This is true. However, the world has moved on without the Hurd; there is now a glut of decent free-as-in-speech operating systems out there (at least seven of which I can think of that have any kind of user base, four of which are BSD variants).
There is an instructive paralell in the world of conlangers (people who like to create languages). There are essentially two camps: the auxlangers and the artlangers. The auxlangers have Esperanto and Volapuk (and perhaps classical Latin and Arabic) as their standard bearers, while the artlanger language king is Klingon. The auxlangers create languages that they eventually expect the world to use (Esperanto is the most evangelical of these languages), while the artlangers create their languages, wouldn't mind being able to have someone else to speak them, but don't expect the world from them.
As a general rule the artlangers, the Okrands and Tolkiens, are in it for fun. The Zamenhofs, the auxlangers, are in it partly for a cause, partly to pick a fight.
While RMS has done great things, he'd be more of an auxlanger...
ObPrediction: The Hurd will get some play and probably steal a sizeable chunk of the FSF zealot market, but in large part it will be a) too complicated, b) hobbled by a community that makes Amiga fans look reasonable, and c) largely irrelevant because of the huge installed Linux/BSD base.
One thing's for certain, somebody's going to now...
The fact is that Mozilla is a prime example of pointless bloat. I have big problems with anything with a tarball that big; the spyware code could easily be hidden right under our noses in a module nobody ever looks at.
That said, I still feel more secure with Mozilla than the commercial version; the Mozilla M logo is pretty ugly (I'd rather have the Communist T-Rex) but that's about the only complaint I have...
Your stars: an eternally chipper, squeaky-voiced, squeaky-clean mouse vs. a slightly insane, unnervingly smart Borscht Belt rabbit.
Your supporting cast: on the one hand, another mouse, a dog, another dog (except this one talks), a spluttering duck; on the other hand, a bashful pig, an obsessive hack hunter, a martian, a coyote, and a spluttering duck. Not to mention other random characters on each side.
One is a paragon of virtue to everyone but the craziest of Christian fundies. The other is a paragon of high comedy to everyone except people who think kids take cartoon violence seriously.
One gave birth to Animaniacs. The other gave birth to infinite copyright extensions.
I might point out that the Mac option is dicey anyway -- the prime advantage of a Mac cluster is the weak multitasking in Classic so that you can beat the OS into submission and take over the system with your code. Once you move to X there is no particular advantage to using the Mac platform because the hardware doesn't have as good a price/performance ratio and the software is Unix -- good for most uses, but the ability to take over the system to maximize performance is gone.
Yeah... the first half of the piece was good reading, but the second half... Knee-jerk conservatism. The problem with conservatives is that they scoff before thinking about it.
As for the election -- both sides tried to steal it. The Republicans succeeded, and Gore botched it (he'd have lost when he should have won if they'd done it his way). But that's a debate for another day (a year ago).
/Brian
Re:...Pascal? gimme a break.
on
Disinformation.com
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Qualify that. Pascal's wager works, but if and only if the spiritual world is binary, which it pretty much was in 17th century France (i.e. everyone believed in the same God, and were *supposed* to believe in the same way (the Huguenots, of course, would take exception)). The problem with Pascal's wager is that it's a logically sound deduction on false premises.
That's my big problem with it, really; of course, logical deduction regarding faith coming from a Jansenist (anti-rationalist cult of the 17th century and thereabouts, to those of you who don't know) is ironic to the point of being funny...
I've met bimbo cheerleaders, but curiously enough the majority of the cheerleaders at my high school weren't (and there were a lot to go around, too -- separate squads for football, basketball, and (God help me) ice hockey). However, it was a small (~600 students) Catholic school, so that might have skewed the results a bit.
Ah, timing loops... I do remember that, too. I don't know about the PC world, but I imagine it wasn't that different from trying to figure out how many times MS BASIC went through a FOR loop in one second on the C64 like I did...
I think they still read it, but I haven't seen a MacOS release that can format a ProDOS disk for a while. DOS 3.3 is right out; I think Apple chose to shunt it aside in favor of ProDOS a very long time ago.
Ah, the Tandy Pocket Computers... always wanted one of those. I actually every so often still want one, and then I realize that a) I carry around a PalmPilot and b) I can get a TI-83 for about $100... still, it would be nice.
Dogmatic conservatism doesn't prove your point. The minimum wage should be enough for a person to scrape by wherever they're living. Put more simply, let me reiterate: two weeks from now it could be you flipping burgers. Chew on that.
(ahem) How about the person behind the counter who's stuck doing what they're doing because they have trouble with job interviews, or their skill set is too narrow to find a job, or they're trying to raise a family but haven't been in this country for very long...
You know, I've worked plenty of those jobs. I wouldn't call myself lazy (I have profound social anxiety problems, but that's another story). It's assholes like you that tend to make people like me want to pour hot coffee in your lap.
Minimum wage *has* to be a living wage because sometimes it's all that someone can get. If that means you pay $1.19 for your cheezy weezy burger instead of $.99, that's the way it has to be. Don't forget: we're in a recession. It could be you flipping burgers for shit pay two weeks from now, so shut the fuck up.
The question I have: what would be so bloody hard about creating a MiniPC with the cost profile of an iOpener? The parts cost on those things was about $400 IIRC, and I'm sure that it wouldn't be all that hard to put together a P3-class MiniPC that would sell for ~$700 or so profitably.
You've never seen Altair BASIC, have you? The source code is on the net somewhere (don't know the URL off the top of my head, though) and the general conclusion was that Bill, Paul, and Monte were very, very good at what they were doing.
The fact that Bill is a flaming scumbag and Paul is a wealthy semifamous nonentity notwithstanding, I'd say Bill still knows his shit.
Reasonably speaking, I'd say a browser with IE's functionality consists of the wrapper for the renderer and networking client functionality and not much more than that. The Cryp API and the rest of it are middleware and have no proper place being considered part of the browser software, which is just a client of the DLLs it's built against.
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And the worst part is the irrelevant radio twats are probably going to get their way because of Colin Powell's mouthbreathing puppet son...
/Brian
This is true. However, the world has moved on without the Hurd; there is now a glut of decent free-as-in-speech operating systems out there (at least seven of which I can think of that have any kind of user base, four of which are BSD variants).
There is an instructive paralell in the world of conlangers (people who like to create languages). There are essentially two camps: the auxlangers and the artlangers. The auxlangers have Esperanto and Volapuk (and perhaps classical Latin and Arabic) as their standard bearers, while the artlanger language king is Klingon. The auxlangers create languages that they eventually expect the world to use (Esperanto is the most evangelical of these languages), while the artlangers create their languages, wouldn't mind being able to have someone else to speak them, but don't expect the world from them.
As a general rule the artlangers, the Okrands and Tolkiens, are in it for fun. The Zamenhofs, the auxlangers, are in it partly for a cause, partly to pick a fight.
While RMS has done great things, he'd be more of an auxlanger...
ObPrediction: The Hurd will get some play and probably steal a sizeable chunk of the FSF zealot market, but in large part it will be a) too complicated, b) hobbled by a community that makes Amiga fans look reasonable, and c) largely irrelevant because of the huge installed Linux/BSD base.
/Brian
You can say that again...
/Brian
and lots of other interesting debugging toys...
/Brian
One thing's for certain, somebody's going to now...
The fact is that Mozilla is a prime example of pointless bloat. I have big problems with anything with a tarball that big; the spyware code could easily be hidden right under our noses in a module nobody ever looks at.
That said, I still feel more secure with Mozilla than the commercial version; the Mozilla M logo is pretty ugly (I'd rather have the Communist T-Rex) but that's about the only complaint I have...
/Brian
Little anvil in the sky, don't be silly, you can't fly...
-Dot Warner
Granted the Animaniacs could get annoyingly in-jokey, but they're the true heirs to Chuck Jones' legacy...
...but there will never be another Bugs.
/Brian
Your stars: an eternally chipper, squeaky-voiced, squeaky-clean mouse vs. a slightly insane, unnervingly smart Borscht Belt rabbit.
Your supporting cast: on the one hand, another mouse, a dog, another dog (except this one talks), a spluttering duck; on the other hand, a bashful pig, an obsessive hack hunter, a martian, a coyote, and a spluttering duck. Not to mention other random characters on each side.
One is a paragon of virtue to everyone but the craziest of Christian fundies. The other is a paragon of high comedy to everyone except people who think kids take cartoon violence seriously.
One gave birth to Animaniacs. The other gave birth to infinite copyright extensions.
Now which one would you rather watch?
Chuck Jones, we'll miss you.
/Brian
It's particle physics -- they're Uncertain...
(ducks flying objects)
/Brian
I might point out that the Mac option is dicey anyway -- the prime advantage of a Mac cluster is the weak multitasking in Classic so that you can beat the OS into submission and take over the system with your code. Once you move to X there is no particular advantage to using the Mac platform because the hardware doesn't have as good a price/performance ratio and the software is Unix -- good for most uses, but the ability to take over the system to maximize performance is gone.
/Brian
XP barely functions on a Tualatin Pentium III. I wouldn't bring it anywhere near my P2....
/Brian
Yeah... the first half of the piece was good reading, but the second half... Knee-jerk conservatism. The problem with conservatives is that they scoff before thinking about it.
As for the election -- both sides tried to steal it. The Republicans succeeded, and Gore botched it (he'd have lost when he should have won if they'd done it his way). But that's a debate for another day (a year ago).
/Brian
Qualify that. Pascal's wager works, but if and only if the spiritual world is binary, which it pretty much was in 17th century France (i.e. everyone believed in the same God, and were *supposed* to believe in the same way (the Huguenots, of course, would take exception)). The problem with Pascal's wager is that it's a logically sound deduction on false premises.
That's my big problem with it, really; of course, logical deduction regarding faith coming from a Jansenist (anti-rationalist cult of the 17th century and thereabouts, to those of you who don't know) is ironic to the point of being funny...
/Brian
I've met bimbo cheerleaders, but curiously enough the majority of the cheerleaders at my high school weren't (and there were a lot to go around, too -- separate squads for football, basketball, and (God help me) ice hockey). However, it was a small (~600 students) Catholic school, so that might have skewed the results a bit.
/Brian
Ah, timing loops... I do remember that, too. I don't know about the PC world, but I imagine it wasn't that different from trying to figure out how many times MS BASIC went through a FOR loop in one second on the C64 like I did...
/brian
I think they still read it, but I haven't seen a MacOS release that can format a ProDOS disk for a while. DOS 3.3 is right out; I think Apple chose to shunt it aside in favor of ProDOS a very long time ago.
/Brian
Ah, the Tandy Pocket Computers... always wanted one of those. I actually every so often still want one, and then I realize that a) I carry around a PalmPilot and b) I can get a TI-83 for about $100... still, it would be nice.
/Brian
Dogmatic conservatism doesn't prove your point. The minimum wage should be enough for a person to scrape by wherever they're living. Put more simply, let me reiterate: two weeks from now it could be you flipping burgers. Chew on that.
/Brian
(ahem) How about the person behind the counter who's stuck doing what they're doing because they have trouble with job interviews, or their skill set is too narrow to find a job, or they're trying to raise a family but haven't been in this country for very long...
You know, I've worked plenty of those jobs. I wouldn't call myself lazy (I have profound social anxiety problems, but that's another story). It's assholes like you that tend to make people like me want to pour hot coffee in your lap.
Minimum wage *has* to be a living wage because sometimes it's all that someone can get. If that means you pay $1.19 for your cheezy weezy burger instead of $.99, that's the way it has to be. Don't forget: we're in a recession. It could be you flipping burgers for shit pay two weeks from now, so shut the fuck up.
/Brian
The question I have: what would be so bloody hard about creating a MiniPC with the cost profile of an iOpener? The parts cost on those things was about $400 IIRC, and I'm sure that it wouldn't be all that hard to put together a P3-class MiniPC that would sell for ~$700 or so profitably.
/Brian
You've never seen Altair BASIC, have you? The source code is on the net somewhere (don't know the URL off the top of my head, though) and the general conclusion was that Bill, Paul, and Monte were very, very good at what they were doing.
The fact that Bill is a flaming scumbag and Paul is a wealthy semifamous nonentity notwithstanding, I'd say Bill still knows his shit.
/Brian
Reasonably speaking, I'd say a browser with IE's functionality consists of the wrapper for the renderer and networking client functionality and not much more than that. The Cryp API and the rest of it are middleware and have no proper place being considered part of the browser software, which is just a client of the DLLs it's built against.
/Brian
(/me shakes head in disappointment)
I'm thinking it's pretty safe to call anyone a monopoly who has the clout to prevent their competitors from gaining a foothold in the marketplace.
/Brian
Yeah, great idea... private inspectors who can be bought off more explicitly than the FDA...
Now maybe you're not the hardcore libertarian you come off as, but this is a libertarian fantasy...
/Brian
Says a lot about our patent system. Unfortunately, it's all been said many times before.
/Brian
"We provide a service. It's not worth our while anymore, but it might be to you, so have fun."
They violate the letter, perhaps, but that is the spirit. Thanks Bungie!
/Brian