"I'm not aware of anybody benefiting from this open-sourcing, however, and this lack of benefits (from vendors being wrestled into releasing their "GPL-tainted" code) was my main point"
How about owners being able to modify their router firmware? There are _LOTS_ of mods for the WRT54G mainly because of this and the WRT54G enjoys part of its sales because it is so flexible.
"If more code was released under BSD-type license, we would've seen wider adoption."
If more code was released under BSD-type licenses, we would see a lot of proprietary software using such software and small contributions to the original, BSD licensed code, only where compatibility between the BSD core and their proprietary extensions is required.
GPL-style is an economic incentive for corporations to act nice (help others or don't sell your "enhanced" version). BSD is no such thing.
We are mostly discoverers, much less inventors. Every now and then we come up (in large numbers)
with stuff that nature has not yet thought of, but for the most part our 'inventions' are already
part of nature.
Says the man who arrived at his air-conditioned office using a four wheeled car powered by an internal combustion engine.
Yea, right. We got our inspiration on the myriad wild compressed-gas-heat-exchanging hydrocarbon-burning wheeled beast that roamed the fields of yore. And we used our Von Neumann silicon brains to refine those patterns we merely found in nature.
Good point.
Add to the list "about half the mass of the shuttle in shielding that could be used as propellant as far as you don't use too much of it".
They could use nuclear-thermal propulsion, but good luck with the paperwork necessary for flying a nuclear reactor that size into space.
Hell. _I_ would be worried having such a device going up on a shuttle. The failure-rate is way too high for that kind of stuff.
"So, an improvement on our current crop of politicians, then: creative *and* reluctant to blatantly violate laws."
The only reason he is reluctant to violate laws is because he doesn't get to write the laws himself.
Seriously - an evil genius is far worse situation than an evil incompetent.
Being that much stupid also prevents Bush from doing even more damage than he is doing. Someone as evil yet smarter than most people who try to stop him now and in a position to put law enforcement between him and them is, positively, scary.
I think that if they filled the cargo bay with some non-chemical thrusters it could, but most probably it would take a couple months to get there.
It would also be a quite remarkable achievement of engineering (building and powering it would not be trivial), stupidity (it's a shuttle, FFS), politics (for spending money on the shuttle) and pointlessness (it _is_ pointless to make a manned mission reach stationary orbit in months)
In 2001 I considered using bzlib to compress some data files in the Brazilian electronic voting system and, since we had to support older, 386-class hardware with little memory, we went the gzip route.
Later some Windows fanboy decided they should use.zip instead of.tgz for the files and someone else recoded that piece.
Consider we are not talking only desktop PCs, but low-end embedded and photographic equipment.
Not only he is unbelievably rich and powerful, but he is responsible for nearly every kind of almost-but-not-quite criminal corporate misconduct in the book and then inventing some. He recklessly and shamelessly exploits everyone and everything he can to benefit himself and the company he sees as an extention of himself.
And you want to give him, in addition to everything he already has, the position of commander of the armed forces.
If you can afford not to feel sitting on a wooden bench, why suffer?
If you can afford a Mac (I am not considering the various more traditional Unix flavors as family computers), why suffer through Windows? Extended exposure to its ugliness is known to impair taste - long-term Windows users really believe Vista is cool. What kind of brain-damage is that?
Those are the folks who install DVDs, neon and musical horns on their cars or drive to the grocery store in monster trucks equipped all that and christmas-tree lighting.
My original point was on the line that Vista may have shiny wheels, an airfoil, spoilers, a very powerful CD + amp and neons everywhere. Under all that make-up, it's a family sedan. It desperately cries out for attention, a cry derived from it's own long-standing feelings of inadequacy.
And a huge mountain of plain bad-taste.
The Mac, OTOH, looks like a Series 5 BMW - precise and spartan. Form serves purpose and using it is a fluid experience. You do not need to be aware of the tool unless you want it.
That is the difference between eye-candy for the sake of it and careful use of visual cues to convey information.
"It was hard to bite the bullet and give up my Windows standard theme. Now that I have though it makes OS X look like an afterthought."
Are sure you ever used a Mac before?
Well... I have. My main computer runs Linux and Gnome, but sitting next to it is an iMac running 10.4 and I can tell you every little bit of it transpires the attention Apple pays to detail. From the extreme elegance of Exposé and the graceful way it solves the ages-long problem of having too many windows - to the minimalism of the screen savers, everything is in the right place. It sure is not a computer for everyone, but for those who appreciate fine things, it's next to unbeatable.
On the other hand, everything in Vista screams "me too!". They are so desperate to look cool that it makes me feel uncomfortable. I tried Vista up to the final version and each and every time I felt less productive than I am under XP, so, the Windows box here will continue running XP.
Too bad X support under OSX is not stellar and there is no decent package manager that can take care of the whole system.
"Microsoft have a policy of not employing software engineers over 30 - apparently, according to Bill Gates, a software engineers skills peak at age 26, and goes downhill from then on."
That explains a lot - that's why Microsoft was so much more interesting in the 70s and 80s and became this dull and greedy nefarious entity in the 90s...
Re:Yeah, I've tried, but thats not the question.
on
NASA Fires Astronaut
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· Score: 1
I would bet she didn't want to be seen or identified. Not stopping helps with that.
While she may be completely nuts, she should be very smart. They don't employ monkeys in space missions since the 50s.
"Hey, doesn't the US have minimum sanity standards for officers in the armed services?"
Well. Considering the armed services must routinely employ violence (that's why they are "armed", after all), a small amount of insanity can be useful.
Being crazy may not be required, but it certainly helps.
I stand by my words - they did it to avoid bankruptcy. The sad fact is they failed miserably and not doing it would, maybe, succeed in making Commodore a more profitable company.
"This is the very reason why each permanent member of the UN Security Council holds veto power"
I would like to ask why those permanent members should be permanent and why they should have the veto power - I think the UN would function much better if all members had equal rights and equal representation.
The whole thing exists so we can decide conflicts with better means than the "who has more guns" method, so, it makes sense not to allow distortions like this.
Of course, any attempt to do it would face a couple vetoes, so, it will never be done.
If we do it right and colonize other worlds, nobody will have to leave Earth when the Sun expands (it will take a good couple million years to do it, anyway). Everyone will have left when the climate becomes unmanageable, long before full expansion, unless we develop some very, very fancy technology to shield the planet from the excess radiation, preserved for its historical importance.
By that time, if this is the only planet we have managed to colonize, we deserve to go extinct and leave the rest of the galaxy to more apt species.
I hope not. I just like mankind and I think we are worthy to be preserved.
If a killer asteroid were about to hit us in the next year, I would think so. Still, a couple months is a lot of time since we already have shuttle and Progress launch capacity plus a couple very good LEO launchers for smaller stuff, lots of nukes and the soviets have built at least one 50GT device, so, they know how to do it. It's not difficult to imagine a rocket-propelled asteroid-penetrator (grabs the asteroid and fires a rocket deep into it) that could neutralize a pile-of-rubble type and turn it into smaller pieces that would not be able to reach the surface. Also, a life-threatening deadline can work miracles in terms of budgets.
If we had more time - likely a couple decades - the greatest danger would be to slip on deadlines until we can no longer respond effectively to it.
Seriously, even a couple years from now we could try to do something without breaking a sweat.
The fact that Commodore did that (build and sell x86 boxes) to postpone its bankruptcy does not diminish this. It was sad then and it is sad now.
There was a time a company called Commodore distinguished itself from other computer makers, by designing and building great computers. I regret to tell you, but your PCIII-20 was not among them.
The IBM PC and its clones are responsible for the first mass extinction in the personal computer arena. Their proliferation spelled doom to a vast array of different and interesting architectures and resulted in the dullness of the current PC.
It's tragic the same brand used by excellent and original personal computers like the PET, VIC-20, C-64 and Amiga is now glued to x86 computers that still have some form of an ISA bus inside its chipset and whose processor still wakes up thinking it's an 8088 inside a IBM 5150 PC.
Folks with 16-bit PCs were bragging about their 16 out of 64 color EGA cards and single-tasking OSs when even the simplest the Amigas had 32-bit processors, 32 out of 4096 colors, PCM audio and a fully multi-tasking OS coupled with a GUI.
As for the "processor socket", there are people selling computers that go into passive backplanes. If you put the CPU and memory in a card, there is little reason why you would have to upgrade the rest of the computer when you change the CPU (you would have to scrap the card, anyway, but processors are intimately related to chipsets, so, it is to be expected.
Thete are some SoC (system on a chip) solutions out there too. Those incorporate the chipset (or most of it) into the CPU, so, it would be easier to build a trans-generational socket
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"I'm not aware of anybody benefiting from this open-sourcing, however, and this lack of benefits (from vendors being wrestled into releasing their "GPL-tainted" code) was my main point"
How about owners being able to modify their router firmware? There are _LOTS_ of mods for the WRT54G mainly because of this and the WRT54G enjoys part of its sales because it is so flexible.
Hell. I have a modded one on my office.
So, I am one who benefited from this.
You can take my garbage. Tuesdays.
"If more code was released under BSD-type license, we would've seen wider adoption."
If more code was released under BSD-type licenses, we would see a lot of proprietary software using such software and small contributions to the original, BSD licensed code, only where compatibility between the BSD core and their proprietary extensions is required.
GPL-style is an economic incentive for corporations to act nice (help others or don't sell your "enhanced" version). BSD is no such thing.
with stuff that nature has not yet thought of, but for the most part our 'inventions' are already
part of nature.
Says the man who arrived at his air-conditioned office using a four wheeled car powered by an internal combustion engine.
Yea, right. We got our inspiration on the myriad wild compressed-gas-heat-exchanging hydrocarbon-burning wheeled beast that roamed the fields of yore. And we used our Von Neumann silicon brains to refine those patterns we merely found in nature.
Wow. The man is a complete idiot.
Good point. Add to the list "about half the mass of the shuttle in shielding that could be used as propellant as far as you don't use too much of it". They could use nuclear-thermal propulsion, but good luck with the paperwork necessary for flying a nuclear reactor that size into space. Hell. _I_ would be worried having such a device going up on a shuttle. The failure-rate is way too high for that kind of stuff.
"So, an improvement on our current crop of politicians, then: creative *and* reluctant to blatantly violate laws."
The only reason he is reluctant to violate laws is because he doesn't get to write the laws himself.
Seriously - an evil genius is far worse situation than an evil incompetent.
Being that much stupid also prevents Bush from doing even more damage than he is doing. Someone as evil yet smarter than most people who try to stop him now and in a position to put law enforcement between him and them is, positively, scary.
I think that if they filled the cargo bay with some non-chemical thrusters it could, but most probably it would take a couple months to get there.
It would also be a quite remarkable achievement of engineering (building and powering it would not be trivial), stupidity (it's a shuttle, FFS), politics (for spending money on the shuttle) and pointlessness (it _is_ pointless to make a manned mission reach stationary orbit in months)
bzip2 is much more resource-intensive than gzip.
.zip instead of .tgz for the files and someone else recoded that piece.
In 2001 I considered using bzlib to compress some data files in the Brazilian electronic voting system and, since we had to support older, 386-class hardware with little memory, we went the gzip route.
Later some Windows fanboy decided they should use
Consider we are not talking only desktop PCs, but low-end embedded and photographic equipment.
Seriously, you want an evil genius as president?
Not only he is unbelievably rich and powerful, but he is responsible for nearly every kind of almost-but-not-quite criminal corporate misconduct in the book and then inventing some. He recklessly and shamelessly exploits everyone and everything he can to benefit himself and the company he sees as an extention of himself.
And you want to give him, in addition to everything he already has, the position of commander of the armed forces.
You gotta be kidding.
If you can afford not to feel sitting on a wooden bench, why suffer?
If you can afford a Mac (I am not considering the various more traditional Unix flavors as family computers), why suffer through Windows? Extended exposure to its ugliness is known to impair taste - long-term Windows users really believe Vista is cool. What kind of brain-damage is that?
Those are the folks who install DVDs, neon and musical horns on their cars or drive to the grocery store in monster trucks equipped all that and christmas-tree lighting.
Don't let it happen to your kids.
Agreed. Windows has all the elegance and comfort of a monster truck...
As for games and recording TV, that's why I have a Playstation and a DVR. My computers are for work, my couch is for TV and games.
And, as far as games are concerned, I would much rather go outside for a walk.
My original point was on the line that Vista may have shiny wheels, an airfoil, spoilers, a very powerful CD + amp and neons everywhere. Under all that make-up, it's a family sedan. It desperately cries out for attention, a cry derived from it's own long-standing feelings of inadequacy.
And a huge mountain of plain bad-taste.
The Mac, OTOH, looks like a Series 5 BMW - precise and spartan. Form serves purpose and using it is a fluid experience. You do not need to be aware of the tool unless you want it.
That is the difference between eye-candy for the sake of it and careful use of visual cues to convey information.
"It was hard to bite the bullet and give up my Windows standard theme. Now that I have though it makes OS X look like an afterthought."
Are sure you ever used a Mac before?
Well... I have. My main computer runs Linux and Gnome, but sitting next to it is an iMac running 10.4 and I can tell you every little bit of it transpires the attention Apple pays to detail. From the extreme elegance of Exposé and the graceful way it solves the ages-long problem of having too many windows - to the minimalism of the screen savers, everything is in the right place. It sure is not a computer for everyone, but for those who appreciate fine things, it's next to unbeatable.
On the other hand, everything in Vista screams "me too!". They are so desperate to look cool that it makes me feel uncomfortable. I tried Vista up to the final version and each and every time I felt less productive than I am under XP, so, the Windows box here will continue running XP.
Too bad X support under OSX is not stellar and there is no decent package manager that can take care of the whole system.
"Microsoft have a policy of not employing software engineers over 30 - apparently, according to Bill Gates, a software engineers skills peak at age 26, and goes downhill from then on."
That explains a lot - that's why Microsoft was so much more interesting in the 70s and 80s and became this dull and greedy nefarious entity in the 90s...
I would bet she didn't want to be seen or identified. Not stopping helps with that.
While she may be completely nuts, she should be very smart. They don't employ monkeys in space missions since the 50s.
"Hey, doesn't the US have minimum sanity standards for officers in the armed services?"
Well. Considering the armed services must routinely employ violence (that's why they are "armed", after all), a small amount of insanity can be useful.
Being crazy may not be required, but it certainly helps.
I stand by my words - they did it to avoid bankruptcy. The sad fact is they failed miserably and not doing it would, maybe, succeed in making Commodore a more profitable company.
"This is the very reason why each permanent member of the UN Security Council holds veto power"
I would like to ask why those permanent members should be permanent and why they should have the veto power - I think the UN would function much better if all members had equal rights and equal representation.
The whole thing exists so we can decide conflicts with better means than the "who has more guns" method, so, it makes sense not to allow distortions like this.
Of course, any attempt to do it would face a couple vetoes, so, it will never be done.
If we do it right and colonize other worlds, nobody will have to leave Earth when the Sun expands (it will take a good couple million years to do it, anyway). Everyone will have left when the climate becomes unmanageable, long before full expansion, unless we develop some very, very fancy technology to shield the planet from the excess radiation, preserved for its historical importance.
By that time, if this is the only planet we have managed to colonize, we deserve to go extinct and leave the rest of the galaxy to more apt species.
I hope not. I just like mankind and I think we are worthy to be preserved.
This seems to be an extremely pragmatic approach that could succeed.
Sometimes, I am afraid the human race might just win a collective Darwin Award.
"There is nothing we can do about it anyway"
If a killer asteroid were about to hit us in the next year, I would think so. Still, a couple months is a lot of time since we already have shuttle and Progress launch capacity plus a couple very good LEO launchers for smaller stuff, lots of nukes and the soviets have built at least one 50GT device, so, they know how to do it. It's not difficult to imagine a rocket-propelled asteroid-penetrator (grabs the asteroid and fires a rocket deep into it) that could neutralize a pile-of-rubble type and turn it into smaller pieces that would not be able to reach the surface. Also, a life-threatening deadline can work miracles in terms of budgets.
If we had more time - likely a couple decades - the greatest danger would be to slip on deadlines until we can no longer respond effectively to it.
Seriously, even a couple years from now we could try to do something without breaking a sweat.
I remember them.
The fact that Commodore did that (build and sell x86 boxes) to postpone its bankruptcy does not diminish this. It was sad then and it is sad now.
There was a time a company called Commodore distinguished itself from other computer makers, by designing and building great computers. I regret to tell you, but your PCIII-20 was not among them.
The IBM PC and its clones are responsible for the first mass extinction in the personal computer arena. Their proliferation spelled doom to a vast array of different and interesting architectures and resulted in the dullness of the current PC.
It's tragic the same brand used by excellent and original personal computers like the PET, VIC-20, C-64 and Amiga is now glued to x86 computers that still have some form of an ISA bus inside its chipset and whose processor still wakes up thinking it's an 8088 inside a IBM 5150 PC.
If you really wanto to do something from scratch, the first thing to do is to create a universe. That's no trivial task.
OK... Let's rephrase that:
Folks with 16-bit PCs were bragging about their 16 out of 64 color EGA cards and single-tasking OSs when even the simplest the Amigas had 32-bit processors, 32 out of 4096 colors, PCM audio and a fully multi-tasking OS coupled with a GUI.
As for the "processor socket", there are people selling computers that go into passive backplanes. If you put the CPU and memory in a card, there is little reason why you would have to upgrade the rest of the computer when you change the CPU (you would have to scrap the card, anyway, but processors are intimately related to chipsets, so, it is to be expected.
Thete are some SoC (system on a chip) solutions out there too. Those incorporate the chipset (or most of it) into the CPU, so, it would be easier to build a trans-generational socket