This isn't real life, where the expensive parts are the special effects. The technology needed to implement realistic facial expressions is surely one of the most impressive (and expensive) parts.
That way, they can concentrate on making great software instead of what will make the shareholders happy. Mandrake's developed a reputation as a good newbie distro as well as a cutting-edge distro for the not-so-newbie. More importantly, they've garnered their own mindshare within the industry. I think developing a body of shareholders might influence them to go one way or the other. As well, this sort of move might open up the way for other business-centred moves, like (eg) letting themselves get bought out by another company.
I think, if they have a good solid foothold in the industry that can't be usurped by another company, the way Red Hat does, they might want to try going public. Until then, doing so might make them even more vulnerable to the manipulations of the business-minded.
What countries and cultures is Linux thriving most in? It seems like there are some societies who would be more predisposed to liking and accepting Linux. Because Microsoft is such a huge company in North America, it's hard to avoid the debate of the benefits of free software vs. proprietary (this is the stage where they fight you (and then you win;)), whereas other countries and cultures might have a more objective view of the benefits and costs of one over the other.
Just curious. I'd actually be interested in hearing pro-Microsoft sentiment coming from other countries -- if for no other reason than novelty.
I thought the US space program was in the process of undergoing a whole ton of budget cuts thanks to GWBush. I guess that means that actual space missions are getting scrapped in favour of meetings where bureaucrats fantasize about what they'd do if they had actual space missions.
That source tree (scroll down a bit) says that in a worst-case scenario, we might only be at 0.9.6 or 0.9.7 by the end of Q4 2001.
Just curious, but considering how delayed the thing is already, why should we believe their optimistic best-case projections? Sorry if this sounds like trolling, but I'm genuinely curious.
I wonder if we're psychologically predisposed towards uncomfortable keyboards. Even the QWERTY layout was created was INefficiency in mind -- people were typing too quickly on old typewriters and the teeth kept getting jammed together. I don't know about other who've gotten used to the ergonomic keyboards, but for someone who isn't a classically trained typist, they are a serious pain. I'm a slightly above average typist (around 65 wpm), but I tend to have my index fingers wander a little further than they should, and that extra space in the middle always ended up being more of a hindrance than anything.
Won't take no 3800 people, neither. Jimmy'll track the guy with the answer down, and me and Tony'll brute force it out of him with a lead pipe. You want I should get on this?
Don't know if the OP was trying to be as funny as the moderators thought it was, but that debate would be a waste of time. The two movies, in terms of form, are completely different, and as such many of the obvious comparisons don't apply. For instance, there isn't really a Darth Vader in LOTR, in that no major villain gets as much time spent on them in the book that DV got in the movie. That's a pretty big difference right there. Without a strong protagonist vs. antagonist setup, you've got a major inconsistency that precludes most of the comparisons you'd normally want to draw.
For instance, the major theme in LOTR is setting. That's why Tolkien could spend 1000+ pages on a book that barely gives the sum total of one page of dialogue to the major antagonist. That wasn't what drew most readers through the book -- instead it was the long and sustained immersion into a foreign world with all its nuances.
Star Wars only has an appeal on this level because of its various spinoffs. The major story in SW was the prototypical Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, whereas Tolkien was going for a much broader approach to mythology, that he achieved not only through LOTR, but also through the hard-core epic writing of the Silmarillion and the fable approach of The Hobbit.
It'll be interesting to see how this major difference gets handled in the LOTR adaptation. Your average modern-day alt.fiction film NEEDS a strong protagonist/antagonist conflict to keep it together. I suspect it'll get a lot of hype just because of its namesake, but the impact won't be anywhere near as lasting as SW was on the world of film. They're probably equal in terms of their place in their respective genres, but as a whole, I wouldn't be surprised if LOTR is as underwhelming in the world of film as SW is in the world of literature.
I thought the big part of the case against Napster was that Napster was profiting from the copying. Does Gnutella have a central body that profits from the trading?
Not that I'd expect anything other than the lawyers trying to use Napster as precedent for shutting down ALL forms of file sharing, but wouldn't their case against Gnutella be weaker?
...and says this may have interesting implications for Internet Quality of Service research.
Just wondering (sorry if this sounds harsh), but implications for what, besides like, CounterStrike? I can't imagine anything out there right now that places good ping higher on the priority list than reliable transactions.
Is bad ping holding back other possible things, like maybe television via the internet or something?
I've sort of got the opinion that many of the open source developers out there are hoping to use the skills they learn while cutting their teeth on the free stuff to get them work, and unfortunately, until open source companies start being able to turn a profit regularly, that'll mean that these guys will end up in the proprietary software industry, probably.
At this point, it'll probably mean that the open source stuff will remain a bit of a hobby for most people. That said, Linux is Linus's hobby, so there's no telling how far a coder can take a project without any of the bureaucratic administrative crap that comes with some companies out there, both in terms of quality and productivity. Still, it IS a hobby and probably very difficult to negotiate into a paying job.
Where's this going? Well, I don't think that many of the free coders out there are going to want to learn skills that can ONLY be used in the open source environment, which is what that license seemed to suggest. They're going to want to get into things that they can take elsewhere for paying work, and this license seems to eliminate that. Of course, maybe you didn't want them anyway.
Probably the only sort of people who would adhere to this license are those who are passionate about the licensed software to begin with, and as such renders this sort of license moot anyway because they'd continue to contribute regardless of whatever real-world job they got.
Socialism (which I love) is a great social model, until you try to legislate it, and then the problems come up. Yeah, it's possible that some people might want to make sure that nobody rips off the Gimp to make a commercial competitor to Photoshop, but there's already a license in place to combat that possibility.
And then there's the argument about whether or not we need more licenses, and then there's the argument about whether or not this sort of license can get enforced properly...
Many thanks goes out to the people at Perforce for making such a good revision control system, the developers at OpenBLT for giving me some ideas, and Be for giving me such a good development platform.
Okay, I'm all for Open Source and sharing of ideas and all that, but this has gone too far. For the love of God, you CAN'T open source a good sandwich!
'The soft-porn fixation embarrassingly displayed at E3 is dooming the gaming industry to the nerd-geek ghetto.'
I find this hilarious. You've got games where you can frag or blow up humans, mutants, zombies, terrorists, counter-terrorists, buildings, spaceships, starships, elves, dwarves, attack choppers, gangsters, aliens, vampires, hostages, and beings from the Alice in Wonderland universe.
And you're concerned about Lara Croft's short shorts? Only in America.
Do you have any idea the amount of time/money those students who had to take summer school lost?
Not to get all touchy-feely, but it might have been a real self-esteem blow for some of them. Summer school could have been a real blow to the ego for some of them, and then to find out that they didn't really fail after having to go through the punishment for having failed...
...apparently the X-Box sample that crashed wasn't the same hardware configuration as the final X-Box, namely lacking memory. So the game probably tried to address non-existant memory and crashed. Wowee.
Wowee indeed. If I were a company spending over half a billion dollars in marketing a game console, I'd make damn sure the thing wouldn't crash because of something so trivial as lacking memory.
What makes this particular bit of news so telling is that we all knew how unreliable an OS Microsoft could put out, but this is a chance for them to dictate their own architecture as well as their own OS, and they still bluescreened.
Thank god it happened at E3. Otherwise it could have happened in hundreds of thousands of homes all across the country after their initial release. Can you say "XBox, Second Edition"? I bet you could...
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't real life, where the expensive parts are the special effects. The technology needed to implement realistic facial expressions is surely one of the most impressive (and expensive) parts.
I think, if they have a good solid foothold in the industry that can't be usurped by another company, the way Red Hat does, they might want to try going public. Until then, doing so might make them even more vulnerable to the manipulations of the business-minded.
He's got a valid point. The MS folks have jumped on less than this to make Linux look bad.
Just curious. I'd actually be interested in hearing pro-Microsoft sentiment coming from other countries -- if for no other reason than novelty.
I thought the US space program was in the process of undergoing a whole ton of budget cuts thanks to GWBush. I guess that means that actual space missions are getting scrapped in favour of meetings where bureaucrats fantasize about what they'd do if they had actual space missions.
Just curious, but considering how delayed the thing is already, why should we believe their optimistic best-case projections? Sorry if this sounds like trolling, but I'm genuinely curious.
Just trol- I mean, wondering.
I wonder if we're psychologically predisposed towards uncomfortable keyboards. Even the QWERTY layout was created was INefficiency in mind -- people were typing too quickly on old typewriters and the teeth kept getting jammed together. I don't know about other who've gotten used to the ergonomic keyboards, but for someone who isn't a classically trained typist, they are a serious pain. I'm a slightly above average typist (around 65 wpm), but I tend to have my index fingers wander a little further than they should, and that extra space in the middle always ended up being more of a hindrance than anything.
Won't take no 3800 people, neither. Jimmy'll track the guy with the answer down, and me and Tony'll brute force it out of him with a lead pipe. You want I should get on this?
For instance, the major theme in LOTR is setting. That's why Tolkien could spend 1000+ pages on a book that barely gives the sum total of one page of dialogue to the major antagonist. That wasn't what drew most readers through the book -- instead it was the long and sustained immersion into a foreign world with all its nuances.
Star Wars only has an appeal on this level because of its various spinoffs. The major story in SW was the prototypical Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, whereas Tolkien was going for a much broader approach to mythology, that he achieved not only through LOTR, but also through the hard-core epic writing of the Silmarillion and the fable approach of The Hobbit.
It'll be interesting to see how this major difference gets handled in the LOTR adaptation. Your average modern-day alt.fiction film NEEDS a strong protagonist/antagonist conflict to keep it together. I suspect it'll get a lot of hype just because of its namesake, but the impact won't be anywhere near as lasting as SW was on the world of film. They're probably equal in terms of their place in their respective genres, but as a whole, I wouldn't be surprised if LOTR is as underwhelming in the world of film as SW is in the world of literature.
I'd like to see how it'd handle some of the gestures I'd have in store for it.
Not that I'd expect anything other than the lawyers trying to use Napster as precedent for shutting down ALL forms of file sharing, but wouldn't their case against Gnutella be weaker?
I was able to sniff my cordless mouse and keyboard a long time ago. Didn't really get much out of it, though.
Then I burned them, and THEN sniffed, and whooboy, do those chemicals go STRAIGHT to the brain. Awesome.
Just wondering (sorry if this sounds harsh), but implications for what, besides like, CounterStrike? I can't imagine anything out there right now that places good ping higher on the priority list than reliable transactions.
Is bad ping holding back other possible things, like maybe television via the internet or something?
I've sort of got the opinion that many of the open source developers out there are hoping to use the skills they learn while cutting their teeth on the free stuff to get them work, and unfortunately, until open source companies start being able to turn a profit regularly, that'll mean that these guys will end up in the proprietary software industry, probably.
At this point, it'll probably mean that the open source stuff will remain a bit of a hobby for most people. That said, Linux is Linus's hobby, so there's no telling how far a coder can take a project without any of the bureaucratic administrative crap that comes with some companies out there, both in terms of quality and productivity. Still, it IS a hobby and probably very difficult to negotiate into a paying job.
Where's this going? Well, I don't think that many of the free coders out there are going to want to learn skills that can ONLY be used in the open source environment, which is what that license seemed to suggest. They're going to want to get into things that they can take elsewhere for paying work, and this license seems to eliminate that. Of course, maybe you didn't want them anyway.
Probably the only sort of people who would adhere to this license are those who are passionate about the licensed software to begin with, and as such renders this sort of license moot anyway because they'd continue to contribute regardless of whatever real-world job they got.
Socialism (which I love) is a great social model, until you try to legislate it, and then the problems come up. Yeah, it's possible that some people might want to make sure that nobody rips off the Gimp to make a commercial competitor to Photoshop, but there's already a license in place to combat that possibility.
And then there's the argument about whether or not we need more licenses, and then there's the argument about whether or not this sort of license can get enforced properly...
Is it as bad as Hologram Time Traveller?
Wow. Does this mean it can handle SQL Server? That's always been my favourite database simulator.
Better throw another space station on the barby.
Well it DOES.
Okay, I'm all for Open Source and sharing of ideas and all that, but this has gone too far. For the love of God, you CAN'T open source a good sandwich!
Where does it all stop? Why? WHYYYYYY?!?!?!
(sorry)
I find this hilarious. You've got games where you can frag or blow up humans, mutants, zombies, terrorists, counter-terrorists, buildings, spaceships, starships, elves, dwarves, attack choppers, gangsters, aliens, vampires, hostages, and beings from the Alice in Wonderland universe.
And you're concerned about Lara Croft's short shorts? Only in America.
Not to get all touchy-feely, but it might have been a real self-esteem blow for some of them. Summer school could have been a real blow to the ego for some of them, and then to find out that they didn't really fail after having to go through the punishment for having failed...
Wowee indeed. If I were a company spending over half a billion dollars in marketing a game console, I'd make damn sure the thing wouldn't crash because of something so trivial as lacking memory.
What makes this particular bit of news so telling is that we all knew how unreliable an OS Microsoft could put out, but this is a chance for them to dictate their own architecture as well as their own OS, and they still bluescreened.
Thank god it happened at E3. Otherwise it could have happened in hundreds of thousands of homes all across the country after their initial release. Can you say "XBox, Second Edition"? I bet you could...
Say it with me now... "XBox 3.1.1"
You'd think with a fixed hardware configuration they could avoid a BSOD. Bwahaha and all that.
I dunno. Lenny Dykstra kinda looked like one.