This article was totally lacking in technical details, so there's no reason based on it to be worried. If Phoenix publishes the interface to whatever new services its BIOS provides, what's the problem?
Just about every PC hardware manufacturer is influenced by Microsoft, because their products better work with Windows. And a lot of them don't even publish their interfaces, let alone write Linux drivers themselves. Yet Linux hackers have reverse-engineered drivers even for complicated things like Winmodems. And we have no reason to believe we'll have to tackle that problem until we know if Phoenix will be hiding technical documentation on its new BIOS.
It makes me cringe to think about people dropping 450 #'s on this thing and then not opening it up for fear of it losing the precious MINT, NIB collector's status.
Thanks to people like that, some day I hope to be able to afford a MINT, NIB Commodore 64 so I can open it next to a Christmas tree and relive my fourth Christmas and the beginning of the rest of my life.
One computer manufacturer has already offered to provide a machine. But we could use more. One consequence you can expect if you donate machines is that GNU will run on them at an early date. The machine had better be able to operate in a residential area, and not require sophisticated cooling or power.
Can someone give examples of donated computers that couldn't run in a residential area in 1983? Is he talking like building-sized supercomputers? Something like the WOPR?
A computer cannot deal with recurring numbers, so must accept a limit, let's say 0.33333 for argument's sake. Multiply by 3, you get 0.99999 - never 1.00000, where has the "remainder" 0.00001 (One) gone? This is the limitation of computers, this is the mathematical imprecision inherent in programming...
For dividing 1 by 3 and then multiplying it by 3 again, you'd use fractions. For taking the square root of 2, your numerical representation can store that, so you can square it and come up with exactly 2. If you're doing calculations where this is important, this is what you need to do, but usually you don't need that precision.
I'm referring to their crappy chipsets, which made me chuck a motherboard+CPU to switch to Intel. Check out this FAQ that I basically know by heart, and even that monster list of bugs and incompatibilities couldn't save my machine from instability. I'm stuck on a P3 now because of the money I wasted on that thing.
I can't wait for Prescott because it'll push P4 prices down in to my range.
Congress controls over a trillion dollars every year. Money in our capitalist society definitely does influence what technologies are pursued. Drug companies pump out ever more exotic drugs every year instead of researching cures for the diseases they treat. I can't blame them.
Does it have a chance? Have any senators commented on it yet? At the bottom of the bill it lists $50 million for 2004 and $200 million for 2005. Are these on top of NASA's budget? If it is, with the deficit we're running now, this looks more like a political stunt. I hope it's not.
It might be really hard. Getting a PhD is really hard, starting a successful business is really hard, but people do those every day. Right now someone on a foriegn visa is impacting my ability to get a job, because while it is very hard, they are I dare say even more motivated than I am. They're fighting to live, I'm fighting for a middle class life instead of a lower class one.
Digging around under the hood is analagous to looking at the files the software installed, using something like CleanSweep to watch what the installer modifies on your system, and using tools to watch how the software works, e.g. watching its network traffic, CPU usage, etc. This is all perfectly legal.
Reverse engineering software in order to modify it or sell or give away an alternative is illegal. However, third parties do sell parts for cars, sometimes retrofitting fairly complicated systems like air conditioning or even an engine. Is the car-software analogy strong enough to immediately say that replacing parts of commercial software should be allowed? The other case, selling a near copy by standing on the backs of engineering paid for by the original company, should clearly not be allowed. A third case, reverse engineering to get around a limitation in the product, doesn't really apply to the car analogy.
About replacing parts in software: first, cars are much more componentized than most software. If cars were like software, if the AC died, the car would stall. But software is becoming more componentized, and if you choose a very well engineered piece of software, you could conceivably replace a COM/.NET/JavaBean/DLL with one of your own or from a third party and the software would still work. Maybe even better. Now, the original company can't be reponsible for your change. Also, if your replaced part is running in the same process space as the rest of the product, it can still affect it. Putting aside support for the moment, this could conceivably be legalized some day, decades from now, when the construction of software is as regular as automobile construction and no really new software architectures are being made. That would be a sad day, I think.
What the OP probably meant to say is that the "perfect" Windows.Forms implementation will need to reproduce all the bugs and quirks that the MS one has, and then fix them when MS does.
Re:Indie games? Like what?
on
Razor Blade Games?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
True, there are no indie console games. But it's also hard to rent VHS/DVD copies of indie movies. Those interested take the effort to make going out to independent movie houses a part of their life, and people who want indie games need to make PCs part of their lives. Some examples of indie PC games:
I see the game industry moving along much the same path as the movie industry did. Today, independent films are still made, movie enthusiasts support them, and they are a great way for individuals or small groups to get noticed and get on large projects that make real money.
I am hoping that moviegoers are getting saturated by the overly formulaic movies they're being given, and will shift the focus back to smaller budget films that are more original. But I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with the movie biz right now. For those that crave original, small-budget films, there's no shortage of them.
Laziness is widely recognized as a desirable trait in programmers. We want to get the most done in the least time. And I must've read a few hundred posts similar to the parent before I let that post go.
Do you know how old this argument is? How many thousands of times it's been posted on Slashdot?
If you don't realize how complicated software is compared to gasoline, how about letting the software industry decide how best to serve you, the user, who happens to dictate what we create?
We can produce more apps that do more things you want to do in less time for less money if you give us more hardware. That's because more hardware lets us use things like managed code, higher level languages, and more abstraction to get your product to you quicker and with fewer bugs. Call it bloat, but we know the people who buy software also buy the hardware to keep up, instead of spending their money on expensive overworked teams trying to create a 100 million LOC program with no OOP, no abstraction, and optimized code everywhere (which is less readable, harder to understand, and is harder to debug). We're glad you're happy with your PII, but we're not going to give up the freedom and flexibility today's hardware gives us.
Finding bacterial life on Mars doesn't allow us to do anything new. It will likely be very boring bacteria. Moving our species on to other planets and making contact with intelligent civilizations will bring us a huge step closer to populating the galaxy/universe and possibly allow us to skip centuries or eons of technological progress (and maybe wars, plagues, etc) if we can borrow from other peoples.
That, and visiting other galaxies and dimensions is clearly out of our means for the time being while colonizing Mars or visiting nearby stars isn't.
Finding Martians is one thing, but why are people so excited about finding some bacteria living underground on Mars? What would that mean? That life doesn't require Earth? I guess that's interesting in the same way that Newton's Principia proved a lot of things people knew and used practically already.
I'm far more interested in either colonizing Mars or visiting nearby stars after we make contact with them. Yes, they're harder, but they would capture the public's attention and are achievable if the public is behind it.
The last games to be conquered by machines will be physical like soccer, or involve recognition of speech or visual information. Humans use their brains to their fullest in those activities; it's what they're best at compared to machines. When AI gets that far, if you believe in the Singularity, we'll be at it.
Bah you actually believe in girls? We all think we've seen them, walking around among us, even seemingly interacting with us to give us our change or look at us only to roll their eyes. But we see a lot of things that don't really exist. Examples include searchlights zooming across the sky when there really is nothing moving that fast, and faked images we see all the time on TV and in magazines.
I ask you this - have you ever touched a girl? I haven't, and none of the guys (a redundant term, since all people are guys) I know have either. What would happen if you tried? I hypothesize that those who do are deleted from existence, possibly from a Matrix that we all live in. Why this is I'm not sure, but it fits the reality that no one has ever touched a girl and lived to tell about it. We seem to have evolved not to be able to, instead spending our time stroking our keyboards and mice with love and affection.
I remember the days when I thought I'd just wait for Enlightenment v1.0. Years later, Enlightenment followers tell me, 0.16 isn't an alpha version or even a beta, it's VERSION SIXTEEN, man.
I've seen how big and heavy the UPS bricks are to keep a 500W computer running for 10-30 minutes, and those cost around $100. CNN says some areas could be out for days to over a week. What does it take to power a tank for that long?
Slashdot Mirror
This article was totally lacking in technical details, so there's no reason based on it to be worried. If Phoenix publishes the interface to whatever new services its BIOS provides, what's the problem?
Just about every PC hardware manufacturer is influenced by Microsoft, because their products better work with Windows. And a lot of them don't even publish their interfaces, let alone write Linux drivers themselves. Yet Linux hackers have reverse-engineered drivers even for complicated things like Winmodems. And we have no reason to believe we'll have to tackle that problem until we know if Phoenix will be hiding technical documentation on its new BIOS.
It makes me cringe to think about people dropping 450 #'s on this thing and then not opening it up for fear of it losing the precious MINT, NIB collector's status.
Thanks to people like that, some day I hope to be able to afford a MINT, NIB Commodore 64 so I can open it next to a Christmas tree and relive my fourth Christmas and the beginning of the rest of my life.
One computer manufacturer has already offered to provide a machine. But we could use more. One consequence you can expect if you donate machines is that GNU will run on them at an early date. The machine had better be able to operate in a residential area, and not require sophisticated cooling or power.
Can someone give examples of donated computers that couldn't run in a residential area in 1983? Is he talking like building-sized supercomputers? Something like the WOPR?
A computer cannot deal with recurring numbers, so
must accept a limit, let's say 0.33333 for argument's sake. Multiply by 3,
you get 0.99999 - never 1.00000, where has the "remainder" 0.00001 (One)
gone? This is the limitation of computers, this is the mathematical
imprecision inherent in programming...
For dividing 1 by 3 and then multiplying it by 3 again, you'd use fractions. For taking the square root of 2, your numerical representation can store that, so you can square it and come up with exactly 2. If you're doing calculations where this is important, this is what you need to do, but usually you don't need that precision.
I'm referring to their crappy chipsets, which made me chuck a motherboard+CPU to switch to Intel. Check out this FAQ that I basically know by heart, and even that monster list of bugs and incompatibilities couldn't save my machine from instability. I'm stuck on a P3 now because of the money I wasted on that thing.
I can't wait for Prescott because it'll push P4 prices down in to my range.
Too bad this wasn't done by a manufacturer that makes quality products, or this might actually be useful.
Congress controls over a trillion dollars every year. Money in our capitalist society definitely does influence what technologies are pursued. Drug companies pump out ever more exotic drugs every year instead of researching cures for the diseases they treat. I can't blame them.
Does it have a chance? Have any senators commented on it yet? At the bottom of the bill it lists $50 million for 2004 and $200 million for 2005. Are these on top of NASA's budget? If it is, with the deficit we're running now, this looks more like a political stunt. I hope it's not.
It might be really hard. Getting a PhD is really hard, starting a successful business is really hard, but people do those every day. Right now someone on a foriegn visa is impacting my ability to get a job, because while it is very hard, they are I dare say even more motivated than I am. They're fighting to live, I'm fighting for a middle class life instead of a lower class one.
Yeah but it would be a really cool toilet seat.
Digging around under the hood is analagous to looking at the files the software installed, using something like CleanSweep to watch what the installer modifies on your system, and using tools to watch how the software works, e.g. watching its network traffic, CPU usage, etc. This is all perfectly legal.
Reverse engineering software in order to modify it or sell or give away an alternative is illegal. However, third parties do sell parts for cars, sometimes retrofitting fairly complicated systems like air conditioning or even an engine. Is the car-software analogy strong enough to immediately say that replacing parts of commercial software should be allowed? The other case, selling a near copy by standing on the backs of engineering paid for by the original company, should clearly not be allowed. A third case, reverse engineering to get around a limitation in the product, doesn't really apply to the car analogy.
About replacing parts in software: first, cars are much more componentized than most software. If cars were like software, if the AC died, the car would stall. But software is becoming more componentized, and if you choose a very well engineered piece of software, you could conceivably replace a COM/.NET/JavaBean/DLL with one of your own or from a third party and the software would still work. Maybe even better. Now, the original company can't be reponsible for your change. Also, if your replaced part is running in the same process space as the rest of the product, it can still affect it. Putting aside support for the moment, this could conceivably be legalized some day, decades from now, when the construction of software is as regular as automobile construction and no really new software architectures are being made. That would be a sad day, I think.
How about Ender's Game, written in 1991? That's the most action-packed book I've ever read.
What the OP probably meant to say is that the "perfect" Windows.Forms implementation will need to reproduce all the bugs and quirks that the MS one has, and then fix them when MS does.
I see the game industry moving along much the same path as the movie industry did. Today, independent films are still made, movie enthusiasts support them, and they are a great way for individuals or small groups to get noticed and get on large projects that make real money.
I am hoping that moviegoers are getting saturated by the overly formulaic movies they're being given, and will shift the focus back to smaller budget films that are more original. But I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with the movie biz right now. For those that crave original, small-budget films, there's no shortage of them.
Laziness is widely recognized as a desirable trait in programmers. We want to get the most done in the least time. And I must've read a few hundred posts similar to the parent before I let that post go.
Do you know how old this argument is? How many thousands of times it's been posted on Slashdot?
If you don't realize how complicated software is compared to gasoline, how about letting the software industry decide how best to serve you, the user, who happens to dictate what we create?
We can produce more apps that do more things you want to do in less time for less money if you give us more hardware. That's because more hardware lets us use things like managed code, higher level languages, and more abstraction to get your product to you quicker and with fewer bugs. Call it bloat, but we know the people who buy software also buy the hardware to keep up, instead of spending their money on expensive overworked teams trying to create a 100 million LOC program with no OOP, no abstraction, and optimized code everywhere (which is less readable, harder to understand, and is harder to debug). We're glad you're happy with your PII, but we're not going to give up the freedom and flexibility today's hardware gives us.
Finding bacterial life on Mars doesn't allow us to do anything new. It will likely be very boring bacteria. Moving our species on to other planets and making contact with intelligent civilizations will bring us a huge step closer to populating the galaxy/universe and possibly allow us to skip centuries or eons of technological progress (and maybe wars, plagues, etc) if we can borrow from other peoples.
That, and visiting other galaxies and dimensions is clearly out of our means for the time being while colonizing Mars or visiting nearby stars isn't.
Finding Martians is one thing, but why are people so excited about finding some bacteria living underground on Mars? What would that mean? That life doesn't require Earth? I guess that's interesting in the same way that Newton's Principia proved a lot of things people knew and used practically already.
I'm far more interested in either colonizing Mars or visiting nearby stars after we make contact with them. Yes, they're harder, but they would capture the public's attention and are achievable if the public is behind it.
The last games to be conquered by machines will be physical like soccer, or involve recognition of speech or visual information. Humans use their brains to their fullest in those activities; it's what they're best at compared to machines. When AI gets that far, if you believe in the Singularity, we'll be at it.
Bah you actually believe in girls? We all think we've seen them, walking around among us, even seemingly interacting with us to give us our change or look at us only to roll their eyes. But we see a lot of things that don't really exist. Examples include searchlights zooming across the sky when there really is nothing moving that fast, and faked images we see all the time on TV and in magazines.
I ask you this - have you ever touched a girl? I haven't, and none of the guys (a redundant term, since all people are guys) I know have either. What would happen if you tried? I hypothesize that those who do are deleted from existence, possibly from a Matrix that we all live in. Why this is I'm not sure, but it fits the reality that no one has ever touched a girl and lived to tell about it. We seem to have evolved not to be able to, instead spending our time stroking our keyboards and mice with love and affection.
I remember the days when I thought I'd just wait for Enlightenment v1.0. Years later, Enlightenment followers tell me, 0.16 isn't an alpha version or even a beta, it's VERSION SIXTEEN, man.
I've seen how big and heavy the UPS bricks are to keep a 500W computer running for 10-30 minutes, and those cost around $100. CNN says some areas could be out for days to over a week. What does it take to power a tank for that long?