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The newest releases of DJGPP Binutils reportedly support a switch in as to get support for Intel-style assembly syntax. Ask further on the newsgroup.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

And [G4] doesn't ship in the iMac

AMD Athlon (the closest x86 equivalent to PowerPC G4) doesn't ship in those all-in-one eMachines-type boxen either.

or any of Apple's portables.

Do you see an Athlon laptop? An Alpha laptop? A Sparc laptop? No. G4 is a workstation/server-oriented processor; it uses too much power and produces too much heat to be practical in a mobile device. If "portable" is extended to "any computer that can be moved from desk to desk very easily" which is often one of the main uses of laptops, would a Power Mac G4 Cube with an LCD qualify?

Windows 2000 ... delivers the same level of DirectX support.

Windows 2000 simply does not yet have the quality of video drivers that Windows 98 has. Its video drivers run in kernelspace (rather than rootspace/userspace as on *N?X) and can bring down the system, and many display adapters are not yet supported at all higher than 16 colors.

...that Darwin has been compiled for the Intel target, but the compilation itself was done on a PPC box.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

DR DOS.com and DR DOS.org have more information on DR DOS.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Because Free Qt is copylefted (choice of QPL or GNU GPL), companies still have to pay the Trolls to be able to port their proprietary winsoftware to free*n?x. GTK+ on the other hand, is lesser copylefted under LGPL; it will be more popular for proprietary apps such as your precious games.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

...Kylix apps can be released under GNU GPL. No more and no less.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

KDE has a far superior architecture to GNOME (its main rival), since it is written in C++

And has no C or Ada/GNAT bindings; do the C++ booksellers have stock in Trolltech?

The Cubes and the G4 towers are cool, but still roughly double the price of an equivalent PC.

Remember: the G4 is about as fast as a PIII of twice the clock speed (remember the snail commercials?).

If Apple had released something like that, Microsoft would have just pulled the plug on Microsoft Office for the Mac, and guaranteed that people would have stuck with them anyway.

Not necessarily. Star Trek was during the Windows 3.0/3.1 days when Windows was just barely starting to actually work (remember the old Windows, which was essentially the Solitaire Shell?). Back then, Office was still selling like hotcakes (this was before the Office 4.2 "bastardized Windows on Mac" debacle).

However, should apple ever port Mac Os X, there would be no technically sound reason to buy apple hardware anymore (at least not at the prices they currently sell it).

Answer: AltiVec. The PowerPC G4 processor used in all current desktop Macintosh computers (Power Mac, Cube, iMac) is twice as fast as Pentium II/III even without AltiVec, but AltiVec provides a sh*tload of 128-bit vector power for Photoshop filters. And there's no x86 frontend overhead on the PowerPC (like there is on the Pentium II/III and Athlon, both of which run x86 in hard emulation) so more of the die can be used for power instead of bassackward compatibility.

Because the flamewar has finally died down to epsilon (BSD vs. Linux; both are Free) levels.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Speed Doubler was an enhanced 68K emulator for PowerPC. Not all Mac apps would be open-source; they'd have to run 68K binaries some time (68K Mac binaries were very common back then before the age of PowerPC). This Intel-based Mac OS would require emulation of the 68K CPU in order to run popular Macintosh software.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

With enough patience, skill, and a good debugger, it is always possible to reverse engineer a binary.

Yes, but is it legal? DMCA, EULA, and UCITA make reverse-engineering illegal, and the software would probably detect most common debuggers.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main(void)
{
char buf[256];
puts(itoa(6 * 9, buf, 13));
return 0;
}

I did not say the games were fixed, I said they IOC had fixed games. Actually they looked the other way when the fixing was discovered, but it amounts to the same thing.

http://ajennings.8m.com/boxing.htm

So the Matrix we all live in is just a game of Quake 3?
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

The immune system detects intruders and stops them before they can cause damage. This allows security to be designed once and well, rather than requiring the additional overhead for each component.

Some of the most successful viruses (e.g. AIDS) attack the intrusion detection system directly.

The question then hinges on how well the "power saving idle mode" works on most PCs. Anybody got the numbers?

Cuts power consumption by about 10% considering the RAM, the network card, the video card, the audio card, the rest of the chipset, and peripherals such as the monitor, the speakers, the department's printers, etc.

Solar cells don't last forever, right? And somebody has to take the time (time is money) to get up on the roof and inspect the solar cells to make sure they still work, right?
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Something like the human genome-mapping seemed very appropriate, wonder why they never started something like SETI@home for that.

Getting all the pieces of the human genome in the right order obviously requires the pieces. There are gigabytes of pieces, and many users have slow (5 KB per second modem) connections. The final data set is estimated to be 1 GB (3 billion base pairs, three base pairs per code word) in size. They're looking into compressibility of certain sequences.

Who wouldn't go see a film they had helped render on their PC!

People who are boycotting MPAA until it drops the DeCSS suit.

At least 10% of the blocks in distributed.net's CSC contest were verification duplicates. Given that each user normally gets at least 100 blocks, 10 invalid results might be enough evidence to detect a tampering problem.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

#43 refutes this argument.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

This is on both the d.net and SETI FAQ lists. Such clients transfer small (<300 KB) chunks of data during (say) your wife's e-mail check.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

...but not in a FREE SOFTWARE® way. For example, distributed.net releases the source to its computing cores; asm wizards have optimized the cores to run on AltiVec, 3DNOW!, etc. However, only d.net's trusted binaries connect to the official servers.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

DCTI does release the source for d.net test clients (so that all the hot-shot asm coders can improve the cores), but test clients don't connect to the d.net servers. Only trusted binaries connect to the servers.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

...data to be processed on untrusted computers whose owners could, closed source or not, reverse engineer the software and gain access to presumably valuable information.

It's a bit harder to reverse-engineer binaries when they're digitally signed and 1024-bit elliptic-curve PK encrypted.

DCTI releases the source to its client apps' computing cores; hotshot assembly coders can get their names in lights by submitting a patch against the public-source core-only clients. The official client binaries, OTOH, are considered "trusted binaries" and may in the near future be digitally signed.

...on to all residents equally.

thick if you think your (landlord, dorm, etc) isn't going to pass the cost to you.

It's averaged out into one rent figure that everyone in the apartment/residence hall pays. Think "local phone service in the US" as opposed to "long distance phone service."

Instead, the East Coast will fall first. Then the Midwest, then everything but California. See also: the video for "Californication" by rhcp://Red Hot Chili Peppers.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Prince, er, O(+>, er, Prince... When will he stop changing his name?

The same thing happened to Andover when VA bought it out. Now Andover is OSDN.

anyone who has used a handle (Do slashdot IDs count?) must be a gray hat hacker.

That is, unless you're bero-rh. In that case, you're a red hat hacker.

...Deep Impact or Armageddon (exactly the same plot)
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

The ROM BIOS of early systems included a simple machine-level debugger with an assembler and disassembler. It also generally included a Microsoft BASIC interpreter (such as Apple II BASIC or something similar).
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

There are aggressive SimCity Classic players who can build the city fast enough to get 500,000 residents in 5 years; is SC3000 that different?
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

...I would hate to see the publisher who would ignore it.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

I'm suprised no-one else mentioned this

You mean like #10?

while the collaboration software enforces the rules to keep the whole thing consistent.

What is required to be consistent, in this case, is the writing style. Collaboration software makes no pretense of being able to fix writing style.

VA Linux Systems pays Malda and Hemos. VA Linux also runs SourceForge.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

But use Cygwin if you're really that enamored with the Win32 subsystem.

Especially when you're porting Win32 apps such as GIMP from *n?x to Wintendo 9x.

And it's Certified POSIX compliant, not wannabe.

All Red Hat needs to do for Cygwin is get UNIFIX's help like it did for GNU/Linux (glibc + GNU *utils + Linux kernel).

Microsoft can't say "Java" anymore because its "J++" language was found not to be 100% compatible with Java® technology. In IE, you can turn off J?v?Script by turning off "Active Scripting" in the Internet security zone.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Let [GNOME users] default to E or whatever

The first time a user uses GNOME, it defaults to Sawfish. E is too bloated (it tries to be both a desktop environment and a wm) to be GNOME's default wm.

We've been waiting for a public journal of this type; search Slashdot for "patents" stories and read through the comments. Antipatents is this journal.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

According to United States law, a patent may not be granted unless the invention is new, non-obvious given prior art, and useful; however, the Patent Office tends to ignore the "non-obvious" part, so here's my definition of "bad patent":

bad patent n. a patent on an invention that is obvious, given prior art, at the time the patent was applied for.

antipatents is trying to collect obvious information into a prior-art database that is easy to search when a Bad Patent is being overturned.

Already patent holders are reluctant to do a comprehensive prior-art search - why should the presence of the "anti-patent" database change things?

antipatents will become a large prior-art database for patent holders to search.

If you really want to share your invention, and ensure that nobody can patent it, release it in such a way that it can be shown to be prior art.

That's what antipatents is. It's a prior art database.

In order to create a good general-knowledge database such as Everything2 or Mindpixel, a ton of common-sense knowledge has to be entered in. Think of antipatents as being a "common sense for engineers" database.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Without patents, there would be no incentive to create new synthetic pharmaceuticals. Without new drugs, new diseases will run rampant, and only the cutest humans will survive.

[Missing symlinks] are causing far more difficulty than the fact that X and Win32 GDI are completely different.

Tiddly-day, especially when one considers that the GIMP toolkit (GTK+ & Co.), allows one application to be written for X and Win32 with minimal OS-specific code.