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Bowie Poag might actually be doing something useful these days.. Hm.

...the screenshots there are impresseve at least.

The GUI was, I believe, developed at PARC, under Xerox, along with the mouse, etc. Apple basically stole the whole idea from them.

The mouse was developed by Doug Englebart at Stanford Research Institute more than a decade before PARC came into existence.

Apple paid a lot of money to license PARC's technologies. Apple also hired several ex-PARC employees. Apple also heavily improved on PARC's ideas; it certainly wasn't the case that Apple simply "stole" the Star. And it certainly was NOT the case that the Star was the first GUI or even mouse-driven GUI. Apple added a hell of a lot of innovations to the technologies they licensed from Xerox. It was Microsoft who shamefully stole the MacOS interface without paying fees. Read folklore.org to hear the story straight from the horse's mouth.

As the saying goes: Microsoft has a brilliant Research and Development team, and they're called Apple. It's disgusting how little Microsoft adds to the industry, given their size and wealth.

If you want to learn more, read _Insanely Great_ by Steven Levy. It's an excellent book (I just finished reading it today), and very educational.

You might want to read it again. From memory, Levy didn't do such a hatchet job on the history.

...Is that you gain nothing, functionally, by adding an extra dimension; you gain nothing by working with a collection of predominantly 2D objects in a 3D space.

If you take an honest look at it, and look past the whoop-de-doo factor of seeing objects handled in a 3D space, you'll realize that there's nothing to be gained by handling 2D objects in 3D space. It just looks pretty; in day-to-day use, it's clumsy as hell.

A document, at it's core, is a 2D object. I, as a user, gain nothing by being able to look at it from an obtuse angle, or at a distance, or any other angle a 3D environment would introduce. A 2D document best viewed head-on, so you can view it and operate on it clearly. Now, mind you, thats not to say "all 3D interfaces are bad", but for chrissake, use the right tool for the job.

A 3D desktop is not the right tool for the job when it comes to handling 2D objects.

2D objects are best dealt with in a 2D environment, with 2D tools. Similarly, 3D objects are best dealt with in 3D environments, with 3D tools.

Being able to manipulate a 2D object in 3D space, in many ways, only serves to complicate the issue in a world where most people don't even know what a truly _good_ GUI looks like anymore. 10 seconds past the eye-candy barrier, you'll realize you're driving nails with a socket wrench. Every 3D workspace/desktop argument basically boils down to this conversation


Q: Oh!! But what about having so much room to work in?!!!
A: Virtual resolution, and multiple workspaces work better.

Q: Oh!! But what about the fact you can fly around!!
A: ...And? What does that ability grant you?

Q: But you can fly around from window to window!!!!
A: Switching workspaces is instantaneous. Do you want to "fly around" when you want to watch CNN instead of NBC? No. You just want to change the damn channel. *Click*

Q: But what about zooming your view in and out??!!!
A: You can do this in 2D. On a app-for-app basis, it's called scaling. On a whole-desktop scale, it's called virtual resolution.

Q: But with a good design, you can convey more information in 3D!!!!
A: Yup. The same information you can convey in 2D, with good design.

Q: You suck!!!!!!
A: Yes, yes, I suck. I suck because I use the right tool for the job. Wanna buy a hammer?

It's inescapable--There's always a natural gravitation toward approaching a problem with the best possible tool available. For 2D objects, you use 2D tools. For 3D objects, you use 3D tools. For the exchange of knowledge, 2D has been the medium of choice for billions of people, for all of recorded history. I don't think a windowmanager is going to change that.

I don't want to take a whiz on what the Looking Glass guys are doing.. I just wish they'd pick up a book on ergonomics, and concentrate their efforts on reversing the trend towards increasingly bad (re: Microsoft Windows-based) GUI designs, and concentrate on how to make a good (AmigaDOS) GUI design even better.

My $0.02,
Me

You absolutely, positively have to rip the audio from this and loop it.

They'll love it. I'm sure. >:D

See here. [grin] ;)

Anything that came after SLS is just Yet Another Distro...

mc for messing around with files.

Wrong.

I've installed a few new windows machines this way. Insert the network card into your existing linux box, activate the routing, and go!

more censorship in the US is the curious omission these days of the fact that during the rape of nanking, the US had battle ships off the coast and troops in the embassy. Even though the gov. was aware of what was going on, it could not intervene because of the anti-war groups. One of the ships was even bombed by japanese aircraft and this was explained away as an accident ..

The USS Panay. It wasn't a battleship -- it was a river gunboat. It was a Battleship you can bet that a war would have resulted. In either case history seems to judge that the sinking was intentional. What's new? Anybody care to talk about the USS Liberty? Sometimes it isn't worth going to war over -- and the United States wasn't materially ready (nor was the population) for a war with Japan in 1937.

Midnight Commander is a much more powerful alternative to Windows Explorer.

Damnit. The one time I don't bother to preview, I left out a quotation mark!

Slackware 9.1 ISOs

Enjoy it while it lasts.

More Doctor Fun.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

More Doctor Fun.

While it's interesting in a crude sort of way, it just doesn't capture the intensity, spirit, and complexity of the real thing. You might want to look at what it's trying to imitate. Some samples: Kadinsky, Composition VIII (1923) , Kadinsky, Yellow-Red-Blue (1925), Kandinsky, Decisive Pink (1932). Wouldn't you rather have these on your wall?

The Ghost of Usenet Past strikes again!

As well what is the definition of 'kiddy porn'. Is simple naked children, i.e. nudist web pages, kiddy porn? In many places that *is* becoming the standard: take a picture of your children bathing and you goto jail.

Is this painting the next to be blocked? This one or perhaps this?

Perhaps spamming such art around would desensitize people to the hysteria that has developed over the past 20 years surrounding this topic.

As well what is the definition of 'kiddy porn'. Is simple naked children, i.e. nudist web pages, kiddy porn? In many places that *is* becoming the standard: take a picture of your children bathing and you goto jail.

Is this painting the next to be blocked? This one or perhaps this?

Perhaps spamming such art around would desensitize people to the hysteria that has developed over the past 20 years surrounding this topic.

As well what is the definition of 'kiddy porn'. Is simple naked children, i.e. nudist web pages, kiddy porn? In many places that *is* becoming the standard: take a picture of your children bathing and you goto jail.

Is this painting the next to be blocked? This one or perhaps this?

Perhaps spamming such art around would desensitize people to the hysteria that has developed over the past 20 years surrounding this topic.

Holy crap, that would be weird. It's like over 2,000 files, let FTP keep track of them all.

the ftp is mirrored many places - ibiblio , among others, can probably take the slashdotting.

The How to Think Like a Computer Scientist series is very good for both Python and Java. They also have versions for Logo and C++.

Scheme is not a bad choice for learning programming and the Sussman book which is the intro CS/Engineering text is avaialble for free also.

All of the above have open source or free environments and if she learns the material, will have a very good chance of learning a trade and having it outsourced to India!

When every one of Earth's 6.4 billion inhabitants get on the net and decide they want their one free speech per user, we'll have approximately 40,960,000,000 messages to get through.

To make the sums as fair as possible, let's consider the most long-lived humans (the Okinawan's) as typical recipients; on average they live a smidge under 80 years (2,522,880,000 seconds).

So that's

• 40,960,000,000 messages in
• 2,522,880,000 seconds, which means only
• 0.06159375 seconds can be allotted per message (assuming the reader doesn't eat, sleep, or need a job to pay for the computer and net access).

QED: Free speech is worthless unless a similar right exists for selective listening.

They loved the DS9 episode with the tribbles, why wouldn't they want Kirk back?

Lackey #1: He's too old and fat, sir.

That gives me an idea. He comes back as a disembodied head! Of course, they couldn't get away with the whole Futurama floating-in-a-jar thing (which is a consistent theme of Dr. Fun, by the way), but surely they could work up some kind of thing where we find out he's the King Borg or something. It's not like consistency is a major concert in the franchise . . . they can always end up with it being a holodeck play or a dream or something.

Hey! Maybe we find out that Kirk's an autistic in a ward on Babylon 5 who just dreamed the whole thing!

"There is plenty of porn out there that depicts 18 - 19 year olds as being much younger (or so I here), are these kind of images also illegal and considered child porn?"

Humans go though puberty at about 11-13, yet we are not suppose to be attracted to people in this age group since 1 million years of evolution is simply wrong, very very wrong, and evil.

As for your question, anything under 19 should be illegal, including 19 year olds in the privacy of their own home having sex.

This should especially be illegal: Cupidon. Art is a no-no.

I don't agree with any of you two... Tanenbaum is known by "the guy who wrote Minix" above all his other achievements, Minix was mainly known and used because it was a free implementation of an Unix-based system. People (like me, like Linus) used to use it before using Linux. As a matter of fact Linus left Minix when he started using Linux in it's v0.99, and I (unfortunatly) only started using it with 1995's Mini-Linux distro (I don't recall which Linux Kernel version it has, but I suppose it was 1.1.?).

Yaaaay, alternative OS'es are great, especially when their designers doll them up as flea-market knockoffs of Windows! Yeah, Windows SUCKS! Lets..errr....do the same thing they're doing!.....

Jesus, just where the fuck in the timeline did people stop thinking about proper GUI design? Have you ever stopped to think whether or not the "start button" approach is actually the best for the user?

Saying that the Start button should be used "because it's popular" ignores the fact that, for the most part, it's the only choice people have been presented with for the past decade. Saying "it's good because it's popular" is like saying you have the highest grade in your class.. Ever stopped and asked yourself, maybe the class is full of idiots?

yeah, it's me.

That's GROSS

I wanted to link this image in the story, as shown on the Gaming Age forums, but didn't manage to get permission from the author before the story ran. Classic.

In a never ending qwest to be the second geekiest guy in the world after the Tron guy, I use and love my Brompton bike. Its expensive, but it folds up for carrying -- an elegant engineering feat.

http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/
http://grass.ibiblio.org

STRM is new, so get the CVS version if you want access to the latest auto-load & clean scripts. View with NVIZ.

cool stuff.

When I was 7, I lucked out. My elementary school was one of the first in the state to have computers for students to use in the library. This was, eh, about 1980-81 or so. Apple ][s, to be exact. Three of them. They were available for students to use both during and after school.

Within a few weeks of their being installed, the demand was high enough that the librarians had to set up a list where you had to reserve blocks of time in advance. On monday mornings, I used to go to the library, and allocate time every day afterschool for that week.

By the time I was in 4th & 5th grade, I used to stay after school so long the custodians would have to come and kick me out.

Once I got to college, I decided I wanted to be a Unix administrator. My choice of career pretty much guarantees a salary well above the national average, and even above the majority of IT-related positions. Had I never been able to sit around and hack Lemonade to paint the sky red on Wednesdays, or hack Swords & Sorcery so that I was immortal, I would have never learned how to code, how to be creative, think logically, or be involved with computers in any form.

At every step of the way, there were computers in every school I went to. By the time I was in junior high, I was writing Risk/Empire'ish stuff. It taught me how to think strategically, and introduced me to languages other than BASIC. Things snowballed from there. Fast forward 15 years. ..Unless i'm seeing things, I've got a house, a wife, and a good career. Anyone care to explain to how my school failed me?

Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Yes, that one.

no you just get this guy!

http://www.ibiblio.org/jmaynard/TRONcostume

Completely offtopic, but check out this giant TRON dork.

Unfortunately RedHat couldn't meet our requirements "out of the box". We require some customized software in order to run our applications. With RedHat, this meant downloading the source RPM, modifying the build spec, recompiling with our own internal revision numbers, and then installing. In some cases, it meant manually downloading the tarball and installing from the source. Dependencies eventually became a nightmare and we determined that we had several choices:

1. Rewrite our applications to conform to the out-of-the-box RedHat packages (no other dependencies)
2. Rewrite everything in Java (would have taken to much time and money)
3. Switch to Gentoo

I think this Gentoo poster about sums up our situation when it says the following:

"... He discovered lots of up-to-date packages that could be auto-built using the optimization settings and build-time functionality that he wanted, rather than what some distro creator thought would be best for him..."

Two things.

One: oh dear god..

Two: Is this guy's ass smiling at me?

Two things.

One: oh dear god..

Two: Is this guy's ass smiling at me?

The aging hippy boys at Mythbusters (Discovery Channel) did some experiment involving running through rain. They film out of San Francisco, so of course they had to suit up in skin tight black latex. One of the hosts is a typical out of shape geek, but the other guy is pretty (I'm so pretty, oh so pretty...) buff , so the contrast was interesting. You also could refer back to that guy who built the Tron suit. That may be what you are visualizing...

Heh...I figure i'm pretty well qualified to speak on this subject, so, here goes.

Running Propaganda for the past 6 years has taught me a few important lessons when it comes to human nature. The most important (and relevant) one here is, nobody walks all over you without your permission. Simply put, if you spread your cheeks and hang a neon sign on your ass, it's just a matter of time before you hear someone behind you unzipping their fly.

People are essentially vultures. They look for a free meal wherever they find it. When they do, they converge on it, and take everything they can without thinking twice about it... Which isn't really bad, when you think about it -- If you're enough of a sucker to give your stuff away in the first place, there's a reasonable assumption on behalf of the vultures that you know what you're doing. Meanwhile, you lose your identity, piece by piece. You become less of a person, and more of a faceless generator set in place to make other people happy.

It's amazing how people even have to be reminded of this idea -- If you don't want people using your shit, don't give it to them for free!

I've got something like 14,000 images out there floating around. I see them pop up all the time.. screenshots, themes, hell even commercials on TV occasionally. It doesn't bother me. Why? Because I consciously gave them away. By giving stuff away for so many years, I effectively gave up my right to bitch about it. If you set a plate full of brownies in the middle of a room full of 5th graders, what the hell do you expect is gonna happen to them? They'll get wrapped in plastic wrap stored in a refrigerator? Hell no. It turns into a free-for-all, no pun intended. I hate to say it, but that's the truth..So pull your pants back up, and quit your "sensitive artist" crap. No one cares, and even if they did, you have no ground to stand on.

Simple as that.

Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag

It's the need for people to take the story literally that surprises me and the issue of the time frame. If the story is literally true then the event happened within the last 6000 years. That's quite simply not enough time to get the genetic diversity we have now. We can attribute this to one of two things, a miracle, or a faulty interpretation of the scriptures. I'm more inclined to believe that men are reading the scriptures wrong, others are backing the miracle option.

You're referring to Midnight Commander.

I use mcedit contained in Midnight Commander, more nostalgia and userfriendliness than either Joe or Pico. It also has a nice blue color which remind me of the days of dos edit or wp5.1. Screenshot here.

Ya know, I've always preferred "Who Will Be Eaten First?"
(It's a shame that the author got a nastygram from Jack Chick's lawyers, and you can't find it on his site.)

That man was actually making a tron costume. The results are quite frightening.

Here is a picture of a soldier wearing some

I believe there are are sites that are designed to cope with this type of thing. The guy that designed the TRON costume at Penguicon has his site at home on a DSL, but copied the site to ibiblio before submitting to slashdot.

Nonsense. Here is the new Vader costume.

> Jay Maynard's cool TRON costume

I think the real TRON would definitely wear a cup and a girdle as part of this costume.

I really didn't need to see Milton's nads.

Ah crap, now I'm stumped.

Do I make a clone of Jay Maynard's cool TRON costume or of Darth's outfit? Our annual Sci Fi convention is next month and I don't want to wear my Vulcan Ears for the 24th time.

Welcome to the new goatsee.cx page...

He's got balls.. (and just look at the photos if you don't believe me)