Do you hold on so dearly to this notion that evidence to the contrary outrages you? Isn't this a symptom that just maybe you might be wrong? ~ Rufusdufus
A wonderful troll.
Sure, people who are wrong and don't like to consider that possibility often get angry when their beliefs are challenged. That doesn't mean that someone getting angry when their beliefs are challenged must therefore be wrong. Please, base your argument on something more solid than a non sequitur.
> This paper suggests that there is no evidence that climate change is human CO2 production.
Even assuming that this one paper is correct where dozens of others, and the scientific community as a whole, hold the opposite view - even assuming that there IS no evidence that CO2 is changing our climate - even then, is it not worth cutting down on something that seems likely to have ill effects?
To take an extreme case, wouldn't abandoning efforts to cut down CO2 emissions be like saying "we should turn off all the warning devices in our nuclear power stations, because they cost money to run, and there's no evidence that anything's going to go wrong"? Isn't it like saying "we should stop all this secret bunker business and keep our NBC weapons in a marked, unguarded warehouse in downtown LA, because there's no evidence that any terrorists will bother to steal them"?
If CO2 emissions are doing serious damage, then it might well be too late to reverse that damage by the time we find evidence so strong that even the authors of this paper agree with it. If, on the other hand, we continue to invest in alternative technologies, and seriously cut back our CO2 emissions, what's the worst outcome then? It might turn out that CO2 wasn't doing significant harm after all. Big deal.
> I'm sorry. It's been so long since MS has charged me for my OS upgrades that I'm almost unable to point out how inverted this is.
What, you mean they gave you a free upgrade to Windows XP? How did you wangle that?
I gather the differences between MacOS X versions 10.2 and 10.3 are at least as significant as those between, let's cut the marketing crap and use use the internal numbers, Windows NT versions 5.0 and 5.1.
Not so easy to shoot down Macs after all, is it now?
> The Civilization series is a good example: a quarter meg of RAM just ain't much.
Bad guess!
256 kb may not be much, but Civilization only requires 640 kb of memory, and that's with DOS loaded and a need to load graphics into RAM. GBAs don't run DOS and they can copy graphics straight from ROM to VRAM without passing through RAM, so I shouldn't think there'd be any problem with that.
> I think it's silly to spend $200 on a vidcard when you can buy a whole gaming system for the same price.
I don't.
You see I already *have* a complete PC. So if I spend $200 on a new video card, I'm getting $200-worth of graphics technology, whereas if I spend my $200 on a whole gaming system, I'm getting maybe $100-worth of graphics technology, plus a whole lot of processor, memory, and so on that I don't need.
Not to mention that I already have a rather nice monitor, while to use a console I'd have to fork out another $200 or so for a decent TV...
> The obvious precaution is to set the bios to only boot from the harddrive...
And what's to stop me from changing it back to boot from CD? A BIOS password? That won't help much if I can get inside the case.
I suppose you could encrypt your valuable data in such a way that merely having root access won't let people access it. Of course, I'll still be able to delete it, in the last resort by dropping your computer into a volcano...
> Problem is that does anyone want to write an operating system in such a high level language, where the optimization is questionable?
Well, Microsoft don't have any problems writing Windows in VB:
Sub Main()
MsgBox ("Illegal operation in EXPLORER.EXE at line foo. Click OK to crash.", vbCritical + vbOkOnly + vbSystemModal)
BlueScreen = True
Stop End Sub
I don't see how moving that into an even higher level language would hurt performance.
To my mind, the only acceptable licenses are either completely proprietary (no code released) or the type that give it away with no strings attached and no responsibility after the release (Artistic, Public Domain, etc.)
Um, would this be the same Artistic license that the FSF describes as "Non-Free"?
I know asking for consistency on Slashdot is like asking for honesty in politics, but do you think we could at least decide whether copyright violations are theft or not?
Whenever (RI|MP)AA representatives talk about how people are "stealing their valuable intellectual property", we get a thousand posts saying "this isn't theft! When will they learn that this isn't theft!". Get a story on a GPL violation, and suddenly everyone's using the term themselves.
You even admit that it looks like it was an honest mistake! How can you say something like that, and then go on in the next sentence to accuse them of profiting from "stolen" code?
...building a games system based on commodity PC hardware actually works against you in the long run as it doesn't get cheaper over time in the same way that the more custom designs such as PS2 and GCN have.
What? Are you claiming that x86 chip and mobo prices have remained constant for the last few years? How naive of me to believe that they were getting cheaper over time just because the numbers after the pound signs were shrinking so fast!
The problem is exclusive licensing. That is to say, you DON'T have a choice: if you want to play $HOT_GAME, you have to fork out for $EXPENSIVE_CONSOLE, when you've already paid through the nose for a top-notch gaming PC which could easily run $HOT_GAME at twice the resolution with your controller of choice.
Your response is "so play some other game instead". That's a perfectly reasonable response. But it's not the one the poster you were replying to wanted.
glibc is LGPL. I assume my grandparent was saying that he thought Readline should be LGPL in the same way that glibc is, not that he thought readline and glibc were GPL and shouldn't be.
I hope you noticed his "Or something like that". The one that indicated that he wasn't actually frothing at the mouth as he typed, and might be able to think of a more important issue than licensing if pressed.
> And because that code was originally under a BSD license, it is quite probably legal and completely legitimate to strip off the GPL from that code and once again distribute it as truly free software.
Why bother? You can just download the original BSD-licensed code and distribute that. And you wouldn't even annoy any zealots.
It (probably; IANALEither) wouldn't be legal to take any modifications from the GPL'd version, because those modifications would never have been BSD'd. If you thought you could, I suggest you read those licenses again and think about it for a moment.
So what the hell is there to 'learn' about a wordprocessor???
Well... things like "where did the `open' option on my menu go?! It was there last time I looked", and "how the hell do I get rid of this talking paperclip", and "what's this squiggly red line doing underneath a correctly-spelt word"?
Is it really legal for a near-monopoly to cut the price of software normally costing hundreds of dollars to $10 in any market, when this undercuts minority competitors who normally charge less than $100, but can't afford to match the $10 price?
The answer is that it probably is (for example, maybe your school is doing the subsidising, not Microsoft), but it damn well shouldn't be. Maybe I should emigrate to the USA so as to acquire a congressman to write to.
Has there been a decent movie-from-computer game film yet?
I think we can take it for granted that there never will be; Hollywood will always take title and premise and try to force them into an established stereotype.
Look at what happened with Wing Commander, for example. The games had already developed into what were essentially movies with bits of space shooting in between the clips; the story was deep and well-established, and the films themselves were watchable, if nothing else (certainly compared to other FMV productions of the era!). They even starred Mark Hamill! It was obvious that a cinema release would be moderately successful.
So they abandoned the existing story and universe, and made a submarine film instead, which bombed.
Are there any decent game-from-movie adaptations?
The original Star Wars arcade game wasn't half bad...
Linux is already easier to install than Windows...
Not so.
Installing Windows XP is a matter of putting the CD in your drive and clicking "Next" a few times. The easiest-to-install Linux distros are slightly harder to install on a PC with Windows already present, because they require you to make _some_ sort of decision about what to do with Windows, and they don't migrate your Windows applications and settings for you like a new version of Windows does. For installing on a fresh PC, the two operating systems are about equal.
And you're right, of course, that preinstalled Linux would reverse the situation. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most of the non-game-playing public wouldn't even notice...
Slashdot Mirror
Do you hold on so dearly to this notion that evidence to the contrary outrages you? Isn't this a symptom that just maybe you might be wrong? ~ Rufusdufus
A wonderful troll.
Sure, people who are wrong and don't like to consider that possibility often get angry when their beliefs are challenged. That doesn't mean that someone getting angry when their beliefs are challenged must therefore be wrong. Please, base your argument on something more solid than a non sequitur.
> This paper suggests that there is no evidence that climate change is human CO2 production.
Even assuming that this one paper is correct where dozens of others, and the scientific community as a whole, hold the opposite view - even assuming that there IS no evidence that CO2 is changing our climate - even then, is it not worth cutting down on something that seems likely to have ill effects?
To take an extreme case, wouldn't abandoning efforts to cut down CO2 emissions be like saying "we should turn off all the warning devices in our nuclear power stations, because they cost money to run, and there's no evidence that anything's going to go wrong"? Isn't it like saying "we should stop all this secret bunker business and keep our NBC weapons in a marked, unguarded warehouse in downtown LA, because there's no evidence that any terrorists will bother to steal them"?
If CO2 emissions are doing serious damage, then it might well be too late to reverse that damage by the time we find evidence so strong that even the authors of this paper agree with it. If, on the other hand, we continue to invest in alternative technologies, and seriously cut back our CO2 emissions, what's the worst outcome then? It might turn out that CO2 wasn't doing significant harm after all. Big deal.
> I'm sorry. It's been so long since MS has charged me for my OS upgrades that I'm almost unable to point out how inverted this is.
What, you mean they gave you a free upgrade to Windows XP? How did you wangle that?
I gather the differences between MacOS X versions 10.2 and 10.3 are at least as significant as those between, let's cut the marketing crap and use use the internal numbers, Windows NT versions 5.0 and 5.1.
Not so easy to shoot down Macs after all, is it now?
> The Civilization series is a good example: a quarter meg of RAM just ain't much.
Bad guess!
256 kb may not be much, but Civilization only requires 640 kb of memory, and that's with DOS loaded and a need to load graphics into RAM. GBAs don't run DOS and they can copy graphics straight from ROM to VRAM without passing through RAM, so I shouldn't think there'd be any problem with that.
Try again.
What would you do to me if I told you that I'd played N64 Quake in an emulator?
Not in my experience -- Japanese (under 35, anyway) are huge!
That's because they're all wearing powered combat armour. The people inside are actually quite small.
> I think it's silly to spend $200 on a vidcard when you can buy a whole gaming system for the same price.
I don't.
You see I already *have* a complete PC. So if I spend $200 on a new video card, I'm getting $200-worth of graphics technology, whereas if I spend my $200 on a whole gaming system, I'm getting maybe $100-worth of graphics technology, plus a whole lot of processor, memory, and so on that I don't need.
Not to mention that I already have a rather nice monitor, while to use a console I'd have to fork out another $200 or so for a decent TV...
Try to explain why Debian's stable version has software from the last century.
Well, one could try beginning one's explanation with the phrase, "Just like Microsoft(r) Windows(r) 2000..."
> The obvious precaution is to set the bios to only boot from the harddrive...
And what's to stop me from changing it back to boot from CD? A BIOS password? That won't help much if I can get inside the case.
I suppose you could encrypt your valuable data in such a way that merely having root access won't let people access it. Of course, I'll still be able to delete it, in the last resort by dropping your computer into a volcano...
Well, Microsoft don't have any problems writing Windows in VB:I don't see how moving that into an even higher level language would hurt performance.
To my mind, the only acceptable licenses are either completely proprietary (no code released) or the type that give it away with no strings attached and no responsibility after the release (Artistic, Public Domain, etc.)
Um, would this be the same Artistic license that the FSF describes as "Non-Free"?
> ...stolen code...
I know asking for consistency on Slashdot is like asking for honesty in politics, but do you think we could at least decide whether copyright violations are theft or not?
Whenever (RI|MP)AA representatives talk about how people are "stealing their valuable intellectual property", we get a thousand posts saying "this isn't theft! When will they learn that this isn't theft!". Get a story on a GPL violation, and suddenly everyone's using the term themselves.
You even admit that it looks like it was an honest mistake! How can you say something like that, and then go on in the next sentence to accuse them of profiting from "stolen" code?
I thought AppleScript was basically Visual Cobol...
I eat babies quite frequently, thank you, and closed source ones, too.
Baby chickens, that is.
...building a games system based on commodity PC hardware actually works against you in the long run as it doesn't get cheaper over time in the same way that the more custom designs such as PS2 and GCN have.
What? Are you claiming that x86 chip and mobo prices have remained constant for the last few years? How naive of me to believe that they were getting cheaper over time just because the numbers after the pound signs were shrinking so fast!
The problem is exclusive licensing. That is to say, you DON'T have a choice: if you want to play $HOT_GAME, you have to fork out for $EXPENSIVE_CONSOLE, when you've already paid through the nose for a top-notch gaming PC which could easily run $HOT_GAME at twice the resolution with your controller of choice.
Your response is "so play some other game instead". That's a perfectly reasonable response. But it's not the one the poster you were replying to wanted.
glibc is LGPL. I assume my grandparent was saying that he thought Readline should be LGPL in the same way that glibc is, not that he thought readline and glibc were GPL and shouldn't be.
I hope you noticed his "Or something like that". The one that indicated that he wasn't actually frothing at the mouth as he typed, and might be able to think of a more important issue than licensing if pressed.
I don't recall seeing anything like that in RMS.
> And because that code was originally under a BSD license, it is quite probably legal and completely legitimate to strip off the GPL from that code and once again distribute it as truly free software.
Why bother? You can just download the original BSD-licensed code and distribute that. And you wouldn't even annoy any zealots.
It (probably; IANALEither) wouldn't be legal to take any modifications from the GPL'd version, because those modifications would never have been BSD'd. If you thought you could, I suggest you read those licenses again and think about it for a moment.
-1, Just Plain Wrong.
PHBs who don't want to pay $500 for MS, and don't trust this commie Open Sauce stuff, might well be quite happy to fork out $80 for this.
So what the hell is there to 'learn' about a wordprocessor???
Well... things like "where did the `open' option on my menu go?! It was there last time I looked", and "how the hell do I get rid of this talking paperclip", and "what's this squiggly red line doing underneath a correctly-spelt word"?
Is that even legal?!
Is it really legal for a near-monopoly to cut the price of software normally costing hundreds of dollars to $10 in any market, when this undercuts minority competitors who normally charge less than $100, but can't afford to match the $10 price?
The answer is that it probably is (for example, maybe your school is doing the subsidising, not Microsoft), but it damn well shouldn't be. Maybe I should emigrate to the USA so as to acquire a congressman to write to.
Has there been a decent movie-from-computer game film yet?
I think we can take it for granted that there never will be; Hollywood will always take title and premise and try to force them into an established stereotype.
Look at what happened with Wing Commander, for example. The games had already developed into what were essentially movies with bits of space shooting in between the clips; the story was deep and well-established, and the films themselves were watchable, if nothing else (certainly compared to other FMV productions of the era!). They even starred Mark Hamill! It was obvious that a cinema release would be moderately successful.
So they abandoned the existing story and universe, and made a submarine film instead, which bombed.
Are there any decent game-from-movie adaptations?
The original Star Wars arcade game wasn't half bad...
I liked the "minimal studs (?)" in the kernel, myself. And the "numma machines".
You'd think they'd get articles about software development written up by people who know the first thing about software development, but no...
Linux is already easier to install than Windows...
Not so.
Installing Windows XP is a matter of putting the CD in your drive and clicking "Next" a few times. The easiest-to-install Linux distros are slightly harder to install on a PC with Windows already present, because they require you to make _some_ sort of decision about what to do with Windows, and they don't migrate your Windows applications and settings for you like a new version of Windows does. For installing on a fresh PC, the two operating systems are about equal.
And you're right, of course, that preinstalled Linux would reverse the situation. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most of the non-game-playing public wouldn't even notice...