I can believe (barely) that life is *so rare* that we are the only EM broadcasting civilisation withing a resonable radio sphere in this galaxy at this epoch. However an argument that life on Earth is unique (and that there has never been and will never be life on other planets) is in my opinion scientifically flawed and can only be considered valid by appealing to faith / religion / god whatever.
Fact is, life did arise here, so the probability of life arising on an Earth like planet is not zero. As Douglas Adams reminds us, space is really big. Big enough, I think for life to beat the odds and evolve on other worlds as well.
Of course, whether we will ever contact them (due to distance or timing) withing the life of human civilisation seems unlikely.
restricting themselves when handing out new addresses, these people should concentrate their efforts on reclaiming IP's from companies and individuals who are just WASTING them
I know companies who blagged 256 or 512 addresses a few years ago to every PC they own has an Internet IP (no NAT) and they are refusing to hand them back (as they regard them now as a monetary asset...)
If an effort was made to reclaim addresses from greedy companies, and defunct sites then they can be reissued to people who need them!
Oh, and I think a move to name based virtual hosting is a good thing, and should be applied retrospectively as well!
Yeah, I saw that too on my box. Nvidia's tech guy (who mailed me back in about 2 hours on a SUNDAY) said it was to do with mapping of memory and buffers on the card which confused 'top' no end.
Oh yeah, and on my 'humble' 16MB TNT gears gives me 340fps. The nVidia driver rock OpenGL to the max! (Even if they are closed source)
I'm as positive abou the Open Source movement as the rest of the Slashdot readership, but I think this is taking it a bit far..
In the case of Baan, their technology is not necessarily their strong point! Thats why the company isn't worth anything. Open Sourcing their technology at this point will only give everyone something to laugh at. I mean, seriously, their stuff has probably been thrown together over 10+ years. There probably isn't even anyone left who can compile it
ERP Software is still in the era of vt100's and those green and white stripy A3 fanfold printouts.
If the open source movement want to develop an ERP system then it will, but to be honest, given the level of freely available database technology, ERP should be considered to be an application built on top of a database system. I can see using something like Postgres along with Java Servlets, Apache and JServ used to build a fairly reliable, scalable and portable system
But the fact is that ERP is something that only large companies need, and they are unlikely to embrace open source for something like this
Formally testing a system against a set of specs at most only proves that the system works ACCORDING to those specs
In my experience writing a set of specs that cover every single possible problem (bugs, features, security holes..) is next to impossible.
A closed source security system which perform according to a resonable set of specs could still have problems, and even nasty little back doors.
That said, it doesn't mean that formal testing doesn't have a place, even (or especially!) in open source projects.
Simple things like the OpenSSL test suite which can be run every time you compile up a new version can be very useful, just think - you have a set of tests you run every time you build that can spot straight away if you inadvertentently break something
And I bet that having the Java Compatability Kit to run against has helped the people porting Java to Linux and BSD.
Just ask youself - what exactly to the tests prove?, before starting to rely on then
I have seen the future, people, and in it there are a multitude of computing devices, not only PC's the way we see them now, but also PDA's, set tops, even computers in your goddamn fridge!
Sucessful development in the future will be by people who understand standardization, integration and adherence to open protocols. From my linux box I can, using protocols like X, http, nfs and things like CORBA and Java, share data and apps with other linux machines, solaris, BDS, hell even Windoze if I want, and using this stuff is kind of natural when developing on linux as most open source software and libraries out there are based on open standards, making portability and interoperability much easier
Contrast this with our poor friend who is stuck with such hideous and non stardard thinks like MFC (ugh) anc COM (double ugh!)
I remember a few months ago spending a happy few weekends going 'back to my youth' by downloading and playing old Sinclair Spectrum games - Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy and the classing Atic Atac
In those days there sure valued gameplay over fancy graphics.
I also tried to get some stuff for the old BBC Micro but found things in a much more dodgy state from a copyright point of view. Acorn was still asserting their copyright on the BBC Rom, and some games makers where getting heavy on sites and getting them to remove images of games. From 1985. Which only run on machines you can only find in junk stores and car boot sales!
Unbelievably, Boo managed to piss £80m up the wall. Despite having this massive arsenal, they seroiusly f**ked up the technology side, with a site most people couldn't use, and it sucked for those that did.
It just goes to show the poor light that a lot of ecommerce entreprenures see technology in. They are quite happy to waste tens of millions on stupid marketing campaigns, but cannot be bothered to invest time and money to make sure their web sites work!
Whats the betting that their technology people told them that their 'high tech' web site ideas wouldn't work in practice, and where roundly ingnored by the management who wouldn't know one end of a computer from the another.
Still, this is the END of the bubble for companies like this. No one is getting that kind of money unless they seriously know what they are doing, including the technology aspect
As the article does state, most game company rightly assume that many Linux owners have a guilty little 95/98 partition which they boot into to play games.
With the advent of people like Loki porting games to Linux (and selling them at full price), we now have to make a choice as to which platform to buy, and I (and I'm sure many others like me) have a sneeking suspicion that the Windows stuff will perform better with most graphics hardware
I would love to see how Q3A will run on my XFree4.0 / nVidia drivers machine, but I don't want to have to fork out another £30 to find out
If Linux wants to establish itself as a serious games platform then it needs to use the same model as it has done on the server platform - free, open source code that everyone can play with
This was the model used with Doom / Quake - buy the Windows version and then get the Linux code at no cost - so no risk if you can't get it to work (or it sucks)
The user gains the ability to experiment with the Linux version, and the game company sells a copy of the game!
"Horse for courses" here. We all know that Solaris sucks on x86 hardware, that its performance and device compatability is poor. Sun have been trying to close off Solaris x86 for a year or so (witness the cancelling of their graphics driver development..). This is mainly I think in response to the sucess of Linux on x86 platform.
Solaris is also a bit lame when it comes to a development environment as well!
However Solaris does excel as the operating system for Sun hardware, especially the enterprise stuff. Everything works, all the hardware is (of course) supported and works like a dream. The centralisation of control of the Os under the Community license also means central bug control and regular patch clusters to keep things up to date. This makes the SA's job a lot easier.
The whole idea, behind Java, I believe was to make Sun machines easier to use. McNeely has seen the writing on the wall for software (and OS's) as a profitable business line, so he wants to sell as much hardware as possible
Hence Java, and now 'free' Solaris (which probably would have been available sooner if it wasn't for the 3rd party stuff included
Everything has its place. I can see a IBM sponsered Linux running on AS/400 and the like as a big competitor for Sun in the Enterprise level server market
reminds me of a thing they had for videos a few years ago where you go a barcode reading pen, swiped a barcode (printed in a listings mag) and sent it off to the video
that failed in the UK as the mags couldn't be arsed to print the barcodes! It was replaced by the videoPlus system where a user typed in a number instead!
Slashdot Mirror
I can believe (barely) that life is *so rare* that we are the only EM broadcasting civilisation withing a resonable radio sphere in this galaxy at this epoch. However an argument that life on Earth is unique (and that there has never been and will never be life on other planets) is in my opinion scientifically flawed and can only be considered valid by appealing to faith / religion / god whatever.
Fact is, life did arise here, so the probability of life arising on an Earth like planet is not zero. As Douglas Adams reminds us, space is really big. Big enough, I think for life to beat the odds and evolve on other worlds as well.
Of course, whether we will ever contact them (due to distance or timing) withing the life of human civilisation seems unlikely.
restricting themselves when handing out new addresses, these people should concentrate their efforts on reclaiming IP's from companies and individuals who are just WASTING them
I know companies who blagged 256 or 512 addresses a few years ago to every PC they own has an Internet IP (no NAT) and they are refusing to hand them back (as they regard them now as a monetary asset...)
If an effort was made to reclaim addresses from greedy companies, and defunct sites then they can be reissued to people who need them!
Oh, and I think a move to name based virtual hosting is a good thing, and should be applied retrospectively as well!
Yeah, I saw that too on my box. Nvidia's tech guy (who mailed me back in about 2 hours on a SUNDAY) said it was to do with mapping of memory and buffers on the card which confused 'top' no end.
Oh yeah, and on my 'humble' 16MB TNT gears gives me 340fps. The nVidia driver rock OpenGL to the max! (Even if they are closed source)
I'm as positive abou the Open Source movement as the rest of the Slashdot readership, but I think this is taking it a bit far..
In the case of Baan, their technology is not necessarily their strong point! Thats why the company isn't worth anything. Open Sourcing their technology at this point will only give everyone something to laugh at. I mean, seriously, their stuff has probably been thrown together over 10+ years. There probably isn't even anyone left who can compile it
ERP Software is still in the era of vt100's and those green and white stripy A3 fanfold printouts.
If the open source movement want to develop an ERP system then it will, but to be honest, given the level of freely available database technology, ERP should be considered to be an application built on top of a database system. I can see using something like Postgres along with Java Servlets, Apache and JServ used to build a fairly reliable, scalable and portable system
But the fact is that ERP is something that only large companies need, and they are unlikely to embrace open source for something like this
Formally testing a system against a set of specs at most only proves that the system works ACCORDING to those specs
In my experience writing a set of specs that cover every single possible problem (bugs, features, security holes..) is next to impossible.
A closed source security system which perform according to a resonable set of specs could still have problems, and even nasty little back doors.
That said, it doesn't mean that formal testing doesn't have a place, even (or especially!) in open source projects.
Simple things like the OpenSSL test suite which can be run every time you compile up a new version can be very useful, just think - you have a set of tests you run every time you build that can spot straight away if you inadvertentently break something
And I bet that having the Java Compatability Kit to run against has helped the people porting Java to Linux and BSD.
Just ask youself - what exactly to the tests prove?, before starting to rely on then
I have seen the future, people, and in it there are a multitude of computing devices, not only PC's the way we see them now, but also PDA's, set tops, even computers in your goddamn fridge!
Sucessful development in the future will be by people who understand standardization, integration and adherence to open protocols. From my linux box I can, using protocols like X, http, nfs and things like CORBA and Java, share data and apps with other linux machines, solaris, BDS, hell even Windoze if I want, and using this stuff is kind of natural when developing on linux as most open source software and libraries out there are based on open standards, making portability and interoperability much easier
Contrast this with our poor friend who is stuck with such hideous and non stardard thinks like MFC (ugh) anc COM (double ugh!)
Now excuse me while I port gcc to the toaster
learn that shooting things is *not* the answer to everything!
I remember a few months ago spending a happy few weekends going 'back to my youth' by downloading and playing old Sinclair Spectrum games - Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy and the classing Atic Atac
In those days there sure valued gameplay over fancy graphics.
I also tried to get some stuff for the old BBC Micro but found things in a much more dodgy state from a copyright point of view. Acorn was still asserting their copyright on the BBC Rom, and some games makers where getting heavy on sites and getting them to remove images of games. From 1985. Which only run on machines you can only find in junk stores and car boot sales!
I find this stuff absolutely ludicrous!
Unbelievably, Boo managed to piss £80m up the wall. Despite having this massive arsenal, they seroiusly f**ked up the technology side, with a site most people couldn't use, and it sucked for those that did.
It just goes to show the poor light that a lot of ecommerce entreprenures see technology in. They are quite happy to waste tens of millions on stupid marketing campaigns, but cannot be bothered to invest time and money to make sure their web sites work!
Whats the betting that their technology people told them that their 'high tech' web site ideas wouldn't work in practice, and where roundly ingnored by the management who wouldn't know one end of a computer from the another.
Still, this is the END of the bubble for companies like this. No one is getting that kind of money unless they seriously know what they are doing, including the technology aspect
As the article does state, most game company rightly assume that many Linux owners have a guilty little 95/98 partition which they boot into to play games.
With the advent of people like Loki porting games to Linux (and selling them at full price), we now have to make a choice as to which platform to buy, and I (and I'm sure many others like me) have a sneeking suspicion that the Windows stuff will perform better with most graphics hardware
I would love to see how Q3A will run on my XFree4.0 / nVidia drivers machine, but I don't want to have to fork out another £30 to find out
If Linux wants to establish itself as a serious games platform then it needs to use the same model as it has done on the server platform - free, open source code that everyone can play with
This was the model used with Doom / Quake - buy the Windows version and then get the Linux code at no cost - so no risk if you can't get it to work (or it sucks)
The user gains the ability to experiment with the Linux version, and the game company sells a copy of the game!
RipOff-Net, or maybe Fraud-Net
Ways to dishonestly extract your money from you using the nets ability to give high gloss to the flimsiest fly by night fraudsters
LinuxOne ?
"Horse for courses" here. We all know that Solaris sucks on x86 hardware, that its performance and device compatability is poor. Sun have been trying to close off Solaris x86 for a year or so (witness the cancelling of their graphics driver development..). This is mainly I think in response to the sucess of Linux on x86 platform.
Solaris is also a bit lame when it comes to a development environment as well!
However Solaris does excel as the operating system for Sun hardware, especially the enterprise stuff. Everything works, all the hardware is (of course) supported and works like a dream. The centralisation of control of the Os under the Community license also means central bug control and regular patch clusters to keep things up to date. This makes the SA's job a lot easier.
The whole idea, behind Java, I believe was to make Sun machines easier to use. McNeely has seen the writing on the wall for software (and OS's) as a profitable business line, so he wants to sell as much hardware as possible
Hence Java, and now 'free' Solaris (which probably would have been available sooner if it wasn't for the 3rd party stuff included
Everything has its place. I can see a IBM sponsered Linux running on AS/400 and the like as a big competitor for Sun in the Enterprise level server market
Should be interesting
reminds me of a thing they had for videos a few years ago where you go a barcode reading pen, swiped a barcode (printed in a listings mag) and sent it off to the video
that failed in the UK as the mags couldn't be arsed to print the barcodes! It was replaced by the videoPlus system where a user typed in a number instead!