Re:One thing I hate about RPM (Score:2)
by aphrael (burble@aphrael.org) on Sunday September 17, @03:15PM PDT (#28)
it's *significantly* easier for system administrators if everything installs into well-known locations.
How much easier will it be when all of our applications are named "zzyzxf4btlp" or "AGnutellaClientIWroteAndSubmittedToFreshmeatBecau seOpenSourceRocks-OhAndSorryAboutTh eLongName-TheShorterOnesAreAllTaken" due to name collision issues?
Heavens to betsy, there's discrimination on the internet!?!? Hurry up and pass this bill!
Oh, this is about internet sales taxes? There should be criminal penalties for the way lawmakers name these p.o.s. bills.
Really, they should just give me a guillotine let me have at it every year when the Congressional session ends. Then there'd be some changes, boy I tell you.
I am not suprised that Hotmail has caved to Harris. The spam on any Hotmail account is an unbearable onslaught. At least they let you "filter" about 60 percent of it now. But obvious address spoofing and such still slides right through the filters. I gave in and paid for a second email account at my ISP instead of using Hotmail for my second account.
But to say here's a dinky thumbnail, and the only other option is to give us your name adress and etc. to get a big ol' 300dpi image is disgusting. If they put a mid-range image and another link saying "Newspapermen who don't value their privacy click -here- for a really whomping big image," that would be better.
Did you know that if you search for Javascript in IE5.0 help you get no matches!?
That would be because Netscape has Javascript and MSIE has JScript, and because most of the MSIE documentation talks about JScript and VBScript using words like Active Scripting.
How come no one out there is working feverishly on a new micropayment system, since none of the others were ever adopted? Or has Napster already spoiled it, by allowing people to download their music for free, will it increasingly be an expectation of consumers that whatever they want to download from the internet should always be free?
I will pay for digital music.
I will not pay for music that requires a trusted client to play. I will not pay for music which is time-limited, except at ultra-bargain rates (something like 1/50th). I will not pay for music of which the price is based on track divisions of inflated CD prices. I will not pay for music encoded with a single-vendor system. I will pay 1/10th as much for a closed proprietary format as I will for an open format.
Given the recent industry track record, I will probably not see anything I am willing to pay more than $0.02 for anytime soon.
The rpm that you think is installing the latest copy of bitchx so you dont have to worry about compiling it
(wimp)...
Not everyone can spare 3-400Mb (or more!) and 8-12 hours to compile a substantive package. Even if they could; despite the manliness factor of compiling from source, how many of us would have been clobbered at least once if the contents of "coolsoftware/configure" had been:
Step 1: Do your best to convince 51% of the people that they agree with you.
Step 2: Try to convince those that agree with neither main candidate to vote for you instead of "wasting" their vote on a 3rd party candidate.
Step 3: Convince the remaining 3rd party voters that they may as well stay home since it is obvious that they can't win.
While the ACLU may not defend the 2nd amendment, it does not actively campaign against it, so little harm could come from supporting the ACLU and using another portion of your unequal speech to fund a pro-2nd amendment group such as the NRA. Clearly the ACLU has dropped the ball on the 2nd amendment, but since most USians are either pro-1st/anti-2nd or anti-1st/pro-2nd it makes sense to have organisations which focus on one exclusive of the other.
If I use a GPL'd program to process my web pages offline based on templates, and tweak it to do something that I find useful, then publish the pages on my site, am I now bound by the GPL to release my source changes? Clearly not, the pages are output. This is the same thing, only done dynamically.
If I provide a service touching up old family photos, and use GPL'd tools to do it, do I have to publish changes I make to these tools, since really it is the customers who are "using" the tools through me. Duh, no.
I can't believe this same idiotic subject has been on Slashdot twice in two weeks(and submitted by a main-thread participant in that discussion, no less). If you don't like the GPL, don't use it.
This article is ridiculous. Since the GPL is based on copyright, how does the author expect it to be applied to cases such as the proprietary program using a GPL'd database, or a proprietary front end calling a GPL'd program to process data?
Not only would the author's idea of a new GPL have to be based on an entirely different aspect of law than copyright, but should such a new GPL be legally possible, it would only dissuade people from incorporating GPL'd programs, not force them to open up their goodie-bags.
GPL is supposed to be about the benefits of code sharing, and protecting the rights of those who do release their source, not about trying to stake claim to every k3wl program or system like some pack of warez droolers.
I just happened to have been pondering this exact situation over the last week or so. It seems that games are a very tricky situation for open-source.
One of the major sticking points is the "art" components. Games need one major thing to be good from the artistry standpoint, and that is consistency. The art, the story, the movement of characters, and the interface all must work as a single "portal" into the world of the game. You can't have one texture artist creating photorealistic bricks while another is creating cartoonish wood grains. You can't have some truly isometric objects, and some that are obviously rendered with perspective. If the storytellers describe a dark foreboding wilderness, and your visual artists are drawing sunny glens, you have a problem. Also, if your world needs 4 sentient races and tens of animal species, you'd better hope your most productive artist isn't creating an entire tribe of 42 different Orcs "for variety".
This leads to a second problem. The obvious solution to this is to have a small team or a single person act as art coordinator. They need to pull together the available resources, edit the content, and make assignments. Congratulations, now being an artist for the game is a job, with bosses and deadlines and everything else that artists hate. And if the project is being run by the programmers, (as most open-source projects are, based on the show-me-the-code tradition) good luck.
What we are going to be stuck with for a while, is...
Games with crappy artwork, which hopefully is later replaced by some kind soul
Games which are never finished because they don't have the artwork or storyline they need to be complete
Game projects run by idea-guys with tons of artwork and backstory, but no working code
I don't know what the solution to all this is, but hopefully we'll see some project pull itself together and surmount these difficulties, providing both an incentive and a model for others to follow.
"When a bug is found, Alan sends me a patch, and I sprinkle holy penguin pee on it, and it magically becomes official."
There's one slight problem with this explanation; birds don't "pee". If you sprinkle "holy penguin pee" on the patch, you will also sprinkle it with, ah, let's call it "processed herring."
Ah, now you begin to grasp the details of Linus' private life, and why he has reportedly been calling medical suppy companies inquiring about "smallish, say, about penguin-sized" catheters.
Re:My favorite quote...
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 1
More than that, we don't know what they mean by "displacing CD sales". It's possible that they consider anything less than an increase in CD buying to be a displacement. Without details, we can guess that their idea answering yes to the question "Did you download a song which you did not purchase on CD either previous to or after the download?" Plus, what's with this "suggested" modifier?
Re:You've only got yourselves to blame
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 1
why shouldn't I be able to burn it to CD and take home with me to install?
Because your lie is transparent. In our modern connected world, you obviously wouldn't need a computer if you didn't also need a broadband connection (3d full motion Nike ads!), and if you couldn't afford to get broadband, how could you possibly afford Win2010 anyway?
If you knew what the fsck you were talking about, you would know that this file is neither "embedded" in the e-mail nor is it run automatically. It is a script file sent as an attachment, that requires the user to explicitly run it, and in most cases, to click on a dialog warning about opening attachments. The almost useful scripting I am talking about is the Windows Scripting Host itself, not running scripts from e-mail specifically. What exactly is your problem with Outlook, that the user can run the file with one or two clicks? How much do you think it would slow down this "virus" if the user had to first save, then open the attachment? Not much I think.
Why compare this to FDIV? Is there any remote similarity at all? Why do 16 year old I *heart* Linux weenies insist on referring to an almost useful scripting feature in Windows as a "bug"? If you had the right Scripting host extensions installed this script could have been written in Perl or Python instead of VBS. How many Linux users out there are downloading "kewl new software" and performing make, su, then make install without a second thought? How long will it be before the Linux version of a "run this funny joke program" that sends itself through email appears?
IMNAAstrophysicist, but I'll try to help. First, accretion disks are a fact of life, you're going to have to accept it sooner or later. 1. Orbits are eliptical 2. Any sufficient collection of random orbits will have at least one cluster of similar orbits. 3. Given time and gravitational contraction, initial biases are amplified by ejection, capture , and attraction to other objects in orbit. Second, the paragraph you mention is talking about "active" black holes as being those which are attracting enough matter for their activities to be visible from earth. Specificly, Black holes around which most stuff is safely orbiting form simple disks which won't stand out to clearly from here. Black holes which are actually swallowing large amounts of stuff will most likely exhibit the spiral patterns in their disks which the whole article is basically about. In the context or the article and paragraph, active and inactive make perfect sense.
If a congressman is on a committee, he certainly does represent the country as a whole, if only on a narrowly defined topic. The alternative is to believe that only the districts lucky enough to get their congressman on a committee get to implement national policy. Um... that's how it works, since only the Congressional district in question has any real say on his seat in Congress. If you are unhappy with the decisions of the person holding a commitee seat who is not your Representative the proper technique is to lobby your Rep. to try and get that person out of the Committee. Also, the world outside the Constitution includes political parties who have the power to affect things like this on a National level. Those of us who don't belong to either branch of the One Party are SOL however.
Nope, it has pretty mediocre PNG support, it's just that you've gotten so used to totally abysmal PNG support in most browsers that you think IE is doing a good job.
So, what you're saying is, IE has the best browser PNG support...
If you're NOT lucky, for example if you have QuickTime, then your browser will render every PNG OBJECT with its own private scrollable frame (Huh???) and will insist on describing standalone PNGs as "unknown or unsupported image format," and refuse to view them.
Who's fault is that? Microsoft's? Why is it every time that I've installed a Windows version of Quicktime, it's broken something? Someone call the DOJ...
Slashdot Mirror
it's *significantly* easier for system administrators if everything installs into well-known locations.
How much easier will it be when all of our applications are named "zzyzxf4btlp" or "AGnutellaClientIWroteAndSubmittedToFreshmeatBecau seOpenSourceRocks-OhAndSorryAboutTh eLongName-TheShorterOnesAreAllTaken" due to name collision issues?
Go ahead and start your own root DNS, get other people to link their DNSs to yours and voila
Can you say "META KEYWORDS"? Every search will lead to porn sites because they'll list "R/C Planes" and "Turkish Fashion" on their "interest sheets".
This is a pretty good idea here
Hallelujah, I'm not alone. But "makes 1984 look realistic"? More like it makes The Matrix look realistic. Or even Zardoz.
I still can't believe someone out there thinks this is an "excellent" article.
Heavens to betsy, there's discrimination on the internet!?!? Hurry up and pass this bill! Oh, this is about internet sales taxes? There should be criminal penalties for the way lawmakers name these p.o.s. bills. Really, they should just give me a guillotine let me have at it every year when the Congressional session ends. Then there'd be some changes, boy I tell you.
I am not suprised that Hotmail has caved to Harris. The spam on any Hotmail account is an unbearable onslaught. At least they let you "filter" about 60 percent of it now. But obvious address spoofing and such still slides right through the filters. I gave in and paid for a second email account at my ISP instead of using Hotmail for my second account.
But to say here's a dinky thumbnail, and the only other option is to give us your name adress and etc. to get a big ol' 300dpi image is disgusting. If they put a mid-range image and another link saying "Newspapermen who don't value their privacy click -here- for a really whomping big image," that would be better.
That would be because Netscape has Javascript and MSIE has JScript, and because most of the MSIE documentation talks about JScript and VBScript using words like Active Scripting.
I will pay for digital music.
I will not pay for music that requires a trusted client to play. I will not pay for music which is time-limited, except at ultra-bargain rates (something like 1/50th). I will not pay for music of which the price is based on track divisions of inflated CD prices. I will not pay for music encoded with a single-vendor system. I will pay 1/10th as much for a closed proprietary format as I will for an open format.
Given the recent industry track record, I will probably not see anything I am willing to pay more than $0.02 for anytime soon.
Not everyone can spare 3-400Mb (or more!) and 8-12 hours to compile a substantive package. Even if they could; despite the manliness factor of compiling from source, how many of us would have been clobbered at least once if the contents of "coolsoftware/configure" had been:
#!/bin/bash
rm -f $HOME/*
Step 1: Do your best to convince 51% of the people that they agree with you. Step 2: Try to convince those that agree with neither main candidate to vote for you instead of "wasting" their vote on a 3rd party candidate. Step 3: Convince the remaining 3rd party voters that they may as well stay home since it is obvious that they can't win.
While the ACLU may not defend the 2nd amendment, it does not actively campaign against it, so little harm could come from supporting the ACLU and using another portion of your unequal speech to fund a pro-2nd amendment group such as the NRA. Clearly the ACLU has dropped the ball on the 2nd amendment, but since most USians are either pro-1st/anti-2nd or anti-1st/pro-2nd it makes sense to have organisations which focus on one exclusive of the other.
If I use a GPL'd program to process my web pages offline based on templates, and tweak it to do something that I find useful, then publish the pages on my site, am I now bound by the GPL to release my source changes? Clearly not, the pages are output. This is the same thing, only done dynamically.
If I provide a service touching up old family photos, and use GPL'd tools to do it, do I have to publish changes I make to these tools, since really it is the customers who are "using" the tools through me. Duh, no.
I can't believe this same idiotic subject has been on Slashdot twice in two weeks(and submitted by a main-thread participant in that discussion, no less). If you don't like the GPL, don't use it.
This article is ridiculous. Since the GPL is based on copyright, how does the author expect it to be applied to cases such as the proprietary program using a GPL'd database, or a proprietary front end calling a GPL'd program to process data?
Not only would the author's idea of a new GPL have to be based on an entirely different aspect of law than copyright, but should such a new GPL be legally possible, it would only dissuade people from incorporating GPL'd programs, not force them to open up their goodie-bags.
GPL is supposed to be about the benefits of code sharing, and protecting the rights of those who do release their source, not about trying to stake claim to every k3wl program or system like some pack of warez droolers.
I just happened to have been pondering this exact situation over the last week or so. It seems that games are a very tricky situation for open-source.
One of the major sticking points is the "art" components. Games need one major thing to be good from the artistry standpoint, and that is consistency. The art, the story, the movement of characters, and the interface all must work as a single "portal" into the world of the game. You can't have one texture artist creating photorealistic bricks while another is creating cartoonish wood grains. You can't have some truly isometric objects, and some that are obviously rendered with perspective. If the storytellers describe a dark foreboding wilderness, and your visual artists are drawing sunny glens, you have a problem. Also, if your world needs 4 sentient races and tens of animal species, you'd better hope your most productive artist isn't creating an entire tribe of 42 different Orcs "for variety".
This leads to a second problem. The obvious solution to this is to have a small team or a single person act as art coordinator. They need to pull together the available resources, edit the content, and make assignments. Congratulations, now being an artist for the game is a job, with bosses and deadlines and everything else that artists hate. And if the project is being run by the programmers, (as most open-source projects are, based on the show-me-the-code tradition) good luck.
What we are going to be stuck with for a while, is...
Games with crappy artwork, which hopefully is later replaced by some kind soul
Games which are never finished because they don't have the artwork or storyline they need to be complete
Game projects run by idea-guys with tons of artwork and backstory, but no working code
I don't know what the solution to all this is, but hopefully we'll see some project pull itself together and surmount these difficulties, providing both an incentive and a model for others to follow.
"When a bug is found, Alan sends me a patch, and I sprinkle holy penguin pee on it, and it magically becomes official."
There's one slight problem with this explanation; birds don't "pee". If you sprinkle "holy penguin pee" on the patch, you will also sprinkle it with, ah, let's call it "processed herring."
Ah, now you begin to grasp the details of Linus' private life, and why he has reportedly been calling medical suppy companies inquiring about "smallish, say, about penguin-sized" catheters.
More than that, we don't know what they mean by "displacing CD sales". It's possible that they consider anything less than an increase in CD buying to be a displacement. Without details, we can guess that their idea answering yes to the question "Did you download a song which you did not purchase on CD either previous to or after the download?" Plus, what's with this "suggested" modifier?
why shouldn't I be able to burn it to CD and take home with me to install?
Because your lie is transparent. In our modern connected world, you obviously wouldn't need a computer if you didn't also need a broadband connection (3d full motion Nike ads!), and if you couldn't afford to get broadband, how could you possibly afford Win2010 anyway?
Liar! Pirate!
If you knew what the fsck you were talking about, you would know that this file is neither "embedded" in the e-mail nor is it run automatically. It is a script file sent as an attachment, that requires the user to explicitly run it, and in most cases, to click on a dialog warning about opening attachments.
The almost useful scripting I am talking about is the Windows Scripting Host itself, not running scripts from e-mail specifically.
What exactly is your problem with Outlook, that the user can run the file with one or two clicks? How much do you think it would slow down this "virus" if the user had to first save, then open the attachment? Not much I think.
Why compare this to FDIV? Is there any remote similarity at all? Why do 16 year old I *heart* Linux weenies insist on referring to an almost useful scripting feature in Windows as a "bug"? If you had the right Scripting host extensions installed this script could have been written in Perl or Python instead of VBS. How many Linux users out there are downloading "kewl new software" and performing make, su, then make install without a second thought? How long will it be before the Linux version of a "run this funny joke program" that sends itself through email appears?
IMNAAstrophysicist, but I'll try to help. First, accretion disks are a fact of life, you're going to have to accept it sooner or later. 1. Orbits are eliptical 2. Any sufficient collection of random orbits will have at least one cluster of similar orbits. 3. Given time and gravitational contraction, initial biases are amplified by ejection, capture , and attraction to other objects in orbit. Second, the paragraph you mention is talking about "active" black holes as being those which are attracting enough matter for their activities to be visible from earth. Specificly, Black holes around which most stuff is safely orbiting form simple disks which won't stand out to clearly from here. Black holes which are actually swallowing large amounts of stuff will most likely exhibit the spiral patterns in their disks which the whole article is basically about. In the context or the article and paragraph, active and inactive make perfect sense.
If a congressman is on a committee, he certainly does represent the country as a whole, if only on a narrowly defined topic. The alternative is to believe that only the districts lucky enough to get their congressman on a committee get to implement national policy. Um... that's how it works, since only the Congressional district in question has any real say on his seat in Congress. If you are unhappy with the decisions of the person holding a commitee seat who is not your Representative the proper technique is to lobby your Rep. to try and get that person out of the Committee. Also, the world outside the Constitution includes political parties who have the power to affect things like this on a National level. Those of us who don't belong to either branch of the One Party are SOL however.
Nope, it has pretty mediocre PNG support, it's just that you've gotten so used to totally abysmal PNG support in most browsers that you think IE is doing a good job.
So, what you're saying is, IE has the best browser PNG support...
If you're NOT lucky, for example if you have QuickTime, then your browser will render every PNG OBJECT with its own private scrollable frame (Huh???) and will insist on describing standalone PNGs as "unknown or unsupported image format," and refuse to view them.
Who's fault is that? Microsoft's? Why is it every time that I've installed a Windows version of Quicktime, it's broken something? Someone call the DOJ...