If something is off topic then it should be modded down. If someone likes to read off topic posts, they can.
Most of the time when I'm reading Slashdot I don't have time to do anything but skim the articles and maybe look at a few comments, and I need for those comments to be focused, to the point, brilliant, short, and informative. Think in terms of the writing on the op-ed page of the New York Times - that is what I like. A few quick posts, full of disagreeing opinions, to give me a quick sense of what the standard, divergent opinions are on the given subject.
In the last 6 years there's maybe been 10 times when I've had time to drill down and read all the posts under a given topic here on Slashdot (tonight being one of those 10 times, which is why I discovered your post). Some people have much more free time and are therefore free to explore widely on a more frequent basis than myself. Some people read every single comment under posts that interst them. I say more power to them. If they like reading obscure posts, they certainly have a right to. But those posts shouldn't be moderated up, or I'll have to read them on the nights when I've almost no time to read.
I recently got a Psion Revo. The thing is amazing. It's got tremendous power packed into a thing that I can put in my pocket. Then I pull it out and type email on it. Stylish. Daring in design. I'm damn impressed.
Misuse of cars kill. Changes in the standard way of use kills. When people go from right-side countries like America to left-side countries like Britain or Japan, they are confused to suddenly have to drive on the "wrong" side of the road. In 1936 Winston Churchill came to New York to give a speech. He stepped out of his hotel and into the street. He looked right, out of sheer force of habit. He did not see the taxi coming at him from the left. He spent 6 months in a hospital. Had the taxi hit him a little harder, world history might have turned out very differently than it has.
So many people seem to think that Windows 2000 is an awesome operating system. But I've a story to tell, a true story. Last week I got to sit down in front of a Windows 2000 machine. It was my first time playing around with Windows 2000. I've been wanting to play around with it since there's been so much talk about it. So I take it for a test run. I launch the modem software and get online. Then I click the icon (single click since its on the launch tab) for IE. Then I think I want a second instance of IE (so I can look at the New York Times and look at Salon simutaneously) so I click the icon again. Crashes the whole machine. Not just the process, but the whole machine. The keyboard won't work anymore, the mouse won't work, Cntrl-Alt-Del doesn't work. Have to reboot. The whole machine! And this is Windows 2000! Crashed just because I wanted a second instance of IE! This is a task, by the way, that Windows 98 handled without a problem.
If something is in the public domain then its not Open Source. Open Source operates under some license, either GPL or GNU or any of a hundred other Open Source licenses that are floating around. Open Source software is copyrighted. Public domain is the opposite, it means no one owns the copyright. Open Source is the exact opposite of the public domain. To say otherwise is to render the phrase meaningless. Think about it. The phrase "Open Source" means the source remains open. If something is in the public domain and I take it and change it then my new version can be proprietary, I can charge money for it. It is not open, nor am I under any obligation to make it open. If Linux was in the public domain, rather than Open Source, then Microsoft could take it and sell their own version of it. They can't do that to Linux because Linux is not in the public domain, rather, someone owns the copyright.
Darpa has been funding OS research since the early 1970s. That's not the point of the article. The point, the interesting new thing, is that now some of the money might go to Open Source projects. Earlier funding lead to technology that ended up in the public domain and was available for companies to take and incorporate into proprietary products (a process that Jim Allicin of Microsoft hopes will continue). If the research was Open Source, then the final product will not end up in the public domain. (This seems likely to provoke a court battle. Why should tax payer funded research not end up in the public domain? What right does the government have to keep the copyright?)
Ted Goranson, who has done research under Darpa grants, often laments that there has been amazing little development in operating systems since the 1970s. The files systems of most of todays operating systems remain primitive and little changed from 30 years ago.
Much research has been done and it has lead to many good experimental technologies (file systems that work as databases,instead of being flat). However, these technologies are slow to be incorporated into commercial products, partly because those products labor under the need for backwards compatibility.
Goranson remarked that some of the Darpa funded research on OSs was incorporated into the latest OS from Apple, but I'm not sure of the details.
when's slashdot going to have a printed magazine that I can read on the throne?
It does now, as near as I know. I stuff a lot of the text from these pages into my handheld, and then go read them while I'm sitting at my favorite coffeeshop. I find I have to do this, otherwise I get eye strain from sitting in front of the computer too long, trying to read too much. I own a Sharp Wizard OZ-730 but I'm sure you can do the same thing with a PalmPilot, a handheld running WinCE, or an EPOCH machine like the Psion Revo. These things are so tiny that they are actually easier to carry than a magazine would be. They are several ounces lighter.
>>>>>> This is an actual computer....you will see that what we are talking about here is a fully-functional LINUX box,.... It ships with Ethernet for LAN's & Broadband connections, and a 56K modem for dial-up. Is there an implication here that computers need to be this powerful to be real (or "actual", as you say)? I recently gave up my laptop for a handheld computer (the Revo from Psion, running the EPOCH operating system). It does about 80% of what I want. I'm in love with the thing. And handhelds are the real future of computers, at least in terms of growth potential. The power of these little machines is just going to grow and grow. Their growth over the next 5 years, at least measured as a percentage of current sales, is going to be greater than that of PCs or Macs. And in dollar volume they might easily represent a bigger market 5 years from now than NCs will. They do now, and I don't see them losing that to NCs in the next 5 years.
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If something is off topic then it should be modded down. If someone likes to read off topic posts, they can.
Most of the time when I'm reading Slashdot I don't have time to do anything but skim the articles and maybe look at a few comments, and I need for those comments to be focused, to the point, brilliant, short, and informative. Think in terms of the writing on the op-ed page of the New York Times - that is what I like. A few quick posts, full of disagreeing opinions, to give me a quick sense of what the standard, divergent opinions are on the given subject.
In the last 6 years there's maybe been 10 times when I've had time to drill down and read all the posts under a given topic here on Slashdot (tonight being one of those 10 times, which is why I discovered your post). Some people have much more free time and are therefore free to explore widely on a more frequent basis than myself. Some people read every single comment under posts that interst them. I say more power to them. If they like reading obscure posts, they certainly have a right to. But those posts shouldn't be moderated up, or I'll have to read them on the nights when I've almost no time to read.
I recently got a Psion Revo. The thing is amazing. It's got tremendous power packed into a thing that I can put in my pocket. Then I pull it out and type email on it. Stylish. Daring in design. I'm damn impressed.
Misuse of cars kill. Changes in the standard way of use kills. When people go from right-side countries like America to left-side countries like Britain or Japan, they are confused to suddenly have to drive on the "wrong" side of the road. In 1936 Winston Churchill came to New York to give a speech. He stepped out of his hotel and into the street. He looked right, out of sheer force of habit. He did not see the taxi coming at him from the left. He spent 6 months in a hospital. Had the taxi hit him a little harder, world history might have turned out very differently than it has.
So many people seem to think that Windows 2000 is an awesome operating system. But I've a story to tell, a true story. Last week I got to sit down in front of a Windows 2000 machine. It was my first time playing around with Windows 2000. I've been wanting to play around with it since there's been so much talk about it. So I take it for a test run. I launch the modem software and get online. Then I click the icon (single click since its on the launch tab) for IE. Then I think I want a second instance of IE (so I can look at the New York Times and look at Salon simutaneously) so I click the icon again. Crashes the whole machine. Not just the process, but the whole machine. The keyboard won't work anymore, the mouse won't work, Cntrl-Alt-Del doesn't work. Have to reboot. The whole machine! And this is Windows 2000! Crashed just because I wanted a second instance of IE! This is a task, by the way, that Windows 98 handled without a problem.
If something is in the public domain then its not Open Source. Open Source operates under some license, either GPL or GNU or any of a hundred other Open Source licenses that are floating around. Open Source software is copyrighted. Public domain is the opposite, it means no one owns the copyright. Open Source is the exact opposite of the public domain. To say otherwise is to render the phrase meaningless. Think about it. The phrase "Open Source" means the source remains open. If something is in the public domain and I take it and change it then my new version can be proprietary, I can charge money for it. It is not open, nor am I under any obligation to make it open. If Linux was in the public domain, rather than Open Source, then Microsoft could take it and sell their own version of it. They can't do that to Linux because Linux is not in the public domain, rather, someone owns the copyright.
Ted Goranson, who has done research under Darpa grants, often laments that there has been amazing little development in operating systems since the 1970s. The files systems of most of todays operating systems remain primitive and little changed from 30 years ago.
Much research has been done and it has lead to many good experimental technologies (file systems that work as databases,instead of being flat). However, these technologies are slow to be incorporated into commercial products, partly because those products labor under the need for backwards compatibility.
Goranson remarked that some of the Darpa funded research on OSs was incorporated into the latest OS from Apple, but I'm not sure of the details.
when's slashdot going to have a printed magazine that I can read on the throne?
It does now, as near as I know. I stuff a lot of the text from these pages into my handheld, and then go read them while I'm sitting at my favorite coffeeshop. I find I have to do this, otherwise I get eye strain from sitting in front of the computer too long, trying to read too much. I own a Sharp Wizard OZ-730 but I'm sure you can do the same thing with a PalmPilot, a handheld running WinCE, or an EPOCH machine like the Psion Revo. These things are so tiny that they are actually easier to carry than a magazine would be. They are several ounces lighter.
>>>>>> This is an actual computer. ...you will see that what we are talking about here is a fully-functional LINUX box, .... It ships with Ethernet for LAN's & Broadband connections, and a 56K modem for dial-up. Is there an implication here that computers need to be this powerful to be real (or "actual", as you say)? I recently gave up my laptop for a handheld computer (the Revo from Psion, running the EPOCH operating system). It does about 80% of what I want. I'm in love with the thing. And handhelds are the real future of computers, at least in terms of growth potential. The power of these little machines is just going to grow and grow. Their growth over the next 5 years, at least measured as a percentage of current sales, is going to be greater than that of PCs or Macs. And in dollar volume they might easily represent a bigger market 5 years from now than NCs will. They do now, and I don't see them losing that to NCs in the next 5 years.