Of course, you're making the (somewhat presumptuous) assumption that there are no other intelligent beings in the universe. While I am no UFO fanatic, I think it is *way* too early to make such a statement.
Now all we have left of the artistic trolls is MEEPT. It's really sad if this is all true. I always browse at -1, just to see the really funny stuff that you guys produce, which invariable gets moderated down by people with no sense of humor or severe anal rententive problems. Slashdot as a whole is getting worse (a cliche, I know, but true), and this extends to the trolls and ACs as well. For aspiring trolls, here are some tips:
1. Calling people gay is not funny. 2. Child molestation is not funny 3. Clever satire IS funny (a la MEEPT! posts) 4. Sig11 is a karma whore and an asshole 5. Really surreal stuff is very funny when it is unexpected 6. Copying the portman/hot grits/whatever stuff is not funny 7. clever poetry/haiku is funny 8. If you dare express an unpopular opinion, especially as an AC, you will get the shit moderated out of you. 9. Jon Katz is boring. RobLimo is an idiot. Hemos is god. 10. Sig11 is a karma whore.
And I think we all know this 'mastah' shit is soooo hax0r k3wl, d00d.
That's odd. I had no problem getting through to either. And my own site, auntfloyd.com, is still running. Of course, I get my mail elsewhere, and my site isn't real high-traffic, so keep that in mind... ~~~~~~~~~ auntfloyd
If you go to http://www.findahost.com/, you can get an easy way to find a web site hosting service based on certain criteria (price, OS type, ftp/shell access, CGI, etc). Granted, it doesn't cover every hosting service, but it is pretty good.
From my research with FindAHost, I ended up choosing CubeSoft Networks (http://csoft.net/). For $10US, you get upto 5 accounts, with email, shell, and ftp access. They use Linux and BSD on their servers, so shell access should present no problem. You get unlimited email aliases, CGI, PHP, MySQL, Java suport, Perl, Python, C, etc. Unlimited space for text and html files, 50 megs for binaries. Not bad. And cheap.
Alright you bastards, it was me. Yes, auntfloyd trolls occasionally, but only when I feel the need to share something with the world. Needless to say, the material was reworked a little to make it more on topic, but it is otherwise preserved. I won't tell you the secret, though, except that it was originally about religion (windows vs. linux is really pagans vs. xtians). The two seem so close to many of us, so I hope you'll understand.
Yes, but that's a feature, remember. They designed it so that all programs could be forwards compatible if the value of 4 ever changes (which is good, since the ISO is now working on the Number89 standard, which is characteristically several years late (C9X, anyone?)) ~~~~~~~~~ auntfloyd
There used to be a time when people had a sense of humor and were able to distinguish between joking and not joking - it seems that time is gone.
Now we have elitist idiots who have nothing better to do than parade their lack of common sense and ramble on about the past that never was. If Slashdot was ever better than it is now, you probably weren't apart of it, user #42901 (ooh.. I get to be elitist now, too).
Now watch it, or I'll ping flood you, mofo. [WARNING: That was a JOKE.] ~~~~~~~~~ auntfloyd
Exactly. That's why I think people should use negative numbers for things like that. So it's obvious that -2.3.8ac77 is not something a random newbie should mess with.
Either that, or make all developer releases "Version 666.xx.xx" or something. That'll keep em away:) ~~~~~~~~~ auntfloyd
It's been trendy for years, and your *just now* getting into it?
Get with the program. If you're not a troll on Slashdot, you're Nothing. *NOTHING*. People will skip your posts unless they've been moderated down to -1. Who wants to read anything else? If I wanted something informative or insightful, I'd read the original article or interview that the comments are attached to. If I want something funny, I'll watch comedy central or something, not read a few lame attempts at humor by people who find Bill Gates being hit by a pie the funniest thing ever.
But, out there in the Real World, can I find hot grits being poured down people's pants, or Natalie Portman being turned to stone, or MEEPTing, or people rushing like drunk cheetahs to be the first to say something?
The answer, simply, is no. Trolling is a true art form, and when it is done well, the result is a something much better than reading some geek's take on the latest MS news or something. Trolls reflect people's real opinions; anonymity allows them to express themselves without fear, be totally uninhibited. It is a raw look at humanity in it's most basic form. Sometimes it is funny, sometimes boring, and often graphically, disgustingly perverse.
I wish there was a way that I could only read -1 posts and skip the trash, but that has yet to happen:(
The reason why he didn't recover was becuase the rare form of lung cnacer that he had was pretty much untreatable. There was nothing anyone could do for him. The ironic part is that Kauffman was such a health nut, and her certainly never smoked, the most certain route to cancer.
Some people must have thought it was an act, but pictures that were printed in tabloids towards the end of his illness clearly show a man succumbing to a terminal disease. Of course, there were some people who thought that his *death* was a joke. Unfortunately, it was not. ~~~~~~~~~ auntfloyd
You must be kidding. There are some key features that are not part of POSIX, such as GUI support, which is a must for any application today. For command line stuff, sure, but nothing more diffucult. ~~~~~~~~~ auntfloyd
People who say that there are no Java apps miss the point. For the non-server applications, they're pretty much right: there are very few end-user, shrink-wrap apps written in Java. Why? Because portability is not an issue for most software companies. If it runs on Win95 and NT, then it's good to go.
However, a large number of server-side applications use Java servlets or the related JSP technology. Bought a computer on line? If it was from Compaq, HP, or a host of others (such as those listed at http://corporate.pcorder.com/customers/), then you benefited from the speed and robustness of the Java platform. Even the Ford e-commerce site, which Bill Gates so lovingly demonstrated in his Comdex keynote, is based on Java (and runs on NT).
And don't count corporate software, either. Lotus Notes web mail runs through a Java applet, and companies like Oracle are increasing their use of Java everyday.
The fact is, whenever you need fast development, good networking capabilites, and (I hate to say it) 'enterprise' support, Java is a good candidate. WORA is just a small part of it.
One last thing. With the advent of GCJ, it is possible that more native software will be written in Java. This will be a huge boon because it will allow GUI apps to run natively on a large numeber of platforms without changing a line of code. Java, I think, is a good argument for having a large, all-encompassing library (GUI, networking, database, ORB, etc). If only it was so easy with everything else... ~~~~~~~~~ auntfloyd
All of the stuff that Borland has completly done away with, such as Turbo Prolog, Turbo Basic, and Turbo Modula (for z80-based CP/M systems) reverted back to the original authors. Philippe Kahn, Borland's founder, made his fortune and his company by licensing and distibuting other's people's software. So, when things went bad, he simply dropped them.
Turbo Basic became PowerBasic from PowerBasic Turbo Prolog became Visual Prolog from PDC (www.pdc.dk) Turbo Modula became JPI Modula. The x86 port became TopSpeed Modula-2. TopSpeed was later sold to Clarion, and now their compilers are only available with the Clarion 4GL products.
Of course, dBase became visual with Visual dBase 5.5, which was a good idea, but incredibly buggy and unstable. And the native compiler cost extra. Supposedly 7.0 is good, but it's pretty much lost the end user DB wars to Access.
I for one would like to see and OSS Turbo Pascal for Unix. That thing had the fastest compiler I've ever seen! Add a nifty IDE and good online help, and you've got a winner. (Yeah, I know there's Free Pascal and GPC, but still...)
Yes, but Java certainly has it's roots in C. Likewise, it is concievable that future systems would have their roots in Linux, and thus, in some way it would still be in use sometime in the future (though probably not the 1000 years I had (jokingly) quoted).
At any rate, both C and Unix are really concepts rather than implementations now (that is, there are multiple C compilers and 'Unix-like' systems, even though there is a real Unix(tm)), where as Linux is a real, concrete thing, so I guess the comparisons aren'y very valid anyway.
How do you know all things must come to an end? C hasn't, neither has Unix. It's too early to say anything. Linux could very well last throught the Y3K problems in a 1000 years. I'm not saying that it will, but the computing field is too young to make such assumptions. After all, software can grow in ways that previous engineering projects never could. In the end: who knows?
How exactly does Linux International work? What sort of services do they provide to the Linux community? What are you planning to do in the future? Do you think that if Linux becomes a truly major player, that the scope, membership, or or mission of LI will change as a resuly?
So/. posters shouldn't be allowed to disagree with Stallman simply because your opinion of him is so great? When posts criticizing Stallman, Linus, ESR and the rest with valid points are considered flamebait, then Slashdot will finally have passed the point of no return. I still maintain that post is insightful, and other moderators seem to agree with me.
How are moderators "elites"? Anyone with positive karma can be a moderator. Make a few quality posts and you might be one yourself tomorrow. Then you can moderate as you see fit. ~~~~~~~~~ auntfloyd
Re:Please moderators, tell me what is Insightful h
on
RMS on Java and GPL
·
· Score: 1
Since I was the one who moderated it up to Insightful, let me tell you.
RMS makes the suggestion that GPL'ing at least one Java implementation will allow unlimited compatibility now and forever. After all, if Microsoft changes their JVM or class library, we can just change ours, right? By this same token, if MS changes their OS, why don't we change any of our free OSes to be compatible? Because it's a lot of diffucult work, that's why. Same goes for any other moderatly-complicated software project.
The original poster (rightly) criticized RMS's simplistic viewpoint. He made valid points in rebuttal. That, my friend, is Insightful.
Just because we agree with the Free Software/Open Source view does not mean that we have to blindly follow or agree with RMS's every word. Demagougery has no place here.
Tecnically, it's 'news for nerds' if only two people (nerds) are interested in it.
If you don't like it, then don't read it. It's not like Slashdot is filled with hundreds of OT atricles daily. You could always right a review of a good technical book yourself to make up for it.
The true signs of Slashdot on the brink of destruction would be when RobLimo writes about something he understands, or when JonKatz ponders whether McDonald's hates geeks because the forgot the Pokemon toy in his happy meal. ~~~~~~~~~ auntfloyd
Why would using Lisp for number crunching be stupid? Are you aware of the high-grade native compilers? Of the multiple types (arrays, vectors, etc) beyond lists that can be easily optimized? Or the fact that floating point precision can be arbitrarily specified and runtime checks turned off? Of the ease with which you can change the safety and speed settings of the compiler on the fly? I would think that Common Lisp would be much better than Fortran95 for pretty much everything.
There's some stuff about Lisp FP speed vs. C at http://www.cons.org/cracauer/lisp.html There's been some benchmarking vs. g77 done, but I don't know where it is. For more info, check dejanews's archive of comp.lang.lisp ~~~~~~~~~ auntfloyd
Sure nightvision is a great thing, but it's just a small step in innovation. The next generation will need auto target tracking, friend or foe detection, and voice activated autofire.
They could even make them in different colors so they could sell to the Bloods *AND* the Crips.
Delaware repealed the law on hanging in the 80's. However, if you were convicted of a capital offense prior to that time, you could still choose it as your way to die. One man actually did this a few years ago, I guess because it was the most painful way to go. And no, it wasn't done public. ~~~~~~~~~ auntfloyd
Slashdot Mirror
while you're waiting, you can read /. and fry both your food and your brain at the same time.
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
Of course, you're making the (somewhat presumptuous) assumption that there are no other intelligent beings in the universe. While I am no UFO fanatic, I think it is *way* too early to make such a statement.
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
Now all we have left of the artistic trolls is MEEPT. It's really sad if this is all true. I always browse at -1, just to see the really funny stuff that you guys produce, which invariable gets moderated down by people with no sense of humor or severe anal rententive problems. Slashdot as a whole is getting worse (a cliche, I know, but true), and this extends to the trolls and ACs as well. For aspiring trolls, here are some tips:
1. Calling people gay is not funny.
2. Child molestation is not funny
3. Clever satire IS funny (a la MEEPT! posts)
4. Sig11 is a karma whore and an asshole
5. Really surreal stuff is very funny when it is unexpected
6. Copying the portman/hot grits/whatever stuff is not funny
7. clever poetry/haiku is funny
8. If you dare express an unpopular opinion, especially as an AC, you will get the shit moderated out of you.
9. Jon Katz is boring. RobLimo is an idiot. Hemos is god.
10. Sig11 is a karma whore.
And I think we all know this 'mastah' shit is soooo hax0r k3wl, d00d.
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
But the aliens?
The space-worthy DC-10s (which are modern aircraft)?
The evil overlord Xenu?
The $100,000 'treatments'?
You're not going to tell me that a 'religion' founded by a hack sci-fi writer based on spaceships and alien psychologists is fake, are you?
Geez, not even L. Ron's *cult* is imaginative. No wonder he was such a failure.
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
It's even more funny when you realize that you've been moderated down, too.
If it's flamebait, where's the flames? Offtopic sure, but not flamebait.
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
That's odd. I had no problem getting through to either. And my own site, auntfloyd.com, is still running. Of course, I get my mail elsewhere, and my site isn't real high-traffic, so keep that in mind...
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
If you go to http://www.findahost.com/, you can get an easy way to find a web site hosting service based on certain criteria (price, OS type, ftp/shell access, CGI, etc). Granted, it doesn't cover every hosting service, but it is pretty good.
From my research with FindAHost, I ended up choosing CubeSoft Networks (http://csoft.net/). For $10US, you get upto 5 accounts, with email, shell, and ftp access. They use Linux and BSD on their servers, so shell access should present no problem. You get unlimited email aliases, CGI, PHP, MySQL, Java suport, Perl, Python, C, etc. Unlimited space for text and html files, 50 megs for binaries. Not bad. And cheap.
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
Alright you bastards, it was me. Yes, auntfloyd trolls occasionally, but only when I feel the need to share something with the world. Needless to say, the material was reworked a little to make it more on topic, but it is otherwise preserved. I won't tell you the secret, though, except that it was originally about religion (windows vs. linux is really pagans vs. xtians). The two seem so close to many of us, so I hope you'll understand.
I wonder if Hemos has read it?
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
Yes, but that's a feature, remember. They designed it so that all programs could be forwards compatible if the value of 4 ever changes (which is good, since the ISO is now working on the Number89 standard, which is characteristically several years late (C9X, anyone?))
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
There used to be a time when people had a sense of humor and were able to distinguish between joking and not joking - it seems that time is gone.
Now we have elitist idiots who have nothing better to do than parade their lack of common sense and ramble on about the past that never was. If Slashdot was ever better than it is now, you probably weren't apart of it, user #42901 (ooh.. I get to be elitist now, too).
Now watch it, or I'll ping flood you, mofo.
[WARNING: That was a JOKE.]
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
Exactly. That's why I think people should use negative numbers for things like that. So it's obvious that -2.3.8ac77 is not something a random newbie should mess with.
:)
Either that, or make all developer releases "Version 666.xx.xx" or something. That'll keep em away
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
It's been trendy for years, and your *just now* getting into it?
:(
Get with the program. If you're not a troll on Slashdot, you're Nothing. *NOTHING*. People will skip your posts unless they've been moderated down to -1. Who wants to read anything else? If I wanted something informative or insightful, I'd read the original article or interview that the comments are attached to. If I want something funny, I'll watch comedy central or something, not read a few lame attempts at humor by people who find Bill Gates being hit by a pie the funniest thing ever.
But, out there in the Real World, can I find hot grits being poured down people's pants, or Natalie Portman being turned to stone, or MEEPTing, or people rushing like drunk cheetahs to be the first to say something?
The answer, simply, is no. Trolling is a true art form, and when it is done well, the result is a something much better than reading some geek's take on the latest MS news or something. Trolls reflect people's real opinions; anonymity allows them to express themselves without fear, be totally uninhibited. It is a raw look at humanity in it's most basic form. Sometimes it is funny, sometimes boring, and often graphically, disgustingly perverse.
I wish there was a way that I could only read -1 posts and skip the trash, but that has yet to happen
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
The reason why he didn't recover was becuase the rare form of lung cnacer that he had was pretty much untreatable. There was nothing anyone could do for him. The ironic part is that Kauffman was such a health nut, and her certainly never smoked, the most certain route to cancer.
Some people must have thought it was an act, but pictures that were printed in tabloids towards the end of his illness clearly show a man succumbing to a terminal disease. Of course, there were some people who thought that his *death* was a joke. Unfortunately, it was not.
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
You must be kidding. There are some key features that are not part of POSIX, such as GUI support, which is a must for any application today. For command line stuff, sure, but nothing more diffucult.
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
People who say that there are no Java apps miss the point. For the non-server applications, they're pretty much right: there are very few end-user, shrink-wrap apps written in Java. Why? Because portability is not an issue for most software companies. If it runs on Win95 and NT, then it's good to go.
However, a large number of server-side applications use Java servlets or the related JSP technology. Bought a computer on line? If it was from Compaq, HP, or a host of others (such as those listed at http://corporate.pcorder.com/customers/), then you benefited from the speed and robustness of the Java platform. Even the Ford e-commerce site, which Bill Gates so lovingly demonstrated in his Comdex keynote, is based on Java (and runs on NT).
And don't count corporate software, either. Lotus Notes web mail runs through a Java applet, and companies like Oracle are increasing their use of Java everyday.
The fact is, whenever you need fast development, good networking capabilites, and (I hate to say it) 'enterprise' support, Java is a good candidate. WORA is just a small part of it.
One last thing. With the advent of GCJ, it is possible that more native software will be written in Java. This will be a huge boon because it will allow GUI apps to run natively on a large numeber of platforms without changing a line of code. Java, I think, is a good argument for having a large, all-encompassing library (GUI, networking, database, ORB, etc). If only it was so easy with everything else...
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
All of the stuff that Borland has completly done away with, such as Turbo Prolog, Turbo Basic, and Turbo Modula (for z80-based CP/M systems) reverted back to the original authors. Philippe Kahn, Borland's founder, made his fortune and his company by licensing and distibuting other's people's software. So, when things went bad, he simply dropped them.
Turbo Basic became PowerBasic from PowerBasic
Turbo Prolog became Visual Prolog from PDC (www.pdc.dk)
Turbo Modula became JPI Modula. The x86 port became TopSpeed Modula-2. TopSpeed was later sold to Clarion, and now their compilers are only available with the Clarion 4GL products.
Of course, dBase became visual with Visual dBase 5.5, which was a good idea, but incredibly buggy and unstable. And the native compiler cost extra. Supposedly 7.0 is good, but it's pretty much lost the end user DB wars to Access.
I for one would like to see and OSS Turbo Pascal for Unix. That thing had the fastest compiler I've ever seen! Add a nifty IDE and good online help, and you've got a winner. (Yeah, I know there's Free Pascal and GPC, but still...)
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
Yes, but Java certainly has it's roots in C. Likewise, it is concievable that future systems would have their roots in Linux, and thus, in some way it would still be in use sometime in the future (though probably not the 1000 years I had (jokingly) quoted).
At any rate, both C and Unix are really concepts rather than implementations now (that is, there are multiple C compilers and 'Unix-like' systems, even though there is a real Unix(tm)), where as Linux is a real, concrete thing, so I guess the comparisons aren'y very valid anyway.
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
How do you know all things must come to an end? C hasn't, neither has Unix. It's too early to say anything. Linux could very well last throught the Y3K problems in a 1000 years.
I'm not saying that it will, but the computing field is too young to make such assumptions. After all, software can grow in ways that previous engineering projects never could. In the end: who knows?
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
How exactly does Linux International work? What sort of services do they provide to the Linux community? What are you planning to do in the future? Do you think that if Linux becomes a truly major player, that the scope, membership, or or mission of LI will change as a resuly?
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
So /. posters shouldn't be allowed to disagree with Stallman simply because your opinion of him is so great? When posts criticizing Stallman, Linus, ESR and the rest with valid points are considered flamebait, then Slashdot will finally have passed the point of no return. I still maintain that post is insightful, and other moderators seem to agree with me.
How are moderators "elites"? Anyone with positive karma can be a moderator. Make a few quality posts and you might be one yourself tomorrow. Then you can moderate as you see fit.
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
Since I was the one who moderated it up to Insightful, let me tell you.
RMS makes the suggestion that GPL'ing at least one Java implementation will allow unlimited compatibility now and forever. After all, if Microsoft changes their JVM or class library, we can just change ours, right? By this same token, if MS changes their OS, why don't we change any of our free OSes to be compatible? Because it's a lot of diffucult work, that's why. Same goes for any other moderatly-complicated software project.
The original poster (rightly) criticized RMS's simplistic viewpoint. He made valid points in rebuttal. That, my friend, is Insightful.
Just because we agree with the Free Software/Open Source view does not mean that we have to blindly follow or agree with RMS's every word. Demagougery has no place here.
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
Tecnically, it's 'news for nerds' if only two people (nerds) are interested in it.
If you don't like it, then don't read it. It's not like Slashdot is filled with hundreds of OT atricles daily. You could always right a review of a good technical book yourself to make up for it.
The true signs of Slashdot on the brink of destruction would be when RobLimo writes about something he understands, or when JonKatz ponders whether McDonald's hates geeks because the forgot the Pokemon toy in his happy meal.
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
Why would using Lisp for number crunching be stupid? Are you aware of the high-grade native compilers? Of the multiple types (arrays, vectors, etc) beyond lists that can be easily optimized? Or the fact that floating point precision can be arbitrarily specified and runtime checks turned off? Of the ease with which you can change the safety and speed settings of the compiler on the fly? I would think that Common Lisp would be much better than Fortran95 for pretty much everything.
There's some stuff about Lisp FP speed vs. C at http://www.cons.org/cracauer/lisp.html There's been some benchmarking vs. g77 done, but I don't know where it is. For more info, check dejanews's archive of comp.lang.lisp
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
Sure nightvision is a great thing, but it's just a small step in innovation. The next generation will need auto target tracking, friend or foe detection, and voice activated autofire.
They could even make them in different colors so they could sell to the Bloods *AND* the Crips.
:)
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
Delaware repealed the law on hanging in the 80's. However, if you were convicted of a capital offense prior to that time, you could still choose it as your way to die. One man actually did this a few years ago, I guess because it was the most painful way to go. And no, it wasn't done public.
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd