But what good if OpenGL network transparency when my local system still doesn't have a decent OpenGL implementation. Besides the commercial Unix systems like Solaris, I'm also thinking of my laptop which has a "mobile" video chip that doesn't have a 3D engine.
Not being president, I really don't know. What I do know is that hindsight is a hell of a lot clearer than foresight. But let me tell you what I did. I heard about the first tower and said "holy shit!" Then I went took a shower, brushed my teeth, and went off to work. It wasn't until I got to work that I heard about the strikes.
But even though I was not the president, I can imagine some common rationales for his actions without having to dredge the deep end of the paranoia pool. Bush was reading to children with the press in attendence. He probably had only the barest of information. So do you A) immediately hold a press conference with your only comments being "no comment" (simply because you don't have sufficient information); or B) tell your aide to get more information while you continue reading to children, because you don't want to start a panic in full view of the televising press? After all, it was only seven minutes.
no, you're not a Bush supporter at all
I am not a Bush supporter, but I will not apologize for my failure to fit into your preconceptions. I am getting extemely weary of this black/white polarity people like you are insisting for this nation. It's a bigger problem then Bush or Kerry or Moore. Heck, it might even be bigger than Iraq for the damage it can ultimately do.
How dare you insinuate which of two discrete political positions I must hold merely because I'm not a Moore fan! Get your mind out of that tiny little container and see the world for what it is! It doesn't matter if Moore is right or wrong, what really matters is that this is rapidly becoming a nation that cannot think outside of the pidgeonhole.
Now there are. But wait until all of these new server extensions become expected functionality for the clients. You mentioned OpenGL, but what about all of these posts under this story hoping for the 100% OpenGL based GUI? What happens when the desktop itself demands OpenGL?
I'm thinking that the traditional X client/server model is going to collide head on with the everything-is-local model people from Windows and Mac expect. Applications are going to be written expecting the server to be local. If the application expects and assumes XComposite to draw the widgets, and the server doesn't have it, what happens? The application may very well be running, but it's not going to be very usable.
Think I'm crazy? You get this right now with certain fonts. A font that looks good antialiased but crappy when it's not, is going to look crappy when its displayed on a non-XFree/Xorg server, such as OpenWindows. Now imagine that every translucent composited region on an application's display were rendered as solid black...
I really don't want to see a world where Xorg clients are only usable on Xorg servers.
Wow! Someone is having a bad day. If you don't like his rather innocuous sig, just ignore it. What's nuts is people going nuts over iPod sigs. Get a life.
I can see that. There must be a lot of things you don't get. I am not a Bush supporter, but the stuff Moore picks out and focuses on are just bizarre.
Reading a children's book is a good example. What the fsck did you want the president to do? Throw the book up in the air and scream like a madman? Instantly launch a bunch of counterstrikes at a then unknown target? Hold a press conference within five minutes to present a weepy announcement? Moore's portrayal of that event is weird. Is he implying that Bush knew 9/11 was going to happen and the children were an "alibi"? Is he implying that Bush should have instantly restored order instead of reading to children? Is he implying that simply reading to children is an unpresidential activity?
Moore has taken a bunch of BFD-class molehills and tried to construct a mountain out of them. Bu that mountain is very crumbly and doesn't give you much of a view when you get to the top.
Yes, he's fat and vain, but being fat and vain doesn't make you wrong when you're right.
No one, and I mean no one, is claiming that Moore is wrong using "fat and vain" as evidence. That's beyond stupid.
I realize that's what GNU says. But they also say otherwise. Simply refer to Free Software, especially Free Software from GNU, as "noncommercial", and you will find representatives from GNU telling you otherwise. If you're a reporter and asserted this publicly, be prepared to receive an email from RMS himself correcting you.
GNU is correct that you can create a commercial endeavor using Free Software, but you cannot in practice make the software itself commercial.
p.s. I'm using the word "GNU" to refer to The GNU Project rather than The GNU System. Projects contain people as well as software. Think of my use as shorthand for "GNU developers".
You're making erroneous assumptions, but don't feel bad, because GNU makes the same ones. The first bad assumption is that the reality follows theory. The second is that you're selling software.
The theory is that you can put a price tag on Free Software. The reality is that you're going to find precious few customers for it. Free Software is like a gate without a fence. You can charge all you want to use the gate, but without a fence you won't find too many people paying you for that privilege. You're going to sell to the first customer, and maybe to the second, but by the time you get to the fifth or sixth you'll find your earlier customers have become your competitors and driven down the market price to zero dollars.
There are no publicly available Free Software packages with a market price greater than zero. Take the GCC toolkit for example. GNU theoretically "sells" it for $45, but in reality everyone gets it for free. I know that I have several copies laying around, and I didn't pay for a one of them.
Which leads to the second bad assumption. When you find people "buying" Free Software, they aren't really buying the software. When you buy a boxed set of SuSE or Redhat you are not buying the software, you are buying the box, manuals, service and support, and the convenience of not having to download and burn your own CDs and DVDs. The software itself is free (as in french fries). Or take the "Deluxe GNU Distribution" which GNU sells for $5000. Do you really think people are buying GNU software for that kind of money? Of course not! They're buying a combination of custom prebuilt binaries and the warm fuzzy feeling a generous charitable donation gives.
Some people will be fooled, however. Some people will buy SuSE and Redhat not knowing that they can get it for no cost. What they're buying in this instance is an education. One notable commercial Open Source figure once admitted to me that he was in the business of taxing ignorance.
Please stop spreading this myth that you can sell the software. You can't. You can certainly sell a convenience, a support contract, or even warm fuzzies, but you cannot sell practically sell the software. The realities of economics won't let you.
Nader decided the last election. Okay, considering the difference in votes, it could have been Brown or Buchanan instead, but I'm assuming it was because of Nader. Now think about this for just a tiny bit. The Democrats lost the election because there was a significant number of liberal voters disillusioned with the Democrat Party bullshit. But did the Democrat Party learn anything from this? Of course not! It's business as usual this time, only in double helpings. Their only outreach towards their disaffected members seems to be "hey, at least we're not Bush!"
But the Democrats aren't the only stupid party. The Republicans still act like Perot was a one-shot coincidence. The people are getting fed up with the two major parties, and if they don't start realizing it, they'll go the way of the Whigs and Federalists.
both Greens and Libertarians agree on states' rights and limiting the Federal government
Which sort of proves my point, because that's not what the average Slashdot editor stands for. They're pseudo-liberatarians because they want government out of their life, but are all for putting more of it in other people's lives. And they're quasi-green because while they deplore corporatism and promote sustainability, they're awfully busy supporting IBM and running megawatt sucking computer hardware.
Am I mixing up my PI's with my PII's? Maybe, I don't know. USB became nearly ubiquitous with the ATX form factor (as another reply said), but I thought PII's where around before then. Also, didn't the big switchover from AT to ATX occur about six years ago. I'm only recently to the urban Silicon Valley, straight from rural America, so I may be off in my timeline.
Liberating the BIOS from the floppy requirement has led to all kinds of ultraportable or hidable machines.
There's another solution. All these ancient Toshiba laptops at work (100MHz) all had an *external* floppy drive (which could be swapped with an external MO or Zip drive as desired). Very convenient with no wastage of realestate.
Of course, an external USB drive would be the same thing. Unfortunately my system doesn't support it. The BIOS *does* support USB booting, it just doesn't work. I don't know why.
I never had that option until I bought my current Intel D865 mobo. I didn't have it on my earlier mobos. The Dell GX240 at work doesn't have it. It was only last year (when floppies-are-dead articles were already old) that I first saw this option in a BIOS.
But the funny thing is, that BIOS option doesn't work! It think it's just in the BIOS and the mobo doesn't really support it.
I've had this experience too. I've got one floppy I have literally been using for the past ten years. You can still see the original label underneath all the scratchouts: OS/2 3.0 boot.
Back in university when the 3.5 first came out, we would subject the floppies to all sorts of student-like abuse. They kept on working. I don't think I ever heard of a floppy losing data back then. But today it's a different story. Open up a new back of ten floppies and the odds are good one of them will already be bad.
The squat dial phone has become an icon, which is why it's used for icons. Seriously. There's no standard cellphone style to make a recognizable cellphone icon. I saw one in a KDE icon collection and thought it was a calculator at first.
It's not just the telephone. Think about the radio. Wouldn't an antique wood Philco radio make a good icon for a radio?
Where I have a real bitch though is the deletion of the serial port from modern laptops.
Aaargh! I'm with you on this one! I bought a laptop last Christmas with the "justification" that I could use it at work. We have a lot of embedded systems with serial port interfaces. A laptop would make a good portable terminal. No more lugging around a Wyse. But lo! It didn't have a serial port. I never thought to check to see if it had one, because I just assumed it did.
It's a school. They don't have the funds to upgrade their hardware everytime some numbnut on Slashdot tells them to. If they're sorry state of hardware offends you, perhaps consider donating...
It's this way for both public and private schools, though public schools tend to get more donations. I used to work for a private school, and if there was a spare $5000, it went towards something necessary like paint or books, instead of luxuries like replacing five year old computers.
Actually, most non-corporate small businesses are this way. They don't throw away perfectly good computers just because it's not geeky enough. If all you're doing is writing reports with Word and Excel, Win98 on a 233Mhz is more than adequate. That may offend your Slashdot sensibilities, but these systems aren't doing a daily Gentoo emerge or running Doom3.
p.s. USB was not standard on most PII's. Some had them, to be sure, but hardly ubiquitous.
Great. Now are you going to buy me a new Dell? Otherwise it doesn't much matter. My computer is barely eleven months old. It cannot boot from USB. I'm not about to go trash the system just because some numbnut thinks the floppy is dead. While I rarely need to boot from floppy, the few times I need is when I REALLY need to.
Frankly who cares if a computer has a floppy or not? It's not like they're wasting much. It's about $5 wholesale and takes up very insignificant mobo realestate.
Why not? Recall the buildup towards the Linux 2.6 release. It seemed like twice a week for three months there was a major story about how it was ALMOST here...
The comment was with regards to the editors, and not the posters or story submitters. Also, if you find a hint of libertarianism with the editors, it's only with regards to Free Software. In any other issue they're firmly authoritarian. They don't want regulations on Free Software, but will frequently advocate sending the 82nd Airborne Infantry into Redmond.
That's not entirely correct. While they may claim to be Green and Libertarian, they are in fact quasi-green pseudo libertarians. Nowhere else besides Slashdot will you find people claiming to be Libertarian while advocating increased tax funding for NASA, or claiming to be Green while strenously arguing against mandatory software warranties.
While I don't expect anyone to ever follow their party's planks one hundred percent, Slashdot editors seem to be the types that only pick a party because someone told them they could get laid.
If anybody wonders why the country is turning to the right, perhaps the answer lies on the left.
You're correct. As a libertarian I have profound political disagreements with Raph Nader. But I have to like the guy. He's like the last remaining liberal in the US. Everyone else has fallen into some sort of leftwing populism. They're so busy being against stuff that they've forgotten how to be for something. Take Michael Moore for instance, who has reached hero stature without ever once providing a positive essay, book or movie.
Clear Channel had nothing to do with it. The fact of the matter is that the Dixie Chicks made a very public statement that was in direct opposition to the general opinions of their target audience.
As Larry the Cable Guy said, it's like walking into a trailer park and yelling "WalMart sucks!"
There's consumer level hardware available for this right now? With working Linux drivers? I'm surprised.
I never said that Linux was in any way behind FreeBSD in quality, functionality or anything else. All I said was that in some areas Linux is more advanced and in others it wasn't. There is no need to account for every difference on a driver-by-driver basis.
Slashdot Mirror
But what good if OpenGL network transparency when my local system still doesn't have a decent OpenGL implementation. Besides the commercial Unix systems like Solaris, I'm also thinking of my laptop which has a "mobile" video chip that doesn't have a 3D engine.
What would *you* have done? Just sat there?
Not being president, I really don't know. What I do know is that hindsight is a hell of a lot clearer than foresight. But let me tell you what I did. I heard about the first tower and said "holy shit!" Then I went took a shower, brushed my teeth, and went off to work. It wasn't until I got to work that I heard about the strikes.
But even though I was not the president, I can imagine some common rationales for his actions without having to dredge the deep end of the paranoia pool. Bush was reading to children with the press in attendence. He probably had only the barest of information. So do you A) immediately hold a press conference with your only comments being "no comment" (simply because you don't have sufficient information); or B) tell your aide to get more information while you continue reading to children, because you don't want to start a panic in full view of the televising press? After all, it was only seven minutes.
no, you're not a Bush supporter at all
I am not a Bush supporter, but I will not apologize for my failure to fit into your preconceptions. I am getting extemely weary of this black/white polarity people like you are insisting for this nation. It's a bigger problem then Bush or Kerry or Moore. Heck, it might even be bigger than Iraq for the damage it can ultimately do.
How dare you insinuate which of two discrete political positions I must hold merely because I'm not a Moore fan! Get your mind out of that tiny little container and see the world for what it is! It doesn't matter if Moore is right or wrong, what really matters is that this is rapidly becoming a nation that cannot think outside of the pidgeonhole.
There are a very small number of exceptions
Now there are. But wait until all of these new server extensions become expected functionality for the clients. You mentioned OpenGL, but what about all of these posts under this story hoping for the 100% OpenGL based GUI? What happens when the desktop itself demands OpenGL?
I'm thinking that the traditional X client/server model is going to collide head on with the everything-is-local model people from Windows and Mac expect. Applications are going to be written expecting the server to be local. If the application expects and assumes XComposite to draw the widgets, and the server doesn't have it, what happens? The application may very well be running, but it's not going to be very usable.
Think I'm crazy? You get this right now with certain fonts. A font that looks good antialiased but crappy when it's not, is going to look crappy when its displayed on a non-XFree/Xorg server, such as OpenWindows. Now imagine that every translucent composited region on an application's display were rendered as solid black...
I really don't want to see a world where Xorg clients are only usable on Xorg servers.
Eventually these things will be hardware accelerated ...
Hopefully by then we'll have some decent Open Source drivers for them.
Wow! Someone is having a bad day. If you don't like his rather innocuous sig, just ignore it. What's nuts is people going nuts over iPod sigs. Get a life.
And he's the bad guy? I don't get it.
I can see that. There must be a lot of things you don't get. I am not a Bush supporter, but the stuff Moore picks out and focuses on are just bizarre.
Reading a children's book is a good example. What the fsck did you want the president to do? Throw the book up in the air and scream like a madman? Instantly launch a bunch of counterstrikes at a then unknown target? Hold a press conference within five minutes to present a weepy announcement? Moore's portrayal of that event is weird. Is he implying that Bush knew 9/11 was going to happen and the children were an "alibi"? Is he implying that Bush should have instantly restored order instead of reading to children? Is he implying that simply reading to children is an unpresidential activity?
Moore has taken a bunch of BFD-class molehills and tried to construct a mountain out of them. Bu that mountain is very crumbly and doesn't give you much of a view when you get to the top.
Yes, he's fat and vain, but being fat and vain doesn't make you wrong when you're right.
No one, and I mean no one, is claiming that Moore is wrong using "fat and vain" as evidence. That's beyond stupid.
I realize that's what GNU says. But they also say otherwise. Simply refer to Free Software, especially Free Software from GNU, as "noncommercial", and you will find representatives from GNU telling you otherwise. If you're a reporter and asserted this publicly, be prepared to receive an email from RMS himself correcting you.
GNU is correct that you can create a commercial endeavor using Free Software, but you cannot in practice make the software itself commercial.
p.s. I'm using the word "GNU" to refer to The GNU Project rather than The GNU System. Projects contain people as well as software. Think of my use as shorthand for "GNU developers".
You're making erroneous assumptions, but don't feel bad, because GNU makes the same ones. The first bad assumption is that the reality follows theory. The second is that you're selling software.
The theory is that you can put a price tag on Free Software. The reality is that you're going to find precious few customers for it. Free Software is like a gate without a fence. You can charge all you want to use the gate, but without a fence you won't find too many people paying you for that privilege. You're going to sell to the first customer, and maybe to the second, but by the time you get to the fifth or sixth you'll find your earlier customers have become your competitors and driven down the market price to zero dollars.
There are no publicly available Free Software packages with a market price greater than zero. Take the GCC toolkit for example. GNU theoretically "sells" it for $45, but in reality everyone gets it for free. I know that I have several copies laying around, and I didn't pay for a one of them.
Which leads to the second bad assumption. When you find people "buying" Free Software, they aren't really buying the software. When you buy a boxed set of SuSE or Redhat you are not buying the software, you are buying the box, manuals, service and support, and the convenience of not having to download and burn your own CDs and DVDs. The software itself is free (as in french fries). Or take the "Deluxe GNU Distribution" which GNU sells for $5000. Do you really think people are buying GNU software for that kind of money? Of course not! They're buying a combination of custom prebuilt binaries and the warm fuzzy feeling a generous charitable donation gives.
Some people will be fooled, however. Some people will buy SuSE and Redhat not knowing that they can get it for no cost. What they're buying in this instance is an education. One notable commercial Open Source figure once admitted to me that he was in the business of taxing ignorance.
Please stop spreading this myth that you can sell the software. You can't. You can certainly sell a convenience, a support contract, or even warm fuzzies, but you cannot sell practically sell the software. The realities of economics won't let you.
Nader decided the last election. Okay, considering the difference in votes, it could have been Brown or Buchanan instead, but I'm assuming it was because of Nader. Now think about this for just a tiny bit. The Democrats lost the election because there was a significant number of liberal voters disillusioned with the Democrat Party bullshit. But did the Democrat Party learn anything from this? Of course not! It's business as usual this time, only in double helpings. Their only outreach towards their disaffected members seems to be "hey, at least we're not Bush!"
But the Democrats aren't the only stupid party. The Republicans still act like Perot was a one-shot coincidence. The people are getting fed up with the two major parties, and if they don't start realizing it, they'll go the way of the Whigs and Federalists.
both Greens and Libertarians agree on states' rights and limiting the Federal government
Which sort of proves my point, because that's not what the average Slashdot editor stands for. They're pseudo-liberatarians because they want government out of their life, but are all for putting more of it in other people's lives. And they're quasi-green because while they deplore corporatism and promote sustainability, they're awfully busy supporting IBM and running megawatt sucking computer hardware.
Am I mixing up my PI's with my PII's? Maybe, I don't know. USB became nearly ubiquitous with the ATX form factor (as another reply said), but I thought PII's where around before then. Also, didn't the big switchover from AT to ATX occur about six years ago. I'm only recently to the urban Silicon Valley, straight from rural America, so I may be off in my timeline.
Liberating the BIOS from the floppy requirement has led to all kinds of ultraportable or hidable machines.
There's another solution. All these ancient Toshiba laptops at work (100MHz) all had an *external* floppy drive (which could be swapped with an external MO or Zip drive as desired). Very convenient with no wastage of realestate.
Of course, an external USB drive would be the same thing. Unfortunately my system doesn't support it. The BIOS *does* support USB booting, it just doesn't work. I don't know why.
I haven't seen a motherboard that came with a floppy in like 6 years
Have you been buying motherboards from Apple?
I never had that option until I bought my current Intel D865 mobo. I didn't have it on my earlier mobos. The Dell GX240 at work doesn't have it. It was only last year (when floppies-are-dead articles were already old) that I first saw this option in a BIOS.
But the funny thing is, that BIOS option doesn't work! It think it's just in the BIOS and the mobo doesn't really support it.
I've had this experience too. I've got one floppy I have literally been using for the past ten years. You can still see the original label underneath all the scratchouts: OS/2 3.0 boot.
Back in university when the 3.5 first came out, we would subject the floppies to all sorts of student-like abuse. They kept on working. I don't think I ever heard of a floppy losing data back then. But today it's a different story. Open up a new back of ten floppies and the odds are good one of them will already be bad.
The squat dial phone has become an icon, which is why it's used for icons. Seriously. There's no standard cellphone style to make a recognizable cellphone icon. I saw one in a KDE icon collection and thought it was a calculator at first.
It's not just the telephone. Think about the radio. Wouldn't an antique wood Philco radio make a good icon for a radio?
Where I have a real bitch though is the deletion of the serial port from modern laptops.
Aaargh! I'm with you on this one! I bought a laptop last Christmas with the "justification" that I could use it at work. We have a lot of embedded systems with serial port interfaces. A laptop would make a good portable terminal. No more lugging around a Wyse. But lo! It didn't have a serial port. I never thought to check to see if it had one, because I just assumed it did.
That must be some pretty poor hardware.
It's a school. They don't have the funds to upgrade their hardware everytime some numbnut on Slashdot tells them to. If they're sorry state of hardware offends you, perhaps consider donating...
It's this way for both public and private schools, though public schools tend to get more donations. I used to work for a private school, and if there was a spare $5000, it went towards something necessary like paint or books, instead of luxuries like replacing five year old computers.
Actually, most non-corporate small businesses are this way. They don't throw away perfectly good computers just because it's not geeky enough. If all you're doing is writing reports with Word and Excel, Win98 on a 233Mhz is more than adequate. That may offend your Slashdot sensibilities, but these systems aren't doing a daily Gentoo emerge or running Doom3.
p.s. USB was not standard on most PII's. Some had them, to be sure, but hardly ubiquitous.
Dells without floppy drives can boot from USB
Great. Now are you going to buy me a new Dell? Otherwise it doesn't much matter. My computer is barely eleven months old. It cannot boot from USB. I'm not about to go trash the system just because some numbnut thinks the floppy is dead. While I rarely need to boot from floppy, the few times I need is when I REALLY need to.
Frankly who cares if a computer has a floppy or not? It's not like they're wasting much. It's about $5 wholesale and takes up very insignificant mobo realestate.
Why not? Recall the buildup towards the Linux 2.6 release. It seemed like twice a week for three months there was a major story about how it was ALMOST here...
The comment was with regards to the editors, and not the posters or story submitters. Also, if you find a hint of libertarianism with the editors, it's only with regards to Free Software. In any other issue they're firmly authoritarian. They don't want regulations on Free Software, but will frequently advocate sending the 82nd Airborne Infantry into Redmond.
That's not entirely correct. While they may claim to be Green and Libertarian, they are in fact quasi-green pseudo libertarians. Nowhere else besides Slashdot will you find people claiming to be Libertarian while advocating increased tax funding for NASA, or claiming to be Green while strenously arguing against mandatory software warranties.
While I don't expect anyone to ever follow their party's planks one hundred percent, Slashdot editors seem to be the types that only pick a party because someone told them they could get laid.
If anybody wonders why the country is turning to the right, perhaps the answer lies on the left.
You're correct. As a libertarian I have profound political disagreements with Raph Nader. But I have to like the guy. He's like the last remaining liberal in the US. Everyone else has fallen into some sort of leftwing populism. They're so busy being against stuff that they've forgotten how to be for something. Take Michael Moore for instance, who has reached hero stature without ever once providing a positive essay, book or movie.
Clear Channel had nothing to do with it. The fact of the matter is that the Dixie Chicks made a very public statement that was in direct opposition to the general opinions of their target audience.
As Larry the Cable Guy said, it's like walking into a trailer park and yelling "WalMart sucks!"
I assume it's Digital Video Broadcasting
There's consumer level hardware available for this right now? With working Linux drivers? I'm surprised.
I never said that Linux was in any way behind FreeBSD in quality, functionality or anything else. All I said was that in some areas Linux is more advanced and in others it wasn't. There is no need to account for every difference on a driver-by-driver basis.