I wonder what those people who whine about the nuclear-powered Cassini space craft would say if they understood the implications of collecting antimatter: when antimatter comes into contact with matter it annihilates, creating two gamma rays (gamma rays != good).
Luckily for the human race, we currently only have to ability to create and maintain minute amounts of the stuff. Someday, however, I'm sure we'll have anti-anti-matter protestors. Won't that be fun?
"The only other alternative is to believe in a created universe"? You do realize, don't you, that evolution has absolutely nothing to do with the origin of life? One could still have a created universe with evolution (though the creator might not necesarily fit into what the Xians have concocted). As for being accountable for our actions if there was a creator . . .
why would anybody or anything capable of creating galaxies give a rat's ass about a race whose combined mass would not even be equal to 1e-10000 of that of a star? Its interesting that we humans are so self centered. Why do you think that a creator, if there was one, would care about us? How do you know that the whales are not the true children of the creator and that we are merely some excess scum that was created as a by product (kind of like that old Star Trek episode where they go in to the past to fetch to whales . ..)
Anyway, I see that this is dissolving into an old fashioned flame fest. There are internet newsgroups more suited to this kind of thing.:)
Now that we are on the subject of Nietzsche . . . he actually says god is dead multiple times (particularly in Zarathustra). I know that at least one of the times he says something like "God is dead, and we killed him" (he then goes on to speak about how god became sick of the human race).
More amusing, however, is his work The Antichrist . . . since this is a rather alternative view of how religion and society interact.
They supposedly eliminated "evolution as an underlying principle of biology". Precisely how did they do that? Since most modern biology is indeed founded on the belief that evolution is a fact. Its things like this which impress upon me the unlimited stupidity of the human race. On one hand we have senators and a president who don't even have enough true leadership ability to run a McDonalds, let alone a country. On the other hand we have a small but vocal group of dipshits who are trying to force their cult upon everyone. Hmmm.
I'm not sure that they are fully ruling out evolution or removing it from the curriculum . ..since this article (http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/evol2.htm) seems to merely imply that while evolution is not removed from the system, it is being given equall time with those wacky religous theories.
Hmmm. Anyway, the way religion is acting here makes Nietzche's Antichrist seem astonishingly accurate.
I worked in a charity similar to the one you described. It was called the "digital clubhouse", and was located in Sunnyvale, CA (heart of Silicon Valley). If you plan to start off such a venture, you need to find someone who is extremely charismatic and who is capable of talking the local tech companies into giving away free software and hardware (like premiere from Adobe and computers/printers from hp). You also need to find a group of loyal volunteers who can put in long hours, together with a handful of techies who can come on a regular basis. Running such a charity is a strange mess. On one hand you might have great servers that were donated by Sun; on the other hand you are scraping together pennies to purchase CAT 5 for cabling. Legal problems shouldn't be too much of an issue. Just make sure that everybody signs a waiver (one that would be cosigned by legal guardians in case of minors) that removes you from liability. Also make sure that there is a clear and conspiciously posted policy regarding internet usage. As for whether its worth donating time for charity . . . Let me just say it can be pretty fun if you can work with friends, but it does take a giant bite of your free time. You need to make a serious committment if you want things to work. For finding out more information, you might want to get in touch with the founder of an existing charity with goals similar to yours. People who run such operations are usually more than happy to share their experiences and wisdom.
It seems that a lot of the services that people are suggesting are vanilla smtp offerings. If thats all you need, I'd definately stay away from exchange. However, if you need groupware type things (shared calenders, address books, etc), you should take a look at IBM's domino server. Just be aware that you will need a pretty beefy cluster of NT machines to support it; but then again, you'd need just as many machines if you went with exchange. Domino running on top of NT4 with nothing else sucks up about 80mb-140mb of ram (thats with about 40 or 50 user accounts in the system). Mail files get rather bulky (they start off at about 3mb when empty). A port of domino to linux is apparently in the works but is not quite there yet.
Let me warn you though, Domino has its own little quirks you get to deal with, and it has several unintuitive aspects about it. On the other hand, there are also some shiney things about it (eg: webpage access to all services, complete integration of all common communication needs, and extensibility through notes designer).
I would be under the assumption that these blocking companies don't fully block major page providers (like Geocities) or major ISPs (like AOL). Then again, I could be wrong.:)
The very problems you are facing are one of the key objections people have to placing such blocking software in public software. While it argueably does get a decent chunk of the porn out there away from children, it also blocks countless legitimate sites (womens rights, aids education, etc).
People need to realize that they must properly educate their children rather than try to physically block them via the use of filter products (which are either to lax and useless or too strict and burdensome).
As for the ask slashdot question, I wouldn't place too much blame on your ISP. Besides, I personally don't know anyone (except for my schools library) that even uses such filter programs. How deep is their market penetration anyway?
If you have an ISP that is blocked, it is probably a wise idea to either switch to a more fascist ISP (with a non-porn, non-interesting, non-anything policy) or pick up a free homepage (eg: one from hotbot.com or geocities.com)
Its nice to see that my favorite compiler-producing company is coming to the unix world. The sexiest thing that would make their products an instant sell for me is a well done RAD environment (I haven't managed to find a freeware one, and am more than happy to lay down the cash for a good commercial product).
Its somewhat of a pity (though understandable) that they are headed to Linux instead of FreeBSD, but maybe with linux emu and a little bit of luck I can get their products running on my FreeBSD box as well.
Well, for assembling the images, one could always use a meta refresh and a rotation script running on the server, though that would be messy bandwidth-wise.
Perhaps the real media video server allows you to do something like this. Not sure. haven't had enough of a chance to poke at its features.
his is entirely offset however, by certain operating systems which require about half a gig to install comfortably. Moores law should not be used as a crutch or excuse for sloppy coding. I sincerely doubt that there is a single piece of microsoft software out there that could not be made in half the size with twice the speed.
Quite unprovable; I'm not convinced that MS programmers are either sloppy or stupid.
I did not say that Microsoft programmers are sloppy or stupid. I simply said that just about every Microsoft program could probably be made with twice the speed and half the size. That has to do with optimization. If they used assembly in key parts of the program, they could probably achieve both of these features, though it would take considerable time and effort, not to mention that it would make modifying the code a pain in the ass.
Standards evolve when vendors provide more features; this is normal and healthy, and the way the industry is supposed to work. HTML mail is good because it's a simple, portable, non-patented extension; in contrast, Word document attachments are evil because they're complicated, non-portable and proprietary. Given that people actually *want* more structure to their mail than ASCII can povide, this is a natural direction for the industry to take. (Remember that we can't (and shouldn't) standardise before we have implementation experience!)
HTML is far from the best choice for this though. HTML is, in many ways, quite limited in the degree of control it gives you over how your text is formatted. Not to mention that different browsers will display similar html differently. Attachments on the other hand, do not suffer this failure. Note that I did not say word attachments. You could just as easily use PDF, RTF, or any other format you please. You use the ascii text in the email to give a description of the attached files and a brief message, and leave the bulk of the data in seperate, attached files, from where it can be transfered to specialized programs (.cpp files to MSVC,.doc to word, etc).
Most people don't know, at install time, which set of features they'll need; their requirements do change over time. Besides, would you really want to spend hours figuring out which of the thousand features you want, specially when the resource you seem to be optimising for (disk/memory space?) is in fact quite plentiful? (A gigabyte of disk is worth ~$30; how many man-hours is that worth?)
First off, features can be packaged into components. You could have you "Basic Documents" component, with the base editor, spell checker, and grammar checker. Take on a "Label Editor" component, "Letter Editor" component, and so forth. Components could be installed from a CDROM, or over the net from a server (with proper authentication and license keys this would work). As for relying on large harddisks . . . remember that the more shit you dump on the disk, the longer the harddisk will have to seek to find data. And . . . let me put it this way. Would you rather have a 200 meg word processor and 800 megs of MP3s, or would you prefer one fat 1000 meg word processor? Harddisks are getting bigger, but so are data files. Use your resources wisely.
I seem to remember having read this nearly a month or two ago on slashdot. Are we doing a "Best of Slashdot" series now? hmmm. Maybe my mind is just defective--giving me fake memories. But hey, its friday morning (9am) and I've already had several arguments with the local NT machines, so what do you expect?
Protecting themselves from lawsuits is one thing, but claiming complete rights over webpages? Sheer BS. I work in a Silicon Valley startup and my contract is less restrictive in regards to intellectual property than Yahoo's is (my company basically gets the right to use any ideas I come up with in any of its products, but does not claim the right to sell my ideas directly).
This Yahoo-Geocities thing is only the beginning of a bad trend. Has anyone looked at NSI's webpage lately? Or ordered a domain from them? They are trying to get customers to aquire the.net and.org address together with a.com purchase, in order to "triple your exposure". Back in my day, these suffixes actually meant something (eg: org = npo, com=commerical, net=network). It seems that logic and meaning has been tossed to the wind in order to make money.
The worst thing is, its all downhill from here. The governments are getting ready to dip their fingers into regulating the net. How long do you think they can stay away from the highly publicized and alluring money that is generated by e-commerce?
I think its time to make a new internet, one where crap like this doesn't happen. By keeping things seperate (eg: one nation wide network for video+voice, one for commerce, one for industry communications, one for research, and one for the individuals) everyone could end up happy.
So what does all this have to do with the original post or the first part of my message? Frankly, I'm not sure. I just realized that I have begun to ramble:).
Anyway, expect to see more shit like this happen in the future.
Was this really necesary as a slashdot article?
on
Feature:GPL vs BSD
·
· Score: 1
Though this review might make a nice comment for a real article, it doesn't seem to make much of an article by itself. It merely points out a few simple facts (BSD != force openness), its not a series of revelations. Perhaps if we had gotten a handful of different well written reviews, from both perspectives, things would be different.
The little jibe at the BSD advocates in the article was pointless, since there are plenty of GPL people who feel exactly the same way.
Perhaps a simple, side by side, unbiased and unopinionated comparison of the licenses would have been more appropriate?
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what those people who whine about the nuclear-powered Cassini space craft would say if they understood the implications of collecting antimatter: when antimatter comes into contact with matter it annihilates, creating two gamma rays (gamma rays != good).
Luckily for the human race, we currently only have to ability to create and maintain minute amounts of the stuff. Someday, however, I'm sure we'll have anti-anti-matter protestors. Won't that be fun?
why would anybody or anything capable of creating galaxies give a rat's ass about a race whose combined mass would not even be equal to 1e-10000 of that of a star? Its interesting that we humans are so self centered. Why do you think that a creator, if there was one, would care about us? How do you know that the whales are not the true children of the creator and that we are merely some excess scum that was created as a by product (kind of like that old Star Trek episode where they go in to the past to fetch to whales . . .)
Anyway, I see that this is dissolving into an old fashioned flame fest. There are internet newsgroups more suited to this kind of thing. :)
More amusing, however, is his work The Antichrist . . . since this is a rather alternative view of how religion and society interact.
I'm not sure that they are fully ruling out evolution or removing it from the curriculum . . .since this article (http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/evol2.htm) seems to merely imply that while evolution is not removed from the system, it is being given equall time with those wacky religous theories.
Hmmm. Anyway, the way religion is acting here makes Nietzche's Antichrist seem astonishingly accurate.
I worked in a charity similar to the one you described. It was called the "digital clubhouse", and was located in Sunnyvale, CA (heart of Silicon Valley). If you plan to start off such a venture, you need to find someone who is extremely charismatic and who is capable of talking the local tech companies into giving away free software and hardware (like premiere from Adobe and computers/printers from hp). You also need to find a group of loyal volunteers who can put in long hours, together with a handful of techies who can come on a regular basis. Running such a charity is a strange mess. On one hand you might have great servers that were donated by Sun; on the other hand you are scraping together pennies to purchase CAT 5 for cabling. Legal problems shouldn't be too much of an issue. Just make sure that everybody signs a waiver (one that would be cosigned by legal guardians in case of minors) that removes you from liability. Also make sure that there is a clear and conspiciously posted policy regarding internet usage. As for whether its worth donating time for charity . . . Let me just say it can be pretty fun if you can work with friends, but it does take a giant bite of your free time. You need to make a serious committment if you want things to work. For finding out more information, you might want to get in touch with the founder of an existing charity with goals similar to yours. People who run such operations are usually more than happy to share their experiences and wisdom.
It seems that a lot of the services that people are suggesting are vanilla smtp offerings. If thats all you need, I'd definately stay away from exchange. However, if you need groupware type things (shared calenders, address books, etc), you should take a look at IBM's domino server. Just be aware that you will need a pretty beefy cluster of NT machines to support it; but then again, you'd need just as many machines if you went with exchange. Domino running on top of NT4 with nothing else sucks up about 80mb-140mb of ram (thats with about 40 or 50 user accounts in the system). Mail files get rather bulky (they start off at about 3mb when empty). A port of domino to linux is apparently in the works but is not quite there yet.
Let me warn you though, Domino has its own little quirks you get to deal with, and it has several unintuitive aspects about it. On the other hand, there are also some shiney things about it (eg: webpage access to all services, complete integration of all common communication needs, and extensibility through notes designer).
I would be under the assumption that these blocking companies don't fully block major page providers (like Geocities) or major ISPs (like AOL). Then again, I could be wrong. :)
The very problems you are facing are one of the key objections people have to placing such blocking software in public software. While it argueably does get a decent chunk of the porn out there away from children, it also blocks countless legitimate sites (womens rights, aids education, etc).
People need to realize that they must properly educate their children rather than try to physically block them via the use of filter products (which are either to lax and useless or too strict and burdensome).
As for the ask slashdot question, I wouldn't place too much blame on your ISP. Besides, I personally don't know anyone (except for my schools library) that even uses such filter programs. How deep is their market penetration anyway?
If you have an ISP that is blocked, it is probably a wise idea to either switch to a more fascist ISP (with a non-porn, non-interesting, non-anything policy) or pick up a free homepage (eg: one from hotbot.com or geocities.com)
Its nice to see that my favorite compiler-producing company is coming to the unix world. The sexiest thing that would make their products an instant sell for me is a well done RAD environment (I haven't managed to find a freeware one, and am more than happy to lay down the cash for a good commercial product).
Its somewhat of a pity (though understandable) that they are headed to Linux instead of FreeBSD, but maybe with linux emu and a little bit of luck I can get their products running on my FreeBSD box as well.
Hmmm. Happy days ahead.
Well, for assembling the images, one could always use a meta refresh and a rotation script running on the server, though that would be messy bandwidth-wise.
Perhaps the real media video server allows you to do something like this. Not sure. haven't had enough of a chance to poke at its features.
his is entirely offset however, by certain operating systems which require about half a gig to install comfortably. Moores law should not be used as a crutch or excuse for sloppy coding. I sincerely doubt that there is a single piece of microsoft software out there that could not be made in half the size with twice the speed.
.doc to word, etc).
Quite unprovable; I'm not convinced that MS programmers are either sloppy or stupid.
I did not say that Microsoft programmers are sloppy or stupid. I simply said that just about every Microsoft program could probably be made with twice the speed and half the size. That has to do with optimization. If they used assembly in key parts of the program, they could probably achieve both of these features, though it would take considerable time and effort, not to mention that it would make modifying the code a pain in the ass.
Standards evolve when vendors provide more features; this is normal and healthy, and the way the industry is supposed to work. HTML mail is good because it's a simple, portable, non-patented extension; in contrast, Word document attachments are evil because they're complicated, non-portable and proprietary. Given that people actually *want* more structure to their mail than ASCII can povide, this is a natural direction for the industry to take. (Remember that we can't (and shouldn't) standardise before we have implementation experience!)
HTML is far from the best choice for this though. HTML is, in many ways, quite limited in the degree of control it gives you over how your text is formatted. Not to mention that different browsers will display similar html differently. Attachments on the other hand, do not suffer this failure. Note that I did not say word attachments. You could just as easily use PDF, RTF, or any other format you please. You use the ascii text in the email to give a description of the attached files and a brief message, and leave the bulk of the data in seperate, attached files, from where it can be transfered to specialized programs (.cpp files to MSVC,
Most people don't know, at install time, which set of features they'll need; their requirements do change over time. Besides, would you really
want to spend hours figuring out which of the thousand features you want, specially when the resource you seem to be optimising for (disk/memory space?) is in fact quite plentiful? (A gigabyte of disk is worth ~$30; how many man-hours is that worth?)
First off, features can be packaged into components. You could have you "Basic Documents" component, with the base editor, spell checker, and grammar checker. Take on a "Label Editor" component, "Letter Editor" component, and so forth. Components could be installed from a CDROM, or over the net from a server (with proper authentication and license keys this would work). As for relying on large harddisks . . . remember that the more shit you dump on the disk, the longer the harddisk will have to seek to find data. And . . . let me put it this way. Would you rather have a 200 meg word processor and 800 megs of MP3s, or would you prefer one fat 1000 meg word processor? Harddisks are getting bigger, but so are data files. Use your resources wisely.
I seem to remember having read this nearly a month or two ago on slashdot. Are we doing a "Best of Slashdot" series now? hmmm. Maybe my mind is just defective--giving me fake memories. But hey, its friday morning (9am) and I've already had several arguments with the local NT machines, so what do you expect?
Protecting themselves from lawsuits is one thing, but claiming complete rights over webpages? Sheer BS. I work in a Silicon Valley startup and my contract is less restrictive in regards to intellectual property than Yahoo's is (my company basically gets the right to use any ideas I come up with in any of its products, but does not claim the right to sell my ideas directly).
.net and .org address together with a .com purchase, in order to "triple your exposure". Back in my day, these suffixes actually meant something (eg: org = npo, com=commerical, net=network). It seems that logic and meaning has been tossed to the wind in order to make money.
:).
This Yahoo-Geocities thing is only the beginning of a bad trend. Has anyone looked at NSI's webpage lately? Or ordered a domain from them? They are trying to get customers to aquire the
The worst thing is, its all downhill from here. The governments are getting ready to dip their fingers into regulating the net. How long do you think they can stay away from the highly publicized and alluring money that is generated by e-commerce?
I think its time to make a new internet, one where crap like this doesn't happen. By keeping things seperate (eg: one nation wide network for video+voice, one for commerce, one for industry communications, one for research, and one for the individuals) everyone could end up happy.
So what does all this have to do with the original post or the first part of my message? Frankly, I'm not sure. I just realized that I have begun to ramble
Anyway, expect to see more shit like this happen in the future.
Though this review might make a nice comment for a real article, it doesn't seem to make much of an article by itself. It merely points out a few simple facts (BSD != force openness), its not a series of revelations. Perhaps if we had gotten a handful of different well written reviews, from both perspectives, things would be different.
The little jibe at the BSD advocates in the article was pointless, since there are plenty of GPL people who feel exactly the same way.
Perhaps a simple, side by side, unbiased and unopinionated comparison of the licenses would have been more appropriate?