So doing what the law says to is intrinsically right eh?
That's what I keep telling people, like in Schindlers list, Speilburg seemed to treat Schindler like a hero where he uses bribery to circumvent the laws that his government had put down.
And when those impudent wretches ousted Slobodan Milosovic, they were clearly in breach of Yucoslav law.
And what about the perpotrators of the French and the Russian Revolutions? Didn't they read that bit about not executing their rightful rulers?
And that goes to all the Mandelas, the Guvaras and the Gandhis out there, DO WHAT YOU ARE TOLD!
What's the difference between sendmail and telnet?
You need a password to get root access through telnet!
*ducks barrage of rotten fruit*
But seriously, and without the bad humor, it makes me wonder why everyone allways sees X as the bloated, non-scensical, anacronistic piece of junk that is holding LINUX/BSD back. Hell at least I can understand a XF86Conf-4 file (although the old style XF86Conf file is still rather infuriating).
I think you might be getting a little melodramatic with your predictions of a forked GTK
STSF is either a replacement to XFT2 or pango (the gtk font layout library). If it is a replacement for XFT2 then it would not contact GTK at all, let alone change it enough to mean a fork. If it replaces pango, that would be a little more tricky, as pango direct contacts GTK, however the speed of Gnome portage to STSF would suggest that if it is a replacement to pango, the api is very similar and the only thing needed would be a few #ifdefs to iron over a few idosyncracys in the two apis.
To me it makes no difference, I write my programs in GTK, I do not touch the internals of X. Most of GTKs developers could claim similar. The UIs are made up of layers upon layers of libraries, only one of these layers would need to be rewritten, hopefully it will be a small one.
Don't get me wrong, I hate division, if I had the choice I would distroy this new standard, then I would force QT, TCL, Java, even Xaw to be displayed through GTK, then I would merge the BSDs, and send in the SA to beat up the XFree86 until they all get along, I would force everyone to drive on the left hand side of the road, GSM would reign supreme, I would make all those weird IBM mainframes use ASCII, I would see DVD+RW was adopted universally or ELSE, MSOffice files would be replaced by a real XML based format, ANYONE that mentioned "HTML 5" would be pronounced an enemy of the people and sent to the Gulag without trial. But I can't, I don't have that power, I don't even have a dictatorial mustache and a sad thing is that even though some people do have mustaches, nobody has the power to tell OSS developers what to do and nobody ever will.
All one has to do is remain positive, cope with the split, not get too passionant about one side or another and hope that one dissapears, hopefully within a year all the new #ifdefs in the code will become nothing but reminants of a time forgotten and we shall live happely with our finely rendered fonts and the victorious font management library shall remain buried and hidden down deep in X. Eventualy our grandchildren shall come and ask us what library was chosen, looking down at their fresh faces that have never been furroughed with the anguish of having to use windows, we will realise that we don't even remember.
You have not mirrored it on 127.0.0.1, I checked the link and nothing... I am so annoyed that I am going to set the slapper worm on the http server on that IP, yes 127.0.0.1 is going to die!
Why the heck is my system going mental? Why is my net slowing down? What's happening, is 127.0.0.1 counter attacking me? That does it I am going to DOS that server and see what it does to me! Right N.........
This one is full of helium, helium is a nobal gas and therefore does not burn. The Hindenburng (LZ-129) was full of hydrogen (although most of the burning that actually killed people was the frame and the cabin).
The hindenburg too was intended to be filled with helium, (hence its size increase over the Graf Zepplin, LZ-127). However the only country that had access to large enough quantities of helium was the US who fractionated it from natural gas (yes natural gas does contain helium). The united states forign department blocked the sale of the gas to Germany fearing it would be used in a military project. As a consiquence of the greater boyancy (hydrogen molecules are about half the mass of helium atoms) the zepplin was installed with extra rooms.
Ironically, the zepplin blew up in America as a result of the flammable hydrogen (although a helium blimp can still go up in flames), and as a consiquence all further exports on helium were authorised and the zepplin company put in an order for enough gas to fill the Graf Zepplin 2 (LZ-130) . However this had little affect on aviation because the zepplins wered decomissioned before the order was delivered.
Another more ironic thing is that the export of helium for a civilian aircraft was blocked, but IBM was still able to supply the punch card machines that orchestrated the haulocaust. But history is funny like that... go figure.
I would much rather make a model destroyer, or anti-sub sea-king chopper... depth charges have been used for fishing for years because of their disrupting effects on fish's swim bladders (i.e. expanding bait, fishing with grenades), I could shoot more fish then you, and blow the crap out of your pathetic shitty submarine! What do you say about that smart guy?
When I was 8 or so I had this great idea to build a submarine out of oil drums. I obsessed over it and spent Way more time than is healthy drawing up plans in coloured pencils... A cute little stick figure inside two oil-drums welded together and two little drums on the side of it which were ballast tanks. It even had a modified toster underneath it to work as a steam jet (like the one on slashdot a couple of weeks ago but wouldn't have worked, however it was Australian designed).
I can't help thinking that if I was one of those "active kids" you know the ones... the ones that leave the house more than just to go to primary school, I would have either electrocuted myself with a toaster or drowned....
Basically I owe my life to my lazyness... sitting around karma whoring and trolling is the least thing I can do to repay my sense of idolness, god bless slashdot!
I worries me to see that for one promising application of linux (Embedded graphical systems) that a non-free library is being used. In my mind having a GPL licence preventing static linking and closed source projects from using it, which can be circumvented with quite a hefty payment to trolltech kind of makes a mockery of the whole Open Source Concept.
I also find it anoying that QT provides wrappers for MacOS' and Windows' existing UIs but on LINUX it creates it's own right down until it touches the windowing system instead of merly providing a wrapper on top of a community supported one (I know QT is older than GTK but there were others before it).
The whole multiple UI systems would be fixed if QT was just made into a wrapper for GTK+ (the reverse would be inpossible because of both licensing and language binding/archetecture issues, although if it wasn't it would be a just as good)
I challenge Trolltech to do this. They would still be able to keep charging royalties to developers using their cross platform wrapper (which is what they advetise to be QT's greatest strength.
As for Qtopia, it has no open source competitors, so the only reasonable solution is to stomach it for the time being, but to have a UI that is owned by a company that seeks to make a profit by restricing it's use seems to me as an unacceptable future for an operating system. Hell even M$ doesn't charge money for people to compile closed source stuff on windows. It seems to me even more laughable that some people consider a UI that costs money for static linking or porting to other OS's as a suitable base library for a free OS like LINUX, it just has no future.
Personally I think you suffer from lack of perspective, every day there are people dying, not being fragged by a UT redeemer, not being killed by a water daemon in nethack, but running from buildings with skin on fire after a napalm attack, lying on twisted pavement with torn limbs waiting for death slowly to come longing for the relief from undiscribable pain, children years later writhing with the pain of lukimia caused by American depleted uranium rounds and not being treated because of embargoes..... and your governement wants to make this happen a little more often for a while. And you are worrying about what you can and can't do on your computer.
Personally, I would much rather live without a computer (I cirtainly would not use a paladium infested computer) than be horifically killed when a United States smart bomb ripped through my bomb shelter in an effort to get some cheap petrol for some twit in Ohio.
It saddens me to think that someone is so self obsessed that they don't give a shit about bombs, carcenogenic depleted uranium rounds and death to civilians but is more interested in some esoteric brand of freedom. Not freedom to live without fear of having ones country invaded, but freedom to run insecure binaries on ones computer.
Sure paladium is evil but pull your head out of your arse!
O.k. I am sorry to flame but you are missing the point... the point of mono is not really to provide an integraded, distributed, enterprise-level, cross-platform (insert more hype here) development paradigm for LINUX, Gnome, Apache or any other part of the open source movement.
The point of mono (or at least why I have it on my computer) is to take Microsoft's new flagship and favorite buzzword enriched toy, run it with open source and shove that right up 'em. It's just like hacking the X-Box, running your win apps under wine, having a more efficiant SMB (windows) networking layer than windows itself and adding NTFS support into the kernel! It builds open-source moral.
After saying that I wonder if maybe Ximian has a different impression of what mono should be for and is clenching their teeth worrying about this whole patent thing. But I see it as a spirit lifter for those in the open source movement. To show MS that we can fight them on the servers, we can fight them on the desktops, we can fight them in their own runtime environment, we will never surrender! (my apologies to Winston Churchill)
I for one are much more sick and tired by posters doing slashdot bashing on slashdot itself! To me, Slashdot is a site for the discussion of all things electronic, online and virtual (if you will excuse the buzzwords, they are sickening I know)
For now, the threat on peoples lives comes from both terrorists and the reckless United States Governement with their wars against defensless countries like Iraq, like you said. But these days the theme of slashdot is quite detached from real world suffering and distruction. Slashdot is news for nerds, a suppliment to the regular news to bring us things of particualar importance for net-dwellers. And for this special esoteric news the villins are not terrorists, not uncle sam, not faulty heat sheilds but those who want to change our environment (the net and our own computers) forever. People like Microsoft, the RIAA and legislators that want to turn information into something that is tightly monitored and unacessable even on ones own computers are what the slashdot community (the bulk of them) are most threatened by.
People come to slashdot. They insult it on the forums they created. They insult the bulk of the community by calling them repetitive. They use words like karma-burn to discribe their posts to make moderators feel guilty to give them the -1s they deserve and they dare to try and change it to fit them!
Slashdot is getting political in a way people give a damn about. It gets political in a way as its readers and community gives a damn about with the exception of those who consider it some matter of their vain pride that they attend it to mock their opinions in a medium created for them. If you want to see war, turn on the TV, there is death, poverty, flaming astronaughts, germ bombs, guncrazy preasidents threatening to use nukes. Then you can discuss them, with friends and family over dinner. You could join a political party, join some demonstration, write a letter to the newspaper or member of parlement, write an alegorical novel, take up sculpture and express yourself that way, become a vidgilante and linch someone, join a terrorist organisation, or you could even go as far as posting your conserns at a different website... there are plenty out there that would love to hear you opinions about "real" political issues. Even post to slashdot when they post their numorous stories about your beloved reality (the space shuttle was mentioned twice). Get political about something that people give a damn about, but don't stop us from getting political about things that people don't.
I agree that non-OSS projects have that sort of tiffs. Put Steve Jobs on a project and you KNOW either him or the other guy is on the way out!
Maybe after Matt Dillon has started his own Unix based system, and then possibly set up his own movie studio (two Matt Dillons in showbiz; now that WOULD be funny!) Then when time passes he can return to FreeBSD like Octavian returning to Rome and issue in a new era of sleak, curvy text interfaces and a tangerine coloured daemon.
Americas big buisinesses never presured our governement to send our boys to 'nam, It is America's governement that is cutting of trade to Iraq, robbing us of a valuable wheat export. And it is the American governement that forces Australia to lick rim for them or else. The only two countries that have pulled their tongue out of Uncle Sam's butt are North Korea and Iraq and look at George W threaten them with death as part of a diversionary tactic to cover up his own stupidity and incompitence with a wave of national patriotism. When those troops charge over the border from Kuait in a few weeks if Iraq does not kiss more arse it will be the governement slaughtering Iraqis not Coke, not GM, not even the dreaded Microsoft, but an elected body chosen by the American people.
It is this that causes the negative view of America. Arabs don't fly planes into buildings simply because they don't like American comertialism. Would you be prepared to take your own life for buisiness reasons?
It is these trade embargoes like against Iraq, against Cuba, against every country that dares to defy the United States. And it is the constant threat of invasion by the American army with a flurry of self rigtous rhetoric that the Australian government fears. Hell the American Governement has military bases inside of Australia with god knows what weapons of mass distruction (yes, America has them too). Out here it is kiss arse of die. If John Howard refuses to adopt American policys (like the DCMA) we may at any time be labled as a "rogue state" and part of the "Axis of Evil" and America may claim we have "weapons of mass distruction" and invade us unless they have proof that we have no weapons. Which is too bad because even if they don't find any weapons, that is not good enough, we would have to proove we had no weapons by showing them the weapons that we don't have. And if the weapons they do not turn up do not include all of the weapons they claim we have.... it will not show that they were wrong... it will show that we are hiding something.
You see the Australian government lives in fear. And your corperations have nothing to do with it.
Unless of course it is a poorly animated mouse with a one-dimentional charactor and a stupid highpitched voice singing.... then we wouldn't be able to listen to his singing until humanity has fully wiped itself off the planet or come to its sences.... which is not as bad as it seems given the nausia factor of most Disney stuff.
P.s. I am pretty sure elvis' music is still copyright... how else do you think Lisa Marie is making more than Elvis ever did? Do you think record companies just give her money out of the goodness of their heart so she can seduce celebrety husbands and blow on the church of scientology training courses?
10 years ago a 486 DX system could cost over $4000 grand
1 grand = $1,000 $4,000 grand = $4,000 * 1,000 = 4,000,000. Man, I hope you didn't buy a 486 in 1993 or you would have been ripped off big time, four million dollars for a pc? I could have got you 1,000 computers for that much!
The FX could probably render toy story in real time
Yes it could, hell, my 1997 vintage voodoo graphics could do that! (well close enough) But it would look crap because like all realtime game renderers (both hardwear and softwear) they both rely on timesaving approximations, simplifications etc. rather than real world effects. Toy story was done using a pain staking scanline rendering technique on 117 sun sparkstations with an average of three cpus in each over many months. That is why it is nice, warm and happy and not just the cold ugly crap you see pumped out of your video card. Because your video card uses hacks it is not as good.
You got to think that the pros that did the work on Golem for LOTR are fans of open source, it won't be long until those kinds of shaders and techniques will be available for game programmers.
Pixel shaders and techniques? You mean ray tracing, radiosity, scanline, etc! Not only have they got nothing to do with hardwear rendering tools (like the G-force FX) but they take minutes to do each frame even on the huge rendering clusters used to make movies. This makes these techniques totaly worthless for game playing. This is done wholy through softwear, it needs no linux driver and no two slot filling behemoths of cards. Also the tools used to render these sorts of things are almost exclusivly proprietry (except for a few like povray) and would not be able to be releaced even if the programmers were as open source mad as RMS simply because the studio would not let them.
I am sorry to get into semantics but really! It's not as bad as whining about spelling I guess.. talk to some mafia contacts and mod me down if you want but come on! movie rendering techniques on a gforce FX on your 4 million dollar 486?
In 3000 years, when archaologysts are digging up the pathetic remnants of our 21st century western society, they will come across some celluloid sheets with black and white body parts painted across the surface of the sheets. Soon they will realise that when they are piled up they form a happy little mouse.
The archaologysts will ponder "what is this mouse? I have seen it on hats, I have seen it on shirts, I have seen huge statues of it in the ruins of L.A. Anaheim, Paris and Tokyo. Is it a god? Why is it painted so often with it's limbs dissconected on transperant sheeting?"
They will have a lot of questions...
But I am sure they will never ask one question:
Is it o.k. if we copy this according to the Sonny Bono copyright extension act?
They will make a copy for every museum, a picture in every historical textbook. The mouse also will star prominantly in every historical epic created by the 51st century Cecil B.DeMiln equivilant (with not a cent going to the Walt Disney corperation nor Walt Disney's thawing head). And although historians will be sceptical, the average person will suspect that Mickey had _something_ to do with the building of the CN tower, statue of liberty and the channel tunnel.
As a Brit I can forgive you for your ignorence about how the Australian Foreign minestry works.
The Australian govenment has a long history of kissing arse here are some instances off the top of my head:
c.1890-1901 The colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and Queensland crawl to Queen Victoria to gain their independance. This involved fighting for her in the Boer War to show their allegience to the British Empire and naming two out of the six states after her.
1914-1918 Australians enlist in record numbers to help the British in WWI. The British demand that a british officer be in charge of the Australian troops in pretty much every battle they went into. In Galipolii, the British Officer accedently lands the Australian troops in the wrong place where they suffer heavier fatalities than any other battle Australian troops have been in to this date.
1945 Australia shifts its arse kissing efforts to the US
1964-1975 Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt declares that the Commonwealth of Australia go "all the way with LBJ (Lyndon Johnson)". This involved mass conscription to Vietnam simply because America Said it was a good idea.
2000 Coca-Cola(australia) decided that for the Sydney 2000 Olympics that the cola should taste more like American Coke (Australian Coke uses cane sugar while American Coke uses beet sugar due to availabity of the different sweeteners).
c2004 If Kasaa does not pay up, the Australian judicial system (which has a spine) will not care and just let them carry on happily. However the house of representitives (like the House of Commons or Congress) will somehow override the High Court and make them pay up or go to hell.
They call Australia the 51st state and that is why. It makes no difference if something was done in Australia or in the middle of Sacremento; the Calefornian courts can still do whatever the hell they like to a poor Australian company.
You provide a great example of why 5 900 000 000 out of the worlds 6.2 billion people hate Americans.
It is bad enough everyone in Mexico is stealing our work, now India
Stealing? I thought competing to do work in the cheapest and most efficient way was what your greedy capitalist ethos was all about. In case you havn't realised Mexican and Indian workers need food as well. You may not have realised how your corperations are colonising these countries and sending billions of dollars back to America
(e.g. Pepsi & Coke's recent war over the Indian market). To the average American it seems fitting that the easy jobs of expanding ones wealth through working in front of ones computer screen to make a product that generates profit from unethical EULAs, infinite reproductability and deliberate incompatibility while forigners work in american sweatshops, and as teenage prostitutes for American tourists.
To me those "because of third world labour I can't get a job" arguments are reminicent of the "because of niggers I can't get a job" arguments I hear from your countrymen, some of who's great grandfathers fought and died for the right to exploit an american underclass as late as the nineteenth century. Now that the slaves have been liberated you turn your greed and selfishness to the sweatshops in Shanghai and the redlight districts of Pnong Penn and Bankok. You expect them to work for you, you expect them to buy things from you, even things they produced themselves, however you vehemetly oppose people buying things off them, paying a just price for their labor, giving them money to trade with their own merchants, have their own entrepeneurs and own their own country.
p.s. Maybe you wouldn't need to worry about this sort of thing if you didn't make your poor starve in the street. Hell, even Cuba has a better welfare system than you.
Years of experiance has taught me that when I pass wind at least one person will inevidably sniff it.
However, my fart smells like anyone elses, I can simply blame it on my dog.
In North Korea's case (or India's, Pakistan's etc.) case, their blast will be loud, rumbly and devistating. However one nuke is pretty much like another unless you compare it with previously detonated weapons of the same model, which will not be possible with a one-of-a-kind prototype. All one has to do then is simply deny it.
A uranium bomb goes off or it doesn't. They could send a mine laying submarine down south with a bomb to muroroa, set a fuze, dump it and go home. If the seizmographs in Pyonyang pick up a tremour they start production and everyone will just blame the French (exept the french themselves who will blame Greenpeace or something and sink another boat). If it does not detonate the heavy uranium will sink to the bottom and iradiate some fish (Kim Il Jong won't give a damn) and they can just try again, it is really simple.
Therefore who realy cares who has supercomputers? It just protects some fish and means that the French won't be hated more than they already are.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I keep telling people, like in Schindlers list, Speilburg seemed to treat Schindler like a hero where he uses bribery to circumvent the laws that his government had put down.
And when those impudent wretches ousted Slobodan Milosovic, they were clearly in breach of Yucoslav law.
And what about the perpotrators of the French and the Russian Revolutions? Didn't they read that bit about not executing their rightful rulers?
And that goes to all the Mandelas, the Guvaras and the Gandhis out there, DO WHAT YOU ARE TOLD!
It's great to know that a product that so many hackers spent countless hours on (LINUX) is promoting a competing closed source proprietry OS.
Is it just me or does Linux promotion seem like a more appropriate use for Linux?
Microsoft -- get yo warez here!
Oh, heck! That was ment to be miniluv, not minitruth. Man my newspeak isn't up to par!
slashdot 4.4.03 reporting minitruth report undoubleplusgood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefilling
You need a password to get root access through telnet!
*ducks barrage of rotten fruit*
But seriously, and without the bad humor, it makes me wonder why everyone allways sees X as the bloated, non-scensical, anacronistic piece of junk that is holding LINUX/BSD back. Hell at least I can understand a XF86Conf-4 file (although the old style XF86Conf file is still rather infuriating).
"In MY house we obey the laws of thermodynamics" --Homer Simpson
STSF is either a replacement to XFT2 or pango (the gtk font layout library). If it is a replacement for XFT2 then it would not contact GTK at all, let alone change it enough to mean a fork. If it replaces pango, that would be a little more tricky, as pango direct contacts GTK, however the speed of Gnome portage to STSF would suggest that if it is a replacement to pango, the api is very similar and the only thing needed would be a few #ifdefs to iron over a few idosyncracys in the two apis.
To me it makes no difference, I write my programs in GTK, I do not touch the internals of X. Most of GTKs developers could claim similar. The UIs are made up of layers upon layers of libraries, only one of these layers would need to be rewritten, hopefully it will be a small one.
Don't get me wrong, I hate division, if I had the choice I would distroy this new standard, then I would force QT, TCL, Java, even Xaw to be displayed through GTK, then I would merge the BSDs, and send in the SA to beat up the XFree86 until they all get along, I would force everyone to drive on the left hand side of the road, GSM would reign supreme, I would make all those weird IBM mainframes use ASCII, I would see DVD+RW was adopted universally or ELSE, MSOffice files would be replaced by a real XML based format, ANYONE that mentioned "HTML 5" would be pronounced an enemy of the people and sent to the Gulag without trial. But I can't, I don't have that power, I don't even have a dictatorial mustache and a sad thing is that even though some people do have mustaches, nobody has the power to tell OSS developers what to do and nobody ever will.
All one has to do is remain positive, cope with the split, not get too passionant about one side or another and hope that one dissapears, hopefully within a year all the new #ifdefs in the code will become nothing but reminants of a time forgotten and we shall live happely with our finely rendered fonts and the victorious font management library shall remain buried and hidden down deep in X. Eventualy our grandchildren shall come and ask us what library was chosen, looking down at their fresh faces that have never been furroughed with the anguish of having to use windows, we will realise that we don't even remember.
You have not mirrored it on 127.0.0.1, I checked the link and nothing... I am so annoyed that I am going to set the slapper worm on the http server on that IP, yes 127.0.0.1 is going to die!
Why the heck is my system going mental? Why is my net slowing down? What's happening, is 127.0.0.1 counter attacking me? That does it I am going to DOS that server and see what it does to me! Right N.........
This one is full of helium, helium is a nobal gas and therefore does not burn. The Hindenburng (LZ-129) was full of hydrogen (although most of the burning that actually killed people was the frame and the cabin).
The hindenburg too was intended to be filled with helium, (hence its size increase over the Graf Zepplin, LZ-127). However the only country that had access to large enough quantities of helium was the US who fractionated it from natural gas (yes natural gas does contain helium). The united states forign department blocked the sale of the gas to Germany fearing it would be used in a military project. As a consiquence of the greater boyancy (hydrogen molecules are about half the mass of helium atoms) the zepplin was installed with extra rooms.
Ironically, the zepplin blew up in America as a result of the flammable hydrogen (although a helium blimp can still go up in flames), and as a consiquence all further exports on helium were authorised and the zepplin company put in an order for enough gas to fill the Graf Zepplin 2 (LZ-130) . However this had little affect on aviation because the zepplins wered decomissioned before the order was delivered.
Another more ironic thing is that the export of helium for a civilian aircraft was blocked, but IBM was still able to supply the punch card machines that orchestrated the haulocaust. But history is funny like that... go figure.
If talking about software (bugs) is so cool... why are nerds picked on so much?
I would much rather make a model destroyer, or anti-sub sea-king chopper... depth charges have been used for fishing for years because of their disrupting effects on fish's swim bladders (i.e. expanding bait, fishing with grenades), I could shoot more fish then you, and blow the crap out of your pathetic shitty submarine! What do you say about that smart guy?
I can't help thinking that if I was one of those "active kids" you know the ones... the ones that leave the house more than just to go to primary school, I would have either electrocuted myself with a toaster or drowned....
Basically I owe my life to my lazyness... sitting around karma whoring and trolling is the least thing I can do to repay my sense of idolness, god bless slashdot!
I also find it anoying that QT provides wrappers for MacOS' and Windows' existing UIs but on LINUX it creates it's own right down until it touches the windowing system instead of merly providing a wrapper on top of a community supported one (I know QT is older than GTK but there were others before it).
The whole multiple UI systems would be fixed if QT was just made into a wrapper for GTK+ (the reverse would be inpossible because of both licensing and language binding/archetecture issues, although if it wasn't it would be a just as good)
I challenge Trolltech to do this. They would still be able to keep charging royalties to developers using their cross platform wrapper (which is what they advetise to be QT's greatest strength.
As for Qtopia, it has no open source competitors, so the only reasonable solution is to stomach it for the time being, but to have a UI that is owned by a company that seeks to make a profit by restricing it's use seems to me as an unacceptable future for an operating system. Hell even M$ doesn't charge money for people to compile closed source stuff on windows. It seems to me even more laughable that some people consider a UI that costs money for static linking or porting to other OS's as a suitable base library for a free OS like LINUX, it just has no future.
Personally, I would much rather live without a computer (I cirtainly would not use a paladium infested computer) than be horifically killed when a United States smart bomb ripped through my bomb shelter in an effort to get some cheap petrol for some twit in Ohio.
It saddens me to think that someone is so self obsessed that they don't give a shit about bombs, carcenogenic depleted uranium rounds and death to civilians but is more interested in some esoteric brand of freedom. Not freedom to live without fear of having ones country invaded, but freedom to run insecure binaries on ones computer.
Sure paladium is evil but pull your head out of your arse!
The point of mono (or at least why I have it on my computer) is to take Microsoft's new flagship and favorite buzzword enriched toy, run it with open source and shove that right up 'em. It's just like hacking the X-Box, running your win apps under wine, having a more efficiant SMB (windows) networking layer than windows itself and adding NTFS support into the kernel! It builds open-source moral.
After saying that I wonder if maybe Ximian has a different impression of what mono should be for and is clenching their teeth worrying about this whole patent thing. But I see it as a spirit lifter for those in the open source movement. To show MS that we can fight them on the servers, we can fight them on the desktops, we can fight them in their own runtime environment, we will never surrender! (my apologies to Winston Churchill)
For now, the threat on peoples lives comes from both terrorists and the reckless United States Governement with their wars against defensless countries like Iraq, like you said. But these days the theme of slashdot is quite detached from real world suffering and distruction. Slashdot is news for nerds, a suppliment to the regular news to bring us things of particualar importance for net-dwellers. And for this special esoteric news the villins are not terrorists, not uncle sam, not faulty heat sheilds but those who want to change our environment (the net and our own computers) forever. People like Microsoft, the RIAA and legislators that want to turn information into something that is tightly monitored and unacessable even on ones own computers are what the slashdot community (the bulk of them) are most threatened by.
People come to slashdot. They insult it on the forums they created. They insult the bulk of the community by calling them repetitive. They use words like karma-burn to discribe their posts to make moderators feel guilty to give them the -1s they deserve and they dare to try and change it to fit them!
Slashdot is getting political in a way people give a damn about. It gets political in a way as its readers and community gives a damn about with the exception of those who consider it some matter of their vain pride that they attend it to mock their opinions in a medium created for them. If you want to see war, turn on the TV, there is death, poverty, flaming astronaughts, germ bombs, guncrazy preasidents threatening to use nukes. Then you can discuss them, with friends and family over dinner. You could join a political party, join some demonstration, write a letter to the newspaper or member of parlement, write an alegorical novel, take up sculpture and express yourself that way, become a vidgilante and linch someone, join a terrorist organisation, or you could even go as far as posting your conserns at a different website... there are plenty out there that would love to hear you opinions about "real" political issues. Even post to slashdot when they post their numorous stories about your beloved reality (the space shuttle was mentioned twice). Get political about something that people give a damn about, but don't stop us from getting political about things that people don't.
Maybe after Matt Dillon has started his own Unix based system, and then possibly set up his own movie studio (two Matt Dillons in showbiz; now that WOULD be funny!) Then when time passes he can return to FreeBSD like Octavian returning to Rome and issue in a new era of sleak, curvy text interfaces and a tangerine coloured daemon.
It is this that causes the negative view of America. Arabs don't fly planes into buildings simply because they don't like American comertialism. Would you be prepared to take your own life for buisiness reasons?
It is these trade embargoes like against Iraq, against Cuba, against every country that dares to defy the United States. And it is the constant threat of invasion by the American army with a flurry of self rigtous rhetoric that the Australian government fears. Hell the American Governement has military bases inside of Australia with god knows what weapons of mass distruction (yes, America has them too). Out here it is kiss arse of die. If John Howard refuses to adopt American policys (like the DCMA) we may at any time be labled as a "rogue state" and part of the "Axis of Evil" and America may claim we have "weapons of mass distruction" and invade us unless they have proof that we have no weapons. Which is too bad because even if they don't find any weapons, that is not good enough, we would have to proove we had no weapons by showing them the weapons that we don't have. And if the weapons they do not turn up do not include all of the weapons they claim we have.... it will not show that they were wrong... it will show that we are hiding something.
You see the Australian government lives in fear. And your corperations have nothing to do with it.
P.s. I am pretty sure elvis' music is still copyright... how else do you think Lisa Marie is making more than Elvis ever did? Do you think record companies just give her money out of the goodness of their heart so she can seduce celebrety husbands and blow on the church of scientology training courses?
1 grand = $1,000 $4,000 grand = $4,000 * 1,000 = 4,000,000. Man, I hope you didn't buy a 486 in 1993 or you would have been ripped off big time, four million dollars for a pc? I could have got you 1,000 computers for that much!
The FX could probably render toy story in real time
Yes it could, hell, my 1997 vintage voodoo graphics could do that! (well close enough) But it would look crap because like all realtime game renderers (both hardwear and softwear) they both rely on timesaving approximations, simplifications etc. rather than real world effects. Toy story was done using a pain staking scanline rendering technique on 117 sun sparkstations with an average of three cpus in each over many months. That is why it is nice, warm and happy and not just the cold ugly crap you see pumped out of your video card. Because your video card uses hacks it is not as good.
You got to think that the pros that did the work on Golem for LOTR are fans of open source, it won't be long until those kinds of shaders and techniques will be available for game programmers.
Pixel shaders and techniques? You mean ray tracing, radiosity, scanline, etc! Not only have they got nothing to do with hardwear rendering tools (like the G-force FX) but they take minutes to do each frame even on the huge rendering clusters used to make movies. This makes these techniques totaly worthless for game playing. This is done wholy through softwear, it needs no linux driver and no two slot filling behemoths of cards. Also the tools used to render these sorts of things are almost exclusivly proprietry (except for a few like povray) and would not be able to be releaced even if the programmers were as open source mad as RMS simply because the studio would not let them.
I am sorry to get into semantics but really! It's not as bad as whining about spelling I guess.. talk to some mafia contacts and mod me down if you want but come on! movie rendering techniques on a gforce FX on your 4 million dollar 486?
The archaologysts will ponder "what is this mouse? I have seen it on hats, I have seen it on shirts, I have seen huge statues of it in the ruins of L.A. Anaheim, Paris and Tokyo. Is it a god? Why is it painted so often with it's limbs dissconected on transperant sheeting?"
They will have a lot of questions...
But I am sure they will never ask one question:
Is it o.k. if we copy this according to the Sonny Bono copyright extension act?
They will make a copy for every museum, a picture in every historical textbook. The mouse also will star prominantly in every historical epic created by the 51st century Cecil B.DeMiln equivilant (with not a cent going to the Walt Disney corperation nor Walt Disney's thawing head). And although historians will be sceptical, the average person will suspect that Mickey had _something_ to do with the building of the CN tower, statue of liberty and the channel tunnel.
The Australian govenment has a long history of kissing arse here are some instances off the top of my head:
c.1890-1901 The colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and Queensland crawl to Queen Victoria to gain their independance. This involved fighting for her in the Boer War to show their allegience to the British Empire and naming two out of the six states after her.
1914-1918 Australians enlist in record numbers to help the British in WWI. The British demand that a british officer be in charge of the Australian troops in pretty much every battle they went into. In Galipolii, the British Officer accedently lands the Australian troops in the wrong place where they suffer heavier fatalities than any other battle Australian troops have been in to this date.
1945 Australia shifts its arse kissing efforts to the US
1964-1975 Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt declares that the Commonwealth of Australia go "all the way with LBJ (Lyndon Johnson)". This involved mass conscription to Vietnam simply because America Said it was a good idea.
2000 Coca-Cola(australia) decided that for the Sydney 2000 Olympics that the cola should taste more like American Coke (Australian Coke uses cane sugar while American Coke uses beet sugar due to availabity of the different sweeteners).
c2004 If Kasaa does not pay up, the Australian judicial system (which has a spine) will not care and just let them carry on happily. However the house of representitives (like the House of Commons or Congress) will somehow override the High Court and make them pay up or go to hell.
They call Australia the 51st state and that is why. It makes no difference if something was done in Australia or in the middle of Sacremento; the Calefornian courts can still do whatever the hell they like to a poor Australian company.
It is bad enough everyone in Mexico is stealing our work, now India
Stealing? I thought competing to do work in the cheapest and most efficient way was what your greedy capitalist ethos was all about. In case you havn't realised Mexican and Indian workers need food as well. You may not have realised how your corperations are colonising these countries and sending billions of dollars back to America (e.g. Pepsi & Coke's recent war over the Indian market). To the average American it seems fitting that the easy jobs of expanding ones wealth through working in front of ones computer screen to make a product that generates profit from unethical EULAs, infinite reproductability and deliberate incompatibility while forigners work in american sweatshops, and as teenage prostitutes for American tourists.
To me those "because of third world labour I can't get a job" arguments are reminicent of the "because of niggers I can't get a job" arguments I hear from your countrymen, some of who's great grandfathers fought and died for the right to exploit an american underclass as late as the nineteenth century. Now that the slaves have been liberated you turn your greed and selfishness to the sweatshops in Shanghai and the redlight districts of Pnong Penn and Bankok. You expect them to work for you, you expect them to buy things from you, even things they produced themselves, however you vehemetly oppose people buying things off them, paying a just price for their labor, giving them money to trade with their own merchants, have their own entrepeneurs and own their own country.
p.s. Maybe you wouldn't need to worry about this sort of thing if you didn't make your poor starve in the street. Hell, even Cuba has a better welfare system than you.
However, my fart smells like anyone elses, I can simply blame it on my dog.
In North Korea's case (or India's, Pakistan's etc.) case, their blast will be loud, rumbly and devistating. However one nuke is pretty much like another unless you compare it with previously detonated weapons of the same model, which will not be possible with a one-of-a-kind prototype. All one has to do then is simply deny it.
A uranium bomb goes off or it doesn't. They could send a mine laying submarine down south with a bomb to muroroa, set a fuze, dump it and go home. If the seizmographs in Pyonyang pick up a tremour they start production and everyone will just blame the French (exept the french themselves who will blame Greenpeace or something and sink another boat). If it does not detonate the heavy uranium will sink to the bottom and iradiate some fish (Kim Il Jong won't give a damn) and they can just try again, it is really simple.
Therefore who realy cares who has supercomputers? It just protects some fish and means that the French won't be hated more than they already are.