That is EXACTLY what Linus did, you ignorant fuckhead. That is why Linux is called
drumroll please
an OPEN SOURCE operating system.
What Linus doesn't do, it turns out, is put his personal blessing on hacks/mods that don't meet his personal standards. This doesn't mean that you or I can't download the code and do whatever we want with it under the GPL.
People aren't downloading music to listen on their PC speakers. MP3 would never have the popularity it does, nor would digital music have any validity at all, if the only place you could play it were your PC speakers.
People want that audio on their stereo, on headphones, on their belt as they jog, and they aren't gonna buy it if they can't get it there. And as soon as you put a headphone jack on your secure digital speakers, they aren't secure any more. Even Joe Doofus can run an attenuating patch cord from the headphone jack back to the input of his real sound card, and sure he'll lose a little quality (the.MP3 compression doesn't bother him though, does it?) he won't lose any more quality when he passes further copies to his 12,000,000 closest friends on Napster.
While the kernel can deal with it, user-space state machines can't deal with the problem of blocking on a resource.
WTF??? You mean you don't have a way of checking whether a resource is available without blocking your thread so that you can go do other processing while the resource is unavailable?
I have done a lot of programming on proprietary pidgin-language controllers where I have had 4 or 5 state machines going at once (describing the behavior of real-world machinery, generally) and not one of these devices supports threading. (Well, one does now, but nobody uses it because it's so hard to debug.)
While it is re-inventing the wheel, the advantage of doing your own threads by implementing multiple state machines is that you can make your own decisions about what is important. In an embedded environment this can make the difference between an app that will and one that won't work on the available hardware.
Harlequin's comment about the consumerware being crippled is well taken, but there's also the fact that, in large measure, it really isn't about the music. It's about an industry that creates mass movements around artificial archetypes so that, ultimately, they can sell you stuff.
I have heard acts in Holiday Inn bars that were clearly more talented than some pop stars. Some of them weren't interested in fame, but most simply lost out in the lottery that leads to superstardom.
You said: Obviously talent is still required on the part of the musicians.
Well, duh. The same is true of writers, actors, directors, and many others who create entertainment media. The middleman distribution industry we all love to hate does, unfortunately, serve a useful function, by directing us to artists who have been pre-selected out of the vast sea of wannabe's as being superior and worthwhile. The fact that this industry is biased, self-serving, and rapacious is irrelevant; we still need it.
Look at the situation with books. Now that the publishing industry is consolidated into abou 1.5 houses it is nearly impossible for an unknown to get a novel published. But wait, you say, you can publish your novel on the Web! Well, that's true -- if you don't care about getting paid -- but have you read much of the free fiction that's out there on the Web? Most of it is bad. Even though some of it may be worthwhile, without an editor to preselect it -- even a biased, greedy rapacious editor -- it just isn't worth the effort. Which is why I still buy the latest Grisham instead of surfing up free entertainment. At least I can expect the Grisham to be entertaining.
What we really need is a replacement for the entertainment industry. But we also need a way for artists to be paid. It takes a lot of time and effort to write a novel or a set of decent songs. (The shareware software industry can give you a good idea of the rate of payment in voluntary systems. We studied it in Calculus under "limits.") Perhaps there is a way to do this over the 'net, with volunteer editors and some kind of honor system for rewarding the good artists, but I haven't seen it yet.
...and while we're at it, we'll help some of our friends in other industries get their share of your money, since we're buying them next year anyway and then it will be our money too.
MSFT: Or you could just save us the trouble and send us all your money now. We're going to get it anyway, so why make things hard on yourself?
Because the basic cost of hosting an auction is cheap, it works well. Everyone in the world gets US$10.00 in credit. (You didn't used to even have to give them a credit card #, and now they require it mainly for ID, not for payment security.) You post auctions. You are charged US$0.25 each time you do. You are charged more if there is a successful bidder.
When your balance reaches US$-10.00 you either stop holding auctions or pay up. You can send a cheque, or use your CC. I don't know if they have an automatic CC charge but another "business," a local toll bridge, does -- when my toll tag account gets in breathing distance of zero they run another receipt.
If the music were fairly priced -- I'd call US$0.25 per song very fair, considering the ease of distribution; much higher than US$0.50 would probably not be accepted, because of the amount of music you're likely to download before finding out how little you like it -- then a system like this would probably be widely accepted.
The kernel will only pass said data to signed drivers
Have you ever programmed a sound card?
Ultimately, there is a 16-bit hardware register which receives this 1/44000sec sample of sound
level, which will soon be converted to a voltage,
amplified, and fed to your speakers.
Have you ever designed a hardware peripheral? The CPU puts an address on a bus which announces to any piece of hardware in the machine that there is data on the data bus which might be of interest to it. The CPU does not know and does not care which or how many devices grab the output of a write, and if multiple devices respond to a read there is nothing it can do to stop the resulting data corruption when both devices try to assert an answer at the same time.
Unless, as another poster has suggested, the decrypter is built into the DAC, which would be a radical change of architecture requiring (at minimum) for everyone in the world to buy a new sound card, there is nothing at all the industry can do to stop you from adding a piggyback card to pick off the outgoing audio stream and make it available to some other totally unrelated piece of software for recording. This requires a board to be built, which is why it is called a hardware hack.
Picking off the sound at the driver is a software hack, and it is remotely possible that uSoft might prevent you from doing this for, oh, a few months until someone hacks the OS itself and provides a patch which prevents it from realizing that output is going to unsigned drivers. Unless uSoft decides to encrypt the whole damn operating system, there isn't much they can do to prevent this, either.
I assume by 'publish', you mean commercially? It is very legal to publish such images for journalistic purposes, what's prohibited is their sale, correct?
No, I mean exactly what I said. There is a "gray area" here but generally, if you take my picture and send it to your friend, as long as that's "private" (and you can consult SCOTUS if you want on how to define that) you can keep it, but if you make my picture that you took generally available to everybody on the 'net, you are in beeeg trouble both with me and the authorities.
Whether it be software designed to exclude Florida felons from voting, tests to show history of illegal drug use, interception of incoming missles from North Korea, identification of drivers entering central London to catch terrorists, or this Super Bowl--each has a definable sensitivity and specificity point.
And, in fact, didn't quite put it as well, thus a little emphasis here. Well spoken, sir.
There was a case where a man videotaped kids at the beach and at public pools with close zooms on genital areas, etc. The kids were all wearing usual swim attire. He then sold the tapes over the internet.
This is illegal, thankfully, not because of any sexual connotations at all (whether or not there were any), but because you own your image. Nobody can publish your picture without your permission unless you fall into a number of clearly enumerated categories defined by the Supreme Court, making you a "public figure." Attending the Super Bowl or the beach does not automatically make you a public figure, so if somebody takes your picture and then publishes it, at a minimum they owe you royalties. I'm sure the parents of the kids involved would not have approved of photographs such as you describe, therefore it was illegal to distribute them (but probably not to take them; that's a different animal altogether).
I think your pro-life stance is compromised just a tad by its presence in an enabling fake reply to what is generically known here as a goatse.cx post.
Re:This technology doesn't work and can't work
on
The Unblinking Eye
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· Score: 2
Instead of measuring the distance between my eyes etc., I would rather assume They[tm] use a properly constructed and trained neural net to recognize the faces.
No, they use metric criteria selected by human beings and implemented in deliberately written software. The neural net is even worse in real implementation, did you hear the one about the "tank detector" that was trained to detect tanks, except all the "tank" pictures were taken on cloudy days and the "no tank" pictures were in a mix of weather, so it was really a "cloudy day" detector.
The thing is, implementing stuff like this is a bad enough idea when you know how it works. It's an even worse idea when you don't know exactly what the machine is doing.
Re:Been done here for ages, and it works.
on
The Unblinking Eye
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· Score: 5
Also, the computer can observe peoples behaviour and alert a human operator if one of them is doing something suspicious, such as breaking into a parked car.
I would really love to see the software that is capable of determining that I am breaking into a car rather than, say, wiping birdshit off the windshield before entering it. This makes the facial recognition thing look like ELIZA for the TRS-80 by comparison.
Its just a question of trusting the authoriteies. If they abuse this power, unlikely, you can just vote them out. That is what a democracy is for.
You really should pay more attention to American politics. Do you think our democracy "worked" as you describe for the folks of darker complexion who were discouraged from voting in Florida by police checkpoints near the polls, or the ones who were unceremoniously dumped from the rolls because a database (built by a company closely allied with one and only one of our two major political parties) said they were felons?
I suppose your city doesn't see it as a major problem if a few people get stopped by the cops and questioned for a few minutes because some computer in a basement fucked up. But if your genes had the bad taste to give you a similar facial profile to some Genuine Bad Dude (tm) so that you got stopped all the time your personal self, I bet your attitude would change quick. Especially in the UK, land of the infamous Terrorist Act that allows you to be held without bond and interrogated for, what is it, 7 days? Yep, I'm sure you wouldn't mind being dragooned every time you entered a new city where you weren't personally known because this shit had become universal, after all, it's for the public good, right?
This technology doesn't work and can't work
on
The Unblinking Eye
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· Score: 4
I happen to know some members of a card counting team. They are naturally not welcome in many casinos, including some known to use this photo scanning system.
This technology was originally developed for use with mug shots, which are taken with calibrated camera position and lighting. Maybe they even work under those conditions. The idea is supposedly that they measure features like the distance between your eyes and ratio of that to mutual distance to your mouth which can't be altered by disguise. In fact, though, my friends continue to play relatively unmolested. They have been nailed by this tech a couple of times, but not nailed by it countless other times, even at places known to use it.
I am also completely unconvinced that this system won't produce errors -- especially when used with photos taken in public space, with uncalibrated lighting and uncontrolled camera angles. There are just too many people in the world and the resolution of the photos is too poor that there won't be some schlep whose nose, eyes, and mouth will all be dimensionally similar enough to mine to cause us to raise each others' alarms.
I figure this tech will last until the first bona fide innocent tourist is roughed up by cops who are convinced he is a big-time felon, then the Big Brother types will go back to dreaming of tracking us with implants.
I wonder -- the article says they identified 17 wanted pholx in the crowd. Did they act on this "discovery?" If not, how do we know these 17 lawbreakers were ID'ed accurately? Answer: We don't. If they really thought this was such hot shit they would have demonstrated its utility by making a few arrests, and it would have certainly made this article. But they aren't quite as stupid as they sound. They know it isn't perfect, and I'm betting even the developers know it never will be.
If he could play both the professor in Brainstorm and the massively psychopathic angel Gabriel in The Prophecy, he can almost project Gates' emotionless drive to rule the world by owning its core technology.
, be pissed at all the people who didn't vote in the last election and thus gave us W for a president.
I think that would actually be the five people who did vote to give us Dubya as prez-duh-dent. As for the rest of us, the majority voted for the other guy.
...it's the CPU speed for doing the MP3 encoding. The MP3 format is designed so that it takes quite a bit more horsepower to encode a song than to play it. My 450MHz Celeron makes short work of playing MP3's, but using all the resources it takes close to real listening time to encode them. A GHz level CPU with better cache would cut this some, but not enough to not be a nuisance. As the guy said, Napster (like a MP3 player) runs in the background. MP3 rippers don't.
That is truly hilarious. How perfectly you capture the irony that is the combination of wideband+napster.
Of course, there is the other side. I collected a lot of our vinyl albums in MP3 for my girlfriend, who is album- rather than song-oriented. Some of her stuff is a tad obscure (Bob Dylan's Royal Albert Hall, or the pirate No Stone Unturned Stones album). You fight those Zimbabwean modems for a week or more, then one day...
...You search and there is not one, not two, but three folks with every single track, neatly labelled and numbered. User #1 is another Zimbabwean. You cancel the transfer and try user #2, and...
vvvvVVVVVVRRRROOOOOMMMMMMMM the first transfer starts, 20kbps, 30kbps, levels out at 50kbps; the second starts, goes straight to 50kbps, the third starts, goes straight to 50kbps, the fourth naturally gets remotely queued but that doesn't matter, you are gripping the armrests and when transfer #1 finishes #2 kicks in, you rightclick #1 and play song, go to the library, take a few samples from different parts of the track, and the last bars are fading sweetly off into nontruncated bliss when you pop back to transfer and transfer #2 is finished and #5 has started, and within 10 minutes you have the entire album. Half an hour later you're popping the CD into the stereo for the female companion to admire. And life is good.
Oh, and while I usually get 800kbps or so ratings from bandwidth meter websites, on Napster I often see exactly the 1.5mbps down and 200kbps up I'm promised by BellSouth for my DSL connection.
flat out wrong. there was never any minix code in any version of linux. minix is a microkernel, linux is a monolithic kernel. the internal architecture is wildly different.
There may never have been any minix code in any version of linux distributed as such, but by his own words, when Linus began writing Linux he started with the Minix codebase and worked by replacing it piece by piece. By the time he got around to showing it to other Minix users there was no Minix code left, but that's how he started. He actually used this as an example of how you can approach a seemingly huge project when there is something inadequate but similar to use as a starting platform.
like he is trying to make the heathens find god or something, and that's not his job.
As a matter of fact, as a devout Mormon he considers that his primary job. I explained in the Card Movie discussion last week about my friend who wrote the Ender and Hitler article; I remember one thing that blew Radford away was that she told Card "we all know what the road to Hell is paved with" and he replied, "I don't believe that."
He's not just trying to teach morality, he is trying to teach a morality most of us would find somewhat reprehensible if he stated it baldly.
P.S. I mentioned that discussion to her recently and she is toying with the idea of putting the article online. Unfortunately she does not have it in digital form and will have to find a hard copy to scan. Also, I think it's less than complete without Card's incredibly lame rebuttal which she can't publish without his permission (which she ain't likely to either ask for or get).
It is, however, available at the library in Literary Review where it was republished. Search for Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman by Mary Elaine Radford.
The serious astrologers (the ones who, unless they're math wonks, need a computer to draw your chart) have been using all the new planets since not long after their discoveries. This is something I found interesting back when I was hanging out in New Age circles.
How, you might wonder, do these guys determine what the influence of, say, Uranus is on your chart? When the planet is discovered they cast charts of people and events including the newly discovered object, and work those charts backward to see if there are any consistent patterns of influence. They also take hints from the object's properties (color, distance, size, etc.) on the assumption that things are conveniently labelled for us by a consistent Nature (the "law of signatures").
Anyway, Pluto or no Pluto, now that the Age of Pisces is definitely over we can finally look forward to the demise of Christianity and its replacement with something more, well, Aquarian:-)
...who started out with Minix and gradually replaced code until none of the original was left. You're right, though, the result does resemble UNIX an awful lot.
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That is EXACTLY what Linus did, you ignorant fuckhead. That is why Linux is called
drumroll please
an OPEN SOURCE operating system.
What Linus doesn't do, it turns out, is put his personal blessing on hacks/mods that don't meet his personal standards. This doesn't mean that you or I can't download the code and do whatever we want with it under the GPL.
People want that audio on their stereo, on headphones, on their belt as they jog, and they aren't gonna buy it if they can't get it there. And as soon as you put a headphone jack on your secure digital speakers, they aren't secure any more. Even Joe Doofus can run an attenuating patch cord from the headphone jack back to the input of his real sound card, and sure he'll lose a little quality (the .MP3 compression doesn't bother him though, does it?) he won't lose any more quality when he passes further copies to his 12,000,000 closest friends on Napster.
WTF??? You mean you don't have a way of checking whether a resource is available without blocking your thread so that you can go do other processing while the resource is unavailable?
I have done a lot of programming on proprietary pidgin-language controllers where I have had 4 or 5 state machines going at once (describing the behavior of real-world machinery, generally) and not one of these devices supports threading. (Well, one does now, but nobody uses it because it's so hard to debug.)
While it is re-inventing the wheel, the advantage of doing your own threads by implementing multiple state machines is that you can make your own decisions about what is important. In an embedded environment this can make the difference between an app that will and one that won't work on the available hardware.
I have heard acts in Holiday Inn bars that were clearly more talented than some pop stars. Some of them weren't interested in fame, but most simply lost out in the lottery that leads to superstardom.
You said: Obviously talent is still required on the part of the musicians.
Well, duh. The same is true of writers, actors, directors, and many others who create entertainment media. The middleman distribution industry we all love to hate does, unfortunately, serve a useful function, by directing us to artists who have been pre-selected out of the vast sea of wannabe's as being superior and worthwhile. The fact that this industry is biased, self-serving, and rapacious is irrelevant; we still need it.
Look at the situation with books. Now that the publishing industry is consolidated into abou 1.5 houses it is nearly impossible for an unknown to get a novel published. But wait, you say, you can publish your novel on the Web! Well, that's true -- if you don't care about getting paid -- but have you read much of the free fiction that's out there on the Web? Most of it is bad. Even though some of it may be worthwhile, without an editor to preselect it -- even a biased, greedy rapacious editor -- it just isn't worth the effort. Which is why I still buy the latest Grisham instead of surfing up free entertainment. At least I can expect the Grisham to be entertaining.
What we really need is a replacement for the entertainment industry. But we also need a way for artists to be paid. It takes a lot of time and effort to write a novel or a set of decent songs. (The shareware software industry can give you a good idea of the rate of payment in voluntary systems. We studied it in Calculus under "limits.") Perhaps there is a way to do this over the 'net, with volunteer editors and some kind of honor system for rewarding the good artists, but I haven't seen it yet.
MSFT: Or you could just save us the trouble and send us all your money now. We're going to get it anyway, so why make things hard on yourself?
Because the basic cost of hosting an auction is cheap, it works well. Everyone in the world gets US$10.00 in credit. (You didn't used to even have to give them a credit card #, and now they require it mainly for ID, not for payment security.) You post auctions. You are charged US$0.25 each time you do. You are charged more if there is a successful bidder.
When your balance reaches US$-10.00 you either stop holding auctions or pay up. You can send a cheque, or use your CC. I don't know if they have an automatic CC charge but another "business," a local toll bridge, does -- when my toll tag account gets in breathing distance of zero they run another receipt.
If the music were fairly priced -- I'd call US$0.25 per song very fair, considering the ease of distribution; much higher than US$0.50 would probably not be accepted, because of the amount of music you're likely to download before finding out how little you like it -- then a system like this would probably be widely accepted.
Have you ever programmed a sound card?
Ultimately, there is a 16-bit hardware register which receives this 1/44000sec sample of sound level, which will soon be converted to a voltage, amplified, and fed to your speakers.
Have you ever designed a hardware peripheral? The CPU puts an address on a bus which announces to any piece of hardware in the machine that there is data on the data bus which might be of interest to it. The CPU does not know and does not care which or how many devices grab the output of a write, and if multiple devices respond to a read there is nothing it can do to stop the resulting data corruption when both devices try to assert an answer at the same time.
Unless, as another poster has suggested, the decrypter is built into the DAC, which would be a radical change of architecture requiring (at minimum) for everyone in the world to buy a new sound card, there is nothing at all the industry can do to stop you from adding a piggyback card to pick off the outgoing audio stream and make it available to some other totally unrelated piece of software for recording. This requires a board to be built, which is why it is called a hardware hack.
Picking off the sound at the driver is a software hack, and it is remotely possible that uSoft might prevent you from doing this for, oh, a few months until someone hacks the OS itself and provides a patch which prevents it from realizing that output is going to unsigned drivers. Unless uSoft decides to encrypt the whole damn operating system, there isn't much they can do to prevent this, either.
I listened to several other tracks on TDTiaB's album, all were great. I wonder if they'd be mad that I downloaded it into my Napster directory, tho...
No, I mean exactly what I said. There is a "gray area" here but generally, if you take my picture and send it to your friend, as long as that's "private" (and you can consult SCOTUS if you want on how to define that) you can keep it, but if you make my picture that you took generally available to everybody on the 'net, you are in beeeg trouble both with me and the authorities.
And, in fact, didn't quite put it as well, thus a little emphasis here. Well spoken, sir.
...which is the type of sentence I used in that post. Linux type people eschew bloat in all things, including punctuation.
This is illegal, thankfully, not because of any sexual connotations at all (whether or not there were any), but because you own your image. Nobody can publish your picture without your permission unless you fall into a number of clearly enumerated categories defined by the Supreme Court, making you a "public figure." Attending the Super Bowl or the beach does not automatically make you a public figure, so if somebody takes your picture and then publishes it, at a minimum they owe you royalties. I'm sure the parents of the kids involved would not have approved of photographs such as you describe, therefore it was illegal to distribute them (but probably not to take them; that's a different animal altogether).
I think your pro-life stance is compromised just a tad by its presence in an enabling fake reply to what is generically known here as a goatse.cx post.
No, they use metric criteria selected by human beings and implemented in deliberately written software. The neural net is even worse in real implementation, did you hear the one about the "tank detector" that was trained to detect tanks, except all the "tank" pictures were taken on cloudy days and the "no tank" pictures were in a mix of weather, so it was really a "cloudy day" detector.
The thing is, implementing stuff like this is a bad enough idea when you know how it works. It's an even worse idea when you don't know exactly what the machine is doing.
I would really love to see the software that is capable of determining that I am breaking into a car rather than, say, wiping birdshit off the windshield before entering it. This makes the facial recognition thing look like ELIZA for the TRS-80 by comparison.
Its just a question of trusting the authoriteies. If they abuse this power, unlikely, you can just vote them out. That is what a democracy is for.
You really should pay more attention to American politics. Do you think our democracy "worked" as you describe for the folks of darker complexion who were discouraged from voting in Florida by police checkpoints near the polls, or the ones who were unceremoniously dumped from the rolls because a database (built by a company closely allied with one and only one of our two major political parties) said they were felons?
I suppose your city doesn't see it as a major problem if a few people get stopped by the cops and questioned for a few minutes because some computer in a basement fucked up. But if your genes had the bad taste to give you a similar facial profile to some Genuine Bad Dude (tm) so that you got stopped all the time your personal self, I bet your attitude would change quick. Especially in the UK, land of the infamous Terrorist Act that allows you to be held without bond and interrogated for, what is it, 7 days? Yep, I'm sure you wouldn't mind being dragooned every time you entered a new city where you weren't personally known because this shit had become universal, after all, it's for the public good, right?
This technology was originally developed for use with mug shots, which are taken with calibrated camera position and lighting. Maybe they even work under those conditions. The idea is supposedly that they measure features like the distance between your eyes and ratio of that to mutual distance to your mouth which can't be altered by disguise. In fact, though, my friends continue to play relatively unmolested. They have been nailed by this tech a couple of times, but not nailed by it countless other times, even at places known to use it.
I am also completely unconvinced that this system won't produce errors -- especially when used with photos taken in public space, with uncalibrated lighting and uncontrolled camera angles. There are just too many people in the world and the resolution of the photos is too poor that there won't be some schlep whose nose, eyes, and mouth will all be dimensionally similar enough to mine to cause us to raise each others' alarms.
I figure this tech will last until the first bona fide innocent tourist is roughed up by cops who are convinced he is a big-time felon, then the Big Brother types will go back to dreaming of tracking us with implants.
I wonder -- the article says they identified 17 wanted pholx in the crowd. Did they act on this "discovery?" If not, how do we know these 17 lawbreakers were ID'ed accurately? Answer: We don't. If they really thought this was such hot shit they would have demonstrated its utility by making a few arrests, and it would have certainly made this article. But they aren't quite as stupid as they sound. They know it isn't perfect, and I'm betting even the developers know it never will be.
If he could play both the professor in Brainstorm and the massively psychopathic angel Gabriel in The Prophecy, he can almost project Gates' emotionless drive to rule the world by owning its core technology.
I think that would actually be the five people who did vote to give us Dubya as prez-duh-dent. As for the rest of us, the majority voted for the other guy.
...it's the CPU speed for doing the MP3 encoding. The MP3 format is designed so that it takes quite a bit more horsepower to encode a song than to play it. My 450MHz Celeron makes short work of playing MP3's, but using all the resources it takes close to real listening time to encode them. A GHz level CPU with better cache would cut this some, but not enough to not be a nuisance. As the guy said, Napster (like a MP3 player) runs in the background. MP3 rippers don't.
Of course, there is the other side. I collected a lot of our vinyl albums in MP3 for my girlfriend, who is album- rather than song-oriented. Some of her stuff is a tad obscure (Bob Dylan's Royal Albert Hall, or the pirate No Stone Unturned Stones album). You fight those Zimbabwean modems for a week or more, then one day...
vvvvVVVVVVRRRROOOOOMMMMMMMM the first transfer starts, 20kbps, 30kbps, levels out at 50kbps; the second starts, goes straight to 50kbps, the third starts, goes straight to 50kbps, the fourth naturally gets remotely queued but that doesn't matter, you are gripping the armrests and when transfer #1 finishes #2 kicks in, you rightclick #1 and play song, go to the library, take a few samples from different parts of the track, and the last bars are fading sweetly off into nontruncated bliss when you pop back to transfer and transfer #2 is finished and #5 has started, and within 10 minutes you have the entire album. Half an hour later you're popping the CD into the stereo for the female companion to admire. And life is good.
Oh, and while I usually get 800kbps or so ratings from bandwidth meter websites, on Napster I often see exactly the 1.5mbps down and 200kbps up I'm promised by BellSouth for my DSL connection.
...they have been SuperBowled.
There may never have been any minix code in any version of linux distributed as such, but by his own words, when Linus began writing Linux he started with the Minix codebase and worked by replacing it piece by piece. By the time he got around to showing it to other Minix users there was no Minix code left, but that's how he started. He actually used this as an example of how you can approach a seemingly huge project when there is something inadequate but similar to use as a starting platform.
Stop showing your ignorance.
As a matter of fact, as a devout Mormon he considers that his primary job. I explained in the Card Movie discussion last week about my friend who wrote the Ender and Hitler article; I remember one thing that blew Radford away was that she told Card "we all know what the road to Hell is paved with" and he replied, "I don't believe that."
He's not just trying to teach morality, he is trying to teach a morality most of us would find somewhat reprehensible if he stated it baldly.
P.S. I mentioned that discussion to her recently and she is toying with the idea of putting the article online. Unfortunately she does not have it in digital form and will have to find a hard copy to scan. Also, I think it's less than complete without Card's incredibly lame rebuttal which she can't publish without his permission (which she ain't likely to either ask for or get).
It is, however, available at the library in Literary Review where it was republished. Search for Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman by Mary Elaine Radford.
How, you might wonder, do these guys determine what the influence of, say, Uranus is on your chart? When the planet is discovered they cast charts of people and events including the newly discovered object, and work those charts backward to see if there are any consistent patterns of influence. They also take hints from the object's properties (color, distance, size, etc.) on the assumption that things are conveniently labelled for us by a consistent Nature (the "law of signatures").
Anyway, Pluto or no Pluto, now that the Age of Pisces is definitely over we can finally look forward to the demise of Christianity and its replacement with something more, well, Aquarian :-)
...who started out with Minix and gradually replaced code until none of the original was left. You're right, though, the result does resemble UNIX an awful lot.