Samarai Champloo is pretty new I think. Eva is a *full* decade old. The original gundam is freaking ancient, but I guess they aren't showing that.
For the record, EVA *has* aired on cartoon network before. It aired the first episode dubbed as part of some Giant Fighting Robot theme day on toonami. It also aired the whole series in australia.
I see three major problems with airing this show.
1. The dub is atrocious. For those who have watched cartoon network before, you know that they refuse to air anything in subtitles, even after midnight. Although, now that I think about it, everything on adult swim currently has a pretty good dub. The cowboy bebop dub is actually better than the original japanese. Maybe they will make this one exception, or redub the show, but I doubt it.
2. There is a lot of sexual innuendo, sex, and gay sex in eva. I don't know how they are handling such things now, but in the old days, they would edit *everything out* even if deleting the relevant scenes made the show make no sense. Somebody who is willing to stay up late and watch adult swim should tell us what they have done recently with the homosexual characters in samarai champloo. Particularly, the guy from holland in episode 6.
3. The ending sucks. Here, let me spoil it for everyone. Gainax runs out of money. Seriously. They start out by finding clever excuses to hold the same frame for a long time, but by the last two episodes, they have given up and they are just animating some rough sketches, not even bothering to color things in. They try to convince you that they are just being artistic and deep with their sketches, but... no. They are just broke.
They do pull together enough money to do a couple of cool, fully animated scenes. I particularly liked the the alternative world bit, where everyone is happy and healthy.
4. There is an alternative ending with extremely high production values that they should show instead. A movie, called End of Evangelion replaces the last two or three episodes. It features some really bad ass fight scenes and is overall, a pretty good ending to eva. Unfortunately, it also has some really disgusting stuff in it. Frankly, I hope cartoon network airs this, and I also hope they censor the hell out of it. It would be nice if they kept the most obvious bit of nudity. The *big* nudity issue (can anyone crack my code? I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't seen it). There are some things, like the disgusting scene between shinji and asuka that starts out the movie that should be removed. Removing that would not be censorship, it would be good editing. No one I know liked that scene or felt that it added anything to the movie.
A number of people in separate threads have made the point that, due to apple's statements that osxi will only run on apple's machines (without some hacking...) apple's x86 switch will mean little outside of apple.
Let me ask you this. What reason do you have to believe apple? Let me remind you, that not very long ago Jobs went on record saying that he had no plans to switch to x86. It is now obvious that this plan has been in the works for a long time, and jobs has only been waiting for the right time. At the time he made those statements because he knew that if the switch happened, it would be a long way off and he didn't want customers to hold off on buying hardware during that time.
In this industry it is sometimes very important to not show your hand too early. Why would jobs be bluffing about not allowing machines on generic hardware? The obvious answer is because such a switch would not happen immediately. It would be a huge transition for apple to suddenly switch to a hardware vendor with enormous revenue, to a software vendor with a much smaller revenue stream, but probably much higher profits. This switch would probably scare the hell out of apple's investors, and it would not be a good idea to do while everybody is still worried about the x86 transition.
There is another reason why apple would not show their hand at this point. Microsoft went on stage at the WWDC, and they commited to porting office to x86 osx. Would they have done this if apple was making moves to put itself into more direct competition with microsoft? I think they would be foolish to. Even if they felt compelled to do so for fear of more anti-trust aligations, microsoft could certainly take all the good developers off the office mac team, resulting in a late and buggy versions of office for mac.
Anyway, I'm not saying there is a good reason to believe that apple will make osx avaiable for generic x86. I'm just saying that if they *were* going to do such a thing, they certainly wouldn't tell *you* about it. So apple's statements about lack of support for generic x86 should be taken with a grain of salt.
how did that get +4 insightful? yeah, microsoft is going to rip off bash... to make a shell that (from what another poster wrote) primarily does reflection on.NET objects. really fucking helpful.
Anyway, the basic stuff that unix shells do (pipes, redirection, conditional and looping statements, job control, environment variable handling, sub shells) are just not that big of a deal. I wrote a shell that did all of those things (except job control) by myself, and it only came out to about 3700 lines of c code.
Furthermore it certainly did not take 20 years to develop the shell. The original sh was probably thrown together pretty quickly (it doesn't have many more features than the shell I wrote). Shells like csh and bash that do job control are a bit more sophisticated, but you're still talking about thousands of lines of code, not millions. (a quick wc of bash gives 55468 lines of code).
The monad shell sounds like a much larger endeavor. I'm still in the dark about a lot of the features it has, but I'm thinking it would be interesting to develop something equivalent for unix that works with mono. If someone would be particularly interested in helping on such a project, my email is catphive AT gmail DOT com.
Anyway, slashdot. Please stop rating 2 line microsoft bashing comments as +4 insightful.
the only people the article identified as behind these complaints is the FSF.
Christ.
The FSF produces some great software, but why do they have to be such whiny bitches all the time? Seriously, they act like they own open source, and throw a tantrum anytime somebody else touches it. All I ever hear from them is how they are pissed off that people call it Linux and not GNU Linux, about how they are pissed off that people are using the word "open source" when they should say "free software". About how think that software has some kind of *moral obligation* to be free.
They also have the most anal retentive development policies I've ever heard of for an open source group. People had to fork emacs into xemacs because the FSF wouldn't accept code unless the developers gave them the copyright to it, in writing.
It just seems like I can't go a week without hearing about RMS doing something prickish. I say we draft an open letter to RMS, the contents of which would be something like this:
Dear Richard Stallman, Thank you for GCC and emacs, they are awesome. Incidentally, would you please, if it is not too much of a bother, go fuck yourself? Sincerely, EVERYONE
In A.D. 2004 Election was beginning. Kerry: What happen ? Edwards: Somebody set up us the bomb. Operator: We get signal. Kerry: What ! Operator: Main screen turn on. Kerry: It's You !! Bush: How are you gentlemen !! Bush: All your electoral votes are belong to us. Bush: You are on the way to destruction. Kerry: What you say !! Bush: You have no chance to survive make your time. Bush: HA HA HA HA.... Kerry: Take off every 'zig' !! Kerry: You know what you doing. Kerry: Move 'zig'. Kerry: For great justice.
Both Connolly and the developer should have had a contract in place for who owned the resulting (if any) IP. However, since Connolly *paid* for that code, I assume that give him the IP anyway.
The developer and Mambo's posts (as well as the posts of many slashdotters) have shown that they are wholly ignorant of the terms of the GPL. As soon as they found out that someone had put proprietary code (whether it had been derived from GPL is irrelevant in this context RTFL) in their code base they should have removed it.
In this case it is a little bit iffy whether the code is owned by Connolly, because it is not the exact same code (not copy pasted) written into his in house version of mambo. This is really the sort of question the Mambo folks should be asking an IP lawyer. Instead, they seem rather eager to get involved in a little crusade for open source against big evil Connolly.
Anyway, I think that this entire incident highlights how little most people know about the GPL. Most people seem to assume that it is whatever they want it to be. Check it out at "http://www.opensource.org/licenses/". Personally, I have always preferred the MIT, or BSD licenses due to how small and clear they are. The GPL, on the other hand, is about the size of most EULAs.
This is really your fault. Yes, you. All you fuckers that pirate software and then turn around and then turn around and give the company you pirated from shit can go to hell.
Microsoft may be a big evil company (obviously evil, because they have lots of money), but *you* are the one who is the criminal.
This is not to say that I haven't pirated software in the past and will never again in the future. I'm just saying that when committing a crime it is best *not* to be prick about it.
P.S. The poster I am responding to, may or may not have pirated software. My impression is that a significant number of the humans that read slashdot are vile pirates. You may consider this message for them.
Personally, I don't see Stallman getting more attention than he already has as a good thing. As much as I like open source stuff, I don't particularly like his take on it. He acts like OSS is the one true faith and we have some moral imperative to live up to its strictures. That is just as stupid as people arguing that open source is harming business or is some form of communism. Really, self righteous assholes have little to contribute to any discussion.
The take home points are: 1. If someone tries to give you shit about buying/selling software, fuck them. 2. If someone tries to give you shit about writing/using OSS, fuck them. 3. It is *software*. This is not a morality issue in any way, shape, or form.
Others have pointed out that the POWER architecture is very similar to the powerpc architecture in terms of instructions sets. Be that as it may, I doubt that an operating system designed for POWER systems will actually run on apple's hardware any more than osx will run on an IBM POWER system which, to be clear, is to say that is will *not* run. The processor after all, is not the only thing that differentiates different platforms.
That said, maybe some open source group will write some kind of workaround similar to maconlinux.
Also, POWER (at least in the sense that the article uses it) does *not* mean G5. The G5 is not just a POWER4 popped out of an IBM workstation and popped in an apple tower.
I (story submitter) would be interested, of course. I have been thinking of starting my own club for a while.
A usenet group is an interesting idea, but might be a bit unwieldy for a local group. Maybe a website + forums would be best?
Anyway, if you are still interested in such a thing, you can get ahold of me at sentientbrendan@yahoo.com, which I check at least once a week.
P.S. What do you think of the name Empirical Society?
The *first* post I see is some bullshit lauding the superiority of the opensource development process with this as an example. RTFA. Here is some sensible info and advice.
1. There *was no patch*. Some systems were immune, but that was completely by chance. 2. There is a patch *now*, but the article also says people are already using the thing to crash free shell providers on day 0. 3. The patch, at this point, requires a kernel recompile. Not everyone running linux knows how to do that. Many who do are too lazy. Don't give me some shit about how everyone running linux is so 1337 that they will be sure the have already patched their system. I know you. You aren't that 1337. 4. Yes, this *is* a big deal. We were caught with our pants down, plain and simple. This *is* worse than any windows security issue that has come up in a long time. 5. Please *do* compile the demo code against your system and test it. If your system crashes, please patch. Don't act like many and just ignore this, especially if you are running a server or anything that stays connected for any amount of time. It also might be a good idea to turn off your telnet and ssh daemon (yes, even ssh) until you patch. 6. If you are *not* running linux or not running on x86, it might also be a good idea to test the demo code against your system. If you are running windows, some versions of windows *do* support possix to a limited degree. The code *might* compile. Then there is also, cygwin. This is probably a bug specific to linux x86, but it won't hurt to check.
I've seen a lot of people complaining about the video cards in the machines not being top of the line. So? These aren't gaming machines. You don't *need* a 2.5 ghz dulie to play video games. Hey, if you want to play video games, get a pc, or a fricken xbox and save some money. These are machines for professionals. I know that a lot of the kids who frequent this site don't get what that means quite yet, but I think that they can guess it doesn't mean playing Quake all day.
Things that these machines *are* used for include:
2D graphics work: does *not* benefit from a fast video card
video editing: nope
3D graphics modeling and rendering: Not nearly as much as your would think. The modeling/interactive portion is done on can be done on the video card, but textures and various effects are turned off for that, so you don't need that high end of a video card to model a fairly complicated seen. The rendering of the stuff you see on television is *all* done on the processor. This is why the G5 is *all about* the processor.
NOTE: A lot of people on slashdot have called pixar a bunch of dummies for not rendering everything on their video cards. Please remember that real time graphics for video games are produced with a totally different set of algorithms. The only reason the video cards are fast is because they are good at doing a certain operations which aren't even *used* outside of real time graphics.
coding: uhm, no. GCC and xcode will not run on your video card. quartz Extreme!: doesn't need or benefit from extremely fast video cards. Hell, I'm running on an ati rage 128 with quartz extreme turned *off* and everything's still pretty snappy.
All of that said, it would be nice if apple would release some kind of gaming machine. Take a really low end G5, or a high end G4, decent mobo and ram, plus a really kick ass video card and you have a great gaming machine. Too bad it doens't run windows. Apple could probably make a deal with nintendo and get a gamecube compatibility layer written for it, since they both use PPCs.
Why do they have to tie every freaking thing into the RIAA and SCO? It would be nice if this news for nerds site provided some more technical news and less social news. Really, as a nerd I just don't care that much about the RIAA. I'm sick of hearing about them. Their existence has little effect on me and my nerdness.
For that matter, I don't care to hear about every nut who thinks that Sun should opensource java, or Y should opensource x. Discussion of the ethics of software development is beyond boring to most people who actually develop software.
So, to some things up. Slashdot, I like you, but please stop being such a fanboy script kiddie website. Please call me again when you are mature enough to post more technical articles, less trash, and are ready to discuss long term commitment.
Okay, I get that there is a certain slashdot kneejerk "patents/copyright bad, genetics should all be open source" attitude, but am I missing something? Normally there is at least some rational posts. I'll admit I haven't followed the Monsanto case very closely, but here is my take on the issue:
Monsanto researched and developed many techniques and products related to genetic engineering and then applied for patents and copyright on them respectively. So what? They were the ones who did the hard work and it is now their IP. Noone has any ethical, legal, or otherwise obligation to give away the products of their work for free. It would be cool if they did that, but we don't have the right to dictate their business strategy. Besides, it not like the patents won't run out (although copyrights will probably last forever).
Yeah, I do get that their work is highly derivative. So what? They used a lot of what I would assume is public domain information in their product. Obviously no one is paying them the big bucks for some bushels of corn seed though, they are paying to use the modifications to said corn. No one is stopping them from buying normal seed.
That said, I would be worried if they did something to stop other people from competing in the same field. I am not referring to restrictive patents here, as patents run out relatively quickly. I would be a little worried if they found some way to copyright the *orginal* genetic code in various organisms. If they did that, it would effectively end competitive development forever. That said, I haven't heard that brought up, just a lot of whining about patents and franken-food.
I know we are supposed to respect everyone's beliefs, but in this case I have to ask, why. These people are traveling to the other side of the planet and hiking up a mountain. At the summit of this mountain they expect to find what? A boat which once housed two members of every single species in the world. Each of these two animals is supposed to have spawned an entire species.
If a group of people firmly believe in something so utterly stupid (replace with "very implausible" if you like) as this, am I not justified in ridiculing them? Is it at least PC to kindly notify them that *some* of their beliefs are logically unsound, contrary to most evidence, and thoroughly un-fucking-possible? Is it kosher to suggest that someone who professes to believe such things either has not closely examined their beliefs, is lying, has a totally arbitrary system for choosing what he/she believes, or is mentally unsound?
If it *is* acceptable to believe things like this and doing so, to be *beyond criticism*, I would like to let you all know something. I believe in Megaman. No, really. I talk to him all the time. He exists. You want me to send you some photographs? Okay, but my digital camera is pretty cheap, so they might seem a little pixelated...
Many posts here have made the following points that I will respond to collectively:
Points made by others:
1. Calculators have caused many people to have bad arithmetical skills. 2. I like Vedic math. Here are some linkies. 3. Math focusses on problems that most people don't need to solve. Trigonometry and calculus are mostly only useful to people going into the sciences.
Counterpoints: 1.
Yes, and this is not a problem. Many people seem to be under the false impression that mathematics is about arithmetic and numbers. No, it is not. There are certain branches of mathematics which studies numbers, but these generally do so from a high level perspective. You might be surprised to know that there are many Phds who will occasional screw up their arithmetic. It's just not that big of a deal now that calculators are available to check work.
That said, it is convenient to not have to reach for your calculator every other moment. It is also true that at some point children are asked to memorize their times tables and various arithmetical algorithms. It is nice to see that they were paying attention. It is *nicer* to see them doing well in calculus or linear algebra. To a certain extent higher level math classes depend on lower level math classes, and to a certain extent they don't. Oh well.
I should point out that calculators are great for any sort of graphing, and that there is no reason to force a human to plot out a graph from a function, especially if that function has more than one independent variable. (being able to sketch such things is still valuable) Furthermore, in college level mathematics there are many problems which a calculator or computer can solve, but that a human simply cannot within a reasonable amount of time. Differential equations pops to mind. Remember, most of the problems you have ever solved by hand have only been toy problems. Real world problems require computers more often than not. 2.
I'll be the first to admit I know very little about vedic math. My impression from many people on slashdot, is that it is a bunch of algorithms for doing arithmetic. Again, I don't see that as especially relevant to mathematics. 3.
Math focusses on mathematics or it should. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who would like to use math classes to teach "practical mathematics." By this, they do not mean the mathematics you need to do physics, computer science, or any other endeavor in which someone will pay you a wad of cash to take part. They mean they want to teach people how to do their taxes, or do one the the billion other mundane administrative tasks that humans need to do throughout that lives in which they are required to apply to basic formula to a problem.
WARNING: after reviewing this post I have determined that the remainder of what I have written here is a rant. If I had to pick a title for this rant, it would be People: the Suckening. Anyway, Although I'm being a little bit brutal here, I don't feel that what I'm about to write is untrue.
Fine, teach all of the people who can't figure basic shit out for themselves. Spend millions of tax payer dollars educating a generation of McDonald's employees. There were plenty of people at the highschool I went to who apparently went for that idea. Every year, I had at least one vaguely disguised health class. Two of them were actually called health I and II. Others had more creative names. Basically they reiterated the finer points of how to put a condom on, how to sign a check, how to fill out your 1040ez tax form (but teacher! what if I'm making more money than the 1040ez is for? (sic) Oh, I don't think that's going to be a problem for anyone coming out of this school!). I think they showed us how to perform CPR at least twice, 'cause some people are so dumb they will forget how to *breath*.
I am going to suggest something that may be a little unpopular with the dumbasses present. People who don't need science and math education, don't need educa
I've heard a lot of people say something like, "It's their own fault for not installing the latest patches." Doesn't that suck anyway though? It's a major pain to need to keep a human around to twiddle some bits periodically.
I'm not sure it really has to be this way. It seems to me, that it is a major design flaw that if there is a small error in one of the *many* programs from *many* different parties being run as root, that it can be exploited so that an arbitrary attacker can end up getting root access or executing arbitrary code or whatever. For that matter, it seems silly that (for desktop systems) disastrous effects can come from code run by Joe user. After all, desktop users store all their important files in some place they *don't* have to authenticate as root to get to.
Rather than just assuming that the ever watchful eyes of open source uber hackers are the only remedy for this as well as all of life's problems, maybe it is possible to come up with some easy solutions, or at least partial solutions, to this problem?
1. Use software that watches the beginning and end of every stack frame for an overflow. If an app overflows *kill it dead*. Similarly, the beginning and end of every block allocated on the heap can be watched. Software like this exists, and it is about time it is built directly into the standard distributions and *turned on by default*.
2. Develop a new security model. The current system sucks out loud. Really, access lists (a la microsoft) are a step in the right direction. Finer grained and more flexible controls are good, but a totally new security model would be better. I've seen some things like this developed as academic projects, but it would be nice to see a patch available for a main stream OS like linux.
3. It might also be useful to have virtualization (think VMWare) built into standard distros and used by default for services like apache that need to run some stuff as root. My understanding is that you can do something like this with chroot currently, but that it is a clumsy and dangerous tool.
I'm not a big security buff, but even I can see that there are some things we can actually *do* about this problem.
Now I have to start watching TV again. My GPA has risen significantly since the networks started canceling all worthwhile programming and replacing it with repetitive crap and TV movies. What are they going to do next? Start airing subtitled anime? Evangelion? Music videos on MTV? I might as well drop out *now* if that's going to happen.
This document is written in an older form of english. Chaucer's spelling and grammar are no worse than Shakespeare's, although Chaucer's version of English is much older than Shakespear's. Just FYI Chaucer was one of the first authors to write in English, and did so at a time when most educated people in England spoke French or Latin. That said, I doubt very much this is the first technical manual. More likely, it is the first technical manual written in English. I'm sure the chinese, greeks, romans, french, etc all had similar documents long ago.
Slashdot Mirror
"Source Codes"
Samarai Champloo is pretty new I think. Eva is a *full* decade old. The original gundam is freaking ancient, but I guess they aren't showing that.
For the record, EVA *has* aired on cartoon network before. It aired the first episode dubbed as part of some Giant Fighting Robot theme day on toonami. It also aired the whole series in australia.
I see three major problems with airing this show.
1. The dub is atrocious. For those who have watched cartoon network before, you know that they refuse to air anything in subtitles, even after midnight. Although, now that I think about it, everything on adult swim currently has a pretty good dub. The cowboy bebop dub is actually better than the original japanese. Maybe they will make this one exception, or redub the show, but I doubt it.
2. There is a lot of sexual innuendo, sex, and gay sex in eva. I don't know how they are handling such things now, but in the old days, they would edit *everything out* even if deleting the relevant scenes made the show make no sense. Somebody who is willing to stay up late and watch adult swim should tell us what they have done recently with the homosexual characters in samarai champloo. Particularly, the guy from holland in episode 6.
3. The ending sucks. Here, let me spoil it for everyone. Gainax runs out of money. Seriously. They start out by finding clever excuses to hold the same frame for a long time, but by the last two episodes, they have given up and they are just animating some rough sketches, not even bothering to color things in. They try to convince you that they are just being artistic and deep with their sketches, but... no. They are just broke.
They do pull together enough money to do a couple of cool, fully animated scenes. I particularly liked the the alternative world bit, where everyone is happy and healthy.
4. There is an alternative ending with extremely high production values that they should show instead. A movie, called End of Evangelion replaces the last two or three episodes. It features some really bad ass fight scenes and is overall, a pretty good ending to eva. Unfortunately, it also has some really disgusting stuff in it. Frankly, I hope cartoon network airs this, and I also hope they censor the hell out of it. It would be nice if they kept the most obvious bit of nudity. The *big* nudity issue (can anyone crack my code? I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't seen it). There are some things, like the disgusting scene between shinji and asuka that starts out the movie that should be removed. Removing that would not be censorship, it would be good editing. No one I know liked that scene or felt that it added anything to the movie.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/ 21/1818241&from=rss
is the original post
A number of people in separate threads have made the point that, due to apple's statements that osxi will only run on apple's machines (without some hacking...) apple's x86 switch will mean little outside of apple.
Let me ask you this. What reason do you have to believe apple? Let me remind you, that not very long ago Jobs went on record saying that he had no plans to switch to x86. It is now obvious that this plan has been in the works for a long time, and jobs has only been waiting for the right time. At the time he made those statements because he knew that if the switch happened, it would be a long way off and he didn't want customers to hold off on buying hardware during that time.
In this industry it is sometimes very important to not show your hand too early. Why would jobs be bluffing about not allowing machines on generic hardware? The obvious answer is because such a switch would not happen immediately. It would be a huge transition for apple to suddenly switch to a hardware vendor with enormous revenue, to a software vendor with a much smaller revenue stream, but probably much higher profits. This switch would probably scare the hell out of apple's investors, and it would not be a good idea to do while everybody is still worried about the x86 transition.
There is another reason why apple would not show their hand at this point. Microsoft went on stage at the WWDC, and they commited to porting office to x86 osx. Would they have done this if apple was making moves to put itself into more direct competition with microsoft? I think they would be foolish to. Even if they felt compelled to do so for fear of more anti-trust aligations, microsoft could certainly take all the good developers off the office mac team, resulting in a late and buggy versions of office for mac.
Anyway, I'm not saying there is a good reason to believe that apple will make osx avaiable for generic x86. I'm just saying that if they *were* going to do such a thing, they certainly wouldn't tell *you* about it. So apple's statements about lack of support for generic x86 should be taken with a grain of salt.
how did that get +4 insightful? yeah, microsoft is going to rip off bash... to make a shell that (from what another poster wrote) primarily does reflection on .NET objects. really fucking helpful.
Anyway, the basic stuff that unix shells do (pipes, redirection, conditional and looping statements, job control, environment variable handling, sub shells) are just not that big of a deal. I wrote a shell that did all of those things (except job control) by myself, and it only came out to about 3700 lines of c code.
Furthermore it certainly did not take 20 years to develop the shell. The original sh was probably thrown together pretty quickly (it doesn't have many more features than the shell I wrote). Shells like csh and bash that do job control are a bit more sophisticated, but you're still talking about thousands of lines of code, not millions. (a quick wc of bash gives 55468 lines of code).
The monad shell sounds like a much larger endeavor. I'm still in the dark about a lot of the features it has, but I'm thinking it would be interesting to develop something equivalent for unix that works with mono. If someone would be particularly interested in helping on such a project, my email is catphive AT gmail DOT com.
Anyway, slashdot. Please stop rating 2 line microsoft bashing comments as +4 insightful.
Is obvious bullshit.
It would be nice to see some editorial control on slashdot.
the only people the article identified as behind these complaints is the FSF.
Christ.
The FSF produces some great software, but why do they have to be such whiny bitches all the time? Seriously, they act like they own open source, and throw a tantrum anytime somebody else touches it. All I ever hear from them is how they are pissed off that people call it Linux and not GNU Linux, about how they are pissed off that people are using the word "open source" when they should say "free software". About how think that software has some kind of *moral obligation* to be free.
They also have the most anal retentive development policies I've ever heard of for an open source group. People had to fork emacs into xemacs because the FSF wouldn't accept code unless the developers gave them the copyright to it, in writing.
It just seems like I can't go a week without hearing about RMS doing something prickish. I say we draft an open letter to RMS, the contents of which would be something like this:
Dear Richard Stallman,
Thank you for GCC and emacs, they are awesome.
Incidentally, would you please, if it is not too much of a bother, go fuck yourself?
Sincerely, EVERYONE
In A.D. 2004 ....
Election was beginning.
Kerry: What happen ?
Edwards: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Kerry: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Kerry: It's You !!
Bush: How are you gentlemen !!
Bush: All your electoral votes are belong to us.
Bush: You are on the way to destruction.
Kerry: What you say !!
Bush: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Bush: HA HA HA HA
Kerry: Take off every 'zig' !!
Kerry: You know what you doing.
Kerry: Move 'zig'.
Kerry: For great justice.
The moral of the story? Democracy sucks.
Both Connolly and the developer should have had a contract in place for who owned the resulting (if any) IP. However, since Connolly *paid* for that code, I assume that give him the IP anyway.
The developer and Mambo's posts (as well as the posts of many slashdotters) have shown that they are wholly ignorant of the terms of the GPL. As soon as they found out that someone had put proprietary code (whether it had been derived from GPL is irrelevant in this context RTFL) in their code base they should have removed it.
In this case it is a little bit iffy whether the code is owned by Connolly, because it is not the exact same code (not copy pasted) written into his in house version of mambo. This is really the sort of question the Mambo folks should be asking an IP lawyer. Instead, they seem rather eager to get involved in a little crusade for open source against big evil Connolly.
Anyway, I think that this entire incident highlights how little most people know about the GPL. Most people seem to assume that it is whatever they want it to be. Check it out at "http://www.opensource.org/licenses/". Personally, I have always preferred the MIT, or BSD licenses due to how small and clear they are. The GPL, on the other hand, is about the size of most EULAs.
This is really your fault. Yes, you. All you fuckers that pirate software and then turn around and then turn around and give the company you pirated from shit can go to hell.
Microsoft may be a big evil company (obviously evil, because they have lots of money), but *you* are the one who is the criminal.
This is not to say that I haven't pirated software in the past and will never again in the future. I'm just saying that when committing a crime it is best *not* to be prick about it.
P.S. The poster I am responding to, may or may not have pirated software. My impression is that a significant number of the humans that read slashdot are vile pirates. You may consider this message for them.
Personally, I don't see Stallman getting more attention than he already has as a good thing. As much as I like open source stuff, I don't particularly like his take on it. He acts like OSS is the one true faith and we have some moral imperative to live up to its strictures. That is just as stupid as people arguing that open source is harming business or is some form of communism. Really, self righteous assholes have little to contribute to any discussion.
The take home points are:
1. If someone tries to give you shit about buying/selling software, fuck them.
2. If someone tries to give you shit about writing/using OSS, fuck them.
3. It is *software*. This is not a morality issue in any way, shape, or form.
Others have pointed out that the POWER architecture is very similar to the powerpc architecture in terms of instructions sets. Be that as it may, I doubt that an operating system designed for POWER systems will actually run on apple's hardware any more than osx will run on an IBM POWER system which, to be clear, is to say that is will *not* run. The processor after all, is not the only thing that differentiates different platforms.
That said, maybe some open source group will write some kind of workaround similar to maconlinux.
Also, POWER (at least in the sense that the article uses it) does *not* mean G5. The G5 is not just a POWER4 popped out of an IBM workstation and popped in an apple tower.
I (story submitter) would be interested, of course. I have been thinking of starting my own club for a while.
A usenet group is an interesting idea, but might be a bit unwieldy for a local group. Maybe a website + forums would be best?
Anyway, if you are still interested in such a thing, you can get ahold of me at sentientbrendan@yahoo.com, which I check at least once a week.
P.S. What do you think of the name Empirical Society?
Good point.
The *first* post I see is some bullshit lauding the superiority of the opensource development process with this as an example. RTFA. Here is some sensible info and advice.
1. There *was no patch*. Some systems were immune, but that was completely by chance.
2. There is a patch *now*, but the article also says people are already using the thing to crash free shell providers on day 0.
3. The patch, at this point, requires a kernel recompile. Not everyone running linux knows how to do that. Many who do are too lazy. Don't give me some shit about how everyone running linux is so 1337 that they will be sure the have already patched their system. I know you. You aren't that 1337.
4. Yes, this *is* a big deal. We were caught with our pants down, plain and simple. This *is* worse than any windows security issue that has come up in a long time.
5. Please *do* compile the demo code against your system and test it. If your system crashes, please patch. Don't act like many and just ignore this, especially if you are running a server or anything that stays connected for any amount of time. It also might be a good idea to turn off your telnet and ssh daemon (yes, even ssh) until you patch.
6. If you are *not* running linux or not running on x86, it might also be a good idea to test the demo code against your system. If you are running windows, some versions of windows *do* support possix to a limited degree. The code *might* compile. Then there is also, cygwin. This is probably a bug specific to linux x86, but it won't hurt to check.
mathematician.
Now here are some words to keep this from being modded down as too short. Note how none of them are misspelled? Wooooo
I've seen a lot of people complaining about the video cards in the machines not being top of the line. So? These aren't gaming machines. You don't *need* a 2.5 ghz dulie to play video games. Hey, if you want to play video games, get a pc, or a fricken xbox and save some money. These are machines for professionals. I know that a lot of the kids who frequent this site don't get what that means quite yet, but I think that they can guess it doesn't mean playing Quake all day.
Things that these machines *are* used for include:
2D graphics work: does *not* benefit from a fast video card
video editing: nope
3D graphics modeling and rendering: Not nearly as much as your would think. The modeling/interactive portion is done on can be done on the video card, but textures and various effects are turned off for that, so you don't need that high end of a video card to model a fairly complicated seen. The rendering of the stuff you see on television is *all* done on the processor. This is why the G5 is *all about* the processor.
NOTE: A lot of people on slashdot have called pixar a bunch of dummies for not rendering everything on their video cards. Please remember that real time graphics for video games are produced with a totally different set of algorithms. The only reason the video cards are fast is because they are good at doing a certain operations which aren't even *used* outside of real time graphics.
coding: uhm, no. GCC and xcode will not run on your video card.
quartz Extreme!: doesn't need or benefit from extremely fast video cards. Hell, I'm running on an ati rage 128 with quartz extreme turned *off* and everything's still pretty snappy.
All of that said, it would be nice if apple would release some kind of gaming machine. Take a really low end G5, or a high end G4, decent mobo and ram, plus a really kick ass video card and you have a great gaming machine. Too bad it doens't run windows. Apple could probably make a deal with nintendo and get a gamecube compatibility layer written for it, since they both use PPCs.
Doesn't the ipod do these things? If I hold down on the menu button for a while, the screen lights up. Similarly the play button can turn it off.
Why do they have to tie every freaking thing into the RIAA and SCO? It would be nice if this news for nerds site provided some more technical news and less social news. Really, as a nerd I just don't care that much about the RIAA. I'm sick of hearing about them. Their existence has little effect on me and my nerdness.
For that matter, I don't care to hear about every nut who thinks that Sun should opensource java, or Y should opensource x. Discussion of the ethics of software development is beyond boring to most people who actually develop software.
So, to some things up. Slashdot, I like you, but please stop being such a fanboy script kiddie website. Please call me again when you are mature enough to post more technical articles, less trash, and are ready to discuss long term commitment.
Okay, I get that there is a certain slashdot kneejerk "patents/copyright bad, genetics should all be open source" attitude, but am I missing something? Normally there is at least some rational posts. I'll admit I haven't followed the Monsanto case very closely, but here is my take on the issue:
Monsanto researched and developed many techniques and products related to genetic engineering and then applied for patents and copyright on them respectively. So what? They were the ones who did the hard work and it is now their IP. Noone has any ethical, legal, or otherwise obligation to give away the products of their work for free. It would be cool if they did that, but we don't have the right to dictate their business strategy. Besides, it not like the patents won't run out (although copyrights will probably last forever).
Yeah, I do get that their work is highly derivative. So what? They used a lot of what I would assume is public domain information in their product. Obviously no one is paying them the big bucks for some bushels of corn seed though, they are paying to use the modifications to said corn. No one is stopping them from buying normal seed.
That said, I would be worried if they did something to stop other people from competing in the same field. I am not referring to restrictive patents here, as patents run out relatively quickly. I would be a little worried if they found some way to copyright the *orginal* genetic code in various organisms. If they did that, it would effectively end competitive development forever. That said, I haven't heard that brought up, just a lot of whining about patents and franken-food.
I know we are supposed to respect everyone's beliefs, but in this case I have to ask, why. These people are traveling to the other side of the planet and hiking up a mountain. At the summit of this mountain they expect to find what? A boat which once housed two members of every single species in the world. Each of these two animals is supposed to have spawned an entire species.
If a group of people firmly believe in something so utterly stupid (replace with "very implausible" if you like) as this, am I not justified in ridiculing them? Is it at least PC to kindly notify them that *some* of their beliefs are logically unsound, contrary to most evidence, and thoroughly un-fucking-possible? Is it kosher to suggest that someone who professes to believe such things either has not closely examined their beliefs, is lying, has a totally arbitrary system for choosing what he/she believes, or is mentally unsound?
If it *is* acceptable to believe things like this and doing so, to be *beyond criticism*, I would like to let you all know something. I believe in Megaman. No, really. I talk to him all the time. He exists. You want me to send you some photographs? Okay, but my digital camera is pretty cheap, so they might seem a little pixelated...
Many posts here have made the following points that I will respond to collectively:
Points made by others:
1. Calculators have caused many people to have bad arithmetical skills.
2. I like Vedic math. Here are some linkies.
3. Math focusses on problems that most people don't need to solve. Trigonometry and calculus are mostly only useful to people going into the sciences.
Counterpoints:
1.
Yes, and this is not a problem. Many people seem to be under the false impression that mathematics is about arithmetic and numbers. No, it is not. There are certain branches of mathematics which studies numbers, but these generally do so from a high level perspective. You might be surprised to know that there are many Phds who will occasional screw up their arithmetic. It's just not that big of a deal now that calculators are available to check work.
That said, it is convenient to not have to reach for your calculator every other moment. It is also true that at some point children are asked to memorize their times tables and various arithmetical algorithms. It is nice to see that they were paying attention. It is *nicer* to see them doing well in calculus or linear algebra. To a certain extent higher level math classes depend on lower level math classes, and to a certain extent they don't. Oh well.
I should point out that calculators are great for any sort of graphing, and that there is no reason to force a human to plot out a graph from a function, especially if that function has more than one independent variable. (being able to sketch such things is still valuable) Furthermore, in college level mathematics there are many problems which a calculator or computer can solve, but that a human simply cannot within a reasonable amount of time. Differential equations pops to mind. Remember, most of the problems you have ever solved by hand have only been toy problems. Real world problems require computers more often than not.
2.
I'll be the first to admit I know very little about vedic math. My impression from many people on slashdot, is that it is a bunch of algorithms for doing arithmetic. Again, I don't see that as especially relevant to mathematics.
3.
Math focusses on mathematics or it should. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who would like to use math classes to teach "practical mathematics." By this, they do not mean the mathematics you need to do physics, computer science, or any other endeavor in which someone will pay you a wad of cash to take part. They mean they want to teach people how to do their taxes, or do one the the billion other mundane administrative tasks that humans need to do throughout that lives in which they are required to apply to basic formula to a problem.
WARNING: after reviewing this post I have determined that the remainder of what I have written here is a rant. If I had to pick a title for this rant, it would be People: the Suckening. Anyway, Although I'm being a little bit brutal here, I don't feel that what I'm about to write is untrue.
Fine, teach all of the people who can't figure basic shit out for themselves. Spend millions of tax payer dollars educating a generation of McDonald's employees. There were plenty of people at the highschool I went to who apparently went for that idea. Every year, I had at least one vaguely disguised health class. Two of them were actually called health I and II. Others had more creative names. Basically they reiterated the finer points of how to put a condom on, how to sign a check, how to fill out your 1040ez tax form (but teacher! what if I'm making more money than the 1040ez is for? (sic) Oh, I don't think that's going to be a problem for anyone coming out of this school!). I think they showed us how to perform CPR at least twice, 'cause some people are so dumb they will forget how to *breath*.
I am going to suggest something that may be a little unpopular with the dumbasses present. People who don't need science and math education, don't need educa
I've heard a lot of people say something like, "It's their own fault for not installing the latest patches." Doesn't that suck anyway though? It's a major pain to need to keep a human around to twiddle some bits periodically.
I'm not sure it really has to be this way. It seems to me, that it is a major design flaw that if there is a small error in one of the *many* programs from *many* different parties being run as root, that it can be exploited so that an arbitrary attacker can end up getting root access or executing arbitrary code or whatever. For that matter, it seems silly that (for desktop systems) disastrous effects can come from code run by Joe user. After all, desktop users store all their important files in some place they *don't* have to authenticate as root to get to.
Rather than just assuming that the ever watchful eyes of open source uber hackers are the only remedy for this as well as all of life's problems, maybe it is possible to come up with some easy solutions, or at least partial solutions, to this problem?
1. Use software that watches the beginning and end of every stack frame for an overflow. If an app overflows *kill it dead*. Similarly, the beginning and end of every block allocated on the heap can be watched. Software like this exists, and it is about time it is built directly into the standard distributions and *turned on by default*.
2. Develop a new security model. The current system sucks out loud. Really, access lists (a la microsoft) are a step in the right direction. Finer grained and more flexible controls are good, but a totally new security model would be better. I've seen some things like this developed as academic projects, but it would be nice to see a patch available for a main stream OS like linux.
3. It might also be useful to have virtualization (think VMWare) built into standard distros and used by default for services like apache that need to run some stuff as root. My understanding is that you can do something like this with chroot currently, but that it is a clumsy and dangerous tool.
I'm not a big security buff, but even I can see that there are some things we can actually *do* about this problem.
Now I have to start watching TV again. My GPA has risen significantly since the networks started canceling all worthwhile programming and replacing it with repetitive crap and TV movies.
What are they going to do next? Start airing subtitled anime? Evangelion? Music videos on MTV? I might as well drop out *now* if that's going to happen.
This document is written in an older form of english. Chaucer's spelling and grammar are no worse than Shakespeare's, although Chaucer's version of English is much older than Shakespear's. Just FYI Chaucer was one of the first authors to write in English, and did so at a time when most educated people in England spoke French or Latin.
That said, I doubt very much this is the first technical manual. More likely, it is the first technical manual written in English. I'm sure the chinese, greeks, romans, french, etc all had similar documents long ago.