Re:That's an okay idea, but...
on
Abandoned Games
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· Score: 1
Please note that I said nothing about the type nor age of the game. (Incidentally, when I made my comment, I had Star Trek: Birth of the Federation in mind. That game was mostly in C.)
However, I would want that code (and artwork, and sprites, and character models, and so on) for historic purposes. Sure, it's great to rewrite something and play it but there is also something to be said for being able to look at coding methodologies from a certain time period, or what have you. While this might not be a big deal 20 years later, it most certainly will be 200 years from now.
Look at it this way: Would you rather have original paintings in an Art Gallery, or copies?
Re:That's an okay idea, but...
on
Abandoned Games
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· Score: 1
Eh, typo. The two +5 posts above are riddled with them, mostly because I didn't go back over and spell/grammar check.
So, in closing, fuck yourself with a rake. Hard.
Re:That's an okay idea, but...
on
Abandoned Games
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· Score: 5, Funny
What if 60 years from now you have the source code but you don't have a compiler for the now defunct C language?:D
When you said that I was suddenly reminded of a scene from Star Trek: First Contact. It occurred on Earth, shortly before Zefram Cochrane went on his first warp flight. Geordi La Forge, excited about meeting his idol and seeing the first warp ship is gushing. While looking at parts of the ship he's saying things like "Wow, I haven't seen something like this since high school!" To which Cochrane replies, "Wait, High School?" "Yes, in the future we learn about warp drives in high school. In fact, I went to Zefram Cochrane High School."
Then I thought about the increasing abstraction of my field (which happens to be computer science) through time ( For example, I could write a simple chess AI in a couple of days that would have been a major research effort maybe forty years ago. ) and came up with this: A group of GNU hackers from the early 22nd century, in a freak compiling accident, are transported through time to the late 80s. While there they meet a desperate RMS (revered as a god in the early 22nd century) who happens to be furiously hacking after losing all his source to a platter crash, freak tape backup fire, and an inappropriately emptied trash can accident which took all his notes on the compiler to a trash heap grave. The compiler hacker, BLT, has been left behind to assist RMS whilst the other hackers go off to rescue un-free code long lost to the ages. "Oh no, what am I going to do, future GNU/Disciple? I've got a talk in three weeks about my fancy new compiler, but all I've got now is a few source files that bootstrap themselves to say 'Hello, oppressed people of proprietary systems!'" "Don't worry RMS, I can code a C compiler in about 20 minutes. I did it in junior high" "Wait, junior high?" "Yeah, well, in the future a C compiler is usually a required project in the opening week of computer science classes. Pretty much anyone can do it, to various degrees of success; sort of like most people can do algebra now. In fact, I went to Richard M. Stallman high school. There was a statue of you out front. The shadow of you beard shielded by lily white skin from the evil day star at lunch."
That's an okay idea, but...
on
Abandoned Games
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'd much rather have the source code to those games, as opposed to having them go on sale again. You know why? Because when the companies who own those games decide to stop selling them (again) you'll have to go right back and beg for them to sell them (again). If they release the source not only will you be able to obtain it whenever you want, but you can port the code to play on modern systems (meaning you don't need the silly hack of emulators or having an old DOS machine sitting about).
Open Source: Ensuring that my kids don't have to listen to Dad tell the same "Oh man, when I was your age I played this great game, but we'd need to find an old binary and a goddamn 60 year old computer to play it..." story over and over again.
Losing information is serious business. Games are quickly becoming part of our shared culture. Think of how much our culture loses by losing those games to time? I can still read ancient Greek and Arabic poetry but I can't play Master's of Orion on my PPC Linux box? I don't know, something seems really fucked up about that.
Perhaps they did it so users would feel cheated, but my guess is there's a much more pragmatic reason behind the disabling of the extra two-gigs: backwards compatibility. If the two gigs aren't there by default then game developers won't assume them to be there.
Honestly, how much would it suck to pop in a game and be told "Woops, sorry. Your Xbox harddrive is too small. Please, buy a new Xbox."
Judging by your past posts you're either a very pissed off jerk, or a troll. Honestly, it's hard to tell.
Anyway, assuming you're just rude and not a troll and in the interests of discussion, what's your justification? Why is your pet era of history the one to which we should all strive?
One of my hobbies happens to be ancient writings. More specifically, one of my hobbies happens to be the translation of personal writtings very akin to what we now call essays or diaries. I find it more than humorous that men have been noting the massive shift in behavior and values, with emphasis on this being a bad thing, since writing became cheap enough to be a viable method for recording one's thoughts.
Long term societies change though time and there's nothing that can be done about that. (Societies that do not change are stagnate, and tend to die out quickly.) None is any more justifiably worse than another, just different. Hell, I'm sure if I looked I'd find people in 1890 bemoaning the sad state of affairs as compared to their own childhood.
So, in closing, keep up the good work. It has a long, proud (myopic) tradition!
I could think you for the very same thing. I think, perhaps, that we feel the need to do so is a rather poor sign.
I think the one key difference between a power grab through climate and a power grab through terrorism is that not enough people are far sighted enough to be frightened by the climate. Terrorism is flashy and spectacular, temperature rising enough to make winters mild doesn't make, for example, my Grandmother say anything other than "What a goddamn lovely winter."
It's entirely possible for scientists to go about getting large amounts of funding without the public necissarily being frightened. A group I worked with got large sums to develop an efficient solar water purifier for use in third world countries (meaning, it had to be cheap and robust). Very few people are concerned, or even know of, a possible water shortage in the developed world; yet the group still got funding. In fact, no one in the group got any more money than they were already salaried for. Their aim was to help poor and dieing people by developing this thing and giving it away for free. Some companies manufacture and sell these devices for about $4000, on which one of the group's physicists said, "It's the worst thing in the world to make money off of dieing people. I figure, if we made cash off this we'd be helping to kill people. That's not something I'd like to think about as I lay on my pile of cash at night."
I've worked with a large number of scientists and environmentalists. While I don't doubt that there are assholes in the bunch, most are concerned with helping and learning. Personal gain is just really not something you get into science for (It's a comfortable living, but you could make a lot more as an engineer or patent monger). Many climatologists getting funding for studies into Global Warming are doing so to figure out if we're going to fuck ourselves, so that their children don't inherit a world worse than they got. The same goes for most second wave environmentalists, people that aren't militant hippies or Green Peace.
The politicians, on the other hand, you might be right about. I haven't met as many politicians as scientists but those that I have met are either really, really dumb or goat fuckers. It makes sense then that global warming or evolution or any number of hot button political science issues are so uselessly kicked about, their political and social ramifications are pretty large.
I suppose, in the end, it really all comes down to your views on human nature. Do you assume that there's some massive, malevolent system in which you are merely a pawn (Nietzche is the dude that brought this idea into modern culture, which should explain my earlier comment if you're not up on the history of thought) or do you assume that most people just want to see their kids and their kids' friends grow up in a better world?
I've never seen estimates of the temperature of the Great Red Spot, but it's fluid mechanics (that much gas can be treated as a fluid) that creates the spot. Wikipedia: Great Red Spot
> My hyposthesis is that this assumption is usually made for the express purpose of frightening people.
Ooo, very Nietzschian! What would be there be to gain from assuming that it would, why would They want to frighten people?
Hmm... me continuing to use the word storm was a bit unfortunate. I should have said weather, storm is usually too limited. When I say storm most people are going to think of wind, rain, and lightening all mixed together. More violent winds, as in the case of Venus, are and example of worsened weather but not necissarily of storms. I apologize for the confusion and hope you won't suddnely stop listening due to a single fuck up.
With that in mind my quoted sentence should be: Venus is a good example of what happens when an atmosphere contains a lot of energy. Overall the planet is really hot, and so, overall, the weather a lot worse there than here.
It kind of depends on where you happen to be on Venus. The cloud layer of Venus is quite dense, so much so that not a lot of the light of the sun reaches the surface. (In fact, the surface is pretty uniform in temperature due to being a bit like a hot dog wrapped in bun.) Anyway, there's not a lot of wind at the surface but 300km/h winds at the top of the clouds due to temperature differences. The friction of this causes the lightening. The lightening would severly limit human life (ignoring all the other obvious killer aspects of the Venusian atmosphere).
> Yet Mars has winds and dust storms beyond what we normally > experience on Earth.
Yes, that is very true. The reason is simple: Mars doesn't have the moisture that Earth has. The Dust Bowl occured for a variety of reasons, a major being drought. Dry dirt takes less force to blow than wet dirt. Also, Mars doesn't have the wind dampening effects of vegitation. Growing up I lived in the flattest part of Missouri, and there was no wind. Why? Hills with trees surrounded me for hundreds of miles. Now I live in Chicago two blocks from Lake Michigan. The wind, with nothing to block it, sometimes blows me over.
> Finally, the larget, most violent storm we know of, Jupter's > Great Red Spot, hovers around only 111K to 125K.
111K is hurricane force wind.
> I'm not clear on why an overall warming would necessarily result > in greater differentials.
Think of it this way: The amount that falling hurts is directly related to distance that you fall. While it's true that you could potentially break your ankle falling from a step ladder, it's much more likely to break falling from the top of your house. Falling farther puts more energy into the system, so you're more likely to cause yourself harm. Weather systems are kind of like that. While it's very true that with minimal amounts of energy you can have really bad weather, say on Mars, it just gets more and more likely that weather will become more violent if there's more energy pumped into the atmosphere. That energy is heat.
Cool air doesn't come only from the polar regions, and cool air meeting warm air isn't the only driving factor in weather systems. There are also temperature differences due to water and land heat radiation, cloud effects, vegitation effects on how land radiates, ocean absorbtion properties, there's a whole lot of stuff. But, really, it all just boils down to a simple physical principle: A system can do more with more energy.
Weather is driven by a differences of temperature and a difference of moisture in the atmosphere.
It isn't necissarily so much that a uniform increase in temperature gets us, it's that the potential temperature and moisture differentials get more pronounced. That's what gets us. Storms occur at the drop off point in temperature and moisture scales, where you suddenly go from really warm to really cold, or from moist to dry. The bigger the drop, the more energy the storm has. The more energy a storm has, the less likely we are to be able to survive it.
Venus is a good example of what happens when an atmosphere contains a lot of energy. Overall the planet is really hot, and so, overall, the storms are a lot worse there than here.
PLOOP! That's the sound of your cliche smacking the wall.
Anyway, very often I see an anti-circumcision guy around Chicago. He's got a massive beard and always seems to be rather passionate. I've often wanted to ask him if he happens to be circumcised, you know, just to figure out why he's so passionate about holding that sign.
When are the environmentalists going to admit that it's not "Global Warming" they're trying to prevent? It's all about DESTROYING industrialization.
Hmm... interesting conclusion.
Let's see, the earth is warming due in large part to the effects of human beings spewing crud into the atmosphere. A warmer earth tends to be covered with more water, have more violent weather patterns, and be all around less hospitable to life as we currently enjoy it. How do we spew crud into the atmosphere or otherwise adversely affect the ecosystem? Well, there's burning things in bulk, sometimes for transportation and sometimes for industry, there's promoting a certain type of environmentally impactive animal over another less harsh type, there's the paving of large swaths of the earth's surface, and so on and so forth.
Now, you're positing that people who want activities such as the above to be curtailed desire to destroy industrialization. You, sir, win today's specious reasoning award.
If they need money so badly why not become a not-for-profit entity? A lot of people, and companies, are uncomfortable giving money to a group if that money might not directly go to coding. At least as a not-for-profit entity the openBSD guys could point and say "Hey, look, here's where our money is going. By the way, enjoy writing that half million off as a tax donation." I understand his objections--basically it's inconvenient--but surely it's less convenient to run out of money.
Okay, I know I'm not the only one. How many of you read "RSMedia Bot" as RMSedia Bot" and thought, "Oh no, some crazy bastard has done it. Some crazy bastard has made the Free Software Foundation an army of RMSedia Bots to stomp out the use of proprietary software the world over. They'll be unstoppable! Wait... Oh God no! It has a subwuffer! We'll be forced to listen to the Free Software Song as well? The humanity!"
Now that's not fair. It's entirely possible that Mr. Archibald is very passionate about source code auditing and that his business and this story are just outpourings of... BWAHAHAHA. Oh geez, I can't believe I typed that for so long.
There's really no point to posting this, true. It's not news. It is, however, making the internet rounds.
It's on the front page of reddit and digg. It's probably elsewhere. The internet "news" sites tend to share quite a number of the same silly stories.
No, I got the point; Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping and all that. Your references were a bit oblique and so I saw an opportunity to be a smart ass. Judging by the +4 Funny I've currently got I was right.
A very bloated text editor that an embedded Lisp certainly doesn't even come close to an operating system. A web browser and news reader an OS does not make. (Though if you can point me to a bootable GNU/Emacs I'd be really quite interested.) As far as X goes, unless I'm mistaken, such low level access is what makes X run on a lot of OSes and a lot of hardware. They either act as their own hardware controller for video cards or hope and pray that the kernel developers for every system X runs on impliments the drivers for cards when they ask.
If any of the above is wrong, please correct me. It's the only way I'll learn.
some people find they need an entire operating system just to edit text
I whole heartedly agree! A Real Men doesn't need some wimpy operating system to commmunicate with hardware. Hell, a Real Man doesn't even need a text editor. He just etches his source straight to the hard drive platter with a bic pen.
Slashdot Mirror
Please note that I said nothing about the type nor age of the game. (Incidentally, when I made my comment, I had Star Trek: Birth of the Federation in mind. That game was mostly in C.)
However, I would want that code (and artwork, and sprites, and character models, and so on) for historic purposes. Sure, it's great to rewrite something and play it but there is also something to be said for being able to look at coding methodologies from a certain time period, or what have you. While this might not be a big deal 20 years later, it most certainly will be 200 years from now.
Look at it this way: Would you rather have original paintings in an Art Gallery, or copies?
Eh, typo. The two +5 posts above are riddled with them, mostly because I didn't go back over and spell/grammar check.
So, in closing, fuck yourself with a rake. Hard.
What if 60 years from now you have the source code but you don't have a compiler for the now defunct C language? :D
When you said that I was suddenly reminded of a scene from Star Trek: First Contact. It occurred on Earth, shortly before Zefram Cochrane went on his first warp flight. Geordi La Forge, excited about meeting his idol and seeing the first warp ship is gushing. While looking at parts of the ship he's saying things like "Wow, I haven't seen something like this since high school!" To which Cochrane replies, "Wait, High School?" "Yes, in the future we learn about warp drives in high school. In fact, I went to Zefram Cochrane High School."
Then I thought about the increasing abstraction of my field (which happens to be computer science) through time ( For example, I could write a simple chess AI in a couple of days that would have been a major research effort maybe forty years ago. ) and came up with this: A group of GNU hackers from the early 22nd century, in a freak compiling accident, are transported through time to the late 80s. While there they meet a desperate RMS (revered as a god in the early 22nd century) who happens to be furiously hacking after losing all his source to a platter crash, freak tape backup fire, and an inappropriately emptied trash can accident which took all his notes on the compiler to a trash heap grave. The compiler hacker, BLT, has been left behind to assist RMS whilst the other hackers go off to rescue un-free code long lost to the ages. "Oh no, what am I going to do, future GNU/Disciple? I've got a talk in three weeks about my fancy new compiler, but all I've got now is a few source files that bootstrap themselves to say 'Hello, oppressed people of proprietary systems!'" "Don't worry RMS, I can code a C compiler in about 20 minutes. I did it in junior high" "Wait, junior high?" "Yeah, well, in the future a C compiler is usually a required project in the opening week of computer science classes. Pretty much anyone can do it, to various degrees of success; sort of like most people can do algebra now. In fact, I went to Richard M. Stallman high school. There was a statue of you out front. The shadow of you beard shielded by lily white skin from the evil day star at lunch."
I'd much rather have the source code to those games, as opposed to having them go on sale again. You know why? Because when the companies who own those games decide to stop selling them (again) you'll have to go right back and beg for them to sell them (again). If they release the source not only will you be able to obtain it whenever you want, but you can port the code to play on modern systems (meaning you don't need the silly hack of emulators or having an old DOS machine sitting about).
Open Source: Ensuring that my kids don't have to listen to Dad tell the same "Oh man, when I was your age I played this great game, but we'd need to find an old binary and a goddamn 60 year old computer to play it..." story over and over again.
Losing information is serious business. Games are quickly becoming part of our shared culture. Think of how much our culture loses by losing those games to time? I can still read ancient Greek and Arabic poetry but I can't play Master's of Orion on my PPC Linux box? I don't know, something seems really fucked up about that.
Perhaps they did it so users would feel cheated, but my guess is there's a much more pragmatic reason behind the disabling of the extra two-gigs: backwards compatibility. If the two gigs aren't there by default then game developers won't assume them to be there.
Honestly, how much would it suck to pop in a game and be told "Woops, sorry. Your Xbox harddrive is too small. Please, buy a new Xbox."
Judging by your past posts you're either a very pissed off jerk, or a troll. Honestly, it's hard to tell.
Anyway, assuming you're just rude and not a troll and in the interests of discussion, what's your justification? Why is your pet era of history the one to which we should all strive?
One of my hobbies happens to be ancient writings. More specifically, one of my hobbies happens to be the translation of personal writtings very akin to what we now call essays or diaries. I find it more than humorous that men have been noting the massive shift in behavior and values, with emphasis on this being a bad thing, since writing became cheap enough to be a viable method for recording one's thoughts.
Long term societies change though time and there's nothing that can be done about that. (Societies that do not change are stagnate, and tend to die out quickly.) None is any more justifiably worse than another, just different. Hell, I'm sure if I looked I'd find people in 1890 bemoaning the sad state of affairs as compared to their own childhood.
So, in closing, keep up the good work. It has a long, proud (myopic) tradition!
I could think you for the very same thing. I think, perhaps, that we feel the need to do so is a rather poor sign.
I think the one key difference between a power grab through climate and a power grab through terrorism is that not enough people are far sighted enough to be frightened by the climate. Terrorism is flashy and spectacular, temperature rising enough to make winters mild doesn't make, for example, my Grandmother say anything other than "What a goddamn lovely winter."
It's entirely possible for scientists to go about getting large amounts of funding without the public necissarily being frightened. A group I worked with got large sums to develop an efficient solar water purifier for use in third world countries (meaning, it had to be cheap and robust). Very few people are concerned, or even know of, a possible water shortage in the developed world; yet the group still got funding. In fact, no one in the group got any more money than they were already salaried for. Their aim was to help poor and dieing people by developing this thing and giving it away for free. Some companies manufacture and sell these devices for about $4000, on which one of the group's physicists said, "It's the worst thing in the world to make money off of dieing people. I figure, if we made cash off this we'd be helping to kill people. That's not something I'd like to think about as I lay on my pile of cash at night."
I've worked with a large number of scientists and environmentalists. While I don't doubt that there are assholes in the bunch, most are concerned with helping and learning. Personal gain is just really not something you get into science for (It's a comfortable living, but you could make a lot more as an engineer or patent monger). Many climatologists getting funding for studies into Global Warming are doing so to figure out if we're going to fuck ourselves, so that their children don't inherit a world worse than they got. The same goes for most second wave environmentalists, people that aren't militant hippies or Green Peace.
The politicians, on the other hand, you might be right about. I haven't met as many politicians as scientists but those that I have met are either really, really dumb or goat fuckers. It makes sense then that global warming or evolution or any number of hot button political science issues are so uselessly kicked about, their political and social ramifications are pretty large.
I suppose, in the end, it really all comes down to your views on human nature. Do you assume that there's some massive, malevolent system in which you are merely a pawn (Nietzche is the dude that brought this idea into modern culture, which should explain my earlier comment if you're not up on the history of thought) or do you assume that most people just want to see their kids and their kids' friends grow up in a better world?
Thanks.
> That was a temperature, not a wind speed.
:) Even as I typed that I saw it as km. Silly me.
I've never seen estimates of the temperature of the Great Red Spot, but it's fluid mechanics (that much gas can be treated as a fluid) that creates the spot. Wikipedia: Great Red Spot
> My hyposthesis is that this assumption is usually made for the express purpose of frightening people.
Ooo, very Nietzschian! What would be there be to gain from assuming that it would, why would They want to frighten people?
> I'm not sure what "storms" you refer to.
Hmm... me continuing to use the word storm was a bit unfortunate. I should have said weather, storm is usually too limited. When I say storm most people are going to think of wind, rain, and lightening all mixed together. More violent winds, as in the case of Venus, are and example of worsened weather but not necissarily of storms. I apologize for the confusion and hope you won't suddnely stop listening due to a single fuck up.
With that in mind my quoted sentence should be: Venus is a good example of what happens when an atmosphere contains a lot of energy. Overall the planet is really hot, and so, overall, the weather a lot worse there than here.
It kind of depends on where you happen to be on Venus. The cloud layer of Venus is quite dense, so much so that not a lot of the light of the sun reaches the surface. (In fact, the surface is pretty uniform in temperature due to being a bit like a hot dog wrapped in bun.) Anyway, there's not a lot of wind at the surface but 300km/h winds at the top of the clouds due to temperature differences. The friction of this causes the lightening. The lightening would severly limit human life (ignoring all the other obvious killer aspects of the Venusian atmosphere).
> Yet Mars has winds and dust storms beyond what we normally
> experience on Earth.
Yes, that is very true. The reason is simple: Mars doesn't have the moisture that Earth has. The Dust Bowl occured for a variety of reasons, a major being drought. Dry dirt takes less force to blow than wet dirt. Also, Mars doesn't have the wind dampening effects of vegitation. Growing up I lived in the flattest part of Missouri, and there was no wind. Why? Hills with trees surrounded me for hundreds of miles. Now I live in Chicago two blocks from Lake Michigan. The wind, with nothing to block it, sometimes blows me over.
> Finally, the larget, most violent storm we know of, Jupter's
> Great Red Spot, hovers around only 111K to 125K.
111K is hurricane force wind.
> I'm not clear on why an overall warming would necessarily result
> in greater differentials.
Think of it this way: The amount that falling hurts is directly related to distance that you fall. While it's true that you could potentially break your ankle falling from a step ladder, it's much more likely to break falling from the top of your house. Falling farther puts more energy into the system, so you're more likely to cause yourself harm. Weather systems are kind of like that. While it's very true that with minimal amounts of energy you can have really bad weather, say on Mars, it just gets more and more likely that weather will become more violent if there's more energy pumped into the atmosphere. That energy is heat.
Cool air doesn't come only from the polar regions, and cool air meeting warm air isn't the only driving factor in weather systems. There are also temperature differences due to water and land heat radiation, cloud effects, vegitation effects on how land radiates, ocean absorbtion properties, there's a whole lot of stuff. But, really, it all just boils down to a simple physical principle: A system can do more with more energy.
Weather is driven by a differences of temperature and a difference of moisture in the atmosphere.
It isn't necissarily so much that a uniform increase in temperature gets us, it's that the potential temperature and moisture differentials get more pronounced. That's what gets us. Storms occur at the drop off point in temperature and moisture scales, where you suddenly go from really warm to really cold, or from moist to dry. The bigger the drop, the more energy the storm has. The more energy a storm has, the less likely we are to be able to survive it.
Venus is a good example of what happens when an atmosphere contains a lot of energy. Overall the planet is really hot, and so, overall, the storms are a lot worse there than here.
PLOOP! That's the sound of your cliche smacking the wall.
Anyway, very often I see an anti-circumcision guy around Chicago. He's got a massive beard and always seems to be rather passionate. I've often wanted to ask him if he happens to be circumcised, you know, just to figure out why he's so passionate about holding that sign.
When are the environmentalists going to admit that it's not "Global Warming" they're trying to prevent? It's all about DESTROYING industrialization.
Hmm... interesting conclusion.
Let's see, the earth is warming due in large part to the effects of human beings spewing crud into the atmosphere. A warmer earth tends to be covered with more water, have more violent weather patterns, and be all around less hospitable to life as we currently enjoy it. How do we spew crud into the atmosphere or otherwise adversely affect the ecosystem? Well, there's burning things in bulk, sometimes for transportation and sometimes for industry, there's promoting a certain type of environmentally impactive animal over another less harsh type, there's the paving of large swaths of the earth's surface, and so on and so forth.
Now, you're positing that people who want activities such as the above to be curtailed desire to destroy industrialization. You, sir, win today's specious reasoning award.
I think I speak for most of humanity when I say, ahem, "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING?"
This message brought to you by the Upright, Sensible People Department.
Oh Chris, sometimes you can be one humorless bastard. Silly you.
Not only that, but he mentioned THX-1138 twice!
If they need money so badly why not become a not-for-profit entity? A lot of people, and companies, are uncomfortable giving money to a group if that money might not directly go to coding. At least as a not-for-profit entity the openBSD guys could point and say "Hey, look, here's where our money is going. By the way, enjoy writing that half million off as a tax donation." I understand his objections--basically it's inconvenient--but surely it's less convenient to run out of money.
Just another five years?
Okay, I know I'm not the only one. How many of you read "RSMedia Bot" as RMSedia Bot" and thought, "Oh no, some crazy bastard has done it. Some crazy bastard has made the Free Software Foundation an army of RMSedia Bots to stomp out the use of proprietary software the world over. They'll be unstoppable! Wait... Oh God no! It has a subwuffer! We'll be forced to listen to the Free Software Song as well? The humanity!"
Now that's not fair. It's entirely possible that Mr. Archibald is very passionate about source code auditing and that his business and this story are just outpourings of... BWAHAHAHA. Oh geez, I can't believe I typed that for so long.
Yeah, good point.
Hehe...
There's really no point to posting this, true. It's not news. It is, however, making the internet rounds. It's on the front page of reddit and digg. It's probably elsewhere. The internet "news" sites tend to share quite a number of the same silly stories.
How is this different from Nupdedia?
No, I got the point; Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping and all that. Your references were a bit oblique and so I saw an opportunity to be a smart ass. Judging by the +4 Funny I've currently got I was right.
A very bloated text editor that an embedded Lisp certainly doesn't even come close to an operating system. A web browser and news reader an OS does not make. (Though if you can point me to a bootable GNU/Emacs I'd be really quite interested.) As far as X goes, unless I'm mistaken, such low level access is what makes X run on a lot of OSes and a lot of hardware. They either act as their own hardware controller for video cards or hope and pray that the kernel developers for every system X runs on impliments the drivers for cards when they ask.
If any of the above is wrong, please correct me. It's the only way I'll learn.
some people find they need an entire operating system just to edit text
I whole heartedly agree! A Real Men doesn't need some wimpy operating system to commmunicate with hardware. Hell, a Real Man doesn't even need a text editor. He just etches his source straight to the hard drive platter with a bic pen.