Both of ye: It is OT. "wfa" has nada to do with Computer Associates or SCO.
WFA = "Weapons Factory Arena", an old (and prolly dead by now) Q3A MOD. There might be one or two servers still up for it, but I wouldn't hold out much hope.
...but on bread-and-butter issues, they're certainly not stupid:
"They're not at all important in the next quarter," Lundstrom said. But "20 years from now, the global center of the software industry will be Asia."
I bet MSFT pays damned close attention to that line right there. Problem is, Asia is already more in love with Linux than nearly anywhere else on the planet, and that may be Linux' ultimate success... and MSFT's ultimate source of destruction.
This is getting to be an ongoing grudge with Forbes... First their editorialists skew every fact they can find in attempts to cheerlead SCO on, now this.
Didn't CA already explain the whole Canopy/SCO financial thing?
They still have 'em now, IIRC - the Video Professor chick pushes that 5 free CD offer on TV that has an encyclopedia in it as part of the package (you know, the one that appears to run a lot like those album clubs from the '80s...)
'course, if you want polygonal porn that badly, there's always the (some would say appropriately named) Poser to make that with, and at much higher poly counts. (shrug).
When it comes to gaming nowadays though, it's either porn (or near-porn), or gore.
...or is it? RPG's still flourish (evercrack aside), as do sims (including The Sims), and if you look closely enough, there are some rather solid action games out there that don't require tons of gore and blood.
All you gotta do is get out and look past the hype.
...what's to stop someone from blowing up a balloon when they park at the bar, then deflating it into the breathylizer tube before starting the car on their way out?
Using technology to solve a problem only spawns more technology to defeat it.
...the new economy acted in accordance with the rules of any other economy. The Dot.Craze was no different from the Tulip craze a hundred years before
I mean, we still have an Internet, they still sell tulips at the flower shop, but you won't be able to rack up a big-assed salary from either anymore, unless you really know WTF you're doing as a businessman.
...which one of the two (MS vs. RH) will suffer the most technically from lack of support anyway?
Supporting a Linux server doesn't cost a clueful admin anything - he just patches the parts he has to, upgrades the parts that need patched but lacks patches (right down to the kernel), and carries on.
Replace the kernel with a generic one, replace the main server apps the thing uses with generic versions (clue: also rip out the ones that box don't use), replace any and all libs you may need to, and since you (should) have already ripped out the fluff ("...you say you have KDE installed on your mail server? WTF!?") It's no big deal... you can have Red Hat 5.1 running the latest and greatest this way with a vendor support cost of, oh... $0 if you know you're doing as the admin. If you don't know, then hire someone locally who does - they can provide the same basic support, and I bet the response time is much, much faster than MS OR RH.
OTOH, upgrading a Windows OS after support drops for it requires that you replace the entire OS (no choice here, kiddies), a large share of the apps that ran on the old OS, AND, there is no way on God's Green Earth(tm) that you'd ever be able to only upgrade the parts of the OS you like. Oh, and there's a hefty license fee involved.
This is why I just don't get why the two are being compared vis-a-vis support.. it's like comparing apples to railguns.
If RH drops support for a Linux version, BFD - the admins will bitch, but they can work around iteasily enough. If MS drops support for a Windows version, then the admins are well and truly fucked... and that's what it all boils down to.
Not sure about Japanese (be it canna, kanji, or etc.), but even a "native" Chinese (simplified) Windows 2000 Pro setup tend to look like a combination of Chinese and English throughout the dialog boxes and windows. (I have quite a few recently arrived Chinese-American students, so I try to help out as much as I can.) In my admittedly limited experience, these machines tend to run much slower than a full-on native English Win2k Pro install on comparable equipment. This is why I mentioned all OSes in the earlier post... I already know that Linux is a pain the arse to get a regional language set in place.
The Chinese ideograms also tend to look more pixellated in the GUI as well (no matter what OS), but that's just my eyeball's opinion.
(And yeah, part of my gripe agrees perfectly that that no, it ain't seamless. )
Actually, character support in any OS (including Windows), is spotty, bug-ridden, and limited at best. I suspect that this is more a chance to re-write the thing from the ground up as a native ideogramatic OS, instead of installing a native Western-char OS, then tacking on the packages afterwards.
"Dude, I hate to be the first to tell you this, but humans breathe air."
Humans also need water, yet they live in the Sahara. Humans need warmth, yet they live in Alaska and Siberia. Humans need food, yet they live in large cities expressly designed to obliterate any chance at local agriculture.
err, so yer point here was... what? After all, if we can't find it already there, we can either bring it or make it, else we'd still be a pack of somewhat intelligent apes living in subtropical Africa, because all the other places on Earth are quite frankly too dangerous without technology and commerce of some sort.
"They're called "robots". You may have heard of them, since one is on Mars right now."
Ah, yes... but there were supposed to be two though, yes? Assuming Beagle2 ever gets over a hump that an astronaut and five minutes of work could've overcome, of course. Human Exploration isn't a matter of just sticking a flag in the ground, y'know.;)
Also, we'll eventually have to start getting away from this wet ball of mud, and out into other areas of the universe. After all, Cristobal Columbus didn't just invent the transoceanic ship and sail off, his ships were built on the technology of previous shipwrights' work, and each step towards the eventual future will make it all that much easier to attain. While robots can go a long way towards doing that, they'll rather suck at assessing psychological conditions of space living, as well as the more human portions of living elsewhere.
Besides, as others have pointed out, Tyrannosaurus Rex prolly didn't give a damn about Mars either... Given the regular cycle of extinction-level asteroids that cross Earth's orbit, it's rather risky to keep all of humanity's eggs in one basket when we have the technology to try and remedy such a situation, ne?
"Youngsters inspired to go into science and engineering Sorry, you can't have it both ways. Which do you think we need: more tech jobs, or more unemployed techs?"
Err, don't quite follow you on this one... could you elaborate? The two items are not mutually exclusive, y'know.
"There are already plenty of inspired youngsters. They become postdocs."
...Nice choice (not) : Get funded, suck up to a prof, or get out. Why not let 'em actually get paid for doing what they love?
I went out and bought a used G4 Cube about six months ago, specifically to do two things: Play with OSX, and find a home for a lot of 3D software that companies wouldn't/couldn't write Linux versions of.
The first problem is that buying an affordable mac means buying one that is waaay below spec when compared to what a PC user may be used to (example: my G4 500MHz Cube cost me $800 via e-bay, and was considered a fairly decent bargain.)
After spending $400 for a processor upgrade, and a LOT of shoehorning just to get a competent videocard to fit in it (a cheap re-flashed Radeon 8500), not to mention OSX itself (currently at 10.2.8), I wound up with nearly $1300 sunk into a box that ran roughly as well as a 2GHz Pentium 4.
After ironing out Apple's particular quirks, I still had to contend with an eternal wait whenever I wanted to load a program, and performance was spotty at best. Granted, this was because jacking up a native G4 w/ a Powerlogix chip isn't going to get you the same performance as a system built natively w/ such speeds in mind, but quite frankly, buying a used Apple to test out OSX would be a lot like buying a 386 laptop to see how Linux stacked up against XP on a gamer's box.
Your best bet would be to spend some time on a friend's Mac (get 'im to make an account for you), and see what it would be like on something more recent (albeit more expensive.) Then, if you want to go whole-hog, go get a G5 and call it good. It'll cost a fortune, but at least you can do it knowing that it'll remain useful for at least 6 years (whereas PC's tend to become 'legacy' items after 3.)
As for me and my cube? I've got 3 Yellow Dog Linux CD's ready to get installed on it... I figure a that YDL 3.0 with MOL (Mac On Linux) for my CG proggies will suffice. At least everything that doesn't require OSX will run with a response time that ends before the next ice age;)/P
Not too awful bad, then. Then again, what would it sound like while it did the switching between the two modes?
more specifically, would the music quality just "shift", or would it make some weird kind of sound? Assume for the moment that I have a decent car with actual sound insulation, and not a Jeep that transmits every 110dB nuance of outside air movement right through the body:)
For those of us who happen to live in and among the more mountainous regions of the world, this could only make things potentially worse.
For instance, FM radio fades in and out quite a bit in my Jeep (in spite of a decent system and antenna), depending on where I drive along here in the mountains of Utah. The signal is largely still there, just that it occasionally degrades in some areas. Wouldn't a more digitized signal just cut out below a certain point, but make it relatively useless in terrain that isn't as flat as, say, Iowa? It's tough enough sometimes to find decent cell coverage as it is out here. I'd hate to think that the radio would suffer the same problems as well.
As a current owner of an Agenda, I can pretty much say that with certainty:
1) The interface, once flashed with the latest binaries (as opposed to the older ones present in teh shipped models), easily kicks Palm into the next century.
2) The handwriting recognition could use a little work still, but differentiation between recognizing writing and mouse-style input is always tricky, and will probably be refined as time goes on.
3) You want color? You can load Linux onto the iPac with a bit of work. I assume that later versions of the Agenda will probably be in color as well. Currently, the screen may be grey, but the resolution is better than that of even the latest model Palm. (besides, doesn't Palm have only one model that comes with a color screen, and it isn't even their top-of-the-line model?)
4) I'm sitting on 24MB of memory here - 16 in flash-storage and 8MB of RAM (I'm not even counting ROM - space...) Most popular palm-tops don't come very close.
5) Yep - there's still bugs in the thing; however, they're getting ironed out now (my own device is very workable and bug-free, though new and experiemtnal additions tend to require ironing-out.) However, the general public doesn't get inflicted with bad code, and the very fact that I can do anything I want to this little machine, evne to the kernel level, is rather enjoyable.../P
Slashdot Mirror
WFA = "Weapons Factory Arena", an old (and prolly dead by now) Q3A MOD. There might be one or two servers still up for it, but I wouldn't hold out much hope.
"They're not at all important in the next quarter," Lundstrom said. But "20 years from now, the global center of the software industry will be Asia."
I bet MSFT pays damned close attention to that line right there. Problem is, Asia is already more in love with Linux than nearly anywhere else on the planet, and that may be Linux' ultimate success... and MSFT's ultimate source of destruction.
My Bad.
Didn't CA already explain the whole Canopy/SCO financial thing?
For some odd reason, this isn't suprising, since you don't need a heavy bookshelf or storage area for a stack of CD's.
'course, if you want polygonal porn that badly, there's always the (some would say appropriately named) Poser to make that with, and at much higher poly counts. (shrug).
When it comes to gaming nowadays though, it's either porn (or near-porn), or gore.
All you gotta do is get out and look past the hype.
Using technology to solve a problem only spawns more technology to defeat it.
I mean, we still have an Internet, they still sell tulips at the flower shop, but you won't be able to rack up a big-assed salary from either anymore, unless you really know WTF you're doing as a businessman.
"when I'm out running along a well used path in my town, there is no fucking way I can live with a woman running infront of me."
/P
I can -- the view is better.
Supporting a Linux server doesn't cost a clueful admin anything - he just patches the parts he has to, upgrades the parts that need patched but lacks patches (right down to the kernel), and carries on.
Replace the kernel with a generic one, replace the main server apps the thing uses with generic versions (clue: also rip out the ones that box don't use), replace any and all libs you may need to, and since you (should) have already ripped out the fluff ("...you say you have KDE installed on your mail server? WTF!?") It's no big deal... you can have Red Hat 5.1 running the latest and greatest this way with a vendor support cost of, oh... $0 if you know you're doing as the admin. If you don't know, then hire someone locally who does - they can provide the same basic support, and I bet the response time is much, much faster than MS OR RH.
OTOH, upgrading a Windows OS after support drops for it requires that you replace the entire OS (no choice here, kiddies), a large share of the apps that ran on the old OS, AND, there is no way on God's Green Earth(tm) that you'd ever be able to only upgrade the parts of the OS you like. Oh, and there's a hefty license fee involved.
This is why I just don't get why the two are being compared vis-a-vis support.. it's like comparing apples to railguns.
If RH drops support for a Linux version, BFD - the admins will bitch, but they can work around iteasily enough. If MS drops support for a Windows version, then the admins are well and truly fucked... and that's what it all boils down to.
The Chinese ideograms also tend to look more pixellated in the GUI as well (no matter what OS), but that's just my eyeball's opinion.
(And yeah, part of my gripe agrees perfectly that that no, it ain't seamless. )
Makes things less clunky that way.
Humans also need water, yet they live in the Sahara. Humans need warmth, yet they live in Alaska and Siberia.
Humans need food, yet they live in large cities expressly designed to obliterate any chance at local agriculture.
err, so yer point here was... what? After all, if we can't find it already there, we can either bring it or make it, else we'd still be a pack of somewhat intelligent apes living in subtropical Africa, because all the other places on Earth are quite frankly too dangerous without technology and commerce of some sort.
"They're called "robots". You may have heard of them, since one is on Mars right now."
Ah, yes... but there were supposed to be two though, yes? Assuming Beagle2 ever gets over a hump that an astronaut and five minutes of work could've overcome, of course. Human Exploration isn't a matter of just sticking a flag in the ground, y'know.
Also, we'll eventually have to start getting away from this wet ball of mud, and out into other areas of the universe. After all, Cristobal Columbus didn't just invent the transoceanic ship and sail off, his ships were built on the technology of previous shipwrights' work, and each step towards the eventual future will make it all that much easier to attain. While robots can go a long way towards doing that, they'll rather suck at assessing psychological conditions of space living, as well as the more human portions of living elsewhere.
Besides, as others have pointed out, Tyrannosaurus Rex prolly didn't give a damn about Mars either... Given the regular cycle of extinction-level asteroids that cross Earth's orbit, it's rather risky to keep all of humanity's eggs in one basket when we have the technology to try and remedy such a situation, ne?
"Youngsters inspired to go into science and engineering Sorry, you can't have it both ways. Which do you think we need: more tech jobs, or more unemployed techs?"
Err, don't quite follow you on this one... could you elaborate? The two items are not mutually exclusive, y'know.
"There are already plenty of inspired youngsters. They become postdocs."
The first problem is that buying an affordable mac means buying one that is waaay below spec when compared to what a PC user may be used to (example: my G4 500MHz Cube cost me $800 via e-bay, and was considered a fairly decent bargain.)
After spending $400 for a processor upgrade, and a LOT of shoehorning just to get a competent videocard to fit in it (a cheap re-flashed Radeon 8500), not to mention OSX itself (currently at 10.2.8), I wound up with nearly $1300 sunk into a box that ran roughly as well as a 2GHz Pentium 4.
After ironing out Apple's particular quirks, I still had to contend with an eternal wait whenever I wanted to load a program, and performance was spotty at best. Granted, this was because jacking up a native G4 w/ a Powerlogix chip isn't going to get you the same performance as a system built natively w/ such speeds in mind, but quite frankly, buying a used Apple to test out OSX would be a lot like buying a 386 laptop to see how Linux stacked up against XP on a gamer's box.
Your best bet would be to spend some time on a friend's Mac (get 'im to make an account for you), and see what it would be like on something more recent (albeit more expensive.) Then, if you want to go whole-hog, go get a G5 and call it good. It'll cost a fortune, but at least you can do it knowing that it'll remain useful for at least 6 years (whereas PC's tend to become 'legacy' items after 3.)
As for me and my cube? I've got 3 Yellow Dog Linux CD's ready to get installed on it... I figure a that YDL 3.0 with MOL (Mac On Linux) for my CG proggies will suffice. At least everything that doesn't require OSX will run with a response time that ends before the next ice age
more specifically, would the music quality just "shift", or would it make some weird kind of sound? Assume for the moment that I have a decent car with actual sound insulation, and not a Jeep that transmits every 110dB nuance of outside air movement right through the body
Puh-leeze, if it were faked in Utah's deserts, you'd see the casinos off in the distance on the Nevada border!
For instance, FM radio fades in and out quite a bit in my Jeep (in spite of a decent system and antenna), depending on where I drive along here in the mountains of Utah. The signal is largely still there, just that it occasionally degrades in some areas. Wouldn't a more digitized signal just cut out below a certain point, but make it relatively useless in terrain that isn't as flat as, say, Iowa? It's tough enough sometimes to find decent cell coverage as it is out here. I'd hate to think that the radio would suffer the same problems as well.
As a current owner of an Agenda, I can pretty much say that with certainty: 1) The interface, once flashed with the latest binaries (as opposed to the older ones present in teh shipped models), easily kicks Palm into the next century. 2) The handwriting recognition could use a little work still, but differentiation between recognizing writing and mouse-style input is always tricky, and will probably be refined as time goes on. 3) You want color? You can load Linux onto the iPac with a bit of work. I assume that later versions of the Agenda will probably be in color as well. Currently, the screen may be grey, but the resolution is better than that of even the latest model Palm. (besides, doesn't Palm have only one model that comes with a color screen, and it isn't even their top-of-the-line model?) 4) I'm sitting on 24MB of memory here - 16 in flash-storage and 8MB of RAM (I'm not even counting ROM - space...) Most popular palm-tops don't come very close. 5) Yep - there's still bugs in the thing; however, they're getting ironed out now (my own device is very workable and bug-free, though new and experiemtnal additions tend to require ironing-out.) However, the general public doesn't get inflicted with bad code, and the very fact that I can do anything I want to this little machine, evne to the kernel level, is rather enjoyable... /P