Out with the old, in with the new
on
Is Usenet Dying?
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· Score: 2
I have been a longtime user of Usenet and still kill a good 20 hours a week looping through my favored groups. But I am getting more fed up with it each year, not because it is tired or difficult to use or boring, because it is none of those. Instead, it has become bloated; I'd bet a good 60-70% of newsgroups never get any traffic, and the ones that do are inundated with spam. Messages expire in no time at all due to the absolute flood of spam that clogs up the Usenet servers, making FIFO actually work against the users. It really saddens me to see it in its current state, because there really is a plethora of great info to be had out there, but most people will never see it because they're driven off by the bloated waste that has attached itself in the form of useless groups and spam.
What I'd like to see is a new Usenet, a Usenet2; not like the invitation-only self titled so-called Internet2, but a new newsgroup system. I'm no ubergeek, so I don't know what would go into a project like that, but probably far too much for anyone to want to bother. But it really would be great to have a new system that is built from the ground up to help prevent the problems that are ruining Usenet.
Well, creating a new Usenet format probably wouldn't be THAT difficult to do, except for one minor little detail that screws the whole thing up: Usenet's current problems aren't caused by poor technology, they are caused by people. People create useless groups, people send out tons of spam, people don't bother to behave with at least a minimal amount of respect towards one another, people fuck up the whole works! And what can really be done about that while maintaining the things that make Usenet great, like anonymity, diversity, widespread access and ease of use? Fuck all if I know, to be quite honest, but if anyone has some good ideas, I'd love to help make it happen, because even as much as I dig Usenet, the bullshit is beginning to run a bit too thick. And it is bullshit when the casual user is being driven away because these days you have to devote a lot of time to reading even one newsgroup just to follow the topics of discussion, as newsservers are forced to push articles out faster all the time to make room for new articles and volumes of spam. And good luck finding populated groups that actually discuss the group topic. *shrug* Maybe they're right, maybe Usenet is dying.
Werd on the EQ port! The response that I've receive from Verant when inquiring about an Everquest port for Linux has been somewhat equivalent to "cold day in hell", but they are also well reknown for doing opinion 180s.:)
Of course, the great news for us MMORPG addicts who have a distaste for Ultima Online is that the coolest upcoming MMORPG, Atriarch, WILL have a Linux port! In fact, its being developed in Linux and the server will be run on a Beowulf cluster, as they are only going to have one giant world upon which everyone resides.:) Only bummer is that Serafina, the lead designer for Atriarch, says that open sourcing the client is out of the question to prevent exploits.:( Damn, almost the perfect game: MMORPG, sci-fi, Linux client, runs on a Beowulf cluster, design headed by a cool chick 8), but not open source... Bah, I'll live.:)
Whew! Let's see if we can burn off some of that meaningless karma here...
You, sir, are either an utter baffoon or a determined troll. After reading your post, I just had to have a look at this site, as the idea of a bunch of misleading information being provided targeted at newbies pissed be off. Within 10 minutes of browsing their site, I have found clear solutions to three different problems that have bugged the hell out of me for a good, long time; two of them I thought were simply impossible as they were related to "made for Windows" hardware that I own that require a Windows program to operate! The instructions that I found were well written and very methodical, so that someone who had just learned to expand a tarball could follow them. This is a truly amazing site and should be praised for its amazing newbie friendliness and quantity of information. If you somehow found discrepancies, then you should have better spent your time submitting your views to them, as they openly solicit feedback on damn near every other page and welcome new information from users. I never heard of Linuxnewbie before reading your post, but I foresee spending many, many hours perusing its excellent content.
Hmm, actually with the proper filtering in place, you would be able to repeatedly use the same batch of fuel, but it wouldn't last forever as only a portion of the byproduct of the reaction is CO2, the rest being useless crap as far as this cycle goes. This would be an awesome method to use on a CO2-rich planet to provide power, though, as fuel wouldn't be an issue.:)
It may have something to do with this quote from the Corporate Profile section of the About VA portion of their website: "Also during the first quarter of 1999, VA attracted equity funding from well-known Sequoia Capital and from Intel. Likely a matter of not biting the hand that feeds you.
Now you release the latest code?!? Now?!? I finally got the damn pre0.3 to work!!!
Just kidding (well, not about getting pre0.3 to work).:) Actually, thank you very much for releasing this as I have been looking forward to getting a hold of a more recent version of the code. And more importantly, thank you for the additional support towards the code, such as the Slashcode site and CVS tree.:) I really appreciate it.
Um, hate to break it to you, but there is only one version of the Bill of Rights, and it prohibits government from inhibiting freedom of speech except under extreme circumstances, such as national security risks or death threats. I think your high school teacher may have misinformed you.:(
I'm not one to make corrections, but with mistakes this fundamental, I feel that I have to or people will have the entirely wrong idea.
The Crusoe processor is not a RISC processor; the presenter was involved in the development of the RISC processor ~1980. The Crusoe family (there are two being presented, with more to be announced) is a small processor that does not have any instructions on the chip itself; it has a software couterpart that translates standard x86 instruction calls to the chip itself. It is completely x86 compatable and the two that were demonstrated operate at 1 watt, making it ideal for mobile computing platforms. To summarize, Transmeta has created a brand new processor family that uses software to handle many of the functionality that is traditionally embedded on the CPU itself.
Oh, and the "marketing geek" is David Ditzel, CEO and president of Transmeta, one of the architects of the Sun SPARC microprocessor and longtime advocate of the RISC architecture; I highly recommend checking out some of the books and articles that he has written over the past 25 or so years working with microprocessors, as they are quite interesting. I will admit that he did abuse the "Internet" line a bit much, especially since he was introducing a bloody processor.:)
Holy shit! I don't know if I could possibly believe this one, but just the thought of clocking an SX-25 to 247 MHz and playing Half-Life on it (even for only 3 minutes or so:)) is friggin awesome.:) Thanks so much for the link!
I would agree with you to a point, but we are all made up differently. I am in total agreement with him, myself. Yes, perhaps once a week, I'd like to go out for a couple of hours, but even then it would only be to window shop for cool new toys or to catch a movie. I detest having to go out in public; I hate having to wander about with strangers, and worse yet communicate with them in person. I am very antisocial, and while my mother-in-law considers it a fault, it suits me just fine, because it is what makes me happy.
You said, "I know that it's not quite the same thing, but I think there's something to be said for living life, rather than reading it." So if I were to find a way to never have to leave the house; i.e. work at home, have everything delivered, etc. then I wouldn't really be living life? In "real life", I am extrodinarily bored dealing with the world around me. I am rarely in a good mood when I'm out of the house. But when I'm at home, spending time with my wife and daughter or sitting at the computer, I am usually happy, or at a minimum content. I would argue that my overall quality of life, much like the poster to whom you responded to, would actually improve if we did not have to deal with the outside world on a physical basis. I certainly understand your point of view, but I also understand that it is your point of view and has absolutely nothing to do with the way that anyone else thinks or feels.
To be honest, I envy you and everyone else who enjoys getting out and meeting people, because that's how society is set up. So when you have to go run an errand, its all good because you felt like getting out of the house for while anyway. But some of us aren't built that way, so having to go to work, to the store, etc. is just an uncomfortable situation that we'd rather not be forced to deal with. I'm not a lazy man (well, in some cases..:)), so its not an issue of taking the time or effort to go out and do things, I simply don't want to deal with other people on a one to one basis. My apologies to all those who cannot comprehend that way of thinking, as it seems to upset many of you greatly that there are those of us who feel this way. (That last wasn't targeted at you, Jennifer, but to the world at large:))
Of course I wouldn't have; Bart Simpson is a character on a Fox program, so they would have simply covered him with a digitized CBS reporter, or a talking cartoon CBS logo, and I would have never known that Bart Simpson had visited the CBS studio.:)
The little desktop that crayola built. LOL! Sorry, no offense to the creator or those who like desktops that look like this; I'm just a more subdued theme kind of guy.:)
But seriously, this and the Yahoo cease and desist story posted just before this one raise an interesting question: How do trademarks apply for displayed computer content and what is the limit on what can be trademarked? In the Yahoo case, it is quite obvious that it is based on Yahoo, as they use a direct copy of their logo, so it is very likely that Yahoo will have a legal leg to stand on, but in this case, it is the overall appearance that is being "copied", although the appearance isn't quite what the Aqua's is. If I hadn't seen it in conjunction with this story, I would have thought that the creator of the skin simply liked bright, happy colors and that it bore a semblance to the Aqua look. I mean, it is fairly generic and doesn't use any logos that make it obvious that it is an Aqua copy. With millions of webpages out there and more being made every day, I would imagine that there are a lot of unintentional look-alikes, so where do you draw the line between similar and "stolen"?
And exactly what harm is coming to the subscribers? They can't get their alt.sex.stories feed for a few days? How's about we look at the harm caused to countless ISPs who host news servers around the world. Spam has been estimated to account for approximately 15% of the total traffic on the internet. When that spam is posted on Usenet, it is being copied to thousands of computers. The amount of space that spam takes up on news servers alone, not even counting email, just news, can be measured in terrabytes. This causes ISPs to have to upgrade their servers and bandwidth to levels far higher than would otherwise be necessary.
Of course, who cares about a bunch of ISPs being financially harmed, suffering very real losses to their business, when @Home subscribers are being inconvenienced and may have to resort to using Deja.com to read Usenet messages? As an end user, I care! Who do you think gets passed the cost of the otherwise unnecessasary upgrades? Who do you think suffers a degradation in connection quality due to the massive spam traffic going through the Internet? Who do you think gets a reduced Usenet feed because the FIFO (first in, first out) nature of most news servers causes spam to expire legitimate traffic sooner than it should. We, the collective users of the Internet, do! And I'm one of the lucky ones; I don't have to pay for the amount of time that I'm connected. But many people do, and they are forced to remain online for much longer than necessary because their news reader or email reader doesn't know spam from any other message and downloads it all.
Spammers force us all to pay for their advertising; they are far, far worse than pickpockets, because pickpockets are far less widespread and don't steal from millions of people at a time. And the only people that can do anything about the massive onslaught of spam coming from @Home users is @Home; I can't stop them, you can't stop them, the collective readership of Usenet can't stop them. Only @Home can do anything about it, and if they choose to turn a blind eye and let hundreds of people steal from me and every other user of Usenet then fuck em, their business can go straight into the toilet, and the faster the better, because every day that they are connected to the Internet, they are allowing hundreds of scumbags to steal money directly from backbone providers, ISPs and end users. The average @Home user has to use another news service for a while until @Home pulls their heads out and gets with the program. I'll take the lesser of two evils and support the UDP.
I was all sorts of ready to blow LPI off as another company trying to pull a quick buck on the Linux bandwagon, until I read their legal info on the website; to quote:
Linux Professional Institute, Inc. was officially granted status as a non-profit corporation, incorporated in the Province of New Brunswick, Canada, October 25, 1999.
Now I understand that this doesn't necessarily mean that their certification is worth a damn, but it does make me much more inclined to accept that they are looking to help the community by offering a way for us Linux users to certify our knowledge for employers who would otherwise have no standard to go by. Methinks I'll be looking further into an LPI cert.:)
You must be talking about that place over on East Colonial, next to the theater in that shopping center across from Fashion Square Mall. They've had that damn word in the window for a couple years now, yet I've never heard anyone mention a Cuchifrito when talking about Mexican munchies.
Great, I can see the Road Warrior-esque future now: "Look out! Its CmdrChalupa and the Cuchifritos!" Erm, sorry.:)
Agreed on all counts, even though I would love to get a hold of the current incarnation myself.:) Thanks for the Slash-help link; I'll try to avoid sending any questions and just lurk nicely, since I probably won't be able to get it working anyhow as I royally suck at interpreting other people's code and have spent many hours trying to get pre0.3 and variants like Squishdot working (I love Linux, but make install can suck my ass, as it NEVER installs the damn files to the right directories, so I have to hunt forever just to get everything in place, because I don't even know what the right directories are supposed to be until I get three billion error messages when compiling an app that depends on the fucked install). I think that its highly cool that they released the code to the site at all and, although I don't get why they just don't release the code as is and let all the code nuts who want to pick and poke at it fix the damn code for them so they can get on with programming the Aibo to piss on the neighbor's cat, I figure that its their business when they release it.
If you've got such a bug up your ass about farting around with the code, then grab the pre0.3 tarball and get it working, then let me know how in the hell you accomplished such a feat.:) Hell, I'm no coder, just know a little C, perl, java, and not even enough of those to get any from this miserable tech support job, but even I grabbed the damn tarball at have been poking at it rather than bitching to the/. kiddies about releasing a newer version. Sheesh, reminds me why I never want to leave the house; too many damn people in the world, and most of them will drive that knife home the first chance they get.
*hands padded glove to Hemos to pat himself on the back with*
Jeez, man, he just posted an interesting link related to part of the post. I understand that people visiting that site may take away from some of the/. banner views, but damn, that nearly made me wince.
Is that specified in your contract? If it's not in your contract, you essentially told them that it is acceptable. If you don't require them to do it, why should they spend extra money to do it?
OK, its not in his contract, so he has no legal recourse. Who cares? Smart business isn't about doing exactly what you stated to your customer and fuck all else, its about making your customers happy, even when the proverbial shit hits the fan. In this case, CI seems to have dropped the ball. Did they violate the contracts that they held with their customers? Probably not. Is that little fact going to keep a truckload of their customers from finding another hosting service? Likely not! Anyone who runs a business with the attitude of, "Well, were doing just what we stated we would and no more" is looking to go out of business in a very big hurry.
Your question was, "If you don't require them to do it, why should they spend extra money to do it?" The simple answer is: Because that's how smart business is done. CI probably won't get sued over this little fiasco, but I'd hate to be in their office when next months financials come out.
Sounds more like marketing hype than anything. What makes the Internet the Internet and not just another large WAN is the fact that anyone can jump on and become a part of it. Perhaps someday this will become Internet II, but right now its just an invitation only high-speed WAN. So if I create a new network that move info a bit faster than "Internet II" and hook up a few machines to it, I can call it Internet III, right? Bah, I'm not impressed; they may as well sell their network to Microsoft just to make sure its run by folks who are expert in running things their way and shutting anyone else who won't improve their bottom line out.
Yes, I undertstand that it would take something on the order of the US national debt to upgrade the Internet to "Internet II" capabilities, but it seems pretty damned precocious for them to be calling their new toy Internet II when the only thing it shares in similarity to the Internet is that it connects computers. But, of course, it will be highly praised because it serves a loftier purpose and doesn't cater to those pathetic outsiders. To quote the article: I-2 is only currently available to institutions of higher learning, and organizers don't see that changing any time soon. The whole idea is to take down roadblocks from the first Internet, like heavy traffic and slow interfaces, and speed things up for college researchers sharing information. Yeah, I'm still having nightmares about those slow-as-molasses connections that I got while I was attending a community college; took me damn near an hour to pull down a 300 MB iso on that slow beast.
I've got nothing against these colleges using the insane amounts of money that they make to build themselves up the geek equivalent of the good-ole-boy network, but labeling it "Internet II" makes me want to wretch from the oily marketing feel of the whole project. Hey, more power to them; in a few years, they'll start trickling their discarded leftovers to the rest of the world and we might begin to see improvements in the real Internet. *shrug*
Um, could someone please verify or deny this one? I mean, a distro without make... I can't remember the last time I installed an app that didn't require me to use make; how in the hell???
Somehow, I just can't bring myself to trust a company that comes out of nowhere, offering carbon-copy products and BS marketing, that claims to have a half-million dollar software distribution arrangement with a company that sells $7.95 software and has a Hotmail address for a point of contact. Why do I get the feeling that the LinuxOne board members all have secondary accounts set up under false names that are going to just happen to get an invite into the LinuxOne IPO and just happen to invest a crapload of cash into it and then just happen to sell off at the end of the first day of trading, just hours before the aforementioned board members disappear? Guess I'm just paranoid...
This idiot preaches on like us tech support folks are a bunch of malicious psychotics who revel in the fact that the people who call us don't know nearly as much about computers as we do. The reason that we bitch and moan and joke about the calls that we get is simply to keep our fucking sanity intact! Tech support is easily one of the worst jobs you could assign a geek to; we're required to interact with people we don't know, we have to deal with the same crap over and over and over again, we don't get to play with any cool, new toys, just the same old shit repeatedly. I don't joke with my fellow techs because I think that my customers are morons (well, most of them anyway), I do it for therapy. And it certainly doesn't help that we have to sympathize with these folks who call, yet they don't give a rat's ass for our situation; shit, if everything doesn't come out roses and cherubs then we're the fucking bad guys! Kurtz can kiss my ass; although to be honest, I envy the shit out of him, as he is obviously lucky enough to be a techhead who likes associating with people. But I'll try to think of his wonderful words of wisdom the next time I wake in a cold sweat or puke my guts out on my lunch break as the stress finally cooks off.
At least UF offers some perspective, whereas his useless bitching only serves to show what a pompous ass he is. I read UF and I laugh my ass off as I see my life parodied on a daily basis. I read Kurtz's column and could only think of how badly I want to drop this fucking headset and walk out the door. Unfortunately for us folks who have a family to take care of and can't afford to hang out in college for four years, tech support is our only door into the industry.
I just got off of a call that left a guy very dissatisfied, but there was NOTHING that I could do because it involved matters that were out of my hands; of course, those folks who were only too happy to inform me of these policies were able to pass their wisdom onto me and walk away while I got to tell this guy all of the great news, whereupon he unloads the miseries of his world on me, like I can do something. So I've got a few choices: go back to renting videos to people for minimum wage, putting my wife and daughter in a very shitty situation; shoot myself in the head and make it all go away, leaving my wife and daughter in the aforementioned shitty situation; or laugh as much as I possibly can. More and more every day I hate my fellow man, because I get too many calls where the person on the other end of the line is an asshole; this has nothing to do with their level of computer literacy but with their shitty attitudes when they do call, especially considering that they called us for help! So fuck you and your holier-than-thou bullshit; I'm going to go read some User Friendly and try to get some perspective back.
Petrified Iron Clad solution: Rob, Jeff - Create the/. API that let's us parse titles and content in articles
You probably meant this as a joke, but I got to thinking about this a bit. What if there was an online listing of the man pages done as a Slash page, where each man page, HOWTO, etc. is posted like an article and users could contribute their own advice, questions, tips, warnings, etc. about that particular command or application? It would have to be well indexed and have a reliable search engine that could lead someone with a question to the appropriate "article", perhaps with an option to allow users to see a listing of what pages have been commented on since their last login, so they can go to articles that they had a question about or have a thorough knowledge about and see the replies and post answers to. It probably wouldn't be feasible because of the massive amount of documentation out there, but it would be an amazing resource to both newbies and power users; kind of like all of the Linux newsgroups in an indexed, easy to use format that doesn't expire. As a bonus, it would provide feedback to the many developers of applications for Linux on their creations to give them an idea of what could be improved in future versions.
Hell, I'm stupid enough to give it a shot, although I'm not a coder by any stretch (rudimentary HTML skills and just starting to learn Perl, which kicks serious ass after learning C and Java:)) so I definately couldn't do it alone, but I'd love to help put together a project like this. You code kidz let me know how realistic this sort of thing would be and, if it seems as though it may be realistically possible, I might just be silly and try to sucker some folks into getting together to plug away at such a resource. If it is, and you're bored enough with real life to want to contribute to such an endeavor, shoot me a line at deosyneNOSPAM@bellsouth.net and maybe we can get something going.:) Just don't bore me with flames that lack any reason; if its a stupid idea, tell me why.
I'm somewhat amused that you took it for "jumping, but no matter; I'm actually in rare good humor today.:) I presume Taco is in a fine mood as well, so I'll assume that he will interpret it as the playful ribbing that it is.;) Happy Holidays, everyone!:)
Slashdot Mirror
I have been a longtime user of Usenet and still kill a good 20 hours a week looping through my favored groups. But I am getting more fed up with it each year, not because it is tired or difficult to use or boring, because it is none of those. Instead, it has become bloated; I'd bet a good 60-70% of newsgroups never get any traffic, and the ones that do are inundated with spam. Messages expire in no time at all due to the absolute flood of spam that clogs up the Usenet servers, making FIFO actually work against the users. It really saddens me to see it in its current state, because there really is a plethora of great info to be had out there, but most people will never see it because they're driven off by the bloated waste that has attached itself in the form of useless groups and spam.
What I'd like to see is a new Usenet, a Usenet2; not like the invitation-only self titled so-called Internet2, but a new newsgroup system. I'm no ubergeek, so I don't know what would go into a project like that, but probably far too much for anyone to want to bother. But it really would be great to have a new system that is built from the ground up to help prevent the problems that are ruining Usenet.
Well, creating a new Usenet format probably wouldn't be THAT difficult to do, except for one minor little detail that screws the whole thing up: Usenet's current problems aren't caused by poor technology, they are caused by people. People create useless groups, people send out tons of spam, people don't bother to behave with at least a minimal amount of respect towards one another, people fuck up the whole works! And what can really be done about that while maintaining the things that make Usenet great, like anonymity, diversity, widespread access and ease of use? Fuck all if I know, to be quite honest, but if anyone has some good ideas, I'd love to help make it happen, because even as much as I dig Usenet, the bullshit is beginning to run a bit too thick. And it is bullshit when the casual user is being driven away because these days you have to devote a lot of time to reading even one newsgroup just to follow the topics of discussion, as newsservers are forced to push articles out faster all the time to make room for new articles and volumes of spam. And good luck finding populated groups that actually discuss the group topic. *shrug* Maybe they're right, maybe Usenet is dying.
Deosyne
Werd on the EQ port! The response that I've receive from Verant when inquiring about an Everquest port for Linux has been somewhat equivalent to "cold day in hell", but they are also well reknown for doing opinion 180s. :)
:) Only bummer is that Serafina, the lead designer for Atriarch, says that open sourcing the client is out of the question to prevent exploits. :( Damn, almost the perfect game: MMORPG, sci-fi, Linux client, runs on a Beowulf cluster, design headed by a cool chick 8), but not open source... Bah, I'll live. :)
Of course, the great news for us MMORPG addicts who have a distaste for Ultima Online is that the coolest upcoming MMORPG, Atriarch, WILL have a Linux port! In fact, its being developed in Linux and the server will be run on a Beowulf cluster, as they are only going to have one giant world upon which everyone resides.
Deosyne
Whew! Let's see if we can burn off some of that meaningless karma here...
You, sir, are either an utter baffoon or a determined troll. After reading your post, I just had to have a look at this site, as the idea of a bunch of misleading information being provided targeted at newbies pissed be off. Within 10 minutes of browsing their site, I have found clear solutions to three different problems that have bugged the hell out of me for a good, long time; two of them I thought were simply impossible as they were related to "made for Windows" hardware that I own that require a Windows program to operate! The instructions that I found were well written and very methodical, so that someone who had just learned to expand a tarball could follow them. This is a truly amazing site and should be praised for its amazing newbie friendliness and quantity of information. If you somehow found discrepancies, then you should have better spent your time submitting your views to them, as they openly solicit feedback on damn near every other page and welcome new information from users. I never heard of Linuxnewbie before reading your post, but I foresee spending many, many hours perusing its excellent content.
Deosyne
Hmm, actually with the proper filtering in place, you would be able to repeatedly use the same batch of fuel, but it wouldn't last forever as only a portion of the byproduct of the reaction is CO2, the rest being useless crap as far as this cycle goes. This would be an awesome method to use on a CO2-rich planet to provide power, though, as fuel wouldn't be an issue. :)
Deosyne
It may have something to do with this quote from the Corporate Profile section of the About VA portion of their website: "Also during the first quarter of 1999, VA attracted equity funding from well-known Sequoia Capital and from Intel. Likely a matter of not biting the hand that feeds you.
Deosyne
Now you release the latest code?!? Now?!? I finally got the damn pre0.3 to work!!!
:) Actually, thank you very much for releasing this as I have been looking forward to getting a hold of a more recent version of the code. And more importantly, thank you for the additional support towards the code, such as the Slashcode site and CVS tree. :) I really appreciate it.
Just kidding (well, not about getting pre0.3 to work).
Deosyne
TWINKIES! Ah, the fun of experiencing The Twinkies Project with full smell-enabled hyperlinks...
:) Maybe the High Times website would be safer. :)
Thinking about it now, I think I might be ill.
Deosyne
Um, hate to break it to you, but there is only one version of the Bill of Rights, and it prohibits government from inhibiting freedom of speech except under extreme circumstances, such as national security risks or death threats. I think your high school teacher may have misinformed you. :(
Deosyne
I'm not one to make corrections, but with mistakes this fundamental, I feel that I have to or people will have the entirely wrong idea.
:)
The Crusoe processor is not a RISC processor; the presenter was involved in the development of the RISC processor ~1980. The Crusoe family (there are two being presented, with more to be announced) is a small processor that does not have any instructions on the chip itself; it has a software couterpart that translates standard x86 instruction calls to the chip itself. It is completely x86 compatable and the two that were demonstrated operate at 1 watt, making it ideal for mobile computing platforms. To summarize, Transmeta has created a brand new processor family that uses software to handle many of the functionality that is traditionally embedded on the CPU itself.
Oh, and the "marketing geek" is David Ditzel, CEO and president of Transmeta, one of the architects of the Sun SPARC microprocessor and longtime advocate of the RISC architecture; I highly recommend checking out some of the books and articles that he has written over the past 25 or so years working with microprocessors, as they are quite interesting. I will admit that he did abuse the "Internet" line a bit much, especially since he was introducing a bloody processor.
Deosyne
If you want to see some crazy-assed OCing, check this out: :)
:)) is friggin awesome. :) Thanks so much for the link!
http://totl.net/Eunuch/Eunuch2.html
Now *thats* serious
Holy shit! I don't know if I could possibly believe this one, but just the thought of clocking an SX-25 to 247 MHz and playing Half-Life on it (even for only 3 minutes or so
Deosyne
I would agree with you to a point, but we are all made up differently. I am in total agreement with him, myself. Yes, perhaps once a week, I'd like to go out for a couple of hours, but even then it would only be to window shop for cool new toys or to catch a movie. I detest having to go out in public; I hate having to wander about with strangers, and worse yet communicate with them in person. I am very antisocial, and while my mother-in-law considers it a fault, it suits me just fine, because it is what makes me happy.
:)), so its not an issue of taking the time or effort to go out and do things, I simply don't want to deal with other people on a one to one basis. My apologies to all those who cannot comprehend that way of thinking, as it seems to upset many of you greatly that there are those of us who feel this way. (That last wasn't targeted at you, Jennifer, but to the world at large :))
You said, "I know that it's not quite the same thing, but I think there's something to be said for living life, rather than reading it." So if I were to find a way to never have to leave the house; i.e. work at home, have everything delivered, etc. then I wouldn't really be living life? In "real life", I am extrodinarily bored dealing with the world around me. I am rarely in a good mood when I'm out of the house. But when I'm at home, spending time with my wife and daughter or sitting at the computer, I am usually happy, or at a minimum content. I would argue that my overall quality of life, much like the poster to whom you responded to, would actually improve if we did not have to deal with the outside world on a physical basis. I certainly understand your point of view, but I also understand that it is your point of view and has absolutely nothing to do with the way that anyone else thinks or feels.
To be honest, I envy you and everyone else who enjoys getting out and meeting people, because that's how society is set up. So when you have to go run an errand, its all good because you felt like getting out of the house for while anyway. But some of us aren't built that way, so having to go to work, to the store, etc. is just an uncomfortable situation that we'd rather not be forced to deal with. I'm not a lazy man (well, in some cases..
Deosyne
Of course I wouldn't have; Bart Simpson is a character on a Fox program, so they would have simply covered him with a digitized CBS reporter, or a talking cartoon CBS logo, and I would have never known that Bart Simpson had visited the CBS studio. :)
Deosyne
The little desktop that crayola built. LOL! Sorry, no offense to the creator or those who like desktops that look like this; I'm just a more subdued theme kind of guy. :)
But seriously, this and the Yahoo cease and desist story posted just before this one raise an interesting question: How do trademarks apply for displayed computer content and what is the limit on what can be trademarked? In the Yahoo case, it is quite obvious that it is based on Yahoo, as they use a direct copy of their logo, so it is very likely that Yahoo will have a legal leg to stand on, but in this case, it is the overall appearance that is being "copied", although the appearance isn't quite what the Aqua's is. If I hadn't seen it in conjunction with this story, I would have thought that the creator of the skin simply liked bright, happy colors and that it bore a semblance to the Aqua look. I mean, it is fairly generic and doesn't use any logos that make it obvious that it is an Aqua copy. With millions of webpages out there and more being made every day, I would imagine that there are a lot of unintentional look-alikes, so where do you draw the line between similar and "stolen"?
Deosyne
And exactly what harm is coming to the subscribers? They can't get their alt.sex.stories feed for a few days? How's about we look at the harm caused to countless ISPs who host news servers around the world. Spam has been estimated to account for approximately 15% of the total traffic on the internet. When that spam is posted on Usenet, it is being copied to thousands of computers. The amount of space that spam takes up on news servers alone, not even counting email, just news, can be measured in terrabytes. This causes ISPs to have to upgrade their servers and bandwidth to levels far higher than would otherwise be necessary.
Of course, who cares about a bunch of ISPs being financially harmed, suffering very real losses to their business, when @Home subscribers are being inconvenienced and may have to resort to using Deja.com to read Usenet messages? As an end user, I care ! Who do you think gets passed the cost of the otherwise unnecessasary upgrades? Who do you think suffers a degradation in connection quality due to the massive spam traffic going through the Internet? Who do you think gets a reduced Usenet feed because the FIFO (first in, first out) nature of most news servers causes spam to expire legitimate traffic sooner than it should. We, the collective users of the Internet, do! And I'm one of the lucky ones; I don't have to pay for the amount of time that I'm connected. But many people do, and they are forced to remain online for much longer than necessary because their news reader or email reader doesn't know spam from any other message and downloads it all.
Spammers force us all to pay for their advertising; they are far, far worse than pickpockets, because pickpockets are far less widespread and don't steal from millions of people at a time. And the only people that can do anything about the massive onslaught of spam coming from @Home users is @Home; I can't stop them, you can't stop them, the collective readership of Usenet can't stop them. Only @Home can do anything about it, and if they choose to turn a blind eye and let hundreds of people steal from me and every other user of Usenet then fuck em, their business can go straight into the toilet, and the faster the better, because every day that they are connected to the Internet, they are allowing hundreds of scumbags to steal money directly from backbone providers, ISPs and end users. The average @Home user has to use another news service for a while until @Home pulls their heads out and gets with the program. I'll take the lesser of two evils and support the UDP.
Deosyne
I was all sorts of ready to blow LPI off as another company trying to pull a quick buck on the Linux bandwagon, until I read their legal info on the website; to quote:
:)
Linux Professional Institute, Inc. was officially granted status as a non-profit corporation, incorporated in the Province of New Brunswick, Canada, October 25, 1999.
Now I understand that this doesn't necessarily mean that their certification is worth a damn, but it does make me much more inclined to accept that they are looking to help the community by offering a way for us Linux users to certify our knowledge for employers who would otherwise have no standard to go by. Methinks I'll be looking further into an LPI cert.
Deosyne
You must be talking about that place over on East Colonial, next to the theater in that shopping center across from Fashion Square Mall. They've had that damn word in the window for a couple years now, yet I've never heard anyone mention a Cuchifrito when talking about Mexican munchies.
:)
Great, I can see the Road Warrior-esque future now: "Look out! Its CmdrChalupa and the Cuchifritos!" Erm, sorry.
Deosyne
Agreed on all counts, even though I would love to get a hold of the current incarnation myself. :) Thanks for the Slash-help link; I'll try to avoid sending any questions and just lurk nicely, since I probably won't be able to get it working anyhow as I royally suck at interpreting other people's code and have spent many hours trying to get pre0.3 and variants like Squishdot working (I love Linux, but make install can suck my ass, as it NEVER installs the damn files to the right directories, so I have to hunt forever just to get everything in place, because I don't even know what the right directories are supposed to be until I get three billion error messages when compiling an app that depends on the fucked install). I think that its highly cool that they released the code to the site at all and, although I don't get why they just don't release the code as is and let all the code nuts who want to pick and poke at it fix the damn code for them so they can get on with programming the Aibo to piss on the neighbor's cat, I figure that its their business when they release it.
:) Hell, I'm no coder, just know a little C, perl, java, and not even enough of those to get any from this miserable tech support job, but even I grabbed the damn tarball at have been poking at it rather than bitching to the /. kiddies about releasing a newer version. Sheesh, reminds me why I never want to leave the house; too many damn people in the world, and most of them will drive that knife home the first chance they get.
If you've got such a bug up your ass about farting around with the code, then grab the pre0.3 tarball and get it working, then let me know how in the hell you accomplished such a feat.
Deosyne
*hands padded glove to Hemos to pat himself on the back with*
/. banner views, but damn, that nearly made me wince.
Jeez, man, he just posted an interesting link related to part of the post. I understand that people visiting that site may take away from some of the
Deosyne
Is that specified in your contract? If it's not in your contract, you essentially told them that it is acceptable. If you don't require them to do it, why should they spend extra money to do it?
OK, its not in his contract, so he has no legal recourse. Who cares? Smart business isn't about doing exactly what you stated to your customer and fuck all else, its about making your customers happy, even when the proverbial shit hits the fan. In this case, CI seems to have dropped the ball. Did they violate the contracts that they held with their customers? Probably not. Is that little fact going to keep a truckload of their customers from finding another hosting service? Likely not! Anyone who runs a business with the attitude of, "Well, were doing just what we stated we would and no more" is looking to go out of business in a very big hurry.
Your question was, "If you don't require them to do it, why should they spend extra money to do it?" The simple answer is: Because that's how smart business is done. CI probably won't get sued over this little fiasco, but I'd hate to be in their office when next months financials come out.
Deosyne
Sounds more like marketing hype than anything. What makes the Internet the Internet and not just another large WAN is the fact that anyone can jump on and become a part of it. Perhaps someday this will become Internet II, but right now its just an invitation only high-speed WAN. So if I create a new network that move info a bit faster than "Internet II" and hook up a few machines to it, I can call it Internet III, right? Bah, I'm not impressed; they may as well sell their network to Microsoft just to make sure its run by folks who are expert in running things their way and shutting anyone else who won't improve their bottom line out.
Yes, I undertstand that it would take something on the order of the US national debt to upgrade the Internet to "Internet II" capabilities, but it seems pretty damned precocious for them to be calling their new toy Internet II when the only thing it shares in similarity to the Internet is that it connects computers. But, of course, it will be highly praised because it serves a loftier purpose and doesn't cater to those pathetic outsiders. To quote the article: I-2 is only currently available to institutions of higher learning, and organizers don't see that changing any time soon. The whole idea is to take down roadblocks from the first Internet, like heavy traffic and slow interfaces, and speed things up for college researchers sharing information. Yeah, I'm still having nightmares about those slow-as-molasses connections that I got while I was attending a community college; took me damn near an hour to pull down a 300 MB iso on that slow beast.
I've got nothing against these colleges using the insane amounts of money that they make to build themselves up the geek equivalent of the good-ole-boy network, but labeling it "Internet II" makes me want to wretch from the oily marketing feel of the whole project. Hey, more power to them; in a few years, they'll start trickling their discarded leftovers to the rest of the world and we might begin to see improvements in the real Internet. *shrug*
Deosyne
Um, could someone please verify or deny this one? I mean, a distro without make... I can't remember the last time I installed an app that didn't require me to use make; how in the hell???
Deosyne
Somehow, I just can't bring myself to trust a company that comes out of nowhere, offering carbon-copy products and BS marketing, that claims to have a half-million dollar software distribution arrangement with a company that sells $7.95 software and has a Hotmail address for a point of contact. Why do I get the feeling that the LinuxOne board members all have secondary accounts set up under false names that are going to just happen to get an invite into the LinuxOne IPO and just happen to invest a crapload of cash into it and then just happen to sell off at the end of the first day of trading, just hours before the aforementioned board members disappear? Guess I'm just paranoid...
Deosyne
This idiot preaches on like us tech support folks are a bunch of malicious psychotics who revel in the fact that the people who call us don't know nearly as much about computers as we do. The reason that we bitch and moan and joke about the calls that we get is simply to keep our fucking sanity intact! Tech support is easily one of the worst jobs you could assign a geek to; we're required to interact with people we don't know, we have to deal with the same crap over and over and over again, we don't get to play with any cool, new toys, just the same old shit repeatedly. I don't joke with my fellow techs because I think that my customers are morons (well, most of them anyway), I do it for therapy. And it certainly doesn't help that we have to sympathize with these folks who call, yet they don't give a rat's ass for our situation; shit, if everything doesn't come out roses and cherubs then we're the fucking bad guys! Kurtz can kiss my ass; although to be honest, I envy the shit out of him, as he is obviously lucky enough to be a techhead who likes associating with people. But I'll try to think of his wonderful words of wisdom the next time I wake in a cold sweat or puke my guts out on my lunch break as the stress finally cooks off.
At least UF offers some perspective, whereas his useless bitching only serves to show what a pompous ass he is. I read UF and I laugh my ass off as I see my life parodied on a daily basis. I read Kurtz's column and could only think of how badly I want to drop this fucking headset and walk out the door. Unfortunately for us folks who have a family to take care of and can't afford to hang out in college for four years, tech support is our only door into the industry.
I just got off of a call that left a guy very dissatisfied, but there was NOTHING that I could do because it involved matters that were out of my hands; of course, those folks who were only too happy to inform me of these policies were able to pass their wisdom onto me and walk away while I got to tell this guy all of the great news, whereupon he unloads the miseries of his world on me, like I can do something. So I've got a few choices: go back to renting videos to people for minimum wage, putting my wife and daughter in a very shitty situation; shoot myself in the head and make it all go away, leaving my wife and daughter in the aforementioned shitty situation; or laugh as much as I possibly can. More and more every day I hate my fellow man, because I get too many calls where the person on the other end of the line is an asshole; this has nothing to do with their level of computer literacy but with their shitty attitudes when they do call, especially considering that they called us for help! So fuck you and your holier-than-thou bullshit; I'm going to go read some User Friendly and try to get some perspective back.
Deosyne
Petrified Iron Clad solution: Rob, Jeff - Create the /. API that let's us parse titles and content in articles
:)) so I definately couldn't do it alone, but I'd love to help put together a project like this. You code kidz let me know how realistic this sort of thing would be and, if it seems as though it may be realistically possible, I might just be silly and try to sucker some folks into getting together to plug away at such a resource. If it is, and you're bored enough with real life to want to contribute to such an endeavor, shoot me a line at deosyneNOSPAM@bellsouth.net and maybe we can get something going. :) Just don't bore me with flames that lack any reason; if its a stupid idea, tell me why.
You probably meant this as a joke, but I got to thinking about this a bit. What if there was an online listing of the man pages done as a Slash page, where each man page, HOWTO, etc. is posted like an article and users could contribute their own advice, questions, tips, warnings, etc. about that particular command or application? It would have to be well indexed and have a reliable search engine that could lead someone with a question to the appropriate "article", perhaps with an option to allow users to see a listing of what pages have been commented on since their last login, so they can go to articles that they had a question about or have a thorough knowledge about and see the replies and post answers to. It probably wouldn't be feasible because of the massive amount of documentation out there, but it would be an amazing resource to both newbies and power users; kind of like all of the Linux newsgroups in an indexed, easy to use format that doesn't expire. As a bonus, it would provide feedback to the many developers of applications for Linux on their creations to give them an idea of what could be improved in future versions.
Hell, I'm stupid enough to give it a shot, although I'm not a coder by any stretch (rudimentary HTML skills and just starting to learn Perl, which kicks serious ass after learning C and Java
Deosyne
I'm somewhat amused that you took it for "jumping, but no matter; I'm actually in rare good humor today. :) I presume Taco is in a fine mood as well, so I'll assume that he will interpret it as the playful ribbing that it is. ;) Happy Holidays, everyone! :)
Deosyne