Damn... this has to be a/. record: Highest rated first post.
(maybe once long ago a first post got a 5, but I went out drinking last night so I can't remember anything before this morning, and hence it wouldn't count)
on topic: yes, RISC lovers have always sung the death of x86. Oh wait, I got RISC lovers and Sun Microsystems confused again...
Very true. However, like you said, there ARE national ads too. Although what these guys are doing does suffer from that problem of not being too smart for the networks because of the misdirection of local advertising, I'm sure they could come up with a network station over the net that had only NATIONAL ads and NATIONAL news, so that the ads would be targeted appropriately no matter where someone viewed them. I'd say national advertisers should pay a PREMIUM for that kind of targeting. But anyway, if they did that, there would be no problem with broadcast relays from different locales.
BUUUUUUUUUT...
that's not gonna happen. First of all, there's about 1000 unforseen issues with doing that... for example, making the video stream available on the net means someone can do the VCR thing, except cut out commercials and send it around IRC... or hackers can edit in a big black mustache onto Kathie Lee Gifford's face, and the local affiliates are STILL getting ignored, and even if you say that the network can distribute on the net, then who's to stop indie producers to hop on the bandwagon with new networks, or who's to stop production companies to be their own networks? (Kinda like if MP3 takes off, and the artists can just post directly on the net, they don't need a record contract, so the RIAA best not encourages online distribution) Second, they don't need to do it because the market is admittedly small right now (good enough excuse for them) and there's too many risks against their total control right now.
Hell, they FORCE us to buy a TV set if we want to watch at all (instead of having public TV viewing shops or allowing us to pipe it over the net), and pay for subscription cable (if we want cable channels that each wouldn't know the difference if we got them through any other means), and to buy a VCR (if we wanna watch "ER" any time other than 10pm Thursday). TV is not about empowerment at all - it's about control that you get lured into by entertainment. Prime time TV is basically infomercials with acting and news inbetween.
I seem like I'm going off the radical end of the cliff here, but here's my point: this is a new distribution method. They could try it out and see if they'd make money on it - and judging from the way a lot of people are, they probably could with some effort. Or, they could swat it down and keep doing things they way they currently are. Of course it's unethical to use intellectual property legislation to eliminate innovation at the expense of the consumer for the sake of corporate laziness and ignorance. But do you expect anything different from these people?
Personally, I wouldn't really make this issue a big deal. I'd rather be more concerned with those non-existent HDTV standards that everyone refuses to get taken care of. They're dragging their feet on that one too - luckily the FCC is gonna kick their asses if they don't get it taken care of on their own. In the meantime, online TV distribution is kinda looking like a bad idea just because it's simply not close enough to perfect yet. Seeing how MP3 turned out to be "perfect" for online music distribution, I'd be worried if I were the TV people. Or for that matter, the MPAA or the RIAA or any of the book/magazine publishers out there...
Well, you talk about being afraid of the elite being in charge. Good point, but two counterpoints:
1. If the elite so badly want to crush the populace, they can probably do so right now. Of course it's one more way for them to wreak havoc on society if they so choose. Paranoia isn't such a huge deterrent to technology, though. Because it hasn't been since the Industrial revolution.
2. Perhaps the elite SHOULD have control over everything, to prevent that lone deranged person from ever getting his hands on the controls. Open source nanotechnology sounds like an Open source nuclear warhead to me.
Excellent point, however freely pirated creative works CAN mean a zero-sum game, or one close enough anyway. Again, the idea of capitalism is to make as much money as possible. Given the widespread use of open content, one might be disinclined to invest in a company that conducts most of its business with the distribution, et. al., of content. This is not because the company definitely won't make money at all, but that there's too much of a chance that it won't be able to at least show acceptable gains on investment.
A great example of this would be LinuxOne. Although LinuxOne has many other problems aside from this, a potential investor might be wary to buy their stock simply because what they sell will also be available freely necessarily. Knowing this, there's still a market for LinuxOne to sell their Linux distro and make money off of it, but even if it turned out to be a very good distro, that's still not enough reason to prevent me from saying that a company like Red Hat would be a better investment option... simply because Red Hat sells other services too.
Meanwhile, if Red Hat ever wanted to really increase profits, they could simply by dropping their distro development team and any intentions of releasing new versions of Red Hat Linux, and just deal with supporting all distros of Linux. Of course, there's many reasons why they SHOULD maintain their distro, but you see where this kind of thinking comes from. The idea is that a new company can just do support services only and, if they're really good at it, be a better investment option because they're not losing money on maintaining a distro.
Errr, through of the land of increasingly poor examples... it's like trying to sell Charlie Chaplin movies, obviously the copyrights on some of them are way expired. You could make money selling them, sure. But it's not the most fantastic of ideas, especially if you can download them off the net or if they're always on TMC or some classics movie channel. Another farfetched example, if the copyrights expired on "Titanic" on release, I bet Fox or Paramount or whoever wouldn't have made a cent on that movie. So knowing that in advance, the movie wouldn't have been made at all.
Finally, if Sony couldn't patent the PSX2 or copyright the games, would they make them? No. Sure, they'd sell a lot of stuff anyway. But some small start-up company might start copying all the games and then sell them cheaper, eventually knocking out some of Sony's profits. Knowing that the margins are initially tight anyway, Sony can't afford to only have first grabs at the market... they need to make profits grow over time. And that's ridiculous to even think about if anyone can just jump in at any time and undercut you.
The idea is that if you don't have decent IP protection, it's not like you can't make money anyway. It's that, ideally for consumers, you wouldn't. That possiblity alone discourages even trying. That can be applied to any IP at all, even if certain companies have a case where they'd always make money off of new concepts and ideas even if they lost their exclusive rights to them.
I do very much like the idea of open content. I think that our culture would very much benefit from the unrestricted passing of ideas and creativity. I'm very glad that the Internet enables this in many ways and I think a lot of people are benefitting.
That said, we can't just set everything free.
The respective industries that are battling against "piracy" are fighting a pointless and selfish fight, but that doesn't automatically mean that the other side of the battle is entirely correct. As a society, we don't want widespread piracy because that DOES create a major disincentive to further creative works. Our society is capitalist, and we can't forget that when dealing with our culture. You see, capitalism encourages: 1. We make as much money as possible 2. Anything that makes you lose money is useless 3. Anything that saves you money is preferred Now, piracy affects creative works by reducing the amount of money that can be made on them. That violates the first concept. Creative works themselves generally violate the second concept if they make no money. Piracy is encouraged by the third concept, which means that ideally you'd want complete piracy. Therefore, creative works themselves would violate the first and second concepts, and avoiding creativity is encouraged by the third. (and eventually the first)
What does this mean? Well, it means that in a perfect capitalist society, creativity is a generally flawed concept. The entire concepts of art, R&D, and individual thinking give way to the idea that you must do what you KNOW will make you more money. We simply don't want that.
Instead, here's the approach we have to take: - We must provide capitalist advantages to creativity - We must protect creativity from being abused squashed financially - We must encourage and assist the dispersal of creative ideas
Copyright law takes care of the first idea. The respective industries are running amok violating the second idea. The Internet is doing a good job of assisting the third idea. Now, changing copyright law doesn't help the second idea... it'll weaken the first. Restricting the Internet is REALLY BAD for the third idea, however encouraging the Internet happens to be really bad for the first and second ideas. The industries want to be in control and they help the first idea, but it's their control that hurts the third idea. Meanwhile, all these people on the Internet that want open content... well, the first idea might not survive that unless we come up with some way to insure it. But then the second and third ideas would be okay. However, that first idea is what allows the whole process to go on, so we better be wary about how open we want our content to be.
In the end, we aren't a utopian society. People need to eat, and people need to be well-rewarded for hard work. Everything can't be GPL'ed, because as much as we think it's a good idea, it's only relevant to hobbyists and philosophers. (in the sense that no one makes money, and not everyone wants the source code) Obviously the DMCA is bad in a lot of ways, but we can't be in denial about the way our society works. We have to prevent the total spread of piracy - obviously some would be ok, but even that argument is very tricky in terms of balancing ethics, freedom, and practicality. The only reason why the Net is doing okay NOW is because not everyone trades warez or mp3s. But in 20 years, we can't let everyone do that. If we are going to use the Internet to spread ideas and creativity, we must work hard to stop abuses. I think we still have some time to work it out under the current system temporarily, but we all know the current system will probably fall apart eventually. We're trying to fight the good fight, but remember that we have to think clearly about what we're fighting for... otherwise what we're trying to encourage we may destroy instead.
Being from Northern NJ and all, how dare you predict the death of newspapers when you have one of the best up there - "The Record"
Basically, I've been to a lot of different places and seen local papers, and most of them are not very good and would best be used lining a bird cage. The Record, on the other hand, is one of the most consistently GREAT newspapers around. The columnists are top rate, the news is very unbiased, in-depth, and complete (local and national, with national stuff usually taking priority over the local without sacrificing the amount of either), it has MANY sections full of information, it's a good source of local and national ads as well as local classifieds, it's very easy to read, the Sports section is probably the best in the nation (a lot of the columnists do national work, some are regulars on ESPN.com), and in general it's pretty much a standard in Northern NJ. Not being there at the moment, I miss it. Every time I get a chance to go back up to NJ, I always make sure I get some copies of it.
Katz, you know about The Record, and you know that a lot of people read it, and you know that it's very useful and enjoyable and it does a very good job at what it's supposed to do. So why are you predicting the death of newspapers? Sure, a lot of the small-town ones are getting trampled by what's available on the Internet daily, but I think a newspaper like The Record ain't going anywhere anytime soon. I think that there is room for quality newspapers in a world dominated by the Internet, even if just because we're not at the point where EVERYONE can get their Internet news up-to-date in the subway, at the breakfast table, or on the toilet yet.
Yea, you're right, it has mostly to do with how they handle things here, and what my preferences are. To be perfectly honest, I don't HATE what I'm doing, but I just would rather be doing other things. It is a good major though.
I wish it was engineering here though. At least we'd get that kind of credit for it, instead of getting a B.S. from an Arts & Science college. And there's always things I wish they'd do and things I wish they'd not do, but that's besides the point.
BTW I do care about you! {group hug} Sorry if I'm bitter, anxious, and bored tonight. I'm usually not, but just the large amount of "CMU this, CMU that" set me off because it's starting to look like no one else goes anywhere else for CS. It's a stupid and poinless thing to be annoyed at though.
And, coincedentally, I need an apartment for next year. (in Delaware)
I noticed a lot of replies dealing directly with CMU. Now I did apply there, and I was accepted (but NOT into comp sci), but I'm not going there right now. I see that everyone on Slashdot from CMU had to put in their two cents on the matter.
Frankly, I don't give a damn what goes on at CMU. I think half of these posts are arrogant and sickening, and the others are just self-serving (when it comes to school). I've found very little productive conversation on the matter at all in these replies. It wouldn't be so bad if one or two people did it, but I think about 20 did. CMU students are NOT representative of the entire CS population in this country. For example, you probably have a LOT more women than we do, which makes a HUGE difference. My social life is that much worse because there's no real females in my classes at all.
The real reason why there's no female comp sci students is that Comp Sci is a ridiculous major to have. It's like engineering, only less social. I personally have to stick with it just because I can still graduate in 4 years if I do. When I graduate, I'm not doing anything in computers or anything CLOSE to what I've learned in school. That's my problem and mine alone, but I think girls and guys alike are often repelled by the general CS cirriculum, just because they teach you how to be the best CS professor and leave no options to "take the easy road". Basically they kick your ass with ridiculously difficult and badly taught classes and then wonder why enrollment is down. Sheesh.
Well, actually my inital approach to the question was, I'm curious, I don't know everything, and if it exists I haven't seen it yet but I'd like to.
Actual quote: "Sadly, I've yet to see anything really practical done with Lisp. I'm not saying that things HAVEN'T been done or CAN'T... they just haven't been called to my attention yet." So I didn't say nothing like this had never existed...
I've used (and I still have to use) Lisp in college courses. Most of my peers feel that, as a language, it's a waste of time. I always thought that if I'm going to do text-based programming in Unix, it might as well be with something interesting and natural, like Lisp is in ways. C++ for text based programming is an arduous chore, although it makes your life easier in many ways. On the opposite end, I've used Prolog and although I did get the hang of it eventually, I thought learning it was like trying to dry my hair on a frying pan...
Sadly, I've yet to see anything really practical done with Lisp. I'm not saying that things HAVEN'T been done or CAN'T... they just haven't been called to my attention yet. Specifically, I know that Lisp ain't the fastest car in the garage when it comes to compiled speed, but I think that someone should really try to fancy it up and release a professional IDE/compiler/libraries set that is capable of making real-world appications. (not that you COULDN'T do that kind of stuff already if you really wanted to, but somehow I assume that no one is making any Winamp plugins or network games with it)
It is kind of ludicrous to think of such an idea... anything called "Visual Lisp" might cause some crying and suicidal thoughts. But I would be SOOO curious to see what might come out of some project like that. After all, the way that information flows within Lisp might make certain applications much easier to code. Also, one of the very nice things about Lisp IMHO is that if you're a decent programmer, you'll save massive amounts of debugging time because generally you won't have to worry about broken functions down the line... I find it easier to debug Lisp functions out of the gate as opposed to C++. Of course, this comes at the expense of coding time, but I think the end tradeoff is worth it. (I hate debugging more than coding, so again this is IMHO) Finally, Lisp is somewhat ideal for AI and logic type stuff, so coding those type of elements into programs would probably be quicker and more natural.
Of course, making it a bloated language might not have superb results. Specifically, just throwing something like MFC on top wouldn't improve the programming experience. Still, though, I'm very curious, and if anyone knows a direction in which to point me, I'll take a look. Otherwise, this is DIY country, but it might take a year or two before I would be able to accomplish anything like that. Right now my best talent on a computer is getting record times in Minesweeper...
What you're failing to take into account here is that many geeks know nothing about user interfaces and that possibly UI/GUI work should be collaborated on by professionals who do it for a living. Yes, you can talk all you want on how that could be open source too, but that's an area where we would be better off buying commercial packages in the near future. Open Source can't be applied to everything... I think that the fields of user interfaces and graphic design are well established OUTSIDE the realm of computers, and that for us to ask that our Open Source model all of a sudden be applied to something that it doesn't make sense with (how can you open source an image? Other than not copyright it at all) is ludicrous.
I think Open Source does a fine job with straight programming without elaborate user interfaces. For it to enter the popular realm, it needs to have user interface work done WITH it, not IN it. I think Microsoft realizes this and spends a lot of time with the user interface as a priority because they know it's important... and we get pissed at them just because the programming is crappy at times. (Part of the problem with bloatware is that fewer bugs cause more damage, so we see a bluescreen when Paintbrush has some awkward error... but we see the error, not every little step along the way that MS did perfect). I think MS has the right approach in terms of UI/GUI, and maybe a lesser quality but acceptable approach to the programming, and if you want to beat MS, then you can't take the right programming approach and the crummy UI approach (treat it as programming, not separate interface design). Do you think that the same guy who wrote the programming for an ATM machine was the same guy who put it together by hand? No. If that was the case, ATMs would suck.
Well, IMHO Linuxnewbie.org did NOT get me into any trouble and was actually more helpful than any other site in pointing me in the right direction. If you have any support for the claim that they can hurt a newbie, I'd like to see it.
Second, does it matter whether they use the HOWTO's or not to build their own articles? If they want to start from scratch and it still turns out to be a good article, then who gives a rat's ass? I can't think of an example where I thought LNO posted an article that was inferior to HOWTO's with related information... although it may be the case rarely, most of the site is just as good as HOWTO's, only easier to read. At that rate, it's almost refreshing to have TWO DIFFERENT explanations of the same information.
It's true that if I looked up everything in LNO and in the HOWTO's and made side-by-side comparisons, I might say that writing a new article from scratch was not necessary. But if the new article is of decent quality anyway and does the job, then I don't see an issue. And if ONE article is worse than the HOWTO's and is a bad article to start with, well then I can personally say that I know that's not the trend for the entire site and I happen to disagree with you.
I dunno if they should win the Beanie contest, but I can tell you that I would RECOMMEND the site wholeheartedly as a good, useful site. If there's anything bad about it, I have yet to see it. It was useful to me, and if it's not useful to you then remove it from your bookmarks and don't bash it unless you trashed a Linux installation with it.
It seems that you have an opinion about the site, but you fail to show good reasons for it. I mean, it's not as if I really care one way or another because it's not my site, but I can't see what would make you think that LNO is so bad. How about you do a little legwork yourself. You just might wind up proving the OPPOSITE of your opinion, IMHO...
... the issues you brought up matter little to a newbie. A clear, helpful, get-things-working explanation is what newbies need. Regardless of arrogance or stupidity or impatience, all people need the short answers that work even if there's a better long answer. LinuxNewbie.org does a fine job of giving short answers, and it's perfect for the first time Linux home user. As a business or experienced Linux user, I'd be reluctant to rely on only one website or source for information anyway, which makes all of your "They're wrong about this and that" points on advanced topics kind of moot. LinuxNewbie.org gets you up and running, and it's your job to take the next step but at least they help A LOT in getting to that point...
And for the most part, HOWTOs are very easily available. Just because they're not an LDP mirror or something doesn't mean that their own information is useless. It's original and it's easy to fill the holes yourself, so why chastise them for spending more time on original content rather than messing around with all of the other easily available documentation (most of which are anti-newbie anyway)...
If your sense of balance can be messed with enough to make you feel like you're falling or getting blown to the side, you're gonna forget that you're sitting in that chair real quick.
Ex1. Imaging retrofitting Gran Turismo with this stuff... no more "Hey I'll spin out and just keep driving", you'll be messed up enough with your senses just from the pull of a normal turn to make the game THAT much more realistic.
Ex2. In Quake, you walk up to someone, hit them point blank with a rocket, and land on two feet and keep walking if you have enough health. But not if you feel like you got blown back halfway across the room in real life like the guy on the screen did. You'll rip out the mouse cord falling backwards.
Ex3. Those free-fall nose dives in MS Flight Simulator (or hell, Corncob 3D) are just a little more realistic now. The sensation of falling straight down while seeing it through 3d goggles and hearing it through headphones should make you shit a nice sized brick.
Dopey! You can't just say "Oh it's a vertical monopoly, not horizontal". The point is that a company this big will have too much power and control. This is BAD in the respective industries that they control. Conventional media is much different from the Internet, although conventional media is trying to move into the Internet. But anyway, this will be a company with control over a lot of conventional media and a lot of the Internet. One would argue that the merging of Netscape and Winamp with EMI and Warner Music alone would be significant enough to online music that it could be a very bad thing. And producing at a lower rate does not mean selling at a lower rate. It means they make more money to buy other companies with. Sheesh.
True... some of these people aren't great role models...
What I have a problem with is your definition of a criminal act. Although Microsoft is ruthlessly aggressive and maybe it has gotten a little out of control, it's hard to say that anything they've done was a criminal act (well, with a few exceptions, but they've been very good about owning up to that stuff... I'm thinking the DoubleSpace/Stac fiasco). And that's besides the point. Microsoft is NOT an unbeatable company. The idea is that they can lose many battles without getting knocked out for good. Now, what stops any other company from winning battles? Well, it's true that MS does throw their weight around a lot, but they're a big clumsy corporation (although pretty swift for one anyway) that can't compete with one very quick successful startup, the elephant that can be beaten by mice.
Netscape was a good example of this, and it wasn't MS that killed Netscape, it was Netscape that killed Netscape (and AOL who swept them under the rug). Face it, there was a point when both 4.0 browsers had just come out that it was very questionable whether or not Netscape could retain their lead, and NO ONE was really whining about the OS browser bundling at that point (except Netscape). Then what happened? Netscape had (and still has) many very loyal users and it would take a thief in the night to kill all the market share that they have right now. But the crap quality of Netscape vs. the improving quality of IE gave everyone a tough decision. In the end, there's tons of people who have both IE and Netscape on their computers but choose to use IE instead. Considering that most of these people aren't first time users (first time users actually look for Netscape, NOT IE), that is a legitimate victory for MS. And currently one that big man-woman Janet Reno thinks involved some criminal act.
I agree that it's not right when criminals turn good and everyone forgets the past. But to say that about Gates, you have to show exactly when he was a criminal.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Business is business. And business means hurting other businesses sometimes. It's the nature of the game. Many companies did NOT have to die in the wake of MS if they just would have done better business, although MS has been very agressive... but that's besides the point. The tech industry has always been like this, and Gates is no different from any other tech CEO in the last 2 decades. That's what I meant by the mythical stuff. This is all hero worship and villianizing. Bill Gates shouldn't have been concerned with the welfare of any company but his own... and I don't see massive layoffs coming at MS (although maybe that's why Ballamer's stepping in... maybe Gates doesn't want to be knows as "Buzzsaw Bill") so I don't think Gates is a big villian. BTW I own AOL stock, so I have no reason to stick up for MS except for my own convictions. And I'm not going to listen to any troll who thinks that Gates is the antichrist because a bunch of companies tanked when they couldn't make money anymore even though you can't blame Microsoft for that. Gates hasn't murdered anyone, so cut him some slack.
There's no doubt that it's a problem not strictly limited to geeks. Or, in more correct terms, tech workers. The idea is that anyone who has this problem can be doing anything with his/her life, but the problem makes them a geek.
By the way, I live 3000 miles from Silicon Valley, so I'm just being observant and not bitchy. However, it's one reason I wouldn't move out there...
The story told here is both tragic and promising, if everyone will put down the biases first.
The idea of Gates as a well-loved philanthropist is something we should hold more strongly in our minds than the "BillGatus of Borg" image we beat to death. Whether truth or opinion, the image of Gates as an evil dictator is not very appealing and does no one good. The image of Gates as the next Carnegie, on the other hand, is very pleasing and beneficial to our minds and our society. My belief is that the entire presence of computers in our world is entirely mythical - although I don't want to get into that. Based on that idea, if you can swallow it, there are no heroes or villians on the Internet or in the tech industry different from those in real life. Such is why the entire antitrust case against MS is a complete fallacy, such is why AOL could merge with AT&T and all the Baby Bells if they wanted to and our existence will be no different, such is why Linus Torvalds is just some guy from Finland when he walks into a local bar.
I hate to see this as the beginning of the end (or some substantial part of it) for MS. First of all, I think Gates is taking his natural role right now rather than cashing out (as this move has little to do with money). Even if it is motivated by the imminent collapse of MS or the current turmoil, it's not as if the power structure is radically shifting - it's more like the movement of the tectonic plates. Second, the idea of this leading into the bitter end for MS is just nauseating. After all, this is a company with tens of thousands of employees, the highest market capitalization of any company existing today, hundreds of (arguably) quality products on store shelves, and a solid financial foundation. Sure, any company can give up the ghost tomorrow for any reason, but it doesn't HAVE to be that way for MS. Especially in light of the AOL-TimeWarner merger, it seems STUPID that a company like Microsoft can lose everything. AOL-TimeWarner could collapse under it's own weight, and yet Microsoft has stayed agile and responsive to the industry over the years throughout failure and success. This alone should be a good reason to not count MS out yet. Finally, like I said computers are mythical and only real people make the difference. Microsoft is still a real corporation with real people in charge... pretty much the same real people as before. No one is going to skip buying Office 2000 tomorrow because Gates isn't CEO. Office 2000 will be the same product as it was yesterday, and Microsoft's ability to continue releasing good or half-baked products and making money regardless is what will tell their future.
That said, is this the end of an era for MS and the computing industry? Maybe. I can't see how that AOL-TimeWarner merger really changes the success of other companies... for example, Yahoo isn't going to be upstaged just because they DIDN'T merge with another company. Same goes for Microsoft... it's a pure battle of control and hype, and in the end the real world fact is that I can hardly think of any major products that the new AOL-TimeWarner possesses that directly compete with anything from Microsoft and vice versa. Microsoft can still succeed in the face of AOL, the DOJ, Linux, temp workers, whatever. If they heavily rely on what they've done in the past to dictate their future, THEN THEY'RE DONE. But they really never have. Not in the real world anyway. Sure, on the computer, it's slow reused 16-bit legacy code in Windows98, it's a web browser given away for free just to crush Netscape, it's Service Pack 7 for NT, it's that annoying paper clip animation. But you have to think for a second... these are all little nitpicks. No one is going to totally upheave their computer(s) because of these things. Microsoft's OS dominance might outlast Microsoft itself. But MS can't live on that alone. And if you naively think that MS has no chance of continuing to be a dominant company, well then you are probably forgetting that all MS has to do is to keep making progress like they have been for 20 years to keep alive and healthy, never mind being the market leader.
Which is why I'm sure that Gates isn't thinking MS is doomed right now. Knowing Gates, he's doing something radical that he probably knows is in the best interests of the company... kinda like John Carmack stepping in and hiring an outsider to improve the bot code in Quake 3 Arena. I think that it's probably a nice side effect that he drops the negative attention directed toward him, and I think it's good for everyone in the real world that someone like him have as little negative attention possible focused on him. The idea of Gates as a benevolent philanthropist sounds heartwarming, even. It would be a shame if all of this posturing, hype, and hypocrisy in the tech industry ruined that for the rest of us. But that's not an issue until Bill quits everything and starts handing out all the cash. Even if Microsoft florishes or whithers, he's going to win in this situation for himself. But I think he still has MS on his mind, and I think that this might be the start of something real good for Microsoft. And possibly the rest of us.
It works PS2 and USB. I couldn't get the USB to work even under Win98, but that might be my system. Using the PS2 with ps2rate.exe is just as good. Serial won't work though.:(
The mouse itself is very solid. Assuming that it'll last long, I have absolutely no problems with it at all. The extra buttons are helpful (although probably useless in Linux) and the mouse generally feels very comfortable to use. I have the Explorer version so now I have this funky looking red-glowing mouse that looks cool IMHO. The movement of the cursor on the screen is very smooth and precise, so it beats out other mice in that category at least. The price hurts (which is why I got it for Xmas) but as long as it doesn't break within a year I'm extremely happy with it and it was worth it. At least one thing that MS did pretty good with...
Yes the article is highly annoying with it's pseudocode and it's jump from simple dating to prostitution and sex fetishes. I thought the best point was made early in the article, and has been said quite a few times here...
That is, even though a lot of geeks were geeks before getting into computers, many geeks became geeks involuntarily because they got into computers. There's a list of contributing factors: 1. Computers aren't something you talk about in a bar. Unfortunately for tech workers, their jobs are all but unmentionable in a social setting. There is a geek stereotype which contributes to this, computers AREN'T sexy, and truthfully most people who aren't in the know about computers are mostly intimidated by those who do. It's kinda like being in high school and talking to girls about your SAT scores... you can pretty much kill a conversation if you both discover that you scored 400 points above the person you're talking to. 2. Long, grueling hours. To have a successful social life, time needs to be put into it. However, most tech jobs would make you work the 25th hour of the day if such an hour existed. Friends and lovers don't magically appear. Hell, you have to put a good two hours into buying them if you need to. This is sad that our industry knows this and doesn't really do much about it. In five years everyone's gonna have a midlife crisis (at 26) and jump ship anyway, so they're slowly but surely pushing their workers away by doing this. 3. You get into it. Most tech work can pretty much suck you in and never let go. The way that everything is so complicated and complex, once you're on a roll you don't really want to stop. I mean, you can be "in the zone" for a whole six months if you're working at it 14 hours a day (10 hours on the job + 4 thinking about it in the shower or in the car or while making dinner). Hell, most tech work REQUIRES this if you're going to do a decent job at it. Most professions requiring such intelligence (doctors, scientists, mathematicians, whatever) have this problem, because you can't take your time with the work, otherwise you'll never get anywhere relative to where the world stands now. 4. If computers are easy and women are hard to understand, you probably will stick with computers. 5. That ungodly male:female ratio in Silicon Valley doesn't help much either.
In the end, a lot of this happens unconciously and most people are drawn into a life that they utterly despise and feel trapped by. It's the type of thing where you have to get out when you see it happening to yourself, but most tech people are then further drawn in by the threat of upheaval, the money, the addictive power of the net, etc. In the end, you just have to look out for yourself and keep your priorities straight. If you want a social life that badly, you'll do what it takes to get one - losing your job and moving out of the Valley is a small price to pay for love. There's tech jobs all over the place, and some probably pay more and don't overwork you. Or maybe not, but like I said it's a small price to pay. If you don't think that way at all, then you're probably NOT having a problem with your sex life and you're probably thinking that Slashdot's been going a bit too far with the sex articles...
Well, we all know that these kids should be policed to hell and back, right? I mean after all, if 2 or 3 of them bring guns in to school then we must lock them down and treat them like dogs... Same thing for adults though. Re: Honolulu shootings. Re: Seattle shootings. So far this year I can count 3 or 4 mass murders committed by adults in the workplace (probably more) but only one done by kids at a school. I think that those 4 adult murder stories got less media time COMBINED than the one at a school. So, we're going to have to live in a police state! After all, it's for our saftey that we allow our hapless government officials to drag us around by the nostrils and abuse the crap out of their power in the interests of their re-elect*COUGH* our saftey. Folks, this is going to get worse. Mostly because when the stories get worse (and they will), the reactions will be worse which will cause future reactions to be even more worse (gr?) and the cycle will become gruesome before anyone in this country makes it an issue worth arguing seriously over instead of just drooling at it while it's on the evening news...
Perhaps the issue isn't whether or not DVD copy protection can be cracked at all, but whether or not it's easy for MOST people to do it...
I'd say that if it were that easy to crack CSS, then perhaps it was meant to be no more effective than Macrovision... a stumbling block too big for those not interested enough in overcoming it. While it's pretty obvious that both it's now easier to crack DVDs and it's still unfeasible to copy them in massive numbers, what's not really thought of here is whether or not such a development will dictate the future effectiveness of the copy protections on DVDs.
The development of MP3+CDR is an entirely different story, as digital audio was an entrenched standard that was already effective for the music industry. On the other hand, DVD is still rather new and it's rather easy to predict that in five years it WILL be feasible to pass around cracked movies on the Net for many people. Just how many people are willing to do that is another issue entirely.
I suppose that fixed storage, recordable media, and available bandwidth will all be large enough in a few years to allow DVDs to be copied easily. Still, it will take a lot of one person's time to do extensive trading, and the availability of that kind of equipment to the general public will be limited. The interesting facts and issues of the situation are: 1. People who buy DVDs usually have all the other nice little gadgets too. Hence the current target market for DVDs will probably be enabled best to trade them illegally. 2. DVD is a premium high-quality format for an extremely popular medium, which means that unlike CDs (which would be more of a standard format) trading DVDs would be preferrable to any other kind of bootlegging. 3. The movie studios do have the option of pulling DVDs and sticking with VHS... for most releases. Or, perhaps a greater control and limited availablity on DVDs would prevent DVDs from becoming a mass-consumer product, hence eliminating the possiblity of mass-pirating. 4. On the contrary, the movie studios can make a huge push of DVD into the consumer market so that it does become a mass-consumer product, not only strengthening their margins above those of the already mass-pirated, more expensive, and lower-quality VHS, but also to eliminate the possiblity that a large part of the DVD market would pirate them. Add more to the market that won't be copying them and you minimize the copying problem. CDs currently enjoy this position, as there are many people who copy them but there's a massive amount of people who can't, don't, and won't, therefore making the CD-copying problem negligible on the bottom line. 5. Finally, the industry has time to combat the problem with a variety of solutions before copying becomes feasible. They don't have to pull off any drastic moves right now, which means that if DVD business is brisk I doubt they'll be scaling back on it anytime soon. They may switch formats (a DVD2), they might try to keep DVD-RWs and all similar DVD writable formats from becoming widespread, or they might ignore the problem altogether. It's not like what happened to the music industry, where one day the tools became available and people started ripping/encoding/copying CDs like crazy as the industry helplessly watched.
Right now, however, it's just a big embarassment for the movie industry and a new opportunity for the elite piraters. If I had the opportunity to advise the movie industry how to handle the situation, I would probably suggest that right now they should take a "good faith" position and trust the current market to not do what they pretty much could have done anyway. In the future, I'd suggest that perhaps they take either one of two paths: They start planning a format change RIGHT now for a rollout in 10 years and make the new DVD-Video format a self-standing component with closed specifications rather than a multi-component open standard, as this would prevent anyone from easily pirating movies (in other words, a DVD drive is like a standalone DVD player and you just overlay it, which shouldn't be too much to ask in 10 years) or getting any undesirable use out of the video. Or, they make DVDs an entrenched standard and a mass-market industry with even a bigger push than they are today, with the understanding that they hold the advantage of being the honest, legal, simple, and not-too-expensive solution for DVD purchasing. In other words, who cares about pirating when you're going to make gadzillions of dollars selling legit DVDs and, for most people, that's the best or only option now and for a long time. It's like if you own a candy store and little kids keep eating the candy... you can put the candy on a higher shelf, or you can put a small basket of free candy by the door. You DON'T stop selling candy (or only sell stale candy)...
It's a fairly run-of-the-mill "Hey I overclocked my processor to Ludicrous Speed!" article. However, I nearly fell out of my chair laughing at some of the truly odd translated phrases...
"If no processor given rhythm at this frequency..." - these processors have rhythm baby! This line reminds me of the dancing bunny-suit Intel engineers.
"While waiting, greediest in MHz can fold back itself on the systems KryoTech Cool Athlon 800 and 900..." - greediest in MHz? Fold back itself while waiting? Sounds like a contortionist that wants all the MHz for itself...
"While waiting, history to dream a little and to see what will have in the belly the processors of demains..." - no comment. Too good for words.
"...on a chipset BX the AGP is to 88 MHz when one uses a drunk face side of 133 MHz..." - my question is, if it's drunk then is it still greedy? Does it still have rhythm? (I know that I lose any rhythm I have when I'm trashed)...
"...the profit of 39% is a little less significant but remains impressive, even if it is also with the read-write memory given rhythm to 133 MHz." - ok it's getting dumb now (the joke, not the article) so I'll end it here... but I like to think that my read-write memory has rhythm too, since my Celeron 300a doesn't shake its stuff too well yet...
Slashdot Mirror
Damn... this has to be a /. record: Highest rated first post.
(maybe once long ago a first post got a 5, but I went out drinking last night so I can't remember anything before this morning, and hence it wouldn't count)
on topic: yes, RISC lovers have always sung the death of x86. Oh wait, I got RISC lovers and Sun Microsystems confused again...
Very true. However, like you said, there ARE national ads too. Although what these guys are doing does suffer from that problem of not being too smart for the networks because of the misdirection of local advertising, I'm sure they could come up with a network station over the net that had only NATIONAL ads and NATIONAL news, so that the ads would be targeted appropriately no matter where someone viewed them. I'd say national advertisers should pay a PREMIUM for that kind of targeting. But anyway, if they did that, there would be no problem with broadcast relays from different locales.
BUUUUUUUUUT...
that's not gonna happen. First of all, there's about 1000 unforseen issues with doing that... for example, making the video stream available on the net means someone can do the VCR thing, except cut out commercials and send it around IRC... or hackers can edit in a big black mustache onto Kathie Lee Gifford's face, and the local affiliates are STILL getting ignored, and even if you say that the network can distribute on the net, then who's to stop indie producers to hop on the bandwagon with new networks, or who's to stop production companies to be their own networks? (Kinda like if MP3 takes off, and the artists can just post directly on the net, they don't need a record contract, so the RIAA best not encourages online distribution) Second, they don't need to do it because the market is admittedly small right now (good enough excuse for them) and there's too many risks against their total control right now.
Hell, they FORCE us to buy a TV set if we want to watch at all (instead of having public TV viewing shops or allowing us to pipe it over the net), and pay for subscription cable (if we want cable channels that each wouldn't know the difference if we got them through any other means), and to buy a VCR (if we wanna watch "ER" any time other than 10pm Thursday). TV is not about empowerment at all - it's about control that you get lured into by entertainment. Prime time TV is basically infomercials with acting and news inbetween.
I seem like I'm going off the radical end of the cliff here, but here's my point: this is a new distribution method. They could try it out and see if they'd make money on it - and judging from the way a lot of people are, they probably could with some effort. Or, they could swat it down and keep doing things they way they currently are. Of course it's unethical to use intellectual property legislation to eliminate innovation at the expense of the consumer for the sake of corporate laziness and ignorance. But do you expect anything different from these people?
Personally, I wouldn't really make this issue a big deal. I'd rather be more concerned with those non-existent HDTV standards that everyone refuses to get taken care of. They're dragging their feet on that one too - luckily the FCC is gonna kick their asses if they don't get it taken care of on their own. In the meantime, online TV distribution is kinda looking like a bad idea just because it's simply not close enough to perfect yet. Seeing how MP3 turned out to be "perfect" for online music distribution, I'd be worried if I were the TV people. Or for that matter, the MPAA or the RIAA or any of the book/magazine publishers out there...
Well, you talk about being afraid of the elite being in charge. Good point, but two counterpoints:
1. If the elite so badly want to crush the populace, they can probably do so right now. Of course it's one more way for them to wreak havoc on society if they so choose. Paranoia isn't such a huge deterrent to technology, though. Because it hasn't been since the Industrial revolution.
2. Perhaps the elite SHOULD have control over everything, to prevent that lone deranged person from ever getting his hands on the controls. Open source nanotechnology sounds like an Open source nuclear warhead to me.
Excellent point, however freely pirated creative works CAN mean a zero-sum game, or one close enough anyway. Again, the idea of capitalism is to make as much money as possible. Given the widespread use of open content, one might be disinclined to invest in a company that conducts most of its business with the distribution, et. al., of content. This is not because the company definitely won't make money at all, but that there's too much of a chance that it won't be able to at least show acceptable gains on investment.
A great example of this would be LinuxOne. Although LinuxOne has many other problems aside from this, a potential investor might be wary to buy their stock simply because what they sell will also be available freely necessarily. Knowing this, there's still a market for LinuxOne to sell their Linux distro and make money off of it, but even if it turned out to be a very good distro, that's still not enough reason to prevent me from saying that a company like Red Hat would be a better investment option... simply because Red Hat sells other services too.
Meanwhile, if Red Hat ever wanted to really increase profits, they could simply by dropping their distro development team and any intentions of releasing new versions of Red Hat Linux, and just deal with supporting all distros of Linux. Of course, there's many reasons why they SHOULD maintain their distro, but you see where this kind of thinking comes from. The idea is that a new company can just do support services only and, if they're really good at it, be a better investment option because they're not losing money on maintaining a distro.
Errr, through of the land of increasingly poor examples... it's like trying to sell Charlie Chaplin movies, obviously the copyrights on some of them are way expired. You could make money selling them, sure. But it's not the most fantastic of ideas, especially if you can download them off the net or if they're always on TMC or some classics movie channel. Another farfetched example, if the copyrights expired on "Titanic" on release, I bet Fox or Paramount or whoever wouldn't have made a cent on that movie. So knowing that in advance, the movie wouldn't have been made at all.
Finally, if Sony couldn't patent the PSX2 or copyright the games, would they make them? No. Sure, they'd sell a lot of stuff anyway. But some small start-up company might start copying all the games and then sell them cheaper, eventually knocking out some of Sony's profits. Knowing that the margins are initially tight anyway, Sony can't afford to only have first grabs at the market... they need to make profits grow over time. And that's ridiculous to even think about if anyone can just jump in at any time and undercut you.
The idea is that if you don't have decent IP protection, it's not like you can't make money anyway. It's that, ideally for consumers, you wouldn't. That possiblity alone discourages even trying. That can be applied to any IP at all, even if certain companies have a case where they'd always make money off of new concepts and ideas even if they lost their exclusive rights to them.
I do very much like the idea of open content. I think that our culture would very much benefit from the unrestricted passing of ideas and creativity. I'm very glad that the Internet enables this in many ways and I think a lot of people are benefitting.
That said, we can't just set everything free.
The respective industries that are battling against "piracy" are fighting a pointless and selfish fight, but that doesn't automatically mean that the other side of the battle is entirely correct. As a society, we don't want widespread piracy because that DOES create a major disincentive to further creative works. Our society is capitalist, and we can't forget that when dealing with our culture. You see, capitalism encourages:
1. We make as much money as possible
2. Anything that makes you lose money is useless
3. Anything that saves you money is preferred
Now, piracy affects creative works by reducing the amount of money that can be made on them. That violates the first concept. Creative works themselves generally violate the second concept if they make no money. Piracy is encouraged by the third concept, which means that ideally you'd want complete piracy. Therefore, creative works themselves would violate the first and second concepts, and avoiding creativity is encouraged by the third. (and eventually the first)
What does this mean? Well, it means that in a perfect capitalist society, creativity is a generally flawed concept. The entire concepts of art, R&D, and individual thinking give way to the idea that you must do what you KNOW will make you more money. We simply don't want that.
Instead, here's the approach we have to take:
- We must provide capitalist advantages to creativity
- We must protect creativity from being abused squashed financially
- We must encourage and assist the dispersal of creative ideas
Copyright law takes care of the first idea. The respective industries are running amok violating the second idea. The Internet is doing a good job of assisting the third idea. Now, changing copyright law doesn't help the second idea... it'll weaken the first. Restricting the Internet is REALLY BAD for the third idea, however encouraging the Internet happens to be really bad for the first and second ideas. The industries want to be in control and they help the first idea, but it's their control that hurts the third idea. Meanwhile, all these people on the Internet that want open content... well, the first idea might not survive that unless we come up with some way to insure it. But then the second and third ideas would be okay. However, that first idea is what allows the whole process to go on, so we better be wary about how open we want our content to be.
In the end, we aren't a utopian society. People need to eat, and people need to be well-rewarded for hard work. Everything can't be GPL'ed, because as much as we think it's a good idea, it's only relevant to hobbyists and philosophers. (in the sense that no one makes money, and not everyone wants the source code) Obviously the DMCA is bad in a lot of ways, but we can't be in denial about the way our society works. We have to prevent the total spread of piracy - obviously some would be ok, but even that argument is very tricky in terms of balancing ethics, freedom, and practicality. The only reason why the Net is doing okay NOW is because not everyone trades warez or mp3s. But in 20 years, we can't let everyone do that. If we are going to use the Internet to spread ideas and creativity, we must work hard to stop abuses. I think we still have some time to work it out under the current system temporarily, but we all know the current system will probably fall apart eventually. We're trying to fight the good fight, but remember that we have to think clearly about what we're fighting for... otherwise what we're trying to encourage we may destroy instead.
Being from Northern NJ and all, how dare you predict the death of newspapers when you have one of the best up there - "The Record"
Basically, I've been to a lot of different places and seen local papers, and most of them are not very good and would best be used lining a bird cage. The Record, on the other hand, is one of the most consistently GREAT newspapers around. The columnists are top rate, the news is very unbiased, in-depth, and complete (local and national, with national stuff usually taking priority over the local without sacrificing the amount of either), it has MANY sections full of information, it's a good source of local and national ads as well as local classifieds, it's very easy to read, the Sports section is probably the best in the nation (a lot of the columnists do national work, some are regulars on ESPN.com), and in general it's pretty much a standard in Northern NJ. Not being there at the moment, I miss it. Every time I get a chance to go back up to NJ, I always make sure I get some copies of it.
Katz, you know about The Record, and you know that a lot of people read it, and you know that it's very useful and enjoyable and it does a very good job at what it's supposed to do. So why are you predicting the death of newspapers? Sure, a lot of the small-town ones are getting trampled by what's available on the Internet daily, but I think a newspaper like The Record ain't going anywhere anytime soon. I think that there is room for quality newspapers in a world dominated by the Internet, even if just because we're not at the point where EVERYONE can get their Internet news up-to-date in the subway, at the breakfast table, or on the toilet yet.
Yea, you're right, it has mostly to do with how they handle things here, and what my preferences are. To be perfectly honest, I don't HATE what I'm doing, but I just would rather be doing other things. It is a good major though.
I wish it was engineering here though. At least we'd get that kind of credit for it, instead of getting a B.S. from an Arts & Science college. And there's always things I wish they'd do and things I wish they'd not do, but that's besides the point.
BTW I do care about you! {group hug} Sorry if I'm bitter, anxious, and bored tonight. I'm usually not, but just the large amount of "CMU this, CMU that" set me off because it's starting to look like no one else goes anywhere else for CS. It's a stupid and poinless thing to be annoyed at though.
And, coincedentally, I need an apartment for next year. (in Delaware)
I noticed a lot of replies dealing directly with CMU. Now I did apply there, and I was accepted (but NOT into comp sci), but I'm not going there right now. I see that everyone on Slashdot from CMU had to put in their two cents on the matter.
Frankly, I don't give a damn what goes on at CMU. I think half of these posts are arrogant and sickening, and the others are just self-serving (when it comes to school). I've found very little productive conversation on the matter at all in these replies. It wouldn't be so bad if one or two people did it, but I think about 20 did. CMU students are NOT representative of the entire CS population in this country. For example, you probably have a LOT more women than we do, which makes a HUGE difference. My social life is that much worse because there's no real females in my classes at all.
The real reason why there's no female comp sci students is that Comp Sci is a ridiculous major to have. It's like engineering, only less social. I personally have to stick with it just because I can still graduate in 4 years if I do. When I graduate, I'm not doing anything in computers or anything CLOSE to what I've learned in school. That's my problem and mine alone, but I think girls and guys alike are often repelled by the general CS cirriculum, just because they teach you how to be the best CS professor and leave no options to "take the easy road". Basically they kick your ass with ridiculously difficult and badly taught classes and then wonder why enrollment is down. Sheesh.
Well, actually my inital approach to the question was, I'm curious, I don't know everything, and if it exists I haven't seen it yet but I'd like to.
Actual quote: "Sadly, I've yet to see anything really practical done with Lisp. I'm not saying that things HAVEN'T been done or CAN'T... they just haven't been called to my attention yet." So I didn't say nothing like this had never existed...
Either way, my question was well answered...
Kinda OT, but...
I've used (and I still have to use) Lisp in college courses. Most of my peers feel that, as a language, it's a waste of time. I always thought that if I'm going to do text-based programming in Unix, it might as well be with something interesting and natural, like Lisp is in ways. C++ for text based programming is an arduous chore, although it makes your life easier in many ways. On the opposite end, I've used Prolog and although I did get the hang of it eventually, I thought learning it was like trying to dry my hair on a frying pan...
Sadly, I've yet to see anything really practical done with Lisp. I'm not saying that things HAVEN'T been done or CAN'T... they just haven't been called to my attention yet. Specifically, I know that Lisp ain't the fastest car in the garage when it comes to compiled speed, but I think that someone should really try to fancy it up and release a professional IDE/compiler/libraries set that is capable of making real-world appications. (not that you COULDN'T do that kind of stuff already if you really wanted to, but somehow I assume that no one is making any Winamp plugins or network games with it)
It is kind of ludicrous to think of such an idea... anything called "Visual Lisp" might cause some crying and suicidal thoughts. But I would be SOOO curious to see what might come out of some project like that. After all, the way that information flows within Lisp might make certain applications much easier to code. Also, one of the very nice things about Lisp IMHO is that if you're a decent programmer, you'll save massive amounts of debugging time because generally you won't have to worry about broken functions down the line... I find it easier to debug Lisp functions out of the gate as opposed to C++. Of course, this comes at the expense of coding time, but I think the end tradeoff is worth it. (I hate debugging more than coding, so again this is IMHO) Finally, Lisp is somewhat ideal for AI and logic type stuff, so coding those type of elements into programs would probably be quicker and more natural.
Of course, making it a bloated language might not have superb results. Specifically, just throwing something like MFC on top wouldn't improve the programming experience. Still, though, I'm very curious, and if anyone knows a direction in which to point me, I'll take a look. Otherwise, this is DIY country, but it might take a year or two before I would be able to accomplish anything like that. Right now my best talent on a computer is getting record times in Minesweeper...
What you're failing to take into account here is that many geeks know nothing about user interfaces and that possibly UI/GUI work should be collaborated on by professionals who do it for a living. Yes, you can talk all you want on how that could be open source too, but that's an area where we would be better off buying commercial packages in the near future. Open Source can't be applied to everything... I think that the fields of user interfaces and graphic design are well established OUTSIDE the realm of computers, and that for us to ask that our Open Source model all of a sudden be applied to something that it doesn't make sense with (how can you open source an image? Other than not copyright it at all) is ludicrous.
I think Open Source does a fine job with straight programming without elaborate user interfaces. For it to enter the popular realm, it needs to have user interface work done WITH it, not IN it. I think Microsoft realizes this and spends a lot of time with the user interface as a priority because they know it's important... and we get pissed at them just because the programming is crappy at times. (Part of the problem with bloatware is that fewer bugs cause more damage, so we see a bluescreen when Paintbrush has some awkward error... but we see the error, not every little step along the way that MS did perfect). I think MS has the right approach in terms of UI/GUI, and maybe a lesser quality but acceptable approach to the programming, and if you want to beat MS, then you can't take the right programming approach and the crummy UI approach (treat it as programming, not separate interface design). Do you think that the same guy who wrote the programming for an ATM machine was the same guy who put it together by hand? No. If that was the case, ATMs would suck.
Well, IMHO Linuxnewbie.org did NOT get me into any trouble and was actually more helpful than any other site in pointing me in the right direction. If you have any support for the claim that they can hurt a newbie, I'd like to see it.
Second, does it matter whether they use the HOWTO's or not to build their own articles? If they want to start from scratch and it still turns out to be a good article, then who gives a rat's ass? I can't think of an example where I thought LNO posted an article that was inferior to HOWTO's with related information... although it may be the case rarely, most of the site is just as good as HOWTO's, only easier to read. At that rate, it's almost refreshing to have TWO DIFFERENT explanations of the same information.
It's true that if I looked up everything in LNO and in the HOWTO's and made side-by-side comparisons, I might say that writing a new article from scratch was not necessary. But if the new article is of decent quality anyway and does the job, then I don't see an issue. And if ONE article is worse than the HOWTO's and is a bad article to start with, well then I can personally say that I know that's not the trend for the entire site and I happen to disagree with you.
I dunno if they should win the Beanie contest, but I can tell you that I would RECOMMEND the site wholeheartedly as a good, useful site. If there's anything bad about it, I have yet to see it. It was useful to me, and if it's not useful to you then remove it from your bookmarks and don't bash it unless you trashed a Linux installation with it.
It seems that you have an opinion about the site, but you fail to show good reasons for it. I mean, it's not as if I really care one way or another because it's not my site, but I can't see what would make you think that LNO is so bad. How about you do a little legwork yourself. You just might wind up proving the OPPOSITE of your opinion, IMHO...
And you are wrong because...
... the issues you brought up matter little to a newbie. A clear, helpful, get-things-working explanation is what newbies need. Regardless of arrogance or stupidity or impatience, all people need the short answers that work even if there's a better long answer. LinuxNewbie.org does a fine job of giving short answers, and it's perfect for the first time Linux home user. As a business or experienced Linux user, I'd be reluctant to rely on only one website or source for information anyway, which makes all of your "They're wrong about this and that" points on advanced topics kind of moot. LinuxNewbie.org gets you up and running, and it's your job to take the next step but at least they help A LOT in getting to that point...
And for the most part, HOWTOs are very easily available. Just because they're not an LDP mirror or something doesn't mean that their own information is useless. It's original and it's easy to fill the holes yourself, so why chastise them for spending more time on original content rather than messing around with all of the other easily available documentation (most of which are anti-newbie anyway)...
If your sense of balance can be messed with enough to make you feel like you're falling or getting blown to the side, you're gonna forget that you're sitting in that chair real quick.
Ex1. Imaging retrofitting Gran Turismo with this stuff... no more "Hey I'll spin out and just keep driving", you'll be messed up enough with your senses just from the pull of a normal turn to make the game THAT much more realistic.
Ex2. In Quake, you walk up to someone, hit them point blank with a rocket, and land on two feet and keep walking if you have enough health. But not if you feel like you got blown back halfway across the room in real life like the guy on the screen did. You'll rip out the mouse cord falling backwards.
Ex3. Those free-fall nose dives in MS Flight Simulator (or hell, Corncob 3D) are just a little more realistic now. The sensation of falling straight down while seeing it through 3d goggles and hearing it through headphones should make you shit a nice sized brick.
Dopey! You can't just say "Oh it's a vertical monopoly, not horizontal". The point is that a company this big will have too much power and control. This is BAD in the respective industries that they control. Conventional media is much different from the Internet, although conventional media is trying to move into the Internet. But anyway, this will be a company with control over a lot of conventional media and a lot of the Internet. One would argue that the merging of Netscape and Winamp with EMI and Warner Music alone would be significant enough to online music that it could be a very bad thing. And producing at a lower rate does not mean selling at a lower rate. It means they make more money to buy other companies with. Sheesh.
Jay and Silent Bob as CmdrTaco and Hemos?
(shudder)
True... some of these people aren't great role models...
What I have a problem with is your definition of a criminal act. Although Microsoft is ruthlessly aggressive and maybe it has gotten a little out of control, it's hard to say that anything they've done was a criminal act (well, with a few exceptions, but they've been very good about owning up to that stuff... I'm thinking the DoubleSpace/Stac fiasco). And that's besides the point. Microsoft is NOT an unbeatable company. The idea is that they can lose many battles without getting knocked out for good. Now, what stops any other company from winning battles? Well, it's true that MS does throw their weight around a lot, but they're a big clumsy corporation (although pretty swift for one anyway) that can't compete with one very quick successful startup, the elephant that can be beaten by mice.
Netscape was a good example of this, and it wasn't MS that killed Netscape, it was Netscape that killed Netscape (and AOL who swept them under the rug). Face it, there was a point when both 4.0 browsers had just come out that it was very questionable whether or not Netscape could retain their lead, and NO ONE was really whining about the OS browser bundling at that point (except Netscape). Then what happened? Netscape had (and still has) many very loyal users and it would take a thief in the night to kill all the market share that they have right now. But the crap quality of Netscape vs. the improving quality of IE gave everyone a tough decision. In the end, there's tons of people who have both IE and Netscape on their computers but choose to use IE instead. Considering that most of these people aren't first time users (first time users actually look for Netscape, NOT IE), that is a legitimate victory for MS. And currently one that big man-woman Janet Reno thinks involved some criminal act.
I agree that it's not right when criminals turn good and everyone forgets the past. But to say that about Gates, you have to show exactly when he was a criminal.
Gimme a break...
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Business is business. And business means hurting other businesses sometimes. It's the nature of the game. Many companies did NOT have to die in the wake of MS if they just would have done better business, although MS has been very agressive... but that's besides the point. The tech industry has always been like this, and Gates is no different from any other tech CEO in the last 2 decades. That's what I meant by the mythical stuff. This is all hero worship and villianizing. Bill Gates shouldn't have been concerned with the welfare of any company but his own... and I don't see massive layoffs coming at MS (although maybe that's why Ballamer's stepping in... maybe Gates doesn't want to be knows as "Buzzsaw Bill") so I don't think Gates is a big villian. BTW I own AOL stock, so I have no reason to stick up for MS except for my own convictions. And I'm not going to listen to any troll who thinks that Gates is the antichrist because a bunch of companies tanked when they couldn't make money anymore even though you can't blame Microsoft for that. Gates hasn't murdered anyone, so cut him some slack.
There's no doubt that it's a problem not strictly limited to geeks. Or, in more correct terms, tech workers. The idea is that anyone who has this problem can be doing anything with his/her life, but the problem makes them a geek.
By the way, I live 3000 miles from Silicon Valley, so I'm just being observant and not bitchy. However, it's one reason I wouldn't move out there...
The story told here is both tragic and promising, if everyone will put down the biases first.
The idea of Gates as a well-loved philanthropist is something we should hold more strongly in our minds than the "BillGatus of Borg" image we beat to death. Whether truth or opinion, the image of Gates as an evil dictator is not very appealing and does no one good. The image of Gates as the next Carnegie, on the other hand, is very pleasing and beneficial to our minds and our society. My belief is that the entire presence of computers in our world is entirely mythical - although I don't want to get into that. Based on that idea, if you can swallow it, there are no heroes or villians on the Internet or in the tech industry different from those in real life. Such is why the entire antitrust case against MS is a complete fallacy, such is why AOL could merge with AT&T and all the Baby Bells if they wanted to and our existence will be no different, such is why Linus Torvalds is just some guy from Finland when he walks into a local bar.
I hate to see this as the beginning of the end (or some substantial part of it) for MS. First of all, I think Gates is taking his natural role right now rather than cashing out (as this move has little to do with money). Even if it is motivated by the imminent collapse of MS or the current turmoil, it's not as if the power structure is radically shifting - it's more like the movement of the tectonic plates. Second, the idea of this leading into the bitter end for MS is just nauseating. After all, this is a company with tens of thousands of employees, the highest market capitalization of any company existing today, hundreds of (arguably) quality products on store shelves, and a solid financial foundation. Sure, any company can give up the ghost tomorrow for any reason, but it doesn't HAVE to be that way for MS. Especially in light of the AOL-TimeWarner merger, it seems STUPID that a company like Microsoft can lose everything. AOL-TimeWarner could collapse under it's own weight, and yet Microsoft has stayed agile and responsive to the industry over the years throughout failure and success. This alone should be a good reason to not count MS out yet. Finally, like I said computers are mythical and only real people make the difference. Microsoft is still a real corporation with real people in charge... pretty much the same real people as before. No one is going to skip buying Office 2000 tomorrow because Gates isn't CEO. Office 2000 will be the same product as it was yesterday, and Microsoft's ability to continue releasing good or half-baked products and making money regardless is what will tell their future.
That said, is this the end of an era for MS and the computing industry? Maybe. I can't see how that AOL-TimeWarner merger really changes the success of other companies... for example, Yahoo isn't going to be upstaged just because they DIDN'T merge with another company. Same goes for Microsoft... it's a pure battle of control and hype, and in the end the real world fact is that I can hardly think of any major products that the new AOL-TimeWarner possesses that directly compete with anything from Microsoft and vice versa. Microsoft can still succeed in the face of AOL, the DOJ, Linux, temp workers, whatever. If they heavily rely on what they've done in the past to dictate their future, THEN THEY'RE DONE. But they really never have. Not in the real world anyway. Sure, on the computer, it's slow reused 16-bit legacy code in Windows98, it's a web browser given away for free just to crush Netscape, it's Service Pack 7 for NT, it's that annoying paper clip animation. But you have to think for a second... these are all little nitpicks. No one is going to totally upheave their computer(s) because of these things. Microsoft's OS dominance might outlast Microsoft itself. But MS can't live on that alone. And if you naively think that MS has no chance of continuing to be a dominant company, well then you are probably forgetting that all MS has to do is to keep making progress like they have been for 20 years to keep alive and healthy, never mind being the market leader.
Which is why I'm sure that Gates isn't thinking MS is doomed right now. Knowing Gates, he's doing something radical that he probably knows is in the best interests of the company... kinda like John Carmack stepping in and hiring an outsider to improve the bot code in Quake 3 Arena. I think that it's probably a nice side effect that he drops the negative attention directed toward him, and I think it's good for everyone in the real world that someone like him have as little negative attention possible focused on him. The idea of Gates as a benevolent philanthropist sounds heartwarming, even. It would be a shame if all of this posturing, hype, and hypocrisy in the tech industry ruined that for the rest of us. But that's not an issue until Bill quits everything and starts handing out all the cash. Even if Microsoft florishes or whithers, he's going to win in this situation for himself. But I think he still has MS on his mind, and I think that this might be the start of something real good for Microsoft. And possibly the rest of us.
I'm using one right now...
:(
It works PS2 and USB. I couldn't get the USB to work even under Win98, but that might be my system. Using the PS2 with ps2rate.exe is just as good. Serial won't work though.
The mouse itself is very solid. Assuming that it'll last long, I have absolutely no problems with it at all. The extra buttons are helpful (although probably useless in Linux) and the mouse generally feels very comfortable to use. I have the Explorer version so now I have this funky looking red-glowing mouse that looks cool IMHO. The movement of the cursor on the screen is very smooth and precise, so it beats out other mice in that category at least. The price hurts (which is why I got it for Xmas) but as long as it doesn't break within a year I'm extremely happy with it and it was worth it. At least one thing that MS did pretty good with...
Yes the article is highly annoying with it's pseudocode and it's jump from simple dating to prostitution and sex fetishes. I thought the best point was made early in the article, and has been said quite a few times here...
That is, even though a lot of geeks were geeks before getting into computers, many geeks became geeks involuntarily because they got into computers. There's a list of contributing factors:
1. Computers aren't something you talk about in a bar. Unfortunately for tech workers, their jobs are all but unmentionable in a social setting. There is a geek stereotype which contributes to this, computers AREN'T sexy, and truthfully most people who aren't in the know about computers are mostly intimidated by those who do. It's kinda like being in high school and talking to girls about your SAT scores... you can pretty much kill a conversation if you both discover that you scored 400 points above the person you're talking to.
2. Long, grueling hours. To have a successful social life, time needs to be put into it. However, most tech jobs would make you work the 25th hour of the day if such an hour existed. Friends and lovers don't magically appear. Hell, you have to put a good two hours into buying them if you need to. This is sad that our industry knows this and doesn't really do much about it. In five years everyone's gonna have a midlife crisis (at 26) and jump ship anyway, so they're slowly but surely pushing their workers away by doing this.
3. You get into it. Most tech work can pretty much suck you in and never let go. The way that everything is so complicated and complex, once you're on a roll you don't really want to stop. I mean, you can be "in the zone" for a whole six months if you're working at it 14 hours a day (10 hours on the job + 4 thinking about it in the shower or in the car or while making dinner). Hell, most tech work REQUIRES this if you're going to do a decent job at it. Most professions requiring such intelligence (doctors, scientists, mathematicians, whatever) have this problem, because you can't take your time with the work, otherwise you'll never get anywhere relative to where the world stands now.
4. If computers are easy and women are hard to understand, you probably will stick with computers.
5. That ungodly male:female ratio in Silicon Valley doesn't help much either.
In the end, a lot of this happens unconciously and most people are drawn into a life that they utterly despise and feel trapped by. It's the type of thing where you have to get out when you see it happening to yourself, but most tech people are then further drawn in by the threat of upheaval, the money, the addictive power of the net, etc. In the end, you just have to look out for yourself and keep your priorities straight. If you want a social life that badly, you'll do what it takes to get one - losing your job and moving out of the Valley is a small price to pay for love. There's tech jobs all over the place, and some probably pay more and don't overwork you. Or maybe not, but like I said it's a small price to pay. If you don't think that way at all, then you're probably NOT having a problem with your sex life and you're probably thinking that Slashdot's been going a bit too far with the sex articles...
Well, we all know that these kids should be policed to hell and back, right? I mean after all, if 2 or 3 of them bring guns in to school then we must lock them down and treat them like dogs... Same thing for adults though. Re: Honolulu shootings. Re: Seattle shootings. So far this year I can count 3 or 4 mass murders committed by adults in the workplace (probably more) but only one done by kids at a school. I think that those 4 adult murder stories got less media time COMBINED than the one at a school. So, we're going to have to live in a police state! After all, it's for our saftey that we allow our hapless government officials to drag us around by the nostrils and abuse the crap out of their power in the interests of their re-elect*COUGH* our saftey. Folks, this is going to get worse. Mostly because when the stories get worse (and they will), the reactions will be worse which will cause future reactions to be even more worse (gr?) and the cycle will become gruesome before anyone in this country makes it an issue worth arguing seriously over instead of just drooling at it while it's on the evening news...
Perhaps the issue isn't whether or not DVD copy protection can be cracked at all, but whether or not it's easy for MOST people to do it...
I'd say that if it were that easy to crack CSS, then perhaps it was meant to be no more effective than Macrovision... a stumbling block too big for those not interested enough in overcoming it. While it's pretty obvious that both it's now easier to crack DVDs and it's still unfeasible to copy them in massive numbers, what's not really thought of here is whether or not such a development will dictate the future effectiveness of the copy protections on DVDs.
The development of MP3+CDR is an entirely different story, as digital audio was an entrenched standard that was already effective for the music industry. On the other hand, DVD is still rather new and it's rather easy to predict that in five years it WILL be feasible to pass around cracked movies on the Net for many people. Just how many people are willing to do that is another issue entirely.
I suppose that fixed storage, recordable media, and available bandwidth will all be large enough in a few years to allow DVDs to be copied easily. Still, it will take a lot of one person's time to do extensive trading, and the availability of that kind of equipment to the general public will be limited. The interesting facts and issues of the situation are:
1. People who buy DVDs usually have all the other nice little gadgets too. Hence the current target market for DVDs will probably be enabled best to trade them illegally.
2. DVD is a premium high-quality format for an extremely popular medium, which means that unlike CDs (which would be more of a standard format) trading DVDs would be preferrable to any other kind of bootlegging.
3. The movie studios do have the option of pulling DVDs and sticking with VHS... for most releases. Or, perhaps a greater control and limited availablity on DVDs would prevent DVDs from becoming a mass-consumer product, hence eliminating the possiblity of mass-pirating.
4. On the contrary, the movie studios can make a huge push of DVD into the consumer market so that it does become a mass-consumer product, not only strengthening their margins above those of the already mass-pirated, more expensive, and lower-quality VHS, but also to eliminate the possiblity that a large part of the DVD market would pirate them. Add more to the market that won't be copying them and you minimize the copying problem. CDs currently enjoy this position, as there are many people who copy them but there's a massive amount of people who can't, don't, and won't, therefore making the CD-copying problem negligible on the bottom line.
5. Finally, the industry has time to combat the problem with a variety of solutions before copying becomes feasible. They don't have to pull off any drastic moves right now, which means that if DVD business is brisk I doubt they'll be scaling back on it anytime soon. They may switch formats (a DVD2), they might try to keep DVD-RWs and all similar DVD writable formats from becoming widespread, or they might ignore the problem altogether. It's not like what happened to the music industry, where one day the tools became available and people started ripping/encoding/copying CDs like crazy as the industry helplessly watched.
Right now, however, it's just a big embarassment for the movie industry and a new opportunity for the elite piraters. If I had the opportunity to advise the movie industry how to handle the situation, I would probably suggest that right now they should take a "good faith" position and trust the current market to not do what they pretty much could have done anyway. In the future, I'd suggest that perhaps they take either one of two paths: They start planning a format change RIGHT now for a rollout in 10 years and make the new DVD-Video format a self-standing component with closed specifications rather than a multi-component open standard, as this would prevent anyone from easily pirating movies (in other words, a DVD drive is like a standalone DVD player and you just overlay it, which shouldn't be too much to ask in 10 years) or getting any undesirable use out of the video. Or, they make DVDs an entrenched standard and a mass-market industry with even a bigger push than they are today, with the understanding that they hold the advantage of being the honest, legal, simple, and not-too-expensive solution for DVD purchasing. In other words, who cares about pirating when you're going to make gadzillions of dollars selling legit DVDs and, for most people, that's the best or only option now and for a long time. It's like if you own a candy store and little kids keep eating the candy... you can put the candy on a higher shelf, or you can put a small basket of free candy by the door. You DON'T stop selling candy (or only sell stale candy)...
It's a fairly run-of-the-mill "Hey I overclocked my processor to Ludicrous Speed!" article. However, I nearly fell out of my chair laughing at some of the truly odd translated phrases...
"If no processor given rhythm at this frequency..." - these processors have rhythm baby! This line reminds me of the dancing bunny-suit Intel engineers.
"While waiting, greediest in MHz can fold back itself on the systems KryoTech Cool Athlon 800 and 900..." - greediest in MHz? Fold back itself while waiting? Sounds like a contortionist that wants all the MHz for itself...
"While waiting, history to dream a little and to see what will have in the belly the processors of demains..." - no comment. Too good for words.
"...on a chipset BX the AGP is to 88 MHz when one uses a drunk face side of 133 MHz..." - my question is, if it's drunk then is it still greedy? Does it still have rhythm? (I know that I lose any rhythm I have when I'm trashed)...
"...the profit of 39% is a little less significant but remains impressive, even if it is also with the read-write memory given rhythm to 133 MHz." - ok it's getting dumb now (the joke, not the article) so I'll end it here... but I like to think that my read-write memory has rhythm too, since my Celeron 300a doesn't shake its stuff too well yet...