Goes by the name of Scrapheap Challenge, and it's presented by Robert Llewellyn, aka Kryten out of Red Dwarf. I've yet to see it but a friend (who lives in a house full of other engineers and architects) tells me it's a blast.
There is no God. There are no gods. Jesus was a man. He lived, he died. End of story. There are no UFOs hovering over earth. The Loch Ness Monster does not exit. Neither does Bigfoot. There are not an abnormal number of vanishing ships/planes in the Bermuda Triangle compared to anywhere else. Crystals do not have unexplained power. There is no such thing as chi.
Fnord. Keep thinking that if it makes you feel better.
They're still selling like hot-cakes in Britain, but I can see that there's only so many gadgets with which they can persuade you to `upgrade' your phone.
Emmet, I think most Slashdot readers know total shite when they read it:-) The rambling of a random analyst might have been front-page news for Slashdot a couple of years ago, but it seems so passe to post such a simple-minded comment just for the standard rebuttals to come out over and over... leave comments like this to wallow in the internet backwaters rather than dredging them to the front page of Slashdot.
It's not like I'm rabid enough not to want to read criticism of Linux, but this one just is such old hat it's not worth the time of day.
Anti-aliasing is great for games and graphics displayed at fairly low resolutions, but on the modern desktop of a contemporary OS it is unneeded and impacts system performance negatively.
Hardly-- back in 1990 I had an Acorn A3000 with an 8MHz ARM2 processor and 2MB of memory that managed to anti-alias all its on-screen fonts without any trouble, since it was very good at cacheing commonly-used characters as bitmaps. If it's slowing Windows down, I'd guess that's because MS did it wrong:-)
Personally I would like to see an offshore provider giving https based webmail. This would probably be a lot more accesible to end users then PGP currently is and would surely start to cause problems for the US & UK governments and their dodgy schemes for monitoring access.
I'm sure offshore https web mail is perfectly safe, what with that recently US government-certified copy of Netscape with its super-safe 128-bit encryption you'd be using to access it... (fnord)
How easy is it going to be for somebody familiar with Windows to reverse-engineer an X-Box (presumably there's very little non-standard about the hardware) and write an emulator to run on another MS platform? You'll sure-as-hell not going to need to emulate the processor, for one. I can imagine that should someone do an emulator, their desktop dominance might become a big stumbling block for them: I mean, how do you sell an X-Box to people who've bought a PC who know they can play the X-Box games just as easily...? Or are MS going to take the chance and sell an X-Box emulator to keep people with Windows? Hmm, quite a few possibilities / conspiracy theories there.
It's official: there are now more people who own a mobile in the UK than not. I'm still in the 48% of people who don't and people are beginning to look at me funny. Text messaging seems to have taken over the lives of quite a few friends at college, but I guess listening to someone writing a text msg on the train has got to be better than wankers shouting HELLO? YEAH, I'M ON THE TRAIN...
The best database engine in the world can't sort out bugs like this one "Oh, just a quick code update on the live site... of course it'll work... no need to check...":-)
Because this is "free enough" for people who don't care about freedom, there will not be enough real demand for a good, GPL or even BSD licensed 3D app
Blender is already a professional quality 3D modelling and animation package. They are committed to making the best quality product possible while keeping it free of charge to their users. Also you should note that the founder has promised to relicense Blender under the GPL if the company should fail. The evidence so far shows that the developers have not fallen into any of the traps/evils of closed-source software: so we are getting the best of both worlds-- although coders cannot submit patches at the moment, the Python API is open and the developers responsive to suggestion. If that situation ever changes, we've got the main man's guarantee that we'll see the code.
(okay, so I do like to moan) Waaaaaaaah! I submitted this, like, about 6 weeks ago when I saw it on Vintage Gaming and nobody took any notice. Grumble mutter grr etc. Still, Mr. Taco took my idea for the Debian non-free poll so there we go:-)
4) RMS rewrites the GPL to allow linking against QPL licensed libraries as well as GPL(LGPL) licensed libraries (which has the added effect of hell freezing over and pigs flying).
Surely just because RMS suggested a license that other people used doesn't mean he can change it once they've applied it to their software? Surely this is the problem?
Or for a more saccharin look at the music business, take a look at the Young Person's Guide to Becoming a Rock Star (all four hours in one session, preferably:-) It's a six-part comedy series about a Scottish band called `Jocks Wahey' who make it big-- but all the way through this surreal `debtometer' pops up to show how much debt they accumulated after being offered their huge advances.
Artists with their own record labels
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 1
Until a couple weeks ago I hadn't ever used Napster at all, so I decided to download it and see what it's all about. One of the things I did on there was do a search for "Celtic" and it came up with Loreena McKennitt, which I listened to and decided I really loved her songs. I decided I wanted to buy one of her CDs for myself, and also thought that my friend would like one for her birthday. So I went to the music store and was COMPLETELY disgusted with the price of the CDs
Unlike 99% of artists on Napster, Loreena McKennitt created a record label to publish her music: Quinlan Road. However as far as I know they have a distribution deal with Warner Bros. So I'd guess the high prices on her CDs are a result of not being able to negotiate volume discounts in the same way as more major artists' labels can do. But kudos to Ms. McKennitt for going it alone; you can even download short previews of nearly all her songs `legit' if you want from her site. Not sure whether they'd fancy going in for full online distribution, but then I'm a rabid fan and have to get the box anyway:-)
douglasadams.com has the original game playable in a little Java applet but if you look at the applet parameters, you'll find the original game in its original form right here. You can play that on any Infocom interpreter you like.
PS if you've never played it, it's very funny, but f**king impossible:-) Took about a year and a half when I was playing in my school lunchbreaks. Maybe being 12 didn't help with getting some of the humour, mind.
The Sunday Times do this all the friggin' time-- whenever they're really stuck for ideas for their colour supplement, somebody goes `Hey, we haven't done one of those House Of The Future articles for a good few weeks now!'. Arrggghh-- and they get paid for doing it, too!
You'd think these sorts of wanky journalistic daydreams might have moved on from the 50s, but oh noooooo: they get some artists in to draw some cheesy pictures of happy smiling housewives watching a robot octopus prepare dinner while another one files her toenails (very progressive:-) ). The children are inanely grinning at the pleasure they're receiving from being taught at home by a robo-tutor and (here's the science bit-- concentrate) the dad is teleworking over the internet having 200-way video conferencing with everybody in his office now that every home in the whole world has been fitted with free 1,000Gb Ethernet. Obviously nobody's imagination stretches to the fact that if daddy had all this technology at his disposal he'd be downloading porn and spending 24hrs a day attached to a catharter and drip feed, and his dick stuck in a robo-masturbator machine for uninterrupted pleasure.
Okay, so journalists all over the world, stop this House of the Future nonsense. It's not big, it's not clever and it won't impress your mates.
There is also GTK for Windows. I'm not sure how well the port is done, but if it's good enough for Mozilla......
I don't think Mozilla uses GTK any more-- however, the GTK port I've used is the same one that powers Win32 GIMP, which works like a charm (though ISTR the file selection boxes were a bit ropey).
Nothing positive about Battlefield Earth comes to mind. Critics and moviegoers have exhausted entire vocabularies of expletives and adjectives trashing this shipwreck of a movie
But not me, oh no. That's for your run-of-the-mill movie critics to do. I'm too cool for that. I'm going to offer something different, a new perspective...
nnnggghh..
can't....
resist...
Otherwise, it's a case study in awful writing, unspeakable direction, grotesque cinematography, horrific acting, and ugly, clunky design.
Aahhhhhhhh.... better.
So herewith a Battlefield Earth contest: we'll be happy to give one copy of O'Reilly's newly-published The Whole Internet: The Next Generation, a new edition of one of the first and best user's guide to the Net, to the first person who sincerely and convincingly offers something good about this movie.
Can't be arsed to write an article this week. You guys do it for me:-)
I think a lot of ISPs for a lot of reasons have a policy on cheapy dial-up accounts (at least in the UK) of being able to take down your web site if it's causing them any hassle whatsoever, whether that's from DoS attacks, nasty lawyers' letters or just high traffic in some cases!
Presumably this guy's site was not the only site hosted on this server, right? So in buckling to these script kiddies they weren't just protecting this guy's site but a whole host of others.
I don't think what they did was that unreasonable in their position, but it's another one of those cases that's going to help shape ISP service contracts of the future. Presumably some other ISP is being paid to host his site now-- so they win, the other ISP loses for their policy of buckling to script kiddies. Though to be honest I'm not sure whether the proportion of `controversial' sites out there moving to upstanding ISPs is going to affect the bank balance of enough ISPs for this to become a big issue. (yeah yeah I know and 640K should be enough for anybody...)
Was because to get one of the `VIP' passes to the event, you had to sign up on a web site that said that `sorry, we cannot accommodate students'. Oh, that's okay, I mean it's not like any students wrote the darned kernel in the first place or anything! I think the non-advance entry price was stated as £15; pretty pricy and not worth it to most students, assuming they were letting 'em in on the door.
Given this perverse entry requirement, I was trying to fathom the purpose of this event from a friend on the Debian stand, and from his description it sounded like a corporate willy-waving competition as to who could sponsor the most number of pissed-up geeks:-)
I was a bit miffed in that I got a pass sent to me as an `independent consultant', but about to start some ferocious exams, I couldn't go. Maybe that was part of their no-students drive too...?
Slashdot Mirror
Goes by the name of Scrapheap Challenge, and it's presented by Robert Llewellyn, aka Kryten out of Red Dwarf. I've yet to see it but a friend (who lives in a house full of other engineers and architects) tells me it's a blast.
There is no God. There are no gods. Jesus was a man. He lived, he died. End of story. There are no UFOs hovering over earth. The Loch Ness Monster does not exit. Neither does Bigfoot. There are not an abnormal number of vanishing ships/planes in the Bermuda Triangle compared to anywhere else. Crystals do not have unexplained power. There is no such thing as chi.
Fnord. Keep thinking that if it makes you feel better.
They're still selling like hot-cakes in Britain, but I can see that there's only so many gadgets with which they can persuade you to `upgrade' your phone.
Emmet, I think most Slashdot readers know total shite when they read it :-) The rambling of a random analyst might have been front-page news for Slashdot a couple of years ago, but it seems so passe to post such a simple-minded comment just for the standard rebuttals to come out over and over... leave comments like this to wallow in the internet backwaters rather than dredging them to the front page of Slashdot.
It's not like I'm rabid enough not to want to read criticism of Linux, but this one just is such old hat it's not worth the time of day.
A bit ruder than I'd have put it, but yeah, fair play to you, sir :-)
Otherwise Apple would have filed a cease-and-desist by now, surely? :-)
Anti-aliasing is great for games and graphics displayed at fairly low resolutions, but on the modern desktop of a contemporary OS it is unneeded and impacts system performance negatively.
:-)
Hardly-- back in 1990 I had an Acorn A3000 with an 8MHz ARM2 processor and 2MB of memory that managed to anti-alias all its on-screen fonts without any trouble, since it was very good at cacheing commonly-used characters as bitmaps. If it's slowing Windows down, I'd guess that's because MS did it wrong
Personally I would like to see an offshore provider giving https based webmail. This would probably be a lot more accesible to end users then PGP currently is and would surely start to cause problems for the US & UK governments and their dodgy schemes for monitoring access.
I'm sure offshore https web mail is perfectly safe, what with that recently US government-certified copy of Netscape with its super-safe 128-bit encryption you'd be using to access it... (fnord)
How easy is it going to be for somebody familiar with Windows to reverse-engineer an X-Box (presumably there's very little non-standard about the hardware) and write an emulator to run on another MS platform? You'll sure-as-hell not going to need to emulate the processor, for one. I can imagine that should someone do an emulator, their desktop dominance might become a big stumbling block for them: I mean, how do you sell an X-Box to people who've bought a PC who know they can play the X-Box games just as easily...?
Or are MS going to take the chance and sell an X-Box emulator to keep people with Windows? Hmm, quite a few possibilities / conspiracy theories there.
It's official: there are now more people who own a mobile in the UK than not. I'm still in the 48% of people who don't and people are beginning to look at me funny. Text messaging seems to have taken over the lives of quite a few friends at college, but I guess listening to someone writing a text msg on the train has got to be better than wankers shouting HELLO? YEAH, I'M ON THE TRAIN...
I don't know if this counts as research, but blender (www.blender.nl) has a totally fresh (if hard to use at first) take on a space-saving GUI.
I think that's the case with all 3D modellers-- they share a few common features but all seem to have wildly different interfaces.
The best database engine in the world can't sort out bugs like this one "Oh, just a quick code update on the live site... of course it'll work... no need to check..." :-)
Because this is "free enough" for people who don't care about freedom, there will not be enough real demand for a good, GPL or even BSD licensed 3D app
Blender is already a professional quality 3D modelling and animation package. They are committed to making the best quality product possible while keeping it free of charge to their users. Also you should note that the founder has promised to relicense Blender under the GPL if the company should fail. The evidence so far shows that the developers have not fallen into any of the traps/evils of closed-source software: so we are getting the best of both worlds-- although coders cannot submit patches at the moment, the Python API is open and the developers responsive to suggestion. If that situation ever changes, we've got the main man's guarantee that we'll see the code.
(okay, so I do like to moan) Waaaaaaaah! I submitted this, like, about 6 weeks ago when I saw it on Vintage Gaming and nobody took any notice. Grumble mutter grr etc. Still, Mr. Taco took my idea for the Debian non-free poll so there we go :-)
4) RMS rewrites the GPL to allow linking against QPL licensed libraries as well as GPL(LGPL) licensed libraries (which has the added effect of hell freezing over and pigs flying).
Surely just because RMS suggested a license that other people used doesn't mean he can change it once they've applied it to their software? Surely this is the problem?
Or for a more saccharin look at the music business, take a look at the Young Person's Guide to Becoming a Rock Star (all four hours in one session, preferably :-) It's a six-part comedy series about a Scottish band called `Jocks Wahey' who make it big-- but all the way through this surreal `debtometer' pops up to show how much debt they accumulated after being offered their huge advances.
Until a couple weeks ago I hadn't ever used Napster at all, so I decided to download it and see what it's all about. One of the things I did on there was do a search for "Celtic" and it came up with Loreena McKennitt, which I listened to and decided I really loved her songs. I decided I wanted to buy one of her CDs for myself, and also thought that my friend would like one for her birthday. So I went to the music store and was COMPLETELY disgusted with the price of the CDs
:-)
Unlike 99% of artists on Napster, Loreena McKennitt created a record label to publish her music: Quinlan Road. However as far as I know they have a distribution deal with Warner Bros. So I'd guess the high prices on her CDs are a result of not being able to negotiate volume discounts in the same way as more major artists' labels can do. But kudos to Ms. McKennitt for going it alone; you can even download short previews of nearly all her songs `legit' if you want from her site. Not sure whether they'd fancy going in for full online distribution, but then I'm a rabid fan and have to get the box anyway
douglasadams.com has the original game playable in a little Java applet but if you look at the applet parameters, you'll find the original game in its original form right here. You can play that on any Infocom interpreter you like.
:-) Took about a year and a half when I was playing in my school lunchbreaks. Maybe being 12 didn't help with getting some of the humour, mind.
PS if you've never played it, it's very funny, but f**king impossible
The Sunday Times do this all the friggin' time-- whenever they're really stuck for ideas for their colour supplement, somebody goes `Hey, we haven't done one of those House Of The Future articles for a good few weeks now!'. Arrggghh-- and they get paid for doing it, too!
:-) ). The children are inanely grinning at the pleasure they're receiving from being taught at home by a robo-tutor and (here's the science bit-- concentrate) the dad is teleworking over the internet having 200-way video conferencing with everybody in his office now that every home in the whole world has been fitted with free 1,000Gb Ethernet. Obviously nobody's imagination stretches to the fact that if daddy had all this technology at his disposal he'd be downloading porn and spending 24hrs a day attached to a catharter and drip feed, and his dick stuck in a robo-masturbator machine for uninterrupted pleasure.
You'd think these sorts of wanky journalistic daydreams might have moved on from the 50s, but oh noooooo: they get some artists in to draw some cheesy pictures of happy smiling housewives watching a robot octopus prepare dinner while another one files her toenails (very progressive
Okay, so journalists all over the world, stop this House of the Future nonsense. It's not big, it's not clever and it won't impress your mates.
There is also GTK for Windows. I'm not sure how well the port is done, but if it's good enough for Mozilla......
I don't think Mozilla uses GTK any more-- however, the GTK port I've used is the same one that powers Win32 GIMP, which works like a charm (though ISTR the file selection boxes were a bit ropey).
Nothing positive about Battlefield Earth comes to mind. Critics and moviegoers have exhausted entire vocabularies of expletives and adjectives trashing this shipwreck of a movie
:-)
But not me, oh no. That's for your run-of-the-mill movie critics to do. I'm too cool for that. I'm going to offer something different, a new perspective...
nnnggghh..
can't....
resist...
Otherwise, it's a case study in awful writing, unspeakable direction, grotesque cinematography, horrific acting, and ugly, clunky design.
Aahhhhhhhh.... better.
So herewith a Battlefield Earth contest: we'll be happy to give one copy of O'Reilly's newly-published The Whole Internet: The Next Generation, a new edition of one of the first and best user's guide to the Net, to the first person who sincerely and convincingly offers something good about this movie.
Can't be arsed to write an article this week. You guys do it for me
That's not something I'd want to admit to on a public forum where photographs of this woman's breasts are available :-)
I think a lot of ISPs for a lot of reasons have a policy on cheapy dial-up accounts (at least in the UK) of being able to take down your web site if it's causing them any hassle whatsoever, whether that's from DoS attacks, nasty lawyers' letters or just high traffic in some cases!
Presumably this guy's site was not the only site hosted on this server, right? So in buckling to these script kiddies they weren't just protecting this guy's site but a whole host of others.
I don't think what they did was that unreasonable in their position, but it's another one of those cases that's going to help shape ISP service contracts of the future. Presumably some other ISP is being paid to host his site now-- so they win, the other ISP loses for their policy of buckling to script kiddies. Though to be honest I'm not sure whether the proportion of `controversial' sites out there moving to upstanding ISPs is going to affect the bank balance of enough ISPs for this to become a big issue. (yeah yeah I know and 640K should be enough for anybody...)
re: `The Great Linux Debate' pic-- what's Boy George doing in the background?
Was because to get one of the `VIP' passes to the event, you had to sign up on a web site that said that `sorry, we cannot accommodate students'. Oh, that's okay, I mean it's not like any students wrote the darned kernel in the first place or anything! I think the non-advance entry price was stated as £15; pretty pricy and not worth it to most students, assuming they were letting 'em in on the door.
:-)
Given this perverse entry requirement, I was trying to fathom the purpose of this event from a friend on the Debian stand, and from his description it sounded like a corporate willy-waving competition as to who could sponsor the most number of pissed-up geeks
I was a bit miffed in that I got a pass sent to me as an `independent consultant', but about to start some ferocious exams, I couldn't go. Maybe that was part of their no-students drive too...?
Hey ho; maybe next year.