From what I gather, this movie is about a Gates/Jobs/Ellison type that is trying to take overe the world via corruption and murder. Why then, use Gnome in all of the screen shots? Shouldn't the hackers in the movie be using Gnome and KDE and all the heavies using Windows or Mac0SX?
FCC Bigwig A: Hmmm... we haven't yet worked enough rules in to make sure that only large business and corporations can get access to the 3G specturm.
FCC Bigwig B: That's a problem! I know, we can do what they did with the internet and create a 'Non-profit Coporation to do our dirty work for us!
Bigwig A: We'll call it 'Gigahurts Solutions'. What's better about having it privatized is that in disputes between corporations and individuals, the corporations will come out on top because they have more money to grease palms with!
Bigwig B: Speaking of which, how's new your 'complimentary' summer home in the keys?
Bigwig A: Almost completed! How about your kids' 'scholarships' to Yale and Harvard.
Bigwig B: Billy's grades aren't that great, but I can just make another 'donation' to take care of that!
Typically in the USA, the same people who want to play non-Region 1 DVDs are the same people who will buy a DVD plager with no copy protection, or a techinically literate enough to altar their own DVD player with one of the well-known hacks. The way I understand it, even the later model Apex 600a's with the 'backdoor' menu removed from the code can be hacked with only the aid of a downloaded rom and a cd burner.
While DeCSS and an array of other, semi-legal gadgest pretty much eliminated the need for chipping in Region 1 DVD players, I understand the practice was *quite* common in Region 2 DVD players and elsewhere. A quick search of Usenet or the web reveals no end of techical information for users who want to do it themselves and quite a few services who *claim* to do it for you if you're not of a mechanical bent.
One can only assume that this will become common practice with copy-protected HDTV equipment such as VCRS and other recording devices. Simply put, the market for chipping, copy-protection-defeat features has already grown so large that a break like HDTV will make Chippers into a real, competitive, albeit black-market, industry that is concerned with its customer's happiness and satisfaction.
...is not something that can be ignored when trying to get one's grandma to install linux or another OSOS.
Remember that one of the points that Apple is selling more than anything else about OSX is its graphical 'beauty' (something like that at any rate.) Steve and Apple marketing truly expect that the graphical theme they've layered on top of their GUI and *nix OS will draw users. When I worked on a Mac at a certain design firm, one of the most used applications was Kaleidoscope. (If you didn't know, it's a set of extensions that allows for complete skinning of the Mac0S.) Windows 'Themes' were so important that Microsoft took them out of the 'Plus' packs and put them into the Main OS install for both Win9x and 200x. While themes are available for some of the different X GUI's, *compelete* one button customization is just not there yet. While it doesn't add any real usability, this will be a major step towards getting more mainline acceptance (and mainline apps) for Linux or any other OSOS
Despite the fact that I usually maintain a *very* liberal bent, one of the things I *won't* miss about a democratic presidency/legislative majority is the fact that the dems have very, very rough on publicly funded science and space exploration.
While this can be good, in the fact that it makes scientists look for better, cheaper ways to do things, as in the various relatively inexpensive space probes we've been launching, it's murder on the sheer amount of real innovation and scientific advance. The only science that has gotten anywhere in the last 10 years has been bio-tech, and this is because profit is close at hand for the corporate world.
If you don't think this is the case, just ask any of the physicists who used to live in Texas. When Clinton was elected.. *BAMF*... there went the SSC.
From a purely nerd-boy point of view, It's nice to see big money being spent, even on a personal, wasteful basis, on space, when so little has gone into it over the last few years. Hopefully it will inspire more public and government confidence in space exploration.
Remember that early exploration of the Americas was costly in terms of money and human life, but without those early pioneers who knew that money was not coming easy or soon, we wouldn't have the industrial powerhouses of the western hemisphere cranking out computer hardware and cheap internet access today.
The aliens did not use english measurements. The first monolith on Earth stood (at least as displayed in the movie) about twice as tall as the austrolapithicines that it altered. The second monolith (TMA 1) appears to stand between 10 and 20 feet.
TMA 2, its big brother in orbit around Jupiter (On the surface of Titan in the novel) measured over 2 kilometers.
All monoliths are but reflections of a grander design and one monolith, since they are self-replicating, can give birth to more. The dimensions 1 x 4 x 9 are just that, proportions.
As a technicly oriented non-coded who uses a variety of platforms, I understand that of the biggest problems people have faced when designing non-Apple OS's for Apple hardware is the existance of Apple's proprietary boot-roms and in-processor features. As I understand it, these features have all but destroyed BeOS's chances on the Mac. What challenges from this sort of 'hardware control' does LinuxPPC overcome, if any?
Well, they'd have to do massive surveillance if they wanted to catch you viewing pr0n, but most of the other things are pretty easy to detect at the firewall level. Even if you have firewalled your own machine, you have to leave ports open if you want to run web/ftp/game servers of any kind.
Essentially what they're saying here is that they don't want to be in the business of actually selling bandwidth. That's why you get 300+kbytes/sec down and only about 15kbytes/sec upload. They don't want you to have any more 'pipe' than they can get away with, even though it doesn't really cost them (the big guys who actually own the infrastructure) any more. This is because if you actually could buy cheap bandwidth like this, it would mean that all their overpriced 'hosting' and 'broadband' solutions would look like what they really are: Big Stinking Piles of Customer Service.
I'm rather torped that the 2.4 kernel was classified as 'vaporware' in Wired Mag's 2000 vaporware winners. It would be different if hundreds, if not thousands were actually using the test versions. They also applied this same logic to Mac OS X despite the fact that there are similiar numbers using the public beta.
If you target your job niche correctly and can, you get all the perks, bennies and *pay* of system administration jobs, and very few of the headaches as a dedicated 'webmaster'. I'm the only member of the networking staff at my company who's *not* required to be on call once a week. ^_^
According to the Pliant Documentation, the creator wants to use his project to turn everyone into programmers so that they'll support FSF ideals.
This logic is a little twisted for me, but okay...
The simple fact of the matter is that programmers aren't the only technically comptent people who use computers. The idea that *everyone* should *have* to program all the time to fit into this guy's rather skewed world view is ridiculous! Take myself for example: I'm a graphical artist. Like many/. readers, I make webpages for a libing. While I *occasionally* crank out some PHP or some Javascript, the vast majority of my 'technical expertise' lies in the areas of understanding the intricacies of dozens of art, paint and drawing programs. I know what minor differences HTML code will display in certain browsers. I can administer Apache, IIS, and a slew of other web servers. I'm competent to install and administer any number of server OS's. I'm even competent enough to make choices between certain operating systems for certain tasks and requirements.
I understand the basics of how machine languages work on different processors and why programming languages behave as they do, *but* If I had to *once* sit down and crank out an application in Java or C, I would be lost. I don't have *time* to hack. I'm busy with the rest of my highly technical job.
The idea that you have to be a programmer to be technically competent is ludicrous, but one all too many hackers view as sacrosanct. Give it up, geeks.
Seven Comments, and this site is already Slashdotted to the point of non-functionality. While this code is in beta, it brings about the point of server overhead.
Is this going to be like any of the various servlet engine that can bring a good, hard server to its knees? Is it going to eat all my RAM and CPU cycles like a pothead at TacoBell?
This *looks* like a damn neat thingy, but I'm scared to run it now.
While a loss like this certainly delivers a nice, firm kick in the balls to the the image of space travel and exploration, its damn nice to see that governments and space agencies are making their mistakes with machines instead of live subjects.
I mean, the claim made by the reporter is a pretty fair generalization. It looks like the other two 'OS's mentioned in the rebuttal are so specialized they're more like proprietary firmware.
A significant bonus to 'online schooling is the fact that it could be used by and for people who otherwise would slip through the cracks. This includes children of people who are 'homeless' either in a real sense, or just have to move from city to city due to legal problems. Children of divorced parents who have 'joint custody' in different cities are a good example. Foster children are another. A consistent online 'classroom' to learn in could be an island of stability and growth for them in an otherwise harsh world.
Another section of the population to consider are the children of migrant workers. Many are ignored by uncaring, understaffed or simply prejudiced school districts. Even if they had to go from public library to public libary to access their 'homeroom', it would still be heads and above any other kind of education they manage to eek out.
This argument is pretty much invalid. A 'link' in and of itself is not content. It is the same thing as publishing a phone number or printing an address.
All political crap aside, the web was built around the idea of 'free information exchange'. Thus, hyperlinks have no built in controls. (And I'll personally beat the ass of the first person who suggests a new type of link). Perhaps people who want to charge for their web content should do it in a semi-private place, such as AOL's user-only pages.
Now wouldn't that be incredibly cool? If all the big-time corporations took their petty little squabbles over intellectual property and 'web-patents', etc... to reside soley on AOL and MSN, it would leave the 'real' web free for the rest of us who care about personal freedoms and the exchange of information.
>obligitory "we're all impressed with how much
>money you spent on a digital camera and the fact
And there I thought that giving a little personal 'cooboration' to a statement of fact was good prosaic form. 0_o;
Sadly, it appears that/. is indeed filled with young geeks with nothing better to do than troll. Okay, I'll bite.
While I tend to disagree with the guy, the post previous to this has some very good points, which the theorist expands on.
Unfortuneately, scientists have *never* like to have their view of the universe questioned. Even if this guy is right, Hawking and the rest of the Black Hole Team (members who are still alive) will passionately fight to the death to prove him
wrong, 'cause, if he's right it will mean *they* were wrong.
They can no doub sell this as 10000 dpi, but if you use 100 pixels in order to create any other 'real' pixel on the map, you go back down to 100dpi (Windows uses (logical) 96, Mac uses 72)
If you do address every single pixel, you've got to do some funky time-shifting things to control pixel intensity, or you've got to create an in-monitor dithering solution to get 24/32 bit equivalencies.
If 'the industry' isn't willing to give the encryption keys necessary to decode DeCSS to Open Source programmers so that they can decode data protected on a DVD, then they *sure* as hell aren't going to give the keys for this kind of 'protection' to OS hackers so that they can build support for them in their kernels and programs. If they did, another Jon Johansen would just build a DePHD program or device driver to rip hard drives.
This will happen anyway once the 'encryption' is broken, but 'Industry Standard' harddrives won't thrive when there is a market for 'non-standard' and older harddrives. I can get a 20g 7200 Western Dig for about $120. I better stock up and get a few IDE controllers.
The pixels can be be only one of 4 states? Let's do the math: 2^4 = 16 color display. You need to have brightness control on the pixels before you can get into 32 bit color (or 64 bit for those lucky female tetrachromats out there)
Slashdot Mirror
From what I gather, this movie is about a Gates/Jobs/Ellison type that is trying to take overe the world via corruption and murder. Why then, use Gnome in all of the screen shots? Shouldn't the hackers in the movie be using Gnome and KDE and all the heavies using Windows or Mac0SX?
FCC Bigwig A: Hmmm... we haven't yet worked enough rules in to make sure that only large business and corporations can get access to the 3G specturm.
FCC Bigwig B: That's a problem! I know, we can do what they did with the internet and create a 'Non-profit Coporation to do our dirty work for us!
Bigwig A: We'll call it 'Gigahurts Solutions'. What's better about having it privatized is that in disputes between corporations and individuals, the corporations will come out on top because they have more money to grease palms with!
Bigwig B: Speaking of which, how's new your 'complimentary' summer home in the keys?
Bigwig A: Almost completed! How about your kids' 'scholarships' to Yale and Harvard.
Bigwig B: Billy's grades aren't that great, but I can just make another 'donation' to take care of that!
Typically in the USA, the same people who want to play non-Region 1 DVDs are the same people who will buy a DVD plager with no copy protection, or a techinically literate enough to altar their own DVD player with one of the well-known hacks. The way I understand it, even the later model Apex 600a's with the 'backdoor' menu removed from the code can be hacked with only the aid of a downloaded rom and a cd burner.
While DeCSS and an array of other, semi-legal gadgest pretty much eliminated the need for chipping in Region 1 DVD players, I understand the practice was *quite* common in Region 2 DVD players and elsewhere. A quick search of Usenet or the web reveals no end of techical information for users who want to do it themselves and quite a few services who *claim* to do it for you if you're not of a mechanical bent.
One can only assume that this will become common practice with copy-protected HDTV equipment such as VCRS and other recording devices. Simply put, the market for chipping, copy-protection-defeat features has already grown so large that a break like HDTV will make Chippers into a real, competitive, albeit black-market, industry that is concerned with its customer's happiness and satisfaction.
...is not something that can be ignored when trying to get one's grandma to install linux or another OSOS.
Remember that one of the points that Apple is selling more than anything else about OSX is its graphical 'beauty' (something like that at any rate.) Steve and Apple marketing truly expect that the graphical theme they've layered on top of their GUI and *nix OS will draw users. When I worked on a Mac at a certain design firm, one of the most used applications was Kaleidoscope. (If you didn't know, it's a set of extensions that allows for complete skinning of the Mac0S.) Windows 'Themes' were so important that Microsoft took them out of the 'Plus' packs and put them into the Main OS install for both Win9x and 200x. While themes are available for some of the different X GUI's, *compelete* one button customization is just not there yet. While it doesn't add any real usability, this will be a major step towards getting more mainline acceptance (and mainline apps) for Linux or any other OSOS
Despite the fact that I usually maintain a *very* liberal bent, one of the things I *won't* miss about a democratic presidency/legislative majority is the fact that the dems have very, very rough on publicly funded science and space exploration.
While this can be good, in the fact that it makes scientists look for better, cheaper ways to do things, as in the various relatively inexpensive space probes we've been launching, it's murder on the sheer amount of real innovation and scientific advance. The only science that has gotten anywhere in the last 10 years has been bio-tech, and this is because profit is close at hand for the corporate world.
If you don't think this is the case, just ask any of the physicists who used to live in Texas. When Clinton was elected.. *BAMF*... there went the SSC.
From a purely nerd-boy point of view, It's nice to see big money being spent, even on a personal, wasteful basis, on space, when so little has gone into it over the last few years. Hopefully it will inspire more public and government confidence in space exploration.
Remember that early exploration of the Americas was costly in terms of money and human life, but without those early pioneers who knew that money was not coming easy or soon, we wouldn't have the industrial powerhouses of the western hemisphere cranking out computer hardware and cheap internet access today.
The aliens did not use english measurements. The first monolith on Earth stood (at least as displayed in the movie) about twice as tall as the austrolapithicines that it altered. The second monolith (TMA 1) appears to stand between 10 and 20 feet.
TMA 2, its big brother in orbit around Jupiter (On the surface of Titan in the novel) measured over 2 kilometers.
All monoliths are but reflections of a grander design and one monolith, since they are self-replicating, can give birth to more. The dimensions 1 x 4 x 9 are just that, proportions.
As a technicly oriented non-coded who uses a variety of platforms, I understand that of the biggest problems people have faced when designing non-Apple OS's for Apple hardware is the existance of Apple's proprietary boot-roms and in-processor features. As I understand it, these features have all but destroyed BeOS's chances on the Mac. What challenges from this sort of 'hardware control' does LinuxPPC overcome, if any?
Well, they'd have to do massive surveillance if they wanted to catch you viewing pr0n, but most of the other things are pretty easy to detect at the firewall level. Even if you have firewalled your own machine, you have to leave ports open if you want to run web/ftp/game servers of any kind.
Essentially what they're saying here is that they don't want to be in the business of actually selling bandwidth. That's why you get 300+kbytes/sec down and only about 15kbytes/sec upload. They don't want you to have any more 'pipe' than they can get away with, even though it doesn't really cost them (the big guys who actually own the infrastructure) any more. This is because if you actually could buy cheap bandwidth like this, it would mean that all their overpriced 'hosting' and 'broadband' solutions would look like what they really are: Big Stinking Piles of Customer Service.
I'm rather torped that the 2.4 kernel was classified as 'vaporware' in Wired Mag's 2000 vaporware winners. It would be different if hundreds, if not thousands were actually using the test versions. They also applied this same logic to Mac OS X despite the fact that there are similiar numbers using the public beta.
If you target your job niche correctly and can, you get all the perks, bennies and *pay* of system administration jobs, and very few of the headaches as a dedicated 'webmaster'. I'm the only member of the networking staff at my company who's *not* required to be on call once a week. ^_^
The first rule of web design is plagarism. I would be *flattered* if you ripped off my designs! ^_^ Feel free:
http://www.coredata.net
http://www.furinkan.net
http://www.harringtoncc.org/ (This one's a little out of date. They may have changed it a little, but the original design is mine.)
http://www.kennethwyatt.com - The art is Mr. Wyatt's, the site design is mine.
According to the Pliant Documentation, the creator wants to use his project to turn everyone into programmers so that they'll support FSF ideals.
/. readers, I make webpages for a libing. While I *occasionally* crank out some PHP or some Javascript, the vast majority of my 'technical expertise' lies in the areas of understanding the intricacies of dozens of art, paint and drawing programs. I know what minor differences HTML code will display in certain browsers. I can administer Apache, IIS, and a slew of other web servers. I'm competent to install and administer any number of server OS's. I'm even competent enough to make choices between certain operating systems for certain tasks and requirements.
This logic is a little twisted for me, but okay...
The simple fact of the matter is that programmers aren't the only technically comptent people who use computers. The idea that *everyone* should *have* to program all the time to fit into this guy's rather skewed world view is ridiculous! Take myself for example: I'm a graphical artist. Like many
I understand the basics of how machine languages work on different processors and why programming languages behave as they do, *but* If I had to *once* sit down and crank out an application in Java or C, I would be lost. I don't have *time* to hack. I'm busy with the rest of my highly technical job.
The idea that you have to be a programmer to be technically competent is ludicrous, but one all too many hackers view as sacrosanct. Give it up, geeks.
Seven Comments, and this site is already Slashdotted to the point of non-functionality. While this code is in beta, it brings about the point of server overhead.
Is this going to be like any of the various servlet engine that can bring a good, hard server to its knees? Is it going to eat all my RAM and CPU cycles like a pothead at TacoBell?
This *looks* like a damn neat thingy, but I'm scared to run it now.
While a loss like this certainly delivers a nice, firm kick in the balls to the the image of space travel and exploration, its damn nice to see that governments and space agencies are making their mistakes with machines instead of live subjects.
I mean, the claim made by the reporter is a pretty fair generalization. It looks like the other two 'OS's mentioned in the rebuttal are so specialized they're more like proprietary firmware.
A significant bonus to 'online schooling is the fact that it could be used by and for people who otherwise would slip through the cracks. This includes children of people who are 'homeless' either in a real sense, or just have to move from city to city due to legal problems. Children of divorced parents who have 'joint custody' in different cities are a good example. Foster children are another. A consistent online 'classroom' to learn in could be an island of stability and growth for them in an otherwise harsh world.
Another section of the population to consider are the children of migrant workers. Many are ignored by uncaring, understaffed or simply prejudiced school districts. Even if they had to go from public library to public libary to access their 'homeroom', it would still be heads and above any other kind of education they manage to eek out.
This argument is pretty much invalid. A 'link' in and of itself is not content. It is the same thing as publishing a phone number or printing an address.
All political crap aside, the web was built around the idea of 'free information exchange'. Thus, hyperlinks have no built in controls. (And I'll personally beat the ass of the first person who suggests a new type of link). Perhaps people who want to charge for their web content should do it in a semi-private place, such as AOL's user-only pages.
Now wouldn't that be incredibly cool? If all the big-time corporations took their petty little squabbles over intellectual property and 'web-patents', etc... to reside soley on AOL and MSN, it would leave the 'real' web free for the rest of us who care about personal freedoms and the exchange of information.
>obligitory "we're all impressed with how much >money you spent on a digital camera and the fact And there I thought that giving a little personal 'cooboration' to a statement of fact was good prosaic form. 0_o;
/. is indeed filled with young geeks with nothing better to do than troll. Okay, I'll bite.
Sadly, it appears that
...when you consider that most 'consumer' webcams range between $60 and $140. My brother recently bought a nice Intel USB camera for $90.
If you don't want to shell out money for a nice digital camera (My sony cybershot cost $999), there are better alternatives than buying a toy.
While I tend to disagree with the guy, the post previous to this has some very good points, which the theorist expands on.
Unfortuneately, scientists have *never* like to have their view of the universe questioned. Even if this guy is right, Hawking and the rest of the Black Hole Team (members who are still alive) will passionately fight to the death to prove him wrong, 'cause, if he's right it will mean *they* were wrong.
What a hoot! MS leverages their vast industry power against the entertainment industry, in effect becoming the hacker's guardian.
It's the Borg vs. The Empire, and I've got a hacked DSS card to watch the PPV Cage Match!
They can no doub sell this as 10000 dpi, but if you use 100 pixels in order to create any other 'real' pixel on the map, you go back down to 100dpi (Windows uses (logical) 96, Mac uses 72)
If you do address every single pixel, you've got to do some funky time-shifting things to control pixel intensity, or you've got to create an in-monitor dithering solution to get 24/32 bit equivalencies.
What a crock of shit!
If 'the industry' isn't willing to give the encryption keys necessary to decode DeCSS to Open Source programmers so that they can decode data protected on a DVD, then they *sure* as hell aren't going to give the keys for this kind of 'protection' to OS hackers so that they can build support for them in their kernels and programs. If they did, another Jon Johansen would just build a DePHD program or device driver to rip hard drives.
This will happen anyway once the 'encryption' is broken, but 'Industry Standard' harddrives won't thrive when there is a market for 'non-standard' and older harddrives. I can get a 20g 7200 Western Dig for about $120. I better stock up and get a few IDE controllers.
The pixels can be be only one of 4 states? Let's do the math: 2^4 = 16 color display. You need to have brightness control on the pixels before you can get into 32 bit color (or 64 bit for those lucky female tetrachromats out there)