple, obvious security hole that Microsoft has never properly addressed.
It's entirely their fault. Name me another Macro Scripting Language
built into a word processor that can format my hard drive and spread
itself over e-mail. That's like making a typewriter that can blow up a
house, it's completely absurd!

Of course, the pitiful lack of security features in Windows '95/'98 only
perpetuates this, but that is another good example. Why is it so
difficult to secure a regular Windows box? I've mentioned this too.
There are many, many ways to hack them, and it's very hard to disable all
of them without losing all functionality.

Microsoft will release patches for specific things that they eventually
admit are bugs, or think will get too much time in the press otherwise.
But they don't fix anything if they don't have to, and the whole process
is akin to using band-aids to plug leaks in a dam.

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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

US and THEM? I could just listen to Pink Floyd for that... :)

But yes, I realise that /. is a community. And when I say that I don't
know why something is posted, that would be ME saying that. And if other
people agree with me, well, that would be US... I'm sure that for every
article, some people agree and some people don't. In this one, though,
you might find that the numbers are a bit closer than you might like.

...and I think I've already sufficiently explained in my previous posts
examples of deaths that would go unquestioned by the /. "US" Collective,
so I won't reiterate them. I don't think that this one is that obvious.
If you do, well, I guess this article was definitely for you.

Other issues you do not consider are: who is posting this, the fact that
a major news franchise already picked up the story and is bombarding
the public with it, the fact that when this story was chosen, the other
big story was *much* more nerd-relevant, (The Mars Lander, fortunately
Roblimo eventually noticed *that* one, it was CNN's top story when he was
busy posting this) the fact that this was posted under Film, which
traditionally discusses movie reviews, or *occasionally* technology in
film, but never obituaries, to my knowledge, and even that Roblimo
*said* in the beginning, "perhaps not news for all nerds"... What can
I say, the films mentioned were about 4 years before my birth, and I
haven't gotten to see them yet. I generally like Mel Brooks movies, and
I'd definitely perk up if Mel Brooks died, but apparently this was a long
time ago...

So, for many reasons, when this story was posted, a lot of people did not
find it relevant. I was also expressing that. Fair enough? I don't
usually see obituaries on slashdot, if I do, I generally say "Who died?",
and if I don't know who it is, I start to wonder, I guess it wasn't Knuth.

I know this isn't my site exclusively, and all I can say is, if it were, I
wouldn't have ever dreamed that this would make it as news. Maybe on a
different site, but not slashdot. I remember when Rob had to apologize
for even *having* Film as a category. But maybe I've just been here too
long, and need to find a different "News For Nerds" site, eh?

Maybe we can finally register

"BackSlashDot
News For Disgruntled 31337 Nerds,
Stuff That Doesn't Suck",

But I'd rather that never happen.

And that's all. If you have any further, non-rhetorical points, please
e-mail them to me, or look at my user bio to see where else you can respond.

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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

My god, I'm impressed.

Which versions of IE and NT? (and please tell me you don't have ActiveDesktop installed)

We generally have NT either crash or become unusable after a maximum of 30 days or so, due to memory leaks. This would happen a lot faster on my machine, because once I'm using more virtual memory than I have physical memory (and I have 64MB, those machines have at least 128MB) and I'm not doing anything, I'd worry.

These memory leaks *might* be in other applications, but I'd like to know what application can make the *kernel* leak that much memory (and not recover it), because I've seen it bloat up to 50MB before.

We only get the occasional BSOD on NT, but this certainly happens often enough that these machines would never go for even months without a crash, and would need reboots much more frequently.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Well, *they* call it "for Unix", not me. And for the record, it 'runs' on Solaris and HP/UX. I've only used the Solaris version.

It doesn't work well on either one at least partially because they ported it with Mainwin. Maybe if they'd used (and developed!) Wine it would run about the same under Linux when recompiled, but to run on non-x86 platforms, they had to use some funky, proprietary stuff, and do some extra special Microsoft tweaking so that it would stay broken.

And, when all is said and done, it's IE. If it were a perfect port, it would look and act like the Windows version. And a lot of people on slashdot would apparently like that very much. Your "winix" argument is completely based on personal taste. I agree with you about that a lot of the time, but realize that most people don't, even a lot of people on slashdot.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.