Once again, showing the intelligence of Mac owners.
You probably don't know that a Mac can tell you fairly exactly [rounded to human readable MBs] how much RAM the OS is currently using. In my opinion 23Mb is big, but thats OS9 for you. Running appleshare with a shared volume and using quicktime while you check ram usage tend to increase the useage by a meg or two.
This figure also includes how much virtual memory (diskspace) is being used to keep the OS loaded. I'd like to know how to get similar information about win95s running status on RAM usage. The reason that this isn't a disk space usage figure for the installation of the OS is because that will run more towards 90MBs and over.
Of course that makes his point pretty meaningless, as you'd need a combined ram of about 128Mb to have a running OS and a RAM disk which holds it; although the mac OS loads really quickly by comparison off of a ram disk. Try it sometime its fun
It had better be a good one. And there should hopfully be some motivation to review in a timly manner. I think the idea behind this is that they are less likely than consultants or isp IT guys to have a bias for what would be convenient for ISPs and such. I hope that the report produced is detailed, thorough, and remains public i.e. not-classified.
Okay; I seem to have left out, or made it seem un-obvious, that I too live in the United States, and that I care about what happens in the legal system, particularly concerning technology, because it ends up affecting me. Even if I didn't live here, I think it would affect me. [grammar... is that affect or effect?].
Its not an issue of not wanting to hear it; its more an issue of some amount of restraint on/.s part for going on and on and on. I'm much more in line with comment #104 (also a reply to my original comment). I mean a few days to a decision means little to us. It means we're/still/ waiting and boy don't we/still/ love to rant about how it would suck if deCSS is somehow criminal. Now if there was some petition to sign, or some news that requires our attention for more than just re-ranting, then it'd be "stuff that matters". By definition a rant doesn't really matter because its not a well formed arguement with decisive action/pleas implied.
But please, don't forget the "News for Nerds" part in all the "Stuff that matters [continually, repetitively, ad infinitum]"
I've heard a lot about deCSS, I've heard a lot about Napster. Its all interesting stuff no doubt... well... okay no some of its damn dry and boring.
Isn't slashdot about: "here's a new technology, here's a new idea, here's a new discovery, here's a review of the above."?
Yes, court cases fall into this somewhat. Like: The idea that napster is liable for the actions of its users, or the idea that reversing/discovering and algorithm could be considered "criminal" by a country you don't even live in and may never have ever visited, and that you could get a ton of flak for it.
But the fact that the case is now being decided uppon by the judge, is something people who wanted to track the case could get from reuters or cnn [ouch the bias, it hurts it hurts].
I mean yeah, its great taht we're days from finding out, but this may be a case where people sort of figured we'd find out sometime, and when that happens it'd be interesting to know how it went down.
I vote that US coporate conglomerates should have no right mandating how or punishing for the way someone elsewhere in the world thinks.
Well. When you bought from a provider to get customer support you trusted that they knew their stuff and made good decisions. Then you decided that one of these descisions was trivial and could be re-thought by you. Unfortunately in this you failed.
The purpose of Linux, besides its source and maintenance model, is to allow for extreame configurability right down to the code. This means that you can go your own way. I going your own way, you've left everyone else behind; can you really expect them to help you out? You've decieded to rely on your own knowledge and understanding of the problem once you start running linux "the way you like it."
Now a hardware provider is not just responsible for choices in their hardware, but also for choices in their software that supports that hardware. If you felt you needed to trust someone for this, you should have stuck to the decisions they made for you.
Now as far as missing parts goes, well that's bad. My theory is that the parts missing were not propperly supported by the software choices you made, and that the system was, as best as possible, configured to run with this choice, which VA makes no claim to have full understanding of. You wanted mandrake, you got mandrake, and although VA doesn't support madrake, they tried, and it seems failed. Possibly running Mandrake with the parts that VA uses is mostly impossible.
Um... I think you mean:
society/culture/information exchange [hence homogenity] and life itself is exponential in growth/organization.
The universe may be logrithmic if it dies a heat death (in respect to heat)... it may be exponential in respect to size in event of a heat death. I suppose its shrinking and heat would be exponential in the case of a big crunch.
how does $20 buy a ferrari or even pay for the running of a corp?
Besides, I think your new idea hinges on replication machines being expensive and few.
Imagine it this way: $5 for a fruit from anybody. $100 for a machine that, will let you make fruit-dupes that you can trade with people from all over instantaniously for variety.
now where exactly is there money in this for anyone but the person making the replicators (its built so you can't fit one in another). Creating an original fruit is a one time sale (almost, barring collector's purchases), you might only make 35 in your life; you'd have to charge a;bout $33,000 a new fruit to be able to support a family with 2 children about [guess]. And your fruit would/have/ to be a hit every time or people would just go for all the other cheep replicated fruits.
The analogy falls appart at "end starvation" because, say, with software or music you're often not eleaviation a natural disaster. but anyway...
What if, F.Fred stops farming because its unfeasable and he needs to work for cash so that he can hold on to his house.
Imagine if F.Fred had continued farming and had, at the age of 55 gained enough experience with excellent farming techniques, and had with the luck of the seasons and some creative inspiration, stumbled upon a fine and hard to cultivate fruit that was wonderful to all who tried it; making them satiated and happy. Well sure your dupe device will allow all to have it and thats great. But the problem is it never came to pass because F.Fred had to become a pool cleaner [or did something else that isn't duplicatable and re-distributable].
Maybe no one would ever know or care because FFFF is pretty damn good, although homogenous. But I think in music, hearing the same couple songs from now until 2020 would make everyone think, "Remember when people used to be able to find the time to actually write music? Like the Beatles or something. I wonder how they ever did that being that theres no money in it and no way to support oneself."
-Daniel
Of course, the Beatles made more money than they'd ever need, but that's beside the point and uncommon.
Cars are centralized. They get produced, thier producers extract money, they are then owned. Sure no one cares later if that care broke down or if the person hit something but that doesn't make them decentralized. Granted a leased car is more centralized.
Books are centralized. They are sold and produced and mostly distributed by the same people [publisher/author cooperation implied]. Temporary use is usually regulated by libraries. Okay so when you're done with a paper back you can give it to a friend. Its nice that that's not illegal but it also makes sense since you didn't just copy it for a friend, you gave it up. Now you could copy parts of a book, but its normally really really inconveinient to copy the whole.
Guns were mostly like cars, or ploughs or toasters or lightbulbs for that matter. How about All non-perishable goods.
Shareware is indeed different in one respect. When someone decides to pass it on, they don't have to give it up for themselves. That's very usefull for wide distribution since a person is not truely "sharing" it they're just copying and distributing it. Money is handled in a mostly centralized way; media can be charged for. It cannot be changed though to send money elsewhere (legally/ethically) without permission from the copyright holder/author (if only those were always the same actual people).
SO: MP3s and Files are just plain distributed, and there isn't a method in place to ask for money, in return for a $12 registration of the album files you get the full color process Album booklet. That would be so cool... huge full color album "jackets" with poster and t-shirt options (gold, platinum, executive/groupie registration).
So I don't think that the article was thoroughly worded to get the idea accross. I think I'm missing why centralization is "new" (think british empire, or just rome).
well.. a number of the caches of this site have let me down too, even the google ones.
could I suggest, that when the next big batch of cash comes in, slashdot expands by running all appropriate links for the last two days though a slashdot run cache system?
I propose, somewhat jokingly, that we call this feature cachedot
hey! I had a real point I just thought I'd open with a joke... permit me to repeat:
But anyway, I don't see how you could sue end consumers for a trademark infringement. But it
wouldn't be any better if they were suing the developers of samba.
what I mean is the producer of the name samba ought to get sued not those who use it.
in that case a company had best buy machines without an OS. This would solve the problem of giving too much money to microsoft. Not that that doesn't happen already. A mail in rebate would be a nice touch, basically buy an MS os, and get $30 off if you mail in the only for new machines disc that came with your machine.
that's the harder part really; you've got to be able to find companies you find suitable. Methods in doing this would be appreciated. I.E. in 1 year of being on boston.techies.com with a willingness to relocate, I've only gotten 1 email about something I found interesting, even with the very specific resume tool. and I get 2 or so a week.
Also establishing what the job and company is about over the phone before an interview needs addressing. Sometimes a company will just ask you to come in without divulging much information, that's not helpful
Strangely, even though america began as an open society, and in many respects remains that way, pollitcally, and ideologically it has been and is very isolationistic. This stems from the strong emphasis on individuality which requires a degree of isolation.
There's and interesting book written in the 70s (don't recall the name) about the degree of masculine values (re-defined as individuality, competetive drive directed against fellow employees, expectaion of personal recognition) and femenine values (re-defined as prefering to work with others to solve problem, redirecting recognition to team members, cooperation with fellow employees in more aspects than what needs to be done) found in various nation's corporate cultures. They do the study by asking employees to rate how they prefer to work in respects to the values. The data collected shows the US UK and Japan to be (oddly) fairly equal in masculine values, and denemark, norway, and sweden to be fairly equal in femenine values. The implications of which are discussed to some degree, but I didn't read the whole thing.
Basically if in the 70s an American were to interview with a danish company they might, through applying common interview tecniques of american culture, come off as over-competative, and possibly incapable of teamwork; conversly a danish person interviewing at an american firm might be thought incapable of individual innovation, lacking in desire to strike out for change etc... None of this says whether any of these values are good or bad, but by understanding the difference it more likley for an american company to do well with danish employees in a danish branch rather than feeling they must hire americans and bring them over at greater cost.
Anyway, in general an isolationist view of the world leads to xenophobia, and worse yet, wars... lots of them. So better than getting all worked up about cultural pillars and ways of life and social change, just relax a bit and enjoy whats available to you. If you start thinking about the way things should be for your children's children you're thinking a bit too much since you realy have no control over the political and social atmosphere that will exist by then.
The above does not apply to environmental issues, those can be fairly clearly defined as good and bad, and you should be thinking about your children's children.
I enjoyed the billboards and the comics... but we know the candywraper and symphony thing were around some time ago. BTW sluggy is catching up again. -Daniel
its clear to most people here that knowing about bugs is the basis of making a better operating system. The second part is being able to fix them (thank you gnu for the license and the compilers).
Now lets hope someone without this clue reads this... hmmm what to do to make it stand out...
Silly <BLINK> tag! wooo! Okay; future ref: it doesn't work here. Silly RED color! woo! Okay. that doesn't work either. Well thats something for those who don't know. I'll be quiet now. But seriously, bug tracks are good.
People that age, not that I'm really that far from that age still, generally feel a need to define themselves. Such expression can take many forms, from being "good" at attending and participating in parties, dressing up for that sort of thing, to learning to play an instrument, writing material, performing on stage, creating artwork, debating and reasoning well; etc.
My highschool teacher had a very strong emphasis on allowing people to spend most of the time in various classes working on a project of their own creation using certain tools, and demonstrating certain understood concepts. Most of these projects ended up being hypercard stacks, logo or apple-soft basic programs, but they were still fun, expressive, and taught people about programming concepts.
If your students have had a chance to familiarize themselves with working in a Unix environment, then asking them to program in it would probably be appropriate to avoid frustrations involving rebooting, and restoring code.
Personally I would suggest you allow them to design simple games, something with points and scoring. I recall people made programs that played card games, did brick-out, followed some sort of sci-fi plot of chasing aliens using game-paddles and a simple sprite collision thing. At the end of the class, the games could be made available for a class day or two to all the students to play each others games. This puts a friendly amount of pressure to impress and polish while it encourages students to lean over to their neighbor and ask, "If you were using my program, would this interface make sense, or would this one?" We actually did something like this in most of our programming classes.
Breaking out some of the older tech, like paddles and apple-][s with simple, documented, peek/poke interfaces to most things really helped to make it simpler to develop something fun without frustration. While these days it may take a pretty geeky kid to be proud of a program that doesn't have menus or dialogs and doesn't multi-task, they should still have something to point at and say, "I made that."
This brings me to my second point; have them work on this project individually. They won't ask too much about the policy because its just like writing an essay or painting some watercolor paper, it needs to express the creator. Working in groups throws up too many questions when people look back and think, how much of this cool thing can I take credit for? Did I really write much of it, was it my idea? Further problems arise with common high-school lazyness that allows team members to leave the work to one dedicated person.
Recently, if your students are up to a bit of threading or whatever, I've thought that a networking project might engage them more. Perhaps something of a chat program that can handle say 5 users at once in a peer to peer chat with a very simple, specific api to which all the students can write a different program. Perhaps even writing a central server for them and specifying how communication should be handled with it, to let them each write "my-nifty-client" would keep them happy.
Of course, while most of the class time should be dedicated to writing one program of their choice, there should be a few other assigned tasks. Some simple, small, comprehension of concept programs might be nice. Also a writen test is never too bad an idea, but don't take it too seriously there or some students won't care what they write because they'll feel they can't resurect their grade from the test score. Of course encouraging students to have programming time after school may help get most projects actually done, and will help add glitter and glam to the over zealous programmer's projects.
Basically, you want them to think little about common sorts, fifo stacks and such and concentrate more on some arithmetic and random number generating fun, with use of some interface, be it text or graphics. That is if you want them to remain interested in the class. Particularly, if they have a program in mind already, they may get bored as you explain a merge-sort, because it doesn't in anyway apply to their arena gladiator simple RPG.
Depending on scale, I think that open sourced projects should stay closed source until they have a good, defining, deliverable. A defining deliverable is important because it makes people say oh,this can be used for class A of things, instead of thinking, well, as long as we are designing this couldn't we just include class B of things? After all, even though open source always runs the risk of being redirected or split into a different direction, if the object is a good tool for its job there won't be as much call to make it a do-all-but-nothing-well-tool A set of individual tools that can be used in tandem is much better than a monolith like an office suite (even though to some extent a suite is a set of individual tools).
Problem being, for something the scale of mozilla, it may not have been viable to close development until it was clearly defined... or wait; was mozilla based on netscape code and hence defined in that sense, or was it built up from "scratch"?
If Napster is a verb meaning "to copy copyrighted material, in specific music in the MP3 format" then you are correct. Otherwise you're wrong because Napster could be a noun that stands for software that give people a means of exchanging data, specifically music in the MP3 format. The makers of Napster did nothing wrong other than possibly encouraging people to actively copy copyrighted material. This is not strictly illegal either.
However what the people did with it, which is to copy copyrighted music, is indeed illegal. I won't even qualify that with a "technically illegal" or "illegal by teh letter of the law", after legality has/nothing at all ever/ to do with morality. well... maybe legality ocasionally is based on a particular morality, but it quickly becomes something too rigid to encompas any true sense of morality, which is most often based on situation.
I told my wife that I would have gladly paid.50 to $1.00 a song to do this.
Could it be that you lied when you said this? I mean, nothings actually stopping you from paying $.50 - $1 for each song. Just write a letter to the studio that owns the rights, enclose an amount, and write enclosed find a voluntary payment in the amount of $1 for listening rights to Blah by Blabber. Sincerely, me. (Napster User).
I'll admit you'd probably get a response like: dear napster user, we under no circumstances wish to grant you listening rights to blah by blabber through Napster. Please pay $15.99 + $100 in the next 30 days for a CD containing Blah by Blabber and your settlement costs for violating our rights on this title. If we do not receive payment for this you can expect us to arrange a court date for the matter to be settled by the law. Sincerely, Us, (legally protected copyright holders).
PowerPCs are much faster than Athlons at the same clock speed. The only reason the two can be compared is, Athlons are available at double the clock speed of the fastest PowerPCs available - and it's questionable which is faster.
Okay; I use linux on a PPC (debain) I love it, It rocks, PPCs are great; RISC makes up for a lot of mHz etc... that's what I was trying to say. Too bad I was trying to be objective in my previous statement.
However; if we were talking about some purely CPU style comparisons, I'd have a hard time believing that the athalon, at twice the clock of a PPC is difficult to compare or has questionable results. I've never used an athalon though so... I will say that lucky for us CPU performance means almost nothing when comparing a 350 PPC to a 700 Athalon. The bottle neck is undoubtably at how many clock cycles are lost waiting on ram, or even cache... and lets not discuss the Hard Drive. I've heard some very good things about the PPCs family design's approach to handling branches [damn brain forgot what the term is for pipelineing both branch results and then discarding one] and waiting for memory. I assumed that the athalon (at least its core) would not be behind on such developments, but maybe its all patented stuff.
Linux on PowerPC takes about as much RAM as Linux on x86. If you run a lot of apps at once, yes, 256MB RAM is great, but 128 is fine, and 64MB works. Sure, you may hit swap (just as you would on a PC), but Linux's swap is fast.
yeah... I run debian linux on a 120Mhz 604 (no e) with 32mb of ram, and I'm happy enough, although the video built into the 8500 (control) could really use some development help, the FB and X both do some weird things with color depth and screen size (X allocates a square for my screen chopping off the bottom, unless I run fbset twice (not once)) My argument here was that, if your not doing CPU tests, you'd be comparing the system's application performance, and since this often can be limited by RAM performance and swap-space performance, it would be really objective of you to set up the systems as similarly as possible excepting for their CPUs.
GCC has been fully optimized for the G4 with AltiVec, and Yellow Dog has been recompiled with it. Presumably other distributions have as well. From what I've heard, Linux on a G4 absolutely screams. And now you can get dual G4 systems. *drool* Wish I weren't broke.
Now this I didn't know... hmmm.. I hope debian will be similarly optimized. I do think though that to get any good usage out of the altivec feature the programmer has to make particular C calls that now help support it... for example in incrementing all values in a matrix, you could write a function that does it the way you'd think an 80s computer would, or you could find that altivec fuction call that probably helps you out. [thats speculation though don't quote me... can anyone confirm?]. I don't think a compiler could go through a loop on a block of memory and figure "Hey all this could be done in one altivec instruction" because there's just so many ways a loop could be setup and you wouldn't always get optimization, hence making a specific function for it would make sense.
Yes, I thought I made it clear though that while everyone has they're preference, I don't feel that there's any need to say something to the effect of:
"I can't possibly believe people use a one button mouse, they must be entirely incapable of meaningful thought, and Apple must be a corporate equivalent of a Necromancer, gathering and furthering its ever-growing-army-of-the-undead." [not quoting anyone in particular there]
And people were generally ruder than that. So if they want to espouse how great some option is, I thought they out to realize that no one cares that much about it and that you use what you like, not what someone said "real-programmers" use.
My preference is a Cordless Optical 4-button Wheelmouse with a USB receiver. When one of those is made
Damn! and I was going to ask "Where can I get one?"
damn! well, while one can live without booth-babes (I've never understood why they don't seem to find such work demeaning, but then they don't have to if they don't want to) the lack of t-shirts, and I'm assuming, other cool toys (like a blinky super-ball thing) is depressing. I mean, sure meeting people and going to the parties is great; but isn't there a mutual understanding that you should get your money's worth (entrance fee) in logo-emblazoned stuff?
There's a pretty cool OS that hasn't been mentioned so far called Elite OS. Its made by the Tao Group and claims to implement a virtual processor that then runs the kernel and everything else. Code can then be dynamically distributed over a networks of nodes consisting of various architechtures. Apart from running on a microkernel that implements the binary conversion, it can also run in a vm under another os like win95/98, which is what the amiga SDK seems to do.
While I'm not too sure about the cube's preformance, I suspect it will be lackluster in price/preformance to my Athlon with 256 megs.
May the wonder of RISC guide you! Actually I wouldn't bet on it being any faster unless your athalon is at the same Mhz as your G4. Then you'd have to make sure that you have 256 megs of ram on the cube too, just to avoid swapping to the same degree... although PPC RISC code may be larger... and then you'd have to hope the compiler was optimizing for the specifics in the RISC PPC G4 chip. Thats less likely. In fact I've been told that GCC doesn't have any decent optimization for anything beyond a 601. and considering a 604 could conceivably do 4 601 instructions in a cycle, it would have been nice to have optimization for that. -Daniel
Slashdot Mirror
You probably don't know that a Mac can tell you fairly exactly [rounded to human readable MBs] how much RAM the OS is currently using. In my opinion 23Mb is big, but thats OS9 for you. Running appleshare with a shared volume and using quicktime while you check ram usage tend to increase the useage by a meg or two.
This figure also includes how much virtual memory (diskspace) is being used to keep the OS loaded. I'd like to know how to get similar information about win95s running status on RAM usage. The reason that this isn't a disk space usage figure for the installation of the OS is because that will run more towards 90MBs and over.
Of course that makes his point pretty meaningless, as you'd need a combined ram of about 128Mb to have a running OS and a RAM disk which holds it; although the mac OS loads really quickly by comparison off of a ram disk. Try it sometime its fun
-Daniel
-Daniel
Its not an issue of not wanting to hear it; its more an issue of some amount of restraint on /.s part for going on and on and on. I'm much more in line with comment #104 (also a reply to my original comment). I mean a few days to a decision means little to us. It means we're /still/ waiting and boy don't we /still/ love to rant about how it would suck if deCSS is somehow criminal. Now if there was some petition to sign, or some news that requires our attention for more than just re-ranting, then it'd be "stuff that matters". By definition a rant doesn't really matter because its not a well formed arguement with decisive action/pleas implied.
But please, don't forget the "News for Nerds" part in all the "Stuff that matters [continually, repetitively, ad infinitum]"
Isn't slashdot about: "here's a new technology, here's a new idea, here's a new discovery, here's a review of the above."?
Yes, court cases fall into this somewhat. Like: The idea that napster is liable for the actions of its users, or the idea that reversing/discovering and algorithm could be considered "criminal" by a country you don't even live in and may never have ever visited, and that you could get a ton of flak for it.
But the fact that the case is now being decided uppon by the judge, is something people who wanted to track the case could get from reuters or cnn [ouch the bias, it hurts it hurts].
I mean yeah, its great taht we're days from finding out, but this may be a case where people sort of figured we'd find out sometime, and when that happens it'd be interesting to know how it went down.
I vote that US coporate conglomerates should have no right mandating how or punishing for the way someone elsewhere in the world thinks.
-Daniel
The purpose of Linux, besides its source and maintenance model, is to allow for extreame configurability right down to the code. This means that you can go your own way. I going your own way, you've left everyone else behind; can you really expect them to help you out? You've decieded to rely on your own knowledge and understanding of the problem once you start running linux "the way you like it."
Now a hardware provider is not just responsible for choices in their hardware, but also for choices in their software that supports that hardware. If you felt you needed to trust someone for this, you should have stuck to the decisions they made for you.
Now as far as missing parts goes, well that's bad. My theory is that the parts missing were not propperly supported by the software choices you made, and that the system was, as best as possible, configured to run with this choice, which VA makes no claim to have full understanding of. You wanted mandrake, you got mandrake, and although VA doesn't support madrake, they tried, and it seems failed. Possibly running Mandrake with the parts that VA uses is mostly impossible.
-Daniel
The universe may be logrithmic if it dies a heat death (in respect to heat)... it may be exponential in respect to size in event of a heat death. I suppose its shrinking and heat would be exponential in the case of a big crunch.
-Daniel
Besides, I think your new idea hinges on replication machines being expensive and few. Imagine it this way: $5 for a fruit from anybody. $100 for a machine that, will let you make fruit-dupes that you can trade with people from all over instantaniously for variety.
now where exactly is there money in this for anyone but the person making the replicators (its built so you can't fit one in another). Creating an original fruit is a one time sale (almost, barring collector's purchases), you might only make 35 in your life; you'd have to charge a;bout $33,000 a new fruit to be able to support a family with 2 children about [guess]. And your fruit would /have/ to be a hit every time or people would just go for all the other cheep replicated fruits.
-Daniel
What if, F.Fred stops farming because its unfeasable and he needs to work for cash so that he can hold on to his house.
Imagine if F.Fred had continued farming and had, at the age of 55 gained enough experience with excellent farming techniques, and had with the luck of the seasons and some creative inspiration, stumbled upon a fine and hard to cultivate fruit that was wonderful to all who tried it; making them satiated and happy. Well sure your dupe device will allow all to have it and thats great. But the problem is it never came to pass because F.Fred had to become a pool cleaner [or did something else that isn't duplicatable and re-distributable].
Maybe no one would ever know or care because FFFF is pretty damn good, although homogenous. But I think in music, hearing the same couple songs from now until 2020 would make everyone think, "Remember when people used to be able to find the time to actually write music? Like the Beatles or something. I wonder how they ever did that being that theres no money in it and no way to support oneself."
-Daniel
Of course, the Beatles made more money than they'd ever need, but that's beside the point and uncommon.
Cars are centralized. They get produced, thier producers extract money, they are then owned. Sure no one cares later if that care broke down or if the person hit something but that doesn't make them decentralized. Granted a leased car is more centralized.
Books are centralized. They are sold and produced and mostly distributed by the same people [publisher/author cooperation implied]. Temporary use is usually regulated by libraries. Okay so when you're done with a paper back you can give it to a friend. Its nice that that's not illegal but it also makes sense since you didn't just copy it for a friend, you gave it up. Now you could copy parts of a book, but its normally really really inconveinient to copy the whole.
Guns were mostly like cars, or ploughs or toasters or lightbulbs for that matter. How about All non-perishable goods.
Shareware is indeed different in one respect. When someone decides to pass it on, they don't have to give it up for themselves. That's very usefull for wide distribution since a person is not truely "sharing" it they're just copying and distributing it. Money is handled in a mostly centralized way; media can be charged for. It cannot be changed though to send money elsewhere (legally/ethically) without permission from the copyright holder/author (if only those were always the same actual people).
SO: MP3s and Files are just plain distributed, and there isn't a method in place to ask for money, in return for a $12 registration of the album files you get the full color process Album booklet. That would be so cool... huge full color album "jackets" with poster and t-shirt options (gold, platinum, executive/groupie registration).
So I don't think that the article was thoroughly worded to get the idea accross. I think I'm missing why centralization is "new" (think british empire, or just rome).
-Danielcould I suggest, that when the next big batch of cash comes in, slashdot expands by running all appropriate links for the last two days though a slashdot run cache system?
I propose, somewhat jokingly, that we call this feature cachedot
-Daniel
But anyway, I don't see how you could sue end consumers for a trademark infringement. But it wouldn't be any better if they were suing the developers of samba.
what I mean is the producer of the name samba ought to get sued not those who use it.
-Daniel
that's the harder part really; you've got to be able to find companies you find suitable. Methods in doing this would be appreciated. I.E. in 1 year of being on boston.techies.com with a willingness to relocate, I've only gotten 1 email about something I found interesting, even with the very specific resume tool. and I get 2 or so a week. Also establishing what the job and company is about over the phone before an interview needs addressing. Sometimes a company will just ask you to come in without divulging much information, that's not helpful
There's and interesting book written in the 70s (don't recall the name) about the degree of masculine values (re-defined as individuality, competetive drive directed against fellow employees, expectaion of personal recognition) and femenine values (re-defined as prefering to work with others to solve problem, redirecting recognition to team members, cooperation with fellow employees in more aspects than what needs to be done) found in various nation's corporate cultures. They do the study by asking employees to rate how they prefer to work in respects to the values. The data collected shows the US UK and Japan to be (oddly) fairly equal in masculine values, and denemark, norway, and sweden to be fairly equal in femenine values. The implications of which are discussed to some degree, but I didn't read the whole thing.
Basically if in the 70s an American were to interview with a danish company they might, through applying common interview tecniques of american culture, come off as over-competative, and possibly incapable of teamwork; conversly a danish person interviewing at an american firm might be thought incapable of individual innovation, lacking in desire to strike out for change etc... None of this says whether any of these values are good or bad, but by understanding the difference it more likley for an american company to do well with danish employees in a danish branch rather than feeling they must hire americans and bring them over at greater cost.
Anyway, in general an isolationist view of the world leads to xenophobia, and worse yet, wars... lots of them. So better than getting all worked up about cultural pillars and ways of life and social change, just relax a bit and enjoy whats available to you. If you start thinking about the way things should be for your children's children you're thinking a bit too much since you realy have no control over the political and social atmosphere that will exist by then.
The above does not apply to environmental issues, those can be fairly clearly defined as good and bad, and you should be thinking about your children's children.
I enjoyed the billboards and the comics... but we know the candywraper and symphony thing were around some time ago.
BTW sluggy is catching up again.
-Daniel
what if a machine wasn't up when it was checked... could there be a lot of machines that just arn't connected all the time?
Now lets hope someone without this clue reads this... hmmm what to do to make it stand out...
Silly <BLINK> tag! wooo! Okay; future ref: it doesn't work here.
Silly RED color! woo! Okay. that doesn't work either. Well thats something for those who don't know. I'll be quiet now.
But seriously, bug tracks are good.
enough of that;
Daniel
People that age, not that I'm really that far from that age still, generally feel a need to define themselves. Such expression can take many forms, from being "good" at attending and participating in parties, dressing up for that sort of thing, to learning to play an instrument, writing material, performing on stage, creating artwork, debating and reasoning well; etc.
My highschool teacher had a very strong emphasis on allowing people to spend most of the time in various classes working on a project of their own creation using certain tools, and demonstrating certain understood concepts. Most of these projects ended up being hypercard stacks, logo or apple-soft basic programs, but they were still fun, expressive, and taught people about programming concepts.
If your students have had a chance to familiarize themselves with working in a Unix environment, then asking them to program in it would probably be appropriate to avoid frustrations involving rebooting, and restoring code.
Personally I would suggest you allow them to design simple games, something with points and scoring. I recall people made programs that played card games, did brick-out, followed some sort of sci-fi plot of chasing aliens using game-paddles and a simple sprite collision thing. At the end of the class, the games could be made available for a class day or two to all the students to play each others games. This puts a friendly amount of pressure to impress and polish while it encourages students to lean over to their neighbor and ask, "If you were using my program, would this interface make sense, or would this one?" We actually did something like this in most of our programming classes.
Breaking out some of the older tech, like paddles and apple-][s with simple, documented, peek/poke interfaces to most things really helped to make it simpler to develop something fun without frustration. While these days it may take a pretty geeky kid to be proud of a program that doesn't have menus or dialogs and doesn't multi-task, they should still have something to point at and say, "I made that."
This brings me to my second point; have them work on this project individually. They won't ask too much about the policy because its just like writing an essay or painting some watercolor paper, it needs to express the creator. Working in groups throws up too many questions when people look back and think, how much of this cool thing can I take credit for? Did I really write much of it, was it my idea? Further problems arise with common high-school lazyness that allows team members to leave the work to one dedicated person.
Recently, if your students are up to a bit of threading or whatever, I've thought that a networking project might engage them more. Perhaps something of a chat program that can handle say 5 users at once in a peer to peer chat with a very simple, specific api to which all the students can write a different program. Perhaps even writing a central server for them and specifying how communication should be handled with it, to let them each write "my-nifty-client" would keep them happy.
Of course, while most of the class time should be dedicated to writing one program of their choice, there should be a few other assigned tasks. Some simple, small, comprehension of concept programs might be nice. Also a writen test is never too bad an idea, but don't take it too seriously there or some students won't care what they write because they'll feel they can't resurect their grade from the test score. Of course encouraging students to have programming time after school may help get most projects actually done, and will help add glitter and glam to the over zealous programmer's projects.
Basically, you want them to think little about common sorts, fifo stacks and such and concentrate more on some arithmetic and random number generating fun, with use of some interface, be it text or graphics. That is if you want them to remain interested in the class. Particularly, if they have a program in mind already, they may get bored as you explain a merge-sort, because it doesn't in anyway apply to their arena gladiator simple RPG.
-Daniel
Depending on scale, I think that open sourced projects should stay closed source until they have a good, defining, deliverable. A defining deliverable is important because it makes people say oh,this can be used for class A of things, instead of thinking, well, as long as we are designing this couldn't we just include class B of things? After all, even though open source always runs the risk of being redirected or split into a different direction, if the object is a good tool for its job there won't be as much call to make it a do-all-but-nothing-well-tool A set of individual tools that can be used in tandem is much better than a monolith like an office suite (even though to some extent a suite is a set of individual tools).
Problem being, for something the scale of mozilla, it may not have been viable to close development until it was clearly defined... or wait; was mozilla based on netscape code and hence defined in that sense, or was it built up from "scratch"?
If Napster is a verb meaning "to copy copyrighted material, in specific music in the MP3 format" then you are correct. Otherwise you're wrong because Napster could be a noun that stands for software that give people a means of exchanging data, specifically music in the MP3 format. The makers of Napster did nothing wrong other than possibly encouraging people to actively copy copyrighted material. This is not strictly illegal either.
However what the people did with it, which is to copy copyrighted music, is indeed illegal. I won't even qualify that with a "technically illegal" or "illegal by teh letter of the law", after legality has /nothing at all ever/ to do with morality. well... maybe legality ocasionally is based on a particular morality, but it quickly becomes something too rigid to encompas any true sense of morality, which is most often based on situation.
I told my wife that I would have gladly paid .50 to $1.00 a song to do this.
Could it be that you lied when you said this? I mean, nothings actually stopping you from paying $.50 - $1 for each song. Just write a letter to the studio that owns the rights, enclose an amount, and write enclosed find a voluntary payment in the amount of $1 for listening rights to Blah by Blabber. Sincerely, me. (Napster User).
I'll admit you'd probably get a response like: dear napster user, we under no circumstances wish to grant you listening rights to blah by blabber through Napster. Please pay $15.99 + $100 in the next 30 days for a CD containing Blah by Blabber and your settlement costs for violating our rights on this title. If we do not receive payment for this you can expect us to arrange a court date for the matter to be settled by the law. Sincerely, Us, (legally protected copyright holders).
Sucks, doesn't it?
--Daniel
Yeah maybe it was poorly worded.
PowerPCs are much faster than Athlons at the same clock speed. The only reason the two can be compared is, Athlons are available at double the clock speed of the fastest PowerPCs available - and it's questionable which is faster.
Okay; I use linux on a PPC (debain) I love it, It rocks, PPCs are great; RISC makes up for a lot of mHz etc... that's what I was trying to say. Too bad I was trying to be objective in my previous statement.
However; if we were talking about some purely CPU style comparisons, I'd have a hard time believing that the athalon, at twice the clock of a PPC is difficult to compare or has questionable results. I've never used an athalon though so... I will say that lucky for us CPU performance means almost nothing when comparing a 350 PPC to a 700 Athalon. The bottle neck is undoubtably at how many clock cycles are lost waiting on ram, or even cache... and lets not discuss the Hard Drive. I've heard some very good things about the PPCs family design's approach to handling branches [damn brain forgot what the term is for pipelineing both branch results and then discarding one] and waiting for memory. I assumed that the athalon (at least its core) would not be behind on such developments, but maybe its all patented stuff.
Linux on PowerPC takes about as much RAM as Linux on x86. If you run a lot of apps at once, yes, 256MB RAM is great, but 128 is fine, and 64MB works. Sure, you may hit swap (just as you would on a PC), but Linux's swap is fast.
yeah... I run debian linux on a 120Mhz 604 (no e) with 32mb of ram, and I'm happy enough, although the video built into the 8500 (control) could really use some development help, the FB and X both do some weird things with color depth and screen size (X allocates a square for my screen chopping off the bottom, unless I run fbset twice (not once)) My argument here was that, if your not doing CPU tests, you'd be comparing the system's application performance, and since this often can be limited by RAM performance and swap-space performance, it would be really objective of you to set up the systems as similarly as possible excepting for their CPUs.
GCC has been fully optimized for the G4 with AltiVec, and Yellow Dog has been recompiled with it. Presumably other distributions have as well. From what I've heard, Linux on a G4 absolutely screams. And now you can get dual G4 systems. *drool* Wish I weren't broke.
Now this I didn't know... hmmm.. I hope debian will be similarly optimized. I do think though that to get any good usage out of the altivec feature the programmer has to make particular C calls that now help support it... for example in incrementing all values in a matrix, you could write a function that does it the way you'd think an 80s computer would, or you could find that altivec fuction call that probably helps you out. [thats speculation though don't quote me... can anyone confirm?]. I don't think a compiler could go through a loop on a block of memory and figure "Hey all this could be done in one altivec instruction" because there's just so many ways a loop could be setup and you wouldn't always get optimization, hence making a specific function for it would make sense.
Yes, I thought I made it clear though that while everyone has they're preference, I don't feel that there's any need to say something to the effect of:
"I can't possibly believe people use a one button mouse, they must be entirely incapable of meaningful thought, and Apple must be a corporate equivalent of a Necromancer, gathering and furthering its ever-growing-army-of-the-undead." [not quoting anyone in particular there]
And people were generally ruder than that. So if they want to espouse how great some option is, I thought they out to realize that no one cares that much about it and that you use what you like, not what someone said "real-programmers" use.
My preference is a Cordless Optical 4-button Wheelmouse with a USB receiver. When one of those is made
Damn! and I was going to ask "Where can I get one?"
damn! well, while one can live without booth-babes (I've never understood why they don't seem to find such work demeaning, but then they don't have to if they don't want to) the lack of t-shirts, and I'm assuming, other cool toys (like a blinky super-ball thing) is depressing. I mean, sure meeting people and going to the parties is great; but isn't there a mutual understanding that you should get your money's worth (entrance fee) in logo-emblazoned stuff?
-Daniel
May the wonder of RISC guide you!
Actually I wouldn't bet on it being any faster unless your athalon is at the same Mhz as your G4. Then you'd have to make sure that you have 256 megs of ram on the cube too, just to avoid swapping to the same degree... although PPC RISC code may be larger... and then you'd have to hope the compiler was optimizing for the specifics in the RISC PPC G4 chip. Thats less likely. In fact I've been told that GCC doesn't have any decent optimization for anything beyond a 601. and considering a 604 could conceivably do 4 601 instructions in a cycle, it would have been nice to have optimization for that. -Daniel