I meant to mention this song myself, but never got around to it.
The interesting thing is that it's been getting play on my local radio station, Alice 95.5 FM, lately. When I called them to ask who it was and on what album I could find it, they said it was "Barely Manilow" (which it isn't--as near as I can tell, "Barely Manilow" is the name of a font on some fonts download webpages) and that they got it off the Internet.
I had thought they meant they ordered the CD off the Internet...but then, after a little websearching, I found the page and noticed that, due to legal matters, they can only make it available as an MP3 and such--it's not on an album.
Which means that my local radio station downloaded an MP3 for the purpose of playing it over the air. Shhhh, don't tell the RIAA!
Is there any way to unmoderate? Like if you realize you accidentally marked a post down when you meant to mark it up? It's happened to me before, and the post in question then had no moderate thingie on it for me to reverse my mistake.
What about people who, like myself, keep their threshhold set to +1 or +2 or higher? They'll only see the posts that are higher-rated already, and not the lower ones that might be worth a promotion.
Rock stars also let you tape to a DAT! Get a grip.
Let you tape what to a DAT? I think you've got your facts reversed. The fact is, the media publishing industry was so scared of DAT that it tried to prevent its adoption (and was successful enough that the only people who now use it are media professionals, rather than the general public at whom it was meant to be targeted. The same is true for the minidisc, to a lesser extent.) In fact, in the past they have tried to get it declared illegal to use VCRs to videotape TV shows in your own home for your own personal use.
As for playing "pirated" games. If you want to go ahead and download games that are 30-50MB in size you go ahead do that on single phone line your whole household uses.
Point the first: There are legitimately downloadable games, even game demos, that are as large as or larger than N64 ROMs.
Point the second: Many people have access to faster methods of downloading than just phone lines. I, for example, have zip disks and the campus computer labs. I downloaded the Q3A test in about 10 minutes. Cable modems and ADSL are becoming more widely available; within five or ten years, we may almost all be using them.
(And at any rate, my phone line is solely my own, so if I stay on the phone all day, nobody cares but me. The really important people in my life can reach me by email or ICQ anyway.)
And stop saying piracy. Players are not guerilla arsonists murdering truck drivers in an ambush.
And what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
Main Entry: piracy Pronunciation: 'pI-r&-sE Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural-cies Etymology: Medieval Latin piratia, from Late Greek peirateia, from Greek peiratEs pirate Date: 1537 1: an act of robbery on the high seas; also: an act resembling such robbery 2: robbery on the high seas 3: the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright
Please tell me why definition 3 does not apply, exactly?
The industry is bent on convincing people that in this world there are game playing couch potatoes who couldn't tell a good story if their life depended on it, the companies who entertain and are the only ones who can make a game by some divine fortune. Oh yeah and them stinkin, ugly, murderin criminals, them pirates. Get real!
And what does that have to do with anything?
The issue isn't that other people don't have the right to make games. The issue is that they don't have the right to copy the games that people have made and distribute them for free, without the creators getting compensated for it.
Sure, the reason people write emulators could be to figure out how their processors work, or just to see if they can, or just because they're there, or any of a dozen other reasons that have nothing to do with playing pirated games.
But I would hazard to guess that at least 90%, and probably closer to 99%, of the people who download them do so because they want to play pirated games. Take me, for example--I'm not a programmer; I don't even own a Nintendo, much less the necessary hardware to make ROM copies--what else could I do with them?
While I do like emulators, and support having them freely available, I have to be honest and admit that the ground on which I do so is legally, if not morally, shaky. I can definitely understand the company's point of view.
Maybe I didn't catch the lines right (I'll have to listen when I watch it again), but I didn't get the impression that the midi-clorians actually caused the Force, or the ability to use it, just that they showed up a lot in people who had that ability. Like being able to use the Force somehow attracts them, instead of having them causing you to be able to use the Force. But I could be wrong...
Also, FreeMWare is not just being written because people like the idea of VMWare but don't want to pay cash for it.
You know, that might be true.
But you have to admit, it sure doesn't look that way.
What I see when I look around is whenever someone comes out with a commercial or semi-commercial product for Linux that looks good, other people immediately rush out with projects to copy it in open source. QT/Harmony, VMware/Freemware...I mean, come on, why name it "Freemware"--obviously meant to rhyme with and suggest "VMware"? It's almost like they're thumbing their collective noses at the VMware creators.
The Freemware folks may have the best of intentions and the purest of motives...but they'll have a damn hard time convincing people of that, because what they're doing looks bad. And it makes it that much harder to convince people to make commercial products for Linux, or to open their commercial source up, for that matter.
It adds to the perception of Linux-users as people who would rather have free beer than free speech.
If we really want Linux to "take over the world," it's starting to seem like we might be our own worst enemies.
I find that the Internet Junkbuster works great for getting rid of annoying banner ads wherever they are, be it search engines or Slashdot. Just think of all the bandwidth you'd save.
First off, I'm rather disappointed at all the disingenious "Use a text editor" responses that have been popping up all over the place. Sure, using a text editor is a good way to start out and learn html, and even put a small webpage of your own together--that's what I did. But for larger-scale authoring, you need something more, be that a HTML editor, or perl scripts, or CGI, or what-have-you.
Frankly, you need to use the right tools for the job, whatever that job is. For me, when I was maintaining the 1998 Missouri State Square Dance Festival homepage, I did most of the large-scale gruntwork (formatting of scanned-in articles from snailmail newsletters) using Netscape Composer, then went back over it with a text editor to fix glitches and make tweaks. I could have done the whole thing in a text editor, but god how slow that would have been! Likewise, the pages would still have been presentable if I'd just used Composer, except some of Netscape's little irksome things would still have grated. So, I used each of them in its time, and it worked out pretty well.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone else mention Netscape Composer.
Now, granted, Composer does a few annoying things, which means you generally have to go back over it with a text editor after you finish...but at least it produces HTML that you can go back over in an editor, not load upon load of machine-generated cruft like some editors. And it's more or less the same from platform to platform. It won't do the fancy things some HTML editors will...but you aren't exactly paying through the nose for it either.
On the matter of text editors...Emacs does rule. It would rule a lot more if I actually knew more about all the things it did, of course...:) Emacs is available in all its glory for Windows. However, all its glory is a good 20-30 megs, zipped. If your hard drive doesn't have room for that much glory, there are Emacs clones available; the one I used most often was a program called NotGNU.
On an episode of "Beyond Tomorrow" I saw a few years ago, the show looked at a Japanese corporate restroom. It was rather amazing, and had enough furnishings in it that, if one could find space to add a bed, one would have the equivalent of a fairly good hotel room there. Soothing acquarium to look at, TV set if that's more your thing, refrigerator (IIRC), and the toilet...now that was something else.
Among other things, it had a built-in retractible bidet (check a dictionary if you don't know what that means), and hot air jets to dry off afterward. It wouldn't wipe for you...but it would let you do your business without ever having to reach down there if you so desired.
It all boils down to the old economic principle of "opportunity cost" in making a decision . . . she had the money, and of all the alternatives on which she could spend it, this was the most attractive to her.
She's no rank newbie trying to buy her way into riches, either--she'd played the game since October 1997. The main reason for the purchase, she says, was the impossibility of acquiring "real estate" in UO anymore.
And of course, games involving real money for virtual property aren't new. I've yet to see anyone mention Chron X, an Internet CCG where you use your credit card to pay real money for virtual cards...
You know, I have to wonder just how qualified someone who uses the sysadmin account as an incoming email address is to run any kind of technical Linux site, let alone a tuning site...
I went to order the CD, and figured that since I didn't need it right away, priority mail, USA only (the last option on their shipping list) would be good enough for me.
Imagine my surprise when shipping proved to be $0.00.
I even saved the page to a file in my home directory as proof.
This is the page that says, "This is how much you will be charged, please enter your credit card number". If they charge more than what they say they will to your card, they'll get in rather serious trouble, don't you think?
I don't know if it's a mistake, or if they usually offer free shipping via the Postal Service (since it is cheaper/slower than other shipping methods), but that's what I got...and so help me if they charge me a penny more I'm really going to raise hell.
(Have you ever had to enter your credit card number so that you can be charged $0.00 to your account? That's a weird experience, but now I can honestly say I've done it.:)
As I look at the part about Mitnick's punishment--being forbidden to touch a computer, cell phone, or cordless phone--I'm reminded of an Asimov short story I read once, in one of his anthologies. I forget the title--maybe someone here will know it--but the way it went was that a fellow had been convicted of some sort of computer crimes and, in punishment, had been given a phobia of computers which prevented him from touching them at all. In the end, he decided to appeal it, preferring time in jail to being so restricted.
The premise of the story was that this was cruel and unusual punishment--not because of having been given the phobia, but because the world had become a place where not being able to use computers of any kind was a crippling handicap. Though we might not have reached that point by the time Asimov wrote that story, I think we're a whole lot closer now, and Asimov knew that day was coming.
Um...my college economics textbook, for the Macroeconomics class I'm currently taking, defines economics quite clearly as
Economics: The science of scarcity: the science of how individuals and societies deal with the fact that wants are greater than the limited resources available to satisfy those wants.
Page 2, Macroeconomics: Fourth Edition, by Roger A. Arnold, South-Western College Publishing, San Marcos, CA.
Why oh why do about half the reviewers feel that they have to give away the main secret of this movie--what the Matrix is--before people even see it? It's as if the reviewers of The Crying Game said flat out, "She's a man."
The movie's tagline embodies the whole mise-en-scene of the film. "What is the Matrix?" By telling people flat out what it is, you deprive them of the viceral impact that it would have a half hour or so into the film when we actually get to find out.
If you, the reader, skipped Katz's review in order to come down and read the responses...Don't read it! Go to see the film unspoiled while you still can!
(And sit through all the way 'til the end of the credits. Trust me.)
I don't know if it's that all the people who've recognized this posted articles below my posting threshhold or what, but even CmdrTaco apparently didn't notice this, as the blurb on the Slashdot homepage gives the wrong impression, too.
The Word GUID was not used to catch David Smith. The article itself specifically calls attention to this fact. Quoting:
However, Chris Bubb, deputy attorney general, said investigators did not use GUIDs, the unique identifiers embedded in every Word document, to track down Smith. Several published reports this week linked the Melissa author to other well-known virus writers by analyzing GUIDs.
So no matter how big-brotherish GUID may be, it was not actually used in this case to catch the actual culprit (note that this fellow, David Smith, is not linked in the article with any of the hacker-handles mentioned in the other articles which talked about who the GUID belonged to).
I don't think those days ever existed. People were debating the subtle semantic differences between those terms since day one. Even if I grant your view of the past, it's pointless to mourn semantic flux, for no two people on the planet have identical sets of semantic bindings.
You miss the point. I'm not longing for the fact of them meaning the same thing or not. I'm longing for the day in which they did...because that was a day that was a bit less, shall we say, turbulent than this one.
Thou shalt not fear diversity, neither shalt thou long for homogeneity.
I don't want either diversity or homogeneity for its own sake. I'm certainly not against people having their own diverse points of view in various Linux matters. It's when they try to impose them on other people, such as Stallman's continued "correction" of people who don't use the term "GNU/Linux," that leads to wailing and gnashing of teeth.
It's a long-known tactical axiom that you can't fight a war on two fronts for very long if you want to win either one. All this infighting among people who continue to act like little more than spoiled children to each other is certainly not helping Linux's case...and it is more than likely hurting it.
No protection is needed, for the world will be a place [...]
I wish I shared your optimism, as that is a world I would very much like to live in. But if there's one thing history has taught me, it's never underestimate the power of greed.
A year ago, I was thoroughly amazed at what was happening. With Netscape going open source, I thought, we had some really great things to look forward to.
Funny, but that's about how that fellow began his article--and it's honestly the way I felt, too. It felt almost like the dawn of a new era. Sadly, I'm not so optimistic now, but the reason is diametrically opposed to the article's diatribe.
Whatever happened to the days when "Free" and "Open Source" were used interchangeably to mean the same thing? Whatever happened to the days when, if a piece of software was to be open source, it went without saying that it would be either BSDL or GPL, not something somebody took out of a "Software License Mad-Libs" book and filled in some blanks their own way? Everybody has his own license...are they compatible? And which is compatible with which?
Aiiigh. People have been worried about Linux fragmenting into myriad distributions...but what I think we should fret about more is the Linux community fragmenting into different little sects. The sad thing is that it's already happened, and I can't see any way to reverse it. The spotlight has been shown on people who, heretofore, behaved like perfectly rational (if eccentric) human beings, and all their prejudices, beliefs, failings have all been amplified and heightened as they've begun to play to that spotlight. Stallman, Perens, Raymond...who can honestly accuse Raymond of playing more to the media than they? Stallman with his loud and boisterous "GNU/Linux" assertions (correcting every reporter at a press conference, for crying out loud!), Perens with his split from OSI and his Open Letters sent this way and that... While I think all three (and the others who've been doing similar things) honestly believe they're doing what's best for the community, they're pulling their respective fragments of the community in different directions, and we'll end up, by the time it's over, with several much-smaller communities, who can't even agree on something as basic as what the operating system they advocate should be called!
And who will protect our {free|open source} software interests from Big Business then? If we can't present a unified front, they'll roll right over us like a steamroller with the Microsoft logo emblazoned on the side.
Sadly, achieving unity is not so easy as simply calling for it. I fear it may already be too late. When it's all over, I'll mourn the loss of a once-great movement to many little not-so-great movements, and continue on with my life.
PSX2, Linux...what do they mean for each other?
on
Gaming on Linux
·
· Score: 1
What I'm curious about is how the PSX2 and Linux will affect each other.
If the PSX2 does end up running on a modified Linux kernel, does that mean we'll see industrious hackers plugging keyboards and hard drives into the USB & Firewire ports and running Linux shell on their PSX2?
Will industrious hackers be able to hack the code for the GPL'd PSX2 simulator to make GPL'd PSX1 simulators (which, needing much less processor power than PSX2, should run on today's machines just fine), thus making Connectix or Bleem!'s commercial efforts irrelevant?
Can GPL'd development tools legally be used to develop commercial games? Doesn't code written using that code have to be GPL'd too? Or am I missing something?
If anyone can fill me in (or make good guesses) I'd like to hear them...
(Assuming that Mikey$oft are the ones who (allegedly) wrote this letter, which isn't certain but does seem to have been implied...)
Let's step back and look at this for a moment, shall we?
No matter how badly they've mucked up the antitrust case in the court, Mikey$oft is not stupid. Certainly not stupid enough to pull a stunt like this.
Let's face it, this is the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, and one of our greatest hot-buttons, as a nation, is the freedom of speech issue, especially when a Big, Evil, Nasty Corporation wants to take it away from The Little Guy. Mikey$oft might just as well adopt the slogan "We torture babies"--it could not get them too much more reviled than something of this nature.
As some of my friends have been saying...if this goes to trial, just think of the legal defense fund. Not only do sysadmins (many of whom are the strip's target audience) tend to make a fairly good income, but companies--especially Mikey$oft's competitors--will be falling all over themselves to get the positive publicity. "IBM contributes $1,000,000 to Internet Humorist's Defense Fund".
There's also the matter that this was an email--not a registered letter or other normal means by which you would think a lawyer would deliver such an ultimatum.
I'll admit, I could be wrong, and I have been before, and I'll be the first to shake my head in consternation if this is really real...but it sure smells like a hoax to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Check this link.
Enough said.
I meant to mention this song myself, but never got around to it.
The interesting thing is that it's been getting play on my local radio station, Alice 95.5 FM, lately. When I called them to ask who it was and on what album I could find it, they said it was "Barely Manilow" (which it isn't--as near as I can tell, "Barely Manilow" is the name of a font on some fonts download webpages) and that they got it off the Internet.
I had thought they meant they ordered the CD off the Internet...but then, after a little websearching, I found the page and noticed that, due to legal matters, they can only make it available as an MP3 and such--it's not on an album.
Which means that my local radio station downloaded an MP3 for the purpose of playing it over the air. Shhhh, don't tell the RIAA!
A couple of points I'd like to make...
Is there any way to unmoderate? Like if you realize you accidentally marked a post down when you meant to mark it up? It's happened to me before, and the post in question then had no moderate thingie on it for me to reverse my mistake.
What about people who, like myself, keep their threshhold set to +1 or +2 or higher? They'll only see the posts that are higher-rated already, and not the lower ones that might be worth a promotion.
Rock stars also let you tape to a DAT! Get a
: an act of robbery on the high seas; also : an act resembling such robbery : robbery on the high seas : the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright
grip.
Let you tape what to a DAT? I think
you've got your facts reversed. The fact is, the
media publishing industry was so scared of DAT
that it tried to prevent its adoption (and was
successful enough that the only people who now use
it are media professionals, rather than the
general public at whom it was meant to be
targeted. The same is true for the minidisc, to a
lesser extent.) In fact, in the past they have
tried to get it declared illegal to use VCRs to
videotape TV shows in your own home for your
own personal use.
As for playing "pirated" games. If you want to
go ahead and download games that are 30-50MB in
size you go ahead do that on single phone line
your whole household uses.
Point the first: There are legitimately
downloadable games, even game demos, that
are as large as or larger than N64 ROMs.
Mario 64 ROM: 8 megs
Legend of Zelda ROM: 30 megs
Half-Life 1.009 patch/Team Fortress Classic: 18 megs
Quake 3 Arena Test: 22 megs
Half-Life Uplink demo: 40 megs
Point the second: Many people have access to
faster methods of downloading than just phone
lines. I, for example, have zip disks and the
campus computer labs. I downloaded the Q3A test
in about 10 minutes. Cable modems and ADSL are
becoming more widely available; within five or ten
years, we may almost all be using them.
(And at any rate, my phone line is solely
my own, so if I stay on the phone all day, nobody
cares but me. The really important people in my
life can reach me by email or ICQ anyway.)
And stop saying piracy. Players are not
guerilla arsonists murdering truck drivers in an
ambush.
And what does that have to do with the
price of tea in China?
Courtesy of the Merriam-Webster
WWWebster Dictionary:
Main Entry: piracy
Pronunciation: 'pI-r&-sE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -cies
Etymology: Medieval Latin piratia, from Late Greek peirateia, from Greek peiratEs pirate
Date: 1537
1
2
3
Please tell me why definition 3 does not apply,
exactly?
The industry is bent on convincing people that
in this world there are game playing couch
potatoes who couldn't tell a good story if their
life depended on it, the companies who entertain
and are the only ones who can make a game by some
divine fortune. Oh yeah and them stinkin, ugly,
murderin criminals, them pirates. Get real!
And what does that have to do with
anything?
The issue isn't that other people don't have the
right to make games. The issue is that they don't
have the right to copy the games that people have
made and distribute them for free, without the
creators getting compensated for it.
And legally and morally, they really don't.
Sure, the reason people write emulators could be to figure out how their processors work, or just to see if they can, or just because they're there, or any of a dozen other reasons that have nothing to do with playing pirated games.
But I would hazard to guess that at least 90%, and probably closer to 99%, of the people who download them do so because they want to play pirated games. Take me, for example--I'm not a programmer; I don't even own a Nintendo, much less the necessary hardware to make ROM copies--what else could I do with them?
While I do like emulators, and support having them freely available, I have to be honest and admit that the ground on which I do so is legally, if not morally, shaky. I can definitely understand the company's point of view.
Maybe I didn't catch the lines right (I'll have to listen when I watch it again), but I didn't get the impression that the midi-clorians actually caused the Force, or the ability to use it, just that they showed up a lot in people who had that ability. Like being able to use the Force somehow attracts them, instead of having them causing you to be able to use the Force. But I could be wrong...
Also, FreeMWare is not just being written because people like the idea of VMWare but don't want to pay cash for it.
You know, that might be true.
But you have to admit, it sure doesn't look that way.
What I see when I look around is whenever someone comes out with a commercial or semi-commercial product for Linux that looks good, other people immediately rush out with projects to copy it in open source. QT/Harmony, VMware/Freemware...I mean, come on, why name it "Freemware"--obviously meant to rhyme with and suggest "VMware"? It's almost like they're thumbing their collective noses at the VMware creators.
The Freemware folks may have the best of intentions and the purest of motives...but they'll have a damn hard time convincing people of that, because what they're doing looks bad. And it makes it that much harder to convince people to make commercial products for Linux, or to open their commercial source up, for that matter.
It adds to the perception of Linux-users as people who would rather have free beer than free speech.
If we really want Linux to "take over the world," it's starting to seem like we might be our own worst enemies.
I find that the Internet Junkbuster works great for getting rid of annoying banner ads wherever they are, be it search engines or Slashdot. Just think of all the bandwidth you'd save.
First off, I'm rather disappointed at all the disingenious "Use a text editor" responses that have been popping up all over the place. Sure, using a text editor is a good way to start out and learn html, and even put a small webpage of your own together--that's what I did. But for larger-scale authoring, you need something more, be that a HTML editor, or perl scripts, or CGI, or what-have-you.
:) Emacs is available in all its glory for Windows. However, all its glory is a good 20-30 megs, zipped. If your hard drive doesn't have room for that much glory, there are Emacs clones available; the one I used most often was a program called NotGNU.
Frankly, you need to use the right tools for the job, whatever that job is. For me, when I was maintaining the 1998 Missouri State Square Dance Festival homepage, I did most of the large-scale gruntwork (formatting of scanned-in articles from snailmail newsletters) using Netscape Composer, then went back over it with a text editor to fix glitches and make tweaks. I could have done the whole thing in a text editor, but god how slow that would have been! Likewise, the pages would still have been presentable if I'd just used Composer, except some of Netscape's little irksome things would still have grated. So, I used each of them in its time, and it worked out pretty well.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone else mention Netscape Composer.
Now, granted, Composer does a few annoying things, which means you generally have to go back over it with a text editor after you finish...but at least it produces HTML that you can go back over in an editor, not load upon load of machine-generated cruft like some editors. And it's more or less the same from platform to platform. It won't do the fancy things some HTML editors will...but you aren't exactly paying through the nose for it either.
On the matter of text editors...Emacs does rule. It would rule a lot more if I actually knew more about all the things it did, of course...
On an episode of "Beyond Tomorrow" I saw a few years ago, the show looked at a Japanese corporate restroom. It was rather amazing, and had enough furnishings in it that, if one could find space to add a bed, one would have the equivalent of a fairly good hotel room there. Soothing acquarium to look at, TV set if that's more your thing, refrigerator (IIRC), and the toilet...now that was something else.
Among other things, it had a built-in retractible bidet (check a dictionary if you don't know what that means), and hot air jets to dry off afterward. It wouldn't wipe for you...but it would let you do your business without ever having to reach down there if you so desired.
Freaky.
Y'know, over on Ars Technica there's a very interesting interview with the lady who paid $2025 for an Ultima Online account, which sheds some light on the decision from her point of view.
It all boils down to the old economic principle of "opportunity cost" in making a decision . . . she had the money, and of all the alternatives on which she could spend it, this was the most attractive to her.
She's no rank newbie trying to buy her way into riches, either--she'd played the game since October 1997. The main reason for the purchase, she says, was the impossibility of acquiring "real estate" in UO anymore.
And of course, games involving real money for virtual property aren't new. I've yet to see anyone mention Chron X, an Internet CCG where you use your credit card to pay real money for virtual cards...
You know, I have to wonder just how qualified someone who uses the sysadmin account as an incoming email address is to run any kind of technical Linux site, let alone a tuning site...
Seriously.
:)
I went to order the CD, and figured that since I didn't need it right away, priority mail, USA only (the last option on their shipping list) would be good enough for me.
Imagine my surprise when shipping proved to be $0.00.
I even saved the page to a file in my home directory as proof.
This is the page that says, "This is how much you will be charged, please enter your credit card number". If they charge more than what they say they will to your card, they'll get in rather serious trouble, don't you think?
I don't know if it's a mistake, or if they usually offer free shipping via the Postal Service (since it is cheaper/slower than other shipping methods), but that's what I got...and so help me if they charge me a penny more I'm really going to raise hell.
(Have you ever had to enter your credit card number so that you can be charged $0.00 to your account? That's a weird experience, but now I can honestly say I've done it.
So I got the drivers installed--and praise the lord, sound on my computer in Linux for the first time since I put it together.
However, I'm having problems playing mp3s. mpg123 does the following:
opening socket, format = 0x00001021 at -1 Hz
unsupported playback rate: -1
audio: Connection refused
x11amp segfaults, even after recompiling from srpm, and freeamp seems to work all right, but it won't take m3u file inputs.
If someone could email me with suggestions, I'd greatly appreciate it.
Gee, now it looks like the people putting together that "non-GNU" Linux distribution will have to find another compiler.
:)
My heart is breaking for them. Really.
As I look at the part about Mitnick's punishment--being forbidden to touch a computer, cell phone, or cordless phone--I'm reminded of an Asimov short story I read once, in one of his anthologies. I forget the title--maybe someone here will know it--but the way it went was that a fellow had been convicted of some sort of computer crimes and, in punishment, had been given a phobia of computers which prevented him from touching them at all. In the end, he decided to appeal it, preferring time in jail to being so restricted.
The premise of the story was that this was cruel and unusual punishment--not because of having been given the phobia, but because the world had become a place where not being able to use computers of any kind was a crippling handicap. Though we might not have reached that point by the time Asimov wrote that story, I think we're a whole lot closer now, and Asimov knew that day was coming.
Um...my college economics textbook, for the Macroeconomics class I'm currently taking, defines economics quite clearly as
Economics: The science of scarcity: the science of how individuals and societies deal with the fact that wants are greater than the limited resources available to satisfy those wants.
Page 2, Macroeconomics: Fourth Edition, by Roger A. Arnold, South-Western College Publishing, San Marcos, CA.
Why oh why do about half the reviewers feel that they have to give away the main secret of this movie--what the Matrix is--before people even see it? It's as if the reviewers of The Crying Game said flat out, "She's a man."
The movie's tagline embodies the whole mise-en-scene of the film. "What is the Matrix?" By telling people flat out what it is, you deprive them of the viceral impact that it would have a half hour or so into the film when we actually get to find out.
If you, the reader, skipped Katz's review in order to come down and read the responses...Don't read it! Go to see the film unspoiled while you still can!
(And sit through all the way 'til the end of the credits. Trust me.)
The Word GUID was not used to catch David Smith. The article itself specifically calls attention to this fact. Quoting:
However, Chris Bubb, deputy attorney general, said investigators did not use GUIDs, the unique identifiers embedded in every Word document, to track down Smith. Several published reports this week linked the Melissa author to other well-known virus writers by analyzing GUIDs.
So no matter how big-brotherish GUID may be, it was not actually used in this case to catch the actual culprit (note that this fellow, David Smith, is not linked in the article with any of the hacker-handles mentioned in the other articles which talked about who the GUID belonged to).
Hey, don't knock User-Friendly...I read that strip religiously!
You miss the point. I'm not longing for the fact of them meaning the same thing or not. I'm longing for the day in which they did...because that was a day that was a bit less, shall we say, turbulent than this one.
Thou shalt not fear diversity, neither shalt thou long for homogeneity.
I don't want either diversity or homogeneity for its own sake. I'm certainly not against people having their own diverse points of view in various Linux matters. It's when they try to impose them on other people, such as Stallman's continued "correction" of people who don't use the term "GNU/Linux," that leads to wailing and gnashing of teeth.
It's a long-known tactical axiom that you can't fight a war on two fronts for very long if you want to win either one. All this infighting among people who continue to act like little more than spoiled children to each other is certainly not helping Linux's case...and it is more than likely hurting it.
No protection is needed, for the world will be a place [...]
I wish I shared your optimism, as that is a world I would very much like to live in. But if there's one thing history has taught me, it's never underestimate the power of greed.
A year ago, I was thoroughly amazed at what was happening. With Netscape going open source, I thought, we had some really great things to look forward to.
Funny, but that's about how that fellow began his article--and it's honestly the way I felt, too. It felt almost like the dawn of a new era. Sadly, I'm not so optimistic now, but the reason is diametrically opposed to the article's diatribe.
Whatever happened to the days when "Free" and "Open Source" were used interchangeably to mean the same thing? Whatever happened to the days when, if a piece of software was to be open source, it went without saying that it would be either BSDL or GPL, not something somebody took out of a "Software License Mad-Libs" book and filled in some blanks their own way? Everybody has his own license...are they compatible? And which is compatible with which?
Aiiigh. People have been worried about Linux fragmenting into myriad distributions...but what I think we should fret about more is the Linux community fragmenting into different little sects. The sad thing is that it's already happened, and I can't see any way to reverse it. The spotlight has been shown on people who, heretofore, behaved like perfectly rational (if eccentric) human beings, and all their prejudices, beliefs, failings have all been amplified and heightened as they've begun to play to that spotlight. Stallman, Perens, Raymond...who can honestly accuse Raymond of playing more to the media than they? Stallman with his loud and boisterous "GNU/Linux" assertions (correcting every reporter at a press conference, for crying out loud!), Perens with his split from OSI and his Open Letters sent this way and that... While I think all three (and the others who've been doing similar things) honestly believe they're doing what's best for the community, they're pulling their respective fragments of the community in different directions, and we'll end up, by the time it's over, with several much-smaller communities, who can't even agree on something as basic as what the operating system they advocate should be called!
And who will protect our {free|open source} software interests from Big Business then? If we can't present a unified front, they'll roll right over us like a steamroller with the Microsoft logo emblazoned on the side.
Sadly, achieving unity is not so easy as simply calling for it. I fear it may already be too late. When it's all over, I'll mourn the loss of a once-great movement to many little not-so-great movements, and continue on with my life.
If the PSX2 does end up running on a modified Linux kernel, does that mean we'll see industrious hackers plugging keyboards and hard drives into the USB & Firewire ports and running Linux shell on their PSX2?
Will industrious hackers be able to hack the code for the GPL'd PSX2 simulator to make GPL'd PSX1 simulators (which, needing much less processor power than PSX2, should run on today's machines just fine), thus making Connectix or Bleem!'s commercial efforts irrelevant?
Can GPL'd development tools legally be used to develop commercial games? Doesn't code written using that code have to be GPL'd too? Or am I missing something?
If anyone can fill me in (or make good guesses) I'd like to hear them...
Someday, if ever I can afford one, I'd like a PdQ--the Palm Pilot/cellphone combination. That's a gadget worthy of a geek... :)
(Assuming that Mikey$oft are the ones who (allegedly) wrote this letter, which isn't certain but does seem to have been implied...)
Let's step back and look at this for a moment, shall we?
No matter how badly they've mucked up the antitrust case in the court, Mikey$oft is not stupid. Certainly not stupid enough to pull a stunt like this.
Let's face it, this is the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, and one of our greatest hot-buttons, as a nation, is the freedom of speech issue, especially when a Big, Evil, Nasty Corporation wants to take it away from The Little Guy. Mikey$oft might just as well adopt the slogan "We torture babies"--it could not get them too much more reviled than something of this nature.
As some of my friends have been saying...if this goes to trial, just think of the legal defense fund. Not only do sysadmins (many of whom are the strip's target audience) tend to make a fairly good income, but companies--especially Mikey$oft's competitors--will be falling all over themselves to get the positive publicity. "IBM contributes $1,000,000 to Internet Humorist's Defense Fund".
There's also the matter that this was an email--not a registered letter or other normal means by which you would think a lawyer would deliver such an ultimatum.
I'll admit, I could be wrong, and I have been before, and I'll be the first to shake my head in consternation if this is really real...but it sure smells like a hoax to me.