You all notice of course the RIAA is only trying to take down popular MP3 trading networks right? They're doing this because they want to stop Jonny and Susie teenager from downloading Britney's newest single rather than buy the album which was released amid much fanfare. They don't give a fuck about us fucking geeks who have uber libraries of music. They're trying to stop the easy trading from happening whcih got MP3 into the public spotlight in the first place. They knew legally they couldn't go after people releasing MP3 encoders because MPEG is an open standard and layer 3 audio is merely a function or a larger system. Because they didn't capitalize on network transmission of music they're trying to get MP3 trading shut down so they can replace it with their illtimed system. I'm willing to bet they want to plan to open a subscription or pay-per-play online service to deliver music. They'll offer limited play singles that can only be downloaded by their software or by people who license their codec and encryption method from them. So you could listen to and download lots of music using say..AOL because it would be part of the client. You'll then be able to download entire albums and burn them to a CD using RIAA software. This would work because its easy. People who run AOL or Earthlink or MSN (which comprise most residential internet users) would get all the "legal" music they wanted and others could download a licensed player in order to jam to tunes while on the net.
For slashdot folk this is horseshit. We're going to get fucked over by the RIAA but theres little we can do about it. Voting and whining have never and will never help. You could also conduct peaceful protests and non-militant terrorist actions against the RIAA in public forums. Don't attack any artists or anything, they're doing what they need to make some cash and get their music heard. For every band that goes platinum there's twenty bands who're lucky as hell to sell ten thousand albums. Send all your RIAA artist cds to some dudes and have them dropped off in the lobby of the various RIAA studios; buy CDs used and from swapmeats; start a CD sharing club locally and copy music within the bounds of the HMRA. There is alot of shit you can do to circumvent the RIAA. Shit how about a realtime version of oth.net using LDAP. All you have to do is run a little FTP deamon and directory client on your PC and blamo instant trading network. The RIAA is a pretty big easy fucking target; the problem hitting them is they're hiding behind their signed artists and the FCC, DOJ, and radio broadcasters are all running interference for them.
Why the fuck does technological hype always take center stage in any of these sort of studies. You can set a computer in front of a monkey for years if you want but it isn't going to magically get smarter. You'll probably balk at my analogy but it is exactly the logic the Clinton administration was using when they decided to use "surplus" money to buy computers for schools all over the country. Fuck technology, what makes people more intelligent is access to information; once they have that access you can help them even more by helping them understand it. I'd much rather have a couple thousand dollars per classroom spent on up to date well written books and repairs to the classrooms which so many schools need. Computers are as much horse shit as the internet. While the web does hold a few gems these are few and far between and filtering through the 99.9998% bullshit of the WWW is an entire project within itself. The technology is useless without actual content for people to absorb. What they should do is split a high school class into three groups, a control and two test groups. The control you leave be. One test group you give a computer lab and internet access and the other group you give access to a university library system. If the group with the internet does better on whatever tests you want to give them all then I'll be wrong and technology DOES make a difference. But if the university group does well then it will prove that content is a thousand times more important than the medium the content is presented on. What the bajillions of dollars spent on computers ought to be spent on is a system which will convey masses of easily parsed, searched, and organized information to students. Technology of it aside, the content ought to be most important.
What Fountain was citing jackoff is that GTK didn't provide a means of object identification to programs. With Motif you can have a interface builder app say "What sort of widgets do you have?" and the Motif library or independent widget library spits out a list of widgets and whatnot. That sort of functionality is nice because you don't need shit hardcoded into your builder, you only need to code the ability to place some library's widgets and ask them what they are. He also is saying in the article that whenever some new Linux app comes out someone's usually patting themselves on the ass because they used GTK+ or Qt to make it. All the GPL mandates is that coders be commie pinkos.
First and foremost Apple is a hardware company, they have to sell their hardware at slightly higher prices then Dell and Gateway because they need to make more money off each one since they know they're going to sell a lower volume. Next to that their hardware is a bit more expensive. Motorola sticks a high price tag on their chips because they sell them only to Apple and only make a small number of them (compared to someone like Intel or AMD) which soohts their price way the fuck up. If they dropped their "beggars act" and dropped the prices on their hardware they'd end up fucked in the ass because they wouldn't make nearly enough money to keep their investors happy or pay their bills. On the matter of their cheapest boxes being twice the price of cheaper PC systems, take a look at what they're offering before you knock them. Cheap PC systems offer 32 fucking megs of RAM and come with an OS which is shitty at best. Low end PCs have shit sound and graphics (often times their graphics cards suck up system memory) and a software modem. If you wat a decent PC you're still going to fork over 7-800$. Which is about the price of the cheapest iMac. I think Windows/PC centric people often regard Apple as some minor player in the corporate business world but take a look at a MacMall catalogue or something one of these days. They are jampacked with all the things a business customer needs, besides that Office 2k1 for Mac is really sweet. SO to make a long story short, Macs are nice for business shit because they network easily and readily with a non-routeable protocol (if you look too long into AppleTalk, AppleTalk begins to look back into you).
So..you're whining about DVD-RAM? What reality distortion field did you fucking fall into? DVD-RAM was meant to go obsolete as soon as DVD-R hit the market. It was a go-nowhere product. Wow I can write 4.2GB onto a disk is about an hour and can only play it back on the drive I wrote it with? And that's useful how? Recordable DVDs at this point are a waste of cash, you can fit 4.7 gigs onto a couple CDs for about 3$ on a writer that costs literally a tenth of a DVD-RAM/R. Unfortunately you're suffering the woes of the early adopter, in a couple years DVD-Rs will cost you about a hundred bucks and media will be nearly as cheap as CDs. Don't bitch about it though, its like people whining because they've got SysQ or Fujitsu MO drives. Not all technologies survive the market place dispite cool factor. Shit man I remember being stoked as shit when I got my 1GB Jaz drive, I could back up my entire hard drive on that thing! My friend and I both got a Jaz at the same time and thats how we swapped everything. Woe to us that the disks were neigh 100$. I've bought one extra Jaz disk in my life. I've still got the original Tools disk lying around with the Win95 drivers on it. That was three years and several hard drives and computers ago.
Game consoles aren't marketed towards poor college students, they're marketing to people who've got a job and thus money to spend (or theory goes). The 60$ price tag on console games is driven by the market's reluctance to go without said console game(s).
With Appleseed clusters you don't need some convoluted set of instructions to set it up, the nodes need only TCP/IP and file sharing turned on and you can use POOCH to control them. You can have a mild mannered room full of graphic workstations during the day and turn them into a super computer at night. Who in the holiest of all holy fucks cares if this cluster isn't on the Top500 list? Supercomputing folk will laugh in your face if you mention Beowulf in the same context as Cray you jackasses. By the way for those of you who are complete fucking idiots, they maintained 50 Gflops using AltiVec aware software which can pump out several values per instruction (SIMD in case you're wondering). If you're going to be using a cluster like this there's no reason not to enable every hardware advantage you possibly can on each of the nodes. As for compatibility you can use MacMPI for C/C++ and FORTRAN code or use distributed object coding in Cocoa in OS X. I guess Linux folk don't appriciate things that actually work how the documentation describes.
I sort of expect a Linux site to naysay the Xbox merely because of the Microsoft logo but you guys are complete jackasses. For some reason slashdot at large thinks that people will only buy a single console and that there are 50 people who do indeed buy consoles and if you sell your console to all of these people your competitors will go out of business. There are MILLIONS of fucking people in the scope of the console market and they all buy different systems for different reasons. There is lots and lots of room for multiple consoles in someone's house, they're fairly small in fact. How many of you have a Dreamcast sitting next to a PSX or PS2? I would bet plenty of you do. The market is large and one console won't dominate simply because it has a particular logo on it. Microsoft is no more evil than Nintendo; ask the UltraHLE folk or all the developers that tried to produce NES games but had cart quantities tightly controlled by Nintendo.
Merely on their technical merits the GC and Xbox are badass boxes. As always the games available for particular consoles will spell victory or defeat. Nintendo has Pokemon which is still immensely popular and alone can garner nearly a million console purchases. Microsoft is going to be competing more with the PS2 in terms of audience than the Nintendo which has always and probably always will be aimed toward the sub-14 crowd. Besides Pokemon Nintendo has their various other franchises like Donkey Kong and Mario, they've been at this for a very long time. Microsoft is still looking mostly for ports of PC titles or spin-offs of PC titles. Alot of kids with a fair amount of purchasing power are going to strip GameCubes off the shelves because of Nintendo's franchises and Nintendo Power which always manages to hype up their new boxes. Microsoft's going to have a marketing advantage and alot more exposure to the general populace. Time and games will tell if Microsoft is going to stand a chance against Sony and the PS2. Ken Kusagi(sp) is pretty hardcore about the Playstation as it's his baby. I don't know if the Xbox's manager is quite as commited as he is. Oh yeah, don't forget all that Japan is cuckoo for cocoa puffs and game consoles. Nintendo's got an enormous user base there and Microsoft doesn't (w/ respect to gaming).
I'm getting really fed up with all of this peer-to-peer shit lately. What ever happened to the client/server model? Because there are millions of computers on the internet doesn't mean they fucking need to be part of some borg collective, especially when they're connecting at 26.4kbps. Unless all of the network nodes are flying around on optical channels from a fibre line it is sort of ridiculous to expect everyone to contribute to any of these P2P projects. Napster worked but it wasn't a full fledged P2P network. You connected to a server and found other people with stuff you wanted and then your client negotiated a client to client send. Gnutella has had to adopt this same model in order to function with half the usability as Napster. It has incorporated the concept of connecting slow clients to a single fast one rather than directly to other slow clients.
The KDE folk have made a mistake from your point of view but are you some sort of moral dictator? No you're not. KDE can do whatever the fuck they want to do. They inserted proprietary technology into their products because they were trying to one up Motif/CDE which is still considered a standard today. TrollTech provided that in a time when there weren't many options for people who said they wanted to give away their code. Qt was made available for them to use without paying beaucoup royalties, that ought to have been good enough. However GPL/RMS hardliners such as yourself have a hard time digesting the concept. You ought to look a little deeper into the dogma of your source code religion, you'll sacrifice functionality over licensing issues. You've been too pampered with computer systems that are fast and inexpensive. Functionality should remain important; if functionality was still key above all else programming science would be at a level far above what it is today.
Re:BeOS in the toilet too -- and it ain't free
on
Eazel Come, Eazel Go?
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· Score: 2
Be was founded when? 1992? That puts its founding outside the era classified as the internet bubble by economists. They failed because they didn't market a superior product correctly. Windows98 wasn't popular for being a good product, it ran all the shit people wanted or needed to run. Had Be run all the shit people wanted or needed to run and let the world know it had that stuff it would be in a different position today. Conventional business models are not inherently superior to anything. Every business needs to sell their product to somebody in some form to survive. Your product can be service or goods but you need to create a demand and then meet that demand. Both Eazel and Be have failed to create and meet the needed demand.
Way back when everyone used CDE, mwm, and Motif widgets for all their desktop applications. That was back in the days though. Motif for a long time wasn't open so all the free Unix distros and whatnot said hey we'll do our own thing. For the same reason they dropped CDE. Of course with the free software folk everyone had to use something different. Now you've got people writing shit for half a dozen different desktop libraries and communication schemas. Maybe if you'd been using the various commercial unicies years hence you would have had the common desktop you want.
The coolest thing about Jabber isn't the ability to IM clients or the XML routing of their server. It's that it may finally be the directory service that will tie a string of independant services together. Anything will be able to send some sort of message to your directory listing and it will find its way to get to you, while you'll easily be able to have your software parse said message and let it determine if it reaches you or not. E-mail is the bastardization of a concept harkening back to the mainframe days. I send a message which gets stored in some form of memory for you to read later. This was then extended for use on the internet. The problem is that you have to login into a particular server to get your messages which by nature aren't realtime. Jabber/IM/... take the concept of delivering information a step further. Rather than get stored messages from a server, I can be automagically routed my messages by the server. Not only can data be routed to me but the sender doesn't need to know anything about my physical location. All of the client interfacing is done blind, only the server really needs to know anything about the clients. IM is only the tip of the iceberg; P2P sharing could easily incorporate Jabber as their person finding system.
Say you write a Jabber deamon that runs on Unix systems. People start writing Jabber modules for it to parse incoming XML. One of those XML packets could be a message going out to WidgetSoft users that there is an update out for WidgetWare and provides information to negotiate a network connection to a server to download the update. Jabber's got the potential to be a whole new way to get your system talking to other systems. Thats why the XML aspect is cool and important, IMing is nothing compared to the stuff you can make it do.
I don't want to be on a submarine in the next big international pissing contest, someone is going to get fucked up. Supercav weapons can be launched from the surface as normal rockets and then go into supercav mode when they hit the water. This turns a Seahawk helicopter into a number one sub killer rather than a second or third tier theater weapon. Destroyers are going to go from minor picket ships back to line ships because they can equip and refuel Seahawks et al for sub killing. Weird, just like back in the old days.
I've met so many people like you that claim because they made a "lifestyle" choice that everyone else has the same oppertunity. It simply doesn't work the same way for everyone man. If everyone moved out of the big cities your rural shit town would have the population density of the area I grew up in. Don't go chanting New Age mantras claiming to be alive because you go backpacking. You're running the same fucking rat race as the rest of this fucked up country. You're just oblivious to it. Don't bother responding further though.
I'm not saying anyone needs a forty thousand dollar "SUV" (more like GasGuzzlingEgoMobile, GGEM). I don't live in a small town, in fact the city I live in has for the past five years been the fastest growing city in the county. Which means modest condos for low low discount prices don't exist here. Not everyone has the ability to live in part-time income. Have yourself a kid or two and see how old your car gets in the span of a week and how little money you find for yourself. Working a 60 hour work week is by no means a good idea for a family man but some people don't get a chance to work otherwise. Fuck man head off to Japan on one of your four week trips and head over to one of their corporate collectives where the people live and work for the corporation. The world works 24 hours a day now which means someone has to pull the late shift to get some money made.
A suggestion for question number one, source code (thus a computer program) can be construed as free speech because it is an extension of the programmers' desires for how things ought to function. I think this might be limited on a technicality only to code which a programmer writes himself which means binary code compiled by a compiler doesn't work but source code for something does. Not only are you expressing personal desires in the source code, you're also commenting it and making up variable names. By blocking the ability to publish said source code you're being denied the right to espress the ideas contained in comments and variable names. Key point, source code is expression because it is a personal literary work while at the same time containing computer instructions, the ability to censor this expression is dangerous because it would give companies arbitrary control over what an individual can and cannot write.
As for problem number two I can only suggest that the MPAA considering a DVD their "home" is complete bumkiss. They own the bytes but I own the physical bits. If I make a representation for my use (it is perfectly legal to draw a picture of a copyrighted work as long as you don't try passing it off as your own) that should fall within the boundries of the law. There are lots of reasons to have unfettered access to the video and audio content of a movie. Say I want to start a homebrew project making mosaics out of frames from movies. With the DMCA and such I'm restricted as to what art forms I can create if they involve using footage from a movie. Same goes for any other art relating to use of movie frames or sound clips. I don't think the court is going to let the MPAA dictate what my next art project is going to look or sound like.
First of all if the company signs a contract saying I get their code under particular circumstances a backruptcy court has little to say to it. Why? I get the code BEFORE the company's assets are sold off because my contract takes effect at such time. To keep such code safe you stick it in escrow someplace (or multiple places, especially if its worth 250k to you).
So...Yahoo is trying to do what? Show the world they spent their remedial reading classes masturbating to pictures in their anatomy textbooks? The code they used was NOT under the GPL and they never said they were going to join your fucking software communist ranks. I'm tired reading you fuckos whining about Quicktime codecs not being open sourced. Apple licenses the Sorensen codec and therefore CANNOT RELEASE THE SOURCE CODE TO IT. Besides the fact they fucking sell it making the free code to the codec in direct competition to themselves. It would cost alot of fucking money porting Quicktime in its entirety to X and your thousand fucking configurations of it. It cost them enough money to port Quicktime to Windows which they had to do because Windows was a prominent platform that lots of potential customers use. Even then the port was fairly rough. If you want to license shit fucking pay for it you whining commie bastards. Microsoft licensed TrueType from Apple and thus gets to use it all they want, do the same and you can to. Put your money where you whining fucking mouths are.
Apple had a great reason for opening the source of the Darwin kernel, it gave them some hype before Aqua came out to wow the public. It had the side effect of attracting alot of developer support since they could now learn about the kernel from the kernel. Apple never said they were going to be the new Linux mascot. Theres no reason for them economically to give code back to the "community", like a signifigant portion of you even fucking worked on any version of the Mach kernel. If you want support pay some money (ah yes that great fiend money!) and join the ADC and talk to the developers themselves. Fuuuuuuck Linux.
Bring Apple to court for what fucko? Acting within the legal bounds of the BSD license? Yeah, I don't think people will laugh at how stupid you just made yourself look.
So..when exactly did India become the world's poorest and most unfortunate company? According to the world bank they are the number 4 economy in the world in terms of GDP. So anyways. Why the Simputer? Why not pass out Gameboy Advance to the rural peoples of India? Most of the stuff you can do with these things could be done with one, to boot you've got a colour screen and the ability to play a bajillion Gameboy games. The good part is it only costs half as much and uses cheap alkaline batteries rather than NiMh ones. Rugedize the body on them a little bit and you'd be good to go. The Simputer is an awesome waste of money for everyone involved, the consumers are going to find too few uses for their 3 months worth of wages and the licensed manufacturers aren't going to move units in volume to make these things worth while to make.
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You all notice of course the RIAA is only trying to take down popular MP3 trading networks right? They're doing this because they want to stop Jonny and Susie teenager from downloading Britney's newest single rather than buy the album which was released amid much fanfare. They don't give a fuck about us fucking geeks who have uber libraries of music. They're trying to stop the easy trading from happening whcih got MP3 into the public spotlight in the first place. They knew legally they couldn't go after people releasing MP3 encoders because MPEG is an open standard and layer 3 audio is merely a function or a larger system. Because they didn't capitalize on network transmission of music they're trying to get MP3 trading shut down so they can replace it with their illtimed system. I'm willing to bet they want to plan to open a subscription or pay-per-play online service to deliver music. They'll offer limited play singles that can only be downloaded by their software or by people who license their codec and encryption method from them. So you could listen to and download lots of music using say..AOL because it would be part of the client. You'll then be able to download entire albums and burn them to a CD using RIAA software. This would work because its easy. People who run AOL or Earthlink or MSN (which comprise most residential internet users) would get all the "legal" music they wanted and others could download a licensed player in order to jam to tunes while on the net.
For slashdot folk this is horseshit. We're going to get fucked over by the RIAA but theres little we can do about it. Voting and whining have never and will never help. You could also conduct peaceful protests and non-militant terrorist actions against the RIAA in public forums. Don't attack any artists or anything, they're doing what they need to make some cash and get their music heard. For every band that goes platinum there's twenty bands who're lucky as hell to sell ten thousand albums. Send all your RIAA artist cds to some dudes and have them dropped off in the lobby of the various RIAA studios; buy CDs used and from swapmeats; start a CD sharing club locally and copy music within the bounds of the HMRA. There is alot of shit you can do to circumvent the RIAA. Shit how about a realtime version of oth.net using LDAP. All you have to do is run a little FTP deamon and directory client on your PC and blamo instant trading network. The RIAA is a pretty big easy fucking target; the problem hitting them is they're hiding behind their signed artists and the FCC, DOJ, and radio broadcasters are all running interference for them.
Why the fuck does technological hype always take center stage in any of these sort of studies. You can set a computer in front of a monkey for years if you want but it isn't going to magically get smarter. You'll probably balk at my analogy but it is exactly the logic the Clinton administration was using when they decided to use "surplus" money to buy computers for schools all over the country. Fuck technology, what makes people more intelligent is access to information; once they have that access you can help them even more by helping them understand it. I'd much rather have a couple thousand dollars per classroom spent on up to date well written books and repairs to the classrooms which so many schools need. Computers are as much horse shit as the internet. While the web does hold a few gems these are few and far between and filtering through the 99.9998% bullshit of the WWW is an entire project within itself. The technology is useless without actual content for people to absorb. What they should do is split a high school class into three groups, a control and two test groups. The control you leave be. One test group you give a computer lab and internet access and the other group you give access to a university library system. If the group with the internet does better on whatever tests you want to give them all then I'll be wrong and technology DOES make a difference. But if the university group does well then it will prove that content is a thousand times more important than the medium the content is presented on. What the bajillions of dollars spent on computers ought to be spent on is a system which will convey masses of easily parsed, searched, and organized information to students. Technology of it aside, the content ought to be most important.
When I'm admirered I get a rock solid erection.
What Fountain was citing jackoff is that GTK didn't provide a means of object identification to programs. With Motif you can have a interface builder app say "What sort of widgets do you have?" and the Motif library or independent widget library spits out a list of widgets and whatnot. That sort of functionality is nice because you don't need shit hardcoded into your builder, you only need to code the ability to place some library's widgets and ask them what they are. He also is saying in the article that whenever some new Linux app comes out someone's usually patting themselves on the ass because they used GTK+ or Qt to make it. All the GPL mandates is that coders be commie pinkos.
First and foremost Apple is a hardware company, they have to sell their hardware at slightly higher prices then Dell and Gateway because they need to make more money off each one since they know they're going to sell a lower volume. Next to that their hardware is a bit more expensive. Motorola sticks a high price tag on their chips because they sell them only to Apple and only make a small number of them (compared to someone like Intel or AMD) which soohts their price way the fuck up. If they dropped their "beggars act" and dropped the prices on their hardware they'd end up fucked in the ass because they wouldn't make nearly enough money to keep their investors happy or pay their bills. On the matter of their cheapest boxes being twice the price of cheaper PC systems, take a look at what they're offering before you knock them. Cheap PC systems offer 32 fucking megs of RAM and come with an OS which is shitty at best. Low end PCs have shit sound and graphics (often times their graphics cards suck up system memory) and a software modem. If you wat a decent PC you're still going to fork over 7-800$. Which is about the price of the cheapest iMac. I think Windows/PC centric people often regard Apple as some minor player in the corporate business world but take a look at a MacMall catalogue or something one of these days. They are jampacked with all the things a business customer needs, besides that Office 2k1 for Mac is really sweet. SO to make a long story short, Macs are nice for business shit because they network easily and readily with a non-routeable protocol (if you look too long into AppleTalk, AppleTalk begins to look back into you).
So..you're whining about DVD-RAM? What reality distortion field did you fucking fall into? DVD-RAM was meant to go obsolete as soon as DVD-R hit the market. It was a go-nowhere product. Wow I can write 4.2GB onto a disk is about an hour and can only play it back on the drive I wrote it with? And that's useful how? Recordable DVDs at this point are a waste of cash, you can fit 4.7 gigs onto a couple CDs for about 3$ on a writer that costs literally a tenth of a DVD-RAM/R. Unfortunately you're suffering the woes of the early adopter, in a couple years DVD-Rs will cost you about a hundred bucks and media will be nearly as cheap as CDs. Don't bitch about it though, its like people whining because they've got SysQ or Fujitsu MO drives. Not all technologies survive the market place dispite cool factor. Shit man I remember being stoked as shit when I got my 1GB Jaz drive, I could back up my entire hard drive on that thing! My friend and I both got a Jaz at the same time and thats how we swapped everything. Woe to us that the disks were neigh 100$. I've bought one extra Jaz disk in my life. I've still got the original Tools disk lying around with the Win95 drivers on it. That was three years and several hard drives and computers ago.
Game consoles aren't marketed towards poor college students, they're marketing to people who've got a job and thus money to spend (or theory goes). The 60$ price tag on console games is driven by the market's reluctance to go without said console game(s).
With Appleseed clusters you don't need some convoluted set of instructions to set it up, the nodes need only TCP/IP and file sharing turned on and you can use POOCH to control them. You can have a mild mannered room full of graphic workstations during the day and turn them into a super computer at night. Who in the holiest of all holy fucks cares if this cluster isn't on the Top500 list? Supercomputing folk will laugh in your face if you mention Beowulf in the same context as Cray you jackasses. By the way for those of you who are complete fucking idiots, they maintained 50 Gflops using AltiVec aware software which can pump out several values per instruction (SIMD in case you're wondering). If you're going to be using a cluster like this there's no reason not to enable every hardware advantage you possibly can on each of the nodes. As for compatibility you can use MacMPI for C/C++ and FORTRAN code or use distributed object coding in Cocoa in OS X. I guess Linux folk don't appriciate things that actually work how the documentation describes.
I sort of expect a Linux site to naysay the Xbox merely because of the Microsoft logo but you guys are complete jackasses. For some reason slashdot at large thinks that people will only buy a single console and that there are 50 people who do indeed buy consoles and if you sell your console to all of these people your competitors will go out of business. There are MILLIONS of fucking people in the scope of the console market and they all buy different systems for different reasons. There is lots and lots of room for multiple consoles in someone's house, they're fairly small in fact. How many of you have a Dreamcast sitting next to a PSX or PS2? I would bet plenty of you do. The market is large and one console won't dominate simply because it has a particular logo on it. Microsoft is no more evil than Nintendo; ask the UltraHLE folk or all the developers that tried to produce NES games but had cart quantities tightly controlled by Nintendo.
Merely on their technical merits the GC and Xbox are badass boxes. As always the games available for particular consoles will spell victory or defeat. Nintendo has Pokemon which is still immensely popular and alone can garner nearly a million console purchases. Microsoft is going to be competing more with the PS2 in terms of audience than the Nintendo which has always and probably always will be aimed toward the sub-14 crowd. Besides Pokemon Nintendo has their various other franchises like Donkey Kong and Mario, they've been at this for a very long time. Microsoft is still looking mostly for ports of PC titles or spin-offs of PC titles. Alot of kids with a fair amount of purchasing power are going to strip GameCubes off the shelves because of Nintendo's franchises and Nintendo Power which always manages to hype up their new boxes. Microsoft's going to have a marketing advantage and alot more exposure to the general populace. Time and games will tell if Microsoft is going to stand a chance against Sony and the PS2. Ken Kusagi(sp) is pretty hardcore about the Playstation as it's his baby. I don't know if the Xbox's manager is quite as commited as he is. Oh yeah, don't forget all that Japan is cuckoo for cocoa puffs and game consoles. Nintendo's got an enormous user base there and Microsoft doesn't (w/ respect to gaming).
I'm getting really fed up with all of this peer-to-peer shit lately. What ever happened to the client/server model? Because there are millions of computers on the internet doesn't mean they fucking need to be part of some borg collective, especially when they're connecting at 26.4kbps. Unless all of the network nodes are flying around on optical channels from a fibre line it is sort of ridiculous to expect everyone to contribute to any of these P2P projects. Napster worked but it wasn't a full fledged P2P network. You connected to a server and found other people with stuff you wanted and then your client negotiated a client to client send. Gnutella has had to adopt this same model in order to function with half the usability as Napster. It has incorporated the concept of connecting slow clients to a single fast one rather than directly to other slow clients.
The KDE folk have made a mistake from your point of view but are you some sort of moral dictator? No you're not. KDE can do whatever the fuck they want to do. They inserted proprietary technology into their products because they were trying to one up Motif/CDE which is still considered a standard today. TrollTech provided that in a time when there weren't many options for people who said they wanted to give away their code. Qt was made available for them to use without paying beaucoup royalties, that ought to have been good enough. However GPL/RMS hardliners such as yourself have a hard time digesting the concept. You ought to look a little deeper into the dogma of your source code religion, you'll sacrifice functionality over licensing issues. You've been too pampered with computer systems that are fast and inexpensive. Functionality should remain important; if functionality was still key above all else programming science would be at a level far above what it is today.
Be was founded when? 1992? That puts its founding outside the era classified as the internet bubble by economists. They failed because they didn't market a superior product correctly. Windows98 wasn't popular for being a good product, it ran all the shit people wanted or needed to run. Had Be run all the shit people wanted or needed to run and let the world know it had that stuff it would be in a different position today. Conventional business models are not inherently superior to anything. Every business needs to sell their product to somebody in some form to survive. Your product can be service or goods but you need to create a demand and then meet that demand. Both Eazel and Be have failed to create and meet the needed demand.
Way back when everyone used CDE, mwm, and Motif widgets for all their desktop applications. That was back in the days though. Motif for a long time wasn't open so all the free Unix distros and whatnot said hey we'll do our own thing. For the same reason they dropped CDE. Of course with the free software folk everyone had to use something different. Now you've got people writing shit for half a dozen different desktop libraries and communication schemas. Maybe if you'd been using the various commercial unicies years hence you would have had the common desktop you want.
The coolest thing about Jabber isn't the ability to IM clients or the XML routing of their server. It's that it may finally be the directory service that will tie a string of independant services together. Anything will be able to send some sort of message to your directory listing and it will find its way to get to you, while you'll easily be able to have your software parse said message and let it determine if it reaches you or not. E-mail is the bastardization of a concept harkening back to the mainframe days. I send a message which gets stored in some form of memory for you to read later. This was then extended for use on the internet. The problem is that you have to login into a particular server to get your messages which by nature aren't realtime. Jabber/IM/... take the concept of delivering information a step further. Rather than get stored messages from a server, I can be automagically routed my messages by the server. Not only can data be routed to me but the sender doesn't need to know anything about my physical location. All of the client interfacing is done blind, only the server really needs to know anything about the clients. IM is only the tip of the iceberg; P2P sharing could easily incorporate Jabber as their person finding system.
Say you write a Jabber deamon that runs on Unix systems. People start writing Jabber modules for it to parse incoming XML. One of those XML packets could be a message going out to WidgetSoft users that there is an update out for WidgetWare and provides information to negotiate a network connection to a server to download the update. Jabber's got the potential to be a whole new way to get your system talking to other systems. Thats why the XML aspect is cool and important, IMing is nothing compared to the stuff you can make it do.
I don't want to be on a submarine in the next big international pissing contest, someone is going to get fucked up. Supercav weapons can be launched from the surface as normal rockets and then go into supercav mode when they hit the water. This turns a Seahawk helicopter into a number one sub killer rather than a second or third tier theater weapon. Destroyers are going to go from minor picket ships back to line ships because they can equip and refuel Seahawks et al for sub killing. Weird, just like back in the old days.
I've met so many people like you that claim because they made a "lifestyle" choice that everyone else has the same oppertunity. It simply doesn't work the same way for everyone man. If everyone moved out of the big cities your rural shit town would have the population density of the area I grew up in. Don't go chanting New Age mantras claiming to be alive because you go backpacking. You're running the same fucking rat race as the rest of this fucked up country. You're just oblivious to it. Don't bother responding further though.
I'm not saying anyone needs a forty thousand dollar "SUV" (more like GasGuzzlingEgoMobile, GGEM). I don't live in a small town, in fact the city I live in has for the past five years been the fastest growing city in the county. Which means modest condos for low low discount prices don't exist here. Not everyone has the ability to live in part-time income. Have yourself a kid or two and see how old your car gets in the span of a week and how little money you find for yourself. Working a 60 hour work week is by no means a good idea for a family man but some people don't get a chance to work otherwise. Fuck man head off to Japan on one of your four week trips and head over to one of their corporate collectives where the people live and work for the corporation. The world works 24 hours a day now which means someone has to pull the late shift to get some money made.
I don't know, have you seen his mom? MIWNLF.
So it's like digital CW.
So how's life living with your mom and dad still?
A suggestion for question number one, source code (thus a computer program) can be construed as free speech because it is an extension of the programmers' desires for how things ought to function. I think this might be limited on a technicality only to code which a programmer writes himself which means binary code compiled by a compiler doesn't work but source code for something does. Not only are you expressing personal desires in the source code, you're also commenting it and making up variable names. By blocking the ability to publish said source code you're being denied the right to espress the ideas contained in comments and variable names. Key point, source code is expression because it is a personal literary work while at the same time containing computer instructions, the ability to censor this expression is dangerous because it would give companies arbitrary control over what an individual can and cannot write.
As for problem number two I can only suggest that the MPAA considering a DVD their "home" is complete bumkiss. They own the bytes but I own the physical bits. If I make a representation for my use (it is perfectly legal to draw a picture of a copyrighted work as long as you don't try passing it off as your own) that should fall within the boundries of the law. There are lots of reasons to have unfettered access to the video and audio content of a movie. Say I want to start a homebrew project making mosaics out of frames from movies. With the DMCA and such I'm restricted as to what art forms I can create if they involve using footage from a movie. Same goes for any other art relating to use of movie frames or sound clips. I don't think the court is going to let the MPAA dictate what my next art project is going to look or sound like.
First of all if the company signs a contract saying I get their code under particular circumstances a backruptcy court has little to say to it. Why? I get the code BEFORE the company's assets are sold off because my contract takes effect at such time. To keep such code safe you stick it in escrow someplace (or multiple places, especially if its worth 250k to you).
So...Yahoo is trying to do what? Show the world they spent their remedial reading classes masturbating to pictures in their anatomy textbooks? The code they used was NOT under the GPL and they never said they were going to join your fucking software communist ranks. I'm tired reading you fuckos whining about Quicktime codecs not being open sourced. Apple licenses the Sorensen codec and therefore CANNOT RELEASE THE SOURCE CODE TO IT. Besides the fact they fucking sell it making the free code to the codec in direct competition to themselves. It would cost alot of fucking money porting Quicktime in its entirety to X and your thousand fucking configurations of it. It cost them enough money to port Quicktime to Windows which they had to do because Windows was a prominent platform that lots of potential customers use. Even then the port was fairly rough. If you want to license shit fucking pay for it you whining commie bastards. Microsoft licensed TrueType from Apple and thus gets to use it all they want, do the same and you can to. Put your money where you whining fucking mouths are.
Apple had a great reason for opening the source of the Darwin kernel, it gave them some hype before Aqua came out to wow the public. It had the side effect of attracting alot of developer support since they could now learn about the kernel from the kernel. Apple never said they were going to be the new Linux mascot. Theres no reason for them economically to give code back to the "community", like a signifigant portion of you even fucking worked on any version of the Mach kernel. If you want support pay some money (ah yes that great fiend money!) and join the ADC and talk to the developers themselves. Fuuuuuuck Linux.
Bring Apple to court for what fucko? Acting within the legal bounds of the BSD license? Yeah, I don't think people will laugh at how stupid you just made yourself look.
So..when exactly did India become the world's poorest and most unfortunate company? According to the world bank they are the number 4 economy in the world in terms of GDP. So anyways. Why the Simputer? Why not pass out Gameboy Advance to the rural peoples of India? Most of the stuff you can do with these things could be done with one, to boot you've got a colour screen and the ability to play a bajillion Gameboy games. The good part is it only costs half as much and uses cheap alkaline batteries rather than NiMh ones. Rugedize the body on them a little bit and you'd be good to go. The Simputer is an awesome waste of money for everyone involved, the consumers are going to find too few uses for their 3 months worth of wages and the licensed manufacturers aren't going to move units in volume to make these things worth while to make.