But then it's still Adobe's fault, for hiring such scum. If they get enough bad press for this, they might pay him off to shut up and drop the suit. --
GAC is a failing AI effort which serves no purpose except for Chris McKinstry to draw attention to himself.
The site began by offering users shares of the "Corpus" worth approximately 25 cents per question you submitted. Eventually, the running total of the "money" you had earned disappeared. Chris claimed that the software that generated that page was broken, but it has never come back. There was also a "referral program" along the lines of alladvantage, where you could get partial credit for the "Mindpixels" submitted by people you referred. That quietly went away. Asking Chris where the "money" went gets you ignored, and the fact is he didn't really promise money, just shares in whatever money this "Corpus" eventually makes. I suppose he pulled out at a good time, when he realized the total would be somewhere around $0.
He promised a rating system to get rid of the dumb or repetitive questions and reward the good ones - this never appeared.
A while later, he got the idea that he could create HAL with the same deficient software that ran GAC, just by telling users to answer questions as they thought the computer HAL would answer. Most people saw that this made no sense whatsoever. The massive funding Chris was expecting for HAL never appeared, and he wrote a bitter news item about it.
So now he's managed to get GAC signed up for this Turing-Test-ish-thing. GAC still appears to answer randomly on the simplest true/false questions, so I doubt it will do spectacularly. It's just another way to draw attention to Chris. --
They go to.1 when they fix some of it, and.2 when they fix most of it, at which point they are prepared to screw everything up again for the next.0 release.
--
Quantum encryption and quantum computing will definitely not arrive at the same time.
It's (relatively) easy to send photons in a certain quantum state, which will then be decoded.
It's really freaking hard to get those quantum states to do computations for you. Note that the biggest quantum calculation they've done to date, last I knew, was 4 bits.
Just because they're both "quantum" doesn't mean that the technologies are related. --
In middle school, the Macs were all set up in such a way that all security would be disabled, so you could actually save stuff to the hard disk, if someone (presumably a teacher) hit F1.
This was not too hard for students to catch on to.
The next year, they had wizened up and set up their software differently. Now if you hit F1 you got a user/password prompt, and each teacher had a different password.
Needless to say, all the teachers promptly forgot their passwords, and another method of getting out of "secure mode" was added to remedy this - hitting F6. --
Some people seem to be confused as to which messages will be removed. The messages that Linus was specifically lashing out against were the kind that tell you the version number of every driver the kernel is loading - for example, from my dmesg, "Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4 - Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039". I really don't care. If something goes wrong with NET4.0, *then* I'd like to hear about it. If it's Swansea University's fault, then maybe I'd want to hear about them too.:P Another example is the famed "ReiserFS is brought to you by MP3.com" message.
Linus specifically said that the important kind of messages are the ones that are displayed when something isn't working properly, so no more whining that you think those messages are going to disappear, okay?
Moreso, some people seem to be under the delusion that the linked Slashdot article with the "pretty bootup" is related to what Linus said. No. Linux isn't saying anything at all about a graphical boot, and that graphical boot system is still hugely experimental anyway.
--
Can anyone comment on Caldera's returns to the community?
Yes. There aren't any.
Whenever they develop something for Linux, they keep it to themselves. How could they convince people to buy their distro if it didn't come with Proprietary Fubarmatic 2.0? --
Well, first of all, _nobody_ drives anybody to purchase Caldera's flavour of Linux. People buy it because it comes with the best support, best installation, best choice of packages or w h a t e v e r.
Actually, based on my own experience with Caldera as my first Linux distro, people buy it because it comes with none of the above and they don't know any better. --
No, but asking people to pay for the low-quality proprietary crapware that Caldera shovels into their distro (just to make you think there's some benefit to buying the non-free version from them) is.
One of the main selling points of Caldera 2.2 was that it came with PartitionMagic. I was new to Linux, and I fell for it, not realizing that RedHat already had a partitioning tool then. And it turned out to be a really cut-down "PartitionMagic Lite" which had very little in common with PartitionMagic except the logo, and would do nothing but create a Linux partition of one of three specified sizes, and faced with my hard disk which already had 3 Windows partitions, it even failed at that.
Oh yeah, it also came with the proprietary WordPerfect 8, but that was free for download anyway. And it had this amazing "Caldera Open Administration System" which was kind of like linuxconf, except it didn't work, and wouldn't tell you what it was attempting to do. --
I love how idiot trolls on/. assume that everyone else has exactly the same opinion, and then criticize the Slashdot "collective" for disagreeing with itself.
(The parent poster doesn't understand the GPL, incidentally.) --
Actually, 1 L^3 = 10^-9 m^9. So tarsi must have a 9-dimensional brain, but it's a bit small. Which could explain why his brain doesn't sound like it works any better than ours, despite having so many extra dimensions to work with. --
Your niece probably doesn't get such spam because she simply hasn't been on the Internet long enough, or because she knows not to post her real e-mail address except when necessary. The spam-scrapers will pick up any e-mail address that they find on USENET or the Web, and they certainly do NOT go to the effort of checking whether the person at that address has visited porn sites before selling that list to a porn site.
It is entirely possible that DoubleClick somehow manages to correlate cookies with e-mail addresses, but if an email-list seller relied exclusively on data from DoubleClick he wouldn't get nearly enough addresses to advertise "1 MILLION E-MAIL ADDRESSES JUST $199.99!!!" Spammers get addresses from any source possible, not one particular source.
You sound disturbingly pro-spam, with your attempt to make it seem like it's the user's fault for recieving spam, and it gives you a nice ad-hominem attack against the original poster as well. The tone of your message implies: "Well, you wouldn't be getting all that spam if you weren't a PERVERTED PORN FIEND."
Spammers will spam anyone and everyone possible. They cannot and do not go to the effort of attempting to target their advertisements. --
I think that was my point, actually. If someone did pay.25 to read PvP the first time, I don't think they'd do it again. Especially since there are better comics out there for free. --
Wow. You certainly must be smarter than John Conway, then. He should take a lesson from you and, instead of teaching neat mathematical tricks, start a course in "Not Reading The Article 101". --
Re:The Science Of Discworld
on
Thief of Time
·
· Score: 2
Aside from the title, I can't see any similarities whatsoever between Discworld and Ringworld. They're even different genres - one is science fiction which strives to be at least plausible, and the other is fantasy/humor. Care to elaborate on what similarities you see? --
If you have to compile all the libraries yourself instead of using an RPM or DEB package, or you have to modify the source, you're obviously attempting to run alpha software. Game reviews don't cover alpha software. --
You know, I agree with what you're saying, but advocacy of the GPL doesn't help if you look like a raving lunatic as you do it.
Some hints:
* Only one exclamation point per sentence is ever necessary.
* It's 'copyright', not 'copywrite'. Think about it a second. Copyright deals with rights to copy, not "writes".
* It's 'their', not 'thier'. i-before-e rules don't work, so you should ignore anyone who tries to teach you one.
Evil Google would be a page full of banner ads where you click one that seems to relate to what you're looking for.
Evil Slashdot would be where the users of Evilnux, the operating system which you can be shot for not using, mock the surviving users of Good Windows. Occasionally Jon Anti-Katz posts a brilliantly-written column, loved by all its readers, in which he protests that the same people who claim to be defending immorality on the Internet actually aren't taking away enough rights, or that high school kids are having way too much of a good time.
On the Evil Internet, sending personal or informative communication using e-mail is grounds for being kicked off of your Evil ISP. Several Evil ISPs have started to install Evil Spam Filters to ensure that nothing but spam is served to their customers.
But the most prevalent thing on the Evil Internet would be the vast number of decent, moral sites showing pictures of cute puppies, hiding underground so that self-declared defenders of evil don't shut them down in the name of "harming the children".
Slashdot Mirror
But then it's still Adobe's fault, for hiring such scum. If they get enough bad press for this, they might pay him off to shut up and drop the suit.
--
GAC is a failing AI effort which serves no purpose except for Chris McKinstry to draw attention to himself.
The site began by offering users shares of the "Corpus" worth approximately 25 cents per question you submitted. Eventually, the running total of the "money" you had earned disappeared. Chris claimed that the software that generated that page was broken, but it has never come back. There was also a "referral program" along the lines of alladvantage, where you could get partial credit for the "Mindpixels" submitted by people you referred. That quietly went away. Asking Chris where the "money" went gets you ignored, and the fact is he didn't really promise money, just shares in whatever money this "Corpus" eventually makes. I suppose he pulled out at a good time, when he realized the total would be somewhere around $0.
He promised a rating system to get rid of the dumb or repetitive questions and reward the good ones - this never appeared.
A while later, he got the idea that he could create HAL with the same deficient software that ran GAC, just by telling users to answer questions as they thought the computer HAL would answer. Most people saw that this made no sense whatsoever. The massive funding Chris was expecting for HAL never appeared, and he wrote a bitter news item about it.
So now he's managed to get GAC signed up for this Turing-Test-ish-thing. GAC still appears to answer randomly on the simplest true/false questions, so I doubt it will do spectacularly. It's just another way to draw attention to Chris.
--
RedHat goes to .0 when they break everything.
They go to .1 when they fix some of it, and .2 when they fix most of it, at which point they are prepared to screw everything up again for the next .0 release.
--
It's (relatively) easy to send photons in a certain quantum state, which will then be decoded.
It's really freaking hard to get those quantum states to do computations for you. Note that the biggest quantum calculation they've done to date, last I knew, was 4 bits.
Just because they're both "quantum" doesn't mean that the technologies are related.
--
This was not too hard for students to catch on to.
The next year, they had wizened up and set up their software differently. Now if you hit F1 you got a user/password prompt, and each teacher had a different password.
Needless to say, all the teachers promptly forgot their passwords, and another method of getting out of "secure mode" was added to remedy this - hitting F6.
--
Linus specifically said that the important kind of messages are the ones that are displayed when something isn't working properly, so no more whining that you think those messages are going to disappear, okay?
Moreso, some people seem to be under the delusion that the linked Slashdot article with the "pretty bootup" is related to what Linus said. No. Linux isn't saying anything at all about a graphical boot, and that graphical boot system is still hugely experimental anyway.
--
Yes. There aren't any.
Whenever they develop something for Linux, they keep it to themselves. How could they convince people to buy their distro if it didn't come with Proprietary Fubarmatic 2.0?
--
Actually, based on my own experience with Caldera as my first Linux distro, people buy it because it comes with none of the above and they don't know any better.
--
No, but asking people to pay for the low-quality proprietary crapware that Caldera shovels into their distro (just to make you think there's some benefit to buying the non-free version from them) is.
One of the main selling points of Caldera 2.2 was that it came with PartitionMagic. I was new to Linux, and I fell for it, not realizing that RedHat already had a partitioning tool then. And it turned out to be a really cut-down "PartitionMagic Lite" which had very little in common with PartitionMagic except the logo, and would do nothing but create a Linux partition of one of three specified sizes, and faced with my hard disk which already had 3 Windows partitions, it even failed at that.
Oh yeah, it also came with the proprietary WordPerfect 8, but that was free for download anyway. And it had this amazing "Caldera Open Administration System" which was kind of like linuxconf, except it didn't work, and wouldn't tell you what it was attempting to do.
--
I love how idiot trolls on /. assume that everyone else has exactly the same opinion, and then criticize the Slashdot "collective" for disagreeing with itself.
(The parent poster doesn't understand the GPL, incidentally.)
--
Actually, 1 L^3 = 10^-9 m^9. So tarsi must have a 9-dimensional brain, but it's a bit small. Which could explain why his brain doesn't sound like it works any better than ours, despite having so many extra dimensions to work with.
--
Your niece probably doesn't get such spam because she simply hasn't been on the Internet long enough, or because she knows not to post her real e-mail address except when necessary. The spam-scrapers will pick up any e-mail address that they find on USENET or the Web, and they certainly do NOT go to the effort of checking whether the person at that address has visited porn sites before selling that list to a porn site.
It is entirely possible that DoubleClick somehow manages to correlate cookies with e-mail addresses, but if an email-list seller relied exclusively on data from DoubleClick he wouldn't get nearly enough addresses to advertise "1 MILLION E-MAIL ADDRESSES JUST $199.99!!!" Spammers get addresses from any source possible, not one particular source.
You sound disturbingly pro-spam, with your attempt to make it seem like it's the user's fault for recieving spam, and it gives you a nice ad-hominem attack against the original poster as well. The tone of your message implies: "Well, you wouldn't be getting all that spam if you weren't a PERVERTED PORN FIEND."
Spammers will spam anyone and everyone possible. They cannot and do not go to the effort of attempting to target their advertisements.
--
Come on, at least have the decency to attribute your .sig quote to its originator: the late Douglas Adams.
--
You should see a psychiatrist about that, then.
--
The Mozilla coders at Netscape are still going strong. I believe that "backing away from browsers" was just bullshit spewed by an AOL exec.
--
I think that was my point, actually. If someone did pay .25 to read PvP the first time, I don't think they'd do it again. Especially since there are better comics out there for free.
--
What's the problem, though? Do you think your music is going to crash?
Ogg works fine now. Go ahead and use it.
--
Look at your units. You're multiplying bits by Hz (which are 1/seconds). That gets you bits/second, which is, incidentally, what bandwidth is.
Perhaps this is why Physics tends to be a required course for Comp Sci majors...
--
Mozilla 1.0? Let me borrow your time machine.
--
I think that most of the confusion in this thread is arising from the fact that "code" has several applicable meanings, and so does "crack".
--
Wow. You certainly must be smarter than John Conway, then. He should take a lesson from you and, instead of teaching neat mathematical tricks, start a course in "Not Reading The Article 101".
--
Aside from the title, I can't see any similarities whatsoever between Discworld and Ringworld. They're even different genres - one is science fiction which strives to be at least plausible, and the other is fantasy/humor. Care to elaborate on what similarities you see?
--
If you have to compile all the libraries yourself instead of using an RPM or DEB package, or you have to modify the source, you're obviously attempting to run alpha software. Game reviews don't cover alpha software.
--
You know, I agree with what you're saying, but advocacy of the GPL doesn't help if you look like a raving lunatic as you do it.
Some hints:
* Only one exclamation point per sentence is ever necessary.
* It's 'copyright', not 'copywrite'. Think about it a second. Copyright deals with rights to copy, not "writes".
* It's 'their', not 'thier'. i-before-e rules don't work, so you should ignore anyone who tries to teach you one.
--
Evil Google would be a page full of banner ads where you click one that seems to relate to what you're looking for.
Evil Slashdot would be where the users of Evilnux, the operating system which you can be shot for not using, mock the surviving users of Good Windows. Occasionally Jon Anti-Katz posts a brilliantly-written column, loved by all its readers, in which he protests that the same people who claim to be defending immorality on the Internet actually aren't taking away enough rights, or that high school kids are having way too much of a good time.
On the Evil Internet, sending personal or informative communication using e-mail is grounds for being kicked off of your Evil ISP. Several Evil ISPs have started to install Evil Spam Filters to ensure that nothing but spam is served to their customers.
But the most prevalent thing on the Evil Internet would be the vast number of decent, moral sites showing pictures of cute puppies, hiding underground so that self-declared defenders of evil don't shut them down in the name of "harming the children".
--