I actually like your idea of using X protocol to drive printers from inside a graphical Linux shell.
The reason why I'm still pushing for a standard interface for Linux is simple: it makes it much easier for printer manufacturers to write actual printer drivers.
Hey, at least being on the inside of printer driver development, at least you can eventually get Linux to support UPDF when that standard is finalized. It'll sure save printer manufacturers a lot of headaches writing Linux printer drivers, that's to be sure.
With the explosive proliferation of high-quality inkjet color printers from Hewlett-Packard, Canon, Epson, and Lexmark, the impetus is there to correct one of Linux's major shortcomings.
What Linux really needs right now is a standard Application Programming Interface (API) for EVERYTHING.
Imagining everyone agreeing to a single standard for both text mode and graphical interface mode. That way, we can optimize the operating system for MUCH improved ease of installation and use, not to mention better hardware support and much improved printing capabilities.
Because Microsoft uses the WIN32 API (which has been improved a lot of the years), it can do a very good job of optimizing the operating system to support system hardware, and MS was able to develop a very good printing system (which works with just about every printer out there). I mean, look at the output from the 1000 dpi-plus color inkjet printers--most of the output is generated by Windows-based computers, unless it's one of the newer models with USB connections, then you can use a newer-generation Macintosh to generate the stunning output. Sadly, that type of output is quite yet available to Linux users.
Given that the computer operating on a long-term spacecraft will have to withstand conditions (like -270 to +270 degrees Celsius with no heatsinks, heavy bombardment of all kinds of radiation from the "solar wind," etc.), it's small wonder why NASA only now has qualified the 486 CPU for space use. Designing the radiation shielding and thermal protection plus guaranteeing extreme reliability of use for years at a time requires a lot of engineering work, and frankly, it'll be some time before NASA will qualify a Pentium II, let alone a Pentium III, CPU for spacecraft use.
I think for the "Person of the Millenium," the choice has to be Johan Gutenberg.
The answer is simple: his invention of the low-cost hot-metal movable-type printing press literally changed the face of the world in the space of 75 years. The printing press made it possible to store and spread information on a scale that was just completely unimaginable before his lifetime.
With the printing press, it had two effects: 1) it allowed people to create thousands of copies of books, and boy did that spread information fast; and 2) it began the steps towards standardization of language, since printing "fixed" the spelling and grammar of language.
In fact, as the Second Christian Millenium comes to a close, some day we will look back at two important people that changed the way information is transmitted. The first is Johan Gutenberg for creating the low-cost printed book, and the second is Tim Berners-Lee for creating the means to share and transmit text and graphical data on a worldwide scale (the World Wide Web).
I think people are missing the point about why TIME chose Jeff Bezos as their 1999 Person of the Year.
Think about it--Amazon.com was one of the very first companies to take advantage of large-scale retail sales over the Internet. By the time Netscape and Microsoft spread web browsers everywhere for Windows 95 users during 1996, Amazon.com was already a well-established company selling books over the Internet.
In many ways, Amazon.com has completely changed the nature of bookselling, period. Because Amazon.com has a huge selection of books, people could buy books that would have been difficult to do with conventional "brick and mortar" bookstores.
Alas, the growth of Amazon.com (and its competitors, Barnes & Noble (bn.com) and Borders (borders.com)) has a big downside: it has essentially killed off the small, independent bookseller in a large fraction of the country. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, stores that used to thrive before the arrival of Amazon.com have disappeared: Books, Inc., A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books, and a number of other stores (even Printers Inc. had to close its Palo Alto, CA store and concentrate on its Mountain View, CA store). Bookstores nowadays have to either cater to the niche market (Future Fantasy in Palo Alto, CA) or go the "superstore" route (the proliferation of Barnes & Noble and Borders).
There are a few independent bookstores that are thriving (City Lights in San Francisco and Cody's in Berkeley), but these stores are also starting to get more niche in its marketing in order to survive against the online bookstores and the book superstores.
But generally, Amazon.com has become the "prototype" of the online retailer. (Yes, there were online retailers on America Online before Amazon.com arrived on the scene, but Amazon.com was the first to cater to almost everyone connected to the Internet). Most every online retailer today, from online grocery stores like webvan.com to luxury item retailers like send.com, have been influenced by the pioneering efforts of Amazon.com.
One serious concern of mine is the fact that the NT File System (NTFS) in Windows 2000 may do things to the partition table that could make it incompatible with older distributions of Linux. I kind of doubt that after installing Windows 2000 Professional you will have problems with Red Hat Linux 6.1 or Caldera OpenLinux 2.3, though.
Actually, somebody is missing the point here. How about creating a dual-boot situation with Windows 2000 Professional in one partition and Linux in another partition? Are the people who created Partition Magic working on this?
Personally, in many cases a Pentium III/Athlon CPU is way overkill for most users. The only people that really need that type of speed are those who run high-end games like Quake III Arena or Flight Simulator 2000 or those who run applications that really use a lot of CPU cycles (Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator).
For most users who is spending most of the time running business apps or surfing the Web, you can get by with an Intel Celeron 300 MHz (A version) CPU. But the big bottlenecks are usually RAM size, hard disk speed and graphics card speed.
Given that most systems built since 1997 using Slot 1 or Socket 370 CPU connectors are of the ATX form factor using the Intel 440LX, 440BX, 440ZX and 440EX chipsets, the best way to get a quick bump-up of performance is as follows:
1. Increase the amount of system RAM to 128 MB. This makes a HUGE difference for most applications because the computer spends much less time swapping to and from virtual memory on the hard drive.
2. Get a faster hard drive. Remember, the current crop of ATA/66 IDE hard drives are downward compatible with the ATA/33 connectors found on the Intel 440 series chipsets, so you might want to get something like an IBM Deskstar or Maxtor DiamondMax hard drive with a 7200 RPM platter speed of around 13 to 24 GB storage capacity.
3. Get a faster graphics card. Since even the "AGP 4X compatible" series of AGP graphics cards will work with the the AGP slot on any motherboard that uses the Intel 440 series chipset; a relatively inexpensive card like the ATI XPert 2000 AGP will provide a speed improvement over the first-generation AGP card in your system, and the ATI XPert 2000 AGP has built-in MPEG-2 decoding so you can add in a DVD-ROM player to play DVD movies.
In short, your system is not as obselete as it seems even if you have an older CPU.
Actually, online bookstores make more sense if you're buying hardback books. Mostly because the cost of a hardback book plus US Priority Mail shipping from an online retailer is usually substantially cheaper than buying the book at most "brick and mortar" bookstores.
Mind you, people often forget that FreeBSD for many years was a VASTLY superior server operating system than Linux. Still is, in many ways today; after all, a large number of Internet Relay Chat servers run FreeBSD.
It's a case of while Linux gets the publicity, FreeBSD "gets the work done." Many high-volume trafficked web sites use FreeBSD, including Hotmail.
Unfortunately, stores like Stacey's are getting increasingly rare in the age of the online bookstore and the "book superstore" as exemplified by Barnes & Noble. Between Amazon.com, bn.com and Borders.com, they have pretty much wiped out the small independent bookseller in a large fraction of this country. I'm not even sure if Stacey's can even survive with the online plus "book superstore" onslaught of the last four years.
You might have concerns about Amazon.com's "one click checkout" patent, but personally, what Amazon.com has done is essentially validate the concept of electronic retailing over the Internet.
They have pretty close to the largest new book selection of any retailer in the world; the only "mortar and brick" bookstore that can even compete against Amazon.com's selection of new books is Powell's Books in Portland, OR. Mind you, this has a big downside--it has essentially killed off the small independent general bookseller and forced remaining bookstores to either become niche resellers in nature (e.g., Future Fantasy in Palo Alto, CA) or become superstores (Barnes & Noble, Borders, and a few others). Here in "Silicon Valley," stores like Printers Inc. are down to one store, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books is gone, and so is Books, Inc.
TIME chose Jeff Bezos as its "Person of the Year" because he is the most visible personality in a sector of the economy that has become very important indeed. Amazon.com's pioneering efforts will have massive repercussions in many parts of the economy for many years to come.
Fortunately, with rapid improvements in both digital storage and projection technology (remember, Hughes and JVC recently announced a 1900x1200 resolution projector!!), I think the days of sending out movies on standard film will start its slow decline.
By the way, if you read my comment, nobody seems to have remembered another way to distribute digitally-encoded movies: optical discs. A 305 mm optical disc with the same pit size encoding as DVD discs could store an ENORMOUS amount of data, so much so we could have not only the movie in 1900x1200 wide screen format, but also separate musical/sound effects soundtrack and voice tracks! This makes it possible to have one optical disk not only store multiple spoken audio tracks in several languages, it will also include subtitling in multiple languages at the same time (think of it as "DVD discs for theaters"). With our burgeoning ethnic population in the USA, for example the large Spanish-speaking population would greatly appreciate first-run American movies dubbed either into Spanish or Spanish-subtitled.
The other advantage of optical disc is that you only need ONE optical disc player about the size of the old Laserdisc players. That's VASTLY smaller than those heavy and bulky reels of 35 mm or 70 mm film, which means vastly lower shipping costs in general. And since it is a digital format, you won't see "jittering," film scratches or dust specks, and the color saturation will of course be excellent.
However, with CCD's already at 6 megapixels and will probably hit 10 megapixels within 18 months (and likely 16 megapixels by 2004), not to mention the cost of hard disk storage dropping like crazy in the last four years, the era of digital recording for "epic" movies has pretty much arrived.
In short, I expect within 5-6 years it'll be fairly common where everything will be done digitally: recording the movie, playing back the "daily rushes," editing, combining of special effects and audio, etc. Because it is ALL done digitally, the picture quality will stay excellent because as the movie is duplicated, there will be NO loss in picture quality.
In short, a LOT of movie studios are watching with great interest what Lucasfilm does with the sequel to Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace; if the results of Lucasfilm using an all-digital process of filmmaking does come out to be superb, then the rush to all-digital filmmaking will happen like a tsunami.
This is where digital film projection--especially if they put the movie on 305 mm optical discs--become very useful.
Let's take for example the sequel to Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace. For the Asian market, a single 305 mm disc for theater projection will have voice soundtracks (separate from the rest of the soundtrack) in English, Japanese, Mandarin dialect Chinese, Cantonese dialect Chinese, Malay, Filipino, Thai and Indonesian, plus subtitling in Vietnamese, Indian languages, etc. It's a LOT cheaper to do it that way.
There is a simple reason why: a digitally-encoded movie for theater projection will easily fit on a 12" (305 mm) optical disk (if we're using the same pit size as those on DVD discs). It's a LOT easier to handle a single 12" optical disc than several big cans of 35 mm or 70 mm film.
Also, because the disc is 305 mm in diameter, you can encode easily things like multi-language spoken audio tracks separate from the rest of the soundtrack (and even more, multi-language subtitling on the same disc!). Let's take for example the second Star Wars "prequel" movie due in May 2002. For the European market, the optical disc for digital projection systems will have separate spoken soundtracks in English, French, Castillian Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese plus subtitling in Catalan, Arabic, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Hungarian, Romanian, and Bulgarian. It's vastly cheaper to do it ONCE so the movie can be simultaneously released to just about all of Europe at the same time.
Also, with digital projection, the complete lack of film "jittering," the total lack of scratches and dust, and superb color saturation means visual quality will of course be superb.
In short, once the cost of digital projectors start coming down (and given the rapid development in the computer industry, they will come down very rapidly), future movie theaters will no longer need the extra space needed to store the large bulk of film; it'll all be reduced to 305 mm optical discs.
What is very interesting is that while Microsoft, Yahoo!, Tribal Voice and a few others will support the IETF's Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol, it's very likely that America Online might thumb its nose at the IETF and still go its own way with AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ, because they do own the majority of the market for this type of product.
Mind you, once IMPP is published, it won't take long for the open-source programmers to come up with Linux-based instant-messaging programs that work with IMPP.
You obviously have not read about the history of the treatment of mental illness.
Treatments in the past border on unimaginable: electric shock, heavy use of restraints, and in some cases lobotomies.
Fortunately, modern medical science with its study of brain chemistry has come up with a far more humane solution, namely medicines such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Effexor, Remeron, etc. The majority of users of these drugs DO respond positively to modern medication, and people in the post that couldn't even properly function in society are now living useful lives for a change.
While I do agree with your assertion that some drugs are over-perscribed (especially Ritalin), if properly diagnosed and proper medication given, it's a major improvement over what has happened in the past.
Given I was diagnosed as with a mild form of clinical depression, I was put on Prozac 20 mg for several months. I do notice that it worked very well--for one thing, I don't experience the severe mood swings I used to have (I'd go from having a temper tantrum to depressed in a matter of minutes from stress).
Right now, I'm taking 300 mg per day of St. John's Wort extract, which has really helped me stabilize my moods.
Well, the "split" putting both the 5 and 6 keys on the left side did take some getting used to.
But once I got used to that, going back to a regular keyboard felt cramped and awkward, mostly because of the fact I had to twist both wrists slightly to set up the "home keys" position.
One complaint of mine about the original model of the Microsoft Natural Keyboard was the fact that the keyboard stands made typing feel quite weird. I'm glad they eliminated that problem with the Elite versions.
Actually, the "Windows" keys on the Microsoft Natural Keyboard actually do have some functions if you're running KDE or GNOME, depending on the theme you set up for these windowing environments.
What's interesting is that while Linux users naturally hate Microsoft software, they do like the Microsoft Mouse ("Dove Bar" variant and newer) and the Microsoft Natural Keyboard. I use the Natural Keyboard myself and enjoy the fact I can type for long periods comfortably, thanks to the fact on the MS Natural Keyboard the wrists are not "bent" to accommodate home key positions like you do on a normal QWERTY keyboard.
Well, you do have to remember that the Linux of 1993 and the Linux of 1999 are quite a bit different, too.;-)
Today's Linux distributions can run seriously powerful hardware and applications, and in fact many of the world's most powerful supercomputer setups use Linux for their operating systems.
And with Caldera OpenLinux 2.3, you no longer have to gnash your teeth trying to install it, either.;-)
Isn't it so ironic that while Sun thinks they can keep Java proprietary and also support Open Source (yeah, right!), IBM has done FAR better work in creating a decently workable Java?
In short, Scott McNealy and Co. seems to have forgotten that IBM can be an extremely formidable force when it comes to programming resources.
At the rate things are going, we'll probably stand a better chance to get the WIN32 API "open sourced" than get the Java specs published from Sun. (shrug)
Actually, a LOT of people want to burn Sun boxes in effigy.
Especially considering how Sun tried to dance around the ISO and ECMA disclosure requirements for standards, and who knows what kind of lip service Sun gives to the GNU Public License (GPL).
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Greyfox,
I actually like your idea of using X protocol to drive printers from inside a graphical Linux shell.
The reason why I'm still pushing for a standard interface for Linux is simple: it makes it much easier for printer manufacturers to write actual printer drivers.
Hey, at least being on the inside of printer driver development, at least you can eventually get Linux to support UPDF when that standard is finalized. It'll sure save printer manufacturers a lot of headaches writing Linux printer drivers, that's to be sure.
With the explosive proliferation of high-quality inkjet color printers from Hewlett-Packard, Canon, Epson, and Lexmark, the impetus is there to correct one of Linux's major shortcomings.
What Linux really needs right now is a standard Application Programming Interface (API) for EVERYTHING.
Imagining everyone agreeing to a single standard for both text mode and graphical interface mode. That way, we can optimize the operating system for MUCH improved ease of installation and use, not to mention better hardware support and much improved printing capabilities.
Because Microsoft uses the WIN32 API (which has been improved a lot of the years), it can do a very good job of optimizing the operating system to support system hardware, and MS was able to develop a very good printing system (which works with just about every printer out there). I mean, look at the output from the 1000 dpi-plus color inkjet printers--most of the output is generated by Windows-based computers, unless it's one of the newer models with USB connections, then you can use a newer-generation Macintosh to generate the stunning output. Sadly, that type of output is quite yet available to Linux users.
Given that the computer operating on a long-term spacecraft will have to withstand conditions (like -270 to +270 degrees Celsius with no heatsinks, heavy bombardment of all kinds of radiation from the "solar wind," etc.), it's small wonder why NASA only now has qualified the 486 CPU for space use. Designing the radiation shielding and thermal protection plus guaranteeing extreme reliability of use for years at a time requires a lot of engineering work, and frankly, it'll be some time before NASA will qualify a Pentium II, let alone a Pentium III, CPU for spacecraft use.
I think for the "Person of the Millenium," the choice has to be Johan Gutenberg.
The answer is simple: his invention of the low-cost hot-metal movable-type printing press literally changed the face of the world in the space of 75 years. The printing press made it possible to store and spread information on a scale that was just completely unimaginable before his lifetime.
With the printing press, it had two effects: 1) it allowed people to create thousands of copies of books, and boy did that spread information fast; and 2) it began the steps towards standardization of language, since printing "fixed" the spelling and grammar of language.
In fact, as the Second Christian Millenium comes to a close, some day we will look back at two important people that changed the way information is transmitted. The first is Johan Gutenberg for creating the low-cost printed book, and the second is Tim Berners-Lee for creating the means to share and transmit text and graphical data on a worldwide scale (the World Wide Web).
Thanks for the superb comments!
I think people are missing the point about why TIME chose Jeff Bezos as their 1999 Person of the Year.
Think about it--Amazon.com was one of the very first companies to take advantage of large-scale retail sales over the Internet. By the time Netscape and Microsoft spread web browsers everywhere for Windows 95 users during 1996, Amazon.com was already a well-established company selling books over the Internet.
In many ways, Amazon.com has completely changed the nature of bookselling, period. Because Amazon.com has a huge selection of books, people could buy books that would have been difficult to do with conventional "brick and mortar" bookstores.
Alas, the growth of Amazon.com (and its competitors, Barnes & Noble (bn.com) and Borders (borders.com)) has a big downside: it has essentially killed off the small, independent bookseller in a large fraction of the country. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, stores that used to thrive before the arrival of Amazon.com have disappeared: Books, Inc., A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books, and a number of other stores (even Printers Inc. had to close its Palo Alto, CA store and concentrate on its Mountain View, CA store). Bookstores nowadays have to either cater to the niche market (Future Fantasy in Palo Alto, CA) or go the "superstore" route (the proliferation of Barnes & Noble and Borders).
There are a few independent bookstores that are thriving (City Lights in San Francisco and Cody's in Berkeley), but these stores are also starting to get more niche in its marketing in order to survive against the online bookstores and the book superstores.
But generally, Amazon.com has become the "prototype" of the online retailer. (Yes, there were online retailers on America Online before Amazon.com arrived on the scene, but Amazon.com was the first to cater to almost everyone connected to the Internet). Most every online retailer today, from online grocery stores like webvan.com to luxury item retailers like send.com, have been influenced by the pioneering efforts of Amazon.com.
Thanks for the information!
One serious concern of mine is the fact that the NT File System (NTFS) in Windows 2000 may do things to the partition table that could make it incompatible with older distributions of Linux. I kind of doubt that after installing Windows 2000 Professional you will have problems with Red Hat Linux 6.1 or Caldera OpenLinux 2.3, though.
Actually, somebody is missing the point here. How about creating a dual-boot situation with Windows 2000 Professional in one partition and Linux in another partition? Are the people who created Partition Magic working on this?
I have a question for you.
Have you been listening to Art Bell a bit too much lately? What you just wrote sounds like the usual things we hear from Art and his guests.
Folks,
Personally, in many cases a Pentium III/Athlon CPU is way overkill for most users. The only people that really need that type of speed are those who run high-end games like Quake III Arena or Flight Simulator 2000 or those who run applications that really use a lot of CPU cycles (Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator).
For most users who is spending most of the time running business apps or surfing the Web, you can get by with an Intel Celeron 300 MHz (A version) CPU. But the big bottlenecks are usually RAM size, hard disk speed and graphics card speed.
Given that most systems built since 1997 using Slot 1 or Socket 370 CPU connectors are of the ATX form factor using the Intel 440LX, 440BX, 440ZX and 440EX chipsets, the best way to get a quick bump-up of performance is as follows:
1. Increase the amount of system RAM to 128 MB. This makes a HUGE difference for most applications because the computer spends much less time swapping to and from virtual memory on the hard drive.
2. Get a faster hard drive. Remember, the current crop of ATA/66 IDE hard drives are downward compatible with the ATA/33 connectors found on the Intel 440 series chipsets, so you might want to get something like an IBM Deskstar or Maxtor DiamondMax hard drive with a 7200 RPM platter speed of around 13 to 24 GB storage capacity.
3. Get a faster graphics card. Since even the "AGP 4X compatible" series of AGP graphics cards will work with the the AGP slot on any motherboard that uses the Intel 440 series chipset; a relatively inexpensive card like the ATI XPert 2000 AGP will provide a speed improvement over the first-generation AGP card in your system, and the ATI XPert 2000 AGP has built-in MPEG-2 decoding so you can add in a DVD-ROM player to play DVD movies.
In short, your system is not as obselete as it seems even if you have an older CPU.
Actually, online bookstores make more sense if you're buying hardback books. Mostly because the cost of a hardback book plus US Priority Mail shipping from an online retailer is usually substantially cheaper than buying the book at most "brick and mortar" bookstores.
Mind you, people often forget that FreeBSD for many years was a VASTLY superior server operating system than Linux. Still is, in many ways today; after all, a large number of Internet Relay Chat servers run FreeBSD.
It's a case of while Linux gets the publicity, FreeBSD "gets the work done." Many high-volume trafficked web sites use FreeBSD, including Hotmail.
Unfortunately, stores like Stacey's are getting increasingly rare in the age of the online bookstore and the "book superstore" as exemplified by Barnes & Noble. Between Amazon.com, bn.com and Borders.com, they have pretty much wiped out the small independent bookseller in a large fraction of this country. I'm not even sure if Stacey's can even survive with the online plus "book superstore" onslaught of the last four years.
Rob,
You might have concerns about Amazon.com's "one click checkout" patent, but personally, what Amazon.com has done is essentially validate the concept of electronic retailing over the Internet.
They have pretty close to the largest new book selection of any retailer in the world; the only "mortar and brick" bookstore that can even compete against Amazon.com's selection of new books is Powell's Books in Portland, OR. Mind you, this has a big downside--it has essentially killed off the small independent general bookseller and forced remaining bookstores to either become niche resellers in nature (e.g., Future Fantasy in Palo Alto, CA) or become superstores (Barnes & Noble, Borders, and a few others). Here in "Silicon Valley," stores like Printers Inc. are down to one store, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books is gone, and so is Books, Inc.
TIME chose Jeff Bezos as its "Person of the Year" because he is the most visible personality in a sector of the economy that has become very important indeed. Amazon.com's pioneering efforts will have massive repercussions in many parts of the economy for many years to come.
Jason,
Fortunately, with rapid improvements in both digital storage and projection technology (remember, Hughes and JVC recently announced a 1900x1200 resolution projector!!), I think the days of sending out movies on standard film will start its slow decline.
By the way, if you read my comment, nobody seems to have remembered another way to distribute digitally-encoded movies: optical discs. A 305 mm optical disc with the same pit size encoding as DVD discs could store an ENORMOUS amount of data, so much so we could have not only the movie in 1900x1200 wide screen format, but also separate musical/sound effects soundtrack and voice tracks! This makes it possible to have one optical disk not only store multiple spoken audio tracks in several languages, it will also include subtitling in multiple languages at the same time (think of it as "DVD discs for theaters"). With our burgeoning ethnic population in the USA, for example the large Spanish-speaking population would greatly appreciate first-run American movies dubbed either into Spanish or Spanish-subtitled.
The other advantage of optical disc is that you only need ONE optical disc player about the size of the old Laserdisc players. That's VASTLY smaller than those heavy and bulky reels of 35 mm or 70 mm film, which means vastly lower shipping costs in general. And since it is a digital format, you won't see "jittering," film scratches or dust specks, and the color saturation will of course be excellent.
However, with CCD's already at 6 megapixels and will probably hit 10 megapixels within 18 months (and likely 16 megapixels by 2004), not to mention the cost of hard disk storage dropping like crazy in the last four years, the era of digital recording for "epic" movies has pretty much arrived.
In short, I expect within 5-6 years it'll be fairly common where everything will be done digitally: recording the movie, playing back the "daily rushes," editing, combining of special effects and audio, etc. Because it is ALL done digitally, the picture quality will stay excellent because as the movie is duplicated, there will be NO loss in picture quality.
In short, a LOT of movie studios are watching with great interest what Lucasfilm does with the sequel to Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace; if the results of Lucasfilm using an all-digital process of filmmaking does come out to be superb, then the rush to all-digital filmmaking will happen like a tsunami.
This is where digital film projection--especially if they put the movie on 305 mm optical discs--become very useful.
Let's take for example the sequel to Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace. For the Asian market, a single 305 mm disc for theater projection will have voice soundtracks (separate from the rest of the soundtrack) in English, Japanese, Mandarin dialect Chinese, Cantonese dialect Chinese, Malay, Filipino, Thai and Indonesian, plus subtitling in Vietnamese, Indian languages, etc. It's a LOT cheaper to do it that way.
I think Roger Ebert is wrong on this.
There is a simple reason why: a digitally-encoded movie for theater projection will easily fit on a 12" (305 mm) optical disk (if we're using the same pit size as those on DVD discs). It's a LOT easier to handle a single 12" optical disc than several big cans of 35 mm or 70 mm film.
Also, because the disc is 305 mm in diameter, you can encode easily things like multi-language spoken audio tracks separate from the rest of the soundtrack (and even more, multi-language subtitling on the same disc!). Let's take for example the second Star Wars "prequel" movie due in May 2002. For the European market, the optical disc for digital projection systems will have separate spoken soundtracks in English, French, Castillian Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese plus subtitling in Catalan, Arabic, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Hungarian, Romanian, and Bulgarian. It's vastly cheaper to do it ONCE so the movie can be simultaneously released to just about all of Europe at the same time.
Also, with digital projection, the complete lack of film "jittering," the total lack of scratches and dust, and superb color saturation means visual quality will of course be superb.
In short, once the cost of digital projectors start coming down (and given the rapid development in the computer industry, they will come down very rapidly), future movie theaters will no longer need the extra space needed to store the large bulk of film; it'll all be reduced to 305 mm optical discs.
What is very interesting is that while Microsoft, Yahoo!, Tribal Voice and a few others will support the IETF's Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol, it's very likely that America Online might thumb its nose at the IETF and still go its own way with AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ, because they do own the majority of the market for this type of product.
Mind you, once IMPP is published, it won't take long for the open-source programmers to come up with Linux-based instant-messaging programs that work with IMPP.
torpor,
You obviously have not read about the history of the treatment of mental illness.
Treatments in the past border on unimaginable: electric shock, heavy use of restraints, and in some cases lobotomies.
Fortunately, modern medical science with its study of brain chemistry has come up with a far more humane solution, namely medicines such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Effexor, Remeron, etc. The majority of users of these drugs DO respond positively to modern medication, and people in the post that couldn't even properly function in society are now living useful lives for a change.
While I do agree with your assertion that some drugs are over-perscribed (especially Ritalin), if properly diagnosed and proper medication given, it's a major improvement over what has happened in the past.
Given I was diagnosed as with a mild form of clinical depression, I was put on Prozac 20 mg for several months. I do notice that it worked very well--for one thing, I don't experience the severe mood swings I used to have (I'd go from having a temper tantrum to depressed in a matter of minutes from stress).
Right now, I'm taking 300 mg per day of St. John's Wort extract, which has really helped me stabilize my moods.
Well, the "split" putting both the 5 and 6 keys on the left side did take some getting used to.
But once I got used to that, going back to a regular keyboard felt cramped and awkward, mostly because of the fact I had to twist both wrists slightly to set up the "home keys" position.
One complaint of mine about the original model of the Microsoft Natural Keyboard was the fact that the keyboard stands made typing feel quite weird. I'm glad they eliminated that problem with the Elite versions.
Actually, the "Windows" keys on the Microsoft Natural Keyboard actually do have some functions if you're running KDE or GNOME, depending on the theme you set up for these windowing environments.
What's interesting is that while Linux users naturally hate Microsoft software, they do like the Microsoft Mouse ("Dove Bar" variant and newer) and the Microsoft Natural Keyboard. I use the Natural Keyboard myself and enjoy the fact I can type for long periods comfortably, thanks to the fact on the MS Natural Keyboard the wrists are not "bent" to accommodate home key positions like you do on a normal QWERTY keyboard.
Well, you do have to remember that the Linux of 1993 and the Linux of 1999 are quite a bit different, too. ;-)
;-)
Today's Linux distributions can run seriously powerful hardware and applications, and in fact many of the world's most powerful supercomputer setups use Linux for their operating systems.
And with Caldera OpenLinux 2.3, you no longer have to gnash your teeth trying to install it, either.
Isn't it so ironic that while Sun thinks they can keep Java proprietary and also support Open Source (yeah, right!), IBM has done FAR better work in creating a decently workable Java?
In short, Scott McNealy and Co. seems to have forgotten that IBM can be an extremely formidable force when it comes to programming resources.
At the rate things are going, we'll probably stand a better chance to get the WIN32 API "open sourced" than get the Java specs published from Sun. (shrug)
Actually, a LOT of people want to burn Sun boxes in effigy.
Especially considering how Sun tried to dance around the ISO and ECMA disclosure requirements for standards, and who knows what kind of lip service Sun gives to the GNU Public License (GPL).