FSF should start a fund which people all over the world to contribute to with which to buy the rights. Imagine: this would be the pinnacle of Irony. The largest open source promoter *buying* the ultimate closed-source product, and turning around and giving it to the world.
Even though I don't think "auctioning" the windows source would help anything at all (in fact, I think the whole anti-trust case is just more evidence of the DOJ/government/media's ignorance of NerdStuff), I'd be willing to pitch in at least as much as I've spent on windows licenses over the past decade.:)
Every interview with Lucas always has him mentioning how he loved the old way movies were, serials and all. That's how he got hooked.
SW:ANH was (arguably) one of the first true sci-fi "blockbusters". Sure, movies had big lines in the past (grep "Fox Theatre" | grep "Gone with the Wind"), but SW changed how lines formed. I think Lucas thinks (to some degree) it will make movies more like they used to be, with people getting in line real early to see the movie they knew would be popular. It's exciting. It's fun. Sure, it will piss off all of us who want to KNOW what showing we'll be going to six weeks in advance, but that doesn't change the fact that we are all going to go see it.
Of course, as soon as exams are over, *I'm* going to get in line for tix. I'll probably be halfway back by then... that will only be two weeks before the 19th.:)
Has anyone else heard rumors about the third prequel being recorded and edited completely digitally? (Maybe even presented digitally; they'd skip the whole convert-to-film stage and find theatres that have digital projectors, which probably won't be unheard of in another 5-6 years.)
Despite my initial disgust at moving away from film as a medium, I realized that it makes lots of sense. With a DVcam, you can do anything you can do with a film camera, with less expense and slightly more versatility. They'd be able to pull shots in the day they record them and start compositing them with the effects right away.
With good preproduction work, the whole movie could be finished in weeks instead of months. It would cost significantly less. And, it would look even better.:)
One might want to think that under those circumstances, it might be Situation Normal, All Fucked Up... or would that be treading on another vietnam era acronym?:)
Didn't get to go to Pi Day, but had a Marie Callendar lemon merengue at pismo beach. Pretty good, if I might say so. What an exciting first visit to sillicon valley.:)
Gee, the uninformed folks out there (definately not the MEDIA, sheesh), might come to some odd conclusion about sun and nsi working together. The outcomes of that would be... interesting?
Pentium mmx and regular pentium systems based on LPX motherboards are being aged out of lots of office places now. They tend to be from Gateway and Compaq and have onboard sound, video, ethernet, and super IO. They're in beautiful little slimline cases with small power supplies (so you can have a big stack of these boxen on UPS and not kill the battery). They're like DEC Multias, except they don't suck.
I'm sick of everyone turning the Piii serial number thing into AMD plugs. I don't care if AMD is the more hippy and into peace, love, happiness and privacy. Intel has pumped more into R&D and *does* have a better product. I'm not going to buy a mobile pentium II or a PIII anytime soon based on the serial number issue, but that doesn't mean I'm going to switch to AMD. When the K6's start supporting some standard of SMP which is SUPPORTED BY MOTHERBOARD MANUFACTURERS, then I'll start buying third party chips. It'd help if amd put out a better chipset, too. These "BXtoo" chipsets from the garage of everyone and their brother in Taiwan just don't cut it.
I wonder if this means there's a switch they DID turn off would theoretically activate the coprocessor on my mobile pentium II and turn it into a mobile pentium II-SX?
Seriously, though, there was no reason whatsoever for them to be screwing around with putting the serial number option on the sillicon for these PII's. It's a waste of space, and a dirty little trick.
Which brings up another question: the serial number itself can't be implemented on the actual CPU, can it? It must be on a rom attached to the cpu card. Which means if we pop open a PIII, we could theoretically pull off the chip with the serial number and put one on with whatever number we wanted? Even if the serial number is on the same chip as other data (maybe where the microcode updates go? or the speed information?) -- all the data on that chip should be easy enough to copy.
Anyone wanna open their PIII and start experimenting?
I hate paying $400 as much as you. But there's a REASON they charge that much. Look at the programs that cost a lot: Quark XPress, $700; Adobe Photoshop, $600; Microsoft Access, $300. The reason these are expensive is because they're not intended for the same guy who pays $50 for Quake 7. The people that buy programs like that are MAKING MONEY BY USING THEM, so they can afford it. If I had a professional-grade photo editing package, I'd charge a few hundred as well, since good graphics designers make more than that on a single job.
Granted, I'd love a copy of Adobe Premiere, but the $500 price is just out of my range. For most of the people who are using it, $500 is lost in the noise of other expenses. That doesn't mean I'm going to pirate it; it means I'll find another solution.
I knew the little homologous structures thing would come up after I posted.:)
Bees wings and birds wings: sure, they're both "wings" that are used for flying, but that's where the similarity ends. They aren't structurally the same, as the magnetites from "mars" and the ones from earth are.
My arguement: A bee and a fly have the same kind of wing. If you saw a bee and a fly next to each other, it would be pretty easy to say "hey, these things probably came from the same planet." If you put a bird and a bee next to each other, even though they both perform the same function, there is no evidence pointing towards evolutionary influence. Here, we have two very similar parts which are assembled the same way, of the same material, and used (presumably) for the same purpose. I'd accept this as a sign of extra-terrestrial life if they were made of a different arrangement of iron or something, but since they are so similar, I interpret them as coming from the same place.
Well, there's probably a lot of UV radiation on the surface of mars. That wouldn't be very helpful for the flash memory in your rio. Nor the controller in your cd player.
I'm all for NASA trying to find ways to convince the government to budget more funds for space exporation (grin), but this isn't going to do it.
Okay, there's a rock from Mars. And it's got similar cell components to some things on Earth. Nifty. Who's to say that rock hasn't been sitting in Antarctica long enough for Earth bacteria to say, "Hi, I like this location. We'll put up some drapes and a few magnetized iron chunks right after we move in."
Now assume the magnetites *are* from Mars. Why would naturally occuring ones be less pure than organically made ones? Scientist's answer: Because on Earth, that's the case. Well, wouldn't it be possible that, since Mars has a pretty high iron content on the surface that their naturally occuring magnetites are rather pure?
Another point: What are the chances that two completely separate evolutionary paths would develop these magnetites? That's like assuming that all the aliens we meet have two arms, two legs, and a head in reasonably the same locations as we do. And, that they "see" the same spectrum as we do. And can "hear" the same sounds. Life which has evoloved in other systems than our own little biosphere probably won't share anything recognizably in common with us, unless of course they're carbon-nitrogen based and have some familiar looking amino acids.
MS Backoffice server (25-user) on Pricewatch.com: $1199. Includes mail server, SMB file & print services, SQL, Proxy, internet services (secure web/ftp/etc), and some directory services.
Recurring costs: Want to add a user? $40. Each. Want to upgrade to a new version? A few hundred. Service pack on CD? $20.
Similar linux (commercial installation): SQL (PostgreSQL): free SMB file/print sharing (Samba): a pizza coupon Proxy (squid): free Mail (sendmail&cyrus): free Secure Web (Raven): $350 The rest of the stuff to keep the system running is mostly GPL.
Number of users? As many as your hardware can handle. Want to allow more? Get a new CPU.
Oh, and the Linux system configured with everything will run on a P-166. Backoffice needs a dual PII-266 so it doesn't crawl to a halt.
Sure, initial costs aren't all of "TCO", but I want to see what ass Mr. Muth pulled his numbers out of. It looks to me like NT costs a wee bit more.
Wait a second, all costs aside: Let's assume you have a NFR copy of backoffice that your reseller-licensed company got for $100. So you've gotten a great deal. What do you do now? Install it. Want to change something about the server? Let's add and IP alias for one of those virtual hosts you'll inevitably be running. Oh no, time to reboot! Change something in the Exchange Administrator? Go find the control panel entry for it, stop (wait two minutes) and start (wait two minutes). You're fixed!
Linux? ifconfig eth0:3 10.0.4.48 up route add -host 10.0.4.48 eth0:3
killall sendmail sendmail -bd -q15m
Whoa, both changes in thirty seconds. That was fun.
-Chris (who had a bad day with an NT machine today, and just HAD to vent)
Don't get mad at id for their "open" release of doom. They wanted to make it an Open release, but they had licensed the sound engine, remember? Even though I doubt it'll be open in the GPL sense, it stands a good chance of being darn close. These guys still care about the community... most of the folks at id now WERE "the community" within a measurable timeframe.
Slashdot Mirror
FSF should start a fund which people all over the world to contribute to with which to buy the rights. Imagine: this would be the pinnacle of Irony. The largest open source promoter *buying* the ultimate closed-source product, and turning around and giving it to the world.
:)
Even though I don't think "auctioning" the windows source would help anything at all (in fact, I think the whole anti-trust case is just more evidence of the DOJ/government/media's ignorance of NerdStuff), I'd be willing to pitch in at least as much as I've spent on windows licenses over the past decade.
-Chris
Every interview with Lucas always has him mentioning how he loved the old way movies were, serials and all. That's how he got hooked.
:)
SW:ANH was (arguably) one of the first true sci-fi "blockbusters". Sure, movies had big lines in the past (grep "Fox Theatre" | grep "Gone with the Wind"), but SW changed how lines formed. I think Lucas thinks (to some degree) it will make movies more like they used to be, with people getting in line real early to see the movie they knew would be popular. It's exciting. It's fun. Sure, it will piss off all of us who want to KNOW what showing we'll be going to six weeks in advance, but that doesn't change the fact that we are all going to go see it.
Of course, as soon as exams are over, *I'm* going to get in line for tix. I'll probably be halfway back by then... that will only be two weeks before the 19th.
-Chris
INTSLASHDOT TUNNEL - DAY
A dark tunnel with a small platform in the middle, on which LUCAS, 50, is hanging over a wounded FANS, 8-80, with his hand outstretched.
FANS
No, no. That's not true! That's impossible!
LUCAS
Search your feelings, you know it to be true.
FANS
NOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Has anyone else heard rumors about the third prequel being recorded and edited completely digitally? (Maybe even presented digitally; they'd skip the whole convert-to-film stage and find theatres that have digital projectors, which probably won't be unheard of in another 5-6 years.)
:)
Despite my initial disgust at moving away from film as a medium, I realized that it makes lots of sense. With a DVcam, you can do anything you can do with a film camera, with less expense and slightly more versatility. They'd be able to pull shots in the day they record them and start compositing them with the effects right away.
With good preproduction work, the whole movie could be finished in weeks instead of months. It would cost significantly less. And, it would look even better.
So, anyone else heard anything?
-Chris
One might want to think that under those circumstances, it might be Situation Normal, All Fucked Up... or would that be treading on another vietnam era acronym? :)
-Chris
Didn't get to go to Pi Day, but had a Marie Callendar lemon merengue at pismo beach. Pretty good, if I might say so. What an exciting first visit to sillicon valley. :)
-Chris
Gee, the uninformed folks out there (definately not the MEDIA, sheesh), might come to some odd conclusion about sun and nsi working together. The outcomes of that would be... interesting?
-Chris
Pentium mmx and regular pentium systems based on LPX motherboards are being aged out of lots of office places now. They tend to be from Gateway and Compaq and have onboard sound, video, ethernet, and super IO. They're in beautiful little slimline cases with small power supplies (so you can have a big stack of these boxen on UPS and not kill the battery). They're like DEC Multias, except they don't suck.
-Chris
Well, I know what I'm doing now...
-Chris
I'd rather put $600 towards an open source version....
-Chris
Hey just because some of you guys have gotten degrees and the rest of us haven't gotten to the class with verilog yet... sheesh. :)
-Chris
That's what I've read. Now show me one. Running linux. :)
-Chris
I want to see what this headset looks like!
-Chris
> Now, who should be nominate for this mission?
Modern science fiction authors. And everyone who mentioned them on the threads here.
-Chris
I'm sick of everyone turning the Piii serial number thing into AMD plugs. I don't care if AMD is the more hippy and into peace, love, happiness and privacy. Intel has pumped more into R&D and *does* have a better product. I'm not going to buy a mobile pentium II or a PIII anytime soon based on the serial number issue, but that doesn't mean I'm going to switch to AMD. When the K6's start supporting some standard of SMP which is SUPPORTED BY MOTHERBOARD MANUFACTURERS, then I'll start buying third party chips. It'd help if amd put out a better chipset, too. These "BXtoo" chipsets from the garage of everyone and their brother in Taiwan just don't cut it.
-Chris
Just because us geeks know it's not oracle doesn't mean fourtune 500 companies realize it.
-Chris
96 bits, eh? Looks like Intel put more thought into their serial number than the original ipv4 implementors... :)
-Chris
Sounds like a good way to get a "friend" in trouble for copyright violations which you've accrued.
"Hey, want a new Pentium III? I've only been using it for a month. I'll give it to you! For free! As long as you visit the FBI website twice a week."
-Chris
I wonder if this means there's a switch they DID turn off would theoretically activate the coprocessor on my mobile pentium II and turn it into a mobile pentium II-SX?
Seriously, though, there was no reason whatsoever for them to be screwing around with putting the serial number option on the sillicon for these PII's. It's a waste of space, and a dirty little trick.
Which brings up another question: the serial number itself can't be implemented on the actual CPU, can it? It must be on a rom attached to the cpu card. Which means if we pop open a PIII, we could theoretically pull off the chip with the serial number and put one on with whatever number we wanted? Even if the serial number is on the same chip as other data (maybe where the microcode updates go? or the speed information?) -- all the data on that chip should be easy enough to copy.
Anyone wanna open their PIII and start experimenting?
-Chris
I hate paying $400 as much as you. But there's a REASON they charge that much. Look at the programs that cost a lot: Quark XPress, $700; Adobe Photoshop, $600; Microsoft Access, $300. The reason these are expensive is because they're not intended for the same guy who pays $50 for Quake 7. The people that buy programs like that are MAKING MONEY BY USING THEM, so they can afford it. If I had a professional-grade photo editing package, I'd charge a few hundred as well, since good graphics designers make more than that on a single job.
Granted, I'd love a copy of Adobe Premiere, but the $500 price is just out of my range. For most of the people who are using it, $500 is lost in the noise of other expenses. That doesn't mean I'm going to pirate it; it means I'll find another solution.
-Chris
I knew the little homologous structures thing would come up after I posted. :)
Bees wings and birds wings: sure, they're both "wings" that are used for flying, but that's where the similarity ends. They aren't structurally the same, as the magnetites from "mars" and the ones from earth are.
My arguement: A bee and a fly have the same kind of wing. If you saw a bee and a fly next to each other, it would be pretty easy to say "hey, these things probably came from the same planet." If you put a bird and a bee next to each other, even though they both perform the same function, there is no evidence pointing towards evolutionary influence. Here, we have two very similar parts which are assembled the same way, of the same material, and used (presumably) for the same purpose. I'd accept this as a sign of extra-terrestrial life if they were made of a different arrangement of iron or something, but since they are so similar, I interpret them as coming from the same place.
-Chris
Well, there's probably a lot of UV radiation on the surface of mars. That wouldn't be very helpful for the flash memory in your rio. Nor the controller in your cd player.
Entertainment system of choice on mars? Records!
-Chris
I'm all for NASA trying to find ways to convince the government to budget more funds for space exporation (grin), but this isn't going to do it.
Okay, there's a rock from Mars. And it's got similar cell components to some things on Earth. Nifty. Who's to say that rock hasn't been sitting in Antarctica long enough for Earth bacteria to say, "Hi, I like this location. We'll put up some drapes and a few magnetized iron chunks right after we move in."
Now assume the magnetites *are* from Mars. Why would naturally occuring ones be less pure than organically made ones? Scientist's answer: Because on Earth, that's the case. Well, wouldn't it be possible that, since Mars has a pretty high iron content on the surface that their naturally occuring magnetites are rather pure?
Another point: What are the chances that two completely separate evolutionary paths would develop these magnetites? That's like assuming that all the aliens we meet have two arms, two legs, and a head in reasonably the same locations as we do. And, that they "see" the same spectrum as we do. And can "hear" the same sounds. Life which has evoloved in other systems than our own little biosphere probably won't share anything recognizably in common with us, unless of course they're carbon-nitrogen based and have some familiar looking amino acids.
-Chris
MS Backoffice server (25-user) on Pricewatch.com: $1199. Includes mail server, SMB file & print services, SQL, Proxy, internet services (secure web/ftp/etc), and some directory services.
Recurring costs:
Want to add a user? $40. Each. Want to upgrade to a new version? A few hundred. Service pack on CD? $20.
Similar linux (commercial installation):
SQL (PostgreSQL): free
SMB file/print sharing (Samba): a pizza coupon
Proxy (squid): free
Mail (sendmail&cyrus): free
Secure Web (Raven): $350
The rest of the stuff to keep the system running is mostly GPL.
Number of users? As many as your hardware can handle. Want to allow more? Get a new CPU.
Oh, and the Linux system configured with everything will run on a P-166. Backoffice needs a dual PII-266 so it doesn't crawl to a halt.
Sure, initial costs aren't all of "TCO", but I want to see what ass Mr. Muth pulled his numbers out of. It looks to me like NT costs a wee bit more.
Wait a second, all costs aside: Let's assume you have a NFR copy of backoffice that your reseller-licensed company got for $100. So you've gotten a great deal. What do you do now? Install it. Want to change something about the server? Let's add and IP alias for one of those virtual hosts you'll inevitably be running. Oh no, time to reboot! Change something in the Exchange Administrator? Go find the control panel entry for it, stop (wait two minutes) and start (wait two minutes). You're fixed!
Linux?
ifconfig eth0:3 10.0.4.48 up
route add -host 10.0.4.48 eth0:3
killall sendmail
sendmail -bd -q15m
Whoa, both changes in thirty seconds. That was fun.
-Chris
(who had a bad day with an NT machine today, and just HAD to vent)
Don't get mad at id for their "open" release of doom. They wanted to make it an Open release, but they had licensed the sound engine, remember? Even though I doubt it'll be open in the GPL sense, it stands a good chance of being darn close. These guys still care about the community... most of the folks at id now WERE "the community" within a measurable timeframe.
-Chris