Case in point on Wired's 1999 list: Diablo II. It had been delayed forEVER, and the fanbase was borderline homicidal. When Blizzard finally released, the engine was unforgivably slow, Battle.Net and LAN play were painfully lagged, singleplayer play was buggy. Fun, sure, but it didn't have the tight, cohesive feel that Diablo I did. The game simply felt rushed.
IMHO as always.
I've searched and searched and searched... what were the names of those books??? I remember them fondly... they gave BASIC source written for a few popular machines (PC, C64, something else IIRC), and porting the code in the books to the esoteric BASIC on my Mattel Aquarius (hey, I grew up poor... hell, I'm still poor) was fairly deep-magic hacking for a third-grader, which is what I was when I got my hands on those books. But what were the names of those books???
Someone will take Linux, throw it up in CVS, allow checkins by quite a few people, and it's downhill from there....maybe it'll be some random college student who couldn't get the authors to listen.
Hey, if that happens, so much the better for OSS and *nix computing as a whole. I know I'm overabstracting here, but that's basically how this whole thing got started in the first place... imagine a kernel that is to Linux what Linux was to Minix.
...we are right back to napster and the music industry again.. there is NO difference between a real BMW and a replicated one down to the molecular level...
This is where the analogy breaks down. mp3 compression is lossy, and detectably so. People keep buying the real McCoy because its quality is superior to that of the replicated McCoy.
Either you're not really a full sysadmin (you do it cuz it needs to get done, and you're the only one where you work that has a brain)....
...or I'm still in college, I work for a non-profit, I live in a city where prices and wages are extremely low compared with the rest of the US, and I was flat broke when I got hired.
And yeah, I know my employer's getting the best deal on the planet. They did take a gamble by hiring a second-year CS undergrad with so-so grades, no formal experience, and no certs, and they hedged that bet with a low low wage. Lucky for us both I turned out to be brilliant... come the end of the year, I'm in line for a big ole fat stinkin raise. *grin*
I don't think that Messrs. Douglass and/or Thoreau would perceive the injustice of preventing people from breaking the law with property which is not their own.
[dons asbestos underwear]
Clarification, or perhaps something I should have made more evident in my original post: I chose those quotes from Douglass and Thoreau not because I want to suggest that shutting down Napster is as great an injustice as salvery, nor because I equate the tyranny of the RIAA with the tyranny of slaveholders. I chose those quotes because they are eloquent philosophical and ethical arguments for the civil disobedience of laws that are unjust. I apologize for any confusion that may have been generated by my out-of-context quoting of two great men.
NAPSTER is being SHUT DOWN at midnight on Friday July 28... FIGHT BACK! The RIAA can never touch GNUtella! Download it at HTTP://GNUTELLA.WEGO.COM Free, Distributed, Open Source, Anonymous!
Replace GNUtella with your sorta-user-friendly distributed-filesharing-system of choice. Post them around your local campus (at night if you want, in order to avoid questions). Be ready to post them again if university officials tear them down.
They will be seen, and they will be seen by the people who matter most. Most colleges and universities have incoming freshmen registering and taking tours now, in addition to summer semester classes.
As to why you should engage in civil disobedience like this, I can never hope to be more persuasive than either of these two great men:
"Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." -- Douglass
"If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn." -- Thoreau
Actually it was either 'B A' or 'B A B A'. But hey... not to brag, but a couple years ago I wired up the old Nintendo and actually tried to play Contra without the Konami code... much to my surprise, I could consistently finish the entire game without dying more than once or twice (ie play forever, since you get like five free lives from points while playing through the game).
Re:Where does one buy pinball games?
on
Is Pinball Dying?
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· Score: 1
eBay auctions are frequently posted on the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.pinball, and r.g.p functions as something of a clearinghouse for private offerings of machines for sale. The flag 'WTB:' in the subject line denotes a wanted-to-buy post, and 'FS:' denotes for-sale.
Blizzard's site says you can hold down the mouse button to attack continuously in Diablo II. Sweet. I'd hate to ruin another of the only decent-quality products MSFT ever made. (Whoops, there goes my karma. *grin*)
A more appropriate analogy would perhaps be that you run a taxicab service.
I hail your cab and say, "Take me to badPart.town." You comply. I get out, pay my fare, and you drive away. I rent prostitutes, buy crack, and have a fantastically illegal time. After I've had my fun, I see your cab cruising, and flag you down. "Take me back to richSuburbs.town," I say.
I somehow doubt that you, the cab driver, have any liability whatsoever.
Oh, please. You effectively direct us to bury our heads in the sand and make a lot of money so we can pretend the destruction of the environment, the oppression of workers, and the curtailment of civil liberties all don't affect us. Sorry, but that solution loses.
Also, don't imply that the profit motivator is noble or admirable. You don't hear people using the phrase "the profit motivator" in everyday conversation simply because our langage has a more concise synonym for it: greed.
...for sticking around after the interview to answer even more questions and clear up misconceptions in the following discussion. Just imagine if Lars had done the same... *grin*
Not to be mindlessly argumentative, but the Red Hat press release contained the following, emphasis added:
Google, one of the fastest growing search engines on the Web, operates its search engine and all of its computing functions on a cluster of more than 4,000 PCs running Red Hat.
That would sort of imply that it is indeed used as people's workstations.
But now, war is so detached and distant that we're isolated from consequences.
My skinny white ass, we're isolated. Can you say Selective Service?
Sorry for the flame, but come on.
Re:Yes - Bring back dueling! (OT)
on
Virtual War
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· Score: 1
Smart money's on the A-4 with the hardened POW at the stick.
But who cares, I vote Democrat anyway. Now there's a tough choice.... imagine Gore vs. Bradley, both piloting Ragnarok 'Mechs. I think I'd have to go with Bradley on that one.
I'm fairly ignorant as far as kedema (Kernel Deep Magic) goes... couldn't this just be implemented as a compile-time module, just like PCMCIA support and such?
Here's a thought. Give 'em Mindstorms and/or a toy language to introduce them to the concepts, and after they've played with that for a little while, let them know that they can play in an environment just like Daddy's bad-ass command line whenever they think they're ready for it. Kids that age know when they're bored with 'kid stuff' and ready for grown-up stuff.
LEGO! Lego is key! Buy them tons of Lego! Every kid who played with Lego to the exclusion of other toys has the potential to be a hacker!
Slashdot Mirror
Case in point on Wired's 1999 list: Diablo II. It had been delayed forEVER, and the fanbase was borderline homicidal. When Blizzard finally released, the engine was unforgivably slow, Battle.Net and LAN play were painfully lagged, singleplayer play was buggy. Fun, sure, but it didn't have the tight, cohesive feel that Diablo I did. The game simply felt rushed. IMHO as always.
I've searched and searched and searched... what were the names of those books??? I remember them fondly... they gave BASIC source written for a few popular machines (PC, C64, something else IIRC), and porting the code in the books to the esoteric BASIC on my Mattel Aquarius (hey, I grew up poor... hell, I'm still poor) was fairly deep-magic hacking for a third-grader, which is what I was when I got my hands on those books. But what were the names of those books???
Someone help!
Someone will take Linux, throw it up in CVS, allow checkins by quite a few people, and it's downhill from there. ...maybe it'll be some random college student who couldn't get the authors to listen.
Hey, if that happens, so much the better for OSS and *nix computing as a whole. I know I'm overabstracting here, but that's basically how this whole thing got started in the first place... imagine a kernel that is to Linux what Linux was to Minix.
This is where the analogy breaks down. mp3 compression is lossy, and detectably so. People keep buying the real McCoy because its quality is superior to that of the replicated McCoy.
I did, in fact, read the entire article, but I must've missed the mention of convective cooling requirements. My bad.
...or I'm still in college, I work for a non-profit, I live in a city where prices and wages are extremely low compared with the rest of the US, and I was flat broke when I got hired.
And yeah, I know my employer's getting the best deal on the planet. They did take a gamble by hiring a second-year CS undergrad with so-so grades, no formal experience, and no certs, and they hedged that bet with a low low wage. Lucky for us both I turned out to be brilliant... come the end of the year, I'm in line for a big ole fat stinkin raise. *grin*
$7.40 an hour.
[dons asbestos underwear]
Clarification, or perhaps something I should have made more evident in my original post: I chose those quotes from Douglass and Thoreau not because I want to suggest that shutting down Napster is as great an injustice as salvery, nor because I equate the tyranny of the RIAA with the tyranny of slaveholders. I chose those quotes because they are eloquent philosophical and ethical arguments for the civil disobedience of laws that are unjust. I apologize for any confusion that may have been generated by my out-of-context quoting of two great men.
Make posters, something along these lines:
NAPSTER is being SHUT DOWN
at midnight on Friday July 28...
FIGHT BACK!
The RIAA can never touch GNUtella!
Download it at HTTP://GNUTELLA.WEGO.COM
Free, Distributed, Open Source, Anonymous!
Replace GNUtella with your sorta-user-friendly distributed-filesharing-system of choice. Post them around your local campus (at night if you want, in order to avoid questions). Be ready to post them again if university officials tear them down.
They will be seen, and they will be seen by the people who matter most. Most colleges and universities have incoming freshmen registering and taking tours now, in addition to summer semester classes.
As to why you should engage in civil disobedience like this, I can never hope to be more persuasive than either of these two great men:
Actually it was either 'B A' or 'B A B A'. But hey... not to brag, but a couple years ago I wired up the old Nintendo and actually tried to play Contra without the Konami code... much to my surprise, I could consistently finish the entire game without dying more than once or twice (ie play forever, since you get like five free lives from points while playing through the game).
eBay auctions are frequently posted on the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.pinball, and r.g.p functions as something of a clearinghouse for private offerings of machines for sale. The flag 'WTB:' in the subject line denotes a wanted-to-buy post, and 'FS:' denotes for-sale.
WRT to the MSOS and MSAP names:
Say them out loud several times and you quickly end up with Microsauce and Microsap. I like.
Blizzard's site says you can hold down the mouse button to attack continuously in Diablo II. Sweet. I'd hate to ruin another of the only decent-quality products MSFT ever made. (Whoops, there goes my karma. *grin*)
So are most Napster users (probably); remember, strong encryption is a weapon, right? (G)
I hail your cab and say, "Take me to badPart.town." You comply.
I get out, pay my fare, and you drive away. I rent prostitutes, buy crack, and have a fantastically illegal time.
After I've had my fun, I see your cab cruising, and flag you down. "Take me back to richSuburbs.town," I say.
I somehow doubt that you, the cab driver, have any liability whatsoever.
Also, don't imply that the profit motivator is noble or admirable. You don't hear people using the phrase "the profit motivator" in everyday conversation simply because our langage has a more concise synonym for it: greed.
...for sticking around after the interview to answer even more questions and clear up misconceptions in the following discussion. Just imagine if Lars had done the same ... *grin*
Google, one of the fastest growing search engines on the Web, operates its search engine and all of its computing functions on a cluster of more than 4,000 PCs running Red Hat.
That would sort of imply that it is indeed used as people's workstations.
And if the Third Reich had this kind of technology on D-Day in 1944, celebrating Memorial Day would probably be punishable by death without trial.
My skinny white ass, we're isolated. Can you say Selective Service?
Sorry for the flame, but come on.
Smart money's on the A-4 with the hardened POW at the stick.
But who cares, I vote Democrat anyway. Now there's a tough choice.... imagine Gore vs. Bradley, both piloting Ragnarok 'Mechs. I think I'd have to go with Bradley on that one.
I'm fairly ignorant as far as kedema (Kernel Deep Magic) goes... couldn't this just be implemented as a compile-time module, just like PCMCIA support and such?
Oh God, that's hilarious... I suppose it's good I don't have any mod points left, cause I'd be torn whether to mod that "Funny" or "Insightful"... (G)
Jesus Christ, I hope no professionals out there are still reusing code they wrote when they were 5 or 8 or 10...
LEGO! Lego is key! Buy them tons of Lego! Every kid who played with Lego to the exclusion of other toys has the potential to be a hacker!