Does anyone else find the irony in the fact that most stories on here discuss open source product etc but this is a Beta test that you need Windows to participate in ? not to put too fine a point on it but it does make me smile a little...
Microsoft has a monopoly on consumer software products and services, and this is one symptom of that monopoly. Why does this make you "smile a little"? Do you honestly enjoy being locked into a single product; smug in the assurance that since there are no other choices you are able to surround yourself with other "successful" software users and laugh at people who are trying to change the situation? I'm sorry, but why do you even bother reading slashdot?
Ahh yes, I answered my own question...
Re:Days of denial are over.
on
Baked Alaska
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· Score: 2
An increase in CO2 can therefore be assumed to increase the amount of heat trapped by the earths atmosphere, since CO2 has been doing that since the beginning of time.
Then why don't satellites show a net change of external energy input and output over the past 20 years? There are studies which show that no net changes are observed, and other studies which detail that surface temperature changes are not uniform, as you would expect CO2 to be; but rather, may be more due to urban concrete heat sinks and soot. Global warming is happening, and we may indeed be able to do something about it and/or be causing it -- but let's make sure we're addressing the proper issue before jumping into anything.
It is like arguing that an oily beach is a natural phenomenon. It is possible that an oil reserve is exposed to the sea through natural causes (like an undersea earthquake opening a rift), but the hulking remains of the Exxon Valdeze would, for example, make the argument that the cause could have been natural pretty weak, even without 100% irrefutable proof.
Well, natural oil slicks occur all the time, so I suppose what we need to see here is the Exxon Valdeze which links human CO2 production to global warming. At one point in the past, the Gulf of Mexico reached the base of the rocky mountains with help from high global temperatures (see Discover Magazine/May 2002) and without the help of human CO2 production. The Green party folks were certain that human pollution was sending us into another ice age back in the 1970s, and now they're just as certain that the Sky is Falling yet again. Those of use who urge caution are signaled out as ignorant duffs who do not pay attention; e.g. "You're with us or you're against us". Personally, I'd rather see some rational discussion happen over this. I want to see all the side-effects of atmospheric CO2 found. I want to see good reconciliation with satellite data. Most importantly, I want scientists, and not politicians, to draft specific reccomendations after the research has become sufficient.
Yeah, but all they had to do to achieve that was to upgrade some seriously defunct machinery in east Berlin (well, what once _was_ east Berlin anyway). Still, kudos to all who reduce emissions; it's a very worthy goal.
I'm a child of the 80s, and every time we had a lecture on petroleum in grade school we were always going to run dry by 2012. When I debated in high school, we were at most going to have enough oil to last until 2020. Now I see that the date has been pushed back yet again -- these sorts of games do not rally confidence to the cause. Now that oil fields are being refilled, perhaps they'll have to re-hash their guesses yet again?
Now, I'm all for real, workable renewable resources -- and the best bet right now is with nuclear and crop-derivated oils -- but when a doomsday case is misstated repeatedly it does the cause no good at all.
Last time MS dropped their prices to match their competitor they nearly drove Netscape out of business.
A bit of revision going on there; Netscape never gave away Navigator until Microsoft made IE free. There was a gratis download for the education market, but you still had to pay for the browser otherwise.
The author also noted a 6 or 7 year turnover in game consoles. The PSX's 5 year endurance was unheard of at the time. I think a 2 or 3 year
I'm not so sure about that. The Atari 2600 and the original Nintendo Entertainment System were each at least 6 year consoles. The Super Nintendo vs. Sega Genesis may have only been a 3 or 4-year affair, but the PSX is still going strong (it's been outselling the X-Box for the past few months anyway).
As a side note; the article cites the Dreamcast as evidence of a failed unit; but the industry is littered with them (Pippen, NeoGeo, Turbo16, 3DO, Coleco, and a few dozen others). The console war is very unforgiving, and highly-geared towards growth; if you're not growing, you're toast. Many of these systems were technically superior to their competitors (3DO, Coleco, Intellevision, Dreamcast) -- but they still ultimately failed due to the second derivative. The XBox needs to keep growing base at any cost now, if they stop, then history says they're dead. Perhaps we'll see a Dreamcast-esque US$99 price-point before next christmas as a last-ditch effort?
Call Advertising Numbers
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 2
To cancel pr0n/AOL/whatever:
Go to their primary website and search for advertising or look for an "advertise with us" link.
Call the toll free number, you will probably not have to wait any time at all.
Play dumb, "Hello, yes, I was trying to disconnect my service...? The wrong number you say? I'm so sorry, could you please transfer me to the correct people....?"
I'll buy an X-Box as soon as there is a game on it that I can't get on my PS2 or PC that I really want to play (just like any other system, I suppose). I'll probably end up getting a GC after Zelda comes out, cause I'm a Z junkie.
This is not true. By this time in the lifespan of the original PlayStation, Sony had already cut the price.
\
The PSX had a price cut before it was even released. I preordered one at US$349 and then on that lovely day (September 9, 1995) they lowered the price to US$299. By Christmas of 1996 it was US$199. By the next holiday season it was US$149, and it has gradually come down from there. I think the PS1 is going to skyrocket at US$50.
Not if free software would be passed on the right way.
When has that ever happened? We have almost no lobying power, while the commerical software world has unlimited influence with the lawmakers. Even if the law is favorable to open source software, odds are that companies could still bring suits against free developers, which achieves the same effect as if we were liable. That they may be frivilous suits will not be obvious to our technology-impaired judges and juries. This whole idea sounds bad for everyhone (but lawyers and companies that can afford to hire them).
Going in, I understand the risks. I assume the responsibility if problems occur.
[I know I'm going to burn through more karma for this!]
But couldn't the same be said for commercial software? I don't see the magical line between "I paid money for something [hard cash, commercial software]" and "I paid other people money [bandwidth, CDs, whatever] for something". One thing I've learned in my life is to never underestimate the law and lawyers; those that pay almost always come out on top. Open source developers do not have the money to fight such suits, and will gladly fold into oblivion if challenged (see recent Wine contributors, DeCSS, bnetd for case examples).
To create a law which provides for liability with software (i.e., Free Speech) seems very dangerous. Even if the intent is to punish those who are making incredible sums of money by shoveling out the most bug-ridden piles of garbage imaginable, it also impunes upon the hobbiest, the casual geek and the open source divoute (if, for nothing less than the threat of a lawsuit). Joe Programmer with his wiz-bang open-source program recieves a summons to a court 2,000 kilometers away is already out the time spent there and the plane tickets -- what is he more likely to do? Give up; which is just as awful as if he'd been found guilty of writing a program (Free Speech, again) that destroyed someone's data. Furthermore, he will serve as a warning to all other programmers (writers of Free Speech) that they should never, ever, under any circumstances release software that does anything.
For all the grief that this would cause Microsoft; it would be worse for us, if only because we don't have a team of lawyers on retainer.
Perhaps you should go back to law school. My wife is a nurse and if she provides free services for some accident victim that we come across, she can and will be held liable for anything that goes wrong. There are many things that you can be sued for, regardless how much you charge.
Even if what you say is true (it isn't), RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, IBM, et. all can be run out of business if there are bugs in Linux for which they are liable, and charging for. It's a horribly bad idea, because then all businesses would stay away from supplying any sort of support structure for open source softwares for fear of an unexpected lawsut. The price of commercial software would go up, and all sorts of draconian legal measures would need to be in place (eg, sigining a NDA before being allowed to operate software -- or similar).
This is bullshit; the "author" is posting the story in separate posts to collect karma. Everything after the first post (heh) should be modded into oblivion. There is no reason why "reflexreaction" couldn't have put it all into a single posting.
Actually, NT's root user is called SYSTEM. The "Administrator" user is a crippled account that cannot do many things. This is a requirement for some security settings (mostly for auditing). It's also the reason why you can't kill the stupid printing spool service as the Administrator (you need the kill.exe or rkill.exe programs, which are SUID-SYSTEM more or less). You'll also notice that members of the "Backup" group have elevated privileges above the Administrator users for exactly the same reason.
I firmly believe that software should be held accountable to liability laws and consumer rights laws.
That would kill all free software. People could personally sue Linus for bugs in the Linux kernel that caused them problems: "I'm seeking $10,000 in damages because your stupid bottom handler for my POS Promise IDE controller caused me to lose all my data!". The listings on freshmeat would be a pool of future clients for lawyers, and not software projects. Amateurs wouldn't release code for any use whatsoever.
In short: that's a realy, realy, really, really bad idea.
That would be the one thing that would get me to buy an X-Box; I'd love to pit that Office Dog against Einstein or the Clippy. They could have special key combinations to unlock their "productivity" powers: Clippy could open a can of printer-spooling whoop-ass by sucking his opponent into the printing animation of his.
Xbox has plenty of good games and many good games to come. Including THPS3,NFL2k2,Max Payne,Rallisport challenge, Wrecless and the list goes on. Just wait for E3 and we'll see even more games coming out for the xbox.
Okay, I'll restate then: The XBox has only one good exclusive game. I can get everything in that list above on my PS2 or PC. Why should I buy an XBox for (again), one game?
Please demonstrate or give specific examples how Perl's "unelegant" after market OO implementation results in program design that is more difficult to maintain. Just interested.
[ Note the slience ]
He probably has never even coded in perl. But that won't stop the morons from modding him up as "insightful"; anything that degenerates the status quo is "insightful" here any more.
OK, that front page was orginally interesting because it was served up by a C64 - you mirroring it demonstrates what - that modern PC's can serve web pages too?
Actually, the machine serving up that bit of C-64 goodness is none other than a symmetric multiprocessing Intel Pentium box. Not a Pentium II, III, IV, Pro, or Celeron; the old fdiv-enabled Pentium. Somewhat of a rarety itself; it's a dual 133, and the processors need to be paired with the chip revision level, so of the seven or so variety of P133 chips made -- only specific versions will work in an SMP setup. There were very few motherboards that supportted this configuration as the Pentium Pro (aka Pentium II, III, Celeron) put a stop to this kludgery shortly after. I had to search on ebay for quite a while before I found the perfect pair. The box runs RedHat 7.2 right now.
Well, I managed to mirror the front page before the machine went down (hopefully others can mirror my copy before my machine goes down!) http://inconnu.isu.edu/~ink/c64
Even that is a bad example. Psygnosis still made Wipeout for the PC and the N64. I highly doubt Bungie will be allowed to "leave the fold" now that they've been brought into Microsoft. Only time will tell, though.
Its SOP in the console game, just like Nintendo and Rare, or Sony and Square.
Then how come Square is targeting the Gamecube now? And Rare, well, they certainly are loyal to Nintendo -- even though the big N only owns 25% of them, everything they have going is headed for the GC and GBA. But, still, neither Sony nor Nintendo just bought them outright.
Or, to put it another way, I'll believe you when Bungie releases something that targets the PS2 or some other non-Microsoft console.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone else find the irony in the fact that most stories on here discuss open source product etc but this is a Beta test that you need Windows to participate in ? not to put too fine a point on it but it does make me smile a little...
Microsoft has a monopoly on consumer software products and services, and this is one symptom of that monopoly. Why does this make you "smile a little"? Do you honestly enjoy being locked into a single product; smug in the assurance that since there are no other choices you are able to surround yourself with other "successful" software users and laugh at people who are trying to change the situation? I'm sorry, but why do you even bother reading slashdot?
Ahh yes, I answered my own question...
An increase in CO2 can therefore be assumed to increase the amount of heat trapped by the earths atmosphere, since CO2 has been doing that since the beginning of time.
Then why don't satellites show a net change of external energy input and output over the past 20 years? There are studies which show that no net changes are observed, and other studies which detail that surface temperature changes are not uniform, as you would expect CO2 to be; but rather, may be more due to urban concrete heat sinks and soot. Global warming is happening, and we may indeed be able to do something about it and/or be causing it -- but let's make sure we're addressing the proper issue before jumping into anything.
It is like arguing that an oily beach is a natural phenomenon. It is possible that an oil reserve is exposed to the sea through natural causes (like an undersea earthquake opening a rift), but the hulking remains of the Exxon Valdeze would, for example, make the argument that the cause could have been natural pretty weak, even without 100% irrefutable proof.
Well, natural oil slicks occur all the time, so I suppose what we need to see here is the Exxon Valdeze which links human CO2 production to global warming. At one point in the past, the Gulf of Mexico reached the base of the rocky mountains with help from high global temperatures (see Discover Magazine/May 2002) and without the help of human CO2 production. The Green party folks were certain that human pollution was sending us into another ice age back in the 1970s, and now they're just as certain that the Sky is Falling yet again. Those of use who urge caution are signaled out as ignorant duffs who do not pay attention; e.g. "You're with us or you're against us". Personally, I'd rather see some rational discussion happen over this. I want to see all the side-effects of atmospheric CO2 found. I want to see good reconciliation with satellite data. Most importantly, I want scientists, and not politicians, to draft specific reccomendations after the research has become sufficient.
Yeah, but all they had to do to achieve that was to upgrade some seriously defunct machinery in east Berlin (well, what once _was_ east Berlin anyway). Still, kudos to all who reduce emissions; it's a very worthy goal.
I'm a child of the 80s, and every time we had a lecture on petroleum in grade school we were always going to run dry by 2012. When I debated in high school, we were at most going to have enough oil to last until 2020. Now I see that the date has been pushed back yet again -- these sorts of games do not rally confidence to the cause. Now that oil fields are being refilled, perhaps they'll have to re-hash their guesses yet again?
Now, I'm all for real, workable renewable resources -- and the best bet right now is with nuclear and crop-derivated oils -- but when a doomsday case is misstated repeatedly it does the cause no good at all.
A bit of revision going on there; Netscape never gave away Navigator until Microsoft made IE free. There was a gratis download for the education market, but you still had to pay for the browser otherwise.
The author also noted a 6 or 7 year turnover in game consoles. The PSX's 5 year endurance was unheard of at the time. I think a 2 or 3 year
I'm not so sure about that. The Atari 2600 and the original Nintendo Entertainment System were each at least 6 year consoles. The Super Nintendo vs. Sega Genesis may have only been a 3 or 4-year affair, but the PSX is still going strong (it's been outselling the X-Box for the past few months anyway).
As a side note; the article cites the Dreamcast as evidence of a failed unit; but the industry is littered with them (Pippen, NeoGeo, Turbo16, 3DO, Coleco, and a few dozen others). The console war is very unforgiving, and highly-geared towards growth; if you're not growing, you're toast. Many of these systems were technically superior to their competitors (3DO, Coleco, Intellevision, Dreamcast) -- but they still ultimately failed due to the second derivative. The XBox needs to keep growing base at any cost now, if they stop, then history says they're dead. Perhaps we'll see a Dreamcast-esque US$99 price-point before next christmas as a last-ditch effort?
- Go to their primary website and search for advertising or look for an "advertise with us" link.
- Call the toll free number, you will probably not have to wait any time at all.
- Play dumb, "Hello, yes, I was trying to disconnect my service...? The wrong number you say? I'm so sorry, could you please transfer me to the correct people....?"
It works every time.I'll buy an X-Box as soon as there is a game on it that I can't get on my PS2 or PC that I really want to play (just like any other system, I suppose). I'll probably end up getting a GC after Zelda comes out, cause I'm a Z junkie.
This is not true. By this time in the lifespan of the original PlayStation, Sony had already cut the price.
\The PSX had a price cut before it was even released. I preordered one at US$349 and then on that lovely day (September 9, 1995) they lowered the price to US$299. By Christmas of 1996 it was US$199. By the next holiday season it was US$149, and it has gradually come down from there. I think the PS1 is going to skyrocket at US$50.
Not if free software would be passed on the right way.
When has that ever happened? We have almost no lobying power, while the commerical software world has unlimited influence with the lawmakers. Even if the law is favorable to open source software, odds are that companies could still bring suits against free developers, which achieves the same effect as if we were liable. That they may be frivilous suits will not be obvious to our technology-impaired judges and juries. This whole idea sounds bad for everyhone (but lawyers and companies that can afford to hire them).
[I know I'm going to burn through more karma for this!]
But couldn't the same be said for commercial software? I don't see the magical line between "I paid money for something [hard cash, commercial software]" and "I paid other people money [bandwidth, CDs, whatever] for something". One thing I've learned in my life is to never underestimate the law and lawyers; those that pay almost always come out on top. Open source developers do not have the money to fight such suits, and will gladly fold into oblivion if challenged (see recent Wine contributors, DeCSS, bnetd for case examples).
To create a law which provides for liability with software (i.e., Free Speech) seems very dangerous. Even if the intent is to punish those who are making incredible sums of money by shoveling out the most bug-ridden piles of garbage imaginable, it also impunes upon the hobbiest, the casual geek and the open source divoute (if, for nothing less than the threat of a lawsuit). Joe Programmer with his wiz-bang open-source program recieves a summons to a court 2,000 kilometers away is already out the time spent there and the plane tickets -- what is he more likely to do? Give up; which is just as awful as if he'd been found guilty of writing a program (Free Speech, again) that destroyed someone's data. Furthermore, he will serve as a warning to all other programmers (writers of Free Speech) that they should never, ever, under any circumstances release software that does anything.
For all the grief that this would cause Microsoft; it would be worse for us, if only because we don't have a team of lawyers on retainer.
Perhaps you should go back to law school. My wife is a nurse and if she provides free services for some accident victim that we come across, she can and will be held liable for anything that goes wrong. There are many things that you can be sued for, regardless how much you charge.
Even if what you say is true (it isn't), RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, IBM, et. all can be run out of business if there are bugs in Linux for which they are liable, and charging for. It's a horribly bad idea, because then all businesses would stay away from supplying any sort of support structure for open source softwares for fear of an unexpected lawsut. The price of commercial software would go up, and all sorts of draconian legal measures would need to be in place (eg, sigining a NDA before being allowed to operate software -- or similar).
Just leave it alone, and let the geeks handle it.
This is bullshit; the "author" is posting the story in separate posts to collect karma. Everything after the first post (heh) should be modded into oblivion. There is no reason why "reflexreaction" couldn't have put it all into a single posting.
NT based windows, administrator has this access.
Actually, NT's root user is called SYSTEM. The "Administrator" user is a crippled account that cannot do many things. This is a requirement for some security settings (mostly for auditing). It's also the reason why you can't kill the stupid printing spool service as the Administrator (you need the kill.exe or rkill.exe programs, which are SUID-SYSTEM more or less). You'll also notice that members of the "Backup" group have elevated privileges above the Administrator users for exactly the same reason.
I firmly believe that software should be held accountable to liability laws and consumer rights laws.
That would kill all free software. People could personally sue Linus for bugs in the Linux kernel that caused them problems: "I'm seeking $10,000 in damages because your stupid bottom handler for my POS Promise IDE controller caused me to lose all my data!". The listings on freshmeat would be a pool of future clients for lawyers, and not software projects. Amateurs wouldn't release code for any use whatsoever.
In short: that's a realy, realy, really, really bad idea.
That would be the one thing that would get me to buy an X-Box; I'd love to pit that Office Dog against Einstein or the Clippy. They could have special key combinations to unlock their "productivity" powers: Clippy could open a can of printer-spooling whoop-ass by sucking his opponent into the printing animation of his.
Xbox has plenty of good games and many good games to come. Including THPS3,NFL2k2,Max Payne,Rallisport challenge, Wrecless and the list goes on. Just wait for E3 and we'll see even more games coming out for the xbox.
Okay, I'll restate then: The XBox has only one good exclusive game. I can get everything in that list above on my PS2 or PC. Why should I buy an XBox for (again), one game?Please demonstrate or give specific examples how Perl's "unelegant" after market OO implementation results in program design that is more difficult to maintain. Just interested.
[ Note the slience ]
He probably has never even coded in perl. But that won't stop the morons from modding him up as "insightful"; anything that degenerates the status quo is "insightful" here any more.
How on Earth did Apple manage the migration from 68k to PowerPC then? I can even run my old 68k applications under _classic_ under OSX.
Except that the X-Box has only one "good" game, and that game is only good if you haven't been bored silly with FPS.
Actually, the machine serving up that bit of C-64 goodness is none other than a symmetric multiprocessing Intel Pentium box. Not a Pentium II, III, IV, Pro, or Celeron; the old fdiv-enabled Pentium. Somewhat of a rarety itself; it's a dual 133, and the processors need to be paired with the chip revision level, so of the seven or so variety of P133 chips made -- only specific versions will work in an SMP setup. There were very few motherboards that supportted this configuration as the Pentium Pro (aka Pentium II, III, Celeron) put a stop to this kludgery shortly after. I had to search on ebay for quite a while before I found the perfect pair. The box runs RedHat 7.2 right now.
Well, I managed to mirror the front page before the machine went down (hopefully others can mirror my copy before my machine goes down!) http://inconnu.isu.edu/~ink/c64
Even that is a bad example. Psygnosis still made Wipeout for the PC and the N64. I highly doubt Bungie will be allowed to "leave the fold" now that they've been brought into Microsoft. Only time will tell, though.
Then how come Square is targeting the Gamecube now? And Rare, well, they certainly are loyal to Nintendo -- even though the big N only owns 25% of them, everything they have going is headed for the GC and GBA. But, still, neither Sony nor Nintendo just bought them outright.
Or, to put it another way, I'll believe you when Bungie releases something that targets the PS2 or some other non-Microsoft console.