It would be nice if we could get Linus, RMS and ESR to together pen a statement (together, so that their individual quirks will roughly even each other out;) ) stating that Linux isn't just about two companies, or even about companies at all. Linux existed before any companies were supporting it, and it will exist afterwards.
And if he doesn't take back this silly, new-wave corporo-capitalist nonsense ("Linux is about two companies"? What, is he learning economics from Bill Gates or Darl McBride?), we should simply boycott SuSE.
I'd love to get an old teletype going. Ever since I read Hackers by Stephen Levy, I really really lusted after the old hardware. (The first computer I owned was an Atari 800; alas, I never got to play on a PDP-11 or a teletype, or punch cards on a modified IBM Selectric (or punch cards at all!)). I wonder if maybe some enterprising geeks could set up an 'old computer museum and workshop' so geeks can go and learn of their roots. I'd love to play with a teletype! (I hear the bell on one of those is an actual BELL!)
Yeah, mod me "Troll", motherfuckers. You know I'm right. Fuck you and your political correctness. WHEN THE US IS IN THE WRONG, I CALL THEM ON IT. You asshole moderators who love modding me down be damned; I have karma to burn.
Go to Hell if you can't handle the truth about your own country.
It'll never happen. All the laws of the US are bought and paid for by corporations anyhow. You and I both know that they'd NEVER let something like the corporate death penalty through. It'd force them to, y'know, act responsibly, and not pull giant Enron/SCO/Microsoft/Verizon/RIAA/MPAA-style schemes out of their rear ends whenever they think they can make money off of blatant lies and illegal business practices.
Sun is not an acronym. (That is, it's "Sun", not "SUN"). Likewise, "Mac" (as in "Macintosh") is not an acronym. It drives me nuts when people assume any short, technical term (or proper noun) is an acronym. (e.g. "Perl", "Sun", "Mac", "Linux"... NONE of them are acronyms, and ALL of them are frequently written in all caps.)
The story uses CPU-hours "at 1GHz" as a unit of measurement.
Guys, please, this is SlashDot. A 1GHz G5 is not the same as a 1GHz Duron is not the same as a 1GHz P3. What sort of 1GHz chip is being referred to here?
I'm not trying to incite a flamewar. I AM, however, interested in seeing what SlashDotters have to say about this concept: It seems to me that there is a "double standard" on "piracy" (I hate that word; see this page for some reasons why not to use this word) here. When people "pirate" the MPAA's latest, no one cares, but when people "pirate" anime, people here get upset. Why?
This will become a common way for 'big' corps to spy on 'small' corps (and individual users?), to find new ways to both screw them over, and appear 'omniscient'. They'll never (or rarely) get called on it. Meanwhile, anyone who tries to reveal information discovered in this way which is incriminating towards said big corps will get sued for being "hackers" and/or "terrorists".
Here is my pre-emptive response to all of the pro-status-quo zealots (yes, the most annoying sort of all, contrary to a recent poll).
Let's say you had a time machine. (Let's say it was built out of a DeLorean, just for fun's sakes.)
So you fire up your DMC chariot, head back to 1965, and pick up some computer scientists.
You then take them back to the present and start showing them things.
After they get past the whole "You elected RONALD REAGAN President!?" bit, they'll probably faint dead away when you tell them about modern computers. "WHAT? The system REQUIRES 64MB of memory to boot!!!??? And 128MB is recommended!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?" At this point, they would probably punch you in the face, and tell you how much of a failure the modern computer world is (by virtue of being the most prodigious waste of perfectly good supercomputing hardware conceivable... short of using all the world's hardware to render an animated video of Britney Spears's assets bouncing... using a renderer written in BASIC, of course.)
This is sad. People on SlashDot shouldn't have to be reminded of the difference between kilobytes, megabytes (MB) and megabits (Mb). This is really sick. Makes me want to start a forum for geeks who are still, well, geeks. You know, that is, people who know this sort of stuff. Mod me down-- you know it's true. Over half (two thirds?) of SlashDot users read the site from Windoze...that should tell you something about how far the standards here have fallen. MEGABITS VERSUS MEGABYTES IS BASIC STUFF HERE.
...90% of hardware improvements are essentially wasted by programmer inefficiency.
Look at those amazing 4K demos that people did (and stll do) for DOS. People are doing wild stuff here-- things like real-time pseudo-3D rendering, fractals, you name it-- all inside of 4 kilobytes of code. And most of these demos will run just as well on a '286 or (at most) '386 than today's space-heater chips.
Contiki is a lovely example of what can be done with efficient coding. In my experience, this sort of efficiency is NEVER achieved today in "commercial" projects or even in OSS/FS code-- people never even come close. The only areas of computing which have seen significant improvements (I don't just mean "more widgets" or "better interfaces" (the latter has nothing to do with hardware improvements, so don't even mention it)) in recent years have been:
* Gaming (perhaps the only area where efficiency is even SOMEWHAT appreciated, as it leads to higher FPS)
* Rendering (ditto)
* Real-time scientific simulations
In 1980, I could flip on an Apple II and have a usable prompt inside of a second or two. Nowadays, even with a screamin' P4 or Duron will get you a 30-second startup time-- if you're lucky. That's just to boot up the OS. Wanna start a word processor? That'll take even longer.
If you want to get a sense of what MY expectations were that were shattered, go grab a good Apple II emulator and some appropriate software and fire the emulator up. Make sure that it's running at the full possible speed-- not "compatible" speed (which is 1.02MHz, if I remember correctly). Look at how fast stuff runs... and that's in emulation. Sure, there's no fancy GUI, there's no clippy, whatever you think "modern" OSes have to have... but the point is that even in emulation, old stuff runs REALLY, REALLY FAST. If the same mentality of "efficiency is everything" that was necessary during the days of limited hardware power was voluntarily adopted today... well... imagine Windows XP starting up in one second (and not crashing). Imagine being able to swap cool new games on floppy disks. Imagine most games being distributed on Mini CDs, even those with lots of videos and speech, since a full (650-700MB) CD would be overkill for them.
Then wake up and realize it's time to go buy some more RAM again... ho hum...BillG just raised the bar on hardware requirements. Back to the treadmill we go...
1) Social security numbers are being used as "unique identifying numbers" EVERYWHERE. When you've gotten someone's SS#, you're halfway to having their identity.
2) Corporations and government agencies now operate almost exclusively on "scripts" and set patterns of behavior. In other words, there is a system to how each and every corporation or government entity does each and every thing that it does. Once you learn the system, all it takes is a little clever social engineering to pass your way through the entity's "checkpoints" (say, the question "What is your mother's maiden name?" or "What are the last four digits of your social security card?") and voila, they believe you are the person you're trying to become.
The whole point of this piece is to say "Be forewarned, our students: If you pirate something, we won't help you when the RIAA and MPAA toss you to the wolves!". That's why. They're just saying "Students-- we won't help you when the nice lawyers from the RIAA and MPAA send you a letter!"
Slashdot Mirror
...a corporation exploiting Linux quite nicely ;)
It would be nice if we could get Linus, RMS and ESR to together pen a statement (together, so that their individual quirks will roughly even each other out ;) ) stating that Linux isn't just about two companies, or even about companies at all. Linux existed before any companies were supporting it, and it will exist afterwards.
And if he doesn't take back this silly, new-wave corporo-capitalist nonsense ("Linux is about two companies"? What, is he learning economics from Bill Gates or Darl McBride?), we should simply boycott SuSE.
Yeah, my boyfriend (I'm a chick) would probably kill me if I lugged one of these into the bedroom.
I'd love to get an old teletype going. Ever since I read Hackers by Stephen Levy, I really really lusted after the old hardware. (The first computer I owned was an Atari 800; alas, I never got to play on a PDP-11 or a teletype, or punch cards on a modified IBM Selectric (or punch cards at all!)). I wonder if maybe some enterprising geeks could set up an 'old computer museum and workshop' so geeks can go and learn of their roots. I'd love to play with a teletype! (I hear the bell on one of those is an actual BELL!)
...and how does it relate to the story? I may be dense (yes I am), but I don't get the reference? SCO sleep 'til Brooklyn?
...that god-awful Sponge-Bob parody video from AlbinoBlackSheep.com stuck in my head...
Yeah, mod me "Troll", motherfuckers. You know I'm right. Fuck you and your political correctness. WHEN THE US IS IN THE WRONG, I CALL THEM ON IT. You asshole moderators who love modding me down be damned; I have karma to burn.
Go to Hell if you can't handle the truth about your own country.
...unless one of their "constituents" (read: Large corporations) see a way to profit from it.
It'll never happen. All the laws of the US are bought and paid for by corporations anyhow. You and I both know that they'd NEVER let something like the corporate death penalty through. It'd force them to, y'know, act responsibly, and not pull giant Enron/SCO/Microsoft/Verizon/RIAA/MPAA-style schemes out of their rear ends whenever they think they can make money off of blatant lies and illegal business practices.
Sun is not an acronym. (That is, it's "Sun", not "SUN"). Likewise, "Mac" (as in "Macintosh") is not an acronym. It drives me nuts when people assume any short, technical term (or proper noun) is an acronym. (e.g. "Perl", "Sun", "Mac", "Linux"... NONE of them are acronyms, and ALL of them are frequently written in all caps.)
What the fuck?
And what's with the "IE" and "OUR" crap?
Wrong, goofball. 1GHz means 1,000,000,000 CLOCK CYCLES per second. There IS a difference.
The story uses CPU-hours "at 1GHz" as a unit of measurement.
Guys, please, this is SlashDot. A 1GHz G5 is not the same as a 1GHz Duron is not the same as a 1GHz P3. What sort of 1GHz chip is being referred to here?
I'm not trying to incite a flamewar. I AM, however, interested in seeing what SlashDotters have to say about this concept: It seems to me that there is a "double standard" on "piracy" (I hate that word; see this page for some reasons why not to use this word) here. When people "pirate" the MPAA's latest, no one cares, but when people "pirate" anime, people here get upset. Why?
This will become a common way for 'big' corps to spy on 'small' corps (and individual users?), to find new ways to both screw them over, and appear 'omniscient'. They'll never (or rarely) get called on it. Meanwhile, anyone who tries to reveal information discovered in this way which is incriminating towards said big corps will get sued for being "hackers" and/or "terrorists".
My computer doesn't have a "BIOS", per se. It's a Mac.
Here is my pre-emptive response to all of the pro-status-quo zealots (yes, the most annoying sort of all, contrary to a recent poll).
Let's say you had a time machine. (Let's say it was built out of a DeLorean, just for fun's sakes.)
So you fire up your DMC chariot, head back to 1965, and pick up some computer scientists.
You then take them back to the present and start showing them things.
After they get past the whole "You elected RONALD REAGAN President!?" bit, they'll probably faint dead away when you tell them about modern computers. "WHAT? The system REQUIRES 64MB of memory to boot!!!??? And 128MB is recommended!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?" At this point, they would probably punch you in the face, and tell you how much of a failure the modern computer world is (by virtue of being the most prodigious waste of perfectly good supercomputing hardware conceivable... short of using all the world's hardware to render an animated video of Britney Spears's assets bouncing... using a renderer written in BASIC, of course.)
This is sad. People on SlashDot shouldn't have to be reminded of the difference between kilobytes, megabytes (MB) and megabits (Mb). This is really sick. Makes me want to start a forum for geeks who are still, well, geeks. You know, that is, people who know this sort of stuff. Mod me down-- you know it's true. Over half (two thirds?) of SlashDot users read the site from Windoze...that should tell you something about how far the standards here have fallen. MEGABITS VERSUS MEGABYTES IS BASIC STUFF HERE.
...90% of hardware improvements are essentially wasted by programmer inefficiency.
Look at those amazing 4K demos that people did (and stll do) for DOS. People are doing wild stuff here-- things like real-time pseudo-3D rendering, fractals, you name it-- all inside of 4 kilobytes of code. And most of these demos will run just as well on a '286 or (at most) '386 than today's space-heater chips.
Contiki is a lovely example of what can be done with efficient coding. In my experience, this sort of efficiency is NEVER achieved today in "commercial" projects or even in OSS/FS code-- people never even come close. The only areas of computing which have seen significant improvements (I don't just mean "more widgets" or "better interfaces" (the latter has nothing to do with hardware improvements, so don't even mention it)) in recent years have been:
* Gaming (perhaps the only area where efficiency is even SOMEWHAT appreciated, as it leads to higher FPS)
* Rendering (ditto)
* Real-time scientific simulations
In 1980, I could flip on an Apple II and have a usable prompt inside of a second or two. Nowadays, even with a screamin' P4 or Duron will get you a 30-second startup time-- if you're lucky. That's just to boot up the OS. Wanna start a word processor? That'll take even longer.
If you want to get a sense of what MY expectations were that were shattered, go grab a good Apple II emulator and some appropriate software and fire the emulator up. Make sure that it's running at the full possible speed-- not "compatible" speed (which is 1.02MHz, if I remember correctly). Look at how fast stuff runs... and that's in emulation. Sure, there's no fancy GUI, there's no clippy, whatever you think "modern" OSes have to have... but the point is that even in emulation, old stuff runs REALLY, REALLY FAST. If the same mentality of "efficiency is everything" that was necessary during the days of limited hardware power was voluntarily adopted today... well... imagine Windows XP starting up in one second (and not crashing). Imagine being able to swap cool new games on floppy disks. Imagine most games being distributed on Mini CDs, even those with lots of videos and speech, since a full (650-700MB) CD would be overkill for them.
Then wake up and realize it's time to go buy some more RAM again... ho hum...BillG just raised the bar on hardware requirements. Back to the treadmill we go...
MacGyver
Eh, go shove off and beat up an abortion doctor or something... or whatever it is you people do for fun.
...because of two simple reasons:
1) Social security numbers are being used as "unique identifying numbers" EVERYWHERE. When you've gotten someone's SS#, you're halfway to having their identity.
2) Corporations and government agencies now operate almost exclusively on "scripts" and set patterns of behavior. In other words, there is a system to how each and every corporation or government entity does each and every thing that it does. Once you learn the system, all it takes is a little clever social engineering to pass your way through the entity's "checkpoints" (say, the question "What is your mother's maiden name?" or "What are the last four digits of your social security card?") and voila, they believe you are the person you're trying to become.
The whole point of this piece is to say "Be forewarned, our students: If you pirate something, we won't help you when the RIAA and MPAA toss you to the wolves!". That's why. They're just saying "Students-- we won't help you when the nice lawyers from the RIAA and MPAA send you a letter!"
Since when are the Universities themselves (and/or their "umbrella groups") supposed to act as unpaid representatives of the RIAA and MPAA?!
It's called the Oxford English Dictionary.