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Well, yeah, that's only half the problem, you'd still have to make a unified graphical interface for it all, somehow. They'll probably both support themes, though, so you could just make GNOME look like KDE, and get one wm to have hooks for both...

I could care less about the unified desktop; I run fvwm2 and bash; but I know a lot of people want that, especially (a) for linux newbies and (b) to get the Mac Zealots to shut up. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I wouldn't mind seeing some more cross-pollination in the GNOME/KDE world. I know it happens already, somewhat, but it seems wasteful to have so many of the same apps re-coded from the ground up.

Ask yourselves: could a Qt compatibility layer be implemented on top of GTK? Could a common library be used for all these widget sets? I know the Harmony project died horribly, and I don't code X stuff yet, but still...

After that, how different would all these apps *really* be? Could they settle on a common component model? With a common component model and a common look-and-feel (customizable, of course!), the two projects would overlap, and if not double, then at least increase in size by, say, sqrt(2), and therefore grow much faster.

I don't want a homogenous Linux desktop, I want a customizable one, but if we could merge these projects one day, everyone could have all their apps for Linux looking the same and playing nice with each other, AND they wouldn't have to worry that GBar is only GNOME and KFoo is only KDE, and the two don't look the same, and this toolkit isn't Free yet, and blah blah blah...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

It was a loong time ago, something about re-negotiating their license for the NT Source.

IIRC, Microsoft was acting like "Crazy Eddie": I'll sell company a product x for $y, but I'll sell it to company b for $z, and I won't sell it to company c at all, because they might compete with me...

And now things must look even bleaker for MS, since they own MainWin, and therefore *really* have a conflict of interests over this one, and with everyone else getting money out of them too, in the wake of the last big lawsuit...

;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I have a copy of Heroes III for Linux, and that game rules. I know a lot of people with Q3A for Linux, and that's even better...

About the Mac: I just call the numbers as I see them. Statistics count in *my* definition of proof.

Just because everyone uses Word documents doesn't mean you can't do the same stuff on Linux; last I saw, StarOffice worked just fine, it just wasn't called "MS-Office". Call it Office, don't use the StarOffice formats, and add a frickin' paperclip, and they'll never know the difference. :)

Would you call the NT stations we have as *public workstations* Desktop machines? If so, so are the Linux and Sun boxes. I guarantee you they don't SERVE anything, and they're accessible to the student body; that's what we call DESKTOPS.

The market grows along with the apps, but as it stands, Linux is getting more attention than MacOS, even without Office. Maybe Microsoft can read the writing on the wall; hopefully their Apps department will.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I believe I mentioned this already, but...

1) I use it on the Desktop.
2) A lot of people on Slashdot do as well.
3) There are retail boxes for WordPerfect's Office Suite, Quake 3, and several other products for Linux; brick-and-mortar software stores often have 'Linux' sections now.
4) Last I saw, Linux was about on par with MacOS for a regular user-base.
5) Many people use Linux as both a Desktop *and* a server as well.
6) My University is converting Sun boxes into Linux boxes; they're more powerful at a lower cost, and run the same stuff (and more!) for what we have around here; University students generally count as Desktop users.
7) Let Microsoft release 'Office for Linux', and watch businesses, universities, and individuals collectively put their money where their mouths are, and make Microsoft Apps richer and Microsoft OS poorer.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Wouldn't Microsoft *want* to port its applications to an OS that had no desktop market share?

I mean, not everyone can use Windows for everything, but Microsoft could still sell them apps. And if Microsoft had no competition, well, that just makes it easier for them.

Of course, people *do* use Linux on the desktop; I know, because I'm one of them. And there *are* other apps, but I'm sure if they ever released "MS-Office for Linux", a lot of people and businesses would buy it. (And then replace Windows, which is why Apps & OS need to be broken up in Microsoft; the Chinese Wall never worked.)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Gotcha; I haven't played those games, and therefore didn't realize it was an issue. I'd like to try EverQuest, but I wouldn't pay $10/month for it. I'd be willing to pay, say, $30 up-front, and maybe $50 if I knew it was a really good game and could test it out (a la Q3DEMO)...

Actually, I think I'll look into Mangband instead; that looks like fun, and it badly needs a graphical Linux client...

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Thanks! That section in particular is a really interesting read.

I thought about 'fair use' somewhere in there, but I figured I wouldn't confuse the issue any, especially since I'm not that familiar with anything complicated in the copyright code--but now that I have that link, I might just get familiar with it. :)

I take it a computer with a CD-ROM drive and a sound card counts as a 'digital recording device', and therefore my non-commercial use of it is fine, eh? ;)

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Who says you have to reverse-engineer it?

All you have to do is just keep trying to connect to the guy that is... who never purchased a copy, either.

He analyzes the packets and writes the server, and occasionally says, "Hey buddy, try to connect to this machine, will ya? I can't get it to work yet..." ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Emulators, server emulators, and mp3's are all legal.

Using copyrighted material without permission (purchasing it or otherwise) probably isn't. This includes goods, ROMs, music, video, photos and text, although many of these are often not enforced... (which is how people often use tapes, video tapes, hard drives, photo-copy machines...)

In the case of EverQuest, I really don't see what the problem is. People still buy your game, and they still use your game. They just aren't connecting to your server. Boo hoo. They aren't even copying anything they shouldn't. I mean, what should you care what they do in their own time, and who are you to tell your customers how they should use your product? You should help them, and give them some specs, and they'll like you better, and support you in the future.

In my case, I'm pretty happy with Loki, for example. They produce great games, and they respond to the community. I beta-tested Heroes III, and I bought a copy, too. They added a lot of stuff they said they would, like fullscreen mode for non-root, and I think the map editor is in beta. I just need to ask them if the Expansion Packs will work with Linux, and if I could just get those separately, or if they have plans to port them...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What, you don't think I realize that? Don't be a moron.

I want to do *exactly* that; I was just pointing out that now they aren't necessarily 'volunteers' all the time, and might have other conflicts of interest as well.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I haven't looked at the CREDITS lately, but I know just from the LKML that a lot of the people working on the kernel have real Linux-related jobs too, like working for SuSE...

Is it still "Mostly Volunteers"? Even in lines of code? I'm sure a lot of these people are still doing it out of love, but realize that they're also getting paid now. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No, I meant, say, each individual build of NT, 9x, 3.1... There should be 3 versions of Windows (or so), not 3,000...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No fair counting *each* Windows build as a separate Operating System!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Maybe he apprentices to Mace Wendu; he's one bad mutha... ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

1) The X-box *is* a PC.

2) Therefore, porting games OR pirating them should be trivial.

3) If I have a PC, why would I ever buy an X-box?

4) PC's have gotten *easier* to design for; we have consistent APIs for gaming now, like SDL, OpenGL, and OpenAL; Quake III looks beautiful on my new Linux box, but it should look the same on Windows. The same goes for Mozilla...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

My question is, how the hell did they fit James Earl Jones into that little Darth Vader suit?

(and how did he turn into a crusty white guy after that?)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, you're supposed to believe it because it's from InfoWorld, but even if the facts are wrong, I've heard this sort of thing in the past.

I know a guy who used to work for Microsoft, and I believe he did most of his work in HP/UX. They did use a lot of Unix internally, at least back then. And what do you expect? If I wanted to get work done, I'd use Unix too.

I'm sure they have to use a lot of Windows boxes nowadays since they've made sure not much else works with Windows, and present-day versions of Windows *do* have better multi-tasking and memory protection than Win 3.1 did. Of course, if they've ported all their stuff to Unix already, that part wouldn't matter.

I wonder how long they held onto Xenix? There were some funny quotes from back when they were pushing that. The same for OS/2, before they stabbed IBM in the back again.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's ok, no one's looking at it now... :)

Yeah, freepascal is pretty good; it's better now. I found it when it was fpk-pascal, and some basic functions weren't quite the same. (also, my event loops could take up 100% cpu in Linux until I explicitly told them to sleep; it's not like DOS anymore!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, but that's an ugly kludge. Too bad DOS never had a standard way to do dynamic linking.

In any case, just pointing out some features that are nice to have in your target OS. I programmed enough Pascal in DOS to know how annoying an arbitrary 64k limit is on allocating blocks of memory; now I use Linux instead. Coincidence? I think not...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

YES! Rendering under DOS!

Wanna make a movie?

(two weeks later...)

What do you mean DOS is (at best) 16 bit and not running in protected mode?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Wow; the assembler dumps are very interesting.

Okay, I think this could help for at least Pentium optimizations, but it seems to leave the K6(/K7) out of the mix.

I'll have to look it up, or test instruction timing on different machines, because I seem to remember a few simple things being drastically different. (like using loop instead of jmp, and whatnot)

gcc and the like don't do *anything* in the way of AMD optimizations, do they? Or has anyone looked into what would be an acceptable compromise?

I know they didn't do much for the Pentium before, and I really don't think they use much past 386 instructions either, but a lot of times the original instruction set ends up being more optimized-for anyhow.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

DUDE!

OMF absolutely rules; I love that game!

If they came out with anything like that again, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

(or, well, any decently-coded demostyle game...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Did gorski get a suggestion in? 'cause he's the *only* person I've heard use that term.

(other geeks from elsewhere chime in: where did you hear this one? I've always heard of it being a pizza decided upon by a group, compromised on by everyone and palatable by no-one...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Wow; you've taken Freshmeat crossposting to a new level!

...but... isn't there a web site for that? :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Watcom was an excellent C compiler; I hope some of their floating-point optimizations will eventually be folded into egcs, because I remember the default DOS-compiled BYTEMarks had a bit of an edge there.

(Also, someone told me that when IBM recompiled the Windows source with it, it was about 30% faster at the time. I think that was for OS/2, but it was funny at the time. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's okay, I tend to use language loosely.

However, there's nothing wrong with trying to explain something, or clear things up for the rest of us.

Eschew obfuscation, that's what I always say...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The Computer History Graphing Project -- it looks like it needs some work, but we'll see.

There's lots of other info out there too, like FOLDOC, which could probably be incorporated into a project like this.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Thank you; it's been a while since I've been to that museum.

Their main attraction back then had to do with calculating path length between cities in Pascal on a very *large* computer; back then, it looked pretty impressive! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

lucid (lsd)
adj.

1.Easily understood; intelligible.
2.Mentally sound; sane or rational.
3.Translucent or transparent. See Synonyms at clear.

[Latin lcidus, from lcre, to shine; see leuk- in Indo-European Roots.]

lucidity or lucidness n.

lucidly adv.

There's a computer museum in Boston, and Bruce Sterling has written about it.

I don't know if you could get a formal position, but by all means, start a web site! Even a lucid history with pointers to resources would be nice.

I have a good book from ~'86 that goes over the languages and the computer internals of the day (specs on the C64 hardware, a basic memory layout of the TRS-80, etc., etc.), and I'm sure you can find more of that at your local library. I got that one from a library book sale, actually!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That really doesn't make any sense--therefore, invest in it!

I now have incredibly high-tech phone misdirection and blocking devices! They're called "prisms".

Oh well. Even if it *does* work, my phone card still won't be activated, and I'll have to call the company somehow to tell them my phone service doesn't work...

I liked the paper-cups-and-string method much better. And I didn't have to rent the string! What am I doing now, leasing the air?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, that's still semantics.

Taking it at face-value, incompetent would mean "not competent"; this could be construed as unskilled, ignorant, or not versed in a field, just as unqualified could be... But I suppose it has worse connotations attached to it, regardless.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The Nazi says, "I'm really sorry about what happened; I was just following orders!"

The Rabbi looks upwards with a puzzled look on his face.

The Nazi says, "What, what is it?"

The Rabbi grabs a heavy pewter pitcher and brains the Nazi with it.

The Bartender says to the Rabbi, "What was that for? I thought Rabbis were peaceful, and I'll have no trouble from anyone in my bar!"

The Rabbi looks upwards again, and tries to explain.

"I'm really sorry, I was just following orders!"
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

It's about time a judge realized that he's incompetent to legislate what he doesn't understand; it's rare that they ever back down and admit their mistakes.

Now if only we could teach Congress the same lesson...

Mind you, I'm not saying there should be no controls placed on the Internet, or the computer industry in general; just that they should be informed.

If it were possible to start a tech-savvy regulation board that occupies the same sort of position as the FDA or the FCC, but in charge of computers or the internet, I'd be all for it. But I have a feeling that they either wouldn't be impartial or wouldn't be tech-savvy, or wouldn't get anything done...

So as usual, we'll probably have to do it all ourselves, and attempt to advise the people who have and exercise the power over what they do not understand.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Judging from the cartoons, I'd say "Just because it's political doesn't mean it's serious".

The text I can take or leave; it reads at only slightly more comprehensible than a Katz article. (I give it a 0.7 Katz rating, where 0 is comprehensible and 1 is obviously computer-generated)

However, the cartoons are hilarious! Balmer's codename is Bald Weasel? Double-plus-negative Microsoft speak? And that's just the beginning.

So, regardless of what your motives are, or what your opinion of the article was, thanks for submitting it! Occasionally, Suck does not suck.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

If the Obfuscated C Contest didn't have such small size limitations on C files, I'd post the source code to Perl!

...however, I need to see what silly rules the Obfuscated Perl contest has. If it doesn't have that many, you can just *bet* that I'll write a source filter that decrypts to Perl, runs itself, and calls the C preprocessor! (and maybe I'll have it generate and compile some C code while I'm at it... hmm.)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That actually sounds really interesting; I'll have to check it out.

I take it there's a bit of a learning curve, though? :)

Thanks!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's cool; is there some sort of method naming convention?

What I like about Scheme is that you can query the datatype to see what it is, and it will be an atom or a list; atoms are like scalars, and lists just need to be parsed recursively.

Perl doesn't really support that well for its scalars, and arrays and hashes sort of have their own namespaces, and look like they came from BASIC. But at least you can get types from references.

And C is downright horrible on this because a pointer could be anything! You'd have to make a struct with a field that identifies it, always in the same place, or something similar. But you have the power to do whatever you want... sort of...

On the other side of the fence, Java has a type for everything, and is correspondingly complex, too.

Those are the issues I see, anyhow.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

There's a C library that does garbage collection already. Actually, I think there are a few of them.

And it's a shame to not see good template (genericity?) support in C#. Or any language, for that matter.

I think choosing a good type system is where a lot of languages fall flat, and I'm not a big fan of the huge C++/Java Object/Type/Library approach, although I haven't seen a truly good solution to this problem yet. C, Pascal, Java, Perl, Scheme... They all have different ideas and solutions, and I haven't seen a "Right Way" yet. Although I think Scheme has the right idea with its first class data types, it still all needs some work.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Software support: only use the standard configuration where possible. Your support will be better, because they are dealing in known quantities.

Hardware support: send it back, hope they make good on it. Sounds like they messed this one up.

Past that, VA Linux systems seem severely overpriced. I'm sure they use excellent components, put it together for you, and give you a working system. But I'd rather do it myself, and it sounds like you would too... so we're probably not their target audience.

I have a feeling they're marketing to clueless companies who want a "Linux Solution" and don't know the first thing about it. Therefore, they get a nice box, a stock configuration, and tech support, and they pay a healthy premium for it.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Wow, imagine a beowulf of these things!

Where are the warez for the StrongArm, dude?

Hey, can it play mp3's? ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Imagine if we all had 3D printers that could pretty much make any plastic object we wanted.

You mean like this?

Hence, the joke.

Next time I'll try to be more obvious in my humor.

How about this:

The Justice Department brought a lawsuit against Apple Computer (AAPL) yesterday over their "There's always room for iMac!" campaign. The Gov't charged them with diluting the Jello trademark and confusing consumers. A class-action suit is pending as well, from angry iMac owners who, eager to try their fruit-flavored iMacs, chipped their teeth on the hard plastic casings. The only winners in this long, sad ride were the investors who thought they had bought into "some fruit company". Fortunately, we the American people are being protected by these fraudulent product promotions and deceptive advertising once again by our loving government.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

In that case, tell me what link it refreshes to!

I'm using a nightly build of Mozilla to browse with at the moment, and it doesn't do Java; meanwhile, IBM doesn't know how to make a link in PLAIN HTML for the rest of us, furthering my point about clueless web design.

IBM: I'm really interested in what you have to say. Please provide a response in HTML next time. Not Java. Not Windows Media Player. Not For-IBM-Internal-Use-Only Format-A220B59. You can use all that and more, but make sure you have it in HTML first!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Geez, some people just want everything.

...and, for the record, I'm one of them. :)

I'd love to be able to play .asf files on Linux! Heck, what's the word on the MPEG4 spec? If we could get a (Free!) player that supported that much, I doubt .asf would be too far away.

(well, depending on the codec; I bet it's Yet-Another-Container-Format(tm), which means it's just as useless and annoying as AVI and QuickTime files...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What do they think this is, television?

Put the frickin' slides up in HTML! Heck, make a transcript of the conversation!

Why would I want to watch and listen to this when I could read or skim it?

Forget Publius, we need a speech-to-text server to translate RealAudio and Windows Media content. Taking snapshots of the video occasionally as jpegs would be nice too.

Or, barring that, we need some major web designers with half a clue. But I think that's even less likely to happen.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I completely agree, but I think they didn't want to appear to be a threat to Intel, and whatnot. It didn't work, though, which is why Intel will need to shape up, or become the next lawsuit target.

...and you could play some "Silence-related" .mp3's. There are some excellent songs like that, with silence in the title or whatnot. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Why?

Transmeta *doesn't*, they do it in software; that's the whole point. (smaller chip, better profiling)

AMD and Intel do; therefore, a lawsuit would be truly anticompetitive and inane, either way.

Next question?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I've been waiting to see these in production since before the launch!

Unfortunately, I'll probably be waiting some more. My next computer is almost certainly going to be an Athlon, and I doubt we'll see a line of Transmeta desktop machines for a while.

Also, I don't want a notebook, and I'd only get an embedded device if it were really cheap and really cool. (although, if it were a tiny, fully x86 compatible device, that'd be pretty cool!)

However, if they ever manage to support another type of processor or provide hooks for emulation/translation (even less likely), then I might get one regardless. I'd love to be able to run multiple instances of random OSes at hardware speeds! (VMWare for a later version of Crusoe would be downright confusing, though...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.