Uh, are you sure about this? I checked both WQED and tvguide.com's listings and found that it did not appear to be airing in the area. Do you have some sort of inside scoop?
One thing the article leaves out is that not only were publically accessible directories searched, but some semi-private ones as well. If the searcher was able to either easily guess the password (something along the lines of "mp3") or was able to learn the password by sending an e-mail message to the archive's maintainer, and copyrighted material was found, network access was revoked.
Re:Be needs a hardware vendor
on
Be on the G4
·
· Score: 1
And I've used the BeOS for years now, and I'm very happy with it. It's a dream to install and configure, unlike Linux, which rendered my disk unbootable the last time I tried to install and upgrade, and which took me two weeks to figure out how to change the resolution and refresh rate of my X server.
Linux can be unfriendly with its installation, but Be isn't necessarily any better. Be decided to set up my friend's box in such a way that it would start by saying "Starting Windows 98" and then immediately booted Be, every single time. He decided to get rid of Be and install Linux, and using some easily-located instructions on the Net, I was able to set him up with a boot menu and Loadlin very easily. (LILO didn't appear to work, as Linux was installed past the 1024 cylinder limit. This is probably also what tripped up Be.)
I agree that X is a little cruddy. It is too thoroughly networked, so there's a fair amount of overhead in performing local operations. It also takes up a lot of RAM. Oh, and it has too much heritage behind it; it really was meant for black and white display, and color hacks atop it make code that supports multiple display depths a massive mess. Luckily toolkits can get rid of most of this pain, but still, if these toolkits could be ported to a new X, that would be neat.
There are two X alternatives that I can think of besides the Berlin mentioned. One of them is The Y Window System, by the Hungry Programmers (specifically Christoph Toshok), which isn't very far along and as far as I can tell hasn't been worked on in a while (since about February 1998). It promotes the use of a single fixed depth, which I think is a bad idea. It does have some good ideas though, like a somewhat separate memory architecture. Download here.
The other one, NanoGUI, was originally developed by Alan Cox. It was designed with a lightweight memory footprint in mind. I'm not sure if it supports networked display, though, but I believe they're going to at least port VNC. It's being used on the new Linux7k project, which is attempting to create a usable Linux system for the Psion 5 series palmtop (it uses an ARM7 processor). It seems to be undergoing active development. Download here.
Interesting, I wasn't aware. Just goes to show that I am not even remotely a lawyer, or a legislator, or a judge. Too bad I can't moderate this one up myself.
This I do find odd, though, as states cannot, for example, create treaties with foreign countries, so I would have thought that foreign export would technically be more of a federal thing and this would refer more to interstate commerce. But at least according to the Supreme Court as of 1901, this is not the case. Who knows, perhaps there could be a reinterpretation. But I doubt it, as the federal government is becoming more powerful, not less. (Which I think means they would want to control state export, which would mean that they'd have to reinterpret that clause to mean something else. Argh. I'll shut up now.)
Goldblum: "You hear about this new Internet thing? Hey, what's this? You want to send me an E Mail? Boy oh boy, doesn't it sound nifty but it might be kinda hard, right? But at Apple, they realize that the average consumer has the IQ of Raisinets®. So they've made it real easy. Now getting on the Internet is as easy as taking a shit."
Title: Sure, it's bulky, overpriced, has a small screen, and looks like a toilet seat, but it says it's easy to use on TV so it must be true.
Small Print: Not intended for people that can count to 30.
Re:Debian and KDE, the current situation (IIRC)
on
qt 2.0 released
·
· Score: 1
I still stick by my view. I don't think that RMS envisioned a situation like KDE's ever occuring because it's fairly bizarre; we have created an entirely free system, but then a nice-looking proprietary GUI library pops up and people reuse the traditional free license when writing software for it, mainly because the GUI's license encourages it. You make it sound as if the KDE team's plans are sinister; I do not think they were "trying to get a proprietary library in the back door."
To address your example, why would a company make a proprietary library and then distribute an application for it under the GPL? If they wanted to free it, they could simply write it under their own free license. The GPL has two purposes: to protect existing software from being abused, while allowing it to be extended. The purpose is certainly not to prevent people from making their software free, open, liberated, or whatever you want to call it. It's just a generalized free license (hence the name "General Public License"), inappropriate for certain specialized situations like KDE's.
Let's say you're Joe and you write JoeOS. But you're too lazy to write a compiler, so you bundle GCC with it. People will buy your operating system because it comes with a nice compiler. This clause prevents this situation from occuring, and I'm glad. Now... wait a minute, doesn't Be do that? HMM...... Oh boy, I don't want to start a flame war. But I have to wonder, is this the key to force Be to release their code under the GPL? Can some Be user tell me if GCC is bundled with BeOS?
Argh, I promise this is the last post I'm making regarding this situation. Must go get some actual work done. So go ahead and flame me to death now. And the above disclaimers still apply; just call me Mr. Layman.
Re:Debian and KDE, the current situation (IIRC)
on
qt 2.0 released
·
· Score: 2
First of all, a disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. What I say below is purely opinion. I am not in any way connected with the Debian project, other than through the existence of a package of something I wrote.
I think you're right, annoyingly enough. I spent some time trying to think of a way to allow KDE and Qt to accompany each other. I came up with an idea, but I don't want to relate it here because it would just make me look stupid, mainly because it didn't work. After reading the above post, I realized I had missed that last part "unless that component itself accompanies the executable," which I think probably makes KDE under its current license, sadly enough, undistributable. In order for KDE to be distributable, Qt would probably have to normally come with Linux distributions. This is a little iffy right now, and it still doesn't let KDE be distributed alongside Qt. Of course I want KDE to be distributable; although I personally don't use it, I think it's easy to see that it's a worthwhile piece of software to say the least, and that its creators obviously wanted it to be legally usable and treated just like a normal GPLed piece of software.
I wondered at first why the GPL was written this way, but I've realized that it's because RMS didn't want people distributing his software along with their proprietary operating systems. This is a protection that I didn't even realize was present in the GPL and it makes me feel a little safer; I know that any silly games that I write won't be sold by SCO or something on their CDs.
Now that a free-according-to-Debian Qt has been released, my hopes were renewed, if only slightly. First of all, realize that KDE is now legally distributable, if one can assume that Qt is now "normally distributed... with the major components... of the operating system." However, realize that it says "unless the component accompanies the executable." That means that if ONLY the source form of Qt is distributed along with KDE, the two can be distributed together. Of course this is incredibly annoying to the end-user as he will have to compile Qt in order to install the KDE on his CD. And on a sluggish old Sun IPX this is really annoying. Don't even get me started with Pine/Pico, either.
That having been said, who does this really affect? The answer is probably almost nobody. Debian packages of KDE have been available the whole time on KDE's site. Nearly all of the people who use KDE are going to be using a distribution other than Debian anyway. And though the way most distributions would distribute KDE are probably illegal, nobody really cares. Even if some crazed KDE developer decided to sue, I think sufficient evidence could be shown that the intent of the KDE team is clear enough, and that the license is vague enough, making statements contradictory to the situation like "... the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software" that his case would probably be thrown out. Either way, things would get worse in a way that nobody wants. If it wasn't, distributions everywhere would be struck a major legal blow, and I have a feeling most would disappear. And if it was, the GPL would be threatened, and I'd probably have to switch to a new license for any software I write. It's in nobody's best interest. (Of course, that hasn't stopped people before.)
The Decay of the Spirit of Free Software
on
GNU Inside?
·
· Score: 3
I believe this represents a decay in the spirit of free software. Once upon a time, before I got involved, before it became a power in itself, it was a fantastic tool and toy. Now, it is being reduced to a bunch of dogma by those who seek to benefit personally from it. It all revolves around the issue of "Who owns free software?" The only answer that can preserve its spirit, that can prevent it from degenerating into a status symbol or a bitter contest is "Everyone."
No one seems to be getting the central issue here. It's not about the hard work of the members of the FSF, or the XFree86 Team, or Linus and his cadre of kernel hackers, or any other group. It's about the whole, the atmosphere, the new great wonder of the world that a vast network of individuals has created. But I can't be surprised about what has happened. People want power. People like exclusive groups. Free software, to these people, has either become too accessible or too far out of their grasp.
Item 1: Accessibility. Many (not necessarily most, and certainly not all) *BSD users have cited that they have fled to it because "too many people are using Linux." To them, Linux was an exclusive club, but no longer. I've seen GIMP plugins that are only free for use under open-source operating systems. I've seen people protest the porting of GTK to Windows because they believe it is an inferior operating system. We must stop treating free software like it is ours; we must treat it as everyone's.
Item 2: Controllability. This is what RMS is worried about. Once upon a time, he used to be part of the scene. He created some great software: a compiler, a complex editor. Then, he got RSI. Now, he can mostly just sit back and watch as free software slips out of his grasp, as his dream of a GNU system goes in directions he never intended. So what does he do? He attaches himself to the one most visible place: the name. Microsoft is big on control. Ever see that "Designed for Windows" logo they grant? Without that, no major software chain will risk buying your Windows software. In the same vein, I see Debian Linux turning into Debian GNU/Linux after the FSF gets involved, and journalists claiming that the "true" name of Linux is GNU/Linux after talking to RMS.
People need to realize that nobody owns free software, that it has become like an organism with its own free will. We can either try to foster this organism or we can try to control it. But like we would from the childhood experiment of transferring an outdoor plant to an indoor pot and watching it wilt and die slowly, we must realize that trying to push free software around is not the way to improve the situation. We must contribute in a positive fashion, with software, or through dissemination. We must not try to put free software in a fishbowl for only us, or force free software into a corral so it runs where we want it to. This will only lead to fragmentation, a breaking of the great network into little conflicting pieces. It may be impossible to prevent, but we must try to keep this great thing we have going for as long as we can.
Let's face it, Ken Thompson is full of himself. He co-created UNIX. It had a lot of new concepts for the time. But, thinking back, they were pretty logical. Heirarchical file systems? Think biological classification. We've done it for millenia. Time sharing? Obvious. C I admit is a nice language, and I use it extensively, but it has plenty of oddnesses. Like, you have to separately declare a typedef to make a struct into a type, or forever refer to it as "struct foo"... the "continue" statement is only valid in a for context... You know the drill. (Obviously all of this is arguable.)
Ken seems to be famous for doing something and then getting angry at others doing it later. For example, you must have heard about his cute trick of inserting some self-reproducing code into the C compiler to make it compile login with a username/password for him to get in. Real cute, Ken. Way to humiliate everyone who nominated you for the ACM award. Yet he was quoted as saying that RTM, the author of the infamous Internet worm of '88, should be put behind bars for a long time. And we're getting the same sort of conceited hypocracy here. "UNIX? Been there, done that. It's all about this OTHER system, you see, that's totally different, although strangely similar. Free software, what a fad." Then watch Lucent start releasing free source. I'll never stop laughing.
I can respect the man's background, but I can't respect his utter insolence. I realize I'm sounding pretty damn conceited and insolent myself, but... hell, it's a Slashdot comment, and I'm a damn undergraduate. I'm allowed to sound stupid.
I'm thinking more along the lines of uCLinux.. You know, the one for the Pilot. One of the primary problems with it, if I remember properly, is that there are patent problems with Graffiti, such that it couldn't be reproduced as an input method. Thus, uCLinux can only get input right now through a serial port. I'm guessing that this thing is more lenient, as it is the product of an educational institution. And besides, increased productivity with a steep learning curve is what Linux is all about. I'm salivating over wiping my Pilot and starting anew with some phat free software.
So far, though, I haven't been able to get the hang of it.. I'll give it time.
However, D.H. Brown didn't assess either the operating system's cost or its stability, Iams noted. Though there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Linux is fairly crashproof, hard data on the subject is missing, he said.
Well, gee, if the purpose of this study wasn't to gather hard data, what was it? For a thousand bucks, I'd expect a little actual research. My box has been up for 157 days, primarily because I am too lazy to install the new kernel. I wonder if any NT box has ever reached that.
... but I don't think this is going to work. I mean, emulation of course does work, but I think this thing will need a fairly large frameskip, such that it will make games practically unplayable.
Take a look at the GameBoy emulators for the Amiga. Also written in 68xxx assembly, only these for the higher-end 68020s and such. Being a big fan of the Z80 (as anyone who has ever run ZShell would know) as well as my Pilot, I myself wanted to undertake this project, but I decided to do some research first. I inquired the author of one emulator and he told me that running his (honed) engine on a 16 mhz 68000 clone wouldn't be feasible. It was already pretty slow on a 68020. (Of course, even if it had been feasible, knowing me, I wouldn't have gotten very far anyway.)
Finally, realize that the processor, for the most part, is the easy part of the emulation. It's all that evil custom hardware, all that sprite stuff and scrolling stuff and such, that will be the real cycle-chewer. So, the author might have some false confidence; the Z80 engine may seem fast, but it uses only a fraction of the processor. And on top of everything, apparently this guy has barely started on the hardware, so don't expect this emulator to come out soon.
I think the only way to emulate the GameBoy effectively on the PalmPilot would be to use dynamic recompilation; that is, translate all of the Z80 instructions to 68000 instructions in the beginning, in one fell swoop. (Perhaps they could be translated by the same utility that converts the binary ROM images to the Pilot's PDB format, making it seamless and preventing any "load time.") And even then, it would be a long shot.
But, of course, I could be wrong. I HOPE I'm wrong. I would love for this thing to work well. I just wouldn't bet my box on it.
Dude, that's about the worst solution. If people always "went somewhere else" whenever something was wrong, nothing would ever become fixed, and (CLICHE ALERT) Hitlers would rule the world. If we complain enough, perhaps Slashdot will actually become a higher-quality publication. I don't think anyone would complain if Slashdot editors actually a) Verified links and b) Verified that the story hadn't already been put up in the past few days.
I hate MS as much as the next guy, as my Linux box with a near triple digit day uptime can attest to. But this crap is going a little too far. Some person posts a message on a ZDNET forum and they write an article about it? Sheeit. Don't you guys have anything better to do with your lives than attack Microsoft? Wouldn't your energy be better put to use improving or creating free solutions? Do you think Linux would exist if all Linus had done was sit on Solaris and say things like "Anyone who claims to like Windows more than Unix must be a Microsoft employee"?
Jeez, I hope that the Linux community isn't turning into the hype machine that every single thing referred to as a "scene" has.
I think that Harry Fox et al already know that quite a few people visited lyrics.ch. I think this is why they shut them down, because they saw this as an infringement of copyrights and a denial of revenue, or something. If it was some shitty little page, they wouldn't have noticed or cared.
Why do I bring this up? Because all this petition is really saying is, "I liked the lyrics server." They already know that people liked it through the statistics. They really don't care. It also says "I disagree with what you're doing," but Harry Fox isn't trying to be popular. Really, I hope that people who sign this petition are only doing so to show their support, not because they think that it will do anything.
Now, if there was some way of boycotting this group, something real could happen. But I'm not sure if this is actually possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, are you sure about this? I checked both WQED and tvguide.com's listings and found that it did not appear to be airing in the area. Do you have some sort of inside scoop?
One thing the article leaves out is that not only were publically accessible directories searched, but some semi-private ones as well. If the searcher was able to either easily guess the password (something along the lines of "mp3") or was able to learn the password by sending an e-mail message to the archive's maintainer, and copyrighted material was found, network access was revoked.
Some relevant articles:
Computing Services reprimands students
Officials crack down on piracy
and an editorial:
CMU: consider approach toward network integrity
(These are all from The Tartan, CMU's student newspaper.)
[insert plug for game here]
And I've used the BeOS for years now, and I'm very happy with it. It's a dream to install and configure, unlike Linux, which rendered my disk unbootable the last time I tried to install and
upgrade, and which took me two weeks to figure out how to change the resolution and refresh rate of my X server.
Linux can be unfriendly with its installation, but Be isn't necessarily any better. Be decided to set up my friend's box in such a way that it would start by saying "Starting Windows 98" and then immediately booted Be, every single time. He decided to get rid of Be and install Linux, and using some easily-located instructions on the Net, I was able to set him up with a boot menu and Loadlin very easily. (LILO didn't appear to work, as Linux was installed past the 1024 cylinder limit. This is probably also what tripped up Be.)
There are two X alternatives that I can think of besides the Berlin mentioned. One of them is The Y Window System, by the Hungry Programmers (specifically Christoph Toshok), which isn't very far along and as far as I can tell hasn't been worked on in a while (since about February 1998). It promotes the use of a single fixed depth, which I think is a bad idea. It does have some good ideas though, like a somewhat separate memory architecture. Download here.
The other one, NanoGUI, was originally developed by Alan Cox. It was designed with a lightweight memory footprint in mind. I'm not sure if it supports networked display, though, but I believe they're going to at least port VNC. It's being used on the new Linux7k project, which is attempting to create a usable Linux system for the Psion 5 series palmtop (it uses an ARM7 processor). It seems to be undergoing active development. Download here.
So I hope that's a good starting point.
Interesting, I wasn't aware. Just goes to show that I am not even remotely a lawyer, or a legislator, or a judge. Too bad I can't moderate this one up myself.
This I do find odd, though, as states cannot, for example, create treaties with foreign countries, so I would have thought that foreign export would technically be more of a federal thing and this would refer more to interstate commerce. But at least according to the Supreme Court as of 1901, this is not the case. Who knows, perhaps there could be a reinterpretation. But I doubt it, as the federal government is becoming more powerful, not less. (Which I think means they would want to control state export, which would mean that they'd have to reinterpret that clause to mean something else. Argh. I'll shut up now.)
No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any State.
That's in pretty plain language. They'd have to come up with an amendment to get around that one.
Goldblum: "You hear about this new Internet thing? Hey, what's this? You want to send me an E Mail? Boy oh boy, doesn't it sound nifty but it might be kinda hard, right? But at Apple, they realize that the average consumer has the IQ of Raisinets®. So they've made it real easy. Now getting on the Internet is as easy as taking a shit."
Title: Sure, it's bulky, overpriced, has a small screen, and looks like a toilet seat, but it says it's easy to use on TV so it must be true.
Small Print: Not intended for people that can count to 30.
I still stick by my view. I don't think that RMS envisioned a situation like KDE's ever occuring because it's fairly bizarre; we have created an entirely free system, but then a nice-looking proprietary GUI library pops up and people reuse the traditional free license when writing software for it, mainly because the GUI's license encourages it. You make it sound as if the KDE team's plans are sinister; I do not think they were "trying to get a proprietary library in the back door."
To address your example, why would a company make a proprietary library and then distribute an application for it under the GPL? If they wanted to free it, they could simply write it under their own free license. The GPL has two purposes: to protect existing software from being abused, while allowing it to be extended. The purpose is certainly not to prevent people from making their software free, open, liberated, or whatever you want to call it. It's just a generalized free license (hence the name "General Public License"), inappropriate for certain specialized situations like KDE's.
Let's say you're Joe and you write JoeOS. But you're too lazy to write a compiler, so you bundle GCC with it. People will buy your operating system because it comes with a nice compiler. This clause prevents this situation from occuring, and I'm glad. Now... wait a minute, doesn't Be do that? HMM...... Oh boy, I don't want to start a flame war. But I have to wonder, is this the key to force Be to release their code under the GPL? Can some Be user tell me if GCC is bundled with BeOS?
Argh, I promise this is the last post I'm making regarding this situation. Must go get some actual work done. So go ahead and flame me to death now. And the above disclaimers still apply; just call me Mr. Layman.
First of all, a disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. What I say below is purely opinion. I am not in any way connected with the Debian project, other than through the existence of a package of something I wrote.
I think you're right, annoyingly enough. I spent some time trying to think of a way to allow KDE and Qt to accompany each other. I came up with an idea, but I don't want to relate it here because it would just make me look stupid, mainly because it didn't work. After reading the above post, I realized I had missed that last part "unless that component itself accompanies the executable," which I think probably makes KDE under its current license, sadly enough, undistributable. In order for KDE to be distributable, Qt would probably have to normally come with Linux distributions. This is a little iffy right now, and it still doesn't let KDE be distributed alongside Qt. Of course I want KDE to be distributable; although I personally don't use it, I think it's easy to see that it's a worthwhile piece of software to say the least, and that its creators obviously wanted it to be legally usable and treated just like a normal GPLed piece of software.
I wondered at first why the GPL was written this way, but I've realized that it's because RMS didn't want people distributing his software along with their proprietary operating systems. This is a protection that I didn't even realize was present in the GPL and it makes me feel a little safer; I know that any silly games that I write won't be sold by SCO or something on their CDs.
Now that a free-according-to-Debian Qt has been released, my hopes were renewed, if only slightly. First of all, realize that KDE is now legally distributable, if one can assume that Qt is now "normally distributed... with the major components... of the operating system." However, realize that it says "unless the component accompanies the executable." That means that if ONLY the source form of Qt is distributed along with KDE, the two can be distributed together. Of course this is incredibly annoying to the end-user as he will have to compile Qt in order to install the KDE on his CD. And on a sluggish old Sun IPX this is really annoying. Don't even get me started with Pine/Pico, either.
That having been said, who does this really affect? The answer is probably almost nobody. Debian packages of KDE have been available the whole time on KDE's site. Nearly all of the people who use KDE are going to be using a distribution other than Debian anyway. And though the way most distributions would distribute KDE are probably illegal, nobody really cares. Even if some crazed KDE developer decided to sue, I think sufficient evidence could be shown that the intent of the KDE team is clear enough, and that the license is vague enough, making statements contradictory to the situation like "... the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software" that his case would probably be thrown out. Either way, things would get worse in a way that nobody wants. If it wasn't, distributions everywhere would be struck a major legal blow, and I have a feeling most would disappear. And if it was, the GPL would be threatened, and I'd probably have to switch to a new license for any software I write. It's in nobody's best interest. (Of course, that hasn't stopped people before.)
I believe this represents a decay in the spirit of free software. Once upon a time, before I got involved, before it became a power in itself, it was a fantastic tool and toy. Now, it is being reduced to a bunch of dogma by those who seek to benefit personally from it. It all revolves around the issue of "Who owns free software?" The only answer that can preserve its spirit, that can prevent it from degenerating into a status symbol or a bitter contest is "Everyone."
No one seems to be getting the central issue here. It's not about the hard work of the members of the FSF, or the XFree86 Team, or Linus and his cadre of kernel hackers, or any other group. It's about the whole, the atmosphere, the new great wonder of the world that a vast network of individuals has created. But I can't be surprised about what has happened. People want power. People like exclusive groups. Free software, to these people, has either become too accessible or too far out of their grasp.
Item 1: Accessibility. Many (not necessarily most, and certainly not all) *BSD users have cited that they have fled to it because "too many people are using Linux." To them, Linux was an exclusive club, but no longer. I've seen GIMP plugins that are only free for use under open-source operating systems. I've seen people protest the porting of GTK to Windows because they believe it is an inferior operating system. We must stop treating free software like it is ours; we must treat it as everyone's.
Item 2: Controllability. This is what RMS is worried about. Once upon a time, he used to be part of the scene. He created some great software: a compiler, a complex editor. Then, he got RSI. Now, he can mostly just sit back and watch as free software slips out of his grasp, as his dream of a GNU system goes in directions he never intended. So what does he do? He attaches himself to the one most visible place: the name. Microsoft is big on control. Ever see that "Designed for Windows" logo they grant? Without that, no major software chain will risk buying your Windows software. In the same vein, I see Debian Linux turning into Debian GNU/Linux after the FSF gets involved, and journalists claiming that the "true" name of Linux is GNU/Linux after talking to RMS.
People need to realize that nobody owns free software, that it has become like an organism with its own free will. We can either try to foster this organism or we can try to control it. But like we would from the childhood experiment of transferring an outdoor plant to an indoor pot and watching it wilt and die slowly, we must realize that trying to push free software around is not the way to improve the situation. We must contribute in a positive fashion, with software, or through dissemination. We must not try to put free software in a fishbowl for only us, or force free software into a corral so it runs where we want it to. This will only lead to fragmentation, a breaking of the great network into little conflicting pieces. It may be impossible to prevent, but we must try to keep this great thing we have going for as long as we can.
Let's face it, Ken Thompson is full of himself. He co-created UNIX. It had a lot of new concepts for the time. But, thinking back, they were pretty logical. Heirarchical file systems? Think biological classification. We've done it for millenia. Time sharing? Obvious. C I admit is a nice language, and I use it extensively, but it has plenty of oddnesses. Like, you have to separately declare a typedef to make a struct into a type, or forever refer to it as "struct foo"... the "continue" statement is only valid in a for context... You know the drill. (Obviously all of this is arguable.)
Ken seems to be famous for doing something and then getting angry at others doing it later. For example, you must have heard about his cute trick of inserting some self-reproducing code into the C compiler to make it compile login with a username/password for him to get in. Real cute, Ken. Way to humiliate everyone who nominated you for the ACM award. Yet he was quoted as saying that RTM, the author of the infamous Internet worm of '88, should be put behind bars for a long time. And we're getting the same sort of conceited hypocracy here. "UNIX? Been there, done that. It's all about this OTHER system, you see, that's totally different, although strangely similar. Free software, what a fad." Then watch Lucent start releasing free source. I'll never stop laughing.
I can respect the man's background, but I can't respect his utter insolence. I realize I'm sounding pretty damn conceited and insolent myself, but... hell, it's a Slashdot comment, and I'm a damn undergraduate. I'm allowed to sound stupid.
I'm thinking more along the lines of uCLinux.. You know, the one for the Pilot. One of the primary problems with it, if I remember properly, is that there are patent problems with Graffiti, such that it couldn't be reproduced as an input method. Thus, uCLinux can only get input right now through a serial port. I'm guessing that this thing is more lenient, as it is the product of an educational institution. And besides, increased productivity with a steep learning curve is what Linux is all about. I'm salivating over wiping my Pilot and starting anew with some phat free software.
So far, though, I haven't been able to get the hang of it.. I'll give it time.
Well, gee, if the purpose of this study wasn't to gather hard data, what was it? For a thousand bucks, I'd expect a little actual research. My box has been up for 157 days, primarily because I am too lazy to install the new kernel. I wonder if any NT box has ever reached that.
... but I don't think this is going to work. I mean, emulation of course does work, but I think this thing will need a fairly large frameskip, such that it will make games practically unplayable.
Take a look at the GameBoy emulators for the Amiga. Also written in 68xxx assembly, only these for the higher-end 68020s and such. Being a big fan of the Z80 (as anyone who has ever run ZShell would know) as well as my Pilot, I myself wanted to undertake this project, but I decided to do some research first. I inquired the author of one emulator and he told me that running his (honed) engine on a 16 mhz 68000 clone wouldn't be feasible. It was already pretty slow on a 68020. (Of course, even if it had been feasible, knowing me, I wouldn't have gotten very far anyway.)
Finally, realize that the processor, for the most part, is the easy part of the emulation. It's all that evil custom hardware, all that sprite stuff and scrolling stuff and such, that will be the real cycle-chewer. So, the author might have some false confidence; the Z80 engine may seem fast, but it uses only a fraction of the processor. And on top of everything, apparently this guy has barely started on the hardware, so don't expect this emulator to come out soon.
I think the only way to emulate the GameBoy effectively on the PalmPilot would be to use dynamic recompilation; that is, translate all of the Z80 instructions to 68000 instructions in the beginning, in one fell swoop. (Perhaps they could be translated by the same utility that converts the binary ROM images to the Pilot's PDB format, making it seamless and preventing any "load time.") And even then, it would be a long shot.
But, of course, I could be wrong. I HOPE I'm wrong. I would love for this thing to work well. I just wouldn't bet my box on it.
Dude, that's about the worst solution. If people always "went somewhere else" whenever something was wrong, nothing would ever become fixed, and (CLICHE ALERT) Hitlers would rule the world. If we complain enough, perhaps Slashdot will actually become a higher-quality publication. I don't think anyone would complain if Slashdot editors actually a) Verified links and b) Verified that the story hadn't already been put up in the past few days.
I hate MS as much as the next guy, as my Linux box with a near triple digit day uptime can attest to. But this crap is going a little too far. Some person posts a message on a ZDNET forum and they write an article about it? Sheeit. Don't you guys have anything better to do with your lives than attack Microsoft? Wouldn't your energy be better put to use improving or creating free solutions? Do you think Linux would exist if all Linus had done was sit on Solaris and say things like "Anyone who claims to like Windows more than Unix must be a Microsoft employee"?
Jeez, I hope that the Linux community isn't turning into the hype machine that every single thing referred to as a "scene" has.
I think that Harry Fox et al already know that quite a few people visited lyrics.ch. I think this is why they shut them down, because they saw this as an infringement of copyrights and a denial of revenue, or something. If it was some shitty little page, they wouldn't have noticed or cared.
Why do I bring this up? Because all this petition is really saying is, "I liked the lyrics server." They already know that people liked it through the statistics. They really don't care. It also says "I disagree with what you're doing," but Harry Fox isn't trying to be popular. Really, I hope that people who sign this petition are only doing so to show their support, not because they think that it will do anything.
Now, if there was some way of boycotting this group, something real could happen. But I'm not sure if this is actually possible.