> Linus himself changed his original > pronounciation to a more popular one!
No, he just got an american accent. The "leen-oox" finnish pronounciation that Linus gives on that sound file is different in accent only. That pronouciation uses the finnish short "i", just as "lynn-uhcks" uses the american short "i".
I agree. The dude's been cast in a lot of annoying roles, which makes people want to hate him. Plus he's on the cover of those "Teen Scream" magazines, another strike against him. But he was good in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape." I'd trade DiCaprio for Jar Jar in Episode II any day.
Dude, can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these things? I tried, but the sheer profoundness of it nearly destroyed my brain. It was like in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" when Hunter Thompson drinks the whole vial of liquified human pituitary gland. IT WAS THAT AMAZING.
Re:What a tangled web we weave...
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
It's interesting that you brought up Orwell. One of the Ingsoc slogans was "Freedom is Slavery", of course, and it wasn't just in 1984 that we hear this. The American Legion will tell you that "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance," that in order to preserve the liberties of U.S. citizens, some U.S. citizens must be (essentialy) enslaved (voluntarily or otherwise) in the armed forces. The same logic applies to the GPL, that the price of the software's freedom is protection from non-freedom. The BSD license is like an anarchic nation, one without government, but by extension without protection from tyrrany.
Re:Philanthropy != Communism
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
> Even in the age of the robber barons --- > probably the closest parallel to the current day > --- there were esteemed philanthropists whose > donations would have dwarfed the incomes of a > roomful of today's wealthy > entrepreneurs. When Andrew Carnegie built > libraries for the entire country, did anyone > accuse him of Marxism?
Yes! There used to be a pseudo-scientific philosophy called "social darwinism", which held that economic competition mirrored biological competition, and that letting the economically weak survive hindered social evolution. In this scheme, charity was seen as a social ill, a failure to let the Great Unwashed die out and leave the rich supermen behind.
Luckily these ideas now seem absurd and evil to all but Ayn Rand fans. Still, the arguments used by Microsoft (in an essay of theirs on free software, was a/. article a while back) and others on why free software is anticapitalist mirror the ideas of social darwinism.
Wow, you have access to electricity? I envy you rich kids. You may be pampered throughout life, but I bet you folks sure get to live it up.
I've been doing DNA computing, using sequences derived from my own blood. Concocting a cheap replacement for the gel electrophoresis was the hardest part. I was able to save and recycle enough Jell-O to do it, and instead of running an electrical current over the gel I've been blowing gently on the DNA sequences to seperate them out by length.
Even though I've lost a lot of blood, it's really worth it to get to read slashdot. I don't think I'd faint quite so often if I didn't have to waste so much computation time on adfu.blockstackers.com. But it's still worth it. Go Linux!
To quote Guy L. Steele (or perhaps he was quoting someone else): just because parallel processing is the only answer, doesn't mean it *is* an answer. Parallel algorithms (which are notoriously hairy to deal with) don't always speed things up, so one might be at a loss if there turned out to be no way to speed a chip up. At that point, computer makers might actually have to worry about speeding up peripherals, or -- god forbid! -- the code itself.
But then again, there's a hell of a lot of money in this industry. Something tells me they'll find another paradigm to move to (nanotechnology, DNA computers, etc.) given enough profit potential.
Dude, me too! Then I tried answering "no" on every question and got C3PO. If only I had the inclination to try all 2^44 combinations...what other characters did people reading this get?
Ethernet was invented in 1973. It is old! It is obselete! I predict that the revenues of NIC retailers will drop dramatically as the general public decides to drop a working technology in favor of something totally new. Ethernet is as good as dead! DON'T TRUST COMPANIES THAT PEDDLE OBSELETE PRODUCTS! ABANDON ETHERNET!
And also, records are hard to accidently reformat. An inadvertant rm -rf * doesn't hurt them either.
I think the fact that Cheapbytes can make money by selling physical copies of downloadable data is a sign that music will continue to be sold on CDs (or other physical media) for a long time.
Good points. However, there are a *lot* of research problems (especially ones in, say, combinatorics, or modeling) that can be solved with brute-force parallelism. Back in school the computer science LAN was almost perpetually bogged down by a math teacher's parallelized research (combinatorics, IIRC), running as background processes.
Assuming that the researcher's computational problem can be cut into fine-grained enough chunks (the way SETI's work and prime number factorization can), a sufficiently large generalized distributed computational system would be a god-send.
CComp> Too many people look at a thing and say, CComp> 'This should be used for X instead of Y, CComp> and right now! Change it! Change it!! CComp> Nownownow!!' Mebbe the intermediate steps CComp> are NECESSARY to get to where they want it, CComp> but no one cares aboutthat. Gotta be CComp> instantaneous or nothing. Call it the CComp> McDonald's Syndrome.
Their FAQ makes little mention of using this factorization software in the larger context of generalized scientific and mathematical research. The closest they come is stating a goal of "feasibility of cooperative networked multiprocessing," with no mention of client security issues, or an API set for future developers, or how timesharing would work. That's what my question was about -- indeed, a cursory search of distributed.net's pages revel no developments along these lines. Or have you seen some place where they address these questions? Call it my McDonald's curiosity.
Could this stuff be put to a *really* practical use? Surely some math professors out there have some linear algebra number crunching to do, or some physicist has weather modelling simulations to make, or the like. Not that generating primes and scanning gads of radio waves for intelligent signs isn't nice and all, but it seems to me that gargantuan amounts of parallelized computation time could really help out researchers on tight budgets.
Is there an easy process for researchers to utilize this stuff? If not, it might be a Good Thing to set up.
(It'd have to be secure, I suppose, and in a best-case scenario could involve timesharing without administrative hassle...)
Not if the key is shorter than the plaintext, and therefore had to be used more than once. If the key is shorter than the text, the cyphertext becomes possible to break. (Not that I know how.)
Perl and Java can both be compiled to (real) machine code; their speed in these situations is close to C++ -- at least, close enough to justify coding in them. (Although I agree that coding real applications in interpreted Java is total folly, at least on today's machines.)
Because most programmers are stuck using shitty languages.
The poster wasn't (necessarily) advocating that everyone use Dylan, s/he was advocating that everyone stop using C/C++ so much. Perl, Ada, Java, Haskell, etc. all have greater robustness (and other advantages) than C/C++, yet C and C++ enjoy much more popularity. The industry is reluctant to change because it has found a standard, lame though it may be. (See any parallels here?)
I don't know...people accuse free software advocates of being anti-capitalist enough already. "Community software" could do without the "communi-" part, IMHO, although it does sum up the idea fairly well.
Here's an thought. The idea here is to market free software to suits (since clueful folks can simply bother to learn how software licensing works;^] ). It seems to me that open source software works by companies providing services -- such as fueling development, or having good support centers, or putting out nice installation CDs with manuals and such -- and not by controlling software products. Open source software is a move away from "software as a product" and over to "software as a service." So if "open source" turns out to be a dead-end buzzword for the PHBs, how about "serviceware"? Says nothing about freedom, but no exec cares about freedom. It does, however, describe a different (and perhaps more lucrative) business model.
Maybe that's too abstract. Plus, OSS seems to have really exploded in the press recently, and has become a pretty well-known buzz word. Media-wise, we may be stuck with it, even if all trademark attempts (past and future) fall through.
I was in electronics class in college, and was advising a fellow student -- who needed a copy of some software program or other -- to look on the internet for a pirated copy. A third student, who had interned at Microsoft, said "How can you, as a CS major, advocate software piracy?" I told her that the greater threat to software developers came from anticompetitive practices by large corporations. That ended the conversation.
Piracy, per se, is not the evil here. Failing to reward software developers for their efforts, whether they develop free or proprietary software, is evil. The eight-year-old who uses emacs often should feel morally compelled to send off one of her piggy-bank quarters to the FSF; or better yet, should sit down and write some extensions to it.
This is why I liked Id's "guiltware," where they put up a splash screen talking about how disappointed your mom would be if she knew you were playing Wolfenstein without paying for it. The Id folks knew that withholding software from those who can't afford is it evil, but so is failing to pay money for software when you can afford it.
There are plenty of successful (and unsuccessful) computer products with atrocious names. An operating system name hononymous with the name for castrated men is not a marketer's dream. Yet Unix has been popular for twenty years.
Re:PPC distribution--LINUX PPC 5.0
on
Corel Linux FAQ
·
· Score: 1
NetBSD has a PPC port. They have a thumbnail of an iMac on their page, so I assume the iMac is supported hardware.
As far as the other comments on this thread -- I have X running on my iMac, although it was a royal bitch to install. The one site which really helped with this was the iMac Linux site, already mentioned several times on slashdot. It describes how to get X (with good resolution and color depth) running, and has other tips for the platform.
A bunch of new PPC distros are in the works -- DebianPPC, iMandrake, Yellow Dog, and of course LinuxPPC v5. For the iMac user, probably any of these will be an improvement over the weird-ass iMac installation of LinuxPPC 4.x.
I've seen some overzelousness recently. Moderately bad, or slightly off-topic, posts have been given inordinately low scores. Mildly good, but not *great* posts have been getting fives (although this is not necessarily such a bad thing). So instead of getting a nice gradient, we get most posts at one pole or the other. (At least in my experience.)
Slashdot Mirror
> Linus himself changed his original
> pronounciation to a more popular one!
No, he just got an american accent. The "leen-oox" finnish pronounciation that Linus gives on that sound file is different in accent only. That pronouciation uses the finnish short "i", just as "lynn-uhcks" uses the american short "i".
I agree. The dude's been cast in a lot of annoying roles, which makes people want to hate him. Plus he's on the cover of those "Teen Scream" magazines, another strike against him. But he was good in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape." I'd trade DiCaprio for Jar Jar in Episode II any day.
> DOES IT RUN LINUX?
Dude, can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these things? I tried, but the sheer profoundness of it nearly destroyed my brain. It was like in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" when Hunter Thompson drinks the whole vial of liquified human pituitary gland. IT WAS THAT AMAZING.
It's interesting that you brought up Orwell. One of the Ingsoc slogans was "Freedom is Slavery", of course, and it wasn't just in 1984 that we hear this. The American Legion will tell you that "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance," that in order to preserve the liberties of U.S. citizens, some U.S. citizens must be (essentialy) enslaved (voluntarily or otherwise) in the armed forces. The same logic applies to the GPL, that the price of the software's freedom is protection from non-freedom. The BSD license is like an anarchic nation, one without government, but by extension without protection from tyrrany.
> Even in the age of the robber barons ---
/. article a while back) and others on why free software is anticapitalist mirror the ideas of social darwinism.
> probably the closest parallel to the current day
> --- there were esteemed philanthropists whose
> donations would have dwarfed the incomes of a
> roomful of today's wealthy
> entrepreneurs. When Andrew Carnegie built
> libraries for the entire country, did anyone
> accuse him of Marxism?
Yes! There used to be a pseudo-scientific philosophy called "social darwinism", which held that economic competition mirrored biological competition, and that letting the economically weak survive hindered social evolution. In this scheme, charity was seen as a social ill, a failure to let the Great Unwashed die out and leave the rich supermen behind.
Luckily these ideas now seem absurd and evil to all but Ayn Rand fans. Still, the arguments used by Microsoft (in an essay of theirs on free software, was a
Wow, you have access to electricity? I envy you rich kids. You may be pampered throughout life, but I bet you folks sure get to live it up.
I've been doing DNA computing, using sequences derived from my own blood. Concocting a cheap replacement for the gel electrophoresis was the hardest part. I was able to save and recycle enough Jell-O to do it, and instead of running an electrical current over the gel I've been blowing gently on the DNA sequences to seperate them out by length.
Even though I've lost a lot of blood, it's really worth it to get to read slashdot. I don't think I'd faint quite so often if I didn't have to waste so much computation time on adfu.blockstackers.com. But it's still worth it. Go Linux!
To quote Guy L. Steele (or perhaps he was quoting someone else): just because parallel processing is the only answer, doesn't mean it *is* an answer. Parallel algorithms (which are notoriously hairy to deal with) don't always speed things up, so one might be at a loss if there turned out to be no way to speed a chip up. At that point, computer makers might actually have to worry about speeding up peripherals, or -- god forbid! -- the code itself.
But then again, there's a hell of a lot of money in this industry. Something tells me they'll find another paradigm to move to (nanotechnology, DNA computers, etc.) given enough profit potential.
Dude, me too! Then I tried answering "no" on every question and got C3PO. If only I had the inclination to try all 2^44 combinations...what other characters did people reading this get?
I'm a normal user, let's see if this gets posted...
Delete me when you get this figured out...
Ethernet was invented in 1973. It is old! It is obselete! I predict that the revenues of NIC retailers will drop dramatically as the general public decides to drop a working technology in favor of something totally new. Ethernet is as good as dead! DON'T TRUST COMPANIES THAT PEDDLE OBSELETE PRODUCTS! ABANDON ETHERNET!
And also, records are hard to accidently reformat. An inadvertant rm -rf * doesn't hurt them either.
I think the fact that Cheapbytes can make money by selling physical copies of downloadable data is a sign that music will continue to be sold on CDs (or other physical media) for a long time.
Or at least in part -- looks like the anagram generator just grokked the
OBKR UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNG
part. STILL, we are provided now with vital clues. Someone growling, and the vows of a mysterious quill-smoking blob.
Of course! The mystery 97 letters are just an anagram for:
Grrr! vow blob knob box GHQ puffs quill.
Where do we send this? Do I win money?
Good points. However, there are a *lot* of research problems (especially ones in, say, combinatorics, or modeling) that can be solved with brute-force parallelism. Back in school the computer science LAN was almost perpetually bogged down by a math teacher's parallelized research (combinatorics, IIRC), running as background processes.
Assuming that the researcher's computational problem can be cut into fine-grained enough chunks (the way SETI's work and prime number factorization can), a sufficiently large generalized distributed computational system would be a god-send.
CComp> Too many people look at a thing and say,
CComp> 'This should be used for X instead of Y,
CComp> and right now! Change it! Change it!!
CComp> Nownownow!!' Mebbe the intermediate steps
CComp> are NECESSARY to get to where they want it,
CComp> but no one cares aboutthat. Gotta be
CComp> instantaneous or nothing. Call it the
CComp> McDonald's Syndrome.
Their FAQ makes little mention of using this factorization software in the larger context of generalized scientific and mathematical research. The closest they come is stating a goal of "feasibility of cooperative networked multiprocessing," with no mention of client security issues, or an API set for future developers, or how timesharing would work. That's what my question was about -- indeed, a cursory search of distributed.net's pages revel no developments along these lines. Or have you seen some place where they address these questions? Call it my McDonald's curiosity.
Could this stuff be put to a *really* practical use? Surely some math professors out there have some linear algebra number crunching to do, or some physicist has weather modelling simulations to make, or the like. Not that generating primes and scanning gads of radio waves for intelligent signs isn't nice and all, but it seems to me that gargantuan amounts of parallelized computation time could really help out researchers on tight budgets.
Is there an easy process for researchers to utilize this stuff? If not, it might be a Good Thing to set up.
(It'd have to be secure, I suppose, and in a best-case scenario could involve timesharing without administrative hassle...)
Not if the key is shorter than the plaintext, and therefore had to be used more than once. If the key is shorter than the text, the cyphertext becomes possible to break. (Not that I know how.)
Perl and Java can both be compiled to (real) machine code; their speed in these situations is close to C++ -- at least, close enough to justify coding in them. (Although I agree that coding real applications in interpreted Java is total folly, at least on today's machines.)
Because most programmers are stuck using shitty languages.
The poster wasn't (necessarily) advocating that everyone use Dylan, s/he was advocating that everyone stop using C/C++ so much. Perl, Ada, Java, Haskell, etc. all have greater robustness (and other advantages) than C/C++, yet C and C++ enjoy much more popularity. The industry is reluctant to change because it has found a standard, lame though it may be. (See any parallels here?)
-- A disgruntled C++ coder
I don't know...people accuse free software advocates of being anti-capitalist enough already. "Community software" could do without the "communi-" part, IMHO, although it does sum up the idea fairly well.
;^] ). It seems to me that open source software works by companies providing services -- such as fueling development, or having good support centers, or putting out nice installation CDs with manuals and such -- and not by controlling software products. Open source software is a move away from "software as a product" and over to "software as a service." So if "open source" turns out to be a dead-end buzzword for the PHBs, how about "serviceware"? Says nothing about freedom, but no exec cares about freedom. It does, however, describe a different (and perhaps more lucrative) business model.
Here's an thought. The idea here is to market free software to suits (since clueful folks can simply bother to learn how software licensing works
Maybe that's too abstract. Plus, OSS seems to have really exploded in the press recently, and has become a pretty well-known buzz word. Media-wise, we may be stuck with it, even if all trademark attempts (past and future) fall through.
I was in electronics class in college, and was advising a fellow student -- who needed a copy of some software program or other -- to look on the internet for a pirated copy. A third student, who had interned at Microsoft, said "How can you, as a CS major, advocate software piracy?" I told her that the greater threat to software developers came from anticompetitive practices by large corporations. That ended the conversation.
Piracy, per se, is not the evil here. Failing to reward software developers for their efforts, whether they develop free or proprietary software, is evil. The eight-year-old who uses emacs often should feel morally compelled to send off one of her piggy-bank quarters to the FSF; or better yet, should sit down and write some extensions to it.
This is why I liked Id's "guiltware," where they put up a splash screen talking about how disappointed your mom would be if she knew you were playing Wolfenstein without paying for it. The Id folks knew that withholding software from those who can't afford is it evil, but so is failing to pay money for software when you can afford it.
HiThere> I'm sure that if it had lived, it would
HiThere> be marvelous by now.
In a sense, it has lived. The successor to SNOBOL is Icon, which supposedly also has cool support for strings and rapid prototyping.
Truly bad names:
revrdist
Unix
LISP
SNOBOL
yacc
There are plenty of successful (and unsuccessful) computer products with atrocious names. An operating system name hononymous with the name for castrated men is not a marketer's dream. Yet Unix has been popular for twenty years.
NetBSD has a PPC port. They have a thumbnail of an iMac on their page, so I assume the iMac is supported hardware.
As far as the other comments on this thread -- I have X running on my iMac, although it was a royal bitch to install. The one site which really helped with this was the iMac Linux site, already mentioned several times on slashdot. It describes how to get X (with good resolution and color depth) running, and has other tips for the platform.
A bunch of new PPC distros are in the works -- DebianPPC, iMandrake, Yellow Dog, and of course LinuxPPC v5. For the iMac user, probably any of these will be an improvement over the weird-ass iMac installation of LinuxPPC 4.x.
I've seen some overzelousness recently. Moderately bad, or slightly off-topic, posts have been given inordinately low scores. Mildly good, but not *great* posts have been getting fives (although this is not necessarily such a bad thing). So instead of getting a nice gradient, we get most posts at one pole or the other. (At least in my experience.)