And I thought I was just not posting because I was busy. Didn't know I was striking a blow against editor tyranny. Good for me! Boycott/.! We will withhold our posts until their value is. ..
[Sierra Leone Kid]: hello i am kid from serraleon. i am 12
[American Kid]: who invided this luser?????
[American Kid 2]: where is serralen? is that near portland?
SLK: it is a country of west africa
AK: you a terrorist? if your a terorist ill kick your a**.
AK2: no no. terorsts are from the middle east. africa is somewhere else
SLK: forgive my english but i have question? i see you amercan kids on tv. you all have bikes. i cannot afford bikes.
AK: u dont have a bike? how do u get to skool?
SLK: i cant afford skool. i have to work.
AK: LIAR!!! EVERYBBODY CAN AFORD SKOOL!!! UR SUCH A IDIOOT!!!
/SLK wanders off to join a terrorist cell.
I've decided that the Internet is vastly overrated as a tool for building tolerance or for fostering "communities" in any but the narrowest definition. Sure, it can put opposing viewpoints a mouseclick away (if the websites you visit aren't afraid to link to said opposition), but most people never bother to click. They'd rather use the 'Net to support their deeply cherished myths, not to undermine them.
The Internet is probably the clearest picture of humanity that anyone could ever ask for. Humans at their angriest, their meanest, their most playful, their horniest. I really don't think that any society can survive that level of honesty.
Let's not ever make any generalized statements, for fear that someone might see it as "stereotypist."
The article makes a good case. Third world nations see images of American wealth and self-absorption, and resent us for having what they don't. We see images of poverty and suffering from around the world. While we pity the sufferers and desire to help them, we also resent them for making us feel selfish and helpless, and for knocking our comfortable illusions out from under us. Even if we were on more level economic ground, we'd still have trouble understanding other cultures that are filtered into our living rooms, and news services compound the problem by focusing on the weird and salacious.
I saw this in practice on the Today Show this morning. We were treated to the rantings of an unnamed Saudi "religious leader" who called Jews "the rats of the Earth," and prayed to God to kill them all. Then we were shown excerpts from Saudi educational materials which pointed out the warnings in the Koran against having Christian and Jewish friends.* Obviously, we're supposed to be repulsed and outraged by this. I've gotten the impression that such feelings are very prevalent throughout the Arab world, so it may not just be selective bias.
But ask me what it did for my feelings of "tolerance."
The situation in the Middle East has created a climate where moderate Arabs dare not speak out for fear of reprisals.
* The Saudi representative claimed that the quotes were taken "out of context," though I can't imagine a context that would make them palatable.
"There is a reason why we released the Web into the public domain and did not make it GPL. GPL would have closed the door on commercial versions which was absolutely the opposite of our objective. We were changing the flow of information, not engaging in an RMS power play."
No, I think the main reason was that, at the time the TCP/IP stack was being created, nobody had come up with the idea of the GPL. The problem with the BSD license is that it allows major players like Microsoft to profit from the work of others without giving anything back.
As to your argument that BSD promotes "widest adoption," I disagree. BSD does promote easy commercialization, but it does so at a huge risk. A powerful company could take any BSD work, add on a few security extensions or other new features, and then make it nigh unto impossible for others to interoperate with them. Just think what a future of MSTCP/IP would be like.
"As for the utility of source, I think it is overated. I would much prefer an API that is written well enough that I do not need to see the source to work out what is going on."
Well, that's lovely, so long as the company providing the API has indeed written it well enough that you don't need to see the source. And provided the company continues supporting the API. And provided the company is willing to send out bugfixes and security patches whenever problems are discovered. And provided the company doesn't go out of business. That's a lot of "provideds." Gimme the source any day.
Oh, and that particle accelerator quote actually makes a lot of sense.
Re:Umm Where is the source?
on
Revolution OS
·
· Score: 2
Apparently, the moderators missed that little fact. +1 Funny, not +1 Informative.
Then there is the 72GB+ windows install if you go that way...
I'll bet Red Hat will be bigger than that. First, throw in every RPM that anyone could conceivably find useful. Then throw in every earlier version, for compatability purposes (which of these 600 Mozilla nightly releases would you like to use?) Then turn the Shadowman splash screen into a fully immersive, first person shooter where an adorably portly penguin hunts down Bill Gates.
It's not a pretty picture, but I think this is the direction Linux distros will have to move in order to keep up.
Oh, and don't forget that when Microsoft is forced to remove Internet Explorer and Media Player from the OS, they'll begin adding a copy of IE to every help file and WMP to every media file.
"GA Tech Cracks Down On Learning" is +1 Funny +1 Insightful. It's only inflammatory if the reader is wrongheaded enough to take it literally. There's nothing wrong with hyperbolizing to make a point, and in this case the point is that the GA Tech policy being discussed is antithetical to its mission as an institution of learning.
Should the/. editors be suggesting a boycott of the school? It's probably not a safe course of action for them. However, if I were looking for a CS program, I would very much want to know that this policy was *gone* before I applied with them. Vague speculations on the possibility of amending the policy wouldn't satisfy me. Also, as a high profile CS course, letting this policy go unchallenged would set a very dangerous precedent which other programs might decide to follow.
In short, I fully agree with the admonishment to keep this policy in mind when looking for a program, and hope/. doesn't get sued for giving such advice.
I think he's just saying that the OS market would suddenly become much more "fragmented" and non-interoperable if Microsoft was forced to release a "modularized" Windows. That's a pretty good description of the state of the OS world 20 years ago.
I really don't understand how this breakage is supposed to be accomplished. Why would not including Windows Media Player in the OS break Win32 binary compatability? Why would removing IE break anything but the rendering of help files? I don't get it.
Your trolling skills are absolutely 1337. Generally I don't like trolls, but PhysicsGenius is turning it into a respectable art form.
I haven't yet read the article myself, but even if his point is absolutely true (doubtful), it strikes me as highly unlikely that one could load up/., load up the article, read the article, find the flaw in the article, and still be able to get first post.
Wait. He's a physics genius. Time travel. Forget I said anything.
I love it when this little misconception rears its head. It gives me the chance to point out that, under this system, anything Microsoft has ever written is GPL-compliant. Just scrape about fifty billion dollars together, and I'm sure they'll be happy to have Steve Ballmer deliver the source CD to your door himself. Asking him to wear a kangaroo costume may cost an extra five billion or so.
In reality, you're allowed to charge whatever you want for the binaries, but once someone receives the binaries, he has the right to receive the source code for no more than the cost of distributing it to him.
Granted, only Lucas knows for sure what was involved in his creative process. But there's no guarantee that he's giving us the straight scoop about the influences of Joseph Campbell. After all, is it sexier to say that you got your ideas from "a deep understanding of the mythologies that bind us together in a common humanity," or Lone Ranger reruns?
Nobody is accusing Lucas of plagarism. Merely of trying to infuse his work with more intellectual credibility than it may deserve. I didn't hear anyone threatening a lawsuit either.
The fact that Lucas has claimed that he was directly influenced by Campbell, while giving no credit to other recent sci-fi, makes the question of direct vs. indirect influence important.
I'm suspicious as to whether these "deeply rooted cultural myths" are necessary for a captivating story. Just as an example, take "The Old Man and the Sea." It seems to me that the story flies in the face of all the mythical archetypes, and yet it's celebrated as a triumph of the human spirit.
The Old Man isn't bigger than life. He's not the bearer of some fateful destiny. He succeeds in catching the fish, only to have his prize taken away by sharks. When he returns to the village, there's no parade, no banners. Nobody even notices his return. The story ends with his health so broken by the ordeal that he's expected to die. He's an anti-hero in every imaginable way, living a life that won't be remembered outside his village. But I finished the book proud to be a human being.
The Salon article had a link to an older article which described these mythical archetypes as unhealthy, because they made a sharp division between "heroes" and normal people. It was a fascinating read, but the message I got from it is that a new sort of mythology was needed. The old mythology says to either be destined a hero from birth or sit idly by and wait for heroes to solve your problems. The new mythology would be based around cooperation between normal people. It's not sexy, but it gets things done.
If you're going to mock the "attack a big target to feel big" approach to life, fine. But I'm going to look through your posting history, and I'd better not see any snide remarks about Bill Gates.
Read the article. I think it makes at least an interesting case. It argues that there are not-at-all coincidental similarities between the Star Wars world and many highly popular modern sci-fi works.
I have to say I find the claims quite compelling. When you get down to it, the sorts of comparisons made by Campbell are absurdly easy. Once, on a dare, I watched "The Matrix" and tried to draw parallels between it and Mormon theology. It was unbelievably easy. Every major plot point could be mapped, as long as I didn't press the "does it make sense" point too hard.
My theory is that, given any two sufficiently complicated works and a fairly high tolerance for messiness, an imaginative person could come up with enough comparisons for at least a B+ term paper.
"2. Better games - crucial. Too many games for the Xbox (Blood Wake) seem good ideas, but are terrible execution. MS would be good to go to developers making Xbox games, look at the "final release", then say "Great. Here's some more money - spend another 3 months polishing it so we don't have good games, we have great games."
I was with you right up until you said this. As great as it sounds in theory, I believe Microsoft is already setting its standards way too high. I'm personally aware of at least a couple of games that would have been released on the X-box, but failed because the 'Softies were being prima donnas about the quality of the games.
The simple fact is, if a developer goes to Microsoft about a game port, and Microsoft says, "Okay, just do a massive code rewrite, ten thousand hours of QA testing, and add features X Y and Z to make the game worthy to grace the X-box," some developers just won't bother.
If the game was originally intended for the X-box, and MS sends it back to the drawing board, it might be a good move. The trick is, the resulting game has to be improved enough that the developers understand that it was in their best interests. If it feels like there's some serious nitpicking going on, they might give up and develop for a different platform next time.
I would still call Final Fantasy 7 and 8 "platform exclusive" games. Of course, they're now available on the PC as well as the Playstation. But there was about six months between the time the game was released for the Playstation and the PC port. Since the majority of the average game's sales takes place in the first couple of months, releasing the PC versions probably did nothing to dampen demand for the Playstation 1.
I wouldn't mind seeing ports for FF 9 and 10 for the desktop. It's already been long enough that it wouldn't matter much in the ongoing platform war. The only reasons not to release them are if there's insufficient demand for it or developers are needed for more valuable projects.
Everything I've heard says that Microsoft demands great games from X-box developers. I think they may be shooting themselves in the foot by doing that. Playstation 2 already has a huge advantage in both number of games and price of said games. Part of this is thanks to the PS1 compatability. But there's another factor.
A game programmer I know was telling me about his experience with his company's latest game. The PC and PS2 ports went fine, but Microsoft wouldn't allow them to release an X-box ports without a massive set of QA tests and a boatload of new improvements/features that the original game didn't have. In short, Microsoft wanted the X-box version of the game to be far and away superior to the other platforms. In the end, the company decided it wasn't worth the effort, and redistributed the team to other projects.
Another hint of this same phenomenon comes from the reviews of "Max Payne" I've read. Everyone loved the desktop and X-box versions of the game, but the PS2 version got panned. Of course, part of it is that PS2 is harder to develop for.
Most gamers aren't going to compare reviews for different consoles. They're just going to figure that Max Payne is available for the Xbox and for the PS2, call it a draw, and see which other games they "must have." If the customer already have a PS2, a vastly superior X-box offering does Microsoft zero good. A game that would have been vastly superior had the developers bitten the bullet and ported it doesn't help them either, and hurts them a great deal.
Summary: Microsoft should realize that crappy games are needed to save the X-box.
"C|Net News is reporting that Overture is suing Google over its AdWords advertising method since it may be infringing upon Patent 6,269,361'System and method for influencing a position on a search result list generated by a computer network search engine'."
Uhh, yeah. It's called META tags.
I was doing this before Overture even went into business, and I have to say it's very effective. I get a lot of feedback on my site these days. Most of it is just people asking where the naked midgets are, but a hit is a hit.
Of course they can. Unfortunately, they can also make everyone else seven feet tall, and when that happens, the hoop is going up to twelve feet. I guarantee it.
Ask for nine feet tall, and extend your career by a couple of years.
It's possible to modify the prefs.js file to masquerade as IE. Or wget. But it would be cool if they threw this into the preferences. "Who would you like to pretend to be today."
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks to this thread, I now have a new sig.
And I thought I was just not posting because I was busy. Didn't know I was striking a blow against editor tyranny. Good for me! Boycott /.! We will withhold our posts until their value is. . .
Oops.
Perhaps we're better off with TV:
[Sierra Leone Kid]: hello i am kid from serraleon. i am 12
[American Kid]: who invided this luser?????
[American Kid 2]: where is serralen? is that near portland?
SLK: it is a country of west africa
AK: you a terrorist? if your a terorist ill kick your a**.
AK2: no no. terorsts are from the middle east. africa is somewhere else
SLK: forgive my english but i have question? i see you amercan kids on tv. you all have bikes. i cannot afford bikes.
AK: u dont have a bike? how do u get to skool?
SLK: i cant afford skool. i have to work.
AK: LIAR!!! EVERYBBODY CAN AFORD SKOOL!!! UR SUCH A IDIOOT!!!
/SLK wanders off to join a terrorist cell.
I've decided that the Internet is vastly overrated as a tool for building tolerance or for fostering "communities" in any but the narrowest definition. Sure, it can put opposing viewpoints a mouseclick away (if the websites you visit aren't afraid to link to said opposition), but most people never bother to click. They'd rather use the 'Net to support their deeply cherished myths, not to undermine them.
The Internet is probably the clearest picture of humanity that anyone could ever ask for. Humans at their angriest, their meanest, their most playful, their horniest. I really don't think that any society can survive that level of honesty.
Let's not ever make any generalized statements, for fear that someone might see it as "stereotypist."
The article makes a good case. Third world nations see images of American wealth and self-absorption, and resent us for having what they don't. We see images of poverty and suffering from around the world. While we pity the sufferers and desire to help them, we also resent them for making us feel selfish and helpless, and for knocking our comfortable illusions out from under us. Even if we were on more level economic ground, we'd still have trouble understanding other cultures that are filtered into our living rooms, and news services compound the problem by focusing on the weird and salacious.
I saw this in practice on the Today Show this morning. We were treated to the rantings of an unnamed Saudi "religious leader" who called Jews "the rats of the Earth," and prayed to God to kill them all. Then we were shown excerpts from Saudi educational materials which pointed out the warnings in the Koran against having Christian and Jewish friends.* Obviously, we're supposed to be repulsed and outraged by this. I've gotten the impression that such feelings are very prevalent throughout the Arab world, so it may not just be selective bias.
But ask me what it did for my feelings of "tolerance."
The situation in the Middle East has created a climate where moderate Arabs dare not speak out for fear of reprisals.
* The Saudi representative claimed that the quotes were taken "out of context," though I can't imagine a context that would make them palatable.
As to your argument that BSD promotes "widest adoption," I disagree. BSD does promote easy commercialization, but it does so at a huge risk. A powerful company could take any BSD work, add on a few security extensions or other new features, and then make it nigh unto impossible for others to interoperate with them. Just think what a future of MSTCP/IP would be like.
Well, that's lovely, so long as the company providing the API has indeed written it well enough that you don't need to see the source. And provided the company continues supporting the API. And provided the company is willing to send out bugfixes and security patches whenever problems are discovered. And provided the company doesn't go out of business. That's a lot of "provideds." Gimme the source any day.
Oh, and that particle accelerator quote actually makes a lot of sense.
Apparently, the moderators missed that little fact. +1 Funny, not +1 Informative.
It's not a pretty picture, but I think this is the direction Linux distros will have to move in order to keep up.
Oh, and don't forget that when Microsoft is forced to remove Internet Explorer and Media Player from the OS, they'll begin adding a copy of IE to every help file and WMP to every media file.
"GA Tech Cracks Down On Learning" is +1 Funny +1 Insightful. It's only inflammatory if the reader is wrongheaded enough to take it literally. There's nothing wrong with hyperbolizing to make a point, and in this case the point is that the GA Tech policy being discussed is antithetical to its mission as an institution of learning.
/. editors be suggesting a boycott of the school? It's probably not a safe course of action for them. However, if I were looking for a CS program, I would very much want to know that this policy was *gone* before I applied with them. Vague speculations on the possibility of amending the policy wouldn't satisfy me. Also, as a high profile CS course, letting this policy go unchallenged would set a very dangerous precedent which other programs might decide to follow.
/. doesn't get sued for giving such advice.
Should the
In short, I fully agree with the admonishment to keep this policy in mind when looking for a program, and hope
Oops! You used it! You used the trademarked emoticon! Send fifty bucks to despair.com right now you infringer!
Sorry. I just slipped into a horrible alternate universe where the Supreme Court decides cases by watching CourtTV.
At least, I hope it's an alternate reality...
I think he's just saying that the OS market would suddenly become much more "fragmented" and non-interoperable if Microsoft was forced to release a "modularized" Windows. That's a pretty good description of the state of the OS world 20 years ago.
I really don't understand how this breakage is supposed to be accomplished. Why would not including Windows Media Player in the OS break Win32 binary compatability? Why would removing IE break anything but the rendering of help files? I don't get it.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!
/me goes to download a SuSE iso and browse theregister.co.uk. I'm such a prick.
Your trolling skills are absolutely 1337. Generally I don't like trolls, but PhysicsGenius is turning it into a respectable art form.
/., load up the article, read the article, find the flaw in the article, and still be able to get first post.
I haven't yet read the article myself, but even if his point is absolutely true (doubtful), it strikes me as highly unlikely that one could load up
Wait. He's a physics genius. Time travel. Forget I said anything.
I love it when this little misconception rears its head. It gives me the chance to point out that, under this system, anything Microsoft has ever written is GPL-compliant. Just scrape about fifty billion dollars together, and I'm sure they'll be happy to have Steve Ballmer deliver the source CD to your door himself. Asking him to wear a kangaroo costume may cost an extra five billion or so.
In reality, you're allowed to charge whatever you want for the binaries, but once someone receives the binaries, he has the right to receive the source code for no more than the cost of distributing it to him.
Granted, only Lucas knows for sure what was involved in his creative process. But there's no guarantee that he's giving us the straight scoop about the influences of Joseph Campbell. After all, is it sexier to say that you got your ideas from "a deep understanding of the mythologies that bind us together in a common humanity," or Lone Ranger reruns?
Nobody is accusing Lucas of plagarism. Merely of trying to infuse his work with more intellectual credibility than it may deserve. I didn't hear anyone threatening a lawsuit either.
The fact that Lucas has claimed that he was directly influenced by Campbell, while giving no credit to other recent sci-fi, makes the question of direct vs. indirect influence important.
I'm suspicious as to whether these "deeply rooted cultural myths" are necessary for a captivating story. Just as an example, take "The Old Man and the Sea." It seems to me that the story flies in the face of all the mythical archetypes, and yet it's celebrated as a triumph of the human spirit.
The Old Man isn't bigger than life. He's not the bearer of some fateful destiny. He succeeds in catching the fish, only to have his prize taken away by sharks. When he returns to the village, there's no parade, no banners. Nobody even notices his return. The story ends with his health so broken by the ordeal that he's expected to die. He's an anti-hero in every imaginable way, living a life that won't be remembered outside his village. But I finished the book proud to be a human being.
The Salon article had a link to an older article which described these mythical archetypes as unhealthy, because they made a sharp division between "heroes" and normal people. It was a fascinating read, but the message I got from it is that a new sort of mythology was needed. The old mythology says to either be destined a hero from birth or sit idly by and wait for heroes to solve your problems. The new mythology would be based around cooperation between normal people. It's not sexy, but it gets things done.
If you're going to mock the "attack a big target to feel big" approach to life, fine. But I'm going to look through your posting history, and I'd better not see any snide remarks about Bill Gates.
Read the article. I think it makes at least an interesting case. It argues that there are not-at-all coincidental similarities between the Star Wars world and many highly popular modern sci-fi works.
I have to say I find the claims quite compelling. When you get down to it, the sorts of comparisons made by Campbell are absurdly easy. Once, on a dare, I watched "The Matrix" and tried to draw parallels between it and Mormon theology. It was unbelievably easy. Every major plot point could be mapped, as long as I didn't press the "does it make sense" point too hard.
My theory is that, given any two sufficiently complicated works and a fairly high tolerance for messiness, an imaginative person could come up with enough comparisons for at least a B+ term paper.
I was with you right up until you said this. As great as it sounds in theory, I believe Microsoft is already setting its standards way too high. I'm personally aware of at least a couple of games that would have been released on the X-box, but failed because the 'Softies were being prima donnas about the quality of the games.
The simple fact is, if a developer goes to Microsoft about a game port, and Microsoft says, "Okay, just do a massive code rewrite, ten thousand hours of QA testing, and add features X Y and Z to make the game worthy to grace the X-box," some developers just won't bother.
If the game was originally intended for the X-box, and MS sends it back to the drawing board, it might be a good move. The trick is, the resulting game has to be improved enough that the developers understand that it was in their best interests. If it feels like there's some serious nitpicking going on, they might give up and develop for a different platform next time.
I would still call Final Fantasy 7 and 8 "platform exclusive" games. Of course, they're now available on the PC as well as the Playstation. But there was about six months between the time the game was released for the Playstation and the PC port. Since the majority of the average game's sales takes place in the first couple of months, releasing the PC versions probably did nothing to dampen demand for the Playstation 1.
I wouldn't mind seeing ports for FF 9 and 10 for the desktop. It's already been long enough that it wouldn't matter much in the ongoing platform war. The only reasons not to release them are if there's insufficient demand for it or developers are needed for more valuable projects.
Everything I've heard says that Microsoft demands great games from X-box developers. I think they may be shooting themselves in the foot by doing that. Playstation 2 already has a huge advantage in both number of games and price of said games. Part of this is thanks to the PS1 compatability. But there's another factor.
A game programmer I know was telling me about his experience with his company's latest game. The PC and PS2 ports went fine, but Microsoft wouldn't allow them to release an X-box ports without a massive set of QA tests and a boatload of new improvements/features that the original game didn't have. In short, Microsoft wanted the X-box version of the game to be far and away superior to the other platforms. In the end, the company decided it wasn't worth the effort, and redistributed the team to other projects.
Another hint of this same phenomenon comes from the reviews of "Max Payne" I've read. Everyone loved the desktop and X-box versions of the game, but the PS2 version got panned. Of course, part of it is that PS2 is harder to develop for.
Most gamers aren't going to compare reviews for different consoles. They're just going to figure that Max Payne is available for the Xbox and for the PS2, call it a draw, and see which other games they "must have." If the customer already have a PS2, a vastly superior X-box offering does Microsoft zero good. A game that would have been vastly superior had the developers bitten the bullet and ported it doesn't help them either, and hurts them a great deal.
Summary: Microsoft should realize that crappy games are needed to save the X-box.
Uhh, yeah. It's called META tags.
I was doing this before Overture even went into business, and I have to say it's very effective. I get a lot of feedback on my site these days. Most of it is just people asking where the naked midgets are, but a hit is a hit.
Sheesh. Some companies.
Of course they can. Unfortunately, they can also make everyone else seven feet tall, and when that happens, the hoop is going up to twelve feet. I guarantee it.
Ask for nine feet tall, and extend your career by a couple of years.
It's possible to modify the prefs.js file to masquerade as IE. Or wget. But it would be cool if they threw this into the preferences. "Who would you like to pretend to be today."