Come on folks, there's a reason Via was able to enter the x86 market so easily. And there's a reason why IBM started making PPCs after Motorla. These folks know how to make computer hardware.
Would anybody be that surprised if Intel started making PPC-esque architecture chips? Don't be. Intel knows Si's at 14 as well as anyone and better than most.
Too many people have taken these rumors to mean Apple's going to release Macintosh for x86. I'm not quite ready to jump that gun just yet.
There's a warning about spoilers on the page, and I just thought I'd say for those who, like me, haven't watched yet but would like to see the Eggs, the first page of the story doesn't have anything that seems particularly spoilerific.
Page 2 has some debatably smelly stuff, so I stopped there.
MNG. Friggen Google it. Who cares if it ain't well known - another patent war would be just push this spec needs.
Hey, that Googling was a great idea! Miramar Mining was up 5.15% just Friday, putting it back over the dollar mark. I can only assume it's because they have a dog in this JPEG format patent fight.
Gotta read between the lines, folks. Man, I love me some/. stock tips.
I recently bagged an iPod Shuffle, which is the greatest mix-tape delivery system I could possible imagine, especially since I've made a few purchases from the iTunes Music Store.
That said, it links itself to a certain Mac's library, and -- afaict -- I'm not able to move files around with it either. In fact, when I plug it into my iBook after sync'n with my iMac, it forces me to erase its contents before filling it up with songs from my mobile computer. Sure, they're mp3s, but Apple has still trapped them and placed another barrier to entry or, in this case, copy.
"But is this really the way to create the "Network Walkman" of the 21st century?" Apparently so.
[And before the eco-kooks chime in that it's electric and so cleaner, it's not. The article point out that 60% of the country's electricity comes from burning dirtier coal. Much like hydrogen powered cars really just shift the polution to a very wasteful and poluting production of hydrogen away from the car, the plug in car talked about here may not be bringing any real benefit.]
The benefit here is that we can run cars on something *other* than gasoline; we have a babelfish of energy, so to speak. Sure, we burn a ton of coal now -- and that probably won't change any time real soon. But with electric cars, we'll have the potential to turn clean, safe, efficient fission generated power into hats of money!;^) No pollution at all, unless you live near Yucca. Or on a railroad that heads to Yucca. Or an interstate. Well, you get the picture.
But once we have this and cold fusion, watch out. It wouldn't be another seventy years before gas becomes harder to find.
Hrm, that became much more cynical than I'd originally expected. Anyhow, mark my words -- soon we'll be driving on fission power.
This is great news. Firefox is now, finally, after years of searching, *the* killer-browser it is on other platforms. It's almost enough I wish I'd kept up with/. after I dropped programming for a living -- to have the points to mod this up.
There are now really only two and a half places Firefox loses to any other OS X browser: 1.) Speed. Safari still kicks arse there, and on a 500 MHz G3 iBook, that makes a difference. 2.) Spell-check in textboxes like Omniweb, though I'm betting that's plug-in fixable if it hasn't been done already 2.5.) Omniweb has very nice thumbnails for each tab that shows the tab's page looks like. That's really more useful than I ever thought it could be.
That said, this makes Firefox my daily browser now on my G4 iMac. Was playing with Camino a bit, as it allowed tabbing to select drop-downs, but now we've got it all, minus what's above, in one place. Phew!
Slowly, management has come around to the fact that open source deployment is faster, if not as flashy, as far more expensive commercial applications and at least as effective. They came to that realization because when problems came up they saw with their own eyes that our open source tools had the answers and the commercial products didn't because the commercial products were not licensed to "see" the problem.
I don't quite follow. Are you saying that open source applications/suites/etc "had the answers" b/c you could modify them? Or just that there were free alternatives for these needs that, for whatever reason, weren't reasonably covered by COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf, fwiw) software?
If it's the former, I'd argue that I'd rather have a well-documented, bug-free API for customizing software (COTS, commercial custom, or even open source with API) than the mangled of code I've seen for many open source projects. Programming an application explicitly for reuse is a much better way around the issue of "anticipating unanticapatable needs" (sorry) than having source handed to you as a perfect theorhetical, but rarely practical, solution. Afaik, it's much easier to automate Microsoft Word through COM than it is to automate AbiWord through the code itself.
And is your "flashy" the same as "good, user-friendly design", which has been a (imo) level-headed complaint against many open source projects? Careful you don't code for the coders and miss the boat. Again, not trying to put words into your mouth; I couldn't quite follow there.
Most corporations have more lines of code for internal applications than MS Windows and the Linux kernel combined.
Okay, that's just outright false. "Most corporations"? Perhaps most Fortune 500 corporations (and I'd bet you're right there), but that's a bit over the top as worded, and if it were the case we'd see more custom OSes housing those customizated corporate applications.
That said, your point is well taken. Custom needs require custom software, and to have a sizable percentage of code be written in-house or contracted out as a custom solution is a common practice. Make the software fit your culture; don't, as you aptly point out, try to inefficiently fit your culture to the 0s and 1s in a COTS application...
It's only fairly recently that commercial packages for these have become available for "enterprise" use. They are expensive and can require changes to business processes that make a particular company's operation less efficient overall.
So, again, who wouldn't rather have intelligently written software with clear, as bug-free as possible hooks for corporation-specific customization rather than code of differing quality with documentation that's not quite up to snuff at times?
Your argument isn't so much an open source argument as it's an argument for designing software with customizations in mind. It's a difficult task, and starting with an oss package might be preferrable in theory than starting from scratch. But, again, whether open source or commercially closed source, what's key is good code with quality hooks/APIs with sound documentation, not simply accessible code.
If you don't believe me, ask Apple again why they used Konq and not Mozilla for Safari.
Admittedly the 5.25" is gone, but seriously, installed user base and legacy uses make ubiquitous media types hard to get rid of. The day Dell stops selling new towers with floppy drives and Blockbuster stops renting VHS is the day that, well, we've probably only got another decade before the CD-ROM gives out. I imagine DVDs will continue just a little while after that.
To sum: "Gates is likely off by at least five years," says the 200,000,000th richest man in the world.
I'm always happy to raid an old box for its CD and floppy drives, which seem to last like mad, which takes a few bucks off of a new whitebox build (though admittedly now I've got about 5 CD drives and haven't built a whitebox other than my 533 Celeron).
But other than those no-brainers, how do places chop up boxes? At this state, I can't imagine them being much good other than the aforementioned drives and as scrap metal -- and it'd seem the scrap metal would take a while to remove. It's not like an old car; this would take some effort to recycle. Any links to places that recycle the contents appropriately or is this really just a PR move?
I believe my point of contention was with this part of the/. article:
Comic books are what novels used to be -- an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal... and then continued comparison to past novel writers in this thread's OP:
I'm pretty sure someone was saying that about Dickens in his day.
Within this, there seems to be two implicit issues. 1.) Both the original/. article and the OP are trying to push graphic novels into the same round hole of [often serialized, which I believe is part of why this cxn is being made] novels that are now easily part of the literary canon. 2.) There are certainly better heirs apparent to the "accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal" imo (granted I didn't touch on this at all originally) than the graphic novel.
Taken together, let me say that I simply explicitly disagree with the implied notion that graphic novels are taking over the spot originally held by "novel novels". Great authors are still writing novels that are great (aka "literature" in my book) and some are still hitting the mainstream culture with great success, of which I named two authors off the top of my head. Secondly, even within this ill-fated comparison, there are better pretenders to the crown -- the Silent Hill series comes to mind as a well-told story that's been quickly soaked up by the mass market, I imagine putting most every graphic novel to shame sales-wise. We should look to film and, in the future, Interactive Fiction, for the best fit in this category. Graphic novels are still a niche player in the field of general fictional stories.
Are graphic novels worthless? Obviously not, and your point is well taken -- I'm wrong to characterize them as simply mature outlets for superheroes. But are they "The New Mainstream Novels" as the NYT suggests and many here seem to believe? Certainly not. It would be wrong to believe an appreciation of the graphic novel is a good replacement for an appreciation of literatary novels. Heck folk, even Oprah's reading Tolstoy now. Get back on the bus.
I think that's a bit harsh for novels and graphic novels. Some of the comics cited above are difficult, intelligent stories with involved character development and a good story to tell.
Please, are you kidding us? I read Batman: The Dark Knight Returns which was okay, but at the back it already admitted they basically made up the last two parts on the fly under pretty intense deadline pressure. And it shows, similar to the way Coleridge's Kubla Khan took something of a dive after he was bothered out of his drug-induced state and the dropped his inspiration -- except I'm not sure Dark Knight part 1 is exactly Coleridge at his best.
Look, I enjoyed Spider-Man vs. Wolverine as much as the next fellow and I'm glad comic book characters have outlets to behave a little more maturely than they do in a short monthly comic, but if you want to find great mainstream literature these days, take a look at Umberto Eco or Toni Morrison, not Frank Miller, please. Graphic novels are perhaps better called the new graphic novellas; they simply aren't replacements for 200-600 pages of truly great writing.
they dont have much of a market share, so hackers dont spend that much time making viruses for them.
The lack of viruses was almost bad enough that I thought I should write a virus that'd execute on the Mac just to say we'd had a good one (other than that silly "bootable CD" scare under OS 8-9). It's not like it'd really take any time. Most viruses seem to be ones that people are silly enough to click on in their email to start the infection. You'd have a harder time writing one that exploited a flaw [without taking that extra time finding one, which is where the real genius comes in, of course], but just so that Mac OS X could say there was one, I thought I'd hack a quick REALbasic or Java or Applescript dohicky and "socially engineer" it to look all clickable in an email sent from the infected box. Heck, I get enough free spamable addresses in the spam I get myself these days even finding the first few hundred hosts wouldn't be a problem.
But your position then is something akin to malaria in someone with sickle cell -- you have to find enough hosts, not only initially but continually, to keep you alive to keep finding more hosts. Without them, you die out.
How many Mac users themselves have a large percentage of Mac users in their address book? Most of my friends use Windows. Even if I got a few Mac users to click and execute an application-virus, giving me pretty free reign on their system, what are the chances that sending the bugger to every email I could cull off their system would keep the outbreak alive? I've got to think pretty small.
So there's more to a virus than just lack of hackers -- what's the payout, even for a good virus? Pretty small as long as, as the original post points out, the market share is too.
Which brings us to...
If everyone gets the same idea to move to a mac, virus wirters will shift their attention to macs.... and a good flaw in the OS. You've got two choices to write a good virus, as I've pointed out. Either socially engineer something that looks clickable and start sending out spam, finding enough suckers that click to keep things going, or find a flaw in the OS to exploit to save on social engineering. So either the numbers have to be massively high, as you point out, or you have to have a virus that infects passively, as all the great viruses do.
I'm not saying the Mac doesn't have these flaws -- nor that it doesn't. But OS X'd have to have the flaw in addition to the market share to really cause the havoc Windows has.
Having kids changes your perspective something massive, I suspect. Did you notice how Greedo's blasting was taken out of the original SW in the remakes? How stormtroopers (real people in suits) were replaced with morally easier to kill robots in the new stories? He's gone soft, and the turning point seems to be the time of his first child and divorce. Coincidence? Perhaps -- I don't know the man. But it seems unlikely.
Hopefully with the remake of this apparently fairly hard-core movie, he'll regain his edge, and maybe remake these last three, well, first three, well, most recently released Star Wars movies.
(And hey, don't slam a guy for copying. Every great author's done it as certainly as every one of my apps has a copy of paste of Hello, World in it to thank somewhere. Isn't that part of the reason/.ers as a whole dislike current copyright laws?)
1.) Anybody got a spoiler why the THX sound jive is [I assume] named after this? 2.) I have to admit -- I liked the original version of Star Wars (Last Hope at least) better and I'm glad I grabbed a tape before they were taken off the market. Anything to gain from finding an old version of this flick insiders already know of?
As long as it's not full of Ewoks...
Why not spill the beans on the new model now?
on
Apple Delays New iMac
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I can't quite figure out why Apple didn't roll out a prototype of the iMac at WWDC or spill a few pictures to the rumor sites (to quickly remove later). Is there more buzz to be had by not hinting at what's to come? I mean Apple stock took a 6% drop in the futures market already -- wouldn't building up some kind of semi-tangible excitment help mitigate that?
Apparently not, as Apple seems to make pretty smart PR moves, but I still wonder -- Why not spill the beans now? I suppose the G5 in the iMac is a shoo-in at this point (and we'd be disappointed if it wasn't), but how about another hint or two? Maybe it'll show movies from the net and replace your TV. Maybe the floppy's back!;^D Toss your stockholders a bone!
As someone's pointed out (and as I tried to submit 2 minutes after I posted; assumed it went through -- perhaps there's a spam filter on Slashdot where I can't post twice quickly? How ironic...), the port blocked is the destination port. I'm an idiot. The original post is BUNK.
As as I tried to point out at 09:14, mod me down, I completely missed the point originally. Hope you enjoyed the RFC link. *sigh* I even previewed.
Talking to an SMTP server is easy. Don't believe me? Telnet to your ISP's smtp server (port 25, obviously) and send the bytes for "HELP". Poof, 99% of the time you'll get every command that server accepts. It doesn't take long to figure out how to use it, even if you are too lazy to read RFC 821 (start at "APPENDIX F" and I bet you're telneting email via telnet in 30 seconds or less).
But wait, were you telnetting *from* 25? Of course not. Yet, somehow, it still worked (likely only if your "rcpt to" entry had a local domain).
Malware can use any port they want to relay from a zombie box to smtp.openSmtpRelay.com 25 as well.
Another thread on this/. discussion deals with issues "underground" relays present, but just remember this -- the SMTP servers you're relaying to don't really care if you're sending from port 25. That's convention. You're likely to find SMTP at smtp.myisp.com's port 25, but it really doesn't make any difference, and even in some email clients it's an option to change.
It's issues like those described in that thread that'll help ultimately bring down spams. Telling malware writers to use another port, which is all Comcast's doing, as others have pointed out, will just have ISPs blocking ports until there are no more ports to block.
I'm surprised to see so many people talking about black helicopters, viruses, trojans, etc. The source is available and seems relatively open for non-commercial hacking purposes.
Now can an open source app download a virus? Be exploited by security holes? Absolutely.
The difference is that, if it concerns enough "tech savvy" users here, we likely have the proverbial skillz to do something about it. I haven't checked the code, but you could have it download to a sandbox enforced by your permissions scheme in your OS or you could hack it to checksum against a list you ["manually"] maintain. Or you could turn off the automatic download "feature" (which I'm betting is a Granny Smith-accessible preference as well). With the new client, your opportunity to watch what's happening goes up, not down, even if only a little (I assume the "modules" that run @home are still potentially closed).
So don't whine about security too much. Your old SETI@home client likely was running around with "rwx" permissions. If you didn't bother with checksums before, not sure why you're bothering now. And if you did check before, heck, now you've got source to the downloader and can put in as strict a check as you're able to code on whatever it's downloading and firing up. Let the hax0rin' begin.
Bill Cosby spoke recently on the Tavis Smiley show on etv, and he made the insightful comment that the price of a stolen Coke is one life (referring to an incident where a kid apparently got shot by a policeman as he ran off with a stolen soda). Real life's not always about fair. The practical cost of breaking the law is often much higher than what anyone would reasonably apply as a punishment.
Here's some content from the link: Private investigators hired by movie and recording industry groups had helped link a space in the warehouse to an alleged criminal operation pirating DVDs and compact discs. They were there when the officers moved in....
The circumstances of the May 22, 2003, shooting remain murky. According to his lawyer, Conroy told a grand jury that Zongo refused his orders to halt, struggled with him and tried to grab his gun.
These people weren't just grabbing a few files from Limewire nor even serving up huge stashes of copyrighted material from their home box or over IRC, they were making pirated DVDs. Obviously nobody wishes them the harm that came to them (I hope!), but there are practical risks to any illegal behavior.
As I think Cosby was pointing out, don't stop holding the police accountable for their actions (or the XXAA to a reasonable level of fairness), but sure as heck don't practice illegal behavior either. It's simply not worth it.
(The counterpoint, of course, is that if you avoided all potentially dangerous activity, very few of us would leave the house. But I think the point's well-taken and useful. Illegal activities have consequences which are often much greater than what is even arguably fair. Stop making illegal DVDs in your garage, dang it!)
Server-side close but GUIs will keep the
on
Java Faster Than C++?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What's important to note is that the differences introduced by the VM and the rest of Java's overhead are small enough now that, for headless applications, poor coding can easily bridge the difference. There's no huge, glaring, a priori reason to use C++ over Java for headless apps, and when you want your server code to be portable crossplatform you'll find a huge, glaring reason to use Java.
Now what this study obviously doesn't deal at all with GUI'd applications, and Sun's Swing in particular does nothing to help Java's reputation as a slow technology. There's a relatively interesting discussion at java.net called Swing Usability that points out some of these shortcomings. What the Swing team doesn't seem to understand is that slower than native means slow to most users.
And just like the comments in this thread point out, as long as you put a compatibility layer between code and execution, you're going to be slower by definition. With Swing, simple to overlook unoptimized coding practices do not easily spell the difference between implementations. Here, Java's speed and performance is visibly slower no matter how quickly the GUI-less logic behind is racing along. (Yes, SWT is a big help, but it's not part of the JDK and likely still won't be seen in, say, Limewire any time soon.)
Jobs further excited the crowd when he said that Apple would release a 3GHz model within a year -- with two weeks to go before that deadline, Boger said Apple will not meet the 3GHz promise.
"It's actually quite simple," said Boger. "When we made that prediction, we just didn't realize the challenges moving to 90 nanometer would present. It turned out to be a much bigger challenge than anyone expected."
2.) Downgrading from a Superdrive to a Combo drive now saves you only $100, not $200 (on the 1.8 DP model at least; all I checked), even though the hardware is twice as fast burning now. This makes the cost of entry into PowermacLand now $1900 and change, not $1600. Though you almost certainly get that extra $300 in goodies, if you don't have that $300 you ain't got it.
3.) No great deals on older models from the [online] Apple Store as some rumors suggested.
4.) Even the super-cool geek quotient for liquid cooling is apparently only in the 2.5 DP. No, I'm happy that cost doesn't appear [directly] in the other models, but if I'm spending enough to pay the going price for three vintage police crusiers, I need something extra to brag about.
From the article: "We haven't worked out how to open-source Java -- but at some point it will happen," [Sun's Java technology evangelist Raghavan] Srinivas said. However, he noted "it might be today, tomorrow or two years down the road"....
However, others, including Sun, believe the main hurdle and concern is the future of the Java brand and compatibility. The main fear is that Java technologies could be forked and the "write once, run anywhere" attraction to Java will be lost, making use of the programming language and platform less attractive.
Doesn't this sound an awful lot like why Microsoft decided to release Rotor as "shared source"? (Rotor is the "open" release of.NET's common langauge runtime, available on some BSD-esque platforms, of course.) The definitions of open source are pretty broadly scattered. We've got everything from shared to GPL to MPL to public domain, with everything in between. The importance of this announcement, which still has no hint of a timeframe, is -- to [nearly] quote one of my ex-presidents -- "Depends on what the meaning of open is."
I couldn't have been more impressed with the VNC server for the OS [sic].
Man, that's a sic and a sick. Impressive stuff. That's enough for me to really start jones'n to build that ethernet port on a breadboard and give it a shot.
Use your Apple IIe from nearly any box connected by broadband from anywhere in the world. Man, the 21st century rocks!;^)
Already, Sun offers a mid-range server for free to software developers provided they subscribe to bundled software and services offerings.
Schwartz isn't alone in saying that hardware will someday be "free," so long as customers sign up for multiyear software subscriptions and services contracts.
If I'm selling you two things, call them A and B, and it cost me 50 units of resources to build them, guess what? The price of A+B > 50 units every time -- or I go out of business.
A or B could be hardware, it could be subscription services, it could be maintenance, it could be anything. We could already say that Apple hardware is free, providing you're willing to pay a couple of thousand for the initial OS X install. It's all semantic gynastics. For heaven's sake folk, the hardware they speak of isn't free. Everyone knows that. No more free than the lenses I got with my glasses frames or the DVD of the Patriots I got with Sports Illustrated.
And *of course* OS makers would prefer you ignored hardware -- and more importantly prefer hardware mfgs become even more beholden to OS makers for their dime. If you think HP/Dell/etc was in MS's pocket a few years ago... sheesh.
So just remember, the price of A+B will always be greater than their combined cost to create. As long as someone bundles, what difference does it make? The profit the hardware makers used to derive directly from you would now come from MS or Sun for each unit sold. Wow. How inventive and out of the box. Let's sound like we're moving the company at light speed, helped by the fact that we're travelling in MS's wake now, and hope it helps people ignore that, "Since the dot-com and telecommunications bubbles burst, Sun has posted a string of quarterly losses and declining revenue as its core customer industries - telecommunications and financial services - suffered."
And, of course, it's almost too obvious to bother pointing out that your "free hardware" will [typically] be bottom of the line jive. Upgrade to Office 2015? Well, it doesn't even pretend to run on your Office 2012 hardware. Want to play DOOM 5? Well, you're still shelling out -- that'll never run on the hardware you get bundled with Office today -- unless you sign up for a pretty danged shackling agreement. The more I learn about corporations' planned tomorrow, the safer I feel it to assume I'll be using Linux when I get there.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on folks, there's a reason Via was able to enter the x86 market so easily. And there's a reason why IBM started making PPCs after Motorla. These folks know how to make computer hardware.
Would anybody be that surprised if Intel started making PPC-esque architecture chips? Don't be. Intel knows Si's at 14 as well as anyone and better than most.
Too many people have taken these rumors to mean Apple's going to release Macintosh for x86. I'm not quite ready to jump that gun just yet.
There's a warning about spoilers on the page, and I just thought I'd say for those who, like me, haven't watched yet but would like to see the Eggs, the first page of the story doesn't have anything that seems particularly spoilerific.
Page 2 has some debatably smelly stuff, so I stopped there.
MNG. Friggen Google it. Who cares if it ain't well known - another patent war would be just push this spec needs.
/. stock tips.
Hey, that Googling was a great idea! Miramar Mining was up 5.15% just Friday, putting it back over the dollar mark. I can only assume it's because they have a dog in this JPEG format patent fight.
Gotta read between the lines, folks. Man, I love me some
I recently bagged an iPod Shuffle, which is the greatest mix-tape delivery system I could possible imagine, especially since I've made a few purchases from the iTunes Music Store.
That said, it links itself to a certain Mac's library, and -- afaict -- I'm not able to move files around with it either. In fact, when I plug it into my iBook after sync'n with my iMac, it forces me to erase its contents before filling it up with songs from my mobile computer. Sure, they're mp3s, but Apple has still trapped them and placed another barrier to entry or, in this case, copy.
"But is this really the way to create the "Network Walkman" of the 21st century?" Apparently so.
[And before the eco-kooks chime in that it's electric and so cleaner, it's not. The article point out that 60% of the country's electricity comes from burning dirtier coal. Much like hydrogen powered cars really just shift the polution to a very wasteful and poluting production of hydrogen away from the car, the plug in car talked about here may not be bringing any real benefit.]
;^) No pollution at all, unless you live near Yucca. Or on a railroad that heads to Yucca. Or an interstate. Well, you get the picture.
The benefit here is that we can run cars on something *other* than gasoline; we have a babelfish of energy, so to speak. Sure, we burn a ton of coal now -- and that probably won't change any time real soon. But with electric cars, we'll have the potential to turn clean, safe, efficient fission generated power into hats of money!
But once we have this and cold fusion, watch out. It wouldn't be another seventy years before gas becomes harder to find.
Hrm, that became much more cynical than I'd originally expected. Anyhow, mark my words -- soon we'll be driving on fission power.
This is great news. Firefox is now, finally, after years of searching, *the* killer-browser it is on other platforms. It's almost enough I wish I'd kept up with /. after I dropped programming for a living -- to have the points to mod this up.
There are now really only two and a half places Firefox loses to any other OS X browser:
1.) Speed. Safari still kicks arse there, and on a 500 MHz G3 iBook, that makes a difference.
2.) Spell-check in textboxes like Omniweb, though I'm betting that's plug-in fixable if it hasn't been done already
2.5.) Omniweb has very nice thumbnails for each tab that shows the tab's page looks like. That's really more useful than I ever thought it could be.
That said, this makes Firefox my daily browser now on my G4 iMac. Was playing with Camino a bit, as it allowed tabbing to select drop-downs, but now we've got it all, minus what's above, in one place. Phew!
Slowly, management has come around to the fact that open source deployment is faster, if not as flashy, as far more expensive commercial applications and at least as effective. They came to that realization because when problems came up they saw with their own eyes that our open source tools had the answers and the commercial products didn't because the commercial products were not licensed to "see" the problem.
I don't quite follow. Are you saying that open source applications/suites/etc "had the answers" b/c you could modify them? Or just that there were free alternatives for these needs that, for whatever reason, weren't reasonably covered by COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf, fwiw) software?
If it's the former, I'd argue that I'd rather have a well-documented, bug-free API for customizing software (COTS, commercial custom, or even open source with API) than the mangled of code I've seen for many open source projects. Programming an application explicitly for reuse is a much better way around the issue of "anticipating unanticapatable needs" (sorry) than having source handed to you as a perfect theorhetical, but rarely practical, solution. Afaik, it's much easier to automate Microsoft Word through COM than it is to automate AbiWord through the code itself.
And is your "flashy" the same as "good, user-friendly design", which has been a (imo) level-headed complaint against many open source projects? Careful you don't code for the coders and miss the boat. Again, not trying to put words into your mouth; I couldn't quite follow there.
Most corporations have more lines of code for internal applications than MS Windows and the Linux kernel combined.
Okay, that's just outright false. "Most corporations"? Perhaps most Fortune 500 corporations (and I'd bet you're right there), but that's a bit over the top as worded, and if it were the case we'd see more custom OSes housing those customizated corporate applications.
That said, your point is well taken. Custom needs require custom software, and to have a sizable percentage of code be written in-house or contracted out as a custom solution is a common practice. Make the software fit your culture; don't, as you aptly point out, try to inefficiently fit your culture to the 0s and 1s in a COTS application...
It's only fairly recently that commercial packages for these have become available for "enterprise" use. They are expensive and can require changes to business processes that make a particular company's operation less efficient overall.
So, again, who wouldn't rather have intelligently written software with clear, as bug-free as possible hooks for corporation-specific customization rather than code of differing quality with documentation that's not quite up to snuff at times?
Your argument isn't so much an open source argument as it's an argument for designing software with customizations in mind. It's a difficult task, and starting with an oss package might be preferrable in theory than starting from scratch. But, again, whether open source or commercially closed source, what's key is good code with quality hooks/APIs with sound documentation, not simply accessible code.
If you don't believe me, ask Apple again why they used Konq and not Mozilla for Safari.
Admittedly the 5.25" is gone, but seriously, installed user base and legacy uses make ubiquitous media types hard to get rid of. The day Dell stops selling new towers with floppy drives and Blockbuster stops renting VHS is the day that, well, we've probably only got another decade before the CD-ROM gives out. I imagine DVDs will continue just a little while after that.
To sum: "Gates is likely off by at least five years," says the 200,000,000th richest man in the world.
I'm always happy to raid an old box for its CD and floppy drives, which seem to last like mad, which takes a few bucks off of a new whitebox build (though admittedly now I've got about 5 CD drives and haven't built a whitebox other than my 533 Celeron).
But other than those no-brainers, how do places chop up boxes? At this state, I can't imagine them being much good other than the aforementioned drives and as scrap metal -- and it'd seem the scrap metal would take a while to remove. It's not like an old car; this would take some effort to recycle. Any links to places that recycle the contents appropriately or is this really just a PR move?
I believe my point of contention was with this part of the /. article:
... and then continued comparison to past novel writers in this thread's OP:
/. article and the OP are trying to push graphic novels into the same round hole of [often serialized, which I believe is part of why this cxn is being made] novels that are now easily part of the literary canon. 2.) There are certainly better heirs apparent to the "accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal" imo (granted I didn't touch on this at all originally) than the graphic novel.
Comic books are what novels used to be -- an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal
I'm pretty sure someone was saying that about Dickens in his day.
Within this, there seems to be two implicit issues. 1.) Both the original
Taken together, let me say that I simply explicitly disagree with the implied notion that graphic novels are taking over the spot originally held by "novel novels". Great authors are still writing novels that are great (aka "literature" in my book) and some are still hitting the mainstream culture with great success, of which I named two authors off the top of my head. Secondly, even within this ill-fated comparison, there are better pretenders to the crown -- the Silent Hill series comes to mind as a well-told story that's been quickly soaked up by the mass market, I imagine putting most every graphic novel to shame sales-wise. We should look to film and, in the future, Interactive Fiction, for the best fit in this category. Graphic novels are still a niche player in the field of general fictional stories.
Are graphic novels worthless? Obviously not, and your point is well taken -- I'm wrong to characterize them as simply mature outlets for superheroes. But are they "The New Mainstream Novels" as the NYT suggests and many here seem to believe? Certainly not. It would be wrong to believe an appreciation of the graphic novel is a good replacement for an appreciation of literatary novels. Heck folk, even Oprah's reading Tolstoy now. Get back on the bus.
I think that's a bit harsh for novels and graphic novels. Some of the comics cited above are difficult, intelligent stories with involved character development and a good story to tell.
Please, are you kidding us? I read Batman: The Dark Knight Returns which was okay, but at the back it already admitted they basically made up the last two parts on the fly under pretty intense deadline pressure. And it shows, similar to the way Coleridge's Kubla Khan took something of a dive after he was bothered out of his drug-induced state and the dropped his inspiration -- except I'm not sure Dark Knight part 1 is exactly Coleridge at his best.
Look, I enjoyed Spider-Man vs. Wolverine as much as the next fellow and I'm glad comic book characters have outlets to behave a little more maturely than they do in a short monthly comic, but if you want to find great mainstream literature these days, take a look at Umberto Eco or Toni Morrison, not Frank Miller, please. Graphic novels are perhaps better called the new graphic novellas; they simply aren't replacements for 200-600 pages of truly great writing.
they dont have much of a market share, so hackers dont spend that much time making viruses for them.
... and a good flaw in the OS. You've got two choices to write a good virus, as I've pointed out. Either socially engineer something that looks clickable and start sending out spam, finding enough suckers that click to keep things going, or find a flaw in the OS to exploit to save on social engineering. So either the numbers have to be massively high, as you point out, or you have to have a virus that infects passively, as all the great viruses do.
The lack of viruses was almost bad enough that I thought I should write a virus that'd execute on the Mac just to say we'd had a good one (other than that silly "bootable CD" scare under OS 8-9). It's not like it'd really take any time. Most viruses seem to be ones that people are silly enough to click on in their email to start the infection. You'd have a harder time writing one that exploited a flaw [without taking that extra time finding one, which is where the real genius comes in, of course], but just so that Mac OS X could say there was one, I thought I'd hack a quick REALbasic or Java or Applescript dohicky and "socially engineer" it to look all clickable in an email sent from the infected box. Heck, I get enough free spamable addresses in the spam I get myself these days even finding the first few hundred hosts wouldn't be a problem.
But your position then is something akin to malaria in someone with sickle cell -- you have to find enough hosts, not only initially but continually, to keep you alive to keep finding more hosts. Without them, you die out.
How many Mac users themselves have a large percentage of Mac users in their address book? Most of my friends use Windows. Even if I got a few Mac users to click and execute an application-virus, giving me pretty free reign on their system, what are the chances that sending the bugger to every email I could cull off their system would keep the outbreak alive? I've got to think pretty small.
So there's more to a virus than just lack of hackers -- what's the payout, even for a good virus? Pretty small as long as, as the original post points out, the market share is too.
Which brings us to...
If everyone gets the same idea to move to a mac, virus wirters will shift their attention to macs.
I'm not saying the Mac doesn't have these flaws -- nor that it doesn't. But OS X'd have to have the flaw in addition to the market share to really cause the havoc Windows has.
Did you notice that RotJ was being made right at the same time Lucas and his soon-to-run-of-with-another-man wife adopted a kid? I don't think an explanation of the replacement of Wookies with Ewoks needs to go much farther than that.
/.ers as a whole dislike current copyright laws?)
Having kids changes your perspective something massive, I suspect. Did you notice how Greedo's blasting was taken out of the original SW in the remakes? How stormtroopers (real people in suits) were replaced with morally easier to kill robots in the new stories? He's gone soft, and the turning point seems to be the time of his first child and divorce. Coincidence? Perhaps -- I don't know the man. But it seems unlikely.
Hopefully with the remake of this apparently fairly hard-core movie, he'll regain his edge, and maybe remake these last three, well, first three, well, most recently released Star Wars movies.
(And hey, don't slam a guy for copying. Every great author's done it as certainly as every one of my apps has a copy of paste of Hello, World in it to thank somewhere. Isn't that part of the reason
Two quick questions:
1.) Anybody got a spoiler why the THX sound jive is [I assume] named after this?
2.) I have to admit -- I liked the original version of Star Wars (Last Hope at least) better and I'm glad I grabbed a tape before they were taken off the market. Anything to gain from finding an old version of this flick insiders already know of?
As long as it's not full of Ewoks...
I can't quite figure out why Apple didn't roll out a prototype of the iMac at WWDC or spill a few pictures to the rumor sites (to quickly remove later). Is there more buzz to be had by not hinting at what's to come? I mean Apple stock took a 6% drop in the futures market already -- wouldn't building up some kind of semi-tangible excitment help mitigate that?
;^D Toss your stockholders a bone!
Apparently not, as Apple seems to make pretty smart PR moves, but I still wonder -- Why not spill the beans now? I suppose the G5 in the iMac is a shoo-in at this point (and we'd be disappointed if it wasn't), but how about another hint or two? Maybe it'll show movies from the net and replace your TV. Maybe the floppy's back!
Hrm, seems like we've had this discussion before! Just like Sun and their "free hardware", there ain't no free lunch.
Hrm, I must have some $10 cups around somewhere. Where do I get my free beer?
As someone's pointed out (and as I tried to submit 2 minutes after I posted; assumed it went through -- perhaps there's a spam filter on Slashdot where I can't post twice quickly? How ironic...), the port blocked is the destination port. I'm an idiot. The original post is BUNK.
As as I tried to point out at 09:14, mod me down, I completely missed the point originally. Hope you enjoyed the RFC link. *sigh* I even previewed.
Talking to an SMTP server is easy. Don't believe me? Telnet to your ISP's smtp server (port 25, obviously) and send the bytes for "HELP". Poof, 99% of the time you'll get every command that server accepts. It doesn't take long to figure out how to use it, even if you are too lazy to read RFC 821 (start at "APPENDIX F" and I bet you're telneting email via telnet in 30 seconds or less).
/. discussion deals with issues "underground" relays present, but just remember this -- the SMTP servers you're relaying to don't really care if you're sending from port 25. That's convention. You're likely to find SMTP at smtp.myisp.com's port 25, but it really doesn't make any difference, and even in some email clients it's an option to change.
But wait, were you telnetting *from* 25? Of course not. Yet, somehow, it still worked (likely only if your "rcpt to" entry had a local domain).
Malware can use any port they want to relay from a zombie box to smtp.openSmtpRelay.com 25 as well.
Another thread on this
It's issues like those described in that thread that'll help ultimately bring down spams. Telling malware writers to use another port, which is all Comcast's doing, as others have pointed out, will just have ISPs blocking ports until there are no more ports to block.
I'm surprised to see so many people talking about black helicopters, viruses, trojans, etc. The source is available and seems relatively open for non-commercial hacking purposes.
Now can an open source app download a virus? Be exploited by security holes? Absolutely.
The difference is that, if it concerns enough "tech savvy" users here, we likely have the proverbial skillz to do something about it. I haven't checked the code, but you could have it download to a sandbox enforced by your permissions scheme in your OS or you could hack it to checksum against a list you ["manually"] maintain. Or you could turn off the automatic download "feature" (which I'm betting is a Granny Smith-accessible preference as well). With the new client, your opportunity to watch what's happening goes up, not down, even if only a little (I assume the "modules" that run @home are still potentially closed).
So don't whine about security too much. Your old SETI@home client likely was running around with "rwx" permissions. If you didn't bother with checksums before, not sure why you're bothering now. And if you did check before, heck, now you've got source to the downloader and can put in as strict a check as you're able to code on whatever it's downloading and firing up. Let the hax0rin' begin.
Bill Cosby spoke recently on the Tavis Smiley show on etv, and he made the insightful comment that the price of a stolen Coke is one life (referring to an incident where a kid apparently got shot by a policeman as he ran off with a stolen soda). Real life's not always about fair. The practical cost of breaking the law is often much higher than what anyone would reasonably apply as a punishment.
...
Here's some content from the link:
Private investigators hired by movie and recording industry groups had helped link a space in the warehouse to an alleged criminal operation pirating DVDs and compact discs. They were there when the officers moved in.
The circumstances of the May 22, 2003, shooting remain murky. According to his lawyer, Conroy told a grand jury that Zongo refused his orders to halt, struggled with him and tried to grab his gun.
These people weren't just grabbing a few files from Limewire nor even serving up huge stashes of copyrighted material from their home box or over IRC, they were making pirated DVDs. Obviously nobody wishes them the harm that came to them (I hope!), but there are practical risks to any illegal behavior.
As I think Cosby was pointing out, don't stop holding the police accountable for their actions (or the XXAA to a reasonable level of fairness), but sure as heck don't practice illegal behavior either. It's simply not worth it.
(The counterpoint, of course, is that if you avoided all potentially dangerous activity, very few of us would leave the house. But I think the point's well-taken and useful. Illegal activities have consequences which are often much greater than what is even arguably fair. Stop making illegal DVDs in your garage, dang it!)
What's important to note is that the differences introduced by the VM and the rest of Java's overhead are small enough now that, for headless applications, poor coding can easily bridge the difference. There's no huge, glaring, a priori reason to use C++ over Java for headless apps, and when you want your server code to be portable crossplatform you'll find a huge, glaring reason to use Java.
Now what this study obviously doesn't deal at all with GUI'd applications, and Sun's Swing in particular does nothing to help Java's reputation as a slow technology. There's a relatively interesting discussion at java.net called Swing Usability that points out some of these shortcomings. What the Swing team doesn't seem to understand is that slower than native means slow to most users.
And just like the comments in this thread point out, as long as you put a compatibility layer between code and execution, you're going to be slower by definition. With Swing, simple to overlook unoptimized coding practices do not easily spell the difference between implementations. Here, Java's speed and performance is visibly slower no matter how quickly the GUI-less logic behind is racing along. (Yes, SWT is a big help, but it's not part of the JDK and likely still won't be seen in, say, Limewire any time soon.)
1.) Apple admits they won't hit their 3 GHz promise :
Jobs further excited the crowd when he said that Apple would release a 3GHz model within a year -- with two weeks to go before that deadline, Boger said Apple will not meet the 3GHz promise.
"It's actually quite simple," said Boger. "When we made that prediction, we just didn't realize the challenges moving to 90 nanometer would present. It turned out to be a much bigger challenge than anyone expected."
2.) Downgrading from a Superdrive to a Combo drive now saves you only $100, not $200 (on the 1.8 DP model at least; all I checked), even though the hardware is twice as fast burning now. This makes the cost of entry into PowermacLand now $1900 and change, not $1600. Though you almost certainly get that extra $300 in goodies, if you don't have that $300 you ain't got it.
3.) No great deals on older models from the [online] Apple Store as some rumors suggested.
4.) Even the super-cool geek quotient for liquid cooling is apparently only in the 2.5 DP. No, I'm happy that cost doesn't appear [directly] in the other models, but if I'm spending enough to pay the going price for three vintage police crusiers, I need something extra to brag about.
Oh well, at least AirTunes is kewl.
From the article: ...
.NET's common langauge runtime, available on some BSD-esque platforms, of course.) The definitions of open source are pretty broadly scattered. We've got everything from shared to GPL to MPL to public domain, with everything in between. The importance of this announcement, which still has no hint of a timeframe, is -- to [nearly] quote one of my ex-presidents -- "Depends on what the meaning of open is."
"We haven't worked out how to open-source Java -- but at some point it will happen," [Sun's Java technology evangelist Raghavan] Srinivas said. However, he noted "it might be today, tomorrow or two years down the road".
However, others, including Sun, believe the main hurdle and concern is the future of the Java brand and compatibility. The main fear is that Java technologies could be forked and the "write once, run anywhere" attraction to Java will be lost, making use of the programming language and platform less attractive.
Doesn't this sound an awful lot like why Microsoft decided to release Rotor as "shared source"? (Rotor is the "open" release of
I couldn't have been more impressed with the VNC server for the OS [sic].
;^)
Man, that's a sic and a sick. Impressive stuff. That's enough for me to really start jones'n to build that ethernet port on a breadboard and give it a shot.
Use your Apple IIe from nearly any box connected by broadband from anywhere in the world. Man, the 21st century rocks!
From the article, emphasis mine, of course...
Already, Sun offers a mid-range server for free to software developers provided they subscribe to bundled software and services offerings.
Schwartz isn't alone in saying that hardware will someday be "free," so long as customers sign up for multiyear software subscriptions and services contracts.
If I'm selling you two things, call them A and B, and it cost me 50 units of resources to build them, guess what? The price of A+B > 50 units every time -- or I go out of business.
A or B could be hardware, it could be subscription services, it could be maintenance, it could be anything. We could already say that Apple hardware is free, providing you're willing to pay a couple of thousand for the initial OS X install. It's all semantic gynastics. For heaven's sake folk, the hardware they speak of isn't free. Everyone knows that. No more free than the lenses I got with my glasses frames or the DVD of the Patriots I got with Sports Illustrated.
And *of course* OS makers would prefer you ignored hardware -- and more importantly prefer hardware mfgs become even more beholden to OS makers for their dime. If you think HP/Dell/etc was in MS's pocket a few years ago... sheesh.
So just remember, the price of A+B will always be greater than their combined cost to create. As long as someone bundles, what difference does it make? The profit the hardware makers used to derive directly from you would now come from MS or Sun for each unit sold. Wow. How inventive and out of the box. Let's sound like we're moving the company at light speed, helped by the fact that we're travelling in MS's wake now, and hope it helps people ignore that, "Since the dot-com and telecommunications bubbles burst, Sun has posted a string of quarterly losses and declining revenue as its core customer industries - telecommunications and financial services - suffered."
And, of course, it's almost too obvious to bother pointing out that your "free hardware" will [typically] be bottom of the line jive. Upgrade to Office 2015? Well, it doesn't even pretend to run on your Office 2012 hardware. Want to play DOOM 5? Well, you're still shelling out -- that'll never run on the hardware you get bundled with Office today -- unless you sign up for a pretty danged shackling agreement. The more I learn about corporations' planned tomorrow, the safer I feel it to assume I'll be using Linux when I get there.