Keanu Reaves..?! I thought that was Wesley Crusher!
Re:Forcing companies to invalidate EULAs themselve
on
EULA In Games
·
· Score: 2
True, but by the same token, whenever I, working for a technology company, am installing software on a company computer, am I legally able to enter into agreements on behalf of my company? I can tell you right now that I'm not. Yet, I as a low-level employee have been faced with the task of installing everything from Windows through to Visual Studio. This is not in my job description, but I do so anyways, as I have been authorized to do so by my boss.
By the same token, the people at Microsoft tech are given the job of talking with customers, and are authorized to recieve feedback from customers for bug-finding purposes, etc. If my program had a bug in it, and I was sending it to their tech people for bug-checking, are they not authorized to enter into a contract to view my code? Remember, in the event that there is no EULA, my code falls under the rules of contract outlined by copyright, where fair use, etc., comes into play.
Come on; just try and tell me that you don't think Microsoft has ever gotten a piece of code before with a huge "COPYRIGHT ID SOFTWARE; reproduction strictly prohibited without prior authorization from ID SOFTWARE" label on the top. (Or substitute your favorite software company. Lucasarts..? Borland-Inprise..? Corel, even.) This is also a contract; are they not entering into it on behalf of Microsoft when they look at the code?
(My argument is not limited to Microsoft, remember; I realize that Microsoft probably doesn't allow any external source code to make it's way into their walls. The argument's more of a theoretical one--if I thought Microsoft were this vulnerable, I'd be off sending emails right now instead of posting on Slashdot..;-)
Forcing companies to invalidate EULAs themselves
on
EULA In Games
·
· Score: 2
Every time I hear about EULAs, I keep having the same thought. That thought is to profit off of these companies' stupidity. I would ensnare them in an EULA of my own, using the same methods that they typically use to ensnare me.
The project would proceed as follows; I would send off two emails to Microsoft, to the actual email address of a known Microsoft employee. The emails would be HTML, which would facilitate the following.
The second email would contain the source code for a short application I had written. The program would be my own work, copyright and all, written for a non-specific target platform. (But it would be written under Linux.) The application source would include several markers indicating who I am, what the program does at every point in it's execution, and a thank you message.
At the bottom of the HTML code, there would be a small image that would load from my website, which would increment a counter and provide exact information on what the IP address of the access was, and the time it was accessed.
The subject of the second email would be "Code which causes a new bug in the compiler."
The first email I would send would then be the EULA for the program. In it, I would specify the usual disclaimers about the program, the general limitations on use (showing it to other persons, etc.) and the usual "fill up space" legalese that's required for such contracts. Then, at the very end of the contract, just before whatever, I'd insert a paragraph stating some rather painful concessions that Microsoft would have to make to me. (..in the form of a yearly licencing fee for said software, regardless of use, and the freedom to copy and resell Microsoft.NET products for the fee of one cent per package)
Lastly, I'd title the first email something like "Questions about EULA? PLEASE READ!"
Typically, the way this would work would be that as soon as the cookie-image did it's business, I would then have my lawyer send off a registered letter to Microsoft, containing the emails and the resulting logs, and asking for the initial cheque of my yearly royalty.
Anyone have any comments on the legality of such a scheme?:)
Personally, I'm curious as to whether or not the fact that licencing agreements in software packages sold in Canada are actually legal if they aren't included in both official languages. In order for something to be suitable for sale around here, documentation has to traditionally be in both official languages. If it isn't, I'm curious as to whether or not it could be considered unfit for sale, and thusly make the EULA unenforceable.
SDL is a compatibility layer, and for 3D, it uses OpenGL. This person's looking for something that would replace OpenGL, too.
I recommend checking out the GGI project. It's essentially what you're looking for, short of the audio stuff. They've got input support through libGII, graphics through libGGI with specialized functions for advanced 2D in libGGI2D and 3D stuff in libGGI3D.
There's even a port of X to it, so you can run your X server "boxed off" so that X crashes don't take down the system. (Assuming you have a card that it supports; it really only supports about a half dozen chipsets--the ones the developers own.)
The GGI people had kernel-level drivers in KGI a year before the X people even started taking DRI seriously, and their monitor drivers auto-detect the hardware attached, no modelines or nothin'.
It's a shame, imo, that they never were more popular, but they were shunned at every turn. GGI never seems to make it into any of the commercial distros, and Linus apparently flipped over the idea of putting graphics logic in the kernel. (How quickly times change..)
The UIUC ACM is very active. We have well over 100 members and many SIGs. Each sig usually works on a project per year. Past projects have included: Homebrew OS, Drunk Driving Simulator, Laser Guided Turret, AI Learning Robotic Arm, and a Real Time Artistic Renderer.
Wow! I think I'm starting to develop a serious case of club envy. : )
For anyone interested in what the BOFH is, it's the Bastard Operator From Hell. They're stories about a tech support guy who burns his customers at every turn. Here's a site with an archive containing a good 90% of what's written:
There are typically three componenets to every pixel in the image you see. A red component, a blue component, and a green component. When working with images, there tends to be another component used on top of these three, called the alpha channel. Essentially, the alpha defines how transparent each pixel is. (ie; how much of whatever's below it is mixed in with it. This gives the illusion of one image showing through another.)
Alpha blending's simply become a necessity these days. The fact that it's taken X this long to even contemplate getting true support for it's a danged shame, but better late than never I suppose.
As an aside, to all of those of you who're suggesting people check out Berlin instead, I would caution you to hold your horses. Sure it supports alpha blending, and a host of new features, but it's not a drop-in replacement for X. X and Berlin are totally different beasts, with totally different purposes. (ie; X is a dumb terminal, displaying whatever the client programs want it to, while Berlin tends to be more object-oriented, with objects relied upon by clients having the capability of running on the server-side.)
How lively is it, though? Carleton University has a chapter too, but it looks like it's pretty much dead. (Uh, check out the programming contest page..)
Not to be a bitch, but it sounds like you simply have a challenging Computer Science curriculum. With the influx of people into the disciple brought about by its high media profile, it seems like a reasonable reaction from your professors.
I don't disagree with you, and I welcome the increased competition between students for those top marks. However, whenever it becomes less of an intellectual challenge, and more one of an endurance race, the societies are usually the first things to suffer. This was the point I was trying to make.
I should probably point out the flip-side to a lot of the statements I made in my original post:
- The 204 prof mentioned is still quite green, as he is only in his second year of teaching. His primary language is not english, and neither is that of the TAs for the course, which is probably where this confusion comes from. (I haven't had him as a prof.)
- The 304 class I mentioned is definitely one of the most useful courses I have ever taken thus far. The lectures were superb. My one beef is with ObjecTime, the CASE tool we're required to use for the course. Whenever you're taking a course on how to write well-designed code, you don't want to use a tool that falls apart at the seams an average of five times an hour.
- The prof who didn't know how to fork() has since "parted company" with the university.
The bottom line, as I said, is that our societies are dropping like flies. There tend to be very few people who have time to actually devote to projects. Whenever the Nexus project was started three years ago, there were a good half-dozen plus projects in the works. They've since all died, with no new ones taking their places.
It's hard for someone like myself to glance south at a place like MIT, or Berkeley, and their infamy, and then look back at my own institution and see the equivalent slowly dying in it's infancy from lack of interest. It's not the hard work I'm complaining about, it's the absence of spare time people have for such explorations.
As to how this applies to the XCF, all I'm saying is that perhaps the undergrads at Berkeley are feeling a similar pinch, when it comes down to the spare time that they're alotted to work on their pet projects. Perhaps someone should welcome the XCF to the real world, too.
I don't know anything about XCC, but maybe I can shed a little light on the issue by telling you what's going on at my own university, up here in Canada.
Currently, at Carleton University, there exists a club with a similar purpose called Nexus. It was intended as a student-run research group, whereby students could gain access to the equipment they needed for certain projects, and have a better way of finding other people to join teams to work on said projects.
It's in danger of dying out this year.
What's killing it? I would suggest that it's the computer science department itself. In the last few years, the faculty of the computer science school at Carleton University has increased the workload of students exponentially. At the current state, we have the following "killer" courses, to weed out people who can't program:
204 - C++, the profs require you to use Visual C++, with the intent of forcing you to recognize all of the little things that are wrong with Microsoft's compiler. (Their words, not mine.) One of the killer assignments includes mixing operator overloading, templates, and exceptions. This is turning into a really frustrating course for a lot of people, because it's supposed to be an intro to C++ course. It's turning into a fight-the-compiler course.
304 - Object Oriented Software Engineering. You are forced to use ObjecTime, which is the most crash-prone, unuseable, finicky, flaky CASE tool I have ever seen. This is also a group work class, which only compounds the problems for a lot of people. Generally, the class is very beneficial, but with the amount of work and spare time it takes, and the required use of ObjecTime it definitely qualifies as killer.
384 - Algorithms. I agree that this should be a "killer" course. But there is a lot that isn't taught in this course that should be, simply because we're TESTED on it afterwards. They use the CLR book, too, which means that a lot of your own questions are never answered by the book, as there is no solution guide available to students. (And the authors don't want this to change.)
484 - Algorithms II. This is the course that's supposed to be THE killer. And from what I've heard, it is. (I'm only in third year right now.)
In addition to these required, core courses, we're also required to take several other courses in third year and above. Our options can be considered killer, too, as some of them (307, which is a Scheme/Prolog course, and requires as one assignment that you reimplement scheme within scheme; 302, a compiler course that I've also heard was a real time consumer) are just plain insane. Especially whenever you consider that each of these students is potentially taking a full course load, involving at least four other courses. (I've heard many a story of a student dropping all of their other courses just so they could get one of the above-mentioned courses enough of their time.)
It really doesn't help that we've got some really really crappy TAs at times. I've had friends in 204, Intro to C++, show me assignments they've gotten back with "WOULD NOT COMPILE" written on it. The reasoning of the TAs was as follows; I put the disk in the drive, I opened the project, and I hit compile. It stopped compiling, so it mustn't work. (In this case, it was because the TAs were compiling it on the disk. Visual C++ requires a good 10 megs swap space to compile anything, after all.) I really pity the people handing in this last assignment, which is the above-mentioned killer assignment for that course. The only TA is flying back to China as soon as he's finished marking them, so students will have absolutely no recourse if it doesn't run. (The new C++ prof absolutely refuses to remark assignments.)
(Part of the problem, I think, is that a lot of the staff is just plain bad at teaching. The currently reigning C++ prof has a fetish for overloading every single operator. Last year's operating systems prof didn't know how to use fork() or IPC. Students have to make up for their profs' bad teaching by learning the material on their own time, which only makes things worse.)
This is what's killing the computer science societies at Carleton. There are no longer people with free time available to volunteer to run the offices of Nexus. There are rumors circulating already about more general services like CCSS shutting down, and the problem's only going to get worse. With CCSS and Nexus, it's becoming the case where the only people who actually have the time to run the services are first-year people. And now we're starting to find that we can't even attract their help. (Recent graduates are not allowed to help, thanks to some rather bizarre restrictions on clubs and societies, so this is what we're stuck with.)
If this keeps up, we really are going to lose all of our societies.
Really, whomever got moderation points that day should've read the FAQ on moderating. If you're going to moderate down, at least give a good reason for it. "Troll" is for when someone's trying to start a flamewar.
Honestly, people who don't know that a wink smiley means "just kidding" really have no business getting mod points.
...hmm. Yeah, I guess Card Captor Sakura kinda qualifies.. although, considering the way the relationships fly around in that series, there'd probably be a lotta people out there who'd vehemently disagree with you.:)
I saw Memories in a darkened showing room at Anime North two years ago. Few people showed up to see it, because it was on at the same time as the cosplay. (Truth be told, I saw it because they wouldn't let me back into the cosplay..)
It really is an amazing anime. At the time, it really messed with my head, and I never really saw the whole thing, so I'm really yearning for a chance to watch it again. I'd love to see it brought over.
I think a lot of this "old style" anime has sort of been eclipsed by the "my head hurts" style of anime. Examples of these include Evangelion, which really busted up the mecha genre, Shoujo Kakumeki Utena, and Lain.
The latest entry into this sequence of "my head hurts" anime series is a wonderfully subversive series called FLCL. (pronounced Furi Kuri (foo-ree koo-ree)) If you've never seen a mech come out of a guy's head before, then this is a show for you.
I dunno. It looks like all of the "good" stuff has been replaced with either "I'm on crack" stuff, or really whacked out slapstick. (ex; Excel Saga) Not that I'm complaining; it just takes some getting used to.
James
Genetics and binary files
on
Golden Rice
·
· Score: 2
Your analogy's a bit wrong.
You see, they're not giving away the source code at all; this is more equivalent to a binary. Genetic engineering has more in common with reverse engineering than it does with looking at the source code.
Genetic engineering, therefor, is more like a crack or patch for a piece of software. Just try and tell me that you've never used a crack or hacked piece of warez before.
Want to take this a step further? How about comparing it to an RFC? He's essentially said that hey, this is what we've done to rice. We've added some beta carotine. Cool. If you want it, to test it out, be my guest. Just, could you help me get these patent lawyers off my back..?
Of course, your argument is more about the ecosystem, and how introducing this may cause side effects.
It's true that the ecosystem's a pretty fragile system. But you've also got to remember that it's pretty sturdy, too. Look at this crop of Zebra Mussels, for instance, that have filled up the great lakes. Everyone in the industry thought this'd be the end of the world... so why haven't we heard about them in ten plus years?
Granted, not everything just disappears, but there's a reason our ecosystem's survived this long. Survival by any means is built into everything we see. How long have trees been around, anyways? If you think about it, the most disastrous thing that could possibly happen would be that humanity'd be wiped out. And considering the type of people that exist today, I should think it'd be about time for a little shake-up.
To all of you who think frankenfood is wrong, let's put this in perspective. He's trying to manufacture genetic code to help people stay alive. To do this, all he's done is mix some beta carotine into rice. Very straight-forward. Yet in the US and Canada, there are currently researchers pulling apart human embryos, trying to "find" the cure for cystic fibrosis, and several other notable diseases. To do this, they aren't pulling apart rice embryos; they're pulling apart human embryos and protoplasts.
Forget for the moment the fact that they're using human genetics to accomplish this. Now it isn't that I say the goal isn't noble, but why do I get the feeling that, should a "cure" be found tomorrow, people aren't going to worry so much about polluting the human genetic code and the effects on the ecosystem as they are in making sure these people get Nobel prizes..?
How about those who attempt to benefit from these discoveries directly? Are people who get genetic alterations to combat illnesses going to be called frankenpersons, and be relegated to second-class citizens with special emmigration requirements? Will they have to pay the patent holder if they want to have children?
My charge is this; are we really so bold that we believe only we humans should benefit from genetics? Are we so arrogant that we believe only ourselves to be capable of handling the side effects properly? And lastly, are we so arrogant that we believe that more damage that can come from genetically engineering one grain of rice than can come from genetically engineering the single most destructive animal on the face of the earth?
1) Celcius. That whole Farenheit thing is stupid. It makes much more sense for the temperature of water to freeze to be 0. I don't want this Farenheit B.S. anymore.
2) Metric system. All of our cars (that last more than 3 years) are built using this system of measurement. Our cars have kilometers per hour below miles per hour. Our drugs are measured in this system. It is a much easier system to remember, and is much better organized than the crazy crap we use.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this already attempted once before? If I remember correctly, I think what happened was that a bunch of morons started shooting down roadsigns, etc.
Not that I'm saying that it'd automatically be doomed to failure, if it were attempted again. I'm just saying that you should wait for that sector of the population to die out before attempting to reimplement metric.
A much better idea would be to start replacing existing signs, etc., with a dual system, whereby information is listed in both imperial and metric.
Even then, I wouldn't be too optimistic. Forgive my Canadian bias, but Americans just don't seem all that flexible in this regard. It would require changing school curriculum, and seeing as what's taught to children appears to be a somewhat taboo topic.. (just look at the arguments over creationism) I doubt you're going to be able to get the population to change, unless something drastic happens. (And I mean something drastic. Look how little came of the Columbine shootings; instead of going after the source, or trying to figure out the truth, you see the media and the police demonizing a whole innocent sector of the population. I get the sense that, even if something on the scale of Golipoli happened to a group of Americans due to an imperial/metric mixup, they'd find some way to shrug it off as a result of poor schooling by their teachers, or blame it on the shoes they were wearing.)
In the meantime, if you're interested in moving to a place that uses metric, I should point out that Canada's always an option. We've had metric for a good while now, and for a lot of us, it's the only one we know. (Although there are quite a few imperial mainstays. There's a tendancy to measure peoples' height in feet and inches, still, and the same with building materials. But other than that, and meat being weighed by the pound..)
It's a matter of how annoying it becomes. Honestly, if you accidentally clicked somewhere and got the start bar, when all you really wanted was to copy the files you have selected, would you be impressed?
Usually, your start bar is pretty cluttered. All of the implementations of the "start bar on right click" for Windows that I've seen all suffer from the same problem; compounded clutter. You don't know how annoying it is to open up that dialog, and realize you have to scroll half of the screen because some moron decided it'd be great to put.. oh.. control panel-related junk on the right-button menu.
This clutter causes the menu to "move to fit." So let's say I'm in the lower right corner of the screen, and I right click for the start bar. It pops up, but to the left of my pointer. This is non-standard, so I have to scroll over to where-ever to select what I want.
Of course, this raises another issue; the start bar always appears in a different spot upon right-click. So, as a user, I have to retrain myself each time I right click in order to find what I'm looking for. At least with a start menu, before I even look at what's available, I know where to move my mouse pointer.
Getting back to right-click menus, personally I think they're great. I just wish that they were designed as a pie-menu around my cursor, so I could just move my mouse a little bit to select something, instead of having to scroll vertically like that. This way, if I bring up the menu accidentally, I can also have the option of moving my mouse outside of the pie, and having the menu disappear automatically.
The only thing to remember with such a setup is that the menu would have to put the most-used options on the top and bottom. (People don't have as much horizontal mouse control as they have vertical.)
Likewise, I'd like to see a mouse with a trackball on top, instead of a roller, so that instead of just being able to scroll up and down, I can scroll from side to side too. T'would be very useful for viewing images on the web, reticles for weapons in games, etc.
Read the licence for the current versions of Office. They can do this already. Pay especially close attention to where it says that your licence can be revoked without needing to give a reason. Beautiful.
If it's a request, go ahead and make a sound proposal. If it's a demand, then you might want to do the following:
Seriously, if they really want it, give it to them. Give them a list of every last thing that you'll need in order to make it work. Write down any additional network support costs that you might forsee. Add in any costs for additional firewalls, etc. Make damned sure you add in your overtime for the cost of the migration.
Then make sure you back up everything. In triplicate.
Make sure one of those copies is off-site. (At your house, for instance.)
If they really really want to move over to Exchange, let them. Just make sure you have a migration path backwards. And that you charge them for all overtime that occurs as a result. (It might be nice to get the names of the people who demanded the switch-over in writing, too, just so that you'll have someone to scapegoat if it totally screws everything up.)
This is what I would do, if it were a small company with few servers. If it were a larger network, where you have more than one office or intranet hub, with a mixed client-OS environment, I wouldn't even think about migrating. I don't know much about Exchange, but see if you can add an Exchange server for just the people who want the "added functionality." (And if you go that route, make _sure_ that everyone who uses it is informed that there will be no additional support provided to users of that box, and that uptime for that server is not guaranteed.)
Worst case, your boss is a moron, and fires you because he thinks you're incompetent with Exchange--before hiring you back a week later whenever the three MSCEs he hired to replace you destroy the rest of the network. (This is when that off-site backup you kept comes in handy.) Best case, only a few people use the new server, while the bulk of users continue to use the old system.
AMD bought the Alpha technology for SMP. That essentially means that they can throw in as many processors as they want.
Other nice thing about the Alpha technology is direct, continuous access to the system bus. The Intel solution's more of a hack, switching back and forth between the CPUs in the system.
I suspect that SMP AMD will be more expensive than the Intel solution as a result, though.
Canadians really shouldn't care less who wins this little tug-of-war in the US over president. Why?
Simple. If Gore wins, then there's continued funding for the military, which means that active attempts to keep foreign governments from getting too war-like will continue.
If Bush wins, the US dollar will go in the toilet, and finally the Canadian loonie will get the value it so richly deserves..!
Go ahead and flip your coin, Florida; I'm a winner either way!;-)
Elections aren't necessary. This is an advertising point of contact, remember. As a business decision, I suspect they formed based on concensus rather than election.
After all, he who has the money makes the rules. In this case, I'm just danged glad that it's these guys who're providing the money.;-)
(If you think about it, it's better not to have the positions elected, because if they're elected, that means that each candidate has to advertise, etc., who they are, whatever. This way, they get the most well-known and knowledgeable people. In the PR world, having a good name and/or good relations with other companies is more important. If they were elected at all, I suspect it was by the people who were going to be working with them.)
I had a similar problem with a build of Mozilla a few weeks ago. However, my problem appeared to a tad worse; I was running it under Windows 98, and for some reason it wasn't releasing the leaked memory even after closing down Mozilla.
I sure hope there isn't a similar problem with Netscape 6, or else things could get ugly.
Slashdot Mirror
Keanu Reaves..?! I thought that was Wesley Crusher!
True, but by the same token, whenever I, working for a technology company, am installing software on a company computer, am I legally able to enter into agreements on behalf of my company? I can tell you right now that I'm not. Yet, I as a low-level employee have been faced with the task of installing everything from Windows through to Visual Studio. This is not in my job description, but I do so anyways, as I have been authorized to do so by my boss.
;-)
By the same token, the people at Microsoft tech are given the job of talking with customers, and are authorized to recieve feedback from customers for bug-finding purposes, etc. If my program had a bug in it, and I was sending it to their tech people for bug-checking, are they not authorized to enter into a contract to view my code? Remember, in the event that there is no EULA, my code falls under the rules of contract outlined by copyright, where fair use, etc., comes into play.
Come on; just try and tell me that you don't think Microsoft has ever gotten a piece of code before with a huge "COPYRIGHT ID SOFTWARE; reproduction strictly prohibited without prior authorization from ID SOFTWARE" label on the top. (Or substitute your favorite software company. Lucasarts..? Borland-Inprise..? Corel, even.) This is also a contract; are they not entering into it on behalf of Microsoft when they look at the code?
(My argument is not limited to Microsoft, remember; I realize that Microsoft probably doesn't allow any external source code to make it's way into their walls. The argument's more of a theoretical one--if I thought Microsoft were this vulnerable, I'd be off sending emails right now instead of posting on Slashdot..
Every time I hear about EULAs, I keep having the same thought. That thought is to profit off of these companies' stupidity. I would ensnare them in an EULA of my own, using the same methods that they typically use to ensnare me.
.NET products for the fee of one cent per package)
:)
The project would proceed as follows; I would send off two emails to Microsoft, to the actual email address of a known Microsoft employee. The emails would be HTML, which would facilitate the following.
The second email would contain the source code for a short application I had written. The program would be my own work, copyright and all, written for a non-specific target platform. (But it would be written under Linux.) The application source would include several markers indicating who I am, what the program does at every point in it's execution, and a thank you message.
At the bottom of the HTML code, there would be a small image that would load from my website, which would increment a counter and provide exact information on what the IP address of the access was, and the time it was accessed.
The subject of the second email would be "Code which causes a new bug in the compiler."
The first email I would send would then be the EULA for the program. In it, I would specify the usual disclaimers about the program, the general limitations on use (showing it to other persons, etc.) and the usual "fill up space" legalese that's required for such contracts. Then, at the very end of the contract, just before whatever, I'd insert a paragraph stating some rather painful concessions that Microsoft would have to make to me. (..in the form of a yearly licencing fee for said software, regardless of use, and the freedom to copy and resell Microsoft
Lastly, I'd title the first email something like "Questions about EULA? PLEASE READ!"
Typically, the way this would work would be that as soon as the cookie-image did it's business, I would then have my lawyer send off a registered letter to Microsoft, containing the emails and the resulting logs, and asking for the initial cheque of my yearly royalty.
Anyone have any comments on the legality of such a scheme?
Personally, I'm curious as to whether or not the fact that licencing agreements in software packages sold in Canada are actually legal if they aren't included in both official languages. In order for something to be suitable for sale around here, documentation has to traditionally be in both official languages. If it isn't, I'm curious as to whether or not it could be considered unfit for sale, and thusly make the EULA unenforceable.
SDL is a compatibility layer, and for 3D, it uses OpenGL. This person's looking for something that would replace OpenGL, too.
I recommend checking out the GGI project. It's essentially what you're looking for, short of the audio stuff. They've got input support through libGII, graphics through libGGI with specialized functions for advanced 2D in libGGI2D and 3D stuff in libGGI3D.
There's even a port of X to it, so you can run your X server "boxed off" so that X crashes don't take down the system. (Assuming you have a card that it supports; it really only supports about a half dozen chipsets--the ones the developers own.)
The GGI people had kernel-level drivers in KGI a year before the X people even started taking DRI seriously, and their monitor drivers auto-detect the hardware attached, no modelines or nothin'.
It's a shame, imo, that they never were more popular, but they were shunned at every turn. GGI never seems to make it into any of the commercial distros, and Linus apparently flipped over the idea of putting graphics logic in the kernel. (How quickly times change..)
In any event, the project link is http://www.ggi-project.org. Good luck..
The UIUC ACM is very active. We have well over 100 members and many SIGs. Each sig usually works on a project per year. Past projects have included: Homebrew OS, Drunk Driving Simulator, Laser Guided Turret, AI Learning Robotic Arm, and a Real Time Artistic Renderer.
Wow! I think I'm starting to develop a serious case of club envy. : )
For anyone interested in what the BOFH is, it's the Bastard Operator From Hell. They're stories about a tech support guy who burns his customers at every turn. Here's a site with an archive containing a good 90% of what's written:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~bofh/
There are typically three componenets to every pixel in the image you see. A red component, a blue component, and a green component. When working with images, there tends to be another component used on top of these three, called the alpha channel. Essentially, the alpha defines how transparent each pixel is. (ie; how much of whatever's below it is mixed in with it. This gives the illusion of one image showing through another.)
Alpha blending's simply become a necessity these days. The fact that it's taken X this long to even contemplate getting true support for it's a danged shame, but better late than never I suppose.
As an aside, to all of those of you who're suggesting people check out Berlin instead, I would caution you to hold your horses. Sure it supports alpha blending, and a host of new features, but it's not a drop-in replacement for X. X and Berlin are totally different beasts, with totally different purposes. (ie; X is a dumb terminal, displaying whatever the client programs want it to, while Berlin tends to be more object-oriented, with objects relied upon by clients having the capability of running on the server-side.)
How lively is it, though? Carleton University has a chapter too, but it looks like it's pretty much dead. (Uh, check out the programming contest page..)
Not to be a bitch, but it sounds like you simply have a challenging Computer Science curriculum. With the influx of people into the disciple brought about by its high media profile, it seems like a reasonable reaction from your professors.
I don't disagree with you, and I welcome the increased competition between students for those top marks. However, whenever it becomes less of an intellectual challenge, and more one of an endurance race, the societies are usually the first things to suffer. This was the point I was trying to make.
I should probably point out the flip-side to a lot of the statements I made in my original post:
- The 204 prof mentioned is still quite green, as he is only in his second year of teaching. His primary language is not english, and neither is that of the TAs for the course, which is probably where this confusion comes from. (I haven't had him as a prof.)
- The 304 class I mentioned is definitely one of the most useful courses I have ever taken thus far. The lectures were superb. My one beef is with ObjecTime, the CASE tool we're required to use for the course. Whenever you're taking a course on how to write well-designed code, you don't want to use a tool that falls apart at the seams an average of five times an hour.
- The prof who didn't know how to fork() has since "parted company" with the university.
The bottom line, as I said, is that our societies are dropping like flies. There tend to be very few people who have time to actually devote to projects. Whenever the Nexus project was started three years ago, there were a good half-dozen plus projects in the works. They've since all died, with no new ones taking their places.
It's hard for someone like myself to glance south at a place like MIT, or Berkeley, and their infamy, and then look back at my own institution and see the equivalent slowly dying in it's infancy from lack of interest. It's not the hard work I'm complaining about, it's the absence of spare time people have for such explorations.
As to how this applies to the XCF, all I'm saying is that perhaps the undergrads at Berkeley are feeling a similar pinch, when it comes down to the spare time that they're alotted to work on their pet projects. Perhaps someone should welcome the XCF to the real world, too.
I don't know anything about XCC, but maybe I can shed a little light on the issue by telling you what's going on at my own university, up here in Canada.
Currently, at Carleton University, there exists a club with a similar purpose called Nexus. It was intended as a student-run research group, whereby students could gain access to the equipment they needed for certain projects, and have a better way of finding other people to join teams to work on said projects.
It's in danger of dying out this year.
What's killing it? I would suggest that it's the computer science department itself. In the last few years, the faculty of the computer science school at Carleton University has increased the workload of students exponentially. At the current state, we have the following "killer" courses, to weed out people who can't program:
204 - C++, the profs require you to use Visual C++, with the intent of forcing you to recognize all of the little things that are wrong with Microsoft's compiler. (Their words, not mine.) One of the killer assignments includes mixing operator overloading, templates, and exceptions. This is turning into a really frustrating course for a lot of people, because it's supposed to be an intro to C++ course. It's turning into a fight-the-compiler course.
304 - Object Oriented Software Engineering. You are forced to use ObjecTime, which is the most crash-prone, unuseable, finicky, flaky CASE tool I have ever seen. This is also a group work class, which only compounds the problems for a lot of people. Generally, the class is very beneficial, but with the amount of work and spare time it takes, and the required use of ObjecTime it definitely qualifies as killer.
384 - Algorithms. I agree that this should be a "killer" course. But there is a lot that isn't taught in this course that should be, simply because we're TESTED on it afterwards. They use the CLR book, too, which means that a lot of your own questions are never answered by the book, as there is no solution guide available to students. (And the authors don't want this to change.)
484 - Algorithms II. This is the course that's supposed to be THE killer. And from what I've heard, it is. (I'm only in third year right now.)
In addition to these required, core courses, we're also required to take several other courses in third year and above. Our options can be considered killer, too, as some of them (307, which is a Scheme/Prolog course, and requires as one assignment that you reimplement scheme within scheme; 302, a compiler course that I've also heard was a real time consumer) are just plain insane. Especially whenever you consider that each of these students is potentially taking a full course load, involving at least four other courses. (I've heard many a story of a student dropping all of their other courses just so they could get one of the above-mentioned courses enough of their time.)
It really doesn't help that we've got some really really crappy TAs at times. I've had friends in 204, Intro to C++, show me assignments they've gotten back with "WOULD NOT COMPILE" written on it. The reasoning of the TAs was as follows; I put the disk in the drive, I opened the project, and I hit compile. It stopped compiling, so it mustn't work. (In this case, it was because the TAs were compiling it on the disk. Visual C++ requires a good 10 megs swap space to compile anything, after all.) I really pity the people handing in this last assignment, which is the above-mentioned killer assignment for that course. The only TA is flying back to China as soon as he's finished marking them, so students will have absolutely no recourse if it doesn't run. (The new C++ prof absolutely refuses to remark assignments.)
(Part of the problem, I think, is that a lot of the staff is just plain bad at teaching. The currently reigning C++ prof has a fetish for overloading every single operator. Last year's operating systems prof didn't know how to use fork() or IPC. Students have to make up for their profs' bad teaching by learning the material on their own time, which only makes things worse.)
This is what's killing the computer science societies at Carleton. There are no longer people with free time available to volunteer to run the offices of Nexus. There are rumors circulating already about more general services like CCSS shutting down, and the problem's only going to get worse. With CCSS and Nexus, it's becoming the case where the only people who actually have the time to run the services are first-year people. And now we're starting to find that we can't even attract their help. (Recent graduates are not allowed to help, thanks to some rather bizarre restrictions on clubs and societies, so this is what we're stuck with.)
If this keeps up, we really are going to lose all of our societies.
At least while sober. :-)
At least someone thinks so.. *sigh*
Really, whomever got moderation points that day should've read the FAQ on moderating. If you're going to moderate down, at least give a good reason for it. "Troll" is for when someone's trying to start a flamewar.
Honestly, people who don't know that a wink smiley means "just kidding" really have no business getting mod points.
(Moderate this down to offtopic..)
Perfectly innocent?
:)
...hmm. Yeah, I guess Card Captor Sakura kinda qualifies.. although, considering the way the relationships fly around in that series, there'd probably be a lotta people out there who'd vehemently disagree with you.
I saw Memories in a darkened showing room at Anime North two years ago. Few people showed up to see it, because it was on at the same time as the cosplay. (Truth be told, I saw it because they wouldn't let me back into the cosplay..)
It really is an amazing anime. At the time, it really messed with my head, and I never really saw the whole thing, so I'm really yearning for a chance to watch it again. I'd love to see it brought over.
I think a lot of this "old style" anime has sort of been eclipsed by the "my head hurts" style of anime. Examples of these include Evangelion, which really busted up the mecha genre, Shoujo Kakumeki Utena, and Lain.
The latest entry into this sequence of "my head hurts" anime series is a wonderfully subversive series called FLCL. (pronounced Furi Kuri (foo-ree koo-ree)) If you've never seen a mech come out of a guy's head before, then this is a show for you.
I dunno. It looks like all of the "good" stuff has been replaced with either "I'm on crack" stuff, or really whacked out slapstick. (ex; Excel Saga) Not that I'm complaining; it just takes some getting used to.
James
Your analogy's a bit wrong.
You see, they're not giving away the source code at all; this is more equivalent to a binary. Genetic engineering has more in common with reverse engineering than it does with looking at the source code.
Genetic engineering, therefor, is more like a crack or patch for a piece of software. Just try and tell me that you've never used a crack or hacked piece of warez before.
Want to take this a step further? How about comparing it to an RFC? He's essentially said that hey, this is what we've done to rice. We've added some beta carotine. Cool. If you want it, to test it out, be my guest. Just, could you help me get these patent lawyers off my back..?
Of course, your argument is more about the ecosystem, and how introducing this may cause side effects.
It's true that the ecosystem's a pretty fragile system. But you've also got to remember that it's pretty sturdy, too. Look at this crop of Zebra Mussels, for instance, that have filled up the great lakes. Everyone in the industry thought this'd be the end of the world... so why haven't we heard about them in ten plus years?
Granted, not everything just disappears, but there's a reason our ecosystem's survived this long. Survival by any means is built into everything we see. How long have trees been around, anyways? If you think about it, the most disastrous thing that could possibly happen would be that humanity'd be wiped out. And considering the type of people that exist today, I should think it'd be about time for a little shake-up.
To all of you who think frankenfood is wrong, let's put this in perspective. He's trying to manufacture genetic code to help people stay alive. To do this, all he's done is mix some beta carotine into rice. Very straight-forward. Yet in the US and Canada, there are currently researchers pulling apart human embryos, trying to "find" the cure for cystic fibrosis, and several other notable diseases. To do this, they aren't pulling apart rice embryos; they're pulling apart human embryos and protoplasts.
Forget for the moment the fact that they're using human genetics to accomplish this. Now it isn't that I say the goal isn't noble, but why do I get the feeling that, should a "cure" be found tomorrow, people aren't going to worry so much about polluting the human genetic code and the effects on the ecosystem as they are in making sure these people get Nobel prizes..?
How about those who attempt to benefit from these discoveries directly? Are people who get genetic alterations to combat illnesses going to be called frankenpersons, and be relegated to second-class citizens with special emmigration requirements? Will they have to pay the patent holder if they want to have children?
My charge is this; are we really so bold that we believe only we humans should benefit from genetics? Are we so arrogant that we believe only ourselves to be capable of handling the side effects properly? And lastly, are we so arrogant that we believe that more damage that can come from genetically engineering one grain of rice than can come from genetically engineering the single most destructive animal on the face of the earth?
1) Celcius. That whole Farenheit thing is stupid. It makes much more sense for the temperature of water to freeze to be 0. I don't want this Farenheit B.S. anymore.
2) Metric system. All of our cars (that last more than 3 years) are built using this system of measurement. Our cars have kilometers per hour below miles per hour. Our drugs are measured in this system. It is a much easier system to remember, and is much better organized than the crazy crap we use.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this already attempted once before? If I remember correctly, I think what happened was that a bunch of morons started shooting down roadsigns, etc.
Not that I'm saying that it'd automatically be doomed to failure, if it were attempted again. I'm just saying that you should wait for that sector of the population to die out before attempting to reimplement metric.
A much better idea would be to start replacing existing signs, etc., with a dual system, whereby information is listed in both imperial and metric.
Even then, I wouldn't be too optimistic. Forgive my Canadian bias, but Americans just don't seem all that flexible in this regard. It would require changing school curriculum, and seeing as what's taught to children appears to be a somewhat taboo topic.. (just look at the arguments over creationism) I doubt you're going to be able to get the population to change, unless something drastic happens. (And I mean something drastic. Look how little came of the Columbine shootings; instead of going after the source, or trying to figure out the truth, you see the media and the police demonizing a whole innocent sector of the population. I get the sense that, even if something on the scale of Golipoli happened to a group of Americans due to an imperial/metric mixup, they'd find some way to shrug it off as a result of poor schooling by their teachers, or blame it on the shoes they were wearing.)
In the meantime, if you're interested in moving to a place that uses metric, I should point out that Canada's always an option. We've had metric for a good while now, and for a lot of us, it's the only one we know. (Although there are quite a few imperial mainstays. There's a tendancy to measure peoples' height in feet and inches, still, and the same with building materials. But other than that, and meat being weighed by the pound..)
It's a matter of how annoying it becomes. Honestly, if you accidentally clicked somewhere and got the start bar, when all you really wanted was to copy the files you have selected, would you be impressed?
;-)
Usually, your start bar is pretty cluttered. All of the implementations of the "start bar on right click" for Windows that I've seen all suffer from the same problem; compounded clutter. You don't know how annoying it is to open up that dialog, and realize you have to scroll half of the screen because some moron decided it'd be great to put.. oh.. control panel-related junk on the right-button menu.
This clutter causes the menu to "move to fit." So let's say I'm in the lower right corner of the screen, and I right click for the start bar. It pops up, but to the left of my pointer. This is non-standard, so I have to scroll over to where-ever to select what I want.
Of course, this raises another issue; the start bar always appears in a different spot upon right-click. So, as a user, I have to retrain myself each time I right click in order to find what I'm looking for. At least with a start menu, before I even look at what's available, I know where to move my mouse pointer.
Getting back to right-click menus, personally I think they're great. I just wish that they were designed as a pie-menu around my cursor, so I could just move my mouse a little bit to select something, instead of having to scroll vertically like that. This way, if I bring up the menu accidentally, I can also have the option of moving my mouse outside of the pie, and having the menu disappear automatically.
The only thing to remember with such a setup is that the menu would have to put the most-used options on the top and bottom. (People don't have as much horizontal mouse control as they have vertical.)
Likewise, I'd like to see a mouse with a trackball on top, instead of a roller, so that instead of just being able to scroll up and down, I can scroll from side to side too. T'would be very useful for viewing images on the web, reticles for weapons in games, etc.
..*sigh*..
Ah well, a guy can dream, can't he?
Read the licence for the current versions of Office. They can do this already. Pay especially close attention to where it says that your licence can be revoked without needing to give a reason. Beautiful.
Question; is it a request, or a demand?
If it's a request, go ahead and make a sound proposal. If it's a demand, then you might want to do the following:
Seriously, if they really want it, give it to them. Give them a list of every last thing that you'll need in order to make it work. Write down any additional network support costs that you might forsee. Add in any costs for additional firewalls, etc. Make damned sure you add in your overtime for the cost of the migration.
Then make sure you back up everything. In triplicate.
Make sure one of those copies is off-site. (At your house, for instance.)
If they really really want to move over to Exchange, let them. Just make sure you have a migration path backwards. And that you charge them for all overtime that occurs as a result. (It might be nice to get the names of the people who demanded the switch-over in writing, too, just so that you'll have someone to scapegoat if it totally screws everything up.)
This is what I would do, if it were a small company with few servers. If it were a larger network, where you have more than one office or intranet hub, with a mixed client-OS environment, I wouldn't even think about migrating. I don't know much about Exchange, but see if you can add an Exchange server for just the people who want the "added functionality." (And if you go that route, make _sure_ that everyone who uses it is informed that there will be no additional support provided to users of that box, and that uptime for that server is not guaranteed.)
Worst case, your boss is a moron, and fires you because he thinks you're incompetent with Exchange--before hiring you back a week later whenever the three MSCEs he hired to replace you destroy the rest of the network. (This is when that off-site backup you kept comes in handy.) Best case, only a few people use the new server, while the bulk of users continue to use the old system.
Good luck!
James
AMD bought the Alpha technology for SMP. That essentially means that they can throw in as many processors as they want.
Other nice thing about the Alpha technology is direct, continuous access to the system bus. The Intel solution's more of a hack, switching back and forth between the CPUs in the system.
I suspect that SMP AMD will be more expensive than the Intel solution as a result, though.
James
Canadians really shouldn't care less who wins this little tug-of-war in the US over president. Why?
;-)
Simple. If Gore wins, then there's continued funding for the military, which means that active attempts to keep foreign governments from getting too war-like will continue.
If Bush wins, the US dollar will go in the toilet, and finally the Canadian loonie will get the value it so richly deserves..!
Go ahead and flip your coin, Florida; I'm a winner either way!
James
A Tim Horton's on every corner, and no guns or immigrants.
Exactly! We don't have immigrants--we have new Canadians!
James
Elections aren't necessary. This is an advertising point of contact, remember. As a business decision, I suspect they formed based on concensus rather than election.
;-)
After all, he who has the money makes the rules. In this case, I'm just danged glad that it's these guys who're providing the money.
(If you think about it, it's better not to have the positions elected, because if they're elected, that means that each candidate has to advertise, etc., who they are, whatever. This way, they get the most well-known and knowledgeable people. In the PR world, having a good name and/or good relations with other companies is more important. If they were elected at all, I suspect it was by the people who were going to be working with them.)
James
I had a similar problem with a build of Mozilla a few weeks ago. However, my problem appeared to a tad worse; I was running it under Windows 98, and for some reason it wasn't releasing the leaked memory even after closing down Mozilla.
I sure hope there isn't a similar problem with Netscape 6, or else things could get ugly.