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In order to come creature who lives with voltages he on the Pepsi-voltages!



Woo-ee, babelfish is smoking crack tonight. It's starting to sound like a religious prophet. The Bible, by Babelfish, anyone?
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

All that means is that they've perfected English->English, French->French, Spanish->Spanish, etc., etc. :)

I wish I could look at the source, if anyone has it, post a link or something.

Someone moderate this up, along with the (real) first post unfairly marked as redundant, and then spank the moderators for me.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

It's pretty dead.

I can ping it, but port 80 is pretty non-responsive...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Hopefully we'll see some better translators, because the current ones suck.

And maybe we'll be able to add on some custom vocabulary, that would be really nice for computer journals (or chemistry, medicine, whatever...)

...at least the article wasn't in German, or something. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Dude, I'm using Navigator 4.05, and they told me to upgrade to Navigator 4? They're a bunch of crack-whores who can't parse user info right.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Sigh. 'Emacs' did, but not the Lisp interpreter. So if we have to make a distinction, I'm not talking about 'TECO Emacs', and it sucks that they had to have the same name...

I quote, from GNU's Emacs FAQ:

23: Where does the name "Emacs" come from?

Emacs originally was an acronym for Editor MACroS. RMS says he "picked
the name Emacs because `E' was not in use as an abbreviation on ITS at
the time." The first Emacs was a set of macros written in 1976 at MIT by
RMS for the editor TECO (Text Editor and COrrector, originally Tape
Editor and COrrector) under ITS on a PDP-10. RMS had already extended
TECO with a "real-time" full screen mode with reprogrammable keys. Emacs
was started by Guy Steele as a project to unify the
many divergent TECO command sets and key bindings at MIT, and completed
by RMS.

Many people have said that TECO code looks a lot like line noise. See
alt.lang.teco if you are interested. Someone has written a TECO
implementation in Emacs Lisp (to find it, see question 90); it would be
an interesting project to run the original TECO Emacs inside of Emacs.


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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

:) It really kicked ass, didn't it?

It ran great on my 386SX25 with 2MB of RAM, so...

And, actually, I could still get it to work under DOS on my P133. I should try it under VMWare sometime, just for hack value...

Hmm. Good question, whatever did happen to Future Crew. I guess they grew up. Here's Abyss's page. Apparently they were going through high school, and writing demos. That's the short, short version. :)

If you can get ahold of FCINFO.TXT (or something like that), it has more details. Like, they were founded in '86, Psi has been with them since the beginning, etc. They were our Gods, so it's hard to picture that they were just kids once, too. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Ah, okay, thanks for the polite correction.

I'm sorry, I definitely read that one too fast, so I'd expect people to show their ire. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Well, yeah, but where does it all start? That would take some serious research. Remember that "Microsoft" BASIC for the Altair was written on a CPU emulator. Much past that is just too early for me... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I always knew they had taste.

Insert something about US not caring about privacy rights here.

But why use BabelFish for something about England? No primary source?
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Huh? Emacs and XFree are definitely hacks, in one way or another. (Originally perhaps more the April Fool's variety, I'm afraid...)

Emacs: Let's write a LISP INTERPRETER on top of UNIX and call it a TEXT EDITOR!!!

If that shouldn't be a Zippy quote, I don't know what is. I'm not even going into byte-compiling, since Java took that seriously... They even gave you hints by including Zippy, *and* a free psych evaluation for when you got frustrated. :)

XFree: Same thing.

Let's run X WINDOWS on the PC and use it as a LOW-COST SOLUTION!!!

You've got to realize that both of these things would be completely unrealistic for when it started. Oh, except for the fact that X on a Sun 4 was just as slow as X on a 486... The only thing scarier than that would be the X Server for DOS that I played around with for a while.

Of course, many people are doing great work on X, XFree, Emacs, XEmacs, etc., etc. Now. Just realize when they started (Emacs is an ancient MIT project!) and how silly it must have looked back then. (ed! ed is the standard! text editor.)

And patch is probably most responsible for forking code and saving bandwidth. In that order. Rather nominate the GPL, for preventing forking. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

What? I didn't *forget* nesticle, it came out much later. It is perhaps the best NES emulator out there (others support more mappers, but it has authentic sound, and good playability) but unfortunately lacks a Linux port. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Yep. That's what you did with OSes back them. Booted them. I mean... never mind. :)

Commercial PC's designed by one person. Hmm. Cray? Originally designed with a pencil and paper, and later, perhaps, on a Macintosh? ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

"What's Perl got that sed and awk don't have?" :)

Sometimes I agree with you, that Perl looks like sed, awk, shell, and C, beaten together without their consent. Which is basically what it is. And it's interpreted, which places its speed right between that of shell scripting and C. (think three orders of magnitude here, with shell scripting the slowest and C the fastest)

However, I've seen some very impressive, short Perl scripts. There's something to be said for three lines of obfuscated code that really *does* something. But woe betide the coder who finds maintenance programming written in Perl, for that is truly evil.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Hmm. You've got a point, I have massive respect for emu authors, and I love the NES. However...

I'm also pretty impressed by MAME, MESS, and even the early C64 emulators. The NES really is a simpler system in some aspects... But the concept of emulating a completely different hardware platform, and doing it well, sure is neet. :)

The first NES emulators I remember were... PasoFami, it was Japanese, for Windows, and often found badly cracked and translated. Also, SuperPasoFami was the most functional SNES emulator for a while, until snes9x got better. iNES is pretty old, too.
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Anyone remember the Second Reality demo for the PC in 1993? Amazing, right? Well, the only thing that could possibly top that would be...

Second Reality for the C64 in 1997! I was amazed, the sound was very good (and the video somewhat limited for obvious reasons :) and it ran fine on vice, with a little tweaking. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

FWIW, I think he's right. That's the same thing I did, and given some experience, an unbiased user (possibly only an old school one, though) should come to the same conclusion. There are a few other factors coming into play that I believe were beyond the scope of that article, however.

1) Jobs that require people to use Windows NT for whatever task. This stops people from trying out anything else. Period. (unless they know better, and their boss doesn't mind / know)

2) Pre-existing bias. Specifically: absolute hatred of tweaking text files. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but how often do you read an article that pans Linux solely because the "techs" felt stupid not knowing what to edit in /etc, and end up mumbling about "arcane text files" and "Windows 3.1", showing both their ignorance and their preference. Contrast this with the same techs talking about how much better their Windows machine runs after they've "tweaked a few registry settings".

Apparently, a binary registry with a lousy GUI interface is more appealing to a Windows "tech" than is a simple text file. Why? What spawns such masochism? Maybe they just like the apparent power of messing with the internals of their system, which they shouldn't normally be doing in the first place... Or maybe they don't realize that they're just editing yet another .DAT file. :)

3) Microsoft is running scared. I wouldn't normally put this in, but I've been watching for a while, and that's the only conclusion I can make. I think they'll try to never port Office to Linux and try to stick to the crappiest and least time-consuming methods for when they need to port Unix applications (MainWin). This way, they can give Unix a bad name, and say it's not ready for the desktop, and that's why they only port their real apps to the Mac, and look at how bad Internet Explorer runs on Unix anyhow why would you want to use it... However, Linux is changing that. As people increasingly see it as a desktop alternative, they also see how whacked out the Microsoft PR Machine is lately.

Especially as Microsoft pays "independent" companies into finding deceiving results for them, and then sneak these results into the press. (Mindcraft - sure, the benchmarks were real, but try them with one NIC, or especially with Gigabit ethernet; The Gartner Group - outright deception on the part of Microsoft, and don't piss off the people writing the reports the bosses read. :) )

Don't get me wrong, Microsoft has always been cautious, but I've never seen them try to screw themselves into the ground the way Apple has until now. (Compare Copland or Taligent to Windows 95/98/2000; Closed hardware, no clones vs. irrational refusal to port application software to new OSes) And that scares me. I don't like Microsoft very much, and I don't know if they could redeem themselves now, but I have to thank them for introducing me to a commandline that was more functional than my C64's was. They couldn't keep that up, though, and they couldn't write a decent GUI Windowing System, (I liked GEOS on my C64 much better than Windows 3.1, and I didn't even like it all that much...)

However, I loved the author's characterizations of Microsoft, because they were humorous and right on the mark. All I can say is: "What has that customer got in his pocketsess? Give me..." (just picture salespeople, corrupted by the ring, hunched over...)

So, yes, some Windows users are stuck in the Windows world, and haven't seen the light. I, personally, never liked Windows, and when I found out about SunOS and later Linux, I never looked back. I grew up on DOS, basically, and Unix is so much better that... well, I can't tell you how wonderful it is to find an OS with a command line that has all the functionality I ever wanted and more... NT tried to hack that back in, but it's got lousy DOS compatibility baggage, and would make for really annoying, slow batch files.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Oh god, don't say that! DEC Pathworks was the most horrible networked file system, especially with an underpowered VAX on the back end. It would represent files in 64k blocks, and eat them and not give back the space... Needless to say, our sysadmins never figured it out, so it was more likely their incompetence that made it so horrible. Now they're using a Windows "solution", and I hope they suffer for it. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Would you be allowed to do this if there *were* a fire in a crowded theatre? I don't think calmly saying "ahem. No problem, just a fire..." would have a very different effect.

Similarly, the extent of the Y2K problem is hotly under debate, and will be until, say, sometime after Jan. 1st, 2000... Therefore, one person's interpretation of events is very much still free speech. And if we don't believe him... well, we don't have to. The problem is, many people are harboring doubts, and this man is not alone...

And is everyone shouting doom? If so, shouldn't the FBI go after *them*? No, this doesn't make much sense, something is definitely missing. Are we just out of real news, here, guys?
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

but boy was that vague. They want to relax some of the export restrictions? So that whatever you're selling might only constitute 10% munitions? Or maybe only if you're using it wrong, or in the wrong market?

If this made sense to you, please post and clear it up for us. This doesn't even look like the government is considering giving us more bits for encryption! (They don't allow enough bits, and no kibbles, so write to your Congressman!)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

What, do you mean by spamming people?

Apparently Red Hat took the heat for that, but since they skyrocketed, maybe we'll all forgive VA Linux and pretend this is standard.

600k, though? That's excessive. Especially for a file format that looks suspiciously like a zipped postscript file with some headers... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Yeah, I agree with you, it's definitely a flaw in the system that allows people with connections to make money. But hey, what else is new? :)

I don't know how much money VA "needs", but with the amount they charge for their systems, they'll probably make it. I'll just be happy if they contribute back to the community, that's worth paying extra for...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Heh heh heh. I wonder if anyone could try to sue the NSA due to "prior art". Then the NSA would have to admit that no, they had prior art that was unpatented, but classified. I mean, how can the government patent anything they want to keep secret? And if you reinvent it and patent it, do you own it? Or would the USPTO be able to tell?
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Anonymity is the human version of security through obscurity. You're fine until someone figures out what you're doing. :)

I agree that on the internet, this can work well, and all of the Anonymous Cowards on slashdot and those darn 'cypherpunk'(s) who have accounts everywhere, and the deserted old computers doing anonymous re-mailing can rejoice. However, you'd better shut off all your ports, and hope that no one is scanning for interesting info... Staying anonymous can be fine for some people, but I consider staying uninteresting as both a good defense, and a horrible curse. :)

Heh, AltaVista (av.com) also tailored their ads according to what you search for. And they didn't check the modifiers. So if you searched for something like: "paisely box -xxx", you'd get porn ads. Is that pitiful, or what? I think they fixed that eventually, but they still try to use your searches to show ads. (no, america, if you search for "mp3", they don't show you porn. ;)

I'd worry a little, just because we found out in the 90's that big brother built a computer, and it really was watching us. Fortunately, the gov't has either been a little less corrupt than some members of Generation X-Files would like you to believe, or really good at covering their tracks. (Ooo, conspiracy theory! :) But the fact remains that there are spooks watching, and if they see something they consider strange, maybe they'll be watching you. So why show them anything at all?
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Don't use telnet, use ssh. Got any sensitive e-mails? Time for PGP or GPG. (GPGPGP? Ahh!)

Why, you say? I don't have any data anyone would care about? Well, you might be right, but don't use that business e-mail account for personal reasons if you care about your job. And remember that the company might be logging your web access too, checking it against company policy. Chilling, isn't it? It's practically standard procedure nowadays.

Also, if you encrypt your stuff, and you usually have nothing to hide, and others do the same, eventually it gets much harder for anyone to snoop on the internet. They'd generally want to attack people who send unencrypted streams of data... Sucks for them. :)

Also, some common sense: Don't leave any encryption keys lying around if you care about your identity. In the future, I'm sure this can only get worse, and not just for Sandra Bullock. And saying "encrypt everything" might sound cool, but alas there are a few places where it isn't a good idea for everything. Like slashdot, for example. I wish my user account / password was secure, that would be nice... (the lesson here: have a throw-away password for the WWW, since much of the submissions are in plaintext, or a reasonable facsimilie) But I could care less about the actual content of my posts, they definitely don't need to be encrypted as they are being posted to a public forum! Like so.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Heh heh. Where did "Big Blue Disk" go... I think there could be a place for that, collecting new, cool online freeware / shareware / public domain software every month.

Heck, I'd be happy with a collection of all the old stuff. I'll have to search for it...

But now that there are no good general computing magazines anymore, (correct me if I'm wrong, I think Byte was the last one... I like Linux Journal, but that really only covers Linux (duh!))

I don't see the point of reading what we have today. A favorable review of Win 2000 in a PC mag of some sort, despite the evidence to the contrary... What a surprise! Some Mac mag likes the iMac, despite the evidence to the contrary... What a surprise! If those old rags surprised me anymore, I think I'd roll over and die.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Sure, dude. First, it isn't new. It's pretty new to the PC industry (although I heard of a guy who stuck his 286 laptop in the fridge, so it would run like a 386... :) but Cray did this a long time ago...

No, it isn't for everyone, just for people who apparently need at least the fastest uni-processor speeds available. That's what this is good for. It isn't good for price/performance, and I haven't seen anything said about multiprocessing, (although you could cluster them, at least) but if you need a high MHz number in a box, this will give it to you.

All CPU-bound apps should speed up. (I could probably encode MPEG audio in realtime, even with a less efficient algorithm... with the setup I have now, it takes 2-3 times the playing time of the CD...) But don't expect everyone to get this until it gets cheaper than a faster chip. Only get this when there are no faster chips! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Sigh. It's been said already, but this is humor.

Would you also be protesting the defamation involved in the valley girl, elmer fudd, redneck, or B1FF text filters? They aren't very different. If you would, then you have no sense of humor. If you wouldn't, then you are a racist.

Or, rather, just to make sure you understand:

WouLD u @l5O b PRO+E5tING tHe DEF@M@zhun INVOLved 1n tHE v@LeY +oDAl BABE, ElMur fudD, RednecK, Or B1Ff +eXt fILtur5?!?1?!?
+hEY AReN+ tOt@LLy difFuRent, 1F u wOuLD, +heN u GO+ no 5En5E uv HuMOR!
iF u wouLDn+, tHeN u r A r@CI5+,

What you should be protesting is the dehumanizing force that is the computer, able to translate plain English into mechanically incomprehensible gibberish that some people still manage to find funny, for no apparent reason. (Slap mah fro!)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Speaking of this, I think my favorite (horrible!) variable declaration had to be:

struct dumb by [sizeof member];

I mean, that's just elegant in its cleverness and wrongness...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Ooo, Yet Another Linux Portal. Forgive my lack of excitement. I'll apologize when it gets so cool that it replaces Slashdot as my "Home" site. (but it'd have to be pretty customizable and real frickin' intelligent for that. Maybe if they let me browse slashdot stories, and track specific software apps (as opposed to freshmeat, which tracks tons of stuff I don't care about...) and give me links to my comics and stuff...)

I see nothing wrong with having someone who used to have to work at Microsoft (but at least get to take their money :) now in charge of developing a Linux site. Provided it doesn't end up being evil. (like, say, IE "enhanced"...)

However, some people might not take this point of view. Like this coward, here. It's somewhat telling that the Anti-Linux section is also the FreeBSD section... What lamers.

Of course, if you get sick of Linux or Microsoft bashing, there's also a section of very mature statements on relationships, and the classic Series 8 Garbage Pail Kids...

There's also a "Free IPO Offering". It's a shame I can't just short their stock now.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Processor speed isn't everything, my man. I'll be using this K6/300 for at least another 6 months, and my mother is relatively happy with her P133 for a while yet. I've got an old one running Linux that I don't use much, but it's still functional... And a 286, too. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Anyone catch the "NSA Secret OS Hooks" reference?

I wonder if the author knows something we don't, or if he's quoting the same speculation on slashdot earlier. Anyhow, he's right that real Free Software doesn't have that problem. (above and beyond regular ol' Obfuscated C. :)

And yes, having the Operating System, a significant percentage of the cost of a PC, costing nothing is definitely a good start. Being able to use donated or refurbished PC's is also good. IIRC, ELKS has this as one of its project goals. (since there are x86 computers 386 still being used in the rest of the world, get them to run something sorta like Linux)

Of course, I hope this is changing nowadays, but a computer is still a computer, and I'd much rather have a Commodore 64 than no computer at all. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

I wouldn't call it valid, because some things are unprovable, and some things are vacuously true. None of this stuff you're debating actually matters enough to get results, as opposed to a scientific study. That's why it's philosophy.

Examples:

You also can't prove that the world wasn't created 5 minutes ago by a giant pink elephant, and that therefore pink elephants will eventually throw off their oppressors and conquer the universe. Unfortunately, you're just a random mutation on another planet, so who cares what you think? :)

if (42==0) then {I am a giant pink elephant.};

The conclusion is true because the assumption is false. This is vacuously true. Similar to:

if (something unprovable) then {my favorite conclusion.};

Due to its nature, this is no way to argue *anything* correctly if you want real answers. A good counter-proof would involve two assumptions yielding contradictory results. They can't both be true, yet individually they should be. Therefore, there's something wrong with the approach.

Of course, that's just my opinion, much like the rest of philosophy... ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

If walking is a problem, then everything else is going to be hideous. What about terrain? Or stairs, inclines, etc.? The sphere is analogous to what a mouse ball does to get x and y co-ordinates, but that's it: no resistance, texture, depth...

It would work if you just wanted to move in a direction and ignore height, like Doom, but I don't see how it'd be so much better than controlling movements with an arbitrary input device. Resistance wouldn't be hard to add (press something against the sphere) but the rest of it would suck.

I guess you could put some realistic surface on the sphere, like astroturf or something, but you'd better hope the simulation doesn't have a desert, or a wood floor or something. And stairs would really be impossible. Nope, until holograms have physical mass, or we can arbitrarily shape some surface that externally looks pretty real or solid (super silly putty?) I don't think we're going to solve this one.

And remember, direct neural interfacing would really blow if you screwed it up. The non-physical solution would be the best one, bypassing the middle-man, but a *lot* of research would have to be done before I would be willing to try it. (virtual human crash-test dummies? :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

A lot of KDE looks inspired by Windows. If they can keep it fast and free, I don't mind if they go that route, it should make a lot of people happy. However, it would be nice if there could be an easy way to get multiple bindings, or some other kind of standardization between all of these Desktop Environments.

I'd be really happy if I could just theme everything, and have an all-encompassing widget set (or bindings for everything, and recompile). If you ever get bored... it's GNOME and athena widgets, or KDE and motif, or something. Also, then we could get the Mac bigots to shut up about the consistent-look-and-feel thing, so we can explain about network transparency. ;)