There is a conspiracy of suppression on Slashdot these days. Some of the best posts I've read have been at -1, including some of the funniest things I've ever read and some of the best, on-topic posts (often moderated as "offtopic").
I don't know whether this suppression of ideas is political, financial, or otherwise or whether it is carried out by the editors of Slashdot at the behest of advertisers or simply by holier-than-thou moderators who are 14 years old and have points to burn.
The point is that now, to get at the cream of the crop, I often have to read at -1 and suffer through the "real" trolls as well, while only the non-controversial posts seem to stay visible to to 0+ readers.
This post will no-doubt be moderated to -1, offtopic within five or six minutes, but I notice that there is no acceptable meta-forum anywhere at Slashdot for discussing the mechanisms of Slashdot itself. That such a forum does not exist in spite of the "free" ongoing ad dollars it would no doubt generate seems to indicate that at least some of this suppression is indeed carried out by the editorial staff or by corporate.
It's nice to see this issue get some attention.
By all means, please read the thread discussed in the parent comment to this one, it's really quite enlightening.
Hand-operated paper punch. Just pull up the inside edges on each side of the ring, *punch* *punch*, and then one on the side where the WP notch was, *punch* and it's done.
We're running the Red Hat 2.4.9-13 kernel on several SMP database servers and they have been perfect (not rebooted since 'rpm -U' of the new kernel) for several weeks. Before that, we were running 2.4.7-something from Red Hat and they were the same -- ran straight from the day we installed the kernel to the day we updated without needing to be restarted.
On my desktop machine, I've taken more risks (installed pretty much every official 2.4.x-linus release as they have come out) and some have been good, while others have been total dogs.
I'm running 2.4.17 right now. It seems okay; I've only had a freeze-up once over the last couple of weeks, though it was a total hard freeze (i.e. no ping, no magic SysRq, no nothing), which I haven't had in Linux for several years.
The obvious issue is VM; if you keep lots of memory (768M, or preferably 1.0G+) in your system, things to much more smoothly, though MP3 playback still skips a little.
Right now, I'd prefer some work on the RAID and IDE performance issues. One or two of the 2.4 series have had disk performance 100%+ better than the current 2.4 kernels. Why? I'd like to get the disk I/O back to reasonable levels.
No doubt. I'm still using my Newton 2100. I recently bought two more on eBay as a "just in case it breaks" measure.
The Newton display's color limitation (no color, only 16 shades of grey) sucks, but the 480x360 resolution of the Newton 2100 is unlike anything else ever in the PDA world. The StrongARM processor at 162.0 MHz is still very snappy and compares well with other PDAs currently on the market. I have 24MB memory and a 3Com PCMCIA ethernet card in the unit and use it to browse the Web, e-mail, read news, etc. And the NewtonOS operating system and Rosetta handwriting engine kick ass--far beyond anything else on the market right now. Far beyond. Hard to believe this thing has a manufacture date of 1997.
I owned a Palm III, a Palm V, a Vadem Clio and a Cassiopeia E-11 (two PDAs from each of the other families). Since owning these I also have played with friends' color iPaqs and a HandEra 330 that I was given on loan for a semester earlier this year.
So far, I haven't seen anything to want to make me trade in my Newtons. Now if only Apple would get their head out of their ass and re-release Newton OS, in a new device with a 480x320 color display with two CF slots down the side and a thickness of 0.5 inches, I'd be willing to pay $1000+ for it.
If I want to show a Mapelthorpe photo to my students, fine. If I want to show them a segment of a PBS documentary on the civil war in class, fine. Neither activity is going to get me or threm thrown in jail.
If, however, I make available to their laptops via our network a certain piece of proprietary software without paying for multiple licenses, I will get into trouble. And if, somehow, I manage to get my hands on and show them actual code from a piece of proprietary software, even if I do so for educational purposes... Well, follow this to its obvious conclusion.
Oddly enough, just involving computers as a medium changes things as well. To play a track from a CD for them using a boombox at the front of the classroom is fine. To transfer an MP3 (again) to each of their desktops for them to listen to through headphones would, I think, be viewed as problematic.
For better or for worse (I think for worse) we treat software, and even data simply stored electronically, very differently from other forms of intellectual property, especially when we get down to issues of fair use.
[Okay, I'm prepared to lose four karma points over this, offtopic, flamebait, troll, overrated, all the way to -1, just because there are so many damn Debian cheerleaders here and moderation is so damn broken]
The problem with Debian is that it's too stable. What I mean by that is that though Debian does feel very stable, the current release also feels about 5 years behind other Linux operating systems in many ways, while not being all that much more stable than Red Hat, Caldera, or Slackware.
I run Debian on a couple of PowerPC-based Web servers so it's not like I've never used it. I'd run Red Hat or Slackware on them if I could, though.
And dselect has to go. Is there a new installer/package selector coming in the next major release, or will Debian still be the ugliest and clumsiest Linux to install on the face of the earth? Way back at Slackware 2.x, its installer was pretty, powerful, automatable, and easy to use.
Red Hat installs a lot of crap, but it's got a decent record of keeping up on updates in a reasonable amount of time (i.e. no lurking glibc bug) and most of the software around the net will run on it.
Aside from the multi-platform abilities of Debian, I really see no reason to use it, especially as.deb packaging moves farther toward the standardization fringes...
Re:groups.google.com always has the answers...
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How Google Saved USENET
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· Score: 5, Insightful
This is absolutely true. I am often asked "What book(s) can I buy, to learn what you've just told me? How do I gain the knowledge in [subject X] that you have? I don't care if it takes me a decade, I just want to learn it, but I can't seem to find out where. Is it written down?"
I tell them: it is a decade's worth of learning, and then some, but not from books. It is all from USENET. I became a competent C programmer who writes more efficient code and makes fewer fundamental mistakes thanks to usenet. I learned to use BSD and then to use Linux as fast and furious as I can type and to get myself out of any system problem, save my data from nearly any corruption thanks to usenet. I am able to network these odd things, build these robots, and have this "cool stuff" that you like so much that works so well thanks to usenet. I can make nearly any computer go, now matter how old or wierd or what media or operating system it uses (a feat which makes you a legend in your own department) thanks to usenet.
It's not my knowledge... I humbly picked it up in the mid and late '80s and early '90s and still constantly refer to it, first through Deja and now through Google. It is our knowledge, collective and stretching backward in time. To ever lose the news archive would be a tragedy -- the amount of searchable data on everything from chemistry and biology to computing and electronics to literature and politics is truly stunning. With the news archive, you can learn to hotwire together any two things so long as they have *wires* to do something useful; you can learn to brew just about anything including some of the best beer ever; you can learn just what the HELL James Joyce is talking about at times in Ulysses. Every question has been answered before you even asked.
The only sad thing has been the degree to which the groups have been turned into a boulevard of endlessly flashing neon porn signs in the last few years, almost to the degree that anything else is drowned out by the brightness.
Unfortunately, it all still depends on your hardware or, more specifically, the drivers you use. I've still encountered my fair share of manufacturer-supplied drivers that crash W2k hard, and even in odd (+disk corruption) ways.
The Linux driver model is both a drawback and a boon -- drawback because there are far fewer drivers and they are often a bear to configure, boon because once you *do* get your device supported in Linux, my experience has been that across the breadth of existing drivers, stability is much better.
I agree, though, than Windows 2000 on vanilla hardware (i.e. nvidia entry level + IDE disk + 3Com netcard + nothing else at all) is very stable compared to Windows 95/98.
My first impression is that I'd have to agree, it looks like a mixmaster or a table lamp or a hair dryer or something, though I suppose that's the point -- less computerish than any computer in history... I suppose it *is* very retro. Maybe it will grow on me.
I'm also worried, though, about the sturdiness of the display mount. Will this thing magnify minor movements and shake all over the place as my typing jiggles my desk slightly? Will it wear out and end up resting on my desk anyway because it won't hold itself up anymore? Will it weaken and tilt sideways ever so slightly so that my display is always rotated by 2-3 degrees, thereby driving me absolutely nuts?
And if I bought one and had to move, it would be a pain in the ass to pack up and ship safely.
Anyway dude, the Newton 2100 form factor is nearly perfect as far as I'm concerned. Natural handwriting recognition is the biggest pain in the ass on an iPaq because the screen is half the size of my hand. I'm a tallish adult male with biggish hands and I get hand cramp trying to hold the current microscopic batch of PDAs during extended use. Plus I run out of space after writing one word. On my Newton 2100, I can take notes using natural handwriting recognition as fast as I can scribble and not run out of screen space waiting for the recognizer, and the unit fits nicely in my palm, unlike a Palm.
And don't tell me that I don't want an organizer that's too big to fit in my pocket, because I don't want a freaking organizer, I want a pen-based computer that I can hold in one hand. The extra real estate (480x320) of the Newton 2100 makes for much better e-book reading, web browsing, note taking, etc. The Palm "any organizer should fit in your pocket" argument blows me away... Who spends $300 on an organizer? You can get a Palm-ish gadget to hold phones and dates for like $20.00 at your local O-Max or O-Depot if that's all you wanted.
IMO, The only way the late-model Newtons could have been improved (I'll stipulate here) is to make them thinner and lighter, but to shrink the WxH dimensions at all (which were largely dictated by the display) would have ruined them.
Basically, any device that fits in my pocket is too small to be useful to me! On the other hand, if it's 640x240 (like the CE HPCs) or 640x480 (like the CE HPC Pros) it's too damn big to carry!
The Newton 2100, the only device ever to fall in betwen these two camps, is perfect, at least for some people.
The point is not just that we aren't helping someone. The point is that we are killing someone really with very little thought about their life, while at the same time paying to have someone try to kill us in a game for joy, for entertainment purposes -- thereby making light of the very REAL death that is going on, giving those who are really dying the finger in a very big way.
What if I were to hold a "terror party" wherein I invited a bunch of guests to dress up in fake blood and come to be "paintbombed" by a paid group of "terrorists" with fake beards. If the paint happened to get on you, you would be "dead" and would have to go sit in the "World Trade" corner with all the other "corpses". Nice party, nice game, right?
Oh, you're offended? You wouldn't pay the cover charge to attend a party like that?
It's the same damn thing. Death is death and to turn it into light entertainment, to pay someone to send you fake death threats for perverse thrills, is tasteless and offensive.
Obviously a better idea is to use the money you would have paid to receive a death threat to help someone else out who may actually be at death's door.
Get it now? I'm not saying "don't eat, help someone else." I'm saying "don't blow money on fake death threats, help someone else." A completely different statement.
The fact that you fail to understand this indicates that you are already too far gone -- you don't even understand the difference and no doubt think that all of the civilians in Afghanistan have also paid a corporation to have their asses shot off.
You'll find that CS degrees tend to concern themselves with the ability to use computers to solve problems in science, especially new and unsual problems (i.e. real problems in research that have never been solved before). CS is therefore much more useful in science and academics for data collection and sophisticated types of analysis, etc.
IS degrees concern themselves with teaching you skills that are valuable not academically but in terms of raw cash in the marketplace, a sort of computing with wall-street emphasis, if you will -- i.e. what skills are selling NOW, in the private sector and are in widespread fashion in business computing. Web pages, e-commerce, deployment, some applications programming, and so on.
There really isn't all that much overlap. A Computer Scientist often really can be a scientist -- you can think of the lab coat and everything -- while IS is very corporate, cash, and business oriented, and few IS graduates have the science background necessary for research computing.
It is definitely wrong to enjoy a six course meal while the guy next to you is starving. Better to give him three courses and share.
But the bigger crime is to throw the food out or (say) blow it up for entertainment purposes while the guy next to you is starving.
Not all that different (to me) from paying to have death threats phoned to you as light entertainment, while at the same time we are bombing civilians in several countries.
It just seems obscene to me. If not to you, I suppose that's your flaw, not mine.
Ummm, I'm a fairly "radical" liberal by most standards, so while I don't argue with the bulk of your post, I do resent being called Republican. I'm not. Republicans would love this stuff -- if they can get everybody hooked, just look at the profit potential involved.
My point is not that God will nail you for participating in games, nor that blacks or Arabs should be restricted from playing.
My point is that people are playing "reality" games and watching "reality" TV while in Afghanistan and Palestine and Argentina people are "really" struggling to live, rather than paying to be threatened to die.
I'm saying -- how hedonistic and selfish is it to spend your money and your time entertaining yourself with fake death threats instead of using those same resources to do some good in the world? Is it really that entertaining to devalue your own life and those of your playing friends? And isn't it an insult to do so while others around the world are trying to save their own lives?
This is a sign of some sort of cultural deficiency
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Goodbye, "Majestic"
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I didn't play Majestic, but...
Am I the only one here who thinks there is something desperately wrong if you wish to turn your entire real life -- as in your walking, talking self and your working days and nights -- into one large video game -- a fiction?
Even more to the point, getting death threats is cool? How do you know they aren't real? Are you about to say that you relish the day when reality and fantasy blur to the point that you can't tell which is which?
When this type of product becomes ubiquitous, we will be watching the news wondering whether we are really at war or whether it is a part of the latest game. When you hear that so-and-so that you know was shot and can you please come to the funeral, you will go with your game face on, taking notes and playing detective, not sure whether your friend is really dead or whether it's all a part of the game, and you won't care because you're so engrossed and because you're paying good money.
And when the general populace becomes very, very involved in the same games, might it not become a part of the game if you get murdered in cold blood by another, rival player? And since you're a participating character in that game -- might everyone not be thrilled at such a "plot development" and attend your funeral not to eulogize, but to play or make some kind of breakthrough?
I'm sure you had to sign some sort of user agreement to play Majestic. It isn't hard to imagine a user agreement in which you agree that the "designers" can use any event in any player's life as a part of the developing plot, and that you as a player agree not to hold them liable for the actions of other players, including actions taken against you or your family...
Games should stay on a board, on a screen, on a field. Americans are too rich, safe and complacent for their own good if they are so bored that they must turn their real lives and identities into gamepieces for entertainment purposes.
I suppose I'll get flamed and called a luddite, but I liked it when smart people used to get degrees and go do research for the greater good, rather than just signing up to receive death threats for entertainment purposes.
They steal your music, your culture, your ideas, your stories, your language, mass produce it, shrink-wrap it and then sell it back to you.
This is exactly the problem... The RIAA/MPAA are the forces driving western culture into the ground, creating generations of bumbling, sex-mad idiots with carbon-copy personalities and giving capitalism a bad name.
Aside from any legal problems, I think it's damned unethical the way today's media giants operate.
They're getting PAID by us consumers NOT to make copy-protected CDs under an existing law.
The question is whether it's fair to REQUIRE consumers to pay a "tax" to the record companies for the privilege of being able to copy CDs for personal use and then for the record companies to copy-protect CDs anyway. It's a great deal for the record companies at the consumers' expense: free money and they don't have to do anything in return.
If they're going to sell copy-protected CDs, they should no longer get their "protection money" for blank CD sales.
Is this real? Is it the new Newton?
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Apple PDA?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
If this thing *is* real and it's based on the same software technology as the Newton MessagePad line, it's worth $1,000+ to me as a PDA, easily. I'm using a Newton 2100 right now -- I finally re-invested in one at eBay prices ($250 or so) and I will be using it forever as far as I'm concerned.
I had a Newton MessagePad back in the mid '90s and it got killed by a falling phone (screen smashed). At that point, I went to Palm. After a while using Palm, I switched to Windows CE. It still didn't seem right. Then I bought a full pen-based PC last year and ran Linux+xscribble on it. These other PDAs and pen-based computers were all just wrong.
When it came right down to it, the Newton *software* and NewtonOS was what I was missing. Nothing else yet manufactured comes close for the PDA paradigm. The hardware is a little bulky, and is expensive for its age, but I finally just broke down and bought a Newton 2100 last year to see if the Newton magic was still there...
And it was like a revelation. I hadn't really appreciated my early Newton as well as I could have... It was my first PDA, it was early technology, and all I could do at the time was see things wrong with it. It's only after using other PDA devices for a while that I realized just how important and wonderful NewtonOS was and just how sad that it was discontinued.
If Apple DOES ever release another PDA, I pray that it will use NewtonOS technology. If instead Apple goes with Palm or some such nonsense, I hope to God that they release the NewtonOS code for StrongARM as open-source so that we don't have to try to copy it ourselves. Imagine a modern, open PDA hardware platform running open-source NewtonOS!
As for right now... I've stocked up on several Newton 2100 machines which will hopefully last me well into the century. I've taken to hand-replacing their dimming backlights and manually repacking their rechargeable battery packs just to get them running well again. At least for the next few years, it looks like we will be dominated by weak software like Palm and Windows CE -- only the few lucky (like me) who are aware of what has gone before and can maintain the machines will be able to depend on something as advanced as NewtonOS for our information.
The RIAA and MPAA are selling data to us-- and trying to protect themselves by making this data unavailable to us once we've bought it. If we can't get at the data, there's no point and we won't buy it, so the data will always be accessible somehow.
However, since the customer is allowed to hear the music or see the film, the data has been "released" into the wild and can easily be recaptured in other formats. In other words, they cannot use purely digital, "black-box" means to protect this data because we have nice analog visual and auditory systems that require this data to pass through the air in order for us to perceive and enjoy it.
Once the data is in the air, any microphone, nice camera, etc. etc. will be able to grab it out of the air again.
The only way I can see copy protection working is if in 50 years all "out-loud" music is strictly forbidden and illegal and instead, we have a DBC (digital-to-brain converter) implanted in our skull that accepts an input from the line-out jack on our "secure" digital music device.
There will have to be secret police everywhere to make sure nobody actually hums along, because if anyone does, someone with a hidden microphone (banned decades ago, but available on the black market, nevertheless) might capture it and distribute it, not to mention the 20 other people in the room who will hear this humming and thus "steal" the music without paying the original artist/composer for it...
You don't need a university degree to vote, serve on a jury...
And this is truly a travesty. The people without degrees are always complaining that they can't seem to get their finger on the button -- that the college grads are monopolizing it. The college grads realize that if they let the uneducated simpletons out there get their hands on the button, the world will soon be in the middle of a nuclear winter. If you didn't go to university, you're simple. You're a worker. That's noble in a way, but you also shouldn't presume to be a diplomat or a scientist on the assumption that you can do what they do without their education. It's silly to pretend that there is no difference.
All of the early proponents of democratic philosophy felt that an educated populace was necessary for things like voting to work properly and produce good results.
Many people out there are simply too stupid to realize how stupid they are, yet they vote and make decisions on juries that affect those of us who are educated -- who are able to realize that we don't know everything but have at least made the effort to learn something other than a trade, be it plumbing or programming.
(*) - if you don't think that school projects are busywork, you haven't worked on interesting enough real-world ones.
Oops, sounds like someone either:
a) Went to a second or third-tier school or
b) [more likely] never graduated university at all
A great deal of the most interesting real-world stuff goes on in academia, including a huge subset of research which never could or would occur in the business sector because it isn't immediately and obviously profitable. Often, this is some of the most interesting stuff of all.
I was much happier at university. It's what I've been doing since in the "real world" that seems like busywork.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know whether this suppression of ideas is political, financial, or otherwise or whether it is carried out by the editors of Slashdot at the behest of advertisers or simply by holier-than-thou moderators who are 14 years old and have points to burn.
The point is that now, to get at the cream of the crop, I often have to read at -1 and suffer through the "real" trolls as well, while only the non-controversial posts seem to stay visible to to 0+ readers.
This post will no-doubt be moderated to -1, offtopic within five or six minutes, but I notice that there is no acceptable meta-forum anywhere at Slashdot for discussing the mechanisms of Slashdot itself. That such a forum does not exist in spite of the "free" ongoing ad dollars it would no doubt generate seems to indicate that at least some of this suppression is indeed carried out by the editorial staff or by corporate.
It's nice to see this issue get some attention.
By all means, please read the thread discussed in the parent comment to this one, it's really quite enlightening.
You don't have a rescue CD? Now that is gutsy.
We're running the Red Hat 2.4.9-13 kernel on several SMP database servers and they have been perfect (not rebooted since 'rpm -U' of the new kernel) for several weeks. Before that, we were running 2.4.7-something from Red Hat and they were the same -- ran straight from the day we installed the kernel to the day we updated without needing to be restarted.
On my desktop machine, I've taken more risks (installed pretty much every official 2.4.x-linus release as they have come out) and some have been good, while others have been total dogs.
I'm running 2.4.17 right now. It seems okay; I've only had a freeze-up once over the last couple of weeks, though it was a total hard freeze (i.e. no ping, no magic SysRq, no nothing), which I haven't had in Linux for several years.
The obvious issue is VM; if you keep lots of memory (768M, or preferably 1.0G+) in your system, things to much more smoothly, though MP3 playback still skips a little.
Right now, I'd prefer some work on the RAID and IDE performance issues. One or two of the 2.4 series have had disk performance 100%+ better than the current 2.4 kernels. Why? I'd like to get the disk I/O back to reasonable levels.
Don't you remember those "Fuck Sony" shirts from the early '90s? Or am I getting even older?
No doubt. I'm still using my Newton 2100. I recently bought two more on eBay as a "just in case it breaks" measure.
The Newton display's color limitation (no color, only 16 shades of grey) sucks, but the 480x360 resolution of the Newton 2100 is unlike anything else ever in the PDA world. The StrongARM processor at 162.0 MHz is still very snappy and compares well with other PDAs currently on the market. I have 24MB memory and a 3Com PCMCIA ethernet card in the unit and use it to browse the Web, e-mail, read news, etc. And the NewtonOS operating system and Rosetta handwriting engine kick ass--far beyond anything else on the market right now. Far beyond. Hard to believe this thing has a manufacture date of 1997.
I owned a Palm III, a Palm V, a Vadem Clio and a Cassiopeia E-11 (two PDAs from each of the other families). Since owning these I also have played with friends' color iPaqs and a HandEra 330 that I was given on loan for a semester earlier this year.
So far, I haven't seen anything to want to make me trade in my Newtons. Now if only Apple would get their head out of their ass and re-release Newton OS, in a new device with a 480x320 color display with two CF slots down the side and a thickness of 0.5 inches, I'd be willing to pay $1000+ for it.
Code is very different.
If I want to show a Mapelthorpe photo to my students, fine. If I want to show them a segment of a PBS documentary on the civil war in class, fine. Neither activity is going to get me or threm thrown in jail.
If, however, I make available to their laptops via our network a certain piece of proprietary software without paying for multiple licenses, I will get into trouble. And if, somehow, I manage to get my hands on and show them actual code from a piece of proprietary software, even if I do so for educational purposes... Well, follow this to its obvious conclusion.
Oddly enough, just involving computers as a medium changes things as well. To play a track from a CD for them using a boombox at the front of the classroom is fine. To transfer an MP3 (again) to each of their desktops for them to listen to through headphones would, I think, be viewed as problematic.
For better or for worse (I think for worse) we treat software, and even data simply stored electronically, very differently from other forms of intellectual property, especially when we get down to issues of fair use.
Where can I buy Windows for $99 or MS Office for $150? Around here, Windows retails for $299 and MS Office for significantly more than that...
[Okay, I'm prepared to lose four karma points over this, offtopic, flamebait, troll, overrated, all the way to -1, just because there are so many damn Debian cheerleaders here and moderation is so damn broken]
.deb packaging moves farther toward the standardization fringes...
The problem with Debian is that it's too stable. What I mean by that is that though Debian does feel very stable, the current release also feels about 5 years behind other Linux operating systems in many ways, while not being all that much more stable than Red Hat, Caldera, or Slackware.
I run Debian on a couple of PowerPC-based Web servers so it's not like I've never used it. I'd run Red Hat or Slackware on them if I could, though.
And dselect has to go. Is there a new installer/package selector coming in the next major release, or will Debian still be the ugliest and clumsiest Linux to install on the face of the earth? Way back at Slackware 2.x, its installer was pretty, powerful, automatable, and easy to use.
Red Hat installs a lot of crap, but it's got a decent record of keeping up on updates in a reasonable amount of time (i.e. no lurking glibc bug) and most of the software around the net will run on it.
Aside from the multi-platform abilities of Debian, I really see no reason to use it, especially as
This is absolutely true. I am often asked "What book(s) can I buy, to learn what you've just told me? How do I gain the knowledge in [subject X] that you have? I don't care if it takes me a decade, I just want to learn it, but I can't seem to find out where. Is it written down?"
I tell them: it is a decade's worth of learning, and then some, but not from books. It is all from USENET. I became a competent C programmer who writes more efficient code and makes fewer fundamental mistakes thanks to usenet. I learned to use BSD and then to use Linux as fast and furious as I can type and to get myself out of any system problem, save my data from nearly any corruption thanks to usenet. I am able to network these odd things, build these robots, and have this "cool stuff" that you like so much that works so well thanks to usenet. I can make nearly any computer go, now matter how old or wierd or what media or operating system it uses (a feat which makes you a legend in your own department) thanks to usenet.
It's not my knowledge... I humbly picked it up in the mid and late '80s and early '90s and still constantly refer to it, first through Deja and now through Google. It is our knowledge, collective and stretching backward in time. To ever lose the news archive would be a tragedy -- the amount of searchable data on everything from chemistry and biology to computing and electronics to literature and politics is truly stunning. With the news archive, you can learn to hotwire together any two things so long as they have *wires* to do something useful; you can learn to brew just about anything including some of the best beer ever; you can learn just what the HELL James Joyce is talking about at times in Ulysses. Every question has been answered before you even asked.
The only sad thing has been the degree to which the groups have been turned into a boulevard of endlessly flashing neon porn signs in the last few years, almost to the degree that anything else is drowned out by the brightness.
Study USENET. Use USENET. Live and learn. Amen.
Unfortunately, it all still depends on your hardware or, more specifically, the drivers you use. I've still encountered my fair share of manufacturer-supplied drivers that crash W2k hard, and even in odd (+disk corruption) ways.
The Linux driver model is both a drawback and a boon -- drawback because there are far fewer drivers and they are often a bear to configure, boon because once you *do* get your device supported in Linux, my experience has been that across the breadth of existing drivers, stability is much better.
I agree, though, than Windows 2000 on vanilla hardware (i.e. nvidia entry level + IDE disk + 3Com netcard + nothing else at all) is very stable compared to Windows 95/98.
My first impression is that I'd have to agree, it looks like a mixmaster or a table lamp or a hair dryer or something, though I suppose that's the point -- less computerish than any computer in history... I suppose it *is* very retro. Maybe it will grow on me.
I'm also worried, though, about the sturdiness of the display mount. Will this thing magnify minor movements and shake all over the place as my typing jiggles my desk slightly? Will it wear out and end up resting on my desk anyway because it won't hold itself up anymore? Will it weaken and tilt sideways ever so slightly so that my display is always rotated by 2-3 degrees, thereby driving me absolutely nuts?
And if I bought one and had to move, it would be a pain in the ass to pack up and ship safely.
Damn, I was hoping for a new Newton, too.
Anyway dude, the Newton 2100 form factor is nearly perfect as far as I'm concerned. Natural handwriting recognition is the biggest pain in the ass on an iPaq because the screen is half the size of my hand. I'm a tallish adult male with biggish hands and I get hand cramp trying to hold the current microscopic batch of PDAs during extended use. Plus I run out of space after writing one word. On my Newton 2100, I can take notes using natural handwriting recognition as fast as I can scribble and not run out of screen space waiting for the recognizer, and the unit fits nicely in my palm, unlike a Palm.
And don't tell me that I don't want an organizer that's too big to fit in my pocket, because I don't want a freaking organizer, I want a pen-based computer that I can hold in one hand. The extra real estate (480x320) of the Newton 2100 makes for much better e-book reading, web browsing, note taking, etc. The Palm "any organizer should fit in your pocket" argument blows me away... Who spends $300 on an organizer? You can get a Palm-ish gadget to hold phones and dates for like $20.00 at your local O-Max or O-Depot if that's all you wanted.
IMO, The only way the late-model Newtons could have been improved (I'll stipulate here) is to make them thinner and lighter, but to shrink the WxH dimensions at all (which were largely dictated by the display) would have ruined them.
Basically, any device that fits in my pocket is too small to be useful to me! On the other hand, if it's 640x240 (like the CE HPCs) or 640x480 (like the CE HPC Pros) it's too damn big to carry!
The Newton 2100, the only device ever to fall in betwen these two camps, is perfect, at least for some people.
Okay, you are missing the point.
The point is not just that we aren't helping someone. The point is that we are killing someone really with very little thought about their life, while at the same time paying to have someone try to kill us in a game for joy, for entertainment purposes -- thereby making light of the very REAL death that is going on, giving those who are really dying the finger in a very big way.
What if I were to hold a "terror party" wherein I invited a bunch of guests to dress up in fake blood and come to be "paintbombed" by a paid group of "terrorists" with fake beards. If the paint happened to get on you, you would be "dead" and would have to go sit in the "World Trade" corner with all the other "corpses". Nice party, nice game, right?
Oh, you're offended? You wouldn't pay the cover charge to attend a party like that?
It's the same damn thing. Death is death and to turn it into light entertainment, to pay someone to send you fake death threats for perverse thrills, is tasteless and offensive.
Obviously a better idea is to use the money you would have paid to receive a death threat to help someone else out who may actually be at death's door.
Get it now? I'm not saying "don't eat, help someone else." I'm saying "don't blow money on fake death threats, help someone else." A completely different statement.
The fact that you fail to understand this indicates that you are already too far gone -- you don't even understand the difference and no doubt think that all of the civilians in Afghanistan have also paid a corporation to have their asses shot off.
Jackass.
You'll find that CS degrees tend to concern themselves with the ability to use computers to solve problems in science, especially new and unsual problems (i.e. real problems in research that have never been solved before). CS is therefore much more useful in science and academics for data collection and sophisticated types of analysis, etc.
IS degrees concern themselves with teaching you skills that are valuable not academically but in terms of raw cash in the marketplace, a sort of computing with wall-street emphasis, if you will -- i.e. what skills are selling NOW, in the private sector and are in widespread fashion in business computing. Web pages, e-commerce, deployment, some applications programming, and so on.
There really isn't all that much overlap. A Computer Scientist often really can be a scientist -- you can think of the lab coat and everything -- while IS is very corporate, cash, and business oriented, and few IS graduates have the science background necessary for research computing.
Sorry, but I can't agree with you.
It is definitely wrong to enjoy a six course meal while the guy next to you is starving. Better to give him three courses and share.
But the bigger crime is to throw the food out or (say) blow it up for entertainment purposes while the guy next to you is starving.
Not all that different (to me) from paying to have death threats phoned to you as light entertainment, while at the same time we are bombing civilians in several countries.
It just seems obscene to me. If not to you, I suppose that's your flaw, not mine.
Perhaps it's time we gave Mister Ashcroft a call!
This is America. If a corporation does it, it's never a bad thing. It's only the consumers and the average working class joe who are evil+expendable.
Ummm, I'm a fairly "radical" liberal by most standards, so while I don't argue with the bulk of your post, I do resent being called Republican. I'm not. Republicans would love this stuff -- if they can get everybody hooked, just look at the profit potential involved.
My point is not that God will nail you for participating in games, nor that blacks or Arabs should be restricted from playing.
My point is that people are playing "reality" games and watching "reality" TV while in Afghanistan and Palestine and Argentina people are "really" struggling to live, rather than paying to be threatened to die.
I'm saying -- how hedonistic and selfish is it to spend your money and your time entertaining yourself with fake death threats instead of using those same resources to do some good in the world? Is it really that entertaining to devalue your own life and those of your playing friends? And isn't it an insult to do so while others around the world are trying to save their own lives?
I didn't play Majestic, but...
Am I the only one here who thinks there is something desperately wrong if you wish to turn your entire real life -- as in your walking, talking self and your working days and nights -- into one large video game -- a fiction?
Even more to the point, getting death threats is cool? How do you know they aren't real? Are you about to say that you relish the day when reality and fantasy blur to the point that you can't tell which is which?
When this type of product becomes ubiquitous, we will be watching the news wondering whether we are really at war or whether it is a part of the latest game. When you hear that so-and-so that you know was shot and can you please come to the funeral, you will go with your game face on, taking notes and playing detective, not sure whether your friend is really dead or whether it's all a part of the game, and you won't care because you're so engrossed and because you're paying good money.
And when the general populace becomes very, very involved in the same games, might it not become a part of the game if you get murdered in cold blood by another, rival player? And since you're a participating character in that game -- might everyone not be thrilled at such a "plot development" and attend your funeral not to eulogize, but to play or make some kind of breakthrough?
I'm sure you had to sign some sort of user agreement to play Majestic. It isn't hard to imagine a user agreement in which you agree that the "designers" can use any event in any player's life as a part of the developing plot, and that you as a player agree not to hold them liable for the actions of other players, including actions taken against you or your family...
Games should stay on a board, on a screen, on a field. Americans are too rich, safe and complacent for their own good if they are so bored that they must turn their real lives and identities into gamepieces for entertainment purposes.
I suppose I'll get flamed and called a luddite, but I liked it when smart people used to get degrees and go do research for the greater good, rather than just signing up to receive death threats for entertainment purposes.
They steal your music, your culture, your ideas, your stories, your language, mass produce it, shrink-wrap it and then sell it back to you.
This is exactly the problem... The RIAA/MPAA are the forces driving western culture into the ground, creating generations of bumbling, sex-mad idiots with carbon-copy personalities and giving capitalism a bad name.
Aside from any legal problems, I think it's damned unethical the way today's media giants operate.
Did you bother to read the article at all?
They're getting PAID by us consumers NOT to make copy-protected CDs under an existing law.
The question is whether it's fair to REQUIRE consumers to pay a "tax" to the record companies for the privilege of being able to copy CDs for personal use and then for the record companies to copy-protect CDs anyway. It's a great deal for the record companies at the consumers' expense: free money and they don't have to do anything in return.
If they're going to sell copy-protected CDs, they should no longer get their "protection money" for blank CD sales.
If this thing *is* real and it's based on the same software technology as the Newton MessagePad line, it's worth $1,000+ to me as a PDA, easily. I'm using a Newton 2100 right now -- I finally re-invested in one at eBay prices ($250 or so) and I will be using it forever as far as I'm concerned.
I had a Newton MessagePad back in the mid '90s and it got killed by a falling phone (screen smashed). At that point, I went to Palm. After a while using Palm, I switched to Windows CE. It still didn't seem right. Then I bought a full pen-based PC last year and ran Linux+xscribble on it. These other PDAs and pen-based computers were all just wrong.
When it came right down to it, the Newton *software* and NewtonOS was what I was missing. Nothing else yet manufactured comes close for the PDA paradigm. The hardware is a little bulky, and is expensive for its age, but I finally just broke down and bought a Newton 2100 last year to see if the Newton magic was still there...
And it was like a revelation. I hadn't really appreciated my early Newton as well as I could have... It was my first PDA, it was early technology, and all I could do at the time was see things wrong with it. It's only after using other PDA devices for a while that I realized just how important and wonderful NewtonOS was and just how sad that it was discontinued.
If Apple DOES ever release another PDA, I pray that it will use NewtonOS technology. If instead Apple goes with Palm or some such nonsense, I hope to God that they release the NewtonOS code for StrongARM as open-source so that we don't have to try to copy it ourselves. Imagine a modern, open PDA hardware platform running open-source NewtonOS!
As for right now... I've stocked up on several Newton 2100 machines which will hopefully last me well into the century. I've taken to hand-replacing their dimming backlights and manually repacking their rechargeable battery packs just to get them running well again. At least for the next few years, it looks like we will be dominated by weak software like Palm and Windows CE -- only the few lucky (like me) who are aware of what has gone before and can maintain the machines will be able to depend on something as advanced as NewtonOS for our information.
The RIAA and MPAA are selling data to us-- and trying to protect themselves by making this data unavailable to us once we've bought it. If we can't get at the data, there's no point and we won't buy it, so the data will always be accessible somehow.
However, since the customer is allowed to hear the music or see the film, the data has been "released" into the wild and can easily be recaptured in other formats. In other words, they cannot use purely digital, "black-box" means to protect this data because we have nice analog visual and auditory systems that require this data to pass through the air in order for us to perceive and enjoy it.
Once the data is in the air, any microphone, nice camera, etc. etc. will be able to grab it out of the air again.
The only way I can see copy protection working is if in 50 years all "out-loud" music is strictly forbidden and illegal and instead, we have a DBC (digital-to-brain converter) implanted in our skull that accepts an input from the line-out jack on our "secure" digital music device.
There will have to be secret police everywhere to make sure nobody actually hums along, because if anyone does, someone with a hidden microphone (banned decades ago, but available on the black market, nevertheless) might capture it and distribute it, not to mention the 20 other people in the room who will hear this humming and thus "steal" the music without paying the original artist/composer for it...
You don't need a university degree to vote, serve on a jury...
And this is truly a travesty. The people without degrees are always complaining that they can't seem to get their finger on the button -- that the college grads are monopolizing it. The college grads realize that if they let the uneducated simpletons out there get their hands on the button, the world will soon be in the middle of a nuclear winter. If you didn't go to university, you're simple. You're a worker. That's noble in a way, but you also shouldn't presume to be a diplomat or a scientist on the assumption that you can do what they do without their education. It's silly to pretend that there is no difference.
All of the early proponents of democratic philosophy felt that an educated populace was necessary for things like voting to work properly and produce good results.
Many people out there are simply too stupid to realize how stupid they are, yet they vote and make decisions on juries that affect those of us who are educated -- who are able to realize that we don't know everything but have at least made the effort to learn something other than a trade, be it plumbing or programming.
(*) - if you don't think that school projects are busywork, you haven't worked on interesting enough real-world ones.
Oops, sounds like someone either:
a) Went to a second or third-tier school or
b) [more likely] never graduated university at all
A great deal of the most interesting real-world stuff goes on in academia, including a huge subset of research which never could or would occur in the business sector because it isn't immediately and obviously profitable. Often, this is some of the most interesting stuff of all.
I was much happier at university. It's what I've been doing since in the "real world" that seems like busywork.