TA must have some very clever code to perform as well as it did on machines of its day, but that's nothing some open source developers working their asses off 12 hours a day can't do -- you can bet that's minimum the amount of work that Cavedog put into TA. It's getting artists to make the keen looking units, terrain, and explosions. It's getting a composer to write a soundtrack and a full symphony orchestra to perform it. OSS games tend to look and sound like ass because it's precisely the aesthetic appeal of the game that often gets dismissed as mere fluff -- forgetting that in the big picture, games themselves are mere fluff.
Of course, when advertising a car, Slashdot is hardly well-directed advertising
Slashdot is fabulous turf for car sales. Young, technical (love them gadgets), well-off, single (lots of disposable income), and male. Won't sell a lot of minivans, no, but sportscars, you betcha.
In BearShare's defense, installation of all these programs is optional. I skipped them all because they all looked like crap. Let's see, Yet Another Proprietary Media Format Codec -- specifically targeted for delivering ads (we all want to see more ads, don't we?), some barbie-ware ("tee-hee, let's go shopping!") and another attempt at an AlterNIC, a good idea, but I know of zero sites worth visiting that use them.
I could see myself even putting up with spyware if it was something, well, useful.
I think the terminology here should be used very carefully; these are patches to the official 2.4 kernel. Not kernel branches. Branches indicate disagreement between programmers (remember, corporate viewpoint here).
Spin. They are branches. Ask AC or Linus, they'll call 'em branches, and AC will tell you chapter and verse where he thinks Linus is a complete bonehead for doing or not doing x, y, or z and why it isn't that way in -ac. They're all binary compatible with each other, they're configuration differences, not architecture differences. What they're not are forks. LinuxPPC and ucLinux, to name a couple, are forks.
GGI has a renderer that will render *any* graphics context into ascii art. Neither that nor ttyquake are really all that interesting, all they are is really low res greyscale that chooses characters from a hand-made table based on how "bright" they appear.
What would be really neat would be something that converted bitmap displays into *line* art.
There's a real difference between an ant and my cat: The ant simply responds to stimulus by instinct, with little or no capacity for learning or thought. While cats certainly are not capable of thought on the same level of humans, they are infinately more capable than ants.
My cat routinely behaves in ways that suggest a capacity for comparing past events to present and future ones, an ability to plan, emotional states ranging from "fear" to "anger" and "sense of fun", and other cognitive abilities that are well beyond those of an ant.
There's no doubt that a cat's cognitive capacities are much greater than that of an ant's, but isn't emotion itself an instinctual reaction to stimulus? And one's control over emotions (something humans exhibit) could be stated as reaction to internally generated stimuli from paths in the brain that were previously stimulated in association with stimuli (e.g. being spanked for throwing a tantrum, causing the emotional reaction to be associated next potential tantrum, triggering avoidant response, and the tantrum is quelled). Are you suggesting that such recursive chains of stimuli are somehow transcendant of the physical matter they reside in, that there is an external source of "free will" that cannot be modelled?
Penrose indeed has such a theory, but from what I've read, it seems to boil down to "quantum mechanics is hard, so we're special". I'm not suggesting you're in the "ineffable quality of human intelligence" camp, I just felt like seeing whether you meant for "not in our future" to mean "not in our lifetime" or "not ever".
Genuine Software Engineering (genuine computer science) as in what has yet to be done, rather than having been distracted by the carrot of money since the mid 1950's.
> The very heart of Capitalism - the right to found and operate a business
That's a nice try, but it's hardly the heart. In fact, it sounds like a smokescreen. The heart of capitalism is to be able to own a business, to keep as much money as it makes as you want (yes, taxes are in a sense a check and balance against pure capitalism). In other words, free rein over one's investment and return of capital. Maybe China is indeed moving toward that. Just that in the information age, it seems a bit odd to consider a tightly throttled media a "free market" in any sense.
Mention "translation" and "genuine computer science" in one more post again and you'll have a lock on the Slashdot Kook Of The Month nomination. Sincerely, if you only explain ideas in rants, that's all it is.
Windows DLL's *can* specify a base address, it doesn't *have* to use it. It's a suggestion, but if the address is in use, it will relocate it. Wouldn't be too hard for linux's ld.so to do something similar... would be nice for the development of ld.so to get a divorce from the pile of smegma that is glibc first...
Repeat after me:
Slashdot is the publisher. Send Slashdot anything, any infantile ranting will do as long as it slams Microsoft.
I'd say fuck it, but slashdot continues to amuse me and occupy my attention occasionally. This is however the full extent of the esteem in which I hold this place though.
It's a pretty commonly known fact that commercial software vendors release products with known, but usually obscure, bugs in place so they can make you pay support costs later as your encunter [sic] these bugs.
It's a commonly known fact that GWB and OBL were drinking buddies in college, and that yer mom really isn't as much a screamer as they say... You can't just throw out complete bullshit and preface it by saying "everybody knows" and not expect to get called on it.
They release products with bugs because they won't trip for most people, can patch them later, and the alternative is shipping the product 10 years late at 10 times the price tag.
So, if you divide a distance by a time, you'd better store the result in a variable whose unit is velocity, otherwise you'll get a run-time exception
How quaint. In Haskell or Ocaml, you'll get a compile time error. Perl and python might be great for string munging, and since so much sysadmin and web work is strings, they're great for that, but if you want the rigor of typing, you're using the wrong languages...
7) Watch the Microsoft apologists come out of the woodwork like bugs when you lift a rotted log;)
If not pointing and shouting nanny-nanny-boo-boo and making irrelevant snide faux-clever asides about antitrust suits is being a Microsoft apologist, then baby, count me as one
Modded up as "insightful" after posting the same nonsense everyone else did.
They are *screenshots* of a site. In flash as opposed to being a gigantic animated gif. As in not the actual sites. As in not the actual ads. Do you look at screenshots for a game and think that the game is a slideshow of jpgs? Does nobody possess the capacity for analytical thought anymore?
> IE is not a web browser it's an advertisement delivery device to windows users.
Which must be why IE6 defaults to blocking third-party cookies. Cripes, slashdot is becoming more and more unreadable as rabid morons increasingly get a default of 2.
> It's difficult to see how IE for Mac increases shareholder value for Microsoft.
Brand identity. Same reason Apple gives away Quicktime for windows -- except MS does a bang-up job with IE for the mac, whereas QT for windows is just banged up.
> I dont think I ever mentioned your moral character.
Maybe not you, but I'm constantly being told about how much I whine about this, it's free software, it's their hard work, it's my job to support them, it's my duty to pitch in and help out the team, I'm being unfair, all software has bugs, yadda yadda yadda.
Fine. Except for "all software has bugs", I think it's crap, but even if it's true, it really doesn't matter what a jackass I am for saying it. Ultimately I make a very cold decision: does it do what I need it to? If I really didn't care about Linux *at all* and didn't want to see it improve to do the things I need it to (like decent usb support, which maybe it has now but didn't just a year ago) then I wouldn't bitch. You don't see me bitch too much about the failings of OS/2 or QNX because they're utterly irrelevant to me, I don't use them at all.
It's kinda like a girlfriend: it might be a pain when she's nagging you, but it's over when she gives up and stops.
You're utterly off the mark if you think you're going to provoke me into some Randroid rant in support of capitalism uber alles. Fact is, you know damn well as much as I do that the government does some things well, but other things it throws enormous sums of cash at are still extremely ineffective. You'll note I mentioned other behemoths that lumbered about throwing good money after bad, not just governments.
> The internet? Highways? Electric power (which failed privately)?
Show me a government owned power company in the USA. Regulation is not ownership, much (not all) of it comes because the monopoly was government-enforced in the first place, so they now have to control it. I work in a social service nonprofit, housing comes to mind as something the government consistently screws up (all the effective housing programs here are other nonprofits that don't receive government funds). This is all of course US-centric -- other nations governments might do some of these things well. It just further demonstrates that having the money does not mean it gets spent wisely in every case, which is the point you seem to be trying to sidetrack me from.
Blaming Microsoft competitors for releasing crappy software on windows ignores the significantly higher development costs incurred by orgs that don't have access to the real APIs, don't have advance knowledge of OS changes, don't have the ability to specify OS or API tweaks that will benefit their designs.
Quantify this. Just give me an actual concrete example of "Real API's". Fuck's sake, I can still write DDE applications on Windows 2000. I have a litany of notepad replacements that are like 4 kilobytes, smaller than notepad, and more featureful. Show me IE under a syscall tracer where it makes an undocumented call, oh but you'd rather believe that Microsoft manages to hide the syscall interface somehow so it doesn't show up on tracers. Hey, I've got a unicorn in my living room, but it's *invisible*.
Show me one *developer* from AOL/Netscape or IBM or Sun who couldn't get perfectly good and fast software written because of hidden API's.
Think about it--can you name a non-microsoft app using OLE that actually works well?
Pathetic. I'm trying, but straight OLE really isn't used that much any more, since most custom controls are OCX's, which are pretty much straight COM. Let's see, there's Netscape, which is actually pretty stable on windows. There's Winamp. There's StarOffice. There's Powerbuilder and Delphi. There's every app that embeds IE (e.g. pretty much every major windows p2p file sharing app), or does it only count if the component isn't also by MS? There's the OLE interfaces for OLE clients and servers in various languages, including php and python. Show me where these implementations are broken.
So how'd they get to be a monopoly? Not like there's just a single software mine that they controlled or anything. Recall how Standard Oil got to be a monopoly: their product was better and cheaper.
But you probably have such a blind and visceral hatred of all things Microsoft that you won't consider that they could have gotten there on any shred of merit.
Slashdot Mirror
TA must have some very clever code to perform as well as it did on machines of its day, but that's nothing some open source developers working their asses off 12 hours a day can't do -- you can bet that's minimum the amount of work that Cavedog put into TA. It's getting artists to make the keen looking units, terrain, and explosions. It's getting a composer to write a soundtrack and a full symphony orchestra to perform it. OSS games tend to look and sound like ass because it's precisely the aesthetic appeal of the game that often gets dismissed as mere fluff -- forgetting that in the big picture, games themselves are mere fluff.
So just run morpheus. Same network (fasttrack), no spyware. Ok, so it's buggier than the chinese embassy, but it does the job.
Of course, when advertising a car, Slashdot is hardly well-directed advertising
Slashdot is fabulous turf for car sales. Young, technical (love them gadgets), well-off, single (lots of disposable income), and male. Won't sell a lot of minivans, no, but sportscars, you betcha.
In BearShare's defense, installation of all these programs is optional. I skipped them all because they all looked like crap. Let's see, Yet Another Proprietary Media Format Codec -- specifically targeted for delivering ads (we all want to see more ads, don't we?), some barbie-ware ("tee-hee, let's go shopping!") and another attempt at an AlterNIC, a good idea, but I know of zero sites worth visiting that use them.
I could see myself even putting up with spyware if it was something, well, useful.
but it just took ages every time there was a hit having to PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
I think the terminology here should be used very carefully; these are patches to the official 2.4 kernel. Not kernel branches. Branches indicate disagreement between programmers (remember, corporate viewpoint here).
Spin. They are branches. Ask AC or Linus, they'll call 'em branches, and AC will tell you chapter and verse where he thinks Linus is a complete bonehead for doing or not doing x, y, or z and why it isn't that way in -ac. They're all binary compatible with each other, they're configuration differences, not architecture differences. What they're not are forks. LinuxPPC and ucLinux, to name a couple, are forks.
GGI has a renderer that will render *any* graphics context into ascii art. Neither that nor ttyquake are really all that interesting, all they are is really low res greyscale that chooses characters from a hand-made table based on how "bright" they appear.
What would be really neat would be something that converted bitmap displays into *line* art.
There's a real difference between an ant and my cat: The ant simply responds to stimulus by instinct, with little or no capacity for learning or thought. While cats certainly are not capable of thought on the same level of humans, they are infinately more capable than ants.
My cat routinely behaves in ways that suggest a capacity for comparing past events to present and future ones, an ability to plan, emotional states ranging from "fear" to "anger" and "sense of fun", and other cognitive abilities that are well beyond those of an ant.
There's no doubt that a cat's cognitive capacities are much greater than that of an ant's, but isn't emotion itself an instinctual reaction to stimulus? And one's control over emotions (something humans exhibit) could be stated as reaction to internally generated stimuli from paths in the brain that were previously stimulated in association with stimuli (e.g. being spanked for throwing a tantrum, causing the emotional reaction to be associated next potential tantrum, triggering avoidant response, and the tantrum is quelled). Are you suggesting that such recursive chains of stimuli are somehow transcendant of the physical matter they reside in, that there is an external source of "free will" that cannot be modelled?
Penrose indeed has such a theory, but from what I've read, it seems to boil down to "quantum mechanics is hard, so we're special". I'm not suggesting you're in the "ineffable quality of human intelligence" camp, I just felt like seeing whether you meant for "not in our future" to mean "not in our lifetime" or "not ever".
YHBT. HAND.
Genuine Software Engineering (genuine computer science) as in what has yet to be done, rather than having been distracted by the carrot of money since the mid 1950's.
Congratulations. Here's your nomination.
> The very heart of Capitalism - the right to found and operate a business
That's a nice try, but it's hardly the heart. In fact, it sounds like a smokescreen. The heart of capitalism is to be able to own a business, to keep as much money as it makes as you want (yes, taxes are in a sense a check and balance against pure capitalism). In other words, free rein over one's investment and return of capital. Maybe China is indeed moving toward that. Just that in the information age, it seems a bit odd to consider a tightly throttled media a "free market" in any sense.
Mention "translation" and "genuine computer science" in one more post again and you'll have a lock on the Slashdot Kook Of The Month nomination. Sincerely, if you only explain ideas in rants, that's all it is.
Windows DLL's *can* specify a base address, it doesn't *have* to use it. It's a suggestion, but if the address is in use, it will relocate it. Wouldn't be too hard for linux's ld.so to do something similar ... would be nice for the development of ld.so to get a divorce from the pile of smegma that is glibc first...
Repeat after me:
Italics is the submitter.
Repeat after me:
Slashdot is the publisher. Send Slashdot anything, any infantile ranting will do as long as it slams Microsoft.
I'd say fuck it, but slashdot continues to amuse me and occupy my attention occasionally. This is however the full extent of the esteem in which I hold this place though.
It's a pretty commonly known fact that commercial software vendors release products with known, but usually obscure, bugs in place so they can make you pay support costs later as your encunter [sic] these bugs.
It's a commonly known fact that GWB and OBL were drinking buddies in college, and that yer mom really isn't as much a screamer as they say... You can't just throw out complete bullshit and preface it by saying "everybody knows" and not expect to get called on it.
They release products with bugs because they won't trip for most people, can patch them later, and the alternative is shipping the product 10 years late at 10 times the price tag.
So, if you divide a distance by a time, you'd better store the result in a variable whose unit is velocity, otherwise you'll get a run-time exception
How quaint. In Haskell or Ocaml, you'll get a compile time error. Perl and python might be great for string munging, and since so much sysadmin and web work is strings, they're great for that, but if you want the rigor of typing, you're using the wrong languages...
7) Watch the Microsoft apologists come out of the woodwork like bugs when you lift a rotted log ;)
If not pointing and shouting nanny-nanny-boo-boo and making irrelevant snide faux-clever asides about antitrust suits is being a Microsoft apologist, then baby, count me as one
Modded up as "insightful" after posting the same nonsense everyone else did.
They are *screenshots* of a site. In flash as opposed to being a gigantic animated gif. As in not the actual sites. As in not the actual ads. Do you look at screenshots for a game and think that the game is a slideshow of jpgs? Does nobody possess the capacity for analytical thought anymore?
> IE is not a web browser it's an advertisement delivery device to windows users.
Which must be why IE6 defaults to blocking third-party cookies. Cripes, slashdot is becoming more and more unreadable as rabid morons increasingly get a default of 2.
> It's difficult to see how IE for Mac increases shareholder value for Microsoft.
Brand identity. Same reason Apple gives away Quicktime for windows -- except MS does a bang-up job with IE for the mac, whereas QT for windows is just banged up.
> I dont think I ever mentioned your moral character.
Maybe not you, but I'm constantly being told about how much I whine about this, it's free software, it's their hard work, it's my job to support them, it's my duty to pitch in and help out the team, I'm being unfair, all software has bugs, yadda yadda yadda.
Fine. Except for "all software has bugs", I think it's crap, but even if it's true, it really doesn't matter what a jackass I am for saying it. Ultimately I make a very cold decision: does it do what I need it to? If I really didn't care about Linux *at all* and didn't want to see it improve to do the things I need it to (like decent usb support, which maybe it has now but didn't just a year ago) then I wouldn't bitch. You don't see me bitch too much about the failings of OS/2 or QNX because they're utterly irrelevant to me, I don't use them at all.
It's kinda like a girlfriend: it might be a pain when she's nagging you, but it's over when she gives up and stops.
You're utterly off the mark if you think you're going to provoke me into some Randroid rant in support of capitalism uber alles. Fact is, you know damn well as much as I do that the government does some things well, but other things it throws enormous sums of cash at are still extremely ineffective. You'll note I mentioned other behemoths that lumbered about throwing good money after bad, not just governments.
> The internet? Highways? Electric power (which failed privately)?
Show me a government owned power company in the USA. Regulation is not ownership, much (not all) of it comes because the monopoly was government-enforced in the first place, so they now have to control it. I work in a social service nonprofit, housing comes to mind as something the government consistently screws up (all the effective housing programs here are other nonprofits that don't receive government funds). This is all of course US-centric -- other nations governments might do some of these things well. It just further demonstrates that having the money does not mean it gets spent wisely in every case, which is the point you seem to be trying to sidetrack me from.
Blaming Microsoft competitors for releasing crappy software on windows ignores the significantly higher development costs incurred by orgs that don't have access to the real APIs, don't have advance knowledge of OS changes, don't have the ability to specify OS or API tweaks that will benefit their designs.
Quantify this. Just give me an actual concrete example of "Real API's". Fuck's sake, I can still write DDE applications on Windows 2000. I have a litany of notepad replacements that are like 4 kilobytes, smaller than notepad, and more featureful. Show me IE under a syscall tracer where it makes an undocumented call, oh but you'd rather believe that Microsoft manages to hide the syscall interface somehow so it doesn't show up on tracers. Hey, I've got a unicorn in my living room, but it's *invisible*.
Show me one *developer* from AOL/Netscape or IBM or Sun who couldn't get perfectly good and fast software written because of hidden API's.
Think about it--can you name a non-microsoft app using OLE that actually works well?
Pathetic. I'm trying, but straight OLE really isn't used that much any more, since most custom controls are OCX's, which are pretty much straight COM. Let's see, there's Netscape, which is actually pretty stable on windows. There's Winamp. There's StarOffice. There's Powerbuilder and Delphi. There's every app that embeds IE (e.g. pretty much every major windows p2p file sharing app), or does it only count if the component isn't also by MS? There's the OLE interfaces for OLE clients and servers in various languages, including php and python. Show me where these implementations are broken.
Have you ever even programmed on Windows?
> My answer, one word: monopoly
So how'd they get to be a monopoly? Not like there's just a single software mine that they controlled or anything. Recall how Standard Oil got to be a monopoly: their product was better and cheaper.
But you probably have such a blind and visceral hatred of all things Microsoft that you won't consider that they could have gotten there on any shred of merit.
> IOW, have more money than God and throw it at any problem you're having trouble with
Didn't work for IBM in the early 90's, didn't work for Detroit in the late 70's and early 80's, still doesn't work for the government.