They make some vague claims, such as "we believe [the patent owners] are serving papers right now." Note the fact that they have no concrete examples of this happening.
Heh, maybe Bruce Perens and OSTG can start selling them MP3 insurance...
Adding to the belief that EA (now in cahoots with ESPN) and Madden would part ways was the fact that Madden will be leaving ABC's Monday Night Football to get behind the microphone of NBC's Sunday Night Football in 2006.
I must have missed that development -- is he jumping from the sinking MNF ship or did ESPN kick him out?
I was a fan of the guy back when, but having him explain football as it's played in the 21st century is like having Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Joy on your 1337 new TV show about computers...
...that people who say "mash-up" be locked in a room with people who say "boxen". And people like Tim O'Reilly who try to extend the term beyond mixing together a drum-n-bass loop and a Jon Stewart clip and pretending you're a real musician should be locked in a cell with people who complain about "hacker" being used inappropriately.
My question was going to be "Whatever happened to Cringeley anyway?" I stopped reading his column years ago as the only value seemed to be of the broken-clock-that's-right-twice-a-day variety. Judging from the evaporation of once-common Cringeley links on Slashdot, I'm not the only one.
As the guest list indicates (Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Joy? Where's Alan Turing?), his circle of Silicon Valley buddies is getting a bit long in the tooth...
As it happens, his first statement is completely wrong, as even the slightest reading of the/. blurb would indicate. I declined to address that bit out of generosity.
As for the rest of it -- if that's what passes for logic for the you two, then, good. To me it seems a bit silly to complain about "stupid hyperactive irresponsible american parents" for expressing displeasure instead of outlawing sales to minors. If GTA 4 is outlawed altogether in the US, are you going to be happy then?
Now I'm cheering on the british... stupid hyperactive irresponsible american parents... stop making a fuss over nothing.
Huh? The point is that the game was already *illegal* for sale to minors in the UK!
I don't get it...
on
RockStar Speaks
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Several investigations are now underway to determine if the allegations are true.
C'mon, we're not talking about finding the Loch Ness Monster or reading the Dead Sea Scrolls! The respective claims of Rockstar and the 1337 h4x0rs are so far apart it doesn't seem like this would be a difficult question to settle objectively...
Historically, they were allies with the anti-WinTel PowerPC platform, but now, with IBM still as a Big Iron vendor and Apple's emergence as a possible supercomputer clsuter provider...
My guess is more that with IBM getting out of the personal computer business (and already a decade out of the PC operating system business), there was no major upside to fighting WinTel, and a lot of nuisance. Like with Motorola, keeping Apple moving forward just wasn't a priority for them.
Thats not half as bad as the anti-tv zealots that feel a need to mention that they never watch tv every time it is mentioned just so they can feel superior.
Around here, those have been supplanted by the people who don't watch reality shows, constantly tell you how much they hate reality shows and yet seem to know every last detail about shows I've never heard of. "Can you believe people watch that crap? Like last night, when ___ told ___ that...., and then on ___ they kicked off ___ because..."
Me, I'm just waiting for them to bring back Temptation Island.
The experts weren't sure that any punishment could fit the crime, but they had several suggestions: Make the hacker spend 16 hours a day fielding help-desk inquiries in an AOL chat room for computer novices. Force him to do this with a user name at least as uncool as KoolDude and to work on a vintage IBM PC with a 2400-baud dial-up connection. Most painful of all for any geek, make him use Windows 95 for the rest of his life.
Some of us might be able to recognize an element of facetiousness there without having to consult Wikipedia for guidance. Of course, I'm not a "computer professional".
Somone call John Dvorak...his title as reigning champion of the blithering idiots is being seriously contested.
Just who is this John Tierney anyway? Judging from his whining about 'man-years I've spent running virus scans and reformatting hard drives', he doesn't sound like any computer profesional I know...
1) He's joking.
2) He's a columnist who frequently combines analysis with whimsy.
3) I understand that the submitter and CmdrTaco can't be expected to catch this stuff. But with 67 +1 posts, am I really the only one to get it?
4) How freaking dense are you people? I'm looking forward to "Who is this Dave Barry fellow? He doesn't sound like any computer professional I know...
If I was going to recommend a programming language for such a person, it would be Java, on the strength of the API documentation alone, but certainly not Objective-C.
And therefore eliminating the Java option raises the barrier to entry for Cocoa! We're basically agreeing, so I don't understand what you're objecting to.
After reading the comments at MacSlash, I figured it's worth clarifying here -- this has nothing to do with cross-platform Java applications (i.e. what "Java support" normally means). What's being pulled is the ability to write to the native Cocoa API in the Java language.
Good idea? As far as large software makers go, it probably doesn't matter. Adobe's Mac developers have all learned Objective C already. This does significantly raise the barrier of entry for hobbyist coders, though. Seems like a typical Apple decision, certainly.
According to the article, this is cash flow from operations, so the revenue from the sales shouldn't be included. (Which, of course, doesn't mean it isn't, somehow.) More likely is that the sale eliminated a lot of red ink that would otherwise have been included in CFO.
Are the Powers That Be simply sitting on a bunch of cures...
Yeah, that's it. We're spending billions of dollars on research to find cures and not sell them. Then when patients die, we burglarize their homes during the funeral. Profit!
Look. Killing certain human cells while not killing all the rest of the cells is hard. It's a lot harder than killing a foreign pathogen without killing the human, which is already a lot harder than, say, rebooting a server or modifying a Perl script.
...or do these things never turn out to be as promising as they were in experimental trials?
Also, please note that the cancer treatment here hasn't been in human trials. (The AIDS treatment has.) It hasn't even been in animals yet. Will it fail to be as promising as the hyperventilating press release makes out? There's a 99.9999% chance that it will.
Why don't they pack up shop and move to Texas or New Mexico? If they can set off a nuke there, I think a rocket accident is the least of their worries.
I think because if a down-range accident happens, you want the wreckage to land in the ocean, not on Phoenix or Ciudad Juarez.
It's surprising we hear so little about MEPIS, given that it's more popular on DistroWatch than SUSE, Debian, Knoppix, Gentoo, and Slackware...
I think the answer is that DistroWatch rankings are completely meaningless. KANOTIX is more popular than Red Hat? PHLAK is more popular than SuSe? Who the hell reads those pages at all? Is somebody getting up every morning and checking to see what version of Postfix is current on Mandows or AGNULA?
The point isn't the precise correctness of assertions that are mostly guesswork, anyway; it's that the overall trend is to consolidation and away from the free-for-all of the Finally, Linux Is Ready For The Desktop! days.
A good C programmer will know this info already (or be on their path there), as the only reason for knowing C today is to interact on a close level with the machine, or to know exactly how things are handled, otherwise theyd be mad not to use a higher level language.
I haven't R'dTFB (not being insane enough to download a book-length PDF linked off the newest story on/.) but it's not obvious that that's so. The book is supposedly using a novel approach to maximizing code readability and comprehensibility, right? Is the result (you've read the book, IIUC) no different from conventional C hacker wisdom?
On the contrary, what you're talking about was the situation in 2002.
Today, things have basically contracted to Ubuntu, Gentoo, Novell/SuSe, Debian and Mandrake on the desktop and the Red Hat family and Debian on the server. The other desktop distros (Turbo, Caldera, Lycoris, Xandros, Lindows/Linwhatever, and the rest) have mostly faded. In the next few years Ubuntu will cannibalize the remaining Debian desktop share, and Mandrake has been spinning its wheels since version 7. The consolidation you're looking for has already happened -- remaining niche players like Yellow Dog don't affect the overall picture.
I'd said I was done here, but you make a sensible argument and deserve a reply:
You just WANT it to be illegal, but logic, not just nerd logic, leads to a different conclusion.
In fact, the legality of hitting an open access point is not particularly my concern. (And, at a minimum, I think leeching bandwidth should be distinguished from real intrusion into files.) What I was objecting to is the assertion that parking in front of someone's house and using his network is indistinguishable from connecting to eBay, and that anyone who draws a distinction between the two knows nothing about the Intarweb.
That said:
1) I'd agree with you more about giving the benefit of the doubt to public use if a majority, or even a large minority of "public" access points were deliberately made public. Given the shoddiness of default wireless security, though, I'm pretty sure that's not the case.
2) The guy in this particular case 100% knew that he wasn't supposed to be on that network, and only nerd logic could hold otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, maybe Bruce Perens and OSTG can start selling them MP3 insurance...
I must have missed that development -- is he jumping from the sinking MNF ship or did ESPN kick him out?
I was a fan of the guy back when, but having him explain football as it's played in the 21st century is like having Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Joy on your 1337 new TV show about computers...
...that people who say "mash-up" be locked in a room with people who say "boxen". And people like Tim O'Reilly who try to extend the term beyond mixing together a drum-n-bass loop and a Jon Stewart clip and pretending you're a real musician should be locked in a cell with people who complain about "hacker" being used inappropriately.
My question was going to be "Whatever happened to Cringeley anyway?" I stopped reading his column years ago as the only value seemed to be of the broken-clock-that's-right-twice-a-day variety. Judging from the evaporation of once-common Cringeley links on Slashdot, I'm not the only one.
As the guest list indicates (Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Joy? Where's Alan Turing?), his circle of Silicon Valley buddies is getting a bit long in the tooth...
As it happens, his first statement is completely wrong, as even the slightest reading of the /. blurb would indicate. I declined to address that bit out of generosity.
As for the rest of it -- if that's what passes for logic for the you two, then, good. To me it seems a bit silly to complain about "stupid hyperactive irresponsible american parents" for expressing displeasure instead of outlawing sales to minors. If GTA 4 is outlawed altogether in the US, are you going to be happy then?
Huh? The point is that the game was already *illegal* for sale to minors in the UK!
C'mon, we're not talking about finding the Loch Ness Monster or reading the Dead Sea Scrolls! The respective claims of Rockstar and the 1337 h4x0rs are so far apart it doesn't seem like this would be a difficult question to settle objectively...
My guess is more that with IBM getting out of the personal computer business (and already a decade out of the PC operating system business), there was no major upside to fighting WinTel, and a lot of nuisance. Like with Motorola, keeping Apple moving forward just wasn't a priority for them.
(I have no idea whether or not it actually _is_ new.)
Around here, those have been supplanted by the people who don't watch reality shows, constantly tell you how much they hate reality shows and yet seem to know every last detail about shows I've never heard of. "Can you believe people watch that crap? Like last night, when ___ told ___ that...., and then on ___ they kicked off ___ because..."
Me, I'm just waiting for them to bring back Temptation Island.
Some of us might be able to recognize an element of facetiousness there without having to consult Wikipedia for guidance. Of course, I'm not a "computer professional".
Just who is this John Tierney anyway? Judging from his whining about 'man-years I've spent running virus scans and reformatting hard drives', he doesn't sound like any computer profesional I know...
1) He's joking.
2) He's a columnist who frequently combines analysis with whimsy.
3) I understand that the submitter and CmdrTaco can't be expected to catch this stuff. But with 67 +1 posts, am I really the only one to get it?
4) How freaking dense are you people? I'm looking forward to "Who is this Dave Barry fellow? He doesn't sound like any computer professional I know...
Apparently, zombies are the one topic that's more appealing to posters than bitterly complaining about dupes...
And therefore eliminating the Java option raises the barrier to entry for Cocoa! We're basically agreeing, so I don't understand what you're objecting to.
Macslash makes PowerPage seem like ArsTechnica.
Well, these days Ars Technica seems a lot like Slashdot...
Good idea? As far as large software makers go, it probably doesn't matter. Adobe's Mac developers have all learned Objective C already. This does significantly raise the barrier of entry for hobbyist coders, though. Seems like a typical Apple decision, certainly.
Sorry, but I'm not sure you're in a position to cast the first stone here...
According to the article, this is cash flow from operations, so the revenue from the sales shouldn't be included. (Which, of course, doesn't mean it isn't, somehow.) More likely is that the sale eliminated a lot of red ink that would otherwise have been included in CFO.
Yes. Ruby on Rails. I hear it cures cancer, too.
Yeah, that's it. We're spending billions of dollars on research to find cures and not sell them. Then when patients die, we burglarize their homes during the funeral. Profit!
Look. Killing certain human cells while not killing all the rest of the cells is hard. It's a lot harder than killing a foreign pathogen without killing the human, which is already a lot harder than, say, rebooting a server or modifying a Perl script.
Also, please note that the cancer treatment here hasn't been in human trials. (The AIDS treatment has.) It hasn't even been in animals yet. Will it fail to be as promising as the hyperventilating press release makes out? There's a 99.9999% chance that it will.
I think because if a down-range accident happens, you want the wreckage to land in the ocean, not on Phoenix or Ciudad Juarez.
I think the answer is that DistroWatch rankings are completely meaningless. KANOTIX is more popular than Red Hat? PHLAK is more popular than SuSe? Who the hell reads those pages at all? Is somebody getting up every morning and checking to see what version of Postfix is current on Mandows or AGNULA?
The point isn't the precise correctness of assertions that are mostly guesswork, anyway; it's that the overall trend is to consolidation and away from the free-for-all of the Finally, Linux Is Ready For The Desktop! days.
I haven't R'dTFB (not being insane enough to download a book-length PDF linked off the newest story on /.) but it's not obvious that that's so. The book is supposedly using a novel approach to maximizing code readability and comprehensibility, right? Is the result (you've read the book, IIUC) no different from conventional C hacker wisdom?
Today, things have basically contracted to Ubuntu, Gentoo, Novell/SuSe, Debian and Mandrake on the desktop and the Red Hat family and Debian on the server. The other desktop distros (Turbo, Caldera, Lycoris, Xandros, Lindows/Linwhatever, and the rest) have mostly faded. In the next few years Ubuntu will cannibalize the remaining Debian desktop share, and Mandrake has been spinning its wheels since version 7. The consolidation you're looking for has already happened -- remaining niche players like Yellow Dog don't affect the overall picture.
You just WANT it to be illegal, but logic, not just nerd logic, leads to a different conclusion.
In fact, the legality of hitting an open access point is not particularly my concern. (And, at a minimum, I think leeching bandwidth should be distinguished from real intrusion into files.) What I was objecting to is the assertion that parking in front of someone's house and using his network is indistinguishable from connecting to eBay, and that anyone who draws a distinction between the two knows nothing about the Intarweb.
That said:
1) I'd agree with you more about giving the benefit of the doubt to public use if a majority, or even a large minority of "public" access points were deliberately made public. Given the shoddiness of default wireless security, though, I'm pretty sure that's not the case.
2) The guy in this particular case 100% knew that he wasn't supposed to be on that network, and only nerd logic could hold otherwise.