One of the great things about Linux is its ability to run on many different architectures.
This is only partially true... While Linux has been ported to PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, etc, all of these ports were always treated as second class citizens to the x86 version. The only really decent non-x86 support going on in Linux these days is support for smaller systems (Palm/Pocket type devices).
Personally, I'd just run Solaris on a SPARC and just grab up all the familiar GNU tools...If I absolutely needed to run an open source OS to appease my conscience I'd use something that had more solid support for multiple platforms (*BSD).
While I agree with the main point of your post, don't underestimate the power of the masses.
Sure, there are plenty of geek-friendly Napster alternatives for getting MP3s, but the sheer number of folks that were using Napster pre-lawsuits meant you could pretty much find ANY song you wanted, right when you wanted it, even in really obscure genres. While geeks will still have the tools to fileshare, the extremely reduced number of participants means far less choice in terms of finding what you want exactly when you want it.
The number of users was the true power of napster...And unfortunately, any service that manages to hit that number of users in the future will have the media companies coming down on them like a ton of bricks...Advanced systems like Freenet can (somewhat) avoid the law using technology, but will they ever be simple enough to use that they gain the type of numbers that make the service really useful? Time will tell.
Agreed! If Slashdot was around back in the day, there'd be 1000 people flaming the Wright Bros...hah hah, some fucking bike shop owners from north carolina trying to FLY, for god's sake, FLY! Can you imagine? Imagine a beowulf cluster of these imaginary flying machines? Hah hah!! Standard Oil is EVIL DARK EMPIRE!!! We must produce Open Source OIL!!! Louise Brooks naked and petrified!
True UNIX is just a label. Look at the structure of the OS. I'm not an expert or anything but OSX uses the UNIX security model, not the bloated NT model. (Which by the way MS said was superior to UNIX's and then came the IIS root exploit stemming from overly-complicated security model). Look at the locking mechanisms, driver philosophy, programming philosophy.
I'm not going to defend NT's security model, but your conclusion that it is responsible for the IIS root exploit is wrong. The IIS root exploit is simply a buffer overrun of a chunk of the server that is running in a privledged super-user mode. There are tons of UNIX servers which have to run all or part of the server in root mode (any web server that wants to access port 80, for example, generally has to start up with root access). Many of these servers have had buffer overflow bugs in the past (Sendmail anyone?). The bug found in IIS is by no means Microsoft-specific or due to their security model (which I would agree has some OTHER flaws).
Like the first one, it never pretended to be a serious movie. It was nothing but one action set piece followed by another, with some plot thrown in. What'd you expect (assuming you saw the first one)?
Anyway, just wanted to comment on two specifics:
Out of nowhere in the middle of this movie, two Egyptian warrior-babes, a re-incarnated Nefertiti and Anck-Su Namum (Patricia Velasquez) launch into a series of utterly-out-of-place kick boxing, knife-wielding duels.
This didn't come out of nowhere. The movie was setting up the fact that Evelyn was the reincarnated Nefertiti and that these two had a past rivalry that only grew worse since Anck-Su Namum killed her dad, the Pharoh. YES this is all very hokey, but its all internally consistent and doesn't come from nowhere, if you are paying the least bit attention (which is all the movie asks of you anyway).
In both The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, death is illusory, to say the least; characters die and return to life so often it's impossible to keep track. In this film, resurrection is just a chant away.
Again, maybe a bit hokey, but is it much worse than Indiana Jones 3 (part of the series that you mentioned various times) in which his dad is miraculously saved by the power of the holy grail?
Or the Alien series where the hero is reincarnated through the wonders of genetic engineering? Or The Matrix, where the hero is brought back to life from, of all fucking things, THE POWER OF LOVE?
You really do need to lighten up Katz. I was half expecting to see some bullshit in here about how Mummys are just misunderstood and striking back at the world for having the nerve to display them in glass cases to be laughed at by the bullies of the world..Or perhaps that the rise of the mummies was an interpretation of the rise of global megacorps, out to destroy the world...Ah well, maybe next time.
van eck phreaking? You could bypass this thing more easily by just pointing a digital video camera at the monitor and taping (hopefully making sure, at the very least, the refresh frequencies match). In either case you degrade the original signal significantly..
The problem the content mfgs have now is that these new displays use a purely digital signal and they hate things that can be used to create "perfect" digital copies.
ummmmm.... apache is able to handle asp as well. check out: http://www.apache-asp.org/index.html
Um, not really. If you read that page it states clearly that this solution only supports Perl scripting ASP style..It doesnt support all the other languages ASP does (Python, JavaScript, VBScript, etc).
So, while it seems like a cool project for Perl programmers who want decent parsed HTML functionality, the project is misnamed...
And worst of all its one of those cheesy 'tiny remote webcam' ads..You know, the ones that never say: USE THIS CAMERA TO (possibly illegally) SPY ON HOT CHICKS, but invariably have a token 'hot chick' picture as part of the ad.
Actually, I find the opposite to be true. Holes in Microsoft servers tend to be much more widely reported, even if they are fairly harmless (which this one is admittedly not).
There's been virtually billions of 'remote root' level holes in Sendmail alone, nevermind the various other daemons that ship with one or more standard Linux (and/or other UNIX based system) distributions..While these are reported on the geek/security sites like buqtraq, they rarely make it to the mainstream.
Anyway, this is bound to turn into a long useless series of Microsoft-sucks, Linux-sucks posts...But the reality is every OS, open source or closed, has major bugs found in it from time to time...glass houses..stones...etc. Try not to feed the trolls.
IIS is generally considered to be quite a bit faster than the standard Apache distribution -- which isn't that surprising since Apache has never really been about raw speed.
IIS is also far easier to install and maintain, it uses Microsoft's standard MMC console admin interface..Of course, there's two sides to the ease-of-admin issue (many will argue it invites security risk due to low-clue admins being able to do the job, half-assedly).
Probably the most important feature, though, is Active Server Pages functionality. The ability to write parsed HTML code in any of the languages supported by Microsoft's Active Scripting (JScript, VBScript, Perl, Python, etc), with the added bonus of access to pre-built COM objects.
It is quite nice. Personally, I prefer PHP for most web-app development..but the wide variety of language choice and the COM integration are pretty cool if you don't mind locking your box to Microsoft technology.
The flaw in your argument is that the ISP has to keep you as a customer. There's no right to Internet service. They can cut you off at-will just for suspecting that you are doing something illegal. It would not be illegal for them to do so..it might cause a minor PR backlash, but companies have been getting away with far worse without most people caring the past few years.
Ok, so his article is filled with trollish bullshit...but on one level there IS a point here.
Advertisements DO pay for network TV and subsidize even cable TV, at least for the channels that aren't full blown "premium" channels.
Technology IS getting to the point where its easy for Joe Sixpack to "zap" the commercials (the fact that VCRs could do this years ago is meaningless considering the average person can't set the clock on a VCR or set it to record a program without some hand-holding VCR+Plus type dealie)... When these devices become commonplace and nobody is watching TV commercials, that IS a problem...The money is going to have to come from somewhere...If the dot-bomb economy proved anything its that advertisements that nobody pays attention to aren't going to pay the bills. So where does the money come from?
Will all TV channels be "premium" in the future? Will the networks mix the advertisements & the programming together (ie. even more gratituous product placements..say one every 1.5 minutes?)
Its easy to dismiss Dvorak as a loon, but there are some tough economic/cultural questions that will need to be answered some day soon...
Due to the extremely dense coverage of space satellites, a rocket launch (or even just a failed attempted) is not really something the Chinese could hide these days.
Re:MS can release whenever they like...
on
No X Box for Xmas?
·
· Score: 1
Heh heh. Even though your original post was based on an incorrect assumption it still got a high moderation.
In any case, the original argument still fits to some degree...
The issue with Nintendo is that, hopefully, they realize the console world has moved on. You need to open your console up to a lot of different genres and games for a wide audience. Trying to restrict the types of games available and the number of developers who can even get development stations, let alone publish titles added to a poor choice of media (going with cartridge) wrecked the N64. Nintendo is lucky Pokemon and the Gameboy Color were around to save them.
The big question is..have they learned? Conker's Bad Fur day suggests that maybe they have..Maybe they are more open to targetting a wide range of consumer ages...Its a start anyway. On the other hand, going with a non-standard media format instead of DVD shows that they probably still do not get it.
In any case, I'll buy an XBox and a GameCube. The Xbox as my primary console entertainment and the GameCube for the Nintendo exclusives I cant live without (next Zelda, Metroid, etc).
The real problem isn't software based. Microsoft changed the physical connector shape of their USB ports. Your mice, keyboards, etc just won't fit. Of course, you can always make an adapter but not many people would go through the trouble..
I never understood why people hated the paper clip so much.. Sure it was annoying but it was really simple to shut him down for good.
Also, I think in the long run people will actually miss him. He was something that most people "loved to hate". Just because people complain about something doesn't always mean they don't want it around anymore...
The basic gist of it was that the President of the United States beamed himself holographically to the houses of all Americans to eat dinner with all the families. It also involved some AI that was a clone of the President's personality so each family could interact with him differently. And then their conversations were later data-mined to try and get an accurate view of how the people felt about the direction the country was moving in.
Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the story or the author:( Anyone? Anyone?
SDL supports MacOS, Be, Win32, *NIX, QNX and maybe even some others. That's its real usefulness. Also, SDL is very mature, its not some project that's just gotten started..I've been using it for over a year (and its been available far longer than that) and it is quite nice.
SDL itself is what you suggested the original question asker to do. 95% of SDL is a simple abstraction layer over lower level system dependent APIs like DirectX, DGA, etc.
There's some custom code in there for doing alpha blits and such on platforms where its not supported in hardware, but you dont have to use those, you can write your own.
But by and large you're suggesting everyone should redo all the work SDL (and ClanLib for that matter) have already done.
Oh and one other thing..There's a bunch of cool support libraries for SDL, including an MPEG player (including MP3), an image loaded library etc that can save you a lot of work from having to write your own.
I love Arthur C Clarke but its too bad 2001 was directed by Stanley Kubrick -- who was great at the technical aspects of directing, and a limited set of the artistic aspects (genius use of lighting, etc) but couldn't pace a movie to save his ass.
Everything he's done with the exception of Full Metal Jack has been a snore-fest from start to finish -- Of interest only to film students and people who claim to like his movies because it makes them seem more film literate.
Most respectable publications, whether they are web based or not, tend to focus on ONE April Fools Day joke. You see, when you have one subtle joke hiding within the regular content, people are taken off guard and the joke works (assuming its funny to begin with).
When EVERY STORY is an April Fools day joke, it just gets really fucking boring and after the first 'joke' people begin to suspiciously eye all other content assuming its a joke by default. Thus any humor those other jokes may have had is pretty much lost.
Next year you might want to try having ONE April Fools Day joke that is Slashdot specific and then linking all the other cool jokes people submit from other sites as one big quickie post.
The finger thing for laptops seems pretty cool..The IBM trackpoint is the only laptop pointing device I've been able to use at all, and even that feels fucked up.
The forehead thing is just wrong, though. I mean, I move my head all the time (to look to the side to see whats going on in the room), bop my head to music, etc...I really don't want these movements jumping my cursor around. Gaming with it would be a nightmare too. Rocket jump too much and you might end up with whiplash. How do you do a 360 turn at medium to low sensitivity? (You know, the type you lift up the mouse for now?)??
There's some good obvious picks on the list,
but leaving out Steve Russell (Computer Space), Nolan Bushnell (No Introduction Needed?) and David Braben (Elite) are all inexcusable omissions.
Also, if they are going to credit companies, like Namco..Where's the love for Atari? The list is stuffed with people still in the business at the expense of some of the pioneers that have moved on.
Slashdot Mirror
This is only partially true... While Linux has been ported to PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, etc, all of these ports were always treated as second class citizens to the x86 version. The only really decent non-x86 support going on in Linux these days is support for smaller systems (Palm/Pocket type devices).
Personally, I'd just run Solaris on a SPARC and just grab up all the familiar GNU tools...If I absolutely needed to run an open source OS to appease my conscience I'd use something that had more solid support for multiple platforms (*BSD).
Sure, there are plenty of geek-friendly Napster alternatives for getting MP3s, but the sheer number of folks that were using Napster pre-lawsuits meant you could pretty much find ANY song you wanted, right when you wanted it, even in really obscure genres. While geeks will still have the tools to fileshare, the extremely reduced number of participants means far less choice in terms of finding what you want exactly when you want it.
The number of users was the true power of napster...And unfortunately, any service that manages to hit that number of users in the future will have the media companies coming down on them like a ton of bricks...Advanced systems like Freenet can (somewhat) avoid the law using technology, but will they ever be simple enough to use that they gain the type of numbers that make the service really useful? Time will tell.
Agreed! If Slashdot was around back in the day, there'd be 1000 people flaming the Wright Bros...hah hah, some fucking bike shop owners from north carolina trying to FLY, for god's sake, FLY! Can you imagine? Imagine a beowulf cluster of these imaginary flying machines? Hah hah!! Standard Oil is EVIL DARK EMPIRE!!! We must produce Open Source OIL!!! Louise Brooks naked and petrified!
I'm not going to defend NT's security model, but your conclusion that it is responsible for the IIS root exploit is wrong. The IIS root exploit is simply a buffer overrun of a chunk of the server that is running in a privledged super-user mode. There are tons of UNIX servers which have to run all or part of the server in root mode (any web server that wants to access port 80, for example, generally has to start up with root access). Many of these servers have had buffer overflow bugs in the past (Sendmail anyone?). The bug found in IIS is by no means Microsoft-specific or due to their security model (which I would agree has some OTHER flaws).
Anyway, just wanted to comment on two specifics:
Out of nowhere in the middle of this movie, two Egyptian warrior-babes, a re-incarnated Nefertiti and Anck-Su Namum (Patricia Velasquez) launch into a series of utterly-out-of-place kick boxing, knife-wielding duels.
This didn't come out of nowhere. The movie was setting up the fact that Evelyn was the reincarnated Nefertiti and that these two had a past rivalry that only grew worse since Anck-Su Namum killed her dad, the Pharoh. YES this is all very hokey, but its all internally consistent and doesn't come from nowhere, if you are paying the least bit attention (which is all the movie asks of you anyway).
In both The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, death is illusory, to say the least; characters die and return to life so often it's impossible to keep track. In this film, resurrection is just a chant away.
Again, maybe a bit hokey, but is it much worse than Indiana Jones 3 (part of the series that you mentioned various times) in which his dad is miraculously saved by the power of the holy grail? Or the Alien series where the hero is reincarnated through the wonders of genetic engineering? Or The Matrix, where the hero is brought back to life from, of all fucking things, THE POWER OF LOVE?
You really do need to lighten up Katz. I was half expecting to see some bullshit in here about how Mummys are just misunderstood and striking back at the world for having the nerve to display them in glass cases to be laughed at by the bullies of the world..Or perhaps that the rise of the mummies was an interpretation of the rise of global megacorps, out to destroy the world...Ah well, maybe next time.
The problem the content mfgs have now is that these new displays use a purely digital signal and they hate things that can be used to create "perfect" digital copies.
Um, not really. If you read that page it states clearly that this solution only supports Perl scripting ASP style..It doesnt support all the other languages ASP does (Python, JavaScript, VBScript, etc).
So, while it seems like a cool project for Perl programmers who want decent parsed HTML functionality, the project is misnamed...
And worst of all its one of those cheesy 'tiny remote webcam' ads..You know, the ones that never say: USE THIS CAMERA TO (possibly illegally) SPY ON HOT CHICKS, but invariably have a token 'hot chick' picture as part of the ad.
Sigh.
There's been virtually billions of 'remote root' level holes in Sendmail alone, nevermind the various other daemons that ship with one or more standard Linux (and/or other UNIX based system) distributions..While these are reported on the geek/security sites like buqtraq, they rarely make it to the mainstream.
Anyway, this is bound to turn into a long useless series of Microsoft-sucks, Linux-sucks posts...But the reality is every OS, open source or closed, has major bugs found in it from time to time...glass houses..stones...etc. Try not to feed the trolls.
IIS is also far easier to install and maintain, it uses Microsoft's standard MMC console admin interface..Of course, there's two sides to the ease-of-admin issue (many will argue it invites security risk due to low-clue admins being able to do the job, half-assedly).
Probably the most important feature, though, is Active Server Pages functionality. The ability to write parsed HTML code in any of the languages supported by Microsoft's Active Scripting (JScript, VBScript, Perl, Python, etc), with the added bonus of access to pre-built COM objects.
It is quite nice. Personally, I prefer PHP for most web-app development..but the wide variety of language choice and the COM integration are pretty cool if you don't mind locking your box to Microsoft technology.
The flaw in your argument is that the ISP has to keep you as a customer. There's no right to Internet service. They can cut you off at-will just for suspecting that you are doing something illegal. It would not be illegal for them to do so..it might cause a minor PR backlash, but companies have been getting away with far worse without most people caring the past few years.
Technology IS getting to the point where its easy for Joe Sixpack to "zap" the commercials (the fact that VCRs could do this years ago is meaningless considering the average person can't set the clock on a VCR or set it to record a program without some hand-holding VCR+Plus type dealie)... When these devices become commonplace and nobody is watching TV commercials, that IS a problem...The money is going to have to come from somewhere...If the dot-bomb economy proved anything its that advertisements that nobody pays attention to aren't going to pay the bills. So where does the money come from?
Will all TV channels be "premium" in the future? Will the networks mix the advertisements & the programming together (ie. even more gratituous product placements..say one every 1.5 minutes?)
Its easy to dismiss Dvorak as a loon, but there are some tough economic/cultural questions that will need to be answered some day soon...
Due to the extremely dense coverage of space satellites, a rocket launch (or even just a failed attempted) is not really something the Chinese could hide these days.
In any case, the original argument still fits to some degree...
The issue with Nintendo is that, hopefully, they realize the console world has moved on. You need to open your console up to a lot of different genres and games for a wide audience. Trying to restrict the types of games available and the number of developers who can even get development stations, let alone publish titles added to a poor choice of media (going with cartridge) wrecked the N64. Nintendo is lucky Pokemon and the Gameboy Color were around to save them.
The big question is..have they learned? Conker's Bad Fur day suggests that maybe they have..Maybe they are more open to targetting a wide range of consumer ages...Its a start anyway. On the other hand, going with a non-standard media format instead of DVD shows that they probably still do not get it.
In any case, I'll buy an XBox and a GameCube. The Xbox as my primary console entertainment and the GameCube for the Nintendo exclusives I cant live without (next Zelda, Metroid, etc).
The real problem isn't software based. Microsoft changed the physical connector shape of their USB ports. Your mice, keyboards, etc just won't fit. Of course, you can always make an adapter but not many people would go through the trouble..
Also, I think in the long run people will actually miss him. He was something that most people "loved to hate". Just because people complain about something doesn't always mean they don't want it around anymore...
Uh the above post is Funny. And it is on topic. Are the moderators smoking crack (again)?
How communistic!
The basic gist of it was that the President of the United States beamed himself holographically to the houses of all Americans to eat dinner with all the families. It also involved some AI that was a clone of the President's personality so each family could interact with him differently. And then their conversations were later data-mined to try and get an accurate view of how the people felt about the direction the country was moving in.
Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the story or the author :( Anyone? Anyone?
SDL supports MacOS, Be, Win32, *NIX, QNX and maybe even some others. That's its real usefulness. Also, SDL is very mature, its not some project that's just gotten started..I've been using it for over a year (and its been available far longer than that) and it is quite nice.
There's some custom code in there for doing alpha blits and such on platforms where its not supported in hardware, but you dont have to use those, you can write your own.
But by and large you're suggesting everyone should redo all the work SDL (and ClanLib for that matter) have already done.
Oh and one other thing..There's a bunch of cool support libraries for SDL, including an MPEG player (including MP3), an image loaded library etc that can save you a lot of work from having to write your own.
Everything he's done with the exception of Full Metal Jack has been a snore-fest from start to finish -- Of interest only to film students and people who claim to like his movies because it makes them seem more film literate.
When EVERY STORY is an April Fools day joke, it just gets really fucking boring and after the first 'joke' people begin to suspiciously eye all other content assuming its a joke by default. Thus any humor those other jokes may have had is pretty much lost.
Next year you might want to try having ONE April Fools Day joke that is Slashdot specific and then linking all the other cool jokes people submit from other sites as one big quickie post.
The forehead thing is just wrong, though. I mean, I move my head all the time (to look to the side to see whats going on in the room), bop my head to music, etc...I really don't want these movements jumping my cursor around. Gaming with it would be a nightmare too. Rocket jump too much and you might end up with whiplash. How do you do a 360 turn at medium to low sensitivity? (You know, the type you lift up the mouse for now?)??
Oh well..
Also, if they are going to credit companies, like Namco..Where's the love for Atari? The list is stuffed with people still in the business at the expense of some of the pioneers that have moved on.