...a building which you can walk on one floor and also on the floor above it. No tunnels which go under a walkway, etc. We need to get this added. If this can be added...
Consider the fact that DOOM did not have a third dimension when it was made. I've read Carmack's book, and DOOM is very two-dimensional. It would be quite a feat to add a third dimension, and even if one were to do so, it would be very suboptimal, given the 2D BSPs. However, Duke Nukem proved you could do quite a bit of magic with teleporters, making you think a third dimension is in play.
The only problem I see with this is when a herd of wolly mammoths go rogue, there's nothing we'll be able to do to stop them. The only one with that kind of experience is Keerok, and do you think you're going to get him to abandon his law firm to sharpen his spear to save your scrawny ass? I don't think so.
(Damn, I hope someone knows what I'm talking about.)
Easy Software Products also sells rights to the CUPS source code under a binary distribution license for vendors that are unable to release source code for their drivers or additions and modifications to CUPS under the GPL. For pricing information please contact us at:
So, let me get this straight... If I want to take their GPL'ed code, and make proprietary changes to it, I have to pay them a license fee? I seriously hope I'm misunderstanding this. I mean, they're the copyright holder, so they can do whatever they want. It doesn't even conflict with the GPL, so far as I can tell, but it just seems... weird. Even weirder, I bet you more than one company is going to do it.
Why don't I just download the code, change it, and not tell anybody?
I've never heard about this until just now. I have to say, the printing situation was getting in the way of my Linux advocacy. Even though the driver system on WinXX is pretty braindead (drivers must be on all the client machines instead of sending the device independent data to the print server! Geez, what genius thought of that?!?!) the support is good, and odds are you can print on whatever noname printer you have on your desk.
Whenever someone newly installs Linux, and then asks me about setting up the printer, I ask, ``Does it do PostScript?'' *Blank stare*, then I start to whistle and change the subject.
Company officials had wanted to use lasers to shine a giant logo on to the surface of the moon, but they started looking for an alternative promotional idea when they learnt that the image would have to be as big as Texas to be seen by earthlings more than 380,000 kilometers (238,000 miles) away.
This is so funny! Can you imagine some bonehead coming up with this idea, of projecting an ad on the moon with lasers?!?!
I'm simultaneously reminded both of Chairface Chippendale (CHA), as well as Dr. Evil (``All I want is sharks with... laserbeams on their forheads!'' or something to that effect.)
Doesn't the English languages use only a few dozen sounds ("phonems" or something)?
You're right. I'm embarassed I didn't think of that. There are definitely a finite number of phonemes, even if you include several mumblings of combinations of phonemes. As well, the rules of phoneme analysis has been quite complete by many varying text-to-speech and speech-to-text translators, so maybe it won't be too long before this research can make a real difference. (Especially if it's truly speaker independent like they claim!) I'm definitely looking forward to what will be produced by such technology.
Be careful in thinking that this will be the great leap in technology, and we'll all be talking to our computers in a year. This 11 neuron system is capable of differentiating four words, each of which was trained extensively. That's a very tight niche. Until we have a system where each word doesn't have to be trained explicitly, we won't have gotten too far. (Imagine training your computer with the estimated 1+ million English words...)
On the other hand, this could be a great leap for neural networks in general. Realizing that the timing of synapse signals is a critical factor in neuron firing is going to shake up some things in AI. (At least, I was never familiar with neural networks that used timing cues. If I am wrong, please let me know.) Of course in a large neural network, you're going to have lots of propagation latencies as signals bounce around the net, and it makes sense that even more important than which neurons fire is when neurons fire. It actually seems to justify the complexity of neural nets because the timing data can represent a much larger data/search space than the simple fire/dormant state of each neuron.
Okay, so ZDNet writers aren't actually journalists, so you can't expect much from them. But their link to the Jesux company's Web page is rediculous. How many companies host their web page on GeoCities?!?!?
I think I'll recommend that as a cost-cutting measure at the next company meeting. ``Say boss, I think that outsourcing our company's web page is not cost-effective. Look at all those places where you can get a web page for free!''
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Taking part in a pilot program that could revolutionize education, Intermediate School 381 in Brooklyn has replaced personal computers with a single network server, which could change the way students read, write and research.
Okay, call me a cynic, but I'm a cynic not long out of high school. If we had NC stations instead of PCs in my school, I don't think my education would be revolutionary! Now maybe it was 0LD 5K3WL, but most of my education came from teachers with blackboards and books. Sure having 5 years of 50 fulltext magazines on CD-ROM was helpful, but I don't think my education would be any lesser if I was forced to *gasp*... use paper.
Seriously, I think this is a great idea. Having PCs as workstations in a classroom environment is a little bottom-heavy, so the reduced cost and maintenance of NC stations makes a lot of sense. But these CNN journalists have to go. Doesn't anyone know what a ``revolution'' is, anymore?
...start up a GPL enforcement office, and we pay a Lawyer to take these things to court.
Hold on a second...
While it is a good idea to enforce the GPL where applicable, it certainly should not be necessary to be as litigious as our closed source friends. This American ``sue everyone'' mentality really gets on my nerves sometimes (and I'm American!).
Corel obviously made a goof. You work on proprietary software long enough, you start to think there is nothing else, especially if you're a software company's lawyer drone, using search and replace to do 10 years of contracts and EULAs.
Certainly, if someone (perhaps the Debian folks) were to contact Corel and point out the error, they should have no problem writing a real agreement that is compatible with the GPL. I mean, they pay the lawers for something, right? Right?
How is that even possible, since I thought 32-bit architecture made 4 Gigs the max addressable limit, period.
If you remember back in the old days of the 8086 and its friends, you had two values to address everything. Segment register, and index. Now some braindead monkey decided that a segment would be equal to 16 bytes (4 bits!) effectively cutting 12 bits off of what could have been 32-bit addressing on those old 16-bit machines. (16-bit segment, 16-bit offset.) Of course the reason was it was much easier to write 16-bit code if you didn't have to worry about wrapping your segment register in the middle of arrays and stuff, so as long as we used under 1 meg of ram, it seemed like a good thing.
When they made the 80386, the mistake wasn't made twice. Now the 16-bit segment register points to a virtual page table, which means each 16-bit segment register 32-bit index pair is theoretically capable of addressing 4 gigs. It would be a bitch and a half I think, to use more than 4 gigs in a single process, but that doesn't rule out different processes using drastically different address spaces. So think about having 4 gigs per process and see how well you could use that.
Frankly, I have no freaking clue what you'd do with it. Maybe I'd increase the size of my memory cache in Netscape...
Also, I don't know what the implications would be for writing an operating system, as I have never done so. But I assume it would make things tricky. I'll just wait for the 64-bit machines, and enjoy the [insert huge number I don't know here] bytes of directly accessible RAM.
I have to add my voice to the chorus here. When the moderation controls show up, I drop the threshold to -1, and spend a lot of time reading everything and trying to be as complete and fair as possible.
I can do that once every several weeks, but I can't do it all the time, knowing that in all probability I'm doing no good.
PLEASE don't do this.
Moderate me down for being redundant, but if this goes into effect, I'm turning it off.
I have to hand it to you, Rob. This karma thing is pretty evil. I love it!
One nasty side-effect this will have for me, and doubtlessly many others, is the irrational need to get super high, (might I say Perens-ian) karma, by posting useful, informative and/or intelligent posts. That is definitely not a bad thing.
Of course, it can go the other way, for those who will pride themselves on having -188 karma points. This is not a good thing.
The Computer field is not fundamentally different than any other field. Every career, whether it is medicine, automobile repair, livery, or telephone operator gives you an opportunity to choose whether to help, or to harm someone.
Doctors could get away with quite a bit, if driven to evil. (I think I saw a piece on one of those prime time news shows some months back.) Auto mechanics can make up repairs, or lie about maintenance schedules to take extra money from an unsuspecting customer. Even the telephone operator, who for some reason decides he doesn't want to look up my brother's number in Cleveland, and instead tells me there's no record and hangs up, has a potential to harm in some small way.
Does there need to be a code of ethics for auto mechanics? Does there need to be a code of ethics for telephone operators? I don't think so. We can get along quite nicely with one big code of ethics for everybody: ``Don't f*** anyone over.'' At least that's my code of ethics. It has worked for me no matter what field I am working in. The only thing it requires is a little bit of thought, that that is what is lacking.
Don't start thinking this is a new problem, either. People have been evil and opportunistic since the beginning of time. Just because we have a new advancement in technology, doesn't mean that today is any different than any other point in history. If you think you live in some kind of ``special time'' or ``golden age,'' you're just fooling yourself.
So come on, everybody. Just be nice.
Also, I have a hard time believing that you can teach ethics. That is something that can only be learned by example.
I assume it's not the same people in this discussion that were slamming Roblimo for posting or believing something with no evidence. Clearly Microsoft has provided themself with a backdoor to everyone's system. Officially, it is so that Microsoft can upgrade the CryptoAPI security on Windows. I find it shocking that no comment I have seen yet identifies a problem with this. This is supposed to be security? Then, there is a second key. What is it for? We don't know, but because it is called NSAKEY, suddenly this is a government conspiracy? Well I have got news for you:
I am the NSA, and I am watching you
Okay, did you believe that? If you did, go and have a lie down, because your brain isn't well rested. Any moron can use the letters N, S, and A. Perhaps it is ``Nominal Secondary Access.'' The point is, you have no clue. There is no evidence that the real NSA is involved. Why don't we stick to Microsoft bashing?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd worry about the day my 9-year-old kid hotwires it in the middle of the night, and the family and I wake up in Tokyo!
Ha! I think we already look like the same user...
(Note: I don't actually believe the USMil is behind this...)
(Damn, I hope someone knows what I'm talking about.)
Why don't I just download the code, change it, and not tell anybody?
Whenever someone newly installs Linux, and then asks me about setting up the printer, I ask, ``Does it do PostScript?'' *Blank stare*, then I start to whistle and change the subject.
All that's changed now!
I'm simultaneously reminded both of Chairface Chippendale (CHA), as well as Dr. Evil (``All I want is sharks with... laserbeams on their forheads!'' or something to that effect.)
And I bet it could be done in 2 lines of perl!
On the other hand, this could be a great leap for neural networks in general. Realizing that the timing of synapse signals is a critical factor in neuron firing is going to shake up some things in AI. (At least, I was never familiar with neural networks that used timing cues. If I am wrong, please let me know.) Of course in a large neural network, you're going to have lots of propagation latencies as signals bounce around the net, and it makes sense that even more important than which neurons fire is when neurons fire. It actually seems to justify the complexity of neural nets because the timing data can represent a much larger data/search space than the simple fire/dormant state of each neuron.
This could be exciting.
I think I'll recommend that as a cost-cutting measure at the next company meeting. ``Say boss, I think that outsourcing our company's web page is not cost-effective. Look at all those places where you can get a web page for free!''
Here comes that promotion!
Who's down on it? Everything I've read (albeit at +2) seems to agree that this is a great idea.
Okay, call me a cynic, but I'm a cynic not long out of high school. If we had NC stations instead of PCs in my school, I don't think my education would be revolutionary! Now maybe it was 0LD 5K3WL, but most of my education came from teachers with blackboards and books. Sure having 5 years of 50 fulltext magazines on CD-ROM was helpful, but I don't think my education would be any lesser if I was forced to *gasp*... use paper.
Seriously, I think this is a great idea. Having PCs as workstations in a classroom environment is a little bottom-heavy, so the reduced cost and maintenance of NC stations makes a lot of sense. But these CNN journalists have to go. Doesn't anyone know what a ``revolution'' is, anymore?
At first, I didn't even want to guess what was at bigger.com, but as it turns out it's yet another free mail service!
DOH! I'm an idiot.
I'm going to walk away slowly now...
Hold on a second...
While it is a good idea to enforce the GPL where applicable, it certainly should not be necessary to be as litigious as our closed source friends. This American ``sue everyone'' mentality really gets on my nerves sometimes (and I'm American!).
Corel obviously made a goof. You work on proprietary software long enough, you start to think there is nothing else, especially if you're a software company's lawyer drone, using search and replace to do 10 years of contracts and EULAs.
Certainly, if someone (perhaps the Debian folks) were to contact Corel and point out the error, they should have no problem writing a real agreement that is compatible with the GPL. I mean, they pay the lawers for something, right? Right?
I'm just wondering if it involves more than changing a lot of `int's to `unsigned int's.
In short, way too much to be talking about ram for now.
If you remember back in the old days of the 8086 and its friends, you had two values to address everything. Segment register, and index. Now some braindead monkey decided that a segment would be equal to 16 bytes (4 bits!) effectively cutting 12 bits off of what could have been 32-bit addressing on those old 16-bit machines. (16-bit segment, 16-bit offset.) Of course the reason was it was much easier to write 16-bit code if you didn't have to worry about wrapping your segment register in the middle of arrays and stuff, so as long as we used under 1 meg of ram, it seemed like a good thing.
When they made the 80386, the mistake wasn't made twice. Now the 16-bit segment register points to a virtual page table, which means each 16-bit segment register 32-bit index pair is theoretically capable of addressing 4 gigs. It would be a bitch and a half I think, to use more than 4 gigs in a single process, but that doesn't rule out different processes using drastically different address spaces. So think about having 4 gigs per process and see how well you could use that.
Frankly, I have no freaking clue what you'd do with it. Maybe I'd increase the size of my memory cache in Netscape...
Also, I don't know what the implications would be for writing an operating system, as I have never done so. But I assume it would make things tricky. I'll just wait for the 64-bit machines, and enjoy the [insert huge number I don't know here] bytes of directly accessible RAM.
I can do that once every several weeks, but I can't do it all the time, knowing that in all probability I'm doing no good.
PLEASE don't do this.
Moderate me down for being redundant, but if this goes into effect, I'm turning it off.
One nasty side-effect this will have for me, and doubtlessly many others, is the irrational need to get super high, (might I say Perens-ian) karma, by posting useful, informative and/or intelligent posts. That is definitely not a bad thing.
Of course, it can go the other way, for those who will pride themselves on having -188 karma points. This is not a good thing.
This is going to be a wild and crazy ride!
Well, obviously someone at the PTO knows what a computer is. Why aren't they handling (ie. rejecting) bogus technology patents?
Doctors could get away with quite a bit, if driven to evil. (I think I saw a piece on one of those prime time news shows some months back.) Auto mechanics can make up repairs, or lie about maintenance schedules to take extra money from an unsuspecting customer. Even the telephone operator, who for some reason decides he doesn't want to look up my brother's number in Cleveland, and instead tells me there's no record and hangs up, has a potential to harm in some small way.
Does there need to be a code of ethics for auto mechanics? Does there need to be a code of ethics for telephone operators? I don't think so. We can get along quite nicely with one big code of ethics for everybody: ``Don't f*** anyone over.'' At least that's my code of ethics. It has worked for me no matter what field I am working in. The only thing it requires is a little bit of thought, that that is what is lacking.
Don't start thinking this is a new problem, either. People have been evil and opportunistic since the beginning of time. Just because we have a new advancement in technology, doesn't mean that today is any different than any other point in history. If you think you live in some kind of ``special time'' or ``golden age,'' you're just fooling yourself.
So come on, everybody. Just be nice.
Also, I have a hard time believing that you can teach ethics. That is something that can only be learned by example.
PS: Was this supposed to be some kind of review?
I am the NSA, and I am watching you
Okay, did you believe that? If you did, go and have a lie down, because your brain isn't well rested. Any moron can use the letters N, S, and A. Perhaps it is ``Nominal Secondary Access.'' The point is, you have no clue. There is no evidence that the real NSA is involved. Why don't we stick to Microsoft bashing?