I'm all for fairness and open mindedness but one shouldn't be so open-minded that your brains fall out. I'm sure there are people who fervently believe that the Earth is the center of the universe and that everything we see in the sky revolves about us. Even though almost everybody believed it 800 years ago, most reasonable people would see no need whatsoever to even consider geo-centrism. Its antiquated to the point that even most Bible literalists won't trot it out (at least not in public).
Evolution has figured in biology for a little over 100 years. Taking the above paragraph into account, let creationism have another century's worth of being taken seriously. We're pretty much stuck with it for now anyway.
I guess the 2100s will be spent arguing over whatever GUT comes along that knocks down Einstein's work in the process.;-) The implications of that should ruffle religious feathers too.
Why is it that creationists are so looked down upon, but other religions that, for example, believe that the world is sitting on an elephant that is sitting on a turtle are okay? Is it because it is expected that white people in North America should know better, but non-whites are free to believe whatever they want?!? That to me seems at the very least bigotted.
Or maybe because those who believe the world is sitting on an elephant on a turtle aren't making nuisances of themselves. I haven't heard turtle believers arguing loudly and often in front of legislatures that we need to throw out all of the astronomy and geology books. Incidentally, biology isn't the only science on the creationists' shit list; even physics would have to be...ah....modified to not state inconvienient facts.
This isn't Western bigotry. If large numbers of turtle believers in our midsts were doing their damndest to drag us back to the 14th century, they'd be looked down on too. Every culture on this planet has problems with religious luddites. The creationists just happen to be ours.
I can't remember the last time I heard of someone getting a gun stuck in his face for his mp3s. Great! Now the **AA has people so brainwashed that downloading a tune off Kazaa is tantamount to armed robbery. Sheesh!
The only problem is that SCO distributes Linux themselves. Anything they own (which I doubt) in the Linux kernel is now properly GPLed and has been downloaded by thousands. They can point out code till the cows come home. They've already committed a Scientology-style Footbullet.
SCO is blasting their feet with a shotgun just as fast as they can pump shells into the chamber. SCO distributes Linux themselves. Since Linux is GPL licensed, they've basically handed the IP in dispute to the world. Assuming there's anything other than a smoking ruin when IBM gets through with them, anyone else they harass can probably turn right around and countersue them for violating their own licence. At most, the kernel hackers might have to "refactor" their development around a SCO kernel source tree.
I've also seen some Chicken Little ranting that MS might buy SCO so they can turn their IP into a Doomsday Weapon. Nope! MS won't touch 'em with a 10,000 foot pole because SCO already cut the legs from under most any possible offensive use of that IP.
While we're at it. Since GTK2 is supposedly so neutral, how the hell can I theme GTK2 apps without running that crapass gnome-settings-damon. You know, that neutral piece of software that clobbers my root window and gets real pissy if I want it back for KDE.
How do you know nothing happened to your "naked" XP? It could be spraying spam or DOSing somebody right now. Is there a file integrity checker of some sort you didn't tell us about? BTW, unless you're booting from known clean media and running the checker from that, it isn't too reliable either.
The problem is that the government gets the same top notch support on equipment that doesn't even belong to them. How's this for idea? Set up a BSD or Linux box to perfectly mimic a pretrojaned Cisco router. Only difference is, it's only going to show Uncle Sammy endless ASCII permutations of the Goatse x man while screaming it's head off to the admin. Idiots.
Not exactly. In principle, Wine is being used a general tool that can run Windows apps. In practice, there's little things that go wrong and keep say Publisher from running correctly. If Codeweavers has a lot of demand for Publisher to work, then they concentrate on fixes that allow that app to run. Fixes that allow that supported app to run will probably help out some other apps too. Of course, what fixes Publisher may well break something else...hopefully something that isn't too popular.
Basically, it's your second idea. They're claiming to have fixed up Wine so it will run particular apps. They make no claims about other apps that may or may not run.
I'll grant you that 2.4 brought improvements but it strictly handle with care ware until the minor release numbers got into the high teens. When 2.6 is released, I'll futz around on some throwaway desktops with it but it won't see server use for a number of minor releases. Do you know how to tell the pioneers from the later settlers? They're the ones with arrows sticking out of their backs.
I think that is the most realistic long term path for MS. As the parent says, they have a desktop monopoly on WWW browsing and office productivity.They have some decent dev tools but they seem to be a second order effect of their desktop and server marketshares. There is no potential for growth there. They have server market share but are basically just holding the line at best. There's some money to be made in console gaming but Sony isn't about to just let MS eat it's lunch entirely. 600lb gorilla meet 900lb gorilla. Aside from all of this, they are seen as King Nero on the Mountain by a horde of coders and smaller businesses. When you're King EVERYBODY wants to knock you off.
In this environment, what used to work isn't going to work going forward. I don't see the death of MS (much as I would enjoy attending a EULA bonfire...) anytime soon. I think the computer industry and many other fields have had just about enough of them. Something is going to have to give if they want to stay as large as they are now.
The way to survival and more importantly profit is probably diversification. Completely owning a couple of specialty markets isn't the most stable situation to be in. The only direction you can go is down. If they have large shares in lots of markets then they can live for the forseeable future...much like IBM. This may even mean, gasp!, Linux apps and support. Why not? Even I might consider buying MS sourced Linux apps if I had no suspicion they were out to migrate my servers to another platform. They can be closed source even. I won't tolerate un-interoperability or bits of intentional brain damage meant to force change in underlying technologies though. They're going to have to get over this insistance that they call all of the shots. For now, OS agnosticism isn't the best move for them. I'm not sure it always will be and that isn't entirely my point. I think the way for them to live long term is to have their fingers in lots of pies rather than being the only ones who can eat two or three.
I agree that such a portable shouldn't be the primary storage device for a music collection. However, having my entire collection on hand at any time kicks ass. At the moment, my entire collection fits in 14 GB. For awhile to come, there will be portable players that can hold it. Of course, being able to afford such a handy player is another thing altogether. I would have a use for a 5 GB player even though it can't hold everything. The flash players seems like a waste of time and money to me. There is a convienience factor as well. Little players have to be filled up all the time. I'd rather only hook the player up to my desktop when I've made significant additions to my music collection. I'm thinking more in terms of syncing the player to the main archive rather picking out new tunes for it all the time.
If they aren't meant to hold the entire collection then they should be. Not for primary storage or even a backup, you're right about that. It is a matter of convienience. If I have to change out whats on it all the time, the player becomes a PITA. Bring on the big hard drives!
The second is a base unit for a whole shitload of derived units. It would screw up Mhz measurements, energy measurements, physical constants and no end of other hell. It would also make using data sets that extend over large periods of time hell. Furthermore, the oscillations and perturbations of this planet have no relavence at all off this planet. This means the software in those probes and satellites we put up instantly become wrong. There is nothing in the least elegant about any of this.
For some reason, the system is handing them out to me like candy. I used to only get mod points once a month. I get them almost once a week now....and yes I alerted the Great Slashdot Admins. Oh well, I wish had some now. That's the funniest thing I've read all month.
A condition of being a provider on a "Truenet" or "Undernet" is to specifically repudiate any extra rights granted by DMCA type laws. Once admins elsewhere get wind of a "Truenet" provider using them on anybody BAM! your packets don't get routed anymore. They can lawyer and PR spin until they're blue in the face and their data won't go anywhere. Enforce it legally with contracts and with Usenet Death Penalty style technological methods.
It would be nice if the oligarchs built a restricted Internet and nobody wanted hook up to it.
The only use any form of Wine can have on non Intel systems is to build binaries of Windows source. Wine will not help you run IA32 binaries on a PowerPC machine. An Intel Linux machine running a Windows app through wine is still executing IA32 code. Remember Wine Is Not an Emulator, it is a port of the Win32 API to Unix.
The Clipper chip got everybody hacked off because it would be the government providing the crypto. Of course, they had a master keyring for every Clipper made. And yeah, there was even an elaborate system for getting warrants and putting two pieces of the key together,etc. All of which, Ashcroft would cheerfully chuck in the name of "national security".
If the crypto is provided by the phone or network vendor then it can't be trusted. This is especially true of anything that has the government's blessing. The situation is less clear cut if the users provide their own crypto.
How has it been implemented? Does it leak information into swapfiles? Are there mistakes that reduce the strength of the system? And what about the users? Both ends of a conversation must be following good procedure. If one end of the conversation has a g-man with a truncheon standing over it or has been bugged then its useless.
Crypto can help secure communications but it isn't the whole story. It surely isn't an all purpose security blanket.
It seems to me that some developments aren't obvious until a basic technology is in place. Once upon a time, all telephone calls were manually connected by operators. Most calls weren't automatically switched until the mid sixties. These systems did not spring full blown out of some engineer's forehead. I'll bet some people were thinking about automatic switching in say the thirties but other technologies (which themselves were "changing over time"...I'll avoid the dreaded `E` word") had to get there first to make it a reality. Lots of people worked on it at different times tweaking and prodding and refining until it was mature. The way it works now doesn't even remotely resemble the way it did in the Sixties so it definitely doesn't have one inventor.
Even the most talented engine coders aren't going to be able to tell us exactly how computer generated 3D is going to work 10 years from now. It changes over time and so does the science on which engineering is based. Also, when fundamentally new technologies are going from the whiteboard to prototypes on a bench lots of ideas are tried and thrown out, tried and thrown out, ad nauseum until something sticks. Imagine that!, competing technological ideas going head to head in a fitness race. Sometimes, it's even automated.
But no, technologies are born fully refined and completely debugged from the disembodied head of Thomas Edison which he preserved in his "last" invention.
I won't say the `E`-word though. That might be carrying an argument that already tiresome in the life sciences into engineering.
Now these guys did "cheat" a little in that the cartridge had a little bit of extra ram in it. But hey!, we're talking about a first person game on a 2600 that isn't a low detail flying game. Tunnel Runner came out in '83 as well. The object of the game was to find the key that would let you go to the next maze. Three differently colored pac-man like Zots chased you and got in the way. Each Zot had it's own theme music that varied in intensity as you got closer to it. It made for some nice tension. Much like Adventure, they varied in speed/intelligence. Of course, the Red one was the most dreaded of all. It also had a random teleporter and the ability go through a door to the previous level. Not too shabby at all.
"Linux is the system where I cannot play mp3's, download pr0n or play games. It is only good for some dumb office terminal. I will not install it on my home computer in a million years".
I think that argument is a red herring. A Windows network with tight mandatory profiles and a strict proxy server can be just as "fascistic". A clued Windows admin can lock down a client every bit as tightly as Unix admins can lock down theirs. I know of school Windows networks that are indeed difficult to "download pr0n, play games and mp3s". Even with the "buy Microsoft" mentality that is prevalent, I don't believe most enterprises would deploy Windows clients if they couldn't lock them down. Well, the MIS managers will insist on the ability anyway.
When I encode mp3s from my own vinyl and cd collection, I use the --r3mix settings of Lame. This produces a VBR encoded mp3 that gives the highest quality possible without being overly greedy with storage. (I'm aware there are other Lame presets meant to accomplish similar goals. --r3mix works for me.)
Almost every mp3 I have seen on the trading services is 128kbit encoded and many of those were done with inferior encoders such as the old Xing encoder. What you are seeing is not hypocrasy. A clueful ripper uses a good encoder with wisely chosen settings. Such mp3s sound very good even if some audiophiles insist they aren't quite cd quality. The vast majority of mp3s aren't these high quality ones. I also think many traders don't understand the filesize/quality tradeoff and just get the smallest file to download. This means that the lowest quality versions of any given track propagate the most.
Both statements are true. Good mp3s are indistinguishable from cds for most people. The quality of most downloaded music is inferior for the most part; quality mp3s with few exceptions are not traded.
The parent of the thread linked to even mentions it. I don't think the Star Destroyer would stand a chance against Berman's stable of "writers". After all, all they have to do is route warp power through the phase inverter and modulate with bursts of flugeron particles and couple the energy through the main deflector dish. This will cause zepton instability in the Star Destroyer's engines and cause them to implode into a quantum singularity. Ditto anything you can trot out from any other sci-fi universe. Of course, the Treknobabble will have to be adjusted accordingly.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for fairness and open mindedness but one shouldn't be so open-minded that your brains fall out. I'm sure there are people who fervently believe that the Earth is the center of the universe and that everything we see in the sky revolves about us. Even though almost everybody believed it 800 years ago, most reasonable people would see no need whatsoever to even consider geo-centrism. Its antiquated to the point that even most Bible literalists won't trot it out (at least not in public).
;-) The implications of that should ruffle religious feathers too.
Evolution has figured in biology for a little over 100 years. Taking the above paragraph into account, let creationism have another century's worth of being taken seriously. We're pretty much stuck with it for now anyway.
I guess the 2100s will be spent arguing over whatever GUT comes along that knocks down Einstein's work in the process.
Why is it that creationists are so looked down upon, but other religions that, for example, believe that the world is sitting on an elephant that is sitting on a turtle are okay? Is it because it is expected that white people in North America should know better, but non-whites are free to believe whatever they want?!? That to me seems at the very least bigotted.
Or maybe because those who believe the world is sitting on an elephant on a turtle aren't making nuisances of themselves. I haven't heard turtle believers arguing loudly and often in front of legislatures that we need to throw out all of the astronomy and geology books. Incidentally, biology isn't the only science on the creationists' shit list; even physics would have to be...ah....modified to not state inconvienient facts.
This isn't Western bigotry. If large numbers of turtle believers in our midsts were doing their damndest to drag us back to the 14th century, they'd be looked down on too. Every culture on this planet has problems with religious luddites. The creationists just happen to be ours.
I can't remember the last time I heard of someone getting a gun stuck in his face for his mp3s. Great! Now the **AA has people so brainwashed that downloading a tune off Kazaa is tantamount to armed robbery. Sheesh!
The only problem is that SCO distributes Linux themselves. Anything they own (which I doubt) in the Linux kernel is now properly GPLed and has been downloaded by thousands. They can point out code till the cows come home. They've already committed a Scientology-style Footbullet.
SCO is blasting their feet with a shotgun just as fast as they can pump shells into the chamber. SCO distributes Linux themselves. Since Linux is GPL licensed, they've basically handed the IP in dispute to the world. Assuming there's anything other than a smoking ruin when IBM gets through with them, anyone else they harass can probably turn right around and countersue them for violating their own licence. At most, the kernel hackers might have to "refactor" their development around a SCO kernel source tree.
I've also seen some Chicken Little ranting that MS might buy SCO so they can turn their IP into a Doomsday Weapon. Nope! MS won't touch 'em with a 10,000 foot pole because SCO already cut the legs from under most any possible offensive use of that IP.
better yet, put him on AOL's tech support desk for a month solid.
Wouldn't violate laws against inhumane and unusual punishment? Not to mention torture? Just give the kid a lethal injection and get it over with.
While we're at it. Since GTK2 is supposedly so neutral, how the hell can I theme GTK2 apps without running that crapass gnome -settings-damon. You know, that neutral piece of software that clobbers my root window and gets real pissy if I want it back for KDE.
How do you know nothing happened to your "naked" XP? It could be spraying spam or DOSing somebody right now. Is there a file integrity checker of some sort you didn't tell us about? BTW, unless you're booting from known clean media and running the checker from that, it isn't too reliable either.
The problem is that the government gets the same top notch support on equipment that doesn't even belong to them. How's this for idea? Set up a BSD or Linux box to perfectly mimic a pretrojaned Cisco router. Only difference is, it's only going to show Uncle Sammy endless ASCII permutations of the Goatse x man while screaming it's head off to the admin. Idiots.
Not exactly. In principle, Wine is being used a general tool that can run Windows apps. In practice, there's little things that go wrong and keep say Publisher from running correctly. If Codeweavers has a lot of demand for Publisher to work, then they concentrate on fixes that allow that app to run. Fixes that allow that supported app to run will probably help out some other apps too. Of course, what fixes Publisher may well break something else...hopefully something that isn't too popular.
Basically, it's your second idea. They're claiming to have fixed up Wine so it will run particular apps. They make no claims about other apps that may or may not run.
I'll grant you that 2.4 brought improvements but it strictly handle with care ware until the minor release numbers got into the high teens. When 2.6 is released, I'll futz around on some throwaway desktops with it but it won't see server use for a number of minor releases. Do you know how to tell the pioneers from the later settlers? They're the ones with arrows sticking out of their backs.
I think that is the most realistic long term path for MS. As the parent says, they have a desktop monopoly on WWW browsing and office productivity.They have some decent dev tools but they seem to be a second order effect of their desktop and server marketshares. There is no potential for growth there. They have server market share but are basically just holding the line at best. There's some money to be made in console gaming but Sony isn't about to just let MS eat it's lunch entirely. 600lb gorilla meet 900lb gorilla. Aside from all of this, they are seen as King Nero on the Mountain by a horde of coders and smaller businesses. When you're King EVERYBODY wants to knock you off.
In this environment, what used to work isn't going to work going forward. I don't see the death of MS (much as I would enjoy attending a EULA bonfire...) anytime soon. I think the computer industry and many other fields have had just about enough of them. Something is going to have to give if they want to stay as large as they are now.
The way to survival and more importantly profit is probably diversification. Completely owning a couple of specialty markets isn't the most stable situation to be in. The only direction you can go is down. If they have large shares in lots of markets then they can live for the forseeable future...much like IBM. This may even mean, gasp!, Linux apps and support. Why not? Even I might consider buying MS sourced Linux apps if I had no suspicion they were out to migrate my servers to another platform. They can be closed source even. I won't tolerate un-interoperability or bits of intentional brain damage meant to force change in underlying technologies though. They're going to have to get over this insistance that they call all of the shots. For now, OS agnosticism isn't the best move for them. I'm not sure it always will be and that isn't entirely my point. I think the way for them to live long term is to have their fingers in lots of pies rather than being the only ones who can eat two or three.
I agree that such a portable shouldn't be the primary storage device for a music collection. However, having my entire collection on hand at any time kicks ass. At the moment, my entire collection fits in 14 GB. For awhile to come, there will be portable players that can hold it. Of course, being able to afford such a handy player is another thing altogether. I would have a use for a 5 GB player even though it can't hold everything. The flash players seems like a waste of time and money to me. There is a convienience factor as well. Little players have to be filled up all the time. I'd rather only hook the player up to my desktop when I've made significant additions to my music collection. I'm thinking more in terms of syncing the player to the main archive rather picking out new tunes for it all the time.
If they aren't meant to hold the entire collection then they should be. Not for primary storage or even a backup, you're right about that. It is a matter of convienience. If I have to change out whats on it all the time, the player becomes a PITA. Bring on the big hard drives!
The second is a base unit for a whole shitload of derived units. It would screw up Mhz measurements, energy measurements, physical constants and no end of other hell. It would also make using data sets that extend over large periods of time hell. Furthermore, the oscillations and perturbations of this planet have no relavence at all off this planet. This means the software in those probes and satellites we put up instantly become wrong. There is nothing in the least elegant about any of this.
For some reason, the system is handing them out to me like candy. I used to only get mod points once a month. I get them almost once a week now....and yes I alerted the Great Slashdot Admins. Oh well, I wish had some now. That's the funniest thing I've read all month.
+5 Fricken' Hilarious.
A condition of being a provider on a "Truenet" or "Undernet" is to specifically repudiate any extra rights granted by DMCA type laws. Once admins elsewhere get wind of a "Truenet" provider using them on anybody BAM! your packets don't get routed anymore. They can lawyer and PR spin until they're blue in the face and their data won't go anywhere. Enforce it legally with contracts and with Usenet Death Penalty style technological methods.
It would be nice if the oligarchs built a restricted Internet and nobody wanted hook up to it.
The only use any form of Wine can have on non Intel systems is to build binaries of Windows source. Wine will not help you run IA32 binaries on a PowerPC machine. An Intel Linux machine running a Windows app through wine is still executing IA32 code. Remember Wine Is Not an Emulator, it is a port of the Win32 API to Unix.
The Clipper chip got everybody hacked off because it would be the government providing the crypto. Of course, they had a master keyring for every Clipper made. And yeah, there was even an elaborate system for getting warrants and putting two pieces of the key together,etc. All of which, Ashcroft would cheerfully chuck in the name of "national security".
If the crypto is provided by the phone or network vendor then it can't be trusted. This is especially true of anything that has the government's blessing. The situation is less clear cut if the users provide their own crypto.
How has it been implemented? Does it leak information into swapfiles? Are there mistakes that reduce the strength of the system? And what about the users? Both ends of a conversation must be following good procedure. If one end of the conversation has a g-man with a truncheon standing over it or has been bugged then its useless.
Crypto can help secure communications but it isn't the whole story. It surely isn't an all purpose security blanket.
Why didn't you feed all that stuff to the local District Attorney then? They would have a slightly harder time laughing that off.
It seems to me that some developments aren't obvious until a basic technology is in place. Once upon a time, all telephone calls were manually connected by operators. Most calls weren't automatically switched until the mid sixties. These systems did not spring full blown out of some engineer's forehead. I'll bet some people were thinking about automatic switching in say the thirties but other technologies (which themselves were "changing over time"...I'll avoid the dreaded `E` word") had to get there first to make it a reality. Lots of people worked on it at different times tweaking and prodding and refining until it was mature. The way it works now doesn't even remotely resemble the way it did in the Sixties so it definitely doesn't have one inventor.
Even the most talented engine coders aren't going to be able to tell us exactly how computer generated 3D is going to work 10 years from now. It changes over time and so does the science on which engineering is based. Also, when fundamentally new technologies are going from the whiteboard to prototypes on a bench lots of ideas are tried and thrown out, tried and thrown out, ad nauseum until something sticks. Imagine that!, competing technological ideas going head to head in a fitness race. Sometimes, it's even automated.
But no, technologies are born fully refined and completely debugged from the disembodied head of Thomas Edison which he preserved in his "last" invention.
I won't say the `E`-word though. That might be carrying an argument that already tiresome in the life sciences into engineering.
This game must have been written by some real men then:
TunnelRunner Screenshots
Now these guys did "cheat" a little in that the cartridge had a little bit of extra ram in it. But hey!, we're talking about a first person game on a 2600 that isn't a low detail flying game. Tunnel Runner came out in '83 as well. The object of the game was to find the key that would let you go to the next maze. Three differently colored pac-man like Zots chased you and got in the way. Each Zot had it's own theme music that varied in intensity as you got closer to it. It made for some nice tension. Much like Adventure, they varied in speed/intelligence. Of course, the Red one was the most dreaded of all. It also had a random teleporter and the ability go through a door to the previous level. Not too shabby at all.
"Linux is the system where I cannot play mp3's, download pr0n or play games. It is only good for some dumb office terminal. I will not install it on my home computer in a million years".
I think that argument is a red herring. A Windows network with tight mandatory profiles and a strict proxy server can be just as "fascistic". A clued Windows admin can lock down a client every bit as tightly as Unix admins can lock down theirs. I know of school Windows networks that are indeed difficult to "download pr0n, play games and mp3s". Even with the "buy Microsoft" mentality that is prevalent, I don't believe most enterprises would deploy Windows clients if they couldn't lock them down. Well, the MIS managers will insist on the ability anyway.
When I encode mp3s from my own vinyl and cd collection, I use the --r3mix settings of Lame. This produces a VBR encoded mp3 that gives the highest quality possible without being overly greedy with storage. (I'm aware there are other Lame presets meant to accomplish similar goals. --r3mix works for me.)
Almost every mp3 I have seen on the trading services is 128kbit encoded and many of those were done with inferior encoders such as the old Xing encoder. What you are seeing is not hypocrasy. A clueful ripper uses a good encoder with wisely chosen settings. Such mp3s sound very good even if some audiophiles insist they aren't quite cd quality. The vast majority of mp3s aren't these high quality ones. I also think many traders don't understand the filesize/quality tradeoff and just get the smallest file to download. This means that the lowest quality versions of any given track propagate the most.
Both statements are true. Good mp3s are indistinguishable from cds for most people. The quality of most downloaded music is inferior for the most part; quality mp3s with few exceptions are not traded.
The parent of the thread linked to even mentions it. I don't think the Star Destroyer would stand a chance against Berman's stable of "writers". After all, all they have to do is route warp power through the phase inverter and modulate with bursts of flugeron particles and couple the energy through the main deflector dish. This will cause zepton instability in the Star Destroyer's engines and cause them to implode into a quantum singularity. Ditto anything you can trot out from any other sci-fi universe. Of course, the Treknobabble will have to be adjusted accordingly.
Google for the "linux badram patch".
You have to patch your kernel to do this. Once the kernel is patched it will accept boot time arguments that tell it what address blocks to mark bad.