I think the point was that they could install 50 StarOffice copies without asking for donations and get up and running straight away; but OTOH they would consider MSO tried and tested and want to go with what they know.
I would join you in that. Here in Sheffield, UK, our Church met together to pray tonight. Truly the World is watching and there really is no other response than to turn to God.
Re:Functional != unprotected
on
Duct Tape
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· Score: 1
What about pseudocode? That wouldn't compile or perform any useful task under any circumstances. It's primary purpose is that of communication - to communicate the operation of a program from one human being to another. Would that constitute as 'speech' for first ammendment protection? Has anyone written down DeCSS in a pseudocode?
Well, my guess is that the joke didn't really work when all the books had similar covers etc.
When it was four-parts they published a set over here (UK) that had four pictures (a fish, a towel, a spaceship and a picture of DA) with a quarter of each picture on each cover, so that you could put the books together on the table and depending on which corners you put in the middle you'd get a better picture (did I describe that right?)
I don't know where else that set was published, but I don't recall it having the cover tags - but perhaps my memory fails me:-)
I suspect that it's a little optimistic to expect people to fess up just by being asked..
I was basing this on cheating I've seen going on, where people were cheating out of laziness and opportunism rather than a desire to blag their way through a degree. Often people borrow papers from friends, and when faced with a charge of cheating they're hit with A. possibly getting a friend thrown off the course if they get the blame or B. getting them selves thrown off. If said person is then given the option of owning up in exchange for repeating the year rather than simply being expelled (the usual case in my university for known plagarisers) then I reckon they would take it.
I don't know how big a deal it is. If it goes on too much then it will definitely lower the quality of graduates, and damage the reputation of the institution when these people finally arrive for day 1 of their new job and don't have a clue. I have to say though that in this example the course sounded like a classic 'no brainer' module which everyone takes because they don't want to do anything serious - so they're bound to cheat if they can.
You're right, but I reckon that most of that has been done. I'm sitting here with a Windows box and a Debian box in front of me, similar spec, running through my monitor with Dsub/BNC switching. Every time I use my Linux box (I use Gnome+Enlightenment) I wish that I could ditch Windows for good. There are really only two things keeping me using Windows as my Primary desktop:
Microsoft Outlook: I need to sync calendars with colleagues, Outlook is the only sane way of doing this without it being a total cludge. If someone made KPim or GnoPim or whatever that could talk to Exchange Server then I could ditch Outlook
Macromedia development tools: I need Dreamweaver and Flash! I'm sorry, but no matter what anyone says, there is no equivalent for Linux, no really good WYSIWYG html editor with roundtripping and all the features of DW, nothing that can make.swf movies half as good as flash.
OK, I would like Photoshop too, but I'm sure I could learn Gimp. I reckon KWord gives MS Word a good run for its money, and if OpenOffice (aka. Star Office 6) gets rid of that stupid, stupid desktop-within-an-application thing and lets me run the apps individually (why should I load the whole stupid suite to edit a text document??????) then there's no contest. So.... let's bug Macromedia everybody. I would love to design pages on the same platform that I'm going to serve them on. (And I would love it if a browser crashing didn't take out the whole 'desktop'...)
Arthur is descended from the Golgofrinchams, not from the original caveman inhabitants of Earth (who were the ones actually determining the Question), so he doesn't have the correct Question. The Earth program was irrevocably screwed up when the Golg. colonized Earth, more or less wiping out the cavemen.
It's actually implied in the books that it didn't matter that the Golgofrinchans replaced the `cavemen', because Arthur still tries to find the answer by randomly pulling letters out of a makeshift scrabble set. It could be argued that the introduction of the GFs was simple part of the program - part of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. In fact, later books suggest that Arthur Dent was one of the key people in the Universe (borne out by the man who was asked to tell `the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth' under an extremely powerful drug, and eventually [literally] died laughing when he met Arthur).
Arthur's fundamental and circular link to Earth was demonstrated when he found the address of Fenchurch (who he really, really fancied) by finding the location of his cave on prehistoric earth using a Macintosh with some sort of astronomy program and guessing which stars he thought he could see from the cave.... of course the location turned out to be Fenchurch's house in London. (She was the girl who, in the first chapter of the first book had a really good idea that didn't involve anyone getting nailed to a tree).
I think I might read all the [five-part] trilogy again soon. Did anyone notice that on the first releases of the books, the fourth book was tagged `the fourth book in the inaccurately named "Hitchhikers' Trilogy"' and the fifth `the fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named "Hitchhikers' Trilogy"' ?
The main problem is that OEMs are forced to include the OS in the form the Microsoft insists upon. I'm sure lots of up-and-coming clone makers who are building iMac look-alikes would love to have Mozilla 1.0 (when it comes) instread of IE6 just because it's going to look way cooler, and have WinAMP instead of Media Player etc. etc. The real bummer is that Windows has to be shipped as Microsoft says - with IE intact etc. etc. Tough for OEMs if they would rather support other apps.
I guess you can choose to customise the OS if you want to e.g. make an Inernet Appliance but then you're talking $$$; you can't simply make a nice install image with all the 'alternative' apps and then use Norton Ghost etc. to install it on machines....
This article seems to make a lot of points where the justifcations given don't match up to the points made on close examination.
For that purpose, the Foundation will devise an open-source Linux distribution with an integral, not a ported, MD database engine...That integral database engine and OS "mix" is designed to run only on PowerPC-based hardware.
Why? The article starts by talking about the "concern... of letting one company, Intel, supply all the processors and thus control the IT industry" and then goes on to suggest that it's a good thing that this guy's latest and greatest product will only run on PPC. The whole thing reads like a long justification for a personal obsession with PPC, and contains all sorts of inaccuracies to make the point.
In spite of... [losing the 8086 chip war] Motorola has managed to remain an important force in computer processors, mainly because of the PowerPC."
Rubbish! Motorola remained a force in the microcomputer market by developing initially the 6502 which competed with Zilog's Z80 processors in the home computer boom of the early 80s, and then releasing the 68000 series which were used in the Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST etc.
Most Linux fans are not old enough to remember that Intel did not always dominate the PC processor market
OK, maybe I'm being picky now, but I thought most Linux fans grew up on Apple ][s, ZX Spectrums, Ataris, Amigas etc. etc. none of which had any kind of Intel chip in them (well, maybe some SSI chips....).
Red Flag Linux has given China its independence from "Win", and the LinuxPC is capable of delivering China out of the "Tel" clutches
But "AMD" and "Cyrix" could do a very good job of getting China out of the "Tel" clutches too! I don't see why selling them overpriced PPC boxes is going to benefit them. Nope, sorry, you'll have to try harder to convince me that a wholehearted Linux Community 'Push' behind a PPC-based Linux platform is a good idea. Personally, the only way I can see PPC-based Linux boxen becoming common is if a really decent rack-mounted server were produced that consumed less power and had better performance than an Intel equivalent (we already know that Althlons run to hot...) I could go on, but there seems to be a marketing-style totally loaded statement in every paragraph (reminds me of a recent Microsoft press release..) and I can't be bothered to quote them all... I think that was more than $0.10...
In the case of this incident, the article implies that some or most of the papers were copied from the year before, in which case you just look at the dates. There are also other ways of demonstrating who did the work - compare it to other papers by style etc., ask all the potential authors to justify an unclear point and see who does a job most consistent with the original, or simply to ask people to own up - under pressure I think many would, especially if they've copied from a friend. I'm sure there are serious cheaters, but I reckon about 80% are opportunists who would own up especially if given a chance to retake the year rather than being thrown out.
Slightly OT, but while we're [sort of] on the topic, there is a Textmode Quake package available which provides an interesting idea for user interfaces. I wonder whether this could be combined with the Doom Sysadmin Tool for a text->GUI->text->severe eyestrain session.
The word COMPUTER means a human who's job it is to compute. That's why all the old computer names end in -AC (e.g. ENIAC, EDVAC) - it means "Automatic Computer" as apposed to a manual computer, a human being. Only recently (~30 years) has the "automatic" part been taken for granted.
What Linux needs is something that it does BETTER than Windows - Something that the average user wants to do, but can't under windows.
What it does do better is operate securely in a networked environment. This is ideal for schools - you have a standard set of software - web browser, word processor, spreadsheet and maybe something like Logo or Basic to teach a bit of programming and that's it. The most important thing is NO downtime.
I run a system for a church and I'm getting sick of the unmanageability of Windows 98/Office 2000. If it wasn't for the fact that I've seen nothing OSS to beat Exchange Server/Outlook 2000 I would be pushing to move to Linux on every desktop because it's not that hard to retrain people (and most people make fairly poor use of their current software anyway!)
But you're comparing doing something on Linux with something you _cannot do_ under Windows. With windows you're stuck with the default GUI (unless you play with LiteStep but I tried it and it sucks). Under Windows if you want a new GUI you have to reinstall/upgrade the ENTIRE OS. (And this very rarely works first time - usually I've ended up reformatting the hard drive). Sure - installing something like KDE2 is difficult, but there's nothing comparable under Windows.
I was trying to make the point that you get loads more out of the box with most linux distros than with NT/2k. If you try to bring a 2k box up to the kind of functionality you get out-of-the-box with, say, Mandrake, it's a pain in the rear! And makes Linux installers look much more value-for-your time. Also, your graphic and sound cards may have installed right out, but I've found that even with mainstream cards like ATI Xpert98 etc. you need new drivers for 2K if you want stability.
Install half-a-dozen 'service packs', 'hotfixes' etc. etc. and then go and find fixes for all the other packages broken by the fist fixes, update Internet Explorer (because everything from Notepad up to Exchange Server seems to depend on it) blah blah blah.
In reply to this and half a dozen other installation rants:
You need to think about what you're installing
I takes me several days to set up an NT server or workstation. Once you've got the basic OS running, you then need:
Drivers for graphics, sound, network
Install Exchange Server
Install Web Server
Setup DNS, DHCP etc. etc.
Try to lock it down (BIG HOT POTATO)
Install things to make it nice, e.g. intellipoint mouse drivers etc.
Go and download many web pages of documentation
And a similar list for a workstation with Office 2K instead of Exchange and a slew of development tools.
Install Mandrake and it's ALL there from the word go, working and ready. Linuxconf works great to set everything up and even works under X (could do with a more sane interface but it's OK). If Mandrake had apt, it would be absolutely fantastic. And if most Linux installers only installed a base system+fancy desktop it would seem incredibly 'easy' to install, but we've all got used to the idea of a complete workstation/server being installed and set up in the space of an hour.
And the best thing is that I can copy half the contents of/etc and have a similar server up and running in half the time again. Try doing that with NT/2K.
Me too. I'm convinced that your browsing behaviour has a much greater impact than Karma - you know, the whole 'split down the middle' thing where the software chooses people who browse and post often but not obsessively.
I realised a long time ago that Trek basically/is/ a soap opera. I don't think it needs to be anything else - many people love it and enjoy it, including myself. It's not hardcore sci-fi, it's the same plotlines recycled, the same fairly shallow characters and predictable endings. There have been attempts to see more depth of character - in TOS this mainly came over in the films where you saw the senior crew going rock climing and reminiscing (sp!) etc. AND I liked insurrection - I thought it was good fun. My point is that none of these things make it a bad thing - take it as it comes and enjoy it if it's your thing...
Ugggggghhhhh -
HORRIBLE web site. I use IE5.5 (I need Windows for dev work) and it has some sort of Javascript to maximise the window, full screen, no taskbars control buttons etc. - you either have to wait for the site to load or kill the browser. Yuk.
Of course, you have to doubt the sanity of someone who thinks taking a lock of their hair and chanting to it will make them fall in love or whatever...
To my mind, the question is not if but why that might work. But then again, I'm a Christian.
Not sure about the photo, but the site looked totally fake to me - far too little information, fairly poor site design condidering they're a hi-tech company. I also can't believe that this is all economically viable, and if it were then why hasn't it been bought by Motorola or another major mobile phone company...?
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point was that they could install 50 StarOffice copies without asking for donations and get up and running straight away; but OTOH they would consider MSO tried and tested and want to go with what they know.
I would join you in that. Here in Sheffield, UK, our Church met together to pray tonight. Truly the World is watching and there really is no other response than to turn to God.
What about pseudocode? That wouldn't compile or perform any useful task under any circumstances. It's primary purpose is that of communication - to communicate the operation of a program from one human being to another. Would that constitute as 'speech' for first ammendment protection? Has anyone written down DeCSS in a pseudocode?
When it was four-parts they published a set over here (UK) that had four pictures (a fish, a towel, a spaceship and a picture of DA) with a quarter of each picture on each cover, so that you could put the books together on the table and depending on which corners you put in the middle you'd get a better picture (did I describe that right?)
I don't know where else that set was published, but I don't recall it having the cover tags - but perhaps my memory fails me :-)
I was basing this on cheating I've seen going on, where people were cheating out of laziness and opportunism rather than a desire to blag their way through a degree. Often people borrow papers from friends, and when faced with a charge of cheating they're hit with A. possibly getting a friend thrown off the course if they get the blame or B. getting them selves thrown off. If said person is then given the option of owning up in exchange for repeating the year rather than simply being expelled (the usual case in my university for known plagarisers) then I reckon they would take it.
I don't know how big a deal it is. If it goes on too much then it will definitely lower the quality of graduates, and damage the reputation of the institution when these people finally arrive for day 1 of their new job and don't have a clue. I have to say though that in this example the course sounded like a classic 'no brainer' module which everyone takes because they don't want to do anything serious - so they're bound to cheat if they can.
OK, I would like Photoshop too, but I'm sure I could learn Gimp. I reckon KWord gives MS Word a good run for its money, and if OpenOffice (aka. Star Office 6) gets rid of that stupid, stupid desktop-within-an-application thing and lets me run the apps individually (why should I load the whole stupid suite to edit a text document??????) then there's no contest. So.... let's bug Macromedia everybody. I would love to design pages on the same platform that I'm going to serve them on. (And I would love it if a browser crashing didn't take out the whole 'desktop'...)
Well, Mr Sarcastic, later reprints of the book (including the nice boxed sets) didn't have it on them - as far as I know only the originals did.
It's actually implied in the books that it didn't matter that the Golgofrinchans replaced the `cavemen', because Arthur still tries to find the answer by randomly pulling letters out of a makeshift scrabble set. It could be argued that the introduction of the GFs was simple part of the program - part of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. In fact, later books suggest that Arthur Dent was one of the key people in the Universe (borne out by the man who was asked to tell `the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth' under an extremely powerful drug, and eventually [literally] died laughing when he met Arthur).
Arthur's fundamental and circular link to Earth was demonstrated when he found the address of Fenchurch (who he really, really fancied) by finding the location of his cave on prehistoric earth using a Macintosh with some sort of astronomy program and guessing which stars he thought he could see from the cave.... of course the location turned out to be Fenchurch's house in London. (She was the girl who, in the first chapter of the first book had a really good idea that didn't involve anyone getting nailed to a tree).
I think I might read all the [five-part] trilogy again soon. Did anyone notice that on the first releases of the books, the fourth book was tagged `the fourth book in the inaccurately named "Hitchhikers' Trilogy"' and the fifth `the fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named "Hitchhikers' Trilogy"' ?
I guess you can choose to customise the OS if you want to e.g. make an Inernet Appliance but then you're talking $$$; you can't simply make a nice install image with all the 'alternative' apps and then use Norton Ghost etc. to install it on machines....
Why? The article starts by talking about the "concern... of letting one company, Intel, supply all the processors and thus control the IT industry" and then goes on to suggest that it's a good thing that this guy's latest and greatest product will only run on PPC. The whole thing reads like a long justification for a personal obsession with PPC, and contains all sorts of inaccuracies to make the point.
Rubbish! Motorola remained a force in the microcomputer market by developing initially the 6502 which competed with Zilog's Z80 processors in the home computer boom of the early 80s, and then releasing the 68000 series which were used in the Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST etc.
OK, maybe I'm being picky now, but I thought most Linux fans grew up on Apple ][s, ZX Spectrums, Ataris, Amigas etc. etc. none of which had any kind of Intel chip in them (well, maybe some SSI chips....).
But "AMD" and "Cyrix" could do a very good job of getting China out of the "Tel" clutches too! I don't see why selling them overpriced PPC boxes is going to benefit them. Nope, sorry, you'll have to try harder to convince me that a wholehearted Linux Community 'Push' behind a PPC-based Linux platform is a good idea. Personally, the only way I can see PPC-based Linux boxen becoming common is if a really decent rack-mounted server were produced that consumed less power and had better performance than an Intel equivalent (we already know that Althlons run to hot...)
I could go on, but there seems to be a marketing-style totally loaded statement in every paragraph (reminds me of a recent Microsoft press release..) and I can't be bothered to quote them all... I think that was more than $0.10...
In the case of this incident, the article implies that some or most of the papers were copied from the year before, in which case you just look at the dates.
There are also other ways of demonstrating who did the work - compare it to other papers by style etc., ask all the potential authors to justify an unclear point and see who does a job most consistent with the original, or simply to ask people to own up - under pressure I think many would, especially if they've copied from a friend. I'm sure there are serious cheaters, but I reckon about 80% are opportunists who would own up especially if given a chance to retake the year rather than being thrown out.
Slightly OT, but while we're [sort of] on the topic, there is a Textmode Quake package available which provides an interesting idea for user interfaces.
I wonder whether this could be combined with the Doom Sysadmin Tool for a text->GUI->text->severe eyestrain session.
Um, you clearly didn't follow the link, because he did put it back together.
Well, they *don't manage windows*. They provide a desktop environment like taskbar, desktop icons, automounters, control panels etc.
The word COMPUTER means a human who's job it is to compute. That's why all the old computer names end in -AC (e.g. ENIAC, EDVAC) - it means "Automatic Computer" as apposed to a manual computer, a human being. Only recently (~30 years) has the "automatic" part been taken for granted.
I run a system for a church and I'm getting sick of the unmanageability of Windows 98/Office 2000. If it wasn't for the fact that I've seen nothing OSS to beat Exchange Server/Outlook 2000 I would be pushing to move to Linux on every desktop because it's not that hard to retrain people (and most people make fairly poor use of their current software anyway!)
But you're comparing doing something on Linux with something you _cannot do_ under Windows. With windows you're stuck with the default GUI (unless you play with LiteStep but I tried it and it sucks). Under Windows if you want a new GUI you have to reinstall/upgrade the ENTIRE OS. (And this very rarely works first time - usually I've ended up reformatting the hard drive). Sure - installing something like KDE2 is difficult, but there's nothing comparable under Windows.
I was trying to make the point that you get loads more out of the box with most linux distros than with NT/2k. If you try to bring a 2k box up to the kind of functionality you get out-of-the-box with, say, Mandrake, it's a pain in the rear! And makes Linux installers look much more value-for-your time. Also, your graphic and sound cards may have installed right out, but I've found that even with mainstream cards like ATI Xpert98 etc. you need new drivers for 2K if you want stability.
Install half-a-dozen 'service packs', 'hotfixes' etc. etc. and then go and find fixes for all the other packages broken by the fist fixes, update Internet Explorer (because everything from Notepad up to Exchange Server seems to depend on it) blah blah blah.
You need to think about what you're installing
I takes me several days to set up an NT server or workstation. Once you've got the basic OS running, you then need:
And a similar list for a workstation with Office 2K instead of Exchange and a slew of development tools.
Install Mandrake and it's ALL there from the word go, working and ready. Linuxconf works great to set everything up and even works under X (could do with a more sane interface but it's OK). If Mandrake had apt, it would be absolutely fantastic. And if most Linux installers only installed a base system+fancy desktop it would seem incredibly 'easy' to install, but we've all got used to the idea of a complete workstation/server being installed and set up in the space of an hour.
And the best thing is that I can copy half the contents of /etc and have a similar server up and running in half the time again. Try doing that with NT/2K.
Me too. I'm convinced that your browsing behaviour has a much greater impact than Karma - you know, the whole 'split down the middle' thing where the software chooses people who browse and post often but not obsessively.
I realised a long time ago that Trek basically /is/ a soap opera. I don't think it needs to be anything else - many people love it and enjoy it, including myself. It's not hardcore sci-fi, it's the same plotlines recycled, the same fairly shallow characters and predictable endings. There have been attempts to see more depth of character - in TOS this mainly came over in the films where you saw the senior crew going rock climing and reminiscing (sp!) etc. AND I liked insurrection - I thought it was good fun.
My point is that none of these things make it a bad thing - take it as it comes and enjoy it if it's your thing...
Ugggggghhhhh - HORRIBLE web site. I use IE5.5 (I need Windows for dev work) and it has some sort of Javascript to maximise the window, full screen, no taskbars control buttons etc. - you either have to wait for the site to load or kill the browser. Yuk.
To my mind, the question is not if but why that might work. But then again, I'm a Christian.
Not sure about the photo, but the site looked totally fake to me - far too little information, fairly poor site design condidering they're a hi-tech company. I also can't believe that this is all economically viable, and if it were then why hasn't it been bought by Motorola or another major mobile phone company...?