the next release of Office (Office 10) will only work on Win98 or later.
Very interesting! The primary difference between Win98 and Win95 is that you can count on Internet Explorer being present in Win98, and you cannot count on it in Win95. I wonder if you will still be able to get Office 10 to run on Win95 if you install enough extra stuff, such as IE and perhaps DirectX. (The thought of an office suite depending on DirectX boggles the mind...)
This would be a lot more devastating than just preventing it from working at all. It would cast serious doubts on Wine's reliability
Okay, time for a reality check.
I used to work at Microsoft. On Word, for a while. Here is how the development process works: a bunch of guys (Program Managers) sit around and invent new features; the features get rolled up into a spec; the developers write code to implement the spec. When I was there, I never saw anything in the spec like "test for DR-DOS and break". I would be very surprised if this has changed.
Everyone was very focussed on getting the features coded and getting the product shipped. You are suggesting that Microsoft is spending time on dirty tricks, time they could be spending on writing new features. I doubt it.
And just who will code these dirty tricks? You would need to be very careful who you ask. You would need to be sure not to have any evidence, because if it were ever proven in court it would be devastating.
And can you be sure the dirty tricks won't also sabotage your paying customers, and cause bugs you will have to deal with? (By the way, Microsoft charges each business unit for the support calls due to their products. This provides valuable negative feedback to ensure that no business unit can have a "we don't care" attitude about bugs.)
When I was there, we didn't dress in black and twirl our mustaches and laugh evilly and sabotage the product. I really don't think Microsoft has changed that much since then. They are still inventing dozens of features and slamming out the code. (This way of doing things is not without its own problems...)
Guns are good, <more> gun laws are bad. Because...because.....because...well they just are the Constitution says so and there is some old guy somewhere in America I can get here on the radio to tell his story about how he foiled a home invasion with his Glock as proof.
In fact, the Constitution does say that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." And, in fact, several studies have shown that guns prevent more suffering than they cause; check out the Lott study, or read the Kleck book. And, it's also true that with the 20,000 gun laws we already have, I'm in no hurry to get more added.
By the way, the definition of libertarian is simple: a libertarian is a person who believes that people should be allowed to own property, including their own bodies; force and fraud are not to be permitted, but anything consensual should be permitted. Some libertarians believe we need a government to enforce the no force/no fraud rules; others (the anarchocapitalists, for example) think we need no government. Some think that abortions must be permitted since a woman owns her own body and a fetus isn't a person yet; others think abortion is murder and must be forbidden just as any other murder. There are many issues upon which libertarians can disagree, and still be legitimate liberarians; if you include the people who say they are libertarians but aren't, you can get an even bigger crowd with even more disagreements.
is the major backbones of the internet not owned by corporations?
True enough, but they cannot use this fact to control the Internet. As soon as a backbone becomes problematic, everyone will stop using them and find or create another backbone.
All the major grocery stores are owned by corporations. Are they able to control us by manipulating the food supply?
There is no reason for corporations to fight and compete with each other, the eventuality is they will merger and monopolize because they benefit from being a monopoly.
Remember when the Reagan administration dropped the anti-trust lawsuit against IBM? What happened? According to your scenario, IBM allied itself with other big companies and has a worse strangle-hold over the computer industry than ever...
What actually happened was that other companies came along and ate IBM's lunch. IBM is still big and still makes a lot of money but they no longer have the industry in an iron grip. And government did exactly nothing to bring this about.
...they can simply put us on a bus and force us to live in their wasteland, where they burn garbage.
And you seriously think this whole scenario is more likely and a greater threat than big government? We have already had armed FDA agents raiding stores to prevent them from selling vitamins. We have already had court decisions and bureaucracy creating brand new laws from whole cloth, with exactly zero input from the citizens. Most of us already have over half of all the money we make taken away.
Easy, control of the media. Browne wants to abolish all government control over the airwaves.
How can anyone completely control the media if they have no power to prevent new people from using it? Do you think Matt Drudge would join the mega merger, or would he continue to be a loose cannon? He would move his site to Canada or Tonga or wherever and keep it going. Do you really think they can lock up the entire Internet? Remember that censorship is something the Internet routes around.
The threat to liberty due to big government far exceeds the threat to liberty due to the hypothetical situation you imagine.
government will restrict our freedom less in a libertarian world, but who will fill that power gap left, when the government has less influence over the people?
CORPORATIONS!
How, exactly, can corporations oppress people? If WalMart won't sell you the CD you want, then CDNow will. If CDNow won't, then Amazon will. Or Target. Or KMart. Or Hemp Nation CD Sales. Someone will want your money and will sell you the CD.
WalMart is not allowed to send goons over to break your kneecaps if you buy the wrong CD. A Libertarian government will prevent WalMart from doing this. So, how can WalMart oppress you by refusing to sell you something?
The traditional way for corporations to oppress people is to buy off the government. Then, WalMart doesn't need hired goons; government officials will do their dirty work for them. If that CD is made illegal, then the corporations don't really need to worry about it; the machinery of law enforcement will oppress you, for them.
Since Nader stands foursquare behind powerful big government, if you vote for him, you are voting to empower big corporations. And you lose.
No, it's just amusing. Microsoft is almost 20,000 people; it isn't too shocking if some guy in marketing writes ad copy that doesn't track perfectly with what the company is doing wiht OEM licensing.
It does open them wide up for complaints about that evil new OEM licensing policy: "Your own web page points out why the customer should always get a system CD!"
Useful, perhaps, novel perhaps, but nonobvious? I seriously think that any teenage hacker could figure out an algorithm to do this in twenty minutes.
Sure, any hacker could figure out an algorithm to do this... once he has the idea. What is nonobvious (to me, anyway) is the idea of trying to solve the cat-on-the-keyboard problem from the computer side of things.
Seriously, if this gets a patent, I think we can stick this in the "ludicrous patent" basket too! Might be a handy one to point at in an argument.
Unless you think no software ideas should ever be patented, I don't see why you would oppose this idea being patented. As they said, it meets the requirements for a patent: useful, novel, and unobvious.
Unless you know of some prior art?
By the way, I love the dialog box: CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED
Maybe if Linus weren't so opposed to using a kernel debugger, he could get the release out a bit sooner. Just a thought...
Not a very smart thought.
Linus is opposed to kernel debuggers because he doesn't need one, and in fact he views them as anti-productive. I'm sure they are anti-productive... for him.
I still think he is wrong to oppose kernel debuggers. There are some people who will be more productive with a kernel debugger, and they will use one whether Linus likes them or not. So all he really is doing is forcing them to maintain their debugger with patches. I personally view this as Linus wasting their time to satisfy his own quirky opinion.
Our debt to Linus is so huge that I'm still a fan of his, even though I think he is wrong about this. But Linus, himself, clearly doesn't need or want a kernel debugger.
AOL buying Netscape was the beginning of the end of Netscape.
No.
Netscape was in trouble, and everyone knew it, and Netscape was desperately casting about for some sort of a plan to save them. When Microsoft started giving away IE, NS couldn't make money from the browser; with Apache taking over the net, NS couldn't make much money from the server; it wasn't at all clear how NS would make money at all.
NS decided to release the browser as Open Source, with the hope that Open Source would turn out to be a magic potion that would solve their problems (== produce a useable browser without costing NS too much money). We can argue over whether NS would have ever done this if they were not truly desperate, but I say they would not.
Finally, AOL neatly solved their problems by buying NS. NS no longer is sweating over where their money will come from. This has resulted in some changes at NS, not all of them good, but it is rather an oversimplification to say that AOL buying NS was "the beginning of the end".
One of the great things about Q3A weapons is that they're tweaked so that every weapon could still be useful in a variety of situations
I disagree with you here. I agree with the reviewCheckout:
With the useless Machine Gun, slow Shotgun and Railgun, you're left with only two choices: Rocket Launcher and Plasma Cannon. Everything else seems like a last resort.
Actually, I wouldn't call the Railgun useless, although it is tricky to use, but the Machine Gun is pretty darn useless.
To me, this is the fatal flaw of Unreal Tournament. There are something like 18 different fire modes total in the game, but only 5 are really playable in a combat situation: Plasma Fire mode 2, Flack 1, Flack 2 (occasionally), Shock Rifle combo (1 and 2), and Rockets. So you end up with at most 35% of your weapon fire modes being used.
Total nonsense. The best thing about UT deathmatch is that you can score a kill with any of the weapons. Some are definitely better than others, but you have at least a chance with anything.
Impact hammer: best used when lying in wait. If you can predict that the other guy is going to come around a certain corner, you can score major damage and a probable frag by lying in wait with the hammer charged up.
Enforcer pistol: use rapid-fire (mode 2) and get another if you can. Especially with two, you can do some damage. Aim at the guy's head; that seems to help. (The other day I used a single pistol to frag a guy with a rocket launcher! It won't always work but at least there is a chance.)
GES Bio-rifle: you can frag in seconds with this one, especially if the other guy doesn't have any armor. And you can use it to lay traps.
Shock Rifle: Not my favorite, but has its uses. Its main fire mode does have "shock" value, so sometimes you can bounce the other guy and make him fall to his doom. But the coolest thing is to shoot the energy ball with mode 2 and then detonate it with mode 1 fire; you can score an instant frag, or multiple frags even. It's tricky enough to do that when you pull it off you feel you have done something cool.
Pulse Gun: As noted above, mode 2 is best (does the most damage). But I use mode 1 as well, because mode 2 requires you to aim more accurately; mode 1 scatters the fire a bit, making it much tougher to evade. I believe mode 1 also has some splash effect; mode 2 is straight line fire only.
Ripper: Quite useful. You can quickly fire off a stream of the spinning saw blades, and since they bounce all around you can fill a hall with death without having to expose yourself to enemy fire. This is particulary useful in team play since you don't hurt your allies. And mode 2 is also useful, mainly because of the shock effect; I use this to make the other guy fall to his doom.
Minigun machine gun: you can kill in seconds with the mode 2 fire. Mode 2 fires bullets quickly, but it takes a moment to spin up to speed, so I usually start firing just before making contact with the enemy. Ideally used from behind, of course. On levels with armor and rocket launchers, this isn't your first choice because it can be a bit slow to kill the other guy and you have to be exposed to use it.
Flak Cannon: my personal favorite. Great in both modes. Mode 1 can bounce flak around corners; mode 2 does a whole lot of damage and has a shock bounce besides.
Rocket Launcher: obviously a favorite. Mode 1 fires from 1 to 6 rockets; mode 2 fires 1 to 6 grenades. But on some small levels it can be hard to use without killing yourself too.
Sniper Rifle: very underrated. Sniping at long range only works in certain situations, but in team play those situations are common. And you can run around using it as a rapid-fire weapon with some success, especially if you "walk" your fire up until you hit the guy's head.
Redeemer: The explosive force of the Redeemer makes for instant kills, even instant multiple kills, but it has weaknesses too. It flies slow enough that with a head start, a person can outrun it! And if you shoot a redeemer missile in flight, it will explode, so you have a chance to save yourself if one is headed your way. And the explosion doesn't go around corners, so you can actually dive for cover.
In short, I have used all of the above successfully in UT, and none is a total waste of time. It's true that once I have a Flak Cannon I usually use that in preference to anything else, but you always have some sort of favorite in any game.
Before I say anything else, I'd like to point out that the folks who want to develop KBasic can do whatever they want, and we can't tell them what to do.
The fundamental question with KBasic is: which flavor of Basic will it be? Basic is even more fragmented than UNIX ever was. There are hundreds of flavors, each with its own quirks.
If KBasic is a brand-new variant with its own quirks, it will still be an interesting and somewhat valuable addition to KDE. (I'll never touch it, but there will be folks who are glad to see it.)
If KBasic and GNOME Basic are brand-new but compatible with each other, the possible benefits become much larger.
If KBasic and GNOME Basic are done in a way compatible with the Microsoft Basics, especially the embedded ones used for macros in Microsoft Office, then this will be totally cool. Anything that makes it easier to move from a Microsoft platform to free software is a Good Thing.
P.S. Modern Basic languages are far advanced past the old BASIC languages such as Applesoft BASIC. Applesoft was severely broken, and you had to fight with it to do things. If you wanted to have an IF statement with multiple lines of code after it, you had to test for the opposite and if the opposite was true, GOTO a line after the multiple lines. Not my first choice for teaching programming to high school kids, yet it was used for this in the early 80's.
I don't understand why people are making so many bitter and sarcastic comments about this. This is Steve Gibson being Steve Gibson, and it isn't any big deal.
Why is it only for Windows? Because Steve Gibson wrote it. He likes to write "hand-crafted" assembly language, for x86 platforms. So he wrote it for Windows.
Maybe it reads like a press release. But don't forget... when he finally has something to release, he is going to give it away free (like beer). He isn't spamming this page out by email, he isn't trying to trick anyone out of their money, so why are people so worked up?
He wrote, and gave away, a cool utility for Zip disk owners. He also wrote and gave away some other stuff, and let's not forget how cool his Shields Up! page has always been.
Even if we moderate his latest web page (-1, marketdroid-speak) he has plenty of karma left over.
I don't want them to go even lower quality unless they lower the ticket price.
The most important thing about digital movies is that the audience will see and hear the same quality every time.
Right now, the more days go by with the same print of a movie being shown, the more scratches appear on the film. Movies have already gone to digital sound so the sound is good, but the visuals can suffer.
Bad movie houses can make this problem even worse by abusing the film!
With a digital format, if the quality is satisfactory on the first day, it will still be satisfactory no matter how many times the theatre shows it. This may lead the masses to accept a digital format that movie fanatics sneer at; they may even prefer the digital format, even if film is arguably better.
USB won't really be all that relevant for another 2 years minimum.
Fred: Hey, Joe, stop using Windows and give Linux a try!
Joe: Will all my hardware work with it?
Fred: Sure! Except for your USB Zip drive, your USB mouse, and your USB scanner. But don't worry; they aren't critical... they won't even really be all that relevant for another 2 years minimum.
Joe: Wow! I think I'll run out and buy a SCSI card, a SCSI Zip drive, a SCSI scanner, and a PS/2 mouse so I can be relevant!
Nowadays, it seems that Fuel cells are always mentioned in conjunction with natural gas. Why natural gas over water?
Fuel cells work by reacting hydrogen with oxygen to make water and electricity. You can't put water into a fuel cell and have it work.
You could split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then run the fuel cell off the hydrogen. If you did that, the fuel cell wouldn't actually care where you got the hydrogen; it still wouldn't be a water cell.
There are several problems with hydrogen for the home. No one has hydrogen lines running to his house; no company is set up to provide hydrogen even if someone was ready; and hydrogen is difficult to contain safely and effectively. (The tiny hydrogen molecules can seep through many materials, even including some metals, so you would probably want to use liquid hydrogen, which you would have to refrigerate... aack.) If you want to make your own hydrogen from water, you will need to get a lot of electricity from somewhere and you will need to store the hydrogen... see above for some of the problems.
But recently an almost magical catalyst was discovered: feed it natural gas, and it strips hydrogen off. It's simple: natural gas and oxygen in, and electricity, waste heat, and carbon dioxide out. (You can also do this trick with methanol, or even gasoline, so we may get fuel-cell cars soon.)
With natural gas, you can just hook it up and it will just work. Direct hydrogen feed would be much messier.
As to the science fair project... I don't think you correctly understand what was going on. It sounds to me like the fuel cell would run on hydrogen and oxygen at night, producing water; and during the day solar cells would split the water back into hydrogen and oxygen. As long as nothing wears out or breaks, and as long as the sun shines, such a device could run continuously.
steveha
Re:Mouse, yes... chord keyboard, no?
on
The First Mouse
·
· Score: 1
I'm not really sure what Jerry Pournelle says
He says "Better is the enemy of good enough," and he often tags things with a label of "Good Enough" when he recommends them. But I am sure that you are correct about the original version.
doesn't really apply here - I think chording keyboards don't catch on because there is too much memorization required.
As I sort of said, a chord keyboard isn't enough better to make most people willing to memorize the chords and give it a try.
I'm certain there is a very loyal niche market for chord keyboards, especially among one-armed folks.
steveha
Re:Mouse, yes... chord keyboard, no?
on
The First Mouse
·
· Score: 2
I only use the w,a,s,&d keys (plus r if I have to reload).
'r' to reload? Are you playing Half-Life?
I didn't connect Quake games with Englebart before this. I doubt he ever expected to see people using his mouse to fire rocket launchers at each other for fun and gibs!
steveha
Mouse, yes... chord keyboard, no?
on
The First Mouse
·
· Score: 3
What is the most annoying thing about using a computer mouse? Having to take a hand off the keyboard, use the mouse, and then put the hand back on the keyboard.
Well, Engelbart had that figured out, too. Put one hand on the mouse, and the other hand on a chord keyboard. A person who is comfortable with this arrangement will be amazingly fast at certain tasks.
Why did the mouse become common and the chord keyboard did not? I suspect it is because "better is the enemy of good enough", as Jerry Pournelle says. The chord keyboard is arguably more efficient, but it isn't enough more efficient to make most people get interested in it.
My solution to the keyboard/mouse problem is to learn all the keyboard accelerators and use them instead of the mouse, whenever possible.
The most interesting comment, to me, was that Mandrake would most likely stay off the radar in the US, but might gain significant market share in Europe. Mandrake is similar to a Red Hat distribution with an excellent, graphical installer and extra cool stuff bundled. Why would people ignore Mandrake and go with Red Hat?
My own theory: Mandrake is more interesting as a desktop install, not as a server install, and server installs are where most of the market interest is at the moment.
By the way, if you haven't checked out Mandrake, you should. The graphical hard disk partitioning utility is so cool, you might want to keep a Mandrake CD around just to use it.
If Linux becomes a popular OS can it really attract sufficent people to ensure the OS and its applications remain cutting edge?
Of course it can!
If Linux is more popular, then there is a larger pool of people interested in its success. That means more people contributing stuff.
If a large portion of the people are willing to pay for a commercial distro, then the distro companies have more money to spend on developers.
Even if we assume that people don't ever want to pay for Linux, the larger pool still means more contributions. Suppose that Company X wants to roll out Linux, but Linux is missing one crucial feature. Perhaps Company X can hire someone to add that feature, for less money than buying Windows 2000 for everyone in Company X. Once the feature is added, it's there forever and everyone can use it.
Try as I might, I just can't imagine any way for large numbers of users to be a problem making Linux grow less quickly.
The only way to do this is with some sort of database that would live in the user's home directory. A general solution must handle multi-user systems.
This is, in principle, not too hard. The devil would be in the details; getting all the fine points right would take some time and experiment.
For example, how do you keep the database tidy? Suppose you install a hundred apps, arrange the icons just so, and then uninstall all the apps. Unless the uninstall also does something with the icon positions database, you will now have a hundred orphan icon positions. The obvious initial solution is to ignore this problem, but schedule a program to walk the database and toss out the obsolete data.
What do you do when the user arranges the icons just so, and then a bunch of new icons appear in the directory? Just put them wherever they fit?
As you noted, how do you handle the dynamic mounting problem? Suppose you mount a remote filesystem at/mnt/temp, and arrange the icons; then un-mount, and mount some other remote filesystem in the same place. Well, maybe that's not really a problem, because you could remember which remote system was mounted, and save that with the database, and do the right thing. (Of course, if you mount a hundred remote filesystems and then never look at them again, you will have significant junk in your database. Perhaps you should age-expire the info in the database?)
It's true that Palm Inc. is not evolving the Palm very much. Their biggest "improvement" to the platform this year is the M100, with a different shape and an incompatible connector.
But look at the Handspring Visor. USB for the connector. An open module bay you can use for almost anything. Even little things like a snap-on system for mounting the Visor inside a protective jacket... that doesn't depend at all on the thickness of the Visor! (That's right; if and when a thin Visor with no Springboard slot comes out, you will be able to use it with existing leather carrying cases.)
And the Visor is just the first product from Handspring! Who can say where they will go in the future?
All that said, even if the Palm platform were frozen completely today, there will still be a ton of them out there in ten years. Consider the Nintendo Gameboy. By your logic, nobody would want one of those today, but I still see people playing games on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Very interesting! The primary difference between Win98 and Win95 is that you can count on Internet Explorer being present in Win98, and you cannot count on it in Win95. I wonder if you will still be able to get Office 10 to run on Win95 if you install enough extra stuff, such as IE and perhaps DirectX. (The thought of an office suite depending on DirectX boggles the mind...)
steveha
Okay, time for a reality check.
I used to work at Microsoft. On Word, for a while. Here is how the development process works: a bunch of guys (Program Managers) sit around and invent new features; the features get rolled up into a spec; the developers write code to implement the spec. When I was there, I never saw anything in the spec like "test for DR-DOS and break". I would be very surprised if this has changed.
Everyone was very focussed on getting the features coded and getting the product shipped. You are suggesting that Microsoft is spending time on dirty tricks, time they could be spending on writing new features. I doubt it.
And just who will code these dirty tricks? You would need to be very careful who you ask. You would need to be sure not to have any evidence, because if it were ever proven in court it would be devastating.
And can you be sure the dirty tricks won't also sabotage your paying customers, and cause bugs you will have to deal with? (By the way, Microsoft charges each business unit for the support calls due to their products. This provides valuable negative feedback to ensure that no business unit can have a "we don't care" attitude about bugs.)
When I was there, we didn't dress in black and twirl our mustaches and laugh evilly and sabotage the product. I really don't think Microsoft has changed that much since then. They are still inventing dozens of features and slamming out the code. (This way of doing things is not without its own problems...)
steveha
In fact, the Constitution does say that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." And, in fact, several studies have shown that guns prevent more suffering than they cause; check out the Lott study, or read the Kleck book. And, it's also true that with the 20,000 gun laws we already have, I'm in no hurry to get more added.
By the way, the definition of libertarian is simple: a libertarian is a person who believes that people should be allowed to own property, including their own bodies; force and fraud are not to be permitted, but anything consensual should be permitted. Some libertarians believe we need a government to enforce the no force/no fraud rules; others (the anarchocapitalists, for example) think we need no government. Some think that abortions must be permitted since a woman owns her own body and a fetus isn't a person yet; others think abortion is murder and must be forbidden just as any other murder. There are many issues upon which libertarians can disagree, and still be legitimate liberarians; if you include the people who say they are libertarians but aren't, you can get an even bigger crowd with even more disagreements.
steveha
True enough, but they cannot use this fact to control the Internet. As soon as a backbone becomes problematic, everyone will stop using them and find or create another backbone.
All the major grocery stores are owned by corporations. Are they able to control us by manipulating the food supply?
There is no reason for corporations to fight and compete with each other, the eventuality is they will merger and monopolize because they benefit from being a monopoly.
Remember when the Reagan administration dropped the anti-trust lawsuit against IBM? What happened? According to your scenario, IBM allied itself with other big companies and has a worse strangle-hold over the computer industry than ever...
What actually happened was that other companies came along and ate IBM's lunch. IBM is still big and still makes a lot of money but they no longer have the industry in an iron grip. And government did exactly nothing to bring this about.
And you seriously think this whole scenario is more likely and a greater threat than big government? We have already had armed FDA agents raiding stores to prevent them from selling vitamins. We have already had court decisions and bureaucracy creating brand new laws from whole cloth, with exactly zero input from the citizens. Most of us already have over half of all the money we make taken away.
steveha
How can anyone completely control the media if they have no power to prevent new people from using it? Do you think Matt Drudge would join the mega merger, or would he continue to be a loose cannon? He would move his site to Canada or Tonga or wherever and keep it going. Do you really think they can lock up the entire Internet? Remember that censorship is something the Internet routes around.
The threat to liberty due to big government far exceeds the threat to liberty due to the hypothetical situation you imagine.
steveha
How, exactly, can corporations oppress people? If WalMart won't sell you the CD you want, then CDNow will. If CDNow won't, then Amazon will. Or Target. Or KMart. Or Hemp Nation CD Sales. Someone will want your money and will sell you the CD.
WalMart is not allowed to send goons over to break your kneecaps if you buy the wrong CD. A Libertarian government will prevent WalMart from doing this. So, how can WalMart oppress you by refusing to sell you something?
The traditional way for corporations to oppress people is to buy off the government. Then, WalMart doesn't need hired goons; government officials will do their dirty work for them. If that CD is made illegal, then the corporations don't really need to worry about it; the machinery of law enforcement will oppress you, for them.
Since Nader stands foursquare behind powerful big government, if you vote for him, you are voting to empower big corporations. And you lose.
steveha
No, it's just amusing. Microsoft is almost 20,000 people; it isn't too shocking if some guy in marketing writes ad copy that doesn't track perfectly with what the company is doing wiht OEM licensing.
It does open them wide up for complaints about that evil new OEM licensing policy: "Your own web page points out why the customer should always get a system CD!"
steveha
Sure, any hacker could figure out an algorithm to do this... once he has the idea. What is nonobvious (to me, anyway) is the idea of trying to solve the cat-on-the-keyboard problem from the computer side of things.
steveha
You can take this statement two ways, and I agree with both.
steveha
Unless you think no software ideas should ever be patented, I don't see why you would oppose this idea being patented. As they said, it meets the requirements for a patent: useful, novel, and unobvious.
Unless you know of some prior art?
By the way, I love the dialog box: CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED
steveha
Not a very smart thought.
Linus is opposed to kernel debuggers because he doesn't need one, and in fact he views them as anti-productive. I'm sure they are anti-productive... for him.
I still think he is wrong to oppose kernel debuggers. There are some people who will be more productive with a kernel debugger, and they will use one whether Linus likes them or not. So all he really is doing is forcing them to maintain their debugger with patches. I personally view this as Linus wasting their time to satisfy his own quirky opinion.
Our debt to Linus is so huge that I'm still a fan of his, even though I think he is wrong about this. But Linus, himself, clearly doesn't need or want a kernel debugger.
steveha
No.
Netscape was in trouble, and everyone knew it, and Netscape was desperately casting about for some sort of a plan to save them. When Microsoft started giving away IE, NS couldn't make money from the browser; with Apache taking over the net, NS couldn't make much money from the server; it wasn't at all clear how NS would make money at all.
NS decided to release the browser as Open Source, with the hope that Open Source would turn out to be a magic potion that would solve their problems (== produce a useable browser without costing NS too much money). We can argue over whether NS would have ever done this if they were not truly desperate, but I say they would not.
Finally, AOL neatly solved their problems by buying NS. NS no longer is sweating over where their money will come from. This has resulted in some changes at NS, not all of them good, but it is rather an oversimplification to say that AOL buying NS was "the beginning of the end".
steveha
I disagree with you here. I agree with the reviewCheckout:
Actually, I wouldn't call the Railgun useless, although it is tricky to use, but the Machine Gun is pretty darn useless.
To me, this is the fatal flaw of Unreal Tournament. There are something like 18 different fire modes total in the game, but only 5 are really playable in a combat situation: Plasma Fire mode 2, Flack 1, Flack 2 (occasionally), Shock Rifle combo (1 and 2), and Rockets. So you end up with at most 35% of your weapon fire modes being used.
Total nonsense. The best thing about UT deathmatch is that you can score a kill with any of the weapons. Some are definitely better than others, but you have at least a chance with anything.
Impact hammer: best used when lying in wait. If you can predict that the other guy is going to come around a certain corner, you can score major damage and a probable frag by lying in wait with the hammer charged up.
Enforcer pistol: use rapid-fire (mode 2) and get another if you can. Especially with two, you can do some damage. Aim at the guy's head; that seems to help. (The other day I used a single pistol to frag a guy with a rocket launcher! It won't always work but at least there is a chance.)
GES Bio-rifle: you can frag in seconds with this one, especially if the other guy doesn't have any armor. And you can use it to lay traps.
Shock Rifle: Not my favorite, but has its uses. Its main fire mode does have "shock" value, so sometimes you can bounce the other guy and make him fall to his doom. But the coolest thing is to shoot the energy ball with mode 2 and then detonate it with mode 1 fire; you can score an instant frag, or multiple frags even. It's tricky enough to do that when you pull it off you feel you have done something cool.
Pulse Gun: As noted above, mode 2 is best (does the most damage). But I use mode 1 as well, because mode 2 requires you to aim more accurately; mode 1 scatters the fire a bit, making it much tougher to evade. I believe mode 1 also has some splash effect; mode 2 is straight line fire only.
Ripper: Quite useful. You can quickly fire off a stream of the spinning saw blades, and since they bounce all around you can fill a hall with death without having to expose yourself to enemy fire. This is particulary useful in team play since you don't hurt your allies. And mode 2 is also useful, mainly because of the shock effect; I use this to make the other guy fall to his doom.
Minigun machine gun: you can kill in seconds with the mode 2 fire. Mode 2 fires bullets quickly, but it takes a moment to spin up to speed, so I usually start firing just before making contact with the enemy. Ideally used from behind, of course. On levels with armor and rocket launchers, this isn't your first choice because it can be a bit slow to kill the other guy and you have to be exposed to use it.
Flak Cannon: my personal favorite. Great in both modes. Mode 1 can bounce flak around corners; mode 2 does a whole lot of damage and has a shock bounce besides.
Rocket Launcher: obviously a favorite. Mode 1 fires from 1 to 6 rockets; mode 2 fires 1 to 6 grenades. But on some small levels it can be hard to use without killing yourself too.
Sniper Rifle: very underrated. Sniping at long range only works in certain situations, but in team play those situations are common. And you can run around using it as a rapid-fire weapon with some success, especially if you "walk" your fire up until you hit the guy's head.
Redeemer: The explosive force of the Redeemer makes for instant kills, even instant multiple kills, but it has weaknesses too. It flies slow enough that with a head start, a person can outrun it! And if you shoot a redeemer missile in flight, it will explode, so you have a chance to save yourself if one is headed your way. And the explosion doesn't go around corners, so you can actually dive for cover.
In short, I have used all of the above successfully in UT, and none is a total waste of time. It's true that once I have a Flak Cannon I usually use that in preference to anything else, but you always have some sort of favorite in any game.
steveha
The fundamental question with KBasic is: which flavor of Basic will it be? Basic is even more fragmented than UNIX ever was. There are hundreds of flavors, each with its own quirks.
If KBasic is a brand-new variant with its own quirks, it will still be an interesting and somewhat valuable addition to KDE. (I'll never touch it, but there will be folks who are glad to see it.)
If KBasic and GNOME Basic are brand-new but compatible with each other, the possible benefits become much larger.
If KBasic and GNOME Basic are done in a way compatible with the Microsoft Basics, especially the embedded ones used for macros in Microsoft Office, then this will be totally cool. Anything that makes it easier to move from a Microsoft platform to free software is a Good Thing.
P.S. Modern Basic languages are far advanced past the old BASIC languages such as Applesoft BASIC. Applesoft was severely broken, and you had to fight with it to do things. If you wanted to have an IF statement with multiple lines of code after it, you had to test for the opposite and if the opposite was true, GOTO a line after the multiple lines. Not my first choice for teaching programming to high school kids, yet it was used for this in the early 80's.
steveha
Why is it only for Windows? Because Steve Gibson wrote it. He likes to write "hand-crafted" assembly language, for x86 platforms. So he wrote it for Windows.
Maybe it reads like a press release. But don't forget... when he finally has something to release, he is going to give it away free (like beer). He isn't spamming this page out by email, he isn't trying to trick anyone out of their money, so why are people so worked up?
He wrote, and gave away, a cool utility for Zip disk owners. He also wrote and gave away some other stuff, and let's not forget how cool his Shields Up! page has always been.
Even if we moderate his latest web page (-1, marketdroid-speak) he has plenty of karma left over.
steveha
The most important thing about digital movies is that the audience will see and hear the same quality every time.
Right now, the more days go by with the same print of a movie being shown, the more scratches appear on the film. Movies have already gone to digital sound so the sound is good, but the visuals can suffer.
Bad movie houses can make this problem even worse by abusing the film!
With a digital format, if the quality is satisfactory on the first day, it will still be satisfactory no matter how many times the theatre shows it. This may lead the masses to accept a digital format that movie fanatics sneer at; they may even prefer the digital format, even if film is arguably better.
steveha
Fred: Hey, Joe, stop using Windows and give Linux a try!
Joe: Will all my hardware work with it?
Fred: Sure! Except for your USB Zip drive, your USB mouse, and your USB scanner. But don't worry; they aren't critical... they won't even really be all that relevant for another 2 years minimum.
Joe: Wow! I think I'll run out and buy a SCSI card, a SCSI Zip drive, a SCSI scanner, and a PS/2 mouse so I can be relevant!
be-fan, I find your comments baffling.
steveha
Fuel cells work by reacting hydrogen with oxygen to make water and electricity. You can't put water into a fuel cell and have it work.
You could split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then run the fuel cell off the hydrogen. If you did that, the fuel cell wouldn't actually care where you got the hydrogen; it still wouldn't be a water cell.
There are several problems with hydrogen for the home. No one has hydrogen lines running to his house; no company is set up to provide hydrogen even if someone was ready; and hydrogen is difficult to contain safely and effectively. (The tiny hydrogen molecules can seep through many materials, even including some metals, so you would probably want to use liquid hydrogen, which you would have to refrigerate... aack.) If you want to make your own hydrogen from water, you will need to get a lot of electricity from somewhere and you will need to store the hydrogen... see above for some of the problems.
But recently an almost magical catalyst was discovered: feed it natural gas, and it strips hydrogen off. It's simple: natural gas and oxygen in, and electricity, waste heat, and carbon dioxide out. (You can also do this trick with methanol, or even gasoline, so we may get fuel-cell cars soon.)
With natural gas, you can just hook it up and it will just work. Direct hydrogen feed would be much messier.
As to the science fair project... I don't think you correctly understand what was going on. It sounds to me like the fuel cell would run on hydrogen and oxygen at night, producing water; and during the day solar cells would split the water back into hydrogen and oxygen. As long as nothing wears out or breaks, and as long as the sun shines, such a device could run continuously.
steveha
He says "Better is the enemy of good enough," and he often tags things with a label of "Good Enough" when he recommends them. But I am sure that you are correct about the original version.
doesn't really apply here - I think chording keyboards don't catch on because there is too much memorization required.
As I sort of said, a chord keyboard isn't enough better to make most people willing to memorize the chords and give it a try.
I'm certain there is a very loyal niche market for chord keyboards, especially among one-armed folks.
steveha
'r' to reload? Are you playing Half-Life?
I didn't connect Quake games with Englebart before this. I doubt he ever expected to see people using his mouse to fire rocket launchers at each other for fun and gibs!
steveha
Well, Engelbart had that figured out, too. Put one hand on the mouse, and the other hand on a chord keyboard. A person who is comfortable with this arrangement will be amazingly fast at certain tasks.
Why did the mouse become common and the chord keyboard did not? I suspect it is because "better is the enemy of good enough", as Jerry Pournelle says. The chord keyboard is arguably more efficient, but it isn't enough more efficient to make most people get interested in it.
My solution to the keyboard/mouse problem is to learn all the keyboard accelerators and use them instead of the mouse, whenever possible.
steveha
My own theory: Mandrake is more interesting as a desktop install, not as a server install, and server installs are where most of the market interest is at the moment.
By the way, if you haven't checked out Mandrake, you should. The graphical hard disk partitioning utility is so cool, you might want to keep a Mandrake CD around just to use it.
steveha
Of course it can!
If Linux is more popular, then there is a larger pool of people interested in its success. That means more people contributing stuff.
If a large portion of the people are willing to pay for a commercial distro, then the distro companies have more money to spend on developers.
Even if we assume that people don't ever want to pay for Linux, the larger pool still means more contributions. Suppose that Company X wants to roll out Linux, but Linux is missing one crucial feature. Perhaps Company X can hire someone to add that feature, for less money than buying Windows 2000 for everyone in Company X. Once the feature is added, it's there forever and everyone can use it.
Try as I might, I just can't imagine any way for large numbers of users to be a problem making Linux grow less quickly.
steveha
This is, in principle, not too hard. The devil would be in the details; getting all the fine points right would take some time and experiment.
For example, how do you keep the database tidy? Suppose you install a hundred apps, arrange the icons just so, and then uninstall all the apps. Unless the uninstall also does something with the icon positions database, you will now have a hundred orphan icon positions. The obvious initial solution is to ignore this problem, but schedule a program to walk the database and toss out the obsolete data.
What do you do when the user arranges the icons just so, and then a bunch of new icons appear in the directory? Just put them wherever they fit?
As you noted, how do you handle the dynamic mounting problem? Suppose you mount a remote filesystem at /mnt/temp, and arrange the icons; then un-mount, and mount some other remote filesystem in the same place. Well, maybe that's not really a problem, because you could remember which remote system was mounted, and save that with the database, and do the right thing. (Of course, if you mount a hundred remote filesystems and then never look at them again, you will have significant junk in your database. Perhaps you should age-expire the info in the database?)
Interesting problem.
steveha
It's true that Palm Inc. is not evolving the Palm very much. Their biggest "improvement" to the platform this year is the M100, with a different shape and an incompatible connector.
But look at the Handspring Visor. USB for the connector. An open module bay you can use for almost anything. Even little things like a snap-on system for mounting the Visor inside a protective jacket... that doesn't depend at all on the thickness of the Visor! (That's right; if and when a thin Visor with no Springboard slot comes out, you will be able to use it with existing leather carrying cases.)
And the Visor is just the first product from Handspring! Who can say where they will go in the future?
All that said, even if the Palm platform were frozen completely today, there will still be a ton of them out there in ten years. Consider the Nintendo Gameboy. By your logic, nobody would want one of those today, but I still see people playing games on them.
steveha