Slashdot Mirror

Hell YEAH, mod that UP!

I remember being SO disappointed with the X-Men NES game. (and SO happy with the Arcade game! X-Men Rule!)

If that isn't enough to convince you to mod the review up, read the bit on Ninjas from "The Legend of Kage". Having a random rating category in a review of bad games rules, and Ninjas are Slashdot tradition as well.

Ninja Rating: 7
While most ninjas are notorious for being silent assassins of the night, it's nice to see one who's not afraid to climb trees and wear neon dresses. The only thing that could make this ninja cooler is a big sombrero and a Tonka Truck t-shirt.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

When WILL you people get it right? It's an OS that's JUST for HACKERS which is WHY it's pronounced LIGNUX!!!

Yes, that's for "LIGNUX Inside GNU's Not UniX" => "LIGNUX Inside GNU's Not UniX Inside Gnu's Not Unix Not UniX" => "LIGNUX Inside GNU's Not UniX Inside GNU's Not Unix Not UniX Inside GNU's Not Unix Not Unix Not UniX"...

I leave the finished expansion to the reader. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Since im not a good writer I did use the letter created by by bakreule(apocalypse29_99@yahoo.spam.com)and sent out two letters to both my senators here in califorina, Barbra Boxer, and Dianne Feinstein. Please show your support by spending 5 mins creating these letters and mailing them to your sentators. Here are the address for Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer

Just download it, make a few changes, sign it, and send it to your senators. You can find their addresses here.

No more excuses. Print it out and send it in today.

Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.

I have gone and done something about it. I wrote a letter and sent it to both my Senators. You can as well. I've put the letter up for download here. Sorry about it being a word doc, but I wrote it at work and our network admin is a M$ nut.

Just download it, make a few changes, sign it, and send it to your senators. You can find their addresses here.

No more excuses. Print it out and send it in today.

Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.

What's this with having parts of the contract blacked out? I've never heard of this. Is this a common practice?

I've heard a few too many stories about heavy-handed tactics by Intel when dealing with their employees, or other corporations, so somehow it does not sadden me to see them trapped by RAMBUS. Maybe this will be a welcome breather to get some competition back into the industry.

In any case, I'm pretty happy with my Athlon. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Linux has support for this, actually; there are diagrams for it in the Documentation section, and drivers in the Joystick section of the kernel configuration.

I haven't tried it, mind you, because that's a hardware problem. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

It sounds like this will compete with the Playstation and the X-Box, going after people who are too cheap to buy real PC's or real consoles.

But people always get upset about other systems playing their games, especially when they have protection built into the CD's to stop stuff just like this.

Of course it's all just competition, but it starts to get unfair when one corporation gets significantly large...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

It sounds great to me, but...

I see a pissed-off Sony Corporation in their future.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hi, Joe!

Because of my corruption into DOS at an early age, I'm used to EDIT-style editors, (edlin really sucked) and PICO is the only standard one on UNIX. For coding, I like RHIDE, but it isn't terribly stable on Linux.

For a slightly better PICO-style editor, I'll use nano. For scripting, I'll just use the shell, you freak! :)

later,

Peter

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

Pico rules! I'm sorry it's *just* a simple, friendly, modeless text editor, but that's all it ever wanted to be.

But if you want another editor to hate, use Nano; it's even better! ;)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Try it out; I've used Quicken 5 on wine, and it's emulated almost perfectly. I don't know if wine will handle the installation correctly, but it should run Quicken.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I've gotten Photoshop 3.0 to work. I like a lot of the features The GIMP has, but I must say that Photoshop is *much* faster. Especially old versions of Photoshop... :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I love the Wine project, and this is great news, but it really isn't there yet. But don't take my word for it, try out some apps, and see what works and what doesn't!

On the plus side, Photoshop 3.0 works almost flawlessly on my machine, and I've gotten an already installed version of Internet Explorer 4.0 to work once. Also, audio player applications (not media player!) seem to work fairly well.

On the minus side, Explorer doesn't work, and Internet Explorer's network installer won't install. A few programs that require or use networking in their install don't work, (web browsers tend to work) and a *lot* of apps (old and new) are pretty broken.

Incidentally, I'm all for using the "WABI approach" in developing wine: if it works for the most popular apps, it'll probably work for a lot of others. So let's see if we can get Explorer, Internet Explorer, and Media Player working, and get the core Microsoft stuff covered! After that we can start worrying about optimization...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hey, nothing wrong with the bottom-up approach; that's what the mathematician would do.

Either that, or they already "know" you're not a criminal, eh? :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I admit, I *have* had to do that on occasion. But usually if they just do something stupid, (like add an extra parameter to some little call in the filesystem code) I can fix it myself.

I understand the value of that, though, since I added a few features to some code that was going to soon be replaced by a "new and improved" and completely different version. However, that was just a summer job, and therefore not my responsibility now. ;)

Also, I can see why, from Linus' perspective, I wouldn't want ReiserFS in the kernel yet: it's huge! It would have to be exceedingly well-documented and friendly to make it in like that, especially this late, because it is very complex for a filesystem.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Why does it have to be official? I'm using ReiserFS on top of software RAID right now, in the 2.4.0-test8 kernel, along with arla and ALSA...

Personally, I don't care if it's officially in the kernel or not; if it works, I'll patch it in; if it doesn't, I won't use it. The old patch for using the PC Speaker as a Sound Card will probably never be in the kernel, but that didn't stop me before... :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, well, that says a lot about Slashdot, but it also says a lot about the nerd population and demographic as well.

Personally, I have *yet* to find GUIs "usable" in the first place, and I try to keep them as stripped-down as possible. If I find a powerful and useful metaphor that helps me out a lot from the GUI camp, I'll let you know, but so far, I'm not impressed, and I'll continue to program with a text editor, toss files around on a shell, and read my e-mail in text mode...

As for Windows 2000, I haven't used it much, but it sounds like a different set of trade-offs were taken in producing it, and it's getting closer to Unix. They must have made it more stable than '98, since they broke some games and applications that were probably using some buggy stuff in the first place.

Hopefully they'll clean up the API enough to make those apps fast *and* stable eventually, and maybe one day, they'll even keep track of their libraries correctly, or implement some real hard or soft links (i.e. at the filesystem level)! Until then, I'll continue to use Linux.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

"Do not adjust your web browser; we control the horizontal, we control the vertical..."

I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, I have google. And with google, I can find Deja News, Altavista, yahoo, etc., etc. And with those, I think I've got it fairly well covered.

Incidentally, how could you claim to map the whole web without violating the Robot Exclusion Principle? I guess you could have a staff of people collecting content, but that would take *way* too long.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Even with Quimby being included in this next round of the debates, many candidates are being ignored by the fascist US administration, and I feel the people have the right to know about them!

BRAK, OOG, and Slashdot Cruiser are all viable candidates for the US Presidency. Personally, I was going to vote Nader, but I would much rather vote BRAK, if only to get funding for the Cartoon Network!

So, in this election, vote your conscience.

ALL HAIL BRAK!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Tim, at first I didn't get it, but now I see how clever you really are!

"Mmm... DoughNIX!"

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

No, I hadn't, but it sounds fascinating. (especially check out the datasheet)

It sounds like a lean, mean, stripped-down version of BeOS, perhaps more appropriate for web kiosks at first glance, but who knows? Use it for web pads, or maybe in a car (play mp3's and use MapQuest--sounds like a killer app to me! :), and whatever else they can get their hands on.

In any case, I'd be very happy if BeOS found its niche; it looks like a very good system, and I'd give it yet another try if I had another processor in my box. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

It looks impressive; I haven't tried it yet, but I think the reason it IS making inroads is because it is free AND it doesn't have that much competition for its market. Conversely, BeOS, although also free, isn't doing nearly as well because of the competition it faces.

As much as I love Linux, it would seriously have to be stripped down to compete with QNX; the kernel itself is way too bloated. However, I realize that there *is* an embedded Linux project, and I haven't messed much with that, either, although I'd be very interested to see a comparison.

I think I could cram as much functionality onto a 1.44MB floppy, but I'd probably be using DOS, or a non-X GUI on Linux, to keep it light. (maybe a suite of SVGALib programs instead?)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I have to agree, at least with R.C. Pro Am, Spy Hunter, and Ninja Gaiden; I remember Kung Fu and Double Dragon from the arcades.

I also have Ninja Gaiden 3, actually; they're all awesome. Go Ryu Hayabusa! I can't remember her name, I want to say 'Linda' or 'Jane' or something, but I could check.

Actually, if you liked Ninja Gaiden... do you remember Strider? I loved that game for the NES. The arcade version was pretty, but it came nowhere near the NES version for plot and puzzle solving and whatnot.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The Constitution itself says very little about Copyright, but I agree with you somewhat, because I don't see where the "Artist" is being represented here, so I doubt their interests are being protected.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I agree, those are all great games; I beat Super Mario Bros. at least 50 times, and one time I beat it like 4 or 5 times in a row. (nothing else happens after the mushroom guys (Goombas?) turn into bullet-proof guys) I wasn't nearly as good at Blaster Master or Contra, but they were both a lot of fun; Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A-(Select) -Start. :)

I also loved Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, the Zeldas, the other Marios (or at least Mario 3), and also Castlevania II had great music.

...but I was trying to ignore those games, because I don't own any of them. :(
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Tell me when I can legally play all the NES games... :(

Oh well, at least I own Metroid, Mega Man, and Mega Man 2. That's all that *really* matters, right? :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Unix is no longer an operating system. An operating system is the software that comes with a computer (or OS distribution) that programmers and users need to make themselves productive.

While ITECS (Information Technology and Engineering Computing Services) is working with RedHat to do the right thing as far as Engineering Computing Services is concerned, the administration in the College of Engineering here at State is still busy blundering.

This next semester, we've finally made the move to Java as the required (not just recommended) language for Electrical Engineers, Computer Engineers, and Computer Science majors. This means new students will be forced to endure 5 Java classes as the core to their coding "education" (Introduction to Programming, Programming Concepts, Discrete Math Sturctions, Concepts of Operating Systems, and Data Structures).

The irony here is that while more and more of the software we use here is open source, fewer and fewer of the students will be able to read that source. C and C++ have simply gone the way of the dinosaur as far as the faculty are concerned, making way for Java, savior of the world.

While a Java-oriented degree program may make sense for some, it is quite myopic for Computer Engineers and Scientists. I pray for the first NCSU student who has to walk into the job market with no idea what a pointer is and why he needs to free what it's pointing at. Java is a great language, mind you, but it's hardly taken over the industry. I strongly doubt a de facto standard interpretted language will ever take the place of C.

Oh, and if you want a link to NCSU's Eos/Linux information (rather than a Business Wire article), try http://www.linux.ncsu.edu/eos-linux/ ;

Thanks for your time,
Ben Creech
Junior, Computer Engineering, NCSU
(Part Time ITECS Help Desk employee)

We do this because this is the curse of the Amiga.

Click on that stupid Amiga Icon, and read through the stories, and see exactly HOW MUCH vapor has been spewed on this topic, and HOW MANY of their plans have never materialized.

...then you might start to understand why we take all our Amiga stories with a decent-sized glacier of salt.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The extraordinary age of the bacterium also begs the question of whether organisms can survive long enough to travel between planets.

The really pathetic thing is, though, that the *last* version didn't do that! However, my heart goes out to all those poor techies that tried to make that crap work, (sorry, James, NT just sucks sometimes... :) because all I've seen it do is eat memory and waste cycles.

Remember, folks, if all you need to do is use Word, then "add Office; Word"; I like having 1 GB of RAM! ;)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I just use fvwm2 on Linux, Solaris, and everything else, (except for NT, of course...) so I don't see what the problem is.

However, I didn't learn how to change my window manager from E115, either, so *that* could be a problem. Solution: they need to teach that.

Otherwise, send a zephyr to instance 'help', and hopefully someone will hear you crying out in the wilderness. I *know* they teach that in E115...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'm an NCSU student, and I have to give this news a fully qualified "Huh?".

Yes, we have some boxes running "EOS/Linux" now, yes, they're based around Red Hat, yes it has some problems.

Of course, it's better than the NT realm configuration (I don't know *where* that came from!) that the OTHER Dells on campus have, but it isn't as stable as the Solaris boxes yet.

Some of this is just how the kit is put together, (Katz and 'jag could fix that easily--tighten the LILO configuration some, and make /tmp larger are my two suggestions for now) and some of this is tougher. I'd prefer a *real* fix for the 16-bit UID problem, rather than just trying to cram them all into 16 bits, (we have a lot of accounts here at NCSU) but that would require a kernel patch, and could break other things, including potentially a lot of userland programs. But this is a fix that I imagine a lot of people will need eventually, and might help the adoption of Linux into large businesses organizations.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

First, I'm more interested in their opinion on it than I am on my opinion on it.

Second, no thanks, I already looked at the source for nano today, and it's ugly. (some kind of filestructure / linked list is used to store the data; I gather there could be some problems with files with many lines, both in seeking and in memory usage, but I'm not sure yet...)

Third, it was yesterday's conversation that prompted my question in the first place. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What data structure do you use to store the text internally, and why? What trade-offs exist in your approach?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

$14,159
POST: 10.18.2000
EXP: 1.18.2001

BountyQuest's Business Method

An internet-based, broadcast reward service for finding prior art relevant to the validity of a patent.

The links are the best part: dynamically updated routing, based on your position. Mmm...

I hope to be able to use this someday, at least with a web pad. I don't want to mess with a laptop, because they're too small and cramped, but a wireless webpad appeals to me.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, once hardware like this is readily available, that'll be the next step: making the underlying OS more multithreaded. That should solve most of the performance bottlenecks right there.

BeOS should have no problems, and Linux should do better now with glibc...

I think a model like this would be better served with processes rather than threads; in all of these systems, will there be unified access to memory? I know the POWER4 will have it, since this is just a beast of a CPU grafted onto a traditional computer, but I can see problems in any NUMA system, where the memory for one thread might be closer to a separate processor. I guess they'll have to take that into consideration as well, for systems like that...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The author seems to be arguing that since OSS is *too* successful, it doesn't work. Didn't he get the hint when he found out about the *TWO* major OSS desktop environments, with all their corresponding programs?

I agree that there is a lot of redundancy in Open Source projects, but so what? You don't have to use them all, just try out the top five or so. For text editors, of course there is vi and emacs, and you can use them all day. But if you don't want to, you could use joe or pico, or for that matter, ed or dd+sh! I like nano (an improved pico) and RHIDE (a Borland-style IDE), but I haven't used them much lately...

However, just to make these people happy, I think we should build a Unix distribution that only allows you to have ONE of each kind of application. I suggest X, twm, mail and ed to start with, and if they don't like that, they can build a distribution that only has mwm, CDE, Z-Mail and Visual Slickedit; then, if they don't like that, they can use only Enlightenment, StarOffice, and nedit; then...

Personally, I'll just install it all instead, and use what I want. Somehow, that doesn't bother me.

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

First off, I'd like to say that that was indeed a great response. While I'm not sold on IBM's approach just yet, at least I'm more informed now than I was when I read the article.

The main technique I've seen exploited in DSP programming (I know someone who does this for a living) is software pipelining, which often involves like loop unrolling, except that you have to pay attention to the instructions to make sure you use all your instruction units.

Compilers these days can do loop unrolling, and past that I guess you'd just hope to be able to reorder the instructions somewhat, to get a decent instruction mix out of the code in the loop, and maximize that magical "IPC" number. However, yes, it's hard to get rid of all the dependencies, and run-time profiling (a la Transmeta) will probably get more popular as research into VLIW systems gains in popularity.

SMT sounds interesting; does it refer to "threads" in the software sense, or just separate processes? For the moment I'll view it with skepticism, just as I did when Sun built streams into the kernel. Any multiprocessing Unix system should be able to run separate processes on separate processors, and some of them can surely do the same with different threads, depending on the implementation. I guess IBM would just have a more compact and possibly more scalable solution in this case.

And yes, I realize these are supposed to be server chips for now, and knowing IBM, they might just stay that way. But this sort of technology usually filters down into the PC market quicker than you'd think, especially if it improves the price/performance ratio, as this might do, eventually.

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

Well, the "NEW INFORMATION" you seek would obviously be my opinion on the subject.

However, since you mention another source of information, would you be so kind as to post a link, perhaps?

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

First off, the basic news here (that IBM's Power4 architecture will be two processors running at Gigahertz speeds) isn't news; that's been known for a while.

However, it *is* nice to have this depth of technical information to examine, and also it's good to know that they're still doing this.

I think the big advantage that VLIW instruction sets will have is strictly architectural, and I'm not sure how IBM's approach fits in yet, but it looks interesting. Throwing more chips at the problem is one approach, but remember that your competitors can do that too, *and* make the chips do more as well...

However, IBM will have to make sure people design their apps with more than one processor in mind, which will be a Good Idea for the future, since more people might have multiprocessor computers.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

"AS it says in the bible, ' there shall be no ice cube wide enough, and no ice cube tall enough to shut up a nerd. And there was much rejoicing' "

Amen, Brother!

Even if slashdot keeps posting crap like this, and even though these posts are at -1, it's good to still see that MEEPT!! is still around.

...but now it's time to go to kuro5hin, and see what the news is. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Real hackers will still just use a chainsaw.

Let me know when use this technique on something a little more permanent, like plastic. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, seriously, you tell them, man. Those Slashdot Moderators have NO sense of humor whatsoever, or we wouldn't have to have mod wars over funny posts, and whatnot.

Actually, wait a minute, isn't it "Trolling At +2 Day", also known in some countries as "Friday"?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, that's actually pretty cool... Thanks for the info!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The man behind the magic--literally! It must be really cool to play the characters that inspired a lot of core D&D spells. (Bigby's Crushing Hand, anyone? :)

I could care less about the "violence in gaming", and it looks like Gary Gygax agrees, too. But the rest of the interview is great. (even if I liked The Realms better, because Elminster is the man, it was all still in the D&D universe...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, a couple of the old core members are still around, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the others still contributed, and eventually got changes folded in.

Really, this isn't that different from how Linux kernel development works, or CVS access in most projects are handled: only a few people are allowed to commit changes. This is just a bit more formalized.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That is some UGLY crap!

I'm *so* glad that the NES didn't look like this back in the day, or I *never* would have gotten one.

P.S. Mad props out to post #25, the first Sneakers reference I saw! :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.