> Release early release often. When was that a crime? As far as polished, its right up there with Redhat and Mandrake (except 7.0).
I wasn't trying to say Corel Linux was bad or anything-- i haven't used it, i'm just expecting from it what should be expected from a 1.0 product. i'm trying to say it's probably not quite developed, mature, or [most importantly] _influential_ enough yet that microsoft having some influence over it is as alarming as, say, microsoft having some influence over wordperfect.
i probably should have left the entire line about "halfassed" out. it was totally unneccicary and apparently offensive. i dunno.
i'd say the fact Corel ships a halfassed, not-fully-developed, debian-based linux distro is probably not the most alarming aspect of all this.
isn't Corel still suing Microsoft over DR DOS and such? how, if at all will microsoft owning 4% of Corel affect the outcome of the lawsuit?
At least it's only 4%.. if it were any more you'd have to get really worried about the fact microsoft has a finger in both Word _and_ Wordperfect.
--ps: i agree with rob COMPLETELY about the rant attached to the article. every other story has at least one person whining "why was this rejected when I submitted it?", apparently oblivious to the fact nobody cares. It's probably about the fourth or fifth most irritating thing about slashdot, right behind the people complaining in every other story that the story was unworthy to have made Slashdot's front page. apparently continuing scrolling and not reading or clicking near the article was taking up too much of their time, but posting a comment and bitching was effortless.. apparently cdmrtaco has no right to litter their screens with a linux kernel upgrade announcement that they personally do not care about on slashdot's front page, yet they have the right to litter the screens of the people reading that announcement to announce they don't want to be reading the article they're replying to..--
Re:Obfuscated DeCSS programming contest
on
A New DeCSS
·
· Score: 2
no.
Remember, ESR himself maintains the INTERCAL compiler for linux! if that isn't promoting obfuscation, what is?
you have to understand the motives. open source's ideals as i understand them is to able to organise things in such a way that no one person is able to prevent anyone else from benefiting from the software just as much as the one person does.
with things such as the ioccc, while only one person (the author) is really able to understand and modify the code, this does not matter. _everyone_ benefits equally for one simple reason:
obfuscated programming is not programming. it is art.
you don't like dropping it in the trash can? ok. press "command-y" or choose "put away" from the file menu. Or in more recent macos versions, go to the special menu and choose "eject disk", or control-click on the disk and choose "eject" from the contextual menu.
__WHAT DO YOU WANT APPLE TO DO??__ Even if throwing it in the trash is not the most intuitive way, what would you suggest they do _instead_?? you apparently dont' think a menu item or a contextual menu is "intuitive", because these are both in the OS.
The trash can eject thing is in fact just a remnant of "ghosting", a really nice idea that allowed you to do something no UI before or since has let you do: copy between two floppies without using a hard disk as an interrim. but in the end, because people like you were unable to handle using "put away" instead of "eject disk", apple removed this feature, and you can no longer ghost. So now "eject disk" makes it go away altogether. are you happy now?
what is your PROBLEM?? that dragging it to the trash should not be in the OS at _all_? are you upset simply the option is there? Perhaps i'm overreacting to this. In fact i _know_ i'm overreacting to this. But it just upsets me when people bring out the same two or three stupid non-issues whenever the mac os is mentioned, and by the way of these two things that they call problems because they have misinterpreted them, claim the entire interface is worthless.
if i were going to post something saying "In Linux, there is a CLI, so you can't drag files between windows to move them around on your hard disk" (which is obviously untrue) i would get the crap flamed out of me. But cdmrtaco can post in the _article subjectline_ "you have to drag a floppy to the trash to eject it in macos", which is just as blatantly untrue, and nobody minds. For God's sake, if you're going to trash the mac interface, target the actual _problems_, not rediculous things like "there's no right mouse button". (so buy a two-button mouse and map rightclick to control-click!!)
ok i'm done ranting now. you can all go back to your homes now there's nothing more to see.
that other desktop manager that i saw posted here last month? like the one that was going to be seen as the alternative to KDE and GNOME.
I can't remember it too well, except that it was apparently based on the Acorn interface (i think?) and it was based almost entirely on the drag&drop metaphor.
Anyone who knows what this was want to correct me? I was really excited about this, i was hoping a linux file manager would come around that would embrace drag&drop-- right now the only GUI that has a truly developed idea of how drag&drop _should_ work (drag from ANYTHING to ANYTHING and have the software figure out how that amkes sense..)is the Mac OS. It would be nice to see more OSes that really understand drag&drop (which Windows never will..)
Especially now that apple seems to be heading away from an application-based view of things (layers, the applications menu) and toward a window-based view of things (maximisation, minimising individual windows, the Dock, "virtual desktops" ala E or WM). forced "maximising" is not only in my eyes the worst thing ever to happen to GUI design, but it is the natural enemy of drag&drop. If my worst fears about Aqua come true.. bah, never mind, i'm rambling.
i've been thinking about this a great deal over the last minute and a half, and i realized something very important: an ibook beowulf cluster would, indeed, be a pretty cool idea. one word: Airport.
Airport would serve wonderfully as the high-speed private network Beowulf requires. and it would very much help with logistics-- no cabling required, which makes things a LOT easier. hell, you could just take the ibooks and stack them in the corner of the room. no messy cables or overloaded hubs.
While ibooks themselves would maybe be a tad expensive to buy them for just this purpose-- after all, you're paying for an LCD screen you won't use-- i'm wondering about what happens when iBooks start getting passed out to grade school students. Think about it; you've got about 20, 30 children per room. ach one is holding an ibook, and most of these are going unused for most of the time. So install the beowulf software on each ibook and have the school network propigate tasks to be used with the spare processor cycles. Suddenly this isn't a grade school anymore; it's a _supercomputer_, with upward of a couple hundred parrallel ibook nodes. This would go beyond cracking RC5 or ripping mp3s for the school administrator; you could actually rent out task time on the ibook beowulf the way they rent out supercomputers at universities. It would be a lot less reliable in terms of exact time because the students would be using some of the computing power to themselves, but still it could work pretty good, and maybe give some extra money to the schools. our schools are underfunded anyway, and hell- if they did something like this to bring in a little extra money, maybe they could _afford_ things like a decent computer network or computer teachers or laptops for the students.
And i'm sure the beowulf software would run wonderfully on the BSD core of mac os x. How well would Beowulf run in a loosely structured dynamic environment such as a school where the nodes of the network are being periodically individually shuffled around into different physical areas of the network, of out of it?
no, there is such a thing as internal firewire. did a quick search on google and found: http://lowendmac.net/tech/internalfw.shtml
this will probably not get very widely used though. i'm not saying internal firewire is worth using, since i know very little about it, only that it's definately there. firewire seems to be establishing itself as a niche thing for the Very High End. It will probably triumph over USB2, and may even make some serious inroads against SCSI, but i don't think it's going to do anything to hurt, say, IDE or ATA. Note that even apple is using IDE drives internally on its computers and has for some time (earlier macs used SCSI internally), because that is a much cheaper way of doing it than SCSI or Firewire. Never mind performance or ease of use. all i know is, if it is some nice, cheap, easy to use internal standard can appear and kill IDE, i'll be happy. if serial ATA is that standard then more power to it.
fellow karma whores: in the interest of space conservation and sorting, and so that the rest of the discussion can be devoted solely to discussion of USB 2.0 and Serial ATA themselves, i would like to request that all Firewire-related flaming be posted as a reply to this message.
suggested topics: -USB 2.0 is a pathetic excuse to destroy Firewire, designed solely to prevent a standard not controlled directly by Intel from gaining importance. -Firewire/Serial ATA/USB 2.0 is not open enough in the sense that the open source movement would like it to be. -Firewire is outrageously liscenced and expensive. -USB 2.0 and Serial ATA will be far more widely used and supported than Firewire. -Firewire will be far more widely used and supported than USB 2.0 and Serial ATA. -WH04 D00D 1 \V4N7 4 830\VULF CLU573R 0F 1B00KZ -[Firewire, Serial ATA, USB 2.0] is far technically superior to [Firewire, Serial ATA, USB 2.0] -[Firewire, Serial ATA, USB 2.0] is vaporware. -by the time [if ever] USB 2.0 comes to market, Firewire will already be in its second generation and far superior to the USB 2.0's first generation in every way USB 2.0 defeats Firewire now. -Firewire is already widely supported.
was looking at the powerbook specs, and i found something interesting:
One of the hottest graphics chips ever invented, the ATI RAGE Mobility 128 graphics controller has an advanced architecture that delivers spectacular 3D graphics performance in millions of colors.
Whoa!!! now is that the best way they could have possibly worded it??:) if it's among the "hottest" graphics chips ever invented, i really don't see why they'd be putting it in a laptop, do you?? Who wrote that description and what were they thinking..?
somebody in Apple Engineering, quick, go over to Apple Marketing and PR and explain to them what heat is, and why it isn't a good thing in laptops, and why computers have fans in them.. -_- btw, while you're over there, can you go and beat the shit out of whoever it was who designed the imac keyboard that came with my G4..? thanks.
the problem in the last week is not related to quality of anonymous posting. it is related to volume. the moderation system was set up to deal with people writing comments for the purpose of discussion, and for this it works rather well. It was not designed to deal with people specifically attempting to destroy the converstion. (people attempting to disrupt the conversation, it can deal with. destroy, no. MEEPT!!)
therefore if someone wishes to prevent slashdot from being used for legitimate purposes, they very easily can, because nothing is in place to check them. if a moderator sees one or two garbage posts he/she will probably spend the mod points to take at least one of them off the map so that others will have a better time reading/. if the moderator sees 15 in a row, probably they aren't going to moderate any of them. The sheer volume is so overwhelming they will probably not even attempt to do something about it, and instead just hit pgdn until they don't see the problem anymore. The system simply doesn't deal with that kind of problem.
blatantly offtopic posting for the sheer purpose of preventing people from actually using slashdot to discuss things isn't something that began until Segfault shut off their comments, thus shutting off these people's playpen and forcing them to find a new one. (why is this called "troll" posting so often? that isn't the real definition of troll, right? i mean, a troll by the definition i've always used wants to hijack the conversation, not keep conversation from taking place) Bulk blatant offtopic posting really isn't something that's appeared until the last two weeks or so. You shouldn't shut down all anonymous posting after however many years because of a really extremely small group of people abusing it at unheard of levels for two weeks. instead you should take measures to control that small group of people.
anonymous posting is really rather important to slashdot. if you silence the voice of the lurker, you silence.. well, everyone but the karma whores. You silence the people who don't care if they get to feed their ego by seeing ooh, look, i have score:92, i must be a worthful person. You especially silence the people who refuse to enable the cookies in their browser just because one single site on the entire internet uses them. Actually, reading slashdot with cookies disabled is something the slashdot sysops have always tried their hardest to prevent; after all, even after all this time you __STILL__ can't click "preview" and then "submit" without it forgetting what you logged in as at the time of clicking preview. And i don't see any point in frequently forcing everyone without a cookie to switch from the hell that is Flat to threaded other than harrassing them into activating cookies and getting a login. I of course would want a login anyway just because i want to have the score:3 thread breakout so badly, but i still can't come up with a good reason or making the non-logged-in comment things Flat. I've gotten way offtopic here haven't i?
ANYWAY. I don't care so much about allowing people to post without fear of retribution; i just know that a lot of people out there are unwilling to either deal with cookies or sign up for an account and remember a password if they aren't going to be posting regularly, yet once, at least once, in all the time they read slashdot intermittently they will hit something they know a lot about, post, and you'll have a real gem. and i really wouldn't trade missing that one gem a week for not having to look at ten NATALIE PORTMAN posts an article.
if you do not agree with me, and would rather not look at the ten portman posts even if you don't get to see the one gem a week, remember that THIS IS THE ENTIRE REASON THE MODERATION SYSTEM WAS IMPLEMENTED IN THE FIRST PLACE. You see that little "threshold" thing? USE IT. Go to score:1 and you will probably never see another Anonymous Coward post again unless the post deserves to be seen.
In the meantime, i hope cdmrtaco thinks of something that can deal with people posting mass amounts of "troll" stuff in an attempt to keep people from carrying on an intelligent discussion. If for no other reason than that the moderation system cannot work if the moderators cannot use threshold:0. I'm sure Taco can come up with something; he's getting paid to do this shit now anyway.
I am curious as to what exactly the new boot process is, but i will tell you that you NEVER needed a mac os partition for linuxppc to happily boot. All you need to do is set the Open Firmware boot settings to whatever ext2 partition you want, and OF will handle it all for you. The way to do this is very extensively, if somewhat confusingly, documented at www.linuxppc.org.
They suggest you use BootX because it is the easiest way, not becuase it is the only one. You could always write a LILOish boot switcher in Forth (very difficult), or choose your OS to boot into through using the Boot Variables app, or typing raw Open Firmware commands at the OF command line. Of course, none of these ways is particularly easy at _all_, and if you are unlucky enough to have one of the early PCI macs-- say, the 7200-- you will have no display drivers in the OF. meaning that you will be typing commands into a command line interface you cannot see. Which is not fun, even though the "commands" are likely to just be a one-line boot command. The crucial line is, i think, "And you don't have to be a programmer to be able to use the new software." This is a major step-- whatever this new boot process they've come up with is, if it doesn't require you to wait for the macos to boot its basic stuff like bootx does, and it doesn't require you to read ten pages of technically-oriented documentation like the OF methods do, and doesn't vary from machine to machine like the OF methods do.. well, that's a very good thing.
i think there's a pretty big difference between an opinion ("windows requires you to reboot a lot") based on personal experience, offhandedly stated in the form of an exaggerated joke posted on an open web-based discussion page, and an opinion ("windows is more stable than solaris") based on a need to sell a product, officially stated as if it were fact on microsoft's website.
basically, "jjohn" or whoever gets nothing out of trashing MS in a public forum. he, and flamers like him, have no hidden agenda; it's obvious they're just saying things like that becuase this is the way they percieve windows. When microsoft says something they're much more likely to have deeper, more self-serving motives besides what they actually believe about the quality of windows or solaris. And anyway you'd think a bit more dignity and responsibility should be expected from the statements of a large corporation (which has to answer to shareholders, customers, etc.) than from a random guy in a web page (who doesn't owe anybody anything).
And anyway [BIASED OPINION], from what little i've used windows, it DOES seem to have to reboot an awful lot more than even the macos does. Which is saying a LOT. And unlike with most unices, the idea of measuring uptime in weeks seems preposterous.
um, sure, yeh. i'm certain the extreme logical power of your argument would make such a hack incredibly effective. i'm pretty certain that were you to do as you suggest, it would cause thousands upon thousands of people in management jobs across the country to realize that using windows NT in server applications is an extremely foolish choice, and would work to switch their networks over to some sort of UNIX after deeply searching the products available to see what fits their needs best.
Especially since NOBODY is going to be reading these "bits of reality" pages anyway, except slashdot readers. Anyone looking at the microsoft webpage, especially any part trying to convince you to use windows nt, and especially anyone who would believe what was on those pages, has already decided what they are going to use.
umm, well, the standard fs used on most DVDs (video ones, anwyay) is "UDF" but i think you can use anything you want. (note "using anything you want" will almost certainly result in not being able to use the resulting DVD in a video-only player.) the standard video format that has come to be known as "dvd" when used in conjunction with DVD-video is MPEG-2 with i forget what sound format, i think dolby (if that's actually a digital format), and some other tricks to allow interactive stuff, different sound/subtitle tracks, etc. Sometimes all this is encoded with CSS encryption, sometimes with country codes and some other junk. There's a _lot_ of information on this-- it's _very_ well documented by the DVD consortum (except the CSS bit, which is documented elseware by the people who reverse engineered it) if you would just look it up.
The FMD thing is, at the moment, just a way of storing data. Like the DVD drives were at first. No mention was made on planning to make video drives out of FMD. There may be eventually but this is probably a little early. in the meantime, there is nothing stopping you from just making an FMD disc and just dumping a bunch of MPEG-2 or whatever format you like on it. Well, nothing stopping you except for the fact that the equipment to make it is not available.
I dunno. either way, you can look this stuff up just as easily as i can.
alright.. so it's based on returning flourescent light.
so what happens if you look at it under a blacklight? is it cool? and do you get the same spectacular lightshow if you put it in a microwave as you did with a CD-ROM?
how can we expect to adopt this technology without clear answers to these questions?
actually, you can make music by "scratching" CDs.. just not the way you meant. Try to find something by Oval to listen to-- most of their music is really cool ambient created by engineering CD player errors (skipping, scratches in the cd created by hand.. i read something somewhere that said they've actually used _painted_ CDs at times)..
heh.. ummm well, if you'll read the original post, you'll notice that i wasn't talking about creating a realtime convert-all-graphics-to-text engine; i just pointed out such an engine (asciimac) was already out there for the mac and already open source, and i was speculating about how difficult it would be to adapt that one engine to send ANSI text over a telnet connection instead of drawing the text to the screen (follow the link and lookit the screenshots..). "possible" was altogether the wrong word..
the post itself was not directly related to TTYQ3, it was just something i posted because TTYQ3 made it occur to me.. sorry.:)
um, no. unsigned variables in C cannot be negative numbers, no matter what happens. That is what "unsigned" means, that it is positive-only. Go look the definition of the word up sometime. Thus if you attempt to increment it past 65535 or whatever the limit is it will start over at zero, not a negative number. anyway if the variable were signed ("normal"), and thus capable of expressing a negative number, then the variable overflow would have occured somewhere around 32000 bugs, not now.
uh oh.. just read back over what i'd posted and noticed a horrendous typo. too late.
"patch all the quicktime traps".. that should have said "patch all the quickdraw traps".
This doesn't really matter or effect the meaning of the post in the end, but i'm pretty sure if anyone catches the error i'll get flamed like hell.
doesn't matter one way or the other, there's no way in hell i'd ever get around to writing anything that patched the quickdraw stuff anyway.. especially for the simple reason that there's no _use_ for an X client running off the mac os, since you can use VNC.. (which is something i probably should have mentioned in the original post, or at least stressed i wasn't serious..)
shoulda looked more carefully before i posted. i'm an idiot. please forgive me, i am tired..
there is, for the mac, an extention called Asciimac. Basically what it does is take the mac os's display and render it in ASCII art in real time on the screen. It is somewhere between incredibly scary and amazing. It won a MacHack award a couple years ago and is somewhat open source.
I wonder if it would be possible to rewrite it so that it sent text over an ANSI telnet connection instead of to the screen? hmm.
i was actually wondering just now if it would be possible to hijack the mac's video drivers or patch all the quicktime traps or something in order to create an X client for the mac os.. but it would have never occured to me to do it with terminal emulation instead if i hadn't seen this..:)
I think i can say with some certainty that before august of 98, there were people installing the default of Redhat with all the services running, and there were other people who compromsed those people's boxes through one of those services. I think i can also say that there were people passing trojans to other linux/solaris-using people on IRC and saying "HEY RUN THIS AS ROOT" before august of 98. I think i could even go so far as to say that in those days before august of 98, people installed unwanted programs on other people's linux or solaris boxes so that they could use those people's connections to packet entirely other people off of EFNET.
So what was it that happened in august of '98 that made them believe this was when trojans/"unauthorized usage of a computer system" first appeared? or were they saying this was when "security experts" first became aware of it? or were they saying this was when it occured to them it could happen? I am truly curious as to what happened in august of 98. Is this when "nelson" got his AOL account activated for the first time, or something..?
Slashdot Mirror
> I think you mean Caldera.
aha! i am apparently an idiot.
> Release early release often. When was that a crime? As far as polished, its right up there with Redhat and Mandrake (except 7.0).
I wasn't trying to say Corel Linux was bad or anything-- i haven't used it, i'm just expecting from it what should be expected from a 1.0 product. i'm trying to say it's probably not quite developed, mature, or [most importantly] _influential_ enough yet that microsoft having some influence over it is as alarming as, say, microsoft having some influence over wordperfect.
i probably should have left the entire line about "halfassed" out. it was totally unneccicary and apparently offensive. i dunno.
i'd say the fact Corel ships a halfassed, not-fully-developed, debian-based linux distro is probably not the most alarming aspect of all this.
isn't Corel still suing Microsoft over DR DOS and such?
how, if at all will microsoft owning 4% of Corel affect the outcome of the lawsuit?
At least it's only 4%.. if it were any more you'd have to get really worried about the fact microsoft has a finger in both Word _and_ Wordperfect.
--ps: i agree with rob COMPLETELY about the rant attached to the article. every other story has at least one person whining "why was this rejected when I submitted it?", apparently oblivious to the fact nobody cares. It's probably about the fourth or fifth most irritating thing about slashdot, right behind the people complaining in every other story that the story was unworthy to have made Slashdot's front page. apparently continuing scrolling and not reading or clicking near the article was taking up too much of their time, but posting a comment and bitching was effortless.. apparently cdmrtaco has no right to litter their screens with a linux kernel upgrade announcement that they personally do not care about on slashdot's front page, yet they have the right to litter the screens of the people reading that announcement to announce they don't want to be reading the article they're replying to..--
no.
Remember, ESR himself maintains the INTERCAL compiler for linux! if that isn't promoting obfuscation, what is?
you have to understand the motives. open source's ideals as i understand them is to able to organise things in such a way that no one person is able to prevent anyone else from benefiting from the software just as much as the one person does.
with things such as the ioccc, while only one person (the author) is really able to understand and modify the code, this does not matter. _everyone_ benefits equally for one simple reason:
obfuscated programming is not programming.
it is art.
> we shouldn't let them push us into inferior, proprietary standards.
Sorry, you're much too late.
you don't like dropping it in the trash can?
ok. press "command-y" or choose "put away" from the file menu.
Or in more recent macos versions, go to the special menu and choose "eject disk", or control-click on the disk and choose "eject" from the contextual menu.
__WHAT DO YOU WANT APPLE TO DO??__ Even if throwing it in the trash is not the most intuitive way, what would you suggest they do _instead_?? you apparently dont' think a menu item or a contextual menu is "intuitive", because these are both in the OS.
The trash can eject thing is in fact just a remnant of "ghosting", a really nice idea that allowed you to do something no UI before or since has let you do: copy between two floppies without using a hard disk as an interrim. but in the end, because people like you were unable to handle using "put away" instead of "eject disk", apple removed this feature, and you can no longer ghost. So now "eject disk" makes it go away altogether. are you happy now?
what is your PROBLEM?? that dragging it to the trash should not be in the OS at _all_? are you upset simply the option is there?
Perhaps i'm overreacting to this. In fact i _know_ i'm overreacting to this. But it just upsets me when people bring out the same two or three stupid non-issues whenever the mac os is mentioned, and by the way of these two things that they call problems because they have misinterpreted them, claim the entire interface is worthless.
if i were going to post something saying "In Linux, there is a CLI, so you can't drag files between windows to move them around on your hard disk" (which is obviously untrue) i would get the crap flamed out of me.
But cdmrtaco can post in the _article subjectline_ "you have to drag a floppy to the trash to eject it in macos", which is just as blatantly untrue, and nobody minds. For God's sake, if you're going to trash the mac interface, target the actual _problems_, not rediculous things like "there's no right mouse button". (so buy a two-button mouse and map rightclick to control-click!!)
ok i'm done ranting now. you can all go back to your homes now there's nothing more to see.
that other desktop manager that i saw posted here last month? like the one that was going to be seen as the alternative to KDE and GNOME.
I can't remember it too well, except that it was apparently based on the Acorn interface (i think?) and it was based almost entirely on the drag&drop metaphor.
Anyone who knows what this was want to correct me? I was really excited about this, i was hoping a linux file manager would come around that would embrace drag&drop-- right now the only GUI that has a truly developed idea of how drag&drop _should_ work (drag from ANYTHING to ANYTHING and have the software figure out how that amkes sense..)is the Mac OS. It would be nice to see more OSes that really understand drag&drop (which Windows never will..)
Especially now that apple seems to be heading away from an application-based view of things (layers, the applications menu) and toward a window-based view of things (maximisation, minimising individual windows, the Dock, "virtual desktops" ala E or WM). forced "maximising" is not only in my eyes the worst thing ever to happen to GUI design, but it is the natural enemy of drag&drop. If my worst fears about Aqua come true.. bah, never mind, i'm rambling.
Anyone rememebr the acornish thing's name?
i've been thinking about this a great deal over the last minute and a half, and i realized something very important: an ibook beowulf cluster would, indeed, be a pretty cool idea. one word: Airport.
Airport would serve wonderfully as the high-speed private network Beowulf requires. and it would very much help with logistics-- no cabling required, which makes things a LOT easier. hell, you could just take the ibooks and stack them in the corner of the room. no messy cables or overloaded hubs.
While ibooks themselves would maybe be a tad expensive to buy them for just this purpose-- after all, you're paying for an LCD screen you won't use-- i'm wondering about what happens when iBooks start getting passed out to grade school students. Think about it; you've got about 20, 30 children per room. ach one is holding an ibook, and most of these are going unused for most of the time. So install the beowulf software on each ibook and have the school network propigate tasks to be used with the spare processor cycles. Suddenly this isn't a grade school anymore; it's a _supercomputer_, with upward of a couple hundred parrallel ibook nodes. This would go beyond cracking RC5 or ripping mp3s for the school administrator; you could actually rent out task time on the ibook beowulf the way they rent out supercomputers at universities. It would be a lot less reliable in terms of exact time because the students would be using some of the computing power to themselves, but still it could work pretty good, and maybe give some extra money to the schools. our schools are underfunded anyway, and hell- if they did something like this to bring in a little extra money, maybe they could _afford_ things like a decent computer network or computer teachers or laptops for the students.
And i'm sure the beowulf software would run wonderfully on the BSD core of mac os x. How well would Beowulf run in a loosely structured dynamic environment such as a school where the nodes of the network are being periodically individually shuffled around into different physical areas of the network, of out of it?
just a thought.
no, there is such a thing as internal firewire. did a quick search on google and found:
http://lowendmac.net/tech/internalfw.shtml
this will probably not get very widely used though. i'm not saying internal firewire is worth using, since i know very little about it, only that it's definately there.
firewire seems to be establishing itself as a niche thing for the Very High End. It will probably triumph over USB2, and may even make some serious inroads against SCSI, but i don't think it's going to do anything to hurt, say, IDE or ATA.
Note that even apple is using IDE drives internally on its computers and has for some time (earlier macs used SCSI internally), because that is a much cheaper way of doing it than SCSI or Firewire. Never mind performance or ease of use.
all i know is, if it is some nice, cheap, easy to use internal standard can appear and kill IDE, i'll be happy. if serial ATA is that standard then more power to it.
fellow karma whores:
in the interest of space conservation and sorting, and so that the rest of the discussion can be devoted solely to discussion of USB 2.0 and Serial ATA themselves, i would like to request that all Firewire-related flaming be posted as a reply to this message.
suggested topics:
-USB 2.0 is a pathetic excuse to destroy Firewire, designed solely to prevent a standard not controlled directly by Intel from gaining importance.
-Firewire/Serial ATA/USB 2.0 is not open enough in the sense that the open source movement would like it to be.
-Firewire is outrageously liscenced and expensive.
-USB 2.0 and Serial ATA will be far more widely used and supported than Firewire.
-Firewire will be far more widely used and supported than USB 2.0 and Serial ATA.
-WH04 D00D 1 \V4N7 4 830\VULF CLU573R 0F 1B00KZ
-[Firewire, Serial ATA, USB 2.0] is far technically superior to [Firewire, Serial ATA, USB 2.0]
-[Firewire, Serial ATA, USB 2.0] is vaporware.
-by the time [if ever] USB 2.0 comes to market, Firewire will already be in its second generation and far superior to the USB 2.0's first generation in every way USB 2.0 defeats Firewire now.
-Firewire is already widely supported.
OK, have fun!
was looking at the powerbook specs, and i found something interesting:
:) if it's among the "hottest" graphics chips ever invented, i really don't see why they'd be putting it in a laptop, do you?? Who wrote that description and what were they thinking..?
One of the hottest graphics chips ever invented, the ATI RAGE Mobility 128 graphics controller has an advanced architecture that delivers spectacular 3D graphics performance in millions of colors.
Whoa!!! now is that the best way they could have possibly worded it??
somebody in Apple Engineering, quick, go over to Apple Marketing and PR and explain to them what heat is, and why it isn't a good thing in laptops, and why computers have fans in them.. -_-
btw, while you're over there, can you go and beat the shit out of whoever it was who designed the imac keyboard that came with my G4..? thanks.
> I don't know why they do it
/.
because they can.
the problem in the last week is not related to quality of anonymous posting. it is related to volume. the moderation system was set up to deal with people writing comments for the purpose of discussion, and for this it works rather well. It was not designed to deal with people specifically attempting to destroy the converstion. (people attempting to disrupt the conversation, it can deal with. destroy, no. MEEPT!!)
therefore if someone wishes to prevent slashdot from being used for legitimate purposes, they very easily can, because nothing is in place to check them. if a moderator sees one or two garbage posts he/she will probably spend the mod points to take at least one of them off the map so that others will have a better time reading
if the moderator sees 15 in a row, probably they aren't going to moderate any of them. The sheer volume is so overwhelming they will probably not even attempt to do something about it, and instead just hit pgdn until they don't see the problem anymore. The system simply doesn't deal with that kind of problem.
blatantly offtopic posting for the sheer purpose of preventing people from actually using slashdot to discuss things isn't something that began until Segfault shut off their comments, thus shutting off these people's playpen and forcing them to find a new one. (why is this called "troll" posting so often? that isn't the real definition of troll, right? i mean, a troll by the definition i've always used wants to hijack the conversation, not keep conversation from taking place) Bulk blatant offtopic posting really isn't something that's appeared until the last two weeks or so. You shouldn't shut down all anonymous posting after however many years because of a really extremely small group of people abusing it at unheard of levels for two weeks. instead you should take measures to control that small group of people.
anonymous posting is really rather important to slashdot. if you silence the voice of the lurker, you silence.. well, everyone but the karma whores. You silence the people who don't care if they get to feed their ego by seeing ooh, look, i have score:92, i must be a worthful person. You especially silence the people who refuse to enable the cookies in their browser just because one single site on the entire internet uses them. Actually, reading slashdot with cookies disabled is something the slashdot sysops have always tried their hardest to prevent; after all, even after all this time you __STILL__ can't click "preview" and then "submit" without it forgetting what you logged in as at the time of clicking preview. And i don't see any point in frequently forcing everyone without a cookie to switch from the hell that is Flat to threaded other than harrassing them into activating cookies and getting a login. I of course would want a login anyway just because i want to have the score:3 thread breakout so badly, but i still can't come up with a good reason or making the non-logged-in comment things Flat. I've gotten way offtopic here haven't i?
ANYWAY. I don't care so much about allowing people to post without fear of retribution; i just know that a lot of people out there are unwilling to either deal with cookies or sign up for an account and remember a password if they aren't going to be posting regularly, yet once, at least once, in all the time they read slashdot intermittently they will hit something they know a lot about, post, and you'll have a real gem. and i really wouldn't trade missing that one gem a week for not having to look at ten NATALIE PORTMAN posts an article.
if you do not agree with me, and would rather not look at the ten portman posts even if you don't get to see the one gem a week, remember that THIS IS THE ENTIRE REASON THE MODERATION SYSTEM WAS IMPLEMENTED IN THE FIRST PLACE. You see that little "threshold" thing? USE IT. Go to score:1 and you will probably never see another Anonymous Coward post again unless the post deserves to be seen.
In the meantime, i hope cdmrtaco thinks of something that can deal with people posting mass amounts of "troll" stuff in an attempt to keep people from carrying on an intelligent discussion. If for no other reason than that the moderation system cannot work if the moderators cannot use threshold:0. I'm sure Taco can come up with something; he's getting paid to do this shit now anyway.
-mcc
nobody will read this post, i know it.
I am curious as to what exactly the new boot process is, but i will tell you that you NEVER needed a mac os partition for linuxppc to happily boot. All you need to do is set the Open Firmware boot settings to whatever ext2 partition you want, and OF will handle it all for you. The way to do this is very extensively, if somewhat confusingly, documented at www.linuxppc.org.
They suggest you use BootX because it is the easiest way, not becuase it is the only one. You could always write a LILOish boot switcher in Forth (very difficult), or choose your OS to boot into through using the Boot Variables app, or typing raw Open Firmware commands at the OF command line. Of course, none of these ways is particularly easy at _all_, and if you are unlucky enough to have one of the early PCI macs-- say, the 7200-- you will have no display drivers in the OF. meaning that you will be typing commands into a command line interface you cannot see. Which is not fun, even though the "commands" are likely to just be a one-line boot command.
The crucial line is, i think, "And you don't have to be a programmer to be able to use the new software." This is a major step-- whatever this new boot process they've come up with is, if it doesn't require you to wait for the macos to boot its basic stuff like bootx does, and it doesn't require you to read ten pages of technically-oriented documentation like the OF methods do, and doesn't vary from machine to machine like the OF methods do.. well, that's a very good thing.
i think there's a pretty big difference between an opinion ("windows requires you to reboot a lot") based on personal experience, offhandedly stated in the form of an exaggerated joke posted on an open web-based discussion page, and an opinion ("windows is more stable than solaris") based on a need to sell a product, officially stated as if it were fact on microsoft's website.
basically, "jjohn" or whoever gets nothing out of trashing MS in a public forum. he, and flamers like him, have no hidden agenda; it's obvious they're just saying things like that becuase this is the way they percieve windows. When microsoft says something they're much more likely to have deeper, more self-serving motives besides what they actually believe about the quality of windows or solaris. And anyway you'd think a bit more dignity and responsibility should be expected from the statements of a large corporation (which has to answer to shareholders, customers, etc.) than from a random guy in a web page (who doesn't owe anybody anything).
And anyway [BIASED OPINION], from what little i've used windows, it DOES seem to have to reboot an awful lot more than even the macos does. Which is saying a LOT. And unlike with most unices, the idea of measuring uptime in weeks seems preposterous.
um, sure, yeh. i'm certain the extreme logical power of your argument would make such a hack incredibly effective. i'm pretty certain that were you to do as you suggest, it would cause thousands upon thousands of people in management jobs across the country to realize that using windows NT in server applications is an extremely foolish choice, and would work to switch their networks over to some sort of UNIX after deeply searching the products available to see what fits their needs best.
Especially since NOBODY is going to be reading these "bits of reality" pages anyway, except slashdot readers. Anyone looking at the microsoft webpage, especially any part trying to convince you to use windows nt, and especially anyone who would believe what was on those pages, has already decided what they are going to use.
ph33r
Personally.. i've always had a serious thing for Ryo-ohki.
DROOOL
umm, well, the standard fs used on most DVDs (video ones, anwyay) is "UDF" but i think you can use anything you want. (note "using anything you want" will almost certainly result in not being able to use the resulting DVD in a video-only player.)
the standard video format that has come to be known as "dvd" when used in conjunction with DVD-video is MPEG-2 with i forget what sound format, i think dolby (if that's actually a digital format), and some other tricks to allow interactive stuff, different sound/subtitle tracks, etc. Sometimes all this is encoded with CSS encryption, sometimes with country codes and some other junk. There's a _lot_ of information on this-- it's _very_ well documented by the DVD consortum (except the CSS bit, which is documented elseware by the people who reverse engineered it) if you would just look it up.
The FMD thing is, at the moment, just a way of storing data. Like the DVD drives were at first. No mention was made on planning to make video drives out of FMD. There may be eventually but this is probably a little early. in the meantime, there is nothing stopping you from just making an FMD disc and just dumping a bunch of MPEG-2 or whatever format you like on it. Well, nothing stopping you except for the fact that the equipment to make it is not available.
I dunno. either way, you can look this stuff up just as easily as i can.
alright.. so it's based on returning flourescent light.
so what happens if you look at it under a blacklight? is it cool?
and do you get the same spectacular lightshow if you put it in a microwave as you did with a CD-ROM?
how can we expect to adopt this technology without clear answers to these questions?
actually, you can make music by "scratching" CDs.. just not the way you meant. Try to find something by Oval to listen to-- most of their music is really cool ambient created by engineering CD player errors (skipping, scratches in the cd created by hand.. i read something somewhere that said they've actually used _painted_ CDs at times)..
God is a DJ.
aha.. now i get it. :P
sorry, misinterpreted "has a negative number" and "underflow" to mean the opposite of what they were supposed to.. clever.
heh.. ummm
:)
well, if you'll read the original post, you'll notice that i wasn't talking about creating a realtime convert-all-graphics-to-text engine; i just pointed out such an engine (asciimac) was already out there for the mac and already open source, and i was speculating about how difficult it would be to adapt that one engine to send ANSI text over a telnet connection instead of drawing the text to the screen (follow the link and lookit the screenshots..). "possible" was altogether the wrong word..
the post itself was not directly related to TTYQ3, it was just something i posted because TTYQ3 made it occur to me.. sorry.
um, no. unsigned variables in C cannot be negative numbers, no matter what happens. That is what "unsigned" means, that it is positive-only. Go look the definition of the word up sometime. Thus if you attempt to increment it past 65535 or whatever the limit is it will start over at zero, not a negative number.
anyway if the variable were signed ("normal"), and thus capable of expressing a negative number, then the variable overflow would have occured somewhere around 32000 bugs, not now.
bitch bitch moan nitpick whine.
uh oh.. just read back over what i'd posted and noticed a horrendous typo. too late.
"patch all the quicktime traps".. that should have said "patch all the quickdraw traps".
This doesn't really matter or effect the meaning of the post in the end, but i'm pretty sure if anyone catches the error i'll get flamed like hell.
doesn't matter one way or the other, there's no way in hell i'd ever get around to writing anything that patched the quickdraw stuff anyway.. especially for the simple reason that there's no _use_ for an X client running off the mac os, since you can use VNC.. (which is something i probably should have mentioned in the original post, or at least stressed i wasn't serious..)
shoulda looked more carefully before i posted. i'm an idiot. please forgive me, i am tired..
there is, for the mac, an extention called Asciimac. Basically what it does is take the mac os's display and render it in ASCII art in real time on the screen. It is somewhere between incredibly scary and amazing. It won a MacHack award a couple years ago and is somewhat open source.
:)
I wonder if it would be possible to rewrite it so that it sent text over an ANSI telnet connection instead of to the screen? hmm.
i was actually wondering just now if it would be possible to hijack the mac's video drivers or patch all the quicktime traps or something in order to create an X client for the mac os.. but it would have never occured to me to do it with terminal emulation instead if i hadn't seen this..
where on earth did they get "august 1998"??
I think i can say with some certainty that before august of 98, there were people installing the default of Redhat with all the services running, and there were other people who compromsed those people's boxes through one of those services. I think i can also say that there were people passing trojans to other linux/solaris-using people on IRC and saying "HEY RUN THIS AS ROOT" before august of 98. I think i could even go so far as to say that in those days before august of 98, people installed unwanted programs on other people's linux or solaris boxes so that they could use those people's connections to packet entirely other people off of EFNET.
So what was it that happened in august of '98 that made them believe this was when trojans/"unauthorized usage of a computer system" first appeared?
or were they saying this was when "security experts" first became aware of it?
or were they saying this was when it occured to them it could happen?
I am truly curious as to what happened in august of 98. Is this when "nelson" got his AOL account activated for the first time, or something..?
Nobody here knows
What QOS systems are
At least i sure don't
The posts will all be
offtopic BSD flames
cruel and ignorant
Natalie Portman
will probably dominate
the whole discussion