The biggest single thing you can to to improve performance is to make the game your window manager. Just make your.Xclients file a link to the game binary.
If you want even better performance, customize a runlevel with fewer things playing, but before you do that, renice the game to a higher priority, that should help out to minimize the effect or anything except memory intensive background programs. --
Dividends are one way of getting a handle on the "real" value of a company and hence it's stock. They are most important in industries which have stable profits and slow growth rates, such as electrical utilities.
They are not the only valuation method that is valid. Clearly when a company generates profits that money goes somewhere. If it is payed out in dividends it gets taxed twice (once as corporate profit, and once as income), and is often reinvested in any case. If instead the company reinvests that money either in it's own operations or by acquisitions, the assets (book value) and purchase price (market value) both naturally increase. The stockholder can get the effect of dividends by selling a small portion of his stock holdings if he wishes and, if he has held the stock for a sufficient length of time (1 year?), he pays only capital gains tax at 15% instead of income tax.
In either the dividend case or growth case, the key is profits, and more importantly the expected growth in future profits. The only other reasonable basis for valuation is the expected value of a acquisition of the company by a larger one.
That being said, I agree that Red Hat, and many internet companies can't justify their collosal valuations. A few, like eBay, are profitable and have the potential to become much more profitable without much more costs by leveraging the network effects of their clients and customers.
I don't see Red Hat being able to make Microsoft's profit margins without Microsoft's market control and proprietaryness. Their support model works well but the costs seem to scale fairly linearly with revenues. Boxed software sales are fairly high margin, but are hard to support without proprietary components (which the current boxed sets _do_ in fact have, just not much).
So the bottom line is that Red Hat, and all other recent IPO's, don't have to have dividends to justify their price. But they will have to have profits, and soon. --
Civilization CTP 1.1 is barely playable on Celeron 300 with 64 MB. The game slows to a crawl in late levels and there are significant bugs: some paratrooper manipulations can crash the game hard, and preferences are not save across sessions. Add to that the 350MB install and you have yourself a good game with severe annoyances. Before you flame me for wanting good performance out of this sub optimal gaming platform, consider that CTP is a 2D game with very little movement. I suspect that Blizzard could do a better port than Loki. For one thing they already do good Windows and Mac versions of their games so their code base is probably reasonably portable. Starting a port early in the development process is also a plus since it makes for better design decisions. I'm willing to give Loki the benefit of the doubt. CTP was their first foray into porting. They were on a tight schedule and have limited resources. The developers are accessible and responsive and they even have a Bugzilla page. I just hope their new releases are more professional and that they continue to fix the annoying bugs in their already released games. --
You can however link to a site hosted outside the US where non-exportable material is kept. The EFF (I think) fought an one a court battle on this matter. --
You are not allowed to export encryption technologies, even if they are developed outside the US. In fact the statute is broad enough to proscribe you from doing a private security audit of foreign code and sending them the results. --
If I understand the previous poster correctly, the power-on password is resettable, but only if you know the current password. This would be realizable using a EEPROM (the two 'E's stand for Electically Erasable) such a PROM is reprogrammable but non-volatile. Otherwise, you're right, there would be not any point. --
Have you ever tried to wonder around microsoft.com with a non-MS browser?
Even better than this is trying to access any MS page with the Internet Explorer bundled with NT 4.0 (IE version 2.0 build 1381)? It can't load the page at all, instead giving bogus error messages like:
Directory Listing Denied
This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed.
Netscape, OTOH displays the pages quite reasonably. --
Of the available unix variants, Linux seems to be one of the 'strangest', least standard (and perhaps least compatible?).
You've obviously never tried to get any major GNU package or even Sendmail to compile under IRIX. Nice GUI, nice admin tools, nice scalability but quite non-standard.
There may be other definitions of standard in which Linux lags, but my operable definition of standard is the ability to compile the common packages I need to get work done. In that respect Linux is very standard indeed. Perhaps this is because developers of open source products all have access to Linux boxen and can work around the oddities, but I would have a hard time calling it the least standard of all unicies. --
An earlier story on Slashdot, MS Dirty Pool Against AOL, referenced a sv.com article which claimed that this buffer exploit was a rumor floated by an MS employee. It would appear that either the CNN or sv.com article or the is factually incorrect and that some people have some apologizing to do. --
While this would work, it would be remarkably expensive and slow. It would never be faster than a digital modem with a direct connection to the link which I suspect would max out at 4800-9600 bps. --
All the GPL gaurantees is that source is distributed with the binary or source is available for nominal cost if you distribute only the binary. Anyone with the TiK source can redistribute it under the GPL, but AOL has no requirement to keep their servers open to outside users, other than to maintain goodwill.
You can argue against their actions and their motives. You can call them misguided or even evil, but recognize that they have every right to do what they are doing even though they "did the right thing" and released TiK under the GPL. If you don't like the control they exert over the instant messaging arena use IRC or roll your own.
Don't think for one minute that AOL does not understand and desire the control that owning the servers gives them and that they would give them up to please you. Don't expect the god of Open Source (all hail his name) protect you from your own greed. Yes greed. You want to use a service that has significant maintenance costs without reciprocating or paying because it is the most convienient to you. You are willing to blind yourself to the fact that you are in fact paying for this service by making it ubiquitous and locking yourself into a proprietary solution on proprietary servers. Don't cry now. Open source is an excellent hedge against commercialization in many contexts, but where there is money spent, there must be money made so either all parties participate equally, as in SMTP or you pay the piper. --
'j' is what engineers use when we mean sqrt(-1). 'I' and 'i' are used for current so using 'i' for sqrt(-1) would make electrical engineering equations impossible read since imaginary numbers are used all the time in electrical analysis. Other engineers also use j to mean sqrt(-1) because the same techniques and equations that are applied to electrical engineering can be applied to other systems so it's nice to keep things consistent. --
Actually, Iridium does satellite to satellite switching. Globalstar does ground switching. Both systems have pros and cons. The advantage of switching on the ground is that you keep the satelites simpler==less expensive and have fewer regulatory problems. The con is more ground station and more exposure to weather outages due to the ground station placement. --
They went bankrupt because they didn't get enough customers. The service was aimed at world business travellers but early phones didn't work in cities or buildings so they were only useful in truly remote locations like oil platforms and the like. New phones use local cellular service if available.
The other problem is that they do not have complete worldwide coverage because they bypass local phone monopolies and thus had difficulty getting regulatory approval in all areas. --
There do not appear to currently be any Iridium Modems.
There are serious technical problems with using a analog modem over a satelite telephone link. The compression and noise supression algorithms assume a voice call (certain frequencies, relatively long pauses between words). Using a regular analog modem would never work well and might not work at all. They could, however, develop a digital modem to directly interface with the digital satellite link but the bit rates would never be that high.
It probably makes sense for data customers to wait for the Teledesic system which is optimized for data traffic. --
The original announcement of the Slashdot buyout gives some explanation and mentions that Rob got a seat on the board of Andover. He also says "Most of what we're getting is a piece of Andover.Net." so I assume that means part ownership. While they may or may not have gotten the ultimate value for their site, it does not seem that they got screwed. And a contract gauranteeing creative control is worth quite a bit of money IMHO. --
If this article were written about Linux we would be righteous in our anger
Non-Microsoft operating systems such as Linux are invulnerable to macro attacks, immune to viruses, and can laugh at Back Orifice.
This is pure unadulterated bullshit and ESR knows it. I couldn't bring myself to read any further to see if he redeems himself so my apologies if he said "just kidding" later on. In his attempt to build up alternative OS's he has falsely stated that MS is vulnerable to attacks that are unthinkable in _all_ other OS's (or at leas Linux). What makes it all the worse is that Linux is far superior to Windows (especially 9x) in terms of real security. Let's stick to the facts and win on the level instead of trying to bead MS at their game of lies and half-truths.
To those who don't see the problems in ESR's statements, here's a quick rebuttal of the sentence above:
Vi has had macro attacks in the past and any application can have a design that allows macro attacks. They simply have to treat data files as scripts. While I can't think of an application that has such a vulnerability at the moment it does not make non-MS OS's immune since it is not an OS issue. MS has the responsibilty for Mellissa et al. not because they made the OS but because they made the programs (Outlook and Word) that were the vector for the worm.
Linux may be less vulnerable to viruses due to more attention to kernel security and memory protection, but it is also fair to say that not many people have tried. I would hesitate to call it invulnerable, but I'll concede the point if a security expert can convince me otherwise.
Laughing at Back Orifice is pure and complete BS. Crackers don't need to install BO, it's already there!!! Seriously, all BO is is a remote GUI. Most linux servers have X installed and everything can be configured with a terminal anyway, all they need is root access. BO may be a more stealthy, but a cracker needs to get Administrator access in the first place to install it and it is slightly easier to monitor for BO listening on one of your ports than it is to monitor all telnet and X connections for root activity.
In any case the name of the game is to prevent root access in the first place. I believe that Linux does a more comprehensive job of this, but we need real arguments, not lies, to win the fight.
Not if he was playing fair. A stock install should mean that a user account that it prompts you to make during the installation should be left in it's default state and that all special users should be left alone (I assume these are all locked in a standard install anyway, but then again they aren't in IRIX so you never know). --
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest single thing you can to to improve performance is to make the game your window manager. Just make your .Xclients file a link to the game binary.
If you want even better performance, customize a runlevel with fewer things playing, but before you do that, renice the game to a higher priority, that should help out to minimize the effect or anything except memory intensive background programs.
--
Dividends are one way of getting a handle on the "real" value of a company and hence it's stock. They are most important in industries which have stable profits and slow growth rates, such as electrical utilities.
They are not the only valuation method that is valid. Clearly when a company generates profits that money goes somewhere. If it is payed out in dividends it gets taxed twice (once as corporate profit, and once as income), and is often reinvested in any case. If instead the company reinvests that money either in it's own operations or by acquisitions, the assets (book value) and purchase price (market value) both naturally increase. The stockholder can get the effect of dividends by selling a small portion of his stock holdings if he wishes and, if he has held the stock for a sufficient length of time (1 year?), he pays only capital gains tax at 15% instead of income tax.
In either the dividend case or growth case, the key is profits, and more importantly the expected growth in future profits. The only other reasonable basis for valuation is the expected value of a acquisition of the company by a larger one.
That being said, I agree that Red Hat, and many internet companies can't justify their collosal valuations. A few, like eBay, are profitable and have the potential to become much more profitable without much more costs by leveraging the network effects of their clients and customers.
I don't see Red Hat being able to make Microsoft's profit margins without Microsoft's market control and proprietaryness. Their support model works well but the costs seem to scale fairly linearly with revenues. Boxed software sales are fairly high margin, but are hard to support without proprietary components (which the current boxed sets _do_ in fact have, just not much).
So the bottom line is that Red Hat, and all other recent IPO's, don't have to have dividends to justify their price. But they will have to have profits, and soon.
--
Civilization CTP 1.1 is barely playable on Celeron 300 with 64 MB. The game slows to a crawl in late levels and there are significant bugs: some paratrooper manipulations can crash the game hard, and preferences are not save across sessions. Add to that the 350MB install and you have yourself a good game with severe annoyances. Before you flame me for wanting good performance out of this sub optimal gaming platform, consider that CTP is a 2D game with very little movement.
I suspect that Blizzard could do a better port than Loki. For one thing they already do good Windows and Mac versions of their games so their code base is probably reasonably portable. Starting a port early in the development process is also a plus since it makes for better design decisions.
I'm willing to give Loki the benefit of the doubt. CTP was their first foray into porting. They were on a tight schedule and have limited resources. The developers are accessible and responsive and they even have a Bugzilla page. I just hope their new releases are more professional and that they continue to fix the annoying bugs in their already released games.
--
Hit submit button too soon...
You can however link to a site hosted outside the US where non-exportable material is kept. The EFF (I think) fought an one a court battle on this matter.
--
You are not allowed to export encryption technologies, even if they are developed outside the US. In fact the statute is broad enough to proscribe you from doing a private security audit of foreign code and sending them the results.
--
If I understand the previous poster correctly, the power-on password is resettable, but only if you know the current password. This would be realizable using a EEPROM (the two 'E's stand for Electically Erasable) such a PROM is reprogrammable but non-volatile. Otherwise, you're right, there would be not any point.
--
Customer: ...So is it fixable?
Mathematician: Let me think about it.....
Customer: Well?
Mathematician:(triumphant) Yes, a solution exists.
Customer: What is it?
Mathematician: I don't know.
--
The announcement at RSA.
The top of the most active thread on sci.crypt at DejaNews
--
Have you ever tried to wonder around microsoft.com with a non-MS browser?
Even better than this is trying to access any MS page with the Internet Explorer bundled with NT 4.0 (IE version 2.0 build 1381)? It can't load the page at all, instead giving bogus error messages like:
Directory Listing Denied
This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed.
Netscape, OTOH displays the pages quite reasonably.
--
Of the available unix variants, Linux seems to be one of the 'strangest', least standard (and perhaps least compatible?).
You've obviously never tried to get any major GNU package or even Sendmail to compile under IRIX. Nice GUI, nice admin tools, nice scalability but quite non-standard.
There may be other definitions of standard in which Linux lags, but my operable definition of standard is the ability to compile the common packages I need to get work done. In that respect Linux is very standard indeed. Perhaps this is because developers of open source products all have access to Linux boxen and can work around the oddities, but I would have a hard time calling it the least standard of all unicies.
--
FWIW, AOL opened the TOC protocol (which every free client uses) not OSCAR (which has a few more features and which MS is using).
--
An earlier story on Slashdot, MS Dirty Pool Against AOL, referenced a sv.com article which claimed that this buffer exploit was a rumor floated by an MS employee. It would appear that either the CNN or sv.com article or the is factually incorrect and that some people have some apologizing to do.
--
You should be able to use Windows Update (tm) and download a new mouse pad driver.
--
While this would work, it would be remarkably expensive and slow. It would never be faster than a digital modem with a direct connection to the link which I suspect would max out at 4800-9600 bps.
--
All the GPL gaurantees is that source is distributed with the binary or source is available for nominal cost if you distribute only the binary. Anyone with the TiK source can redistribute it under the GPL, but AOL has no requirement to keep their servers open to outside users, other than to maintain goodwill.
You can argue against their actions and their motives. You can call them misguided or even evil, but recognize that they have every right to do what they are doing even though they "did the right thing" and released TiK under the GPL. If you don't like the control they exert over the instant messaging arena use IRC or roll your own.
Don't think for one minute that AOL does not understand and desire the control that owning the servers gives them and that they would give them up to please you. Don't expect the god of Open Source (all hail his name) protect you from your own greed. Yes greed. You want to use a service that has significant maintenance costs without reciprocating or paying because it is the most convienient to you. You are willing to blind yourself to the fact that you are in fact paying for this service by making it ubiquitous and locking yourself into a proprietary solution on proprietary servers. Don't cry now. Open source is an excellent hedge against commercialization in many contexts, but where there is money spent, there must be money made so either all parties participate equally, as in SMTP or you pay the piper.
--
'j' is what engineers use when we mean sqrt(-1). 'I' and 'i' are used for current so using 'i' for sqrt(-1) would make electrical engineering equations impossible read since imaginary numbers are used all the time in electrical analysis. Other engineers also use j to mean sqrt(-1) because the same techniques and equations that are applied to electrical engineering can be applied to other systems so it's nice to keep things consistent.
--
Actually, Iridium does satellite to satellite switching. Globalstar does ground switching. Both systems have pros and cons. The advantage of switching on the ground is that you keep the satelites simpler==less expensive and have fewer regulatory problems. The con is more ground station and more exposure to weather outages due to the ground station placement.
--
They went bankrupt because they didn't get enough customers. The service was aimed at world business travellers but early phones didn't work in cities or buildings so they were only useful in truly remote locations like oil platforms and the like. New phones use local cellular service if available.
The other problem is that they do not have complete worldwide coverage because they bypass local phone monopolies and thus had difficulty getting regulatory approval in all areas.
--
There do not appear to currently be any Iridium Modems.
There are serious technical problems with using a analog modem over a satelite telephone link. The compression and noise supression algorithms assume a voice call (certain frequencies, relatively long pauses between words). Using a regular analog modem would never work well and might not work at all. They could, however, develop a digital modem to directly interface with the digital satellite link but the bit rates would never be that high.
It probably makes sense for data customers to wait for the Teledesic system which is optimized for data traffic.
--
The original announcement of the Slashdot buyout gives some explanation and mentions that Rob got a seat on the board of Andover. He also says "Most of what we're getting is a piece of Andover.Net." so I assume that means part ownership. While they may or may not have gotten the ultimate value for their site, it does not seem that they got screwed. And a contract gauranteeing creative control is worth quite a bit of money IMHO.
--
Originally a quote about the NSA but works as well for MS in the above context.
--
It's obvious to me...
kibblebytes are what AIBO eats.
--
The last time I checked, it worked like this.
exp(j*PI) = cos(PI) + j*sin(PI)
= -1 + 0
= -1
It OK though. One of my systems professors repeatedly uses the "fact" that exp(j*0) = 0
:-)
--
If this article were written about Linux we would be righteous in our anger
Non-Microsoft operating systems such as
Linux are invulnerable to macro attacks, immune to viruses, and can laugh at Back Orifice.
This is pure unadulterated bullshit and ESR knows it. I couldn't bring myself to read any further to see if he redeems himself so my apologies if he said "just kidding" later on. In his attempt to build up alternative OS's he has falsely stated that MS is vulnerable to attacks that are unthinkable in _all_ other OS's (or at leas Linux). What makes it all the worse is that Linux is far superior to Windows (especially 9x) in terms of real security. Let's stick to the facts and win on the level instead of trying to bead MS at their game of lies and half-truths.
To those who don't see the problems in ESR's statements, here's a quick rebuttal of the sentence above:
Vi has had macro attacks in the past and any application can have a design that allows macro attacks. They simply have to treat data files as scripts. While I can't think of an application that has such a vulnerability at the moment it does not make non-MS OS's immune since it is not an OS issue. MS has the responsibilty for Mellissa et al. not because they made the OS but because they made the programs (Outlook and Word) that were the vector for the worm.
Linux may be less vulnerable to viruses due to more attention to kernel security and memory protection, but it is also fair to say that not many people have tried. I would hesitate to call it invulnerable, but I'll concede the point if a security expert can convince me otherwise.
Laughing at Back Orifice is pure and complete BS. Crackers don't need to install BO, it's already there!!! Seriously, all BO is is a remote GUI. Most linux servers have X installed and everything can be configured with a terminal anyway, all they need is root access. BO may be a more stealthy, but a cracker needs to get Administrator access in the first place to install it and it is slightly easier to monitor for BO listening on one of your ports than it is to monitor all telnet and X connections for root activity.
In any case the name of the game is to prevent root access in the first place. I believe that Linux does a more comprehensive job of this, but we need real arguments, not lies, to win the fight.
--
Not if he was playing fair. A stock install should mean that a user account that it prompts you to make during the installation should be left in it's default state and that all special users should be left alone (I assume these are all locked in a standard install anyway, but then again they aren't in IRIX so you never know).
--