I speak as moderator form the very first days when 'ordinary'/.ers could moderate.
Just because you are Carmack or ESR or RMS or Christiansen does NOT mean that EVERYTHING you post is worth of a moderation increase.
In fact, as some of Toms replies to flamebait prove, often they should be moderated down.
If a post is judged worthy by the collective wisdom of/. then it will be moderated up accordingly, and does not need the +1.
All the moderation bonus does in produce envy and increases the much discussed/. signal to noise ratio as ppl (like me right now) discuss it. It also promotes heirarchies, essentially saying 'I am more worthy than you'.
/. would be fairer and better without it. I think the/. moderation system is an amazing thing, but does no need the bonus system at all.
I think Inktomi, the search engine that powers hotbot and others runs on the hardware I described. I think they have two of the NOW's now. Their products may run on other hardware, you seem to have done the research.
Its an interesting design, and I like it . . . kind of beowulfy
Is it the case the strong encryption will make the decoders too slow? I know these things need fairly constant bitrates, and after reading Schniers interview, I think the 'best' algorithm he knew required 18clock cycles for a decrypt, is this likely to impact on how much encryption they can put on a stream?
This is prolly not an issue for hardware decoders, but may be for software, can anyone comment?
I don't think GNU-heads necessarily contend that Free Software leads to better software in all cases. This would be a logically absurd position, as a contra-example could always be envisaged.
I believe there may also be a quote somewhere where RMS says that Free Software should be used even if there is a better proprietary equivalent.
I think the Free Software argument is about (funnily enough) FREEDOM. ie, that proprietary software threatens us all.
My bias is to agree with that proposition, and I thank RMS and all the other GNU-heads for what they have achieved. Just when our freedom was most at threat from microsoft and government hegemony (also thanks Phil Zimmerman), Free Software snuck in to mass conciousness and more or less saved us.
I may be going too far now, but I think RMS is practically a Ghandi like figure in his ideals and practice.
He talks the talk and walks the walk. For fucks sake, he wrote the compiler! We would any of us be without that?
I share your views. The World did indeed play extremely well. If, as it seems to be the case, that Irina and her 'team' were the best of the coaches, then the World is to be credited for seeing this and going with it.
I think even m$ fuckup did a lot for this. It has certainly brought the experiment a lot of new eyeballs and commentary.
If Netscape had written the better browser, they'd still be on top today.
Impossible to know for sure, but I doubt it. How could they compete? M$ has done this to heaps of other competitors going back to dos days, ie, include a free version of a competitors product, tie it to the OS.
Trying to argue that Windows doesn't work anything less than the vast majority of time is foolish.
Oh yeah? NEVER in my life have I ever had a flawless installation of any version of windows, going back to 3.1 and 3.11
My experiences have been timewasting nightmares. For a while I thought it was cool that I was smart enough to do the strange and random things necessary on mine and my friends computers (and later, clients) to get doze to work. Now, I dread having to install it, let alone an 'upgrade' or putting in some new hardware. It is insane. No normal, non-'power' user has a hope in hell.
My first linux box was an ipmasq debian box a friend built for me out of spare parts. Took a bit of work, mainly re-compiling kernal for a tulip nic. My experiences with this, an order of magnitude more reliable than the wingate solution I was using tempted me to try more.
Since then, I have installed rh 5.1, 5.2 and 6.0. They all worked first time, including apache and sendmail, right out of the box. Getting ipmasq etc working with 2.2 kernals fooled me for a bit with 6.0, but a couple of howto's later and I was going fine.
I have to say that rh's autodetection and general hardware installation pisses on m$ from a great height. It ain't pretty, but it works, is extremely simple and more logical.
The marketdroid lies that win98 spews out during an installation just make me laugh nowadays. And it takes forever and you have to reboot at least 3 times, and thats if you are lucky . . .
Simply put, if you want to use peoples work that they own copyright on and choose to release under the terms of the GPL, then you must play by the rules.
You are under no obligation to use the software, and the very fact that the source is supplied gives you immense freedoms (thanks richard!) that cannot be taken for granted.
Yes, you may have to pay financially, or with your time and/or labor in order to adhere to the conditions and distribute the source. A small, but important, price to pay. Be grateful.
-- Reverend Vryl
Re:IPv4 and area codes
on
CNN On IPv6
·
· Score: 1
You have violated some age-old law of the usenet who's name escapes me atm.
Basically, some time soon, perhaps even in this thread, some-one will turn up with a beowulf driven toaster farm running on their kitchen internet. You can put money on it.
I have tried before, and I will give it a go again.
The Free Gene Foundation more or less exists. 'Seed Savers' networks have existed for decades or more preserving 'old varieties' seeds. Our food was under threat for ages before the current methods of genetic engineering from Multinational (now Transnational) companies (read ICI).
There are a lot of parallels between Free/Open Source ideas and the seed savers. It would make a good essay for someone to write it up, but I have never got anyone on/. interested in pursuing the link in a thread . . . oh well . . .
Micrografx has always made better vector-based drawing packages, in any case.
Hrrrrmmmm . . . I had the unpleasant experience of having to fix up someones job done in Micrographix, and while I will agree that their GUI improvents to CorelDRAW and generally good (and yeah, it is a blatant ripoff of corel), the software is so buggy as to be non-useful.
Really, really, really buggy. I wrote em a nasty nasty letter just because I was sooooo pissed with them.
Known as the Network Device, The Webtop or the Network Computer (such as the recently released Sun Ray) may make it well nigh impossible to get around. You have virtually no access to anything except the apps (that run on the server, with, one hopes, fairly tight security).
This environment makes it difficult to know what is going on, as it would all run on the server.
Hmmmm . . . hack the server maybe, but there ain't much on the client to play with.
Now, with *other* os's (ossen?), modem compatability may not be such a problem, but, urrrr, linux is mainly a server os, and even as a workstation, has heavy networking as a core part of the os. So, what, no modem? are you freaking kidding me? Compatable? Hell No!
This could be a huge PR mistake for both companies. I don't think this is the kind of stunt you wish to pull on a voiciferous, informed community like Linux.
Now, big blue have been pretty darn good lately, what with apache and alphaworks (try this: http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/linuxjvm) et al, they should either rectify the modem BEFORE they go 'redhat compatible', or just drop the idea entirely.
And yeah, I reckon that 'Linux Compatible' is preferable to 'Distro X' compatible any day.
Slashdot Mirror
Buggy, Crash-prone, Slow, all this I accept, but 'without anyapplications'
Ok, what is wordpad? What is outlook? What is Internet Explorer (M$ newspeak aside, IE is an application), Paint and a heap of other things.
Actually, 9x is pretty feature rich, applications-wise.
we bought a second hand server with a full windows NT still installed on the hardisk. (twin p90, two scsi hard disks and a 4gb tape drive, bargain!)
l0pht crack got the admin password in seconds and brute forced all the other user passwords in 14 hours.
I speak as moderator form the very first days when 'ordinary' /.ers could moderate.
Just because you are Carmack or ESR or RMS or Christiansen does NOT mean that EVERYTHING you post is worth of a moderation increase.
In fact, as some of Toms replies to flamebait prove, often they should be moderated down.
If a post is judged worthy by the collective wisdom of /. then it will be moderated up accordingly, and does not need the +1.
All the moderation bonus does in produce envy and increases the much discussed /. signal to noise ratio as ppl (like me right now) discuss it. It also promotes heirarchies, essentially saying 'I am more worthy than you'.
At least 50% are excellent (in the current market conditions, that is)
I have read a lot of info on attrition et al about him (including the /. bit as well, and have wondered where he ever got his 'cred' from.
His history files on attrition (or was it hnn?) are as funny as hell tho . . .
-- Reverend Vryl
I think Inktomi, the search engine that powers hotbot and others runs on the hardware I described. I think they have two of the NOW's now. Their products may run on other hardware, you seem to have done the research.
Its an interesting design, and I like it . . . kind of beowulfy
-- Reverend Vryl
-- Reverend Vryl
I seem to recall from previous research that they are dual processor/dual mirror hard-drive sun sparcs, so I assume sunos/solaris.
-- Reverend Vryl
This is prolly not an issue for hardware decoders, but may be for software, can anyone comment?
-- Reverend Vryl
I believe there may also be a quote somewhere where RMS says that Free Software should be used even if there is a better proprietary equivalent.
I think the Free Software argument is about (funnily enough) FREEDOM. ie, that proprietary software threatens us all.
My bias is to agree with that proposition, and I thank RMS and all the other GNU-heads for what they have achieved. Just when our freedom was most at threat from microsoft and government hegemony (also thanks Phil Zimmerman), Free Software snuck in to mass conciousness and more or less saved us.
I may be going too far now, but I think RMS is practically a Ghandi like figure in his ideals and practice.
He talks the talk and walks the walk. For fucks sake, he wrote the compiler! We would any of us be without that?
-- Reverend Vryl
I think even m$ fuckup did a lot for this. It has certainly brought the experiment a lot of new eyeballs and commentary.
-- Reverend Vryl
Impossible to know for sure, but I doubt it. How could they compete? M$ has done this to heaps of other competitors going back to dos days, ie, include a free version of a competitors product, tie it to the OS.
-- Reverend Vryl
Oh yeah? NEVER in my life have I ever had a flawless installation of any version of windows, going back to 3.1 and 3.11
My experiences have been timewasting nightmares. For a while I thought it was cool that I was smart enough to do the strange and random things necessary on mine and my friends computers (and later, clients) to get doze to work. Now, I dread having to install it, let alone an 'upgrade' or putting in some new hardware. It is insane. No normal, non-'power' user has a hope in hell.
My first linux box was an ipmasq debian box a friend built for me out of spare parts. Took a bit of work, mainly re-compiling kernal for a tulip nic. My experiences with this, an order of magnitude more reliable than the wingate solution I was using tempted me to try more.
Since then, I have installed rh 5.1, 5.2 and 6.0. They all worked first time, including apache and sendmail, right out of the box. Getting ipmasq etc working with 2.2 kernals fooled me for a bit with 6.0, but a couple of howto's later and I was going fine.
I have to say that rh's autodetection and general hardware installation pisses on m$ from a great height. It ain't pretty, but it works, is extremely simple and more logical.
The marketdroid lies that win98 spews out during an installation just make me laugh nowadays. And it takes forever and you have to reboot at least 3 times, and thats if you are lucky . . .
-- Reverend Vryl
Yeah, hackerish types can play with em, and I reckon we can break the watermarks and have them sound virtually the same or better.
Remember this? Not even experts can tell the diffrence all the time, so how can Joe Public do it?
-- Reverend Vryl
You are under no obligation to use the software, and the very fact that the source is supplied gives you immense freedoms (thanks richard!) that cannot be taken for granted.
Yes, you may have to pay financially, or with your time and/or labor in order to adhere to the conditions and distribute the source. A small, but important, price to pay. Be grateful.
-- Reverend Vryl
Basically, some time soon, perhaps even in this thread, some-one will turn up with a beowulf driven toaster farm running on their kitchen internet. You can put money on it.
-- Reverend Vryl
The Free Gene Foundation more or less exists. 'Seed Savers' networks have existed for decades or more preserving 'old varieties' seeds. Our food was under threat for ages before the current methods of genetic engineering from Multinational (now Transnational) companies (read ICI).
There are a lot of parallels between Free/Open Source ideas and the seed savers. It would make a good essay for someone to write it up, but I have never got anyone on /. interested in pursuing the link in a thread . . . oh well . . .
-- Reverend Vryl
Hrrrrmmmm . . . I had the unpleasant experience of having to fix up someones job done in Micrographix, and while I will agree that their GUI improvents to CorelDRAW and generally good (and yeah, it is a blatant ripoff of corel), the software is so buggy as to be non-useful.
Really, really, really buggy. I wrote em a nasty nasty letter just because I was sooooo pissed with them.
-- Reverend Vryl
This environment makes it difficult to know what is going on, as it would all run on the server.
Hmmmm . . . hack the server maybe, but there ain't much on the client to play with.
-- Reverend Vryl
Now, with *other* os's (ossen?), modem compatability may not be such a problem, but, urrrr, linux is mainly a server os, and even as a workstation, has heavy networking as a core part of the os. So, what, no modem? are you freaking kidding me? Compatable? Hell No!
This could be a huge PR mistake for both companies. I don't think this is the kind of stunt you wish to pull on a voiciferous, informed community like Linux.
Now, big blue have been pretty darn good lately, what with apache and alphaworks (try this: http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/linuxjvm) et al, they should either rectify the modem BEFORE they go 'redhat compatible', or just drop the idea entirely.
And yeah, I reckon that 'Linux Compatible' is preferable to 'Distro X' compatible any day.
-- Reverend Vryl
well, for small palette images, gif is both lossless and extremely small.
I regularly use 3,4,5 bit gifs for low colour images and get very small file sizes.
Now, why cant we clone the file format, put a different compression (better?) and call it GEF? JIF? FOU? (Fuck Off Unisys).
Then make browser software backwards compatible with the legacy format (gif) and wait for the patent to expire.
-- Reverend Vryl
Have fun . . .
-- Reverend Vryl
Until we bunged AIX back on it, it was running NT ppc. It even had perl!
Nice pics too . . .
-- Reverend Vryl