He didn't say "some people have too much freedom", he said "there ought to be limits on freedom". If you think about it, that is much worse... Click here for the full story, as it was printed in the Dallas Morning News back in May.
Trust no one... Especially if they're trying to get elected.
(offtopic, I know, but in answer to a direct question...)
Here's what bothers me about this system: the current card & PIN system has my bank's routing information encoded on it, so if I use an ATM at a bank other than my own, it gets the routing info from the card, and sends the transaction info to my bank. With this iris system, every bank has to have everyone's retina on file in order to provide the same service. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable letting *MY* bank scan my retina, much less send that data out into some kind of master database that any financial institution could access...
Also, I like this line at the end of the article:
The machines would also be able to provide [night club patrons] with airtime cards for pre-paid mobile phones and stamps.
When was the last time you went out to a night club for drinks and dancing, and needed stamps? "Oh, crap, I forgot to send Grandma's birthday card. I'll use STELLA to get some stamps!":-)
Will the new Gnu/Linux/Amiga OS be available for download along with source-code?
I didn't see anything about GNU in the two articles I read. All I saw was the plan to use the Linux kernel. I suspect the rest of the OS will be Amiga's own stuff, not GNU (why would they make YALD [Yet Another Linux Distribution]?) I suspect that any code they modify in the kernel will be released, but there's nothing that says they have to release the whole OS, if libraries and the GUI and such are written in-house with no GPL code.
Very true, all early PC OSes were small. But the AmigaOS fit on two floppies and gave you a fully multitasking OS with GUI and CLI interfaces, and could run quite usably in 256K or RAM (which was what my first A1000 had initially). Looking at PCs around the same time, we had MS-DOS 3.1 (this was 1985), which had almost none of the capabilities of AmigaDOS/Workbench, and would gladly hog up all of your PC's 640K...
The Amiga was a mightily impressive machine it its day, doing more with less than any of its competitors. I still remember the awe I felt when I saw the Video Toaster for the first time... I'm glad to see a glimmer of hope for a possible comeback, and maybe some new life into the A1200 I still have in the closet...
As for the Be thing, I think Be is full of it. All that whining about not having hardware specs, etc. Come on, LinuxPPC and NetBSD managed to get it to run without any problems, what's up with Be?
I tend to agree. I suspect that Be, as a small company, really only had the resources to do (and support) an Intel port OR a G3 port, not both. The Intel market is about a hundred times more viable, so they made a wise choice in choosing it, but didn't want to piss off their old PPC customers, so they made a big deal out of Apple not releasing the specs to them, to make Apple the bad guy. All the while, they probably were planning on phasing out PPC support anyway; Apple just gave them a convenient scapegoat.
As others have pointed out, there are many pieces of hardware that have Linux and *BSD support without having a single spec to work with. It can be done, it's just costly in terms of time, which Be couldn't spare.
...or adults who get all of their news from National Public Radio or National Public Television.
...or from Slashdot and other online, non-governmental sources. I'd wager that the average slashdotter gets more news and information from various online outlets than they do from traditional radio and TV media.
This, apart from your obvious misinterpretation of Fascism... Might consider actually reading Mussolini's writings on the subject.
I know that for you american people war is a funny thing that you can watch on CNN, but for us in Europe we've all lost one of more menbers of our familly in WW2, and it's NOT something that you can laugh about.
a) Millions of Americans died in WWII, also. Many of whom left families behind. 2) Nobody watched WWII on CNN. iii) The French DO have a history of surrendering to Germany...
Bottom line is you may say code it yourself but i can't and won't but i and others still deserve a fast lightweight reliable browser to use on linux.
You deserve it? Says who? If you're not contributing to the community in some way, you don't deserve anything. You're lucky to have what you do, thanks to the work of others. What an asinine comment. If you're not happy with the software offerings for Linux, and you can't code your own, and you won't pay for commercial alternatives ("although i shudder at paying for what should be included for free in a distro"), find another OS that meets your needs better.
I'm not a coder, but I like to think I give back to the community by providing help and support where I can in newsgroups and on the LSS web site, as well as bug reports in software that I use. At any rate, I've never once felt that the Free Software community OWED me any particular application just because I gave them the privilege of providing me free software. I guess I'm just not a leech...
Sorry, I normally don't pick on grammar errors, but this is one of those that really bugs the shit out of me. It's "moot", not "mute". A mute point, whether in ALL CAPS or not, would be one that was unable to speak...
Again, sorry, but if I had kept it in, I would have exploded. It's like hearing someone pronounce "nuclear" as "nucular". Nails on a blackboard...
There's a free package available called p3nfs that enables you to mount the Psion's internal drives on your Linux (or other Unix) box, via the serial cable. It works pretty well, and I use it to tar and gzip my Psion's data regularly for backup purposes.
Converting documents (i.e. between Wordperfect and Psion's Word program) is still only supported (AFAIK) under PsiWin in Windoze. I've been trying to get PsiWin to work under VMWare, but I can't seem to get the serial ports to work in VMWare...
My question is, will the new software available on the 5mx be available as a ROM upgrade for Series 5 users? That Jotter app looks pretty handy. Java might be a bit slow on the older 5, though...
And why didn't they put the Message Suite (e-mail, fax, and web browser - an amazing little package) on the ROM?
It's not clear where this ZD guy got his information, but if it was straight from the USPTO's web page, it may not be the most current information. According to the USPTO's disclaimer page, the web database could be quite out of date:
Currency of the Web Database
The PTO?s trademark data on the Web is updated on a two-month cycle. Coupled with the time required for data production, this means that particular trademarks could be as much as four months out of sequence with the PTO?s internal trademark database.
The Web database does not include new applications that were filed and entered into the PTO?s internal trademark database during the last two to four months.
The Web database does not reflect changes made to the PTO?s internal trademark database during the last two to four months.
The Web database will show applications that registered after its last update as pending applications rather than registrations.
The Web database will not include edits made to individual records after its last update.
I could be wrong here, but I was under the impression that PocketWord that comes with WinCE is more akin to WordPad with a spell-checker, and doesn't have any of the more "advanced" "features" of Word, such as macros and what-not.
I've no first-hand experience with WinCE (I've got a Psion 5), but everything I've read has bemoaned the dearth of features in all the WinCE "Pocket" applications.
I think the chances of them addressing your specific issues are very, very slim. They don't even have the funding to manufacture this thing as a standalone PCI card, let alone slap a SCSI port on the thing, or make it an add-on for a Banshee...
Your comment about the bias built into their poll is very valid, though. I noticed it, too. There should have simply been a "I'm not interested in DVD" box instead of the Windows remark.
I didn't look for an email(Rushed) someone please post it and hit it hard.
Brilliant idea! I'm sure Bellsouth will cower at the feet of PacBell, SWBell, and BellAtlantic customers e-mailing them our outrage...
The only people who should directly contact BellSouth are customers who are affected by this policy. Just calling to complain on principle makes Linux users look like a mob of crying skr1pt k1dd1&z.
The rest of us, however, can make sure this gets good coverage, so BS will want to rectify the problem immediately to avoid a major PR debacle.
Looks like Infoworld is collecting e-mail signatures for a petition against this thing. Look at the bottom of this page for details. The address is ucita@infoworld.com.
Its not a sealed system. You'd think condensation would fry it within a few minutes of operation.
The bottom of the page says he's working on the second iteration, which will submerge the coils completely and resolve the condensation problem, so yeah, he must be getting some water in there, and is apparently aware of it.
Since oil & water don't mix, it's likely that a small amount of water in the system wouldn't be much of a problem, as the thin layer of oil covering everything (eeeeww...) would probably insulate the components well enough. But run the thing long enough, and you'd have a gallon of water in the thing, and that might be a bit much...
If it was me, I'd send it back in under warranty (oozing oil all over the place) just to hear the response...
Why I'm starting to hate that "I have redhat, why should I use this new distro?" Sound like those dickheads at the university who says..."Hey I have NT, why should I use XX OS?"
Umm... Not to make you look like a moron, but these people are generally asking "What's better about this distro that would make me want to choose it over Red Hat?", not "I have Red Hat, I am going to bury my head in the sand."
YOUR RIGHT TO CHOOSE! (hey, clap your hands!)
They are exercising their right to make an informed decision, not just blindy jumping on to the flavor-of-the-month distro...
What if it is not PTC's fault, something broke in the kernel? Are they required to fix the bug themselves or tell the customers, "I can't fix the problem, it has nothing to do with our software".
Umm... Linux is open-sourced. They CAN fix it themselves, then distribute a kernel patch. If it's good, it'll get absorbed into the regular kernel tree. Haven't you been paying attention?
What happens when they slam headlong into a bug in NT or one of the commercial UNIXes? They wait for the vendor to fix it, and tell their customers to sit tight. So even if they waited for the kernel developers to fix it, it's no worse than what they're doing now.
I saw this last week, and I'm glad I voted before the rush of 10,000 votes comes in, all referred from slashdot.org. I, like many others, judging from the comments already posted about this, question the value of posting news stories on slashdot about polls. All it does is send clueless people to skew the results and makes the Linux community look like a bunch of lemmings.
Please stop posting these things on slashdot. Admittedly, these sorts of polls aren't scientific at all, but these companies do use them to judge the opinions of their target market. It's safe to say that if you didn't happen across this poll by browsing PTC's site yourself, you're not in the target market, so you shouldn't vote.
Keep in mind, also, that by posting these things on this site, it's really easy for a site to look at the server logs and simply reject all votes that came from a/. referral, so there's very little point to it, anyway.
And what on earth is wrong with "wide links = no"?? As hard as it may be to believe, some people may want to use the same data on a Unix network and a Windows network.
So where were the Unix clients in this benchmark? Throw an NFS server on the NT box, and then we'll talk. Otherwise, having the Samba configured with "wide links = no" makes absolutley no sense in this test, so it should be changed. In the real world, where you'd have a mix of clients, sure, it's useful. This test ain't about the real world, though. It's about doing a benchmark on a high-end machine with Windows 9x clients. Period. If they're going to narrow the focus so that NT has the advantage, we should be allowed to respond in kind.
The figures I've seen (and I'll distance myself by saying I haven't verified this at all) is that the Sun compilers produce 10-30% faster binaries than the GNU compilers. So that may be one reason to plunk down the $1500 or so for the compiler license from Sun.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoron iser
Please... I can?t stand reading HTML with a bunch of ?question marks? littering it. It?s very annoying, don?t you think?
Trust no one... Especially if they're trying to get elected.
(offtopic, I know, but in answer to a direct question...)
Also, I like this line at the end of the article:
The machines would also be able to provide [night club patrons] with airtime cards for pre-paid mobile phones and stamps.
When was the last time you went out to a night club for drinks and dancing, and needed stamps? "Oh, crap, I forgot to send Grandma's birthday card. I'll use STELLA to get some stamps!" :-)
I didn't see anything about GNU in the two articles I read. All I saw was the plan to use the Linux kernel. I suspect the rest of the OS will be Amiga's own stuff, not GNU (why would they make YALD [Yet Another Linux Distribution]?) I suspect that any code they modify in the kernel will be released, but there's nothing that says they have to release the whole OS, if libraries and the GUI and such are written in-house with no GPL code.
The Amiga was a mightily impressive machine it its day, doing more with less than any of its competitors. I still remember the awe I felt when I saw the Video Toaster for the first time... I'm glad to see a glimmer of hope for a possible comeback, and maybe some new life into the A1200 I still have in the closet...
I tend to agree. I suspect that Be, as a small company, really only had the resources to do (and support) an Intel port OR a G3 port, not both. The Intel market is about a hundred times more viable, so they made a wise choice in choosing it, but didn't want to piss off their old PPC customers, so they made a big deal out of Apple not releasing the specs to them, to make Apple the bad guy. All the while, they probably were planning on phasing out PPC support anyway; Apple just gave them a convenient scapegoat.
As others have pointed out, there are many pieces of hardware that have Linux and *BSD support without having a single spec to work with. It can be done, it's just costly in terms of time, which Be couldn't spare.
This, apart from your obvious misinterpretation of Fascism... Might consider actually reading Mussolini's writings on the subject.
a) Millions of Americans died in WWII, also. Many of whom left families behind.
2) Nobody watched WWII on CNN.
iii) The French DO have a history of surrendering to Germany...
You deserve it? Says who? If you're not contributing to the community in some way, you don't deserve anything. You're lucky to have what you do, thanks to the work of others. What an asinine comment. If you're not happy with the software offerings for Linux, and you can't code your own, and you won't pay for commercial alternatives ("although i shudder at paying for what should be included for free in a distro"), find another OS that meets your needs better.
I'm not a coder, but I like to think I give back to the community by providing help and support where I can in newsgroups and on the LSS web site, as well as bug reports in software that I use. At any rate, I've never once felt that the Free Software community OWED me any particular application just because I gave them the privilege of providing me free software. I guess I'm just not a leech...
...with Red Hat, is a MUTE point.
Sorry, I normally don't pick on grammar errors, but this is one of those that really bugs the shit out of me. It's "moot", not "mute". A mute point, whether in ALL CAPS or not, would be one that was unable to speak...
Again, sorry, but if I had kept it in, I would have exploded. It's like hearing someone pronounce "nuclear" as "nucular". Nails on a blackboard...
Absolutely not. It's just not worth making a silly, silly cascading thread over.
I agree. Replying to such a thread would only encourage others to do so, thereby drawing attention to the offending post.
Well, you don't really need a computer, either, unless it's the controller for your iron lung or kidney dialysis machine...
Converting documents (i.e. between Wordperfect and Psion's Word program) is still only supported (AFAIK) under PsiWin in Windoze. I've been trying to get PsiWin to work under VMWare, but I can't seem to get the serial ports to work in VMWare...
And why didn't they put the Message Suite (e-mail, fax, and web browser - an amazing little package) on the ROM?
Currency of the Web Database
I could be wrong here, but I was under the impression that PocketWord that comes with WinCE is more akin to WordPad with a spell-checker, and doesn't have any of the more "advanced" "features" of Word, such as macros and what-not.
I've no first-hand experience with WinCE (I've got a Psion 5), but everything I've read has bemoaned the dearth of features in all the WinCE "Pocket" applications.
Your comment about the bias built into their poll is very valid, though. I noticed it, too. There should have simply been a "I'm not interested in DVD" box instead of the Windows remark.
Brilliant idea! I'm sure Bellsouth will cower at the feet of PacBell, SWBell, and BellAtlantic customers e-mailing them our outrage...
The only people who should directly contact BellSouth are customers who are affected by this policy. Just calling to complain on principle makes Linux users look like a mob of crying skr1pt k1dd1&z.
The rest of us, however, can make sure this gets good coverage, so BS will want to rectify the problem immediately to avoid a major PR debacle.
Time to put the /. effect to good use?
The bottom of the page says he's working on the second iteration, which will submerge the coils completely and resolve the condensation problem, so yeah, he must be getting some water in there, and is apparently aware of it.
Since oil & water don't mix, it's likely that a small amount of water in the system wouldn't be much of a problem, as the thin layer of oil covering everything (eeeeww...) would probably insulate the components well enough. But run the thing long enough, and you'd have a gallon of water in the thing, and that might be a bit much...
If it was me, I'd send it back in under warranty (oozing oil all over the place) just to hear the response...
Umm... Not to make you look like a moron, but these people are generally asking "What's better about this distro that would make me want to choose it over Red Hat?", not "I have Red Hat, I am going to bury my head in the sand."
YOUR RIGHT TO CHOOSE! (hey, clap your hands!)
They are exercising their right to make an informed decision, not just blindy jumping on to the flavor-of-the-month distro...
Umm... Linux is open-sourced. They CAN fix it themselves, then distribute a kernel patch. If it's good, it'll get absorbed into the regular kernel tree. Haven't you been paying attention?
What happens when they slam headlong into a bug in NT or one of the commercial UNIXes? They wait for the vendor to fix it, and tell their customers to sit tight. So even if they waited for the kernel developers to fix it, it's no worse than what they're doing now.
Please stop posting these things on slashdot. Admittedly, these sorts of polls aren't scientific at all, but these companies do use them to judge the opinions of their target market. It's safe to say that if you didn't happen across this poll by browsing PTC's site yourself, you're not in the target market, so you shouldn't vote.
Keep in mind, also, that by posting these things on this site, it's really easy for a site to look at the server logs and simply reject all votes that came from a /. referral, so there's very little point to it, anyway.
So where were the Unix clients in this benchmark? Throw an NFS server on the NT box, and then we'll talk. Otherwise, having the Samba configured with "wide links = no" makes absolutley no sense in this test, so it should be changed. In the real world, where you'd have a mix of clients, sure, it's useful. This test ain't about the real world, though. It's about doing a benchmark on a high-end machine with Windows 9x clients. Period. If they're going to narrow the focus so that NT has the advantage, we should be allowed to respond in kind.
The figures I've seen (and I'll distance myself by saying I haven't verified this at all) is that the Sun compilers produce 10-30% faster binaries than the GNU compilers. So that may be one reason to plunk down the $1500 or so for the compiler license from Sun.