While I think you're correct that Slashdot is generally more tolerant of Unix problems than MS problems, there is some legitimacy. We see critical security problems fairly rarely from the major Unix players and we see them more often from MS. Also, the Unix players tend to get patches out a bit more quickly. Sun and IBM have temp. patches out which probably means they have a bunch of guys using the patch and banging on it mercilessly to see if they can break it. When they determine it's not breaking, they'll call the temp patch the patch.
"clearly, Derkec missed the seinfeld in which it is revealed that donations to fake charities in other people's names make extremly affordable gifts, and can land you with a real check for $20,000 to the "Human Fund"."
No, I've seen it more times than I would like. If she was saying give to a fake charity, then I admit to being a really poor reader and apologize. I thought the comment was saying give to a real charity, which is a good thing to do.
Java and C# are both "closed" languages controlled by large corporate entities with their own self-interests in mind
This has been something I've been holding against Java for a while myself, but the article makes an excellent point. C++, which was released for the public to 'run' really stagnated to a large degree. However, if a single corporation runs a language, the language can change with the times and adapt to the users' needs quicker since there is less politicing to be done. Since Sun seems to want as many people to use Java as possible, they have a strong interest in responding to developer demands. I'm interested to see the response to these two competitors. When faced with the closed systems, it might come down to a question of who do you trust. Between Bill and Scott, I've got my pick, but hey I'm biased.
A couple of smart people playing Starcraft will certaintly use one of several strategies they've cooked up. I agree with you all there. What I think is needed is a strategy game where the computer has a number of strategies to choose from and picks one that seems appropriate (with some randomness). When playing against the computer, I would like it to be skillful enough to bring a solid rush but not always see that rush. Sometimes it could use lots of cloaked units, sometimes none. I don't think I see this sort of behavior from many games, but then again, I could be wrong.
Several times we've seen security experts say to a large company, "Hey! there's a nasty exploit here!" The large company indicates they'll fix it and ignores the problem. Only when the exploit is publicized do companies like Microsoft actually take the effort to fix the code. Releasing the information is the only way. Perhaps out of courtesy the security community could give the company with the bug a week's notice.
IBM is way too big to have everyone on the same page. Just because some over-proud techie asked legal to patent something doesn't mean the CEO looked over it and made a strategic decision.
Suggesting this is flat out unfair. The kind folks at Oracle offered their software for free. I'm not sure what McNealy is calling for, but he doesn't strike me as the kind of guy to do such a thing. I could be wrong though.
The Net is both. It is what the creator of the content wants it to be. There is plenty of foolishness and plenty of parody -neither of which is "serious" news. However, cnn.com and nytimes.com provide insightful, and informative information. When one wants to find other perspectives, npr.org provides differant looks. Salon looks at things mostly from the left. Many sites take a right-wing view of events. The net may be the place the serious person goes to find out about an event, but calling it the most serious news source is probably a misnomer.
As a consumer, I really couldn't give a damn what a synthetic benchmark rates a processor at. I would really rather see a bunch of benchmarks used and weighted as AMD does. I'm much more interested in it's impact on applications I use such as a FPS.
Despite the fact that there is a new core which yields 3-7% more performance per clock, Tom's points out the Model Number scheme is the most interesting thing. AMD is now not selling thier processors as 1500MHz, but instead as 'equivilant to a P4 at 1800MHz' -> an AthlonXP 1800+. Is this a fair thing to do? It seems to me that it is trying to trick customers into evaluating the processors more fairly. While most slashdotters know MHz != speed, the average joe does not. I am comforted that the AthlonXP 1800+ is able to run with the P4 2GHz. AMD doesn't seem to have overhyped their processors at all.
The next topic for discussion: AMD is trying to bring together a third party instituation to rate processor speeds in some fair way. I'm sure Apple would be thrilled to jump on this bandwagon and our dear friends at Microsoft already have their hands in it.
Amen. I've listened to Blair a few times in the past week or so and I have to say, I love him. He and Britain are great friends and the alliance is better for an orator with his tallents. Frankly, he makes Clinton look like a poor speaking and I won't mention how that reflects on W. Blair, whenever you're done in Britain, I'd be happy to have you come run our country.
IF Linux ever gains the popularity we all hope it will, it will stop being the land of all open source. Games will not be open sourced and other really good products that people worked hard enough to earn money from won't be either. Realize that. It's already happening. People need to feed their families, so they sell their hard work.
This guy here is selling a product on Win32. I assume they are making money. The question is simply, if we provide Linux users the option to use our software on that platform, will anyone buy it? They are doing a good thing here. They are taking an application that presumably gives the Win32 platform some advantage and offering to make it available to Linux users. I hate to say this, but if MS Office was ported to Linux, not only would it sell, but the platfom would become more popular. Just because you as an individual flee from closed source, does not mean that a company should not market a closed source product to the Linux platform.
" Seems that every time we turn around, nvidia has a new chipset... "
There's really very little interesting here. Some minor tweaks to existing chips and upping the speed of the core and memory. Moreover, it's not every time we turn around, it's every 6 months a new graphics product is put out. That's their cycle, they stick to it.
Nope, actually that's not it. What they say is wow, for about $200 bucks, you can get something that performs close to a GeForce3, that's pretty cool. They also point out a product that is awesome and expensive and one which is cheaper but not so great, but the T200 (I think) has been fallen in love with.
Banning that song is just idiotic. I'll give you that, it's one of my favorites. But it isn't really censorship. I still hold that they are trying to be polite. You might not want to tell a whole bunch of very sad people that the world is great, it could piss them off. However, that song just makes me happy.
I would go back to the begining for an arguement for a well rounded education. Looking at the records of Plato and Socrates, what they believed was most critical in an education was a broad enough education to be a useful voting citizen. Applying towards today, we should strive to have a reasonable understanding of sciences so we can understand why NASA should or should not be funded - or why 60 stem cell lines may or may not be plenty. Reading great literature exposes one both to the great minds of the past and the metaphors being used by our contempories. Of course, you must understand the workings of the systems of politics you live in.
Once this basic level has been reached, it makes sense to get marketable skills.
Very well put. Perhaps this means that instead of "defending" encryption, the geeks of the world should be:
1) Using it more.
2) Convincing non-Geeks that it is a good idea to use.
Put simple encryption in everybody's home and they will realize that it isn't exclusively the tool of evil, it's just a tool that people use for privacy on the internet.
"Am I the only one that conceives of the notion that they could use both? Or perhaps implement both then roll out out as official if the other tanks? When you develop something, do you download the first toolkit you find and swear by it forever, or do you evaluate different solutions?"
Yah, fair enough. But it does show that the iron grip Microsoft was shooting for in authentication left even their first passport customers nervous.
I've seen a number of times people have said this is just a big corporation which is maybe trustworthy (Sun) competing with one which is most likely not trustworthy (Microsoft). The Liberty folks, while led by Sun, are not exclusively Sun. On their site, they list the charter members which include big nasty corporations and some players who are more likely to be loved than hated on Slashdot. For instance, the Apache Software Foundation and O'Reilly & Associates.
Sun probably orchestrated this. Why? Not because they want your data, but because they passionately hate Microsoft and don't want to risk letting Microsoft take over a large chunk of the web. They are trying to Liberate a web that has yet to be enslaved by Microsoft, but one which they are scared will be. Other comments regarding the charter members:
Microsoft enemy AOL-TimeWarner is not there
Microsoft enemy RealNetworks is
eBay is a charter member - which is interesting since they were one of the first to sign up for passport. Second thoughts perhaps?
What I'm trying to say is that this is not Sun vs Microsoft round 6000, there are a number of companies here who will hopefully keep one another honest.
We may want to forgive Sun for being a bit slow in getting their DB server back up and pretty. A huge chuck of their support staff is helping bale out clients whose data centers got blown up out east. On the other hand, it's your brand new product, you gotta make sure it's available to be bought up. But then again, who in their right mind would just go online and buy one of these? I'd bet ALL of these are sold through meetings between sales reps and IT purchasers.
Slashdot Mirror
While I think you're correct that Slashdot is generally more tolerant of Unix problems than MS problems, there is some legitimacy. We see critical security problems fairly rarely from the major Unix players and we see them more often from MS. Also, the Unix players tend to get patches out a bit more quickly. Sun and IBM have temp. patches out which probably means they have a bunch of guys using the patch and banging on it mercilessly to see if they can break it. When they determine it's not breaking, they'll call the temp patch the patch.
Entirely fair? No. Somewhat fair? Probably.
No, I've seen it more times than I would like. If she was saying give to a fake charity, then I admit to being a really poor reader and apologize. I thought the comment was saying give to a real charity, which is a good thing to do.
Re: giving to charity in someone's name
A noble and good idea. Those of you calling this guy names and scoring him a Troll should be ashamed.
This has been something I've been holding against Java for a while myself, but the article makes an excellent point. C++, which was released for the public to 'run' really stagnated to a large degree. However, if a single corporation runs a language, the language can change with the times and adapt to the users' needs quicker since there is less politicing to be done. Since Sun seems to want as many people to use Java as possible, they have a strong interest in responding to developer demands. I'm interested to see the response to these two competitors. When faced with the closed systems, it might come down to a question of who do you trust. Between Bill and Scott, I've got my pick, but hey I'm biased.
A couple of smart people playing Starcraft will certaintly use one of several strategies they've cooked up. I agree with you all there. What I think is needed is a strategy game where the computer has a number of strategies to choose from and picks one that seems appropriate (with some randomness). When playing against the computer, I would like it to be skillful enough to bring a solid rush but not always see that rush. Sometimes it could use lots of cloaked units, sometimes none. I don't think I see this sort of behavior from many games, but then again, I could be wrong.
"I'll show you a game of real strategy ... on the 30th"
amen
Glad to see I'm in line with the nice folks over there. I never claimed to know a whole lot.
Several times we've seen security experts say to a large company, "Hey! there's a nasty exploit here!" The large company indicates they'll fix it and ignores the problem. Only when the exploit is publicized do companies like Microsoft actually take the effort to fix the code. Releasing the information is the only way. Perhaps out of courtesy the security community could give the company with the bug a week's notice.
IBM is way too big to have everyone on the same page. Just because some over-proud techie asked legal to patent something doesn't mean the CEO looked over it and made a strategic decision.
Suggesting this is flat out unfair. The kind folks at Oracle offered their software for free. I'm not sure what McNealy is calling for, but he doesn't strike me as the kind of guy to do such a thing. I could be wrong though.
The Net is both. It is what the creator of the content wants it to be. There is plenty of foolishness and plenty of parody -neither of which is "serious" news. However, cnn.com and nytimes.com provide insightful, and informative information. When one wants to find other perspectives, npr.org provides differant looks. Salon looks at things mostly from the left. Many sites take a right-wing view of events. The net may be the place the serious person goes to find out about an event, but calling it the most serious news source is probably a misnomer.
You're nit-picking, but you are also right. Fair enough.
As a consumer, I really couldn't give a damn what a synthetic benchmark rates a processor at. I would really rather see a bunch of benchmarks used and weighted as AMD does. I'm much more interested in it's impact on applications I use such as a FPS.
Despite the fact that there is a new core which yields 3-7% more performance per clock, Tom's points out the Model Number scheme is the most interesting thing. AMD is now not selling thier processors as 1500MHz, but instead as 'equivilant to a P4 at 1800MHz' -> an AthlonXP 1800+. Is this a fair thing to do? It seems to me that it is trying to trick customers into evaluating the processors more fairly. While most slashdotters know MHz != speed, the average joe does not. I am comforted that the AthlonXP 1800+ is able to run with the P4 2GHz. AMD doesn't seem to have overhyped their processors at all.
The next topic for discussion: AMD is trying to bring together a third party instituation to rate processor speeds in some fair way. I'm sure Apple would be thrilled to jump on this bandwagon and our dear friends at Microsoft already have their hands in it.
Amen. I've listened to Blair a few times in the past week or so and I have to say, I love him. He and Britain are great friends and the alliance is better for an orator with his tallents. Frankly, he makes Clinton look like a poor speaking and I won't mention how that reflects on W. Blair, whenever you're done in Britain, I'd be happy to have you come run our country.
IF Linux ever gains the popularity we all hope it will, it will stop being the land of all open source. Games will not be open sourced and other really good products that people worked hard enough to earn money from won't be either. Realize that. It's already happening. People need to feed their families, so they sell their hard work.
This guy here is selling a product on Win32. I assume they are making money. The question is simply, if we provide Linux users the option to use our software on that platform, will anyone buy it? They are doing a good thing here. They are taking an application that presumably gives the Win32 platform some advantage and offering to make it available to Linux users. I hate to say this, but if MS Office was ported to Linux, not only would it sell, but the platfom would become more popular. Just because you as an individual flee from closed source, does not mean that a company should not market a closed source product to the Linux platform.
" Can I get a Linux driver for it?"
Nividia is good about having all their graphics products use the same driver.
" Seems that every time we turn around, nvidia has a new chipset... "
There's really very little interesting here. Some minor tweaks to existing chips and upping the speed of the core and memory. Moreover, it's not every time we turn around, it's every 6 months a new graphics product is put out. That's their cycle, they stick to it.
Nope, actually that's not it. What they say is wow, for about $200 bucks, you can get something that performs close to a GeForce3, that's pretty cool. They also point out a product that is awesome and expensive and one which is cheaper but not so great, but the T200 (I think) has been fallen in love with.
Banning that song is just idiotic. I'll give you that, it's one of my favorites. But it isn't really censorship. I still hold that they are trying to be polite. You might not want to tell a whole bunch of very sad people that the world is great, it could piss them off. However, that song just makes me happy.
Once this basic level has been reached, it makes sense to get marketable skills.
Very well put. Perhaps this means that instead of "defending" encryption, the geeks of the world should be:
1) Using it more.
2) Convincing non-Geeks that it is a good idea to use.
Put simple encryption in everybody's home and they will realize that it isn't exclusively the tool of evil, it's just a tool that people use for privacy on the internet.
"Am I the only one that conceives of the notion that they could use both? Or perhaps implement both then roll out out as official if the other tanks? When you develop something, do you download the first toolkit you find and swear by it forever, or do you evaluate different solutions?"
Yah, fair enough. But it does show that the iron grip Microsoft was shooting for in authentication left even their first passport customers nervous.
I've seen a number of times people have said this is just a big corporation which is maybe trustworthy (Sun) competing with one which is most likely not trustworthy (Microsoft). The Liberty folks, while led by Sun, are not exclusively Sun. On their site, they list the charter members which include big nasty corporations and some players who are more likely to be loved than hated on Slashdot. For instance, the Apache Software Foundation and O'Reilly & Associates.
Sun probably orchestrated this. Why? Not because they want your data, but because they passionately hate Microsoft and don't want to risk letting Microsoft take over a large chunk of the web. They are trying to Liberate a web that has yet to be enslaved by Microsoft, but one which they are scared will be. Other comments regarding the charter members:
Microsoft enemy AOL-TimeWarner is not there
Microsoft enemy RealNetworks is
eBay is a charter member - which is interesting since they were one of the first to sign up for passport. Second thoughts perhaps?
What I'm trying to say is that this is not Sun vs Microsoft round 6000, there are a number of companies here who will hopefully keep one another honest.
We may want to forgive Sun for being a bit slow in getting their DB server back up and pretty. A huge chuck of their support staff is helping bale out clients whose data centers got blown up out east. On the other hand, it's your brand new product, you gotta make sure it's available to be bought up. But then again, who in their right mind would just go online and buy one of these? I'd bet ALL of these are sold through meetings between sales reps and IT purchasers.