White Wolf was able to inherit all the best parts of the system that Lion Rampart had created in Ars Magica (which predates the StoryTelling line - as it stands now); but was unsuccessful in integrating Ars Magica as a product into it's genre which was bent on being Dark ("World of Darkness"). It wasn't so much that they failed to integrate Ars Magica, it's that they had already bought a really good system to build off of. If you check the Ars Magica Faq (in paticular the history section) you'll see that White Wolf the game company was created with Ars Magica as it's game. Despite White Wolf's reluctance to embrace Ars Magica there is not doubt that it is the genesis of the Storyteller series.
I must agree that White Wolf never paid enough attention to the game, and Wizards abandoned it entirely. But atlas seems to have all but killed it. Joseph Elwell.
Wizard's of the coast actually owns Game Keeper (the mall chain store) now too. It astonishes me that Wizards is allowing themselves to be bought out. But more importantly worries me that many games and game stores might be hurt irreparably in the transition. Wizards bought another Role Playing Game previously from White Wolf Games called "Ars Magica", which was in the same line as Vampire the Masquerade and other Storytelling rpgs. Ars Magica was very quickly dumped on Atlas Games which has since mired the production.
It would be a shame if Hasbro dumped D&D entirely or even put it on the back burner as many gaming stores could be hurt by this move.
For more info on the aquisition goto wizards site. Joseph Elwell.
You can have encryption in software, and you can also have hooks in place to be used for encryption. You just can't export these versions. It would be nice if Mozilla had a convienent hook built into it's email application that GnuPG could take advantage of. It's not entirely sucksville if you live in the US. But most of it is still sucksville. Joseph Elwell.
Hopefully someone ingenious person will integrate GnuPG into Mozilla's email client. Hopefully that would encourage other email clients to adopt the integration and create wide spread use of signed email.
I think the idea behind this article of a "click" would define "click" to be a mouse click. Which would rule out all typing. It's a fair assumption that the web would be considerably smaller if search engines were lumped together, because you could type in the addresses of the two places you wanted to find the distance of into altavista as +url:www.math.com +url:www.slashdot.org . Placing all sites that are logged by altavista much closer.
But then do you calculate width by starting at point A and continuing to point B? Because if that were true then the search engine argument would still be relatively benign. As you would still have to reach a search engine from page A in less "clicks" than it would take you to go straight.
If the "true" diameter is required one could measure in any fashion as long as we agree on a definition of "click" (which I define - for myself - as only mouse presses). So such sites as yahoo might bring unrelated pages closer. But without typing would many be relatively fewer than 19 clicks away? Yahoo is still categorically sorted so sites that are unrelated would need to traverse up the Yahoo category tree after first leaving the first site.
Joseph Elwell.
The Source code for that mandelbrot set.
on
Web: 19 Clicks Wide
·
· Score: 4
The Source code for that mandelbrot set is available at Caida. My friend has been working on the project for quite some time, ever since graduating at UCSD. Most of the work is done by him in the San Diego Super Computer Center. Take a look at the software, it's java and Brad put a lot of cross platform testing into it. So it should run fine everywhere. (Java claim). It has a lot of really nice features to it. Joseph Elwell.
This Tivo looks *really* cool, to start off with. But doesn't it look a whole lot like webtv? Does anyone else think it strange that Sony and Phillips teamed up orignally to produce WebTV ( old news) and then sold off the product to Microsoft when it was failing? Now Sony has partnered with Tivo to produce a Television application that actually seems pretty useful, and that will maybe compete with WebTV in the future? Did anyone notice that Phillips is again involved in this venture (Phillips personal Receiver).
My guess is that Sony (in selling webtv to Microsoft) has a deal with Microsoft that disallows them from manufacturing tv-web appliances for X number of years or altogether. Maybe Sony has a few tricks up it's sleeves.
I've seen those posts on not only amazon but other auction houses where someone is intentionally duping bidders into thinking they are paying for a retail product when it is apparent that they are not to the dubious buyer. I applaud Redhat for their efforts to protect the "newbie" consumers from such fraud. Joseph Elwell.
I assume tonight means Pacific Standard Time, because they are in Sunnyvale CA. That's too bad for me, because I'll be in line for seats at Star Wars tonight. I guess linux.com will have to wait until tomorrow. I feel for the engineers that have to make sure the site stays running on it's opening day. Joseph Elwell.
I must admit that I was a little shocked when I initially read the interview. Thompson stated that linux is unreliable and worse than Miscrosoft. I went as far as going to freebsd's homepage, and wondering if I should install FreeBSD at home, or Solaris 7 personal edition. Then I realized a couple of things. First of all, Thompson said "I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically." Wow, that's a pretty brutal statement when you look at it; but, if you think about it - how much Windows98 source code has Thompson seen, and how much of it would he approve of? The second decision that made me think I shouldn't switch over is Quake3. I know it's a feeble reason, but q3 came out for linux the other week, and just today I saw a howto for the freebsd linux emulator, and when is quake going to show up for Solaris - never. So, if id thinks that linux is good enough to develop for, maybe it's just good enough to use. I don't know. Maybe I should be running Windows98 at home. What do you guys think?
Well, the sblive driver worked great for Quake 3 test; but, for mpg123 all I heard was crackling and chirping. At least the important things worked. By the way, the redhat kernel source rpms are no good because the kernel version needs to be 2.2.5 not 2.2.5-14 or 2.2.5-anything. So go grab the kernel sources at www.linuxhq.com and uninstall the kernel-source rpm. Joseph Elwell.
How do you launch the windows version? I'm at work right now, so I downloaded the windows version. But I see a lot of.exe 's and no readme files and most of the.exe 's I click on are dos programs that just kill themselves or guis that don't seem to do anything and/or crash. Joseph Elwell
I've used altavista for some time now. Altavista has been my search engine choice because it pioneered a true advanced search that allows many features not found in other search engines, such as + - url: link: image: etc.. However, other search engines have started to incorporate those ideas into their searches. What I am concerned about is your new sales policy that would allow people to "buy" the top hit on an engine. This reminds me of Amazon.com when it was determined that the reviews on the front page of Amazon.com were actually sold to booksellers and therefore extremely underminded the validity of all the reviews on Amazon.com. In moving towards a "buyers market" for search results you too would be diminishing the value of your search engine by making the engine return results that the user would not expect to see. By "not expecting to see" I mean that your search engine is expected by many to act in a paticular way. If I type +auctions -ebay and Ebay bought the work "auction" are you going to show me ebay as the first result?
Not to deter you from making money, I think that selling the first result could work. If you added an option, such as "-spam" that filtered out the bought ads.
I think you're missing the obvious point. Car & Driver did a review of a snow-plow, and *actual* review - as a joke. However that review sounds like it was still *real*. Slashdot is contriving news, and propogating lies. There is a difference between funny news and lies.
Anyways Malda and others have made it clear that they want user input, so asking someone to shut up is clearly out of line.
If slashdot wants to portray itself as a joke site to the world, by all means they can. But, we have been given the opportunity to submit our feedback and try to help shape slashdot into something it wants/isn't.
I think it's important to differentiate between taking yourself seriously and actually lying to people. I'm all for a good joke. I laughed when this morning I reached for my mouse and it didn't work - only to find that someone put a sticky on the ball that said "april fools".
Rob Malda, of all people, should understand that posting lies on the slashdot page could also be called "flamebait". Joseph Elwell.
Well, there's the needle that broke this back. I think it's high time that slashdot evaluate it's goals. If it wants to be accepted as a legitimate source of information then it should realize that just because today is April 1st doesn't mean that legitamite businesses shut down. I think the lack of seriousness in a site like slashdot only reflects what many people have been complaining about during the whole Linux movement. In paticular that is the seemingly childness of its user base. I think there are certain things that shouldn't be sullied by this days events.
How, in good conscience can Malda post an article explaining how he would rather get emails about old news and unrelated news rather than flame on the comment list?
Isn't it time for the slashdot community to leave the jokes to segfault, the flame to script kiddies on irc, and invest it's efforts in some serious news?
It is one thing for a news site to propogate the jokes of others unwittingly. It is another to start them knowingly and allow them to interfere with the site and it's users as a whole.
On another note, I'm really curious to know if April Fools is celebrated all over the world? Are there people reading these articles and believing them because they don't A) know better, B) celebrate April Fools in there part of the world C) trust Slashdot as a news source and therefore have been duped by a confidante or D) couldn't smell a lie if it were a ton of tuna.
I think it's about time that Slashdot grow up. Why do I as a user have to filter through fake news on this site? Why do I have to pay lip service to the jokers tradition on any day, when all I ask for out of slashdot is the news. Is a bad april's fools joke "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters"? I read Malda's little epitath on "please don't flame me", where he specifically posted a request for people to email him when things are wrong. So, this post goes out to all of the slashdot users, and also a direct email to Malda himself.
I think a little investigative reporting might need to be done a few of the articles that were posted recently. I'm asking not only the maintainers of slashdot but the users themselves to weed out the fake news. Maybe it's time for the news to be moderated in a similar fashion as the comments.
Doesn't Internic actually own all the domain names? If not, why is it that I have to pay them every two yeats? If this is my property, it apparently has a limited life under my ownership. But, really I don't see why this is any different than renting a building to conduct business in. If that building is owned by Internic and Microsoft sues me they can't take my building - i'm leasing the building from internic. They can however force me to close down business. But the building is still Internic's. Is there a procedure for transferring ownership of leased property to victor's for litigation?
This was in February's Linux Journal. The article about wearable computers. Dr. Mann talks about the evolution of the WearComp. You can check out that research and innovation at wearcomp.org What I want to know is, who uses this? And how easy is it to learn? Joseph Elwell.
I think that when a story is posted on the home page, the person who submitted the story should go up in rank. This would reflect the values of a moderator that I think slashdot is trying to pursue. People who have the initiative to go out and find stories and contribute to slashdot probably correlate highly to people who read and review comments posted on articles.
Any ideas about this?
Also, I'm still routing for slashdot to OPEN it's article submission process. Articles that don't make the cut should be available for perusal by those who are interested. Maybe a similar ranking system could be used to sift through the fluff. The front page would still be controlled by the core group so that articles make it in timely without having to undergo hundreds of pokes by semi-anonymous slashdotters. But older articles that never made it could float to the top and eventually appear on the main page.
Maybe that's something to look into? comments? Joseph Elwell.
First of all, source code is one thing but 0 support is another - which is the case in the Sorenson codec. Apple didn't say, "you can't have the source code". Xanim has 3 modules that are distributed as binaries only because of that sort of agreement. What Apple said was "you have to pay us to allow people to view the movies *WE* made". If they make these movies you would think that they would want people to see them.
Troll Tech is another completely different case. Troll Tech came up with a really good window toolkit that didn't catch on because although it was free for users it was not open source. Joseph Elwell.
Slashdot Mirror
White Wolf was able to inherit all the best parts of the system that Lion Rampart had created in Ars Magica (which predates the StoryTelling line - as it stands now); but was unsuccessful in integrating Ars Magica as a product into it's genre which was bent on being Dark ("World of Darkness"). It wasn't so much that they failed to integrate Ars Magica, it's that they had already bought a really good system to build off of. If you check the Ars Magica Faq (in paticular the history section) you'll see that White Wolf the game company was created with Ars Magica as it's game.
Despite White Wolf's reluctance to embrace Ars Magica there is not doubt that it is the genesis of the Storyteller series.
I must agree that White Wolf never paid enough attention to the game, and Wizards abandoned it entirely. But atlas seems to have all but killed it.
Joseph Elwell.
Wizard's of the coast actually owns Game Keeper (the mall chain store) now too. It astonishes me that Wizards is allowing themselves to be bought out. But more importantly worries me that many games and game stores might be hurt irreparably in the transition. Wizards bought another Role Playing Game previously from White Wolf Games called "Ars Magica", which was in the same line as Vampire the Masquerade and other Storytelling rpgs. Ars Magica was very quickly dumped on Atlas Games which has since mired the production.
It would be a shame if Hasbro dumped D&D entirely or even put it on the back burner as many gaming stores could be hurt by this move.
For more info on the aquisition goto wizards site.
Joseph Elwell.
You can have encryption in software, and you can also have hooks in place to be used for encryption. You just can't export these versions. It would be nice if Mozilla had a convienent hook built into it's email application that GnuPG could take advantage of.
It's not entirely sucksville if you live in the US. But most of it is still sucksville.
Joseph Elwell.
Hopefully someone ingenious person will integrate GnuPG into Mozilla's email client. Hopefully that would encourage other email clients to adopt the integration and create wide spread use of signed email.
Joseph Elwell.
I think the idea behind this article of a "click" would define "click" to be a mouse click. Which would rule out all typing. It's a fair assumption that the web would be considerably smaller if search engines were lumped together, because you could type in the addresses of the two places you wanted to find the distance of into altavista as +url:www.math.com +url:www.slashdot.org . Placing all sites that are logged by altavista much closer.
But then do you calculate width by starting at point A and continuing to point B? Because if that were true then the search engine argument would still be relatively benign. As you would still have to reach a search engine from page A in less "clicks" than it would take you to go straight.
If the "true" diameter is required one could measure in any fashion as long as we agree on a definition of "click" (which I define - for myself - as only mouse presses). So such sites as yahoo might bring unrelated pages closer. But without typing would many be relatively fewer than 19 clicks away? Yahoo is still categorically sorted so sites that are unrelated would need to traverse up the Yahoo category tree after first leaving the first site.
Joseph Elwell.
The Source code for that mandelbrot set is available at Caida. My friend has been working on the project for quite some time, ever since graduating at UCSD. Most of the work is done by him in the San Diego Super Computer Center. Take a look at the software, it's java and Brad put a lot of cross platform testing into it. So it should run fine everywhere. (Java claim). It has a lot of really nice features to it.
Joseph Elwell.
This Tivo looks *really* cool, to start off with. But doesn't it look a whole lot like webtv? Does anyone else think it strange that Sony and Phillips teamed up orignally to produce WebTV ( old news) and then sold off the product to Microsoft when it was failing? Now Sony has partnered with Tivo to produce a Television application that actually seems pretty useful, and that will maybe compete with WebTV in the future? Did anyone notice that Phillips is again involved in this venture (Phillips personal Receiver).
My guess is that Sony (in selling webtv to Microsoft) has a deal with Microsoft that disallows them from manufacturing tv-web appliances for X number of years or altogether. Maybe Sony has a few tricks up it's sleeves.
Joseph Elwell.
I've seen those posts on not only amazon but other auction houses where someone is intentionally duping bidders into thinking they are paying for a retail product when it is apparent that they are not to the dubious buyer. I applaud Redhat for their efforts to protect the "newbie" consumers from such fraud.
Joseph Elwell.
A good way to install linux without a working cd is to copy the whole cd to your harddrive - either via nfs or even windows networking.
I assume tonight means Pacific Standard Time, because they are in Sunnyvale CA. That's too bad for me, because I'll be in line for seats at Star Wars tonight. I guess linux.com will have to wait until tomorrow. I feel for the engineers that have to make sure the site stays running on it's opening day.
Joseph Elwell.
I must admit that I was a little shocked when I initially read the interview. Thompson stated that linux is unreliable and worse than Miscrosoft. I went as far as going to freebsd's homepage, and wondering if I should install FreeBSD at home, or Solaris 7 personal edition. Then I realized a couple of things. First of all, Thompson said "I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically." Wow, that's a pretty brutal statement when you look at it; but, if you think about it - how much Windows98 source code has Thompson seen, and how much of it would he approve of? The second decision that made me think I shouldn't switch over is Quake3. I know it's a feeble reason, but q3 came out for linux the other week, and just today I saw a howto for the freebsd linux emulator, and when is quake going to show up for Solaris - never. So, if id thinks that linux is good enough to develop for, maybe it's just good enough to use.
I don't know. Maybe I should be running Windows98 at home. What do you guys think?
Well, the sblive driver worked great for Quake 3 test; but, for mpg123 all I heard was crackling and chirping. At least the important things worked.
By the way, the redhat kernel source rpms are no good because the kernel version needs to be 2.2.5 not 2.2.5-14 or 2.2.5-anything. So go grab the kernel sources at www.linuxhq.com and uninstall the kernel-source rpm.
Joseph Elwell.
Redhat 6.0 contains the new 2.2.x kernel and also glibc2.1 both of these additions over the 5.x are extremely valuable to the desktop user.
:)
On another note 6.0 comes with GNOME and kde, and also x11amp.
Joseph.
Caldera's OpenLinux 2.2 has both glibc 2.1 and libc5 installed. You might want to check their distribution to see how they do it.
How do you launch the windows version? I'm at work right now, so I downloaded the windows version. But I see a lot of .exe 's and no readme files and most of the .exe 's I click on are dos programs that just kill themselves or guis that don't seem to do anything and/or crash.
Joseph Elwell
I've used altavista for some time now. Altavista has been my search engine choice because it pioneered a true advanced search that allows many features not found in other search engines, such as + - url: link: image: etc.. However, other search engines have started to incorporate those ideas into their searches. What I am concerned about is your new sales policy that would allow people to "buy" the top hit on an engine. This reminds me of Amazon.com when it was determined that the reviews on the front page of Amazon.com were actually sold to booksellers and therefore extremely underminded the validity of all the reviews on Amazon.com. In moving towards a "buyers market" for search results you too would be diminishing the value of your search engine by making the engine return results that the user would not expect to see. By "not expecting to see" I mean that your search engine is expected by many to act in a paticular way. If I type +auctions -ebay and Ebay bought the work "auction" are you going to show me ebay as the first result?
Not to deter you from making money, I think that selling the first result could work. If you added an option, such as "-spam" that filtered out the bought ads.
Joseph Elwell.
Why are you _STILL_ posting april fools jokes?
And isn't it about time that you post retractions for the previous april fools articles?
Joseph Elwell.
I think you're missing the obvious point. Car & Driver did a review of a snow-plow, and *actual* review - as a joke. However that review sounds like it was still *real*. Slashdot is contriving news, and propogating lies. There is a difference between funny news and lies.
Anyways Malda and others have made it clear that they want user input, so asking someone to shut up is clearly out of line.
If slashdot wants to portray itself as a joke site to the world, by all means they can. But, we have been given the opportunity to submit our feedback and try to help shape slashdot into something it wants/isn't.
I think it's important to differentiate between taking yourself seriously and actually lying to people. I'm all for a good joke. I laughed when this morning I reached for my mouse and it didn't work - only to find that someone put a sticky on the ball that said "april fools".
Rob Malda, of all people, should understand that posting lies on the slashdot page could also be called "flamebait".
Joseph Elwell.
Well, there's the needle that broke this back. I think it's high time that slashdot evaluate it's goals. If it wants to be accepted as a legitimate source of information then it should realize that just because today is April 1st doesn't mean that legitamite businesses shut down. I think the lack of seriousness in a site like slashdot only reflects what many people have been complaining about during the whole Linux movement. In paticular that is the seemingly childness of its user base. I think there are certain things that shouldn't be sullied by this days events.
How, in good conscience can Malda post an article explaining how he would rather get emails about old news and unrelated news rather than flame on the comment list?
Isn't it time for the slashdot community to leave the jokes to segfault, the flame to script kiddies on irc, and invest it's efforts in some serious news?
It is one thing for a news site to propogate the jokes of others unwittingly. It is another to start them knowingly and allow them to interfere with the site and it's users as a whole.
On another note, I'm really curious to know if April Fools is celebrated all over the world? Are there people reading these articles and believing them because they don't A) know better, B) celebrate April Fools in there part of the world C) trust Slashdot as a news source and therefore have been duped by a confidante or D) couldn't smell a lie if it were a ton of tuna.
Joseph Elwell.
I think it's about time that Slashdot grow up. Why do I as a user have to filter through fake news on this site? Why do I have to pay lip service to the jokers tradition on any day, when all I ask for out of slashdot is the news. Is a bad april's fools joke "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters"? I read Malda's little epitath on "please don't flame me", where he specifically posted a request for people to email him when things are wrong. So, this post goes out to all of the slashdot users, and also a direct email to Malda himself.
I think a little investigative reporting might need to be done a few of the articles that were posted recently. I'm asking not only the maintainers of slashdot but the users themselves to weed out the fake news. Maybe it's time for the news to be moderated in a similar fashion as the comments.
Joseph Elwell
Doesn't Internic actually own all the domain names? If not, why is it that I have to pay them every two yeats? If this is my property, it apparently has a limited life under my ownership. But, really I don't see why this is any different than renting a building to conduct business in. If that building is owned by Internic and Microsoft sues me they can't take my building - i'm leasing the building from internic. They can however force me to close down business. But the building is still Internic's. Is there a procedure for transferring ownership of leased property to victor's for litigation?
Joseph Elwell.
You can already download TriCorder II for your palm pilot. Check out tucows Look down towards the bottom for Tricorder II.
Now all I need is a legitimate reason to run around with a tricorder.
Joseph Elwell.
This was in February's Linux Journal. The article about wearable computers. Dr. Mann talks about the evolution of the WearComp. You can check out that research and innovation at wearcomp.org What I want to know is, who uses this? And how easy is it to learn? Joseph Elwell.
I think that when a story is posted on the home page, the person who submitted the story should go up in rank. This would reflect the values of a moderator that I think slashdot is trying to pursue. People who have the initiative to go out and find stories and contribute to slashdot probably correlate highly to people who read and review comments posted on articles.
Any ideas about this?
Also, I'm still routing for slashdot to OPEN it's article submission process. Articles that don't make the cut should be available for perusal by those who are interested. Maybe a similar ranking system could be used to sift through the fluff. The front page would still be controlled by the core group so that articles make it in timely without having to undergo hundreds of pokes by semi-anonymous slashdotters. But older articles that never made it could float to the top and eventually appear on the main page.
Maybe that's something to look into?
comments?
Joseph Elwell.
First of all, source code is one thing but 0 support is another - which is the case in the Sorenson codec. Apple didn't say, "you can't have the source code". Xanim has 3 modules that are distributed as binaries only because of that sort of agreement. What Apple said was "you have to pay us to allow people to view the movies *WE* made". If they make these movies you would think that they would want people to see them.
Troll Tech is another completely different case. Troll Tech came up with a really good window toolkit that didn't catch on because although it was free for users it was not open source.
Joseph Elwell.