The issue is not to whom the flag belongs, the issue is misrepresentation. The government wants to prevent anyone from mistaking this website for a government-sponsored or -condoned website.
Besides, your argument is somewhat flawed. For example, the passport office is owned by citizens. Does this mean I should be able to dictate to the Passport Office? If so, I'm going to get myself a diplomatic passport. Likewise Petro-Canada. I don't think I should have to pay for my petrol.
Technically, RH isn't selling any software derived from any other software, they're distributing other people's software.
Back in that day, there wasn't exactly the huge heap of free software that there is now, so a simple 'This product contains software derived from Berzerkley Systems Distribution UNIX' would have sufficed.
That's also one reason the advertising clause is taken out of teh BSD license. Also, because a lot of people don't advertise their software (I know I don't).
/me pictures an animated gif banner add advertising a new distro... 18 meg banner ad...
Now I personally don't give one whit who you worship, why, or in what building, and frankly it's none of my business, even if I did care. On top of that, I'm not going to get into some pathetic argument over the nature of humanity and sins and all that crud.
However, you are correct (whether by logic or coincidence) - this IS a power trip for them. It's a testosterone thing, it's being a jackass, it's kicking the world in the crotch because they hate school, but whatever it is, it's the chance for pathetic little rodents to lash out at the world. Jocks beat people up, skids do drugs, thugs steal cars, B&E, whatever, preps fill their vacuous lives with sporting and school events.
But what about the people that don't fall into that category? The loners, the persecuted with no outlet? They turn to the internet, and find groups of friends. In fact, I once spent some time with a group online, a few years back, and they were easily the most accepting, friendliest, nicest IRC channel I have ever met in my life, and I've been to a lot.
So they gain acceptance, and thus feel a need to impress their friends and attack their friends' enemies. They fancy themselves part of an 'army', lamer groups waging war, they take down EFnet servers or entire IRC networks because other groups use them, they take out ISPs to demonstrate their power.
It's a social issue, and if we prevent DDoS attacks, they'll come up with something else (I fonud an amusing log of a VB 'virus' writer - who actually used Visual Basic, his virus needed runtimes - backed up on CD). What we need to do is solve this problem socially. Either give these teens something to do, or beat them unrecognizable so no one will know if they are who they say they are, and thus cannot get recognition.
only are charged when a certain minimum total is built up.
And therefore the smart customers create a bunch of new accounts, get as many comics as they can before hitting the limit, and then switch accounts. Then, they set up an fserv on #ecomic on dalnet.
But IIRC, they only have a T1 connection to the internet, and it's always full.
I recall getting 300 kbytes/s download from them once or twice. I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure I'm not. Perhaps they have several T1s (they're fairly cheap nowadays, all things considered).
Keep in mind that, in this instance, the flag's use is on a pro-cancer (smoker's rights) website, and that's a distinctly partisan topic. The government wants to make absolutely certain that it is in no way affiliated with this kind of issue.
Which I think is a good thing, since it's a stupid issue.
Anyway, the law, as my reading goes, says that the emblems of the government (flags and whatnot) are trademarked, and not usable, just like I couldn't arbitrarily throw IBM and Lucent logos on my pages or products.
I could use a logo to refer to them (that's fair use) but not to refer to me (that's trademark infringement).
9. (1) No person shall adopt in connection with a business, as a trade-mark or otherwise, any mark consisting of, or so nearly resembling as to be likely to be mistaken for,
(n) any badge, crest, emblem or mark
(i) adopted or used by any of Her Majesty's Forces as defined in the National Defence Act,
(ii) of any university, or
(iii) adopted and used by any public authority, in Canada as an official mark for wares or services,
in respect of which the Registrar has, at the request of Her Majesty or of the university or public authority, as the case may be, given public notice of its adoption and use;
I can't find the bit about enforcement, but I would assume that lack of enforcement equals acceptance until it is enforced.
I would suggest Canadians start using the Canadian Communications Research Centre's servers. They do have the bandwidth, especially to University students (CA*Net III and other academic/research networks) who are probably a large amount of users of the Linux kernel.
Incidentally, just some of the files available via rsync from ftp.crc.ca (which, sadly, has an anon-ftp limit of 25 users):
Perl CPAN mirror
GNOME desktop and utilities
Linux HowTo's
KDE desktop and utilities
XFree86
ALSA Linux sound drivers
Debian Linux
Debian Linux ISO images
FreeBSD
Alexy Kuznetsov's IP Routing Tools for linux
Blackdown's port of JAVA for Linux
CRC's Linux Kernel Archive (I wonder if this is different from the standard kernel? they don't say "CRC's" on everything)
CRC's RedHat mirror
CRC's RedHat Contrib (interesting)
Slackware Linux
SUSE Linux
TurboLinux
CRC's VQEG Digital Video Experiments
CRC's XAnim mirror
So if you are Canadian and use any of these software packages (or the others on the page I linked), PLEASE use this site, it's extremely fast on broadband and even more so to university students. I used it for my Debian packages until they dropped the limit on FTP users. Maybe if I ask real nice they'll give me a login....
They're not controlling anything outside their borders. The entire issue is about controlling Canadians' use of the trademark.
That being said, the US is imposing sanctions against the Ukrane for not having the same law, so maybe that will directly answer your question, even if it's not relevant to the topic.
Backwards compatibility and the code required is one of the things that has screwed Windows up so badly. That being said, Windows had backwards compatibility in the same way GTK/GNOME will.
Not only do they have to support Win32 in Win95, but they also have to support Win16, which was different, and DOS, which was radically different. How did they do it? New libraries. 32-bit libs, 16-bit libs, and the DOS crud. 16-bit apps don't load the 32-bit libs Win95/98/etc. use.
Thus, it is similar to GNOME/GTK. You can't compile a GTK1.2 app against the GTK2.0 libs, but you can compile it against GTK1.2, and they can coexist (or at least, they did on my box when I was testing GTK1.3, the GTK2 test version).
All it means is that you will have to have GTK1.x libs installed, and GTK2.x libs installed if you want to use both. GTK3.x will require a new set of libs.
Maintaining source/binary compatibility would cause too many problems, since the GLib/GDK/GTK/Pango/blahblah scenario is being totally redone. It's easier to let old apps use old libs, and write new apps (or rewrite old apps) with new libs.
The only renderer I've seen that is better than FT2 is BitStream's FontFusion (found in QNX RtP) and the only reason I like it better is because it is less heavy-handed with the anti-aliasing.
I have to say that the rendering in the GNOME screenshots I see is, while better than none in some ways, ass ugly in other ways.
My personal favourite antialiasing engine is the one in the Macintosh shareware control panel SmoothType, which does a great OSX-style job of rendering fonts, and is surprisingly fast too.
before and after screenshots as examples. The FT2 rendering seems similar, but there's just something ugly about it that rubs me the wrong way.
Certainly, FT2 blows away Windows' font rendering. Compare Arial in FT2 to Arial in XP, and you'll notice that FT2 renders the text visibly more clearly.
FT2 indeed does have beautiful antialiasing, though I can't say whether XP does or not. Most of the fonts Windows uses (in my experience) are not antialiased (MS Sans Serif for example), nor are the common file sizes (12 pt or something), so unless it's changed big-time in XP (which wouldn't surprise me) you don't gain a whole lot from MS Antialiasing.
On a related note, anyone know of antialising render engine replacements for Windows 98?
The typical assumption (as I've heard it) has always been that Microsoft's poor security was a necessary side effect of their quick-to-market and add-lots-of-new-feature strategies.
I think one of the problems at Microsoft (and this was displayed eminantly in a story my uncle (who works big time in multimedia) related to me once, but which I won't repeat in its entirety because I'm tired and lazy.
In the story, though, there were a team of programmers at Microsoft working on a project (don't know which), and they gave a presentation to Bill Gates himself, telling him when it would ship. He responded by getting angry, and telling THEM when it would ship - bumping up the release date by a huge amount.
Well, the programmers had to work their asses off to meet the release date. They worked overtime, some burned out, some dropped by the wayside, some quit. Seriously undermanned, they missed their new release date, but the program did eventually get released - on the day that they'd originally said it would get released.
The only difference is, now they have lost several key programmers on the project, the ones they have like their job far less than they used to, and the code is rushed for no good reason.
I don't know if this story is true, or, if it is, if that still goes on today, but I get the feeling that it is, at least in part, a good indicator. What reminded me was the mention of 'rush-it-out' philosophy PLUS always being late with their products, both of which are still true today (remember how Win2K/ME were supposed to be WinXP? Remember Win93? Win94?).
Honestly, and not trying to troll. What will everyone here do if microsoft ceases being the evil empire?
Hey hey hey, let's not get hasty here. They said they were going to stop shipping swiss cheese, not turn into a fairy godmother. Just because they're going to try to make software that isn't holier than the pope doesn't mean they're not going to screw you over, it just means that they and their corporate partners are going to have exclusive rights to do so.
They'll still want to control every aspect of your life, track your movements, sell your children, monopolize your chequebook, and sell you out whenever there's a buck to be made, they just want to be your first choice for getting screwed, used, abused, and refused.
I think the idea is that if all your personal information, music, videos, text, and so on don't belong to you, and your OS license doesn't bequeath anything to you but rather lets you use MS's OS for a while, then if someone breaks into 'your' computer, it's not your stuff they're deleting, so it's not 'insecure'.
New in Windows Media Player: Digital Rights Management! Remember, 'If you have no rights, there's nothing to lose!'
Will you remember that the next time somebody installs a Linux workstation with every daemon in the world running?
In all the (four or five years of) Linux experience I've had, no one blames RedHat users (except arrogant jerks), but everyone blames RedHat.
The difference between that and IIS is that when RedHat is installed as a desktop OS and still has a world of rootable daemons installed by default, that's stupid design. When Windows NT is installed with IIS by default on a desktop machine, it is, again, stupidity on the part of the company (in this case, Microsoft).
When someone gets paid to install/admin a box and they leave security holes open by default, I'm inclined to blame the person getting paid - it is their duty to be aware of problems and fix them, and if something so simple as a stupid default installation is beyond their grasp, they should look for a new line of work. For someone who just wants to use the computer, however, I don't think they deserve blame, no matter what OS they chose (or not) to install.
All this being said, I'm sick to the teeth of hearing about Steve Jobs' "attitude," about hipness, squareness, personality, and market shares. I don't care if Steve Jobs is an egomaniac or obsessed with being the hippest. I don't care if he's a maverick just to satisfy some mental hang-up. Would someone just review the damn computer?!
Alright, here's my review. The new iMac comes with OS X, which has been reviewed to death. It also features a DVD-burner, which can burn DVDs, and LCD display, which displays OSX using liquid crystals. It has a G4 chip, which makes it as fast as any other computer with a G4, and includes Firewire and USB, which every other mac has. It also comes with a wide ranges of programs that everyone knows about, like iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD.
Yes, I'm being sarcastic, but the point is that this computer is just that - a computer. A fascinating design, an interesting philosophy, but no one is going to make anyone interested by reviewing the computer itself. It is the sum of its parts.
The interesting thing about the computer is this: Why those parts? Why did Jobs have this computer created? What is his goal? What goes on in that head of his? That's the exciting part, that's what keeps people guessing. Because whether you think he's a genius or a fool, he and his ideas are ten times more interesting than a computer, even if the computer is the beginning of the implementation of those ideas.
People know where they are, but if you can get into Jobs' head, we can find out where we're going. Jobs has always managed to create what people want before they realize they want it (note: this is different than Gates telling us what we want and then giving us a broken implementation). If we watch him carefully, maybe we can find out what we're going to want later, and what new excitements are in store.
Yes, and to amplify on this a little more, one should ask why the various major features were added to MacOS X versus Windows XP. In the case of MacOS, virtually every feature was added to enhance the user experience.... Microsoft, on the other hand, added most of the big new features to XP in order to lock it's users into Windows, to increase revenues, and to kill competitors.
An interesting side note. I remember back before the Mac had heirarchial submenus in the Apple menu, there was a small little shareware company that made an Extension or Control Panel or somesuch to add this functionality.
When Apple started adding more 'modern' features into its OS, it wanted to add in submenus in the Apple menu.
The Microsoft way is to simply add the technology, build it into the OS, and poof, it's there, and that's that. Sure, the shareware companies are dead, unless they want to not only write their own stuff, but also write calls to replace the OS - and also they have to add enough functionality to make it worth paying for, on top of heirarchy.
Apple, however, did not do that. Rather, they actually paid this little software company to use their technology in the MacOS (or rather, to bundle it), and did not build it into the OS per se. It's very easy to disable, and very simplistic, but if you want something more, it's easy to replace. Maybe a replacement still needs lots more functionality, but at least Apple didn't screw anyone.
This is very close to what I was thinking even before the rest of the article actually loaded.
Steve Case and Bill Gates are laughing all the way to the bank because they've managed to sell millions of people inferior products. The knowledgable hate them, sure, but the mainstream? It's so easy to use, no wonder it's number one.
Steve Jobs is different. He doesn't want to damn the world and get rich quick. He wants to change the world, and for the better. That's been his goal ever since he started stealing executives away from sugar-water companies, since before that, marketing a product that no one knew anything about to the masses.
Steve Jobs is not doing what Bill Gates et. al. are doing because they only care about the money, and they're too blinded by greed and arrogance to see that their product is inferior and unreliable (I honestly do believe that Gates thinks he is doing the world a great favour with Windows; I don't think he sees things from our point of view).
So yes, Jobs and Gates may both be lunatics who refuse to see reality, but the reality Gates refuses to see is substandard, overpticed software. The reality that Jobs fails to see is that you can't get rich by making quality products and competing fairly on style and reliability.
Remember what happened the last time a Steve (in this case Woz) refused to see reality? He built a personal computer in a garage and enabled Jobs to start the entire personal computer revolution that we can't live without today.
I opened the link and read through the introductions, with the intent of reading. I'm a middling-to-pathetic C/C++ programmer, and I figured it might be interesting to join into the kernelnewbies project - then this came out.
Now, I'm scared. Honestly, after reading through that introduction, I'm scared to touch kernel code. Hell, I'm scared to look at it.
I think Apple did a great job with this document. They don't want anyone writing code unless they know EXACTLY what they're doing (the code, they say, has to be well nigh perfect), so they put in as much intimidation as they can manage without being overly conspicuous.
The newbies will be scared, the people with no confidence (like myself; I don't remember ever compiling warningless code on the first go; if I'm writing something complex, I'll miss a }, if I'm writing Hello World I'll forget to #include) will be scared. The only people who will even think about trying their hand at kernel programming are Gods and fools.
Good job Apple, you really know how to screw with heads.;>
First, UT doesn't run well on old
machines anyway. Yet, Quake III, with all its curved-surface niceness
runs fine on my PII-300.
Unreal is just playable on my P166, with its 66 MHz bus, 80 megs of SIMMs, and ATI Rage Pro. It seems your definition of 'old machines' is different from a lot of other people's.
Me, I'm just waiting until I get around to overclocking my way up to 200 MHz, to see if that makes any difference. I guess we'll see.
A lot of universities don't have caches - trying to cache web content for the (approx) 9000 students in UBC's dorms would be a nightmare, and if those caches included 600-700 meg files, resources would be taxed.
A lot of universities (larger ones anyway) tend to have their own file mirrors, and if not, they are often connected to larger universities which do, sometimes over private academic networks.
A HREF="ftp://ftp.crc.ca/">ftp.crc.ca, for example, my personal favourite Debian mirror, is connected to the CA*Net III, as are all major universities in Canada. This gives a friend at the University of New Brunswick the ability to max out his network card pulling down ISOs, Debian packages, and anything else, over an ultra-fast network link that costs the school absolutely nothing.
Perhaps more universities could benefit from building thier own such networks between each other. This is, after all, how the Internet got started, why not start again?
You know, if you'd actually read the article instead of just looking at the pretty pictures, you'd have discovered that they want to make this game run on older machines - like 233s and the like.
The point of that is that they can then market to people who can't afford to upgrade to an XP1800 with a gig of ram and a GeForce 3. And really, who needs awesome graphics anyway? I don't know about you, but I play for the gameplay.
You'll never find me sitting around in UT saying 'wow, the texture detail on that player model is really amazing- damn, he fragged me. Wow, the sky is beautifully- agh, who shot me?' I keep the detail set on low to get better framerates. If you want to spend $1200 to make a system hit 30FPS, go ahead, but me, I turn the detail down and go to work.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue is not to whom the flag belongs, the issue is misrepresentation. The government wants to prevent anyone from mistaking this website for a government-sponsored or -condoned website.
Besides, your argument is somewhat flawed. For example, the passport office is owned by citizens. Does this mean I should be able to dictate to the Passport Office? If so, I'm going to get myself a diplomatic passport. Likewise Petro-Canada. I don't think I should have to pay for my petrol.
--Dan
Technically, RH isn't selling any software derived from any other software, they're distributing other people's software.
Back in that day, there wasn't exactly the huge heap of free software that there is now, so a simple 'This product contains software derived from Berzerkley Systems Distribution UNIX' would have sufficed.
That's also one reason the advertising clause is taken out of teh BSD license. Also, because a lot of people don't advertise their software (I know I don't).
/me pictures an animated gif banner add advertising a new distro... 18 meg banner ad...
--Dan
Now I personally don't give one whit who you worship, why, or in what building, and frankly it's none of my business, even if I did care. On top of that, I'm not going to get into some pathetic argument over the nature of humanity and sins and all that crud.
However, you are correct (whether by logic or coincidence) - this IS a power trip for them. It's a testosterone thing, it's being a jackass, it's kicking the world in the crotch because they hate school, but whatever it is, it's the chance for pathetic little rodents to lash out at the world. Jocks beat people up, skids do drugs, thugs steal cars, B&E, whatever, preps fill their vacuous lives with sporting and school events.
But what about the people that don't fall into that category? The loners, the persecuted with no outlet? They turn to the internet, and find groups of friends. In fact, I once spent some time with a group online, a few years back, and they were easily the most accepting, friendliest, nicest IRC channel I have ever met in my life, and I've been to a lot.
So they gain acceptance, and thus feel a need to impress their friends and attack their friends' enemies. They fancy themselves part of an 'army', lamer groups waging war, they take down EFnet servers or entire IRC networks because other groups use them, they take out ISPs to demonstrate their power.
It's a social issue, and if we prevent DDoS attacks, they'll come up with something else (I fonud an amusing log of a VB 'virus' writer - who actually used Visual Basic, his virus needed runtimes - backed up on CD). What we need to do is solve this problem socially. Either give these teens something to do, or beat them unrecognizable so no one will know if they are who they say they are, and thus cannot get recognition.
This is my rant on the subject, anyway.
--Dan
only are charged when a certain minimum total is built up.
And therefore the smart customers create a bunch of new accounts, get as many comics as they can before hitting the limit, and then switch accounts. Then, they set up an fserv on #ecomic on dalnet.
I hate to say it, but this will happen.
--Dan
But IIRC, they only have a T1 connection to the internet, and it's always full.
I recall getting 300 kbytes/s download from them once or twice. I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure I'm not. Perhaps they have several T1s (they're fairly cheap nowadays, all things considered).
--Dan
Keep in mind that, in this instance, the flag's use is on a pro-cancer (smoker's rights) website, and that's a distinctly partisan topic. The government wants to make absolutely certain that it is in no way affiliated with this kind of issue.
Which I think is a good thing, since it's a stupid issue.
Anyway, the law, as my reading goes, says that the emblems of the government (flags and whatnot) are trademarked, and not usable, just like I couldn't arbitrarily throw IBM and Lucent logos on my pages or products.
I could use a logo to refer to them (that's fair use) but not to refer to me (that's trademark infringement).
--Dan
Prohibited marks
I can't find the bit about enforcement, but I would assume that lack of enforcement equals acceptance until it is enforced.
--Dan
I would suggest Canadians start using the Canadian Communications Research Centre's servers. They do have the bandwidth, especially to University students (CA*Net III and other academic/research networks) who are probably a large amount of users of the Linux kernel.
Incidentally, just some of the files available via rsync from ftp.crc.ca (which, sadly, has an anon-ftp limit of 25 users):
Perl CPAN mirror
GNOME desktop and utilities
Linux HowTo's
KDE desktop and utilities
XFree86
ALSA Linux sound drivers
Debian Linux
Debian Linux ISO images
FreeBSD
Alexy Kuznetsov's IP Routing Tools for linux
Blackdown's port of JAVA for Linux
CRC's Linux Kernel Archive (I wonder if this is different from the standard kernel? they don't say "CRC's" on everything)
CRC's RedHat mirror
CRC's RedHat Contrib (interesting)
Slackware Linux
SUSE Linux
TurboLinux
CRC's VQEG Digital Video Experiments
CRC's XAnim mirror
So if you are Canadian and use any of these software packages (or the others on the page I linked), PLEASE use this site, it's extremely fast on broadband and even more so to university students. I used it for my Debian packages until they dropped the limit on FTP users. Maybe if I ask real nice they'll give me a login....
The site itself is interesting too. Neat stuff.
--Dan
#$%#$
'for not having the same laws as the US on copyright'
Last time I post first thing in the afternoon, I'm too damned tired...
--Dan
They're not controlling anything outside their borders. The entire issue is about controlling Canadians' use of the trademark.
That being said, the US is imposing sanctions against the Ukrane for not having the same law, so maybe that will directly answer your question, even if it's not relevant to the topic.
--Dan
Backwards compatibility and the code required is one of the things that has screwed Windows up so badly. That being said, Windows had backwards compatibility in the same way GTK/GNOME will.
Not only do they have to support Win32 in Win95, but they also have to support Win16, which was different, and DOS, which was radically different. How did they do it? New libraries. 32-bit libs, 16-bit libs, and the DOS crud. 16-bit apps don't load the 32-bit libs Win95/98/etc. use.
Thus, it is similar to GNOME/GTK. You can't compile a GTK1.2 app against the GTK2.0 libs, but you can compile it against GTK1.2, and they can coexist (or at least, they did on my box when I was testing GTK1.3, the GTK2 test version).
All it means is that you will have to have GTK1.x libs installed, and GTK2.x libs installed if you want to use both. GTK3.x will require a new set of libs.
Maintaining source/binary compatibility would cause too many problems, since the GLib/GDK/GTK/Pango/blahblah scenario is being totally redone. It's easier to let old apps use old libs, and write new apps (or rewrite old apps) with new libs.
--Dan
The only renderer I've seen that is better than FT2 is BitStream's FontFusion (found in QNX RtP) and the only reason I like it better is because it is less heavy-handed with the anti-aliasing.
I have to say that the rendering in the GNOME screenshots I see is, while better than none in some ways, ass ugly in other ways.
My personal favourite antialiasing engine is the one in the Macintosh shareware control panel SmoothType, which does a great OSX-style job of rendering fonts, and is surprisingly fast too.
before and after screenshots as examples. The FT2 rendering seems similar, but there's just something ugly about it that rubs me the wrong way.
Certainly, FT2 blows away Windows' font rendering. Compare Arial in FT2 to Arial in XP, and you'll notice that FT2 renders the text visibly more clearly.
FT2 indeed does have beautiful antialiasing, though I can't say whether XP does or not. Most of the fonts Windows uses (in my experience) are not antialiased (MS Sans Serif for example), nor are the common file sizes (12 pt or something), so unless it's changed big-time in XP (which wouldn't surprise me) you don't gain a whole lot from MS Antialiasing.
On a related note, anyone know of antialising render engine replacements for Windows 98?
--Dan
thought of the day:
;>
Do you think for yourself, or do you just think you think for yourself?
Conversely, did you write that yourself, or did you hear it somewhere before?
--Dan
The typical assumption (as I've heard it) has always been that Microsoft's poor security was a necessary side effect of their quick-to-market and add-lots-of-new-feature strategies.
I think one of the problems at Microsoft (and this was displayed eminantly in a story my uncle (who works big time in multimedia) related to me once, but which I won't repeat in its entirety because I'm tired and lazy.
In the story, though, there were a team of programmers at Microsoft working on a project (don't know which), and they gave a presentation to Bill Gates himself, telling him when it would ship. He responded by getting angry, and telling THEM when it would ship - bumping up the release date by a huge amount.
Well, the programmers had to work their asses off to meet the release date. They worked overtime, some burned out, some dropped by the wayside, some quit. Seriously undermanned, they missed their new release date, but the program did eventually get released - on the day that they'd originally said it would get released.
The only difference is, now they have lost several key programmers on the project, the ones they have like their job far less than they used to, and the code is rushed for no good reason.
I don't know if this story is true, or, if it is, if that still goes on today, but I get the feeling that it is, at least in part, a good indicator. What reminded me was the mention of 'rush-it-out' philosophy PLUS always being late with their products, both of which are still true today (remember how Win2K/ME were supposed to be WinXP? Remember Win93? Win94?).
Just my two bits.
--Dan
Honestly, and not trying to troll. What will everyone here do if microsoft ceases being the evil empire?
Hey hey hey, let's not get hasty here. They said they were going to stop shipping swiss cheese, not turn into a fairy godmother. Just because they're going to try to make software that isn't holier than the pope doesn't mean they're not going to screw you over, it just means that they and their corporate partners are going to have exclusive rights to do so.
They'll still want to control every aspect of your life, track your movements, sell your children, monopolize your chequebook, and sell you out whenever there's a buck to be made, they just want to be your first choice for getting screwed, used, abused, and refused.
--Dan
I think the idea is that if all your personal information, music, videos, text, and so on don't belong to you, and your OS license doesn't bequeath anything to you but rather lets you use MS's OS for a while, then if someone breaks into 'your' computer, it's not your stuff they're deleting, so it's not 'insecure'.
New in Windows Media Player: Digital Rights Management! Remember, 'If you have no rights, there's nothing to lose!'
--Dan
Will you remember that the next time somebody installs a Linux workstation with every daemon in the world running?
In all the (four or five years of) Linux experience I've had, no one blames RedHat users (except arrogant jerks), but everyone blames RedHat.
The difference between that and IIS is that when RedHat is installed as a desktop OS and still has a world of rootable daemons installed by default, that's stupid design. When Windows NT is installed with IIS by default on a desktop machine, it is, again, stupidity on the part of the company (in this case, Microsoft).
When someone gets paid to install/admin a box and they leave security holes open by default, I'm inclined to blame the person getting paid - it is their duty to be aware of problems and fix them, and if something so simple as a stupid default installation is beyond their grasp, they should look for a new line of work. For someone who just wants to use the computer, however, I don't think they deserve blame, no matter what OS they chose (or not) to install.
--Dan
All this being said, I'm sick to the teeth of hearing about Steve Jobs' "attitude," about hipness, squareness, personality, and market shares. I don't care if Steve Jobs is an egomaniac or obsessed with being the hippest. I don't care if he's a maverick just to satisfy some mental hang-up. Would someone just review the damn computer?!
Alright, here's my review. The new iMac comes with OS X, which has been reviewed to death. It also features a DVD-burner, which can burn DVDs, and LCD display, which displays OSX using liquid crystals. It has a G4 chip, which makes it as fast as any other computer with a G4, and includes Firewire and USB, which every other mac has. It also comes with a wide ranges of programs that everyone knows about, like iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD.
Yes, I'm being sarcastic, but the point is that this computer is just that - a computer. A fascinating design, an interesting philosophy, but no one is going to make anyone interested by reviewing the computer itself. It is the sum of its parts.
The interesting thing about the computer is this: Why those parts? Why did Jobs have this computer created? What is his goal? What goes on in that head of his? That's the exciting part, that's what keeps people guessing. Because whether you think he's a genius or a fool, he and his ideas are ten times more interesting than a computer, even if the computer is the beginning of the implementation of those ideas.
People know where they are, but if you can get into Jobs' head, we can find out where we're going. Jobs has always managed to create what people want before they realize they want it (note: this is different than Gates telling us what we want and then giving us a broken implementation). If we watch him carefully, maybe we can find out what we're going to want later, and what new excitements are in store.
--Dan
Yes, and to amplify on this a little more, one should ask why the various major features were added to MacOS X versus Windows XP. In the case of MacOS, virtually every feature was added to enhance the user experience. ... Microsoft, on the other hand, added most of the big new features to XP in order to lock it's users into Windows, to increase revenues, and to kill competitors.
An interesting side note. I remember back before the Mac had heirarchial submenus in the Apple menu, there was a small little shareware company that made an Extension or Control Panel or somesuch to add this functionality.
When Apple started adding more 'modern' features into its OS, it wanted to add in submenus in the Apple menu.
The Microsoft way is to simply add the technology, build it into the OS, and poof, it's there, and that's that. Sure, the shareware companies are dead, unless they want to not only write their own stuff, but also write calls to replace the OS - and also they have to add enough functionality to make it worth paying for, on top of heirarchy.
Apple, however, did not do that. Rather, they actually paid this little software company to use their technology in the MacOS (or rather, to bundle it), and did not build it into the OS per se. It's very easy to disable, and very simplistic, but if you want something more, it's easy to replace. Maybe a replacement still needs lots more functionality, but at least Apple didn't screw anyone.
--Dan
This is very close to what I was thinking even before the rest of the article actually loaded.
Steve Case and Bill Gates are laughing all the way to the bank because they've managed to sell millions of people inferior products. The knowledgable hate them, sure, but the mainstream? It's so easy to use, no wonder it's number one.
Steve Jobs is different. He doesn't want to damn the world and get rich quick. He wants to change the world, and for the better. That's been his goal ever since he started stealing executives away from sugar-water companies, since before that, marketing a product that no one knew anything about to the masses.
Steve Jobs is not doing what Bill Gates et. al. are doing because they only care about the money, and they're too blinded by greed and arrogance to see that their product is inferior and unreliable (I honestly do believe that Gates thinks he is doing the world a great favour with Windows; I don't think he sees things from our point of view).
So yes, Jobs and Gates may both be lunatics who refuse to see reality, but the reality Gates refuses to see is substandard, overpticed software. The reality that Jobs fails to see is that you can't get rich by making quality products and competing fairly on style and reliability.
Remember what happened the last time a Steve (in this case Woz) refused to see reality? He built a personal computer in a garage and enabled Jobs to start the entire personal computer revolution that we can't live without today.
I don't know about you, but my money's on Apple.
--Dan
I opened the link and read through the introductions, with the intent of reading. I'm a middling-to-pathetic C/C++ programmer, and I figured it might be interesting to join into the kernelnewbies project - then this came out.
;>
Now, I'm scared. Honestly, after reading through that introduction, I'm scared to touch kernel code. Hell, I'm scared to look at it.
I think Apple did a great job with this document. They don't want anyone writing code unless they know EXACTLY what they're doing (the code, they say, has to be well nigh perfect), so they put in as much intimidation as they can manage without being overly conspicuous.
The newbies will be scared, the people with no confidence (like myself; I don't remember ever compiling warningless code on the first go; if I'm writing something complex, I'll miss a }, if I'm writing Hello World I'll forget to #include) will be scared. The only people who will even think about trying their hand at kernel programming are Gods and fools.
Good job Apple, you really know how to screw with heads.
--Dan
First, UT doesn't run well on old
machines anyway. Yet, Quake III, with all its curved-surface niceness
runs fine on my PII-300.
Unreal is just playable on my P166, with its 66 MHz bus, 80 megs of SIMMs, and ATI Rage Pro. It seems your definition of 'old machines' is different from a lot of other people's.
Me, I'm just waiting until I get around to overclocking my way up to 200 MHz, to see if that makes any difference. I guess we'll see.
--Dan
A lot of universities don't have caches - trying to cache web content for the (approx) 9000 students in UBC's dorms would be a nightmare, and if those caches included 600-700 meg files, resources would be taxed.
A lot of universities (larger ones anyway) tend to have their own file mirrors, and if not, they are often connected to larger universities which do, sometimes over private academic networks.
A HREF="ftp://ftp.crc.ca/">ftp.crc.ca, for example, my personal favourite Debian mirror, is connected to the CA*Net III, as are all major universities in Canada. This gives a friend at the University of New Brunswick the ability to max out his network card pulling down ISOs, Debian packages, and anything else, over an ultra-fast network link that costs the school absolutely nothing.
Perhaps more universities could benefit from building thier own such networks between each other. This is, after all, how the Internet got started, why not start again?
--Dan
You know, if you'd actually read the article instead of just looking at the pretty pictures, you'd have discovered that they want to make this game run on older machines - like 233s and the like.
The point of that is that they can then market to people who can't afford to upgrade to an XP1800 with a gig of ram and a GeForce 3. And really, who needs awesome graphics anyway? I don't know about you, but I play for the gameplay.
You'll never find me sitting around in UT saying 'wow, the texture detail on that player model is really amazing- damn, he fragged me. Wow, the sky is beautifully- agh, who shot me?' I keep the detail set on low to get better framerates. If you want to spend $1200 to make a system hit 30FPS, go ahead, but me, I turn the detail down and go to work.
--Dan
FreeBSD has both ports and packages - I know this, having used ports myself from time to time.
As for anything else, I couldn't comment. Sorry.
--Dan