I had a similar situation with Comcast @home. I was having very bad lag spikes on my cable (spikes of 45-180 seconds, stalling downloads, making games unplayable, etc.). This from a $50 a month service.
I called up their tech support, and after navigating their maze of annoying menus that never applied to my situation, I finally got in touch with a human being. He pinged my cable modem, said everything was fine, and said that was it.
I tried e-mailing the tech support, asking if I could get in touch with somebody to have someone sent out. They said I'd have to call such-and-such number and have a tech support "representative" with the authority to have someone sent out approve it. Of course, that was the number I had called in the first place, the very people who said there was no problem, and thus no need to send anyone out!
My problem, after three months of tinkering and phone tag with tech support, eventually corrected itself for some unknown reason. Perhaps some network upgrade they did had the side affect of fixing my "connectivity issue" (as they so eloquently put it).
Are all cable services this bad with support?
The technology is fine, we just need people that actually give a damn on the other end of the phone line!
The idea is to replace traditional, expensive leased line modems with software modems running on PCs...
Just what we need, another round of WinModems. DSL is hard enough to get working in Linux. My friend, who is very capable in setting up and tweaking his DSL setup, spent three months of trial and error getting his DSL connection working with Linux. The last thing we need is a software modem to make it even worse.
Indeed, dial-up is a great deal more reliable, although this isn't due so much to the technology as the support behind it. Consider:
DSL - The phone company puts multiple people on one DSL line (yes, you do often share, despite the "cable sucks, it's a shared line!" hype), and has absolutely no clue how to support it well. One of my friends uses DSL, and it's awful - disconnects almost every day, and a blatant lack of tech support from the phone company. I notice that the people I see most dropping from my online games are the people on DSL.:P
Cable - Ok, you have to share a cable line with others in your neighborhood. Honestly though, I've never found this to be much of a problem, and neither have any of my cable using buddies online. We all still get great speed. However, the tech support is just garbage most of the time. I had to jump through multiple bureaucratic hoops to get up to a "high level" tech support guy who pinged my cable modem and told me "everything looks fine." Thanks a lot.
When I was having massive lag spike problems with my cable modem, I was seriously considering going back to dial-up. Modem may be slow, but at least it's reliably slow.
For broadband to really replace dial-up modem, the companies need to support it better, and actually give a damn about their customers. They seem to think I'll stay with a provider who can't give me stable service, even if I do get 800k/sec downloads when it's working. I won't.
In slight defense of MozillaQuest, the articles on "branding" the browser are pretty thorough, and helped me learn a bit about how Mozilla is designed. But yeah, if you want reliable news, stick with MozillaZine. Or, gee, I dunno, the Mozilla site itself.
I was one of the lucky few to get the Linux port in the first batch shipped by Tux Games, so I've been playing it for a while. Here are my thoughts:
- Good: The graphics in T2, while not stunning, are very nice, and in fact very impressive in some areas. The game sounds are excellent, and the sound track is just incredible. Not to mention the new game modes totally rock (gotta love Bounty), and the few new items in the game add some flavor without upsetting the balance.
- Bad: Performance is a joke at times, with mysterious slow-downs on some maps. The "community" services are a nice idea, but feel like they're held together by duct tape and could break any moment (and they usually do).
I waited a year and a half for Tribes 2, and as a hard core Tribes player, I can say it was definitely worth the wait. It's not perfect, but it is a nice update to Tribes, and I love it. I do have a couple of tips for people, though:
- To see your FPS rate, bring up the console (this is bound to the ` key, in the upper left of your keyboard, by default) and type: showaudio();
- Do _not_ even consider Tribes 2 if you have anything less than a Pentium II 500mHz or equivelant. If you've got a Voodoo 3 card, I hear they work great, but V5 is supposedly total garbage with the game. Your best bet is any sort of recent Nvidia card (it works great with my GeForce 2). Make sure you have at least 128MB of RAM too.
- If you're suffering from framerate problems, here's how you can get another 10fps or so without making things ugly: go to your graphics settings and turn Terrain Detail down most of the way, and maybe lower the rendering distance a bit. Then go to the texture settings and turn the Terrain Textures to the max. This way you'll have some warping in terrain as you move, but it'll still look good, and get you some speed.
- If you suck, go through the training missions. Once you've finished those, play some LAN games against bots to get a feel for the different modes. The bots do a good job of giving you some practice for the real thing, and you don't have to parade your (lack of) skill in public.;)
Aside from the packet loss factor, I don't think ping is necessarily the most important factor in internet game lag. Yes, it is important, but how a given game _handles_ that lag is what makes the difference.
As an example, take the original Tribes. I used to play that game on 56k with a ping of 500-800 and I never even felt it. Conversly, now on cable, I get pings of 50-150 in Quake 3 and UT, and it still sucks pretty badly. Tribes works fine, as always, and Tribes 2 does as well.
For the modem performance, consider that I live in one of the worst parts of the US for modem access - New Mexico. Minimum pings of 300ms outside of games, numerous hops just to get to the hub 1000 miles away in San Francisco, max downloads of 2.2k/sec etc. and you'll see I'm a good candidate for telling you how bad modem can really be.
Yes, ping and packet loss have a noticeable effect on gameplay, obviously. However, I think the truly good games are the ones that can cope with it, and not make you feel like you wasted $50 simply because you can't afford a T1 like the game developers have.
Here are reasons I think the X-Box won't live up to the hype, and may inevitably fail:
* Microsoft has no experience in the console gaming world, where it can be even more cutthroat than what the company is used to. Sure, they have lots of money and lots of influence, but their influence has mainly been used in PR campaigns to sway IT folks into using Windows. You can't "sway" Joe Gamer that way. He doesn't care about the technical merits like Microsoft usually pushes, he just wants to have a nice game to play without any hardware/software problems.
* Reliability is essential for a console system, and considering this box is powered by PC hardware and PC software... The stability of the X-Box is questionable. Not only that, this is the company that brought us such fine products as Windows ME, which we all know to be 100% stable.
* Companies like Nintendo and Sony have been at this for years, with Nintendo's experience going back 20 years or so. Microsoft is coming to this arena with new software, new hardware, and no experience. They're relying on their name and massive amounts of cash to carry them, which just may not be enough.
* If a company like Sega, with decades of experience in arcades and consoles, can't make it work, could Microsoft? Sega had an established name, a significant following, and lots of experience in this market, but they couldn't cut it.
* The console gaming world is about raking in the dough on software, not hardware. Suzy Console Gamer isn't going to upgrade her console system every three months like PC gamers do, and she's not going to pay twice as much for a new PC-esque gaming system when she could get something from an established name like the Playstation. If Microsoft tries to get their money from the hardware side of it, they may end up losing.
I'm sure all of these points could be countered to some degree, but you have to admit there's a lot of things that Microsoft could mess up with the X-Box, and they've got a lot riding on it. Windows/MS-bashing aside, the X-Box has its merits... But honestly I don't think it will be nearly as successful as Microsoft is betting. Then again, it's another system we could port Linux to....;) --
Indeed, one of the coolest ideas, for me, would be a show centered around the view of the Star Trek universe from something other than a human ship/spacestation/whatever. Especially if it was a re-interpretation of a turbulent time in the Trek world. For example, a series focusing on Klingons that happened to coincide with the Borg invasion, or the Dominion war, would be very cool I think. The non-human aspect of Star Trek should be expanded, if you ask me.
As others mentioned on here, Opera is an excellent browser. I don't think Red Hat would have a difficult time at all striking a deal to include the banner-sponsored version of Opera with their distro. I bet Opera would jump at the chance to get exposure from the heavyweight company in the Linux world. Sure, the Linux port doesn't really support Java or plug-ins yet, but they could still include Netscape/Mozilla for people who need that stuff (I don't).
My area gets "service" (I use the term lightly) from QWest, and a friend of mine uses QWest for internet. I can say that I've never been impressed with the telephone end of their business, and my friend's internet access through them has been hellish to say the least. I'm sure it'll only get better with Microsoft's influence. *rolls eyes*
I think this was a rather tasteless "joke" and I don't blame Mastercard for their actions in this particular case. It's a very bad association for their name, linking a large business with a massacre (no matter what the intent was). There's a fine line between humor and
and outright poor taste.
If you put my name up on the net in some way that linked me to, say, war crimes committed in the east (just as off-the-wall), I wouldn't be too happy with you either.
DSL was supposed to be the be-all and end-all of consumer broadband. A couple of years into the hype, we have DSL still only available in major areas, with very poor performance for many users. What happened?
The biggest problem, in my view, is that DSL is such a young technology (two years old or so, I believe). The DSL providers pile users onto shared lines*, pushing this relatively untested technology to the limits. The result is what I hear about every day from a lot of people I know who use DSL: a connection that's usually very unreliable.
For instance, a member of my family signed up for DSL in his area a year ago. It was fantastic for the first few months, but the providers kept piling people on in that area, and what does he have now? Weekly outages of a day or more (one time nearly two weeks), virtually non-existent support, and wildly fluctuating download speeds. He's actually going back to dial-up 56k, because even though it crawls, at least it crawls with some reliability.
I hear stories like this from my DSL-using friends more often than not. I know a grand total of probably two people that are truly pleased with their DSL service.
Don't get me wrong -- when DSL is done right, it totally rocks. I'm envious of the performance gains a really good SDSL connection has over my cable modem. However, my cable goes out maybe once a month, if even that, and usually only for a few minutes. Compare this to the nightmare stories from a lot of DSL users. I'd rather have the sometimes lesser bandwidth than risk having a faster (but crappy) line.
* Yes, despite the hype, many DSL setups are shared. Often times, three or four people will be put on one DSL line in a given area. So the "cable sucks because it's shared, so use DSL" argument doesn't always apply.:-)
No, the "HUGE problem" would be if the station's computer systems were compromised in such a way that could put the lives of the crew members at risk. I'm not saying it's bound to happen or terribly likely, but it is certainly possible, given the nature of the network technology they're using.
> The log seems to indicate that the crew is using Microsoft Outlook as their e-mail client.
Ok, they're not only using Windows, but Outlook as well? What kind of security implications might this have? I'm sure the use of the e-mail to and from the space station is fairly well regulated, but then again, government web sites and e-mail servers have been compromised more times than anybody can count. One would figure, though, that such problems would be considerably more serious if they affected a station orbiting miles above the Earth...
> I'm sorry if this sounds like a flame, but why would anyone want a website to hold on to all of your passwords? I mean, we all know that it's insecure to submit passwords in open text anyways.
"We all know." *WE* do. We, the savvy users of the net know that. But does Joe Blow Internet User know? Nope. The average web surfer doesn't know one wit about security, not even the simplest idea like not giving out your passwords. Hell, these are the people that write their work login on a sticky note and put it on their monitor.
This is exactly how companies like Microsoft, AOL, etc. can get away with their predatory and irresponsible practices. They target the 90% of the computer world that is totally clueless about how to protect themselves and their data. All they see in things like Passport is a very nice, pretty service that makes their life a bit easier. They don't know or think about the (in)security side of it.
And another problem is, this sort of knowledge really only circulates among people like us, who hang out on Slashdot and other techie sites. This kind of information needs to be put in places where the average user will see it, like in PC Magazine and such. I'd say it also needs to be put on the front pages of the main portals (like Yahoo, and so forth). But then again, a lot of those portals are run by companies guilty of these practices, so...
Some April Fool's stuff is ok, to a point. But frankly, this stuff got old after the 500th fake press release/revolutionary discovery/whatever I read today. I wish all these web news sites would actually post some REAL NEWS instead of page after page of infantile pranks. LinuxGames, Slashdot, and basically every other site I visit throughout the day, is litered with this stuff I have to wade through. I can't even tell the real stuff from the fake today.
A couple of jokes worthy of a chuckle is fine. But every damn site I go to has a dozen or so gag postings, and it gets real old real fast. I can't wait for this day to be over, so we can all be returned to our regularly scheduled programming.
> Who knows? Maby it will be released as open source?
Unfortunately even if Be, Inc. wanted to make BeOS open source, they couldn't really. Many core components of the OS include licensed, commercial code that they can't release. This proprietary stuff is part of how the OS works so well in some areas. Assuming Be went to the trouble to strip out all the proprietary crap (which would take a long time, weeding through all that code), it wouldn't be quite the same OS.
This just goes to show what can happen with commercial, locked up software. As good as BeOS is, it still needs development, and without Be, Inc. the users will be stranded and forced to either abandon it or try to develop hacks and add-ons on their own to keep it up to date.
Don't get me wrong -- I love BeOS, and I hate to see it stall like this. I use it exclusively on my laptop, for everything. But I've never really liked the closed source nature of basically 99% of the BeOS world. There's always a long-term sacrifice to be made for convenience and compatibility (in this case it is commercially licensed components), and the price to pay this time around may very well be the death of the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a similar situation with Comcast @home. I was having very bad lag spikes on my cable (spikes of 45-180 seconds, stalling downloads, making games unplayable, etc.). This from a $50 a month service.
I called up their tech support, and after navigating their maze of annoying menus that never applied to my situation, I finally got in touch with a human being. He pinged my cable modem, said everything was fine, and said that was it.
I tried e-mailing the tech support, asking if I could get in touch with somebody to have someone sent out. They said I'd have to call such-and-such number and have a tech support "representative" with the authority to have someone sent out approve it. Of course, that was the number I had called in the first place, the very people who said there was no problem, and thus no need to send anyone out!
My problem, after three months of tinkering and phone tag with tech support, eventually corrected itself for some unknown reason. Perhaps some network upgrade they did had the side affect of fixing my "connectivity issue" (as they so eloquently put it).
Are all cable services this bad with support?
The technology is fine, we just need people that actually give a damn on the other end of the phone line!
... NASA finally has the balls for space exploration. Har har
Just what we need, another round of WinModems. DSL is hard enough to get working in Linux. My friend, who is very capable in setting up and tweaking his DSL setup, spent three months of trial and error getting his DSL connection working with Linux. The last thing we need is a software modem to make it even worse.
Indeed, dial-up is a great deal more reliable, although this isn't due so much to the technology as the support behind it. Consider:
:P
DSL - The phone company puts multiple people on one DSL line (yes, you do often share, despite the "cable sucks, it's a shared line!" hype), and has absolutely no clue how to support it well. One of my friends uses DSL, and it's awful - disconnects almost every day, and a blatant lack of tech support from the phone company. I notice that the people I see most dropping from my online games are the people on DSL.
Cable - Ok, you have to share a cable line with others in your neighborhood. Honestly though, I've never found this to be much of a problem, and neither have any of my cable using buddies online. We all still get great speed. However, the tech support is just garbage most of the time. I had to jump through multiple bureaucratic hoops to get up to a "high level" tech support guy who pinged my cable modem and told me "everything looks fine." Thanks a lot.
When I was having massive lag spike problems with my cable modem, I was seriously considering going back to dial-up. Modem may be slow, but at least it's reliably slow.
For broadband to really replace dial-up modem, the companies need to support it better, and actually give a damn about their customers. They seem to think I'll stay with a provider who can't give me stable service, even if I do get 800k/sec downloads when it's working. I won't.
.. which, if any, C64 emulators this might work with? I've got a working C64 and modem, but I don't have a dial-up ISP to try it with.
In slight defense of MozillaQuest, the articles on "branding" the browser are pretty thorough, and helped me learn a bit about how Mozilla is designed. But yeah, if you want reliable news, stick with MozillaZine. Or, gee, I dunno, the Mozilla site itself.
I was one of the lucky few to get the Linux port in the first batch shipped by Tux Games, so I've been playing it for a while. Here are my thoughts:
;)
- Good: The graphics in T2, while not stunning, are very nice, and in fact very impressive in some areas. The game sounds are excellent, and the sound track is just incredible. Not to mention the new game modes totally rock (gotta love Bounty), and the few new items in the game add some flavor without upsetting the balance.
- Bad: Performance is a joke at times, with mysterious slow-downs on some maps. The "community" services are a nice idea, but feel like they're held together by duct tape and could break any moment (and they usually do).
I waited a year and a half for Tribes 2, and as a hard core Tribes player, I can say it was definitely worth the wait. It's not perfect, but it is a nice update to Tribes, and I love it. I do have a couple of tips for people, though:
- To see your FPS rate, bring up the console (this is bound to the ` key, in the upper left of your keyboard, by default) and type: showaudio();
- Do _not_ even consider Tribes 2 if you have anything less than a Pentium II 500mHz or equivelant. If you've got a Voodoo 3 card, I hear they work great, but V5 is supposedly total garbage with the game. Your best bet is any sort of recent Nvidia card (it works great with my GeForce 2). Make sure you have at least 128MB of RAM too.
- If you're suffering from framerate problems, here's how you can get another 10fps or so without making things ugly: go to your graphics settings and turn Terrain Detail down most of the way, and maybe lower the rendering distance a bit. Then go to the texture settings and turn the Terrain Textures to the max. This way you'll have some warping in terrain as you move, but it'll still look good, and get you some speed.
- If you suck, go through the training missions. Once you've finished those, play some LAN games against bots to get a feel for the different modes. The bots do a good job of giving you some practice for the real thing, and you don't have to parade your (lack of) skill in public.
Aside from the packet loss factor, I don't think ping is necessarily the most important factor in internet game lag. Yes, it is important, but how a given game _handles_ that lag is what makes the difference.
As an example, take the original Tribes. I used to play that game on 56k with a ping of 500-800 and I never even felt it. Conversly, now on cable, I get pings of 50-150 in Quake 3 and UT, and it still sucks pretty badly. Tribes works fine, as always, and Tribes 2 does as well.
For the modem performance, consider that I live in one of the worst parts of the US for modem access - New Mexico. Minimum pings of 300ms outside of games, numerous hops just to get to the hub 1000 miles away in San Francisco, max downloads of 2.2k/sec etc. and you'll see I'm a good candidate for telling you how bad modem can really be.
Yes, ping and packet loss have a noticeable effect on gameplay, obviously. However, I think the truly good games are the ones that can cope with it, and not make you feel like you wasted $50 simply because you can't afford a T1 like the game developers have.
Here are reasons I think the X-Box won't live up to the hype, and may inevitably fail:
;)
* Microsoft has no experience in the console gaming world, where it can be even more cutthroat than what the company is used to. Sure, they have lots of money and lots of influence, but their influence has mainly been used in PR campaigns to sway IT folks into using Windows. You can't "sway" Joe Gamer that way. He doesn't care about the technical merits like Microsoft usually pushes, he just wants to have a nice game to play without any hardware/software problems.
* Reliability is essential for a console system, and considering this box is powered by PC hardware and PC software... The stability of the X-Box is questionable. Not only that, this is the company that brought us such fine products as Windows ME, which we all know to be 100% stable.
* Companies like Nintendo and Sony have been at this for years, with Nintendo's experience going back 20 years or so. Microsoft is coming to this arena with new software, new hardware, and no experience. They're relying on their name and massive amounts of cash to carry them, which just may not be enough.
* If a company like Sega, with decades of experience in arcades and consoles, can't make it work, could Microsoft? Sega had an established name, a significant following, and lots of experience in this market, but they couldn't cut it.
* The console gaming world is about raking in the dough on software, not hardware. Suzy Console Gamer isn't going to upgrade her console system every three months like PC gamers do, and she's not going to pay twice as much for a new PC-esque gaming system when she could get something from an established name like the Playstation. If Microsoft tries to get their money from the hardware side of it, they may end up losing.
I'm sure all of these points could be countered to some degree, but you have to admit there's a lot of things that Microsoft could mess up with the X-Box, and they've got a lot riding on it. Windows/MS-bashing aside, the X-Box has its merits... But honestly I don't think it will be nearly as successful as Microsoft is betting. Then again, it's another system we could port Linux to....
--
... this will make flight school more interesting to be sure.
Instructor: All right, you ready for your first solo flight?
Flight Student: Yes, I am!
*in the air*
Instructor: Excellent, you're doing a great job keeping us level.
Student: Thank you sir. It's really not that diff-- ah... ahhhhh.... AHHHCHOO!
--
... Now, will somebody make a version of this that actually installs on Slackware? :)
--
Indeed, one of the coolest ideas, for me, would be a show centered around the view of the Star Trek universe from something other than a human ship/spacestation/whatever. Especially if it was a re-interpretation of a turbulent time in the Trek world. For example, a series focusing on Klingons that happened to coincide with the Borg invasion, or the Dominion war, would be very cool I think. The non-human aspect of Star Trek should be expanded, if you ask me.
As others mentioned on here, Opera is an excellent browser. I don't think Red Hat would have a difficult time at all striking a deal to include the banner-sponsored version of Opera with their distro. I bet Opera would jump at the chance to get exposure from the heavyweight company in the Linux world. Sure, the Linux port doesn't really support Java or plug-ins yet, but they could still include Netscape/Mozilla for people who need that stuff (I don't).
My area gets "service" (I use the term lightly) from QWest, and a friend of mine uses QWest for internet. I can say that I've never been impressed with the telephone end of their business, and my friend's internet access through them has been hellish to say the least. I'm sure it'll only get better with Microsoft's influence. *rolls eyes*
... that tech suport.
I think this was a rather tasteless "joke" and I don't blame Mastercard for their actions in this particular case. It's a very bad association for their name, linking a large business with a massacre (no matter what the intent was). There's a fine line between humor and and outright poor taste.
If you put my name up on the net in some way that linked me to, say, war crimes committed in the east (just as off-the-wall), I wouldn't be too happy with you either.
DSL was supposed to be the be-all and end-all of consumer broadband. A couple of years into the hype, we have DSL still only available in major areas, with very poor performance for many users. What happened?
:-)
The biggest problem, in my view, is that DSL is such a young technology (two years old or so, I believe). The DSL providers pile users onto shared lines*, pushing this relatively untested technology to the limits. The result is what I hear about every day from a lot of people I know who use DSL: a connection that's usually very unreliable.
For instance, a member of my family signed up for DSL in his area a year ago. It was fantastic for the first few months, but the providers kept piling people on in that area, and what does he have now? Weekly outages of a day or more (one time nearly two weeks), virtually non-existent support, and wildly fluctuating download speeds. He's actually going back to dial-up 56k, because even though it crawls, at least it crawls with some reliability.
I hear stories like this from my DSL-using friends more often than not. I know a grand total of probably two people that are truly pleased with their DSL service.
Don't get me wrong -- when DSL is done right, it totally rocks. I'm envious of the performance gains a really good SDSL connection has over my cable modem. However, my cable goes out maybe once a month, if even that, and usually only for a few minutes. Compare this to the nightmare stories from a lot of DSL users. I'd rather have the sometimes lesser bandwidth than risk having a faster (but crappy) line.
* Yes, despite the hype, many DSL setups are shared. Often times, three or four people will be put on one DSL line in a given area. So the "cable sucks because it's shared, so use DSL" argument doesn't always apply.
"While you load your saved game, why not load up on delicious Campbell's soup!"
"Great screen shot you just took. Speaking of screen shots, nothing takes shots like the new Kodak l33tz0r 3000 Camera!"
"Star Trek: Borg Invasion is loading, please wait. And now an advertisement from our sponsor, Microsoft..."
No, the "HUGE problem" would be if the station's computer systems were compromised in such a way that could put the lives of the crew members at risk. I'm not saying it's bound to happen or terribly likely, but it is certainly possible, given the nature of the network technology they're using.
One line from the article got me thinking...
> The log seems to indicate that the crew is using Microsoft Outlook as their e-mail client.
Ok, they're not only using Windows, but Outlook as well? What kind of security implications might this have? I'm sure the use of the e-mail to and from the space station is fairly well regulated, but then again, government web sites and e-mail servers have been compromised more times than anybody can count. One would figure, though, that such problems would be considerably more serious if they affected a station orbiting miles above the Earth...
Guess this means I better dust off the ol' Klingon dictionary, eh?
> I'm sorry if this sounds like a flame, but why would anyone want a website to hold on to all of your passwords? I mean, we all know that it's insecure to submit passwords in open text anyways.
"We all know." *WE* do. We, the savvy users of the net know that. But does Joe Blow Internet User know? Nope. The average web surfer doesn't know one wit about security, not even the simplest idea like not giving out your passwords. Hell, these are the people that write their work login on a sticky note and put it on their monitor.
This is exactly how companies like Microsoft, AOL, etc. can get away with their predatory and irresponsible practices. They target the 90% of the computer world that is totally clueless about how to protect themselves and their data. All they see in things like Passport is a very nice, pretty service that makes their life a bit easier. They don't know or think about the (in)security side of it.
And another problem is, this sort of knowledge really only circulates among people like us, who hang out on Slashdot and other techie sites. This kind of information needs to be put in places where the average user will see it, like in PC Magazine and such. I'd say it also needs to be put on the front pages of the main portals (like Yahoo, and so forth). But then again, a lot of those portals are run by companies guilty of these practices, so...
... I'll just make a link.
Some April Fool's stuff is ok, to a point. But frankly, this stuff got old after the 500th fake press release/revolutionary discovery/whatever I read today. I wish all these web news sites would actually post some REAL NEWS instead of page after page of infantile pranks. LinuxGames, Slashdot, and basically every other site I visit throughout the day, is litered with this stuff I have to wade through. I can't even tell the real stuff from the fake today.
A couple of jokes worthy of a chuckle is fine. But every damn site I go to has a dozen or so gag postings, and it gets real old real fast. I can't wait for this day to be over, so we can all be returned to our regularly scheduled programming.
> Who knows? Maby it will be released as open source?
Unfortunately even if Be, Inc. wanted to make BeOS open source, they couldn't really. Many core components of the OS include licensed, commercial code that they can't release. This proprietary stuff is part of how the OS works so well in some areas. Assuming Be went to the trouble to strip out all the proprietary crap (which would take a long time, weeding through all that code), it wouldn't be quite the same OS.
This just goes to show what can happen with commercial, locked up software. As good as BeOS is, it still needs development, and without Be, Inc. the users will be stranded and forced to either abandon it or try to develop hacks and add-ons on their own to keep it up to date.
Don't get me wrong -- I love BeOS, and I hate to see it stall like this. I use it exclusively on my laptop, for everything. But I've never really liked the closed source nature of basically 99% of the BeOS world. There's always a long-term sacrifice to be made for convenience and compatibility (in this case it is commercially licensed components), and the price to pay this time around may very well be the death of the OS.