I still use USENET more than any other forum for general purpose Q and A type stuff. If there was no USENET and I had a problem I couldn't solve there is nothing comparable on the web. Sure there are websites, but many require logins. With USENET I can search the list of groups for a forum that relates to a *very* specific topic, such as comp.graphics.algorithms. If these were all done by specialty websites, I'd have to have a login for each one! Yuck! Can you imagine maintaining a list of 30,000 links and userids for each user? I don't even want to think about it.
As to Mr. Ellis, it's sad that he died at such a young age. I didn't know him, but his idea has helped me and will continue to help me for many years. Maybe someday there will be an Internet hall of fame. He should certainly be there.
Before You Post. You need to be made aware that your message will be forwarded and duplicated on computers all over the world, even the pink squishy ones. It has been estimated that one troll costs millions of dollars. In the case of silicon computer systems, this results in increased costs to maintain and install new hardware. In the case of pink squishy systems, it results in a decreased regard for humanity in general, and contributes to the viewpoint that there are just too many sick people out there. The dollar cost of cynicism hasn't been estimated, but there is strong evidence that it impairs the function of the pink squishy computer in ways that aren't fully understood. Are you really sure you want to post that troll? Hit x to cancel, p to post.
...then why do you care how you get your MSN mail anyway?
Just do the same thing I used to do with Lotus Notes at work--use it for the "required" company BS, use real mail to do real work.
If MSN sends you privacy notices, billing info, things like that, then you have to read your MSN e-mail, but you should be able to filter out everything that doesn't come from them and/or just check it once in a while to make sure you aren't being charged for scratching your butt. If you never give out your MSN address, then you know that everything else that comes there is spam.
Use real mail for everything else. Is it a PiTA? Yes, but what did you expect from a freebie given away with a box for promotional reasons?
All this bashing is making me sick. Shit I don't use MS, way I see it, out of sight out of mind, my opinion is let them be, they can self destruct on their own.
Wow, a live-n-let-live Linux advocate. There's something you don't see every day.
This is *so* on the money. All those guys who say "nobody forces you to use the GPL" should read this guys post.
You forgot,...That building a brand then tossing it away doesn't make any sense.
If VA doesn't want to build the servers themselves, they should license the design to some other box maker. It would be kind of like what GM did to Chevy and all the other car makers.
They can't charge a per seat fee for GPL'd software. The fee must either cover support or some closed product bundled with the GPL'd software.
So, this won't keep you from copying (or even reselling) the GPL'd portions of their bundle. It will just keep you from calling up their tech line and scamming for free support and/or illegal copying of bundled closed products. Surely many on/. will balk at the idea of bundling closed-source, but you it's hard to argue for a more fair way to charge for support other than a per-seat.
In other words, this is YASFA (Yet Another Slashdot False Alarm).
Right on! I can't believe I had to read this far down to see it.
Some of my best memories of playing as a 10-18 year old in the late 70s/early 80s were of either meeting with (or confronting) people at the arcades. They were *the* hangout spots. I once rode my bike miles to get to the mall because they had such a good arcade.
Anybody else out there who remembers the Spaceway Raceway in Springfield Mall (Virginia) knows what I'm talking about. They didn't just have games either--they had air hockey and bumper cars towards the back. My dad always used to take me there on Saturdays. We'd play air hockey and bumper cars while my sister and my mother shopped.
Usually I would just go to the 7-11, County rec-center or some other place nearby. I must have known every machine within a reasonable bike ride.
For me, the end of the arcade came a long time ago. First, the games started getting "cartoony" and getting much harder to play. That wasn't so bad, but what really killed it was they turned the lights on in the arcade. The dark, noisy atmosphere was part of the whole appeal. I imagine some people might have gotten pick-pocketed, but they should have just gotten more security. Instead, they ruined the atmosphere.
Finally, I went to college and that was the straw that broke the camels back. I guess I was burned out on games by then, and if I really wanted my fix I could play them on my C-64. Defender on the C-64 was almost as good as the arcade, and when I think about all the quarters I pumped in that game, the cart must have payed for itself in two weeks.
As for the social scene, I had a college dorm. 'nuff said. Then, by the time you graduate you can drink. You've got bars. 'nuff said.
This makes me wonder though, where do the suburban brats that used to visit the machines hang out these days? Of course they can play games at their houses, but is there anyplace where kids are *forced* to contend with eachother in a social setting, whether they like eachother or not? I think you learn a lot that way.
Even if you request information in electronic format, these guys still send you junk mail. Not just once or twice either. At least once, sometimes twice per week for the past four months.
Their customer service was totally unresponsive to my request not to send snail mail. After all, my whole purpose for requesting the information online was to be environmentally responsable and avoid this.
I don't consider myself an "environmental wacko", but these guys definitely deserve to be the target of an angry e-mail campaign or something.
As of June 20, 2001 There are 14304 projects under OSI compliant license on SourceForge. Of those, 11981 are under the GNU GPL or GNU LGPL. That's 83.8 percent.
Plainly, GPL/LGPL has a monopoly in the category of Open Source licenses. Nevermind that there is other software under other licenses. None of them have more than 10% of the market. The closest competitor, BSD has only 6.2% of the market. They are really just a niche player with a loyal dedicated following and therefore don't count as competition.
We recommend that the GPL/LGPL licenses be broken up into several smaller licenses. To prevent the monopoly from re-forming after the breakup, all of these licenses should be mutually incompatable and they should be allowed to follow competing philosophies. Perhaps one could be "academic use only", another could be closed source freeware, another EULA'd and another BSD-like. The GPL/LGPL community would be allowed to keep a few core programs, perhaps GCC and the Linux kernel, but not any applications.
So, how do you like it? It's fair, it's justice; right?
Running everything in a sandbox could accomplish the same thing, and you wouldn't have to re-write all your code. There's nothing about the Java language itself that prevents overruns. How many times has your VM thrown a pointer exception? The important thing is that the exception is caught and handled. Of course, if they did start writing system code in Java they would want to compile it to the native machine, and then the security is still only as good as the quality of the code generated by the compiler. There is no magic bullet.
The GPL extends the right to anyone to use the original work for any purpose whatsoever on a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exlusive basis.
RTFGPL. No it doesn't.
At any rate, since you are granting the University a non exclusive license, I take that to mean that you can license the code to any other party in any way you want. That includes licensing it to the rest of the world under GPL. Of course, IANAL.
No matter how good your QA process, the chances of catching and squashing every single bug before release are minimal
Unless you're Microsoft; then you're an incompetent, obnoxious, FUD-spouting dinosaur and every bug that escapes is an indictment of you, your business practices, design methodology, family heritage, preference for breakfast cereal, haircut and anything else associtated with you or anyone you have ever met, slept with, laid eyes upon, or casually passed on the street.
...for a reason, wasn't it? Perhaps there were problems having the value of money tied to a commodity that might fluctuate in value for reasons beyond our control. For example, right now gold is at a historic low. If we were on the gold standard the dollar would be really weak right now instead of really strong. Of course, that would be good news because the dollar is too strong right now.
OTOH, one of the reasons gold is less valuable now is that gold jewelry apparently isn't as fashionable as it once was (remember the 80s? Mr. T and his chains, etc. You don't see that anymore). Do we really want the value of the dollar tied to fashion sense? You think Greenspan is bad? Wait till some Paris designer starts making economic policy.
If this e-gold stuff has legs, then maybe I'll go back and study some economic history from when we had the gold standard. It might be possible to score some wins buying and selling e-gold at the right times.
Encounter 2001 will ship a part of your DNA to space
Just part of it? Will it also come with a message that says:
Thank-you for trying humans. If you enjoy them, you should consider registering them. What are the advantages of registration? With the full version, you get reproductive capability and higher learning. As an added bonus, we include hair-color changer and genital resizing programs.
Having developed launch capabilities, the hairless water-ape now launches its spores into space. That completes the cycle of the amino acid based carbon chemistry life form. Be sure to tune in next millenium for another exciting edition of Mutual of Andromeda's Wild Universe.
Slashdot Mirror
I still use USENET more than any other forum for general purpose Q and A type stuff. If there was no USENET and I had a problem I couldn't solve there is nothing comparable on the web. Sure there are websites, but many require logins. With USENET I can search the list of groups for a forum that relates to a *very* specific topic, such as comp.graphics.algorithms. If these were all done by specialty websites, I'd have to have a login for each one! Yuck! Can you imagine maintaining a list of 30,000 links and userids for each user? I don't even want to think about it.
As to Mr. Ellis, it's sad that he died at such a young age. I didn't know him, but his idea has helped me and will continue to help me for many years. Maybe someday there will be an Internet hall of fame. He should certainly be there.
Before You Post. You need to be made aware that your message will be forwarded and duplicated on computers all over the world, even the pink squishy ones. It has been estimated that one troll costs millions of dollars. In the case of silicon computer systems, this results in increased costs to maintain and install new hardware. In the case of pink squishy systems, it results in a decreased regard for humanity in general, and contributes to the viewpoint that there are just too many sick people out there. The dollar cost of cynicism hasn't been estimated, but there is strong evidence that it impairs the function of the pink squishy computer in ways that aren't fully understood. Are you really sure you want to post that troll? Hit x to cancel, p to post.
If they don't want to upgrade their client, they can still use HotMail, right?
...then why do you care how you get your MSN mail anyway?
Just do the same thing I used to do with Lotus Notes at work--use it for the "required" company BS, use real mail to do real work.
If MSN sends you privacy notices, billing info, things like that, then you have to read your MSN e-mail, but you should be able to filter out everything that doesn't come from them and/or just check it once in a while to make sure you aren't being charged for scratching your butt. If you never give out your MSN address, then you know that everything else that comes there is spam.
Use real mail for everything else. Is it a PiTA? Yes, but what did you expect from a freebie given away with a box for promotional reasons?
All this bashing is making me sick. Shit I don't use MS, way I see it, out of sight out of mind, my opinion is let them be, they can self destruct on their own.
Wow, a live-n-let-live Linux advocate. There's something you don't see every day.
This is *so* on the money. All those guys who say "nobody forces you to use the GPL" should read this guys post.
NOOOOOOOOOO!!! It's already bad enough when you try to post some C++ code to a newsgroup and it turns your comments into file://
What's so hard about highlight ctrl-c ctrl-v anyway?
You forgot, ...That building a brand then tossing it away doesn't make any sense.
If VA doesn't want to build the servers themselves, they should license the design to some other box maker. It would be kind of like what GM did to Chevy and all the other car makers.
Too much "I'd buy X if Y" in the FS/OS communities. Not enough "I bought".
Well, you can still buy that video card and those fancy aluminum cases from ThinkGeek. That's about half a system right there.
...how long will it be before somebody creates a VanGogh version of goatse?
They can't charge a per seat fee for GPL'd software. The fee must either cover support or some closed product bundled with the GPL'd software.
So, this won't keep you from copying (or even reselling) the GPL'd portions of their bundle. It will just keep you from calling up their tech line and scamming for free support and/or illegal copying of bundled closed products. Surely many on /. will balk at the idea of bundling closed-source, but you it's hard to argue for a more fair way to charge for support other than a per-seat.
In other words, this is YASFA (Yet Another Slashdot False Alarm).
Right on! I can't believe I had to read this far down to see it.
Some of my best memories of playing as a 10-18 year old in the late 70s /early 80s were of either meeting with (or confronting) people at the arcades. They were *the* hangout spots. I once rode my bike miles to get to the mall because they had such a good arcade.
Anybody else out there who remembers the Spaceway Raceway in Springfield Mall (Virginia) knows what I'm talking about. They didn't just have games either--they had air hockey and bumper cars towards the back. My dad always used to take me there on Saturdays. We'd play air hockey and bumper cars while my sister and my mother shopped.
Usually I would just go to the 7-11, County rec-center or some other place nearby. I must have known every machine within a reasonable bike ride.
For me, the end of the arcade came a long time ago. First, the games started getting "cartoony" and getting much harder to play. That wasn't so bad, but what really killed it was they turned the lights on in the arcade. The dark, noisy atmosphere was part of the whole appeal. I imagine some people might have gotten pick-pocketed, but they should have just gotten more security. Instead, they ruined the atmosphere.
Finally, I went to college and that was the straw that broke the camels back. I guess I was burned out on games by then, and if I really wanted my fix I could play them on my C-64. Defender on the C-64 was almost as good as the arcade, and when I think about all the quarters I pumped in that game, the cart must have payed for itself in two weeks.
As for the social scene, I had a college dorm. 'nuff said. Then, by the time you graduate you can drink. You've got bars. 'nuff said.
This makes me wonder though, where do the suburban brats that used to visit the machines hang out these days? Of course they can play games at their houses, but is there anyplace where kids are *forced* to contend with eachother in a social setting, whether they like eachother or not? I think you learn a lot that way.
I found programming to be more enjoyable than playing games anyway
Programming is the ultimate text-based adventure.
You are in a twisty little maze of compiler warnings, all alike.
Does anybody else here wonder how long it will be before DEA agents start reading /. on Friday nights?
You're too late, American Business Financial Services already pulped it to send me information about their latest investment note rates.
Even if you request information in electronic format, these guys still send you junk mail. Not just once or twice either. At least once, sometimes twice per week for the past four months.
Their customer service was totally unresponsive to my request not to send snail mail. After all, my whole purpose for requesting the information online was to be environmentally responsable and avoid this.
I don't consider myself an "environmental wacko", but these guys definitely deserve to be the target of an angry e-mail campaign or something.
As of June 20, 2001 There are 14304 projects under OSI compliant license on SourceForge. Of those, 11981 are under the GNU GPL or GNU LGPL. That's 83.8 percent.
Plainly, GPL/LGPL has a monopoly in the category of Open Source licenses. Nevermind that there is other software under other licenses. None of them have more than 10% of the market. The closest competitor, BSD has only 6.2% of the market. They are really just a niche player with a loyal dedicated following and therefore don't count as competition.
We recommend that the GPL/LGPL licenses be broken up into several smaller licenses. To prevent the monopoly from re-forming after the breakup, all of these licenses should be mutually incompatable and they should be allowed to follow competing philosophies. Perhaps one could be "academic use only", another could be closed source freeware, another EULA'd and another BSD-like. The GPL/LGPL community would be allowed to keep a few core programs, perhaps GCC and the Linux kernel, but not any applications.
So, how do you like it? It's fair, it's justice; right?
Running everything in a sandbox could accomplish the same thing, and you wouldn't have to re-write all your code. There's nothing about the Java language itself that prevents overruns. How many times has your VM thrown a pointer exception? The important thing is that the exception is caught and handled. Of course, if they did start writing system code in Java they would want to compile it to the native machine, and then the security is still only as good as the quality of the code generated by the compiler. There is no magic bullet.
The GPL extends the right to anyone to use the original work for any purpose whatsoever on a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exlusive basis.
RTFGPL. No it doesn't.
At any rate, since you are granting the University a non exclusive license, I take that to mean that you can license the code to any other party in any way you want. That includes licensing it to the rest of the world under GPL. Of course, IANAL.
No matter how good your QA process, the chances of catching and squashing every single bug before release are minimal
Unless you're Microsoft; then you're an incompetent, obnoxious, FUD-spouting dinosaur and every bug that escapes is an indictment of you, your business practices, design methodology, family heritage, preference for breakfast cereal, haircut and anything else associtated with you or anyone you have ever met, slept with, laid eyes upon, or casually passed on the street.
...for a reason, wasn't it? Perhaps there were problems having the value of money tied to a commodity that might fluctuate in value for reasons beyond our control. For example, right now gold is at a historic low. If we were on the gold standard the dollar would be really weak right now instead of really strong. Of course, that would be good news because the dollar is too strong right now.
OTOH, one of the reasons gold is less valuable now is that gold jewelry apparently isn't as fashionable as it once was (remember the 80s? Mr. T and his chains, etc. You don't see that anymore). Do we really want the value of the dollar tied to fashion sense? You think Greenspan is bad? Wait till some Paris designer starts making economic policy.
If this e-gold stuff has legs, then maybe I'll go back and study some economic history from when we had the gold standard. It might be possible to score some wins buying and selling e-gold at the right times.
After that, the people responsible for sacking the webmaster were themselves sacked.
Then they all went down to the Piggly-Wiggly and got jobs sacking groceries.
It's a perfectly cromulent word.
...silly words from a cartoon are not in the dictionary. I bet that link is totally bogus. I'm going to click it now and... D'oh!
Encounter 2001 will ship a part of your DNA to space
Just part of it? Will it also come with a message that says:
Thank-you for trying humans. If you enjoy them, you should consider registering them. What are the advantages of registration? With the full version, you get reproductive capability and higher learning. As an added bonus, we include hair-color changer and genital resizing programs.
Having developed launch capabilities, the hairless water-ape now launches its spores into space. That completes the cycle of the amino acid based carbon chemistry life form. Be sure to tune in next millenium for another exciting edition of Mutual of Andromeda's Wild Universe.