It does not sound like it. WoW did not take a hit and WAR appears to be off to a nice start. More like two different games for two different kinds of people.
There's speculation in one of TFAs that WAR grew the market for MMOs by drawing people back in who were bored with everything.
I have two questions. I appreciate very much the fact that you guys support Mac OS X out of the box. Indeed, I enjoy playing WoW on a Mac far more than I did playing on a Microsoft Windows box. Will you ever consider doing native (OpenGL) support for Linux?
My second question is about the weather. There are several zones that are always covered in snow, Winterspring, Dun Murogh, etc. You have rain effects in the old world, how come it never snows?
I'm curious, do you see any inherent value in replying to yourself with five different accounts
Considering the nature of the article, for once, it is on topic. If only as a bad example.
"GNU/Linux" or "Linux/GNU" is an abomination
on
Linux Turns 17 Today
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
No problem. Your points are valid.
It's easier to make a case that Stallman has been hindering the advancement of Linux, rather than helping it.
No one other than the handful of people who already had our own private versions of hand rewritten versions of Unix utilities really care anyway. Desktop users do not.
And as to programming skills... I do not think of Linus as the very best programmer in the Linux kernel world today (I'd rate AKPM, Al Viro and Davem higher), he's very good... but as a manager and arbiter of programming taste, he gets top score. He knows how to trust people and delegate responsibility and get things done at a rate I would have considered impossible 10 years ago.
2) The original GCC was so poor that they eventually gave up on it and instead used EGCS, which was a much better fork of the same software which they then merged back in to GCC.
Sorry, but this is the wrong argument. EGCS broke away because Richard Kenner was a crappy GCC maintainer. It was also driven in the fact that "official" GCC could not successfully compile the Linux kernel at the time. HJ Lu made forks of libc and gcc in order to support building Linux systems.
The HJ Lu gcc fork was separate from EGCS and ended when EGCS was established.
Otherwise, OK and that random slashdotter you quoted was me.
Though to be fair, my linux computer can't shut down correctly, either, because it gets to "unmounting network filesystems" and just sits there forever.
No, that's not fair. A network mounted disk is very much a horse of another feather, or something like that.
If you have any local state that has not been written back to the disk, it will be lost forever. In that instance you want to do a umount -f and kiss whatever data you most recently dealt with goodbye.
WTF are we to do if Windows 7 turns out to be just Vista by another name?
For all the rose colored glasses memories of Microsoft Windows XP, did it not take until SP2 to get reasonably[1] secure? Microsoft Windows XP (the original release) was the most popular botnet O/S the last time I looked at statistics on that.
My prediction[2] is that big enterprise use of Microsoft systems will NOT skip Microsoft Vista. That would waste the approximately two years of effort that's been invested so far.
And so long as users remain tied in and buying newer licenses via annual site licensing, whether they use them or not, it does not really matter, does it?
[1] "reasonably" as far as Microsoft systems go.
[2] According to the little bird on my shoulder, anyway.
Try reading at -1. The moderation patterns become obvious after awhile. Try also reading all the responses to old articles on anything Linux/Microsoft.
Oh and I've ususally been moderated down days later.
When MS Vista came out, there were many voices telling how stable and wonderful it was and all the bad stories were evil lies perpetuated by linux fanboys. When MS Vista SP1 came out, the same and/or similar voices were saying "well NOW they have best system Microsoft ever produced and all the crap from the initial Vista release (which was really crap) has been fixed."
Some of the responses in the BSOD at the Olympics in Berlin^H^H^H^Hijing were comical and included several that insisted that it had to be a hoax.
Bruce is one of the Good Guys, in my opinion, and I agree with him most of the time. He's right on, on this one.
Never? Next year? Linux version numbering is different than it used to be. Linus recently expressed openness towards changing the version numbering, but it does not seem that anyone took the ball and ran with it.
The only number in the 2.6.X version number that is important now is the X.
The Linux kernel model is, after a release, merge everything that has been exposed to the "system" and approved. Freeze it, fix as many regressions as possible. Lather, rinse, repeat for the next cycle.
The rate of code change that Linus is able to sustain with his "management" structure and git is astounding. I do hope he writes a book on it some day. He has more experience than Frederick Brooks at this point.
Of course. But what that comment referred to was the lawsuit that effectively ended Unix' chances at the time, but spurred all the BSD spinoffs and later Linux. Maybe I had the year wrong, that was during the time I took a sabbatical from Unix hacking to pursue professional bowling.
I was a Unix admin in 1984. At the time it was the stuff.
Ah. Right on and yes, Unix was very much the cutting edge then.
Now that I think about it, I'm at the tipping point. I started with Unix in late 1981, Linux in late 1995 and I have very nearly spent more time with Linux than Unix. Unix in the form of its descendents Linux and Mac OS X is still very much alive. Powerful, fast and it doesn't crash, so it's still the stuff.
Actually, you can only read part of the resolutions passed by this stacked committee. As usual, there are deep secrets that the public can't access. That's just one part of what's wrong with those people and why ODF must never fall into their secretive clutches. If it does, I have little doubt that ODF will end up brain dead, on life support, turning blue for lack of oxygen, and then suddenly, sadly, we'll find it dead as a doornail.
This was the same state Unix was in around the early 1990s. We're not dead yet! In fact, we've taken over the large computer market since then.
ISO has lost its street cred so expect an Open Source replacement. Open Standards benefit everyone, so I expect someone to fill in the gap.
Ballots at the precinct level should be tabulated by hand, in front of witnesses.
The totals are sent up to the next highest level of government (city/county/state). They are also sent to designated representatives of every political party represented in the election across the USA.
Computers can be useful in all this for tabulating the results as they move up the system. The internet is already used for publishing the precinct totals.
As demonstrated once again in Zimbabwe this year, time is of the essence, but the difference between 12-24 hours and having everyone's vote tabulated immediately for some approximation of immediately in some computer is not worth "solving".
In the past, blood was shed to preserve freedom. This would only require some people to do a little extra work on election day evening.
Other methods of stealing elections will come into play once counting is solved - the stakes are too high. Let's solve one problem at a time and really solve it instead of throwing a vast sum of money at the people who created the problem, as the representatives of the USA did today.
An alpha/beta of the most recent linux kernel patch had a bug fixed, and it hits the front page?
They have not fixed the bug that caused the e1000e ethernet cards to get bricked. This is at least a two part bug. The EEPROM should not have been writable and Something Is Happening to cause bad writes to happen. What that "Something" is, no one knows yet, though it appears they are getting close.
Linus is an absolute, total anal retentive with regards to fixing bugs by understanding and fixing the root cause[1], not just papering over it. This papers over it for the moment, because the bug hasn't been isolated yet, but it allows more people to participate because the side effects were really nasty - this was a true bricking of the ethernet card.
This stage isn't newsworthy for Slashdot.[2] It must be a slow news day.
[1] This is a Good Thing.
[2] Nor will the real bug fix when it comes. A bug is found, a bug is fixed. Life, goes on.
The GPL is a unique copyright license that kind of pushes copyright law to the limits. There has always been FUD spread that it would never stand up in court. Now, it has, at least to some extent.
If someone takes a piece of GPL'ed code I wrote, incorporates it into proprietary software and sells the software without following the GPL, that's copyright infringement.
What this guy did was incorporate the GPL'ed code into proprietary software, patented the software, then sent a $200,000 bill to the original author for licensing fees due to patent infringement. That's just wrong on so many different levels.
What has happened is that along the way, the GPL now has an established legal precedent as a valid copyright license. That's important. It also establishes legal precedent to be able to go after the copyright infringer in the first example. The infringer cannot just say, "GPL means public domain. Neener! Neener! Neener!"
I distinctly remember news back in the mid-eighties about NASA sending a married couple into orbit, as part of a Shuttle crew.
I was out of NASA before then.:-(
Judith Resnick was a #1 (unmarried) babe. I'm still betting on her as the first on the ladies' side and wishing I was first on the other, if indeed something really happened. She had one or two trips up before the accident.
While your explanation is probably close to what they'd claim, that seems pretty darn farfetched to me.
I'll take that as a compliment, then. I'm not trying to defend the voting machine guys. Do note the
Poorly coded software
part.
I voted by machine once in Austin TX, Presidential election 2004. I was absolutely appalled by the procedure. The precinct I voted in in Dallas 2006 I think had paper ballots, but my mind was on other more important things, so I forget. The only winning candidate I voted for was the lady running for state office who had written a porn novel.
There are plenty of ways to "misplace" votes.
2008, of course, my vote was stolen. Libertarian reregistering Republican in Bay Area of California? Lose that voter registration application when the applicant is overseas and cannot complain and remedy the situation before the deadline.
So yes, static electricity can maybe generate votes. Who cares? It's like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or how many 100s of Billions of dollars the US Senate can add to an "emergency" bill in political pork.
How do we get fair elections? It has to begin with something that includes a TV blackout so the media cannot call an election before people are done voting on the West Coast (and Alaska and Hawaii).
Q: When was the last time California was carried by a Republican candidate? A: 1980 (1984 does not count, that was the last fair election and featured the only extremely popular elected[1] incumbent we've had in the last 50 years) and Jimmy Carter conceded the election before folks were finished voting.
[1] Promoted Vice President Johnson in 1964 does not count either in that category and note that even though he was eligible for reelection in 1968, wisely decided to concede in the primaries.
Slashdot Mirror
It does not sound like it. WoW did not take a hit and WAR appears to be off to a nice start. More like two different games for two different kinds of people.
There's speculation in one of TFAs that WAR grew the market for MMOs by drawing people back in who were bored with everything.
I have two questions. I appreciate very much the fact that you guys support Mac OS X out of the box. Indeed, I enjoy playing WoW on a Mac far more than I did playing on a Microsoft Windows box. Will you ever consider doing native (OpenGL) support for Linux?
My second question is about the weather. There are several zones that are always covered in snow, Winterspring, Dun Murogh, etc. You have rain effects in the old world, how come it never snows?
...wouldn't intentionally tanking the stock of a company via unsubstantiated rumor be criminal?
Actually, I live in Hong Kong and here it can be considered criminal.
Wow. You've come a long ways from the days of being a British Colony and stuff like James Clavell wrote about.
You need a highly refined bullshit detector. Just remember to treat TV news the same way and you are mostly OK.
I don't see a new problem. I don't trust "news" in general anyway.
I'm curious, do you see any inherent value in replying to yourself with five different accounts
Considering the nature of the article, for once, it is on topic. If only as a bad example.
No problem. Your points are valid.
It's easier to make a case that Stallman has been hindering the advancement of Linux, rather than helping it.
No one other than the handful of people who already had our own private versions of hand rewritten versions of Unix utilities really care anyway. Desktop users do not.
And as to programming skills ... I do not think of Linus as the very best programmer in the Linux kernel world today (I'd rate AKPM, Al Viro and Davem higher), he's very good ... but as a manager and arbiter of programming taste, he gets top score. He knows how to trust people and delegate responsibility and get things done at a rate I would have considered impossible 10 years ago.
2) The original GCC was so poor that they eventually gave up on it and instead used EGCS, which was a much better fork of the same software which they then merged back in to GCC.
Sorry, but this is the wrong argument. EGCS broke away because Richard Kenner was a crappy GCC maintainer. It was also driven in the fact that "official" GCC could not successfully compile the Linux kernel at the time. HJ Lu made forks of libc and gcc in order to support building Linux systems.
The HJ Lu gcc fork was separate from EGCS and ended when EGCS was established.
Otherwise, OK and that random slashdotter you quoted was me.
Does anyone else get sad at the thought that there are so many weird things in the universe you may not learn the answers to in your lifetime?
Which lifetime? I believe in reincarnation.
I get sadder at the fact that most people simply do not care.
Though to be fair, my linux computer can't shut down correctly, either, because it gets to "unmounting network filesystems" and just sits there forever.
No, that's not fair. A network mounted disk is very much a horse of another feather, or something like that.
If you have any local state that has not been written back to the disk, it will be lost forever. In that instance you want to do a umount -f and kiss whatever data you most recently dealt with goodbye.
Definitely NOT the same thing.
Any service built to assume to 100% uptime is really bad architecture.
True, but ... WGA, where the "A" stands for "Advantage" assumes 100% server uptime. Are you saying Microsoft should have learned from themselves?
WTF are we to do if Windows 7 turns out to be just Vista by another name?
For all the rose colored glasses memories of Microsoft Windows XP, did it not take until SP2 to get reasonably[1] secure? Microsoft Windows XP (the original release) was the most popular botnet O/S the last time I looked at statistics on that.
My prediction[2] is that big enterprise use of Microsoft systems will NOT skip Microsoft Vista. That would waste the approximately two years of effort that's been invested so far.
And so long as users remain tied in and buying newer licenses via annual site licensing, whether they use them or not, it does not really matter, does it?
[1] "reasonably" as far as Microsoft systems go.
[2] According to the little bird on my shoulder, anyway.
Try reading at -1. The moderation patterns become obvious after awhile. Try also reading all the responses to old articles on anything Linux/Microsoft.
Oh and I've ususally been moderated down days later.
When MS Vista came out, there were many voices telling how stable and wonderful it was and all the bad stories were evil lies perpetuated by linux fanboys. When MS Vista SP1 came out, the same and/or similar voices were saying "well NOW they have best system Microsoft ever produced and all the crap from the initial Vista release (which was really crap) has been fixed."
Some of the responses in the BSOD at the Olympics in Berlin^H^H^H^Hijing were comical and included several that insisted that it had to be a hoax.
Bruce is one of the Good Guys, in my opinion, and I agree with him most of the time. He's right on, on this one.
Why would you download this 'super-safe' OS from some people you never met, through a public unencrypted network, if your life depended on it?
Because the precautions to make that safe are not too tough?
Never? Next year? Linux version numbering is different than it used to be. Linus recently expressed openness towards changing the version numbering, but it does not seem that anyone took the ball and ran with it.
The only number in the 2.6.X version number that is important now is the X.
The Linux kernel model is, after a release, merge everything that has been exposed to the "system" and approved. Freeze it, fix as many regressions as possible. Lather, rinse, repeat for the next cycle.
The rate of code change that Linus is able to sustain with his "management" structure and git is astounding. I do hope he writes a book on it some day. He has more experience than Frederick Brooks at this point.
We don't actually need to upgrade hardware until a few years from now so that won't really apply in this case I'm afraid.
The common wisdom is that you do not install a Microsoft O/S until SP2 or later (correct me if I'm wrong).
How much time was it between Microsoft Windows XP and SP2? It was about a year for Microsoft Vista to get to SP1.
So shouldn't you be like adding a year or two to the timeline to wait for the bugs to be worked out by Microsoft first?
But of course you knew that.
Of course. But what that comment referred to was the lawsuit that effectively ended Unix' chances at the time, but spurred all the BSD spinoffs and later Linux. Maybe I had the year wrong, that was during the time I took a sabbatical from Unix hacking to pursue professional bowling.
I was a Unix admin in 1984. At the time it was the stuff.
Ah. Right on and yes, Unix was very much the cutting edge then.
Now that I think about it, I'm at the tipping point. I started with Unix in late 1981, Linux in late 1995 and I have very nearly spent more time with Linux than Unix. Unix in the form of its descendents Linux and Mac OS X is still very much alive. Powerful, fast and it doesn't crash, so it's still the stuff.
FTFA:
Actually, you can only read part of the resolutions passed by this stacked committee. As usual, there are deep secrets that the public can't access. That's just one part of what's wrong with those people and why ODF must never fall into their secretive clutches. If it does, I have little doubt that ODF will end up brain dead, on life support, turning blue for lack of oxygen, and then suddenly, sadly, we'll find it dead as a doornail.
This was the same state Unix was in around the early 1990s. We're not dead yet! In fact, we've taken over the large computer market since then.
ISO has lost its street cred so expect an Open Source replacement. Open Standards benefit everyone, so I expect someone to fill in the gap.
obviously I'm not in the debug loop, but I don't see why this has been so hard to figure out...
Because it bricked the card. No way to have it fixed other than to get a replacement as there was no way reload the firmware.
People were scared to test.
Yes, kinda sorta.
Ballots at the precinct level should be tabulated by hand, in front of witnesses.
The totals are sent up to the next highest level of government (city/county/state). They are also sent to designated representatives of every political party represented in the election across the USA.
Computers can be useful in all this for tabulating the results as they move up the system. The internet is already used for publishing the precinct totals.
As demonstrated once again in Zimbabwe this year, time is of the essence, but the difference between 12-24 hours and having everyone's vote tabulated immediately for some approximation of immediately in some computer is not worth "solving".
In the past, blood was shed to preserve freedom. This would only require some people to do a little extra work on election day evening.
Other methods of stealing elections will come into play once counting is solved - the stakes are too high. Let's solve one problem at a time and really solve it instead of throwing a vast sum of money at the people who created the problem, as the representatives of the USA did today.
An alpha/beta of the most recent linux kernel patch had a bug fixed, and it hits the front page?
They have not fixed the bug that caused the e1000e ethernet cards to get bricked. This is at least a two part bug. The EEPROM should not have been writable and Something Is Happening to cause bad writes to happen. What that "Something" is, no one knows yet, though it appears they are getting close.
Linus is an absolute, total anal retentive with regards to fixing bugs by understanding and fixing the root cause[1], not just papering over it. This papers over it for the moment, because the bug hasn't been isolated yet, but it allows more people to participate because the side effects were really nasty - this was a true bricking of the ethernet card.
This stage isn't newsworthy for Slashdot.[2] It must be a slow news day.
[1] This is a Good Thing.
[2] Nor will the real bug fix when it comes. A bug is found, a bug is fixed. Life, goes on.
The GPL is a unique copyright license that kind of pushes copyright law to the limits. There has always been FUD spread that it would never stand up in court. Now, it has, at least to some extent.
True, but ...
If someone takes a piece of GPL'ed code I wrote, incorporates it into proprietary software and sells the software without following the GPL, that's copyright infringement.
What this guy did was incorporate the GPL'ed code into proprietary software, patented the software, then sent a $200,000 bill to the original author for licensing fees due to patent infringement. That's just wrong on so many different levels.
What has happened is that along the way, the GPL now has an established legal precedent as a valid copyright license. That's important. It also establishes legal precedent to be able to go after the copyright infringer in the first example. The infringer cannot just say, "GPL means public domain. Neener! Neener! Neener!"
It is also why men won't stop for directions when lost and women are able to care for families so well.
Bwahaha. Good one. Apt name for you too.
Sweeping generalizations are always wrong.
I distinctly remember news back in the mid-eighties about NASA sending a married couple into orbit, as part of a Shuttle crew.
I was out of NASA before then. :-(
Judith Resnick was a #1 (unmarried) babe. I'm still betting on her as the first on the ladies' side and wishing I was first on the other, if indeed something really happened. She had one or two trips up before the accident.
While your explanation is probably close to what they'd claim, that seems pretty darn farfetched to me.
I'll take that as a compliment, then. I'm not trying to defend the voting machine guys. Do note the
Poorly coded software
part.
I voted by machine once in Austin TX, Presidential election 2004. I was absolutely appalled by the procedure. The precinct I voted in in Dallas 2006 I think had paper ballots, but my mind was on other more important things, so I forget. The only winning candidate I voted for was the lady running for state office who had written a porn novel.
There are plenty of ways to "misplace" votes.
2008, of course, my vote was stolen. Libertarian reregistering Republican in Bay Area of California? Lose that voter registration application when the applicant is overseas and cannot complain and remedy the situation before the deadline.
So yes, static electricity can maybe generate votes. Who cares? It's like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or how many 100s of Billions of dollars the US Senate can add to an "emergency" bill in political pork.
How do we get fair elections? It has to begin with something that includes a TV blackout so the media cannot call an election before people are done voting on the West Coast (and Alaska and Hawaii).
Q: When was the last time California was carried by a Republican candidate?
A: 1980 (1984 does not count, that was the last fair election and featured the only extremely popular elected[1] incumbent we've had in the last 50 years) and Jimmy Carter conceded the election before folks were finished voting.
[1] Promoted Vice President Johnson in 1964 does not count either in that category and note that even though he was eligible for reelection in 1968, wisely decided to concede in the primaries.