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I'd like to complain about Mozilla too: lately, Mozilla has gotten too fast and stable and standards-compliant. I miss the old days when everything was obviously broken, and it was easy to find bugs.

Therefore, here is my advice to you: install Mozilla for Windows. No, no, don't install Windows, unless you already have it. Just make sure that you run Mozilla for Windows under Wine on Linux. THEN you get all your old bugs back, for free! Oh yeah, it still browses the web, but at least you have some real, obvious, fixable bugs. And then you get to help out the Wine project, too! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to MySQL server on 'mysql.csoft.net' (111) in /export/home0/webtrade/www/dbconnect.inc on line 1
Unable to connect to database

Other than that, it looks like a really cool site, but you're not getting my 286! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, me too! I hate PDF. "Open Standard", my ass.

Unfortunately, though, I found this stuff so fascinating that I couldn't resist! I'm a sucker for ciphers, I wrote a Vinegre cipher encoder/decoder in BASIC like 8 years ago... :)

This just builds the table, because I'm sure no one wants to see all this old code, but I'm just getting nostalgic here. I guess I was 14, reading through some tiny book on ciphers throughout history, wondering how the modern stuff worked, and later why PGP was so slow on my 386SX25...

DIM ALPHABET$(25, 25)
FOR Y = 0 TO 25
FOR Z = 0 TO 25
A = Y + Z + 65
IF Y + Z > 25 THEN A = Y + Z - 26 + 65
ALPHABET$(Y, Z) = CHR$(A)
NEXT Z
NEXT Y

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

A company apologizes for Spam. What a concept!

I wish Microsoft would apologize to me, at the least for the spam they send me occasionally about their "Freedom to Innovate" crud.

Also, I want to see more of these web pads! I could care less about laptops, but I think surfing the web remotely on a slim little pad would be *the* killer app. (and it would definitely be a better use of a Crusoe processor, too :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, we've just gone full circle now, haven't we?

Starting with the punch cards inspired by the textile industry, and using the icons inspired by embroidery... Now we're using a pocket gaming system to do the original functions we copied!

I guess that's a tribute to our history, albeit a sick one.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I've been wondering for a while what "Digital DNA" is; I guess that's it! It's "DNA of the Digital Kind"--personal information that identifies you, except digitally.

I thought it was just a dumb marketing ploy for Motorola technology, but now I know it's an even dumber ploy for Motorola marketing. Well, my answer is the same for both kinds of DNA: it's mine; hands off.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I've been interested in this project for a while now, and it looks like (according to the TODO list) they've fixed a lot of gotchas, and now it's time to hammer out the bugs and optimize.

However, I still like the idea of running a virtual x86 machine better, for the OS compatibility. Running a virtualized Linux would be cool for security, (run sendmail and wuftpd and whatnot on top of that; if someone hacks it, just kill and respawn :) and of course development, but that's about it.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, I was wondering if 666 came from the old Greek dice games where they would roll three dice; it was considered lucky to roll "triple-sixes", as that was a high score.

Of course, if you're looking for conspiracy theories, then you can find 666 in role-playing, "www", UPC bar-codes, and pretty much everything else, too. (29Ah; ha ha ha!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

First, if there's a hole in a product that has been found, the company has been notified, and nothing has been done about it for 45 days, I'm sure someone has and is using an exploit by then.

Second, by publishing the details, and saying "hey, you knew about this for 45 days; don't you think your customers should know?", you're encouraging software companies to get their act together.

If left to themselves, no, they won't fix bugs out of the goodness of their hearts. The only people this sort of thing affects are the consumers; big businesses have firewalls and probably use better, more expensive products internally, wherever possible.

I think it's pretty sad that it has to be this way, but that's the way it is. Taking a laissez-faire attitude to big software companies doesn't seem to work, because there is too much potential for abuse.

I also don't like the whole "unauthorized negative reviews aren't allowed" business. Who cares about freedom of speech, eh? We can have unauthorized biographies of Bill Gates, and not unauthorized reviews of Front Page. Whatever you say, guys. For example, I did a lot of benchmarking between DOS and Linux's DOSEmu; my findings at the time were that DOSEmu was about 3% slower in raw CPU than actual native DOS (testing using the DOS 32-bit BYTEMarks), but that defragging a native DOS partition was *much* faster under DOSEmu, due to Linux's cache subsystem. Those are the facts; why should they be censored just because someone else isn't happy about it?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Why, when you get to make a standard, would you make it *intentionally* incompatible everywhere? It's bad enough with TVs and cellphones, since the US and Europe consistently manage to pick different standards, but why do this when you *have* a choice?

I know this is about control and greed, and not about common sense. Therefore, why do we let these people make the standards? We need an independent group of experts deciding these things, a standards board releasing drafts, and companies implementing the drafts. Period. Also, there can be no patents held on the standards, or if there are patents, they can't be used to restrict an implementation of a draft or standard.

I don't care if this has to be a government regulated activity, or if it takes a little longer, (but not too much longer; that's why we need the drafts) but we can't let the corporations mess up important technology for their own personal gain. The web browser standards war was useless enough, and that didn't have nearly as much money riding on it.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Oh, indeed. There's nothing wrong with testing that, but the out of the box settings often suck for both of them, and anyone doing real work will have to tune something. For instance, you never get security out of the box, and you often don't get speed; the initial settings are pretty newbie-friendly.

So, yes, it would be good to use the out-of-the-box settings for some sort of ease-of-use test, but not for a real benchmarking test.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Heck, lets go back to flaming ZD-Net, and telling Jesse Berst "I bet you're getting paid by Microsoft to say that"... :)

Well, yeah; arla definitely needs a lot of work before that happens, but it makes an okay client now; I understand OpenLDAP is good, but I never had to implement it. However, the distributions have the resources to sink into these projects, easily. And back in the day, Caldera would have just paid for the real stuff, from Netscape or Transarc...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I seem to remember that, actually, but I've gotten too lazy on slashdot to post links lately.

However, there you have it folks, Linux rules on a real test--a mix of static and dynamic content--even on the evil mindcraft test platform.

Mad props to IntlHarvester for his MLP skillz; mod him up for bothering to find the link!

And since I'm also too lazy to reply to your other post: if I want a scalable networked filesystem with ACLs on Linux, I'd use AFS, or just use arla, and get it to work with AFS. If I wanted security, I'd use kerberos on top of that. And since I'm at NCSU, I currently do all that anyhow to integrate with the network.

The NT boxes on the network do the same, but the interface is lousy and not available to the students, the users have to type their passwords in twice and wait an ungodly amount of time for everything, and the software is more expensive and takes up more resources. Hopefully they'll switch those boxes back over, too, now that Linux is a supported platform here.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That page wasn't accurate *then*; I'm sure you can look up several refutations of it.

However, I'd be interested in seeing another round of benchmarks, especially between Linux 2.4.0 (preferably whenever it's officially released) and Windows 2000. Also, a comparison between the many actual journaling filesystems that run under Linux and the one (not really) journaling filesystem that runs on NT/2000 would be interesting; heck, include BeOS in that one, too! :)

Ground rules: use identical hardware, use stable, recent software, tune it all as much as possible, and test with multiple hardware configurations, (i.e. not just 4 Processors and 4 NIC cards; that's not terribly realistic in the first place) to figure out what is the best overall solution.

Also, when determining web server performance, make sure there are some tasks that are CPU-bound or IO-bound as well as simply network-bound; you want to test everything.

That all having been said, I'm pretty sure that a lot of the Mindcraft-specific differences have been fixed in 2.4, and therefore Linux should perform significantly better on those sorts of tests than it did in the past, as well. I'd rather see some more well-rounded tests constructed to go along with that, though.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I've been running 2.4.0-test8, and most of the 'test' patches have been *big* patches. Along with that, I've also patched in support for reiserfs, arla, and ALSA.

Since the filesystem code has been overhauled somewhat, the first patches I got broke, and I had to fix them; alsa was fine (sound code), reiserfs was fairly stable, and arla was just broken. After waiting a bit longer, I got the latest patches; it all compiled cleanly, and reiserfs is solid, the kernel is a little less stable, and arla is still somewhat buggy, but much improved.

So half the reason for delaying a kernel release is to fix bugs, but the other half is to make sure that everyone else relying on the kernel has time to catch up and write for the new API. OpenWall will have their patch for 2.4 when it's stable, which they predict to be around 2.4.10. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Of *course* it's bizarre. It's just that your disbelief is supposed to be suspended in sci-fi novels. :)

I suppose it's easier in space when you don't really have gravity in the way, but still... a constant force no matter how far away you are? Weird.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I hope you were talking about how mature you weren't being in your original reply. This reply isn't very mature, either.

On slashdot, your glass house has long since been destroyed.

If you don't understand it, please don't reply.


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

This sounds *bizarre*.

However, the proof is in the pudding. Since I find it hard to believe everything in this article, I'll wait until 2001 and see if it happens.

If it does, then I'll say "Wow..." again. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, RMS will be the first to tell you that he had nothing to do with the Open Source movement; he's staunchly behind the Free Software movement.

Of course, a lot of this is semantics, definitions, smoke and marketing anyhow.

Red Hat was probably one of the first "Open Source" companies that both used the words in their marketing material *and* fit the bill in real life.

Personally, I'd have to credit ESR as chief Open Source advocate, and Bruce Perens for the DFSG.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hey, at least the link about SAP is in English, eh?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That is long, rambling, and tangential. I wish *I* got paid by the word.

However, he does have a point or two--this is a big deal, because we'll finally get to leave MacOS behind. Say what you will about MacOS X, whether you like the new graphical interface, or cringe at the thought of taking a perfectly good UNIX and ripping stuff out of it and putting a Mac emulation layer into it instead... It still has to be better than MacOS.

However, I'd rather be waiting for the Radiohead CD.

Also, I think Siggy was right about Steve Jobs being able to get people excited--I wish BeOS could have generated this much interest, considering how cool it is, and how much earlier it was released...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Sounds like another Tivo waiting to happen.

The specs are nice, I wouldn't mind having a device based around the same card. But I could seriously do without the Macrovision (stupid A/V laws :).

However, my big question is, why can't they make this like a VCR? Does your VCR broadcast your information back to anyone? I didn't think so! Well, now that it's a "computer", why does it suddenly have to be networked? Why do I not have faith in some corporate privacy policy?

I, for one, would pay extra up front to not have my information broadcasted back to people. Really.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I argue that the crappy stories that are accepted lead to the S/N ratio going to shit; if I were actually *really* interested in this article, would I be posting this? Conversely, if there was a good place for us all to really talk about this, would we be posting here? Like I said, the hidden sid's are worthless these days, so lets just get it out.

The anomalous moderation bugs me, but what bugs me more is that there isn't really a good check against this; metamod is broken, too. Also, I wonder where these people get all their mod points; do they just have a few accounts they switch between and imitate "regular slash user" behavior, or do they have scripts to do this now?

The corporate influence might be to blame for some of 1-3, as well; the slash people have known that there are better solutions to these problems; heck, there are better *implementations* out there, too. But do they change this? Nooo...

I think a bit more user control over the submission queue might help, but ultimately I don't think mob rule is really the answer, especially when it comes to moderation. Heck, I'd just be happy with an Everything-like interface to slashdot--recent story submissions, popular story submissions...

Anyone who wants to, feel free to continue this discussion in sid=moderation as well; I'm just not enthusiastic enough anymore to think that slashdot users can make a difference on slashdot.

...Oh, and for anyone who is reading this obscure thread in the article and thinking that it's offtopic, or irrelevant, or wants to post a snotty followup...

FUCK YOU, Go back up to the top, sort at +3, Highest Scores First, Flat, read the first two comments, and then shoot yourself. This is pretty deep into a thread that's already pretty low in this pretty crappy story, so stop reading if you aren't interested, or change the damn channel already and lay off the cheap $3 crack, OK???
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I see...

Interesting => Offtopic
Not Slashdot => Troll

Please teach slashbot-speak! RIAA double-plus-ungood?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I think Linux is starting to be the victim of its success. I'm running a box with RH 6.2/7.0 and 2.4.0-test8+reiserfs+arla; some things are stable, and some things are flaky. Most notably, gcc and arla are pretty flaky; 2.4.0-test8 is a little flaky; reiserfs and RH 6.2 are pretty stable. But all the new flashy stuff for Linux starts out at almost Windows-level quality, and sometimes worse. Just look at the history of Enlightenment development--always flashy first and stable later.

I've also been here so long that I've been reading it more out of habit than anything else--actually, check out Siggy's piece at Kuro5hin, and ask yourself when Slashdot has had even 1/4 of the enlightened discussion that they have there, every day.

The emu community hid under a rock a long time ago. I loved Node 99, and after that EmuNews was really good too, I remember I asked slashdot to make a slashbox for EmuNews when slashboxes first came out, but they didn't do it. What is the cool Emulation news site now? I always just search when I'm in the mood, or generally use MAME, MESS, Frodo, snes9x and TuxNES...

Tired of computers? Don't say that! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Thanks for the link, that's interesting.

Kuro5hin is what slashdot should have been; we told them what would happen and how to fix it, and they blew us off and told us there wasn't a problem.

And then they wrote duct tape and bailing wire in Perl and called it a day.

Nope, sorry guys, moderation is broken. See?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Wow, I could have sworn you were doing better than that lately. :)

However, if I had mod points, it'd be the least I could do, provided I could have some of that cheap $3 crack too. The market seems to be flooded with it, lately.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I thought it was some kind of *really* high-end network benchmarking utility.

Anyhow, the screenshots look really neat. Hmm...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I would have to agree, anyone who can't learn how to communicate with their peers by the time they need to get a job is in big trouble; good communication skills and English would obviously be necessary for a job in America.

For that matter, anyone who sends e-mail with Microsoft Outlook or sends out their resume as an attached MS-Word document, or develops web pages with a Microsoft product without demoronizing it first *definitely* has a problem communicating with the rest of the (not entirely owned by Microsoft yet) world.

Unless, of course, you *like* broken MIME attachments, unreadable bloated binary OLE streams of text with attached random hard-drive contents, and undefined UNICODE characters from non-standard character sets, and pandering unsolicited e-mails, or mistake them for "Innovation"...

Why can't we have a country of standards-compliant people? If we could do that, I'd break ties with Microsoftia, and move to RFCville, right across the way from POSIX-land.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'd hate to find myself on the wrong side of a 96-1 vote.

Once faced with an up-and-down vote on H-1B visas alone, only one Democrat--Ernest Hollings of South Carolina--voted against the legislation, without citing why.

That poor bastard. :)

Now if only there was a requirement that additions to a bill had to be ON TOPIC! Adding in stuff about immigration in this bill isn't that bad, but when they sneak in random riders about internet freedom and crop subsidies in with legislation about crime legislation or trade agreements... Well, after a while it just gets silly.

The topic should be established at the top, and anything that doesn't fit shouldn't be allowed in the bill. Vote on one issue at a time, guys.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Bye, bye, Bojay.

I read the rant on your user page, and I'm sorry you feel this way; I just have one question for you, so feel free to reply by e-mail if necessary.

How did you manage to take this site seriously for so long?

I started trolling with a fake account somewhere around UID# 140,000; all the posts from that account wouldn't easily pass the lameness filter now, but some of them were really quite funny.

OOG THE CAVEMAN is a more successful example of a smart caveman that would be censored by modern-day slashdot, but I'm certainly not taking credit for that one; he's a genius! :)

More recently, I created another troll account that was quite successful, but also rather unfairly moderated down.

Somewhere in between, since Rev told me how well I was doing in 'Fantasy Karma Whore', (I wasn't really keeping track until then, but I was so proud...) I've tried my hand at Karma Whoring lately, just for the love of the game. There's nothing wrong with posting something that's moderately insightful or informative, but you're right, with slashdot it has much more to do with being in the right place at the right time, and getting your opinions seen and making them seem catchy; this is all just social engineering.

However, I've been here since before we had moderation, and I loved the quality of both the news and the discussion; that has done nothing but degrade since I got here, and I don't see it getting better in the foreseeable future. The admins have refused to tackle both the simple problems (eliminating duplicate links, checking their spelling, finding and fixing dead links -- this could *easily* be automated) and the hard ones; (the incredibly broken moderation system, the incredibly broken karma system, and don't even get me started about metamod) slashdot needs to admit it has a problem and ask for help.

So although it's still fun to post here, and every once in a while I'll see a glimmer of intelligent discussion, other sites like kuro5hin and half-empty will definitely be looking up in the future unless slashdot's admins wake up and see what their site has become. And with people like Signal 11 posting to the other sites, well, maybe we'll have some more intelligent conversations and honest opinions for a while, since these are often not welcome here at slashdot anymore.

Mob rule != Intelligent conversation.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Ah, I remember fondly the days of running netrek on a crappy black and white Mac, drooling at the graphics...

...and it looks like it has only gotten better.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, I noticed that later...

Great minds, eh? :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

They're in favor of dragging their feet whenever possible. If they really thought they could win this, they would have been pushing for the speediest trial possible.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Is anyone surprised?

They're using a development version of gcc, for one thing; it complains about all sorts of random things.

I haven't installed it all, mind you, because I just got my system halfway stable with 2.4.0-test8. (with arla, reiserfs, and whatnot...)

There's nothing wrong with being bleeding-edge, but I'm at least waiting for the updates...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Um... yeah. If you say so. Generating the output string, eh?

Ah well, I can still write the other version at my leisure, since your optimized version won't help me figure out the algorithm. ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yet another Napster article; nothing to see here. Could we please have that "beaten dead horse" icon for this story?

Again, the record companies don't need more money, they can do that all by themselves. They just want control.

The interesting thing here, though is that the judges sound sympathetic to Napster's plight. The RIAA is making the same tired old arguments without regard to what the law really says, or how Napster really works.

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

Hey, don't blame it on the DSP!

I think the same thing when I read what you code in C!

I mean, really, who else does stuff like this?

L[j] = "ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA9876543210"[i];

Well, ok, I would, now that I know it's legal...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Thanks, Joe; that's also what I've heard from other people. I've lost about 37 points so far; good thing high karma doesn't matter...

I never did code that depth-first approach. I guess I'll see how it's *really* done soon enough, though? :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

You might get eaten by a Grue...
> Use Brass Lantern
I don't know what "Use" means.
It is dark.
> Turn On Brass Lantern
You are in a cavern.
There is an exit to the north.
> N
You are in a great hall.
It says "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
The room is full of passages.
> N
You see a display case in front of you. It says 'hof'.
There are exits to the east, west, and south.
> E
You fall through a trap door.
You are in a deep cavern.
There are trolls lurking about.
> Talk to Trolls
The trolls heckle you.
You are moderated down.
You feel less intelligent.
> E
You step into a pool of slime.
You see an amulet on the ground.
> Take Amulet
You have the Amulet of Karma Whoring +2
> Wear Amulet
You radiate light.
The trolls cower in fear.
You now have secret slashdot knowledge.
> Go Home
Using your new mastery of Slashdot, you go to your homepage, which is 'slashdot.org', because you have no life.
> Shut Up
You feel less intelligent.
> Post to slashdot
You post to the most recent article.
Would you like to hear what the article is about?
--> No
What kind of post would you like?
--> This is not News for Nerds
You are moderated up to +2; you get three replies
> Read replies
Anonymous Coward: j00 suck Karma Whore; I 0wn j00!
> Moderate trolls down
You can't moderate and post in the same account
> Switch to other account
You have no mod points.
Your other account was bitchslapped for abuse.
> Complain to Malda
There is no reply.
> Switch to kuro5hin
Your karma was 253 out of a possible 64,
giving you a rank of Old-school Karma Whore.
# _

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

Well, I don't like the karma cap, but all that means is that you have to keep score yourself. Also, I think that displaying/not displaying karma on your page to other people should be a user-configurable option, because my Karma is definitely part of my user info.

I think that your other idea is basically sound, but needs some work. Realize that Signal 11, as well as most users that post a lot, get moderated down a fair bit, and not always for valid reasons. Therefore, this shouldn't be a number of downward moderations, but rather a percentage.

I know (because of the karma cap) that I've gotten 37 downward moderations since it was enstated, but since that only counts downward moderations, that includes a (-1, Overrated) moderation on a (+5, Insightful) post. That is, what would normally be at least a +3 gain in karma ends up being a -1 loss. Under your system, I might be posting at 0 for posting insightful comments; that's why a flat number won't work for everybody.

Similar proposals have existed in the past, including "aging" of karma. Personally, I would like a simple all-time chart, though, just to keep score. I still think that a really fair way to do moderation probably looks a lot more like kuro5hin, though, and they don't have karma, hence, no need to want to "keep score". That's probably a good thing.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What, is the new limit 64? I only lose points because my karma is well over the new karma cap that was enstated. I asked Rob about it, and he told me that it doesn't matter because high karma doesn't matter. Well, he's right, but it would have been nice to mention that on the site.

The proper place to go to bitch about moderation is here; that's one thing slashdot *did* get right.

Hey, write a better FAQ, and link to it in your .sig; maybe you'll get it on slashdot as a story. You can only expect so much from CmdrTaco and company, and most of the time it doesn't happen. That's why sites like kuro5hin and half-empty exist, because obviously slashdot wasn't enough for some people.

Personally, I'm still drooling over the skinning support on half-empty. On slashdot, I'd be happy if I could just get a consistent *color scheme*; if Rob implemented a skinning system, I'd probably have a heart attack!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

It's good that someone has proof that hyperlinking is really not a new idea. Of course people do it on the web today, and they did it in gopher, but as far as I'm concerned, references and footnotes in a paper do the same conceptual thing, as does the index in the back of a book, or the table of contents in the front. It does the same thing, too; it points you to a number (a link) where you can find the information on the subject (text of link). Then you follow the link (turn to the page) and read the linked information.

Asimov would often work in uses of hyperlinking in his stories; he was a big fan of it, and thought that if you had a machine that could track your eye movements, then if you stared at a word longer than necessary, it could make references pop up in the margins, and explain the subject. And that was a long time ago, and Asimov is dead now.

The only thing new about hyperlinking was the idea that you could somehow automate this process, but that's not new; people always want to automate things. I'm sure people have said for as long as books have been around in their current form: gee, it'd be nice if I already had this information I wanted on the page in front of me...

Yet another obvious implementation of a real world phenomenon that's unique now because it's on the net.

In the future, this will be abbreviated YAOIOARWPTUNBIOTN.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

They'll probably just end up cutting a deal, but RAMBUS has patents on not just DDR-SDRAM, but SDRAM itself! They have some ridiculously broad patents that should never have been approved in the first place; hopefully this will get struck down due to *obvious* prior-art.

I think it's sad that Intel has these losers around to do their dirty work for them. Remember, "When you can't compete on technical merit, sue!"
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Wow; QBASIC had a PALETTE command and a logical and operator? I never knew that, back then!

I could make *my* simple display hack a lot prettier, now! Thank your friend for me, and ask him where he was 10 years ago when I needed him! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Can we make it completely anonymous, too?

That way, no one else has to know who you are, or what you're saying... wait, if I wanted that, I could just lock myself in the closet...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Please, troll moderators, moderate correctly! The above post is Ontopic. It may be many other things, but Offtopic is not one of them.

Here, let me help you in your tasks.

This story is about KBasic, a RAD tool similar to Visual BASIC on Windows, but being developed for KDE on Linux.

My position is that if it is as similar to "Visual BASIC on Windows" as the rest of the K Desktop Environment is to the Windows Desktop Environment, then this would be a manifestly bad thing.

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

Thanks! That looks pretty cool when bilinearly filtered and scaled to 640x480 in DOSEMU. :)

Incidentally, those lemmings look sorta like penguins, and they can run on Linux! Coincidence? I think not...

SCREEN 13
FOR I = 0 TO 319
FOR J = 0 TO 199
PSET (I, J), I OR J
NEXT J
NEXT I

REM P.S. Boy, the standard DOS color palette bites!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, that's because that sort of thinking tends to crop up more on those GUI, component-based models that imitate the market leader instead of those CLI, component-based models that design for themselves.

Actually, on our system, they're automatically backed up. And it might get root if you're good, but hopefully the sysadmin is better. However, the language *itself* shouldn't require root for its useful features. That's another obvious design flaw that makes everything so much more usable when your system isn't being hosed, apparently.

Here's Microsoft's party line on this stuff. Of course they aren't responsible for designing a system with no security at all; it's those darn 'malicious hackers'. Too bad we don't know how to fix our software to stop them; oh well.

In my opinion, this is a design flaw that should be avoided. That is all.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Oh well; at least it will take a long time to complete...

Please, NO ONE tell them where they can find already completed code or tools to quickly finish this project! Give us time to develop a decent language as a response...

The last thing we need is a custom Macro Virus Language for Linux...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.