On the Onion's "Not for Broadcast" CD, they have Steven Hawking pretending to be his sexy twin brother, hitting on a couple of undergrad co-eds ("He's the smart one, me I'm the sexy one...") in that computer-generated voice.
He even expains how he is able to "maintain an erection for up to fifteen minutes on a single battery charge." Hilarious, repulsive, and offensive, all at once. That's the Onion.
Now do you understand why the US has such tight restriction on encryption code? It won't be long before we can no longer IMPORT crypto, and, I immagine, soon we won't be allowed to use it at all.
Of course, us Good People don't have to worry about that, since only Criminals would want to send encrypted messages.
One thing that Woz and Cringely agree on: the portrayal of Steve Jobs was good. In fact, Woz said that Jobs' tyrades and abuse of his employees was much worse than in the movie. The movie makes him out to be a real asshole with a messiah complex. Maybe it was all of the acid he dropped, I dunno....
When Cringely makes comments like "And I'm the guy who knows it all. If you happen to be a friend of Oliver Stone, please give him my number", it makes me wonder if he's just bitter about not being the one who got to tell the story. He knows all of it? I doubt that.
If Linux/apache grows in popularity, Microsoft will simply find a way to weasel into the market. Why not make a proprietary API that runs on top of Linux -- then, port a bunch (but not all) of MS applications to it?
Microsoft is sneaky, sneaky, sneaky. But you know what? I couldn't give a rat's ass how Microsoft responds to Linux, Apache, or any other open source project. Microsoft thrives because People Are Dumb, and the open source projects will continue to plod along on their own, getting better and better every month, regardless of market success. If the rest of the world wants to live as Microserfs for the rest of their little lives (and constantly bitch about it), that is not my problem (or the problem of anyone in the open source movement).
Microsoft will never produce Internet serving software that's as good as Apache anyway, because of inherant flaws in their platform.
A Women (aka Hot Chicks) in Computer Science fund is a very cool idea. We have a WICS program at our university. Unfortunately, it consists of mostly men (seriously!).
Slashdot is a free-for-all, open forum where anyone can post. If anyone takes profanity-filled, moronic flames from ACs on Slashdot as the "voice" of the Linux community, they are deeply misguided.
Guess what: immature people abound everywhere, in every community. If people take the "Mindcraft is the spawn of the Devil!" type comments as evidence against supporting Linux, it seems to me that they just need an excuse of some sort. Those of you here who use Linux: do the "Linux sux freeBSD rulz" idiots make freeBSD any more or less attractive in your eyes? Come on!
Slashdot is an open arena, not a closed magazine. There will always be idiotic posters, and there will always be embarassing, misguided, inflamatory comments. This reflects no worse on Linux than the people who stand in line for a month and dress in Chewbaca costumes reflect on the Star Wars saga. There will be idiotic zealots everywhere (my apologies to the Chewbaca people). Live with it.
Cooperation like this is a sign of things to come. I expect to see major changes in the application layer of the major Linux distributions. Expect Redhat, Caldera, Corel, and IBM to cooperatively build an entire base of core applications for the OS.
Here's what we should see in the next year or so (at least what I hope for):
-Linuxconf becoming the standard, accepted graphical system administration tool -A unified, X-level TrueType font database with hundreds of available fonts -A unified desktop environment-level object-hadling standard (cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop, shortcut icons, URL links, all behaving in a standard way across desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME). -More robust and wider selection of office applications for Linux. And they all will interoperate. -The beginnings of a standard Installation/deinstallation "wizard" API for commercial Linux applications. Probably based on RPM (unless Corel/Debian pushes.deb). -A new generation of Linux users who will never touch a bash prompt.
Basically, Linux will become much more consistent, predictable and standardized in its GUI. Across all distributions. It will shatter a major FUD claim about Linux: that the different distributions will diverge the way that UNIX did. There will be only two Linux GUIs, KDE and GNOME, and those two environments will interoperate with one another seamlessly.
Oh, and once all of this comes about, expect Microsoft to start porting applications to Linux. Why? Because Microsoft loves to enter new markets. And because it will bolster their claim that Windows is not a monopoly.
Linux will become an accepted desktop operating system. There are too many very powerful players who are determined to make it happen.
People who make their own fortunes do work extremely hard. They eat, drink, breathe, and sleep their business. They work 24/7 and take naps in their rented offices. It is a specific personality type.
There is a reason why Bill Gates stays constantly busy running Microsoft, even though most of us, with his money, would buy a gigantic compound outside of a major city, have it networked with 1000-or-so top-of-the-line workstations, and hold a non-stop LAN party for the rest of eternity (well, at least, that's what I would do). It's not because he wants to get richer. It's because doing work, building businesses, etc. is what people with a personality like Gates' live for.
I'm not justifying his riches, just explaining how you get to be worth $50B
Yeah, this pretty much marries nVidia and Creative, since they are the only standalone board/silicon manufacturers left. Only, as good as their sound hardware is, I am not the biggest fan of Creative video cards. Or CD-ROMs, or modems...
It used to be that the silicon makers made silicon, and the board makes made boards, and everything was happy, people cooperated with one another, and the shelves and Best Buy were filled with a myriad of choices. Each board manufacturer made its own implementation of a graphics chip, and you could pick and choose which one was the best deal.
Now, each board manufacturer just makes cards with their own chip. No more cooperation, no more choice. Want 3dfx? You have to buy STB. Want S3? Well, now you'll have to buy Diamond. Of course, this does not bode well for XFree86 developers, trying to keep up with changes in technology. Developments like this are only going to encourage concealment of design specs *cough*ATI*cough*.
It would be interesting if Diamond/S3 decides to enter the PC market. Collectively, they own enough products to produce an entire box - except for the hard drive and CPU. Perhaps Western Digital and Transmeta can be wooed.......
Personally, I thought that the movie told the story of how Gates and Jobs arrived on the PC scene quite well. Without going into unnecessary technical details, the movie covered the arrival of the Altair, Apple Computer starting in a garage, how Microsoft acquired DOS and sold it to IBM, how Jobs got his idea for a graphical interface from Xerox... You even see a working model of the Lisa.
Of course, there were a few historical errors, e.g., Xerox did not invent the mouse. But Gates' characterization is quite good. I like his line when Gates, Allen, and Ballmer are at Harvard, on the phone with the Altair guy: "We have to let him know what he doesn't think he needs, and that we are the only people he can get it from." Seems to sum up Microsoft's business strategy.
The underlying story of the movie was that Gates and Jobs were sucessful because they understood what the personal computer was good for, whereas Big Business (IBM, HP, etc) did not. Which is probably fairly true.
Definately watchable, if you can get past Ballmer's very badly done bald cap.
UNIX has lasted 30 years, and will last 30 more. Why is this?
The UNIX design model (small kernel running the show, everything else, processes, devices, etc. represented as files, real or virtual), make it the ideal system for multi-user, multitasking, networked computers.
When the Personal Computers arrived in the late 70s/early 80s, they were small. They were single-user, singletasking, standalone machines. You ran a spreadsheet. Or a word processor. Or a game. And nothing else. The single-user OSes, DOS and MacOS, were ideal for this purpose. They didn't need the complexity of the UNIX design model.
Then the PCs got big, and thanks to the Internet, they got networked. They had the power and memory resources to run multiple applications, and the GUIs to manage them. This is where the single-user OSes started to hit a wall. DOS (now known as Win9x) wasn't designed for the heavy strain that multiple applications, networks, and a myriad of devices placed on it.
UNIX, by its very nature, its underlying design, could handle this. IMHO, this is why we saw Linux explode at just this time. Linux is UNIX, and UNIX makes sense on the modern PC.
Calling UNIX "60s technology" is extremely misleading anyway, since most of what we know as the features of UNIX were developed in the BSD and SysV strains in the 1980s.
Yes, but the thing you are forgetting is that with online trading, etc., Big Companies can be owned by Little People. This is part of the revolution (evolution?) that I am talking about.
It would be fantastic if the entire IPO was bought up by small investors who trade over the Web (as opposed to large investment bankers). Especially individual open source developers whose efforts go directly towards making the Redhat distribution better. It means that they now also have a genuine stake in the profitability of their work. And when you consider that the web serving technology (i.e., Apache) that they use to do those online stock transactions was also created by the very same open source community, it becomes all the more fitting.
I see this as part of an emerging New World, in which the Little Guys, the individuals, can survive and profit without Big Business. Maybe I'm an idealist, but isn't that what the open source movement is all about? Spirit of demoracy and freedom, and all of that? Maybe I'm just on crack.:-)
I see IBM's support of Open Source to be one example of a shift in the software industry from a "manufacturing" mindset to a "service" mindset. Instead of producing boxes of CD-ROMs, which are worthless in themselves (who doesn't have a CD-R drive these days), IBM creates software as part of a service business, which includes consulting, "e-business" solutions, as they call it, and various levels of technical support. In this business model, open source makes a lot of sense. The software itself is not for sale. It's only part of a larger service package. They can easily let everyone under the sun look at their source with no risk of losing anything. Yes, the source is copyrighted material, but in the same way as a technical manual is copyrighted material. Obfusicating source code makes about as much sense, in the IBM "e-business" model, as selling PCs without letting anyone see a manual or open the case.
Perhaps "Deep Computing" will provide us with the AI necessary to eliminate the silly ? that pops up all over the place. I just don't get it. How many computer manuals are the in the world that print out the ASCII code? They all very clearly state: 27 = ' 3F = ?. WHAT THE FSCK IS THE PROBLEM?!?!?! Are the designers of these "advanced" word processors ON CRACK? I never have this problem, because I write all of my Web documents in Pico.
Slashdot Mirror
He even expains how he is able to "maintain an erection for up to fifteen minutes on a single battery charge." Hilarious, repulsive, and offensive, all at once. That's the Onion.
microshit.comg
winfuck.org
(enter-hated-OS-here)+(enter-obscenity-here).or
...etc...
fuck.co.uk has existed for years. Gotta love the Fulchester Underwater Canoeing Klub!
Yawn.
Of course, us Good People don't have to worry about that, since only Criminals would want to send encrypted messages.
Is that a nude woman in the top corner of the home page?
Mmmmm.....
When Cringely makes comments like "And I'm the guy who knows it all. If you happen to be a friend of Oliver Stone, please give him my number", it makes me wonder if he's just bitter about not being the one who got to tell the story. He knows all of it? I doubt that.
Right on!
If Linux/apache grows in popularity, Microsoft will simply find a way to weasel into the market. Why not make a proprietary API that runs on top of Linux -- then, port a bunch (but not all) of MS applications to it?
Microsoft is sneaky, sneaky, sneaky. But you know what? I couldn't give a rat's ass how Microsoft responds to Linux, Apache, or any other open source project. Microsoft thrives because People Are Dumb, and the open source projects will continue to plod along on their own, getting better and better every month, regardless of market success. If the rest of the world wants to live as Microserfs for the rest of their little lives (and constantly bitch about it), that is not my problem (or the problem of anyone in the open source movement).
Microsoft will never produce Internet serving software that's as good as Apache anyway, because of inherant flaws in their platform.
A Women (aka Hot Chicks) in Computer Science fund is a very cool idea. We have a WICS program at our university. Unfortunately, it consists of mostly men (seriously!).
I think I feel a Segfault story coming on.....
Guess what: immature people abound everywhere, in every community. If people take the "Mindcraft is the spawn of the Devil!" type comments as evidence against supporting Linux, it seems to me that they just need an excuse of some sort. Those of you here who use Linux: do the "Linux sux freeBSD rulz" idiots make freeBSD any more or less attractive in your eyes? Come on!
Slashdot is an open arena, not a closed magazine. There will always be idiotic posters, and there will always be embarassing, misguided, inflamatory comments. This reflects no worse on Linux than the people who stand in line for a month and dress in Chewbaca costumes reflect on the Star Wars saga. There will be idiotic zealots everywhere (my apologies to the Chewbaca people). Live with it.
Here's what we should see in the next year or so (at least what I hope for):
-Linuxconf becoming the standard, accepted graphical system administration tool .deb).
-A unified, X-level TrueType font database with hundreds of available fonts
-A unified desktop environment-level object-hadling standard (cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop, shortcut icons, URL links, all behaving in a standard way across desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME).
-More robust and wider selection of office applications for Linux. And they all will interoperate.
-The beginnings of a standard Installation/deinstallation "wizard" API for commercial Linux applications. Probably based on RPM (unless Corel/Debian pushes
-A new generation of Linux users who will never touch a bash prompt.
Basically, Linux will become much more consistent, predictable and standardized in its GUI. Across all distributions. It will shatter a major FUD claim about Linux: that the different distributions will diverge the way that UNIX did. There will be only two Linux GUIs, KDE and GNOME, and those two environments will interoperate with one another seamlessly.
Oh, and once all of this comes about, expect Microsoft to start porting applications to Linux. Why? Because Microsoft loves to enter new markets. And because it will bolster their claim that Windows is not a monopoly.
Linux will become an accepted desktop operating system. There are too many very powerful players who are determined to make it happen.
Illogical. Jesus claimed to be God. If God does not exist, Jesus is either a liar or nuts.
People who make their own fortunes do work extremely hard. They eat, drink, breathe, and sleep their business. They work 24/7 and take naps in their rented offices. It is a specific personality type.
There is a reason why Bill Gates stays constantly busy running Microsoft, even though most of us, with his money, would buy a gigantic compound outside of a major city, have it networked with 1000-or-so top-of-the-line workstations, and hold a non-stop LAN party for the rest of eternity (well, at least, that's what I would do). It's not because he wants to get richer. It's because doing work, building businesses, etc. is what people with a personality like Gates' live for.
I'm not justifying his riches, just explaining how you get to be worth $50B
Yeah, this pretty much marries nVidia and Creative, since they are the only standalone board/silicon manufacturers left. Only, as good as their sound hardware is, I am not the biggest fan of Creative video cards. Or CD-ROMs, or modems...
Now, each board manufacturer just makes cards with their own chip. No more cooperation, no more choice. Want 3dfx? You have to buy STB. Want S3? Well, now you'll have to buy Diamond. Of course, this does not bode well for XFree86 developers, trying to keep up with changes in technology. Developments like this are only going to encourage concealment of design specs *cough*ATI*cough*.
It would be interesting if Diamond/S3 decides to enter the PC market. Collectively, they own enough products to produce an entire box - except for the hard drive and CPU. Perhaps Western Digital and Transmeta can be wooed.......
Of course, there were a few historical errors, e.g., Xerox did not invent the mouse. But Gates' characterization is quite good. I like his line when Gates, Allen, and Ballmer are at Harvard, on the phone with the Altair guy: "We have to let him know what he doesn't think he needs, and that we are the only people he can get it from." Seems to sum up Microsoft's business strategy.
The underlying story of the movie was that Gates and Jobs were sucessful because they understood what the personal computer was good for, whereas Big Business (IBM, HP, etc) did not. Which is probably fairly true.
Definately watchable, if you can get past Ballmer's very badly done bald cap.
The UNIX design model (small kernel running the show, everything else, processes, devices, etc. represented as files, real or virtual), make it the ideal system for multi-user, multitasking, networked computers.
When the Personal Computers arrived in the late 70s/early 80s, they were small. They were single-user, singletasking, standalone machines. You ran a spreadsheet. Or a word processor. Or a game. And nothing else. The single-user OSes, DOS and MacOS, were ideal for this purpose. They didn't need the complexity of the UNIX design model.
Then the PCs got big, and thanks to the Internet, they got networked. They had the power and memory resources to run multiple applications, and the GUIs to manage them. This is where the single-user OSes started to hit a wall. DOS (now known as Win9x) wasn't designed for the heavy strain that multiple applications, networks, and a myriad of devices placed on it.
UNIX, by its very nature, its underlying design, could handle this. IMHO, this is why we saw Linux explode at just this time. Linux is UNIX, and UNIX makes sense on the modern PC.
Calling UNIX "60s technology" is extremely misleading anyway, since most of what we know as the features of UNIX were developed in the BSD and SysV strains in the 1980s.
The link crashes Netscape in NT. Does Linux fare any better? I'm at work right now, unfortunately.
Yes, but the thing you are forgetting is that with online trading, etc., Big Companies can be owned by Little People. This is part of the revolution (evolution?) that I am talking about.
I see this as part of an emerging New World, in which the Little Guys, the individuals, can survive and profit without Big Business. Maybe I'm an idealist, but isn't that what the open source movement is all about? Spirit of demoracy and freedom, and all of that? Maybe I'm just on crack. :-)
I see IBM's support of Open Source to be one example of a shift in the software industry from a "manufacturing" mindset to a "service" mindset. Instead of producing boxes of CD-ROMs, which are worthless in themselves (who doesn't have a CD-R drive these days), IBM creates software as part of a service business, which includes consulting, "e-business" solutions, as they call it, and various levels of technical support. In this business model, open source makes a lot of sense. The software itself is not for sale. It's only part of a larger service package. They can easily let everyone under the sun look at their source with no risk of losing anything. Yes, the source is copyrighted material, but in the same way as a technical manual is copyrighted material. Obfusicating source code makes about as much sense, in the IBM "e-business" model, as selling PCs without letting anyone see a manual or open the case.
Perhaps "Deep Computing" will provide us with the AI necessary to eliminate the silly ? that pops up all over the place. I just don't get it. How many computer manuals are the in the world that print out the ASCII code? They all very clearly state: 27 = ' 3F = ?. WHAT THE FSCK IS THE PROBLEM?!?!?! Are the designers of these "advanced" word processors ON CRACK? I never have this problem, because I write all of my Web documents in Pico.