First, its FUD because they have always supported kernel patches in the past. You have to depend upon the developers of Linux for the kernel source to be improved just as you have to depend upon netraverse to maintain their patches.
You don't complain about that because the kernel developers are (arguably) dependable. Netraverse has been very regular and dependable in updating their kernel archive. Therefore, to claim that you can't get kernel patches for their products is merely to spread unfounded fear, uncertainty and doubt about the reliability of NeTraverse.
Common site - http://www.bootdisk.com Its sort of well known for its bootdisks. Its been up for a very long time, and is quite legal. Recommended by win4lin tech support, actually.
And you CAN buy win4lin for $80 if you look hard enough, just not directly from the company. (And yes, its also legal).
The main point of that is that $50 isn't really a good price for bug fixes.
You think Windows 98 is going away because Microsoft stops supporting it? Do you think most developers are actively supporting.NET? I doubt it. But at any rate, I got the idea from the previous post that the reason win4lin might go under is because they aren't improving. But they are improving. The reasons that their product doesn't work on NT are fast evaporating.
However, if TransGaming ever beats down the problem, I really don't think anything else has a shot unless they make the product MUCH more affordable.
First of all, the claim that you have to depend upon Netraverse is just FUD. Netraverse has done a very good job of supplying kernel patches; they've got all of the patches up to the 2.4.18 kernel available. Also, I wouldn't consider downloading a boot image for windows 98 from a common site exactly jumping through hoops - thats all I had to do. Also, the claim that they'll die is also FUD. They've on version 4.0 now, which only just came out, and it works with ME as well. And they really do have a good claim to fame: in my experience, their product works at the same speed as native windows (unlike VMWare, which I'm told runs at about half speed or less). However, there product has some serious drawbacks which have angered me.
1) v3.0 will only let you use 64MB of RAM. Also, video sucks.
2) Upgrades to remove the limitations COST MONEY. That's right, design flaws that are the fault of the software designers (because they used an old BIOS to do their initial design) are almost as expensive as the actual products ($20 less).
3) Documentation is very bad, and there are some serious memory requirements which are barely mentioned (each user gets their own "windows partition" with their own copies of ALL system files - about 200MB/user on top of the 400MB that is required for the initial install). With the help of tech support, I got it to work on my system after A MONTH of e-mails - two from me each weekday, and one from them.
Still, it runs, and only crashes occasionally due to some thrashing problems. As "nice" as their product works, Its quite frustrating that they expect their customers who have already contributed a substantial sum to also pay for the upgrade in which they fix their bugs. Its almost like paying for the latest version of Windows, except that instead of getting features I don't use to go along with the bug fixes, I'm getting only the bug fixes. I believe Windows at least uses service packs.
I'm done paying until they start playing nice. I bought the product initially with the understanding that this was a promising product that they where going to improve upon, and give to their current users and sell to other users (like they did from v2.0 to v3.0).
I think its pretty clear by Genesis 1:1 that God created everything at some particular point in time.
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."
Now, for ancient society, the heavens referred to everything that wasn't the earth.
As you read the rest of Genesis, you can see that God filled the heaven with "light." I would assume that means stars, the cosmos, etc. So its most likely that He created the universe in those 7 days. Still, there are some basic questions about what a day means to God.
Personally, I believe that God is omnipresent, which, in light of some current theries about space time, I think He exists in every point in space-time simultaneously. An easy ramification for us to understand about this is that God would be omnitemporal. I wonder what the "beginning" means to a being who is omnitemporal?
Just as with the church and Galileo, a lack of belief in science is due to a limited understanding of God and His words. There are still a lot of theories that have been brought into existance for the sole purpose of rejecting the existance of God while providing little or no evidence whatsoever (such as the multiple universe theory).
Based upon that, Gone with the Wind is much more popular than otherwise thought because nobody had a lot more than $.25 back then. There are many other factors to consider, though. Like for instance, during economic downturn, entertainment industries thrive (it serves as a form of escapism). Also, the theme of "Gone with the Wind" which is "I will personally rebuild the life that was taken from me" spoke to the entire nation of the time. Its been a while since the US was as unified in misery or anything else (although 9/11 certainly came close).
Still, it goes to show that "Gone with the Wind" was almost needed at the time. People almost needed to see it. So its going to be the most popular for a long time, hopefully. If this nation is that unified again, we'll either be really pissed or really sad, and I'd rather not see either condition.
On a similar note, the first cliffhanger, the Pickwick Papers (by Charles Dickens) still holds the record as being bought and read by more of the literate world than any (non-Bible) in the history of the world. Wierd, huh?
Well...not all the Spiderman fans are perfectly happy. Saying, "I wrote a paper in Nano-technology" does not really do much to show Parker to be a technological genius, not nearly as much as inventing web shooters (they were organic in the movie as we all know), and Pete didn't love MJ since they where little...she wasn't even his first girlfriend.
Still, JJJ was perfect, and there were some great scenes and quotes in there like "your friendly neighborhood spiderman" and "with great power comes great responsibility," and there was some real attention to detail to make some of the shots reminescent of the comics, such as when Spidey hung upside down, and where he would go to think (on top of a gargoyle on a particular building).
Its better than anything else like it, but not at all the same spirit. In the movie (and trailer) aunt May said, "You do too much. You're not Superman, you know." If all he's got going for him is his super powers, then isn't that exactly what he is, just another superman?
You know that I mean: I know where I'm going to go.
However, I could just as easily mean: I know where I'm going to be.
However, this is hardly a compelling argument which tells us what we shouldn't do with our prepositions and what with. Sometimes the context makes it perfectly clear what is understood, as in the previous sentence. And I've never heard any rule that says that it is illegal for certain parts of the sentence to be understood (i.e. not written out), just as I've never heard a compelling argument for why sentences shouldn't begin with a conjunction if it clarifies that a previous idea is being continued with another independent set of thoughts.
Language theorists have known for a long time that it is possible to create grammatically correct sentences that are lexically impossible for humans to understand without thinking about them for a few minutes (or hours, depending on the human).
Bottom line: he's right. Also, if a sentence is not terribly awkward to parse, its generally proper enough for the circumstance. Awkward is, of course, relative, but in this case we're talking about an unedited comment on a message board, so I think we can take it fast and loose.
Not sure if your serious or not, however, I remember where this comes from. "ugly bags of mostly water" was a description of humans by a microscopic yet intelligent lifeform found in one of the ST: TNG episodes. It seems someone is showing some objection to using whatever you're using for your own purposes, "enslaving" it.
You know, we have to put this stuff in perspective. They're doing movies based upon comic books. The way I see it, there are two options: make something that doesn't make much sense which won't sell as well (like Dick Tracy), or completely alter the mood and how everything works (like TMNT, Incredible Hulk, Batman) to suit the time and place.
Comic books are rather like books: they can be timeless. Movies have a much harder time with that because your imagination can't fill in details that make the characters seem to fit in your present time - things like how they walk, what their clothing would look like if they where real, how they sound, etc.
Have you seen any spidey movies from the seventies? They are...VERY 70's. You almost expect Shaft to bust in and help Spidey out with the bad guys.
One final note: Organic web shooters? Raimi's on crack. Spiderman was Marvel's answer to Batman: a character who used his mind to figure out how to defeat his enemies. Nowhere is there a better reminder of that than in the fact that the webshooters where an invention.
Plus, I could totally see that going awry: Peter gets all hot 'n bothered by MJ, and, completely distracted, he shoots webbing all over the place, random-like. Of course, I've always thought that Wolverine would have similar problems with his lovers, except instead of accidentally getting everything sticky, he'd probably destroy everything. Comics creators and movie directors just don't think much about those kinds of things...
Perhaps I should be more clear as to why I say that open source leads to interoperability in this case.
1) Everyone who wants to develop a client for this system works with the developers themselves; its all part of one project. That means they test the interoperability between each system. This is possible because no one cares about profit. If people did care about profit, then there would be different entities working on each system (unless one had enough for all systems, which is seldom the case).
2) Age leads to maturity for Open Source products (because of the many eyes system), and this is an old enough product to be mature, and therefore not particularly buggy.
3) The goal of any open source developer is that their product becomes popular. Breaking standards can take away that popularity as long as the product does not have market dominance. The developers therefore have a vested interest in ensuring that the product is interoperable.
Why did I give this example rather than NFS? Because there is a Windows DLL which will let you mount AFS shares automatically on any version of Windows. This means that there is no real reason to use the Windows protocol (other than laziness, which I'll admit is a problem).
Perhaps this clears up the fact that I understand what I'm talking about and that open source sometimes means better interoperability.
And as far as understanding economics, I find that perhaps that claim is based upon some lack of such understanding. A company is leveraging its dominant market position to become a standards leader to drive out competition and thereby increase demand for their products. This is certainly shafting consumers, making the name "Micro$haft" quite apropoe. Perhaps you didn't think of OSS as a part of the economic system. It is, though its effects aren't quite the same.
Thats the first thing I think of when I think of RRP.
If any movie fits the bill, They Live! is the precursor to the Matrix (awesome fight scenes killin' a heartless enemy who seeks to control all of humanity).
With any luck, Roddy will be in one of the up and coming installations of the Matrix. He could be one of the ones who can recognize agents because of his...sunglasses. Maybe he can show that dainty surfer dude (Keanu) how to beat up agents by continuously slamming their heads into cement.
Micro$haft is the main company working on Windows networking protocols, and as has always been the case they don't seem to encourage standards or interoperability.
I'm thinking a better solution would be to use OpenAFS. It works on Windows and Linux just fine, and its not going to have interoperability problems because all of the stuff is open source.
I believe its only a short time, maybe a year or four, before M$ doesn't have anything to do with network interoperability software, unless they change their policy.
A saying comes to mind: "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Perhaps pong isn't proof of concept, but perhaps also you don't know what modern day oscilloscopes can do.
I gave that as an example because I know someone who did it, not to show proof of concept (sorry, he didn't make any screenshots). Most modern oscilliscopes come with some programmable I/O features and a built in embedded processor. If you want a video game that better serves as an example, how about centipede or nibble? Most of the modern versions of HP oscilliscopes have those built in (which can only be accessed using an easter egg).
It seems to me that these modern oscilliscopes are sitting right on the edge of possibility for a Linux install.
And as far as that kernel being linux or not, its an assembly shell, but its probably the closest he could get to posix compliance on so little memory. Also keep in mind that it may be an adaptation of some concept of Linux more than just the whole system. There are a lot of features in Linux that are already handled by the underlying ROM on a TI89.
I think that this is actually a little smaller... Look at the bottom of the page. There's a Linux shell for TI-89! http://www.ticalc.org/pub/89/asm/shells/ Now for more wierdness...how about Linux on an oscilloscope? I know a guy who wrote "pong" for it using anolog circuits. Perhaps someone should take it further.
They could use a TV remote as the interface and an adapted LCD driver chip to do it cheap...
I've been wondering about this for a long time. They cache possibly illegal content, and are certianly distributing some stuff that the authors aren't giving them permission to, as well as possibly linking to sites which violate DMCA (and if they recieve too many letters about this, it could take forever to take down all the sites that are apparently violating the act).
It seems that Google might be breaking some of the current laws, or may break some in the future. IMHO, this is a good thing, because there are so many people who think that Google is an innocent, noble and pure search engine. The law may just be changed so that Google no longer violates it. I would certainly hate to see such a mechanism slip quietly into the night.
And what, praytell, is a neutron?
on
Quark Stars
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· Score: 2
The difference, of course, is the mass and possibly density of a neutron star compared to that of an actual neuron.
Its difficult to call a neutron star a collection of neutrons because in a normal neutron is composed of a (theoretically) fixed collection of quarks which "belong" to that neuron in some way; we have no such guarantee within a neuron star - in fact, its quite likely that all of the quarks composing a neutron star interact with each other in a way that is characteristic of the interactions of quarks within a single neutron.
We think of neutrons as little "balls" of quantum probability which exhibit matter properties, but what if we "melted" those balls so that the surface of an object composed of such balls looked more like the (macroscale) ocean than a McDonald's playground ballpit?
Yahoo and AOL are against it because of the DMCA, and yakity-yakity blah blah blah. Also, imagine if we could get a beowulf cluster of these?
Seriously, I think it falls into personal privacy just as phone messages would be. I really think its only a matter of time before by default, it becomes legal precedent.
Apparently history repeats itself. That article is very reminiscent of some ideas proposed a few centuries earlier by a Mr. Karl Marx. I believe his society fell because of government management of resources. Or one by Aristotle...I believe the principals that where applied to Roman society from his work on government also led to Rome's fall (equal distribution of resources led to an almost non-existant working class).
"Basic economics" do indeed apply - but I think we should only worry about applying economics that have been shown correct in practice. Its strange that so many argue against laisse faire, and so many for forcable direction of resources, though the latter has been shown to work, and the former has been shown to fail miserably in almost every case.
I read that article, and I think I'd have to say that 802.11 networking would be capable of succeeding for the same reason that free market systems work (despite the comments in this article claiming that they don't) - resources could be reallocated as efficiently as possible according to the will of the consumers of those resources.
Compared to ALL other systems, resources in a free market system flow to their users the fastest. There are no hour-long lines at the supermarkets, or shortages, or anything else of that nature. Supply is very close to equaling demand. I think you assume too much when you assume that the nets have to be "maintainted" in some way - maintenance is only a result of a high enough population of users and a better routing mechanism (on top of 802.11b) than we currently have - one that is ad-hoc. You think the computers are going to be getting tired of doing the routing? I'd like to end with a well known saying: democracy is a pretty bad system of government, but its a lot better than the alternatives.
Actually, URPMI does stop working on its own. At least, that's exactly what it did. I checked all of the files in the dependancy list, and I have upgraded none of them, and changed none of them. What happened? As far as I can tell, URPMI expects that the RPM sources are going to be at a particular location relative to the zipped file listing, and along the process of using it, all of the mirrors changed this location. I tried to upgrade, but I found that in order to do so, I would have to upgrade rpm and all its dependencies (which would be roughly equal to almost my entire operating system). Of course, I could force an upgrade, but that would result in the instability that I've been blamed for here on/. , and for which I'm blaming Mandrake.
And as far as my "it doesn't upgrade well" comment, while it may be your experience that upgrading was successful, this is not the norm - you are one of the lucky ones. Here on Slashdot is the first time I've heard anyone say that they've had a successful upgrade of Mandrake (and I've asked around).
As far as the last comment, that things are detected automatically unless they're very new, I guess the two most popular ethernet cards on the market - Netgear and DLink brand - are just too new (only being two years old and all), and so is Soundblaster AWE 64 Value (since its only 6 years old or so), and it doesn't work on a quirky system like a PIII-500 with one of the most standard motherboards ever used with it.
Does anyone else tire of moderators modding down posts that they don't agree with despite supported arguments?
I love the fact that Mandrake has worked hard to improve usability, and that their install is easier than the one for Windows ME. I've used 7.2, 8.0, and I'm currently using 8.1.
It wasn't until recently that I found out that most distros don't require a reformat to have a successful upgrade, and that usually you don't have to worry about most packages not working correctly out of the box like Mandrake's.
Even when I work hard to fix Mandrake's problems, there are a lot of packages that haven't worked. I have yet to get one PCI card to install using harddrake, and urpmi stopped working about four months ago, and no amount of work has made it work again. Also, in the latest installment, for some reason, neither Kudzu nor sndconfig work as well as they have in the past.
What do I mean by too Windowsish? Too buggy! They spend so much time making it look nice, and little time on ensuring that everything works as it should (just like Windows does). I think they're doing it so that they can seem to be the flashiest - flashy like Windows. "Does the distro you're trying to use have the latest, greatest version of product X? Mandrake does."
I'm sick of Mandrake and all its crap. They've made a convert out of me - a convert to another distro.
What makes you think that traveling through time would result in a slow or stop in movement through space, or that the laws that hold a person to the same trajectory as the Earth would no longer apply?
Relativistic effects do not negate the effects of gravity or inertial effects - the effects that cause us to "stick to" the earth. The majority of this force is the force of gravity - which would really do the job no matter which direction we were moving in time (inertial effects would only be helpful in "sticking" to the earth if traveling forward in time.
Also, if you read the article, the effect only happens inside the beam of electrons. That means that there is some minimum point before which time travel is not possible - the point at which the electron machine is turned on. This also limits the point in space.
If time travel where possible, I guess maybe you'd feel a strange sensation, something like getting off the elevator (perhaps worse - you might be thrown several hundred feet in the air), as the earth began to rotate in the opposite direction though.
Hmm...you could be right about the media lab. And you could be right about some middle management. But I know a lot of business majors, and I know that the reason they're doing it is because they want an easy job where they can make lots of money.
I just gave the media lab as an example because that's what it was like at the lab I worked for while in school, and I know thats what its like at CMU.
As far as being "a joke," that's just not true. They come up with stuff that obviously takes a long time to develop. If you don't believe me, you haven't been reading technical journals enough. It is precisely these technical journals that ensure that the lab continues to make a profit. Otherwise, they wouldn't be overfunded.
Consider a story also about the corporate workplace, "Working with Einstiens." Heres a quote from a news segment I've seen: Reporter: "Mr. Edison, how do you feel about Einstiens theory of relativity?" Edison: "Well, I don't quite understand it."
Edison inspired his staff by working EXTREMELY hard all of the time. Also, because of this, he was certianly qualified to be the boss: he was the one who made it happen, and he didn't play golf to do it. Can the same be said of the local IT industry? Is the management a group of people who got there because their career path in life was to work harder than their peers? Or did they choose a path that they thought would net them the most money with the least amount of work?
My guess is on the latter for most management.
I like Edison's management technique a lot better: "What a man's mind can create, a man's character can control."
His character gave him the respect and admiration of his assistants, who helped him with the mundane task of trying out thousands of different materials to find just the right one for the light bulb, among other things. Do you think we find the same in the IT industry? Will I do something "stupid" for someone else because I have faith in them? I think not. I'd only do it for a high rate of pay.
There is a place akin to this one: MIT media lab, as well as a lot of other Universities throughout the world, where the professors work like dogs for a lot less pay than they would get if they would sell some of their inventions on their own. But don't be so haughty as to compare this lab to IT.
Buz! is amazing...have you looked at the specs? Cards with that quality are usually about $400...and while it does suck that they didn't write drivers, there are now drivers IN THE KERNEL which work great. You don't even have to patch.
So what's your complaint about it? You've been using Windows as your main OS, haven't you?
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First, its FUD because they have always supported kernel patches in the past. You have to depend upon the developers of Linux for the kernel source to be improved just as you have to depend upon netraverse to maintain their patches.
.NET? I doubt it. But at any rate, I got the idea from the previous post that the reason win4lin might go under is because they aren't improving. But they are improving. The reasons that their product doesn't work on NT are fast evaporating.
You don't complain about that because the kernel developers are (arguably) dependable. Netraverse has been very regular and dependable in updating their kernel archive. Therefore, to claim that you can't get kernel patches for their products is merely to spread unfounded fear, uncertainty and doubt about the reliability of NeTraverse.
Common site - http://www.bootdisk.com
Its sort of well known for its bootdisks. Its been up for a very long time, and is quite legal.
Recommended by win4lin tech support, actually.
And you CAN buy win4lin for $80 if you look hard enough, just not directly from the company. (And yes, its also legal).
The main point of that is that $50 isn't really a good price for bug fixes.
You think Windows 98 is going away because Microsoft stops supporting it? Do you think most developers are actively supporting
However, if TransGaming ever beats down the problem, I really don't think anything else has a shot unless they make the product MUCH more affordable.
...but I sure hope the film does something to highlight the quality for which he is most beloved. Strange that the press report didn't mention it.
Do you suppose the movie will be funny?
First of all, the claim that you have to depend upon Netraverse is just FUD. Netraverse has done a very good job of supplying kernel patches; they've got all of the patches up to the 2.4.18 kernel available. Also, I wouldn't consider downloading a boot image for windows 98 from a common site exactly jumping through hoops - thats all I had to do.
Also, the claim that they'll die is also FUD. They've on version 4.0 now, which only just came out, and it works with ME as well. And they really do have a good claim to fame: in my experience, their product works at the same speed as native windows (unlike VMWare, which I'm told runs at about half speed or less).
However, there product has some serious drawbacks which have angered me.
1) v3.0 will only let you use 64MB of RAM. Also, video sucks.
2) Upgrades to remove the limitations COST MONEY. That's right, design flaws that are the fault of the software designers (because they used an old BIOS to do their initial design) are almost as expensive as the actual products ($20 less).
3) Documentation is very bad, and there are some serious memory requirements which are barely mentioned (each user gets their own "windows partition" with their own copies of ALL system files - about 200MB/user on top of the 400MB that is required for the initial install). With the help of tech support, I got it to work on my system after A MONTH of e-mails - two from me each weekday, and one from them.
Still, it runs, and only crashes occasionally due to some thrashing problems. As "nice" as their product works, Its quite frustrating that they expect their customers who have already contributed a substantial sum to also pay for the upgrade in which they fix their bugs. Its almost like paying for the latest version of Windows, except that instead of getting features I don't use to go along with the bug fixes, I'm getting only the bug fixes. I believe Windows at least uses service packs.
I'm done paying until they start playing nice. I bought the product initially with the understanding that this was a promising product that they where going to improve upon, and give to their current users and sell to other users (like they did from v2.0 to v3.0).
I think its pretty clear by Genesis 1:1 that God created everything at some particular point in time.
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."
Now, for ancient society, the heavens referred to everything that wasn't the earth.
As you read the rest of Genesis, you can see that God filled the heaven with "light." I would assume that means stars, the cosmos, etc. So its most likely that He created the universe in those 7 days. Still, there are some basic questions about what a day means to God.
Personally, I believe that God is omnipresent, which, in light of some current theries about space time, I think He exists in every point in space-time simultaneously. An easy ramification for us to understand about this is that God would be omnitemporal. I wonder what the "beginning" means to a being who is omnitemporal?
Just as with the church and Galileo, a lack of belief in science is due to a limited understanding of God and His words. There are still a lot of theories that have been brought into existance for the sole purpose of rejecting the existance of God while providing little or no evidence whatsoever (such as the multiple universe theory).
Actually, I'd say that my example is just completely bad. Still, it shows the idea of an understood word.
Based upon that, Gone with the Wind is much more popular than otherwise thought because nobody had a lot more than $.25 back then. There are many other factors to consider, though. Like for instance, during economic downturn, entertainment industries thrive (it serves as a form of escapism). Also, the theme of "Gone with the Wind" which is "I will personally rebuild the life that was taken from me" spoke to the entire nation of the time. Its been a while since the US was as unified in misery or anything else (although 9/11 certainly came close).
Still, it goes to show that "Gone with the Wind" was almost needed at the time. People almost needed to see it. So its going to be the most popular for a long time, hopefully. If this nation is that unified again, we'll either be really pissed or really sad, and I'd rather not see either condition.
On a similar note, the first cliffhanger, the Pickwick Papers (by Charles Dickens) still holds the record as being bought and read by more of the literate world than any (non-Bible) in the history of the world. Wierd, huh?
Well...not all the Spiderman fans are perfectly happy.
Saying, "I wrote a paper in Nano-technology" does not really do much to show Parker to be a technological genius, not nearly as much as inventing web shooters (they were organic in the movie as we all know), and Pete didn't love MJ since they where little...she wasn't even his first girlfriend.
Still, JJJ was perfect, and there were some great scenes and quotes in there like "your friendly neighborhood spiderman" and "with great power comes great responsibility," and there was some real attention to detail to make some of the shots reminescent of the comics, such as when Spidey hung upside down, and where he would go to think (on top of a gargoyle on a particular building).
Its better than anything else like it, but not at all the same spirit. In the movie (and trailer) aunt May said, "You do too much. You're not Superman, you know." If all he's got going for him is his super powers, then isn't that exactly what he is, just another superman?
I know where I'm going to.
You know that I mean:
I know where I'm going to go.
However, I could just as easily mean:
I know where I'm going to be.
However, this is hardly a compelling argument which tells us what we shouldn't do with our prepositions and what with. Sometimes the context makes it perfectly clear what is understood, as in the previous sentence. And I've never heard any rule that says that it is illegal for certain parts of the sentence to be understood (i.e. not written out), just as I've never heard a compelling argument for why sentences shouldn't begin with a conjunction if it clarifies that a previous idea is being continued with another independent set of thoughts.
Language theorists have known for a long time that it is possible to create grammatically correct sentences that are lexically impossible for humans to understand without thinking about them for a few minutes (or hours, depending on the human).
Bottom line: he's right. Also, if a sentence is not terribly awkward to parse, its generally proper enough for the circumstance. Awkward is, of course, relative, but in this case we're talking about an unedited comment on a message board, so I think we can take it fast and loose.
Not sure if your serious or not, however, I remember where this comes from.
"ugly bags of mostly water" was a description of humans by a microscopic yet intelligent lifeform found in one of the ST: TNG episodes. It seems someone is showing some objection to using whatever you're using for your own purposes, "enslaving" it.
You know, we have to put this stuff in perspective. They're doing movies based upon comic books. The way I see it, there are two options: make something that doesn't make much sense which won't sell as well (like Dick Tracy), or completely alter the mood and how everything works (like TMNT, Incredible Hulk, Batman) to suit the time and place.
Comic books are rather like books: they can be timeless. Movies have a much harder time with that because your imagination can't fill in details that make the characters seem to fit in your present time - things like how they walk, what their clothing would look like if they where real, how they sound, etc.
Have you seen any spidey movies from the seventies? They are...VERY 70's. You almost expect Shaft to bust in and help Spidey out with the bad guys.
One final note: Organic web shooters? Raimi's on crack. Spiderman was Marvel's answer to Batman: a character who used his mind to figure out how to defeat his enemies. Nowhere is there a better reminder of that than in the fact that the webshooters where an invention.
Plus, I could totally see that going awry: Peter gets all hot 'n bothered by MJ, and, completely distracted, he shoots webbing all over the place, random-like. Of course, I've always thought that Wolverine would have similar problems with his lovers, except instead of accidentally getting everything sticky, he'd probably destroy everything. Comics creators and movie directors just don't think much about those kinds of things...
Perhaps I should be more clear as to why I say that open source leads to interoperability in this case.
1) Everyone who wants to develop a client for this system works with the developers themselves; its all part of one project. That means they test the interoperability between each system. This is possible because no one cares about profit. If people did care about profit, then there would be different entities working on each system (unless one had enough for all systems, which is seldom the case).
2) Age leads to maturity for Open Source products (because of the many eyes system), and this is an old enough product to be mature, and therefore not particularly buggy.
3) The goal of any open source developer is that their product becomes popular. Breaking standards can take away that popularity as long as the product does not have market dominance. The developers therefore have a vested interest in ensuring that the product is interoperable.
Why did I give this example rather than NFS? Because there is a Windows DLL which will let you mount AFS shares automatically on any version of Windows. This means that there is no real reason to use the Windows protocol (other than laziness, which I'll admit is a problem).
Perhaps this clears up the fact that I understand what I'm talking about and that open source sometimes means better interoperability.
And as far as understanding economics, I find that perhaps that claim is based upon some lack of such understanding. A company is leveraging its dominant market position to become a standards leader to drive out competition and thereby increase demand for their products. This is certainly shafting consumers, making the name "Micro$haft" quite apropoe. Perhaps you didn't think of OSS as a part of the economic system. It is, though its effects aren't quite the same.
Thats the first thing I think of when I think of RRP.
If any movie fits the bill, They Live! is the precursor to the Matrix (awesome fight scenes killin' a heartless enemy who seeks to control all of humanity).
With any luck, Roddy will be in one of the up and coming installations of the Matrix. He could be one of the ones who can recognize agents because of his...sunglasses. Maybe he can show that dainty surfer dude (Keanu) how to beat up agents by continuously slamming their heads into cement.
...SMB will have to go away.
Micro$haft is the main company working on Windows networking protocols, and as has always been the case they don't seem to encourage standards or interoperability.
I'm thinking a better solution would be to use OpenAFS. It works on Windows and Linux just fine, and its not going to have interoperability problems because all of the stuff is open source.
I believe its only a short time, maybe a year or four, before M$ doesn't have anything to do with network interoperability software, unless they change their policy.
A saying comes to mind:
"The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Pessimest.
Perhaps pong isn't proof of concept, but perhaps also you don't know what modern day oscilloscopes can do.
I gave that as an example because I know someone who did it, not to show proof of concept (sorry, he didn't make any screenshots). Most modern oscilliscopes come with some programmable I/O features and a built in embedded processor. If you want a video game that better serves as an example, how about centipede or nibble? Most of the modern versions of HP oscilliscopes have those built in (which can only be accessed using an easter egg).
It seems to me that these modern oscilliscopes are sitting right on the edge of possibility for a Linux install.
And as far as that kernel being linux or not, its an assembly shell, but its probably the closest he could get to posix compliance on so little memory. Also keep in mind that it may be an adaptation of some concept of Linux more than just the whole system. There are a lot of features in Linux that are already handled by the underlying ROM on a TI89.
I think that this is actually a little smaller...
Look at the bottom of the page.
There's a Linux shell for TI-89!
http://www.ticalc.org/pub/89/asm/shells/
Now for more wierdness...how about Linux on an oscilloscope? I know a guy who wrote "pong" for it using anolog circuits. Perhaps someone should take it further.
They could use a TV remote as the interface and an adapted LCD driver chip to do it cheap...
I've been wondering about this for a long time. They cache possibly illegal content, and are certianly distributing some stuff that the authors aren't giving them permission to, as well as possibly linking to sites which violate DMCA (and if they recieve too many letters about this, it could take forever to take down all the sites that are apparently violating the act).
It seems that Google might be breaking some of the current laws, or may break some in the future. IMHO, this is a good thing, because there are so many people who think that Google is an innocent, noble and pure search engine. The law may just be changed so that Google no longer violates it. I would certainly hate to see such a mechanism slip quietly into the night.
The difference, of course, is the mass and possibly density of a neutron star compared to that of an actual neuron.
Its difficult to call a neutron star a collection of neutrons because in a normal neutron is composed of a (theoretically) fixed collection of quarks which "belong" to that neuron in some way; we have no such guarantee within a neuron star - in fact, its quite likely that all of the quarks composing a neutron star interact with each other in a way that is characteristic of the interactions of quarks within a single neutron.
We think of neutrons as little "balls" of quantum probability which exhibit matter properties, but what if we "melted" those balls so that the surface of an object composed of such balls looked more like the (macroscale) ocean than a McDonald's playground ballpit?
Yahoo and AOL are against it because of the DMCA, and yakity-yakity blah blah blah. Also, imagine if we could get a beowulf cluster of these?
Seriously, I think it falls into personal privacy just as phone messages would be. I really think its only a matter of time before by default, it becomes legal precedent.
Apparently history repeats itself. That article is very reminiscent of some ideas proposed a few centuries earlier by a Mr. Karl Marx. I believe his society fell because of government management of resources. Or one by Aristotle...I believe the principals that where applied to Roman society from his work on government also led to Rome's fall (equal distribution of resources led to an almost non-existant working class).
"Basic economics" do indeed apply - but I think we should only worry about applying economics that have been shown correct in practice. Its strange that so many argue against laisse faire, and so many for forcable direction of resources, though the latter has been shown to work, and the former has been shown to fail miserably in almost every case.
I read that article, and I think I'd have to say that 802.11 networking would be capable of succeeding for the same reason that free market systems work (despite the comments in this article claiming that they don't) - resources could be reallocated as efficiently as possible according to the will of the consumers of those resources.
Compared to ALL other systems, resources in a free market system flow to their users the fastest. There are no hour-long lines at the supermarkets, or shortages, or anything else of that nature. Supply is very close to equaling demand.
I think you assume too much when you assume that the nets have to be "maintainted" in some way - maintenance is only a result of a high enough population of users and a better routing mechanism (on top of 802.11b) than we currently have - one that is ad-hoc. You think the computers are going to be getting tired of doing the routing?
I'd like to end with a well known saying:
democracy is a pretty bad system of government, but its a lot better than the alternatives.
Actually, URPMI does stop working on its own. At least, that's exactly what it did. I checked all of the files in the dependancy list, and I have upgraded none of them, and changed none of them. /. , and for which I'm blaming Mandrake.
What happened? As far as I can tell, URPMI expects that the RPM sources are going to be at a particular location relative to the zipped file listing, and along the process of using it, all of the mirrors changed this location. I tried to upgrade, but I found that in order to do so, I would have to upgrade rpm and all its dependencies (which would be roughly equal to almost my entire operating system). Of course, I could force an upgrade, but that would result in the instability that I've been blamed for here on
And as far as my "it doesn't upgrade well" comment, while it may be your experience that upgrading was successful, this is not the norm - you are one of the lucky ones. Here on Slashdot is the first time I've heard anyone say that they've had a successful upgrade of Mandrake (and I've asked around).
As far as the last comment, that things are detected automatically unless they're very new, I guess the two most popular ethernet cards on the market - Netgear and DLink brand - are just too new (only being two years old and all), and so is Soundblaster AWE 64 Value (since its only 6 years old or so), and it doesn't work on a quirky system like a PIII-500 with one of the most standard motherboards ever used with it.
Does anyone else tire of moderators modding down posts that they don't agree with despite supported arguments?
I love the fact that Mandrake has worked hard to improve usability, and that their install is easier than the one for Windows ME. I've used 7.2, 8.0, and I'm currently using 8.1.
It wasn't until recently that I found out that most distros don't require a reformat to have a successful upgrade, and that usually you don't have to worry about most packages not working correctly out of the box like Mandrake's.
Even when I work hard to fix Mandrake's problems, there are a lot of packages that haven't worked. I have yet to get one PCI card to install using harddrake, and urpmi stopped working about four months ago, and no amount of work has made it work again. Also, in the latest installment, for some reason, neither Kudzu nor sndconfig work as well as they have in the past.
What do I mean by too Windowsish? Too buggy! They spend so much time making it look nice, and little time on ensuring that everything works as it should (just like Windows does). I think they're doing it so that they can seem to be the flashiest - flashy like Windows. "Does the distro you're trying to use have the latest, greatest version of product X? Mandrake does."
I'm sick of Mandrake and all its crap. They've made a convert out of me - a convert to another distro.
What makes you think that traveling through time would result in a slow or stop in movement through space, or that the laws that hold a person to the same trajectory as the Earth would no longer apply?
Relativistic effects do not negate the effects of gravity or inertial effects - the effects that cause us to "stick to" the earth. The majority of this force is the force of gravity - which would really do the job no matter which direction we were moving in time (inertial effects would only be helpful in "sticking" to the earth if traveling forward in time.
Also, if you read the article, the effect only happens inside the beam of electrons. That means that there is some minimum point before which time travel is not possible - the point at which the electron machine is turned on. This also limits the point in space.
If time travel where possible, I guess maybe you'd feel a strange sensation, something like getting off the elevator (perhaps worse - you might be thrown several hundred feet in the air), as the earth began to rotate in the opposite direction though.
Hmm...you could be right about the media lab. And you could be right about some middle management. But I know a lot of business majors, and I know that the reason they're doing it is because they want an easy job where they can make lots of money.
I just gave the media lab as an example because that's what it was like at the lab I worked for while in school, and I know thats what its like at CMU.
As far as being "a joke," that's just not true. They come up with stuff that obviously takes a long time to develop. If you don't believe me, you haven't been reading technical journals enough. It is precisely these technical journals that ensure that the lab continues to make a profit. Otherwise, they wouldn't be overfunded.
Consider a story also about the corporate workplace, "Working with Einstiens."
Heres a quote from a news segment I've seen:
Reporter: "Mr. Edison, how do you feel about Einstiens theory of relativity?"
Edison: "Well, I don't quite understand it."
Edison inspired his staff by working EXTREMELY hard all of the time. Also, because of this, he was certianly qualified to be the boss: he was the one who made it happen, and he didn't play golf to do it. Can the same be said of the local IT industry? Is the management a group of people who got there because their career path in life was to work harder than their peers? Or did they choose a path that they thought would net them the most money with the least amount of work?
My guess is on the latter for most management.
I like Edison's management technique a lot better:
"What a man's mind can create, a man's character can control."
His character gave him the respect and admiration of his assistants, who helped him with the mundane task of trying out thousands of different materials to find just the right one for the light bulb, among other things. Do you think we find the same in the IT industry? Will I do something "stupid" for someone else because I have faith in them? I think not. I'd only do it for a high rate of pay.
There is a place akin to this one: MIT media lab, as well as a lot of other Universities throughout the world, where the professors work like dogs for a lot less pay than they would get if they would sell some of their inventions on their own. But don't be so haughty as to compare this lab to IT.
Buz! is amazing...have you looked at the specs?
Cards with that quality are usually about $400...and while it does suck that they didn't write drivers, there are now drivers IN THE KERNEL which work great. You don't even have to patch.
So what's your complaint about it? You've been using Windows as your main OS, haven't you?