Stallman is the guru of "open source"?? D'oh!
on
Hacking The City
·
· Score: 1
> Richard M. Stallman - the widely-esteemed
> guru of the "open source" software movement
> (a philosophy of coding that is most popularly
> represented today by the Linux operating system)
> - was behind schedule delivering the next
> version of Emacs, a favorite text editor.
Whoops.
(Stallman is rabidly defensive about supporting Free Software, not Open Source Software)
Konqueror (the KDE 2.0 browser) may or may not be standards compliant, but it looks good on just about every site I've tried. I think it does lack proper CSS support, but it makes up for it with its speed and otherwise good rendering.
Take it, leave it - or repair it. Copyright law isn't perfect by a long shot. Abandonware is a very gray area (in terms of ethics, not necessarily legality).
Personally, I think that it's perfectly OK to noncomercially copy old games that are no longer sold for private use.
Copyright law is designed to allow authors to profit reasonably from their works, NOT to give authors a means to sit on their works and keep them out of the public view.
Point taken, but I'll contest your comment about IRC. Sometimes questions get ignored, but I've never been kicked for asking a serious question. People usually get kicked for being obnoxious or not bothering to read a channel's guidelines.
For the record, #linpeople on irc.openprojects.net is a pretty friendly place.
It allows you to put the right angle on the quotes, and it's the preferred way of using quotes in high-quality typesetting environments (TeX, for instance).
If you choose to use AOL's (lacking) service, you choose to deal with AOL's annoyances. Of course they're not going to admit "Hey, yeah, we're taking away your choice", and of course we know it's not intended as an aesthetic move. But does this really surprise anyone? It sucks, but it's not really immoral or unethical. If you don't like it, get another ISP.
Besides, you can use normal socket apps with AOL. Just fire up your own copy of Netscape.
Because different OSes employ different degrees of weirdness with the hardware. They make different assumptions. Unless your emulation is perfect, there will be some discrepancies.
I sent a polite but determined message to orders@crcpress.com. That seems to be their general-purpose customer service contact.
They have every right to expect a fair profit from a book they have contracted, but this is ridiculous. In my email I suggested that a better strategy would be to ask Wolfram to insert a small ad for the printed book on the site. I for one didn't know it even came in a printed version.
I really hope this gets resolved. It was one of the Internet's better points of reference.
-John
Re:Never piss off the world's sysadmins
on
MAPS Sued Again
·
· Score: 1
Take a look at the VTech Helio (http://www.vtechinfo.com). It's about the same size and shape as a Visor, but it has a 75MHz MIPS processor, 8 megs RAM, a good LCD panel, audio hardware (voice memos), and it runs Linux. I got one at the Atlanta Linux Showcase from the Pocket Linux booth. They were selling them cheap to attract developers to their new Linux-based Java handheld platform.
The Helio comes with VTOS, which seems to be a clone of PalmOS. It's actually pretty decent, and I'm using it until the Linux desktop stuff stabilizes. It uses Jot, a pretty good clone of Graffiti (I had no trouble switching over). This particular model retails for $180 or less, considerably cheaper than anything from Palm or Handspring (the Palm III series STILL sells for $250, which is exactly what I paid for mine 2 years ago).
Palm has been selling the same basic palmtop for years. It's not bad at all (I'm a happy owner of a Palm III), but they're going to need to innovate more if they want to stay in the lead. It does its intended job well, but VTOS is just as good and runs on a much more powerful processor. I think Palm is currently riding on its name recognition rather than its features.
Hell, there are drive through marriages, so why not drive through patents? I feel that this is necessary in a world where ideas are a dime a dozen and most of them can be patented.
"Method and apparatus for securing intellectual property rights through the operation of a motorized vehicle..."
http://www.emperorlinux.com will have these later this month, and they'll be preconfigured for Linux. They already sell the non-Transmeta version of this notebook (Sony PictureBook w/ Pentium II). The camera does work under Linux, and I suspect the Transmeta chip will improve the battery life and performance quite a bit. If you want to get one of these soon, I can recommend these people (and no, I don't work for them, I just know them).
Quite frankly I don't think those with a strong economic interest in pollution will be convinced until it's too late. That will be ironic - our precious money will be worthless when our species is dead.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, of course. But I don't think the reality of the situation will really hit us as a whole until we start feeling the effects of our pollution on a much larger scale than we have so far.
At this point we're talking about the survival of the human species. Money has no meaning in this context - it's an artificial human system, and a pretty lousy one at that.
I wonder how long they'll keep upping the clock rate on the beast that is x86... I have no doubt that they (Intel or AMD) could build a much better chip if they were willing to break compatibility, but I don't see that happening. I personally don't care too much about the cutting edge of x86 performace; it's just a really ugly hack at this point. If I need a fast machine, I'll use the Sun Ultra80 in the multimedia lab... The IA-32 architecture is good for one thing: making really cheap chips. And that's only because the quantities are so huge and the competition is so tight.
Not entirely true! Rendering usually runs on one CPU, yes, but the other can offload a lot of other stuff. Take a look at a CPU usage graph on an SMP box playing a 3D game. Under Linux, one CPU can handle the X server, and the other can take care of the game. This is automatic, since the game and the X server generally require more CPU time than any other process.
SMP does help for a lot of things. I have a dual PII 350, and while a 350MHz CPU is nothing to write home about, their combined power means that I can play any game that's currently available for Linux (I've tested most of Loki's stuff on this box). I could probably play just about any game available for Windows, but I don't own a copy thereof, so it's a moot point.
My SMP machine is much more responsive than any comparably-equipped single processor machine I've seen. It almost never becomes sluggish; indeed, one CPU frequently becomes saturated, bringing the load to an even 1.0, but the other CPU is still there to respond to input.
You're right that SMP has less market penetration, mainly due to Win98's (or whatever 2-letter code they're up to now) lack of support for multiple processors. This has kept it out of the low-end market. I think this may be a self-fulfilling prophecy as well: there's no incentive to add SMP support to the Win95 series, since there's a very small base of SMP users, and that base isn't likely to grow until there's support in the OS.
If you have a problem with a college textbook, talk to the professor who chose the book. Professors don't always agree with students, but most of them seem to appreciate student feedback (they put up with so much undirected bitching every day that any form of constructive feedback stands out). If one of my professors chose such a book, I'd probably send him an email explaining why this is bad and why he should choose a different one for next semester.
As an author (of an upcoming Linux-related book), I agree with a previous poster's suggestion that you should complain to the author directly rather than to the publisher. It happens that I finally arrived at a contract with very favorable publishing terms, but I got bounced between several publishers at first, and they could have really screwed me over if they wanted to (and they do want to - if you ever wish to write a book, enlist the services of a competent contract lawyer before you sign!!). It's very possible that the author in this case didn't really have a choice, but he would probably like to hear your opinion on it, and might be able to provide a point of view you haven't considered yet.
No, it's not that strong. It's mainly for prototyping.
But you could probably use a prototype part to create mold for real parts. However, there are better ways of making parts that need to be strong (CNC milling machines).
I've seen two different types: the really expensive ones and the really rough ones. Both are extremely cool geek toys.
I took a tour of Lockheed Martin's missile plant once, and they had a $500k stereolithography machine that produced high-quality 3D resin models by repeatedly tracing over a pool of liquid with a powerful laser. The liquid it used was $300 per gallon (or something ridiculous like that), but it produced excellent results. It could turn a CAD model into a very high precision plastic model in a few hours. This box looks roughly like a big popcorn machine. I wonder if it goes "Ding!" when the model is finished...
Georgia Tech's mechanical engineering department has a couple of much cheaper machines that use a special powder instead of a liquid. I think the basic principle is the same, but it's cheap enough to allow students free run of the lab (a couple of MechE's across the hall were geeking out with this machine a while back, and I saw some of their models). Unfortunately, the quality was not very good at all, and the models would crumble fairly easily. Fine for simple prototypes though, just probably not good for testing tightly interlocking parts. I think the cheaper machines are much faster as well.
That's why the Free (beer/speech) software community is so important. It gives us the opportunity to develop meaningful software as the art it is intended to be.
Case in point: I just grabbed a copy of Flight Gear. I used to think FGFS was an ambitious attempt that would never get anywhere, but DAMN! It's made an AMAZING amount of progress. It's really not that far from a widely useful and complete flight simulator. It hasn't been the subject of a rushed release schedule or marketing bullshit. It was created by people who think flight simulators are cool. They have applied their talents to something they care about, and the results are beginning to show. I suspect that the FlightGear project will produce a superior simulator most commercial offerings eventually.
Unfortunately, the keyword is "eventually". Businesses often don't like the unpredictable nature of free software development schedules, even if they can figure out a way to make money from it. That's the reason for RAD tools - they are driven by the companies that need to release products tomorrow, not coders who would rather do things right.
I'm not involved with the FGFS project; this is just an example (I'm a flight sim enthusiast). It could be equally applied to many free software projects.
Slashdot Mirror
> Richard M. Stallman - the widely-esteemed
> guru of the "open source" software movement
> (a philosophy of coding that is most popularly
> represented today by the Linux operating system)
> - was behind schedule delivering the next
> version of Emacs, a favorite text editor.
Whoops.
(Stallman is rabidly defensive about supporting Free Software, not Open Source Software)
-John
Konqueror (the KDE 2.0 browser) may or may not be standards compliant, but it looks good on just about every site I've tried. I think it does lack proper CSS support, but it makes up for it with its speed and otherwise good rendering.
-John
Take it, leave it - or repair it. Copyright law isn't perfect by a long shot. Abandonware is a very gray area (in terms of ethics, not necessarily legality).
Personally, I think that it's perfectly OK to noncomercially copy old games that are no longer sold for private use.
Copyright law is designed to allow authors to profit reasonably from their works, NOT to give authors a means to sit on their works and keep them out of the public view.
-John
Point taken, but I'll contest your comment about IRC. Sometimes questions get ignored, but I've never been kicked for asking a serious question. People usually get kicked for being obnoxious or not bothering to read a channel's guidelines.
For the record, #linpeople on irc.openprojects.net is a pretty friendly place.
-John
It allows you to put the right angle on the quotes, and it's the preferred way of using quotes in high-quality typesetting environments (TeX, for instance).
-John
If you choose to use AOL's (lacking) service, you choose to deal with AOL's annoyances. Of course they're not going to admit "Hey, yeah, we're taking away your choice", and of course we know it's not intended as an aesthetic move. But does this really surprise anyone? It sucks, but it's not really immoral or unethical. If you don't like it, get another ISP.
Besides, you can use normal socket apps with AOL. Just fire up your own copy of Netscape.
All the more reason to avoid AOL, I guess.
-John
Because different OSes employ different degrees of weirdness with the hardware. They make different assumptions. Unless your emulation is perfect, there will be some discrepancies.
-John
They have every right to expect a fair profit from a book they have contracted, but this is ridiculous. In my email I suggested that a better strategy would be to ask Wolfram to insert a small ad for the printed book on the site. I for one didn't know it even came in a printed version.
I really hope this gets resolved. It was one of the Internet's better points of reference.
-John
Preach on, Brother Rick!!
-John
Nope, I don't work for vtech.
Perhaps they are riding on the name of 'Linux'. Who cares? If it means that Linux ends up on my palmtop, I'm a happy geek.
-John
Take a look at the VTech Helio (http://www.vtechinfo.com). It's about the same size and shape as a Visor, but it has a 75MHz MIPS processor, 8 megs RAM, a good LCD panel, audio hardware (voice memos), and it runs Linux. I got one at the Atlanta Linux Showcase from the Pocket Linux booth. They were selling them cheap to attract developers to their new Linux-based Java handheld platform.
The Helio comes with VTOS, which seems to be a clone of PalmOS. It's actually pretty decent, and I'm using it until the Linux desktop stuff stabilizes. It uses Jot, a pretty good clone of Graffiti (I had no trouble switching over). This particular model retails for $180 or less, considerably cheaper than anything from Palm or Handspring (the Palm III series STILL sells for $250, which is exactly what I paid for mine 2 years ago).
Palm has been selling the same basic palmtop for years. It's not bad at all (I'm a happy owner of a Palm III), but they're going to need to innovate more if they want to stay in the lead. It does its intended job well, but VTOS is just as good and runs on a much more powerful processor. I think Palm is currently riding on its name recognition rather than its features.
-John
ftp://ftp.armory .co m/pub/user/rstevew/PIC/DaveTait/picprog.html
This file contains links to plans for building really cheap but functional PIC programmers. I've done it before; it's not too hard.
These are really cool little chips.
-John
Hell, there are drive through marriages, so why not drive through patents? I feel that this is necessary in a world where ideas are a dime a dozen and most of them can be patented.
"Method and apparatus for securing intellectual property rights through the operation of a motorized vehicle..."
-John
Yep. It's an option in the 2.4 kernel.
-John
http://www.emperorlinux.com will have these later this month, and they'll be preconfigured for Linux. They already sell the non-Transmeta version of this notebook (Sony PictureBook w/ Pentium II). The camera does work under Linux, and I suspect the Transmeta chip will improve the battery life and performance quite a bit. If you want to get one of these soon, I can recommend these people (and no, I don't work for them, I just know them).
-John
Why do you NEED a journalling filesystem on a floppy? -John
Quite frankly I don't think those with a strong economic interest in pollution will be convinced until it's too late. That will be ironic - our precious money will be worthless when our species is dead.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, of course. But I don't think the reality of the situation will really hit us as a whole until we start feeling the effects of our pollution on a much larger scale than we have so far.
-John
-John
If I had a Windows box I'd give it a try.
-John
I wonder how long they'll keep upping the clock rate on the beast that is x86... I have no doubt that they (Intel or AMD) could build a much better chip if they were willing to break compatibility, but I don't see that happening. I personally don't care too much about the cutting edge of x86 performace; it's just a really ugly hack at this point. If I need a fast machine, I'll use the Sun Ultra80 in the multimedia lab... The IA-32 architecture is good for one thing: making really cheap chips. And that's only because the quantities are so huge and the competition is so tight.
-John
Not entirely true! Rendering usually runs on one CPU, yes, but the other can offload a lot of other stuff. Take a look at a CPU usage graph on an SMP box playing a 3D game. Under Linux, one CPU can handle the X server, and the other can take care of the game. This is automatic, since the game and the X server generally require more CPU time than any other process.
SMP does help for a lot of things. I have a dual PII 350, and while a 350MHz CPU is nothing to write home about, their combined power means that I can play any game that's currently available for Linux (I've tested most of Loki's stuff on this box). I could probably play just about any game available for Windows, but I don't own a copy thereof, so it's a moot point.
My SMP machine is much more responsive than any comparably-equipped single processor machine I've seen. It almost never becomes sluggish; indeed, one CPU frequently becomes saturated, bringing the load to an even 1.0, but the other CPU is still there to respond to input.
You're right that SMP has less market penetration, mainly due to Win98's (or whatever 2-letter code they're up to now) lack of support for multiple processors. This has kept it out of the low-end market. I think this may be a self-fulfilling prophecy as well: there's no incentive to add SMP support to the Win95 series, since there's a very small base of SMP users, and that base isn't likely to grow until there's support in the OS.
-John
If you have a problem with a college textbook, talk to the professor who chose the book. Professors don't always agree with students, but most of them seem to appreciate student feedback (they put up with so much undirected bitching every day that any form of constructive feedback stands out). If one of my professors chose such a book, I'd probably send him an email explaining why this is bad and why he should choose a different one for next semester.
As an author (of an upcoming Linux-related book), I agree with a previous poster's suggestion that you should complain to the author directly rather than to the publisher. It happens that I finally arrived at a contract with very favorable publishing terms, but I got bounced between several publishers at first, and they could have really screwed me over if they wanted to (and they do want to - if you ever wish to write a book, enlist the services of a competent contract lawyer before you sign!!). It's very possible that the author in this case didn't really have a choice, but he would probably like to hear your opinion on it, and might be able to provide a point of view you haven't considered yet.
-John
No, it's not that strong. It's mainly for prototyping.
But you could probably use a prototype part to create mold for real parts. However, there are better ways of making parts that need to be strong (CNC milling machines).
-John
I've seen two different types: the really expensive ones and the really rough ones. Both are extremely cool geek toys.
I took a tour of Lockheed Martin's missile plant once, and they had a $500k stereolithography machine that produced high-quality 3D resin models by repeatedly tracing over a pool of liquid with a powerful laser. The liquid it used was $300 per gallon (or something ridiculous like that), but it produced excellent results. It could turn a CAD model into a very high precision plastic model in a few hours. This box looks roughly like a big popcorn machine. I wonder if it goes "Ding!" when the model is finished...
Georgia Tech's mechanical engineering department has a couple of much cheaper machines that use a special powder instead of a liquid. I think the basic principle is the same, but it's cheap enough to allow students free run of the lab (a couple of MechE's across the hall were geeking out with this machine a while back, and I saw some of their models). Unfortunately, the quality was not very good at all, and the models would crumble fairly easily. Fine for simple prototypes though, just probably not good for testing tightly interlocking parts. I think the cheaper machines are much faster as well.
-John
That's why the Free (beer/speech) software community is so important. It gives us the opportunity to develop meaningful software as the art it is intended to be.
Case in point: I just grabbed a copy of Flight Gear. I used to think FGFS was an ambitious attempt that would never get anywhere, but DAMN! It's made an AMAZING amount of progress. It's really not that far from a widely useful and complete flight simulator. It hasn't been the subject of a rushed release schedule or marketing bullshit. It was created by people who think flight simulators are cool. They have applied their talents to something they care about, and the results are beginning to show. I suspect that the FlightGear project will produce a superior simulator most commercial offerings eventually.
Unfortunately, the keyword is "eventually". Businesses often don't like the unpredictable nature of free software development schedules, even if they can figure out a way to make money from it. That's the reason for RAD tools - they are driven by the companies that need to release products tomorrow, not coders who would rather do things right.
I'm not involved with the FGFS project; this is just an example (I'm a flight sim enthusiast). It could be equally applied to many free software projects.
-John