For example, look at that total failiure, the war on drugs. Billions of dollars spent on attempting to stem the flow of drugs into this country by ignoring the demand for them and just trying to shut down the supply.
I'm sure if I spent 15 minutes with a history book, I could come up with a ton of bad policies which were enacted, enforced, and never repealed, because some bureaucratic twit couldn't be bothered to admit he'd been wrong.
Gee, so the FCC wants to open up the few remaining radio frequencies to exploitation by anybody with the $$$ to pay off the feds. And where does that leave our quest for a better understanding of our universe?
IIRC, Iridium screwed up a bunch of radio spectrums popular amongst astronomers, and the upcoming Teledesic system is supposed to be even worse - I wonder what this plan is going to do...
Dude, have you actually PLAYED the Battlezone game that Activision put out? Admittedly, not many did, but it was actually a rather cool game. A lot of people have put it on their "Top ten games that nobody played" list... I spent quite a few hours with it. A nice twist on the FPS/RTS type games we've seen lately - and the graphics were quite nice as a bonus.
When 80% of the COOL games come out on Linux, THEN I'll switch over to Linux for my gaming OS.
(Actually, as it is, I'll switch to whatever OS runs the game best that I'm playing right now. I've been known to keep an NT partition around for the Quake series games...)
Just because Sci-fi isn't traditional literature, doesn't mean it can't be deep, or meaningful, or thought provoking, or interesting. I haven't read any of Tad's works other than Tailchaser's Song, but as somebody who reads a lot of Sci-Fi, as well as general philosophy and classical literature, I find your attitude demeaning and insulting.
It's opinions like yours that have caused such a slow acceptance of "Sci-Fi" into our general society. Remember that in it's time, "Frankenstein" and "The Island of Dr. Moreau" were the period's equivalent of Sci-Fi, and were pretty widely derided as "not being worth literature." Yet today, the "crap of yesteryear" are considered the classics of today. Who are you to judge a book down because it is "Sci-fi?"
Now, if Tad Williams isn't a deep author (and I cannot say whether or not he is admittedly) then blame it on the author, not the damn genre. And take your silly prejudices back to that half-assed English 101 class that you slept through.
Sheesh.
(Now, I'm going to go sentence myself to read "King, Warrior, Magician, Lover" ten times for blowing my top like that.)
I work at the US EPA Region 10 in downtown Seattle. Except for the fact that we're running Windows 95 (and there's been some rumormongering about a Linux thin client here pretty soon...) there isn't a single wide-deployed MS product around here.
We're using Wordperfect and Lotus Smartsuite for our office apps, Lotus Notes R5 (Gag! Choke! Urk!) for our groupware (Have you ever had to use Notes R5 for e-mail? It almost makes me want to use Outlook! It's THAT bad!) and Netscape 4.5 is our official browser. Oh, and we're using Novell for our network.
We do some spot licensing of MS products for people who are constantly getting MS-formatted documents, but for the most part, we're forced down to non-MS products - and thankfully so.
MS beta = closed source = you can't see what they did differently
Corel beta = open source = you can see what they did differently = if you find a bug you can go fix it yourself and send the idea back to the developers!
You know, they used to be much more subtle in their maneuvering, basically when the competition was so inept that they couldn't find their own asses. Now that AMD finally has a winner (Athlon) and they're getting better than expected earnings (high expected was ~26 cents/share, turns out to be more like 46) Intel's starting to get desperate.
Despite the spread of the Athlon, VIA's bread and butter in the PC industry is still the P6/PPro/P2/Celeron/whatever it's called this week market. Intel is trying to strangle all the competitors out of this market - witness the copyrighted P6 bus preventing competitors from breaking into Intel's market...
...they had some fairly revolutionary stuff going for a while in the late '80s.
Anybody else remember GEOS, the GUI for the Commedore 64? (A GUI that fits in 64k of RAM? Who woulda thunkit?) Or GeoWorks Ensemble, the short-lived GUI on the x86 platform that (at least on my 386/25 with 1mb of RAM) seriously outperformed Windows 3.1? That also worked on an 8086 and maybe even an 8088?
George Orwell wrote 1984 not as a commentary on the future, but a commentary on his times. The sad thing, from my perception, is that his work has continued to be viewed as "something that isn't happening yet" as opposed to "something that's happening right now, and we need to change it."
Does anybody else remember reading a bunch of articles in the year 1984 about how wrong "1984" had gotten things? Most of the arguments were against the exact manifestation of objects listed in "1984" not against the philosophy behind it...
As long as drivers are availible for Windows first, then other products later, the "lag" will lead to a general public perception that Linux is not as "well-supported" as Windows is - and they're right.
What we need is a public commitment by major companies to have Linux-ready drivers at the get-go. Preferrably open-source, but whatever tickles their whiskers... If they can't handle open-sourcing their drivers, then they can release binary only, and release specs on request for the hardware.
The constitution of the U.S. of A. gives you a legal way of making your voice heard - a vote. If you vote, and the election/law doesn't go the way you want, bitch all you want. Hell, you should hear me go on about I-695 or some of the other crap that goes on here in Washington state.
On the other hand, if you didn't vote, you didn't participate in the process, despite being offered a very straightforward way to participate. Therefore, you have no right to complain AT ALL.
Thanks, Bruce. This is pretty damn amazing, especially posting it to/. - I figure that your ftp site is going to be SWAMPED for the next few days.
Folks, this is the real solution to the problem - instead of whining about somebody not having some piece of information availible, find a way to make it availible, then let everybody know where to get it.
Sure, people made a lot of money by investing in M$. The problem is, they did it quite unethically. I was arguing on ethical grounds that it was wrong to invest in them. They thought that Bill Gates Could Do No Wrong.
THAT'S what I've got them over the barrel on. Unfortunately, they're going to start ribbing me about the passage of the Voter Suicide Act, er, I-695.
You know, every time I've gone to Thanksgiving, I get in a massive argument with my extended family over whether or not Microsoft is a good investment. They keep talking about how Microsoft "can do no wrong," and I keep talking about all the crap that they have pulled to stay on top of the pile.
I can't wait for Thanksgiving this year - the "I told you so" is going to be CLASSIC!
Slashdot Mirror
There is an internal electronic discussion forum at Microsoft called (IIRC) the Dead Borlanders Club, for ex-Borland employees.
THAT'S how many Borland employees ended up at MS.
...have been removed.
For example, look at that total failiure, the war on drugs. Billions of dollars spent on attempting to stem the flow of drugs into this country by ignoring the demand for them and just trying to shut down the supply.
I'm sure if I spent 15 minutes with a history book, I could come up with a ton of bad policies which were enacted, enforced, and never repealed, because some bureaucratic twit couldn't be bothered to admit he'd been wrong.
Gee, so the FCC wants to open up the few remaining radio frequencies to exploitation by anybody with the $$$ to pay off the feds. And where does that leave our quest for a better understanding of our universe?
IIRC, Iridium screwed up a bunch of radio spectrums popular amongst astronomers, and the upcoming Teledesic system is supposed to be even worse - I wonder what this plan is going to do...
Dude, have you actually PLAYED the Battlezone game that Activision put out? Admittedly, not many did, but it was actually a rather cool game. A lot of people have put it on their "Top ten games that nobody played" list... I spent quite a few hours with it. A nice twist on the FPS/RTS type games we've seen lately - and the graphics were quite nice as a bonus.
When 80% of the COOL games come out on Linux, THEN I'll switch over to Linux for my gaming OS.
(Actually, as it is, I'll switch to whatever OS runs the game best that I'm playing right now. I've been known to keep an NT partition around for the Quake series games...)
We can get all along. ^_^
I'm not one to extend a flamewar, so I'll take your olive branch, and hand one back of my own. Have a nice day!
#define RANT
What the hell kind of comment is THAT?
Just because Sci-fi isn't traditional literature, doesn't mean it can't be deep, or meaningful, or thought provoking, or interesting. I haven't read any of Tad's works other than Tailchaser's Song, but as somebody who reads a lot of Sci-Fi, as well as general philosophy and classical literature, I find your attitude demeaning and insulting.
It's opinions like yours that have caused such a slow acceptance of "Sci-Fi" into our general society. Remember that in it's time, "Frankenstein" and "The Island of Dr. Moreau" were the period's equivalent of Sci-Fi, and were pretty widely derided as "not being worth literature." Yet today, the "crap of yesteryear" are considered the classics of today. Who are you to judge a book down because it is "Sci-fi?"
Now, if Tad Williams isn't a deep author (and I cannot say whether or not he is admittedly) then blame it on the author, not the damn genre. And take your silly prejudices back to that half-assed English 101 class that you slept through.
Sheesh.
(Now, I'm going to go sentence myself to read "King, Warrior, Magician, Lover" ten times for blowing my top like that.)
...when did that happen?
I work at the US EPA Region 10 in downtown Seattle. Except for the fact that we're running Windows 95 (and there's been some rumormongering about a Linux thin client here pretty soon...) there isn't a single wide-deployed MS product around here.
We're using Wordperfect and Lotus Smartsuite for our office apps, Lotus Notes R5 (Gag! Choke! Urk!) for our groupware (Have you ever had to use Notes R5 for e-mail? It almost makes me want to use Outlook! It's THAT bad!) and Netscape 4.5 is our official browser. Oh, and we're using Novell for our network.
We do some spot licensing of MS products for people who are constantly getting MS-formatted documents, but for the most part, we're forced down to non-MS products - and thankfully so.
It's kind of an apples v.s. oranges thing.
MS beta = closed source = you can't see what they did differently
Corel beta = open source = you can see what they did differently = if you find a bug you can go fix it yourself and send the idea back to the developers!
You know, they used to be much more subtle in their maneuvering, basically when the competition was so inept that they couldn't find their own asses. Now that AMD finally has a winner (Athlon) and they're getting better than expected earnings (high expected was ~26 cents/share, turns out to be more like 46) Intel's starting to get desperate.
Despite the spread of the Athlon, VIA's bread and butter in the PC industry is still the P6/PPro/P2/Celeron/whatever it's called this week market. Intel is trying to strangle all the competitors out of this market - witness the copyrighted P6 bus preventing competitors from breaking into Intel's market...
...they had some fairly revolutionary stuff going for a while in the late '80s.
Anybody else remember GEOS, the GUI for the Commedore 64? (A GUI that fits in 64k of RAM? Who woulda thunkit?) Or GeoWorks Ensemble, the short-lived GUI on the x86 platform that (at least on my 386/25 with 1mb of RAM) seriously outperformed Windows 3.1? That also worked on an 8086 and maybe even an 8088?
It's what George Orwell would have written if he'd been smoking dope at the time he wrote 1984.
Even better yet...
It's about oppressive totalian governments, chasing one's dreams, getting lost in the paperwork, and tubing. Lots and lots of tubing.
George Orwell wrote 1984 not as a commentary on the future, but a commentary on his times. The sad thing, from my perception, is that his work has continued to be viewed as "something that isn't happening yet" as opposed to "something that's happening right now, and we need to change it."
Does anybody else remember reading a bunch of articles in the year 1984 about how wrong "1984" had gotten things? Most of the arguments were against the exact manifestation of objects listed in "1984" not against the philosophy behind it...
After all, what came BEFORE the big bang?
(Yes, I know this was a troll. But hopefully, some good will come out of this.)
Fundi-christians are not the only people of spiritual leaning - nor do they have a lock on the notion of God.
As long as drivers are availible for Windows first, then other products later, the "lag" will lead to a general public perception that Linux is not as "well-supported" as Windows is - and they're right.
What we need is a public commitment by major companies to have Linux-ready drivers at the get-go. Preferrably open-source, but whatever tickles their whiskers... If they can't handle open-sourcing their drivers, then they can release binary only, and release specs on request for the hardware.
...create a file named win.com in c:\windows. Doesn't even have to be any particular length...
Used to work with the original Win95 upgrade, don't know about Win98.
If Redhat turns around and buys LZW for $20m from Unisys, then Redhat is just justifying software patents, which are a Bad Idea.
...don't deserve the right to bitch.
The constitution of the U.S. of A. gives you a legal way of making your voice heard - a vote. If you vote, and the election/law doesn't go the way you want, bitch all you want. Hell, you should hear me go on about I-695 or some of the other crap that goes on here in Washington state.
On the other hand, if you didn't vote, you didn't participate in the process, despite being offered a very straightforward way to participate. Therefore, you have no right to complain AT ALL.
Thanks, Bruce. This is pretty damn amazing, especially posting it to /. - I figure that your ftp site is going to be SWAMPED for the next few days.
Folks, this is the real solution to the problem - instead of whining about somebody not having some piece of information availible, find a way to make it availible, then let everybody know where to get it.
He probably overclocked it using a 75mhz system bus.
Damn, and I thought that they both were just malted battery acid.
Tony Blair is Hitler.
Pheet! Godwin's law, 15 yard penalty! (Can I call Godwin on myself?)
Sorry about this, just feeling mildly silly today.
Sure, people made a lot of money by investing in M$. The problem is, they did it quite unethically. I was arguing on ethical grounds that it was wrong to invest in them. They thought that Bill Gates Could Do No Wrong.
THAT'S what I've got them over the barrel on. Unfortunately, they're going to start ribbing me about the passage of the Voter Suicide Act, er, I-695.
Bleah.
You know, every time I've gone to Thanksgiving, I get in a massive argument with my extended family over whether or not Microsoft is a good investment. They keep talking about how Microsoft "can do no wrong," and I keep talking about all the crap that they have pulled to stay on top of the pile.
I can't wait for Thanksgiving this year - the "I told you so" is going to be CLASSIC!
http://www.iinet.net.au/~bofh/
I think it has most of them. Do it, do it now!