America (and other countries) almost need a revolution.
Almost, you say? With all this ridiculous patent crap, intellectual property, citizens suing each other or big corps for the slightest mistake, or trying to forsake all the responsibility for bad things that happen to them (McDonalds suers? Tobbaco Co. suers?) At least people still have freedom of speech, but how long will that last? How long till they sue you because some dipshit patented the metaphor you are using, or your accent (patent number 131313: Method for expressing irony using certain combinations of words), or some other such irrelevant thing? Damnit, they are patenting clicks these days! When will the people rebel? When it is too friggin late?
I didn't see the other entries, but I like beastie, Christian fundamentalists notwhitstanding. FreeBSD won't be the same without the handsome little daemon.
Roger that. If there is no need to write native games for Linux, then why bother? The performance penalty will be high, Linux gaming will be slow and painful, and people will say: "Look at that Linux thingie, it's slow, it's incompatable [sic], it's hard to use...". Should more software houses follow iD Software's example, using open standards (OpenGL anyone?), portability would be dead easy, code would be better written, Linux gamers would have more options, and these soft houses would have faithful customers (I wouldn't have bought Doom 3 if it didn't run on Linux, and it runs smooth; now I know that iD respects its Linux customers, and I buy anything Linux they make)
Don't be fooled; the software patent folly, the monopoly of huge corporations is also present here, perhaps not as big as in the U.S. or Europe, but it's growing. In our case, the situation is a little worse: the monopoly holder is foreign! If the operating system in almost all computers in American homes was from some Brazilian monopoly, I bet you would think something is very wrong. But here, in Brazil, we live by copying others, adopting foreign technologies, and never developing our own. We don't even play catch-up, for two reasons primarily: first, Brazil is a poor country and public money is very badly managed; research and development are secondary goals to making rich people, politicians, richer. Second, so-called first world is so ahead in technology that not a few think that pursuing our own self-sufficience in tech (not only IT, but science in general) is futile. Of course, there are a few and honourable exceptions (Cesar Lattes is a very well known physicist), but in general this is how we fare.
And on a related note, what accounts for the $1billion damages?
I've just read Bruce Sterling's "Hacker Crackdown", in which there is a similar claim by a large corporation (AT&T) of a document being worth almost $80k, while a very similar document was sold for 13 bucks by the same company to anyone who asked for it.
The interesting part was how they arrived to the 80k figure for a 12 page doc. In it they computed, among other things, two weeks of a typist and an observer...
I agree with you in that binary formats can be faster, and I don't love XML-as-storage-format too much, but the case in point is *microsoft's* binary formats, which are little more than straight memory dumps, and UNDOCUMENTED, and SLOW.
A well-designed binary format makes much more sense than XML, in this I concur with you, but XML is better than current microsoft's doc formats in that it would be easier to figure out the inner workings of the format, and making struggle for compatibility a much less gory task.
My own ancestors are Spaniards, Portuguese, Italian, African, and South American indians. Many of them suffered the wrongs of Inquisition, of slavery, of censorship, political murdery, torture (even well into XX century) in many places around the world, and many of them fought for their freedoms. You know, not all who fight for freedom are americans.
That's precisely the point, slashdotters seem to be more interested in the "he was fired/he was resigned" question than the crucial point of FREEDOM OF SPEECH, which so many of our ancestors fought, suffered, and died for, being shamelessly raped.
I find it really sad in this day and age, and in a supposedly civilized country as Spain, that freedom of speech is so mistreated.
It wouldn't surprise me if this happened in the United States, where RIAA, MPAA, and $GENERIC_MEGACORP actually rule, but in a modern first-world country in Europe?
We need, along the lines of "X considered harmful", a paper entitled "Automatic transmission considered harmful"; I drive an old VW Gol (in Brazil; in Mexico it's known as Pointer, and in US and Canada it's SW version was known as Fox in the mid-80s), with no electronics whatsoever (only, perhaps, on the radio, and I'm not too sure about that either). It means I cannot tell to the cops that my car, for some reason, had its throttle wide open on its own, or I couldn't stop because the auto transmission wouldn't let me, or the brakes ceased worked because the engine died, or the car had some software bug that locked me out. Electronics is not always Good, and in something as dangerous as a car, the complexities it leads to, and consequently the potential problems that arise from those complexities, I find them to be Evil. I won't trust any computer to outsmart me when I'm driving around at 160 Km/h; they are faster than me, for sure, and can react faster, but I am the more intelligent, and can weigh and evaluate the risks better than any chunk of silicon. Carbon still wins on this one.
Slashdot Mirror
(cachaça is pronouced "ca-*sha*-sa", with the stress on the middle sillable... oh, my, I'll repent this)
Tobbaco Co. suers?
Tobacco. Heil dictionary!
Sorry guys, too many cachaças tonight (you should try cachaça, the best alcoholic drink eva.)
And be careful, for having said this, I'm a terrorist. Don't touch me with a ten feet pole.
America (and other countries) almost need a revolution.
Almost, you say? With all this ridiculous patent crap, intellectual property, citizens suing each other or big corps for the slightest mistake, or trying to forsake all the responsibility for bad things that happen to them (McDonalds suers? Tobbaco Co. suers?) At least people still have freedom of speech, but how long will that last? How long till they sue you because some dipshit patented the metaphor you are using, or your accent (patent number 131313: Method for expressing irony using certain combinations of words), or some other such irrelevant thing? Damnit, they are patenting clicks these days! When will the people rebel? When it is too friggin late?
I didn't see the other entries, but I like beastie, Christian fundamentalists notwhitstanding. FreeBSD won't be the same without the handsome little daemon.
Roger that. If there is no need to write native games for Linux, then why bother? The performance penalty will be high, Linux gaming will be slow and painful, and people will say: "Look at that Linux thingie, it's slow, it's incompatable [sic], it's hard to use...". Should more software houses follow iD Software's example, using open standards (OpenGL anyone?), portability would be dead easy, code would be better written, Linux gamers would have more options, and these soft houses would have faithful customers (I wouldn't have bought Doom 3 if it didn't run on Linux, and it runs smooth; now I know that iD respects its Linux customers, and I buy anything Linux they make)
Don't be fooled; the software patent folly, the monopoly of huge corporations is also present here, perhaps not as big as in the U.S. or Europe, but it's growing. In our case, the situation is a little worse: the monopoly holder is foreign! If the operating system in almost all computers in American homes was from some Brazilian monopoly, I bet you would think something is very wrong. But here, in Brazil, we live by copying others, adopting foreign technologies, and never developing our own. We don't even play catch-up, for two reasons primarily: first, Brazil is a poor country and public money is very badly managed; research and development are secondary goals to making rich people, politicians, richer. Second, so-called first world is so ahead in technology that not a few think that pursuing our own self-sufficience in tech (not only IT, but science in general) is futile. Of course, there are a few and honourable exceptions (Cesar Lattes is a very well known physicist), but in general this is how we fare.
And on a related note, what accounts for the $1billion damages?
I've just read Bruce Sterling's "Hacker Crackdown", in which there is a similar claim by a large corporation (AT&T) of a document being worth almost $80k, while a very similar document was sold for 13 bucks by the same company to anyone who asked for it.
The interesting part was how they arrived to the 80k figure for a 12 page doc. In it they computed, among other things, two weeks of a typist and an observer...
I agree with you in that binary formats can be faster, and I don't love XML-as-storage-format too much, but the case in point is *microsoft's* binary formats, which are little more than straight memory dumps, and UNDOCUMENTED, and SLOW.
A well-designed binary format makes much more sense than XML, in this I concur with you, but XML is better than current microsoft's doc formats in that it would be easier to figure out the inner workings of the format, and making struggle for compatibility a much less gory task.
You fucking troll, since when microsoft's binary document formats are documented, or fast?
Try this, you alienated greedy little capitalist!
:) )
(oh, to the mods:
The Intel chips are cheaper
It's been a long time since I've last seen such a statement regarding x86 hardware...
In French, that is "Vive la revolution".
Spanish yields "Viva la revolución".
Portuguese, "Viva a revolução"
No shit! More insight than funny IMO.
Bah, in my days we played rogue and that was it. These games are called roguelike for a reason.
Somehow I cannot take Half-Life 2 out of my head. The US are heading to that direction.
As of 4/26/05 I enter the world of a non-smoker. Wish me luck and a lot of support.
Good luck, and I hope you are still a non-smoker.
Ah, the good days of Carmageddon...
My own ancestors are Spaniards, Portuguese, Italian, African, and South American indians. Many of them suffered the wrongs of Inquisition, of slavery, of censorship, political murdery, torture (even well into XX century) in many places around the world, and many of them fought for their freedoms. You know, not all who fight for freedom are americans.
BTW, I'm Brazilian.
That's precisely the point, slashdotters seem to be more interested in the "he was fired/he was resigned" question than the crucial point of FREEDOM OF SPEECH, which so many of our ancestors fought, suffered, and died for, being shamelessly raped.
I find it really sad in this day and age, and in a supposedly civilized country as Spain, that freedom of speech is so mistreated.
It wouldn't surprise me if this happened in the United States, where RIAA, MPAA, and $GENERIC_MEGACORP actually rule, but in a modern first-world country in Europe?
My name is Legion, for we are many.
Get a manual Porsche if you like driving, and want to be sure that you will get to B.
We need, along the lines of "X considered harmful", a paper entitled "Automatic transmission considered harmful"; I drive an old VW Gol (in Brazil; in Mexico it's known as Pointer, and in US and Canada it's SW version was known as Fox in the mid-80s), with no electronics whatsoever (only, perhaps, on the radio, and I'm not too sure about that either). It means I cannot tell to the cops that my car, for some reason, had its throttle wide open on its own, or I couldn't stop because the auto transmission wouldn't let me, or the brakes ceased worked because the engine died, or the car had some software bug that locked me out. Electronics is not always Good, and in something as dangerous as a car, the complexities it leads to, and consequently the potential problems that arise from those complexities, I find them to be Evil. I won't trust any computer to outsmart me when I'm driving around at 160 Km/h; they are faster than me, for sure, and can react faster, but I am the more intelligent, and can weigh and evaluate the risks better than any chunk of silicon. Carbon still wins on this one.
Four! I'm in the club, too!