since it is maintaining compatibility with x86 instruction sets, it will always follow Intel's lead (and require Intel to continue leading) mainstream chip technology
Not so. They are emulating x86 off the bat because that is the current standard. However they can emulate other chip technologies with some coding. They mention that they should be able to emulate even a Mac.
It will never run as fast as a native x86 chip would (because it must execute extra instructions). Of course, being smaller and independent to the hardware, these chips may be made significantly faster (clock-wise) than mainstream CISC/RISC chips and comparatively match performance. But not yet.
Three answers here. First off, I don't think that one of the goals is super speed. One of the (short-term) goals is decent speed with near zero power consumption and heat production. They achieve this. Second off, if their optimization code is good, they may not lose much in the way of performance. Thirdly, the chip is built on 128-bit architecture. That's a lot of room for growth. They may soon surpass Intel and emulate them faster than they can run native because of that.
No mention was made regarding the connection to the Internet...that was just assumed to be there. But I have yet to hear about any affordable and sufficiently fast connection via mobile unit... How will they address this, or will they just leave it up to other companies to solve this general problem?
Ummm, it's called a modem or network card. Transmeta just produced a chip. They mentioned that they've already shipped laptops to OEM's with the Transmeta chip. Just use whatever hardware you have been using.
Transmeta touts Internet Compatibility, but the low-end Internet appliances are specifically designed to work with Linux. However, Linux does not have a standards-conforming browser (i.e. IE) available until Mozilla is complete. Will Transmeta help push Mozilla to completion? The specific mantra was, "You have to run the cool site of the day" but many sites are becoming dependent on HTML 4, CSS2, DOM2, ECMAScript 2, etc., which, sorry, only are supported to any extent by IE5. How will Transmeta maintian "Internet Compatibility" with Linux-running machines?
You can install Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, or whatever OS you want that's designed for an x86 machine. They just shipped it with a version of Linux for OEM's to demo it. Did you not read the part about how they ran Office 2000 on a computer with a Transmeta chip? Did you not read the section about how the Transmeta chip will blue-screen like any other chip if you run Windows on it? You can run whatever OS and whatever browser you like.
It sounds like you got confused and thought that Transmeta produced an entirely different type of proprietary computer. They didn't do this. They aren't producing a new computer a la Amiga, Macintosh, or IBM. They produced a type of chip that can emulate almost any other chip with the right code. In time you might be able to use these chips in IBM PC's, Macintosh PC's, SPARC workstations, etc. In other words, they produced a meta-chip that can transform to look like other chips. Their name Transmeta actually makes sense given what they produced.
First off, the 400 MHz chip does exist. It's available "now". Heck, they ran demo's with the thing. As for the 700 MHz chip, we'll see if they meet their expected release date, but that's no different from any other chip company.
As to performance, the big story here is that it runs on 1/35th the power of a Pentium. If it runs a generation slower, that's to be expected. It's new technology, and thus it hasn't matured yet. Furthermore, I think you're wrong about it being as slow as a Pentium 160 or so. Time will tell, but if by some extremely long chance you are correct about that, then the company won't be around very long in any event.
I think the problem with 'A' movies is they take themselves too seriously. That's why I tend to be a big fan of stuff like the Evil Dead series. I mean let's face it. How many of the most quotable movies are so-called 'A' movies? Let's see, what are the most quotable movies?
Monty Python and the Holy Grail - Nope, that's B.
Evil Dead series - B again.
Princess Bride - maybe not 'B' but certainly not part of the 'A' category either.
Highlander - (first movie) - again a 'B' movie.
I mean really, it just goes on like that. The first Terminator is one of the few exceptions to this rule.
First off, maybe I don't export it to the other state - I but it in the other state where I will reverse engineer it. Of course they can just decide to not sell it in those states. Good luck trying to make a profit that way.
However let's assume that somehow this law goes into effect across all the states, and that it is enforcable somehow. What would be the natural result of this?
First, they wouldn't be able to sell the product outside of the country and keep everything under wraps. Most countries wouldn't abide by the licensing agreements, and further they would be extremly paranoid about back-door issues with such software. They already are now, but it would become much worse. End result is no market outside of the U.S. for any U.S. software, period.
This creates a void, and that void will be filled. The United States isn't the only country with programmers after all. This would be a huge encouragement for foreign-based software development. They'll quite happily reverse-engineer anything they want. Good luck suing someone in India or Thailand. The phrase "Have fun storming the castle!" comes to mind here.
This means that the next thing that U.S. companies would need to have done is restrict the importing of software, since they wouldn't be able to compete with this 'end runaround' of their licensing. So the logical progression is from open trade to no exporting to no exporting or importing of software.
The other half of the pincer of course would be the OSS movement. Corporations would now have huge incentives to pour lots of money into OSS development. It will be cheaper for them to do this than deal with the licensing stupdities, and the inevitable decline in quality that such licensing laws would foster.
The end result of such absurdity is that this field of U.S. commerce would become insular and stagnant, leading to decay. Foreign software companies and free OSS based software development would eventually eclipse commercial U.S. companies in both size and quality. Basically the same thing that happened to the U.S. automotive industry in the 70's would happen to the U.S. software companies.
Talk about self destructive ideas. Let's take a look at what these laws would do.
First off, these laws are passed on a state by state basis. If some states decide to not play ball, then things get very messy. For example, people will just reverse-engineer the product in one of the states that didn't join this stupidity. Or it would be done in other countries.
If the laws were passed and then they tried to actually enforce them, there would be such a huge consumer backlash that it wouldn't even be funny. Just wait until people try to sell their used game at the local swap meet, bookstore, or whatever and get told it's against the law for them to sell something they bought. I can smell the anger already.
Then of course there would be the movement to OSS based software. I for one do use a number of Microsoft products, and I'm an MCSE to boot. (Oh no! He's E-vil!) I like OSS and Linux, but I'm not rabid about it. However if something like this law went into effect, I WOULD become rabid about it. Hell, I'd start coding free stuff just to help bury the companies that were trying to take advantage of these laws.
Then of course there are the big time consumers. The government and the corporations of the world. Most of them aren't going to waste time with stupid licensing either. They'll say 'screw you' to the software venders and code in-house, use GPL'd and OSS stuff, or get it from companies that don't succumb to the stupidity. Big companies and such don't care as much about the initial expense of a product as individual users do since they write it off of their taxes as an expense, but they do care greatly about security (backdoors), future costs (how often do they have to upgrade and such), quality of support, and things like liability concerns, which would be huge for these types of licenses.
What it sounds like to me is that a few companies and some lawyers have decided that they can make a lot more money if these laws go into effect. Their greed and one sided view of things has blinded them to certain realities. It always amazes me the level of stupidity that such self-delusion can lead to. Just like Circuit City and their DIVX concept, they'll wind up salting their own ground.
Well, I think you've made a great argument FOR the UDP. If @home considers USENET compaints near the bottom of the list, and they don't even have the capability to police themselves, then they have no business being on USENET at all.
If they ever decide that USENET is important enough for them to clean up their house, then they can be allowed to play again. Until then, I guess they won't.
Whoops, here I went and posted this, and you've done it already.
It's a bummer, since he'd be excellent for the part. I went and got all excited about the Spiderman movie when I read that Bruce was going to be in it. Now even if the movie comes out, I'll be comparing whoever gets the part with Bruce Campbell.
I hate to point this out, but go to Bruce's web site and see for yourself. To quote the relevant portion:
Q: IS IT TRUE YOU'RE CAST AS THE LEAD IN THE "DOOM" AND "SPIDERMAN" AND "QUAKE" AND "SUPERMAN" AND "BATMAN" MOVIES?
A: NO, BY GOLLY, I AM NOT "CAST AS THE LEAD" OR INVOLVED WITH EITHER THE "DOOM" OR "SPIDERMAN" OR "QUAKE" OR "SUPERMAN" OR "BATMAN" FLICKS. APPARENTLY, THE PRODUCERS CALLED ME, BUT I DIDN'T HAVE CALL WAITING...
It's a bummer, since he would make a great Peter Parker.
Like most super-heroes with a secret ID, Peter Parker plays the part of the nerd very well. You can cover a lot of muscle under the right clothes. Remember the guy who played the lead in Fantasy Island on Kahn in the Star Trek II movie? (Can't remember his name.) The guy hid a massive amount of muscle under his suits. Besides, unlike Batman, you can't fake it with the suit because it isn't body armor. You'll need someone who has some muscle to play the part, or else he'll look totally lame when in costume. As for the geek factor, Bruce showed that he can play the geek when he needs to. Take a look at him when he's back in the S-Mart store at the end of Army of Darkness. He does a good job coming across geeky there. Plus, Spiderman is a wise-cracking, quick-witted, devil-may-care kind of character. It takes a certain kind of pinache to carry that off, and Bruce has it. If you got someone who was too geeky, it wouldn't work.
I found the article very well done. Gillian actually took the time to install two different distributions and try them out. That is totally amazing. That's about two more distributions than the average journalist would try. She also did a good job of explaining source code vs. binaries and the concept of Open Source in such a way that non-computer people understand it.
I'm a little less sure than Gillian about the future of Linux on the desktop, but we'll see. I don't think that will happen until Linux has better game support and a better GUI.
As for the impact of the article, now that women with appellations like "Miss April, 1996" are starting to get on the Linux bandwagon, it's bound to get more popular:) I bet Red Hat's stock goes up some more as well.
I didn't know about it. I'm not surprised that it's happened a couple of times, but it is rare. One interesting parrallell here is that the Zippy comic strip and the PvP comic strip seem to both be right on the outer fringes of popularity. It's not like you see Charles Schultz trash talking about Gary Trudeau or something. Here we see fringe people slamming someone who was much more successfull than them. In other words, it's just some posers with sour grapes.
Most humor has an element of cruelty in it. We laugh at others or ourselves. This guys blather is about as interesting as people who knocked the Three Stooges as not being funny because it was violent, or people who said the same thing about cartoons like Roadrunner/Wild E. Coyote, or the people who think jokes about (place politically correct group terminology here) aren't appropriate, etc.
Personally, I've laughed at jokes about whites, blacks, blonds, women, men, preachers, sex, death, baldness, and just about everything else under the sun. Almost every bit of humor out there can be offensive to someone, so deal with it.
As for this Scott guy, I'm more offended at him slamming his competition directly like this. Do you hear professional comic strip artists going around talking about how their competitors suck? No, you don't. Sometimes they lampoon each other's strips, but they don't trash talk. Since Scott is 'in the biz' so to speak, I think people are perfectly justified in ignoring his rant as nothing more than an attempt to get cheap publicity for himself and knock the competition. His conflict of interest here makes everything he says about other people's comic strips suspect in the extreme.
Another thing - I've never heard of this guy before, so I checked out his site from the link/. provided. Scott's strip was about as funny to me as Family Circus, which is to say it was boring as hell. Gee, a guy gets his eye hurt with a Nerf dart and so calls in someone else, who is a big furry monster of some kind, to play his game. What a snoozer. That's about as flat a joke as I can imagine. Kind of like Al Gore trying to make a joke. The kind of safe and sanitized humor I expect from someone who is making sure they don't offend anyone. I also checked out Absurd Notions, which I had also not heard of. Absurd Notions at least raised a chuckle or two out of me. Pvp was just painful. Also, the page for the current strip on Pvp was poorly designed. I had to search for the navigation buttons. Once I went to the previous strip, suddenly there were clearly labeled icons for navigation at the top. He also buries links in the midst of text that you have to read to figure it out. I've seen people who literally barely know how to turn on the computer turn out better designed web sites than that.
Humor lets us deal with taboo and dangerous subjects in a socially acceptable way. Comedians take the absurd, frightening, and frustrating and lampoon, satirize, or turn it into parody. Cartoons like UF and Absurd Notions just do that for a more specific target audience than most. As for Scott and his Pvp strip, all I can say I'm surprised that given the Quaalude effect his comic strip had on me, that he is popular enough that anyone even knows he exists, let alone being worthy of a/. article.
It's an easy question to answer. It was a farce. Sure there were some things that needed to be fixed, and it cost a pretty penny to fix up a bunch of old Cobol code, but there was never any major danger.
Biggest impact of Y2K was that some people became rich off of the hype, and a lot of programmers got employed fixing Y2K stuff. It also pushed sales of water, generators, and canned food, which made a lot of money for some stores. and soon you'll be able to buy some of that stuff like generators really cheap.
The only danger from Y2K was if too many people believed the hype and there was a run on the banks. Nothing like that happened, so it was a big yawn.
To the status quo statement. There is status quo, and there are basic facts of life. To me status quo refers to the state of a system, not to the laws, which specify which systems can even exist. My statement about it being the way the world works applied to my point that celebrities are listened too much more than the random individual with something to say. I don't consider that 'status-quo', I consider it as just being a law of human nature. Even in the days of hunter-gatherer societies village elders and shamans had more pull than most other people. Status quo can be changed. Something like changing the ability for some people to be listened to more so than others is just not possible, and so I don't think your status quo comment really applies to what I said, unless you think you know of a way to change this aspect of human nature.
As to a real status quo, that of ESR being the spokesman for Linux, that is a different matter. I say that if someone else can garner the support needed to take over the job, more power to him or her. Go for it. I'm all for competition of ideas. Too few viewpoints with an effective voice creates stagnation.
As to making it personal, I only meant for the first line to be taken personally. I was playing off of what you yourself said - that maybe you were being touchy. I responded that yes, (in my opinion) you were being touchy. If you say it, I feel free to comment on it. There isn't any way to respond to that line of yours without it being a little personal.
As for the rest of the paragraph, I didn't mean for it to be a personal statement. I meant it to be a statement about how you were coming across, which is why I said I had no idea if this was the type of person you are. I figured if I was taking it that way, others might as well, and you probably were not meaning to come off that way. Either way, it wasn't smart of attempt that after saying you were being touchy. Even though I didn't mean to get personal, looking back on it there isn't any way for it to come across any other way, especially since it was part of the same paragraph. I apologize.
As to hero-worship being pointless, I agree. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who is less celebrity oriented than I am. However what I mostly see is people slamming his article, not the other way around. I think that it is changing from people liking him because it is 'the in thing' to people hating him because it is 'the in thing'. I got real tired real quick of reading posts where people were not commenting on ESR's ideas and statements in the article, but ESR himself. They don't like his popularity. They don't like his thoughts on gun control. They don't think he represents the Linux community properly. Etc, etc, yada, yada. I'd be just as aggravated if it was people saying 'it's ESR so it must be right', which seemed to prevail in the past.
Of course this behavior goes back to human nature and celebrity, so I'm somewhat hung by my own petard. Oh well.
>Here I was, all set to agree with ESR for once...But then he had to go and mix other politics into it.
In other words you reversed your opinion to agree with his article because of his beliefs on gun control. Does that mean if he said 'Murder is Bad' you would decide that murder must be good because of his beliefs on gun control? Personally, I find that totally wacky.
As for it being appropriate or not, It's a free country. ESR can say what he wants. You're free to tell him that you don't think it is appropriate, and he's free to ignore you. I don't agree with all of ESR's ideas, but I don't begrudge him using his status to air them. The world is full of people who have no opinion, or who let their opinion be swayed by extraneous factors. I salute those people with the courage of their convictions, whether or not I agree with them.
First off, yes you are being touchy. You come across like someone who feels he's isn't getting the attention he deserves. In other words, it makes you sound petty. Note that I am not saying that you are petty - I don't know you so I can't say what kind of person you are. I'm just saying that it makes you seem that way.
As for ESR getting tons of attention for saying something that many people have said before, that's just the way it is with a celebrity. Like it or not, Eric S. Raymond is a minor celebrity thanks to his work for the Linux community and for his paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The media knows him, the Linux community knows him, and the companies know him. Furthermore, he is an excellent writer. Other people have said the same thing, but his piece is one of the most well written one on the subject I have seen. For these reasons, he will make the news when he says something, and you and I won't.
I personally don't expect my thoughts and opinions to make the news, no matter how brilliant they are, or I think they are. If I ever achieve celebrity status, then sure, it'll happen. Until then I'm just another voice in the crowd, and so are you. ESR isn't just a voice in the crowd, and that is why when he speaks, he gets attention. People outside of the/. community will actually listen to what he has to say. This means that like it or not, just the fact that he has an stated an opinion is news, no matter how many times you or I or other people have yelled that opinion to the mountain tops. It's just the way of the world.
40 bit encryption is the best they can do because of US encryption export laws. They didn't have a choice on the quality of protection they could utilize. They went with the best they could. Of course 40 bit encryption is so outdated, they shouldn't have even bothered, and that they didn't expect it to be broken shows a high level of self-delusion and stupidity on their part.
I doubt many people do overclock production servers. I would also doubt the sanity of anyone doing that. However, why do you assume that production servers are where the overclocking is taking place?
Overclocking makes perfect sense for people who need maximum power, or need more power than they can afford. People using their computers for games are good candidates for overclocking. If their chip is old enough to have trouble with newer games, they can overclock it and delay the time when they have to buy a more powerful chip. Other people overclock because they know they can buy chips that are a 100 MHz slower than the top of the line for very cheap and overclock it faster than the top chips, saving them a lot of dough. If it burns out too soon and they have to buy another, they're no worse off than if they had bought the expensive one anyway. Other gamers may have enough cash, but they want the most powerful machine possible, so they buy the best and then overclock it. They don't care if the chip will burn out in six months since they are planning on upgrading in six months anyway.
I'd say Time made a reasonable choice here. Some people have suggested people like Gandhi, but most of these people didn't impact the course of history for the last century the way Einstein did. Atomic energy and the atomic bomb have so utterly shaped the course of history for the last several decades that there isn't really any comparison. Further, the ramifications and danger of this technology reach out to everyone in the world, even if they are totally ignorant of it. Nuclear war is the end all and be all as far as importance goes.
As for credit, Einstein wasn't working alone on these things, there were a lot of brilliant minds involved. Einstein is a good figurehead to hang it all on.
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If you want to foster intelligent discussion, reduce the number of trolls, stupid posts, and the like on /., just ban anonymous posting.
Not so. They are emulating x86 off the bat because that is the current standard. However they can emulate other chip technologies with some coding. They mention that they should be able to emulate even a Mac.
Three answers here. First off, I don't think that one of the goals is super speed. One of the (short-term) goals is decent speed with near zero power consumption and heat production. They achieve this. Second off, if their optimization code is good, they may not lose much in the way of performance. Thirdly, the chip is built on 128-bit architecture. That's a lot of room for growth. They may soon surpass Intel and emulate them faster than they can run native because of that.
Ummm, it's called a modem or network card. Transmeta just produced a chip. They mentioned that they've already shipped laptops to OEM's with the Transmeta chip. Just use whatever hardware you have been using.
You can install Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, or whatever OS you want that's designed for an x86 machine. They just shipped it with a version of Linux for OEM's to demo it. Did you not read the part about how they ran Office 2000 on a computer with a Transmeta chip? Did you not read the section about how the Transmeta chip will blue-screen like any other chip if you run Windows on it? You can run whatever OS and whatever browser you like.
It sounds like you got confused and thought that Transmeta produced an entirely different type of proprietary computer. They didn't do this. They aren't producing a new computer a la Amiga, Macintosh, or IBM. They produced a type of chip that can emulate almost any other chip with the right code. In time you might be able to use these chips in IBM PC's, Macintosh PC's, SPARC workstations, etc. In other words, they produced a meta-chip that can transform to look like other chips. Their name Transmeta actually makes sense given what they produced.
As to performance, the big story here is that it runs on 1/35th the power of a Pentium. If it runs a generation slower, that's to be expected. It's new technology, and thus it hasn't matured yet. Furthermore, I think you're wrong about it being as slow as a Pentium 160 or so. Time will tell, but if by some extremely long chance you are correct about that, then the company won't be around very long in any event.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail - Nope, that's B.
Evil Dead series - B again.
Princess Bride - maybe not 'B' but certainly not part of the 'A' category either.
Highlander - (first movie) - again a 'B' movie.
I mean really, it just goes on like that. The first Terminator is one of the few exceptions to this rule.
Oh well, just the way it is.
However let's assume that somehow this law goes into effect across all the states, and that it is enforcable somehow. What would be the natural result of this?
First, they wouldn't be able to sell the product outside of the country and keep everything under wraps. Most countries wouldn't abide by the licensing agreements, and further they would be extremly paranoid about back-door issues with such software. They already are now, but it would become much worse. End result is no market outside of the U.S. for any U.S. software, period.
This creates a void, and that void will be filled. The United States isn't the only country with programmers after all. This would be a huge encouragement for foreign-based software development. They'll quite happily reverse-engineer anything they want. Good luck suing someone in India or Thailand. The phrase "Have fun storming the castle!" comes to mind here.
This means that the next thing that U.S. companies would need to have done is restrict the importing of software, since they wouldn't be able to compete with this 'end runaround' of their licensing. So the logical progression is from open trade to no exporting to no exporting or importing of software.
The other half of the pincer of course would be the OSS movement. Corporations would now have huge incentives to pour lots of money into OSS development. It will be cheaper for them to do this than deal with the licensing stupdities, and the inevitable decline in quality that such licensing laws would foster.
The end result of such absurdity is that this field of U.S. commerce would become insular and stagnant, leading to decay. Foreign software companies and free OSS based software development would eventually eclipse commercial U.S. companies in both size and quality. Basically the same thing that happened to the U.S. automotive industry in the 70's would happen to the U.S. software companies.
First off, these laws are passed on a state by state basis. If some states decide to not play ball, then things get very messy. For example, people will just reverse-engineer the product in one of the states that didn't join this stupidity. Or it would be done in other countries.
If the laws were passed and then they tried to actually enforce them, there would be such a huge consumer backlash that it wouldn't even be funny. Just wait until people try to sell their used game at the local swap meet, bookstore, or whatever and get told it's against the law for them to sell something they bought. I can smell the anger already.
Then of course there would be the movement to OSS based software. I for one do use a number of Microsoft products, and I'm an MCSE to boot. (Oh no! He's E-vil!) I like OSS and Linux, but I'm not rabid about it. However if something like this law went into effect, I WOULD become rabid about it. Hell, I'd start coding free stuff just to help bury the companies that were trying to take advantage of these laws.
Then of course there are the big time consumers. The government and the corporations of the world. Most of them aren't going to waste time with stupid licensing either. They'll say 'screw you' to the software venders and code in-house, use GPL'd and OSS stuff, or get it from companies that don't succumb to the stupidity. Big companies and such don't care as much about the initial expense of a product as individual users do since they write it off of their taxes as an expense, but they do care greatly about security (backdoors), future costs (how often do they have to upgrade and such), quality of support, and things like liability concerns, which would be huge for these types of licenses.
What it sounds like to me is that a few companies and some lawyers have decided that they can make a lot more money if these laws go into effect. Their greed and one sided view of things has blinded them to certain realities. It always amazes me the level of stupidity that such self-delusion can lead to. Just like Circuit City and their DIVX concept, they'll wind up salting their own ground.
If they ever decide that USENET is important enough for them to clean up their house, then they can be allowed to play again. Until then, I guess they won't.
It's a bummer, since he'd be excellent for the part. I went and got all excited about the Spiderman movie when I read that Bruce was going to be in it. Now even if the movie comes out, I'll be comparing whoever gets the part with Bruce Campbell.
Q: IS IT TRUE YOU'RE CAST AS THE LEAD IN THE "DOOM" AND "SPIDERMAN" AND "QUAKE" AND "SUPERMAN" AND "BATMAN" MOVIES?
A: NO, BY GOLLY, I AM NOT "CAST AS THE LEAD" OR INVOLVED WITH EITHER THE "DOOM" OR "SPIDERMAN" OR "QUAKE" OR "SUPERMAN" OR "BATMAN" FLICKS. APPARENTLY, THE PRODUCERS CALLED ME, BUT I DIDN'T HAVE CALL WAITING...
It's a bummer, since he would make a great Peter Parker.
Like most super-heroes with a secret ID, Peter Parker plays the part of the nerd very well. You can cover a lot of muscle under the right clothes. Remember the guy who played the lead in Fantasy Island on Kahn in the Star Trek II movie? (Can't remember his name.) The guy hid a massive amount of muscle under his suits. Besides, unlike Batman, you can't fake it with the suit because it isn't body armor. You'll need someone who has some muscle to play the part, or else he'll look totally lame when in costume. As for the geek factor, Bruce showed that he can play the geek when he needs to. Take a look at him when he's back in the S-Mart store at the end of Army of Darkness. He does a good job coming across geeky there. Plus, Spiderman is a wise-cracking, quick-witted, devil-may-care kind of character. It takes a certain kind of pinache to carry that off, and Bruce has it. If you got someone who was too geeky, it wouldn't work.
"CLATU, VERATTA, NIHuaaagghhcouugh. There, I said the words! Allright? Okay then."
"Again? But that trick never works!"
"Nothing up my sleeve. Presto!"
"ROAR, SNARL!!!"
(Moose stuffs lion back into hat)
"Whew. That was a close one."
"Sigh. And now for something you'll really like."
At the rate we have jackasses trying to tm the Linux name, maybe we need a new icon for it. How about a jackass with 'tm' branded on it's butt?
Did you follow the link to her website, Blackdragon? She's involved in some technical businesses.
Is he even allowed to lobby them in Singapore? I don't know.
WARNING!! The Surgeon General has determined that using this software may cause maleitis and geekiness in beautiful women.
I'm a little less sure than Gillian about the future of Linux on the desktop, but we'll see. I don't think that will happen until Linux has better game support and a better GUI.
As for the impact of the article, now that women with appellations like "Miss April, 1996" are starting to get on the Linux bandwagon, it's bound to get more popular :) I bet Red Hat's stock goes up some more as well.
I didn't know about it. I'm not surprised that it's happened a couple of times, but it is rare. One interesting parrallell here is that the Zippy comic strip and the PvP comic strip seem to both be right on the outer fringes of popularity. It's not like you see Charles Schultz trash talking about Gary Trudeau or something. Here we see fringe people slamming someone who was much more successfull than them. In other words, it's just some posers with sour grapes.
Personally, I've laughed at jokes about whites, blacks, blonds, women, men, preachers, sex, death, baldness, and just about everything else under the sun. Almost every bit of humor out there can be offensive to someone, so deal with it.
As for this Scott guy, I'm more offended at him slamming his competition directly like this. Do you hear professional comic strip artists going around talking about how their competitors suck? No, you don't. Sometimes they lampoon each other's strips, but they don't trash talk. Since Scott is 'in the biz' so to speak, I think people are perfectly justified in ignoring his rant as nothing more than an attempt to get cheap publicity for himself and knock the competition. His conflict of interest here makes everything he says about other people's comic strips suspect in the extreme.
Another thing - I've never heard of this guy before, so I checked out his site from the link /. provided. Scott's strip was about as funny to me as Family Circus, which is to say it was boring as hell. Gee, a guy gets his eye hurt with a Nerf dart and so calls in someone else, who is a big furry monster of some kind, to play his game. What a snoozer. That's about as flat a joke as I can imagine. Kind of like Al Gore trying to make a joke. The kind of safe and sanitized humor I expect from someone who is making sure they don't offend anyone. I also checked out Absurd Notions, which I had also not heard of. Absurd Notions at least raised a chuckle or two out of me. Pvp was just painful. Also, the page for the current strip on Pvp was poorly designed. I had to search for the navigation buttons. Once I went to the previous strip, suddenly there were clearly labeled icons for navigation at the top. He also buries links in the midst of text that you have to read to figure it out. I've seen people who literally barely know how to turn on the computer turn out better designed web sites than that.
Humor lets us deal with taboo and dangerous subjects in a socially acceptable way. Comedians take the absurd, frightening, and frustrating and lampoon, satirize, or turn it into parody. Cartoons like UF and Absurd Notions just do that for a more specific target audience than most. As for Scott and his Pvp strip, all I can say I'm surprised that given the Quaalude effect his comic strip had on me, that he is popular enough that anyone even knows he exists, let alone being worthy of a /. article.
Biggest impact of Y2K was that some people became rich off of the hype, and a lot of programmers got employed fixing Y2K stuff. It also pushed sales of water, generators, and canned food, which made a lot of money for some stores. and soon you'll be able to buy some of that stuff like generators really cheap.
The only danger from Y2K was if too many people believed the hype and there was a run on the banks. Nothing like that happened, so it was a big yawn.
As to a real status quo, that of ESR being the spokesman for Linux, that is a different matter. I say that if someone else can garner the support needed to take over the job, more power to him or her. Go for it. I'm all for competition of ideas. Too few viewpoints with an effective voice creates stagnation.
As to making it personal, I only meant for the first line to be taken personally. I was playing off of what you yourself said - that maybe you were being touchy. I responded that yes, (in my opinion) you were being touchy. If you say it, I feel free to comment on it. There isn't any way to respond to that line of yours without it being a little personal.
As for the rest of the paragraph, I didn't mean for it to be a personal statement. I meant it to be a statement about how you were coming across, which is why I said I had no idea if this was the type of person you are. I figured if I was taking it that way, others might as well, and you probably were not meaning to come off that way. Either way, it wasn't smart of attempt that after saying you were being touchy. Even though I didn't mean to get personal, looking back on it there isn't any way for it to come across any other way, especially since it was part of the same paragraph. I apologize.
As to hero-worship being pointless, I agree. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who is less celebrity oriented than I am. However what I mostly see is people slamming his article, not the other way around. I think that it is changing from people liking him because it is 'the in thing' to people hating him because it is 'the in thing'. I got real tired real quick of reading posts where people were not commenting on ESR's ideas and statements in the article, but ESR himself. They don't like his popularity. They don't like his thoughts on gun control. They don't think he represents the Linux community properly. Etc, etc, yada, yada. I'd be just as aggravated if it was people saying 'it's ESR so it must be right', which seemed to prevail in the past.
Of course this behavior goes back to human nature and celebrity, so I'm somewhat hung by my own petard. Oh well.
In other words you reversed your opinion to agree with his article because of his beliefs on gun control. Does that mean if he said 'Murder is Bad' you would decide that murder must be good because of his beliefs on gun control? Personally, I find that totally wacky.
As for it being appropriate or not, It's a free country. ESR can say what he wants. You're free to tell him that you don't think it is appropriate, and he's free to ignore you. I don't agree with all of ESR's ideas, but I don't begrudge him using his status to air them. The world is full of people who have no opinion, or who let their opinion be swayed by extraneous factors. I salute those people with the courage of their convictions, whether or not I agree with them.
As for ESR getting tons of attention for saying something that many people have said before, that's just the way it is with a celebrity. Like it or not, Eric S. Raymond is a minor celebrity thanks to his work for the Linux community and for his paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The media knows him, the Linux community knows him, and the companies know him. Furthermore, he is an excellent writer. Other people have said the same thing, but his piece is one of the most well written one on the subject I have seen. For these reasons, he will make the news when he says something, and you and I won't.
I personally don't expect my thoughts and opinions to make the news, no matter how brilliant they are, or I think they are. If I ever achieve celebrity status, then sure, it'll happen. Until then I'm just another voice in the crowd, and so are you. ESR isn't just a voice in the crowd, and that is why when he speaks, he gets attention. People outside of the /. community will actually listen to what he has to say. This means that like it or not, just the fact that he has an stated an opinion is news, no matter how many times you or I or other people have yelled that opinion to the mountain tops. It's just the way of the world.
40 bit encryption is the best they can do because of US encryption export laws. They didn't have a choice on the quality of protection they could utilize. They went with the best they could. Of course 40 bit encryption is so outdated, they shouldn't have even bothered, and that they didn't expect it to be broken shows a high level of self-delusion and stupidity on their part.
Overclocking makes perfect sense for people who need maximum power, or need more power than they can afford. People using their computers for games are good candidates for overclocking. If their chip is old enough to have trouble with newer games, they can overclock it and delay the time when they have to buy a more powerful chip. Other people overclock because they know they can buy chips that are a 100 MHz slower than the top of the line for very cheap and overclock it faster than the top chips, saving them a lot of dough. If it burns out too soon and they have to buy another, they're no worse off than if they had bought the expensive one anyway. Other gamers may have enough cash, but they want the most powerful machine possible, so they buy the best and then overclock it. They don't care if the chip will burn out in six months since they are planning on upgrading in six months anyway.
As for credit, Einstein wasn't working alone on these things, there were a lot of brilliant minds involved. Einstein is a good figurehead to hang it all on.