I think that in many ways, Slashdot is a city. It certainly has enough viewers to otherwise be a small city in real life. There are a diversity of opinions and mindsets, and there's a system of government (moderation and administration), there's business that goes on, everyone has a place where they live (slashdot.org/~username)...and people have jobs (submitting articles, commenting on articles, moderating comments, paying subscriptions, voting in polls), some are volunteer, some you have to earn the privilege of being able to do, some actually cost money. Fascinating stuff...
LiveCDs are an incredibly useful thing to have for an OS, especially for BSD, which has been really neglected by a lot of Linux users. They don't view it as a an easy or powerful or otherwise compelling alternative to Linux, and I really think that attitude needs to get blown away by some kickass releases and, of course, LiveCDs to actually show them what BSD'S about.--Proud user of Mac OS X since 2001
Uh, no. I am a regular user of i2hub, and though I am at a school that is part of Internet2/Abilene, (Indiana University), such speeds definitely do NOT translate to the residence halls, nor does i2hub exclude schools that are not on Internet2. "i2hub" is just a name.
Everyone seems to love to say, "we're so cool cuz we're on internet2, omg wtf lol!" Just do some research before saying stuff like this. It seems to me that i2hub only allows hosts with a.edu TLD, or maybe has some sort of list of schools to allow.
The other thing I should mention is that the DC protocol is truly terrible. There are a huge number of things wrong with it (no unique node identification system, no multi-source downloads, no nick registration, bulky connection negotiation protocol, slow file hashing, no unicode support, etc.) and it doesn't seem like they'll be fixed at the moment.
However, for those of you screaming that i2hub isn't free, actually, it is free, and it's open to many operating systems; I'm on Mac OS X, for example, and use a client called Direct Connect.
You might want to try it out--for a little while. All told, there is a huge selection, but it's slow and shitty, the people are complete idiots ("ppl, how do u ply a divx!?"), and I've found Gnutella to be far more useful for obtaining music, and BitTorrent for movies.
Argh, RMFA (read my fuckin' article).
I'm not talking about reverse-engineering anything. This would not be a few guys creating an XBox emulator in their spare time. It would either be 1) an Apple virtual machine with which you could play XBox 2 games or 2) direct ports of the games, by Apple, using the source code.
--Eoban
I have noticed this about many older products. Call me a luddite, but I feel that many products from the early nineties and the eighties are much more robust than their equivilants today. Older keyboards, ones that use mechanical switches, just feel plain better than newer, squishier all-plastic media-keyed rounded-space-bar messed-up-arrow-keys keyboards.
Same with phones--and this goes for both cell phones and desk phones. A cordless phone that I bought a few weeks ago from VTech is just complete shit. It's hard to dial and there's a noticable delay between the time I push the button and the time it actually registers the number and generates the tone, forcing me to dial slower.
Same with TVs. My 1989 Sony produces a great picture, has a nice big remote, and it's overall just very reliable and durable. I got a new Philips of the same size about two months ago, and it just isn't the same.
So to apply this to the iPod, I find my 3G to be very very nice, though I'm always slightly put off by the fact that I can't feel the buttons move. The alternatives, though--like the Dell DJ--are far worse. The button layout is crap and there's just no getting used to the interface. Maybe in ten years, the same thing will happen with portable music players. Every manufacturer will feel the need to make some improvement on something that is already good enough, and they just end up messing it up.
--Eoban
If you think about it: weirdly, the iPod is a rotary controller that became a joypad. The first iPods had the mechanical scroll wheel and then they moved to the touch wheel....but the latest generation also rocks left, right, up and down.
I personally love these kind of interfaces. Scroll wheels on mice are similar, as are just plain old dials, but they requre you to lift up your finger/hand repeatedly to scroll far enough in either direction. The iPod doesn't. What if that kind of interface was more widespread?
This reminds me of Wargames. In case you haven't seen it, it involved a 'supercomputer' that could play out various scenarios leading up to a nuclear war. In the end the computer figured out that, like the game tic-tac-toe, if both sides were even remotely intelligent, there was no way for either side to win.
Wait...you mean they're closed source...
AND the source code is not available...
AND you can only get binaries?
All three of those things?
Well that sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that in many ways, Slashdot is a city. It certainly has enough viewers to otherwise be a small city in real life. There are a diversity of opinions and mindsets, and there's a system of government (moderation and administration), there's business that goes on, everyone has a place where they live (slashdot.org/~username)...and people have jobs (submitting articles, commenting on articles, moderating comments, paying subscriptions, voting in polls), some are volunteer, some you have to earn the privilege of being able to do, some actually cost money. Fascinating stuff...
Congrats. Now go get laid.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
LiveCDs are an incredibly useful thing to have for an OS, especially for BSD, which has been really neglected by a lot of Linux users. They don't view it as a an easy or powerful or otherwise compelling alternative to Linux, and I really think that attitude needs to get blown away by some kickass releases and, of course, LiveCDs to actually show them what BSD'S about.--Proud user of Mac OS X since 2001
In other news, Reuters reports that America Online has purchased the state of Iowa.
Think of its management processes as a code base that has been hacked by a lot of untalented people over 30 years.
Uh, like Unix?
Uh, no. I am a regular user of i2hub, and though I am at a school that is part of Internet2/Abilene, (Indiana University), such speeds definitely do NOT translate to the residence halls, nor does i2hub exclude schools that are not on Internet2. "i2hub" is just a name.
Everyone seems to love to say, "we're so cool cuz we're on internet2, omg wtf lol!" Just do some research before saying stuff like this. It seems to me that i2hub only allows hosts with a .edu TLD, or maybe has some sort of list of schools to allow.
The other thing I should mention is that the DC protocol is truly terrible. There are a huge number of things wrong with it (no unique node identification system, no multi-source downloads, no nick registration, bulky connection negotiation protocol, slow file hashing, no unicode support, etc.) and it doesn't seem like they'll be fixed at the moment.
However, for those of you screaming that i2hub isn't free, actually, it is free, and it's open to many operating systems; I'm on Mac OS X, for example, and use a client called Direct Connect.
You might want to try it out--for a little while. All told, there is a huge selection, but it's slow and shitty, the people are complete idiots ("ppl, how do u ply a divx!?"), and I've found Gnutella to be far more useful for obtaining music, and BitTorrent for movies.
Well I will be for my Powerbook...
(ducks)
As for slashdot editting
As for post editing, you're a hypocrite.
Argh, RMFA (read my fuckin' article). I'm not talking about reverse-engineering anything. This would not be a few guys creating an XBox emulator in their spare time. It would either be 1) an Apple virtual machine with which you could play XBox 2 games or 2) direct ports of the games, by Apple, using the source code. --Eoban
I have noticed this about many older products. Call me a luddite, but I feel that many products from the early nineties and the eighties are much more robust than their equivilants today. Older keyboards, ones that use mechanical switches, just feel plain better than newer, squishier all-plastic media-keyed rounded-space-bar messed-up-arrow-keys keyboards. Same with phones--and this goes for both cell phones and desk phones. A cordless phone that I bought a few weeks ago from VTech is just complete shit. It's hard to dial and there's a noticable delay between the time I push the button and the time it actually registers the number and generates the tone, forcing me to dial slower. Same with TVs. My 1989 Sony produces a great picture, has a nice big remote, and it's overall just very reliable and durable. I got a new Philips of the same size about two months ago, and it just isn't the same. So to apply this to the iPod, I find my 3G to be very very nice, though I'm always slightly put off by the fact that I can't feel the buttons move. The alternatives, though--like the Dell DJ--are far worse. The button layout is crap and there's just no getting used to the interface. Maybe in ten years, the same thing will happen with portable music players. Every manufacturer will feel the need to make some improvement on something that is already good enough, and they just end up messing it up. --Eoban
Reading comprehension ain't your strong-suit, is it? With regards to network-transparency, Windows and Mac *does* have a long way to go.
You mean Windows and Mac DO have a long way to go.
Do your reading comprehension have a long way to go?
Personally, I'm waiting for Apache 1.3.37. 0h y34h!!!
If you think about it: weirdly, the iPod is a rotary controller that became a joypad. The first iPods had the mechanical scroll wheel and then they moved to the touch wheel....but the latest generation also rocks left, right, up and down. I personally love these kind of interfaces. Scroll wheels on mice are similar, as are just plain old dials, but they requre you to lift up your finger/hand repeatedly to scroll far enough in either direction. The iPod doesn't. What if that kind of interface was more widespread?
This reminds me of Wargames. In case you haven't seen it, it involved a 'supercomputer' that could play out various scenarios leading up to a nuclear war. In the end the computer figured out that, like the game tic-tac-toe, if both sides were even remotely intelligent, there was no way for either side to win.
The most expensive U2 album yet.
Does anyone else hate the new ArsTechnica look?
yeah. two grains, then.
Solution: Don't visit trusted web sites while visiting untrusted web sites or disable JavaScript.
Right. Okay. I'll do that. All I need to do is set my time machine to go to 1994.
I get it. It tricks the browser into displaying a blank page. Clever bastards.
Wait...you mean they're closed source... AND the source code is not available... AND you can only get binaries? All three of those things? Well that sucks.