Usually I'd be agreeing with you except that this rumor actually comes from Lucas' mouth. Most rumors like this are just some guy hearing from some guy who knows a guy that delivers food to Lucasfilms.
I saw the clip that Travolta showed on The Tonight Show and unless he chose the worst scene in the whole movie to show, this movie looks like it's going to suck and suck big-time. As one memorable post on AICN said, Battlefield Earth looks like it could be the Howard The Duck of the year 2000.:) It kind of reminds me of The Postman in that it's a big star's pet project that just didn't turn out well. Of course it's not out yet so I could be wrong but from the clips I've seen and script reviews I've read, I'm not holding out much hope.
And about the size of the book, the movie is focusing on only the first half of the book. Plans are in the works to make the second half of the book if this one does well.
Didn't you learn anything from the Futurama episode with the crazed robot Santa?
I guess not everybody watches Futurama but they had an episode with a robot Santa that went out of control a long time before and ever since then, everybody ran inside before night on Christmas so they wouldn't be killed by the robot. It was a pretty funny episode if I remember correctly.
As usual, those of us who live in New Mexico will have to be behind everybody else on this. According to my Ventana (member's TVGuide for KNME, our PBS affiliate) we won't be seeing this show until April 24th. grrrr.
I wonder if this is because KNME is a poor station and can't afford to buy the first-run shows? I know that's how some movie houses have to do things, does anybody know if buying PBS shows works like this also?
I wonder why people are always confusing Jeremy Allison with Andrew Tridgell?
Andrew is the one in Australia, Jeremy is from England.
In person a lot of people mess them up because of the accents but in print, why does this happen? Not to knock the people who asked Jeremy about 'down under,' I just think it's funny that it happens so often.
Q: But LEGO CAD isn't even optimized for 32-bit Windows 95 operation. Why not? A: As a LEGO Dacta product, LEGO CAD was developed primarily for the educational market. As developers, we were faced with producing a program which would run on everything from MAC 68040 machines to Windows 95 and beyond, in a limited amount of time, on a fixed budget.
I really appreciate a company that would explain why the program is slow and un-optimized in the FAQ. Hopefully this program will sell pretty well so they can devote the resources to updating it. It definately looks worth the effort.
I have a friend at SGI that said SGI's bid for this was almost at cost and it was like $1 million. IBM is losing a lot of money on this deal but they get the publicity and the fact that all the geeks at UNM will see big blue's logo all over it.
Also, the cost of the boxes is almost unimportant with something like this, you have to take into account the actual construction of the network (usually the most time-consuming part of any super computer) and the main cost is the support contract. You have to have people available to fix this guy on a moment's notice whenever it breaks.
It's a tad more complicated than that. Our government has allowed USWest to totally screw up the data infrastructure in this state. USWest owes NM over $50 million they made illegally over their profit cap. If the state had the guts to get that money, it would do a lot for a lot of small businesses without having to do anything to the tax code. Our phone lines are barely good enough for voice in most parts of the state and getting any kind of good bandwidth has been ridiculously expensive until about the last 3 months. We're also one of 3 states that charge tax on consumer services, as was mentioned in the article. If it were a level playing field here I'd be right there with you but the fact is that it's not. Also, it's not like we'd be the first state to help out online businesses, many other states do it and it's worked wonders.
We've had quite a bit of discussion here in New Mexico recently about this very topic. The Mayor of Albuquerque recently gave a speech blaming the internet for a 3% loss in state tax revenue (it turned out that the state tax revenue actually grew by 3% but the projections were 6% so he called that a loss). Since then, many people have been complaining about the net's influence on our state since we're pretty poor overall. I think I'm going to print out and mail this to those people in charge here, just to shine a little truth on the hysteria.
On a semi-related topic, is it only in New Mexico that people completely neglect the idea of helping businesses get on the net in order to bring money into the area? It seems that tax breaks or some sort of help in getting local businesses on the web would be the best plan, that way the cost of the item comes into your area, not just the tax. Everytime somebody here talks about the internet, they make it seem like some sort of foreign entity that nobody here can be a part of. This state has that sort of attitude about a lot of topics so I was wondering whether this was just us or prevalent in other parts of the country/world.
Actually, until recently the tobacco companies wouldn't even admit that the product was addicting, resulting in millions of people using a product they were assured would not addict them. I'm not so sure that they are forced by law to talk about addiction actually. The industry has had "warning" labels in place for years talking about the risks but never once mentioning addiction. These labels in fact have only served to insulate the industry from lawsuits because just as you say "consumers know it." Cigarettes are physically addicting, meaning that is physically difficult to quit, not everybody just can. Some people quit in a weekend, some people have to smoke through their traceotomy (sp?) tubes in their necks because they are so addicted. Saying no is pretty easy now that we know what's what but not everybody has always had the same information we have. Millions of packs of cigarettes were given out during both World Wars to soldiers and the government told them it was okay to smoke even though the industry had knowledge that was not the case. The industry has also targetted young people with high caliber ad campaigns designed to hook those kids who are most likely to succumb to peer pressure and who have not yet been fully aware of the risks of smoking. It would be great if everything were real black-and-white like you see it and the government never had to get involved but in reality, there are situations that are more complicated than that.
Starting smoking is a choice, once they start most people can't quit. That's the difference. The tobacco companies promote (very effectively) a product that is physically addictive. Nintendo products hook you when you're young but they don't make it nigh-impossible to stop when you've played for too long. As soon as the tobacco industry makes all of it's products non-addicting I'll be right there with you saying it's a choice and they aren't at fault if you die, until then, they are absolutely responsible.
I guess it's just whatever you have experience with. I always say 'Grandpa' when trying to exemplify the "average user" but I guess most people have more female relations that aren't computer literate.
I don't think it's exclusive to OSS people either, just about anybody who wants to explain complicated things uses a "Relative So-and-so" name. I'd imagine it also comes from the old mentality of thinking women couldn't do anything except cooking and cleaning. Now, we say women can't understand computers instead of saying they can't understand cars or something like that.
It strikes me as somewhat strange that are very few posts on this thread talking about the update to the story, which was submitted many hours ago. A flood of posts came right after the story was posted, some doing the usual juvenile 'I know nothing about this case but I hate this squatter anyway' thing and some actually advocating waiting until the whole story was out. Now it seems that the whole story is out and nobody wants to talk about it. Is Theo de Raat such a beloved figure that nobody wants to recognize that he seems to have acted like an ass in this matter? Of course I have little information besides Theo's letter and the response but it seems like an apology is in order from both Theo and the Slashdot crew. I hate to think that/. will become a place that posts anything by an Open Source advocate even when it turns out to be a personal vendetta or something else of that sort.
Of course I hope that this post will not be moderated down but my karma can take it and I had to say something so if you feel the need to mark me down, feel free, just please don't do it because I said Slashdot isn't perfect or that Theo might be human.
The only ones I've used are nap, gnome-napster, and gnapster. My personal favorite is gnapster, it's really professional and works perfectly for me. I've only used the windows client 1 or 2 times but it didn't impress me half as much as gnapster.
I never really understood what the big uproar was about this patent, we all know there have been stupider ones out there. I remember the first time I saw the 1-click thing, it was really cool and I'd never seen it before in years of net shopping (that doesn't mean they were the first, it was just the first I'd seen). Sure it might be somewhat obvious in hindsight but what isn't? What casts a shadow over Amazon's intent with the 1-click patent is their recent patent on affiliate programs. I was a member of the CDNow affiliate program before Amazon had anything resembling an affiliate system. Bezos would be very hard pressed to explain the patenting of affiliate programs in the same way he explained the 1-click patent and it makes me even more suspicious of their motives.
I think the way you get privacy without having the government involved in every transaction of personal information is to have laws regulating disclosure of all personal information transactions. When companies are forced to tell you who they're selling your information to it becomes possible for people to make informed decisions about who they want to give information to and who they don't. That makes privacy a commodity with measurable financial risks and rewards attatched to it for companies to look at. Until not selling my information becomes worth more than not selling it, we'll have no real privacy.
I can't believe how hard it is to get people to hear this argument. No higher court has ever found that the NRA's interpretation of the 2nd amendment is what the framers meant but that gets almost zero air time during debates on gun control. Even people who are for gun control talk about it as if an amendment to the Constitution is needed even though that would only confuse things further.
I have to give it to the NRA though, they are right up there with the tobacco industry and politicians in their ability to snow the American public with ad campaigns.
I've always thought this was the way to go. Censorware is not going to go away and the only way to get stuff that actually works is to do it open. My idea was to have the list of blocked sites on a website that the programs download periodically. This list would be not only viewable by the public, people would be able to add links to the list. The list of links would then be voted on by site visitors according to their "smut" rating or something and if a librarian wanted to filter only stuff rated above +2 on the smut-o-meter they could. This would make it similar to the slashdot forum moderation, the sites that are blatantly adult-only would get rated that way and some shmoe's student homepage would get off the list where it belongs.
"They have found a valuable resource that is growing with content every second. There are far worse places to be, and to each his own."
'to each his own' is not a phrase a lot of people tend to use I'm afraid. While you and I and it seems most other people in the/. community might be content to let people do their own thing in life and not bother them about it, there's a huge number of people in the world who like nothing better than to but in on other people's lives for no other reason than that other life is different than their's is.
I saw this report too. It took me longer to explain to my dad why they were wrong than they spent on their "report." I'm used to local newscasters not having even a hint of a clue but the inaccuracy of that ABCNews report was shocking.
There's been a ton of discussion on the NANOG mailing list about these attacks and it seems to be the general consensus that these attacks didn't use source spoofing. It was just a huge amount of traffic from many different places around the net. The way most of these attacks work is the perp(s) crack a system to use as the home base of the attack and run scripts on that machine to find other machines to crack and park the dDoS daemons on. This way they just have tons of machines throwing traffic at the victim and since it all looks like real traffic (ie: it's not spoofed), it all gets through until they start blocking specific addresses at the edge of the network.
This is not to say that disabling source spoofing on every router in the world wouldn't be a great great thing but it wouldn't have helped in these cases.
I think jwz buying this club is one of the first of what I believe will be a lot of now rich geeks doing a lot of Big weird things with their money. There's only so many cars and houses you can buy before doing something Big becomes the only thing to do with all the money.
Well, you could always save it but who wants to do that?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Usually I'd be agreeing with you except that this rumor actually comes from Lucas' mouth. Most rumors like this are just some guy hearing from some guy who knows a guy that delivers food to Lucasfilms.
I saw the clip that Travolta showed on The Tonight Show and unless he chose the worst scene in the whole movie to show, this movie looks like it's going to suck and suck big-time. As one memorable post on AICN said, Battlefield Earth looks like it could be the Howard The Duck of the year 2000. :) It kind of reminds me of The Postman in that it's a big star's pet project that just didn't turn out well. Of course it's not out yet so I could be wrong but from the clips I've seen and script reviews I've read, I'm not holding out much hope.
And about the size of the book, the movie is focusing on only the first half of the book. Plans are in the works to make the second half of the book if this one does well.
Didn't you learn anything from the Futurama episode with the crazed robot Santa?
I guess not everybody watches Futurama but they had an episode with a robot Santa that went out of control a long time before and ever since then, everybody ran inside before night on Christmas so they wouldn't be killed by the robot. It was a pretty funny episode if I remember correctly.
As usual, those of us who live in New Mexico will have to be behind everybody else on this. According to my Ventana (member's TVGuide for KNME, our PBS affiliate) we won't be seeing this show until April 24th. grrrr.
I wonder if this is because KNME is a poor station and can't afford to buy the first-run shows? I know that's how some movie houses have to do things, does anybody know if buying PBS shows works like this also?
I wonder why people are always confusing Jeremy Allison with Andrew Tridgell?
Andrew is the one in Australia, Jeremy is from England.
In person a lot of people mess them up because of the accents but in print, why does this happen? Not to knock the people who asked Jeremy about 'down under,' I just think it's funny that it happens so often.
The UNM sports teams are The Lobos, which is Los Lobos in Spanish. New Mexico has a large Hispanic population so they were just trying to fit in.
:)
But the band was the first thing I thought of too and I live here.
Q: But LEGO CAD isn't even optimized for 32-bit Windows 95 operation. Why not?
A: As a LEGO Dacta product, LEGO CAD was developed primarily for the educational market. As developers, we were faced with producing a program which would run on everything from MAC 68040 machines to Windows 95 and beyond, in a limited amount of time, on a fixed budget.
I really appreciate a company that would explain why the program is slow and un-optimized in the FAQ. Hopefully this program will sell pretty well so they can devote the resources to updating it. It definately looks worth the effort.
I have a friend at SGI that said SGI's bid for this was almost at cost and it was like $1 million. IBM is losing a lot of money on this deal but they get the publicity and the fact that all the geeks at UNM will see big blue's logo all over it.
Also, the cost of the boxes is almost unimportant with something like this, you have to take into account the actual construction of the network (usually the most time-consuming part of any super computer) and the main cost is the support contract. You have to have people available to fix this guy on a moment's notice whenever it breaks.
It's a tad more complicated than that. Our government has allowed USWest to totally screw up the data infrastructure in this state. USWest owes NM over $50 million they made illegally over their profit cap. If the state had the guts to get that money, it would do a lot for a lot of small businesses without having to do anything to the tax code. Our phone lines are barely good enough for voice in most parts of the state and getting any kind of good bandwidth has been ridiculously expensive until about the last 3 months. We're also one of 3 states that charge tax on consumer services, as was mentioned in the article. If it were a level playing field here I'd be right there with you but the fact is that it's not. Also, it's not like we'd be the first state to help out online businesses, many other states do it and it's worked wonders.
We've had quite a bit of discussion here in New Mexico recently about this very topic. The Mayor of Albuquerque recently gave a speech blaming the internet for a 3% loss in state tax revenue (it turned out that the state tax revenue actually grew by 3% but the projections were 6% so he called that a loss). Since then, many people have been complaining about the net's influence on our state since we're pretty poor overall. I think I'm going to print out and mail this to those people in charge here, just to shine a little truth on the hysteria.
On a semi-related topic, is it only in New Mexico that people completely neglect the idea of helping businesses get on the net in order to bring money into the area? It seems that tax breaks or some sort of help in getting local businesses on the web would be the best plan, that way the cost of the item comes into your area, not just the tax. Everytime somebody here talks about the internet, they make it seem like some sort of foreign entity that nobody here can be a part of. This state has that sort of attitude about a lot of topics so I was wondering whether this was just us or prevalent in other parts of the country/world.
Actually, until recently the tobacco companies wouldn't even admit that the product was addicting, resulting in millions of people using a product they were assured would not addict them. I'm not so sure that they are forced by law to talk about addiction actually. The industry has had "warning" labels in place for years talking about the risks but never once mentioning addiction. These labels in fact have only served to insulate the industry from lawsuits because just as you say "consumers know it." Cigarettes are physically addicting, meaning that is physically difficult to quit, not everybody just can. Some people quit in a weekend, some people have to smoke through their traceotomy (sp?) tubes in their necks because they are so addicted.
Saying no is pretty easy now that we know what's what but not everybody has always had the same information we have. Millions of packs of cigarettes were given out during both World Wars to soldiers and the government told them it was okay to smoke even though the industry had knowledge that was not the case. The industry has also targetted young people with high caliber ad campaigns designed to hook those kids who are most likely to succumb to peer pressure and who have not yet been fully aware of the risks of smoking. It would be great if everything were real black-and-white like you see it and the government never had to get involved but in reality, there are situations that are more complicated than that.
Starting smoking is a choice, once they start most people can't quit. That's the difference. The tobacco companies promote (very effectively) a product that is physically addictive. Nintendo products hook you when you're young but they don't make it nigh-impossible to stop when you've played for too long. As soon as the tobacco industry makes all of it's products non-addicting I'll be right there with you saying it's a choice and they aren't at fault if you die, until then, they are absolutely responsible.
Yes, the tobacco companies should be paying but I don't think Nintendo should be paying for this for one reason:
:)
I've played Mario Party, and it's not addictive.
I guess it's just whatever you have experience with. I always say 'Grandpa' when trying to exemplify the "average user" but I guess most people have more female relations that aren't computer literate.
I don't think it's exclusive to OSS people either, just about anybody who wants to explain complicated things uses a "Relative So-and-so" name. I'd imagine it also comes from the old mentality of thinking women couldn't do anything except cooking and cleaning. Now, we say women can't understand computers instead of saying they can't understand cars or something like that.
It strikes me as somewhat strange that are very few posts on this thread talking about the update to the story, which was submitted many hours ago. A flood of posts came right after the story was posted, some doing the usual juvenile 'I know nothing about this case but I hate this squatter anyway' thing and some actually advocating waiting until the whole story was out. Now it seems that the whole story is out and nobody wants to talk about it. Is Theo de Raat such a beloved figure that nobody wants to recognize that he seems to have acted like an ass in this matter? Of course I have little information besides Theo's letter and the response but it seems like an apology is in order from both Theo and the Slashdot crew. I hate to think that /. will become a place that posts anything by an Open Source advocate even when it turns out to be a personal vendetta or something else of that sort.
Of course I hope that this post will not be moderated down but my karma can take it and I had to say something so if you feel the need to mark me down, feel free, just please don't do it because I said Slashdot isn't perfect or that Theo might be human.
The only ones I've used are nap, gnome-napster, and gnapster. My personal favorite is gnapster, it's really professional and works perfectly for me. I've only used the windows client 1 or 2 times but it didn't impress me half as much as gnapster.
I never really understood what the big uproar was about this patent, we all know there have been stupider ones out there. I remember the first time I saw the 1-click thing, it was really cool and I'd never seen it before in years of net shopping (that doesn't mean they were the first, it was just the first I'd seen). Sure it might be somewhat obvious in hindsight but what isn't? What casts a shadow over Amazon's intent with the 1-click patent is their recent patent on affiliate programs. I was a member of the CDNow affiliate program before Amazon had anything resembling an affiliate system. Bezos would be very hard pressed to explain the patenting of affiliate programs in the same way he explained the 1-click patent and it makes me even more suspicious of their motives.
I think the way you get privacy without having the government involved in every transaction of personal information is to have laws regulating disclosure of all personal information transactions. When companies are forced to tell you who they're selling your information to it becomes possible for people to make informed decisions about who they want to give information to and who they don't. That makes privacy a commodity with measurable financial risks and rewards attatched to it for companies to look at. Until not selling my information becomes worth more than not selling it, we'll have no real privacy.
I can't believe how hard it is to get people to hear this argument. No higher court has ever found that the NRA's interpretation of the 2nd amendment is what the framers meant but that gets almost zero air time during debates on gun control. Even people who are for gun control talk about it as if an amendment to the Constitution is needed even though that would only confuse things further.
I have to give it to the NRA though, they are right up there with the tobacco industry and politicians in their ability to snow the American public with ad campaigns.
I've always thought this was the way to go. Censorware is not going to go away and the only way to get stuff that actually works is to do it open. My idea was to have the list of blocked sites on a website that the programs download periodically. This list would be not only viewable by the public, people would be able to add links to the list. The list of links would then be voted on by site visitors according to their "smut" rating or something and if a librarian wanted to filter only stuff rated above +2 on the smut-o-meter they could. This would make it similar to the slashdot forum moderation, the sites that are blatantly adult-only would get rated that way and some shmoe's student homepage would get off the list where it belongs.
"They have found a valuable resource that is growing with content every second. There are far worse places to be, and to each his own."
/. community might be content to let people do their own thing in life and not bother them about it, there's a huge number of people in the world who like nothing better than to but in on other people's lives for no other reason than that other life is different than their's is.
'to each his own' is not a phrase a lot of people tend to use I'm afraid. While you and I and it seems most other people in the
I saw this report too. It took me longer to explain to my dad why they were wrong than they spent on their "report." I'm used to local newscasters not having even a hint of a clue but the inaccuracy of that ABCNews report was shocking.
Anybody making cables without at least some sort of tester deserves to have to spend a weekend searching for a bad cable. :)
There's been a ton of discussion on the NANOG mailing list about these attacks and it seems to be the general consensus that these attacks didn't use source spoofing. It was just a huge amount of traffic from many different places around the net. The way most of these attacks work is the perp(s) crack a system to use as the home base of the attack and run scripts on that machine to find other machines to crack and park the dDoS daemons on. This way they just have tons of machines throwing traffic at the victim and since it all looks like real traffic (ie: it's not spoofed), it all gets through until they start blocking specific addresses at the edge of the network.
This is not to say that disabling source spoofing on every router in the world wouldn't be a great great thing but it wouldn't have helped in these cases.
I think jwz buying this club is one of the first of what I believe will be a lot of now rich geeks doing a lot of Big weird things with their money. There's only so many cars and houses you can buy before doing something Big becomes the only thing to do with all the money.
:)
Well, you could always save it but who wants to do that?