You raise a good point, but I think my argument still holds. The infrastructure already exists to handle this sort of thing. Distribution of resources across hetero networks isnt really a new idea anyway. Maybe new to people who grew up on Windows, but not for the rest of us.
Wanna share applications? No problem, add an NFS filesystem and include it in your $PATH... Want to share storage? Same answer. Wanna add available memory to your stem without a RAM upgrade? Same answer. Nothing stops me from assigning swap on my system to an NFS-mounted filesystem half a world away if I choose to. man swapon.:) Sure, it wont be the speediest thing in the world, but its already there, and no more a kludge than a separate P2P infrastructure would be.
Ok. i'll take a dare and assert that i'm not the only one puzzled by wether or not we even need such a thing.
Anybody with an hour or two and a good book on Perl can write a client/server package, complete with a crude protocol that allows both sides to talk. I guess what i'm getting at is, what good is an "application substrate" in this situation? If peer-to-peer sharing is by definition a specialized application meant only to communicate (and deal with) an equally specialized scorresponding part, then why bother building a "one size fits all" version in the first place? Perhaps a common protocol for P2P would be a good idea, but then again, we already have that. Its called TFTP. Or NFS, for that mattter. I've always thought that publically exported NFS shares make the best platform-independant P2P solution.:)
Sometimes, especially for experienced coders, it becomes tempting to want to reinvent the wheel. If you're going to set out to make something as complicated into something thats now easier to handle, cool..Go for it. But don't try and over-do something that is already simple by its very design.
By the way, if you're one of the guys building such an app, feel free to swing by System 26 when you're ready and have a look around. You might find something useful to include in your code to make it a little more asthetically pleasing. Plus, its free.:)
Cheers,
Re:Linux game development, or lack thereof..
on
Kohan for Linux
·
· Score: 1
Let them try. I already have a copyright asserted on everything thats possible to copyright. If they take one step in that direction i'll come down on them. Hard.
Re:Homogeny isn't a bad thing.
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 1
Thats just sad..I cant decide which is worse. How hopeless you are, or how clueless you are. Scamper back under the bridge, troll.
Re:Homogeny isn't a bad thing.
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 1
By your own assertion, you seem content with the idea of Linux "crushing the competition"... Isn't this the same mentallity thats powering your much-hated adversary, Microsoft? How are you any better than them, if you're willing to engadge in the same sort of practices?
...Very kind of you to take an insulting tone with me when i've done nothing but speak my mind, by the way. Have a good one.
Cheers,
Homogeny isn't a bad thing.
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm sure the resulting discussion about how evil-evil-evil OS homogeny is would be totally different if it were our OS that "won" the great battle for the desktop. We'd all be proudly singing the virtues about how Linux did away with the confusion inherent with supporting multiple platforms, and how it was Linux that prevailed in its design and implementation.
But it's not Linux's supremacy that's being talked about here. It's Windows..And that makes you angry.
Now, before you call me a turncoat, i'll underscore the fact that I love Linux -- I use it on the majority of systems I own, and couldn't live without it -- Regardless of that, I cant help but notice that I've grown increasingly disappointed with the Linux community's almost blind willingness to look down upon Windows as a platform et al, regardless of the fact that for most things, Windows is (nowadays) far easier to deal with from a user's standpoint than Linux us. To some degree, I myself am partly to blame -- I used to hate Microsoft simply because it was fun to, and not based on any real concrete observations. Regardless of how much I like Linux, i'd be lying if I said Microsoft hadn't come a long way in the past year or two in improving the stability and usability of their OS offerings.
The Linux community itself is partly to blame for Microsoft's domination. Its our own partisanship and internal bickering that has prevented Linux from showing a unified face to the world when it came to the desktop -- Had KDE and Gnome merged for the common good, and challenged Microsoft's stronghold on the desktop, we would have probably made it...But instead that challenge ended up being more of separate Gnome vs. Microsoft, then KDE vs. Microsoft battle. We got squashed, and sent home with our tail between our legs. That was our fault, not theirs.
OS homogeny is a wonderful thing if it's your OS they're talking about. Its only when that homogeny is achieved with an OS you don't like that homogeny becomes on par with communism. Ask yourself if your opinion on OS homogeny would be the same if Linux were king of the hill versus Windows. How you answer that question will dictate wether or not you need to re-evaluate your view of the competition.
BTW, thanks to all who visited the site earlier today. It was a good stress test!
Cheers,
Re:Description question "Open-Source GUI Component
on
Kohan for Linux
·
· Score: 1
Hi Jones,
True, GPL and "Open Source" are not synonymous. I'm still tossing around which license I want to settle on (keep in mind, the page, and the components have only been up for a week or so) and haven't quite comitted to going with the GPL at this point -- I thought I would, at the time the very first news article was written. Infact, I thought it was inevitable, because anything less than saying "It's GPL" would potentially scare off developers.
What will more than likely happen is that future components will be released under a "GPL-Compatible" license. Literally, a simple duplicate of the GPL that refers to multimedia in the same ways and manners that it refers to sourcecode. Bottom line, stay tuned. Good catch, by the way -- I missed that one.
Cheers,
Linux game development, or lack thereof..
on
Kohan for Linux
·
· Score: 5, Funny
This is gonna sound like spam, but i'll say it anyway.
If you're interested in developing games for Linux, alot of the work may already be done for you. I recently started up a project called System 26 a little over a week ago, that aims to provide Linux developers (and Win32 developers, for that matter) with a resource they can visit, and grab all the raw materials they need to build basically anything. By "raw materials", I mean things like images, icons, other graphics, music, sound samples, things like that. They're organized into kits that developers can freely download and incorporate into their apps. In exchange for doing so, we even offer them the ability to showcase their work via our page, to encourage others to do the same.. In essence, we provide the lumber, the developers build the house.
We're trying to build the project's popularity by word of mouth -- I don't believe in banner advertising, and there really is no money to be made by running such a project.. I just thought it would be cool to set up a nexus where artists and coders could exchange their work and loosely collaborate on building high-quality apps and games.
If you're interested, especially if you're going to be building games for Linux, feel free to swing by and check us out. We'll see you there.:)
You're welcome. While you go set fire to a piece of hardware you could have let someone else learn from, the rest of us will click on the link to your homepage and laugh at how greasy you look. And FYI, yes, I owned a NeXT. Infact, I owned two of them, a Cube and a Turbostation. Picked them up on auction here at the U, used them both for about a year until I exhausted the things I could have picked up from them as a platform. Sold both on Ebay not too long ago for a couple hundred each. The cube even had a working MO drive in it. Stick around, shit for brains, and i'll even show you the NeXT bumper sticker on my car downstairs.
A good thing.. Although while I wouldnt elevate a system that pumps out itinieraries for flight crews to the level of "mission critical" (most pilots and flight crews know the times when and where they'll be flying often weeks in advance) its a step in the right direction. It takes projects like this to keep eyeballs focused in the right direction. Has anyone heard anything about what happened to Burlington Coat Factory, after they made the switch? How are they doing now?
Learning a Unix other than Linux.
Learning a Mach kernel.
Learning a fully BSD-style Unix.
Learning Xwindow.
Learning PostScript.
Learning how to handle SCSI devices in Unix.
..and countless other things.
And, what do we gain by burning a NexT?
The ability to say "Duh, I burned a NeXT, i'm 31337."
Yes, I know that the one used in this little "demonstration" was only the case, and not the guts of the box. I just think its a pathetically stupid waste to destroy something that could be of value to someone else not as "31337" as you. No doubt, there will be some dingbat who thinks it'll be cool to take his Pentium out in the back yard and douse it with lighter fluid just so he can see a fire. Meanwhile, there are plenty of people who would have killed to get their hands on something as simple as a Pentium, to learn off of, and better themselves.
My favorite little utility for AmigaDOS was a thing called MultiClock.. It sat nicely up in Workbench's titlebar, and would annouce the time in English at user-specified intervals. The guy who wrote it recorded a series of sound samples of himself saying different numbers so that he could play them on-the-fly whenever someone requested the time. "The time is" + "Eight" + "Oh" + "Six" + "PM".
The timing of this article is sort of interesting. We released a verbal clock toolkit on System 26 earlier this morning, featuring the voice of yours truly. Time to start coding..:)
Uhh...wait a minute..
on
Case Tweaking
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
I don't get it. Why would you want people to think you owned a Mac? Hell, especially at a LAN party, i'd go out of my way to let them know I didn't show up with a Mac!
Aw, shit. The link got pulled.... Oh well, theres another link on Kuro5hin, but, to make life easier for you, i'll put the MPEG up on System 26 for everyone to enjoy.
I think this MPEG of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer flipping out like a rhesus monkey on crystal meth says more about what Aeron chairs do to people than any ergonomics study you could come up with. And yes...as frightening as it may seem....it's real.
I remember when I was a kid, seeing some article on Usenet circa 1990 about how it was impossible for any computer to do 30 FPS in 24-bit...The original PCI spec had come out, if I remember correctly, spec'ed out at 133MB/sec. Ah, the world was going to open up..So many things that you could do with that much bandwidth. The difference being that nowadays, I cant think of a single application that could need 6.6 GB/sec of bus bandwidth, other than really, really intensive data collection. But then again, it may not mean much now..It's built for the future, after all.
I find it funny sometimes that people think that they have the right to do anything they want with something they've paid money for.
When you buy a CD, a DVD, or hell, even an old VHS tape, yes, you do own the copy -- But part of that ownership states that you are prohibited from copying it, redistributing it, or rebroadcasting it without the consent of the manufacturer. When you exchange money for that item, you enter into an agreement. Plain and simple.
It's no different than when you lease a car, or even rent one. Yes, you pay money for it, and you put the gas in it, but you can't do whatever you want with it. You are paying for access, not ownership when you buy a DVD, and if you don't like it, don't friggin enter into the agreement by purchasing it.
Now, would anyone else like to whine about the fact they don't read the fine-print?
You can register mcdonalds.com and list Harry Balzac as your contact person as far as I'm concerned.. If you're the first in line to grab the domain, it should be yours. Thats what the whole appeals process is for. Suppose your company is McDonald's Heating & Air Conditioning, and you got your name on the dotted line before The Evil Clown did.. Too bad for Clownburger, the domain is yours, and if they still have a problem with it, there are plenty of avenues of recourse.
This whole post is pretty much pointless. There is no such thing as a "bogus registration".
Who's bright idea was it to put that stupid terminal-specific ANSI penguin at the login prompt? Has it occured to anyone at Mandrake that not everyone will be using an ANSI terminal to log in with?
Tell a stock trader that he's going to be more "productive" by simply walking over to the gentleman he wishes to conduct a transaction with, and speaking quietly versus standing elbow deep in a pit with thousands of other guys screaming at the top of his lungs and flinging gestures at other traders.
It all comes down to the work environment. For some things, like engineering, QA, R&D, a quiet distraction-free environment is ideal. For other things, where transaction speed matters more than quality of execution, multitasking is the only way to go.
Timothy, people like you would have rejected the invention of the wheel because "it takes so much time to chip one out of stone that you can just drag it along the ground in half the time!"
Hah, thats the first time somebody accused me of having "multiple accounts". Thats a good one. So, lemmie get this straight. Microsoft is evil evil evil, and they're eeeevil, and evil. Thats your stance. Meanwhile, the rest of the industry is doing the same exact thing. Buying up ISPs, and migrating customers! The FAQ states pretty clearly that it only applies to Qwest.net customers, and only a portion thereof. To quote directly from the FAQ:
"Under the agreement, MSN will become the preferred Internet Service Provider (ISP) for some Qwest.net Consumer Internet Access customers"
What part of "some" is confusing to you?
This whole ordeal only affects Qwest.net customers...Each of which signed a contract that stated Qwest can do whatever the hell they want to do with their customer accounts. The rest of us use local, privately-owned ISPs, and aren't affected by this.
Slashdot Mirror
You raise a good point, but I think my argument still holds. The infrastructure already exists to handle this sort of thing. Distribution of resources across hetero networks isnt really a new idea anyway. Maybe new to people who grew up on Windows, but not for the rest of us.
Wanna share applications? No problem, add an NFS filesystem and include it in your $PATH... Want to share storage? Same answer. Wanna add available memory to your stem without a RAM upgrade? Same answer. Nothing stops me from assigning swap on my system to an NFS-mounted filesystem half a world away if I choose to. man swapon.
Cheers,
Ok. i'll take a dare and assert that i'm not the only one puzzled by wether or not we even need such a thing.
Anybody with an hour or two and a good book on Perl can write a client/server package, complete with a crude protocol that allows both sides to talk. I guess what i'm getting at is, what good is an "application substrate" in this situation? If peer-to-peer sharing is by definition a specialized application meant only to communicate (and deal with) an equally specialized scorresponding part, then why bother building a "one size fits all" version in the first place? Perhaps a common protocol for P2P would be a good idea, but then again, we already have that. Its called TFTP. Or NFS, for that mattter. I've always thought that publically exported NFS shares make the best platform-independant P2P solution.
Sometimes, especially for experienced coders, it becomes tempting to want to reinvent the wheel. If you're going to set out to make something as complicated into something thats now easier to handle, cool..Go for it. But don't try and over-do something that is already simple by its very design.
By the way, if you're one of the guys building such an app, feel free to swing by System 26 when you're ready and have a look around. You might find something useful to include in your code to make it a little more asthetically pleasing. Plus, its free.
Cheers,
Let them try. I already have a copyright asserted on everything thats possible to copyright. If they take one step in that direction i'll come down on them. Hard.
Thats just sad..I cant decide which is worse. How hopeless you are, or how clueless you are. Scamper back under the bridge, troll.
By your own assertion, you seem content with the idea of Linux "crushing the competition"... Isn't this the same mentallity thats powering your much-hated adversary, Microsoft? How are you any better than them, if you're willing to engadge in the same sort of practices?
...Very kind of you to take an insulting tone with me when i've done nothing but speak my mind, by the way. Have a good one.
Cheers,
I'm sure the resulting discussion about how evil-evil-evil OS homogeny is would be totally different if it were our OS that "won" the great battle for the desktop. We'd all be proudly singing the virtues about how Linux did away with the confusion inherent with supporting multiple platforms, and how it was Linux that prevailed in its design and implementation.
But it's not Linux's supremacy that's being talked about here. It's Windows..And that makes you angry.
Now, before you call me a turncoat, i'll underscore the fact that I love Linux -- I use it on the majority of systems I own, and couldn't live without it -- Regardless of that, I cant help but notice that I've grown increasingly disappointed with the Linux community's almost blind willingness to look down upon Windows as a platform et al, regardless of the fact that for most things, Windows is (nowadays) far easier to deal with from a user's standpoint than Linux us. To some degree, I myself am partly to blame -- I used to hate Microsoft simply because it was fun to, and not based on any real concrete observations. Regardless of how much I like Linux, i'd be lying if I said Microsoft hadn't come a long way in the past year or two in improving the stability and usability of their OS offerings.
The Linux community itself is partly to blame for Microsoft's domination. Its our own partisanship and internal bickering that has prevented Linux from showing a unified face to the world when it came to the desktop -- Had KDE and Gnome merged for the common good, and challenged Microsoft's stronghold on the desktop, we would have probably made it...But instead that challenge ended up being more of separate Gnome vs. Microsoft, then KDE vs. Microsoft battle. We got squashed, and sent home with our tail between our legs. That was our fault, not theirs.
OS homogeny is a wonderful thing if it's your OS they're talking about. Its only when that homogeny is achieved with an OS you don't like that homogeny becomes on par with communism. Ask yourself if your opinion on OS homogeny would be the same if Linux were king of the hill versus Windows. How you answer that question will dictate wether or not you need to re-evaluate your view of the competition.
BTW, thanks to all who visited the site earlier today. It was a good stress test!
Cheers,
Hi Jones,
True, GPL and "Open Source" are not synonymous. I'm still tossing around which license I want to settle on (keep in mind, the page, and the components have only been up for a week or so) and haven't quite comitted to going with the GPL at this point -- I thought I would, at the time the very first news article was written. Infact, I thought it was inevitable, because anything less than saying "It's GPL" would potentially scare off developers.
What will more than likely happen is that future components will be released under a "GPL-Compatible" license. Literally, a simple duplicate of the GPL that refers to multimedia in the same ways and manners that it refers to sourcecode. Bottom line, stay tuned. Good catch, by the way -- I missed that one.
Cheers,
This is gonna sound like spam, but i'll say it anyway.
If you're interested in developing games for Linux, alot of the work may already be done for you. I recently started up a project called System 26 a little over a week ago, that aims to provide Linux developers (and Win32 developers, for that matter) with a resource they can visit, and grab all the raw materials they need to build basically anything. By "raw materials", I mean things like images, icons, other graphics, music, sound samples, things like that. They're organized into kits that developers can freely download and incorporate into their apps. In exchange for doing so, we even offer them the ability to showcase their work via our page, to encourage others to do the same.. In essence, we provide the lumber, the developers build the house.
We're trying to build the project's popularity by word of mouth -- I don't believe in banner advertising, and there really is no money to be made by running such a project.. I just thought it would be cool to set up a nexus where artists and coders could exchange their work and loosely collaborate on building high-quality apps and games.
If you're interested, especially if you're going to be building games for Linux, feel free to swing by and check us out. We'll see you there.
Cheers,
You're welcome. While you go set fire to a piece of hardware you could have let someone else learn from, the rest of us will click on the link to your homepage and laugh at how greasy you look. And FYI, yes, I owned a NeXT. Infact, I owned two of them, a Cube and a Turbostation. Picked them up on auction here at the U, used them both for about a year until I exhausted the things I could have picked up from them as a platform. Sold both on Ebay not too long ago for a couple hundred each. The cube even had a working MO drive in it. Stick around, shit for brains, and i'll even show you the NeXT bumper sticker on my car downstairs.
Oh, and have a great day.
A good thing.. Although while I wouldnt elevate a system that pumps out itinieraries for flight crews to the level of "mission critical" (most pilots and flight crews know the times when and where they'll be flying often weeks in advance) its a step in the right direction. It takes projects like this to keep eyeballs focused in the right direction. Has anyone heard anything about what happened to Burlington Coat Factory, after they made the switch? How are they doing now?
Give me a friggin break...
Lets see.. for burning a NeXT, you miss out on:
Learning a Unix other than Linux.
Learning a Mach kernel.
Learning a fully BSD-style Unix.
Learning Xwindow.
Learning PostScript.
Learning how to handle SCSI devices in Unix.
..and countless other things.
And, what do we gain by burning a NexT?
The ability to say "Duh, I burned a NeXT, i'm 31337."
Yes, I know that the one used in this little "demonstration" was only the case, and not the guts of the box. I just think its a pathetically stupid waste to destroy something that could be of value to someone else not as "31337" as you. No doubt, there will be some dingbat who thinks it'll be cool to take his Pentium out in the back yard and douse it with lighter fluid just so he can see a fire. Meanwhile, there are plenty of people who would have killed to get their hands on something as simple as a Pentium, to learn off of, and better themselves.
My favorite little utility for AmigaDOS was a thing called MultiClock.. It sat nicely up in Workbench's titlebar, and would annouce the time in English at user-specified intervals. The guy who wrote it recorded a series of sound samples of himself saying different numbers so that he could play them on-the-fly whenever someone requested the time. "The time is" + "Eight" + "Oh" + "Six" + "PM".
The timing of this article is sort of interesting. We released a verbal clock toolkit on System 26 earlier this morning, featuring the voice of yours truly. Time to start coding..
I don't get it. Why would you want people to think you owned a Mac? Hell, especially at a LAN party, i'd go out of my way to let them know I didn't show up with a Mac!
:)
Cheers,
Being monitored in the workplace isn't so bad..Just ask Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
Aw, shit. The link got pulled
Cheers,
I think this MPEG of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer flipping out like a rhesus monkey on crystal meth says more about what Aeron chairs do to people than any ergonomics study you could come up with. And yes...as frightening as it may seem....it's real.
I remember when I was a kid, seeing some article on Usenet circa 1990 about how it was impossible for any computer to do 30 FPS in 24-bit
I find it funny sometimes that people think that they have the right to do anything they want with something they've paid money for.
When you buy a CD, a DVD, or hell, even an old VHS tape, yes, you do own the copy -- But part of that ownership states that you are prohibited from copying it, redistributing it, or rebroadcasting it without the consent of the manufacturer. When you exchange money for that item, you enter into an agreement. Plain and simple.
It's no different than when you lease a car, or even rent one. Yes, you pay money for it, and you put the gas in it, but you can't do whatever you want with it. You are paying for access, not ownership when you buy a DVD, and if you don't like it, don't friggin enter into the agreement by purchasing it.
Now, would anyone else like to whine about the fact they don't read the fine-print?
...How is it fraudulent, if you bought it?
You can register mcdonalds.com and list Harry Balzac as your contact person as far as I'm concerned.. If you're the first in line to grab the domain, it should be yours. Thats what the whole appeals process is for. Suppose your company is McDonald's Heating & Air Conditioning, and you got your name on the dotted line before The Evil Clown did.. Too bad for Clownburger, the domain is yours, and if they still have a problem with it, there are plenty of avenues of recourse.
This whole post is pretty much pointless. There is no such thing as a "bogus registration".
Who's bright idea was it to put that stupid terminal-specific ANSI penguin at the login prompt? Has it occured to anyone at Mandrake that not everyone will be using an ANSI terminal to log in with?
Yup. Timothy is the one who agreed with the bonehead, and wasted both yours and my time with it.
Tell a stock trader that he's going to be more "productive" by simply walking over to the gentleman he wishes to conduct a transaction with, and speaking quietly versus standing elbow deep in a pit with thousands of other guys screaming at the top of his lungs and flinging gestures at other traders.
It all comes down to the work environment. For some things, like engineering, QA, R&D, a quiet distraction-free environment is ideal. For other things, where transaction speed matters more than quality of execution, multitasking is the only way to go.
Timothy, people like you would have rejected the invention of the wheel because "it takes so much time to chip one out of stone that you can just drag it along the ground in half the time!"
Smarten up. Please.
Hah, thats the first time somebody accused me of having "multiple accounts". Thats a good one. So, lemmie get this straight. Microsoft is evil evil evil, and they're eeeevil, and evil. Thats your stance. Meanwhile, the rest of the industry is doing the same exact thing. Buying up ISPs, and migrating customers! The FAQ states pretty clearly that it only applies to Qwest.net customers, and only a portion thereof. To quote directly from the FAQ:
"Under the agreement, MSN will become the preferred Internet Service Provider (ISP) for some Qwest.net Consumer Internet Access customers"
What part of "some" is confusing to you?
This whole ordeal only affects Qwest.net customers...Each of which signed a contract that stated Qwest can do whatever the hell they want to do with their customer accounts. The rest of us use local, privately-owned ISPs, and aren't affected by this.