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I've tried to upgrade to Netscape 6.0

So use Mozilla brand NS6 instead of Netscape brand NS6. Mozilla 0.8 is already several proverbial kilometers ahead of NS4 in terms of HTML/CSS/DOM standards conformance and stability.

You have to use .SWFs or .SVGs to show animation. Don't watch the cartoons, eh?

On wb.com or disney.com, if they use Flash to show animated content, that's OK because I surfed in explicitly to view animated content. But if Flash is used for navigation or advertising (shock the monkey anyone?), it gets annoying real fast.

Sometimes content must be updated without reloading, many applications require real time data streaming.

Granted. But I've also seen Java used to annoy and advertise (shock the monkey anyone?). Even then, stock tickers can be done with an autorefreshing <iframe>.

Point: Don't annoy. Oh, and to your other comment:

The web is more than a World Wide Reference Section.

Have you looked at the parallel web that is Everything? It's a bulletin board that has both factual content and humor, and it's all text (except the ASCII art).

Images ARE content

Granted, some sites (corbis.com, artchive.com, etc.) actually provide images as their content, but bullet GIFs instead of <li> and transparent spacer GIFs instead of CSS positioning doesn't look very "content" to me.

Frankly, any site I hit with "aural" content gets bypassed immediately

Even MP3.com?

Why not install it on the server level so that it forwards using more standard, lower-level methods

Installing any dynamic content on a server costs a hefty chunk of change when upgrading from free hosting (Geo/Tripod/8m/Xoom).

Last time I looked, there wasn't an NS6 that had email and newsgroups built-in. If I was up to NS6, I'd have to put up with more Netscape commercialism, and I'd have been exposed to some security problems that didn't hit 4.76.

Have you looked at Mozilla 0.8 (NS6 without the commercialism and with more bugfixes) yet?

But with a 4+ year old computer and only 128 MB

(I wish I could fit that much RAM in my 4+ year old computer.) Mozilla 0.8 should work just fine for you.

The original goal of Web and HTML was to be platform neutral - now I'm being told that I need one of the approved browsers in order to sites.

The point wasn't to reject all browsers but a select few. The point was to reject a few bad browsers (read IE 4 for Windows and Netscape 4.x) that are known not to conform to standards, known not to degrade gracefully when presented with content they don't recognize, known not to be accessible to the physically challenged, and known not to be fixable by the community.

I use conforming HTML 4 on my own pages and see no reason why I should have to support user agents that don't handle conforming HTML in a "nice" way.

If you're running Netscape 4, upgrade to Mozilla 0.8. Now.

You could (and should) have used a server-side dynamic page that looked at the User-Agent: request header and 302'ed to (or, better yet, displayed) the correct content.

Many professionals have their pages hosted on a free service (such as GeoCities, XOOM, FortuneCity, Freeservers, or the like) that does not permit CGI access "for security purposes." Do you know how much mod_perl costs per month?

Frankly, I don't *want* massive Java/Flash/DXQRCIHTML/XML/super-special effects-enabled web sites. I just want the damn content. Text, and the ability to display PNG and JPG graphics. That's really all I need or want.

Then compile Galeon on your machine and don't install any heavy plugins.

But I don't see what the problem here really is at the top end: just generate your pages from a database and stick the content into a template for the browser/platform in question. What's the big deal?

I know of a good system to do this: the Everything engine (which powers the world's largest online encyclopedia). But what about people whose content is hosted on Freeservers, GeoCities, and XOOM, hosts whose security policies do not permit server-side dynamic page generation?

Until recently, any org that primarily provided education could get a .edu. However, the .edu domain is now restricted to American not-for-profits that provide a bachelor's degree.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

Isn't everyone always saying how napster can provide a legitimate service to swap non-commercial MP3's?

If you want people to hear your non-commercial MP3s, get hosted. I helped my brother's metal band get on MP3.com. The high-powered MP3.com servers and connection are much more reliable than the 56K modem of some Napster user in Zimbabwe.

It is shocking that a corporation would invent something and then turn right around and patent it!

It's only shocking because Rambus agreed not to file patents on any of the SDRAM technology, but while the standard was being made, Rambus amended an existing patent application to include new claims that covered SDRAM.

...when I run a wire from my sound card's digital out to the digital in and hit record?

You'll get nothing useful. The Secure Audio Path (available in Windows ME and Windows XP) won't play through unsigned drivers, signed drivers turn off digital outputs when Secure Audio Path is open, and some labels may require Secure Audio Path for playback. You'll have to use analog, but with a good setup, analog doesn't suck as much as the sheeple think it does.

NI started out on TVT Records, and TVT's partnering with Napster. There's a TVT logo on halo 2 (pretty hate machine).

Only 47,000 variations on this track, and 2.5 million songs to go.

I guess you've never heard of Soundex hashing. (Of course, PayNapster would use something more advanced, but this illustrates the point.) It would also have the side effect of keeping illegal (under US "derivative work" copyright law) cover songs off PayNapster.

The reason the RIAA has been able to go after Napster, is because of the centralized root servers. Why not just move those servers out of the RIAA's reach?

They already have.

Even worse, if I want to be the 500th person to make their own recording of "Yesterday" by McCartney and distribute it via Napster I guess I'm screwed too.

Except this time it's by the publishers not the labels. Composers' and performers' rights organizations such as ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI in the US (along with a host of organizations in other countries) control cover rights, as a cover can be considered a "derivative work" and/or a "public performance" of a copyrighted work, and there is no longer a public domain to speak of.

and we make a song called Metallica

Except many modern acts (Billy Joel, *NSYNC, etc.) are trademarking their names.

most of your "rights" don't mature until you're 18

But if even 10% of the high school seniors in the district sign the petition, that's a lot of names.

you'll get the equivalent of "those kids are so cute"

Human children are not cute. Eloi children (depicted in Precious Moments drawings and figurines) are.

clients besides the official one, and older napster official clients, will no longer work

on the official servers. But there are other Napster-compatible directory servers that run OpenNap.

Encrypted SHell

What about FRESH? That would be a more precise name:
F ree (it's free software)
R emote (remote login is its main purpose)
E ncrypted (truth in advertising; encryption doesn't in and of itself provide security)
SH ell

Windows XP will itself destroy protected audio and video files that do not "authenticate" with the sound and/or video cards.

It doesn't delete them; it simply refuses to play them through any driver that isn't signed by Microsoft. To be signed, the driver must disable all digital outputs (such as waveOut to waveIn (What-U-Hear), writing to file, and connectors on the card) when the Secure Audio Path is open.

I never did upgrade to 2000

Lucky you. My box came bundled with Windows ME.

if you received 100 replies you could automatically halt querying to see if they would suffice.

Sorry, I realized that as soon as I hit submit.

A DSL line can handle over a thousand a second. This shouldn't be a problem, and again, this is all configurable and adaptable. You get to make the rules.

But a good dial-up connection runs at only 50 kilobit/s. Are you saying that users who want to use ALPINE should pack up and move to an area where DSL is available?

This is not intended to be the be-all-end-all of peer searching. It is simply a usable completely decentralized searching network ... I can think of quite a few better ways to get certain things

Not to put down the ALPINE system, but I'm beginning to think a completely decentralized approach just won't work for dial-up users.

split the search tasks up into hierarchies. you search for N inside a given range. if the result can't get found within that range, you propogate the request of the tree

Which is exactly how Napster works. And look what happened to the company that hosts the biggest nap network.

Funny, I thought web servers acted this way

And they're on high-speed T3 or OCx connections to the Internet, connections that are designed to handle such a load.

If you find the reply your looking for, then there is no need to query the remaining peers

What if your query isn't an exact match to one file? For instance, I'm looking for "songs by The Offspring, in .ogg or .mp3 format, at bitrate >= 160 kilobit/s," in whatever query language the system uses. (I picked a random P2P-friendly band.) I'm not "Feeling Lucky"; I know my query is vague, but I want to survey the net around me and see what Offspring tracks are on hosts close to mine. The reply is the set of results I get back, not just the chronologically first element.

If, on the other hand, I typed in "artist contains Offspring, title contains Pretty Fly, length within +/- 3 s of [whatever the real length is], Ogg Vorbis format, bitrate 160-192 kbps, on a persistent connection," I would accept a "first reply" response.

No, each of these 'victims' would only receive a single 60 byte packet

From every single user who's searching. Say a user searches a 20,000 user network once every 10 minutes (this takes into account inactive users). You'll have to handle (on the average) 2,000 queries a minute, over 60 a second. That's not even counting peak use. Can your hardware and network connection keep up?

But whenever I think of the obvious solution to this problem (proxies that cache search requests for a group of users), I realize that such a topology would be equivalent to that of the existing OpenNap network.

Why can't we just define what an assembler is ? It would be much easier. An assembler assembles assembly. Simple. Anything that does not do this is not an assembler.

Now your definition of an "assembler" is "a program that translates assembly language into object code"; you still leave "assembly language" undefined. The task of defining asm precisely is complicated by the virtual machines that exist on several levels:

• The macroinstruction support in more powerful assemblers distorts the "one asm instruction, one binary instruction" aspect of the commonly accepted definition of asm. The MIPS asm specification specifies a large number of "pseudoinstructions," that is, short macros that use MIPS register 0. A rich macro system in an assembler could possibly make MIPS look like PowerPC look like ix86 look like Sparc look like Alpha look like XScale look like ARM look like even good ol' Z80 and 6502.
• One word: Java.
• How do we know it isn't possible to create a machine that runs C bytecode in hardware? It's already been done for Forth.

The idea is to try to make a porttable ( to an extent ) assembler so asm written on one Arch can port easily to another.

C source code is pretty close to a portable assembly language, source-compatible across any conforming ANSI C compiler. Jasmin (Java virtual machine assembly) is even binary-compatible across Linux/x86, Solaris/SPARC, Mac/PowerPC, and Windows/x86.

Common practice where I work is to call programs that convert assembly into machine code assemblers, and programs that convert high level source (C,Fortran) into machine code compilers.

Scheme and Perl advocates would say that C and Fortran aren't much higher level languages than assembly; thus the common joke about C compilers being PDP-11 assemblers. I still haven't seen a hard distinction made between "an assembler with a rich macro language" and "a compiler."

Almost any consumable quantity whose extent is limited has or will be referred to at some point as a "resource".

Resources under GNU/Linux (and other POSIX) systems are called things such as "memory," "free space in /var/tmp," "processes," "LWPs," "texture memory," etc. But when a resource is actually called "System Resources", and it's measured in percent, ten bucks says it refers to the 64 KB USER and GDI heaps in Win32, which can't be enlarged without breaking Win16 apps. (See also Resource Meter.) I see no analog to the 64 KB USER and GDI heaps on POSIX+X11 systems.

And to the OP: A program CANNOT use 125% or 250% of system resources, as your kernel won't let it.

not to nit pick,

Yet you go ahead and do it. I'll play along:

but the plural of "antenna" is "antennas" when in reference to ariels

"aerials" not "ariels" (see also The Little Mermaid)

and "antannae" when in reference to bugs. :)

You misspelled "antennae." Yet, this story was about a bug, a bug in the design of the AirPort base station.

When you use emacs that way, it only requires 125% of system resources, rather thant 250%.

Only Win32 systems actually have a resource called "system resources," which is (in Windows 9x's case) a pair of 64 KB heaps (one for user interaction, one for graphics structures). A running NTEmacs instance takes less than 2% of each heap.

Tylenol-brand pain reliever" is OK; "Aspirin-brand pills" is not.

Except in some jurisdictions, Bayer still has a trademark on ASPIRIN® brand acetylsalicylic acid pain reliever. See also this Flash map of jurisdictions.

In fact, this is exactly equivalent to the GIF trick

Not necessarily. There's a difference between trademarks and patents. Open*** can comply by simply changing its name to FreSH (free shell). (The same thing happened when The Tetris Company tried to sue Tetris cloners; the cloners simply changed the name of their products.) GIF writer developers have to completely abandon GIF, as LZW compression (a necessary and irreplaceable part of the GIF87 and GIF89 standard) is patented.

In that case, just go out and buy a 20GB IDE hard drive for $99.

20 GB ATA hard drives for laptop computers cost much more than $99. A laptop is all many students at my school have, as they are issued one at the start of their freshman year.

I'm at home on a 28.8k line. So I have to wait 5 minutes to download 1/2 megabyte of responses when all I want to do is glimpse at the main article.

I see two more ways to fix this:

• In the link to the article, add &threshold=5 and see only the highest-rated comments. As George pointed out, tricks like this do not work on archived articles, which are archived at threshold=0.
• Or use a browser that supports rendering a nested-tables page as it loads, such as Mozilla. Opera and Konqueror may support it, but Netscape 4.x and IE definitely don't.

If I wanted to, I could use Google as some sort of ads on request machine to get offers of whatever I want.

But wouldn't it be quicker and easier to use GoTo.com as your ads-on-request machine? Pay-For-Performance(TM) is what they do.

They don't even use advertising ontheir site?

Yes they do, just not annoying advertising. Try typing airlinesinto Google. You get two sponsored links. This and the AdWords program are text-based advertising that has "an average clickthrough rate 4-5 times higher than industry standard for banner ads" according to the Google advertising overview.

Unfortunately, unless someone else came up with the idea before Rambus submitted their patent (not before it was accepted), the patent remains valid.

The original patent was submitted in 1991 or so, with one set of claims, all of which were replaced after SDRAM was standardized. If the date of amendments has no bearing on the validity of a patent, then that's a bug in US patent law.

Sony invented both, kept Betamax and licensed out VHS, and ended up losing.

Except JVC created VHS, not Sony. VHS won because it was an open, semi-free standard with easy licensing terms.

There's no excuse for lossy compression these days, when CD audio can be losslessly compressed at a ratio of 2:1 and hard drives are less than three dollars a gig.

Which creates huge problems if you want to send CD audio from one place to another. You have to either pay through the nose for bandwidth (even 2:1 compressed it's 700 kilobits per second, and 56K dialup is still the fastest access available in many areas), or burn the audio onto CD and send it through snail mail. Streaming is out of the question unless you're Hollywood and can afford the infrastructure to every home in the target market.

Well, how do programmers eat?

Programmers create code. Businesses run code on servers and see the value of contributing to its development. They don't use art that much (except in Hollywood, which follows completely different rules altogether).

It's also a lot harder to convince artists to work for free; the "incremental improvements to existing product" model behind free software development doesn't apply as much in art as in code.

In Windows, use win+r for the RUN command

This opens a single command line. History? Tab completion? cd? Hardly. It does not open a shell window. To open a shell window, you have to type command or bash into the dialog box that the Run... command creates. (To get bash and friends, download and install DJGPP (DOS/Win9x) or Cygwin (9x/NT).)

Long after Descent and Quake have been forgotten, Marathon will live on via its source code.

Except a quick Google search tells me that Quake is released under GNU GPL and so are Descent, Descent 2, and a Tetris clone that gives you motion sickness like Descent. But the mission pack in many games (required for the game to run) is written by artists and level designers and is not GPL'd. This is why open source is thought not to be able to produce professional quality games: how do the artists and level designers eat?

Exactly how is lossy compression supposed to improve audio quality?

Look at it this way. Say you only have 50 kilobits per second downstream because neither cable nor DSL is available in your area. Now would you rather give up the phone line for 20 minutes to download a (lossy) OGG at 192 kbps VBR or for an hour and a half to download the (lossless) FLAC? What would you consider a better quality representation of a song, the whole song in near-CD quality or a short snippet in CD quality?

And would you rather be able to store eight lossless PNGs or sixty high-quality JPEGs on your digital camera's flash card?

Think about it; anywhere in the GUI, you could pop-down the console and type a command.

In Windows, add a shortcut to command.com or bash.exe to the top level of the start menu. Name it `cmd and you can pull up a prompt by pushing Win and then `.

In POSIX environments running X11, assign a hotkey to pull up an rxvt running bash or ksh.

But what about movies? Short of large computer generated casts and scenery

Which is becoming easier and easier. I could see a Quake 3 mod allowing players on a LAN to act instead of killing one another. Sure, Q3A's graphics are cartoonlike, but look how good Toy Story did (forget for a moment that it was backed by Di$ney) with its cartoon graphics. Now all you need is to know how to voice act and model your sets and virtual actors. Oh, and you need a VGA to DV converter and a video card on the "camera" computer capable of handling 1600x1200 (movie quality is approx. 1600x1000 after the top and bottom are cropped off to form the letterbox).

Although I enjoy low-budget independent films as much as the next guy, and I have a serious issue with blockbusters, I think there's good reason for concern that certain types of movies will no longer be produced by anyone.

Do you feel the same way about music, or do you really want Christina, Britney, *NSUCK, and Backstreet Boys to fill the airwaves? The content that can't stand up on its own and leans on its marketing is not the true content.

Go to the artist's web site and get the MP3s

MP3s are so late-1990s. Ogg Vorbis is the future. Vorbis already slightly better than MP3 at the same bitrate, and it still has room to grow.

Newer versions of GCC can generate diagnostics as they compile and optimize.
gcc -Wall -W -O -c foo.c will generate lots of helpful diagnostics on stderr.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?

• If your program accesses CDDB, it must be a GUI program, not a console program, as it must display the CDDB logo and a clickable "mail info to CDDB" icon.
• A web browser must be installed on any computer that accesses CDDB.
• A client must access the CDDB server and no other server.
• You must accept this license, as the very idea of a CDDB indexed by a hash of track lengths is patented. Read it and weep.
• Bad, bad, bad.