Bowie accepts that the (rather modern) "traditional" concept of music sales is on its way out, and forecasts that bands will have to tour in order to stay alive. From the tone, he's comfortably excited about it.
Yes, I understand that. And so does David Bowie. The important thing, I suggest, is that we make a huge show of support. Record distribution remains wholey unchanged, for the time being. Soon in will be. For the moment however, a demonstration of loyalty to artists who believe current methods are horrible can only help the situation.
If fans react by supporting him and his label, he'll definitely associate it with his stance on music. It will not convince him he has it wrong or something. It will make him smile and know that he hit the nail right on the head. Perhaps he'll even up his opinions beyond passing comments of a small interview.
This kind of act needs rewarded. I definitely agree that supporting his concert is a means of doing this, but so is buying his record (which is more feasible for some).
An artist, a rather good one at that, has stepped forward and made a move for the greater good.
Now the question is, will the Slashdot community - a group always bitching about these issues - use its large, unified presence to mirror that good act? I was just discussing with my girlfriend that we ought to go out and purchase the CD as soon as it becomes available.
If there's a huge show of support for Bowie's move here, it will reflect that his ideals are good ones. Others will follow his lead (lots of other artists have - but after seeing his success). So go out and actually buy a disc with confidence that most of the money is going to the artist, instead of some rich old wind-bag's pocket.
By your reasoning, by calling a distro 'mature', I should perceive it to be exactly the opposite. An immature, scam of a distro. Thanks for the insight.
Stupid comment. Have you no reading comprehension? First of all, I am not a vendor touting a product. Second, none of the products I mentioned as being mature advertise that they are mature. That fact is implied historically that they have been around for a while. Not because their marketing departments say they are.
"Unbreakable"? THE Reason To Stay Away.
on
'Unbreakable Linux'
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
I am sure we have all received spam email that contained a phrase "THIS EMAIL IS NOT SPAM!!!" What is the first thing that this statement tells us? Simply that email is in fact spam and probably contains some sort of nonsense gimmic, lies, or scam. Why do spammers put lines like these in their spam? Because in some people, this tends to create a feeling of excitement or levity that for the moment, gives them cause to evaluate the content of the email.
With this in mind, enter "Unbreakable Linux". The first thing you should get from this title is that it is most definitely a gimmic. Immediately, you should recognize that the opposite is true to an extreme. Oracle and whatever marketing department is driving this product not on quality, but with reliance upon the mentality that such an impressive title gives. Oracle database was also claimed to be unbreakable. Goes to show how much they know about inpenitrable security. Aside from that, a distro like this is bound to contain all sorts of proprietary foolishness that is not up for community review. It will likely lack the "many eyes" principle that makes other open source software so rock solid against attacks and failures. This combined with the product's immaturity in the face of tried and true distros from other vendors, you certainly have a very breakable and likely to be broken operating system.
So what we have here is spam on a huge scale. We're sure to have this nonsense fired at us for months to come because Oracle have deep pockets full of cash. Hopefully, most people will ignore ploys like these and stick to distros that are mature and need more usage to improve (Debian, RedHat, et al).
actually, if you are hired by the company to crack property that company owns, you are not in violation of the DMCA, because you are authorized to do so.
Normally, I would agree with you. However, it seems that the possibility the party that requested the hacking might change their minds and decide to give you a hassle.
...if the European version of the DMCA is passed, this would be an illegal act, likely to get the participant thrown in jail. Just to generalize, if the system is used commercially as a copy protection scheme by anyone, it would immediately fall under the category of "circumventing a copy protection device" by "cracking" it.
Of course, I am sure those in charge would happily my exceptions to this rule when it suits them. Still, this could be a great opportunity to speak out against such legislature.
There is such a word as "oban", which means the same as "oba-san", but also contains somewhat negative sense there (and not very polite in many cases).
This is what I was getting at.:) Probably from the device or software making an error. I'm sure it can do "I would like some bread and cheese" well enough anywhere though.
Which district? There are significantly different dialects of Nihon'go spread throughout Tokyo itself, let alone the northern and southern parts of the country. Try learning some basic Japanese before journeying to Japan. You PDA will likely end up calling a 30+year lady an "oban-san" and that's the last thing you want in Japan.:)
The dumbest statement I have seen here in a while.
Prove it. Perhaps you failed to properly understand it and think things through before replying.
The children should decide?
Absolutely. Contrary to your typical parental opinion, children have brains and they are not stupid. They know what they're doing. Just the same as you giggled with all your friends when you looked up "sex" and "penis" in your school's encyclopaedia.
If parents took some responsibility to spend time with their children and instill their values into their children, they'd have nothing to worry about. Instead, they ship their kids off to day care and work all day. Children can be taught to look out for and stay away from harmful material. Myself and a close friend of mine, even at young ages, knew what was right and wrong.
So when they do a search on Toy Story and a bunch of porn sites pop up, they are supposed to go: Is this morally right for me to look at?
This looks quite innocuous to me. So does this. You're one of those who sides with these panicky, overzealous, hyper soccer moms that have a heart attack at the first sight of reality. Children aren't raised in a pure, crystalline world. There's no sense in pretending that they will never be exposed to sex, violence, or anything else you find "objectionable". It will happen. The only way to prevent this would be to lock them in a box until they're 21 years old. And after that, they'll still be children. It never helps to patronize children. That only frustrates them and defeats the natural development of their intellects. Deal with it rationally, not like a fruit with a mindless agenda that needs no pursuit. I wasn't censored from the Internet when I in my early teens, and neither was anyone else I know. Everyone's turned out fine.
Gimme me a break.
Go out and hang with your right winger friends. Pat each other on the back over how right you are and past "breaks" back and forth. The rest of us prefer to just live life without ridiculous and excessive regulation and other nonsense.
There are a plethora of searches that yield perfectly acceptable results (if done right) that censoring software will filter. Search google for "breast cancer" with NetNanny or some other stupid filter, and it will block everything.
Get a clue. It's up to the people, even children, to decide what they do and do not want to look at. Parents should never bitch about kids looking at "objectional material". It's their own damn faults if they failed to instill their morals in their children.
I can only assume I'm either being mod-bombed, or two of you are just plain idiots. Why exactly is this a "troll"? It cannot even be remotely called as such. It's a simple observation on which I wanted input of other people in the/. community. Now I won't get it because nobody will read it.
Slashdot moderators need some accountability. Meta-mod doesn't do it.
We can have all sorts of stories posted about the latest Linux kernel patch level, but when it comes to important matters of freedom... the Slashdot editors turn the other way ("Oooh! Puppies!"). Sorry for the OT, but this is for those interested in the fight to keep freedom in and censorship out of libraries...
* 2002-06-01 13:41:19 Courts Strike Down Law For Library Filters (yro,news) (rejected)According to this story over at the NewYork Times (free registration automatically generated for you), a "federal court panel struck down a law requiring libraries to filter the Internet for material harmful to minors yesterday, saying that the technology blocks so much unobjectionable material that it would violate the First Amendment rights of library patrons." I think we all know what a great win this is, especially if you've ever had a search struck down when doing research on breast cancer or the Holocaust (such nasty topics children should never be exposed to, appearantly).
For your erudition;From the human zygote to the human adult there are no genetic or cellular changes besides the unfolding, damage and repair of the DNA and growth, decay, and loss of cells. To your logic we may not be the same person we were yesterday which is a paradox.
You're right, it is a paradox. But it is also true. The fact that something is a paradox does not make it false. Every day our cells die while others divide. We take in different types of food and expell what's left of what we last consumed. Every day, large portions of our bodies are replaced with different material that makes up brand new cells. It can be truly stated that my body is almost completely different from the one I had 2 years ago. So, if I set my computer chair on fire, and throw it away, then replace it with another chair, is it the same chair? Is it the same workstation? I would venture a guess of "no" for both, but again, it's a matter of opinion. Along these lines, not a single cell from your original set after conception remains. Not even the DNA are the same from each cellular division to the next (with the loss of the RNA primer). So are you the same human being today as you were then? I don't think so either.
Looking at the benchmarks for Quake III, I immediately asked myself, "is TransGaming capping the frame rate?" It seems quite unlikely that all three benchmarks with vastly different settings would yield the same results without any intentional influence. Thanks to the closed source nature of WineX, it seems possible to me that TransGaming will do what many other software companies have done to encourage users to buy upgrades: cripple a product that people can't live without. Maybe WineX 2.1 will boast higher rates than 60fps. Shady.
I have a Riva TNT2 based card in my gaming box (a 1.4GHz Athlon/w a Tbird core). This box, running Windows, could never give me decent frame rates in Unreal Tournament or Quake III with resolutions above 800x600 with decent texture quality. Now, under X, UT is silky smooth at 1024x768 with maximum detail. Quake III is only marginally better, but there is definitely an improvement. The only downside is that I have to clock the memory speed of my card down using NVclock otherwise I get random crashes (such that the mem and core speeds are the same). (But it's still faster than Windows.)
Anyway, the point is that Linux turns out to be a powerful gaming platform (duh). It's a shame that there isn't more commercial game development taking place for it. TransGaming is doing a great job, but this bit about only supporting nVidia at this point is frustrating. This line, "This could change if other graphics card vendors improve their Linux drivers, but for now Nvidia is the only game in town" seems silly to me. ATI Radeon support under Linux is pretty solid (maybe not as good as nVidia's, but it is open source and that makes a huge difference) and so more attention ought to be paid to it. Besides, what's the point of restricting development to nVidia? We're dealing with OpenGL here, which is a common interface to all 3D hardware. What difference does it make, so long as X has proper GLX support? Does TransGaming get funded by nVidia?
...do they have to develop a 3D accellerator that is compatible with most software (OpenGL, DirectX, etc)? It seems to me that many of the design concepts in this arena are mired up in patents by giants like nVidia and ATI. For instance, doesn't nVidia have 'rights' to per-pixel vertex shader techniques?
No, CS courses are not about learing to write sorting algorythms, compilers, operating systems, or any code at all. Computer Science courses should focus on the theory topics such as "this is how you determine the time it would take for the algorythm to complete" (since this is a very limited, deliberate subset of the Turing Halting question, it is possible). Most students won't understand the theory they know how to write code and put the theory to use writing (or analyzing) code-- but that shouldn't affect the course's focus.
You're confusing discrete mathematics with computer science. CS involves code to apply the algorithms. The algorithms are abstract. Most of them cannot be used in anything except theoretical constructs (such as those that appear on a computer system). You can learn everything about computer science without any computer technology, but you will be unable to apply it to anything meaningful. As a result, I the ability to code is critical to acheiving a useful computer science education. Just the same as physics students apply the theory of numbers to real world objects, computer science students apply the theory of algorithms to operating systems, compilers, and what have you.
So if when you talk of teaching "how to write... sorting routines" you mean teaching "this is the optimal sort algorythm" not "this is how you determine the efficiency", you are the one who've missed the point of CS education.
This doesn't oppose my argument. Code is extremely useful for determining algorithmic complexity. Obviously not required, except for a niche. If you don't know about code, you won't know where to use which algorithms. On top of that, if you can't code them, you probably do not understand them.
As for your statement that I do not know the point of CS... I can only respond by asking you what the point is. Computer science is a broad field. It includes everything from linguistic analysis to software development. It's not specific and myopic as you're making it seem.
Maybe now some young Computer Science student can spend more time on developing a good overall program, instead of spending a bunch of time writing simple things like their own sorting routine.
You're missing the point of a CS education. Students are supposed to learn how to write "simple" things like sorting routines. (Of course, if you think sorting is simple, you're either inexperienced or you're extremely well versed in computer science.) That's why professors always tell you to not use libraries for assignments you're supposed to do yourself. Otherwise, we're talking about short typing exercises. The more simple algorithms you write, the more experience you gain for making the jump from higher complexity algorithms to code.
Students should not be swapping code on assignments. That's called cheating. These kids need to write as much code as possible, even if it's been done before.
...We can rest assured that Toplan will have absolutely no involvement whatsoever with the building of this base. They are a Japanese company, right? Right!?
Had a friend who I worked with at a start up one summer. Told me - quit frustratedly - that he lost points on an assignment for this...
// increments i by one i++;
Don't do that. Some code is self-documenting. Document pre and post conditions of complex procedures, and make notes of what they do internally. As for the algorithms described in those procedures, leave that for external documentation. (They often require proofs anyway which do not fall into the scope of source documentation.)
Re:This article an off topic troll.
on
Review: U-571
·
· Score: 2
Slashdot Mirror
Did you even read the article?
Yes.
Bowie accepts that the (rather modern) "traditional" concept of music sales is on its way out, and forecasts that bands will have to tour in order to stay alive. From the tone, he's comfortably excited about it.
Yes, I understand that. And so does David Bowie. The important thing, I suggest, is that we make a huge show of support. Record distribution remains wholey unchanged, for the time being. Soon in will be. For the moment however, a demonstration of loyalty to artists who believe current methods are horrible can only help the situation.
If fans react by supporting him and his label, he'll definitely associate it with his stance on music. It will not convince him he has it wrong or something. It will make him smile and know that he hit the nail right on the head. Perhaps he'll even up his opinions beyond passing comments of a small interview.
This kind of act needs rewarded. I definitely agree that supporting his concert is a means of doing this, but so is buying his record (which is more feasible for some).
I meant "thought", not "though" :)
An artist, a rather good one at that, has stepped forward and made a move for the greater good.
Now the question is, will the Slashdot community - a group always bitching about these issues - use its large, unified presence to mirror that good act? I was just discussing with my girlfriend that we ought to go out and purchase the CD as soon as it becomes available.
If there's a huge show of support for Bowie's move here, it will reflect that his ideals are good ones. Others will follow his lead (lots of other artists have - but after seeing his success). So go out and actually buy a disc with confidence that most of the money is going to the artist, instead of some rich old wind-bag's pocket.
By your reasoning, by calling a distro 'mature', I should perceive it to be exactly the opposite. An immature, scam of a distro. Thanks for the insight.
Stupid comment. Have you no reading comprehension? First of all, I am not a vendor touting a product. Second, none of the products I mentioned as being mature advertise that they are mature. That fact is implied historically that they have been around for a while. Not because their marketing departments say they are.
I am sure we have all received spam email that contained a phrase "THIS EMAIL IS NOT SPAM!!!" What is the first thing that this statement tells us? Simply that email is in fact spam and probably contains some sort of nonsense gimmic, lies, or scam. Why do spammers put lines like these in their spam? Because in some people, this tends to create a feeling of excitement or levity that for the moment, gives them cause to evaluate the content of the email.
With this in mind, enter "Unbreakable Linux". The first thing you should get from this title is that it is most definitely a gimmic. Immediately, you should recognize that the opposite is true to an extreme. Oracle and whatever marketing department is driving this product not on quality, but with reliance upon the mentality that such an impressive title gives. Oracle database was also claimed to be unbreakable. Goes to show how much they know about inpenitrable security. Aside from that, a distro like this is bound to contain all sorts of proprietary foolishness that is not up for community review. It will likely lack the "many eyes" principle that makes other open source software so rock solid against attacks and failures. This combined with the product's immaturity in the face of tried and true distros from other vendors, you certainly have a very breakable and likely to be broken operating system.
So what we have here is spam on a huge scale. We're sure to have this nonsense fired at us for months to come because Oracle have deep pockets full of cash. Hopefully, most people will ignore ploys like these and stick to distros that are mature and need more usage to improve (Debian, RedHat, et al).
actually, if you are hired by the company to crack property that company owns, you are not in violation of the DMCA, because you are authorized to do so.
Normally, I would agree with you. However, it seems that the possibility the party that requested the hacking might change their minds and decide to give you a hassle.
...if the European version of the DMCA is passed, this would be an illegal act, likely to get the participant thrown in jail. Just to generalize, if the system is used commercially as a copy protection scheme by anyone, it would immediately fall under the category of "circumventing a copy protection device" by "cracking" it.
Of course, I am sure those in charge would happily my exceptions to this rule when it suits them. Still, this could be a great opportunity to speak out against such legislature.
If you're really that worried about the readiation...Here is a great solution for you. http://zapatopi.net/afdb.html
:)
Hahaha... Smart ass
There is such a word as "oban", which means the same as "oba-san", but also contains somewhat negative sense there (and not very polite in many cases).
:) Probably from the device or software making an error. I'm sure it can do "I would like some bread and cheese" well enough anywhere though.
This is what I was getting at.
Which district? There are significantly different dialects of Nihon'go spread throughout Tokyo itself, let alone the northern and southern parts of the country. Try learning some basic Japanese before journeying to Japan. You PDA will likely end up calling a 30+year lady an "oban-san" and that's the last thing you want in Japan. :)
The dumbest statement I have seen here in a while.
Prove it. Perhaps you failed to properly understand it and think things through before replying.
The children should decide?
Absolutely. Contrary to your typical parental opinion, children have brains and they are not stupid. They know what they're doing. Just the same as you giggled with all your friends when you looked up "sex" and "penis" in your school's encyclopaedia.
If parents took some responsibility to spend time with their children and instill their values into their children, they'd have nothing to worry about. Instead, they ship their kids off to day care and work all day. Children can be taught to look out for and stay away from harmful material. Myself and a close friend of mine, even at young ages, knew what was right and wrong.
So when they do a search on Toy Story and a bunch of porn sites pop up, they are supposed to go: Is this morally right for me to look at?
This looks quite innocuous to me. So does this. You're one of those who sides with these panicky, overzealous, hyper soccer moms that have a heart attack at the first sight of reality. Children aren't raised in a pure, crystalline world. There's no sense in pretending that they will never be exposed to sex, violence, or anything else you find "objectionable". It will happen. The only way to prevent this would be to lock them in a box until they're 21 years old. And after that, they'll still be children. It never helps to patronize children. That only frustrates them and defeats the natural development of their intellects. Deal with it rationally, not like a fruit with a mindless agenda that needs no pursuit. I wasn't censored from the Internet when I in my early teens, and neither was anyone else I know. Everyone's turned out fine.
Gimme me a break.
Go out and hang with your right winger friends. Pat each other on the back over how right you are and past "breaks" back and forth. The rest of us prefer to just live life without ridiculous and excessive regulation and other nonsense.
There are a plethora of searches that yield perfectly acceptable results (if done right) that censoring software will filter. Search google for "breast cancer" with NetNanny or some other stupid filter, and it will block everything.
Get a clue. It's up to the people, even children, to decide what they do and do not want to look at. Parents should never bitch about kids looking at "objectional material". It's their own damn faults if they failed to instill their morals in their children.
I can only assume I'm either being mod-bombed, or two of you are just plain idiots. Why exactly is this a "troll"? It cannot even be remotely called as such. It's a simple observation on which I wanted input of other people in the /. community. Now I won't get it because nobody will read it.
Slashdot moderators need some accountability. Meta-mod doesn't do it.
We can have all sorts of stories posted about the latest Linux kernel patch level, but when it comes to important matters of freedom... the Slashdot editors turn the other way ("Oooh! Puppies!"). Sorry for the OT, but this is for those interested in the fight to keep freedom in and censorship out of libraries...
* 2002-06-01 13:41:19 Courts Strike Down Law For Library Filters (yro,news) (rejected) According to this story over at the NewYork Times (free registration automatically generated for you), a "federal court panel struck down a law requiring libraries to filter the Internet for material harmful to minors yesterday, saying that the technology blocks so much unobjectionable material that it would violate the First Amendment rights of library patrons." I think we all know what a great win this is, especially if you've ever had a search struck down when doing research on breast cancer or the Holocaust (such nasty topics children should never be exposed to, appearantly).
For your erudition;From the human zygote to the human adult there are no genetic or cellular changes besides the unfolding, damage and repair of the DNA and growth, decay, and loss of cells. To your logic we may not be the same person we were yesterday which is a paradox.
You're right, it is a paradox. But it is also true. The fact that something is a paradox does not make it false. Every day our cells die while others divide. We take in different types of food and expell what's left of what we last consumed. Every day, large portions of our bodies are replaced with different material that makes up brand new cells. It can be truly stated that my body is almost completely different from the one I had 2 years ago. So, if I set my computer chair on fire, and throw it away, then replace it with another chair, is it the same chair? Is it the same workstation? I would venture a guess of "no" for both, but again, it's a matter of opinion. Along these lines, not a single cell from your original set after conception remains. Not even the DNA are the same from each cellular division to the next (with the loss of the RNA primer). So are you the same human being today as you were then? I don't think so either.
Looking at the benchmarks for Quake III, I immediately asked myself, "is TransGaming capping the frame rate?" It seems quite unlikely that all three benchmarks with vastly different settings would yield the same results without any intentional influence. Thanks to the closed source nature of WineX, it seems possible to me that TransGaming will do what many other software companies have done to encourage users to buy upgrades: cripple a product that people can't live without. Maybe WineX 2.1 will boast higher rates than 60fps. Shady.
Haven't you editors heard yet? BSD is dying! Get with the program and post another Linux 2.5 patch level increment announcement. Thank you!
I have a Riva TNT2 based card in my gaming box (a 1.4GHz Athlon /w a Tbird core). This box, running Windows, could never give me decent frame rates in Unreal Tournament or Quake III with resolutions above 800x600 with decent texture quality. Now, under X, UT is silky smooth at 1024x768 with maximum detail. Quake III is only marginally better, but there is definitely an improvement. The only downside is that I have to clock the memory speed of my card down using NVclock otherwise I get random crashes (such that the mem and core speeds are the same). (But it's still faster than Windows.)
:\
Anyway, the point is that Linux turns out to be a powerful gaming platform (duh). It's a shame that there isn't more commercial game development taking place for it. TransGaming is doing a great job, but this bit about only supporting nVidia at this point is frustrating. This line, "This could change if other graphics card vendors improve their Linux drivers, but for now Nvidia is the only game in town" seems silly to me. ATI Radeon support under Linux is pretty solid (maybe not as good as nVidia's, but it is open source and that makes a huge difference) and so more attention ought to be paid to it. Besides, what's the point of restricting development to nVidia? We're dealing with OpenGL here, which is a common interface to all 3D hardware. What difference does it make, so long as X has proper GLX support? Does TransGaming get funded by nVidia?
Seems I shouldn't upgrade my TNT2 for a while.
...do they have to develop a 3D accellerator that is compatible with most software (OpenGL, DirectX, etc)? It seems to me that many of the design concepts in this arena are mired up in patents by giants like nVidia and ATI. For instance, doesn't nVidia have 'rights' to per-pixel vertex shader techniques?
No, CS courses are not about learing to write sorting algorythms, compilers, operating systems, or any code at all. Computer Science courses should focus on the theory topics such as "this is how you determine the time it would take for the algorythm to complete" (since this is a very limited, deliberate subset of the Turing Halting question, it is possible). Most students won't understand the theory they know how to write code and put the theory to use writing (or analyzing) code-- but that shouldn't affect the course's focus.
You're confusing discrete mathematics with computer science. CS involves code to apply the algorithms. The algorithms are abstract. Most of them cannot be used in anything except theoretical constructs (such as those that appear on a computer system). You can learn everything about computer science without any computer technology, but you will be unable to apply it to anything meaningful. As a result, I the ability to code is critical to acheiving a useful computer science education. Just the same as physics students apply the theory of numbers to real world objects, computer science students apply the theory of algorithms to operating systems, compilers, and what have you.
So if when you talk of teaching "how to write... sorting routines" you mean teaching "this is the optimal sort algorythm" not "this is how you determine the efficiency", you are the one who've missed the point of CS education.
This doesn't oppose my argument. Code is extremely useful for determining algorithmic complexity. Obviously not required, except for a niche. If you don't know about code, you won't know where to use which algorithms. On top of that, if you can't code them, you probably do not understand them.
As for your statement that I do not know the point of CS... I can only respond by asking you what the point is. Computer science is a broad field. It includes everything from linguistic analysis to software development. It's not specific and myopic as you're making it seem.
Maybe now some young Computer Science student can spend more time on developing a good overall program, instead of spending a bunch of time writing simple things like their own sorting routine.
You're missing the point of a CS education. Students are supposed to learn how to write "simple" things like sorting routines. (Of course, if you think sorting is simple, you're either inexperienced or you're extremely well versed in computer science.) That's why professors always tell you to not use libraries for assignments you're supposed to do yourself. Otherwise, we're talking about short typing exercises. The more simple algorithms you write, the more experience you gain for making the jump from higher complexity algorithms to code.
Students should not be swapping code on assignments. That's called cheating. These kids need to write as much code as possible, even if it's been done before.
...We can rest assured that Toplan will have absolutely no involvement whatsoever with the building of this base. They are a Japanese company, right? Right!?
If only we could mod articles down...
http://www.kuro5hin.org.
Does Slashdot fall into this so-called "technology failures/disasters" category?