Two things:
1) This is only a picturebook. Yeah, it's a good start, but still- not exactly the most practical way to blow good money.
2) I, for one, will never be buying another Vaio. I bought a pretty early one (Pentium200) and the sixe and performance are pretty solid. But the construction is shit. The paint started peeling and bubbling nearly immediately, two major screws just plain old fell out, the inner ring of the female end of the power plug fell out (still works, but is loose), and the battery died. And (in less than two years!) they've stopped producing the battery, so I can't get a new one of the same type. What else... oh, yeah, the thick (1") vertical black stripes that frequently appear on the screen. Umm... does that cover it all? Oh, wait, there is also the friend's vaio where the screen hinge broke. And did I mention the 6 month warranty? ARgh... the vaio is soooo close to being about the ultimate laptop. But completely shoddy construction just makes that impossible.
~luge
Heh. Whatever- I mean, not like I post all that often anymore, and 50 or 250 I still get a bonus, so even if you think of it as a "30% dropoff!" it's still not a big deal. Just really irritating never getting a response from the/. people when I said "WTF?" So, keeping this thread alive: Anyone? Anyone? Explanations? Thoughts? sid links?
~luge
karma cap? eh? My karma dropped from 70+ to 49 several weeks ago, and I never could get a response from Taco as to why... obviously, though, it's not a hard cap, if it can still stay at 120+. Anyone have details (or pointers to which &sid thread I can find more details in?)
~luge
Re:Stop saying a kernel isn't slash dot material
on
Linux 2.2.17 Released
·
· Score: 2
Hear, hear. About time we founded an "old timers who actually think/. hasn't gotten that much worse than it used to be except for all the idiots who post" club:)
~luge
Hrm... I'll let them stay unnamed, but c'mon- what do they expect? I was smart/stupid/loyal enough to put my money where my mouth was and buy one of their machines, but if they continue to charge nearly twice as much as Dell does for a comparable product with 1/3 as much warranty coverage, well, duh. Of course they aren't going to sell any machines. I really hope that they eventually wake up, and start selling some cheaper machines. I'd hate to see sourceforge go under...
~luge
Here's my two cents: Security through obscurity is horrible for the 5-10% of us Linux users that update our machines obsessively in order to get the latest fixes and patches. For the other 90-95% (and virtually all Windows users) it's a failure- the kiddies who want to know about it, go out and find out about it, while that vast number of users sit there deaf and dumb and get hacked. If you want to argue for security through obscurity, you have to justify screwing those who are knowledgeable enough to care (like me.) But if you want to argue security through openness you have to justify screwing the 90% who wouldn't know what a security update was if you hit them in the face with it. Of course, with things like apt and Windows Update, this balance may be changing (numerically speaking) but who can really say for sure? ~luge
The funny thing about your post is that immediately below the mention about this add-in board is... a piece about the SGI that id is selling. The same piece that/. had two days ago. All these weblog-type sites steal from each other- it's quite OK. For a long time, Wired stole from/. too... they get paid, so that's different. ~luge
I think the difference is that the stubborness and immaturity of the leadership at MS hurts their image, and certainly their legal standing, but not their products. In contrast, Jobs directly hurts the quality of the Apple product- one button mice (still!), crappy video cards, those damn iMac "keyboards," etc. Given that he has had more than his share of strokes of genius, but still... if I were an Apple stockholder I'd want to bring an insider in to replace Jobs (not a Coke saleman or whatever it was they tried last time.)
The author of GPL'd code almost always retains ownership of the copyright. It's not a big deal- once released under GPL, it's safe. Probably the only reason that they mention it in the press release is that normally the FSF recommends assigning ownership of copyright to them so that they are better positioned to protect the GPL on your program in a court of law, and Sun is ignoring that (I'd assume that this is the case since they have their own resources for this that far outstrip those of the FSF.) ~luge
They are pretty far along with it, and hope to release it later this summer, I think. I know that evolution (the Gnome Outlook-ish thing) uses bonobo pretty heavily, and I believe that Gnumeric has also been bonobo-ized. So, while it's not 1.0-like yet, it is pretty far along. ~luge
Actually, he provided "real" numbers (well, as real as a G4 v. X86 comparison can get when it is sponsored by Apple) which the original article didn't. ~luge
OK, so it would seem that the new SO is going to be built on GTK (see Miguel's comments about Bonobo and such.) I'm really curious: does this mean the end of multi-platform Star Office? I know that there is a GTK port to Windows, and I even found the home page, but it really doesn't say how stable, usable, or up to date it is. Not that I really care too much about the windows port, but it would be really nice to be able to give Windows users SO 6.0 for Windows and say: "This is what GPL software can be, if you give it a chance." So... anyone know enough about GTK for Windows to give an educated guess about the chances of the Windows port surviving? ~luge
Heh. As soon as I say that, the official press release quotes Miguel as saying he is excited that it will all be bonoboized. Cool... I suppose that definitely means GTK too. Nice. Very, very nice. ~luge
Yeah, but Sun has a large team (a couple other folks around here seem to have confirmed this) doing that "lot of work." Remember, this is not going to be 4.x or 5.x (both of which sucked, size wise.) It's going to be a new version which (presumably) will have learned a lot from the mistakes of the old one. Heck, just pure speculation- if you follow Gnome, you know what a freak Miguel De Icaza is about componentization through Gnome's Bonobo framework. We know he is on their advisory board- what do you want to bet that the new release is bonoboized? If that guess is correct, and they do it right, then there is no need to worry about the size- you just strip out the component you want to use and put it in a stripped-down GTK framework, no problem. Light-weight word processing, here we come... ~luge
Oh! That is really cool. I had honestly never thought of it that way. I'm sort of torn though: to make the perspective historically correct, you'd have to imply that all crackers are basically just grey-hats who are cracking just because they are pissed that you are stupid and want to prove it. (i.e., peasants trying to overthrow an evil government.) This probably isn't correct: it does describe a lot of hackers, but doesn't really cover the criminals. I can't really think of a better historical parallel, so I'll suggest Fort Knox in Goldfinger would be better: the bad guys are trying to take what you've got (or at least destroy it), while simultaneously embarassing your government and exploiting the fact that the American Army is pretty incompetent. This casts the product formerly known as Bastille in the role of Bond, dashing in to save the day while screwing Pussy Galore. Oh, wait... guess the parallel isn't quite exact. Oh well... ~luge
Why name a security product after a fort whose only claim to fame is that it was stormed by a bunch of peasants? Seriously, it sounds like a cool product, but a) no debian yet so no help to me:( and b) really, a better name:) My suggestion would be Gibraltar, or maybe (once they get IDS set up) "Invading Russia in Winter." ~luge
Oh, completely! But that was 4.x and before- Mozilla is standards compliant to the point of breaking pages that 4.x and IE render just fine. Whether or not that is a good thing is debatable, but that's how it is. If you want to page through the old articles in mozillazine you'll find plenty of links that actually test CSS compliance and document that even pretty early Mozilla betas beat IE and NS 4.x hands down. In contrast, check out this little article about how badly IE 5.5 breaks/"extends" various standards. (Given that 5.5 for Mac is actually very standards compliant, but (no offense) Mac IE isn't exactly what drives the market.) ~luge (hey, I don't want to defend MS either, but that doesn't mean we can't both take a swipe at the "old" NS)
You really aren't that stupid, right? Most of us here couldn't/wouldn't use any version of IE, and I'm guessing that no windows user can use galeon. The old "yet another browser" shit is old, especially when you try to trumpet non-standards compliant crap like IE as the solution. gecko (and therefore galeon) will be the most standards compliant browser around, and that is infinitely preferable to "yet another IE standards grab." ~tieguy
Good point! This will make it virtually impossible for the other registrants to get a hold of lapsed names, as they currently can. And it looks nice and capitalist to the regulators, too... argh. ~luge
Nice move on their part. Let's imagine- what happens when something like hotmail.com goes unpaid (which has happened before?) That's right... instead of getting 35$ (or whatever NSI is charging during this phase of the moon) when someone realizes their mistake, now NSI gets to extort the new owner for however much they feel like. Note that the notice doesn't say what happens to the money above and beyond what is owed... think that it disappears? I doubt it. It'll go straight into NSI's pockets. For most names that will expire, this isn't a big deal- at most they'll clear only a slight amount above what they are owed. But for names that expire and are highly in demand, this gets NSI a huge return. Nothing illegal in it, I guess... but it reeks just the same. ~luge
I wouldn't bother to correct this, but when sorted by score, this comes out as the third or fourth post in the story. As a result, it should be corrected. Anyway- to my point- Not to flame or anything, but many, many people in this discussion have pointed out that hyperlinks were a novel idea, not in 1980 (when BT "invented" it), but in 1960. Check out xanadu.net for more details. If 20 years doesn't a) qualify as "prior art" and b) disqualify you as "original" then I don't know what does. ~luge
1) AI class I took last year (well, TA'd) we went in to some detail on possible RPS strategies. Yes, you can have strategies, at least assuming that your opponent is not a pure RNG (in which case the only correct strategy is to be RNG yourself.) 2) Nothing that the tourney produces will be as cool as this. Unfortunately, the picture stinks, but on the left is my professor, and on the right is the kid (he'll hate me for that) who build the RPS-playing Lego Mindstorm. And that's the RPS bot in the kid's hand. It used some pattern learning software (written in legOS) to attempt to detect patterns in human RPS players. Didn't work great, but what the heck... it was still damn cool. Had fingers and the whole bit. ~luge
"Combining" does not mean "is." Gnu/OpenBios did and still does have it's own page, and its own development. Yes, these are related, and are probably very relevant, but that's not what you claimed or what I flamed you for. You claimed it was recycled news. You can try to twist and spin it, but it is just not recycled, and that is what you claimed before you bothered to do the reading yourself. Go away... you are no better than the first posters.
Slashdot Mirror
Two things:
1) This is only a picturebook. Yeah, it's a good start, but still- not exactly the most practical way to blow good money.
2) I, for one, will never be buying another Vaio. I bought a pretty early one (Pentium200) and the sixe and performance are pretty solid. But the construction is shit. The paint started peeling and bubbling nearly immediately, two major screws just plain old fell out, the inner ring of the female end of the power plug fell out (still works, but is loose), and the battery died. And (in less than two years!) they've stopped producing the battery, so I can't get a new one of the same type. What else... oh, yeah, the thick (1") vertical black stripes that frequently appear on the screen. Umm... does that cover it all? Oh, wait, there is also the friend's vaio where the screen hinge broke. And did I mention the 6 month warranty? ARgh... the vaio is soooo close to being about the ultimate laptop. But completely shoddy construction just makes that impossible.
~luge
Heh. Whatever- I mean, not like I post all that often anymore, and 50 or 250 I still get a bonus, so even if you think of it as a "30% dropoff!" it's still not a big deal. Just really irritating never getting a response from the /. people when I said "WTF?" So, keeping this thread alive: Anyone? Anyone? Explanations? Thoughts? sid links?
~luge
karma cap? eh? My karma dropped from 70+ to 49 several weeks ago, and I never could get a response from Taco as to why... obviously, though, it's not a hard cap, if it can still stay at 120+. Anyone have details (or pointers to which &sid thread I can find more details in?)
~luge
Hear, hear. About time we founded an "old timers who actually think /. hasn't gotten that much worse than it used to be except for all the idiots who post" club :)
~luge
If you have any particular suggestions as to what should be "fleshed out," please let me know...
Luis
Hrm... I'll let them stay unnamed, but c'mon- what do they expect? I was smart/stupid/loyal enough to put my money where my mouth was and buy one of their machines, but if they continue to charge nearly twice as much as Dell does for a comparable product with 1/3 as much warranty coverage, well, duh. Of course they aren't going to sell any machines. I really hope that they eventually wake up, and start selling some cheaper machines. I'd hate to see sourceforge go under...
~luge
Here's my two cents: Security through obscurity is horrible for the 5-10% of us Linux users that update our machines obsessively in order to get the latest fixes and patches. For the other 90-95% (and virtually all Windows users) it's a failure- the kiddies who want to know about it, go out and find out about it, while that vast number of users sit there deaf and dumb and get hacked. If you want to argue for security through obscurity, you have to justify screwing those who are knowledgeable enough to care (like me.) But if you want to argue security through openness you have to justify screwing the 90% who wouldn't know what a security update was if you hit them in the face with it. Of course, with things like apt and Windows Update, this balance may be changing (numerically speaking) but who can really say for sure?
~luge
The funny thing about your post is that immediately below the mention about this add-in board is... a piece about the SGI that id is selling. The same piece that /. had two days ago. All these weblog-type sites steal from each other- it's quite OK. For a long time, Wired stole from /. too... they get paid, so that's different.
~luge
I think the difference is that the stubborness and immaturity of the leadership at MS hurts their image, and certainly their legal standing, but not their products. In contrast, Jobs directly hurts the quality of the Apple product- one button mice (still!), crappy video cards, those damn iMac "keyboards," etc. Given that he has had more than his share of strokes of genius, but still... if I were an Apple stockholder I'd want to bring an insider in to replace Jobs (not a Coke saleman or whatever it was they tried last time.)
The author of GPL'd code almost always retains ownership of the copyright. It's not a big deal- once released under GPL, it's safe. Probably the only reason that they mention it in the press release is that normally the FSF recommends assigning ownership of copyright to them so that they are better positioned to protect the GPL on your program in a court of law, and Sun is ignoring that (I'd assume that this is the case since they have their own resources for this that far outstrip those of the FSF.)
~luge
They are pretty far along with it, and hope to release it later this summer, I think. I know that evolution (the Gnome Outlook-ish thing) uses bonobo pretty heavily, and I believe that Gnumeric has also been bonobo-ized. So, while it's not 1.0-like yet, it is pretty far along.
~luge
Actually, he provided "real" numbers (well, as real as a G4 v. X86 comparison can get when it is sponsored by Apple) which the original article didn't.
~luge
OK, so it would seem that the new SO is going to be built on GTK (see Miguel's comments about Bonobo and such.) I'm really curious: does this mean the end of multi-platform Star Office? I know that there is a GTK port to Windows, and I even found the home page, but it really doesn't say how stable, usable, or up to date it is. Not that I really care too much about the windows port, but it would be really nice to be able to give Windows users SO 6.0 for Windows and say: "This is what GPL software can be, if you give it a chance." So... anyone know enough about GTK for Windows to give an educated guess about the chances of the Windows port surviving?
~luge
FYI: Boerries is not a spokesman, but the original author of Star Office.
~luge
Heh. As soon as I say that, the official press release quotes Miguel as saying he is excited that it will all be bonoboized. Cool... I suppose that definitely means GTK too. Nice. Very, very nice.
~luge
Yeah, but Sun has a large team (a couple other folks around here seem to have confirmed this) doing that "lot of work." Remember, this is not going to be 4.x or 5.x (both of which sucked, size wise.) It's going to be a new version which (presumably) will have learned a lot from the mistakes of the old one.
Heck, just pure speculation- if you follow Gnome, you know what a freak Miguel De Icaza is about componentization through Gnome's Bonobo framework. We know he is on their advisory board- what do you want to bet that the new release is bonoboized? If that guess is correct, and they do it right, then there is no need to worry about the size- you just strip out the component you want to use and put it in a stripped-down GTK framework, no problem. Light-weight word processing, here we come...
~luge
Oh! That is really cool. I had honestly never thought of it that way. I'm sort of torn though: to make the perspective historically correct, you'd have to imply that all crackers are basically just grey-hats who are cracking just because they are pissed that you are stupid and want to prove it. (i.e., peasants trying to overthrow an evil government.) This probably isn't correct: it does describe a lot of hackers, but doesn't really cover the criminals.
I can't really think of a better historical parallel, so I'll suggest Fort Knox in Goldfinger would be better: the bad guys are trying to take what you've got (or at least destroy it), while simultaneously embarassing your government and exploiting the fact that the American Army is pretty incompetent. This casts the product formerly known as Bastille in the role of Bond, dashing in to save the day while screwing Pussy Galore. Oh, wait... guess the parallel isn't quite exact. Oh well...
~luge
Why name a security product after a fort whose only claim to fame is that it was stormed by a bunch of peasants? :( and b) really, a better name :) My suggestion would be Gibraltar, or maybe (once they get IDS set up) "Invading Russia in Winter."
Seriously, it sounds like a cool product, but a) no debian yet so no help to me
~luge
Oh, completely! But that was 4.x and before- Mozilla is standards compliant to the point of breaking pages that 4.x and IE render just fine. Whether or not that is a good thing is debatable, but that's how it is. If you want to page through the old articles in mozillazine you'll find plenty of links that actually test CSS compliance and document that even pretty early Mozilla betas beat IE and NS 4.x hands down. In contrast, check out this little article about how badly IE 5.5 breaks/"extends" various standards. (Given that 5.5 for Mac is actually very standards compliant, but (no offense) Mac IE isn't exactly what drives the market.)
~luge (hey, I don't want to defend MS either, but that doesn't mean we can't both take a swipe at the "old" NS)
You really aren't that stupid, right? Most of us here couldn't/wouldn't use any version of IE, and I'm guessing that no windows user can use galeon. The old "yet another browser" shit is old, especially when you try to trumpet non-standards compliant crap like IE as the solution. gecko (and therefore galeon) will be the most standards compliant browser around, and that is infinitely preferable to "yet another IE standards grab."
~tieguy
Good point! This will make it virtually impossible for the other registrants to get a hold of lapsed names, as they currently can. And it looks nice and capitalist to the regulators, too... argh.
~luge
Nice move on their part. Let's imagine- what happens when something like hotmail.com goes unpaid (which has happened before?) That's right... instead of getting 35$ (or whatever NSI is charging during this phase of the moon) when someone realizes their mistake, now NSI gets to extort the new owner for however much they feel like. Note that the notice doesn't say what happens to the money above and beyond what is owed... think that it disappears? I doubt it. It'll go straight into NSI's pockets. For most names that will expire, this isn't a big deal- at most they'll clear only a slight amount above what they are owed. But for names that expire and are highly in demand, this gets NSI a huge return. Nothing illegal in it, I guess... but it reeks just the same.
~luge
I wouldn't bother to correct this, but when sorted by score, this comes out as the third or fourth post in the story. As a result, it should be corrected.
Anyway- to my point- Not to flame or anything, but many, many people in this discussion have pointed out that hyperlinks were a novel idea, not in 1980 (when BT "invented" it), but in 1960. Check out xanadu.net for more details. If 20 years doesn't a) qualify as "prior art" and b) disqualify you as "original" then I don't know what does.
~luge
1) AI class I took last year (well, TA'd) we went in to some detail on possible RPS strategies. Yes, you can have strategies, at least assuming that your opponent is not a pure RNG (in which case the only correct strategy is to be RNG yourself.)
2) Nothing that the tourney produces will be as cool as this. Unfortunately, the picture stinks, but on the left is my professor, and on the right is the kid (he'll hate me for that) who build the RPS-playing Lego Mindstorm. And that's the RPS bot in the kid's hand. It used some pattern learning software (written in legOS) to attempt to detect patterns in human RPS players. Didn't work great, but what the heck... it was still damn cool. Had fingers and the whole bit.
~luge
"Combining" does not mean "is." Gnu/OpenBios did and still does have it's own page, and its own development. Yes, these are related, and are probably very relevant, but that's not what you claimed or what I flamed you for. You claimed it was recycled news. You can try to twist and spin it, but it is just not recycled, and that is what you claimed before you bothered to do the reading yourself. Go away... you are no better than the first posters.