No, it's a completely different company publishing the game. I'm not sure if the development studio is the same and they just changed publishers, or if somebody sold the rights to the name. Either way, Sid is not involved in the least.
And, no, Sid didn't get to take the name "Civilization" with him. The real sequel to Civ2 is his recent game "Alpha Centauri," which is called that precisely because he didn't have the rights to the civilization name. And, no, it doesn't run on Linux, but it's a hell of a lot better than CTP is =)
While I agree that, by not giving out personal details, it did not breach the privacy of the individual making the call, it did breach the privacy of the organization on whose behalf he was making the tech support call. Unless this Loki employee asked Microsoft's permission to reveal the contents of their employee's phone call, I'd consider this publication unethical at the least. When I call a company for tech support, I expect my call to be confidential, and for the purposes of providing me with support, not for future publication somewhere.
As said before, if it was Microsoft releasing information about tech support calls made by Red Hat employees, I'm sure everybody would be upset.
Hmm, another thing I forgot to mention in my previous post.
If you don't like dumbing down of technology, why are you using a keyboard and mouse? Why are you using a compiler? Front-panel switches too hard for you? Machine code is too hard, so you need some dumbed-down C to hold your hand for you?
You're mixing up your analogies. Knowing that you need a steering wheel to drive a car is completely reasonable, and analogous to knowing that you need to run a program to do stuff on a computer, and you use the keyboard and mouse to enter data (and view it on the monitor). All this is reasonable, and most users know it.
Requiring a user to know the exact specs of their video card/monitor to configure X (XF86Setup) is more analogous to requiring a driver to know what the volume of their engine is in order to start it. Requiring a user to know how to compile their own software is just fucking stupid. They want the software binaries, not some stuff they need to compile. Give them the software, and stop bitching about dumbing things down.
While I have no problem with metal detectors per se, I don't see why they're being seen as a security measure after Columbine. If they had metal detectors in that school, it would've done absolutely no good. The kids had their guns in their hands. When they went through the metal detectors, that would've set off the alarm, letting everybody know they had guns. However, since the guns were in their hands and being fired, everybody already knew that. The metal detectors would be somewhat of a redundancy, and would not have done anything to avert the tragedy. Either would transparent bookbags, since, well, the guns weren't in the bookbags.
Backwards in your opinion. A step forwards in my opinion, and apparently that of Apple's. Sure, SCSI is faster and less CPU-intensive. However, it's also much more expensive. For $150, I can get a 20 gig IDE drive (or bigger). For that same $150, you can't even break 10 gigs on a SCSI drive. So if you want 40 gigs of hard drive space, you have a choice of around $300 for IDE or over $800 for SCSI. IMO, the extra speed isn't worth the extra $500.
If you look through the documents filed with the SEC (somebody had a link to it in the comments of the "andover.net files for IPO" story), Andover mentions that they paid Rob&Co. $5 million+ to buy out Slashdot. (partially payable in stock options upon Andover going public, so apparently this was planned for a while).
Not only wasn't 1.2.x good enough, 2.0.x wasn't either. It required patches just to get a decent number of file descriptors available (segfault.org was having some problems with this running the 2.0.36 kernel). Hence the various comments that Linux is not good enough for an IRC server. I'm not sure if 2.2.x improves things, but I hope so.
Your responses seem to indicate that your thinking is oddly similar to mine, despite the fact that we come to nearly opposite conclusions.
One thing that I'm not clear on is that, if you recognize that faith is something that one believes without solid evidence, how does one decide what to believe in? Why become Muslim, or Christian, or Hindu, or Jewish, or Wiccan? More importantly, why become any of these? What's wrong with making up your own hope/belief and having faith in that?
Have you ever felt genuine faith before? If not, you have no place to say it is irrational. Feelings afterall, are very rational.
Feelings are indeed quite irrational. Feelings are abstract emotions, not reasoned responses. The term "rational" refers to reasoning, not emotional responses. Faith is an emotional response, and hence not any more rational than nostalgia, lust, or annoyance are.
And so the prospect of faith, a belief in something with no physical evidence, can only be thought as irrational to those who have never felt it before. Or to those whose faith has let them down and have become disillusioned with their beliefs.
The concept makes perfect sense - it's the belief in something without evidence that it is correct. This belief is usually based on either a hope or desire for something to be true, some sort of "gut feeling" (some prefer to think of this "gut feeling" as a message from God) that it is true, or both. Either way, it's not rational - i.e. a reasoned response.
This I would not call faith at all. Faith is more akin to a desire, or hope for something to be true. It often influences one's actions, and sometimes the consequences positively affirm the faith.
Exactly. it's a hope for something to be true, rather than any sort of evidence that the thing is indeed true. One can hope for whatever one wants, but this doesn't increase the chances of it actually happening.
Of course he focuses on the text. if you start focusing on what you believe to be the meaning of the scripture, it becomes, in fact, completely meaningless, since you can interpret it any way you want. To get any sort of useful analysis you have to look at what's actually written, not what your political agenda, religion, or hopes want you to believe is meant.
I find it hard to believe that every distro has personally asked Linus (or his lawyers) for permission to use the Linux trademark. Slackware has been using it since before it was registered - did Patrick ask Linus for licensing of the trademark after it was trademarked?
I still think the whole trademark is invalid - if you look at the filing, it's all wrong. It claims August 1994 as the first use of the word, when it was in use long before that.
IANAL either, but I thought that it was required to license a trademark in order to sell a product using that trademark as a name. RedHat labels its products as "RedHat Linux," not "RedHat OS which contains the Linux(r) kernel." If Red Hat wants to call their product itself "Linux," and Linux is a registered trademark, I think it would be necessary to obtain a license to do so (perhaps for free, but it'd still have to be done officially).
That's the problem with mandatory minimum sentencing laws. In most cases, the judge is indeed powerless, since legally he is not allowed to give less than a certain sentence. The only other alternative he has is to overturn the conviction, which would be somewhat akin to lying. The person is guilty, but doesn't deserve the sentence, but the judge's sentencing leeway has been done away with by stupid laws, so he's in a no-win situation.
Not really. Some idiot tried to trademark "Linux" as a music-related term, and then sue Linux the kernel for infringement. As part of the settlement, the trademark was assigned to Linus, so Linus now owns a worthless trademark for the word "Linux" that only applies to some narrow music-related field. Even if it was broader, the trademark would be unenforceable by now, since Linus has not vigorously protected it (barely at all). Does Debian have a written contract allowing them to use the term Linux? What about Red Hat? SuSE? Slackware? If not, they're all in violation of the trademark, and since Linus hasn't done anything bout it, his claim on the trademark can be assumed to have been reliquished.
I emailed Rob about this, and he said that the top and bottom 20% of readers are thrown out (leaving the middle 60%). The theory here is that the most infrequent 20% of the readers don't really read enough to be able to make informed judgements. Throwing out the top 20% is intended to stop people in that category from writing reload scripts to get themselves into a "reads slashdot more often" category. It's probably still possible to cheat the system somehow, but it makes it more difficult I suppose.
I dislike it as well, as i've been here for over a year and have high karma, but have never, not even once, been given moderator access, since I read slashdot two to three times a day and click the "read more" on nearly all the stories.
If you had read the post I was responding to, he cited 20 million as the number of U.S. Linux users. It would make very little sense to be talking about Europe, as you suggested, when discussion estimates of U.S. Linux users, now wouldn't it?
Re:"the Linux de facto standard desktop"?
on
KDE 1.1.2 is out
·
· Score: 2
Mind you, that 20 million figure is estimated Linux boxes, not Linux users. This includes people with 8 Linux boxes, as well as corporations with 500-box clusters. As the previous poster mentioned, it's highly unlikely that 7% of the American population uses Linux. From my experiences (which happen to be among mostly technically oriented people), the average is around 2 or 3%. Among the general American public (many of whom don't have any computer at all, much less a Linux one), I'd guess it's probably less than 1%.
Re:"the Linux de facto standard desktop"?
on
KDE 1.1.2 is out
·
· Score: 3
That's exactly what I was thinking. Claiming your desktop is superior because it's the de facto standard is obviously something Microsoft does quite well. At least Microsoft has something to back that up - they are the de facto standard desktop, with millions of users. KDE most likely doesn't even have a million users, so it's not a de facto standard anything.
How is an AC who signs his name at the bottom of his messages (but doesn't actually have a slashdot account) any less worthy of attention than somebody such as yourself, who has a slashdot account, but is every bit as anonymous as that AC?
Re:Install less, and use firewalls
on
Linux Lite?
·
· Score: 3
(1) Yeah, that would seem to be the best way to do things.
(2) This doesn't seem like such a great idea. If all the services are set up correctly, there's no need to firewall the PPP device. If there's no telnetd running, a script kiddie can't telnet into your box. Rejecting incoming TCP connections would have nasty side-effects such as messing up IRC DCC transfers and ICQ messaging.
(3) Definitely. New users should not be encouraged to set up an ftp/http/irc/telnet server during their initial install. They should get the OS running first, then worry about setting up services.
Every time somebody mentions how to compile a kernel it's different - perhaps that's part of the problem. I've never seen your 4-step sequence mentioned before. The ones I've seen all include "make config" and "make zImage" or "make bzImage" as two of the steps.
Phrack was never intended as an infosec technical journal. It was an ezine written primarily by high school kids and some college kids (the founders/editors were both around 16 when it was founded), intended for high school and college kids. It explored areas of security, computer and otherwise, that interested its authors. Hence articles covered everything from "how to pick Master locks" to discussion of Telenet's security. An important focus was always on community and learning about technology. The Phrack Loopback sections were interesting and contained useful dialog between the readers and the editors. Now they're just crap. The Phrack World News was good. The editors weren't egocentric. The list of differences could continue ad nauseum.
In short, Phrack today is not Phrack, except in name. It's a technical infosec journal that happens to have "borrowed" a name from a popular ezine with a much different purpose and editorial style. IMHO, it's a fine technical journal, but its use of the Phrack moniker is somewhat unfair and incongruous with its history. It's a cheap ploy to get more readership than a technical journal would normally get.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's a completely different company publishing the game. I'm not sure if the development studio is the same and they just changed publishers, or if somebody sold the rights to the name. Either way, Sid is not involved in the least.
And, no, Sid didn't get to take the name "Civilization" with him. The real sequel to Civ2 is his recent game "Alpha Centauri," which is called that precisely because he didn't have the rights to the civilization name. And, no, it doesn't run on Linux, but it's a hell of a lot better than CTP is =)
While I agree that, by not giving out personal details, it did not breach the privacy of the individual making the call, it did breach the privacy of the organization on whose behalf he was making the tech support call. Unless this Loki employee asked Microsoft's permission to reveal the contents of their employee's phone call, I'd consider this publication unethical at the least. When I call a company for tech support, I expect my call to be confidential, and for the purposes of providing me with support, not for future publication somewhere.
As said before, if it was Microsoft releasing information about tech support calls made by Red Hat employees, I'm sure everybody would be upset.
Hmm, another thing I forgot to mention in my previous post.
If you don't like dumbing down of technology, why are you using a keyboard and mouse? Why are you using a compiler? Front-panel switches too hard for you? Machine code is too hard, so you need some dumbed-down C to hold your hand for you?
You're mixing up your analogies. Knowing that you need a steering wheel to drive a car is completely reasonable, and analogous to knowing that you need to run a program to do stuff on a computer, and you use the keyboard and mouse to enter data (and view it on the monitor). All this is reasonable, and most users know it.
Requiring a user to know the exact specs of their video card/monitor to configure X (XF86Setup) is more analogous to requiring a driver to know what the volume of their engine is in order to start it. Requiring a user to know how to compile their own software is just fucking stupid. They want the software binaries, not some stuff they need to compile. Give them the software, and stop bitching about dumbing things down.
Well, if that's the case, then I'm afraid I'm sticking with Windows. Sorry.
While I have no problem with metal detectors per se, I don't see why they're being seen as a security measure after Columbine. If they had metal detectors in that school, it would've done absolutely no good. The kids had their guns in their hands. When they went through the metal detectors, that would've set off the alarm, letting everybody know they had guns. However, since the guns were in their hands and being fired, everybody already knew that. The metal detectors would be somewhat of a redundancy, and would not have done anything to avert the tragedy. Either would transparent bookbags, since, well, the guns weren't in the bookbags.
Backwards in your opinion. A step forwards in my opinion, and apparently that of Apple's. Sure, SCSI is faster and less CPU-intensive. However, it's also much more expensive. For $150, I can get a 20 gig IDE drive (or bigger). For that same $150, you can't even break 10 gigs on a SCSI drive. So if you want 40 gigs of hard drive space, you have a choice of around $300 for IDE or over $800 for SCSI. IMO, the extra speed isn't worth the extra $500.
If you look through the documents filed with the SEC (somebody had a link to it in the comments of the "andover.net files for IPO" story), Andover mentions that they paid Rob&Co. $5 million+ to buy out Slashdot. (partially payable in stock options upon Andover going public, so apparently this was planned for a while).
Not only wasn't 1.2.x good enough, 2.0.x wasn't either. It required patches just to get a decent number of file descriptors available (segfault.org was having some problems with this running the 2.0.36 kernel). Hence the various comments that Linux is not good enough for an IRC server. I'm not sure if 2.2.x improves things, but I hope so.
Your responses seem to indicate that your thinking is oddly similar to mine, despite the fact that we come to nearly opposite conclusions.
One thing that I'm not clear on is that, if you recognize that faith is something that one believes without solid evidence, how does one decide what to believe in? Why become Muslim, or Christian, or Hindu, or Jewish, or Wiccan? More importantly, why become any of these? What's wrong with making up your own hope/belief and having faith in that?
Have you ever felt genuine faith before? If not, you have no place to say it is irrational. Feelings afterall, are very rational.
Feelings are indeed quite irrational. Feelings are abstract emotions, not reasoned responses. The term "rational" refers to reasoning, not emotional responses. Faith is an emotional response, and hence not any more rational than nostalgia, lust, or annoyance are.
And so the prospect of faith, a belief in something with no physical evidence, can only be thought as irrational to those who have never felt it before. Or to those whose faith has let them down and have become disillusioned with their beliefs.
The concept makes perfect sense - it's the belief in something without evidence that it is correct. This belief is usually based on either a hope or desire for something to be true, some sort of "gut feeling" (some prefer to think of this "gut feeling" as a message from God) that it is true, or both. Either way, it's not rational - i.e. a reasoned response.
This I would not call faith at all. Faith is more akin to a desire, or hope for something to be true. It often influences one's actions, and sometimes the consequences positively affirm the faith.
Exactly. it's a hope for something to be true, rather than any sort of evidence that the thing is indeed true. One can hope for whatever one wants, but this doesn't increase the chances of it actually happening.
Of course he focuses on the text. if you start focusing on what you believe to be the meaning of the scripture, it becomes, in fact, completely meaningless, since you can interpret it any way you want. To get any sort of useful analysis you have to look at what's actually written, not what your political agenda, religion, or hopes want you to believe is meant.
The French are calling it Debian GNU/Linux because it is Debian GNU/Linux. Anybody with a modicum of intelligence would call it that as well.
Note: there is no distribution named "Debian Linux."
I find it hard to believe that every distro has personally asked Linus (or his lawyers) for permission to use the Linux trademark. Slackware has been using it since before it was registered - did Patrick ask Linus for licensing of the trademark after it was trademarked?
I still think the whole trademark is invalid - if you look at the filing, it's all wrong. It claims August 1994 as the first use of the word, when it was in use long before that.
IANAL either, but I thought that it was required to license a trademark in order to sell a product using that trademark as a name. RedHat labels its products as "RedHat Linux," not "RedHat OS which contains the Linux(r) kernel." If Red Hat wants to call their product itself "Linux," and Linux is a registered trademark, I think it would be necessary to obtain a license to do so (perhaps for free, but it'd still have to be done officially).
That's the problem with mandatory minimum sentencing laws. In most cases, the judge is indeed powerless, since legally he is not allowed to give less than a certain sentence. The only other alternative he has is to overturn the conviction, which would be somewhat akin to lying. The person is guilty, but doesn't deserve the sentence, but the judge's sentencing leeway has been done away with by stupid laws, so he's in a no-win situation.
Not really. Some idiot tried to trademark "Linux" as a music-related term, and then sue Linux the kernel for infringement. As part of the settlement, the trademark was assigned to Linus, so Linus now owns a worthless trademark for the word "Linux" that only applies to some narrow music-related field. Even if it was broader, the trademark would be unenforceable by now, since Linus has not vigorously protected it (barely at all). Does Debian have a written contract allowing them to use the term Linux? What about Red Hat? SuSE? Slackware? If not, they're all in violation of the trademark, and since Linus hasn't done anything bout it, his claim on the trademark can be assumed to have been reliquished.
I emailed Rob about this, and he said that the top and bottom 20% of readers are thrown out (leaving the middle 60%). The theory here is that the most infrequent 20% of the readers don't really read enough to be able to make informed judgements. Throwing out the top 20% is intended to stop people in that category from writing reload scripts to get themselves into a "reads slashdot more often" category. It's probably still possible to cheat the system somehow, but it makes it more difficult I suppose.
I dislike it as well, as i've been here for over a year and have high karma, but have never, not even once, been given moderator access, since I read slashdot two to three times a day and click the "read more" on nearly all the stories.
If you had read the post I was responding to, he cited 20 million as the number of U.S. Linux users. It would make very little sense to be talking about Europe, as you suggested, when discussion estimates of U.S. Linux users, now wouldn't it?
Mind you, that 20 million figure is estimated Linux boxes, not Linux users. This includes people with 8 Linux boxes, as well as corporations with 500-box clusters. As the previous poster mentioned, it's highly unlikely that 7% of the American population uses Linux. From my experiences (which happen to be among mostly technically oriented people), the average is around 2 or 3%. Among the general American public (many of whom don't have any computer at all, much less a Linux one), I'd guess it's probably less than 1%.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Claiming your desktop is superior because it's the de facto standard is obviously something Microsoft does quite well. At least Microsoft has something to back that up - they are the de facto standard desktop, with millions of users. KDE most likely doesn't even have a million users, so it's not a de facto standard anything.
How is an AC who signs his name at the bottom of his messages (but doesn't actually have a slashdot account) any less worthy of attention than somebody such as yourself, who has a slashdot account, but is every bit as anonymous as that AC?
(1) Yeah, that would seem to be the best way to do things.
(2) This doesn't seem like such a great idea. If all the services are set up correctly, there's no need to firewall the PPP device. If there's no telnetd running, a script kiddie can't telnet into your box. Rejecting incoming TCP connections would have nasty side-effects such as messing up IRC DCC transfers and ICQ messaging.
(3) Definitely. New users should not be encouraged to set up an ftp/http/irc/telnet server during their initial install. They should get the OS running first, then worry about setting up services.
Every time somebody mentions how to compile a kernel it's different - perhaps that's part of the problem. I've never seen your 4-step sequence mentioned before. The ones I've seen all include "make config" and "make zImage" or "make bzImage" as two of the steps.
Phrack was never intended as an infosec technical journal. It was an ezine written primarily by high school kids and some college kids (the founders/editors were both around 16 when it was founded), intended for high school and college kids. It explored areas of security, computer and otherwise, that interested its authors. Hence articles covered everything from "how to pick Master locks" to discussion of Telenet's security. An important focus was always on community and learning about technology. The Phrack Loopback sections were interesting and contained useful dialog between the readers and the editors. Now they're just crap. The Phrack World News was good. The editors weren't egocentric. The list of differences could continue ad nauseum.
In short, Phrack today is not Phrack, except in name. It's a technical infosec journal that happens to have "borrowed" a name from a popular ezine with a much different purpose and editorial style. IMHO, it's a fine technical journal, but its use of the Phrack moniker is somewhat unfair and incongruous with its history. It's a cheap ploy to get more readership than a technical journal would normally get.