I would *love* to see Molly in a movie. (for those who don't know... if Trinity were really a badass, she'd have permanent, Woverine-esque claws to go with the leather pants and bad attitude...)
Heck, that was worth it, just to hear Gibson make fun of Johnny Mnemonic. Maybe 'The Matrix' was how Keanu chose to make up for his sins there.
Or, even better, the gov't would never have funded The Internet as it is today... maybe. But it sure has helped the economy.
Man, Gibson entertains me. You know, when he got his Apple ][, he expected some kind of pulsating crystal inside. Man, was he disappointed. He's a visionary alright. We even get to read Neuromancer for my Science Fiction class. Yes!
Thank you slashdot, you've made my day. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Dude, if wearing an armband to protest the Vietnamm war is considered free speech, then writing an encryption program to protest laws against strong encryption should be considered free speech.
Shooting people tends to infringe on their freedoms as well, and is therefore treated somewhat differently. If I got together a bunch of people who wanted to protest laws against assisted suicides, and shot them during an art presentation, I'd probably be arrested for murder, but at least the trial would be interesting. (Can you kill someone with their consent? Probably not, legally, but if you can prove it, it isn't murder, IMO)
However, any other "shooting people" example doesn't necessarily apply. All you're saying is that cracking wouldn't be protected speech, not coding.
You're right, source == speech isn't a tried and true defense, and I wouldn't want to use it as one. However...
Speech is speech. Transcribed speech is speech is text. Text on paper is text on a disk is speech. Speech is information. Code is information, can be spoken, and can be text on a disk... Math is not patentable, and code can be expressed as math...
The lesson, boys and girls, is to protect your code, you need to first have a recorded tape or transcription of everything you want to code in math, BNF notation, English, or some combination, until the laws and lawyers catch up with the reality of the situation, and what is obvious to the programmers.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hi, I'm pb, and this is an Offtopic post. But it's important, so don't moderate it, or keep it around 2, okay, guys?
Maybe you've noticed all the images popping up on slashdot lately. Well, it's an easy bug to exploit, I've tested it on a hidden thread (and on my user page, it's nice to have a picture).
Well, the long and the short of it is, security through obscurity is no excuse. I encourage you to do something about this, either by moderating UP that anonymous coward who first showed it to us with his funny Bill Gates post, or by posting a harmless image, or by contacting the staff running Slashdot, or by downloading the recently released Slash code, and checking if it's similar enough to be patched for this. Because if slashdot is vulnerable, the hole will have to be patched both on here, *and* on every site that uses their code.
Thank you.
Also, on the topic at hand: cool. It's always good to have Linux on a new processor, especially early. Of course, we knew this was going to happen, they've been working under NDA for a while, and I trust Linus. Also, people will probably still be waiting for the Monterey, and analyzing how Intel will do with its competition from both AMD and Transmeta now. Anyhow, the next few years should be very interesting. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot scientists discovered the origin of ball lightning while attempting to overclock their new Athlons to 1Ghz without proper cooling mechanisms.
"...and then I gave it the juice, man, and it was like, this huge cloud of fire and stuff passing through my case, and I said 'Whoa, Stovetop, did you do that?', and Stovetop said 'No, man, maybe it was the silicon', and I said 'Thats stupid', but then Stovetop said 'I think thats the same as ball lightning', and I said 'that would hurt, man', and Stovetop got pissed at me and left and wrote up a paper and got famous and stuff, and all I have is this charred motherboard and stuff." --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Microsoft, public, and beta should not exist together. In fact, they don't.
Corel is freely releasing their contributed source code changes to an open source project, even though they don't have to.
The WINE license allows you to incorporate the entire WINE project, modify it, not release the changes, and sell it. That's fine, but Corel isn't doing that.
The WINE project is a reimplementation of the Windows libraries and environment on top of Linux, (and *BSD and hopefully all of Unix with a little x86 emulation...:) allowing easy execution and porting of Windows applications on/to Linux.
Microsoft, on the other hand, places their products on a very restrictive license, sometimes charges people for beta releases, (and for that matter always charges people for "gold" releases that would be better called beta releases;) and wouldn't dream of freely releasing Windows source code.
Heck, they wouldn't even give you access to an ftp archive, and say "check out the alpha Windows daily builds", unless you're a WaReZ d00d. (anyone remember Windows '97?)
I'd be happy with Microsoft if they decently ported *any* of their apps to Linux with WINE, and contributing to the WINE project would be a plus. Because MainWin blows on Solaris and HP/UX, and I've run IE 3.0 and Photoshop 3.0 under Wine so far, so I don't think it would take that much work on their part, and they'd get a decent software port.
The only reason for them *not* to port to Linux is their OS monopoly, because a lot of people would still buy their software. Especially if they tried giving back to the community for once, instead of just taking our money and giving us substandard products. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Your post was wonderful and fair until you mentioned the incredibly stupid "GNU/[blah blah blah]" flamewar.
First, some "facts" about Linux. Linus didn't even want to call it Linux, or GNU/Linux, or Bob, or anything. In his mind, it was probably originally called "386 protected mode assembly tutorial", and eventually grew into an OS kernel. He did mention that he wanted to call it FreaX, or something silly like that. The guy on the ftp archive said "Nah, that's a dumb name. His name is Linus, I'll call it Linux." This is all paraphrasing what I remember about the subject -- feel free to post more detailed accounts of this story if you wish.
Second, once development really got going in C, and Linus managed to get gcc running under Linux, he was grateful enough that he GPL'ed the Linux kernel. Linux is essentially an excellent GPL'ed, Unix-looking OS kernel, which can be used to fulfill the final bit of the GNU project. Calling Linux GNU/Linux makes about as much sense as calling GNU GNU/Linux.
Linux can also be used with many other free and commercial packages, but is not dependent on them, as it is an OS kernel. If you wanted to, you could probably run iBCS, and use FreeBSD or SCO or Solaris's system tools. Most people would rather just compile the GNU ones, but this is a distribution issue, not a kernel issue. Even so, we don't name the kernel or the distribution by the name of the packages within. Otherwise, the full and accurate name of my modified Redhat 6.0 distribution would consist of about 494 separate names, not counting anything I compiled myself. That's a long name, and unless you're writing the new Sumerian Unix epic poem, I don't recommend doing so.
Finally, if you're stupid or arrogant enough to call the OS kernel GNU/Linux, or the distribution "a GNU/Linux system", why stop there? How about "GNU/RedHat 6.1", even though the GNU project has no real corporate association with RedHat? (they didn't merge or anything, guys)
The GPL cuts both ways. We can use your software, and we'll give you your source, but the GPL doesn't include any "advertising clause". Is this what you want, RMS? The good old BSD license provisions to protect you?
How about a new license, the JPL, for "Jealous Public License", requiring any program or collection of programs to clearly state all the programs or projects involved in its name, regardless of how stupid, inane, or non-marketable the resulting name sounds? If using the GPL for your software isn't enough for you, does that sound inane enough for you, RMS? (*please* don't take this seriously. I *beg* of you.) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
All this means is that the TI CEO thinks wireless internet devices or whatever are the "next big thing".
Well, everyone is investing in all kinds of crazy stuff hoping it will be the next big thing. Feel free to make a generator for it, using the words "innovative", "wireless", "internet", "hand-held", "touch screen", "Open-Source", "integrated", "internet-ready", "small footprint", "network", "Java", "device", "organizer", etc., etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. We'll all be sick of it soon enough.
Does that mean this will be the next big thing? They sure hope so. We'll see a lot of attempts, and most of them will fail. These devices have their place, and some of them will live on. Some of them might even replace cell phones and pagers, and let you check on your stuff when you're on the road. That's really handy.
But the PC will live on. PC's will always have more brute computational force, display your games prettier, give you more room to surf the web and chat with people, play your music, etc., etc. Technological advances from both sides will be folded together. I can't wait to have a PC with a nice big flat screen, and a few really efficient processors.
But I still wouldn't want to take it on the road, and it's still a PC, just as much as my old Tandy with the monochrome monitor and the full-sized keyboard. Heck, anyone who hasn't been keeping up would just know that PC's are more like TV's now, they're prettier and stuff. Outwardly, they look pretty similar. Screen, keyboard, CPU, etc. I don't think that's gonna change for a while.
Screw paradigm shifts, I'm staying right here.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think your experience applies to this conversation, since becoming a citizen would be the next logical step after getting the green card, and this article claims that at least one of these have gotten better when in fact that may not be strictly true, especially wherever you are.
It's scary to think that some people might not be "good enough for gov't work". At least there's work at the post office too... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
This wouldn't be as regards the Open-NP project, would it? A project to "portman to an OpenSource environment", perhaps?
Well, that post was hilarious, so maybe we need to start a "TrollForge" website for such projects and related postings, etc., etc. Some sort of central slashdot repository so we can store all of the funny troll postings. Heck, make it searchable too, then we can copyright it. *snicker*
Portman
"Trollin', Trollin', Trollin', perl scripts a' pollin', keep on slashdot trollin', Portman! Mae Ling Mak and First Post, So I can now boast, Wishin' my gal was petrified. All the things I'm missin', My Karma, baths, and wimmin, I don't care, or else I'd cry!
CHORUS Click 'em on, post 'em up Post 'em up, click 'em on Click 'em on, post 'em up Portman! Click 'em on, post 'em up Post 'em up, click 'em on Click 'em on, post 'em up Portman!
Keep movin', movin', movin', Though they're disapprovin', Keep them fingers movin, Portman! Don't try to understand 'em, Just post and reprimand 'em, Soon we'll be trollin' far and wide! My porn's stimulatin' My right hand will be achin' I don't care or else I'd cry!
Portman! Portman! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Quick, patent the 'locate' command, and the resultant indexes, and you'll own everything, ha ha ha ha ha!
Doesn't Microsoft own a *lot* of this stuff now? And now Time-Warner / AOL? That scares me.
Also, rules against "linking to a web site" strike me as being incredibly stupid. Oh no, I made links to the current stories on slashdot's main page. They're going to sue me for infringing on their content. Good thing everyone else is doing it too, now, and we should be thanking them for cutting down on wasted bandwidth, and cross-indexing sites for us in a useful fashion...
"Can't we all just get along?":) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Anyone else think it's scary that people are quoting Slashdot comments, probably out of context, in a court of law, attempting to present some kind of "accurate representation" of the community and its opinions?
Man, if I was the other lawyer in that case, I'd read a few "Naked and Petrified" comments and destroy that "Anonymous Coward" guys testimony.
No, I know, they could just look at my user number, and make me an "expert witness"!:P
I guess my question for Jon would be "Do you think tactics like using posts from one user, out of context, from an online forum should be allowed as testimony to represent the views of the community at large?"
Geez, I like DNA testing much better compared to this crap. With DNA testing, I'm 99.9999% certain as to someone's identity. With Slashdot, I've got the other 0.0001% certain about their identity, that they mean what they say, that they have any idea what they're talking about... etc., etc. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Oh my God, I just found out today that Bill Gates has something to do with Microsoft! I bet that's why they sell so much stuff...
Transmeta employs Linus because he wanted a cool job where he could do something interesting and work on Linux on the side. And guess what, that's what he did.
And if you haven't checked lately, there are special icons on slashdot for *everything* now, including but not limited to Beanies, Star Wars Prequels, Wine, and Christmas Cheer...
We "rabid" Linux users would be very interested in that "box of shit", because Linus tends to have more integrity than that. Say what you will, but he hasn't let me down yet, unlike Bill Gates.
I'd be easily manipulated if I didn't question your post. Fortunately, I know enough about the people and forum involved that I don't, citizen.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, this is definitely unfair. We aren't supposed to lose our rights after we enter the schoolhouse gate, but I guess things change.
Universities are big business nowadays. I'm glad that at least one company has been able to provide competing phone service here at NCSU, but by and large we don't have that many choices, AT&T enjoys a virtual monopoly here, and I'd hate to see our few bad choices get limited even further.
...and I'll trade campuses with you. My university switched to Pepsi, and I can't stand it. However, getting Coke from off campus is cheaper than buying Pepsi on campus, and of course Coke is far superior...:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Here's a site in Australia that has some more detailed information. Everything the Anonymous Coward first poster said sounds pretty accurate (!).
The card they're using here is the Telsat Turbo, from SatNet. It's a PCI card, and it says in their FAQ that they're working on drivers for MacOS and Linux. It should already work under Windows NT. And yeah, you need a modem too. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually, Laserjets are far and away the printing platform used in business. And it's nice to see VA Linux supporting the community by using SourceForge, and HP promoting (even indirectly) Linux, where before some would have seen it as competition. <ZEALOT> I yearn for the day when companies write drivers for Linux(/Unix) and opensource them so that all Unixes can share in the glory, and we all laugh at Windows for a decade because it's fragmented, hard to use for longer than 30 minutes, and it locks you into proprietary solutions.:) </ZEALOT> --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I would have to agree, because in practice, I never use any of the graphical monitoring tools.
Ktop looks pretty, I like the tree view, and the process monitoring mode, (showing user and system in different colors) but it's still a bit of a hog. However, I know the text in/proc takes some time to parse, which is another argument for a complimentary binary interface to process info.
I haven't used ntop, but it sounds handy. Mostly, top, sort, grep, etc. are good enough. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Thanks for the info. I've seen minix running on an 8086, and it ran horribly... but I guess the miracle is that it ran at all. I haven't tried it on a 286, but I might someday.
Hadn't heard of VsTA... Support for SMP? Hmm... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
This was a good technical article with some interesting ideas, and I'm proud to see it on Slashdot.
I think the reason that functional languages are left out of the evaluation is that they are "research", and as such tend to have more of the features that will be in "The Language Of The Future", which will be whatever is worthy to finally replace C/C++ as the development language of the future, and do a good job.
I've been learning Scheme lately, and the design of the language encourages a lot of flexibility and reuse. Since the data types are numbers and symbols (which are atoms), and lists, (and S-expressions and functions...) all you can really do is recursive list manipulation. But that turns out to be a lot. (and you can build code from data, too) Some of these concepts will take off and be successful, and others won't, but it will be interesting to see what the future holds... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
:) Yeah, running on a Root disk sucks. The best thing to do is see if you can get it to use some swap. However, if it crashed when you say it did, (at startup, basically) you're probably out of luck.
Which distro did you try to install? Some linux distros, like Small Linux, claim to be able to do what you want.
I've got a 286 that I tried running ELKS on, and... well, it's *really* not ready for prime time. And I wouldn't want to do any real work on minix, either. No, I'd probably run DOS--try to get the Second Reality demo looping on it instead.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
On the download page, they say something about it being a "special, not for distribution" version, and some other licensing stuff. Anyone who considers themselves a GPL expert, take a look. My take on it is they aren't ready to distribute it to the masses.
However, if they gave you the binaries, and there's GPLed code in there, they owe you the source. So we'll see how this goes. (Please, not another lawsuit! I'd love to test the GPL, but...) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Looks like this is for making embedded linux solutions on x86 and PowerPC. It's free for download, and they'll have to at least release whatever changes they've made to the 2.2 kernel, if they aren't just kernel modules. It will be interesting to see what functionality this shares with MobileLinux (if any), and how much of it we can cobble together between the two of them.
Also, some of this code might be handy for making a modern version of Linux that runs well on old computers without that much RAM. (yeah, yeah, yeah, 386 with 4MB RAM. Of course it's possible, but have you tried it lately? I wouldn't mind a distro that made it easier.) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
2) It's too confusing. I bet there are text tools. No one on Unix would use graphical tools...
3) If we told the truth, we'd lose our "Microsoft Journalistic Objectivity", and get shunned by the other trade rags. Oh no!
4) We're really incompetent to review anything but Windows, but we'll pretend we can do it to sound smarter... And we wouldn't want to actually *ask* anyone else for help....except Microsoft. They're okay. They provide support...
Finally, for those curious about the link / screenshot, I'm running a modified Redhat 6.0. That is, it's somewhere between RH6.0 and RH6.1, and also supports the freaky network stuff my university (NCSU) uses for networking. It's neet. And I was running DOSEmu (Fire demo) for the CPU cycles, and a Scheme interpreter (essentially doing 6^6^6^6, for the swap). Gtop is a pig, I like xosview and xsysinfo. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh man. William "FREAKING" Gibson.
I would *love* to see Molly in a movie. (for those who don't know... if Trinity were really a badass, she'd have permanent, Woverine-esque claws to go with the leather pants and bad attitude...)
Heck, that was worth it, just to hear Gibson make fun of Johnny Mnemonic. Maybe 'The Matrix' was how Keanu chose to make up for his sins there.
Or, even better, the gov't would never have funded The Internet as it is today... maybe. But it sure has helped the economy.
Man, Gibson entertains me. You know, when he got his Apple ][, he expected some kind of pulsating crystal inside. Man, was he disappointed. He's a visionary alright. We even get to read Neuromancer for my Science Fiction class. Yes!
Thank you slashdot, you've made my day.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Dude, if wearing an armband to protest the Vietnamm war is considered free speech, then writing an encryption program to protest laws against strong encryption should be considered free speech.
:)
Shooting people tends to infringe on their freedoms as well, and is therefore treated somewhat differently. If I got together a bunch of people who wanted to protest laws against assisted suicides, and shot them during an art presentation, I'd probably be arrested for murder, but at least the trial would be interesting. (Can you kill someone with their consent? Probably not, legally, but if you can prove it, it isn't murder, IMO)
However, any other "shooting people" example doesn't necessarily apply. All you're saying is that cracking wouldn't be protected speech, not coding.
You're right, source == speech isn't a tried and true defense, and I wouldn't want to use it as one. However...
Speech is speech. Transcribed speech is speech is text. Text on paper is text on a disk is speech. Speech is information. Code is information, can be spoken, and can be text on a disk... Math is not patentable, and code can be expressed as math...
The lesson, boys and girls, is to protect your code, you need to first have a recorded tape or transcription of everything you want to code in math, BNF notation, English, or some combination, until the laws and lawyers catch up with the reality of the situation, and what is obvious to the programmers.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hi, I'm pb, and this is an Offtopic post. But it's important, so don't moderate it, or keep it around 2, okay, guys?
Maybe you've noticed all the images popping up on slashdot lately. Well, it's an easy bug to exploit, I've tested it on a hidden thread (and on my user page, it's nice to have a picture).
Well, the long and the short of it is, security through obscurity is no excuse. I encourage you to do something about this, either by moderating UP that anonymous coward who first showed it to us with his funny Bill Gates post, or by posting a harmless image, or by contacting the staff running Slashdot, or by downloading the recently released Slash code, and checking if it's similar enough to be patched for this. Because if slashdot is vulnerable, the hole will have to be patched both on here, *and* on every site that uses their code.
Thank you.
Also, on the topic at hand: cool. It's always good to have Linux on a new processor, especially early. Of course, we knew this was going to happen, they've been working under NDA for a while, and I trust Linus. Also, people will probably still be waiting for the Monterey, and analyzing how Intel will do with its competition from both AMD and Transmeta now. Anyhow, the next few years should be very interesting.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot scientists discovered the origin of ball lightning while attempting to overclock their new Athlons to 1Ghz without proper cooling mechanisms.
"...and then I gave it the juice, man, and it was like, this huge cloud of fire and stuff passing through my case, and I said 'Whoa, Stovetop, did you do that?', and Stovetop said 'No, man, maybe it was the silicon', and I said 'Thats stupid', but then Stovetop said 'I think thats the same as ball lightning', and I said 'that would hurt, man', and Stovetop got pissed at me and left and wrote up a paper and got famous and stuff, and all I have is this charred motherboard and stuff."
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Microsoft, public, and beta should not exist together. In fact, they don't.
:) allowing easy execution and porting of Windows applications on/to Linux.
;) and wouldn't dream of freely releasing Windows source code.
Corel is freely releasing their contributed source code changes to an open source project, even though they don't have to.
The WINE license allows you to incorporate the entire WINE project, modify it, not release the changes, and sell it. That's fine, but Corel isn't doing that.
The WINE project is a reimplementation of the Windows libraries and environment on top of Linux, (and *BSD and hopefully all of Unix with a little x86 emulation...
Microsoft, on the other hand, places their products on a very restrictive license, sometimes charges people for beta releases, (and for that matter always charges people for "gold" releases that would be better called beta releases
Heck, they wouldn't even give you access to an ftp archive, and say "check out the alpha Windows daily builds", unless you're a WaReZ d00d. (anyone remember Windows '97?)
I'd be happy with Microsoft if they decently ported *any* of their apps to Linux with WINE, and contributing to the WINE project would be a plus. Because MainWin blows on Solaris and HP/UX, and I've run IE 3.0 and Photoshop 3.0 under Wine so far, so I don't think it would take that much work on their part, and they'd get a decent software port.
The only reason for them *not* to port to Linux is their OS monopoly, because a lot of people would still buy their software. Especially if they tried giving back to the community for once, instead of just taking our money and giving us substandard products.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Malicious code
:)
Oh no, Slashdot is vulnerable! No one is safe from the dreaded CERT Advisory Exploits!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Your post was wonderful and fair until you mentioned the incredibly stupid "GNU/[blah blah blah]" flamewar.
First, some "facts" about Linux. Linus didn't even want to call it Linux, or GNU/Linux, or Bob, or anything. In his mind, it was probably originally called "386 protected mode assembly tutorial", and eventually grew into an OS kernel. He did mention that he wanted to call it FreaX, or something silly like that. The guy on the ftp archive said "Nah, that's a dumb name. His name is Linus, I'll call it Linux." This is all paraphrasing what I remember about the subject -- feel free to post more detailed accounts of this story if you wish.
Second, once development really got going in C, and Linus managed to get gcc running under Linux, he was grateful enough that he GPL'ed the Linux kernel. Linux is essentially an excellent GPL'ed, Unix-looking OS kernel, which can be used to fulfill the final bit of the GNU project. Calling Linux GNU/Linux makes about as much sense as calling GNU GNU/Linux.
Linux can also be used with many other free and commercial packages, but is not dependent on them, as it is an OS kernel. If you wanted to, you could probably run iBCS, and use FreeBSD or SCO or Solaris's system tools. Most people would rather just compile the GNU ones, but this is a distribution issue, not a kernel issue. Even so, we don't name the kernel or the distribution by the name of the packages within. Otherwise, the full and accurate name of my modified Redhat 6.0 distribution would consist of about 494 separate names, not counting anything I compiled myself. That's a long name, and unless you're writing the new Sumerian Unix epic poem, I don't recommend doing so.
Finally, if you're stupid or arrogant enough to call the OS kernel GNU/Linux, or the distribution "a GNU/Linux system", why stop there? How about "GNU/RedHat 6.1", even though the GNU project has no real corporate association with RedHat? (they didn't merge or anything, guys)
The GPL cuts both ways. We can use your software, and we'll give you your source, but the GPL doesn't include any "advertising clause". Is this what you want, RMS? The good old BSD license provisions to protect you?
How about a new license, the JPL, for "Jealous Public License", requiring any program or collection of programs to clearly state all the programs or projects involved in its name, regardless of how stupid, inane, or non-marketable the resulting name sounds? If using the GPL for your software isn't enough for you, does that sound inane enough for you, RMS? (*please* don't take this seriously. I *beg* of you.)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
All this means is that the TI CEO thinks wireless internet devices or whatever are the "next big thing".
:)
Well, everyone is investing in all kinds of crazy stuff hoping it will be the next big thing. Feel free to make a generator for it, using the words "innovative", "wireless", "internet", "hand-held", "touch screen", "Open-Source", "integrated", "internet-ready", "small footprint", "network", "Java", "device", "organizer", etc., etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. We'll all be sick of it soon enough.
Does that mean this will be the next big thing? They sure hope so. We'll see a lot of attempts, and most of them will fail. These devices have their place, and some of them will live on. Some of them might even replace cell phones and pagers, and let you check on your stuff when you're on the road. That's really handy.
But the PC will live on. PC's will always have more brute computational force, display your games prettier, give you more room to surf the web and chat with people, play your music, etc., etc. Technological advances from both sides will be folded together. I can't wait to have a PC with a nice big flat screen, and a few really efficient processors.
But I still wouldn't want to take it on the road, and it's still a PC, just as much as my old Tandy with the monochrome monitor and the full-sized keyboard. Heck, anyone who hasn't been keeping up would just know that PC's are more like TV's now, they're prettier and stuff. Outwardly, they look pretty similar. Screen, keyboard, CPU, etc. I don't think that's gonna change for a while.
Screw paradigm shifts, I'm staying right here.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
No, feel free to share. I, for one, am curious.
I think your experience applies to this conversation, since becoming a citizen would be the next logical step after getting the green card, and this article claims that at least one of these have gotten better when in fact that may not be strictly true, especially wherever you are.
It's scary to think that some people might not be "good enough for gov't work". At least there's work at the post office too...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
This wouldn't be as regards the Open-NP project, would it? A project to "portman to an OpenSource environment", perhaps?
Well, that post was hilarious, so maybe we need to start a "TrollForge" website for such projects and related postings, etc., etc. Some sort of central slashdot repository so we can store all of the funny troll postings. Heck, make it searchable too, then we can copyright it. *snicker*
Portman
"Trollin', Trollin', Trollin',
perl scripts a' pollin',
keep on slashdot trollin',
Portman!
Mae Ling Mak and First Post,
So I can now boast,
Wishin' my gal was petrified.
All the things I'm missin',
My Karma, baths, and wimmin,
I don't care, or else I'd cry!
CHORUS
Click 'em on, post 'em up
Post 'em up, click 'em on
Click 'em on, post 'em up
Portman!
Click 'em on, post 'em up
Post 'em up, click 'em on
Click 'em on, post 'em up
Portman!
Keep movin', movin', movin',
Though they're disapprovin',
Keep them fingers movin,
Portman!
Don't try to understand 'em,
Just post and reprimand 'em,
Soon we'll be trollin' far and wide!
My porn's stimulatin'
My right hand will be achin'
I don't care or else I'd cry!
Portman!
Portman!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Quick, patent the 'locate' command, and the resultant indexes, and you'll own everything, ha ha ha ha ha!
:)
Doesn't Microsoft own a *lot* of this stuff now? And now Time-Warner / AOL? That scares me.
Also, rules against "linking to a web site" strike me as being incredibly stupid. Oh no, I made links to the current stories on slashdot's main page. They're going to sue me for infringing on their content. Good thing everyone else is doing it too, now, and we should be thanking them for cutting down on wasted bandwidth, and cross-indexing sites for us in a useful fashion...
"Can't we all just get along?"
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Anyone else think it's scary that people are quoting Slashdot comments, probably out of context, in a court of law, attempting to present some kind of "accurate representation" of the community and its opinions?
:P
Man, if I was the other lawyer in that case, I'd read a few "Naked and Petrified" comments and destroy that "Anonymous Coward" guys testimony.
No, I know, they could just look at my user number, and make me an "expert witness"!
I guess my question for Jon would be "Do you think tactics like using posts from one user, out of context, from an online forum should be allowed as testimony to represent the views of the community at large?"
Geez, I like DNA testing much better compared to this crap. With DNA testing, I'm 99.9999% certain as to someone's identity. With Slashdot, I've got the other 0.0001% certain about their identity, that they mean what they say, that they have any idea what they're talking about... etc., etc.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Oh my God, I just found out today that Bill Gates has something to do with Microsoft! I bet that's why they sell so much stuff...
:)
Transmeta employs Linus because he wanted a cool job where he could do something interesting and work on Linux on the side. And guess what, that's what he did.
And if you haven't checked lately, there are special icons on slashdot for *everything* now, including but not limited to Beanies, Star Wars Prequels, Wine, and Christmas Cheer...
We "rabid" Linux users would be very interested in that "box of shit", because Linus tends to have more integrity than that. Say what you will, but he hasn't let me down yet, unlike Bill Gates.
I'd be easily manipulated if I didn't question your post. Fortunately, I know enough about the people and forum involved that I don't, citizen.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, this is definitely unfair. We aren't supposed to lose our rights after we enter the schoolhouse gate, but I guess things change.
:)
Universities are big business nowadays. I'm glad that at least one company has been able to provide competing phone service here at NCSU, but by and large we don't have that many choices, AT&T enjoys a virtual monopoly here, and I'd hate to see our few bad choices get limited even further.
...and I'll trade campuses with you. My university switched to Pepsi, and I can't stand it. However, getting Coke from off campus is cheaper than buying Pepsi on campus, and of course Coke is far superior...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Good observation, but I think Bruce Sterling still beat you to it. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Here's a site in Australia that has some more detailed information. Everything the Anonymous Coward first poster said sounds pretty accurate (!).
The card they're using here is the Telsat Turbo, from SatNet. It's a PCI card, and it says in their FAQ that they're working on drivers for MacOS and Linux. It should already work under Windows NT. And yeah, you need a modem too.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Cool! All source rpm's...
Heck, it's just cool to see the list of programs they're cramming into this.
It doesn't look like a bad start for a root/boot disk.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually, Laserjets are far and away the printing platform used in business. And it's nice to see VA Linux supporting the community by using SourceForge, and HP promoting (even indirectly) Linux, where before some would have seen it as competition. :)
<ZEALOT>
I yearn for the day when companies write drivers for Linux(/Unix) and opensource them so that all Unixes can share in the glory, and we all laugh at Windows for a decade because it's fragmented, hard to use for longer than 30 minutes, and it locks you into proprietary solutions.
</ZEALOT>
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I would have to agree, because in practice, I never use any of the graphical monitoring tools.
/proc takes some time to parse, which is another argument for a complimentary binary interface to process info.
Ktop looks pretty, I like the tree view, and the process monitoring mode, (showing user and system in different colors) but it's still a bit of a hog. However, I know the text in
I haven't used ntop, but it sounds handy. Mostly, top, sort, grep, etc. are good enough.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Thanks for the info. I've seen minix running on an 8086, and it ran horribly... but I guess the miracle is that it ran at all. I haven't tried it on a 286, but I might someday.
Hadn't heard of VsTA... Support for SMP? Hmm...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
This was a good technical article with some interesting ideas, and I'm proud to see it on Slashdot.
I think the reason that functional languages are left out of the evaluation is that they are "research", and as such tend to have more of the features that will be in "The Language Of The Future", which will be whatever is worthy to finally replace C/C++ as the development language of the future, and do a good job.
I've been learning Scheme lately, and the design of the language encourages a lot of flexibility and reuse. Since the data types are numbers and symbols (which are atoms), and lists, (and S-expressions and functions...) all you can really do is recursive list manipulation. But that turns out to be a lot. (and you can build code from data, too) Some of these concepts will take off and be successful, and others won't, but it will be interesting to see what the future holds...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
:) Yeah, running on a Root disk sucks. The best thing to do is see if you can get it to use some swap. However, if it crashed when you say it did, (at startup, basically) you're probably out of luck.
:)
Which distro did you try to install? Some linux distros, like Small Linux, claim to be able to do what you want.
I've got a 286 that I tried running ELKS on, and... well, it's *really* not ready for prime time. And I wouldn't want to do any real work on minix, either. No, I'd probably run DOS--try to get the Second Reality demo looping on it instead.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
On the download page, they say something about it being a "special, not for distribution" version, and some other licensing stuff. Anyone who considers themselves a GPL expert, take a look. My take on it is they aren't ready to distribute it to the masses.
However, if they gave you the binaries, and there's GPLed code in there, they owe you the source. So we'll see how this goes. (Please, not another lawsuit! I'd love to test the GPL, but...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Looks like this is for making embedded linux solutions on x86 and PowerPC. It's free for download, and they'll have to at least release whatever changes they've made to the 2.2 kernel, if they aren't just kernel modules. It will be interesting to see what functionality this shares with MobileLinux (if any), and how much of it we can cobble together between the two of them.
Also, some of this code might be handy for making a modern version of Linux that runs well on old computers without that much RAM. (yeah, yeah, yeah, 386 with 4MB RAM. Of course it's possible, but have you tried it lately? I wouldn't mind a distro that made it easier.)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think what our friends at CNN meant to say was:
...except Microsoft. They're okay. They provide support...
1) There are *too many* graphical monitoring tools for Linux.
Therefore,
2) It's too confusing. I bet there are text tools. No one on Unix would use graphical tools...
3) If we told the truth, we'd lose our "Microsoft Journalistic Objectivity", and get shunned by the other trade rags. Oh no!
4) We're really incompetent to review anything but Windows, but we'll pretend we can do it to sound smarter... And we wouldn't want to actually *ask* anyone else for help.
Finally, for those curious about the link / screenshot, I'm running a modified Redhat 6.0. That is, it's somewhere between RH6.0 and RH6.1, and also supports the freaky network stuff my university (NCSU) uses for networking. It's neet. And I was running DOSEmu (Fire demo) for the CPU cycles, and a Scheme interpreter (essentially doing 6^6^6^6, for the swap). Gtop is a pig, I like xosview and xsysinfo.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.