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"Kernel Drivers do not have to be under the GPL"

They do if you want them distributed with the kernel source tree.


OpenVerse Visual Chat: http://openverse.org

There are some SPEC benchmarks and commentary up on aceshardware.com.

Interesting that Intel appears to have finally released a CPU with good (great, even) fp performance. Too bad it sucks for integer...

Here's another idea. If DSL providers actually policed their network, and culled all the script kiddies, nukers, DVD-downloaders, DDoSsers etc., they could save themself one hell of a lot of money on bandwidth charges to their upstream provider.

Here's an easier way...why don't they just lower the amount of bandwidth everyone gets. Oh wait, then not as many people would want the service. Legalities aside, a fast connection that you can't download DVD's, MP3's, warez, porn, or whatever else you want is rather useless. And I suspect DVD downloading is actually the least popular of the above, and consumes the least bandwidth.

There are two types of people who use their connections. The occasional browsers, and the heavy users. The ISPs love the occasional browsers, as they don't use their connections to anywhere near capacity. Unless DSL or cable is cheap (it is in many areas now, but far from all), not many of these people are going to get it, because they don't really need it. The heavy users on the other hand, are going to be the first ones in line for cheap bandwidth. They are the ones the ISPs hate, because they actually _use_ the the services provided to them. :)

Script kiddies aren't that big of an issue here, they mainly cause problems for the receiver. A script kiddie on a modem attacking some user on x random DSL provider is more likely to consume their bandwidth, than one who is actually on their service attacking others. At least until they get attacked in return... I'm not saying they're not a problem, just that they are not a DSL-specific problem, and it's not really any worse there than it is anywhere else.

Right except for wet weather. I've never seen a race halted for wet weather.

However, a large number of the drivers on the street seem to freak out and drive like idiots (even more so than normal) whenever it rains. Racers don't have to worry about that.

OpenVerse Visual Chat: http://openverse.org

Linux can run on the old Amigas (16bit CPU).

Actually, the 68000-series CPUs on which the Amiga was based are mostly 32-bit. The original 68000 CPU was not fully 32-bit, but the 68020 and up were. Linux requires a 68020 or higher with an MMU.

Otherwise you need something like ucLinux.

Over all, I think I would have liked network or modem multiplayer support better than the two mouse method. It was too tempting to peek at that the other player was doing.

Too tempting? If you didn't pay attention to what the other person was doing, you were likely to find all of your lemmings falling down a new hole that was not originally part of the map. :)

I'm still annoyed that there's no serial port on Sony's recent laptops...

"Yes, there are a lot of people who wouldn't be able to use an electric car because of the distances they drive, or other factors. That doesn't mean they aren't great solutions for those of us who can use them."

But if there were no government incentives to GM allowing them to sell the car for thousands of dollars less than it costs to build it, and you had to pay the full price of the car, would you still be willing to buy one?

Plus, they double as your floppy drive which is cool, saves space, and sounds better than a regular floppy drive (not quite as gratingly noisy with the seeks and transfers).

You obviously don't have the same model LS120 that my brother has. Not only is it about 1/4th the speed of a standard floppy drive when reading standard floppies, it's also about 3x louder.

It's perfectly fast and not particularly loud for reading SuperDisks though.

I've had from 1-3 computers running 24/7 at home
at various times over the last 5 years.

A few years ago, I had just put a new (old) 8-bit soundblaster card into my 486. A few hours later, one of the capacitors on the card caught on fire. I would not have noticed if the case had been on.
Whether it would have spread to other components, or just burned itself out I do not know.

I never did check the card to see if it works, but a friend of mine has an SB16 that he said caught on fire once, and still works.

OpenVerse Visual Chat: http://openverse.org

"I still don't like the idea that they're keeping the instruction sets closed. It would seem like if someone out there wanted to port GCC to Crusoes native instructions, that would be good... But they just don't want to be percieved as being at all incompatible with Intel, i guees.

The reason has nothing to do with Intel compatibility, it has to do with the nature of VLIW. As someone else mentioned above, every new VLIW CPU from Transmeta will be different (the two CPUs they announced have different cores) and require totally different optimizing, possibly even having a different instruction set.

What Transmeta has done is remove the primary problem of VLIW...the fact that you need a very specific compiler for your CPU to extract performance out of it. By including the "compiler" in the CPU, it's done for you at run time, so you won't have to recompile your code every time you get a new CPU.

See the worlds shittiest website, complete with cartoons for avatars at

http://openverse.org

If you want something to be open source, get off your ass and write something that's open source.

Perhaps the people who are being loud about this issue are OpenSource authors? (I am)

I for one am not interested in writing a new /. I am interested in the community involvement in IMPROVING this one which is impossible without an ongoing availability of the /. source.

I cannot speak for everyone but I don't think anyone is interested in the code to "steal the slashdot crowd and relocate them to a new forum". nor do I think this is even possible. The net has shown that he who comes first, leads (amazon.com's auction site is a good example as it lags behind eBay even with the troubles eBay has). Users become loyal to the first commers and I include myself as a loyal slashdotter (for now)

What I am shouting about is the hipocrisy which runs rampant from a site which is making money off of our OpenSource model while refusing to participate in it. I'm glad they're making money don't get me wrong... It's a good thing to have money. It's a bad thing to have made that money off of someone else's idea and then to deficate on the idea with comments like "ask me again and I'll delay it again". At the very least, Andover should make a public announcement as to IF,WHEN,and HOW the source will be released and stick to that schedule. They have nothing to loose, and everythgin to gain. There are other discussion forums out there. Some may even argue that they are better, more user friendly, etc... But we WANT to be loyal to /. /. is making it hard on a lot of us to remain loyal.


They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen

this guy's website sux

You're missing the point.

/. does not suck. It is a wonderful means of communication. It is extremely effective And has >GREAT power to enhance OpenSource and other general geek values.

You may not like my application, or my web site. You may think the smattering of avatars people have taken the time to put on the site suck too. but you are still missing the point.

The point is... Slashdot is riding the OpenSource / Linux wave while not participating by releasing their code in manner which allows people to participate in the development of this environment And making money off of our ideals in the process.

I love /. as a community to discuss geek stuff. I hate the fact that they are ripping us off in the process.

As for advertising my site in my sig, It's called pride in what you do.. Perhaps if you had something to be proud of you would not be posting as an anonymous coward and would have a link to your own site... even if it did suck somewhat. But for what it's worth.. Enough people think that OpenVerse Visual Chat does not suck that we have a fairly large userbase which includes some major OS heros who I will spare mentioning here. Have a look at the comments page if you're insterested to see who thinks OV doesn't suck.




They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen

My question is this..

We, as programmers, have put a lot of work into providing applications, drivers, kernels, extensiosn to existing apps, etc all for the good of all to share. I do as well. OpenVerse Visual Chat

But what happens when a company who distributes these applications we worked so hard on begins to dominate the market. What happens when their distro is no longer freely available to the masses via FTP, ISO images and restrictions on giving copies via cheapbytes.

The masses still get our products, the fruit of our hard earned labour but now, they cannot share it as easily as before (no ISO to download, a new RPM format is introduced that only extracts on new RPM $120 distro cds) etc. What if the required inclusion of the license information and gpl.tx were obscurely placed away somewhere on the system?

If this were to happen, would the GPL protect us? Would we be, as a group, be able to say HAY YOU BIG CORPORATION! we know you're not breaking any rules but you've made it nearly impossible for people to share our information which is included on your product (at little or no cost to you) which was not our intent.

I'm not looking to be paid for my efforts. I'm only looking for others to be able to enjoy my efforts, modify it to their needs and share it with everyone who wants it. These big corps have a responsibility to advance this concept using the money they ear off of our work. If the GPL does not encompass this, perhaps it's time to rework the GPL... IANAL - I really don't understand all the implications of the GPL.


They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen

We had it easy in our dept at The Death Star(tm)

We were on call, sure.. but the rules were that you had to return the call within 30 minutes and be available to come in to the office within 8 hours. Our team is the programming team, I guess they had enough failth in us as programmers, in the function testers as testers, in the regression testers in their work and the second function test/regression test that all of the software went through before we were any where near y2k.

In otherwords... Perhaps the gripes should be about a lack of trust in your preparedness procedures.

I had a nice peaceful evening in the OpenVerse as I watched the time switch from everywhere in the world. We drank shots for NZ, OZ/China, All of europe, blah blah.. safely zoinked out of my mind with my parrot, the captain, and my OpenVerse friends.


They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen

With no funding, OpenVerse is most deserving of a $2000 award.

http://openverse.org is where you can see info on this project. We could use the money to pay for the web space we are using.




You are a threat to free speech and must be SILENCED!

Chat is dominated by IRC. But let's face it.. It's effective but very dull on the eyes.

Introduce eye-candy and you have OpenVerse Visual Chat http://openverse.org

This is my nomination for best UNIX (or windows, or mac) eye candy OpenSource project.


You are a threat to free speech and must be SILENCED!

"The only solution might be to run all the code on the server. Yes, really. Imagine the client side just being a 2D graphical dumb terminal just drawing frames from the server. It can't be 3D because it would be hackable at the driver-level again."

Something similar happened to me.

I've written a chat software which is now called OpenVerse. When I started writing it, it was called Metaverse. But it turns out some company named SJGames owns this word (surprisingly, they only obtained a trademark for this word after the book SnowCrash was released.

It seems SJGames CONFIGURED a mush and called is Metaverse and trademarked the name.

So I'm happily working on my chat program when I get a letter from that company telling me I can't call it Metaverse cause they own the word.

I was a little upset to say the least but what can I do? I'm just a lowly free software programmer and I don't have any lawyer money to protect me from them.

I Quickly folded up Metaverse and changed the name to OpenVerse but now I worry about the next big guy to come along. What will I do then? Throw my project out the window? Fight it with no money and loose? All of these thin trademarks are really upsetting.

There should be some merrit when it comes to trademarks. I feel that simply configuring someone elses free software and then trademarking a name based on that is pretty damn thin to me.

I use a Ricochet modem on my server at home in Alexandria, Fairfax County, VA. It's my only connection to the Internet. Sometimes I get nearly 28.8K out of it. Other times it's much slower. Overall, I'm happy with the service although I wish that its interactive performance was better. It's unusable for telnet. In spite of the sometimes slow connections, I'm running a couple of services over the radio link. Visit Madison to play with my NetBSD port of Alan Cox's Linux Portaloo and also Ben Reser's Echelon Armor thingie which I swiped from here. I'm running an OpenVerse server on madison.dynip.com:7000 and a dopewars server on the default dopewars port. Feel free to try any of them. I don't advertise, so I don't get lot of traffic. Don't be surprised if the connection is slow!

I've also used the modem on my NetBSD-running Sony PCG-505 laptop. I've used it to listen to WPFW in DC and WWOZ in New Orleans using RealAudio. In fact, Frank Ahrens of the Washington Post wrote about my experience in an article on the future of radio. It appeared on January 21, 1999. Depending on network congestion, it acutally sounds OK. In the article, I think I said the sound was "like a cheap transistor radio". Mr. Ahren's editor cut out the qualification that that was a weakness of the small Sony speakers I used rather than the streaming audio technology or the wireless modem.

A recent announcement from Metricom promised 128K service in 12 markets by summer 2000.