AMD's K7 had pretty good buzz, and was still renamed at the last minute to the moronic "Athlon". I think that they are required to have a marketing that's different from the internal project name. If they used the same name, the marketing guys wouldn't earn a paycheck and us nerd folks wouldn't be confused enough.
It's a good idea...not gonna happen while our grandchildren are alive. If you're going to take to the streets demanding one measurement system, you might as well demand one language while you're at it. How amazingly inefficient is it for us to not only speak different languages, but to have a dozen major character sets? I think the obvious solution is for everyone in the world to speak English. If anyone doesn't speak English, then we will just have to speak louder and slower until they understand.
Does this remind anyone else of Homer Simpson starting the ISP because "Everyone is making money off the internet except me"?
On a semi-serious note: two things could happen if the SEC actually lets these guys offer stock.
1) Nobody buys it, the IPO tanks, and Wall Street has a slightly lower opinion of upcoming IPOs like VA and LinuxCare.
2) Morons (see: mutual fund managers) buy a ton of LinuxOne stock, remembering the word "Linux" from a Red Hat press release and noticing the three digit share price next to RHAT. In three months when the earnings report is released with the entries "Income: Allowance $20 / Expenses: Kegger $4,329", the stock plummets. At that point, the Wall Street hive mind concludes "Huh, that Linux fad sure ended quickly". After that, VA or LinuxCare might not be able to get together ANY sort of IPO.
Open question to anyone with a background in finance: Are there any rules about what companies can and can't be publicly traded? Is it one of those capitalist "let the market decide" kind of deals?
I agree that this is a good test of the GPL license. As long as people stays calm, it will probably end in Good resolution. As far as future abuses go, I think they can be headed off easily with crystal clear definitions of "beta" and "internal". Just off the top of my head- Beta: Software that you have not made any money on. Once any money change hands in exchange for the software, it becomes "released". Internal: Everyone using the software is employed by the developing company. I'm sure employment is defined in some legal document. The important one here is "beta". The main argument I've seen here is that companies, such as MS, could slap illegal licenses on GPLed software and have them permanently be betas. That would be fine as long as they can't make a dime off this "beta" software. Are these two terms defined somewhere that I'm not aware of? Let me know. The lack of a JD doesn't stop anyone else on Slashdot from pitching in thier $.02, why should it stop me.
It has been a few years since I took psych, but I remember that short term memory lasts a matter a seconds (15-20), not a whole day. You mentioned that you think your brain keeps the imporatant stuff and dumps the "crap". I was a subject in an experiment that was trying to prove that you can't ignore or forget anything (and made 20 bucks doing it). Two words were shown on a computer screen together for half a second. I was supposed to ignore the red one and say if the green one was an English word or not. I did that for 2 or 3 hours. After that, I spent another hour just looking at words and saying if I had seen them previously in the experiment. I recalled seeing about 95% of the words I was supposed to concentrate on, and about 75% of the words I was supposed to ignore. The theory was that you forget unimportant things (like the color of every person's shoes you ever see) because the data doesn't have good linkages to other data in your long term memory, not because you "don't care" or "ignore" the data.
It makes absolutely no sense (to me anyway) to make a hardware game platform when the market has three huge players there already. The Dreamcast is running CE already so what's the niche there? Sony and Nintendo are planning some amazing graphics horsepower consoles in the next 12-18 months. MS should be targeting WebTV. It has enough of a consumer base to create a market, but isn't big enough to have real power in the computer world. Will it be good for everyone to have MS dominate another market? no. Will it be good to get more people online, newbies or otherwise? yes.
You actually live in the Cambridge territory of the 'People's Republic of Massachusetts' where you're free to do anything you want: except use any bank other than BankBoston, get a tattoo, or get your cuticles trimmed at the manicurist. The government has decided these things "with your best interests in mind" because you are obviously too stupid to make a decision about your own bank or toenails for yourself.
I agree with you, but you're forgetting one thing. I trust that 1% of folks because they have no financial, legal, political, or nationalist ties to any one entity. If any one of the people in that 1% finds something shady going on, they have the ability to bring the whole world's attention to it (read: slashdot.org). I have one semester of C training and as far as I'm concerned, the Linux kernel code is complete giberish. Still, I trust it because a group of brillaint, nerdy guys I don't know are checking it out for me. When you get a group of people with shared ties writting code (in this case financial and political) where it would not be in thier self-interest to cry wolf, you end up with interesting situations like this one.
skepticism note: I would not be suprised if this story was either an anti-MS hoax pulled by some fanatical open source group or if the naming scheme is a joke from a 25 year old programmer at MS and has nothing to do with the National Security Agency.
Once you realize that your credit card is only slightly more secure then leaving all of your money on a sidewalk, you can stop worrying about it. It's also good to be poor so that if someone does take all your stuff, you're out $290 and a playstation.
I read the people who want *really* random numbers (NSA, CIA, folks with scary acronyms) take readings from geiger counters and record background radiation. Unless you have another geiger counter in the exact same point in space, at the exact same time, you can't get the same numbers. Building an OTP from that sounds secure to me. Sidenote: the novel Cryptonomicon has some cool stuff about OTPs.
I've never played with tubes, but I know that smell you're talking about. There's only one thing in the world that smells like melting semiconductors. Psychologists say that smells are the sense most linked to memories and emotions. The dentist's office has that one smell, Grandma's house has one smell, and melting semiconductors have that smell that always makes you think "Ooooh Shiiiiiiiiit!"
From what I understand, putting the L2 cache on-die creates a huge quality control mess. If the processor core is perfect, but the L2 cache isn't right, you throw out the processor. This makes prices high because us consumers have to pay for one we bought plus a prorated portion of all the ones they threw away. That's why LCD prices are high and don't drop quickly, because they're very hard to make perfectly. It's been a long time, and my memory isn't great, but didn't the Pentium Pro have an on-die cache? Those tanked pretty hard. Sure, it would be great if we had a CPU, 2 megs of L2 cache, and 128 megs of RAM on one piece of silicon (which is entirely possible with current technology and has been proposed by more than one person) but the price just does not make it realistic. -Barry
I'm no engineer. If I'm entirely wrong, please don't flame me, it will make me cry.
Did you get a copy with a MSDN Universal Subscription? I got "Windows 2000 Professional, Beta 3 Release Candidate 1 (x86) Build 2000" a while ago and it completely ate a hard drive. This was a test machine with a blank hard drive and I couldn't even make the 4 install disks (disk inflation from NT 4.0). When I tried to boot from the first disk, it completely screwed up the boot sector of the HD and quit. I went so far as reading the directions and I was doing it exactly right (having installed NT about 20 times on our 7 servers). Did you have to do anything fancy to get the install disks to work?
Before the Open Source police scorch my mailbox, the $1000+ MSDN subscription is paid for by my company, so it's free to me. I ran Linux when I was at school, back in the day.
Stand in the back of a computer science class lecture hall. How many people have a watch on? How many of those watches have a digital seconds readout? How many of those watches have a black plastic band on them? I'm not saying we're on time for anything, but dammit, we know exactly what time it is.
I don't think anyone has called them out and out liars. I'm sure they're working very hard on a product they think is great. If they do build a product with specs like that, it would be impressive. The questions then become, "How much is this thing going to cost?", and "What competeting products are going to be on the shelf next to it?"
On a related note, I would like to take this opportunity to announce that I'm building a cold fusion reactor. It is expected to go live in May of 2048. I am currently up to date with my project plan and the crayon drawing looks great.
I would settle for an implant that made the time display in the corner of my field of vision. I think the girl from Neuromancer had that (it's been a while since I've read it). How hard would that be to make? If every nerd on the planet threw away thier black plastic watch and paid 500 bucks for an optic nerve implant, that's like a billion dollars. Bio majors, team up with an EE major and build me an optic nerve clock. If you could do it before Christmas, that would be great. Thanks.
I have even less faith in these guys then you do. As mentioned above, the real estate, the electricity bill, the air conditioning, and the network cabling, will cost serious cash. A few thousand good hearted, naive, nerds may send in thier old Pentium 133s, but nobody's going to send them the miles and miles of cabling they would need. I think they're going to give up, sell off the hardware and keep the money. I'm sure there is little to no legal paperwork involved in this project. Even if you were to sue them, what would you claim in losses? A 3 year old computer that you were willing to give away basically for free. I was at a police auction this weekend where someone bought a Power PC 7200/133 for $650. Let's say people donate more than 1000 PCs and they can sell them off for $100-$300. Those few guys can pocket a quarter of a million dollars with almost no overhead. But then again, I might just be a cynical, bitter, mean guy.
I didn't learn much in high school British lit, but I did learn where the words "beef" and "pork" came from. In England, the rich people called the animals "cow" and "pig", but the servants (who were of some lower class, maybe from another country...it's been a while) called those animals "beef" and "pork". The only time the rich people talked to their servants was when they were serving them food. The rich folks (being inbread and not too bright) thought that "beef" meant "dead cow that's been cooked" while the servants where just saying their word for "cow". If my English teacher was right, then the Brits messed up those words long before they got to the US. We've messed up many, many other things (see: Velveeta) but not those words.
As far as I remember it, Linus said "Windows sucks" when answering a question about MS Office for Linux/WINE/StarOffice. This isn't the exact quote, but it was to the effect of "If you want to use MS Office, use MS Office and overlook the fact that Windows sucks." It wasn't mean spirited. He was joking around the whole time.
I thought that the best part was when he admitted that the "world domination" was tongue in cheek and detailed where he wants Linux to be in 3 to 5 years. He wasn't too serious, though. He did say the phrase "brain implants for dogs".
For all the media hype, the mainstream computer industry still underestimates Linux. Linus was moved to a bigger room at the last minute and I still had to stand in the back.
"...the IntelliMouse Explorer is housed in a sleek industrial-silver finish..."
I was at Comdex Monday morning and I could swear that Bill said the thing was made from titanium. I can't imagine that a titanium mouse could cost $75, but I would buy one if it did.
"...and features a glowing red underside and taillight."
That's what I need, more LEDs to light up my room at night.
Rob is my hero and all, but I have to aggree, he did screw up on this one. The creators of those strips knew that they didn't have a legal leg to stand on and that any serious publicity would get them shut down. Rob saw some "fighting the Man" content and slapped a link onto/. Guess what happened?
Rob needs to give more publicity to Swatch's attempt to broadcast commercials from space using a pirated amateur "sputnik". That's a front where the Man needs fighting. -Barry
SW:TPM is going to suffer from the same problem that the last Seinfeld had. It's being hyped as the greatest thing since sliced bread. And if it's the second greatest thing since sliced bread, people are going to be pissed. The only reason I think that it might hit all the expectations is that George Lucas is in charge of it. He is one crazy, obsessive dude. He knows full well how much hype is involved (having created most of it) and knows the severity of the backlash if he doesn't live up to said hype. All I know is that the guys in our IT department told our office manager that there's a Microsoft SQL training session on May 19th. We're going to get paid to ditch work and go try and see it. Sweet.
Slashdot Mirror
AMD's K7 had pretty good buzz, and was still renamed at the last minute to the moronic "Athlon". I think that they are required to have a marketing that's different from the internal project name. If they used the same name, the marketing guys wouldn't earn a paycheck and us nerd folks wouldn't be confused enough.
-Barry
It's a good idea...not gonna happen while our grandchildren are alive. If you're going to take to the streets demanding one measurement system, you might as well demand one language while you're at it. How amazingly inefficient is it for us to not only speak different languages, but to have a dozen major character sets? I think the obvious solution is for everyone in the world to speak English. If anyone doesn't speak English, then we will just have to speak louder and slower until they understand.
-Barry
Does this remind anyone else of Homer Simpson starting the ISP because "Everyone is making money off the internet except me"?
On a semi-serious note: two things could happen if the SEC actually lets these guys offer stock.
1) Nobody buys it, the IPO tanks, and Wall Street has a slightly lower opinion of upcoming IPOs like VA and LinuxCare.
2) Morons (see: mutual fund managers) buy a ton of LinuxOne stock, remembering the word "Linux" from a Red Hat press release and noticing the three digit share price next to RHAT. In three months when the earnings report is released with the entries "Income: Allowance $20 / Expenses: Kegger $4,329", the stock plummets. At that point, the Wall Street hive mind concludes "Huh, that Linux fad sure ended quickly". After that, VA or LinuxCare might not be able to get together ANY sort of IPO.
Open question to anyone with a background in finance: Are there any rules about what companies can and can't be publicly traded? Is it one of those capitalist "let the market decide" kind of deals?
Will LinuxOne be sending out "The Letter II"?
-Barry
I agree that this is a good test of the GPL license. As long as people stays calm, it will probably end in Good resolution. As far as future abuses go, I think they can be headed off easily with crystal clear definitions of "beta" and "internal". Just off the top of my head-
Beta: Software that you have not made any money on. Once any money change hands in exchange for the software, it becomes "released".
Internal: Everyone using the software is employed by the developing company. I'm sure employment is defined in some legal document.
The important one here is "beta". The main argument I've seen here is that companies, such as MS, could slap illegal licenses on GPLed software and have them permanently be betas. That would be fine as long as they can't make a dime off this "beta" software.
Are these two terms defined somewhere that I'm not aware of? Let me know. The lack of a JD doesn't stop anyone else on Slashdot from pitching in thier $.02, why should it stop me.
-Barry
It has been a few years since I took psych, but I remember that short term memory lasts a matter a seconds (15-20), not a whole day.
You mentioned that you think your brain keeps the imporatant stuff and dumps the "crap". I was a subject in an experiment that was trying to prove that you can't ignore or forget anything (and made 20 bucks doing it). Two words were shown on a computer screen together for half a second. I was supposed to ignore the red one and say if the green one was an English word or not. I did that for 2 or 3 hours. After that, I spent another hour just looking at words and saying if I had seen them previously in the experiment. I recalled seeing about 95% of the words I was supposed to concentrate on, and about 75% of the words I was supposed to ignore. The theory was that you forget unimportant things (like the color of every person's shoes you ever see) because the data doesn't have good linkages to other data in your long term memory, not because you "don't care" or "ignore" the data.
-Barry
It makes absolutely no sense (to me anyway) to make a hardware game platform when the market has three huge players there already. The Dreamcast is running CE already so what's the niche there? Sony and Nintendo are planning some amazing graphics horsepower consoles in the next 12-18 months. MS should be targeting WebTV. It has enough of a consumer base to create a market, but isn't big enough to have real power in the computer world. Will it be good for everyone to have MS dominate another market? no. Will it be good to get more people online, newbies or otherwise? yes.
-Barry
You actually live in the Cambridge territory of the 'People's Republic of Massachusetts' where you're free to do anything you want: except use any bank other than BankBoston, get a tattoo, or get your cuticles trimmed at the manicurist. The government has decided these things "with your best interests in mind" because you are obviously too stupid to make a decision about your own bank or toenails for yourself.
-Barry
I agree with you, but you're forgetting one thing. I trust that 1% of folks because they have no financial, legal, political, or nationalist ties to any one entity. If any one of the people in that 1% finds something shady going on, they have the ability to bring the whole world's attention to it (read: slashdot.org). I have one semester of C training and as far as I'm concerned, the Linux kernel code is complete giberish. Still, I trust it because a group of brillaint, nerdy guys I don't know are checking it out for me.
When you get a group of people with shared ties writting code (in this case financial and political) where it would not be in thier self-interest to cry wolf, you end up with interesting situations like this one.
skepticism note: I would not be suprised if this story was either an anti-MS hoax pulled by some fanatical open source group or if the naming scheme is a joke from a 25 year old programmer at MS and has nothing to do with the National Security Agency.
-Barry
Once you realize that your credit card is only slightly more secure then leaving all of your money on a sidewalk, you can stop worrying about it. It's also good to be poor so that if someone does take all your stuff, you're out $290 and a playstation.
-Barry
I read the people who want *really* random numbers (NSA, CIA, folks with scary acronyms) take readings from geiger counters and record background radiation. Unless you have another geiger counter in the exact same point in space, at the exact same time, you can't get the same numbers. Building an OTP from that sounds secure to me. Sidenote: the novel Cryptonomicon has some cool stuff about OTPs.
-Barry
I've never played with tubes, but I know that smell you're talking about. There's only one thing in the world that smells like melting semiconductors. Psychologists say that smells are the sense most linked to memories and emotions. The dentist's office has that one smell, Grandma's house has one smell, and melting semiconductors have that smell that always makes you think "Ooooh Shiiiiiiiiit!"
-Barry
From what I understand, putting the L2 cache on-die creates a huge quality control mess. If the processor core is perfect, but the L2 cache isn't right, you throw out the processor. This makes prices high because us consumers have to pay for one we bought plus a prorated portion of all the ones they threw away. That's why LCD prices are high and don't drop quickly, because they're very hard to make perfectly. It's been a long time, and my memory isn't great, but didn't the Pentium Pro have an on-die cache? Those tanked pretty hard. Sure, it would be great if we had a CPU, 2 megs of L2 cache, and 128 megs of RAM on one piece of silicon (which is entirely possible with current technology and has been proposed by more than one person) but the price just does not make it realistic.
-Barry
I'm no engineer. If I'm entirely wrong, please don't flame me, it will make me cry.
-Barry
This is my sig...or something
-Barry
Before the Open Source police scorch my mailbox, the $1000+ MSDN subscription is paid for by my company, so it's free to me. I ran Linux when I was at school, back in the day.
-Barry
This is my .sig....or something
-Barry
sigsigsigsigsigsigsigsigsigsigsigsigsigsig
On a related note, I would like to take this opportunity to announce that I'm building a cold fusion reactor. It is expected to go live in May of 2048. I am currently up to date with my project plan and the crayon drawing looks great.
-Barry
Ummm...this is my sig...or something
-Barry
"I don't need no steenking sig"
Pvt. Pyle
-Barry
-Ralph Wiggam
I thought that the best part was when he admitted that the "world domination" was tongue in cheek and detailed where he wants Linux to be in 3 to 5 years. He wasn't too serious, though. He did say the phrase "brain implants for dogs".
For all the media hype, the mainstream computer industry still underestimates Linux. Linus was moved to a bigger room at the last minute and I still had to stand in the back.
-Ralph Wiggam
I was at Comdex Monday morning and I could swear that Bill said the thing was made from titanium. I can't imagine that a titanium mouse could cost $75, but I would buy one if it did.
"...and features a glowing red underside and taillight."
That's what I need, more LEDs to light up my room at night.
-Ralph Wiggam
Rob needs to give more publicity to Swatch's attempt to broadcast commercials from space using a pirated amateur "sputnik". That's a front where the Man needs fighting. -Barry
SW:TPM is going to suffer from the same problem that the last Seinfeld had. It's being hyped as the greatest thing since sliced bread. And if it's the second greatest thing since sliced bread, people are going to be pissed. The only reason I think that it might hit all the expectations is that George Lucas is in charge of it. He is one crazy, obsessive dude. He knows full well how much hype is involved (having created most of it) and knows the severity of the backlash if he doesn't live up to said hype. All I know is that the guys in our IT department told our office manager that there's a Microsoft SQL training session on May 19th. We're going to get paid to ditch work and go try and see it. Sweet.