Come now, at least the AC before you was intelligent enough to give examples for his argument (take any news piece from Miguel in the early days). You, are much more the troll in this thread.
The people that worked on Harmony (some left when Qt2's QPL was blessed to work on KDE) couldn't look at the Qt1 source since they were mimicking it. As for KDE, there isn't any contamination issue looking at Qt's source. Many bugs are found in Qt by the core KDE developers. Their heavy pounding on it has made it better.
But more importantly, KDE is hated for (1) it's use of Qt and that whole license stuff, (2) it's use of C++, seen as the most evil language you can write in, and most importantly (3) it's target of new users who were moving from Windows, aka newbies.
(1) has become moot with the free license now, but many people haven't gotten the message and will just hate Qt/Troll Tech forever. As for (2), C is a horrible language to mock objects like Gtk+ does. Some complain about the use of moc, preparsing the headers. I would complain just as much at Gtk's use of mock-inheritance and all. C++ works and it's a heck of a lot easier to program in for something like this.;) Finally, for (3), well there's little you can do to change the mind of those that just want Linux to remain for the brightest among us.
I can respect his position, I think it is bogus, but I can respect it.
Don't demean the meaning of "respect" like this. A respectable position must have a solid base. This guy is saying, "I must give you the source by law, but I'm not." Such a statement is clearly contradictory and illegal. If I say the planet is flat and ends at the horizon, you say it isn't there is more past the horizon, then that's a different situation. In a world where no one has been known to go out into the ocean that far, both are reasonable guesses as to what's out there. This I can being a respectable position, even if you disagree with one side.
So what, the world has to wait for a game to be officially dead before people can see its source code? This has been obviously a problem just waiting to be fixed. Trusting that the client is honest ("I just killed JoeUser, I just killed JaneUser,...) is not the way to properly handle such a game. When Carmack released the source, there were talks of ways people have cheated before because the server trusts the client to be honest.
The proper way to fix it is through peer review. Let the world see the source, and with all those eyes on it bugs will be found and worked out. Ultimately, there will be something that works and works well. Any closed-source solution would just be another delay until someone reverse engineers it or whatever and you're back at the same problem.
Carmack gets to release older engines and such things under the GPL, _knowing_ that nobody can take his work and build it into a competing closed source project
This is true. But now anyone can take the source, make it better, and release a super-duper 5000 times better engine, as long as they also GPL it. And boom, Carmack is some loser that made a wimpy engine, meanwhile that group is heralded as the kings of FPSes and everyone makes games with that engine.;) The wonderful part of the GPL, is now Carmack can take that super-duper engine, modify it here and there and come up with an even better engine. It's an endless cycle, and it all helps the Free Software movement.
This is what the GPL is about. Just because some suits at another company only think one way (closed-source is the only way to beat competition), that's their problem. The world will move on without them.
Linux (the kernel and the various standard tools) are GPL'ed. The only reason Linus/Stallman/etc did this was so that rival OS makers couldn't steal their ideas and put them in closed-source operating systems. And that, my friend, is exactly the spirit of Free Software, share the code, share the ideas. It has been shown in this area Open Source works. It will work as well in games if it can get a foothold.
But, what about this scenario? Say there's an open source game engine. To bring in the (one-way-thinking) suits, it allows closed source modules much like the Linux kernel. That would work, right? Now, can the quake code (or anything GPL) be used like this, or must the engine code have had a line saying "closed modules are ok" from the beginning? Kernel modules aren't considered derivative works, right, just making calls to a kernel API?
This would be a great boon for Linux really. People could put together their own games, concentrating on the story-line, artwork, and such, while another team concentrates on the core things of the engine. An engine with all the latest bells/whistles is one thing, but I'll take a simpler engine with a great storyline anyday.
You know what pisses me off most about this stuff? Every time I shop for hds for my Linux box (I don't do IDE, except for spare storage space), they require a whole new SCSI card.
Back many years ago, I started with a simple $15 NCR SCSI2 card and two or three 2g Seagate drives. That was great for a while, then I wanted more. After shopping around for quite a while, pretty much anything over 4g was Ultra-Wide. Ok, so I plunk down the money for an UW card and a couple 4.5g IBM drives. Now, I figure it's time to upgrade again, and guess what? Most all the 9g drives I see are Ultra2 Wide. I'm going to have to talk with Al Gore to stop inventing these new technologies so dang much!!
Um, search slashdot.;) When the shop button came out, v4.7 I think it was, someone put up a link to a huge document at netscape.com that explained many of the.Xdefaults/preferences.js settings. Also breaking a hex editor out on the netscape bin can find many of the settings strings.
The downside is Netscape (Linux) always wants to rewrite the preferences.js and do away with my modifications. A simple chmod a-w took care of that, and now I know Netscape always starts with the settings I want.
Anyway, it's possible to change many of the buttons. I have the search button going to google's linux search, and the "guide" button (replacing My Netscape) bringing down a droplist of Linux sites.
No, no, no. The Y-axis would be the amount of learning required to addiquately use something. X is (as usual) just time, starting I would guess when you first are put in front of said program. If you already know a little bit about computers/word procs/etc, you may start at Y=5 or something. But assuming the person has no experience in anything, than it would start at the origin (0, 0). Then just out the gates, the need to know a lot is high, so the graph jumps straight up, then plateaus or just increases very slightly, an inverted L if you will (saves me from drawing ASCII graphs:)).
Nah, we should use "Free Grits" vs "Petrified Natalie Portman." When someone like Borland/Netscape/Microsoft gives a free bin, that would be like pouring a nice bowl of hot grits down your pants. Enjoyable while it stays warm, than it's just more gunk down there. Whereas when you give the source code out, it is like having Ms. Portman petrified to do with what you want, take her to the movies, go swinging in the park, go fishing off the peer, etc.
Though I too have no idea where you get the 30% schtick, these systems were using Linux 2.2.14. I compared compiling a kernel with the same config, as well as some kde2 cvs source (kdelibs I think it was). With the kernel, I could do it in 2-2.5 minutes on my Athlon/550. Using just one process on the BP6, it took about 4.5. Going with -j2 it cut it down to a tad over 2 minutes, well better than your 30% rule. With similar performance in the other things I've compiled since then, sometimes I win by a few seconds, sometimes the BP6 does, I've come to the conclusion that they are pretty much the same at compiling. To me, this says a lot about how well the Athlon runs. Once SMP Athlon boards come along, there will be no comparison to the BP6 anymore.;) Maybe by then the PPGA P3/500 will be cheap enough to load in.
AMD has said since long before Athlons were released that it's chipset was only a prototype until third parties made some. Also that's why they haven't produced an SMP chipset. I've had mine for three or four months (550 Mhz) and haven't had a problem with it. I'm just not into all the 3D games, so I don't care about AGP 2x, 4x, etc. But as a real workhorse it's fantastic, keeping pace with a friend's BP6 dual Celeron/466.
Hopefully soon VIA will take the chipset to the next level, SMP.
See, this shows just how beautiful CS companies can be. Not only can Microsoft declare their programs the most secure, best, or whatever (and no one can refute it without cracking it), but the other side can make outlandish claims (and there's no way to refute it without looking at the source). If anyone makes these claims about Linux, Apache, etc, we can easily say, "Here's the source code, point out where it's spying on you and we'll remove it." All Microsoft can say about this is, "Um, no we're not. Buy Windows 2000 though."
It's all about image, at least here in the US. Every stupid piece of (major) legislation is given a nickname like the "Victim Rights" bill or whatever. Who's going to be against the rights of victims? Likewise, who's going to be for piracy? When someone types/nick President_Clinton in IRC, they aren't a simple prankter, but an eveil hacker out to wreak havoc on all of cnn.com. Republications put out a national budget, Democrats rave that it will descroy the entire universe (1995 and the "school lunch" fiasco), they add two dollars here, subtract two dollars there, and voila they have a similar budget that adverts major catastrophe. Every computer/Internet related news piece uses "hacker" and "your credit card number" in the same sentence.
Every little thing is given such a label so that the general (uneducated) public will be instantly on their side when they see the piece on the local news. In that one little phrase, the majority of the public is agreeing with them. What can we do? Well, just keep preaching the good word. You'll be labelled many things yourselves, but with perseverence we shall prevail...
Typical media/public reactions we've seen, go somewhere else if you can't take a wise ass:
Come one, NASA can get off their butts if we tell them too. The best way to solve this is to cut their budget in half each time they mess up. Yeah. Then they'll have to make missions with less money, less resources, less time, and they will have to succeed. I mean come on, I go to the grocery store every week and it doesn't cost me millions of dollors, nor do I crash each time I go.
Eventually, their budget will be so small, they will only be able to hire one man. That one man will be none only than, Quinn Mallory. I mean, if this college student living with his mom can manage to traverse universes/dimensions on his own, it can't cost that much. There's nothing that he can't do if he sets his mind to it. All we have to do is learn from his diary tapes how to slide, locate and bring him back home before the Kromags run us over, brainwash that goofball that's taken over his body to bring the real Quinn back to the forefront, and then he can start some real work on going to Mars. That's the way to do it...
I had the opportunity to see Mr. Gates give the keynote at the spring Comdex (it is put on by ZD and named "Windows World" after all) last year.
He opened with a video showing the previous year's (Spring 1998) presentation where they demonstrated the wonderful ease Windows 98 installed drivers for USB devices. He showed a video of that presentation and how it failed. I wasn't there in '98, so I assume that video was legit. A scanner (I think) was plugged in, Windows 98 saw that and displayed the "Adding New Hardware" box. The next dialog that came up requested the driver disk. A little bit later the blue screen came up and they immediately shut off the display.
So, to correct that "problem," Mr. Gates said they had worked on the problem the entire year since, and would give it another try, with the same computer and scanner. They plugged it in and it went beautifully, with one minor difference. The computer didn't prompt for the driver disk. My guess, with what I've known of Windows 9x over these years, is they already had the driver installed once before on that computer. So when it came around this time, it did not need the drivers because Windows already knew they were already there...
I did see some write ups on those Windows type magazine web sites about this event, how it couldn't have gone smoother and Windows will save the universe from certain damnation. Not a word was mentioned of the difference in the presentation. I guess I was the only one there that paid attention to such details (the Windows tech support life did it to me;)).
Seeing him in person and watching this incident revealed to me much about Mr. Gates that is never covered in trade magazines/web sites. It can also be surmised by many accounts from people that knew him in the early days that he is a very competitive guy and hates to be embarrassed like that, PBS' Triumph of the Nerds (or whatever it was called), TNT's Pirates of Silicon Valley. I saw this side of him there at the keynote in Chicago. He will never let that happen to him again.
Where's this going? Well, I wouldn't be surprised if what was shown for the audiece to "ooo" and "ahh," and give these lapdog magazines something to proclaim as a true renevation for the new millennium we just entered, and what was really going on behind the scenes were not exactly the same. A screen saver on these desktops that reloads the page every second, some graph app that shows the "load" on the servers? I wouldn't put it past the man. Things must run completely smoothely, no matter what...
"Today, an unknown number of cypervandalists have desicrated the venerable Slashdot web site with thousands of posts not related to Borland's survey. Experts have been noted as saying, 'These are the same sort of attacks we have seen used in previous cases, from the RIAA and MPAA, to Denial of Service attacks against E-Trade/eBay/Buy.com, to the break in of computers at the White House by an unknown individual to boost the porn industry.'
Despite being sent an estimated quizillion number of bogus posts, Slashdot for some unknown reason has not crashed. We here at (insert news agency/network) believe this site is run by aliens with far superior technology to anything we have from Redmond, Washington. More to come as we think of it. For (insert name again), this is Fox McCloud."
This foxnews.com piece says right out that "someone had been able to bypass the electronic filters in place to prevent such disruptions." (http://www.foxnews.com/vtech/021400/hack.sml)
Sure, they have all these "filters" but looked over any/nick President_Clinton commands.;)
What I'd like to ask the Fox Internet experts though, and most here seem to be overlooking, is how do you go about "deleting" a message after it's been broadcast to everyone on that server? Presuming the logs this prankster has are legit, the message made it out to users.
That's nothing. Back in '96, during a campaign stop in Chicago, a woman shouted at President Clinton something like, "You sent our boys to be killed," referring to Bosnia. I believe her last name was along the lines of Mendoza.
Anyway, what happens to her? Well after the President walks past (like 3-5 minutes), three Secret Service agents approach her and her husband. They spend some five or six hours at the local police station undergoing questioning. The long delay before they agents approached her certainly paints the picture of Clinton just going out for revenge on these simple folks. If it was truely a matter of protecting his life (as that's the "official" reasoning) against nutballs, wouldn't they tackle them right then and there?
Ms. Mendoza made some appearances on WLS radio in the coming weeks of that incident, where I've gotten these facts. So much for free speech...
Heh, as well, Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson, and perhaps Fox as well, were taken by callers during the Prince John F. "Coulda-Been-President-Too" Kennedy, Jr. ordeal. Just call up a network, say you're an expert or Coast Guard official (something along those lines) and boom, you're on the air.
Do you folks not realize who this man is? There is no event a Clinton would walk within 150 miles that wasn't completely scripted and he knew the questions 48 hours in advance. This is the way he works. So, you (as citizens) will never get your questions answered. The only questions that will get through are the ones by crying single mothers who need more government money. Why does Hillary only run a "listening campaign?" Because she cares about the views of the citizens of New York? Sure...;)
All these "town hall" deals are this way. What candidate would want to be asked a tough, maybe embarassing question? They (and you) know that will be the only clip played on the news for weeks to come. So, to avoid this, they only allow generic questions that let the repeat the one or two themes of their campaign, which they hope is carried by the mass media.
Even if a "hard hitting" question comes about, you can bet it wouldn't be against the candidate at such a forum. Take the McCain fiasco with the allegedly 13 year old boy who idolizes McCain and his (near) weeping mother. No one asks, "What pollster (who gets paid per valid person he polls) would bother talking to someone who can't vote for another five years?" No, instead all the news blurbs are about how her son was in tears because a mean Bush push pollster (how many ordinary citizens, the same types which can't find the power button on a simple computer case, know the term "push poll?") said McCain is a bad man. This has accomplished what it was set out to do, boost McCain. Too bad he shot himself in the ass with that commercial calling Bush "Clinton." Without that, this would have been a decent last week before the South Carolina primary for him.
I won't get into the number of levels of people these questions go through before being asked by Wolf Blitzer or answered by President Clinton. But be assured, the two aren't sitting there at terminals actually typing.;)
This was only a summary of the report. Look at the URL, it's not bloor-research.com. It took me under two minutes to follow the link to bloor-research.com, click on "Bloor Interactive," and enter Linux in the search box. Top on the list is this study. If you want the full study, as with many of these sort of papers, you'll have to pay the $81US.
Slashdot Mirror
Come now, at least the AC before you was intelligent enough to give examples for his argument (take any news piece from Miguel in the early days). You, are much more the troll in this thread.
The people that worked on Harmony (some left when Qt2's QPL was blessed to work on KDE) couldn't look at the Qt1 source since they were mimicking it. As for KDE, there isn't any contamination issue looking at Qt's source. Many bugs are found in Qt by the core KDE developers. Their heavy pounding on it has made it better.
;) Finally, for (3), well there's little you can do to change the mind of those that just want Linux to remain for the brightest among us.
But more importantly, KDE is hated for (1) it's use of Qt and that whole license stuff, (2) it's use of C++, seen as the most evil language you can write in, and most importantly (3) it's target of new users who were moving from Windows, aka newbies.
(1) has become moot with the free license now, but many people haven't gotten the message and will just hate Qt/Troll Tech forever. As for (2), C is a horrible language to mock objects like Gtk+ does. Some complain about the use of moc, preparsing the headers. I would complain just as much at Gtk's use of mock-inheritance and all. C++ works and it's a heck of a lot easier to program in for something like this.
Or, if you're in South Park, Colorado (US, of course) there are two seasons, Winter and July...
Hey! I'm havin a god damned honerable distinction over here.
I can respect his position, I think it is bogus, but I can respect it.
Don't demean the meaning of "respect" like this. A respectable position must have a solid base. This guy is saying, "I must give you the source by law, but I'm not." Such a statement is clearly contradictory and illegal. If I say the planet is flat and ends at the horizon, you say it isn't there is more past the horizon, then that's a different situation. In a world where no one has been known to go out into the ocean that far, both are reasonable guesses as to what's out there. This I can being a respectable position, even if you disagree with one side.
So what, the world has to wait for a game to be officially dead before people can see its source code? This has been obviously a problem just waiting to be fixed. Trusting that the client is honest ("I just killed JoeUser, I just killed JaneUser, ...) is not the way to properly handle such a game. When Carmack released the source, there were talks of ways people have cheated before because the server trusts the client to be honest.
The proper way to fix it is through peer review. Let the world see the source, and with all those eyes on it bugs will be found and worked out. Ultimately, there will be something that works and works well. Any closed-source solution would just be another delay until someone reverse engineers it or whatever and you're back at the same problem.
That's false logic.
;) The wonderful part of the GPL, is now Carmack can take that super-duper engine, modify it here and there and come up with an even better engine. It's an endless cycle, and it all helps the Free Software movement.
Carmack gets to release older engines and such things under the GPL, _knowing_ that nobody can take his work and build it into a competing closed source project
This is true. But now anyone can take the source, make it better, and release a super-duper 5000 times better engine, as long as they also GPL it. And boom, Carmack is some loser that made a wimpy engine, meanwhile that group is heralded as the kings of FPSes and everyone makes games with that engine.
This is what the GPL is about. Just because some suits at another company only think one way (closed-source is the only way to beat competition), that's their problem. The world will move on without them.
Linux (the kernel and the various standard tools) are GPL'ed. The only reason Linus/Stallman/etc did this was so that rival OS makers couldn't steal their ideas and put them in closed-source operating systems. And that, my friend, is exactly the spirit of Free Software, share the code, share the ideas. It has been shown in this area Open Source works. It will work as well in games if it can get a foothold.
But, what about this scenario? Say there's an open source game engine. To bring in the (one-way-thinking) suits, it allows closed source modules much like the Linux kernel. That would work, right? Now, can the quake code (or anything GPL) be used like this, or must the engine code have had a line saying "closed modules are ok" from the beginning? Kernel modules aren't considered derivative works, right, just making calls to a kernel API?
This would be a great boon for Linux really. People could put together their own games, concentrating on the story-line, artwork, and such, while another team concentrates on the core things of the engine. An engine with all the latest bells/whistles is one thing, but I'll take a simpler engine with a great storyline anyday.
Thank you for bringing some charm into my dull monkeyless life.
Bravo, good man/woman/beast.
You know what pisses me off most about this stuff? Every time I shop for hds for my Linux box (I don't do IDE, except for spare storage space), they require a whole new SCSI card.
Back many years ago, I started with a simple $15 NCR SCSI2 card and two or three 2g Seagate drives. That was great for a while, then I wanted more. After shopping around for quite a while, pretty much anything over 4g was Ultra-Wide. Ok, so I plunk down the money for an UW card and a couple 4.5g IBM drives. Now, I figure it's time to upgrade again, and guess what? Most all the 9g drives I see are Ultra2 Wide. I'm going to have to talk with Al Gore to stop inventing these new technologies so dang much!!
Wow. 15 whole RPMs? Watch out, we're cruising now... That's what? About 1 Round every 4 seconds???
What Taco didn't mention, is that the platters are about four kilometers in diameter. So, 15 RPM looks pretty sweet.
Um, search slashdot. ;) When the shop button came out, v4.7 I think it was, someone put up a link to a huge document at netscape.com that explained many of the .Xdefaults/preferences.js settings. Also breaking a hex editor out on the netscape bin can find many of the settings strings.
The downside is Netscape (Linux) always wants to rewrite the preferences.js and do away with my modifications. A simple chmod a-w took care of that, and now I know Netscape always starts with the settings I want.
Anyway, it's possible to change many of the buttons. I have the search button going to google's linux search, and the "guide" button (replacing My Netscape) bringing down a droplist of Linux sites.
No, no, no. The Y-axis would be the amount of learning required to addiquately use something. X is (as usual) just time, starting I would guess when you first are put in front of said program. If you already know a little bit about computers/word procs/etc, you may start at Y=5 or something. But assuming the person has no experience in anything, than it would start at the origin (0, 0). Then just out the gates, the need to know a lot is high, so the graph jumps straight up, then plateaus or just increases very slightly, an inverted L if you will (saves me from drawing ASCII graphs :)).
Nah, those are howtos for slow people...
Nah, we should use "Free Grits" vs "Petrified Natalie Portman." When someone like Borland/Netscape/Microsoft gives a free bin, that would be like pouring a nice bowl of hot grits down your pants. Enjoyable while it stays warm, than it's just more gunk down there. Whereas when you give the source code out, it is like having Ms. Portman petrified to do with what you want, take her to the movies, go swinging in the park, go fishing off the peer, etc.
;)
Though I too have no idea where you get the 30% schtick, these systems were using Linux 2.2.14. I compared compiling a kernel with the same config, as well as some kde2 cvs source (kdelibs I think it was). With the kernel, I could do it in 2-2.5 minutes on my Athlon/550. Using just one process on the BP6, it took about 4.5. Going with -j2 it cut it down to a tad over 2 minutes, well better than your 30% rule. With similar performance in the other things I've compiled since then, sometimes I win by a few seconds, sometimes the BP6 does, I've come to the conclusion that they are pretty much the same at compiling. To me, this says a lot about how well the Athlon runs. Once SMP Athlon boards come along, there will be no comparison to the BP6 anymore. ;) Maybe by then the PPGA P3/500 will be cheap enough to load in.
AMD has said since long before Athlons were released that it's chipset was only a prototype until third parties made some. Also that's why they haven't produced an SMP chipset. I've had mine for three or four months (550 Mhz) and haven't had a problem with it. I'm just not into all the 3D games, so I don't care about AGP 2x, 4x, etc. But as a real workhorse it's fantastic, keeping pace with a friend's BP6 dual Celeron/466.
Hopefully soon VIA will take the chipset to the next level, SMP.
See, this shows just how beautiful CS companies can be. Not only can Microsoft declare their programs the most secure, best, or whatever (and no one can refute it without cracking it), but the other side can make outlandish claims (and there's no way to refute it without looking at the source). If anyone makes these claims about Linux, Apache, etc, we can easily say, "Here's the source code, point out where it's spying on you and we'll remove it." All Microsoft can say about this is, "Um, no we're not. Buy Windows 2000 though."
It's all about image, at least here in the US. Every stupid piece of (major) legislation is given a nickname like the "Victim Rights" bill or whatever. Who's going to be against the rights of victims? Likewise, who's going to be for piracy? When someone types /nick President_Clinton in IRC, they aren't a simple prankter, but an eveil hacker out to wreak havoc on all of cnn.com. Republications put out a national budget, Democrats rave that it will descroy the entire universe (1995 and the "school lunch" fiasco), they add two dollars here, subtract two dollars there, and voila they have a similar budget that adverts major catastrophe. Every computer/Internet related news piece uses "hacker" and "your credit card number" in the same sentence.
Every little thing is given such a label so that the general (uneducated) public will be instantly on their side when they see the piece on the local news. In that one little phrase, the majority of the public is agreeing with them. What can we do? Well, just keep preaching the good word. You'll be labelled many things yourselves, but with perseverence we shall prevail...
Typical media/public reactions we've seen, go somewhere else if you can't take a wise ass:
Come one, NASA can get off their butts if we tell them too. The best way to solve this is to cut their budget in half each time they mess up. Yeah. Then they'll have to make missions with less money, less resources, less time, and they will have to succeed. I mean come on, I go to the grocery store every week and it doesn't cost me millions of dollors, nor do I crash each time I go.
Eventually, their budget will be so small, they will only be able to hire one man. That one man will be none only than, Quinn Mallory. I mean, if this college student living with his mom can manage to traverse universes/dimensions on his own, it can't cost that much. There's nothing that he can't do if he sets his mind to it. All we have to do is learn from his diary tapes how to slide, locate and bring him back home before the Kromags run us over, brainwash that goofball that's taken over his body to bring the real Quinn back to the forefront, and then he can start some real work on going to Mars. That's the way to do it...
I had the opportunity to see Mr. Gates give the keynote at the spring Comdex (it is put on by ZD and named "Windows World" after all) last year.
;)).
He opened with a video showing the previous year's (Spring 1998) presentation where they demonstrated the wonderful ease Windows 98 installed drivers for USB devices. He showed a video of that presentation and how it failed. I wasn't there in '98, so I assume that video was legit. A scanner (I think) was plugged in, Windows 98 saw that and displayed the "Adding New Hardware" box. The next dialog that came up requested the driver disk. A little bit later the blue screen came up and they immediately shut off the display.
So, to correct that "problem," Mr. Gates said they had worked on the problem the entire year since, and would give it another try, with the same computer and scanner. They plugged it in and it went beautifully, with one minor difference. The computer didn't prompt for the driver disk. My guess, with what I've known of Windows 9x over these years, is they already had the driver installed once before on that computer. So when it came around this time, it did not need the drivers because Windows already knew they were already there...
I did see some write ups on those Windows type magazine web sites about this event, how it couldn't have gone smoother and Windows will save the universe from certain damnation. Not a word was mentioned of the difference in the presentation. I guess I was the only one there that paid attention to such details (the Windows tech support life did it to me
Seeing him in person and watching this incident revealed to me much about Mr. Gates that is never covered in trade magazines/web sites. It can also be surmised by many accounts from people that knew him in the early days that he is a very competitive guy and hates to be embarrassed like that, PBS' Triumph of the Nerds (or whatever it was called), TNT's Pirates of Silicon Valley. I saw this side of him there at the keynote in Chicago. He will never let that happen to him again.
Where's this going? Well, I wouldn't be surprised if what was shown for the audiece to "ooo" and "ahh," and give these lapdog magazines something to proclaim as a true renevation for the new millennium we just entered, and what was really going on behind the scenes were not exactly the same. A screen saver on these desktops that reloads the page every second, some graph app that shows the "load" on the servers? I wouldn't put it past the man. Things must run completely smoothely, no matter what...
... This just coming across the news wires.
"Today, an unknown number of cypervandalists have desicrated the venerable Slashdot web site with thousands of posts not related to Borland's survey. Experts have been noted as saying, 'These are the same sort of attacks we have seen used in previous cases, from the RIAA and MPAA, to Denial of Service attacks against E-Trade/eBay/Buy.com, to the break in of computers at the White House by an unknown individual to boost the porn industry.'
Despite being sent an estimated quizillion number of bogus posts, Slashdot for some unknown reason has not crashed. We here at (insert news agency/network) believe this site is run by aliens with far superior technology to anything we have from Redmond, Washington. More to come as we think of it. For (insert name again), this is Fox McCloud."
This foxnews.com piece says right out that "someone had been able to bypass the electronic filters in place to prevent such disruptions."
/nick President_Clinton commands. ;)
(http://www.foxnews.com/vtech/021400/hack.sml)
Sure, they have all these "filters" but looked over any
What I'd like to ask the Fox Internet experts though, and most here seem to be overlooking, is how do you go about "deleting" a message after it's been broadcast to everyone on that server? Presuming the logs this prankster has are legit, the message made it out to users.
That's nothing. Back in '96, during a campaign stop in Chicago, a woman shouted at President Clinton something like, "You sent our boys to be killed," referring to Bosnia. I believe her last name was along the lines of Mendoza.
Anyway, what happens to her? Well after the President walks past (like 3-5 minutes), three Secret Service agents approach her and her husband. They spend some five or six hours at the local police station undergoing questioning. The long delay before they agents approached her certainly paints the picture of Clinton just going out for revenge on these simple folks. If it was truely a matter of protecting his life (as that's the "official" reasoning) against nutballs, wouldn't they tackle them right then and there?
Ms. Mendoza made some appearances on WLS radio in the coming weeks of that incident, where I've gotten these facts. So much for free speech...
Heh, as well, Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson, and perhaps Fox as well, were taken by callers during the Prince John F. "Coulda-Been-President-Too" Kennedy, Jr. ordeal. Just call up a network, say you're an expert or Coast Guard official (something along those lines) and boom, you're on the air.
Do you folks not realize who this man is? There is no event a Clinton would walk within 150 miles that wasn't completely scripted and he knew the questions 48 hours in advance. This is the way he works. So, you (as citizens) will never get your questions answered. The only questions that will get through are the ones by crying single mothers who need more government money. Why does Hillary only run a "listening campaign?" Because she cares about the views of the citizens of New York? Sure... ;)
;)
All these "town hall" deals are this way. What candidate would want to be asked a tough, maybe embarassing question? They (and you) know that will be the only clip played on the news for weeks to come. So, to avoid this, they only allow generic questions that let the repeat the one or two themes of their campaign, which they hope is carried by the mass media.
Even if a "hard hitting" question comes about, you can bet it wouldn't be against the candidate at such a forum. Take the McCain fiasco with the allegedly 13 year old boy who idolizes McCain and his (near) weeping mother. No one asks, "What pollster (who gets paid per valid person he polls) would bother talking to someone who can't vote for another five years?" No, instead all the news blurbs are about how her son was in tears because a mean Bush push pollster (how many ordinary citizens, the same types which can't find the power button on a simple computer case, know the term "push poll?") said McCain is a bad man. This has accomplished what it was set out to do, boost McCain. Too bad he shot himself in the ass with that commercial calling Bush "Clinton." Without that, this would have been a decent last week before the South Carolina primary for him.
I won't get into the number of levels of people these questions go through before being asked by Wolf Blitzer or answered by President Clinton. But be assured, the two aren't sitting there at terminals actually typing.
This was only a summary of the report. Look at the URL, it's not bloor-research.com. It took me under two minutes to follow the link to bloor-research.com, click on "Bloor Interactive," and enter Linux in the search box. Top on the list is this study. If you want the full study, as with many of these sort of papers, you'll have to pay the $81US.