I never said it wasn't going to happen. Nor did I actually ctriticise Drudge for trustworthiness. And nothing in my post implied laughter.
I was merely pointing out , as did yourself , that this story is always popping up around the web over a fair span of time. And always unsubstantiated.
But for all I know they could be already signing the papers as we speak. I am no expert.
Doubtless fuelled by the Jobs/Pixar Pixar Disney connection and the fact that the Pixar movies , well at least the toy stories represent some of Disneys biggest money spinners of recent years.
Just feed Apple Disney merger into any search engine for many previous similar speculations, all equally uninformed ever since Jos took over the helm back at Apple.
I seem to recall slashdot fetaturing it before as well... here it is
Considering all the infrastructure needed to do this "transmission", and the fact that it will still be a four hour download, I can't help thinking that it might have just been easier to courier over a disk array or a server.
Before the inevitable Stallman bashing starts ...
on
RMS On 'Open' Motif
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· Score: 5
Please note that he's not being a pedant here. Similar in position to defending a trademark,everything he says about the Motif licensing is true. Itis incompatible with the philosophies of the FSF, and the term open-source is becoming increasingly polluted.
I see RMS as forced to comment every time some organisation/company hijacks the free software, open source hype attached to some press release, which is bound to attract plenty of press coverage,and reach eyeballs who aren't particularly clued up about the issues behind some of this wonderful "free" software they keep hearing is taking the world by storm..
Yes,but as I pointed out in my post, Corel have customised Debian a lot more besides adding extra packages, and they are aiming at an completely different market to the sourt of people who might intall Debian.
Isn't this exactly where Mandrake got started out, as a RedHat + KDE distro back when Redhat were not shipping KDE due to license conflicts ?
It strikes me that there could be a sizable business opportunity for someone to push out a KDE based debian ditribution. Of course there is already Corel, but they seem to be firmly targeting the Windows user / newbie market which isn't exacly the same memespace that Debian inhabits.
A company like Stormix would be well positioned to roll out a "KDE edition", and in fact they already include KDE with their product.
There's always room for more distributions, and if there really is this much demand, it strikes me as an ideal business opputunity.
I'm just reporting what our NT admins were saying. I don't know anything about Windows really. It was still pretty amazing watching how fast it spread itself
We got hit in our office this morning. Obviously the techs like me were running Linux and laughed it off. But unlike Melissa this one actually carries a nasty payload.
It mails to everyone in your Outlook addressbook, not just 50. Also your MIRC nick list. It trawls all your mounted directories copying itself over all MP3's JPEGS.jpgs, style sheets and.js files amongst others
This actually managed to knock out half of our office , as well as render one of our live web servers pretty messed up , within under 10 minutes of the first person activating it. Yes, the webserver was a linux box, but one unfortunate had a subtree on a server that mirrored stuff to it mounted over a samba share
And no, you didn't have to click on it. That damn preview pane was enough to trigger it off.
Re:don't overplay the scientology angle
on
Battlefield Earth
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· Score: 1
That is a very good point actually, although I'm afraid I was not clear enough in my intent with my original post. Although even then having thought about your examples I'm still not sure my thinking holds up.
I rather had in mind the subliminal mind control and brainwashing allegations, which I think are absolute bunk. But still, you may well be right. Any publicity is generally good publicity in the mass marketing medium
don't overplay the scientology angle
on
Battlefield Earth
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· Score: 2
People are going to try very hard esecially in certain press sectors to portray this as a scientology fronted PR execrcise. I'm not so sure . In Hubbards own words, from the intro to the book,in a section aimed at fans of his theology
"Some of my readers may wonder that I did not include my own serious subjects in this book. It was with no thoughts of dismissal of them. It was just that I put on my professional writers hat. I also did not want to give anybody the idea I was doing a press relations job for my other serious works"
Also remember that the scientology movement is exremely unpopular politically in many areas. Especially so over here in Europe where it is refused official recognition in countries such as Germany. Ask yourself if such a major company as Warner Brothers would pour huge budgets and promotional costs into such a film, if its content was guuranteed to cause controversy and drive away such potentially large audience areas?
Many years ago I spied a copy of Battlefield Earth on a friend's bookshelf. Curious, seeing all I knew about Hubbard was the scientology angle , abnd I had read a little about that movement I asked to borrow it with the intention of studying it for hidden meaning. I actually found it to be an interminally long, overlong extremely cheesy and dated space opera style sci-fi book.
I imagine that the Travolta connection is obviously no coincidence. But imagine this for a second...
Perhaps , like me he read the novel because of the scientology connexion, but with a twist... maybe he liked the book ?....
Well , following on from my subject line the first question that strikes me is how "open source" this "open source" release is going to be , in these days of this being a much-maligned label. Are we going to be seeing yet another open-source licence, or will Intel have the sense to use a pre-existing one.
I must confess to knowing vey little about this product , but I am also led to speculate if this is going to lead to any interesting crypto algorithims leaking their way out into open-source space. Security products often mean cryptography and as we all know, cryptography often means patents, so there could be some interesting issues there.
The thing that really confused me was the references in the article to this software being Itanium optimized. Fair enough then, Intel's motives could be seen as carrot dangling to persuade consumers to migrate more enthusiastically to a nascent technology platform. Then I was left wondering exactly how source code would be Itanium optimized. Surely it could be optimally tweaked and recompiled for any platform, even non-intel architectures.
Unless of course I'm missing the point as to what the product does and there is a hardware component of some kind.
Either that or its largely an assember source code release which people could already have disassembeled for themselves. But that would be ridiculous, so I'm still left pondering. Have to wait and see I guess. Anyone got any more information, or links
That was magnetic based and non-volatile and I seem to recall it being used in a series of portables from some manufacturor like Sharp.
I've got a nagging feeling that one of the reasons it didn't take off was access speed. I wonder if this new approach is at all similar, and if so what they have done about any performance issues.
I mean if it required dirty great RAM cacheing to make the performance acceptable surely this would be a reinvention of the hard disk ?( joke )
It looks as if the drivers run in userspace and there is a stubbed "superdriver" kernel module that provides a generic API for driver style interfaces between this userspace "driver" and the Linux kernel.
Its pretty possible that the "superdriver" stub could be a binary only module too from the looks of things.
I didn't read far enough in to look for licence restrictions, redistribution royalties etc.
I am certainly no kernel programming expert but it seems to me that there could be some definite performance issues with this approach, aside from these other issues I have outlined.
Would anyone suitably clever care to comment on the performance issue here?
Not that I am trying to stand up for this theory in any way, but not having read the actual report the link summarises, but I think you might have a hold of the wrong end of the handle.
I don't think for a second that the authors are suggesting that DOS contained hidden security back doors. Look at the paragraph where DOS is mentioned.
it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the (Microsoft) MS-DOS operating system by the same administration.
I infer from this that the creation of a dominant controlling software company overseeing PC operating sytems was the aim,and to further this scheme IBM was persuaded to use MS operating sytems on their incumbent PC platform. In this way a spook controlled company would be delivering the OS that was in use on the majority of the worlds desktop computers. Even if that operating system contained nothing shady on initial delivery, maybe enough foresight allowed them to realise that in later years it would be easy enough to slip in features like the famous NSA key as these devices became more powerful and networked.
Establish an initial base camp in the foothills , so to speak and there's no real harm done if nothing comes of it.
Still it all seems a bit far fetched to me. Now, if they'd suggested extraterrestrial involvement or drug money on the other hand . . .:o)
Vaguely following your thread, I only found out very recently that you can use av.com/?text=Y to use the portalized version of altavista in a text only version that is extemely modem friendly.
Try going to www.jwz.org and viewing the source code to the homepage. Although to be fair, he has removed the ALT tags in protest of 4.x browsers rendering them as tooltips or something.
Here comes the inevitable hordes of whiners complaining about the absence of the Slashdot code release...
But seriously, although opensource is cool and everything and the more of it around the better, how useful is this code release likely to be for people ? Not intended as a criticism, just genuine curiosity. It would seem to me that the usefulness of this site is in the resources offered rather than the code itself. But still,kudos, good show to VA, definitely one of the companies that "get it"
Look, I said that I didn't agree or disagree particularly with the moral intent, nor did I claim to have an handle on the absolute meaning of the bible.
I was merely contending with the parent posters statement that the bible does not condemn sex apart from homosexuality in the most "indirect" fashion.
Unless of course the person I was replying to is a fluent ancient Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek/Latin Middle English speaker. In which case I concede the point.
Or more likely their exposure to the Bible is from a root pretty common to mine, in which case, turn to Leviticus and find plenty of pretty explicit condemnation of sexual behaviour.
Interesting that this seems to be the first time that sun has pitched in with a major investment in a linux distributor.
Add this to the fact that they recently started pushing for a up to date linux JVM implementation, couple it with the fact that Caldera are moving into embedded stuff in a big way , in bed alongside Motorola, sprinkle with a little irrelevant transmeta, add three or four conspiracy theorists to the mix and leave to stand for half an hour.
Serve along with the tidbit that Intel aren't investing in a linux company for once, consume and then sit back and wait for the traditional after-dinner IPO and coffee.
Its pretty great that this comes hot on the heels of the Nvidia driver update announcement. It means that those people with GeForces can update their X server nice and cleanly with a XFree binary package from their preferred supplier without having to go through any scary patch your X | install this binary only special driver | build this from source stuff.
In short all those Christmas newbies with their latest "hot" video cards should be able to get Linux installed pretty painlessly without going through the "Why doesn't X work for me" woes that were so common last yuletime round.
Thanks for the hard work XFree guys, eagerly awaiting version 4.0
Or maybe they've just realised they aren't likely to get any further share in the competetive low cost CPU market and are desparately trying to dump all those Celerons they don't think they can shift...
Until hardware hackers everywhere turn on to these
I thought Intel said they would be using StrongARM for their appliance devices a while back ?
I am not moaning, merely asking the sites creators opinions on the current standards of commenting.The article is a call for questions after all.
I'm afraid I can't agree that the discussion content improving over time, I wouldn't make any claims for having read slashdot since day one whenever that was, but I have been reading for a long time and I'm stating my opinion here. I don't expect it to coincide with everyones. I certainly am not moaning.
I agree with you that moderation has solved certain problems but I feel it has created others. I have certainly seen examples of posts moderated severely by moderators who seem to not have understood the posters point or merely disagreed with its content. The "anyone praising Microsoft is a troll" syndrome.
I don't believe there is any perfect solution to any of these issues, but there is always room for improvement, and as we have been using the current solution for a while now I merely wished to know what the slashdot guys felt about the current posting standards, the moderation system and any plans to modify it further, given the much higher levels of traffic the site now attracts.
I'm sorry that my original post seems to have given you so much offence.
Slashdot Mirror
I was merely pointing out , as did yourself , that this story is always popping up around the web over a fair span of time. And always unsubstantiated.
But for all I know they could be already signing the papers as we speak. I am no expert.
For example http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/9902/disney-t o-buy-apple.shtml
Just feed Apple Disney merger into any search engine for many previous similar speculations, all equally uninformed ever since Jos took over the helm back at Apple.
I seem to recall slashdot fetaturing it before as well ... here it is
Kudos due trolls , you own slashdot!
Hey moderator ! This is a joke
I see RMS as forced to comment every time some organisation/company hijacks the free software, open source hype attached to some press release, which is bound to attract plenty of press coverage ,and reach eyeballs who aren't particularly clued up about the issues behind some of this wonderful "free" software they keep hearing is taking the world by storm..
It strikes me that there could be a sizable business opportunity for someone to push out a KDE based debian ditribution. Of course there is already Corel, but they seem to be firmly targeting the Windows user / newbie market which isn't exacly the same memespace that Debian inhabits.
A company like Stormix would be well positioned to roll out a "KDE edition", and in fact they already include KDE with their product.
There's always room for more distributions, and if there really is this much demand, it strikes me as an ideal business opputunity.
It mails to everyone in your Outlook addressbook, not just 50. Also your MIRC nick list. It trawls all your mounted directories copying itself over all MP3's JPEGS .jpgs, style sheets and .js files amongst others
This actually managed to knock out half of our office , as well as render one of our live web servers pretty messed up , within under 10 minutes of the first person activating it. Yes, the webserver was a linux box, but one unfortunate had a subtree on a server that mirrored stuff to it mounted over a samba share
And no, you didn't have to click on it. That damn preview pane was enough to trigger it off.
I rather had in mind the subliminal mind control and brainwashing allegations, which I think are absolute bunk. But still, you may well be right. Any publicity is generally good publicity in the mass marketing medium
"Some of my readers may wonder that I did not include my own serious subjects in this book. It was with no thoughts of dismissal of them. It was just that I put on my professional writers hat. I also did not want to give anybody the idea I was doing a press relations job for my other serious works"
Also remember that the scientology movement is exremely unpopular politically in many areas. Especially so over here in Europe where it is refused official recognition in countries such as Germany. Ask yourself if such a major company as Warner Brothers would pour huge budgets and promotional costs into such a film, if its content was guuranteed to cause controversy and drive away such potentially large audience areas?
Many years ago I spied a copy of Battlefield Earth on a friend's bookshelf. Curious, seeing all I knew about Hubbard was the scientology angle , abnd I had read a little about that movement I asked to borrow it with the intention of studying it for hidden meaning. I actually found it to be an interminally long, overlong extremely cheesy and dated space opera style sci-fi book.
I imagine that the Travolta connection is obviously no coincidence. But imagine this for a second ...
Perhaps , like me he read the novel because of the scientology connexion, but with a twist ... maybe he liked the book ?....
I must confess to knowing vey little about this product , but I am also led to speculate if this is going to lead to any interesting crypto algorithims leaking their way out into open-source space. Security products often mean cryptography and as we all know, cryptography often means patents, so there could be some interesting issues there.
The thing that really confused me was the references in the article to this software being Itanium optimized. Fair enough then, Intel's motives could be seen as carrot dangling to persuade consumers to migrate more enthusiastically to a nascent technology platform. Then I was left wondering exactly how source code would be Itanium optimized. Surely it could be optimally tweaked and recompiled for any platform, even non-intel architectures.
Unless of course I'm missing the point as to what the product does and there is a hardware component of some kind.
Either that or its largely an assember source code release which people could already have disassembeled for themselves. But that would be ridiculous, so I'm still left pondering. Have to wait and see I guess. Anyone got any more information, or links
That was magnetic based and non-volatile and I seem to recall it being used in a series of portables from some manufacturor like Sharp.
I've got a nagging feeling that one of the reasons it didn't take off was access speed. I wonder if this new approach is at all similar, and if so what they have done about any performance issues.
I mean if it required dirty great RAM cacheing to make the performance acceptable surely this would be a reinvention of the hard disk ?( joke )
Its pretty possible that the "superdriver" stub could be a binary only module too from the looks of things.
I didn't read far enough in to look for licence restrictions, redistribution royalties etc.
I am certainly no kernel programming expert but it seems to me that there could be some definite performance issues with this approach, aside from these other issues I have outlined.
Would anyone suitably clever care to comment on the performance issue here?
I don't think for a second that the authors are suggesting that DOS contained hidden security back doors. Look at the paragraph where DOS is mentioned.
it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the (Microsoft) MS-DOS operating system by the same administration.
I infer from this that the creation of a dominant controlling software company overseeing PC operating sytems was the aim,and to further this scheme IBM was persuaded to use MS operating sytems on their incumbent PC platform. In this way a spook controlled company would be delivering the OS that was in use on the majority of the worlds desktop computers. Even if that operating system contained nothing shady on initial delivery, maybe enough foresight allowed them to realise that in later years it would be easy enough to slip in features like the famous NSA key as these devices became more powerful and networked.
Establish an initial base camp in the foothills , so to speak and there's no real harm done if nothing comes of it.
Still it all seems a bit far fetched to me. Now, if they'd suggested extraterrestrial involvement or drug money on the other hand . . . :o)
But seriously, although opensource is cool and everything and the more of it around the better, how useful is this code release likely to be for people ? Not intended as a criticism, just genuine curiosity. It would seem to me that the usefulness of this site is in the resources offered rather than the code itself. But still ,kudos, good show to VA, definitely one of the companies that "get it"
I was merely contending with the parent posters statement that the bible does not condemn sex apart from homosexuality in the most "indirect" fashion.
Unless of course the person I was replying to is a fluent ancient Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek/Latin Middle English speaker. In which case I concede the point.
Or more likely their exposure to the Bible is from a root pretty common to mine, in which case, turn to Leviticus and find plenty of pretty explicit condemnation of sexual behaviour.
Add this to the fact that they recently started pushing for a up to date linux JVM implementation, couple it with the fact that Caldera are moving into embedded stuff in a big way , in bed alongside Motorola, sprinkle with a little irrelevant transmeta, add three or four conspiracy theorists to the mix and leave to stand for half an hour.
Serve along with the tidbit that Intel aren't investing in a linux company for once, consume and then sit back and wait for the traditional after-dinner IPO and coffee.
In short all those Christmas newbies with their latest "hot" video cards should be able to get Linux installed pretty painlessly without going through the "Why doesn't X work for me" woes that were so common last yuletime round.
Thanks for the hard work XFree guys, eagerly awaiting version 4.0
Until hardware hackers everywhere turn on to these
I thought Intel said they would be using StrongARM for their appliance devices a while back ?
I'm afraid I can't agree that the discussion content improving over time, I wouldn't make any claims for having read slashdot since day one whenever that was, but I have been reading for a long time and I'm stating my opinion here. I don't expect it to coincide with everyones. I certainly am not moaning.
I agree with you that moderation has solved certain problems but I feel it has created others. I have certainly seen examples of posts moderated severely by moderators who seem to not have understood the posters point or merely disagreed with its content. The "anyone praising Microsoft is a troll" syndrome.
I don't believe there is any perfect solution to any of these issues, but there is always room for improvement, and as we have been using the current solution for a while now I merely wished to know what the slashdot guys felt about the current posting standards, the moderation system and any plans to modify it further, given the much higher levels of traffic the site now attracts.
I'm sorry that my original post seems to have given you so much offence.