Of course, once we start engineering genes rather than just copying them from other humans, then no one would be increasing their Darwinian fitness; engineered humans would be the Darwinian offspring of no one, but rather products of technology and mind working directly upon biological material.
I disagree. Simply because manipulating genes isn't the equivalent of having sex doesn't mean we aren't increasing our Darwinian fitness. On the contrary, it means we're actively taking responsibility for our Darwinian fitness. We'd be creating human beings that are better suited for their environments, that are healthier, stronger, faster, smarter, choose-your-adjective.
There seems to be this perspective that if it isn't two people having sex, it's somehow "unnatural." We were all born on this planet, and discounting half-baked alien conspiracy theories, humanity has developed their technology based on the resources available on this planet. We fought our way off the plains of Africa, survived the Ice Age, managed to develop sophisticated thought processes and advanced toolmaking, and began to improve ourselves through means provided by nature (using animal skins for warmth, caves for shelter, etc.). Genetic manipulation is merely a modern equivalent of primitive mans' stone tools - a tool derived and adapted from nature to better suit humanity.
The fruit of our hands didn't fall from the sky, in other words. We made it out of what we had available here. That makes it just as natural as sexual intercourse. It's simply a greatly-accelerated process of evolution, no longer controlled at the slow pace of millions of years, but at the frenetic pace of dozens. It is only that our consciousness allows us to do these things, instead of having Mother Earth do it for us.
I'm not really smart ('on par,' maybe), but I maybe can field this one.
Black holes, contrary to popular myth, actually do radiate. This involves virtual particle pairs and all sorts of crazy logic, and if you really want to read up on it you can email me for some accessible-to-the-layperson titles. Further, they don't attract matter to them anymore than a object of equal gravitational strength, so they aren't a universal vaccuum cleaner, more like a bottomless pit. So it's more of a passive "suck" then an active one, and you can orbit a black hole just like any other gravitational object of equal mass (rephrased, if you replaced the Earth with a black hole of equal mass, the moon and all the satellites would continue to orbit in exactly the same place they are now).
At any rate, black holes will only grow if they consume more matter than they radiate. As they radiate, the event horizon shrinks. So it's a sort of balancing act for the black hole. If the black hole doesn't balance it's consumption, it will either grow or shrink. If it's shrinking, it's mass - and therefore gravitational influence - dissipates, albeit slowly. Eventually, when it gets down to a critical size, it will explode in a burst of energy.
They aren't, so his statement is technically false.
However, I think it's pretty commonly believed that a grand unified theory (not to be confused with any specific Grand Unified Theory) of some sort does govern the entire universe. Whether it be a single equation, or a set of equations, the universe acts according to that grand theory.
So while his statement is technically incorrect using today's theories, eventually (for suitably arbitrary definitions of "eventually") we will figure out how to unite all of the various theories and forces into one encompassing mathematical/physical explanation.
If I remember events correctly, the original Linux developers were having difficulty even getting started with the Linux port. Eventually, Opera got so fed up with the team that they disbanded them and started looking for a new team to do the port over, from scratch.
So scrapping a poor attempt and trying to get people to do a much better one is certainly a good justification for the long delay. Whether it's a good excuse is left as an exercise for the user.
I had a friend in college who was 21 when I was 20. He had discovered a liking for scotch, and I had never tried it before, so one night he went out and purchased a massive bottle of Dewars. Cutting out many, many details, my friend and I, along with a third mutual friend, split the bottle three ways - straight up, no mixing or chasing.
I woke up the next morning (with virtually zero recollection of the night before) to find an email waiting in my inbox from one of my friends, asking me if I was drunk. After inquiring about how she knew, she forwarded me the email I had apparently sent her the night before.
I was surprised at how well I had actually managed to type, considering how drunk I must've been to have the large gaping hole in my memory. After a few hours, I had managed to puzzle out almost everything I had written. One sentence still eluded me, however, largely because it did not contain a single vowel.
So that "Dude, I wrote that?" isn't very far fetched.:)
Hypothetically, if BeOS were to open their source code to the public with a license that conformed to the OSI specs, would that change your opinion of its viability?
Rephrased, is BeOS unrecoverable even if it opens its source code?
I thought I'd heard about this months ago, and I could *swear* it appeared on Slashdot then, too.
Regardless, this isn't really important to anybody. It still bears Sun's license, which prohibits developers from doing anything with the code and retaining their contribution. It all goes back into Sun's pockets. Their license is useful - it lets you look at the code of their products, which might be very handy in an educational environment - but for real world work, it's only a good license if you don't mind handing all your work back to Sun.
Question: would it be possible to look at how Sun's code does something (say, for example, SMP) and then use the *ideas*, not the code itself, to improve areas of Linux?
What is says to me is that there are dirty old men in the computing industry, just as there are dirty old men in every industry in the world.
The only difference is that the computer industry, unlike the cement mixing industry or the auto repair industry, is in the face of the average Joe on a daily basis.
A few years ago, I read about some guy in California who had purchased gay-themed child pornography before it had been made illegal in the United States (sometime in the late 1970s, IIRC). The police decided to go after this guy *after* the material had become illegal, so they bombarded his house with magazines and ordering information for his preference of child porn. After *many* months, the guy finally ordered some, and the police arrested him.
The case, however, was thrown out because the judge ruled that while the man had purchased material in the past, it had been legal at the time. The police had not demonstrated that the man was actively buying new material in violation of the law, and that the constant bombardment of literature in his mail box constituted entrapment because the man testified that the only reason he bought the new literature was because he had received this material so much that he eventually decided to check it out.
I recently visited an amusement park in Minnesota, and if you wanted to leave the park temporarily (for example, running out to your car to grab a towel for the water park inside), they stamped your hand using special ink that could only be seen under a black light.
Re:Just another step.
on
CALEA update
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· Score: 1
A very brief anecdote.
I visited a friend in Minnesota this past July. In exchange for giving him a K6-2/350, he gave me a 10.2G hard disk, which wound up in my carry-on luggage. After having my carry-on X-rayed at the St. Paul bag inspection, I was asked to step off to the side and have the bag swabbed. (The guy slapped on some gloves, took out a fresh swab, wiped the edges around my bag, and then stuck it in a machine for a few seconds; apparently, the machine reported no traces of bad chemicals on the swab, and he returned my bag.) However, they never actually opened my bag.
I'd be very curious in knowing what aspects feel unfinished to you (I'm not picking an argument, I'm genuinely curious). I've used it as my solo OS for nearly six months now, so... I'm interested in a fresh perspective.:)
>If this was true, why would they change their API every 'major' release again?..
Please tell me you aren't that dense.
Which changes would those be? The Media Kit, where they did a complete rewrite of their media subsystem, and you still expect them to maintain the exact same API? Or would that be the Network Kit, where they're *adding* a C++ API layer on top of the existing C calls, not replacing.
Or would it be the addition of several new kits - such as the Input Server Kit - that allows people to make input server add-ons for devices such as mice, keyboards, and tablets without having to go through the entire rigamarole of having to write a brand-new driver?
They *change* the API only when it becomes useless not to do so. Maintaining the old interface to the Media Kit would've been plain stupid, considering how much functionality would've been hidden to the programmer. Further, given that BeOS is explicitly designed to reduce the number of hacks around poor design decisions, adding a compatability layer would go against BeOS' design ethos - much like using microkernels or disabling streams goes against the idea of Linux and UNIX, respectively.
As for the power of OpenStep/Cocoa, you said it all with two words 'I believe.' The other poster was offering his opinion as well. So we have two dueling opinions. Guess what, opinion isn't objective fact (no pun intended). He's not right, but neither are you. Deal with it.
I'll ignore the obvious troll-like qualities to your response and attempt to engage in some sort of meaningful dialoge.
LinuxPPC is not in the same boat as Be. LinuxPPC has the excuse in the event of a lawsuit that they are simply repackaging an existing operating system, that they are only contributing to a community-designed operating system. Be doesn't have that excuse. If they reverse-engineer the specs, they could conceivably be held legally accountable. Further, unofficial specs also leave them at the whim of Apple (as is the case with LinuxPPC as well) - if Apple decides to change something that the MacOS understands, but screws all alternative OSes... oops.
The common complaint is, why doesn't BeOS just use the Linux base? Because most likely that would contaminate the BeOS source base with GPL code. Be doesn't want to open-source their operating system yet, so they can't incorporate GPL source into the underlying operating system.
As for BeOS has on Linux, ease of use, ease of installation, ease of configuration, GUI speed (after trying both GNOME and KDE, BeOS is by far the more responsive performer - although non-DEs, like the "basic" window managers, are on par with it), the SMP tricks (some of which you simply can't do on the Linux kernel, because of the differences in kernel architecture), pervasive multithreading, a clean, intelligent, and simple C++ API, built-in GUI scripting, built-in standard , powerful messenging system, the MIME-based file system (of which GNOME has, been virtually no applications use), and lastly, a 64-bit journalled file system with attributes that can handle very significantly larger file and volume sizes than even XFS.
Yes, however, hardware support is lacking. On the other hand, my machine (as listed below) works perfectly with absolutely no problems. The situation is analogous to how Linux used to be a few years ago - you'd have to buy Linux-compatible hardware, instead of buying hardware and pretty much knowing it would work.
Dual Pentium-II/400 384M PC100 Memory Matrox G200 8Mb AGP Creative Labs Voodoo2 SB Live! Value 3Com 3C905B-TX Fast Ethernet adapter Intel PRO/100+ Fast Ethernet adapter 10.2G Maxtor UDMA HDD 8.4G Western Digital UDMA HDD Iomega Internal Zip Drive (100M) 40x UDMA CD-ROM Drive (generic)
Don't get me wrong - I'm not shitting on Linux. Linux is a wonderful operating system, one that I've used in the past. If somebody asked me about setting up a server, I would certainly recommend one of the Unices (Linux, *BSD, or one of the commerical Unices), the specific one being dependent on their needs. If anybody told me they were running BeOS as a server for more than a handful of home users, I'd probably laugh at them.
I've simply found that *I*, personally, can get things done faster and with less hassle using BeOS as opposed to Linux, contradicting the original poster who claimed (paraphrasing) that no one could ever find BeOS more productive than Linux.
Gee, that's odd. I find BeOS to be significantly easier for me to accomplish my everyday tasks in than Linux, and less intrusive on my computer experience to boot.
Then again, perhaps it's because I simply want to get things done without the hassle of struggling with the operating system - something that Linux, despite all of it's window managers, desktop environments, and pretty installation programs has yet to master.
Ignorant of the implications
on
Linux on a SIMM
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· Score: 1
I am, as the subject says, ignorant of what this means. Besides the novelty value of having Linux on such a small/low-power device, what good is this? Should this appeal to Joe Average Linux user, and if so, why?
"We are comparing apples and oranges here. My 'accusation', as you call it, to Linux is based on the fact that Windows came out first. Of course you scrap an idea or two in developing a new project, but my question was: do we really need another desktop operating system since Windows is already out?... All the energy poured on Linux could have been reversed to create more Windows applications and help Windows to get more features sooner."
If you can point out why the above is wrong, chances are, you'll have a jump start of figuring out why we need *BOTH* KDE and GNOME.
My friend Rob and I got hooked on it our freshman year in college, right when the original DI playable demo came out. We'd stay up until all hours of the night to play that thing, and then struggle to get up in the morning to go to class.
We've often referred to it as the most expensive computer game we've ever played. That game, single-handedly, has fueled more hardware upgrades than anything I've used in my life. Between faster processors, more memory, better audio and video subsystems, new controllers, and larger hard disks (storing all those extra levels)... aahhh.:)
I don't know what's worse: the amount of money I've sunk into getting that game to be absolutely kick-ass, or the fact that I don't regret spending a penny of it!:)
No offense intended, but Tribes 2 sucks. I would much rather have something like Descent, which pretty much pioneered the first person flight-sim shooter market (where it still remains, by far, on top of the heap) than just another wannabe Mechwarrior rip-off.
Re:Why are they allowed to delay source release?
on
Corel Linux Preview
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· Score: 1
What about the whole "information wants to be free" mantra? What about the whole "it's unethical and immortal to not share" concept?
While I certainly respect RMS, if he truly feels this way then he's talking out of both sides of the mouth. Either information is completely free, in which case you should have to publish modications regardless of whether you release binaries, or it isn't, in which case he can stop trying to foist the GPL on every software project from here to Mars.
Just want I want to be the ambassador of the human race, some spam about "the world's youngest, nakedest xxx teens!" Granted, E.T. won't have the cultural frame of reference to really understand it, but still... it's embarassing.
Gee, yeah, that would be really cool. Instead of being a different operating system with new forms of technology, it could just be yet another Linux distribution.
[/sarcasm]
Seriously, my biggest fear with open-sourcing BeOS is that people wouldn't work on it as a whole, but take what they could, throw it all on Linux, and then leave. Aside from the kernel, which most of the kernel developers from Linux wouldn't look at because it's a microkernel, most of the BeOS technology would simply wind up as fodder for the other Linux distributions. In the words of some anonymous Star Trek villains, "We will add your own distinctiveness to our own."
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, once we start engineering genes rather than just copying them from other humans, then no one would be increasing their Darwinian fitness; engineered humans would be the Darwinian offspring of no one, but rather products of technology and mind working directly upon biological material.
I disagree. Simply because manipulating genes isn't the equivalent of having sex doesn't mean we aren't increasing our Darwinian fitness. On the contrary, it means we're actively taking responsibility for our Darwinian fitness. We'd be creating human beings that are better suited for their environments, that are healthier, stronger, faster, smarter, choose-your-adjective.
There seems to be this perspective that if it isn't two people having sex, it's somehow "unnatural." We were all born on this planet, and discounting half-baked alien conspiracy theories, humanity has developed their technology based on the resources available on this planet. We fought our way off the plains of Africa, survived the Ice Age, managed to develop sophisticated thought processes and advanced toolmaking, and began to improve ourselves through means provided by nature (using animal skins for warmth, caves for shelter, etc.). Genetic manipulation is merely a modern equivalent of primitive mans' stone tools - a tool derived and adapted from nature to better suit humanity.
The fruit of our hands didn't fall from the sky, in other words. We made it out of what we had available here. That makes it just as natural as sexual intercourse. It's simply a greatly-accelerated process of evolution, no longer controlled at the slow pace of millions of years, but at the frenetic pace of dozens. It is only that our consciousness allows us to do these things, instead of having Mother Earth do it for us.
I'm not really smart ('on par,' maybe), but I maybe can field this one.
Black holes, contrary to popular myth, actually do radiate. This involves virtual particle pairs and all sorts of crazy logic, and if you really want to read up on it you can email me for some accessible-to-the-layperson titles. Further, they don't attract matter to them anymore than a object of equal gravitational strength, so they aren't a universal vaccuum cleaner, more like a bottomless pit. So it's more of a passive "suck" then an active one, and you can orbit a black hole just like any other gravitational object of equal mass (rephrased, if you replaced the Earth with a black hole of equal mass, the moon and all the satellites would continue to orbit in exactly the same place they are now).
At any rate, black holes will only grow if they consume more matter than they radiate. As they radiate, the event horizon shrinks. So it's a sort of balancing act for the black hole. If the black hole doesn't balance it's consumption, it will either grow or shrink. If it's shrinking, it's mass - and therefore gravitational influence - dissipates, albeit slowly. Eventually, when it gets down to a critical size, it will explode in a burst of energy.
*poof!*
They aren't, so his statement is technically false.
However, I think it's pretty commonly believed that a grand unified theory (not to be confused with any specific Grand Unified Theory) of some sort does govern the entire universe. Whether it be a single equation, or a set of equations, the universe acts according to that grand theory.
So while his statement is technically incorrect using today's theories, eventually (for suitably arbitrary definitions of "eventually") we will figure out how to unite all of the various theories and forces into one encompassing mathematical/physical explanation.
If I remember events correctly, the original Linux developers were having difficulty even getting started with the Linux port. Eventually, Opera got so fed up with the team that they disbanded them and started looking for a new team to do the port over, from scratch.
So scrapping a poor attempt and trying to get people to do a much better one is certainly a good justification for the long delay. Whether it's a good excuse is left as an exercise for the user.
Funny story on that.
:)
I had a friend in college who was 21 when I was 20. He had discovered a liking for scotch, and I had never tried it before, so one night he went out and purchased a massive bottle of Dewars. Cutting out many, many details, my friend and I, along with a third mutual friend, split the bottle three ways - straight up, no mixing or chasing.
I woke up the next morning (with virtually zero recollection of the night before) to find an email waiting in my inbox from one of my friends, asking me if I was drunk. After inquiring about how she knew, she forwarded me the email I had apparently sent her the night before.
I was surprised at how well I had actually managed to type, considering how drunk I must've been to have the large gaping hole in my memory. After a few hours, I had managed to puzzle out almost everything I had written. One sentence still eluded me, however, largely because it did not contain a single vowel.
So that "Dude, I wrote that?" isn't very far fetched.
>Maybe yes, maybe no
Rocky Rococo: Do you know what this is?
Nick Danger: That's a brown paper bag.
Rocky Rococo: That's correct. Now, look inside.
Nick Danger: Why that's easy. That's a pickle.
Rocky Rococo: Good. Now I think you're ready for *this!*
(Firesign Theater, anybody?)
>Now, what do you get for the hooker who has everything?
Antibiotics.
Hypothetically, if BeOS were to open their source code to the public with a license that conformed to the OSI specs, would that change your opinion of its viability?
Rephrased, is BeOS unrecoverable even if it opens its source code?
I thought I'd heard about this months ago, and I could *swear* it appeared on Slashdot then, too.
Regardless, this isn't really important to anybody. It still bears Sun's license, which prohibits developers from doing anything with the code and retaining their contribution. It all goes back into Sun's pockets. Their license is useful - it lets you look at the code of their products, which might be very handy in an educational environment - but for real world work, it's only a good license if you don't mind handing all your work back to Sun.
Question: would it be possible to look at how Sun's code does something (say, for example, SMP) and then use the *ideas*, not the code itself, to improve areas of Linux?
What is says to me is that there are dirty old men in the computing industry, just as there are dirty old men in every industry in the world.
The only difference is that the computer industry, unlike the cement mixing industry or the auto repair industry, is in the face of the average Joe on a daily basis.
Some types of entrapment aren't that overt.
A few years ago, I read about some guy in California who had purchased gay-themed child pornography before it had been made illegal in the United States (sometime in the late 1970s, IIRC). The police decided to go after this guy *after* the material had become illegal, so they bombarded his house with magazines and ordering information for his preference of child porn. After *many* months, the guy finally ordered some, and the police arrested him.
The case, however, was thrown out because the judge ruled that while the man had purchased material in the past, it had been legal at the time. The police had not demonstrated that the man was actively buying new material in violation of the law, and that the constant bombardment of literature in his mail box constituted entrapment because the man testified that the only reason he bought the new literature was because he had received this material so much that he eventually decided to check it out.
As a personal anecdote of dubious value...
I recently visited an amusement park in Minnesota, and if you wanted to leave the park temporarily (for example, running out to your car to grab a towel for the water park inside), they stamped your hand using special ink that could only be seen under a black light.
A very brief anecdote.
I visited a friend in Minnesota this past July. In exchange for giving him a K6-2/350, he gave me a 10.2G hard disk, which wound up in my carry-on luggage. After having my carry-on X-rayed at the St. Paul bag inspection, I was asked to step off to the side and have the bag swabbed. (The guy slapped on some gloves, took out a fresh swab, wiped the edges around my bag, and then stuck it in a machine for a few seconds; apparently, the machine reported no traces of bad chemicals on the swab, and he returned my bag.) However, they never actually opened my bag.
So it does happen.
I'd be very curious in knowing what aspects feel unfinished to you (I'm not picking an argument, I'm genuinely curious). I've used it as my solo OS for nearly six months now, so... I'm interested in a fresh perspective. :)
>If this was true, why would they change their API every 'major' release again? ..
Please tell me you aren't that dense.
Which changes would those be? The Media Kit, where they did a complete rewrite of their media subsystem, and you still expect them to maintain the exact same API? Or would that be the Network Kit, where they're *adding* a C++ API layer on top of the existing C calls, not replacing.
Or would it be the addition of several new kits - such as the Input Server Kit - that allows people to make input server add-ons for devices such as mice, keyboards, and tablets without having to go through the entire rigamarole of having to write a brand-new driver?
They *change* the API only when it becomes useless not to do so. Maintaining the old interface to the Media Kit would've been plain stupid, considering how much functionality would've been hidden to the programmer. Further, given that BeOS is explicitly designed to reduce the number of hacks around poor design decisions, adding a compatability layer would go against BeOS' design ethos - much like using microkernels or disabling streams goes against the idea of Linux and UNIX, respectively.
As for the power of OpenStep/Cocoa, you said it all with two words 'I believe.' The other poster was offering his opinion as well. So we have two dueling opinions. Guess what, opinion isn't objective fact (no pun intended). He's not right, but neither are you. Deal with it.
I'll ignore the obvious troll-like qualities to your response and attempt to engage in some sort of meaningful dialoge.
LinuxPPC is not in the same boat as Be. LinuxPPC has the excuse in the event of a lawsuit that they are simply repackaging an existing operating system, that they are only contributing to a community-designed operating system. Be doesn't have that excuse. If they reverse-engineer the specs, they could conceivably be held legally accountable. Further, unofficial specs also leave them at the whim of Apple (as is the case with LinuxPPC as well) - if Apple decides to change something that the MacOS understands, but screws all alternative OSes... oops.
The common complaint is, why doesn't BeOS just use the Linux base? Because most likely that would contaminate the BeOS source base with GPL code. Be doesn't want to open-source their operating system yet, so they can't incorporate GPL source into the underlying operating system.
As for BeOS has on Linux, ease of use, ease of installation, ease of configuration, GUI speed (after trying both GNOME and KDE, BeOS is by far the more responsive performer - although non-DEs, like the "basic" window managers, are on par with it), the SMP tricks (some of which you simply can't do on the Linux kernel, because of the differences in kernel architecture), pervasive multithreading, a clean, intelligent, and simple C++ API, built-in GUI scripting, built-in standard , powerful messenging system, the MIME-based file system (of which GNOME has, been virtually no applications use), and lastly, a 64-bit journalled file system with attributes that can handle very significantly larger file and volume sizes than even XFS.
Yes, however, hardware support is lacking. On the other hand, my machine (as listed below) works perfectly with absolutely no problems. The situation is analogous to how Linux used to be a few years ago - you'd have to buy Linux-compatible hardware, instead of buying hardware and pretty much knowing it would work.
Dual Pentium-II/400
384M PC100 Memory
Matrox G200 8Mb AGP
Creative Labs Voodoo2
SB Live! Value
3Com 3C905B-TX Fast Ethernet adapter
Intel PRO/100+ Fast Ethernet adapter
10.2G Maxtor UDMA HDD
8.4G Western Digital UDMA HDD
Iomega Internal Zip Drive (100M)
40x UDMA CD-ROM Drive (generic)
Don't get me wrong - I'm not shitting on Linux. Linux is a wonderful operating system, one that I've used in the past. If somebody asked me about setting up a server, I would certainly recommend one of the Unices (Linux, *BSD, or one of the commerical Unices), the specific one being dependent on their needs. If anybody told me they were running BeOS as a server for more than a handful of home users, I'd probably laugh at them.
I've simply found that *I*, personally, can get things done faster and with less hassle using BeOS as opposed to Linux, contradicting the original poster who claimed (paraphrasing) that no one could ever find BeOS more productive than Linux.
Gee, that's odd. I find BeOS to be significantly easier for me to accomplish my everyday tasks in than Linux, and less intrusive on my computer experience to boot.
Then again, perhaps it's because I simply want to get things done without the hassle of struggling with the operating system - something that Linux, despite all of it's window managers, desktop environments, and pretty installation programs has yet to master.
I am, as the subject says, ignorant of what this means. Besides the novelty value of having Linux on such a small/low-power device, what good is this? Should this appeal to Joe Average Linux user, and if so, why?
What an odd statement.
... All the energy poured on Linux could have been reversed to create more Windows applications and help Windows to get more features sooner."
"We are comparing apples and oranges here. My 'accusation', as you call it, to Linux is based on the fact that Windows came out first. Of course you scrap an idea or two in developing a new project, but my question was: do we really need another desktop operating system since Windows is already out?
If you can point out why the above is wrong, chances are, you'll have a jump start of figuring out why we need *BOTH* KDE and GNOME.
You too? :)
:)
:)
My friend Rob and I got hooked on it our freshman year in college, right when the original DI playable demo came out. We'd stay up until all hours of the night to play that thing, and then struggle to get up in the morning to go to class.
We've often referred to it as the most expensive computer game we've ever played. That game, single-handedly, has fueled more hardware upgrades than anything I've used in my life. Between faster processors, more memory, better audio and video subsystems, new controllers, and larger hard disks (storing all those extra levels)... aahhh.
I don't know what's worse: the amount of money I've sunk into getting that game to be absolutely kick-ass, or the fact that I don't regret spending a penny of it!
No offense intended, but Tribes 2 sucks. I would much rather have something like Descent, which pretty much pioneered the first person flight-sim shooter market (where it still remains, by far, on top of the heap) than just another wannabe Mechwarrior rip-off.
What about the whole "information wants to be free" mantra? What about the whole "it's unethical and immortal to not share" concept?
While I certainly respect RMS, if he truly feels this way then he's talking out of both sides of the mouth. Either information is completely free, in which case you should have to publish modications regardless of whether you release binaries, or it isn't, in which case he can stop trying to foist the GPL on every software project from here to Mars.
Just want I want to be the ambassador of the human race, some spam about "the world's youngest, nakedest xxx teens!" Granted, E.T. won't have the cultural frame of reference to really understand it, but still... it's embarassing.
[sarcasm]
Gee, yeah, that would be really cool. Instead of being a different operating system with new forms of technology, it could just be yet another Linux distribution.
[/sarcasm]
Seriously, my biggest fear with open-sourcing BeOS is that people wouldn't work on it as a whole, but take what they could, throw it all on Linux, and then leave. Aside from the kernel, which most of the kernel developers from Linux wouldn't look at because it's a microkernel, most of the BeOS technology would simply wind up as fodder for the other Linux distributions. In the words of some anonymous Star Trek villains, "We will add your own distinctiveness to our own."