Yeah, I see what they're talking about now. That photo looks exactly like an early eighties video game UFO! No wonder they're convinced this is real!:)
More seriously, the first google link is a bunch of eurofolks running seti@home. I seriously doubt that seti@home has generated any pictures of "ufos" in our solar system. The second link is the one above. The third seems to be some crank who regularly gives speeches on "SETV" (the "Search for Extraterrestrial Vehicles") -- he claims to be a "professor", which may be true, as advanced degrees are hardly a prophylactic against insanity.
So, ooh, ahh, some bunch of UFO freaks have announced that some obscure other group (which may or may not also be a bunch of UFO freaks) have proof (proof! At last, real proof! Mwuah-ha-ha-ha-ha!) of UFOs. Geeze, there's news for ya! Guess what, one group or another of UFO freaks has been claiming that they have proof (real proof, see, it's a genuine photograph of a blob, what more do you want, sheesh!) for years. Wake me when someone with a operating brain gets involved.:)
Frankly, without a little more than this, I'm sticking with Timothy Leary's theory that so-called UFOs are actually human time-travellers from our future astral-projecting themselves back to our time.:)
Getting rid of the spam after it's arrived at your mailbox is not a solution. The problem of spam is that it costs the ISPs lots of money. And, of course, that cost gets passed along to you, their customer. So you're still paying for the spam, even if you don't actually see it. I'm sorry, but you can babble about your wonderful bayesian filters all you want, but it's not actually much of a solution for anything except a tiny bit of personal annoyance.
Furthermore, if the last decade has taught us anything, it's that spammers are smart! You think they don't have access to filtering software? If these filters become widespread, then they'll start using them to test their spam before they send it, and they'll make adjustments to get through, adding subtle misspellings or other weirdnesses to confuse and confound the filters. Treating censorship as damage and routing around it is something the black hats do just as readily as the white.
They just want our programs to charge users 99 dollars a year...
Personally, I'm a little upset by the way that Lindows dealt with this conference, and if I had been planning to go, I'd abort those plans. But I really don't care one way or the other about Lindows making money off of Debian, even though I contribute to Debian, and they're probably charging money for packages I built. That's how things go in the free software world.
Maybe the next program I create will GPLL. Meaning it's GPL'ed less than Lindows. Lindows can't distribute my program or use any of my code.
That would violate the Debian Free Software Guidelines, in particular, point 6. So you'd also, effectively be forbidding Debian from including your program.
Of course, maybe that's what you want (since Lindows is based on Debian), but somehow, I doubt it. A smarter move, IMO, would be to publicize info on how Lindows users can get free updates by editing/etc/apt/sources.list to point to Debian's servers.
But in general, I think your argument is silly -- if you don't want random people to be able to make money off of your software, without giving you anything in return, then don't write free software. It's as simple as that. And if you do write free software, then accept the fact that some people will use it without giving anything in return. Debian does.
It may be not immediately evil, but it is agressive, for sure.
Sure, absolutely, no argument there. The Debian project has encountered several cases of trademark/logo infringement, and we've never gone so far as to call in the lawyers, let alone, to use that as an opening move. But we're hackers and geeks.
So I gather that in your view of the world[...]
I refuse to dignify your staw dog with a response. I donate much of my spare time to the Debian project. What do you do to make the world a better place?
calling it immature not to agree with it is quite another.
There's a big difference between "not agreeing with it", and "freaking out about it". A C&D letter is not the opening move I'd make, and it is an agressive one. But acting like it's the end of the world, and that we should boycott PCI devices in future is simply childish. (Note that I'm addressing the reaction here on/. more than I am the poor fellow with the web page here.)
they didn't have the courtesy to contact him before resorting to lawyers.
You make it sound like "resorting to lawyers" is some sort of evil, violent deed. The fact of the matter is that real, professional businesspeople don't have a violent (and childish) aversion to lawyers. Lawyers are a routine part of the everyday business world, and have been since time immemorial. Freaking out about this merely makes the fellow look immature and foolish.
Hell, that's one of the politest and friendliest C&D letters I've ever seen.
Yeah, really 'open standard' when they Cease and Desist people compiling a list of device IDs!
They didn't send him a C&D for compiling a list, they sent him a C&D for using their trademark and logo without permission. And, in fact, as C&D letters go, this one was remarkably polite.
Not all the world thinks that lawyers are inherently evil, and that any use of them is equivalent to waving firearms in someone's face. Many people, especially businesspeople, consider the use of lawyers to be routine. And this case looks fairly routine. Heck, for lawyers, they're positively bending over backwards to be helpful. The guy needs to grow up and act like a professional who knows how the real world works, and knows that it isn't always pretty.
show me that you can figure out how to use our tools to reach me.
So, out of idle curiousity, how do you react if the document has obviously been created with ps2pdf or dvipdf or another, similar non-Adobe tool? Does that count against the candidate, or is it not an issue?
The guy funding the Linux XBOX project is a direct competitor of MS.
Well, duh, I think we all sort of expected something of the sort. But he's not a competitor in the game console arena. Most earlier speculation about the mystery funding revolved around Sony.
Kinda cheapens the whole thing, duddn't it?
Uh, no? Rather, I would say that it makes it make perfect sense.
But his motivations place him at MS's level.
No, there's a big difference -- Robertson is engaging in competitive behavior. MS engages in ANTI-competitive behavior.
[Tim Powers wrote] several magnificent [novels] (The Drawing of the Dark through Last Call) and then a handful of bad ones (attempts to do "sequels" if you will to Last Call that in my opinion just didn't work).
I basically agree, except that with his latest novel, Declare, he seems to have finally escaped his rut, and turned out a truly fine novel, IMO, for the first time in several years. It won the 2001 World Fantasy Award, which suggests I'm not the only one who thinks so.:)
Of course, this just re-emphasises your "peaks and valleys" argument. Except that it means that writers may have multiple peaks and/or multiple valleys. Which only makes sense -- people are complex beasts. Anyway, to bring this back around to topic, all theories aside, there is no reason whatsoever that this new work shouldn't be Gibson's best-to-date. It might be, it might not be, I'll judge it when I read it.
While I like Varley, I think that Brunner has a better claim to the title of "Cyberpunk Emeritus." He wrote a lot of dreck, but four titles (at least) redeem him and stake his claim to greatness: Stand on Zanzibar (1968), Jagged Orbit (1970), The Sheep Look Up (1972), and Shockwave Rider (1975). SOZ is my personal favorite (and the only one to win the Hugo), but SR is the most cyber- of them, and the one most often referenced on cyberpunk-related sites. My main problem with SR is that it was too short and didn't really cover enough (any?) new ground, in the context of having read the others already. But it's a fan favorite, and often quoted as the "first cyberpunk novel", so who am I to carp?
And, of course, the influence of Vernor Vinge's classic (and excellent) story True Names (1981) cannot be overlooked.
On the gripping hand, Gibson is a fine writer, and it's his works that really put the term "cyberpunk" on the map.
PS: Please use a divider between your message and the signature. Less confusion that way.
Bad suggestion, no biscuit! If you are easily confused (as, I confess, I am), then enable the "Signature Dash" option in your user preferences. (I believe this is the default.) Adding a manual divider to your signature just makes it look stupid to the people who have this option enabled. And people who don't have this option enabled have noone but themselves to blame for any confusion they may experience.
It should take you an infinite amount of time to do.
Nope, because all the digits are the same, so they all have the same properties. All I have to do is show that the digits are all the same (they're all '1' in this case), and that the transform works on any one of them (which it does), and I'm done. It's called inductive reasoning, and it's a standard (and indispensible) part of any mathematician's toolkit.
It gets trickier when you start to deal with irrationals, but there's interesting things that can be done there too. I highly recommend that you read Cantor on transfinites before engaging in this sort of debate again.
The question was explicitly not about terminal emulators (xterm, mlterm, kterm, whatever). However, if you want a unicode-supporting xterm, then why not use gen-oo-wine xfree86 xterm? Yes, xterm indeed supports unicode (at least since Xfree4.2), if you use the -u8 switch. Debian's xterm package even comes with a script, uxterm, to set up variables and resources as appropriate.
Somehow, I have a feeling William Scarboro would be happier with a $1 donation...
Nice of you to second-guess the people who knew him! I won't venture to speak for Mr. Scarboro, since I didn't know him, but all I know is that as a programmer myself, I've already made arrangements for my family -- it's called insurance. I would be FAR more happy to see one of my old projects released to the public by the company that owns the code.
Though they earned a bad reputation in their first days on the Net, AOL quickly became a strong supporter of the anti-spam forces. (Not surprising, since ISP, especially big ISPs, are really the ones that suffer from the efffects of spam the worst.)
There are reasons to dislike AOL, but their attitude towards spam is not one.
I like AOL because:
they've funded mozilla for so long,
they made a nice open-source webserver, and
they actually work to fight spam.
I dislike AOL for a number of reasons I won't bother to iterate here. Basically, they're a mixed bag, like most big companies.
I'd like to think that the "last man on the moon" is an event that won't happen for a few more tens of thousands of years. 30th anniv. of the most recent trip to the moon, I'd accept.
But the DMCA isn't a copyright law. It's about providing information (irrespective of copyrights) which can potentially be used to violate copyrights. It's as if it were illegal to write manuals for photocopy machines (except photocopy machines aren't digital, and therefore aren't magical and dangerous in the eyes of the powers-that-be).
Now now, let's not go TOO far! While dselect is perfectly workable once you get used to its quirks, I hardly think it qualifies as "excellent". Especially when compared to, say, aptitude. I admit, I stuck with dselect for a long time, and I agree with you that some of the complaints about dselect are overblown. But now that I've finally taken the time to learn aptitude, I am so much happier! It makes my life just so much easier. And, in the end, isn't that the whole point of a tool?
Some of my favorite features of aptitude:
Allows you to mark packages as "autoloaded", i.e. only installed to fulfil a dependency. Will autoremove these packages once they're no longer needed. Marks can be manually tuned. This is so much simpler and easier than using deb-orphan, I can't tell you.
Can go directly from a package to one of its dependencies (or recommendations), and then back. This makes checking alternative dependencies (A | B | C) so much easier. Best of all, it's recursive.
Can see what packages depend on the package you're looking at (and can go browse those, just like dependencies).
Can browse virtual packages. Wow!
Remembers which packages are new until I tell it to forget.
I've just been reading Steve Rabin's book, AI Game Programming Wisdom, mentioned briefly in the article. I'm not a game programmer, but I am a programmer, and I've always been curious about game AIs. And I have to say that the book is very good, well worth it if you have any interest in the topic. It's actually a collection of articles written by a bunch of game AI programmers, collected and edited by Rabin. It covers a lot of ground, explains approaches that have worked and approaches that have failed, and why (in both cases). It contains both useful general principles and interesting examples of specific cases.
I'm not sure I'd recommend this book to a novice programmer, but for a moderately experienced programmer who's interested in practical game AI design, this book is well worth a look. The name says it all, this is a book written by the folks in the trenches, passing along their hard-earned wisdom. Very enjoyable.
Now I want to try my own hand at writing some game AI. Maybe I should poke around on sourceforge for games that need AI help. (Assuming I can weed my way past all the projects that have NO CODE AT ALL, which seems to be especially common with the games on sourceforge.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I see what they're talking about now. That photo looks exactly like an early eighties video game UFO! No wonder they're convinced this is real! :)
See this link. :)
:)
:)
More seriously, the first google link is a bunch of eurofolks running seti@home. I seriously doubt that seti@home has generated any pictures of "ufos" in our solar system. The second link is the one above. The third seems to be some crank who regularly gives speeches on "SETV" (the "Search for Extraterrestrial Vehicles") -- he claims to be a "professor", which may be true, as advanced degrees are hardly a prophylactic against insanity.
So, ooh, ahh, some bunch of UFO freaks have announced that some obscure other group (which may or may not also be a bunch of UFO freaks) have proof (proof! At last, real proof! Mwuah-ha-ha-ha-ha!) of UFOs. Geeze, there's news for ya! Guess what, one group or another of UFO freaks has been claiming that they have proof (real proof, see, it's a genuine photograph of a blob, what more do you want, sheesh!) for years. Wake me when someone with a operating brain gets involved.
Frankly, without a little more than this, I'm sticking with Timothy Leary's theory that so-called UFOs are actually human time-travellers from our future astral-projecting themselves back to our time.
Getting rid of the spam after it's arrived at your mailbox is not a solution. The problem of spam is that it costs the ISPs lots of money. And, of course, that cost gets passed along to you, their customer. So you're still paying for the spam, even if you don't actually see it. I'm sorry, but you can babble about your wonderful bayesian filters all you want, but it's not actually much of a solution for anything except a tiny bit of personal annoyance.
Furthermore, if the last decade has taught us anything, it's that spammers are smart! You think they don't have access to filtering software? If these filters become widespread, then they'll start using them to test their spam before they send it, and they'll make adjustments to get through, adding subtle misspellings or other weirdnesses to confuse and confound the filters. Treating censorship as damage and routing around it is something the black hats do just as readily as the white.
They just want our programs to charge users 99 dollars a year...
/etc/apt/sources.list to point to Debian's servers.
Personally, I'm a little upset by the way that Lindows dealt with this conference, and if I had been planning to go, I'd abort those plans. But I really don't care one way or the other about Lindows making money off of Debian, even though I contribute to Debian, and they're probably charging money for packages I built. That's how things go in the free software world.
Maybe the next program I create will GPLL. Meaning it's GPL'ed less than Lindows. Lindows can't distribute my program or use any of my code.
That would violate the Debian Free Software Guidelines, in particular, point 6. So you'd also, effectively be forbidding Debian from including your program.
Of course, maybe that's what you want (since Lindows is based on Debian), but somehow, I doubt it. A smarter move, IMO, would be to publicize info on how Lindows users can get free updates by editing
But in general, I think your argument is silly -- if you don't want random people to be able to make money off of your software, without giving you anything in return, then don't write free software. It's as simple as that. And if you do write free software, then accept the fact that some people will use it without giving anything in return. Debian does.
It may be not immediately evil, but it is agressive, for sure.
/. more than I am the poor fellow with the web page here.)
Sure, absolutely, no argument there. The Debian project has encountered several cases of trademark/logo infringement, and we've never gone so far as to call in the lawyers, let alone, to use that as an opening move. But we're hackers and geeks.
So I gather that in your view of the world[...]
I refuse to dignify your staw dog with a response. I donate much of my spare time to the Debian project. What do you do to make the world a better place?
calling it immature not to agree with it is quite another.
There's a big difference between "not agreeing with it", and "freaking out about it". A C&D letter is not the opening move I'd make, and it is an agressive one. But acting like it's the end of the world, and that we should boycott PCI devices in future is simply childish. (Note that I'm addressing the reaction here on
they didn't have the courtesy to contact him before resorting to lawyers.
You make it sound like "resorting to lawyers" is some sort of evil, violent deed. The fact of the matter is that real, professional businesspeople don't have a violent (and childish) aversion to lawyers. Lawyers are a routine part of the everyday business world, and have been since time immemorial. Freaking out about this merely makes the fellow look immature and foolish.
Hell, that's one of the politest and friendliest C&D letters I've ever seen.
Yeah, really 'open standard' when they Cease and Desist people compiling a list of device IDs!
They didn't send him a C&D for compiling a list, they sent him a C&D for using their trademark and logo without permission. And, in fact, as C&D letters go, this one was remarkably polite.
Not all the world thinks that lawyers are inherently evil, and that any use of them is equivalent to waving firearms in someone's face. Many people, especially businesspeople, consider the use of lawyers to be routine. And this case looks fairly routine. Heck, for lawyers, they're positively bending over backwards to be helpful. The guy needs to grow up and act like a professional who knows how the real world works, and knows that it isn't always pretty.
show me that you can figure out how to use our tools to reach me.
So, out of idle curiousity, how do you react if the document has obviously been created with ps2pdf or dvipdf or another, similar non-Adobe tool? Does that count against the candidate, or is it not an issue?
The guy funding the Linux XBOX project is a direct competitor of MS.
Well, duh, I think we all sort of expected something of the sort. But he's not a competitor in the game console arena. Most earlier speculation about the mystery funding revolved around Sony.
Kinda cheapens the whole thing, duddn't it?
Uh, no? Rather, I would say that it makes it make perfect sense.
But his motivations place him at MS's level.
No, there's a big difference -- Robertson is engaging in competitive behavior. MS engages in ANTI-competitive behavior.
[Tim Powers wrote] several magnificent [novels] (The Drawing of the Dark through Last Call) and then a handful of bad ones (attempts to do "sequels" if you will to Last Call that in my opinion just didn't work).
:)
I basically agree, except that with his latest novel, Declare, he seems to have finally escaped his rut, and turned out a truly fine novel, IMO, for the first time in several years. It won the 2001 World Fantasy Award, which suggests I'm not the only one who thinks so.
Of course, this just re-emphasises your "peaks and valleys" argument. Except that it means that writers may have multiple peaks and/or multiple valleys. Which only makes sense -- people are complex beasts. Anyway, to bring this back around to topic, all theories aside, there is no reason whatsoever that this new work shouldn't be Gibson's best-to-date. It might be, it might not be, I'll judge it when I read it.
While I like Varley, I think that Brunner has a better claim to the title of "Cyberpunk Emeritus." He wrote a lot of dreck, but four titles (at least) redeem him and stake his claim to greatness: Stand on Zanzibar (1968), Jagged Orbit (1970), The Sheep Look Up (1972), and Shockwave Rider (1975). SOZ is my personal favorite (and the only one to win the Hugo), but SR is the most cyber- of them, and the one most often referenced on cyberpunk-related sites. My main problem with SR is that it was too short and didn't really cover enough (any?) new ground, in the context of having read the others already. But it's a fan favorite, and often quoted as the "first cyberpunk novel", so who am I to carp?
And, of course, the influence of Vernor Vinge's classic (and excellent) story True Names (1981) cannot be overlooked.
On the gripping hand, Gibson is a fine writer, and it's his works that really put the term "cyberpunk" on the map.
PS: Please use a divider between your message and the signature. Less confusion that way.
Bad suggestion, no biscuit! If you are easily confused (as, I confess, I am), then enable the "Signature Dash" option in your user preferences. (I believe this is the default.) Adding a manual divider to your signature just makes it look stupid to the people who have this option enabled. And people who don't have this option enabled have noone but themselves to blame for any confusion they may experience.
It should take you an infinite amount of time to do.
Nope, because all the digits are the same, so they all have the same properties. All I have to do is show that the digits are all the same (they're all '1' in this case), and that the transform works on any one of them (which it does), and I'm done. It's called inductive reasoning, and it's a standard (and indispensible) part of any mathematician's toolkit.
It gets trickier when you start to deal with irrationals, but there's interesting things that can be done there too. I highly recommend that you read Cantor on transfinites before engaging in this sort of debate again.
you cannot do math on a "...", you must use the limit or you are approximating.
That's not true. Read Cantor.
NFNNMIDATA writes: you can't do add/subtract operations on a repeating decimal like that
Yes, you can. But if you don't want to, there are other ways to prove the case that don't involve addition or subtraction:
9 *
9 * 1/9 = 9/9 = 1
1 =
This is not some fancy mathematical trick, like proving that 1 = 0 by dividing by zero. This is a simple mathematical fact.
The question was explicitly not about terminal emulators (xterm, mlterm, kterm, whatever). However, if you want a unicode-supporting xterm, then why not use gen-oo-wine xfree86 xterm? Yes, xterm indeed supports unicode (at least since Xfree4.2), if you use the -u8 switch. Debian's xterm package even comes with a script, uxterm, to set up variables and resources as appropriate.
Somehow, I have a feeling William Scarboro would be happier with a $1 donation...
Nice of you to second-guess the people who knew him! I won't venture to speak for Mr. Scarboro, since I didn't know him, but all I know is that as a programmer myself, I've already made arrangements for my family -- it's called insurance. I would be FAR more happy to see one of my old projects released to the public by the company that owns the code.
Extra bonus brownie points if the spam licenses are large bright orange tags attached to the ears.
Nah. Brightly colored concentric circles, centered on the chest.
There are reasons to dislike AOL, but their attitude towards spam is not one.
I like AOL because:
- they've funded mozilla for so long,
- they made a nice open-source webserver, and
- they actually work to fight spam.
I dislike AOL for a number of reasons I won't bother to iterate here. Basically, they're a mixed bag, like most big companies.Yes, yes, I understand. It's the implication, not the definition that bothers me.
I'd like to think that the "last man on the moon" is an event that won't happen for a few more tens of thousands of years. 30th anniv. of the most recent trip to the moon, I'd accept.
But the DMCA isn't a copyright law. It's about providing information (irrespective of copyrights) which can potentially be used to violate copyrights. It's as if it were illegal to write manuals for photocopy machines (except photocopy machines aren't digital, and therefore aren't magical and dangerous in the eyes of the powers-that-be).
I have yet to see an ATM machine running any type of Linux install.
:)
That's because you haven't looked here .
Now now, let's not go TOO far! While dselect is perfectly workable once you get used to its quirks, I hardly think it qualifies as "excellent". Especially when compared to, say, aptitude. I admit, I stuck with dselect for a long time, and I agree with you that some of the complaints about dselect are overblown. But now that I've finally taken the time to learn aptitude, I am so much happier! It makes my life just so much easier. And, in the end, isn't that the whole point of a tool?
Some of my favorite features of aptitude:
- Allows you to mark packages as "autoloaded", i.e. only installed to fulfil a dependency. Will autoremove these packages once they're no longer needed. Marks can be manually tuned. This is so much simpler and easier than using deb-orphan, I can't tell you.
- Can go directly from a package to one of its dependencies (or recommendations), and then back. This makes checking alternative dependencies (A | B | C) so much easier. Best of all, it's recursive.
- Can see what packages depend on the package you're looking at (and can go browse those, just like dependencies).
- Can browse virtual packages. Wow!
- Remembers which packages are new until I tell it to forget.
'Nuff said.I've just been reading Steve Rabin's book, AI Game Programming Wisdom, mentioned briefly in the article. I'm not a game programmer, but I am a programmer, and I've always been curious about game AIs. And I have to say that the book is very good, well worth it if you have any interest in the topic. It's actually a collection of articles written by a bunch of game AI programmers, collected and edited by Rabin. It covers a lot of ground, explains approaches that have worked and approaches that have failed, and why (in both cases). It contains both useful general principles and interesting examples of specific cases.
I'm not sure I'd recommend this book to a novice programmer, but for a moderately experienced programmer who's interested in practical game AI design, this book is well worth a look. The name says it all, this is a book written by the folks in the trenches, passing along their hard-earned wisdom. Very enjoyable.
Now I want to try my own hand at writing some game AI. Maybe I should poke around on sourceforge for games that need AI help. (Assuming I can weed my way past all the projects that have NO CODE AT ALL, which seems to be especially common with the games on sourceforge.)