Whats worse than the folks who couldn't yack to their buddies for hours on end is people PAYING for MSN. My grandparent's had a hell of a time figuring out what was happening when MSN Messenger told them they weren't connected to the internet. I spent a while with them on the phone about that one. MSN needed to show off Passport to everyone so their execs basically forced them to incorporate it into their services. Before the dot com downturn I'm assuming MSN expected to be selling a bunch of their Companion boxes with their internet service. Then I could go to Jonny MSNSubscriber's house and cruise the net with all my personal settings. This is a decent idea but has run into some technical difficulties. I agree with those now question.NET (but for fucksake MS doesn't need to host.NET components you goddamn idiots they're just providing the foundation classes and runtimes) and its reliability. This just teaches the lesson to be prepared and don't put all your eggs in one basket and if you do only have one basket make sure it's a BaskeTron 4000 that can survive an orbital reentry.
NASA Administrator:Hey engineers, yeah you with the pencils. Go forth and do geeky things, preferably in space.
NASA Engineers:Ok but when do we get paid?
NASA Administrator *practicing golf swing*:Uh...riiiight. Since NASA gets about a fraction of the money they probably should get it's no wonder they're facing budget overruns. It's too bad they don't purposely blow stuff up or they could get as much money as the Air Force (who's getting ready to order a fat load of F-22s and plans to junk most of their fleet for a new batch of JSFs). No NASA doesn't make magical things or cure cancer (directly) or feed hungry homeless kids but neither does the military or national park service or the person expense budget of Washington D.C.. Bitching we need to feed homeless people or put money into schools rather than send things into space is pretty ridiculous. Siphoning money away from NASA isn't going to put any more fucking food in anyone's fucking mouth and it certainly isn't going to make your dumbfuck child any smarter. Most of the money for any public works project goes into paying for the bureauracy to "run" the program. It's like donating to a charity, only a small fraction of your 10$ donation does anything semi-meaningful most of it goes into someone's wallet tax free. The government makes trillions off us in a year and most it we never see again unless you live next door to a government contractor and see his brand new fishing boat. Hmmm...maybe NASA ought to contact Kleiner-Perkins for venture capital on their next set of missions. Will Hearst III and John Doerr might throw down some cash for a DS probe or two.
Hmmm, I'd personally rather have fiber. Why would I rather see fiber widely distributed? Because it is multifunction. A single fiber line can carry hundreds of TV channels, tons of voice channels and even data channels for us internet users. Coax could do the same thing if cable companies and telephone companies were allowed to be a little more friendly with one another (ergo, getting higher throughput on copper means it could compete with fiber thus this article is is interasting however this is pushing the limits of copper wiring's data rate while optical fibers still have room left for bandwidth). Using fiber networks wouldn't necessarily destroy the country's backbones either, if anything it would spurn the usage of higher data rate routers and lines. IIRC the fastest backbone in the US is the OC-192 between Chicago and St.Louis owned and operated by MCI. RUnning fiber to homes and businesses is not going to automatically mean they've got an OC-3 in their garage. The owners of the fiber would just allocate data channels (just like on copper lines) and sell them to whoever wanted to use them. Video could be transmitted on channels a-b whilst data/voice is allocated to channels c-d with e-f (the letters obviously represent ranges of individual data channels) reserved for other usage. Wiring inside houses could easily be preserved by connecting it to a small autonomous bridge in a box on your garage. I could envision fiber to homes but this is marred by the reality that cable companies and telephone companies are both pretty stingy and the only real way to get fiber to the home is for the government to do it and control the lines themselves letting others fill them with content.
This brings up an interesting point, should municipalities get into the fiber game? Not for profit but merely to seed the technology's availability, especially since private organizations are not willing to do it. Routine maitenance of sewers, streets, and power grids could be used to lay dark fiber for later illuminating. If the process was tacked onto work already being done it could be made cost effective and it offers greater local competition for service. You'd get the fiber run to your house and opt to either keep your existing copper service to upgrade to fiber. With bridges linking the copper in your house and the fiber outside you wouldn't need to spend several thousand dollars on new equipment right off the bat. I guess I'm warm to the idea because my city has a municipally owned electricity company and is thus fairly exempt from the troubles of the rest of the state's privatized electricity generators.
Smart cards are rare enough in first world countries (the US) and you fucking expect a third world citizen to be picking them up at the local radio shack? Give me a fucking break. Fifty bucks goes a long way when you're livig in a country without electricity and running water. The Simputer is not perfect for developing countries because it requires too much infrastructure they don't rightly have. Using an old PSX is much more feasible because it will hook right into the TV a village already has.
Win32 and IE specific features? Name one fucking Win32 or IE specific feature in wither IE or Win32. Give me one fucking example of a function in the MFC that could not be replicated. You must have been a prenatal accident. There is no fucking.NET, it is not a fucking product. It is the name Microsoft is giving to an extremely large number of protocol and architecture schema they're incorporating into their future operating systems.
So show me where oh smart one I can find a cheap PC setup like you claim that has a Firewire port and a built in antenna for wireless networking? Eight hundred bucks gets you a nice little bundle on the iMacs. They don't clock as high as Duron based systems but then they don't really need to. I don't see how iMacs don't work with "standard printers" either. It seems to me if it wasn't for iMacs there's be no USB shit at all going around. My Canon S400 works just fine with my Powerbook and my PC workstation, it works really well with both systems and I can't seem to find in memory a complaint I've had about it working with either.
There is no.net client you drooling piece of monkey shit. There is the CLR which runs the IL bytecode produces by the Visual Studio.Net compilers. A CLR can easily be written for any Unix as well as a copy of the.NET specific libraries. How is this any fucking different from Unix anyhow? I could write a small network based system based on [insert name of RPC protocol here] and charge money for it, entirely Unix native. Shit man this is mainframe processing. You rent resource time on a remote system. What the fuck are you spouting about ownership of the desktop, most people who used computers in the 70's and 80's didn't even own the computer they used.
That's quite a statement about Linux users being more technical. I'm glad you think so because as I churn through newsgroups I don't find anything to back that up. The Linux user population is not growing larger and larger, they got an influx of attention because Linux companies had IPOs. Now no one gives a shit. The Mac using populous is larger than that of Linux users and we still have problems finding companies that support anything even related to Apple products. Linus is NOT a profit making market either, they're people that don't believe in software they can't view the source code to.
This can either be off topic entirely or completely relevant depending on which direction you're facing. I've read before about a different sort of radio communication that instead of modulating either frequency or amplitude of a carrier wave the system turns the CW on and off to send data. O | O O O O O | (O being off and | being on) would send an ASCII A for instance. Now I can't find the Popular Science I read about this in and can't seem to remember the name of the scheme to look for it. Anyways, it's basically digital Morse code and has a pretty long fucking reach and attenuates only when the signal washes out in background noise (and even then doesn't have to if you transmit on a Golomb ruled rate). For a second assume I'm not talking out of my ass, wouldn't this be entirely possible with a microcontroller, laser, and a light sensor? Seeing as your baud would be limited by the physical properties of your circuitry namely the speed at which the lighting element in the laser switched from on to off. However I doubt this would be too limited and you could probably get a pretty fair baud rate out of such a system as well as a damn long range. A medium power solid state laser would good range even in less than perfect conditions. A laser link would be a good way to connect wirelessly between buildings as there's little chance of interception and anyone not listening in the correct pattern key wouldn't be able to grab your signal from background noise. Anyone remember the name of the radio pulsing scheme?
Everybody get stoned (biblically)
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SMS vs. E-mail?
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SMS would have been a factor of ten more popular in the US did we not have really cheap landline communication. AOL has a bajillion users because it doesn't cost ten cents a minute to make a local telephone call. You can tie up the locals loops here ad infinitum for free. Thus chatting and e-mail on AOL is extremely popular and often used. When you go across the pond it is a very different story. Landlines aren't nearly as cheap and abundant as they are here thus people don't spend a trillion hours on AOL tying up local loops. The EU however in the name of a better economy suggested everyone's wireless networks ought to talk to one another. Europe started off with a better wireless arrangement than in the US (in response to a poorer landline arrangement) and now SMS is more popular than e-mail with the kids. I'm not really sure SMS will really ever take off in the US like it has elsewhere because most people have already got enough ways to keep in touch if not too many ways.
A slashdotter talking to an AOLer about SMS:
[AOLer]:I wish I could send e-mail to my friends with my cell phone!
[slashdotter]:You can, it's called SMS.
[AOLer]:So like you mean I could use AOL on my phone?
[slashdotter]:It's different from e-mail.
[AOLer]:But I want to send an e-mail to my friends not some weird thing!
[slashdotter]:You'd be sending them something like an e-mail but it's different.
[AOLer]:Shut up geek!
[slashdotter]:*mumbling and jotting something down* You're going on my list!
I just don't see SMS catching on in the laziest country on the planet. What American is going to spend a bunch of time writing email with only 12 keys for input? It'd be cool more companies offered it though so you at least had the option. You can fit alot of information into 160 characters, there are plenty of uses for SMS on PCS networks hint:dedicated SMS pagers for professionals and regular consumers.
Re:Gas guzzlers should pay for damaging our (publi
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Eco-Terrorism
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You are a god damned fucking idiot. My car gets 22 miles or so to the gallon but I still drive alot. I drive all over Southern California. Should I e-commute everywhere using up kilowatt hour after kilowatt hour which is generated using really fucking dirty coal power? Fuck you. It takes less energy (thus less fuel) to maass manufacture something and ship it three thousand miles than it does to have a bunch of small factories NOT running at peak operating efficiency. You've got to remember there is a matter of getting raw materials to places, if I have to get one rare element to a thousand small factories than one large one, I'm going to need alot more power. So shut the fuck up about buying locally produced shit.
For those of you in Southern California the local astronomical groups have been able to cordon off a huge section of land in the Joshua Tree state park that is a light pollution free zone. I've been out in the park before and the night sky is great. Being able to see all of the stars on star charts is quite the experience for a city dweller like me. Joshua Tree is a ways from LA but it is worth the drive if you're at all interested in seeing a pretty awesome light show for free. I've seen a Leonid shower from the park and I lost count at 142 meteors. If you do go out there remember it is a desert and contains all the sorts of things deserts contains and lacks what deserts usually lack, namely water. Most of my 25 kilo bag was water and I took a purifier with me because there's a few streams in the area I was hiking. Run away from pulsating cacti and bushes that rattle.
Congrats to Jordan for snagging a pretty sweel job over at Apple. I heard about this earlier today and found it pretty interesting. I think more experience with *BSD will help Apple out alot as they migrate from the old OS7 codebase to their MachBSD scheme. I don't see this though as Apple trying to grab an x86 developer and making him port shit to Intel processors. There's no need at all for Apple to switch ISAs. They are a hardware company and thus make their cash by selling hardware. Selling OSX for Intel machines would be ludicrous because no one would fucking buy it. Most PC users are anal enough about their "IBM Compatibles" without naysaying Apple for releasing a MacOS on Intel machines. A hundred million Windows/Intel users are not going to suddenly see the error of their ways and switch to MacOS or Linux for fuck sake. Jordan isn't being hired to port the Carbon library to x86. He's got useful experience with the type of development Apple has adopted for OSX. He's got the sort of experience to know when is a good time to release a kernel revision or how to manage a group responsible for a system component that no one will probably ever give a fuck about until it crashes.
Uh...it's sort of sad to see everyone here getting so fucking bent out of shape because a company wants to impliment per-seat licensing. I don't see how thats one step closer to Microsoft, they charge per fucking user. They're trying to sell their distro to corporate types and they need to make it clear to PHBs how they charge for their product. Charging just for a box with CDs and a manual isn't something PHBs or even accountants are used to with software products. The need a term on the price and also a condition for the price. Charging per seat is Caldera's way of clarifying what they're selling.
The Sphinx predates the Pyramids however they do not show the same erosion patterns as it does. Ergo they were built much later than the Sphinx. Besides that the excavations of the settlements around the Big Three you see in history books has shown that people working on the Pyramids were not in fact slaves but hired help. Hired help isn't that hard to believe in an area where your biggest crops only need your attention for part of the year. Not only do you have an abundance of cheap labour sitting around while fields are fallow but their religion is based on the assertation that the Pharoh is indeed a reincarnation of Amon-Ra on Earth. Look at all the shit people do in contemporary history because they think some god somewhere told them to or wants them to. The labour contractors went to the farms and said "hey want some work to bring in some extra cash this next winter, oh yeah, your god on Earth would REALLY appriciate your help" and that was that. Maintaining a mass of slaves in any one area is a pretty dumb thing to do besides. You can't trust slave labour (especially opressed slave labour) to do much of anything so you need lots of guards to oversee them and ocassionally beat the shit out of them. Thats an army of guards for an army of slaves that require an army of logistical personelle. Every year for 30-40 years? That's sort of ludicrous to suggest. Nor an army of volunteer labour which acts as its own logistical unit is threefold more efficient than an army of slaves. I'm talking mostly about the Big Three at Giza of course. I bet there was probably a pyramid or two built by slaves for some bastard Pharoh at some point. But don't extrapolate too much from the Sphinx's erosion patterns, it's been buried in sand and whatnot over the course of however many thousands of years. Egypt was alot more complex than we thought it was in 1901 and will only continue to grow in complexity as we find out more about it but making extrapolations and assertations doesn't get you much farther than the end of your nose which is practically where you started from.
Microsoft is not "eating up the GPL" twinky. They're saying "you can't use this toolkit to develop GPL'ed software because you can't rerelease this toolkit like the GPL says you have to". I don't see what is so difficult to comprehend about that, I picked it up from my first read of the EULA. Microsoft can make their licenses as restrictive as possible, it is your responsibility to read through them for fuck sake. This isn't really any worse than the GPL which says if I use ANY amount of GPL'ed code in my program I need to release the source code under the GPL. It forces you to open your code and release everything which is the opposite of Microsoft's licensing which sayy you can't release anything.
Ha, I got a GB classic when it first came out in 89 but it sort of died over the years and I didn't want one until I became addicted to Pokémon about a year ago and bought a GBC at Costco. I think the GBC screen is pretty damn clear in good lighting, I don't recall ever having trouble with it. I've never used a GB pocket before though.
Well since I'm not officially poor I won't be buying a GBA anytime soon and will stick to kinking my body into strange contorted shapes to play my GBC. From what I've seen now the GBA seems to have gotten their reflective backing from the same GBC fab because the LCD in my GBC sucks ass. It's not so bad if I'm somewhere with a single source or light (or very diffuse light) but never try playing it in an airport or the light with alot of bright lights. I can see Nintendo's reason for nixing a backlight on the GBA (and Colour) though. I used to have a Gamegear waaaay back when and that thing chewed through batteries like mad. My GB could handle plenty of playing without a hitch while the Gamegear would cop out pretty quickly, it lasted long enough to beat Sonic but that was about it.
The Gameboy colour came out pretty much as a direct response to Pokémon becoming ultra popular. Pokémon was designed for people to play and trade with one another likening to the appeal of Tetris when the GB first came out. What better way for Nintendo to capitalize on Pokémon's popularity than to come out with a new system which costs less to produce than even the GB Pocket (meaning no profit loss on GBC sales). Both the Pocket and Colour integrate all of the GB's components onto a single chip which makes them light and really easy to produce. Oh yeah, and the fact that with the GBC out they could sell DX versions of their old games. Few things are quite as satisfying as when someone buys two or more copies of your product.
Alot of times when working with a pre-existing codebase buffer overflows and problems pop up when you add new code to older code or go back and try to fuck with older code. Big software projects can get really complex which means for every so many lines you write you've fucked up so many times. Plus with writing code on a schedule you often times have to have a product ready by a certain date, not when it's finished so you don't have time to do a whole bunch of testing. Personally if I were managing something like IIS I'd give the dev guys plenty of time to work on testing and evaluation but thats just me.
I think one of the best points made is the bit about Napster being a collection of the history of music. As stated, there is an enormous amount of overlap but you only need one guy with a Bif Naked fetish to grab one of your favourite Bif Naked songs. Only bands affiliated with the big 6 RIAA houses get any play on the radio or shelf space in the store. Next time you're out look for bands on Vagrant or Kung-Fu or Hepcat and see how many you find. Figuring out how to charge for and manage downloadable media is the big problem. You can't expect to have everything for free, that's communist open source horse shit because it isn't REALLY free. Downloading all the music from a particular band might not hurt some large band who's gone platinum or has the potential to go platinum but if I download some small band's discography who'll probably be blessed if they even sell 100,000 records I'm really fucking them over.
Slashdot has this reality distortion field in which the specifics of a problem are never really discussed, only the concept and some quick numbers. CDs are an enormous business and growing but the billions of dollars in sales don't all go into some dude's pocket. It goes into the pocket of that dorky kid at Warehouse Music or the truck driver every cuts off while he's making his rounds and then finally the artist who's had to sell rights to their soul in order to get their music out to people. Even if a band absolutely loves playing their music just to play it they can't exactly do it for free. As my brother's taught me in the time he's been playing guitar, a rockstar's toys are expensive as mine are. Not only is their equipment expensive but so are recording sessions and hiring a guy to master your songs. Don't assume any music comes out of the studio sounding like the cut you lsiten to on your CD. Even if it's only removing the sound of some guy farting while he's jamming down on his guitar shit still needs to be mastered. None of that is to mention how a musician is supposed to make a living. No one here can write free code without some sort of income (for most of you thats mom and dad). Figure out a way for a musician to recoup all those losses without a recording industry (and associated framework) and you're a billionaire.
On my high school's grad night we ended up going to Disneyland and pretty much had run of the park. In one of the gazebos there were fair sized posters of Disney characters but drawn in the full anime styling. It was pretty funny to see them stop hiding the definite anime influence in alot of their art now. Before Pokemon exploded in the US most people didn't have any idea what anime even was. Shit look at what Disney did to Princess Mononoke. I was really stoked to go see it in theaters, especially with the high quality dubbing Miramax had done to it. My problem started with the fact it was only released in two fucking theaters in Southern California, one I'd never even heard of. Then there was the problems with Miramax being able to release it on DVD. I'm glad I got my copy before Disney decides to pull any horse shit and yank the disc from market. The original Japanese cut of PM is really good but Miramax's effort is also pretty damn cool. Now I'm off to count change so I can finish my Lain collection.
As I look through the System Folder on my Powerbook I notice there aren't a large number of platform specific tools in there. The drivers are Apple drivers comforming to driver rules and everything is compiled for PPC. Oh yeah, Mac OS 8 worked on just about every piece of Mac hardware after the introduction of the 603. Linux is pretty much the same way. I've installed binary packages on lots of different computers and never had a hardware related problem before. If you DO have problems thats your own fucking fault for using shitty hardware that doesn't comform to specs like everyone else does. You don't install different C libraries because you've got an Athlon on a Via chipset. The dude had a valid point, installation procedures on linux are pretty retarded sometimes and turn people off to using it. Not only that but it is fairly daunting to have a thousand little apps that do the exact same thing a different way. Do I really need Yet Another (insert function name here)? Saying OS X is inferior because it doesn't work on Y platform is retarded. Linux doesn't "support" any more chipsets than x86. All the other platforms are worked on by third parties besides Cox and Torvalds. And lastly, Linux != X (as in windows).
When humans started getting alot smarter than their prey they sort of artificially took themselves out of the predator/prey loop. Human's didn't over specialize because they moved around so much. We're arguably omnivores which means we never needed to specialize in hunting any particular sort of prey. When supply dwindled we moved to a new area or chased down animals that were roving. Strict carnivores don't have that ability because they've got too many special straits for hunting particular types of animals. Our specialty was our brains and with that we were able to augment the rest of our abilities. You don't need to run really fast to throw some sort of missle weapon and you don't need sharp claws if you've got oposed thumbs and can grip sharp rocks. Since we could outlive the extinction of our prey we could afford to make it go extinct. I'd assume if you looked at human populations during a prey downturn you'd see their populations didn't shrink too much only moved on or split up.
I suppose technically you could still root it by using microwaves to power the circuits as well as read/write values (van Eck style) into the onboard cache of the processor. You've got a couple kilobytes in the BIOS memory you could use for runtime/firmware stuff. Granted you'd need to get some equipment really close to it but the water might provide a good way to cancel out noise. Hmmm.
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Whats worse than the folks who couldn't yack to their buddies for hours on end is people PAYING for MSN. My grandparent's had a hell of a time figuring out what was happening when MSN Messenger told them they weren't connected to the internet. I spent a while with them on the phone about that one. MSN needed to show off Passport to everyone so their execs basically forced them to incorporate it into their services. Before the dot com downturn I'm assuming MSN expected to be selling a bunch of their Companion boxes with their internet service. Then I could go to Jonny MSNSubscriber's house and cruise the net with all my personal settings. This is a decent idea but has run into some technical difficulties. I agree with those now question .NET (but for fucksake MS doesn't need to host .NET components you goddamn idiots they're just providing the foundation classes and runtimes) and its reliability. This just teaches the lesson to be prepared and don't put all your eggs in one basket and if you do only have one basket make sure it's a BaskeTron 4000 that can survive an orbital reentry.
NASA Administrator:Hey engineers, yeah you with the pencils. Go forth and do geeky things, preferably in space.
NASA Engineers:Ok but when do we get paid?
NASA Administrator *practicing golf swing*:Uh...riiiight.
Since NASA gets about a fraction of the money they probably should get it's no wonder they're facing budget overruns. It's too bad they don't purposely blow stuff up or they could get as much money as the Air Force (who's getting ready to order a fat load of F-22s and plans to junk most of their fleet for a new batch of JSFs). No NASA doesn't make magical things or cure cancer (directly) or feed hungry homeless kids but neither does the military or national park service or the person expense budget of Washington D.C.. Bitching we need to feed homeless people or put money into schools rather than send things into space is pretty ridiculous. Siphoning money away from NASA isn't going to put any more fucking food in anyone's fucking mouth and it certainly isn't going to make your dumbfuck child any smarter. Most of the money for any public works project goes into paying for the bureauracy to "run" the program. It's like donating to a charity, only a small fraction of your 10$ donation does anything semi-meaningful most of it goes into someone's wallet tax free. The government makes trillions off us in a year and most it we never see again unless you live next door to a government contractor and see his brand new fishing boat. Hmmm...maybe NASA ought to contact Kleiner-Perkins for venture capital on their next set of missions. Will Hearst III and John Doerr might throw down some cash for a DS probe or two.
Hmmm, I'd personally rather have fiber. Why would I rather see fiber widely distributed? Because it is multifunction. A single fiber line can carry hundreds of TV channels, tons of voice channels and even data channels for us internet users. Coax could do the same thing if cable companies and telephone companies were allowed to be a little more friendly with one another (ergo, getting higher throughput on copper means it could compete with fiber thus this article is is interasting however this is pushing the limits of copper wiring's data rate while optical fibers still have room left for bandwidth). Using fiber networks wouldn't necessarily destroy the country's backbones either, if anything it would spurn the usage of higher data rate routers and lines. IIRC the fastest backbone in the US is the OC-192 between Chicago and St.Louis owned and operated by MCI. RUnning fiber to homes and businesses is not going to automatically mean they've got an OC-3 in their garage. The owners of the fiber would just allocate data channels (just like on copper lines) and sell them to whoever wanted to use them. Video could be transmitted on channels a-b whilst data/voice is allocated to channels c-d with e-f (the letters obviously represent ranges of individual data channels) reserved for other usage. Wiring inside houses could easily be preserved by connecting it to a small autonomous bridge in a box on your garage. I could envision fiber to homes but this is marred by the reality that cable companies and telephone companies are both pretty stingy and the only real way to get fiber to the home is for the government to do it and control the lines themselves letting others fill them with content.
This brings up an interesting point, should municipalities get into the fiber game? Not for profit but merely to seed the technology's availability, especially since private organizations are not willing to do it. Routine maitenance of sewers, streets, and power grids could be used to lay dark fiber for later illuminating. If the process was tacked onto work already being done it could be made cost effective and it offers greater local competition for service. You'd get the fiber run to your house and opt to either keep your existing copper service to upgrade to fiber. With bridges linking the copper in your house and the fiber outside you wouldn't need to spend several thousand dollars on new equipment right off the bat. I guess I'm warm to the idea because my city has a municipally owned electricity company and is thus fairly exempt from the troubles of the rest of the state's privatized electricity generators.
Smart cards are rare enough in first world countries (the US) and you fucking expect a third world citizen to be picking them up at the local radio shack? Give me a fucking break. Fifty bucks goes a long way when you're livig in a country without electricity and running water. The Simputer is not perfect for developing countries because it requires too much infrastructure they don't rightly have. Using an old PSX is much more feasible because it will hook right into the TV a village already has.
Win32 and IE specific features? Name one fucking Win32 or IE specific feature in wither IE or Win32. Give me one fucking example of a function in the MFC that could not be replicated. You must have been a prenatal accident. There is no fucking .NET, it is not a fucking product. It is the name Microsoft is giving to an extremely large number of protocol and architecture schema they're incorporating into their future operating systems.
So show me where oh smart one I can find a cheap PC setup like you claim that has a Firewire port and a built in antenna for wireless networking? Eight hundred bucks gets you a nice little bundle on the iMacs. They don't clock as high as Duron based systems but then they don't really need to. I don't see how iMacs don't work with "standard printers" either. It seems to me if it wasn't for iMacs there's be no USB shit at all going around. My Canon S400 works just fine with my Powerbook and my PC workstation, it works really well with both systems and I can't seem to find in memory a complaint I've had about it working with either.
There is no .net client you drooling piece of monkey shit. There is the CLR which runs the IL bytecode produces by the Visual Studio .Net compilers. A CLR can easily be written for any Unix as well as a copy of the .NET specific libraries. How is this any fucking different from Unix anyhow? I could write a small network based system based on [insert name of RPC protocol here] and charge money for it, entirely Unix native. Shit man this is mainframe processing. You rent resource time on a remote system. What the fuck are you spouting about ownership of the desktop, most people who used computers in the 70's and 80's didn't even own the computer they used.
That's quite a statement about Linux users being more technical. I'm glad you think so because as I churn through newsgroups I don't find anything to back that up. The Linux user population is not growing larger and larger, they got an influx of attention because Linux companies had IPOs. Now no one gives a shit. The Mac using populous is larger than that of Linux users and we still have problems finding companies that support anything even related to Apple products. Linus is NOT a profit making market either, they're people that don't believe in software they can't view the source code to.
This can either be off topic entirely or completely relevant depending on which direction you're facing. I've read before about a different sort of radio communication that instead of modulating either frequency or amplitude of a carrier wave the system turns the CW on and off to send data. O | O O O O O | (O being off and | being on) would send an ASCII A for instance. Now I can't find the Popular Science I read about this in and can't seem to remember the name of the scheme to look for it. Anyways, it's basically digital Morse code and has a pretty long fucking reach and attenuates only when the signal washes out in background noise (and even then doesn't have to if you transmit on a Golomb ruled rate). For a second assume I'm not talking out of my ass, wouldn't this be entirely possible with a microcontroller, laser, and a light sensor? Seeing as your baud would be limited by the physical properties of your circuitry namely the speed at which the lighting element in the laser switched from on to off. However I doubt this would be too limited and you could probably get a pretty fair baud rate out of such a system as well as a damn long range. A medium power solid state laser would good range even in less than perfect conditions. A laser link would be a good way to connect wirelessly between buildings as there's little chance of interception and anyone not listening in the correct pattern key wouldn't be able to grab your signal from background noise. Anyone remember the name of the radio pulsing scheme?
SMS would have been a factor of ten more popular in the US did we not have really cheap landline communication. AOL has a bajillion users because it doesn't cost ten cents a minute to make a local telephone call. You can tie up the locals loops here ad infinitum for free. Thus chatting and e-mail on AOL is extremely popular and often used. When you go across the pond it is a very different story. Landlines aren't nearly as cheap and abundant as they are here thus people don't spend a trillion hours on AOL tying up local loops. The EU however in the name of a better economy suggested everyone's wireless networks ought to talk to one another. Europe started off with a better wireless arrangement than in the US (in response to a poorer landline arrangement) and now SMS is more popular than e-mail with the kids. I'm not really sure SMS will really ever take off in the US like it has elsewhere because most people have already got enough ways to keep in touch if not too many ways.
A slashdotter talking to an AOLer about SMS:
[AOLer]:I wish I could send e-mail to my friends with my cell phone!
[slashdotter]:You can, it's called SMS.
[AOLer]:So like you mean I could use AOL on my phone?
[slashdotter]:It's different from e-mail.
[AOLer]:But I want to send an e-mail to my friends not some weird thing!
[slashdotter]:You'd be sending them something like an e-mail but it's different.
[AOLer]:Shut up geek!
[slashdotter]:*mumbling and jotting something down* You're going on my list!
I just don't see SMS catching on in the laziest country on the planet. What American is going to spend a bunch of time writing email with only 12 keys for input? It'd be cool more companies offered it though so you at least had the option. You can fit alot of information into 160 characters, there are plenty of uses for SMS on PCS networks hint:dedicated SMS pagers for professionals and regular consumers.
You are a god damned fucking idiot. My car gets 22 miles or so to the gallon but I still drive alot. I drive all over Southern California. Should I e-commute everywhere using up kilowatt hour after kilowatt hour which is generated using really fucking dirty coal power? Fuck you. It takes less energy (thus less fuel) to maass manufacture something and ship it three thousand miles than it does to have a bunch of small factories NOT running at peak operating efficiency. You've got to remember there is a matter of getting raw materials to places, if I have to get one rare element to a thousand small factories than one large one, I'm going to need alot more power. So shut the fuck up about buying locally produced shit.
For those of you in Southern California the local astronomical groups have been able to cordon off a huge section of land in the Joshua Tree state park that is a light pollution free zone. I've been out in the park before and the night sky is great. Being able to see all of the stars on star charts is quite the experience for a city dweller like me. Joshua Tree is a ways from LA but it is worth the drive if you're at all interested in seeing a pretty awesome light show for free. I've seen a Leonid shower from the park and I lost count at 142 meteors. If you do go out there remember it is a desert and contains all the sorts of things deserts contains and lacks what deserts usually lack, namely water. Most of my 25 kilo bag was water and I took a purifier with me because there's a few streams in the area I was hiking. Run away from pulsating cacti and bushes that rattle.
Congrats to Jordan for snagging a pretty sweel job over at Apple. I heard about this earlier today and found it pretty interesting. I think more experience with *BSD will help Apple out alot as they migrate from the old OS7 codebase to their MachBSD scheme. I don't see this though as Apple trying to grab an x86 developer and making him port shit to Intel processors. There's no need at all for Apple to switch ISAs. They are a hardware company and thus make their cash by selling hardware. Selling OSX for Intel machines would be ludicrous because no one would fucking buy it. Most PC users are anal enough about their "IBM Compatibles" without naysaying Apple for releasing a MacOS on Intel machines. A hundred million Windows/Intel users are not going to suddenly see the error of their ways and switch to MacOS or Linux for fuck sake. Jordan isn't being hired to port the Carbon library to x86. He's got useful experience with the type of development Apple has adopted for OSX. He's got the sort of experience to know when is a good time to release a kernel revision or how to manage a group responsible for a system component that no one will probably ever give a fuck about until it crashes.
Uh...it's sort of sad to see everyone here getting so fucking bent out of shape because a company wants to impliment per-seat licensing. I don't see how thats one step closer to Microsoft, they charge per fucking user. They're trying to sell their distro to corporate types and they need to make it clear to PHBs how they charge for their product. Charging just for a box with CDs and a manual isn't something PHBs or even accountants are used to with software products. The need a term on the price and also a condition for the price. Charging per seat is Caldera's way of clarifying what they're selling.
The Sphinx predates the Pyramids however they do not show the same erosion patterns as it does. Ergo they were built much later than the Sphinx. Besides that the excavations of the settlements around the Big Three you see in history books has shown that people working on the Pyramids were not in fact slaves but hired help. Hired help isn't that hard to believe in an area where your biggest crops only need your attention for part of the year. Not only do you have an abundance of cheap labour sitting around while fields are fallow but their religion is based on the assertation that the Pharoh is indeed a reincarnation of Amon-Ra on Earth. Look at all the shit people do in contemporary history because they think some god somewhere told them to or wants them to. The labour contractors went to the farms and said "hey want some work to bring in some extra cash this next winter, oh yeah, your god on Earth would REALLY appriciate your help" and that was that. Maintaining a mass of slaves in any one area is a pretty dumb thing to do besides. You can't trust slave labour (especially opressed slave labour) to do much of anything so you need lots of guards to oversee them and ocassionally beat the shit out of them. Thats an army of guards for an army of slaves that require an army of logistical personelle. Every year for 30-40 years? That's sort of ludicrous to suggest. Nor an army of volunteer labour which acts as its own logistical unit is threefold more efficient than an army of slaves. I'm talking mostly about the Big Three at Giza of course. I bet there was probably a pyramid or two built by slaves for some bastard Pharoh at some point. But don't extrapolate too much from the Sphinx's erosion patterns, it's been buried in sand and whatnot over the course of however many thousands of years. Egypt was alot more complex than we thought it was in 1901 and will only continue to grow in complexity as we find out more about it but making extrapolations and assertations doesn't get you much farther than the end of your nose which is practically where you started from.
Microsoft is not "eating up the GPL" twinky. They're saying "you can't use this toolkit to develop GPL'ed software because you can't rerelease this toolkit like the GPL says you have to". I don't see what is so difficult to comprehend about that, I picked it up from my first read of the EULA. Microsoft can make their licenses as restrictive as possible, it is your responsibility to read through them for fuck sake. This isn't really any worse than the GPL which says if I use ANY amount of GPL'ed code in my program I need to release the source code under the GPL. It forces you to open your code and release everything which is the opposite of Microsoft's licensing which sayy you can't release anything.
Ha, I got a GB classic when it first came out in 89 but it sort of died over the years and I didn't want one until I became addicted to Pokémon about a year ago and bought a GBC at Costco. I think the GBC screen is pretty damn clear in good lighting, I don't recall ever having trouble with it. I've never used a GB pocket before though.
Well since I'm not officially poor I won't be buying a GBA anytime soon and will stick to kinking my body into strange contorted shapes to play my GBC. From what I've seen now the GBA seems to have gotten their reflective backing from the same GBC fab because the LCD in my GBC sucks ass. It's not so bad if I'm somewhere with a single source or light (or very diffuse light) but never try playing it in an airport or the light with alot of bright lights. I can see Nintendo's reason for nixing a backlight on the GBA (and Colour) though. I used to have a Gamegear waaaay back when and that thing chewed through batteries like mad. My GB could handle plenty of playing without a hitch while the Gamegear would cop out pretty quickly, it lasted long enough to beat Sonic but that was about it.
The Gameboy colour came out pretty much as a direct response to Pokémon becoming ultra popular. Pokémon was designed for people to play and trade with one another likening to the appeal of Tetris when the GB first came out. What better way for Nintendo to capitalize on Pokémon's popularity than to come out with a new system which costs less to produce than even the GB Pocket (meaning no profit loss on GBC sales). Both the Pocket and Colour integrate all of the GB's components onto a single chip which makes them light and really easy to produce. Oh yeah, and the fact that with the GBC out they could sell DX versions of their old games. Few things are quite as satisfying as when someone buys two or more copies of your product.
Alot of times when working with a pre-existing codebase buffer overflows and problems pop up when you add new code to older code or go back and try to fuck with older code. Big software projects can get really complex which means for every so many lines you write you've fucked up so many times. Plus with writing code on a schedule you often times have to have a product ready by a certain date, not when it's finished so you don't have time to do a whole bunch of testing. Personally if I were managing something like IIS I'd give the dev guys plenty of time to work on testing and evaluation but thats just me.
I think one of the best points made is the bit about Napster being a collection of the history of music. As stated, there is an enormous amount of overlap but you only need one guy with a Bif Naked fetish to grab one of your favourite Bif Naked songs. Only bands affiliated with the big 6 RIAA houses get any play on the radio or shelf space in the store. Next time you're out look for bands on Vagrant or Kung-Fu or Hepcat and see how many you find. Figuring out how to charge for and manage downloadable media is the big problem. You can't expect to have everything for free, that's communist open source horse shit because it isn't REALLY free. Downloading all the music from a particular band might not hurt some large band who's gone platinum or has the potential to go platinum but if I download some small band's discography who'll probably be blessed if they even sell 100,000 records I'm really fucking them over.
Slashdot has this reality distortion field in which the specifics of a problem are never really discussed, only the concept and some quick numbers. CDs are an enormous business and growing but the billions of dollars in sales don't all go into some dude's pocket. It goes into the pocket of that dorky kid at Warehouse Music or the truck driver every cuts off while he's making his rounds and then finally the artist who's had to sell rights to their soul in order to get their music out to people. Even if a band absolutely loves playing their music just to play it they can't exactly do it for free. As my brother's taught me in the time he's been playing guitar, a rockstar's toys are expensive as mine are. Not only is their equipment expensive but so are recording sessions and hiring a guy to master your songs. Don't assume any music comes out of the studio sounding like the cut you lsiten to on your CD. Even if it's only removing the sound of some guy farting while he's jamming down on his guitar shit still needs to be mastered. None of that is to mention how a musician is supposed to make a living. No one here can write free code without some sort of income (for most of you thats mom and dad). Figure out a way for a musician to recoup all those losses without a recording industry (and associated framework) and you're a billionaire.
On my high school's grad night we ended up going to Disneyland and pretty much had run of the park. In one of the gazebos there were fair sized posters of Disney characters but drawn in the full anime styling. It was pretty funny to see them stop hiding the definite anime influence in alot of their art now. Before Pokemon exploded in the US most people didn't have any idea what anime even was. Shit look at what Disney did to Princess Mononoke. I was really stoked to go see it in theaters, especially with the high quality dubbing Miramax had done to it. My problem started with the fact it was only released in two fucking theaters in Southern California, one I'd never even heard of. Then there was the problems with Miramax being able to release it on DVD. I'm glad I got my copy before Disney decides to pull any horse shit and yank the disc from market. The original Japanese cut of PM is really good but Miramax's effort is also pretty damn cool. Now I'm off to count change so I can finish my Lain collection.
As I look through the System Folder on my Powerbook I notice there aren't a large number of platform specific tools in there. The drivers are Apple drivers comforming to driver rules and everything is compiled for PPC. Oh yeah, Mac OS 8 worked on just about every piece of Mac hardware after the introduction of the 603. Linux is pretty much the same way. I've installed binary packages on lots of different computers and never had a hardware related problem before. If you DO have problems thats your own fucking fault for using shitty hardware that doesn't comform to specs like everyone else does. You don't install different C libraries because you've got an Athlon on a Via chipset. The dude had a valid point, installation procedures on linux are pretty retarded sometimes and turn people off to using it. Not only that but it is fairly daunting to have a thousand little apps that do the exact same thing a different way. Do I really need Yet Another (insert function name here)? Saying OS X is inferior because it doesn't work on Y platform is retarded. Linux doesn't "support" any more chipsets than x86. All the other platforms are worked on by third parties besides Cox and Torvalds. And lastly, Linux != X (as in windows).
When humans started getting alot smarter than their prey they sort of artificially took themselves out of the predator/prey loop. Human's didn't over specialize because they moved around so much. We're arguably omnivores which means we never needed to specialize in hunting any particular sort of prey. When supply dwindled we moved to a new area or chased down animals that were roving. Strict carnivores don't have that ability because they've got too many special straits for hunting particular types of animals. Our specialty was our brains and with that we were able to augment the rest of our abilities. You don't need to run really fast to throw some sort of missle weapon and you don't need sharp claws if you've got oposed thumbs and can grip sharp rocks. Since we could outlive the extinction of our prey we could afford to make it go extinct. I'd assume if you looked at human populations during a prey downturn you'd see their populations didn't shrink too much only moved on or split up.
I suppose technically you could still root it by using microwaves to power the circuits as well as read/write values (van Eck style) into the onboard cache of the processor. You've got a couple kilobytes in the BIOS memory you could use for runtime/firmware stuff. Granted you'd need to get some equipment really close to it but the water might provide a good way to cancel out noise. Hmmm.