> They know exactly what the problem is and the software solution would be, clearly, to make the earth image rotate the other way. But, it seems to me that they are looking for "other options"
"other options".. hmm... We can only hope that in their "research" they don't come across that old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode where the evil businessmen attempted to take over the world by making the rotation of the earth stop, thus causing all people on earth to fling off into space due to inertia. The businessmen, who had built an underground shelter so they could survive the massive inertial holocaust, would then come out and, being the only people left on planet earth, would be able to enjoy all of its natural resources all to themselves. The episode contained not only this startling idea, but also the same degree detailed scientific explanation of how such a scheme would be implemented that all Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episodes contained. What if it were to occur to the Microsoft executives that they could carry out such a plan?
(I'm also pretty sure there was an episode of Rescue Rangers with a similar plotline, and possibly one [jeopardy?] of Pinkie and the Brain, but i don't remember for certain.)
All i know for certain is, we must take all measures possible to ensure this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode, this recipe for destruction, does not fall into the hands of Microsoft. If it does, then the only hope for planet earth may be.. Jackie Chan.
-mcc-baka --- WWJD --- (What Would Jackie Chan Do?)
remember that first April Fools post that was just in dumb gibberish?
well, i replied to it with a post that had been run through the Malkovich script.
I got moderated down as "offtopic".
I wanted to scream out, HOW CAN IT BE MORE ON-TOPIC THAN THAT?? WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE MORE ONTOPIC TO A GIBBERISH STORY THAN A GIBBERISH POST??.. but i figured what i did was sophomoric enough that i deserved to be moderated down, even if not as "offtopic".
so now somehow i feel bitter that had at the time i simply submitted the malkovichizer as a story, i could have gotten the satisfaction of having a quickie printed instead of a karma loss.. but i assumed it had already been posted. (i saw it mentioned in the astralwerks newslwetter..) Oh well. I'm probably totally unjustified..:) Anyway i'm just glad the Malkovichizer got quickied. And i'm REALLY glad the Constructor applet got quickied. I found that last week and it's the coolest thing i've ever seen..:)
this is why you need to think about these things.. (Score:) by mcc (mcc@drowned.cx) on soon (#) (User Info) http://drowned.cx/ this is why people writing open source software need to think these things out ahead of time..
i personally like the restrictions of the LGPL better and think they're a lot more "fair". but i realize they shouldn't be for everything. if you're doing something that could conceivably be linked into, rather than just used, you have to take the time to think out whether it would be better to put that part under the LGPL.
look, for example, at Macintosh NSCA Telnet 3.0, which the NSCA has given to this guy to continue work on. The guy placed it under the GPL/LGPL, and the way he did it is a model of well-thought-out application of the LGPL. The "library" portions are LGPLed-- the low-level bits,the bits that someone could concievably reuse later as a basis for a telnet feature in some other program. Such that people will feel free to use it casually, improve their software and maybe improve the LGPLed open bits (which they would then have to redistribute the source to) without having to go to the trouble of totally opening something they may not feel ready to open. The front-end bits, meanwhile, the bits that you wouldn't want anyone outright stealing, are GPLed. Each individual.c or.h file is split up into a different folder, and each one indicates which liscense it's under.
But most people don't think these things out, they just slap "GPL" on it, and it doesn't occur to them to think whether some of it it may be better for everyone in general if they allowed some of the bits of the program to be linked against. Software in the "public good" doesn't mean it HAS to be GPLed.. THINK about how people may best be served by your program, and think about what may inspire them most likely to _use_ your library to link against, and maybe as a result improve it in ways they wouldn't if they didn't have a use for it.. Even if it isn't a library, even if it's something that could eb adapted into a library. THINK.
> I'm sick of the insulting emails, the deregotory namecalling, and the all in all childish behavior accusing me of some sort of shadow conspiracy.
OK.. so if i've deciphered your rant correctly, the problem is that you failed to post a story saying "the stock market is falling".. and so people got angry, assumed you had some nefarious reasons for not posting said story, and flamed you. So you, just to make these people shut up, are posting a story saying "the stock market is falling".
I find that kind of funny. because while i obviously haven't seen your personal email and don't know what's in it, i _have_ been reading slashdot postings.. and for the last couple weeks i've actually seen a bunch of flame postings saying there is TOO MUCH coverage of stock/financial/business-related-money issues on slashdot! As in, people who see periodic announcements about commercial businesses going public or having things happen to them, and thus assume that Andover has turned slashdot into some kind of CNNfn workalike. These people are probably going to be tearing their hair out over the story you just posted.
Taco: no matter what you do, people are going to get pissed off. There is nothing you can DO about this. People in general suck. For some reason slashdot readers in particular if they see something they don't care to read about, they seem to be unable to just not read it and move on with their lives. No, they have to post flame crap saying "this shouldn't have been written". And of course that works in reverse too, as you well know. You can't please these people NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO. So why try?
hmm, well lets see here. i'm really tired but let's see if i can still respond coherently:
Ah!Megami-sama [Ah!MyGoddess] actually takes place at a technical college.. Keichii is a CS student and he builds racing cars in his spare time. Which SCREAMS geek. AMG has a very interesting theological system going on, in that the Godesses are actually !!!sysadmins!!! for the system running the universe, Ygdrasil, which is portrayed as more or less a huge ethereal abstract mainframe or something, with little monsters running around in it that need to be "debugged". Ygdrasil has system outages, needs maintenence, and basically is a perfect allegory of a computer system. The only way they could make the whole thing cooler is by adding Daemons. Skuld, besides being a Godess sysadmin in the Mother of All Sysadmin Jobs, appears to be a rather competent Electrical Engineer as well who can randomly design mecha in her spare time and, upon seeing blueprints for one of Keichii's racekart things sitting around, on the spot grabs a pencil and redesigns it to be more efficient. Just because she can.
Ghost in the Shell is vaguely geeky in that it involves androids, computer systems, and the idea of the human mind being transferred to a digital form and thus losing its meaning as it becomes an increasingly mechanical abstract digital construct rather than a real human soul. Meanwhile while mind decays, body becomes irrelivant; just a container that can be summoned and discarded at will, letting the mind, however little of its content the mind still contains, do its work. While this isn't very geeky in itself, it certainly describes prevailing geek lifestyle. Becoming a part of the machine.. hm. i can relate to that.
There's probably some others i can't remember at the moment. I'm _tired_.
I think Ah!Megami-sama takes the prize for one very important reason: it actually contains FORTRAN. Keichii knows it.:)
i am sick of the bias on slashdot that seems to be implying that only thinks Pepsi matters. Pepsi is NOT the only thing that needs compatibility.
As an ardent user of RC Cola, i'm annoyed. Pepsi generally gets drivers for everything, so why are you complaining? RC Cola hardware drivers, meanwhile, are almost impossible to get done. Meaning we have to run the Pepsi Emulation Layer, or just not use that hardware.
This wouldn't be so bad if we could easily simply adapt the pepsi drivers for rc cola, but no, then we have liscensing issues to worry about. blah. It is not easy to be drinking a soda which has a smaller user base and a liscence incompatible with both closed-source products and its fellow open-source source-compatible sodas. I realize most Slashdot readers are Pepsi users, but please try to be a little more considerate and inclusinve when asking for hardware support, and remember Pepsi is not the only alternative soda out there.
so if C/C++ could be considered analog to abstract art or jazz music, with a deeper communicative meaning which is not immediately obvious but which holds extremely deep meaning to one who is familiar with it.. then i guess INTERCAL would be that woman who covered herself in chocolate naked, masturbated using a crucifix, and got her National Endowment for the Arts funding revoked..?
at any rate this is probably the most important legal decision that will be made in the next decade and i shouldn't be making jokes about it.. the ruling pertains to encryption, but anyone interested in emulators, portscanners, mp3 distribution programs, programs to break/decrypt copy/playback/usage protection in commercial software, hacking tools, things that haven't been thought of yet, etc-- or anyone who would like to see how one works, or at least anyone who thinks that it should be legal to create such tools even if usage of the tools would in most cases be illegal-- should rejoice. This is what we've been waiting for a court to say for years.
I'd like to hope that we'll see a lot less now of corporations attempting to suppress information in source code form about things they don't want done.. but, of course, most such cases against emulators or programs such as cphack or decss were pretty damn shaky anyway, and were initiated not to be won, but to bankrupt the defendant via legal bills. So the fact that the cases are now even _shakier_ because the source code has First Amendment rights shouldn't cause a huge problem.
On the bright side, this should encourage more emulator makers to go open source:)
do you suppose this will help apple/motorola/ibm's massive problems meeting demand on the G4 chips?
or is this process something that the chip has to be specifically designed to use? or something that will take a long time to be put into usage?
how much collaboration is IBM still putting into the powerpc line? are the rumors that they've begun helping produce G4s any more than rumors? IBM was manufacturing ppcs at some point (before Altivec came out), weren't they..? This POWER4 thing looks very, very impressive..
Re:Thoughts on possible remedies
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Aha. i apologize. i was not aware of what you mention, possibly because i have not looked at any windows SDKs or APIs, do not have an MSDN account, have no windows programming experience beyond stdlib console, do not use or own windows, etc. I know nothing beyond what others have told me, which had lead me to believe that internet explorer 5 is almost impossible to uninstall or detatch from win98. From the fact i had never seen anyone other than microsoft in ie5 attempt to replace the windows GUI, i assumed there was no microsoft-provided way of doing so. Apparently i was wrong.
Re:Thoughts on possible remedies
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> Nowhere does it mention that they made Windows incompatible with another piece of software, or that they used hidden APIs in any of their products, which would be the biggest argument toward opening part or all of the Windows source code. Since neither of those is mentioned at all, or even alluded to, I believe that opening their APIs/source code isn't a likely penalty.
It does seem to mention windows 98 / MSIE 5, where the browser used OS hooks to override the normal UI.. if that isn't "hidden APIs" i don't know what is. Although that's probably not an example relivant to your point, because opening the windows source code would probably not be as effective in terms of allowing other web browser makers to override the windows interface as a breakup.. seeing as with open code the browser maker would have to sift through and reverse-engineer a huge amount of code, whereas with a breakup the OS MS would be forced to create an open API for browser embedding in order for the App MS to integrate (hey, i'll bet apple would be willing to liscence the code for Opendoc/cyberdog.. **laughs evilly**) which seems like it would make, say, Netscape's job a lot easier than having to read the windows source.
i _don't_ think there's any good reason for the windows source code to be opened, or any reason they will. That's not my point here; i'm just making the admittedly not very large point that "secret APIs" are not a complete non-issue. Here's to hoping the gov's solution will be better than nothing.. and maybe even a breakup! woohoo!
--- i know nothing and you shouldn't be listening to me. ---
"Instead of blowing up a single plane, these groups will be able to patch into the central computer of a large airline and blow up hundreds of planes at once. "
"central computer"? somebody remind these people the FAA's air traffic controller system is still using 1970s equipment based on vacuum tubes..?
::laughs until he cries::
the quality of these tabloids has really gone down.. Back in the Day there was an article in WWW about a dog that had been specially genetically engineered to be used as a mop. It was really, really shaggy, and its hair was exactly like mop fibers (they had a "picture"). The idea was that you'd pour soapy water on the dog, and it would walk around the house and clean the floor behind it.
But that was a long time ago. Now things are a lot harder for the tabloids in the Post-Lewinsky Era. What with the mainstream media these days posting regular front-page stories about Oral Sex and tech articles so blatantly clueless and inaccurate it boggles the mind, the tabloids have really had to stretch to keep up with a respectable level of relative trashiness. Which is how we get this-- in order to appear even more clueless and inaccurate about technology than an average newspaper, they've had to stoop to writing that would be unsurprising to see in the Onion.
this _is_ one of those cases where the PPC should be highly recommended. why? altivec. Speed improvements are always arbitrary. Yes, there are times when a G3 350 will be twice as fast as a pentium 350. THere are times the pentium 350 will be faster. Benchmarks are not something you should be listening to, and different processors will be better at different tasks.
However the question is not "which processor is better overall"; the question is "which processor is better for real-time heavy computational math". In which case you really kinda do probably want to go with the G4. "real time" implies you are going to be taking one speciallized [difficult] task and doing it over and over and over with different data, which is what Altivec is designed for (SIMD) and what it excels at. As long as you are willing to go ahead and specially code for Altivec, in this case you will get a speed jolt virtually unparallelled.
Unfortunately, due to manufacturing problems, Motorola and IBM are for the moment having trouble making G4s that run at over 500 mhz, and there are _still_ no multiprocessing G4 mobos available as far as i am aware.
So as soon as the third parties would actually get around to shipping a SMP G4 mobo for use with linux/bsd (apple is a bit tied up in their own problems..), that's what you'd want. As of now G4 may not be the best choice. A good choice to be sure, but i'm a bit dubious as to how well a single 500 mhz G4 would do against, say, four 800 mhz athlons.
um, dude, calm down. it's a sig. it has like three layers of irony wrapped around it. it isn't supposed to be a literal belief, just something to make you think. if it was meant to be taken literally would it be in capital letters..?
do you actually have anything to say or were you just feeling like insulting someone? you seem to disapprove of the sig, yet you give no reason (logical or otherwise) why.
Perhaps you should try actually relating to what was said in some way, or otherwise attempting to express an alternate viewpoint, instead of meaninglessly flinging empty flames and then running away..
-mcc-baka MAKE ABORTION MANDATORY RAPE AND SLOWLY KILL ALL CHRISTIANS :)
you misunderstood what i said. what you say is more or less right, but it is not relevant. you have contradicted nothing i said. so since what i said obviously came across wrong, i will attempt to clarify the things i said that prompted your post. :
i have no sympathy for MS. understand? none. the only reason anything the gov could do in this case (besides not going far enough) could possibly upset me is precedent. i don't care what they do to MS. however there are certain things it would serverely bother me if they did them to ANY software company, just becuase it sets up that certain kinds of things in terms of the amount of intrusion and control and micromanagement the government can have, and says these are an acceptable way to solve a problem. I don't particularly want those to become viewed as acceptable ways to solve problems. i would be happier if they used things which are already established ways that the government has traditionally used to stop a vertical monopoly from abusing its power any more-- for example, breaking the monopoly up. Regulating liscensing of windows is one thing and is neccicary, regulating the ways they can interact with other companies is important. But you shouldn't have to put a government person inside microsoft to read all their code and ensure the APIs are open; you should just split the company and make it so microsoft has no _alternative_ but to make it open.
that being said, i'm vaguely bothered by the fact you apparently just want revenge, by the fact all you want is to hurt microsoft. That is NOT the way to go about it. The point is to make it so that Microsoft can never again do the simply evil things that got them to where they are now. You don't _need_ to punish them; take away their unethical business practices, and they are nothing. Take away all their weapons, leave no way of gaining customers other than creating a quality product (ha!), and they will wither to nothing.
i am _not_ taking a philosophy of love the sinner, hate the sin, because in this case if you kill off the sin the sinner will die as well.
but NOTHING should be done solely for punishment-- anything done should be done _only_ to effect change, in order to stop microsoft. do ANYTHING to act solely for revenge or punishment or spite, and microsoft becomes a "victim", a martyr. Do anything solely designed to degrade the quality of their code (like say they cannot use a {} without filling out a form) and you will make it appear that microsoft is being downtrodden, which should NOT happen. Massive fines are a silly idea. What you want to do is effect change, NOT "hurt" microsoft. Microsoft is like a plague upon the computing industry; it spreads, it poisons, it contaminates everything, it seeps the life out of all. The purpose should be to make it so the disease can cause no more damage; the purpose should not be to cause the disease pain.
seems to me a "settlement" would be silly. after all, wasn't this whole thing started because MS failed to abide by their last settlement and refused to abide by their agreement not to tie products together?
if they didn't do it then why would they do it now? they'd just appear to comply for two years, stop complying, and then when the gov sues them to start complying again the injunction to stop would be overturned again and we'd be back at square one, going into a massive legal battle that will not end until enough time has passed the original issues (in this case netscape) are irrelivant.
likewise "forcing them to open APIs" by a legal _judgement_ doesn't seem too bright either. How would you insure they _were_ following the judgement? You couldn't, except by having the government surveilance and oversight of MS be so intense it would be seriously scary. I have no sympathy for MS, but i don't want them to be a precedent that states the government has the right to interfere in scary ways with the internal workings of a software company.
This is why i say a breakup is the only way-- make OS/compilers and software seperate companies, and make it so they can only communicate through openly published, universally usable APIs. This is the only way i can think of to reliably ensure the MS OS is just as integrated with MS apps as it is with non-MS apps without resorting to Shades of Orwell. [although somewhere you still have to do something about OEM contracts]
I have one other thought, one which may be wrong since i don't think i have all my information straight. so i'm just going to say it, and ask for corrections: i think "opening up" the windows source code would do more in the way of placating the public than of actually solving anything, but one thing that does need to be done is force MS to open-source Visual C++ and MS Developer Studio and all that other crud. MS development tools seem to have an insane stranglehold on the market and seem to have a distinctly unfair advantage, but i think making compilers a third company seperate from both OS and software (as some have suggested) would actually make it very difficult for MS to do things such as propigate APIs.. my opinion probably isn't very meaningful though because i don't know much about this subject. Could someone please correct the flaws in my thinking? does anyone else have comments on what if anything should be done about the situtation involving MS having such a huge advantage when writing the compiler / MS making it virtually impossible to write decent software for their OS without shelling out huge amounts of money to them?
i think there was a lot more truth in Hemos' first post last night than any of us suspected.
my interpretation of it is that the "spring cleaning" is metaphorical; while the internet is not, in reality, being "disconnected", so much of the internet is rendered unusable by the kind of jokes that have gripped slashdot today that it might as well be "down for system maitenence". So no, it's not down, but it's also useless, and people might as well take Hemos' advice and follow your example and disconnect their "terminals" for the day.
that being said, the whole slashdot-marketing thing was really funny. Malkovich!
yes, it's going to be blatantly obvious by the time i say this. yes, it's cliched to say this, and it's a running joke on slashdot to say things of this sort. but it needs to be said:
cdmrtaco.. what were you THINKING?? unleashing the slashdot effect on an Atari 800?? That's just CRUEL!! the quickies have been up eight minutes, there are only four comments, and ALREADY the poor thing's slashdotted all to hell. Yes, i realize in a couple days the traffic from/. will subside to a non-overwhelming level as this article disappears into the void of "older stuff", but surely the Atari 800 will be so traumatized by this event that it will take years of therapy before it fully recovers psychologically.
A piece of software losing its maintainer is a vague problem for the users of open source software, but in the closed source world losing the maintainer is a really rather dangerous problem which will slowly get worse and worse as time passes from the time the maintainer goes away. If your hardware changes and the program doesn't like it, or you need a bug fixed, too bad, because that code is gone and there's no way to fix it.
So I was just sitting here, looking at UFO, thinking about all the closed-source software that winds up getting abandoned by their parent companies, and i'm starting to wonder: what if UFO could get companies to give them the source to dead products instead of just letting the products die?
Of course, there's no reason for a company to do that; they'd get nothing out of it. So why not make it so they do get something? Make the UFO part of the FSF. Since the FSF is a registered nonprofit organisation, UFO will thus become nonprofit too. Meaning any "donations" by corporations to UFO would be tax-deductable. Is there any reason that wouldn't work? I don't know what defines "charity" legally but seems to me it would be pretty hard to claim that releasing software to UFO as open source anything other than helping the public good. Think about it.
(P.S. If the people who made UFO are reading this.. this is TOTALLY irrelivent, and i realize the site isn't supposed to look that polished, but do do some slight tuning on that huge table in the project list. Adding a couple td bgcolor attributes to distinguish between a cell with a project name, a cell with project data, and an empty cell between projects would only take a minute or so, and it would help readability a _lot_.:) Your project looks very promising, good luck)
also an about:mozilla egg _inside_ program
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there's also an, um, interesting little message that appears if you go to the URL "about:mozilla". It's been there in every version of netscape i've ever seen.
if you don't happen to have a copy of netscape sitting around, i did a quick search and found a mirror here.
Fittingly enough, this little message is not in standard html. there's no <html></html>.. so although the Prophesy doesn't appear in Mozilla, and i doubt the AOL-owned netscape that's producing version 6 will care that much about tradition, if they DO add the about:mozilla egg, i hope they'll add the html tag as a kind of metaphorical sign that yes, for the first time, netscape _is_ actually thinking of "w3c-compilant" as a feature and not a bug. Or even better, do it in XML.:)
hey.. personally i think the little "galaxy" java applet is cool enough it deserves to have Slashdot link to it all by itself.:) it deserves at LEAST quickie status. At any rate it's more relevant than the page it's attatched to.
Then again, if the point of posting something on slashdot is to begin a discussion, Roblimo hit gold with this one. I've rarely seen a discussion so intelligent on slashdot. We need more theoretical physics flamewars here!
Slashdot Mirror
> They know exactly what the problem is and the software solution would be, clearly, to make the earth image rotate the other way. But, it seems to me that they are looking for "other options"
"other options".. hmm...
We can only hope that in their "research" they don't come across that old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode where the evil businessmen attempted to take over the world by making the rotation of the earth stop, thus causing all people on earth to fling off into space due to inertia. The businessmen, who had built an underground shelter so they could survive the massive inertial holocaust, would then come out and, being the only people left on planet earth, would be able to enjoy all of its natural resources all to themselves. The episode contained not only this startling idea, but also the same degree detailed scientific explanation of how such a scheme would be implemented that all Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episodes contained. What if it were to occur to the Microsoft executives that they could carry out such a plan?
(I'm also pretty sure there was an episode of Rescue Rangers with a similar plotline, and possibly one [jeopardy?] of Pinkie and the Brain, but i don't remember for certain.)
All i know for certain is, we must take all measures possible to ensure this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode, this recipe for destruction, does not fall into the hands of Microsoft. If it does, then the only hope for planet earth may be.. Jackie Chan.
-mcc-baka
--- WWJD ---
(What Would Jackie Chan Do?)
remember that first April Fools post that was just in dumb gibberish?
.. but i figured what i did was sophomoric enough that i deserved to be moderated down, even if not as "offtopic".
:) Anyway i'm just glad the Malkovichizer got quickied. And i'm REALLY glad the Constructor applet got quickied. I found that last week and it's the coolest thing i've ever seen.. :)
well, i replied to it with a post that had been run through the Malkovich script.
I got moderated down as "offtopic".
I wanted to scream out, HOW CAN IT BE MORE ON-TOPIC THAN THAT?? WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE MORE ONTOPIC TO A GIBBERISH STORY THAN A GIBBERISH POST??
so now somehow i feel bitter that had at the time i simply submitted the malkovichizer as a story, i could have gotten the satisfaction of having a quickie printed instead of a karma loss.. but i assumed it had already been posted. (i saw it mentioned in the astralwerks newslwetter..)
Oh well. I'm probably totally unjustified..
this is why you need to think about these things.. (Score:)
.c or .h file is split up into a different folder, and each one indicates which liscense it's under.
by mcc (mcc@drowned.cx) on soon (#)
(User Info) http://drowned.cx/
this is why people writing open source software need to think these things out ahead of time..
i personally like the restrictions of the LGPL better and think they're a lot more "fair". but i realize they shouldn't be for everything.
if you're doing something that could conceivably be linked into, rather than just used, you have to take the time to think out whether it would be better to put that part under the LGPL.
look, for example, at Macintosh NSCA Telnet 3.0, which the NSCA has given to this guy to continue work on. The guy placed it under the GPL/LGPL, and the way he did it is a model of well-thought-out application of the LGPL. The "library" portions are LGPLed-- the low-level bits,the bits that someone could concievably reuse later as a basis for a telnet feature in some other program. Such that people will feel free to use it casually, improve their software and maybe improve the LGPLed open bits (which they would then have to redistribute the source to) without having to go to the trouble of totally opening something they may not feel ready to open.
The front-end bits, meanwhile, the bits that you wouldn't want anyone outright stealing, are GPLed.
Each individual
But most people don't think these things out, they just slap "GPL" on it, and it doesn't occur to them to think whether some of it it may be better for everyone in general if they allowed some of the bits of the program to be linked against.
Software in the "public good" doesn't mean it HAS to be GPLed.. THINK about how people may best be served by your program, and think about what may inspire them most likely to _use_ your library to link against, and maybe as a result improve it in ways they wouldn't if they didn't have a use for it.. Even if it isn't a library, even if it's something that could eb adapted into a library. THINK.
> I'm sick of the insulting emails, the deregotory namecalling, and the all in all childish behavior accusing me of some sort of shadow conspiracy.
OK.. so if i've deciphered your rant correctly, the problem is that you failed to post a story saying "the stock market is falling".. and so people got angry, assumed you had some nefarious reasons for not posting said story, and flamed you. So you, just to make these people shut up, are posting a story saying "the stock market is falling".
I find that kind of funny.
because while i obviously haven't seen your personal email and don't know what's in it, i _have_ been reading slashdot postings.. and for the last couple weeks i've actually seen a bunch of flame postings saying there is TOO MUCH coverage of stock/financial/business-related-money issues on slashdot! As in, people who see periodic announcements about commercial businesses going public or having things happen to them, and thus assume that Andover has turned slashdot into some kind of CNNfn workalike.
These people are probably going to be tearing their hair out over the story you just posted.
Taco: no matter what you do, people are going to get pissed off. There is nothing you can DO about this. People in general suck. For some reason slashdot readers in particular if they see something they don't care to read about, they seem to be unable to just not read it and move on with their lives. No, they have to post flame crap saying "this shouldn't have been written". And of course that works in reverse too, as you well know.
You can't please these people NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO. So why try?
hmm, well lets see here. i'm really tired but let's see if i can still respond coherently:
:)
Ah!Megami-sama [Ah!MyGoddess] actually takes place at a technical college.. Keichii is a CS student and he builds racing cars in his spare time. Which SCREAMS geek. AMG has a very interesting theological system going on, in that the Godesses are actually !!!sysadmins!!! for the system running the universe, Ygdrasil, which is portrayed as more or less a huge ethereal abstract mainframe or something, with little monsters running around in it that need to be "debugged". Ygdrasil has system outages, needs maintenence, and basically is a perfect allegory of a computer system. The only way they could make the whole thing cooler is by adding Daemons.
Skuld, besides being a Godess sysadmin in the Mother of All Sysadmin Jobs, appears to be a rather competent Electrical Engineer as well who can randomly design mecha in her spare time and, upon seeing blueprints for one of Keichii's racekart things sitting around, on the spot grabs a pencil and redesigns it to be more efficient. Just because she can.
Ghost in the Shell is vaguely geeky in that it involves androids, computer systems, and the idea of the human mind being transferred to a digital form and thus losing its meaning as it becomes an increasingly mechanical abstract digital construct rather than a real human soul. Meanwhile while mind decays, body becomes irrelivant; just a container that can be summoned and discarded at will, letting the mind, however little of its content the mind still contains, do its work. While this isn't very geeky in itself, it certainly describes prevailing geek lifestyle. Becoming a part of the machine.. hm. i can relate to that.
There's probably some others i can't remember at the moment. I'm _tired_.
I think Ah!Megami-sama takes the prize for one very important reason: it actually contains FORTRAN . Keichii knows it.
i am sick of the bias on slashdot that seems to be implying that only thinks Pepsi matters. Pepsi is NOT the only thing that needs compatibility.
As an ardent user of RC Cola, i'm annoyed. Pepsi generally gets drivers for everything, so why are you complaining? RC Cola hardware drivers, meanwhile, are almost impossible to get done. Meaning we have to run the Pepsi Emulation Layer, or just not use that hardware.
This wouldn't be so bad if we could easily simply adapt the pepsi drivers for rc cola, but no, then we have liscensing issues to worry about. blah. It is not easy to be drinking a soda which has a smaller user base and a liscence incompatible with both closed-source products and its fellow open-source source-compatible sodas. I realize most Slashdot readers are Pepsi users, but please try to be a little more considerate and inclusinve when asking for hardware support, and remember Pepsi is not the only alternative soda out there.
i actually kind of find it funny the way everyone's spazzing about that line..
seeing as the line wasn't actually serious to begin with.. -_-
-mcc-baka
http://drowned.cx/decss/
so if C/C++ could be considered analog to abstract art or jazz music, with a deeper communicative meaning which is not immediately obvious but which holds extremely deep meaning to one who is familiar with it..
:)
then i guess INTERCAL would be that woman who covered herself in chocolate naked, masturbated using a crucifix, and got her National Endowment for the Arts funding revoked..?
at any rate this is probably the most important legal decision that will be made in the next decade and i shouldn't be making jokes about it..
the ruling pertains to encryption, but anyone interested in emulators, portscanners, mp3 distribution programs, programs to break/decrypt copy/playback/usage protection in commercial software, hacking tools, things that haven't been thought of yet, etc-- or anyone who would like to see how one works, or at least anyone who thinks that it should be legal to create such tools even if usage of the tools would in most cases be illegal-- should rejoice. This is what we've been waiting for a court to say for years.
I'd like to hope that we'll see a lot less now of corporations attempting to suppress information in source code form about things they don't want done.. but, of course, most such cases against emulators or programs such as cphack or decss were pretty damn shaky anyway, and were initiated not to be won, but to bankrupt the defendant via legal bills. So the fact that the cases are now even _shakier_ because the source code has First Amendment rights shouldn't cause a huge problem.
On the bright side, this should encourage more emulator makers to go open source
-mcc-baka
http://drowed.cx/decss/
do you suppose this will help apple/motorola/ibm's massive problems meeting demand on the G4 chips?
or is this process something that the chip has to be specifically designed to use? or something that will take a long time to be put into usage?
how much collaboration is IBM still putting into the powerpc line? are the rumors that they've begun helping produce G4s any more than rumors? IBM was manufacturing ppcs at some point (before Altivec came out), weren't they..?
This POWER4 thing looks very, very impressive..
Aha. i apologize.
i was not aware of what you mention, possibly because i have not looked at any windows SDKs or APIs, do not have an MSDN account, have no windows programming experience beyond stdlib console, do not use or own windows, etc. I know nothing beyond what others have told me, which had lead me to believe that internet explorer 5 is almost impossible to uninstall or detatch from win98.
From the fact i had never seen anyone other than microsoft in ie5 attempt to replace the windows GUI, i assumed there was no microsoft-provided way of doing so.
Apparently i was wrong.
> Nowhere does it mention that they made Windows incompatible with another piece of software, or that they used hidden APIs in any of their products, which would be the biggest argument toward opening part or all of the Windows source code. Since neither of those is mentioned at all, or even alluded to, I believe that opening their APIs/source code isn't a likely penalty.
It does seem to mention windows 98 / MSIE 5, where the browser used OS hooks to override the normal UI.. if that isn't "hidden APIs" i don't know what is.
Although that's probably not an example relivant to your point, because opening the windows source code would probably not be as effective in terms of allowing other web browser makers to override the windows interface as a breakup.. seeing as with open code the browser maker would have to sift through and reverse-engineer a huge amount of code, whereas with a breakup the OS MS would be forced to create an open API for browser embedding in order for the App MS to integrate (hey, i'll bet apple would be willing to liscence the code for Opendoc/cyberdog.. **laughs evilly**) which seems like it would make, say, Netscape's job a lot easier than having to read the windows source.
i _don't_ think there's any good reason for the windows source code to be opened, or any reason they will. That's not my point here; i'm just making the admittedly not very large point that "secret APIs" are not a complete non-issue.
Here's to hoping the gov's solution will be better than nothing.. and maybe even a breakup! woohoo!
--- i know nothing and you shouldn't be listening to me. ---
don't certain PC motherboards allow software to set the clockrate?
meaning a virus really _could_ overclock/overheat/kill the processor?
of course there used to be certain motorola processors with a Halt Catch Fire (HCF) instruction, but that wasn't quite what it did.
"Instead of blowing up a single plane, these groups will be able to patch into the central computer of a large airline and blow up hundreds of planes at once. "
"central computer"? somebody remind these people the FAA's air traffic controller system is still using 1970s equipment based on vacuum tubes..?
::laughs until he cries::
the quality of these tabloids has really gone down.. Back in the Day there was an article in WWW about a dog that had been specially genetically engineered to be used as a mop. It was really, really shaggy, and its hair was exactly like mop fibers (they had a "picture"). The idea was that you'd pour soapy water on the dog, and it would walk around the house and clean the floor behind it.
But that was a long time ago. Now things are a lot harder for the tabloids in the Post-Lewinsky Era. What with the mainstream media these days posting regular front-page stories about Oral Sex and tech articles so blatantly clueless and inaccurate it boggles the mind, the tabloids have really had to stretch to keep up with a respectable level of relative trashiness. Which is how we get this-- in order to appear even more clueless and inaccurate about technology than an average newspaper, they've had to stoop to writing that would be unsurprising to see in the Onion.
so basically it isn't a "linux" version of BeOS-- it's an ext2 version?
Will it run off an ext2 partition that has, say, a BSD living on it?
this _is_ one of those cases where the PPC should be highly recommended.
why? altivec.
Speed improvements are always arbitrary. Yes, there are times when a G3 350 will be twice as fast as a pentium 350. THere are times the pentium 350 will be faster. Benchmarks are not something you should be listening to, and different processors will be better at different tasks.
However the question is not "which processor is better overall"; the question is "which processor is better for real-time heavy computational math". In which case you really kinda do probably want to go with the G4. "real time" implies you are going to be taking one speciallized [difficult] task and doing it over and over and over with different data, which is what Altivec is designed for (SIMD) and what it excels at. As long as you are willing to go ahead and specially code for Altivec, in this case you will get a speed jolt virtually unparallelled.
Unfortunately, due to manufacturing problems, Motorola and IBM are for the moment having trouble making G4s that run at over 500 mhz, and there are _still_ no multiprocessing G4 mobos available as far as i am aware.
So as soon as the third parties would actually get around to shipping a SMP G4 mobo for use with linux/bsd (apple is a bit tied up in their own problems..), that's what you'd want. As of now G4 may not be the best choice. A good choice to be sure, but i'm a bit dubious as to how well a single 500 mhz G4 would do against, say, four 800 mhz athlons.
um, dude, calm down. it's a sig. it has like three layers of irony wrapped around it. it isn't supposed to be a literal belief, just something to make you think. if it was meant to be taken literally would it be in capital letters..?
do you actually have anything to say or were you just feeling like insulting someone? you seem to disapprove of the sig, yet you give no reason (logical or otherwise) why.
Perhaps you should try actually relating to what was said in some way, or otherwise attempting to express an alternate viewpoint, instead of meaninglessly flinging empty flames and then running away..
-mcc-baka
MAKE ABORTION MANDATORY
RAPE AND SLOWLY KILL ALL CHRISTIANS
:)
you misunderstood what i said. what you say is more or less right, but it is not relevant. you have contradicted nothing i said. so since what i said obviously came across wrong, i will attempt to clarify the things i said that prompted your post. :
i have no sympathy for MS. understand? none.
the only reason anything the gov could do in this case (besides not going far enough) could possibly upset me is precedent.
i don't care what they do to MS. however there are certain things it would serverely bother me if they did them to ANY software company, just becuase it sets up that certain kinds of things in terms of the amount of intrusion and control and micromanagement the government can have, and says these are an acceptable way to solve a problem. I don't particularly want those to become viewed as acceptable ways to solve problems. i would be happier if they used things which are already established ways that the government has traditionally used to stop a vertical monopoly from abusing its power any more-- for example, breaking the monopoly up. Regulating liscensing of windows is one thing and is neccicary, regulating the ways they can interact with other companies is important. But you shouldn't have to put a government person inside microsoft to read all their code and ensure the APIs are open; you should just split the company and make it so microsoft has no _alternative_ but to make it open.
that being said, i'm vaguely bothered by the fact you apparently just want revenge, by the fact all you want is to hurt microsoft. That is NOT the way to go about it. The point is to make it so that Microsoft can never again do the simply evil things that got them to where they are now. You don't _need_ to punish them; take away their unethical business practices, and they are nothing. Take away all their weapons, leave no way of gaining customers other than creating a quality product (ha!), and they will wither to nothing.
i am _not_ taking a philosophy of love the sinner, hate the sin, because in this case if you kill off the sin the sinner will die as well.
but NOTHING should be done solely for punishment-- anything done should be done _only_ to effect change, in order to stop microsoft. do ANYTHING to act solely for revenge or punishment or spite, and microsoft becomes a "victim", a martyr. Do anything solely designed to degrade the quality of their code (like say they cannot use a {} without filling out a form) and you will make it appear that microsoft is being downtrodden, which should NOT happen. Massive fines are a silly idea. What you want to do is effect change, NOT "hurt" microsoft. Microsoft is like a plague upon the computing industry; it spreads, it poisons, it contaminates everything, it seeps the life out of all. The purpose should be to make it so the disease can cause no more damage; the purpose should not be to cause the disease pain.
seems to me a "settlement" would be silly.
after all, wasn't this whole thing started because MS failed to abide by their last settlement and refused to abide by their agreement not to tie products together?
if they didn't do it then why would they do it now? they'd just appear to comply for two years, stop complying, and then when the gov sues them to start complying again the injunction to stop would be overturned again and we'd be back at square one, going into a massive legal battle that will not end until enough time has passed the original issues (in this case netscape) are irrelivant.
likewise "forcing them to open APIs" by a legal _judgement_ doesn't seem too bright either. How would you insure they _were_ following the judgement? You couldn't, except by having the government surveilance and oversight of MS be so intense it would be seriously scary. I have no sympathy for MS, but i don't want them to be a precedent that states the government has the right to interfere in scary ways with the internal workings of a software company.
This is why i say a breakup is the only way-- make OS/compilers and software seperate companies, and make it so they can only communicate through openly published, universally usable APIs. This is the only way i can think of to reliably ensure the MS OS is just as integrated with MS apps as it is with non-MS apps without resorting to Shades of Orwell. [although somewhere you still have to do something about OEM contracts]
I have one other thought, one which may be wrong since i don't think i have all my information straight. so i'm just going to say it, and ask for corrections: i think "opening up" the windows source code would do more in the way of placating the public than of actually solving anything, but one thing that does need to be done is force MS to open-source Visual C++ and MS Developer Studio and all that other crud. MS development tools seem to have an insane stranglehold on the market and seem to have a distinctly unfair advantage, but i think making compilers a third company seperate from both OS and software (as some have suggested) would actually make it very difficult for MS to do things such as propigate APIs.. my opinion probably isn't very meaningful though because i don't know much about this subject. Could someone please correct the flaws in my thinking? does anyone else have comments on what if anything should be done about the situtation involving MS having such a huge advantage when writing the compiler / MS making it virtually impossible to write decent software for their OS without shelling out huge amounts of money to them?
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
i think there was a lot more truth in Hemos' first post last night than any of us suspected.
my interpretation of it is that the "spring cleaning" is metaphorical; while the internet is not, in reality, being "disconnected", so much of the internet is rendered unusable by the kind of jokes that have gripped slashdot today that it might as well be "down for system maitenence". So no, it's not down, but it's also useless, and people might as well take Hemos' advice and follow your example and disconnect their "terminals" for the day.
that being said, the whole slashdot-marketing thing was really funny.
Malkovich!
That reminds me of a site i visit frequently-- here's a link. it's a real webcam, and much more useful.
yes, it's going to be blatantly obvious by the time i say this.
/. will subside to a non-overwhelming level as this article disappears into the void of "older stuff", but surely the Atari 800 will be so traumatized by this event that it will take years of therapy before it fully recovers psychologically.
yes, it's cliched to say this, and it's a running joke on slashdot to say things of this sort.
but it needs to be said:
cdmrtaco.. what were you THINKING?? unleashing the slashdot effect on an Atari 800?? That's just CRUEL!!
the quickies have been up eight minutes, there are only four comments, and ALREADY the poor thing's slashdotted all to hell.
Yes, i realize in a couple days the traffic from
You should be ashamed of yourself.
A piece of software losing its maintainer is a vague problem for the users of open source software, but in the closed source world losing the maintainer is a really rather dangerous problem which will slowly get worse and worse as time passes from the time the maintainer goes away. If your hardware changes and the program doesn't like it, or you need a bug fixed, too bad, because that code is gone and there's no way to fix it.
:) Your project looks very promising, good luck)
So I was just sitting here, looking at UFO, thinking about all the closed-source software that winds up getting abandoned by their parent companies, and i'm starting to wonder: what if UFO could get companies to give them the source to dead products instead of just letting the products die?
Of course, there's no reason for a company to do that; they'd get nothing out of it. So why not make it so they do get something?
Make the UFO part of the FSF. Since the FSF is a registered nonprofit organisation, UFO will thus become nonprofit too. Meaning any "donations" by corporations to UFO would be tax-deductable.
Is there any reason that wouldn't work? I don't know what defines "charity" legally but seems to me it would be pretty hard to claim that releasing software to UFO as open source anything other than helping the public good.
Think about it.
(P.S. If the people who made UFO are reading this.. this is TOTALLY irrelivent, and i realize the site isn't supposed to look that polished, but do do some slight tuning on that huge table in the project list. Adding a couple td bgcolor attributes to distinguish between a cell with a project name, a cell with project data, and an empty cell between projects would only take a minute or so, and it would help readability a _lot_.
there's also an, um, interesting little message that appears if you go to the URL "about:mozilla". It's been there in every version of netscape i've ever seen.
:)
if you don't happen to have a copy of netscape sitting around, i did a quick search and found a mirror here.
Fittingly enough, this little message is not in standard html. there's no <html></html>.. so although the Prophesy doesn't appear in Mozilla, and i doubt the AOL-owned netscape that's producing version 6 will care that much about tradition, if they DO add the about:mozilla egg, i hope they'll add the html tag as a kind of metaphorical sign that yes, for the first time, netscape _is_ actually thinking of "w3c-compilant" as a feature and not a bug.
Or even better, do it in XML.
just how much of this
will ever actually
make it to market?
intel tends to be
a bit too optimistic
about release dates.
So is this roadmap
more or less realistic, or
V-A-P-O-R . . . ?
(this sounds like flamebait
but it's really more or less
an honest question)
hey.. personally i think the little "galaxy" java applet is cool enough it deserves to have Slashdot link to it all by itself. :)
it deserves at LEAST quickie status. At any rate it's more relevant than the page it's attatched to.
Then again, if the point of posting something on slashdot is to begin a discussion, Roblimo hit gold with this one. I've rarely seen a discussion so intelligent on slashdot. We need more theoretical physics flamewars here!