From one of the "Least influential movies of all time" (according to something mentioned, I believe in a "quickie" a while back) called "Spaced Invaders".
Not exactly high quality art or anything, but I thought it was a rather sadly underrated movie.
But, then, I'm easily amused...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
...but I'm wondering if whoever is running the "wrong server" they accidentally contacted and uploaded to saw the page, thought they'd been cracked (perhaps the pages being uploaded were about to be used to "deface" whatever was supposed to be there, the sysadmin may have thought), and made a panicked call to the cops saying somebody was "hacking" his system.
We all know how rational US law enforcement/government is about anything involving computers, and perhaps they looked at the pages uploaded in the supposed "hacking", saw the "death threats" [in the game] and did their usual ridiculous overreaction.
Mind you, this is all wild speculation on my part. The article doesn't really say much.
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I think the slot machine concept fits into Microsoft's vision of client access licensing via a coin slot.
Now, there's and amusing notion - when you put a quarter into one of these machines, are you really "gambling a quarter" or are you paying $0.25 for a one-use license to run "RandomMoney.exe" on one particular slot machine?...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
My friends and I wasted so many quarters on this game...[insert nostalgic interlude here]...
This is one game I'd LOVE to see an "open source" equivalent for. Crossfire is the closes thing I've seen, and it's not really close at all - it's far more of a Multiplayer Ultima V than a Guantlet (still looks fun, though, from what little I've played with it.) Anybody know of any "Gauntlet-like" game projects going on?
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
At least, it doesn't look that way to me, browsing Sun's documentation
The nice thing about Mosix is that it automatically handles migrating any existing processes to wherever it thinks it will be finished the quickest. Last time I played with Mosix, I put it on an old P-100 Laptop with no L2 Cache and a K6-2/350. When not connected to the network, using LAME to generate MP3's on the P-100 went at about 15% of "real-time" speed. Connected to the network, it went at about 85% since the process could be automatically migrated to the K6-2. (It goes at about 105% or so when run "natively" directly on the K6-2/350). I suspect it would have been an even more dramatic difference had I been running on something faster than a 10BaseT Hub for the networking. Other than the kernel patch for Mosix, all of the software on both systems were standard "off the shelf" linux programs. (Compiling, I noticed, also went substantially faster, using plain old GCC, for example).
It looks like with "gridware" you actually have to "submit a job" to the handler using a separate program. I can't tell for sure just browsing the documentation whether you can submit ANY process, but it does look like it has to be done 'manually' in any case.
Gridware looks pretty neat, but I get the impression it'll be of more use to technical people who have need to distribute particular types of jobs, and have the resources to set up a "compute farm", and have technical enough users to make good use of it. Other than the installation, Mosix doesn't seem to have this limitation (but on the other hand, Mosix is Linux only [I think even ix86 Linux only, but don't quote me on that] and requires patching the kernel).
Now, if Mosix would get a 2.4 patch out, I could get it set up again at home...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I'm not certain, but I kind of got the impression that KOffice was included with KDE2 mainly to get more people jumping up and down on it to test it, and so people in the "mainstream" would be able to see that KOffice existed. It seemed like they are leaving it out of the newer "current releases" simply because it's not QUITE ready for "prime time" (though it seems to be coming along nicely. KWord's not so hot at the moment, relatively speaking, but KIllustrator seemed nice during what little I played with it. I also notice that Kivio is now in the KOffice snapshots...).
Personally, I can cope. I can deal with StarOffice 5.2 for now until KWord is "ready". (Side note - does anybody know if "OpenOffice 6" can export/save as postscript files? That'd give me a way around the lack of a print function, and I could try it out...)
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
but it just wasn't cutting it on my Pentium 233 with 98 MB.
Odd. I'm running 2.0.1 on an ancient P-100 laptop with 48MB and no L2 cache. I would describe its performance there as "adequate". It's still faster and more useful than the Windows 95 it replaced on that machine...
If you haven't tried it already, you might try recompiling QT with the "-fno-exceptions" switch (which solved the "huge and slow" problem for me when I saw someone else post that in a much earlier article - thanks, whoever you were!)
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
How is "I'm a long-time programmer and I actually find many of KDE's features helpful", "KDE won't cause a shortage of crypto development", and "It's not just for newbies anymore" classified as "Flamebait"?
I, on the other hand, am more of a "grovelling newbie" *nix programmer, but I find KDE handy as well. If kwrite had a native "HTML with PHP" highlight mode I'd be in heaven (meanwhile I can get by using PERL highlight mode for php, which works reasonably well, until Quanta+ is out of beta...)
Or is that "Flamebait" too?
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I'm using a daily snapshot from the beginning of the week, and I agree. They DO seem to have introduced a couple of minor rendering bugs (actually, the only place I've really noticed it so far is that the banner ad on some of the "Linux Today" pages shows up in the middle of the screen, obscuring the text - I haven't really noticed a problem anywhere else)
BONUS - they finally got the "javascript:..." urls in anchor tags working properly. It still doesn't support the feature of typing "javascript:" directly in the location bar, but that's a comparatively minor issue
The new versions even support the special "favicon.ico" thing that IE popularized (Even www.userfriendly.org uses it, it seems...). Purely a toy, in my book, but still kind of nifty.
I'm finally able to abandon Netscape Navigator for browsing! Hooray!
(Now, if only I could figure out what I screwed up on one of my machines that causes applications trying to use the kde sound server to crap out with a "Bad MD5 cookie" error...any hints? It works fine on my other machines, so it's obviously something I've screwed up...I've had this problem on this machine since the 1.9x betas of KDE...)
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Re:can Windows be beaten on the desktop?
on
Linux Is Going Down
·
· Score: 2
both of my copies of Windows (one 95 and one 98) are licensed, as they came with my computers (both Dell). Microsoft is getting paid even if I don't use their software.
Ah, but you've missed the key factor in their OS income - you've stepped off of their Upgrade Treadmill®. According to industry accountants, it seems, "Not selling" is the same as "losing money" [whether you would have bought anyway or not]. Therefore, according to MS's accounting department, you could be costing them $100's or even $1000's each year because you didn't buy 98SE (and then W2k and then Whistler...) and you aren't buying Office 2001 (and 2001+ and 2003 and...), and you aren't buying IIS, and....well, you get the idea...
Therefore, whether they admit it or not, they do care...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
In essence, yes. (Actually, if it were "software licensed" I guess it'd probably be more like the BSD license.) The information is here on Larry Ewing's page about it...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I think the government only takes your taxes at gunpoint if you're in some fundamentalist cult
Only in the literal sense. Look at it this way - if a mugger says "Give me your money or I'll get a gun out of my car and shoot you", is that or is that not, for all intents and purposes "at gunpoint" (presuming, of course, he actually has a gun in his car)?
The "government takes your money at gunpoint" is a bit melodramatic, I admit, but fundamentally, it is true.
The government says "give me your money, or I'll send somebody with a gun over to take it from you, and throw you in jail and/or shoot you."...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
If MS were to release an OS upgrade, then, a week or two later, released a patch/hotfix/etc., there would be all sorts of discussion about how they never release the good stuff, how evil it is, etc.
Would it make you happier if they just released a.diff and called it "Linux 2.4.0 Plus"?:-)
It's free (as was 2.4.0). It's got new features (e.g. ReiserFS). There's no marketing department pushing people to upgrade from the 2.2.x kernels. And besides all that, the "newest (i.e. development) kernel" is constantly available, not just officially sanctioned "service packs". And, to me, there's a big difference between "You know that program you just paid $500 for? You need Service Pack 1 for it or [whatever] won't work" and "You know that thing you found for free on the internet a month ago? There's an also-free patch for it if you've been having a problem with [whatever]"
Mind you, I understand what you're trying to say, but I don't quite "get" the apparent hostility in the message...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
No, no, no, you use the.NET to catch the stuff to make the C Hash with.
Gee, whiz, don't they teach you guys elementary cooking theory in those CIS classes? (and if not, how come there's all those "The [insert programming style here] Cookbook" books, huh?)
Sorry, couldn't resist...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
If there ever was an easily-renewable thing, it's microbes. It seems to me there was a mention relatively recently on Slashdot about "Gastrobots", as a small-scale example.
The idea of turning septic tanks into generators appeals to me. This sort of thing might also someday make an adjunct to methane-burning power plants in landfills.
Personally, I'd love to find a way to make the medium that the microbes grow in safe to drink - imagine, brew your own beer AND generate your own power at the same time! (This fuel cell runs on yeast...)
Some other random links: here and here --- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I doubt it...
But...Maybe they'll buy the "Dreamcast" division.
Makes me wonder if the XBox will play Dreamcast games (either natively or perhaps after you buy a $100 add-on...)
(As an aside - does anybody else wonder about that "XBox" name? Until Microsoft trademarked it, an "X Box", to me, was a terminal machine for X-windows...) --- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
It's a lot more subtle than people seem to think. The one example (NOTE:this is a purely subjective observation) that comes to mind is:
Clinton wanted to appoint someone, who turned out to have once hired a person who hadn't followed the proper procedures to get into this country. The media, in general, referred to that person as "undocumented".
Bush wanted to appoint someone, who turned out to have once hired a person who hadn't followed the proper procedures to get into this country. The media, in general (certainly, ABC news was, I noticed), referred to that person as "illegal".
It's subtle things like that - nothing too blatant as some righties would have you believe, but they certainly aren't paragons of objectivity as some lefties like to think.
I really do wish it was easier to get relatively objective news, rather than merely a choice between "lefty" news or "righty" news, both of which tend to irritate me...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
But, the media, being Big D Democrats for the most part, will be gunning for Bush.
OOOooo! That's a bonus I hadn't thought of...
I personally think the "checks and balances" will be working better than ever this administration:
The Legislature is almost exactly divided between lefties and righties. They'll be so busy arguing with each other, they won't have much time to take away as many freedoms over the next four years.
The righties know that the very narrow victory Bush got means they'd better be careful or there'll be an outright voting-tantrum next election and we'll be tipped way over to the left, so I suspect most of their "anti-"whatever policies will be mostly limited to "not supporting" rather than "actively resisting/criminalizing".
And, as cathryn pointed out, the distinctly left-leaning mainstream media will be scrutinizing the Bush administration VERY closely, so they won't be getting away with nearly as much as the administration they're replacing.
So, in short, I think US Federal Gov't, inc. will probably be less actively oppressive for the next four years. My opinion, anyway.
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I heard a blurb on the radio this morning that I thought was kind of funny....
Someone was commenting that they had just managed to get keep enough power flowing yesterday by temporarily shutting off the water pumps that suck water from northern california to feed southern california. (It wasn't a comedic comment, incidentally...)
<joking>So, first L.A. sucks away all of our water, and then they suck away all of our electricity to suck away all of our water?</joking>
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Part of the legislation that affects the deregulation says that the power companies can only charge the consumer x dollars for the power.
Sounds like regulation to me.
So is the government telling power companies what to do with their assets (IIRC, the "de"regulation required the power companies to sell off their generators to small companies [who then turned around and gouged the power companies for the power]).
So is the government telling the power companies from which agencies or organizations they must buy their power from.
In short, I don't think there was any deregulation at all - the problem seems to have been the "REregulation" that the California state government did [which they called "de"regulation to make it sound harmless.]
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
(Off the "AltaVista" topic, but still about IP...)
Unisys (I think) owned the patent and was going to try and charge for every GIF out there.
Specifically, I believe it was a patent on the compression algorithm used - technically, you can use GIF's without worrying about patent issues if you either have them uncompressed or use some other compression method. Problem there is that uncompressed GIF's are naturally huge, and I suspect it would take forever to get all the gif-reading programs (browsers, etc.) to implement the "alternate compression".
Of course, that's what.png's are for. If mng ever catches on (Mozilla/Netscape 6+ and Konqueror already support it, and I suspect if Gnome's browser doesn't already, it will very soon), we'll finally have a replacement for animated GIF's, too.
The big question on my mind, though, is: Unisys' patent runs out next year, as I recall. When it does, will everybody run back to.GIF and animated.GIF, or can.PNG and.MNG catch on and take over anyway?
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
BTW, on an offtopic note, how does ArseTechnica sound as an Ars-spoof site?
Judging by the IP-related stories on slashdot over the last year or two, I'd say it sounds like "Serious, Life-and-liberty-and-profit threatening Trademark Infringement".:-)
(Hey, if "guinness-sucks" can be infringment, and "verizonreallysucks" can be infringement, certainly just adding one letter can be, too, to a highly-enough paid IP lawyer)
(Fortunately - in reality, I don't get the impression that ars technica is quite such a lawyer-happy bunch...)
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Slashdot Mirror
From one of the "Least influential movies of all time" (according to something mentioned, I believe in a "quickie" a while back) called "Spaced Invaders".
Not exactly high quality art or anything, but I thought it was a rather sadly underrated movie.
But, then, I'm easily amused...
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Uh...that was unintentional, right?
Though it might explain things...
[insert obligatory comment about Kent State campus police moderating slashdot here...]
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
...but I'm wondering if whoever is running the "wrong server" they accidentally contacted and uploaded to saw the page, thought they'd been cracked (perhaps the pages being uploaded were about to be used to "deface" whatever was supposed to be there, the sysadmin may have thought), and made a panicked call to the cops saying somebody was "hacking" his system.
We all know how rational US law enforcement/government is about anything involving computers, and perhaps they looked at the pages uploaded in the supposed "hacking", saw the "death threats" [in the game] and did their usual ridiculous overreaction.
Mind you, this is all wild speculation on my part. The article doesn't really say much.
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Now, there's and amusing notion - when you put a quarter into one of these machines, are you really "gambling a quarter" or are you paying $0.25 for a one-use license to run "RandomMoney.exe" on one particular slot machine?...
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I think if you read the article the answer is obviously "no". They run on batteries, not crack!
(Says the guy that just used up 5 moderator points... :-) )
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
My friends and I wasted so many quarters on this game...[insert nostalgic interlude here]...
This is one game I'd LOVE to see an "open source" equivalent for. Crossfire is the closes thing I've seen, and it's not really close at all - it's far more of a Multiplayer Ultima V than a Guantlet (still looks fun, though, from what little I've played with it.) Anybody know of any "Gauntlet-like" game projects going on?
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
At least, it doesn't look that way to me, browsing Sun's documentation
The nice thing about Mosix is that it automatically handles migrating any existing processes to wherever it thinks it will be finished the quickest. Last time I played with Mosix, I put it on an old P-100 Laptop with no L2 Cache and a K6-2/350. When not connected to the network, using LAME to generate MP3's on the P-100 went at about 15% of "real-time" speed. Connected to the network, it went at about 85% since the process could be automatically migrated to the K6-2. (It goes at about 105% or so when run "natively" directly on the K6-2/350). I suspect it would have been an even more dramatic difference had I been running on something faster than a 10BaseT Hub for the networking. Other than the kernel patch for Mosix, all of the software on both systems were standard "off the shelf" linux programs. (Compiling, I noticed, also went substantially faster, using plain old GCC, for example).
It looks like with "gridware" you actually have to "submit a job" to the handler using a separate program. I can't tell for sure just browsing the documentation whether you can submit ANY process, but it does look like it has to be done 'manually' in any case.
Gridware looks pretty neat, but I get the impression it'll be of more use to technical people who have need to distribute particular types of jobs, and have the resources to set up a "compute farm", and have technical enough users to make good use of it. Other than the installation, Mosix doesn't seem to have this limitation (but on the other hand, Mosix is Linux only [I think even ix86 Linux only, but don't quote me on that] and requires patching the kernel).
Now, if Mosix would get a 2.4 patch out, I could get it set up again at home...
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I'm not certain, but I kind of got the impression that KOffice was included with KDE2 mainly to get more people jumping up and down on it to test it, and so people in the "mainstream" would be able to see that KOffice existed. It seemed like they are leaving it out of the newer "current releases" simply because it's not QUITE ready for "prime time" (though it seems to be coming along nicely. KWord's not so hot at the moment, relatively speaking, but KIllustrator seemed nice during what little I played with it. I also notice that Kivio is now in the KOffice snapshots...).
Personally, I can cope. I can deal with StarOffice 5.2 for now until KWord is "ready". (Side note - does anybody know if "OpenOffice 6" can export/save as postscript files? That'd give me a way around the lack of a print function, and I could try it out...)
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Odd. I'm running 2.0.1 on an ancient P-100 laptop with 48MB and no L2 cache. I would describe its performance there as "adequate". It's still faster and more useful than the Windows 95 it replaced on that machine...
If you haven't tried it already, you might try recompiling QT with the "-fno-exceptions" switch (which solved the "huge and slow" problem for me when I saw someone else post that in a much earlier article - thanks, whoever you were!)
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Okay, somewhere in there is a wise-ass comment about the usefulness of voice-recognition for porn-surfing, but I won't stoop to that level... :-)
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
"Flamebait"?????
How is "I'm a long-time programmer and I actually find many of KDE's features helpful", "KDE won't cause a shortage of crypto development", and "It's not just for newbies anymore" classified as "Flamebait"?
I, on the other hand, am more of a "grovelling newbie" *nix programmer, but I find KDE handy as well. If kwrite had a native "HTML with PHP" highlight mode I'd be in heaven (meanwhile I can get by using PERL highlight mode for php, which works reasonably well, until Quanta+ is out of beta...)
Or is that "Flamebait" too?
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I'm using a daily snapshot from the beginning of the week, and I agree. They DO seem to have introduced a couple of minor rendering bugs (actually, the only place I've really noticed it so far is that the banner ad on some of the "Linux Today" pages shows up in the middle of the screen, obscuring the text - I haven't really noticed a problem anywhere else)
BONUS - they finally got the "javascript:..." urls in anchor tags working properly. It still doesn't support the feature of typing "javascript:" directly in the location bar, but that's a comparatively minor issue
The new versions even support the special "favicon.ico" thing that IE popularized (Even www.userfriendly.org uses it, it seems...). Purely a toy, in my book, but still kind of nifty.
I'm finally able to abandon Netscape Navigator for browsing! Hooray!
(Now, if only I could figure out what I screwed up on one of my machines that causes applications trying to use the kde sound server to crap out with a "Bad MD5 cookie" error...any hints? It works fine on my other machines, so it's obviously something I've screwed up...I've had this problem on this machine since the 1.9x betas of KDE...)
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Ah, but you've missed the key factor in their OS income - you've stepped off of their Upgrade Treadmill®. According to industry accountants, it seems, "Not selling" is the same as "losing money" [whether you would have bought anyway or not]. Therefore, according to MS's accounting department, you could be costing them $100's or even $1000's each year because you didn't buy 98SE (and then W2k and then Whistler...) and you aren't buying Office 2001 (and 2001+ and 2003 and...), and you aren't buying IIS, and ....well, you get the idea...
Therefore, whether they admit it or not, they do care...
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
In essence, yes. (Actually, if it were "software licensed" I guess it'd probably be more like the BSD license.) The information is here on Larry Ewing's page about it...
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Only in the literal sense. Look at it this way - if a mugger says "Give me your money or I'll get a gun out of my car and shoot you", is that or is that not, for all intents and purposes "at gunpoint" (presuming, of course, he actually has a gun in his car)?
The "government takes your money at gunpoint" is a bit melodramatic, I admit, but fundamentally, it is true.
The government says "give me your money, or I'll send somebody with a gun over to take it from you, and throw you in jail and/or shoot you."...
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Would it make you happier if they just released a .diff and called it "Linux 2.4.0 Plus"? :-)
It's free (as was 2.4.0). It's got new features (e.g. ReiserFS). There's no marketing department pushing people to upgrade from the 2.2.x kernels. And besides all that, the "newest (i.e. development) kernel" is constantly available, not just officially sanctioned "service packs". And, to me, there's a big difference between "You know that program you just paid $500 for? You need Service Pack 1 for it or [whatever] won't work" and "You know that thing you found for free on the internet a month ago? There's an also-free patch for it if you've been having a problem with [whatever]"
Mind you, I understand what you're trying to say, but I don't quite "get" the apparent hostility in the message...
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
No, no, no, you use the .NET to catch the stuff to make the C Hash with.
Gee, whiz, don't they teach you guys elementary cooking theory in those CIS classes? (and if not, how come there's all those "The [insert programming style here] Cookbook" books, huh?)
Sorry, couldn't resist...
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
If there ever was an easily-renewable thing, it's microbes. It seems to me there was a mention relatively recently on Slashdot about "Gastrobots", as a small-scale example.
The idea of turning septic tanks into generators appeals to me. This sort of thing might also someday make an adjunct to methane-burning power plants in landfills.
Personally, I'd love to find a way to make the medium that the microbes grow in safe to drink - imagine, brew your own beer AND generate your own power at the same time! (This fuel cell runs on yeast...)
Some other random links:here
and here
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I doubt it...
But...Maybe they'll buy the "Dreamcast" division.
Makes me wonder if the XBox will play Dreamcast games (either natively or perhaps after you buy a $100 add-on...)
(As an aside - does anybody else wonder about that "XBox" name? Until Microsoft trademarked it, an "X Box", to me, was a terminal machine for X-windows...)
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Clinton wanted to appoint someone, who turned out to have once hired a person who hadn't followed the proper procedures to get into this country. The media, in general, referred to that person as "undocumented".
Bush wanted to appoint someone, who turned out to have once hired a person who hadn't followed the proper procedures to get into this country. The media, in general (certainly, ABC news was, I noticed), referred to that person as "illegal".
It's subtle things like that - nothing too blatant as some righties would have you believe, but they certainly aren't paragons of objectivity as some lefties like to think.
I really do wish it was easier to get relatively objective news, rather than merely a choice between "lefty" news or "righty" news, both of which tend to irritate me...
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
OOOooo! That's a bonus I hadn't thought of...
I personally think the "checks and balances" will be working better than ever this administration:
So, in short, I think US Federal Gov't, inc. will probably be less actively oppressive for the next four years. My opinion, anyway.
---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I heard a blurb on the radio this morning that I thought was kind of funny....
Someone was commenting that they had just managed to get keep enough power flowing yesterday by temporarily shutting off the water pumps that suck water from northern california to feed southern california. (It wasn't a comedic comment, incidentally...)
<joking>So, first L.A. sucks away all of our water, and then they suck away all of our electricity to suck away all of our water?</joking>
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Sounds like regulation to me.
So is the government telling power companies what to do with their assets (IIRC, the "de"regulation required the power companies to sell off their generators to small companies [who then turned around and gouged the power companies for the power]).
So is the government telling the power companies from which agencies or organizations they must buy their power from.
In short, I don't think there was any deregulation at all - the problem seems to have been the "REregulation" that the California state government did [which they called "de"regulation to make it sound harmless.]
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
(Off the "AltaVista" topic, but still about IP...)
Unisys (I think) owned the patent and was going to try and charge for every GIF out there.
Specifically, I believe it was a patent on the compression algorithm used - technically, you can use GIF's without worrying about patent issues if you either have them uncompressed or use some other compression method. Problem there is that uncompressed GIF's are naturally huge, and I suspect it would take forever to get all the gif-reading programs (browsers, etc.) to implement the "alternate compression".
Of course, that's what .png's are for. If mng ever catches on (Mozilla/Netscape 6+ and Konqueror already support it, and I suspect if Gnome's browser doesn't already, it will very soon), we'll finally have a replacement for animated GIF's, too.
The big question on my mind, though, is: .GIF and animated .GIF, or can .PNG and .MNG catch on and take over anyway?
Unisys' patent runs out next year, as I recall. When it does, will everybody run back to
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Judging by the IP-related stories on slashdot over the last year or two, I'd say it sounds like "Serious, Life-and-liberty-and-profit threatening Trademark Infringement". :-)
(Hey, if "guinness-sucks" can be infringment, and "verizonreallysucks" can be infringement, certainly just adding one letter can be, too, to a highly-enough paid IP lawyer)
(Fortunately - in reality, I don't get the impression that ars technica is quite such a lawyer-happy bunch...)
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.