I've heard some users of free ISPs report that their connections can be flaky, and the phone lines are often busy. It seems that some free ISPs are becoming victims of their own success. Can anyone here who uses a free ISP confirm or deny these reports? Quite what MSN's service will be like now is anyone's guess; they were flaky enough before going free...
By contrast, U-Net, the subscription-funded ISP that I have an account with, has very few problems; I connect first time nearly every time I dial, and I get fast transfer rates (connects are typically 52kbps using a V90 modem and a cable phone line).
I hope I made a point here without making anyone's head explode from bad acronyms.
You didn't make my head explode, but you did make my bottom fall off as a result of excessive laughter. "SCOGNUX" is such a brilliant name that Linux needs to be renamed right this instant:-)
Because of the $300-per-day limit your bank undoubtedly has on ATM withdrawals, the mugger must now appear on security video at multiple ATM locations over several days holding a severed eyeball, or the whole endeavor is only mildly profitable given the risk.
ROTFLMAO!
(sorry about the zero-content posting, but I had to congratulate djw for providing me with the funniest mental image I've had all day. Cheers djw:-)
The number of passwords that a busy Net user (like me) has to remember is getting silly. I have a system for passwords which works most of the time, but I'd much rather get rid of the silly things.
What we need, and which may well happen within a few years, is a system like this for the desktop. It might work something like this: you'd run an iris scan server on each machine on the network. When authenication is required, the remote host connects to your iris scan server which gets the little camera mounted on your monitor to ID you using your iris pattern and send the data back just like a password.
Re:Licenses, Capitalism and Communism
on
BSD vs GPL
·
· Score: 1
So people say the Gnu GPL is communist. . . . SO WHAT?!?! Is that really all that bad? Is it so bad to desire equality of results for all, and a community where people only take what they need and give what they can? I don't think that's really a bad thing, and if you really think communism is all that bad (I talking about political theory here), then you've been brainwashed by the capitalist world we live in.
I've been thinking the same thing since I studied sociology at school. I personally like a lot of communist philosophy. The thought of an entire society cooperating instead of constantly screwing each other over for fun and profit has always seemed appealing.
What I disagree with is what happened in the former Soviet Union, where a dictatorial government was installed under the guise of communism. I don't believe you can have a "communist dictatorship". It's a contradiction in terms. It seems to me that a true communist state would be more like an anarchy; there'd be no controlling government as such, because the people would "rule" themselves as a community.
Unfortunately, it ain't going to happen. Every single one of us is subject to human nature, which is inherently selfish. Whether we admit it or not, we all secretly harbour a desire for power and a bit of oneupmanship. This selfishness would destroy a true communist state before it got off the ground.
/me puts on his asbestos trousers and waits for the torrent of flamage...
I think we need to see an objective comparison between the two licenses. Free Software Foundation texts which compare the GPL to other licenses are always written from the FSF's point of view, and their hardline politics comes through in their articles. This article suffers from the same problem, just from the opposite angle. For example, here is a quote from the final section of the article, in which the author expresses his opinions on various licensing issues:
It is my opinion that the General Public License is not so much about ``keeping free software free'' as it is about forcing us to accept the extreme Communistic political philosophy of Richard Stallman and others at the Free Software Foundation. The very spirit of the GPL is to attack the very concept of Capitalism and individualism.
This quote seems to me as loaded as the pro-GPL, anti-everthing-else texts published by the FSF.
It seems to me that any article on licensing is going to have some political, ideological aspect to it. We're all human, we all have opinions, and our opinions are guaranteed to show in what we write, to a greater or lesser extent. However, I think it is possible to write a reasonably objective article which doesn't descend into attacking another's ideology.
I wonder if we'll start seeing more of this sort of thing. Let's say some random country, which we'll call Foonia, has been doing stuff that a few heavyweight Western nations disagree with. These nations can sever their IP connections to Foonia, or refuse to accept incoming Foonian traffic. In effect, you've implemented an information embargo on this country. In the future, this could be as devastating as a "normal" trade embargo.
There's a difference between a "techincal news" site, and a site which publishes articles which technical people are likely to enjoy. Slashdot is the latter. I, for one, enjoy the coverage of diverse topics such as Quake 3, Star Wars, MP3 distribution and Linux kernels. I don't find every article to be of interest, but that's okay; I just don't read them. They are guaranteed to be of interest to others.
Treat Slashdot as an eclectic medley of all things nerdy, not as a purely technical site.
Try The Register. It's a news site only (i.e. readers can't post comments). Its style is a bit "tabloid" and thoroughly biased (anti-MS, anti-Intel), but you can pick up some useful snippets of information.
I tell you what would be really sweet: a next generation Game Boy-type system based on the PPC. Then you could run Linux on your Game Boy:-)
This might not be at all possble, as I suspect that the PPC needs quite a bit of power. StrongARM would be a reasonable substitute. Ya, that would be cute - a StrongARM-powered Game Boy-a-like running Linux:-)
Maybe he's looked into it, found Linux to be a refreshing alternative to the oversized, slow MS Windows, and has been so impressed that he's decided to design a machine?
You might be right, of course. My Sinclair-tinted glasses are undoubtedly colouring my judgement. However, it's really not fair to assume he's "just jumping on the bandwagon". Give the guy a chance:-)
But seriously, according to the article it says it'll be two years before the machine is to market. I don't see why it would take that long, there are plenty of good options for a cheap PC right now. You can throw together an AMD based machine which would be quite nice for next to nothing.
Sir Clive is, first and foremost, an innovator. He's also known to dislike the current Inteloid architecture; I reckon he'd prefer something much slimmer and more efficient.
I wonder if they're actually planning on designing their own motherboard rather than OEM'ing something.
Almost certainly. They'll use a "non-standard" (standard being x86-compat) processor as well. ARM maybe?
The guy who introduced the UK to personal computing is going to make a Linux box? I'll buy one:-)
Note to Sinclair fans: in my final year at university, I wrote an essay about Sinclair computers as part of my History of Computing course. It's on the Web at http://www.nysa.u-net.com/essay.html. The ending's a bit rubbish, 'coz I exceeded my word count, but you might want to give it a read anyway (shameless plug mode off).
In Europe (Also known as Utopia;-)) there aren't really any sports in school.
You Scandinavians are very fortunate. Sport in school is mandatory in the UK. My school, fortunately, gave the older kids the opportunity to opt out. I used the time to get my homework done so I could have the evening free to do geek stuff. Before I was old enough to opt out, I had to play sports with the other kids, and a very humiliating four years it was, too.
I have since learned that my old school has abolished the sports opt-out for the top three years. Sigh.
So, from my experience (and that's an important point), I'd say the problems that have been described here, seem to be much worse in America, than they are in the UK, though I'm pretty sure there's some bad schools in the UK.
My experiences in an English school weren't very good. I agree that the problem is worse in America; I think that this is probably due to the "if you don't succeed then you are nothing" attitude which seems to plague the USA.
My class at school had a few kids who were seen as the really popular kids. A lot of other kids hung around with them and went along with what they did and said. Some kids, like me, refused, and we got singled out for verbal abuse. I never got physically attacked, thank goodness, though some did.
Of all the "outcasts" in my class, I got some of the worst verbal abuse, because I had nothing in common with the "in crowd". I wouldn't go out underage drinking with them. I wouldn't use bad language. I was the only member of my class with any firm religious convictions. I studied hard. I was utterly useless at sport, and took no interest in soccer or cricket. Basically, I stuck out like a sore thumb, and was an obvious target for vicimization. At lunchtimes, I hung around in the computer room with the other nerds. On the occasions that I hung around in my classroom with the other kids, I just got constant verbal abuse.
The problem isn't confined to American schools. People who are different suffer, no matter where you are. Sigh.
PS: I was at Spalding Grammar School from September 1988 to June 1995. I was in house Wykeham. If any of my tormentors are reading this, I'd like you to know that I have been irrecovably changed by what you put me through. The scars haven't healed. I hope you're proud of yourselves.
I wonder how long it'll be before someone borrows bits of this for an X11 window manager, complete with buzzy bee mouse pointer instead of X11's stopwatch, and bombs on the screen when something segfaults.
Mind you, it's probably been done. I wouldn't be surprised if there are GEM themes for Enlightenment, Gnome and KDE out there.
Why didn't ESR mention Debian as a distribution that companies can run?
Because corporations like to buy products from other corporations, so there's somebody to sue for lots of dollars if something goes wrong. As you said, ESR's comment was aimed at companies, and I think he was talking from that perspective.
...Because it couldn't be that high school inherently alienates teenagers when they need the most nurturing, and it certainly couldn't be that maybe they had a lousy homelife and that's why they didn't know that mass murder is not the way to solve problems.
I totally agree with your comment about school. I was verbally abused by my classmates for about two and a half years at school, for various reasons. My experiences of school lead me to believe that the only way to avoid such treatment is:
Be good at sport;
Follow the crowd like some kind of sheep;
Never, ever behave differently in any way from the popular kids.
I heard news reports in which the reporters were saying things like "no-one has any idea why these kids did what they did". I have a suggestion. I suspect it's because they were psychologically unstable - for whatever reason - and years of verbal abuse at school pushed them over the edge.
The iMac take on the Apple logo (one colour, and kinda jelly-like) looks better to me than the old, multi-coloured one. Multi-coloured logos were used a lot by computer manufacturers in the early 1980s; I guess it was to say "look at me, I can do colour and the other 8-bitters can't!" I think Apple should drop the multi-coloured logo and go with the jelly one full-time.
The old "tubular cube" logo is way better than the new one. Looks kinda like something Mike Oldfield would put on a record sleeve. The new logo is, well, ordinary.
If Sun ever change their logo then the computing industry will be all out of cool logos, unless Debian settle on option 4:-)
Genetically modified food
on
Gene Leakage
·
· Score: 2
Someone should develope open source plants.
Cool! You could buy a packet of seeds (the binary form) and get a breakdown of the gene sequence with it (the source form).
You'd have to be careful with licenses, though. Someone might produce a kind of cabbage and license it using a BSD-style license, so derived cabbages could be made proprietary. If I crossed this with a GPLed carrot gene sequence and made a spiffy new vegetable, we'd have license incompatibility wars starting all over again.
hysterical environmentalists
on
Gene Leakage
·
· Score: 2
Let the environmentalist run things and then you'll have huge environmental catastrophies.
The environmentalists are yet another breed of poeple who try to leverage on emotional FUD to gain power and undermine the society.
The nazis did that with the german resentment against the WWI defeat and economic crisis, and wanted a 1000 years empire. They destroyed their own country and it took half a century for Germany to have again some influence in international affairs.
I don't know if the UK's game ratings are mandated by law or are voluntary, but violent games get 15 or 18 ratings in this country, just as movies with "adult" content do. My copy of Doom came with a 15 sticker on it which looks almost identical to the stickers on videos rated 15.
I personally find Doom's violence orders of magnitiude less offensive than the content of a lot of 15-rated movies. Doom just seems so obviously "pretend" to me. This will not be the case with newer, more realistic games, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard some users of free ISPs report that their connections can be flaky, and the phone lines are often busy. It seems that some free ISPs are becoming victims of their own success. Can anyone here who uses a free ISP confirm or deny these reports? Quite what MSN's service will be like now is anyone's guess; they were flaky enough before going free...
By contrast, U-Net, the subscription-funded ISP that I have an account with, has very few problems; I connect first time nearly every time I dial, and I get fast transfer rates (connects are typically 52kbps using a V90 modem and a cable phone line).
You didn't make my head explode, but you did make my bottom fall off as a result of excessive laughter. "SCOGNUX" is such a brilliant name that Linux needs to be renamed right this instant :-)
ROTFLMAO!
(sorry about the zero-content posting, but I had to congratulate djw for providing me with the funniest mental image I've had all day. Cheers djw :-)
The number of passwords that a busy Net user (like me) has to remember is getting silly. I have a system for passwords which works most of the time, but I'd much rather get rid of the silly things.
What we need, and which may well happen within a few years, is a system like this for the desktop. It might work something like this: you'd run an iris scan server on each machine on the network. When authenication is required, the remote host connects to your iris scan server which gets the little camera mounted on your monitor to ID you using your iris pattern and send the data back just like a password.
I've been thinking the same thing since I studied sociology at school. I personally like a lot of communist philosophy. The thought of an entire society cooperating instead of constantly screwing each other over for fun and profit has always seemed appealing.
What I disagree with is what happened in the former Soviet Union, where a dictatorial government was installed under the guise of communism. I don't believe you can have a "communist dictatorship". It's a contradiction in terms. It seems to me that a true communist state would be more like an anarchy; there'd be no controlling government as such, because the people would "rule" themselves as a community.
Unfortunately, it ain't going to happen. Every single one of us is subject to human nature, which is inherently selfish. Whether we admit it or not, we all secretly harbour a desire for power and a bit of oneupmanship. This selfishness would destroy a true communist state before it got off the ground.
/me puts on his asbestos trousers and waits for the torrent of flamage...
I think we need to see an objective comparison between the two licenses. Free Software Foundation texts which compare the GPL to other licenses are always written from the FSF's point of view, and their hardline politics comes through in their articles. This article suffers from the same problem, just from the opposite angle. For example, here is a quote from the final section of the article, in which the author expresses his opinions on various licensing issues:
This quote seems to me as loaded as the pro-GPL, anti-everthing-else texts published by the FSF.
It seems to me that any article on licensing is going to have some political, ideological aspect to it. We're all human, we all have opinions, and our opinions are guaranteed to show in what we write, to a greater or lesser extent. However, I think it is possible to write a reasonably objective article which doesn't descend into attacking another's ideology.
I wonder if we'll start seeing more of this sort of thing. Let's say some random country, which we'll call Foonia, has been doing stuff that a few heavyweight Western nations disagree with. These nations can sever their IP connections to Foonia, or refuse to accept incoming Foonian traffic. In effect, you've implemented an information embargo on this country. In the future, this could be as devastating as a "normal" trade embargo.
There's a difference between a "techincal news" site, and a site which publishes articles which technical people are likely to enjoy. Slashdot is the latter. I, for one, enjoy the coverage of diverse topics such as Quake 3, Star Wars, MP3 distribution and Linux kernels. I don't find every article to be of interest, but that's okay; I just don't read them. They are guaranteed to be of interest to others.
Treat Slashdot as an eclectic medley of all things nerdy, not as a purely technical site.
Try The Register. It's a news site only (i.e. readers can't post comments). Its style is a bit "tabloid" and thoroughly biased (anti-MS, anti-Intel), but you can pick up some useful snippets of information.
I tell you what would be really sweet: a next generation Game Boy-type system based on the PPC. Then you could run Linux on your Game Boy :-)
This might not be at all possble, as I suspect that the PPC needs quite a bit of power. StrongARM would be a reasonable substitute. Ya, that would be cute - a StrongARM-powered Game Boy-a-like running Linux :-)
Maybe he's looked into it, found Linux to be a refreshing alternative to the oversized, slow MS Windows, and has been so impressed that he's decided to design a machine?
You might be right, of course. My Sinclair-tinted glasses are undoubtedly colouring my judgement. However, it's really not fair to assume he's "just jumping on the bandwagon". Give the guy a chance :-)
Sir Clive is, first and foremost, an innovator. He's also known to dislike the current Inteloid architecture; I reckon he'd prefer something much slimmer and more efficient.
Almost certainly. They'll use a "non-standard" (standard being x86-compat) processor as well. ARM maybe?
The guy who introduced the UK to personal computing is going to make a Linux box? I'll buy one :-)
Note to Sinclair fans: in my final year at university, I wrote an essay about Sinclair computers as part of my History of Computing course. It's on the Web at http://www.nysa.u-net.com/essay.html. The ending's a bit rubbish, 'coz I exceeded my word count, but you might want to give it a read anyway (shameless plug mode off).
You Scandinavians are very fortunate. Sport in school is mandatory in the UK. My school, fortunately, gave the older kids the opportunity to opt out. I used the time to get my homework done so I could have the evening free to do geek stuff. Before I was old enough to opt out, I had to play sports with the other kids, and a very humiliating four years it was, too.
I have since learned that my old school has abolished the sports opt-out for the top three years. Sigh.
My experiences in an English school weren't very good. I agree that the problem is worse in America; I think that this is probably due to the "if you don't succeed then you are nothing" attitude which seems to plague the USA.
My class at school had a few kids who were seen as the really popular kids. A lot of other kids hung around with them and went along with what they did and said. Some kids, like me, refused, and we got singled out for verbal abuse. I never got physically attacked, thank goodness, though some did.
Of all the "outcasts" in my class, I got some of the worst verbal abuse, because I had nothing in common with the "in crowd". I wouldn't go out underage drinking with them. I wouldn't use bad language. I was the only member of my class with any firm religious convictions. I studied hard. I was utterly useless at sport, and took no interest in soccer or cricket. Basically, I stuck out like a sore thumb, and was an obvious target for vicimization. At lunchtimes, I hung around in the computer room with the other nerds. On the occasions that I hung around in my classroom with the other kids, I just got constant verbal abuse.
The problem isn't confined to American schools. People who are different suffer, no matter where you are. Sigh.
PS: I was at Spalding Grammar School from September 1988 to June 1995. I was in house Wykeham. If any of my tormentors are reading this, I'd like you to know that I have been irrecovably changed by what you put me through. The scars haven't healed. I hope you're proud of yourselves.
I wonder how long it'll be before someone borrows bits of this for an X11 window manager, complete with buzzy bee mouse pointer instead of X11's stopwatch, and bombs on the screen when something segfaults.
Mind you, it's probably been done. I wouldn't be surprised if there are GEM themes for Enlightenment, Gnome and KDE out there.
Because corporations like to buy products from other corporations, so there's somebody to sue for lots of dollars if something goes wrong. As you said, ESR's comment was aimed at companies, and I think he was talking from that perspective.
I totally agree with your comment about school. I was verbally abused by my classmates for about two and a half years at school, for various reasons. My experiences of school lead me to believe that the only way to avoid such treatment is:
I heard news reports in which the reporters were saying things like "no-one has any idea why these kids did what they did". I have a suggestion. I suspect it's because they were psychologically unstable - for whatever reason - and years of verbal abuse at school pushed them over the edge.
I bet they won't listen to you unless you own large quantities of SGI stock.
The iMac take on the Apple logo (one colour, and kinda jelly-like) looks better to me than the old, multi-coloured one. Multi-coloured logos were used a lot by computer manufacturers in the early 1980s; I guess it was to say "look at me, I can do colour and the other 8-bitters can't!" I think Apple should drop the multi-coloured logo and go with the jelly one full-time.
The old "tubular cube" logo is way better than the new one. Looks kinda like something Mike Oldfield would put on a record sleeve. The new logo is, well, ordinary.
If Sun ever change their logo then the computing industry will be all out of cool logos, unless Debian settle on option 4 :-)
Cool! You could buy a packet of seeds (the binary form) and get a breakdown of the gene sequence with it (the source form).
You'd have to be careful with licenses, though. Someone might produce a kind of cabbage and license it using a BSD-style license, so derived cabbages could be made proprietary. If I crossed this with a GPLed carrot gene sequence and made a spiffy new vegetable, we'd have license incompatibility wars starting all over again.
Bzzzt! Godwin's Law invoked. You lose.
Why do AOL want to be domain name registrars? when metoo.com is already taken.
I don't know if the UK's game ratings are mandated by law or are voluntary, but violent games get 15 or 18 ratings in this country, just as movies with "adult" content do. My copy of Doom came with a 15 sticker on it which looks almost identical to the stickers on videos rated 15.
I personally find Doom's violence orders of magnitiude less offensive than the content of a lot of 15-rated movies. Doom just seems so obviously "pretend" to me. This will not be the case with newer, more realistic games, of course.