They're using their very own homemade supercomputer which ranks in at 107 on the Top 500 supercomputers list. Quote from article: "Linux makes it so easy to create a supercomputer."
Considering both the survey group and the results, I think people did quite well here. 75% of the people surveyed got 8 +/- 2 terms correct out of 11, btw, whereas random guessing would yield an average score of less than 4. Only 14% of the people in the survey actually got a 4 or below.
I know because I took the survey yesterday to check it out. Yep. got all 11 right, as I bet most/.'ers would. Although you have to "choose the best answer"; some of the choices are a bit misleading or slightly incomplete in their definitions. However, most of them are completely obvious if you have any idea of what the term actually means.
That looks pretty similar to what you already wrote up; I'm not convinced, but maybe you're right. In any case, I obviously won't be buying a Mac, and at least for those reasons. Their additions--much like Microsoft's--generally annoy me more than anything.
However, you should probably collect those comments together and distill them into a stock reply on the subject; the topic does come up often enough, after all.
Ok, state your arguments, and I'll state mine. After all, I seriously doubt you can conduct a civil discussion in the first place, based on your preference for ad-hominem attacks instead.
Apple and Microsoft both make piles of money; that doesn't mean I like how they conduct their businesses.
As for the Xerox bit, I admit I never looked into it, but after a little googling, it sounds like Apple did have some sort of agreement with Xerox, or at least "In the end, Xerox got a large block of Apple stock for sharing the technology." (according to Woz himself). That doesn't make it any more innovative, however.:)
Um... I understand that Apple wants to control their market with an iron fist, much as IBM wanted to do but couldn't, when the PC clones first came out.
You know what that means? It means that every box maker has the same sort of control that Apple does over what they put in their boxes (like if they want to eliminate serial ports in favor of USB-only boxes, or ship boxes without floppy drives, or absolutely anything else); they just can't control what other vendors do. And you know, somehow I'm fine with that.
Maybe they'd have to distinguish themselves on reputation, service, and brand loyalty, much as IBM does. If they can't do that much, then they have an incentive to keep their market closed. That doesn't make them innovative, though; that makes them failed monopolists. In fact, they've never been innovators, unless you count cannibalizing fishbowls and toasters for case design ideas. They stole all the basic concepts from Xerox, AT&T, and a host of other places. Just because Microsoft stole them next doesn't make Apple somehow more innovative.
That's why I'd never buy a computer from Apple (or a high-end computer from Dell, apparently); I could buy or build more computer than I'd ever want for approximately $2,000 and it would be comparable to those systems (better in some ways and worse in others, most likely).
However, I've never spent more than $1,100 on a computer; in fact, lately I've spent less. And I've still been quite happy with what I've gotten for my money. For me, it's all about getting a computer that fits my needs, and maxing out that magical price/performance ratio. Therefore, my computer is invariably a non-Intel x86 built from parts from (or by) my local generic computer shop.
I actually considered getting a Mac when there were PowerPC clone vendors; I thought it was very cool that Apple was finally opening up its hardware. But even the clones were pricey, and lo and behold Apple squashed them so fast that it didn't even matter. Also, Rhapsody didn't deliver on its promises at the time, so I'm glad I didn't get stuck with an old, overpriced G3, and I'm certainly not going to end up with a new, overpriced G4 or G5.
But hey, no hard feelings; I'm just not in their target market of suckers with too much cash lying around. If I had that much cash and I wanted a PowerPC of some sort, I'd probably look into getting something from IBM instead.
How much do the console companies charge for games in South America and Asia, anyhow (and how many do they ship)? If it's the same price, then I'd wager that a lot more people can't afford them (or consoles in general) in the first place.
Also, were these professionally done, or just cheap home CD-burner jobs?
I think the vast majority of people just go to the store and buy their games--either when they come out, when they get cheaper, used, whatever--and the actual percentage of people who mod their conosles is relatively small. Obviously you'd have to study this, but like the interview says, they aren't hurting.
However, what about the people who do mod their consoles and download games? I knew a guy who had tons of Playstation games and almost every Dreamcast game period. He had more games than he could ever buy, and he was a college student. He still spent what money he had on Playstation and Dreamcast peripherals and whatnot.
So how much money did the big video game companies lose on him personally? Probably the price of a few games, at most. And how much did they make? Well, I don't know, but I had the opportunity to try out just about any game I wanted to for the Playstation and the Dreamcast, without having to buy it. Now I have a Playstation, and I have quite a few games for it, all legal.
So I guess the question here is, does the price of the one or two games the average modder would otherwise end up having to pay for outweigh the incredible amount of free advertising they do?
Personally, I'd say their time would be better spent going after the professional pirates, who can produce professional-looking games at base manufacturing costs. And I'd say the same thing to the RIAA and the MPAA. Just as long as you aren't actively screwing over the vast majority of law-abiding customers, you have nothing to fear; this is probably why the RIAA is so scared right now.:)
Apparently they're having trouble getting this deployed because the theatres are having a tough time with their new digital video systems; it quits immediately with this error:
- MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your gcc
version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read DOCS/bugreports.html
and follow the instructions there. We can't and won't help unless you provide
this information when reporting a possible bug.
So what you're saying is that now slashdot can stop posting all these extra software release stories!:)
(Seriously, I hope you noticed that the list I posted precisely matches the last [n] software packages listed on Freshmeat. I just felt like posting something a bit more interesting than the typical "slashdot is turning into freshmeat" post...)
Wouldn't it be great if you could get some sort of 'sidebar' that told you what software has been released today, instead of having to post new/. stories every time? Well, until such a feature is implemented, or a new site is devoted to such things, I guess we'll just have to keep track of all the software releases the old fashioned way, by releasing new stories every time Netscape, Mozilla, or indeed any other software package that our readers might find relevant is released.
I know, it's a tough job, but some site in the open source community needs to take this on. Now some of you might say this gets in the way of actual news, but I don't think there's actually that much risk of that here. If it pushes another Anime story off the front page, I think that's a risk I'm willing to take just to make sure that I have the latest version of Mozilla available to me. And I'm sure the rest of you will agree, once you see the new vision for slashdot's software section, which will soon greatly boost our daily story posting, as well as provide reviews of all the software, and meaningless license debates, which will surely degenerate into GPL misunderstandings and anti-BSD flamewars, and more zealotry! As you can plainly see, everybody wins.
There are lots of retailers out there; I just did a google search, and that's what came up. However, how many sales are we talking about here? I bet Buy Rite does a lot of business. Also, it's good that almost all of those complaints (over 97% of them, at least) were resolved.
Still, thanks for the heads-up. Do you have any suggestions as to which game retailers have better reputations, prices, or selections? (and of course there's always e-Bay... just don't use PayPal, eh?)
It all goes back to the nature of copyright, "To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This balances the benefit to the public of having a work in the public domain. I would argue that when a copyright holder is not using their copyright "To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts" (i.e., suppressing knowledge instead of making it available) then they are violating that original copyright agreement, and therefore should not get the benefits of its protection.
Note that this would not be as big a deal if other parts of that language were actually enforced as well, such as the "for limited times" part, or the "exclusive right to their respective inventions and discoveries" (emphasis mine) part. This would imply that a person could reasonably expect a copyright (on, say, the song "Happy Birthday") to expire sometime, perhaps not too long after the death of the original author(s). It would also imply that copyrights can't be transferred or sold. But that isn't the world we live in, sadly.
It would be harder to find new cartridges, but theoretically an old cartridge is all you need to justify using the ROMs. However, when I had a Nintendo, I bought my games new and used the hell out of them; I think the games are generally more durable than the system, unless you run into a glitch in the battery-backed, on-cartridge saves (as I did once, with Ultima III). If you do run into problems, you can always get your system repaired, generally by repairing or replacing the 72-pin connector.
With glxgears, I can get like 650fps out of my old G400 (and 115fps maximized at 1024x768); that having been said, I wouldn't mind having a faster card to make NeverWinter Nights look prettier...:)
Actually, you can still find a lot of actual NES games out there; I got a copy of Final Fantasy I from my local game store not too long ago, and they have a wide selection. And if you don't have something like that nearby, there's always the web, right?
The problem with the copyright issue is that it can provide the original company with monopoly powers that are simply too broad, as the dissenting opinions in Eldred state. I see nothing wrong with letting companies keep their successful copyrights, but I feel they should have an obligation to "use it or lose it"; that is to say, companies should not be able to use copyrights to *suppress* works that could otherwise be in the public domain. They should theoretically have an obligation to sell things at a fair market price, but with copyrights, they don't have to. There's no check against their monopolistic behaviors.
However, the illegal copyright infringements of ROMs, of music, etc., etc., has proven to the industry that there is a demand that isn't being filled due to monopoly powers. You didn't see the old arcade games being re-released by the companies and the current swath of remakes we've had until well after the development and popularity of console and arcade emulators. I think it's quite possible that it's now easier to obtain legal ROMs or games because of the interest spawned by illegal ROM copying, and without it, there would be few or no arcade collections released for the PC nowadays.
Also, note that Windows scored a 4.25 in their earlier review, better than both Red Hat's 4.13 and UnitedLinux's 4.00. However, I don't think it'd be fair to compare those ratings across reviews; I just mention it to showcase how far off-base "Anonymous Coward" is here, and how little fact-checking (err... zero) Timothy does in his article posting.
But hey, why should/. editors have to read the articles? Most of the other people here don't either.
You won't be able to escape their license, just because the Linux kernel is under the GPL. But you can find other implementations of *everything*. First, there are the *BSDs, which have nothing to do with GNU. Then, there are alternative shells, C libraries, compilers (as you mentioned), etc., etc.
Anyhow, search around; I'm sure other people have tried this, and there's very little actual FSF-related code that is absolutely necessary for the basic operation of your average Linux box.
Slashdot Mirror
<Insert Beowulf Joke Here>
Considering both the survey group and the results, I think people did quite well here. 75% of the people surveyed got 8 +/- 2 terms correct out of 11, btw, whereas random guessing would yield an average score of less than 4. Only 14% of the people in the survey actually got a 4 or below.
/.'ers would. Although you have to "choose the best answer"; some of the choices are a bit misleading or slightly incomplete in their definitions. However, most of them are completely obvious if you have any idea of what the term actually means.
I know because I took the survey yesterday to check it out. Yep. got all 11 right, as I bet most
That looks pretty similar to what you already wrote up; I'm not convinced, but maybe you're right. In any case, I obviously won't be buying a Mac, and at least for those reasons. Their additions--much like Microsoft's--generally annoy me more than anything.
However, you should probably collect those comments together and distill them into a stock reply on the subject; the topic does come up often enough, after all.
"The winners claim prizes including the wife's weight in beer."
Where can I sign up??
After all, I got this friday off... in the next six month period I get two fridays off... after that, another friday... then, three fridays...
Looks like I average about *two* fridays off in a six month period! I don't think I want your plan instead, unless those are *additional* fridays.
Ok, state your arguments, and I'll state mine. After all, I seriously doubt you can conduct a civil discussion in the first place, based on your preference for ad-hominem attacks instead.
:)
Apple and Microsoft both make piles of money; that doesn't mean I like how they conduct their businesses.
As for the Xerox bit, I admit I never looked into it, but after a little googling, it sounds like Apple did have some sort of agreement with Xerox, or at least "In the end, Xerox got a large block of Apple stock for sharing the technology." (according to Woz himself). That doesn't make it any more innovative, however.
Um... I understand that Apple wants to control their market with an iron fist, much as IBM wanted to do but couldn't, when the PC clones first came out.
You know what that means? It means that every box maker has the same sort of control that Apple does over what they put in their boxes (like if they want to eliminate serial ports in favor of USB-only boxes, or ship boxes without floppy drives, or absolutely anything else); they just can't control what other vendors do. And you know, somehow I'm fine with that.
Maybe they'd have to distinguish themselves on reputation, service, and brand loyalty, much as IBM does. If they can't do that much, then they have an incentive to keep their market closed. That doesn't make them innovative, though; that makes them failed monopolists. In fact, they've never been innovators, unless you count cannibalizing fishbowls and toasters for case design ideas. They stole all the basic concepts from Xerox, AT&T, and a host of other places. Just because Microsoft stole them next doesn't make Apple somehow more innovative.
That's why I'd never buy a computer from Apple (or a high-end computer from Dell, apparently); I could buy or build more computer than I'd ever want for approximately $2,000 and it would be comparable to those systems (better in some ways and worse in others, most likely).
However, I've never spent more than $1,100 on a computer; in fact, lately I've spent less. And I've still been quite happy with what I've gotten for my money. For me, it's all about getting a computer that fits my needs, and maxing out that magical price/performance ratio. Therefore, my computer is invariably a non-Intel x86 built from parts from (or by) my local generic computer shop.
I actually considered getting a Mac when there were PowerPC clone vendors; I thought it was very cool that Apple was finally opening up its hardware. But even the clones were pricey, and lo and behold Apple squashed them so fast that it didn't even matter. Also, Rhapsody didn't deliver on its promises at the time, so I'm glad I didn't get stuck with an old, overpriced G3, and I'm certainly not going to end up with a new, overpriced G4 or G5.
But hey, no hard feelings; I'm just not in their target market of suckers with too much cash lying around. If I had that much cash and I wanted a PowerPC of some sort, I'd probably look into getting something from IBM instead.
Even the regular Gentoo kernel has a lot of extra patches in it, including the O(1) Scheduler, and Low-latency scheduling; works great for me.
How much do the console companies charge for games in South America and Asia, anyhow (and how many do they ship)? If it's the same price, then I'd wager that a lot more people can't afford them (or consoles in general) in the first place.
Also, were these professionally done, or just cheap home CD-burner jobs?
I think the vast majority of people just go to the store and buy their games--either when they come out, when they get cheaper, used, whatever--and the actual percentage of people who mod their conosles is relatively small. Obviously you'd have to study this, but like the interview says, they aren't hurting.
:)
However, what about the people who do mod their consoles and download games? I knew a guy who had tons of Playstation games and almost every Dreamcast game period. He had more games than he could ever buy, and he was a college student. He still spent what money he had on Playstation and Dreamcast peripherals and whatnot.
So how much money did the big video game companies lose on him personally? Probably the price of a few games, at most. And how much did they make? Well, I don't know, but I had the opportunity to try out just about any game I wanted to for the Playstation and the Dreamcast, without having to buy it. Now I have a Playstation, and I have quite a few games for it, all legal.
So I guess the question here is, does the price of the one or two games the average modder would otherwise end up having to pay for outweigh the incredible amount of free advertising they do?
Personally, I'd say their time would be better spent going after the professional pirates, who can produce professional-looking games at base manufacturing costs. And I'd say the same thing to the RIAA and the MPAA. Just as long as you aren't actively screwing over the vast majority of law-abiding customers, you have nothing to fear; this is probably why the RIAA is so scared right now.
It's nice to hear from Bill himself that Linux isn't such a threat now that the lawsuit is over...
If it were, a lot of couples would be in prison right now...
- MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your gcc
version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read DOCS/bugreports.html
and follow the instructions there. We can't and won't help unless you provide
this information when reporting a possible bug.
(and, yes, that was a joke, folks...)
So what you're saying is that now slashdot can stop posting all these extra software release stories! :)
:)
(Seriously, I hope you noticed that the list I posted precisely matches the last [n] software packages listed on Freshmeat. I just felt like posting something a bit more interesting than the typical "slashdot is turning into freshmeat" post...)
Also, your homepage is a 404, dude.
I know, it's a tough job, but some site in the open source community needs to take this on. Now some of you might say this gets in the way of actual news, but I don't think there's actually that much risk of that here. If it pushes another Anime story off the front page, I think that's a risk I'm willing to take just to make sure that I have the latest version of Mozilla available to me. And I'm sure the rest of you will agree, once you see the new vision for slashdot's software section, which will soon greatly boost our daily story posting, as well as provide reviews of all the software, and meaningless license debates, which will surely degenerate into GPL misunderstandings and anti-BSD flamewars, and more zealotry! As you can plainly see, everybody wins.
Also Released Recently Today:
- CodeTek VirtualDesktop 2.3.5
- dnspython 1.0.0 (Stable)
- Alt+Connect 2.5.7/9 (Development)
- Advanced Bash Scripting Guide 1.9 (Stable)
- bes-cms 0.3
- BlogPlanet 1.0.2
- PhotoGen 1.9b
- imgSeek 0.7.2
- The Tamber Project 1.2.10 (Pogo)
- OSSP fsl 1.2.0
- Minimalist Queue Services 0.0.3
- OSSP l2 0.9.2
- Cyrus SASL 2.1.14 (SASLv2)
- Bugzero 2.7
- tclperl 2.5
- tclpython 3.1
- PHPXref 0.3
- SimpleData 3.0.17
- Postfix 2.0.13 (Stable)
- Firepass 1.1.1a
- Nmap 3.30 (Stable)
- GKrellM 2.1.14 (GTK 2.0)
[...]
There are lots of retailers out there; I just did a google search, and that's what came up. However, how many sales are we talking about here? I bet Buy Rite does a lot of business. Also, it's good that almost all of those complaints (over 97% of them, at least) were resolved.
Still, thanks for the heads-up. Do you have any suggestions as to which game retailers have better reputations, prices, or selections? (and of course there's always e-Bay... just don't use PayPal, eh?)
It all goes back to the nature of copyright, "To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This balances the benefit to the public of having a work in the public domain. I would argue that when a copyright holder is not using their copyright "To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts" (i.e., suppressing knowledge instead of making it available) then they are violating that original copyright agreement, and therefore should not get the benefits of its protection.
Note that this would not be as big a deal if other parts of that language were actually enforced as well, such as the "for limited times" part, or the "exclusive right to their respective inventions and discoveries" (emphasis mine) part. This would imply that a person could reasonably expect a copyright (on, say, the song "Happy Birthday") to expire sometime, perhaps not too long after the death of the original author(s). It would also imply that copyrights can't be transferred or sold. But that isn't the world we live in, sadly.
It would be harder to find new cartridges, but theoretically an old cartridge is all you need to justify using the ROMs. However, when I had a Nintendo, I bought my games new and used the hell out of them; I think the games are generally more durable than the system, unless you run into a glitch in the battery-backed, on-cartridge saves (as I did once, with Ultima III). If you do run into problems, you can always get your system repaired, generally by repairing or replacing the 72-pin connector.
With glxgears, I can get like 650fps out of my old G400 (and 115fps maximized at 1024x768); that having been said, I wouldn't mind having a faster card to make NeverWinter Nights look prettier... :)
Actually, you can still find a lot of actual NES games out there; I got a copy of Final Fantasy I from my local game store not too long ago, and they have a wide selection. And if you don't have something like that nearby, there's always the web, right?
The problem with the copyright issue is that it can provide the original company with monopoly powers that are simply too broad, as the dissenting opinions in Eldred state. I see nothing wrong with letting companies keep their successful copyrights, but I feel they should have an obligation to "use it or lose it"; that is to say, companies should not be able to use copyrights to *suppress* works that could otherwise be in the public domain. They should theoretically have an obligation to sell things at a fair market price, but with copyrights, they don't have to. There's no check against their monopolistic behaviors.
However, the illegal copyright infringements of ROMs, of music, etc., etc., has proven to the industry that there is a demand that isn't being filled due to monopoly powers. You didn't see the old arcade games being re-released by the companies and the current swath of remakes we've had until well after the development and popularity of console and arcade emulators. I think it's quite possible that it's now easier to obtain legal ROMs or games because of the interest spawned by illegal ROM copying, and without it, there would be few or no arcade collections released for the PC nowadays.
It is the "tape archiver", after all. ...or--if you prefer--BRU, star, or some other tar relative.
Combine with compression programs such as gzip, bzip2, compress, etc., as needed.
rinse, lather, repeat.
Also, note that Windows scored a 4.25 in their earlier review, better than both Red Hat's 4.13 and UnitedLinux's 4.00. However, I don't think it'd be fair to compare those ratings across reviews; I just mention it to showcase how far off-base "Anonymous Coward" is here, and how little fact-checking (err... zero) Timothy does in his article posting.
/. editors have to read the articles? Most of the other people here don't either.
But hey, why should
You won't be able to escape their license, just because the Linux kernel is under the GPL. But you can find other implementations of *everything*. First, there are the *BSDs, which have nothing to do with GNU. Then, there are alternative shells, C libraries, compilers (as you mentioned), etc., etc.
Anyhow, search around; I'm sure other people have tried this, and there's very little actual FSF-related code that is absolutely necessary for the basic operation of your average Linux box.
How about something like this: m|/\*.*?\*/|s