Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Apache, DRM, Limbo
Those guys did not ride in with us. Sascha Schumann of the Apache Software Foundation wrote to correct the story presented in Monday's post (".Net for Apache"), writing "this is _not_ a joint Apache Software Foundation/Microsoft stunt. It has not been approved or endorsed by the Apache Software Foundation, nor does it require any of those acts -- it is a deal between two private companies, Covalent and Microsoft."
Fly on wall video, anyone? kikensei writes: "DSL Reports has a story summarizing last week's DRM round table that was stacked with corporate panel members. You can read it here. It presents a much more apt framework for discussion than the overly sensitive, passive account from Al3x that defined our discussion last week."
Dancing in limbo, limbo, limbo. Earlier this month, we mentioned Red Hat's new beta, called Limbo. wiredog writes "From eWeek, a review of RedHat 8.0 beta. With gcc 3.1,the latest versions of GNOME, Mozilla and OpenOffice, and Apache 2.0"
The force is strong in these metallic boxes. Verizon Guy writes "CNet is reporting that Industrial Light and Magic, the group responsible for rendering the special effects in the Star Wars films, is moving away from their proprietary SGI/IRIX/RISC based systems and is instead moving to Dells running Linux. This will give them 100% performance at 20% of the cost."
Here's a link to our post with the recent Linux Journal article on same; look for more on this soon.
Wear name tags, please. mpawlo writes "Slashdot meetup day is only a week away. Some 4 500 people have already signed up to meet all over the world on Thursday July 25, 2002, 7 pm. We need more fellow Swedes to meet in Stockholm and I guess the same goes for other cities."
According to the top meetup list, more than 200 meetings are with 5 or less people. I wonder how many of them will actually take place. The 70 meetups with only one member will be really cool... at least there's no risk the other guests are boring.
Teenagers these days don't have as much sex as they want each other to think they do.
Some 4 500 people have already signed up to meet...
4,500 people! I feel sorry for the three girls that are gonna show up. Behave yourselfz, gentlemen! Keep your 1337n335 where it belongs!
In order to learn the secret location of a geek get together in your area, you must submit your email address.
The site promises that I won't be spammed, but I have found repeatedly that many companies don't share my definition of spam. More often than not, when a company promises not to use my email address for spam, what they mean is that they won't sell my address (for now). However, they don't consider sending me a weekly newsletter consisting soley of product ads to be spam.
Yeah I suppose a newbie might not understand it first off. Slashback revisits stories posten recently with some interesting (and sometimes vital) additional info or clarifications. They usually do around one or two slashbacks a week. These are the articles where replys to the editorial team like "Thats not true!!" or "You should have also had a link to this..." go.
It's a sort of errata. Corrections and updates to articles posted earlier in Slashdot are published here.
Teenagers these days don't have as much sex as they want each other to think they do.
Anyone who has successfully downloaded the new Mandrake beta want to comment on that?
What? We're no longer permitted to respond in-band? Or can the Mandrake Beta now claim to be /.'s quickest
Slashback topic?
In other words: huh?
And it's only the Devil Rays...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Only if they provide tags I will. If they have these corny "Hello, I am " stickers/tags, I will blatantly refuse...
I have no clue what you are talking about... ;)
I pretty much figure we'll see the first ever recorded Slashdotting of a bowling alley!
> Digital Revelations is largely relying on
> Intel-based computers for the effects on "Rendezvous
> with Rama," a thriller coming out next year in
> which a group of humans seek revenge on aliens
> that blow up Italy.
Possibly offtopic, but I don't remember Arthur Clarke's story having any mention of destroying Italy...
I have a friend who has a friend who etc. works for ILM. They had planned this thing for a loooong time and they had assigned three (small) teams to this swithover project.
;) .
One of the teams was to investigate the actual power of Linux in this domain and the offer of the marked. Techies .
Second team was to look over the market see about savings, opportunities, investors, stuff like that. Financial $tuff
The existence of the third team will probably never be acknowledged, but their task was to look into what their competitors who switched to Linux (see preview slashdot's announces of switchovers) were doing, how were they doing it, what impact on their revenues had, etc. I'd say spies. They've done a pretty good job.
Of course, this is highly fictional and has no relation to any living person or existing company
__________
Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace!
If I remember correctly, Venice was wiped out by a very small asteroid strike, which led to Spacewatch starting, which led to the discovery of Rama.
As usual, CNet gets some individual facts right, others a bit wrong, and totally fucks up the connections between them.
> Digital Revelations is largely relying on
... just an encounter with an intelligence (or perhaps just an automated machine) we are apparently unequiped to understand. A fun and very thoughtful story, which the blurb you quote above seems to imply Hollywood is shameless bastardizing into something unrecognizable and repellant.
> Intel-based computers for the effects on "Rendezvous
> with Rama," a thriller coming out next year in
> which a group of humans seek revenge on aliens
> that blow up Italy.
Possibly offtopic, but I don't remember Arthur Clarke's story having any mention of destroying Italy...
IFF that caption accurately represents the Hollywood interpretation of Arthur C. Clark's masterpiece the movie will not be worth seeing.
In the book a meteor of natural origion caused tremendouse damage to the Earth when it skimmed by the atmosphere (I don't recall if Italy was affected per se, but it may have been), resulting is the construction of a space defense against any future incoming rocks. This defense detected an inert alien craft entering the solar system (years or decades after the defense system had been built), and a science mission was sent to explore it.
The encounter is a little remeniscent of Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco. The scientists experience a great deal, see a lot, learn a little, but those who survive come away at the end mostly baffled and uncomprehending of what they saw.
No "evil alien attacking" or other such nonsense
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The meet FAQ specifically states that nobody "runs" the meets. They are instead pure peer-to-peer gatherings.
If someone were to bring a floppy disk or CD with an MP3 file on it, or even a sheet of music with lyrics, wouldn't that technically violate the DMCA resulting in the RIAA attempting to prosecute the whole meet structure? As an organized peer-to-peer structure, it MUST have no other purpose than to violate copyrights, right?
I've got my good buddy Fritz on the line. Maybe he'll funnel some of that good sweet Disney or RIAA Christmas money my way. I'll wash his campaign limo so it's all legal as payment for a service of course... You peer-to-peer criminals have only one thing in mind, and you're the biggest threat to individual expression and creativity the universe has ever seen!
*wakes up in cold sweat, hits "decline" RSVP link*
Industrial Light and Magic, you're getting a dell!
Please stop signing me up for mailing lists. I am tired of getting your spam.
Sincerely,
Joe Dickless
Society for the Prohibition of Circumcision
dicklessjoe@dick.org
I'm getting that "they're going to rape and pillage it like Starship Troopers" feeling. What a waste.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
You might not sign up for Meetup, but I just want to say that Scott Heiferman (Meetup's Co-Founder & CEO) is a swell guy.
/. :)
Hey, Scott! Good to know you hang out on
- fader
Check out the top cities for Slashdot Meetup Day. First on the list is Toronto. Vancouver (13) and Montreal (Tied-14) are in the top 20; taken together they outscore the combination of San Francisco and San Jose. Outside of Canada, London (England) is second on the list (the top American city is Washington, at third). The Aussies are putting in a strong showing with three in the top 20: Melbourne (6), Sydney (7), and Brisbane (11); Perth weighs in at 32nd. "Majority" is too strong a word to use, but ... are us non-Americans taking over Slashdot?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I think its rediculous how the manhattan location is getting all of NY's members, what about Queens?? Long island?? There are 5 or 6 people to those locations. LAME!
:)
Theres more to NY than the over populated and polluted island.
Strewth: do they not have a net installer with just a basic small (e.g. 35MB) bootableISO download yet? Why waste your precious bandwidth on packages you're never going to use? Try Debian see why I don't ever want to download Mandrake again.
I wish Mandrake come up with some way for me to upgrade painlessly over the 'net without having to download and burn GBs of ISO. If I can't get it done, the next time I try to upgrade my Mandrake 8.1 system, I'll replace it with Debian and never worry about it again.
You've been coming here for four years and didn't work it out? Are the new glasses helping?
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
SLASHDOT GET TOGETHER
Please bring the following items:
- Trollbot
- Know-it-all Attitude
- Socialist Mindset
- Secret piggy-bank where you keep that big karma horde
- "I love/hate Linus" Flag
- e-Book version of the Bible, preprocessed to replace "God" and "Lord" with "Richard Stallman" and "Eric Raymond", respectively.
- Outrageously Customized Computer Case (Laboratory Eyeshades optional)
- Anti-Editorial-Censorship SLASH backdoor
- Photoshopped picture of you and a beautiful woman (woman stolen, of course from OMM's coverage of QuakeCon)
- Editors: Your favorite foot (for insertion into your collective mouth)
Come one come all!!!Oh come on we are supposed to be the second damn silicon valley or something like that.
/. is not exactly friendly to. . . .
Ok so granted most of the high tech companies around here
Err, but crud. With Real Networks, McNeel Software, Wild Tangent, Immunex, and so forth all around here, why doesn't Seattle have a few hundred people minimum signed up? Not to mention Boeing, Starbucks, Seattle's Best Coffee, and other Nerd and Geek related enterprises.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
The problem didn't happen in the LA-Beverly Hills-Hollywood (damn, who concatenated that unholy hodge-podge!) area. 48 geeks will be dropping by Jillian's Bowling Alley in CityWalk for the meetup. Including moi.
I would have actually preferred a little more localism. A San Fernando Valley meetup would have been way better for my purposes (Sherman Oaks, anyone?) and I'm sure Westsiders would have been much happier with a Venice or Santa Monica locale. Downtown would probably have been better for the NOC geeks centered around One Wilshire. However, it's cool that there will be such a throng.
I will be bringing the digital camera. Photos will be up at msgeek.org as soon as I can swing it after the big event.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Jillian's is a bowling alley too. At CityWalk. In Universal City, CA. This is where the LA /.-ers will be meeting.
/.-ings of a bowling alley! Damn!
Two
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Along with replacing its workstations, ILM also has installed a 1,000-processor render farm based on Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon processors and a server cluster built with Compaq Alpha processors.
So Intel chips get the headline but Athlon MP rackmounts do the serious computation. I bet if ILM had found a top-tier vendor with a decent Athlon business (vs. consumer) desktop configuration they'd have Athlon XP's on their desktops too. Or Athlon MP dual CPU workstations, which cost about the same as a high-end uniprocessor P4. Having fought with some thoroughly screwed up Dell Optiplexes recently, the support geeks at ILM have my sympathies.
(Not that the whole business vs. consumer thing really matters, until you try to convince purchasing of that point...)
Um the last time I installed MDK 8.1 It took 1 floppy for the net install. Not one cd. Not multiple floppies. 1 floppy.
Why not fork?
XFree 3.3.6 had 3D support.
While this is true, it is sub-optimal.
What you really want to do is tell it to install XFree 4.x, then go to nvidia.com and download the latest drivers and install them.
Your 3D acceleration will be much faster.
Mandrake does not include these drivers because they are not Open Source.
When Mandrake's installer tells you that only Xfree 3.x had 3D support for your Geforce, that's because those are the only 3D drivers *it* has. The official nvidia drivers are better, and XFree 4.x kicks ass over 3.x any day.
Perhaps the 9.0b1 net install image is accessible somewhere and not made widely known because they want beta testers to test the cdrom install program, which is one of the features that leads people to choose Mandrake over other distros.
To ensure that things get really complicated, some of us crazy europeans use a comma to seperate real and fractional parts and a DOT to seperate groups of digits (thousands, millions etc.). So where I come from (Denmark), 4500 could be written as 4.500, which I'm sure would confuse the American audience far more than 4 500. It's going out of style though - most young people don't seperate groups of digits in ordinary numbers, probably because of the confusion it often causes. We're a small country with limited resources for localization, so a lot of stuff used in higher education is foreign (typically anglo-american), where the 4,500.0 style is rampant. So to deal with that, we take away the grouping seperators and use a comma or dot interchangably as a real/frational seperator. :-)
Confused? You should be - we are
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Then went over to Company X and offered the person who oversaw their Linux shift a large paypacket to switch.
Its the cheapest way to steal IP, just steal the people.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Easy. Your email is cmdrtaco@slashdot.org, and your password is slashdot. I tried it, and I guess I am not the first one to try it, because it says "Welcome back cmdrtaco!"
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
But then, that's what intelligence is like. Most CIA employees spend their work days analysing documents that are either public or not very hard to get. The people who sneak into the Pottsyvlvania embassy to photograph the secret war plans contribute to the information stream, but most of the work goes into analysing the information, not gathering it. Of course, nobody will ever make a movie about a guy sitting in a cube in Langley, reading foreign newspapers!