Currently, if a user doesn't want to touch a command line using one of the WM's then they don't have to...
Scientific experiment: install either Gnome or KDE and your choice of WM. Remove all terminal emulators from your system. Write back and let us all know how functional any Unix system becomes. Don't have to touch a CLI my ass. (Although BeOS was damn near usable without out it, too bad so many developers went out of there way to force you to use the terminal...)
in a year or two, i expect that Linux will be very easy to use...if you want it to be.
I've been hearing this one almost as long as I've been hearing "Everyone will soon be using MacOS because they'll realizw how much better it is!" The only way I can see any Unix being palatabble by Jane Consumer is to keep every that works, then completely redesign the GUI- starting with a complete and total rewrite of Xwindows. Current work being done on desktops and WMs show how great things could be, if they only had a leg to stand on.
Now that I think about it, isn't that exactly what Apple is doing?
The advantage is if you take a sip, find it too sweet, send in a recommendation and it gets rejected you can bottle up your version and sell it yourself. How long until we start seeing LucentCOLA or openCOLA_Helix_1.2.2pre16a?:p
Physics tells us that quite literally, one immortal monkey with one arm tied behind his back would eventually re-create your work. Some of us are a lot smarter than monkeys. And there are four billion years until the sun goes out.
Quite literally nothing tells you anything of the kind. It's a simple problem in statistics (and a homework problem in every statistical physics, thermal dynamics, and quantum mechanics class) that if you have a roomful of monkeys, let them use both typing hands, and let them bang away far past any reasonable lifetime for the univers they won't create shit. Maybe just throw some in aggravation at being forced to do something so pointless but stupid humans...
It would be a big gamble but one with potentially huge payoffs. I can dream can't I;-)
I dream of exactly the opposite: more OS ports in the other direction to drive down the cost of PowerPC hardware. I mean, do you guys really think that highly of x86 or just stick with it due to legacy code?
A better question might, in fact, be if Microsoft had switched to DEC Alpha, as they had planned off and on for several years, would you still have bought a Compaq?;)
With the deluge of political battles, legal battles, market wars, and marketing bullshit we're bombarded with these days it was so refreshing to read something that makes you say, "Damn, it feels good to be a hacker!"
The fact of the matter is, Microsoft practically single-handedly turned the PC from the haven of 31337 tech-savvy "gurus" to a domain where anyone could use a computer to browse the internet, write letters and play games. Whilst I know that/.ers seem to think that only they should be allowed to use PCs, Microsoft pushed the idea that everyone could benefit from a PC, and it worked, because people wanted that.
Unfortunately this is just plain wrong. If anybody it was Apple Computer with the Apple II and then the Macintosh that made computers for use by the common man. Microsoft wrote software for minicomputers/switchers that kind of thing. Personal computers as powerful, or even more so, than the slap-dash IBM PC were available, but it was the machine for Elite Men in Blue Suits. Microsoft had no interest whatsoever in making anything easier to use until Gates saw that everyone else was going to GUIs, which would threaten his DOS monopoly. Hence the tying of early versions of Windows to DOS, and the original federal anti-trust case against Microsoft. It wasn't ease of use that prompted customers to buy Microsoft, it was the Elite attitude of the company's early customers. When someone went shopping for a computer they bought what they used at work. When everyone else went to buy theirs, they asked their friends what they should buy, and of course, they recommended what they used, calling everything else "a toy" (Macintosh, Amiga) or "too technical" (Unix)
It seems that most Slashdot readers got their start with Microsoft systems. Think about why you made that choice. I doubt "ease of use" figured anywhere in it at all.
The original one, yes. There's many more, and a new large one (300 ft) is being constructed. A picture I took when I was there observing this summer is all that's on a website of mine, currently.
So, as an astronomer, do you prefer Matlab, or Mathematica for your calculations.... or do you write them yourself? (Begging the question: Perl or Python...) Mathematica. I do more observation than theory, though, so the correct debate is IRAF or XVista? (XVIsta whenever possible, IRAF usually because it's shoved down my throat...) And anything I write myself is in C++ or Java. Sometimes BASIC.
But only for a few seconds. Then all that stored up energy is gone. Meanwhile your warm-blooded ass has been generating more waste heat than a Pentium III. If you can survive the croc's initial charge then you have plenty of energy to run screaming for thirty miles while the crocodile has to eat and lay in the sun for awhile to recharge.
I didn't even know there was a science section. I recall reading once that there was a seperate BSD page, and there seems to be a seperate Ask Slashdot area. Guess I just never bothered to look.
Related to missing interesting things here, did the hyped jwz interview ever actually show up? There are so many interviews these days that I always seem to miss the ones I actually want to read, then can never find them in all of the old stuff.
Um, yes. the news here is not that dinosaurs were warmblodded (the accepted view of paleontologists for at least a decade now) but the detail of the specimen itself.
As an aside rant this is what I hate about the "science" submissions on Slashdot. The Community knows far more about obscure networking cable adapters than junior high level scientific knowledge. As an astronomer I long ago got tired of even trying to contribute to the almost weekly astronomy story posted here. Think of all the stories you tell each other about AOLer's and newbie support calls. To a scientist y'all sound that bad sometimes. I'm sorry, but it's true. On the other hand most science discussions tend to quickly shift focus to the research hardware, or whether the analysts use PERL or Python, so the quality of the post go up, but it's no longer about scientific discoveries. Oh well. Guess this is just a single-interest audience.:)
Re:Stallman is just plain wrong here
on
RMS On eBooks
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· Score: 1
This is just ridiculous. Nobody's going to write very much worth reading if the second I write something it goes public domain. I had a commercial pornographic site rip off some of my scholarly articles and put them on their site. According to Stallman, this is just peachy and my emails to them to enforce my copyright were oppressive. What a load of bullshit.
I highly question the "scholarly" nature of this work if a commercial pornography site was interested in it. I hope it wasn't entitled "Attract Girls Now!"
All I can say is finally! Computer hardware is becoming more and more energy wasteful with each increase in speed/power. At last there's something that can help offset all of that bad engineering...
He did give away music in mp3. It was, in some opinions, the act that started the industries defensive attacks. Before that they seemed to have mostly just ignored it. PE's response was to keep releasing music, but in an executable format. That still pissed off the record label, and Chuck wasn't satisfied with it, either, since the player they were using was only available for Windows. (And called 'MP4', which ticked off the MPEG group...)
To add insult to injury many of the songs downloadable for free were critical of the recording industry's not allowing the songs to be downloaded in the first place. You can still find copies of "Swindler's Lust" floating around.
Many major artists have gone independent, or in some cases psuedo-independent. Trent Reznor owns and runs nothing records, and spent as much time promoting his bands the last few years as he did working on "The Fragile". And a KMFDM anything would sell like crazy, since it would be a reunion record...:)
However, Venter also defended the company's plan to patent up to 500 genes.
This is what the outcry is over. It's also why their (and many other 'biotech' firms') stock evaluation is soaring through the roof.
After the HGP had ran for a few years a group splintered off to pursue it purely for profit. That's Celera. They've promised to allow access to the information for researchers, but have never deatiled to what extent. They obviously aren't going to allow outside research to be done with any genes they claim a patent to, and that's been the sticking point in most of the past cooperation talks.
Also remember that the announcement made by Clinton & Blair a few months ago gauranteeing the freedom of the genome only applied to the HGP. They would have had to have completed the first map in order for it to mean anything. Celera's rather amazing accomplishment now will mean a real big headache for everyone who's not one of their investors.
A possible scenario is that you fully develop a way to clone yourself, but can't because certain genes giving you immunity to some diseases are protected by a patent. It's really horrifying. Medicine is about to get as nasty as computer software. Everyone is going to sue everyone over everything, all trying to get any slight advantage they can. And people will be dying so stock prices can raise a few tenths of a point...
I'm having nothing but problems with the Mac version. Window redrawing, especially in the dialogues, is painfully slow. (As in blank windows for a minute or two before components begin slowly appearing.) This is on a 500MHz G4 system. I can't check my email at all. I can't even set up the mail preferences (and I'm royally pissed it didn't import my mail account info, although importing everything else went beautifully.) Touching anything relating to email or messaging dumps me into Talkback and kills the entire app.
I've been compiling the source nightly from CVS, and that works beautifully. I think the PR designation of this build is important to regard. This can in no way be considered beta. Alpha, at best. The Gecko components appear stable, but all the Netscape specific features so far are unusable.
Exactly. It's a carefully crafted vapor announcement to get people excited. Just count all the current buzzwords: Linux, nVidia, etc. A machine that's a step beyond the PS2 is certainly possible, but this ain't it.
What I find most interesting about the rash of internet home appliances being announced nowadays is the lack of Transmeta and the Crusoe chip. Isn't this exactly the type of device that this thing was designed for, and that we were all so excited about only one month ago?
I hope the pundits weren't correct at the time when they forecasted Transmeta would go nowhere and be clobbered under a continuing Intel monopoly.
I couldn't help but think of Rob's misguided apology while I was reading this article. The obnoxious minority of flamers have succeeded in censoring the site creator and apparently all future discussion of certain topics. This is one of the greatest wrongs I have ever seen on the web. I think the rest of us need to contribute more actively, and be extra careful when we intensely disagree with an expressed opinion, to reclaim this forum from the abusive flamers.
MACHOs are interesting in their own right, but have almost nothing to do with dark matter. Overwhelming evidence shows that dark matter is around 90% of the mass of the universe, and it must be nonbaryonic. For the non-physicists out there, this means it cannot be made of protons, electrons, and neutrons. Everything that emits or reflects light (including planets, small stars, and the matter contained in black holes) is baryonic. Hence the designation of "dark" for the other stuff.
Well, this is something I've been wanting to say for a long time, and unfortunately maybe a moot point now: Linux can be run on non-X86 hardware. Okay, I know most of you know this, but from many of the comments to various announcements seen here it's obvious that many don't. The press orgy surrounding Linux over the past year has certainly ignored this fact
I've been running Linux on several PowerPC boxes for the last three years. My first impression of Linux was that I'd found the Holy Grail: I could run powerful applications at home on my PowerMac, on a friend's Dell, or a Sun workstation at school. GNU software and POSIX compliance made all of this possible.
The first inkling that fragmentation was going to occur in this wonderful new community was when id released the Linux port of Quake. The Linux world went crazy- those that could run it, at least. Suddenly the rest of us were shut out. It wasn't free software, either- which meant there was no ability to hack it for the rest of us. When they released the Alpha-based Linux port it was an encouraging sign, but the future was all too clear.
Now everyday there is a great new "Linux" product announced, most by comapnies that aren't even aware that an "Intel compatible processor" is definitely not a requirement for this wonderful opertaing system. If software based on Win32 APIs become the standard Linux applications, everything Linux was created for is over. The various productivity suites under development will be crushed by Office2000- authentic Microsoft bugs, security holes, and all.
What can be done? I don't know. Until the last year or so we used to stick together as a community. Now software is developed strictly for one graphical desktop, or worse one particular packaged distribution. I'm not willing to concede there's the imminent fragmentation the traditional technology press is salivating waiting for, but we s the Linux community need to start looking out for each other again, and fighting to make sure this wonderful operating system remains free from being shackled to one particular company (software OR hardware.)
I really hope you find a way to make life miserable for the PR firm involved. I'm also quite sure it's illegal to use your name to promote themselves, but that would get into the wonderful world of lawyers. And _that_, unlike free software, is something PR firms are very comfortable with...
Yet again Microsoft brings to light the most glaring troubles with proprietary "standards" and abuse of monopoly power: they're hyping up a Windows CE player, and you can guarantee they'll be players for whatever the next desktop version of Windows is, but that's it. Does anyone seriously see them developing players for other operating systems? And it'll be a cold day in Hell before they'll license it to outside developers to design, say, an application to play the files on Linux. IBM et al. have shown recently that they're truly interested in developing new technologies, both to increase their profits and the gee-whiz value. Microsoft is just doing this as yet another attempt to keep the world strangled in the jaws of Windows. I'm really starting to miss the old world, where we as customers could decide what products we preferred, instead of having them rammed down our throats before there's even a chance for competition on the marketplace...
Slashdot Mirror
They already have one. It's blue lowercase letters spelling 'intel'.
Scientific experiment: install either Gnome or KDE and your choice of WM. Remove all terminal emulators from your system. Write back and let us all know how functional any Unix system becomes. Don't have to touch a CLI my ass. (Although BeOS was damn near usable without out it, too bad so many developers went out of there way to force you to use the terminal...)
in a year or two, i expect that Linux will be very easy to use...if you want it to be.
I've been hearing this one almost as long as I've been hearing "Everyone will soon be using MacOS because they'll realizw how much better it is!" The only way I can see any Unix being palatabble by Jane Consumer is to keep every that works, then completely redesign the GUI- starting with a complete and total rewrite of Xwindows. Current work being done on desktops and WMs show how great things could be, if they only had a leg to stand on.
Now that I think about it, isn't that exactly what Apple is doing?
The advantage is if you take a sip, find it too sweet, send in a recommendation and it gets rejected you can bottle up your version and sell it yourself. How long until we start seeing LucentCOLA or openCOLA_Helix_1.2.2pre16a? :p
Physics tells us that quite literally, one immortal monkey with one arm tied behind his back would eventually re-create your work. Some of us are a lot smarter than monkeys. And there are four billion years until the sun goes out.
Quite literally nothing tells you anything of the kind. It's a simple problem in statistics (and a homework problem in every statistical physics, thermal dynamics, and quantum mechanics class) that if you have a roomful of monkeys, let them use both typing hands, and let them bang away far past any reasonable lifetime for the univers they won't create shit. Maybe just throw some in aggravation at being forced to do something so pointless but stupid humans...
I dream of exactly the opposite: more OS ports in the other direction to drive down the cost of PowerPC hardware. I mean, do you guys really think that highly of x86 or just stick with it due to legacy code?
A better question might, in fact, be if Microsoft had switched to DEC Alpha, as they had planned off and on for several years, would you still have bought a Compaq? ;)
Thanks, Slashdot, this story made my day. :)
Unfortunately this is just plain wrong. If anybody it was Apple Computer with the Apple II and then the Macintosh that made computers for use by the common man. Microsoft wrote software for minicomputers/switchers that kind of thing. Personal computers as powerful, or even more so, than the slap-dash IBM PC were available, but it was the machine for Elite Men in Blue Suits. Microsoft had no interest whatsoever in making anything easier to use until Gates saw that everyone else was going to GUIs, which would threaten his DOS monopoly. Hence the tying of early versions of Windows to DOS, and the original federal anti-trust case against Microsoft. It wasn't ease of use that prompted customers to buy Microsoft, it was the Elite attitude of the company's early customers. When someone went shopping for a computer they bought what they used at work. When everyone else went to buy theirs, they asked their friends what they should buy, and of course, they recommended what they used, calling everything else "a toy" (Macintosh, Amiga) or "too technical" (Unix)
It seems that most Slashdot readers got their start with Microsoft systems. Think about why you made that choice. I doubt "ease of use" figured anywhere in it at all.
The original one, yes. There's many more, and a new large one (300 ft) is being constructed. A picture I took when I was there observing this summer is all that's on a website of mine, currently.
So, as an astronomer, do you prefer Matlab, or Mathematica for your calculations.... or do you write them yourself? (Begging the question: Perl or Python...) Mathematica. I do more observation than theory, though, so the correct debate is IRAF or XVista? (XVIsta whenever possible, IRAF usually because it's shoved down my throat...) And anything I write myself is in C++ or Java. Sometimes BASIC.
But only for a few seconds. Then all that stored up energy is gone. Meanwhile your warm-blooded ass has been generating more waste heat than a Pentium III. If you can survive the croc's initial charge then you have plenty of energy to run screaming for thirty miles while the crocodile has to eat and lay in the sun for awhile to recharge.
Related to missing interesting things here, did the hyped jwz interview ever actually show up? There are so many interviews these days that I always seem to miss the ones I actually want to read, then can never find them in all of the old stuff.
As an aside rant this is what I hate about the "science" submissions on Slashdot. The Community knows far more about obscure networking cable adapters than junior high level scientific knowledge. As an astronomer I long ago got tired of even trying to contribute to the almost weekly astronomy story posted here. Think of all the stories you tell each other about AOLer's and newbie support calls. To a scientist y'all sound that bad sometimes. I'm sorry, but it's true. On the other hand most science discussions tend to quickly shift focus to the research hardware, or whether the analysts use PERL or Python, so the quality of the post go up, but it's no longer about scientific discoveries. Oh well. Guess this is just a single-interest audience. :)
I highly question the "scholarly" nature of this work if a commercial pornography site was interested in it. I hope it wasn't entitled "Attract Girls Now!"
All I can say is finally! Computer hardware is becoming more and more energy wasteful with each increase in speed/power. At last there's something that can help offset all of that bad engineering...
To add insult to injury many of the songs downloadable for free were critical of the recording industry's not allowing the songs to be downloaded in the first place. You can still find copies of "Swindler's Lust" floating around.
Many major artists have gone independent, or in some cases psuedo-independent. Trent Reznor owns and runs nothing records, and spent as much time promoting his bands the last few years as he did working on "The Fragile". And a KMFDM anything would sell like crazy, since it would be a reunion record... :)
This is what the outcry is over. It's also why their (and many other 'biotech' firms') stock evaluation is soaring through the roof.
After the HGP had ran for a few years a group splintered off to pursue it purely for profit. That's Celera. They've promised to allow access to the information for researchers, but have never deatiled to what extent. They obviously aren't going to allow outside research to be done with any genes they claim a patent to, and that's been the sticking point in most of the past cooperation talks.
Also remember that the announcement made by Clinton & Blair a few months ago gauranteeing the freedom of the genome only applied to the HGP. They would have had to have completed the first map in order for it to mean anything. Celera's rather amazing accomplishment now will mean a real big headache for everyone who's not one of their investors.
A possible scenario is that you fully develop a way to clone yourself, but can't because certain genes giving you immunity to some diseases are protected by a patent. It's really horrifying. Medicine is about to get as nasty as computer software. Everyone is going to sue everyone over everything, all trying to get any slight advantage they can. And people will be dying so stock prices can raise a few tenths of a point...
I've been compiling the source nightly from CVS, and that works beautifully. I think the PR designation of this build is important to regard. This can in no way be considered beta. Alpha, at best. The Gecko components appear stable, but all the Netscape specific features so far are unusable.
Exactly. It's a carefully crafted vapor announcement to get people excited. Just count all the current buzzwords: Linux, nVidia, etc. A machine that's a step beyond the PS2 is certainly possible, but this ain't it.
I hope the pundits weren't correct at the time when they forecasted Transmeta would go nowhere and be clobbered under a continuing Intel monopoly.
I couldn't help but think of Rob's misguided apology while I was reading this article. The obnoxious minority of flamers have succeeded in censoring the site creator and apparently all future discussion of certain topics. This is one of the greatest wrongs I have ever seen on the web. I think the rest of us need to contribute more actively, and be extra careful when we intensely disagree with an expressed opinion, to reclaim this forum from the abusive flamers.
MACHOs are interesting in their own right, but have almost nothing to do with dark matter. Overwhelming evidence shows that dark matter is around 90% of the mass of the universe, and it must be nonbaryonic. For the non-physicists out there, this means it cannot be made of protons, electrons, and neutrons. Everything that emits or reflects light (including planets, small stars, and the matter contained in black holes) is baryonic. Hence the designation of "dark" for the other stuff.
Well, this is something I've been wanting to say for a long time, and unfortunately maybe a moot point now: Linux can be run on non-X86 hardware. Okay, I know most of you know this, but from many of the comments to various announcements seen here it's obvious that many don't. The press orgy surrounding Linux over the past year has certainly ignored this fact
I've been running Linux on several PowerPC boxes for the last three years. My first impression of Linux was that I'd found the Holy Grail: I could run powerful applications at home on my PowerMac, on a friend's Dell, or a Sun workstation at school. GNU software and POSIX compliance made all of this possible.
The first inkling that fragmentation was going to occur in this wonderful new community was when id released the Linux port of Quake. The Linux world went crazy- those that could run it, at least. Suddenly the rest of us were shut out. It wasn't free software, either- which meant there was no ability to hack it for the rest of us. When they released the Alpha-based Linux port it was an encouraging sign, but the future was all too clear.
Now everyday there is a great new "Linux" product announced, most by comapnies that aren't even aware that an "Intel compatible processor" is definitely not a requirement for this wonderful opertaing system. If software based on Win32 APIs become the standard Linux applications, everything Linux was created for is over. The various productivity suites under development will be crushed by Office2000- authentic Microsoft bugs, security holes, and all.
What can be done? I don't know. Until the last year or so we used to stick together as a community. Now software is developed strictly for one graphical desktop, or worse one particular packaged distribution. I'm not willing to concede there's the imminent fragmentation the traditional technology press is salivating waiting for, but we s the Linux community need to start looking out for each other again, and fighting to make sure this wonderful operating system remains free from being shackled to one particular company (software OR hardware.)
I really hope you find a way to make life miserable for the PR firm involved. I'm also quite sure it's illegal to use your name to promote themselves, but that would get into the wonderful world of lawyers. And _that_, unlike free software, is something PR firms are very comfortable with...
Yet again Microsoft brings to light the most glaring troubles with proprietary "standards" and abuse of monopoly power: they're hyping up a Windows CE player, and you can guarantee they'll be players for whatever the next desktop version of Windows is, but that's it. Does anyone seriously see them developing players for other operating systems? And it'll be a cold day in Hell before they'll license it to outside developers to design, say, an application to play the files on Linux.
IBM et al. have shown recently that they're truly interested in developing new technologies, both to increase their profits and the gee-whiz value. Microsoft is just doing this as yet another attempt to keep the world strangled in the jaws of Windows.
I'm really starting to miss the old world, where we as customers could decide what products we preferred, instead of having them rammed down our throats before there's even a chance for competition on the marketplace...