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x86 compatibility.

That's why the Crusoe doesn't emulate a PPC (yet).

If that's not an issue, then, sure, go for it.

And please don't bring performance into it, because then we'll all just say "for what", and we'll be arguing about Photoshop and The Gimp and kernel compiles and optimizing compilers and registers and architecture...

Also, if speed isn't an issue, you can run *cough* Soft Windows.

Actually, how fast have the PC emulators gotten? I never tried VirtualPC before. Are any of them better than about two orders of magnitude slower than native performance, yet?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, after Microsoft, it looks like we'll need to take care of Intel, and maybe that darn sewing-circle of PC manufacturers, too.

I agree with them to an extent, though: the Crusoe will probably see most of its success on web-pads and whatnot. If you're feeling cautious, wait until that takes off before you bet the farm on the low-end laptop business.

However, any laptop with even as much power as my K6/300 would be fine with me; and if it lasted for 8 hours or more, so much the better. I still don't see why I would want a computer that's 50% faster if it can only last 2 hours, and still does all the word-processing you could possibly expect a computer to do...

Oh wait, you're using Office 2000 on Windows 2000? What? On a laptop?!?? Never mind... ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Oh yeah right, like we're any better.

(or don't you know what VLSI stands for? :)

I'm pushing for RDBICASWTMT, myself, but IANAEE.

(For the acronym and humor-impaired, that's "Really Damn Big Integrated Circuits And Stuff, With Too Many Transistors"; but "I Am Not An Electrical Engineer")
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What are the benefits of having an Earth-bound, optical telescope?

Or rather, what can a larger optical telescope find better from Earth that we can't already find on other wavelengths and from other venues (i.e. The Hubble)?

If there are no advantages here, is it more cost-effective, or what?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Heh heh heh.

Why am I not surprised that Berkeley has "something for the ACID crowd"...

:)


There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX.
We don't believe this to be a coincidence.
-- Jeremy S. Anderson

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

Who cares if Oracle investigated Microsoft? Anyone could hire IGI and have them investigate *anyone else*. As long as they don't break the law, there's nothing wrong here.

The important part, IMO, is what Microsoft had to hide. I was always suspicious about that "Freedom to Innovate" campaign, and it's nice to see some more skeletons being turned up...

Bottom line: if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. Investigate me all you want.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Gee, thanks, I try reel hard...

*blushes*

Does this mean I have to go back to marking my posts with "HUMOR:" in the subject line?

Maybe I'll just stick with "LAUGH, DAMN YOU!"; then I won't have to listen to Europeans telling me that I spelled "HUMOR" wrong.

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

That's right, folks; the entire web is just 17 clicks away from being TOTALLY ILLEGAL!

If you have any off-site links, just TURN YOURSELF IN NOW, you FELONS!!

I'm waiting for when links get classified as MUNITIONS, since they let people ignore international boundaries and traffic in stolen goods, and defraud the poor, innocent, rich multinational conglomorates that are looking out four our best interests.

Hey, it's not quite as stupid as charging hackers with MAIL FRAUD just because you didn't have the proper laws on the books...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, you're right.

C# == type foo.tpw | p2c

(or, for the prompt-impaired people out there, C# looks like a Borland Turbo Pascal for Windows program run through a Pascal-to-C translator...)

Gosh. The worst of Delphi, Visual C++, and Java.

What will they innovate next, guys?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

...or forced to create real cross-platform applications for all other OSes with equivalent native performance / size compared to the Windows versions, and maintain NT for them as well...

The hard part will be making it all rhyme.

As Gates slaveth on code /
and watcheth the bloat erode /
his head was fit to explode /
with each optimized opcode


...better write it in Italian, or Pascal, or something...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yes!

Now all we need is a rewritten and updated version of Dante's Inferno, and have it approved and endorsed by the pope!

Cower in FEAR, AOL, TELEMARKETERS, MICROSOFT!!!

The telemarketers will be FORCED to sit in a room answering phones all day and POLITELY LISTEN to mind-numbingly BORING advertisements!!!

Top AOL employees will have to DOWNLOAD programs to UPDATE their pitiful computers... only to have AOL CRASH on them, and give them BUSY signals!!

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

>talk troll
What do you want to say to troll?

>ask troll about "Signal 11"
Which Signal 11 do you mean, SIGSEGV or (Slashdot User #203709)?

>oops #203709

TRoLLaXoR stares at you and says "New around here, eh, Karma Whore? Signal 11 is much older than that, but we Trolls have destroyed his account and burned his webpages! The Great Karma Whore is no more!"

>ask troll about "Great Karma Whore"

TRoLLaXoR chuckles in delight. "The form errors were only the first step in our plan to overthrow the evil moderators. Now he has been reduced to his mortal form as the lowly 'Bojay Baggins'."

>bojay

The vaporous shapes envelop you; you are teleported through a rabit hole.

>look

You are in a rabbit hole. All the posts have expired. There is a dead link to the east. There is a dangling HREF here.

>look HREF
The link text says "The Search for Signal 11 begins here". The anchor is unreadable.

>i

You have a cookie, and 5 Karma.

>xyzzy

What do you think this is, boy? Adventure?

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

Thanks for the info about the La Raza movement; I was really wondering what his problem was.

I learned a little Spanish in school, but even then I could tell that different countries had many different dialects and words for everything. I couldn't keep track of them all even if I had kept up with my Spanish...

Also, "statesunitedian" doesn't make sense, because literally translating a sentence without regard to sentence structure (or word order) is just stupid... But if we were smart about that, we'd probably call them "IS Units" instead of "SI Units", and mess up many other acronyms, allowing the US (EU? EEUU?) to continue to confuse everyone once again. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, if you want to specify North or South American, that's generally "norteamericano" or "sudamericano" (if I remember anything from the Spanish classes I took 5 years ago... :) and it looks like they have some other words for it.

But I know my English pretty well, and I can guarantee you that if the proper term isn't "American", well... it sure as hell isn't "unitedstatesian". If you want to check, ask someone from Britain or France. I guarantee you they'll say "Silly american!". :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Let me help you with that chip on your shoulder there, Estanislao. I'm Peter.

I'm a United States citizen, also known as an "American". I don't know what a "unitedstatesian" is, but I'm not it. That makes about as much sense as "puertoriquenian", which is to say none. It's a disrespectful, mangled version of the original form, so watch what you say, lest you offend somebody.

I guarantee you, no benevolent US scientists go to third world countries and use the locals as human guinea pigs. That doesn't even make any sense; it doesn't parse!

It's possible that some malevolent US scientists might do whatever evil things they are capable of, but I doubt they'd get any sponsorship of this. It's also possible that some malevolent Central American scientists could do tests on people in their country or in other counrtries, but I hope they wouldn't have government support.

Also, in all the cases I know about where there was government support, it was covered up for a long time, and I have no idea who was responsible, but I couldn't imagine blaming the entire country as a whole for actions they had know knowledge of. Generally when these experiments were performed, their effects were not known, and they either had consent, or couldn't obtain consent. (Hence the coverup; I'm thinking about the early radiation experiments with retarded kids, for instance; I hadn't heard about the stories you cited, but they sound horrible)

In the vast majority of these experiments, however, there is informed consent, often because the people involved are dirt-poor, and there is money offered. By reading a local paper, I'm sure I could find many studies looking for smokers, blood donations, or whatever else. I don't think they ask for "Hispanic" specifically, I think the applicant has to come to them. Try not to blame the US for what people would willingly do on their own.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Let me check the timetable...

Ah yes, then we start preparing the humans for the alien colonization and takeover of Earth.

With this genome information, we can finally perfect The Black Oil!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I think you've isolated the problem.

There are many kinds of people in this world, and they sometimes overlap.

1) Those who RTFM
2) Those who beg #1 to please reinstall their computer for them because they can't RTFM or get their stuff to work
3) Those who make software without manuals for #2; software without manuals doesn't work. If you don't explain it, and insist on hiding it, there might be something wrong with it. This is what would be called "suspicious behavior" anywhere else.
4) Those who try to have useful discussions about these topics.
5) Those who whine, bitch, moan, and flame #4.

...and your arguments are *completely* unsound, even for a rant *OR* a flame.

It's like saying that apples have been oranges all along, I mean, what are those seeds for?

So let me help you.

1) UNIX does things properly.

2) Windows does things in a way that allows the most people to be able to use it, at least theoretically.

3) However, if #2 doesn't do things properly, how can it allow anyone to use it, ultimately? Also, how could knowing how to do a task help you when the procedure doesn't work?

Give me my pipes, my C, and my terse documentation any day, until you can show me another system that *works* as well.

Feel free to make things easier to use once you've at least gotten them working in the first place.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I care. I'm sure the people working on the project cares.

Hey, "who the fuck cares, if" some big corporation takes my domain name away from me?

I think that any software project, no matter how big, could take the time to see if someone is already using its name. That's just common courtesy.

Remember, "Internet Explorer" was trademarked before Microsoft got to it. They didn't seem to check, know, or care.

Hey, I was just remembering an old programming language fondly. When I realized it might not be the same one, I was disturbed. It seemed to bother you a lot more, though. Chill, dude.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

This can't be a real law site. You said it yourself: it's surprisingly readable.

The real law site would be called www.the.internet.law.journal.tm.com, and all its pages would get referred by an .asp script, which arbitrarily places you two directories lower and refers you to another script.

It would then inform you that by reading this webpage, you're relinquishing all rights to the intellectual property contained within, including but not limited to misrepresentation, or defamation. But not in so few words.

In fact, the only resemblance I see between this site, and a *real* law site is that this site is unreachable right now. But I'm willing to blame that on Slashdot.

Anyone want to post a mirror, so I can try for an informed comment later? :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, I've been learning Perl lately, actually.

I concede that it's powerful, but I don't know if I'd call it easy-to-use, precisely. I think a less powerful subset of perl would be useful and easy to learn, but less powerful.

However, perl is just too big to be that simple, and a lot of its charm comes from its regexps, which are actually pretty complicated, once you get right down to it. It has many handy C system calls and UNIX shell commands, and these aren't commonly regarded as being that easy or obvious.

And Perl is an interpreted language that supports lexical scoping, has an eval command, does some rudimentary garbage collection, etc., which puts it in the same class of languages as Lisp or Scheme, and that means you can do some weird, whacked-out stuff in Perl. Like writing a program to write Perl for you, and recursively doing something with the results.

Maybe if you're a programmer, and you spend some time learning it, Perl can be very powerful and somewhat easy to use. But I know there are some gotchas in there, and I'm sure many programmers have found themselves writing Perl code late one night and looking at it the next day, not knowing what it does, or how it does it...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

C-- exists, is old, and is not by Microsoft.

I bet this "C--" just stole the name.

C-- was somewhere between C and assembler, x86-only, and great for writing demos. ax, bx, cx, dx, et. al. were predefined variables that went directly to the registers, etc., etc.

I remember the "Under 4k Starfield Demo" it compiled. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Wow, Enoch Root! I haven't seen you in a while...

Maybe I did come off as being somewhat elitist. Unfortunately, I'm not uninformed here, either. Powerful and easy-to-use in the Microsoft sense of the terms seems to have to do with providing simple scripting functions for dangerous OS-level operations that anyone can get access to...

Also, this seems to be their design methodology. Either that, or they leave that part of the design process up to Marketing or Sales so they can get some coding done, and let Legal take care of the bugs so they can get some more features in. That's the only way I can explain their products without mentioning the phrase "criminal negligence".

I'm sorry I confused you using common terms; I was using the Microsoft Meaning(tm) of those terms.

Hey, a powerful and easy to use language is a GREAT thing. But what's wrong with Assembler? It is at the least very powerful and flexible. Didn't you mean to say COBOL, or DOS Batch files, or machine-code-on-punch-cards, or something? :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Read these, and think "Word Macros", or "ILoveYou"...

..."intended to drastically simplify and speed up software development"...

Good intentions, yep. Sounds about right.

"Microsoft has its own unique programming model with Visual Basic..."

That's putting it mildly.

"Combine it with the Web services (Microsoft) is announcing and you get powerful stuff.

Oh no!

Okay, I'm stopping right here.

Powerful + Easy-to-use => Dangerous

Anything about "Security" has to be marketing. If it's Powerful, and it's Easy-to-use in the Microsoft sense, and on the web... then you're going to be in BIG trouble, Real Soon Now.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I think you were looking for >this page</A>.

Windows 3.1:
#include <windows.h>

int PASCAL WinMain(HINSTANCE, HINSTANCE, LPSTR, int)
{
return MessageBox(NULL, "Hello World", "", MB_OK);
}

Windows 95/NT:
#include <windows.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
return MessageBox(NULL, "Hello, world!", "", MB_OK);
}

Compare to Motif:
#include <ltXm/XmAll.h>

void main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
Widget toplevel, main_w, button;
XtAppContext app;

XtSetLanguageProc(NULL, NULL, NULL);

toplevel = XtVaAppInitialize(&ampapp, "main", NULL, 0,
&ampargc, argv, NULL, NULL);

main_w = XtVaCreateManagedWidget("main_w", xmMainWindowWidgetClass,
toplevel, XmNscrollingPolicy,
XmAUTOMATIC, NULL);

button = XtVaCreateWidget("Hello World", xmLabelWidgetClass, main_w, NULL);

XtManageChild(button);
XtRealizeWidget(toplevel);
XtAppMainLoop(app);

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

Actually, wasn't there a USB update for W95OSR2?

I seem to remember it, because it caused some problems of its own. :)

Did it eat itself on Microsoft's site, never to be seen again, much like the Linux version of their NetShow player that I can't find?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I used to think the same thing, until I saw them contributing to the Wine project. Now they've also put together a great distro (or so I hear) and are bringing new applications to Linux.

Say what you want about their motivations or business savvy; they're definitely contributing, regardless. Wine has gone a long way, no one has forced them to take any patches, but many of them needed to be done. (the "boring" stuff--it might help you run MS-Word instead of StarCraft :)

I'm sure Corel will provide support for their products, too. (now that people charge for that...) Heck, they might do that for their distro, I don't know...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, depending on how you look at it, Corel is doing some of Adobe's work for them. :)

Adobe dropped support for UNIX a long time ago, around Photoshop 3.x

However, Photoshop 3.0 for Windows 3.1 runs beautifully on my Linux box, thanks to WINE. It's really speedy, and I haven't had any problems with it lately.

But, the damage is done, we already have The GIMP, which has great support for .PSD's, scripting, transparent compression, and all kinds of other stuff Adobe missed out on. (how about a decent JPEG encoder? If I'm paying hundreds of dollars, you could at least find one!)

So, the bottom line for Linux will be... sure, you could use Photoshop, but why would you want to? ;)

(yeah, I know, Pantone and CMYK support. My mom is a screenprinter. But most people aren't, most of them think they're web developers, and wouldn't know a Pantone Blue from a #0000FF...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The only thing worth getting CorelDraw for is the vector editing features, at least on Linux. Maybe it'd be more comfortable or reassuring for the novice, though.

However, I have to thank Corel for their work on the Wine project; things are really looking up there. Although CorelDRAW 9 might not be quite production quality yet because it uses WINE, it would also never be on Linux if it didn't. And it isn't like I haven't seen a "sluggish" or "flickering" GTK application before--that doesn't mean it's GTK's fault! That sort of behavior is as often a problem with the application as it is with the library, and Windows has some very different ideas on how to implement graphics that I'd be happy to deal with just a little flickering for now.

However, chew on this. If this is successful, then perhaps CorelDRAW 10 will be equivalent to--or better than--the Windows version. And if so, maybe all your Windows apps will run natively or get ported to Linux.

All thanks to WINE and Corel.

So I'll think about buying a copy, if I can afford it.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Who's the white writin' geek that's a superstar to all the freaks?
KATZ!
Darn right!

Who is the man that would write a book for his brother man?
KATZ!
Can you dig it?

Who's the cat that won't stop yakkin' when there's evil people hackin'?
KATZ!
Right On!

They say this cat Katz is a bad writer...

SHUT YOUR MOUTH!

I'm only talkin' 'bout Katz.

THEN WE CAN DIG IT!

He's a complicated man but no one understands him like his fan club.
JOHN KATZ!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

How did you find out about my She-Hulk collection!!!

Oh well, you know this wouldn't affect Captain Kirk: he's got that fetish for blue women...

So where's the web filter that filters out stupid e-censorship ideas?

Oh. It filtered itself. Never mind...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Here's where software projects go when they die...

Most of these don't look too impressive, which is good, because I'd hope the decent software projects could find maintainers. (i.e. Everybody loves Mozilla, DOSEmu 1.0 is finally out now, and Wine got some more developers, thanks to Corel...)

Also, all the games are rogue or nethack based; please add Angband-Tk for Unix to that list, 'cause I want it! ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What the man is trying to say is, you can install Linux on one of these things.

NOT that Compaq can do it for you. Do-it-yourself.

Shouldn't be too hard, as it runs on a StrongArm...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Heh heh. Yeah, the cool games would support that too, along with Tandy Sound. Sort of a consolation for owning a Tandy, I guess. (I had an old one with a Monochrome monitor and a 10MB HD...)

Since my 386 got stolen, my XT donated, and my C64 sold, I guess that old SVGA card is my oldest video card...

MEEPT was funny and witty and controversial, and generally entertaining. So much of that is lost now, mostly replaced with lamers. OOG was fun, too, but ever since they started filtering posts in ALL CAPS (not hard to get around, actually) I haven't seen him.

Ah well, enough reminiscing, back to posting. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'm sorry, Mr. Incredibly-Anal-But-Correct Anonymous Coward: what I meant to say is as follows:

1) All interpreted language implementations in this test were slower, often much slower than a compiled C implementation on the same platform.

2) Most programmers tend to assume reasonably optimized interpreters and compilers as tools for their host language. Given the indicated specifications on this benchmark, this seems to be a reasonable assumption. (unreasonable assumptions would include proper tail recursion handling in all cases under C, for instance...)

3) A lot of sleep() calls everywhere under C and not under the other languages would be a false test; also, your feeble attempt at trickery would show using the time system utility, as the actual CPU usage under a reasonably optimized version of a UNIXish Operating System would be much lower than the execution time.

4) A gcc compiled executable runs faster than a gcc compiled interpreter running similar code in this test. There. I said it. What a surprise.

5) Piss off, I'm not in the mood to be this anal over a fine point of nerd language usage, even if I am on slashdot.

I hope that clears things up for you.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Starting DOJ-OS...
C:/> DIR
Volume in drive C is JANETRULEZ
Volume Serial Number is C0ED-BABE
Directory of C:/
MICROS~1 6.66E666 01-01-80 12:00a Microsoft
C:/> DEL MICROS~1
Corrupt File Microsoft
(A)bort (R)etry (I)gnore (F)ail? R
Error Reading File Microsoft
(A)bort (R)etry (I)gnore (F)ail? I
Unprintable Error In File Microsoft
(A)bort (R)etry (I)gnore (F)ail? F
Error On INT 24
C:/>

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Some things never change, as much as we would like them to...

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

Wow, interpreted languages are slower than C! Who woulda thunk it...

I tried to do some ackerman(sp?) tests in several scheme and lisp environments; I ran out of memory for ackerman 6 6 in Chez Scheme (the interpreted version), and had the lisp compilers crash and burn on me (fast, but not really arbitrary precision for the power functions, I guess...)

Oh, and Timothy: leave the Quickies to CmdrTaco, okay? So people can filter the Quickies instead of you? Thanks.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I loved the merchants in Diablo...

I probably won't see D2 for a while, but if the merchants still say "What can I do for you?", I'll still say "YOUR MOM!" :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Shut up, man, I've got one of those in my 286!

(it sure beats the CGA card I had for it before, and it plays Lightspeed in VGA!!)

I've been on slashdot easily since before logins, but I don't think I've been on there as long as FinkPloyd, so I hope he's got at least an EGA card lying around. (so he can play Tangled Tales! Rock on!)

And yes, this is proof that slashdot will continue to suck at the regular downward spiral. This merger is probably what MEEPT was talking about, before he went insane or got abducted by his home planet. (read his posts lately, geez...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I beta-tested and got the retail version of Heroes III, and I've recently finished all the campaigns: it's well worth the money!

I'm probably going to get a Matrox G400 for my next computer, in anticipation of future Linux games, so keep porting them, Loki, and we'll keep buying them.

Now if only I could get FF VII or VIII working, or Ultima IX...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Excellent, my man, simply excellent.

Also, good work posting this at night, you may escape the Evil Romulan Moderators yet.

(Oh NO, they were just cloaked a short distance away! My karma will be gone too, if I can't say anything about "Knives Crafted From Meteorites" in the next 30 seconds!!!)

Um... ummm...

Hey, isn't all the metal on Earth that's heavier than Lead or so from Supernova residue anyhow? Wouldn't that be pretty old too? Actually, isn't it all the same age, and just tossed around for a while longer? Hey, why not harass a comet and sell dirty ice while you're at it? Capitalist pigdogs...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's right, it's all Army of Darkness, baby!

What a wonderfully horrible movie; I just got it on VHS the other day.

Hey Apogee: "You got real ugly, real fast."

I can't buy your games anyhow; they don't have them at my local S-Mart!

"Shop smart; shop S-Mart."
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Sour grapes, anyone?

Who wants to get elected?

"I think ICANN, I think ICANN"...

I say, screw 'em. What a dumb name. We can set up our own @#*( domain servers, to ensure that little kids, Scottish clans, and small countries (who have already sold their TLD's and pocketed the cash) can get their names before the big corporations do. Nyah nyah.

...or, we could just get a monarchy there, and let Al Gore decide! After all, if we let the Slashdot community run this instead, you know Alan Cox and Hemos would be running the show. (darn slashdot polls!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

_|_|_
_|_|_
|X|

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

Just a minor clarification:

Everyone on slashdot should know by now that the penguin/Tux/flightless bird and Daemon/devil/beatific background process are by now.

If it bugs you, well, go hit your head into a wall a few times. Because that's what I do every time someone points out a stupid correction to some commonly-used slang for an informal mascot that we all already know about in the first place.

Can I read slashdot with -Wall -pedantic disabled now, or do I have to recompile with -DNOT_ANAL -DNO_MORONS too?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, I know MacOS *and* Windows pretty well. I believed I mentioned that there are multiple, different ways to do the same thing.

In Windows, you'd right-click the background and go to "Properties", and it magically gives you the Display Properties. Is this "Intuitive"? Maybe if you knew to right-click.

On the Macintosh, *if* you see a Control Strip in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen (if it's there), or a little tab, and you click on it, and it zooms out to the right, and you figure out what the little pictures represent, then yes, you can change the resolution there, too. I believe they first included that thing on laptops, and it wormed its way into regular MacOS on the desktop. But you can't rely on it always being there, *or* in the same place, because it's "customizable". If you put it wherever it is, that's fine. Otherwise, well, you'll have to figure it out...

The mechanism I described in my post is fairly consistent on *two* platforms, which is impressive. (or shows just how much Windows copied MacOS... :)

I never mentioned that a MacOS user should resort to keyboard controls, although often they have to. Many's the time when I've had to force-quit a program, yea even the Finder, and had MacOS hang on me. More's the pity.

Here's something non-intuitive for you: how do you turn off a Mac? I was *so* confused when I first found a Mac that didn't have a power button. It was even worse when I got it into DOS mode (it had a separate Pentium chip in it, to run Windows) and couldn't get info on how to get back. The "Quick Reference Guide" wasn't any help. I pulled the plug on it, and it bitched at me. Later, I found out that that particular Mac powers down by pressing the power button on the keyboard, and only if it wants to!!! (therefore, even knowing that button *was* the power button wouldn't have helped me any in DOS-mode...)

To this day, I hate soft power buttons on any computer, and power buttons on the keyboard triply so. The Macintosh is a tribute to inconsistent design and marketing, at both the hardware and the software level. The software sucks, the hardware configuration is funky, the actual hardware is pretty good, and the package is overpriced. Yay, Apple.

Darwin even has some Open-Source licensing. I would rather have something Unix-y than MacOS any day. Segmented memory architectures should already have gone the way of the Dodo, when better alternatives have been available for so long.

Now... next time, before you flame someone, do a little research. Please, don't make assumptions outside of the information in the post! It would be hard to defame the name "Anonymous Coward" much more, but you're not helping...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

*sigh*

I thought it was a rather amusing analogy. Not FUD at all, really. But if you don't like my choice of targets, I might accept the label, but that I am rather a "Linux bigot of some worth", and also not arbitrarily a Linux bigot.

Of course, you could extend it to any bureaucracy or system that the public percieves as only one or a few individuals.

However, you'll notice that I was being rather generous to the mission control guys and the tech support guys for their work, something that seems to have been lost in the translation.

Also, the U.S. doesn't have royal titles for people; technically he couldn't even be named "Sir Linus" here, let alone "Lord Linus". And he doesn't really have an affiliation to Red Hat. And *please* don't confuse religion ("singing praises") with anything secular.

Support companies can indeed turn a profit, but it's harder when you aren't trying to rip everyone off with the zeal of a corporation like Microsoft. ...and if you've checked lately, Wall Street doesn't seem to like them much anymore, either, so we'll see what happens.

In conclusion, if you controlled that temper of yours, I'm sure you too could contribute useful critiques of all the Linux bigots on slashdot, yea, even Anonymously. But otherwise, you will merely look like a fool to many here, even the non-Linux bigots, and give your bretheren a bad name.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Why does the mission control story make me think of tech support...

Thousands of trained men in pocket protectors and white shirts waiting to cooly dissect and fix the latest problem within seconds after the release of a new Microsoft Operating System, while Bill Gates and his lackeys get all the credit...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yes, you learn many powerful things in the documentation.

In this case, I think "easy to learn" and "easy to use" is the same thing here. It's just a keypress. Sure, if you don't know it, you'd have to look it up. But isn't that always true? Hey, here's a thought, Mr. Joe A. User: "If you don't know how to do it, maybe you should look it up."

I remember when the Joe Users of my time knew this fact...

In any case, if they (the Joe Users of the world) instead called tech support, and were told how to do it, then they'd know. If they forgot, well, there are always Post-It notes, or (God Forbid!) documentation.

And there are real applications which let you pick one bitdepth and one resolution as well, which many people seem to want to do.

Ewwey GUI stuff. So go have a Fig Newton. (bonus points if you catch the references...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I would critique your post point-by-point, but you've already gotten a good one. Sorry, I was out partying with my friends, not learning more about the UNIX CLI. :)

Maybe I should explain my background here. I started out on Apple ][e's and C64's. All we had was text. I learned to hunt-and-peck, and later to touch-type. I learned BASIC programs, and I saw Windows-like "graphical interfaces" like GEOS: all the functionality of Windows 2.0, with about 5% of the system requirements or less.

Later, I learned DOS. Ever since I tried to use 'fdisk' to format a disk in the beginning, and had to rebuild my system from scratch, (which isn't that hard if you have a System Disk, a DOS Disk, and know how to read the manual that came with software back then...) I developed a strict policy towards reading *all* the documentation for any new DOS commands I encountered. :)

Probably around Windows 3.0 and DOS 6.0, I noticed that there was a trend towards including less and less documentation and instructions on how to actually *use* the software. Since I used the "on-line help" in programs a lot, and played around a lot, I didn't really mind, but I guarantee you a lot of other users who didn't have the time or the energy to do this were short-changed in the process, and now we have users who don't get a manual, and apparently don't have time to read what is on the screen right in front of them.

I don't profess to understand this, because I learned from an early age, in MS-DOS, that if you don't understand what's going on, one day your hard drive will be nuked, and it will be all your fault. That's the lesson that Microsoft taught me about computers, and I think it is a good lesson that when combined with appropriate documentation can be a powerful teaching tool.

So... When Windows '95 came out, this disturbing lack-of-documentation trend continued, making Windows resemble nothing more than a Mac with a useless vestigal DOS box that didn't do anything really helpful. Don't get me wrong, I loved DOS, but I found myself writing useful commands in Pascal that I later found out were standard UNIX commands... So I switched to Linux.

First, I learned about SunOS, because my friend Simon was in charge of the Suns we had. They were mystical, and complex, and powerful. But all you really have to tell someone who wants to learn is a few simple commands, most notably 'man'. Once you learn the documentation system, there's really no excuse not to learn everything else.

Now, at this point, all those "easy to use", "User Interface Zealots" who somehow think that MacOS 8.6 or the original release of Windows '98 were the first *real* Operating Systems ever are probably foaming at the mouth. "Documentation?", they say, "It should be easy to use!".

Well, of course it's easy to use. But sometimes you have to learn how. If you stuck me on a tricycle and gave me no directions, maybe I could learn how to ride it by myself. If you stuck me on a bicycle, and gave me no directions, I'd probably be clueless. But if you taught me how to use it, I'd be eternally grateful that now I have a fast, efficient, non-polluting form of transportation and exercise. And if it had multiple *speeds* that I learned how to use, well, I'd be in heaven.

Is learning how to use a complex tool in the first place so bad? Remember, you had to do this for any Operating System sometime.

Once, I didn't know how to type this:

LOAD "*",8,1

Or this:

[Control]-[Alt]-[Delete]

Or this:

[Control]-[Open-Apple]-[Delete]

(or [Control]-[Pound]-[Power] or whatever; Apple's keyboard commands are horribly inconsistent!)

For that matter, once I didn't know how to doubleclick.

Many users today do not know the difference between single-clicking, double-clicking, or right-clicking, and simply do them all until something "works". Just try to tell me they don't need some documentation! Maybe they never sat through the "Tutorial" that's buried somewhere in their Oh-So-Easy-To-Use GUI OS. It took me forever to find that thing under Windows, on a system *designed* for entry-level users! I had to look through their cryptic, badly-indexed help system, so it could tell me to find the CD and put it in! So the Tutorial could tell my Clueless User what a CD-ROM Drive was in the first place!!

Maybe a "Quick Reference" card might have been advisable in that situation. Or, God Forbid, a real Paper-And-Ink Printed Dead-Tree MANUAL!

So, yes, you can't get any work done until you've had someone walk you through using the thing for several hours. On *ANY* system, if you want to be able to use it decently.

And on a Mac or Windows, you might NEVER be able to do even moderately complex tasks. Or you might never know that it's possible, how you should go about doing it, what to do when "dragging things" doesn't meet your organizational needs, etc., etc. Usually the answer is, "find a shareware program that implements a tiny piece of useful functionality that's already built into UNIX but that I don't know about yet."

My classic example here is splitting and joining a file. In UNIX, there are a couple of powerful ways to do this. There's the split tool, which is made for this. But nothing split does couldn't be done by dd instead, possibly with some help from sh. Also, the regular, old cat command, which isn't much more powerful than the DOS type command except that it has wild-card support, and UNIX implements pipes properly, can be used to join files.

In DOS, there's one, cryptic command that is generally considered the right way to join files, no good way to split files, and the type command is castrated, and there's no indication of how you'd do any of this stuff in the first place, anyhow.

On the Macintosh, not only is there no notion of splitting and joining files, but there is no hint of even what a file really is besides a pretty picture, without being at least an intermediate Macintosh user. After that, the user is expected to find some third-party utility, and read the help and documentation on that program to figure out how to split a file. But if it's too confusing, don't worry, you can choose "Less Options" and all that clutter will go away. Just ask your friend who knows about computers...

Anyhow, you get the point, and I'll be happy to talk about these or other issues. But do you understand my perspective better, now? :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I guess I meant "any terminal interface to UNIX is more intuitive". But I also could have said "a brick is more intuitive", or "a Chinese water torture device is more intuitive".

(I mean, really, who would ever devise a system where folders can't have folders in them? That's just broken. It's like running DOS 1.0 with multiple disks...)

In any case, 'intuitive' is what you make it, since it's all based on past experience anyhow. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.