As I see it Corel lost a huge chance when they sold their whole Linux division to work with Microsoft on.NET.
They had a set of great graphics/design tools, a wordprocessor with a decent user base and a decent Linux distribution. With the right management (visionary, willing to further the boundaries) they could have been a great company. But they decided to go conservative, keep selling their boxed products and use a few OEMs, kill their linux development and surrender to the.NET platform.
Long live Corel, I would have wanted to have heard a lot more from them, but they had their shot and panicked.
Yes, sorry, I stand corrected, the code and paper pointed in my previous post is not the "direct" proof-of-concept code, but tools that have been used by them to find the exploits.
Nontheless the link to the lsd-pl.net article contains a lot more info (technical info) than any other source
The problem as I see it is the same as with all the IP laws. A technological problem cannot be solved using legal methods, it must be solved technically.
As with IP laws, spam laws will only encourage spammers to find a new way for sending spam. You need a technical solution (be it closing open relays or refactoring the SMTP protocol -my personal favorite solution-) to solve this problem. You can extrapolate the development of the spam problem with the development of P2P systems. Hundreds of times the *AA have already tried to use the law against P2P sharers, but here we always complain that's not the solution, the solution should be found when they realize they are using a outdated business model that cannot be applied successfully in this information era without screwing your customers.
The same way, we cannot expect to make bigger and better laws to solve a technical problem, no matter what we do, the spammers will keep sending spam. It's a proven business model, and as long as people keep buying from them they will keep spamming us.
We must focus on solving this problem the way it should be done: the same way we have been telling the *AA to solve the piracy problem, adapt to the new era, do not pass patches to the legal system.
Great shot, this was just the question I was going to submit, but since you already posted it, it's already at 5 and I have no mod points anyway here is my vote for this question to be sent.
What I wonder is how long before the government pulls the plug on this one. Considering the practices shown, the government could argue almost anything from the Patriot Act to "information in the hands of terrorists", no matter how idiotic it is, and the big media (ala CNN) will repeat it to death so Joe Moron will believe it and feel comfy when the plug gets pulled.
This project has the potential to show the big players the dangers and possible consequences of the Total Awareness Act (or whatever is named).
Anyways, a great idea nontheless, and here's hopes for it to live long enough to make a difference. Projects like this, the EFF and the few others make you hopeful.
In other news SCO's CEO Duhr'l McBribe said they would sue the CELF members because the chips running Linux "are belong to us". "Some electrons switched states as a result of Linux instructions being executed, and as we stated before, that constitutes derivative work".
In second thought... I claim exclusive ownership in all derivative works of my fecal remainders... Take that you copyright infringement bacteria !!!!!
I don't know about you, but that interview told me a lot more than BG wanted to. In the first answer he seems to get really angered about the claim that "nobody used OS/2" and ends up sumarizing why Microsoft is the best company in town.
Linux is here to stay, and they know it. This is _not_ like the OS/2 days. OS/2 was IBM's, GNU/Linux is a comunity, they can't sweep linux out of the market because most linux users uset it because they won't run anything from Microsoft. I know I do.
Even if RedHat, Mandrake and all commercial distros dissapear and SCO's FUD manages to kill Linux (highly unlikely) the mentality, press coverage and community that has gathered around GNU/Linux will live on in the *BSDs and even in OSX.
All the people and companies spreading FUD and satanizing Linux have, in some way or another, gained a lot from the GNU/Linux movement. SCO has lasted a little longer than it should have because of OpenLinux, OSX and Windows have incorporated software and ideas that were born in the GNU/Linux/*BSD world.
Even if Linux is to dissapear the "damage" is already done... USA Today is interviewing one of the richest and more powerful man on earth and the main topic is Linux.
Some would say that the "world domination" thingie has already started.
And here is the rest.... reading from the beginning it seemed a lot more interesting....
And hey, don't mod me up, I'm already posting this at two...
Page 4 (cont.)
Now if I wanted to spend several hundred dollars, I'd be able to purchase my very own reprint from a specialty bookseller, but that seemed a little severe for the purpose of cracking a message that, for all I knew, contained the publishing equivalent of "Drink more Ovaltine." I looked into borrowing one from a nearby university's rare books collection, but one phone call made it quite clear that no self-respecting librarian was going to let my grubby hands anywhere near a 335 year-old book. Desperate, I scoured the Internet looking for online versions of Real Character. It turned up in bits and pieces, but those were invariably converted into plain text--useless if you want to view the original symbols and even worse if you wanted to decode anything.
And then, like a bolt from the blue, it appeared. One site that seemed to have an eerie fascination with Wilkins offered me everything I could have asked for. Not only was the entire book online, but it was in its original form too, scanned and converted into large GIF files. Displayed within the browser's window, the pages were too small to be legible, but I found that if I downloaded each page individually to my computer (there were more than 600), I could then read the document in its original size.
The Final Push consisted of trying to figure out how Wilkins went about creating this language, requiring a healthy chunk of the book to be actually read. As Mr. Stephenson pointed out, Wilkins was trying to create a universal language, and it was supposedly understandable by anyone as long as you knew how the system worked. He came up with a hierarchal means of classifying words, dividing the English language into roughly forty categories. These categories were then divided into smaller and smaller subsections, until every word would fit somewhere within.
In order to take the message and convert it back into English, I needed something that would give me the roadmap as to which category any particular word belonged. Once I had located this particular chart, I realized this was the key to using his "dictionary," from which I could then look up words. To make things easier, I began with a word I already knew (from the Lord's Prayer), and reverse-engineered it to better understand the system. From there, it became a pretty straightforward process to do the same with the remainder of the words.
Getting the hang of the language's subtleties like verb tense, adverbs, etc., was a bit stickier and required some extra reading, but in the end, every word found on the Baroque Cycle site was capable of being identified and translated. There were some liberties taken with words that didn't exist in 1668, like "fax" or "telephone," but Lisa Gold, the message's creator--and my greatest aggravation--found a clever way to work around these obstacles.
It turns out that the message was really a set of instructions to anyone who could read it, and the first person to do so would receive a reward for their efforts. For all of you who have waited patiently through all this, you'll find the complete translation taken from Wilkins's script below:
Quicksilver will be published in the fourth week of the ninth month in the year of our Lord 2003. If you understand this, send a fax to 1 (212) XXX-XXXX with your name, address, phone number, and email address along with your translation. The first person to accomplish this will receive a signed copy of the book.
See the image below for a literal translation:
Click image for larger view
I hope you enjoyed the story, and despite my protestations to the contrary, I really did enjoy the challenge of tackling Wilkins's system of writing. In fact, the whole process was an immense learning experience as well. If you have any additional questions or comments about any of the above, you are more than welcome to email me at todd@substream.com.
I'm having trouble loading the page 3, that subscription thinguie should last a little longer.... anyways, here are the first two pages from Mozilla's cache... if yo can post the 3rd page, reply to this message:
By Todd Garrison
This blow-by-blow account was created for all the Neal Stephenson readers who, in anticipation of his upcoming book, Quicksilver, took it upon themselves to try to solve the cryptographic puzzle they encountered at the Baroque Cycle Web site. If you had difficulty making heads or tails of it or are simply curious as to what it all means, what follows is an explanation of how one person arrived at the solution. Bear in mind that this narrative will reveal the translation of the code written in Wilkins's script, so if you are still interested in solving it for yourself, you may want to reconsider reading further.
Some time ago I received an email from HarperCollins's Author Tracker system, notifying me of some news relating to the publication of Quicksilver. I was directed to their promotional Web site, www.baroquecycle.com, where they had posted some information about its release date, an author bio and an excerpt from the book. Now sated, my attention was drawn once again to its strange introductory page. Without fanfare, nor any form of communication whatsoever, appeared this image of some parchment strewn with strange symbols. Added in the corners were little icons of what appeared to be oldish-looking glassware. What a strange way to welcome you to the site, I thought. In order to get to the Good Stuff, one must first pass through this page--an indication that it was meant to be noticed. Was this some sort of secret message? If this had anything to do with Neal Stephenson, I found it hard to believe it was all just window dressing. Sensing there was a mystery to be uncovered, I decided to dive in and see what I could come up with.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
Page 2 (cont.)
I started with the assumption that if this was intended for a mass audience to figure out, there had to be a relatively simple solution lurking out there. My first thought was that this "code" was concocted out of thin air, designed to look old. Cryptonomicon had taught me some things about codes, and assuming each symbol stood for a particular letter of the alphabet, I knew that frequency analysis was a tool often used for decoding simple substitution ciphers. This is the process whereby one counts the occurrence of each symbol and compares it with a normal letter distribution for written English. Therefore, with the letter "E" being the most common, I should then be able to substitute it for the most common symbol; likewise for the next most common letter, "T," then "A," and so on. Unfortunately, this strange alphabet seemed to have well more than 30 letters and only a few of them were used more than once. Mr. Stephenson, one - Todd, nada.
I was still convinced the solution was a simple one, so my next thought was to try looking at TrueType fonts of ancient languages, reasoning that if I found the correct one, all I had to do was key in the ciphertext and change the typeface to say, Times Roman, and the translated message would magically appear. But more than a hundred or so unsuccessful attempts later, this line of thinking was also abandoned. It was starting to get ugly.
I needed to take stock of the situation; it occurred to me that there no longer appeared to be a simple solution I could arrive at with basic guesswork. The only clues I had to work with were derived from the excerpt, and it had to somehow be tied in with the people or ideas from that period. Therefore it was probably pretty old, had something to do with alchemy, Kabalism or the occult, and it might have been the product of one of the leading scientific minds of the 17th century, etc.
The key to deciphering the message seemed to be predicated on finding a real-life example of this strange writing. Once that happened, the p
Re:Quick! Someone wake up Bill!
on
My Visit to SCO
·
· Score: 1
This is a issue that has bees floating in my mind for a while. I believe the real reason for the UNIX license bought a while ago by Microsoft was beacuse they knew the suit (or part of it) was about the viral license in the UNIX code that gives rights over any modification or contribution to the UNIX copyright owner (in this case SCO).
Given the huge ammount of developers in Microsoft, it would be an easy target for this kind of claim, a lot of those developers (even BillG himself) must have had something to do with the UNIX code (SysV). Microsoft knew beforehand what was going on (maybe IBM knew it too, before the suit).
Then, get some cheaper, more expandable astronauts... Some deathrow residents... You know... You might make it, you might not. If you make it we'll give you life instead of the needle?
This is pretty wicked, you know?
I remember, as a child, asking my dad why didn't they use deathrow residents for the cint-eastwood-cowboys movies... that way the shootings wold look a lot more real!
Although the manned space program has been ridiculously successful in terms of preventing accidents, there have been 3 instances where small decisions have led to fatal mishaps. The Apollo launchpad fire, the Challenger, and of course Columbia. The more times we attempt these types of activities, the more accidents we will have. That said...
With that kind of tought we would not have airplanes, sea boats, even cars. Do you think that the first airplane was the safest thing in the world? A lot of people died in the first days of aviation, or in the beginning of the trasatlantic cruises.
I'm pretty sure there was somebody saying "why do you do it? do you have to risk so many lives? why do you try to make that thing fly instead of helping create faster cars?"
I'm a space junkie, I love reading about anything exploration related. But national pride is not a good excuse for spending billions to go into space. Should we be celebrating the Chinese, or asking them why they aren't instead working on a way to contribute to the ISS program?
WTF?? So, what you are saying is the ISS is the only thing we must focus on?
Europe is heading for Mars news story, and the US has already been there. How many different times do we need to accomplish the same goal under different flags?
Why does Ford keeps creating sport cars if Ferrari's will always be faster? In your previos sentence you asked why didn't they focused on the ISS, but if the US and the Russinas are already there, why bother?
If Europe wants to go to mars then Good For Them !!!! If the US has lost it's enthusiasm for the big targets, that's their problem. The rest of the world still wants to conquer space, and complaining about other nation's efforts is not helping.
If the US wants to focus on the ISS that's great, but somebody has to keep pushing the edges, that's how science and technology evolve.
I applaud the Chinese for getting a man into space, this is by no means an easy task. But we have to look at priorities. I'd love to live in a world where competition wasn't the driving reason to succeed!
Competition is one of the driving reasons to succeed. Ask IBM, Apple, Michael Jordan, the NYY, the Brazil football team... etc
Re:As previously seen on Slashdot...
on
Settling SCOres
·
· Score: 1
What intrigues me is that all accounts state that the code shown was from the linux kernel mailing list... wouldn't that give them the source of the code?
One of the most important roles of the GNU movement is to protect the individual's rights against big corporations.
When you create GPL software you can handle the copyrights to GNU to administer for you, and they have a lot more power than you for defending that copyright in case somebody violates it.
Apparently the above is hilarious (+5 Funny). Would someone please explain it to those of us not in the business?
The 10.x.x.x network not public (non routing), so anyone can use it for private networks.
Also, at the price $0.01 per IP that gives a total of $0.01 * 255 * 255 * 255 = $165,813.75
Private network: a network that is not directly connected to the Internet, thus avoinding possible clashes if anybody else is using the same addresses. These networks connect to the Internet using proxies/gateways/etc that do have a public -valid- addresses.
I have a 7 year old who uses my Linux PC always (while I'm not in it:).
He has his own account, plays games (ksirtet and Lbreakout2 are his favorites), browses the Internet (mozilla) and has even started to learn how to use a word processor (OpenOffice).
How is using any of those tools harder in Linux than in windows or OSX?? He just points and clicks in any of those OSs.
When he is ready I will teach him to use the console tools (right now he can change dirs, ls , mkdirs and use wget to download files from the net, but no more than that) and to program.
Are you going to tell that to every user whenever there is a user demand?
I'm not telling that to a user that has a demand. A regular user could not care less wether a game is "free as in beer or free as in speech". I'm telling that to somebody who complained that the game was not really "free" (most users think there's just one type of "free").
Its fantastic that they are releasing it for free, and I'm very grateful that development took place for GNU/Linux and win32 concurrently. However, I'd still like to see a quality open source FPS sometime. It is important to note that this is still "free as in beer", not "as in speech".
Well, you are very welcome to write one and donate it to the comunity.
Slashdot Mirror
As I see it Corel lost a huge chance when they sold their whole Linux division to work with Microsoft on .NET.
.NET platform.
They had a set of great graphics/design tools, a wordprocessor with a decent user base and a decent Linux distribution. With the right management (visionary, willing to further the boundaries) they could have been a great company. But they decided to go conservative, keep selling their boxed products and use a few OEMs, kill their linux development and surrender to the
Long live Corel, I would have wanted to have heard a lot more from them, but they had their shot and panicked.
Yes, sorry, I stand corrected, the code and paper pointed in my previous post is not the "direct" proof-of-concept code, but tools that have been used by them to find the exploits.
Nontheless the link to the lsd-pl.net article contains a lot more info (technical info) than any other source
More info here, here and here. Here internetnews.com state that 3 vulnerabilities (not 2) where patched.
Here is the report from the people who found the vulnerabilities (or at least one of them) which includes a proof-of-concept paper and code.
The problem as I see it is the same as with all the IP laws. A technological problem cannot be solved using legal methods, it must be solved technically.
As with IP laws, spam laws will only encourage spammers to find a new way for sending spam. You need a technical solution (be it closing open relays or refactoring the SMTP protocol -my personal favorite solution-) to solve this problem. You can extrapolate the development of the spam problem with the development of P2P systems. Hundreds of times the *AA have already tried to use the law against P2P sharers, but here we always complain that's not the solution, the solution should be found when they realize they are using a outdated business model that cannot be applied successfully in this information era without screwing your customers.
The same way, we cannot expect to make bigger and better laws to solve a technical problem, no matter what we do, the spammers will keep sending spam. It's a proven business model, and as long as people keep buying from them they will keep spamming us.
We must focus on solving this problem the way it should be done: the same way we have been telling the *AA to solve the piracy problem, adapt to the new era, do not pass patches to the legal system.
Great shot, this was just the question I was going to submit, but since you already posted it, it's already at 5 and I have no mod points anyway here is my vote for this question to be sent.
kasdjfcnoijhisduhiuhfg my ass !!!!!!
mod parent as -1 redundant
I just read some sad news on CNN.com - R&B crooner Barry White was found dead
...
You got modded offtopic, but I checked the link and is quite insightful, may the father of R&B rest in peace
What I wonder is how long before the government pulls the plug on this one. Considering the practices shown, the government could argue almost anything from the Patriot Act to "information in the hands of terrorists", no matter how idiotic it is, and the big media (ala CNN) will repeat it to death so Joe Moron will believe it and feel comfy when the plug gets pulled.
This project has the potential to show the big players the dangers and possible consequences of the Total Awareness Act (or whatever is named).
Anyways, a great idea nontheless, and here's hopes for it to live long enough to make a difference. Projects like this, the EFF and the few others make you hopeful.
I believe it should be ...
... I claim exclusive ownership in all derivative works of my fecal remainders ... Take that you copyright infringement bacteria !!!!!
In other news SCO's CEO Duhr'l McBribe said they would sue the CELF members because the chips running Linux "are belong to us". "Some electrons switched states as a result of Linux instructions being executed, and as we stated before, that constitutes derivative work".
In second thought
I don't know about you, but that interview told me a lot more than BG wanted to. In the first answer he seems to get really angered about the claim that "nobody used OS/2" and ends up sumarizing why Microsoft is the best company in town.
... USA Today is interviewing one of the richest and more powerful man on earth and the main topic is Linux.
Linux is here to stay, and they know it. This is _not_ like the OS/2 days. OS/2 was IBM's, GNU/Linux is a comunity, they can't sweep linux out of the market because most linux users uset it because they won't run anything from Microsoft. I know I do.
Even if RedHat, Mandrake and all commercial distros dissapear and SCO's FUD manages to kill Linux (highly unlikely) the mentality, press coverage and community that has gathered around GNU/Linux will live on in the *BSDs and even in OSX.
All the people and companies spreading FUD and satanizing Linux have, in some way or another, gained a lot from the GNU/Linux movement. SCO has lasted a little longer than it should have because of OpenLinux, OSX and Windows have incorporated software and ideas that were born in the GNU/Linux/*BSD world.
Even if Linux is to dissapear the "damage" is already done
Some would say that the "world domination" thingie has already started.
And here is the rest .... reading from the beginning it seemed a lot more interesting ....
...
And hey, don't mod me up, I'm already posting this at two
Page 4 (cont.)
Now if I wanted to spend several hundred dollars, I'd be able to purchase my very own reprint from a specialty bookseller, but that seemed a little severe for the purpose of cracking a message that, for all I knew, contained the publishing equivalent of "Drink more Ovaltine." I looked into borrowing one from a nearby university's rare books collection, but one phone call made it quite clear that no self-respecting librarian was going to let my grubby hands anywhere near a 335 year-old book. Desperate, I scoured the Internet looking for online versions of Real Character. It turned up in bits and pieces, but those were invariably converted into plain text--useless if you want to view the original symbols and even worse if you wanted to decode anything.
And then, like a bolt from the blue, it appeared. One site that seemed to have an eerie fascination with Wilkins offered me everything I could have asked for. Not only was the entire book online, but it was in its original form too, scanned and converted into large GIF files. Displayed within the browser's window, the pages were too small to be legible, but I found that if I downloaded each page individually to my computer (there were more than 600), I could then read the document in its original size.
The Final Push consisted of trying to figure out how Wilkins went about creating this language, requiring a healthy chunk of the book to be actually read. As Mr. Stephenson pointed out, Wilkins was trying to create a universal language, and it was supposedly understandable by anyone as long as you knew how the system worked. He came up with a hierarchal means of classifying words, dividing the English language into roughly forty categories. These categories were then divided into smaller and smaller subsections, until every word would fit somewhere within.
In order to take the message and convert it back into English, I needed something that would give me the roadmap as to which category any particular word belonged. Once I had located this particular chart, I realized this was the key to using his "dictionary," from which I could then look up words. To make things easier, I began with a word I already knew (from the Lord's Prayer), and reverse-engineered it to better understand the system. From there, it became a pretty straightforward process to do the same with the remainder of the words.
Getting the hang of the language's subtleties like verb tense, adverbs, etc., was a bit stickier and required some extra reading, but in the end, every word found on the Baroque Cycle site was capable of being identified and translated. There were some liberties taken with words that didn't exist in 1668, like "fax" or "telephone," but Lisa Gold, the message's creator--and my greatest aggravation--found a clever way to work around these obstacles.
It turns out that the message was really a set of instructions to anyone who could read it, and the first person to do so would receive a reward for their efforts. For all of you who have waited patiently through all this, you'll find the complete translation taken from Wilkins's script below:
Quicksilver will be published in the fourth week of the ninth month
in the year of our Lord 2003. If you understand this, send
a fax to 1 (212) XXX-XXXX with your name, address, phone number,
and email address along with your translation. The first person to
accomplish this will receive a signed copy of the book.
See the image below for a literal translation:
Click image for larger view
I hope you enjoyed the story, and despite my protestations to the contrary, I really did enjoy the challenge of tackling Wilkins's system of writing. In fact, the whole process was an immense learning experience as well. If you have any additional questions or comments about any of the above, you are more than welcome to email me at todd@substream.com.
Cheers,
- Todd Garrison
June 2003
I'm having trouble loading the page 3, that subscription thinguie should last a little longer .... anyways, here are the first two pages from Mozilla's cache ... if yo can post the 3rd page, reply to this message:
By Todd Garrison
This blow-by-blow account was created for all the Neal Stephenson readers who, in anticipation of his upcoming book, Quicksilver, took it upon themselves to try to solve the cryptographic puzzle they encountered at the Baroque Cycle Web site. If you had difficulty making heads or tails of it or are simply curious as to what it all means, what follows is an explanation of how one person arrived at the solution. Bear in mind that this narrative will reveal the translation of the code written in Wilkins's script, so if you are still interested in solving it for yourself, you may want to reconsider reading further.
Some time ago I received an email from HarperCollins's Author Tracker system, notifying me of some news relating to the publication of Quicksilver. I was directed to their promotional Web site, www.baroquecycle.com, where they had posted some information about its release date, an author bio and an excerpt from the book. Now sated, my attention was drawn once again to its strange introductory page. Without fanfare, nor any form of communication whatsoever, appeared this image of some parchment strewn with strange symbols. Added in the corners were little icons of what appeared to be oldish-looking glassware. What a strange way to welcome you to the site, I thought. In order to get to the Good Stuff, one must first pass through this page--an indication that it was meant to be noticed. Was this some sort of secret message? If this had anything to do with Neal Stephenson, I found it hard to believe it was all just window dressing. Sensing there was a mystery to be uncovered, I decided to dive in and see what I could come up with.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
Page 2 (cont.)
I started with the assumption that if this was intended for a mass audience to figure out, there had to be a relatively simple solution lurking out there. My first thought was that this "code" was concocted out of thin air, designed to look old. Cryptonomicon had taught me some things about codes, and assuming each symbol stood for a particular letter of the alphabet, I knew that frequency analysis was a tool often used for decoding simple substitution ciphers. This is the process whereby one counts the occurrence of each symbol and compares it with a normal letter distribution for written English. Therefore, with the letter "E" being the most common, I should then be able to substitute it for the most common symbol; likewise for the next most common letter, "T," then "A," and so on. Unfortunately, this strange alphabet seemed to have well more than 30 letters and only a few of them were used more than once. Mr. Stephenson, one - Todd, nada.
I was still convinced the solution was a simple one, so my next thought was to try looking at TrueType fonts of ancient languages, reasoning that if I found the correct one, all I had to do was key in the ciphertext and change the typeface to say, Times Roman, and the translated message would magically appear. But more than a hundred or so unsuccessful attempts later, this line of thinking was also abandoned. It was starting to get ugly.
I needed to take stock of the situation; it occurred to me that there no longer appeared to be a simple solution I could arrive at with basic guesswork. The only clues I had to work with were derived from the excerpt, and it had to somehow be tied in with the people or ideas from that period. Therefore it was probably pretty old, had something to do with alchemy, Kabalism or the occult, and it might have been the product of one of the leading scientific minds of the 17th century, etc.
The key to deciphering the message seemed to be predicated on finding a real-life example of this strange writing. Once that happened, the p
This is a issue that has bees floating in my mind for a while. I believe the real reason for the UNIX license bought a while ago by Microsoft was beacuse they knew the suit (or part of it) was about the viral license in the UNIX code that gives rights over any modification or contribution to the UNIX copyright owner (in this case SCO).
Given the huge ammount of developers in Microsoft, it would be an easy target for this kind of claim, a lot of those developers (even BillG himself) must have had something to do with the UNIX code (SysV). Microsoft knew beforehand what was going on (maybe IBM knew it too, before the suit).
Then, get some cheaper, more expandable astronauts... Some deathrow residents... You know... You might make it, you might not. If you make it we'll give you life instead of the needle?
... that way the shootings wold look a lot more real!
...
This is pretty wicked, you know?
I remember, as a child, asking my dad why didn't they use deathrow residents for the cint-eastwood-cowboys movies
I won't copy here his answer
Although the manned space program has been ridiculously successful in terms of preventing accidents, there have been 3 instances where small decisions have led to fatal mishaps. The Apollo launchpad fire, the Challenger, and of course Columbia. The more times we attempt these types of activities, the more accidents we will have. That said...
... etc
With that kind of tought we would not have airplanes, sea boats, even cars. Do you think that the first airplane was the safest thing in the world? A lot of people died in the first days of aviation, or in the beginning of the trasatlantic cruises.
I'm pretty sure there was somebody saying "why do you do it? do you have to risk so many lives? why do you try to make that thing fly instead of helping create faster cars?"
I'm a space junkie, I love reading about anything exploration related. But national pride is not a good excuse for spending billions to go into space. Should we be celebrating the Chinese, or asking them why they aren't instead working on a way to contribute to the ISS program?
WTF?? So, what you are saying is the ISS is the only thing we must focus on?
Europe is heading for Mars news story, and the US has already been there. How many different times do we need to accomplish the same goal under different flags?
Why does Ford keeps creating sport cars if Ferrari's will always be faster? In your previos sentence you asked why didn't they focused on the ISS, but if the US and the Russinas are already there, why bother?
If Europe wants to go to mars then Good For Them !!!! If the US has lost it's enthusiasm for the big targets, that's their problem. The rest of the world still wants to conquer space, and complaining about other nation's efforts is not helping.
If the US wants to focus on the ISS that's great, but somebody has to keep pushing the edges, that's how science and technology evolve.
I applaud the Chinese for getting a man into space, this is by no means an easy task. But we have to look at priorities. I'd love to live in a world where competition wasn't the driving reason to succeed!
Competition is one of the driving reasons to succeed. Ask IBM, Apple, Michael Jordan, the NYY, the Brazil football team
What intrigues me is that all accounts state that the code shown was from the linux kernel mailing list ... wouldn't that give them the source of the code?
GEE I WONDER WHY...
From $248.42 to $0.54 in two years, ouch.
There should be a law against using a logarithmic scale on stock charts
It's more complicated than that.
One of the most important roles of the GNU movement is to protect the individual's rights against big corporations.
When you create GPL software you can handle the copyrights to GNU to administer for you, and they have a lot more power than you for defending that copyright in case somebody violates it.
The 10.x.x.x network not public (non routing), so anyone can use it for private networks.
Also, at the price $0.01 per IP that gives a total of $0.01 * 255 * 255 * 255 = $165,813.75
I have a 7 year old who uses my Linux PC always (while I'm not in it :).
He has his own account, plays games (ksirtet and Lbreakout2 are his favorites), browses the Internet (mozilla) and has even started to learn how to use a word processor (OpenOffice).
How is using any of those tools harder in Linux than in windows or OSX?? He just points and clicks in any of those OSs.
When he is ready I will teach him to use the console tools (right now he can change dirs, ls , mkdirs and use wget to download files from the net, but no more than that) and to program.
... not to use any DRM at all ...
I oppose these rules. They will stifle debate, inhibit new ideas and shut out smaller businesses trying to compete.
I'm quite impressed with this statement, coming from somebody who would greatly beneficiate from such rules being passed.
We surely need this kind of thinking to be expressed a lot more in the IT business.
Imagine what would be of the software world if Bill Gates had made that statement when Microsoft first had the chance to stablish a monopoly:
"I remember where I came from, and if these practices would have been enforced by IBM, Xerox et al by the time I was nobody, I would still be nobody"
When you think of it, even $CO is what it is today because laws like these ones did not exist.
Are you going to tell that to every user whenever there is a user demand?
I'm not telling that to a user that has a demand. A regular user could not care less wether a game is "free as in beer or free as in speech". I'm telling that to somebody who complained that the game was not really "free" (most users think there's just one type of "free").
Its fantastic that they are releasing it for free, and I'm very grateful that development took place for GNU/Linux and win32 concurrently. However, I'd still like to see a quality open source FPS sometime. It is important to note that this is still "free as in beer", not "as in speech".
Well, you are very welcome to write one and donate it to the comunity.