I bought a copy of "Bureaucracy" years ago, because I love Infocom games, and I never knew that was his until now. It's great, but I never did finish it, because it's hard, like HHGTTG (the Infocom game) is hard.
I also have a copy of those tapes as.MP3 that I got from a friend, and I've never managed to pay attention to it long enough to listen to it. I've seen the movie a couple of times, and I bought the first few books (and read the first two a few times; I lose interest in the middle of book 3) but I'm not a big fan of the whole "books on tape" concept, and generally can't pay attention to it for long enough.
So if I ever manage to listen to the radio show for a substantial amount of time, (like, more than 5 minutes) I'll buy a copy, now that I know that I can.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I had the exact same thing happen to me years ago in DOS; I assumed that 'fdisk' was like 'format', which is what I was looking for to format a disk...
Yes, reading documentation is essential. I guess understanding it is, too. And that first time it happens to you, it's always a learning experience.
By the way, my Linux distribution has nothing like a format command, except maybe the various mkfs.* commands, like mke2fs. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I agree. And I feel like I've already replied to this.
Please read my other posts in this thread.
This woman claims to not be a newbie, but she couldn't possibly have used a distribution of Linux produced in the past three to six years for any length of time and come up with this story without large amounts of crack.
Seriously.
I tried very hard to suspend my disbelief and respond calmly and rationally. I lost it somewhere around the "Gopher Server in Madagascar". (I think I already covered the "Moon Language" comment)
Ask yourself these questions for the newbie:
Does RedHat do RPM updates over Gopher?
Is their only server in Madagascar?
Does RedHat expect a user to know what Gopher IS?
Is it even INSTALLED in the DISTRIBUTION?
Now, please tell me who the rational person is here. Hmm? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Oh man, I hate that. How could you possibly start out your post with "If you'd actually bothered to read the article" when it's painfully obvious "If you read my post" that I've read the article. In fact, the *reason* my response was what it was was *because* I read the article. In fact, everything ridiculous in my post was taken directly FROM the article. But anyhow...
You're right. No one should know how many cylinders a hard drive has in it to install their OS. And no recent version of Linux should expect you to. Do you know how I partition my drive? Well, I still use the CLI fdisk utility instead of one of the many GUIs, (on installation, you'll often see "Disk Druid", or even cfdisk, both text GUIs) and I tell them how many megabytes I want each partition to take up. No knowledge of cylinders involved. However, if you install RedHat and press the magic "WorkStation" button, it tends to do all that for you. (I always pick "Custom")
Almost all of the HOWTOs or Mini-HOWTOs I have read are incredibly detailed and informative. They really do start from the beginning. Sometimes there's a lot of information there, and often I know nothing about it to start with. But by the time I'm done, I halfway understand whatever the topic is, and that understanding is often necessary for those times when you actually have to read the HOWTO.:)
For instance, the Linux ipchains HOWTO: let's assume that you think you want to use this program. I'll skip to "Packet Filtering Basics".
2. Packet Filtering Basics
2.1 What?
All traffic through a network is sent in the form of packets. For
example, downloading this package (say it's 50k long) might cause you
to receive 36 or so packets of 1460 bytes each, (to pull numbers at
random).
The start of each packet says where it's going, where it came from,
the type of the packet, and other administrative details. This start
of the packet is called the header. The rest of the packet, containing
the actual data being transmitted, is usually called the body.
Now, let's look at the more difficult Moon-language constructs, so we can understand this foreign language. If you don't understand Moon-language, but for some reason you are reading this ipchains HOWTO in Linux, (don't ask me how you got there!) you might come up with a list of questions like this:
"What's a network?" (since they explained what a packet was)
"What's a 'k' or a 'byte', and why are they in this package?"
Now, if you're asking *these* questions, you probably shouldn't have skipped to the ipchains HOWTO. These are perfectly acceptable questions for a newbie to ask when she first gets on the internet, *not* when she's trying to configure a firewall. It's true that most of the Linux HOWTO's are somewhat technical in nature; that's not a surprise. What's a surprise is how well-written and comprehensible they actually are (IMHO).
And what could an english speaker learn from this? That a packet is composed of a header and a body, where the header says where it's going and other stuff like that, and the body contains data. Or that packets split things into a fixed number of bytes, and are the fundamental unit of network traffic.
So, yes, most of her article is hyperbole, and it's rather difficult to understand. I accuse her of speaking in "Moon language", whatever the hell that is! The rest of it is either uninformed, or blatant lies. And I can actually back up my points with facts. I regularly expect better quality and reporting accuracy from ZD-Net now, and that's saying something.
WTF is this article? Is Emily writing this in 1994 and posting it now??
Ok, I tried to stick to a reasoned response, here, but she got increasingly weird.
---pb attempts to understand the Journalist---
Almost every time I see a journalist writing about Linux, it's because they think it's too hard to use. That's also because they think it consists entirely of software that would frighten almost any journalist, like Emacs and Vi. Now, to her credit, she also talks about StarOffice, which in my mind is basically a Linux port of Microsoft Office, and certainly enough to frighten any hacker. But her problem is the same.
If she doesn't want her word processor dumping core, then she shouldn't use Word 2000. There are *tons* of word processor programs for Linux, including Word Perfect. It isn't Linux's fault that she can't seem to find them all. For that matter, Windows '98 doesn't come with a decent word processor either.:)
Speaking of annoyances, it's painfully obvious that she *did* write this in Word, or something from Microsoft-land. That's because when she writes this sentence, "That's" looks like "That?s" on this Solaris box. Microsoft is evil, Emily; don't give in. They will make you look like a fool to your audience.
Many Linux distributions do install rather quickly, and with a simple interface. They do indeed have big buttons that say "Workstation" and "Server", but thank god they have one that says "Custom" as well. And most users shouldn't have to install it anyhow; after all, Windows comes pre-installed, and if Linux distros didn't have to worry about *that* taking up space on the computer, there wouldn't be a problem (Windows doesn't; it just silently overwrites your MBR for you; how nice!).
---pb cracks and starts to want some of her drugs---
Download patches from an obscure server in Madagascar using GOPHER?
The HOW-TO files are written in some strange moon language?
Should my mother attempt to change her shell to CSH when she probably doesn't know how to get to one from the default Desktop environment?
My god, woman; who taught you how to troll?
Ok, EMILY. Listen. Find a copy of COREL's Linux Distro. Or MANDRAKE 7.1. Or REDHAT 7.0. NOT Redhat 3.0.3; not Slackware on disks. Then, get an empty hard-drive just for linux, and push the big red "Workstation" button. Then be amazed, and PLEASE shut the fuck up in the future. Did someone actually *pay* you to write this, because I wouldn't!
Here's some friendly advice. Try sending this same article to a linux newsgroup and see what advice they give you. In fact, please DO THAT FIRST before you even THINK about "publishing" anything else. PLEASE.
Also, yes, Linux has a set of technical standards. It does not dictate GUI policies, though, and that's a good thing. Individual environments like GNOME do, and you can find those, pre-installed, as your desktop, from big mainstream Linux distros like those you claim to have tried. Now please try them.
However out of all this, I think we did find what Linux desperately does need: a JOURNALIST-NEWBIE FAQ. We'll make that a big button on startup, and burn them a special CD. Maybe then they'll click the WORKSTATION button and get the special JOURNALIST packages that magically detects which ONE software program they wanted. Even the standard RedHat GNOME stuff would probably do, and definitely XMMS instead of mpg123 for them.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Copyright law is pretty twisted. Everything you're saying about music is basically correct as per the laws about it, but only because there's one line in the code that states that you only own the physical representation of that disc. (probably somewhere in Chapter 11 of Title 17)
As for what you might be able to do for backup purposes, or 'fair use', that's an entirely different nest of hornets, and everything I've read about copyright law sounds pretty twisted and contradictory. I'm glad you think it's all black and white, but let me be the first to tell you it isn't. For instance, Fair Use would let me make multiple copies for classroom use, or copies for research, which is really what an electronic copy is good for.
Also, another good question would be what constitutes a "library or archive"; I'd consider The Gutenberg Project to be an archive, but I'm guessing the law probably doesn't. However, they are non-commercial, and it'd be pretty cool if they could have copies of everything stored there for us to read. Except that, guess what, there's an expressed prohibition against distributing it in digital format unless you're on the library premises.
In fact, there are special prohibitions all through the copyright code that relate to what you can't do if something is "digital" or "a computer program" or over "a cable system"; well, isn't that nice of them. Remind me to modulate all my books onto audio tapes next time, so I can distribute them to my friends.
Another entirely different ball of wax is the moral implications of the current system, and even its constitutionality. I'd argue that today it would fail tests based in either of those criteria. But since we're just talking about the vast body of law that is Copyright, spread out amongst so many bills, many of them completely unrelated, I'll skip that.
Buying some books *does* give you a right to a copy of it in an electronic format, and I'm happy when it does. In fact, in some of those cases, even not buying the book gives you that right. That's because either the author, or the publisher, or both, is a kindly soul deserving of sainthood, like Bruce Sterling, or Bruce Eckel, or probably a few other great guys named Bruce. Not Harlan, apparently.
Also, if the book is old enough to be in the public domain, (whatever the fuck date Disney decides *that* is) then yes, you're entitled to a copy of it that way, too. That's because Bram Stoker isn't making that much off of Dracula lately, but I'm sure the movie people are. (the book is much better, guys; buy it anyhow)
Now, I don't quite understand the difference between my friend copying a book, and me copying a book. I suppose that's because it's a *legal* difference, and not an actual difference. Like, if our copies are identical, and my copy gets deleted, and I copy his, then in ACTUALITY, they're exactly the same, but LEGALLY they aren't.
Maybe that's why I went into Computer Science; they aren't about to convince me of bullshit like that, but apparently 535 old white guys were convinced by enough money and power that it's in actuality the law of the land.
However, like I mentioned, legality and actuality are two quite different things. I mean, legally, you'd get arrested for personal copyright infringement. But in actuality, almost no one cares unless someone is losing money. And that's almost impossible to track; it's like trying to track the effectiveness of advertising.
Copyright law itself stops no one from copying things; all it ensures is that no one knows if what they're doing is actually against the law. That's why the current code needs to be rewritten. Maybe if everyone knew what intellectual property was, what rights they had to it, and why, we could come to amicable solutions about these issues. But the truth is, I don't know anyone who could rationally understand how we could have this particular combination of laws in place to "promote the arts and sciences". It makes less than no sense.
I printed out Flatland once, for a class; that's because printing was free, and I had already read the book.
Still, I didn't read my copy much, because it was really not formatted correctly, and didn't have any of the pictures (don't laugh--they make Flatland a much more readable book!) in the e-text.
However, I have searched through e-texts for my Literature classes before, and they make it much easier to pull out references and find passages. It isn't even too hard to find page numbers, since you know about where you are in the file.
Now, if you had a book in a format like TeX, and printed it out sideways, in two columns, maybe you could get something in close to book form, but that's more work than most people are probably going to put into it, especially when printing it can cost them as much or more than buying it in the store does; at that point, it really makes no sense. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I did read the article, but my point is simple. Having text in an electronic form can be far more useful than having it trapped in a book.
Just because I have the book doesn't grant me an electronic copy; either the author would have to make it available, or someone would have to type it in.
Now, I agree, if someone doesn't pay you for it at some time in the first place, that's wrong, and I'm against that too. But it's much nicer if an author can make it available in more than one form, and most stuff by Ellison I can find in used bookstores--do you know how much money he gets for *that*? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Harlan Ellison is well known for spitting venom. I see why he's mad, but would understand it better if, say, people were printing copies of his books and selling them. As it is, I doubt he's being harmed any more than a music artist is harmed by bootleg tapes.
Having a searchable text is quite different from having a paper copy of the book. I massively prefer the former for quoting passages and doing research, and similarly prefer the latter for just sitting down and reading a book.
Therefore, I doubt this will effect Ellison's book sales in the slightest. And as he doesn't offer an electronic version of his books, it isn't really competing with anything, but rather providing a service to his fans that wasn't there before.
But it's his property, and he can do with it what he wants. However, until then I'll much prefer the enlightened perspective of authors like Bruce Sterling. I first read "The Hacker Crackdown" from the library, and then I downloaded the electronic version. Later, I bought the paperback. I greatly appreciate it when an author provides a reference like that to his fans; otherwise, I have to go back home and search through my books whenever I want to find a quote, and that's really troublesome.
Similarly, I have seen a lot of Douglas Adams stuff online, but I don't know if he knows about it. However, I hope he approves. (should have asked him when Slashdot had the interview) In the future, I hope more authors embrace, or at least examine, the potentials of the new media before lambasting and taking legal action against their present fan base. Ellison, are you out there? You listening? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'm guessing that, as much as I love them, Google will eventually sell out too, once all the original people are gone, and the corporate schmucks have paid them off for the name. The same thing happened with Mosaic -> Netscape -> Mozilla, and AOL is responsible for being the Corporate Schmuck in a few cases so far.
I have no idea why SunSite keeps changing their name; however, the ftp site remains essentially the same, and I can still go to 'sunsite.unc.edu', port 21, so I don't care what *they* call it.:)
But I'm very thankful for that, because they're the closest and biggest linux archive around. (it's at UNC, I'm at NCSU... thank us for UUCP and USENET, too.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Obviously not you. In the future, please do not read my posts.
I would have reserved an extra-long boring comment for you, but sadly you did not provide me with enough information to write about.
In the future please provide Your Real Name, Your E-Mail Address, Your Home Phone Number, Your Credit Card Number, and a one-hundred word essay about Why I'm Such An Asshole On Slashdot.
I remember Yahoo fondly from the early days of the web. Back then, it had a well-structured directory of links that was maintained by hand. It was a quality site, and had links the vast majority of useful sites for a given area. It was a lot easier to go to Yahoo to find something than it was to click your way down whatever path you were used to, going through maybe six sites instead of one.
However, times have changed. Now Yahoo is yet another Cheesy Portal Site, and you'll notice that the article is entirely about their stock price, their public perception, their CEO, blah, blah, blah... And nothing about their customers, their technology, and the useful service they provide.
That's because they don't provide a useful service anymore. Instead, they're partners with people who do provide a useful service. After the web started getting too large for Yahoo to handle, AltaVista became popular. It was a showcase for DEC's Alpha computers, showing how powerful they were by how they efficiently searched and indexed millions of web pages, and found your queries. The best part about altavista.digital.com, though, was the query structure, for instance being able to say "+host:slashdot" and search for posts...
So, for a while, when Yahoo needed a real search engine, they used AltaVista's, I believe. I'm not sure because by then I had switched over to AltaVista anyhow. But that too eventually turned into a cheesy portal site, although it looks better recently. However, now Yahoo uses Google for their searching, as well as having their own tree of links that people submit.
Google, however, actually *does* have innovative technology, and hasn't sold out quite yet. They also use the Open Directory project as the basis for their web directory, and have a high quality tree of links reminiscent of how Yahoo used to. But the really useful features are their "PageRank" technology, which takes links into account when indexing, and their Cache, which often is the only way to find things that have been taken off the web.
So, sadly, new useful web sites will often give into the money, and their quality will go downhill. (not mentioning any names here;) But that seems to be the way the world works, and all we can do is cultivate the young upstarts to bring us the technology of tomorrow, so we can enjoy today again. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Heh, many ports of Japanese games *are* dumbed down for Americans, like FF2 and FF3.
But I heard that there wasn't interest in another Mario game so soon after the release of the first one. Not that, as a gamer, I ever believed THAT.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, Mario Allstars was awesome, and that was an SNES title, too.
Mario 2 was dumb, though; Nintendo needed a new US Mario game, so they bought some silly Arabian game and changed the sprites and whatnot. Hence, the preponderance of deserts and carpets.
But you probably were reading Nintendo Power back then too, so I'll assume you knew that.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Shouldn't someone tell them that Super Mario Bros. 3 has been out for years already, and was a classic NES title? I also see no reference to it in the article.
Also, Super Mario Advance looks more like a Mario 2 remake, at least by judging from the screenshots.
Now, a handheld NES... THAT would be worthwhile. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, I was messing with Cygwin last night. After I got X up and running, I tried compiling stuff for it.
With (very) minor tweaking, I got glib, gtk+, and xchat compiled on it. With a little more work, I compiled everybuddy as well. I would have tried for Mozilla, but I was running out of space on that partition, so I just called it a night.
I'm pretty impressed with Cygwin; in fact, with a different X-Server, I'm sure I could get my roommate hooked on it. He wants something like Everybuddy for Windows, but they don't offer a Windows version. Little do they know that it compiles on Cygwin!:)
Anyhow, this LINE project sounds like a much simpler solution, except that "LINE requires Cygwin". And the page was still somewhat slashdotted when I got to it. But it'd be interesting to compare performance against Cygwin compiled binaries, or DJGPP... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Remember, it isn't like Bill Gates wasn't born into a priviledged family.
And, FWIW, I think the Estate Tax is currently too high, but obviously there are ways to get around it anyhow. That's what gifts and trusts are for. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Web standards are for *both*. If web browsers didn't render incorrect HTML, then web pages would stay clean.
However, I'd be happy if browsers even had the *option* to enforce compliance.
For instance, if browsers could actually obey the </HTML> tag, then the fascist disclaimer that is automatically appended to all of my pages at NCSU wouldn't show up.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I didn't know at first if this referred to "Buggy" web pages, or "Bugging" web pages.
Microsoft is surely responsible for more buggy web pages, such as any HTML generated by Word or FrontPage, and the creation of their own Windows-only character set that often render what should be simple ASCII punctuation into question marks, or worse. Also, their webpage fonts are incredibly small on any system that doesn't support *their* fonts.
Doubleclick also is responsible for buggy code, specifically something known *as* a "web bug" or a "GIF bug", but that's also used to track people, so that would count as "bugging" as well.
The short answer for that would be to simply install JunkBuster. As for fixing Microsoft's sloppy HTML, I bet a proxy server like Junkbuster could detect a "GENERATOR" tag or maybe an undefined character code and just run the page through the Demoronizer.
But I wish people actually implemented the web standards we had originally, or put such compliance in the web browsers we have now. Netscape and IE are much prettier than Amaya, but they still read past a closing HTML tag... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Comparing mathematics to computer science is laughable?
Have you taken a course in Automata, or even Discrete Math? Do you know who Alan Turing is?
No, computer science is very much rooted in math. In fact, we still haven't gotten past some of the boundaries that the original math has set up for us.
For instance, no computer on Earth can compute more than a Turing Machine can, strictly speaking, and NP-complete problems still haven't been found to take a polynomial amount of time.
No, real Computer Science problems require a large mathematics background. Therefore, I would say that it is you who are uninformed, for I am not about to hurriedly level base accusations of trolling. Please be more polite to your fellow slashdotters in the future, if that isn't too difficult to do. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually, the wheel has been patented many times over, and in many forms. Look it up sometime.
It is the nature of patents to allow the extension of existing ideas. So even if "The Wheel" (the concept of a circular object that rolls) isn't patented, there are always "Wagon Wheels", "Spoked Wheels", "Bicycle Wheels", "Motorcycle Wheels", "Tires", "Aquatread Tires"...
So, yes, the wheel is indeed patented, in many forms. And if you can think of a few more, you can patent them too. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
That's actually really funny.
.MP3 that I got from a friend, and I've never managed to pay attention to it long enough to listen to it. I've seen the movie a couple of times, and I bought the first few books (and read the first two a few times; I lose interest in the middle of book 3) but I'm not a big fan of the whole "books on tape" concept, and generally can't pay attention to it for long enough.
:)
I bought a copy of "Bureaucracy" years ago, because I love Infocom games, and I never knew that was his until now. It's great, but I never did finish it, because it's hard, like HHGTTG (the Infocom game) is hard.
I also have a copy of those tapes as
So if I ever manage to listen to the radio show for a substantial amount of time, (like, more than 5 minutes) I'll buy a copy, now that I know that I can.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I had the exact same thing happen to me years ago in DOS; I assumed that 'fdisk' was like 'format', which is what I was looking for to format a disk...
Yes, reading documentation is essential. I guess understanding it is, too. And that first time it happens to you, it's always a learning experience.
By the way, my Linux distribution has nothing like a format command, except maybe the various mkfs.* commands, like mke2fs.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Please read my other posts in this thread.
This woman claims to not be a newbie, but she couldn't possibly have used a distribution of Linux produced in the past three to six years for any length of time and come up with this story without large amounts of crack.
Seriously.
I tried very hard to suspend my disbelief and respond calmly and rationally. I lost it somewhere around the "Gopher Server in Madagascar". (I think I already covered the "Moon Language" comment)
Ask yourself these questions for the newbie:
Now, please tell me who the rational person is here. Hmm?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
You're right. No one should know how many cylinders a hard drive has in it to install their OS. And no recent version of Linux should expect you to. Do you know how I partition my drive? Well, I still use the CLI fdisk utility instead of one of the many GUIs, (on installation, you'll often see "Disk Druid", or even cfdisk, both text GUIs) and I tell them how many megabytes I want each partition to take up. No knowledge of cylinders involved. However, if you install RedHat and press the magic "WorkStation" button, it tends to do all that for you. (I always pick "Custom")
Almost all of the HOWTOs or Mini-HOWTOs I have read are incredibly detailed and informative. They really do start from the beginning. Sometimes there's a lot of information there, and often I know nothing about it to start with. But by the time I'm done, I halfway understand whatever the topic is, and that understanding is often necessary for those times when you actually have to read the HOWTO.
For instance, the Linux ipchains HOWTO: let's assume that you think you want to use this program. I'll skip to "Packet Filtering Basics".
Now, let's look at the more difficult Moon-language constructs, so we can understand this foreign language. If you don't understand Moon-language, but for some reason you are reading this ipchains HOWTO in Linux, (don't ask me how you got there!) you might come up with a list of questions like this:
"What's a network?" (since they explained what a packet was)
"What's a 'k' or a 'byte', and why are they in this package?"
Now, if you're asking *these* questions, you probably shouldn't have skipped to the ipchains HOWTO. These are perfectly acceptable questions for a newbie to ask when she first gets on the internet, *not* when she's trying to configure a firewall. It's true that most of the Linux HOWTO's are somewhat technical in nature; that's not a surprise. What's a surprise is how well-written and comprehensible they actually are (IMHO).
And what could an english speaker learn from this? That a packet is composed of a header and a body, where the header says where it's going and other stuff like that, and the body contains data. Or that packets split things into a fixed number of bytes, and are the fundamental unit of network traffic.
So, yes, most of her article is hyperbole, and it's rather difficult to understand. I accuse her of speaking in "Moon language", whatever the hell that is! The rest of it is either uninformed, or blatant lies. And I can actually back up my points with facts. I regularly expect better quality and reporting accuracy from ZD-Net now, and that's saying something.
Oh no, that's not the problem at all; according to her article, she successfully installed Slackware from floppies.
She just isn't aware that Linux distributions have made any progress since then.
Either that, or I want some of her crack. Or both.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
WTF is this article? Is Emily writing this in 1994 and posting it now??
:)
:)
Ok, I tried to stick to a reasoned response, here, but she got increasingly weird.
---pb attempts to understand the Journalist---
Almost every time I see a journalist writing about Linux, it's because they think it's too hard to use. That's also because they think it consists entirely of software that would frighten almost any journalist, like Emacs and Vi. Now, to her credit, she also talks about StarOffice, which in my mind is basically a Linux port of Microsoft Office, and certainly enough to frighten any hacker. But her problem is the same.
If she doesn't want her word processor dumping core, then she shouldn't use Word 2000. There are *tons* of word processor programs for Linux, including Word Perfect. It isn't Linux's fault that she can't seem to find them all. For that matter, Windows '98 doesn't come with a decent word processor either.
Speaking of annoyances, it's painfully obvious that she *did* write this in Word, or something from Microsoft-land. That's because when she writes this sentence, "That's" looks like "That?s" on this Solaris box. Microsoft is evil, Emily; don't give in. They will make you look like a fool to your audience.
Many Linux distributions do install rather quickly, and with a simple interface. They do indeed have big buttons that say "Workstation" and "Server", but thank god they have one that says "Custom" as well. And most users shouldn't have to install it anyhow; after all, Windows comes pre-installed, and if Linux distros didn't have to worry about *that* taking up space on the computer, there wouldn't be a problem (Windows doesn't; it just silently overwrites your MBR for you; how nice!).
---pb cracks and starts to want some of her drugs---
Download patches from an obscure server in Madagascar using GOPHER?
The HOW-TO files are written in some strange moon language?
Should my mother attempt to change her shell to CSH when she probably doesn't know how to get to one from the default Desktop environment?
My god, woman; who taught you how to troll?
Ok, EMILY. Listen. Find a copy of COREL's Linux Distro. Or MANDRAKE 7.1. Or REDHAT 7.0. NOT Redhat 3.0.3; not Slackware on disks. Then, get an empty hard-drive just for linux, and push the big red "Workstation" button. Then be amazed, and PLEASE shut the fuck up in the future. Did someone actually *pay* you to write this, because I wouldn't!
Here's some friendly advice. Try sending this same article to a linux newsgroup and see what advice they give you. In fact, please DO THAT FIRST before you even THINK about "publishing" anything else. PLEASE.
Also, yes, Linux has a set of technical standards. It does not dictate GUI policies, though, and that's a good thing. Individual environments like GNOME do, and you can find those, pre-installed, as your desktop, from big mainstream Linux distros like those you claim to have tried. Now please try them.
However out of all this, I think we did find what Linux desperately does need: a JOURNALIST-NEWBIE FAQ. We'll make that a big button on startup, and burn them a special CD. Maybe then they'll click the WORKSTATION button and get the special JOURNALIST packages that magically detects which ONE software program they wanted. Even the standard RedHat GNOME stuff would probably do, and definitely XMMS instead of mpg123 for them.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Copyright law is pretty twisted. Everything you're saying about music is basically correct as per the laws about it, but only because there's one line in the code that states that you only own the physical representation of that disc. (probably somewhere in Chapter 11 of Title 17)
As for what you might be able to do for backup purposes, or 'fair use', that's an entirely different nest of hornets, and everything I've read about copyright law sounds pretty twisted and contradictory. I'm glad you think it's all black and white, but let me be the first to tell you it isn't. For instance, Fair Use would let me make multiple copies for classroom use, or copies for research, which is really what an electronic copy is good for.
Also, another good question would be what constitutes a "library or archive"; I'd consider The Gutenberg Project to be an archive, but I'm guessing the law probably doesn't. However, they are non-commercial, and it'd be pretty cool if they could have copies of everything stored there for us to read. Except that, guess what, there's an expressed prohibition against distributing it in digital format unless you're on the library premises.
In fact, there are special prohibitions all through the copyright code that relate to what you can't do if something is "digital" or "a computer program" or over "a cable system"; well, isn't that nice of them. Remind me to modulate all my books onto audio tapes next time, so I can distribute them to my friends.
Another entirely different ball of wax is the moral implications of the current system, and even its constitutionality. I'd argue that today it would fail tests based in either of those criteria. But since we're just talking about the vast body of law that is Copyright, spread out amongst so many bills, many of them completely unrelated, I'll skip that.
Buying some books *does* give you a right to a copy of it in an electronic format, and I'm happy when it does. In fact, in some of those cases, even not buying the book gives you that right. That's because either the author, or the publisher, or both, is a kindly soul deserving of sainthood, like Bruce Sterling, or Bruce Eckel, or probably a few other great guys named Bruce. Not Harlan, apparently.
Also, if the book is old enough to be in the public domain, (whatever the fuck date Disney decides *that* is) then yes, you're entitled to a copy of it that way, too. That's because Bram Stoker isn't making that much off of Dracula lately, but I'm sure the movie people are. (the book is much better, guys; buy it anyhow)
Now, I don't quite understand the difference between my friend copying a book, and me copying a book. I suppose that's because it's a *legal* difference, and not an actual difference. Like, if our copies are identical, and my copy gets deleted, and I copy his, then in ACTUALITY, they're exactly the same, but LEGALLY they aren't.
Maybe that's why I went into Computer Science; they aren't about to convince me of bullshit like that, but apparently 535 old white guys were convinced by enough money and power that it's in actuality the law of the land.
However, like I mentioned, legality and actuality are two quite different things. I mean, legally, you'd get arrested for personal copyright infringement. But in actuality, almost no one cares unless someone is losing money. And that's almost impossible to track; it's like trying to track the effectiveness of advertising.
Copyright law itself stops no one from copying things; all it ensures is that no one knows if what they're doing is actually against the law. That's why the current code needs to be rewritten. Maybe if everyone knew what intellectual property was, what rights they had to it, and why, we could come to amicable solutions about these issues. But the truth is, I don't know anyone who could rationally understand how we could have this particular combination of laws in place to "promote the arts and sciences". It makes less than no sense.
I printed out Flatland once, for a class; that's because printing was free, and I had already read the book.
Still, I didn't read my copy much, because it was really not formatted correctly, and didn't have any of the pictures (don't laugh--they make Flatland a much more readable book!) in the e-text.
However, I have searched through e-texts for my Literature classes before, and they make it much easier to pull out references and find passages. It isn't even too hard to find page numbers, since you know about where you are in the file.
Now, if you had a book in a format like TeX, and printed it out sideways, in two columns, maybe you could get something in close to book form, but that's more work than most people are probably going to put into it, especially when printing it can cost them as much or more than buying it in the store does; at that point, it really makes no sense.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I did read the article, but my point is simple. Having text in an electronic form can be far more useful than having it trapped in a book.
Just because I have the book doesn't grant me an electronic copy; either the author would have to make it available, or someone would have to type it in.
Now, I agree, if someone doesn't pay you for it at some time in the first place, that's wrong, and I'm against that too. But it's much nicer if an author can make it available in more than one form, and most stuff by Ellison I can find in used bookstores--do you know how much money he gets for *that*?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Harlan Ellison is well known for spitting venom. I see why he's mad, but would understand it better if, say, people were printing copies of his books and selling them. As it is, I doubt he's being harmed any more than a music artist is harmed by bootleg tapes.
Having a searchable text is quite different from having a paper copy of the book. I massively prefer the former for quoting passages and doing research, and similarly prefer the latter for just sitting down and reading a book.
Therefore, I doubt this will effect Ellison's book sales in the slightest. And as he doesn't offer an electronic version of his books, it isn't really competing with anything, but rather providing a service to his fans that wasn't there before.
But it's his property, and he can do with it what he wants. However, until then I'll much prefer the enlightened perspective of authors like Bruce Sterling. I first read "The Hacker Crackdown" from the library, and then I downloaded the electronic version. Later, I bought the paperback. I greatly appreciate it when an author provides a reference like that to his fans; otherwise, I have to go back home and search through my books whenever I want to find a quote, and that's really troublesome.
Similarly, I have seen a lot of Douglas Adams stuff online, but I don't know if he knows about it. However, I hope he approves. (should have asked him when Slashdot had the interview) In the future, I hope more authors embrace, or at least examine, the potentials of the new media before lambasting and taking legal action against their present fan base. Ellison, are you out there? You listening?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Excellent. We Are Nerds. :)
:)
:)
I'm guessing that, as much as I love them, Google will eventually sell out too, once all the original people are gone, and the corporate schmucks have paid them off for the name. The same thing happened with Mosaic -> Netscape -> Mozilla, and AOL is responsible for being the Corporate Schmuck in a few cases so far.
I have no idea why SunSite keeps changing their name; however, the ftp site remains essentially the same, and I can still go to 'sunsite.unc.edu', port 21, so I don't care what *they* call it.
But I'm very thankful for that, because they're the closest and biggest linux archive around. (it's at UNC, I'm at NCSU... thank us for UUCP and USENET, too.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Obviously not you. In the future, please do not read my posts.
I would have reserved an extra-long boring comment for you, but sadly you did not provide me with enough information to write about.
In the future please provide Your Real Name, Your E-Mail Address, Your Home Phone Number, Your Credit Card Number, and a one-hundred word essay about Why I'm Such An Asshole On Slashdot.
Thank you.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I remember Yahoo fondly from the early days of the web. Back then, it had a well-structured directory of links that was maintained by hand. It was a quality site, and had links the vast majority of useful sites for a given area. It was a lot easier to go to Yahoo to find something than it was to click your way down whatever path you were used to, going through maybe six sites instead of one.
;) But that seems to be the way the world works, and all we can do is cultivate the young upstarts to bring us the technology of tomorrow, so we can enjoy today again.
However, times have changed. Now Yahoo is yet another Cheesy Portal Site, and you'll notice that the article is entirely about their stock price, their public perception, their CEO, blah, blah, blah... And nothing about their customers, their technology, and the useful service they provide.
That's because they don't provide a useful service anymore. Instead, they're partners with people who do provide a useful service. After the web started getting too large for Yahoo to handle, AltaVista became popular. It was a showcase for DEC's Alpha computers, showing how powerful they were by how they efficiently searched and indexed millions of web pages, and found your queries. The best part about altavista.digital.com, though, was the query structure, for instance being able to say "+host:slashdot" and search for posts...
So, for a while, when Yahoo needed a real search engine, they used AltaVista's, I believe. I'm not sure because by then I had switched over to AltaVista anyhow. But that too eventually turned into a cheesy portal site, although it looks better recently. However, now Yahoo uses Google for their searching, as well as having their own tree of links that people submit.
Google, however, actually *does* have innovative technology, and hasn't sold out quite yet. They also use the Open Directory project as the basis for their web directory, and have a high quality tree of links reminiscent of how Yahoo used to. But the really useful features are their "PageRank" technology, which takes links into account when indexing, and their Cache, which often is the only way to find things that have been taken off the web.
So, sadly, new useful web sites will often give into the money, and their quality will go downhill. (not mentioning any names here
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Heh, many ports of Japanese games *are* dumbed down for Americans, like FF2 and FF3.
:)
But I heard that there wasn't interest in another Mario game so soon after the release of the first one. Not that, as a gamer, I ever believed THAT.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, Mario Allstars was awesome, and that was an SNES title, too.
:)
Mario 2 was dumb, though; Nintendo needed a new US Mario game, so they bought some silly Arabian game and changed the sprites and whatnot. Hence, the preponderance of deserts and carpets.
But you probably were reading Nintendo Power back then too, so I'll assume you knew that.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Shouldn't someone tell them that Super Mario Bros. 3 has been out for years already, and was a classic NES title? I also see no reference to it in the article.
Also, Super Mario Advance looks more like a Mario 2 remake, at least by judging from the screenshots.
Now, a handheld NES... THAT would be worthwhile.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, I was messing with Cygwin last night. After I got X up and running, I tried compiling stuff for it.
:)
With (very) minor tweaking, I got glib, gtk+, and xchat compiled on it. With a little more work, I compiled everybuddy as well. I would have tried for Mozilla, but I was running out of space on that partition, so I just called it a night.
I'm pretty impressed with Cygwin; in fact, with a different X-Server, I'm sure I could get my roommate hooked on it. He wants something like Everybuddy for Windows, but they don't offer a Windows version. Little do they know that it compiles on Cygwin!
Anyhow, this LINE project sounds like a much simpler solution, except that "LINE requires Cygwin". And the page was still somewhat slashdotted when I got to it. But it'd be interesting to compare performance against Cygwin compiled binaries, or DJGPP...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I did read the article, actually.
But I still don't believe it.
Remember, it isn't like Bill Gates wasn't born into a priviledged family.
And, FWIW, I think the Estate Tax is currently too high, but obviously there are ways to get around it anyhow. That's what gifts and trusts are for.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What does that mean when the *rich* fight against getting a tax cut?
:)
That's seriously bizarre. Oh well, I guess they can afford it.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Web standards are for *both*. If web browsers didn't render incorrect HTML, then web pages would stay clean.
:)
However, I'd be happy if browsers even had the *option* to enforce compliance.
For instance, if browsers could actually obey the </HTML> tag, then the fascist disclaimer that is automatically appended to all of my pages at NCSU wouldn't show up.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I didn't know at first if this referred to "Buggy" web pages, or "Bugging" web pages.
Microsoft is surely responsible for more buggy web pages, such as any HTML generated by Word or FrontPage, and the creation of their own Windows-only character set that often render what should be simple ASCII punctuation into question marks, or worse. Also, their webpage fonts are incredibly small on any system that doesn't support *their* fonts.
Doubleclick also is responsible for buggy code, specifically something known *as* a "web bug" or a "GIF bug", but that's also used to track people, so that would count as "bugging" as well.
The short answer for that would be to simply install JunkBuster. As for fixing Microsoft's sloppy HTML, I bet a proxy server like Junkbuster could detect a "GENERATOR" tag or maybe an undefined character code and just run the page through the Demoronizer.
But I wish people actually implemented the web standards we had originally, or put such compliance in the web browsers we have now. Netscape and IE are much prettier than Amaya, but they still read past a closing HTML tag...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Comparing mathematics to computer science is laughable?
Have you taken a course in Automata, or even Discrete Math? Do you know who Alan Turing is?
No, computer science is very much rooted in math. In fact, we still haven't gotten past some of the boundaries that the original math has set up for us.
For instance, no computer on Earth can compute more than a Turing Machine can, strictly speaking, and NP-complete problems still haven't been found to take a polynomial amount of time.
No, real Computer Science problems require a large mathematics background. Therefore, I would say that it is you who are uninformed, for I am not about to hurriedly level base accusations of trolling. Please be more polite to your fellow slashdotters in the future, if that isn't too difficult to do.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually, the wheel has been patented many times over, and in many forms. Look it up sometime.
It is the nature of patents to allow the extension of existing ideas. So even if "The Wheel" (the concept of a circular object that rolls) isn't patented, there are always "Wagon Wheels", "Spoked Wheels", "Bicycle Wheels", "Motorcycle Wheels", "Tires", "Aquatread Tires"...
So, yes, the wheel is indeed patented, in many forms. And if you can think of a few more, you can patent them too.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'd rather they read the Moderation Guidelines first.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What about the fact that Newtonian Mechanics don't work in the real world?
:)
I mean, I'm not that good at pool, but in the future I want to be able to break *really* fast.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.