Or they just don't want to support the couple of engineers needed to get any of the specs they could possibly need from the LinuxPPC, NetBSD, or Darwin source code and keep it legal to make their software proprietary (still a possibility, but it involves cleanroom techniques, which means sacrificing several engineers since they have to document the specs but then cannot code).
at least in theory. They're relatively easy to program and understand, and in an emergency the hand-editability becomes a great asset.
But programmers forget one problem: the average person. The average person is not a programmer. They get no masochistic joy from hunting through cryptically-named directories to find the file, change it, and then restart the program, especially a big one like X.
This wouldn't be a problem is most programmers provided other means of configuring the program. But in the *nix crowds, they don't tend to do that (it's getting more popular but is still relatively rare). That's why things like iceconf, e-conf, and wmakerconf are getting so popular; I don't want to have to hunt down, for example, each of the config files WindowMaker uses (~/GNUstep/Defaults/WindowMaker, ~/GNUstep/Defaults/WMWindowAttributes, ~GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/Menu, and so forth), learn the different syntaxes on each file, and hand-edit them. And the hell of it is, I do know what I'm doing with those files; I've done it before.
(By the way, WM fans, please don't flame me for this one; I use WindowMaker every day; I'm just using its multiplicity of config files as an example).
Having multiple config files is a Good Thing; certainly better than having them in a Registry. But it needs to be done right; put them all in a consistent, well-defined place, like the Preferences folder in MacOS, so you at least know where to look for them (if you have lots of them; make a subdirectory of this place and put them in there to keep it organized; but at least get them in one good spot). And to all the coders out there, add a somewhat more convenient way of configuring programs to supplement the config files; your users will thank you for it.
In theory, this is a Good Thing. After all, little robots healing any damage that befalls me? Great!
However, consider the other uses of these things. First, as a weapon. And you know that's what the military will use them for first. What better weapon is there, after all? Dump a few billion in the water supply and kill off everyone, then have the nanites "dissolve" the bodies so that there's no mess.
Then take that further and you have an instrument of controlling people. Sure, you're not literally dictating their throughts, but if a person has them in there it wouldn't take much to have the nanites go berserk and destroy everything.
Take this further still and you have the ultimate instrument of torture. Kill a person as slowly and painfully as you like, or simply heal them of any damage you do then do it again and again and again.
I wish these things would be used as this doctor would like to see them used. But it won't happen.
Last I checked, "defamation" wasn't legal anyway, with "defamation" being defined as spreading untrue information about someone or something with malicious intent (similar to libel or slander).
Anonymity is, naturally, a right just as any other. But as someone once said, "the right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." No one has the right to start spreading bad things about someone or something without being able to back it up, and to hide behind anonymity is an abuse of the right to be anonymous. I think the judge might be in the right on this one.
How does it apply to this specific case? Well, there I'm not sure. Can this person back up his (her?) claims about Xircon? If so, then it isn't defamation anyway, and Xircon can't do a thing about it. If not, the person has no right to hide behind anonymity.
Actually, I don't think it's scary. In fact, it may be the one good thing M$ has taight us.
Unix and its clones are very powerful, stable operating systems. This is a Good Thing. However, the stability itself tends to create a problem: the sysadmins get too cocky and never think about possible problems, simply because "they'll never happen; this is Unix."
Well, the thing is, they do happen. The law of averages (to say nothing of Murphy's Law) demands it; eventually something is going to happen. The fact that it happens with Windows and especially MacOS so often has led to one thing: they tend to recover from crashed in a relatively graceful manner; seldom in more than fifteen minutes for MacOS and a day or two for Windoze. No Unix-related problem I've ever seen has ever taken fewer than four days to fix, due to various combination of user-hostility on the OS's part, a lack of tools to help get the system back up (particularly in the Open-Source OS's but in all Unix-like systems to some degree), and other factors.
You can understand the reasoning behind this: if errors never happen, why plan for them? But the fact is, errors do happen. The worst-case scenario is that everything is always broken, and this scenario must be planned for, because at some future point it will pop up. It's like the proverb goes: "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst."
It does have some ATI support, though it was written for the Mach64 if I'm not mistaken (works just fine on my Rage Pro, and should work on their other chipsets too).
I know it also supports the IMS Twin Turbo (which was popular with the clones) and the Matrox Millennium. Then there are the Control and Valkyrie chipsets (used in older PowerMacs before Apple used ATI's stuff).
How would you use the Turing test on a robotic dog, anyway?
Consider that the Turing test basically states that to pass, it must be able to mimic a human so well that it is impossible to tell the machine from the genuine article. In the area of intelligence, it's been agreed upon that this means using language as intelligently as a human would (which would be possible via an IRC-like mechanism).
So, how would you apply the Turing test to a robotic dog? Would you send up up against a team of dog experts (veterinarians, dog trainers, etc.) to see if it were indistinguishable from a real dog? We're far away from that one happenning.
No one is using it? There are two flaws in your argument:
1) It's only been out for a couple of months. That's hardly a point when someone can even really begin to say that. "No one" used Linux for the first couple of months after its release either. Give it a break. 2) It's growing. Rather quickly, actually.
Am I the only one who remembers the glory days before Microsoft when a 1.0 release was ready to go?
You must have dreamed that. A 1.0 (or even x.0) release of any software is never quite ready to go, not even in the realm of Open-Source.
Why? Because before 1.0 is released, the program is tested. Testing methods can be pretty thorough, but you can never test every possible situation, no matter how hard you try. Even in Open-Source projects, no one can get them all. Someone is guaranteed to put that software into some scenario you didn't think about, and might or might not run into a bug there. It's the proverbial million monkeys banging on a million typewriters; eventually one of them will type out Hamlet (OK, so maybe comparing a computer glitch to a Shakespeare play isn't an appropriate metaphor, but you know what I mean).
To be honest, I'm rather surprised that it took this long to find a major bug in OSX. Even Linux bugs seem to be found much more quickly than that. I find that fact to be something of a testament to Apple's quality control. Yes, bugs were found; bugs are inevitable (even Linux and *BSD have them). But it certainly took a long time to find one. And the one they did find can't seem to be reproduced in any reliable way; people have tried and only one or two seem to be having the problem.
1) M$ will not be doing the work itself. We all know what happens when Microsoft intervenes directly; things get wrecked. At least with some other firm Perl has a chance of remaining intact. 2) The development will be Open-Sourced. Under the same license as Perl itself, no less (which does make sense). In other words, we won't have to scramble so much to keep up with the damage M$ does. 3) M$ doesn't dare try to kill Perl. The Internet is the only thing Microsoft has ever fought against and lost. They tried killing TCP/IP; that didn't work. They're doing their damndest to wreck the Web, but that isn't working either (the piece of crap known as IE might be popular, but there are not many sites using IE-only features). And they will not be able to stop Perl for the same reason: it is too deeply entrenched already. Java failed because MS attacked early, while it was still weak. Apple's hanging on because M$ was a little too late; MS has weakened it severely (there was a time when Apple II's and Macs had more marketshare than Windoze or DOS, way back in the beginning) but it can't kill Apple off completely. Likewise, Perl has dug itself in too deep for MS to totally uproot. 4) Consider that DOS and Windows have no native scripting systems. Macs have AppleScript, Unix/Linux have Perl and the shells, DOS/Windows have... nothing. Not as a normal part of the operating system, at any rate (I hardly think batch files count). Simply put, Windows needs scripting, and Perl could well fit the bill. MS needs Perl, so it can't harm it (too much) or it hurts itself.
We should have an open mind about this. It's possible that Perl might just get some improvement out of this deal.
I remember that Imlib used to require ImageMagick, and I think it still uses it if available. This being the case, I'm still not totally sure why it doesn't just use Imlib with ImageMagick and get the best of both.
Honestly, these two DE's are getting a little bit crazy. Neither will admit where the other is ahead, so they use different stuff just to be different, at least at this point (there were genuine reasons to do this with toolkits and ORBs, but this?) It's ridiculous.
Something tells me there's more to it than what Australia is letting on. I get the feeling it wants out; something big is going on that they're not telling up about, but Australia doesn't want anything to do with it anymore. They cloak it in this impractical crap like "you have to strike out the names of Australians" to make it sound credible, but what they want is to destroy the system. No better way to do that then to drag it out into the light and let the public get outraged by it.
Frankly, if it destroys the system, I'm all for it. To be honest, I never trusted the government, but I never thought it had gotten so bad that a revolution was necessary. I'm still no revolutionate, but now I am no longer so certain that this government isn't bad enough that one is uncalled for. This is simply going too far. But at least now we know the real reason why the governments don't like crypto. It won't hamper future snooping; it'll kill current snooping.
However, you've got to admit that UKUSA is doing a pretty damn poor job of spying as it is; you'd think that if they were doing anything halfway decent then all terrorists and such would mysteriously "disappear" before the crime was actually comitted.
I hope that the UN takes UKUSA to task and raises hell about this, perhaps even to the point of punitive action (as if the UN's punitive actions have ever had the desired effect, if any at all). Then again, the UN's probably in on Echelon too.
Well, when the laws of your land do not guarantee free speech, this is what inevitably happens, eventually. Worse, it's only the first step.
But enough with that. What we need to work on are solutions to this problem. What I think would work well is what I call a "reverse proxy."
Basically it works like this. Proxies like the Anonymizer work such that all outgoing traffic from your site seems to come from the proxy, not from you. What I propose is the reverse: a person can log into the proxy, and then all Net traffic coming in to the user appears to come from that proxy server. Front it with a clearly nonoffensive Web page (for this to work, of course, the proxy aspect of the site would have to be covert), and voila: all of your Web traffic appears to be coming from a nonoffensive site, even though it does not (which would be next to impossible to prove). Since it appears to come from a nonoffensive site, none of it is blocked.
Even better would be a "meta-reverse-proxy" which juggled a user between different proxies. That would make it harder to detect, since any site caught doing this would likely be blocked. It also would lighten the load on each individual proxy, since the load could be spread between them.
Anyone know of current software that might be able to do something like this?
Here's the thing. People always use the "programmers will starve" argument against Open-Source and moving the whole industry in that direction. The thing is, they're half right. If the Open-Source model becomes the standard for the industry, those programmers who cannot adapt to it will either lose their jobs or have to take severe pay cuts.
However, there is still big money to be made. Why? Here's the deal: Open-Source has many advantages. The biggest advantage is that maintenance turnaround times are extremely high. However, Open-Source does have one flaw: initial development time, be it for a piece of software or even just a major feature being added to a piece of software, is very slow.
And that is where the money is to be made.
Why? Well, Open-Source proponents say that the initial development time does not matter. However, they're wrong: it matters. A great deal. People outside the industry care about it even if people in the industry don't. This isn't a bad thing, though, because that's where the money comes in. Imagine a company which writes only Open-Source software. Of course, you have the idea of selling support and such, but let's face it, that alone is not going to pay all the bills. It'll sustain the tech support division but it won't fund programming, especially not on completely new projects. However, what happens when that company also does consulting? That is, it is hired by others to write completely new Open-Source software or add large new features to existing software.
Why would people do this? Individuals probably would not, but businesses would. Why? Because they need software now. They can't depend on waiting for features to naturally evolve, as features do in the Open-Source model; it simply takes too long (and there is no guarantee that the feature you want will evolve at all). That is where the companies come in: what they are selling still is not the software itself. What they are selling is the ability to get that software out more quickly than would otherwise happen. It's like shipping via FedEx; you can save a lot of money by using the regular mail, but FedEx will get it there much more quickly (plus they're more reliable than the postal service).
There's money to be made in Free Software. You just have to know where to look. And ironically enough, Open-Source's only flaw is the reason you can make money from it.
I have a big problem with emulating current systems, except the PSX (which, if only the stupid blind idiots at Sony would take a look, actually increases their bottom line with every sale). The reason: piracy does happen on emulators. A lot (I do believe it would happen less if there were an easy way to get a cartridge into a computer; since there isn't most of us must rely on ROM's). And I think it isn't fair to do that to a current system.
Past systems for which games are no longer made? That's another subject entirely. There, my views mesh with those of most retrogamers.
I do have trouble with UltraHLE, therefore, and I think Nintendo does have a right to get pissed off over that one. They can't do anything about it, true, but in any case UltraHLE should never have been made, at least not until Dolphin was out and kicking.
And I was so looking forward to getting a Dolphin eventually, too. However, I'd say it's time to call for a boycott of Nintendo over this. At least until they get it straight that emulators themselves are perfectly legal and stop this crap.
Sorry, but I hate all these accusations of "racial overtones" in the movie.
Japanese? Please. Those Trade Federation guys weren't supposed to be spoofing the Japanese. Isn't it obvious? They were supposed to be spoofing William Shatner. Just watch any episode of Star Trek (original series) and you'll see what I mean; the speech patterns (right down to the insipid extraneous pauses) are identical.
KDE and Gnome are not window managers (though KDE does come with one).
Both of these are, at heart, suites of applications and libraries. The applications are there to make the user experience easier; examples are the file managers and the panels of each. The libraries are there for two purposes: to provide a consistent look and feel, and to help applications written for a given desktop environment to interact with one another, thereby providing a more seamless experience.
If M$ even does this, which I highly doubt they will, I'll bet that the license they use will make a combination of the worst elements of the original revisions of the NPL, APSL, and QPL look like the GPL (actually, probably more like the BSD license) by comparison.
I should also reiterate an argument which has been stated before: several-million-plus-line projects don't seem to do well when they start proprietary and then go Open-Source later. It seems as though the mig stuff almost has to be Open-Source from the very beginning to be successful. This is understandable, since that means you get a team of developers who've worked on this project as an Open-Source project right from day one, to help the new programmers out.
In short, even if M$ does do this, it'll fail miserably. And then they'll likely use that to spout some more FUD.
Of course they should port it. Ideally, all software would be available on all platforms.
But still, don't vote unless you plan to buy it. They're obviously looking for demand here; don't make them regret their decision later on, or it's likely we'll never hear from them again even if there is huge demand.
Its not his actions its his message. And no I did not make it sound like that, but he did take obvious sites, but let me ask you, if it was not a big deal then why did he fork out the money to do it? The only reason I can think of is to send out a message, because that makes his actions less pointless, either that or he is a fool with money (I doubt).
You honestly think that's his message? Look, here's the thing:
The written word is a remarkable thing. It can convey messages, calm the hysterical, heal the depressed, and so forth. It can also be a terrible weapon. Look back over the history of presidential races: especially in recent years, every candidate who runs is dragged through the dirt. Every little aspect of their lives, sometimes going as far back as childhood mistakes, is dredged up in ways which would land the dredger in jail in any other circumstance.
No you think Bush wants that? No; he'd have to be out of his mind to want that. I doubt you'd want it either; no one does.
Also, note the names he eliminated. "bushsucks.org" or "bushblows.org," but not things like "boycottbush.net." My point: he took the names which were explicitly defamatory, as opposed to ones which suggested actions or at least sounded professional (honestly, do you think his opponents' campaigns will use "bushsucks.com"? No; it'll be the upstarts, the people with little vendettas and axes to grind). He's trying to save some shred of his dignity; he'll lose the rest during the race, as will all the other candidates. Can you blame him for that?
Since when does stuff like this make someone briliant? What when microsoft buys or destroys other companys is that briliant? When a criminal shoots someone in the head so they won't call the police, is that briliant? When atheletes cheat in the olympics and get away with it, are they briliant as well? When someone cheats on a math test and does not get caught, are they also briliant?
When someone compares the buying of domain names to various illegal and/or reprehensible acts, are they being brilliant?
Its just like saying "you can say anything you want, but you can't say it out loud".
Oh, please. You make it sound like he's banned anti-Bush Websites. He hasn't. Yeah, now the sites are going to be something like bushsucks.somewhere.com, or maybe something a bit more obscure like www.nowhere.org/~fvj2354/bush/ih8bush.html. Big deal.
By the way, I suggest you read the Gnome vs. KDE flamewars sometime. Why? Take a look at all the posts. Every time the word "sucks" or "blows" or anything is used in a post, you'll notice that the person doesn't have anything worthwhile or serious to say. Those who are really trying to make a point never use language like that (I dare you to find me a serious post on the issue that has the word "sucks" anywhere in it except to quote someone else). My point: yeah, the little oh-boy-lets-badmouth-a-candidate kiddies are going to be deterred by this. But not the professionals, and not the people who actually have something to say. Bush hasn't stopped the pros. He didn't mean to do that either.
I'd like to see the numbers Square used to figure out that $1000+" bit. I'd imagine they're just plain wrong. Would FF7 be a pricey cartridge? Yeah. But over a thousand? No way.
Here's the thing about carts, and this is why Nintendo has stuck with them until now. CD's hold more (though the gap is closing), and they're dirt cheap. However, they're much easier to pirate than carts, and they're sloooooooooooow, especially when comkpared to carts. Carts have the advantage in that they're a great deal faster, they're harder to pirate, and they're much more durable (as a kid I did all kinds of things to my carts, including running over then with a bike and sending them through the washing machine, which would have killed a CD).
DVD solves the speed issue; it's really still too slow (at least in my opinion) to make it particularly suitable for any game but an RPG, but it's almost there, and certainly much closer than CD's ever were. Plus, you can start with advanced encryption and other such things, helping to solve the piracy issue. I don't know what Nintendo's going to do about the piracy to make it as piracy-resistant as they claim, though; perhaps it'll start punching holes in the disk in strategic locations which are different for each game?
Not only that, but carts aren't going to catch up to DVDs capacity-wise for a long time to come. That's more than enough to outshine the durability issue.
So then you come to the last issue, and the only other advantage carts still have over DVD's: portability. Yes, I know you can stick a DVD in your pocket (it'd have to be a big pocket, yes, but you can). But just try sticking the DVD player in your pocket. Those would have to be huge pockets to pull that off, especially if you had to add a screen and controller to the mix.
So I think that from this point on, carts will be relegated to the portable systems. However, don't rule them out just yet. Never know when the next huge advance in solid-state technology will come out...
Slashdot Mirror
Or they just don't want to support the couple of engineers needed to get any of the specs they could possibly need from the LinuxPPC, NetBSD, or Darwin source code and keep it legal to make their software proprietary (still a possibility, but it involves cleanroom techniques, which means sacrificing several engineers since they have to document the specs but then cannot code).
at least in theory. They're relatively easy to program and understand, and in an emergency the hand-editability becomes a great asset.
But programmers forget one problem: the average person. The average person is not a programmer. They get no masochistic joy from hunting through cryptically-named directories to find the file, change it, and then restart the program, especially a big one like X.
This wouldn't be a problem is most programmers provided other means of configuring the program. But in the *nix crowds, they don't tend to do that (it's getting more popular but is still relatively rare). That's why things like iceconf, e-conf, and wmakerconf are getting so popular; I don't want to have to hunt down, for example, each of the config files WindowMaker uses (~/GNUstep/Defaults/WindowMaker, ~/GNUstep/Defaults/WMWindowAttributes, ~GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/Menu, and so forth), learn the different syntaxes on each file, and hand-edit them. And the hell of it is, I do know what I'm doing with those files; I've done it before.
(By the way, WM fans, please don't flame me for this one; I use WindowMaker every day; I'm just using its multiplicity of config files as an example).
Having multiple config files is a Good Thing; certainly better than having them in a Registry. But it needs to be done right; put them all in a consistent, well-defined place, like the Preferences folder in MacOS, so you at least know where to look for them (if you have lots of them; make a subdirectory of this place and put them in there to keep it organized; but at least get them in one good spot). And to all the coders out there, add a somewhat more convenient way of configuring programs to supplement the config files; your users will thank you for it.
In theory, this is a Good Thing. After all, little robots healing any damage that befalls me? Great!
However, consider the other uses of these things. First, as a weapon. And you know that's what the military will use them for first. What better weapon is there, after all? Dump a few billion in the water supply and kill off everyone, then have the nanites "dissolve" the bodies so that there's no mess.
Then take that further and you have an instrument of controlling people. Sure, you're not literally dictating their throughts, but if a person has them in there it wouldn't take much to have the nanites go berserk and destroy everything.
Take this further still and you have the ultimate instrument of torture. Kill a person as slowly and painfully as you like, or simply heal them of any damage you do then do it again and again and again.
I wish these things would be used as this doctor would like to see them used. But it won't happen.
Last I checked, "defamation" wasn't legal anyway, with "defamation" being defined as spreading untrue information about someone or something with malicious intent (similar to libel or slander).
Anonymity is, naturally, a right just as any other. But as someone once said, "the right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." No one has the right to start spreading bad things about someone or something without being able to back it up, and to hide behind anonymity is an abuse of the right to be anonymous. I think the judge might be in the right on this one.
How does it apply to this specific case? Well, there I'm not sure. Can this person back up his (her?) claims about Xircon? If so, then it isn't defamation anyway, and Xircon can't do a thing about it. If not, the person has no right to hide behind anonymity.
Actually, I don't think it's scary. In fact, it may be the one good thing M$ has taight us.
Unix and its clones are very powerful, stable operating systems. This is a Good Thing. However, the stability itself tends to create a problem: the sysadmins get too cocky and never think about possible problems, simply because "they'll never happen; this is Unix."
Well, the thing is, they do happen. The law of averages (to say nothing of Murphy's Law) demands it; eventually something is going to happen. The fact that it happens with Windows and especially MacOS so often has led to one thing: they tend to recover from crashed in a relatively graceful manner; seldom in more than fifteen minutes for MacOS and a day or two for Windoze. No Unix-related problem I've ever seen has ever taken fewer than four days to fix, due to various combination of user-hostility on the OS's part, a lack of tools to help get the system back up (particularly in the Open-Source OS's but in all Unix-like systems to some degree), and other factors.
You can understand the reasoning behind this: if errors never happen, why plan for them? But the fact is, errors do happen. The worst-case scenario is that everything is always broken, and this scenario must be planned for, because at some future point it will pop up. It's like the proverb goes: "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst."
It does have some ATI support, though it was written for the Mach64 if I'm not mistaken (works just fine on my Rage Pro, and should work on their other chipsets too).
I know it also supports the IMS Twin Turbo (which was popular with the clones) and the Matrox Millennium. Then there are the Control and Valkyrie chipsets (used in older PowerMacs before Apple used ATI's stuff).
After that, I don't know. Have I missed any?
How would you use the Turing test on a robotic dog, anyway?
Consider that the Turing test basically states that to pass, it must be able to mimic a human so well that it is impossible to tell the machine from the genuine article. In the area of intelligence, it's been agreed upon that this means using language as intelligently as a human would (which would be possible via an IRC-like mechanism).
So, how would you apply the Turing test to a robotic dog? Would you send up up against a team of dog experts (veterinarians, dog trainers, etc.) to see if it were indistinguishable from a real dog? We're far away from that one happenning.
No one is using it? There are two flaws in your argument:
1) It's only been out for a couple of months. That's hardly a point when someone can even really begin to say that. "No one" used Linux for the first couple of months after its release either. Give it a break.
2) It's growing. Rather quickly, actually.
Am I the only one who remembers the glory days before Microsoft when a 1.0 release was ready to go?
You must have dreamed that. A 1.0 (or even x.0) release of any software is never quite ready to go, not even in the realm of Open-Source.
Why? Because before 1.0 is released, the program is tested. Testing methods can be pretty thorough, but you can never test every possible situation, no matter how hard you try. Even in Open-Source projects, no one can get them all. Someone is guaranteed to put that software into some scenario you didn't think about, and might or might not run into a bug there. It's the proverbial million monkeys banging on a million typewriters; eventually one of them will type out Hamlet (OK, so maybe comparing a computer glitch to a Shakespeare play isn't an appropriate metaphor, but you know what I mean).
To be honest, I'm rather surprised that it took this long to find a major bug in OSX. Even Linux bugs seem to be found much more quickly than that. I find that fact to be something of a testament to Apple's quality control. Yes, bugs were found; bugs are inevitable (even Linux and *BSD have them). But it certainly took a long time to find one. And the one they did find can't seem to be reproduced in any reliable way; people have tried and only one or two seem to be having the problem.
Consider the following:
1) M$ will not be doing the work itself. We all know what happens when Microsoft intervenes directly; things get wrecked. At least with some other firm Perl has a chance of remaining intact.
2) The development will be Open-Sourced. Under the same license as Perl itself, no less (which does make sense). In other words, we won't have to scramble so much to keep up with the damage M$ does.
3) M$ doesn't dare try to kill Perl. The Internet is the only thing Microsoft has ever fought against and lost. They tried killing TCP/IP; that didn't work. They're doing their damndest to wreck the Web, but that isn't working either (the piece of crap known as IE might be popular, but there are not many sites using IE-only features). And they will not be able to stop Perl for the same reason: it is too deeply entrenched already. Java failed because MS attacked early, while it was still weak. Apple's hanging on because M$ was a little too late; MS has weakened it severely (there was a time when Apple II's and Macs had more marketshare than Windoze or DOS, way back in the beginning) but it can't kill Apple off completely. Likewise, Perl has dug itself in too deep for MS to totally uproot.
4) Consider that DOS and Windows have no native scripting systems. Macs have AppleScript, Unix/Linux have Perl and the shells, DOS/Windows have... nothing. Not as a normal part of the operating system, at any rate (I hardly think batch files count). Simply put, Windows needs scripting, and Perl could well fit the bill. MS needs Perl, so it can't harm it (too much) or it hurts itself.
We should have an open mind about this. It's possible that Perl might just get some improvement out of this deal.
I remember that Imlib used to require ImageMagick, and I think it still uses it if available. This being the case, I'm still not totally sure why it doesn't just use Imlib with ImageMagick and get the best of both.
Honestly, these two DE's are getting a little bit crazy. Neither will admit where the other is ahead, so they use different stuff just to be different, at least at this point (there were genuine reasons to do this with toolkits and ORBs, but this?) It's ridiculous.
Something tells me there's more to it than what Australia is letting on. I get the feeling it wants out; something big is going on that they're not telling up about, but Australia doesn't want anything to do with it anymore. They cloak it in this impractical crap like "you have to strike out the names of Australians" to make it sound credible, but what they want is to destroy the system. No better way to do that then to drag it out into the light and let the public get outraged by it.
Frankly, if it destroys the system, I'm all for it. To be honest, I never trusted the government, but I never thought it had gotten so bad that a revolution was necessary. I'm still no revolutionate, but now I am no longer so certain that this government isn't bad enough that one is uncalled for. This is simply going too far. But at least now we know the real reason why the governments don't like crypto. It won't hamper future snooping; it'll kill current snooping.
However, you've got to admit that UKUSA is doing a pretty damn poor job of spying as it is; you'd think that if they were doing anything halfway decent then all terrorists and such would mysteriously "disappear" before the crime was actually comitted.
I hope that the UN takes UKUSA to task and raises hell about this, perhaps even to the point of punitive action (as if the UN's punitive actions have ever had the desired effect, if any at all). Then again, the UN's probably in on Echelon too.
Well, when the laws of your land do not guarantee free speech, this is what inevitably happens, eventually. Worse, it's only the first step.
But enough with that. What we need to work on are solutions to this problem. What I think would work well is what I call a "reverse proxy."
Basically it works like this. Proxies like the Anonymizer work such that all outgoing traffic from your site seems to come from the proxy, not from you. What I propose is the reverse: a person can log into the proxy, and then all Net traffic coming in to the user appears to come from that proxy server. Front it with a clearly nonoffensive Web page (for this to work, of course, the proxy aspect of the site would have to be covert), and voila: all of your Web traffic appears to be coming from a nonoffensive site, even though it does not (which would be next to impossible to prove). Since it appears to come from a nonoffensive site, none of it is blocked.
Even better would be a "meta-reverse-proxy" which juggled a user between different proxies. That would make it harder to detect, since any site caught doing this would likely be blocked. It also would lighten the load on each individual proxy, since the load could be spread between them.
Anyone know of current software that might be able to do something like this?
Here's the thing. People always use the "programmers will starve" argument against Open-Source and moving the whole industry in that direction. The thing is, they're half right. If the Open-Source model becomes the standard for the industry, those programmers who cannot adapt to it will either lose their jobs or have to take severe pay cuts.
However, there is still big money to be made. Why? Here's the deal: Open-Source has many advantages. The biggest advantage is that maintenance turnaround times are extremely high. However, Open-Source does have one flaw: initial development time, be it for a piece of software or even just a major feature being added to a piece of software, is very slow.
And that is where the money is to be made.
Why? Well, Open-Source proponents say that the initial development time does not matter. However, they're wrong: it matters. A great deal. People outside the industry care about it even if people in the industry don't. This isn't a bad thing, though, because that's where the money comes in. Imagine a company which writes only Open-Source software. Of course, you have the idea of selling support and such, but let's face it, that alone is not going to pay all the bills. It'll sustain the tech support division but it won't fund programming, especially not on completely new projects. However, what happens when that company also does consulting? That is, it is hired by others to write completely new Open-Source software or add large new features to existing software.
Why would people do this? Individuals probably would not, but businesses would. Why? Because they need software now. They can't depend on waiting for features to naturally evolve, as features do in the Open-Source model; it simply takes too long (and there is no guarantee that the feature you want will evolve at all). That is where the companies come in: what they are selling still is not the software itself. What they are selling is the ability to get that software out more quickly than would otherwise happen. It's like shipping via FedEx; you can save a lot of money by using the regular mail, but FedEx will get it there much more quickly (plus they're more reliable than the postal service).
There's money to be made in Free Software. You just have to know where to look. And ironically enough, Open-Source's only flaw is the reason you can make money from it.
I have a big problem with emulating current systems, except the PSX (which, if only the stupid blind idiots at Sony would take a look, actually increases their bottom line with every sale). The reason: piracy does happen on emulators. A lot (I do believe it would happen less if there were an easy way to get a cartridge into a computer; since there isn't most of us must rely on ROM's). And I think it isn't fair to do that to a current system.
Past systems for which games are no longer made? That's another subject entirely. There, my views mesh with those of most retrogamers.
I do have trouble with UltraHLE, therefore, and I think Nintendo does have a right to get pissed off over that one. They can't do anything about it, true, but in any case UltraHLE should never have been made, at least not until Dolphin was out and kicking.
And I was so looking forward to getting a Dolphin eventually, too. However, I'd say it's time to call for a boycott of Nintendo over this. At least until they get it straight that emulators themselves are perfectly legal and stop this crap.
In other words, this means war.
Sorry, but I hate all these accusations of "racial overtones" in the movie.
Japanese? Please. Those Trade Federation guys weren't supposed to be spoofing the Japanese. Isn't it obvious? They were supposed to be spoofing William Shatner. Just watch any episode of Star Trek (original series) and you'll see what I mean; the speech patterns (right down to the insipid extraneous pauses) are identical.
Quite frankly, I support that spoof.
KDE and Gnome are not window managers (though KDE does come with one).
Both of these are, at heart, suites of applications and libraries. The applications are there to make the user experience easier; examples are the file managers and the panels of each. The libraries are there for two purposes: to provide a consistent look and feel, and to help applications written for a given desktop environment to interact with one another, thereby providing a more seamless experience.
My choice: Gnome, with KDE's libs also installed.
If M$ even does this, which I highly doubt they will, I'll bet that the license they use will make a combination of the worst elements of the original revisions of the NPL, APSL, and QPL look like the GPL (actually, probably more like the BSD license) by comparison.
I should also reiterate an argument which has been stated before: several-million-plus-line projects don't seem to do well when they start proprietary and then go Open-Source later. It seems as though the mig stuff almost has to be Open-Source from the very beginning to be successful. This is understandable, since that means you get a team of developers who've worked on this project as an Open-Source project right from day one, to help the new programmers out.
In short, even if M$ does do this, it'll fail miserably. And then they'll likely use that to spout some more FUD.
I prefer "Daemonic Hordes" myself.
Of course they should port it. Ideally, all software would be available on all platforms.
But still, don't vote unless you plan to buy it. They're obviously looking for demand here; don't make them regret their decision later on, or it's likely we'll never hear from them again even if there is huge demand.
Its not his actions its his message. And no I did not make it sound like that, but he did take obvious sites, but let me ask you, if it was not a big deal then why did he fork out the money to do it? The only reason I can think of is to send out a message, because that makes his actions less pointless, either that or he is a fool with money (I doubt).
You honestly think that's his message? Look, here's the thing:
The written word is a remarkable thing. It can convey messages, calm the hysterical, heal the depressed, and so forth. It can also be a terrible weapon. Look back over the history of presidential races: especially in recent years, every candidate who runs is dragged through the dirt. Every little aspect of their lives, sometimes going as far back as childhood mistakes, is dredged up in ways which would land the dredger in jail in any other circumstance.
No you think Bush wants that? No; he'd have to be out of his mind to want that. I doubt you'd want it either; no one does.
Also, note the names he eliminated. "bushsucks.org" or "bushblows.org," but not things like "boycottbush.net." My point: he took the names which were explicitly defamatory, as opposed to ones which suggested actions or at least sounded professional (honestly, do you think his opponents' campaigns will use "bushsucks.com"? No; it'll be the upstarts, the people with little vendettas and axes to grind). He's trying to save some shred of his dignity; he'll lose the rest during the race, as will all the other candidates. Can you blame him for that?
Since when does stuff like this make someone briliant? What when microsoft buys or destroys other companys is that briliant? When a criminal shoots someone in the head so they won't call the police, is that briliant? When atheletes cheat in the olympics and get away with it, are they briliant as well? When someone cheats on a math test and does not get caught, are they also briliant?
When someone compares the buying of domain names to various illegal and/or reprehensible acts, are they being brilliant?
Its just like saying "you can say anything you want, but you can't say it out loud".
Oh, please. You make it sound like he's banned anti-Bush Websites. He hasn't. Yeah, now the sites are going to be something like bushsucks.somewhere.com, or maybe something a bit more obscure like www.nowhere.org/~fvj2354/bush/ih8bush.html. Big deal.
By the way, I suggest you read the Gnome vs. KDE flamewars sometime. Why? Take a look at all the posts. Every time the word "sucks" or "blows" or anything is used in a post, you'll notice that the person doesn't have anything worthwhile or serious to say. Those who are really trying to make a point never use language like that (I dare you to find me a serious post on the issue that has the word "sucks" anywhere in it except to quote someone else). My point: yeah, the little oh-boy-lets-badmouth-a-candidate kiddies are going to be deterred by this. But not the professionals, and not the people who actually have something to say. Bush hasn't stopped the pros. He didn't mean to do that either.
I'd like to see the numbers Square used to figure out that $1000+" bit. I'd imagine they're just plain wrong. Would FF7 be a pricey cartridge? Yeah. But over a thousand? No way.
Here's the thing about carts, and this is why Nintendo has stuck with them until now. CD's hold more (though the gap is closing), and they're dirt cheap. However, they're much easier to pirate than carts, and they're sloooooooooooow, especially when comkpared to carts.
Carts have the advantage in that they're a great deal faster, they're harder to pirate, and they're much more durable (as a kid I did all kinds of things to my carts, including running over then with a bike and sending them through the washing machine, which would have killed a CD).
DVD solves the speed issue; it's really still too slow (at least in my opinion) to make it particularly suitable for any game but an RPG, but it's almost there, and certainly much closer than CD's ever were. Plus, you can start with advanced encryption and other such things, helping to solve the piracy issue. I don't know what Nintendo's going to do about the piracy to make it as piracy-resistant as they claim, though; perhaps it'll start punching holes in the disk in strategic locations which are different for each game?
Not only that, but carts aren't going to catch up to DVDs capacity-wise for a long time to come. That's more than enough to outshine the durability issue.
So then you come to the last issue, and the only other advantage carts still have over DVD's: portability. Yes, I know you can stick a DVD in your pocket (it'd have to be a big pocket, yes, but you can). But just try sticking the DVD player in your pocket. Those would have to be huge pockets to pull that off, especially if you had to add a screen and controller to the mix.
So I think that from this point on, carts will be relegated to the portable systems. However, don't rule them out just yet. Never know when the next huge advance in solid-state technology will come out...
I don't think so. Frankly, I think most people will just laugh over this one (though it's a brilliant move, campaign-wise).
This is not an attack on free speech in any way. People can still say whatever they want about him.