The average woman weighs 100 lbs and man 150 lbs? Not hardly.
Yeah, that does seem a little high. I suppose if we're only sending up really tall people, it's a reasonable weight. But for average height men, 150 lbs makes you a fatty. Or an American. Your choice.
You know that thing I said a while back about you being a good troll?
Well, I take it back. If you can't get people to take you seriously, mod you up, and reply in a hug bluster to a farcical post about gay astronauts, you're clearly not trying very hard.
In short, I'm very dissapointed.
Also, if you want to convince NASA to send you into space, you don't need slashdot's support for sending gay men into space. You need NASA's support.
I think he is saying that he will not "license" the program to you unless you agree to the GPL.
The GPL gives the aRTS project right to do a very interesting things: they have the right to distribute the program to only the people they wants to distribute it to. It does nothing to force anyone to give anything to anybody. If they want to distribute aRTS only to vegetarians, or registered republicans, or people who have given them $1,000,000.00, that's completely within their rights (at least, as far as the GPL is concerned).
However, the GPL also says You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted
herein. So, although the original licensor may have restrictions on who he will give the program to, once he gives it away under the GPL, any recipient under the GPL is explicitely allowed to stick the who thing up on a public archive to allow anyone who wants to pull it down -- whether those future recipients want to agree to the GPL or not.
Since I'm obviously not a lawyer, I have no idea if the blurb on the front page qualifies as some type of restriction on use, or if the aRTS project is themselves in violation of the GPL just by virtue of their public misunderstanding of the license of thier own software.
I woke up this morning to NPR talking about the Dreamcast finally being dead. While I was drinking coffee, I opened up the NY Times to an article about Dreamcast being dead.
But until I saw it on Slashdot, I wasn't sure it was true. 'Cuz until Slashdot reports it, it ain't news.
Ok. We have proof that slashdot is not a geeksite. Commands like:
find . -print > file ; grep string file , or
ls -lR > file | grep string
don't fill me with a warm fuzzy glow. To find a string in a file, use:
find . -print | xargs grep string (works on just about anything),
find | xargs grep string (works with Gnu find), or
rgrep string . (works with rgrep, but rgrep is ugly).
Of course, I had never imagined the use for rgrep before now, since a cursory glance made it look less powerful than either find or grep alone -- never use one tool when two tools are simpler, that's my motto. It's good to know at last why something like rgrep exists -- people can't handle relatively simple plumbing.
Yes, there are a hundred definitions of conservative out there. The "people are dangerous and should have constraints placed on them" crowd doesn't have any more to do with the current 10 o'clock news version of the "conservative-liberal" spectrum than my definition did earlier, though.
There are a lot of "radical conservatives" under your "conservatives want to put constraints on people" metric -- Diane Fienstien is my favorite villian of the day, of course, and George W. Bush ranks up there on that measure, too. Some of the more folks who were far more liberal than either of the two above on that metric included Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., John Ashcroft (to some degree), the Cato Institute, and quite a few of the "Blue Dog" Democrats (who, paradoxically, are often called "conservative" democrats, despite being much more liberal by your definition).
The point I'm making is that there is not definitive text on conservativism. To say that there is only one kind of conservative is like saying there is only one kind of feminist, or one kind of hacker (for a slashdot definition). The words conservative and liberal have become worse than useless for labeling people and movements -- they mean so many different things to so many different people, and have accrued so much baggage that the words puts people into very useless, very high sided boxes, that do nothing to compartmentalize any actual beliefs.
Without context, conservative and liberal are almost always the wrong words to use in any conversation that demands thought.
Pay phones can recive calls, you can usualy find a phone number printed on the thing somewhere.
You obviously don't live here in the states. Everyone in the states knows that the only people who ever recieved phone calls at pay phones were druggies -- drug users used to use pay phones to page their dealers, and buy drugs. So, most pay phones in most major cities in the states no longer accept incoming calls. As everyone is aware, this policy has had significant effects on the availablity of drugs in the states -- it's nearly impossible to drugs here now.
one conservative "law and order" "tough on crime" judge who has never heard of the Fourth Amendment...
Please stop confusing conservatisim with the philosphies of the judges and prosecutors who stopped believing in individual liberties and have fully subscribed to the notion of state control.
Even though a nasty, pro-big government, anti-individual liberty doofus like George W. Bush has co-opted and perverted words like "coservative" and "compassionate", there's no reason to believe that vile filth that promises to continue the last 50 years of ever increasing federal government encroachment is any type of "conservativism" that any real conservative would understand.
Conservatism is essentially about "leave me the fuck alone," not "force other fuckers to stop doing stuff I don't like." Most politicians, on both sides of the aisle, long ago realized that "leave me the fuck alone" doesn't get anyone elected, while "force other fuckers to stop doing stuff I don't like" seems to get every dickhead on earth out to vote for you. It's pretty sad, really. But it's not conservativism.
Personally, I see nothing wrong in recieving signals from the air and decrypting them.
I totally agree.
I can't see any reason why you should have been prevented from recieving and decrypting the signal from Hughes. In fact, Hughes counted on you recieving and decrypting the signal. It counted on you being stupid enough to download and decrypt a signal that said "destroy yourself now, little card. w00t!".
There's also the problem that changing the servers is undoubtedly extremely expensive for AOL -- every time they hack the servers so that they won't work with Microsoft, they're essentially just making their servers less robust and more brittle. It's pretty easy to guess what kind of bill they'll get from their tech support outsources, not to mention what AOL stock would do the next morning, if they managed to f*ck up their AIM servers by making the software a little too brittle some night.
I don't have a great deal of respect for the engineers at AOL, but I have to imagine that even they understand implications of replacing the software on the wildly popular, heavily loaded, 24x7x365 server clusters that make up a large part of their business, with software that is specifically designed to be less robust and break with "certain" clients.
The fact that AOL is willing to repeatedly f*ck around with that software just to d*ck over Microsoft is a very good indication of where AOL feels the threat to their business model lies, what lengths they'll go to to protect that model, and the amount of respect they have for their customers.
The managers will pull the company together again.
And then you say:
Think of your friends. If you leave, now THEY do not have a job.
Either the managers can pull the company together, or they can't. If his friends are as good as he thinks they are, one of them will stop up as CTO and fill his shoes. Or, they'll find new jobs before the company disinigrates. Hell, they might find new jobs before his two week notice is through.
If the "Anonymous CTO" is such hot shit that the company will fail immediately when he leaves, then his company is fucked twelve ways before Tuesday, anyhow. Everyone should take the opportunity to get the fuck out while the paychecks are still coming in, instead starting to look for a job once the lights get shut off and fancy desks and workstations get hauled away by the creditors. He's not doing anyone any favors by giving them a reason to stay until their ass is reamed bigger than the goat sex guy's.
By some metrics, you are probably the second best troll on slashdot (after Jon Katz, who wins on every metric).
It disapoints me, though, that your posts are never particularly useful or insightful in themselves -- rather, they are only inciteful, useful only as a means of promoting discussion.
So, my question to you is this, Mr. New Lover's Arrival: does it bother you that you are not interesting yourself, except for in your ability to spur interesting people to disagree with you?
Win2k for the G4? apple would love that (steve's always thought of apple as a hardware company which also happens to make the software for its boxes)
Is that why Apple got in bed with Be so quickly when Steve came back?
Oh, wait... that must have been in a different universe. In this one, Steve closed up the specs on the hardware, partially to screw the clone manufacturers, but also to screw Be and get rid of the only other OS that was starting to look viable on the hardware.
Here's the rub -- if non-Apple OS's run on Apple hardware, then the hardware clones have somewhere else to turn when they want to start making compatible boxes. Any OS on the PPC is only going to be viable when it ran on the Apple hardware. Any PPC clone is only going to be viable if a viable OS runs on it. Hence, any non-Apple OS on Apple hardware makes clones viable, even if those clones don't run the Mac OS. The same arguement holds for both Win2K and Be, unfortunately.
Apple is a hardware and OS company, whether they wanted to be or not. And Steve is very aware of that fact.
I'm sure if I poked around it a bit more, I'd find more things to nit-pick, but I think I heard something about a good number of config files moved to XML? If so, that's pretty far away from any of the current *nix's.
Do you generally nit-pick about good things? What do you do about bad things?
It would also be fun to see MacOS X scaled down to the pda's and embedded systems. These are all areas that Linux excels in and has been proven as a good solution.
Wow. You must be using a completely different dictionary, because when I look up the definition of "good solution" and "excel" in my dictionary, Linux doesn't even come close to matching the definition for pda's.
I imagine MacOS X can scale down to PDA's the same way Win CE can -- not by porting the operating system, and the 30 or so system calls provided by the kernel, but instead by porting the rich and featurful API the programmers actually use on top of a new operating system.
I'm sure if I poked around it a bit more, I'd find more things to nit-pick, but I think I heard something about a good number of config files moved to XML? If so, that's pretty far away from any of the current *nix's.
Do you generally nit-pick about good things? What do you do about bad things?
It would also be fun to see MacOS X scaled down to the pda's and embedded systems. These are all areas that Linux excels in and has been proven as a good solution.
Wow. You must be using a completely different dictionary, because when I look up the definition of "good solution" and "excel" in my dictionary, Linux doesn't even come close to matching the definition for pda's.
I imagine MacOS X can scale down to PDA's the same way Win CE can -- not by porting the operating system, and the 30 or so system calls provided by the kernel, but instead by porting the rich and featurful API the programmers actually use on top of a new operating system.
So why wouldnt it be posible for Mac OSX to do the same? masses of linux coders brushing up gnome/kde/xfree86/etc to get it upto spec, and maybe even better then Mac OS X.
You've answered your own question. A mass of coders is never going to agree on one widget set, or one file manager, or one configuration framework and database, or one user preference manager, or one way to do anything.
The fundemental advantage Apple has over Linux is Apple's ability to choose the "one true way" -- keep what they like, throw away what they don't like, and pay a bunch of people to implement the boring, tedious, and unrewarding little pieces you need to fill in the gaps and make it all work together. Apple decided that, where possible, they would eliminate choice -- choose one way that works, and then spend the time, effort, and drudgery (i.e., money) to polish it all up.
Apple is hoping to make a successful Unix by getting rid of all the stuff we normal associate with Unix and with Free Software. There's no way that a mess of linux coders are ever going to duplicate that -- there's no incentive for a mass of linux coders to try. When we can't even agree on a widget set (I have open apps right now with Gnome, KDE, Motif, XUL, and Athena widget sets, and I don't even want to think about Java Swing), and most user-land applications really never go beyond the 85% stage, it's pretty clear we're never going to make anything even remotely like MacOS X.
MacOS X is going to slaughter Linux on the desktop. But who cares? BeOS slaughtered Linux on the desktop, Windows 2000 slaughterd Linux on the desktop, MacOS 9 slaughtered Linux on the desktep, NeXTStep slaughtered Linux on the desktop, even Windows 3.1 was better than Linux on the desktop.
Linux, as we know it today, it not going going to ever take over the desktop -- not when it doesn't support any of the new media files, not when it doesn't have a decent web browser, not when every distribution comes with (several) piss-poor, incompatible, incomplete control panel utilities, not when it every single program I run seems to have its own widget set, has a different set of fonts, has home-rolled its own ugly alpha blending, and has a different look-n-feel to go with it all.
It will never take over when clicking "install everything" on any distribution means that every passing script kiddie has root on your machine. It will never take over when every single piece of software available requires a certain kernel, a certain C library, a certain set of fonts, a certain version of X, a certain version of Gnome, or any one of the half-dozen Java Runtimes, and each is incompatible with whatever you're running now.
Linux will never take over when every significant program has implemented it's own (somewhat incomplete, and slightly buggy) installer, each incompatible with any method you were using to keep track of where every file on your machine came from.
Linux will never take over when every distribution, every desktop, ever file manager, and even ever program available has its own way of associating files with programs -- It will never take over when telling Gnu Midnight Commander, Netscape, Mozilla, Konquerer, and any other program whether to open PDF files with Ghostview or Adobe Acrobat means configuring each program individually.
Linux is never going to take over the desktop as long as working as a networking client is so piss poor. It will never take over when browsing the network, and attaching to an SMB share, or a Netware share, or an NFS share requires either strong administrator magic, or a user poking around in the shell as root.
Linux is never going to take over the desktop as long as printing is still such an immense pain in the ass -- printing on Linux is about as pitiful as printing from DOS was 15 years ago. The only difference is that DOS programs often made an attempt to work with available printers, while every Linux program demands either a PostScript printer, or a buggy filter manually set up to pretend there's a PostScript printer there.
In short, Linux as we know it essentially has no desktop presence at all. Given the realities of the market, I can't imagine a situation where most current Linux users would consider using a version of Linux that fixed the flaws of Linux that makes it so useless on the desktop. Linux has nothing to worry about from Apple on the Desktop, because Linux isn't on the Desktop anyhow.
Larry! It's so good to see you here on Slashdot at last, finally abandoning the scourge that is Usenet. Soon, you'll join us on the darkside. You will join me and Dan D. in our exclusive use of Windows 2000...
If your plan is to take some of the existing documentation (howto's, FAQ's, info page, man pages, etc.) and publish them with the authors permission, I'd definitely pay real money for it -- with a couple of stipulations.
I wouldn't care too much about the paper or binding quality, but the typesetting would have to be reasonable. If I got anything that looked like it came out of Microsoft Word, or got screen dumped from a web browser, I'd never buy another one again for as long as I live. (Typesetting is my primary beef with many of the vanity books I've seen. I can understand the non-existant editing -- good editing costs real money. But reasonable, computer assisted typesetting has been available for a long time now. Yet, the typesetting is often worse than the editing on some of these books.)
Second, I would need some way to get diff's from the dead tree version to the current version, at least for a little while. You should be able to do this pretty easily, and deliver diffs online.
Third, it couldn't cost much more than just typesetting the thing myself with TeX or groff, and printing it on the office laser printer. This last one is the kicker -- you'll have to pay the author, typeset the book, print the book, bind the book, and ship it to me, all for less than the $50 or so it costs me to just do a half-assed job on my own.
Of course, I might not be the typical market for this kind of thing. I'm just letting you know what kind of thing I can see myself buying.
It's badly off topic, and clearly trolling (which may be why it was posted anonymously), but would someone mod the above up anyhow? It's worth reading.
I guess now that Usenet has become essentially unusable, Slashdot is the place to go when your too damned lazy to spend the five minutes it would take to answer this yourself?
It would be really, really nice if the guy who posted to "ask slashdot" had done any homework at all, and found out if there was some "unusual" reason his Sony DVD doesn't work with CD-R disks, such as Sony intentionally not supporting some logical format or if this was just the standard Frequently Asked Question that wouldn't even get into most moderated usenet news groups.
I think there are two places where your view sharply diverge from reality:
7. Unwitting investors believe this, and buy the stock
There is no such thing as an "unwitting investor." People who give give money to endeavors they make no effort to understand, in the hopes of making large profits, are not called "investors." They are called gamblers, or speculators. Con men call them "dupes." No-one calls them "investors."
13. Lawyers find a way for some people to recoup their losses
These lawyers have no interest in helping anyone recoup their losses. They are not going to help anyone recoup their losses. I do not share the same general animosity and lawyers and the legal system held by many other people on slashdot; but it is painfully clear that in this case, dirty little parasites hope to use the broken parts of the US legal system to suck as much blood as they can out of VA Linux, with no intention of passing any significant amount back to the investors.
If you con someone, is it the fault of the con-man, or the fault of the 'idiot', as you say?
Frankly, it's often the fault of the person getting conned. In general, con men don't con stupid or gullible people. They con greedy people. If you check out most of the successful cons jobs out there, they usually involve greedy dupes who were led to believe they were somehow taking advantage of the con man. It's true that the Internet IPO market started to look kind of ugly in the last few years, but it was never the case of greedy, evil companies taking poor, unsuspecting dupes to the cleaners. The reality is quite a bit more complicated. It usually is.
And seeing an article on Slashdot about something you're doing is probably a good way to egg him (or her) on.
This may not always be the case. One of the serious disadvantages to virtual "communities" (like Slashdot, or IRC, or UO, or whatever) is that it's very easy to forget that there are humans on the other end of the line. It's a whole hell of a lot easier to destroy something when the only consequences are to a group that doesn't seem real.
There really are people who like to hurt things -- people who set cats on fire. These people are broken. But just about everyone likes to destroy things -- people who built big lego cities when they were a kid, just so they could play godzilla, or play Quake deathmatches, or just see how many levels deep they can 'eval' their scheme interpreter before the machine grinds to a halt. These people are, for the most part, not broken.
The problem is that crashing Undernet is a little like watching the NASCAR crashes in the sports hilight films -- it's pretty easy to imagine that there are no real people being hurt. But, by publicizing this, there's a slim chance that this punk will realize he's actually hurting real people.
Of course, it would be nice if they provided his name and address, so someone could go explain it to him in person.
Slashdot Mirror
The average woman weighs 100 lbs and man 150 lbs? Not hardly.
Yeah, that does seem a little high. I suppose if we're only sending up really tall people, it's a reasonable weight. But for average height men, 150 lbs makes you a fatty. Or an American. Your choice.
You know that thing I said a while back about you being a good troll?
Well, I take it back. If you can't get people to take you seriously, mod you up, and reply in a hug bluster to a farcical post about gay astronauts, you're clearly not trying very hard.
In short, I'm very dissapointed.
Also, if you want to convince NASA to send you into space, you don't need slashdot's support for sending gay men into space. You need NASA's support.
I think he is saying that he will not "license" the program to you unless you agree to the GPL.
The GPL gives the aRTS project right to do a very interesting things: they have the right to distribute the program to only the people they wants to distribute it to. It does nothing to force anyone to give anything to anybody. If they want to distribute aRTS only to vegetarians, or registered republicans, or people who have given them $1,000,000.00, that's completely within their rights (at least, as far as the GPL is concerned).
However, the GPL also says You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted
herein. So, although the original licensor may have restrictions on who he will give the program to, once he gives it away under the GPL, any recipient under the GPL is explicitely allowed to stick the who thing up on a public archive to allow anyone who wants to pull it down -- whether those future recipients want to agree to the GPL or not.
Since I'm obviously not a lawyer, I have no idea if the blurb on the front page qualifies as some type of restriction on use, or if the aRTS project is themselves in violation of the GPL just by virtue of their public misunderstanding of the license of thier own software.
I woke up this morning to NPR talking about the Dreamcast finally being dead. While I was drinking coffee, I opened up the NY Times to an article about Dreamcast being dead.
But until I saw it on Slashdot, I wasn't sure it was true. 'Cuz until Slashdot reports it, it ain't news.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
OMFG. That was the funniest thing I've seen in a while.
Yes, there are a hundred definitions of conservative out there. The "people are dangerous and should have constraints placed on them" crowd doesn't have any more to do with the current 10 o'clock news version of the "conservative-liberal" spectrum than my definition did earlier, though.
There are a lot of "radical conservatives" under your "conservatives want to put constraints on people" metric -- Diane Fienstien is my favorite villian of the day, of course, and George W. Bush ranks up there on that measure, too. Some of the more folks who were far more liberal than either of the two above on that metric included Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., John Ashcroft (to some degree), the Cato Institute, and quite a few of the "Blue Dog" Democrats (who, paradoxically, are often called "conservative" democrats, despite being much more liberal by your definition).
The point I'm making is that there is not definitive text on conservativism. To say that there is only one kind of conservative is like saying there is only one kind of feminist, or one kind of hacker (for a slashdot definition). The words conservative and liberal have become worse than useless for labeling people and movements -- they mean so many different things to so many different people, and have accrued so much baggage that the words puts people into very useless, very high sided boxes, that do nothing to compartmentalize any actual beliefs.
Without context, conservative and liberal are almost always the wrong words to use in any conversation that demands thought.
Pay phones can recive calls, you can usualy find a phone number printed on the thing somewhere.
You obviously don't live here in the states. Everyone in the states knows that the only people who ever recieved phone calls at pay phones were druggies -- drug users used to use pay phones to page their dealers, and buy drugs. So, most pay phones in most major cities in the states no longer accept incoming calls. As everyone is aware, this policy has had significant effects on the availablity of drugs in the states -- it's nearly impossible to drugs here now.
one conservative "law and order" "tough on crime" judge who has never heard of the Fourth Amendment...
Please stop confusing conservatisim with the philosphies of the judges and prosecutors who stopped believing in individual liberties and have fully subscribed to the notion of state control.
Even though a nasty, pro-big government, anti-individual liberty doofus like George W. Bush has co-opted and perverted words like "coservative" and "compassionate", there's no reason to believe that vile filth that promises to continue the last 50 years of ever increasing federal government encroachment is any type of "conservativism" that any real conservative would understand.
Conservatism is essentially about "leave me the fuck alone," not "force other fuckers to stop doing stuff I don't like." Most politicians, on both sides of the aisle, long ago realized that "leave me the fuck alone" doesn't get anyone elected, while "force other fuckers to stop doing stuff I don't like" seems to get every dickhead on earth out to vote for you. It's pretty sad, really. But it's not conservativism.
Personally, I see nothing wrong in recieving signals from the air and decrypting them.
I totally agree.
I can't see any reason why you should have been prevented from recieving and decrypting the signal from Hughes. In fact, Hughes counted on you recieving and decrypting the signal. It counted on you being stupid enough to download and decrypt a signal that said "destroy yourself now, little card. w00t!".
Ha ha.
There's also the problem that changing the servers is undoubtedly extremely expensive for AOL -- every time they hack the servers so that they won't work with Microsoft, they're essentially just making their servers less robust and more brittle. It's pretty easy to guess what kind of bill they'll get from their tech support outsources, not to mention what AOL stock would do the next morning, if they managed to f*ck up their AIM servers by making the software a little too brittle some night.
I don't have a great deal of respect for the engineers at AOL, but I have to imagine that even they understand implications of replacing the software on the wildly popular, heavily loaded, 24x7x365 server clusters that make up a large part of their business, with software that is specifically designed to be less robust and break with "certain" clients.
The fact that AOL is willing to repeatedly f*ck around with that software just to d*ck over Microsoft is a very good indication of where AOL feels the threat to their business model lies, what lengths they'll go to to protect that model, and the amount of respect they have for their customers.
It ain't a pretty picture, sunshine.
By some metrics, you are probably the second best troll on slashdot (after Jon Katz, who wins on every metric).
It disapoints me, though, that your posts are never particularly useful or insightful in themselves -- rather, they are only inciteful, useful only as a means of promoting discussion.
So, my question to you is this, Mr. New Lover's Arrival: does it bother you that you are not interesting yourself, except for in your ability to spur interesting people to disagree with you?
Win2k for the G4? apple would love that (steve's always thought of apple as a hardware company which also happens to make the software for its boxes)
Is that why Apple got in bed with Be so quickly when Steve came back?
Oh, wait... that must have been in a different universe. In this one, Steve closed up the specs on the hardware, partially to screw the clone manufacturers, but also to screw Be and get rid of the only other OS that was starting to look viable on the hardware.
Here's the rub -- if non-Apple OS's run on Apple hardware, then the hardware clones have somewhere else to turn when they want to start making compatible boxes. Any OS on the PPC is only going to be viable when it ran on the Apple hardware. Any PPC clone is only going to be viable if a viable OS runs on it. Hence, any non-Apple OS on Apple hardware makes clones viable, even if those clones don't run the Mac OS. The same arguement holds for both Win2K and Be, unfortunately.
Apple is a hardware and OS company, whether they wanted to be or not. And Steve is very aware of that fact.
I'm sure if I poked around it a bit more, I'd find more things to nit-pick, but I think I heard something about a good number of config files moved to XML? If so, that's pretty far away from any of the current *nix's.
Do you generally nit-pick about good things? What do you do about bad things?
It would also be fun to see MacOS X scaled down to the pda's and embedded systems. These are all areas that Linux excels in and has been proven as a good solution.
Wow. You must be using a completely different dictionary, because when I look up the definition of "good solution" and "excel" in my dictionary, Linux doesn't even come close to matching the definition for pda's.
I imagine MacOS X can scale down to PDA's the same way Win CE can -- not by porting the operating system, and the 30 or so system calls provided by the kernel, but instead by porting the rich and featurful API the programmers actually use on top of a new operating system.
I'm sure if I poked around it a bit more, I'd find more things to nit-pick, but I think I heard something about a good number of config files moved to XML? If so, that's pretty far away from any of the current *nix's.
Do you generally nit-pick about good things? What do you do about bad things?
It would also be fun to see MacOS X scaled down to the pda's and embedded systems. These are all areas that Linux excels in and has been proven as a good solution.
Wow. You must be using a completely different dictionary, because when I look up the definition of "good solution" and "excel" in my dictionary, Linux doesn't even come close to matching the definition for pda's.
I imagine MacOS X can scale down to PDA's the same way Win CE can -- not by porting the operating system, and the 30 or so system calls provided by the kernel, but instead by porting the rich and featurful API the programmers actually use on top of a new operating system.
So why wouldnt it be posible for Mac OSX to do the same? masses of linux coders brushing up gnome/kde/xfree86/etc to get it upto spec, and maybe even better then Mac OS X.
You've answered your own question. A mass of coders is never going to agree on one widget set, or one file manager, or one configuration framework and database, or one user preference manager, or one way to do anything.
The fundemental advantage Apple has over Linux is Apple's ability to choose the "one true way" -- keep what they like, throw away what they don't like, and pay a bunch of people to implement the boring, tedious, and unrewarding little pieces you need to fill in the gaps and make it all work together. Apple decided that, where possible, they would eliminate choice -- choose one way that works, and then spend the time, effort, and drudgery (i.e., money) to polish it all up.
Apple is hoping to make a successful Unix by getting rid of all the stuff we normal associate with Unix and with Free Software. There's no way that a mess of linux coders are ever going to duplicate that -- there's no incentive for a mass of linux coders to try. When we can't even agree on a widget set (I have open apps right now with Gnome, KDE, Motif, XUL, and Athena widget sets, and I don't even want to think about Java Swing), and most user-land applications really never go beyond the 85% stage, it's pretty clear we're never going to make anything even remotely like MacOS X.
MacOS X is going to slaughter Linux on the desktop. But who cares? BeOS slaughtered Linux on the desktop, Windows 2000 slaughterd Linux on the desktop, MacOS 9 slaughtered Linux on the desktep, NeXTStep slaughtered Linux on the desktop, even Windows 3.1 was better than Linux on the desktop.
Linux, as we know it today, it not going going to ever take over the desktop -- not when it doesn't support any of the new media files, not when it doesn't have a decent web browser, not when every distribution comes with (several) piss-poor, incompatible, incomplete control panel utilities, not when it every single program I run seems to have its own widget set, has a different set of fonts, has home-rolled its own ugly alpha blending, and has a different look-n-feel to go with it all.
It will never take over when clicking "install everything" on any distribution means that every passing script kiddie has root on your machine. It will never take over when every single piece of software available requires a certain kernel, a certain C library, a certain set of fonts, a certain version of X, a certain version of Gnome, or any one of the half-dozen Java Runtimes, and each is incompatible with whatever you're running now.
Linux will never take over when every significant program has implemented it's own (somewhat incomplete, and slightly buggy) installer, each incompatible with any method you were using to keep track of where every file on your machine came from.
Linux will never take over when every distribution, every desktop, ever file manager, and even ever program available has its own way of associating files with programs -- It will never take over when telling Gnu Midnight Commander, Netscape, Mozilla, Konquerer, and any other program whether to open PDF files with Ghostview or Adobe Acrobat means configuring each program individually.
Linux is never going to take over the desktop as long as working as a networking client is so piss poor. It will never take over when browsing the network, and attaching to an SMB share, or a Netware share, or an NFS share requires either strong administrator magic, or a user poking around in the shell as root.
Linux is never going to take over the desktop as long as printing is still such an immense pain in the ass -- printing on Linux is about as pitiful as printing from DOS was 15 years ago. The only difference is that DOS programs often made an attempt to work with available printers, while every Linux program demands either a PostScript printer, or a buggy filter manually set up to pretend there's a PostScript printer there.
In short, Linux as we know it essentially has no desktop presence at all. Given the realities of the market, I can't imagine a situation where most current Linux users would consider using a version of Linux that fixed the flaws of Linux that makes it so useless on the desktop. Linux has nothing to worry about from Apple on the Desktop, because Linux isn't on the Desktop anyhow.
Especially on a three-node VAXstation cluster.
Larry! It's so good to see you here on Slashdot at last, finally abandoning the scourge that is Usenet. Soon, you'll join us on the darkside. You will join me and Dan D. in our exclusive use of Windows 2000...
If your plan is to take some of the existing documentation (howto's, FAQ's, info page, man pages, etc.) and publish them with the authors permission, I'd definitely pay real money for it -- with a couple of stipulations.
I wouldn't care too much about the paper or binding quality, but the typesetting would have to be reasonable. If I got anything that looked like it came out of Microsoft Word, or got screen dumped from a web browser, I'd never buy another one again for as long as I live. (Typesetting is my primary beef with many of the vanity books I've seen. I can understand the non-existant editing -- good editing costs real money. But reasonable, computer assisted typesetting has been available for a long time now. Yet, the typesetting is often worse than the editing on some of these books.)
Second, I would need some way to get diff's from the dead tree version to the current version, at least for a little while. You should be able to do this pretty easily, and deliver diffs online.
Third, it couldn't cost much more than just typesetting the thing myself with TeX or groff, and printing it on the office laser printer. This last one is the kicker -- you'll have to pay the author, typeset the book, print the book, bind the book, and ship it to me, all for less than the $50 or so it costs me to just do a half-assed job on my own.
Of course, I might not be the typical market for this kind of thing. I'm just letting you know what kind of thing I can see myself buying.
It's badly off topic, and clearly trolling (which may be why it was posted anonymously), but would someone mod the above up anyhow? It's worth reading.
I guess now that Usenet has become essentially unusable, Slashdot is the place to go when your too damned lazy to spend the five minutes it would take to answer this yourself?
Try this: Go to Google. Type in "CDR FAQ", and press return. Click on the very first returned link., for the "Andy McFadden's CD-Recordable Frequently Asked Questions." Read the table of contents, and follow the link to Can DVD players read CD-Rs?. Read.
It would be really, really nice if the guy who posted to "ask slashdot" had done any homework at all, and found out if there was some "unusual" reason his Sony DVD doesn't work with CD-R disks, such as Sony intentionally not supporting some logical format or if this was just the standard Frequently Asked Question that wouldn't even get into most moderated usenet news groups.
Will I have to agree to a Microsoft End Use License Agreement before I vote?
I think there are two places where your view sharply diverge from reality:
There is no such thing as an "unwitting investor." People who give give money to endeavors they make no effort to understand, in the hopes of making large profits, are not called "investors." They are called gamblers, or speculators. Con men call them "dupes." No-one calls them "investors." These lawyers have no interest in helping anyone recoup their losses. They are not going to help anyone recoup their losses. I do not share the same general animosity and lawyers and the legal system held by many other people on slashdot; but it is painfully clear that in this case, dirty little parasites hope to use the broken parts of the US legal system to suck as much blood as they can out of VA Linux, with no intention of passing any significant amount back to the investors. Frankly, it's often the fault of the person getting conned. In general, con men don't con stupid or gullible people. They con greedy people. If you check out most of the successful cons jobs out there, they usually involve greedy dupes who were led to believe they were somehow taking advantage of the con man. It's true that the Internet IPO market started to look kind of ugly in the last few years, but it was never the case of greedy, evil companies taking poor, unsuspecting dupes to the cleaners. The reality is quite a bit more complicated. It usually is.And seeing an article on Slashdot about something you're doing is probably a good way to egg him (or her) on.
This may not always be the case. One of the serious disadvantages to virtual "communities" (like Slashdot, or IRC, or UO, or whatever) is that it's very easy to forget that there are humans on the other end of the line. It's a whole hell of a lot easier to destroy something when the only consequences are to a group that doesn't seem real.
There really are people who like to hurt things -- people who set cats on fire. These people are broken. But just about everyone likes to destroy things -- people who built big lego cities when they were a kid, just so they could play godzilla, or play Quake deathmatches, or just see how many levels deep they can 'eval' their scheme interpreter before the machine grinds to a halt. These people are, for the most part, not broken.
The problem is that crashing Undernet is a little like watching the NASCAR crashes in the sports hilight films -- it's pretty easy to imagine that there are no real people being hurt. But, by publicizing this, there's a slim chance that this punk will realize he's actually hurting real people.
Of course, it would be nice if they provided his name and address, so someone could go explain it to him in person.