There are thousands newspapers and web sites with much more exciting news than NYTimes which do not require stupid registration. Why do editors keep letting these stories through?
I have a couple of questions. First of all, what is the processor that Apple using now? Isn't it some sort of PowerPC already? I see this one supports Altivec and I know that G3 and G4 Apple computers have the same instruction sets. Is this just another implementation, or is G3 and G4 relatives of this new processor?
Second: what operating system does the IBM PowerPC run?
I suspect that the article is just confusing and processor itself is not made by IBM. Right??
Sorry, I'm really ignorant when it comes to Mac hardware (or any hardware actually)
why would it? I beleive modern automatic transmissions in regular cars are at least as efficient as an average driver with manual transmission. With the hybrid, I think, it is really better to let the computer do the shifting since its doing switching between enginges as well.
Of course its a troll, but it's the troll inpsired by the editor ("... or disappointed that people are being asked to work on a commercial project without a salary") so I'll bite.
They say that if the game brings in profit, the developers will get it. I think this is completely fair. Of course I'm not sure if that can be called sponsorship, because the really contribution from the LGP only starts when the game is well on its way (they will help to find artists etc). I beleive this is quite fare and makes sense. Finding good Open Source developers is possible. Finding good artists is harder. Organizing the development process in any professional kind of manner is hardes. If they will make sure that selected developers have a clue and really provide them with artists and QA -- they have a chance (unlike 99% of game projects on SourceForge, for example). My opinion is that it's a good idea and really nice of them, but I think that chances of success are around 20%. Success being a released title, of course.
My desktop (it's FreeBSD but in my experience Linux is almost as stable) has uptime record of 60 days before I decided that it's time to upgrade kernel. Desktop means: a lot of Mozilla, a lot of java, some gcc, some vim, some StarOffice, rare scanning and rare game of Myth 2 in Linux emulation.
We were moving our server room two weeks ago. I was shutting down our database server (Interbase) running on Windows 2000. I have bginfo [1] (and you should too) installed on all my servers, so I immediately noticed that the last time this guy was rebooted was some time in September 2001. Its neighbors were all rebooted periodically since they were in contact with outside world to some degree and patches were applied, but this guy was just sitting there with uptime of 1.5 years.
obviousely poster has no clue. Not only IMAP has nothing to do with webmail, but nothing says that only IMAP is vulnerable. The researcher just used IMAP to test exploiting the vulnerability, because Outlook keeps sending the same message every 5 minutes (which is questionable from the security standpoint in itself) and hence it was the easiest target.
Even smaller companies are starting to bring their products to Linux. The company I work for is planning to release Linux version of our flagship product this winter... oh, I guess I better get back to work then...
Well, I'm sorry, but Windows NT allows you to design your own filesystems too. I'm sure that the task is easier with Open Source (especially if you do it in userland libraries), but you can create your own low level file system on NT.
Troll? Just in case it's not (or someone doesn't realize it is): this NCP has absolutely nothing to do with Netware. It stands for Network Control Protocol and was invented long before NetWare came up with their NCP (I don't even know if NetWare existed at the time, most likely not). I don't know much about NCP, but I think it was a HOST-to-HOST only protocol, so unlike TCP it did not know about different networks.
I think that if the waves story is true, this might have been a government thing. When 386 came out CIA (or whatever) was probably still conserned about Soviets not being able to build chips. I can easily see government asking Intel polietly to change their manufacturing process a bit to confuse us.
um... no? There are real advertisements before the previews start. Before The Two Tours I remember watching a Nissan commercial (pretty decent) and a couple of bad Coca Cola ones. There was also a truly horrible one with Val Kilmor (unless I'm mistaken and it wasn't him). So my two points are: a) there are commercials before movies b) for some reason I remember them better than TV commercials.
they used to make "Poisk" ("Search") computers based on chips that were manfucatured in, I beleive, Kiev, Ukraine. The processor was a rip off of the Intel's 8086 chip. Then, I beleive, they managed to rip off 286. We had a bunch of these in our school. They were quite compatible. I've even heard reports of Windows 3.11 almost working on them. Many DOS programs worked just fine (I remember Computer Associates' SuperCalc working quite well). Almost all games failed to work though. I beleive we traced it down to the io port 0x60 not being the keyboard port (I don't know if that's a processor or AT architecture feature). Unfortunately they never succeeded in making a Soviet verion of the 80386 processor. Now I've heard to stories which claim the reason of the failure. The first one says that in order to reproduce 80286 they just took really thin slices of the Intel's processors and reversed engineered them this way. In order to prevent this, Intel started to print layers of 80386 processor in waves, not on straight planes and it was much harder to slice that without ruining the processor. The second version says that poplar seeds were to blame: there is a lot of poplars in Kiev (that part is a fact) and when the time for poplar seeds comes, the air in the city is filled with it. They couldn't get it out of their manufacturing areas and had to shut it down.
Was *everything* invented in US? The slideshow is very annoying so I didn't force myself to go beyond 30s, but everything seems to be invetned in the USA.
Well, I didn't pull that phrase out of your ass, I'm just repeating it after people who I consider to be smarter than I am. Also my experience as software developer tells me, that maintaining backwards compatibility is always difficult. The same experience tells me that Linux is incomparably more friendly to the developer than Windows. Furthermore I have not met a developer who would have experience of working on both Unix and Windows and who would say that he enjoys Windows programming more than Unix. As for the quality user-level apps -- compare the ammount of money invested on both sides.
It is not *bad* that they maintain compatibility. They have to, because people are paying for their products. Unfortunately Microsoft is pushing a lot of that cost onto people, who develop for their platform: writing program which will run on both win95 and XP, including everything in between is non-trivial. The costs of QA are skyrocketing. Everything must be tested on Win98, w2k and XP as a minimum. Add to that testing under Terminal server and Citrix environments, and in some cases under Novel and you get insane costs of product development on Windows. The the good (for consumers) fact that MS is backwards compatible is makeing the produt worse. Linux is free of that burden and it allows it to mature much faster. It took Microsoft 15 years (at least) to come up with a decent server OS, Linux was there in 8 with much less money pumped into it. By transparent I meant not backwards compatible, but the fact that it is posible to a) look at the source and figure out why the interface changed and how exactly it change b) it is possible to discuss the change with people who implemented it.
Please not that I am not a Linux fan, I use it only when I have to (read: can't use BSD)
You are wrong when portraing the fact that you can still run Corel 3.0 as a plus. Windows is paying a huge price for maintaining backwards compatibility, it is really hurting the operating system and especially the developers who develop for Windows. The fact that Linux kernel changes the APIs often and does not have backward compatibility is is well-compensated by the fact that all the interface changes are completely transparent and has the advantage of preventing drivers bit rot (among others).
Re:Soderberg's Film a Total Failure
on
Review: Solaris
·
· Score: 1
first of all I used the wrong expression. I didn't mean to say that you hate the book, but you obviosely can't consider it a good or a very good book. People don't say "I really like this book, but it is really weak on the plot". I assumed that if you like the book, you like the plot.
The interview you cite is very interesting. Can you provide a more exact reference? I've just reread the ending and I'm convincied again that there is absolutely nothing there that would suggest that Kelvin stays.
The station is not lying on the surface of the planet. It is hanging above it on the height of 500-1000 meters using antigravity. I don't have English translation, but I have verified this in the Russian translation. 500 meters is closer to the surface than to the orbit, so I'm right:)
I completely agree with your description of the theme, but theme and plot are different things. Plot is the story (action... events that happen) which make a book readable and not just a bunch of philosophical constructions. I maintain that main plot is the story about Harry and Kelvin.
Finally I don't think that your logic about maintaining replicants away from the planet applies. This part is not done by Lem, so it doesn't even have to be logical. I don't feel too emotional about the film ending, it didn't make much sense either way, so I leave it at that.
P.S. I'd really appreciate the complete Lem's interview you cited.
Re:Soderberg's Film a Total Failure
on
Review: Solaris
·
· Score: 1
so may I ask what do you really like? Looks like you hated the book, you didn't like Tarkovsky's movie and you really hated the new movie. I don't remeber the Tarkovsky's movie to well as I saw it some 10 years ago, but you've made a number of mistakes when talking about the book. Klevin doesn't stay on Solaris, at least it's not stated clearly. Most likely he comes back to Earth. The station on the book is on the surface of the planet. The love story in the book is not a minor subplot, it is the plot. The relationship of the human and the uncomprehendable life form is the theme, or topic or whatever, but the plot is Kelvin and Harry. I agree with some of your points abouit Soderberg's movie though. I think though that it is quite clear that Kelvin had decided to stay on the station and didn't go with Gordon. He stayed and died together with Snow when station was absorbed by Solaris. Now I don't really know what happened in the last scene of the movie: it was either Kelvin's copy that went to Earth with Gorodn, or the entire last scene happens on Solaris. I tend to thikn that a copy of Kelvin went to Earth, because recreating an illusion of Earth on Solaris is more along the lines of Tarkovsky's film than of the Lem's book, and the movie is based on the book, not on Tarkovsky's film.
replying to my own review to add a couple of things. I've been thinking about the movie a lot after writing the review, so here are the additions.
Pro: * I've been thinking about the movie a lot -- always a good sign * Every time we see Earth it is raining. Another nice touch. Not sure if they imply screwed up climate or just try to create mood, but I think it was appropriate.
Cons: * They basically did the Hans Solo thing. Remeber how Lucas changed the episode 4 so that Hans Solo doesn't shoot first? Same thing here. In the book we don't know what started the argument between Kelvin and Rheya. In the Hollywood movie it has to be spelled out, of course. And the reason for argument happens to be serious enough to make Kelvin come out clean. No fucking shit, if a women kills his child without at least discussing it with him first, he has the right to freak out. Bringing this out changes the whole equilibrim of characters from the novel. It doesn't even fit in the movie properly, isn't Rheya the one who beleives in God in the beginning?
* PG-13. It looks like they really wanted that PG-13 rating. The sex scene is very modest. And this is a good thing. I think there should've been no sex scene at all, as it is very easy to spoil a good movie with a badly done sex scene. I'm talking about the liquid oxygen sequence. That scene is supposed to be really frightening, graphic, physical, revolting, unhuman, what not. Didn't happen.
my schematic review
on
Review: Solaris
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Hints at spoilers, but it doesn't metter because you shouldn't watch this movie:)
First good things. 1) The portrayal of future, everything that's concerned with little details like the PDAs that people on the train use and costumes that upper-class people wear on the night out -- everything like that is superb. Creates an atmosphere quite nicely.
2) The beam generator (what's its name?) they built on the station to destroy the visitors uses some cables with BNC connectors. I think this is a great detail. They've built it out of *real* spare parts and it shows.
3) The image of the Rheya is well done for the most part. Both Rheya's actually. Natascha McElhone did a really good job and she is fit for the role.
4) Snow is great. Kudos to Jeremy Davies.
5) In case you are wondering why the hell did they move the station from the surface of the planet to the orbit -- there is an explanation to that. Which brings us to the second part. What sucked.
1) Changes where made to the plot. Horrible changes. 1.1) See 5 above. Of course it must be on the orbit: the mass of Solaris started growing exponentially, you see. Of course it did, honey. 1.2) Was it a happy ending? Was it an attempt to make a happy end which doesn't seem so happy? It's an ending which really screwed it up. Sorry. 1.3) Anyone remembers that scene from Simpsons, when they leave Australia and a coala is flying back with them, evil grin on his face? I kind of hoped that we won't see an ending like that again.
2) Clooney doesn't work in this role. And no, I didn't like his naked butt.
3) Not a single shot of the ocean surface. Yes, Solaris is a planet covered with Ocean. It is beautiful too. But that's in book, not in the movie. The movie only shows you a plasma lamp, er, star, er... planet? from the orbit.
4) Yes, the book makes you think about God. Sometimes quite explicitly. Throwing in one conversation cut before it actually makes sense and one scene referencing Michelangelo's painting does not make sense and feels taken out of context.
I guess here is what I'm trying to say: this movie would work beautifully if it was more friendly to the book. Hero's memories of his life with Rheya on Earth a well done and are very enjoyable for someone who read the book. Unfortunately people who have read the book will be alienated by weird changes to the story which don't really make much sense. I don't know how this film works for people who have not read the book.
Slashdot Mirror
There are thousands newspapers and web sites with much more exciting news than NYTimes which do not require stupid registration. Why do editors keep letting these stories through?
so this is not a whore but a troll, it still should not be a +5.
I have a couple of questions.
First of all, what is the processor that Apple using now? Isn't it some sort of PowerPC already? I see this one supports Altivec and I know that G3 and G4 Apple computers have the same instruction sets. Is this just another implementation, or is G3 and G4 relatives of this new processor?
Second: what operating system does the IBM PowerPC run?
I suspect that the article is just confusing and processor itself is not made by IBM. Right??
Sorry, I'm really ignorant when it comes to Mac hardware (or any hardware actually)
why would it?
I beleive modern automatic transmissions in regular cars are at least as efficient as an average driver with manual transmission. With the hybrid, I think, it is really better to let the computer do the shifting since its doing switching between enginges as well.
Of course its a troll, but it's the troll inpsired by the editor ("... or disappointed that people are being asked to work on a commercial project without a salary") so I'll bite.
They say that if the game brings in profit, the developers will get it. I think this is completely fair. Of course I'm not sure if that can be called sponsorship, because the really contribution from the LGP only starts when the game is well on its way (they will help to find artists etc).
I beleive this is quite fare and makes sense. Finding good Open Source developers is possible. Finding good artists is harder. Organizing the development process in any professional kind of manner is hardes. If they will make sure that selected developers have a clue and really provide them with artists and QA -- they have a chance (unlike 99% of game projects on SourceForge, for example).
My opinion is that it's a good idea and really nice of them, but I think that chances of success are around 20%. Success being a released title, of course.
I can argue with both of you.
. shtml
My desktop (it's FreeBSD but in my experience Linux is almost as stable) has uptime record of 60 days before I decided that it's time to upgrade kernel. Desktop means: a lot of Mozilla, a lot of java, some gcc, some vim, some StarOffice, rare scanning and rare game of Myth 2 in Linux emulation.
We were moving our server room two weeks ago. I was shutting down our database server (Interbase) running on Windows 2000. I have bginfo [1] (and you should too) installed on all my servers, so I immediately noticed that the last time this guy was rebooted was some time in September 2001. Its neighbors were all rebooted periodically since they were in contact with outside world to some degree and patches were applied, but this guy was just sitting there with uptime of 1.5 years.
[1] http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/bginfo
obviousely poster has no clue. Not only IMAP has nothing to do with webmail, but nothing says that only IMAP is vulnerable. The researcher just used IMAP to test exploiting the vulnerability, because Outlook keeps sending the same message every 5 minutes (which is questionable from the security standpoint in itself) and hence it was the easiest target.
no, I think you are the only one. Sorry.
Here is the url of the report in a readable form.
Is here: http://www.boredom.org/~cstone/worm-annotated.txt
u dp_worm /
Some more information from digitaloffense here:
http://www.digitaloffense.net/worms/mssql_
Even smaller companies are starting to bring their products to Linux.
The company I work for is planning to release Linux version of our flagship product this winter... oh, I guess I better get back to work then...
Well, I'm sorry, but Windows NT allows you to design your own filesystems too. I'm sure that the task is easier with Open Source (especially if you do it in userland libraries), but you can create your own low level file system on NT.
Troll?
Just in case it's not (or someone doesn't realize it is): this NCP has absolutely nothing to do with Netware. It stands for Network Control Protocol and was invented long before NetWare came up with their NCP (I don't even know if NetWare existed at the time, most likely not).
I don't know much about NCP, but I think it was a HOST-to-HOST only protocol, so unlike TCP it did not know about different networks.
I think that if the waves story is true, this might have been a government thing. When 386 came out CIA (or whatever) was probably still conserned about Soviets not being able to build chips. I can easily see government asking Intel polietly to change their manufacturing process a bit to confuse us.
um... no? There are real advertisements before the previews start. Before The Two Tours I remember watching a Nissan commercial (pretty decent) and a couple of bad Coca Cola ones. There was also a truly horrible one with Val Kilmor (unless I'm mistaken and it wasn't him). So my two points are: a) there are commercials before movies
b) for some reason I remember them better than TV commercials.
they used to make "Poisk" ("Search") computers based on chips that were manfucatured in, I beleive, Kiev, Ukraine. The processor was a rip off of the Intel's 8086 chip. Then, I beleive, they managed to rip off 286. We had a bunch of these in our school. They were quite compatible. I've even heard reports of Windows 3.11 almost working on them. Many DOS programs worked just fine (I remember Computer Associates' SuperCalc working quite well). Almost all games failed to work though. I beleive we traced it down to the io port 0x60 not being the keyboard port (I don't know if that's a processor or AT architecture feature).
Unfortunately they never succeeded in making a Soviet verion of the 80386 processor. Now I've heard to stories which claim the reason of the failure. The first one says that in order to reproduce 80286 they just took really thin slices of the Intel's processors and reversed engineered them this way. In order to prevent this, Intel started to print layers of 80386 processor in waves, not on straight planes and it was much harder to slice that without ruining the processor.
The second version says that poplar seeds were to blame: there is a lot of poplars in Kiev (that part is a fact) and when the time for poplar seeds comes, the air in the city is filled with it. They couldn't get it out of their manufacturing areas and had to shut it down.
Was *everything* invented in US?
The slideshow is very annoying so I didn't force myself to go beyond 30s, but everything seems to be invetned in the USA.
Philip Dick and Roger Zelazny, not just Roger Zelazny.
Well, I didn't pull that phrase out of your ass, I'm just repeating it after people who I consider to be smarter than I am. Also my experience as software developer tells me, that maintaining backwards compatibility is always difficult. The same experience tells me that Linux is incomparably more friendly to the developer than Windows. Furthermore I have not met a developer who would have experience of working on both Unix and Windows and who would say that he enjoys Windows programming more than Unix.
As for the quality user-level apps -- compare the ammount of money invested on both sides.
It is not *bad* that they maintain compatibility. They have to, because people are paying for their products. Unfortunately Microsoft is pushing a lot of that cost onto people, who develop for their platform: writing program which will run on both win95 and XP, including everything in between is non-trivial. The costs of QA are skyrocketing. Everything must be tested on Win98, w2k and XP as a minimum. Add to that testing under Terminal server and Citrix environments, and in some cases under Novel and you get insane costs of product development on Windows.
The the good (for consumers) fact that MS is backwards compatible is makeing the produt worse. Linux is free of that burden and it allows it to mature much faster. It took Microsoft 15 years (at least) to come up with a decent server OS, Linux was there in 8 with much less money pumped into it.
By transparent I meant not backwards compatible, but the fact that it is posible to a) look at the source and figure out why the interface changed and how exactly it change b) it is possible to discuss the change with people who implemented it.
Please not that I am not a Linux fan, I use it only when I have to (read: can't use BSD)
You are wrong when portraing the fact that you can still run Corel 3.0 as a plus. Windows is paying a huge price for maintaining backwards compatibility, it is really hurting the operating system and especially the developers who develop for Windows. The fact that Linux kernel changes the APIs often and does not have backward compatibility is is well-compensated by the fact that all the interface changes are completely transparent and has the advantage of preventing drivers bit rot (among others).
first of all I used the wrong expression. I didn't mean to say that you hate the book, but you obviosely can't consider it a good or a very good book. People don't say "I really like this book, but it is really weak on the plot". I assumed that if you like the book, you like the plot.
:)
The interview you cite is very interesting. Can you provide a more exact reference? I've just reread the ending and I'm convincied again that there is absolutely nothing there that would suggest that Kelvin stays.
The station is not lying on the surface of the planet. It is hanging above it on the height of 500-1000 meters using antigravity. I don't have English translation, but I have verified this in the Russian translation. 500 meters is closer to the surface than to the orbit, so I'm right
I completely agree with your description of the theme, but theme and plot are different things. Plot is the story (action... events that happen) which make a book readable and not just a bunch of philosophical constructions. I maintain that main plot is the story about Harry and Kelvin.
Finally I don't think that your logic about maintaining replicants away from the planet applies. This part is not done by Lem, so it doesn't even have to be logical. I don't feel too emotional about the film ending, it didn't make much sense either way, so I leave it at that.
P.S. I'd really appreciate the complete Lem's interview you cited.
so may I ask what do you really like? Looks like you hated the book, you didn't like Tarkovsky's movie and you really hated the new movie.
I don't remeber the Tarkovsky's movie to well as I saw it some 10 years ago, but you've made a number of mistakes when talking about the book. Klevin doesn't stay on Solaris, at least it's not stated clearly. Most likely he comes back to Earth.
The station on the book is on the surface of the planet.
The love story in the book is not a minor subplot, it is the plot. The relationship of the human and the uncomprehendable life form is the theme, or topic or whatever, but the plot is Kelvin and Harry.
I agree with some of your points abouit Soderberg's movie though. I think though that it is quite clear that Kelvin had decided to stay on the station and didn't go with Gordon. He stayed and died together with Snow when station was absorbed by Solaris. Now I don't really know what happened in the last scene of the movie: it was either Kelvin's copy that went to Earth with Gorodn, or the entire last scene happens on Solaris. I tend to thikn that a copy of Kelvin went to Earth, because recreating an illusion of Earth on Solaris is more along the lines of Tarkovsky's film than of the Lem's book, and the movie is based on the book, not on Tarkovsky's film.
replying to my own review to add a couple of things.
I've been thinking about the movie a lot after writing the review, so here are the additions.
Pro:
* I've been thinking about the movie a lot -- always a good sign
* Every time we see Earth it is raining. Another nice touch. Not sure if they imply screwed up climate or just try to create mood, but I think it was appropriate.
Cons:
* They basically did the Hans Solo thing. Remeber how Lucas changed the episode 4 so that Hans Solo doesn't shoot first? Same thing here. In the book we don't know what started the argument between Kelvin and Rheya. In the Hollywood movie it has to be spelled out, of course. And the reason for argument happens to be serious enough to make Kelvin come out clean. No fucking shit, if a women kills his child without at least discussing it with him first, he has the right to freak out. Bringing this out changes the whole equilibrim of characters from the novel. It doesn't even fit in the movie properly, isn't Rheya the one who beleives in God in the beginning?
* PG-13. It looks like they really wanted that PG-13 rating. The sex scene is very modest. And this is a good thing. I think there should've been no sex scene at all, as it is very easy to spoil a good movie with a badly done sex scene. I'm talking about the liquid oxygen sequence. That scene is supposed to be really frightening, graphic, physical, revolting, unhuman, what not. Didn't happen.
Hints at spoilers, but it doesn't metter because you shouldn't watch this movie :)
First good things.
1) The portrayal of future, everything that's concerned with little details like the PDAs that people on the train use and costumes that upper-class people wear on the night out -- everything like that is superb. Creates an atmosphere quite nicely.
2) The beam generator (what's its name?) they built on the station to destroy the visitors uses some cables with BNC connectors. I think this is a great detail. They've built it out of *real* spare parts and it shows.
3) The image of the Rheya is well done for the most part. Both Rheya's actually. Natascha McElhone did a really good job and she is fit for the role.
4) Snow is great. Kudos to Jeremy Davies.
5) In case you are wondering why the hell did they move the station from the surface of the planet to the orbit -- there is an explanation to that.
Which brings us to the second part. What sucked.
1) Changes where made to the plot. Horrible changes.
1.1) See 5 above. Of course it must be on the orbit: the mass of Solaris started growing exponentially, you see. Of course it did, honey.
1.2) Was it a happy ending? Was it an attempt to make a happy end which doesn't seem so happy? It's an ending which really screwed it up. Sorry.
1.3) Anyone remembers that scene from Simpsons, when they leave Australia and a coala is flying back with them, evil grin on his face? I kind of hoped that we won't see an ending like that again.
2) Clooney doesn't work in this role. And no, I didn't like his naked butt.
3) Not a single shot of the ocean surface. Yes, Solaris is a planet covered with Ocean. It is beautiful too. But that's in book, not in the movie. The movie only shows you a plasma lamp, er, star, er... planet? from the orbit.
4) Yes, the book makes you think about God. Sometimes quite explicitly. Throwing in one conversation cut before it actually makes sense and one scene referencing Michelangelo's painting does not make sense and feels taken out of context.
I guess here is what I'm trying to say: this movie would work beautifully if it was more friendly to the book. Hero's memories of his life with Rheya on Earth a well done and are very enjoyable for someone who read the book. Unfortunately people who have read the book will be alienated by weird changes to the story which don't really make much sense.
I don't know how this film works for people who have not read the book.