Part of the reason that "geeks" like anime is that all the best anime is the fan subbed and only found on irc.
Sure, sometimes the picture is a little rough (ok a lot rough). But there is something that just feels right about watching anime on a computer screen in a darkenned dorm room.
My personal favorite is "Bezerk."
I especially like the episode towards the end (around episode 20) where Bezerk has left the others. He's staying at an old retired blacksmith's house in the woods he gets to talking about life and he asks the blacksmith, "How did you become a blacksmith."
And the blacksmith responds, "My father was a blacksmith."
Bezerk asks, "So do you like it?"
The blacksmith thinks about it a while and then he says, "Yeah, I like the sparks."
To me, that's the coolest thing. To get to the end of life and say that you had a good life. Because life is good really, in a lot of ways. To look past all the heat and unpleasantness that goes with blacksmithing and enjoy the sparks.
>"I should be allowed to de-compile software to port it to other operating systems, right? "
I would say certainly. It's your software go ahead.
>"I should be allowed to distribute this de-compiler at large so that people can run their software under unintended operating systems?"
At first I misread and thought you said you wanted to distribute your decompiled program and that would be illegal. But distributing a de-compiler would be fine.
Isn't this what the new Amiga does? ( Tao or whatever it's called). You start with a windows/linux/mac binary and translate it to a Tao binary.
No one so far has sued wine for letting you run Windows programs under Linux.
Samba is the brainchild of Andrew Tridgell, who currently heads the Samba development team from his home of Canberra, Australia. The project was born in 1991 when Andrew created a fileserver program for his local network that supported an odd DEC protocol from Digital Pathworks. Although he didn't know it at the time, that protocol later turned out to be SMB. A few years later, he expanded upon his custom-made SMB server and began distributing it as a product on the Internet under the name SMB Server. However, Andrew couldn't keep that name -- it already belonged to another company's product -- so he tried the following Unix renaming approach:
grep -i 's.*m.*b'/usr/dict/words
And the response was:
salmonberry samba sawtimber scramble
Thus, the name "Samba" was born.
Which is a good thing, because our marketing people highly doubt you would have picked up a book called "Using Salmonberry"!
To me the whole idea seems to have been fated for disaster from square one.
If people want to want a secure computer then it's possible with linux or they could run BSD. OpenBSD has not had any remote holes in 3 years using the default instalation.
But with Linux people just care about getting the newest, coolest software as fast as possible. Linux people seem to have the attitude that being more secure than MicroSoft is important but after that they don't care much.
This is how it should be I think. For me personally security is not too important. I am only connected to the internet for a couple hours a day. If someone trashed my system I would cuss but it wouldn't be hard to rebuild.
I would think that potential damages are far more serious for napster. Your last paragraph show that see why.
"if simply being offline for a little while makes tons of other good software spring up, and people realize that napster was actually kind of crappy, and that much better could be done.. that's not a BAD thing. "
It is a BAD thing if you have invested millions of dollars in napster.
Not that I plan on feeling sorry for them until they have less money than I do.:P
Offtopic but I do not think they should call the client "GNU"tella unless they release the sources under GPL. Originally they said that they were going to but now it looks like they may not. If you're going to call yourself gnu software then you should release the source you have. Promising to do so at some future date is not enough. I know they probably had good intentions, but it still bugs me.
(from the gnutella faq)
Will The Source Code Be Released, and if so, when?
If all goes well and development of Gnutella continues you should see the source code during the 1.0 release. The source code has not been released yet and we are unsure at this time if it will ever be released, due to AOL locking it in a closet underneath a large pile of Time Warner's dirty laundry.
With your example you still have multiple individual computers connected to a central server that store/home and/usr
But with linuxNOW it doesn't sound like you have a central computer just a bunch of computer that are connected. Some of the data may be stored on your buddies computer down the hall. If you access the same data a lot it would move itself over to your hardrive.
But thank you for telling me about that, I was not aware of it. The fact that Microsoft could put executable code in.doc is deplorable. Microsoft coders obviously do not have much computer experience. Don't they realise that this could be used for viruses?
This is why their users have so many problems with email I think.
"Napster users are the same people who can't remember not to open e-mail attachments from random people."
This is oftopic I know, but actually it's executing attachments that really causes the problem. I open dozens of data attachments from people I've never heard of (.doc attachments etc). The real problem here is junk email clients that execute the attachments by default.
You could blame the users for using Microsoft email clients or you could just blame Microsoft itself. I generally do the latter.
You're missing my point. The slashdot article paints this thing in a positive light which is natural.
Doesn't unity and standards seem grand?
My point is at the last paragraph. It's in these companies interest to not allow any other competing clients. Therefor they do not plan on allowing any OPEN SOURCE clients to communicate on their network.
This organisation looks like a very evil thing for open source.
Some people think that the will be just able to write a jabber transport to communicate on the network. But they should expect to have to reverse hack the authenication protocol and be sued for it in the process.
My post tries to show this, but I guess I wasn't clear enough.
Nothing is simpler than writing a jabber client. A jabber programmer only has to deal with one unified protocol. I wrote a little bash script jabber client using netcat. It was crappy and I never botherred about parsing the return messages. But i could still add people to my roster, take people off, check who was on my roster, talk to people on the icq network. So I thought it was pretty decent for just a couple hours of tooling around.
You could do what you are talking about with PGP pretty easilly with jabber too. The problem is that no one has done it yet. Probably a dozen different clients out there wouldn't mind canabalizing your code if you made the first jabber client that supported PGP.
The other problem is that none of the other protocols are advanced enough to be able to handle fairly complex stuff like that.
Jabber transport programmers face the same problem elsewhere as well. AIM for example does not support offline message storage. With MSN you can send little messages that say, "Fred has recieved your message and is composing a reply." but with ICQ you can't do that.
But I say go ahead and program the PGP enabled jabber client. Thousands of users will love you for it.:)
None of these companies really want any competition. As much as unity sounds noble I seriously doubt it's the driving motivation.
If I understand it correctly, both the MSN and Yahoo instant messanging protocols had to be reverse engineered. If they wanted people to write competing clients the obvious thing to do is make the protocol public domain.
In the instant messanging world having an established user base is like having a sort of standard. Right now AOL has that and so for these companies it's time to gang up on AOL. But think for a moment... If microsoft was in AOL's position how can you be sure they'd care about Unity and interoperability?
And when these companies make their own standard protocol, what then? How do they plan on making money? No one pays for an instant messenging client because you can get AOL for free.
Are they going to sell server software? I would actually respect them if that was there plan.--especially if they made a GPL server that ran on LINUX;)-- However, I doubt they intend to because: 1) I don't recall that Yahoo has any history of selling software. 2) The companies on the list that do sell software have never sold IM software.
The only other conclusion that I can think of is that they plan to continue with their current business model of selling adds. AT&T I can picture as being interesting in a standard protocol for embedded devices and cell phones etc. But the others are going to sell adds.
There are two things you don't want to happen when you start selling adds. 1) You don't want people to switch to another provider. This makes me not expect to see Yahoo selling Instant Messenging servers that will compete with them. 2) You don't want people to figure out how to block your adds. This makes me think that yahoo does not want you to make your own client.
Writing this I think I begin to realise how this will be done. There are ways that blocking rogue servers and clients can be done. It will be called "Security." MSN will be interoperable with Yahoo because Yahoo will lease the bandwith and cpu cycles that it's clients will use on the MSN mainfraims. People without leases will not be welcome. This will be called "Unity."
Welcome to your bright tomorrow.
[Disclaimer] I plan to continue my computer science education and perhaps learn enough to program jabber applications some time in the future.
When ever the subject of Voice Rec comes up everyone always brings up the same old stuff. 1) At my office we have 387 people in one room and I'd go insane. 2) It doesn't work very well yet. 3) rm / -rf 4) etc
But my point is sure, voice rec may not be practical in every situation. Yes it is not very acurate right now. No, no one is going to be stupid enough to make a program so that anyone can just come up to your computer and start deleting whatever they want to. (unless they do crack and then all bets are off... *cough* *ms* *cough*)
The point of Voice Rec is not that it's practical, although it can be in certain situations, the point is that it's cool.
Let me put it this way: Word processors are practicle. But nobody cares about them. You just sit down type out your paper/letter/whatever, double space it, spell check it, save it and print it out. Nobody cares about that. It's just not interesting. You don't tell your friend, "Hey come over to my place and check out this cool word processor I got! It's rocking!!" It just ain't happenning.
But voice recognition on the other hand is cool. I could definately see coming back home and saying, "Hey computer play some music." That would be almost Star Trek like.
Star Trek is actually a good paradigm. They don't do everything through voice rec. Complex things are still done with a keyboard. And in a group setting they manage to keep the noise level down. Mostly when they do use voice rec they enter formulaic verbal commands but the commands are so natural that it seems like more AI is involved in parsing the commands than is actually the case. The people who keep talking about spelling out "rm / -rf" are applying a command line mindset to a verbal user interface but you really want to think out natural sounding commands. The vui Star Trek way is "computer, erase main memory." This is far more natural and would almost make you think the computer understands what you are saying.
You know what else about Star Trek? You never see them using word processors.
I know that this is not another macro virus but still reading the article pisses me off because of this quote:
?This vulnerability can affect a user even if the user follows what would normally be safe computing practices.?
It's absolutely horrible how badly microsoft has infected their customers with the idea that it is only stupid users who get attacked by viruses. I just really want to slap someone in fact everytime I hear that, "Hey those people shouldn't have clicked on the attachment." NO!! Email should be text. Just blame your users for your crappy programs why don't you?
This works into so many things.
The I was with a friend of mine setting up a some software on Linux. He was treating the machine so gently, doing things slowly and not starting too many things at once. I had to tell him, "Hey this is Linux you can't hurt it. Go ahead be rough..." With windows users feel so bad that _they_ crashed the system. But it wasn't them it's THE CRAPPY SOFTWARE STUPID.
Or when they are typing a document they blame themselves for not saving enough. This isn't right. That's crap. You shouldn't have to take that from a computer.
The computers job is not that difficult. Linux has shown that people just working for the heck of it can make decent software. There is no reason why microsoft should be able to make some decent software. And there is NO reason to blame the users when the system is crashes.
Microsoft software may be good for playing games and for watching asf. (although it's still ticks me off when the computer crashes half way through a movie.) But for doing _actuall work_ it's a crappy crappy crappy system.
Jack Daniels, at 69 just edged past Armani at 70. (http://www.interbrand.com/league_chart.html) at least there are some things you can count on in this wacky world.
I think the problem with pepsi adds is that they are too memorable. Coke adds appeal to people on a more submlinal level.
For example there is the color of the coke cans and bottles. Coke bottles look cool while i'm not even sure if I've ever seen a pepsi bottle. In general coke products outwardly appear to be smoother, darker and richer than pepsi.
The girl singing add was quite cute/funny for a while but I don't drink stuff because it's funny.
I think the new adds about the pepsi challenge may be partitially based on fact. In the first few seconds Pepsi tastes lighter and crisper than Coke and people like that at first. I believe that what the "New Coke" was meant to counter?
Perhaps this article makes a little more sense if you realise that the original "free" QT lisence was only free for non-profit organizations. So it is a little ironic for the Troll Tech guys to say that GPL does not allow people to make charge for software.
"Is there some environment where they are most common?"
< australian tour guide accent >This rather nasty looking fellow here is know as "homus-wienieus" or weenie head for those of you who don't speak latin. Mostly you'll see them hanging around in alt.advocasy.* </australian tour guide accent >
Lets say I have a file/program/whatever and it's called "pif". Then where should that be put in the windows hiearchy. Where is the metaphorical dwelling place of this lonely filename. It turns out that "pif" would go in c:\windows\pif. What is pif you ask? I haven't got the foggiest idea. I haven't got the slightlest clue as to why it goes in c:\windows\ directory. But it does. Along with about 260 other programs/files/whatever.
I found ironic how glibbly you said "Windows - The system files." If you take a minute to actually browse around in here I think that you'll find it is a complete and utter mess. This is the point the author was trying to make.
On the other hand the fact that you didn't have a similar attitude about linux system files shows that something is amiss. With a good linux distribution (say debian) you should never have to look at system files either. They only place you should really have to worry about is/home and/etc.
Here is my $HOME 526~.$ ls Mail bin data etc images progs sounds tmp var writings www
data is stuff I'm archiving. bin is scripts and programs that I wrote. etc is some setup stuff. var is where is keep tar.gz files if i download them. www is where my webpage is stored.
all the rest are fairly self explanatory.
I rarely go into the system files. I used to before I installed a good distribution. If I need to install something then i type "apt-cache search program_name" and "apt-get install program_name"
In windows the GUI organization is tied to the filesystem but in Linux this is rarely the case. The Debian menu is organised into catagories based on the type of application (in enlightenment you bring this menu up with your middle finger). However, I generally use my own shorter menu of applications that I bring up by clicking on the desktop with my index finger.
This is means that 95% of the time I'm within 2 mouse clicks of the application I need. And I never thought about it until now but I'd be willing to wager that with a very little bit of practise I could start any of these aplications blindfolded.
What windows needs to do IMHO is take a page out of Debians book. 1] Seperate the GUI from the underlying filesystem. 2] Seperate the programer interface from the user interface. The user shouldn't care how the filesystem is laid out so long as he/she knows how to find that document he wrote. If their computer crashes and they don't know where to find the backup that the wordprocessor has been making every 5 minutes it doesn't do them a lot of good does it? You wouldn't believe the number of people who have exactly that problem. 3] Establish some standards that programmers can use to know where to place files. From the placement of the file and the file name a programmer should be able to tell exactly what a program is and does. No more wandering around putting files like "pif" in any old directory you stumble across. Common sence? Apparently not common enough i guess.
However not all is bleak for microsoft. I have seen Unix systems far worse. Take my school solaris acount for example. Instead of putting bash under/bin or/usr/bin it's under/usr/local/ssl/bin/bin-sun5/bash How horrible is that? Thousands of innocent student endure Solaris/bin/sh each year because only about 5 people know where to find bash.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of the reason that "geeks" like anime is that all the best anime is the fan subbed and only found on irc.
Sure, sometimes the picture is a little rough (ok a lot rough). But there is something that just feels right about watching anime on a computer screen in a darkenned dorm room.
My personal favorite is "Bezerk."
I especially like the episode towards the end (around episode 20) where Bezerk has left the others. He's staying at an old retired blacksmith's house in the woods he gets to talking about life and he asks the blacksmith, "How did you become a blacksmith."
And the blacksmith responds, "My father was a blacksmith."
Bezerk asks, "So do you like it?"
The blacksmith thinks about it a while and then he says, "Yeah, I like the sparks."
To me, that's the coolest thing. To get to the end of life and say that you had a good life. Because life is good really, in a lot of ways. To look past all the heat and unpleasantness that goes with blacksmithing and enjoy the sparks.
>"I should be allowed to de-compile software to port it to other operating systems, right? "
I would say certainly. It's your software go ahead.
>"I should be allowed to distribute this de-compiler at large so that people can run their software under unintended operating systems?"
At first I misread and thought you said you wanted to distribute your decompiled program and that would be illegal. But distributing a de-compiler would be fine.
Isn't this what the new Amiga does? ( Tao or whatever it's called). You start with a windows/linux/mac binary and translate it to a Tao binary.
No one so far has sued wine for letting you run Windows programs under Linux.
just thought you should know.
Samba is the brainchild of Andrew Tridgell, who currently heads the Samba development team from his home of Canberra, Australia. The project was born in 1991 when Andrew created a fileserver program for his local network that supported an odd DEC protocol from Digital Pathworks. Although he didn't know it at the time, that protocol later turned out to be SMB. A few years later, he expanded upon his custom-made SMB server and began distributing it as a product on the Internet under the name SMB Server. However, Andrew couldn't keep that name -- it already belonged to another company's product -- so he tried the following Unix renaming approach:
grep -i 's.*m.*b' /usr/dict/words
And the response was:
salmonberry samba sawtimber scramble
Thus, the name "Samba" was born.
Which is a good thing, because our marketing people highly doubt you would have picked up a book called "Using Salmonberry"!
To me the whole idea seems to have been fated for disaster from square one.
???
the qoute from the open bsd page is no remote holes in the _default_ installation.
their is no "default" installation for linux.
(not that openbsd isn't more secure but i bet i could make it as insecure as windows if it installed enough exotic programs)
You always sacrifice useability for security.
If people want to want a secure computer then it's possible with linux or they could run BSD. OpenBSD has not had any remote holes in 3 years using the default instalation.
But with Linux people just care about getting the newest, coolest software as fast as possible. Linux people seem to have the attitude that being more secure than MicroSoft is important but after that they don't care much.
This is how it should be I think. For me personally security is not too important. I am only connected to the internet for a couple hours a day. If someone trashed my system I would cuss but it wouldn't be hard to rebuild.
gnutella is not opensource. They said they were going to be a version 1.0 but they are not sure now.
it's on their faq page.
Lars' slashdot interview was cool and made a lot of sense. He was the little man coming out against the evil corporation that is napster.
But on TV he comes off as really annoying and whiny.
I would think that potential damages are far more serious for napster. Your last paragraph show that see why.
:P
"if simply being offline for a little while makes tons of other good software spring up, and people realize that napster was actually kind of crappy, and that much better could be done.. that's not a BAD thing. "
It is a BAD thing if you have invested millions of dollars in napster.
Not that I plan on feeling sorry for them until they have less money than I do.
Offtopic but I do not think they should call the client "GNU"tella unless they release the sources under GPL. Originally they said that they were going to but now it looks like they may not. If you're going to call yourself gnu software then you should release the source you have. Promising to do so at some future date is not enough. I know they probably had good intentions, but it still bugs me.
(from the gnutella faq)
Will The Source Code Be Released, and if so, when?
If all goes well and development of Gnutella continues you should see the source code during the 1.0 release. The source code has not been released yet and we are unsure at this time if it will ever be released, due to AOL locking it in a closet underneath a large pile of Time Warner's dirty laundry.
He didn't explain it fully in his answer.
With your example you still have multiple individual computers connected to a central server that store /home and /usr
But with linuxNOW it doesn't sound like you have a central computer just a bunch of computer that are connected. Some of the data may be stored on your buddies computer down the hall. If you access the same data a lot it would move itself over to your hardrive.
This is what I understand at least.
check out these other articles aobut it:
http://www.linux-mag.com/online/pro geny_01.html
http://www.linux.com/interviews/2000071 2/63/
Actually i use linux so I'm safe.
.doc is deplorable. Microsoft coders obviously do not have much computer experience. Don't they realise that this could be used for viruses?
But thank you for telling me about that, I was not aware of it. The fact that Microsoft could put executable code in
This is why their users have so many problems with email I think.
"Napster users are the same people who can't remember not to open e-mail attachments from random people."
This is oftopic I know, but actually it's executing attachments that really causes the problem. I open dozens of data attachments from people I've never heard of (.doc attachments etc). The real problem here is junk email clients that execute the attachments by default.
You could blame the users for using Microsoft email clients or you could just blame Microsoft itself. I generally do the latter.
You're missing my point. The slashdot article paints this thing in a positive light which is natural.
Doesn't unity and standards seem grand?
My point is at the last paragraph. It's in these companies interest to not allow any other competing clients. Therefor they do not plan on allowing any OPEN SOURCE clients to communicate on their network.
This organisation looks like a very evil thing for open source.
Some people think that the will be just able to write a jabber transport to communicate on the network. But they should expect to have to reverse hack the authenication protocol and be sued for it in the process.
My post tries to show this, but I guess I wasn't clear enough.
Nothing is simpler than writing a jabber client. A jabber programmer only has to deal with one unified protocol. I wrote a little bash script jabber client using netcat. It was crappy and I never botherred about parsing the return messages. But i could still add people to my roster, take people off, check who was on my roster, talk to people on the icq network. So I thought it was pretty decent for just a couple hours of tooling around.
:)
You could do what you are talking about with PGP pretty easilly with jabber too. The problem is that no one has done it yet. Probably a dozen different clients out there wouldn't mind canabalizing your code if you made the first jabber client that supported PGP.
The other problem is that none of the other protocols are advanced enough to be able to handle fairly complex stuff like that.
Jabber transport programmers face the same problem elsewhere as well. AIM for example does not support offline message storage. With MSN you can send little messages that say, "Fred has recieved your message and is composing a reply." but with ICQ you can't do that.
But I say go ahead and program the PGP enabled jabber client. Thousands of users will love you for it.
None of these companies really want any competition. As much as unity sounds noble I seriously doubt it's the driving motivation.
;)-- However, I doubt they intend to because: 1) I don't recall that Yahoo has any history of selling software. 2) The companies on the list that do sell software have never sold IM software.
If I understand it correctly, both the MSN and Yahoo instant messanging protocols had to be reverse engineered. If they wanted people to write competing clients the obvious thing to do is make the protocol public domain.
In the instant messanging world having an established user base is like having a sort of standard. Right now AOL has that and so for these companies it's time to gang up on AOL. But think for a moment... If microsoft was in AOL's position how can you be sure they'd care about Unity and interoperability?
And when these companies make their own standard protocol, what then? How do they plan on making money? No one pays for an instant messenging client because you can get AOL for free.
Are they going to sell server software? I would actually respect them if that was there plan.--especially if they made a GPL server that ran on LINUX
The only other conclusion that I can think of is that they plan to continue with their current business model of selling adds. AT&T I can picture as being interesting in a standard protocol for embedded devices and cell phones etc. But the others are going to sell adds.
There are two things you don't want to happen when you start selling adds. 1) You don't want people to switch to another provider. This makes me not expect to see Yahoo selling Instant Messenging servers that will compete with them. 2) You don't want people to figure out how to block your adds. This makes me think that yahoo does not want you to make your own client.
Writing this I think I begin to realise how this will be done. There are ways that blocking rogue servers and clients can be done. It will be called "Security." MSN will be interoperable with Yahoo because Yahoo will lease the bandwith and cpu cycles that it's clients will use on the MSN mainfraims. People without leases will not be welcome. This will be called "Unity."
Welcome to your bright tomorrow.
[Disclaimer] I plan to continue my computer science education and perhaps learn enough to program jabber applications some time in the future.
http://slashdot.com
http://zanyantics.com
http://slashdork.org
http://smashdot.org
http://crashdot.org
http://splashdot.org
http://splashdot.org
http://hashdot.org
http://slapdash.org
http://slashnot.org
http://slashrot.org
http://slashpot.org
http://slashbot.org
http://hotgrits.org
http://slashroot.org
http://slashback.org
http://smokedot.org
http://crackdot.org
Those are the ones I've found so far anyways...
When ever the subject of Voice Rec comes up everyone always brings up the same old stuff.
1) At my office we have 387 people in one room and I'd go insane.
2) It doesn't work very well yet.
3) rm / -rf
4) etc
But my point is sure, voice rec may not be practical in every situation. Yes it is not very acurate right now. No, no one is going to be stupid enough to make a program so that anyone can just come up to your computer and start deleting whatever they want to. (unless they do crack and then all bets are off... *cough* *ms* *cough*)
The point of Voice Rec is not that it's practical, although it can be in certain situations, the point is that it's cool.
Let me put it this way: Word processors are practicle. But nobody cares about them. You just sit down type out your paper/letter/whatever, double space it, spell check it, save it and print it out. Nobody cares about that. It's just not interesting. You don't tell your friend, "Hey come over to my place and check out this cool word processor I got! It's rocking!!" It just ain't happenning.
But voice recognition on the other hand is cool. I could definately see coming back home and saying, "Hey computer play some music." That would be almost Star Trek like.
Star Trek is actually a good paradigm. They don't do everything through voice rec. Complex things are still done with a keyboard. And in a group setting they manage to keep the noise level down. Mostly when they do use voice rec they enter formulaic verbal commands but the commands are so natural that it seems like more AI is involved in parsing the commands than is actually the case. The people who keep talking about spelling out "rm / -rf" are applying a command line mindset to a verbal user interface but you really want to think out natural sounding commands. The vui Star Trek way is "computer, erase main memory." This is far more natural and would almost make you think the computer understands what you are saying.
You know what else about Star Trek? You never see them using word processors.
I know that this is not another macro virus but still reading the article pisses me off because of this quote:
?This vulnerability can affect a user even if the user follows what would normally be safe computing practices.?
It's absolutely horrible how badly microsoft has infected their customers with the idea that it is only stupid users who get attacked by viruses. I just really want to slap someone in fact everytime I hear that, "Hey those people shouldn't have clicked on the attachment." NO!! Email should be text. Just blame your users for your crappy programs why don't you?
This works into so many things.
The I was with a friend of mine setting up a some software on Linux. He was treating the machine so gently, doing things slowly and not starting too many things at once. I had to tell him, "Hey this is Linux you can't hurt it. Go ahead be rough..." With windows users feel so bad that _they_ crashed the system. But it wasn't them it's THE CRAPPY SOFTWARE STUPID.
Or when they are typing a document they blame themselves for not saving enough. This isn't right. That's crap. You shouldn't have to take that from a computer.
The computers job is not that difficult. Linux has shown that people just working for the heck of it can make decent software. There is no reason why microsoft should be able to make some decent software. And there is NO reason to blame the users when the system is crashes.
Microsoft software may be good for playing games and for watching asf. (although it's still ticks me off when the computer crashes half way through a movie.) But for doing _actuall work_ it's a crappy crappy crappy system.
Jack Daniels, at 69 just edged past Armani at 70.
(http://www.interbrand.com/league_chart.html) at least there are some things you can count on in this wacky world.
I think the problem with pepsi adds is that they are too memorable. Coke adds appeal to people on a more submlinal level.
For example there is the color of the coke cans and bottles. Coke bottles look cool while i'm not even sure if I've ever seen a pepsi bottle. In general coke products outwardly appear to be smoother, darker and richer than pepsi.
The girl singing add was quite cute/funny for a while but I don't drink stuff because it's funny.
I think the new adds about the pepsi challenge may be partitially based on fact. In the first few seconds Pepsi tastes lighter and crisper than Coke and people like that at first. I believe that what the "New Coke" was meant to counter?
Perhaps this article makes a little more sense if you realise that the original "free" QT lisence was only free for non-profit organizations. So it is a little ironic for the Troll Tech guys to say that GPL does not allow people to make charge for software.
< australian tour guide accent >This rather nasty looking fellow here is know as "homus-wienieus" or weenie head for those of you who don't speak latin. Mostly you'll see them hanging around in alt.advocasy.* </australian tour guide accent >
Lets say I have a file/program/whatever and it's called "pif". Then where should that be put in the windows hiearchy. Where is the metaphorical dwelling place of this lonely filename. It turns out that "pif" would go in c:\windows\pif. What is pif you ask? I haven't got the foggiest idea. I haven't got the slightlest clue as to why it goes in c:\windows\ directory. But it does. Along with about 260 other programs/files/whatever.
/home and /etc.
/bin or /usr/bin it's under /usr/local/ssl/bin/bin-sun5/bash How horrible is that? Thousands of innocent student endure Solaris /bin/sh each year because only about 5 people know where to find bash.
I found ironic how glibbly you said "Windows - The system files." If you take a minute to actually browse around in here I think that you'll find it is a complete and utter mess. This is the point the author was trying to make.
On the other hand the fact that you didn't have a similar attitude about linux system files shows that something is amiss. With a good linux distribution (say debian) you should never have to look at system files either. They only place you should really have to worry about is
Here is my $HOME
526~.$ ls
Mail bin data etc images progs sounds tmp var writings www
data is stuff I'm archiving.
bin is scripts and programs that I wrote.
etc is some setup stuff.
var is where is keep tar.gz files if i download them.
www is where my webpage is stored.
all the rest are fairly self explanatory.
I rarely go into the system files. I used to before I installed a good distribution. If I need to install something then i type "apt-cache search program_name" and "apt-get install program_name"
In windows the GUI organization is tied to the filesystem but in Linux this is rarely the case. The Debian menu is organised into catagories based on the type of application (in enlightenment you bring this menu up with your middle finger). However, I generally use my own shorter menu of applications that I bring up by clicking on the desktop with my index finger.
This is means that 95% of the time I'm within 2 mouse clicks of the application I need. And I never thought about it until now but I'd be willing to wager that with a very little bit of practise I could start any of these aplications blindfolded.
What windows needs to do IMHO is take a page out of Debians book.
1] Seperate the GUI from the underlying filesystem.
2] Seperate the programer interface from the user interface. The user shouldn't care how the filesystem is laid out so long as he/she knows how to find that document he wrote. If their computer crashes and they don't know where to find the backup that the wordprocessor has been making every 5 minutes it doesn't do them a lot of good does it? You wouldn't believe the number of people who have exactly that problem.
3] Establish some standards that programmers can use to know where to place files. From the placement of the file and the file name a programmer should be able to tell exactly what a program is and does. No more wandering around putting files like "pif" in any old directory you stumble across. Common sence? Apparently not common enough i guess.
However not all is bleak for microsoft. I have seen Unix systems far worse. Take my school solaris acount for example. Instead of putting bash under
Sheesh... It's ridiculous really...