Hello,
I can imagine what a shock it must have been to leave for two years and then come back to slashdot. Somewhere along the way, slashdot became *big time* (well, sorta anyhow) and a flood of new people came in. Not that the people were overall dumber or smarter, but they did seem overall ruder and less mature. And, also, somewhere along the way, alot of the stories just became a lot less interesting. I remember a time when it killed me to miss a day of slashdot because EVERY article was interesting. Nowadays, if I don't read slashdot for a week, that's alright because there are only about 3 stories each day which actually interest me.
However, I would like to say this: those people who were involved in the Free Software movement in 1998, who you thought were so cool, are still in the Free Software movement(for the most part). They might not bother to read and post on slashdot anymore. The point is, it is rather precipitous to decide " I will instead return to the Windows platform which I've been on since 1983" based upon the postings on slashdot. There may (or may not) be excellent reasons to program on a particular platform, but slashdot posters don't really make for a good reason.
Personally, my goal is to make most of the stuff I write to be as portable and platform agnostic as possible, while still being full featured (perhaps a pipe-dream).
And lastly, I also agree with a lot of the stuff that Michi Henning has to say. It has been tremendously disappointing to me to see, that in the years since 1998, Linux has become more complex and difficult, in a lot of ways, than it was. The whole Gnome/KDE thing has been nothing but a pain in the butt. (I could go on a long rant about Gnome/KDE but I won't). And, slowly, but surely, all the Linux Distros are becoming a little bit less like each other all the time (which set of commands do I use on Distro X to configure a network interface?).
Of course, the stuff Michi says is really fairly universal, not just Linux related, but Linux falls victim to a lot of the same myths.
So, in summary, do what you want to do. Don't worry about slashdot. Feel free to ignore OS/FSF politics (I've taken to not worrying about what Richard Stallman, or Bruce Perens, or Eric Raymond, or CmdrTaco say anymore, lol) And, maybe, just perhaps, you can be part of the solution and not the problem =)
Note: for background info on what "Wild-Cat Dollars" are, go get a U.S. history book that covers the 1800's and look for Wild Cat Banks.
Basically, all these different banks all over the US were issuing their own currency, so there were hundreds of different currencies around the country, and they were only worth something as long as the bank that issued them was still solvent. Some of these Wild Cat banks issued more money than they could back (because at the time, you were supposed to be able to exchange these 'dollars' for gold at the bank). Obviously this isn't a good situation.
Well, as you say, if you allow people to trade 'real' money for 'fake' money, that 'fake' money starts to become 'real' in as much as there is an actual (though perhaps inconsistent) valuation for that 'fake' money. And, since Mythic, EA, Microsoft, Verant/Sony, etc are not Governments, they have no right to issue currency. Now, of course, they aren't trying to create "Wild-Cat" Dollars, but if people are allowed to pay real money for the in-game money, then you have that problem. So, from the US Government's standpoint, disallowing the sale/purchase of in-game currency is the only sensible thing to do in order to prevent the arising of wild-cat money.
Of course, the truth is that this probably doesn't even register on the radar as being a problem with the feds because it is so small scale, and probably always will be. But, there is a philosophical/historical argument for you to back up the idea that the courts should disallow the sale of this stuff.
There are plenty of sites with info about what LDAP is. Do a search on yahoo.com, dmoz.org, or google.com and you'll find plenty of sites. Basically, it is a standard, high-level network protocol (like http, ftp or ssh), that allows you to access directory servers. A directory server is basically a database that is organized hierarchicaly(sp?) and is optimized for a lot of reads and very few writes. They are useful, for example, for running address book servers (Outlook or Netscape, and presumably other email clients) can use an LDAP server for looking up email addresses given a nickname, or a full name of a person, or even a partial name that is unique.
Another purpose that they are sometimes used for is to implement network authentication services, similar to the way Novell or Win2K server allow you to log into any workstation on your company's/organization's network using a network account. Your login account, instead of being created on individual workstations, is created in the LDAP directory and when you go to login to a workstation, the workstation requests authentication from the directory server.
I'm sure there are other uses for LDAP directory servers as well, but these are the two most common. Cheers.
I agree with you that sometimes the design is fundamentally, intrinsically flawed and needs to be thown out; but more often times you can revise and evolve code.
As far as Microsoft redesigning the OS with NT:
Microsoft is one of the few companies who can afford, financially, to have parallel development teams. When Microsoft started building NT they had help in funding the development because IBM was helping them (remember that NT started out of the OS/2 project that Microsoft was working on with IBM). And later on they had made such a fortune on Win95 + Office 95/97 that they had more than enough money to fund parallel development.
Microsoft realized that, at least in the early versions of NT, normal users would have a hard time administering NT and running a lot of the programs they wanted to use under NT. That is why they paid developers to keep developing Win9X/ME, EVEN AFTER they decided to redesign the OS. I would say that Win2k Pro is the first version of NT that most users would have no more problems with than if they were using Win9x.
Since most companies can't afford to keep parallel development teams in order to maintain the old product until the new product is "ready" for all their users, it usually (though not always, I think) makes more sense financially to try to evolve and revise the current code base.
Point 2: Microsoft IS, in most cases, following exactly the strategy that Joel outlines. Take Internet Explorer for example. Up until IE4, IE just plain sucked as a browser. Microsoft kept revising/evolving it though; With 4 it still had lots of annoying things about it, but was generally usable. With 5.x they fixed more bugs, got a lot of things working fairly well (of course, there were still some things that were annoying about it, especially from a web developers' perspective, like a bad implementation of Cascading Style Sheets, which still isn't quite right (but I'd hasten to add that Netscape 4.x's implementation of CSS is much worse; sometimes valid CSS would CRASH some of the 4.x browsers). Now they've released IE 6. Still not perfect, but adequate and productive for most users. The point of my writing about IE like this is that Microsoft has been able to, relatively quickly, revise their browser, whereas Mozilla/Netscape6 has basically become really useable only in the last 4 months or so (here's where I point out that I'm composing this in Mozilla under Linux).
So, I'd say that Joel's point is somewhat valid, and that Microsoft, in fact, does follow his logic, in most cases (Office, SQL Server/BackOffice, IE, etc).
As for point 1, I don't really think Joel would say that bugs are "good" or that they shouldn't be fixed. Just fix them in the most economical manner.
I do somewhat agree with you on the other points, though I'm going to take the liberty of doing some "charitable" interpreting of Joel on a couple of the points:
2. Load in useless features to drive sales, knowing that your code will suck.
I think, with respect to this, Joel isn't interested in useless features. What he is basically saying is that if users REALLY want a feature, you're stupid to to take the attitude that "I know better than you: you don't need this feature". You just lose customers that way. Remeber, the customer is always right.
3. Once you have gobs of crap code and a large user base, there will never exist the possibility of re-designing things (eg, WinXP) since it doesn't matter that code sucks (see point 1) and all that counts is revenue.
Well, although I do believe there are certain situations where a complete re-write is in order, I think he makes a valid point. I think Joel (again I'm interpreting here) would say that it is better to revise the current code, clean the current buggy code up and "perfect" it rather than to start over. After all, starting over doesn't even guarantee you that the new code will be any less crufty than the old code, just different! (Although, sometimes your design was fundamentally flawed to begin with and you need to start over to deal with the intrinsic problems in it, but hopefully those kinds of problem can also be dealt with by revisioning instead of starting over completely.) Start over with a new code base and you just end up with new bugs sometimes. Plus, as he points out, not releasing an updated product in the market for 3 or 4 years REALLY hurts a technology company.
4. Being efficient is a waste of time. Let the hardware catch up with the crap code.
Hmm, he does sound a bit like he's saying that. But, to be charitable again, I'll interpret him as meaning that it's not worth spending a lot of money and time to get small incremental performance increases or size decreases. But, obviously you're not going to set out to make your code as inefficient as possible. And he does have somewhat of a point about Moore's law. How many people are still using WordPerfect 5.1? Undoubtedly there are still a few people. . . but is Corel making any money from those people? Probably not, and since Corel is a company that needs (desperately at this point) to make money, they are going to add features that user want, that they think will give them a competitive advantage to Microsoft, even if that means increasing the size of the program a little bit.
I guess my question to this idea is two-fold: do you have any numbers, calculations to give an estimate of how long the laser would have to fire to get the effect? If, for example, it would take a laser shooting at the object for 25000 years (just a wild number thrown out with the assumption that the amount of pressure exerted would be extremely small) to exert enough presssure to deorbit one piece of space junk, then this idea is without much use. If on the other hand each laser (assume you put up multiple laser platforms) could deorbit something in 6 months, then it might be a useful idea.
Second response: wouldn't it, possibly, be simpler (though not simple of course) to attempt to fire projectiles (thinking using a magnetic "railgun" to do the firing) into highly calculated orbits with the sole purpose of the projectile hitting the piece of space junk, and deorbiting both itself and the object it is aimed at? This would seem like a slightly more feasible scheme. . . (though maybe just as pie-in-the-sky as Bruce's suggestion, hehe).
That Header file is a "Work of Authorship" in as much as he wrote that header file. As HE stated, he doesn't have any problem with his ideas being used; the problem is they took the header file that HE Authored and claimed that is was their original work and that they had the copyright on it, which in point of fact they do have partial copyright (derivative work; e.g the changes they made they have copyright on), but so did Soren on his work.
Hello,
RMS is a very intelligent, very talented man. When he takes the time to sit down, right down his thoughts, review them and edit them, he can come up with some very persuasive, intelligent, and reasonable arguments.
But if you've ever seen RMS in action at a Live event, he can sometimes be very harsh. I was at the conference called The Bazaar, in NYC in, I believe December of, hmm, 2000 I think. Anyhow I was at a session where he was speaking in the larger keynote hall, and there was a question and answer period afterword. Someone asked a question that RMS apparently didn't like, and his answer was rather nastier than I thought was appropriate. And there are many many examples of this, just ask around among people who've had the "pleasure" of meeting RMS in person.
So, in summary, a lot of the RMS bashing that happens on Slashdot is, to a large degree, RMS' own fault, as it is in reaction to people's experiences with him. That said, I do agree that he is a very intelligent man who does have things to say which need to be said.
I was with you right up to point Number 7. Most MMORPGs are built around killing people/monsters with swords, knives, arrows and explosives (albeit "magical" explosives, lol). I seriously doubt most MMORPG's would pass the No Violence clause. And most of them wouldn't be particularly contructive environments for Juvenile Delinquents to be in, methinks.
I like the Ultima Series, and I suppose I'm somewhat looking forward to seeing whatever Tabula Rasa becomes, but. . .
The article starts out talking about how Garriott's new company just sold themselves to NCSoft. SO, EA screwed up the Ultima Series, and now Garriott is going to allow NCSoft to screw up whatever games his new company creates. RG needs to find some other way to fund development than finding some big Sugar Daddy company to fund him. Like finding private investors who are willing to allow him to run the company semi-autonomously (yeah, I know, easier said than done, blah, blah; but the fact is someone with as much gaming clout and previous success as Garriott shouldn't have that hard a time finding investors), instead of some big corporate headquarters constantly butting in and throwing their weight around.
I mean, I could be totally wrong here; maybe NCSoft will allow Garriott and co. to do their thing and come up with a great game. We'll see. . . but I doubt it.
Hello, for everyone saying "The problem with OpenGL is that it doesn't include a cross platform abstraction for sound and input", you NEED to go check out The Simple DirectMedia Layer. SDL integrates with OpenGL and provides cross-platform (essentially it wraps DirectX on Win32 and Xlib/XDGA on *nix) access to mouse, joystick, sound, etc.
From what I can tell, Ulrich wasn't upset by RMS forking, because that's not what RMS was even TRYING to do. RMS was trying to go around and turn all the other glibc developers against Ulrich, which is a bit more personal kind of activity. I wouldn't be insulted if someone forked a project I was working on, HOWEVER, I too would be PISSED if someone tried to turn all my codevelopers against me. Very few people on Slashdot seem to be getting this point. They think it is ALL about license or naming issues. Those issues might have been the original issues that caused a split between Ulrich and RMS, but I'm sure it's Stallmans essentially personal attack against Ulrich that sparked this flamefest.
AOL: "We're reasonable people: the paperwork for your License to use Air Of Life[AOL](tm) technology will come through next week. We'll allow you to keep breathing, but there will be compensatory and actual damages of three times the normal license fee for the duration of the period during which you continue to use our patents without a proper license. The total will come to $3,246.95. Thank You for your business."
LOL
Ok, I'm going to make the charitable assumption that you are intelligent, but English isn't your native tongue. So, here's a free clue: the article you replied to was Sarcasm. Sarcasm is a type of humour and rhetorical device where you make a point by stating the point's anti-thesis in such a way to show that the anti-thesis is ridiculous and beyond believability.
I agree that we shouldn't be worrying about moving earth's orbit right now, so this isn't a criticism of that. But, I find it interesting that people seem to take for granted that:
Humans will still be here a million, let alone a billion, years from now.
Our civilization will continue to increase forever, w/o disruption, in intellectual capacity and technological prowess, and wealth to God like levels
Honestly, I think we will run out of easily/quickly consumable energy within a few hundred or thousand years, which will throw human civilization back to the level of, oh, hunter-gatherers (while massively de-populating humans, taking us back to less than 1 billion people). With human populations taken back to relatively small levels, and disease, hunger, disasters, etc keeping it there, the planet will have a chance to renew itself. After a few million years, the earth will once again have relatively large oil deposits, forests, and other resources for man to use (if man is still around), and man will once again begin progressing in levels of technology, begin increasing population again, and eventually grow to the point where he consumes inordinate amounts of resources again, and once again run out of those resources, throwing civilization back again.
I think civilization could thus be cyclical until the period of the earth's demise when Sol goes Red Dwarf. Or not, but sure sounds plausible don't it? I think it is more plausible than the theory that man's knowledge and power will grow without bound, because the nature of the universe shows us that we are finite, and our capability to increase ourselves, though very large, must be finite as well.
That is one theory. Other theories that are more plausible than the infinite technological expansion of man include various doomsday scenarios where all life is wiped off the planet. (Which other people have exhaustively covered).
While I tend to agree with your sentiment, I also want to point out why people use (or perhaps in the past used) devices like this. And as other's point out, this is not a new idea. In 1998 I was working for a place that regularly installed similar devices at client sites. I don't remember the devices having a built-in hub, but they could be hooked up to a hub through an ethernet port, and had a built-in modem, DHCP server and NAT-ing router.
The company I worked at was a small VAR/System integrator in a Semi-rural area of Northeast Ohio. We sold and supported desktop computers and Novell networks to small businesses ( <500 employees) in an area with a radius of about 50 miles. The reason we installed these devices was that as the clients were very small companies, they had maybe two or three desktop PC's in their office that needed access to the internet. This was before cable modem/DSL technology (which I would say would be a more practical solution today, where available), ISDN cost a small fortune and didn't give much of a performance benefit, and a T1 cost a real lot of money (in the semi-rural areas where this company does consulting, I'm not even sure if T1's were available at the time, and even now they cost something like $1500/month because the clients are out in the boon-docks).
You might ask why not just give each PC their own modem and connection? Because then the company had to pay for extra dial-up accounts and extra phone lines (and these were not deep-pocketed companies), and the people in these offices that used the internet only made light use of it. Email, maybe an hour or two a day of doing business related work on the web (like checking prices from suppliers, or updating the company website, or electronically submitting government or insurance forms), and maybe a little bit of personal web surfing. Odds are, the various employees wouldn't all use the internet at the exact same time, and even if they did, the internet connection was mostly idle while they read the web-pages/email. So it worked out very economically and satisfactorily for the company to use one shared internet connection, and using an external device like this is more reliable than using Win98SE's internet connection sharing (which didn't even exist at the time). Although you could use *BSD/Linux, that would require a dedicated computer (which would be more expensive than one of these devices), and additionally the VAR I worked for didn't have any *nix experience and didn't want any;-), and didn't require that any of the individual computers be on all the time.
I forgot in my last post, to deal with the other problem with your post. You state that.NET will be server-side, like PHP. This is only half-true, in asmuch as PHP is server-side only, whereas.NET is supposed to allow both server-side, and client-side applications to be written (again, more like Java than PHP). And, in case you didn't know, there is a server-side version of Java. It is called JSP (Java Server Pages), and the Apache project is the maintainer of the Open-Source reference implementation of JSP.
Since when is PHP a "multi development language solution"? Don't get me wrong, I love PHP (spent 6 hours yesterday working on a PHP app), but I've never heard anything about it being multi-language.;-p
Java, however, is sort-of multi-language. I remember seeing once a list of different compilers for a whole bunch of different languages that could compile down to java byte-code.
I too am interested in this question so I hope it get's selected. Honestly, though, I'm guessing that the answer will probably be something along these lines: it would be nice, but the amount of editorial work that would be necessary to mark-up the books, etc already in the database, plus new works, is beyond the scope of the resources of PG.
People get too bent about death
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 1
Don't get me wrong. I value human life as much as anyone. But people have unrealistic ideas and expectations about death. Tens (or hundreds?) of thousands of people die every year on the worlds roads and highways. Thousands of people die every year as a result of natural events (hurricanes, earthquakes, eruptions, tornadoes, floods, etc). Death is a natural part of life.
However, a small number of people die in the Challenger accident and it becomes a national "tragedy" that threatened the existence of the space program. I'm not saying we should be careless in our scientific research (of course all reasonable safety precautions should be adhered to), but if some people are willing to take on potentially dangerous jobs (and no-one ever said being an astronaught doesn't have any risks) to help everyone progress their knowledge; and an occasional accident happens and they die, that's only to be expected and not a good reason to can the space program. (Which, of course, was never completely canned in any case).
It's hard to say, but something that might not be enforceable in a U.S. court might be enforcable in a court in another country (or vice-versa). Every country (at least in theory:o) is sovereign, which is to say that it has the right to make and enforce it's own laws. That said, many countries have "reformed" (gotta love euphamisms;-) their laws, especially regarding Intellectual Property, to come in line with certain international treaties (e.g. WIPO, GATT/WTO), that make their laws the same or simaller to U.S. IP law.
But the point is, you're going to see a movie. The fun of playing the RPG is that, for all the lame dialog, absurd scenarios, etc, you actually have some influence on the outcome and direction of the game. When I go to see a movie, I go to see a very strongly written story, or at least an improbable story that is really fun.
If I wanted to play D&D, I'd go look up my friends and say "Hey, let's do a campaign." I wouldn't go to the Movie theatre. The reason that people had high expectations for this movie, is that the movie makers had so much to begin with: Most fanstasy screen-writers have to make up their worlds from "scratch" (ok, most screen-writers "borrow" heavily from other sources for inspiration, but they still have to do some work to make up the world). In the case of D&D, you have a well-tested, well-balanced "universe" with lots of items, lots of spells, lots of character classes, lots of monsters, and lots of lands. The writer gets lots of cool stuff to use to make their well-structured story even more interesting and fun. It is possible to create really fantastic stories set in the D&D Universe.
Frankly, I'm not going to see a movie that tries to be a cheesy campaign. Nothing says a campaign has to be bad. It's just that most people aren't that creative when it comes to dialogue, and playing their characters. But if I'm going to shell out 8 bucks to see a movie, which is completely structured, I want it to be well written.
But the cinema I was at has really large screens that completely fill your field of vision even when your sitting 2/3 of the way back as I was. (This was a cinema that is part of the General Cinemas chain, so I would say this theatre is fairly representative of the average viewing experience.)
As for the near/far focus, yes, I know it is a common technique. The problem I had was that they keep that same shot so long, and the out-of-focus rack is so large and dominating of the screen, that it really started to screw with my head. That is, most directors would keep that shot for a fairly short amount of time, and to your mind, it would approximate fairly well the actual effect of looking down the aisle from the vantage point of the character (in this case Elijah). But when he holds that shot as long as he did, the optical part of my brain, feeling like it is really beholding this scene (because the screen took up my entire field of vision as stated earlier), wanted to temporarily bring the rack in focus and when I couldn't, it bugged me.
Also, it bugged me because for the preceding hour of film, most of the time was spent on very close up shots. The optical part of your brain gets really fed up (at least mine did) with constantly being so close. I just wanted to step back a couple feet and look at things from a normal perspective (which, I know, is the point. The director doesn't want a normal perspective. But after an hour to hour and a half of film, only about three minutes of which is at normal perspective, you get really fatigued.)
To give the director the benefit of the doubt, I suppose he was trying to imitate the comic book form, where close up drawings are very common. However, this works in comic books because that close up drawing is still relatively small, and gives the reader the feeling that they are looking from a normal perspective, just their view is being cut-off, or framed in, by the art cell. Additionally, with a comic book, I can hold the book as close or far away from my head as I want. In the cinema, I don't have that option.
Come on, be serious, would you? Would you go to the police and tell them you touched someone and had a vision that they did something bad. Yeah right.
Obviously no, but he still could've done something. I do understand that no hero can fix all the wrongs, even in just Philadelphia. The point of what I wrote was that him seeing five or six people's "dark secrets" just felt somehow gratuitous. Like Shyamalan was reveling in the dark depths the human psyche can sink to, w/o having any plan for "redemption" of the wrong that was done.
The other thing is, Dunn could be a hero even without that "sense", although that sense is cool and does add another comic book hero touch. Heck, he could be walking down the street and see things being done and intervene w/o having to see all those scenes. As far as his "sense" goes, I'm not saying it isn't a good literary/plot device, or detracts from the premise. It is good, I suppose, just because it does leave the viewer with a sense of disquiet (which seems to be the central theme of this movie, making the viewer feel ill-at-ease, as the hero is ill-at-ease with himself and his abilities). Mostly, I'm saying that of all superhero abilities, this is the one I would least like to have myself (you know how you always fantasized about having one or more of superman's or spiderman's super senses, not this one though;-), because he always see's things after-the-fact when it is too late too stop them.
Hmm...real life isn't like a comic book...maybe you did get the movie but just are[sic] bright enough to realize it.
Again, I understand this is meant to be a more in-depth, "dark" hero-story than your typcical action-hero comic/movie like X-men. And I guess that was appropriate, symbolically, that he came a little too late to do the most good in his rescuing, considering the whole movie is about him hesitating to fulfull his destiny as a protector.
But at some point, a hero story is supposed to be about satisfaction. Satisfaction that there is someone who can right wrongs, someone who can redeem bad circumstances. Someone who can save the day. That is the whole point of hero's. We have this cultural fantasy about hero's because of the fact that we have, in real life, villians. Crazy people, or otherwise that do really awful things; or just stuff that happens that is really aweful, but might not be anybody's fault. We yearn for the someone who steps in and takes away the feeling of violation, the feeling of helplessnes, the feeling of weakness.
Dunn might have stopped the garbage man from continuing to terrorize that family, but the violation was already done, and the audience feels that violation.
As for part two, I don't expect it to be an action fest. That isn't why I went to see this movie in the first place. But I do hope that in part two we get to see him finaly be an effective hero at least. I should think that would be the logical progression from this first movie. That is, this movie is about him discovering himself and his destiny, and being a reluctant and somewhat ineffective hero because of his reluctance. Having finally picked up his role, it seems logical that part two will be about him being a hero, not trying to decide to be one.
Slashdot Mirror
Hello,
I can imagine what a shock it must have been to leave for two years and then come back to slashdot. Somewhere along the way, slashdot became *big time* (well, sorta anyhow) and a flood of new people came in. Not that the people were overall dumber or smarter, but they did seem overall ruder and less mature. And, also, somewhere along the way, alot of the stories just became a lot less interesting. I remember a time when it killed me to miss a day of slashdot because EVERY article was interesting. Nowadays, if I don't read slashdot for a week, that's alright because there are only about 3 stories each day which actually interest me.
However, I would like to say this: those people who were involved in the Free Software movement in 1998, who you thought were so cool, are still in the Free Software movement(for the most part). They might not bother to read and post on slashdot anymore. The point is, it is rather precipitous to decide " I will instead return to the Windows platform which I've been on since 1983" based upon the postings on slashdot. There may (or may not) be excellent reasons to program on a particular platform, but slashdot posters don't really make for a good reason.
Personally, my goal is to make most of the stuff I write to be as portable and platform agnostic as possible, while still being full featured (perhaps a pipe-dream).
And lastly, I also agree with a lot of the stuff that Michi Henning has to say. It has been tremendously disappointing to me to see, that in the years since 1998, Linux has become more complex and difficult, in a lot of ways, than it was. The whole Gnome/KDE thing has been nothing but a pain in the butt. (I could go on a long rant about Gnome/KDE but I won't). And, slowly, but surely, all the Linux Distros are becoming a little bit less like each other all the time (which set of commands do I use on Distro X to configure a network interface?).
Of course, the stuff Michi says is really fairly universal, not just Linux related, but Linux falls victim to a lot of the same myths.
So, in summary, do what you want to do. Don't worry about slashdot. Feel free to ignore OS/FSF politics (I've taken to not worrying about what Richard Stallman, or Bruce Perens, or Eric Raymond, or CmdrTaco say anymore, lol) And, maybe, just perhaps, you can be part of the solution and not the problem =)
Note: for background info on what "Wild-Cat Dollars" are, go get a U.S. history book that covers the 1800's and look for Wild Cat Banks.
Basically, all these different banks all over the US were issuing their own currency, so there were hundreds of different currencies around the country, and they were only worth something as long as the bank that issued them was still solvent. Some of these Wild Cat banks issued more money than they could back (because at the time, you were supposed to be able to exchange these 'dollars' for gold at the bank). Obviously this isn't a good situation.
Well, as you say, if you allow people to trade 'real' money for 'fake' money, that 'fake' money starts to become 'real' in as much as there is an actual (though perhaps inconsistent) valuation for that 'fake' money. And, since Mythic, EA, Microsoft, Verant/Sony, etc are not Governments, they have no right to issue currency. Now, of course, they aren't trying to create "Wild-Cat" Dollars, but if people are allowed to pay real money for the in-game money, then you have that problem. So, from the US Government's standpoint, disallowing the sale/purchase of in-game currency is the only sensible thing to do in order to prevent the arising of wild-cat money.
Of course, the truth is that this probably doesn't even register on the radar as being a problem with the feds because it is so small scale, and probably always will be. But, there is a philosophical/historical argument for you to back up the idea that the courts should disallow the sale of this stuff.
There are plenty of sites with info about what LDAP is. Do a search on yahoo.com, dmoz.org, or google.com and you'll find plenty of sites. Basically, it is a standard, high-level network protocol (like http, ftp or ssh), that allows you to access directory servers. A directory server is basically a database that is organized hierarchicaly(sp?) and is optimized for a lot of reads and very few writes. They are useful, for example, for running address book servers (Outlook or Netscape, and presumably other email clients) can use an LDAP server for looking up email addresses given a nickname, or a full name of a person, or even a partial name that is unique.
Another purpose that they are sometimes used for is to implement network authentication services, similar to the way Novell or Win2K server allow you to log into any workstation on your company's/organization's network using a network account. Your login account, instead of being created on individual workstations, is created in the LDAP directory and when you go to login to a workstation, the workstation requests authentication from the directory server.
I'm sure there are other uses for LDAP directory servers as well, but these are the two most common. Cheers.
I agree with you that sometimes the design is fundamentally, intrinsically flawed and needs to be thown out; but more often times you can revise and evolve code.
As far as Microsoft redesigning the OS with NT:
Microsoft is one of the few companies who can afford, financially, to have parallel development teams. When Microsoft started building NT they had help in funding the development because IBM was helping them (remember that NT started out of the OS/2 project that Microsoft was working on with IBM). And later on they had made such a fortune on Win95 + Office 95/97 that they had more than enough money to fund parallel development.
Microsoft realized that, at least in the early versions of NT, normal users would have a hard time administering NT and running a lot of the programs they wanted to use under NT. That is why they paid developers to keep developing Win9X/ME, EVEN AFTER they decided to redesign the OS. I would say that Win2k Pro is the first version of NT that most users would have no more problems with than if they were using Win9x.
Since most companies can't afford to keep parallel development teams in order to maintain the old product until the new product is "ready" for all their users, it usually (though not always, I think) makes more sense financially to try to evolve and revise the current code base.
Point 2: Microsoft IS, in most cases, following exactly the strategy that Joel outlines. Take Internet Explorer for example. Up until IE4, IE just plain sucked as a browser. Microsoft kept revising/evolving it though; With 4 it still had lots of annoying things about it, but was generally usable. With 5.x they fixed more bugs, got a lot of things working fairly well (of course, there were still some things that were annoying about it, especially from a web developers' perspective, like a bad implementation of Cascading Style Sheets, which still isn't quite right (but I'd hasten to add that Netscape 4.x's implementation of CSS is much worse; sometimes valid CSS would CRASH some of the 4.x browsers). Now they've released IE 6. Still not perfect, but adequate and productive for most users. The point of my writing about IE like this is that Microsoft has been able to, relatively quickly, revise their browser, whereas Mozilla/Netscape6 has basically become really useable only in the last 4 months or so (here's where I point out that I'm composing this in Mozilla under Linux).
So, I'd say that Joel's point is somewhat valid, and that Microsoft, in fact, does follow his logic, in most cases (Office, SQL Server/BackOffice, IE, etc).
As for point 1, I don't really think Joel would say that bugs are "good" or that they shouldn't be fixed. Just fix them in the most economical manner.
I do somewhat agree with you on the other points, though I'm going to take the liberty of doing some "charitable" interpreting of Joel on a couple of the points:
2. Load in useless features to drive sales, knowing that your code will suck.
I think, with respect to this, Joel isn't interested in useless features. What he is basically saying is that if users REALLY want a feature, you're stupid to to take the attitude that "I know better than you: you don't need this feature". You just lose customers that way. Remeber, the customer is always right.
3. Once you have gobs of crap code and a large user base, there will never exist the possibility of re-designing things (eg, WinXP) since it doesn't matter that code sucks (see point 1) and all that counts is revenue.
Well, although I do believe there are certain situations where a complete re-write is in order, I think he makes a valid point. I think Joel (again I'm interpreting here) would say that it is better to revise the current code, clean the current buggy code up and "perfect" it rather than to start over. After all, starting over doesn't even guarantee you that the new code will be any less crufty than the old code, just different! (Although, sometimes your design was fundamentally flawed to begin with and you need to start over to deal with the intrinsic problems in it, but hopefully those kinds of problem can also be dealt with by revisioning instead of starting over completely.) Start over with a new code base and you just end up with new bugs sometimes. Plus, as he points out, not releasing an updated product in the market for 3 or 4 years REALLY hurts a technology company.
4. Being efficient is a waste of time. Let the hardware catch up with the crap code.
Hmm, he does sound a bit like he's saying that. But, to be charitable again, I'll interpret him as meaning that it's not worth spending a lot of money and time to get small incremental performance increases or size decreases. But, obviously you're not going to set out to make your code as inefficient as possible. And he does have somewhat of a point about Moore's law. How many people are still using WordPerfect 5.1? Undoubtedly there are still a few people. . . but is Corel making any money from those people? Probably not, and since Corel is a company that needs (desperately at this point) to make money, they are going to add features that user want, that they think will give them a competitive advantage to Microsoft, even if that means increasing the size of the program a little bit.
I guess my question to this idea is two-fold: do you have any numbers, calculations to give an estimate of how long the laser would have to fire to get the effect? If, for example, it would take a laser shooting at the object for 25000 years (just a wild number thrown out with the assumption that the amount of pressure exerted would be extremely small) to exert enough presssure to deorbit one piece of space junk, then this idea is without much use. If on the other hand each laser (assume you put up multiple laser platforms) could deorbit something in 6 months, then it might be a useful idea.
Second response: wouldn't it, possibly, be simpler (though not simple of course) to attempt to fire projectiles (thinking using a magnetic "railgun" to do the firing) into highly calculated orbits with the sole purpose of the projectile hitting the piece of space junk, and deorbiting both itself and the object it is aimed at? This would seem like a slightly more feasible scheme. . . (though maybe just as pie-in-the-sky as Bruce's suggestion, hehe).
That Header file is a "Work of Authorship" in as much as he wrote that header file. As HE stated, he doesn't have any problem with his ideas being used; the problem is they took the header file that HE Authored and claimed that is was their original work and that they had the copyright on it, which in point of fact they do have partial copyright (derivative work; e.g the changes they made they have copyright on), but so did Soren on his work.
Hello,
RMS is a very intelligent, very talented man. When he takes the time to sit down, right down his thoughts, review them and edit them, he can come up with some very persuasive, intelligent, and reasonable arguments.
But if you've ever seen RMS in action at a Live event, he can sometimes be very harsh. I was at the conference called The Bazaar, in NYC in, I believe December of, hmm, 2000 I think. Anyhow I was at a session where he was speaking in the larger keynote hall, and there was a question and answer period afterword. Someone asked a question that RMS apparently didn't like, and his answer was rather nastier than I thought was appropriate. And there are many many examples of this, just ask around among people who've had the "pleasure" of meeting RMS in person.
So, in summary, a lot of the RMS bashing that happens on Slashdot is, to a large degree, RMS' own fault, as it is in reaction to people's experiences with him. That said, I do agree that he is a very intelligent man who does have things to say which need to be said.
I was with you right up to point Number 7. Most MMORPGs are built around killing people/monsters with swords, knives, arrows and explosives (albeit "magical" explosives, lol). I seriously doubt most MMORPG's would pass the No Violence clause. And most of them wouldn't be particularly contructive environments for Juvenile Delinquents to be in, methinks.
I like the Ultima Series, and I suppose I'm somewhat looking forward to seeing whatever Tabula Rasa becomes, but. . .
The article starts out talking about how Garriott's new company just sold themselves to NCSoft. SO, EA screwed up the Ultima Series, and now Garriott is going to allow NCSoft to screw up whatever games his new company creates. RG needs to find some other way to fund development than finding some big Sugar Daddy company to fund him. Like finding private investors who are willing to allow him to run the company semi-autonomously (yeah, I know, easier said than done, blah, blah; but the fact is someone with as much gaming clout and previous success as Garriott shouldn't have that hard a time finding investors), instead of some big corporate headquarters constantly butting in and throwing their weight around.
I mean, I could be totally wrong here; maybe NCSoft will allow Garriott and co. to do their thing and come up with a great game. We'll see. . . but I doubt it.
Hello, for everyone saying "The problem with OpenGL is that it doesn't include a cross platform abstraction for sound and input", you NEED to go check out The Simple DirectMedia Layer. SDL integrates with OpenGL and provides cross-platform (essentially it wraps DirectX on Win32 and Xlib/XDGA on *nix) access to mouse, joystick, sound, etc.
From what I can tell, Ulrich wasn't upset by RMS forking, because that's not what RMS was even TRYING to do. RMS was trying to go around and turn all the other glibc developers against Ulrich, which is a bit more personal kind of activity. I wouldn't be insulted if someone forked a project I was working on, HOWEVER, I too would be PISSED if someone tried to turn all my codevelopers against me. Very few people on Slashdot seem to be getting this point. They think it is ALL about license or naming issues. Those issues might have been the original issues that caused a split between Ulrich and RMS, but I'm sure it's Stallmans essentially personal attack against Ulrich that sparked this flamefest.
AOL: "We're reasonable people: the paperwork for your License to use Air Of Life[AOL](tm) technology will come through next week. We'll allow you to keep breathing, but there will be compensatory and actual damages of three times the normal license fee for the duration of the period during which you continue to use our patents without a proper license. The total will come to $3,246.95. Thank You for your business." LOL
Ok, I'm going to make the charitable assumption that you are intelligent, but English isn't your native tongue. So, here's a free clue: the article you replied to was Sarcasm. Sarcasm is a type of humour and rhetorical device where you make a point by stating the point's anti-thesis in such a way to show that the anti-thesis is ridiculous and beyond believability.
Honestly, I think we will run out of easily/quickly consumable energy within a few hundred or thousand years, which will throw human civilization back to the level of, oh, hunter-gatherers (while massively de-populating humans, taking us back to less than 1 billion people). With human populations taken back to relatively small levels, and disease, hunger, disasters, etc keeping it there, the planet will have a chance to renew itself. After a few million years, the earth will once again have relatively large oil deposits, forests, and other resources for man to use (if man is still around), and man will once again begin progressing in levels of technology, begin increasing population again, and eventually grow to the point where he consumes inordinate amounts of resources again, and once again run out of those resources, throwing civilization back again.
I think civilization could thus be cyclical until the period of the earth's demise when Sol goes Red Dwarf. Or not, but sure sounds plausible don't it? I think it is more plausible than the theory that man's knowledge and power will grow without bound, because the nature of the universe shows us that we are finite, and our capability to increase ourselves, though very large, must be finite as well.
That is one theory. Other theories that are more plausible than the infinite technological expansion of man include various doomsday scenarios where all life is wiped off the planet. (Which other people have exhaustively covered).
The company I worked at was a small VAR/System integrator in a Semi-rural area of Northeast Ohio. We sold and supported desktop computers and Novell networks to small businesses ( <500 employees) in an area with a radius of about 50 miles. The reason we installed these devices was that as the clients were very small companies, they had maybe two or three desktop PC's in their office that needed access to the internet. This was before cable modem/DSL technology (which I would say would be a more practical solution today, where available), ISDN cost a small fortune and didn't give much of a performance benefit, and a T1 cost a real lot of money (in the semi-rural areas where this company does consulting, I'm not even sure if T1's were available at the time, and even now they cost something like $1500/month because the clients are out in the boon-docks).
You might ask why not just give each PC their own modem and connection? Because then the company had to pay for extra dial-up accounts and extra phone lines (and these were not deep-pocketed companies), and the people in these offices that used the internet only made light use of it. Email, maybe an hour or two a day of doing business related work on the web (like checking prices from suppliers, or updating the company website, or electronically submitting government or insurance forms), and maybe a little bit of personal web surfing. Odds are, the various employees wouldn't all use the internet at the exact same time, and even if they did, the internet connection was mostly idle while they read the web-pages/email. So it worked out very economically and satisfactorily for the company to use one shared internet connection, and using an external device like this is more reliable than using Win98SE's internet connection sharing (which didn't even exist at the time). Although you could use *BSD/Linux, that would require a dedicated computer (which would be more expensive than one of these devices), and additionally the VAR I worked for didn't have any *nix experience and didn't want any ;-), and didn't require that any of the individual computers be on all the time.
I forgot in my last post, to deal with the other problem with your post. You state that .NET will be server-side, like PHP. This is only half-true, in asmuch as PHP is server-side only, whereas .NET is supposed to allow both server-side, and client-side applications to be written (again, more like Java than PHP). And, in case you didn't know, there is a server-side version of Java. It is called JSP (Java Server Pages), and the Apache project is the maintainer of the Open-Source reference implementation of JSP.
Java, however, is sort-of multi-language. I remember seeing once a list of different compilers for a whole bunch of different languages that could compile down to java byte-code.
I too am interested in this question so I hope it get's selected. Honestly, though, I'm guessing that the answer will probably be something along these lines: it would be nice, but the amount of editorial work that would be necessary to mark-up the books, etc already in the database, plus new works, is beyond the scope of the resources of PG.
However, a small number of people die in the Challenger accident and it becomes a national "tragedy" that threatened the existence of the space program. I'm not saying we should be careless in our scientific research (of course all reasonable safety precautions should be adhered to), but if some people are willing to take on potentially dangerous jobs (and no-one ever said being an astronaught doesn't have any risks) to help everyone progress their knowledge; and an occasional accident happens and they die, that's only to be expected and not a good reason to can the space program. (Which, of course, was never completely canned in any case).
Yeah, someone will be maintaining it. They're called Debian. :-P
It's hard to say, but something that might not be enforceable in a U.S. court might be enforcable in a court in another country (or vice-versa). Every country (at least in theory :o) is sovereign, which is to say that it has the right to make and enforce it's own laws. That said, many countries have "reformed" (gotta love euphamisms ;-) their laws, especially regarding Intellectual Property, to come in line with certain international treaties (e.g. WIPO, GATT/WTO), that make their laws the same or simaller to U.S. IP law.
If I wanted to play D&D, I'd go look up my friends and say "Hey, let's do a campaign." I wouldn't go to the Movie theatre. The reason that people had high expectations for this movie, is that the movie makers had so much to begin with: Most fanstasy screen-writers have to make up their worlds from "scratch" (ok, most screen-writers "borrow" heavily from other sources for inspiration, but they still have to do some work to make up the world). In the case of D&D, you have a well-tested, well-balanced "universe" with lots of items, lots of spells, lots of character classes, lots of monsters, and lots of lands. The writer gets lots of cool stuff to use to make their well-structured story even more interesting and fun. It is possible to create really fantastic stories set in the D&D Universe.
Frankly, I'm not going to see a movie that tries to be a cheesy campaign. Nothing says a campaign has to be bad. It's just that most people aren't that creative when it comes to dialogue, and playing their characters. But if I'm going to shell out 8 bucks to see a movie, which is completely structured, I want it to be well written.
As for the near/far focus, yes, I know it is a common technique. The problem I had was that they keep that same shot so long, and the out-of-focus rack is so large and dominating of the screen, that it really started to screw with my head. That is, most directors would keep that shot for a fairly short amount of time, and to your mind, it would approximate fairly well the actual effect of looking down the aisle from the vantage point of the character (in this case Elijah). But when he holds that shot as long as he did, the optical part of my brain, feeling like it is really beholding this scene (because the screen took up my entire field of vision as stated earlier), wanted to temporarily bring the rack in focus and when I couldn't, it bugged me.
Also, it bugged me because for the preceding hour of film, most of the time was spent on very close up shots. The optical part of your brain gets really fed up (at least mine did) with constantly being so close. I just wanted to step back a couple feet and look at things from a normal perspective (which, I know, is the point. The director doesn't want a normal perspective. But after an hour to hour and a half of film, only about three minutes of which is at normal perspective, you get really fatigued.)
To give the director the benefit of the doubt, I suppose he was trying to imitate the comic book form, where close up drawings are very common. However, this works in comic books because that close up drawing is still relatively small, and gives the reader the feeling that they are looking from a normal perspective, just their view is being cut-off, or framed in, by the art cell. Additionally, with a comic book, I can hold the book as close or far away from my head as I want. In the cinema, I don't have that option.
Obviously no, but he still could've done something. I do understand that no hero can fix all the wrongs, even in just Philadelphia. The point of what I wrote was that him seeing five or six people's "dark secrets" just felt somehow gratuitous. Like Shyamalan was reveling in the dark depths the human psyche can sink to, w/o having any plan for "redemption" of the wrong that was done.
The other thing is, Dunn could be a hero even without that "sense", although that sense is cool and does add another comic book hero touch. Heck, he could be walking down the street and see things being done and intervene w/o having to see all those scenes. As far as his "sense" goes, I'm not saying it isn't a good literary/plot device, or detracts from the premise. It is good, I suppose, just because it does leave the viewer with a sense of disquiet (which seems to be the central theme of this movie, making the viewer feel ill-at-ease, as the hero is ill-at-ease with himself and his abilities). Mostly, I'm saying that of all superhero abilities, this is the one I would least like to have myself (you know how you always fantasized about having one or more of superman's or spiderman's super senses, not this one though ;-), because he always see's things after-the-fact when it is too late too stop them.
Hmm...real life isn't like a comic book...maybe you did get the movie but just are[sic] bright enough to realize it.
Again, I understand this is meant to be a more in-depth, "dark" hero-story than your typcical action-hero comic/movie like X-men. And I guess that was appropriate, symbolically, that he came a little too late to do the most good in his rescuing, considering the whole movie is about him hesitating to fulfull his destiny as a protector.
But at some point, a hero story is supposed to be about satisfaction. Satisfaction that there is someone who can right wrongs, someone who can redeem bad circumstances. Someone who can save the day. That is the whole point of hero's. We have this cultural fantasy about hero's because of the fact that we have, in real life, villians. Crazy people, or otherwise that do really awful things; or just stuff that happens that is really aweful, but might not be anybody's fault. We yearn for the someone who steps in and takes away the feeling of violation, the feeling of helplessnes, the feeling of weakness.
Dunn might have stopped the garbage man from continuing to terrorize that family, but the violation was already done, and the audience feels that violation.
As for part two, I don't expect it to be an action fest. That isn't why I went to see this movie in the first place. But I do hope that in part two we get to see him finaly be an effective hero at least. I should think that would be the logical progression from this first movie. That is, this movie is about him discovering himself and his destiny, and being a reluctant and somewhat ineffective hero because of his reluctance. Having finally picked up his role, it seems logical that part two will be about him being a hero, not trying to decide to be one.