Not to mention the possibility that IBM itself has officially purchased one or two copies of CalderaLinux and OpenLinux and is hence "held harmless." I think maybe SCO are about to find out just how harmless IBM can really be...
To get to the point where IBM decides it'll be cheaper to buy SCO to stop the lawsuit than it would be to fight it.
It will most certainly not be cheaper to buy SCO. IBM have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Linux already. The last thing it wants to do is send a message to the world that says: "uh yeah, SCO has a claim here so we're going to buy them and make it go away." The damage to the Linux reputation would be incalculable - including considerable impact on IBM's bottom line. No, they're going to smack them down in court and rightly so.
As someone who has tried his hand at a bit of charcoal , graphite , pencil, and the odd digitaleffort, allow me share the two top tutorials (IMHO) for learning to draw. The first one: buy Drawing on the Right Side of The Brain by Betty Edwards. It can take you from "can't draw to save your life" to "I can draw realistic portraits from life" in a couple of weeks. I'm serious. It's that good. The second is here. It's Paul Wilkinson's tutorial on lifelike portraits - with an especially good section on proper shading and how to do it. I've been saying drawing is very like coding for years - it's nice to see someone else quantify that.
That's the thing, eventually the computer will be able to go through every combination, and be the best Go player in the world.
This is not true - Go has too much depth to be effectively searched beyond just a few moves. The first 14 moves of Go have more than 200^14 possibilities. Go games take many many more moves than that to complete. The second problem is that an effective searching algorithm is only the first step. The really hard part is trying to come up with an analysis function based on pattern matching. There are no weights for different pieces, some more important than others. Each stone is worth the same. It's the arrangement of stones which counts - something really hard to describe as a heuristic.
Read the grandparent's linked article - it explains all this a lot better than I can...
Much better "marks of the beast" would be finger prints, DNA typing, or plain automatic face recognition.
Indeed. The main problem with the Mark of the Beast is that people want to yank it out of context into today's society; seeing 666s behind every bush, worrying about credit cards, tatoos and all kinds of nonsense. But the original recipients of the letter (the Christian Church scattered throughout the known world somewhere around 95 AD) would have known who 666 was. In those days, as in some societies today, it was popular to add the numbers formed from the letters in your name and make a total. So for instance, some Roman graffiti has been found which says "I love her whose name is 545." Hard for us to extrapolate but doubtless the young lady knew:) Which brings us to 666. Apart from being a numerical pun (a man's name that represents a being impersonating deity but falling short), John's readers would have known that you get 666 when you add the letters together of "Nero Caesar." In Greek it adds up to 666, in Latin it comes to 616. 616 appears as a variant reading in plenty of the original manuscripts of Revelation which adds quite a lot of weight to this theory. Apocalyptical literature is hard for us to understand today but in those days it was an effective way of painting a picture using symbols and metaphors, all the while making its meaning known to those who were familiar with it. There is nothing in Revelation that would not have been unfamiliar to early Jewish Christians, steeped as they were in the old Testament. And the message they get from that passage is: "you're suffering terrible persecution from a man who thinks he's God. You all know who I mean. He is just a foreshadowing of all corrupt and evil leaders who will persecute the church throughout history. But ultimately you will overcome."
Teacher: Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? Simone: Um, he's sick. My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend knows this kid who wrote this script which plugs into this database that links to this client which says that Ferris passed out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious. Teacher: Thank you Simone.
The man who did this -- Andrew Wiles -- spent about 30 years working on this, & succeeded only after a second try
I was about to correct this but a quick look through Fermat's Last Theorem proves you're absolutely right: he first heard of the problem aged 10 and finally solved it after turning 40 having spent much of his life studying everything about it. That's a scary kind of dedication, especially for a problem which might not have been soluble.
X is the single biggest obstacle to Linux becoming a usable desktop OS. It's absolutely fantastic at doing what it was designed to do, but it has no place in a desktop environment.
X does just fine in a desktop environment, despite being designed the way it is. It runs on a wide variety of hardware from Onyxs right down to my iPAQ, provides more than enough flexibility for window manager authors and works transparently over a network.
Heck, most of the time even Terminal Services on Windows 2000 (running over a 10mbit network) is more responsive than my Linux box.
Tsk Tsk:) Anecdotal evidence! The very thing that Linux users are always criticised for. What's your hardware? Video card? Kernel version? Distribution? Did you compile X for yourself? You mention "my Linux box" - so is it another box entirely? My anecdotal evidence: X has always outperformed Windows 2000 on the same hardware for me (easy to test since I dual-boot) - an entirely unfair comparison since I've always compiled it from source with lots of optimisations turned on.
The recent Slashdot story about kernel tweaking (kernel tweaking!) to make X more responsive underscores this perfectly. First you start tweaking the kernel... and then you realize that you have to move the graphics subsystem closer to ring 0 to make the thing work at sufficient speed. The very thing that Windows has been criticized for since NT 3.51 came out.
What's so surprising about kernel tweaking? Any large software layer that uses kernel functions is going to be helped by making those functions run faster. Linux treads a middle road by design here - it's impractical and stupid to move a graphics subsystem into the kernel - but graphics apps could use more speed so you use things like the DRI and kernel tweaks.
You DO NOT abstract the windowing system first and then tack stuff to it (say "OpenGL") - you put the graphics close to the metal and then abstract that instead. That's why DirectX is the darling of game developers.
Not quite sure what you mean here. X and GL are two different architectures with two vastly different requirements that have evolved independently and only fairly recently have worked nicely together. Not everyone who needs X needs 3d graphics - and the 2D accelerated functions of X are pretty close to the metal anyway. When the performance of GL became an issue that needed to be addressed, a solution was found (the DRI) that didn't need to move graphics into the kernel but still provided an acceptable enough solution for GL users. This is the real world: X is there, it works and it's not going away. GL is there and also immensely popular. Could both be better designed from the ground up to work better and work better together? Of course. But that's entirely impractical. And your comparison with DirectX conveniently forgets that DirectX was a crappy and unusable API for a long time - famously spurned by Carmack in his 1996.plan as being a "waste of time." It's only recently that it's evolved and improved to what it is now.
Phil Zimmermann has faced this issue for a lot longer than most of us. Read his thoughts here and the thoughts of some of the beneficiaries of PGP here. Restricting technology because it has the capacity to be used for evil is a slippery slope.
If his name doesn't ring a bell, just know that he designed pretty much all of episode 2 and 3 of the original doom, 20+ levels of Doom 2, and was responsible for the first use of gratitous crates in a FPS.
Don't be modest Matt:) Age of Empires' graphics engine was pretty damn impressive too. Oh and some of us are still looking at your ten-year old graphics library code so we can port it to the ARM...
Rest of the gaming industry? From my viewpoint it was Carmack alone.
He certainly started it but many agreed, and continue to agree with him.
OpenGL certainly wasnt (and still isnt in many cases) faster on consumer level cards.
Speed wasn't the primary concern to him, it was the design and functionality of the two APIs.
An excellent chronology of that period (Christmas 96 to around October 97) can be found here.
By and large 3D gaming was being written for glide, and developers absolutely loved an open api specifically targetted for game development.
At first. But when 3dfx kept pushing our their GL drivers - and actively targeting with lawsuits any developers who dared to write wrappers - the time was ripe for a change, and it came with the TNT.
In his excellent book Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer mentions the money and sponsorship that's gone into mountaineering in the region as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, Sherpas receiving carrying fees have managed to pay for first-class education for their children (for example) - not really possible otherwise. On the other, technology and money have undoubted downsides on so-called "simple" cultures.
Anyway, technology won't help. Sargamatha can kick anyone off at any time no matter what they've got...
I have to agree. I am not American and was many thousands of miles away from 9/11 when it happened which is why I have yet to feel the emotion that it caused the USA - more than a year later. Of course I felt shock and the horror and the sadness (and even the reluctant admiration for the success of the operation as a military exercise) but not really the emotion.
Until just now when I read this piece. Even the outstanding documentary 9/11 made by a pair of french brothers didn't make me feel it. Of course it was horrifying and very personal, but somehow the TV format gave it just enough distance. Not so with this column. Great stuff Dave - and yeah, you should do more serious stuff. Very moving.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention the possibility that IBM itself has officially purchased one or two copies of CalderaLinux and OpenLinux and is hence "held harmless."
I think maybe SCO are about to find out just how harmless IBM can really be...
To get to the point where IBM decides it'll be cheaper to buy SCO to stop the lawsuit than it would be to fight it.
It will most certainly not be cheaper to buy SCO. IBM have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Linux already. The last thing it wants to do is send a message to the world that says: "uh yeah, SCO has a claim here so we're going to buy them and make it go away." The damage to the Linux reputation would be incalculable - including considerable impact on IBM's bottom line.
No, they're going to smack them down in court and rightly so.
- 20 percent cowbell
/. polls all day long...
I first read this as 20 percent CowboyNeal. I think I need to get some real work done instead of reading
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.
C:\Documents and Settings\Dave>su
"I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
C:\Documents and Settings\Dave>
As someone who has tried his hand at a bit of charcoal , graphite , pencil, and the odd digital effort, allow me share the two top tutorials (IMHO) for learning to draw. The first one: buy Drawing on the Right Side of The Brain by Betty Edwards. It can take you from "can't draw to save your life" to "I can draw realistic portraits from life" in a couple of weeks. I'm serious. It's that good.
The second is here. It's Paul Wilkinson's tutorial on lifelike portraits - with an especially good section on proper shading and how to do it. I've been saying drawing is very like coding for years - it's nice to see someone else quantify that.
That's the thing, eventually the computer will be able to go through every combination, and be the best Go player in the world.
This is not true - Go has too much depth to be effectively searched beyond just a few moves. The first 14 moves of Go have more than 200^14 possibilities. Go games take many many more moves than that to complete.
The second problem is that an effective searching algorithm is only the first step. The really hard part is trying to come up with an analysis function based on pattern matching. There are no weights for different pieces, some more important than others. Each stone is worth the same. It's the arrangement of stones which counts - something really hard to describe as a heuristic.
Read the grandparent's linked article - it explains all this a lot better than I can...
Heh - those who use a Vegetable-oil powered vehicle which can run on sunflower oil do exactly that :)
There is nothing in Revelation that would not have been unfamiliar to early Jewish Christians, steeped as they were in the old Testament.
Triple negative idiocy. Of course what I mean is that there in nothing in Revelation that *would* have been unfamiliar to early Jewish Christians.
Much better "marks of the beast" would be finger prints, DNA typing, or plain automatic face recognition.
:)
Indeed. The main problem with the Mark of the Beast is that people want to yank it out of context into today's society; seeing 666s behind every bush, worrying about credit cards, tatoos and all kinds of nonsense. But the original recipients of the letter (the Christian Church scattered throughout the known world somewhere around 95 AD) would have known who 666 was. In those days, as in some societies today, it was popular to add the numbers formed from the letters in your name and make a total. So for instance, some Roman graffiti has been found which says "I love her whose name is 545." Hard for us to extrapolate but doubtless the young lady knew
Which brings us to 666. Apart from being a numerical pun (a man's name that represents a being impersonating deity but falling short), John's readers would have known that you get 666 when you add the letters together of "Nero Caesar." In Greek it adds up to 666, in Latin it comes to 616. 616 appears as a variant reading in plenty of the original manuscripts of Revelation which adds quite a lot of weight to this theory. Apocalyptical literature is hard for us to understand today but in those days it was an effective way of painting a picture using symbols and metaphors, all the while making its meaning known to those who were familiar with it. There is nothing in Revelation that would not have been unfamiliar to early Jewish Christians, steeped as they were in the old Testament. And the message they get from that passage is: "you're suffering terrible persecution from a man who thinks he's God. You all know who I mean. He is just a foreshadowing of all corrupt and evil leaders who will persecute the church throughout history. But ultimately you will overcome."
twitter is right - install WindowMaker and you can get really close...
Teacher: Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?
Simone: Um, he's sick. My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend knows this kid who wrote this script which plugs into this database that links to this client which says that Ferris passed out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious.
Teacher: Thank you Simone.
We don't have plans you insensitive clod!
It has one. From the site page (right hand column):
You can get it from the source where they also make the first four chapters available as a free download. My copy should be arriving any day now...
The man who did this -- Andrew Wiles -- spent about 30 years working on this, & succeeded only after a second try
I was about to correct this but a quick look through Fermat's Last Theorem proves you're absolutely right: he first heard of the problem aged 10 and finally solved it after turning 40 having spent much of his life studying everything about it.
That's a scary kind of dedication, especially for a problem which might not have been soluble.
is a Unix system! I know this!
X is the single biggest obstacle to Linux becoming a usable desktop OS. It's absolutely fantastic at doing what it was designed to do, but it has no place in a desktop environment.
:) Anecdotal evidence! The very thing that Linux users are always criticised for. What's your hardware? Video card? Kernel version? Distribution? Did you compile X for yourself? You mention "my Linux box" - so is it another box entirely? My anecdotal evidence: X has always outperformed Windows 2000 on the same hardware for me (easy to test since I dual-boot) - an entirely unfair comparison since I've always compiled it from source with lots of optimisations turned on.
.plan as being a "waste of time." It's only recently that it's evolved and improved to what it is now.
X does just fine in a desktop environment, despite being designed the way it is. It runs on a wide variety of hardware from Onyxs right down to my iPAQ, provides more than enough flexibility for window manager authors and works transparently over a network.
Heck, most of the time even Terminal Services on Windows 2000 (running over a 10mbit network) is more responsive than my Linux box.
Tsk Tsk
The recent Slashdot story about kernel tweaking (kernel tweaking!) to make X more responsive underscores this perfectly. First you start tweaking the kernel... and then you realize that you have to move the graphics subsystem closer to ring 0 to make the thing work at sufficient speed. The very thing that Windows has been criticized for since NT 3.51 came out.
What's so surprising about kernel tweaking? Any large software layer that uses kernel functions is going to be helped by making those functions run faster. Linux treads a middle road by design here - it's impractical and stupid to move a graphics subsystem into the kernel - but graphics apps could use more speed so you use things like the DRI and kernel tweaks.
You DO NOT abstract the windowing system first and then tack stuff to it (say "OpenGL") - you put the graphics close to the metal and then abstract that instead. That's why DirectX is the darling of game developers.
Not quite sure what you mean here. X and GL are two different architectures with two vastly different requirements that have evolved independently and only fairly recently have worked nicely together. Not everyone who needs X needs 3d graphics - and the 2D accelerated functions of X are pretty close to the metal anyway. When the performance of GL became an issue that needed to be addressed, a solution was found (the DRI) that didn't need to move graphics into the kernel but still provided an acceptable enough solution for GL users. This is the real world: X is there, it works and it's not going away. GL is there and also immensely popular. Could both be better designed from the ground up to work better and work better together? Of course. But that's entirely impractical. And your comparison with DirectX conveniently forgets that DirectX was a crappy and unusable API for a long time - famously spurned by Carmack in his 1996
only to have been BBC'd to my superiors
You mean like this ? Nope - my bad - that was to the Observer not the BBC...
Phil Zimmermann has faced this issue for a lot longer than most of us. Read his thoughts here and the thoughts of some of the beneficiaries of PGP here. Restricting technology because it has the capacity to be used for evil is a slippery slope.
If his name doesn't ring a bell, just know that he designed pretty much all of episode 2 and 3 of the original doom, 20+ levels of Doom 2, and was responsible for the first use of gratitous crates in a FPS.
:) Age of Empires' graphics engine was pretty damn impressive too. Oh and some of us are still looking at your ten-year old graphics library code so we can port it to the ARM...
Don't be modest Matt
Russia was the first country to take advantage of the program in January.
Actually, I thought it was a couple of years ago that Russia took advantage of the Windows source code offer.
Rest of the gaming industry? From my viewpoint it was Carmack alone.
He certainly started it but many agreed, and continue to agree with him.
OpenGL certainly wasnt (and still isnt in many cases) faster on consumer level cards.
Speed wasn't the primary concern to him, it was the design and functionality of the two APIs.
An excellent chronology of that period (Christmas 96 to around October 97) can be found here.
By and large 3D gaming was being written for glide, and developers absolutely loved an open api specifically targetted for game development.
At first. But when 3dfx kept pushing our their GL drivers - and actively targeting with lawsuits any developers who dared to write wrappers - the time was ripe for a change, and it came with the TNT.
In his excellent book Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer mentions the money and sponsorship that's gone into mountaineering in the region as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, Sherpas receiving carrying fees have managed to pay for first-class education for their children (for example) - not really possible otherwise. On the other, technology and money have undoubted downsides on so-called "simple" cultures.
Anyway, technology won't help. Sargamatha can kick anyone off at any time no matter what they've got...
Too bad it doesn't have a decent text editor.
:) Put this in your ~/.xemacs/init.el file (or ~/.emacs):
Sure it does
(setq viper-mode t)
(require 'viper)
I have to agree. I am not American and was many thousands of miles away from 9/11 when it happened which is why I have yet to feel the emotion that it caused the USA - more than a year later. Of course I felt shock and the horror and the sadness (and even the reluctant admiration for the success of the operation as a military exercise) but not really the emotion.
Until just now when I read this piece. Even the outstanding documentary 9/11 made by a pair of french brothers didn't make me feel it. Of course it was horrifying and very personal, but somehow the TV format gave it just enough distance. Not so with this column. Great stuff Dave - and yeah, you should do more serious stuff. Very moving.