Oh, baby! This is cool. My old BBS is on here, my friend's BBS that inspired me to make mine is on here (err, that's rather glorified-- "I wanna start a BBS. I really wish I had enough money for another line" and two years later, with my vision of BBS perfection almost forgotten, "Well damnit, if he can afford another line, so can I!")!
I may not be insightful or interesting right now, but I do want to publically state that my ego is stroked. Now I'm waiting for somebody to cut me down and remind me how pointlessly insignificant this is, and how it's actually rather pathetic to be excited by such things. Alas...
And, for the record, I miss FIDONet... 1:105/40.14? Maybe? And later, the BBS was 1:105/300-something, I think, though I believe I kept/40.14 just for the hell of it...
I'd love to start-up the WWW-equivilent of a BBS, with door games et al, but other web-games always seem so... webish... and I just don't like it. (And uhh, vinyl sounds better than reality, though not as good as one of those old funky cylinder phonographs) And I wouldn't have the joy of a file area (what would be the point?). A usenet gateway would be just stupid. If you wanna "chat with the sysop", use AIM or ICQ or something. Things just seem so dead these days. I might as well kill myself...
Personally, I hope the "Internet" fails compeletly and it we go back to the good ol' days of Archie and Gopher, bring back mosaic!
About three days after the death of the internet (it would have been the day, but it took a bit to learn why Slashdot wouldn't load):
Señor Budda Elf Duder: Lesse, I'll stick the archie server on 192.168.0.1 and the gopher one on 192.168.0.2, use my 56k to log into 192.168.0.3, and...
Why do I have turn 5 knobs and push 4 buttons to make my home theater receiver/tv switch from dss to ps2?
You do?
Why do 90% of VCR functions only come on the remote, especially important stuff, like switch to the aux video source?
Because it's cheaper...
why does every piece of software come with crappy default settings?
That depends...
A: The author wants the most popular options (regardless of how they interact) enabled and the blandest, least-offensive, most generic defaults possible.
B: The author wants defaults that make them money. If there is an annoying new "feature" that is either a selling point or a lame attempt to get information/money/whatever out of poeple (somehow), it gets enabled, even if newborn chimps can understand just how doomed the feature is even after being dropped on their head and cut in fifths.
why are we stuck with crappy interoperatability between anything? DV vs. D8mm, firewire vs. whatever, ide vs. scsi.. you name it...
What exactly are you looking for, there...? VHS-C?:)
i have a pda, cell phone, pager, email, etc... but for some reason, getting them all to work together in a synchronous, efficient manner is impossible, unless you of course get all your services from the same company, and who wants that?
I repeat, what are you looking for? I can sort of see the usefulness of getting your cell phone to dial up something in an address book on a pda once you've found the number, but it's not much of an increase in convenience (actually dialing a number isn't mind-numbingly difficult, to say the least). And you'd think a cell phone should make a decent pager as well (although having both at once seems like the on-the-go version of using your answering machine to screen your calls, or something). What is so wrong with these devices not communicating? I don't own any of them, so, umm, anyway.
I know I'm generalizing, but these 'engineers and scientists' are the same jerks who've been pushing shitty technology down our throats... if all engineers and scientists contributed to what makes sense and push good technology instead of market-speak, we'd would have had beta vcr's, be running linux, and stupid shit like DMCA/UCITA wouldn't exist...
Err, not that companies didn't do their darndest to manipulate the markets, but it wasn't a bunch of engineers that decided to buy more BETA VCR's and tapes than VHS VCR's and tapes... And so on.
Why focus on the hardware when, really, all the interesting stuff is in the software?
All the money is made in software, too, though. *ALL* the money, AFAIK. If the software doesn't support their platform, they lose on the hardware. It may not be interesting, but *somebody* has to make the hardware, and Nintendo's been doing that for a while now. Nintendo is simply trying to keep the same business model that made them big after the multi-platform spew of crap that happened in the first half of the '80's which critically wounded the industry at the time...
Yamauchi is right. Consoles aren't like appliances. Maytag doesn't make money selling you the clothes or food that go with your appliances.
There's nothing wrong with Mozilla taking as long as it has, but they (meaning either "Netscape" or "those guys over there at the big congolmerate") really should have released _something_. I hate to actually defend the concept of marketing (remember that department? the one that tells you to hurry it up, resulting in buggy crap?), but things really would have worked out better if there were two development teams, one producing Mozilla as we know it, and the other producing what everybody else here is whining about: A decent, modern browser that says "v5.0" on it somewhere-- Something to keep the world's attention 'till the real product, Mozilla, comes out.
Regardless of the reality of the product (or at this point the possibility of the end-product), long-running projects like Mozilla tend to reach a point where, no matter how good they are when they finally come out, there is a good chance they will be forgotten and left in the dust (and eventually become the software equivilent of a cult horror movie-- software used almost exclusively by the geek population).
The primary difference-of-opinion in all this is, though, releated to Mozilla's corporate scholarship: As an open-source program, there isn't any reason to lose faith in it. When it comes, it may very well be a fantastic browser. But since it's competing against Microsoft, on it's platform, and for the "regular" users, its success or failure is much more dependant on things like marketing (well, that and the tea.. and the fact that only geeks--and not all geeks for that matter--consider things like "turn javascript off" an acceptable response to "Netscape crashes a lot").
Err, and I'd just like to add that I didn't intend to make it sound like the gaming world revolved entirely around Sierra up until (but not including) KQ7.:)
Hmm. And now I'm feeling nostalgic. What should I play? Space Quest 3? Zork? 7th Guest? Maybe I should pull out a thesaurus (and a dictionary to make sure I spelled "thesaurus" right).
And come to think about it, I wonder what the thesaurus has to say about the word "thesaurus".
And how many more stupid FidoNET taglines can I rip-off to waste time until I go to work?
I miss that portion of the early '90's where I thought it was still the '80's.
Actually, up until (but not including) King's Quest 7, the graphical parser (SCI?) wasn't at all mindless. In the games like KQ6, nearly *everything* you clicked on could do something (often killing you), so you still had to use your mind to think of what would be the logical thing to do.
And you never had to worry about the fact that you had absolutely no idea what the sprite in the closet in "Hugo's House of Horrors" was supposed to look like.:) Not a problem with todays graphics, of course...
Lord. Yes, and music in America has utterly died and descended into Britney Spears and N'Sync. Theatre has been replaced by re-runs of "Roseanne" (or perhaps the latest action film starring Arnold and his walker) and fine art has given way to supermarket logos. Literature has ceased, the closest thing being either Stephen King's self-described "Literary equivilent of a Big Mac" or the summeries on the back of the box of the home video copies of "Cheers".
Lets just kill ourselves now before the government outlaws the use of sharp and dangerous instruments, guns, and chewable dramamine.
To everybody who posted here saying how much they appreciated and will miss Joel who actually knew him (or at least read newsgroup postings or something before today), read some other message. This ain't for you.
To the people who made posts saying, essentially, "I didn't know him, I'm not entirely certain who he was, and will probably never really use Debian, but I'd like to say that I really appreciate what he's done and will always be moved by his dedication to life and the future etc.", what's the point?
I'm really not trolling or trying to be a dick, but I find it disturbing that people use times like this to force upon themselves a weird sense of melencholy inspiration. Will there come a time when somebody starts reading the obituaries and learning as much about the good traits of every last person in there just to make themselves feel inspired? Are dead people Chicken Soup For The Living Person's Soul?
My mother died about two years ago (the first person to say "I'm Sorry" gets punched in the face), and I had similar thoughts then-- people who haven't had a single experience with any relative dying nor any relationship with my mother felt the need to console me by, essentially, lying their asses off. They said they knew how great a person mom was. They gave their ideas of how they would, philosophically, feel in my shoes, and then tried to pass-off the feeling as the one they were having right then.
*I* was taking it better than my friends. My neighbor probably cried more than I did, and all I could really do was wonder is if those tears of hers stopped the second I left the room or if she actually managed to do some serious empathizing with her own imagination.
Anyway, maybe I'm just removed from the rest of my race (a true nerd!), and maybe I'm just inhuman and capable of feeling, but I'd just like to tell you to think about this for one moment and think about whether your sorrow at the death of someone you really didn't know is insincere. If the answer is "yes", go ahead and write a canned speach about how Joel should be admired and we should think of this every once in a while to humble ourselves as people who are still living (since we are, apparently, arrogent in comparison to the dead), but think twice about hitting the submit button.
And I would like to restate that I'm not trolling or being a dick. I'm not trying to trivialize the death of Joel, but I personally find people using it to manufacture some strange inspiration for themselves to be insincere and rude, and I felt like getting that fact out of my system.
Re:"Like another legendary creature...."
on
The History of UNIX
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· Score: 1
Well, if you print the entire sentence, there are clues, but it's still odd:
Like another legendary creature whose name also ends in 'x,' UNIX rose from the ashes of a multi-organizational effort in the early 1960s to develop a dependable timesharing operating system.
"...rose from the ashes..." indicates a pheonix, but it can't be a pheonix because the ashes the phoenix rose from were not those of a multi-organizational effort in the early 1960's to develop a dependable timesharing operating system.
I'm puzzled.
"If you look under the bed, you can see my house from here." -- Pulp
My point had nothing to do with that. It still gets 60fps in 16bit in current benchmarks, but think a bit later than now (2001? 2002?), when the Radeon is old. Will Super Unreal II Championship Edition Turbo run on it in 32bits decently? Maybe not, and if not, you'd naturally try stepping down to 16bit to make the game fun and/or tolerable, except in the Radeon, it'll hardly make a difference.
I agree that arguing about the difference between one insanely-high framerate vs another isn't too important, but when the chips become older, the Radeon won't be as useful for as long as the GeForce2 will be.
I know it might seem stupid to complain that the card looses at 16-bit and resolutions under 1024x768, but it really isn't that dumb a complainnt-- when games start coming out that seriously tax the current generation of 3d cards, resulting in games that are unplayable at higher resolutions/colors, GeForce users are going to be able to run their card in 16-bit color and/or at lower resolutions to make the games playable while the ATI users get almost no performance gain doing the same thing, and just can't play the game.
I'll reply to someone else's message to get my point across:
Yes, but Carnivore goes beyond simply tapping one person's phone line... If phones still had party lines, this would be the equivalent of the FBI picking up the phone every time someone has a conversation, listening until they figure out who is talking, and then if it isn't the person they want, they supposedly hang up. I don't know about you, but that wouldn't make me too happy....
Okay, so, in what immediate way would it really *matter* if they hear you? You don't plan on nuking LA's I-405 at rush hour (if I wanted to kill a large number of people and generally bring traffic from bad to impossible, that would be my plan). What horrible things at this point in time would happen if the FBI/CIA/DMV heard every word you said, every character you typed, and a good portion of the information on the intake?
I've never liked the idea of this sort of thing simply because I don't want to give the government the power to become anything other than a government for the people-- in other words, I don't like giving them the power to be (pardon the drama of it all) an evil oppressive government, behind our backs, in a way that is nearly within "the system" (yes, let them do it with a constitutional amendment and a press release:). If that sounds vague along with sounding childishly dramatized, that's only because what worries me is the future possibilities, not any suspicion of a specific plan the government has to ruin our private hells.
But this, the future possibilities, often doesn't seem to be the stated concern to the privacy advocates. Or at least, it's only one. The one I see paraded around is usually stuff like the reply I quoted-- the ability for the government to overhear us talking about flavor #22 at Baskin Robbins, why we hate Dr. Laura, or about our spouse's general cluelessness of the affair we're having.
I don't like Carnivore any more than anybody else, but I really don't think the FBI gives a damn about me or what I'm saying.
1. It said that it's based on FreeBSD and mach (or is FreeBSD-ISH or what not), and it uses some code from FreeBSD and NetBSD. I don't and haven't ever run FreeBSD, and have only decided to pay any attention to Darwin/MacOSX as of this slashdot article, so what I'm about to say is probably insanely stupid, but: Could Darwin be plugged into a regular BSD, perhaps only after some minor revision? Or is it not that close to the *BSD's? I know there would probably be absolutely no point to it, but I'm curious.
2. What type of license would this be under? I doubt it would be too free, but I am, once again, curious...
(I feel stupid enough asking these that I'm |-| that close to posting anonymously...:)
you account only lasts about a week (i already found that out)
Actually, that's not quite it. If you use the service over 80 (IIRC, used to be a hundred) hours in a month, they may suspend your account. Another IIRC: They even encourage users to get multiple accounts if they're going to use more than 80 hours.
Bad comparison-- BC++ being free (beer) helps the Windows 9x open-source community because it's a compiler. If you want to author an OS'd proggie, you can now use Borland's compiler. Internet Explorer doesn't compare, because all it does is look at webpages.
For the record, though, making Internet Explorer free doesn't make MS against open-source, either. It just makes them lose in court.;)
For those who want to use the "DeCSS" now pic...
on
A New DeCSS
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· Score: 1
I feel the need to code my own. We all should.:)
But for those of you who want to use the pic to link to the site, I recommend you use the following code, instead, so the small.png file doesn't have to be loaded before the browser formats it's page (yeah, a bit picky, but we should all do our part to clean up the 'net...):
USENET has a number of problems, starting with the picky nature of its users. While it can do HTML to present an opinion in rich text, it is frowned upon.
If you're suggesting this is a Slashdot-to-NNTP problem, then they can just convert stuff to plain text. If it bugs you that you can't, that's different. Deal with it.:)
As for the FAQ stuff, it's not hard to search the web for a newsgroup FAQ. A lot of newbies won't know what FAQs really are, of course, but that's not usenet's problem, and really not it's responsibility. The FAQs are a service to the regulars more than the users, and dumb questions (in help groups) usually get answered (it's the weird ones that aren't in the FAQs nobody can answer:). Q&A groups aren't all of usenet, anyhow.
Forums based on Slash or UBB feel more like communities. If you're interested in the person who made such-and-such a comment, there's an easy way to find out who/what they are -- you just click the link to their user information, and if they want to share anything, they've put it into their forum profile directly or by a link.
Reading that Sylvia likes fireplaces, long walks on the beach, and cute puppies doesn't make you part of the Playboy Magazine community. Talking to Sylvia and all her (ahem) friends comes closer to qualifying, in my book.
Usenet feels a lot more like a bunch of people talking to each other than anything like Slashdot. A small town vs., say, Los Angeles..
Usenet is moving to the Web because the interface, content, and interactivity can be done better there.
Usenet is moving to the Web because people know how to use the web (not to mention that it exists).
This is all from memory and not very detailed, but keep in mind that the MPAA was a load of crap from the beginning. It was formed in 1922 (the "Hays office") as a PR organization in response to some movie-related scandals (like the Fatty Arbuckle thing). It was headed by William Hays, who was a former lawyer, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and US Postmaster General. The MPAA's own words on their initial function: "The initial task assigned to the association was to stem the waves of criticism of American movies, then silent, while sometimes rambunctious and rowdy, and to restore a more favorable public image for the motion picture business."
In addition, they created a list of "Do's and Don'ts" on what could be done in movies, but they were unenforced (and therefore a worthless gentleman's agreement). Around 1930, the MPAA/Hay's Office created the Production Code, which was similar to the "Do's and Don'ts" list, except it was enforcable (one could be fined for violating it). Some aspects of the code were pretty damned ridiculous (people weren't supposed to be depicted as having slept in the same bed, you weren't supposed to directly depict violence, children and dogs couldn't be hurt much, etc.).
Valenti came into the picture in the 60's. He was previously an advisor to a president (Johnson?). Hollywood wasn't doing so well partially because of TV and partially because it was stupid (ie out-of-touch, bloated...). To compete with television, the MPAA relaxed all the restrictions allowing much more controversial (and hence, more money-making) material, in the form of our current ratings system, which isn't as stupid as the production code (but not exactly a good thing).
X ratings were supposed to be for adults, but not necessarily without artistic value. When X became synonymous with "porn", they introduced NC-17 which isn't so different. And the ratings board's opinions are biased and change constantly, it seems. There seems to be almost no rhyme or reason to what they give some movies (look at what the creators of the "South Park" movie claimed-- the MPAA would say "change this", so they'd make it longer and more obscene, and then the MPAA would let it through...).
So, in conclusion, the MPAA is stupid.
(And don't actually hold me to any of this, since aside from the South Park comment, I haven't even thought about this in a looong time... some stuff might be off...;) )
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah. Grab an old (pre 1.51?) copy of Terminate and you're on your way.
Mr. Gus [TEAM-OS/2]
Oh, baby! This is cool. My old BBS is on here, my friend's BBS that inspired me to make mine is on here (err, that's rather glorified-- "I wanna start a BBS. I really wish I had enough money for another line" and two years later, with my vision of BBS perfection almost forgotten, "Well damnit, if he can afford another line, so can I!")!
/40.14 just for the hell of it...
I may not be insightful or interesting right now, but I do want to publically state that my ego is stroked. Now I'm waiting for somebody to cut me down and remind me how pointlessly insignificant this is, and how it's actually rather pathetic to be excited by such things. Alas...
And, for the record, I miss FIDONet... 1:105/40.14? Maybe? And later, the BBS was 1:105/300-something, I think, though I believe I kept
I'd love to start-up the WWW-equivilent of a BBS, with door games et al, but other web-games always seem so... webish... and I just don't like it. (And uhh, vinyl sounds better than reality, though not as good as one of those old funky cylinder phonographs) And I wouldn't have the joy of a file area (what would be the point?). A usenet gateway would be just stupid. If you wanna "chat with the sysop", use AIM or ICQ or something. Things just seem so dead these days. I might as well kill myself...
Personally, I hope the "Internet" fails compeletly and it we go back to the good ol' days of Archie and Gopher, bring back mosaic!
About three days after the death of the internet (it would have been the day, but it took a bit to learn why Slashdot wouldn't load):
Señor Budda Elf Duder: Lesse, I'll stick the archie server on 192.168.0.1 and the gopher one on 192.168.0.2, use my 56k to log into 192.168.0.3, and...
Why do I have turn 5 knobs and push 4 buttons to make my home theater receiver/tv switch from dss to ps2?
.. you name it ...
:)
.. but for some reason, getting them all to work together in a synchronous, efficient manner is impossible, unless you of course get all your services from the same company, and who wants that?
... if all engineers and scientists contributed to what makes sense and push good technology instead of market-speak, we'd would have had beta vcr's, be running linux, and stupid shit like DMCA/UCITA wouldn't exist...
....
You do?
Why do 90% of VCR functions only come on the remote, especially important stuff, like switch to the aux video source?
Because it's cheaper...
why does every piece of software come with crappy default settings?
That depends...
A: The author wants the most popular options (regardless of how they interact) enabled and the blandest, least-offensive, most generic defaults possible.
B: The author wants defaults that make them money. If there is an annoying new "feature" that is either a selling point or a lame attempt to get information/money/whatever out of poeple (somehow), it gets enabled, even if newborn chimps can understand just how doomed the feature is even after being dropped on their head and cut in fifths.
why are we stuck with crappy interoperatability between anything? DV vs. D8mm, firewire vs. whatever, ide vs. scsi
What exactly are you looking for, there...? VHS-C?
i have a pda, cell phone, pager, email, etc.
I repeat, what are you looking for? I can sort of see the usefulness of getting your cell phone to dial up something in an address book on a pda once you've found the number, but it's not much of an increase in convenience (actually dialing a number isn't mind-numbingly difficult, to say the least). And you'd think a cell phone should make a decent pager as well (although having both at once seems like the on-the-go version of using your answering machine to screen your calls, or something). What is so wrong with these devices not communicating? I don't own any of them, so, umm, anyway.
I know I'm generalizing, but these 'engineers and scientists' are the same jerks who've been pushing shitty technology down our throats
Err, not that companies didn't do their darndest to manipulate the markets, but it wasn't a bunch of engineers that decided to buy more BETA VCR's and tapes than VHS VCR's and tapes... And so on.
my 2 cents
I'm penniless. And sigless. I think.
Why focus on the hardware when, really, all the interesting stuff is in the software?
All the money is made in software, too, though. *ALL* the money, AFAIK. If the software doesn't support their platform, they lose on the hardware. It may not be interesting, but *somebody* has to make the hardware, and Nintendo's been doing that for a while now. Nintendo is simply trying to keep the same business model that made them big after the multi-platform spew of crap that happened in the first half of the '80's which critically wounded the industry at the time...
Yamauchi is right. Consoles aren't like appliances. Maytag doesn't make money selling you the clothes or food that go with your appliances.
Yeah, if we're only getting screwed one way, that's bad, but if the whole world is going to hell, well, that's okay.
There's nothing wrong with Mozilla taking as long as it has, but they (meaning either "Netscape" or "those guys over there at the big congolmerate") really should have released _something_. I hate to actually defend the concept of marketing (remember that department? the one that tells you to hurry it up, resulting in buggy crap?), but things really would have worked out better if there were two development teams, one producing Mozilla as we know it, and the other producing what everybody else here is whining about: A decent, modern browser that says "v5.0" on it somewhere-- Something to keep the world's attention 'till the real product, Mozilla, comes out.
Regardless of the reality of the product (or at this point the possibility of the end-product), long-running projects like Mozilla tend to reach a point where, no matter how good they are when they finally come out, there is a good chance they will be forgotten and left in the dust (and eventually become the software equivilent of a cult horror movie-- software used almost exclusively by the geek population).
The primary difference-of-opinion in all this is, though, releated to Mozilla's corporate scholarship: As an open-source program, there isn't any reason to lose faith in it. When it comes, it may very well be a fantastic browser. But since it's competing against Microsoft, on it's platform, and for the "regular" users, its success or failure is much more dependant on things like marketing (well, that and the tea.. and the fact that only geeks--and not all geeks for that matter--consider things like "turn javascript off" an acceptable response to "Netscape crashes a lot").
Err, and I'd just like to add that I didn't intend to make it sound like the gaming world revolved entirely around Sierra up until (but not including) KQ7.
Hmm. And now I'm feeling nostalgic. What should I play? Space Quest 3? Zork? 7th Guest? Maybe I should pull out a thesaurus (and a dictionary to make sure I spelled "thesaurus" right).
And come to think about it, I wonder what the thesaurus has to say about the word "thesaurus".
And how many more stupid FidoNET taglines can I rip-off to waste time until I go to work?
I miss that portion of the early '90's where I thought it was still the '80's.
Actually, up until (but not including) King's Quest 7, the graphical parser (SCI?) wasn't at all mindless. In the games like KQ6, nearly *everything* you clicked on could do something (often killing you), so you still had to use your mind to think of what would be the logical thing to do.
:) Not a problem with todays graphics, of course...
And you never had to worry about the fact that you had absolutely no idea what the sprite in the closet in "Hugo's House of Horrors" was supposed to look like.
Lord. Yes, and music in America has utterly died and descended into Britney Spears and N'Sync. Theatre has been replaced by re-runs of "Roseanne" (or perhaps the latest action film starring Arnold and his walker) and fine art has given way to supermarket logos. Literature has ceased, the closest thing being either Stephen King's self-described "Literary equivilent of a Big Mac" or the summeries on the back of the box of the home video copies of "Cheers".
Lets just kill ourselves now before the government outlaws the use of sharp and dangerous instruments, guns, and chewable dramamine.
To everybody who posted here saying how much they appreciated and will miss Joel who actually knew him (or at least read newsgroup postings or something before today), read some other message. This ain't for you.
To the people who made posts saying, essentially, "I didn't know him, I'm not entirely certain who he was, and will probably never really use Debian, but I'd like to say that I really appreciate what he's done and will always be moved by his dedication to life and the future etc.", what's the point?
I'm really not trolling or trying to be a dick, but I find it disturbing that people use times like this to force upon themselves a weird sense of melencholy inspiration. Will there come a time when somebody starts reading the obituaries and learning as much about the good traits of every last person in there just to make themselves feel inspired? Are dead people Chicken Soup For The Living Person's Soul?
My mother died about two years ago (the first person to say "I'm Sorry" gets punched in the face), and I had similar thoughts then-- people who haven't had a single experience with any relative dying nor any relationship with my mother felt the need to console me by, essentially, lying their asses off. They said they knew how great a person mom was. They gave their ideas of how they would, philosophically, feel in my shoes, and then tried to pass-off the feeling as the one they were having right then.
*I* was taking it better than my friends. My neighbor probably cried more than I did, and all I could really do was wonder is if those tears of hers stopped the second I left the room or if she actually managed to do some serious empathizing with her own imagination.
Anyway, maybe I'm just removed from the rest of my race (a true nerd!), and maybe I'm just inhuman and capable of feeling, but I'd just like to tell you to think about this for one moment and think about whether your sorrow at the death of someone you really didn't know is insincere. If the answer is "yes", go ahead and write a canned speach about how Joel should be admired and we should think of this every once in a while to humble ourselves as people who are still living (since we are, apparently, arrogent in comparison to the dead), but think twice about hitting the submit button.
And I would like to restate that I'm not trolling or being a dick. I'm not trying to trivialize the death of Joel, but I personally find people using it to manufacture some strange inspiration for themselves to be insincere and rude, and I felt like getting that fact out of my system.
Isn't plasma blood?
Well, if you print the entire sentence, there are clues, but it's still odd:
Like another legendary creature whose name also ends in 'x,' UNIX rose from the ashes of a multi-organizational effort in the early 1960s to develop a dependable timesharing operating system.
"...rose from the ashes..." indicates a pheonix, but it can't be a pheonix because the ashes the phoenix rose from were not those of a multi-organizational effort in the early 1960's to develop a dependable timesharing operating system.
I'm puzzled.
"If you look under the bed, you can see my house from here." -- Pulp
My point had nothing to do with that. It still gets 60fps in 16bit in current benchmarks, but think a bit later than now (2001? 2002?), when the Radeon is old. Will Super Unreal II Championship Edition Turbo run on it in 32bits decently? Maybe not, and if not, you'd naturally try stepping down to 16bit to make the game fun and/or tolerable, except in the Radeon, it'll hardly make a difference.
I agree that arguing about the difference between one insanely-high framerate vs another isn't too important, but when the chips become older, the Radeon won't be as useful for as long as the GeForce2 will be.
I know it might seem stupid to complain that the card looses at 16-bit and resolutions under 1024x768, but it really isn't that dumb a complainnt-- when games start coming out that seriously tax the current generation of 3d cards, resulting in games that are unplayable at higher resolutions/colors, GeForce users are going to be able to run their card in 16-bit color and/or at lower resolutions to make the games playable while the ATI users get almost no performance gain doing the same thing, and just can't play the game.
"Tomorrow is another day. Damn."
America is a continent, not a nation.
Yes, hidden somewhere inbetween "North America" and "South America" is the secret and elusive mega-continent known only as "America"...
I'll reply to someone else's message to get my point across:
Yes, but Carnivore goes beyond simply tapping one person's phone line... If phones still had party lines, this would be the equivalent of the FBI picking up the phone every time someone has a conversation, listening until they figure out who is talking, and then if it isn't the person they want, they supposedly hang up. I don't know about you, but that wouldn't make me too happy....
Okay, so, in what immediate way would it really *matter* if they hear you? You don't plan on nuking LA's I-405 at rush hour (if I wanted to kill a large number of people and generally bring traffic from bad to impossible, that would be my plan). What horrible things at this point in time would happen if the FBI/CIA/DMV heard every word you said, every character you typed, and a good portion of the information on the intake?
I've never liked the idea of this sort of thing simply because I don't want to give the government the power to become anything other than a government for the people-- in other words, I don't like giving them the power to be (pardon the drama of it all) an evil oppressive government, behind our backs, in a way that is nearly within "the system" (yes, let them do it with a constitutional amendment and a press release
But this, the future possibilities, often doesn't seem to be the stated concern to the privacy advocates. Or at least, it's only one. The one I see paraded around is usually stuff like the reply I quoted-- the ability for the government to overhear us talking about flavor #22 at Baskin Robbins, why we hate Dr. Laura, or about our spouse's general cluelessness of the affair we're having.
I don't like Carnivore any more than anybody else, but I really don't think the FBI gives a damn about me or what I'm saying.
1. It said that it's based on FreeBSD and mach (or is FreeBSD-ISH or what not), and it uses some code from FreeBSD and NetBSD. I don't and haven't ever run FreeBSD, and have only decided to pay any attention to Darwin/MacOSX as of this slashdot article, so what I'm about to say is probably insanely stupid, but: Could Darwin be plugged into a regular BSD, perhaps only after some minor revision? Or is it not that close to the *BSD's? I know there would probably be absolutely no point to it, but I'm curious.
:)
2. What type of license would this be under? I doubt it would be too free, but I am, once again, curious...
(I feel stupid enough asking these that I'm |-| that close to posting anonymously...
I had to read that twice to understand it. I kept seeing Signal 11, and wondering if this AC was a friend of his asking for help or something...
----
"So, I removed a FAT partition. Signal 11 !!!!"
--
"What about him?"
----
you account only lasts about a week (i already found that out)
Actually, that's not quite it. If you use the service over 80 (IIRC, used to be a hundred) hours in a month, they may suspend your account. Another IIRC: They even encourage users to get multiple accounts if they're going to use more than 80 hours.
Bad comparison-- BC++ being free (beer) helps the Windows 9x open-source community because it's a compiler. If you want to author an OS'd proggie, you can now use Borland's compiler. Internet Explorer doesn't compare, because all it does is look at webpages.
;)
For the record, though, making Internet Explorer free doesn't make MS against open-source, either. It just makes them lose in court.
I feel the need to code my own. We all should. :)
.png file doesn't have to be loaded before the browser formats it's page (yeah, a bit picky, but we should all do our part to clean up the 'net...):
< /a></p>
But for those of you who want to use the pic to link to the site, I recommend you use the following code, instead, so the small
<p align="center"><a href="http://www.pigdog.org/decss/"><img border="0" width=100 height=42 alt="DeCSS Now!" src="http://www.pigdog.org/images/decss-now.png">
USENET has a number of problems, starting with the picky nature of its users. While it can do HTML to present an opinion in rich text, it is frowned upon.
:)
:). Q&A groups aren't all of usenet, anyhow.
If you're suggesting this is a Slashdot-to-NNTP problem, then they can just convert stuff to plain text. If it bugs you that you can't, that's different. Deal with it.
As for the FAQ stuff, it's not hard to search the web for a newsgroup FAQ. A lot of newbies won't know what FAQs really are, of course, but that's not usenet's problem, and really not it's responsibility. The FAQs are a service to the regulars more than the users, and dumb questions (in help groups) usually get answered (it's the weird ones that aren't in the FAQs nobody can answer
Forums based on Slash or UBB feel more like communities. If you're interested in the person who made such-and-such a comment, there's an easy way to find out who/what they are -- you just click the link to their user information, and if they want to share anything, they've put it into their forum profile directly or by a link.
Reading that Sylvia likes fireplaces, long walks on the beach, and cute puppies doesn't make you part of the Playboy Magazine community. Talking to Sylvia and all her (ahem) friends comes closer to qualifying, in my book.
Usenet feels a lot more like a bunch of people talking to each other than anything like Slashdot. A small town vs., say, Los Angeles..
Usenet is moving to the Web because the interface, content, and interactivity can be done better there.
Usenet is moving to the Web because people know how to use the web (not to mention that it exists).
> Make the option avaliable to all (AC and those
> with accounts) and, voila! Problem solved.
Dumb question:
How can an AC enforce the GPL-equivilent? "I posted that, I swear to the mother mary!"
This is all from memory and not very detailed, but keep in mind that the MPAA was a load of crap from the beginning. It was formed in 1922 (the "Hays office") as a PR organization in response to some movie-related scandals (like the Fatty Arbuckle thing). It was headed by William Hays, who was a former lawyer, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and US Postmaster General. The MPAA's own words on their initial function: "The initial task assigned to the association was to stem the waves of criticism of American movies, then silent, while sometimes rambunctious and rowdy, and to restore a more favorable public image for the motion picture business."
In addition, they created a list of "Do's and Don'ts" on what could be done in movies, but they were unenforced (and therefore a worthless gentleman's agreement). Around 1930, the MPAA/Hay's Office created the Production Code, which was similar to the "Do's and Don'ts" list, except it was enforcable (one could be fined for violating it). Some aspects of the code were pretty damned ridiculous (people weren't supposed to be depicted as having slept in the same bed, you weren't supposed to directly depict violence, children and dogs couldn't be hurt much, etc.).
Valenti came into the picture in the 60's. He was previously an advisor to a president (Johnson?). Hollywood wasn't doing so well partially because of TV and partially because it was stupid (ie out-of-touch, bloated...). To compete with television, the MPAA relaxed all the restrictions allowing much more controversial (and hence, more money-making) material, in the form of our current ratings system, which isn't as stupid as the production code (but not exactly a good thing).
X ratings were supposed to be for adults, but not necessarily without artistic value. When X became synonymous with "porn", they introduced NC-17 which isn't so different. And the ratings board's opinions are biased and change constantly, it seems. There seems to be almost no rhyme or reason to what they give some movies (look at what the creators of the "South Park" movie claimed-- the MPAA would say "change this", so they'd make it longer and more obscene, and then the MPAA would let it through...).
So, in conclusion, the MPAA is stupid.
(And don't actually hold me to any of this, since aside from the South Park comment, I haven't even thought about this in a looong time... some stuff might be off...