What do you need drugs for to listen to Orbital? It sounds just fine to me without them.
Einsturzende Neubauten, on the other hand, REQUIRES serious painkillers for the average person to listen to -- at least stuff from 80-83. Their stuff from 90 onwards is actually musical.:-)
BTW, Orbital just doesn't fit the Quake theme that much IMHO. The sound of metal bashing against metal works MUCH better.
Ok, now that I have an excuse...
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Slashdot Updates
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What happened to "Weather in Hell"????
That was the best Slashbox ever... now my life is a little emptier...
Just want to comment on that Amiga crack ;-)
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Linux Advocacy Hurts
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(heck, there's probably still a guy out there somewhere who thinks his 68K-based Amiga 500 with 2 floppies can out-multitask a today's Pentiums. You go boy!)
I'd be willing to bet that guy's right on account of the Pentium will crash first. Also: Try running the Pentium at the same clock speed and same RAM, then see which architecture will outperform which.
If only I had had the pleasure of owning one of those Amigas...:-/
Somebody remind me what caused Commodore to die a horrible death? Wouldn't be Microsoft, now, would it?
ALthough Linux is the next "big thing" in the IT world, regular UNIX knowledge still gives you a better chance of landing and keeping a job.
If that's true, then the best way to prepare for the future is to set up a box that boots Linux, your favorite BSD distribution, and Solaris, and boot and use all three regularly.
If you can use all three without too much trouble and can recognize the differences between the systems in your sleep, then get a second box and networking hardware and build a very small network using every combination of server OS to client OS possible. If you can do all that succesfully, then you're ready for an admin job just about anywhere (And if you run into a weird configuration like IRIX, at least you know approximately where to look for help...)
Well, gee, they should have told me that then instead of being all rude to me. Ever think of THAT?
No FUD here, just facts. If it was sloppy crap coding then they could have mentioned that as a reason, or told me that it needed more testing before being integrated into the kernel.
Probably true, though Xpilot does run on it (rather well if you use -colorSwitch No)... and does trying to make sure Wine works as advertised in the README count as "fun and games"?
Yeah, yeah, I know... not that kind of fun and games.
Point 1 is a decent remedy for the Microsoft problem. It would certainly level the playing field for competitors in application software. In fact, I feel this should be the LAW for any and all OS vendors.
What I can't see is how it would _help_ other OS vendors any. It sure would help the Wine project immensely though;-)
2 would make Microsoft's software patents effectively meaningless. The only thing that would happen is that other software companies can't patent things that Microsoft has already patented. Instead they would have to go to Microsoft and get the license, which supposedly Microsoft would have to grant. I suppose that's a Good Thing if in fact we (or any other software company for that matter) get to use that code freely.
I guess I feel that software should be copyright(left)ed, not patented. Maybe copyrighting is even a bit much -- after all, all software is is a very large number that when interpreted in a very specific way by a specific machine, does something. Suppose you found a mathematical series that produces numbers that, when interpreted in binary, just happen to be the files necessary to run Word? Not likely, in many lifetimes of the universe, but there's a non-zero chance of it occuring. (In fact, there are trivial ways of doing it with an n-th order polynomial where n is the number of files, but it would probably require using the numbers in question to generate the polynomial -- as in using them as the roots or using them as the values at x=1, x=2, etc.) Of course, with the size of today's software, actually _using_ such a formula if found is another near impossibility...
OK, so that was a pathetic attempt at finding a position on patented software. I guess 2 sounds good in a "Wouldn't that be nice" sort of way, but I don't know if it really _is_ Good & Right.
3 is pretty lame. If Microsoft just stops _certifying_ hardware as MS-Compatible altogether, that doesn't affect hardware vendors any
Difference between types of filtering
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ShutUp Software
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· Score: 1
Darn, that's exactly what I was going to say, except that I would seperate a per-user filter from a system-wide filter.
If you can set up NetNanny so that it only filters for you and no one else, and that was the default, that would be OK. If the admin could set up a killfile that everyone at the company was forced to use, then that would be Evil & Wrong.
I hate the FreeBSD central team. Back in the 2.2.6-current days when you needed a patch to run Quake 2 under the Linux emulation (dunno if that's still true) I suggested to them that they should just integrate the patch into their OS.
They basically gave me the finger. You might still be able to find the exchange on the freebsd-current archives if thy go back a year or more.
Sorry, but FreeBSD just doesn't have a real open development model from what I can tell.
Really, LOC is probably the worst measure of product size or productivity that there is. The effect of 4GLs is to try to _reduce_ the number of lines of code that the programmer has to write to do a task.
So, maybe we should take this as a good article. I mean, we're doing more with less lines of code!
Besides, I hear writing the code for a project is the easy part. The requirements, analysis, planning, and design are what eat up most of the time and demand the most skill. Perhaps we should define productivity as lines of pseudocode???
Oh yeah, maintenance eats up tons of time too, just to change a few wrong lines of code.
The only thing they didn't point out is that Microsoft paid for the whole thing. Everything else they pretty much nailed.
So, all you gurus out there, it seems there's a definite need for a "Highend-Server-Tuning-HOWTO". Any takers?
Also, I'd love to see the same test run on NT, a properly tuned Linux, Solaris 7 (which is supposed to be Much improved over 2.6 on x86 hardware), and Netware to see how many OSes beat NT, when Mindcraft claims the other way around. Unfortunately, I don't have the money for a quad-Xeon box or Netware, or I'd make my website useful for once;-)
You can certainly add new _instructions_ by changing the microcode. The way microcode works is that each opcode is actually a jump instruction to a certain point in control memory. The section of memory that correspond to opcodes is actually a sort of jump table to where the actual work gets done.
So yes, you can add instructions if you define previously "reserved" opcodes and add the control sequence for them. Whether you can actually do something really new with them depends on if you're not using all the features of your ALU or coprocessor, which is not a likely situation.
Therefore, adding mere instructions is not a problem with microcode (unless you've used all the opcodes from 0 to 2^the length of your opcode). Adding new actual features is much harder.
I wonder how many home consumers use Works instead of Office then, as would make sense. Of course, then Microsoft would make less money, so that's Not Reccomended.
Not anymore, bub. Calling today's word processing applications "relatively simple" is like calling the Notre Dame Cathedral "relatively plain".
Maybe at one time, when there was no such thing as WYSIWYG(MOR), word processors were rather simple. However, the GUI changed all that. Now it's hard to draw the line between word processors and desktop publishing.
However, nearly all the features in today's word processors are "nice" features rather than "necessary" features. Do we really need to underline all of our misspelled words and poorly written sentences as we're typing? Not really; I find it only slows me down, and I pretty much ignore the grammar checker because it's never right;-)
To be honest, I don't even know all the features that are in a modern spreadsheet; the only one I use is "graph". The other features might as well not exist and I would be happy. Yet QPW.exe takes up 4.5 MB on my hard disk! It can't all be graphics, can it?
Unfortunately, Mr. Gates is half right: Word processors and spreadsheets are theoretically simple programs. However, the public concept is that the more features a program has, the better it is. Microsoft's software has the most features, so it must be the best.
How can you fight a public that thinks that way? "Sure, our product has half the features of Word, but they all work flawlessly and are the ones used by 95% of consumers!" Good thing I'm not going into marketing...
Anyway, I guess now we need office apps that are to Office what Linux is to Windows, except for the "hard for the average consumer to use' part. Should be a "simple" task, right?
Maybe that's the point Mr. Gates is trying to make. We've got an OS, admittedly a hard thing to create, but no applications, which should be easier! (I'm not counting commercial stuff, only Free Software/GNU apps competitive with Office.) Sounds like a challenge to me.
I guess what I should have said was "If the emulator came with source code on the disk and full distribution rights of any modifications you made, then sure I would buy it. Of course then you could just download the source code instead, but you'd probably need the latest MS compiler to compile anyway, so that wouldn't do me any good."
The problem is Free has too many meanings. Sorry if I mislead you in that.
As for 1, I wonder if you can buy the Japanese version if you're in the US.
I guess 2 just means the games would look how they're supposed to look, not how the regular Playstation hardware renders them.
Also on that note, I wonder if the Playstation 2 would be bug-for-bug compatible or "correct"? Oh well, I'll just have to wait on that one.:(
Yeah, I came to see the trailers preceeding Star Wars, not the movie itself!
EIGHT MINUTES of trailers? That's ludicrous.
Come to think of it, so are most of the other regulations -- obviously contrived so LucasFilm makes even more money. The "minimum run" and "You must pay us within a week" ones especially hurt. The only good one is the 12:01 first showtime. I wonder how many theaters will actually have a special showing then.
PLEASE tell me there's other reasons for these special restrictions. Otherwise I might start to think that the movie went way over budget and Lucas is worried that it won't necessarily be enough of a blockbuster to make a profit.
YOu gotta wonder, with Free Software threatening to kick Microsoft's butt back to the Atomic Age, if this is a calculated plot to get RMS to quit rather than work in a building bearing Bill's name.
It should be interesting to see what RMS does (if in fact the building is renamed Gates Center for Computer Science or something similar). I'm pretty sure his work with the FSF doesn't depend on him having an office at MIT, though whatever else he does might.
Finally, if prep.ai.mit.edu goes down, or tsx-11.mit.edu switches to an NT server and dumps its Linux collection, you know what happened;-(
Linux is just getting into SMP and probably needs more tuning. Though I'm pretty sure they didn't do their own tuning other than replacing the kernel.
Doesn't somebody make a special Server Edition for this sort of thing though? I though it was RedHat but I can't find it... If there is, try running the test with that and see what happens.
Solaris already had this problem
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Killer Asteroid
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White -- check. Middle-class -- check. Male -- check. Lacks social skills -- that's what my parents tell me;-) Dysfunctional family -- Mom and dad have their differences but are still married. Feels more comfortable behind a computer system than in face-to-face interaction -- check. Subjected to physical abuse -- does paddling count?;-)
Ooh... you better watch out for me... especailly since I've been known to read Bugtraq!!!!
Actually, I probably am not even at the level of "scrpit kiddie", and I read Bugtraq to see what security issues I need to fix on my own computer, and to laugh at how many times Microsoft appears on there.
I personally wouldn't try to crack for two reasons: 1. The most sophisticated attack I know is "ping -f" which isn't even a feature on Solaris ping and any halfway decent server should be able to handle it without a problem. 2. Cracking is just plain Bad & Wrong, Internet access is a priviledge, you'll probably go to jail and earn the disrespect of real hackers everywhere, etc. etc.
Finally, just remember that it's ok to say "If a person is a hexor (can we use that instead of cracker because it's considered derogatory in the South?) then he probably has X personality traits", but it's NOT ok to say "if a person has X personality traits then he's probably a hexor."
Slashdot Mirror
Wow man, that's a classic. ROFL.
From the look of E (the WM), though, I wonder sometimes what those people have been smoking...
Finally, what the hell is this doing at 0? Moderate it back up!!! This is great!
What do you need drugs for to listen to Orbital? It sounds just fine to me without them.
:-)
Einsturzende Neubauten, on the other hand, REQUIRES serious painkillers for the average person to listen to -- at least stuff from 80-83. Their stuff from 90 onwards is actually musical.
BTW, Orbital just doesn't fit the Quake theme that much IMHO. The sound of metal bashing against metal works MUCH better.
What happened to "Weather in Hell"????
That was the best Slashbox ever... now my life is a little emptier...
(heck, there's probably still a guy out there somewhere who thinks his 68K-based Amiga 500 with 2 floppies can out-multitask a today's Pentiums. You go boy!)
:-/
I'd be willing to bet that guy's right on account of the Pentium will crash first. Also: Try running the Pentium at the same clock speed and same RAM, then see which architecture will outperform which.
If only I had had the pleasure of owning one of those Amigas...
Somebody remind me what caused Commodore to die a horrible death? Wouldn't be Microsoft, now, would it?
ALthough Linux is the next "big thing" in the IT world, regular UNIX knowledge still gives you a better chance of landing and keeping a job.
If that's true, then the best way to prepare for the future is to set up a box that boots Linux, your favorite BSD distribution, and Solaris, and boot and use all three regularly.
If you can use all three without too much trouble and can recognize the differences between the systems in your sleep, then get a second box and networking hardware and build a very small network using every combination of server OS to client OS possible. If you can do all that succesfully, then you're ready for an admin job just about anywhere (And if you run into a weird configuration like IRIX, at least you know approximately where to look for help...)
but I figured it out. Searching on MS's Knowledge Base for Antialiased turns up the fact that antialiased fonts are a Microsoft Plus! enhancement!
:-P(and on X they're just not available yet :( )
So unless they're a part of Windows 98, antialiased fonts cost you extra, while on Macs they're free.
Well, gee, they should have told me that then instead of being all rude to me. Ever think of THAT?
No FUD here, just facts. If it was sloppy crap coding then they could have mentioned that as a reason, or told me that it needed more testing before being integrated into the kernel.
Yeah, whatever. If they're antialiased, why do they still look jagged on my box?
Probably true, though Xpilot does run on it (rather well if you use -colorSwitch No)... and does trying to make sure Wine works as advertised in the README count as "fun and games"?
Yeah, yeah, I know... not that kind of fun and games.
Point 1 is a decent remedy for the Microsoft problem. It would certainly level the playing field for competitors in application software. In fact, I feel this should be the LAW for any and all OS vendors.
;-)
What I can't see is how it would _help_ other OS vendors any. It sure would help the Wine project immensely though
2 would make Microsoft's software patents effectively meaningless. The only thing that would happen is that other software companies can't patent things that Microsoft has already patented. Instead they would have to go to Microsoft and get the license, which supposedly Microsoft would have to grant. I suppose that's a Good Thing if in fact we (or any other software company for that matter) get to use that code freely.
I guess I feel that software should be copyright(left)ed, not patented. Maybe copyrighting is even a bit much -- after all, all software is is a very large number that when interpreted in a very specific way by a specific machine, does something. Suppose you found a mathematical series that produces numbers that, when interpreted in binary, just happen to be the files necessary to run Word? Not likely, in many lifetimes of the universe, but there's a non-zero chance of it occuring. (In fact, there are trivial ways of doing it with an n-th order polynomial where n is the number of files, but it would probably require using the numbers in question to generate the polynomial -- as in using them as the roots or using them as the values at x=1, x=2, etc.) Of course, with the size of today's software, actually _using_ such a formula if found is another near impossibility...
OK, so that was a pathetic attempt at finding a position on patented software. I guess 2 sounds good in a "Wouldn't that be nice" sort of way, but I don't know if it really _is_ Good & Right.
3 is pretty lame. If Microsoft just stops _certifying_ hardware as MS-Compatible altogether, that doesn't affect hardware vendors any
Darn, that's exactly what I was going to say, except that I would seperate a per-user filter from a system-wide filter.
If you can set up NetNanny so that it only filters for you and no one else, and that was the default, that would be OK. If the admin could set up a killfile that everyone at the company was forced to use, then that would be Evil & Wrong.
the anti-aliased fonts in the UI (though that probably falls under "It's gorgeous").
;-)
Windows? Bzzt.
X? Bzzt.
Anti-aliased fonts mean I wouldn't have to run my 15" screen at 1280x1024 for the letters to be clear and not jagged.
You're right, Linus is more of a minimalist (I think).
Bill Gates? Definitely a surrealist
I hate the FreeBSD central team. Back in the 2.2.6-current days when you needed a patch to run Quake 2 under the Linux emulation (dunno if that's still true) I suggested to them that they should just integrate the patch into their OS.
They basically gave me the finger. You might still be able to find the exchange on the freebsd-current archives if thy go back a year or more.
Sorry, but FreeBSD just doesn't have a real open development model from what I can tell.
Write everything in assembler!!!
Really, LOC is probably the worst measure of product size or productivity that there is. The effect of 4GLs is to try to _reduce_ the number of lines of code that the programmer has to write to do a task.
So, maybe we should take this as a good article. I mean, we're doing more with less lines of code!
Besides, I hear writing the code for a project is the easy part. The requirements, analysis, planning, and design are what eat up most of the time and demand the most skill. Perhaps we should define productivity as lines of pseudocode???
Oh yeah, maintenance eats up tons of time too, just to change a few wrong lines of code.
The only thing they didn't point out is that Microsoft paid for the whole thing. Everything else they pretty much nailed.
;-)
So, all you gurus out there, it seems there's a definite need for a "Highend-Server-Tuning-HOWTO". Any takers?
Also, I'd love to see the same test run on NT, a properly tuned Linux, Solaris 7 (which is supposed to be Much improved over 2.6 on x86 hardware), and Netware to see how many OSes beat NT, when Mindcraft claims the other way around. Unfortunately, I don't have the money for a quad-Xeon box or Netware, or I'd make my website useful for once
You can certainly add new _instructions_ by changing the microcode. The way microcode works is that each opcode is actually a jump instruction to a certain point in control memory. The section of memory that correspond to opcodes is actually a sort of jump table to where the actual work gets done.
So yes, you can add instructions if you define previously "reserved" opcodes and add the control sequence for them. Whether you can actually do something really new with them depends on if you're not using all the features of your ALU or coprocessor, which is not a likely situation.
Therefore, adding mere instructions is not a problem with microcode (unless you've used all the opcodes from 0 to 2^the length of your opcode). Adding new actual features is much harder.
Theaters will still put in all 8 minutes though :(
*Note to self: Watch knee-jerk reactions*
I wonder how many home consumers use Works instead of Office then, as would make sense. Of course, then Microsoft would make less money, so that's Not Reccomended.
Not anymore, bub. Calling today's word processing applications "relatively simple" is like calling the Notre Dame Cathedral "relatively plain".
;-)
Maybe at one time, when there was no such thing as WYSIWYG(MOR), word processors were rather simple. However, the GUI changed all that. Now it's hard to draw the line between word processors and desktop publishing.
However, nearly all the features in today's word processors are "nice" features rather than "necessary" features. Do we really need to underline all of our misspelled words and poorly written sentences as we're typing? Not really; I find it only slows me down, and I pretty much ignore the grammar checker because it's never right
To be honest, I don't even know all the features that are in a modern spreadsheet; the only one I use is "graph". The other features might as well not exist and I would be happy. Yet QPW.exe takes up 4.5 MB on my hard disk! It can't all be graphics, can it?
Unfortunately, Mr. Gates is half right: Word processors and spreadsheets are theoretically simple programs. However, the public concept is that the more features a program has, the better it is. Microsoft's software has the most features, so it must be the best.
How can you fight a public that thinks that way? "Sure, our product has half the features of Word, but they all work flawlessly and are the ones used by 95% of consumers!" Good thing I'm not going into marketing...
Anyway, I guess now we need office apps that are to Office what Linux is to Windows, except for the "hard for the average consumer to use' part. Should be a "simple" task, right?
Maybe that's the point Mr. Gates is trying to make. We've got an OS, admittedly a hard thing to create, but no applications, which should be easier! (I'm not counting commercial stuff, only Free Software/GNU apps competitive with Office.) Sounds like a challenge to me.
I guess what I should have said was "If the emulator came with source code on the disk and full distribution rights of any modifications you made, then sure I would buy it. Of course then you could just download the source code instead, but you'd probably need the latest MS compiler to compile anyway, so that wouldn't do me any good."
:(
The problem is Free has too many meanings. Sorry if I mislead you in that.
As for 1, I wonder if you can buy the Japanese version if you're in the US.
I guess 2 just means the games would look how they're supposed to look, not how the regular Playstation hardware renders them.
Also on that note, I wonder if the Playstation 2 would be bug-for-bug compatible or "correct"? Oh well, I'll just have to wait on that one.
Yeah, I came to see the trailers preceeding Star Wars, not the movie itself!
EIGHT MINUTES of trailers? That's ludicrous.
Come to think of it, so are most of the other regulations -- obviously contrived so LucasFilm makes even more money. The "minimum run" and "You must pay us within a week" ones especially hurt. The only good one is the 12:01 first showtime. I wonder how many theaters will actually have a special showing then.
PLEASE tell me there's other reasons for these special restrictions. Otherwise I might start to think that the movie went way over budget and Lucas is worried that it won't necessarily be enough of a blockbuster to make a profit.
YOu gotta wonder, with Free Software threatening to kick Microsoft's butt back to the Atomic Age, if this is a calculated plot to get RMS to quit rather than work in a building bearing Bill's name.
;-(
It should be interesting to see what RMS does (if in fact the building is renamed Gates Center for Computer Science or something similar). I'm pretty sure his work with the FSF doesn't depend on him having an office at MIT, though whatever else he does might.
Finally, if prep.ai.mit.edu goes down, or tsx-11.mit.edu switches to an NT server and dumps its Linux collection, you know what happened
Linux is just getting into SMP and probably needs more tuning. Though I'm pretty sure they didn't do their own tuning other than replacing the kernel.
Doesn't somebody make a special Server Edition for this sort of thing though? I though it was RedHat but I can't find it... If there is, try running the test with that and see what happens.
Has that been fixed in 2.6? I hope so...
but I ain't no cracker.
;-) ;-)
White -- check.
Middle-class -- check.
Male -- check.
Lacks social skills -- that's what my parents tell me
Dysfunctional family -- Mom and dad have their differences but are still married.
Feels more comfortable behind a computer system than in face-to-face interaction -- check.
Subjected to physical abuse -- does paddling count?
Ooh... you better watch out for me... especailly since I've been known to read Bugtraq!!!!
Actually, I probably am not even at the level of "scrpit kiddie", and I read Bugtraq to see what security issues I need to fix on my own computer, and to laugh at how many times Microsoft appears on there.
I personally wouldn't try to crack for two reasons:
1. The most sophisticated attack I know is "ping -f" which isn't even a feature on Solaris ping and any halfway decent server should be able to handle it without a problem.
2. Cracking is just plain Bad & Wrong, Internet access is a priviledge, you'll probably go to jail and earn the disrespect of real hackers everywhere, etc. etc.
Finally, just remember that it's ok to say "If a person is a hexor (can we use that instead of cracker because it's considered derogatory in the South?) then he probably has X personality traits", but it's NOT ok to say "if a person has X personality traits then he's probably a hexor."