I'm with you on this one. The more I've learned about it, the more it seems they generally got things right. It could've been the unix heritage that I'm admiring, but going off to another system (such as windows or mac), I'm consistently struck by how easy it is to get things wrong. OS X was a bit closer on the mark, but I've never found its unix-like layer to be that enjoyable. Many of my favorite tools aren't there (such as my text editor of choice, joe) and those that are seem like they were done wrong (there's a fair amount of wrangling involved with getting perl to behave. Pretty flimsy for a "well-integrated system", in my opinion). No matter, it's not really the point I'm trying to make here anyway.
What I was getting at is that there's an amazing amount of stuff-that-feels-right when I get on a linux box, but I've become increasingly disenchanted with the way things have been going in the desktop-environment camp. Granted, I started off with afterstep (after a few false starts mucking about with twm), but I've never really enjoyed the "We know best" attitude. It's kept me off KDE to a large degree (it's a minor thing, but pet peeves are made from getting used to swallowing apps in the afterstep wharf and trying to transition to the kde panel (kicker?) which has always seemed wildly inflexible). Gnome wasn't so bad in the early days, but ever since Pennington wrote about the evils of preferences, I've become rather wary of it. Watching configurable items disappear, or get moved into places that are [highly recommended|otherwise inconvenient to avoid]. Gconfd and it's rather senseless approach to XML-izing the windows registry is a particular point of contention. Awful, it is.
So I'm thinking I'm going to have to go off-mainstream from much of where the linux-on-the-desktop guys are headed. There are going to be occassions where it's more painful than others (keeping a few extra libraries around isn't so bad. Getting used to the loss of.*rc files is)
I think I liked it better when I was talking about how Right things could be, rather than how much we've given up because of vocal tards that keep bitching about a fictional Aunt Tillie needing everything to be dumbed down.
Once (if) the examples of infringing code are published, keen-eyed individuals should probably consider comparing them against the BSD-licensed source that was released by SCO (as Caldera).
Sure, they didn't give out System V, but I'm sure any similarities that could be found would make for a fine "friend of the court" submission.
Because whois queries for.org's dropped off months ago for me.
transiit@machine$: whois slashdot.org
. .
. (big versign legal statement)
The Registry database contains ONLY.COM,.NET,.EDU domains and
Registrars.
oops. No.ORG there. I can't help but think the Reg happened to try a whois and not getting an answer freaked out. Note the total lack of explanatory detail.
The closest I've ever come to this (or plan to) was a quick and dirty perl script which generated all of the words to "4294967295 Bottles of Beer on the Wall", which was piped to festival.
My roommates, while amused for the first 10 minutes or so, threatened grevious personal injury a few hours later.
It can't be a link between birds and dinosaurs, because it's a fossil from the future! That animal planet show about speculating evolution (referenced in a slashdot article here) said that 4-winged birds are yet to come.
I can't help but think of the Simpsons episode where they find a fossil of an angel. "The end is here. The end of high prices!"
Find a few more specimens and it will be easier to insert into our understanding of how the progression took place. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The poster specified websites, and not servers or URL's, which is the first problem:
If it's by server, that's a very large amount of content that a single entry claims as "OK for library use."
If it's by URL, it doesn't allow much for letting a document be moved around on the same server.
If a domain name lapses, then there's no guarantee regarding the content if it's picked up by a new owner.
You could submit a URL, wait for it to be approved, and then change the content.
Would it be a master list for all sorts of libraries, or would you need to submit a particular reference to each individual library system?
If you're going the master list route, you might as well already be setting up the filters in the first place.
If you're going with the per-library list, it means there will need to be somebody to maintain that list there, and anyone who wants their site white-listed will have a huge number of places to inform.
I'm not sure it's the easy answer it wants to be.
This seems to be a popular reply to that comment, and I'm going to reply to this one because it seems like you are actually care about an answer.
Cope's rule is basically a rework of the phrase "survival of the fittest". Things that get bigger will tend to survive against other members of the species over mates, territory and food. This sometimes works as a disadvantage, because as things get bigger, they tend to need more food, and thus are more susceptible to climatic changes (and thus more prone to extinction).
Dollo's law states that evolution can't go backwards. This may or not may be true, but when scientists start calling it a "law" as opposed to a "theory", chances are high that they really believe it (contrast the law of gravity vs. the theory of relativity). As a bit of a disclaimer, let me mention that I'm a computer scientist, not a paleontologist, so whatever interest I have in this is only as a hobby. However, the idea as I understand it is that the traits that keep a species alive are based on the circumstances of the time period in which they live. While coarse fur vs. fine fur may not amount to a hill of beans today, they may eventually lead to survival of a major climatic change a few thousand years down the road.
What a number of these comments seem to be missing is that evolution isn't linear. There isn't a set number of species which change into different forms. Some of this occurs in parallel. For example, take a group of mice today. Put some of them in one climate. Put the rest in another climate. Pick locations that they can both survive in. Wait a few thousand years. Examine the two groups of mice. Are they the same? Wait a few million years. Are they still the same?
Now for a bit about homologous traits: Compare a whale flipper and a bat wing. Same basic bone structure. Does this alone mean that the bats left the sea, or that whales used to be able to fly? Probably not. Does this suggest that they might have a common ancestor? Probably.
With that in mind, what is the rationale for whales ever being land-dwelling? Is it because they are mammals? Could it have been that they just shared a common ancestor with the land-dwelling mammals?
I'd like to avoid speaking in absolutes on this. What we think we know is based on a horribly incomplete fossil record. I'm still not sold on evolution as the one true explanation, as I still don't think anyone's managed to explain when things stop being chemical goo and when they start being alive (although marsupial vs. placental mammals are still a bit of mystery as well)
I taped it. I'm watching it in segments because I get too angry at the junk science it's based on.
My problems: Every single animal they had was just a slight modifcation of current specimens. Ok, so maybe things wouldn't change that much for the first part (5 million years), but in 100 million years, the best they could come up with is babookari? (The baboon is allegdly extinct, and that bald, redfaced monkey is all that's left of the primates.)
Disregarding Cope's rule: The idea is that as things evolve, they get bigger. Bigger animals tend to win fights over mates, get more food, have fewer predators. It just makes sense. The last of the mammals being herded by spiders bigger than it? Nope.
Disregarding Dollo's law: Evolution is a one-way path. Dinosaurs evolve into birds which evolve into dinosaurs?
The awful subplot: Humans are gone and are sending probes back to check out the earth (but clearly not recolonizing it, even if it has gotten past any environmental damage and is just chock full of raw natural resources) Don't forget the bad tech.: 95 million years of technological progress, and the new space probe not only is just slightly larger and silver, it also can't operate without first attaching to the ancient probe.
Just generally weird ideas: The spiders are silver to avoid UV radiation. The birds are blue to avoid UV radiation. The birds sleep in midair. One gopher-sized spink is enough to feed an entire flock of deathgleaners.
Bad writing: The deathgleaners (highly evolved bats) exit their cave "like bats out of hell"
I especially like the egotism that intelligence never really returns to the earth (I've only made it 2/3rds through, so it might).
My suspicion is that Apple has been astroturfing around these parts for some time, and I'm overall tired of the advocacy for most systems.
Too many times have I seen obvious bullshit such as "I used Linux for 5 years, and I used to hack in the kernel, but then I saw the icons on Mac OS X and it is so much better for development and now all I need my computer for is iMovie"
Or "I used to use solaris, but now I've got OS X and it's so much better for everything!", from the same people that used to post nothing but pro-Beos comments.
'The Best System for the Job' is indeed a noble goal, but I find a distinct lack of statement as to what's really all that great about OS X. Before you get into how 'pretty' it is, let me immediately exclude things that really don't apply for many developers: icons. consistency in look and feel. any of the "i-" apps. anti-aliasing.
When I'm coding, I tend to have several xterms open with my text editor of choice (joe), manpages, and top. That's about it, so all I really need of a GUI is to leave me plenty of screen real estate. So tell me, what can OS X do better for me?
While my better judgement is trying to tell me that replying to someone who felt "Corporate Troll" was a witty username is a bad idea, I'll bite:
First, you've already shot yourself down by talking about how great OS X is, without stating a single thing that makes you stick with it...even if you do claim to agree that much of the flash isn't very useful.
Second, you've confirmed my assertion that the console/terminal (and thus the layer that most closely resembles unix) is largely unused by stating that you mostly use it to shell into another box.
Third, this was never about windows. I don't use it either.
Fourth, you pull the standard bsd bullshit of "managing linux is hard". I'll give the BSD's credit that they may have a lead on security over linux. (What's that motto? OpenBSD: less than a year without a remote root exploit?) However, the BSD's also cripple themselves by maintaining an "avoid the GPL" mindset and would rather maintain their own userland. I, on the other hand, enjoy what the GNU versions provide. I also won't budge on the utility of Debian's "apt" or Gentoo's "emerge". Even as a diehard slackware user, I'll still give apt the overall thumbs-up when it comes to maintaining a large number of machines.
Finally, you say the apple hardware is slower, that you hate the apps os x bundles, and yet you still paid more. Congratulations. You have achieved a higher level of consumerism.
Why should they get a Mac? What would the greater cost of hardware + software get them?
Better multimedia performance? A simpler GUI? Proprietary crap masquerading as open source?
This is NASA. These are scientists and mathematicians and people that are smarter than the average visual basic programmer that think that the success of the computer is by slapping on as much meaningless cruft as possible! People that have been using mainframes for years. Scientists.
What does the average mac advocate usually present as the case for the mac since the release of OS X? "It's Unix! Really! We think so! We never use the terminal because we've got crap like iTunes and iMovie and iChat and iBlow! These are innovative apps that aren't at all like winamp, xmms, windows media player, gqmpeg, the numerous windows apps that get bundled with hardware (ulead), broadcast 2k, or any of the players like mplayer, xine, videolan, etc. These are innovative! They've got skins! Just like all those others, but it's got Quartz and displaypdf. We don't know what it does, but damn, does it sound cool! Don't you want to be cool? I've got a TiBook. I'm cool. Some teenage girl on allergy meds says I'm cool. Isn't that what computing is about?"
Ok, so I've gone way overboard into the land of flamebait. But still, why are all the people that claimed any technical merit a year or so ago now collectively creaming their jeans over eyecandy and pretending it to be the greatest contribution to the advancement of technology ever?
My problem with OS X is that it presents so little to the core while trying to slap on a pretty facade. They failed on both accounts. I find aqua to be pretty darn ugly, and beneath the whitewash, nothing that would make me shell out the money to move away from LinuxPPC on the same hardware.
Darwin refers to the userland stuff, and it seems a bit odd to equate "heavily based" with "100%".
Quartz clearly isn't unix, but that doesn't necessarily mean that X isn't either. Historically, X is the unix GUI, and has as much justification for being considered part of a full-fledged unix system as say, 'tar'.
As for freshmeat deciding this warrants its own section, I could care less. Just another category for me to filter out. I would not consider this newsworthy by any means, though. Maybe if they were specifically excluding OS X packages, or excluding everything else except OS X, but not this. This lands in importance just above "Freshmeat fixed a typo" and just below "Freshmeat redesigned the look of the site again"
Not true.
While you may want to discount Linux, it has a lot more support and momentum than any sort of reimplementation of BeOS. Whatever sort of technological advantage you see in BeOS isn't really the point at this time, for the short term, we need something to rally around while getting the long-term message out: "The operating system doesn't matter as long as the concern is to follow open standards and make the overall goal to be interoperable rather than acheive dominance".
Getting Linux, or a BSD, or a BeOS workalike to take the place of windows doesn't really solve the overall problem that computing can't be simplified into a one-size-fits-all situation. A better situation is to aim for at least source-compatibility where possible (binary compatibility is nice, but largely unreasonable to expect any compatibilty layer to account for all quirks of the original host OS). If you can manage that, then things like UI become relatively easy (application framework differences are picked up at the library level, install the necessary libs and you can pick and choose your favorite, or combination thereof).
-transiit
Open Source programmers make things for themselves, and generally don't have the public in mind.
But they do have the public in mind, which is largely why they give away the source code. Yeah, there's some of it for notoriety, exposure, etc., but if there wasn't some concern to a greater good, why release it at all?
I think there's still a lot to be said for the idea that "If I find this useful, others will too." But that's a far cry from having to be slave to the public or honoring every demand from a user.
I try to be an informed voter, and when I run into an issue that I could go either way on, and I see no possible way to make a decision short of flipping a coin, I follow the following rules:
1) Vote for the Libertarian candidate or the weirdest looking person in the voter information guide (which is usually the Libertarian)
2) Vote for any bill that will raise taxes. This is part of a strategy that is fulfilled with rule #3.
3) Vote against any government spending. In conjunction with #2, this should create a large government surplus which shows either a) They are largely incapable of doing effective work, no matter how much money they demand, or b) It gives ample opportunity for the corrupt to embezzle their way into an indictment.
4) Ignore national elections and focus on local elections. I don't care how many times people talk about "global economies" and whatnot, the issues that tend to impact my life daily tend to be decided at the local level first, followed in order by the state and national levels.
5) Vote for anything that gives the citizens increased rights to kill themselves. Just because.
One of the things that struck me about the article is that they talked about cable providers being the primary provider of internet access for Americans.
Granted, AOL is a big chunk of the ISP market, but they've never really been about broadband: seems like a great wall still exists between AOL and time warner's roadrunner. So disregarding this for a moment....
How does this threat stand up with all the articles we've seen in the past along the lines of "Oh shit! Nobody gives a damn about broadband! It must not be profitable! We'll raise our prices!"
Anyhow, I do agree that having the same companies in charge of all aspects of information (from creation to distribution to analyis to criticism) is a dangerous path, but it's their playground and they do get to set the rules on this one. This particular article is not without its flaws.
But hey, if this really bothers anyone, you could always try to exert pressure on your representative government to make internet access a regulated utility. Won't that make things better?
Funny how chrisd lets this one through the submission queue right around the same time Wired runs an articleabout him leaving VA to go start up a gaming company.
This is not what I would call a good way to start the publicity.
Anagraph had all of this stuff inside the plotter. Even a little HPGL interpreter on board, so we would literally just dump raw HPGL on the serial port and it would deal with it. It was up to the people over in the engineering department to worry about vinyl control or what direction the knife should be in and all that crap.
It's a bit analagous to postscript printers with their own interpreters working out all the hard parts of printing a document.
When I was working there, our usual debug method was to use the mode command in dos to set up the com port, then just do a "copy art.hpg com1" (or whatever. I know it involved mode and copy)
So now we just need stuff that's capable of doing nice vectorized art and will put out (or can be converted to) hpgl I'd go look at gnuplot first, or xfig, or some other pre-existing app (they are out there) and I notice that imagemagick (convert) supports hpgl output.
I did a stint in technical support for a vinyl-cutting plotter manufacturer in 1996, so I can at least give a brief idea of what this is all about.
This sort of sign does not involove cutting and then glueing (as mentioned in another comment), but the use of these big rolls of adhesive-backed vinyl. You load this on to a plotter, which basically has a knife instead of a pen, and set your job going. When finished, you have to weed the unwanted portions (basically remove any vinyl that should know be a negative area) and apply the thing to a sign, glass, your car, etc.
A lot of the fancy striping on cars is done this way, and you see the vinyl sold as "laser-cut" or "die-cut" stickers (even though they don't use lasers or dies.) All those bootleg Calvin-peeing-on-whatever-stickers could be used as an example.
At least back in 96, the big manufacturers were Roland, Summagraphics, and Anagraph. (I worked for Anagraph, and those were the only other names I heard. We could've been piddly small, I never cared enough about the sign-making industry to find out.). Our plotters basically worked by hooking up to the serial port and just throwing an HPGL file at it. Nothing too hard. The *nix equivalent would be "cat art.hpgl >/dev/ttyS0'
So if you can put together a *insert your favorite vector graphics format here* to HPGL converter, it could be done. Around the time I left, they were all wetting their pants about printing other images on the vinyl before cutting, but I don't know how that works.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with you on this one. The more I've learned about it, the more it seems they generally got things right. It could've been the unix heritage that I'm admiring, but going off to another system (such as windows or mac), I'm consistently struck by how easy it is to get things wrong. OS X was a bit closer on the mark, but I've never found its unix-like layer to be that enjoyable. Many of my favorite tools aren't there (such as my text editor of choice, joe) and those that are seem like they were done wrong (there's a fair amount of wrangling involved with getting perl to behave. Pretty flimsy for a "well-integrated system", in my opinion). No matter, it's not really the point I'm trying to make here anyway.
.*rc files is)
What I was getting at is that there's an amazing amount of stuff-that-feels-right when I get on a linux box, but I've become increasingly disenchanted with the way things have been going in the desktop-environment camp. Granted, I started off with afterstep (after a few false starts mucking about with twm), but I've never really enjoyed the "We know best" attitude. It's kept me off KDE to a large degree (it's a minor thing, but pet peeves are made from getting used to swallowing apps in the afterstep wharf and trying to transition to the kde panel (kicker?) which has always seemed wildly inflexible). Gnome wasn't so bad in the early days, but ever since Pennington wrote about the evils of preferences, I've become rather wary of it. Watching configurable items disappear, or get moved into places that are [highly recommended|otherwise inconvenient to avoid]. Gconfd and it's rather senseless approach to XML-izing the windows registry is a particular point of contention. Awful, it is.
So I'm thinking I'm going to have to go off-mainstream from much of where the linux-on-the-desktop guys are headed. There are going to be occassions where it's more painful than others (keeping a few extra libraries around isn't so bad. Getting used to the loss of
I think I liked it better when I was talking about how Right things could be, rather than how much we've given up because of vocal tards that keep bitching about a fictional Aunt Tillie needing everything to be dumbed down.
*sigh*
-transiit
Once (if) the examples of infringing code are published, keen-eyed individuals should probably consider comparing them against the BSD-licensed source that was released by SCO (as Caldera).
Sure, they didn't give out System V, but I'm sure any similarities that could be found would make for a fine "friend of the court" submission.
-transiit
I wouldn't go villifying anyone just yet.
-transiit
Yup. It's always fun to speculate.
Without going into "blind loyalty to the government" mode, I feel it's wise to add that it's pretty early to say how right or wrong they were.
It's easy to think that the historical record is resolved within days of the event.
-transiit
The closest I've ever come to this (or plan to) was a quick and dirty perl script which generated all of the words to "4294967295 Bottles of Beer on the Wall", which was piped to festival.
My roommates, while amused for the first 10 minutes or so, threatened grevious personal injury a few hours later.
-transiit
It can't be a link between birds and dinosaurs, because it's a fossil from the future! That animal planet show about speculating evolution (referenced in a slashdot article here) said that 4-winged birds are yet to come.
I can't help but think of the Simpsons episode where they find a fossil of an angel. "The end is here. The end of high prices!"
Find a few more specimens and it will be easier to insert into our understanding of how the progression took place. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
-transiit
The poster specified websites, and not servers or URL's, which is the first problem:
If it's by server, that's a very large amount of content that a single entry claims as "OK for library use."
If it's by URL, it doesn't allow much for letting a document be moved around on the same server.
If a domain name lapses, then there's no guarantee regarding the content if it's picked up by a new owner.
You could submit a URL, wait for it to be approved, and then change the content.
Would it be a master list for all sorts of libraries, or would you need to submit a particular reference to each individual library system?
If you're going the master list route, you might as well already be setting up the filters in the first place.
If you're going with the per-library list, it means there will need to be somebody to maintain that list there, and anyone who wants their site white-listed will have a huge number of places to inform.
I'm not sure it's the easy answer it wants to be.
-transiit
This seems to be a popular reply to that comment, and I'm going to reply to this one because it seems like you are actually care about an answer.
Cope's rule is basically a rework of the phrase "survival of the fittest". Things that get bigger will tend to survive against other members of the species over mates, territory and food. This sometimes works as a disadvantage, because as things get bigger, they tend to need more food, and thus are more susceptible to climatic changes (and thus more prone to extinction).
Dollo's law states that evolution can't go backwards. This may or not may be true, but when scientists start calling it a "law" as opposed to a "theory", chances are high that they really believe it (contrast the law of gravity vs. the theory of relativity). As a bit of a disclaimer, let me mention that I'm a computer scientist, not a paleontologist, so whatever interest I have in this is only as a hobby. However, the idea as I understand it is that the traits that keep a species alive are based on the circumstances of the time period in which they live. While coarse fur vs. fine fur may not amount to a hill of beans today, they may eventually lead to survival of a major climatic change a few thousand years down the road.
What a number of these comments seem to be missing is that evolution isn't linear. There isn't a set number of species which change into different forms. Some of this occurs in parallel. For example, take a group of mice today. Put some of them in one climate. Put the rest in another climate. Pick locations that they can both survive in. Wait a few thousand years. Examine the two groups of mice. Are they the same? Wait a few million years. Are they still the same?
Now for a bit about homologous traits: Compare a whale flipper and a bat wing. Same basic bone structure. Does this alone mean that the bats left the sea, or that whales used to be able to fly? Probably not. Does this suggest that they might have a common ancestor? Probably.
With that in mind, what is the rationale for whales ever being land-dwelling? Is it because they are mammals? Could it have been that they just shared a common ancestor with the land-dwelling mammals?
I'd like to avoid speaking in absolutes on this. What we think we know is based on a horribly incomplete fossil record. I'm still not sold on evolution as the one true explanation, as I still don't think anyone's managed to explain when things stop being chemical goo and when they start being alive (although marsupial vs. placental mammals are still a bit of mystery as well)
-transiit
I taped it. I'm watching it in segments because I get too angry at the junk science it's based on.
My problems:
Every single animal they had was just a slight modifcation of current specimens. Ok, so maybe things wouldn't change that much for the first part (5 million years), but in 100 million years, the best they could come up with is babookari? (The baboon is allegdly extinct, and that bald, redfaced monkey is all that's left of the primates.)
Disregarding Cope's rule: The idea is that as things evolve, they get bigger. Bigger animals tend to win fights over mates, get more food, have fewer predators. It just makes sense. The last of the mammals being herded by spiders bigger than it? Nope.
Disregarding Dollo's law: Evolution is a one-way path. Dinosaurs evolve into birds which evolve into dinosaurs?
Stupid-ass names: snowstalker. deathgleaner. buttpicker. assgoblin.
The awful subplot: Humans are gone and are sending probes back to check out the earth (but clearly not recolonizing it, even if it has gotten past any environmental damage and is just chock full of raw natural resources) Don't forget the bad tech.: 95 million years of technological progress, and the new space probe not only is just slightly larger and silver, it also can't operate without first attaching to the ancient probe.
Just generally weird ideas:
The spiders are silver to avoid UV radiation.
The birds are blue to avoid UV radiation.
The birds sleep in midair.
One gopher-sized spink is enough to feed an entire flock of deathgleaners.
Bad writing:
The deathgleaners (highly evolved bats) exit their cave "like bats out of hell"
I especially like the egotism that intelligence never really returns to the earth (I've only made it 2/3rds through, so it might).
-transiit
My suspicion is that Apple has been astroturfing around these parts for some time, and I'm overall tired of the advocacy for most systems.
Too many times have I seen obvious bullshit such as "I used Linux for 5 years, and I used to hack in the kernel, but then I saw the icons on Mac OS X and it is so much better for development and now all I need my computer for is iMovie"
Or "I used to use solaris, but now I've got OS X and it's so much better for everything!", from the same people that used to post nothing but pro-Beos comments.
'The Best System for the Job' is indeed a noble goal, but I find a distinct lack of statement as to what's really all that great about OS X. Before you get into how 'pretty' it is, let me immediately exclude things that really don't apply for many developers: icons. consistency in look and feel. any of the "i-" apps. anti-aliasing.
When I'm coding, I tend to have several xterms open with my text editor of choice (joe), manpages, and top. That's about it, so all I really need of a GUI is to leave me plenty of screen real estate. So tell me, what can OS X do better for me?
-transiit
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/06/26/1547242.shtm l?tid=172
OpenSSH vulnerability. Posted June 26.
The 7 years slogan no longer stands.
While my better judgement is trying to tell me that replying to someone who felt "Corporate Troll" was a witty username is a bad idea, I'll bite:
First, you've already shot yourself down by talking about how great OS X is, without stating a single thing that makes you stick with it...even if you do claim to agree that much of the flash isn't very useful.
Second, you've confirmed my assertion that the console/terminal (and thus the layer that most closely resembles unix) is largely unused by stating that you mostly use it to shell into another box.
Third, this was never about windows. I don't use it either.
Fourth, you pull the standard bsd bullshit of "managing linux is hard". I'll give the BSD's credit that they may have a lead on security over linux. (What's that motto? OpenBSD: less than a year without a remote root exploit?) However, the BSD's also cripple themselves by maintaining an "avoid the GPL" mindset and would rather maintain their own userland. I, on the other hand, enjoy what the GNU versions provide. I also won't budge on the utility of Debian's "apt" or Gentoo's "emerge". Even as a diehard slackware user, I'll still give apt the overall thumbs-up when it comes to maintaining a large number of machines.
Finally, you say the apple hardware is slower, that you hate the apps os x bundles, and yet you still paid more. Congratulations. You have achieved a higher level of consumerism.
-transiit
Why should they get a Mac? What would the greater cost of hardware + software get them?
Better multimedia performance?
A simpler GUI?
Proprietary crap masquerading as open source?
This is NASA. These are scientists and mathematicians and people that are smarter than the average visual basic programmer that think that the success of the computer is by slapping on as much meaningless cruft as possible! People that have been using mainframes for years. Scientists.
What does the average mac advocate usually present as the case for the mac since the release of OS X? "It's Unix! Really! We think so! We never use the terminal because we've got crap like iTunes and iMovie and iChat and iBlow! These are innovative apps that aren't at all like winamp, xmms, windows media player, gqmpeg, the numerous windows apps that get bundled with hardware (ulead), broadcast 2k, or any of the players like mplayer, xine, videolan, etc. These are innovative! They've got skins! Just like all those others, but it's got Quartz and displaypdf. We don't know what it does, but damn, does it sound cool! Don't you want to be cool? I've got a TiBook. I'm cool. Some teenage girl on allergy meds says I'm cool. Isn't that what computing is about?"
Ok, so I've gone way overboard into the land of flamebait. But still, why are all the people that claimed any technical merit a year or so ago now collectively creaming their jeans over eyecandy and pretending it to be the greatest contribution to the advancement of technology ever?
My problem with OS X is that it presents so little to the core while trying to slap on a pretty facade. They failed on both accounts. I find aqua to be pretty darn ugly, and beneath the whitewash, nothing that would make me shell out the money to move away from LinuxPPC on the same hardware.
-transiit
The kernel is Mach.
Not Unix.
Darwin refers to the userland stuff, and it seems a bit odd to equate "heavily based" with "100%".
Quartz clearly isn't unix, but that doesn't necessarily mean that X isn't either.
Historically, X is the unix GUI, and has as much justification for being considered part of a full-fledged unix system as say, 'tar'.
As for freshmeat deciding this warrants its own section, I could care less. Just another category for me to filter out. I would not consider this newsworthy by any means, though. Maybe if they were specifically excluding OS X packages, or excluding everything else except OS X, but not this. This lands in importance just above "Freshmeat fixed a typo" and just below "Freshmeat redesigned the look of the site again"
-transiit
Not true.
While you may want to discount Linux, it has a lot more support and momentum than any sort of reimplementation of BeOS. Whatever sort of technological advantage you see in BeOS isn't really the point at this time, for the short term, we need something to rally around while getting the long-term message out: "The operating system doesn't matter as long as the concern is to follow open standards and make the overall goal to be interoperable rather than acheive dominance".
Getting Linux, or a BSD, or a BeOS workalike to take the place of windows doesn't really solve the overall problem that computing can't be simplified into a one-size-fits-all situation. A better situation is to aim for at least source-compatibility where possible (binary compatibility is nice, but largely unreasonable to expect any compatibilty layer to account for all quirks of the original host OS). If you can manage that, then things like UI become relatively easy (application framework differences are picked up at the library level, install the necessary libs and you can pick and choose your favorite, or combination thereof).
-transiit
But they do have the public in mind, which is largely why they give away the source code. Yeah, there's some of it for notoriety, exposure, etc., but if there wasn't some concern to a greater good, why release it at all?
I think there's still a lot to be said for the idea that "If I find this useful, others will too." But that's a far cry from having to be slave to the public or honoring every demand from a user.
-transiit
Woohoo! No java, no flash, no embedded multimedia, no word documents, no pdf!
Can't wait! Finally, we can actually look at actual *gasp* content!
It'll be like we can browse the web with just a web browser.
-transiit
I try to be an informed voter, and when I run into an issue that I could go either way on, and I see no possible way to make a decision short of flipping a coin, I follow the following rules:
1) Vote for the Libertarian candidate or the weirdest looking person in the voter information guide (which is usually the Libertarian)
2) Vote for any bill that will raise taxes. This is part of a strategy that is fulfilled with rule #3.
3) Vote against any government spending. In conjunction with #2, this should create a large government surplus which shows either a) They are largely incapable of doing effective work, no matter how much money they demand, or b) It gives ample opportunity for the corrupt to embezzle their way into an indictment.
4) Ignore national elections and focus on local elections. I don't care how many times people talk about "global economies" and whatnot, the issues that tend to impact my life daily tend to be decided at the local level first, followed in order by the state and national levels.
5) Vote for anything that gives the citizens increased rights to kill themselves. Just because.
-transiit
One of the things that struck me about the article is that they talked about cable providers being the primary provider of internet access for Americans.
Granted, AOL is a big chunk of the ISP market, but they've never really been about broadband: seems like a great wall still exists between AOL and time warner's roadrunner. So disregarding this for a moment....
How does this threat stand up with all the articles we've seen in the past along the lines of "Oh shit! Nobody gives a damn about broadband! It must not be profitable! We'll raise our prices!"
Anyhow, I do agree that having the same companies in charge of all aspects of information (from creation to distribution to analyis to criticism) is a dangerous path, but it's their playground and they do get to set the rules on this one. This particular article is not without its flaws.
But hey, if this really bothers anyone, you could always try to exert pressure on your representative government to make internet access a regulated utility. Won't that make things better?
-transiit
Funny how chrisd lets this one through the submission queue right around the same time Wired runs an articleabout him leaving VA to go start up a gaming company.
This is not what I would call a good way to start the publicity.
-transiit
Firmware.
Anagraph had all of this stuff inside the plotter. Even a little HPGL interpreter on board, so we would literally just dump raw HPGL on the serial port and it would deal with it. It was up to the people over in the engineering department to worry about vinyl control or what direction the knife should be in and all that crap.
It's a bit analagous to postscript printers with their own interpreters working out all the hard parts of printing a document.
When I was working there, our usual debug method was to use the mode command in dos to set up the com port, then just do a "copy art.hpg com1" (or whatever. I know it involved mode and copy)
So now we just need stuff that's capable of doing nice vectorized art and will put out (or can be converted to) hpgl
I'd go look at gnuplot first, or xfig, or some other pre-existing app (they are out there) and I notice that imagemagick (convert) supports hpgl output.
-transiit
I did a stint in technical support for a vinyl-cutting plotter manufacturer in 1996, so I can at least give a brief idea of what this is all about.
This sort of sign does not involove cutting and then glueing (as mentioned in another comment), but the use of these big rolls of adhesive-backed vinyl. You load this on to a plotter, which basically has a knife instead of a pen, and set your job going. When finished, you have to weed the unwanted portions (basically remove any vinyl that should know be a negative area) and apply the thing to a sign, glass, your car, etc.
A lot of the fancy striping on cars is done this way, and you see the vinyl sold as "laser-cut" or "die-cut" stickers (even though they don't use lasers or dies.) All those bootleg Calvin-peeing-on-whatever-stickers could be used as an example.
At least back in 96, the big manufacturers were Roland, Summagraphics, and Anagraph. (I worked for Anagraph, and those were the only other names I heard. We could've been piddly small, I never cared enough about the sign-making industry to find out.). Our plotters basically worked by hooking up to the serial port and just throwing an HPGL file at it. Nothing too hard. The *nix equivalent would be "cat art.hpgl >/dev/ttyS0'
So if you can put together a *insert your favorite vector graphics format here* to HPGL converter, it could be done. Around the time I left, they were all wetting their pants about printing other images on the vinyl before cutting, but I don't know how that works.
-transiit
whoa....those were all ten year olds? No wonder they thought it was hysterical for so long.
Hopefully we'll finally be free of the underwear-stealing-gnome joke derivatives soon.
If only people would mark those fuckers "Redundant" like they should instead of "Funny"
-transiit
So I went through the news search and tried out some terms like "Linux", "Open Source", "Perl" and "Junk Science".
I think I've seen the future of the slashdot submission queue.
-transiit
I'm boycotting SciFi because they gave us crap like Farscape.
After a cable rebuild, the first day I got it was the last day after they stopped showing the old Incredible Hulk reruns.
Forget those guys.
-transiit