According to the article, Horizon had to suspend publishing of the comic Radix "due to legal issues" related to the MIT expropriation of their work.
While I don't think the claim that this harms their use of the character as "escapist entertainment" is in any way meaningful, it would be interesting to see if it can be proved in court that they HAD to suspend the comic due to MIT's action, or whether they are just using that as an excuse for low initial sales of the comic.
If the former, then they clearly have a case against MIT.
Obviously, MIT felt they couldn't go the Army with a character image ACTUALLY taken from a comic, because they felt they wouldn't be taken seriously. But nobody draws stuff like comic book artists (except maybe expensive product design artists), so MIT felt they had to rip one off while concealing the fact that it was a comic book image.
They should have gone to the Marvel Universe series and ripped off Iron Man's armor if they wanted some real heavy duty engineering concepts wrapped up in a comic book character...
>There are, of course, the obvious facts that a long, long time ago your life-expectancy would be 30 years, whereas now (depending on where you live) it might be near 80. This is a development over thousands of years, though.
Actually, as of the turn of the (last) century, the average lifespan was something like 50, I think. The 30 years more you get now happened in the last 100 years, not thousands.
With nanotech, it is likely that people will easily live to 100 starting in the next 20 years, and indefinitely within 50 years.
So, yes, the time you live in counts. And if you are under 40 today, you will likely never die of conventional age-related causes.
Those who are 40-60 may survive depending on how close they are to 60 versus 40 and how well they stay in shape and healthy. Take up tai chi...
WINE is a WINDOWS Emulator. There is a DOS emulator, I believe (and that's gotta be easier to do than a Windows one). Go here:
http://www.dosemu.org/
Also a review of it (not sure how old the review is) is here:
http://hcs.harvard.edu/~hcr/94dec/dosemu.html
From the review:
DOSEMU can be run from a text terminal or an X environment. The X version (XDOS) can run only text-mode applications in an X window, while the terminal version can run both text and graphics mode applications.
One of the major things that DOSEMU is still lacking is reliable DPMI emulation. As a result, a DOS DPMI application has almost no chance of actually running under DOSEMU.
Windows 3.0 will only run in standard mode and Windows 3.1 will not run at all. Many newer DOS development applications (Borland C, Pascal etc.) which use DPMI will not run, but the old versions (Turbo Pascal 6.0 and Turbo C 2.0) run just fine.
As far as games go, DOSEMU supports all major video cards, including VESA emulation and drivers. However, in order to get any reasonable speed in graphics mode, video shadowing must be disabled (from BIOS setup). Otherwise, performace is hardly acceptable.
The X version of DOSEMU only works in text mode and is quite slow, at least on a 386. The window refresh looks very strange and is noticeable, but with a fast local bus video card, this should not be of concern.
The major problem with DOSEMU is that it is very self-contained. You can only communicate with a card or peripheral if a compliant device exists in/dev. The documentation does not go to great lengths to explain how such devices can be created. (From what I understand, they require a recompilation of the Linux kernel and loading a Linux driver which comes precompiled with DOSEMU).
Basically, no DOS driver can be loaded. DOSEMU does not provide access to any hard interrupts (probably because it runs in user space under Linux) and in order to have such access, it's necessary to setup a SillyInt (Silly Interrupt) driver, another process that comes with very little documentation.
DOSEMU runs very nicely in the background. I tested whether switching from the DOS tty to a Linux tty stalled the DOS emulation. To my surprise, upon switching back to the DOS tty I noticed that the program had continued running and made progress!
Despite numerous warnings all over the documentation, there seem to be no major bugs in DOSEMU. Documentation is relatively straight-forward, but to properly install and configure DOSEMU, you need to have a fair amount of knowledge of both DOS and Linux (especially DOS).
If you want strong, reliable DOS emulation under Linux, then DOSEMU does not really live up to that task. It's a very nice program to play with and it performs very well with older DOS applications. I use it to run WordPerfect 5.1 in an X window while running an FTP session in another window and telnet in another window. Most importantly, installing this program is a good way to learn more about Linux and DOS, which was the largest benefit of installing DOSEMU for me.
Wouldn't hurt to install a Linux box, install DOSEMU, and try your old DOS client programs on it.
And therefore so does Windows because a lot of people can't do those things in Windows, either - especially the latter one, find a file that some Windows app decided to drop in some default directory that nobody ever heard of...
ANY user on ANY OS can mistype something and end up in some place they have no clue how to get out of...
Linux is at NO disadvantage on this level of user, because it (or more precisely, its apps - Linux is an OS, NOT an APP) certainly has "New" and "Save as" dialogs...
"Setting up a Unix system can be hell> for a novice if no one or nothing is there to help and provide guidance -- the most likely scenario in a corporate environment.
As for Windows, most folks don't set anything up. They just use whatever the IT department pushed out to them."
Now these comments DIRECTLY contradict themselves!
If the usual scenario in a corporate environment is that Windows users get whatever IT pushes at them, then why is it that there is no one to assist them when they install Linux? Obviously in an IT environment, the Linux system will be set up by IT people just like Windows.
If what you are trying to say is that the IT department doesn't have any Linux experts to do this, then the problem is not Linux, but the IT department. There are plenty of computer science grads who know Linux these days, hire some.
And ANYBODY in IT should be able to install Linux just as well as Windows regardless of their experience - it's not rocket science...all they have to do is RTFM...(Not that it is always easy in Windows OR Linux, as numerous posts here have shown.)
Now, if you have to "ghost" ten thousand copies of Linux at one time, maybe it gets tricky... I imagine it's tricky for Windows, too.
"it will not help me a bit to find Linux acting like Windows. It removes the choice, "
NO, NO, NO! It does NOT (unless you can't figure out how to use "switch desktop" or whatever that command is.)
ALL it does is enable RH to sell to the corporate market. (Not that I really care about that...)
Red Hat's DESKTOP is NOT LINUX! It's just another desktop, like KDE or GNOME. If you don't like it, then CHANGE IT! As long as Linux is open-source, you WILL have CHOICE!
The advantage of Linux having a Windows desktop clone is increased users, more money, more development, thus better Linux. As long as Linux is a command-line niche market, it won't get better as fast as it might. Not to say it isn't getting better fast, please note. But it still has a way to go (as does all software).
Ted Nelson said at a West Coast Computer Faire some years ago that there was no acceptable software. He was right. It ALL has to get WAY better before I'm happy.
(For those who don't recognize the second name, she is the Director of the Miami Planetarium and she also produces musical CD's based on radiotelescope data. She looks like an Italian porn starlet but is really an astrophysicist educated in Milan.)
I'm an anarchist and a supporter of the concept of a "free market" which is NOT identical to the concept "capitalism".
And yes, I object to public roads AND Microsoft AND the GPL license AND the notion of intellectual property and restrictions on the use and distribution of anything by anybody.
If you bought it OR somebody gave it you OR it just fell in your lap OR you hacked (stole) it fair and square (but it's info so the original owner still has it), you own it and can do ANYTHING you want with it.
Otherwise we end up with George Lucas wanting to make a law forbidding anyone to change anything the "artist" did. (Yes, he actually advocates this - if a sculptor sells a sculpture, he wants it illegal for the owner to paint it blue...)
The problem, as some other posters have noted, is that DNS is couplng static legal identifiers with dynamic physical addresses while at the same time people are trying to use the legal identifiers as conceptual addresses.
This cannot work.
While directory services function moderately well at locating references to concepts, they don't do it REAL well. I went looking for HTMLView a few days ago and had to slog through pages of results that pointed to the wrong product that happened to have the same name. And most people are not experts at using search engines.
Maybe we need to consider Ted Nelson's Xanadu Project all over again. ie., we need something to allow entities on the Net to be conceptually identified and categorized so that people can put a name or concept in a search engine and find an INTELLIGENTLY ORGANIZED (unlike Google where the results are a hodgepodge of whatever the Web server operator put in his HTML) list that describes the entity in sufficient terms to determine WHAT KIND of entity it is and WHICH entity of that kind it is.
Then you hit the button and you get the legal address which has no more importance than "1055 Market Street" does (or wouldn't if we didn't live on a physical street) and IT takes you to 455.622.012.5 which only the routers care about.
I agree - direct subscription on a pure individual show basis is the way to go.
HOWEVER - the problem likely would be initially the producers or distributors would charge excessive amounts - just like to music download companies are doing now. Your $100 for Star Trek is WAY too much.
People have to remember that the average consumer spends maybe $100 a month for entertainment. And that $100 is competed for by ALL the entertainment options including eating out, movies, etc. You simply CANNOT charge more than $5-10 for ANYTHING without the consumer simply dropping it. That's why people are screaming over $9 movie tickets.
So the cost of a subscription to a show should probably be no more than $2-5/month, and less on an annualized basis.
If it could be done, it wouldn't be so bad. I liked the Louie the Lizard commercials - they were hilarious and the only advert part was the company naming themselves as the producer (plus the use of the product name by Louie himself, of course - which didn't even occur in all the ads).
The problem is - most advertisers (for that matter, most producers and directors of TV or movies) are incompetent. They simply could not and would not produce decent commercials. They don't now...
But it would be nice to see the model for advertising be: tell a funny story or show something dramatic, then tell people they got it from so-and-so product. That's like giving away something free to the viewer, then telling them where they can spend their money if they liked it. It's the same model as TV shows ARE NOW - the only difference is it would be applied to the commercials as WELL.
How does Microsoft (or anybody else) expect major corporations to run mission-critical stuff over lines provided by ISPs who routinely oversubscribe their boxes and undersubscribe their bandwidth?
I can't reliably get my Usenet newsfeed without "Connection unexpectedly closed by server" messages.
Anybody think you can run General Motors or any bank on that basis? Anybody think any ASP isn't just going to be an ISP with a new acronym?
In a way, until the phone companies get us that infinite bandwidth they were promising a couple years ago, this is good because it will probably kill Microsoft when it becomes apparent that none of this will work for reasons entirely outside the issue of which programming language or object broker is used.
The interesting thing is that I got a response from HP in my email today. Clearly they KEPT all those emails and responded to them en mass Friday. I find that a good PR move on their part. The email I got thanked me for my concern and referred me to the CNET article. It was issued by the fellow in the HP Linux Division - also interesting, because the guy who caused the ruckus is in the Compaq UNIX Division. Sounds like Linux pulling Unix out of the fire again?
I sent an email to her via the HP feedback mechanism. Told her I was always impressed by her leadership abilities but suggested that this was a very bad PR move to use a controversial piece of legislation to in effect suppress the First Amendment. Told her a lot of HP customers were threatening to become former customers. Told her she didn't need this in the middle of trying to make the merger work.
And I added a PS that said I always thought she was a "babe", too!
Slashdot Mirror
I think they mean "water pipes" as well, but their editors obviously don't read anything they put up on the site (maybe their editors can't read...)
According to the article, Horizon had to suspend publishing of the comic Radix "due to legal issues" related to the MIT expropriation of their work.
While I don't think the claim that this harms their use of the character as "escapist entertainment" is in any way meaningful, it would be interesting to see if it can be proved in court that they HAD to suspend the comic due to MIT's action, or whether they are just using that as an excuse for low initial sales of the comic.
If the former, then they clearly have a case against MIT.
Obviously, MIT felt they couldn't go the Army with a character image ACTUALLY taken from a comic, because they felt they wouldn't be taken seriously. But nobody draws stuff like comic book artists (except maybe expensive product design artists), so MIT felt they had to rip one off while concealing the fact that it was a comic book image.
They should have gone to the Marvel Universe series and ripped off Iron Man's armor if they wanted some real heavy duty engineering concepts wrapped up in a comic book character...
>There are, of course, the obvious facts that a long, long time ago your life-expectancy would be 30 years, whereas now (depending on where you live) it might be near 80. This is a development over thousands of years, though.
Actually, as of the turn of the (last) century, the average lifespan was something like 50, I think. The 30 years more you get now happened in the last 100 years, not thousands.
With nanotech, it is likely that people will easily live to 100 starting in the next 20 years, and indefinitely within 50 years.
So, yes, the time you live in counts. And if you are under 40 today, you will likely never die of conventional age-related causes.
Those who are 40-60 may survive depending on how close they are to 60 versus 40 and how well they stay in shape and healthy. Take up tai chi...
WINE is a WINDOWS Emulator. There is a DOS emulator, I believe (and that's gotta be easier to do than a Windows one). Go here:
/dev. The documentation does not go to great lengths to explain how such devices can be created. (From what I understand, they require a recompilation of the Linux kernel and loading a Linux driver which comes precompiled with DOSEMU).
http://www.dosemu.org/
Also a review of it (not sure how old the review is) is here:
http://hcs.harvard.edu/~hcr/94dec/dosemu.html
From the review:
DOSEMU can be run from a text terminal or an X environment. The X version (XDOS) can run only text-mode applications in an X window, while the terminal version can run both text and graphics mode applications.
One of the major things that DOSEMU is still lacking is reliable DPMI emulation. As a result, a DOS DPMI application has almost no chance of actually running under DOSEMU.
Windows 3.0 will only run in standard mode and Windows 3.1 will not run at all. Many newer DOS development applications (Borland C, Pascal etc.) which use DPMI will not run, but the old versions (Turbo Pascal 6.0 and Turbo C 2.0) run just fine.
As far as games go, DOSEMU supports all major video cards, including VESA emulation and drivers. However, in order to get any reasonable speed in graphics mode, video shadowing must be disabled (from BIOS setup). Otherwise, performace is hardly acceptable.
The X version of DOSEMU only works in text mode and is quite slow, at least on a 386. The window refresh looks very strange and is noticeable, but with a fast local bus video card, this should not be of concern.
The major problem with DOSEMU is that it is very self-contained. You can only communicate with a card or peripheral if a compliant device exists in
Basically, no DOS driver can be loaded. DOSEMU does not provide access to any hard interrupts (probably because it runs in user space under Linux) and in order to have such access, it's necessary to setup a SillyInt (Silly Interrupt) driver, another process that comes with very little documentation.
DOSEMU runs very nicely in the background. I tested whether switching from the DOS tty to a Linux tty stalled the DOS emulation. To my surprise, upon switching back to the DOS tty I noticed that the program had continued running and made progress!
Despite numerous warnings all over the documentation, there seem to be no major bugs in DOSEMU. Documentation is relatively straight-forward, but to properly install and configure DOSEMU, you need to have a fair amount of knowledge of both DOS and Linux (especially DOS).
If you want strong, reliable DOS emulation under Linux, then DOSEMU does not really live up to that task. It's a very nice program to play with and it performs very well with older DOS applications. I use it to run WordPerfect 5.1 in an X window while running an FTP session in another window and telnet in another window. Most importantly, installing this program is a good way to learn more about Linux and DOS, which was the largest benefit of installing DOSEMU for me.
Wouldn't hurt to install a Linux box, install DOSEMU, and try your old DOS client programs on it.
And therefore so does Windows because a lot of people can't do those things in Windows, either - especially the latter one, find a file that some Windows app decided to drop in some default directory that nobody ever heard of...
ANY user on ANY OS can mistype something and end up in some place they have no clue how to get out of...
Linux is at NO disadvantage on this level of user, because it (or more precisely, its apps - Linux is an OS, NOT an APP) certainly has "New" and "Save as" dialogs...
"Setting up a Unix system can be hell> for a novice if no one or nothing is there to help and provide guidance -- the most likely scenario in a corporate environment.
As for Windows, most folks don't set anything up. They just use whatever the IT department pushed out to them."
Now these comments DIRECTLY contradict themselves!
If the usual scenario in a corporate environment is that Windows users get whatever IT pushes at them, then why is it that there is no one to assist them when they install Linux? Obviously in an IT environment, the Linux system will be set up by IT people just like Windows.
If what you are trying to say is that the IT department doesn't have any Linux experts to do this, then the problem is not Linux, but the IT department. There are plenty of computer science grads who know Linux these days, hire some.
And ANYBODY in IT should be able to install Linux just as well as Windows regardless of their experience - it's not rocket science...all they have to do is RTFM...(Not that it is always easy in Windows OR Linux, as numerous posts here have shown.)
Now, if you have to "ghost" ten thousand copies of Linux at one time, maybe it gets tricky... I imagine it's tricky for Windows, too.
"it will not help me a bit to find Linux acting like Windows. It removes the choice, "
NO, NO, NO! It does NOT (unless you can't figure out how to use "switch desktop" or whatever that command is.)
ALL it does is enable RH to sell to the corporate market. (Not that I really care about that...)
Red Hat's DESKTOP is NOT LINUX! It's just another desktop, like KDE or GNOME. If you don't like it, then CHANGE IT! As long as Linux is open-source, you WILL have CHOICE!
The advantage of Linux having a Windows desktop clone is increased users, more money, more development, thus better Linux. As long as Linux is a command-line niche market, it won't get better as fast as it might. Not to say it isn't getting better fast, please note. But it still has a way to go (as does all software).
Ted Nelson said at a West Coast Computer Faire some years ago that there was no acceptable software. He was right. It ALL has to get WAY better before I'm happy.
"there's Wordpad, which honestly is up to par with Linux 'word processors.' "
BWAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Trolls! Ya Gotta Love 'Em!
While we're at it, a thirty second Google search turned up this review of word processors at LinuxPlanet on the second results page (URL may wrap):
1 76 2/1/
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/
They SPECIFICALLY TESTED MAIL MERGE CAPABILITY!
Can you read?
MAIL MERGE? MAIL MERGE? The simplest, stupidest task a user can do? Linux can't?
Bullshit! There must be a thousand ways in ANY UNIX to merge an address into a page of text!
What you are complaining about is that it MAY be hard to find a GUI-based text processor in Linux that can do this with a few mouse clicks like Word.
And I don't know THAT is true since I haven't looked to do something this stupid!
Also, does it fix the problem that it pops up an error message when your Host file has ad-server addresses in it you are using for blocking?
If not, pass...
A Jesus with 900 feet?
Is he related to Kali, by any chance?
Or maybe the SubGenius "Fightin' Jesus"?
As long as the babe is in the movie - and hopefully the one getting screwed by Da Kapitan - I'm happy!
She was supposed to be the "mother figure" on the show (to Picard's "father figure") but she was the quirkiest sexiest mother figure I ever saw.
That Anne Rice "Lasher" spinoff show with the Scottish ghost pleasuring her from the INSIDE? Oh, yeah!
Jodie Foster or Dr. Fiorella Terenzi?
(My two favorite babes...)
(For those who don't recognize the second name, she is the Director of the Miami Planetarium and she also produces musical CD's based on radiotelescope data. She looks like an Italian porn starlet but is really an astrophysicist educated in Milan.)
I'm an anarchist and a supporter of the concept of a "free market" which is NOT identical to the concept "capitalism".
And yes, I object to public roads AND Microsoft AND the GPL license AND the notion of intellectual property and restrictions on the use and distribution of anything by anybody.
If you bought it OR somebody gave it you OR it just fell in your lap OR you hacked (stole) it fair and square (but it's info so the original owner still has it), you own it and can do ANYTHING you want with it.
Otherwise we end up with George Lucas wanting to make a law forbidding anyone to change anything the "artist" did. (Yes, he actually advocates this - if a sculptor sells a sculpture, he wants it illegal for the owner to paint it blue...)
The problem, as some other posters have noted, is that DNS is couplng static legal identifiers with dynamic physical addresses while at the same time people are trying to use the legal identifiers as conceptual addresses.
This cannot work.
While directory services function moderately well at locating references to concepts, they don't do it REAL well. I went looking for HTMLView a few days ago and had to slog through pages of results that pointed to the wrong product that happened to have the same name. And most people are not experts at using search engines.
Maybe we need to consider Ted Nelson's Xanadu Project all over again. ie., we need something to allow entities on the Net to be conceptually identified and categorized so that people can put a name or concept in a search engine and find an INTELLIGENTLY ORGANIZED (unlike Google where the results are a hodgepodge of whatever the Web server operator put in his HTML) list that describes the entity in sufficient terms to determine WHAT KIND of entity it is and WHICH entity of that kind it is.
Then you hit the button and you get the legal address which has no more importance than "1055 Market Street" does (or wouldn't if we didn't live on a physical street) and IT takes you to 455.622.012.5 which only the routers care about.
I agree - direct subscription on a pure individual show basis is the way to go.
HOWEVER - the problem likely would be initially the producers or distributors would charge excessive amounts - just like to music download companies are doing now. Your $100 for Star Trek is WAY too much.
People have to remember that the average consumer spends maybe $100 a month for entertainment. And that $100 is competed for by ALL the entertainment options including eating out, movies, etc. You simply CANNOT charge more than $5-10 for ANYTHING without the consumer simply dropping it. That's why people are screaming over $9 movie tickets.
So the cost of a subscription to a show should probably be no more than $2-5/month, and less on an annualized basis.
But it should be the way to go.
If it could be done, it wouldn't be so bad. I liked the Louie the Lizard commercials - they were hilarious and the only advert part was the company naming themselves as the producer (plus the use of the product name by Louie himself, of course - which didn't even occur in all the ads).
The problem is - most advertisers (for that matter, most producers and directors of TV or movies) are incompetent. They simply could not and would not produce decent commercials. They don't now...
But it would be nice to see the model for advertising be: tell a funny story or show something dramatic, then tell people they got it from so-and-so product. That's like giving away something free to the viewer, then telling them where they can spend their money if they liked it. It's the same model as TV shows ARE NOW - the only difference is it would be applied to the commercials as WELL.
How does Microsoft (or anybody else) expect major corporations to run mission-critical stuff over lines provided by ISPs who routinely oversubscribe their boxes and undersubscribe their bandwidth?
I can't reliably get my Usenet newsfeed without "Connection unexpectedly closed by server" messages.
Anybody think you can run General Motors or any bank on that basis? Anybody think any ASP isn't just going to be an ISP with a new acronym?
In a way, until the phone companies get us that infinite bandwidth they were promising a couple years ago, this is good because it will probably kill Microsoft when it becomes apparent that none of this will work for reasons entirely outside the issue of which programming language or object broker is used.
...shall we say, posterior penetration image that is the first thing you see on the Web site.
Somebody has made their displeasure with this conference known in no uncertain terms!
The interesting thing is that I got a response from HP in my email today. Clearly they KEPT all those emails and responded to them en mass Friday. I find that a good PR move on their part. The email I got thanked me for my concern and referred me to the CNET article. It was issued by the fellow in the HP Linux Division - also interesting, because the guy who caused the ruckus is in the Compaq UNIX Division. Sounds like Linux pulling Unix out of the fire again?
I sent an email to her via the HP feedback mechanism. Told her I was always impressed by her leadership abilities but suggested that this was a very bad PR move to use a controversial piece of legislation to in effect suppress the First Amendment. Told her a lot of HP customers were threatening to become former customers. Told her she didn't need this in the middle of trying to make the merger work.
And I added a PS that said I always thought she was a "babe", too!