Like nothing mentioned on Slashdot ever turned up as vapor...
Well, we can be certain the Sonique 2 port to Linux is not itself vaporware. Because, you see, the website "Dimension Music" says that "Team Sonique" plans a "technology demonstration" "before the end of the year" on a new version of Sonique. And, of course, the new version of the software "currently runs on linux."
If I had read about this on anything except slashdot, I would exclaim, "You stupid dimension music reporter! How can they have a version of Sonique 2 that runs on Linux, when they apparently don't even have a version that runs at all yet? Why are reporters such stupid consumers of press reports?"
But, of course, I read about the next version of Sonique 2 on Slashdot, so I know its true. After all, Slashdot would never post a linux story without completing its rigorous policy of fact checking. Otherwise, those thousands and thousands of ad impressions would be wasted on people reading and responding to a totally bogus story. Thank God that the only pointless flamebait cruft that ends up on slashdot are the penis-birds posted by anonymous cowards.
I agree with everything you say about LaTeX. The output looks great, and for the type of writing I do it is infinitely beter than any What You See is All You Get word processor.
But, with that said, I look at LaTeX with the same jaundiced eye I use for X and Emacs (and, to some extent, Unix itself). Each of them is "good enough" at what they do that there is no compelling reason to replace them (or, perhaps, each of them are aguably the best thing available for what they do, and its difficult for most of us to imagine what could replace them). But each of them have obvious, huge, glaring problems that all of us can easily see, but none of us have enough energy to fix.
That's what I used to think... until I learnt LaTeX.
Repeat after me: LaTeX is NOT a wordprocessor. LaTeX is NOT a wordprocessor. LaTeX is NOT a wordprocessor. LaTeX is NOT...
LaTeX is a disgusting crude combination of a document markup language and document style language, all painfully written in TeX's braindead macro language.
LaTeX has several inherent problems -- first, its a piss-poor as a document markup language; its trivially simple to make ad-hoc extensions, but there's no equivilant to a DTD, so communicating those extensions (either to another person or to a program like LyX) is extremely difficult.
Second, its fairly difficult to change the style and format of output. I would honestly be suprised if more than a few hundred people in the entire world could reliably create a new output style to match, for example, a book designer's specification.
Third, TeX's macro language was never intended to allow such a thing as LaTeX to be built -- Knuth has even admitted that. Unfortunately, extending LaTeX to add nontrivial extensions to the markup language or modify the output style involves learning a lot of TeX and a lot of the ugly guts of LaTeX.
I don't even want to start on the flaws of TeX.
Anyhow, with that being said, I'll freely admit that LaTeX and TeX are the best free programs available that do what they do -- There are some things they do very well, I use them often, and I've invested a lot of time and effort to learn them very well. But it annoys the jeebus out of me when someone calls either of them a "word processor," and it annoys me even more when any product that faulty gets some sort of reverent praise.
Oddly enough, this is the funniest thing I've seen in a few days.
For some reason, having the goat sex links going to photo's from Bob Jones University just tripped my surreal limit, and I laughed pretty darn hard. I guess you just had to be here... oh wait... you are here. I guess you just had to be me, then...
If they wrote and published the RFC before applying for the patent, they effectively released it into public domain.
Can you provide any documentation for this claim? I'm assuming from your comment that there is some contract somplace that must be signed before releasing an RFC, and that contract specifies that RFC's are in the "public domain" (whatever that means).
Clearly, there are some copyright issues involved with the release of an RFC -- I'm assuming that since RFC's get copied so freely, there is some type of license that allows copying under certain circumstances. But I am intrigued by the idea that in addition to copyright issues, there is some type of patent issue involved.
Like I say, please provide some references to this "public domain" idea. Thanks.
Minor point - Pitbulls are fairly useless guard dogs.
It depends on what you want a guard dog to do.
A tiny Westhighland White Terrier is going to bark at anything -- they're great if you want a dog to warn you when something strange is happening, but not scare or hurt intruders in any meaningful way,
A well trained Collie could probably hurt any person you ask it to hurt -- they're great if you want a dog that will hurt intruders, but possibly not scare intruders very much, and
A Pitbull is going to scare the poop out of anyone who sees it -- they're great if you want to deter intruders, but in general they're probably too friendly to actually hurt anyone, and they might not even bark much.
Pitbulls are a reasonable deterent. As long as you understand you have a deterent (instead of something else), you'll be fine.
(Actually, I agree with your sentiments -- people who have been around a lot of dogs are probably not going to be particularily scared of a Pitbull, except inasmuch as the amount of violence in a dog is pretty much a function of training, and the sort of dumbass that trains a dog to be irrationally violent against humans seemed to pick pitbulls five years ago, and rottweilers today. Its really a shame -- both are reasonably decent breeds with unfortunate reputations.)
I'm all for free software, but I also think that if the programmer of something wants to make money from his work, then he should be perfectly entitled to. If I ever wrote something original and cool, I'd want to be reimbursed in some way for the time that I put into it.
Thats great. Many of us share your sentiments. But what does it have to do with Patents? Patents don't help you sell your software -- they give you legal redress if another person writes software that uses some algo. that you've patented.
Are you, by any chance, confusing patents with copyrights?
So, some moron wearing a suit believes that the only thing Cisco adds to its routers is the name, while the real value lies in the manufacturing? No wonder D-Link sucks.
Cisco is doubly smart for using D-Link to build equipement -- D-Link apparently takes pride in their manufacturing, but is far to stupid to ever understand where the real value lies in computer equipment. So, all D-Link's home-grown stuff is well-built hardware, with lousy designs, crappy software, and lousy support. If they ever lose that "well-built hardware", then Cisco can just dump them, and move on to the next manufacturer.
(And before anyone says, "You shouldn't need support if its built right," all i have to say is that you obviously don't understand what support is. Here's a hint -- if there's an endless tape loop that says "your call is important to us!", then you're dealing with a company that doesn't provide support.)
Umm, please re-read my post. It wasn't a rumor, it came directly from a "higher-up" at D-Link.
Umm, please re-read your post. It came from you, who said you got it from your dad, who said he got it from some dude wearing a suit, who said he worked at D-Link.
I, for one, don't believe 90% of the crap I read on slashdot. I don't believe that Natalie Portman poured grits down anyone's trousers, I don't believe that's a real bird on that guys dick, and I can't believe that goatse.cx's guys asshole is really that big.
Why should I believe a story I heard from you heard from your dad heard from some dude in a suit?
... about as well as "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire."
I must have missed the alternative ending of "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire." You know, the part where all the contestants were sucked out into the cold void of space. The happy ending.
What's the point of 50-60 FPS when broadcast video is ~30? Are we itching for a higher frame rate in movies and TV?
Actually, yes -- we are itching for a higher frame rate in movies and TV. Thirty frames per second really isn't fast enough to have objects move quickly across the screen without appearing jerky. It limits the speed you can pan across a scene, and it limits the speed at which you can move the important objects across the screen.
You'll probably never notice the jerkiness caused by fast side-to-side movement when you watch any professionally made movie. Why? Because cinimatographer's are very careful to avoid fast side-to-side movement. Since you'll never see them, you might not have ever even noticed that they're missing!
The same thing also plays heavily into the limits of a first person shooter. How fast you can spin, how quickly other objects can move across your field of view, even the width of your field of view, are all carefully controlled by the game designers. You can only spin around so fast, before the walls and other players start to jump around instead of slide around, and the limits are controlled primarily by your frame rate.
And, of course, frame rates faster than your video display hardware give the designer all sorts of interesting tricks -- anti-aliasing, motion blur, all types of interesting effects. And some of those effects (like motion blur) can make up for otherwise slow display hardware. So, a video card that can render a few hundred frames per second, but only display 70-80 (depending on the monitor) can still give game designers more leeway in game design -- there are a number of interesting tricks they can do before the video starts to appear choppy.
Many of us on slashdot are probably leery of including the shell, the utilities, the libraries, and much of the stuff appearing in the POSIX standard (and on our hard drives) in what we define as an "operating system". Instead, most of those pieces constitute what we recognize as an "environment", and we're very careful to separate the "environment" from the "operating system" in our minds.
But notice what the author does -- he included the shell and the libraries in the operating system, with the same breath he uses to include the drivers. (Since you can't have an operating system without drivers, and since the author mentions the drivers, the shell, and the libraries all in the same sentence, it simply follows that you can't have an operating system without a shell!)
Now the author has the perfect slippery straw man. Since he's included part of the environment in the operating system, he can include it all! Now, the entire environment can be part of the operating system -- the GUI, the text editor, the pretty little clicky-clicky thing you swear at when you're trying to set up a new printer -- everything you get on that installation CD! After all, Microsoft representatives have claimed, under oath, that the web browser is part of the operating system, so obviously the operating system is quite a bit more than just the kernel!
But it's a false argument. Apple is in the business of developing excellent user environments -- environments that many people argue are worth the money. Since the word "user environment" isn't marketable, most companies (Microsoft, Sun, Redhat, and Apple included) have developed the marketeer's new definition of "operating systems," which simply means "environment plus operating system" to most engineers. Hence, the confusion of terms that makes tripe like this article possible.
There are many ways the author could have made the distinction between the environment and the operating system clear, and there are many ways the author could have worked to convince us that the environment Apple is developing is going to be superior and worth paying for. But he chose not to, either out of ignorance, or marketing hype, or both. Instead, he confused the marketeers defintion of operation system with the engineers definition, and he hoped to slip difference by us in this awful article.
In any case, the author should do nothing in your mind to detract from what Apple is doing -- remember that what they're building is separate from what any wonk at Ziff-Davis might say.
No... you misunderstand completely. I want to write web pages that work in any reasonable, standards conforming browser, and I believe that all webpages should be written for standards-conforming browsers.
Unfortunately, the reality of the market is that most of us are forced to write ugly, non-compliant web pages that work in that ugly abortion called Netscape 4.x. I applaud these authors for taking a stand, and refusing to do so.
The most unfortunate thing about Netscape being a totally unviable browser is that once designers stop designing for it entirely (as I believe many will, soon), most "pragmatic" designers such as yourself will see little reason to design to any kind of standard except the defacto Microsoft extensions.
That's not where I wanted to go today, but I guess I'm on the train with the rest of you.
After looking at it in IE5 (after being snubbed in NS 4.7!) all I can say is if this kid cant achieve a layout like that without CSS then he needs to quit making web sites.
No... you have it all wrong. If you truly believe that you should use anything other than CSS to make a layout like this, then you should stop making websites. I am sick and tired of using <TABLE> and <FONT> tags in all my code, and I despise Netscape for forcing me to continue writing such sh*tty HTML.
I'll be glad when Netscape is whiped off the earth.
This approach should be generic in coding: take a standard environment and if your code works on it it should work everywhere. If you want to add browser-specific features, then do it after.
This is precisely what they did on this page -- the wrote HTML that should work in any standard environment. Unfortunately, Netscape 4 is such a huge piece of sh*t that quite a bit of standard stuff simply doesn't work on it.
Oh well... that's AOL's problem. I'm done apologizing for them.
You simply cannot charge for a GPL'ed program. You can charge for *support*, but if the product's good enough, it shouldn't *need* that support. (Makes you think about the quality of certain Linux distros, eh?)
Are you smoking crack? Of course you can charge for GPL'd programs! Let's say I write a version of GCC that works super-duper great for the Palm. Then, I call up 3-Com and say "give me $1,000,000, and you can have a copy, otherwise it's/dev/null for this baby..." Of course, you can only sell it once, but who cares?
And wtf you talking about with support? Oracle makes a bundle with support, and a lot of people swear by their stuff. Microsoft probably doesn't make anything from support, and no-one swears by that stuff...
Blockquote is a nonstandard (not part of html 4), proprietary tag that for unknown reasons completely screws up text formatting, often making it appear in strange fonts and/or italics.
That's true, I was using charged phrases, and I apologize. But read his post again -- he really does have a very rigid view of the "right" way to view the world, and the "wrong" way to view the world. And he isn't claiming that drugs are a physically dangerous way to alter perception -- he's saying that drugs alter your perception in a way thats dangerous mentally, and ultimately dangerous to society.
That is my real difficult with the post I responded to -- I am genuinely scared of people who want to supress ideas that are dangerous to society, and I really did read his post to mean exactly that. He essentially says that drug use may be ok for a hermit out in the woods, but no-one else. Why? Because the hermit wouldn't be able to infect anyone with his crazy drug ideas.
But perhaps I am reading it wrong -- it is possible that matman really does believe that drugs give one an "incorrect" view of reality, and that view is dangerous because the drug view is invariably "wrong". If that's all he's argueing, then I have no arguement -- its not really a view that I've ever seen or considered before. My gut instinct is to flat out reject it, but it's so late at night that I'm going to try hard not to do that...
As a recovering heroin addict, I watched many a friend pass out and never awaken based on having a little too much, air in the needle, etc..
Heroin is a fucking evil thing -- no-one is going to argue with that. But heroin is much, much, much worse because it is illegal. When alcohol was illegal in the States, a hell of a lot of poor fuckers went blind or died from cheap-shit bathtub hooch, made with no quality control measure at all. Many lives were ruined because low-potency alcohol (like beer) was expensive, and only the much easier to smuggle and distribute distilled spirits were affordable.
By contrast, alcohol today is relatively safe, with only two types of victims being common: guys that drink themselves to death over a period of years because they're too chicken-shit to just jump off a bridge, and people killed when morons drive cars around drunk.
If heroin were legal, it would be as bad as a combination of alcohol and cigarrettes -- a horribly addictive drug with strong mind-altering powers. And, like cigarrettes and alcohol, a lot of people would choose to die from it. But it wouldn't be anything at like the horrible, horrible thing it is today....
Slashdot Mirror
I've got your source right here: #!/usr/bin/perl
while (<>) {
!/fbi|cia|atom-bomb|saddam hussien/i && next;
print;
}
the RIAA would be killing itself because it would have no way to listen to demo tapes of up and coming artists.
Ummm... yeah. Without demo tapes, how would anyone have heard N'Sync or The Spice Girls before they got signed?
Like nothing mentioned on Slashdot ever turned up as vapor...
Well, we can be certain the Sonique 2 port to Linux is not itself vaporware. Because, you see, the website "Dimension Music" says that "Team Sonique" plans a "technology demonstration" "before the end of the year" on a new version of Sonique. And, of course, the new version of the software "currently runs on linux."
If I had read about this on anything except slashdot, I would exclaim, "You stupid dimension music reporter! How can they have a version of Sonique 2 that runs on Linux, when they apparently don't even have a version that runs at all yet? Why are reporters such stupid consumers of press reports?"
But, of course, I read about the next version of Sonique 2 on Slashdot, so I know its true. After all, Slashdot would never post a linux story without completing its rigorous policy of fact checking. Otherwise, those thousands and thousands of ad impressions would be wasted on people reading and responding to a totally bogus story. Thank God that the only pointless flamebait cruft that ends up on slashdot are the penis-birds posted by anonymous cowards.
Oh yeah? I hereby present my own mp3 player, the Foo(TM).
Unlike Sonique 2, this "Foo" program of yours is just vaporware.
Once you get a slashdot story all to yourself, I'll believe this "Foo" program actually exists.
I agree with everything you say about LaTeX. The output looks great, and for the type of writing I do it is infinitely beter than any What You See is All You Get word processor.
But, with that said, I look at LaTeX with the same jaundiced eye I use for X and Emacs (and, to some extent, Unix itself). Each of them is "good enough" at what they do that there is no compelling reason to replace them (or, perhaps, each of them are aguably the best thing available for what they do, and its difficult for most of us to imagine what could replace them). But each of them have obvious, huge, glaring problems that all of us can easily see, but none of us have enough energy to fix.
Oh well... Worse is Better...
That's what I used to think ... until I learnt LaTeX.
Repeat after me: LaTeX is NOT a wordprocessor. LaTeX is NOT a wordprocessor. LaTeX is NOT a wordprocessor. LaTeX is NOT...
LaTeX is a disgusting crude combination of a document markup language and document style language, all painfully written in TeX's braindead macro language.
LaTeX has several inherent problems -- first, its a piss-poor as a document markup language; its trivially simple to make ad-hoc extensions, but there's no equivilant to a DTD, so communicating those extensions (either to another person or to a program like LyX) is extremely difficult.
Second, its fairly difficult to change the style and format of output. I would honestly be suprised if more than a few hundred people in the entire world could reliably create a new output style to match, for example, a book designer's specification.
Third, TeX's macro language was never intended to allow such a thing as LaTeX to be built -- Knuth has even admitted that. Unfortunately, extending LaTeX to add nontrivial extensions to the markup language or modify the output style involves learning a lot of TeX and a lot of the ugly guts of LaTeX.
I don't even want to start on the flaws of TeX.
Anyhow, with that being said, I'll freely admit that LaTeX and TeX are the best free programs available that do what they do -- There are some things they do very well, I use them often, and I've invested a lot of time and effort to learn them very well. But it annoys the jeebus out of me when someone calls either of them a "word processor," and it annoys me even more when any product that faulty gets some sort of reverent praise.
http://www.goatse.c x
Oddly enough, this is the funniest thing I've seen in a few days.
For some reason, having the goat sex links going to photo's from Bob Jones University just tripped my surreal limit, and I laughed pretty darn hard. I guess you just had to be here... oh wait... you are here. I guess you just had to be me, then...
If they wrote and published the RFC before applying for the patent, they effectively released it into public domain.
Can you provide any documentation for this claim? I'm assuming from your comment that there is some contract somplace that must be signed before releasing an RFC, and that contract specifies that RFC's are in the "public domain" (whatever that means).
Clearly, there are some copyright issues involved with the release of an RFC -- I'm assuming that since RFC's get copied so freely, there is some type of license that allows copying under certain circumstances. But I am intrigued by the idea that in addition to copyright issues, there is some type of patent issue involved.
Like I say, please provide some references to this "public domain" idea. Thanks.
- A tiny Westhighland White Terrier is going to bark at anything -- they're great if you want a dog to warn you when something strange is happening, but not scare or hurt intruders in any meaningful way,
- A well trained Collie could probably hurt any person you ask it to hurt -- they're great if you want a dog that will hurt intruders, but possibly not scare intruders very much, and
- A Pitbull is going to scare the poop out of anyone who sees it -- they're great if you want to deter intruders, but in general they're probably too friendly to actually hurt anyone, and they might not even bark much.
Pitbulls are a reasonable deterent. As long as you understand you have a deterent (instead of something else), you'll be fine. (Actually, I agree with your sentiments -- people who have been around a lot of dogs are probably not going to be particularily scared of a Pitbull, except inasmuch as the amount of violence in a dog is pretty much a function of training, and the sort of dumbass that trains a dog to be irrationally violent against humans seemed to pick pitbulls five years ago, and rottweilers today. Its really a shame -- both are reasonably decent breeds with unfortunate reputations.)I'm all for free software, but I also think that if the programmer of something wants to make money from his work, then he should be perfectly entitled to. If I ever wrote something original and cool, I'd want to be reimbursed in some way for the time that I put into it.
Thats great. Many of us share your sentiments. But what does it have to do with Patents? Patents don't help you sell your software -- they give you legal redress if another person writes software that uses some algo. that you've patented.
Are you, by any chance, confusing patents with copyrights?
So, some moron wearing a suit believes that the only thing Cisco adds to its routers is the name, while the real value lies in the manufacturing? No wonder D-Link sucks.
Cisco is doubly smart for using D-Link to build equipement -- D-Link apparently takes pride in their manufacturing, but is far to stupid to ever understand where the real value lies in computer equipment. So, all D-Link's home-grown stuff is well-built hardware, with lousy designs, crappy software, and lousy support. If they ever lose that "well-built hardware", then Cisco can just dump them, and move on to the next manufacturer.
(And before anyone says, "You shouldn't need support if its built right," all i have to say is that you obviously don't understand what support is. Here's a hint -- if there's an endless tape loop that says "your call is important to us!", then you're dealing with a company that doesn't provide support.)
Umm, please re-read my post. It wasn't a rumor, it came directly from a "higher-up" at D-Link.
Umm, please re-read your post. It came from you, who said you got it from your dad, who said he got it from some dude wearing a suit, who said he worked at D-Link.
I, for one, don't believe 90% of the crap I read on slashdot. I don't believe that Natalie Portman poured grits down anyone's trousers, I don't believe that's a real bird on that guys dick, and I can't believe that goatse.cx's guys asshole is really that big.
Why should I believe a story I heard from you heard from your dad heard from some dude in a suit?
... about as well as "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire."
I must have missed the alternative ending of "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire." You know, the part where all the contestants were sucked out into the cold void of space. The happy ending.
Sorry... I don't have any reason to pay attention to the IIS security reports. Does IIS/4.0 have some security issues?
What's the point of 50-60 FPS when broadcast video is ~30? Are we itching for a higher frame rate in movies and TV?
Actually, yes -- we are itching for a higher frame rate in movies and TV. Thirty frames per second really isn't fast enough to have objects move quickly across the screen without appearing jerky. It limits the speed you can pan across a scene, and it limits the speed at which you can move the important objects across the screen.
You'll probably never notice the jerkiness caused by fast side-to-side movement when you watch any professionally made movie. Why? Because cinimatographer's are very careful to avoid fast side-to-side movement. Since you'll never see them, you might not have ever even noticed that they're missing!
The same thing also plays heavily into the limits of a first person shooter. How fast you can spin, how quickly other objects can move across your field of view, even the width of your field of view, are all carefully controlled by the game designers. You can only spin around so fast, before the walls and other players start to jump around instead of slide around, and the limits are controlled primarily by your frame rate.
And, of course, frame rates faster than your video display hardware give the designer all sorts of interesting tricks -- anti-aliasing, motion blur, all types of interesting effects. And some of those effects (like motion blur) can make up for otherwise slow display hardware. So, a video card that can render a few hundred frames per second, but only display 70-80 (depending on the monitor) can still give game designers more leeway in game design -- there are a number of interesting tricks they can do before the video starts to appear choppy.
What's the middle layer in a news reader/news server connection?
xrn is the middle layer. Your X server runs the display, and your NNTP server runs the database.
Many of us on slashdot are probably leery of including the shell, the utilities, the libraries, and much of the stuff appearing in the POSIX standard (and on our hard drives) in what we define as an "operating system". Instead, most of those pieces constitute what we recognize as an "environment", and we're very careful to separate the "environment" from the "operating system" in our minds.
But notice what the author does -- he included the shell and the libraries in the operating system, with the same breath he uses to include the drivers. (Since you can't have an operating system without drivers, and since the author mentions the drivers, the shell, and the libraries all in the same sentence, it simply follows that you can't have an operating system without a shell!)
Now the author has the perfect slippery straw man. Since he's included part of the environment in the operating system, he can include it all! Now, the entire environment can be part of the operating system -- the GUI, the text editor, the pretty little clicky-clicky thing you swear at when you're trying to set up a new printer -- everything you get on that installation CD! After all, Microsoft representatives have claimed, under oath, that the web browser is part of the operating system, so obviously the operating system is quite a bit more than just the kernel!
But it's a false argument. Apple is in the business of developing excellent user environments -- environments that many people argue are worth the money. Since the word "user environment" isn't marketable, most companies (Microsoft, Sun, Redhat, and Apple included) have developed the marketeer's new definition of "operating systems," which simply means "environment plus operating system" to most engineers. Hence, the confusion of terms that makes tripe like this article possible.
There are many ways the author could have made the distinction between the environment and the operating system clear, and there are many ways the author could have worked to convince us that the environment Apple is developing is going to be superior and worth paying for. But he chose not to, either out of ignorance, or marketing hype, or both. Instead, he confused the marketeers defintion of operation system with the engineers definition, and he hoped to slip difference by us in this awful article.
In any case, the author should do nothing in your mind to detract from what Apple is doing -- remember that what they're building is separate from what any wonk at Ziff-Davis might say.
No... you misunderstand completely. I want to write web pages that work in any reasonable, standards conforming browser, and I believe that all webpages should be written for standards-conforming browsers.
Unfortunately, the reality of the market is that most of us are forced to write ugly, non-compliant web pages that work in that ugly abortion called Netscape 4.x. I applaud these authors for taking a stand, and refusing to do so.
The most unfortunate thing about Netscape being a totally unviable browser is that once designers stop designing for it entirely (as I believe many will, soon), most "pragmatic" designers such as yourself will see little reason to design to any kind of standard except the defacto Microsoft extensions.
That's not where I wanted to go today, but I guess I'm on the train with the rest of you.
After looking at it in IE5 (after being snubbed in NS 4.7!) all I can say is if this kid cant achieve a layout like that without CSS then he needs to quit making web sites.
No... you have it all wrong. If you truly believe that you should use anything other than CSS to make a layout like this, then you should stop making websites. I am sick and tired of using <TABLE> and <FONT> tags in all my code, and I despise Netscape for forcing me to continue writing such sh*tty HTML.
I'll be glad when Netscape is whiped off the earth.
This approach should be generic in coding: take a standard environment and if your code works on it it should work everywhere. If you want to add browser-specific features, then do it after.
This is precisely what they did on this page -- the wrote HTML that should work in any standard environment. Unfortunately, Netscape 4 is such a huge piece of sh*t that quite a bit of standard stuff simply doesn't work on it.
Oh well... that's AOL's problem. I'm done apologizing for them.
You simply cannot charge for a GPL'ed program. You can charge for *support*, but if the product's good enough, it shouldn't *need* that support. (Makes you think about the quality of certain Linux distros, eh?)
/dev/null for this baby..." Of course, you can only sell it once, but who cares?
Are you smoking crack? Of course you can charge for GPL'd programs! Let's say I write a version of GCC that works super-duper great for the Palm. Then, I call up 3-Com and say "give me $1,000,000, and you can have a copy, otherwise it's
And wtf you talking about with support? Oracle makes a bundle with support, and a lot of people swear by their stuff. Microsoft probably doesn't make anything from support, and no-one swears by that stuff...
Blockquote is a nonstandard (not part of html 4), proprietary tag that for unknown reasons completely screws up text formatting, often making it appear in strange fonts and/or italics.
Why am i even replying to this? I am such a stupid troll biter, but you are such a stupid troll...Yeah, yeah! And I can distribute an album called "U2"!!
That's true, I was using charged phrases, and I apologize. But read his post again -- he really does have a very rigid view of the "right" way to view the world, and the "wrong" way to view the world. And he isn't claiming that drugs are a physically dangerous way to alter perception -- he's saying that drugs alter your perception in a way thats dangerous mentally, and ultimately dangerous to society.
That is my real difficult with the post I responded to -- I am genuinely scared of people who want to supress ideas that are dangerous to society, and I really did read his post to mean exactly that. He essentially says that drug use may be ok for a hermit out in the woods, but no-one else. Why? Because the hermit wouldn't be able to infect anyone with his crazy drug ideas.
But perhaps I am reading it wrong -- it is possible that matman really does believe that drugs give one an "incorrect" view of reality, and that view is dangerous because the drug view is invariably "wrong". If that's all he's argueing, then I have no arguement -- its not really a view that I've ever seen or considered before. My gut instinct is to flat out reject it, but it's so late at night that I'm going to try hard not to do that...
As a recovering heroin addict, I watched many a friend pass out and never awaken based on having a little too much, air in the needle, etc..
Heroin is a fucking evil thing -- no-one is going to argue with that. But heroin is much, much, much worse because it is illegal. When alcohol was illegal in the States, a hell of a lot of poor fuckers went blind or died from cheap-shit bathtub hooch, made with no quality control measure at all. Many lives were ruined because low-potency alcohol (like beer) was expensive, and only the much easier to smuggle and distribute distilled spirits were affordable.
By contrast, alcohol today is relatively safe, with only two types of victims being common: guys that drink themselves to death over a period of years because they're too chicken-shit to just jump off a bridge, and people killed when morons drive cars around drunk.
If heroin were legal, it would be as bad as a combination of alcohol and cigarrettes -- a horribly addictive drug with strong mind-altering powers. And, like cigarrettes and alcohol, a lot of people would choose to die from it. But it wouldn't be anything at like the horrible, horrible thing it is today....