So I have the following (it all works unless specified and I fire it up at least twice a year unless specified). And yes, my office looks like a train-wreck twice a year when I pull all this stuff out to keep it alive..
2 Commodore 64s (one works, the other is for parts), and a Commodore 64C 1 1541-II disk drive (works) and a bunch of software. 1 Commodore 128 (Has a couple of broken keys on the numeric pad), and a 1571 disk drive 1 Laser 128 (Apple II clone) with two drives. Works fine and I have a bunch of games and office type software to go with it. 1 Amiga 500, the internal and two external drives (one pulled from an A1000 so it's very big. Another is an off-brand, very small and cool 3 1/2) 1 Commodore Plus/4. Works great. 1 Commodore Vic-20. Works great 1 Commodore 16 which is unfortunately busted I have a serial modem (14.4) I use to hook up the Amiga to a PC. I cheat because it's actually just doing telnet, but it's cool to get on the web with Lynx by using a kermit terminal program (my Amiga software is so old that it doesn't have a TCP stack). At some point I started getting some public domain amiga tcp stack off ftp but I needed a hard drive to hold it all so I stopped (even emulation is better than the real thing when you don't have enough hardware).
And of course I also keep a bunch of emulators on the modern machines so I can try things out and have interesting stuff to run (being able to run it on the actual hardware gives you a reason to want to pull it out). I love retrocomputing. In fact, that's how I plan on teaching programming to my kids. Yes, they'll use modern hardware too, but for programming I want them to see how there can be very little between you and the metal and you can still accomplish a bunch. All the layers of abstractions can actually make the basics (like why assembly is important and how you actually talk to hardware) a lot harder to understand. If all you have is a Commodore and you have to send commands to the drive to initialize the hardware, and you have to poke values in order to create a little assembly routine or change colors, it just makes it so much more *real*, and there's a lot less to explain of what's going on in the background. Since everything is an extrapolation of that pattern of thought anyway, I think it's better to start the understanding at that level.
From any truly intelligent, open-minded evangelical Christian (I'm not evangelical though):-), the good answer is to relate the good samaritan parable.
Most people, Christian or not, know about this one. It is part of Jesus' response to the question "What shall I do to inherit eternal life". He answered to love God, and your neighbor. To the question "Who is my neighbor", he answered with the parable.
Basically a bunch of good, God loving people (even a priest!) pass a badly hurt man on the street without helping him, even going out of their way to avoid them (some of them thought he must be drunk). Then a nonbeliever (a Samaritan) had compassion for him, took him to an inn, patched his wounds, and asked the innkeeper to take care of him for as long as he needed and he would reimburse him.
This story is great, because it has two points. First, that we are not supposed to be judging other people over whether they are "Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, or secularists". We're in fact not supposed to judge at all - that's up to Him for later.
The second, and most important, point is that even these "Buddhists, Jews, Hindus and secularists" (you forgot Muslims) can be deserving because of their acts of love and kindness, since love is something you feel and do, not something you talk and thump your Bible about. Their acts can make them even more so deserving than a born and raised Christian.
The question you are posing is not easy, and has been addressed on Christian theological discussion throughout the years. The particular question "are you saved by your faith or by your acts?" has always been a difficult thing to ponder for Christians. In my opinion, why not do both, ignore the naysayers, don't judge the ones who "won't convert" and keep the question unimportant anyway.:-)
The other part of your post, about the exclusionary doctrines, nothing I've ever read about Larry Wall has ever made me think that he hates non-christian folken. That reveals a possible prejudice against religion on yourself.
It's all genes and DNA and every complex living thing shares something in common with the others. There is no "artistic expression" that shows up at all.
This is wrong in two counts. First, you simply don't see the art because you're looking at the DNA and not at the creature it composes - kind of like looking at the surface of Van Gogh's "Waterlillies" with a Microsocope ("it's all little blotches of paint in a canvas, there's no art here"). Once you look at the level your brain is most comfortable with, you can see the art and creativity.
On the other hand, you must not be a programmer (or at least not a very good one). The DNA structures themselves and their intermingling (i.e., code) can be beautiful once you understand what you are looking at. Anybody who has written a large software system should know what I'm talking about.
"...In December 2000, CCS ran across one of the most brazen pirate sites Powell had seen on the Internet in months....[Powell] received a tip from an informant who knew the site's administrative password, allowing Powell to download the e-mail addresses of all the registered users."
Isn't this crime under the legislation of most developed nations? If you access a person's computer without that person's authorization (even if you have all the passwords), you are guilty of hacking and can go to jail (unless you are law enforcement and have a warrant to search).. Amazing to hear that a lawyer will actually admit to doing something like that.
It's bad crime-fighting too, since in the U.S. evidence obtained illegally is automatically discarded.
I usually don't care about the whole piracy debate (it's easy not to worry about it that much when you use Linux), but it really irks me when I read about someone using illegal techniques to catch people doing illegal stuff.
I can understand Coca-cola's position on this one. Now you try to keep in mind that you're dealing with Businessmen. So here's my recommendation (I am not a lawyer, your mileage may vary, etc):-)
If, as you say, your purpose was legitimate, ask them to negotiate - ask them to buy the "cocaine.ch" domain for you (or another domain you think would be appropriate) and tell them in exchange you will gladly relinquish the domain. Your site stays up, they get back their name. They might even agree to add a link to your site for your old users for a year or two.
You are dealing with businessmen, not goons. Be polite and tell them your good faith reasoning, while allowing them a clean Win-win deal. Most businesspeople would rather spend the few bucks for the domain you want (and depending on the price, maybe even buying it off the original owner for you) and trade it with you (while making you sign a few papers relinquishing the "Coke" name forever) than pay for lawyers, media spin (so they don't look like the bad guys) and that kind of thing.
The very first implementation of Text-To-Speech I ever saw was for the Commodore 64, an Assembly library with BASIC bindings called SAM (I don't remember the company). I think it was around 1983 or so. Anyone else remembers this cool toy? Their selling point is that is was the only one that was software-only at the time (thanks to the excellent sound synthesizer inside C64 machines).
I loved it and loved writing code for it. I can still hear the demo saying:
---------- Imagine a scratchy but very understandable voice here: "Hello, my name is SAM, the software mouth for the Commodore 64 computer. I am the most versatile, understandable speech synthesizer on the market. And I am the lowest price of them all. So what can you do with me? Why you can put me into your own programs. How yould you like your business software to say "Please enter this week's purchases". Or imagine an adventure game that has this: The elf was capture by the giant. He began to cry and he said: 'oh, no! Please don't hurt me Mr Giant!' but the giant was very mean, and he only said 'Ho-Ho-Ho!'." -------- Imagination off:-)
There was also a demo of SAM singing the Star Spangled Banner and reciting the gettysburg address.
There were two ways of getting it to talk; Natural and Phonetic. In natural mode, it would just interpret your typing, but it made pronounciation errors often. The best way was to use phonetic style, which involved a lot of "H"s to give the correct inflections.
A BASIC program that "talked" looked a little like:
10 PI 64:SP 128 20 SAY "H4EHLLO, H4AW R U?" 30 SAY "I H4OP UR F4Y4LLING f4AYHNE."
This would have said "Hello, how are you?" (with proper question mark inflection) and "I hope you're feeling fine". If you took the punctuation mark it would stop "feeling" natural because the slightly lowered pitch when you finish a sentence was not accounted for (it was my most common error):-)
It took a little experimentation, but once you got a hang of it, all you needed to do was to maintain two strings for each message, one the text, another the speech. Not bad.
If you're into emulation it might even still be floating around, these days the SID (The C64 sound chip) emulation is not that bad anymore; it would probably sound pretty close.
>>It might also interest you to know that the >>Delphi (and C++ Builder) on Linux team is a >>completely different team than the Delphi on >>Windows team (they hired all-linux developers >>to write the Delphi-Linux >>"Kylix" project).
>Really? I hadn't noticed that.
>--Robert West >--Delphi R&D
I'm sorry, seems like I have been misinformed at the last Borland Conference (where they gave all impression that the Linux team was a separate entity of "Real Linux guys" (whatever that meant) and they were doing the port). I apologize for that.
However, this begs the question. Will Delphi suffer stagnation during the next year due to the Linux port? Do you have more or less people/budget than you used to? Is the delay on the Delphi patch (which should address several important Corba/Midas issues for your enterprise customers) in any way related to this? As I wrote before, I'm not worried about the long term future of Delphi, but we still have deadlines and planning to do.
As a Linux user and enthusiast, I really like the fact that you are doing a port and all, but I don't want you guys to cover the front door and let the thief go in through the kitchen, if you know what I mean. Even if you are suffering from a shortage of resources to be able to release patches and such, as your clients, we kind of deserve to know, don't you agree?
I'm a Delphi programmer. I was just asked at my work my opinion about what this means for Delphi. Here's a fragment of an email with my take on it. There's some thoughts on Corel as well that might help you understand why this happened.
------------------------------------
Corel is a company that knows very well how to side-step Microsoft. They are non-competitive with Microsoft, as you say, because it would be stupid to do so directly, as Borland found out, twice, first with office tools and then with development tools. At any rate, that sidestepping paid out in the long run - not only did they survive "the big Windows Desktop and Devtool wars" without nearly as many bruises as Borland, they still have all the products they ever did, and they ended up (counting their own Linux distribution and now the Visibroker and Borland development tools) with a cradle-to-grave solution that involves absolutely no Microsoft products (or products from any other vendor for that matter).
In addition, it's hard to find any other company with such a large scope of products (from OS to Enterprise to Desktop) except for Sun Microsystems and possibly IBM on their Unix market. It's actually kind of amazing to see them actually pulling it off. I see a Michael Cowpland book on the horizon.:-)
Since Delphi and C++ Builder) for Linux are not products that are out yet, but are in development now (albeit in early stages from what I've been able to extract from Inprise Linux people I've talked to), it will be very interesting to see if they will open source them (as they have behaved with their wine move and other things) to increase the rate of development while freeing some of their Delphi people to bugfix them. It might also interest you to know that the Delphi (and C++ Builder) on Linux team is a completely different team than the Delphi on Windows team (they hired all-linux developers to write the Delphi-Linux "Kylix" project).
In my opinion, Delphi suffered more when Borland lost over half of their Delphi team to Microsoft's Visual Basic team in the infamous "limousine lunch invitations" by "The Dead Borlanders Society" of Seattle - which prompted a lawsuit that was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount - than they are suffering here.
In any case Delphi in particular has already been suffering somewhat (in my opinion) from their concentration on Java development and CORBA/Java integration. The entropy is much higher from Delphi 3 to 5 (mainly because Delphi 3 to 4 was huge) than from Delphi 1through 3, even though 1 was 16-bit and 2 was a complete rewrite.
I'm definitely not saying that it will be a good thing for the next iteration of the product, but in the future, you'll have to remember that Unix people in general tend to care more about infrastructure than wizards. That change of view will probably be very healthy for the product in general, especially considering that the last two versions of Delphi have been feeling in general less stable and the do-it-yourself-with-code functionality is starting to go missing in newer features - so it's not just "don't use the wizard, it doesn't work right", it's "don't use the feature at all"... Delphi would be well served by a year of bugfix-only development in the manner of Sun's JDK1.3.
So all in all, I think it's actually "neutral" news from our perspective, at least until we see what the plans are (not that Delphi was a high priority in Borland anymore anyway). Now it would be good news if they GPLd Visibroker, which strategically is a smart thing to do (depending on how much revenue they're getting from it after factoring in all the Corel product revenue). Now = that = would save us some money.
Just my opinion from the Delphi front,
---------------- My opinions are mine of course, they don't represent the opinions of my employer, my cats, or slashdot:-)
Since its early days, the MPA, often referred to now as "a little State Department," has expanded to cover a wide range of foreign activities falling in the diplomatic, economic, and political arenas.
------------------------------------ I think basically, this shows just how arrogant they are... "A little state department"? EXCUUUUSE ME!?!?! But what elected representatives set up this "state department"?
Looks to me like the media consider themselves a separate state, being that they are represented by a separate state department.. To whom I'm sure they pay "taxes" in the form of membership dues.
Be careful, ten years from now, they'll have their own military. They already seem to have a legislative, executive and judiciary branch.
IANAL, but isn't this the same situation as the DeCSS evidence being in the public record? Couldn't Mitnick just ask a friend to ask for all records of his trial, including copies of the files?
You know there's actually a law in Florida from the turn of the Century (still in effect) that goes something like:
"When a person driving a motor vehicle reaches a horse and the horse acts frightened, the driver of the vehicle must get out of the car and take it apart, laying its pieces in front of the horse so the horse will calm down"
That is the problem with enacting laws about technology that might change everything:-) We have to be very careful when enacting laws, because it's very difficult to overturn them. One day if we're not careful we'll have more of these laws than real ones.:-)
I was born and lived for 20 years in a country with socialized medicine (one of those wonderful places your American centrism calls "rest of the world" like it's a glamorous thing - usually just to ignore questions about particular countries because you usually don't know the first thing about them), and one of my fingers was badly treated when it was smashed (not too badly, actually - until I got treated) and went to the emergency room of the public hospital (because it was closest and I didn't know any better). By the time a private thraumathologist got to look at it (the next day) it was deformed for life (threading the suture without pulling out the nail beforehand will do that to you - and it hurts like hell). The guy told me he's seen it over and over again, and that I was actually very lucky in comparison with other patients he has had after the public hospital is done with them.
Sure my right thumb still hits the spacebar just fine and it's fully functional (just looks rather ugly), but it did make me think of one thing - socialized medicine means, among other Bad Things (tm) there's nobody to sue if something goes wrong.
I mean, it might have been possible, but who can take on big government?
Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.
As for the 60's, personally I'm tired of the 60's rethoric. I'm sure your 60's parents must love to hear you talking like that and probably encourage it, but I'd bet that (notwithstanding how the media tries to portray us) our "Generation X" is composed of a very plural in ideas, but mostly conservative group of people, as a backlash from the 60's left-winging and picketing.. Of course the 60's children are in their prime now and holding very good positions of influence today, so you're, say, 80% more likely to hear from them and their ideas (especially since they all went on to Journalist school). But just like the ultra conservative, "everything-alien-is-bad" generation before them, they will also get old and fade away, leaving us to clean the mess. Please use your brain now, so you can know better than they did.
I am not saying everything the left wing proposes is bad, or everything the right wing proposes is good (or viceversa), but as a rule I distrust anyone who says "everything" the other side says been has and always will be wrong (and you should too).
Personally there's nothing I fear the most than a fundamentalist - even if he agrees with me. And that is why your post makes me sick.:-)
Well, this could be due to the fact that the more money you pay for something, the more need you feel to say all the wonderful things it can do, especially if you're insecure about your purchase.
I have both SCSIs and IDEs. I guess it depends on how much money I have at the time, how much storage I think I need and most importantly (and everybody's missed it) "WHAT YOU'RE PLANNING ON STORING ON IT" (i.e. you might want to put your kernel+gnu on a SCSI and home on an IDE - since you're probably backing up home much more often and you want the extra speed SCSI can give you when dealing with a myriad small files).
Things like that make all the difference and they're different between the Home, Business, Developer and techhead user types. They're different technologies, yes, but you can use them for what they're useful.
So I guess my point is that this discussion has gone on for waaay too long. Very few people are actually on topic (as far as reactions to the WD announcement). It's sad to see a potentially good discussion turn into a pissing match.
"Amiga" is the feminine for friend (a friend who happens to be a girl). Girlfriend in the couple sense is "Novia". So I guess your analogy was a little bit off (unless you sweep all your friends who are girls off their collective feet, in which case, may I ask how you do it?), but point taken anyway.:-)
Loved that machine, though. Used for years and made a good living consulting for a couple of audio-visual and video production firms and outfitting them with Amigas, toasters, ARexx scripts, etcetera. It was a really neat platform to work on.
And their command-line shell was much better than DOS, although of course worse than, say, bash. Still ARexx allowed you to do really cool things in realtime with a couple of Amigas hooked up together.
I also lost hope about a year ago. I still keep one of my old Amigas and my software lying around though:-)
I hope IDG (AND their lawyers) are reading this - by now we've mentioned "for dummies" (trademark of IDG being protected by overly stupid lawyers) so much they probably are.
It's sickening to see a company that pretends to be "in touch" with technology as IDG, and then hires lawyers to assail the very culture that gives them much of their livelyhood.
Well, only thing I have to say is that I've been a client for 12 years and you'll never see another penny from me (not even for Linuxworld). See if your corporate offices like that.
They only listen to money, folks, so it's very simple: Boycott them until they have no money to pay those sharks or they apologize and promise not to do it again.
I allow for them to apologize to give them the benefit of the doubt; it's probably a "pointy-haired boss" (trademark of Scott Adams - gotta be careful these days) who got a little carried away with some stupid lawyer firm - or the lawyers themselves trying to justify their salary.
I have many, many IDG publications, including "For Dummies" books... About 10 or 15 books plus many, many "....World" magazines... I'd say to the tune of at least a few hundred dollars over the years.
BYE BYE IDG...! Nice knowing you while you still knew how to please your customers instead of how to alienate them (though your magazines were always better than your books)!
You might want to drop in and leave your impressions (be nice but firm - and you might want to refer them here to get Andover and Rob in trouble;-)). The form mentions you can send messages to Sarah Hansen, Corporate Communications.
I think a Linux conference should be like the Inprise/Borland Conference, more focused to the technical aspects than the marketing mumbo-jumbo. I think it is vital that Linux doesn't lose the technical stuff amid all this media frenzy. By all means let them pamper you, but don't give into going to all-marketing and no-techstuff events.
Basically what they do is that they have different people from different consulting firms/book authors give talks that are very technically oriented... From 7:30AM-10pm (with an hour for lunch) it's so chock-full of technical sessions about specific applications of the technology (in this case would be all kinds of Linux technologies), and there is one or two specific "expositor days" specifically for people to actually go to the booths on the floor (which are available all the time anyway).
At the end they give you a CD with all the papers/source code for all the sessions in all the tracks, to make up for the ones you missed (on the Inprise conference, there are so many sessions you can't possibly do them all).
I learned more on the Borland conferences than I ever learned at school or enterprise courses, and I'd like to see Linux sessions like that.
Imagine the "conference tracks" for a minute, along with the sessions you could write:
System Administration (large volume sendmail, nntp, management of huge networks, etc)
System Security
Programming - General (full tutorials on make, autoconf and things like that)
Programming - Languages (C, C++, Python, Java, LISP, etc)
Wouldn't you like to attend something like this? Knowing that all the free stuff is still there and you can go see it now (forgoing your session) or wait until Wednesday?
I know many conferences have technical sessions, but the way the Borland conferences emphasize going to the sessions instead of getting bugged by pushy salespeople all day makes you learn a lot more (and the AMOUNT of sessions they have! God!).
Of course, there's also a party every night, so don't even think about sleeping.:-)
Well, I have used the Amiga since the A500 (went through 2000, 2500, and expanded that sucker like crazy), and although I was very hardcore, now as I see it it's just sad...
Commodore will always be a place of great technology and stupid, stupid management.
Early this year I was even ready to buy a new Amiga, now all I want is a new SCSI HD+ROMs for the A500 that's collecting dust in the closet, install Linux w/minicom and use it as a terminal at home. All the other machines have been gone for a while.
A sad ending for a great piece of hardware, that's for sure.
I have to disagree with you... You can't make a ruling on the items your child will see or avoid seeing from the underlying parent-child relationship. That's why those programs don't work, because you can't have a one-size-fits-all approach.
My mother was a psychologist. I grew up around books. Every wall of every hallway in my childhood home was full of books of all types (psychologists read pretty creepy stuff):-)
As a young kid, there was so much to read, I didn't even care about the nasty stuff (there was always something else around that was equally interesting). By having my parents participate in my personal reading by suggesting really good, interesting books and discussing them afterwards I learned to pick my reading carefully. Very soon I was reading anything that I could get my hands on. Never even cared about the dirty stuff.
When I turned 13 I was "given free range" to any book in the house (not that they ever actually stopped me from grabbing a book, but I was actually told I could now). There was *a lot* of psychology stuff, WW II stuff detailing the horrible Nazi period and their psychological aftermath, and other miscellaneous books my mom used as case studies, most of them with content decidedly not for children or even teenagers.
Of course I started by reading pretty heavy stuff, but then that got boring and came back to the stuff I was really interested in (and kept just a couple of "ugly" topics I was interested in, which I dropped after a couple of years). I read a lot of really nasty stuff, but by then my general culture was enough that it didn't disturb me. And I always had somebody to talk about it.
I guess my point is, it depends on the parent and on the child. I realize most parents wouldn't get that involved, and I guess they are the kind who would buy those filters anyway.
But if you care about your kids, you'll encourage them to go to good pages, keep them entertained with cool stuff, and if they demonstrate they're a little ahead of their age on this or that topic, don't stop them from investigating things, but always stress the "use your brain" side of web browsing. There's a lot of good material out there. Problem is - it takes work. But look at it this way: You'll actually have a meaningful relationship with your child, and that will positively influence his/her entire life. And who doesn't want that for their kids?
I am married, and planning on having children soon. I intend to put the kids' computer either next to mine, or in the family room, and I intend to try to be around when my kid browses the first few years and from then on play it by ear, depending on how mature he/she turns out to be about it. Not very different than the way I was educated, I guess.
I don't really have a solution for libraries and public places. But I do know it takes adult involvement, but not censure.
But look at it this way, by starting early, my parents were able to "release me from the leash" at 13 (your mileage may vary):-). From then on they didn't have to worry about what I was doing, I came up to them with questions before doing stupid stuff. And I think that's extremely positive for the parent-child relationship.
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So I have the following (it all works unless specified and I fire it up at least twice a year unless specified). And yes, my office looks like a train-wreck twice a year when I pull all this stuff out to keep it alive..
2 Commodore 64s (one works, the other is for parts), and a Commodore 64C
1 1541-II disk drive (works) and a bunch of software.
1 Commodore 128 (Has a couple of broken keys on the numeric pad), and a 1571 disk drive
1 Laser 128 (Apple II clone) with two drives. Works fine and I have a bunch of games and office type software to go with it.
1 Amiga 500, the internal and two external drives (one pulled from an A1000 so it's very big. Another is an off-brand, very small and cool 3 1/2)
1 Commodore Plus/4. Works great.
1 Commodore Vic-20. Works great
1 Commodore 16 which is unfortunately busted
I have a serial modem (14.4) I use to hook up the Amiga to a PC. I cheat because it's actually just doing telnet, but it's cool to get on the web with Lynx by using a kermit terminal program (my Amiga software is so old that it doesn't have a TCP stack). At some point I started getting some public domain amiga tcp stack off ftp but I needed a hard drive to hold it all so I stopped (even emulation is better than the real thing when you don't have enough hardware).
And of course I also keep a bunch of emulators on the modern machines so I can try things out and have interesting stuff to run (being able to run it on the actual hardware gives you a reason to want to pull it out). I love retrocomputing. In fact, that's how I plan on teaching programming to my kids. Yes, they'll use modern hardware too, but for programming I want them to see how there can be very little between you and the metal and you can still accomplish a bunch. All the layers of abstractions can actually make the basics (like why assembly is important and how you actually talk to hardware) a lot harder to understand. If all you have is a Commodore and you have to send commands to the drive to initialize the hardware, and you have to poke values in order to create a little assembly routine or change colors, it just makes it so much more *real*, and there's a lot less to explain of what's going on in the background. Since everything is an extrapolation of that pattern of thought anyway, I think it's better to start the understanding at that level.
Most people, Christian or not, know about this one. It is part of Jesus' response to the question "What shall I do to inherit eternal life". He answered to love God, and your neighbor. To the question "Who is my neighbor", he answered with the parable.
Basically a bunch of good, God loving people (even a priest!) pass a badly hurt man on the street without helping him, even going out of their way to avoid them (some of them thought he must be drunk). Then a nonbeliever (a Samaritan) had compassion for him, took him to an inn, patched his wounds, and asked the innkeeper to take care of him for as long as he needed and he would reimburse him.
This story is great, because it has two points. First, that we are not supposed to be judging other people over whether they are "Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, or secularists". We're in fact not supposed to judge at all - that's up to Him for later.
The second, and most important, point is that even these "Buddhists, Jews, Hindus and secularists" (you forgot Muslims) can be deserving because of their acts of love and kindness, since love is something you feel and do, not something you talk and thump your Bible about. Their acts can make them even more so deserving than a born and raised Christian.
The question you are posing is not easy, and has been addressed on Christian theological discussion throughout the years. The particular question "are you saved by your faith or by your acts?" has always been a difficult thing to ponder for Christians. In my opinion, why not do both, ignore the naysayers, don't judge the ones who "won't convert" and keep the question unimportant anyway. :-)
The other part of your post, about the exclusionary doctrines, nothing I've ever read about Larry Wall has ever made me think that he hates non-christian folken. That reveals a possible prejudice against religion on yourself.
But again, who am I to judge? :-)
Just my 2c.
This is wrong in two counts. First, you simply don't see the art because you're looking at the DNA and not at the creature it composes - kind of like looking at the surface of Van Gogh's "Waterlillies" with a Microsocope ("it's all little blotches of paint in a canvas, there's no art here"). Once you look at the level your brain is most comfortable with, you can see the art and creativity.
On the other hand, you must not be a programmer (or at least not a very good one). The DNA structures themselves and their intermingling (i.e., code) can be beautiful once you understand what you are looking at. Anybody who has written a large software system should know what I'm talking about.
Herein the beauty and the magic lays.
"...In December 2000, CCS ran across one of the most brazen pirate sites Powell had seen on the Internet in months....[Powell] received a tip from an informant who knew the site's administrative password, allowing Powell to download the e-mail addresses of all the registered users."
Isn't this crime under the legislation of most developed nations? If you access a person's computer without that person's authorization (even if you have all the passwords), you are guilty of hacking and can go to jail (unless you are law enforcement and have a warrant to search).. Amazing to hear that a lawyer will actually admit to doing something like that.
It's bad crime-fighting too, since in the U.S. evidence obtained illegally is automatically discarded.
I usually don't care about the whole piracy debate (it's easy not to worry about it that much when you use Linux), but it really irks me when I read about someone using illegal techniques to catch people doing illegal stuff.
Hi,
:-)
I can understand Coca-cola's position on this one. Now you try to keep in mind that you're dealing with Businessmen. So here's my recommendation (I am not a lawyer, your mileage may vary, etc)
If, as you say, your purpose was legitimate, ask them to negotiate - ask them to buy the "cocaine.ch" domain for you (or another domain you think would be appropriate) and tell them in exchange you will gladly relinquish the domain. Your site stays up, they get back their name. They might even agree to add a link to your site for your old users for a year or two.
You are dealing with businessmen, not goons. Be polite and tell them your good faith reasoning, while allowing them a clean Win-win deal. Most businesspeople would rather spend the few bucks for the domain you want (and depending on the price, maybe even buying it off the original owner for you) and trade it with you (while making you sign a few papers relinquishing the "Coke" name forever) than pay for lawyers, media spin (so they don't look like the bad guys) and that kind of thing.
Above all, be civil.
Hope this helps,
- David
The very first implementation of Text-To-Speech I ever saw was for the Commodore 64, an Assembly library with BASIC bindings called SAM (I don't remember the company). I think it was around 1983 or so. Anyone else remembers this cool toy? Their selling point is that is was the only one that was software-only at the time (thanks to the excellent sound synthesizer inside C64 machines).
:-)
:-)
:-)
I loved it and loved writing code for it. I can still hear the demo saying:
---------- Imagine a scratchy but very understandable voice here:
"Hello, my name is SAM, the software mouth for the Commodore 64 computer. I am the most versatile, understandable speech synthesizer on the market. And I am the lowest price of them all.
So what can you do with me? Why you can put me into your own programs. How yould you like your business software to say "Please enter this week's purchases". Or imagine an adventure game that has this:
The elf was capture by the giant. He began to cry and he said: 'oh, no! Please don't hurt me Mr Giant!' but the giant was very mean, and he only said 'Ho-Ho-Ho!'."
-------- Imagination off
There was also a demo of SAM singing the Star Spangled Banner and reciting the gettysburg address.
There were two ways of getting it to talk; Natural and Phonetic. In natural mode, it would just interpret your typing, but it made pronounciation errors often. The best way was to use phonetic style, which involved a lot of "H"s to give the correct inflections.
A BASIC program that "talked" looked a little like:
10 PI 64:SP 128
20 SAY "H4EHLLO, H4AW R U?"
30 SAY "I H4OP UR F4Y4LLING f4AYHNE."
This would have said "Hello, how are you?" (with proper question mark inflection) and "I hope you're feeling fine". If you took the punctuation mark it would stop "feeling" natural because the slightly lowered pitch when you finish a sentence was not accounted for (it was my most common error)
It took a little experimentation, but once you got a hang of it, all you needed to do was to maintain two strings for each message, one the text, another the speech. Not bad.
If you're into emulation it might even still be floating around, these days the SID (The C64 sound chip) emulation is not that bad anymore; it would probably sound pretty close.
So, any more Microsoft "Innovations"?
>>It might also interest you to know that the
>>Delphi (and C++ Builder) on Linux team is a
>>completely different team than the Delphi on
>>Windows team (they hired all-linux developers
>>to write the Delphi-Linux
>>"Kylix" project).
>Really? I hadn't noticed that.
>--Robert West
>--Delphi R&D
I'm sorry, seems like I have been misinformed at the last Borland Conference (where they gave all impression that the Linux team was a separate entity of "Real Linux guys" (whatever that meant) and they were doing the port). I apologize for that.
However, this begs the question. Will Delphi suffer stagnation during the next year due to the Linux port? Do you have more or less people/budget than you used to? Is the delay on the Delphi patch (which should address several important Corba/Midas issues for your enterprise customers) in any way related to this? As I wrote before, I'm not worried about the long term future of Delphi, but we still have deadlines and planning to do.
As a Linux user and enthusiast, I really like the fact that you are doing a port and all, but I don't want you guys to cover the front door and let the thief go in through the kitchen, if you know what I mean. Even if you are suffering from a shortage of resources to be able to release patches and such, as your clients, we kind of deserve to know, don't you agree?
I'm a Delphi programmer. I was just asked at my work my opinion about what this means for Delphi. Here's a fragment of an email with my take on it. There's some thoughts on Corel as well that might help you understand why this happened.
:-)
:-)
------------------------------------
Corel is a company that knows very well how to side-step Microsoft. They are non-competitive with Microsoft, as you say, because it would be stupid to do so directly, as Borland found out, twice, first with office tools and then with development tools. At any rate, that sidestepping paid out in the long run - not only did they survive "the big Windows Desktop and Devtool wars" without nearly as many bruises as Borland, they still have all the products they ever did, and they ended up (counting their own Linux distribution and now the Visibroker and Borland development tools) with a cradle-to-grave solution that involves absolutely no Microsoft products (or products from any other vendor for that matter).
In addition, it's hard to find any other company with such a large scope of products (from OS to Enterprise to Desktop) except for Sun Microsystems and possibly IBM on their Unix market. It's actually kind of amazing to see them actually pulling it off. I see a Michael Cowpland book on the horizon.
Since Delphi and C++ Builder) for Linux are not products that are out yet, but are in development now (albeit in early stages from what I've been able to extract from Inprise Linux people I've talked to), it will be very interesting to see if they will open source them (as they have behaved with their wine move and other things) to increase the rate of development while freeing some of their Delphi people to bugfix them. It might also interest you to know that the Delphi (and C++ Builder) on Linux team is a completely different team than the Delphi on Windows team (they hired all-linux developers to write the Delphi-Linux "Kylix" project).
In my opinion, Delphi suffered more when Borland lost over half of their Delphi team to Microsoft's Visual Basic team in the infamous "limousine lunch invitations" by "The Dead Borlanders Society" of Seattle - which prompted a lawsuit that was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount - than they are suffering here.
In any case Delphi in particular has already been suffering somewhat (in my opinion) from their concentration on Java development and CORBA/Java integration. The entropy is much higher from Delphi 3 to 5 (mainly because Delphi 3 to 4 was huge) than from Delphi 1through 3, even though 1 was 16-bit and 2 was a complete rewrite.
I'm definitely not saying that it will be a good thing for the next iteration of the product, but in the future, you'll have to remember that Unix people in general tend to care more about infrastructure than wizards. That change of view will probably be very healthy for the product in general, especially considering that the last two versions of Delphi have been feeling in general less stable and the do-it-yourself-with-code functionality is starting to go missing in newer features - so it's not just "don't use the wizard, it doesn't work right", it's "don't use the feature at all"... Delphi would be well served by a year of bugfix-only development in the manner of Sun's JDK1.3.
So all in all, I think it's actually "neutral" news from our perspective, at least until we see what the plans are (not that Delphi was a high priority in Borland anymore anyway). Now it would be good news if they GPLd Visibroker, which strategically is a smart thing to do (depending on how much revenue they're getting from it after factoring in all the Corel product revenue). Now = that = would save us some money.
Just my opinion from the Delphi front,
----------------
My opinions are mine of course, they don't represent the opinions of my employer, my cats, or slashdot
From the mpaa.org website:
Since its early days, the MPA, often referred to
now as "a little State Department," has expanded
to cover a wide range of foreign activities falling in the diplomatic, economic, and political arenas.
------------------------------------
I think basically, this shows just how arrogant they are... "A little state department"? EXCUUUUSE ME!?!?! But what elected representatives set up this "state department"?
Looks to me like the media consider themselves a separate state, being that they are represented by a separate state department.. To whom I'm sure they pay "taxes" in the form of membership dues.
Be careful, ten years from now, they'll have their own military. They already seem to have a legislative, executive and judiciary branch.
IANAL, but isn't this the same situation as the DeCSS evidence being in the public record? Couldn't Mitnick just ask a friend to ask for all records of his trial, including copies of the files?
You know there's actually a law in Florida from the turn of the Century (still in effect) that goes something like:
:-) We have to be very careful when enacting laws, because it's very difficult to overturn them. One day if we're not careful we'll have more of these laws than real ones. :-)
"When a person driving a motor vehicle reaches a horse and the horse acts frightened, the driver of the vehicle must get out of the car and take it apart, laying its pieces in front of the horse so the horse will calm down"
That is the problem with enacting laws about technology that might change everything
Hi, Mr. Socialized Medicine...
:-)
I was born and lived for 20 years in a country with socialized medicine (one of those wonderful places your American centrism calls "rest of the world" like it's a glamorous thing - usually just to ignore questions about particular countries because you usually don't know the first thing about them), and one of my fingers was badly treated when it was smashed (not too badly, actually - until I got treated) and went to the emergency room of the public hospital (because it was closest and I didn't know any better). By the time a private thraumathologist got to look at it (the next day) it was deformed for life (threading the suture without pulling out the nail beforehand will do that to you - and it hurts like hell). The guy told me he's seen it over and over again, and that I was actually very lucky in comparison with other patients he has had after the public hospital is done with them.
Sure my right thumb still hits the spacebar just fine and it's fully functional (just looks rather ugly), but it did make me think of one thing - socialized medicine means, among other Bad Things (tm) there's nobody to sue if something goes wrong.
I mean, it might have been possible, but who can take on big government?
Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.
As for the 60's, personally I'm tired of the 60's rethoric. I'm sure your 60's parents must love to hear you talking like that and probably encourage it, but I'd bet that (notwithstanding how the media tries to portray us) our "Generation X" is composed of a very plural in ideas, but mostly conservative group of people, as a backlash from the 60's left-winging and picketing.. Of course the 60's children are in their prime now and holding very good positions of influence today, so you're, say, 80% more likely to hear from them and their ideas (especially since they all went on to Journalist school). But just like the ultra conservative, "everything-alien-is-bad" generation before them, they will also get old and fade away, leaving us to clean the mess. Please use your brain now, so you can know better than they did.
I am not saying everything the left wing proposes is bad, or everything the right wing proposes is good (or viceversa), but as a rule I distrust anyone who says "everything" the other side says been has and always will be wrong (and you should too).
Personally there's nothing I fear the most than a fundamentalist - even if he agrees with me. And that is why your post makes me sick.
Nothing personal,
Heheheh...
Well, this could be due to the fact that the more money you pay for something, the more need you feel to say all the wonderful things it can do, especially if you're insecure about your purchase.
I have both SCSIs and IDEs. I guess it depends on how much money I have at the time, how much storage I think I need and most importantly (and everybody's missed it) "WHAT YOU'RE PLANNING ON STORING ON IT" (i.e. you might want to put your kernel+gnu on a SCSI and home on an IDE - since you're probably backing up home much more often and you want the extra speed SCSI can give you when dealing with a myriad small files).
Things like that make all the difference and they're different between the Home, Business, Developer and techhead user types. They're different technologies, yes, but you can use them for what they're useful.
So I guess my point is that this discussion has gone on for waaay too long. Very few people are actually on topic (as far as reactions to the WD announcement). It's sad to see a potentially good discussion turn into a pissing match.
"Amiga" is the feminine for friend (a friend who happens to be a girl). Girlfriend in the couple sense is "Novia". So I guess your analogy was a little bit off (unless you sweep all your friends who are girls off their collective feet, in which case, may I ask how you do it?), but point taken anyway. :-)
:-)
Loved that machine, though. Used for years and made a good living consulting for a couple of audio-visual and video production firms and outfitting them with Amigas, toasters, ARexx scripts, etcetera. It was a really neat platform to work on.
And their command-line shell was much better than DOS, although of course worse than, say, bash. Still ARexx allowed you to do really cool things in realtime with a couple of Amigas hooked up together.
I also lost hope about a year ago. I still keep one of my old Amigas and my software lying around though
Thanks for letting me know about this.
;-)). The form mentions you can send messages to Sarah Hansen, Corporate Communications.
I hope IDG (AND their lawyers) are reading this - by now we've mentioned "for dummies" (trademark of IDG being protected by overly stupid lawyers) so much they probably are.
It's sickening to see a company that pretends to be "in touch" with technology as IDG, and then hires lawyers to assail the very culture that gives them much of their livelyhood.
Well, only thing I have to say is that I've been a client for 12 years and you'll never see another penny from me (not even for Linuxworld). See if your corporate offices like that.
They only listen to money, folks, so it's very simple: Boycott them until they have no money to pay those sharks or they apologize and promise not to do it again.
I allow for them to apologize to give them the benefit of the doubt; it's probably a "pointy-haired boss" (trademark of Scott Adams - gotta be careful these days) who got a little carried away with some stupid lawyer firm - or the lawyers themselves trying to justify their salary.
I have many, many IDG publications, including "For Dummies" books... About 10 or 15 books plus many, many "....World" magazines... I'd say to the tune of at least a few hundred dollars over the years.
BYE BYE IDG...! Nice knowing you while you still knew how to please your customers instead of how to alienate them (though your magazines were always better than your books)!
Also, at he idg.com site there's a form for communications titled "Trying to reach someone at an IDG company?"
You might want to drop in and leave your impressions (be nice but firm - and you might want to refer them here to get Andover and Rob in trouble
Basically what they do is that they have different people from different consulting firms/book authors give talks that are very technically oriented... From 7:30AM-10pm (with an hour for lunch) it's so chock-full of technical sessions about specific applications of the technology (in this case would be all kinds of Linux technologies), and there is one or two specific "expositor days" specifically for people to actually go to the booths on the floor (which are available all the time anyway).
At the end they give you a CD with all the papers/source code for all the sessions in all the tracks, to make up for the ones you missed (on the Inprise conference, there are so many sessions you can't possibly do them all).
I learned more on the Borland conferences than I ever learned at school or enterprise courses, and I'd like to see Linux sessions like that.
Imagine the "conference tracks" for a minute, along with the sessions you could write:
Wouldn't you like to attend something like this? Knowing that all the free stuff is still there and you can go see it now (forgoing your session) or wait until Wednesday?
I know many conferences have technical sessions, but the way the Borland conferences emphasize going to the sessions instead of getting bugged by pushy salespeople all day makes you learn a lot more (and the AMOUNT of sessions they have! God!).
Of course, there's also a party every night, so don't even think about sleeping. :-)
Just my 2c
Well, I have used the Amiga since the A500 (went through 2000, 2500, and expanded that sucker like crazy), and although I was very hardcore, now as I see it it's just sad...
Commodore will always be a place of great technology and stupid, stupid management.
Early this year I was even ready to buy a new Amiga, now all I want is a new SCSI HD+ROMs for the A500 that's collecting dust in the closet, install Linux w/minicom and use it as a terminal at home. All the other machines have been gone for a while.
A sad ending for a great piece of hardware, that's for sure.
- David
I have to disagree with you... You can't make a ruling on the items your child will see or avoid seeing from the underlying parent-child relationship. That's why those programs don't work, because you can't have a one-size-fits-all approach.
:-)
:-). From then on they didn't have to worry about what I was doing, I came up to them with questions before doing stupid stuff. And I think that's extremely positive for the parent-child relationship.
My mother was a psychologist. I grew up around books. Every wall of every hallway in my childhood home was full of books of all types (psychologists read pretty creepy stuff)
As a young kid, there was so much to read, I didn't even care about the nasty stuff (there was always something else around that was equally interesting). By having my parents participate in my personal reading by suggesting really good, interesting books and discussing them afterwards I learned to pick my reading carefully. Very soon I was reading anything that I could get my hands on. Never even cared about the dirty stuff.
When I turned 13 I was "given free range" to any book in the house (not that they ever actually stopped me from grabbing a book, but I was actually told I could now). There was *a lot* of psychology stuff, WW II stuff detailing the horrible Nazi period and their psychological aftermath, and other miscellaneous books my mom used as case studies, most of them with content decidedly not for children or even teenagers.
Of course I started by reading pretty heavy stuff, but then that got boring and came back to the stuff I was really interested in (and kept just a couple of "ugly" topics I was interested in, which I dropped after a couple of years). I read a lot of really nasty stuff, but by then my general culture was enough that it didn't disturb me. And I always had somebody to talk about it.
I guess my point is, it depends on the parent and on the child. I realize most parents wouldn't get that involved, and I guess they are the kind who would buy those filters anyway.
But if you care about your kids, you'll encourage them to go to good pages, keep them entertained with cool stuff, and if they demonstrate they're a little ahead of their age on this or that topic, don't stop them from investigating things, but always stress the "use your brain" side of web browsing. There's a lot of good material out there. Problem is - it takes work. But look at it this way: You'll actually have a meaningful relationship with your child, and that will positively influence his/her entire life. And who doesn't want that for their kids?
I am married, and planning on having children soon. I intend to put the kids' computer either next to mine, or in the family room, and I intend to try to be around when my kid browses the first few years and from then on play it by ear, depending on how mature he/she turns out to be about it. Not very different than the way I was educated, I guess.
I don't really have a solution for libraries and public places. But I do know it takes adult involvement, but not censure.
But look at it this way, by starting early, my parents were able to "release me from the leash" at 13 (your mileage may vary)