I don't think that Judge Jackson was actually doing this because he thought that it was such a "matter of national importance." I think it may have had something to do with the number of times appealate courts have reversed his descisions... I thought that the deadline for him to do this had passed?
man, CNN is just stating the obvious. To give an idea on what is happening with online security/privacy on the internet, I'll give you some background on the NSA. The National Security Administration has banned export of strong cryptography - so they can read what people are sending. The NSA does not reveal any cryptanalytical weaknesses that they find. They make their hardware encryption devices tamperproof, so you can't see that they have put in a backdoor. As technology and organizations like the NSA evolve, privacy will just get worse and worse.
Nanosatellites are all good and everything, but I think that we have better things to spend our money on. Nanosatellites sound fine, but, talking about nanotechnology, when am I going to get free food and perfect genes? Nanosatellites seem so, well, small now.......
These are advantages, but to me, with the exception of the lack of an iMac port, Be has more compelling advantages. What I'm saying is that, based on your subject title, you came off sounding like a "if it ain't open source, I won't run it" zealot, whereas I prefer to run software based on the product, not the development model.
The Personal edition _IS_ the "real deal!" The Pro edition just has some extra stuff bundled! I don't see LINUX including any proprietary codec's with it's free distros either! Or with the commercial distros, for that matter! Why? Because they cost _money_ for the company to liscence, and it would be illegal to give them away for free without paying Fraunhoffer or whoever the liscence fees. Unfourtunately, Be probably will never open source the OS until they run out of money and die. I personally am not trying to get away from closed source OS's, I am trying to get away from Crappy OS's (like windows.) This has lead me to Linux, but I prefer Be and OpenBSD.
There is a Linux version, and it is trivial to set it up in its own partition (just create the partition, run FreeBe, and use the built-in "installer" program. If you happen to have version 4.5 on CD, you can use Partition Magic Be Edition.) But my point was that the actual OS is the same, regardless of how it installs itself.
The file system does not "feel faster" than it's competition. The OS in general does. I thought I had explained that in my post. If someone would post benchmarks, as you suggested, that would clarify a lot in this discussion.
This is not trying to sound like flamebait, but have you ever actually modified the Linux kernel? Have you even compiled it, or do you use whatever was given to you by your installer? Though the open source development model has some good advantages, which you mentioned (ie more ports, a million bug-spotting coders) for most people, it is only a means to an end, and if that end is achieved by other means, why should you care? I'm not saying you don't have good reasons for wanting OSS, I'm just asking to hear what those reasons are.
BeOS IS free. The only difference between the free and non-free versions of Be are that the proprietary stuff that Be had to pay for (the BinkJet drivers, the MP3 codec, the 128-bit SSL liscence) have been removed. Other than that, it is the exact same OS, bundled with the utilities to run it from a file on a FAT32 partition.
It is important to remember that XFree86 is not the only X server available. I have never used any of the proprietary accelerated X servers, but they may offer performence that is significantly better (anyone use them? wanna comment?)
It was also designed to take full advantage of SMP, especially the inherent parallelness of Mulitmedia... meaning that it's greatest stregnth was running multimedia on an SMP box (like the BeBox.)
The reason the hardware that was used was used, was because the person doing the benchmarking at BeNews has nothing better. If anyone wants tests done with other hardware, then send your nVidia card to BeNews!
I haven't actually seen the numbers, but BFS was designed by an ex-sgi employee who worked on XFS... Without a doubt be "feels" faster, but that is only because it is a clean and efficient GUI (which linux doesn't have yet... at least not one as fast as Be's.) Be also is about to get a network re-write that should put it on level ground with Linux as far as that is concerned... Linux has a performence advantage over Be in that it is written in C, not C++, it is highly compiler-optimized, and it is a monolithic kernel. However, this means that Be's code is simpler to understand and especially to port. (I would think... I have never actually seen Be's source, of course.)
The 'public access to information' part of the donations is basically giving people in the Pacific Northwest computers (yes yes....with windows installed) with internet on them. By giving them windows based computers, it _is_ extending the microsoft stranglehold. But I mean, what is he supposed to do, put linux on them? It is certainly better than nothing. Also, the other part of his donations, the global health donations, are completely unrelated to computers, internet, and the microsoft monopoly. It does things like giving vaccines to people in poverty. How is that possibly pushing microsoft products? I am not a windows advocate or anything (personally, i use openBSD and beOS), but I do find it unfair that a pretty bright person who employs some unscrupulous business tactics is labeled as an enemy of humanity. Sure, windows sucks, but people shouldn't take their anger out on him.
bungie is a great game company. myth and myth 2 were great. oni is a good idea (although the actual engine looks a bit dated), and halo looks like it's going to rock. so bungie was bought by microsoft. Before every open-source fanatic on/. goes on ranting about how bill gates is the devil (btw, he's not: he donates billions and billions of dollars to charity every year - more money than most of us/. people will ever make or begin to fathom), really think what they will do to bungie. Probably only two things will happen: 1) everything will be ported to the x-box, not the playstation2 or anything else. 2) some of bungie's funny stuff (tons of easter eggs in myth...) won't come out anymore.
This 'random pad' scheme is simply a form of steganography, which is basically a form of hiding data. While it may hide the data, it doesn't actually do anything for the internet censorship issue. People on the internet should be able to SAY WHAT THEY WANT TO SAY, WITHOUT NEEDING TO RESORT TO STEGANOGRAPHY OR CRYPTOGRAPHY. To solve this issue, we don't need another way of hiding our messages from the secret police (We already have strong cryptography). We need to reserve our right of free speech! There shouldn't be a need to circumvent the law when it is the law itself that gives us the right to free speech! Where did the first amendment go.....
You'd know that the word "niggardly" has nothing to do with the word "nigger." Someone moderately famous in NYC got fired for using the word "niggardly," thus sparking a controversy that ended with him getting his job back (I think.) The word "niggardly" means what the Anonymous coward said it meant, and is not a racial slur.
what is the best easter egg of all time? None other than the dopefish!! It has become bigger and bigger ever since its first appearance in Commander Keen. It was last seen in the Well of Wishes in quake 2...or so i think.
with other distro's "out of the box." At least, that is my understanding. The linux that is used has been modified to support the Crusoe's features. However, sincs it is all open-source, it should be trivial to get another distro working on it. It won't be possible to install it right off the CD, that's all. Also, is the version of linux running on top of the x86 emulation, or has it been compiled directly for the Crusoe's VLIW instruction set? After all, the whole point of VLIW was to leave less to the processor (because so much real estate on the advanced RISC chips is going towards branch prediction and such) and mvoe that work to the compiler. I'll bet that the performence gains from native compiled code would rock (not that I have seen the design of the Crusoe or would be competent to interpret it.) Still, one of the great benefits of open-source software is that it can be re-compiled for any platform. I would wonder if Linus or any of the other Transmeta guys could comment (we know you read/. Come on now.)
man, people find these comments funny? i mean, with jokes like "i don't have 8mb of ram, neither should you", linus is a regular comedian, isn't he? He can code operating systems, but he can't make a joke. no flamebait, but this stuff isn't exactly hilarious (i'm not blaming him, either: this stuff is in the linux source code, for god's sake. it's doesn't _need_ to be funny, and its not).
I don't think that on the grand scale of hollywood movies, the/. effect is so big. I mean, it can cripple non-commercial sites that don't expect more than a couple thousand or tens of thousands of hits per day, but when we are talking about hundreds of millions of tickets, it is not such a big deal.
For swordfighting games, I think that an actual sword is definetly the best interface possible. Have you ever tried playing Die By the Sword? It was a great game, but it's VSIM technology which used a mouse to control the sword was too damn hard to learn. An actual sword is very intuitive... Though I suppose force feedback would be almost neccesary to make it accesible to "casual gamers." I think the best way to implement this game would be in an arcade, where you can integrate hardware and software. AFter it was succesful there, you could release the hardware and software for the PC. Then open-source hackers could figure out how to operate the device and write linux drivers... Imagine closing frozen programs by slashing their windows... Actually that would be stupid... I better stop now.
If you choose to go with some sort of PHP design / content seperation, you should know that PHP has dynamic image generation capabilities. PHP has documentation and webmonkey has a guide.
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I don't think that Judge Jackson was actually doing this because he thought that it was such a "matter of national importance." I think it may have had something to do with the number of times appealate courts have reversed his descisions... I thought that the deadline for him to do this had passed?
The iPlay MP3 player by maxtech take CompactFlash cards, so it should be able to use the 1 gig microdrive when it is released.
man, CNN is just stating the obvious. To give an idea on what is happening with online security/privacy on the internet, I'll give you some background on the NSA. The National Security Administration has banned export of strong cryptography - so they can read what people are sending. The NSA does not reveal any cryptanalytical weaknesses that they find. They make their hardware encryption devices tamperproof, so you can't see that they have put in a backdoor. As technology and organizations like the NSA evolve, privacy will just get worse and worse.
Nanosatellites are all good and everything, but I think that we have better things to spend our money on. Nanosatellites sound fine, but, talking about nanotechnology, when am I going to get free food and perfect genes? Nanosatellites seem so, well, small now.......
These are advantages, but to me, with the exception of the lack of an iMac port, Be has more compelling advantages. What I'm saying is that, based on your subject title, you came off sounding like a "if it ain't open source, I won't run it" zealot, whereas I prefer to run software based on the product, not the development model.
The Personal edition _IS_ the "real deal!" The Pro edition just has some extra stuff bundled! I don't see LINUX including any proprietary codec's with it's free distros either! Or with the commercial distros, for that matter! Why? Because they cost _money_ for the company to liscence, and it would be illegal to give them away for free without paying Fraunhoffer or whoever the liscence fees. Unfourtunately, Be probably will never open source the OS until they run out of money and die. I personally am not trying to get away from closed source OS's, I am trying to get away from Crappy OS's (like windows.) This has lead me to Linux, but I prefer Be and OpenBSD.
There is a Linux version, and it is trivial to set it up in its own partition (just create the partition, run FreeBe, and use the built-in "installer" program. If you happen to have version 4.5 on CD, you can use Partition Magic Be Edition.) But my point was that the actual OS is the same, regardless of how it installs itself.
The file system does not "feel faster" than it's competition. The OS in general does. I thought I had explained that in my post. If someone would post benchmarks, as you suggested, that would clarify a lot in this discussion.
This is not trying to sound like flamebait, but have you ever actually modified the Linux kernel? Have you even compiled it, or do you use whatever was given to you by your installer? Though the open source development model has some good advantages, which you mentioned (ie more ports, a million bug-spotting coders) for most people, it is only a means to an end, and if that end is achieved by other means, why should you care? I'm not saying you don't have good reasons for wanting OSS, I'm just asking to hear what those reasons are.
BeOS IS free. The only difference between the free and non-free versions of Be are that the proprietary stuff that Be had to pay for (the BinkJet drivers, the MP3 codec, the 128-bit SSL liscence) have been removed. Other than that, it is the exact same OS, bundled with the utilities to run it from a file on a FAT32 partition.
It is important to remember that XFree86 is not the only X server available. I have never used any of the proprietary accelerated X servers, but they may offer performence that is significantly better (anyone use them? wanna comment?)
It was also designed to take full advantage of SMP, especially the inherent parallelness of Mulitmedia... meaning that it's greatest stregnth was running multimedia on an SMP box (like the BeBox.)
The reason the hardware that was used was used, was because the person doing the benchmarking at BeNews has nothing better. If anyone wants tests done with other hardware, then send your nVidia card to BeNews!
I haven't actually seen the numbers, but BFS was designed by an ex-sgi employee who worked on XFS... Without a doubt be "feels" faster, but that is only because it is a clean and efficient GUI (which linux doesn't have yet... at least not one as fast as Be's.) Be also is about to get a network re-write that should put it on level ground with Linux as far as that is concerned... Linux has a performence advantage over Be in that it is written in C, not C++, it is highly compiler-optimized, and it is a monolithic kernel. However, this means that Be's code is simpler to understand and especially to port. (I would think... I have never actually seen Be's source, of course.)
The 'public access to information' part of the donations is basically giving people in the Pacific Northwest computers (yes yes....with windows installed) with internet on them. By giving them windows based computers, it _is_ extending the microsoft stranglehold. But I mean, what is he supposed to do, put linux on them? It is certainly better than nothing. Also, the other part of his donations, the global health donations, are completely unrelated to computers, internet, and the microsoft monopoly. It does things like giving vaccines to people in poverty. How is that possibly pushing microsoft products? I am not a windows advocate or anything (personally, i use openBSD and beOS), but I do find it unfair that a pretty bright person who employs some unscrupulous business tactics is labeled as an enemy of humanity. Sure, windows sucks, but people shouldn't take their anger out on him.
bungie is a great game company. myth and myth 2 were great. oni is a good idea (although the actual engine looks a bit dated), and halo looks like it's going to rock. so bungie was bought by microsoft. Before every open-source fanatic on /. goes on ranting about how bill gates is the devil (btw, he's not: he donates billions and billions of dollars to charity every year - more money than most of us /. people will ever make or begin to fathom), really think what they will do to bungie. Probably only two things will happen: 1) everything will be ported to the x-box, not the playstation2 or anything else. 2) some of bungie's funny stuff (tons of easter eggs in myth...) won't come out anymore.
This 'random pad' scheme is simply a form of steganography, which is basically a form of hiding data. While it may hide the data, it doesn't actually do anything for the internet censorship issue. People on the internet should be able to SAY WHAT THEY WANT TO SAY, WITHOUT NEEDING TO RESORT TO STEGANOGRAPHY OR CRYPTOGRAPHY. To solve this issue, we don't need another way of hiding our messages from the secret police (We already have strong cryptography). We need to reserve our right of free speech! There shouldn't be a need to circumvent the law when it is the law itself that gives us the right to free speech! Where did the first amendment go.....
Why is this a -1? It seems like a decent post to me.
You'd know that the word "niggardly" has nothing to do with the word "nigger." Someone moderately famous in NYC got fired for using the word "niggardly," thus sparking a controversy that ended with him getting his job back (I think.) The word "niggardly" means what the Anonymous coward said it meant, and is not a racial slur.
what is the best easter egg of all time? None other than the dopefish!! It has become bigger and bigger ever since its first appearance in Commander Keen. It was last seen in the Well of Wishes in quake 2...or so i think.
with other distro's "out of the box." At least, that is my understanding. The linux that is used has been modified to support the Crusoe's features. However, sincs it is all open-source, it should be trivial to get another distro working on it. It won't be possible to install it right off the CD, that's all. Also, is the version of linux running on top of the x86 emulation, or has it been compiled directly for the Crusoe's VLIW instruction set? After all, the whole point of VLIW was to leave less to the processor (because so much real estate on the advanced RISC chips is going towards branch prediction and such) and mvoe that work to the compiler. I'll bet that the performence gains from native compiled code would rock (not that I have seen the design of the Crusoe or would be competent to interpret it.) Still, one of the great benefits of open-source software is that it can be re-compiled for any platform. I would wonder if Linus or any of the other Transmeta guys could comment (we know you read /. Come on now.)
man, people find these comments funny? i mean, with jokes like "i don't have 8mb of ram, neither should you", linus is a regular comedian, isn't he? He can code operating systems, but he can't make a joke. no flamebait, but this stuff isn't exactly hilarious (i'm not blaming him, either: this stuff is in the linux source code, for god's sake. it's doesn't _need_ to be funny, and its not).
I don't think that on the grand scale of hollywood movies, the /. effect is so big. I mean, it can cripple non-commercial sites that don't expect more than a couple thousand or tens of thousands of hits per day, but when we are talking about hundreds of millions of tickets, it is not such a big deal.
For swordfighting games, I think that an actual sword is definetly the best interface possible. Have you ever tried playing Die By the Sword? It was a great game, but it's VSIM technology which used a mouse to control the sword was too damn hard to learn. An actual sword is very intuitive... Though I suppose force feedback would be almost neccesary to make it accesible to "casual gamers." I think the best way to implement this game would be in an arcade, where you can integrate hardware and software. AFter it was succesful there, you could release the hardware and software for the PC. Then open-source hackers could figure out how to operate the device and write linux drivers... Imagine closing frozen programs by slashing their windows... Actually that would be stupid... I better stop now.
If you choose to go with some sort of PHP design / content seperation, you should know that PHP has dynamic image generation capabilities. PHP has documentation and webmonkey has a guide.