Technology today is led by three great monopolies: Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft.
I take issue with Metcalfe's assertion. I don't know about switches and such, although as far as I know there isn't much innovation going on in that area, but neither Intel nor Microsoft is leading the technology in its field. In fact, neither chips nor office suites nor any of the other areas those two companies are involved in are really doing anything exciting these days. Intel is consistently being bested by AMD, but continues to feel the benefits of its monopoly position.
One of the only areas of the hardware field that is experiencing qualitative, rather than quantitative, improvement, is that of 3D acceleration. By that distinction, I mean that CPUs are merely getting faster, not better in any radical way. However, video cards, products of a field with several major players, namely nVidia, 3dfx, Matrox and ATI, are getting better, with additions of things like better texturemapping, lighting, motion blurs, lens flares, and other improvements. I think that this competition is a result of the fact that the field enjoys fierce competition.
Of course, it's a little unfair to compare Intel to 3d card makers, because there isn't much you can really do to chips that wouldn't completely break backwards compatibility. That is, Intel couldn't start manufacturing DNA processors tomorrow, because besides the fact that they're not really extant, they would need massive engineering in order to be useful. The same goes for hard drives, which are getting bigger, faster and cheaper, but not more interesting, even though they are in a competetive field, because there, again, isn't really much you can do with a hard drive except those things. Microsoft, however, hasn't had an original thought in its life, except maybe in their mouse-making division, and that's an area where (ahem) they don't have a monopoly.
Somebody got their mythology wrong. Ulysses is the Roman name for Odysseus, the protagonist of the Odyssey, who had an epic journey around the Mediterranean after the Trojan War. The Golden Fleece was the object of Jason and the Argonauts.
Yeah, but books don't generally go out of date. Games do. People mostly only play brand-new games and really old ones. No onbe wants to play a game that's 3 years old, or at least not pay fifty bucks for it.
It sounds like at least one of those includes comprehensive information on rolling your own distribution, which is quite handy if you have to roll your own distribution.
I guess I'm the History Nazi now, but "yellow journalism" doesn't mean what they think it means. It refers to the influential muckraking (and sometimes inaccurate and inflammatory) journalism practiced around the turn of the century by newspapermen such as H.L. Mencken. "Yellow" refers not to cowardice but to the yellow ink used.
That was exactly the reverse. Open Source tool over at corporate project. Originally, Netscape was closed source. Netscape opened it to some extent, with their own licence. Now it looks like it will be genuinely Free. Good try, though, buddy boy.
In fact, that's how TV (and radio) used to work. In the 30s through 50s, companies would sponsor shows, and the characters would plug the products. Usually this was done in two ways: working the products into the plot, and also separately and explicitly advertising them. For example, the Jack Benny radio show was actually "The Jello Program," at one point, and was sponsored by Lucky Strike at another (which they advertised with a barbershop quartet). Burns & Allen were sponsored by B.F. Goodrich (which is hard to plug within the plot, so they advertised it separately) and also Carnation and Maxwell House (which are easy to advertise within the show, but were advertised separately, as well).
Why do so few free services appear these days? What happened to, "I'm doing it for fun, and if I make a few bucks, then that's icing on the cake"? Like Slashdot, for instance, and photo.net, for another. Everything now has to make millions of bucks, or else it's not worth doing, apparently.
Sorry, I should have previewed. The above message should read:
This was discussed in an editorial on Freshmeat
a little while ago. The editorial has a couple problems, but on the whole it's pretty good. There are still a few kinks to
work out (it's not always easy to tell if information is accurate, and no one's going to want to vote on whether it is or
take the time to reload to get the official page), but it's a step toward a workable scheme.
This was discussed in an,a href="http://freshmeat.net/news/2000/07/29/9649295 99.html">editorial on Freshmeat a little while ago. The editorial has a couple problems, but on the whole it's pretty good. There are still a few kinks to work out (it's not always easyt o tell if information is accurate, and no one's going to want to vote on whether it is or take the time to reload to get the official page), but it's a step toward a workable scheme.
Gaim already has that. Click the rightmost tab in the main window. You can make a whitelist or a blacklist, or never let anyone talk to you, or always let everyone.
Even aside from compatibility, getting exactly what your buddy got can be a good thing. Assuming that the platform as a whole isn't obsolete, all the new games that come out have to perform well on the existing hardware, which means that people won't always have to lust after the GeForce2 or whatever the new cool thing is at the time.
I find that MandrakeUpdate is not very useful. It has only 27 packages listed right now, even though there are certainly more packages on my system that could be updated. Also, it lists XEmacs, for instance, as "essential," even though a) it's not essential in the first place and b) I already have the same version, down to the patch number. Helix Update is far more useful: it only lists things that you actually don't have, and its assessments of your needs are more plausible.
Admittedly, this isn't as convenient as having such preferences in the browser itself, but you can always use JunkBuster or Muffin. JunkBuster is great; I haven't tried Muffin, but the article mentioned it and it looks cool. Even does a couple things JunkBuster can't, like removing <BLINK> tags.
Well, what would you do with the 's? Those are non-unique. A whole buncha hex values become that character, and you wouldn't know which they were. I know I'm being too literal, but still.
Not if it has redeeming value. For instance, there was a Supreme Court case during the Vietnam War involving a person who wore a shirt (or maybe a jacket) inside a courthouse which said, "FUCK THE DRAFT." The Court ruled that the message was not without social value and was not to be taken literally. Despite its vulgarity, the T-shirt was protected because of its political message.
That's true. Another example is Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, which contains instructions for both electronic (Perl) and physical (playing cards) implementations of a strong crypto algorithm called Solitaire. It's a book, so it can be distributed worldwide. What's even more elegant is that the strong crypto can be implemented without any computer, as long as the cryptographer is willing to be bored stiff and never make mistakes.
Slashdot Mirror
I take issue with Metcalfe's assertion. I don't know about switches and such, although as far as I know there isn't much innovation going on in that area, but neither Intel nor Microsoft is leading the technology in its field. In fact, neither chips nor office suites nor any of the other areas those two companies are involved in are really doing anything exciting these days. Intel is consistently being bested by AMD, but continues to feel the benefits of its monopoly position.
One of the only areas of the hardware field that is experiencing qualitative, rather than quantitative, improvement, is that of 3D acceleration. By that distinction, I mean that CPUs are merely getting faster, not better in any radical way. However, video cards, products of a field with several major players, namely nVidia, 3dfx, Matrox and ATI, are getting better, with additions of things like better texturemapping, lighting, motion blurs, lens flares, and other improvements. I think that this competition is a result of the fact that the field enjoys fierce competition.
Of course, it's a little unfair to compare Intel to 3d card makers, because there isn't much you can really do to chips that wouldn't completely break backwards compatibility. That is, Intel couldn't start manufacturing DNA processors tomorrow, because besides the fact that they're not really extant, they would need massive engineering in order to be useful. The same goes for hard drives, which are getting bigger, faster and cheaper, but not more interesting, even though they are in a competetive field, because there, again, isn't really much you can do with a hard drive except those things. Microsoft, however, hasn't had an original thought in its life, except maybe in their mouse-making division, and that's an area where (ahem) they don't have a monopoly.
Somebody got their mythology wrong. Ulysses is the Roman name for Odysseus, the protagonist of the Odyssey, who had an epic journey around the Mediterranean after the Trojan War. The Golden Fleece was the object of Jason and the Argonauts.
Yeah, but books don't generally go out of date. Games do. People mostly only play brand-new games and really old ones. No onbe wants to play a game that's 3 years old, or at least not pay fifty bucks for it.
Well, you can buy it on CD from helixcode.com, or even better, you can download it for free. Try typing the following as root:
lynx -source http://go-gnome.com/ | sh
The non-link doesn't work. Perhaps Miguel meant http://www.helixcode.com/tech/ helix-setup-tools.php3. Maybe not, though; it doesn't have a lot to do with what he was talking about.
Indisputable.
It was a reference to our own poster the Grammar Nazi.
Hey, buddy, that was the Vietnam War. And I did observe that the journalism was sometimes inaccurate and inflammatory.
I guess I'm the History Nazi now, but "yellow journalism" doesn't mean what they think it means. It refers to the influential muckraking (and sometimes inaccurate and inflammatory) journalism practiced around the turn of the century by newspapermen such as H.L. Mencken. "Yellow" refers not to cowardice but to the yellow ink used.
In the words of another poster, BZZZT!
That was exactly the reverse. Open Source tool over at corporate project. Originally, Netscape was closed source. Netscape opened it to some extent, with their own licence. Now it looks like it will be genuinely Free. Good try, though, buddy boy.
This is slightly offtopic, but I would be interested to know how you got your non-GTK programs to use GTK themes.
In fact, that's how TV (and radio) used to work. In the 30s through 50s, companies would sponsor shows, and the characters would plug the products. Usually this was done in two ways: working the products into the plot, and also separately and explicitly advertising them. For example, the Jack Benny radio show was actually "The Jello Program," at one point, and was sponsored by Lucky Strike at another (which they advertised with a barbershop quartet). Burns & Allen were sponsored by B.F. Goodrich (which is hard to plug within the plot, so they advertised it separately) and also Carnation and Maxwell House (which are easy to advertise within the show, but were advertised separately, as well).
Yeah, you'll notice I mentioned Slashdot. Slashdot makes money. However, its purpose is not to make money. Catch the difference?
Why do so few free services appear these days? What happened to, "I'm doing it for fun, and if I make a few bucks, then that's icing on the cake"? Like Slashdot, for instance, and photo.net, for another. Everything now has to make millions of bucks, or else it's not worth doing, apparently.
This was discussed in an editorial on Freshmeat a little while ago. The editorial has a couple problems, but on the whole it's pretty good. There are still a few kinks to work out (it's not always easy to tell if information is accurate, and no one's going to want to vote on whether it is or take the time to reload to get the official page), but it's a step toward a workable scheme.
This was discussed in an ,a href="http://freshmeat.net/news/2000/07/29/9649295 99.html">editorial on Freshmeat a little while ago. The editorial has a couple problems, but on the whole it's pretty good. There are still a few kinks to work out (it's not always easyt o tell if information is accurate, and no one's going to want to vote on whether it is or take the time to reload to get the official page), but it's a step toward a workable scheme.
Gaim already has that. Click the rightmost tab in the main window. You can make a whitelist or a blacklist, or never let anyone talk to you, or always let everyone.
Even aside from compatibility, getting exactly what your buddy got can be a good thing. Assuming that the platform as a whole isn't obsolete, all the new games that come out have to perform well on the existing hardware, which means that people won't always have to lust after the GeForce2 or whatever the new cool thing is at the time.
Because then there wouldn't be any cool new toys. Have you never heard of the problems backwards-compatibility causes?
Not that RPM is so great, but just so you know, you can safely use Mandrake and Red Hat packages interchangeably. Not so SuSE, though.
I find that MandrakeUpdate is not very useful. It has only 27 packages listed right now, even though there are certainly more packages on my system that could be updated. Also, it lists XEmacs, for instance, as "essential," even though a) it's not essential in the first place and b) I already have the same version, down to the patch number. Helix Update is far more useful: it only lists things that you actually don't have, and its assessments of your needs are more plausible.
Admittedly, this isn't as convenient as having such preferences in the browser itself, but you can always use JunkBuster or Muffin. JunkBuster is great; I haven't tried Muffin, but the article mentioned it and it looks cool. Even does a couple things JunkBuster can't, like removing <BLINK> tags.
Well, what would you do with the 's? Those are non-unique. A whole buncha hex values become that character, and you wouldn't know which they were. I know I'm being too literal, but still.
Not if it has redeeming value. For instance, there was a Supreme Court case during the Vietnam War involving a person who wore a shirt (or maybe a jacket) inside a courthouse which said, "FUCK THE DRAFT." The Court ruled that the message was not without social value and was not to be taken literally. Despite its vulgarity, the T-shirt was protected because of its political message.
That's true. Another example is Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, which contains instructions for both electronic (Perl) and physical (playing cards) implementations of a strong crypto algorithm called Solitaire. It's a book, so it can be distributed worldwide. What's even more elegant is that the strong crypto can be implemented without any computer, as long as the cryptographer is willing to be bored stiff and never make mistakes.