Along w/ that letter I suggest you write a/polite/ letter to some of your favorite studios telling them that you won't buy their movies on DVD if you aren't allowed to watch them on your choice of platforms. This two way attack would cause double the pressure.:)
Be has every right not to release their source, and I have every right not to develop for BeOS until they do. I'm sure making the price affordable for the average Joe Blow to try BeOS will help bring in both users and developers but the truth is they've been giving away free copies to anybody who bothered to ask for some time. I tried it and passed out lots of free copies to people I knew in the computer business to help Be's cause. BeOS has some wonderful concepts and is a good product. It still would gain a lot from open sourcing as would all it's users. The biggest problem I had reported to me by people I gave free copies too was that devices weren't supported, even many devices that worked perfectly under Linux. If they opened up they would have a lot more drivers and such available in a very short time. Good ideas flow both ways between equals. Until Be opens up most the ideas are flowing toward Linux from Be.:) And if Be gets popular enough I would be surprised if a LinuxOne like company didn't show up here and there to try to steal some crumbs from the table. Theifs exist anywhere there is something to steal.
Funny, the majority of Mac users I know all prefer Netscape over IE. I can't think of a single exception. If you don't like the way Mozilla looks and feels because it avoids OS-centric trends I wouldn't worry. I'd be very surprised if Apple or some other Mac-oriented company doesn't run w/ the Mozilla source and blend it into the MacOS in some interesting ways. The great thing about Mozilla is it is open source so that anything that you don't like you can change. In cases such as this where many people might not like it there is all the more chance that a variant that fixes that annoyance will be available. This way everybody gets what they want.:)
For myself I don't see this as a threat. I certainly can and will always be able to get online (hey I've managed even when I was homeless) and look at whatever sites I want and if I can't find what I want then I'll create it. What this will do is take the hopeless newbies of the world and trap them in AOL Hell. Start brainwashing children with cartoon characters (ever see WB commercials?) and then have their schools use AOL driven Internet and by the time they are productive adults they'll be locked in. I hope if this goes through that some of the other networks and Internet providers will see their danger and start funding open source software and open content and who knows, maybe even free access to the Net. Sometimes companies do extreme things to save their own necks.
I suggest you look at the PHPSlash project if you want to create your own Slashdot like site. Or if that isn't good enough for you then just recode it. In all truth Slashdot isn't that complicated a site to be so amazingly hard to clone. The amazing part is how well it works with such a high load.:) Get over it you silly Llama.
Decentralized Wireless!
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 1
Maybe if this goes through we'll finally see companies popping out affordable highspeed wireless network units. Lots more bandwidth and no central source to control things. And hey, it works w/ laptops!:)
I am either going to vote for ESR, RMS, or Weird Al. The first two I think would be good advocates for the Internet way of things and the third I'd just like to see some laws written by. The Bill of Rights by Weird Al. Woo.
I'm waiting to see a couple of the big dist's start including DVD abilities. Once the code is on the hdd's of a few million people it gets really hard to get it back. Sue the world and hope the world doesn't file a class-action back at you. May as well speed the process up.
IMO all this has done is made Quake more like real life. Now the end user has the ability to invent new smart weapons. Now it can get really interesting. Myself I'm thinking of a game where there are tons of bots mixed in with the players and they are hooked to neural nets and can communicate to each other in teams to plan attacks. It could be quite awesome. As an AI programmer I love bots.
If anyone is a chess person could you make a quick variation of this puzzle that can be played on Zillions (http://www.zillions-of-games.com) please. I don't follow chess lingo but would be interested in playing. Coding games in Zillions is really easy so it should be simple. BTW anybody who likes board games be sure to try to convince them to port Zillions to Linux. They aen't unwilling but need some motivation.:)
This is interesting but I was disappointed not see any ideas of what they might use it for. It doesn't look as if it were being designed as a general purpose OS. If they could code a simple network layer and XWindow-ish layer then maybe we'd have the beginings of something similar to QNX in GPL. Anyway can always learn from new projects. I'm sure ideas will get merged into other more well known GPL OS's at some point.
It might be interesting to write a piece of crossplatform software that can do everything needed to process taxes and a program to generate the data files w/ this years rules and such. If that is publiclly available IMO it'd be good to contact your congress man to try to get a law passed stating the IRS had to provide the data files themselves as their electric filing plan wasted so much of our money and bombed (the big project, they did luckily make some small improvments).. also if you could email them in I'd be glad. I always lose envelopes and papers I'm supposed to fax before they make it there.:)
Similar though the ones I've played with were all homemade (I designed, someone else wired em.) or in books. The ones we had were meant to leave the hands totally usable for real world tasks. so they were simply slightly sticky straps across the back of the hand w/ loops around the base of each finger to help keep them in place. They had a sensor just behind the knuckle of each finger and had a small bundle of data wires that ran to a little wrist band gadget that had a mini processing circuit and a transmitter on it. The wrist unit was also supposed to track wrist motion but we never got that far. It worked pretty well considering the price and the fact a couple of clueless halfwits were making it. Main problem we had was keeping the damn thing calibrated as the sensors tended to slip around a little and we had to calibrate it for each individual user since it had problems working w/ people of different hand sizes. It also didn't work very well on people w/ fleshy hands. It worked very well on my hands which happen to be very thin and boney which seemed to make tracking movements easier. The software used a sort of wireframe of the hand to use the map the sensor data to the VR equiv since we only had sensor data from that one point instead of at each joint which meant it took a lot more work to figure things out but it did seem to be possible on most people to calculate each joint position just from that one sensor per finger. Never tried it on a full 3D model, just wireframes on my old 486 but it seemed to be pretty fun anyway. Considering the things only cost us about $40 per hand to make I'm surprised we haven't seen any similar products sold from joystick companies or something. It'd be perfect for games. Really it was so light weight you barely noticed it was there. No more than the average watch.
Nice gadget but I still like the doodad that fits like a strip of tape across the back of each hand and uses joint stresses to figure out what you were supposedly typing. I always wanted a pair of gloves that used that rigged to work w/ VR in a more general system.:) Could track join movement of your shoulders to see what your arms were doing too.:)
I agree. I enjoy building robots and almost all of them have had more functionality than this and the most I've ever spent to design and build one was about $5000. Probably a robot that costs $5000 to prototype could be massproduced at under $500. This robot is cute and it's simplicity is impressive but the price tag seems a little hefty. When it gets in the $100-$200 price range and can be controled w/ any web browser then I'll buy one.:) IMO I'd rather pay a little more for a more functional robot though. It'd be nice if it could map things for itself and figure out how to avoid dynamic objects such as children, pets, and bags of groceries. Also if it can't go up/down stairs and go outside it isn't near as fun IMO. I want the same robot to vacuum all my floors and mow the grass and feed the cat. Also does anyone know what happens to this lil guy if Windows crashes? Must be rough having your brain crash.:) Does anyone know of a good place to have a plastic shell made for a robot? Metal is somewhat expensive and heavy although it does hold up to quite a lot of abuse. I've been thinking of making a body out of used soft drink cans just to see how well it'd work. Anyone want a Pepsi robot?:)
Ok maybe punching would be a bit much but the way I type is to use my shoulders and elbows a lot to take the stress off using my wrists for the same motion. With practice you can type just as fast with much less stress and hey you get a good workout. The only downside is keyboards tend to wear out pretty fast. Or try my new solution and don't type so much.:)
Your basiclly spouting back tv and similar stories all of which are of limited range. There will doubtless be a rough period of transition where we do dumb things and make mistakes but as always the wheel keeps rolling and soon the technology will seem like yesterdays tinkertoys as we go on to bigger and better things. Society will change, it is always in flux, because any society who doesn't change ceases to exist. Evolution will always win. Those that choose to breed so called perfect children will restrict their own evolution and will eventually out-date themselves over several generations. It is those that are on the fringe that move our society and species ahead. It'd be nice to cure illnesses and assure mainstream society is at least a minimum level of quality but the mainstream will never be the bleeding edge. Man can not stop evolution. Our choices and inventions are evolution in motion. We are nothing more than lab rats to the gods.
If you want Slashdot source and it isn't available clone it. I good point to start is PHP Slash. Slashdot is great but it can't be that complex a site. The hardest part I'd imagine is keeping it from being/.'d into total lag.
FreeM development is being headed by the creator of Bochs I believe. Bochs is fairly interesting but it is way to slow and is to much hassle to set up. Virtualization is a lot faster than emulation and I'd hope to see a lot of nice tools developed to make using FreeM easier.
I've suggested updates to the story several times and nobody ever wanted to let them through. Oh well anyway is good to finally see some more on this. I'd like to see RedHat and/or some other major dist's to fund this so it can develop faster and we can see it included with the distribution of our choice. VMWare is cool but I'd rather invest my $100 in the development of an open source version than a commercial program.
I just assume everything I say, online or in real life, is going to be heard by the person who'll be most likely to be hurt by it. I almost never say anything I haven't carefully gone over in my head. I say a lot of stuff that is just plan nuts but rarely anything that is cruel or bound to cause problems (even by accident). After a while your brain seems to adjust to this, at least mine did. It has made me a nicer person but has made it harder for me to be charming on controling. I haven't decided if it was worth the trade yet.
More proof that the standards are being perverted
on
License to Surf
·
· Score: 1
As always innovation can't come from a standards body any more than from a huge corporation. Instead they just mess with things until everything is fucked up. It's the same as the government. Let them screw the web I guess. If they do then maybe a better alternative will be invented. Remember all this is the transition period. Eventually we'll throw it all away and make a new and better Internet from what we learn here. May the best Net win.:P
Everyone should help with the PHPslash project so that anyone could easily setup and maintain a Slashdot like site. I think each school should have such a site for students and teachers and it'd be great if teaching associations offered Slashdot-like discussion areas for teachers to share news, information, and ideas with each other. Slashdot is the future of news.:)
Don't feel bad, I actually tend to read articles bottom to top usually skipping back and forth. I have no idea why. I do it on anything technical or that is news coverage but not with stories. I guess I'm impatient or something. I hate when text has links in it as I end up reading the linked page at the exact same time I'm reading the original and end up with about 20 Netscape windows open at once. Lots of eye candy mixed into text also annoys me as it grabs my attention as I'm skimming back and forth through text. If anyone ever looks at my web pages they usually appear sort of dull but the text is always formatted to be read and understood quickly. Much more quickly than my Slashdot messages no doubt. I actually use decent grammar on web pages.;>
They really need to turn over the radio spectrum to the public for short-range Internet wireless systems. On the other hand they should sheild those lines too. No reason to be stupid about it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Along w/ that letter I suggest you write a /polite/ letter to some of your favorite studios telling them that you won't buy their movies on DVD if you aren't allowed to watch them on your choice of platforms. This two way attack would cause double the pressure. :)
Be has every right not to release their source, and I have every right not to develop for BeOS until they do. I'm sure making the price affordable for the average Joe Blow to try BeOS will help bring in both users and developers but the truth is they've been giving away free copies to anybody who bothered to ask for some time. I tried it and passed out lots of free copies to people I knew in the computer business to help Be's cause. BeOS has some wonderful concepts and is a good product. It still would gain a lot from open sourcing as would all it's users. The biggest problem I had reported to me by people I gave free copies too was that devices weren't supported, even many devices that worked perfectly under Linux. If they opened up they would have a lot more drivers and such available in a very short time. Good ideas flow both ways between equals. Until Be opens up most the ideas are flowing toward Linux from Be. :) And if Be gets popular enough I would be surprised if a LinuxOne like company didn't show up here and there to try to steal some crumbs from the table. Theifs exist anywhere there is something to steal.
Funny, the majority of Mac users I know all prefer Netscape over IE. I can't think of a single exception. If you don't like the way Mozilla looks and feels because it avoids OS-centric trends I wouldn't worry. I'd be very surprised if Apple or some other Mac-oriented company doesn't run w/ the Mozilla source and blend it into the MacOS in some interesting ways. The great thing about Mozilla is it is open source so that anything that you don't like you can change. In cases such as this where many people might not like it there is all the more chance that a variant that fixes that annoyance will be available. This way everybody gets what they want. :)
For myself I don't see this as a threat. I certainly can and will always be able to get online (hey I've managed even when I was homeless) and look at whatever sites I want and if I can't find what I want then I'll create it. What this will do is take the hopeless newbies of the world and trap them in AOL Hell. Start brainwashing children with cartoon characters (ever see WB commercials?) and then have their schools use AOL driven Internet and by the time they are productive adults they'll be locked in. I hope if this goes through that some of the other networks and Internet providers will see their danger and start funding open source software and open content and who knows, maybe even free access to the Net. Sometimes companies do extreme things to save their own necks.
I suggest you look at the PHPSlash project if you want to create your own Slashdot like site. Or if that isn't good enough for you then just recode it. In all truth Slashdot isn't that complicated a site to be so amazingly hard to clone. The amazing part is how well it works with such a high load. :) Get over it you silly Llama.
Maybe if this goes through we'll finally see companies popping out affordable highspeed wireless network units. Lots more bandwidth and no central source to control things. And hey, it works w/ laptops! :)
I am either going to vote for ESR, RMS, or Weird Al. The first two I think would be good advocates for the Internet way of things and the third I'd just like to see some laws written by. The Bill of Rights by Weird Al. Woo.
I'm waiting to see a couple of the big dist's start including DVD abilities. Once the code is on the hdd's of a few million people it gets really hard to get it back. Sue the world and hope the world doesn't file a class-action back at you. May as well speed the process up.
IMO all this has done is made Quake more like real life. Now the end user has the ability to invent new smart weapons. Now it can get really interesting. Myself I'm thinking of a game where there are tons of bots mixed in with the players and they are hooked to neural nets and can communicate to each other in teams to plan attacks. It could be quite awesome. As an AI programmer I love bots.
If anyone is a chess person could you make a quick variation of this puzzle that can be played on Zillions (http://www.zillions-of-games.com) please. I don't follow chess lingo but would be interested in playing. Coding games in Zillions is really easy so it should be simple. BTW anybody who likes board games be sure to try to convince them to port Zillions to Linux. They aen't unwilling but need some motivation. :)
This is interesting but I was disappointed not see any ideas of what they might use it for. It doesn't look as if it were being designed as a general purpose OS. If they could code a simple network layer and XWindow-ish layer then maybe we'd have the beginings of something similar to QNX in GPL. Anyway can always learn from new projects. I'm sure ideas will get merged into other more well known GPL OS's at some point.
It might be interesting to write a piece of crossplatform software that can do everything needed to process taxes and a program to generate the data files w/ this years rules and such. If that is publiclly available IMO it'd be good to contact your congress man to try to get a law passed stating the IRS had to provide the data files themselves as their electric filing plan wasted so much of our money and bombed (the big project, they did luckily make some small improvments).. also if you could email them in I'd be glad. I always lose envelopes and papers I'm supposed to fax before they make it there. :)
Similar though the ones I've played with were all homemade (I designed, someone else wired em.) or in books. The ones we had were meant to leave the hands totally usable for real world tasks. so they were simply slightly sticky straps across the back of the hand w/ loops around the base of each finger to help keep them in place. They had a sensor just behind the knuckle of each finger and had a small bundle of data wires that ran to a little wrist band gadget that had a mini processing circuit and a transmitter on it. The wrist unit was also supposed to track wrist motion but we never got that far. It worked pretty well considering the price and the fact a couple of clueless halfwits were making it. Main problem we had was keeping the damn thing calibrated as the sensors tended to slip around a little and we had to calibrate it for each individual user since it had problems working w/ people of different hand sizes. It also didn't work very well on people w/ fleshy hands. It worked very well on my hands which happen to be very thin and boney which seemed to make tracking movements easier. The software used a sort of wireframe of the hand to use the map the sensor data to the VR equiv since we only had sensor data from that one point instead of at each joint which meant it took a lot more work to figure things out but it did seem to be possible on most people to calculate each joint position just from that one sensor per finger. Never tried it on a full 3D model, just wireframes on my old 486 but it seemed to be pretty fun anyway. Considering the things only cost us about $40 per hand to make I'm surprised we haven't seen any similar products sold from joystick companies or something. It'd be perfect for games. Really it was so light weight you barely noticed it was there. No more than the average watch.
Nice gadget but I still like the doodad that fits like a strip of tape across the back of each hand and uses joint stresses to figure out what you were supposedly typing. I always wanted a pair of gloves that used that rigged to work w/ VR in a more general system. :) Could track join movement of your shoulders to see what your arms were doing too. :)
I agree. I enjoy building robots and almost all of them have had more functionality than this and the most I've ever spent to design and build one was about $5000. Probably a robot that costs $5000 to prototype could be massproduced at under $500. This robot is cute and it's simplicity is impressive but the price tag seems a little hefty. When it gets in the $100-$200 price range and can be controled w/ any web browser then I'll buy one. :) IMO I'd rather pay a little more for a more functional robot though. It'd be nice if it could map things for itself and figure out how to avoid dynamic objects such as children, pets, and bags of groceries. Also if it can't go up/down stairs and go outside it isn't near as fun IMO. I want the same robot to vacuum all my floors and mow the grass and feed the cat. Also does anyone know what happens to this lil guy if Windows crashes? Must be rough having your brain crash. :) Does anyone know of a good place to have a plastic shell made for a robot? Metal is somewhat expensive and heavy although it does hold up to quite a lot of abuse. I've been thinking of making a body out of used soft drink cans just to see how well it'd work. Anyone want a Pepsi robot? :)
Ok maybe punching would be a bit much but the way I type is to use my shoulders and elbows a lot to take the stress off using my wrists for the same motion. With practice you can type just as fast with much less stress and hey you get a good workout. The only downside is keyboards tend to wear out pretty fast. Or try my new solution and don't type so much. :)
Your basiclly spouting back tv and similar stories all of which are of limited range. There will doubtless be a rough period of transition where we do dumb things and make mistakes but as always the wheel keeps rolling and soon the technology will seem like yesterdays tinkertoys as we go on to bigger and better things. Society will change, it is always in flux, because any society who doesn't change ceases to exist. Evolution will always win. Those that choose to breed so called perfect children will restrict their own evolution and will eventually out-date themselves over several generations. It is those that are on the fringe that move our society and species ahead. It'd be nice to cure illnesses and assure mainstream society is at least a minimum level of quality but the mainstream will never be the bleeding edge. Man can not stop evolution. Our choices and inventions are evolution in motion. We are nothing more than lab rats to the gods.
If you want Slashdot source and it isn't available clone it. I good point to start is PHP Slash. Slashdot is great but it can't be that complex a site. The hardest part I'd imagine is keeping it from being /.'d into total lag.
FreeM development is being headed by the creator of Bochs I believe. Bochs is fairly interesting but it is way to slow and is to much hassle to set up. Virtualization is a lot faster than emulation and I'd hope to see a lot of nice tools developed to make using FreeM easier.
I've suggested updates to the story several times and nobody ever wanted to let them through. Oh well anyway is good to finally see some more on this. I'd like to see RedHat and/or some other major dist's to fund this so it can develop faster and we can see it included with the distribution of our choice. VMWare is cool but I'd rather invest my $100 in the development of an open source version than a commercial program.
I just assume everything I say, online or in real life, is going to be heard by the person who'll be most likely to be hurt by it. I almost never say anything I haven't carefully gone over in my head. I say a lot of stuff that is just plan nuts but rarely anything that is cruel or bound to cause problems (even by accident). After a while your brain seems to adjust to this, at least mine did. It has made me a nicer person but has made it harder for me to be charming on controling. I haven't decided if it was worth the trade yet.
As always innovation can't come from a standards body any more than from a huge corporation. Instead they just mess with things until everything is fucked up. It's the same as the government. Let them screw the web I guess. If they do then maybe a better alternative will be invented. Remember all this is the transition period. Eventually we'll throw it all away and make a new and better Internet from what we learn here. May the best Net win. :P
Everyone should help with the PHPslash project so that anyone could easily setup and maintain a Slashdot like site. I think each school should have such a site for students and teachers and it'd be great if teaching associations offered Slashdot-like discussion areas for teachers to share news, information, and ideas with each other. Slashdot is the future of news. :)
Don't feel bad, I actually tend to read articles bottom to top usually skipping back and forth. I have no idea why. I do it on anything technical or that is news coverage but not with stories. I guess I'm impatient or something. I hate when text has links in it as I end up reading the linked page at the exact same time I'm reading the original and end up with about 20 Netscape windows open at once. Lots of eye candy mixed into text also annoys me as it grabs my attention as I'm skimming back and forth through text. If anyone ever looks at my web pages they usually appear sort of dull but the text is always formatted to be read and understood quickly. Much more quickly than my Slashdot messages no doubt. I actually use decent grammar on web pages. ;>
They really need to turn over the radio spectrum to the public for short-range Internet wireless systems. On the other hand they should sheild those lines too. No reason to be stupid about it. :)