Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Hoaxery, New Math, Gestures
At least the jurors don't get to set the value of Pi. openbear writes: "According to a story at c|net the jurors meant for MP3.com to pay $3 million and not $300,000 in the court decision made last week. This may sound bad for MP3.com, but considering that TVT was originally going for $8.5 million I suppose that $3 million still looks like a good ruling. Espically since they have $42.9 million set aside for damage awards in pending suits."
(Here are some other articles about MP3.com as well.)
Parroting the (ORA, ActiveState, etc.) company line: rjoseph writes: "Perl.com's managing editor Simon Cozens has written a quick article on O'Reilly.com that explains the April Fools joke of the faked colaboration between Perl and Python to produce Parrot. He explains how the most interesting aspect about the whole affair is the fact that, to pull it off succesfully, the Perl and Python communities had to work together more than they had in a long time!"
Humor may suffer from analysis, but this is a cool explanation of what it took to pull off what turned out to be probably the most convincing Fool of the year, at least for those in the very small Venn diagram with the background and motivation to care about open-source programming languages and their creators;) Of course, now no one will believe it when the two do actually merge. (For a while I thought that the talk of "Python 3000" was a joke, too.)
Small steps on tiny machines n7lyg writes: "IEEE Computer has an article this month about a prototype PDA developed at Compaq's Western Research Labs: Itsy: Stretching the Bounds of Mobile Computing. Itsy has been through two implementations and has several unique features, including using MEMS accelerometers to implement a gesture interface (Rock'n'Scroll). This is all just research, but it does show promise for Linux-based PDA's. Itsy runs the X Window System and Qt Palmtop. The WRL website for Itsy is here."
This is really cool background material; now the earlier Itsy work has led to Linux on the iPAQ, I wish Compaq would actually sell a PDA with the size and shape of the Itsy itself. And tiny accelerometers for gesture-control would be welcome on my visor as well, and surely for small video game systems.
Big Blue, Big Blue, your transmission is fading, please say again, over. An Onymous Coward writes: "This sucks. At LWCE there was a big display at the KDE booth using ViaVoice to control KDE apps through Qt. Now it looks like the project is dead in the water, according to this article at Newsforge -- maybe lack of interest from IBM?"
What with the billion dollars that IBM has pledged to spend on Linux-related projects, and the fact that ViaVoice has shipped for a while with the high-end boxed version of Mandrake, hopefully this is just an oversight. ViaVoice is a cool technology -- but if things don't work out between Qt and IBM, perhaps KDE (and GNOME, and others, level playing field here!) can work on integration with Sphinx. An Apache-style license should be all-around friendly, right?
http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2384/LWD010410maccomme nts/
You know, Linus Torvalds said April 8 that reports of him trashing the new Mac OS X are simply misquotes, as he has "never commented on OS X."
But, this is slashdot. Suggest that something said about THE CREATOR was wrong? *gasp*
They've got less than 20,000 active users for their my.mp3.com service, and the number of *paying* users is a hall of a lot less. Supposedly they had 500,000 sign ups initially, but everyone stopped using it after they encoutnered the licensing problems.
Considering they spent >100 million on the licenses for beam-it that works out at $5,000 per user.
Meanwhile, Musicbank Just closed its Doors today, another company that licensed stuff from the music business. These guys Never got round to Launching a product though.
Which leaves myplay.com as the only music service provider looking healthy, it must be cheaper to buy all that disk storage than it is to pay those label licenses.....
Oh man, you have never taught. Granted, there's teachers that are flakes, but there's lots that aren't, too, and to be even a barely competent teacher, you have to:
Doing this well, heck, even doing it passably, is really, really hard. It's such an important job that lots of people are willing to do it despite the fact that it's such hard work for (usually) such low pay. And there are rewards, for example when you get to see someone learn a difficult new idea. But don't ever say it's easy till you've spent a year or two trying it. You've got no idea.
--Bruce Fields
The very first post on Slashdot set the tone for all of April Fool's. LZip with compression down to %0 of the file size. That ruined any possibility of anything being taken seriously. The ensuing crap that followed didn't help either. I would have thought that intelligent people could have had better execution than on the site that pathetic day.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
At least the jurors don't get to set the value of Pi. openbear writes: "According to a story at c|net the jurors meant for MP3.com to pay $3 million and not $300,000 in the court decision made last week.
In Indiana, there used to be a law setting pi equal to 4 instead of the more common value of 3.141592653589793238462650133. It was repealed, though. More info here.
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