... except that the LZW patent was valid, as far as I know. It's not nice that they said they would not pursue the patent and then changed their mind, but that's beside the fact.
And.gif already had a replacement that was superior in most ways --.png. The only problems with.pngs are 1) not everything supported them at the time (but now most things do) and 2) it didn't support animated pictures like gifs do. (But I think mpng does, but nobody uses it.)
The jpeg patent, from what I can tell, ignores the prior art that was out there when it was filed, and so that makes it invalid (but that needs to be proven in court, of course.) That, and there really isn't anything out there that's really ready to replace jpeg.
Beyond all those import things that are different, sure, it's gif all over again:)
What is so complicated about that? The entire concept of a "FORK" requires secret proprietary source code and copyrighted functions and pantented methods.
I think I understand the problem here -- your definition of `fork' doesn't match with the defintion of `fork' used by most everybody else here. To everybody else, it means that one package/program/group of code/whatever becomes two or more, each diverging more as time goes on.
You want some examples of open source forks? How about ssh -> openssh? X11 -> Xfree86? Xfree86 -> Xorg? emacs -> xemacs? BSD -> FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD. There's probably thousands of packages out there that have forked for whatever reason (usually political) and are open source.
Personally, I think this issue of Red Hat shipping a custom kernel is a non-issue -- they've been doing this since beginning, and so does everybody else. I guess technically it does qualify as a fork, but forks are not inherently bad.
like xinetd, on regular systems, it was just inetd, then redhat had to be all different and put an x in front of it. *shakes head*
Xinetd was a replacement inetd that was created many many years ago, and used by some systems administrators who wanted more control over inetd than the standard inetd gave. It gives you what tcp_wrappers does, plus a lot more. It worked on most *nix platforms -- not just Linux. (in fact, I think it's even slightly older than Linux.)
Xinetd wasn't just something that Red Hat threw together to upset you -- it was a well tested, established package that they decided Red Hat would benefit from.
And Red Hat didn't just put the x in there -- it was there long before Red Hat existed:)
Well, at low speeds 1.1 g could be attainable by some cars. However, air drag scales with the speed^2, so attaining 1.1 g acceleration at speeds above 100 km/h is out off reach for most cars.
The parent of your post was talking about stopping -- braking, deacceleration. In that case, thair air drag is actually helping you stop. His suggestion that many cars could do this is completely reasonable. Actually, most cars could have stopped before hitting the other car given 4 seconds of warning -- since once they start slowing down, that gives them more time to slow down -- they wouldn't need to stop in four seconds, they'd have more time than that.
Of course, the guy was accelerating, not deaccelerating, so it's sort of moot.
Assuming that the premise of Road Warrior is to drive around in cars with guns, it's already been done in games like Autoduel and Interstate 76.
I like to think that both games were pretty successful.
Of course, there's more to the Road Warrior than just driving around, but that should be a large part of it. Done right, it could be pretty cool:)
European bicycle racers have been wrapping their water bottles with a damp cloth covering to keep the water chilled for decades as well.
Now, wouldn't it be really cool if these same European bicycle racers could excrete liquid directly from their skin and then have it evaporate, removing heat directly from their body...
That statement depends on what your estimate of tax cheating is
Of course. And I estimate it to be huge -- people will do everything they think they can get away with. The IRS is probably smarter than people give them credit for, but they can't audit everybody. For individuals, there's a good deal of of room to fudge deductions and the like... but for a business, there's oodles of room, and I'm guessing that most people don't even really think they're doing anything wrong. Personally, I think I'd be terrified of an audit, but some people are professional liars and probably would have no problems lieing their way through one.
Also, most of the cheating is from the black market mostly illegal transactions and such, if we catch those cheats the governement is not simply going to collect the taxes and go along their merry way.
Actually, I was originally intending to mention illegal activities, but I got distracted -- thanks for bringing it up. Of course, we really don't have any way of measuring said activities, but I'll bet it's signifigant.
But this whole idea of catching all the cheating is hypothetical anyways -- it's not like some magic database is going to suddenly catch all the cheating/fudging that's going on. At most it might get a few percentage points -- but I'll bet it does better than $10 billion dollars if done properly.
You are dreaming. Let's say the government caught all the cheats. And they collected and unexpected $10B. That'd be a lot, right?
While I do tend to agree with you, your figure is way off. $10B is only about $40/person in the US. Remember, the national debt (not deficit) works out to something like $24,000/person..
I've heard it claimed that the US could immediately balance it's budget if all the tax cheating could be stopped. I don't know how they came to this conclusion, but I do tend to believe it.)
If they really could catch ALL the tax cheating and fudging, the figure would probably be more like $250 billion dollars than $10 billion dollars. $250 billion dollars sounds like a lot, but it's only about $1000/person. (Yes, you may not cheat to the tune of $1000/year, but there's certainly lots of people who cheat by a lot more than that. Be it not reporting tips, fudging the books of their business, taking bogus exemptions, not paying sales tax (we never limited this to federal taxes) when they should, whatever.)
I almost bought an Xbox back when it first came out, because I really wanted to play Halo. (I don't usually do consoles -- I play PC games.)
Now that Halo is out on the PC, and I've gotten and played it, I'm glad I waited. It was indeed a good game, but it wasn't worth paying $350 to play it right away. And I imagine it was even better on the PC, with the mouse for aiming instead of their controller.
Not meant to be short or pretty, just to decode the message. I'm sure somebody will show how they did it in 2 or 1 lines soon enough. In fact, I'm surprised it hasn't happened already:)
The reason most (or all) viruses are written for Windows is because that's where they'll do the most damage, since most people use Windows.
There is some truth to this.
If everyone switches to Linux or Mac OS then you'll
start to see viruses for those operating systems.
Some more truth...
You should be glad you're in the OS minority. That's what's keeping virus writers away from your system.
That's one small thing that's keeping virii out of my system. But it's only a small thing. Other things?
My mail client (mutt) does not run under an account that has full access to the entire system. Instead, it runs as me, and cannot replace parts of the OS even if it wants to. So it can't do things like replace part of the TCP/IP stack -- a popular Windows worm/virus trick.
My mail client does not automatically execute things sent to it. Instead, it shows me the text included in a file, and if I want to, I can open an external program to view it (like a movie player.) But under no conditions does it execute the email as a program, unless I save it to a file myself and execute that.
... And I know better than to do that unless I trust the source of the file, or can read through it and tell what it does.
If they want to configure their server to refuse to serve up pages if the Referrer: header contains something they don't approve of, that's certainly their right to do so. It's their server to do with as they please.
We've (well, many others and I) have always said that if you don't want people linking to you, configure your web server to block it -- it's not difficult. CMP has done this.
But even though they have the right to do something, that doesn't mean that they should. I don't know anymore more about this story than the LinuxToday editorial, but after reading it, I definately believe that LinuxToday did nothing wrong (what they did certainly does fall under the category of `Fair Use'), and reacted accordingly when they discovered the block -- except that I saw no mention of CMP being contact. Perhaps they were contacted and it just didn't make it into the editorial, but if not, they should have been. It could have just been a misunderstanding or misconfiguration, though the message seen does suggest otherwise.
I predict that CMP will change their configuration shortly, probably due in large part to the LinuxToday editorial and this/. article. We'll see if I'm right...
You won't find those titles on the voting list because they aren't action-games at heart.
Translation: we never played these games, or if we did play them, we were then hit on the head and forgot. Had they actually played them, they'd realize that they had just as much action (and sometimes more) than the games they did pick. Which is a pity, because System Shock 2 and Deus Ex were some of the best FPSs of all time.
You're kidding, right? Gunman Chronicles was worse than Daikatana. (Of course, Daikatana wasn't nearly as bad as people said -- it was mediocre, not awful -- but Gunman was even more mediocre.)
Personally, my favorites were Deus Ex, Half-Life and Descent 2 (Descent 3 lost much of the magic, and I can't explain why. Perhaps it was Wingut always getting `stuck'.) Tribes and Unreal Tournament probably belong up there too (certainly, they're the kings of multi-player.) I'm not sure I'd call Ultima Underworld a first person shooter, but it was certainly neat at the time.
With older games, a few companies have made commercially emulated games available on some platforms (e.g. "Atari Arcade Hits") but these have not sold particularly well because anybody who has an Internet connection can go get hold of MAME (or another free emulator) and a few ROMs and get them for free.
Allow me to provide an alternative reason -- as a general rule of thumb, these collections suck. It's kind of nostalgic to play games you played 20 years ago, yes, but after a few minutes the novelty wears off. Especially the `Atari Arcade Hits' -- the 2600 may have been way neat when it first came out, but very few of the games were any good by today's standards. The Intellivision had much better games, and the games that were actually in the arcades were even better. If you want to emulate something, emulate the games from the arcades, not from the 2600.
Doing the same stories over and over again is a recent development in movies, it's only really happened in the last 20 years.
Well, remember that motion pictures have been around for less than 100 years total. And while sequels are a relatively new thing, the given stories are not. Boy meets girl, boy loves girl, boy loses girl... hardly new. Or secret agent types -- we've had movies about them for decades.
Books recycle the same plots as well, and have done so for hundreds of years.
He didn't say that and actually felt quite the opposite.
Oops. I didn't mean to capitialize `He' (as one might if He referred to somebody like God.) It was capitalized to indicate the start of a sentence, but then I changed my mind...
Christ, it's a couple hundred half-sheets of paper glued and bound into a set of thick cardboard covers for fucks's sake.
Well, it's more than that. There's also a fair bit of information on those sheets of paper.
That $100 bill in your pocket -- it's just a blend of linen and cotton, for fuck's sake. But you'd probably get upset with me if I relieved you of it, even if I paid for you for the value of it's constituent components (probably just a few cents) first...
Indeed. Also, it's 3.5 million hits, not 3.5 million users (as the grandparent post said). It's hard to count unique users, but certainly the number of hits is usually much much larger than the number of users.
Slashdot Mirror
One guy even wrote an irc server in ircII script, just to show that it could be done.
And .gif already had a replacement that was superior in most ways -- .png. The only problems with .pngs are 1) not everything supported them at the time (but now most things do) and 2) it didn't support animated pictures like gifs do. (But I think mpng does, but nobody uses it.)
The jpeg patent, from what I can tell, ignores the prior art that was out there when it was filed, and so that makes it invalid (but that needs to be proven in court, of course.) That, and there really isn't anything out there that's really ready to replace jpeg.
Beyond all those import things that are different, sure, it's gif all over again :)
You want some examples of open source forks? How about ssh -> openssh? X11 -> Xfree86? Xfree86 -> Xorg? emacs -> xemacs? BSD -> FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD. There's probably thousands of packages out there that have forked for whatever reason (usually political) and are open source.
Personally, I think this issue of Red Hat shipping a custom kernel is a non-issue -- they've been doing this since beginning, and so does everybody else. I guess technically it does qualify as a fork, but forks are not inherently bad.
Xinetd wasn't just something that Red Hat threw together to upset you -- it was a well tested, established package that they decided Red Hat would benefit from.
And Red Hat didn't just put the x in there -- it was there long before Red Hat existed :)
Of course, the guy was accelerating, not deaccelerating, so it's sort of moot.
Of course, there's more to the Road Warrior than just driving around, but that should be a large part of it. Done right, it could be pretty cool :)
(:
But this whole idea of catching all the cheating is hypothetical anyways -- it's not like some magic database is going to suddenly catch all the cheating/fudging that's going on. At most it might get a few percentage points -- but I'll bet it does better than $10 billion dollars if done properly.
If they really could catch ALL the tax cheating and fudging, the figure would probably be more like $250 billion dollars than $10 billion dollars. $250 billion dollars sounds like a lot, but it's only about $1000/person. (Yes, you may not cheat to the tune of $1000/year, but there's certainly lots of people who cheat by a lot more than that. Be it not reporting tips, fudging the books of their business, taking bogus exemptions, not paying sales tax (we never limited this to federal taxes) when they should, whatever.)
Now that Halo is out on the PC, and I've gotten and played it, I'm glad I waited. It was indeed a good game, but it wasn't worth paying $350 to play it right away. And I imagine it was even better on the PC, with the mouse for aiming instead of their controller.
My mail client (mutt) does not run under an account that has full access to the entire system. Instead, it runs as me, and cannot replace parts of the OS even if it wants to. So it can't do things like replace part of the TCP/IP stack -- a popular Windows worm/virus trick.
My mail client does not automatically execute things sent to it. Instead, it shows me the text included in a file, and if I want to, I can open an external program to view it (like a movie player.) But under no conditions does it execute the email as a program, unless I save it to a file myself and execute that.
We've (well, many others and I) have always said that if you don't want people linking to you, configure your web server to block it -- it's not difficult. CMP has done this.
But even though they have the right to do something, that doesn't mean that they should. I don't know anymore more about this story than the LinuxToday editorial, but after reading it, I definately believe that LinuxToday did nothing wrong (what they did certainly does fall under the category of `Fair Use'), and reacted accordingly when they discovered the block -- except that I saw no mention of CMP being contact. Perhaps they were contacted and it just didn't make it into the editorial, but if not, they should have been. It could have just been a misunderstanding or misconfiguration, though the message seen does suggest otherwise.
I predict that CMP will change their configuration shortly, probably due in large part to the LinuxToday editorial and this /. article. We'll see if I'm right ...
Personally, my favorites were Deus Ex, Half-Life and Descent 2 (Descent 3 lost much of the magic, and I can't explain why. Perhaps it was Wingut always getting `stuck'.) Tribes and Unreal Tournament probably belong up there too (certainly, they're the kings of multi-player.) I'm not sure I'd call Ultima Underworld a first person shooter, but it was certainly neat at the time.
Books recycle the same plots as well, and have done so for hundreds of years.
(Yes, I know that wasn't the answer you were looking for.)
That $100 bill in your pocket -- it's just a blend of linen and cotton, for fuck's sake. But you'd probably get upset with me if I relieved you of it, even if I paid for you for the value of it's constituent components (probably just a few cents) first ...