Why even bother their servers at all? SETI should wait until we have our own world's problems figured out. Please visit Folding@Home or Genome@Home for two ways you can help solve actual problems. If solving geeky problems is more your style, visit d.net.
Here's the text of the license before it gets slashdotted or for those who don't want to bother with PDF:
January 23, 2002
Dear UNIX enthusiasts,
Caldera International, Inc. hereby grants a fee free license that includes the rights use, modify and distribute this named source code, including creating derived binary products created from the source code. The source code for which Caldera
International, Inc. grants rights are limited to the following UNIX Operating Systems that operate on the 16-Bit PDP-11 CPU and early versions of the 32-Bit UNIX Operating System, with specific exclusion of UNIX System III and UNIX System V and successor operating systems: 32-bit 32V UNIX
16 bit UNIX Versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Caldera International, Inc. makes no guarantees or commitments that any source code is available from Caldera International, Inc.
The following copyright notice applies to the source code files for which this license is granted.
Copyright(C) Caldera International Inc. 2001-2002. All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the
following conditions are met: Redistributions of source code and documentation must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the
following disclaimer. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed or owned by Caldera International, Inc.
Neither the name of Caldera International, Inc. nor the names of other contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
USE OF THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED FOR UNDER THIS LICENSE BY CALDERA INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL CALDERA INTERNATIONAL, INC. BE LIABLE FOR
ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR
OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
Very truly yours,
/signed/ Bill Broderick
Bill Broderick
Director, Licensing Services
* UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the US and other countries.
Dev-C++ is currently undergoing 5.0 development, and will be a very good tool when it reaches that milestone. I don't know whether or not the 4.0 series is solid/"non-shabby" enough for a full class. DJGPP has always been the best option for DOS and continues to be a great option for windows, IMHO. When Dev-C++ 5 comes out, however, I think DJGPP will be surpassed.
If only they'd known before the new iMacs came out!
Implication being that God "thought different"?
Or is that "thunk different" in Apple advertising grammar, since it's "think different" instead of "think differently"?
Everybody here seems to be entirely concerned about privacy, and yet expects people to be open about what they're doing. Why can't we be consistent? Unless you're guilty of a felony type crime, the government wouldn't nail you if they had a 24/7 videofeed, and if you are, punishment will help you change. If your prosecutor was listening in on your conversations with your lawyer, then that would be bad- he'd be able to know how you were going to argue your case before you did it, and he'd have his counterattacks all mapped out. However, if an impartial person listens in, what has an innocent person to fear? Nothing. Unless, of course, the laws are unfair, which should be fixable without tremendous hassle in any nation in the free world.
Justice is served in an odd way...
on
Brian West Update
·
· Score: 1
Copying password lists and using them to access data normally forbidden is not ethical in any way, and probably shouldn't be legal. He copied their perl lists via the security hole, which shouldn't be legal either. What he gets charged for is something else. One can, I suppose, complain about the charge- but one really can't say that he did nothing unethical. (BTW, they messed up the perl acronym- it ought to retain its more dignified name of Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.)
Well, the microsats sent out from my home state were fairly well one-purpose, one-use machines (amateur radio for webersat, rotation/attitude manipulation with tracking for the JAWSAT)- see here for an optimistic description. See here for other previous microsats. NASA's microsats, according to their page, "carry a wide range of spacecraft services including guidance, navigation and control, attitude control, propulsion, high bandwidth and complex communication functions," some of which are diagrammed on that page and its successor. With the previous story and the other ways in which NASA has exceeded expectations on almost all of their craft in mind, I think this is an idea whose time has come.
Here are NASA engineers, squeezing every last drop of science and knowledge out of projects which had justified themselves and their cost before the end of the Cold War- the possibilities presented by a modern project would now be so exponentially greater, due to increased technology, that it's ludicrous Congress doesn't invest in such more heavily. Perhaps one could add this to the list of things/. could become a million-strong lobby for.
The previous comment is quite true about patents, but the understanding I got from the article was that Intel and AMD were thinking about this. If they force the optimizations to stay in their own compilers, they will lose out in many ways, and I thought that they were making the logical move of asking developers to start making these optimizations. I may quite possibly be misinformed. As for the inclusion problem, I do not see major distros moving to GCC 3.x right now. RH is apparently sticking with their modified 2.96 version for 7.2, the latest rant from glibc tells us 3.x will not be adopted, and so on and so forth. This is what I am commenting needs to change. (I have no complaints about the ABI, I think it's great.)
Yes, I forgot to include Heimlein. While many somewhat interesting books have been written since the founding of these genres, my main rant is that the new material is not of the truly epic and original quality. What themes are people writing about these days? Can you call these themes original? Do any of them truly draw you into a world like Hobbit-LOTR, Narnia, and Foundation do? The answer (as far as I can see, and I admit I have no authoritative opinion) is a resounding no. Sure, there's plenty that's fun to read, but nothing which truly achieves greatness.
Oops. The majority of those question marks ought to be quotation marks, this is the fault of problems converting to plaintext.
The Demise of Fantasy and Science Fiction
on
Harry Potter Wins Hugo
·
· Score: 3, Informative
In recent years, science fiction and fantasy (especially childrens' books such as Harry Potter) have failed to come up with anything truly original. No authors have come up with anything which approaches the originality or the epic grandeur shown by Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Here's a short bit by Clarke on the matter, published in 1939 but valid today:
Reverie
?All the ideas in science fiction have been used up!?
How often we?ve heard this moan from editors, authors and fans, any one of whom should know better. Even if it were true, which is the last thing it is, it would signify nothing. How long ago do you think the themes of ordinary, mundane fiction were used up? Somewhere in the late Paleolithic, I should say. Which fact has made exactly no difference to the overwhelming outrush of modern masterpieces, four a shilling in the third tray from the left.
No. The existing material is sufficient to provide an infinite number of stories, each individual and each worth reading. Too much stress is laid on new ideas, or ?thought-variants?, on ?novae?. They are all very well in their way ? and it?s a way that leads to strange, delightful regions of fantasy ? but at least as important are characterization and the ability to treat a common- place theme in your own individual style. And for this reason, in spite of all his critics, I maintain that if any could equal Weinbaum, none could surpass him.
If, in addition to its purely literary qualities, a story has a novel idea, so much the better. Notwithstanding the pessimists, there are a million million themes that science fiction has never touched. Even in these days of deepening depression, a few really original plots still lighten our darkness. ?The Smile of the Sphinx? was such a one; going a good deal further back we have ?The Human Termites?, perhaps the best of all its kind before the advent of ?Sinister Barrier?.
As long as science advances, as long as mathematics discovers incredible worlds where twice two would never dream of equaling four: so new ideas will come tumbling into the mind of anyone who will let his thoughts wander, passport in hand, along the borders of Possibility. There are no Customs regulations; anything you see in your travels in those neighboring lands you can bring back with you. But in the country of the Impossible there are many wonders too delicate and too fragile to survive transportation.
Nothing in this world is ever really new, yet everything is in some way different from all that has gone before. At least once in his life even the dullest of us has found himself contemplating with amazement and perhaps with fear, some thought so original and so startling that it seems the creation of an exterior, infinitely more subtle mind. Such thoughts pass through the consciousness so swiftly that they are gone before they can be more than glimpsed, but sometimes like comets trapped at last by a giant sun, they cannot escape and from their stubborn material the mind forges a masterpiece of literature, of philosophy or music. From such fleeting, fragmentary themes are the Symphonies of Sibelius built - perhaps, with the Theory of Relativity and the conquest of space, the greatest achievements of the century before the year 2000.
Even within the limits set by logic, the artist need not starve for lack of material. We may laugh at Fearn, but we must admire the magnificent, if undisciplined, fertility of his mind. In a less ephemeral field, Stapledon has produced enough themes to keep a generation of science fiction authors busy. There is no reason why others should not do the same; few of the really fundamental ideas of fantasy have been properly exploited. Who has ever, in any story, dared to show the true meaning of immortality, with its cessation of progress and evolution, and, above all, its inevitable destruction of Youth? Only Keller, and then more with sympathy than genius. And who has had the courage to point out that, with sufficient scientific powers, reincarnation is possible? What a story that would make!
All around us, in the commonest things we do, lie endless possibilities. So many things might happen, and don?t - but may some day. How odd it would be if someone to whom you were talking on the phone walked into the room and began a conversation with a colleague! Suppose that when you switched off the light last thing at night you found that it had never been on anyway? And what a shock it would be if you woke up to find yourself fast asleep! It would be quite as unsettling as meeting oneself in the street. I have often wondered, too, what would happen if one adopted the extreme solipsist attitude and decided that nothing existed outside one?s mind. An attempt to put such a theory into practice would be extremely interesting. Whether any forces at our command could effect a devoted adherent to this philosophy is doubtful. He could always stop thinking of us, and then we should be in a mess.
At a generous estimate, there have been a dozen fantasy authors with original conceptions. Today I can only think of two, though the pages of UNKNOWN may bring many more to light. The trouble with present-day science fiction, as with a good many other things, is that in striving after the bizarre it misses the obvious. What it needs is not more imagination or even less imagination. It is some imagination.
What Intel and AMD are really looking for is not as much for their products to conform to Linux as for Linux to conform to their products. Neither is a bad idea. However, the failure of the community to band together behind GCC 3, fix the major bugs, and get distros and other major software compiled with processor optimizations is going to cause these moves by the processor companies to fade away. A message to all developers everywhere: Help now with what you can in order to get code to compile cleanly on GCC 3!
The:CueCat has been the only really affordable barcode scanner I've seen in some time, and many people managed to put the thing to industrial use (most often by doing something that D:Cdidn't approve of). The only upcoming replacement I see is the new expansion pack for Wizcom scanner pens to allow them to recognize barcodes. However, although Wizcomtech told me about 6 months ago they'd be opening specs so Linux drivers could be writen, nothing's come of that, so that solution won't work for me. Seems like hardware to do this type of stuff ought to be really cheap. Does anyone know of low-cost alternatives?
Well, the evolution of Evolution is unfortunately still hosted at Eazel, so their evolution is no Evolution. Ximian is an odd name, and I think Neanderthal Gnome might be better- after all, Neanterthals actually were stronger and had a slightly larger brain capacity than modern Homo Sapiens Sapiens, so perhaps the interface will be more intelligent than that of some early bacteria or primate.
Good luck to all involved in the Gnome/GTK+ efforts, no matter what they call themselves.
I thought these were around a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. So now we have a real implementation of it. Wonder how long it will take to reproduce the Rebels' medical robots?
I think that this story simply proves that the time has come for moderation of Slashdot stories in the same way as other posts. The number of contributors is going up quickly, and not all of these contributors consistently post good, informative, unbiased news. The phrasing used in the submission of this particular story is such that the story itself should be moderated to "flamebait." Case in point-the hundreds of extremely angry responses on both sides of this debate which it has prompted. This is definitely counterproductive and needs to be reformed. How CmdrTaco implements the moderation of stories I don't care, but it needs to be implemented somehow.
This Jesse Berst article has one idea I think is great- split Microsoft into three companies by attitude! Microsoft Arrogance Inc., obviously headed by Bill, Microsoft Vaporware, and Microsoft Ludicrous User Interface "Enhancements" (like that annoying dancing paper clip).
For most software companies, it would be appropriate to have a new Bloatware company, but I don't see any way that would divide Microsoft at all.
I always thought that the charge that people like Richard Stallman were Communists was crazy. However, now that China is supporting Linux because they like the opensource idea, a lot of people will be reopening this charge...
Linux, as it stands now, is much better for someone who only needs to connect a printer and do a little word processing than for someone who needs top-end hardware support such as USB and use of all the capabilities of the new high-end graphics cards such as the Matrox G400. I know that people are working on this, but right now Linux is quite easy to use and lacks much of the hardware support you get with Win32.
Slashdot Mirror
(doh) Sorry about the links... Folding@Home Genome@Home.
Why even bother their servers at all? SETI should wait until we have our own world's problems figured out. Please visit Folding@Home or Genome@Home for two ways you can help solve actual problems. If solving geeky problems is more your style, visit d.net.
Here's the text of the license before it gets slashdotted or for those who don't want to bother with PDF:
January 23, 2002
Dear UNIX enthusiasts,
Caldera International, Inc. hereby grants a fee free license that includes the rights use, modify and distribute this named source code, including creating derived binary products created from the source code. The source code for which Caldera
International, Inc. grants rights are limited to the following UNIX Operating Systems that operate on the 16-Bit PDP-11 CPU and early versions of the 32-Bit UNIX Operating System, with specific exclusion of UNIX System III and UNIX System V and successor operating systems: 32-bit 32V UNIX
16 bit UNIX Versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Caldera International, Inc. makes no guarantees or commitments that any source code is available from Caldera International, Inc.
The following copyright notice applies to the source code files for which this license is granted.
Copyright(C) Caldera International Inc. 2001-2002. All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the
following conditions are met: Redistributions of source code and documentation must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the
following disclaimer. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed or owned by Caldera International, Inc.
Neither the name of Caldera International, Inc. nor the names of other contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
USE OF THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED FOR UNDER THIS LICENSE BY CALDERA INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL CALDERA INTERNATIONAL, INC. BE LIABLE FOR
ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR
OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
Very truly yours,
/signed/ Bill Broderick
Bill Broderick
Director, Licensing Services
* UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the US and other countries.
Dev-C++ is currently undergoing 5.0 development, and will be a very good tool when it reaches that milestone. I don't know whether or not the 4.0 series is solid/"non-shabby" enough for a full class. DJGPP has always been the best option for DOS and continues to be a great option for windows, IMHO. When Dev-C++ 5 comes out, however, I think DJGPP will be surpassed.
If only they'd known before the new iMacs came out!
Implication being that God "thought different"? Or is that "thunk different" in Apple advertising grammar, since it's "think different" instead of "think differently"?
I don't know why it hasn't been mentioned, but LyX seems to be maturing well.
Everybody here seems to be entirely concerned about privacy, and yet expects people to be open about what they're doing. Why can't we be consistent? Unless you're guilty of a felony type crime, the government wouldn't nail you if they had a 24/7 videofeed, and if you are, punishment will help you change. If your prosecutor was listening in on your conversations with your lawyer, then that would be bad- he'd be able to know how you were going to argue your case before you did it, and he'd have his counterattacks all mapped out. However, if an impartial person listens in, what has an innocent person to fear? Nothing. Unless, of course, the laws are unfair, which should be fixable without tremendous hassle in any nation in the free world.
Copying password lists and using them to access data normally forbidden is not ethical in any way, and probably shouldn't be legal. He copied their perl lists via the security hole, which shouldn't be legal either. What he gets charged for is something else. One can, I suppose, complain about the charge- but one really can't say that he did nothing unethical. (BTW, they messed up the perl acronym- it ought to retain its more dignified name of Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.)
Well, the microsats sent out from my home state were fairly well one-purpose, one-use machines (amateur radio for webersat, rotation/attitude manipulation with tracking for the JAWSAT)- see here for an optimistic description. See here for other previous microsats. NASA's microsats, according to their page, "carry a wide range of spacecraft services including guidance, navigation and control, attitude control, propulsion, high bandwidth and complex communication functions," some of which are diagrammed on that page and its successor. With the previous story and the other ways in which NASA has exceeded expectations on almost all of their craft in mind, I think this is an idea whose time has come.
Here are NASA engineers, squeezing every last drop of science and knowledge out of projects which had justified themselves and their cost before the end of the Cold War- the possibilities presented by a modern project would now be so exponentially greater, due to increased technology, that it's ludicrous Congress doesn't invest in such more heavily. Perhaps one could add this to the list of things /. could become a million-strong lobby for.
The previous comment is quite true about patents, but the understanding I got from the article was that Intel and AMD were thinking about this. If they force the optimizations to stay in their own compilers, they will lose out in many ways, and I thought that they were making the logical move of asking developers to start making these optimizations. I may quite possibly be misinformed. As for the inclusion problem, I do not see major distros moving to GCC 3.x right now. RH is apparently sticking with their modified 2.96 version for 7.2, the latest rant from glibc tells us 3.x will not be adopted, and so on and so forth. This is what I am commenting needs to change. (I have no complaints about the ABI, I think it's great.)
Yes, I forgot to include Heimlein. While many somewhat interesting books have been written since the founding of these genres, my main rant is that the new material is not of the truly epic and original quality. What themes are people writing about these days? Can you call these themes original? Do any of them truly draw you into a world like Hobbit-LOTR, Narnia, and Foundation do? The answer (as far as I can see, and I admit I have no authoritative opinion) is a resounding no. Sure, there's plenty that's fun to read, but nothing which truly achieves greatness.
Oops. The majority of those question marks ought to be quotation marks, this is the fault of problems converting to plaintext.
In recent years, science fiction and fantasy (especially childrens' books such as Harry Potter) have failed to come up with anything truly original. No authors have come up with anything which approaches the originality or the epic grandeur shown by Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Here's a short bit by Clarke on the matter, published in 1939 but valid today:
Reverie
?All the ideas in science fiction have been used up!?
How often we?ve heard this moan from editors, authors and fans, any one of whom should know better. Even if it were true, which is the last thing it is, it would signify nothing. How long ago do you think the themes of ordinary, mundane fiction were used up? Somewhere in the late Paleolithic, I should say. Which fact has made exactly no difference to the overwhelming outrush of modern masterpieces, four a shilling in the third tray from the left.
No. The existing material is sufficient to provide an infinite number of stories, each individual and each worth reading. Too much stress is laid on new ideas, or ?thought-variants?, on ?novae?. They are all very well in their way ? and it?s a way that leads to strange, delightful regions of fantasy ? but at least as important are characterization and the ability to treat a common- place theme in your own individual style. And for this reason, in spite of all his critics, I maintain that if any could equal Weinbaum, none could surpass him.
If, in addition to its purely literary qualities, a story has a novel idea, so much the better. Notwithstanding the pessimists, there are a million million themes that science fiction has never touched. Even in these days of deepening depression, a few really original plots still lighten our darkness. ?The Smile of the Sphinx? was such a one; going a good deal further back we have ?The Human Termites?, perhaps the best of all its kind before the advent of ?Sinister Barrier?.
As long as science advances, as long as mathematics discovers incredible worlds where twice two would never dream of equaling four: so new ideas will come tumbling into the mind of anyone who will let his thoughts wander, passport in hand, along the borders of Possibility. There are no Customs regulations; anything you see in your travels in those neighboring lands you can bring back with you. But in the country of the Impossible there are many wonders too delicate and too fragile to survive transportation.
Nothing in this world is ever really new, yet everything is in some way different from all that has gone before. At least once in his life even the dullest of us has found himself contemplating with amazement and perhaps with fear, some thought so original and so startling that it seems the creation of an exterior, infinitely more subtle mind. Such thoughts pass through the consciousness so swiftly that they are gone before they can be more than glimpsed, but sometimes like comets trapped at last by a giant sun, they cannot escape and from their stubborn material the mind forges a masterpiece of literature, of philosophy or music. From such fleeting, fragmentary themes are the Symphonies of Sibelius built - perhaps, with the Theory of Relativity and the conquest of space, the greatest achievements of the century before the year 2000.
Even within the limits set by logic, the artist need not starve for lack of material. We may laugh at Fearn, but we must admire the magnificent, if undisciplined, fertility of his mind. In a less ephemeral field, Stapledon has produced enough themes to keep a generation of science fiction authors busy. There is no reason why others should not do the same; few of the really fundamental ideas of fantasy have been properly exploited. Who has ever, in any story, dared to show the true meaning of immortality, with its cessation of progress and evolution, and, above all, its inevitable destruction of Youth? Only Keller, and then more with sympathy than genius. And who has had the courage to point out that, with sufficient scientific powers, reincarnation is possible? What a story that would make!
All around us, in the commonest things we do, lie endless possibilities. So many things might happen, and don?t - but may some day. How odd it would be if someone to whom you were talking on the phone walked into the room and began a conversation with a colleague! Suppose that when you switched off the light last thing at night you found that it had never been on anyway? And what a shock it would be if you woke up to find yourself fast asleep! It would be quite as unsettling as meeting oneself in the street. I have often wondered, too, what would happen if one adopted the extreme solipsist attitude and decided that nothing existed outside one?s mind. An attempt to put such a theory into practice would be extremely interesting. Whether any forces at our command could effect a devoted adherent to this philosophy is doubtful. He could always stop thinking of us, and then we should be in a mess.
At a generous estimate, there have been a dozen fantasy authors with original conceptions. Today I can only think of two, though the pages of UNKNOWN may bring many more to light. The trouble with present-day science fiction, as with a good many other things, is that in striving after the bizarre it misses the obvious. What it needs is not more imagination or even less imagination. It is some imagination.
What Intel and AMD are really looking for is not as much for their products to conform to Linux as for Linux to conform to their products. Neither is a bad idea. However, the failure of the community to band together behind GCC 3, fix the major bugs, and get distros and other major software compiled with processor optimizations is going to cause these moves by the processor companies to fade away. A message to all developers everywhere: Help now with what you can in order to get code to compile cleanly on GCC 3!
The :CueCat has been the only really affordable barcode scanner I've seen in some time, and many people managed to put the thing to industrial use (most often by doing something that D:C didn't approve of). The only upcoming replacement I see is the new expansion pack for Wizcom scanner pens to allow them to recognize barcodes. However, although Wizcomtech told me about 6 months ago they'd be opening specs so Linux drivers could be writen, nothing's come of that, so that solution won't work for me. Seems like hardware to do this type of stuff ought to be really cheap. Does anyone know of low-cost alternatives?
Tripwire (under GPL since last year) is available at tripwire.org or through their Sourceforge project. This should have been posted with the story (if he's going to mention it, why not link it).
Sorry. For future reference, I'll remember not to post when I'm dead tired- I may say some odd things in such a state.
Well, the evolution of Evolution is unfortunately still hosted at Eazel, so their evolution is no Evolution. Ximian is an odd name, and I think Neanderthal Gnome might be better- after all, Neanterthals actually were stronger and had a slightly larger brain capacity than modern Homo Sapiens Sapiens, so perhaps the interface will be more intelligent than that of some early bacteria or primate.
Good luck to all involved in the Gnome/GTK+ efforts, no matter what they call themselves.
I thought these were around a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. So now we have a real implementation of it. Wonder how long it will take to reproduce the Rebels' medical robots?
I think that this story simply proves that the time has come for moderation of Slashdot stories in the same way as other posts. The number of contributors is going up quickly, and not all of these contributors consistently post good, informative, unbiased news. The phrasing used in the submission of this particular story is such that the story itself should be moderated to "flamebait." Case in point-the hundreds of extremely angry responses on both sides of this debate which it has prompted. This is definitely counterproductive and needs to be reformed. How CmdrTaco implements the moderation of stories I don't care, but it needs to be implemented somehow.
It's time for /. to create a SETI category- specifically so I can block these pointless irrelevant stories.
This Jesse Berst article has one idea I think is great- split Microsoft into three companies by attitude! Microsoft Arrogance Inc., obviously headed by Bill, Microsoft Vaporware, and Microsoft Ludicrous User Interface "Enhancements" (like that annoying dancing paper clip).
For most software companies, it would be appropriate to have a new Bloatware company, but I don't see any way that would divide Microsoft at all.
I always thought that the charge that people like Richard Stallman were Communists was crazy. However, now that China is supporting Linux because they like the opensource idea, a lot of people will be reopening this charge...
Linux, as it stands now, is much better for someone who only needs to connect a printer and do a little word processing than for someone who needs top-end hardware support such as USB and use of all the capabilities of the new high-end graphics cards such as the Matrox G400. I know that people are working on this, but right now Linux is quite easy to use and lacks much of the hardware support you get with Win32.