I glanced over at your web site and, among other things, noticed the review of Lost In Space.
Is nobody out there aware that the original TV series was based on a comic book? The orignal comic books were titled Space Family Robinson. I don't think the comics had the robot or Dr. Smith (it's been a long time), but there was the alien pet critter that showed up in the movie but not the TV show.
But in none of the reviews of the movie have I seen any reference to real origin. Cultural illiteracy, I guess.
Fine, so spell it Li'nux. The 'g' is missing and silent. And drop the apostrophe too.
As for RMS's bitching, how much of gcc and the other FSF utilities (not counting Emacs, which is a waste of disk space as far as I'm concerned) did he actually right, vs all the other uncredited authors of FSF code? Didn't a founder of Cygnus do about half-a-dozen ports of gcc himself?
I've heard it said "it's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit", and there's a lot of truth to that. What has RMS/FSF accomplished in the time they've been whining about credit? If you wanted credit, it should have been a requirement in the GPL. Sheesh.
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. [...]
I certainly have no problems with Apple's 12(c), and can understand the motives behind 9.1 and the rest of 12.
I'd like to see more licenses with sections like 12(c), even the GPL, although I might restrict it to software patents. It'd help weaken the whole software patent mess.
Both x86 machines at home run Cyrix chips, just fine. Nice inexpensive machines, sufficient unto doing all my Linux XWindows and Sybase stuff, and my wife running her AutoCAD.
May not be quite up to the latest gee-whiz ultramegaflash 4D hyperaccelerated twitch games, but I grew bored with those a long time ago. (I once wrote a multi-player 'asteroids/spacewar' game for a VAX 11/780 with a Norpak graphics unit and a D-to-A unit for sound.)
Hey, imagine the cheap Beowulf cluster ...
on
The $299 PC
·
· Score: 1
For a real retro look, how about an old PDP-11/34 case, or an IMSI or Altair case if you could find one.
I dunno what you'd do with all those front panel switches, though, and you'd have to disguise the CD drive.
Too bad I scrapped the old VT-52 I had, would have been cool to replace the guts with an SVGA monitor or something. Hmm, I wonder if an ATX or baby-AT mobo would fit in the old Franklin Apple-II clone that's out in the garage...
The rest of us recognize that when talking about anything other than computer memory/storage (which is addressed in binary), k for kilo means decimal one thousand. As in km, kW, kg, kiloton, etc.
And besides, on Linux (or any other 32 bit unix) we have a year 2038 problem, not a year 2048 problem. I'll start worrying about that around the time that Star Wars episode IX is released...:-)
Heh. Somewhere around I think I still have an old Newsweek cover, with a picture of the British battle fleet heading out to the Falklands, with the caption "The Empire Strikes Back".
Realistic not in the sense of conformance to known physics (about which we're willing to suspend some disbelief for the sake of a good story - so long as the physics of the story is internally consistent).
Realistic in the sense of real characters, characters who are affected by their experiences in the story. The basic characters in Star Trek, for example, never change. Compare that to Luke's transition from the beginning of ANH to the end of ROTJ. Or Solo's. (The bit with Greedo shooting first in the updated edition of ANH really weakened that, though. That was a mistake.)
Yeah, there have been some other scifi films that have had that character development -- Contact comes to mind. But that's not the same sort of spacefaring, lots of action, flick that we're looking for here. The classic Forbidden Planet (the inspiration for Star Trek, btw) comes close.
Part of Lucas' genius here is combining sheer technical cinematographic brilliance (the SFX, etc) and the classic fast pace of the old serial thrillers with some classic story lines. (Some have complained that he 'stole' his plot lines from other classic films or stories. Hey, they're just ideas. Steal from the best, I say.)
Rereading that, a couple more historical perspectives come to mind.
For those of us that grew up in the 60s, when the space program was new and we (we nerds, anyway) all dreamed of becoming astronauts when we grew up, the mid-seventies was a disaster. They cancelled the Apollo program, scrapping the hardware already built for Apollos 18 and 19. Skylab had come crashing down. Space was over, from what we could tell. The Shuttle was being delayed and delayed.
For the non-nerds, the seventies were just as bleak. Watergate and Vietnam were only recently over. We'd had one "oil crisis" where in todays dollars, gas had gone from todays' prices to two or three dollars a gallon. Jimmy Carter was President.
And then along comes this roller-coaster, revolution in filmmaking, feel-good (the good guys win) movie with the awsome John Williams music. It was just what we needed.
Well, that would certainly make it scifi and not SF - nobody AFAIK has ever done that realistically in film, and it's been damn rare in books.
That aside - does 2010 make the cut for "within the past ten years? That was pretty good (just no space combat). Lost In Space turned out not nearly as bad as it might have - the launch sequence was silly but the rest was far better than the original TV show.
Armageddon and Deep Impact were entertaining, in their way, but really bad on the technical accuracy scale.
Apollo 13 doesn't count - that was a historical drama.:-)
For the youngsters here that don't remember life before Star Wars, some who wonder what the big deal is, let me take you back a bit. It was long long ago, in a galaxy far far away -- at least compared to today.
The first trailer appeared in late 76 or early 77. I don't remember the exact time, or even what the feature movie was, but I do remember seeing the trailer, and thinking "damn, I can't wait". You have to remember that for us SF fans, things had been bleak for years. Star Trek had been off the air for years (except syndicated reruns some places), the Apollo program was long over with the first shuttle flight still years in the future, and cinematic SF had been a wasteland, with the high points, the high points, being the Nth sequels to Planet Of The Apes. There was no such thing as personal computers - there were a few, and expensive, "hobbyist computers" like the Altair, the SOL, possibly the Apple I. Most computer geeks (who were damned rare by comparison) programmed mainframes, as often as not using punched cards.
And into this cultural (ok, nerd culture) vacuum came Star Wars. The title "A New Hope" didn't show on the original film, but it was that to all of us nerdy SF, space, robotics, etc. fans who'd about given up on ever seeing again anything that lived up to "2001" or even - and this tells how desparate we were - the original Star Trek.
Sure, Star Wars was "scifi" (a somewhat derogatory term to true hardcore SF fans) what with the sounds in vacuum and aerodynamic manoeuvering of space vehicles, but that was OK, we also understood the need for popular dramatic appeal, and at least you didn't see the goddamn wires holding the spaceship models, and the robots didn't look like humans in cardboard boxes and heating duct. Heck, C3PO's design even paid homage to one of the classic SF films.
The release of subsequent episodes was nearly as exciting, but not quite the, revelation?, that the first was -- we had some idea what to expect, and we knew the characters. You youngsters that grew up with the Star Wars series on videotape don't, can't have the same appreciation. Well, some of you perhaps do. The brief theatrical re-release of the (updated) originals a year ago may have damped some of the anticipation, but that aside it's been over two decades since theatrical release of a new Star Wars episode. And this one (with a couple of obvious exceptions) has all new characters, new worlds, and some new filmmaking technology. Still, it won't quite be the revolution the original was -- we haven't had the same dearth of scifi flicks in the last few years - the studios know now that you can make money on them if you're halfway serious about doing a good job. (Which still excludes some of the bombs we've seen). But for us old geezers:-) who remember the first (I was barely out of college then), the prospect of a new Star Wars will always be something special.
Yeah, I was just noticing the other day how many of those suckers I had. Might make yet another stup^h^h^h^h interesting/. poll to see how many folks have.
Oh, we've got NT systems around here, Server and Workstation - that are up for days, even weeks at a time. But mostly they are sitting very idle, occasionally talking to each other. (They form a back end for a specialized web commerce app scaled to take several hundred hits a day, but we're just starting so we get maybe one hit a day. Each hit ties up a workstation for 10 minutes to an hour creating specialized video tape.) We've had our share of mysterious lock-ups and reboots in the middle of the night, but it mostly just sits there twiddling its virtual thumbs. We'll see what happens when traffic picks up (and no, I'm not gonna let you slashdot it:-).
HOWEVER, I have had several BSOD's when doing something that should be either totally harmless or at worst would cause an app to core-dump on Unix/Linux.
(BTW - NT wasn't my choice - this was all set up before I was involved, and the app involves some specialized video hardware for which only NT drivers are available. If it were up to me I'd do everything above that on Linux, but it isn't.)
Hah. Comparing MS's P/E ratio to Yahoo's to show it's "normal"? GMAFB! Bill Gates himself has described MS stock as "over valued", and has been dumping the stuff as fast as the SEC will let him (which isn't very, compared to how much he has) for the last few years.
That's Microsoft's real fear -- it knows that when the bubble starts to burst it'll be all at once (because of those stock options) and the whole thing will come crashing down. That's why they played little (probably illegal) games like squirreling money away in the good times so they can bring it out in the not so good to prop up their income figures (and help "normalize" P/E).
Microsoft stock is living on borrowed time, as a number of market analysts have been pointing out for the past year or so.
The rest of the post has about as little accuracy as the comment about price/earnings.
Cool, always nice to see more GPL'd software. Although if you don't like drawing vectors in Gimp there is fig.
(Meanwhile, my work progresses on an 'engine' that can form the core of CAD/GIS/CASE/etc packages. So far the display list manager is (more or less) working. Still in progress are the compiler/interpreter for the control language and the database interface. (Well, there's lots more to do beyond that, but that's the minimum I want to get done before I release anything, so that there's at least the basic framework.))
I mean, it seemed like a good idea at the time -- attract users to Linux and they can still run their Win apps.
But now that the commercial app community (Corel, Sybase, Oracle, IBM, Applix, etc...) sees the momentum shifting away from Windows, why not just roll with it and encourage development of killer apps designed on a good OS rather than a sucky one? WINE just gives app developers an excuse not to.
Now, if the various desktop folks could just all agree on a drag'n'drop model...
Actually that's not true at all, since a majority of GPL'd software users probably don't ever contribute code to a GPL'd program.
But if you want to base your commercial product on GPL'd software, you have to pay the original authors the licensing fee for doing so -- and that licensing fee is GPL'ing the result. If you don't like that licensing fee, either roll your own or try to make some other licensing arrangements with the original authors. Possible in some cases, not in others.
Slashdot Mirror
I glanced over at your web site and, among other things, noticed the review of Lost In Space.
Is nobody out there aware that the original TV series was based on a comic book? The orignal comic books were titled Space Family Robinson. I don't think the comics had the robot or Dr. Smith (it's been a long time), but there was the alien pet critter that showed up in the movie but not the TV show.
But in none of the reviews of the movie have I seen any reference to real origin. Cultural illiteracy, I guess.
"Free bee ess dee".
"Lin ux".
Nah, FreeBSD just has too many syllables. Unless you want to pronounce it "freebased".
Fine, so spell it Li'nux. The 'g' is missing
and silent. And drop the apostrophe too.
As for RMS's bitching, how much of gcc and the
other FSF utilities (not counting Emacs, which is a waste of disk space as far as I'm concerned) did he actually right, vs all the other uncredited authors of FSF code? Didn't a founder of Cygnus do about half-a-dozen ports of gcc himself?
I've heard it said "it's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit", and there's a lot of truth to that. What has RMS/FSF accomplished in the time they've been whining about credit?
If you wanted credit, it should have been a requirement in the GPL. Sheesh.
See section 4.
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided
under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is
void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. [...]
I certainly have no problems with Apple's 12(c), and can understand the motives behind 9.1 and the rest of 12.
I'd like to see more licenses with sections like 12(c), even the GPL, although I might restrict it to software patents. It'd help weaken the whole software patent mess.
Both x86 machines at home run Cyrix chips, just fine. Nice inexpensive machines, sufficient unto doing all my Linux XWindows and Sybase stuff, and my wife running her AutoCAD.
May not be quite up to the latest gee-whiz ultramegaflash 4D hyperaccelerated twitch games, but I grew bored with those a long time ago. (I once wrote a multi-player 'asteroids/spacewar' game for a VAX 11/780 with a Norpak graphics unit and a D-to-A unit for sound.)
...you could make with these.
(Sorry. Somebody had to do it.)
Yeah, how about custom cases designed to coordinate with your desktop theme-of-the-day.
(Now, if I could only get the resize button in the corner of my monitor housing to work...)
For a real retro look, how about an old PDP-11/34 case, or an IMSI or Altair case if you could find one.
I dunno what you'd do with all those front panel switches, though, and you'd have to disguise the CD drive.
Too bad I scrapped the old VT-52 I had, would have been cool to replace the guts with an SVGA monitor or something. Hmm, I wonder if an ATX or baby-AT mobo would fit in the old Franklin Apple-II clone that's out in the garage...
Sure I'd call Windows95 Win32. After all, it's only about 1/3 as good as Microsoft says it is.
The rest of us recognize that when talking about anything other than computer memory/storage (which is addressed in binary), k for kilo means decimal one thousand. As in km, kW, kg, kiloton, etc.
:-)
And besides, on Linux (or any other 32 bit unix) we have a year 2038 problem, not a year 2048 problem.
I'll start worrying about that around the time that Star Wars episode IX is released...
There's gotta be a theme named "coli", right?
(Sorry - a year of microbiology and I'm ruined for life.)
Time cover
Heh. Somewhere around I think I still have an old Newsweek cover, with a picture of the British battle fleet heading out to the Falklands, with the caption "The Empire Strikes Back".
Realistic not in the sense of conformance to known physics (about which we're willing to suspend some disbelief for the sake of a good story - so long as the physics of the story is internally consistent).
Realistic in the sense of real characters, characters who are affected by their experiences in the story. The basic characters in Star Trek, for example, never change. Compare that to Luke's transition from the beginning of ANH to the end of ROTJ. Or Solo's. (The bit with Greedo shooting first in the updated edition of ANH really weakened that, though. That was a mistake.)
Yeah, there have been some other scifi films that have had that character development -- Contact comes to mind. But that's not the same sort of spacefaring, lots of action, flick that we're looking for here. The classic Forbidden Planet (the inspiration for Star Trek, btw) comes close.
Part of Lucas' genius here is combining sheer technical cinematographic brilliance (the SFX, etc) and the classic fast pace of the old serial thrillers with some classic story lines. (Some have complained that he 'stole' his plot lines from other classic films or stories. Hey, they're just ideas. Steal from the best, I say.)
Rereading that, a couple more historical perspectives come to mind.
For those of us that grew up in the 60s, when the space program was new and we (we nerds, anyway) all dreamed of becoming astronauts when we grew up, the mid-seventies was a disaster. They cancelled the Apollo program, scrapping the hardware already built for Apollos 18 and 19. Skylab had come crashing down. Space was over, from what we could tell. The Shuttle was being delayed and delayed.
For the non-nerds, the seventies were just as bleak. Watergate and Vietnam were only recently over. We'd had one "oil crisis" where in todays dollars, gas had gone from todays' prices to two or three dollars a gallon. Jimmy Carter was President.
And then along comes this roller-coaster, revolution in filmmaking, feel-good (the good guys win) movie with the awsome John Williams music. It was just what we needed.
had decent space combat and starship scenes
:-)
Well, that would certainly make it scifi and not SF - nobody AFAIK has ever done that realistically in film, and it's been damn rare in books.
That aside - does 2010 make the cut for "within the past ten years? That was pretty good (just no space combat). Lost In Space turned out not nearly as bad as it might have - the launch sequence was silly but the rest was far better than the original TV show.
Armageddon and Deep Impact were entertaining, in their way, but really bad on the technical accuracy scale.
Apollo 13 doesn't count - that was a historical drama.
For the youngsters here that don't remember life before Star Wars, some who wonder what the big deal is, let me take you back a bit. It was long long ago, in a galaxy far far away -- at least compared to today.
:-) who remember the first (I was barely out of college then), the prospect of a new Star Wars will always be something special.
The first trailer appeared in late 76 or early 77. I don't remember the exact time, or even what the feature movie was, but I do remember seeing the trailer, and thinking "damn, I can't wait".
You have to remember that for us SF fans, things had been bleak for years. Star Trek had been off the air for years (except syndicated reruns some places), the Apollo program was long over with the first shuttle flight still years in the future, and cinematic SF had been a wasteland, with the high points, the high points, being the Nth sequels to Planet Of The Apes. There was no such thing as personal computers - there were a few, and expensive, "hobbyist computers" like the Altair, the SOL, possibly the Apple I. Most computer geeks (who were damned rare by comparison) programmed mainframes, as often as not using punched cards.
And into this cultural (ok, nerd culture) vacuum came Star Wars. The title "A New Hope" didn't show on the original film, but it was that to all of us nerdy SF, space, robotics, etc. fans who'd about given up on ever seeing again anything that lived up to "2001" or even - and this tells how desparate we were - the original Star Trek.
Sure, Star Wars was "scifi" (a somewhat derogatory term to true hardcore SF fans) what with the sounds in vacuum and aerodynamic manoeuvering of space vehicles, but that was OK, we also understood the need for popular dramatic appeal, and at least you didn't see the goddamn wires holding the spaceship models, and the robots didn't look like humans in cardboard boxes and heating duct. Heck, C3PO's design even paid homage to one of the classic SF films.
The release of subsequent episodes was nearly as exciting, but not quite the, revelation?, that the first was -- we had some idea what to expect, and we knew the characters. You youngsters that grew up with the Star Wars series on videotape don't, can't have the same appreciation.
Well, some of you perhaps do. The brief theatrical re-release of the (updated) originals a year ago may have damped some of the anticipation, but that aside it's been over two decades since theatrical release of a new Star Wars episode. And this one (with a couple of obvious exceptions) has all new characters, new worlds, and some new filmmaking technology. Still, it won't quite be the revolution the original was -- we haven't had the same dearth of scifi flicks in the last few years - the studios know now that you can make money on them if you're halfway serious about doing a good job. (Which still excludes some of the bombs we've seen).
But for us old geezers
Even if it is only a movie.
-- Al
shelf full of O'Reilly books
/. poll to see how many folks have.
Yeah, I was just noticing the other day how many of those suckers I had. Might make yet another stup^h^h^h^h interesting
The title of your comment fit the content.
"X + existing WM" describes the state of the X Window System back around when Microsoft was still struggling with Windows 286. X 10 had that.
Since then we've had X desktops built to IBM's CUA guidelines (you know, MS Windows, OS/2 ?), plus CDE, KDE, Gnome, etc.
Modern? Does Windows yet natively support networked GUI access?
Oh, we've got NT systems around here, Server and Workstation - that are up for days, even weeks at a time. But mostly they are sitting very idle, occasionally talking to each other. (They form a back end for a specialized web commerce app scaled to take several hundred hits a day, but we're just starting so we get maybe one hit a day. Each hit ties up a workstation for 10 minutes to an hour creating specialized video tape.) :-).
We've had our share of mysterious lock-ups and reboots in the middle of the night, but it mostly just sits there twiddling its virtual thumbs.
We'll see what happens when traffic picks up (and no, I'm not gonna let you slashdot it
HOWEVER, I have had several BSOD's when doing something that should be either totally harmless or at worst would cause an app to core-dump on Unix/Linux.
(BTW - NT wasn't my choice - this was all set up before I was involved, and the app involves some specialized video hardware for which only NT drivers are available. If it were up to me I'd do everything above that on Linux, but it isn't.)
Hah. Comparing MS's P/E ratio to Yahoo's to show it's "normal"? GMAFB! Bill Gates himself has described MS stock as "over valued", and has been dumping the stuff as fast as the SEC will let him (which isn't very, compared to how much he has) for the last few years.
That's Microsoft's real fear -- it knows that when the bubble starts to burst it'll be all at once (because of those stock options) and the whole thing will come crashing down. That's why they played little (probably illegal) games like squirreling money away in the good times so they can bring it out in the not so good to prop up their income figures (and help "normalize" P/E).
Microsoft stock is living on borrowed time, as a number of market analysts have been pointing out for the past year or so.
The rest of the post has about as little accuracy as the comment about price/earnings.
Cool, always nice to see more GPL'd software. Although if you don't like drawing vectors in Gimp there is fig.
(Meanwhile, my work progresses on an 'engine' that can form the core of CAD/GIS/CASE/etc packages. So far the display list manager is (more or less) working. Still in progress are the compiler/interpreter for the control language and the database interface. (Well, there's lots more to do beyond that, but that's the minimum I want to get done before I release anything, so that there's at least the basic framework.))
I mean, it seemed like a good idea at the time -- attract users to Linux and they can still run their Win apps.
But now that the commercial app community (Corel, Sybase, Oracle, IBM, Applix, etc...) sees the momentum shifting away from Windows, why not just roll with it and encourage development of killer apps designed on a good OS rather than a sucky one? WINE just gives app developers an excuse not to.
Now, if the various desktop folks could just all agree on a drag'n'drop model...
Actually that's not true at all, since a majority of GPL'd software users probably don't ever contribute code to a GPL'd program.
But if you want to base your commercial product on GPL'd software, you have to pay the original authors the licensing fee for doing so -- and that licensing fee is GPL'ing the result. If you don't like that licensing fee, either roll your own or try to make some other licensing arrangements with the original authors. Possible in some cases, not in others.