Slashdot Mirror

Slashdot picked up another Kuro5hin story. I just wish the book was closer to being released. So here are my comments, from there to here...

Yeah, I've seen Card talk about [his movie plans], too, (since I live in North Carolina :) but realize that he's been talking about it for years. I, for one, hope it happens sometime soon, but even if it happened tomorrow, it'd probably be at least three years before we saw anything.

I'd love it if they could film the two at once, because then you'd get all the same cast at the same time. There aren't really any other decent sequel possibilities that wouldn't be completely different, and otherwise, they'd screw up Ender's Shadow.

I really like almost everything in that series, but everything after Ender's Game originally is pretty different. They're good books, and they aren't a rehash of Ender's Game, either, like Ender's Shadow is, (even though I love that, too :) but they're slower, and they have different characters, and most importantly they aren't necessarily what his audience was expecting out of him...

Card writes a lot of stuff, and some of it hits the mark; I liked the Harmony series, and I really enjoyed Songmaster and A Planet Called Treason. Most of his short stories are really good, which is funny since he claimed that he can't write short stories decently. I didn't like the Alvin Maker series as much, but maybe I just wasn't expecting American Historical Fantasy... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What was Offtopic?

Christ, if you *must* moderate down my posts, mark that post as Overrated (like the coward you are), or pay for it in MetaMod, you incredibly clueless moderator.

But read my sig a few times first, and hit yourself over the head with an anvil a few times as well, just for good measure. It may not help you, but I'll feel better...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Look, everybody, more numbers! It's a huge '128-bit address space'!

Suddenly, the internet is faster, my computer is smarter, the world looks brighter, slashdot posts are more intelligent....

Nah. Everything still sucks.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, hopefully it'll end up being more efficient in the future. I'm trying to set up a test 'hard drive' to boot right now, and I'm using Bochs to do some of it just because it's faster on my new computer.

(which is amazing, considering how *slow* Bochs used to be; Plex86 appears to be that slow at the moment, but I still have to do more testing...)
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I saw that (linked from freshmeat) and downloaded it, and compiled it. Once I figured out that all the configuration files were set up for me, (in the conf/ dir.) it was easy enough to get FreeDOS booting.

I'll try Windows next, I suppose. I'm pleased with how quickly this project has developed; at least Plex86 seems a lot faster than Bochs. I'll be happy once it's competitive (speed-wise) with DOSEmu, and (compatibility-wise) with VMWare.

But in the meantime, kudos, Kevin; keep up the good work! And thanks, MandrakeSoft, for making Bochs open in the first place! :)
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Oh wow, they have my entry! (it's in entries/baylie.pl; no, that's not perl, it's uuencoded. :)

Ok, it was pretty pitiful, and for some reason didn't make it into a category, but I was proud. I don't remember why I didn't write something longer, though. I guess I thought there was a 256 byte limit, and it was actually 512 bytes?
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Apparently, the only Clue worth having is the Clue Granting Clue, because once you have that, you can get all the other Clues...

...AUGH! Kerberos is eating my soul!
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That's the funniest thing I've seen on Slashdot in a long time!
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Just remember that: 70 ms is a latency, not a speed.

"Speeds up to 70mph" makes sense; "Speeds up to 70ms" does not.

Maybe I should have been more clear on this one; I had thought the quote would be enough.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, first, every little bit helps; who knows, maybe whatever techniques they use could be applied here as well.

Second, that goes triple for when you can pre-compute stuff.

And finally, we'll probably see it in Final Fantasy X. I love Square...
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Ha ha ha ha ha...

Oh well, at least they let you use 'fucken'. :)
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Didn't I hear something about Square getting patents on a method for doing this quickly for the Final Fantasy movie?

Well, I probably saw it on slashdot at some point, if I know me...

Oh man, I can't wait for that movie...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, right.

I'd like to see them do this, and encompass the myriad of different protocols and formats that abound on the web today, plus the ones that will be designed just to break it.

I think that simple passwords, encryption, steganography, and file-sharing will each be enough to defeat this, but who knows, maybe we'll have to go to something really sophisticated, like trading over IRC, or ratioed ftp...

Companies that base their business model over scare tactics just crack me up...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, I used to have a program that would send a "high-res" fax, at 300dpi. (or 300x100? 300x150? I'm confused...)

But yeah, I mentioned about the anti-aliasing, I think that would make up for most of it. Not true color printing at 600dpi or greater, but on a lit screen I'm sure it would look amazing, much like HDTV's do. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Teaching your grandmother to suck eggs? That's a new one on me...

I've read the Foundation Series, and the Le Guin books; I need to read the Robot books, and the other stuff still... :)

Re:Leiber--I could never get into the "Swords" stuff; I read that a long time ago, in the big book club edition.

And while we're Offtopic, have you read the Amber books? It's probably not Sci-Fi, but it could be; it's definitely pulp. I love those, and just about everything else I've read by Zelazny.

Thanks for the other authors; I love the older stuff, but never know which ones are good. (Do you remember "The Stars, Like Dust"? That was fun...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

This sounds great; we're up to fax-quality dpi, but in full color. Not quite up to the "virtual paper" level yet, but probably really close, especially with a little anti-aliasing.

And even though these aren't available to the public yet... How much do they cost, and when can we expect to see these in the home? The answer had better not be "2010" still. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Let me guess, you wish the Lisp machines have taken over. For some people, Unix *is* natural, and for a lot more people, AI Languages are very non-intuitive. Unix was natural for me, and I like it quite a bit. I wish someone had introduced me to it sooner. I have nothing against AI Languages either, (well, Lisp is pretty ugly; I like Scheme a lot better) but I haven't been able to get any real work done in them yet--it makes common system programming tasks pretty clumsy.

I used DOS for a long time, and although I liked it a lot, it was missing some functionality that I wanted. I wrote a few commands of my own, basically re-implementing stuff like "which", "df", "touch", and "ls -R"... before I ever knew about Unix! Therefore, when I found all it had to offer, I was thrilled.

If you think Unix is bad with the "worse-is-better" philosophy, then you of all people should understand why we'd prefer Unix over Windows. The MIT Approach is to the New Jersey approach as the New Jersey Approach is to the Redmond approach. Also, Lisp machines are dead, Unix is alive and kicking, and Windows is dominant. Given the choice between Windows and Unix, I'd rather have Unix.

As there is no free version of Windows, and there are free versions of Unix, I'd say that Unix itself is quite a bit less proprietary and commercial than Windows. Is the Windows source open yet? No. What about Unix? Not only are there many implementations of Unix out there with source code available, (including Solaris, by the way) but you can even buy a book, and read about the original source and its design, with comments, as a teaching tool!

It's a good, simple, straightforward design, and I'm glad people are starting to realize that. All the major players in the OS market today owe a lot to Unix. Apple and Microsoft both sold Unix distributions at one point in time or another, and many of the new features that Microsoft has added to Windows were already in Unix in some form or another; that's innovation for you...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Damn stupid moderators.

Moderators: please mod down ALL Larry Niven / Ringworld references, and show everyone what humorless, discussion-stifling bastards you all are.

P.S. Do not try to post useful discussion here, or start discussions. You will be ignored, moderated down, and eventually bitchslapped.

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

What about RCS? SCCS? Aegis?

If that doesn't work for you, follow some links. Go to freshmeat. Do a search.

Heck, there are whole books written about this stuff, even by O'Reilly!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

First, check your *link*. For a site that only has ten stories a day on its front page, quality control is horrible!

Second, your choice of links didn't help me figure this one out anyhow, since I hadn't heard of the player. I found some info in the slashdot comments too--looks like a cheap-o Cyrix-based box...

Third, I'm glad it's dead, even though I like Virgin in general. I found Virgin Radio soon after I found RealAudio, and I thought their station was pretty cool. (We USians find those UKians so quaint sometimes! :)
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Do they really think *that* makes it secure?

Well, if they do, they can feel free to release it. ;)
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Since you'll never get equal time on slashdot, here's another filemanager.

It's just a file manager, it doesn't try to be a web browser.

Oh, and it's for KDE.

Disclaimer: I don't use either one, but the Open Zealotry(tm) here is starting to piss me off.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Dude, almost all web-browsers are file managers as well. This isn't new. You might as well cover w3m, Konqueror, Mozilla, or just about anything else.

If you like it, so be it. Use it, submit code for it, whatever. I'm just not very impressed.

You're right, there is no point in trying to smear GNOME on slashdot; they'll just keep posting stories about it. It *is* News for Nerds, but it's also pretty biased. I don't use either one, but this makes me want to check on the progress of KDE2...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Now they have Gore winning.

Why don't we all wait a bit before trying to call this one?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The canonical number for NT 4.0 is just under $5,000, but it's really hard to compare once you start talking about Terminal Server, and Licensing.

Anything that comes with a standard Red Hat installation won't have anything like a per-seat (or per-ponnection or per-whatever) license fee; that model doesn't exist. So figure out what is the maximum amount of traffic or users that box can handle, and charge the equivalent amount on NT.

Of course they *both* cost something to implement. The difference under Linux is that if you do it right, it should cost significantly less to maintain. I've seen both boxes in use, and it's pretty hard to debug an NT bluescreen from the ColdFusion service because of some user that calls it with a Perl application... Under Linux, the box tends to stay up, and the users call if they have a problem...

But of course, that's just *my* experience with it. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

If you assume that the RISC core is *running* the CISC core in the first place, then the problem is solved.

Thank you, Transmeta! :)

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Dude, punk isn't dead; it's healthier than it's been for a while!

By your reasoning, you could argue that Unix and Linux were dead for a long time before they were ever alive; I can only hope that MacOS is dead too. :)

Does MiniDisc specify a compression format? The big mistake Sony always makes is making their stuff proprietary; then, the entire industry develops alternatives. But when it does pay off for Sony, it pays off big (like the PlayStation).
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

It feels fine. It's going to take a walk now...

Is CD dead? No, we have CD *and* DVD.

Is MD dead? No, we'll have MD *and* MD2.

Heck, I stil have 360k floppies and 100MB Zip disks and MFM HD's...

A friend of mine still watches movies on LD and CED; (a CD is sorta like a 'video record') those formats are massively more dead than MD will be for a while.

Is Ask Slashdot dead? Yeah, probably. :)
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What, I don't count? Drat! :)

Anyhow, user numbers shouldn't count for anyone who was on slashdot before we had them, and mholve and I both fall in that category...
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"I hope you know /
that this will go down /
on your permanent record... /
...Oh yeah?"
-- The Violent Femmes

I'd be amazed if any of this were enough to generate a *real* permanent record, (an FBI file, that is...) but it would be very silly and entertaining as hell if someone had something this stupid catch up with them.

("Mr. Bush, we have here that you got suspended in high school and later tried to have that record expunged. Is that true? You DO know that you have a suspension on your PERMANENT RECORD, right? I'm sorry, but America cannot in good conscience elect a President with such a black mark on his PERMANENT RECORD. We all understand about the drugs and the alcohol and not wanting to serve in the military, that's just business as usual. But MY GOD, MAN, why did you have to get suspended in High School?")
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I agree. Read the frickin' guidelines, guys.

First, you should moderate Jon Katz down for not posting this under his account!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Mod that up!

I just tell everyone that aliens have stolen his brain...

Man, that's funny...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'm using Arla now because it compiles on 2.4, but arla isn't terribly stable yet even as a client, and I've heard that it's even worse as a server.

Too bad ARLA won't be able to use code from OpenAFS...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hundreds of comments, and everyone here thinks Stallman hasn't written an OS. I guess no one has heard of emacs (EMACS Makes A Computer Slow...)

I'm sickened by the current generation of slashdotters and their pathetic post; will no one build a Beowulf Cluster of these things? Where are my GRITS??? :)
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A Contributor may choose to distribute the Program in object code form under its own license agreement, provided that:
[...]
b) its license agreement:
[...]
iv) states that source code for the Program is available from such Contributor, and informs licensees how to obtain it in a reasonable manner on or through a medium customarily used for software exchange.

This sounds very much like a good thing; arla works okay as a client, but not great, and it's probably the least stable thing I have running under 2.4 right now.

I do have a few questions, though:

1) Does IBM own Transarc? What's the deal here?

2) What are the extra restrictions on the "IPL"? (Like we need YAOSSL (-> another license...))
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, my point was, sometimes it isn't that easy to turn something on or get it working after it has been secured. I don't necessarily like it, but that's the rationale, and it isn't so hard to run something like Bastille, either.

It would be nice if the default installs were more secure, though, and it sounds like Mandrake tries to give people that option upon installation.

The hardest thing to do is to make something like this easy and smart; any distro vendor who can do that gets my vote of confidence as well.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

First, if you want a default installation that's "hardened from the get-go", either run OpenBSD, or a non-UNIX that has no services.

However, I don't see why this is really necessary. It's the sysadmin's job to secure his boxes, which is generally done after installation. First, you only select the services you need, then you tighten things up. Bastille just speeds this process up, and helps out novices a lot. Also, the OpenWall security patches (for the Linux kernel) are quite nifty; also, on ext2, chattr is pretty sweet if you're really paranoid. :)

It would be nice if a distro had a "Secure" option during installation, but basically they're just catering to the masses. Maybe you want to run 'ping'; maybe you're behind a firewall. Maybe you're not on the internet. Maybe you want to have all your services running in default configurations at startup, so you can tweak them later...

Basically, it's just easier to let the admin decide what to do with the box, and making it less secure makes that process easier for them as well. Most people don't know or care about security. And remember, just as the best form of birth control is still abstinence, the best form of network security is still the 'air-gap'.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah; actually, read my reply to the pico post, I've got a little code for you (linked from my User Info page as well)...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

If the patent office didn't pipeline the applications, could they possibly be any slower?

Oh, and the purpose behind those applications is to see if you can claim a patent on some inane obfuscation process to later sue IOCCC entrants, even if they're (probably) not writing in assembler.

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

Excellent; they've got an editor with your name written all over it!

I used to know all the keys in TP5.0; they're the same, and I'm only 22...

I *love* rectangular cut-and-paste! That's why I tried to edit stuff in "The Draw" in the first place!

I type in shell script with 'cat'. If it's really complicated, well, I use pico! :)

Heh.

(a) paste them with cat (Unix: just cat and paste!)
(b) run pico as 'pico -w' (just alias it to 'pico -wb', actually...)
(c) use bash. Oh man do I hate tcsh; and we can't change it, either. At least I'm writing a simple shell for Operating Systems; I implemented pipes tonight!
(d) '/bin/vi' vs. '/usr/bin/pico'? Too scary for me...
(e) That code you sent me was demented. Now I have to replace the typedefs... TELL me no-one writes unions like that!
(f) Go to my SID and tell me what my demented code does, and why, and how. Bonus points if you find that it actually might do something else. (hey, what do I know?)
(g) I had to edit a passwd file once in vi on a hosed system. Yuck! Deleting the end of a line is seriously broken; I'm just going to shut up about "HJKL", too. Now I probably would just use sed; it's easier.

later...

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

Thanks for telling me, Michael! I was going to mark it as 'Insightful' by mistake...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

First, I understand the argument that benchmarks aren't necessarily relevant. I can only type so fast in Microsoft Word, so provided it runs at a decent speed, I'm happy. For the user who just wants a cheap laptop, these might provide adequated performance coupled with a long battery life; that's just great.

But I'm a nerd, and I want to see the benchmarks. First, I remember reading *another* article about this from Slashdot, where they claimed that the Crusoe really shined at memory bandwidth, perhaps because it had so much integrated on the chip. That's really important nowadays, and people tend to ignore it.

Also, if anyone has one of these, could you please post results for the BYTEMarks? The Unix port includes numbers for memory bandwidth as well as integer and floating point, and the benchmark statistically repeats the tests until it gets a steady-state result for performance, which means that the Crusoe would get to optimize them after the first few passes through, and therefore this test should be more than fair to the Crusoe.

Also, the Crusoe should be compared against an equivalent (specced or priced) *laptop* configuration; remember that.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

If 100k of us put up a few bucks, we'd still be off by a factor of 10, and there aren't even that many of us.

I think that's a very cool idea, but you'd probably need a wider base of people to sponsor it.

Also, who would we donate it to? And couldn't we contact the museums about it first? Maybe they could help...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I thought you could do that, but you just had to type in "Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A-Select- Start" or something first. Wasn't that on Slashdot a while back?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, it reminded me too much of Episode I, but with the villian from Howard The Duck. (I'm sure he isn't the same guy, but he has the annoying grating cheesy villian voice down pat)

I'll reserve judgement until I see it, and forgive me, osm, but it looks like Thora Birch will be the next Natalie Portman... :)
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Sure.

Oh.... you mean the Sorensen codec.

Never mind...

Someone please convert this to an mpeg instead...
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Ok, now call it a PSX2.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Let me stop this right here. For my sake, please:

Don't call it a PS2!!!

I prefer PSX2, but realize that PS2 -> PS/2, which is much closer to the X-Box, but rather dated.

Ok?

Thanks.

Any game with Spiderman in it has to be awesome!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

As far as I can tell, what this will mean for Sony is that the first games for the Playstation II will be impressive, and it will have much room to grow, especially as the programmers get smarter about using the beast.

Whatever else people might say about Sony, the PSX2 is here now, and the X-Box isn't. Once it comes out, sure they'll have some competition, but I think a lot of people will just stick to using their PC's. As long as Square sticks with Sony, I'll be interested. ;)

However, what I really wanted to play was Metroid 64. And for that I'll probably have to wait for the 'Dolphin' or whatever. BAH.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.