When was it exactly that you knew (or had the feeling) that GNOME was a project that was going somewhere? Free software projects start with no guarantee of popularity, and for every GNOME, there's 1000 totally unknown applications.
Was there a particular application or library or component of GNOME after which you knew GNOME was going to be successful or in general "something special"? What did the GNOME project do that prevented it from sinking into obscurity like so many other free software projects?
It's going to happen. Somebody is going to write a badass virus for linux that's going to cause som e damage. The amount of damage is what's variable in my mind, not whether or not it will occur.
I think it would be incredibly ignorant of people here to think that a virus couldn't happen on linux, even if the system is well-defended against virii. Personally, i think one of the biggest things linux has going for it in the anti-virus arena is that it's so non-homogenous. Everybody talks about how wonderful windows is because it's consistent from machine to machine, but that's the same type of "feature" that makes it easy to write virii that spread quickly. The virus automatically "knows" what kind of machine it's on, and it can always assume a base level of functionality. Not so on linux, where you have everything from diskless workstations to development boxes that don't have daemons on them, to "production" servers that have daemons, but are missing some normal development tools. There isn't a baseline functionality the virus can assume.
Pretty much everybody on slashdot should know that anything is possible when it comes to a coder with too much time on his hands.:) With that, like I said, it's pure ignorance, (or just blind platform advocating idiocy) to say that linux won't ever have a problem with virii.
I forget the exact wording, but a quote on the l0pht's site comes to mind: "Making the 'theoretical' practical since 1995". Doesn't that say it all? Linux is a great system, and I love it as much as the next guy, but it's blind arrogance to say that it will never be susceptible to virii. I agree with this poster. Articles like this seem to want to poke the moster and yell "Haha - you can't crack my box!!!". As far as security is concerned, it's best to keep a low profile.:)
I've had my resume out there for a while, and while I wouldn't consider myself even close to the top echelon of linux coders out there, I get a whole lot of calls just based off of the fact that my resume is out there, and people are interested in hiring me.
I'm in college, and I'm going to be looking for a "career" soon, but so far, I haven't really had to look, companies seem to just find me on the internet.
It seems at times that with the economy that we've got now, and with the job market in our sector the way it is, here's my checklist --
1: Do you have a pulse? 2: Are you a crack/heroin addict? 3: Do you plan to immediately defraud the company? 4: Do you have any convictions for homicide?
If you answered 'Yes' to all of the above, congratulations, you're qualified for practically any job out there.
While that is a bit exaggerated, it has seemed to me recently like a lot of employers are desparate for employees. Good economy means expansion in business, expansion in business means that you need more employees. And there aren't any to be had as far as I can see....
(Note: stay away from consulting firms - I've interviewed with 2 - and they seem to be of two breeds - the sharks, and the pimps)
I didn't think that up - it's been floating around the net for a very long time - but it is kinda funny.:) Reminds me of how much I hated DOS once windows95 and long file names came into existance - they probably should have just realized that they were a 2 bit OS and not bothered implementing long filenames...
I agree with you on the choice issue - I just wanted to point out that there's a reason Windows is so restricted.
Micros~1 started off selling operating systems to desktop users, and computer hobbyists. They eventually developed their software more and more, till the point where they broke into the server market with NT. (It may have happened before NT to a certain degree, but they probably weren't that popular as a server platform). So here you've got a company that has always built desktop OS's, (arguably "toy" OS's compared to what is required of a server). Their approach has always been to insulate the user from anything approaching a technical decision, and to swath the deficiencies of the system in a pretty GUI.
That type of design and implementation is arguably quite good for desktop users and hobbyists, it plain sucks for server configurations. And once they had dominated the market, what's the point of spreading out and porting to other CPUs? (Especially when they're in bed with Intel)
I think the lack of choice on the wintel side of things has a lot to do with the evolution of windows, whereas UNIX has always tried to run on everything. (remember how one of the original brag points of UNIX was that it was portable?)
Just an idea - but it may be that getting PR out of it isn't possible. I don't know very much about the mechanics of how things get torched in the atmosphere, but if I were this company, I would want to plonk these satellites in the middle of the ocean, as far from land as possible. That way, if they don't completely disintegrate, they hit the water, and nobody dies.
If you crash them into the ocean miles and miles from anyone, it may be that you would not really be able to see them. Besides, who knows where they orbit the earth? It may be that they'll be swandiving straight into antarctica, in which case we surely won't see them. (Although the people on the southern tip of south america might have a shot)
Here's a company that's strapped for cash. Because of bankruptcy, they'd prefer to sell the satellites to work off some debt, but instead they decide to destroy everything.
(???)
It seems to me that if you're looking for money, you can probably find any number of people who'd be willing to buy it. I mean, let's face it, selling the satellites for $2.00 a piece would be far more economical than crashing them into the ocean at 4000 degrees fahrenheit, since you wouldn't have to pay the technical staff to make sure that the satellites didn't land on Jesse Helms. (Or at least not on purpose, anyway)
But then again - the article said "Barring finding a 'qualified' buyer" - whatever that means. I'm sure you've probably got to have some pretty heavy duty terrestrial hardware to keep the things functioning correctly, but come on.
I wonder if we can call Bruce Perens and his ham radio buddies and convince them to buy the satellite array for amateur radio.:)
But seriously people, please point out what I'm missing here - it seems to me like there couldn't POSSIBLY be a way where destroying them all would be the most economical thing to do for Iridium. What gives?
Is this the start of more and more companies who view strong privacy as the product itself? No, not at all. This is a company that wants to cash in on what they see as a recent internet community backlash against people who were buying and selling personal information. I doubt that in this case privacy is the product - it's just a feature of the product meant to lure the disillusioned...
IMHO the disillusioned should realize that they are disillusioned for a reason; namely, that when it comes right down to it, companies are about profit, and if earning lots of money conflicts with protecting the consumer, then "Oh well". I'd like to see this company's privacy policy in a few years (assuming it survives that long) when it wants to go public, become more profitable, and expand all at the same time.
'Scuse me, but I'm feeling particularly bitter tonight.
Maybe it's real, but most likely, it's some losers idea of a practical joke. I must admit though, that for all the screaming about patents that goes on here, it would be kinda cool to have a patent of my own. My patent would be on something that's definately obvious, but harmless to everyone. Something like "Patent on a method for ultra-high-speed avoidance of job-related injuries using three pounds of cool-whip, a pair of scissors, and a copy of the new Stephen King eBook (after I had bitfrobbed it out of whatever pathetic format they're distributing it in) while walking and chewing bubble gum"
Just you fools wait! You'll all owe me MILLIONS when this type of activity becomes all the rage!
Alternately, I could preemptively patent the "Natalie Portman/Hot Grits" post, and make TRILLIONS of dollars. (But #2, why make trillions of dollars, when we could make....BILLIONS OF DOLLARS!!!!) Also possibly in the future is the Jon Katz flame post patent, the "Slashdot sucks since it's become freshmeat" post patent, and the all-important meta-whiner post patent.
I think that all right-thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I'm certainly not. But I'm sick and tired of being told that I am. - Monty Python
First, some background. I used to be like a lot of the reviewers, in that I couldn't stand pseudo-science, but I eventually came to the point that I realized that it's science-FICTION, not science, and that transgressions in the scientific area are totally OK, since it takes some suspension of belief to even think up a movie where people are walking on Mars.
My main criticism of the movie is that it takes half the movie to establish the premise (one mission lost, a second mission to mars to save the losers abandoned from the first) and that for a sci-fi movie, it has a lot of human interactions in it, and not as much galactic piracy, violence, wormholes, etc. That's not necessarily bad, but it's not what I look for in sci-fi.
I too didn't like the constant product shots, but they weren't nearly as obtrusive as some of the slash team's reviews said they were, (with the exception of M&Ms - that was pretty obvious). Most of the product shots consisted of a "pennzoil" sticker on a mars lander in the background and so on. If you're looking to ferret commercialism out of these movies and criticise it on that point, then there will be plenty of ammo in this movie, but I'm straining to think of a movie I've seen in the last few years that didn't have these types of blatant promos in them, and I'm wondering why the reviewers chose to screw the movie based off of those, when they seem to be everywhere.
For me, sci-fi is about suspending disbelief, and in a way, being like a child, and just enjoying wherever it is the movie maker wants to take you. I think all of us have plenty of the cynical bastard type of mindset that permeates professional work. YOU DON'T GO TO SCI-FI MOVIES TO CRITICISE THEIR SCIENCE - LARGELY BECAUSE IT'S NONEXISTANT, NO MATTER WHAT TYPE OF SCI-FI IT IS. (There are some exceptions to that, but not too many)
I thought it was pretty good, all in all. I left the movie theater feeling like I got my money's worth. I understand that there's a lot of people that hate it, but I feel they're hating it for all the wrong reasons. Sort of like how for any given movie, no matter what the premise is, you can find small plot holes and problems in it, small incontinuities, etc. to the point where if you really want to, you can convince yourself that the movie sucks rocks. I think that's what the slash team did in this instance.
Now that my post is on, I think I'll don my asbestos underwear....
It still works under win95 and so on. You can make directories that win95 can't handle. (You can only delete them through DOS) every once in a while at work people go around and put folders on people's desktops called: XXXGOATPORNO Which looks like "XXX GOAT PORNO" of course. You can't move it, you can't rename it, you can't delete it. Gotta try that on the PHB some time...
Aaah, it takes me back to the time when I was about 14 years old, I had gotten my first computer, (it was a 486SX2 with 4MB) and I was using DOS as it was a REAL operating system. Sure, those other quiche eating wimps may use Windows 3.1, but I'm a real man (at 14, yeah right) who uses a REAL system. A CLI.
I remember playing Doom, Doom ][, (always done with the backwards brackets) using some obscure phone program to dial my favorite BBS (it was called "Cyberia" -- how lame is that:)
I remember ridiculing edlin. I didn't think that it was possible to have an editor that was worse than edlin. Surely, edlin was the most pathetic program ever written. (Well, it wasn't, but I thought it was at the time. In all actuality, the most pathetic programs ever written were my early attempts at QBASIC)
And then all of the tricks shared with friends, like putting high-ascii characters in filenames so they couldn't be deleted by conventional means, (because you couldn't type the filename) and looking at virus source code trying to figure out what the hell "mov" and "cmp" stood for.
My progression went from Dos->windows->linux. It reminds me of a Pearl Jam song ("I'm Open") -- "Illusion was traded for Reality...no tradebacks. So this is what it's like to be an adult".
Dosemu is a total time machine for me. I use it every now and then to go back to my "roots" of computing. It's a personal thing, and probably isn't interesting to many people, but it's a holy shitload of fun for me.:-)
When I was at the NYC Linux Expo last month, I spoke with one of Mandrake's head honchos. I don't remember his name, but he was a rather skinny guy who looked like he was in his 50's, with a mustache and a very thick french accent. Really nice guy, he kinda lamented that he didn't have as much time to code recently.
He told me that LinuxOne had done a lot of things such as printed up stickers and promotional items with the Mandrake character on them, and also other stuff with the tophat and magic wand on it to promote LinuxOne type things. For those of you who were at the Expo, you'd probably think it was pretty brazen since LinuxOne's booth was right behind Mandrakes! It was, and it was true, they were handing some of that stuff out on Friday (the last day of the show).
He said, (as I remember) "We would have given them permission to use them if they had just asked, but they never did". What he didn't say, (but that I got out of the conversation) was "Those guys have got a lotta fuckin' nerve to be doing that."
I was reading through the docs that come with the latest bzip2 source recently. They still have all of the "WARNING: BETA SOFTWARE ALERT" messages all over the docs talking about how the software *should* work, but has not been thoroughly tested and may cause data corruption or loss.
Does anybody know how long bzip2 has been out? (Honestly curious) It's a damn good compression algorithm, even if it is slow. I've never had a single problem with data corruption or loss (with the one exception of a file that got trashed because the disk was bad, not the compression algorithm). I would think that if the bzip2 format is good enough to use to distribute the linux kernel to the world, it's probably good enough for every day files.
Any other people with comments/thoughts on the stability of bzip2? Why all those warning messages - just because it isn't v1.0 yet?
I noticed that you allowed the people who make the Winzip product to incorporate code written for Gzip. I think it's cool that you did that, because it would be horrible if winzip couldn't handle the gzip format, but at the same time, what are your thoughts about allowing free software code to be included in closed-source products?
Just out of curiosity, (tell me it's none of my business if you want to and I'll be OK with that) did you receive a licensure fee from the company that makes Winzip for the code?
If you like calc, it's probably written in elisp, which is just regular common lisp with a little bit of sugar here and there to tie it into emacs.
Porting calc from elisp to common lisp should be relatively easy, and once it's in lisp, you can run it with CLISP or any number of good high-quality free lisp implementations that come with source.
Porting calc has extra benefits too (if it's written in elisp and is portable) - first you would have done the community a favor by contributing work, and second, you wouldn't have to learn a new program.:)
Generally speaking, in terms of the way laws are written and upheld, the use of mp3s would be upheld because although it has illicit uses, it also has legitimate uses. Think of the music students on campus who download recorded music from sites that make it freely available to the public for study and just for regular enjoyment. I've also known students who tape lectures of classes and make them available for other students via mp3.
Think about guns - guns are made to kill people. They are used in crimes every day all over the nation. But still, they are legal, because we recognize that they have legitimate uses. You can restrict the use of guns, and you might even reduce crime, (I don't actually believe that, but that's an entirely different story) but you'd be giving up a portion of your freedom to do that. Similarly, you can ban mp3s, and you may reduce the amount of IP theft, or lower your bandwidth utilization, but you're giving something up. Namely, the positive aspects of downloading mp3s, and also, the students freedom to be in an environment that allows them to expand themselves as they see fit, not as the university sees fit.
I can kinda sympathize with the bandwidth argument, but I really hate it when people change things midstream. If you come onto the university network, and sign an agreement saying "by signing this you agree not to do x, y, or z" then you have a choice, and you can go elsewhere. On the other hand, if you invest in a NIC for your student network, and then have regulations piled on you never agreed to, that's different, because you weren't given a choice.
It's their bandwidth, right? So they're completely justified in monitoring and restricting all traffic, including all your outgoing email and communication and logging them. That's just not fair, and it's somewhat absurd. They're fighting a losing battle anyway. If they ban napster, somebody will figure out how to run it on a differnent port, or will just move to another service.
I didn't say it was a "bad" thing, I just meant that it's a different thing. What I was trying to say with the paragraph that you quoted was that what we have works, so why mess with success? I didn't say that anything that isn't the preordained way of doing things is necessarily bad. That's obviously not true.
I also didn't claim that it's dumbing down linux. Those are your words you're putting into my mouth. They are again two completely different ways of doing things that I don't necessarily think mix well. That doesn't mean that I think one is "dumber" than the other.
In my view projects like KDE are obviously redundant? Wrong again - I didn't say that either. I don't think KDE is redundant, I just think it's got a different user market than other projects. And I wouldn't necessarily say that Kdevelop the way it's being described is the same as the rest of the KDE project. I personally don't use KDE, but I don't begrudge people who do. KDE isn't redundant, it's just different. And before you go claiming that I slagged KDE, I said "different" not "bad" or "inferior" - they're very "different" things.
About how using linux as a desktop OS could be a bad thing - it wouldn't be bad necessarily. I just think that if you're going to switch from windows to linux, then you may as well actually switch and learn something new, rather than just having people on the linux side of things rewrite all of your favorite apps for windows under linux. There's a time and a place for windowish applications under linux, and there's a time and a place for straight windows applications under linux (i.e. vmware, wine). I just don't think that they should slowly become the DEFAULT, which is how it seems to be going. (You need not insult me on that point, it's just an opinion)
Oh, and by the way, I've used gdb in its pure command line form plenty of times, and I don't frankly find anything wrong with it. GDB is working on the assembly level of things, where there isn't much in the way of datastructures to visualize. After you invest the time in learning the way the app works, you can fly with just a command line gdb.
There's a new reason to start reading comments at 0 and -1...when there are funny trolling posts like this one that slip through the moderators. People see something that is anti-rob anti-slashdot or anti-"linux party line" and they moderate it down.
But this is a high-quality troll. Has Jesus Christ ever checked out segfault.org? You'd fit in over there.
This looks like it was a very good article but I was only able to read the first page of it because by the time I was trying to click through to the second page, the damn thing had been slashdotted.
I used to hate multipage articles because it allowed the webmaster to force me to submit to more advertisers-but now I hate multipage articles because of the slashdot effect.
Of course they can do what they want - and I think that the poster acknowledges that.
It's just that linux is made to be linux. Linux is a UNIX clone, and as such, has a certain heritage. What I think the guy is trying to point out is that even though you might be able to dress up Linux as something very similar to windows so that it will be attractive to certain types of people, (i.e. the windows converts as they come over to linux) that's not the main point of linux. Linux was supposed to be an alternative to windows, not a cheap bastardized rip off version that looks exactly like windows. And I don't think that that's what KDE or KDeveloper is doing, just that Linux is made to be Linux, and these types of programs are fine to run on linux, but they don't embody the soul of what the operating system is supposed to be about.
But if you get enough developers using it, you may have a real shift in what type of software shows up for linux. Since we all seem pretty happy with our operating system right now, whatever "paradigm" that is in use seems to be pretty popular and seems to be working out. Why mess with success in the name of catering to a population moving over to linux from windows? If they want a pretty GUI to develop programs in that looks just like windows, well then stay with windows.
Point well taken. Frankly, back when I wasn't much of a touch typist and when I didn't know the flags to the commands, a GUI file manager made a lot of sense. But in the long run, if you learn the commands and become a decent typist, you can absolutely FLY with the shell, whereas you can only get "fast" with a file manager.
I want to get through that stuff as fast as possible after all, because when I'm interacting with my computer, I'm not marveling over the innards of the "cp" command, I'm just trying to get something done. And the faster that thing gets done, the more time I can spend on what it is that I'm actually doing with the computer rather than wrangling with the OS imposed structure.
Oh oh oh!!!! Mr. Torvalds!!! I can't believe it's REALLY YOU!!!
>SARCASM< It's a good thing that you finally decided to lay claim to the "Linus Torvalds." nick so that no brainless flaming immature wank of a troll would take it over and pester all of slashdot with his pointless invective! The slashdot system does work! And your post is proof! >/SARCASM<
I've used linux for quite a while, and I've never used a file manager. I've tried gentoo (I think that's what it's called) and the new KDE file manager, and of course gmc. They're all VERY nice programs. But what I've found is that I've worked on my box for so long, I know exactly where something is when I'm looking for it, and a GUI actually SLOWS ME DOWN when I have to click "up the tree", ok, now into the "/home" directory, ok, now choose the "uruk" user directory, yeah, ok, choose foo.txt, etc. etc. etc.
My file manager is called "bash". It provides extremely powerful features such as "cd", "ls", "cp", "rm", "find", etc. If you know how to use them and you're a touch typist, you'll smoke whatever a GUI file manager can offer.
And besides, how do you do something like this in a GUI file manager?
find . -name "*.txt" -exec grep "foobar" {} \;
I have yet to find a file manager that will let me do that, but maybe there's one out there.
The only way that I could think of that a GUI file manager would become what I would prefer to use is if it was able to pop up a window corresponding to whichever directory I wanted to be in at a certain time. While that's usually $HOME, it changes a lot, so really the file manager would have to be psychic. The GNOME folks have done some really amazing things with software, but I have yet to see psychic software.:) Of course why not just have a popup window that asks you what directory you want to be in before the window comes up? That way you can type, right? But then you have to fool around with the right window having focus, and those window manager features where popup windows get focus automatically drive me bat shit, so that's kind of out.:)
Slashdot Mirror
When was it exactly that you knew (or had the feeling) that GNOME was a project that was going somewhere? Free software projects start with no guarantee of popularity, and for every GNOME, there's 1000 totally unknown applications.
Was there a particular application or library or component of GNOME after which you knew GNOME was going to be successful or in general "something special"? What did the GNOME project do that prevented it from sinking into obscurity like so many other free software projects?
It's going to happen. Somebody is going to write a badass virus for linux that's going to cause som e damage. The amount of damage is what's variable in my mind, not whether or not it will occur.
:) With that, like I said, it's pure ignorance, (or just blind platform advocating idiocy) to say that linux won't ever have a problem with virii.
:)
I think it would be incredibly ignorant of people here to think that a virus couldn't happen on linux, even if the system is well-defended against virii. Personally, i think one of the biggest things linux has going for it in the anti-virus arena is that it's so non-homogenous. Everybody talks about how wonderful windows is because it's consistent from machine to machine, but that's the same type of "feature" that makes it easy to write virii that spread quickly. The virus automatically "knows" what kind of machine it's on, and it can always assume a base level of functionality. Not so on linux, where you have everything from diskless workstations to development boxes that don't have daemons on them, to "production" servers that have daemons, but are missing some normal development tools. There isn't a baseline functionality the virus can assume.
Pretty much everybody on slashdot should know that anything is possible when it comes to a coder with too much time on his hands.
I forget the exact wording, but a quote on the l0pht's site comes to mind: "Making the 'theoretical' practical since 1995". Doesn't that say it all? Linux is a great system, and I love it as much as the next guy, but it's blind arrogance to say that it will never be susceptible to virii. I agree with this poster. Articles like this seem to want to poke the moster and yell "Haha - you can't crack my box!!!". As far as security is concerned, it's best to keep a low profile.
I've had my resume out there for a while, and while I wouldn't consider myself even close to the top echelon of linux coders out there, I get a whole lot of calls just based off of the fact that my resume is out there, and people are interested in hiring me.
I'm in college, and I'm going to be looking for a "career" soon, but so far, I haven't really had to look, companies seem to just find me on the internet.
It seems at times that with the economy that we've got now, and with the job market in our sector the way it is, here's my checklist --
1: Do you have a pulse?
2: Are you a crack/heroin addict?
3: Do you plan to immediately defraud the company?
4: Do you have any convictions for homicide?
If you answered 'Yes' to all of the above, congratulations, you're qualified for practically any job out there.
While that is a bit exaggerated, it has seemed to me recently like a lot of employers are desparate for employees. Good economy means expansion in business, expansion in business means that you need more employees. And there aren't any to be had as far as I can see....
(Note: stay away from consulting firms - I've interviewed with 2 - and they seem to be of two breeds - the sharks, and the pimps)
My $0.02
I didn't think that up - it's been floating around the net for a very long time - but it is kinda funny. :) Reminds me of how much I hated DOS once windows95 and long file names came into existance - they probably should have just realized that they were a 2 bit OS and not bothered implementing long filenames...
I agree with you on the choice issue - I just wanted to point out that there's a reason Windows is so restricted.
Micros~1 started off selling operating systems to desktop users, and computer hobbyists. They eventually developed their software more and more, till the point where they broke into the server market with NT. (It may have happened before NT to a certain degree, but they probably weren't that popular as a server platform). So here you've got a company that has always built desktop OS's, (arguably "toy" OS's compared to what is required of a server). Their approach has always been to insulate the user from anything approaching a technical decision, and to swath the deficiencies of the system in a pretty GUI.
That type of design and implementation is arguably quite good for desktop users and hobbyists, it plain sucks for server configurations. And once they had dominated the market, what's the point of spreading out and porting to other CPUs? (Especially when they're in bed with Intel)
I think the lack of choice on the wintel side of things has a lot to do with the evolution of windows, whereas UNIX has always tried to run on everything. (remember how one of the original brag points of UNIX was that it was portable?)
Just my $0.02
Just an idea - but it may be that getting PR out of it isn't possible. I don't know very much about the mechanics of how things get torched in the atmosphere, but if I were this company, I would want to plonk these satellites in the middle of the ocean, as far from land as possible. That way, if they don't completely disintegrate, they hit the water, and nobody dies.
If you crash them into the ocean miles and miles from anyone, it may be that you would not really be able to see them. Besides, who knows where they orbit the earth? It may be that they'll be swandiving straight into antarctica, in which case we surely won't see them. (Although the people on the southern tip of south america might have a shot)
Here's a company that's strapped for cash. Because of bankruptcy, they'd prefer to sell the satellites to work off some debt, but instead they decide to destroy everything.
:)
(???)
It seems to me that if you're looking for money, you can probably find any number of people who'd be willing to buy it. I mean, let's face it, selling the satellites for $2.00 a piece would be far more economical than crashing them into the ocean at 4000 degrees fahrenheit, since you wouldn't have to pay the technical staff to make sure that the satellites didn't land on Jesse Helms. (Or at least not on purpose, anyway)
But then again - the article said "Barring finding a 'qualified' buyer" - whatever that means. I'm sure you've probably got to have some pretty heavy duty terrestrial hardware to keep the things functioning correctly, but come on.
I wonder if we can call Bruce Perens and his ham radio buddies and convince them to buy the satellite array for amateur radio.
But seriously people, please point out what I'm missing here - it seems to me like there couldn't POSSIBLY be a way where destroying them all would be the most economical thing to do for Iridium. What gives?
Is this the start of more and more companies who view strong privacy as the product itself? No, not at all. This is a company that wants to cash in on what they see as a recent internet community backlash against people who were buying and selling personal information. I doubt that in this case privacy is the product - it's just a feature of the product meant to lure the disillusioned...
IMHO the disillusioned should realize that they are disillusioned for a reason; namely, that when it comes right down to it, companies are about profit, and if earning lots of money conflicts with protecting the consumer, then "Oh well". I'd like to see this company's privacy policy in a few years (assuming it survives that long) when it wants to go public, become more profitable, and expand all at the same time.
'Scuse me, but I'm feeling particularly bitter tonight.
Maybe it's real, but most likely, it's some losers idea of a practical joke. I must admit though, that for all the screaming about patents that goes on here, it would be kinda cool to have a patent of my own. My patent would be on something that's definately obvious, but harmless to everyone. Something like "Patent on a method for ultra-high-speed avoidance of job-related injuries using three pounds of cool-whip, a pair of scissors, and a copy of the new Stephen King eBook (after I had bitfrobbed it out of whatever pathetic format they're distributing it in) while walking and chewing bubble gum"
Just you fools wait! You'll all owe me MILLIONS when this type of activity becomes all the rage!
Alternately, I could preemptively patent the "Natalie Portman/Hot Grits" post, and make TRILLIONS of dollars. (But #2, why make trillions of dollars, when we could make....BILLIONS OF DOLLARS!!!!) Also possibly in the future is the Jon Katz flame post patent, the "Slashdot sucks since it's become freshmeat" post patent, and the all-important meta-whiner post patent.
I think that all right-thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary decent people are fed up in this
country with being sick and tired. I'm certainly not. But I'm sick and tired of being told that I am.
- Monty Python
It's an option...
I saw the film, and I liked it a whole lot.
First, some background. I used to be like a lot of the reviewers, in that I couldn't stand pseudo-science, but I eventually came to the point that I realized that it's science-FICTION, not science, and that transgressions in the scientific area are totally OK, since it takes some suspension of belief to even think up a movie where people are walking on Mars.
My main criticism of the movie is that it takes half the movie to establish the premise (one mission lost, a second mission to mars to save the losers abandoned from the first) and that for a sci-fi movie, it has a lot of human interactions in it, and not as much galactic piracy, violence, wormholes, etc. That's not necessarily bad, but it's not what I look for in sci-fi.
I too didn't like the constant product shots, but they weren't nearly as obtrusive as some of the slash team's reviews said they were, (with the exception of M&Ms - that was pretty obvious). Most of the product shots consisted of a "pennzoil" sticker on a mars lander in the background and so on. If you're looking to ferret commercialism out of these movies and criticise it on that point, then there will be plenty of ammo in this movie, but I'm straining to think of a movie I've seen in the last few years that didn't have these types of blatant promos in them, and I'm wondering why the reviewers chose to screw the movie based off of those, when they seem to be everywhere.
For me, sci-fi is about suspending disbelief, and in a way, being like a child, and just enjoying wherever it is the movie maker wants to take you. I think all of us have plenty of the cynical bastard type of mindset that permeates professional work. YOU DON'T GO TO SCI-FI MOVIES TO CRITICISE THEIR SCIENCE - LARGELY BECAUSE IT'S NONEXISTANT, NO MATTER WHAT TYPE OF SCI-FI IT IS. (There are some exceptions to that, but not too many)
I thought it was pretty good, all in all. I left the movie theater feeling like I got my money's worth. I understand that there's a lot of people that hate it, but I feel they're hating it for all the wrong reasons. Sort of like how for any given movie, no matter what the premise is, you can find small plot holes and problems in it, small incontinuities, etc. to the point where if you really want to, you can convince yourself that the movie sucks rocks. I think that's what the slash team did in this instance.
Now that my post is on, I think I'll don my asbestos underwear....
It still works under win95 and so on. You can make directories that win95 can't handle. (You can only delete them through DOS) every once in a while at work people go around and put folders on people's desktops called: XXXGOATPORNO Which looks like "XXX GOAT PORNO" of course. You can't move it, you can't rename it, you can't delete it. Gotta try that on the PHB some time...
Aaah, it takes me back to the time when I was about 14 years old, I had gotten my first computer, (it was a 486SX2 with 4MB) and I was using DOS as it was a REAL operating system. Sure, those other quiche eating wimps may use Windows 3.1, but I'm a real man (at 14, yeah right) who uses a REAL system. A CLI.
:)
:-)
I remember playing Doom, Doom ][, (always done with the backwards brackets) using some obscure phone program to dial my favorite BBS (it was called "Cyberia" -- how lame is that
I remember ridiculing edlin. I didn't think that it was possible to have an editor that was worse than edlin. Surely, edlin was the most pathetic program ever written. (Well, it wasn't, but I thought it was at the time. In all actuality, the most pathetic programs ever written were my early attempts at QBASIC)
And then all of the tricks shared with friends, like putting high-ascii characters in filenames so they couldn't be deleted by conventional means, (because you couldn't type the filename) and looking at virus source code trying to figure out what the hell "mov" and "cmp" stood for.
My progression went from Dos->windows->linux. It reminds me of a Pearl Jam song ("I'm Open") -- "Illusion was traded for Reality...no tradebacks. So this is what it's like to be an adult".
Dosemu is a total time machine for me. I use it every now and then to go back to my "roots" of computing. It's a personal thing, and probably isn't interesting to many people, but it's a holy shitload of fun for me.
When I was at the NYC Linux Expo last month, I spoke with one of Mandrake's head honchos. I don't remember his name, but he was a rather skinny guy who looked like he was in his 50's, with a mustache and a very thick french accent. Really nice guy, he kinda lamented that he didn't have as much time to code recently.
He told me that LinuxOne had done a lot of things such as printed up stickers and promotional items with the Mandrake character on them, and also other stuff with the tophat and magic wand on it to promote LinuxOne type things. For those of you who were at the Expo, you'd probably think it was pretty brazen since LinuxOne's booth was right behind Mandrakes! It was, and it was true, they were handing some of that stuff out on Friday (the last day of the show).
He said, (as I remember) "We would have given them permission to use them if they had just asked, but they never did". What he didn't say, (but that I got out of the conversation) was "Those guys have got a lotta fuckin' nerve to be doing that."
I was reading through the docs that come with the latest bzip2 source recently. They still have all of the "WARNING: BETA SOFTWARE ALERT" messages all over the docs talking about how the software *should* work, but has not been thoroughly tested and may cause data corruption or loss.
Does anybody know how long bzip2 has been out? (Honestly curious) It's a damn good compression algorithm, even if it is slow. I've never had a single problem with data corruption or loss (with the one exception of a file that got trashed because the disk was bad, not the compression algorithm). I would think that if the bzip2 format is good enough to use to distribute the linux kernel to the world, it's probably good enough for every day files.
Any other people with comments/thoughts on the stability of bzip2? Why all those warning messages - just because it isn't v1.0 yet?
I noticed that you allowed the people who make the Winzip product to incorporate code written for Gzip. I think it's cool that you did that, because it would be horrible if winzip couldn't handle the gzip format, but at the same time, what are your thoughts about allowing free software code to be included in closed-source products?
Just out of curiosity, (tell me it's none of my business if you want to and I'll be OK with that) did you receive a licensure fee from the company that makes Winzip for the code?
If you like calc, it's probably written in elisp, which is just regular common lisp with a little bit of sugar here and there to tie it into emacs.
:)
Porting calc from elisp to common lisp should be relatively easy, and once it's in lisp, you can run it with CLISP or any number of good high-quality free lisp implementations that come with source.
Porting calc has extra benefits too (if it's written in elisp and is portable) - first you would have done the community a favor by contributing work, and second, you wouldn't have to learn a new program.
Generally speaking, in terms of the way laws are written and upheld, the use of mp3s would be upheld because although it has illicit uses, it also has legitimate uses. Think of the music students on campus who download recorded music from sites that make it freely available to the public for study and just for regular enjoyment. I've also known students who tape lectures of classes and make them available for other students via mp3.
Think about guns - guns are made to kill people. They are used in crimes every day all over the nation. But still, they are legal, because we recognize that they have legitimate uses. You can restrict the use of guns, and you might even reduce crime, (I don't actually believe that, but that's an entirely different story) but you'd be giving up a portion of your freedom to do that. Similarly, you can ban mp3s, and you may reduce the amount of IP theft, or lower your bandwidth utilization, but you're giving something up. Namely, the positive aspects of downloading mp3s, and also, the students freedom to be in an environment that allows them to expand themselves as they see fit, not as the university sees fit.
I can kinda sympathize with the bandwidth argument, but I really hate it when people change things midstream. If you come onto the university network, and sign an agreement saying "by signing this you agree not to do x, y, or z" then you have a choice, and you can go elsewhere. On the other hand, if you invest in a NIC for your student network, and then have regulations piled on you never agreed to, that's different, because you weren't given a choice.
It's their bandwidth, right? So they're completely justified in monitoring and restricting all traffic, including all your outgoing email and communication and logging them. That's just not fair, and it's somewhat absurd. They're fighting a losing battle anyway. If they ban napster, somebody will figure out how to run it on a differnent port, or will just move to another service.
I didn't say it was a "bad" thing, I just meant that it's a different thing. What I was trying to say with the paragraph that you quoted was that what we have works, so why mess with success? I didn't say that anything that isn't the preordained way of doing things is necessarily bad. That's obviously not true.
I also didn't claim that it's dumbing down linux. Those are your words you're putting into my mouth. They are again two completely different ways of doing things that I don't necessarily think mix well. That doesn't mean that I think one is "dumber" than the other.
In my view projects like KDE are obviously redundant? Wrong again - I didn't say that either. I don't think KDE is redundant, I just think it's got a different user market than other projects. And I wouldn't necessarily say that Kdevelop the way it's being described is the same as the rest of the KDE project. I personally don't use KDE, but I don't begrudge people who do. KDE isn't redundant, it's just different. And before you go claiming that I slagged KDE, I said "different" not "bad" or "inferior" - they're very "different" things.
About how using linux as a desktop OS could be a bad thing - it wouldn't be bad necessarily. I just think that if you're going to switch from windows to linux, then you may as well actually switch and learn something new, rather than just having people on the linux side of things rewrite all of your favorite apps for windows under linux. There's a time and a place for windowish applications under linux, and there's a time and a place for straight windows applications under linux (i.e. vmware, wine). I just don't think that they should slowly become the DEFAULT, which is how it seems to be going. (You need not insult me on that point, it's just an opinion)
Oh, and by the way, I've used gdb in its pure command line form plenty of times, and I don't frankly find anything wrong with it. GDB is working on the assembly level of things, where there isn't much in the way of datastructures to visualize. After you invest the time in learning the way the app works, you can fly with just a command line gdb.
There's a new reason to start reading comments at 0 and -1...when there are funny trolling posts like this one that slip through the moderators. People see something that is anti-rob anti-slashdot or anti-"linux party line" and they moderate it down.
But this is a high-quality troll. Has Jesus Christ ever checked out segfault.org? You'd fit in over there.
This looks like it was a very good article but I was only able to read the first page of it because by the time I was trying to click through to the second page, the damn thing had been slashdotted.
I used to hate multipage articles because it allowed the webmaster to force me to submit to more advertisers-but now I hate multipage articles because of the slashdot effect.
Oh well.
Of course they can do what they want - and I think that the poster acknowledges that.
It's just that linux is made to be linux. Linux is a UNIX clone, and as such, has a certain heritage. What I think the guy is trying to point out is that even though you might be able to dress up Linux as something very similar to windows so that it will be attractive to certain types of people, (i.e. the windows converts as they come over to linux) that's not the main point of linux.
Linux was supposed to be an alternative to windows, not a cheap bastardized rip off version that looks exactly like windows. And I don't think that that's what KDE or KDeveloper is doing, just that Linux is made to be Linux, and these types of programs are fine to run on linux, but they don't embody the soul of what the operating system is supposed to be about.
But if you get enough developers using it, you may have a real shift in what type of software shows up for linux. Since we all seem pretty happy with our operating system right now, whatever "paradigm" that is in use seems to be pretty popular and seems to be working out. Why mess with success in the name of catering to a population moving over to linux from windows? If they want a pretty GUI to develop programs in that looks just like windows, well then stay with windows.
Well yes, windows does that, so let me qualify that a little bit to better show what I was trying to get across:
instead of grep "foobar", how about something like egrep "^[fF][oO][bB][aA][rR],\s+?\d{1,4}"
So yes, you can use windows to "search for a string" but what I was talking about is REAL searching - regexps.
Point well taken. Frankly, back when I wasn't much of a touch typist and when I didn't know the flags to the commands, a GUI file manager made a lot of sense. But in the long run, if you learn the commands and become a decent typist, you can absolutely FLY with the shell, whereas you can only get "fast" with a file manager.
I want to get through that stuff as fast as possible after all, because when I'm interacting with my computer, I'm not marveling over the innards of the "cp" command, I'm just trying to get something done. And the faster that thing gets done, the more time I can spend on what it is that I'm actually doing with the computer rather than wrangling with the OS imposed structure.
Oh oh oh!!!! Mr. Torvalds!!! I can't believe it's REALLY YOU!!!
>SARCASM<
It's a good thing that you finally decided to lay claim to the "Linus Torvalds." nick so that no brainless flaming immature wank of a troll would take it over and pester all of slashdot with his pointless invective! The slashdot system does work! And your post is proof!
>/SARCASM<
I've used linux for quite a while, and I've never used a file manager. I've tried gentoo (I think that's what it's called) and the new KDE file manager, and of course gmc. They're all VERY nice programs. But what I've found is that I've worked on my box for so long, I know exactly where something is when I'm looking for it, and a GUI actually SLOWS ME DOWN when I have to click "up the tree", ok, now into the "/home" directory, ok, now choose the "uruk" user directory, yeah, ok, choose foo.txt, etc. etc. etc.
:) Of course why not just have a popup window that asks you what directory you want to be in before the window comes up? That way you can type, right? But then you have to fool around with the right window having focus, and those window manager features where popup windows get focus automatically drive me bat shit, so that's kind of out. :)
My file manager is called "bash". It provides extremely powerful features such as "cd", "ls", "cp", "rm", "find", etc. If you know how to use them and you're a touch typist, you'll smoke whatever a GUI file manager can offer.
And besides, how do you do something like this in a GUI file manager?
find . -name "*.txt" -exec grep "foobar" {} \;
I have yet to find a file manager that will let me do that, but maybe there's one out there.
The only way that I could think of that a GUI file manager would become what I would prefer to use is if it was able to pop up a window corresponding to whichever directory I wanted to be in at a certain time. While that's usually $HOME, it changes a lot, so really the file manager would have to be psychic. The GNOME folks have done some really amazing things with software, but I have yet to see psychic software.