Slashdot Mirror

:) I agree. I was thinking the same thing.

But I figured the only way I could intelligently comment on the content would be by listening to it, and commenting on it, since there isn't a transcript.

But, some of my comments weren't just rehashes of the article, and some of their comments were somewhat funny (but not for long :)...

I also hadn't listened to one of these before, so I figured I'd give it a try.

Frankly, if I wanted to hear a bunch of nerds talking about slashdot, I could go to the lab. But of course this is a special bunch. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I wish I were reading a transcript. It wouldn't waste as much time, eh? :)

CmdrTaco, Hemos, CowboyNeal, and Nate...
Talking about stuff posted on slashdot? What nerds! :)
Oh well, at least they're warez dudes at heart, eh? Burn your DVD's onto CD-R's, d00d...

Remote control robotic snakes? That's out there too... So they're cheap, but no one will want them, eh? Good improv fake snake charming music and sound effects there...

"The Internet as an Ecosystem"... Ooo, animated internet traffic stuff. Of *course* it has "organic" properties. You're looking at a lot of humans doing stuff. Surprise.

The stupid Amazon patent. Umm... go to technocrat.net, d00d. I'm waiting for no-click shopping. Make them press "Enter". :)

I guess this would be pretty cool if we were all listening to it earlier, eh? It *is* nice to hear the posters yammering about this, for the novelty of it, I guess, but... well, that's about it.

Hmm. I got cut off somewhere around wireless modem/ghosting. And that was actually sounding interesting. Oh well. A waste of 15 minutes, but all in all better than television. (What, I was missing Pokemon? Ahhh!)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I don't think you could have missed it. It was right there along with the Mars Polar Explorer, which might be missing.

I did a little research to see what I missed, and it looks like most of the best stuff she did was 25 years ago. Perhaps the generation gap is at work here.

For what it's worth, I loved Paper Moon. But I don't think I would have recognized her from that. And I still don't think it's enough to warrant a slashdot story, especially when it's already plastered over all the major media.

Also, our "whining" is not off-topic. I think that questioning the validity of a story, especially when there are other more suitable stories available, is always rather ON topic. (I mean, if the story *is* the topic, and it isn't a very good one considering the audience, isn't that an issue?

If Douglas Adams, Weird Al, or Eric Idle (probably in that order) died, I might be surprised if it didn't show up on slashdot. But this? Sorry I didn't watch the Cosby show, or whatever, dude.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I completely agree. This is beyond my simple nerd-movie knowledge. I guess I expect the film category to be the standard "popular film review" that it always has been, which we accept provided it's a film for nerds that we might want to see. (The Matrix Roolz D00d! Something like that.)

I don't think "celebrity obituary" really counts. And I didn't even recognize this one. Even if you had said Gilda Radner, back in the day, I would have said "Oh yeah", and then looked at you, puzzled, saying "Why is this in Byte?" :)

So. Note to slashdot. I'll handle the movie stars. Just let me know if DMR, RMS, ESR, or any hacker with a three-letter name dies.

Or Natalie Portman, otherwise grits-boy would freak. ;)

(I would be PDB if I ever got famous. But since I'm pb now, thanks to slk, I'll never be famous, but he might be! Oh, the agony! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I'll say. HOT PINK? That's unnatural!

I'm not nearly stupid enough to try to run, say, WIndows, or a web browser in my retina. But I guess some people would be.

And I really wouldn't like it if someone asked me to sort a list of numbers and put them in a table, and I found myself inexplicably saying "Missing VBRUN200.DLL".... ;)

Oh man, cute BorgBSD stab. (or is that *Borg? hmm. I can't picture a Demonic borg, but a Penguin borg would be freaky.)

Borger King.
We do it our way.
Your way is irrelevant.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Netscape hasn't really released anything new. I haven't played with the CSS/XML stuff, because I fear my web programming is still stuck in '94 or '95. (I'm glad tables are standardized now. :)

Microsoft tends to ignore security holes whenever possible. That scares the crap out of me.

Remember that traitor streak, because most of us have it when it comes to free (beer) software. Heck, that's why I switched to Netscape in the first place, it was far cooler than Mosaic.

(stupid title bar and background color flashing tricks, the blink tag, and the invention of background pictures aside, allowing inline JPEGs was a beautiful thing, so I forgive them. :) )

However, when I tried IE... well, it sucked, and it annoyed the crap out of me. But I haven't tried it in a while, and the only new feature I *really* like from it is the fullscreen option. But that's just because Word and PowerPoint annoys the crap out of me more, so I'm happy to write papers and presentations in HTML if I have to.

(at least web browsers support using JPEG files without converting them to binary bitmap-looking crap and wasting 20 times the disk space, and my text editor doesn't highlight random words because it thinks they look funny, and then try to talk to me about it...)

Hmm. Interesting FUD.

I, personally, abandon a company when they break trust. Therefore, on that scale:

Microsoft & Apple: both bad, by betraying their customers and backstabbing their partners.

IBM: generally pretty good. Lumbering and clueless, but not really mean, AFAICT.

RedHat: much better. They flirted with proprietary software until they realized how much it sucked, and now they've done a good job of promoting open source, and not really screwing up (like Caldera did, or now Corel).

Caldera: I don't trust them, and I never have. They seem to have an axe to grind, and I have a feeling that given the chance, they'd try to be another Microsoft. But, we'll see. I've heard good things about their Linux distribution. (except for the commercial (closed source?) add-ons)

Corel: Either they mean well, or their strategy coincides with 'ours' briefly. It's great to see them funnelling development into Wine, I can't believe how much it's advanced lately. I just wish I used Windows enough to test it better. :)

These are, as always, my opinions, and if you have any facts to challenge my assumptions with, present them. I am, especially on this topic, rather interested to hear it.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

What do you find to be slow about it?

Its rendering seems pretty snappy, to me. Other stuff is less reliable. But table-intensive stuff in slashdot is a lot sweeter in Mozilla than it is in Netscape.

I'm not sure if I like the new progressive rendering feature, though. I'd like to have more meaningful options in my web browser. Being able to set different levels of HTML standard compliance would be nice, or being able to pick and choose tags (and JavaScript stuff, too, I hate stupid popups, and would love to filter some of them out...) to allow or deny would be way cool.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I agree. Ever use IE? Windows?

Ever stop to think that Mozilla is alpha-level software, and therefore should be about as consistent as a bad random number generator, until the beta release?

(which is, by the way, why they can't release it as Netscape 5.0 anytime soon...)

Now let's look through, and see who marks their software correctly:

Wine: alpha level. Yep, lots of stuff doesn't work.

Dosemu: beta level. Ok, it's impressive how much they got to work. About as good as a DOS box in NT, but certainly not perfect.

Windows 3.0,3.1,'95,'98: gold. Not even close! Let me know when you implement *libraries* properly. (waiting for Windows 2000, I suppose)

IE 4.0 or 5.0 for UNIX: gold. Oh god, it's worse than alpha! It doesn't usually load on Solaris, in my experience. Microsoft's web site claims that *Solaris* needs random kernel patches, and that it's not MS's fault. Heh. Heh. Really, we couldn't code around this. Frickin' bad Windows-emulating porting software. IE runs more reliably under SoftWindows--or even Wine, where possible.

Netscape 4.7 for Unix: gold. Not really. It still crashes sometimes, can leak memory, and table rendering needs some work. But it's pretty solid. Definitely better than your average beta.

Anyhow, the point *is* having something that works. That's why they're still working on it, pushed back the date, and don't claim that it's anything it isn't advertised as... It's fast, nifty looking, and not yet stable. But compare this with claiming it has features it lacks, and it looks much nicer.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Excellent! I'm impressed.

All you did was use high-ASCII for A,E,O,S, and Y (and the pipe for I?), but that looks really neet! Mind if I steal that for my lex scripts?
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

A lot of people have missed this, but if you look at the link in the other article, the chip doesn't stay in.

It isn't some kind of artificial vision replacement. Rather, AFAICT, it just stimulates the nerves to the point where they remember how to see again. Then the chip is removed.

Sorry. No Star Trek story here. You can go.

(however, the Star Trek technology might be next. I seem to remember a story about constructing an image by reading the neurons in a cat, or something. It worked, but the picture was lower res.

I think it'd be awesome if I could replace or add, say, a thermal view of my surroundings, or a clock... It'd involve being able to add, replace or superimpose "images" in the stream of data from the eyes to the brain. Of course, goggles would be a *lot* easier. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Right, I agree, that is still a useful resource.

However, then another key point to stress is advocacy. And I could repeat that hundreds of times on slashdot, and still not get the message across. :)

I will write things that are anti-MS, (I have a "Microsoft Sucks" page on my web pages :) but I also remember to state my point of view, try to explain *why* I've come to these conclusions, and post comments, if I get them.

It's also pretty funny when MS tries to fight the truth with propaganda. It shows their point of view very clearly. The "Linux Myths" page was a good one, but I think my favorite is probably this one:

"The macro functionality of Microsoft Office applications provides a
programming environment that allows customers and developers to extend the functionality of Office. However, malicious hackers have recently taken advantage of this macro functionality to create these harmful viruses. "

Come on! Hardly anyone in the media really has the balls to say how much Microsoft screwed up on this one. There should be a class-action suit against them just for this, for *creating* an entire category of viruses by not providing appropriate security measures. Sun never screwed up this much with Java, and that's a programming language built into a web browser. This is a frickin' word processor! Why can it format my hard drive? It's like if Emacs' E-Lisp had a built-in "root shell" feature in case you needed one, and the solution proposed was "Oh, just turn off E-Lisp if you think it might be dangerous..."

But, enough ranting. Sometimes it seems that Byte was the only magazine that *did* have the balls to say what they thought. It's a shame that we don't even have that anymore.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

At least they're admitting their bias here.

This won't help for directly combatting FUD, because those most susceptible to it are also those who don't know
the difference. The marketdroids are pretty firmly entrenched in most of the trade rags, although the web news
sites have been much more savvy lately (probably because of their readership :) and even the magazines have gotten
better. (But I still want Byte back! They are coming back, right?)

However, one should not be too quick to blow the whistle or jump to the wrong conclusions. (c.f. the Mindcraft
Fiasco. Sure, the tests were biased and unrealistic, but that doesn't mean that there weren't also limitations
in Linux w.r.t. what they were testing.)

Anyhow, it should be interesting to see what they put up here...

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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

To the guy who tried to do this down below:
sed s/\ \ /'\ \&'nbsp\;/g

------ ----- ---- --- -------
| | | \ / \ |
| | | / \ |
|-- | ---- --- |
| | | \ \ |
| | | \ / |
| ----- - \ \--- -

---- --- --- ------- !!!
| \ / \ / \ | !!!
| / | | \ | !!!
|--- | | --- | !!!
| | | \ | !
| \ / / |
| --- \--- | O
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Yeah. Lots. And it doesn't translate backwards properly, either.

@ = A
0 = O
+ = T
Z = S

... and many others. And once you start using DOS high ASCII, ASCII art letters, or ANSI, you're really incomprehensible. :)

________________ __
|//_\|\|\ / //\ /_
/_\_/|\|//_//_//_

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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I always use lex and other useful tools to generate my elite speak. Of course, my scripts could use some updating. Get the b1ff filter, and have fun from there. I also do simple character replacement, and random letter capitalization. I'm sure this could all be unified, redone in perl, or whatever your little heart desires as well.

Or, alternatively:

i @lwAYz u5e LEX + OtHuR kool +oolz tO GeNur8 my elI+E zPE@k, Of cOuRzE, MY zKr1P+z CouLD u5e 5uM uPdAtINg! Get tHe B1fF FILtuR, + gOt FuN fruM +hEY'RE. 1 Al5O DO 5iMpLe ch@RAc+uR RepLACument, + r@nDom lettuR CApIt@L1z@zhun. Im 5Hur th15 COuld AL B uNIF1ed, RedONE iN PurL, or wu+EVuR uR Lit+lE hERe+ DEz1Rez Az wEL


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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

You're obviously not doing it right. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Yeah, Itanium is pretty stupid.

Inprise was so bad that Borland *did* change it back, actually. And I'm glad, that was a really dumb idea.

If Borland wasn't floundering, I'm surprised they wouldn't *sue* TurboLinux for diluting their trademark or whatever. The "Turbo" brand of product has traditionally been Borland's, just as "Quick" was Microsoft's. But I guess that went out with the 80's, to be replaced by these new meaningless names.

Heh heh, I hadn't heard about the k-rad k001 fonikz namez yet. That's funny. +He 31337 DooDz gE+ 2 m@KE CoRPor@5Hunz, and stuff.

If you're going to bash all of the meta names, why not Transmeta? (which is actually pretty cool, as "meta" names go...) I think it's funny that if you put meta in your name, it ends up meaning "more vague", as far as I'm concerned. :)

My lamest name: Traf-O-Data, Bill Gates' first company. Definitely worse than the original Micro-Soft.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Civ:CTP, Heroes III, Q3A... Ahh, heaven.

Now if only I could get Ultima IX, Final Fantasy VIII, anything else with cool roman numerals, or Gauntlet: Legends, along with a kickass box to play them on...

Incidentally, if they keep this up, maybe this will become standard. Loki seems to port games very quickly, and if the games used SDL in the first place, it'd be even quicker...

(of course Quake is the exception, id has always written games with cross-platform support in mind. Amazing, really.)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Yeah. I know. There was a bug.

Look at #4, #6, #7, etc.

Hopefully it's been fixed... at least temporarily.

Time to open the (rest of the) source for slash, it's already pretty fast for some things, but it has some weird bugs...

Incidentally, slashdot *does* pump out html at a frighteningly fast rate, that isn't the bottleneck. I don't know what we can do about the image server, though. At least it's somewhat better now.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Yep. My machine is setup like so:

I allow Ctrl-Alt-Del, 'cause I'm generally the only one here, but it's easily disabled in /etc/inittab.

However, the other flaw you mentioned, the boot disk, is a PC hardware/BIOS issue, not a Linux one:

I do not allow booting from floppies, or anything but the hard drive, and I have a password on my BIOS setup. That is the correct way to secure an x86 machine, configure that in your BIOS.

Do this also with your Windows machines, etc., since you could just as easily reboot a Windows machine and insert a Linux boot disk. (I've done this before, to mount NTFS and stuff... :)

Of course, if you have physical access to any machine for long enough, it's compromised. There are BIOS password cracking/bypassing programs available for some BIOSes (at least there were, for DOS)

Past that you can always take out the hard drive, or insert another one as the first hard drive... This should work, x86 or not! (assuming you can get to the case, and open it. Locked cabinet, anyone?)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Get dadadodo (from jwz's page) and download some Katz stories. I've done just that a couple of times. The results are incomprehensible gibberish, but... well, what else is new? :)

He meant to be built the responses, between white and he said it seems
to browse but strangely, it may be young age: of geeks and revealing
for some prescient and the level visually and others who spot dangerous
movies and the New Era. As I just we expect hope it's the development
that. A Tomorrowland to design, and thought, with other: words; I've
come. If these parks are destroyed; once government announced it;
possible: for the rest Bible. Another nightmare, grisly Columbine
legacy; of Berners Lee has identified, and stock options, and Millenial
blabber about the Apple unveiled it a in its public or useless debate
under the computing trade offs.

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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

No, sorry, it's actually much worse.

Win '98 doesn't really have administrative accounts. Accounts are all wrong. They might have some "Policies and profiles" stuff, but that's pretty flawed too. I routinely get around Windows "security", and even that usually involves continually taking out OS "features", until there isn't anything usable left.

I'd be happy to discuss this with anyone. The effort required to really secure a Win '95/'98 box generally isn't worth it, which is why Microsoft sells NT. (not that that's *so* much better, it has its own problems. :)

Simple exploits:

F5 or F8 to bypass or mess with boot sequence. Good to disable this, and put a BIOS password on your computer.

Ctrl-Esc before you're logged in: can still bring up the Task Manager!

Cancel the log in, if it asks you for one. Often still brings up Windows.

Ctrl-Alt-Del. 'nuff said.

On a "locked-down" Windows box, try to get a command prompt or shell window, so as to execute the commands you want to use. Alt-F3, I think, will often still bring up "Find". See if they disabled "Run", "My Computer", etc.

If you can get to a web browser, set--say--the app for telnet to C:\COMMAND.COM. :)

If you can get Macros running, in Word or Excel, I think SHELL("C:\COMMAND.COM") works in Word Basic, but you can look up the SHELL command in the help.

Originally, you could just shut down Windows '95, and then type in DOS commands--it just dropped you to a prompt, and left you in graphics mode, saying "It is now safe to shutdown your computer"! You could type in, say, "MODE CO80", get back to text mode, and play in DOS from there...

These are just the pretty obvious ones, of course there are more interesting ways to hack Windows, like copying/editing binaries to run other programs, this sometimes gets around that Policies & Profiles crap...

On UNIX:

Login:
Password:

Damn damn damn damn damn! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Sent with what? Any intermediate servers?

Where's "Intercept stupid ICMP broadcast", "Spoof IP address", "Fake silly chat client account",
"Use silly X-Files satellite to intercept / read message", "divine message with psychic help", "brute-force guess the message (no, really! You might not recognize it when you find it, though...)"...

Or my favorite: preemptively crash Windows '95 computers. No messages sent, no problem!
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Are people being scored up for bad posts now? Is this what slashdot has become? Or should we just expect this in an article about skript kiddiez... Someone mentioned this bug the other day, but I hoped that they were kidding.

Anyhow, the article looks somewhat interesting in an *yawn* academic way, but I don't think it's really that new. However, Dr. Dobb's traditionally has cool stuff in it...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I think Lunix was for the C64, actually.

Definitely a different Unix. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I'm not on crack, sorry, fresh out.

I don't like Java, I like it perhaps less than you do. But I'm talking about perceived reality here, not as you or I perceive it, but as Microsoft's customers would. People are learning Java, schools are teaching it, and businesses are implementing it. What do you think is going to happen? We'll probably be stuck with it for a while.

Also, you *can* do some really impressive stuff in Java. Anything you could do on a 386 in assembler, you should be able to do at least equally fast in Java. And that looks really cool in a web browser. You shouldn't need more speed than that for a decent word processor, or a cool graphics demo. And if you do, if you want something really cutting-edge, don't write it in Java for at least a few years. :)

GTK is not nearly platform independent, unless you the developer compile it on all the platforms and statically link it. That might be the best idea since it differs enough from version to version (minor versions!) to break a lot of code. I like GTK, but I think I'll wait until it's a bit more stable.

Lots of people use Java apps on a daily basis, not usually Office suites or web browsers (for obvious reasons), but often communications applications. I know a lot of people who use Java versions of AIM or ICQ simply because it's easier and takes up less disk space than trying to install the real version. Of course, we could all just use byte-compiled LISP in Emacs, but it doesn't look as pretty. :)

Feel free to use what works, I do too, and it generally isn't C++ if I can help it (or at least not anything that uses iostream, it's slow and ugly!). I like C better, and assembler when I can. But I bet you I'll still be writing C++ and Java in the years to come, regardless.

And there *are* supposed to be some pretty good IDEs for Linux, but I haven't tried them. I know a lot of people who use Visual Slickedit, but of course that's a commercial product, as is CodeWarrior. I also haven't tried CodeForge. I like RHIDE (it's just like the old TurboVision-based Borland editors, yay!) but it isn't that stable or actively developed on Linux, AFAICT... So I end up using pico, and grep, and stuff. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Oh, I didn't forget, far from it.

But I still think they've always sucked at it. :)

They got in early, and therefore didn't have enough competition for BASIC implementations, but Borland kicked a lot of ass, technically speaking, and dominated at least Pascal and C for a while. And then there was Watcom, and many other C compilers better than Microsoft's. Microsoft had to leverage their Windows dominance to get people to use their compilers again.

In 1982, Microsoft was profiting on providing software for an open hardware platfrom, once that got saturated they got complacent and greedy. Somewhere around MS-DOS 5.0, IMO. (4.x sucked horribly, just like everything before 3.0, but everything after 5.0 was a minor upgrade for too much money, which is all MS does with their OSes anymore, these days, too.)

If it weren't for IBM, no one would have *bought* the PC. In retrospect, it really sucked. My Commodore 64 had far superior graphics and sound, it took the PC years to catch up. (until they had EGA and soundcards, when it was debatably about equal) And by then, the Amiga was better, too. But somehow we ended up in this current state of affairs, because MS can market and bully better than IBM could, and that apparently makes some people's decisions for them.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

If this is a sign of the "evolution" of the web, then mommy I'm scared, take me back to my nice cozy porn sites and away from people like this.

However, that was pretty funny. :)

Just remember folks, natural selection. The Shakers died, not because they were bad people, but because they didn't want to have sex. Ergo, no next generation of Shakers. The same would happen with this, guy if he's serious. But I hope he isn't, because I don't think I could handle that many anonymous cowards.

Natural selection on the web would mean, I suppose, getting your page viewed and keeping it online. The goal here would be to be popular, and there are many strategies for that, my favorite is making a *useful* page...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I'd rather have Sun attempt to tell me why, thanks, but don't tell me you can't find a good Java VM. There are tons of those little suckers! It would be nice if Sun really did open the source to something (especially Java) to show support for open source and more importantly open standards. But they want to control the standards, and I think that will be their downfall. Heck, we can't even handle standards for a simple, fake markup language like HTML.

Perl and Python can be ported by independent parties that show the interest to do so, instead of depending on one central company. But at least the spec for Java is open...

I agree, I tend to use C and shell script myself, and it's pretty handy. I don't really like python or tcl, and perl syntactically annoys the piss out of me, but eventually I'll either find or come up with a fast scripting language that I like, or just stick to C.

I admit that object hierarchies have to be very carefully designed. I think objects are C++ and Java's way of letting you shoot yourself in the foot, when C only had pointers for that. However, this doesn't mean that pointers and objects aren't useful. Rather, the programmer must be more careful in the "design" phase. Which doesn't happen often, if we can help it. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I completely agree with you, since I wrote in Turbo Pascal 7, which supports classes and whatnot, for way too long. (and there's definitely some Ada resemblance there)

However, hype never stopped Microsoft from selling a product before. To the contrary, they seem to thrive on it. Hence, why not sell people what they think they want, instead of spending time and effort to make them think they want something else?

Judging by their past history, I would much more easily believe that this is due to the rivalry between Microsoft and Sun rather than any integrity on Microsoft's part. But, I'm willing to wait a couple of years, and see if they can prove me wrong. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Explain thyself, Coward.

I don't like Java either, but what do you mean, it isn't portable?

I think its performance bites too, but I'm comparing it to C. Compared to Python, Java looks like a speed freak.

And object-orientation has been the trend in language design, at least officially, for a while. It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it's been really proven yet. I've used it to my advantage before, but it doesn't really do anything that can't be done without an object-oriented language.

Your post made a lot of sense until I read your "preemptive return-volley", so consider just posting the message next time. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Microsoft has always tried to be in the language business, no matter how much they suck at it. So I, for one, don't know what they're doing here. Java is definitely the language of the future. Everyone is trying to use it on the Web and decide what to do with it (they changed the introductory CS classes at my school to use it, just recently, but what do I care, the upper level classes use C because it works :) and I can't believe that Microsoft wouldn't want to profit from that. I doubt they're admitting defeat, so either they have some other arrangement with this company, or they'll be releasing something new, and hopefully better.

The article seems to imply that they're competing by using XML as some kind of glue language, to work with COM and other stuff. But that isn't the same thing at all. Of course, Microsoft is trying to subvert open standards, but this is a separate example, and will not help them with the popularity of Java. I guess I'll have to wait and see what they release...

Of course, in a couple of years, we might not be on the x86 anymore, toto. And if any of these proposed future chips execute Java bytecodes at hardware-lookin' speeds, watch out, Microsoft! :)

(Insert Beowulf, Transmeta, Java/XML/C-- comment here :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I don't think that Rob or Katz were trying to skew our world view there, my man. I'm willing to bet that the only point Katz was trying to make is that once the millenium is over, the hype surrounding it will be over, and we won't have to suffer through bad millenial/end-of-world movies for a while. I'm not this optimistic, but we'll see. This one happened to use Christianity as a crutch, and apparently Katz didn't find that to be particularly realistic either, so relax.

I'm an Atheist, but I'd love to see more movies like The Prophecy, and I personally find the subject fascinating, much in the way I like Science Fiction or Fantasy. And I find myself agreeing with you on a lot of your points, (I saw a silly "Christian" rag yesterday espousing the "Jesus was fully God and fully man, but worthy of salvation as we are not, but will save us from our sins"... etc., etc., and I find evolution, genetics, dark matter, pokemon and invisible pink elephants much easier to believe in than that) so it's good to see a Christian trying to incorporate reason into theology. (St. Augustine did that too, and he also had some pretty liberal views about the world... I'm actually surprised he made it as a saint, considering.)

The Christian doctrine is more complex than most Christians give it credit for. I'm not convinced as to its internal consistency, and I hope it's not as complex as St. Augustine found it, because then, if I were concerned by it, I would have given up and started a simpler religion... And this has happened many times in Christianity, but I don't know if anyone has gotten it right. (I personally would side with the Unitarian Universalists, but that's not very Christian, except as Christian means Christ-like, respecting people, etc.)

And I think the real problem here is that *Hollywood* is confining their view of Christianity to "Jesus comes in y2k", much like they confine their view of hacking to "this video game controls the security system". And Katz is saying that after y2k, Hollywood won't have an excuse to drag out this tired old plot.

(of course, if they did some research, they could. Even if they continued their base-10, 2000 years obsession, they could observe that the date of Jesus' birth is widely disputed, (of course, this means that 2000 years has come and gone, better pick 2222 years or something, and do another Fifth Element-like movie! Yay!) or count from an event in a different calendar for whatever reason (that would make much more sense).
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I knew apple had gone over to the dark side a long time ago, but this is still ridiculous...

For those of you worried about software bloat, side effects, etc., etc.: shut up! This is only an issue if you can't code well in the first place. As long as you have a simple, well-written, 'credits scrolly' type module, all it does is take up disk space until it is executed. Therefore, no real extra bloat (oh no, it calls a library function...) and no side effects. And geez, if you can't figure out how to compress a *text* file, go to jail, do not download mini-lzo, do not write a credits scrolly...

If Jobs had told Woz this back in the day, do you think there would even *be* an Apple? Of course, Hertzfeld had to fight to get the frickin' puzzle game in, so what do we expect...

(incidentally, the article I linked to has a *real* list of hacking feats. I'm gonna have to save that page...)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Run it under Wine. Last I checked, I could get IE 3.0 for Win 3.1 to run under Wine. I can't get IE 4.0 or 5.0 to install with the stupid network installer, so I don't know if Wine will run the current crop of Internet Explorer versions, but it'd be fun to try.

And heck, if it doesn't work, and you want it that badly, post to the newsgroup, or try to fix it yourself...

I guarantee you, if MS ported IE with Wine, it'd run better on Linux than it does on Solaris or HP/UX, easily. And it'd probably have some advantages over the Windows version. (stability--if IE crashes, it doesn't bring down Linux :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

FreeBSD would be the choice for x86-only, no heavy security, getting started.

Or at least, that's what they tell me. I'd have to free up some space on my 8GB of Linux and stuff to check it out... Maybe when I get my next computer. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

BSD and Solaris are both offshoots of the original (v7?) Unix source, one side developed by Berkeley, the other side by AT&T, with a lot of cross-pollination. Linux was independently developed to be compatible, without the original source.

Read about the history of unix by one of the original dudes... (dmr).

FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD should have no proprietary source left, they've been cleaned up so they could open the source. OpenBSD is a latecomer, basically a distribution/offshoot (of NetBSD?) designed for security, both by hopefully fixing security problems before they are exploited in the code and having a secure default configuration.

I've messed more with SunOS, Solaris, and Linux than I have with any of the *BSD's, tho...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

What else is new?

Let violence == flaming,
WTO == generic_news_item,
protesters == posters,
and we're just talking about slashdot!

However, you won't get that free TV set from posting on slashdot, and you're probably pretty safe from the pepper spray too.

Let's hear it for Anarchy. I've seen more of it on slashdot lately, that's what happens when any system fails to meet the needs of the people. (Windows? :) They should expect it more, in an indirect democracy, that occasionally they should have more referendums or polls about the issues that matter, and less silly news media coverage about Pokemon or Monica or whatever this week's dead, beaten horse is in the media...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

What do you find surprising? I found this story on slashdot, followed some links posted in the comments, and I'm reading it (the book, not the article) now, after everybody's commented on it.

That, long with some of the original papers on Unix, that is... Some of these examples are hilarious, since DOS and Windows both do things the wrong way, when compared to the Unix way.

(instead of real pipes, DOS uses temporary files, while Windows builds useless functionality into every program...)

At least some people took this message to heart, if not Bill G...

"But on the whole you will find that the authors of UNIX, Ken Thompson
and Dennis Ritchie, have created a program of great strength,
integrity and effectiveness, which you should admire and seek to
emulate."
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I've been waiting for an actual "slashdot" story for a while now.

1) Moderation has gone to hell. Be careful who you give it to, guys. I don't think anyone knows the moderation guidelines now. Short, short version: the first post probably isn't redundant, but it might be a troll, flamebait, offtopic, or massively overrated. And don't moderate anything as overrated if you have a better reason. If you just don't like it, try posting a *reply*. Still waiting for metamoderation to fix this one...

2) Quality of articles on slashdot has gone to hell. Get rid of those losers except Rob and maybe Hemos. Either moderate the stories, let someone screen them before they get posted, or moderate/edit the potential stories, or something.

3) What's with the messed up colors on some of the comments pages? I don't want some ugly green, or some red. I don't want a page to look *any* different than it always has unless I have an option to customize it. Where's the "make the comment page stay standard slashdot green, dammit!" button?

Slashdot used to be a cozy little website. Yes, now it's a lot more popular. Now we have guest authors who can write long, rambling articles, and new posters who can get cool, sensationalistic headlines, and a comments section that needs to go back to segfault. It's always been "News for Nerds". Now we need to work on that "Stuff that matters" some more.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Well, it looks like we have a use for that neural interface technology that the doctor doesn't want us to have.

Being able to move a phantom finger over a phantom keyboard sounds pretty useful here, I wonder if you could do better. I know I have some neurons that are wired to touch-type, could we learn how to do the same sort of thing, without the fingers, and stuff? I'd be pretty happy if I could use my brain as a fast keyboard.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

mmm, now we can have naked women on those E themes instead of just scantily clad ones, and include it in the distribution! What a great idea. Also include the man pages for sex and beer, make the offensive fortunes the default, and don't include the English HOWTOs with the distribution, for even more profanity!

But we'll have a lot of catching up to do with Microsoft, must remember to hose the MBR and only install the OS to the first drive, for maximum user friendliness, just like Windows. Oh, and move the graphics, web server, and kitchen sink api into the kernel for speed... yeah, that's it, speed... And get rid of those messy development versions, they only slow us down. And close the source, no one really looks at that stuff, so we can charge more for the product. You only want *professionals* using this stuff. And we'll need full DOS compatibility, maybe as a default text-mode user interface, so people will only use the GUI...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

That looks pretty neat, but... I don't see how a 4.3GB HD is supposed to hold 100 CD's worth of music, unless you rely on the CD's being rather not full... It seems like they're off by 2GB or so.

The FM transmitter sounded like a really cool idea, tho.

Okay, so it's a low-powered Linux box, I couldn't find a price, and their ordering page and screenshots were all very dead.

Why not just make a little add-on kit, or a distribution, to turn people's old Linux boxes into dedicated mp3 servers? I've got an old P133 I could use, when I get a new computer I could put my old (newer) HD in there, and serve some mp3's...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Wasn't there a Mac version before, back in 5.0, when Stardivision was doing it? And is Sun still working on the Java client version?

They shouldn't have to do too much work to port that thing, just clean up whatever they did from 5.0 to 5.1...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

This is just plain silly. I was hoping for a fun, simple test like The Geek Test, but no, it was a Katz article. :)

I'm so glad I'm out of public school. Now I can hear about this stuff, but at least I don't have to do it again. Of course I was a nerd, dude, we're all on slashdot...

However, I don't know about some of this stuff: I'm pretty outgoing, at least within my "band of outcasts", never really ran into drugs and don't do any of the illegal ones personally, and if I got bullied it was for being smart or ignoring stupid people (I was usually reading...).

So how are we dangerous, again? That's the implication Katz wants us to see, and I think some schools or "educators" might be dumb enough to think that, but why would the FBI think that? They're a bunch of dangerous nerds too, and they should know that you can't prepare for terrorism, and you generally can't identify terrorists beforehand... They're just disgruntled people, and you don't have to be a nerd to get like that: you could be a (non-nerdy) postal worker, say... ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

*sigh* That's right, I agree with you. And maybe if you read the rest of my post, you could tell me if *that* constitutes "posting a modified copy".

In any case, if you have a license that forbids making copies, wouldn't even "your browser making a copy" be illegal?

Just think about it for a while, my man...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

That's pretty funny. Silly politician attacks obvious parody site and ends up looking stupid. We need more of this. Everybody don't vote, and maybe we'll have anarchy, just like the web.

My take on the 'copyrighted images on the web' -- good luck. Once you put an image on the web, *everyone* has to make a copy of it just to *see* it. So what are you saying, no copying? Sounds impossible to me, you'd have to have a special license or something for your images. And if I had my browser view the same image, from the same site, on a different page, is that okay? What if I change the HEIGHT and WIDTH tags? Did I change the image? Or is someone else responsible, if they look at my page? This may sound stupid, but there are a lot of issues here that need to be worked out.

So when is slashdot gonna get rid of that nasty off-green color? The next time we get an article about slashdot, I'm posting about that, a lot...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

That's actually really funny,

I'm on Linux, so if I (1) turn off Java, and (2) go directly to http://www.fox.com/flash_front.html, the page loads fine. I have the Shockwave plug-in, so their silly ad-lookin' thing loads great. Those fascists. Now why would I want to go there, again? :)

I reiterate: they don't parse the user info correctly.

I'm using Netscape 4.7 here, on Linux, I have the Shockwave plugin, I have RealPlayer G2 installed, and I managed to view their site properly despite *their* best efforts.

They've told me I don't have Netscape >= 4.0, their site will only work on Windows or Mac, and that I also might want the plugins I have.

Therefore, they were wrong at least four times, and shouldn't be allowed near a text editor.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

History of emersione, chapter 1
1: When one to begin with the God to produce to skies and the movement.
2: The track was without form and esvazía and the density was in the consideration with of the deep one; and ragia of the water of the God was moved in the consideration with of water.
3: And the visualized God, " is he here light of the left "; light
4 of and had one: This God of and has the light of buoa; and the God separated the light of the density.
5: The God visualized the system to ignite in the day and the density, of that had indicated the night. Irradiates one and had had one night and one morning, a day
6: And the visualized God, " was implied is firmament with the average of the water and the f4ez here he with her, who separated, to innaffiare of...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

You're right, this is a big problem, and one which Cyc will hopefully solve. Don't expect *that* to be Open Source anytime soon, it requires a huge amount of tedious work to make something like Cyc, so they're pretty careful about holding onto it...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.