i think this is really going to change fairly soon-ish (within the next year or two). first, for a lot of portable devices that need fast transfer (like...um, mp3 players or video cameras) it'll be necessary and also, because of creative's SoundBlaster Audigy; even the base card (not the deluxe or the ultra mega deluxe or whatever the designations are,) has firewire (SB1394 port is what Soundblaster papers call it, but "firewire" just sounds cooler.)
the only real problem with USB is it's speed, which USB 2.0 is supposed to fix, but unless there's going to be some magical firmware program or ultra easy hack that upgrades you from 1.0 to 2.0 (i dunno jack about USB 2.0, so i dunno), you're gonna need to buy new hardware; if you're going that far, you might as well get the tried and tested tech that's been on the market for a while already and is hence cheaper.
This sounds like a smart-ass reply, but taken at face value, you're suggesting that the line between "animals" and "spiritual beings" (i.e. humans,) is that they can communicate; chimps and gorillas both can communicate. are they 'spiritual beings' (that sounds sooo final fantasy) or 'animals'?
and because humans can tell you that they're spiritual beings, does it make it true?
if we are spiritual beings, does it make us any less animals?
While I disagree with a lot of what Stephenson wrote in his essay
"In The Beginning Was The Command Line" (find it here,) a lot of it is obviously accurate.
Without the PC's open architechture the demand for programs would have been harder to supply, and without Microsoft's influence and saturation of the market, there wouldn't have been a demand for cheap PCs.
Open architechture of PCs == clones
IBM clones == Cheap PCs.
Cheap PCs == computers to play with for the non-super-rich hoi-polloi.
With PC hardware as open (and cheap!) as it was (and is) Linus and RMS were able to do stuff. I really dislike Stephenson's closing of the essay, talking about the right pinky of god and all that shit, but even today, it's a well written essay with many good points.
i've just recently picked Godflesh's "Hymns" cd and while it plays fine on win98/Me/2k machines in winamp and cdplayer and windows' media player (v.7), everytime i put it in an NT machine the damn thing skips like i'm kicking the machine or something. is this an NT specific problem? at first i thought the disc was 'protected' because of this, but as soon as i got it home i ripped a copy for work (which won't play at the NT machines at work either).
Visa, Amex, Mastercard et al are forced to re-issue credit cards to all people using passport
The global economy is severely disrupted due to the downturn in online spending, the overall costs incurred by the replacement and the lack of consumer confidence in online shopping, banking etc Microsoft point to the famous "we're not liable for jack shit" clause in the agreement So what happens? Does MS still get sued? Do the credit card companies just sit back, hemorrhage and go "Oh well, shit happens."?
While not impossible, this is an unlikely scenario, IMO. Right around the time that the CC companies were sending out 150 million new cards to replace the jacked #'s on the old ones, they would hand MS a pretty hefty bill or a new contract with extra clauses along the lines of "if MS passport causes fuck ups and people steal the #s, MS pays for the CC companies' damage repair" in really nice legalese.
I also really doubt that 'the global economy going into a downturn because of online spending disruptions' part; most spending (i.e., global economy,) is not online -- consumers are nice, but governments are the biggest spenders (individual citizens just don't buy tanks and provisions for armies of millions all that often,) and governments do not tend to go to eBay or Half.com for great bargains on stuff. The economy, increasingly global, may go into a downturn (recession, depression, whatever,) but it won't be because people aren't clicking on "buy it now!" buttons on eBay.
>>>>DOS was not really an OS so much as a very simple library and some interupt handlers. The command-prompt was a program that came with it, and a very important one (so were "dir", "del" and others). >>>>>
uh, no.
DOS was (and is) an OS. It's quality is debateable, but that it controlled tasks (w/r/t disk I/O, system calls, etc,) defined by users is fact.
And "dir", "del" and others are not by any stretch of the imagination programs -- merely calls to OS, which would in turn look in \command.com for a command (call) by the same name (e.g. dir or del). that's why you'd just put command.com on a rescue/emergency floppy and not fill up millions of floppies with different commands ("damn, now i need the XCOPY floppy...") -- all that stuff was in command.com already.
>>>>>>>>>>>I would love to see an openBe implimentation, because it would be really nice to have an opensource OS geard toward multimedia instead of networking and programming. (Linux is many wonderful things, but it simply not geared for multimedia.) >>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;>>>
ditto on that; BeOS should have been geared to multimedia exclusively. Apple has some hardcore fans in the recording world, mainly because of protools. a free OS that was geared towards visual art/music creation would be a welcome addition. Linux is nice, but i don't see any really high-quality sound apps (e.g., anything by SonicFoundry or Native Instruments) or anything comparable. I've leafed through 'linux music and sound' and have yet to find anything that really compares to the windows (or even apple) apps available. BeOS' death was drivers and supported hardware -- with an open version of BeOS, that wouldn't be as much of a problem, since there would be a more open (no pun intended,) environment for hobbyists to develop their own drivers and apps.
>>>>3) linux desktops are still not dumbed down enough. Come on, TiVo is easy to use, my playstation 2 is easy to use, why is my computer so hard? >>>>
Because your computer is not a single purpose machine. Arguably, PS2 isn't either, but it's main purpose is not as a DVD player or computer -- notwithstanding sony's "lets pretend it is so we can avoid UK taxes" strategy. Your computer is designed (at least PCs) to do any variety of things. Apple's machines are meant to do a few specific things -- if your machine isn't designed to, you can't easily open them up and switch much around to make it into a game machine, a music studio, a word processor, a programming station, a server, a tv/digital recorder without voiding your warranty; Apple has seen the desire people have for these functions and (mostly) built them into it's design. A PC is as flexible as it is because the parts are (mostly,) off-the-shelf stuff.
Computers (and operating systems,) are dumbed down for the hoi polloi -- this is what gets you stuff like Win ME, or the anti-command line stance that Apple has(had). It's a "make it unbelievably easy for every idiot to use". Most people these days don't use their computer's full capabilities because they don't need it; they'll do a little word processing and surf the net, maybe play a game or two and if they're really stretching it, use a couple of other extra apps -- geneaology programs, tax and accounting software, etc. Most people don't have a LAN at home -- most people don't have more than one computer at home. AOL is simpler than Win9x in many way, and way simpler than 2000/NT variants.
because windows has a well-spoken, photogenic Evil Overlord^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H monkeyboy^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H spokesman and that's how it got so widespread.
BeOS' lack of vid card support is probably the main reason i don't use BeOS anymore. Sure, you can do nice things with it, but you can do nice things will other OSes as well. Be's work on the OS was/is magnificent. I think linux's free beer/speech is really what made a lot of people choose linux over BeOS; Be did offer the R5 free for personal use right before all the flying excrement started recently, but they couldn't go open source due to licensing agreements w/r/t propriatery code or something. It's a shame, really.
As for atheOS, i hope it gets GPLed (last time i checked it wasn't,) as that would give it a better chance at avoiding BeOS' fate.
while this lawyer's involvement is a Good Thing, i really doubt that this case will be publicized (unless this lawyer is willing to finance some promotion firm to get the word out.) right now is a precarious time to get publicity, especially in the U.S. -- michael jackson could go on air and announce that he is indeed a pedophiliac alien and that he and Bill Gates have a love child, and people would probably stare blankly and ask about the Sept. 11 attacks and what's going on with that.
Hell, even when this happened (pre-attack), the media didn't pick up on it. a few protests in a few towns, a paragraph in USA Today and a two minute segment on NPR aren't exactly Getting The Word Out.
Someone else mentioned a fear that there'd be headlines about 'former commie hackers': this kid's a grad student, like early/mid-twenties, right? he'd have been in his early teens when the Soviet Union fell into a trillion pieces, he can't really be portrayed that way -- much more likely he'll be seen as a 'trouble maker' in the vein of MafiaBoy or the Kournikova-virus script kiddie. The only problems with that are:
a)he's not a juvenile, like MafiaBoy
b)the "arrest" and his legal problems are in America, which is not nearly as lenient as Canada or Europe (i think the kournikova author was Dutch?) have traditionally been.
c) the case is complicated by the juridictional snafu; he didn't commit the 'crime' in the US, he's not a US citizen, he's not selling the program himself, and of course, the biggie: what he wrote isn't illegal in the country he wrote it in.
Anyone out there who's more verbose and somewhat profesional should get some 'friend of the court' briefs together and send them to the lawyer. Dmitry's going to need all the help he can get.
>>>>The deluge of digital music available on the internet has not been followed by the collapse of the record industry. We do not see top 40 artists hanging out on the street pushing shopping carts full of pop cans>>>>>>>>>
if you really think that, read this chilling article.
Shawn Fanning is an evil, evil man and this easily cracked, almost completely worthless security measure -- so worthless it needs legislation to protect it being violated as easily as our Fair Use Rights -- is here just in time.
There used to be an online service (something like firefly.com or a similar name...back in like 96 or 97) that did exactly this; it'd list a bunch of groups, and you'd select how much you liked them (a radio button selection between 1-10) and based on that, it'd recommend other bands whose music you were likely to enjoy. i remember being impressed when it suggested Wire, Coil and Mission of Burma, some great bands that aren't exactly household names. i'd love to have a similar service online now; lately i've just been using mailing lists ("anyone recommend stuff like XXXXXX by XXXXXX? i love that album.")
I've seen this happen, and in fact have picked up some really nifty stuff dumpster diving. my first three (3) linux boxes were snagged from dumpsters outside tech companies. and they're great for cannibalization for other, better boxes too. So please, don't steal, throw the boxes away. (for me.)
Doesn't everyone wish they hadn't seen Phantom Menace? I remember before it came out, everyone was so stoked about how cool it was going to be. After Jar-Jar...blah.
i'm not 100% sure of the law in the UK, so i could just be talking out of my ass here. that said, the british idea that if they ask you for the password and you refuse to give it you're jailed + the american court system would be a Good Thing. if you believe the Gov'm't has not right to ask you for your passphrase, take it to a judge, who will likely side for the govt., especially if there's proof of some sort against you.
that aside, if you're keeping sensitive information (like life and death stuff,) anywhere other than your head, you're deluded and a fool.
the argument has been made in the comments that people will just use older non-govt-backdoor encryption systems that need huge keys (decades or centuries to break,) is faulty. these crypto systems will become obsolete, sooner rather than later.
it's quite possible that our corporate owners^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hleaders will actually help protect civil liberties here -- individuals, as a rule, do not have big money that would be threatened by loss of confidentiality of secrets.
this is not necessarily a good thing. MS's strong point (besides marketing, where they're like Jimi Hendrix against a field of Britney Spears',) is their application software. If MS is split (doubtful imo,) then there wont be any reason for the Office division to stick exclusively with MS OSes. they won't make a linux port of anything outrageously popular like Office or IE, but there's other software that they could make or port that would do extremely well. if they did make the switch to porting stuff to linux (don't hold your breath for that while balmer and gates are sucking air,) it would be a great thing for both linux and MS. consumers would have less of areason to not try linux, and MS would have a new market. IE for linux, Office for linux, Outlook for linux, games ported...all of these would be good things.
although the thought of Outlook for linux is scary (and of course it would INSIST on root privileges and support scripting.)
Slashdot Mirror
i think this is really going to change fairly soon-ish (within the next year or two). first, for a lot of portable devices that need fast transfer (like ...um, mp3 players or video cameras) it'll be necessary and also, because of creative's SoundBlaster Audigy; even the base card (not the deluxe or the ultra mega deluxe or whatever the designations are,) has firewire (SB1394 port is what Soundblaster papers call it, but "firewire" just sounds cooler.)
the only real problem with USB is it's speed, which USB 2.0 is supposed to fix, but unless there's going to be some magical firmware program or ultra easy hack that upgrades you from 1.0 to 2.0 (i dunno jack about USB 2.0, so i dunno), you're gonna need to buy new hardware; if you're going that far, you might as well get the tried and tested tech that's been on the market for a while already and is hence cheaper.
and because humans can tell you that they're spiritual beings, does it make it true?
if we are spiritual beings, does it make us any less animals?
Sorry -- it's too bad being cynical didn't produce a significant amount of energy. ;-)
if cynicism ever actually produced energy, America would actually look forward to elections and MS products! too much to hope for...
While I disagree with a lot of what Stephenson wrote in his essay
"In The Beginning Was The Command Line" (find it here,) a lot of it is obviously accurate.
Without the PC's open architechture the demand for programs would have been harder to supply, and without Microsoft's influence and saturation of the market, there wouldn't have been a demand for cheap PCs.
Open architechture of PCs == clones
IBM clones == Cheap PCs.
Cheap PCs == computers to play with for the non-super-rich hoi-polloi.
With PC hardware as open (and cheap!) as it was (and is) Linus and RMS were able to do stuff. I really dislike Stephenson's closing of the essay, talking about the right pinky of god and all that shit, but even today, it's a well written essay with many good points.
i've just recently picked Godflesh's "Hymns" cd and while it plays fine on win98/Me/2k machines in winamp and cdplayer and windows' media player (v.7), everytime i put it in an NT machine the damn thing skips like i'm kicking the machine or something. is this an NT specific problem? at first i thought the disc was 'protected' because of this, but as soon as i got it home i ripped a copy for work (which won't play at the NT machines at work either).
Visa, Amex, Mastercard et al are forced to re-issue credit cards to all people using passport The global economy is severely disrupted due to the downturn in online spending, the overall costs incurred by the replacement and the lack of consumer confidence in online shopping, banking etc Microsoft point to the famous "we're not liable for jack shit" clause in the agreement So what happens? Does MS still get sued? Do the credit card companies just sit back, hemorrhage and go "Oh well, shit happens."?
While not impossible, this is an unlikely scenario, IMO. Right around the time that the CC companies were sending out 150 million new cards to replace the jacked #'s on the old ones, they would hand MS a pretty hefty bill or a new contract with extra clauses along the lines of "if MS passport causes fuck ups and people steal the #s, MS pays for the CC companies' damage repair" in really nice legalese.
I also really doubt that 'the global economy going into a downturn because of online spending disruptions' part; most spending (i.e., global economy,) is not online -- consumers are nice, but governments are the biggest spenders (individual citizens just don't buy tanks and provisions for armies of millions all that often,) and governments do not tend to go to eBay or Half.com for great bargains on stuff. The economy, increasingly global, may go into a downturn (recession, depression, whatever,) but it won't be because people aren't clicking on "buy it now!" buttons on eBay.
-d.
>>>>DOS was not really an OS so much as a very simple library and some interupt handlers. The command-prompt was a program that came with it, and a very important one (so were "dir", "del" and others). >>>>>
uh, no.
DOS was (and is) an OS. It's quality is debateable, but that it controlled tasks (w/r/t disk I/O, system calls, etc,) defined by users is fact.
And "dir", "del" and others are not by any stretch of the imagination programs -- merely calls to OS, which would in turn look in \command.com for a command (call) by the same name (e.g. dir or del). that's why you'd just put command.com on a rescue/emergency floppy and not fill up millions of floppies with different commands ("damn, now i need the XCOPY floppy...") -- all that stuff was in command.com already.
>>>>>>>>>>>I would love to see an openBe implimentation, because it would be really nice to have an opensource OS geard toward multimedia instead of networking and programming. (Linux is many wonderful things, but it simply not geared for multimedia.) >>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;>>>
ditto on that; BeOS should have been geared to multimedia exclusively. Apple has some hardcore fans in the recording world, mainly because of protools. a free OS that was geared towards visual art/music creation would be a welcome addition. Linux is nice, but i don't see any really high-quality sound apps (e.g., anything by SonicFoundry or Native Instruments) or anything comparable. I've leafed through 'linux music and sound' and have yet to find anything that really compares to the windows (or even apple) apps available. BeOS' death was drivers and supported hardware -- with an open version of BeOS, that wouldn't be as much of a problem, since there would be a more open (no pun intended,) environment for hobbyists to develop their own drivers and apps.
>>>>> I do have faith in Linux tho. Esp since a lot of CG shops are using it more and more. Just needs the software and drivers, thats all. >>>>>
that's like saying it's a great car, it just needs wheels and an engine.
linux sound apps are sorely lacking, although i will second the earlier post mentioning the 'linux sound and music' books -- excellent resource.
>>>>3) linux desktops are still not dumbed down enough. Come on, TiVo is easy to use, my playstation 2 is easy to use, why is my computer so hard? >>>>
Because your computer is not a single purpose machine. Arguably, PS2 isn't either, but it's main purpose is not as a DVD player or computer -- notwithstanding sony's "lets pretend it is so we can avoid UK taxes" strategy. Your computer is designed (at least PCs) to do any variety of things. Apple's machines are meant to do a few specific things -- if your machine isn't designed to, you can't easily open them up and switch much around to make it into a game machine, a music studio, a word processor, a programming station, a server, a tv/digital recorder without voiding your warranty; Apple has seen the desire people have for these functions and (mostly) built them into it's design. A PC is as flexible as it is because the parts are (mostly,) off-the-shelf stuff.
Computers (and operating systems,) are dumbed down for the hoi polloi -- this is what gets you stuff like Win ME, or the anti-command line stance that Apple has(had). It's a "make it unbelievably easy for every idiot to use". Most people these days don't use their computer's full capabilities because they don't need it; they'll do a little word processing and surf the net, maybe play a game or two and if they're really stretching it, use a couple of other extra apps -- geneaology programs, tax and accounting software, etc. Most people don't have a LAN at home -- most people don't have more than one computer at home. AOL is simpler than Win9x in many way, and way simpler than 2000/NT variants.
because windows has a well-spoken, photogenic Evil Overlord^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H monkeyboy^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H spokesman and that's how it got so widespread.
BeOS' lack of vid card support is probably the main reason i don't use BeOS anymore. Sure, you can do nice things with it, but you can do nice things will other OSes as well. Be's work on the OS was/is magnificent. I think linux's free beer/speech is really what made a lot of people choose linux over BeOS; Be did offer the R5 free for personal use right before all the flying excrement started recently, but they couldn't go open source due to licensing agreements w/r/t propriatery code or something. It's a shame, really.
As for atheOS, i hope it gets GPLed (last time i checked it wasn't,) as that would give it a better chance at avoiding BeOS' fate.
They're going to do this by 'embracing and extending' (TM) standard definitions of 'up' and 'down'.
The "Secured IIS" is probably going to go through various iterations, and end up something like this.
Hell, even when this happened (pre-attack), the media didn't pick up on it. a few protests in a few towns, a paragraph in USA Today and a two minute segment on NPR aren't exactly Getting The Word Out.
Someone else mentioned a fear that there'd be headlines about 'former commie hackers': this kid's a grad student, like early/mid-twenties, right? he'd have been in his early teens when the Soviet Union fell into a trillion pieces, he can't really be portrayed that way -- much more likely he'll be seen as a 'trouble maker' in the vein of MafiaBoy or the Kournikova-virus script kiddie. The only problems with that are:
a)he's not a juvenile, like MafiaBoy
b)the "arrest" and his legal problems are in America, which is not nearly as lenient as Canada or Europe (i think the kournikova author was Dutch?) have traditionally been.
c) the case is complicated by the juridictional snafu; he didn't commit the 'crime' in the US, he's not a US citizen, he's not selling the program himself, and of course, the biggie: what he wrote isn't illegal in the country he wrote it in.
Anyone out there who's more verbose and somewhat profesional should get some 'friend of the court' briefs together and send them to the lawyer. Dmitry's going to need all the help he can get.
>>>>The deluge of digital music available on the internet has not been followed by the collapse of the record industry. We do not see top 40 artists hanging out on the street pushing shopping carts full of pop cans>>>>>>>>>
if you really think that, read this chilling article.
Shawn Fanning is an evil, evil man and this easily cracked, almost completely worthless security measure -- so worthless it needs legislation to protect it being violated as easily as our Fair Use Rights -- is here just in time.
>Ok... back to 'writing software'
...do you do that with your left hand, or your right hand?
people on slashdot think they're so clever, using that rot-26 encryption...
There used to be an online service (something like firefly.com or a similar name...back in like 96 or 97) that did exactly this; it'd list a bunch of groups, and you'd select how much you liked them (a radio button selection between 1-10) and based on that, it'd recommend other bands whose music you were likely to enjoy. i remember being impressed when it suggested Wire, Coil and Mission of Burma, some great bands that aren't exactly household names. i'd love to have a similar service online now; lately i've just been using mailing lists ("anyone recommend stuff like XXXXXX by XXXXXX? i love that album.")
So it turns out that VA was just being cautious when they got out of the hardware business...
Michael: [Sinister Laughter] When they fire me, I'm stealing 500 copies of...LINUX SOFTWARE! [Sinister Laughter]
CmdrTaco: Uh, Mike, that's free anyway. Besides, Katz took all the boxes.
Michael: Why did he get all the boxes first?
CmdrTaco: According to the poll, everyone wanted him gone first. You and CowboyNeal tied for 2nd.
I've seen this happen, and in fact have picked up some really nifty stuff dumpster diving. my first three (3) linux boxes were snagged from dumpsters outside tech companies. and they're great for cannibalization for other, better boxes too. So please, don't steal, throw the boxes away. (for me.)
Doesn't everyone wish they hadn't seen Phantom Menace? I remember before it came out, everyone was so stoked about how cool it was going to be. After Jar-Jar...blah.
>Fortunately, the geeks can now read this
/. readers actually reading the linked article.
>synopsis instead of reading the author's wordy
>version. This way we will save hundreds of geek
>hours.
i don't think there was ever any real danger of
-d.
i'm not 100% sure of the law in the UK, so i could just be talking out of my ass here. that said, the british idea that if they ask you for the password and you refuse to give it you're jailed + the american court system would be a Good Thing. if you believe the Gov'm't has not right to ask you for your passphrase, take it to a judge, who will likely side for the govt., especially if there's proof of some sort against you.
that aside, if you're keeping sensitive information (like life and death stuff,) anywhere other than your head, you're deluded and a fool.
the argument has been made in the comments that people will just use older non-govt-backdoor encryption systems that need huge keys (decades or centuries to break,) is faulty. these crypto systems will become obsolete, sooner rather than later.
it's quite possible that our corporate owners^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hleaders will actually help protect civil liberties here -- individuals, as a rule, do not have big money that would be threatened by loss of confidentiality of secrets.
-d.
it took a while for the tax rebate checks to clear, that's why.
this is not necessarily a good thing. MS's strong point (besides marketing, where they're like Jimi Hendrix against a field of Britney Spears',) is their application software. If MS is split (doubtful imo,) then there wont be any reason for the Office division to stick exclusively with MS OSes. they won't make a linux port of anything outrageously popular like Office or IE, but there's other software that they could make or port that would do extremely well. if they did make the switch to porting stuff to linux (don't hold your breath for that while balmer and gates are sucking air,) it would be a great thing for both linux and MS. consumers would have less of areason to not try linux, and MS would have a new market. IE for linux, Office for linux, Outlook for linux, games ported...all of these would be good things.
although the thought of Outlook for linux is scary (and of course it would INSIST on root privileges and support scripting.)