I disagree. He stated that Palladium can be disabled. It's a technical fact, and it also happens to be correct. Not nonsense.
Like playing Quake 3, or Counter-Strike? Better enjoy them while you can...soon you won't be able to play them without palladium enabled.
a) Learn about Quake. Quake's insane success was mostly because of massive online acceptance which was mostly due to piracy. This increased the value of the game, and sold more copies. id admitted as much. Quake is without a doubt the single *worst* example you could have chosen of a piece of software having incentive to have strong DRM. Almost any other piece of software would be a more valid argument.
b) This is tough for Windows warez-playing gamers. I have a tough time feeling sorry for them. It'll never affect Linux -- to do Palladium, you'd need universal blessed, signed binaries of the kernel. That will happen when hell freezes over, because Linus can't even stand distribution of binary code, much less universalized binary code.
I'm in a video games class being co-taught by a UT engine developer. It's taught entirely on Linux.
Believe me, most developers love Linux. The bloody thing was made to appeal to programmers and techies. If the consumers will shift to Linux, you can be damn sure that the developers will be there in a heartbeat.
Of course, the poor schmuck that has to support the things will be miserable, but...
I'm running XFree86-4.2.0-64 as packaged by RH. I'm using the DRI Matrox G450 drivers happily and with no trouble. I frequently use fancy features (play Quake, I code OpenGL stuff, use mga_vid to write movies directly to video memory, use xv). No memory leakage.
Nvidia is certainly entitled to make closed-source Linux drivers, just as they are to make no Linux drivers at all. However, my money will always go to companies that are putting out open source drivers for their cards.
So why did Matrox do fully (well, sans a *small* amount of microcode for two specific features -- WARP and Macrovision, which weren't x86 code anyway) open source drivers for their earlier cards? I'm using a fully open source G450 driver. Why can't anyone demand the same from other graphics card vendors?
Transgaming's stuff (well, WINE in general) works with some stuff, not with others. It frequently takes a fair bit of poking around, often has worse performance or glitches even on things marked as "fully working", and is probably not what the Average Joe wants.
It's a hell of a cool technical feat, and it's saved my butt a few times, but presenting it as a general alternative to Windows for users who want to use Windows products...no. That's not fair representation at all. Think of it as icing on the Linux cake ("AND you can run some Windows programs") rather than another bullet point ("Runs Windows programs").
I, for one, would be interested in showing User-Agent with Slashdot posts. Perhaps registered users could have the option of disabling it, as I'm sure some people will object.
Yes, all of us with hardware capable of running this.
I can't figure out why people are so obsessed with *new* games. Do games suddenly suck because they're a year old? I like my Linux box because I *don't* have to constantly upgrade it to keep it nice and usable. I have an old PII and a Matrox G450 that work nicely in Linux, but would never be able to play this at a reasonable clip.
Let's work this out:
a) People that dual-boot. They can already play this in Windows. Little reason to use Linux to play UT2003. b) People that don't dual-boot -- are they going to upgrade their graphics card and processor to play a single game? Plus, most of them already can live without games pretty well, or else they wouldn't be using Linux in the first place, so there's a significant cost to doing lots of hardware changes for one game.
Now, don't get me wrong. I bought Quake 3, Alpha Centauri, and Jagged Alliance II for Linux. But those *run* reasonably on computers not built for gaming. UT2003? Riiight...
Ah, well. I'm sure others won't agree. However, IIRC, SimCity 3k and Alpha Centauri were Loki's biggest sellers...
Now, I don't mean "retro" games like Asteroids. I mean, what about Close Combat? Command & Conquer? Fallout (okay, this *does* work in WINE, so less draw)? What's wrong with porting these? Does the port cost so blinking much to do that it's not worth it?
(Exile III did get ported, which was great, but the widget set used was absolutely unbearable. Try it and see what I mean.)
Believe me, if there was some way to get Bush to STFU about his stupid Iraq-invading obsession, we would.
Does anyone in the US have the slightest interest in (a) invading Iraq or (b) using the "War on Terror" momentum up on Iraq, which had nothing the hell to do with Sept. 11th at all?
My point is that almost no one uses USB Ethernet adapters. New computers destined for a network just come with Ethernet. You might dredge up some four-year-old systems that predated widespread Ethernet in homes, but few people have USB adapters. It makes as much sense to attack the PC market for clunky USB Ethernet adapters as the Mac market for the equally rare and clunky AAUI Ethernet adapters. I'll bet one in a bazillion machines actually have one.
As for the volume, that was just an interesting aside.
Frankly, I'm quite fed up with the heat generated by x86 chips, but I swore off propriatary Apple hardware after Apple killed off the PPC clones. We'll see what other options present themselves.
My Mac Plus showed a bootup screen featuring a tiger, played a startup sound, loaded all of its extensions, loaded the Finder and was completely ready to use in seven seconds from hitting the power switch.
Okay, I've used and liked Mac for years, and I've certainly done evangelism of my own, but this is stretching it.
The big beige box PC seems like such a dinosaur to me after using Mac for the past few years.
You can get x86 machines in all sizes, shapes, colors, and designs. The beige box is simply popular because it's cheap. Apple doesn't *offer* a beige box -- you *must* pay a premium for their cases.
The huge fans, the noise
I have a PII/266 and a PPC 6100/60. The 6100 is noticeably louder, though it also has older bearings. And the Klammath was a pretty hot chip.
the lack of ports
You're crazy. Your typical new PC has 2 serial ports, a parallel port, (with OEM models) frequently modem and Ethernet ports, two or four USB ports, two PS/2 ports, and sometimes Firewire. The only leg up Macs have is that they always have Firewire. Apple left SCSI behind a while ago on most models, so that isn't in the cards any more (and if you really use SCSI, you can get a $25 card in the PC world). Consumer-level Macs have been ragged on for having too few ports, as a matter of fact.
the 15-hour USB MP3 transfers
So get a Firewire player. Same story if you plug a USB MP3 player into your Mac.
the USB Ethernet adapters
Oh, yeah, those are *really* common. How about Apple's AAUI-to-10BaseT Ethernet adaptors, if we're going to be getting into corner cases?
no Wi-Fi built-in on most notebooks
Why the hell do people keep calling 802.11b "Wi-Fi"? It sounds like a home electronics fixation. Anyway, this is increasingly less true, and many people just get the cards. Were you really out of PC card slots? GSIA students at CMU have Thinkpads with three PC card slots and built in modem, wired Ethernet, and 802.11b.
no UNIX compatibility in Windows
Well, I solve the "Windows problem" by using Linux instead, but what do you mean by that? Grab cygwin or mingw + UnixUtils.
lack of internationalization in Windows
Oh, knock it off. Apple pimps their i18n, but the fact is that Windows and the Mac OS both speak Unicode just fine. Linux less so, but if you're using modern KDE or GNOME, you're pretty well off (particularly GNOME -- *hell* of a lot of translations there).
the unstable NT kernel
Bullshit. You can add a flaky driver to it -- NT today runs drivers in kernel space, *just like the Mac OS and Linux*, but the vanilla kernel is fine from a stability standpoint. The same claims are just as valid with respect to *BSD, Linux, or Mac OS.
P3P is notable in that it allows computing an unforgeable proof that the company did in fact give you agreement X about what they were going to do to your data.
P3P can't force people not to break their agreements, true. But it means that companies that do break them that use P3P will easily be sued in court. And for reputable companies (who waver at the thought of expensive litigation), this is more than enough.
My policy is that GUIs (like calculators) are a luxury, and not a requirement. In my company, you WILL understand how things work at the most primitive of levels (command line, vi, etc.).
I don't buy this. You can make the policy, and to some degree it's still possible to keep this, but it's doomed to failure. (The sole exception is if you have a troubleshooter, where knowing as much as possible under the hood is helpful, but becoming less and less possible.)
First of all, like it or not, the GUI *is* an alternative tool on most systems. If the GUI is feature complete, who cares if someone needs the GUI? You're hiring them to get the database work done, not to do so with a particular tool.
Second, this policy is semi-inane. If the GUI presents a particular prohibitive issue, then you'd have a reason to ban reliance upon it. If you want to factor that $40K of software in as a minus to her value, then do so. But a flat out, no exceptions policy is silly.
Third, *you* may feel great that you know your command line tools...but at some level, your knowledge breaks down as well. There just isn't any point or any way of completely understanding a field any more. Specialization has become key. You don't "know physics", you know a particular small area of it. A carpenter can make houses with nails, but probably has no idea how to mine, refine, and forge the ore necessary to make the nails. No computer scientist, no network admin, knows everything *down to the metal*.
The point is that factoring in this lack of skills is reasonable, but a flat out ban seems wrong.
There were 8th grade students in my Middle School who could not multiply on paper because they were provided with calculators, as to not slow down the rest of the class
While I see your point, I ask you -- can you, a presumably educated sort, calculated square roots on paper? At one point, doing so was considered a normal, required part of a mathematics curriculum. My mother was required to learn how to do this process, and it would have been unthinkable for anyone to not know how to do this at one point. Yet most people are no longer taught this process, and while I could probably figure something out that would work, I don't know exactly what the proper method is.
So you moved an entire section of something from the heads of students into a calculator. Without that calculator, they'd be helpless to do that sort of math.
Granted, multiplication is a lot more common than square roots. However, as devices proliferate more and more, cell phones are *always* with their owner and frequently have calculator functions, and we get close to the dawn of simple subdermal implanted computers, you have to ask yourself -- what, exactly, must be in the brain?...this is lazy short hand...
So the students are doing better Huffman on the language -- assigning shorter sequences to commonly used words. Languages warp and mutate. At one point, English didn't have contractions. Few people correct the use of "who" and "whom" any more, or worry about ending a sentence in a preposition.
Children were being abused before the Internet even existed, and they'll still be abused after Worldcom implements this decision
Child abuse (at least in the US) is a lot lower than it would have been in, say, the Middle Ages, or even a hundred years ago. Don't lose sight of this -- it's not some new, looming danger -- it's something on the drop.
Perhaps. But how can you say that removing the Internet to prevent one child being photographed nude wouldn't prevent the voices of anti-government protesters being massacred in a third world country from being heard widely enough? Outside aid wouldn't be sent, the protestors would be killed and raped, their children killed or left to starve to death. A photograph against a starvation...
Quick judgements about difficult issues are too often wrong.
Hershey has decried wrenching caps off fire hydrants as vandalism. Sears has classified unfounded assumptions made by physicists as "dangerous". And MacDonalds is putting up billboards stating that playing overly loud music is "un-American".
Slashdot Mirror
That's complete nonsense.
I disagree. He stated that Palladium can be disabled. It's a technical fact, and it also happens to be correct. Not nonsense.
Like playing Quake 3, or Counter-Strike? Better enjoy them while you can...soon you won't be able to play them without palladium enabled.
a) Learn about Quake. Quake's insane success was mostly because of massive online acceptance which was mostly due to piracy. This increased the value of the game, and sold more copies. id admitted as much. Quake is without a doubt the single *worst* example you could have chosen of a piece of software having incentive to have strong DRM. Almost any other piece of software would be a more valid argument.
b) This is tough for Windows warez-playing gamers. I have a tough time feeling sorry for them. It'll never affect Linux -- to do Palladium, you'd need universal blessed, signed binaries of the kernel. That will happen when hell freezes over, because Linus can't even stand distribution of binary code, much less universalized binary code.
I'm in a video games class being co-taught by a UT engine developer. It's taught entirely on Linux.
Believe me, most developers love Linux. The bloody thing was made to appeal to programmers and techies. If the consumers will shift to Linux, you can be damn sure that the developers will be there in a heartbeat.
Of course, the poor schmuck that has to support the things will be miserable, but...
I'm running XFree86-4.2.0-64 as packaged by RH. I'm using the DRI Matrox G450 drivers happily and with no trouble. I frequently use fancy features (play Quake, I code OpenGL stuff, use mga_vid to write movies directly to video memory, use xv). No memory leakage.
Nvidia is certainly entitled to make closed-source Linux drivers, just as they are to make no Linux drivers at all. However, my money will always go to companies that are putting out open source drivers for their cards.
So why did Matrox do fully (well, sans a *small* amount of microcode for two specific features -- WARP and Macrovision, which weren't x86 code anyway) open source drivers for their earlier cards? I'm using a fully open source G450 driver. Why can't anyone demand the same from other graphics card vendors?
Transgaming's stuff (well, WINE in general) works with some stuff, not with others. It frequently takes a fair bit of poking around, often has worse performance or glitches even on things marked as "fully working", and is probably not what the Average Joe wants.
It's a hell of a cool technical feat, and it's saved my butt a few times, but presenting it as a general alternative to Windows for users who want to use Windows products...no. That's not fair representation at all. Think of it as icing on the Linux cake ("AND you can run some Windows programs") rather than another bullet point ("Runs Windows programs").
I, for one, would be interested in showing User-Agent with Slashdot posts. Perhaps registered users could have the option of disabling it, as I'm sure some people will object.
Yes, all of us with hardware capable of running this.
I can't figure out why people are so obsessed with *new* games. Do games suddenly suck because they're a year old? I like my Linux box because I *don't* have to constantly upgrade it to keep it nice and usable. I have an old PII and a Matrox G450 that work nicely in Linux, but would never be able to play this at a reasonable clip.
Let's work this out:
a) People that dual-boot. They can already play this in Windows. Little reason to use Linux to play UT2003.
b) People that don't dual-boot -- are they going to upgrade their graphics card and processor to play a single game? Plus, most of them already can live without games pretty well, or else they wouldn't be using Linux in the first place, so there's a significant cost to doing lots of hardware changes for one game.
Now, don't get me wrong. I bought Quake 3, Alpha Centauri, and Jagged Alliance II for Linux. But those *run* reasonably on computers not built for gaming. UT2003? Riiight...
Ah, well. I'm sure others won't agree. However, IIRC, SimCity 3k and Alpha Centauri were Loki's biggest sellers...
Now, I don't mean "retro" games like Asteroids. I mean, what about Close Combat? Command & Conquer? Fallout (okay, this *does* work in WINE, so less draw)? What's wrong with porting these? Does the port cost so blinking much to do that it's not worth it?
(Exile III did get ported, which was great, but the widget set used was absolutely unbearable. Try it and see what I mean.)
It's not that small. Maybe 30% turnout? That's still only a third the normal number of Republicans.
Maybe if she can get the Dems to climb on board...be a *moderate* Libertarian, villify Coble.
Here's luck to her -- one Libertarian wouldn't upset the boat too much, and it would get a lot more attention given to online/tech types.
Believe me, if there was some way to get Bush to STFU about his stupid Iraq-invading obsession, we would.
Does anyone in the US have the slightest interest in (a) invading Iraq or (b) using the "War on Terror" momentum up on Iraq, which had nothing the hell to do with Sept. 11th at all?
My point is that almost no one uses USB Ethernet adapters. New computers destined for a network just come with Ethernet. You might dredge up some four-year-old systems that predated widespread Ethernet in homes, but few people have USB adapters. It makes as much sense to attack the PC market for clunky USB Ethernet adapters as the Mac market for the equally rare and clunky AAUI Ethernet adapters. I'll bet one in a bazillion machines actually have one.
As for the volume, that was just an interesting aside.
Frankly, I'm quite fed up with the heat generated by x86 chips, but I swore off propriatary Apple hardware after Apple killed off the PPC clones. We'll see what other options present themselves.
You wanted sub-2 minute boots?
My Mac Plus showed a bootup screen featuring a tiger, played a startup sound, loaded all of its extensions, loaded the Finder and was completely ready to use in seven seconds from hitting the power switch.
My much newer Linux box takes much, much longer.
You can get a Mac and run most of the popular flavors of Linux on it (notable exception: RedHat)
Red Hat does put out a PPC distro, though I'm not sure if it's for Macs or IBM's PPC line.
Okay, I've used and liked Mac for years, and I've certainly done evangelism of my own, but this is stretching it.
The big beige box PC seems like such a dinosaur to me after using Mac for the past few years.
You can get x86 machines in all sizes, shapes, colors, and designs. The beige box is simply popular because it's cheap. Apple doesn't *offer* a beige box -- you *must* pay a premium for their cases.
The huge fans, the noise
I have a PII/266 and a PPC 6100/60. The 6100 is noticeably louder, though it also has older bearings. And the Klammath was a pretty hot chip.
the lack of ports
You're crazy. Your typical new PC has 2 serial ports, a parallel port, (with OEM models) frequently modem and Ethernet ports, two or four USB ports, two PS/2 ports, and sometimes Firewire. The only leg up Macs have is that they always have Firewire. Apple left SCSI behind a while ago on most models, so that isn't in the cards any more (and if you really use SCSI, you can get a $25 card in the PC world). Consumer-level Macs have been ragged on for having too few ports, as a matter of fact.
the 15-hour USB MP3 transfers
So get a Firewire player. Same story if you plug a USB MP3 player into your Mac.
the USB Ethernet adapters
Oh, yeah, those are *really* common. How about Apple's AAUI-to-10BaseT Ethernet adaptors, if we're going to be getting into corner cases?
no Wi-Fi built-in on most notebooks
Why the hell do people keep calling 802.11b "Wi-Fi"? It sounds like a home electronics fixation. Anyway, this is increasingly less true, and many people just get the cards. Were you really out of PC card slots? GSIA students at CMU have Thinkpads with three PC card slots and built in modem, wired Ethernet, and 802.11b.
no UNIX compatibility in Windows
Well, I solve the "Windows problem" by using Linux instead, but what do you mean by that? Grab cygwin or mingw + UnixUtils.
lack of internationalization in Windows
Oh, knock it off. Apple pimps their i18n, but the fact is that Windows and the Mac OS both speak Unicode just fine. Linux less so, but if you're using modern KDE or GNOME, you're pretty well off (particularly GNOME -- *hell* of a lot of translations there).
the unstable NT kernel
Bullshit. You can add a flaky driver to it -- NT today runs drivers in kernel space, *just like the Mac OS and Linux*, but the vanilla kernel is fine from a stability standpoint. The same claims are just as valid with respect to *BSD, Linux, or Mac OS.
Haven't seen the movie. Plan 9 has been around for some time -- big AT&T research project into distributed systems.
I believe there was also a Plan 9 video game -- based on the movie, not the operating system.
...or no decent OCR, anyway. There are a couple of abandoned useless research projects.
Kind of surprising.
P3P is notable in that it allows computing an unforgeable proof that the company did in fact give you agreement X about what they were going to do to your data.
P3P can't force people not to break their agreements, true. But it means that companies that do break them that use P3P will easily be sued in court. And for reputable companies (who waver at the thought of expensive litigation), this is more than enough.
Take a look. This is the first of open standards to control information about yourself.
Carly let go all the remaining calculator engineers. No more new models after the current ones.
Stupid CEO.
I find this comment on the impurity of language quite entertaining, once you factor in your signature.
My policy is that GUIs (like calculators) are a luxury, and not a requirement. In my company, you WILL understand how things work at the most primitive of levels (command line, vi, etc.).
I don't buy this. You can make the policy, and to some degree it's still possible to keep this, but it's doomed to failure. (The sole exception is if you have a troubleshooter, where knowing as much as possible under the hood is helpful, but becoming less and less possible.)
First of all, like it or not, the GUI *is* an alternative tool on most systems. If the GUI is feature complete, who cares if someone needs the GUI? You're hiring them to get the database work done, not to do so with a particular tool.
Second, this policy is semi-inane. If the GUI presents a particular prohibitive issue, then you'd have a reason to ban reliance upon it. If you want to factor that $40K of software in as a minus to her value, then do so. But a flat out, no exceptions policy is silly.
Third, *you* may feel great that you know your command line tools...but at some level, your knowledge breaks down as well. There just isn't any point or any way of completely understanding a field any more. Specialization has become key. You don't "know physics", you know a particular small area of it. A carpenter can make houses with nails, but probably has no idea how to mine, refine, and forge the ore necessary to make the nails. No computer scientist, no network admin, knows everything *down to the metal*.
The point is that factoring in this lack of skills is reasonable, but a flat out ban seems wrong.
There were 8th grade students in my Middle School who could not multiply on paper because they were provided with calculators, as to not slow down the rest of the class
...this is lazy short hand...
While I see your point, I ask you -- can you, a presumably educated sort, calculated square roots on paper? At one point, doing so was considered a normal, required part of a mathematics curriculum. My mother was required to learn how to do this process, and it would have been unthinkable for anyone to not know how to do this at one point. Yet most people are no longer taught this process, and while I could probably figure something out that would work, I don't know exactly what the proper method is.
So you moved an entire section of something from the heads of students into a calculator. Without that calculator, they'd be helpless to do that sort of math.
Granted, multiplication is a lot more common than square roots. However, as devices proliferate more and more, cell phones are *always* with their owner and frequently have calculator functions, and we get close to the dawn of simple subdermal implanted computers, you have to ask yourself -- what, exactly, must be in the brain?
So the students are doing better Huffman on the language -- assigning shorter sequences to commonly used words. Languages warp and mutate. At one point, English didn't have contractions. Few people correct the use of "who" and "whom" any more, or worry about ending a sentence in a preposition.
Children were being abused before the Internet even existed, and they'll still be abused after Worldcom implements this decision
Child abuse (at least in the US) is a lot lower than it would have been in, say, the Middle Ages, or even a hundred years ago. Don't lose sight of this -- it's not some new, looming danger -- it's something on the drop.
Now, obesity or cancer is another story...
Perhaps. But how can you say that removing the Internet to prevent one child being photographed nude wouldn't prevent the voices of anti-government protesters being massacred in a third world country from being heard widely enough? Outside aid wouldn't be sent, the protestors would be killed and raped, their children killed or left to starve to death. A photograph against a starvation...
Quick judgements about difficult issues are too often wrong.
I seriously doubt any six year old would voluntarily pose nude without being coerced into it.
:-)
Of course, in a similar vein, I doubt any six year old would voluntarily undergo required immunization shots without being coerced into it.
I sure as hell wouldn't.
Hershey has decried wrenching caps off fire hydrants as vandalism. Sears has classified unfounded assumptions made by physicists as "dangerous". And MacDonalds is putting up billboards stating that playing overly loud music is "un-American".