However, there has never been, as far as I know, a better site for finding out what's likely to be going on in the geek-film arena in the next six months to two years. It's where I found out that Lord of the Rings had gone to Peter Jackson. It's where I first heard that Lucas had recanted his early statements about making a third trillogy. They turned me on to such masterworks as The Usual Suspects, The Matrix and Life is Beautiful long before they were on the screen.
I also recommend the AICN: Coaxial section which focuses on television and home-media releases of films (where I found out about the Buckaroo Banzai DVD release).
Very minor nit, but the PDP-1 was the first mini, not a mainframe. The name, Peripheral Data Processor was in response to the econimics of the time. Trying to get PHBs to see the wisdom of buying a couple of minis instead of an IBM mainframe was virtual job-suicide.
However, you could easily justify buying a peripheral to offload some data processing to. Thus was born the PDP and the mini (and eventually PDP was the reason for two of the best OSes of all time: VMS via DEC which is now Compaq and UNIX via Bell Labs which is now partly AT&T, partly Lucent and partly Caldera... what a long road).
I'm beginning to feel like a broken record, and maybe Linus should just change the terminology so that people stop making the same assumption over and over, but people: wake up and smell the bogomips!
"Stable", in the context of a kernel release refers to the interfaces. When Linus releases 2.<leven>.0, he is saying that this kernel is one that has reached some arbitrary plateu of development stability, and it's now ready for others to begin actuall release engineering on.
You have to understand that the Linux Kernel is released by Linus in a state that is very reasonable for a development team, but that will never be "production quality". Debian puts a lot of realease engineering work into a Kernel. As does Red Hat. As does SuSe, etc, etc.
If you just grab 2.4.x and install it, you're acting as Linux Q/A, and I applaud your effort, but when it breaks in your environment, you should not be stunned.
Once again, production release != stable release. A stable release is just one the developers are happy with (and I've yet to see a 2.4 kernel that I can say developers should not be happy with).
So, maybe next time, 2.6.0 should be called the "post-development" release so that people don't go off half-cocked installing it on production systems.
Please read the GPL. There's no clause that even comes close to what you're suggesting. You are always free to restrict distribution of your changes as long as that restriction is to not distribute.
But, of course, I'm responding to a Troll and am way off topic. Oh well, karma comes and karma goes.
Actually, since Bing and I are across the hall from eachother, here are ITA, let me point out that the really interesting story is that we have the best programming puzzles in the industry.
The goal is to get candidates to submit code samples of their work that actually address the kinds of problems that we work on, so if you can do the puzzles, send us your code and a resume, and there's a great chance you'll be hauled in for an interview at one of the best tech companies in the country!
Keep in mind that we're not just a LISP shop. I'm in the operations group, and I do a lot of Perl and C++ work. Submit code in any language you like!
You believe that there is an appearance [...] You are very wrong. A true analysis of the progress
Ok, so you're argument is that the perception is not one of chaos because the perception does not match the reality of the situation?
I'm just trying to understand, since that would seem to be a self-contradicting statement.
Yes, Linux kernel development is moving along just fine. Yes, it's very well structured. But I work in a Linux shop, and let me tell you what the perception of the folks we deal with is: "Oh, Linux. Isn't that the bunch of kids that are always arguing and forking projects?" I know that that's bunk, but most folks don't.
Which point of view do you think Microsoft is working hard to portray?
Open Source's biggest PR dilema is this sort of argument.
Make no mistake, every company has developers that do this. There's two differences in the Open Source world: 1) you can't just fire an Open Source developer who won't "play ball" with management's edict 2) it's usually public.
These are actually both really good things. The fact that you can't silence someone leads to repeated analysis of a problem. OSS' biggest benefit is that it brings massive peer review to bare not just on the code, but on the process.
The fact that it's public feeds into that, and is equally good.
The problem is PR. The Linux kernel is starting to look like anarchy to non-developers. I suggest that the process works, so we should all take a deep breath and leave it be. However, we all need to take the front lines on PR. Spin is all-important. This is not a "spat" or a "fight", this is "parallel development" and "peer review". The joy of this kind of spin is that, unlike most spin, it's TRUE! This guy is pissed at Linus. Linus has dumped his code. Yet, the two of them keep working hard to meet their customers' demands and producing what they feel is the best possible product.
Please, don't foster the idea that we're a bunch of anarchists producing code that's any less functional than the rest of industry, because quite the opposite is true.
revert the "kill(-1..)" change. POSIX isn't that clear on the
issue anyway, and the new behaviour breaks things.
I have a problem here which is somewhat tangential, but I feel is very important. First, let me tell you about a friend of mine. He works for an organization that is helping a VERY large organization decide on the merits of going to Linux or not. The problem is that the very large org has a requirement that the platforms they use be POSIX compliant. He started out with the edict that "Microsoft is POSIX compliant, you must prove that Linux is too!"
I know this is bass-ackawards, but so was his mandate. So, he called Red Hat. Red Hat said that they run the POSIX test suite, and sometimes it works and sometimes it don't. They don't officially support 100% compliance to the POSIX test suite because a) it's buggy and b) sometimes compliance would hurt the average Linux consumer. Messages on the Debian lists seemed to confirm this approach in the Debian community.
So, now we get to my problem with the above quote. What is the goal of Linux visa vis POSIX compliance? Should we be pushing the POSIX folks to clarify the standard in such cases? Should we be making sure that the test suite doesn't test for this condition? Or, do we really care?
Don't know the right answer, but I'd love to see the discussion instead of a vacuum...
....but... if I had to make a bet on it, I'd wager a large sum that illegal activities were occuring.
Sure, I can buy that. I'd also buy that if a helicopter shows heavy IR coming from a house in a residential area, that there's a good chance there's a grow-room in it. Note please, that such evidence is no longer sufficient for a warrant.
I know you didn't say "... so lock the bastards up", but the presumption of guilt is a large step in the wrong direction. My feeling (and it's just that) on this is that a school should attempt to provide an environment that seeks to engage students in the basics of our society. Acting as an authorotarian regime, and presuming guilt is arguably a very bad way to do this.
Now, the students in question seem to have violated school policy, and for that I understand that some administrative action was required. But, to presume anything more seems unreasonable to me.
I hate to be topical, here, but we are not Borg. The "Slashdot Community" is no more a single hive-mind with but a single thought than any other broad-based subculture (I remember someone explaining to me that this is why the gay community has such a hard time getting anything done).
When you see one article with folks flaming the MPAA and saying that they (MPAA) needs to be stopped, and another which raves about some new DVD, why would you assume that the same people are interested? Slashdot is correctly reporting on "News for Nerds", it's not censoring "cool MPAA stuff" because it would hurt some particular cause any more than its censoring anti-MPAA stuff; nor should they!
Now, I very much see the value in pointing out to the "ooh, shiny thing" audience that these brand new nifty DVDs are brought to you by the folks who want to stamp out fair use as if it were a plague, but let's not expect that EVERYONE will listen. Many folks who are geeky enough to care about what Slashdot says have no interest in fair use and what it means to them. I consider this their loss, but it's a valid point of view.
didn't understand that leaving Kazaa, Morpheus and all their other file trading utilities on all day long was not only illegal,
Hello! Why would leaving Kazaa running all day be illegal?!
I think you're making some interesting conclusions about legal precidents which have yet to be set. Now, I could buy that explicitly downloading something which is copyrighted is a violation of copyright (assuming that no other provision, e.g. licensing, has been made), but you're way out on a limb otherwise.
This is the classic application of authority to solve a technical problem. Look how well that works for the Chinese;-)
Now, if a University *really* wanted to solve the problem, they would devote some research dollars to p2p networking.
For starters, yes the majority of p2p communications these days is porn and music. You will also find humor, news footage, open source software, movie trailers released (quietly and so as not to endorse the media) by the studios, text documents authored by fanatics, fools, story-tellers and tech writers.
If Universities have a problem with high bandwidth utilization, they should 1) work on the protocols to make them more sensitive to network topology so that they prefer cheaper resources (ala UUCP) 2) impose per-port bandwidth monitoring and charge students per-Gb after some nominal "you can do your homework and send mail to the folks" cap 3) educate students on how the services they use affect bandwidth.
This idea that Gnutella should be banned because we don't like what it *can* (and often is) used for is counter to what Universities profess to offer to their students. If I wantsed to get a lesson in authoritarian control, I'd work for the IRS.
So, let's follow your logic here, just to be sure I understand.
You liked the GPL.
You joined a company that had a business plan centered on software that was distributed under an open source license (not the GPL, but I'll follow you that far).
That company semi-failed and had to lay off employees (including you).
Conclusion: The GPL "doesn't pay my rent"... Well, I suggest to the folks being laid off at Ford that "your precious e-commerce and online-stock trading (two of the side-ventures that hurt Ford) don't pay their rent". However, we cannot the extrapolate to say that the GPL, e-commerce and online stock trading are the ingredients that make for bad business models.
Personally, I think that the GPL is a tough nut to crack for business, and it will be another decade before the economics of GPLed software are truely understood. This does not change the facts that
There are many successful companies from small mom-and-pop operations to fairly sizable public companies (RHAT) to behemoths like Apple and IBM that are doing very well interacting with GPLed and other open source software.
Companies with bad business plans, or which are overcome by market pressures will fail
The GPL is not, in and of itself a business model, good or ill.
Opinion: if your business plan is "GPL good, non-GPL bad", you will fail
I'm sorry you got laid off. Really. But, please don't lay it at the feet of the GPL.
The point? Hmm, leave it to an IT guy to think only IT guys have use for processor speed.
3D rendering, MP*/QT encoding, video transition rendering, image manipulation (rotate a 20 meg image clockwise 1 degree anyone?), audio DSP, and making Windows not seem sluggish
3D redering -- Speed comes from RAM, video hardware and bus speed, these days, not CPU speed.
Video -- Hardware video decoders are a must. Why would you want your CPU to grunt over decoding video?!
audio DSP -- Been done in commodity hardware since the early 90s....
Making windows seem... not windows -- Been done by installing Linux since the mid 90s.
I've had limited experience with 2000 (friends who have been forced to install it in production environments tell me that the daily reboot that NT4 required was down to weekly), but I use XP at home to play games. I have to admit that 30-40 percent of the time that the game crashes, it now fails to take the OS with it.
This is great for a Windows OS (don't let them fool you into thinking it's not a DOS descendent, just ask what OS' limitations Win32 was written arund....)
However, it SUCKS for a multi-user OS. It sucks compared to MacOS X. It sucks compared to Linux. It sucks compared to *BSD. Heaven help us, it even sucks compared to Solaris!
Can we please wake up and remember that stability is not measured in the number of days that the machine has not spontaneously burst into flames?!
Interestingly, I can see no way in which that claim fails to describe hotmail (temporary storage, message notification via email with URL, etc) with return-receipt turned on. I don't know if there are any email-via-web services that support return reciept and forwarding of your mail to an alternate address, but if there are they clearly violate that claim.
First, I loved LoTR: FotR. It was a great movie and a solid adaptation (heavy emphasis on adaptation, since no movie could perfectly embody the books, IMHO).
Next, the IMDB has had the "latest and greatest" problem for a LONG time. They've tried to weight votes all sorts of ways to get rid of this phenomenon, and that's why you see Godfather on the list at all. It used to be that SW:ANH was #1 with a bullet and the movie of the week was #2. Why? Because more people were voting every week than had the previous week, and that meant that someone who got to IMDB via a link from some movie site would vote for that movie and that type of voter was in the majority. It just so happened that so many of the minority were united on SW:ANH, that it managed to beat the fragmented movie of the week crowd.
Since current movies are the most popular movie sites on the Web...
So, this is to be expected. I would think that FotR will settle down to somehwhere just below SW:ESB, but who knows.
As movies go, I put it above Truman Show, below Matrix, above SW:TPM, below Rear Window, above Tucker, below Fight Club, above My Neighbor Totoro and below The Usual Suspects. I think that narrows it down pretty well, since those are all movies that I liked quite a bit (all for different reasons).
I suspect that people who have not read the books will rate it higher, though. For example, I rate it below Fight Club because Fight Club wowed me with a very original story. However, Fight Club was also based on a book (one I had not read). If I had read that book, would I weigh the movie adaptation above the movie adaptation of FotR? Probably not, but I don't know....
I think this counts as news for nerds regardless. Circling the entire dome is no small feat, and of course you know they'll have gotten the elvish right... Love those MIT hackers;-)
I saw it almost by accident last night (12:01 showing in Revere, MA). I've got some nits to pick, but was floored overall by the quality of this rendition. I want to make it clear that the small concerns I have below should be the level of critisism that EVERY movie can aspire to, this is not meant to diminish the film.
I understand that a lot had to be cut for time, and to add some hollywood moments here and there, but why remove the repair of Aragorne's sword? It would seem to be critical later on.
Jackson's take on what happens to the wearer when the ring is on is... a little out of place with what Bilbo goes through in The Hobbit
Some of the special effects for the hobbits were inconsistant. I couldn't figure out if they were supposed to be 3 feet tall or 5 (though this faded as I got more into the movie and stopped paying attention to the details of FX)
Gollum's part has been re-worked quite a bit. In place, we're given a visual omen of doom (the creation of the Uruk-Hai). I'm not sure I like that trade-off, though it does make for a more traditional Hollywood action feel, and bad-guy training montages never get old;-).
Everyone does a great job, but I really felt that Elrond was a little wooden compared to the rest of the cast. In just about any other film his performance would have simply been unremarkable, but the level of acting was so damn good, here....
Now for just a few things that I think were brilliant:
The eye. 'Nuff said.
I thought that taking Tom Bombadil out of the beginning would break the pacing. Boy was I wrong! It's important in the book because we're being taken on a slow, guided tour of Frodo's education about the world. Tom is a gentle introduction. The movie simply ups the pace, and that works fine.
Someone give Ian McKellan more money... NOW!
The mines were perfectly done. I think that was probably the biggest challenge, visually, in the movie, and it was brilliant.
Thanks, Peter. Oh, and about making us wait a year... YOU BASTARD!;-)
"stable" is perhaps the world's most misunderstood word, when it comes to software. When you release a version and call it "stable", you're not saying that you haven't seen a fatal industrial accident in 29 days. You're saying that a) the interfaces are frozen so that others may rely on them for external dependancies b) the rate of "emergency changes" has slowed to the point that they should no longer interfere with packaging and release of the software.
That's it. When you buy Red Hat (or SuSe or Debian or whatever), you pay for the NEXT 3-6 months of work, integrating the results of those "stable releases" into a supportable commercial software product. You can roll your own, but if you do you take on a lot of work, and you have to expect that.
Your definition of "intelligent" is suspect. I know many people who could pass Turing's test who would not be able to solve the NYT crossword. I don't think being able to solve hard problems quickly is a factor in intelligence. Being able to evaluate the relative quality of many options based on projected outcomes and prior experience is my rough stab at what makes up intelligence.
Interestingly there are many computer programs which perform this to a limited extent. We don't consider them "intelligent" for roughly the same reasons that we feel that tuna is an acceptable meal, but dolphins must be "safe"....
plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor[
EMACS], shell[bash], C compiler [GCC, probably GNU's largest contribution to the world], linker [GNU ld, an undersung hero],
assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text
formatter [groff, another great program, a YACC [bison], an Empire game [heh, who could have forseen where we'd end up], a spreadsheet [Anyone remember sc?], and hundreds of
other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that
normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including
on-line and hardcopy documentation.
GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical
to Unix. We will make all improvements that are convenient, based
on our experience with other operating systems. In particular,
we plan to have longer filenames [heh], file version numbers [does any modern filesystem do this?], a crashproof
file system [many years later, but it wasn't GNU that did it], filename completion perhaps [built into the shell], terminal-independent
display support, and eventually a Lisp-based window system through
which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen [I sense a bias;-)].
Both C and Lisp will be available as system programming languages [The world might be a simpler place if those were the choices].
We will have network software based on MIT's chaosnet protocol [heard many good things about that, wonder how it compared to IP?],
far superior to UUCP [double heh]. We may also have something compatible
with UUCP [Honey-Dan-Ber UUCP was, of course, free].
It's interesting to look back through this post. UNIX has come a long way (baby....)
Slashdot Mirror
For those not aware of the history, AICN is one of the net's oldest movie rumor sites. They have a style that grates on many (from crude reviews to rambling praise for odd cult films to strange animated graphics of the chubby leader of the cool news pack).
However, there has never been, as far as I know, a better site for finding out what's likely to be going on in the geek-film arena in the next six months to two years. It's where I found out that Lord of the Rings had gone to Peter Jackson. It's where I first heard that Lucas had recanted his early statements about making a third trillogy. They turned me on to such masterworks as The Usual Suspects, The Matrix and Life is Beautiful long before they were on the screen.
I also recommend the AICN: Coaxial section which focuses on television and home-media releases of films (where I found out about the Buckaroo Banzai DVD release).
Very minor nit, but the PDP-1 was the first mini, not a mainframe. The name, Peripheral Data Processor was in response to the econimics of the time. Trying to get PHBs to see the wisdom of buying a couple of minis instead of an IBM mainframe was virtual job-suicide.
However, you could easily justify buying a peripheral to offload some data processing to. Thus was born the PDP and the mini (and eventually PDP was the reason for two of the best OSes of all time: VMS via DEC which is now Compaq and UNIX via Bell Labs which is now partly AT&T, partly Lucent and partly Caldera... what a long road).
Or is that GNU/AOL?
Sounds like a euphamism for gnomes to me, which would be appropriate.
I'm beginning to feel like a broken record, and maybe Linus should just change the terminology so that people stop making the same assumption over and over, but people: wake up and smell the bogomips!
"Stable", in the context of a kernel release refers to the interfaces. When Linus releases 2.<leven>.0, he is saying that this kernel is one that has reached some arbitrary plateu of development stability, and it's now ready for others to begin actuall release engineering on.
You have to understand that the Linux Kernel is released by Linus in a state that is very reasonable for a development team, but that will never be "production quality". Debian puts a lot of realease engineering work into a Kernel. As does Red Hat. As does SuSe, etc, etc.
If you just grab 2.4.x and install it, you're acting as Linux Q/A, and I applaud your effort, but when it breaks in your environment, you should not be stunned.
Once again, production release != stable release. A stable release is just one the developers are happy with (and I've yet to see a 2.4 kernel that I can say developers should not be happy with).
So, maybe next time, 2.6.0 should be called the "post-development" release so that people don't go off half-cocked installing it on production systems.
Please read the GPL. There's no clause that even comes close to what you're suggesting. You are always free to restrict distribution of your changes as long as that restriction is to not distribute.
But, of course, I'm responding to a Troll and am way off topic. Oh well, karma comes and karma goes.
Actually, since Bing and I are across the hall from eachother, here are ITA, let me point out that the really interesting story is that we have the best programming puzzles in the industry.
The goal is to get candidates to submit code samples of their work that actually address the kinds of problems that we work on, so if you can do the puzzles, send us your code and a resume, and there's a great chance you'll be hauled in for an interview at one of the best tech companies in the country!
Keep in mind that we're not just a LISP shop. I'm in the operations group, and I do a lot of Perl and C++ work. Submit code in any language you like!
You believe that there is an appearance [...] You are very wrong. A true analysis of the progress
Ok, so you're argument is that the perception is not one of chaos because the perception does not match the reality of the situation?
I'm just trying to understand, since that would seem to be a self-contradicting statement.
Yes, Linux kernel development is moving along just fine. Yes, it's very well structured. But I work in a Linux shop, and let me tell you what the perception of the folks we deal with is: "Oh, Linux. Isn't that the bunch of kids that are always arguing and forking projects?" I know that that's bunk, but most folks don't.
Which point of view do you think Microsoft is working hard to portray?
Open Source's biggest PR dilema is this sort of argument.
Make no mistake, every company has developers that do this. There's two differences in the Open Source world: 1) you can't just fire an Open Source developer who won't "play ball" with management's edict 2) it's usually public.
These are actually both really good things. The fact that you can't silence someone leads to repeated analysis of a problem. OSS' biggest benefit is that it brings massive peer review to bare not just on the code, but on the process.
The fact that it's public feeds into that, and is equally good.
The problem is PR. The Linux kernel is starting to look like anarchy to non-developers. I suggest that the process works, so we should all take a deep breath and leave it be. However, we all need to take the front lines on PR. Spin is all-important. This is not a "spat" or a "fight", this is "parallel development" and "peer review". The joy of this kind of spin is that, unlike most spin, it's TRUE! This guy is pissed at Linus. Linus has dumped his code. Yet, the two of them keep working hard to meet their customers' demands and producing what they feel is the best possible product.
Please, don't foster the idea that we're a bunch of anarchists producing code that's any less functional than the rest of industry, because quite the opposite is true.
I know this is bass-ackawards, but so was his mandate. So, he called Red Hat. Red Hat said that they run the POSIX test suite, and sometimes it works and sometimes it don't. They don't officially support 100% compliance to the POSIX test suite because a) it's buggy and b) sometimes compliance would hurt the average Linux consumer. Messages on the Debian lists seemed to confirm this approach in the Debian community.
So, now we get to my problem with the above quote. What is the goal of Linux visa vis POSIX compliance? Should we be pushing the POSIX folks to clarify the standard in such cases? Should we be making sure that the test suite doesn't test for this condition? Or, do we really care?
Don't know the right answer, but I'd love to see the discussion instead of a vacuum...
....but... if I had to make a bet on it, I'd wager a large sum that illegal activities were occuring.
Sure, I can buy that. I'd also buy that if a helicopter shows heavy IR coming from a house in a residential area, that there's a good chance there's a grow-room in it. Note please, that such evidence is no longer sufficient for a warrant.
I know you didn't say "... so lock the bastards up", but the presumption of guilt is a large step in the wrong direction. My feeling (and it's just that) on this is that a school should attempt to provide an environment that seeks to engage students in the basics of our society. Acting as an authorotarian regime, and presuming guilt is arguably a very bad way to do this.
Now, the students in question seem to have violated school policy, and for that I understand that some administrative action was required. But, to presume anything more seems unreasonable to me.
I hate to be topical, here, but we are not Borg. The "Slashdot Community" is no more a single hive-mind with but a single thought than any other broad-based subculture (I remember someone explaining to me that this is why the gay community has such a hard time getting anything done).
When you see one article with folks flaming the MPAA and saying that they (MPAA) needs to be stopped, and another which raves about some new DVD, why would you assume that the same people are interested? Slashdot is correctly reporting on "News for Nerds", it's not censoring "cool MPAA stuff" because it would hurt some particular cause any more than its censoring anti-MPAA stuff; nor should they!
Now, I very much see the value in pointing out to the "ooh, shiny thing" audience that these brand new nifty DVDs are brought to you by the folks who want to stamp out fair use as if it were a plague, but let's not expect that EVERYONE will listen. Many folks who are geeky enough to care about what Slashdot says have no interest in fair use and what it means to them. I consider this their loss, but it's a valid point of view.
didn't understand that leaving Kazaa, Morpheus and all their other file trading utilities on all day long was not only illegal,
Hello! Why would leaving Kazaa running all day be illegal?!
I think you're making some interesting conclusions about legal precidents which have yet to be set. Now, I could buy that explicitly downloading something which is copyrighted is a violation of copyright (assuming that no other provision, e.g. licensing, has been made), but you're way out on a limb otherwise.
Morpheus, Gnutella, etc. Those should be blocked.
;-)
This is the classic application of authority to solve a technical problem. Look how well that works for the Chinese
Now, if a University *really* wanted to solve the problem, they would devote some research dollars to p2p networking.
For starters, yes the majority of p2p communications these days is porn and music. You will also find humor, news footage, open source software, movie trailers released (quietly and so as not to endorse the media) by the studios, text documents authored by fanatics, fools, story-tellers and tech writers.
If Universities have a problem with high bandwidth utilization, they should 1) work on the protocols to make them more sensitive to network topology so that they prefer cheaper resources (ala UUCP) 2) impose per-port bandwidth monitoring and charge students per-Gb after some nominal "you can do your homework and send mail to the folks" cap 3) educate students on how the services they use affect bandwidth.
This idea that Gnutella should be banned because we don't like what it *can* (and often is) used for is counter to what Universities profess to offer to their students. If I wantsed to get a lesson in authoritarian control, I'd work for the IRS.
You liked the GPL.
You joined a company that had a business plan centered on software that was distributed under an open source license (not the GPL, but I'll follow you that far).
That company semi-failed and had to lay off employees (including you).
Conclusion: The GPL "doesn't pay my rent"... Well, I suggest to the folks being laid off at Ford that "your precious e-commerce and online-stock trading (two of the side-ventures that hurt Ford) don't pay their rent". However, we cannot the extrapolate to say that the GPL, e-commerce and online stock trading are the ingredients that make for bad business models.
Personally, I think that the GPL is a tough nut to crack for business, and it will be another decade before the economics of GPLed software are truely understood. This does not change the facts that
- There are many successful companies from small mom-and-pop operations to fairly sizable public companies (RHAT) to behemoths like Apple and IBM that are doing very well interacting with GPLed and other open source software.
- Companies with bad business plans, or which are overcome by market pressures will fail
- The GPL is not, in and of itself a business model, good or ill.
- Opinion: if your business plan is "GPL good, non-GPL bad", you will fail
I'm sorry you got laid off. Really. But, please don't lay it at the feet of the GPL.The point? Hmm, leave it to an IT guy to think only IT guys have use for processor speed.
... not windows -- Been done by installing Linux since the mid 90s.
3D rendering, MP*/QT encoding, video transition rendering, image manipulation (rotate a 20 meg image clockwise 1 degree anyone?), audio DSP, and making Windows not seem sluggish
3D redering -- Speed comes from RAM, video hardware and bus speed, these days, not CPU speed.
Video -- Hardware video decoders are a must. Why would you want your CPU to grunt over decoding video?!
audio DSP -- Been done in commodity hardware since the early 90s....
Making windows seem
I've had limited experience with 2000 (friends who have been forced to install it in production environments tell me that the daily reboot that NT4 required was down to weekly), but I use XP at home to play games. I have to admit that 30-40 percent of the time that the game crashes, it now fails to take the OS with it.
This is great for a Windows OS (don't let them fool you into thinking it's not a DOS descendent, just ask what OS' limitations Win32 was written arund....)
However, it SUCKS for a multi-user OS. It sucks compared to MacOS X. It sucks compared to Linux. It sucks compared to *BSD. Heaven help us, it even sucks compared to Solaris!
Can we please wake up and remember that stability is not measured in the number of days that the machine has not spontaneously burst into flames?!
Interestingly, I can see no way in which that claim fails to describe hotmail (temporary storage, message notification via email with URL, etc) with return-receipt turned on. I don't know if there are any email-via-web services that support return reciept and forwarding of your mail to an alternate address, but if there are they clearly violate that claim.
First, I loved LoTR: FotR. It was a great movie and a solid adaptation (heavy emphasis on adaptation, since no movie could perfectly embody the books, IMHO).
Next, the IMDB has had the "latest and greatest" problem for a LONG time. They've tried to weight votes all sorts of ways to get rid of this phenomenon, and that's why you see Godfather on the list at all. It used to be that SW:ANH was #1 with a bullet and the movie of the week was #2. Why? Because more people were voting every week than had the previous week, and that meant that someone who got to IMDB via a link from some movie site would vote for that movie and that type of voter was in the majority. It just so happened that so many of the minority were united on SW:ANH, that it managed to beat the fragmented movie of the week crowd.
Since current movies are the most popular movie sites on the Web...
So, this is to be expected. I would think that FotR will settle down to somehwhere just below SW:ESB, but who knows.
As movies go, I put it above Truman Show, below Matrix, above SW:TPM, below Rear Window, above Tucker, below Fight Club, above My Neighbor Totoro and below The Usual Suspects. I think that narrows it down pretty well, since those are all movies that I liked quite a bit (all for different reasons).
I suspect that people who have not read the books will rate it higher, though. For example, I rate it below Fight Club because Fight Club wowed me with a very original story. However, Fight Club was also based on a book (one I had not read). If I had read that book, would I weigh the movie adaptation above the movie adaptation of FotR? Probably not, but I don't know....
I think this counts as news for nerds regardless. Circling the entire dome is no small feat, and of course you know they'll have gotten the elvish right... Love those MIT hackers ;-)
- I understand that a lot had to be cut for time, and to add some hollywood moments here and there, but why remove the repair of Aragorne's sword? It would seem to be critical later on.
- Jackson's take on what happens to the wearer when the ring is on is... a little out of place with what Bilbo goes through in The Hobbit
- Some of the special effects for the hobbits were inconsistant. I couldn't figure out if they were supposed to be 3 feet tall or 5 (though this faded as I got more into the movie and stopped paying attention to the details of FX)
- Gollum's part has been re-worked quite a bit. In place, we're given a visual omen of doom (the creation of the Uruk-Hai). I'm not sure I like that trade-off, though it does make for a more traditional Hollywood action feel, and bad-guy training montages never get old
;-). - Everyone does a great job, but I really felt that Elrond was a little wooden compared to the rest of the cast. In just about any other film his performance would have simply been unremarkable, but the level of acting was so damn good, here....
Now for just a few things that I think were brilliant:- The eye. 'Nuff said.
- I thought that taking Tom Bombadil out of the beginning would break the pacing. Boy was I wrong! It's important in the book because we're being taken on a slow, guided tour of Frodo's education about the world. Tom is a gentle introduction. The movie simply ups the pace, and that works fine.
- Someone give Ian McKellan more money... NOW!
- The mines were perfectly done. I think that was probably the biggest challenge, visually, in the movie, and it was brilliant.
Thanks, Peter. Oh, and about making us wait a year... YOU BASTARD!Yep, there's that word....
"stable" is perhaps the world's most misunderstood word, when it comes to software. When you release a version and call it "stable", you're not saying that you haven't seen a fatal industrial accident in 29 days. You're saying that a) the interfaces are frozen so that others may rely on them for external dependancies b) the rate of "emergency changes" has slowed to the point that they should no longer interfere with packaging and release of the software.
That's it. When you buy Red Hat (or SuSe or Debian or whatever), you pay for the NEXT 3-6 months of work, integrating the results of those "stable releases" into a supportable commercial software product. You can roll your own, but if you do you take on a lot of work, and you have to expect that.
I've admined VMS, which is why I asked if any "modern OSes" allowed for such a thing.
Your definition of "intelligent" is suspect. I know many people who could pass Turing's test who would not be able to solve the NYT crossword. I don't think being able to solve hard problems quickly is a factor in intelligence. Being able to evaluate the relative quality of many options based on projected outcomes and prior experience is my rough stab at what makes up intelligence.
Interestingly there are many computer programs which perform this to a limited extent. We don't consider them "intelligent" for roughly the same reasons that we feel that tuna is an acceptable meal, but dolphins must be "safe"....