Same here at Stanford, only it's called SU Linux. It's a modified version of Red Hat, supposedly "hardened", but I think the main difference is that it comes with built-in support for AFS and Kerberos, 2 things we use a lot here. I'm not sure how many people actually use it - I'm using Debian (which has packages enabling AFS and Kerberos, though it was a bit tricky to get working at first), and I know some other people using other normal distros (I've seen Gentoo, Red Hat, and Mandrake floating around), so I suspect it's mostly used for installation in some computer labs around campus that run Linux.
I would be shocked if anyone tried to claim that the software ESR has written is even comparable in importance to the software RMS has written. Fetchmail vs. the entire GNU collection (though one really must wonder why he wasted so much time writing all the bloat inside emacs;)...); it's clear which is more important. Furthermore, I'd add that RMS is a really important figure in the community politically. It's crucial to have someone who is really serious about not making any moral compromises (as in my previous example of his refusing to speak until the Quicktime stream was turned off).
Still, though, I think ESR has done more from a political perspective to bring open-source into the mainstream field of view. My conception on the issue is that ESR takes a more pragmatic approach to the issue; while RMS says "100% free or forget it", ESR tries to make free and proprietary work together. ESR makes open source much more appealing to the business world; he was a huge part in convincing Netscape to make Mozilla open source, and I think if memory serves may have played a similar role in IBM's involvement with Linux (though I'm not positive about that one). Even the choice of the term "open source" over "free software" was made with the intention of making it sound more appealing to the corporate world. While RMS refused to speak to a quicktime stream, ESR may have (and of course, this is pure speculation) decided that it was more important to increase his audience and spread his message further, even if it meant being recorded in a proprietary format.
I'm not trying to discredit either one, I just am making the distinction between RMS the fanatic and ESR the (relative) pragmatist.
Interesting...I had the exact same experience while seeing Stallman speak. Having seen them both, I thought ESR was a lot more down-to-earth and approachable than RMS was. Stallman just came across as bitter and angry and was just whining about all sorts of boring things, while ESR actually had a well-organized and far more entertaining talk prepared. I got the impression that Stallman was bitter that ESR and his phrase "open source" has won the battle over Stallman's preferred "free software". When I tried asking Stallman a question he get really defensive and wouldn't even let me finish the question - he interrupted with a dismissive comment.
Stallman did, though, have a couple interesting highlights...the first was when he yelled at the professor who had set up the talk in front of the whole audience because it was going to be filmed and broadcast over the internet in Quicktime (since he was giving the talk for a class which is always broadcast in this fashion). He refused to start his talk until they turned off the cameras or came up with a way to broadcast it in a format viewable by open-source players. Here, he came across as a bit immature in the way he handled the situation but at the same time it was entertaining and he was making a good point. The other entertaining thing was the whole Church of Emacs routine, although it was heavily apparent that he does it and uses the same jokes at every talk he gives.
Pretty interesting to see that the changelog contains almost nothing major - just a small handful of "fixed ___ bug". I'd say that's a good sign that the KDE 3.1.x line is nice and mature and stable.
After a bit of searching, I found a site that had this as part of a realaudio stream from some radio program, then extracted the relevant section and converted it to an mp3. Yes I know that's not the best way to do it but I'm not too concerned with quality, and 1.8 megs is not a big deal to me even if the file should be way smaller.
Anyway, you can download this at: http://www.stanford.edu/~ari05/mcdonalds.mp3.
Not to mention the fact that the GTA series has a lot more to gain by giving it away - its free advertising for future games in the series.
Unless id decides to release a new Commander Keen games and wants to rebuild interest in the franchise, they don't really gain as much by giving it away (it's not like they need to increase fan loyalty). Of course, if it is $15, I agree with the other posts that it's a bit much (for some reason Galeon keeps crashing on the page so I can't see it).
I use it just for received messages to get sports scores from Yahoo. It's completely free to receive messages on most services (I've got AT&T), as opposed to having to pay money for wireless web to get the same type of function. It is also possible to recieve little e-mails through it (for AT&T it's yourphonenumber@mobile.att.net) so a bunch of my friends often send me short little messages through that, maybe something along the lines of "good luck on your test" or "you fucking cock sucker" (though hopefully not too much of the latter).
As for the success rate, I dunno if it's Yahoo or AT&T but I definitely don't get all scores instantly - sometimes they are delayed by a couple hours, sometimes they don't come through at all. When I've had my phone off they often don't come right away when I turn it back on, but they'll usually get through eventually.
Pretty cool. This kind of reminds me of Google Sets. Just make a set of a bunch of your favorite bands and it can come up with a bunch of related ones. Unfortunately it's mostly stuff that you've probably already heard of, but it's kind of cool nonetheless.
Also, I'm surprised I haven't seen more mentions of All Music, which has reviews and links to related artists and stuff like that.
They go for the PC's like Alienware because they heard that Alienware makes the best computers for gaming, but they really don't know jack/shit about what makes a computer good for gaming.
Hah, my roommate is definitely one of those kids. He paid big bucks to get a top-of-the-line Alienware computer, but for the first six months of using it, somehow he managed to have his CPU underclocked - the bus was set to 100 mhz instead of the 133 his Athlon is meant to use, but the multiplier was unchanged, meaning his 1.4 ghz cpu was running at about 1 ghz. Ooops.
Good call - now that I think about it, the album came out about 4 or 5 years before this guy claims to have met the alien. I dunno what I was thinking - I guess the religious tone of the song threw me off for a second.
Anyone know what the relationship is between this cult and two song's from The Who Sell Out - Rael and Rael 2 (the latter was added to the CD version from a b-side, I think). Here are the lyrics:
Rael
The Red Chins in their millions
Will overspill their borders
And chaos then will reign in our Rael
Rael, the home of my religion
To me the center of the Earth
The Red Chins in their millions
Will overspill their borders
And chaos then will reign in our Rael
My heritage is threatened
My roots are torn and cornered
And so to do my best I'll homeward sail
And so to do my best I'll homeward sail
Now Captain, listen to my instructions
Return to this spot on Christmas Day
Look toward the shore for my signal
And then you'll know if in Rael I'll stay
If a yellow flag is fluttering
Sickly herald against the morn
Then you'll know my courage has ended
And you'll send your boat ashore
But if a red flag is flying
Brazen bold against the blue
Then you'll know that I am staying
And my yacht belongs to you
Now Captain, listen to my instructions
Return to this spot on Christmas Day
Look toward the shore for my signal
And then you'll know if in Rael I'll stay
He's crazy if he thinks we're coming back again
He's crazy if he thinks we're coming back again
He's crazy if he thinks we're coming back again
He's crazy, anyway
If a yellow flag is fluttering
Sickly herald against the morn
Then you'll know my courage has ended
And you'll send your boat ashore
Rael 2
What I see is all I've seen,
In my sweetest sleep in dreams,
What I feel is all I've felt,
When by newborn babes I've knelt,
What I know now is all I've known,
That has been good while I have grown,
Bless the thoughts that made me sail
And the God who made Rael.
No, I have no idea what they are talking about, but it definitely seems relevant.
Oh, and by the way, the stupid lameness filter isn't letting me put linebreaks in the lyrics - anyone know a way around this? If you want it with the linebreaks, I found the lyrics here.
Yeah.. unless they were dead. That sorta puts a crimp your argument though I suppose.
True, I kind of "conveniently" overlooked that point. If there were a likely chance of the gun malfunctioning (I'd imagine it wouldn't be very likely, but let's assume it was), then one way to help the situation would be to suggest that people test their gun by firing a blank once a month. Of course, it could still malfunction at critical moments, but then it might be less likely to happen. I think at that point, though, the amount it would happen would be far less frequent then the amount of times a kid dies by firing their parent's gun. Ideally the technology would err on the side of being too generous with its identification rather than being too strict, or just not err at all.
...there are definitely a few things we should be concerned about.
Will it be possible to "unencode" the gun? Specifically, if a person decided to resell their gun, obviously it would not make sense to let them resell it privately (since that would defeat the purpose of this capability), but they should be able to resell it to a licensed gun dealer, who could then in turn either send it back to the manufacturer or use a special tool to unencode it.
Will bullets fired from these guns be traceable to the owner of the gun, and if so, will evidence along those lines be useable in court? It seems kind of like a lie detector-type situation (or, if you prefer, a "Gattacca"- or "Minority Resport"-type situation). If somehow someone figured out how to fire someone else's gun, and the bullet were traced back to the gun, then, because of this technology, a jury might be inclined to assume that there is only one possible person who could have fired it, when in fact there could theoretically have been someone else. They should be very explicit in describing how this can and cannot be used in court.
In general, though, this seems like a pretty solid idea that would be useful even if not 100% effective. If something malfunctioned and the rightful owner was not able to fire the gun, then they could take it back to the store and replace it, while alternatively if it malfunctioned and someone else was able to fire the gun, well then even in this worst-case scenario it would be no worse than it is now. I think, as long as they're careful about the two aforementioned issues, I can be proud of my home state (not that I shouldn't already be proud of it), and hopefully not have to hear too many New Jersey jokes as a result of this.
What if that information was to prevent you getting a job or a visa at some point in the future? For example, I could criticise this drive for a war in Iraq.
However, I now risk those thoughts becoming a part of my electronic persona. They could prevent me getting a Visa for the US, working for a US company, or working in any area of national security for my own country.
I have bad news for you...this can already happen, thanks largely to that site we all love so dearly, Google. When you post something on the Internet, you better be willing to stand by that statement later, because don't be surprised if when you apply for a job the potential employer searches for you on Google and sees what statements you've made recently. Kind of like that Googling for dates story from a few days ago.
A couple days ago, a friend of mine and I were discussing how easy it would be to piss someone off simply by adding a crontab job to send a short little e-mail to ??????????@mobile.att.net every few minutes. Of course, it would be incredibly obnoxious, but it's so easy it's scary! It seems that phone companies should give their users a way to block SMS messages from specific addresses.
I saw it at 12:01 in a place with 5 sold-out screens (300 people each). I thought it was kind of interesting comparing this release to the 12:01 showing I saw last year of FotR. I definitely don't remember that one being on 5 screens, and I also remember there being a hell of a lot more hardcore fans at the last one. Sure there were a handful of people dressed up for this one, but there were only 2 people clapping when it started (and nobody at the end), nor was there any response to the X2 preview. Compared to last year when there was practically a standing ovation for the Spiderman preview (let alone the applause for the actual movie last time). One group of people last year still stands out in my mind; a group of about 10 lesbians all holding hands and singing and dressed as elves that was sitting in front of me. I didn't see anything like that this year. I guess a bigger, more mainstream crowd for the sequel was to be expected given the success of the first movie.
Just to play devil's advocate (I'm not sure which side of this argument I really support), do you really want your ISP to be responsible for what its users do on its network? Is it UU.Net's job to police its paying users? What if the next suit comes not from AOL but from the **AA's and it's not a spammer they're upset about but you just because you used a P2P program?
While in general I agree with what you're saying, it's worth pointing out that one could probably make a similar argument against junk mail that comes in your regular (snail) mail box. It costs you your time in the amount of time it takes you to stick it in your trash (and depending on how deceptive it is it might even make you open it), wastes "precious" mailbox/trash can space (I bet your computer's hard drive can handle more trash than the trash can I have to throw my junk mail in), etc. Yes, snail-mail costs significantly more to deliver than spam does, but that doesn't really make a difference on MY end. I don't gain anything by Dole or some company being forced to spend more money by sending snail mail vs. e-mail; it's still just as annoying to me either way. Not to mention the whole environmental issue (which, frankly, I don't really care much about but I suppose it might be worth bringing up).
The thing I'm dreading about Linux hitting 3.0 is all the inevitable jokes posted to Slashdot about how they can't wait for Linux 3.1 or better still 3.11 for Workgroups. It seems to happen every time something closes in on that dreaded number (most recently with Debian and KDE).
Re:Or you could just...
on
Xandros 1.0
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I wish you were right, but honestly, Red Hat and Mandrake still have a lot of room to improve in terms of being easy for Windows users to pick up on. I just helped my roommate install Mandrake, and believe me, there's a lot for him to learn (though he's doing an admirable job, I think he would have given up by now if he wasn't fairly adept with computers). The truth is that Red Hat and Mandrake are not 100% intuitive to Windows migrators.
Lindows, Xandros, and Lycoris are trying to make this migration much easier. In particular, the file management in Linux tends to be a bit difficult to grasp for Windows users (root directory? huh?), so I think Xandros is very smart to work on improving this area. Also, finding/installing new programs tends to be a little trickier than it should be, and I think Lindows is working hard in this area.
The bottom line, though, is "why complain?". There is a hole in Linux that needs to be filled, and there are a bunch of companies trying to fill that hole. For now, more is better, so we the users can benefit from the progress that these companies make. I agree that not all will survive, but I definitely wouldn't be surprised to see one of these newer distros end up threatening the big boys, as long as they play their cards right.
Slashdot Mirror
Same here at Stanford, only it's called SU Linux. It's a modified version of Red Hat, supposedly "hardened", but I think the main difference is that it comes with built-in support for AFS and Kerberos, 2 things we use a lot here. I'm not sure how many people actually use it - I'm using Debian (which has packages enabling AFS and Kerberos, though it was a bit tricky to get working at first), and I know some other people using other normal distros (I've seen Gentoo, Red Hat, and Mandrake floating around), so I suspect it's mostly used for installation in some computer labs around campus that run Linux.
Still, though, I think ESR has done more from a political perspective to bring open-source into the mainstream field of view. My conception on the issue is that ESR takes a more pragmatic approach to the issue; while RMS says "100% free or forget it", ESR tries to make free and proprietary work together. ESR makes open source much more appealing to the business world; he was a huge part in convincing Netscape to make Mozilla open source, and I think if memory serves may have played a similar role in IBM's involvement with Linux (though I'm not positive about that one). Even the choice of the term "open source" over "free software" was made with the intention of making it sound more appealing to the corporate world. While RMS refused to speak to a quicktime stream, ESR may have (and of course, this is pure speculation) decided that it was more important to increase his audience and spread his message further, even if it meant being recorded in a proprietary format.
I'm not trying to discredit either one, I just am making the distinction between RMS the fanatic and ESR the (relative) pragmatist.
Interesting...I had the exact same experience while seeing Stallman speak. Having seen them both, I thought ESR was a lot more down-to-earth and approachable than RMS was. Stallman just came across as bitter and angry and was just whining about all sorts of boring things, while ESR actually had a well-organized and far more entertaining talk prepared. I got the impression that Stallman was bitter that ESR and his phrase "open source" has won the battle over Stallman's preferred "free software". When I tried asking Stallman a question he get really defensive and wouldn't even let me finish the question - he interrupted with a dismissive comment. Stallman did, though, have a couple interesting highlights...the first was when he yelled at the professor who had set up the talk in front of the whole audience because it was going to be filmed and broadcast over the internet in Quicktime (since he was giving the talk for a class which is always broadcast in this fashion). He refused to start his talk until they turned off the cameras or came up with a way to broadcast it in a format viewable by open-source players. Here, he came across as a bit immature in the way he handled the situation but at the same time it was entertaining and he was making a good point. The other entertaining thing was the whole Church of Emacs routine, although it was heavily apparent that he does it and uses the same jokes at every talk he gives.
Pretty interesting to see that the changelog contains almost nothing major - just a small handful of "fixed ___ bug". I'd say that's a good sign that the KDE 3.1.x line is nice and mature and stable.
:)
Bring on 3.2
Umm...a fighting game tournament without Super Smash Brothers? What were they thinking?
Any other smash players out there? (N64 version, of course...I'm a purist)
After a bit of searching, I found a site that had this as part of a realaudio stream from some radio program, then extracted the relevant section and converted it to an mp3. Yes I know that's not the best way to do it but I'm not too concerned with quality, and 1.8 megs is not a big deal to me even if the file should be way smaller.
Anyway, you can download this at: http://www.stanford.edu/~ari05/mcdonalds.mp3.
Hmm, makes you wonder if the grand-parent was karma-whoring or being ironic (by posting a "comment dupe")...
Not to mention the fact that the GTA series has a lot more to gain by giving it away - its free advertising for future games in the series.
Unless id decides to release a new Commander Keen games and wants to rebuild interest in the franchise, they don't really gain as much by giving it away (it's not like they need to increase fan loyalty). Of course, if it is $15, I agree with the other posts that it's a bit much (for some reason Galeon keeps crashing on the page so I can't see it).
As for the success rate, I dunno if it's Yahoo or AT&T but I definitely don't get all scores instantly - sometimes they are delayed by a couple hours, sometimes they don't come through at all. When I've had my phone off they often don't come right away when I turn it back on, but they'll usually get through eventually.
Also, I'm surprised I haven't seen more mentions of All Music, which has reviews and links to related artists and stuff like that.
Hah, my roommate is definitely one of those kids. He paid big bucks to get a top-of-the-line Alienware computer, but for the first six months of using it, somehow he managed to have his CPU underclocked - the bus was set to 100 mhz instead of the 133 his Athlon is meant to use, but the multiplier was unchanged, meaning his 1.4 ghz cpu was running at about 1 ghz. Ooops.
(Sorry for OT, posted without bonus for obvious reasons.)
Good call - now that I think about it, the album came out about 4 or 5 years before this guy claims to have met the alien. I dunno what I was thinking - I guess the religious tone of the song threw me off for a second.
Oh, and by the way, the stupid lameness filter isn't letting me put linebreaks in the lyrics - anyone know a way around this? If you want it with the linebreaks, I found the lyrics here.
True, I kind of "conveniently" overlooked that point. If there were a likely chance of the gun malfunctioning (I'd imagine it wouldn't be very likely, but let's assume it was), then one way to help the situation would be to suggest that people test their gun by firing a blank once a month. Of course, it could still malfunction at critical moments, but then it might be less likely to happen. I think at that point, though, the amount it would happen would be far less frequent then the amount of times a kid dies by firing their parent's gun. Ideally the technology would err on the side of being too generous with its identification rather than being too strict, or just not err at all.
- Will it be possible to "unencode" the gun? Specifically, if a person decided to resell their gun, obviously it would not make sense to let them resell it privately (since that would defeat the purpose of this capability), but they should be able to resell it to a licensed gun dealer, who could then in turn either send it back to the manufacturer or use a special tool to unencode it.
- Will bullets fired from these guns be traceable to the owner of the gun, and if so, will evidence along those lines be useable in court? It seems kind of like a lie detector-type situation (or, if you prefer, a "Gattacca"- or "Minority Resport"-type situation). If somehow someone figured out how to fire someone else's gun, and the bullet were traced back to the gun, then, because of this technology, a jury might be inclined to assume that there is only one possible person who could have fired it, when in fact there could theoretically have been someone else. They should be very explicit in describing how this can and cannot be used in court.
In general, though, this seems like a pretty solid idea that would be useful even if not 100% effective. If something malfunctioned and the rightful owner was not able to fire the gun, then they could take it back to the store and replace it, while alternatively if it malfunctioned and someone else was able to fire the gun, well then even in this worst-case scenario it would be no worse than it is now. I think, as long as they're careful about the two aforementioned issues, I can be proud of my home state (not that I shouldn't already be proud of it), and hopefully not have to hear too many New Jersey jokes as a result of this.I have bad news for you...this can already happen, thanks largely to that site we all love so dearly, Google. When you post something on the Internet, you better be willing to stand by that statement later, because don't be surprised if when you apply for a job the potential employer searches for you on Google and sees what statements you've made recently. Kind of like that Googling for dates story from a few days ago.
A couple days ago, a friend of mine and I were discussing how easy it would be to piss someone off simply by adding a crontab job to send a short little e-mail to ??????????@mobile.att.net every few minutes. Of course, it would be incredibly obnoxious, but it's so easy it's scary! It seems that phone companies should give their users a way to block SMS messages from specific addresses.
I saw it at 12:01 in a place with 5 sold-out screens (300 people each). I thought it was kind of interesting comparing this release to the 12:01 showing I saw last year of FotR. I definitely don't remember that one being on 5 screens, and I also remember there being a hell of a lot more hardcore fans at the last one. Sure there were a handful of people dressed up for this one, but there were only 2 people clapping when it started (and nobody at the end), nor was there any response to the X2 preview. Compared to last year when there was practically a standing ovation for the Spiderman preview (let alone the applause for the actual movie last time). One group of people last year still stands out in my mind; a group of about 10 lesbians all holding hands and singing and dressed as elves that was sitting in front of me. I didn't see anything like that this year. I guess a bigger, more mainstream crowd for the sequel was to be expected given the success of the first movie.
Just to play devil's advocate (I'm not sure which side of this argument I really support), do you really want your ISP to be responsible for what its users do on its network? Is it UU.Net's job to police its paying users? What if the next suit comes not from AOL but from the **AA's and it's not a spammer they're upset about but you just because you used a P2P program?
Two identical score 5's in one day? I call dibs on this post next time this subject comes up.
Oh well, the editors make reposts all the time, why not let the users do it too, I guess. And at least this was was an AC so it's no karma whore.
While in general I agree with what you're saying, it's worth pointing out that one could probably make a similar argument against junk mail that comes in your regular (snail) mail box. It costs you your time in the amount of time it takes you to stick it in your trash (and depending on how deceptive it is it might even make you open it), wastes "precious" mailbox/trash can space (I bet your computer's hard drive can handle more trash than the trash can I have to throw my junk mail in), etc. Yes, snail-mail costs significantly more to deliver than spam does, but that doesn't really make a difference on MY end. I don't gain anything by Dole or some company being forced to spend more money by sending snail mail vs. e-mail; it's still just as annoying to me either way. Not to mention the whole environmental issue (which, frankly, I don't really care much about but I suppose it might be worth bringing up).
A list like this without Bruce Springsteen? That's a first...
The thing I'm dreading about Linux hitting 3.0 is all the inevitable jokes posted to Slashdot about how they can't wait for Linux 3.1 or better still 3.11 for Workgroups. It seems to happen every time something closes in on that dreaded number (most recently with Debian and KDE).
Lindows, Xandros, and Lycoris are trying to make this migration much easier. In particular, the file management in Linux tends to be a bit difficult to grasp for Windows users (root directory? huh?), so I think Xandros is very smart to work on improving this area. Also, finding/installing new programs tends to be a little trickier than it should be, and I think Lindows is working hard in this area.
The bottom line, though, is "why complain?". There is a hole in Linux that needs to be filled, and there are a bunch of companies trying to fill that hole. For now, more is better, so we the users can benefit from the progress that these companies make. I agree that not all will survive, but I definitely wouldn't be surprised to see one of these newer distros end up threatening the big boys, as long as they play their cards right.