And he presented his case well. These other XFree86 guys sound like the cast from Othello... way too serious for what is, after all, something that's supposed to be fun: working on an open source project.
You know, what kind of nut must it be to crack to get X running atop of Windows? You'd think they'd give Harry some slack just out of the complexity of what he's doing.
Another poster mentioned that it's the fault of the tools, and I think this is a good point. A truly usable code management system would allow for Bozo the Clown to have commit privileges and it wouldn't impact the overall effort at all.
I've got Yellow Dog Linux 3 running on the original Rev. A Bondi iMac and it is as beautiful a sight as I've been treated to by computers. Very fast, very responsive under Gnome.
OS X on the same machine by contrast is an exercise in futility. The spinning ball never stops spinning. It crashes. It's slow. It's almost completely useless.
The point was that I spend enormous quantities of time in front of the computer.
Sure I go out. The places I go may have their own music, or it may be an activity where music isn't appropriate, or, and this will probably offend you, but maybe I don't need to be listening to music 24/7.
In fact, I find people who do that to have serious problems with mental hygiene... unable to occupy their thoughts without constantly dosing themselves with external stimuli. It's almost kind of sad, when you think about it.
what songs do you have that you are trying to add to a playlist that you can't with iTunes?
Songs you haven't explicitly purchased.
With iTunes, I can only listen to music I've actually bought.
With Rhapsody, I can listen to any song in their entire collection as many times as I want.
This is very appealing if you want to sample other genres, bands, etc. Doing it the iTunes way means I have to spend a buck on a song I might not like. With Rhapsody, I'm only out the four or five minutes it took to listen to the song.
It's amazing how much broader your musical tastes become when you're free to listen to music without having to explicitly pay for each title. Like when Johnny Cash died... I was never really introduced to his music, but Rhapsody had him as a featured artist on their main page and so I listened to a few tunes. If it were iTunes, I'd have had to pay for those tunes, and I probably wouldn't have done it.
It's a very nice service. I don't have to worry about Apple pulling a switcheroo with their media formats or their licensing, something I guarantee you will happen when the company goes into "maximizing shareholder's value" mode.
To my mind this is by far the superior service. I get to listen to anything I want as often as I want for ten bucks a month ('cept for the Beatles, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Elton John's Blue Moves.)
The only downside appearas to be that I can't take the music on the go, unless I pay 70(?) cents to burn a track, but since I'm a shut-in who's always sitting in front of his computer anyways, what's the diff?
A War Crime or an Act of War? By Stephen C. Pelletiere New York Times | Opinion
Friday 31 January 2003
MECHANICSBURG, Pa. -- It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."
The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.
But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.
I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.
This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.
And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.
The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent -- that is, a cyanide-based gas -- which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.
These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.
I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.
In fact, those who really feel that the disaster at Halabja has bearing on today might want to consider a different question: Why was Iran so keen on taking the town? A closer look may shed light on America's impetus to invade Iraq.
We are constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the world's largest reserves of oil. But in a regional and perhaps ev
Yeah, but sea water isn't just saltier. It's got all kinds of crap in there, wouldn't that muck up the system?
You could filter it, but then that would take up power. Would it require as much or more power as ends up being produced?
This is a big deal. If you can generate power using sea water, which is now and will continue to be ubiquitous for the foreseeable future, then this could conceivably be a milestone in civilization.
If not, it could end up being another almost but not good enough source of energy, like solar or hemp or what have you.
We had plenty of water. If you read the headlines, you'll see that our supply is becoming strained.
And actually, the Arabs do have water. Or had. Iraq is blessed with an abundant supply of water, so much so in fact that some had speculated we did not go there for the oil as much as the water.
Water is going to become increasingly scarce as time goes by. Even power production using it may not be economically feasable... unless, again, you can use sea water.
That would be a reasonable analogy, if it weren't for the fact that you were the aggressor in this conflict, continually stealing their land, destroying their homes, killing their people.
Three times as many Palestinians have died as have Israelis, but nobody in the mainstream media seems to want to report that fact, expect maybe AFP.
If anything, Israelis should appreciate Microsoft's strategy of embrace and extend.
That said, if I were an Israeli, I'd ditch MS and put my eggs in the Mac OS X/Open Office basket. It seems the fastest way to usable Hebrew text available.
And the fastest way to Arabic as well.
Right to left. Right to left.
Maybe if we get both sides writing right to left using usable software that lets them write right to left we'll be closer to solving this Goddamned conflict.
I'm using WinXP Pro but get all the Linux I want by using Virtual PC. This is *the* solution.
I get all my games and don't have to worry about hardware (though I am Linux-conscious when buying new stuff) and whenever I want I have my Linux desktop only a mouse click away.
With a fast CPU, the performance is excellent. Moreover, when I screw things up it's easy to fix, I simply discard the changes to the session. This encourages experimentation, which is really most of the fun in using Linux I think.
My next step is going to be adopting Linux as my main system (probably SuSE) and using VMWare for my Windows needs, and this might be as soon as my next box. Games are really the linchpin here. XP is very nice in that I no longer have to keep booting into different partitions to do the stuff I want. With 1.5G of RAM I can have all kinds of development shit open, decide I need a break, and launch Unreal Tournament 2003 with no fuss, play my heart out, and then immediately resume where I left off, regardless of whether I was working on Linux or Windows stuff.
Pending: your vote is now the property of Diebold, Inc. Any attempt on your part to ascertain the disposition of your vote is hereby declared to be in violation of federal law, e.g., the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
You have the right not to vote. Any vote you make can be used against you in a court of law. The judge presiding in such a court of law may be appointed by Diebold, Inc., and need not require a jury, but if a jury is summoned, it need not be a jury of your peers.
By acting to vote you consent to our determining whether your vote is valid, and in the event it is judged not to be valid, you consent to our voiding your vote and further voiding your right to vote in the future.
You furthermore acknowledge that owing to storage and bandwidth limitations that Diebold, Inc., may experience, your vote may be digitally compressed in a way such that your true intent in casting the vote may be lost. If such an eventuality should occur, your vote may be determined using statistical data derived from any source we deem appropriate or convenient.
You have the right to protest if your vote is cancelled, altered, or in any way modified as the result of such action on our part, however, you hereby acknowledge that in such an eventuality, Diebold, Inc. may determine that your right to vote is deleterious to democracy as implement by Diebold, Inc., and therefore may be considered to be an overt act against the national security of these United States.
(just kidding, it sucked for entirely different reasons)
I don't see where the submitter gets off claiming that MR introduced us to *any* new cinematic technique, except perhaps for the fight scene with 200 Agent Smiths and not only was that done poorly but the whole thing could have been avoided if only Neo had done another one of his Superman jumps. In other words, it was gratuitous.
Yeah, I'm sure we'll see cubism in movies. It's another knob the show business kids can turn that will make their latest turd appear "original" and "daring", but I bet we won't see intelligent use of it for several years or more, not until a director actually has need for the effect as part of the narrative. Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas might have benefited, for instance.
BTW, that's one of the things that made the original Matrix so unique... it's use of bullet-time was one of the very rare example of a new special effect that is put to intelligent use right off the bat. What a great movie.
Slashdot Mirror
And he presented his case well. These other XFree86 guys sound like the cast from Othello... way too serious for what is, after all, something that's supposed to be fun: working on an open source project.
You know, what kind of nut must it be to crack to get X running atop of Windows? You'd think they'd give Harry some slack just out of the complexity of what he's doing.
Another poster mentioned that it's the fault of the tools, and I think this is a good point. A truly usable code management system would allow for Bozo the Clown to have commit privileges and it wouldn't impact the overall effort at all.
Guess you never ran Linux on a Mac.
:)
I've got Yellow Dog Linux 3 running on the original Rev. A Bondi iMac and it is as beautiful a sight as I've been treated to by computers. Very fast, very responsive under Gnome.
OS X on the same machine by contrast is an exercise in futility. The spinning ball never stops spinning. It crashes. It's slow. It's almost completely useless.
I guess that makes me an ass-clown too.
I was kidding when I called myself a shut-in.
The point was that I spend enormous quantities of time in front of the computer.
Sure I go out. The places I go may have their own music, or it may be an activity where music isn't appropriate, or, and this will probably offend you, but maybe I don't need to be listening to music 24/7.
In fact, I find people who do that to have serious problems with mental hygiene... unable to occupy their thoughts without constantly dosing themselves with external stimuli. It's almost kind of sad, when you think about it.
what songs do you have that you are trying to add to a playlist that you can't with iTunes?
Songs you haven't explicitly purchased.
With iTunes, I can only listen to music I've actually bought.
With Rhapsody, I can listen to any song in their entire collection as many times as I want.
This is very appealing if you want to sample other genres, bands, etc. Doing it the iTunes way means I have to spend a buck on a song I might not like. With Rhapsody, I'm only out the four or five minutes it took to listen to the song.
It's amazing how much broader your musical tastes become when you're free to listen to music without having to explicitly pay for each title. Like when Johnny Cash died... I was never really introduced to his music, but Rhapsody had him as a featured artist on their main page and so I listened to a few tunes. If it were iTunes, I'd have had to pay for those tunes, and I probably wouldn't have done it.
It's a very nice service. I don't have to worry about Apple pulling a switcheroo with their media formats or their licensing, something I guarantee you will happen when the company goes into "maximizing shareholder's value" mode.
To my mind this is by far the superior service. I get to listen to anything I want as often as I want for ten bucks a month ('cept for the Beatles, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Elton John's Blue Moves.)
The only downside appearas to be that I can't take the music on the go, unless I pay 70(?) cents to burn a track, but since I'm a shut-in who's always sitting in front of his computer anyways, what's the diff?
Because I say so.
And just because I say it's funny doesn't make it a troll either.
Won't be long before this thing is pointed at *us*.
A War Crime or an Act of War?
By Stephen C. Pelletiere
New York Times | Opinion
Friday 31 January 2003
MECHANICSBURG, Pa. -- It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."
The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.
But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.
I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.
This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.
And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.
The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent -- that is, a cyanide-based gas -- which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.
These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.
I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.
In fact, those who really feel that the disaster at Halabja has bearing on today might want to consider a different question: Why was Iran so keen on taking the town? A closer look may shed light on America's impetus to invade Iraq.
We are constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the world's largest reserves of oil. But in a regional and perhaps ev
Yeah, but sea water isn't just saltier. It's got all kinds of crap in there, wouldn't that muck up the system?
You could filter it, but then that would take up power. Would it require as much or more power as ends up being produced?
This is a big deal. If you can generate power using sea water, which is now and will continue to be ubiquitous for the foreseeable future, then this could conceivably be a milestone in civilization.
If not, it could end up being another almost but not good enough source of energy, like solar or hemp or what have you.
We had plenty of water. If you read the headlines, you'll see that our supply is becoming strained.
And actually, the Arabs do have water. Or had. Iraq is blessed with an abundant supply of water, so much so in fact that some had speculated we did not go there for the oil as much as the water.
Water is going to become increasingly scarce as time goes by. Even power production using it may not be economically feasable... unless, again, you can use sea water.
Or can sea water be used?
No, I haven't, Dumbrat, but these people have.
Go on and give yourself a big pat on the back.
Right now whatever they're running /. on is not the most popular OS in this poster's view.
Have you guys tried coding the server in feckfeck?
Why, "first post" of course.
Yes, you can, however, you can't later import it into the full version.
And no, the watermark isn't gone in anything but wireframe mode.
That would be a reasonable analogy, if it weren't for the fact that you were the aggressor in this conflict, continually stealing their land, destroying their homes, killing their people.
Three times as many Palestinians have died as have Israelis, but nobody in the mainstream media seems to want to report that fact, expect maybe AFP.
If anything, Israelis should appreciate Microsoft's strategy of embrace and extend.
That said, if I were an Israeli, I'd ditch MS and put my eggs in the Mac OS X/Open Office basket. It seems the fastest way to usable Hebrew text available.
And the fastest way to Arabic as well.
Right to left. Right to left.
Maybe if we get both sides writing right to left using usable software that lets them write right to left we'll be closer to solving this Goddamned conflict.
It isn't just that the winners come from rich-kid schools. Look at the gender split: 50/50.
/., IMHO.
The awards are a political statement, nothing more.
This shit has no place on
The parent post should be modded up.
How else to end the endless cycle of first post nonsense?
Would you do the fp dance if you knew it would net somebody else the fat karma?
I don't think so.
I'm using WinXP Pro but get all the Linux I want by using Virtual PC. This is *the* solution.
I get all my games and don't have to worry about hardware (though I am Linux-conscious when buying new stuff) and whenever I want I have my Linux desktop only a mouse click away.
With a fast CPU, the performance is excellent. Moreover, when I screw things up it's easy to fix, I simply discard the changes to the session. This encourages experimentation, which is really most of the fun in using Linux I think.
My next step is going to be adopting Linux as my main system (probably SuSE) and using VMWare for my Windows needs, and this might be as soon as my next box. Games are really the linchpin here. XP is very nice in that I no longer have to keep booting into different partitions to do the stuff I want. With 1.5G of RAM I can have all kinds of development shit open, decide I need a break, and launch Unreal Tournament 2003 with no fuss, play my heart out, and then immediately resume where I left off, regardless of whether I was working on Linux or Windows stuff.
I can't recommend this solution enough.
...from a technology angle, Microsoft really has been one of the least interesting companies.
Cuts like a knife. Go Linus!
Pending: your vote is now the property of Diebold, Inc. Any attempt on your part to ascertain the disposition of your vote is hereby declared to be in violation of federal law, e.g., the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
You have the right not to vote. Any vote you make can be used against you in a court of law. The judge presiding in such a court of law may be appointed by Diebold, Inc., and need not require a jury, but if a jury is summoned, it need not be a jury of your peers.
By acting to vote you consent to our determining whether your vote is valid, and in the event it is judged not to be valid, you consent to our voiding your vote and further voiding your right to vote in the future.
You furthermore acknowledge that owing to storage and bandwidth limitations that Diebold, Inc., may experience, your vote may be digitally compressed in a way such that your true intent in casting the vote may be lost. If such an eventuality should occur, your vote may be determined using statistical data derived from any source we deem appropriate or convenient.
You have the right to protest if your vote is cancelled, altered, or in any way modified as the result of such action on our part, however, you hereby acknowledge that in such an eventuality, Diebold, Inc. may determine that your right to vote is deleterious to democracy as implement by Diebold, Inc., and therefore may be considered to be an overt act against the national security of these United States.
You have 10 seconds to comply.
God Bless America.
That's a pretty big risk, for a science officer, it's, uh, not exactly out of the manual, is it?
I do take my responsibilities as seriously as you, you know. You do your job, and let me do mine, yes?
(did I mention that Ash is a Goddamn robot?)
---
Yes, I'm sending the DVD back to you soon.
...to virtual cinema???
Oh, is that why it sucked?
(just kidding, it sucked for entirely different reasons)
I don't see where the submitter gets off claiming that MR introduced us to *any* new cinematic technique, except perhaps for the fight scene with 200 Agent Smiths and not only was that done poorly but the whole thing could have been avoided if only Neo had done another one of his Superman jumps. In other words, it was gratuitous.
Yeah, I'm sure we'll see cubism in movies. It's another knob the show business kids can turn that will make their latest turd appear "original" and "daring", but I bet we won't see intelligent use of it for several years or more, not until a director actually has need for the effect as part of the narrative. Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas might have benefited, for instance.
BTW, that's one of the things that made the original Matrix so unique... it's use of bullet-time was one of the very rare example of a new special effect that is put to intelligent use right off the bat. What a great movie.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to patent a system and method for controlling moderator access to my posts from complete and utter nimrods.
Sad and ironic... instead of looking at the LDEF to see how it fared in space we shoulda been looking at the shuttle just a little bit closer.