Where's "Intercept stupid ICMP broadcast", "Spoof IP address", "Fake silly chat client account", "Use silly X-Files satellite to intercept / read message", "divine message with psychic help", "brute-force guess the message (no, really! You might not recognize it when you find it, though...)"...
Or my favorite: preemptively crash Windows '95 computers. No messages sent, no problem! --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Are people being scored up for bad posts now? Is this what slashdot has become? Or should we just expect this in an article about skript kiddiez... Someone mentioned this bug the other day, but I hoped that they were kidding.
Anyhow, the article looks somewhat interesting in an *yawn* academic way, but I don't think it's really that new. However, Dr. Dobb's traditionally has cool stuff in it... --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I don't like Java, I like it perhaps less than you do. But I'm talking about perceived reality here, not as you or I perceive it, but as Microsoft's customers would. People are learning Java, schools are teaching it, and businesses are implementing it. What do you think is going to happen? We'll probably be stuck with it for a while.
Also, you *can* do some really impressive stuff in Java. Anything you could do on a 386 in assembler, you should be able to do at least equally fast in Java. And that looks really cool in a web browser. You shouldn't need more speed than that for a decent word processor, or a cool graphics demo. And if you do, if you want something really cutting-edge, don't write it in Java for at least a few years.:)
GTK is not nearly platform independent, unless you the developer compile it on all the platforms and statically link it. That might be the best idea since it differs enough from version to version (minor versions!) to break a lot of code. I like GTK, but I think I'll wait until it's a bit more stable.
Lots of people use Java apps on a daily basis, not usually Office suites or web browsers (for obvious reasons), but often communications applications. I know a lot of people who use Java versions of AIM or ICQ simply because it's easier and takes up less disk space than trying to install the real version. Of course, we could all just use byte-compiled LISP in Emacs, but it doesn't look as pretty.:)
Feel free to use what works, I do too, and it generally isn't C++ if I can help it (or at least not anything that uses iostream, it's slow and ugly!). I like C better, and assembler when I can. But I bet you I'll still be writing C++ and Java in the years to come, regardless.
And there *are* supposed to be some pretty good IDEs for Linux, but I haven't tried them. I know a lot of people who use Visual Slickedit, but of course that's a commercial product, as is CodeWarrior. I also haven't tried CodeForge. I like RHIDE (it's just like the old TurboVision-based Borland editors, yay!) but it isn't that stable or actively developed on Linux, AFAICT... So I end up using pico, and grep, and stuff.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
They got in early, and therefore didn't have enough competition for BASIC implementations, but Borland kicked a lot of ass, technically speaking, and dominated at least Pascal and C for a while. And then there was Watcom, and many other C compilers better than Microsoft's. Microsoft had to leverage their Windows dominance to get people to use their compilers again.
In 1982, Microsoft was profiting on providing software for an open hardware platfrom, once that got saturated they got complacent and greedy. Somewhere around MS-DOS 5.0, IMO. (4.x sucked horribly, just like everything before 3.0, but everything after 5.0 was a minor upgrade for too much money, which is all MS does with their OSes anymore, these days, too.)
If it weren't for IBM, no one would have *bought* the PC. In retrospect, it really sucked. My Commodore 64 had far superior graphics and sound, it took the PC years to catch up. (until they had EGA and soundcards, when it was debatably about equal) And by then, the Amiga was better, too. But somehow we ended up in this current state of affairs, because MS can market and bully better than IBM could, and that apparently makes some people's decisions for them. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
If this is a sign of the "evolution" of the web, then mommy I'm scared, take me back to my nice cozy porn sites and away from people like this.
However, that was pretty funny.:)
Just remember folks, natural selection. The Shakers died, not because they were bad people, but because they didn't want to have sex. Ergo, no next generation of Shakers. The same would happen with this, guy if he's serious. But I hope he isn't, because I don't think I could handle that many anonymous cowards.
Natural selection on the web would mean, I suppose, getting your page viewed and keeping it online. The goal here would be to be popular, and there are many strategies for that, my favorite is making a *useful* page... --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I'd rather have Sun attempt to tell me why, thanks, but don't tell me you can't find a good Java VM. There are tons of those little suckers! It would be nice if Sun really did open the source to something (especially Java) to show support for open source and more importantly open standards. But they want to control the standards, and I think that will be their downfall. Heck, we can't even handle standards for a simple, fake markup language like HTML.
Perl and Python can be ported by independent parties that show the interest to do so, instead of depending on one central company. But at least the spec for Java is open...
I agree, I tend to use C and shell script myself, and it's pretty handy. I don't really like python or tcl, and perl syntactically annoys the piss out of me, but eventually I'll either find or come up with a fast scripting language that I like, or just stick to C.
I admit that object hierarchies have to be very carefully designed. I think objects are C++ and Java's way of letting you shoot yourself in the foot, when C only had pointers for that. However, this doesn't mean that pointers and objects aren't useful. Rather, the programmer must be more careful in the "design" phase. Which doesn't happen often, if we can help it.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I completely agree with you, since I wrote in Turbo Pascal 7, which supports classes and whatnot, for way too long. (and there's definitely some Ada resemblance there)
However, hype never stopped Microsoft from selling a product before. To the contrary, they seem to thrive on it. Hence, why not sell people what they think they want, instead of spending time and effort to make them think they want something else?
Judging by their past history, I would much more easily believe that this is due to the rivalry between Microsoft and Sun rather than any integrity on Microsoft's part. But, I'm willing to wait a couple of years, and see if they can prove me wrong.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I don't like Java either, but what do you mean, it isn't portable?
I think its performance bites too, but I'm comparing it to C. Compared to Python, Java looks like a speed freak.
And object-orientation has been the trend in language design, at least officially, for a while. It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it's been really proven yet. I've used it to my advantage before, but it doesn't really do anything that can't be done without an object-oriented language.
Your post made a lot of sense until I read your "preemptive return-volley", so consider just posting the message next time.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Microsoft has always tried to be in the language business, no matter how much they suck at it. So I, for one, don't know what they're doing here. Java is definitely the language of the future. Everyone is trying to use it on the Web and decide what to do with it (they changed the introductory CS classes at my school to use it, just recently, but what do I care, the upper level classes use C because it works:) and I can't believe that Microsoft wouldn't want to profit from that. I doubt they're admitting defeat, so either they have some other arrangement with this company, or they'll be releasing something new, and hopefully better.
The article seems to imply that they're competing by using XML as some kind of glue language, to work with COM and other stuff. But that isn't the same thing at all. Of course, Microsoft is trying to subvert open standards, but this is a separate example, and will not help them with the popularity of Java. I guess I'll have to wait and see what they release...
Of course, in a couple of years, we might not be on the x86 anymore, toto. And if any of these proposed future chips execute Java bytecodes at hardware-lookin' speeds, watch out, Microsoft!:)
(Insert Beowulf, Transmeta, Java/XML/C-- comment here:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I don't think that Rob or Katz were trying to skew our world view there, my man. I'm willing to bet that the only point Katz was trying to make is that once the millenium is over, the hype surrounding it will be over, and we won't have to suffer through bad millenial/end-of-world movies for a while. I'm not this optimistic, but we'll see. This one happened to use Christianity as a crutch, and apparently Katz didn't find that to be particularly realistic either, so relax.
I'm an Atheist, but I'd love to see more movies like The Prophecy, and I personally find the subject fascinating, much in the way I like Science Fiction or Fantasy. And I find myself agreeing with you on a lot of your points, (I saw a silly "Christian" rag yesterday espousing the "Jesus was fully God and fully man, but worthy of salvation as we are not, but will save us from our sins"... etc., etc., and I find evolution, genetics, dark matter, pokemon and invisible pink elephants much easier to believe in than that) so it's good to see a Christian trying to incorporate reason into theology. (St. Augustine did that too, and he also had some pretty liberal views about the world... I'm actually surprised he made it as a saint, considering.)
The Christian doctrine is more complex than most Christians give it credit for. I'm not convinced as to its internal consistency, and I hope it's not as complex as St. Augustine found it, because then, if I were concerned by it, I would have given up and started a simpler religion... And this has happened many times in Christianity, but I don't know if anyone has gotten it right. (I personally would side with the Unitarian Universalists, but that's not very Christian, except as Christian means Christ-like, respecting people, etc.)
And I think the real problem here is that *Hollywood* is confining their view of Christianity to "Jesus comes in y2k", much like they confine their view of hacking to "this video game controls the security system". And Katz is saying that after y2k, Hollywood won't have an excuse to drag out this tired old plot.
(of course, if they did some research, they could. Even if they continued their base-10, 2000 years obsession, they could observe that the date of Jesus' birth is widely disputed, (of course, this means that 2000 years has come and gone, better pick 2222 years or something, and do another Fifth Element-like movie! Yay!) or count from an event in a different calendar for whatever reason (that would make much more sense). --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I knew apple had gone over to the dark side a long time ago, but this is still ridiculous...
For those of you worried about software bloat, side effects, etc., etc.: shut up! This is only an issue if you can't code well in the first place. As long as you have a simple, well-written, 'credits scrolly' type module, all it does is take up disk space until it is executed. Therefore, no real extra bloat (oh no, it calls a library function...) and no side effects. And geez, if you can't figure out how to compress a *text* file, go to jail, do not download mini-lzo, do not write a credits scrolly...
(incidentally, the article I linked to has a *real* list of hacking feats. I'm gonna have to save that page...) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Run it under Wine. Last I checked, I could get IE 3.0 for Win 3.1 to run under Wine. I can't get IE 4.0 or 5.0 to install with the stupid network installer, so I don't know if Wine will run the current crop of Internet Explorer versions, but it'd be fun to try.
And heck, if it doesn't work, and you want it that badly, post to the newsgroup, or try to fix it yourself...
I guarantee you, if MS ported IE with Wine, it'd run better on Linux than it does on Solaris or HP/UX, easily. And it'd probably have some advantages over the Windows version. (stability--if IE crashes, it doesn't bring down Linux:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
FreeBSD would be the choice for x86-only, no heavy security, getting started.
Or at least, that's what they tell me. I'd have to free up some space on my 8GB of Linux and stuff to check it out... Maybe when I get my next computer.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
BSD and Solaris are both offshoots of the original (v7?) Unix source, one side developed by Berkeley, the other side by AT&T, with a lot of cross-pollination. Linux was independently developed to be compatible, without the original source.
FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD should have no proprietary source left, they've been cleaned up so they could open the source. OpenBSD is a latecomer, basically a distribution/offshoot (of NetBSD?) designed for security, both by hopefully fixing security problems before they are exploited in the code and having a secure default configuration.
I've messed more with SunOS, Solaris, and Linux than I have with any of the *BSD's, tho... --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Let violence == flaming, WTO == generic_news_item, protesters == posters, and we're just talking about slashdot!
However, you won't get that free TV set from posting on slashdot, and you're probably pretty safe from the pepper spray too.
Let's hear it for Anarchy. I've seen more of it on slashdot lately, that's what happens when any system fails to meet the needs of the people. (Windows?:) They should expect it more, in an indirect democracy, that occasionally they should have more referendums or polls about the issues that matter, and less silly news media coverage about Pokemon or Monica or whatever this week's dead, beaten horse is in the media... --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
What do you find surprising? I found this story on slashdot, followed some links posted in the comments, and I'm reading it (the book, not the article) now, after everybody's commented on it.
That, long with some of the original papers on Unix, that is... Some of these examples are hilarious, since DOS and Windows both do things the wrong way, when compared to the Unix way.
(instead of real pipes, DOS uses temporary files, while Windows builds useless functionality into every program...)
At least some people took this message to heart, if not Bill G...
"But on the whole you will find that the authors of UNIX, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, have created a program of great strength, integrity and effectiveness, which you should admire and seek to emulate." --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I've been waiting for an actual "slashdot" story for a while now.
1) Moderation has gone to hell. Be careful who you give it to, guys. I don't think anyone knows the moderation guidelines now. Short, short version: the first post probably isn't redundant, but it might be a troll, flamebait, offtopic, or massively overrated. And don't moderate anything as overrated if you have a better reason. If you just don't like it, try posting a *reply*. Still waiting for metamoderation to fix this one...
2) Quality of articles on slashdot has gone to hell. Get rid of those losers except Rob and maybe Hemos. Either moderate the stories, let someone screen them before they get posted, or moderate/edit the potential stories, or something.
3) What's with the messed up colors on some of the comments pages? I don't want some ugly green, or some red. I don't want a page to look *any* different than it always has unless I have an option to customize it. Where's the "make the comment page stay standard slashdot green, dammit!" button?
Slashdot used to be a cozy little website. Yes, now it's a lot more popular. Now we have guest authors who can write long, rambling articles, and new posters who can get cool, sensationalistic headlines, and a comments section that needs to go back to segfault. It's always been "News for Nerds". Now we need to work on that "Stuff that matters" some more. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Well, it looks like we have a use for that neural interface technology that the doctor doesn't want us to have.
Being able to move a phantom finger over a phantom keyboard sounds pretty useful here, I wonder if you could do better. I know I have some neurons that are wired to touch-type, could we learn how to do the same sort of thing, without the fingers, and stuff? I'd be pretty happy if I could use my brain as a fast keyboard. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
mmm, now we can have naked women on those E themes instead of just scantily clad ones, and include it in the distribution! What a great idea. Also include the man pages for sex and beer, make the offensive fortunes the default, and don't include the English HOWTOs with the distribution, for even more profanity!
But we'll have a lot of catching up to do with Microsoft, must remember to hose the MBR and only install the OS to the first drive, for maximum user friendliness, just like Windows. Oh, and move the graphics, web server, and kitchen sink api into the kernel for speed... yeah, that's it, speed... And get rid of those messy development versions, they only slow us down. And close the source, no one really looks at that stuff, so we can charge more for the product. You only want *professionals* using this stuff. And we'll need full DOS compatibility, maybe as a default text-mode user interface, so people will only use the GUI... --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
That looks pretty neat, but... I don't see how a 4.3GB HD is supposed to hold 100 CD's worth of music, unless you rely on the CD's being rather not full... It seems like they're off by 2GB or so.
The FM transmitter sounded like a really cool idea, tho.
Okay, so it's a low-powered Linux box, I couldn't find a price, and their ordering page and screenshots were all very dead.
Why not just make a little add-on kit, or a distribution, to turn people's old Linux boxes into dedicated mp3 servers? I've got an old P133 I could use, when I get a new computer I could put my old (newer) HD in there, and serve some mp3's... --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Wasn't there a Mac version before, back in 5.0, when Stardivision was doing it? And is Sun still working on the Java client version?
They shouldn't have to do too much work to port that thing, just clean up whatever they did from 5.0 to 5.1... --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
This is just plain silly. I was hoping for a fun, simple test like The Geek Test, but no, it was a Katz article.:)
I'm so glad I'm out of public school. Now I can hear about this stuff, but at least I don't have to do it again. Of course I was a nerd, dude, we're all on slashdot...
However, I don't know about some of this stuff: I'm pretty outgoing, at least within my "band of outcasts", never really ran into drugs and don't do any of the illegal ones personally, and if I got bullied it was for being smart or ignoring stupid people (I was usually reading...).
So how are we dangerous, again? That's the implication Katz wants us to see, and I think some schools or "educators" might be dumb enough to think that, but why would the FBI think that? They're a bunch of dangerous nerds too, and they should know that you can't prepare for terrorism, and you generally can't identify terrorists beforehand... They're just disgruntled people, and you don't have to be a nerd to get like that: you could be a (non-nerdy) postal worker, say...;) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
That's pretty funny. Silly politician attacks obvious parody site and ends up looking stupid. We need more of this. Everybody don't vote, and maybe we'll have anarchy, just like the web.
My take on the 'copyrighted images on the web' -- good luck. Once you put an image on the web, *everyone* has to make a copy of it just to *see* it. So what are you saying, no copying? Sounds impossible to me, you'd have to have a special license or something for your images. And if I had my browser view the same image, from the same site, on a different page, is that okay? What if I change the HEIGHT and WIDTH tags? Did I change the image? Or is someone else responsible, if they look at my page? This may sound stupid, but there are a lot of issues here that need to be worked out.
So when is slashdot gonna get rid of that nasty off-green color? The next time we get an article about slashdot, I'm posting about that, a lot... --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
Sent with what? Any intermediate servers?
Where's "Intercept stupid ICMP broadcast", "Spoof IP address", "Fake silly chat client account",
"Use silly X-Files satellite to intercept / read message", "divine message with psychic help", "brute-force guess the message (no, really! You might not recognize it when you find it, though...)"...
Or my favorite: preemptively crash Windows '95 computers. No messages sent, no problem!
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Are people being scored up for bad posts now? Is this what slashdot has become? Or should we just expect this in an article about skript kiddiez... Someone mentioned this bug the other day, but I hoped that they were kidding.
Anyhow, the article looks somewhat interesting in an *yawn* academic way, but I don't think it's really that new. However, Dr. Dobb's traditionally has cool stuff in it...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I think Lunix was for the C64, actually.
:)
Definitely a different Unix.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I'm not on crack, sorry, fresh out.
:)
:)
:)
I don't like Java, I like it perhaps less than you do. But I'm talking about perceived reality here, not as you or I perceive it, but as Microsoft's customers would. People are learning Java, schools are teaching it, and businesses are implementing it. What do you think is going to happen? We'll probably be stuck with it for a while.
Also, you *can* do some really impressive stuff in Java. Anything you could do on a 386 in assembler, you should be able to do at least equally fast in Java. And that looks really cool in a web browser. You shouldn't need more speed than that for a decent word processor, or a cool graphics demo. And if you do, if you want something really cutting-edge, don't write it in Java for at least a few years.
GTK is not nearly platform independent, unless you the developer compile it on all the platforms and statically link it. That might be the best idea since it differs enough from version to version (minor versions!) to break a lot of code. I like GTK, but I think I'll wait until it's a bit more stable.
Lots of people use Java apps on a daily basis, not usually Office suites or web browsers (for obvious reasons), but often communications applications. I know a lot of people who use Java versions of AIM or ICQ simply because it's easier and takes up less disk space than trying to install the real version. Of course, we could all just use byte-compiled LISP in Emacs, but it doesn't look as pretty.
Feel free to use what works, I do too, and it generally isn't C++ if I can help it (or at least not anything that uses iostream, it's slow and ugly!). I like C better, and assembler when I can. But I bet you I'll still be writing C++ and Java in the years to come, regardless.
And there *are* supposed to be some pretty good IDEs for Linux, but I haven't tried them. I know a lot of people who use Visual Slickedit, but of course that's a commercial product, as is CodeWarrior. I also haven't tried CodeForge. I like RHIDE (it's just like the old TurboVision-based Borland editors, yay!) but it isn't that stable or actively developed on Linux, AFAICT... So I end up using pico, and grep, and stuff.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Oh, I didn't forget, far from it.
:)
But I still think they've always sucked at it.
They got in early, and therefore didn't have enough competition for BASIC implementations, but Borland kicked a lot of ass, technically speaking, and dominated at least Pascal and C for a while. And then there was Watcom, and many other C compilers better than Microsoft's. Microsoft had to leverage their Windows dominance to get people to use their compilers again.
In 1982, Microsoft was profiting on providing software for an open hardware platfrom, once that got saturated they got complacent and greedy. Somewhere around MS-DOS 5.0, IMO. (4.x sucked horribly, just like everything before 3.0, but everything after 5.0 was a minor upgrade for too much money, which is all MS does with their OSes anymore, these days, too.)
If it weren't for IBM, no one would have *bought* the PC. In retrospect, it really sucked. My Commodore 64 had far superior graphics and sound, it took the PC years to catch up. (until they had EGA and soundcards, when it was debatably about equal) And by then, the Amiga was better, too. But somehow we ended up in this current state of affairs, because MS can market and bully better than IBM could, and that apparently makes some people's decisions for them.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
If this is a sign of the "evolution" of the web, then mommy I'm scared, take me back to my nice cozy porn sites and away from people like this.
:)
However, that was pretty funny.
Just remember folks, natural selection. The Shakers died, not because they were bad people, but because they didn't want to have sex. Ergo, no next generation of Shakers. The same would happen with this, guy if he's serious. But I hope he isn't, because I don't think I could handle that many anonymous cowards.
Natural selection on the web would mean, I suppose, getting your page viewed and keeping it online. The goal here would be to be popular, and there are many strategies for that, my favorite is making a *useful* page...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I'd rather have Sun attempt to tell me why, thanks, but don't tell me you can't find a good Java VM. There are tons of those little suckers! It would be nice if Sun really did open the source to something (especially Java) to show support for open source and more importantly open standards. But they want to control the standards, and I think that will be their downfall. Heck, we can't even handle standards for a simple, fake markup language like HTML.
:)
Perl and Python can be ported by independent parties that show the interest to do so, instead of depending on one central company. But at least the spec for Java is open...
I agree, I tend to use C and shell script myself, and it's pretty handy. I don't really like python or tcl, and perl syntactically annoys the piss out of me, but eventually I'll either find or come up with a fast scripting language that I like, or just stick to C.
I admit that object hierarchies have to be very carefully designed. I think objects are C++ and Java's way of letting you shoot yourself in the foot, when C only had pointers for that. However, this doesn't mean that pointers and objects aren't useful. Rather, the programmer must be more careful in the "design" phase. Which doesn't happen often, if we can help it.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I completely agree with you, since I wrote in Turbo Pascal 7, which supports classes and whatnot, for way too long. (and there's definitely some Ada resemblance there)
:)
However, hype never stopped Microsoft from selling a product before. To the contrary, they seem to thrive on it. Hence, why not sell people what they think they want, instead of spending time and effort to make them think they want something else?
Judging by their past history, I would much more easily believe that this is due to the rivalry between Microsoft and Sun rather than any integrity on Microsoft's part. But, I'm willing to wait a couple of years, and see if they can prove me wrong.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Explain thyself, Coward.
:)
I don't like Java either, but what do you mean, it isn't portable?
I think its performance bites too, but I'm comparing it to C. Compared to Python, Java looks like a speed freak.
And object-orientation has been the trend in language design, at least officially, for a while. It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it's been really proven yet. I've used it to my advantage before, but it doesn't really do anything that can't be done without an object-oriented language.
Your post made a lot of sense until I read your "preemptive return-volley", so consider just posting the message next time.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Microsoft has always tried to be in the language business, no matter how much they suck at it. So I, for one, don't know what they're doing here. Java is definitely the language of the future. Everyone is trying to use it on the Web and decide what to do with it (they changed the introductory CS classes at my school to use it, just recently, but what do I care, the upper level classes use C because it works :) and I can't believe that Microsoft wouldn't want to profit from that. I doubt they're admitting defeat, so either they have some other arrangement with this company, or they'll be releasing something new, and hopefully better.
:)
:)
The article seems to imply that they're competing by using XML as some kind of glue language, to work with COM and other stuff. But that isn't the same thing at all. Of course, Microsoft is trying to subvert open standards, but this is a separate example, and will not help them with the popularity of Java. I guess I'll have to wait and see what they release...
Of course, in a couple of years, we might not be on the x86 anymore, toto. And if any of these proposed future chips execute Java bytecodes at hardware-lookin' speeds, watch out, Microsoft!
(Insert Beowulf, Transmeta, Java/XML/C-- comment here
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I don't think that Rob or Katz were trying to skew our world view there, my man. I'm willing to bet that the only point Katz was trying to make is that once the millenium is over, the hype surrounding it will be over, and we won't have to suffer through bad millenial/end-of-world movies for a while. I'm not this optimistic, but we'll see. This one happened to use Christianity as a crutch, and apparently Katz didn't find that to be particularly realistic either, so relax.
I'm an Atheist, but I'd love to see more movies like The Prophecy, and I personally find the subject fascinating, much in the way I like Science Fiction or Fantasy. And I find myself agreeing with you on a lot of your points, (I saw a silly "Christian" rag yesterday espousing the "Jesus was fully God and fully man, but worthy of salvation as we are not, but will save us from our sins"... etc., etc., and I find evolution, genetics, dark matter, pokemon and invisible pink elephants much easier to believe in than that) so it's good to see a Christian trying to incorporate reason into theology. (St. Augustine did that too, and he also had some pretty liberal views about the world... I'm actually surprised he made it as a saint, considering.)
The Christian doctrine is more complex than most Christians give it credit for. I'm not convinced as to its internal consistency, and I hope it's not as complex as St. Augustine found it, because then, if I were concerned by it, I would have given up and started a simpler religion... And this has happened many times in Christianity, but I don't know if anyone has gotten it right. (I personally would side with the Unitarian Universalists, but that's not very Christian, except as Christian means Christ-like, respecting people, etc.)
And I think the real problem here is that *Hollywood* is confining their view of Christianity to "Jesus comes in y2k", much like they confine their view of hacking to "this video game controls the security system". And Katz is saying that after y2k, Hollywood won't have an excuse to drag out this tired old plot.
(of course, if they did some research, they could. Even if they continued their base-10, 2000 years obsession, they could observe that the date of Jesus' birth is widely disputed, (of course, this means that 2000 years has come and gone, better pick 2222 years or something, and do another Fifth Element-like movie! Yay!) or count from an event in a different calendar for whatever reason (that would make much more sense).
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I knew apple had gone over to the dark side a long time ago, but this is still ridiculous...
For those of you worried about software bloat, side effects, etc., etc.: shut up! This is only an issue if you can't code well in the first place. As long as you have a simple, well-written, 'credits scrolly' type module, all it does is take up disk space until it is executed. Therefore, no real extra bloat (oh no, it calls a library function...) and no side effects. And geez, if you can't figure out how to compress a *text* file, go to jail, do not download mini-lzo, do not write a credits scrolly...
If Jobs had told Woz this back in the day, do you think there would even *be* an Apple? Of course, Hertzfeld had to fight to get the frickin' puzzle game in, so what do we expect...
(incidentally, the article I linked to has a *real* list of hacking feats. I'm gonna have to save that page...)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Run it under Wine. Last I checked, I could get IE 3.0 for Win 3.1 to run under Wine. I can't get IE 4.0 or 5.0 to install with the stupid network installer, so I don't know if Wine will run the current crop of Internet Explorer versions, but it'd be fun to try.
:)
And heck, if it doesn't work, and you want it that badly, post to the newsgroup, or try to fix it yourself...
I guarantee you, if MS ported IE with Wine, it'd run better on Linux than it does on Solaris or HP/UX, easily. And it'd probably have some advantages over the Windows version. (stability--if IE crashes, it doesn't bring down Linux
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
FreeBSD would be the choice for x86-only, no heavy security, getting started.
:)
Or at least, that's what they tell me. I'd have to free up some space on my 8GB of Linux and stuff to check it out... Maybe when I get my next computer.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
BSD and Solaris are both offshoots of the original (v7?) Unix source, one side developed by Berkeley, the other side by AT&T, with a lot of cross-pollination. Linux was independently developed to be compatible, without the original source.
Read about the history of unix by one of the original dudes... (dmr).
FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD should have no proprietary source left, they've been cleaned up so they could open the source. OpenBSD is a latecomer, basically a distribution/offshoot (of NetBSD?) designed for security, both by hopefully fixing security problems before they are exploited in the code and having a secure default configuration.
I've messed more with SunOS, Solaris, and Linux than I have with any of the *BSD's, tho...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
What else is new?
:) They should expect it more, in an indirect democracy, that occasionally they should have more referendums or polls about the issues that matter, and less silly news media coverage about Pokemon or Monica or whatever this week's dead, beaten horse is in the media...
Let violence == flaming,
WTO == generic_news_item,
protesters == posters,
and we're just talking about slashdot!
However, you won't get that free TV set from posting on slashdot, and you're probably pretty safe from the pepper spray too.
Let's hear it for Anarchy. I've seen more of it on slashdot lately, that's what happens when any system fails to meet the needs of the people. (Windows?
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
What do you find surprising? I found this story on slashdot, followed some links posted in the comments, and I'm reading it (the book, not the article) now, after everybody's commented on it.
That, long with some of the original papers on Unix, that is... Some of these examples are hilarious, since DOS and Windows both do things the wrong way, when compared to the Unix way.
(instead of real pipes, DOS uses temporary files, while Windows builds useless functionality into every program...)
At least some people took this message to heart, if not Bill G...
"But on the whole you will find that the authors of UNIX, Ken Thompson
and Dennis Ritchie, have created a program of great strength,
integrity and effectiveness, which you should admire and seek to
emulate."
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I've been waiting for an actual "slashdot" story for a while now.
1) Moderation has gone to hell. Be careful who you give it to, guys. I don't think anyone knows the moderation guidelines now. Short, short version: the first post probably isn't redundant, but it might be a troll, flamebait, offtopic, or massively overrated. And don't moderate anything as overrated if you have a better reason. If you just don't like it, try posting a *reply*. Still waiting for metamoderation to fix this one...
2) Quality of articles on slashdot has gone to hell. Get rid of those losers except Rob and maybe Hemos. Either moderate the stories, let someone screen them before they get posted, or moderate/edit the potential stories, or something.
3) What's with the messed up colors on some of the comments pages? I don't want some ugly green, or some red. I don't want a page to look *any* different than it always has unless I have an option to customize it. Where's the "make the comment page stay standard slashdot green, dammit!" button?
Slashdot used to be a cozy little website. Yes, now it's a lot more popular. Now we have guest authors who can write long, rambling articles, and new posters who can get cool, sensationalistic headlines, and a comments section that needs to go back to segfault. It's always been "News for Nerds". Now we need to work on that "Stuff that matters" some more.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Well, it looks like we have a use for that neural interface technology that the doctor doesn't want us to have.
Being able to move a phantom finger over a phantom keyboard sounds pretty useful here, I wonder if you could do better. I know I have some neurons that are wired to touch-type, could we learn how to do the same sort of thing, without the fingers, and stuff? I'd be pretty happy if I could use my brain as a fast keyboard.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
mmm, now we can have naked women on those E themes instead of just scantily clad ones, and include it in the distribution! What a great idea. Also include the man pages for sex and beer, make the offensive fortunes the default, and don't include the English HOWTOs with the distribution, for even more profanity!
But we'll have a lot of catching up to do with Microsoft, must remember to hose the MBR and only install the OS to the first drive, for maximum user friendliness, just like Windows. Oh, and move the graphics, web server, and kitchen sink api into the kernel for speed... yeah, that's it, speed... And get rid of those messy development versions, they only slow us down. And close the source, no one really looks at that stuff, so we can charge more for the product. You only want *professionals* using this stuff. And we'll need full DOS compatibility, maybe as a default text-mode user interface, so people will only use the GUI...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
That looks pretty neat, but... I don't see how a 4.3GB HD is supposed to hold 100 CD's worth of music, unless you rely on the CD's being rather not full... It seems like they're off by 2GB or so.
The FM transmitter sounded like a really cool idea, tho.
Okay, so it's a low-powered Linux box, I couldn't find a price, and their ordering page and screenshots were all very dead.
Why not just make a little add-on kit, or a distribution, to turn people's old Linux boxes into dedicated mp3 servers? I've got an old P133 I could use, when I get a new computer I could put my old (newer) HD in there, and serve some mp3's...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Wasn't there a Mac version before, back in 5.0, when Stardivision was doing it? And is Sun still working on the Java client version?
They shouldn't have to do too much work to port that thing, just clean up whatever they did from 5.0 to 5.1...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
This is just plain silly. I was hoping for a fun, simple test like The Geek Test, but no, it was a Katz article. :)
;)
I'm so glad I'm out of public school. Now I can hear about this stuff, but at least I don't have to do it again. Of course I was a nerd, dude, we're all on slashdot...
However, I don't know about some of this stuff: I'm pretty outgoing, at least within my "band of outcasts", never really ran into drugs and don't do any of the illegal ones personally, and if I got bullied it was for being smart or ignoring stupid people (I was usually reading...).
So how are we dangerous, again? That's the implication Katz wants us to see, and I think some schools or "educators" might be dumb enough to think that, but why would the FBI think that? They're a bunch of dangerous nerds too, and they should know that you can't prepare for terrorism, and you generally can't identify terrorists beforehand... They're just disgruntled people, and you don't have to be a nerd to get like that: you could be a (non-nerdy) postal worker, say...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
*sigh* That's right, I agree with you. And maybe if you read the rest of my post, you could tell me if *that* constitutes "posting a modified copy".
In any case, if you have a license that forbids making copies, wouldn't even "your browser making a copy" be illegal?
Just think about it for a while, my man...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
That's pretty funny. Silly politician attacks obvious parody site and ends up looking stupid. We need more of this. Everybody don't vote, and maybe we'll have anarchy, just like the web.
My take on the 'copyrighted images on the web' -- good luck. Once you put an image on the web, *everyone* has to make a copy of it just to *see* it. So what are you saying, no copying? Sounds impossible to me, you'd have to have a special license or something for your images. And if I had my browser view the same image, from the same site, on a different page, is that okay? What if I change the HEIGHT and WIDTH tags? Did I change the image? Or is someone else responsible, if they look at my page? This may sound stupid, but there are a lot of issues here that need to be worked out.
So when is slashdot gonna get rid of that nasty off-green color? The next time we get an article about slashdot, I'm posting about that, a lot...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.