It's weird how everyone becomes so picky when it comes to AIDS and HIV but not for other diseases. I wonder why.
Interestingly, you wouldn't encounter that much general nit picking on biology/medicine websites. Maybe people visiting those sites concentrate more on facts that have any relevance. Where as on Slashdot someone can indeed get modded up while showing off their "impressive" (ehem...) bio skills by correcting minor details in posts of others.
Well I used dasher and I think it's a really neat interface technology (although it made me sort of dizzy first). I can see it's tremendous use for people with physical disabilities as well as for the mobile sector (e.g. PDAs, it's a pain to get text in there with decent accuracy and speed). But in comparison to conventional text input I have to say that Dasher is definitely slower than a keyboard. Since the poster asked about coding, i don't see how to type and navigate with this interface in my text-based source code efficiently at all. On the other hand, someone might develop a high level visual programming language based on a refined dasher-like interface? That would be cool, like looking at the unencoded matrix or something!
...and you people have the gall to be discussing the FISA court rebuking the FBI and Justice Department???? My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!
While I agree with you that a load of shit is going on around the world (and always has been): it's imperative that you clean things up in your own house, regardless of what the neighborhood looks like. If you want to stand for civil rights and liberties, for justice and equal opportunities and oppose the idea police/military regimes you have to follow your own ideals. Otherwise they are worthless and "The Free World" becomes another meaningless term used for propaganda, political power struggles and disposal of the opposition (as it probably is right now, anyway). If you don't pay attention to our society's very foundation then our course is meaningless. And protection from arbitrary, unchecked wiretap is part of this foundation, we call it privacy. And no, privacy is not for terrorists only.
Apparently it will not work with today's standard drives, as they are not capable of hardware-decrypting any data streams from CD. So this whole thing will only be successful if ALL player manufacturers comply and add that capability to their drives (or this capability is added on the operating system side for PCs). So the obligatory question is (again): would you rather buy a crippled DRM-ROM or a normal drive? And you can be sure of one thing: if this technology becomes mainstream, they RIAA _WILL_ make you pay per session or invalidate CDs after a certain time and you _WILL_ end up paying much more while having much less freedom of use!
I can see it now, you will have to buy Mod chips for your PC on the grey market, to get around the hardware "security" just to install Linux..
Yes, maybe so! Obviously the first version of Palladium will be the friendliest, in order to calm critics and get user acceptance. At some point in the future you won't be able to install Linux, but before that a lot of other stuff will be gone, too. The PC will be a completely different thing, the stuff you can do with it will be outweighed by the stuff you are not allowed to do with it, by then. It will be a slow process of course, to keep the users in a spiral that is slowly spinning down (you don't want to wake them up doing harsh movements).
The main problem is, that the computer as we know it today is inherently the most dynamic tool mankind has ever built. It is based on the concept of copying and modifying data freely. Most of the computer's convenience and usefulness comes from this property. Now Palladium/DRM takes this away to the maximum extent possible without turning the whole PC into a vegetable.
This technology WILL come, and it WILL take away our most beloved toy to replace it with some ghastly Juggernaut that watches our every move. Our own PC will be treating us as the enemy!
Reading this interview you almost get the impression that the concept of prior art is completely meaningless. I mean look at the confidence of those people. They blatantly ignore anyone who's testifying that there has been prior art. Now I don't know the internal workings of the patent office but is it possible they will ignore the prior art clause in some cases? The ActiveBuddy people sound so damn confident as if they had a deal with the P.O. or something. Bah, that's conspiracy for you... Let's talk again when the first bot developers has been successfully sued.
By the way I think it's totally not acceptable that the burden of proof is up to the guys who get sued. Shouldn't a patent owner have to prove that his invention is genuine in the first place?
This article is fascinating, no doubt. But the Slashdot headline had me confused for a second, because EVERY evolutionary advantage (in fact every property a living thing can have) has been created by a mere mutation. So I was wandering how this is news. What had me fascinated most about the article is the timeframe - 20.000 years! This is really a short time, not so long ago evolutionary speaking. I think it's interesting to know that the human race is in fact that young, which means we're merely at the beginning!
One digit isn't going to cut it, we're all aware of that. And those guys must be, too. So what's the reason for "extending" this aged format so weakly? I think the production cost of all these little bar code reader gizmos will be to big, because most of it would have to be redesigned completely to allow for the extra (storage) functionality. You see, the number of digits and even the barcode recognition algos are probably so damn hardwired into the equipment you'd have to start all over again to make room for, say, a new 64 digit GUID or something...
The Big Microsoft Secret...
on
Linuxworld Fun
·
· Score: 1
So the BMSS really boils down to an attempt at making money off of developers (according to the article). As an interesting side effect they wills show you the superiority of Windows but they're REALLY here to make peaceful contact and get you to buy Visual Studio.NET or whatever. (Because who says you can't sell stuff to your enemies, I mean even Slashdot does it by posting MS software ads.)
The kid who died because of playing EverQuest?
Link [jsonline.com]
Shawn Wooley, we miss you! RIP!
He died because he had massive psychological and physical problems. The article you linked to also explains that his mother basically just wanted to find out what his last moments (he spent them on EQ) where like, and whether other players (whose screen names she found in his notes) might have driven him into suicide. A game cannot make you commit suicide and it cannot make you mentally ill. The poor guy has had a lifelong history of brain chemistry problems. Given his mental state he could very likely not distinguish between EQ/chat and the real world (at least at times). People like that should not be interacting with others over the internet AT ALL, or at least only when supervised.
BTW, it should be easy for AOL to write a quick batch test that can examine all the big web sites. Then send out e-mails to webmaster notifying them that they are losing millions in business.
I'm not so sure about that. Most incompatible pages have difficulties at even being _displayed_ at all on Mozilla, and the rest just looks like Things From The Dungeon Dimensions scrambled your network connection and done something horrible with it. How is a simple script going to discover those problems, when it has no eye to look at the mess on the screen?
Well in my experience (our company does web development) it makes sense to build sites for Mozilla as a reference, because chances are they will look good in IE, too. Sadly the same cannot be said the other way around. At least we don't have to "optimize" for Netscape 4.x anymore, that one was pure evil! But you can actually develop most cross-browser things quite painless if you start off with that good old Mozilla! (Well, if you know how to avoid the common pitfalls, anyway)
Wow, I must be a little behind that sort of mainstream! Maybe I'm to poor or something. And my company too. I mean for workstations we still have a lot of single processor 1GHz, 256MB boxen (Servers are different of course). And we do lots of programming and graphics stuff, still the hardware is all in all sufficient. Well depends on what you have to do with them. Speaking of that: spiro_killglance, what do you do with your killer boxen?
I can't help but feel that "real"
manager's will just say Itanium plus winXP
despite
the advantages of Hammer and RedHat
AMD has almost constantly succeeded to deliver technically better hardware for a lower price. Given the current economic downturn (blabla) and the lessons learned in the dotcom meltdown (e.g. that image is not everything) even your average modestly intelligent manager type will perhaps chose the cheaper, better product. Besides, I don't think AMD is still viewed as that kind of an underdog anymore! And Linux on the server front looks good, too. So I think the chances are good.
Another issue is of course whether an 64+ bit addressing architecture is needed for mainstream PCs yet. But as we all know: it's not whether you need it - it's whether the industry thinks you need it!
GOD is into open source.
Provided you can figure out what it means.
Actually life is pretty closed source because genetic code is really BINARY machine code that is executed within the cell's nucleus and mitochondria. Genetic research actually revolves a lot around reverse engineering the binaries back to a human-readable form, and the API (protein behavior and interaction) is pretty badly documented too.
Yeah right, me too. I think there's a lot of people like us out there. With most projects the time comes when the idea of a new project become much more interesting than the stuff you are currently working on! I would just love to complete SOMETHING once in a while...
And if you do this to somebody whose web server *could* handle the load, you've just lost him the banner ad revenue.... or the ego boost of seeing his hit count go through the roof?
Hm, valid point. Here is another one: quite many people actually have to PAY for their website's traffic if it exceeds certain limits (especially bad for private hobbyist's sites)!!! Also there is of course bound to be Copyright Trouble.
So I propose the following addition to glh's suggestion: let the Slashdot editor contact the website's owner and ASK "hey dude, we're going to blast your site to nirvana so do you want us to cache it?" In my experience it isn't that difficult to make contact with a website's owner, so it should be possible to use caching in a legally safe manner. Most site owners would welcome this feature.
Thanks for the reply. I guess I'm a little over the top, recently. (It's not that I normally think all people are out there just to diss me or something...) You are right, I didn't read your post correctly. Ehem. Well. Happens. Really sorry. *apologizes*
And me being a technologist I have to say that I would hardly qualify for anything else but technology! I would probably kill myself while taking care of the pizza oven or whatever. I know it's sad and maybe an alarming signal for the state of our society but I think I'm not alone here. If you're a techie, you're a techie for life (sometimes)! Sometimes I wonder what I would have done if I had been born 100 years ago...
And even with this background note that it's also possible to have a completely different after-work life, like having a girlfriend, going out, having non-tech hobbies and stuff. That's where I think the geek stereotype is overrated, because probably most of us have this sort of balance in one way or the other.
I didn't troll about SDL versus other libraries at all, not in one word. All I was complaining about was the fact that this guy was heralded as some sort of Linux games celebrity when he is really not (yet). I have nothing against small developers, I think they are important, I believe some of them can make it big. I thought my comment was clear about that point.
I don't know what is the reason people are always annoyed when I say something, even though I'm almost always nice about it. Like I get modded Flamebait in my other post in this thread where I complain about the heighest moderated posts not being about Linux games, but instead being about Marijuana. No seriously what am I doing wrong?
I cannot believe that the highest moderated post in here is a discussion about the political incorrectness of placing a pot plant logo on the bottom of your site (and how that affiliates you with terrorists), while on-topic posts about Linux gaming and Michael Speck's work have been virtually IGNORED. What's wrong with the moderators?
1. It's his personal homepage, he can put on it whatever he wants. 2. It's a games page, it's not intended to be The Definitive Linux Reference Page For The Politically Correct. 3. This guy is from Germany. Smoking this stuff in moderate amounts is NOT EXACTLY ILLEGAL there! 4. Like many creative minds he likely consumes alcohol and pot. Face the fact, it's very common, even *gasp* in the U.S.! It only get's bad if it is illegal (see 4) or you bomb your brain out with this stuff (but then he wouldn't be able to code anymore). So cool down, man. And anyway it's not as if the guy posted a large banner on his page saying "SMOKE LARGE AMOUNTS OF POT AND F*CK THE POLICE". He just posted a little picture of the plant on the bottom of his page!
Michael seems to be a nice guy allright. And the games he did are really enjoyable little funny things. And it's clear hat he knows more about programming than me or 98% of the SlashDot crowd....BUT it REALLY surprises me that he is attributed "one of the two more influential Free game developers for Linux today". Look at a professional games developer for comparison and you know what I mean. I'm sure there would be a lot of fun games around if there where more people like Michael Speck but he has not yet done anything of (even moderately) big scope in the gaming scene. I'm only writing this because the SlashDot article implicitly suggested there was an interview with some sort of Linux games guru, when instead there was an interview with a gifted young hobby programmer learning his way through the SDL...
Slashdot Mirror
It's weird how everyone becomes so picky when it comes to AIDS and HIV but not for other diseases. I wonder why.
Interestingly, you wouldn't encounter that much general nit picking on biology/medicine websites. Maybe people visiting those sites concentrate more on facts that have any relevance. Where as on Slashdot someone can indeed get modded up while showing off their "impressive" (ehem...) bio skills by correcting minor details in posts of others.
Well I used dasher and I think it's a really neat interface technology (although it made me sort of dizzy first). I can see it's tremendous use for people with physical disabilities as well as for the mobile sector (e.g. PDAs, it's a pain to get text in there with decent accuracy and speed). But in comparison to conventional text input I have to say that Dasher is definitely slower than a keyboard. Since the poster asked about coding, i don't see how to type and navigate with this interface in my text-based source code efficiently at all. On the other hand, someone might develop a high level visual programming language based on a refined dasher-like interface? That would be cool, like looking at the unencoded matrix or something!
...and you people have the gall to be discussing the FISA court rebuking the FBI and Justice Department???? My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!
While I agree with you that a load of shit is going on around the world (and always has been): it's imperative that you clean things up in your own house, regardless of what the neighborhood looks like. If you want to stand for civil rights and liberties, for justice and equal opportunities and oppose the idea police/military regimes you have to follow your own ideals. Otherwise they are worthless and "The Free World" becomes another meaningless term used for propaganda, political power struggles and disposal of the opposition (as it probably is right now, anyway). If you don't pay attention to our society's very foundation then our course is meaningless. And protection from arbitrary, unchecked wiretap is part of this foundation, we call it privacy. And no, privacy is not for terrorists only.
Apparently it will not work with today's standard drives, as they are not capable of hardware-decrypting any data streams from CD. So this whole thing will only be successful if ALL player manufacturers comply and add that capability to their drives (or this capability is added on the operating system side for PCs). So the obligatory question is (again): would you rather buy a crippled DRM-ROM or a normal drive? And you can be sure of one thing: if this technology becomes mainstream, they RIAA _WILL_ make you pay per session or invalidate CDs after a certain time and you _WILL_ end up paying much more while having much less freedom of use!
Well Bill Gates was a technical guy, he also had not much experience when he started...
I can see it now, you will have to buy Mod chips for your PC on the grey market, to get around the hardware "security" just to install Linux..
Yes, maybe so! Obviously the first version of Palladium will be the friendliest, in order to calm critics and get user acceptance. At some point in the future you won't be able to install Linux, but before that a lot of other stuff will be gone, too. The PC will be a completely different thing, the stuff you can do with it will be outweighed by the stuff you are not allowed to do with it, by then. It will be a slow process of course, to keep the users in a spiral that is slowly spinning down (you don't want to wake them up doing harsh movements).
The main problem is, that the computer as we know it today is inherently the most dynamic tool mankind has ever built. It is based on the concept of copying and modifying data freely. Most of the computer's convenience and usefulness comes from this property. Now Palladium/DRM takes this away to the maximum extent possible without turning the whole PC into a vegetable.
This technology WILL come, and it WILL take away our most beloved toy to replace it with some ghastly Juggernaut that watches our every move. Our own PC will be treating us as the enemy!
Reading this interview you almost get the impression that the concept of prior art is completely meaningless. I mean look at the confidence of those people. They blatantly ignore anyone who's testifying that there has been prior art. Now I don't know the internal workings of the patent office but is it possible they will ignore the prior art clause in some cases? The ActiveBuddy people sound so damn confident as if they had a deal with the P.O. or something. Bah, that's conspiracy for you... Let's talk again when the first bot developers has been successfully sued.
By the way I think it's totally not acceptable that the burden of proof is up to the guys who get sued. Shouldn't a patent owner have to prove that his invention is genuine in the first place?
This article is fascinating, no doubt. But the Slashdot headline had me confused for a second, because EVERY evolutionary advantage (in fact every property a living thing can have) has been created by a mere mutation. So I was wandering how this is news. What had me fascinated most about the article is the timeframe - 20.000 years! This is really a short time, not so long ago evolutionary speaking. I think it's interesting to know that the human race is in fact that young, which means we're merely at the beginning!
One digit isn't going to cut it, we're all aware of that. And those guys must be, too. So what's the reason for "extending" this aged format so weakly? I think the production cost of all these little bar code reader gizmos will be to big, because most of it would have to be redesigned completely to allow for the extra (storage) functionality. You see, the number of digits and even the barcode recognition algos are probably so damn hardwired into the equipment you'd have to start all over again to make room for, say, a new 64 digit GUID or something...
So the BMSS really boils down to an attempt at making money off of developers (according to the article). As an interesting side effect they wills show you the superiority of Windows but they're REALLY here to make peaceful contact and get you to buy Visual Studio .NET or whatever. (Because who says you can't sell stuff to your enemies, I mean even Slashdot does it by posting MS software ads.)
The kid who died because of playing EverQuest? Link [jsonline.com] Shawn Wooley, we miss you! RIP!
He died because he had massive psychological and physical problems. The article you linked to also explains that his mother basically just wanted to find out what his last moments (he spent them on EQ) where like, and whether other players (whose screen names she found in his notes) might have driven him into suicide. A game cannot make you commit suicide and it cannot make you mentally ill. The poor guy has had a lifelong history of brain chemistry problems. Given his mental state he could very likely not distinguish between EQ/chat and the real world (at least at times). People like that should not be interacting with others over the internet AT ALL, or at least only when supervised.
BTW, it should be easy for AOL to write a quick batch test that can examine all the big web sites. Then send out e-mails to webmaster notifying them that they are losing millions in business.
I'm not so sure about that. Most incompatible pages have difficulties at even being _displayed_ at all on Mozilla, and the rest just looks like Things From The Dungeon Dimensions scrambled your network connection and done something horrible with it. How is a simple script going to discover those problems, when it has no eye to look at the mess on the screen?
Well in my experience (our company does web development) it makes sense to build sites for Mozilla as a reference, because chances are they will look good in IE, too. Sadly the same cannot be said the other way around. At least we don't have to "optimize" for Netscape 4.x anymore, that one was pure evil! But you can actually develop most cross-browser things quite painless if you start off with that good old Mozilla! (Well, if you know how to avoid the common pitfalls, anyway)
Wow, I must be a little behind that sort of mainstream! Maybe I'm to poor or something. And my company too. I mean for workstations we still have a lot of single processor 1GHz, 256MB boxen (Servers are different of course). And we do lots of programming and graphics stuff, still the hardware is all in all sufficient. Well depends on what you have to do with them. Speaking of that: spiro_killglance, what do you do with your killer boxen?
I can't help but feel that "real" manager's will just say Itanium plus winXP despite the advantages of Hammer and RedHat
AMD has almost constantly succeeded to deliver technically better hardware for a lower price. Given the current economic downturn (blabla) and the lessons learned in the dotcom meltdown (e.g. that image is not everything) even your average modestly intelligent manager type will perhaps chose the cheaper, better product. Besides, I don't think AMD is still viewed as that kind of an underdog anymore! And Linux on the server front looks good, too. So I think the chances are good.
Another issue is of course whether an 64+ bit addressing architecture is needed for mainstream PCs yet. But as we all know: it's not whether you need it - it's whether the industry thinks you need it!
GOD is into open source. Provided you can figure out what it means.
Actually life is pretty closed source because genetic code is really BINARY machine code that is executed within the cell's nucleus and mitochondria. Genetic research actually revolves a lot around reverse engineering the binaries back to a human-readable form, and the API (protein behavior and interaction) is pretty badly documented too.
Yeah right, me too. I think there's a lot of people like us out there. With most projects the time comes when the idea of a new project become much more interesting than the stuff you are currently working on! I would just love to complete SOMETHING once in a while...
And if you do this to somebody whose web server *could* handle the load, you've just lost him the banner ad revenue .... or the ego boost of seeing his hit count go through the roof?
Hm, valid point. Here is another one: quite many people actually have to PAY for their website's traffic if it exceeds certain limits (especially bad for private hobbyist's sites)!!! Also there is of course bound to be Copyright Trouble.
So I propose the following addition to glh's suggestion: let the Slashdot editor contact the website's owner and ASK "hey dude, we're going to blast your site to nirvana so do you want us to cache it?" In my experience it isn't that difficult to make contact with a website's owner, so it should be possible to use caching in a legally safe manner. Most site owners would welcome this feature.
Thanks for the reply. I guess I'm a little over the top, recently. (It's not that I normally think all people are out there just to diss me or something...) You are right, I didn't read your post correctly. Ehem. Well. Happens. Really sorry. *apologizes*
And me being a technologist I have to say that I would hardly qualify for anything else but technology! I would probably kill myself while taking care of the pizza oven or whatever. I know it's sad and maybe an alarming signal for the state of our society but I think I'm not alone here. If you're a techie, you're a techie for life (sometimes)! Sometimes I wonder what I would have done if I had been born 100 years ago...
And even with this background note that it's also possible to have a completely different after-work life, like having a girlfriend, going out, having non-tech hobbies and stuff. That's where I think the geek stereotype is overrated, because probably most of us have this sort of balance in one way or the other.
I didn't troll about SDL versus other libraries at all, not in one word. All I was complaining about was the fact that this guy was heralded as some sort of Linux games celebrity when he is really not (yet). I have nothing against small developers, I think they are important, I believe some of them can make it big. I thought my comment was clear about that point.
I don't know what is the reason people are always annoyed when I say something, even though I'm almost always nice about it. Like I get modded Flamebait in my other post in this thread where I complain about the heighest moderated posts not being about Linux games, but instead being about Marijuana. No seriously what am I doing wrong?
I cannot believe that the highest moderated post in here is a discussion about the political incorrectness of placing a pot plant logo on the bottom of your site (and how that affiliates you with terrorists), while on-topic posts about Linux gaming and Michael Speck's work have been virtually IGNORED. What's wrong with the moderators?
1. It's his personal homepage, he can put on it whatever he wants.
2. It's a games page, it's not intended to be The Definitive Linux Reference Page For The Politically Correct.
3. This guy is from Germany. Smoking this stuff in moderate amounts is NOT EXACTLY ILLEGAL there!
4. Like many creative minds he likely consumes alcohol and pot. Face the fact, it's very common, even *gasp* in the U.S.! It only get's bad if it is illegal (see 4) or you bomb your brain out with this stuff (but then he wouldn't be able to code anymore).
So cool down, man. And anyway it's not as if the guy posted a large banner on his page saying "SMOKE LARGE AMOUNTS OF POT AND F*CK THE POLICE". He just posted a little picture of the plant on the bottom of his page!
How come Dell is still in the mix if they are not allowed to sell machines without an MS operating system inside anymore? How does that fit?
Michael seems to be a nice guy allright. And the games he did are really enjoyable little funny things. And it's clear hat he knows more about programming than me or 98% of the SlashDot crowd. ...BUT it REALLY surprises me that he is attributed "one of the two more influential Free game developers for Linux today". Look at a professional games developer for comparison and you know what I mean. I'm sure there would be a lot of fun games around if there where more people like Michael Speck but he has not yet done anything of (even moderately) big scope in the gaming scene. I'm only writing this because the SlashDot article implicitly suggested there was an interview with some sort of Linux games guru, when instead there was an interview with a gifted young hobby programmer learning his way through the SDL...